Jounouchi had been stealing magazines since childhood. He was a lazy shoplifter, one who took things on impulse, and magazines were exactly the kind of thing he wanted but didn't need. It was a habit he never really gave up and one he didn't think Yuugi had ever known about, like his smoking and low-stakes gambling and other things he pretended he didn't do when trying to make something better of his life. Not that it mattered, not that any of those things mattered; shop-lifting was just something he did. It didn't shame him, it wasn't transgressive. It was a habit, nothing more. Though he had found himself doing it more so recently than he used to, especially on the way back from the 7/11 when he was hit with that sudden, bright, rich impulse to grab a zine off the outside rack and keep walking. No one noticed and he never got caught. And on the way back from getting tobacco and soda he found Kaiba's face staring back at him, pasted on the front page of some pop-economics magazine, and he took it without thinking. No one saw or cared. Because Kaiba had no business appearing in the shitty main drag of this corner of downtown Domino. His face was an insult to these people. Jounouchi was, in a way, doing the world a favour.

He let himself into his apartment and threw himself onto the bed, then tossed the magazine down in front of him. He covered half of the front page text with tobacco and a rizla, rolling it as he stared down Kaiba's paper replica.

The photo was glossy, retouched. Fragments of tobacco ghosted his face like leaves on a lake. He looked unreal, but this unreality was of a different taste to that which Jounouchi had encountered in that weird party. He had seen dozens of publicity shots of Kaiba over the years, even before he met the guy and didn't know what KaibaCorp was. As a child, the faces of beautiful wealthy strangers filled his magazines, billboards, TV screens, and they were all of them a kind of hierarchy of peculiar angels. They were other, distant, unreachable.

He hadn't picked out Kaiba as an individual until after they had met. Then he would start to recognise him in interviews and press announcements. In those early years, Kaiba was just as he was when duelling: furious, alive, magnificent, obnoxious. He calmed over the years. Jounouchi would see him in suits more often than those ridiculous coats, more often speaking from a desk or a lab than a helicopter.

And here he met him again, smart in a navy two piece, posing against his desk. There was still that bright, snide shimmer to his eyes, his lip ever so slightly cocked, but there was something dry and static to him as well. Jounouchi studied the contours of his photoshopped face. It was impossible to read anything into that expression. He wasn't a person here. He was one of those other things again.

Jounouchi tossed the magazine across the room. He wasn't going to read the interview it advertised. As if he needed to hear about however many billions Kaiba was worth and how many new products he was debuting. It wasn't as though he could afford them, and he wasn't going to save up, not again. That was a dead, awful ambition. He had to have something else to look forward to than buying Kaiba's shit to play duels he had no chance of winning.

But he missed it. Oh, fuck, he missed duelling and Yuugi and the infinite possibilities of it all so much that his chest burned.

He sniffed and wiped his nose. He was acting like a stupid kid, wanting to go back in time and be that person again. That was all over. He had to move on.

A clumsy knock rattled his door, then Sugata's broad face peered into the room. Sugata had one of those faces that was always a little too greasy, a little too sweaty for you to think he could be in good health. His mouth was wide and his teeth were all neat yellow blocks, like someone was building some horrid piece of brutalism in there.

'How much do you make these days?' Sugata's voice was like the texture of his skin: thick, greasy, with bits floating in it.

'None of your business.' Jounouchi picked up another stolen magazine. 'I'm not lending you money.'

'Dude, you must be making, what, man, hundreds of thousands a night to afford one of these TVs.'

Jounouchi looked up again. 'What?'

'The delivery guy wants you to sign for it. It's fucking huge, it's like a…' Sugata's brain rifled through its drawers in search of something that conveyed bigness. 'Like those ones they have in the main square. Like those really big TVs.'

Jounouchi, full of confusion laced with misplaced dread, swung himself off the bed and came to the door. Sugata's threadbare T-shirt stank of smoke.

The delivery guy stared them down like even he was too good for this job.

'You Jounouchi Katsuya?'

'Who's asking?'

The delivery guy rolled his eyes. 'Just sign here.'

Between them, taking up most of the hall, was a TV of obscene size whose box listed a cavalcade of features so extensive that it might as well have been advertising its capability for interplanetary flight.

