Chapter 10: Lacking A Coherent Structure.
"You ready?" Sam smiled at him as Joey paced restlessly, fidgeting discontent with his clothing.
"As ready as I'll ever be," he sighed unconvinced, glancing backward at himself in the mirror. A deep green button down shirt hung undecidedly over a plain-white shirt, which was riding slightly above his waistline where he'd fastened a brown leather belt through the dark set denim. In truth, it felt fancy, like the clothes didn't fit the simple, slender body beneath them. The unfamiliar weight caused him to constantly check himself over for flaws.
Impressions were everything, and he knew that to win over Kaiba, he had to make his stand out. So, with that in mind, he phoned Sam an hour before Kaiba arranged their rendezvous, in order to help him look the part. A request to which she'd laughed affectionately and asked, "What's the matter? Afraid he wont ask you on a second date?" Joey had scoffed, turning an angry, flustered shade and choked on some sort of excuse, but she'd simply shrugged it off with a sarcastic, "Suuure."
That shouldn't have bothered him, but since he'd allowed it, the notion clung to his conscience like the worst kind of catalyst. Without even a wink of thought, the night transposed with all the proper etiquette and expected anxieties of a date. Not that this is date, Joey stressed breathlessly to himself, but god, could I be any more nervous? For all Joey could tell, this may as well have been a date. Because to him Kaiba was as complex and elusive as any women he'd ever met. There was no graspable science behind his emotions, what he meant wasn't always what he said, and trying to navigate through the right things to say was like playing a game of minesweeper. One second you think you've got a pattern down, but one blindsiding explosion in the next disrupts the sequence and resets the score.
This was going to call for Joey to bring out everything had, to pull out all the right stops, because the metaphor was just too perfect. Even though Joey not actually courting Kaiba went without saying—the brunette was, in every way, just like that girl who was totally out of his league. He only got one shot, if he wasn't on top of his game, interest would be easily lost, and his efforts would become just another failed attempt. In this situation, Joey was the reacher and Kaiba was the settler; a formidable yet functional philosophy he'd stolen from endless How I Met Your Mother marathons with Sam. Although he hated submissively agreeing to assume the substandard half of the equation—there was an unspoken quality of leadership in Kaiba that Joey couldn't help but want to follow. Which is why he had to extend his confidences beyond his own comfort zones if he ever hoped to keep up with the condition he admired. However, the brunette had to decide his own willingness to settle; unfortunately to this scenario, Kaiba only ever did so for the best, and it was going to take a hell of a lot more than a change of clothes to convince him that that was Joey.
This overwhelming performance anxiety is what led the blonde to equip himself with several sort of artificial enhancers. Laughing to himself about the immature play on words, he patted down on his pocket for comfort, and smiled away fears of inadequacy. Armored in alprazolam, there was no cataclysm that could hope to disrupt the comfort encasing his exposure. The sweet breeze swept wind through his hair, and his heart beat even and confidently beneath the weightless links, forged from calmness into chainmail—absorbing all the properties of carefree security. The sensation of waves rising and breaking continued to amplify the electric current that kept Joey's feet falling in front of each other in a constant motion. Maybe it'll be him asking for that second date, he entertained with a smug smirk.
Deaf to the churning, restlessness of the endless tide, Kaiba did everything to isolate himself from these waves of uncertainly crashing over him. It were as if Joey's attitude had somehow offset him from a far—and the closer time got to his arrival, the more the water seemed to toss about, rocking the sensitive balance his stomach was struggling to maintain. Just because he said he needed this didn't mean he wanted it—any of it. He didn't want the exposure, the risk, or the consequence. All of the above could easily undo him, and as if the clock struck midnight, this masquerade might reveal that underneath the mask, he was human.
What if that is his real goal, Kaiba flashed a web of connecting scenarios, just to expose me—to get back at me for everything I've done. Even in his most arrogant of moods, he could not deny his evident awareness of slighting Joey any more than he could ignore what he'd done to his brother. The evidence was too compelling and the disappointment was always there. Joey isn't Mokuba though, Kaiba contrasted harshly, he's not mine to care about, and I have no reason to trust him.
