A Yu-Gi-Oh! Fanfiction Contest Entry
Round 12: Bondageshipping (Yami no Malik x Ryuuji Otogi)
Warnings: Mild yaoi, YM/Otogi and Kaiba/Malik; AU, science, profanity, and a comically inaccurate depiction of the future.
Disclaimer: Saying I own YGO is like saying that Zigfried von Shroeder is a paragon of manliness.
Much love to Mismagium, Angela and MiniMix, and the7joker7 for their awesome mass beta'ing efforts.
Remember that this is AU. Complete AU. Canon never happened.
Necropolis
The Sun is rising again, orange-red and bloated like a dying fish in the black sea of the sky. If he squints and tilts his head and holds up a hand with fingers spread to block its rays from entering his eyes, Otogi thinks that he can see the pale yellow-white outline of its shape, spilling over the outline of his palm and into the air surrounding it. He doesn't remember the Sun being this huge or listless, like a tired child dragging itself up the stairs to its bedroom.
Behind him, the countdown continues ticking, letters white and sharply visible against the dark blue of the computer screen suspended over all of empty Domino—or at least, an emptier Domino than he remembers. There are a little over six months left now—six months, thirteen days, five hours, twenty-nine minutes, and eighteen-seventeen-sixteen seconds, to be exact.
Otogi doesn't feel nervous, or horrified, or even the mad rush of insanity that has come for some in the city who fear death; he's had too much time to think by now, despite those years upon years upon years when there was no thinking. Worse than a vegetable, he muses to himself, seeing the morning's light dance upon the waves of the harbor and burn lightly on his skin. Like a freeze-dried vegetable.
Millennia and centuries and tens of thousands of years have passed—and really, once the millions and billions begin to pile up, the number of zeros begins mattering less and less. He knows of the others who have survived that passage of time and now wander Domino with the same blankness that he's sure is on his face, knows that they sometimes get together and compare the accumulation of digits, who make it a contest to see who was born the earliest.
He thinks it's stupid, and he doesn't join.
There is nothing to be proud of if the only reason for your survival is your own wealth and your own faith in the workings of the human mind—which, as he hears, does not work so well after all. And he supposes that they too are desperate, that they too are waiting for the countdown to finish until the digits that are visible from practically every place in Domino finally reach 00:00:00:00:00:00. So he tries to forgive them, but he finds it is hard to.
Then there are those who were born into this time, born at a most unfortunate moment—the scarce few children who still remain and the scattered groups of teenagers and the faces of the adults, all pale and worried. It is a blessing to die now, to fall under the wheels of a passing truck or even to jump into the warming waters of Domino's ocean and give up to the currents that grasp hungrily at its depths. Domino is a dead city, a ghost city, and will become a true grave-city like those Otogi has learned have spread across the rest of the world like some sort of sea-spanning wildfire; Domino's living days are ticking down with the huge white numbers that scroll through their twelve options methodically in the city's center, and they will end in six months, thirteen days, five hours, twenty-eight minutes, and seven-six-five seconds.
Wind blows—only cool—past him, and he shivers; it is unreasonably warm for spring, dew slick and sticky on the wooden railing of the dock and morning fog clinging to the air. The Earth is closer to the Sun now, or so they say, and people have adapted sufficiently to the heat, but Otogi is a member of the distant, distant past, land of science that was just beginning to develop and people who believed that with the future would come teaching robots and a computer-run society. He is not accustomed to the changes in temperature.
He's not sure, even, if this is spring, but the seasons tumble over each other slowly now, and he simply divides the year into four sections and declares, when he sees the rain or the Sun or the snow or the brown of dead leaves littering the ground, that a new section has begun. But he does try not to buy calendars, to check the time daily, as much as he attempts to insist to his friends that he doesn't care; he does not like to remind himself of how very foreign this world is to him..
All four hundred and something of Domino's inhabitants have lost interest in anything but the 'black' market—well, not really 'black' anymore; it is common enough and public enough to be far from illegal, and it's not like anyone has the time or the desire to stop its trade—and Otogi tries not to think what they might be selling in it. Drugs, opium, some new chemical they have to induce memory loss—
The Sun burns against his cheeks and along his neck, and Otogi shuts his eyes, opens them, and watches green and purple afterimages dance across the plain gray-brown buildings of Domino's streets.
It is noon now, and the people are wandering the city with umbrellas designed to keep as much of the light away from them as possible, heads down toward the pavement as they watch the cracks in the concrete pass them by. Otogi walks with his red vest half-hanging off his shoulders and black tank top exposing his arms to the fury of whatever ultraviolet rays may hit him, hair tied up as if to invite the Sun to scorch as much available skin as it can. He has gotten sunburn before, painful blisters that made it excruciating to do so much as pull his shirt over his head, but he doesn't care.
He has no fear of cancer. They all have only a bit more than six months left to live.
A child patters down the street past him, bundled up in the sheer long-sleeved clothes that have been developed specifically for the purpose of protecting them from radiation; the silver reflective surface on the outside of the fabric shines into his eyes, making him wince.
He continues onward, in the direction of the huge screen that wraps around all four sides of the KaibaCorp building like another part of its wall; he is one of the survivors of millennia upon millennia past, he has been alive again for less than two years, and check-ups at the only hospital left in use throughout all of Domino are customary.
He doesn't understand why they're necessary; it's not like they need to have great worry about diseases and sudden death, because anything is better than waiting those six months thirteen days however-many-hours there are left. But Seto Kaiba will be Seto Kaiba, cold and methodical and perfectionist person he is, and Otogi has learned by now to simply let him be.
Blue eyes meet his; Otogi shivers and presses the fingers of his left hand to the wet skin of his right arm as a cold gust of air conditioning blows through the room. His clothing is soaked through with water—or 'melted ice,' as the doctor by his bed (rather prissily, in Otogi's opinion) informed him when he had woken up. He supposes that Kaiba prefers the more informative term 'melted ice.'
"You were lucky."
Otogi scowls now, jabbing a finger at the dripping fabric of his sleeve. "Can you tell me this after I get new clothes?"
