Mokuba
I nodded to Hobson as he shepherded the maids out of the room and closed the door behind him.
Joey was punching one of the spare pillows and stuffed it behind Yugi's head to prop him up in the bed a bit more, but it wasn't really needed. He looked comfortable enough already and it wasn't like the household staff had never dealt with a comatose person before - weird as that was.
Once he was done beating up the bedding Joey wandered around the room poking and prodding at everything; the lamp shades, the curtain ties and of course all the trinkets that were peppered around the shelves to make the space look more 'homey'.
"Jeez, some guestroom!" He teased as he opened up the sliding door to the balcony and stuck his head through. How genuinely intrigued he was by every little detail made me laugh a bit.
There was something extra dumb about decorating the place with store-bought knickknacks and keepsakes to make it look friendlier. Mementos were meant to be special, not something snagged out of a store to pretend the room was more lived in than it really was. I guess beggars couldn't be choosers. Gozaburo had tossed all the games and souvenirs the orphanage had let Seto and I keep into the fireplace right in front of us so it wasn't like we had a bunch extra lying around to use as decorations.
"Nheh! It's even got those packaged up toothbrushes an' mini toothpaste tubes like in fancy 'otels!" Joey shouted to me from the bathroom - like I didn't already know.
"It wouldn't be much of a guestroom if it didn't have toiletries, right?" I called back.
"Guess so." Joey snickered, the mechanical clunk of the lever being pulled and the rushing sound of water flushing down the toilet sounded off. Gross. He hadn't even fully closed the door.
I heard the faucet run before he came back out wiping his hands dry on his jeans, despite all the hand towels. "Are all of em' done up like this?"
"Nope. Only this one and another." The mansion had lots of guestrooms - it used to have way more when Gozaburo was alive, but some of them had been converted into other things since. Seto had even knocked down a wall to merge two of them together into a home cinema. My big brother's logic was that since there was no way in hell he was ever going to allow so many guests to stay the night keeping a tonne of extra rooms didn't make sense, and making up the rooms each day was an inefficient use of the maids time. After Pegasus turned over half of our employees against us he'd cut back the mansion's staff, only keeping the ones we knew we could trust. Since then only two guestrooms were made up each day, with the others only being aired out every other week.
That wasn't why I'd picked this room out though. I'd chosen it for Yugi to use because it was my room back when Gozaburo was alive and I knew the mattress was really comfortable.
It was strange to see the place I'd basically spent half my childhood in tidied up and refurbished as a guestroom. It almost felt like an effort to erase all the memories I'd made in here. Maybe that was Seto's intention, but I didn't mind looking back. He probably thought I should hate our past as much as he did. Thing was, unlike him I remembered more than just the bad stuff.
I glanced over to the middle of the room, knowing that under the antique rug the interior decorator had put there was a loose floor board, and under it was a treasure trove. I actually used to call it that, but I'd been really little at the time
Having all our games burnt up hadn't beaten Seto - not even a little. He'd sulked about it for half a day and then come up with a plan.
We'd pulled the box from one of Gozaburo's pairs of dress shoes out of the trash the next day and stashed it away under the squeaky floorboard in my room. Into it went everything we could swipe without being noticed. Junk like wine corks, pen lids, coasters and any ornaments small enough that we could fit into our pockets made up the new game pieces of whatever we played. There were stacks of paper crayoned to look like chess, checkers and monopoly boards - complete with hand drawn money made from sheets of toilet paper that had half the numbers backwards because Seto let me make them and only noticed the fives were inverted after I'd already used up a whole roll. It didn't matter back then that they were crude and sometimes even actual trash; my big brother sneaking into my room after dark and the two of us prying up the board to play games with all the 'toys' we'd repurposed were some of my favorite memories.
I was waiting for the day I could dig the shoe box out, show it to my big brother, and actually see him smile at it. That day would come - I really did think that - sometime after all this Pharaoh stuff was finished with for real.
The legs of one of the wooden chairs from the balcony scrapped against the floor as Joey pulled it inside into the room and over to Yugi's bedside. He flopped down into it and pulled a face. "So now we just wait, huh?"
Shrugging back was all I had. "I guess."
