Title: Le Seuil
Author: Lysander (Fairly Grimm)
Pairing: Yami no Yuugi/Seto Kaiba
Rating: T, PG-13
Summary: Incredibly late sequel to "Le Jardin," WIP, eventual YYxSK. The sky's cleared, his clothes are dry, what did or didn't happen in the park is out of his head -- Kaiba should be in his element, but something's throwing him off, and he won't tolerate that.

...It's been about six months since I promised a sequel in a few weeks. Don't ask how that happened. At any rate, I plotted out twenty-four chapters, got twelve in before deciding the project needed to be shredded apart, and some massive overhauling later, here's the result. Or, the first chapter of it. Expect the next in a week or two (really, this time), assuming I don't drift off into the ether again. And don't worry: set up chapters, bane of my existence, will be over with shortly.

Ridiculous amounts of love to Mechante Fille for betaing and Raventide for scribbling, Analyzing, and poking me into actually posting this instead of just letting the chapters set around and collect dust.

01: Some Boy Tarted Up in a Business Suit

By Monday morning, the skies had cleared and the familiar smell of fresh revenues printouts and fresher coffee had broken the spell of Sunday's rain.

The day before had passed in a blur, something saturated and slightly numb; Kaiba had walked all the way home from the park before he realized his mobile was waterproof, that he should've just called his driver. From that realization he'd staggered to bed, and he lay there in a stupor, staring at the ceiling until he could feel -- although he'd made sure that his blinds cut off all light -- that the sun had set. Then he finally slept, and the vague, confusing dreams that followed weren't much different from what he'd been experiencing in waking hours. The whole day was a distant, dull fantasy that played incessantly in the back of his head but was no more real to him than a ghost's kiss on the back of his neck.

Hardly a surprise that he wouldn't retain something so obviously too surreal to have meaning.

Today, though, today was a new day, untouched by the implications of the recent past, and after taking Mokuba out to a local restaurant for breakfast before school -- a small unspoken thank-you, as he knew it had to have been his little brother's doing, that no one disturbed him on Sunday when he was so obviously out of sorts -- Kaiba was firmly ensconced in his office, flicking through the latest reports. It was very easy to purge the scent of rain with scalding hot coffee.

Kaiba didn't have much to do with the various sales departments, as he was far too important to waste his time on paperwork, but if there was one set rule for business at Kaiba Corp, it was that everything, everything, right down to the most minute detail, was subjected to the scrutiny of the meticulous CEO. His company was hardly a one-man empire, but Kaiba made sure that nothing escaped his attention, or more importantly, his control. If anyone was considering another takeover, they were going to have a hell of a time. He'd poured everything he had into this company, and nothing was going to interfere with Kaiba Corp's steady recovery from the…Doma incident. Maintaining focus at a time like this was crucial.

And yet…something nagged at him, put his laser focus off by just a touch. It wasn't enough to slow him down any, as he mentally summed columns and checked the accuracy of the profit reports, making a little red tick in the margin as he noticed a slight discrepancy -- probably the east Niigata branch, a usual trouble spot; he'd make a call to accounting in an hour or so to determine who needed firing, although he already had his suspicions as to the culprit, and -- his train of thought had already switched rails.

Focus.

All that aside, it tugged at him, like an irritating half-remembered melody with words he could only guess at. At the same time, though, the tune was…compelling, and he wanted to know where he'd heard it before, if only so that he could properly exorcise it. Every time he thought he'd caught on to something familiar, it slipped through his fingers like smoke, and he was left with no idea of what he'd been searching for. It was like being stared at, except that he could never seem to turn his head quickly enough to catch the culprit at it, and he was all alone.

Something was amiss, and that was intolerable.

Kaiba tucked away the revenue pages, absently giving his red pen a click, and moved on to spending, trying to shake the italics out of his head. Oh, corporate spending, and a weekend report, as well: always such a predictable mess. How those idiots managed to make any progress at all was mind-boggling. He'd fire them, but that'd only generate more of a mess, and these particular pages of his daily breakdown were something that demanded his complete attention nowadays without the added stress. He frowned, and wondered when exactly he'd started caring about spending reports anyway. While he'd only been minorly concerned with the amount of capital that went into various projects before, lately every penny had been something to hold on to, and the fact that he cared without know why bothered him.