Alarm stared to alleviate the burden of optimism and openness Seto had succumbed to when he realized how foolishly he underestimated his opponent. Joey isn't a genius, but he's by no means stupid. Kaiba joined his hands in a gesture of thought, contemplating the others strengths. He'll never match my intelligence, but he has more street smarts than I ever will, the brunette admitted with slight admiration, and even more anguish. This is probably what he wanted all along. He needs me to let my guard down, and he knows me well enough to figure out how. As the logical simplicity became no longer hindered by the complex possibility—the false skin grew taught around Seto's bones and hardened into a rough callous. Years of extensive use had taken all the feeling out of exerted pressure, and they were already so accustomed to being walked all over.
Transforming with his defense sequence, Kaiba's mindset melted into a malevolent pulsing magma. Furious in color, but contained in chambers underground it was the most dangerous form of heat. Free flowing but impossible to contain; no one was exempt from its alluring beauty, but few and far between would ever succeed in getting close enough. No one could withstand the heat. No one possessed the resistance to deflect the disorienting temperature of this particular temperament, and Kaiba fed off the unattainable obsession that infected those who tried. He liked it especially because it proved he was invincible—untouchable—and because those who failed would walk away with scars to remind them they were only hurting themselves. And Joey was always running himself into walls, so Kaiba saw no reason to deprive him of this self-destruction he seemed so set on. But I will not follow him headfirst into it. His resentment bubbled beneath the flow of dangerous currents as he dwelled on Joey's double-motives.
Justly disillusioned by his own self-fashioned logic, Kaiba's face boiled as his thoughts formulated ten times faster than he could form words…that second-rank, second-class, subservient animal thinks he can slander my name? Remembering suddenly that just because they'd reached a compromise didn't make them equals. Still, Kaiba gritted his teeth at Joey's recent advance, an advance which he could not seem to fathom how or why the other duelist had reigned victoriously from. You may have won the battle Wheeler, Kaiba shook his head, still not stomaching such ludicrousness as he prepared himself for the following half hour, but just you wait.
Although, overwhelmed with his usual overconfidence, his overactive mental process couldn't help but begin to dissect the issue at large; and if, for whatever reason, he were to be disproven, in even the slightest way, then his worst fears would all come true-like a living nightmare, trapped with his worst rival. Even though Yugi had always been his most detrimental opponent, Kaiba had at least learned to respect Yugi's genuine abilities, and so there was something diplomatic about losing to his equal. However, when it came to Joey, who insulted everything he stood for, the duelist was never even a threat, and yet it was a rivalry that burned deeply in his core—a loss that he himself found unforgiveable.
Yugi wouldn't even risk me falling off that ledge back at Duelist Kingdom, even though it would take him out of the running. He even knew that I was manipulating him to take his spot, but he has never held it over my head, or ever brought it up either. If Joey had something like that on me though, he would never let it go, he would never let me forget that.
Such a realization was far from new to Kaiba though, so whether there was some truth behind what the mutt had said or not, he calculated there was no possible way to recover from something as degrading as losing to such an unrefined creature. If he did, he would become trapped in a city where Joey could easily find him, and without the resources he was so accustom to, there was little he could do to hide from the boy. Joey's victory would cut him off at the knees, making his life unmanageable. It would not only destroy his being here, but escape would become impossible to attain altogether; and should it travel back to Japan, it would ruin his reputation too. No one would ever take him seriously again, and he would never be able to accept his own worth or credibility as the best.
There were no exceptions, and he couldn't improvise this time. He needed his strategy to be absolutely foolproof, causing him to revisit something he'd been running away from for quite some time, and ironically the same thing that had caused the blonde's disoriented state to remind him so much of himself just a few weeks ago. Sighing, Kaiba stared down thoughtfully at the prescription he'd abandoned. Resting in his palm, the pills returned his gaze with one of allure; the bottle beckoned him close, begging for a chance to breathe again, and bargaining its advantages by bestowing the ability to alleviate all that burdened him.
