Notes: I posted this on Tumblr a few days ago, but I figured I'd go ahead and upload it here now.

In the manga, Shizuka's operation took place (and was successful) earlier than it did in the anime. While Shizuka didn't have her operation until right before Battle City in the anime, she had it before Otogi even transferred to Domino High in the manga. This fic takes place in manga canon, both because I prefer it and because it gives me more room to work with (on top of being preferable for characterization reasons).

Additionally, while I know the anime created a design/personality for Jounouchi's mother, I've tossed that out of the window as well and have created my own version of her, better suiting what I imagined her to be like when I read the manga. This fic is manga-based anyway, so it isn't as if the anime really holds any relevance regardless. Either way, I thought I'd mention it.

See Through it All

Shizuka went into surgery at exactly 9:23 PM. That was the time on Jounouchi's watch, anyway, when the nurses blocked him from following the stretcher down the hall into the surgery room. Part of him wanted to go around them so that he could follow Shizuka into the surgery room, so he could be there for her every single step of the way as he had promised; but common sense told him that even if he did he would just be in the way because there was nothing he could do for her (at least, not in comparison to what the doctors were goingto do for her), and so he allowed the nurses to lead him back to a little waiting area down near Shizuka's recovery room, where his and Shizuka's mother was already waiting.

In the general practice areas of the hospital, as well as the emergency wings, the waiting areas often consisted of either crowded rooms at the end of halls, or chairs lining the halls near the outpatient rooms. For surgical recovery wings the waiting areas were little rooms again, and at this time of night the room that Jounouchi and his mother occupied was completely empty save for the two of them. The chairs had stiff wooden arms and uncomfortable tweed cushions, along with a television fastened to the wall in one corner and various magazines spread out over a coffee table in the center. There were plenty of chairs lining the walls of the room, and for a moment Jounouchi hovered awkwardly by the door, his gut twisting into knots as he tried to figure out which one to take. If he took a seat away from her, it would be a pointed, obvious statement that he wanted nothing to do with her, which wasn't necessarily true. On the other hand, if he sat right beside her, that would be a pointed, obvious statement that he wanted to talk to her, and that wasn't necessarily true either. But as he waffled over which seat to take, his mother looked up from her mobile phone to meet his eyes, and Jounouchi—telling himself that he was a man, and men weren't afraid to talk to their mothers—strode over to take the seat beside her, a feeling of panic springing alive in his brain the second he did so.

But his mother didn't say anything to him. Instead, she looked back down at her phone, her thumb scrolling through whatever messages she was reading on it. Jounouchi folded his arms stiffly across his chest in an attempt to look relaxed, crossed his ankles one way and then the other, and then—as surreptitiously as he could manage, hoping she wouldn't notice—he looked at her out of the corner of his eye.

When he had first arrived at the hospital, he almost didn't recognize her. Part of the reason, he felt, was because he had been so focused on finding Shizuka; he didn't have time to spare for the nurses or doctors who tried to block his path, or for the woman who had been speaking to Shizuka's doctor before Jounouchi ran up and demanded to know where his sister was. The woman was all he had thought of her upon seeing her, for the half second he had taken to glance in her direction. Even after she had spoken up in surprise, even after she had said his name, it had taken him a second to realize that it was really her. And even then he had found that he didn't care very much, or rather, that he couldn't care until the doctor took him to go see Shizuka.

But now the two of them were alone, and Jounouchi wondered how he hadn't recognized her. It had been six years, true, but looking at her now (even in an aside glance) made him painfully aware of how much he resembled her. Her hair was the same color as his, golden blonde beneath the fluorescent hospital lighting, and she had it tied in a little ponytail that fell across her left shoulder, her bangs light and fluffy. Her eyes were the same as his—same dark brown color, same shape, same fierce look of pointed determination as she stared at her phone much in the same way he sometimes stared into the mirror. Her lips were pursed, and maybe they weren't as thin as his, but then again, that might have had something to do with her lipstick giving her lips the illusion of fullness. Her face was thin like his, at least, even if their noses were different. He didn't have her ears, either.

