Not too much to say about this one, except that the fire's starting. Also, bit of a warning. Verse Two contains some particularly…colorful language from your friendly neighborhood sociopath.

Seems that when Noa gets emotional, he also gets…vulgar.

Who knew?

Verse One.

"Kay? Kay?! Are you all right? What's the matter?"

Something about Yugi's entire demeanor just…changed. He rounded the counter slowly, and bent down to pick up the card from the floor where Kay had dropped it. The white-haired young woman was still breathing harshly, but it was clear that most of the shock had passed. She studied Yugi's face like she was searching for something she couldn't find.

Yugi offered a self-conscious little smile. "Sorry about that," he said. "It's complicated. Would you like to sit down for a moment?"

"Yes…yes, I would." Kay collected herself and waited as Joey stepped over to one corner of the shop and took down a card table, which he unfolded and set into the center of the floor. He took a number of folding chairs as well. When he'd situated everything, he pulled one chair out and gestured for Kay to sit.

"Word online," Renie said, looking strangely serious, "is that your, ah…personality shift in the arena isn't just some act. People think you've seriously got multiple personalities. Was that…uh…him?"

Yugi chuckled as he sat down. "For lack of a more politically correct way of saying it…yes. It was. We call him Yami. I'm sorry, Miss Mayer. Sometimes he forgets that other people take 'personal space' rather seriously."

"You talk about a serious mental illness like it's a precocious puppy," Kay said, sounding like she didn't want to be offended.

Yugi shrugged. "I guess so. It's more complicated than that. Kaiba would agree with you, though. With your sentiment and your apparent discomfort with it." Kay suddenly looked guilty, but Yugi waved it away. "It's okay. Don't worry about it. It'll make sense eventually. I'm guessing that you're here to visit. Here in the city, I mean."

"Yes. I am."

"Don't be surprised if you end up coming back. This place is kind of a black hole."

"You mentioned Kaiba. Seto Kaiba? Do you know him, too?"

"I do. Quite well. Better than most people, I'd say. Not that that's saying much."

Kay looked curious. "Friend of yours?"

Yugi laughed. "Much as I'd like to think so…no."

"Mokuba hangs out around here," Joey put in. "He's the friend. Butcha don't get one Kaiba without the other. They're a package deal."

"Wouldn't peg the two of you as the sort to make friends with kids," Kay said.

Yugi thought a moment, then said, "Remember that line in the first Harry Potter book about there being some things you just can't go through without learning to like each other?"

"Yes…?"

"Us 'n Mokuba," Joey put in, "we ain't fought a troll, but we've been through some…uh…contingencies. Is that the right word? Damn it, I bet it isn't. They're long stories, and I dunno if Mokuba'd want us tellin' 'em."

"The short of it is," Yugi added, and Kay realized rather quickly that these two thought on pretty much the exact same wavelength, "we've had some adventures. Mokuba used it as an excuse to get to know us. Kaiba used it as an excuse to ignore our existence."

"Sounds like a charmer." Kay sent a sardonic glance Katie's way.

"He can be," Yugi said, placating. "He's just…selective. Extremely selective. Who knows? If you get a chance to meet him, you might get his good side."

"How many people have gotten his good side?"

"Uh…six?"

"Makin' our boy look bad," Renie said, kicking her feet up and assuming the air of a Mafioso. "Now, children, you don't want us comin' down on you…do ya?"

"Bring it, sister," Joey said. "You might got an inside shot at the upper tiers of society, but Yugi 'n me? We got street cred." The two friends bumped fists. "Yeah."

Yugi glanced back at Kay. "Have we frightened you away yet?"

"Not on your life," Kay said, grinning. "This trip is turning out to be an…extra-curricular activity."

Yugi chuckled, but she could spy something remarkably like fear somewhere in the backs of his eyes. Like he knew something she didn't.

Which, she thought upon further reflection, he probably did.

Verse Two.

The next day, Seto Kaiba woke from a remarkably restful sleep with no clear recollection of…well, anything. His eyes opened and focused on the ceiling of his bedroom, and he felt more awake than he had in weeks. He felt better than he had in weeks. He slipped out of bed and immediately into a shower.