'I didn't order a TV,' said Jounouchi, nonplussed. 'I can't pay for this.'

'Look, it's already paid for, and I carried it all the way up here, so can you just sign for the thing? I'm not taking it back.'

Jounouchi clenched his teeth and felt the tension spark through his spine. He hadn't felt this kind of anger in months, years. It felt different; a little good, a little bad.

Fucking Kaiba.

'Whatever. I'll sign for it.'

He did so, and watched with folded arms as Sugata dragged the huge cardboard box into the living room. The room was trashed; Sugata slept on the couch in a rat's nest of sheets and jackets. A bowl of cigarettes overflowed ash into the carpet and everywhere empty bowls, glasses, and food wrappers crowded the floor.

'Do you want it in your room?'

'No. Take it. I don't want it.'

'You sure, dude?' Sugata scratched the back of a filthy neck. 'That thing is worth hundreds of thousands.'

'Do what you want with it. I don't give a shit.' Jounouchi felt the anger seethe within him. It built and built, hot and rank, climbing his throat. He was on fire. He wanted to put his fist through something.

He strode out, slammed the door, found his phone, dialled.

It rang four times.

'Kaiba.' The voice was neutral, automatic.

'Did you buy me a fucking TV?'

There was a pause, and it seemed Kaiba was genuinely trying to remember.

'Ah – yes, two days ago. Or my secretary did.'

'Why the fuck did you buy me a TV?' Jounouchi could not quite explain why he was so angry, but he knew with deep certainty that Kaiba had wronged him somehow.

'You wanted to watch the USDM stream. You asked for a TV.'

'I asked you to lend me your TV, not fucking buy me one! I don't want this!'

'Why? It has to be better than whatever trash you're watching television on currently.' A small, smug noise of laughter slunk down the phone. 'Oh, I'm sorry. I forgot you don't own a television.'

'When I suggested you lend me yours, I meant I would watch the match with you. Why the hell do you think I would want a new fucking TV?'

'Embarrassed you could never afford anything so good?'

'I don't want a TV, Kaiba! Do you not get that? I don't own a TV because I don't want one. I didn't want one yesterday, I didn't want one this morning, and how there's some giant fuck-off flat screen in my living room I still don't want one. Send someone to take it back.'

'Why? Whether you want one or not, you need one. How else will you effectively watch the USDM streams? The lag is terrible on the website, I assure you. This is much better.'

Jounouchi took a long breath. 'You're an idiot, Kaiba. You're really fucking stupid. I can't believe – go to hell, okay?'

This time, there was annoyance and a genuine confusion to Kaiba's voice. 'I don't see the problem. You needed a television, I bought you one. The money is inconsequential to me.'

And then Jounouchi understood why this was making him angry. For once, it wasn't a slight. Kaiba wasn't trying to make him feel bad for being poor. Kaiba just wanted him to watch Yuugi's duels so he could have someone to yell nonsense at about hand statistics and winrate percentages – but Jounouchi didn't own a TV. It was a simple problem with a simple solution: buy Jounouchi a TV. Like he was a faulty car who needed its carburettor replacing.

Once again, the pity and anger started to fight it out within him.

'Oh my god, Kaiba.' He ran a hand over his face. 'Don't do shit like this. Just fucking don't. I will never speak to you ever again if you pull something like this one more time.'

The other side of the phone sniffed. 'I do not care either way if you ever speak to me again. Why on earth would you think something so absurd?'

'I don't care if you don't care–' Jounouchi started, then swallowed. 'I'm just telling you this. Just sharing a piece of information. Don't disrespect me like that.'

'Is there some other way I'm supposed to treat you? Do you think someone like me could ever have respect for someone like you?'

Jounouchi closed his eyes. He thought, for no reason at all, of stars, then the Red Eyes, and then the eyes of that beautiful cold woman who opened the door for him at the party. If he had Kaiba in the room, he would have hit him. He would have sunk his fists into his face until he spat blood.

'Okay, Kaiba. Do what you want.' He breathed in thinly and his lungs filled with gasoline. 'I don't give a shit. I'm not watching your fucking duelling channel. How about you hire someone to do that for you? As you've said, it's not like you can't afford it.'

