#fic scrap

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If I’d known what was going to happen that night, maybe I wouldn’t have gone up to Kaiba’s office.

Or maybe I would have, just to have it over with. Like ripping off a band-aid, right?

We’d been working together for a little over a year, then. I was three years out from high school, one year into developing Spherium. I didn’t work for KaibaCorp—technically, our legal arrangement was co-development, a partnership between the entity Otogi had helped me set up and KaibaCorp for full production development, distribution, and eventual service support—but we still saw each other a lot. The contracts were very clear that I had ownership of the IP, but Kaiba was the kind of boss who liked to keep a close eye on major product decisions. A little micro-managerial, maybe, but really I think he just liked getting to work on something, seeing a game come to life.

Maybe he didn’t need to be involved in the nitty-gritty, but anytime I went up there to walk him through my team’s latest direction—a new feature, some new approach we were thinking about that would need a unique adaptation of Solid Vision—he had practical ideas, real solutions to our problems. Insights, that corporate shill word that usually comes paired with KPIs, but with Kaiba that’s what they were. I’d tell him about a snag we’d hit with some aspect of the development, and he’d look at what I’d given him and pierce right to the heart of the problem, something I’d felt itching at my attention but hadn’t quite managed to articulate to myself. And of course he knew Solid Vision better than anyone, but anyone, else; he’d invented it, and he wasn’t exactly hands-off about the ongoing development, either.

So we saw each other often enough for work, sometimes as much as once or twice a week if we were close to a development milestone. The further we got, the more nervous and excited I was about how the project was going. It was thrilling, but terrifying, you know? Seeing something that had once existed only in my imagination, coming together in the real world through the efforts of a hundred-dev team—it was still a little hard to believe. Spherium was my dream, and KaibaCorp was making it happen, readying to put that dream into the hands of real players, to be loved or hated or anything in between. Would they like it? Would it matter that I’d put so much love and effort into making it good, or would it vanish into the long list of B-list games with barely a gurgle, like so many new releases did?

Fears like that kept me up at night, but Kaiba was confident the game would succeed. That was another good thing about working with him: when Kaiba was sure about something he radiated that assurance so strongly you couldn’t help but absorb some of it for yourself. And it was never just empty assurance; if he believed in something he had logical reasons lined up for why he did, and could argue them from first principles. If he didn’t think that my game would fail it was because he understood what we were doing and how it would feel to the player, and when his flat rebuttals poked holes in my inflated anxieties I could even believe him.

I know it sounds like I’m focusing on talking about our work to avoid the real subject, but that isn’t it. It’s just that our working relationship was our relationship, and I want to be clear that it was a good relationship. Sure, Kaiba could be overbearing when he thought he was right, but he also knew a good idea when he heard one, and at the end of the day there’s a reason the contracts Otogi’s lawyer drew up stipulated my creative control. I couldn’t have asked for a better co-developer than KaibaCorp, and I couldn’t have asked for a better development partner than Kaiba, without whom Spherium would’ve been a totally different game.

Of course, it was always a little strange to step back and see ourselves working together. After everything that had happened between us I don’t think either of us had expected to wind up interacting for something so normal, seeing each other week after week with no world-shattering stakes or evil magic at all. He’d been my classmate, my rival, had hurt my friends and saved them, and I’d done those same things to him. Kaiba was no longer so angry; I was alone in my head. We weren’t the people we’d been, and for both of us there was a big empty space in our lives where another person had been.

It’s funny, really. We never talked about Atem, but his absence defined us, anyway. That gap was like an invisible tether between us, tying us together in silent knowledge. He was here, and now he is not.

I say “never,” but that’s not exactly true. We never spoke about him once we started working together, but I met Kaiba once before that, not long after the whole mess with Diva. There’d been a minor headline in the news saying Kaiba had been hospitalized, and I’d seen it and thought—

Well. You can probably guess what I thought, considering how Kaiba had been the last time I’d seen him. I called Mokuba before I could think better of it, feeling sick to my stomach.

Mokuba set me straight, his tone cold, affect flat. What had happened, he said, was that his brother had built a dimension cannon, untested and experimental; he’d used it, successfully; and now he was back, and the circumstances of his return necessitated an inpatient stay at a private hospital.