Kaiba resumes talking, and Otogi resorts to settling back in the office chair he was offered and spinning it aimlessly from side to side. "Most of the cryonics containers in Japan were destroyed in a variety of wars and natural disasters that occurred in 178 P."
"178 P?" Otogi repeats slowly.
"Our years have changed," Kaiba says. "When were you born?"
"Well, if your year system is different, then how will that matter at all?" Otogi retorts, crossing his arms.
"When were you born?" Kaiba says, insistent.
Otogi pauses to think, grappling in his mind for some sort of number.
He finds none.
"I don't remember," he says through gritted teeth, and he wonders for a moment why Kaiba is asking him this, why he is trapped in a steel tower with the night sky of a darkened city lit by the moon outside.
Kaiba nods, scribbles down something on the paper notepad he has on his desk, and Otogi reads the letters upside down: BRAIN DAMAGE.
"I'm not—" he begins, indignant, but a cold glance up at him silences his words.
"Your memories are, and I can assure you that is through no fault of your own." Kaiba stands, walking around his desk and opening the door at the other end of the room. "Go to the lobby, and there will be clothes and a guide waiting for you. You are to report here for medical examinations once every week. Do you understand?"
Otogi rolls his eyes. "I'm not that brain-dead."
"Good," Kaiba says, and before he knows it, a hand is dragging him through the entrance and the door is slamming behind him.
The lobby is familiar to him as he walks in, marble-tiled floor and white walls rising high above, quiet and smelling of dust and emptiness. There is a cardboard box lying on its side, its contents spilling out over the ground in a pile of papers. The few workers who pass by maneuver around it as if it is a puddle of spilled liquid, and the sounds of their footsteps clacks against the floor and echoes off the smooth sides of the room.
He jabs the elevator button with his thumb and glances critically at its gray metallic sides, lit yellow-beige by the weak fluorescent lights on the ceiling. The floor there is speckled with bits of dirt from passing shoes, and if he tilts his head, he can see the imprint of the sole of a sneaker there, traced out in lines of mud.
Otogi thinks he remembers cleaner elevators, ones with glass sides and immaculately shining walls, ones with wood paneling and gold-edged banisters for railings. But the memories flit in and out of his mind as they choose, and he can never be sure.
The corridor of the eighteenth floor is as cold as it was the first time he entered it.
"You're late," Kaiba observes, giving Otogi's attire a critical glance.
"We don't have a set time," Otogi points out, lounging in the same chair as he has in all the appointments before it.
"You're later than usual, then," Kaiba says. Without hesitation, he clamps what looks like a white plastic bracelet on Otogi's arm and starts his usual barrage of questions. "Have you remembered anything else?"
"Little things," Otogi says. "Food. Slang." He pauses before he can add, the Sun.
The white bracelet beeps, and Kaiba takes it off and copies the numbers onto his ever-present notepad. The ink of his pen streaks, black and thick, across the plain white of the paper.
"Why don't you use a laptop so you don't have to write all this down?" Otogi asks. "Or haven't they invented something that records all of this automatically or does voice-to-text conversions by now?"
"You have too much faith in the human race," Kaiba answers coolly, the tip of his pen scratching across the table.
"Have you been walking around in a tank top for the entire day?" Kaiba continues.
Otogi nods,. "It's not like cancer will kill me any sooner than the end of the world will."
The paper is ripped out with the usual Kaiba precision—not one scrap of it left attached to the pad, Otogi notes with a sort of dark amusement—and he begins on a fresh sheet. "You're not nervous about the countdown, then?"
"What's that?" Otogi says as they walk down the street, twisting around to see the huge white letters looming above his head. 01:04:01:04:21:35.
Yugi glances back with him. "Oh," he says, and the welcoming glow in his face fades a bit. He bites his lip. "That's the countdown."
"Countdown to what?" Otogi says.
"To the end of the world." Yugi grabs his arm, marching resolutely away from the Domino's center, and tugs his sleeve down to cover his wrist from the burning of the Sun.
"Why would I be?" Otogi twists a loose thread of his vest round his index finger, absentmindedly noting the fact that the bottom of it is ragged from wear. "I've died once already."
"That doesn't make you any more immune to dying again," Kaiba answers flatly.
"Yeah, tell me about that," Otogi says, propping his elbows against the arms of the chair and leaning back. He sees the corner of the file on Kaiba's desk, off-white with RYUUJI OTOGI written in large black print on the side, and Kaiba shifts his arm before he can finish reading the long list of numbers underneath it. "How exactly do cryonics work?"
"Cryonics is the preservation of humans or animals that have been pronounced dead," Kaiba corrects, and when he looks up, there is tenseness in the clenching of the jaw and the whiteness of his fingers on the pen he holds.
Otogi sighs with theatrical exasperation. "Don't be a prick. You know what I meant."
"Prick?" Kaiba repeats.
"Prick," Otogi enunciates. "It's an insult."
He receives one of Kaiba's somewhat famous condescending glares in return.
"Not in this time, then," he allows, "which brings up my original point again. How long has it been since my time? How does this thing work?"
"With the help of science that you wouldn't understand."
"And you can't bother to tell me how science has advanced far enough to heal fatal injuries after their receivers have been pronounced legally dead? I died—" Otogi pauses and tries to remember.
"What's your name?" The face looms over him, eyes peering down behind glasses and one hand encased in some sort of transparent, skintight glove reaching down to pull back one eyelid, then another. Light flares into his vision, leaving black-green-brown spots floating across the ceiling before him.
"Otogi." His tongue feels thick, unused; the words form sloppily in his mouth and tumble out. He clears his throat and tries again. "Otogi Ryuuji. Where...?"
"Welcome to 330 P, Otogi Ryuuji," the doctor interrupts him. "You died—"
"—in a car crash," Otogi finishes, one hand instinctively going to the hem of his shirt and feeling the fabric there; his fingers remember the sensation of blood, of warm liquid and cotton ripping into fibers underneath his skin, of ragged tears where there should have been flesh. "How did you heal that?"
