title: there's more than a nation inside us
ship: rivalshipping [mutou yuugi / kaiba seto]
disclaimer: i don't own anything and i don't make money on this.
a/n: just after doma arc
All those billions of dollars for the surgeries - some not even tested for the public but when had that ever mattered? - for the body he knew he damned well deserved, even before Nao Tsurumoto joined Kinpachi Sensei. And no one knows (why should they? Hmph). No one but Mokuba, who, even before the surgeries, simply wrapped his small arms around Seto's legs and declared his nii-sama was the best big brother ever.
He had kept it from the orphanage, understaffed and overpopulated as it was. This way, he told himself, back then, too young but hardened enough to dismiss his own identity as a valid enough reason, Mokuba would not be alone.
He even kept it from Gozaburo, though when he hit thirteen that became harder. It was fortunate, maybe, that events escalated the way they had, and Gozaburo was too busy scrambling for his company, and then too dead, to know.
And while he too became twisted in power and darkness - enough to misuse his genius mind and potential to try and kill Yuugi, his family, and his friends for his pride - that had nothing to do with his body. That was his soul that had become corrupted. So don't even pull the evil trans card.
Years later he had been forced to rebuild himself in his heart, piece by piece. Trapped in his own body. But… it was his own body. And maybe the other Yuugi, during Judgment, had sensed that Kaiba could overcome that Shadow game penalty: he could sense that when Kaiba truly wanted to, he could rebuild himself.
He never confronted Yuugi on that. He was not afraid of the answer; he just knew that either way would make him angry... for some reason he refused to examine.
Seto walks into an anonymous support group during junior year, every inch of his height proud and determined. It's on a whim, and it's the community center on the edge of town, and just after the events of Atlantis of all the damned things, and there's Mutou Yuugi, a fellow transboy and he never knew it. The rival he's obsessed over, been disdainful of and confused by, refusing to believe there were two frustrating guys in that one body.
He had never paid attention to the details of Yuugi's bullying, or looked into Anzu's extreme protectiveness, or questioned how Jounouchi and Honda's cries of Yuugi being a girl in the hallways dropped off sharply after they became friends. In fact, Jounouchi once threw someone across the class room for issuing something like that; which Kaiba only noticed because the body was annoying enough to crash into his desk.
It doesn't change his universe, but it is a connection that Seto can't refuse, not the way he can the ridiculous ramblings about magic. Not when it's this personal.
If he threw down his deck now, and declared loudly enough to Yuugi, would it wash away the loss of control threatening to swallow him right now?
Yuugi already had enough self confidence issues without adding dysphoria. With the other him, especially after seeing the tablets at the museum… the other him having been… 'real.' Even as Yuugi knew such terminology was stupid, the carving was a stab in his heart usually reserved for whispering he was not strong, tall, powerful enough. Now…
His other self had always been supportive. He accepted everything about Yuugi a long time ago, before Yuugi knew him. His other self understood, in the way only a soul who doesn't really have a body can, of someone whose soul is...sad, in having a body that didn't feel like theirs.
He never really had a real fear declaring who he was, letting alone letting it stop him. His upper body never developed to the point that binding became an issue. His mother and grandfather had been accepting when he started shifting pronouns at eight. And while Domino High wasn't the pinnacle of class, kids rarely avoided him for his speech, not when Yuugi had been so weird in other ways. In the locker room he was left alone by the back, though these days a few friends 'nonchalantly' stood guard. And as for his friends…
Yuugi is Yuugi.
It still rang true in this context. So Yuugi never needed to think about things like surgery or medication for his validation - validation for himself or for other people. Especially not when there remained too many other things really mattering to him. Like getting his other self to Egypt.
Still, when Kaiba walks into the meeting (how had they never crossed paths before?), Yuugi feels like he's been dunked in cold water, and his other self stirs in alarm, asking what's wrong.