There was no mistaking it. Six years hadn't made it so that he had completely forgotten what she looked like, but even if he had, he saw himself often enough in the mirror when brushing his teeth that he could recognize the similarities between himself and the woman—Kawai Reika—his mother when she was seated right beside him.

He looked away as his throat squeezed, and tried hard to swallow the feeling down.

Six years ago, his mother had taken Shizuka and left Domino City. Jounouchi didn't blame her for leaving; with the way his dad was, the only real question was why she had never left sooner. But he wondered—he didn't necessarily blame, but he wondered—why she had left him behind. He wondered more often still why she had never written any letters, never made any attempt to visit, never made any attempt to go back for him. As much trouble as he was often in as a kid, Jounouchi had loved his mother. He had thought, too, that she . . . well, she had her reasons, he was sure. He just wished he knew what those reasons were.

Or he thought he had, anyway. He had daydreamed more than once about getting the opportunity to ask. But now that he had it fear made him fold his arms a little more tightly as he stared hard at the sterilized floor, his foot tapping in a rapid beat against the laminate tile.

For a time, the only sounds between them were the distant sounds of the hospital intercom or nurses and doctors bustling down the corridor, along with the steady tick, tick, tick of the clock mounted on the waiting room wall. But just as Jounouchi was thinking about maybe muttering some excuse about finding a vending machine so he could have a reason to escape the anxious tension in the room, his mother broke the silence.

"I want to say thank you, by the way," she said. "For the—for this. For paying for the operation. That was very generous of you."

Her tone reminded Jounouchi of the various guidance counselors that had tried to talk to him during middle school—the ones who had this or that to say about his grades, or his test performance, or his punctuality, or the fact that there were rumors he was involved in gang activity and that would make the school look bad if he didn't shape up and start doing better. Jounouchi shot her another glance out of the corner of his eye, but his mother still wasn't looking at him. Whatever she was doing on her phone, it seemed to have ensnared her attention wholesale.

"It wasn't," he said after a moment, and still his mother didn't look up, but her thumb was frozen over the keypad of her phone, and she was staring so hard at the screen that she might have cracked it through sheer force of mental will alone. "Generous, I mean. I just did what I had to do. It was for Shizuka, so . . ." Jounouchi shrugged. "The money was hers to begin with. It was hers before I even had it—always was. There wasn't really a choice to be made, you know?"

His mother was quiet for a moment before she said, in the same carefully measured tone as before, "All the same, I speak for both Shizuka and myself when I say how much we appreciate this. Thank you, Katsuya."

Aside from Shizuka saying his name at the very start of her video tape message, and his mother's outcry (which he had more or less ignored) from when he had first arrived at the hospital and demanded to be taken to Shizuka's room, no one had called Jounouchi by his given name in years. His father rarely directly addressed him anymore, and when he did it was usually just "boy" or the occasional "kid." No one else Jounouchi knew was on a given-name basis with him either, at least not when it came to his name. Being addressed that way now, and by his mother no less, made an uncomfortable shiver work its way through him. He cleared his throat a little and looked away from her, and tried to remind himself that even if it felt a little too personal, she had every right to call him that. What he didn't have was the right to tell her not to. In lieu of asking her not to anyway, he scuffed his shoe against the floor and mumbled, "S'no problem. You're welcome."

Silence fell between them once more, interrupted only by the ticking clock, before his mother spoke again. This time she sounded more hesitant, and even a little afraid, but no less like the guidance counselors at school. This time she just sounded like a newbie instead of an old professional.

"I wanted to ask . . . how . . . did you get the money?" He glanced over at her again, and his heart leaped into his throat like a startled frog when he saw that she was looking at him, her eyes searching his. "I can't imagine your father could have . . . or even would have . . ." She closed her eyes briefly and cleared her throat, and when she looked at him her expression was set in stern determination, betrayed only by the lingering hints of wariness in her voice. "Did you steal it?"

That was enough to make Jounouchi sit up straight in the chair and half turn to face her, his mind seized between horror that she would think that, shame that she would have reason to, and disbelief at the fact that she could possibly know anything about him or the things he had done when she had been gone for six years. "What—no! I didn't steal it."

"Oh. Good." His mother relaxed a little, but Jounouchi didn't, particularly since she was still watching him shrewdly, with none of the suspicion having left her gaze. "Then how did you . . . ?"

