Chapter Text
One ride out of many millions follows the arm of the Milky Way northward. Its destination, mountainous, marks the center of Domino and cuts into the empyrean, reaching higher still.
The night comes for Yugi Mutou. The persevering twinkle of constellations in its expanse begin to resemble the shine at the points of deadly teeth. Dread pinks the nebulae his naked eyes follow through the window of the armored SUV he is seated in, and within the maw he makes out the tongue.
You are not selfish for believing you are hunted.
Him, among the entire population of the city, the country, the world. He reconsiders his unique circumstances instead of downplaying his unrest. His pharaonic demon strokes black nails down and along the edges of his soul and comforts him, douses the sparks of his anxiety before they can explode into an inferno.
Yugi traces an edge of the ancient artifact hanging from his neck with the pad of a thumb. He cradles it the way he would the hand of a loved one; he is a possessed man bonded to the thing sustaining itself on everything negative in him. The ride is so smooth that it feels like the heavy vehicle is gliding over the blacktop. Should be impossible with its weight.
Abandon the idea of impossibility. Your life is no longer so pedestrian.
Yugi opens his mouth, and then he remembers that he is not alone. The driver has not said a word since arriving. He is in the darkest suit Yugi has ever seen, eyes hidden behind shades opaque in their blackness just like the windows from the outside looking in. When he’d seen the armored SUV pulling up to his apartment, his first thought was that it has to be illegal here for a tint to be that deep.
Every little detail about this serves as a sobering reminder of Seto Kaiba’s power. Surely, up in that tower, surrounded by miles and miles of cybernetic and computerized order, Kaiba cannot be more than just a man. At most, some hideous line between man and machine. A brilliant lunatic that communes with dragons. An incredibly formidable Duelist, definitely. But a man in spite of all that, still. Mortal, still.
One of those modifiers no longer applies to Yugi.
On the night of his transition from earthly being to living gateway bridging hereafters he'd seen his shadow extend in front of him, unbound by the laws of light interaction, empowered by rage that could bleed between planes and beckon untold annihilation. He watched Pharaoh Atem pull open his own chest and release the God of the Sky and the underworld from the hollow of himself.
Belligerent, unrelenting, multiplying monsterkind from beyond the veil taught the scorned Pharaoh that divinity as an entire concept hinges on the conviction and faith of humanity and not the other way around. A lesson that they have returned to teach the Earth again today, at the expense of every living thing across the land and in its sea.
We create our idols, Yami Yugi had shared with his kinder half as they joined hands through the mirror this afternoon, as he was mentally preparing, carefully dressing for this outing. This standoff that has been organized as a dinner date. For us to allow ourselves to be called god-king or deific solely because we are strong would be to undermine our own greatness.
The force in him, right now, gently acting to control his nerves is the single greatest threat to existence that there is. By no means should Yugi find himself daunted by, what, one evil billionaire? His Blue-Eyes White Dragon? Surely these two problems are minuscule in comparison.
Instinct sharpened by the constant presence of that very force tells him that he can’t be so sure, and he can’t bring himself to ignore it.
The closer they get to that building, the more the constellation of gaping draconic jaws seems to open for him. KaibaCorp and its surrounding towers make up a chrome, titanium, concrete and circuitboard fortress that fancies itself a set of lungs, the heart, and the nervous system of the city. Its highest point rests at the cloud cover. It’s not just a bewildering marvel of architecture, it’s a statement. A bold one.
Long before my awakening, he has intruded on my domain. Him, and his father before him. Transgression after transgression.
Yami Yugi has a fight to pick with Seto Kaiba, and has had it going back two years, when he emerged very briefly to defend the home—the Game Shop, at the time—from Kaiba and his men stampeding into the place to snatch some ridiculous Blue-Eyes lookalike monster card from Grandpa’s shelves.
Yugi has close to no memory of that entire debacle, because the ancient fury that took hold of his body doesn’t remember either. He’d been in some sleep-drunken, drowsy stupor. And yet he had also been more than clear headed enough to call forth Exodia the Forbidden One and obliterate every unwelcome soul under their roof.
Somehow, at some point during his childhood after he’d solved the Millennium Puzzle, Grandpa made a deal with the spirit within. He’d exchanged something for a promise, a promise that said spirit would not rise and take its revenge until Yugi was ready to confront it first. And so Atem’s hibernation was extended just a little longer. Grandpa had exchanged a second thing, something precious to him, and set the condition that a temporary waking would be in order if their home needed protecting.
Yugi has to have a conversation with his grandfather about what he gave up. Or maybe ... he doesn’t quite yet, and he’ll sort it out after he’s gotten the Pharaoh under better control.
That initial fight is over and has been over for some time now. Yami Yugi has just judged that the penalty for losing to him, which has crushed the minds and consequently erased the totality of all other victims before it, wasn’t actually enough to reduce Kaiba to a thoughtless husk of his former self.
Maybe that’s the part giving me the jitters.
Yugi stares at the back of the driver’s head. If he cares to, he can see straight through the material of the car-seat headrest, leather and all. He can see through the person’s skull and glance across their psyche. He hasn’t had time to hone his elevated senses, he barely had time to catch up with everyone. Tabletop last night was ... interesting. He got to thank Bakura. That was most important. The smile on his friend’s typically dour face was an assurance that everything will be okay.
He came back from something that no one has ever come back from before, as you say. Right? I can only wonder what that did to his sanity.
His abnormality is therefore well established. It would be ill-advised to dismiss him just because he’s still a mortal man. He may not be. Who knows what his other monsters have done to the fundamental makeup of his being since they last met. Who knows what they’ve done to him or what he’s done to himself in the past week alone.
Time is everyone’s enemy.
Dread morphs slow and reluctant into anticipation as the journey approaches its end; the SUV carrier passes through a heavily manned checkpoint leading into KaibaCorp property. Yugi’s eyes flick back outside the window and he watches the air shimmer along this fixed, irregular curve at some huge distance encompassing the entire complex and its connected bounds. Cloaked hard-light forms an invisible barrier. Yugi only makes it out because he no longer sees like most people see.
Yugi would also say that headquarters are equipped and fortified like a military base, but the technology is so far ahead of everywhere else on the planet that it would be a sore understatement. The guards don’t seem to have weapons. There is at least one bizarre vehicle-thing that he’s about 65% sure he’s seen on a Duel Monsters card before. He feels like he’s on the set of some science fiction production or something and he has yet to get his foot in the door.
His ride pulls into the lowest level of the parking complex, which has one opening each to the left and right of the southeast and southwest towers. Yugi is almost glad when the concrete ceiling covers up the veil of night ahead, the unnavigable star ocean that has scrambled known constellations into wrong and alien formations. Maybe he didn’t imagine a dragon’s jaws. Or he did, and his overthinking caused the stars to change positions and reflect it back at him.
