Discover Top Posts Tagged with #kaiborg

May 6, 2013

Fic: Through the Black: Contact

Yuugi and Jounouchi fly their little ship through the depths of space in search of duels but instead find themselves confronted with Kaiba - who isn't quite the man they once knew. Sci-fi AU.

Sequel to Through the Black but this functions as a standalone.

I know I've been promising this for a long time but it's been a real struggle getting it down. I'm not thrilled with it, but it's been almost a year since part one so I figured I might as well post it or you would never see it. (Though I kind of want to write a part three because I had to edit out my favourite most disgusting scene and I'm sad about that.)

Nothing really to warn for except a little profanity.

They docked silently. The black pressure of space pushed noiselessly against the windows of the small blue ship while, inside, Yuugi and Jounouchi held their breath. A deep metallic sigh reverberated through the bowels of the Bluebird craft that carried them, and then something large clicked heavily into place. Yuugi exhaled slowly, calming himself, then eased off the black joystick that had guided their landing.

“We're locked on,” Yuugi said.

Jounouchi too breathed out. His eyes flickered over the sight beyond the fish-bowl window that encased them both. The KaibaCorp. vessel drifted like something dead on the surface of a lake, big and grey and mute in the blackness – and now they drifted with it. Soon their air circulation systems would be connected, each feeding the other, pumping life and death between the two mismatched ships. This was a dangerous endeavour. No one else would have taken it. Jounouchi even wasn't sure that he would have, if it hadn't been for Yuugi.

But Yuugi never abandoned a person in need. And especially not if that person was Kaiba.

“Yuugi?” Jounouchi began, but Yuugi held up a hand.

“Just don't,” he said. “I know what you're thinking and I don't want to hear it.”

“Yuugi, you have to at least, like, vaguely consider the possibility that-”

“No.” Yuugi's voice left no room for argument. Long ago, Jounouchi would have mocked him for trying to take that kind of tone. Now it rang soft but firm and cold all at once, no longer the voice of that little fifteen-year-old that Jounouchi had victimised at school. His friend had long ago grown into a man.

“I'll check the oxygen filters one last time,” Jounouchi said, heaving himself from the bunk and slipping easily into the tiny warren of wires and pistons below deck. Yuugi leaned back in his shabby little captain's chair and stared out at the silver beast before them.

It was three months since anyone had heard from Kaiba's ship. It was sheer luck – pure, insanely improbable luck – that had brought him and Jounouchi close enough to pick up the ship's faint electronic imprint in the universe. They had tried to hail them, but there had been no reply. They diverted their course to intersect with the ship, in case it was in trouble, and then its huge mass had emerged before their window and they read the serial number. The ship was Kaiba's. Of all the thousands of ships cruising the darkness that teemed about them, what were the chances?

“Beyond improbable,” Yuugi muttered aloud, but no one heard. His hand drifted unconsciously to his chest and clutched at air. Even after all these years his neck still felt too light. He clenched his fist and shut his eyes briefly, then opened them again and flicked several switches on the console. “We're ready to board,” he called.

---

The stench hit them the moment the door opened. It was beyond foul, rotten and stale, thick with sweat and salt and awful, unclean muskiness. Yuugi dry retched. Jounouchi caught his shoulder to steady him.

“Something is obviously screwed in their oxygen filtration system,” Jounouchi said through the sleeve he had pressed over his mouth. “But it's still breathable. That's a good sign.”

“Breathable,” Yuugi repeated archly. “That's generous.”

“Well, I've smelt guys' locker rooms that were almost this bad,” said Jounouchi. He peered into the gloom beyond. The doors from their tiny, two-roomed ship opened into a narrow, unsettlingly clean corridor, with the rungs of a metal ladder at the end. A faint, pale green glow came from somewhere beyond. “The lights aren't working either.”

“I don't like this.”

“Could be worse,” Jounouchi said, stepping over the threshold and passing from their ship into Kaiba's. He lingered before the ladder that would take them up into the ship proper. “If they were in a really dire situation then they'd shut down everything that wasn't necessary. The fact that the air is still on but the lights aren't means they've still got power.”