"I won it," he said, and he folded his arms again as her expression flickered through brief surprise before settling on a stony look. "It was prize money."

". . . Prize money," she said after a moment. She turned away from him, looking back out toward the main part of the waiting room, and huffed a small, bitter sounding laugh before she said softly, "Gambling. I should have known."

If being accused of theft had been upsetting, it was nothing compared to the sudden shot of outrage that set every one of his nerves on fire. Jounouchi leaped up from his chair before he was even aware of what he was doing, his hands balled into fists. His mother jumped a little in her seat at his sudden movement, her eyes wide, but in that second he couldn't bring himself to care.

"It wasn't through gambling either!" he said, and though he lowered his voice a fraction as she shushed him, he couldn't quite manage "indoor voice" level again. "I won at Duelist King—in a card game tournament."

His mother gave him a look that was so filled with both pity and condescension that he couldn't be sure which one won out. "A card game tournament is still gambling, Katsuya. The game doesn't matter—"

"No, it's—it wasn't like that!" he cried, and he ran a hand through his hair. "It wasn't for money—I mean, yeah, there was the prize money, but we anted up star chips, not—"

"Chips. That does sound typical for a gambling tournament."

"No, they weren't chips worth money!" He threw his hands in the air before he let them fall back down to smack against his legs. "I never—I wouldn't—you think I got money to gamble with when I'm still paying off all the old man's shit? I don't! He's racked up enough gambling debt to last this family a lifetime!"

Jounouchi's mother scoffed and picked at a piece of fuzz attached to the sleeve of her blouse. "You don't have to tell me."

"Well apparently I do, since you don't seem to realize that I wouldn't do the same things he did when he fu—screwed us over so badly," Jounouchi said, and she looked back at him, her eyes no less judgmental. "I didn't gamble for money. Not with any of my own, anyway. I don't have any to gamble with. I just entered the tournament so I could have a shot at winning the prize money for Shizuka, and then I did, and then I sent it in to the hospital so they could use it for Shizuka's operation. That's all. It was a one time thing, and I didn't—I wouldn't—" He took a deep breath. "I'm not interested in doing the same things he did. I'm not that kind of guy."

His mother stared at him for a long moment before she gave a curt nod and looked away again. "All right, I understand," she said, slipping back into the same cool, detached tone she had used before. "I apologize for jumping to conclusions."

"It's . . . fine," he said, and he ran a hand through his hair again, squeezing his locks between his fingers to tug gently on his roots in some form of stress relief before he dropped back into the chair. "It's . . . whatever. It's fine."

His mother said nothing. Jounouchi looked at her out of the corner of his eye again to see that she had gone back to her phone, but like before she didn't seem to be doing anything more than scrolling through messages of some kind. Jounouchi tore his eyes away from her to look down at his jeans instead, picking at a piece of string from around the frayed edges of the hole exposing one knee.

In all of the conversations he had imagined having with his mother, none of them had ever gone like this. To be fair, in the time leading up to the surgery he had done his best not to think about his mother at all; every time he had thought about her he had ended up feeling a little sick, a little frightened, and if there was one thing he hated feeling, it was fear, at least of the debilitating kind. It was one thing to be able to channel any fear he felt into adrenaline, to use it to bolster his battle cries and give him more strength as he threw himself into whatever challenge or battle was before him. It was another to feel that kind of fear that tugged on his lungs from the inside and urged him to bolt. Jounouchi never ran from any fight if he could help it. He firmly believed it was much better to go down swinging than with a sword in your back because you were spineless enough to turn tail and run.

So in the time leading up to the surgery, he hadn't thought much about his mother at all—but when he had, or when he had thought about her long before the surgery was so much as a blip on his radar, he hadn't imagined that their first conversation would go like this. He had thought that maybe she might try to pretend like nothing had happened, as if they hadn't gone literal years without speaking to each other. Maybe she would open by apologizing for leaving him behind, or maybe she would suggest he come live with her and Shizuka after all. Maybe she would do both. Or maybe—he didn't know. Even now, as he tugged at the string to make the hole in his pant leg that much bigger, Jounouchi didn't know what he had wanted her to say. All he did know was that he hadn't been expecting her to compare him to his father, to look at him like he was his father, even though he now wasn't sure why he hadn't been expecting that.