He hung up. He could feel his nails vibrating, he could feel his teeth like lumps of molten metal in his face.

'What was that about?'

Jounouchi turned. Sugata lurked at the door.

'It doesn't matter. Just some prick.'

'Your boss buy you that TV?'

'Takeda? No. The fuck would you think that?'

Sugata shrugged a bare, slimy shoulder. 'He might be the type. Buy you nice things.'

Jounouchi's face scrawled into an expression of disgust. 'He's a dealer, Sugata, not a pimp. I don't do that kind of work. You know that.'

'I believe you, man, you don't have to justify yourself.' He shrugged again. 'It's a nice TV.'

'Then you can have it. I don't want it.'

Sugata's wide eyes widened more. 'You sure?'

'Push it out the window for all I care. If I–'

His phone rang again. Jounouchi clenched his teeth until his head throbbed and stars erupted before his vision.

'You shouldn't answer it,' said Sugata, as though this was wise, ancestral advice.

'No, I shouldn't.' Jounouchi watched the numbers pulse against the screen, a string of digits he was getting to know like you get to know the stray cats in your neighbourhood who always spook when you get too close. 'He's such a fucking asshole.'

The phone stopped ringing. Jounouchi breathed out sweet, metallic relief.

The phone rang again.

'Oh my fucking god. Does he not have a fucking company to run?'

He hit the answer button, raised the phone to his hear, opened his mouth to speak, then thought better of it. He waited. He could hear Kaiba's breathing.

'Jounouchi?'

He held his own breath and waited. He fantasised about breaking Kaiba's nose and it never healing right.

'I can hear the car alarm outside your apartment. I know you're there.'

Jounouchi had played these games before. He threw himself down onto the bed, grabbed his cigarette and lighter, lit up, and waited.

'Jounouchi? Stop acting like a child. You are throwing a tantrum over a television. It's unbecoming.'

The sirens swelled outside. Jounouchi felt the calm gradually seep through him along with the smoke. He didn't want to break Kaiba's face any more.

'Fine, you do what you want. I'm embarrassed for you.' The phone clicked.

Jounouchi didn't hesitate before redialling. Kaiba answered it immediately.

'Jounouchi?'

Jounouchi let the sound of sirens and traffic fill the phone, but said nothing. He heard Kaiba breathe out in irritation, disappointment, humour – he couldn't tell.

'Don't call this number again,' said Kaiba, and the second before Jounouchi was sure he'd hang up he spoke.

'Hey Kaiba!'

There was no click. He stayed on the line.

Jounouchi didn't think. He had never been a planner, not then and not now. He let the thoughts drifting on the surface of his mind spill out of his mouth. He was hungry. He wanted udon: fat, beefy, oily.

'I'm hungry. I'm going to be at the Oishī diner on Susu street at 8pm. You can meet me there and buy me dinner.'

Kaiba's breath embossed the texture of the phone's static hum. Jounouchi tried and failed to interpret whatever mad emotions might be running through Kaiba's head.

'Why on earth would I do that?

'How should I know? Why would you buy me a TV? But be there or don't. If you want me to watch those stupid Duel Monsters streams, then show up. I'm giving you this last chance – and you don't fucking deserve it.'

He hung up before he could think better of it. Worst came to worst, he would get a free meal. He would never turn that down.

The Oishī diner was a dive: sticky tables, sticky floors, waiters with sticky hands. It smelled like soy, burnt food, and piss. His dad used to bring him here on special occasions. Jounouchi and Honda would eat here in their young teens, spending stolen change on flat soda. It smelled like home.

Jounouchi had not really expected Kaiba to show. It would be ridiculous to see him here, the perfect weird freak Kaiba Seto looking like an insect crammed into a worsted wool suit pretending it was a human. It would be impossible to see him sitting in this piece of shit diner and eating its food like he actually needed sustenance and didn't subsist entirely off flies that landed on his tongue. And even if he was somehow planning to show, Jounouchi figured he'd be late. It would be like that time he faked them out on Alcatraz and Jounouchi thought he'd killed himself. He never did things on other people's schedule.

Jounouchi almost burst out laughing when he found that Kaiba was already there.

