'Did I do something wrong?'

The bathroom was fluorescent, almost but not quite like sunlight. Jounouchi studied the dirt under his fingernails as he washed them at the sink. He didn't wash them enough. Seemed like the kind of thing Kaiba would comment on. He was always too dirty.

He could feel her hovering by the door, hesitant to be in this male space, and he could see reflected the one hand playing with the dangling button on her blouse. That button, limp and useless, somehow made him in this moment feel worse about this girl than he ever had for Mai. God, at least Mai had her shit together. No one looked after Mai. Her clothes never fell apart.

He still had not answered. He turned off the tap and looked at the girl's reflection in the mirror above the sink.

'No, of course not.' He grinned. He looked possessed. 'Just had a long day. Sorry I wasn't better.'

'It's okay,' she said too quickly, too ready to comfort him, too ready to make everything alright. 'Maybe we rushed things a bit, huh?'

Jounouchi could smell her cheap perfume on his clothes. It made him feel sick. It wasn't her fault. He probably smelled like grave dirt.

'Yeah. Sorry. I should, uh…' He ran a hand through his hair. It was greasy. He could feel the long absence from his apartment, his shower. 'I should get home.'

'Where do you live?'

'Other side of downtown.'

'The smaller hiroba district? I live near there.' She looked hopeful. She looked like she thought this was the start of something new and exciting, and not just another disgusting, pointless conclusion. She was too young. She didn't understand. Jounouchi wanted to punch his face in the glass.

'Ah, right. I've got to…' He searched for an excuse. There wasn't one. He wondered, briefly, if he should bring her home. Or he could go to her place. He thought about waking up with her. She'd make him breakfast. They could go to the park. Next time Shizuka called, he could tell her he had been seeing someone, and no it wasn't serious yet but he was seeing someone. She works in the city. She's really sweet, Shizuka, you'd like her. We're going to get our own place, once I've saved up a bit more. We'll live on her salary until then. We'll get a little one-bed and there'll be room enough for a crib if we decide to have kids… And that would happen eventually. He'd drink too much and not be able to get a condom on, and she'd be too passive to object, and that's how that would happen. That would be how his life would happen.

'I've got to get home,' he said, his eyes avoiding those of her reflection. 'My girlfriend will be up soon.'

He saw the pain and shame and disgust crash though her face. It made him feel sick. Welcome to my world.

'Oh. I'll… I'm sorry, I didn't… I didn't realise.' She waited for him to say something, or for her to think of something else to say, and there was nothing from either of them. And then she left.

Jounouchi stood in the bathroom, staring into the sink, for a good ten minutes until he was sure she wasn't coming back.

He would go home now. He would call Takeda and apologise and try to work something out. He would go back to his apartment and sleep for a bit, then do some of the coke in the morning, then—

Kaiba still had the coke.

Jounouchi swore and did, then, punch the mirror. It didn't crack and his knuckles didn't bleed, which was what was supposed to happen, and so this was another failure in the useless parade of failures that made up his life. He stared at the spot he'd punched. He didn't have the fire to do it again.

He had to get the coke back. There was ¥200,000 worth in that bag; he couldn't leave it here. That was his job on the line, that was next month's rent, food. His life. That's what the next day hinged on, and the day after that, and the day after that…

He retraced his steps with no idea which route he had taken. The place was a maze, every corridor identical the one before it, every empty office filled with the same chairs and the same desks and the same pot plants and the same KC branded corporate art. Stencil prints of dragons, macro photography of circuit boards, all of Kaiba's stupid bullshit he had slathered over his offices. He eventually found the conference room, only able to recognise it from the fact the projector screen was still pulled down and the table shone with whisky spills. Kaiba was gone.