But realizing that he should have expected that brought his original curiosity back to the forefront of his mind, even as the question itself—sitting on his tongue like a sour fruit—made him feel queasy. He chanced another glance at her and saw that she hadn't changed; she was still staring at her phone with an almost antagonistic intensity, her fingernail gently scratching along the keypad. He took a deep breath, his heart beating hummingbird quick in his chest, and squeezed his nails into his arms as he forced himself to be a man, seize the opportunity, and ask before he could wuss out.

"Hey, old la—uh . . . Mom." It felt weird to say that, to call someone that again, and when she looked up at him, the startled look on her face suggested she certainly hadn't expected to hear him say it. He looked back at the floor, and scuffed his shoe against the laminate again. "Why did you, uh . . . why . . . why didn't I get to go with you and Shizuka when you moved out?"

The question dropped, and if there had been anxious pressure in the room before, it was nothing compared to what the atmosphere felt like now. Jounouchi didn't have to look at his mother to feel the sudden tension radiating off her, and he set his jaw as he tried to keep his own nerves under control.

". . . It was a complicated situation," his mother said at last, and for all the stress he could feel emanating from her, she did a remarkable job of keeping her voice level. "You wouldn't understand."

"Try me," he said, and he turned to face her again. She pointedly looked away.

"There were a lot of factors that went into the decision—"

"What were they?"

"Katsuya, now is not the time—"

"Then what is the time?" he demanded, and as she shot him a look of warning he fought to keep his voice at a reasonable level. "It's been six years, I think I've got a right to know since it's not like you said a word to me then—"

"You were ten years old, you wouldn't have understood—"

"Well I'm sixteen now, so I think you should give me a chance!"

"It's not like you'll understand any better now!" his mother cried, but her anger deflated in a frustrated sigh a second later as she shut her eyes and shook her head. "Always so stubborn," she said under her breath, as she sagged back against her chair. "Always talking back . . ."

"I just want to know why you left m—why I had to stay behind," Jounouchi said, and once again he fought to keep his own voice level. "That's all. I get that it might be hard to explain, or whatever. That's fine. We've got time. I just want you to try. Please."

His mother opened her eyes to look at him again, her expression conflicted, before she sighed again and looked back at the wall across the room.

"It would have been too expensive to take both of you," she said. "I had no savings to take with me when I left, and although I was fortunate enough to be able to find work relatively quickly, my new salary wasn't enough to enable me to afford an apartment and raise two children. I—Shizuka and I had to live with your grandmother for a time as it was, until I could save up the money for us to move out. Particularly given the fact that not all of Shizuka's medical expenses were covered by our insurance, I couldn't afford to take both of you, and with Shizuka's condition, I didn't want to leave her with your father. I felt that, between the two of you, you would be able to get along best there."

"You weren't wrong. I would've never forgiven you if you'd left Shizuka behind instead," Jounouchi said. "In fact, I wouldn't have gone. No way I'd let you leave her there with him."

His mother looked over at him, and smiled thinly. "Then, you see? You understand?"

"Not really." His mother's smile faded, and her expression became more guarded as he frowned at her. "If it was just money, why not take me along? I could've helped."

She blinked at him, and then laughed a little, incredulous. "Helped? Katsuya, you were ten years old—"

"So?"

"You were a child—"

"And?"

"And children can't help with the finances!"

Jounouchi stared at her for a second before he said, "That's a joke, right?"

His mother laughed outright this time in scornful disbelief. "No, Katsuya, it's reality. I can understand your desire to help, but it isn't as if you could very well go out and get a job—"

"I've been working since I was eleven years old!" he burst out, and any amusement she felt at what she perceived to be nonsensical ideas slid off her face.

"What?"

"Or just about eleven, anyway. I can't actually remember if I was ten or eleven when I got the paper route job." He chewed his lip for a second in thought before he asked, "When was the exact date you left, again? Because it was something like a couple months after that, so that would give us an idea."

