Author's Note: Hi! Wow, these Seto/Téa fics are popular!! Welcome to the romance...please Read, Review, and tell me what you would most like to see happen in this fic. If someone gives me a good idea...I may use it!! ENJOY, friendly ppls!
Oh and yeah, I messed with the ages, changed the show storyline, yes I know it's not accurate. Who really cares with these semi-AU slightly-OOC future romances, anyway? Hehe...well normally I do, but this is an experiment ^.^
Téa for Two
(or three...)
By Kvaedi
Chapter One - Dreamers
They dragged him here. They being the new investors in Kaiba Corp's revolutionary solid hologram technology; here being the bloody New York City Ballet. And him? Only the most powerful twenty-one-year old in the world: Seto Kaiba.
"It's so nice to see a young man with culture," crooned an elderly woman with cheeks that drooped down the entire length of her neck. She had a stuffed parrot perched on the end of her ridiculously small opera glasses--it gave him the creeps.
"Bleah," he said with a shudder. The way her nose curled down over her upper lip...but she was a new investor, and he had to entertain her at least this one night.
"Have you forgotten about me, mumsie?" said a voice behind her. Her son, he took it. The man looked no older than thirty--his mother--well, it explained a lot; really. A windbag like this could only have been spawned from those dry, arid...
"Bleah," he said again.
"Of course not, poopsie," said the old woman. "But I know I raised my Humbert to be a gentleman--and where young Kaiba came from is...a matter of some debate."
The CEO prickled at the dig. Maybe the screech owl thought he couldn't hear her, but he wouldn't tolerate insults directed toward his dead parents.
"I know," whispered the son, Humbert, in an effeminate tone. He flopped a wrist and hid his mouth with the other hand. "Just look at his brother. Nothing like him at all."
Mokuba leaned over the balcony railing, looking for girls. He'd just turned fifteen, and had a growth spurt to boot. He'd come along because of one thing--ballerinas! After the show, there would be a reception, and plenty of chances to get to know one or four of them a little bit better. He looked antsy, his long black hair beginning to escape its ponytail.
Yes, both of the Kaiba brothers had aged, and well. Too well for the jealous investor and his mother. They continued to backstab, not realizing how much Seto heard. He was about to tear them into bite-sized pieces when suddenly the theater went dark, and a hush fell over the crowd. Soft music began to play.
Mokuba eagerly stared through his binoculars as the curtain rose.
'Our last show. I can't believe how fast time has gone!'
"Places, places!" a voice hissed in her ear, and the lead dancer darted off to her spot, her thoughts abandoned for now.
Time to dance. The opening strains of Prokofiev's First Violin Concerto filled the hall, the stage, and her body. Téa Gardner raised her arms, and from the ground it appeared that she had a hundred pairs, as the arms in position of the other dancers posed a mind-boggling illusion.
"Fabulous," Kaiba muttered, although the effect was lost on those in the box seats. It was the motion that captivated him--every body in perfect tune with every other, rigidly aligned yet fluidly harmonious. A sight that filled the mind with adjectives! Seto watched, entranced. His brother watched, too.
'Hey, I can see down her top!' Mokuba realized with glee.
Opus 19, The Dreamer. How perfectly fitting to cast Téa as lead dancer! Not quite twenty-one, but getting there, her life had been a succession of dreams. Ever since her first dance lesson when she was a toddler, she had wanted to be here, on this stage.
During her high school years, however, life got a bit crazy. First, her childhood friend Yugi solved this puzzle...and from then on everything was changed. Where before she had time to dance and study, she suddenly found herself surrounded by megalomaniacs, freaks, weirdos, and soul-stealing lunatics. It seemed like every day someone new had some kind of evil scheme to foist on them. Life was a constant cycle of dueling, terror, and out-of-body possession experiences.
This lasted for about a year. Then, one day, she'd had enough. What caused it, she didn't know. They were all sitting together, having a picnic, enjoying a "normal" spring Saturday--and she snapped. She looked from one face to another--Yugi, Joey, Tristan, Bakura, Mai--then she shook her head, said "I've had it," and left.
"Téa, wait!" someone called after her. It sounded like Yugi, but it could well have been Joey, with the wind and all.
"Let her go," said someone else. They didn't understand; she was serious.
That night her parents found her curled up on the floor of her room with an empty bottle of aspirin. She'd only taken the last two for a headache, but for her parents, who lived in a little cloud that we call "fantasy land", it was "a big wake-up call, a cry for help." Téa was burned out.