"Science," Kaiba repeats, and when he writes down something else on the paper, it is with the steady deliberation that Otogi has learned comes with him being on guard.
He raises an eyebrow. "Is it really so top-secret, Kaiba?"
Kaiba does not look up. "It is."
"Top secret like what?" His voice is sharp now, as cold as his companion's, as he remembers the dull red-orange of the Sun in the sky, the drab, peeling gray of the buildings lit in its glow. "Like the fact that the Sun is about ten thousand times bigger than it was in my time? Like the fact that Domino only has four hundred people living in it? Like the fact that there's a black market that wanders the streets freely and sells drugs and you're not doing anything about it?"
"I never thought that you'd be one to stick up for humanity," Kaiba remarks. Otogi notices that he does not answer.
His hands move, clenching on the arms of his chair. "I'm not," he says. "But I don't like it when everyone seems to know something, and I don't."
The corridors of the building are cool and comfortable, a relief in comparison to the hot, dry air of the outside. Silence reigns supreme throughout, but the walls are far from blank and bare; portraits cover them, portraits and diagrams and bulletin boards until it looks not so much an office building as a cross between that and someone's home.
He pauses to read one chart, eyes scanning over the drawings of a mouth and what he thinks could be vocal cords, and catches the long list of notes scribbled in black ink on the top corner, in handwriting that can only be Kaiba's: c = dp/dp^1/2 = 340.29 m/s = 343.2 m/s = 1484 m/s = 5120 m/s...
"Kaiba, vandalizing his own property?" he says out loud, half out of amusement and half out of the sudden desire to hear a human voice after nearly fifteen minutes wandering aimlessly throughout the building. He looks up, startled, when there is no echo of his words bouncing off the cool metal of the walls; they soak in his voice, drink in the sound.
"I have not heard anyone speak here for a long time."
Otogi backs away from the source of the voice, bumping into the poster he commented on not half a minute before and eyes searching the ceiling for some sign of speakers or video cameras. "Who are you?" he asks the air, ignoring the other question that arises in his mind. What are you?
"I am Noa."
Otogi gives the walls another suspicious glance. "Did Kaiba send you to spy on me?"
"No. Why? Is Seto Kaiba doing much of that now?"
"Now?" Otogi repeats, latching onto that one word. He continues down the hall, footsteps loud in the silence that follows his question, and peers through slits in the doors to see abandoned computer rooms, storage rooms, office rooms, furniture abandoned where it stands and covered in layers of sheets and dust.
"06:17, 330 P, isn't it," Noa says. "Only five hundred years since I was first created, but five hundred years can seem a surprisingly long time when your motherboard is kept active enough and isolated enough to ensure that you are utterly bored for the entirety of that period."
"You're a computer?" Otogi asks in surprise, though to be honest, he's not certain exactly why he should be. Domino has changed too much in however many centuries he has been gone from it, changed for the worse while the dying Sun looms over half the sky like a weight dropping from space.
There is another minute in which Noa does not answer, in which the heaviness that hangs in the air speaks of something that is not right. "They are not common in this day, I take it." His sigh is more of a physical thing than anything else he has spoken, cold air conditioning blowing over Otogi's skin. "What a shame. Seto Kaiba, I am disappointed in you."
"Wait a second," Otogi says, coming to a halt in mid-step as if that will convince the Noa-computer—whatever he is—to answer his question quicker. "How do you know Kaiba?"
The amusement in Noa's voice is tangible, dark as it seems. "He was the one who created me."
Otogi thinks that he would have choked if he'd had anything in his mouth. As it is, the closest he can get is a splutter of, "But five hundred years—"
"—are a trivial lifespan these days, stranger, or so I suppose you would know." Noa pauses. "Or so you should know. How old are you?"
"Seventeen," Otogi answers, and frowns at the ceiling as a muted beep emanates from one of the speakers. The lights dim to blackness, and the walls glow faintly orange-yellow with reflected light from the Sun outside.
Noa sounds pleased when he next speaks; the lights of one room are on, casting squares of white onto the floor. "See that room? Enter it."
"Why?" Otogi asks, peering through its window. Its walls are covered with the steely white blankness that he has learned to recognize as computer screens, and he thinks that if he tilts his head, he can see the words that cover them like paper.
"You have questions. I have answers."
With a click, the door opens, and Otogi steps in.
There are equations and diagrams and half-formed sentences written on the walls. Radicals and Greek letters and formulas snake around each other, horizontally and diagonally and sometimes even broken apart, arrows pointing toward where they are continued. And in corners, overlapping with the math that covers them, are drawings of people and arrays of boxes and multiple ones of the human brain, painstakingly perfected and symmetrical.
Otogi reaches out to touch one, and finds that his fingers do not do anything but leave marks on the screen's surface. "What is this?" he asks, and the computers soak in his voice like they are made of thick fabric.
"This was Seto Kaiba's workplace, many years ago." Noa's voice sounds closer than before; perhaps this is his home, Otogi thinks, among the lifeless diagrams that are gathering dust in this lonely room. Perhaps one of these brains was meant to be his.
"Why are you showing it to me?" he says instead, eyeing something that looks suspiciously like a warped version of Pascal's triangle and another like an attempt to rewrite the entirety of the periodic table in one sitting.
"Here," Noa says, "is where he planned out the changing of the world."
The black market is thriving and so very obvious in the late afternoon Sun, merchants shouting their offers in loud voices, effortlessly rattling off full names of drugs that Otogi thinks are at least ten syllables long. Their stalls are filled with little white boxes on display, larger cardboard ones hidden underneath the tables, letters on the sides proclaiming the superiority of their products over everyone else's.
He walks instead to the circle of people that has developed in an empty square, surrounding a man whom Otogi can only see the deep purple cape of. The man's arm is up, holding some sort of package, wrapped in old, dust-brown fabric and tied messily with string.
"Who wants this one?" he calls, and Otogi thinks that he hears the subtext beneath the words—take it, buy it, or die. He feels the flinch that goes through the crowd at his voice—the instinctive step back, as if knives press to their chests whenever the man speaks. He shivers involuntarily and listens closer.
