Written for Round 13 of the wonderful Ryou VeRua's YGO Fanfiction Contest, challenge pairing Rendershipping: PegasusxJounouchixKaiba. Oy. Three characters I think, given what canon gives us, are very much, erm… not Rendershipping material. So I ran with that, and a bunch of other reality/delusion influences. AU, post-canon (by canon I mean after the time that canon would take place), Pegasus lives. Oh, and there's a lot more hokey science that alas, two years of physics can't explain away. Also hokey economics, and minor Polarshipping.
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folie à trois
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Frenzied nights, sleepless nights,
Incoherent speeches, tired gazes...
Nights lit by the last candle,
Dead-autumn's late-blooming flowers!
Tchaikovsky Opus 60, No 6, Sleepless Nights
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Half-past two on a Thursday afternoon , not a cloud in the sky, not that he would know—but on a day like this, when one was cooped up inside it just had to be a beautiful day. Jounouchi sat at a dark wooden desk, fingers tapping away at computer keys. Sure, he had upgraded from a cubicle to a closet, but at least here he could sigh loudly and impatiently and not suffer the wrath of every other nine-to-fiver in the room. It also meant that while he could no longer distract others, he had far too many means of distracting himself. He supposed it was a fair trade.
Jounouchi turned back to the slew of images on his monitor, rating and ranking them before linking back to the market research on each card indicating how well it had sold in the past calendar year. Cards had to go out of print to make room for newer ones, but old-card days were so boring. When he got picked to go over the new stuff, to test new cards and gauge their sales based on the comparable cards already out on the market—that was exciting. Even though he had nearly signed away his soul to Industrial Illusions, he'd still go over each one in detail to Mai after work on those days, just to see her eyes light up. She didn't duel much anymore but she loved to be let in on the trending news of the world she had only just left behind.
It wasn't a great job, but it paid the mortgage. And whenever either of the corporate kings of Domino decided their egos needed boosting, they'd host a tournament and he'd enter that and go as far as he could. It just wasn't the same as the old days, though. There wasn't any passion in it anymore. Dueling for his own paycheck compared to fighting the odds for the one person in his life who supported him unconditionally? No contest.
A week later he was collating and stapling his reports on several new magic cards—always paper copies, things that they could keep track of and wouldn't leave the building—walking them up the three flights of stairs to the secretary's desk outside of Pegasus' own suite of rooms. He handed the papers to the secretary, who slipped them into a labeled manilla folder, her eyes scanning the cover page. "Jounouchi, is it?"
"Yeah," he said, momentarily concerned that he had forgotten one section of his report, or that there was some glaring typo on the first page.
"I have instructions to send you in to his office once you had completed the report," she said, waving him towards the closed wooden doors with her left hand, the other sliding the folder into a filing cabinet. "No, I don't know what he wants—could be bad, could be good. I don't know."
Before his courage failed him, Jounouchi turned the silver filigreed handle and pushed the door open, stepping across the sand-colored carpet. The door shut behind him, a resolute and definitive reminder of how very much alone he was.
The room was comfortably sized and sumptuously furnished; it was a microcosm of the entire building. "Oh Jounouchi, how good of you to come!" The voice came from behind him and Jounouchi turned around, seeing the man himself over by the window. Pegasus' attention was directed to the just-poured cup of tea before him, fussing with it, adding in a packet of sugar and squeezing a lemon wedge into the mix. He hadn't looked up, yet he knew it was Joey that had walked into the room.
"Would you like any?"
"Um, no thanks." He couldn't help but blanch as Pegasus raised the cup of tea to his lips. With the amount of sugar and lemon juice he had added, it would be too sour, or too sweet.
"Of course you wouldn't, that's why I only got out one teacup." They sat down at two armchairs in the corner of the room. The only desk that he could see looked more suitable for drawing than for anything else. "It's important to think like that, to stay two steps ahead of the game. It's the only way to survive in this world."
Jounouchi nodded and nodded and wondered what any of this had to do with him.
"Now I know your contract with Industrial Illusions has only just begun, but I am quite curious to hear your thoughts on this matter. How do you feel about Kaiba Corporation?"
Jounouchi wanted to answer in ten different ways, none of them advancing his dignity or his workplace professionalism. He could have burst out laughing, or said that Kaiba could get hit by a bus, or that he'd willingly give him some of the expired food in his fridge (that stuff he wouldn't wish upon his worst enemies). The idea came to him that, in their next tournament duel, he should try to hit him with his duel disk, completely 'on accident.' He made a mental note to not forget that last one. "Well, I'm working here, so I think that speaks pretty clearly," he said.