Kaiba's office was the next step. He went out again, up and down more corridors, found one flight of stairs and climbed it and then found another and climbed down. Every wrong turn took him closer to sobriety, and that was the last place he wanted to end up. If he could just find those double doors, if he could just take the right turning…

His buzz had curdled into nausea by time he found his way back and it didn't even occur to him to knock. The doors pushed open easy and Jounouchi blinked for a moment at the open maw of the glass windows, the city crowding below, the distant sound of traffic and helicopters and far, far away people.

Kaiba was here. He was, bizarrely, printing something. He looked gaunt and weird and sick, pale against the abyssal black of the night sky beyond his office. He didn't look up when Jounouchi walked in.

'Forget your drugs?'

'Yeah. Unless you want to take them off me? I'll cut you a deal, 250k for the batch.'

'What would I do with that much cocaine?' His eyes were twitching over the print out.

'Maybe cut loose and have some fun for a change,' Jounouchi muttered to himself, but loud enough for Kaiba to hear. He rubbed the back of his neck and walked up to the chasmic city below. A million miles down. He felt Kaiba watching him, but when he turned back Kaiba's eyes were still on the printer. 'What are you printing at…' He glanced at the wall clock. 'Fucking six in the morning?'

'A notice of termination.'

Jounouchi snorted. 'Who the fuck managed to piss you off enough to get fired in the middle of the night?' But as soon as the words left his mouth he knew.

'Is your memory that poor? Have you forgotten her already?'

'Are you fucking kidding me, Kaiba? Jesus Christ, what the hell did she do?'

'She abandoned her post. And then she fucked you on a desk, which is company property.' The profanity sounded strange in Kaiba's mouth, a weird flower blooming in a patch of dry dirt.

'You're unbelievable, Kaiba. You really are. Just when I think you might not be absolutely, entirely the bitterest, saddest piece of shit I've ever met, you find a way to outdo yourself.'

'She was a poor secretary anyway.'

Seized with petulance, Jounouchi twisted Kaiba's words in his mouth and parroted them back. '"She was a poor secretary, suboptimal performance, immediate termination. God, do you even know her name?'

Kaiba glanced up for the first time since he'd entered and watched him like a cool river. He spoke with a rich, indulgent disgust. 'Do you?'

Jounouchi opened his mouth, closed it. 'Ayako.'

'Wrong.' His eyes dropped again.

'Oh, fuck you. Who cares if she had sex at work? She's working way overtime; just dock her pay or something. You can't fire her, it was my fault anyway. Don't blame her for my shit.'

'Your fault? Was she not consenting?' Kaiba's voice was flat, like none of this mattered to him. 'If that's the case I can have my security team escort you to the police station.'

'Fuck you, of course she was consenting. She—'

'So she is at fault. Thus my decision to terminate her contract is entirely justified.' He leaned against the desk, unreadable, eyes like lead. 'Either you raped her, or it's grounds for termination. Take your pick.'

Jounouchi wanted to kill him. He wanted his hands to swim in blood. 'God. Why are you like this? Why do you have to ruin people's lives for some petty vengeance?'

'I could ask you the same question.' Kaiba looked up at him and his face was totally blank. He took no pleasure in this. It didn't look like he took pleasure in anything. None of this meant anything to him, but he was going to do it anyway. He glanced over to the desk. 'Your bag is there. I suggest you take it and you don't come back.'

Jounouchi wanted to hit him. The urge uncoiled itself within him, whispering fight fight fight in his ear like they used to do in the playground when he roughhoused with a bully twice his size. He wanted to ruin Kaiba's pretty face. But he didn't.

'Hey Kaiba,' he said, and he let the words pour out of him in a polluted sluice. 'Why are you still studying Yuugi? You know he wants nothing to do with you, right? He thinks you're pathetic and sad and weird. He doesn't even think about you any more. You're just some freak he went to high school with, and he's moved on. You're wasting your time with all these stats and late night study sessions. He's over you.'

'Fascinating opinion.' But Kaiba didn't meet his eyes. Even if Jounouchi had no idea of the veracity of his claims, even if he was just saying everything he worried Yuugi thought about him, it was still, really, probably true of Kaiba as well.

