Notes: Holy shit, sorry for the delay, guys. FFN was being a total douchewaffle yesterday and wouldn't let me put any new documents in the document manager. Seriously, wtf?
Also, the notes at the end of this chapter are ungodly long. I've included them for now, but if you'd like to read them separately (including the parts I couldn't include here for formatting reasons), follow this link: h t t p : / / t e n i k a . l i v e j o u r n a l . c o m / 8 1 5 2 4 . h t m l
And for a surprise, follow this link!: h t t p : / / t e n i k a . l i v e j o u r n a l . c o m / 8 1 3 1 8 . h t m l. (come on, you know you want to)
Start Four
Golden Wheel
They played for nearly four hours before Kaiba at last won a game, by which point the victory had all but lost any magic it might once have contained. Jounouchi had long since discovered a clock beside the door, and glancing up at it as Kaiba finally, finally collected all the cards, he found the short hand past midnight, and rubbed one hand over his eyes in exhaustion.
They'd talked off and on throughout the matches, but only intermittently, and never for very long; Kaiba was too busy focusing, as was Jounouchi after he misread the number on a card for the third time in a row and got a painfully wordy two-minute lecture on devotion for his troubles.
But they were done. They were done, damnit. "Feel better?" Jounouchi muttered, slumping even more against the desk and pressing his thumbs into his temples, trying to shove out as much of the brain ache as possible.
"Yes," Kaiba said quietly, but there was something about it--maybe just how reserved it was, maybe some underlying tone--that made Jounouchi's head lift again.
Kaiba looked...pathetic, sitting there in his grey socks and holding the deck in his spidery, long hands like some kind of trophy. His face was expressionless, turned down to stare at them, as though he'd been expecting something more to happen.
And just as Jounouchi had been afraid, like a punch to the ribs, he felt sorry for him.
He actually felt sorry for Kaiba. Kaiba, the asshole, the snob, the guy who at eighteen was still moving through the world with every intention of devoting the rest of his life to making games for kids, for all that Jounouchi had never been able to imagine him being genuinely nice to one who wasn't family. Kaiba, who in that moment looked for all the world like he'd never gotten over being twelve, and probably knowing he was a genius even then.
Jounouchi wondered if he'd ever gotten on with anyone besides his brother, and realized suddenly how unlikely that was, how much he must have scared the kids his age. He remembered being twelve, and knew that, given the choice, he never would have played with someone like Kaiba. More likely he would have broken his nose and stolen the small change from his pockets.
"You were in an orphanage once, right?" Jounouchi wasn't sure what had called this into his head, but he had asked before he could stop and think about it.
Instantly the image was gone; Kaiba was eighteen and defensive again, staring at him with narrowed eyes and reaching into one of his pockets to pull out a rubber band for the deck. "That's correct."
Wow, he'd actually been right. "How'd you get out? I mean, how'd you get old man Kaiba to take you?"
Kaiba stood, setting the cards on the desk and opening one of his laptops. There was a very small, very strange smile on his face. "I made a bet with him."
Of course he had. Struggling into a slightly less hunched position, Jounouchi watched him sit down in the desk chair and log on. "Oh yeah?"
"Kaiba Gozaburo's claim to fame before his entrepreneurial successes was his standing as a chess champion," Kaiba explained quietly, beginning to type as he did. "I knew that, and took advantage of it. I bet that I could win a game against him, and that if I succeeded, he would have to adopt both Mokuba and myself. And I won."
"How old were you?"
"Twelve."
Oh, creepy. Jounouchi shuddered in spite of himself, climbing unsteadily to his feet. "Lucky you won, huh?"
Kaiba didn't respond to that for a surprisingly long moment, long enough that Jounouchi again turned around to look at him.
He was staring fixedly at the desk, a complex but unnamable expression on his face. Jounouchi couldn't have put a word to it if he'd tried, and didn't particularly want to.
But all Kaiba eventually said was, "Yes. I've always been good with strategy."
Then he shook himself, turning to frown at Jounouchi in a much more familiar way. "You can go now."
Jounouchi was torn about this. On the one hand, it would be nice to get back to his own familiar room, where he could dislike Kaiba in comfort and not be forced to spend time thinking about what a sad kid he must have been to grow up into such a sad near-adult.
On the other hand, he didn't want to go back to his apartment just to sit in the dark by himself for the next six hours on the off chance that he might be able to sleep. The way he figured it at this point, his best option was going to be to stop trying, to stay awake as long as he possibly could and just wait until his body took over and knocked him out. It would happen eventually, and hopefully while he was out everything would shuffle more or less back into place, and he'd wake up himself again.
Kaiba might be a jerk, but at least he was company. Jounouchi wondered if he ever felt the same way, if on nights like this Kaiba sometimes wished for somebody to be there, just to absorb the silence.
