A/N: Over the summer I've been reading Catch-22 as an assignment for my Literature class. The story follows the (mis)adventures of a squadron of American soldiers who fly bombing missions over Italy; Yossarian, the protagonist, is determined to get out of the war using any means necessary. As the book puts it, he wants to "live forever or die trying." It's funny, but in a strange, Monty-Python-in-print kind of way that not everyone will understand. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that most of the people who read this will have read Catch-22, but it's not an absolute requirement.
So the inevitable question: Why the hell did I combine Yu-Gi-Oh! and Catch-22?
The answer is... I really don't know. They have almost nothing in common. Maybe Catch-22's wacky characters reminded me a little bit of Yu-Gi-Oh's cast of crazies, at least in spirit.
Joseph Heller's writing style is characterized by repetition and a strong use of irony. He also presents events in a fragmented, non-chronological order that can sometimes be confusing. I don't approve of trying to emulate someone else's style all the time, but I think it can make an interesting exercise. I had a lot of fun writing this, but don't expect to see a continuation or more Catch-22 crossovers.
This has been posted un-betaed because my beta reader has been working hard and deserves a break. All missing commas are intentional.
I don't own Yu-Gi-Oh! or Catch-22; they belong to Takahashi Kazuki and Joseph Heller, respectively. I'm just borrowing the characters for fun.
Jounouchi was in the hospital for ten days before the doctors figured out that he wasn't really suffering from severe constipation. They probably wouldn't have realized this for ten more days if one of the other patients hadn't walked in on Jounouchi in the latrine and scurried to the appropriate authorities.
The bastard who ratted out Jounouchi was named Otogi, and he had managed to stay in the hospital for nearly a month by pretending to suffer from unexplainable stomach pains. No one on the ward was actually sick, except maybe for Bakura, who was more a head case than anything else. Bakura bounced in and out of the hospital like a ping-pong ball because the doctors could never quite figure out what to do with him, just like they could never quite figure out how to get Otogi to stop screwing around with the nurses.
Jounouchi walked back to his squadron as slowly as he could, hoping that by the time he reached his tent the war would be over. When he got to Honda's tent, which was next to his, he paused and listened as hard as he could for any sort of sign that the war had ended. He did this every time they released him from the hospital, but it never worked.
His roommate, Yuugi, was a tiny kid from Jounouchi's hometown who had originally come under suspicion for lying about his age. He was twenty but looked fifteen, even though he had spiked his hair with an egregious amount of gel to make himself look taller. Even after definitive proof was produced in the form of his birth certificate, the superior officers still muttered darkly amongst themselves whenever Yuugi walked by. They didn't care that he was too young to die in the war; they cared that he had lied to them.
Whatever Yuugi's age, Jounouchi didn't give a damn because he was good company regardless. Yuugi was eternally optimistic. Every single time Jounouchi dragged himself back to the tent, forlorn because the war hadn't ended while he was in the hospital, Yuugi would smile and reassure him that the war would be over "next time". This touched Jounouchi because he could tell that Yuugi secretly didn't approve of lying to the doctors, and yet he comforted Jounouchi anyway.
When Jounouchi, Yuugi, and Honda had all been in cadet training together, Yuugi had fallen in love with a nurse named Anzu. She had been there on some kind of internship, which of course meant that she never got to touch the sick cadets. She drove the ambulance instead because the man they had hired to drive the ambulance was always calling in sick. Yuugi fell in love with her on the day that he collapsed during parade from heat exhaustion and Anzu drove him to the base hospital. Although Yuugi had been unconscious for the whole ride, this experience convinced him that Anzu was the best ambulance driver the world had ever seen. He woke up in a bed next to Bakura, who had arrived at cadet training the same day as everyone else but had spent the entire time in the hospital.
"Hello," Bakura said politely. Bakura was always polite because he had read somewhere that this would help him make friends. So far it had not worked.
"Hello," Yuugi replied. "Did you see the ambulance driver who brought me here?"
"No."
"She was beautiful. She was the best ambulance driver in the world."
"What did she look like?"