If I have that much power, God forbid, I should be able to just cool it.
At last, the driver gruffly announces that they’ve arrived, and all the guest must do is take the elevator to his left. Yugi jumps at the sudden string of words. He thanks the man, slides out of the vehicle, and adjusts the collar of his jacket.
He doesn’t feel like he’s dressed ... primly enough for this. There’s nothing in his wardrobe that could actually get over that bar, and there's nothing he can do about that. He can’t just ... strain the reality layer warping his clothes for the purpose of a fresh new fit or something silly like that.
Engine surprisingly quiet, a low purr instead of a roar, the SUV peels away from the dropoff area and takes its blinding LED headlights with it. Yugi puts the vehicle and its driver outside of his thoughts, and enters the elevator. It's pristine, clinical, chrome-finished. A box of false mirrors with metal guts and pipes around it. He has no earthly clue where he is going, but he doesn’t have to. He is watched, already. He can feel it.
He does not have to touch a thing. In his line of sight is a scanner for thumb pads, a scanner for retinas, right there on the control panel instead of buttons. Yugi doesn’t know if he’d utilize them even if he was instructed to.
There’s a heaviness to the air that cannot be attributed to himself or his restless old demon, who paces across his consciousness, prowls the interlocking and sprawling corridors of its cerebral labyrinth. A tiger in an enclosure.
I know you can’t wait to get your hands on him.
To say the least. Yugi stills as the elevator begins its ascent, confirming him as the correct guest through surveillance footage and the weight scale built into the floor.
At least let me try to reason with the guy a little bit, first. Maybe there’s even a chance that we have a good talk over a pleasant dinner.
There is no response to that whatsoever. Maybe his partner stops pacing for a second, but then he continues without acknowledging what was just said. Okay.
Like the armored vehicle, the elevator and its inner workings are near-silent. The multi-towered KaibaCorp superstructure is a leviathan beyond Yugi’s senses. Largely beyond the Pharaoh’s, too. He feels like the near and far hum of interior mechanisms and the indecipherable language and processing of micro-computers is an unknowable realm all its own.
It is a place of the purest order, tightly managed and maintained. Overseen by an unimpeachable and unquestionable authority.
He can see endless scores of wire tangles and individual universes of circuits from here to the darkest corner of the entire complex. He has to push his vision to its furthest end to find any dust. It’s phenomenal.
He can count the very motes, that is how little of it there is. And only attached to an employee, a living thing, that is not as on top of themselves and their orders as the infallible machinery. In the pits of not-quite-perfect pockets. There was always a margin of error with people; sometimes the dragon of order forgave this, and sometimes he didn’t.
Yugi’s head tips back. He looks for the eyes in the elevator’s interior. Many times he catches only his reflection, wild red irises and severe features gazing back at him. He looks further and eventually he finds them, or the medium through which their authority sees. Hidden lenses, some so small that they could fit atop his pupils when they contract.
There are so many that he cannot quite guess which ones path directly into Kaiba’s own vision. It doesn't matter. The doors are sliding open, depositing him onto the long connective bridge from the parking maze to the main building.
Yugi makes the decision to look straight ahead and not out the floor to ceiling windows on both sides of him, and still he becomes conscious of his position as a subatomic point in the enormity of the cosmos.
You are grander than that. Thoughts of insignificance are small delusions cast from fear. Ignore them. Control it.
The sky is his eternal partner’s kingdom. All the celestial bodies sitting idle on their perches, his subjects.
I am with you. Remember this always.
The guest of honor flicks his violet stare towards the moon. He searches its gently glowing surface like it’s a human face, looks for assurance that the night will go as easily as it comes. It says nothing. A cold and impassive pillar of their star system.
Something rushes at him then, from what he can only conclude is thin air, with the intent to be met and known forever. Yugi is absorbed enough in himself that the voice flies over all six of his senses and startles him worse than the driver had, at the tail end of the journey here, breaking the thin silence that spanned the entire ride.
“Yugi Mutou! Welcome to KaibaCorp!”
Yugi clamps shut his jaws, clenches them, biting back a yelp that would have likened him to a small frightened dog. Did this young man drop from the ceiling?
How? This is a single-level outdoor path made of glass and steelwork.
“My name’s Mokuba! You might have heard of me putting belt to ass in regional Duel Monsters tournaments or spearheading cybercrime-busting rings. You may have even seen me promoting the biggest names in sports automobiles.”
Yugi blinks a few times quickly, and then bows his head respectfully, correctly assuming that this youth expects respect as much as the head of the snake.
“Seto’s my big brother! I’m just gonna walk you to the 120th floor dining hall and clue you in on a couple of things before you go in.”
“Understood. Thank you, Mokuba. It’s nice to meet—”
Mokuba suddenly feints a nasty right hook, fist cranked back and shot forward so fast that one might wonder how he even stops it short. When Yugi recoils, he points at him instead and only reins in a bark of laughter by letting it mingle into a jeering remark instead. He is the most fantastically animated and self-adored soul in all of Domino. An overzealous kind of hope shines out of him, scintillating through his tech decal-patterned, white and pale steel-blue two piece suit.
“You're in for a hell of a night if it's that easy to scare you.”
There are “living” robotic networks layered on top of each other and then contained in his wristwatch. His earpiece, hidden beneath naturally windswept raven hair.
Yugi has had no interaction with the Machine archetype of monsters. He can only assume they are somehow ingrained in their duelist. Yami Yugi quietly, telepathically reveals that isn't actually what he's looking at.
They're both out of their depth.
Yugi gives the younger Kaiba heir one of his common bewildered stares, and all Mokuba does is swing a hand over his shoulder, motioning for him to come right along.
Down the walkway they go, suspended hundreds of meters in the air by see-through platforms that Yugi doesn't want to think about the fragility of. Feet against glass.
“I should want to pop your eyeballs out with an ice cream scoop because of what you did to Seto,”
Mokuba, at the first opportunity, will never hesitate to boldly ask the question of: How can I make this about me?
“but he came out of his comatose pit a new man. There's nothing on this Earth like red hot fucking scorn, let me tell you. I asked him if he was ready for tonight and he said he's waited thousands of years for it to come.”
Yugi’s eyebrows bunch into a look of disdain. He stares at the back of Mokuba's head, keeping his mouth sealed tight because the wrong voice, a demonic voice, may leave him if he doesn't. He balances a hand beneath the Millennium Puzzle, and it is hotter to the touch than it was just a moment ago.
“Don't tell him I told you that, by the way. Or you can, it doesn't matter. He was in a fugue state when he said it.”
“... Huh?”
Mokuba answers no questions. He is just a bit shorter than Yugi, but his quick stride is like one belonging to someone of his brother's titanic height.
