Yu-Gi-Oh and the characters within it are the creation of Kazuki Takahashi and the property of Konami.

Warnings: The following story contains non-explicit references to hentai doujinshi, mostly mild cursing, drug trafficking, recreational drug use, non-graphic consensual sex, torture of an inimitable variety, and the self-directed use of derogatory terms for gay people (you know the kind of thing). There's also copious consumption of meat and other animal products, which may be offensive to vegans and vegetarians. No, seriously, this fic is a meat-eating extravaganza whenever food is involved, which is often.

The time is five years after Yu-Gi-Oh Duel Monsters. The place, at least in the beginning, is Japanamerica.

Dedication: To all the tabletop gaming nerds, the comic book nerds, the science fiction nerds, the anime nerds, the women who persevere in their fandom despite assholes who call them "fake geek girls," the anthro nerds, the LARPers, the folks with galleries of fantasy art hanging from their walls, and, of course, the card game nerds, fanficcers, dinosaur aficionados, and entomo– and arachnophiles. This story is for you.

Prologue: It All Begins with a Smutty Comic

"Oof!"

Rex looked up at the closed door to what was, until a minute ago, his private room. No amount of pounding and yelling would gain him re-entry. Mai was not to be trifled with, as he had learned at his own expense. Grumbling, he picked up his cards from the floor and walked down the hall.

When he reached one particular door, a thought occurred to him. He did not absolutely have to consign himself to the communal quarters. With a little bit of persuasion, he could finagle his way into sharing someone else's—a specific someone else's—personal accommodations. After all, Rex knew no one else on the ship, and he had exchanged a modicum of semi-friendly banter with the guy before their duel. He knocked on the door in front of him...

"Hey, Weevil!"

A brief pause ensued before the reply issued. "What do you want?"

"Can I sleep in your room tonight? I sorta kinda got kicked outta mine."

A snicker came from behind the door. "What, did you get caught smoking weed or something?"

The nerve of this guy! Rex balled his hand into a fist. "No, I lost a duel! Where do you get off calling me a pothead?"

"Hee hee! Well, okay." Weevil opened his door, revealing that he wore short cotton pajamas printed with spider webs. "But you are sleeping on the sofa. I didn't win the championship to give my bed to somebody else."

"Eh, it's all right," said Rex, stepping into the room. Looking around, he observed that the suite resembled his in almost every detail, save for the addition of a potted fern in one corner.

Upon shutting the door, Weevil said, "Whatever you do in here, don't touch my backpack. If you lay a finger on my backpack or anything in it"—he pointed his own index finger in a preemptively accusatory gesture at Rex—"I will cut your hands off and wear them in my pockets for good luck!"

"Jeez, you lay it on thick. And I won't touch your friggin' backpack. Say, you got anything to eat? I don't have any of my snacks anymore." Mai was probably eating them now, he considered with a pang of bitterness. If she would ever deign to eat anything as sugary or greasy as what he kept lying around, anyway—the woman looked like a supermodel, which was how he got into this situation in the first place. Why did she have to be so attractive?

"Oh, I have snacks, but first you have to tell me how you lost your room 'cause of a duel."

Rex sighed. "Okay, I let Mai in my room 'cause she didn't wanna sleep in the communal bunks and I sorta hoped she'd sleep with me if I shared my room with her, but then she tricked me into betting my room in a duel, and I was sure I'd win, but, well..." He gazed at the floor in silence.

Instead of speaking, Weevil's first reaction was to reach into his pocket and pull out a wrapped pair of toaster pastries. He unwrapped the silver coating, pushed the top pastry out slightly, and extended it to Rex.

"Help yourself."

With what he hoped was not too wide a smile, Rex snatched the manufactured confection from its package. Wordlessly, he stuffed what felt like a third of the pastry into his mouth.

"Well, that's enough togetherness for me," said Weevil, heading into his bedroom. "I'd love to stay up with you and listen to how you expect to crush the competition, and I'd love even more to tell you how I plan to do the same thing, but it's a little too late for that. Enjoy the couch, lizard brain!"

He closed the door, leaving Rex to take a seat, grumblingly, on the sofa. Well, he didn't want to hear that pest ramble on about his strategies anyway, even if it would be fun to tell him about how he was going to improve his own deck. It was time for bed.

In the middle of the night, Rex's eyes snapped open. The realization that he had not taken a shower in over twenty-four hours fell upon him.

He threw the blanket onto the floor. And the only bathroom he could get to was inside the bedroom—Weevil's bedroom...

Sighing, he rose from the couch and crept up to the door that separated the bedroom from the den. When he tried to turn the doorknob, he discovered to his relief that the door was unlocked, and he opened it and pushed on inside.