"Ah, yes… your dueling rivalry is the stuff of tournament legend. You've met in more than one tournament final, if I do remember correctly. But what if you got the opportunity to really get back at him, to show him once and for all which side is truly superior?" Pegasus crossed one leg over the other and waited.
Jounouchi let his mind run wild with the thoughts of it. Kaiba, who always put him down with snide remarks and that arrogant smirk, he'd never rest until he had his way. Not anymore. His senses were flooded with the smell of hot tea and the crispness of the lemons, and he knew why Pegasus had summoned him here. Yet he had his man. Joey would do it. And he'd get what he deserved.
"What did you have in mind?"
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It was all over the news—with much of the city's wealth in this corner of the market, it was talked about, written about, and shouted through the streets in the biggest parade of fools Kaiba had ever seen. He watched as weeks of work were condensed into three-minute news reels and the subject of countless meetings and memos vanished into the space of a headline. And the cries were all the same. What was he going to do about it?
Pure creation; the development of an idea into something tangible and beneficial, but most of all commercial, came to him easily. It was natural, like breathing. Holding onto those ideas was the real challenge. Once everyone realized how successful it was, they all wanted a piece of the pie.
It was his damn pie, and if he had to challenge them all in a court of law when his patents came up for renewal next month then so be it. By then, he'd have something even better.
So he continued to stay later and later at the office, delving into the intricacies of the virtual technology that he would be sole master of for only a few short weeks. Public Domain was one thing—using the technology for nefarious ends was another. And the companies he barely deigned to call his rivals using it was incomprehensible.
He started another test and then copied the generated pattern on an email to R&D. They were on the cusp of something big. It would change the very essence of the game.
It was all about staying two steps ahead.
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He had been surveyed, interviewed, called back, and given a medley of physiological and overall examinations before they finally called him in—they were ready for him. He still had no idea just what it was that he would be doing.
Jounouchi just remembered the plan, and Pegasus' parting words. Today severs all public communication between us. Your name will be removed from all records. Just get inside Kaiba Corporation and then report back to me.
He was ushered through the building, all glass and steel and plasma—even the walls seemed to ripple and pulse with various images, and it took Jounouchi a moment to realize that he was surrounded by a continuous screen for these projections. It was a cityscape of impossible architecture—of buildings that didn't exist, of colors and lights fit more to a futuristic mind than of his, focused solely in the present. He had to admit it was beautiful.
He was led into a room with walls covered in large square tiles, maybe ceramic or porcelain. There was light coming in from somewhere, he couldn't quite tell. The reclining chair he sat on was much like the one they had at the dentist's, and he stretched out in the chair as an assistant taped various cords to his chest, to each arm, at his temple. "What's going to happen?"
"You'll see." They quickly walked the floor, and then tapped twice on one of the panels near the door. "I'm dimming the lights, so go ahead and relax."
Jounouchi briefly shut his eyes as the cocoon of panels suddenly disappeared, edges bending into each other as the ambient light gradually faded from the room. It was as if the square had become a cylinder, and if he even knew where to begin to look he would trace its boundaries with his eyes, searching for any hint of sharpness.
He might have opened them, or maybe it was his mind's eye that had awakened, but as he noticed definitive shapes in the air around him he began to rise, not quite corporeal but very much aware of this heightened sense of reality. He wanted to reach out his hands, wanted to touch the panels of the wall. Instead, he found himself stumbling out of the cocoon-like room into the empty hallway. His mind was telling him that the panels set into this space were showing him fake-windows; each looking out into a different landscape, a different weather.
He followed Spring through to Summer and Fall and found himself looking through the glass panels set into a door. It would open with a simple push, he knew that much, but as he looked in he felt something, like a subtle pull in the back of his mind that made him pause.
It was a duel, and as he looked in to the cavernous space he could see two wings unfurl in a haze of light. It was as if his senses were fine-tuned; he could see, hear, experience it all, all at once, and Jounouchi burst into the arena, unsure of what to do but certain that motion was better than stillness. The room was bright, airy, like an atrium. The roar of a crowd was in his ears.
It was all for him, they were here for him, this whole system was a product of himself—he could feel himself taking in deep breaths. With each breath his chest would expand, and on that last great push it was as if his own pair of wings reached outwards, edges tipped scarlet. He could hear roaring again.
There was so much brightness—the smudge of darkness in the air started to quiver and shake, and grow just the slightest bit outwards—
"I'm watching the readouts. Just what the hell is going on down there?"
Jounouchi was heaving, the deep breaths he had been taking becoming gasps. He was back in the rectangle room, back in the chair, the spaces of skin where the pads and cords were still attached feeling remarkably cool compared to the flush of his own skin.