“Actually, I changed my mind. I'm not gonna give you any warnings that are worth a damn. Planning any funny business? Go for it, see what happens.”
Mokuba stops when they are mere feet from the tall sliding doors leading into the private dining area where the CEO awaits. He hasn't stopped smiling since he appeared out here.
“We know what you let out of that inverted pyramid in your hand. My brother is ready for you. That’s all.”
When the guest is given a precious second to get a word in, he wastes it heaving an exasperated breath.
“Good to know, Mokuba.”
The edge to Mokuba's smile, the mischief in his eyes, the openly spoken dare to plunge this place of stringent law and hard science into chaos—Yugi finds him like the cunning fox in myths and old children's tales.
The dragon's gargantuan pride, his tyranny wrought in this life, they are ravenous sins that poison every set of eyes that witness and choose to condone them.
When I judge him, I will also judge those that forgive and encourage his wickedness. Mark my words.
You don't have to tell me. I believe you.
Yami Yugi was handed an excuse to get violent the moment they opened the invitation to dinner. If he isn’t restrained, he’ll subject every employee in the building to their own personal doomsday just for their proximity to the boss.
The instant he felt Yugi’s heart rate spike at the sight of disconcerting photos taken of his home, his workplace, his friends’ homes, truly, that was it. As if it wasn’t already personal from two years ago. Seto Kaiba is a lunatic and couldn't ask him out nicely, he had to turn a completely ordinary gesture into a threat!
Yugi has to control his demon’s temper. He has to get through this without losing consciousness. If he can do that, then damn everything else, it will be a victory.
Mokuba snorts, averts his stare from Yugi at last and with it stops daring him to escalate. To his face, at least. He steps aside and the automatic doors slide open with a loud pressurized hiss of air escaping them. The teen genius is given no more attention.
Yugi crosses into the semidarkness of the hall in wait and does not look back, or anywhere but in front of himself. Again. Perhaps he glances upward to see if there are any more surprises that way, but what he discovers instead is that the night has not halted its descent onto him.
Overhead is the open sky. The stars forming a celestial ocean are hanging lower than passing planes and helicopters, no longer millions of light-years away. Yugi could hold out his hand and watch one land at the point of his finger like a little butterfly if he truly wished. There is a strong suggestion of the sublime, and it approaches rapidly.
The absurd overtakes it; the 120th isn’t the rooftop of this structure, so there should be a ceiling and the uppermost levels of the main tower on top.
Yugi voices his guess at this aloud.
“Virtual reality?”
It was the only thing other than delusion or magic that could create this marvel. KaibaCorp is known for it.
But the answer he gets shatters his expectations. It almost validates Mokuba’s pointed comment flung his way mere moments ago because it is just that startling.
“Think even bigger. Reach for what you can see and take it.”
Seto Kaiba’s voice at this height is a scratch across the bowl of the Milky Way. Yugi hears him and then he feels him long before he actually sees him, because his eyes round with shock and stick to the spaces between his fingertips at first instead.
The stars are there, smoldering but not even hot enough to dissolve the topmost layer of skin. He can turn his hand over and let them roll into his palm like a set of marbles cloaked in gas and stellar smoke.
Yugi finds their light underwhelming up close. That is on purpose. He casts his stare back ahead of himself and understands why.
Seto Kaiba can stand on top of the statement made by the existence of this tower from any floor. He could do it from the basement levels. The whole of it exists as a declaration that he is above all the things that inspire awe in other people.
To touch the heavens is nothing; to shoot for the moon and land among the stars is child’s play. He carves out a truth where there is no life-giving, illuminating glow brighter and greater than the light in his cold eyes.
The tyrant in his spotless, creaseless white suit steps out from the lit distance and footfalls padded by dark loafers more expensive than Yugi’s entire wardrobe make no noise.
Yugi stops considering the incredible depth of this man’s arrogance for a second to realize that those eyes are a sort of improbable shade of blue. It metronomes, to him, between azure and cobalt. Too light to be navy and much too deep to invoke the clear daytime sky.
“KaibaCorp’s VR technology primarily serves the purpose of escapism. It can achieve other low maintenance ends, but I advanced it years ago.”
Then what the hell is this place? Yugi shuts and opens his hands, watches the stardust fall from his palm with all the same texture and consistency as sand. This isn’t scientifically sound whatsoever, but evidently he is standing in a place where science is whatever his host says it is.
That doesn’t seem right. That’s madness.
“Have you altered reality?”
For the love of God, he’s had enough of that this weekend.
“No. That would be your power. This,”
Kaiba doesn’t even have to lift a finger to reconfigure their surroundings from the foundation up, turning the blanket of the local star system around them to the 120th floor interior that regular visitors and business associates see when they are arriving for a meeting. Windows for walls. Sterile, white, chrome-finished and so sanitized that Yugi cannot smell anything but Kaiba’s cologne.
Instead of a conference table surrounded by chairs and accompanied by a large whiteboard, there is a smaller tabletop with a set of empty plates and utensils for each, empty wine glasses and a candle in the middle.
“is the answer to that power. It’s an overlay.”
An overlay.
The dread that nicked Yugi’s heels on the way into the SUV and weighed on his shoulders during the drive comes roaring back all at once. The pace of his heart picks up into a gallop, and he could swear that the man in front of him can hear it.
He’s in another dimension.
Again!
“So, you ... you’ve greatly elevated your technology.”
This isn’t like being pulled into the chthonic space of the Millennium Puzzle. Kaiba has total control over a separate reality layer, perhaps some unique iteration of cyberspace, that is imposed on top of the baseline physical. That would also explain why Yami Yugi is in such a foul way, hackles raised like an agitated beast’s.
He’s quieted within the labyrinth of their joined psyche, beginning the process of comprehension, determining how to adapt. This man will be at their mercy once understanding is attained.
Yugi advances towards the table and takes his seat, not needing to be told, not awaiting permission. It is pertinent that he refrains from distracting the spirit of the Puzzle. The trials of the night are beginning.
It’s just dinner, he reminds himself.
Kaiba sits across from him, and even halved this way he is still so tremendous. Long legged, broad-shouldered and barrel chested under that suit and yet lacking no elegance. He must have a complete foot over his guest of honor.
“You left me no other option.”
“You broke into my home with men in body armor. You attacked me, and my Grandpa. Over a card.”
Kaiba is fully aware of his wrongdoing and sees no point in arguing about it or feigning remorse, so he skips over it like it wasn’t even mentioned to start with.
“It’s because of you, in the end, that my growth curve accelerated to what it was. The gulf between myself and the next best Duelist and summoner is a hundred million miles wide. I could be almost grateful.”
“—Now those men of yours are dead, Kaiba. Something horrible happened to them because of your obsession and you don’t even care. You should be dead too.”
