""Ich find mich hier nicht wieder

Erkenn mich selbst nicht mehr

Komm und zieh mich raus hier

Ich gib alles dafür her

Ich hab Fernweh

Ich will zurück"

~Hilf mir Fliegen, Tokio Hotel

-Chapter 17-

Concrete and Stone

When he saw that Alistair hadn't come home the night before, Seto thought little of it as Alistair so often stayed in the city overnight these days. Still, as he pulled out of the driveway to begin his morning commute, he felt the same twinge of annoyance he always felt when he discovered that Alistair hadn't come back. And as always, he admonished himself for it. There was no clause in their agreement that Alistair stay locked in the house, and he had no justification for adding it. He turned his focus to Roland's latest memo.

Apparently, the proposed site for the new Kaibaland Duel Dome was home to an obscure, endangered species of toad. After having this fact pointed out to him by the environmental health and safety officer, the lead architect had lost his temper and threatened to shove one of the creatures up the man's ass. Roland claimed that the two had since made amends, but the fact remained that the site had to be changed and a new location given Seto's stamp of approval.

It was one of his more tedious and time-consuming duties, but he supposed it was as good an excuse as any for getting out of producing another selfie for Tanaka.

Since they'd run through the original pictures taken at his house, Seto had been dodging Tanaka's messages about scheduling another shoot by uploading content about Grand Championship and updates on the VR pods. Soon, he'd run out of excuses not to meet with him, but for now, an endangered toad would do.

Though still heavily under construction, KaibaLand was starting to take shape. Most of the track had been laid for the Blue Eyes White Dragon roller coaster, candy-colored kiosks dotted half-completed paths, and work had begun on digging out patches for the various gardens. Among the buildings covered in construction tape and platforms was what would be home to the indoor duel arenas and arcade. Seto was pleased to see that the builders hadn't forgotten to demarcate the locations of the Blue Eyes White Dragon statues that would guard the entrance. He'd commissioned the same artist who'd brought the dragon in his foyer to life to make them, telling Kobayashi he'd pay for them himself if the CFO thought they were too expensive. KaibaLand was his endgame; there was no way he was going to cut corners.

He joined Roland, head architect Brian Rossi, and environmental health and safety officer Wilson Tremblay in a tent that had been erected alongside the KaibaLand hotel and resort.

The moment he entered, Seto had to resist the urge to wrinkle his nose in disgust. The stench of body odor and old canvas hung heavily in the stale air which was being cooked by the noonday sun.

Rossi had abandoned his suit jacket over the back of a fold-out chair, but that appeared to have done nothing but reveal the massive sweat stains on his shirt. So in an odd twist, Tremblay, who didn't seem like a man who normally wore anything that couldn't be accessorized with cargo shorts, managed to maintain a more put-together outward appearance, though the shininess of his face and pate belayed that it wasn't only Rossi's body perfuming the tent.

The KaibaLand blueprints had been splayed out across a spindly picnic table and Seto noticed that someone had slashed a red 'X' through the Kaiba Dome.

Whatever Roland had assumed otherwise, Rossi and Tremblay had not set aside their differences since the discovery the day before. The men hardly waited for Seto to sit down before starting up their argument again as though his arrival marked the beginning of the second act of their two-man performance.

"Where else on this map do you see space for a duel dome?" Rossi demanded of Tremblay, thumping one hand against the map. "Just capture the damn thing and take it with you!"

"The Habitats Directive is very clear on this point," Tremblay responded, reaching into his suit pocket for a handkerchief which he used to begin dabbing at the perspiration along his receding hairline. "Water abstraction goes against-."

"So basically what you're saying is that some three-inch frog is standing between Mr. Rossi and the construction of my duel dome?" Seto clarified, resisting the urge to rub his temples.

"Look," Tremblay said, turning his back on Rossi to address Seto directly. "I understand that you're trying to build a theme park here and that you don't care whether or not the animal we found yesterday dies. It's just a toad, right?" He tucked his handkerchief back in his breast pocket where it formed an untidy lump. "But where does that stop, Mr. Kaiba? Would it make a difference to you if it were a fox or a rabbit or-."

"Save it for your next flyer, Mr. Tremblay," Seto interrupted, putting his hand up. There really was only one solution, and he'd just as soon cut to the chase rather than let the nature do-gooder stand on a soap box. "First of all, let's be honest about what you're really asking of me. We both know that this isn't just about moving the dome; once you report back to your department, they're going to make me rezone the whole park."