Mokuba gave me the address, and hung up.

I went to see him. Of course I did; knowing what Kaiba had done, knowing what we all wished we could do—wouldn’t you have? I would’ve gone even if I hadn’t been worried about him, and I was. Despite what Mokuba had said, I couldn’t help thinking that what Kaiba had done wasn’t so different from what I’d imagined when I’d first seen that headline. Had he really planned to come back?

I didn’t need to ask him that question, when I saw him at the hospital. Just seeing him was enough.

What I did ask him about was Atem, and that question he answered.

Yes, he’d seen him. Yes, Atem was well.

And:

“I almost stayed,” Kaiba had said, his voice distant, his eyes fixed on some vague point outside the room’s window, where the springtime trees were in full bloom. I was standing at the foot of his bed. “Mokuba was here, but I almost stayed.”

He hadn’t sounded guilty. Hadn’t sounded any way at all, just—stating a fact. Colorless, uninflected.

It stuck with me, seeing him like that. Kaiba—thunderous, forward-looking Kaiba—looking almost as hollow as the last time I’d seen him in hospital? You can bet I wasn’t about to forget it. But I didn’t see him again after that, not until Germany, when he found me at the reception for the game design competition I won with Spherium.

I was surprised to see him, though given that KaibaCorp was one of the competition’s sponsors I really shouldn’t have been. He was dressed less ostentatiously than I remembered, enough that I didn’t spot him until he was right next to me: no belts, no flared coat, just a sleek suit and a blue tie with a matching triangle in the front pocket, topped off with a silver tie pin shaped like a blue-eyes white dragon (what else?). But he looked well, far better than the last time I’d seen him. Quieter than he used to be, sure, but when he asked if I had a co-developer lined up for Spherium the light was there in his eyes, where before the spark had been extinguished. I was relieved—and, okay, a little flattered. I’d always known Kaiba was smart, really smart, even when he was just my classmate, and I knew he was a real master of games. I’d just won a competition on Spherium’s merits, but it still meant something to me to hear that Kaiba thought it worth investing millions.

Like I said: he had a way of making you believe in what he believed.

And maybe seeing him spoke to something else in me, too.

Because I’d shared a body with Atem for over two years, and the thing about that is: he wasn’t only there for the card games. And everyone who knew about Atem knows that, in theory—but they don’t get what it means. Nobody does, except maybe Ryou, and this definitely isn’t something I’m going to ask him about, not when the other Bakura was the way he was. Though Ryou kept putting the Ring on despite that, so maybe I have my answer.

What I’m trying to say is, once Atem and I connected—when we started being able to hear each other, feel each other, after Death-T—I really wasn’t alone in my head. Even when he was silent inside me, his emotions bled into me, and vice versa. The more strongly he felt something the more likely it was to spill over into me, and we only had one nervous system between us. If he had a reaction to something—to someone—again and again, the one who was left with the physical memory of that reflex was me.

So, yes: every time our heart beat faster for Kaiba—every time Atem felt adrenaline and excitement at a chance to face him—I felt it, too. And my body didn’t forget.

Perverse, I know. But I wanted to explain that part, because it matters to what happened between us, and I don’t want you to think it was all Kaiba’s fault. I screwed up, too.

Really, out of the two of us, I’m the one to blame.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The point is: Atem was gone, but the way Atem felt about Kaiba was still there inside me, floating around in my peripheral nervous system. Which was weird, because my conscious feelings about Kaiba weren’t like that. I felt for him, and once we started working together I realized I even liked him, in the quiet, burgeoning way that comes with getting a glimpse under someone’s spiky exterior. He was my friend—a real friend, after so long pacing the edges of that possibility—and I cared for him as a friend. The undercurrent of something else left over from Atem didn’t fit into that, but I couldn’t ignore it, either. It was part of me, and it blended into what I felt about Kaiba, whether I liked it or not.

So maybe that was why I ended up drawn to him. Just—as context. For everything.

Anyway, obviously we started working together. I got to know Kaiba as a colleague, but we’d known each other too long for it to stay that surface-level; of course I got to know him as a person, too. And I hadn’t been wrong, in thinking that although he looked better he still wasn’t quite himself, or at least not quite himself as he had been.

