#some beast

Summary: The best laid schemes of Kaiba and kaiju often go awry… now he needs a new Drift partner.

Word Count: 15k out of 149k | Rating: M | ship: flareshipping

Annoying! The Millennium Eye never gave you a moment to yourself. It was always noise, all the time. Always an untuned orchestra. Every mind playing its own neurotic catastrophic arrhythmic melodies. Here someone sang the sad, sad tune of their ailing old granny; over there someone’s heart played a joyful little ditty about the mess hall’s chocolate cookies–to drown out the angry, insistent trumpet of their tyrannical officer’s parting comments. During the good times it was chaos, of a petty, terribly pedestrian kind; like standing on a street corner on a Friday night in Las Vegas, in the old days. During the bad times, Pegasus wanted to knock their heads together, just for a moment of silence.  Just his luck: the second he uncorked the Californian pinot noir, a bottle from the summer before that blazing, apocalyptic October, something dark and terrible come to his door. Like a stray dog, but worse: a man, desperate and terrified, with a tender, wincing soul.  He sighed, set the bottle down on his credenza, and opened the door to his stateroom. There was Seto, frozen mid-pace in front of his door, frowning in suspicious surprise. He’d wanted several more moments to make up his mind about what he was going to say, and how.  “Hello, Kaiba-boy,” Pegasus said. “Come in. Sit.”

A/N: many, many, many things happen. not all of them good. actually pretty bad.

Summary: The best laid schemes of Kaiba and kaiju often go awry… now he needs a new Drift partner.

Word Count: 13k out of 133k | Rating: M | ship: flareshipping

2347 HOURS, SOMEWHERE IN THE NORTH PACIFIC Despite being a parasite of the most loathsome kind, no better than a worm buried in the heel of a bare foot, squirming between dirt and skin and blood, Kaiba had built an excellent ship. The massive, foam-marbled swells rose like black teeth out of the midnight sea, but the Paradius rolled with the ease of a seabird, calm and poised. Dartz barely felt the sway as he left the bridge and went down towards his private stateroom. Swaddled in steel, safe from the sea, the ship’s rhythmic rise and fall in tandem with the distant hums and groans of the engine and the dim, shifting shadows of the passageway, made him feel like an unborn child yet inside their mother’s womb.  Destiny twisted and writhed in exquisite ways. Of all his wretched glories, all the battleships and the tanks and the artilleries and the unmanned aerial vehicles, each of them glossed and polished with the promise of making peace but engineered for making war, the best weapon Kaiba had made was his son. Sweet lamb, raging bull! Of all the Rangers, the son’s faith in the world was the most unfounded and therefore the strongest. Life had planted the jagged grain inside his beaten flesh, and he’d transformed the pain into a pearl. Now it was pure and it was perfect.  A shame, then, that Dartz had to turn his attention away from him and the Nameless Pharaoh and their little kicking donkey.

A/N: YAY UPDATE <3

bonus:

- Jounouchi, Mai, and Malik all love doing the press circuit; Rishid and Honda tag along, indifferently; Amelda uses it for political soapboxing so they don't let him and Valon do it anymore; Kaiba flatly refuses and no one tries to make him. Mokuba and Yuugi would be great at doing press but again the Kaiba "i'm not your show pony I won't do tricks" factor prevents them

- Rishid and Kaiba are the only Rangers who have been formally paired with two other people (Isis and Malik, Mokuba and Yuugi/Yami.) Jounouchi and Yuugi technically as well but they were never the primary Ranger pair for their Jaeger. As a result Rishid's kaiju kill count is one or two behind Kaiba's bc of his battles with Isis and his battles with Malik. Unlike Kaiba, he's the supporting Ranger for his more take-charge siblings, playing the same role Mokuba played for Kaiba.

- Rangers don't get to choose their Jaeger names or color schemes; Pegasus chooses for them, and is weirdly good (👁️) at choosing things they love

- Kaiba is stationed in Domino not bc he's from Domino but bc Pegasus is the only Marshal equipped (👁️) to handle him. The former is the official reason and the latter is the "lol we manipulated/strong-armed this guy and he's not happy about it" reason

- the Rangers invariably set the tone for their Shatterdomes. As a result, Lima is permissive, indulgent, and indifferent to rule-breaking; Anchorage and Hong Kong are social, friendly, and fun; Sydney is fiery and principled; Domino is all work, no play. Not so much gloomy as intense. San Francisco WAS known for being eccentric and gleefully nerdy.

- Ranger candidates generally train in the Honolulu or Anchorage Shatterdomes. How many candidates there are at one time, and how many actually become Rangers, is an ongoing battle of wills between Pegasus (more) and Dartz (only the best)