When he'd shaved, combed his hair, and dressed himself, Seto stepped into the hall and strode down toward the stairs. If he'd been thinking normally, he might have been worried—even offended—that he couldn't rightly remember what he'd done the previous afternoon (or evening). But he felt at peace with himself, at peace with the world, for the first time in…

His life.

He found his brothers in the game room. Mokuba was playing a racing game—his favorite genre—while Noa watched studiously nearby. He noticed Seto's presence almost immediately, and Seto got his first impression that something was wrong. A spark of outright terror lit in Noa's light blue eyes, but was masked immediately by his usual exuberance.

"Heya, Aniki," the middle Kaiba offered, too casually.

Mokuba turned to glance over his shoulder. "Hi, Niisama. Are you feeling better? Noa said you went to bed early last night."

Seto's brow creased. "Yes, Mokuba. I'm fine."

"You should do that more often," the black-haired boy mused.

"Mm."

Noa stood up. "Aniki. Sorry to infringe, but I've got something I need to go over with you. Mind takin' a stroll with me down to my facility?"

Mokuba pouted, but didn't say anything. Seto nodded.

They left the room, and walked almost leisurely toward Noa's private sanctuary. They rounded a corner, and Noa whirled, pinning Seto to the wall with surprising, frightening, strength. "What. The fuck?"

Seto stared at the man blankly. "Let go of me."

"Not on your life! Not until you tell me what the fuck happened to you yesterday!"

"I have no idea what you're insinuating. Let go of me, Noa. Now."

Seto had never seen anything like the panic rising in the middle Kaiba's eyes like cresting waves in a glacial typhoon. "You listen to me and you listen good, you stupid son of a bitch! You don't like me. Probably you fucking hate me. Fine. Whatever. Go ahead. But don't you dare give me orders right now. You hear me? I want an answer, goddamn it!"

It was on Seto's lips to tell the impudent cyborg off. Every instinct in him screamed that this was going too far, and it was time to lay down the proverbial law. But there was something about Noa's earnestness—his raw, naked terror—that gave the eldest Kaiba pause. So instead, he said: "…What happened yesterday?"

Noa blinked, and his grip on Seto slackened. "I…you…don't remember. Of course you don't fucking remember. When was the last time you lost a day, Aniki? Think back. Has there ever been a time in your life that you've ever lost track of where you were and what you were doing?"

It was like a steel rod crashed into Seto's skull and split his brain in half. Sudden, stark horror froze his mind as he realized—not that he'd ever truly forgotten—that the answer was no. And that whatever euphoric haze he'd woken up feeling had made him forget how wrong that was.

"He gave you the rod, didn't he?" Noa guessed, finally letting his elder go and stepping back. "That stupid twat gave you the Millennium Rod."

Another shock went through Seto's body, and like a man in a dream he reached under his coat and pulled something out from where he'd tucked it, up against the small of his back. Taking the mysterious object in a fist that wanted desperately to tremble, Seto looked down at it and almost didn't see what he knew was there.

It was. The Millennium Rod.

"You know how Mutou gets that boost of confidence like a damn booster shot from hell, right before he steps into an arena? How his fucking voice changes? How he gets taller? Don't lie to me, Aniki. You know it's not a mental disorder. Something in that puzzle he keeps chained to his neck is alive. Or…at least, it exists. And we both know that's what comes out when he's in danger. We both know that's the man we both faced, and to whom we both lost so goddamn spectacularly."

Seto was listening, but only cursorily. His mind was too busy scrambling to repair itself.

His eyes kept drifting almost magnetically to the gleaming gold in his hand.

Noa gripped Seto by the shoulders and shook him, hard. "Look at me! Whatever the hell that thing is—what's he call it, Yami? There's another one in that gaudy piece of desert-glitter you keep staring at! Someone, or something, has the capacity to take over your body! Put your mind to sleep! It's stealing the one thing you've always lusted after like a junky for fucking heroin! Control."

Seto was not one for hyperventilating, but he could feel his breath hitching in his throat. Everything he had ever known, everything he'd ever been taught, was rearing up to fight off the accusations Noa was flinging at him; but some deep, secret part of him—growing and reaching through his veins like a disease—knew the man with the sandy hair and the ice-colored eyes was telling the truth.

"Sure, okay, Yami acts like Mutou's own private Jiminy Cricket half the time, but he's still bitch-nut crazy. There's a little kid down the hall relying on you to keep your shit. So you need to do something about this. Now. I really don't care how you do it. Snort mood stabilizers. Gargle moonshine. Dig scars into your skin like a motherfucking Batman villain. Just do it. Before I wind up having to do it for you."