So Jounouchi hedged, unable to go one way or the other. "Yeah, I guess," he agreed, shoved his hands into his pockets and wandered around through the books for a minute or two. Kaiba ignored him, engrossed in whatever he was doing on the laptop.
Jounouchi came across a tall stack of thick manga and picked one up, eyeing it appraisingly. He hadn't expected to see comics mixed in with all the textbooks. When he got a look at the artist's name, however, the surprise dissipated instantly. "Tezuka Osamu?"
Kaiba turned to look, eyeing the book, then nodding sharply. "Buddha."
"It any good?" Jounouchi set it back on the stack carefully as he asked, reluctant to repeat the morning's fiasco. "I never liked his other shit much. Too druggy."
"I think it's one of his better pieces," Kaiba replied coolly, "and that you just proved once and for all what an uncultured slob you really are. I suppose you read American comics?"
Jounouchi tried not to be offended at this, but it was hard. American comics were awesome. "Yeah, mostly. I like Otomo's stuff, though."
"Akira," Kaiba snorted, turning back to his laptop with a light shake of his head. "I should have guessed. Why exactly are you still here?"
"No reason," Jounouchi said hotly, resisting the urge to kick one of the stacks over just for the sake of being a shithead; "I just like being made fun of. What else do you got? Comics, I mean."
Kaiba was beginning to look irritated, his typing growing pointedly louder. "I don't suppose you'd know Shirou Masamune?"
"Ghost in the Shell," Jounouchi replied promptly, relieved that he actually did. Not that he'd ever done more than flip through it. "Not my thing. Too deep. His chicks are hot, though."
"You really don't like to think, do you."
"About as much as you like being nice, dickhead."
"Being nice is a waste of both time and energy," Kaiba declared precisely, and smacked the enter key with great force.
Jounouchi managed a sneer that was at once delicate and completely obscene. "So's thinking."
He went for the door then, moving quickly in an effort to escape the inevitable comeback Kaiba would throw at that if he got enough time. "I'm outta here. Have fun doing whatever you're doing, moneybags. Alone."
Though Jounouchi made it across the room fast, he knew it wasn't fast enough to escape a response--or wouldn't have been on a normal night. But this time Kaiba just sat there staring at his laptop, no longer typing, and remained that way until Jounouchi shut the door on him.
-
He made it halfway across the lawn before stopping to swear at nothing for a few minutes, kicking up pieces of the perfectly manicured turf and wondering furiously why he felt like such an asshole when he'd been the one Kaiba was mocking.
"How does he fucking do that?" he hissed up at the stars, and grabbed at his hair when they failed to provide a good answer. "Fuck. He's just--"
Lonely. He looked lonely. That was the problem, and Jounouchi had attacked it directly, cruelly. Now he couldn't get that sorry image out of his head, Kaiba sitting there at his desk and just taking it.
"What the hell?" he found himself muttering, shaking his head in mingled frustration and confusion. "Why'd he do that? He never just takes my shit, even when it's true. He should've had something to say."
Five minutes later Jounouchi still couldn't make himself leave, and finally, torn between being utterly infuriated and laughing at what a dumbass he was, stomped back into the house and up the stairs and through the door of Kaiba's study.
"So I had a thought," he began, and wondered what that thought was going to be.
Kaiba turned around to stare at him in obvious surprise, both eyebrows lifted.
"I'll call our teachers," he managed after a second, apparently willing to take this new development in stride. "They'll be overjoyed to know they finally had some success."
"Do you have a hat?"
This was apparently out of Kaiba's stride. His mouth opened a little in surprise, his face going from faint curiosity to open incredulity. "Do I what?"
"Have a hat," Jounouchi repeated, and finally figured out where he was going with this. "It's just that you got that deck of cards, and if you have a hat too then I can try out the card tossing game. I saw it in a movie once. But see, I never had my own hat, so I couldn't ever give it a shot. I always wanted to."
Kaiba didn't have an immediate response to this, or even a slightly less than immediate one. Eventually he went the non-verbal route and shook his head, a faint edge of wonder slipping into his expression. "I honestly thought I'd seen the limits of your randomness, Jounouchi."
A few seconds of quiet were allowed to pass, followed by Kaiba shaking his head once more and standing. "I'll be right back."
-
So the game was awesome, but frustrating. Apparently Jounouchi couldn't aim to save his life, and so far he'd managed to go through half the deck without getting a single card in the upturned fedora. (Absently Jounouchi wondered why Kaiba even owned a fedora, and even more absently if he'd ever actually worn it.)
