A/N: Written for the Diversity Writing Challenge, a99 - write a fic that has less than half dialogue, and for the Advent Ca lender 2015, BONUS 1 - Roll a dice three times. The first is your minimum. The second is your maximum. The third is how many zeroes you add to your min and max. I rolled 2,5,2, which means my word count range was 200-500. And this fic is 496. (I actually did roll a 6 in the last slot somewhere...)
Softened Stones
Crow and Yusei both went soft, in his opinion. Maybe Kalin'd had the right idea after all - but how could he say that? Someone died. What Kiryu did - Kiryu went too far. But Crow and Yusei weren't going far enough. They were content to protect the little kids under their wings (or almost adults who insisted on acting like little kids, in the case of Yusei). Content to let Satellite slip under the sewers. Content to waste away, working towards some useless goal - because it didn't matter to the people of the City, ultimately, whether their work got done or not. They had the world's fruits within reach.
Once upon a time, they'd all dreamed about those fruits. They were all still dreaming, but differently now. Lazily, in his opinion. He doubted Yusei would ride out into the city with his duel runner. It had been sitting, finished, in his garage for months, and he only ever used it to put on a show for the Satellite kids. He gave them little bits of the skin. They could have the whole fruit if someone just drove into the City on it, but Yusei didn't go and Crow always turned around and came back.
Then again, he was hardly one to talk. He didn't have the means they did, and it was his own frustration that was to blame, or maybe Kalin. The Enforcers would have pulled it off if they'd still been a team. Yusei and Kalin came up with the plans: Kalin in the sun and Yusei in the shadow. Jack and Crow pulled them off: Jack the fire that burned the path and Crow the water that slid under and around. And Jack and Kalin were the ones willing to make sacrifices, the ones ready to bowl over whatever was necessary to reach the end, the ones who wouldn't settle for a back-up plan and Crow and Yusei were the ones who knew when to cut their losses, who went away with as much as they could carry and no less. They balanced before. Not anymore. Now they were idly wasting away, because they wouldn't push far enough without Kalin to spark them on. Gone soft, like he thought.
Perhaps times like that were when he missed Kalin the most. When that restlessness stirred in his soul, when he wanted to escape and just snatch up one of the Duel Runners they'd fashioned and ride right out of the city. But then their sentiments would catch him and he'd find themselves waiting again. 'Until the kids grow up,' said Crow.
'Soon,' said Yusei. Even though 'soon' was a long time coming. Even though 'soon' may never come if things stayed the way they were.