Joey bounced his leg up and down restlessly. It didn't look like he could keep still. Waiting around and being patient didn't phase me at all, I had so much practice it was one of the things I was best at, but other than when he was watching duels - which as a duelist probably counted as entertainment for him - Joey was always on the move, always doing something or bugging someone. It figured the idea of waiting around for the next thing to happen wasn't his style.
He awkwardly cleared his throat and started talking, probably just to give himself something to do.
"Soooo. whad'ya think 'is chances would actually be?"
"Huh?" It wasn't the greatest reply in the world, but I didn't know what he was talking about.
"Kaiba's - of winnin' against Atem in a duel, if they got ta play it." Joey scratched at his nose, his eyes aiming towards the ceiling like he was trying to imagine it. "That's what he went for, right?" He leaned back in the chair casually and crossed his arms behind his head.
Sort of. Ignoring the big 'if' he'd even got there.
"Depends, on the deck he uses, the strategies - you know, duelist stuff." And on if my big brother was even trying to win. That was the biggest factor.
"Maybe you don't have to win, Seto. Maybe it's okay to just call it a draw and let it go?"
I wish I hadn't said that to him.
I hadn't realized exactly what I'd done until it was too late. I knew I'd messed up as soon as I saw that gleam in Seto's eyes - the sort of overly bright one that a lot of other people seemed to find off-putting, that only flicked on when my brother had a new and crazy idea.
His plan to draw with Atem and bring him back here had sprung out of those words, and the worse thing was Seto had deliberately misread my meaning. That made all of this my fault, even though I hadn't meant it that way. I think a part of Seto knew that.
Maybe he wouldn't even need that plan though. He said he'd keep it as a back-up and only use it if he felt it was the best option.
"He already beat the Pharaoh in simulation." I reminded myself.
"Pft." Joey waved that off like it was a bug buzzing around him. "Like any robo-pharaoh could compare to the real deal."
He had no idea just how authentic Seto's 'robo-pharaoh' really was. It was creepy in how life-like my big brother had got it to being over the years.
"Man, think how crazy it would be if Atem came back with 'im." That threw me, but luckily Joey didn't notice. He kept grinning up at the ceiling. "Like that would happen though, nheh."
"By choice, you mean?"
Joey's eyes jumped down to mine and he stared, like I'd said something strange. "Yeah o'course by choice." He eyeballed me suspiciously for a second before shrugging it off. "Why else would he come back?"
I shrugged right back. I didn't want to tell him anything else, because he wouldn't understand. None of them would. They didn't know how badly my brother needed to get this done, no matter what it took.
I began answering the question, but had to pause half way to figure out my reply. "If Atem came back..." 'willingly' was the word I didn't say, but added it on to the end of my sentence mentally anyway. I pictured the Pharaoh climbing out of the Dual Dimension pod with my brother, trying to visualize it for myself. I wasn't ready for the rush of pure anger than shot through me at the thought.
I didn't want the Pharaoh to come back. How was I only just realizing that now?
If he did then all of this would never end - Seto would never get over his losses and move on. Not to mention that if he came back willingly, for Seto's sake, that would be even worse.
Knowing that someone was living just for you, dedicating their life to yours and putting what they wanted and needed aside... it was a heavy burden. I knew that better than anybody. At best there was the guilt of being someone else's obligation and at worse the helplessness of having to watch how that person twisted and changed under the weight of fulfilling their promise until it made them so completely different that they couldn't go back to how they'd started.
I didn't want that for Seto.
"Earth to Mokuba. Y'in there?" Joey drawled with a snicker.
"Y-yeah." I threw a grin his way, pretending that everything was fine and that I'd just zoned out. "I hope everyone ends up where they're meant to be." I concluded honestly.
For my brother that was here, with me. For Atem that was in the afterlife, far away from Seto.
I felt myself frown. I was bitter at my own bitterness. How dumb.
Joey shot me a supportive grin from across the bed and pulled out a thumbs up. "Don't worry, Yug'll come through. He always does." He jostled Yugi's shoulder while he lay in bed loudly shouting 'Right, buddy?', as if he expected that to wake Yugi up so he could reply.
His encouragement just proved that Joey didn't get what I was thinking, and that was probably for the best.
Atem
I stretched as I awoke.
