Intervention

"Ah ha! And who might this be?" Sawatari cried, sweeping his arm across the empty room. He wasn't talking to himself, but to the person who had just knocked on the door. He hadn't been expecting Yuya for another hour or so, but he didn't put it past his rival to surprise him with an early arrival. (It's what he liked best about Yuya—never a dull moment.)

"Might it be my second-in-command? My protégé?" he continued, grabbing his duel disk. A true entertainment duelist always had to be prepared to defend the Sacred Philosophy of Egao, even against a fellow believer. "Yuya! You've come a hundred years too early if you think you can beat—"

A fist pounded on the door; Sawatari skidded to a stop. "It's Serena!" the voice on the other side of the door barked. "Open up!"

Sawatari scowled. He was glad to have Serena back after her ill-conceived ascent into godhood, but he didn't care for the way her yelling made his heart pound in such a delightfully confusing way. He opened the door, and was reminded of another drawback to Serena's return—the overgrown parasite that now followed her everywhere. (Everyone insisted on calling it 'Yuri'; Sawatari preferred to ignore it's existence.)

"Serena-chan!" Sawatari leaned up against the doorframe. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"

She grabbed him by the collar, and pulled him along. "Come."

"W-what—?"

"We're staging an intervention!" the parasite elaborated as it roughly grabbed him by the upper arm. "For some reason, Serena thought you might be able to help."

Sawatari tried to ignore the jagged nails digging spitefully into his skin. He whipped his head in Serena's direction. "'The hell do you mean, 'an intervention'?!" he cried. "On who?!"

"Yuya."

Sawatari's heart leapt into his chest, and images from that time violently flashed before him. "Don't tell me—"

The parasite laughed cruelly. "Serena," it managed between giggles, "why are you friends with this moron?"

"Shut up, Yuri." Serena turned to Sawatari. "I'll remind you that even if Zarc were still in existence, his revival would require his pieces to become one again. And," she gestured vaguely in the parasite's direction, "that obviously has not happened."

"Then what's wrong with Yuya?!"

"You know, I always wondered what it'd be like to get kidnapped," Sora mused as they sped down Maiami City's main highway. "It was sort of interesting, but I'm ready to get off now."

Yugo looked down at Sora, who laid face down across his lap, nestled between himself and Rin. He kept his arms on her shoulders as she drove, both to maintain his balance and to keep the other boy pinned. "I told you to shut up about that! We nabbed you fair and square!"

Sora rolled his eyes, tempted to remind him that as a former soldier of Academia, they'd only 'kidnapped' him because he allowed it to happen. He held his tongue, but only because he didn't want to ruin the experience. "Can you at least take this hood off, then? Not being able to see is really annoying."

Yugo sucked his teeth, and just when Sora accepted that it wasn't going to happen, Yugo roughly yanked the black hood off from over his head. "Happy now?!"

"I'd be a lot happier if you let me off, or at least told me where we were going. Why all the drama?"

"You don't need to know!"

"Maybe if you told him, he'd stop his incessant whining," Rin suggested.

Yugo sucked his teeth. "Fine." Sora felt the other boy's chest expand as he took a deep breath. "We're staging an intervention, and we need your help."

"That's all? Why didn't you just say that? I have loads of experience intervening in things!" Had his hands not been bound behind his back, Sora would've counted off his credentials on his fingers. "I intervened in the Synchro and Standard Dimensions! I intervened in Heartland before that! When students tried escaping Academia, I would intervene on them, too. So tell me, who are we destroying?"

"We're destroying…" Sora swore he heard Yugo's voice crack. "We're destroying Hiragi Yuzu."

A hot, indignant fury rose in Sora's chest. How dare Yuya's idiot Synchro double try to blow Yuzu off the face of the planet? "Oh? And what makes you think I'd help with something like that?" he baited, silently begging Yugo to give him an excuse.

Rin swung her arm around, backhanding Yugo. "We're just going to talk to her," she grated behind clenched teeth. "Yuzu's gone down a… strange road. We need to stop her before it's too late!"

Sora tried to think of what Rin could mean by 'strange road'. Had Yuzu picked up on some strange Pendulum Dimension fashion trend? Had she discarded her real father in favor of the Professor? Was she trying to become an intangible force for good again? "What do you mean by that?"

Rin sighed. "You better brace yourself…"

"This absurd behavior has gone on long enough. You need to stop."

Sawatari heard Reiji's low voice rumbling through the halls of the Sakaki household. Serena and her parasite had filled him in on everything, but he needed to see it for himself. He was having a hard time picturing Yuya… Yuya and Yuzu—

"What do you mean?" Yuzu asked, her ever-melodic voice just a bit sunnier than usual. "This is fine."