They moved immediately. That Monday morning, Yugi and friends found her locker cleaned out and her desk empty. No more Téa. She was gone.
Oddly enough a similar thing had happened to Seto Kaiba at about the same time. A boy with no childhood hits that angst phase sooner or later; for Seto, it came at the tail end of another tournament. Yugi had won, as always. The next day, it was back to school. High school. What a joke. Seto had more knowledge about computers, science, and mathematics than any of the so-called teachers. So when he walked into class that day, he didn't take his seat like he usually did.
Instead, he went to the principal, and demanded to take the exit exams.
They let him.
He passed.
He left.
He packed up his office in Domino City after a month of frustration, and reopened a new branch of Kaiba Corp.
This freed up a lot of time for Seto Kaiba. He used it to perfect the solid holograms--but there were times when even those weren't enough to contain his wandering, angry thoughts. With no school, only work and duel monsters, to consume him, those thoughts festered in his brain for six years.
Little did they realize it; both ended up in New York.
Seto Kaiba clenched the railing of the theater box.
"My gracious, look at the bags under his eyes. Dreadful, atrocious!" said the screech owl.
"If you can see his eyes underneath the bangs. Such a disgrace, I'd fire his stylist," said the overstuffed windbag.
"His parents must have been abusive," presumed Screech Owl.
"Mumsie dearest, you mustn't say such things. You only think; you don't know. For all we know, they could have been ragpickers, or cokeheads."
'Ragpickers?'
"Drug lords, pimps, slumlords..."
'Pimps?'
"I suspect they were petty crooks."
"THAT'S ENOUGH!" Seto growled as the strings reached the peak of a crescendo. "You will NOT talk about my parents that way!"
'Huh?' wondered Téa, looking up toward the box. She thought she heard someone shouting.
'She's beautiful...' thought Mokuba.
"Do you want to fight me, little man?" scoffed Windbag.
"Try me," Seto hissed, raising his fists. Windbag lunged, and the next thing he knew, he was over the railing. His head went through a tympani. But no one noticed; the ballet had just ended. There was a standing ovation.
Téa disappeared behind the curtain.
"Seto, are you all right?" Mokuba asked. His adorable devotion to his big brother had never faded.
"The...the impudence! The audacity! I'm completely flabbergasted!" Screech owl blubbered.
Seto wasn't listening. He didn't even hear Mokuba. Wordlessly, he turned and marched out of the box.
"Seto..." Mokuba called, worried.
Everyone was still applauding. The curtain rose again, and the lead male dancer leapt across the stage amid a shower of flowers. Mokuba looked back to the stage, completely confused. The old woman flapped her arms and made noise--like a chicken--and Mokuba giggled.
'Poor Seto. I wonder why he got so mad,' he thought. 'With all these pretty girls to look at...'
The remainder of the cast danced out one by one, until finally Téa herself made her bows. People threw roses by the dozen, and even after scores of performances the girl still blushed at the sight of them.
A light went on in Mokuba's brain.
'This gives me an idea...'
*
Her head was spinning: everything had gone perfectly. Routine perfectly. Everyday perfectly! Would it have killed someone to mess up, for once? Their final performance, and it was no different from the last twenty plus. Téa craved some sort of closure, a grand finale to a wonderful season. After all, it was anti-climactic to walk down the stairs with six bouquets of red roses and see the other dancers, in various states of undress, packing up and going home.
Tomorrow started another round of auditioning and training. Her mind couldn't quite handle the idea that instead of a line, life on the stage was a circle. She wanted an endpoint! She walked past rows of toe shoes to her dressing room.
"Téa, sweetheart!" purred a male voice, as a muscular man pulled her into a hug, then just as quickly shoved her back for an appraising look. "No wonder zey loved you out there, just look at you!"
His comment made her smile. Sergei was the russian-born male lead dancer in the show, and when she first joined the company she had a crush on him. But he was a male ballerina, and, well, not interested. Obvious reasons.
"Thanks, Sergei," she said, trying to stifle a little sigh, continuing toward the dressing room.
"What's the matter?" he asked, stepping in her way. "Ve finally did it! A perfect season!"
"I don't know," she muttered. "Maybe I didn't want it."
"What? Where is the Téa who spent twenty hours a day in rehearsal, vorking her way to absolute perfection..."
"Probably still rehearsing." Her voice was gruff, she pushed past her friend.
"It's that dream again, isn't it?"
She sighed. Sergei always knew what was on her mind. Sliding to the floor by a row of lockers, she gestured for him to join her for another long story.