He tries to give Yuugi these meetings in privacy, but that feeling just now shot from Yuugi's soul and echoed into his. And after America, he'd been more wary than usual.
Yuugi had always felt a strange connection to Kaiba. A reluctance to write him off that didn't have to do with Isis telling him Kaiba was related to his other self in the past life. A reluctance not beyond, but still different from, the hesitance against distrusting his other self's rival. Like something in him recognized the sameness between them. With Jounouchi he saw loyalty and bravery, and there were variations of this in his other self, and Anzu. In Kaiba… it was the way Kaiba looked at games, like it had once been exactly the way Yuugi saw them - a source of joy - until life had twisted Kaiba around and he shed that innocence to evolve. But it was the feeling about gender, now, Yuugi realizes, too. When he looks at Kaiba he's seeing someone looking out at opponent's the same as himself, just a little.
And what if... what if there's even more than this...?
But what if there isn't? I will not duel here!
For a long time they stare at each other, Kaiba's face darkening forebodingly under his baseball cap, his lanky shoulders hunching like a cat, a hoodie and faded jeans instead of his usual KC emblazoned trench coat. Yuugi's clothes are what he always wears, though his eyes are wide and his body poised to bolt.
It's hard to tell who looks away first, but Yuugi's head whips back to the speaker and Kaiba makes a beeline for a chair as far away from Yuugi as possible.
Yuugi is tense, while his other self's presence gives off the feeling of hovering by his ear, inside their soul hallway.
"Everything okay, Partner?" He cannot see out of Yuugi's eyes, which are stiffly glued to the speaker he can't hear, not with his heart pounding in his ears. He doesn't dare to turn around to the back where Kaiba is. He is ridiculously grateful that none of his friends are waiting outside to walk him home from this meeting.
'Yes!' he thinks back. He sends the feeling to his other self that this is not a lie; there's... just more to the story, and Yuugi will tell him in twenty minutes, when the meeting is over.
Just as soon as he figures out what the story is himself.
A/N
I was inspired to write this after gorging on ygo fic and eventually browsing back into the old fics. Wow, YGO fic was pretty bad; it's like I repressed that pretty deeply. Particularly 'Yuugi is really a girl!' fic, because that fan favorite wasn't about FtM or MtF, but about making queer ships 'actually straight all along!', and therefore 'comfortable' for straight readers. Same with Atem, though this was largely for prideshipping, and since I hate that pairing, I only ever heard of it.
That's pretty disturbing and shady tbh. Because YGO actually, unintentionally, presents some valid opportunities to explore gender, sexual identity, etc; considering two of the characters eating up screen time spend half the manga without identities, let alone bodies. This is touched on in GX, but lbr, I only really care about Yuugi (and co) in the end lol. For this fic I did Kaiba Seto and Mutou Yuugi as having gone on their own, separate, equally valid and unique explorations of FtM, though Yuugi's is left more ambiguous and can even be read as intersex or gender neutral. Not that any of these things are interchangeable; IRL each has their own struggles and narratives.
Also I didn't have Yuugi ostracized bc he isn't ostracized in the manga. Kids invite him to play at recess and unanimously vote for his ideas. They think he's weird, but no one hates him. The particularly climate of Domino struck me as a universe where Yuugi's identity, likewise, wouldn't be too extreme (in reality, as in most places in the world, it's dangerous). It's mostly he's a magnet for extreme cases (and doesn't know how to quit lol), and they weren't about his gender, and I didn't want to suddenly make it about that either.
From the 1980's to the early 2000's, there was a televised series about a trans teacher, called 3-Nen B-Gumi Kinpachi Sensei. In 2001, Nao Tusurumoto was the first student added to the cast.
For errors on the nineties culture in Japan for transmen, I apologize. I tried digging in the week to find history on it, but it's scarce, and with the Gender Identity Disorder movement during that time I was additionally out of my league, let alone perspective, to address the nuances of that.