He was sat in a booth, his face cobwebbed in a frown, an untouched cup of tea before him, typing on his phone with a now-familiar rapidity. In the dim light of the party and surrounded by the kind of vain, sick individuals that comprised those parties, he had looked fine. But in the winter light of day he looked faded and ugly. His skin was dry and kind of cracked, especially around the mouth, and his hair was flat. His skin had an unpleasant sweaty sheen. He clearly hadn't slept. Jounouchi felt that now familiar mix of pity and anger, like that he had felt for Yuugi when they first met, so long ago.

Jounouchi swung in across from him. 'Yo, Kaiba.'

Kaiba did not glance up from his phone, but his fingers did pause in their onslaught of the keys. 'You're late.'

Jounouchi pulled a face. 'No I'm not.'

Kaiba wrapped up whatever he was typing, then gently set the phone onto the filthy table. He delicately pulled up the sleeve of his jacket – a deep blue blazer, and expensive – and inclined his wrist in Jounouchi's direction. Jounouchi read the silver and blue face of a KC brand watch.

'It says eight o' clock.'

Kaiba met his eyes with withering disgust. 'It says eight-oh-two. Can you not tell the time? I would have thought for someone who won half his duels with an awful card like Time Wizard you might be familiar with a clock face.'

Jounouchi watched Kaiba say this like he was some kind of talking museum exhibit, like those recreations of medieval peasant life with mechanical mannequins that acted out ancient weird customs and said the same phrase to whomever walked past. He laughed and rubbed a hand over the back of his neck.

'Okay, Kaiba. I'm late. I'm sorry. Can you find it in your heart to forgive me?' He put his hands together in mock-prayer. 'Please, Kaiba-sama. I beseech you.'

'Would you stop embarrassing yourself?' Kaiba's lips contracted like he was trying to suppress a grimace of pain and his gaze flicked from Jounouchi to the window, distracted by something, as he had been the other night when they met. Whatever occupied him, it was far away from their little booth.

'I'm glad you agreed to meet with me,' Jounouchi said, keeping his tone intensely reasonable. He was going to be like a serene meadow full of flowers and pampas grass and shit in the face of Kaiba's jagged hostility. 'I didn't think you'd show.'

Kaiba tossed him the expected smirk, though his eyes were still looking away. 'You certainly do care a lot about what I think of you.'

'I really don't. I'm just... you know, Yuugi used to worry about you, and you didn't deserve it then, and you sure as hell don't deserve my concern now. But your behaviour is totally insane. I mean, you called me at five AM—'

'I called you at five AM because I get up early,' Kaiba said, his voice like sandpaper and his eyes suddenly on Jounouchi, though he was still an infinite glacial distance away. 'Not all of us sleep in until noon like degenerates.'

Jounouchi pursed his lips. He took a breath. Wrong tack. 'Okay. How did you get my number?'

Kaiba was looking out of the window again. 'It wasn't difficult.'

'Be honest, man. It's creepy. I don't mean creepy in the "ooh-big-secret-billionaire-can-do-what-he-wants" kind of way, I mean in the "some-guy-I-don't-really-know-stole-my-number-and-it's-weird-and-gross" kind of way. I don't fucking like it.'

Kaiba's eyes shut for a moment. The moment went on, stretched itself, and Jounouchi waited for Kaiba to open them again. He didn't. Jounouchi glanced around.

'Uh, Kaiba—?'

His eyes opened. 'I asked my security team. It took them twenty minutes, and that includes the time it took them to walk back to their offices and probably chat about soap operas at the water cooler. I imagine your number was publicly listed somewhere in conjunction with your name, probably on a Duel Monsters register.'

'Okay. Thanks for telling me.'

Kaiba was back to looking out the window. Jounouchi was briefly saved from needing to eke their way through their parody of conversation by the appearance of the waiter, a large man with tree trunk forearms.

'What can I get you fellas?'

'I'll have the beef brisket udon and a coke. Kaiba?'

Kaiba performed a weird gesture, partly a headshake and partly the wave of a hand. It seemed to indicate 'nothing'.

'Oh come on, you gotta eat something. He'll have…' Jounouchi scanned the menu and settled at random on some kind of fish stew. He jabbed at it with his finger. 'He'll have that.'