"I—you—that's illegal," his mother said, and Jounouchi rolled his eyes. "You can't have—"

"I got an exemption to work a part-time job even though I'm still in school," he said, waving off her concern. "They let you do it if your family's low income enough, so I did. Of course, they don't know that I also work a couple other jobs when I can, like at a local convenience mart and stuff, but hey, what they don't know won't hurt 'em."

"But what about school?"

"I told you, I do it in spite of school. I still go, but I just go after my paper route in the mornings, and before whatever night job I have if I have to work that night." His mother continued to stare at him in open disbelief, and Jounouchi sighed. "Look, it's not like I had much choice, all right? We got—well, get welfare checks, but between rent, bills, the old man's booze and his fu—freaking gambling debts, the government checks just aren't enough to cut it. The old man's been unemployed pretty much the whole time you've been gone, save for a few times when he sobered up just long enough to get a contract job through a job center, so that meant someone else had to pick up the slack. Since there was no one else, that someone else had to be me. So I did."

His mother stared at him as if she hadn't really seen him before, but found him to be something terrifying now that she had. Jounouchi scratched at the back of his neck, uncomfortable under the weight of his mother's gaze, and decided to steer the subject back to its original starting point.

"So, I could've helped," he said. "I get that maybe you didn't know about the job waiver thing. I didn't know at first either until I looked into it. Actually, it was Nagahata—that's my paper route boss—who turned me onto it. I went to him looking for a job, and he said I had to get the school to approve a waiver before he could hire me on. So I did, and then I got the job. But if you didn't know, then I guess that's not your fault, but . . . you know, you could've asked, or looked into it, I guess. Or I would have, if you would've said something. And if we did that, then I could've help—"

"No you couldn't have," his mother cut in at last. A little bit of color had returned to her cheeks, even as her voice shook a little.

Jounouchi frowned. "Did you not hear what I just got through saying? I could have. I've been—"

"Our expenses are more than what you and your father have," his mother said, and a little composure started to return to her voice as well—a bit of that professional, brisk tone she had employed at the start. "Your father has his debts, of course, but between Shizuka's medical bills and the overall difference in the cost of living between the Hanafuda suburbs and Domino City apartments—"

"But we would've had a dual income, right?" Jounouchi asked, and his mother shot him a brief, frustrated look before she looked away again. "So that would've helped, and—"

"Yes, but because of that it's unlikely that you would have been able to have the waiver approved. I'm a salaried employee, and was then, which is a different circumstance from your father—"

"But you said yourself that you couldn't afford both of us on just your job, so they would've had to approve the waiver then. Like I said, it's need based, and from the sounds of things we would've been in a pretty tough situation, so—"

"Even with that—it was still—it still would have been too much!" his mother insisted, and Jounouchi felt heat rising along the back of his neck along with the shaky adrenaline tying his stomach in knots. "Even if you had a paper route in Hanafuda as well, I can't see how that would have been enough to cover our expenses."

"We might've qualified for some government help. Not as much as me and the old man get, probably, but—"

"I don't think that we could have qualified for the sort of aid you're thinking of given my salary. They would have taken one look at it and laughed in my face."

"Then I could have gotten two jobs," Jounouchi said. "Big deal, it's not as if I don't work—"

"Oh yes, because sending you to work two jobs plus school would have made me a wonderful mother," his mother said, and Jounouchi's nails dug into his palms. "That isn't an acceptable solution either, it wouldn't have worked—"

"Well it has worked for the past six years, so I really don't see what the problem is!" Jounouchi exploded, but as quickly as his temper had surged to the surface, it crumbled when his mother turned back to look at him.

She didn't look angry; her eyes were bright, her forehead scrunched, the little wrinkles around the edges of her eyes from years spent scowling or frowning more prominent than ever. Her lips were pressed tightly together, and her fingers were curled around her skirt, almost as if she was holding herself back from saying or doing something. The absence of Jounouchi's anger left a hollow sort of feeling in his chest, but with each tick of the clock hands, he became more and more aware that it wasn't really emptiness he felt.

"Nothing I could've done would've been good enough, would it?" he asked quietly. His mother swallowed and turned her eyes to her lap, and that was really all the answer he needed.