My limbs no longer ached from doing so and I chanced sitting upright to find that thankfully the lightheadedness that had accompanied the action last night had faded until it was barely noticeable. The sweat of my body had dried leaving behind the faint outline of undignified stains rounding my armpits and neckline as well as a scattering of smaller marks where it had pooled in the valleys of my abdominal muscles. The sight was unseemly, but mercifully the dizzying heat had receded to only a lick of lingering warmth as I chanced touching my forehead.
Isis's sleek form wordlessly knelt down at my side ready to attend me as I peered through the half-light of a new day to see that Kaiba's clearly unattended campfire had fallen into only a pile of softly smoldering ash. Kaiba himself was nowhere to be seen. I wondered what form of mild to intermediate chaos he was off sowing now, the thought filling me with the contradictory fondness he had demanded I elaborate on the night before.
"Where-"
Isis hushed me with a touch of her fingers to her lips. Silencing a Pharaoh was audacious, but as a paragon of propriety I found Isis's strange gesture curious instead of disrespectful.
Though muted there was a gleam of good-natured amusement in her eye. The same one that she and Mahad often shared when they were jesting with my High Priest at his expense. It was well-meaning, rarely unprovoked and never a source of concern, but was more difficult to ignore now that I guessed it was being aimed at Kaiba instead.
With a meaningful tilt of her head I allowed Isis to lead my gaze toward a nearby date palm, one of many alike all bearing an unseasonal bounty of sweet fruit and jostling for position around the oasis's edge. Though short compared to others its trunk was wider, so much so that only the angular peaks of Kaiba's coat were visible from our vantage point on the opposite side.
"Apologies, my Pharaoh." The part of Kaiba's shoulder visible to me twitched in response even as Isis whispered the words, "It seems he is a poor sleeper."
I nodded back in understanding as I leaned forward, finding a new angle that brought the side of Kaiba's body and his face into my view.
As the Spirit of the Millennium puzzle I'd grown fond of watching over Yugi as he slept and guarding him against dark dreams. It was my honor to do so, but also my responsibility, as it was often hazy memories of the carefree wrath that I had visited indiscriminately upon his various tormentors in our early days together that haunted him the most. With those nightmares banished Yugi looked so relaxed and at peace while asleep.
Kaiba on the other hand looked anything but. Instead he looked only tired and uncomfortable.
His head was bowed at a harsh angle, his chin resting on his chest as though he'd fallen asleep accidentally and his Duel Disk lay half disemboweled across his legs along with a few scraps of purple cloth I recognized to be parts of my cloak. Beside him lying on another section of my cape was and array of components, the small toolkit he'd rescued from his pod in the desert and the very welcome sight of my own Duel Disk, appearing to be whole and in working condition.
"Mahad will arrive here soon." Isis softly announced from beside me. I turned to her to find her watching me closely.
I still didn't know what to think of our softly spoken conversation the night before - of the council she had offered while I'd watched Kaiba flee the light of his own campfire, but there was no time to dwell on it as her newest words gently struck me.
Hearing that my most ardent champion would soon be meeting us here lit a hopeful fire at my core.
He'd been tracking Teleia for as long as she herself had been hunting us. It wasn't a surprise that he would eventually converge with us here at the site she'd been defeated. It was very welcome news. Mahad had a more rounded knowledge of Kaiba than anyone else in my priesthood and after last night I would welcome the council of another, or just the chance to tell him of the unexpected development. Simply thinking about it filled half of me with the deep trepidation that comes from knowing a thing to be a bad idea and continuing to do it anyway, while the other half wished nothing more than to jostle Kaiba awake right now and continue from where we had been interrupted to see the conclusion. The feeling was capricious, intoxicating and foolish to let run unbridled.
I closed my eyes and took a slow breath to center myself, exhaling the rebel impulses from my mind with a steady and cleansing exhalation. As I reopened them I was calm once more, the poise of a Pharaoh worthy of my ancestor's bloodline firmly in place.
"By your leave, I would like to go on ahead and meet him." Isis quietly requested and I granted her it immediately with a nod of my head. With Kaiba, Isis and Mahad at my side we'd make short work of Anubis and put his villainy to an end. What that end would mean for Kaiba and I, I didn't know now. It was admittedly short-sighted but I placed my belief in destiny once more and forced any second guesses out of my mind, determined not to smother a flame with such doubts when it had barely begun to spark, let alone catch fire. I trusted we would meet our fate when the time came, whatever it was.