The assistant was back, frantically pressing buttons with one hand, holding two fingers against Jounouchi's neck with the other. He spoke into the wall intercom, slowly and patiently. "The system crashed."
"I can see that. It hasn't happened with any of the other testers. Who did you have in there?"
A consultation of a clipboard and a rustle of papers followed. "A… Katsuya Jounouchi."
"Noted." A slight pause. "Run an IQ Test on him, maybe his mind just can't handle the increased activity."
Jounouchi sat up, the adhesive of the pads tugging at his skin. "I heard that."
"Welcome back to the land of the living," was the crisp reply.
"Care to explain what that was all about?" He asked, swinging his legs over the side of the chair as the assistant removed the pads, making a few brief notes and checking his pulse again.
"It was your mind—explain it to yourself."
The assistant turned to him with an apologetic smile. "…He did order that test."
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Pegasus threw open the doors to his home, enjoying the way the late afternoon sunlight pierced into the open foyer. He had designed it facing West for just that reason. He walked smoothly over to the switches set into the wall and pressed the top button.
The lights flickered on, battling against the sunlight and entangling in the crystal dripping from each fixture.
He pressed a second button.
Tchaikovsky's Opus 60 began to play from hidden speakers, the sound of the piano wafting through the airy hall. The voice soon followed, all trembling vibrato and controlled power. Pegasus stood there in the doorway for a moment more before closing the door and briskly walking down the hallway, his footsteps providing a cadence that matched the song.
He sought out the kitchen, where he had been saving a half-empty bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon just for the occasion. There would be plenty of time to enjoy it before the enterprising young Jounouchi arrived.
The money notes of the tenor were disrupted faintly by two soft knocks at the door, followed by three sharper ones. Pegasus looked reluctantly at the glass. He didn't quite want to play the gracious host today.
"Ah! Jounouchi. Make yourself at home." A home which, no doubt, had the sound of game consoles and TV chatter to replace the higher art—and the barest of morsels in place of such finer things. There was a time and place for all things, and perhaps a time for things to come as well.
"Sure." He led Jounouchi through his home to the sitting room on the far end of the hall. "Where is your, um… staff?"
"I gave them the night off. Do you know how to best remove such untimely… distractions?" At his nod, Pegasus continued. "You leave, and then give them the time you will be returning. Ensuring, then that you are left to yourself." As they passed the counter he quickly scooped up the glass of wine that had been resting on its surface.
"Amontillado?"
Pegasus stopped, eyeing his target with a new appreciative smile. "Very good. But no—tonight is for a different kind of revenge. What has Kaiba been up to, shut away in his tower?"
"It's very difficult to describe…" Jounouchi stretched in his tufted, upholstered confection of a chair.
"Well, try." His reply was sharper, scathing.
Jounouchi told of the panel-covered room and of the curious virtual reality he found himself in that one afternoon. "It wasn't like any VR I had ever seen before… everything was clearer, more accentuated. My mind felt free, but like it was connected to something bigger, all at the same time. The inside of KC Tower had been converted into a gigantic dueling arena, and—"
Pegasus had suddenly leant forward, increasingly attentive to Jounouchi's story. "What had he done to it?"
"The tower. Right." Jounouchi paused for a moment to think. "Well, at first it looked like the hallway that I had come out of, but it was actually hollow. The middle of the tower was one huge stadium, and there was a duel monster inside it, only one. And then I remember walking inside, and I was supposed to be dueling—I think—and then… this is going to sound unbelievable… it felt like I was becoming the dragon…"
Jounouchi abruptly stopped there, at the moment when the system had shut down and he had woken up. "Look, if I'm going to risk my neck for you, the least you can do is fill me in a little too. You don't look too surprised by any of this."
Pegasus crossed one leg over the other and leaned back in his own chair. "I suppose you've heard the saying that we only use ten percent of our brains?"
"Of course I heard it, probably at school—"
"It's a lie," he sneered. "Although I'm sure some might say otherwise. I'm sure not all of us are lucky enough to fulfill our potential during our lifetimes, but that's not what's important here. Its synergy: link multiple minds and you can do so much more. Just as the Internet is a connection of computers, so Kaiba Corporation hopes to develop a new technology for improving the experience and possibilities of his existing holographic and virtual reality programs. And from what you're telling me, they're much farther along than I'd have given them credit for."
Pegasus paused, momentarily lost in thought. "I don't suppose we can get any hardcopies of this technology? Papers, photos, voice clips?"
"They won't let me take anything into the room. What about a hidden camera?"