“I should be. I’m not. I dragged myself from the brink, tempered and enlightened. As for my security detail,”
He lifts his wrist and idly taps at the face of his watch, which is similar to Mokuba’s in that it is probably a tiny supercomputer and not a standard article that only tells time.
“they don’t need your sympathies or your fake outrage. No one on my payroll is permitted to leave this Earth before I’ve fired them.”
What?
Yugi’s revulsion stretches large across his face. He inclines his head very slightly, disbelief parting his lips.
“Are you out of your mind?”
Inane question. Kaiba continues.
“I’ve long since backed up the data of each person's consciousness and recreated functional drives within human-imitation bodies to store them in. Their quality of life has mostly improved. No one can look at them or touch them and tell that their flesh is synthetic. They still work for me. If I ordered them to report again for the same operation with the same rate of success they’d do it without question.”
Yugi is unhappy to admit that he didn’t come here with any significant portion of an appetite, but what little he had is now gone.
“You’ve trivialized death.”
Kaiba folds his hands patiently atop the table, no longer looking at his watch. He hasn’t blinked once. Yugi watches the hyper-subtle contraction of his pupils and notices that they aren’t fully circular.
“So have you. Rather, the Pharaoh has done it for you.”
His stomach repeats on him. He tries to convince his own body that it’s hunger straight after losing any desire to eat anything and his innards do not buy the lie. He can’t shake the uncomfortable feeling that Kaiba is looking through him, past him, and not at him. Predatory attention.
“Okay. Listen. Let me just put my largest concern forward.”
There’s no purpose in discussing the past, it cannot be undone. Learning Kaiba’s feelings about it was a mistake, he shouldn’t have prodded.
Yugi leans forward until his chair creaks. His hand meets the table, fingers curling, black nails scraping the pristine cloth.
“Whatever problem you have with me, you are to leave my loved ones out of it. This is non-negotiable. Let whatever atrocious acts we commit against each other stay between us.”
It is difficult to see because of his low swept fringe, but Kaiba’s eyebrow twitches. Then the corner of his mouth plays at half a smile. The ice slips back under the angles of his face straight after.
“One significant piece of information that I was unable to obtain about you was your preference for dinner entrees. Your taste in wines. Or if you don’t drink, your preferred brand of bottled water.”
Is everything a joke to this man?
“Kaiba.”
“You're appalled with my methods,”
And he has not remotely begun to even breach the surface of all that he's done and achieved in the field of merging the organic and the cybernetic. Converting chemical and bioelectric impulses to readable frequencies and converting thought to code.
“because you cannot begin to wrap your superstitious little mind around the idea that the science behind them defends itself. That it works. It is human nature to fear what we don't understand, however. And you are a squirrely thing. Fear rules you.”
There is no remaining room for doubt. Kaiba’s pupils are slitted like a reptile's. Yugi is distantly reminded of the serpents in his deck.
“It's not the method that gets me, Kaiba. It's the intent behind it. Your science has evolved into its own kind of magic and you are using it on other living things like a dark spell.”
The dragon sucks his teeth. The first flash of displeasure presents itself, the curl of a lip, a light snarl.
“Magic is a blanket term for ideas realized through the unknowable. It has a grip on emotional, hysterical people like you because you aren't interested in finding the truth behind it.”
Yugi opens his mouth, needing at this point to corral his own anger.
He shuts it again when a server quietly approaches and places a salad tray in front of him. A fresh, richly seasoned spring mix with a scattering of croutons and sliced cherry tomatoes, topped with a dusting of some lightly-sweet seasoning and fragrant citrus dressing. He can see the neatly sliced hunks of salmon grilled to perfection. Far and away the most indulgent thing he's ever had in front of him.
It is followed by a glass of ice, promptly filled with flavored sparkling water and a slice each of lemon and lime.
Yugi’s rebuttal freezes in his throat as hunger reawakens and chases him again.
Kaiba is served a single stuffed lobster tail atop stalks of roasted asparagus, and unwraps his utensils from the wrappings of their napkins.
Dinner. It's just dinner.
Yugi does not have to make it through the entire night. He doesn't have to make it to dawn. He just has to keep his wits about himself until his phantom can phase them above the overlay. Or something like that.
He's slower about picking out and sliding his fork into his tray. He decides, partially out of discomfort, to make a joke. This is a grave error.
“It looks and smells excellent, Kaiba. I'd expect nothing less of your kitchens. Too bad it's most certainly poisoned, right?”
Kaiba is no longer looking at him, beginning to pick at his asparagus.
“I applied a hybridized formula developed from neurotoxic peptides and tetrodotoxin. Had some additional deep chemical engineering done to make it scentless and tasteless, to bond it and bring out the negative health effects from both components.”
Yugi stops in the middle of bringing a forkful of romaine and salmon towards his open mouth, staring slackjawed at the man who's served him.
“It’s blended with the dressing, tossed with the leaves and the rest of the ingredients. No matter how small the bite you take, it’ll go down and begin its work shortly.”
The fork is dropped to the tabletop with a noisy clatter, and Yugi leans back in his seat, pushing the bowl a few inches ahead of him.
“Why on Earth would I eat this, then? Why would I do that, why would you even tell me?”
Kaiba is not kidding. He poisoned the hell out of this salad. Yugi can deduce that he isn’t being lied to just by looking at his face, reading his dry tone as he slowly helps himself to his own meal. The answer is given in an easy, languid drawl.
“Because now you know it’s coming.”
His eyes lift from the plate and they watch each other, letting the implications of their being land and settle. Yugi understands before the explanation finishes.
“And you, with your power in mind, are able to decide exactly how effective foreign agents are once they enter your bloodstream. When you are aware of them. The overlay shouldn't affect that.”
The sheer nerve of it is just showstopping. At the same time, Kaiba seems to put a sincerely insane amount of confidence in Yugi’s strength.
It is spiritual fortitude. Conviction is the energy source through which he holds absolute control over his bodily faculties. ‘Spiritual’ anything is meaningless to the madman before him, however. How much does the definition and the terminology matter when the outcome is the same?
“And you wouldn't describe this as magic?”
Yugi picks the fork back up and takes the first bite after all. A second, then, with a thin hunk of faintly glazed salmon. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say it is the best salad he's ever had. It would be polite to pay the KaibaCorp kitchen a compliment, but he’s feeling pretty sore about the poison even if it’s true that something so simple (the intent, not the careful fusion of neurotoxins and additives) couldn’t possibly kill him.
This wasn’t the case on Friday, before Kuriboh first appeared in his apartment and signaled the start of his transformation. It almost scares Yugi to think about that, and he doesn’t want to be scared while he’s mentally preparing to immunize himself to the toxin cocktail tearing through his system.
“No, because it isn’t an unknowable phenomenon. It’s an extreme psychosomatic response.”