Near soundlessly Isis rose from her seated position in a slow smooth motion. She cast one last curious glance over her shoulder towards Kaiba before gracefully picking her way between the fallen leaves and loose natural debris that blanketed the oasis's grounds to noiselessly make her way from our camp and toward the mouth of the canyon that acted as the single long corridor of entry into this sacred place.
As soon as she was beyond my vision vanishing into the foliage I followed her example.
I watched Kaiba closely for signs of stirring as I crept over to the golden Duel Disk at his side, trusting my footfalls to be too quiet to wake him.
His eyes pinched together tightly as I approached and his mouth morphed into an unconscious sneer but still he remained asleep, even as I came near enough to collect my Duel Disk and take a seat on the ground beside his tree. The device slid onto my arm just as comfortably the second time as it had done the first and with its return I could finally liberate Yugi from the Millennium Puzzle.
Yugi! And where was the Puzzle?
The familiar weight of it around my neck was gone and I could scarcely believe I hadn't noticed its absence earlier! I'd grown used to living without it in the many months spent in my afterlife before finally retrieving it from the living world after the battle against Diva, but that was no excuse. I jerked my head around our campsite searching for it in the pre-dawn darkness that threw everything into impenetrable shadows. When did I even recall last having it? I frowned, casting my mind back. It had rattled against my chest as I'd leaned into Kaiba's draconic wing beats - that I recalled clearly. Had it been lost in the crash? Was it lying somewhere scattered into pieces, or worse - sunk to the bottom of the oasis?
I collected myself and analyzed the cards at play. It wasn't the only part of my regalia to be missing, after all. Several pieces of my jewelry were also mislaid and that was an unlikely coincidence.
"Why are you undressing me?"
"You have a fever. I'm getting all this crap off you so I can bring down your temperature."
Ah. That was why.
Knowing approximately where to look I cast my eyes to the place Kaiba had lain me yesterday and found the Item's telltale silhouette unassumingly crowning a small pile of cast off finery. I collected the Puzzle from its resting place swiftly.
The fevered memory of Kaiba's cool fingers touching my hot, bare skin and the feeling of the silken cinnamon hair that lined the back of his neck pressed against my cheek as I rested my head on his shoulder stirred me in a way that had little to do with sleep. The intense reaction seemed inappropriate given that the person of interest was obliviously unconscious nearby. It was a feat of either trust or fatigue that seemed difficult for Kaiba given the last time I'd seen him attempt to rest and I wouldn't permit myself to sully it.
It shamed me to realize too that this was the first time I'd thought about Yugi's plight since the cave.
The terrible breathless feeling that had struck me there; riding on Kaiba's back as he flew for the first time in his dragon state; the overwhelming rush of last night - all of it had banished Yugi from my thoughts. Even only temporarily that was unacceptable. Knowing Yugi he'd understand that I'd become caught up in other things and that only made my own callous disregard for my partner sting more painfully. I owed him an apology.
"I'm sorry, Yugi. Forgive me." I willed into the Puzzle's depths as I held it in my hands.
Once more I received no reply, sensing only the yawning darkness of the Puzzle's core. As soon as I was convinced of his safety outside of the Item I would try my hand at releasing Yugi regardless, and with Teleia defeated and two of my priests arriving the chance was fast approaching.
The Duel Disk restarted not a moment too soon with a soft jingle that was far too cheerful to be something of Kaiba's choosing. It loaded up quickly, eagerly rendering my holographic interface and informing me of all the updates to card statuses that had been made while it was in stand-by mode somewhere in the stomach of Bird of Roses. Apparently Kaiba had been busy with more than just dismantling his Duel Disk while I was sleeping. His Kaiser Seahorse had been swapped to attack mode, which meant it had been returned to the field – based on the card log Kaiba had done this in reaction to one of Anubis's unknown face down cards having been sent to the Graveyard, leaving the necromancer with only one card left on the field to call his own.
I searched the vicinity for the sea serpent that Kaiba had named his Deck Master during our time in his step-brother's Virtual World but couldn't see the monster.
"Where is it?" I wondered aloud, my question was little more than a murmur.
"Around." Came a hoarse reply from my side.
Though he hadn't otherwise moved I turned back to meet Kaiba's piercing blue gaze studying me carefully and I became locked in an impromptu staring contest with him as he pinned me with a long fixed look, as if waiting for me to blink.
