Yu Yu Hakusho Fan Fiction / Yu-Gi-Oh! Fan Fiction ❯ The New Students ❯ Chapter 2

Priestess: I watched Mean Girls before writing this chapter, so I think that some of it might remind you of the movie (If you've seen it, that is)

***

"Must we do this?" Hiei asked for the millionth time, staring at the crisply-ironed blue pants as if he had no idea what to do with it—but then again, he probably didn't. I mean, think about it—how many times have you seen a demon wear pants?

"Yes," Kurama replied for the millionth time, sounding somewhere between tired and exasperated.

"But how are you supposed to put this thing on?"

Kurama glanced at him with a raised eyebrow. "You're joking, right?" he asked, after a long moment just staring at him. He had already put his school uniform on.

Hiei glared at him. "You may be stuck in a lousy human body right now, but you were a demon for centuries. Did you ever have to wear these…things?" he demanded.

"………………………& #8230;………………………… ;"

"Well?!!!" Hiei bellowed.

"I'm thinking, I'm thinking!" Kurama retorted, rather fed up with Hiei's impatience at this point"…………………No."

"No what?"

"No, I never wore pants as a demon. Happy now?"

"Oh. So they're called 'pants,' are they?" asked Hiei, a distinctive sneer in his voice. "Well, I would consider 'torture devices' to be a bit more accurate, but whatever you say."

The usually-patient Kurama glared at him. "Hiei, could you try not to be an annoying little brat for about ten minutes?"

"Make me," he retorted.

"Hiei, we're late already. Hiei, we need to do this mission. Hiei, are you even listening to me? Hiei?!"

"Stop saying my name over and over again like that, it's so irritating," he snapped.

"I'll stop saying when you start listening.”

"No, you won't. You would talk twice as much!" he challenged. There was a long and hostile silence in which the two half-breeds (kind of) glared at each other. Then Kurama's expression suddenly seemed to soften, and Hiei groaned inwardly, knowing all too well that the wily fox had figured out why he was acting like such a brat.

"You're scared, aren't you?" he murmured, taking a step forward. His hand lifted for a moment, almost as if he was going to touch Hiei, but then he lowered it again.

"What?" Hiei balked. "Me? Scared? I am not!”

"Yes, you are," replied Kurama in that infuriatingly knowing way of his. "You're scared of going to a human school. You're scared everybody is going to hate you. You're scared you won't know what to do."

There was another silence, even longer, but this one not hostile. It was Hiei who surrendered this time. With a deep inward groan, he lifted the pants. "Help me put these on."

"Gladly."

***

"Did you see the new kids?" That was the first phrase all day which caught Seto Kaiba's attention. There were no class-skippings and such in Japan, so he had to go to school, but that didn't mean he had to pay attention. He aced all the tests anyway.

"That short one looked weird." This meant nothing. He knew two weird-looking short people. Actually, they were the same people, but that meant little to him. Or at least he pretended it did.

"I don't know, I thought he was kind of cute." Kaiba groaned inwardly. What was with girls and that disgusting word? If this other kid was anything like him, he would despise being referred to as 'cute.'

"The red-haired one was as hot as Ryou Bakura." All right, Ryou was cute. But Bakura was the hot one. Ryou or Bakura, though, he still thought it bewildering that he had gotten a fanclub on the first day. Then again, all the girls—and half the guys—in school were intimidated by him. Which he preferred, quite frankly.

"Ha! No one is as hot as him!"

"What about that kid that came a few months ago? He's hot." Malik? Hot? Kaiba snorted. Too loudly. A couple of kids glanced at him. He gave them a hard stare, and they immediately looked away. He smirked. They were all scared of him.

"You're kidding, right? He's a freak!" Kaiba agreed. If it weren't for Malik, he would never have gotten so many memories back of his past. If it weren't for the memories, he would never have accepted that he had a past life in the first place.

"Yeah, but he has a motorcycle and everything."

Listening to this conversation was getting him nowhere. They would keep arguing about levels of hot and cute, and he wouldn't learn anything about these new kids.

