OH MY GOODNESS GRACIOUS! It has literally been forever and a day since I've posted anything for this story. However, since its a present to my sister, I really wanted to try and finish it, plus I promised not to abandon the project. Also, I've been writing a lot more for this story recently, so if I get reviews I can push through some more consistent updates :) Hopefully some people are still checking this out, and thanks to any and all new faces that came during my leave of absence. life was a little crazy this last year, but I'm finally better and writing again. Hopefully you guys like it!
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Chapter Nine: Interactions and Collisions.
Kaiba stared unflinching at the front door, feeling the in sync flutter of his lashes against each other, as the echoing of Joey's footfalls grew more and more faint. The cigarette that he'd previously been struggling to light now sat stunted and extinguished under an unbroken inch of ash, and the stale, bitter scent wrinkled the CEO's nose distastefully. Somewhere in the back of his thoughts he was still trying to retrace how he'd begun a negotiation with his CFO, in regards to an over sea's shareholder, who they had been courting for months, with this big investment deal—only to find himself the one courted after unknowingly settling upon Joey's terms of agreement. He was dizzy and feeling just a little sick as his thumb and forefinger rose to the bridge of his nose. I needed to secure our sales for this quarter, Kaiba grumbled, not a new friend to play with.
In truth, the company was starting to slip up without his presence there to re-enforce the work environment, but there was little and less he could do about it from here. Still, however, there was admittedly some sort of spark left behind from this latest development. It lingered almost nostalgically, if you will, even long after the length of hallway outside his door had grown silent. It wasn't like him to put something as fruitless as Joey in front of his livelihood; and yet here he found himself sliding shamelessly back into his oldest rivalry. He certainly hasn't changed a bit, his regarded: Outspoken, overconfident, and too quick to ever realize that Seto was already two steps ahead. Albeit, he himself was getting a little rusty, but what better way to sharpen his edges back up than with a little practice? That's all Joey ever really was, right? –Just practice.
Wheeler may be feeling high and mighty he dismissed the lingering suspicion of inferiority, but I wouldn't expect anything less from someone who thinks they've already won. In that instant though, a dull wave of heat flashed across his face, and his mental monitoring system played back Joey's closing argument. "If you can't handle that type of commitment then you could've just said so. I mean, its not your fault that you're too scared to take a chance, but I never thought the Great Seto Kaiba was such a coward…" The cool, cocky, confidence of that infamous lazy smirk had caused his blood to boil, but in the end the blonde had done nothing more than provoke him—and that was the point, wasn't it? You couldn't practice until you found a fight, and what better use could the CEO have for this uncertainty than to twist it and give it shape?
It was certainly far from the solution he'd set out to find, but it became his only solution the second Joey stepped through the door. Business is doing well enough to take a hit; he reassessed spreadsheets of their numbers in his head. I'll let Rob handle this one; he's twice my age but doesn't have even half my experience. It will be a good move for the company he decided strategically, and an even better move for me….
"I do need this," the brunette sighed after contemplating Joey's accusations unwillingly; but the other boy had not been so far off from the truth. Kaiba was as bored as he was friendless, but it wasn't the latter that concerned him; no, he had come into this world alone and he'd always known he would leave in the same way. The former however had been as infectious as madness—yet now, here was Wheeler, clear as day, offering Seto a cure. This perfect outlet to remedy the spark in his chest, and channel the flow of electricity onto a conductor; and he could think of no better opponent than the one he'd been through the most with. Yugi was always acclaimed as his rival, but he'd earned such titles only by association. Those losses served merely as black and purple bruises on the CEO's ego, but every reoccurring duel with Joey was like a fist crashing into his face and left the taste of blood in-between his teeth. He reigned victorious practically by default, but then there was Joey again, standing in his way like he always was. There had never been any humility or advantage to their duels, so why did Kaiba always find himself agreeing to them?
Even half a world away, and it still wasn't far enough to change that fact. The game was foreign, but the brunette accepted it all the same. There was just something about it, something nostalgic that withdrew his hesitation to proceed. Perhaps it was the evidence of how dramatically ironic their chanced collision was that was lulling Seto back down into himself, but Kaiba knew better than to believe that.
He was just too smart not to see through such obvious lies—even the ones he told to himself; but that knowledge he'd acquired came with a price, and the price of ignorance had cost Kaiba the chance of bliss. It was too funny, really, whenever he stopped to think about it—because he'd spent a lifetime running away from what would always be apart of him: The Truth. By itself, it almost sounds innocent, but once you took a bite, you were bound to it. The consequence of knowing was like being permanently indebted to acknowledgement, and Seto had never forgotten that since he himself once dared to understand.