I closed down the Duel Disk's interface and returned its creator's stare, if only to rise to his challenge.
Muttering something about coffee beneath his breath Kaiba broke our eye contact a moment later, turning away slightly to clear his throat and massage his right temple beneath the thick fringe of his hair. "You're feeling better, huh." He quipped, his eyes snake-like as he tossed the unimpressed gibe over his shoulder at me, but I suspected his sarcasm was only a means to shield genuine questions that he perceived to be too 'soft' for his pride to permit asking outright.
"I am." I confirmed evenly, watching as Kaiba sat up properly and subtly rolled his shoulders. The movement was only very slight, as though he was trying to hide it despite the fact I already knew about the injury. I felt a prick of disappointment at the surly sight. Yesterday we'd broken new ground and I didn't like the idea that Kaiba may have already begun trying to retreat back into our previous status quo.
"Your shoulder-" I pointed to the left one, testing the waters by asking "-does it still hurt?". Kaiba stilled immediately. The look he leveled at me in return was cold and studious. His lips pressed into a thin line as I watched him and after scoffing to himself he turned away to stare at a nearby shrub.
"It's a torn labrum, and it aches." He grunted to the plant.
Small as it was that admission of minor discomfort, of what he perceived to be weakness, reassured me with only two words that things were indeed now different.
"I'll probably need another arthroscopic shoulder surgery once I get back." He added with a scowl, no longer bothering to hide his actions as he worked his hand around his shoulder and kneaded the joint. "There's a bunch of pins in the bone that are supposed to keep it anchored, but at least one's loose. That's the only reason you could leverage it out of place."
I wasn't familiar with the bodily terminology of Kaiba's time and a 'labrum' wasn't a word Yugi had known either. I raised my eyebrow at him, hoping for some sort of explanation and wondering if I would receive one.
Kaiba rolled his eyes at me as if he expected it to be common knowledge but nevertheless answered me.
"It's the ring of cartilage around the rim of the shoulder socket that helps stabilize the joint." he explained.
"Ah." I hummed back, concluding that conversation without words.
Asking about the injury's original source was ill-advised, akin to deliberately triggering an enemy's face down card without any prepared counter-measures. There was a deep, stormy intensity in Kaiba's expression as he watched me, clearly waiting for me to ask any number of questions that we both knew were a logical, if foolish, follow up. It was as though his anger was a hungry pet he had yet to feed this morning and was searching for any provocation that might volunteer me to be its first meal of the day. I denied him the trigger he was so expectantly waiting to hear and turned to the sky instead. Within a moment Kaiba withdrew his blade of attention and focused it elsewhere, rotating his shoulder fully and gritting his teeth in part as he did so, then relaxing it. He patted smooth the leather padding of his coat's shoulder pad before turning his face away from mine to leer fiercely at the horizon with me.
It was oddly peaceable, being sat here on the sand beside Kaiba, especially after our heated exchange the night before. Together we watched the orange rays of Ra's solar barge spill new light to banish away the deep indigo of the night sky as the sun began to crest over the horizon - neither of us apparently ready to talk about the night before, yet. The dawn slowly began to restore color and detail to the rocks and plants around us that had been cast into deep silhouettes by the moon, breathing warmth into the world once more. I crossed my legs and leaned back, resting my palms against the soft earth and catching the outer edge of my hand against Kaiba's in the process. The motion drew his attention away from the sky and down to the ground where our two hands now lay side by side on the earth.
"Tch." He glanced back up to my face, his expression as stony as ever.
For a brief moment he lifted his hand up and away from mine. It hovered in the air in what I suspected his unreadable expression was trying to disguise as anything other than a moment of hesitation before he finally lowered it back down to place it on top of my own - stiffly, yet loosely gripping my hand as he covered it. His touch was tentative; enough so to give me room to flip mine upward from beneath it so our palms touched and I could weave my fingers between his. Despite being much taller than me his hands weren't that much larger than my own, the difference lying mostly in the extra length of his slightly longer digits. Belatedly he returned the gesture and curled them around my hand to mesh the two together just as we had last night.
"This feels weird." Kaiba critiqued, bluntly. The statement was so true and pointedly factual it made me laugh unexpectedly.
"Yes, it does." I eventually agreed. Yesterday's potent torrent of emotions had abated and without it this all felt more than a little abnormal. Not unpleasant, but strange. "We could stop." I noted as a neutral observation. Stopping was indeed within our power.