There is a hesitation too, a slight pause before anyone dares to begin bargaining—but when they do, the crowd erupts into a flurry of shouts, arms waving and mouths calling numbers that go higher and higher until he stops them.
"Four hundred," the man declares, and silence falls quickly. He bends, reaches down to the cardboard box at his feet, and pulls out a stack of papers yellowed with age. "Who wants these?"
"What are they?" someone calls.
The man lowers his extended arm and glances at the pages. "A poem," he says, carelessly, dismissively, and the sarcasm in his tone is evident. There is amusement too, dark malicious amusement thick in his voice, as if he is challenging his observers—asking if they fear him enough to buy it. "Reliqui Alabamam cum viola mea, nam; velim ire in Louisianam, qui Susannam cupiam."
The people do not reply; the words are as foreign to Otogi as they are to the rest of them, but their cadence and rhyme block out the noise of his surroundings and the glare of the Sun for a moment, reminds him of something he cannot quite remember. He thinks, for a second, that he knows the next line.
And then he is pushing his way through the press of bodies, reaching out his hand towards the man's shoulder. "I'll take them."
The man turns, and Otogi stops short of grabbing his arm as their eyes meet.
His face is all angles and bones, the sharp lines of his chin and mouth and the pale slash of his eyebrows on his forehead. Tarnished metal earrings dangle at the sides of his head, and he has painted two jagged streaks of kohl on his cheekbones. His smile is as dark as his voice, and his eyes glint with amusement as he looks at Otogi. "Why do you want this junk?"
"Why do you care?" Otogi retorts, digging in his pocket for change. "I'll give you five dollars."
The man tilts his head in contemplation, and his hair, wildly unkempt, falls over his forehead. "Five dollars is nothing."
"Nobody else will take it," Otogi points out, turning back to look at the crowd that is watching their bargaining with rapt eyes. The Sun shines at an angle to their bodies, casting long black shadows onto the pavement; he can feel its burn against the side of his neck.
"I'll give it to you for free if you tell me why you want it," the man offers. The wind pushes his cloak back, baring one tanned shoulder before he covers it again with a shrug.
"Not here," Otogi says.
"Fine," he agrees, bending down and picking up his box before marching through the crowd that parts readily before him. "Auction over. Go back home," he says over his shoulder, and the people do not even grumble as they drift away to the other sellers in the market.
The man leads the way through the streets, away from the noise, until they reach a cliff overlooking the sea, where the nearest building is a good few blocks away and forgotten papers blow along the sidewalk. His box still held with one arm, he turns. "So?"
The Sun takes up nearly a fifth of the horizon, huge and gleaming orange-red as it sets. Neither Otogi nor his companion blink. "So nothing," Otogi says. "I just wanted it."
The man raises his eyebrows, skeptical, sounding almost disappointed. "No secret government mission? No important messages hidden in the poem—"
"Song," Otogi corrects automatically. "It's a song."
The man seems momentarily surprised at the retort. "You're not afraid of me, are you?" he muses, thoughtful. "That's interesting. Most people are."
"How would you know?"
"I know these things," he says, "even when nobody tells me them. I was created to know them."
"Created?" Otogi says slowly. And though the suspicion is rising in his mind and he can predict the answer to his question even before he asks it—"Who created you?"
"Seto Kaiba."
The word is like a physical blow to the stomach; Otogi doubles over, gasping as the breath is knocked out of him and the pavement swims before his eyes. The man's voice is distant as he remarks, "I wonder if this one will hurt—"
Malik's eyes gleam pale violet and laughing in the moonlight, his arms bared and gold bracelets clinking together when he moves. The computer screens of the room glow faintly white, marked by the black lines of Kaiba's ink-less pen as he draws another diagram on them. "This is incredibly stupid."
Kaiba's head turns and he scowls, though perhaps with not the same amount of coldness as his glares for Otogi hold. "What is?"
"Uploading a mind to a computer," Malik elaborates. "Creating a mind on a computer. Prolonging life. Renovations to that fucking eggshell over Domino that's falling apart."
"Everything I plan out in this room, then," Kaiba concludes, and Otogi thinks he sees something like amusement in his eyes.
Malik nods in agreement, jumping off the table—more formulas covering its surface and even a few scrawled down its legs, Otogi notices—and walking over to jab a finger at the model of the inner Solar System Kaiba has just finished. "Why do you bother? Everyone's going to die in another five hundred or so years anyway."
"I doubt the public would be very pleased if I allowed KaibaCorp's preservation plans to collapse," Kaiba says, and there is only a very slight hesitation before he continues. "Neither would my father."
"The public won't be alive enough to know that they're dead," Malik says. His hands snatch the pen out of Kaiba's hand, turn him and press him to the wall. The light of the screens outlines their bodies in a cool white border. "Forget about your insane dad for a moment," he says, and the pen clatters to the ground. "Think. What's the point of doing this if it's all going to come to waste soon? Let them die."
"You still haven't told me why you care about this song so much," the man says darkly half an hours later, when Otogi has brought them both to the KaibaCorp building in the center of the city, its display now showing a 00:06:02:07:41:19. He holds the papers in his hand, black ink against yellowed background, almost like he is protecting them.
"You haven't told me your name yet," Otogi retorts sharply, pressing the elevator button and tapping his foot as he waits.
"Mariku," the man says.
"Otogi." Malik—Mariku—?
The elevator doors slide open, and they step in.
"Tell me," Otogi says. "Why are the Kaibas so important?"
He smirks. "The Kaiba—only one now."
"Fine," Otogi says. "Why is Kaiba so important?
Mariku shrugs. "He is. And when there were many, they were. They've been that way for a while."
The eighteenth floor is empty, its lights turned off, and the gleam of the setting Sun slants through the west-facing windows. Otogi passes by Kaiba's office and notices that it is empty too; he wonders where Kaiba goes during the night. He has no home outside of the massive KaibaCorp building as far as the general public knows. He half-runs down its halls, hoping that he remembers where the room with the computer screens for walls is, and almost passes it until he sees the white glow that emanates from its window.