Melting backwards into silky sheets, Kaiba lazily reached out to pull an empty glass closer. It must have been sitting next to his alarm clock for days judging by the flat smell of stale whiskey, but it would suffice to serve as an ashtray all the same. As a rule of thumb, smoking was usually prohibited past Seto's bedroom door because he preferred to keep his sheets free of ashes, and his suits smelling clean with a spurt of cologne as opposed to carcinogens. One cigarette wont hurt anything though, he justified to himself, taping the glowing tip against the inside of the glass, well, besides my dishes that is, he observed as the clump of ash broke the thin, discolored layer of film and drifted apart as it sank and dissolved.
He turned away from the putrid, half-empty-ash-cup with an unburdened sigh though, and chose to focus on the one opposite his cigarette hand that was still more than half full. The drink was well deserved after the night he'd been having, and the pleasure of a well awaited cigarette was too sweet to deny himself. The simple things, the CEO shut his eyes. The things that make the most sense without demanding any words at all. Although he knew that most were quick to call him flashy, extravagant, or even vain; he offend wondered if it would amuse them to know how he used them purely to protect himself; or if, instead, would they pity him, and say it wasn't his fault? That was stupid too though and he knew the people and the place he once adopted as his own would never bear any love for him. I was only six, he thought sadly, I didn't…understand. .
They would need to know him to love him, but Seto had given up that truth to create a false one in its stead. He knew it could never replace reality, but it would bend and distort perception; so he wore it just like skin, or maybe it was just his features, like a mask he wore so long, he could no longer find where the farce ended and where his face began. That part wasn't always as bad as it sounded though, it wasn't like he had ever really gone anywhere; they had just given him a different name is all. But it was the only one the world knew him by, and from a young age, Kaiba decided it was that simple, and it always could be. Just because he couldn't forget didn't mean everyone else needed to be reminded. The truth was too infectious and it spread to too many unwanted places while its outbreak becomes contagious. The only practical solution to such a threat was to quarantine himself to a life of unchanging simplicity.
From that day on, the rest of the world saw only what he wanted them to, but there were no hidden complexities behind his behaviors. They were as deep as the amount of consideration people put into their opinions of the pretentious, young prodigy, and took half-as-long to convince everyone that they were true than the truth would have. Really, that belief had been the point, the single objective that made everything he'd ever done so simple, the knowledge that allowed him to cleanse the guilt of claiming to be someone he'd been required to create. You're always alone. I told him, Kaiba thought drowsily as his cigarette hissed into a simper, and the slippery slosh of ice and alcohol served to loosen the hinges that so frequently rusted into place. That's why we do this he considered, in a way that may almost have been empathetic if he was ever going to act on it, because its all we have left to stand between us and the world now. The mutt may have been too happy-go-lucky to see it, but they were both living in empty shells that they'd outgrown with time. Did they forget to mention that to normal people too, Wheeler? He wondered, both blue eyes shutting to grasp the blonde's features. That all that one-size-fits-all crap is total shit?
This made the lines in his frown crease even more sadly though when it struck him so softly that Joey had no clue. Had he ever known anything other than the face they plastered on the sides of card shops, or the official pin-up posters that adoring boys and girls alike lined their bedroom walls with? Or is all of this just his desperate attempt to catch his breath because he's starting to realize all the oxygen has dissolved, and there's no breathing room left in that shell of his?
Scrunching his nose up tightly, something too akin to feeling filled his chest, twisting and contorting unfamiliarly inside a locked cell where it did not belong. He had to remember to be careful when allowing his simplicity to twist his thoughts; else they may just prove too frank once he wrung them out again. The line between the two cousins was a thin one; upon which truth and simplicity were always dancing, and every once in awhile they got the best of him. The part he kept out of the prison his person had become in hopes that it would neither grow nor be outgrown. Yet, the stunted, twisted truth wriggled painfully, regardless, and wouldn't let a simple disadvantage of size take away its right to live and breathe on its own accord; and it was hard to ignore that it left its host at the mercy of its resolutions.