"I'll have something delivered to your apartment before your next appointment." The sun was beginning to dip below the horizon, and Jounouchi turned his head to escape the harsh beam of light. It reflected and scattered across his hair, and Pegasus was striken, not for the first time, that he looked remarkably familiar. It had to be the light, or the blond hair, or even a few of the less coarse mannerisms. There weren't that many to choose from. Yet, when the light was right and he looked at him through the curved, clear glass held between his fingers, he swore he was looking at—
"I'd better go," Jounouchi said, and the spell was broken.
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Kaiba raised the ceramic mug of coffee to his lips, robotically sipping from the liquid before setting it back on the napkin masquerading as a coaster. He drank his coffee black and as hot as he could stand it—and that day he needed the caffeine infusion.
He had worked late, using the downtime to run many of his own tests that would have sapped the computing strength from the rest of the tower otherwise. Then, when he had returned to his house he had booted his computer up there and continued to work long into the night.
It was said that the atom was the most basic unit—something unable to be parsed down in any further way. Yet subatomic particles existed, furiously complex… yet strangely similar to his own objectives.
He had pulled up an image from his computer, of his own most recent plunge into the brilliant world of his creation. It was a scan of his brain activity in the final moments of his run, when he had come across three dragons, each with scales that shone brightly and eyes that tinged blue. He hadn't noticed his feet leave the ground, it was more that the ground had disappeared beneath him. He could hear the sound of the flapping of wings, and in the moments before the system reset—after Jounouchi crashed the system he installed an automatic shut-off switch over a threshold brain activity coefficient—his world too had tinged blue. The last thing he saw was a curtain of blue and white—the glint of sunlight on scales, or the sheen of hair nearly white in its luster—
So he sat at his desk and muscled his way through this problem like many others. Using a combination of a computer program he wrote and his own duel disk, he had projected a small component of the scan into the air before him. He zoomed in, catching the image from every angle and feeding the results back into his computer.
He knew they were connected; they had to be. Now he was just looking for a thread, any tie between them. Something to connect back to the Blue Eyes White Dragon, to that curtain of pale white and blue.
Kaiba focused in on the boundary of the readout, of the very final moments of the scan. It was a maddeningly complicated shape, with dots, straight lines and curved, twisted together into something so fractal that it only got more complex as he magnified it further. There was no simplifying it. Perhaps he hadn't gone deep enough.
Abruptly he stood up, saving his work as he did so. He'd been at it too long—he'd come back to it later, and be successful that time. Perhaps he should even go under again. With the click of a button he pulled up the readings from the current test. It was Jounouchi's turn again to sample their VR, their 'think tank,' so to speak, and he had looked at the strings of numbers and shapes for long enough to be able to make sense of them. Kaiba could see what Jounouchi experienced.
His mind was erratic, distracted, too focused on the big picture to notice any of the smaller details that passed him by. It was as if he was trying to capture everything, to glean as much information as he could. While for experiment's sake it was good that the system was tested in this way, it didn't make sense.
While they had confined the physical space of the VR to the KaibaCorp tower, the subject's mind could interpret that a number of different ways—from the space itself to something much larger. It wasn't long before he'd have participants going in together. They'd be dueling against each other, and then he'd be able to see the real beauty of it. No longer confined to simple playing fields, no longer bound by the intangibility of the holograms. Two people from across the world could duel, face to face.
It would be as real as it could get without a Blue-Eyes spontaneously flying right out of his computer.
He dialed up that room once the session had come to an end. "Send Jounouchi up here after he's completed his evaluation and processing," he said, his voice even and low. Looking at the printout and at the shots from the security camera in that room, he needed to have a discussion about the sort of company he kept.
"What do you want?" Jounouchi slouched into the room, acting like he was the one that owned the place.
"Give it up," Kaiba said coolly, resting his elbows on the desk and lacing his fingers together. The classic power pose. Perhaps it would have been better suited by the window. He'd pulled the curtains back that day. "Do you honestly think I wouldn't figure it out?"
Jounouchi scoffed as he moved about the room, casually picking up various items and setting them back down—a clock, a business card holder, the trophy he won at his own tournament last year. "If you're so smart, then tell me exactly what it is I'm doing wrong?"
Kaiba smirked—he wasn't about to take that bait, but he could set traps outside of duels just as well as in them. "It was all you were thinking about during the session," he said, shuffling the stack of papers with the most recent printout on them. "Your mind betrays you."
"Sorry. Go fish." Jounouchi turned back to a small credenza where two windows met at a sharp right angle, picking up a Blue-Eyes paperweight.
In an instant Kaiba was on his feet and in one more he had crossed the room and snatched the paperweight out of Jounouchi's hands. Swiftly Kaiba twisted one of Jounouchi's arms behind his back. This was no game. This was menacing, raw, dangerous. "All I want is one name. Your employer, the company, it doesn't matter."