It is still unlocked when he opens the door.
He kneels on the ground in the center, fingers moving to the wall and tracing over the words scrawled there, searching for what he saw during his dream-hallucination-vision less than an hour ago. He finds the Sun in an uneven black circle, the dotted lines of the planets' orbits around it, and some sort of equation snaking around its right. And, below it, a list that is half-erased: personality cognition question response memory—
"Why are you here?" Mariku asks, and there is irritation in his tone. Out of the corner of his eye, Otogi sees him standing with one hand on the door frame, feet still outside, unwilling to enter.
"Wait a second," Otogi says, attempting to read the rest of the handwriting that can only be Kaiba's. But when he glances back to make sure Mariku has listened, he is gone.
"I recognize him."
Otogi does not even bother turning; there will be nothing to turn to. "You again?"
"You again. What are you searching for?"
"I don't know," Otogi grumbles, standing again and scanning the wall and looking for something else. "Answers, which you haven't given."
"But I have. All the answers to your questions are here, in this room, written through diagrams and equations and words."
"Then why don't you just tell me what it is that I'm supposed to be looking for?"
"The other wall," Noa says finally. "On the top."
The first thing he sees is the subtle bending of the screen in the light, its reflected glow wavering as if the plastic has been compressed between someone's fingers. The warping distorts the scribbled drawing on it—a person's body, arms and legs hastily traced but head depicted in startling detail: spikes of hair, angular eyes, the sharp line of the nose.
It is Mariku there, drawn in Kaiba's hand.
Who created you?
Seto Kaiba.
"Literally?" Otogi asks, his voice near a whisper, and he does not bother to clear his throat before he continues; the dark, shadowed corners of the room look all the more sinister now, the indecipherable numbers running across the walls like a floor plan, almost—
Here is where he planned out the changing of the world.
"He literally created him? Out of scratch?" He winces at the wildly inappropriate way to describe the process, but forges on nonetheless. "But if this world is capable of that now, then why isn't it here today? Why did Kaiba just destroy all of it?"
"During the years from 100 to 200 P," Noa begins, "there was a war. And after the war, there was no more great technology. There were no more of the scientists of the past. There was barely anyone left on the earth, and those who still survived gathered in Domino to wait out the end. KaibaCorp protected them, and in turn... they gave KaibaCorp their loyalty."
"What does this have to do with Mariku?" Otogi says.
"During this war, they discovered how to create people that would exist only to take the emotions and memories from others. Psychological warfare, in a way."
Otogi remembers with a sickening feeling of horror the instinctive flinch that comes with hearing Mariku's voice, the tiny brown packet of something he waved around in the marketplace—drugs are all they have now to feel emotion.
"You—" Otogi finds that after he has finally dragged Mariku into a corner and is face-to-face with him, he cannot speak. His words die in his throat as he stares up at his companion—hunger-sharpened lines of his face, lips curled up into a half-smirk, the same maliciousness in his eyes. "You're not human."
Mariku's arm is out, holding up the papers that Otogi recognizes as the lyrics to the song whose name he cannot remember, but he jerks it back just as quickly. "I am."
Otogi shakes his head slowly, not believing it. Unwilling to believe it. "You're not."
Fury lights his expression, livid and burning, and Otogi resists the temptation to step back. "I am! Don't tell me that I can't think or feel or breathe, because I can! I am as much alive and human as you are; I keep these idiots who buy drugs from me human by keeping them alive, because without me—" He reaches into the box in his arms, grabs another packet of something, tosses it to the ground where it shatters into a pile of white dust. "Without me, they are nothing."
"You have no feelings," Otogi insists. The Sun is beginning to rise, scorching along the tips of his fingers, but for once, he does not care. "You only have what you take from others, and that's not your own. You don't feel."
Mariku snarls wordlessly, dropping the box at his side. "I do."
"Not on your own," Otogi repeats. "Kaiba made you so that you wouldn't be able to feel on your own."
His cry of surprise is muffled by Mariku's arm clamped over his face and his hands pressing him to the wall nearby. The stone is warm against his back, and he does not fight when the pressure over his mouth disappears.
"And what's it to you?" Mariku's voice has dropped to a whisper, hissed in his ear. The streets are empty; it is far to empty for even the most desperate of marketeers to rise and buy some more of their 'illegal' goods. Otogi thinks that if Mariku were to kill him here and now, nobody would know. "Why do you care?"
Otogi catches sight of the off-white of the papers fluttering in the breeze, held feet away by Mariku's hand. "I'm human; you're not. I care about what you have stored in whatever smuggling houses you have stationed throughout the city, and you care less. I want to know what happened in the past, and you have the answers." He averts his eyes, fixing his gaze on the typed words that blow out of his sight.
"I have no answers," Mariku says—his voice is bitter, self-deprecating. "How is it that I know anything, then, if I'm not a true person?"
"You were created in the past." Otogi thinks he catches sight of a phrase on the sheets—propter me—before it flips over and he can only see white. His next sentence is a whisper. "And I can teach you to be human."
"Why do you care?" Mariku repeats, his grip relaxing slightly. Otogi tentatively flexes his fingers. "Why do you give a damn about these stupid sheets of paper with the songs you can't even understand?"
"I care about the past," Otogi says, and his words taste of truth on his tongue. "I search for the past, I discover it again, and I know that it's important—that something happened to Kaiba back then. And it has to do with the countdown." He does not know why he continues; he can feel the burn of Mariku's eyes on his cheek, mingling with the burn of the dying Sun. "What was that, yesterday afternoon?"
"A memory," Mariku says.
"Why did you ask me if it would hurt?"
"I wasn't asking you." He seems surprised by his own honesty. "I was asking myself. Because it usually does."
Mariku speaks so much more as they walk down the stairs and back toward the main street of Domino, as the Sun inches higher and higher on the horizon. They are standing on the pier when its bottom half is finally free of the water and the first man comes walking down the boardwalk, plastered from head to toe in the thick, silvery clothes that are supposed to reflect ultraviolet radiation. He glances at Otogi, still with the same bright red vest and tank top, and at Mariku, the hem of his cloak limp on the ground, and continues on as if they are not there.