I saw—in pieces, in glimpses across the table during our meetings, which started to run later and later into the evening as we got deeper into development, and began to sidetrack into other games—that he was deeply sad, and deeply lonely. There was a hole in his heart just like there was in mine, made by the same person, and if mine was filled by the friends I loved then Kaiba’s was always half-empty, the fire inside him leaking out through it. Leaving him a little colder, always, than he had been.

And if the heat that sometimes flushed through me at being near him belonged to Atem, then the way I sometimes caught him looking me left no question whom he was seeing, either.

Neither of us said a word about it. But we didn’t avoid the pull we felt. Atem or no Atem, he was my friend, and I was his. The sense that we were both being haunted made my heart ache, but it didn’t stop me from loving my friend.

Or falling for him.

Predictable, right? Yeah, I fell for him. And even now I couldn’t tell you how much of that was me, myself, Yugi Mutou of the twenty-first century, and how much was all those left-over ghost feelings from Atem, who—no, he hadn’t loved Kaiba, not then, he hadn’t gotten that far. But who could have, so easily, if only he’d been here, loved Kaiba back.

Because of course Kaiba loved him. There was no question of that.

But I really am dragging my feet, aren’t I? I was going to tell you what happened. Okay. I can do that. I can.

So: we were having another late-evening meeting. Spherium was approaching the point of being ready for alpha testing, but I was starting to get cold feet about some of the latest additional features—were we suffering scope creep? I wanted my game to be perfect, and while working with a big dev team was great, it also meant there were a lot of ideas that weren’t my own. I’d been neck-deep in it all for so long that I felt like I was losing perspective, and I wanted Kaiba’s eyes on the more recent changes, to do that piercing-through-the-bullshit thing he was so good at.

Which he did, and afterward we got takeout and played gin rummy, and then worked some more—barely. Kaiba produced a bottle of wine to go with dinner, and we both had a glass or two.

Not that I was drunk. Don’t think I’m trying to pass this all off on being sloshed.

No, I was still sober when I looked over at him—we were both on the couch by then, laptops and tablets spread out around us—and made my decision. He was languid beside me, saying something about what he thought I should do based on what kind of feedback we got during the alpha; I was sitting next to him on my knees, laptop balanced across them, putting me at equal height. I had been listening, even agreeing, but somewhere in the middle of Kaiba talking something inside me slipped loose, and then I wasn’t listening anymore. I was paying attention to how close we were, and how warm I was from the wine, and how it felt like the two of us had been circling each other for months. Like a binary system, Kaiba might have said; tethered to a common center of mass, but never able to touch.

Except we weren’t just dumb collections of matter, unable to act upon our own motion. That was what Kaiba believed. No fate, no predestination. What you gave was what you got. I, too, could by my own power move.

So I set my laptop aside, and then I leaned over and kissed him, turning his face towards myself with one hand.

He cut off mid-sentence, and went very still. His lips had been parted around his argument, so I didn’t need to be satisfied with a chaste press of lips:

[skipped section]

“Wait.” Kaiba’s voice came out hoarse. I pulled quickly back, but he wasn’t pushing me away. He pulled up a holographic display over one of his bracers—I recognized the experimental Solid Vision interface he’d been working on, for the moment only available to himself—and tapped through to a menu with controls for his office.

His hands were shaking. “Kaiba-kun,” I said. “Do you want to stop?”

I got a dirty look for that. The lock on the door engaged with an audible thunk, and Kaiba dissipated the virtual overlay before hooking his fingers into the front of my shirt and reeling me in.

I allowed myself to be reeled, climbing over his lap. We found ourselves once again face to face, close enough to feel each other’s breath, and kneeling around his hips I was taller than he was, a rare change in perspective. I curled my hands around the back of his neck, tipped his face up, and kissed him. His hands slid warm up my back.

For a while we descended into sweet tentative exploration, fascinated by the press of lips and tongue. Kaiba was a fast learner, as always: soon he was mapping my soft palate, his tongue sliding over mine as I sank against him, wrapping my arms around his shoulders. I pulled him closer, pressed our bodies together, and let him kiss me.