It was as if the sweet, orange sphere had already taken hold of his heart and jumpstarted the hundred miles per hour acceleration of reality. After all, life was so much easier set on fast-forward, and he'd once been given the power to skip right to the end, undisrupted by the effects that collected in the middle. The temptation crept incrementally into his blood stream the more he allowed the bottle to become part of his hand. I could be invincible, he insisted, almost helplessly, to himself, remembering how vitalizing every inch of air around him became, how tangible it made everything.
His external surroundings became internal and vice-versa; so thoughts and emotions were no exceptions to its altering effects. From his passions to his fears, the amphetamine-based ingredient amplified them all; to the point they were scarcely controllable. Yes, he could still feel it now, even after twenty-four months and thirty-three days, almost exactly two years after the Orichalocs, the memory alone was still potent enough to last a lifetime. That's when I told myself I'd stop, he argued feebly, as the conviction dissolved with in the chemical reactions telling him to take control.
As his neck stiffened under the straining balance of behavior he'd been trying so hard to maintain, Kaiba shook his head, turning his lids down painfully. The seldom-showed soft space in his thoughts wanted to submit to something real, but to err was too human for a person with so many faults. And if forgiveness was in fact, this divine sort of gift, then he decided there was no god merciful enough to grant solace to the likes of a monster. So the inhuman, marionette he kept hidden began to pull strings, hinging his joints in rehearsed motions that reminded him what he'd been conditioned for: performance; the demand for perfection that fastened seven strings in place of a lifetime of immobility. They were the formula of restraint and remembrance that taught Kaiba not to bite the hand that feeds; the hand that had assembled this little wooden boy on strings and breathed life into his hollow lungs. As real as his desire was to see the world through eyes that weren't painted—Kaiba knew he'd never be a real boy. He'd never taste that freedom.
The bottle practically dissolved right into his palm the way he was clenching it so protectively; all the receptors in his brain taking total control of the action potentials. Once fired, they never missed, and his already anal obsession with accuracy made certain of it. Where most people paused to process, Kaiba was pulled through every potential his brain produced; so forget about a refractory period, he wasn't most people anymore, he was a Kaiba now, and they didn't have time for failure. After all, time is money, and money is the product of perfection. Loss was not even permitted in their vocabulary, and so the last time Seto ever experienced it, was the second his stepfather signed the dotted line.
Against the elements of resentment and pain that the prescription had inflicted through out his life, Kaiba chose instead to remember them in their most basic form. In their simplicity—they were perfection; they were organization and analysis. In a finite science, they were the hypothesis that had never been disproven. I should know too, Kaiba thought, swallowing before secondary opinions overthrew any doubts. After all, I was the experiment. He let himself remember. 'The trial and error prototype to a coming of age production of the perfect child.'
The notion filled him with a bitter irony that even the sweet after-taste in his mouth couldn't sugarcoat. It was the contradictory childhood that remedied the experiences of growing up with the requirement of immediacy—for to have the perfect child is to prevent them from ever being one in the first place. A most challenging prospect, but noting a little money and medicine couldn't solve. Kaiba may have been the dependent variable, but the only truly independent factor had always been his step-father; his demeanor was always unchanging yet the boy depended on it, no matter how subjectively cruel, because it was the only way forward.
Even now, the pill may have produced the synthetic shift, but it wasn't the hand bending Kaiba's body to its will, and it was certainly not his own either. The prominent rush that accelerated his heart beat into an exciting, hypersensitive simulation reminded him of that truth. However, it did more than just disillusion, it drove an in dissuadable sense of security to smother submission. Even though he sometimes entertained the idea of constant happiness; it broke effortlessly against the fatal forces of finality—those all or nothing, eaten or be eaten, stakes were the only thing he'd ever known; and as far as he knew now, this place was a jungle. There was no compassion in instinct, only survival, and when it came to the fittest—Seto was the prime paradigm of natural selection. That characteristic had never been given to him however, he'd just been born that way, and it had not gone unnoticed. Even from a young age, older people were impressed with his potential; but only one had ever broken it.
