Disclaimer: Characters by Kazuki Takahashi
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Author's Note:
Just a quick drabble, only took a few days to polish through. It's meant to be kind of confusing, the details murky. That's intended to be the tone.
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Train Third Coming- Long Enough
Chapter 1.1
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There was a train coming in at the station. Seto could hear it before it pulled in. He could smell it- the smoke and soot. He imagined that he could see it in the air.
Something dark pulled at the corners of his mind. He saw soot falling on all the passengers and station agents who hurried around like it was a normal afternoon. He himself was covered in ash so thick that no one would ever bother to shovel it off.
And then, the train pulled in.
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Anzu stepped off the train and looked around with a forced grin. There was a reason she had agreed to this infernally long train ride to Domino, not even on the route to Tokyo from her university in Nagasaki. Her reason was standing on the platform, scowling.
"Kaiba!"
He turned and there were shadows in his unfocused eyes. Anzu sighed and waved a hand in front of his face. "Earth to Kaiba... come on, stop dozing off."
"Anzu," he said with surprise.
She frowned. "Don't tell me you didn't see me."
He blinked. "Not at all."
She didn't bother to ask which meaning of that phrase he wanted to get across. There was nothing this time, either- same as all the other times that she had come by Domino. Even Shizuka had learned the lesson before she had- that when a man said goodbye, it was forever. Whether he meant it or not.
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He had always been busy- she didn't mind. He couldn't complain to her when she was out, then. It wasn't like they lived together, and someone would wait up in an empty house. It would only be strange, then- they never even thought about living together. It was too familiar.
This was too strange. He was too familiar, and she had thought that he could have grown up. Kaiba Seto, despite what he'd like people to believe, had never really grown up. He still expected people to center on him and do his bidding. It was like nothing so much as the self-centered demands of a child.
When she had told him that, once, he smirked and told her that the best could afford to act the worst. While ruffling her hair.
It was times like that when she thought of how Yuugi would have been different, but then the image of Yuugi would float up to her mind. He was the small figure standing half-hidden by the dock while Kaiba buried his face in her hair. He was the one who didn't see the secret malicious smirk that Kaiba gave her.
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"You haven't been waiting long, have you?" she asked.
"No longer than I would care to wait for you."
If she saw the insult in there, she didn't comment. Too soft, too forgiving, she never commented. He didn't know why he kept her, or why she kept him. He was the kind of person who had no qualms over taking another person and jerking them around by their emotions. She was the one on the end of the string.
This time. He would end it this time. Their strange, contorted play had gone on long enough, neither one willing to let the other down. It was as if they were trapped. Three years... he needed to clear his head.
She would go to America. He'd pay her way, as he'd told her often enough, even if he had to endure her pitiful resistance, kicking and screaming. She would go to America where Motou was, Jounochi and Honda as well, if he remembered corrected. Then he would be free of her.
Where would he go? There was nothing new for him in Japan. But he'd be damned if he set foot in America. Three years was long enough.
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"I don't know why I kept you."
Anzu blinked. "Excuse me? I seem to recall that it takes two people "keeping" one another to make a relationship!"
He sneered –"think that if you will."
"You're the same pompous bastard," Anzu told him. "Always think that we're balanced on your whim, and if you say the word we're finished. I have no idea why I thought six months might change that- God knows you were the same whenever I called you."
"If you really thought that, you wouldn't have come back," said Kaiba. He smiled.
She saw at once that it was the kind of genuine smile that Kaiba allowed once in a year if she was lucky. She smiled back. It was the perfect parting gift. "Goodbye."
He blinked, twice. "Excuse me."
"Not a question, was that," she said tartly. "You never did learn your manners."
"You have no reason to leave me," he said calmly. "If you did find the provocation, you would have been gone before this. You came so that I could tell you that I was leaving you, and then both of us would be free of this... mess. This acquaintanceship."
"This was a waste of my time and money," said Anzu. "I'll expect to find the reimbursement at my bank account when I'm back in Nagasaki.
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Three years had been a long time for purgatory. It was a mutual depression, and like depression it was impossible for the two of them to get out of that downward spiral. They were a mutual victim of purgatory, two in the same mind being dragged down in the same relationship.
It was remarkable that such a horrific torture could be ended so quickly. Self-destruction is destroyed very quickly, though it takes such a long time to be made.
By the time that Anzu was back on the train, and Kaiba had left the station for a long drive to his offices, the wound was nearly self-healed. All that was left was a scar of confusion, but it was the kind that neither would or could bear to think about. It was a place in the mind that bears mutual confusion. Even after the fact, neither really understood what had happened in all that time.
Everyone, though, can bear the scar of one confusing, tortuous relationship.
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End.