"What does the song mean?" Mariku says as they watch the waves lap against the green planks of the dock and wash clumps of seaweed left and right.
Otogi shrugs. The top of his head, exposed to the light while his eyes search the depths of the water as if it holds answers, feels hot and uncomfortable, but he does not move. The air he breathes in is thick but dry, and it scrapes like sandpaper against the sides of his throat. "I told you, I don't know."
Perhaps it would be a mistake in any normal interaction to converse without looking at each other, but he does not care, and he somehow doubts that Mariku will be associating with polite company in the near future.
"So how do you know it's important?" Mariku asks, doubtful. Otogi glances up at him, and sees the orange-gold of the sunlight hitting his skin and pale hair, that he still clutches the papers—wrinkled by his grip now—in his right hand.
"I remember what it sounded like," Otogi says.
Mariku's eyebrows rise, and his lips curl into a smirk. "Sing it."
Otogi scowls at him. "No."
"Sing it, and I'll show you another memory," Mariku offers.
Otogi eyes the paper in his hand before grabbing it and reading off the top, the familiar tune coming easily to his lips: "Reliqui Alabamam cum viola mea, nam; velim ire in Louisianam, qui Susannam cupiam. Oh—"
He feels hands on his back, fingers pressed against his skin and palms flat on his clothes, and he jerks his head up fast enough to catch a glimpse of Mariku's smirk and the way the sleeves of his cloak flutter as he shoves him off the pier and into the water.
Otogi remembers sparkling blue waves in the midst of the sea, foam-tipped ones rippling on the shore of a beach, flotsam of broken shells and bits of glass and beer caps pricking against his feet. He remembers stagnant green algae, dirty brown currents, and the thick smell of brine, but this water is nothing like it.
He remembers that even during the summer, it was cold. This is too warm—sickeningly warm, suffocating him beneath its heat, reminding him of sulfur-filled hot springs and fermenting grain. He is afraid to open his eyes, to breathe, to move, fearing the burn of salt against his skin so much more than the burn of the Sun.
This Sun is new, foreign; it may as well be an entirely different star, so distantly does he recognize it. But he knows the feel of water billowing through his clothes, and he knows the feeling of drowning.
He squeezes his eyes shut, tries to recall what he was last thinking about—reliqui Alabamam cum viola mea—
And in a moment of panic, he realizes that he cannot remember what comes next, and that the paper is still there, torn and soggy and crumpled, in his hand.
He does not know how, but he fights his way back to the pier and latches on to one of the wooden pillars that supports it, pulling himself up until he lies, gasping and coughing, on the rough planks of its surface.
Mariku's face swims before his eyes.
"What was that?" Otogi chokes, snatching the paper closer to his body lest Mariku attempt to take that too. "Are you trying to kill me now?"
Mariku bends down, and Otogi doubles over again—
"Give me a number," Malik says, hair matted with blood, though he sits upright in his bed because the drugs are working, pumping his body full of adrenaline and painkillers until it is like he has never been injured in the first place. His shirt is soaked through, wet and red, but he ignores it.
"Three billion," Kaiba says, his fingers tangled in others with blood-caked nails and dark skin. "It doesn't really change from day to day. You know that."
Malik shakes his head. "Three billion until what? Until the Sun's corona overlaps with the atmosphere? Until we're completely swallowed up? It will be less than three billion years until it becomes close enough to kill everyone on the surface, far less, and that will be a slow death. A starvation death."
"I'm not going to start spreading the religion of pessimism, if that's what you're saying," Kaiba scoffs, and tries to smile. His thumb draws circles on the back of Malik's hand.
"You need to stop this," Malik says instead, leaning forward in his earnestness. Blond hair tumbles over the side of his face, ends stained dark brown. "You need to end this sooner than it will of its own accord."
"My father—"
"Your father," Malik interrupts, "is the most hypocritical man I have ever met. Let him go on patching up the cracks in his fucking eggshell as long as he wants; it's not going to slow anything down when the Sun decides that it's going to die. Let him keep making his robots and human atrocities, but none of those are going to do shit for the world right now."
Kaiba gently grabs his shoulders and pushes him back down. "You should—"
"I'm not resting," Malik says. "I'm not going to survive this."
Blue eyes flash to his, alarmed. "What do you mean?"
"Your precious techonology isn't going to save the human race, Seto," Malik says. "Death is death. Make it happen in less time, for everyone's good—I'm sure they'd all rather go out in ignorance, quickly, than in a drawn-out fight for survival." He slumps lower in his position; the painkillers are wearing off.
Too fast, Kaiba thinks, I'll have to change that—
"Five hundred years," Malik says. "I say it takes five hundred years. Long enough for the memories of KaibaCorp's old purpose to pass, long enough for the past to be buried by time. Short enough that you'll still be alive then, unchanged." His fingers flex out of Kaiba's palm, reaching for the nightstand and fumbling blindly there.
Kaiba's gaze goes to the remote control pad on the table, to the blank concentration on Malik's face as he searches for the correct button. He does not move as Malik presses it.
"You and your fucking technology," Malik mumbles, though affectionately this time. The painkillers still buzz through his bloodstream, giving him voice even as it grows hoarse. "You can't stop death when I'm supposed to die."
"The paper," Otogi groans, turning the bits and pieces over in his hands. The concrete of the pavement beneath him has been warmed by the Sun, and his bared shoulders are beginning to burn from two straight days with every waking moment in the sunlight, but he pays it no mind. "It's gone."
"So?" Mariku says. "It's just a song."
"It's the past," Otogi snaps back. "You may not care about that, you may not care about why KaibaCorp is here or why the countdown is counting down to, but I do."
"The past isn't going to make the Sun explode any slower," Mariku says, irritated. Otogi keeps his head down, keeps feeling the fibers of the papers with his fingers, but internally he marvels at the so very human qualities of Mariku's voice—annoyance and sarcasm, but with the menacing quality it previously held completely gone.
He thinks he is making progress, but then he realizes what Mariku has said. "What?"