He had settled against the wall beside Kaiba's desk with the hat placed halfway across the room from him, the stacks of books acting as obstacles dividing him from his goal. Kaiba had furthermore relieved some of the oppressive quiet by turning on a normal-looking radio hooked up to a very abnormal-looking something--it was black and covered in many knobs, with an antenna the size of fucking Hokkaido--which in turn hooked into the wall, and gave it what seemed to be unlimited access to not only all of the radio stations in Japan, but apparently a few from other countries as well.
Jounouchi had plans to examine this more thoroughly as soon as the opportunity presented itself, but was prepared to wait until Tuesday night if he had to.
"Oi. Oi, Kaiba."
"...mm."
"Kaiba."
"What?" Kaiba snapped, turning a frustrated, put-upon glare over his shoulder.
Jounouchi paused, lifting his head from its singular angle of focus on the hat and purposefully giving him the weirdest look he was capable of producing before turning back to his game. "Jeez," he muttered, lowering his hand a fraction of a molecule (or, more realistically, a couple of inches) and flicking his fingers to toss another card. Like so many of the others, it fell short. "I was just making sure you heard me. Touchy much?"
"Very much," Kaiba muttered, turning back to his laptop. "This install is going to hell in a hand basket. Talk. You have fifteen seconds."
Another card fell short of the hat's edge. Jounouchi made a face, both at it and Kaiba's tone. "You speak English, right?"
"That is correct," said Kaiba, smacking a key with particular force. The tell-tale chime of an automatic alert appearing promptly followed this. "Damn--"
"So," Jounouchi interrupted quickly, the edge of his next card bouncing off the rim of the hat, propelling it farther away than all the others, "you could, uh, theoretically translate this weird-ass song, right?"
Kaiba paused. "What?"
"Weird-ass song," Jounouchi repeated, stopping for a moment to point at the magical radio, which was currently playing what sounded like a disgustingly bouncy American rock number. "You know, music. Chords. Instruments. All arranged and stuff. With notes. You could translate this, right?"
The withering look Kaiba shot him was hardly intimidating; Jounouchi just went back to his game and waited for him to stop being such a bitch.
"Yes," Kaiba said after a moment, as coldly as possible. "If you must know, I would be capable of something that inane."
Another moment passed. Jounouchi's next card missed as well. He wrinkled his nose. "So," he prompted again, exasperated, preparing to toss another one. "What's he saying?"
"Jounouchi," Kaiba said with a dark, slow smirk, watching in Jounouchi's peripheral vision as he took aim, "the day I bend over backwards to fill such a pointless request for you is the day you develop some modicum of hand-eye coordination and score even one point in that ridiculous waste of time you call a game. In smaller and simpler words, figure it out on your own."
Jounouchi's next card sailed straight into the hat.
Neither teen moved for a moment, both busy staring at the miracle in miniature. Jounouchi had a fleeting thought that maybe he could get turned into a saint for this: Jounouchi-sama, who once made a total stooge out of one who deserved it.
Then Kaiba tilted his head back, closing his eyes (possibly searching for some sort of inner calm), and murmured to the ceiling, "No one is that lucky. No one, no one, no one, no one, no one..."
He knew he was grinning foolishly, but Jounouchi couldn't help himself, pointing at the hat in his excitement. "Look at that!" he crowed aloud. "I'd call that a point, moneybags! Damn." He patted himself on the back quickly, then turned to point at the other teen next. "Right! Let's hear some translation, moneybags. And it better be nice. I mean, you're bending over backwards for this."
Kaiba began to rub his temples. Eyes still shut, he pushed out an exhausted sigh through his nose, but eventually began to relate in a quick, irritated tone, "I love you more than I did the week before I discovered alcohol, oh alcohol, would you please forgive me, for while I cannot love myself, I'll use something else..."
The next card slipped unnoticed from Jounouchi's fingers, dropping noiselessly into his lap. Kaiba continued, oblivious, still speaking in that same flat tone: "I thought that alcohol was just for those with nothing else to do, I thought that drinking just to get drunk was a waste of precious booze, but now I know that there's a time and there's a place where I can choose to walk the fine line between self-control and self-abuse--"
"Fine," Jounouchi heard himself say sharply, surprised at how curt his own voice was. He couldn't quite take his eyes from the hat, meaning he missed whatever look passed across Kaiba's face at his reaction, interest or irritation or whatever. "That's--fine. Thanks. Sorry to bother you."
He tossed the next card so hard that it hit the opposite wall, spinning away to fall some inches from the white molding. A moment passed before he finally heard Kaiba beginning to type again, returning to his previous task. The song ended.
How could anybody actually write about that? For a song that sounded like it was supposed to be funny? Jounouchi took a deep breath, shoulders slumping a little.
He shouldn't have asked. That was more than he'd wanted to contemplate right then, or ever. Americans were just disturbing.
He wondered what his father would have said to those sentiments.
