YGO is all about drama. It's all about high stakes and shenanigans.
It's a soap opera.
But sometimes, all I want is to give these kids a happy ending.
.
More often than not, Noa was the calmest and most self-assured, the most easygoing, member of the Kaiba family. Even when he was in a stressful situation, even if he was working late, even if he hadn't slept well, he almost never seemed upset or angry or even mildly annoyed. He didn't smile very much, not authentically, but there was something about his bearing that just . . . radiated calm.
He was fine.
Everything was going well for this young man, and no hardship could shake his confidence in a better tomorrow, or a better world in general. Noa was, quite possibly, the most optimistic man in Domino City. He took bad news in stride, he took delays easily, he took every possible stressor without comment or complaint. Even when he did have colorful words for a public situation, it was clear to anyone who spent longer than a minute or two with him that he wasn't serious.
His grousing was never honest.
He was, in essence, playing a game.
"How do you do that?" Ryo asked him once, as Noa practically skipped out of a grocery store, after having to lug all his purchases to three different registers, thanks to a series of random mishaps. "Don't get me wrong; I'm glad you can. But, well, forgive me for saying, but I've heard stories from the others about how you behaved in your . . . cage, as you tend to call it. I feel like the old Noa Kaiba would have, pardon the expression, lost his entire shit back there."
Noa, for his part, laughed. "That's pretty much the point, though," he said. "That raging jackass you just invoked, the idiot I used to be, spent entirely too long just . . . torturing himself in solitary confinement, just to feel something. I, the one who escaped all that, don't really have it in me to worry about cash registers."
Ryo's eyes widened. "Is that right?"
"This place has its problems," Noa said, gesturing all around himself so that Ryo knew he wasn't talking about Rosco's Food Mart, but the real world as a whole, "and plenty of them would probably make me want to rip my hair out and eat it . . . if I was still the person I used to be. If I was still that kid who got stuck in a box. I'd have thrown the mother of all tantrums. I would have threatened to sue. Hell, I probably would have stabbed somebody. Assuming someone was stupid enough to trust me with a weapon. But the thing is, I'm not that kid, and I'm not in that box. So, for all intents and purposes, there's nothing left for me to worry about."
"I can't decide if that's admirable or concerning," Ryo said.
Noa shrugged. "Couldn't tell you. Maybe both. Probably both. I lost pretty much all my nerves in that box. I lost all my shame, all my self-pity, and most of my anger, in that box. Nothing I've seen in this world has even come close to provoking the shit I used to wrestle with . . . in that box. I think the main thing I can thank Chichiue for, even after so long, is this: of all the things he tried to give me, the main one he succeeded with was something he didn't even know he was teaching."
"And what's that?"
"Contentment."