There was the new European Kaiba Land to think of, naturally, and while he didn't truly mind the slight dip he'd noticed in their second quarter profits as he poured more funds into the place, Kaiba didn't want any slack in his company at a time like this. Kaiba Corp was recovering, was definitely going places, and something as stupid as capital wasn't going to get in the way of that. It was a good enough reason, plausible excuse for the amount of time he was spending running through columns of numbers, doing busywork. After all, he wasn't going to tolerate any sort of negligence -- or for that matter, whichever snake in the east Niigata branch had been skimming off the top of company revenue.

Actually, that was really beginning to get to him; he felt his fingers close too tightly on his pen, and relaxed his grip almost forcibly.

It wasn't that he expected honesty and integrity from his employees, and certainly, if any of them were dishonest and corrupt, it had to be the people in revenue. Kaiba knew and respected the fact that business was all a matter of avoiding being backstabbed while you waited for your own carefully executed coup d'etat to come through. He'd spent more than one evening lately wining and dining some of the tech industry's most accomplished liars, and before the table was ever set, it was mutually acknowledged that all parties involved were out solely for their own gain.

But something about the nature of this transgression, the fact that there was some balding, middle-aged coward hiding behind a Kaiba Corp desk, engaging in petty theft against the very company that in another ten years would be paying out his pension... Dishonesty was of no consequence, but disloyalty was an entirely different matter, disgusted him in a way that usually nothing did. He made a mental note to drop by the Niigata headquarters for a little unannounced evaluation and find just which bastard had been shorting the company a few thousand yen a week, see that he was dealt with personally. He tolerated some things, knew the nature of the beast he sought to tame, but petty thievery was not among those.

Petty thievery.… This entire affair was petty. He was sitting in his office, eyes glazing over as he scanned computer printouts of money he didn't particularly care about. His mouth felt dry and tasted like nothing. Copper, though, once he bit his tongue. Why? Why any of this? Somewhere on the smooth line from point to point, he'd lost track of the purpose. Did he have an agenda any longer? His head felt strange and his eyes didn't quite focus. Mental disconnect, rather: what he saw was meaningless, and he couldn't think about anything else.

Kaiba set down his pen. It landed beside his papers with a clack, rolled in lazy circles towards the edge, fell -- almost drifted -- off his desk, clattered on the floor, slid across the tile, connected with the wall, reversed course, drifted backwards…stopped; he watched, and watched, and watched, and stopped. He blinked. He reached down, picked the pen up, and set it firmly on the desk again. To his eyes, it was motionless; in his head, it was spiraling again, gliding in uneven curves across the floor. Why?

Why any of this?

Why was he even thinking about this?

His head hurt, or maybe it felt numb.

That was it; there was definitely something up. There had to be something else going on, something distracting him. No valid reason to blame this on anything other than chance, but he didn't trust chance, and he'd learned early on to go with his gut feeling. Preoccupation and inobservance could be costly mistakes. He was on edge, and not about to dismiss it as nothing, not until he could be sure. He'd seen enough competitors go down, and hard, just because they were a little too hasty to write him off as nothing to worry about, just some boy tarted up in a business suit, Gozaburo's pet.

At the time, it'd bothered him, but when he'd matured a bit, it'd become clear that however irritating it was to be classed as a useless pawn, at best a pretender to the throne, it was a definite advantage. He'd always been able to taste the change in the atmosphere when his eyes met his enemies' and he could feel the unusual shade of blue unnerving them, could sense their misgivings as they scanned his face, eyed him up and down, and weighed that against what they'd heard about him. It was the moment they shrugged it off, eased their defenses, that damned them.

Kaiba wasn't about to ease up on his own.

Even if his mind was hazy and his thoughts were spinning slowly down to die.

Focus. Concrete world, digital mind. Connections: perfect line, no curves, straight, point to point to point. No interference. Nothing extraneous.

To attack, one targeted order first. Order had to be preserved.

Kaiba scanned his desk suspiciously, taking in slowly the objects that sat on it, looking for anything that might've been tampered with. Mokuba's picture was in its proper place, beaming at him the way only a child could smile. His coffee was a bit cold, but just where he'd left it, seven centimeters to the right of his elbow, four centimeters down from his keyboard. His keyboard, too, was exactly where it ought to be, although that was unsurprising, considering that it was built into the desk. Kaiba tapped the key to turn his personal computer on, and its screen slid up out of the desk right on cue as an automated voice greeted him brusquely. Quickly he logged in and skimmed through his files. Nothing seemed wrong there.