"It isn't like that," she said. "Don't make this into—where are you going?"

She sounded startled, but just as he hadn't looked at her before he shoved out of his chair, he didn't look back as he headed toward the open waiting room door, instead calling over his shoulder, "I need to leave. I'll—I'll be back."

His mother said something else—it might have been his name—but as he exited the waiting room he broke into a stride that was only a few paces below a run. Nurses and lost patients alike expressed annoyance and alarm at how quickly he brushed by them as he made his way through the winding, identical corridors. He only had half of an idea in mind for where he was headed, but so long as his feet managed to take him far away from his mother, he thought that anywhere would be good enough.

Eventually, either by some stroke of luck or subtle herding done by doctors and nurses that wanted him to stop barrelling through their corridors, he made his way outside. Two nurses were hovering by the door near the entrance (evidently taking advantage of the mild night air to enjoy a peaceful break outside), and so Jounouchi looped around to the other side of the building, where the only available light was from that of the full moon overhead and no one else was around, to sit down at the base of the wall.

The moment he did so, he felt a cloak of shame drape over his shoulders.

He hated running. He hated it. There was no worse feeling in the world than feeling like a coward, and yet here he sat, alone in the dark after he ran away from his mother like a scared little boy. Jounouchi pulled his knees up to his chest and wrapped his arms around them, scowling at the concrete. He shouldn't have run from her, but no matter how sick with embarrassment he felt, he couldn't force himself to go back, either. For years he had wondered, in a peripheral sort of way, if maybe the reason she had left him behind was because he wasn't good enough. His old man certainly seemed to think so, when he flew into a rage fueled by too much alcohol and heartbreak all rolled into one. When he wasn't ranting about how Jounouchi's mother was a whore who had left him for "some lawyer in accounting," he was instead blaming Jounouchi for ruining the marriage by daring to be born in the first place. By now, Jounouchi knew not to put too much weight into his old man's opinion; when his dad decided to pick up some of the slack and hold an actual job for more than a week, then what he said could be given some merit. But after what had just happened in the hospital waiting room, Jounouchi couldn't help but wonder—couldn't help but think that maybe his old man had a point. His dad didn't want him around, and that was fine. It was—he could live with the fact that he wasn't good enough for his dad. But finding out that he wasn't good enough for his mother, either—that she really had left him behind because she wanted to, and nothing he could have said or done would have changed that—stung more than he had ever thought it could.

Jounouchi hugged his knees a little more tightly to his chest, his chin upon them, and swallowed hard. It was stupid to be upset, he knew. It was really stupid. He didn't need her, or his dad, really. He was sixteen years old—a man, and men didn't cry because their parents didn't love them. He sucked in a breath through his teeth and put his forehead on his knees instead, his eyes squeezed shut. It wasn't like this was anything new. He had known for years that his dad didn't love him, even if he thought he could maybe change things by winning the money they needed to pay off his dad's gambling debts from that TV game show. And if his mom didn't love him—well, he had known that for years too, hadn't he? Even if he hadn't wanted to admit it. There had to be a reason she never called, or wrote any letters. There had to be a reason why she hadn't contacted him at all over the past six years, why Shizuka had to send him a video tape in an unmarked package so that neither of their parents would find out. The writing had been on the wall for years, even if he had tried to convince himself that it said something else, that maybe there was some other reason. But there wasn't; the only reason that existed was that his mom didn't love him any more than his dad did, and had wanted just as little to do with him. The only difference was, she got to walk out where his dad couldn't really. Lucky her.

So he had known, had known for years even if he hadn't fully acknowledged it, and so it was stupid for him to feel so upset now. He had no reason to—nothing had changed. And even if something had . . . even if she was sorry, or she did love him . . . what could have changed? Jounouchi lifted his head up to look at the sky, which was dark and lightly peppered with stars. What if she did love him? What if she had offered to let him come live with her and Shizuka in Hanafuda City once Shizuka's surgery was finished? What then?