-
Jounouchi left the mansion around two and went back to his apartment, where he gave up temporarily on his resolution to stay awake until he passed out by getting into his futon and trying to sleep. He attempted this for about an hour before deciding once and for all that his first solution was in fact the best, and got up to do some homework instead, then took a quick bath and got dressed for school.
School itself was a blur of activity and noise, and Jounouchi, exhausted, skipped P.E. for the first time in years. He just didn't feel like wasting the energy on it, as fun as it was to have an excuse to throw dodge balls at people really hard.
Once it was over he went home and ate, did a little more homework, tried to study for about twenty seconds, then gave up and went to lie in his futon just for the hell of it. If he fell asleep, oh well. If he didn't...well, oh well.
The verdict in the end was didn't, and Jounouchi got up with the worst headache yet, and a bizarre sense of not only vertigo, but randomness. As in, weird thoughts kept popping in and out of his head, and as he was making dinner for himself he kept putting things back in the wrong places. He thought his dad came home for a short while, but found by the time he'd finished eating that he couldn't remember, and wondered if this was a bad sign.
Then he thought of the radio in Kaiba's house, and the next thing he knew he was halfway there. The security guard, recognizing him from the night before, let him through the gate without making him wait, and feeling very much as though he had only left for a few minutes, Jounouchi made his way up to the door and knocked hard.
The sun had gone down half an hour before he'd set out, meaning it was probably about nine, but it was still Mokuba who answered the door.
Jounouchi wasn't exactly crazy about the look he got at this point (like, what right did he have to be there?), but bore up under it pretty well. "You're back again?"
"Yeah, it's a bummer, isn't it?" Jounouchi replied, and kicking his shoes off, jogged up the stairs without waiting for a reply.
Upon entering Kaiba's study for the third time (fourth if he counted his short-lived exodus last night), it finally occurred to Jounouchi that there was no doorstop on the wall the door opened into, and accordingly he made a note to put an impressive dent in the plaster with the handle if Kaiba was ever too much of a shithead in the near future.
"I've become so popular," Kaiba drawled from across the room, drawing Jounouchi's eyes away from the wall.
Now things looked different, owing to the two bookcases which had appeared between Jounouchi's last visit and the present. Most of the books on the floor had been collected and shelved by now, and the room suddenly looked a hell of a lot bigger for it. For the first time Jounouchi noticed that there was actually a rug by the desk.
"Wow," he said out loud, taking a look around. "I thought you liked your piles?"
"I did," Kaiba replied calmly, hefting three books in one hand and two in another. "Then I stopped. Did you leave something last night?"
"Nah," Jounouchi said, walking toward him, only to pause a few feet away, hands in his pockets. "I was gonna ask if I could mess around with your radio. If I helped with those would you let me? I promise I'll be outta your hair before midnight this time."
Kaiba hesitated for a second, but apparently deemed this a safe enough agreement, and nodded his assent. "So long as you remember that it costs more money than you'd ever be able to repay in your lifetime. Not that I wouldn't make you try."
"'Course," Jounouchi agreed, and bent down to pick up some books for himself.
It was close to the bottom of his second stack that Jounouchi encountered, to his surprise, a piece of paper with a calendar spread of the month of October printed across it. The twenty fifth had been circled vigorously in red, and written beside it in the same red ink the message, "Nii-san, look at that! It's coming up again! Would you please spare me this year and actually ask for something?"
Jounouchi couldn't help but grin at this reminder that even a little toe rag like Mokuba could be brotherly and affectionate. Then he actually took note of the day that was circled, and hummed his surprise. "Kaiba, your birthday's the twenty fifth too?"
Kaiba turned to look at what he was holding, and for just a second there was in his face the tiniest, tiniest expression of warmth. "I thought I lost that," he murmured. Then his eyes sharpened, the expression disappearing. "You were born in the fall?"
"No, January, January," Jounouchi corrected, handing the paper to him. "But it's the same day. That's weird." Then he went back to lifting and shelving books, done marveling at the coincidence.
Kaiba, however, was still lost in thought, and remained that way for several seconds, until abruptly he turned to stare at Jounouchi in something that was at once surprise and horrible, dark amusement. "You're younger than me, aren't you?"
Jounouchi bristled, suspicious. "Only by a few months, asshole."
"But that means you were born the year after me," Kaiba persisted, still wearing that creepy look.
Unable to deny it, Jounouchi nodded slowly.
The smirk got wider. "So you were actually born in the--"
Oh fuck. "Don't say it, you--"
But Kaiba said it anyway, speaking over him: "--year of the dog? You're actually a dog?"
Jounouchi glared at him miserably. "I can't believe you have the fucking zodiac memorized."
"I can't believe I didn't realize that before now," Kaiba marveled, about three seconds away from grinning outright. "Allow me to enjoy this for a moment."
Jounouchi wondered how it was that he'd ever felt sorry for the guy.