Usually, Kaiba wouldn't give a crap about any new kids. But in the last year and a half, they had had two new kids, and both of them had brought massive changes to his life.

Which wasn't necessarily a bad thing—it just didn't happen to have the slightest resemblance to a good thing.

"I don't think this school can take anymore freaks," he ground out, fingers tightening around his books. He could feel the faint tingle of energy at his fingers, begging to be freed so it could melt through the books—he hadn't yet harnessed enough of his energy to do much more. His magic was in the form of electricity, and most of it was used in his work. "And I know my life can't."

"We heard that," came a teasing, sing-songy voice that made the hairs at the nape of his neck bristle. Whirling around, he saw Malik and Bakura watching him. Growling, he flipped them off.

Malik had a taunting expression, but Bakura's face couldn't be read. Bakura scared Kaiba, at least a little bit. He had always had the nagging feeling that the Spirit of the Millennium Ring was…well…not quite insane, that wasn't the word he was looking for. There was just something empty about his eyes that made Kaiba wonder what horrors had occurred in his past.

He knew that Bakura still had all of his memories of living in Ancient Egypt, and couldn't help but think that he was probably the one who would most want to forget.

***

It was turning out to be a horribly hot day for Domino. No one knew where the sudden heat wave had sprung up from, but it had, and the school's paltry air conditioning was no match.

Malik and Kaiba, being Egyptian (though Kaiba still gave no clue of believing this) didn't seem to notice the sweltering heat, but Yugi sure as hell did. Because of this, he insisted Yami take control.

And it seemed Ryou and Bakura had had similar ideas—though he couldn't be sure, seeing as how they sat in the first row in front of Malik and next to his best friend Katsuya Jonouchi. But this wasn't significant, considering. Between the stress of school and the lack of knowledge in most academics (except math and a little history) Yami was going half-mad.

"Dammit! You can't just break your stupid head off when the great Pharaoh is using you!" Yami screamed as the pencil lead broke for maybe the millionth time. "This piece-of-crap pencil is disobedient to its king! I have never seen such a lazy ass pencil!"

He began smashing it against the table, when suddenly he decided to notice that everybody was staring at him as if he had gone insane—which, with all the pressure lately, was sadly likely.

"Umm…I…" he turned brilliant red and wished he could melt in the seat and disappear. "The…the heat…it was…umm…getting to me?"

"Well, taking this into account…" said the teacher, a voluptuous woman with dark curly hair and pale skin that was getting astoundingly flushed by the heat. "Here's a one-hour detention and a new pencil."

Yami's first thought was that Yugi would be furious. His next was that he deserved it for getting him here in the first place. The strange stares and barely-suppressed snickers from just about everybody in class—even Anzu, Honda, and Katsuya—really weren't helping. He glared at Kaiba, at the back of Bakura and Malik, and at total strangers.

He also glared at Katsuya, because he wouldn't be able to see him anyway.

He decided not to glare at Honda or Anzu because they were his friends and because Anzu would probably scream his ear off for it.

***

"I have never felt this nervous in my life," Hiei muttered.

"Relax, Hiei," soothed Kurama, rather impressed that Hiei had admitted this to him anyway. "You can get all the information that you might need through reading minds, and we have most of our classes together anyway."

"Why only 'most?'" he demanded. "I don't know the first thing about human schools, or humans for that matter!"

"Because there are some classes when none of the four kids are together, and we need to have two see at least two of them every period—which is impossible if we're in the same period and they aren't."

"Ach!" Hiei cried. "All this logic is making my head hurt!"

Kurama glanced at the bell. "All right, I think it's time to go in now."

***

"Class, we have two new students today," the teacher announced.

"What?" Honda exclaimed. "Why are they always in this class?"

"I don't know, maybe you should ask them. All right, come in," she said to the doorway. Two handsome boys walked in, one who looked oddly feminine and one who was oddly short. "Class, meet Suichi Minamoru and Hi-e Koorime."