“Alright,” Yuugi breathed. “After you.”

Jounouchi obliged.

The room into which they emerged was far larger than their own tiny cockpit, with room enough to walk around freely. A great glass window gaped out into space beyond; on either side big black screens bulged out of the walls, some fat and blank, others slim and alight with vibrant scrolls of nonsensical aqua text. They pressed around a large silver table that dominated the centre of the room. The table was almost bare save for a single cotton sheet, stained with vile smears of red and yellow, crumpled like a little pile of tripe. The only other object was a strange drill-like plug. It had been fed through a round hole drilled through one end of the table and rested on the hole's lip through which it trailed a thick black cable. The plug had a single metal prong, a centimetre in diameter, which serrated at its tip into minute ridges and valleys. The cable that formed its base was covered with thin black rubber, beneath which it seemed countless wires and electronic tendons strained against the surface.

Seeing the abandoned sheet and plug, the former clearly blood stained and the latter so honed and bright and sharp and violent, Jounouchi felt as though they stood where somebody had been killed.

Yuugi had begun to walk around the table, studying the many glimmering screens. Their bright blue light shone in his eyes, but Jounouchi was unable to take his own off that plug. It felt wrong to look at, taboo, a weapon or part of someone's insides. As he stared he saw that the gleaming metal prong was not entirely clean: little trails of some dried, black matter wound around it.

“Yuugi, I don't think we should be here.”

“According to what I'm reading here the ship isn't even that low on power,” Yuugi said. “There are definitely faults – the air, the water, the communications – but it seems half the power is going to something called 'KCUplink'.” He flicked a switch, and above them several dull lights flickered on, not so much brightening the room as dousing it in weak, oily yellow. Then Yuugi's breath caught. “Wait...”

“What? Seriously, Yuugi, something is not right here.” A small rust coloured stain curled around the hole in the table.

“The ship. It can send communications but it can't receive them. Why would they not have sent out a call for help?”

“Because we don't need help,” came a voice behind them.

They both spun on their feet. When their eyes met Kaiba's, Jounouchi let out a tense breath of half-dead oxygen, but Yuugi's lips remained tight and pursed. Kaiba stood in the dim light furthest from the cockpit, his face half in shadow. It was the same Kaiba they had last seen on Earth four long years ago. It was the same tall, slim frame cast in tight black cottons, the same proud pose. The same disdain curled his lip, and the same guarded, battle-hungry warmth bent that disdain into a smirk.

But it was not the same left eye. The right was the same familiar blue that in this dim light recalled the sea floor and tons of black oceanic pressure behind his irises. But the left eye was pale luminescent green, ringed with jagged black concentric circles shrinking to where a pupil ought to be. It swivelled slightly out of sync with its unidentical twin.

“What are you doing on my ship?”

“Kaiba,” said Yuugi. “I'm glad you're alive.”

Kaiba made a small noise in the back of his throat that was supposed to be contempt but which, for a very brief moment, both misinterpreted as pain. “Of course I am.”

As he spoke he shifted into the light, staring Yuugi down, that odd glowing eye never quite settling. The low yellow drone of the lights above caught thin flashes of vibrant green sub-dermal wiring along his neck. Five thin electronic veins embossed the skin and wound around the shell of Kaiba's ear where they disappeared into his hair. But even aside from the wires and the eye he looked different: colder, paler. His skin smoothed the hollows of his cheeks like damp clay and faded into sallow shades beneath his eyes, and the line drawn by his pale lips was thinner. He had changed.

“What happened to your eye?” Jounouchi said.

Kaiba's gaze drifted to Jounouchi and filled with deliberate, weighted disapproval, as though he had only just noticed him. “What is that lowlife doing here?”

“I'm Yuugi's mechanic.”

Kaiba snorted. “And how could you afford that kind of training?”

“I couldn't. I taught myself.”