-
"Why don't you take sleeping pills, Kaiba? It's not like you can't afford 'em."
Jounouchi turned down the magical radio device to ask this, having only just thought of it. He was sitting on the floor next to it, and had been for about an hour, prodding at its various pieces and realizing that he would maybe never understand how exactly it worked, but would all the same never stop finding it totally fascinating. It was like he was actually hopping around the world himself, something he'd never thought he'd be able to do.
All the books being neatly housed in their new shelves, Kaiba had returned once more to his desk, where he'd promptly thrown himself into what looked like the same homework Jounouchi had been whittling away at earlier. He glanced up discerningly for a few seconds at the question, then returned to his work, responding without looking at Jounouchi: "Several reasons. They only correct temporarily, and often disturb the body more than the initial problem. Mostly they're addictive. It's difficult to control the dosage with a solid pill if you want to operate outside of standard dosages. And very few of them actually work for me. I understand melatonin is a good natural supplement, but I haven't tried it yet."
...so basically all the reasons Jounouchi had thought they sounded like a bad idea to begin with. Good to know.
"Why? I'm not giving you any, if that's what you're wondering."
"No," Jounouchi snorted, switching channels again, "you can keep that shit. Just, y'know, a passing thought."
-
Wednesday morning.
Jounouchi still hadn't slept. He'd gotten back to his apartment from Kaiba's by half past eleven, and then...nothing. More homework. Another bath. More food. All the hours were starting to blur together, but he did his best to ignore this, to keep functioning normally.
Which was, of course, pretty much impossible. He looked at himself in the mirror without meaning to as he was putting his school uniform on, and was startled by how bad his reflection appeared. He was clean thanks to his bath, his hair damp and relatively neat, but the bags beneath his eyes were ridiculous, and he was a lot paler than normal.
His body, furthermore, had begun to hurt all over, to the point where it was difficult to move both quickly and coordinately at the same time; he had to focus on either one or the other to fully achieve it. But Jounouchi was determined to outlast this thing, and figured these had to be signs that he was getting close. It would kind of suck if he passed out at school, but he could smooth it over once he woke up. No need to worry.
But people still looked worried. Particularly Honda.
"I dunno, man," he said at school that afternoon. "You're just acting weird. Like, you're spacing out way more than usual, and what the hell was that you were saying an hour ago? I mean, I know you're kinda crazy anyway, but that was real crazy talk." His voice lowered, his expression growing both vaguely suspicious and overtly concerned: "You're not on anything, right? I'm not gonna have to kick your ass for dipping into some bad shit for these mocks?"
"No," Jounouchi hissed back, offended by the thought, and looked around to make sure Yuugi wasn't within ear shot. He'd never hear the end of it if the kid got it into his head that he was on drugs. "I'm just tired, okay? I haven't slept in a while. It's all this fucking studying."
Honda still looked a little suspicious, but accepted this eventually, nodding once. "So long as you're sure, I guess. You wanna forget about our thing tonight?"
Huh? "What thing?"
"Our study thing, man. At Yuugi's place, remember? Tonight and tomorrow, eight o'clock? Anzu's coming too? Fuck, are you sure--"
"Yeah, yeah," Jounouchi said quickly, cutting him off before he could get started again. "I'll go. I can do it." He didn't want to go, but they'd just worry more if he didn't. Better to get it over with quick.
-
Sitting in Yuugi's game room at ten in the evening and trying to pay attention to Honda reading some of their printed biology notes out loud, however, Jounouchi was forced to at last admit that this hadn't been one of his better ideas.
He couldn't focus, and it didn't help at all that he seriously doubted Honda was pronouncing any of this shit right. But Anzu hadn't jumped in to correct him yet, so he had to hold his tongue, as much as he wanted to grab the guy by his shirt and make him give them to someone else.
"Prokaryotes comprise the most ancient lineage of life as we know it," Honda was currently reading falteringly, "and are in many ways considerably less complex than their eu...uh, eukaryotic counterparts. Significantly, instead of a nucleus, prokaryotes are possessed of a nucleoid, reproduce mainly by a process known as prokaryotic fission, and perform the majority of their metabolic reactions at either the plasma membrane or cytoplasmic levels. Prokaryotes also, unlike most eukaryotes, are possessed of a cell wall which encloses the plasma membrane--"
No way. Jounouchi had managed to hold out for two hours, but there was just no way he was going to remember this if he wasn't writing it down himself.
"Honda," he interrupted, staring at him with all the movie-star intensity he could muster (think Rashomon, man--you are Tajomaru, you breathe Tajomaru), "there's no fucking way I'm gonna remember any of that."
"Then it's your balls in the vice next week," Honda shot back, pointing at him rudely. "You promised you would at least try, right? And you said you were up to doing this?"
