Kaiba was perfecting the simulation again.

'Perfecting' wasn't really the right word. It was more like he was in the simulation room, alone, at 3 in the morning, and it was running, and he was staring at it, thinking. So? He had a right to think, at any hour. It was his tech, built out of his own tired brainwaves. He could stand around glaring at whatever he wanted at whatever time of night he chose. Better this way, with no obsequious technicians hovering around to press buttons he was perfectly capable of working himself.

The fake pharaoh stood in an idle pose, saying nothing. It didn't say much, on standby mode. The AI only has so many lines of dialogue, and if you let it run too long it would start to repeat them, which sort of ruined the illusion. He supposed he could turn it on, duel it again, but what would be the point of that? He'd already beaten it. He'd gotten very good at defeating it, in fact. Now he only lost to it about half the time. What was the use, really, of dueling a shadow?

"I know you're still out there." he said, with crossed arms, to no one who could hear him. "I know you can come back. You saved us once, already."

The words settled into the silence, hung in the air, and the thing-that-was-not-the-Pharaoh did not respond. It was a very good simulation. Even idle, the chest rose and fell like it was breathing, locks of hair gently wavering in the breeze. Many people would skimp on such details, but Seto Kaiba never tolerated mediocrity as an acceptable standard. Still, it wasn't perfect. Something was off. The expression, that was it. In standby, the face was neutral, vague, unfocused. No intelligence behind the eyes. The real one would have been smiling at him, that classic smirk just before he played the perfect card. The kind of smile that made his blood boil.

"So why haven't you?"

I know you miss him, was what Mokuba said. Kaiba didn't like that word. It implied a sentimental attachment to the past. Seto Kaiba didn't miss people, or need people. It was not a weakness he considered himself to have. Still, he could concede it was useful to have someone around willing to argue with him. He possessed the modicum of self-awareness needed to know he had a tendency to take things too far. The higher up you got in the world, the fewer people challenged you, which felt victorious in the moment but inevitably led to stagnation. Boredom. Worst of all, complacency. It is important, vital even, to have someone to challenge you. Someone to make you work for victory. Someone to make your heart beat again.

"Are you happy, wherever you are?" A pause. "You can't be. Not without all of your insipid little friends. And not without..." He didn't dare finish the thought. Not out loud.

The light fell through the cathedral windows, scattered into colors, highlighted falling dust. No one understood how difficult it was to do windows well in a hologram. The untrained eye is impressed by elaborate plane crashes and shining dragon scales, but really it's always the little things that were the hardest to simulate. Fluid dynamics. The way grass and loose dirt crunched beneath your feet. Light that refracts through stained glass just right, bounces off the metal on your clothes and dances on the floor when you move. This cathedral had ten windows full of odd shapes and with seven colors of glass, and in every single one the light was perfect. This place was a masterwork. A crown jewel, a spectacular flourish, the holographic zenith, the perfect venue for the two of them. He'd taken hours to animate and render and perfect it. Even if everyone else just saw a mostly empty room.

"Yugi got a goodbye. All of them did." Why was he raising his voice? He shouldn't be so angry. He shouldn't care. "I wasn't important enough to wait for?"

It stared blankly ahead, a copy of a ghost, a simulacrum of a simulacrum, empty eyes with no answers. It had no answers at all, just scrupulously detailed dueling strategies, and even those were hardly a challenge anymore. Really, why had he even made this thing? What was the point? Seto Kaiba, play-acting at victory like a child? It was stupid. Pathetic. Facile. A bad joke. He should delete the code and recycle the assets and scrub the whole thing from the network.

"Did you really think I was just going to just let you run away?" Sharp words, raw and seething, aimed at someone who wasn't there to hear them. "From everything?"

The familiar face just looked at him, ready to duel. It did not move. He wouldn't delete it. He knew he wouldn't. He turned the simulation off.

Kaiba walked through the pristine, glass-and-marble halls of corporate headquarters that morning, trailed by an ever-present gaggle of staffers, including one or two he liked and a great deal more he didn't care for. It happens, once you become too important. It doesn't matter how much you try to avoid it. Bureaucracy reproduces itself. Inevitably, eventually, no matter how many you fire, swarms of interchangeable yes-men cling to you like flies, infest your time like maggots, their precise job titles unclear, ever placative and eager to please and yet demanding more and more of your attention.

They were talking to him, to each other, an irritating, ambient buzz. It was always worse when he was tired. He was always tired, but today he was extraordinarily tired, and he didn't hear even a single word of their chatter. Just undifferentiated, grating noise.

"Isono." he said. They all fell dead silent and at attention, the moment he spoke. "How long until the Duel Dimension System can be used again?"

"It requires an immense amount of power, sir, and the measurements are highly precise. Since there was a forced shutdown, the engineers say almost everything will need to be reset."

"I didn't ask for excuses, I asked how long."

"At least several days. More likely a week."

Kaiba considered, recalculated. He could handle Mokuba, but the system was so fragile. He didn't have time for this. He had a duel waiting for him, boundaries to break, barriers to transcend. He'd been so close! So very, horribly close. The system would work. He knew it would work, all he needed was the chance to try.

The outburst yesterday was gnawing at the back of his brain. Mokuba didn't get like that unless something had been bothering him for a while. Had he not noticed? It was fair to say he'd been busy lately. Less attentive than he should be. He'd been doing something important, though, and it's not like Mokuba needed babysitting anymore. The kid could handle himself, these days.

Maybe he'd been too distant. Too quick to go through with things. A week wouldn't be so bad. This morning he'd done a search and found his locket, lying on top of his dresser, and slipped it into his coat pocket. He must have forgotten to put it on one day, some time ago. That wasn't like him. Yes, he could wait a week. A victory delayed is not a victory denied. One last week in this dimension, to take care of unfinished business.

He didn't notice that they were all hovering behind him, waiting for him to say something. "My schedule?" he prompted.

A young bespectacled man whose name he did not care to know read off a tablet. "There's a board meeting later today, sir, and the VP wanted to meet with you ahead of time to—"

"Good. Cancel it." He waved a hand dismissively, without looking at them. "I have business with Mokuba. Find something useful to do with yourselves."

He made a beeline for his office, and his entourage stopped awkwardly in their tracks, lost and confused without his direction. It would be funny, how lost they were without him, if it wasn't so utterly pitiful. To be left so useless just because someone else walked away.