"It's fine." came Kaiba's bland reply. His eyes sliced over to mine, only returning to the sky after I nodded in agreement.
Then so it was.
We sat together in silence, both trying to exude our usual confidence even while the quickening pulse in my veins and the beginnings of a layer of cool sweat slicking Kaiba's palm threatened to expose us.
This excitable anxiety was something I'd experienced through Yugi when he was faced with public speaking or presentations of his schoolwork in the classroom, but I'd rarely felt this way myself while alive. I was born to be a Pharaoh, groomed to be beyond this sort of compromising nervousness. I'd faced down many powerful foes without ever feeling this fretful, including Kaiba himself. Now in this unfamiliar arena I was just an initiate, still trying to understand the workings of a new role without sabotaging it in the process.
"What were you doing to your Duel Disk?" I was curious, but also wondered if the distraction of diplomatic conversation might make us both feel more grounded.
As if reminded of its existence Kaiba began gathering up the components with his free hand and slotted them back into place in an impressive show of ambidextrousness. "Transplanting some components. One of the tertiary projection coils in yours was damaged, so I swapped it out for one of mine." He held a small band which I assumed to be the coil in question captive between his fingers to demonstrate, before slipping it into a hidden pocket on the inside of his coat.
"I see." I doubted doing so was Kaiba's preferred solution and was likely the only choice he had left but I added "I appreciate that." nevertheless.
"Save it." He chided testily, confirming my suspicion as he pressed the shell of his Duel Disk back into place over the components. "Our odds are better if at least one of us has a fully operational Duel Disk, and mine's already damaged." He grimaced at the device for good measure, as though testing if he could glower it back into functionality.
"Did Kaiser Seahorse despawn again?" I pressed, watching with mild fascination as Kaiba managed to maneuver a small screwdriver one-handed and drove the screws that held the Duel Disk's case together back into place. The motions seemed well practiced.
"No." Kaiba's answer was dismissive and disinterested as he worked on his device. "It's still here." he added, most likely meaning he had purposefully placed the monster out of sight.
"You've hidden it." I concluded aloud. Knowing how his mind worked and with an imposing statue much greater than Kaiba's own there was only one place that he would think to conceal it. His eyes pinched as I glanced across the still waters of the oasis, his irked expression telling me I had guessed its hiding place correctly.
He sneered back, "It's a precaution" clearly frustrated to have been so easily figured out.
"A precaution?" I repeated, the unspoken question of 'why' inherent in my tone.
"Don't be stupid." Kaiba scoffed back. I narrowed my eyes and raised an eyebrow at him, waiting for a worthy explanation for his rudeness. The one I received was unexpected. "If Ishizu was compromised during your duel with Anubis-" Her name was Isis, and he knew it, but that was beside the point. "-Then we have to assume the other one was too."
'The other one' I took to mean Mahad, based on the context.
I'd spoken to the Magician myself after Anubis's first defeat in my throne room and hadn't detected anything strange in his manner.
No, that wasn't true.
He'd seemed distant and absent in a way I hadn't been able to describe, only sense. I'd thought it was just a momentary distraction created by his concern for Isis.
If there was any chance that Kaiba's suspicion was true then that would place Isis was in very real danger. I twisted my head around to look in the direction she had departed in so quickly it nearly pulled a muscle in my neck.
"Relax." Kaiba huffed tonelessly. "I let her in on my hypothesis last night after I finished patching your Duel Disk. She said she'd go ahead to check it out." He dismissed the tiny hologram and went back to his repairs, tossing the careless statement of "It's a solid theory - but I'll believe it when I see it." in my face as he did so.
I threw a scolding look at Kaiba and his sheer lack of care for the situation, or Isis's safety. He steadfastly ignored it, paying more attention to playing with his device than to my rage. Had Kaiba suspected this from the outset? "When did you intend to tell me this?" I demanded. He may not think of either Isis or Mahad as being 'real' or my friends, but Kaiba knew I did and he'd withheld the information nevertheless.