Kaiba made a little familiar sound of disdain. So familiar. The same sound he made the last time they met, when they were all eighteen, all high school students. Four years and it hadn't changed at all. “I suppose it suits you, following your better half around. It's not as though you could afford your own ship.”

“At least our ship is running,” Jounouchi snapped back, and he saw Kaiba's lips twitch with satisfaction. Jounouchi took a breath. “If you want me to fix your water system,” he continued more levelly, “I can do that. I know your ships are mostly automated, but hydraulics are pretty much all mechanics. Your air filtration also seems kind of...” He trailed off and let them all become conscious again of the stench they were breathing in, though it was less now the fresher air from the Bluebird was being pumped in.

“As if you have any idea how a craft like mine operates.”

Now it was Jounouchi's turn to laugh in disbelief. “Kaiba, you fly a KC-Fourteen. You use the exact same hydraulics system as the Bluebird that Yuugi pilots.”

“I'm quite aware of what system we use. I designed this ship, idiot.”

“But you didn't design the hydraulics,” Jounouchi concluded. His tone softened. “I can fix them for you.”

For a long moment Kaiba simply held his sneer, but then it slowly fell away. He turned back to Yuugi. “Bluebirds are good ships. Fast. But they're not durable. Hardly the best choice if you're pursuing duels across deep space.”

“I don't have your budget, Kaiba,” Yuugi said gently. “We get by.” He smiled. “After all, I have a great mechanic.”

“Speaking of we,” Jounouchi interrupted, “You said, 'We don't need help.' Is Mokuba here?”

Kaiba watched Jounouchi while he talked, but when Kaiba answered his gaze was back on Yuugi. “He's on Earth. Isono is the only other passenger; he's in his quarters,” he said. He inhaled slowly and thinly, making them wait for him to finish what he was saying. “While you stabilise your connection to my ship I'll have him make you something to drink. Then-” His eyes focused on Yuugi. “-We can discuss the duel you owe me.”

---

Jounouchi, Yuugi, and Kaiba sat around the table in the control room, which had been mercifully cleared of the dirty sheet (though the plug had only had its wire coiled up and been stashed under one of the screens). Isono walked between them and poured each a cup of hot, unpleasantly pungent liquid before coming to stand behind his employer, arms folded neatly behind him.

“Isono, sit down,” Kaiba snapped. “You're not our waiter.”

“Sorry, Master Seto,” Isono muttered, then cast around for a free seat. All were taken. He opted instead to lean awkwardly against the wall.

Jounouchi examined the drink he'd been poured. There were bits floating in it. He wondered if it would be too rude to ask if the bits were supposed to be there. Deliberate bits. Yuugi sipped his cup in polite silence.

“So,” said Jounouchi. “Why didn't you send out a distress call? People have been worried about you, y'know.”

“We've been experiencing communication problems,” Kaiba answered, not touching his own drink. “And we're not in distress.”

“Man, come on.” Jounouchi leaned over the table to see Kaiba better and rested his head against his oil-grubby, half-gloved hand. “Your water isn't working properly, your air would be practically unbreathable if you weren't linked up with our ship, your food supplies are...” He looked down at the murky grey-green liquid and its little floating piece of something. “What even is this?”

Something almost resembling a smile crooked the side of Kaiba's mouth. He tilted his head to Isono. “Well?”

Isono coughed. “It's a liquidised protein beverage diluted with Assam tea,” he answered.

“I like it,” said Yuugi. He exchanged a smile for a grateful nod from Isono. Jounouchi sighed in exasperation.

“Damn, Kaiba, nothing on this ship is working properly. You aren't even moving right now. Do you get how terrifying that is? Just drifting, in deep space, weeks of travel from any kind of station. And months from Earth. It's beyond miraculous that we even found you. What the hell are you doing out here?”

“Why don't you travel back?” Yuugi continued in a quieter, more measured voice. “Why are you diverting half your power?” He took a breath. Kaiba didn't blink as he watched him. “What's KCUplink?”