“The science of that doesn’t ... it doesn’t defend itself. Human bodies can’t do what I’m doing right now. It’s absurd. There are forces at play in this world now that just don’t abide by human laws and understanding. I am—I’m an example of exactly that and I’m sitting right in front of you.”
“If I understand how it works, then it isn’t an absurdity. End of discussion. The capacity the rest of our race has for comprehending what is happening is irrelevant.”
Yugi decides not to argue with him. They are outside of their right minds in different ways and that may just be all that matters right now.
A stinging pain lashes across his chest and streaks into his guts following the flicker of frustration, trailing liquid fire in his veins. It’s abrupt like a bullet punching clean through the afflicted area. The range of it expands and he can begin to feel muscle groups in more than one spot locking up and locking together, as if melting into solid mass.
It swells to its worst in his neck; the tubes of his throat contract, restricting airflow. His chest tightens.
Kaiba watches him evenly, unblinkingly, sticking a hunk of decadent lobster meat in his mouth.
He thinks about Yami Yugi, who remains at the boundary line between the living realm and the chthonic space of the Puzzle. If his vessel were in serious danger then he would return and take point before the next set of the dragon’s jaws.
The pain halts and his muscles relax, paralysis and tension ejected from him all at once. Yugi simply expels the efforts of the toxic agents in one thought and speaks the next aloud. A regular person would be nearing asphyxiation at this rate if they didn’t already enter shock. He nudges some salad leaves around with his fork, frowning.
Yugi focuses on getting through dinner. Getting through the night. He has to. He has no choice.
“This really isn’t how you treat a guest, Kaiba.”
Again, the big man’s eyebrow twitches. It’s more pronounced this time, and though he does not smile, there is a soft lilt of amusement under his next words. The gravelly growl of his regular cadence is softened.
“I’m sure you can imagine that I’ve had to pretend my way through quite a lot of for-show outings and gatherings with business partners.”
This wasn’t as common an occurrence these days. Smaller conglomerates seeking one of KaibaCorp’s immense mounds of treasure in ample funding might call its draconian CEO to a fancy restaurant with steaks more expensive than a month of some homes’ rent, but it doesn’t entice him. It’s always just a performance.
“This is real. My first time sitting across from someone I actually want to know.”
Yugi would be lying through his teeth if he said the scope of it wasn’t mind blowing. Perhaps it’s not that big of a deal to a man who has the money to essentially lord over all of Domino.
All of this. Because he wants to know me.
Yugi slides another forkful of his meal into his mouth. Fresh, tangy-sweet taste. The pleasant crunch of a crouton and the juiciness of a sliced cherry tomato. The agents of the potent hybrid neurotoxin mixed in with the dressing try to do their work again and his body has elected to ignore them. There is no longer any poison.
“I’m going to assume that you chose to stalk me, pull surveillance from my workplace, and figure out every detail of my daily life because you figured I’d turn you down if you asked nicely.”
Or like a normal person.
“Correct.”
Kaiba only just now begins properly digging into the lobster tail on his plate. He eats neatly, but very slowly.
“It’s been two years since the Pharaoh and I threw you off Game Shop property. Why the sudden interest in me now of all times?”
Yugi, himself, hadn’t even been conscious. But he knows his other half wouldn’t hold taking partial credit against him. It seems to go somewhere by way of getting under his gracious host’s skin.
“Preparations completed. As my brother told you just outside.”
His pupils are slits again, razor-thin in boldly blue irises. Realizing after that he’s neglected his drink, Yugi collects the cup and draws a light sip.
His fancy water has also been tampered with. He is now familiar with the presence of the toxin mix and the race it starts down his bloodstream. This time he kills it before it can make reach the back of his throat.
Kaiba addresses him flatly.
“We’ll prevent any dullness or argumentative back and forth with a game.”
The centerpiece of both their lives. Yugi would be remiss to turn it down even in these highly mysterious circumstances.
“All right. If you lose, he’s going to punish you. Hope you know that.”
You can choose what we play, but for your petty acts against my peace, your invasion of my privacy ...
“And he may act to make sure you can’t harm anyone else anymore.”
Kaiba finally shows Yugi all his teeth. The grin that smashes the stone mask of his handsome face shows his true colors, as if he’d ever bothered to hide them.
He lifts his fork, waves it back and forth to signal a wrong answer.
“Everything is not a zero sum game, Yugi. Know this. We’re so adjusted to Duel Monsters and its defined system of victors and losers. Some games are solely for education.”
There’s a flicker somewhere past the far edge of Yugi’s vision. The backdrop loses opacity, transitions single percentage by percentage into a new environment. It draws from the previous; dim, grounded starlight filters into the vast dining hall that has now shrunken to contain only guest, host, and their table.
“You and I will take turns asking each other personal questions. We each get three passes, three times in which we can decline to answer.”
A sound, then, long after the flicker. Sitting badly in the marrow of his bones. Something grinding, a bulldozing, heavy barriers deactivating to make room. Yugi pushes his chair back until it hits an invisible wall behind him, the solid and impassable interstellar medium. He looks down at his feet instead of behind and around himself at actualized breathable space.
They are suspended atop a thin sheet of glass overlooking the 119th floor’s entire area. It has been carved into a vast plunging pit, walls curved and unscalable, as if to totally prevent the objects or terrain or flightless things within from escaping.
Yugi’s eyes blow wide with raw horror for the first time. A line is crossed.
There are three people in the pit, behind a thin dividing metal wall. They are wearing plain clothes, by all accounts they appear to be ordinary civilians, and each one is mortified in a way that shows on their faces as they search for an exit that does not exist.
He recognizes them. They are coworkers of his, kind and personable folks that he saw often when he went into the office. They’d sprinkled in one after the other last year, filling positions he wasn’t aware were open, but when one’s life is cut evenly between work and home the people at the job become significant in their own ways.
Yugi’s next breath quakes on the way out. He looks over the frail wall between them and the source of their animal fear.
There is a gangly, blade-covered dragon sitting with its thin hands planted in front of itself. It looks meticulously chiseled from polished bronze and copper, a rare and striking beast of the earth element. Long, curved, almost unwieldy horns sit on its triangular skull like a crown. The scales are as armor, flaring and then sitting flat as it draws the pungent odor of cornered prey just meters away from it.
One bite from the creature will bisect any one of the full grown adults instantaneously. Yugi had a considerably larger dragon in his deck, but this was no comfort.
“Kaiba.”
The name is now uttered in clear, emphasized warning.
The bastard ignores it.
“For each time that you pass on one of my questions, or you lie to me, one of those people down there will die an easily avoidable death for it. Do you understand me?”
Yugi fights a full body twitch. He loses. His voice is lower than usual when it comes out of him this time.