"Rezone the whole park?" Rossi demanded loudly, a vein in his forehead pulsating with anger. "I got approval for this project a year and a half ago! We're almost a third of the way through construction!"

"There's a reason you haven't mentioned this to your superior yet, isn't there?" Seto asked Tremblay candidly, his fingers steepled on the table. "I think you see an opportunity here.

I'm sure there are grand projects an underfunded office like yours has never been able to find backing for. And as you so astutely realized, I can change that. So how about you go back to your hotel and think about which parks could use a little bit of a hand, or that research that just never quite had the budget it needed to get off the ground, and when you've made up your mind, give Roland a call and I'll take care of it. Kaiba Corporation wants to be on the right side of history, after all. As I'm sure do you."

The brazonness of the bribe caught Tremblay off-guard. Everyone knew who his father had been, of course, but to see Gozaburo Kaiba's sly, cool smile on the face of his nineteen year-old son was distinctly unsettling.

"So what do you say?" Seto continued, getting up and holding out his hand politely. "Do we have a deal?"

Seto had known before even entering the tent that Tremblay would agree, so his obligatory hesitation was boring. But before long, the agreement had been sealed with a handshake.

"Roland, I want you to take Mr. Tremblay to buy a tank for his new pet," Seto instructed as he let his arm fall back to his side. "And Rossi," his gaze shifted to the architect. "As soon as Mr. Tremblay has secured his little friend, I want you to switch priority to the completion of the duel dome."

"But sir," Rossi protested as Tremblay and Roland made to depart. "We're in the middle of about five different things already! The infrastructure for the theater has to be finished, the other two roller coasters are having problems with-."

"I don't know why I expected you to just do your job," Seto mused, eyeing the architect coldly. "But considering that you willfully called for the destruction of what should be a protected habitat, without my knowledge, you've put yourself in a precarious position. So if I were you, I'd rally my team and start draining some water or shoveling dirt or whatever it is you need to do to turn that mud out there into concrete before that decision comes back to haunt you."

Rossi started and stopped several sentences before seeming to decide that in this case, silence was golden.

"We're done here," Seto said, walking past him to the exit where Saito was waiting for him. "And Rossi: burn this tent, get a new one, and invest in a fan; this isn't some nineteenth century battlefield."

It was amazing that the dusty air of a construction site could ever be considered refreshing, but once he was no longer in the tent, Seto took a moment to bask in it and wished he had time to change his clothes again before heading into the office. Since that was out of the question, he did the next best thing and sprayed himself with the small vial of cologne he kept in his jacket pocket. Next to him, Saito coughed lightly.

If Trudy had ever called him at work before, Seto couldn't remember it, and he immediately assumed something had happened to Mokuba when her number showed up on his screen late that afternoon. His day had been going rather smoothly until that point, and he'd been tranquilly answering emails after meeting with Kobayashi to get his approval for a sizable donation to the Domino National Wildlife Conservation Center.

"What happened?" he asked after reluctantly taking the call.

"Well that's a fine way to answer the phone," Trudy noted with some indignation and he relaxed; if she had time to be offended, she couldn't be calling about anything dire.

"Look, I'm busy right now," he lied. "Can this wait?" He suddenly had a nagging suspicion that she intended to lay into him about not replacing Isobel quickly enough and it wasn't something he felt like dealing with in his few precious minutes of relaxation.

"I understand," she said, "this won't take but a moment. And don't think I didn't ask Mokuba and Kanzo first; I'd never go bothering you at work unless I'd exhausted my other options, you know."

"Fine, what is it?" he pressed, leaning back in his chair, only mildly more intrigued. It could still be about Isobel.

"Do you know where Alistair is? No one else seems to, and he hasn't been back since yesterday. Of course, I know that he stays with friends sometimes, but he's usually home by now and he wouldn't answer my calls and I-."

"Why would I know where he is?" Seto interrupted, his tone uninterested even as he felt his pulse begin to race. Alistair wouldn't just leave, would he?

"I'm sure I have no idea," Trudy answered huffily. "But I thought maybe he'd gone with you to practice flying your helicopter since he'd said something about needing more hours."

Seto was only half listening, his attention directed instead at his computer screen. A few clicks had brought him to a page he knew better than to use under the KC network, and so he was careful to reroute it under several layers of encryption. Now, even if someone tried to trace it back to him they'd have to explain what he was doing in Moscow and Sao Paulo and how he'd managed to get there and back without leaving his office.