Kaiba presented them with a dense granite wall of silence. He looked between them both, assessing each, weighing something massive in his mind. Then he spoke to Isono. “Go make sure that our oxygen system hasn't been ruined by their ship's interference. And then you can take the rest of the night off, unless I call you.”

Isono nodded and smartly exited. Kaiba waited until his footsteps died away beneath them. Then he spoke.

“KCUplink is Kaiba Corporation's latest invention,” he said. “It's VR technology.”

“Virtual reality?” Jounouchi said bluntly. Kaiba's eyes flicked up in irritation.

“Yes. It allows one to connect directly with cyberspace. No pods, no screens, no interface. A direct connection.” He paused. He seemed to be considering something. And then a light came into his eyes, the kind of light that burned there when duelling, when winning. Something alive. “Imagine the most vibrant, the most intimate experience of life you have ever had. Multiply it by a thousand. You're standing in a city, but you're not just standing. You know everything there is to know about the cement beneath your feet, about the gravitational pull on your body, about the thousands that have walked this street before you. And you can map the city instantly. All you need do is think about what lies around the corner and you know – you know about the coffee shop, the library, the clothes store. And then you're there, instantaneously; and you can drink the coffee, read the books, try on the clothes. Everything is immediate, atemporal. A series of instances, each drenched in perfect omniscience. It is the removal of all intermediary between human and technology. Cyberspace. Pure, infinite. It is everything and everywhere.” His left eye was raging burning solar white, the pupils flaring, while its electronic twin focused and refocused with mad vivacity. “It is the future,” Kaiba breathed.

Then he sat back. His breath had quickened. He looked between them both in crackling, electric anticipation.

“I don't get it,” said Jounouchi.

“A direct connection?” said Yuugi, ignoring the withering look Kaiba had thrown Jounouchi. “What does that mean, exactly? You have to have some intermediary. A computer, or something.”

Kaiba shook his head. “No. You don't. Not with KCUplink. It plugs directly into the cerebral cortex.”

“What, into your brain?” said Jounouchi.

“Exactly. You don't need a simulator. You don't need a computer – except to act as a server. Your brain creates everything.” A smile played lightly over his lips. “It is flawless.”

“Neat concept. How you going to test something like that? Start drilling into monkey skulls or what?”

“He's already tested it.”

They both turned to Yuugi. His features were dark.

“Yes,” Kaiba said. “It's working admirably. There are a few issues with the organics, but the technology is sound. It's already working on a small scale.”

“'Issues with the organics'?” Jounouchi repeated, mimicking Kaiba's voice. “Is that a fancy way of saying you're struggling to drill a hole through someone's skull?”

“Not at all.” Kaiba smiled at them both with lips of barbed wire. Then he shifted in his chair, turning to face the other way. He pulled aside his hair and bared his neck. There, just above his collar, was a small metal disc, about an inch in diameter, set into his skin.

“Shit,” muttered Jounouchi.

“Show me,” said Yuugi.

Kaiba inclined his head slightly in a kind of embryonic nod, and then he reached behind his neck, fingers closing on the ridge that bisected the metal disk. He twisted it three times. Then he moved his hand away.

A little more than a finger width of pure void disappeared into his neck. Around the hole Kaiba's unhealthy pale skin faded into pink, then into red inflammation, and then bleached foetid yellow at the ragged edge of the open wound where the flesh grew helplessly against the metal, trying to heal the hole. The black metallic O glistened with vile liquids. It was impossible to determine how deep it bored.

“Shit,” Jounouchi repeated. “It looks infected."

"It's not,” said Kaiba. His voice was oddly quiet. “It takes time to heal.”

"How long you had it?"

Kaiba inhaled audibly and Yuugi got up. He came to stand next to his rival with his eyes alight.

“Two years, eight months,” Kaiba replied, remaining stationary as Yuugi stood before him. Yuugi hesitated, then very gently placed the tips of his fingers on Kaiba's chin, the palm of his other hand on the back of his head. He delicately tilted Kaiba's head forwards, throwing the first few centimetres of the hole into sharp relief. Kaiba allowed it. The topmost notch of his spine rose clean and sharp above his collar, pointing sharply towards the hole. In the light they could both see silver circles of grooves and teeth spiralling inwards, into him, and the deeper parts glistened with something wet.