The waiter retreated, and then they were back to the odd stalemate of Kaiba staring out of the window – which was, Jounouchi now fully registered, frosted and filthy and impossible to actually see through – and Jounouchi trying to hack his way through conversation. He tested out the impulse of breaking Kaiba's nose, but now his thoughts were occupied with food it no longer appealed. Something suddenly occurred to him.

'Hey Kaiba, did you ever graduate high school?'

This convinced Kaiba to flick up his gaze to eye contact. 'What?'

'High school. I never saw you in class in the later years. I didn't even know if you were still enrolled.'

Kaiba frowned. 'No, I never graduated. I didn't need to.'

Jounouchi punched the air. 'Sweet! I bested you academically. Never thought I'd see the day.'

'Jounouchi. I did not come here to make small talk with you. I agreed to this meeting because I thought you had some insight to offer on Yuugi's playstyle, which might have a gross overestimation of your abilities.'

'Is that really why you came?'

Kaiba's eyes were blank. 'Of course. What more could you possibly have to offer me?'

Jounouchi did not reply to that. What could he offer Kaiba? Friendship, like Yuugi had tried to offer him for years. But Kaiba had never taken it. He had only wanted a rival, something to define himself against, like the tide against the shore. He barely even treated them all like human beings, and he had treated Jounouchi like the worst kind of shit. He wondered again why he was there.

The waiter brought the food, and Jounouchi remembered. A free meal.

He sank chopsticks into the oily water. 'Well, Kaiba, what do you want to know? I can offer you my opinion on anything Yuugi-playstyle-related, as long as it's to do with the Leo Ricci duel because I haven't read up on anything else he's done in years.' He slurped the noodles thickly. Kaiba's mouth was a perfect horizontal.

'Yuugi's strategy. Your opinions?'

'Yeah, sure. Uh, I read the hand history. I thought Yuugi played well. He always does, you know. The loss was mostly bad luck.'

'Nonsense. He lost because he played weakly.'

'Dude, he played fine. Not everyone can get lucky every time.'

'You think everything is about luck and chance and gambling, don't you?'

Jounouchi chased the ice cubes around his coke with his straw. 'Nah. Just some things. Sometimes the cards you draw, you know, there's an element of luck.'

'Luck is for amateurs.'

'Kaiba, you always play super aggressively. You build beatdown decks. There are other strategies than just brute force.' He rolled his shoulders and felt a good, satisfying crack go through him. 'Have you ever considered… not doing that?'

Kaiba made a noise that could be interpreted as a laugh if you really strained your ears. 'I suppose I could consider rebuilding my decks to more closely resemble yours and learn to enjoy constantly losing.'

'Kaiba, card games are supposed to be fun. Why don't you get that? It's not all about winning and getting somewhere. Losing is not as big a deal as you make it out to be.'

It had seemed for a few minutes that he was making some kind of progress, a sense of throwing some kind of light into the endless, black, hollow, dripping pointlessness of Kaiba's emotional spillway, but that light receded in an instant. The faint playfulness that Jounouchi could almost trace in his features withered, and in its place was only bile. He couldn't imagine what he had said to brook such a sudden shift. Kaiba's gaze slid away again, back through the filthy window, seeing something in the grime and dead insects that Jounouchi couldn't.

'Kaiba?'

Kaiba suddenly met his eyes. 'Do you want to know my net worth?'

Jounouchi shrugged. 'Sure. What is it?'

'Fifty billion USD.'

Jounouchi extracted a curled, black hair from his soup. 'What's one dollar in yen?'

'113 point three, last I checked.'

'Oh. So fifty million times that?'

'Billion, idiot.'

'Oh, right.' Jounouchi fed a fat wad of noodles into his mouth. 'These are so good. They do something to made them extra oily.' He slurped loudly. 'So a billion is ten million, yeah?'

'Are you joking?'

Jounouchi pulled Kaiba's untouched bowl towards him. 'Dude, I make, uh…' He ran some mental math and counted on his fingers. '250 you-ess-dee—', he mimicked Kaiba's accent, 'a week. A million, a billion, you might as well tell me you made sixty pounds of fairy dust this year.'

Kaiba stared through the yellow window. 'I want to hit sixty billion by the end of next year. Have you heard of MonsterWorks?'

