Yu-Gi-Oh! Fan Fiction ❯ Unexpected Consequences (formerly 'The Gaming Spirit') ❯ All the King's Horses ( Chapter 2 )

The Gaming Spirit   PART II: All the King’s Horses…   Seto’s ability to accept what had happened lasted for about two minutes. Then he reached for his clothes, and Joey let him go.   “Hey, you don’t have to go,” Duke told him. “Anyway, it’s your turn.”   Seto shook his head. “I’m leaving.”   “You can’t leave,” Bakura told him. “Not until you take your turn.” He grinned at him, knife still in evidence.   Seto swept them all with a piercing glare. “I dare you all to fuck off and leave me alone!” he snarled, then turned on his heel and stalked out, slamming the door. The others looked after him, Yugi looking wide-eyed and a little worried. Ryou stood nervously, but didn’t go after him.   Joey glared at them all and hurriedly pulled on his pants. “If anybody else goes out there, I will personally kick your butts all the way back to Egypt. Capish?” He fixed them with a glare of his own and  ran out after Seto, prepared to have to chase him down.   He was surprised to find the object of his pursuit still there, at the end of the sidewalk, apparently having more or less collapsed. He was on his knees, with his hands almost flat on the ground, and he looked like he was sobbing. Joey crouched beside him. “Kaiba…?” he started, and Seto actually flinched away from his voice. When he put his hand on Seto’s shoulder, though, the taller brunet hit him, sending him sprawling onto his back. He sat up again and looked at him to see that he wasn’t crying at all… even if he had been sobbing, his eyes were still entirely dry.   “Hey, man, what was that for?” Joey asked, holding his jaw.   Seto seemed to pause at the question, then laughed harshly. “’What was that for?’” he mocked. “My god, you actually have to ask?”   Joey pushed himself off the ground. “I thought you were okay with it.”   “Well I’m not!”   “You sure didn’t seem to mind ten minutes ago.”   “How would you know? You were too busy raping me in front of your friends!”   Joey froze. Seto seemed near hysterics, and he hadn’t realized…   “Is that really how you felt about it?”   “I thought I made it abundantly clear how I felt about it. I believe I told you ‘no’ several times.” He seemed to be trying to get himself back under control, but he was still way too far on the defensive. He still wasn’t okay, with what had happened, or with Joey… The blond felt for him. For some reason, he didn’t like seeing Seto Kaiba like this, defensive and… scared, it almost seemed.   “But you did it…”   “I had to!”   “What the hell, Kaiba? No one was going to force you to do anything! No one was holding a gun to your head. You could have walked away.”   “I tried that, remember?”   Joey paused. He had tried. It just hadn’t seemed like he was really refusing… somehow, he thought that if Seto really wanted to refuse him he would have done it, would have made him stop somehow. Just saying no didn’t feel like a refusal… everything had just seemed like he was playing hard to get.   “You didn’t have to. No one was going to force you…”   “I know that!” This admission almost seemed to bring him back to that edge, whatever it was, again. “I know your pet psychopaths weren’t going to hurt me any, I know that there was nothing you could do to me…”   “So why’d you do it… if you didn’t want to?”   “I don’t know…” Seto looked away, then turned his back to him. “I don’t know why I did it. But I didn’t want to.”   “You could have made me stop.”   “Don’t you think I’m perfectly aware of that? I could have fucking killed you if I didn’t want it bad enough! And I still did it…”   “So you wanted it…”   “No, I didn’t! It was a challenge – I couldn’t say no!” His shoulders were hunched up, and he still wasn’t looking at Joey. “Did you really think I was going to say no? Especially after I tried, and you wouldn’t let me go?”   “It was only a game, Kaiba.”   “And what was I supposed to do? Run away, in front of all of you – all of them?”   “It was only a game, Kaiba! No one was going to lose any respect for you for refusing something like that!”   “Like Hell!”   Joey was silent. He knew the truth behind what Seto was saying. As much as they didn’t like him, they all respected him, at least a little. If, having finally loosened up a little and more or less accepted Yami and Yugi’s hand of friendship, he had abruptly refused to pay up when he had already agreed to play their game, they would have lost that respect for him. And every time they saw him, they’d remember him as a chicken…   He felt lower than dirt. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to do that… It was only supposed to be a game. It was supposed to be fun.”   “You all had loads of fun.”   “Yeah…” he admitted. “And I thought you did too. You looked like you enjoyed it.”   “I did,” Seto muttered.   Joey was confused again. “What’s the problem, then? If you enjoyed it…?”   “The problem is that I didn’t want it!” Seto yelled, turning back to him. “Pleasure does not change anything! If anything, it makes it worse! Are you that much of an idiot, Wheeler? Do you not understand anything that I’m saying? I didn’t want it, and that fact doesn’t change no matter how much pleasure I managed to get from it! It was still rape!”   Joey said nothing at first. Seto was obviously trying to make him feel like a jackass, and it was just as obviously working. He never wanted to rape him… it was all supposed to be in fun. Sure, he looked hotter than hell when he was bent over like that in total submission, and he had gone ahead and done it even though he knew Seto was tense and afraid… but it wasn’t supposed to be like this!   “Come back inside,” he finally said.   “No. You must be out of your mind.”   “I didn’t mean come back and play with us. I meant, you probably don’t want to keep talking about this out here on the street…”   Seto glared coldly at him. “I don’t want to continue talking about this at all. I just want to forget it – and you could greatly facilitate that by never speaking to me again.”   “I’m not going to let you do that, Seto. You’re just going to try to block it out and pretend like it never happened – and I’m sorry as hell for what I did, but that’s not healthy. I didn’t realize what I was doing to you; I want to make it up to you.”   “And how does one make such a thing up to someone?”   “Well, if possible, they first convince the other person that they’re sorry…”   Seto said nothing, only looked at Joey. He seemed sincere… He looked like he really hadn’t meant it. But that didn’t mean anything. Seto had long since learned not to trust appearances… much more trustworthy was knowledge about general human nature, and that knowledge told him that people would try to hurt one another as often and as badly as possible, and revealing to Joey how much he’d hurt him had been a very bad move that was going to haunt him in the future.   “I don’t believe you.”   “I wish you would… I didn’t realize. I am sorry.”   Seto turned away. “Just leave me alone.”   Joey came forward and put his hand on his shoulder; Seto instinctively grabbed that hand and twisted it painfully.   “I get it, you don’t like to be touched,” Joey said, bent slightly to relieve pressure on his wrist.   “Oh, you get it now, do you?”   Joey ignored what he said, and the awkward, painful position. “I’m sorry. I want to convince you. Can I try and convince you at dinner…?”   “The way you make it up to someone is by taking them on a date?” Seto asked incredulously, and let his wrist go.   “If nothing else works…” He looked hopeful, even as he rubbed his hurting wrist.   Seto had a split second to choose. He could either keep hold of his blind lack of faith in human nature and assume that this was just some elaborate plot to hurt him more… or he could let Joey try to convince him that he hadn’t meant to hurt him in the first place. It would be so much easier just to turn his back and dismiss him, and try to forget this had ever happened, all while preparing for the inevitable hurt that was sure to come from revealing so much of himself…   “Fine,” he said shortly. “You have three chances to convince me. If I don’t believe you after that, you’re never to speak to me again.”   “All right…” Joey agreed reluctantly. How the hell was he supposed to convince Seto of anything in three dates…?   Had Seto just consented to go on three dates with him?   All right!   Seto walked away, and Joey wondered again how he was supposed to do this. How did one win the affections of someone like Seto Kaiba? And he did mean win, because this was a game. He knew that it would almost have to be, with Seto. A game, with higher stakes than he had ever played for before… and he would have to play better than he ever had before. Second place wouldn’t do here, let alone fourth. He’d have to prove to Seto that he was first-place material, if he was going to win him over…