Yuugi released his whisper-soft grip. “What does it feel like?” he asked in a low, soft voice. Kaiba's head remained down.

“Nothing.”

“Would you feel it if we touched it?”

“I can't feel anything. It's metal."

“What if you stuck a finger in there?” said Jounouchi.

“That could kill me.”

Yuugi's hand drifted to the metal threshold, his middle finger infinitesimally extended. He ran the fingertip around the silver edge, very lightly, then withdrew. He rubbed his fingertips together, forcing his face to stay flat. Something wet was sticking to his fingers.

“It doesn't look very hygienic,” he said, standing back. He took a tissue from his pocket and kept his eyes politely averted as he wiped his fingers clean.

“That's why I keep it covered,” Kaiba said. He leaned away from them and turned around again, then screwed the protective cap back in place. “It requires frequent cleaning. The technology is still very much in its early stages. I certainly can't market it to the public like this.”

“Well, yeah, it's super gross,” Jounouchi said bluntly. Yuugi stifled a laugh for Kaiba's sake, but Kaiba was smiling wryly.

“I know. It's a prototype.”

“What do you mean by 'it'?” Yuugi asked. “The metal? Can it be removed?”

Kaiba shrugged a single shoulder. “Perhaps. But I wouldn't attempt such a thing unless there was serious risk to my life. There have been some... unanticipated complications.” That same dry smile twisted his lips again. “I expect it will be a permanent addition.”

“So when you say it's a prototype,” said Jounouchi, “what you mean is you're a prototype.”

Kaiba straightened his neck and turned to face them again. His one blue eye was fixed cold and unreadable upon Jounouchi. There was no emotion, not even hostility, in its green twin. “Someone needs to be.”

He took in Jounouchi and Yuugi's horrified gazes silently. He rolled his eyes. “Neither of you have any conception of what work like mine entails. Don't be so pathetic.”

“There's no amount of money in the world you could pay me to go through with something like that,” Yuugi said quietly.

“I won't offer you a job then,” Kaiba said drily. “Not that you'd need it. I hear you're doing very well for yourself. Three international tournaments won this year alone, and all with cash prices. Congratulations.”

“Well, I like to duel,” said Yuugi, politely side-stepping Kaiba's sarcastic congratulations. “And it pays to keep us in the air.”

“Duelling for money. Not something I would have expected from you.” He awaited an answer, but Yuugi gave him none. “Well. Now that you're here, perhaps you can set aside your financial motivations and duel me.” He smirked. “Assuming you haven't gone soft.”

Jounouchi watched them talk, biting his tongue on every comeback for Yuugi's sake. The thought of being stuck out in deep space with Kaiba and Yuugi locked in a duel made his head hurt, but he wouldn't argue. He had quietly resigned himself to being trapped on a ship with Kaiba for the next few days when Yuugi, completely to Jounouchi's surprise, quietly said: “No.”

“I'm sorry?” said Kaiba. “Did you just refuse me?”

“No, Kaiba,” Yuugi repeated. “I don't think it would be appropriate.”

“What are you talking about? I'm challenging you to a duel. How could accepting be anything but appropriate?”

Yuugi sat silently and stared at Kaiba for a very long time. If Jounouchi didn't know better he would have thought Yuugi was conversing with his other self—but of course that was impossible.

“I'll think about it,” said Yuugi finally. “But don't expect a yes.”

Kaiba shook his head in disgust. “Sleep on it,” he said harshly, and put his hand to the neck of his black shirt. He twitched it, and something electronic blinked on beneath the fabric. “Isono? Get up here and ensure their ship is safely docked.”

“You don't trust us to stabilise our own ship?” said Jounouchi.

“Yuugi's ship. You're just a passenger.”

Jounouchi opened his mouth to protest, but Isono's reappearance forced him to swallow the unformed insult.