The pockets of Jounouchi's jeans were fairly deep, but seated as he was he could still feel the bulge of his keys buried in his pocket, digging lightly into his leg. He tugged them out with a bit of effort, and after flipping his keyring around in his hand, he looked at the little Kuriboh keychain that dangled from it. He and Yuugi had gone to the arcade the weekend after Duelist Kingdom, and had discovered that a five hundred yen capsule machine had been set up there—one that sold Duel Monsters keychains, no doubt to capitalize on the latest craze. Both he and Yuugi had tossed in the yen to get one, and while Yuugi's yen rewarded him with a Baby Dragon keychain, Jounouchi's had given him Kuriboh. At first they had considered trading, given that they had both ended up with each other's monsters, but they decided against it in the next second. It felt fitting, somehow, for them to have each other's monsters. Aside from the capsule machine (or fate, or the universe) apparently feeling like it was a good idea, somehow it just felt right. It was as if Kuriboh would always be watching over Jounouchi this way, like Baby Dragon would always have Yuugi's back. It was like, Yuugi had said, they would always have a little piece of each other with them this way, represented by their Duel Monsters keychains. They were small, but the keychains still represented them, and could serve as reminders of their time at Duelist Kingdom if nothing else.

Jounouchi held the little Kuriboh keychain between his fingers, rolling it gently between them. No, even if his mom had offered to let him move to Hanafuda with her, nothing would have changed. He couldn't leave. He had his job here, responsibilities, school . . . and Yuugi, Honda, Anzu, and Bakura, too. He couldn't just leave them. He had a life to live here. Even if his mom had offered—had asked him to move to Hanafuda with her, even if she did want him, ultimately, nothing would have changed.

Jounouchi put his forehead on his knees again, his lips pressed tightly together to keep them from trembling.

Nothing would have changed, but damn if it didn't still hurt like a bitch.

It took roughly forty-five minutes for Jounouchi to collect himself, according to his watch, but when he finally made it back to the waiting area, his mother was still there. She was talking on her phone when he walked in, and when she looked up and saw that it was him, her eyes widened and she clutched the phone more tightly, as if he had walked in on her doing something that she shouldn't have been.

"Right, I have to go," she said, her voice a rushed undertone. She ducked her head down, as if that would help mask her conversation with whoever she was speaking with. "No, it's not the doctor. Mmhm. Yes. I love you too. Bye."

As his mother snapped her phone shut and held it in a tight fist in her lap, Jounouchi felt himself taken aback. She loved whomever she was speaking with, and from the sounds of things—he could have been reading too much into it, he guessed, but from the way she said it, it sounded to him like she could have been talking to a lover. He wondered if she was seeing someone else—if perhaps she had married someone else, if he had a stepdad that he didn't know about.

His mother's eyes met his, and that was all he needed to remind himself that it didn't really matter if she had met or married someone else or not. There was no reason for him to care about that. It didn't concern or affect him at all.

He had paused in the doorway when he saw that she was talking on the phone, but now that she was finished and had fixed him with a wary stare, Jounouchi chose a chair on the left side of the room, nearer to the door than to his mother. The moment he sat down, he felt an odd sort of atmospheric shift; like before, this choice alone made a statement, but somehow he felt it was an even stronger one than he had made previously. He crossed his arms over his chest, and stared at the coffee table instead of looking over at her.

He didn't care. He had no reason to care, and so he didn't. He wouldn't.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw his mom start to say something. What she was going to say he didn't know—maybe she wanted to pick up the conversation where they had left off, maybe she wanted to apologize for before, maybe she—but he also knew that it didn't matter. Before the first syllable of the first word left her lips, he spoke over her.

"I'll be nice to you for Shizuka's sake," he said, and his nails dug into his arms with the effort it took to keep his voice level. "I don't want to upset her, so I don't want to fight with you, or anything. But, except for when we're around her, I don't really want to talk to you, either. So just . . . don't talk to me if it's not about—or if we're not around—her, okay?"

His mother was quiet for a long moment, and when she spoke again, it was in a tone so brisk it was almost cold.

"Fine."

No fight. No resistance. No questions. Jounouchi didn't know if he was relieved or disappointed.

"Okay," he said, and he picked at the frayed edge of the hole in his pant leg again. "Great. Glad we got that sorted out."

His mother said nothing, and when he looked over, he saw that she was once again doing something on her phone.

He figured that, things being what they were, maybe that was for the best.