The only sound in the room was the soft slick noise of our mouths coming together, punctuated by an occasional sigh. His hands roamed my waist, my back, and I lost track of time, caught up in finally getting to touch and taste and have. All the desire I’d inherited from Atem had blossomed into my own, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d enjoyed just kissing someone so much, savoring Kaiba’s every soft exhalation, the dazed look in his eyes. His eyelashes were long and dark when they dipped against his face. Why had we waited so long?

Somewhere in all of this we shifted so that his thigh was between my legs, my knee between his, and it didn’t take long before I was worked up enough to roll my hips into him, wanting. His breath stuttered, and he said, “Yugi—Yugi, let me touch you,” the words very rough.

Who was I to refuse a request like that? I pulled back enough for him to fit a hand between us, and while I bent forward to kiss him again he unfastened my pants, taking me out. I huffed into his mouth as he took me in his hand, feeling the curl of his fingers. A firm stroke of his hand, another, in time with my suddenly urgent kisses, and then I drew back enough to look down, wanting to see him touching me.

A sweet spasm of heat sank right through me. The sight of myself in his hand—

It wasn’t just my body’s reflexes that remembered Atem’s attraction to Kaiba. My brain remembered it just fine, too. Somehow during his duels we always ended up watching Kaiba’s hands, my eyes following every elegant draw and flip of a card, the dramatic flair of each gesture. Atem had more than appreciated that aspect of Kaiba’s gameplay, and on one occasion—during our first night aboard the blimp during Battle City, when we’d been lying awake in bed, thinking back over his tag-team duel with Kaiba—the memory of Kaiba’s hands had elicited in him a surge of eroticism so intense that I’d found myself hard, for all that I was then nominally in control of our body.

Atem—simply the Other Me to me, then—had been embarrassed, stiffly apologetic. But I hadn’t minded. What did it matter whose feeling it was, so long as it made us feel good? I’d put my hand beneath my waistband, and let myself feel it, let Atem feel it. We lay there, and together we thought about Kaiba’s hands: those long slender fingers, their nimble precision, how they might feel touching us in place of our own. I’d had to bite my pillow to keep from making a sound, desperately wound up from the intensity of our mutual focus on that shared vision. I had come wrenchingly hard, Atem’s moan on my lips.

So you can imagine how I felt about what was happening now.

[skipped section]

I’d done this a few times, years ago when I was fooling around with Otogi. I was newly glad for the experience; at least I wouldn’t make a total fool of myself.

I nudged Kaiba’s shoulder back, making him lie back on his elbows, and took him out of his clothes. He exhaled harshly, his eyes on me very dark, and I held his gaze as I bent over him to take him into my mouth.

[skipped section]

Kaiba’s breath hitched, and I felt the warning tightening of his inner thighs. I shuddered with him, and had the fleeting thought that I still needed to be able to walk out of here past the security guard, and couldn’t risk stains on my clothes. I didn’t pull off.

Above me Kaiba made a broken sound like ah, ah!—and came, his back bowing up.

And that was when he said it.

I heard him clearly. Even if I hadn’t, I would have known that my ears weren’t mistaken by the way he went rigid beneath me, locking up even before he finished spilling into my mouth. He’d heard himself say it, and he knew that I’d heard him, and it left both of us frozen, petrified by the reality that when we moved it would be in a universe where that had happened.

Atem. Barely more than a gasp.

It hurt.

Of course it hurt. I wanted him, and just for a moment I’d allowed myself to believe that he wanted me. Me, not the dead man with my face—my partner, the other half of my soul.

Time unfroze; we sprang apart. Kaiba recoiled hard, and I blinked against the sudden sting in my eyes, furious with him and Atem and myself, hating that I’d landed us here. Just for a moment I wanted to swing at Kaiba, to scream in his face: Remember Duelist Kingdom? I saved your life! Me! He was going to have you step right off that ledge!

Which was true, and still it was Atem he wanted. Of course. Who would ever choose me, between the two of us?