"You can't control a man until you learn to break the man," the strange, shadow with the hard-lined face told him too professionally. A lesson Kaiba shamelessly adopted; as the heir in training, Gozaburo indented to ensure his investments. A simple protocol as to protect everything he had endowed in Seto's name. It was a simple, bullet-point plan, the science experiment from which he was truly born. As a specimen, the boy proved to be almost perfect—the parts were already assembled, and the test-runs had all provided adequate results, but he needed to be absolutely sure. Gozaburo had to be certain, without a doubt, that perfection was more than just an implication—that it became hardwired into Seto's DNA—programmed. The boy had to be a paternal prototype—practically identical to everything he didn't belong to. However, in Gozaburo's mind, the boy did belong to him, and so he made all the incisions. He consulted with his private staff of doctors, made all the proper calls, and just like that, a proscription was produced: Adderall 20 Mg. Instant Release. It was the final touch necessary to regulate the results, the knot that secured the strings Gozaburo had carefully customized.
I was always meant to wear them. He felt sad on the inside. They're not an attachment; they're apart of me.
In a matter of no time, Gozaburo had trained the youth rigorously—running him in and out of simulation testing, and conditioning the boy's reactions and results. There was no room for error in the sequence, and with Seto as the guinea pig, the medicine quickly combine the youth's raw and astounding intellect with limitless, incalculable control. Quickly potentiating, just the same as it was now, the sequence in this strain was flawless, and once injected, production was unstoppable; its value, inconceivable.
Gozaburo's medication corrected and prohibited any and all malfunctions; and upon its dissolution into Seto's digestive track, the cogs in the boy's head fell flawlessly in sync. Success is material, remember? He reminded himself bitterly, with Joey's voice echoing in narration. Just be what they want you to be, he repeated in an offsetting manner when life filled his heart with apprehension. In some ways, his brain was so ruthlessly trained that it was militarized. You are what you eat, he claimed frantically, while his thoughts fell focused around a format. Be invincible. Yes, that's what Gozaburo had indented, he didn't want a son, let alone two, he wanted a weapon. So he had taken a young, relatively bright boy of ten, and turned him into a well-oiled machine. Like father like son. Seto stood to represent the dictating authority of the Kaiba dynasty, and anything besides despotism was dehumanizing.
This is all a review, a voice inside assured him as he rose to meet the sounds falling from Joey's hesitant knocking. However, with the ghost of his late step-father reassuming control, he gave himself defenselessly to the manipulatively meticulous manifestations of the methamphetamine madness. The strategy appeared unsound, but the more unsettling it was, the more sense it made. "Madness in great one's must not unwatched go," he quoted Shakespeare's infamous insinuation with a self-satisfied smirk—knowing the true extent of its sincerity. His own step father had once underestimated that, and paid the same price he'd cost Seto; a price that left behind the most unfeasible kind of debt: the claim to a name that was drawn up in a contract, a contract that had given the boy no choice than to fall victim to the restless shade of the hand that signed away his soul. Left with nothing but a legacy of pre-planned logistics, and a lifetime of being strategically positioned amidst corporate warfare, he had been groomed for battle. But they didn't tell you father, he thought, moving mechanically, there's method in the madness. You forgot that when you made me, didn't you?
A secret weapon without autopilot, a gun without a trigger—Gozaburo Kaiba waged mass destruction, and Seto cocked back his trigger finger, and delivered the promise. Sometimes he found himself wondering if it wasn't him who put the actual gun to Gozaburo's head, if his promise was kept with two bullets instead of one. Ballistics didn't seem to favor him though, and the thought left him ill-at ease, but he pushed it away when he popped a second pill, and finally pulled open the door.
"Are you deaf?" Joey demanded breathlessly after fifteen minutes of waiting.
"Hmm," Kaiba looked on obliviously, then feigned surprise, "Did you say something?"
-.-.-
reviews? pewees? :) i ammmm about to give you the next chapter as a free-bee y'know!