"His whereabouts are none of my concern, and frankly, not yours either," he responded absently, already narrowing in on the last tower Alistair's phone had pinged off of. Cross-referencing the data with a digital map of the city, he was unsurprised to see that as of ten minutes ago, Alistair was still downtown.

"Look," he cut into Trudy's protests as he continued to pinpoint where Alistair most likely was. "If you want to spend the rest of the day worrying about someone you're not paid to care about, I can't stop you. But I think you're wasting your time, and now you've wasted five minutes of my time." His inquiry finally resolved, leaving him with a list of businesses in the vicinity of where Alistair's phone had last been registered. "If you're really concerned, feel free to file a missing person's report, but know that if you do he'll get deported. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have work to do." He hung up before she could respond.

He finished scanning the list, mostly made up of government offices rather than high rises and university buildings, and frowned. What business did Alistair have there?

Annoyed by how invested he was in finding out, Seto dove a layer deeper and broke into Alistair's email account so he could view the search history associated with it. He could have easily used a program to hack the account for him, but he'd felt a strange compulsion to do it manually. Alistair had once called him predictable, and though the accusation held some merit, that didn't mean that Alistair wasn't predictable too.

Seto grinned after guessing the password on his second try: DYNADUDE. His first guess, of course, had been 'Mikey', and his third guess would have been 'Sewell'. Seto wasn't sure why he even remembered the name of Alistair's stupid cat; just a random piece of useless information he'd probably picked up from Trudy at some point, but it had come to him easily enough to leave him oddly disconcerted.

He scanned Alistair's search history with a trained eye, taking in each page and assembling them, puzzle-like, into a fleshed-out pathway to his exact whereabouts and intentions.

The top results gave him the answer he'd been looking for which, like Alistair's password, should have been easy to guess. And it was nothing he wasn't capable of taking care of, provided that Alistair hadn't gone through with it yet. But before he turned to the more tedious task of accessing the files of the Domino Migration Agency, Seto let himself roam a little further back through the list of websites Alistair had visited. If he'd been using his phone to do anything illicit, his search history didn't betray him. Granted, Alistair had the computer skills it would take to wipe away his digital fingerprints just as easily as he'd allegedly broken into the KC headquarters security cameras, but once again, Seto could think of no reason why he would.

Beyond his initial, weak denials that Dartz hadn't tricked him, that it was Kaiba's company that had ruined his life, Alistair had seemed to accept the truth, evidenced by his considerably more docile behavior.

So it wasn't a discovery of Alistair's continued determination to take down Kaiba Corporation that erased Seto's grin from before. It was with an uncomfortable jolt that he noted that Alistair had twice gone to his PictureThis account: once the day of the photoshoot, and once just the night before. Et tu, Brute? It really shouldn't have felt like a stab in the back-Alistair owed him no loyalty. It rather cheapened the effect of the sympathy he'd shown, though.

Seto knew he was under no obligation to intervene in Alistair's self-imposed martyrization, especially since Alistair had never proven himself to be any more of a friend than Yugi was. In fact, Alistair getting himself deported or at the very least put on a tight leash by the migration courts was an easy way to ensure neither Alistair nor anything he represented would ever bother him again.

He pulled his phone back into his hand and tapped it thoughtfully against the lip of his desk as he considered.

Not since being on the run could Alistair remember being so exhausted. With all his energy being exerted on his efforts to stay awake, he knew he wouldn't be able to remain upright much longer.

He clumsily switched a half-empty paper coffee cup from one hand to the other and tried to shake off the stiffness in his fingers.

From the numerous loops he'd been making since early that morning, Alistair knew he was approaching the migration office again. He tripped on an uneven patch of sidewalk just as he had an hour ago. The momentary jolt of adrenaline jarred him into a sickly feeling of consciousness, but even before his heart had slowed to its normal, steady rhythm, his eyelids had begun to droop. He quickly raised the coffee to his lips and sloppily drank from it. The lid must have become dislodged when he'd tripped because a third of the remaining contents of the cup spilled down his chin and the front of his shirt.

Two girls passing by tittered at his misfortune, but he didn't have the energy to waste on a glare. Instead, he laughed too, a sound more like a cough.

Alistair removed the lid, downed the rest of the lukewarm coffee, then deposited the lot in the nearest trash can, already packed with the remnants of a dozen people's on-the-go lunches.