In this case, it decidedly sought out the closet thing it could find, and the safest escape route. It was true what he'd said about being alone, and knew it was simply why people grew-up and outgrew a constant shedding layer of skin. It was because who you are is never good enough—people don't want the truth, they want to decide it for themselves—and they couldn't care less who you really are when they've already figured out exactly who they want you to be. And that much he could allow himself to agree that Joey and he had in common; though such a comparison did not soften the CEO's edges enough for him to feign loneliness, nor did his honestly lead him to admit inadequacy by claiming to be in need of assistance when he did not require it. He had no love for Joey, but he saw nothing to gain from lying about what was plainly going on—The world is changing outside the one we both lived in for so long, and it doesn't know who we are anymore…Duel Monsters is just a shade, and we're nothing more than the shadows we cast after we step outside ourselves, and into the light. But it was clear to him now that it made no difference how hard or how bright the beams shone as they rose above and broke off the features that no longer fit, because in the end it had left both of them blind to what the other had lost; and Kaiba began gritting his teeth at the reality he was, if nothing else, lost.
–-Stumbling around clumsily, groping around in the darkness that once seemed so familiar before this city shone a light down and exposed all the carefully placed baggage he used to think made him invisible. He had chosen bitter characteristics in the past because it was the easiest way to instill a sense of security—there was too much risk in exposing yourself to people that simply avoiding them altogether could solve. It was simple, and no one ever saw through to something else, because it was all he had armored himself with. Now, however, he found himself tripping over suitcases full of secrets and trunks so deep they could swallow you. And all the while, it had been so unnerving for Kaiba to feel all these new eyes falling curiously over him and not knowing what it is they saw. But when Joey had come to him earlier with his sweet words and slick smiles, Kaiba knew exactly what he saw. He saw home. He saw hope. He saw himself.
Sometimes the light was tricky like that, it illuminates and it eliminates, and then plays our sight false with shadows; but where light casts shades, it can just as easily cast reflections instead. So when Joey had come to him and tried to look forward, towards what he believed was change-it was simply the distracting shimmer off a pair of eyes that saw no further than the past. To each other, Kaiba and Joey were no more estranged than when they'd first met; the world they were in now may have shown sides of them differently, but they would always see each other exactly the same. It was easier to hold onto the last, remaining pieces than it was to admit the rest was gone. It began to discomfort the brunette however, the more he remembered that Joey was hanging on because its probably the first time he's ever had to push himself off a cliff before, and he has no idea what's down there. But Seto had leapt from the precipice and crash-landed onto a cliff, broke every bone as he free-fell to the floor of rock bottom, then sank into the subterranean before clawing his way back to the surface and crawling back up to the summit…It may have been the alcohol in that instant, but Kaiba, in that moment, realized he didn't have the heart left in him to tell the other boy that you have to go through all of that, just to jump back off again…that the falling never stopped, and some part of you was always broken…
A wince of pain shot through his spine, and Kaiba pushed the glass in his hand away. Earlier it seemed so full of possibility, and he let the intoxicating elixir provoke the potential of this rouse, but now that all the ice cubes had melted and displaced the balance, Kaiba had never felt so empty than as he watched his certainty diluting into a watered down drink that was too hard to swallow.
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Joey hadn't faired much differently than the CEO, only leaving the sight of his apartment building behind long enough for the reality to sink in, and begin to pull him down beneath his thoughts. Half of him was still high off the idea that he'd finally outfoxed Kaiba and the other half was slowly coming down to realize the effects were only temporary. He may have won the battle, but he would need to remember that the fight wasn't over until one of them won the war. What war? Joey could not honestly say, but it was always a safer bet to expect gunfire from Kaiba than it was to seek good tidings. There may have been no real reason behind this self-styled feud they both remained so dedicated to, but there had always been a tension between them. For as long as Joey could remember.
Sometimes it felt like heat and other times energy, but both could be transferred just as easily between the duelists. Even the slightest brush of contact could spark enough friction to set the two of them on fire, and they had proved that well enough over the years. Maybe that's why they tell you never fight fire with fire, Joey thought as he examined the absentminded motions of his fingers against the lighter, because everything just burns… although, in some backwards way, Joey had learned to like the sensation of heat swelling through his muscles. It was much better to feed off the flames he'd decided than it was to freeze to death should they go out. There was nothing worse than the sensation of ice, crackling and freezing the flow of warmth throughout the chambers of the heart; it reminded him too much of dying, it reminded him of the damp, clammy weightlessness that deprived him of his will to live, and turned his heart to stone.