Seto Kaiba stood outside on the cold cement, looking up at the Manhattan skyline. He felt like a fool for letting these people get to him. What was it his stepfather used to say? "Emotions are what make men weak; they are to be crushed or someone will crush you." Maybe the old asshole was right. The only emotions Seto ever had, outside of affection for his brother, centered around the loss of his birth parents. Here, they had gotten out of control, and cost him an investor.
'No big loss,' he assured himself. Financially, this was true; but he was starting to get a reputation as an oddball. If word got out about this, his stocks would take a tumble. Of course, the man probably wouldn't let a word slip about it; he knew what he had said, and it was entirely his momentum that carried him over the edge and into the drum. Seto doubted if he could have prevented the fall. So that settled that. The stocks were secure.
But why did he keep thinking about money?! He didn't care about money. He had all the money he could ever need; more than he and Mokuba could ever use if they tried. Any thinking about money was a vestige of...he wouldn't say the name. That cursed old bastard. It was his fault Seto was so angry! Entirely his!
And to make matters worse, he'd been having those dreams again. Stupid dreams, filled with stupid people. Stupid, angry, hateful dreams that, when he woke from them, gave him a cold sweat. All he could remember was how much it hurt to dream them, because their plots and words disappeared into the night when he opened his eyes.
Much like his train of thought. Mokuba was tapping him on the shoulder, saying something about heading to the hotel for the reception. He looked really excited, and whenever he used that tone of voice it reminded Seto of their days together, just before they were adopted. So he always went along with whatever Mokuba wanted to do.
They climbed into the limousine, and rode off.
"...and so, I guess that's the fifth time in two weeks," Téa finished.
Sergei had pulled his jeans on over his tights and slid his feet into his sneakers. "But the twenty-fourth time this year. Hef you considered counseling?"
"But Sergei...you are my counseling," she said with a grin.
"True..." the man laughed. "But these are terrible dreams. Now you are sure zat you don't remember anything like this ever happening to you?"
"Don't be silly," Téa laughed uncomfortably. "You can't steal souls and put them in cards."
"It's all I can think of. I'm not good at symbolics...symboly..."
"Symbolism," she supplied. "Thanks for listening, anyway, Sergei. It's good to have a best friend like you."
When she said those words something tore at her heart. Fortunately the Russian did not notice. He said his goodbyes, and left her to finally make it to the dressing room.
Seto leaned back at the table. He and Mokuba were the only people sitting at the reception. Screech owl with her bird-glasses was conspicuously absent; this was good. Seto sipped a black coffee. Mokuba stole a sip of wine when his brother wasn't looking. He was becoming visibly agitated, looking around the dining room. Waiters kept coming to the table, thinking he was looking for them.
"Calm down, Mokuba," said Seto, lost in thought, taking another sip of the coffee. Coffee: the perfect beverage for a ten p.m. reception.
"I am calm," said Mokuba. He looked his brother, drooping in the chair. Normally Seto Kaiba could at least pretend to be social, when forced. Normally, however, he would have put up some resistance to being here in the first place. Mokuba was glad that it was not a normal day--his plan had to work!
"Mokuba!" Seto snapped. Mokuba put down the wine glass sheepishly.
Téa opened the door to her dressing room. It wasn't locked--where could a ballerina hide a key? She gasped when she saw the interior.
Hastily arranged but collossal wreaths of flowers filled nearly every square inch of floor, vanity, and wardrobe top. It wasn't just roses, but lilies, baby's breath, tulips, chrysanthemums, irises: every kind of flower imaginable. Someone had bought the flower shop's entire inventory.
And there was a card, too, to top it all off. Dizzy with excitement, Téa gave herself a paper cut trying to open it. Finally the envelope gave, and she read the following:
To the dancer. Love, your secret admirer. Meet me at the reception.
"A secret admirer?! Maybe the season WILL end well, after all!" she cheered, sounding for all the world like the little cheerleader watching the rounds at the Duelist Kingdom.
Pulling on a black dress from one of the costume racks and a pair of black strappy heels, she ran for the theater exit and then the street, shouting "TAXI!"
*
So do you like it? Flame if you want, I was bad and flamed some people recently, so I deserve it. But I promise, this will get better!! With a love tri/qyadrangle! And a twist ending!! So review! And check out my other work!!
Next chapter: Your Secret Admirer.
Mokuba: What happens when Big Brother and Téa are reunited after all these years? Will sparks fly--the right kind of sparks, that is! And find out more about these mysterious dreams that they have both been having, and the lies they've been living, when we return!