Trapped in the corner of the office, his shoulders pressed up against the thick molding between each pane of glass, Jounouchi could barely move. He ground out, "You can go to hell—"
"And I don't like it when you touch my things." Had he been the sort of person to laugh he probably would have, but instead he merely twisted his arm tighter, securing his other arm in a tight hold. He wouldn't have Jounouchi trashing his office. "I was reading the scans from your entire time in VR. It was painfully obvious what you were thinking about, so you should really just cooperate."
"Shut up!"
"Why so loyal? You're mine now, and we both know it. Now just… throw me a bone, and maybe I'll go easy on you."
Quickly Kaiba's hands darted for Jounouchi's pants pocket, taking the standard writing instrument out before Jounouchi had any idea of what was going on. He twisted the clip, then clicked the top of the ballpoint pen once. "Where did you get this?"
"…Stole it from the front desk."
"A hidden camera, imprinted on a KC ballpoint pen? Like I said, it's over. Now, let's pull the video up and see what's worth so much to you." He stepped away to his computer, leaving plenty of space between himself and Jounouchi.
"God, I hate you."
"Take a number," Kaiba sneered, opening up the pen and pulling a mini-USB from its center. "I'm only going to ask one more time—who is it? In fact, I probably don't even have to ask. This looks like Crawford's handiwork." He plugged the drive in, barely even glancing at Jounouchi. "What does he have on you? Blackmail? Will this win you a tournament?"
"I work for him… as in, I have a career. Had, a career." Jounouchi hadn't moved from his position at the window, content to gaze out to the spot where he knew Pegasus was expecting an update.
Kaiba was scrolling through the footage from the camera, the occasional click of the mouse punctuating the silence. "How much does he know? About the technology, about the patents?"
Patents… Pegasus had never mentioned anything about them. "He knows a little of everything, I think."
Sighing, Kaiba pulled the drive from his computer and re-inserted it back into the pen, snapping it closed. "I've removed all of the sensitive information from it, but there's probably enough left to satisfy him."
"Wait, what—?"
Kaiba stood up and approached his nemesis, tilting his head down slightly to look him straight in the eye. "If I wanted to, I could sue you for every cent you have or ever would have. Your contract has some very strict stipulations. If I wanted to, I could throw you out and leave you to Crawford—and he won't be kind, I can assure you. If I wanted to, I could snap this pen in two and leave you to sort this out for yourself, and you would fail."
"…But you don't want to, right?" Jounouchi's feet were traitorously backing up. Having a full dueling field between them was about as close as he could handle.
"You are to take this back to Crawford. Tell him whatever excuse you want for the footage, for being late, whatever you like. But I want everything. I want his angle, his plans, everything you've ever done for I2, it's mine."
"But—"
"Did I make it seem like this was negotiable?" Kaiba held out the pen and Jounouchi's fingers reflexively closed around it for a moment before yanking it back towards him. "Don't think for a second that I won't expose the both of you."
He turned around and resumed his work at his desk as if nothing had happened. "Go. Before I change my mind."
He went.
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There was just something about Pegasus' house that Jounouchi hated, whether it was the senseless extravagance or the damned chamber music or the fact that he had been shown through all of these large open gathering rooms and he had never seen a soul there besides him. Nothing looked lived-in, it was all staged. He half expected to touch a wall and find it falling backwards, only a prop set up to fool him.
"I thought we'd meet in here today, I'm very busy," Pegasus bade him to sit on a green chair near one wall adorned with a frilly curtain and scalloped-print wallpaper in a jewel tone that clashed magnificently with his red suit. He wondered if Pegasus owned anything else. Perhaps everything he owned was the same red color with gold trim—maybe he never had to worry about mixing his clothes up in the laundry. Knowing Pegasus, he probably had someone else do it for him. Not like he'd seen them around. He was starting to get a little on edge from it.
"You just sit there, and tell me about how everything went while I finish this up." He pulled a white sheet up from an easel and began to dab quick strokes of color across the canvas.
"Should I just come back later—?"
"No! No, that won't be necessary," he said, the outlines of a form starting to take shape. "Look at me—now tell me what you learned about KC today. I trust that you received the camera?"
"Yeah, I have it…" He stopped, that sinking feeling in his stomach only festering. He didn't know whether to look angry, intrigued, or horrified. "What are you painting?"
"Katsuya Jounouchi, you try my patience." There was something in his eyes that he didn't like; a much darker kind of menace than Kaiba's. At the same time, he was afraid to look away, afraid to hear those words again—look at me—afraid to even ask the question because he was better off just not knowing the answer.