“There are enough black marks on your soul already. Don’t do this. It’s pointless.”
“I was perfectly clear about the point to this. For my part, the same rule applies in your favor. If I pass, if I lie, one of those people will be granted immediate escape.”
But he isn’t going to do that.
Yugi has no way of determining what kinds of questions are unanswerable for this man. He has no way of knowing that at this point, there is no singular subject about his life or his past or his present that he isn’t willing to confront.
Through what he was able to glean through the very thorough measures of monitoring Yugi’s every move and activity, Kaiba has learned that he is actually a very closed off person. It brings him little pleasure to open up to others, and it has taken even his adored and adoring friends years to draw as near as they have, to know what they know of him.
The Earth’s remaining lifespan isn’t long enough for him to go about this the standard, acceptable way. This stunt will make for a passable head start. He has already accepted the risks.
Yugi is pulling the reins on his own mounting fury. The way that his stare has sharpened brings the violet of it onto the edge of fuchsia. He is starting to look the way he did two years ago, when he was unconscious in his own body, letting a ghost defend his home.
Kaiba finds it fascinating.
“That beast is called Primite Dragon Ether Beryl.”
Yugi does not take his eyes off of Kaiba, like he is trying to impale him through the face with the promise of avenging lost life in advance. If he could care any less about what that monster’s deal is it would be unbelievable.
The three captives in the pit are arguing about how they are going to get out of there. They have been told vastly different things, deceived about their escape conditions. They can hear the easy, snarly breaths of the dragon past the wall. They can count them like precious seconds ticking by, bringing them closer to their destination beneath its goring claws or mashed between its teeth.
“Her attack power isn’t spectacular, but she offered it to me in service of my Blue-Eyes, and was a more acceptable prospect than the dirty packs of beasts that arrived earlier in the year. I won’t allow any interruptions from your obnoxious magicians.”
Yugi doesn’t see or feel any hint of the Blue-Eyes White Dragon. He knows that he will if he concentrates on looking for it. He knows that it is in some way right in front of him, daring him to pounce for an alternate route to this interrogation.
“Fine, Kaiba.”
“Are you ready to begin?”
“First, tell me how you could possibly know that I’m lying to you. I won’t allow any one of those people to die over a false accusation of dishonesty.”
“I will know, Yugi. I’ll know.”
His entire body seems to tighten up in one big hard knot as Kaiba slams his palm to the table and shakes it. The sounds they make don’t seem to travel far down enough to reach the people or the copper dragon.
“You and I are already involved! A bond forged in hate is still a bond. Get that through your thick skull. Make your peace with it. We are involved. I will not stop until I destroy you for what you’ve done to me.”
“Hate will kill what’s left of you and walk in your body. Believe me.”
The madman huffs, scoffs a sharp and dismissive laugh. It reaches his eyes and thins them. His grins are always too big. He is but a hair off from a cackle. His steely calm has unraveled with minimal provocation.
“Hate can connect us in the same way that love does. They are opposite ends of the same extreme. A mutation in thinking powerful enough to affect instinct and drive and the total summation of a person.”
Yugi asks the first question because he knows that Kaiba will let him.
“What else can you tell me about love? What does someone like you know of something sacrificed for money, power, control?”
Seto Kaiba loves worthless disputes of morality. The evil automatically associated with him because of his tax bracket. Not once has he ever cared to argue against it. Let them deem him the devil. It puts him on equal ground with God or whatever supposed absolute good they might worship.
“You and every other anti-capitalist, anti-establishment nuisance howling at the elite you outnumber but never mobilize to dethrone so greatly enjoy reminding me that all this power doesn’t complete me. That I am lesser than you in some emotional, karmic way because of the biblical definition of greed. Cling to that resentment if it keeps you going.”
Their entrees are forgotten. Kaiba feels alive. Yugi has shown him a very restrained sort of rage and he is high as a kite on the idea that even one percent of his hatred is reciprocated, even if only for a while, even if only for right now.
“Reciprocation,” The word almost comes out a breathy sigh, his fancy chair creaks with audible protest as he throws his weight against it slightly in the way that he leans back.
“is a behavior caused by the mutation of love. I choose to give and if I am acknowledged I am given back to. At times I give without expectation of receiving. The world slowly spins off its axis but I ensure day in and day out that every charity assessing and undoing the damage human warfare has caused will never close its doors due to lack of funding; a single example.”
In a past life, in some nonsense information bestowed upon him from dreams, Seto Kaiba dismissed it as a concept altogether. His mind is blown much further open in this long line of possibility. It accelerates his madness.
“Obsession is a well documented primary behavior observed by people in love. I believe I am very fast to obsession.”
Yugi starts to commend him for actually acknowledging a flaw for what it is, but stops before he speaks too soon.
“I am of the belief that anyone who doesn’t feel strongly enough about any specific people or passions or occupations is dull. Our lives are too short for small feelings and opinions. It’s a matter of controlling them and understanding when to allow others to see and hear them. To witness how we rave and fixate and spiral in our devotion to this or that.”
He loves to hear himself speak. He could go on and on about it forever. Mutations in himself and others. He glances to the side and down at the pit through the glass beneath them; the three captives are huddled together, weeping. Primite Dragon Ether Beryl is standing up, long neck craning towards the divider.
“... So,”
Yugi has found some degree of his composure. It is hard to hold onto, like trying to keep a squirming ferret still one handed. Kaiba cannot set his face and body language all the way back into the state of icy calm it had been in at the start of dinner, which leads the guest to believe it’s been feigned this entire time.
“Because you and I are already involved, you think you know me well enough already to tell when I’m lying to you?”
“Correct.”
It’s not a deception. Kaiba fully and wholeheartedly believes in this.
But there is something else.
A secondary act of tampering. Microscopic sensors, a cloud of nanites deposited into his water, cloaking itself among and within the minerals that give it its unique but distilled taste. Buried under carbonation. Yugi takes another sip, oblivious.
He cannot act to immunize or defend himself against a foreign agent he is completely ignorant to. Not while his partner’s focus is elsewhere.
Getting information from the cloud, Mokuba is reading the guest’s heart rate and vitals on one of many screens in his supercomputer rig, up in his primary office. He is able to see this as well as the patterns of all the bioelectricity in Yugi’s body.
It’s a backup lie detector. Kaiba is confident enough in his hawkeyed, inhuman vision to catch every microexpression Yugi could possibly make, but even if he doesn’t, Mokuba will spot some other sign and a minuscule vibration in Kaiba’s watch will signal to him that one of the three people in the pit must die.
“Your choice of work.”
Kaiba decides on what he feels is a simple question.
“Explain it to me. You could have made enough from a stable esports career to let your grandfather retire years ago.”
Yugi looks down at the people in the pit, unease settling badly like a cluster of stones in his gut.