"The past," Mariku repeats, enunciating each word, with a look on his face that indicates how seriously he is questioning his companion's sanity, "is not going to make the Sun explode any slower."
Otogi turns to look at him in the eyes, wondering if he is just joking with him, with one of his humorless jokes that are meant to teach a lesson and not to poke fun.
"What was that for?" Otogi splutters once more, grasping desperately at the dissolving papers on the dock.
"That was to teach you," Mariku says simply.
"You're not going to teach me anything by almost killing me!"
"You're already dead," Mariku says, flat and almost angry. His teeth grit, fingers curling into fists, and he stands once more, leaves Otogi doubled over in the wake of the memory he has so generously shared. "You need to remember that."
"I do," Otogi says, forcing himself to his feet as well. "I know that whenever I walk down the street and think that Domino was nicer before, that the Sun was smaller before, that there was no such thing as KaibaCorp before. I know that, because I'm too strange, because I couldn't care less about dying—"
"In that," Mariku says, "lies power." He turns and walks away, and it takes Otogi a long, long minute to reconcile the look in his eyes with some sort of emotion; he is too used to Mariku as bitter, sarcastic, and unfeelingly insane.
Perhaps he was trying to help.
"Hey!" Otogi calls after him. "Wait!"
"What?" Mariku snaps, and Otogi sees the shaking of his fingers as they slip into sight from the edge of his sleeve.
"Help me put the songs back together," Otogi offers.
"The Sun's not going to explode," he says slowly.
"Of course it is."
"No..." Otogi glances higher, toward the blue-black screen on KaibaCorp's building, its seconds ticking down to the right. "Who told you that?"
"Everyone knows it," Mariku says.
I say it takes five hundred years.
Long enough for the past to be buried by time.
"That can't be possible," he says in a rush of words, tumbling from his mouth quicker than he can manage to sort them out. "I learned—before today, in the past—I learned that it would take billions and billions of years—and how can he manage to predict it anyway—"
"Otogi," Mariku interrupts, voice mockingly controlled. "Shut up." When Otogi closes his mouth, half automatically and half in surprise at the sound of his voice from Mariku's lips, his companion continues. "Shut up," Mariku repeats, perhaps once more for emphasis, "think, and then talk."
"The world isn't going to end in six months," Otogi says. "The Sun isn't going to explode in six months. The Sun isn't even going to explode."
"And how would you know?"
"Science," Otogi says—the same simple, one-word answer he remembers Kaiba giving him. A scowl begins to form on Mariku's face, and he hastily stands, grabbing the drying fragments of paper on the ground, and motions toward the dark screen of the KaibaCorp building. "I'll show you."
They kneel on the dusty ground, by the screens that display their contents for what seems to be all hours of the day, as Otogi once again runs his finger over the walls in search of the diagram that proves his point. "I remember this room," Mariku says quietly, his own eyes fixed on another point not two feet away. "I used to live here."
"Here," Otogi says after a moment, unsure of how to respond to Mariku's declaration; and besides, Otogi is fairly certain that he was only telling, not waiting for an answer. He taps the screen.
His finger rests on the same drawing of the inner Solar System he saw in the first memory Mariku showed him, orbits of the outer planets outlined with careful precision. There is even a caption of sorts on the bottom of it, reading 5 billion. In red ink, Kaiba has outlined the outer edge of the Sun somewhere close to Mars, and arrows reach across from it and toward the circle-with-a-cross that represents Earth.
Mariku frowns at it. "This doesn't explain anything."
Otogi taps the surface again, following a line from the two symbols shaped like stick figures—Mercury and Venus, his mind tells him, but he does not care about that for once—and outward. "Stars only explode if they're big enough," he says.
Mariku snorts. "It looks pretty big to me."
"It's not," Otogi says. The memories are trickling into his mind slowly, selectively; he cannot remember who he was then, who his friends were, what it was like, but he remembers with painful clarity everything he learned about astronomy. "Instead, it's going to expand until it goes past the Earth, and then it'll shrink back down and die."
Mariku seems morbidly interested. "And that will happen in six months?"
"No, it will take hundreds of years, and by that time..." Otogi pauses, tries to sort through his muddled conceptions of the end of the world, but finally resorts to guessing.
If he is right, they are far from the natural end, anyway.
"By that time what?" Mariku says sharply.
"By that time, we'll be dead, because the Sun will be so close, the surface of the Earth will be roasted," Otogi finishes.
There is a moment of silence, in which Mariku tentatively reaches out and touches the red-lined border of the dying Sun, as if afraid that the computer screen will burn him. "Six months...?" he says, and it is phrased as a question—there is uncertainty in his expression, and he glances nervously outside, where the Sun is still rising in all its bloated golden glory, nearly at the zenith of the sky.
"Kaiba made that up," Otogi says.
"So it won't actually happen?" Mariku prods.
Otogi opens his mouth to say that he does not know, but a voice from the walls beats him to it.
"I can assure you that it's very real."
"You again," Otogi says, and rolls his eyes; this is becoming a daily occurence.
"The world will end in six months, ten days, eight hours, twenty-seven minutes, and fifty-one seconds," Noa informs them both, before his words die away and there is a sharp clicking sound that echoes through the building like the remnants of an explosion; Otogi can hear it, soft as it is, hear it as if he is hearing the sound of the world shifting.
"Not anymore," Noa whispers.
"What do—" Otogi begins, but then the screams of the people resound outside, the low hum of machinery reverberating once more through the walls, and he rushes to the window.
Mariku is already there, glancing out at the huddles gathered at the foot of the KaibaCorp tower, arms that look tiny from this distance pointing upward. Otogi thinks he sees something like fear on their normally blank faces, ripped from the emotionlessness that they have trained themselves to feel in view of their six-month deaths. "Kaiba changed it," Mariku says, and the certainty in his voice is dark, almost angry. "He changed it somehow."
"Changed what?" Otogi demands.
"The world will end in fifteen minutes exactly," Noa says by way of answer.