Fucker. "...yeah."
"Then fucking do it." Honda glanced back down at the book, then prompted loudly, "So prokaryotes. They've got cell walls. What other things have them too?"
"Prisons?" Jounouchi tried.
Yuugi began to cough suspiciously, setting down his teacup with a rattle. Anzu slid over beside him on the couch and applied a few good thumps between his shoulders blades, attempting to hide a smile the whole time and doing a piss-poor job of it. Honda didn't even try, just slapped a hand over his face in exasperation. "Fucking plants, man. Have you been sleeping in class all this time instead of at home?"
Frustrated, Jounouchi scrubbed the heel of one hand hard into his right eye and tried not to grimace. Didn't he wish.
-
He didn't manage to claw his way free until eleven o'clock, by which point he seriously suspected that his brain was all but three seconds away from liquefying. It sure felt like liquid, the thing sloshing crazily around, making him dizzy, making everything fuzz up, blur.
The three of them looked kind of worried watching him go, but it was hard to tell whether this was because they could see something was seriously wrong, or rather because they were just beginning to realize there was no way in the known universe he was actually going to pass these mock exams, let alone the real ones.
And if Jounouchi hadn't hated the insomnia before, he had definitely gotten there by now. His chances had never been good, but this whole not-sleeping thing had pretty effectively staked that reality down. He might have managed to pull it off if he'd been able to organize his time better before.
He headed straight for Kaiba's place, figuring it was closer than his own, and that his nightly heckling session was just about due. This whole actively trying to avoid sleep thing was hard, a lot harder than he'd ever expected, and he really didn't understand why it was taking so long for his body to give up and pass out. The whole thing ached now with a slow, steady fire, and the more he thought about it, the more he realized how much he was forgetting.
The buildings looked kind of weird on his way to Kaiba's, somehow unlike what he remembered. He didn't think he was taking a different route, but he was certain the colors were off, and a few were definitely shorter, a few wider. It made him kind of nervous, but it was easy enough to ignore so long as he kept his eyes on the road, and carefully he did just that.
The one nice thing he'd noticed in all of this, between the memory loss and the pain, was that he was finally, finally starting to feel a little cooler, and could only hope this meant the weather was evening out a bit.
The Kaiba mansion looked very much like itself once he reached it, however, and brushed away the sense of unease the walk had created in him. The security guard again let him in, this time with a very strange look, but thankfully no comment, and Jounouchi got Kaiba at the door instead of Mokuba, which was kind of nice.
Or would have been if Kaiba hadn't looked just as incredulous as his brother at the sight of him. "You're back again?"
"My mom used to say I was sorta like a fungus," Jounouchi snickered, and wondered why Kaiba didn't recognize how hilarious this was. "Yeah, I'm back. You sleeping yet?"
"Not much," Kaiba replied carefully, and looked for a second like he was considering the merits of not letting him in. Then he stepped back. "You?"
"Nothing since Sunday," Jounouchi replied lightly, shrugging as he kicked his shoes off. "It's weird, though, it's not so bad tonight. I mean, it is, but I keep kind of going between Zen and wondering if my head's finally hit the limit. Y'know, of how bad it can feel. Good thing it finally cooled off a little, right?"
Kaiba shot him an odd look. "In your area?"
Jounouchi paused on the bottom step of the staircase, frowning. "No, man, everywhere. Don't you feel it?"
"No," Kaiba said slowly, approaching him now. "But I suppose it could just be residual heat. The study windows are closed."
That made sense. Jounouchi couldn't help laughing at him for it, jogging the rest of the way up the stairs and turning around at the top to watch the CEO climbing sedately after him. "See, that's why you need to get out more."
"Are you sure you don't want to go home and sleep?" Kaiba wanted to know, still staring at him oddly.
Trying to get rid of him. Jounouchi rolled his eyes at that, wondering why the asshole couldn't ever just come out and say a thing. "I can nap on the floor if you're really worried, mom. But I wanna mess with your radio more first. Think I could pick up military stuff from America?"
Kaiba finally started to look irritated and normal at that, taking the lead. "You think I'd actually let you try?"
-
An hour flowed by, most of which Jounouchi spent curled up around the radio, flipping from channel to static to channel and again to static. He couldn't believe how infinite the range was turning out to be, and wondered why Kaiba hadn't ever started to put this wall-connector-thing on the market.
"Because," Kaiba replied very slowly when he asked, "what the 'wall-connector-thing' does is actually quite illegal. You should be glad you can't understand most of those languages you seem to find so amusing."
"Were you just born without a sense of humor?" Jounouchi mumbled, but Kaiba didn't pick up on it, and in the end he went back to the radio.