'Nope.'

'You wouldn't have. It's a social network and gaming platform.' His knuckles whitened as he tightened them about his cup. 'If it's successful, we'll make billions.'

'Okay. Why are you telling me this?'

Kaiba shook his head, but the gesture didn't seem to be directed at Jounouchi. 'I thought it might be useful for you to educate yourself on developments in the tech sector.'

Jounouchi rolled his eyes. 'Yeah, sure, whatever.' He thought about punching Kaiba again, tumbled that thought around his head, then let it recede. He slapped his palms down on the table in a gesture of getting-things-done. 'Man, what is up with you? Why are you telling me all this? Why are you texting me? Why were you at that stupid party?'

Kaiba regarded him with a level gaze. 'Why are you listening to all this? Why are you texting me? Why were you at that party?'

'I guess we were both there to work, huh?'

'Is dealing a form of work?'

Jounouchi gritted his teeth and swallowed hard. He wasn't going to let himself get baited. 'Yeah, as a matter of fact, it is. I provide a product, people purchase it. People like yourself.'

Kaiba wasn't getting caught in that trap again. 'And what else do you deal?'

'I told you, man, just coke. I haven't even been doing it long.'

'Stop lying to me.'

Jounouchi nearly spat out his drink. 'I'm not fucking lying. What is with you all of a sudden? We were almost having a normal conversation.'

'How are we supposed to have a conversation if you won't stop lying to me?'

Jounouchi thought, briefly, about killing him. 'I'm not, you fucking asshole. Why do you have to do this? Why can't you talk to someone like a normal human being? You have to pick a fight the moment you think you might be on a level playing field with someone.'

'I'm saying this because you won't stop lying to me.'

'I am not fucking lying to you.'

'You dealt methamphetamines as well.' Kaiba spoke with a voice full of soft, even sand. There was something flat in his eyes, like something in there had been blown out.

Jounouchi leaned back. He could hear forks against plates, words coming out of mouths, people being normal and living normal lives. 'Fuck you. I never dealt meth.'

'Liar.'

'I know what meth does to a person, okay? I've seen too much of that shit. I wouldn't sell it to anyone.'

'Did you do freebies, then? I can understand your wanting to offer a family discount.'

A horrible hot disgust and guilt and anger bore through the centre of Jounouchi's stomach.

'You fucking asshole,' he spat. 'You have no idea what you're talking about.'

Kaiba's eyes were two thin black zeroes. 'I know exactly what I'm talking about.

Jounouchi wanted to crack his face into a hundred pieces, wanted to smash his face into the side of the table until his eyes popped, wanted to coat himself in blood. He took a single breath. 'What, you think because you got your dad killed, I must've done the same? Fuck you.'

Jounouchi stood and backed away from the table. Even as he exited the diner, with Kaiba's eyes trained on him, Kaiba did not seem to react. If there was any emotion in there, it seemed to be something resembling victory, though Jounouchi could not for the life of him understand what Kaiba thought he had won.

Jounouchi reached his apartment and stalked into his bedroom and slammed the door. He hadn't taken a second step before he almost slipped on something. He glanced down and saw, with a jolt, Kaiba's face staring up at him again. It was the magazine from earlier. Was the Kaiba he had seen today the same as this spectral thing on the magazine? He picked it up and considered spitting on the cover. The image warped in his tense fingers.

Sugata pushed his door open without knocking. 'Don't make so much noise, man, I was asleep.'

Jounouchi stuffed the magazine into his pocket. 'Maybe if you got out of bed before 9pm you wouldn't have this issue.'

Sugata looked aggrieved. 'Hey, I work the night shift, man. Don't get up in my face about this.' He cocked his head like he was focusing all his energies on figuring out Jounouchi's problem. 'Hey, you still upset about that TV?'

'Maybe.'

'Who bought it? Was it the guy you were yelling at on the phone?'

Jounouchi groaned, ran a hand over his face. 'He's… someone I used to work with.'

'Sounded like he was giving you shit.'

'Yeah, well. He's a jackass.'

'But he bought you a TV.' Sugata picked something out of his ear while watching Jounouchi with fat jaundiced eyes.

'Man, that's part of his jackassery. He wants to rub it in my face that I can't afford one. Or he wants to treat me like his fucking staff.'