"I got some footage of the test run on the camera," he said evenly. "They mentioned something about multiple people going in at once. It makes sense, if our minds are linked as part of it." He took a deep breath to steady himself. "But… I want to know more about the patents."
Pegasus looked up sharply, just the top of his face visible above the canvas. "Come again?" His hand, shaking only slightly, continued to dab at the canvas.
"I did my homework," he said, faking confidence at his bluff. "I can help you better if I know what to look for."
"Kaiba's running out of time," Pegasus said absentmindedly, as if he was talking not to him but to the painting itself. "Several of the original patents he filed when he first started out in this business are coming up for renewal. It's going to be a huge legal battle—what we both do is so similar now, each of us controls different steps in the chain of production. So he's trying to take us out of the equation. Everything completely digital—it's a new environment for the duelist and the duel monster. We just need to figure out enough to stall development long enough to beat him to the punch."
"And that's where I come in."
"Yes, you're—" He stopped, silent, at the sound of a door opening and closing somewhere else in the House. With an icy smile, he got up and set his brushes down. "Our meeting, unfortunately, is at an end. If you don't mind, could you show yourself out?" He quickly left the room. Jounouchi rose, hearing Pegasus' sharp voice and another, someone apologizing. Before he came back, Jounouchi moved to the other side of the easel, to the finished side.
It was himself—in a sense. His hair was a little sizeable—the way it looked when it was humid outside—but longer than he wore it. He pulled at the ends of his own hair to check, seeing the kind smile on the portrait's face, the blue shirt he was wearing; Pegasus must have done the backdrop ahead of time, he must have been preparing for this—
He had to get out of there. Whatever Pegasus wanted with him—he was not about to stick around long enough to find out what it was. He crept out through the expansive hall, his feet making soft sounds on the stone floors, and he made the mistake of stopping once to look behind him.
Set against the wall was a portrait of a woman with blond hair and a kind smile, resting on a green chair. He was certain that it hadn't been there before. Jounouchi dashed outside, a dark realization coming over him.
He was done. He was done with all of this.
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Jounouchi's voice rang out from across the apartment. "Mai, where do we keep the extra cleaning solution? Is it in the bathroom cabinet?"
The reply came back from the open door of the bathroom, where light spilled out onto the adjoining hallway. "You're still cleaning? Give it a rest—You'd think you could see your reflection in every surface by now!"
"Not quite," he replied, a little more seriously, socked feet padding into the bathroom. "I think there's some left in… Mai, what are you doing?"
His steady girlfriend, the woman he thought he knew completely was standing with her hair over the sink, a light-colored bottle in her hand. "My roots are starting to show," she complained, examining the crown of her head in the mirror. "That's what I get for trying to downgrade to the cheaper stuff."
He watched her put some of the cream onto her gloved fingers and dab the color onto where her hair parted evenly down the middle.
True, they did look a shade darker, but he never really noticed things like hair. "So you're not a natural blonde?"
She turned back to her reflection, smoothing the color over each strand, eyeing the darker patch with a critical eye. "No, but I've been coloring it for so long that I hardly even remember what it looks like. I don't have any pictures or anything, but I was born with hair as brown as Kaiba's."
She caught him continuing to watch her and smiled at him, though he couldn't quite meet her eyes, determined as he was to imagine what she would look like with darker hair.
A week later she had commented offhandedly that she had misplaced her bottles of coloring reactant, and he had shrugged, taken her hand, and changed the conversation.
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It was a week of late nights, of greeting the moon and often the sun. Kaiba continued to explore and observe his virtual creation, delving deeper into the metrics of it. Could you quantify the essence of a Duel Monster? A Duelist?
He had gone so deep into the fabric of the schema for the Blue-Eyes that he had arrived at the most beautiful shapes, interlacing and weaving back and forth, replicated a thousand times over yet twisted only just, to make new patterns until they were recognizable as something new. It was order out of chaos, simplicity out of complexity. Such perfection from such a complicated model.
He stopped, rubbing at his eyes to clear the sleep from them. It happened without fail—he'd close his eyes and in a waking dream see the Dragon again. It was there, in the room with him, more vibrant than he had ever seen it, awash in a shower of white and blue. He would see that curtain and try to grasp at it, to see what was behind it. Only now did he pull it aside, his fingers jerking back as if burned when he revealed a dark gaping hole behind it. It was the opposite of perfection, just a rotten, desiccated husk.