"Tch." Kaiba's eyes raised from his tinkering to narrow at me. His shoulders stiffened immediately at the heat in my voice, and the oaf matched it with a standoffish counter of "Whenever the hell I felt like it!", defiant and rebellious apparently just for the sake of it despite the grave stakes. "It wasn't relevant before. The information only just became useful - and now I'm using it." We glared at each other for a long moment, Kaiba mirroring my deserved rage with his own. "We've done nothing but react to these dolts. It's time to change that!" he hissed.
I relented my reprimanding expression, finding a logic in Kaiba's drive to strike out and proactively seize an advantage over our foe.
If Mahad indeed had fallen under the sway of another of Anubis's minions we could use its expectation of our ignorance to gain the upper hand. It was a clever play. One I couldn't begrudge if Isis had willingly agreed to be a part of, yet somehow the idea of being left in the dark agitated my temper. During my life entrusting my priests to work without my knowledge to protect my throne and my realm had come naturally.
Why only now did leaving them to do so of their own accord feel so disquieting?
"It's not that I doubt you, or your intentions." I faltered, considering my own question. Kaiba's dark look grew only sharper at my pause. I looked away from it, contemplating my words carefully.
"I suppose I've grown unaccustomed to having my battles fought for me." I frowned to myself. "In your world I became so used to the fate of the world weighing on me alone." It was an admission and an unspoken apology fused into one. During my time as the Spirit of the Millennium Puzzle I'd assumed the role of Yugi's guardian and protector. Now it was difficult to fall back into the opposite role and in turn be protected by others as was the expectation of the Pharaoh of Egypt.
Kaiba snorted derisively. "Whatever happened to 'you're never alone if you've got friendship' and all that bull?" he challenged, though he did add a mocking lilt to his words.
I regarded him for a moment, wondering if he realized that by throwing that argument in my face he was on some level also acknowledging that we were indeed friends. If he did then his sour face certainly gave nothing away.
I chuckled at that and blinked slowly. "Well said." I taunted, followed sincerely by, "You're right."
Something in the way Kaiba held his jaw seemed to ease slightly, which I took to mean the spat was forgiven. Kaiba only grunted at me in reply, even as the tense grip of the hand covering mine relaxed.
With the hostility in the air lifting I returned my thoughts to my Magician and the matter at hand. If Mahad was as similarly afflicted as Isis had been then he'd make a truly formidable foe.
From beside me Kaiba scoffed at something without bothering to verbalize what and struck me off-balance with a toneless comment of, "Get rid of Isis once she's back."
I balked at his brazen and surly order.
His eyes fixated on a spot in the distance, refusing to meet mine which was always suspect when dealing with him given his usual determination to stare his opponents into cinders. "This is our fight. She'd just get in the way." Unwittingly Kaiba echoed my previous thoughts aloud with his next words; "And it'll be much worse than fighting Teleia was." He remarked, only now breaking the link of our hands so he could finish sealing up his Duel Disk once again and slipping the cuff back onto his wrist and arm. "Pegasus makes up a lot of Duel Monsters cards himself and if even half of the Dark Magician adjacent cards are based on things this one can actually do then it's a wide and varied arsenal. Wiping out their high attack monster cards isn't going to matter if he nukes us with spells and traps." He summarized as he busied himself with restarting the unit and navigating its interface.
Kaiba's knowledge on the subject didn't surprise me. As my most diligent rival I expected he was especially attentive to all cards he thought Yugi and I would consider as candidates for our deck and empowering the Dark Magician and Dark Magician Girl had always been one of our most versatile strategies.
Kaiba crossed his arms as he finished fitting the device and sneered. "Pegasus sure knows how to panda to consumer demand." Disapproval dripped from his words and there was a note of petulance in them. "He throws out a new Dark Magician themed card spell or trap card every quarter since there's so many mid-tier duelists running imitations of your deck. Now it's one of the most overpowered monsters in the game."
Did he realize the irony that he of all people was complaining about a card being too powerful? I doubted it, though it certainly amused me.
"Plus it's unoriginal." He concluded with clear distaste.
Though he was ever determined to shout his personal beliefs across an arena when we dueled it was strange to hear him protest so openly about something so trivial as card releases. I focused on his last comment since it was a safer topic of conversation. After all, with just one glance at his attire no one could ever deny that Kaiba was indeed 'original' beyond all else. I could understand his apparent abhorrence of imitators. The cards a true duelist chose for their deck said much about them, who they were and what they believed in. "A deck should be personal; a reflection of the duelist who plays it." I agreed.