'He has staff?'

'Yes, Sugata,' Jounouchi sighed, then rubbed his eyes. Another migraine was uncurling somewhere back there. He inhaled sharply. 'Look, do you want to go out? Hit the bar or something, get wasted? I can't stay in this apartment.'

Sugata shrugged that slow, slurring shrug again. 'You got money?'

'No.'

Sugata looked back to the hallway, back to Jounouchi, back to the hallway. 'You wanna sell the TV?'

Sugata was not a friend. Sugata had no friends, just people he didn't owe. But he paid the rent on time and he kept to himself, and that was all Jounouchi wanted in a roommate. He could have roomed with any number of people; god knows he'd received offers. Once Yuugi and Honda left, Jounouchi started filling his days with his old haunts, the old bars, the gambling dens, the patchwork hellholes that made up his childhood. Once he started showing up there with nowhere else to go, familiar faces emerged like woodworms. That was how he got the job with Takeda. So many people he used to know, or people just the same as those he used to know, boys with hollow eyes and butterfly knives that lived in squats, warehouses, stacks of shipping containers. They had short lives and a high turnover rate, long faces and set jaws, black under their fingernails like tar. Jounouchi was someone like them who had made it past twenty-five and that gave him a mythic quality. But he couldn't slip back into that life, he couldn't be the big brother these kids so desperately wanted. They were all of them drowning and they would drag you down with them. Jounouchi couldn't take care of them the way Yuugi had taken care of him. The best those kids could hope for was to keep their heads above the water long enough for the drugs to kill them.

Then there was the older generation. Men and women who took him for an urisen and offered him security and a warm bed. Every conversation with those people felt like falling down a long black storm drain.

He had refused all that. Instead, he had holed up in a cybercafe for a day and answered every craiglist ad for a spare room he could find. And thus he met Sugata. Too idle, too lacking in not only ambition but any real sense of self to join the gangs, Sugata preferred to spend his days smoking and drinking and playing video games, making his money working the till at the 7/11 night shift. He was an oily mirror of a person: everything bounced or slid off him. He repelled importance, permanence, seriousness. He lit his cigarettes like Honda had, way back when, and perhaps it had been that which pushed Jounouchi to move into the bedroom of Sugata's tiny piece of shit apartment, while Sugata slept on the lounge futon.

They took the TV to the first pawn shop they came across, both of them quickly exhausted by lugging the thing down the street. They cleared a good two hundred thousand for it, which Jounouchi was more than happy with, even though it was easily worth twice that. Carrying the thing around was weirdly humiliating. Then they immediately took themselves to the local rathole bar and put down ten thousand on bottles of rice wine, which they set to drinking like it was oxygen.

Sugata rambled about shit Jounouchi didn't care about, something about some level in a video game with a dragon he had to defeat but couldn't, and Jounouchi stared into the bottom of his glass and hated Kaiba with every sinew, every vessel, every bone that ran through him. The more he drank, the more he hated him. And he hated Yuugi, too. And Honda, and his ugly baby. Kaiba was, really, just the face of a problem. They had all moved on and weren't coming back, and he was left alone, the dregs circling the drain.

But Kaiba was the same. Kaiba was all alone at the top of that tower and hating the closest thing to a friend he had because that was the only way he knew how to do anything. Pity and anger, such familiar mixers, swam against each other. He felt an acidic maelstrom burn through him. He needed to beat the shit out of someone, or for someone to beat the shit out of him. Picking a fight with Sugata would be pointless, the guy would fold like cards, but there were plenty of other prospects in the bar.

'I hate Kaiba Seto.'

'What, the Konami CEO?'

'KaibaCorp. He should have thrown himself off that castle tower when he had the chance.'

Sugata downed his glass. 'I liked Blue Eyes Flight Simulator VII. The one where they teamed up with Google Maps and you can fly around the real world as a dragon.'

'I've never played any of his stupid games. He's just an asshole. I went to school with him.'

Sugata's eyes expanded into perfect round balls. 'Dude, no way.'

'Who cares, you know? Celebrities are all the same. Rich pieces of shit that only care about themselves. I wish he would fucking kill himself.'

'Do you think Steve Jobs killed himself?'