'You know I'm right. Where's Mokuba, anyway? Did he abandon you too?'

'Where's your sister?' countered Kaiba, his voice still empty, just going through the motions. There wasn't even disgust in there. 'Stopped taking your calls?'

'What is this, "I'm rubber you're glue"?'

'And your mother? I assume she didn't offer to take you in after you killed your father.'

'You know I didn't kill him. Don't be so fucking obtuse. Just because you killed yours.'

This had no discernible effect on Kaiba. He was probably used to the accusations, or he genuinely didn't care, or maybe he did murder the guy and he still took a kind of sick pleasure in being reminded of it. 'Your cowardice isn't charming. You're weak and pathetic. You always were.' There was the faintest ripple of genuine excited anger to Kaiba's words, like he was desperate to unleash that old fury and he'd forgotten quite how. But it wasn't thrilling any more. It was sad. He stood there and his chest heaved ever so lightly with his angry breaths, and it was just sad.

Jounouchi nested his hands in the pockets of his jeans and looked around him at Kaiba's office, seeing it again, seeing the barrenness of the space. The walls were bare, the desk was empty. The bone white sofa was faintly smudged in one space from his shoes. The room was cold and ghostly; the windows gaped out over the black skyscrapers, high office window lights, tiny people miles and miles away from him. He wondered if you could see his little scrap of downtown from here. He wondered what it looked like from above.

'I'm going home,' he said. 'I think we're done here.' He sounded tired and old in a way he didn't remember.

'Fine. Go.' Kaiba turned away and sat at his laptop, opening it up, probably pretending to work. Jounouchi watched him type. Kaiba would never be the one to turn back and to try again and to make things right; it wasn't in his nature. It wasn't in most people's.

'Okay. See you around.'

He had barely turned to leave when Kaiba spat out a laugh. '"See you around"? What, do you think I'm going to crawl to the other side of downtown and visit you in your vile apartment?'

Jounouchi was almost gone. He paused at the door. 'It's just an expression, Kaiba.' And he left.

Jounouchi's back hit his hard mattress with familiar discomfort as polluted sunlight dribbled through the blinds. He lay there, staring at the stains on the ceiling, the shadeless light bulb, the posters of bands he'd worshipped as a teenager who had long broken up. He rubbed his face as though he could rub away his skin and bare his skull. A hangover was edging its way into his brain, and he felt kind of hot and flu-like, with a swarm of anxiety lodged somewhere in his lower gut.

He checked his phone. Seven AM.

He would sleep. He would sleep and wake up and shower, and he'd feel better maybe. He would go out and make amends with Takeda and get a new job, and then he'd have something to do. Some sense of purpose. And then he could…

He never knew what came after that. Get a job, get paid, and then what?

Jounouchi pushed the thought from his mind by getting up to tweak the blinds, sinking the bedroom into a dim murkiness he could sleep through. He fell back to the bed and positioned the flat, lifeless pillow beneath his head. Things would look better in the morning.

But it was already morning.

Jounouchi slept, woke, slept again. Dreamed of a cave under the ground with skulls in it, walking with Bakura, and Bakura picked up a skull and said, 'You know, I used to know this one. He was a sculptor. Couldn't get it right, though, in the end.' Bakura handed him the skull, but in Jounouchi's hand it was a shiny apple, stolen from the lunch room at school, and he bit it and all his teeth fell out into the sugary flesh.

He woke, his heart slamming in his chest, his skin burning hot. He slept again. Dreamed of his father's corpse. Dreamed of turning the corner into the bathroom and there was Kaiba, washing his hands at the sink, the dead body between them. 'This is your mess,' said Kaiba. 'I'm not going to clean it up. But if you submit the proper paperwork, I will reimburse you for the cleaning expenses.' Kaiba looked at him. 'The deadline is the last Thursday of the month. Don't forget.'