There, as expected, Weevil lay sleeping in a bed that looked too large for him. Taking care not to be too creepy, Rex transferred his gaze to the nightstand, where he thought he saw something under the pair of folded-up glasses that sat there. He then strode right along into the small enclosed bathroom, shut the door, and turned on the light. As he began to run the bathtub faucet, he prayed silently that he would not wake Weevil.

Eleven minutes later, when he stepped out of the bathroom with a towel around his waist and another around his head, he allowed his eyes to rest on the still-sleeping Weevil's nightstand again. Rex noticed the trademark pair of spectacles folded up and set neatly atop the nightstand's plastic surface—nothing was out of place there—but what was that underneath them?

On tiptoe, Rex sidled up to the nightstand, lifted the glasses, and picked up the mystery object between the very tips of his index and middle fingers. Whatever it was, it was made of paper. A novel? No, a comic.

Well, now he simply had to check it out. I'm not afraid of this punk. What's he gonna do, drink my blood? With the purloined item in hand, he retreated back into the bathroom.

The front cover looked innocuous enough: two young men, one in a blue school uniform and white collared shirt and the other a green-haired fellow clad all in black, riding a green-and-gold dragon through a clear blue sky. Rex recognized them as characters from the RPG series Dragon Yeomen. That the artist had evidently forgotten that the green-haired youth and the dragon were the same character briefly gave Rex pause, but he let the matter pass. Then he opened the comic.

He was not prepared for what he saw.

After a few pages of preamble in a medieval European-style tavern, the two young men from the front cover got up to activities decidedly outside the realm of what the games depicted. That was one thing, but Rex stifled a gasp when he saw what happened after the green-haired youth transformed into a dragon. Not only that, but the young man in the school uniform revealed that he, too, had an alternate form as a smaller, cuter blue dragon.

By the time he had turned the last page, Rex stopped and stared into space. Good Lord, he had really read the whole doujinshi.

A more significant thought dawned on him. This was why Weevil forbade him from so much as touching his backpack. The doujin, his prized possession, usually stayed in there. If, indeed, it was the only one—there could be others just like that stashed within the recesses of his bookbag. How many other yaoi comics did Weevil carry around in there? For that matter, where did he get them in the first place? Did he go to some convention where they sell stuff like this? Eh, it doesn't matter. Better put it back where it was.

He froze. Was it too late to return the comic to its nightstand? Gingerly, he opened the bathroom door to find…

Everything was exactly as he had left it.

Rex turned off the bathroom light, stepped quietly to the nightstand, and put the doujin back where it was, under the scarab-joined spectacles.

Without another look back, Rex left the bedroom, shutting the door behind him.

For years afterward, Rex swore that some vindictive phantasm ensorcelled him when he read that doujin. Opening the first page of that comic sealed his fate. Ever since the crushingly disappointing end of the Duelist Kingdom tournament, Rex had tried to think mostly of claiming new victories for himself and getting his own back on Mai. No matter what he did, however, Rex crossed paths with Weevil again and again, and once that boy entered Rex's consciousness, there was no extricating him. Difficult, almost impossible, to get rid of, as befit his name, Weevil exerted a persistent presence in Rex's life, but Rex strangely discovered that he preferred it that way. When you were as lonesome as Rex, even one friend was a godsend, especially when fate had decreed that few people were as lonesome as your friend.

Geographically, it made little to no sense. They didn't exactly live in the same neighborhood. Somehow, though, they always found each other. Rex could think of no other explanation but the callous whimsies of fate itself. As loath as he was to admit it, putting up with those whimsies was worth his while. Whatever kept Weevil coming back to him, Rex never knew, but he cherished it despite himself. And something made him come back for Weevil's company every time.

That something, he liked to tell himself, was his absence of other friends. The social life he imagined Rex would grow into never materialized. With no prospects outside of the crummy apartment he shared with his mother and the town comprising it, Rex gravitated exactly where his detractors told him he would: the local burger joint. For the next several months, he spent his working life manning the cash register, mopping floors, and dunking sliced potato wedges in grease.

Degrading though it was, the work at Fast Times had its upside. Rex enjoyed keeping a tally of the more unusual customers he saw, taking home discounted burgers, fries, chicken sandwiches, and milkshakes, and swiping the occasional mustard, ketchup, and tartar sauce packets under his often negligent boss's eye. Most of all, he liked talking to his favorite coworker, a tall dark-haired girl named Kiki—when she was around, of course, which was all too rare. When he asked her about her absences, she just smiled and replied, "I'm sort of a hiring manager elsewhere, in my own way. You'll see one day." Then she would return to grilling hamburger patties.