"No, it is not fine!" Gongenzaka roared. "This is totally unhealthy!"

"Yuya," it was Yuto speaking now, "I understand your feelings—better than anyone. But this… this isn't right."

"I agree. Think of your families!" Ruri—Yuzu's XYZ double—spoke up. "Your mother can hardly stand to look at you, her disgust is so great. And your father! Poor Sakaki-sensei is so disturbed, he's gone out into the woods 'find himself'. Who knows when he'll be back!" Her voice lowered. "And that isn't even to speak of Hiragi-san's reaction—"

"That's not fair, you leave dad out of this!" Yuzu snapped, her chipper tone gone.

Sawatari, still flanked by Serena and the parasite, walked into the living room. And when he saw that what the two of them told him was true, he only just managed to stifle his scream.

There they were: Yuzu and Yuya, as audacious as anyone could ever be, nestled together in one giant shirt.

"You haven't managed to talk any sense into them yet?" the parasite drawled, an amused smirk creeping its way across his face. "Oh, you're both so lucky you didn't grow up in Academia. You would've been beaten senseless for such insolence."

"Y-yuya…" Sawatari began, truly at a loss for words for the first time in his life. "How… how long has this been going on…?"

"Three days," Reiji replied, his tone tight and his hand clenched into a white knuckled fist. "Three! Days!"

Sawatari was mortified. How had this been allowed to go on for three days?

"Oh no, don't stop there. Tell him what else has happened in those three days," Serena didn't wait for a response before listing off everything herself. "In three days, they've refused to walk a step apart! The looks we get in public range from fear to pity to outright disgust! Long past are the days when one could call themselves a Lancer with pride! It seems this entire city is just waiting for us to join in on the giant shirt orgy!"

Yuya took a deep breath. "Look, all of you—"

He was abruptly cut off by the roar of an engine, just outside the house. "Shit shit shitshitshitshit—!"

There was a loud crash. The lot of them ran back into the kitchen, to find that a d-wheel—foreign to the Pendulum Dimension, destructive and excessive in all ways—had crashed through the kitchen wall.

The parasite was the first to react, bursting into a violent fit of laughter. Yuto stomped his foot on the ground. "Damnit, Yugo!"

"It wasn't me! It was Ri—holy shit, Rin was right! Yuya has trapped Yuzu in a giant shirt!" he slammed his helmet onto the floor and started towards the two of them. "Don't worry, I'll save—!"

Yuzu wasted no time kicking him in the groin. He collapsed onto the ground in a heap of pain.

"Please get a hold of yourself, Yugo," Rin remarked dryly as she unbound Sora's wrists.

The former Academia soldier stood up a moment later, his eyes immediately honing in on his two former classmates. His normally expressive face went completely blank, and he shook his head slowly. "I thought they were lying to me. 'Yuya and Yuzu would never do something so outrageous', I told them. 'My comrades have way more dignity than that', I insisted." He sighed heavily, and began to walk over to them. "Well, let's get on with it, then. Take the shirt off."

"Get away!" Yuya cried, and he and Yuzu backed away from him, together. "I'll duel you all right now if it comes down to it! No one's going to separate me and Yuzu ever again!"

"Oh, is that what this is about?" Yuri purred. "Don't be such a baby. Serena and I have been separated until very recently, and look how I turned out—perfectly fine!"

"You're not helping."

"My father has been taken care of, and Zarc is no longer a threat," Reiji reasoned. "There is no reason to go to such an embarrassing extreme."

"I still don't see why everyone is so offended by this," Yuzu complained, her voice edging dangerously close to a whine. "Why can't you just leave us be?!"

"Because no comrade of mine is going to strut around town like… like this!" Serena spat. "If you can't see reason, we'll use force! Yuri, get them!"

Yuri spun around, a cold smile on his face. "Don't you just love how masterful she is? I certainly do. I don't know what I ever did without my little barbarian."

Yuya and Yuzu turned to the door, and ran outside. Everyone chased after them—Yuri and Sora in the lead, Rin and Yugo starting at the rear before recovering their d-wheel, and everyone else in between. The shouting from the eventual ten-versus-two duel could be heard for miles.

An hour or so later, Yoko returned from grocery shopping to find her home in an utter state of disarray. Garbage was strewn everywhere. A discarded shoe lay cast off on the far end of the living room. Several chairs had been flipped over. The fridge door was cast wide open; someone had obviously raided it. Yuya (and Yuzu, she remembered with a shudder) were nowhere to be found.

She thought nothing of it. Her husband went missing without a trace for a solid three years, and that fiasco eventually worked itself out. She had no doubt this one would as well.

As she began dinner, she idly wondered who was going to pay for the giant hole in her wall.