"It's Hiei, not Hi-e," Hiei corrected rather rudely, though if you've ever had your name mispronounced you'll realize that it wasn't Hiei's usual unwarranted rudeness.

A few kids arched their eyebrows, surprised at hearing someone so small speaking in such a deep voice. Yami, Bakura, Malik, Katsuya, Honda, and Anzu were the only ones who seemed to think that it was a perfectly natural occurrence. Maybe because Yami's voice was just as deep, and his body—or rather Yugi's body—was just as small.

"All right, Suichi, you can sit next to Mister Ishtal." A boy with long, pale blonde hair waved at him. Kurama recognized him immediately as one of the boys they were researching. And he was sitting right behind another one. That was two down.

"And Hiei, you sit…umm…the only other free spot is next to Seto Kaiba." The teacher sounded nervous about this statement, and a few gasps fluttered through the room. "He's at the bathroom right now, but your seat is right there." She pointed.

Some kids looked at Hiei pityingly. Hiei, however, looked determinedly stoic. He walked towards the desk and sat down.. Kurama felt proud of him—usually, Hiei would have perched on the table as if it were a desk. All the time he had spent training the unwilling demon about the human world was paying off.

He himself sat where he was supposed to. The boy next to Bakura, a kid with messy blonde hair and the scruffy look of a street kid, turned around in his seat. "Hiya! I'm Katsuya Jonouchi!"

"Hello," Kurama greeted. He noticed, suddenly, that Bakura was watching him intently. Those black-lashed eyes were so creepy, sly and wise and sad, piercing and unrelenting, so penetrating he felt as if his soul were being looked into.

The class continued for a while, and suddenly Malik looked at him and asked, "Is that your natural hair color?"

Subconsciously, Kurama reached up and fingered the red locks, wondering what to say. They weren't, of course, his natural hair color was white. But in this body, they were. Usually he would just have said yes and not given it a thought, but those astonishingly blue eyes made him feel uncertain. Somehow, he knew that Bakura would know if he lied, and tell Malik.

"Yes," he replied at last.

"I like it," said Malik.

"Thanks."

Then, unexpectedly, Malik grabbed one of them and pulled them next to his own sun-bleached hair. Kurama felt a slight pain in his scalp, as if the Egyptian were trying to rip his hair out. To Bakura, Malik said, "See, this is the color I want."

"Let him go," said Katsuya in disgust. To Kurama, he said, "Don't mind him, these Egyptians are almost too gay to function."

"Liar," said Bakura unexpectedly. His voice was a rich tenor, very similar to Hiei's voice, but different. Startled for some reason, Kurama looked at him. There was something so familiar about his face, though he knew he had never seen eyes that color.

"I am not!" Katsuya cried.

"Not you, him!" Bakura replied, with a look that clearly said ignoramus. To Kurama, he said, in a voice remarkably close to a sneer, "That isn't your natural hair color. It isn't even close to your natural hair color."

Kurama was startled, but tried his best to hide it. "Right, my hair is white," he replied, trying his best to sound sarcastic. "I actually look just like you. Is that what you expect me to say?"

"Well, well, well, if it isn't a new member of the 'guys-who-look-like-girls' guild," said a frigid voice. Kurama glanced up to see the tall, slender, blue-eyed brunette he had seen on the screen. He looked at the four of them with a distinctive scowl, and Kurama noticed he had a briefcase in one hand. Odd thing to bring to a bathroom.

"Piss off, Kaiba," snapped Katsuya, but Kaiba ignored him and looked strait at Kurama. For the second time that day, the usually-serene Kurama was unnerved by a pair of sad blue eyes. His eyes were sapphire, not cerulean like Bakura's. They were sharp and intelligent, but also utterly frigid, bitingly icy in a way that even Hiei's eyes were not.

"So, what's your wig made out of?"

"Your mom's chest hair!" Malik retorted.

Bakura and Kaiba remind me of Hiei, Katsuya reminds me of Kuwabara or Yusuke, and Malik reminds me of no one I've ever met, thought Kurama, feeling weary already. This day cannot get any weirder.

He was wrong.