She unfortunately represented an additional problem of an under-active social life: chastity. Kiki was cute, but she was unapproachable sexually, and while Rex harbored no contempt for her because of that, she reminded him of his ongoing dry spell. Recently, Rex had taken a page out of Weevil's book and started pursuing his jollies through smutty fan comics. Although he liked doujinshi featuring RPG characters, he took a keener interest in the erotic adventures of Duel Monsters. Dark Magician Girl was not his thing, which limited his options somewhat, but with diligence, he had found comics about the Harpie Lady tying up some helpless man-shaped creature and a horde of small, weak male insect monsters fertilizing the Insect Queen on demand. Dinosaur monsters in sexual situations remained frustratingly rare, but the abundance of dragon erotica compensated for their lack. Rex might have wondered what his interest in these particular scenarios said about him, but he expended greater concern on something else.

That something was the direction in which his attractions had turned. In his adolescence, he had hoped, nearly prayed, that all the people who drew his sexual gaze would look like Mai Valentine: leggy, busty, long-haired, or, at the absolute bare minimum, female. This was not to be, for Rex noticed men as often as he noticed women. A barrel-chested stud who ordered an egg and bacon sandwich in the morning drew his eye as readily as a voluptuous woman who ordered a salad in the evening.

Neither the bodybuilder nor the sweater model elicited as intense a reaction from him as the man who entered Fast Times during Rex's third late-night shift.

Rex stood behind the counter at the eleventh hour of the night, waiting for the junkies in need of a sugar fix to arrive for their cup of soft-serve ice cream with rainbow sprinkles, when he heard an unforgettable high-pitched, raspy voice.

"Yes, I'd like a—Rex?"

The familiar sound jolted Rex out of the trance that threatened to claim him. "Weevil? What are you doing here?" Fate was up to its old tricks again, he knew. This meeting was only a matter of time...but he dared not say so.

"Guess whose family just moved to your town?" He grinned, as though it were his own idea and an ingenious one at that.

"Really? That's awesome! I'd be happy for you, except this place is kind of a dump. The whole city, I mean, not just the restaurant, although it is a dump."

His friend shrugged. "I was gonna work in a supermarket here or in the old home town. It evens out. And rents are cheaper here, so that is something!"

"Looks like we'll be spending more time together, anyway." He looked up at the ceiling. "Hey, wait a second…are the security cameras turned off?" He squinted. "They are! Who turned them off? Hang on, that gives me an idea. Weren't you going to order something?"

"No, I came in here to bring your mail. Of course I was going to order something! Just let me get out my wallet."

As Weevil pulled his wallet from the pocket of his trousers, Rex held up his hand to stop him. "Save your money."

"Are you serious?"

"As the Cretaceous extinction event."

Weevil beamed like one receiving his due.

Shortly thereafter, both duelists sat at one of the restaurant's tables, Rex with his double-decker cheeseburger and chili fries and Weevil with a fish sandwich and two orders of fries sprinkled with sea salt and pepper. Each had his own milkshake: chocolate and strawberry swirl in the former case and cookies and cream in the latter. As the de facto host, Rex dug into his tray of cow flesh wrapped in lettuce, cheese, and bread, and then he sat back and listened to his friend talk.

"Yeah, you wouldn't believe the time I had looking for a job. None of the call centers would hire me. I couldn't figure out why. You'd think I'd at least be a good tech support guy, but apparently not." With a tang of spite in his last words, Weevil took a bite of his sandwich.

What could Rex do but chuckle to himself? "Um, maybe they're outsourcing."

"Right, I can't stand any more of this," said Kiki suddenly. She stepped out from the kitchen and sidled up to the men's table.

"Any more of what? Me talking to my best friend?" asked Rex. Cute or not, Kiki had no right to pass judgment on his occasional moments of social interaction.

"No. What I can't stand is hearing you talk about your humdrum lives." She looked at Rex specifically. "I think it's time to show you what I mean when I say I'm a hiring manager in my own way. Come out into the alley with me."

"Do you only mean him, or can I come, too?" asked Weevil.

"Of course you're invited. You're with Rex. And don't worry: I turned off the security cameras both inside and outside."

Although he did not know it at the time, this night would ensure that Rex was never the same again, and for two reasons. The first, which did not occur to him until less than an hour after he exited the burger joint, was that his career would take an extreme though not entirely unexpected turn. The second, which he realized as soon as he started walking out, made his stomach drop. It was the crystallization of something that he had kept hidden from himself until now. Previously, he wondered whether his reluctance to approach men in a sexual capacity was a strength or a weakness or possibly a survival technique. Girls would simply laugh at you to signify rejection, but guys…he tensed up to think of it. But now a new revelation made him shudder. He wanted to believe it was a matter of simple frustration, of staying a virgin all his life. Whatever it was, he could no longer ignore it, regardless of how much he wished he could.

Weevil was starting to look good to him.

But he should not dwell on that now. He had a new life ahead of him, and his attraction to his long-time rival had nothing to do with it. Didn't it?