Primite Dragon Ether Beryl slinks close to the divider and swivels her hand, talons turned away from the almost papery sheet of it; she raps her knuckles against its surface a couple of times impatiently.
All three of the captives jolt and erupt into screaming, running from the thin metal wall.
The gleaming earth dragon's tail sways as a display of amusement as their terror hits the air. Shortly after she lies back down and tucks her arms beneath her chest, patiently awaiting kill orders.
That isn't a stupid beast. Complicit in Kaiba’s depravities all the same as his brother and his highest paid subordinates and bodyguards.
Yugi gives Kaiba a hard look up from the 119th floor, keeps it chilly and determined but distinctly lacking in the detestful edge he seems to like so much.
“Everything isn't about money. Grandpa enjoys running the shop. It's something that keeps him going,”
Speaking fondly of someone allows Yugi to remain grounded. He can't see Atem's progress without distracting himself. His monsters are largely unable to manifest under the overlay without detection. His voice shakes just slightly, which is so unfortunate he could almost wince.
“and I didn't want the fame associated with my team, the trophies. I am a reserved person. I strongly prefer a quiet lifestyle—tell me, tell me how you got so much from the surveillance. My bosses—they wouldn't just hand it over to you. They wouldn't breach my trust like that. We have history together.”
“You think too much of your higher-ups. And in the meantime they think nothing of you.”
Kaiba is quick to remind other people that they are replaceable peons to any business that hires them. Then he gives Yugi the expected but dreaded answer as to how he was able to infiltrate his place of work so easily:
“I bought the company.”
... Yugi heaves a sigh that seems to pull all of the oxygen out of him at once. He deflates, slumps forward, dizzy. He grinds the heels of his hands into his eyes, clenching his teeth in a futile effort to try and shroud some part of his frustration.
Kaiba goes on talking, as if it’s all ordained. Expected.
“I noticed that you have some experience in game development. You’ll find that field more fulfilling than online store management for collector’s items and cheap apparel that largely ends up in landfills.”
“No, Kaiba, I won’t. Not for you. I’m quitting tomorrow morning.”
Kaiba doesn’t bother hiding the low curve of another smile. His eyes are a little bloodshot.
“Mm. Resigning without two weeks notice? Because you’re that hellbent on rejecting my generosity?”
“Because I refuse to be in a position where you have any control over me.”
“So much for history.”
This isn’t a setback to him. Yugi will be forced to go back to the Game Shop helping his grandfather or he’ll eventually find himself employed under KaibaCorp or one of its lesser known divisions, with or without his knowledge, because he certainly can’t coast off of his savings for very long. It was an inescapable entity in both of his fields and had its silver claws in all sorts of other ventures from drinkable water and filtration systems to antivirus software and cybersecurity.
He’d get the brat one of these days.
Yugi straightens up, hands dropping into his lap. His appetite has fled him again. He weighs the pros and cons of asking to use the restroom, and decides against it for the sake of the innocent civilians in the pit.
Personal questions, he’d said.
“You’ve barely touched that. Are you even enjoying it?”
Yugi gestures lazily across their table to Kaiba’s plate of lobster.
He seems almost a touch annoyed with how meaningless that string of words is.
“It serves a purpose. My personal enjoyment of the meal isn’t a factor worth considering as far as the entire operation goes.”
A half laugh, half scoff escapes Yugi in response to this admittedly sad answer. He tries not to tell such a proud man outright that he pities him. It could read as an insult. It could read as dismissive.
“I think it would be nice to show you what a dinner date actually looks like. My home is obviously not like this. I’m not a five star cook. But ...”
The guest of honor does not consider himself a prisoner here. He looks over the edge of the table and down into the pit; one of the three captives appears to be weeping. The deadly Primite dragon is beginning to stand all the way up, finding that she can hook her claws over the edge of the divider and easily tug it out of place.
He swallows down nothing but saliva, controlling his nerves.
“it would do you a lot of good to enjoy something truly ordinary. Humanizing. I won’t let you lord over me, but I will give you my company, because you need it. Solitude is rotting you faster than your ego and your thirst for blood.”
Something about this wipes the idle smugness clean off of Kaiba’s face.
“You’re rotting up here in this tower, alone in every way except for the familial. If I had known, I would have come to you of my own volition a long time ago.”
The beast in the pit slaps down the divider of sheet metal and the captives stop all of their fussing and begin to panic, backing away from her.
“If I had known, if I hadn’t been so embroiled in my own routines,”
Absorbed in his life, ignorant, under observance by this very man seeking exactly the right moment to reach for him.
“we could have started over. I should have given you more consideration. For that, Kaiba, I’m sorry.”
He’s apologizing? Why?
“I’m surprised. That was shockingly ill informed of you.”
What a string of assumptions to make. Not a single one of them is correct. The berserk parts of him rushing to memorize and psychoanalyze every little word that comes out of Yugi’s mouth and every little response tic he has down to the faintest spasm of muscle, the parts of him hyper invested in this entire thing, they are disappointed at how wrong the guesswork is.
“I’m not interested in entertaining domestic monotony with you long term.”
“Isn’t the entire point of this stunt to get to know me? It’s not effective. I’m offering you a better way.”
“I didn’t ask.”
Yugi jumps when the restless Earth dragon down below begins a slow prowl towards the captives, snapping her jaws but once. Even at the height they are seated at the sound is like a firecracker going off in their ears, the force behind it is such that the humans are thrown to the dirt screaming.
His host has no more questions.
“Kaiba ...”
Yugi’s eyes have rounded with terror for those people again.
Kaiba is repulsed with the empathy in him. He thinks that it’s affected the honesty and integrity of his answers. He does not immediately blame his own extreme methods, he blames the nearest obstacle, the captives, that he had chosen to put there himself.
“I haven’t passed on anything. We’re speaking, like you demanded. She looks ready to kill them.”
“And?”
“And? And it isn’t what we agreed to? I told you that I’m not going to condone them suffering or losing their lives for—”
“Those three individuals in particular are employees of mine that I had planted in your place of work last year for the purpose of tab-keeping and observation.”
Yugi stops talking. Kaiba scans him for stronger reactions, unblinking again, this sudden bottomless depth to his stare that runs cold enough to freeze blood in veins.
“Are you going to hold me accountable, Yugi?”
It’s like some significant, rational part of him has tapped out. Yugi’s mouth falls slightly open. When he meets his gaze again, it’s like he falls into it. He becomes aware that he could scream and plead with Kaiba, dilate this moment into a thousand years and beg the whole time, and never get through to him.
His first thought is that he must have struck a nerve and struck it hard. But that wouldn’t warrant this, would it? It would have warranted a dismissal.
His second is that he has responded in a way that is so far outside of acceptable parameters that correction is mandatory.