Now close enough that it blocked out the painful late-morning sunshine, Alistair looked up at the facade of the Domino Migration Agency. It looked like an approximation of roman architecture designed by someone on a shoestring budget who'd only had pictures of Washington D.C as references. What was supposed to be an intimidating set of wide, stone steps leading up to several sets of doors sheltered under eight bulky white pillars lost the illusion of grandeur under the remotest scrutiny. Everything was concrete, not stone, for one thing, and a multitude of dings in both the stairs and the columns made it all look cheap rather than impressively weathered after having stood strong against the elements century after century. Something about the fakeness of it had kept Alistair from walking straight in when the office had opened at eight-thirty.

None of the men and women in dark, brooding suits that had streamed up the cracked steps an hour before that had endowed him with confidence either.

He'd told himself that being off-put by a building or the color of anyone's suit was childish and shallow. This had led to his internal agreement that he'd stop walking in circles the next time he passed by, an agreement he'd renewed now eight times.

With the afternoon wearing on towards dinnertime, and his confidence that even if he did go inside he'd be able to string together a coherent sentence waning, he was starting to seriously doubt the soundness of an already ill-conceived idea.

Like an extra in a zombie movie, Alistair lurched drunkenly towards an unoccupied bench someone had set up along the office's treelawn, populated by exactly two trees that had been planted like sentries on either end of the grassy strip.

The distance the bench put him away from the building made it look even more offensively tacky. While in places like Washington D.C. such buildings rose up impressively to tower over the city in menacing austerity, The Domino Migration agency was no taller than the bank or hotel it shared the block with.

In his fatigued state, Alistair couldn't put his finger on why it all left him wanting to have the place torn down, but later it would become clear to him that it was because of what a deliberate lie it was. Anyone hoping to immigrate had to come to this office, so as a first impression, it needed to be palatial to demonstrate just how magnificent of a country Domino was, and how much of an honor it would be to belong to it. But it wasn't, really.

Domino was rich enough that it could have been built of real stone without putting anyone out of anything but a new cappuccino machine in the Parliament cafeteria, could have been given the scale the architecture demanded. But the government hadn't seen the point of investing in something real because they apparently hadn't thought anyone coming there would be any less impressed by a toy model, hadn't thought they were worth wasting stone on when concrete would do.

The moment Alistair's back hit the rough wooden slats of the bench he felt an almost magnetic force pulling his eyes closed. If he could rest them, even for a moment, he was sure he would stop feeling nauseated, the fog in his head would clear, and he'd finally be able to climb the stairs he'd been avoiding all day. He just needed a few seconds…

His phone buzzed against his hip. The vibration got him to open his eyes a sliver, but he made no move to take it out of his pocket. If sleep deprivation hadn't stalled his ability to feel anything other than tired, he might have been surprised that the battery had lasted so long, although he supposed that ignoring every phone call and text message for the past twenty hours had contributed to its longevity.

It buzzed two more times. A call then. Probably Darren again. His hands shaking with wasted caffeine, Alistair worked the phone out of his pocket with the intention of hitting ignore and then shutting it off. He should have shut it off hours ago, but on some level he may have hoped for something to change his mind, point him in a different direction. But all of Darren's texts had been hollowly conciliatory and full of excuses. Trudy had called him several times, but while she more than likely would have been able to convince him to go back to the Kaiba estate with words of motherly worry, he knew she would have done the same for anyone.

A slight crinkling of his eyebrows and a skipped heartbeat were the closest signs of shock his body could muster when he saw the number displayed on his screen. It was a number his phone didn't recognize, but one that he'd memorized almost a year ago.

"If there's one type of person I can't stand, it's a time waster." Kaiba's gruff tone sounded almost too crisp to be real, and for a moment Alistair wondered if he hadn't fallen asleep after all. "And if you do what you're thinking about doing, you'll have wasted an entire summer of my time. So if that was your idea of ultimate revenge against me, congratulations."

"What?" Alistair rasped, still unclear whether he was actually talking to Kaiba or not.

"Go home, Alistair," Kaiba clarified. "I would ask you what you were thinking lurking outside the agency in the first place, but why bother? It's a stupid idea, and the fact that you haven't gone through with it means you know that too." Alistair felt suddenly incredibly chagrined as though his father had caught him attempting to take out their car for a midnight joyride.

It was something about the expression 'go home' that made him realize it all had been stupid. A knee-jerk reaction. Had he really intended to just leave Sewell like that? And what would he have even said to anyone in that office? How had he intended to explain how he'd gotten into Domino in the first place when the border was locked down almost airtight?

"Ok," he agreed finally.

"Meet me at the pool at ten."

When Kaiba didn't immediately hang up, Alistair realized he was waiting for some kind of verbal confirmation.

"If I feel like it," he answered finally.