Epiphanies often come at moments when we're least prepared to receive them, and as Kaiba shook himself awake, wanting more than anything to turn his mind from this project that had so wholly consumed him, he began to feed the fractal code of the dragon into the landscape of the virtual world itself, looking for a match. The world itself was too complex to be rendered in every minutiae, so the programmers had used a fractal code to generate much of the surroundings of the world. He pressed one key, and found a match.
.
"So let me get this straight. You come all the way here, across town, up thirty stories to tell me that you're quitting. You could have just called the office. You could have just not shown up at all."
It was like the classic school teacher's meeting, only it was Kaiba imperiously behind the desk and Jounouchi at the chair, looking anywhere but straight across the flat plane of wood. When he finally became brave enough to look up, he saw Kaiba looking curiously at him, still silent. Brown hair, brown hair but blue eyes, not violet. He could see Mai somewhere in the planes of his face and the arch of his brow but it was the eyes that did it. There was something wrong, something wrong with the eyes.
Kaiba stopped waiting; he was never truly patient. "So why are you really here?"
"Look, you can have your VR. You can have it, all of it. I don't care who wins anymore, but I'm done."
"That's a shame," Kaiba said, only the barest shadow of a smile on his face, "because we cracked the code on the VR. The problem that's been haunting us, solved. I'm pretty sure you weren't even aware that there was one."
"Problem? Oh, so you mean yourself," Jounouchi said, just barely stopping himself from kicking the expensive-looking desk, or doing something else completely childish.
Kaiba sighed, rising to his feet like it was an ordeal. "Come on," he said, motioning for Jounouchi to follow him.
"We hadn't realized the similarities in the code. I'm not even going to bother asking if you know anything about fractals—hmm, didn't think so—but its something infinitely complex and self-similar. Previously those who entered the world could only connect to a single Duel Monster. Our team couldn't figure out why, so I looked into the code. The quantified essence of the game, Jounouchi. Come on, keep up."
Kaiba had nearly closed the elevator doors on him. He pressed a button for a lower floor and waited while each floor beeped in turn. "The code is infinitely complex and self-similar—it was a perfect match to segments of the Blue-Eyes White Dragon code. I tested it again with your Red-Eyes Black Dragon that originally crashed my system. Again, a perfect match."
The doors opened with a loud chime and Jounouchi started; all he heard of that entire conversation were the words 'perfect match,' and he had no idea what Kaiba could be referring to. "So…what does that mean?"
"You'll understand it once you're in," he said, using a key card to open the door to one of the VR rooms. In a matter of moments and really before he could say anything to protest the situation; he had closed his eyes and was once again transported into a world of heightened reality, of sensation and perception.
Kaiba was standing there when he left the room; in such living, fractal color Jounouchi could almost call his eyes violet. This time, however, the hallway has changed and instead of windows or even walls he stepped out onto the rooftop of the KC Tower.
"Outside of a duel you can only summon that one, singular monster. Yet when multiple people are inside the VR, interacting, dueling, you can summon any existing monster." Jounouchi knew what he was after. If he wanted a duel, then that's what he would get. He took his place, ready to defeat him quite literally at his own game, when the sky around the tower began to grow darker. The clouds started to roll and churn.
"You can't expect to change things and not get found out," Kaiba spoke directly to the clouds, his face tilted upwards. "We all have a stake in this, but make no mistake—mine is bigger than yours."
"Of course you would think that, but what rules does a place like this have? And you really have created something extraordinary."
Jounouchi recognized that voice just as he heard it loudly, his senses magnified in fold. Pegasus descended from the churning clouds, a peculiar-looking Duel Monster seeming to grow out of his very limbs. It was mottled dark and tan, with strange claw-like arms and the glinting gold of an eye set into its center. "How did you get in here?" Jounouchi shouted, the intensity of his own voice surprising him.
"I'm quite surprised you didn't realize it sooner. The pen I gave you has a fail-safe that prevents the data from becoming corrupted. When dear Kaiba Seto opened it I was able to remotely access the contents and download them before he could destroy them—enough information to break into the system on my own. I knew at once whose side you had chosen, Jounouchi. I must say I'm disappointed, although in the end you served your role excellently."
In the grasping dark arms of the Duel Monster he was brought back to two canvases; to the woman who shared his face, to those peculiar similarities that turned his stomach and turned Pegasus' mind down the darkest of paths. "I'm not her! Whoever she is, I'm not her! You've got to come back to reality!"
Pegasus sneered, the tips of his shoes at last coming to rest on the rooftop of the tower. Throwing his arm out to the side towards Kaiba, he said, "Can you look at him and not call me a liar? A hypocrite? Blue eyes or violet eyes, such a small, insignificant distinction…"
He started to laugh as Kaiba shuddered, a pang of disgust at those countless sleepless, frenzied nights, of computer keys and codes, of a curtain of light, or the essence of the Dragon, or maybe the palest strands of hair… "Get out of my mind," he growled, advancing towards him. In an instant, his single Blue-Eyes had multiplied to three, each one primed to attack.