Jounouchi woke again. He breathed in slowly, breathed out. His skin felt cooler than when last he woke. He checked his phone.

4pm, and no messages. Not even Takeda.

Jounouchi considered. He felt like he hadn't woken up yet. He was still asleep, surely, and the morning was still to come. He had been awake for so long, hadn't he, going to those parties, and seeing Kaiba, and that secretary – what was her name? – and he wasn't awake yet…

He hadn't even changed out of his clothes. He had nowhere to go tonight. He had cash, but all of that had to go to Takeda. And he was short. And there was nowhere else for him to go. He knew the ending of every street and the ending of every sentence Takeda or Sugata would ever say to him. It was all already over.

And then, like he was still dreaming, Jounouchi's hand went back to his pocket, like he had déjà vu, and he felt inside the lining, past the feather soft lint against his fingertips, and he moved against something flat and matte shiny. He pulled it out.

The card was immaculate white. A logo he recognised but could not exactly place dominated the bottom right. The bottom left text read a US address and, in the centre, a phone number was haloed by a name and position.

Michael Tanner.

CEO.

Jounouchi tapped his fingertips against the card. His nails were tar-black, somehow, once again. He had only just washed them, hadn't he? In the bathroom, with Mai — no, Ayako. She would be alone now. She would be hating him like Mai did, like Mai had probably done in secret for months before she left him. He deserved that. He was nothing. He would never be anything. He never had been.

The card was, if nothing else, a possibility. And he had so few of those. What other possibilities remained to him? Kaiba, curled over his laptop, nothing but the whetstone of his work to keep him alive. Ayako, maybe crying somewhere, maybe sharpening a switchblade for him, it didn't matter. Takeda, with his throat full of sand, the mummy, who would come for him one day in the night, and put his fingers around his throat.

His phone screen gleamed at him as he dialled. Tanner was Kaiba's Takeda. Tanner was Kaiba's death.

It was ludicrous, calling an American billionaire who had given him his business card in a moment of intoxicated camaraderie, and expecting an answer. No one was that lucky.

I'm that lucky.

'Hola.'

The voice was old, rough, smoke-wretched like Takeda's was, like his father's had been, like his would be one day. Jounouchi recognised something so intimate and primal in that wasted quality. It was like decay itself was winding into his ears and scratching at him. It was like home and it was like dying. He missed his dad.

'Yo, Micky, it's Jounouchi.'

The voice at the other end breathed in and out, trying to place him, confused but not questioning why. The kind of man that was comfortable with confusion, who lacked humility and any capacity for self-doubt.

'The coke guy,' Jounouchi clarified. And then, with bile and irony, 'Kaiba's friend.'

'Ah-h-h!' The thin sound of breathing in and out like around a cigarette. 'Yeah, Jo-Jo. You got me at just the right time, kiddo, I was just…' The words cascaded on too quickly for Jounouchi to follow, that broad accented American around which he had watched Kaiba tiptoe, like someone eating fast food with ivory chopsticks. 'You get me? You understand?'

'Eh, say it again?'

The man laughed and said something foreign and abrasive and rude that made Jounouchi feel the same way Kaiba made him feel, alone and hated and wrong and weak. 'Bring me that good stuff, I'll text you an address.' And he hung up, and that was that. Jounouchi stared at his phone for a moment. Maybe this was it. Maybe this was the way out. He'd be the intermediary between Takeda and a ring of billionaires and he'd make enough money to leave this awful town and he could find somewhere warm in the sunlight…

Jounouchi hurled himself off the mattress. He needed to eat. He used to love food. He used to be so hungry all the time for everything, just trying to stuff life down his throat, and now hours could slip by and he would forget his meals. bought three packets of chips from the vending machine downstairs and stuffed them into his pockets, remembering violently the apple in his dream, and feeling like vegetables would rot if he put them to his lips.