"No. A deck should be powerful." He defiantly snapped back. "But copying someone else's is just cutting corners."
I smirked at that. "You've just proven my point, Kaiba." Previously Kaiba's ire had been aimed at the non-present 'mid-tier duelists', but as I noted that his eyes narrowed on me. "You idolize power above all else and your deck is built with that philosophy at its foundation." I noted.
And that wasn't all. Kaiba's decks brimmed with dragons, machine-types and Light attributed monsters. Those choices weren't coincidental, though he would loath to admit that. Beyond that his decks also harbored less aspirational cards; a dark undertow of viruses and germs lurking beneath the surface ready to infect and corrupt. Slowly those cards had become less essential to him over the years. Pandemic Dragon had been the only monster in that vein to make an appearance during our duel in my throne room. It was a sign of times changing.
"So?" came Kaiba's monosyllabic retort.
"So, a personal belief influences your card selection." I continued, "Therefore, your deck is just as personal to you as ours is-" I stumbled on the word, correcting myself without missing a beat. "-was, to Yugi and I." With Kaiba by my side everything felt so alarmingly present and immediate that for a moment it was easy to forget I'd left that life behind.
"Hnh."
Kaiba didn't bother to articulate this thoughts on the matter any more than that, but since decoding the meaning of that particular low sound I took the grunt of reluctant agreement as it was.
The hand that he had finished using to re-situate his Duel Disk returned to its original place on the ground and I placed mine on top of it, wanting to restore the cautious link between us that had been temporarily broken. Kaiba's breathing hitched discreetly as I ran a finger over his skin, closely watching him through the corner of my eyes to gauge his tolerance of the touch.
His stoic face was unrevealing but a second later he lifted up my hand and turned my palm upwards to study it with an intense focus.
What had prompted such a reaction mystified me until he experimentally ran his much softer fingers over one of the slightly hardened calluses of my hand. They were the tokens of a childhood spent riding and sparring and the skin there was much less sensitive and rough to the touch, which was most likely what had drawn his interest in the first place. He inspected them, running his eyes and thumb over one on my palm and several on my fingers as if charting them in his mind. If he found them unattractive he gave no indication, his calculating expression resembling something closer to scientific curiosity than disapproval. His investigation concluded without comment and he threaded his fingers back through mine in silence.
The acceptance was bolstering so I leaned towards him, coaxing Kaiba to do the same if only to meet me in battle.
I wasn't surprised when a muscle in his cheek only twitched unsurely in response.
Pressing my tongue against his the night before had been a misstep. I'd seen that in his reaction alone. Our ideas of normal expressions of affection varied and that mistake had proven that falling back on whatever insights I'd reluctantly absorbed while Yugi watched the 'adult' video tape that Tristan had once borrowed from the video store for he and Joey wasn't a reliable strategy. Confident as Kaiba and I both were as duelists that didn't extend to this new and strange contest, and dueling with someone else's cards was hindering me.
I returned to what I knew, needing nothing but stillness from Kaiba to do so as I bridged the distance between us and pressed my nose against his.
The act was as intimate to me as a kiss mouth to mouth was to him.
Down the length of his sharp nose Kaiba's eyes widened a fraction in confusion and he reared backward, his shoulders tensing momentarily as if to pull away even further before relaxing again as he rapidly acclimatized to the previously unfamiliar gesture. I didn't expect he would understand and he was wary even as he reapplied the end of his nose to mine, but it endeared me regardless.
The contact was tender and short-lived as the dawn concluded before us.
After a few moments the two of us parted again in the mutual understanding that there was little time to further explore this newest arena. We needed to be better prepared for what could potentially be a fast-approaching battle. Wordlessly I rose to my feet to reclaim the rest of the jewelry and clothing that Kaiba had stripped from my body the day before, while he turned his attention to the device on his arm and pursued the now familiar sight of his Duel Disk's holographic diagnostic screen.
Kaiba was right; we held an advantage and it was time to seize it.
AN: Kaiba's shoulder injury in this story was actually inspired by a scene towards the end of Yu-Gi-Oh! The Movie: Pyramid of Light. In it Anubis tosses Kaiba across the stadium and despite landing on his back somehow it's Kaiba's shoulder/arm that ends up injured. I found that a bit strange, so it inspired me to think of reasons to justify the reaction.