Blessed Be Those Who Live

Rating- T

Pairings- None for this chapter, but mainly Thiefshipping, Puppyshipping, and Puzzleshipping

Summary- The pharaoh separates Ryou and Bakura, and now they must deal with life.

Joey's house sucked. The entire apartment building sucked, but his house sucked the most. He skipped up the stairs to his apartment, thinking about composing a song about it, but despite the idea making him smile, in the end it only depressed him more.

The lights were on, which meant that his father was already there. Joey gritted his teeth before getting in.

"Dad! I'm home!" he called. He kicked a bunch of beer bottles out of his way. He had to clean up soon, but the last thing he wanted was to stay in that damned house any longer than necessary.

"Finally! Ya know what hour it is?" shouted his father. There was a drawl in his voice, which meant he had been drinking. The night just got more and more interesting.

"Yeah, I dropped by Yuugi's place for a while."

"To play those damned cards, didn't you?" His father came out of Joey's room and threw a bunch of cards to the floor.

"What the hell are you doing?!"

"You've been spending all your money in this useless things, when there's nothing in the fridge! Didn't I give you money to buy food?"

"Yeah, but the landlord came and I had to give it to him because you haven't paid the rent in three months! What the hell was I supposed to do? Let him kick us out?"

"Don't speak to me like that! I work hard, but all you do is hang around with that loser playing cards!"

"Don't call my friends losers! They've done more for me than you!"

Joey was too angry to notice his father's fist going to his face. He stumbled backwards, tripped on an empty beer bottle and fell down on a couple of them that he had kicked away before. They broke and pieces of glass cut his left arm.

He didn't move, and neither did his father. He breathed deeply, and suddenly felt the intense burning in his arm. There was blood all over the carpet too.

"F-fuck, I…"

"Joey-"

"Shut up!" he got up. The room tilted around him, but he wasn't sure if it was because of his anger, or because of the blood loss. He picked a couple pieces of glass off his arm, but it only made him bleed more. "Just shut up, alright?!," he shouted, trying to drown out the pain with his voice. He walked towards the door. "And don't throw away any of my cards! I'll know if you do!" he called back as he closed the door.

#

Kaiba took note of the bad state of the streets around the clinic as he sat on his limousine on the other side of the street. He would need to spend a bit more than planned on security if he ended up buying this one. But it was the closest one to the lab with a decent enough infrastructure.

He was a few minutes early to his appointment with the director of the clinic, which gave him an opportunity to tighten his proposal. It wouldn't take too much, considering the worsening state of the neighborhood, but he still had to keep costs down on the new pharmaceutical branch of the company. If he played his cards right, all that trash left over from the biochemical weapons branch of the company would serve a much more…profitable purpose. People would pay far more for healing than for killing, of course.

He noticed someone limping towards the clinic. A long figure with a mop of yellow hair that Seto would recognize anywhere.

Seeing one of those friendship obsessed dorks alone was certainly an odd sight, so Seto got out of his car and followed him into the clinic. At the entrance he noticed bloodstains making a beeline for a particular door

"I can't believe you, Joseph." Said an old man from inside. The door was slightly ajar, so Seto could see inside. An old doctor sat before Joey, who sat with his back towards the door, and had taken off his shirt and left it hanging over the back of a chair near the door. Seto's eyes narrowed at the sight of big blood stains on it.

"Neh, I'm fine. Just fell on a broken bottle."

"You will need stitches."

"Yeah, whatever."

"A lot of stitches. Good thing you came straight here, or this could get ugly."

"It's not that much."

"Who is the doctor here, Joseph?"

"Fine, fine. Ugh-"

"I told you it would hurt."

The doctor looked up and saw Seto, who quickly moved away from the door. He was already late for his appointment, so he took the elevator up to the third floor, and kept the image of Joey's bloody shirt out of his mind. He had a job to do.

And it took way too long. The meeting that he had expected to only take him a few minutes went on for more than an hour, to the point that Seto had the most annoying headache once he got out of the meeting room. He also had a new clinic to add to the new branch of the company, of course, he was Seto Kaiba; he always got what he wanted.

Before he turned towards the entrance, he passed by the door where he had seen Joseph being treated. The door was wide open now, and he saw the doctor sitting at his desk writing something. The old man looked up and saw Seto staring at him.

"Oh, you must be Joey's friend," the doctor said, getting up from his desk. Seto rolled his eyes.

"Friend would be quite an exaggeration, I'd say."

The doctor laughed softly. The scent of antiseptic was overpowering, and Seto wondered just how many stitches would "a lot" mean for doctors, who always claimed that incredibly painful procedures "wouldn't hurt at all."

"That Joey," said the doctor with a smile. "He sure can be a handful when he gets into trouble."
"Of that I'm too well aware," said Kaiba. He'd had his share of problems due to that idiot always getting wherever he wasn't wanted. Like his tournament. And his life as a whole.
"I'm sure you are. Joey is always talking about you."
That got Seto's attention and he stopped looking at the office to follow the doctor's movements as he searched through the cabinets with slightly shaking hands until he found the bottle he wanted.
"Is he?" finally asked Seto, when it seemed like the doctor wasn't going to say anything else.
"Oh, yes. He told me all about that tournament you hosted a while ago. Battling city."
"Battle City," corrected Seto. The doctor smiled slightly at all, and Kaiba realized he had fallen into a trap for his ego. Despite the shaking and the old age, that doctor was smarter than he let on.
"Of course, how could I forget? Anyway, it's a good thing I caught you before you left. Joey left in such a hurry, he forgot his pain medication. He'll need it in the morning once the shock wears off, that's for sure," the doctor took a back with what looked like Joey's bloody shirt inside, then gave both things to Seto.
"I'll be leaving for a convention the next couple of days, so I won't be able to see him. But if he takes the medicine, he should be fine and I'll take out the stitches once I am back," he shook his head. "I suppose I shouldn't hope for him to actually get some rest and not do any effort for a few days, like he should."

"Of course not."

Seto took the bags from him. There wasn't a time that he hadn't seen that idiot doing something stupid like getting into fights or pissing off the wrong people -like him- so the old man shouldn't get his hopes high. It was more likely that Joey would end up popping his stitches and then have to come running back crying.

"What happened to him?" Seto finally asked.

"He said he tripped and fell on a broken glass."

Kaiba didn't miss the 'said' there.

Once inside his limousine Seto looked inside the bag and the smell of beer and dirt made him throw the shirt out the window. Some glass that had been. Still, Kaiba was sure that despite his reputation as a thug, Joey wasn't one to go around getting drunk on cheap beer.
So many things he didn't care about just kept coming up.

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