He rode the underground to the address Tanner had given him, unsure what to expect, realising he might be walking into something different, something violent. Tanner was dangerous. He'd known that from the moment the man had walked into the room, that casual comfort with everybody's hyper-aware anxiety, from the way he talked about women, from the broken glass in his smile. The address was a part of downtown he didn't know and the streets were empty, not filled with the lost and homeless like the warehouse district but totally barren. He saw a security guard pacing outside one building and a dog watching him from an alley. He watched the dog back. It was big and black, not the kind of mutt you'd expect to find running loose downtown, and it looked at him with hunger and recognition.

Jounouchi walked away from the dog and prayed that it didn't follow him.

The address brought him to a flight of concrete steps that took him down to a jet black door. He could hear the beat of weird electric music on the other side of it. He knocked.

The door opened. A strange pin-thin man with long gleaming hair pulled into a ponytail loomed out of the darkness. A pencil goatee was sketched around his mouth. His lips retracted to reveal meth addict teeth. Jounouchi felt like he was going to die.

'Tanner's boy.'

'Uh.' There was an ambiguity in the categorisation that Jounouchi didn't like, but that could just be his paranoia eating at him. 'Yeah. Is he…'

The doorman jerked his head. Jounouchi made out a tattoo on his neck: an uyoku dantai gang symbol, the kind he'd once learned, long ago, to avoid at sight. Sensing his hesitation, the doorman bared his teeth again, his eyes pulsed, and he wiggled a skeletal finger down into the dark corridor beyond.

'First on the left.'

Jounouchi stepped into the dark and the door slammed behind him. Bakura handing him a skull.

He walked gingerly along, one hand trailing the wall, until his eyes adjusted and he could make out the thin light creeping under a door on the left. He could see nothing else. The sound of music grew louder, hollow thumping music that felt like having a panic attack, and voices. One he recognised.

He opened the door.

Tanner's voice exploded into the air like a grenade and the music washed over him.

'And I fucking swear, I said to him – and you know I'm a joker, you know me, Han – I said that I wouldn't take his offer, and that night I took his wife instead. And she cried like it was Christmas.'

The room was dark in every corner, with luminescent neon blue bulbs blooming like fat mushrooms on the tables. It vaguely resembled a strip club, but there was only one woman on the stage, and there was nothing erotic about the strange swaying dance she did around the single pole. The area in which he stood was separated from the rest of the club by a rail and two security guards. The music crowded into his ears like maggots.

'Ah!' Tanner noticed the new guest and rose to greet him. He wore a pale blue suit with a black shirt, his neck and wrists emblazoned in jewellery, like he'd been sleeping in a coffin in Miami since 1984 and had only just emerged. Four other American men sat around him, three in suits, one in a leather jacket whose skin crawled with tattoos Jounouchi wished he didn't recognise. Tanner smiled at him like a rotting sunflower. 'Jo-Jo! My saviour. Oh-hi-yo!' He pulled Jounouchi into a hug and his skin was sticky. Tanner clapped his shoulder. 'You know, Jo-Jo, I've been in this awful fucking country for three days and I can't score a single ounce of anything stronger than fucking Stevia.'

Jounouchi grinned at him with all his teeth and all his soul. 'Here to help,' he said, and hated how the English felt in his mouth. All the men laughed and he wanted to throw up. He realised he had no idea how to ask for payment. But Tanner was a demon with a strange mercy.

'Pay the kid. Whatever the fuck five grand is in this country's bullshit currency.'

One of the men who had 0911 and 1488 emblazoned on his knuckles handed Jounouchi an envelope. Jounouchi took it, dumb, and looked inside. It was too much. He said nothing. He slipped it into his coat and nodded his thank you and wondered if he could leave, if the throat he'd crawled through would be so kind to cough him back up again…

'Sit down, Jo-Jo! So good to have you and Kaiba to keep me company again. I feel really welcomed.'