"I don't know."
It wasn't until two days later that Yuugi actually met Anzu. On the day that he was discharged, she came to the hospital to drop off someone else who had collapsed from heat exhaustion. Yuugi happened to be at the front desk right when she walked in.
From the first glance he was sure it was her, even though he had never seen her before. He wanted to say something like "You're beautiful" or "You're the girl I've been waiting for," but what came out instead was "Are you the ambulance driver who brought me in?"
"I'm the only ambulance driver," she replied.
Yuugi was so ecstatic that she had actually spoken to him that he couldn't say anything else.
Honda had a girl that was waiting for him back home, or so he claimed. Half the guys on the squadron claimed to have girls waiting for them back home, and all of the girls sounded the same. Jounouchi started to wonder if all of these men came from a region of Japan that had perfected human cloning or had something in the water that made all pregnant women give birth to identical twins. Then he started to wonder why they couldn't let him go home if they had perfected human cloning.
"They could send an army of clones over to do the fighting," he told Otogi while he was still in the hospital with his fake constipation. "I saw it in the movies."
"I saw a guy get cut in half by a naked chick with a buzz saw in the movies," Otogi replied. "I think I'd stick around if there were a chance of that actually happening. That's how I want to go."
Jounouchi had spent so much time trying to prolong his life that he hadn't given any thought to how he wanted it to end. "Why do you want to go that way?"
"Think about it," Otogi advised him, wagging a finger like an adult telling off a mischievous child. "The last thing you get to see before you die is a naked chick."
But it turned out that Honda's girl wasn't a lie. Jounouchi found this out when the mail finally came in. There were two letters for Honda, one from his parents and one from his girl.
"See, I told you Honda wasn't lying," Yuugi scolded. "You read that letter he showed us." Yuugi had had faith in Honda from the beginning. He had faith in everyone.
"It was a very nice letter," Jounouchi admitted. "She's either a real girl or a clone who's smart enough to be flattering."
Honda rushed to write back to his girl the same day because he wanted the letter to reach her as fast as possible. His news wasn't urgent, but it took several weeks for the outgoing letters to reach their recipients and even longer for incoming letters to reach theirs. The reason it took so long was because all the letters had to be inspected and censored. This job usually fell to any officers who happened to be hospital patients, but if there weren't any officers in the hospital, the job went to Bakura. Even though there was a good chance he was mentally ill, the doctors trusted him.
Bakura took his job very seriously. He deleted all the swear words in any letters that were addressed to women because he had a firm belief in propriety even if he couldn't believe in anything else. Sometimes he was so busy looking for swear words that he forgot to censor important military business. Eventually headquarters ordered him removed from the hospital so he wouldn't be in charge of censoring letters anymore.
When Bakura arrived back at his tent, he found another man sleeping on his cot. A different man had also taken his place as cook at the mess hall. This disconcerted him so much that he went right back to the hospital and checked himself back in.
"What seems to be the trouble?" the doctor asked him.
Bakura sighed. "Somebody I don't know is sleeping on my cot. Somebody I don't know is cooking in the mess hall. Somebody I don't know is censoring letters. I feel like my life is expendable."
"This is the army, son," the doctor told him. "Everyone feels that way. I'm afraid I can't help you."
Bakura ended up living in Honda's tent.
"You can sleep on Mr. X's cot," Honda explained. "He won't mind." Honda's former roommate had been killed in action before anyone had bothered to find out his name. To make up for this, everyone called him Mr. X and talked about him like he was still alive.
"Do you know who's sleeping on my cot?" Bakura asked Honda.
"Yeah, sure. He's a C.I.D. man who's been sent down to investigate some enlisted man who was censoring letters."
The C.I.D. man was supposed to be a secret, but by the second day of his investigation everyone knew that he was a C.I.D. man. Somebody saw him trying to put a suggestion into the suggestion box, and then the gig was up.
The suggestion box had been Yuugi's idea. When the Major refused, Jounouchi pointed out that the neighboring squadron had a suggestion box. The Major hated the officer who was in charge of the neighboring squadron and desired nothing more than to make him look bad. He had read somewhere that making other officers look incompetent was the best way to get promoted. So far it had worked splendidly.