After another half hour, however, it got too hard to concentrate on all the numbers, which he could have sworn were rearranging themselves on him. Irritated, he turned onto his back and settled for instead watching Kaiba switch between typing furiously and writing things by hand across a series of charts, pausing occasionally to stare at his figures and tap his mouth slowly with his fingertips.
And that was fascinating somehow. He hadn't really realized how long Kaiba's fingers actually were, and--no, no, nothing having to do with Kaiba could be fascinating, but it was sort of cool. Jounouchi blinked once hard, trying to clear some of the ache from his eyes so he could focus better, and shot a quick glance out the windows to see if the moon had appeared yet, then turned back just in time to watch Kaiba slip a lit cigarette into his mouth.
...wait. Wait. Jounouchi frowned in confusion, staring at the other teen twice as hard as before. "Since when do you smoke, asshole?"
Kaiba looked up at him, also frowning, the cigarette bobbing slowly up and down between his lips, as though he was working it with his teeth. Smoke curled lazily out of his nose, drifting up to the ceiling in strange, pale spirals. "What the hell are you talking about?" he demanded, the words slightly muffled around the object in his mouth. "I don't, moron."
Jounouchi blinked again.
Kaiba had a pen in his mouth. The smoke had vanished, like the after image of a bright light fading away beneath closed eyelids.
Oh. Oh, wow. Jounouchi couldn't keep his mouth from dropping open, or the reverent, "Holy shit," from slipping out.
He'd just fucking hallucinated.
"What?" If Jounouchi hadn't known him he would have said Kaiba looked concerned; but he did know him, and was aware of how impossible that was. He looked...perturbed. Was that the right word? Perturbed and irritated. "What's wrong?"
"I just--" For a moment Jounouchi floundered, trying to think of some way to say it that didn't sound insane. He couldn't, however, and eventually answered, hesitantly, "I just thought you were smoking. Like, that pen--for a second it just looked like a cigarette. And there was, like, smoke. A bunch of it. Shit."
Kaiba said nothing, but his expression had closed suspiciously, the kind of face he wore when he was more worried about something than he wanted to admit, and was trying to puzzle it out. For some reason that scared Jounouchi way more than the hallucination itself had, sent his heart racing uncomfortably around his chest. The low lighting of the room felt suddenly oppressive, the darkness of the world outside pressing strangely inward, moving toward him.
"Shit," he said again, quietly. "What's that mean? Is my brain about to fall out or something?"
Kaiba's mouth pursed slowly. Jounouchi couldn't be sure, of course, but it looked like he was trying to measure his expression very carefully--trying to return from a mental overreaction, or trying to calm Jounouchi down for the news he was about to deliver?
Kaiba said, "You might want sit in one of the chairs for a little while."
Jounouchi's stomach turned over.
Apparently his expression conveyed this perfectly, because almost immediately Kaiba lifted a hand, as though placating an animal. "It's not imminently bad. You just need to sleep a little before it gets worse. Even if you can't sleep you should rest. But don't panic."
This wasn't exactly soothing, but Jounouchi was too freaked out at the moment to be ungrateful. "Okay," he agreed, and stumbled up shakily, making his way to the chair closest to the window and folding himself into it. He had a good profile view of Kaiba here, so he could keep an eye on the guy's expressions.
"I'm going to work more now," Kaiba said slowly, and for a second Jounouchi wondered why he'd bothered to mention it--he'd already turned back toward the desk--before it occurred to him that Kaiba was actually trying to keep him clued in to reality. In case he saw something again.
Staring at him from the chair, Jounouchi hung on to the words as a distraction, trying to slow his breathing in the meantime: "Just close your eyes first. I should only need another hour here, so stay in the chair until your feet start to feel better, and then we'll see what we can do about letting you outside for a walk..."
Wide-eyed, Jounouchi realized that this--what was this, was Kaiba actually saying that?--wasn't matching the motions of Kaiba's mouth--Kaiba's mouth--Kaiba was facing the desk still, and then all of a sudden his jaw distended with a wet, snake-like click, dropped wider and wider like some kind of grotesque parody of a gulper eel--
The words were still running in the background, "--too bad you'll have to go blind after all, but it's your father's fault, really, and I wouldn't eat for a while if I were you--"
--and Kaiba's head dropped heavily forward onto the desk, the gaping, horrible mouth working--he was eating the post-it notes and charts with a dry, rough sound, the sound of paper and wood on skin--
Jounouchi slapped his hands over his eyes. Then he buried his face in his knees for good measure, horrified, this was horrible--he didn't want that in his head, why the fuck was that in his head?
"Jounouchi? Jounouchi."
It took him a moment to realize that the ominous running dialogue had faded back into these simple repetitions of his name. But he didn't trust himself to look up and see something normal. He didn't want to know what he'd see. His teeth began to chatter.