Jounouchi was sure he had misheard. This was impossible. Real life wasn't like this.

He hadn't noticed him at first. Kaiba was leaning back in the deep of the shadows, barely visible, a pale glyph. He stared at Jounouchi. Jounouchi stared back.

Oh god, Jounouchi thought, we've died. We've died and this is hell. That's what's going on. We're in hell.

And then he thought, You were in my dream. And he knew Kaiba was thinking the same thing.

Jounouchi sat. Kaiba was wearing those black leather or latex style trousers he had once so favoured, and his shirt was a dark silk blue. But his face was drained. His eyes tracked Jounouchi like one of them were prey, and Jounouchi did not know which.

Jounouchi had never wanted to leave a place more in his life. A woman who was, he realised with a start, entirely naked brought him a glass of champagne. A confused spike of lust jumped within him, and then Jounouchi wanted Mai to hold him so bad he thought he might cry. He drank quickly. The woman on stage below was swaying like she was underwater, back and forth, back and forth, her skin glittery, her eyes wide and unseeing. He felt vaguely like he might be having a heart attack.

He couldn't follow the conversation. Kaiba said nothing. Tanner talked until he got bored, then the other men would exchange clipped sentences about owing money and ex-girlfriends and child support and visa problems, and then Tanner would bring himself back into the fray and the other men's conversation would recede politely.

Then Tanner said something vile and dumb and racist to Kaiba, only the gist of which caught Jounouchi's ears, like barbed wire. A weird kind of inward smile crawled up the corner of Kaiba's mouth and disappeared into his face, and for a moment Jounouchi thought the joke had been at his expense. But he could read from Tanner's jackal laugh and the way he pointed the ashy cigarette at Kaiba that the joke had been at, not with, Kaiba, and yet here was Kaiba smiling at it, if only for a moment, in that ghostly way. Tanner hit Kaiba on the back like they were friends, which they weren't, and suddenly Jounouchi felt like there was something even worse and other going on here that didn't belong to him.

And then an idea struck him. An awful idea. And it was only in his head because Tanner was like Takeda, who was like his dad, who was like a legion of dead old men that had raised them and used them and wrung them out for money and coke and love.

He tapped Tanner's arm and spoke his first words since entering this place. 'Yo, did you know Kaiba Gozaburo?'

The leech smile dropped dead from Kaiba's mouth. His eyes were full of ice.

'Fuck yeah, I knew Gozaburo. We went back to the old days. Fuck! I miss that old bastard. Threw himself out of a window. How does a thing like that happen?'

Jounouchi nodded along. He could feel Kaiba watching him. 'My dad died this year,' he told Tanner, imparting this information like it was just the kind of thing you told people like him. Like you'd list off your receipts to the reaper.

Something empty that had the shape and consistency of compassion settled in Tanner's features like the ash shapes of Pompeii. 'Sorry to hear that, Jo-Jo! Kaiba, how old were you when old G kicked it? Seventeen?'

'Fifteen.'

'God! You were so young back then. I remember those days so clear. Just like yesterday. Days go by!' Tanner pulled out a matte black credit card and neatened up a line. 'Same as it ever was.'

He offered the coke to Jounouchi and Jounouchi, his hands moving like in a dream, took the card and did a line and leaned back. His heart soared and his blood jumped around his body. Kaiba stared at him.

'Want to duel?' he shouted in Japanese across the table. Kaiba didn't respond. Jounouchi shrugged. 'Your loss.'

'I made microchips for G,' said Tanner, speaking in that slow exaggerated manner he always did to Jounouchi. 'For weapons. Big ones. But Kaiba junior wanted to make toys and video games, and they needed microchips too, so here we still are. More money in the military if I'm honest, but I value loyalty.' He breathed in cigarette smoke and his mouth poured it over Jounouchi. 'Are you loyal, Jo-Jo?'