Jounouchi's squadron got not one but two suggestion boxes. After a month the Major was promoted, and one of the boxes disappeared. After two months the suggestion box started to overflow, and the discovery was made that no one was actually reading the suggestions. After that no one put suggestions in the box anymore because they knew it was pointless, just like how Jounouchi never argued about Anzu with Yuugi because it was pointless.
"Look, Yuugi, I'm sorry to tell you this, but I don't know if she even remembers your name."
"She will," Yuugi insisted. "I sent her a letter. I didn't swear or write about military business, so it should get through the censors pretty quickly."
Three months later Yuugi received a letter from Anzu. She asked him very politely to please not write to her at this address again because in two weeks she was getting her degree and going to work at the Kaiba Corporation.
"You see? She's so kind. She went to all the trouble of writing back!"
"Did she tell you where you can write to her once she starts working at Kaiba Corp?"
Yuugi's face fell. "…No, she didn't." He stared at the letter and then at Jounouchi, like a child who had been asked to solve a difficult math problem. "She forgot. She'll send her new address to me real soon."
Jounouchi was always impressed by Yuugi's ability to have faith in everyone. He never argued about Anzu with Yuugi after that. Besides, she had been kind enough to give him an idea.
Otogi was still in the hospital when Jounouchi was brought in. "Constipation again?" he asked.
"Nope," Jounouchi replied. "Stomach pains. I think whatever you've got is catching."
This time Jounouchi only lasted three days because the doctor caught him using the hospital phone to call Kaiba Corp long distance.
"I want to talk to Kaiba," Jounouchi insisted over the protests of the lady on the other end of the line. "I want to ask him how he got out of the war."
The lady mumbled something about Kaiba being a very busy man.
"Hey, lady, I was a busy man too before they put me in the army," Jounouchi countered. "I was on level forty of Masters of Combat. And I flipped burgers at Domino King. And I did all of my own laundry."
At this point the connection started to break up, but Jounouchi heard the lady say that Mr. Kaiba had a company to run and couldn't waste his time talking to asylum patients.
"Look, lady, I'm not crazy. Bakura's crazy, and Yuugi's crazy about Anzu, and Honda's crazy about his girl back home, and Otogi's crazy about the nurses, but I'm not crazy. I'm not in some damn asylum. I'm in a war, and people I don't know are trying to kill me. It's not funny at all."
The line went dead right as the doctor pulled Jounouchi away from the phone.
Jounouchi was pretty sure the war hadn't ended when he got back to his tent, but he decided to ask just in case.
"Hey, Yuugi, did we win the war yet?"
Yuugi looked up from Anzu's letter. "I don't know. I wasn't paying attention."
A/N: Several of the events in this story have parallels in Catch-22.
Mr. X: In Catch-22, Yossarian's former roommate dies before his arrival is officially reported, so no one has the authority to remove his belongings from Yossarian's tent. Throughout the book, he is referred to as "the dead man in Yossarian's tent" even though his body isn't actually there.
Censoring letters and the C.I.D. man: Yossarian pulls the same stunt as Jounouchi and Otogi: he fakes illness to spend time in the hospital with the hope that the war will end before he is sent back to combat duty. Because Yossarian is an officer, he must censor letters, but this gets so boring that he starts making up games - like censoring all of the adjectives and adverbs and signing the censored letters "Washington Irving". Eventually headquarters sends a C.I.D. (Criminal Investigation Division) man to find out who has been signing a fake name to all of these censored letters. Hilarity ensues.
"People I don't know are trying to kill me. It's not funny at all.": This is a take-off from my favorite Catch-22 line, which appears in Chapter Two while Clevinger is trying to convince Yossarian that the enemy isn't out to kill him specifically: "Clevinger really thought he was right, but Yossarian had proof, because strangers he didn't know shot at him with cannons every time he flew up into the air to drop bombs on them, and it wasn't funny at all."