He stayed like this for what felt like an incredibly long time, the sound of footsteps pounding in and out of his skull, until out of nowhere a hand touched his arm gently.
"Jounouchi."
"Go the fuck away," Jounouchi whispered. "If I look you'll go weird again."
"Just hold your hand out."
Jounouchi hesitated, frightened to do what he said, scared this was another hallucination. But after a moment he obeyed, holding one hand out, his fingers trembling.
Something small was placed right in the center of his palm. "Try that. They don't work for me, but for you they might. It's not a high dosage. Just put it in your mouth and swallow."
Jounouchi wasn't sure what made him believe Kaiba--some intuition, maybe--but he did, slipped the pill in his mouth and dry swallowed, grimacing as it went down, and at the sour, chalky flavor, the way it dried his throat in seconds.
And then even though he was cool he was suddenly sweating so much he was making water, he could feel water lapping around his legs, but--but obviously that wasn't real either. Jounouchi kept working his throat over and over, swallowed and swallowed, and the water reached up all around him, got in his nose, his ears, and he still kept breathing. He kept breathing, breathed in and out.
And the water was abruptly wonderful, comforting, warm inside his lungs with his blood, inside his head, cushioning him all around. It felt familiar, essential, and it was the easiest thing in the world to sink into it, to let go of the fear and fall instead into this perfect feeling of safety, of being so inexplicably, wonderfully, peacefully reborn.
end four
end notes
- Okay, so in chapter 40 of the original manga Mokuba actually tells the gang all about their sojourn in the orphanage, but I'm pretending here that Jounouchi: a) wasn't listening, or b) doesn't remember. Seto had also just had the holy hell mind crushed out of him and was busy picking up the pieces of his shattered evil heart, so he has no clue that Mokuba spilled the beans at all, regardless of whether Jounouchi was listening or not. Finally, I have altered the original timeline a little, in that I've had Mokuba and Seto's father die when they were 5 and 10 (respectively) instead of 3 and 8. This means Seto only had four years with Gozaburo instead of his original six, but I figure four is still plenty.
- I'm sure many of you recognized the mangaka names, but for those who didn't, check out the extended version of these notes on LJ (there's a permanent link in my profile). :D
- No, the magical radio device isn't real. Fictional characters get all the cool toys.
- Poor Jounouchi. Little does he know that the Barenaked Ladies are actually Canadian. And speaking of those lovely manladies, its SONG CREDIT TIME: "Alcohol" is copyright Barenaked Ladies, and is number six on the record Stunt, released July 7th, 1998, on the Reprise/Wea label. I DON'T OWN IT. Furthermore, I cannot magically make you hear this song's tune by copying its lyrics into this fic, nor can I assist anybody in illegally nabbing it. You'll just have to figure that part out on your own. (re: sarcasm)
- The notes on the birthdays mentioned so briefly in this chapter actually got so long that I've decided to separate them out and include them only at the end of the LJ equivalent of this list. Sorry, but I can't footnote things in this format (and let's not talk about how embarrassing it is that I actually had to footnote something).
- Kaiba's diatribe on why he doesn't take sleeping pills is a combination of his personal opinion and scientific fact: I encourage anyone who wants to know more to start some independent research on the topic. One thing he mentions in particular, however, is melatonin, which many people don't seem to know about.
Melatonin is a hormone produced naturally by the brain which fulfills several functions, most notably regulation of the circadian rhythm (in other words, regulation of sleep patterns). It's also an antioxidant that focuses on protection of nuclear and mitochondrial DNA, but somehow I doubt many of you care about that. The important point is that, while many people online jabber on about its uses as a dietary supplement (which seriously, wtf? this makes no sense to me), encapsulated melatonin is a really awesome, totally natural sleep aid, and has helped various members of my family out of several really bad bouts of insomnia. The only danger I can think of with reference to it is dependence (that is, you start to think you can't fall asleep if you don't take it), but that's a mental difficulty, not a by-product of addiction (you don't experience a physical craving for the melatonin like you do for alcohol or nicotine).
- Honda's exposition on the morphology of prokaryotes is largely paraphrased from page 334 of Starr and Taggart's "Diversity of Life," Unit IV in the textbook "Biology: The Unity and Diversity of Life," encompassing chapters 21-27, pages 331-476.
- Tajomaru is the name of the bandit in Akutagawa Ryuunosuke's short story In a Grove, which was later combined with his short story Rashomon by Kurosawa Akira for his 1950 film Rashomon. In the film he was played by Mifune Toshirou, who was easily the most famous Japanese actor of his day, and highly valued for his ability to show intense emotional depth and range, particularly in his common portrayal of a rough, but nevertheless honorable warrior-figure. This guy could kill you with his eyes. (Think our cowboys--Clint Eastwood, John Wayne--combined with Humphrey Bogart, only handsome.)