Jounouchi looked at his drinking partner with disgust. 'What the fuck are you talking about?'

'Just because we're on the subject of CEOs dying.'

Jounouchi shook off the comment and downed the last of his drink. He poured another, gulped at that, refilled his glass, then started fingering a strange wad of paper curiosity lodged in his pocket. He clumsily pulled it out and held it before his drunken gaze. It was the magazine he'd stolen earlier. He flipped through to the interview. The words were gibberish: latest in the series, another guaranteed bestseller, captured the hearts and minds of millions, blah blah blah. Then some bullshit questions about Kaiba's personal life that probed for the girlfriend the interviewer was apparently convinced he kept secret. Jounouchi snorted. As if any woman could tolerate Kaiba for more than five minutes. Unless he was paying them.

Jounouchi turned the page and spat sake over the pages. A photo of Kaiba dominated the spread, one the editor must have picked for seeming charismatic and confident, but which to Jounouchi came across as crazed. A spray of female celebrities had been pasted around him, each of their faces against a bright, badly photoshopped background. The page hinted that one of these 'lucky ladies' was unquestionably Kaiba's secret lover and it was just a question now of discerning which. Jounouchi vaguely recognised some of the women – two actresses, two singers, one minor princess – but there in the corner, staring up at him with electric beauty and ferocity, was Mai.

He read the copy before he could stop himself.

'Kujaku Mai! The top female duellist in Japan and a grade-A hottie to boot! Kaiba and this talented babe have been in many tournaments together – was this the battleground that sparked a secret love affair?'

He wanted to throw up. The idea of Kaiba and Mai – the image of Mai, perfect, her soft hair, her sweet breath, against Kaiba's face – the sickness of it – her lips on his, her waist in his hands, the arc of her back beneath him – god, it was obscene. He saw her breasts in his hands, his lips covering them, his long fingers inside her exquisite cunt that he had once loved so much. Nausea roiled through him.

'Hey, Sugata. You think Kujaku fucked her way into Battle City?'

Sugata stared at him uncomprehending. 'Huh?'

Jounouchi jabbed the page. His head swum. 'This chick. Do you think she fucked Kaiba?'

Sugata's expression was as blank as an infinite empty desert. 'Sure. Maybe. Who is she?'

Jounouchi cracked his neck. 'Fucking bitch.' He found his phone, which took longer than it should have, and negotiated it to the table. He clumsily trawled his way through his contacts. The names bled together. There was Kaiba's number, still unsaved. First he hit edit and coded the number to a name: useless fucking loser. Then he composed a message.

'Hey asshole. If you find a spare moment when you're not reliving murdering your dad could you let me know how many women you made fuck you so they could duel in BC? Aside from Kujaku I mean.'

He hit send. The anger filled him hotter than the wine. He needed to do more. This wasn't enough.

He stumbled from his chair. 'I'm going to make a… a fucking phone call, alright?'

Next thing he knew he was outside, not remembering the trip. The present came in disconnected bright bursts. The night was black and thick like thick fingers over his face. He dialled the familiar number.

The phone went to voicemail. Jounouchi listened to the answering message unspool into his ears, then spat on the sidewalk after the tone.

'I don't miss you,' he said. He could taste how his words came out weird and unfocused. 'I don't miss your smell or your hair or… I don't miss any of it. I don't want you in my life, okay? You gotta know that, because I'm not calling because I miss you, I'm…' Vomit tickled his throat and he spat again. 'I'm calling you to let you know you're a bitch, Mai. You're a stuck up, cold bitch. You only get people to like you by… by…' He could sense this was going wrong, that what he was doing had gone off course, like he was on a roller-coaster and the track ahead was broken and yet the carriage kept hurling through the air… 'You have to fuck people to get them to like you, right? Or make them think you're going to fuck them. I bet that's the only way you get into tournaments, because it sure as shit can't be your duelling skills. You cheated your way into Duellist Kingdom, bet you fucked your way into Battle City.' The nausea began to burn through him. He hung up, vomited, vomited again, felt thick undigested udon lodge in his soft palate. He thought about beating Kaiba into messes. He thought about his blood on the pavement, and under his nails, and in his hair. And then he didn't think about anything.