"Just watch me and we'll see what happens when the attack knocks you clear out of the bounds of the VR. I wonder what will happen then?" Kaiba gave the signal to fire.
"It's no use! Your attack won't work!" Pegasus shouted as the attack was absorbed with minimal damage.
"Let me try," Jounouchi said, his own Red-Eyes shimmering behind him. "This may be a long shot, but I think I can do it."
"Weren't you listening? You can't attack!"
"Who said anything about attacking?" Jounouchi turned to Kaiba. "You said you installed a cap on the system. Is it still in place?"
Kaiba didn't say a word, but Jounouchi knew that he was right. It was that look on his face—the look he always wore when he was going to win a duel. He had seen it on more than one occasion. From it, he could almost even forget the discrepancy in eye color.
He could tell that they'd overloaded the system when each breath became deeper and deeper. One gasp escaped his lips and he managed to shout, "We can't attack the Duel Monster? So where will all that energy go?"
Kaiba responded immediately and without reserve. "Then attack the Duelist." The top of the tower was awash in light, and Jounouchi couldn't help but close his eyes—
—he was back, out of the virtual world and still out of breath. His heart was still racing, and only one thought was running through his mind: What had happened to Kaiba? What had happened to—?
As if on cue, the door opened and Kaiba ran inside, the faintest sheen of sweat on his brow the only indicators that the ordeal had taxed him at all. He looked a mix of surprise that they had both gotten out, anger at how Jounouchi was plucking the cords off of himself and throwing them carelessly to the ground, and a level, even look that he couldn't quite name.
Had Kaiba ever shown gratitude towards another person in his life? Jounouchi ripped the pad on his chest off; the pain let him know that at least he wasn't dreaming. That it was reality he was in, pure reality and not the heightened counterpart which was at the same time perfect and yet so imperfect. Seemingly simple but so complex beneath the surface.
He slowly got up, still breathing deeply from the strain, and faced Kaiba. For a moment ,neither of them knew what to say. For once, Jounouchi spoke first. "Tomorrow, I'm going to go right back to hating you."
"You're lucky I don't blame you for the whole thing."
Later Jounouchi found out that Pegasus' mind had been trapped inside the virtual system when it had crashed; in essence he was perpetuating the network of minds that they had envisioned. Yet Kaiba deemed it too dangerous to re-enter that world that Pegasus could control so it had become a graveyard of code and clouds and Duel Monsters, waiting for something else to come along.
Jounouchi had asked a short time later; when he thought that the time was right, if Kaiba could ever release his mind from the VR world. "Of course," Kaiba had said, struggling to type up an email and read the memo that Jounouchi had just brought up. "But it would mean the destruction of that system. I'd have to start over."
"You're serious! All this time you could have freed him but you didn't? What are you waiting for?"
At this Kaiba set down every scrap of paper and turned his attention to the man before him. With an air of finality, but also of promise, he said, "I'll free him. The day after we renew the patents."
.
.
.
The End.
Review please?
Author's Notes, for those who are so inclined:
folie à trois is a shared delusion amongst three people. The 'delusion' here is that each of the three men of this story (Kaiba, Jounouchi, and Pegasus) all have strongly canonically affirmed/supported/hinted-at relationships with three different women (Kisara, Mai, Cecilia) who all look like each other, if you view them under a specific sort of funhouse mirror ;) But really, Cecilia looks like Jounouchi, Mai being naturally brunette would make her look similar to Kaiba, and Kisara's hair does look kind of similar to Pegasus' drove the story as each character becomes more invested/overwhelmed, and that 'delusion' starts to manifest.
A fractal is anything infinitely complex and self-similar, like I stated in the body of the work. Yet that's mostly pertinent to mathematical fractals; something like Esher's drawings display fractal qualities-the repetition or the same imagery, zooming in and there never being any smoothness. Fractals are one of my passions and I was very glad to include them here. They are applied in the real world to landscapes and other models in computer simulations, hence their use in constructing the world here.
If any of you all are budding economists and can help me fine-tune the patent application and renewal process in this story to make it more congruent with actual processes, I would be greatly appreciative. I confess to exercising creative license on that process; I've skimmed a few finance textbooks in my day but that's about it.
I also saw Black Swan last weekend? Which inspired me to listen to Tchaikovsky, which is why Pegasus plays Opus 60 at his most humble abode. The one I favor the most is No 6, Sleepless Nights.
Catch the Cask of Amontillado reference?