Chapter 5

(Seto hates his life, the universe, and everything. Hope is a zombie attempting to eat his coffee-deprived brain.)

Seto wasn't sure if he'd gone blind or if it was just the blind rage that was turning the world around him white. After one of those suspended moments in which time seems to have stalled, his vision returned and he found himself staring at the smoking hole where his office had been. Half his desk was missing, along with most of the floor. His ceiling had been replaced by a "skylight" that was open to the actual sky. A pigeon fluttered through the opening and came to rest on the melted remains of his computer. He stared at the bird. It stared back at him and then crapped on what was left of his desk.

That summed up Seto's day life quite nicely.

Then it occurred to him that the hole was precisely where Yami had been standing and suddenly things were looking up... Until he realized that if Yami had actually been vaporized, then Seto was the one who was going to have to explain it to Yugi and suddenly things were grim again.

Damn it, Seto thought and dropped his head down onto his desk. He really needed some fucking coffee...

And a wet wipe, since he'd just noticed that his forehead had landed precisely in the pigeon poop.

As it turned out, unlike the majority of Seto's office, Yami had not in fact been vaporized. Unfortunately.

Instead, Seto found him lounging against an intact wall and staring up at Seto's new skylight. Because that was a useful reaction to finding yourself in a half-vaporized office. Too bad he wasn't closer to the hole in the floor or Seto would've been tempted to "accidentally" bump him into it.

"How," Seto demanded, and was gratified when it garnered Yami's attention. "How did you - we - survive that? And don't say 'magic' or I swear I will push you into this hole and laugh maniacally while waiting for you to go 'splat' at the bottom."

Yami just looked at him and raised one eyebrow. It was the most condescending raised eyebrow Seto had ever been subjected to. He almost pushed Yami into the hole just on principle.

Seto spent the next minute and a half trying to form a word that wasn't an expletive in any of the seven languages he spoke.

Finally, he managed, "What the hell were you staring at, anyway?"

Yami pointed upward. Squinting, Seto could just make out something small and shiny perched precariously on the edge of the remains of the roof far above them.

"What is that?" he muttered, mostly to himself.

"That, unless I'm very much mistaken... which I'm not," said Yami, in an unnecessarily smug tone, "is your Coffeenator 3000."

Hope flared in Seto's chest -

- just as the Coffeenator wobbled, tipped, and fell from its ledge.

He made a lunge for it as it sped past him, but Yami - the bastard - grabbed onto Seto and prevented him from following his beloved coffee maker as it plunged to its probable doom in the depths of the Kaiba Corp tower.