He moved on to his phone and intercom; he heard his secretary's professionally cheerful chirrup without delay, and when he dialed one of Kaiba Corp's many test numbers, the phone connected fine. He went so far as to call his own home number to make sure that it wasn't a closed circuit within the company, but Mokuba's voice on the answering machine dispelled that fear. It had to be something else….

There! He snatched up his stapler, previously ignored at the edge of his desk, and snapped it open, dumping out the staples and tossing it aside. It clattered; he ignored it; his attention was elsewhere. One staple, two, four, five, ten, twenty, forty, fifty, sixty, sixty-one, sixty-two, sixty-three staples. There had been sixty-four at last count and--! And he'd used one himself, he realized, not ten minutes earlier, to put his printouts together.

Kaiba's breath left him in a whoosh. He was going mad, clearly, letting this all get to him. He retrieved the stapler from where it'd landed, refilled it carefully, counting the staples again as he did so, just to be sure.

A quick check also confirmed that his pen jar still contained nine pens (four black, two red not counting the one still spinning in its circles in his head, two blue, one fountain pen for signing documents) and two mechanical pencils. Nothing seemed to have been moved. Not that anyone who was intelligent enough to break into his office should've been stupid enough to leave something obviously disturbed, but it was a small reassurance. Narrowed the list of possible suspects, anyway, if he ever came up with one.

One more set of values out; that much closer to finding the final solution.

He checked the desk drawers after that, and even got down underneath the desk to pop out the hidden tape recorder and make sure it was still functioning, but that was where he stopped. This was all becoming ridiculous. It wasn't worth removing the wall panels to see that the cameras and recorders installed by security were still online. He didn't tend to use them unless he had company he wanted to keep an extra eye on, anyway.

Besides, the last time he'd tried to get into the equipment behind the walls, he'd gotten a nasty shock from a new security measure that his advisors had neglected to mention. It wasn't worth sitting in the infirmary being gawked at again, not when the memory of the tabloid report -- CEO of Kaiba Corp Being Treated for Electricity Burns After Breaking into Own System -- was still so fresh. The room was safe, he decided.

Safe enough. Nothing was ever truly safe.

Whatever this was, this thing that was bothering him so, he concluded, it was surely more in his head than his office. But even having settled that…Kaiba couldn't seem to concentrate, to continue summing the columns and checking places to shave off a few million yen a week. He set down his pen momentarily, shutting his eyes and beginning to massage his temples; usually all it took was a simple in-out of breath and a bit of focus. Only an amateur would get thrown off by something like his, and Kaiba was hardly that.

It was just a headache, a momentary lapse; it had to be.

He opened his eyes. The spending report was suddenly in some foreign language -- and evidently not French, German, English, Korean, or Latin, because he understood those, and this one made no sense whatsoever. It was like his brain was going numb; whatever it was, it was quite effective in keeping him from getting any work done. How could he be slipping like this? He didn't have time for this sort of distraction! There wasn't time for any of this.

Kaiba scowled in irritation, but he knew his own limits, that he wasn't going to make any progress like this. How could he make progress, with existential gibbersh running round with spinning pens in his head? All tied up in one great, shifting circle like an ouroboros -- ultimate symbol of futility, in his mind, not continuity. And where was he? Lost somewhere in the center? Unacceptable.

He tapped the intercom, and didn't wait for his secretary to answer. "Fujiwara, cancel my three o'clock with Kobayashi. If he argues, tell him we're going public with the our little secret, and have security deal with him. I'm leaving; call Isono and have a car waiting out front."

Without bothering to hear the concerned response, he switched off the intercom and flipped his briefcase onto the desk. Methodical, and that was comforting: he spun the combo lock, slid his printouts inside the case, then locked it shut again. Work could be dealt with later, and maybe it was even better that way, as he could finish it off it while Mokuba did his schoolwork. Grabbing his coat, Kaiba headed to his personal elevator and punched in the button for the ground floor.

Whatever it was that was bothering him so much, it didn't leave, and even staring through the tinted windows of his limousine at a dimmer, more distant, less complicated version of reality, the whole world just seemed beyond his reach. And that thing, that thing in the back of his mind that kept him from being able to…to function, that thing was still there, a nameless whisper in a tongue he couldn't speak. He'd forgotten something, lost something important, and there didn't seem to be any hope of pulling it back again.

And then it strolled by on the sidewalk, suddenly giving a name and face to everything Kaiba had wanted to dissect and understand, and there it was, that had to be the tugging in the back of his mind, standing on the street with a grocery bag under its arm. It looked at him with curious eyes.

"Stop the car."