Otogi shakes his head, unwilling to believe it, unable to believe it. "He promised five hundred years, I know he did—"
It is Mariku who laughs now, the sound harsh. "Yes, and Kaiba certainly keeps his promises."
"You!" Otogi turns, looks to the wall, looks anywhere Noa may be. "Stop it! Stop the countdown, stop whatever Kaiba's doing to get the world to end sooner, do something—"
"Why?" Noa and Mariku say at the same time, though it is Noa who continues. "Better to end the world now, to die now, than to die later."
Otogi shakes his head. "Maybe, but we're not the ones who should decide."
"It doesn't matter," Noa says. "I can't do anything about it."
Otogi stands there for a moment, frozen in place by the utter unreality of the situation—their lives ticking down to zero with every beat of their hearts, a boy who is a computer speaking to him and another who is not human staring at him, and the tattered scraps of songs of the past clutched in his hand. "Okay," he says finally. "But we have to go down."
"Why?" Mariku says.
Otogi glares at him, anger beginning to seep through his veins—anger at Kaiba, anger at fate, anger he is mistakenly taking out on his companion, but he's sure Mariku understands. Mariku lives for anger. "You say you want to be human? Well, there's this human idea of helping others."
He and Mariku push their way through the crowd, through the people who are wide-eyed in terror as they glance at the huge screen that now proudly displays 00:00:00:00:03:42, out of the press of bodies and into the empty space at the foot of the building. They clamber atop a stone statue of two dragons, standing on their backs, and wait.
"What now?" Mariku has his arms folded over his dark purple cloak, eyes defensive as he glares back at everyone who stares at him.
Otogi holds up the paper; it is wrinkled, torn, but the words to some other song he cannot understand are still visible. "Sing with me," he says, impulsively, desperately, staring out at the sparkle of the sea and the worried faces of those looking at them.
The frown deepens. "No."
"Why not?"
"Because everyone will laugh and think we're insane," Mariku says, stubborn, and Otogi resists the sudden urge to smile himself, feeling lightheaded from stress and adrenaline and the ridiculous notion of him standing with a former drug dealer atop stone statues in front of the KaibaCorp building as they await the end of the world. The Sun has reached its noon height, shining down on their heads and casting glittering golden light over the entire tense scene; it is scorching his arms, but Otogi doesn't care.
He smiles anyway, because Mariku is almost sulking, and perhaps Otogi has succeeded after all. "That's the point."
Mariku gives him another flat glance.
"Do you want to be human? Do you want to learn how to care?" Otogi says, almost under his breath; the crowd has quieted, waiting to hear what they have to say. "Then do what I told you to and sing."
"This one," Mariku says finally, even softer, pointing at one stanza. "Domino still remembers the tune to this one."
"What about the words?"
Mariku smirks. "They'll know them when you do."
"Reliqui Alabamam," Otogi begins, and Mariku joins in reluctantly. The people stare at them, wondering what they can possibly be doing; Otogi catches Yugi's gaze somewhere amongst the silver-bundled clothes and smiles, attempting to seem encouraging.
"Cum viola mea, nam," Yugi says softly, and he looks surprised that he knows what to say; Otogi simply smiles wider, because he thinks that Mariku has not admitted the truth of his existence to anyone but him.
Otogi can tell that the words are meaningless to them, simply sounds they have memorized to a children's tune, but he forges on—"Velim ire in Louisiana qui Susannam cupiam. Pluebat, cum profectus sum, et sol urebat. Ne me frigoris bi peritum despores quaeso te."
Pause, breathe, repeat again; a new stanza and new words. It takes on a different rhythm than he remembers—the chorus is last, or so he assumes, and he checks the paper to realize with a start that those lines have been smudged beyond recognition by the water it was submerged in. Behind him, blinking white on a background of blue and only too visible, the countdown continues ticking. One minute now, fifty-five seconds—
Pause, breathe, repeat again; don't think. Otogi and Mariku are both bent over the paper, heads touching and hair falling in a tangle of black and blond over their shoulders, too intent on the words like everyone else is; they would rather die reading this than conscious of when the end will be.
"Nisi inveniam melculum, actum erit de me. Ne me sepultum mortuum deplores, quaeso te!"
Otogi continues, into the chorus stanza, not aware that everyone else has fallen silent—that to them, this is the end. "Oh, Susanna—"
His voice echoes into the empty space, alone, and he remembers that he does not know what comes next. The countdown is ticking audibly now, a steady beeping like the ones he remembers hearing in the movies of old, and he shuts his eyes in an attempt to block the screen out. "Oh, Susanna, blah blah blah blah blah blah—"
Everyone joins, and all their voices combined make it impossible to hear anything else.
Otogi dares to look again and sees Mariku's gaze locked with his, and beyond him, the white numbers flashing—it's too fast, much to fast, as if Kaiba is speeding it up on purpose. Thirty, twenty-nine, twenty-eight—
On impulse, the thump of his heartbeat drowned out by the noise around them, he takes Mariku's hand and weaves his fingers through it, feeling his palm against his own. Mariku looks at him in surprise before closing his fingers as well, and Otogi has to smile—it is a human gesture, an entirely human gesture, and one he is determined to teach Mariku before it all ends.
The chorus repeats.
"Oh, Susanna—"
The numbers display 00:00:00:00:00:05, 00:00:00:00:00:04, 00:00:00:00:00:03, and the people fall silent. Otogi involuntarily shifts to his left, so that his shoulder is pressed against Mariku's, warm skin to warm skin. He wonders, briefly, if Kaiba will survive. If Noa will survive. If he and Mariku, too painfully different from the oh-so-human people of this world today, will survive.
00:00:00:00:00:01.
00:00:00:00:00:00.
Otogi takes a deep breath, and closes his eyes.
End
A/N: Necropolis means, literally, city of the dead. Latin songs because if Otogi had known what the words meant, do you think he would've been as fascinated by them? Finally, some details—Otogi's past, Yugi, how Otogi knows English, etc.—have been left out because they were unnecessary.
Footnotes: safaat-keruth .livejournal .com /3138 .html
Please review; concrit is loved, but everything is welcome. Thank you for reading!