“No part of that forfeits their lives.”
Yugi tries not to think about the conversion of consciousness to code, and then code filtered into hard drives. He can’t even wrap his head around the logistics of it.
He tries not to think about this man not answering for what he’s just done.
It is its own kind of death. Different from the merging of souls that would see one cannibalized by the other. People that die in this building never leave it. They are in the walls, stored in printed circuits and mainframes making up the guts of every computer, automaton, internal and external layer of cybernetic existence.
When Yugi comes to understand this, he can hear them. When he listens to the pulsation of Kaiba’s own soul, it thrums out from the fibers of him as if his flesh makes an insufficient seat for it. It’s not all the way human.
“That isn’t your call to make.”
There is fathomless hunger in this union of man and beast. Torturous, ravaging him every moment of every day. He wants for so much, and there is no sum of money nor any measure of power capable of really fulfilling him.
Yugi understands that this is why he is here.
He stands up from his chair then, slowly. At long last, after fighting with himself about the risk of it, he asks something of his trusted monsters. Always with him, each and every one, tucked away in the deck box on his person.
I have to reach him.
In order to reach him, I have to see his heart.
Please help me to find it.
He feels hands at his shoulders, delicately guiding him away from the table, the pretense of dinner, the form of the man before him. Below them, light years and digital boundaries away, the Primite dragon pounces the captives and their shrieking fails to tick anywhere within the soundscape of cyberspace. It is the same as noise dying in the interstellar vacuum. He cannot stop it from happening. It puts another black mark on Kaiba’s soul. Atem will see it. Atem will judge him for it along with all the rest of the souls ground down and mutated into abnormal, unrecognizable states.
The Dark Magician stands behind his summoner, his presence casting blinding strobing light that clearly defines where reality ends and cyberspace begins. It highlights the anomaly that is a human soul tangled with that of a dragon’s.
Seto Kaiba’s pride and pursuit of power and knowledge, revealed in truth and totality to be an immeasurable thirst for carnage, smothers his humanity underneath primordial instinct older than this cursed cutting edge tower, its legacy, its foundations.
It is an instinct old enough to have walked the same earth as Pharaoh Atem.
Yugi looks up at the Blue-Eyes White Dragon in front of him, and titanic does not do it justice. Once its ancestral iteration had stood toe to toe with the gods, and that knowledge tells him exactly how Kaiba found the conviction and the nerve to bring his statement of superiority to life and build it high enough to pierce the heavens. He had once ruled them too.
“Kaiba.”
Again, Yugi repeats his name with the faint edge of a warning. He tries to keep the tenderness in him out of it, but he can’t.
The great white dragon’s jaws twitch, and sparks spill from between his teeth. The wings are snapped tight to its sides, heaving lightly with slow, deep, snarl-underlined breaths.
“I wonder if words are no longer good enough. If we should get to know each other more closely.”
I’m not going to fight you. I refuse.
I’m not going to feed you hatred and rage.
That is not the kind of person I am.
The Blue-Eyes White Dragon speaks, and his voice carries over the boom of every deity and every idol, whether real through faith or rooted in delusion, that has ever addressed a human being.
I could get to know the smell of your flesh cooking.
“Yes, you could. If that’s what you’d like.”
I could see how much empathy you have left when I crush you underfoot.
“I wouldn’t have any less than I do right now.”
The jaws of the beast fall further open. Kaiba lets out some distantly enraged sound, a fierce hiss that ripples. It vibrates Yugi’s rib cage in his body; he merely watches the massive blue universes encased in the dragon’s skull, lit up with starbursts of blood vessels. Its teeth gleam more beautifully than any kind of precious jewel known to man.
His Dark Magician releases him, and steps back. It makes the decision to trust in his staunch pacifism.
The line of Yugi’s mouth shakes, and then it lifts into a smile. He holds his hand out for the bowed head of the silver monstrosity, even as it looks at him dead-on, tusks pointed forward in threat display, static dancing wildly up and down its impenetrable armored hide like it is in standoff with the Spellcaster behind him and not him.
“You’re very handsome, you know. No matter how you choose to appear. Whether I look at you or your heart.”
The tail lashes, and false stars behind them are thrown out of their orbits. Electrical currents are beginning to make contact with Yugi’s skin. Their dance slips beneath his insides. He becomes conscious of his blood boiling, completely separate from anything even vaguely resembling anger. He is far from angry, and has not a single hateful bone in his body.
I want to know what I have to do.
“For me to resent you?”
Yes.
“You deserve better than that.”
Yugi steps forward instead of waiting for Kaiba to come closer. The currents become like lightning, tearing through him from the soles of his feet to the very top of his skull instead of dropping from the sky. He touches palm and all five fingertips to the curiously cool and smooth surface of the dragon’s head.
“You deserve better than to be defined by hate. I know that you know that. I know that you are more than that.”
You are embodying love everlasting right this second. It followed you from a past life and will follow you to the next.
“If you come with me, I can prove it to you.”
The great beast lifts itself, confusion blunting all other emotion, hard stopping the blaze of instinct and the intense internal fight to not just close its jaws around the object of its obsession.
Kaiba looks down on the mere human man, flexes each of his claws which are all longer than he is tall. An alteration in the color of starlight draws his attention. It is so brilliant and vast that the definition of Yugi’s shape and stature blurs.
There is nowhere for you to go.
When the Blue-Eyes White Dragon makes out his image again, beneath the golden glow of the Millennium Puzzle, Yugi is recognizable only in the most basic and most distinctive aspects of his person. The wild fray of his hair, his choice of dress for the evening.
But his eyes have run a fierce, furious red. His flesh has distorted and twisted itself to better suit the part of him that seeks out the hatred in others. To keep record of it. To weigh it against the worth of their soul.
He figured it out.
“We will go where your pride cannot insulate you from the consequences of your actions, Seto Kaiba.
I will prove to you that you are more than your hate.
But first, for your petty acts against my peace, the invasion of my privacy ... and the senseless loss of life, you will face my judgment.”
All the light dies at once. It takes every modicum of Kaiba’s control with it. Not even his scales shine. The darkness is so absolute that it leaves no room for the idea of thought, action, noise or movement that is not permitted by the Pharaoh.
“At the end of days, at the end of time and of possibility, you and I will still remain.
I will have kept close count of all the black marks you’ve accrued across your soul, all the results of your most wicked acts of overpride, and I am the one who will hold you accountable.
Come with me.
Come and meet your fate.”
Yugi approaches his chair again, mind blank. Sound does not travel. Objects move only when he touches them, interacts with them; the rest of the world, contained entirely in this building and its connected towers, is suspended in halted time while Kaiba is made to look at the blood on his hands.
Back at the table he sits, thumbing the edge of the Millennium Puzzle resting gently in his hand.
He is alone in the room.