Stupid, stupid, stupid. How embarrassing, how humiliating, to have let myself believe anything else. My throat was tight, the inside of my nose burning with impending tears. I couldn’t look at Kaiba. I didn’t want him to see me cry, didn’t want him to read what I’d been thinking in my face and laugh, pressing on the bruise the way only he knew how. Just like he used to, with a sneer and the blue in his eyes turned ice cold.

Kaiba wasn’t laughing. When I finally managed to raise my eyes he looked stricken, all the blood drained from his face, his whole body flinched back and curling in on itself with shame. One hand was clutched against his sternum; the other was fisted against the couch.

No, he hadn’t meant to say it. This wasn’t a practical joke, or a ploy to humiliate me. I knew that. I’d known it the moment the thought had crossed my mind.

It would have been easier, if it had been. Then maybe I could hate him, instead of both of us sitting here as if we’d accidentally grabbed the wrong end of a knife. Both of us, cut to the quick.

Kaiba’s throat moved. My eyes followed the bob of his Adam’s apple. “Yugi,” he croaked, and stopped. He seemed to have run out of words.

Reasonable enough. What was there to say?

My anger drained away as quickly as it had come, leaving only a dull ache in my chest. I sat back on my heels, and sniffed hard, pressing the back of my wrist under my nose. Damply, I said, “Okay,” my voice wavering. “Okay. I guess I should have known.” I had known, and I’d let myself cross the line anyway. I had only myself to blame.

I gave another sniff, and looked up at him, forcing a watery smile. “He wanted you too, Kaiba-kun. I felt it, when he was with me.”

The words seemed to knock Kaiba out of his stupor, anger flashing in his eyes. “Fuck off,” he snarled, and lurched suddenly into motion, scrambling to put himself away and zip up, clattering with his belt buckle. “If you started this so you could laugh at me—”

Is that the first thing you think of, too? What did it say about us, that our minds ran along the same tracks? “It’s the truth. You think I’d lie about something like that?”

“Shut up.” Kaiba’s hands clenched into fists at his sides, his angular shoulders hunching. “What do you know, you—”

“We shared a body for two and a half years. I knew.” I wiped my nose, looked away. “I can still . . . I have all these leftover feelings from him, you know? I wanted to kiss you, but—he did, too.”

“Shut up!” This time it was a savage snarl, Kaiba’s teeth bared. His eyes blazed, meeting mine. “If he’d wanted me, I wouldn’t be here.”

I stared at him, stunned. “But you . . .”

The words turned to ash in my mouth.

I’d never asked him what had happened there, in Aaru. I hadn’t asked him what he’d hoped to get out of that trip, either, though I could guess: he’d wanted to find Atem and bring him back, and when that hadn’t worked I assumed he’d come back of his own volition, tethered by Mokuba and KaibaCorp and whatever else.

But if Atem had turned him away—

How much had it hurt Atem, to push Kaiba back into the world of the living? I knew how Atem had felt. I even knew, courtesy of running around in Atem’s memories, who Kaiba was, who he was to Atem: that priest with the arch voice and the cold eyes, whose memories Atem said Kaiba had. And I’d seen the stone at the museum, read the plaque with the translated inscription, that elegy for a dearly departed friend which the priest—which Kaiba, if Atem was right—had etched into stone three thousand years prior.

I said, in a small voice: “He sent you back?”

Kaiba had gone from white to red, scarlet with fury and shame. Dead level, he said, “Get out of my office.”

*** 

"...I won't!" Geordo is insisting to their father when Ian walks in. For a rarity, all the male members of the royal family are now gathered in one room at the same time - the king behind his desk, weary; Geoffrey leaning against the wall and watching, his face uncharacteristically somber; Alan standing near his twin, his expression complicated. 

All conversation cuts off as Ian strides to their father's desk and upends a portmanteau, covering the teakwood surface with papers and envelopes.

"Ian!" King Owen says in surprise. "What are you..."

"This talk of new engagements for Geordo is stupid," Ian says bluntly. "So I went ahead and got the rescindments from everyone who sent in their application. There. That should fix it."

"...what?" comes the same reply from four different voices at once. 

"Everyone who's sent in an application has now sent in a formal renouncement of their offer in writing," Ian explains, slowly, in a tone that indicates his opinion of his family's intelligence is dropping rapidly. "There they are."