Jounouchi thought of Yuugi in a burning building. He thought of Yuugi on the other side of that anchor. He thought of Yami Malik's screaming, laughing face as he hit unconsciousness. Yes, he was loyal.

'Always.'

Tanned laughed with the sound of a sinkhole collapsing and slapped Jounouchi's thigh and said something so relentlessly fucking stupid and racist that Jounouchi felt it slide right the way through him. He accepted another glass of champagne from the naked woman and watched, unfeeling, empty, as a woman (the same one?) got down on her knees in front of Tanner and took his half-hard cock into her mouth. Jounouchi watched this and frowned, not really sure what he should feel, and he looked to Kaiba for some kind of hint as to the etiquette. Everything was operating on so many levels of absurdity above real life that he was fairly sure he was asleep again.

But Kaiba was standing, leaving the table. Jounouchi stood as well, at least free to wander without Tanner stopping him, and followed the familiar childhood figure through the club into the bathrooms. Once the door shut behind them Kaiba turned to look back, his face annoyed, disgusted, sallow, the music barely muffled.

'Why are you here?' said Kaiba.

'Why are you here?'

'I'm using the bathroom, if you don't object.'

'I mean, why are you in this club?'

'I'm here on business.'

'No you're not. You're lying.' Jounouchi breathed in sharply. 'We're in hell, that's what this place is. We died and we're being punished. That's what's happening. I figured it out.'

'We're not in hell.'

'You look dead.'

'Have you seen what you look like?' said Kaiba, suddenly savage, and piano wire fingers curled around Jounouchi's arm and flipped him to face the mirror behind them. Jounouchi looked. Two things that used to be boys looked back at him.

Jounouchi yanked his arm away. 'Don't touch me.'

He wanted to hit him. He wanted to hurt him. If he killed Kaiba, then the link would be severed and he would be free. It would be over. He'd wake up at Yuugi's on the floor, and it would be a school night, and he still hadn't done his homework…

'I bet Yuugi is delighted to be free of you,' said Kaiba, his voice strained over the music, which was screaming, and Jounouchi felt that anger heating within him. He remembered calling Mai a bitch. He remembered his dad dead on the floor and Bakura, again, handing him a skull.

He hadn't expected Kaiba to hit him first. It didn't hurt; it was an open slap, unpractised, awkward and clear. The beat of the slap quietened in the air and Kaiba stared at him, something like surprise in his face, and Jounouchi hesitated. In that moment he considered if Kaiba was, really, worth it. Was Kaiba worth a street-brawl with Honda, roughhousing with kiddie gangs who were playing dress up for when they dropped out of school and had to make the gangs their life? Or was Kaiba worth killing?

In some deep black part of him, two great cogs shifted and a decision was made. Jounouchi's shoulder dropped and his fist went forth. There was a crack. Kaiba's face erupted in red.

Jounouchi blinked and the world resettled.

Kaiba was slumped on the floor. His expression was topaz and marble, blue and green and hard, and his eyes were white magma. Blood dripped from his face.

'I'm going home now,' Jounouchi said. 'I'm done. This is finished.'

He left the bathroom. The woman on the stage was still dancing, watching him, eyes black like that dog, and he knew Tanner was watching him too. He was certain as he walked through the club that every person inside was watching him, jealous and hungry, ready to eat. He kept his eyes to the floor and walked through the club, the awful music swallowing up any speech, any approaching footsteps.

He reached the door and shoved through into the black corridor beyond, finding his way through the blindness purely by memory. He found the exit and yanked at it, freeing himself, spilling dismal wet daylight into the club.

He had forgotten about the doorman, who was shuffling a deck of cards. A deck of – Duel Monsters? Jounouchi could have sworn that's what they were, but he didn't turn back.

'We hope to see you again, Jo-Jo,' called the doorman, but Jounouchi didn't reply. He pushed out into the outside where it was raining hard and cold like it had been that night he first met Kaiba. He was out. He wasn't in hell yet. He wasn't dead yet.