I wont ever go back there, he thought with a shiver through his core that did little to reassure him. He'd barely survived it the first time around, and even then it was really Kaiba who had melted the restraints of death away so easily, not Joey. Which had left part of him frozen somewhere deep down where temperatures kept the truth from thawing and melting away. Instead it sat inside his body like a kidney stone, and no matter how painful it got, no matter how hard he tried to ignore it, or push it out of the way—it refused to pass.
Instead, it grew and grew, snowballing into a fortress tat was slowly fighting to freeze the blonde from the inside out; and he'd already gone so numb that laying down and letting sleep take him didn't sound half as bad as watching himself shatter. For who would be there to pick up all his pieces? Would anyone really be that surprised? Would someone cry for him somewhere? Or would everyone just shrug it off like it's been a long time coming?
Sighing, he turned over on his side to face the wall and decided he'd rather not know the answers. Instead, he continued to coax his lighter into a faint and heatless flicker, as if maybe it could at least bring some feeling back into his fingers. It had been so long since he'd last felt alive, and Kaiba had ignited him like warm weather in January—only enough to give him hope before vanishing back beneath the endless weeks of frost. It wasn't enough but it was all Joey could do to save himself by trying to fan the flame he'd sparked, and keep it from going out completely.
How long could he really keep that up though when Kaiba had gone colder than the ice? Replacing his fiery charge with an impersonal magnetism, instead, that pulled them together, despite the resistance, but wobbled unfittingly as they forced their way together, only to rip furiously away from the other the second they touched. How could he ever hope to restore the life support when he couldn't even get close enough to inspect the damage? Kaiba agreed, much to Joey's surprise, and he would hold true to his word, Joey knew, but that left how seriously he would take it to debate. Perhaps in the end it would be the biggest mistake he ever made, and Kaiba would simply trample over him and emerge unscathed and victorious as he always did; while Joey laid down like a dog with his tail between his legs.
The thought alone was enough to start compiling all the ingredients of a panic attack, and the pressure began to knead his heart muscles, causing sudden, sharp shocks of pain throughout his ribs. Please no, he groaned, clenching his shirt as if to prevent the pain from escalating, not tonight. But begging for this to cease was like begging Kaiba to make sense. There were no answers; he simply had to let them run their course.
Perhaps if he was fortunate enough, they would play out in his favor, but I'm not really about to stake my life on it, Joey thought in an increasing panic, reaching out clumsily to shuffle a slender orange container with a white, child-proof cap towards himself. Turning it around thoughtfully in his fingers first, Joey's ears were met with the soft tapping of small, yellow ovals shifting against the see through sides of the bottle as the pills shuffled and slid though the space. Every time he completed a rotation, one side of the bottle was like a little window, tinted the color of negatives; and the other was wallpapered with a large white label that described its contents. At the top in small, black and bold print read his full name from last to first, and beneath it instructions to "take two tablets as needed." Although Doctor Nyguen assured him they were perfectly safe, Joey didn't feel right about ingesting this strange, bitter tasting prescription.
The first time he'd taken them, the doctor told him to let the pill dissolve beneath his tongue instead of swallowing right away. Joey nearly wretched up his breakfast, he'd never tasted something so disgusting before.
"Well yah' aren't taken'em to taste good, are yah?" the man smiled warmly at Joey's scrunched up expression when he'd placed it under his tongue. "Yuck," Joey shook his head as the solid shape beneath his taste buds began to dissolve and lose shape. He could feel it spread with the saliva, which took on an almost metallic taste as the pill was left sitting in a wet, mushy clump that Joey could no longer stomach. He reached out for a glass of water, but found it mixing in with the cold, bitterness of metal. Somehow the bitter, distaste left over in his mouth had actually enhanced and elevated to an even cheaper, watered down taste. " Yeahh," Joey breathed deeply, looking to the shrink unconvinced, "Do I always have to take them like that?"
"Ah'course not," he smiled, "But now tha'ya have, next time ya get-ah buggah of an attack y'all know tha fastes' way tah fix it." However, the sweet blanket of darkness that started to swallow all feeling should have been an obvious answer, but Joey found himself asking anyways. "How is it the fastest?"
"Well, ya'see, the chemicals act-tually start ta work fastah, because they dissolve directly inta' ya blood stream." That much Joey had begun to figure out when by the same time his question had been answered, his entire mind had already been swept clean and calmness unlike any in the world encased him like a weightless armor.
Doctor Nguyen called it Alprazolam, he pressed down on the lid with his palm twisting until the cover gave way; and Sam called them Xanex, he recalled, fingering out several ovals before tossing them to the back of his tongue, but to Joey they were Miracles.