King Owen picks up a particularly creamy-looking envelope and studies it. "This - this is from Duke Richaud of Quid. We don't even have an application from him."

"Oh, his application must not have gotten here yet." Ian shrugs. "Well, whatever. It doesn't matter. We can keep this on file for when it does show up." 

Geordo is staring at him with the shocked look of a drowning man who has unexpectedly been hit in the head by a life-preserver dropping out of the sky. "Ian...Ian-nii..." He swallows hard and stands up straight, shoulders relaxing from a tension that has been stiffening them for days. "Th-thank you!"

Ian slants a cool blue gaze at his younger brother. "I didn't do it for you," he informs Geordo. "Next time - better let a few months pass first, a half-year if we can - just let her be the one to break it. Don't let her name be dragged in the mud further than it has been already just because she's had the terrible luck to be engaged to you."

Geordo staggers backwards as if Ian has struck him in the face. "What?"

Ian ignores Geordo and turns to his staring father. "And then, adopt the girl as a ward of our family. We don't, legally speaking, need to have precedent, but Grandmother Calla's link to the Adeths and your own time as a ward of Duke Lucan Claes will serve as justification. That way it'll be clear that it was us seeking a tie with House Claes, and not the other way around, and people will stop running their mouths about a girl who deserves better at our hands."

"Duke Claes is still alive, though," Geoffrey points out. "As her legal guardian and actual father..."

"But she's not his heir, and as a ward of House Stuart we can make her one," Ian replies. "The estate I was given from mother's side, Atholl..."

"What are you talking about?" Geordo demands, grabbing Ian's shoulder. 

"She doesn't need to marry you to be my younger sister," Ian states baldly. "And at Atholl she'll be closer to me and Selena..."

"She's not yours!" Geordo screams. 

"And she's certainly not yours, nor do you deserve her," Ian says coolly. Alan flinches, but Geordo just stares with eyes aflame. Ian stares back, water-magic as potent as Geordo's fire-magic backing the coldness of his gaze. If Geordo's eyes flare with inferno, Ian's has all the dark, hidden depths of a northern sea.  

(Ian thinks back to his visit with Selena to Katarina at her Claes household; the staff staring with anger at the royal sigil on Ian's clothes. They are well-trained and the pick of the wealthy and expansive Claes holdings; still they cannot help but show it. They, too, have heard the unflattering rumours about the prince casting off their young mistress. 

But Katarina Claes herself does not look the slightest bit unhappy or flustered as she welcomes them to tea with the grace only actual happiness at a guest's arrival can give. 

"Oh no," she laughs, waving her hand airily, when Selena - anxious, sad, seeing herself all too easily in the younger girl's place - brings the topic up with much fear. "I always knew Geordo would end up with someone better than me." 

There is a moment of silence.

"But…Katarina…you're crying," Selena says, her voice very soft.

Katarina puts a hand up to her face, feels tears on her fingertips. "Oh.”

She swallows hard. “Oh, you're right."

And Ian remembers the feeling of watching Katarina Claes, who had given Selena the confidence she needed, had given Ian the chance he didn’t deserve, who had forgiven her own kidnapping and imprisonment and become the best friend her kidnapper could have, who had been the reason he and Selena had finally realized their love - watching the girl who had been so bright and joyous in the face of so much darkness - watching her smile waver and tremble but stick on her pale face as the tears streamed down - remembers the sick twisting in his belly, remembers the answering and too-empathetic tears on Selena's face as she had taken a finally-sobbing Katarina into her arms.)

And, remembering, he finds the strength to tell his younger brother, "She deserves better than this." 

"How dare you," Geordo begins to snarl.

"And I don't deserve Selena. I hurt her, for longer. I was pathetic. You - you've been braver than me, but just as pathetic. You're braver, but not brave enough to actually open your heart enough to convince her. Not when she knows the real reason you pushed for the engagement to begin with," Ian tells Geordo, remembering what Katarina had gasped out to Selena as she sobbed in the older girl's arms. 

Geordo goes pale. "She - she knows?"

Alan is pale as well. "Knows - knows what? Geordo, what real reason? Ian!" 

Geoffrey exhales sharply, in conjunction with his father.