Noa let him go, turned around, and stalked down the hall.

Seto was left staring at the rod in his hand, the tatters of his first good mood in years flitting around his head like so many gnats.

Verse Three.

Duke Devlin often found himself falling victim to routine, and he didn't like it. Wake up, go to class, go to work, go home, sleep. Wake up, go to class, go to work, go home, sleep. God. Talk about insufferable. That was probably why he never made plans for those sparse few days he was able to take off.

His professors always said, at the beginning of the semester, that he had three days out of the fifteen weeks when nobody would question his absence. Past that, it affected his grade. He usually spaced those out like Xanax, making absolutely sure that he didn't fall into the habit of relying on them and only taking them when the pressure got to the point that putting on a mask and climbing up Holmes Tower with questionable intentions started sounding like a decent way to let off steam.

It happened more often than he would have liked to admit.

Sure, he played it cool and confident. Part of his image. He was a savvy sort of businessman (or so he liked to tell himself), and he knew how important image was. He'd cultivated a persona so engrained that he often wore tight jeans and sleeveless shirts to quarterly meetings, because that's just what he did. He supposed, in retrospect, that that was one thing he appreciated about working with the Kaiba Corporation, instead of Industrial Illusions.

Pegasus Crawford was pretty open-minded, but he had a traditionalist's sense of tact.

Duke could wear a bright pink leotard, and Seto Kaiba wouldn't care so long as his affairs were in order. Perhaps that was a product of his youth? Sure, Pegasus wasn't much older than the two of them, but he had the proverbial old soul. He'd grown up in an old-fashioned house, with old-fashioned views.

The proprietor of the Black Crown and inventor of Dungeon Dice Monsters strolled leisurely along a randomly-selected side-street on a randomly-selected afternoon, his cell phone turned off for once, soaking in the glory of boredom. Could he have been doing something productive? Certainly. Should he have been doing something productive? Probably.

Did he intend to do something productive? Nope.

Duke was humming a random tune, swinging his arms far too dramatically and was about one misplaced step away from dancing, letting his brain fill itself with blissful, cotton-candy nothingness, and generally just falling in love with the world. He supposed this was what previous generations called having a free spirit.

Was he a hippy now? Is that what was happening?

He did have a certain fondness for tie-dyed shirts.

Duke rounded a corner into an alley, and found Ryou Bakura lying facedown in the dirt, his legs tangled in an upturned bicycle.

For a moment Duke's eyes went blurry, and his mind followed, and he couldn't figure out what he was looking at. The moment passed, and he stumbled forward. "Ryou! Hey! Oh, Jesus, man, have you been—what, jousting with a lawnmower?"

The white-haired boy—Duke knew that Ryou wasn't any younger than he was, but he was short, and thin, and unassuming, and otherwise just plain vulnerable—was in bad shape. His shirt was streaked with dust and grass stains; his jeans were tattered at the knees, which were rubbed raw and bleeding.

He was unconscious.

No head wound, though, thank Heaven for condolence-prize favors. His breathing was okay. In fact, he seemed to be sleeping rather peacefully. Duke didn't know Ryou Bakura very well, but he knew enough. He'd been struggling with depression (or was it bipolar disorder?) for years, and had a propensity for vanishing off the face of the earth for weeks at a time. He lived alone, had been for the past few years, and was often found haunting the library.

Some part of Duke felt betrayed that this would happen on his first day off in two months, but he pushed that away. So maybe this kid wasn't his bestest buddy in the whole wide world; it didn't matter. He was a good enough guy, really, and Duke didn't like to think of himself as a tool-bag. So he extricated Ryou from his two-wheeled death trap and laid him out flat.

Then he fished his phone out of a pocket, turned it on, and punched in a number.

"…Double-D. Thought you might'a died. How's tricks?"

"I told you not to call me that," Duke muttered. "Got a situation here. Grab my keys from the break-room and drive my car down to Olive and Soring. Clear out the backseat."

"Something up? You okay, man?"

"…I don't know yet," Duke said, as Ryou's eyes slid slowly, slowly open.

END.

Does this count as a cliffhanger?

I guess it does now.

See you next time, folks.