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The sun seemed to shine through his window, reflecting an adjacent stream of sunlight leading to his air mattress, and beamed like a laser, heatedly, over Joey's face in a wave of golden light. One pill in the morning, however, filled him with such an overwhelming sense of serenity that the heat caressed him like a lover, so warm, and so tender that he'd rather lay in its arms than get up to embrace the cold, emptiness that awaited him once he'd left the sanctity of his pillows. A lazy cat-nap wasn't likely to hurt anything anyways, it was still way too early.
Besides, if Kaiba was sincerely going to follow through tonight than Joey could certainly use all the heat his body could possibly savor before Kaiba greeted him with a cold front, and those icy irises emerged to frost the blonde back over. That was the worst-case scenario, but at the same time Joey knew it was also the most plausible; if he was not mistaken, Kaiba had truly only promised Joey that he would have his ass handed to him—an unpromising situation that he would never be able to prevent or prepare for should it come down to that. Still, even amidst the probable outcomes he had rehearsed, Joey found himself instinctually unprepared. The truth of it was that he hadn't the fainted notion of what to expect, but this time Kaiba was to blame for that.
Joey had never felt more clear-headed, but it seemed to him like the CEO'S own head had been filled even fuller with full-proof plots and plans to reveal at his disposal. Usually, their interactions stopped after a lost challenge, a few cheap shots, and the same uncreative insults they'd coined after Duelist Kingdom. Typically, Joey picked the fight and Kaiba played along—he was not ignorant to how empty the true threat of their 'rivalry' was. It was more of a game than an actual competition, but then once the right hooks started coming out of left field, and the punch lines grew to be more personal than they were impartial the game switched from levels of difficulty with the two of them squabbling to get a word in edge wise. And whenever their heated, competitive affairs simmered down into the dullness of ordinary life, they both seemed to gravitate towards each other instead of orbiting on their own respective planes. There was never a conversation, just always the unspoken urge to reach out and ruffle a few feathers. Whenever they were surrounded in a crowd—their words were usually brief and tame enough to almost appear playful to someone who didn't know them. Things like a sarcastic flip of the wrist and some sideways comment about how Joey was oblivious and never aware enough to grasp a situation—or how Kaiba's trench coats must be as stiff as he is to withstand so much gravity—and were there any other laws, natural or physical, that his money couldn't defy? And then their words would end with the brunette calling out to Joey like he were a canine, and the blonde retorting with a smirk and a 'see ya later money bags,' as if to irritate the other by reducing him to an inanimate object. Which, as it turned out was still one step beneath 'mutt,'
Joey sighed and then inhaled deeply, wondering if the two of them could have been friends once; during some unknown window of time they'd missed. Locks of shaggy blonde hair bounced off his forehead as his head shook condescendingly and dismissively at the idea he blamed these pills for allowing to formulate. Who cares if we could have been friends, Joey thought crossly, mixing the rest of the memories into the thought, because I'd never wantto be friends with him. Contradictory to his plans, the youth couldn't help but harbor resentment when he remembered the truth of their most compelling connection—the harsh, raw, reality that they unleashed upon each other whenever they slipped a duel disk onto their arms.
Maybe once their tactics had been empty, but they developed a certain energy over the years, and with that energy came a bond of familiarity which granted a certain control over the ebb and flow of the duel. They easily learned which fuses were short and what buttons to push and when to push them; however, they had grown relentless n their slander and their shared stamina to endure the others insults often led them into a standstill. Perhaps that was the phenomenon Joey was witnessing right now; perhaps this was them in an epic standstill, caught between the two extremes of interaction that were no longer divided between school and tournaments. Yet, without that clear bisector, those extremes became counterproductively entangled when they could no longer discern which behavior the situations demanded. You see, it was difficult to be nice to Kaiba when a part of Joey hated him; but it was even harder to scream at him when the distance between them was a pocket of air; without an arena, the words seemed emptier devoid of an echo. He wasn't sure what kind of sense that even made, but that seemed to be the running theme lately. Every time he asked another question, he fell short of an answer, and everything remained in free fall, with no gravity to pull down what was real.
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Aye! Okay, well there we go, it's a pretty long chapter, so hopefully you all forgive me for disappearing for so long :( As always, reviews are appreciates, as is your dedication and loyalty to this story :) so thank you so much to anyone who's still checking in from time to time, as well as any new readers that find this. ANYWAYS, yes, review please, and I'm going to go work on corrections for chapters ten and eleven. (thats right BOTH).