“Master Seto?”

Kaiba stood. “Escort them back to their ship. Ensure it's safe to sleep on. I don't want to babysit a broken vessel.”

“You don't want them accommodated in our own quarters?” said Isono. “It'll be far more spacious.”

“They can sleep on their own ship.”

“Master Seto, we could accommodate them quite easily in Mokuba's room.” A glacial silence swallowed up the wake of Isono's words. He coughed awkwardly and lowered his voice, though there was no way Yuugi and Jounouchi wouldn't hear. “He's not going to be using it any time soon.”

Kaiba stared through them and the tension, a muscle twitching under the skin of his jaw. “He might,” he finally said. “They can sleep on their own ship.” The firmness of the repeated words left no room for argument.

---

The Bluebird in which they were travelling was built for speed; compact, a tiny silver bullet hurtling through space. Jounouchi had hoped, though not expected, something a bit more luxurious from Kaiba's craft. Every ship is a suffocating little fish bowl out here, but a small part of him had thought that Seto Kaiba's private ship might have a little more to it, if only to show off. But it was like any other craft: tiny and tight and everywhere metal, stinking of recycled air and close-quarter sweat, but even worse than their own.

“I think this is messed up,” Jounouchi said. He was lying in his bunk, while Yuugi sat barely a foot from his head at the controls. “It's been, what, five years since you guys last duelled? And he's still obsessing over beating you? Shouldn't he be concentrating on running his company?”

“I think Mokuba takes care of most of it these days,” Yuugi replied, making final checks of their link with the KC vessel. “He handles most of the publicity, anyway. I suppose that leaves Kaiba to focus on inventions and the like. But I get your point. I thought...” His fingers hovered above the keys and he turned to look at Jounouchi. “I thought he would have grown out of this by now.”

“He thinks you guys are death-till-us-part rivals, man. I don't think he's ever going to get over it.”

“Perhaps. But you'd have thought he'd have at least picked up a hobby or something. It's like he hasn't changed at all since high school.”

“He has picked up a hobby. He's into Frankenstein body mod shit, apparently." Jounouchi kicked off his boots, glossy black with engine grease, and examined his equally greasy grey socked feet. "What is up with that?”

“Maybe he needed a challenge. If I'm not around, and no one else is, then... What's he going to do, duel Isono?” Yuugi's eyes drifted to the silver mass floating beyond the window. “Kaiba needs an enemy. With no one else around he's just making an enemy of himself.”

“Floating out around in space to prove he can beat the galaxy,” Jounouchi muttered. His feet, whole and organic, wiggled their unscarred toes. “Yuugi? Is that why you won't duel him?”

“I don't know. I just... I don't want to make him worse. What if he loses? Then what? What's he going to try to beat instead?” Yuugi ran a tired hand through his hair. “What are we going to do about him?”

“I don't know.” Jounouchi watched his friend and saw the empathy and the selfless worry begin to cloud his eyes. He lightly thumped him. “But we'll think of something, don't worry. Come on. Let's get some sleep.”

---

Yuugi slept deeply, dreaming of sands and glittering silver lakes beneath a perfect azure sky. He dreamt of heat and the bustle of everyday humanity in a beautiful city buried long ago that he had never seen. Half-remembered faces flashed before him, glancing off fragments of memories that drifted against the beautiful cloudless blue like silent weightless rain. A man he once knew stood before him, his face turned away. His skin glowed in the sun and shafts of hot white light shone from the gold that hung about his shoulders. When he turned his face was a soft, smiling mirror of Yuugi's own, and his mouth formed a word that was carried away on the breezeless air...

Yuugi opened his eyes. The dull metal ceiling of his ship rose a few feet above him. He shut his eyes again but the blue sky did not return.

“Hey, Yuugi? Are you awake?”

Yuugi sighed and swallowed. He rolled over and saw Jounouchi standing beside his bunk.

“Yes, I'm awake. What is it?” He blinked away the sleep and Jounouchi's expression came into sharper focus. Something between fear and sickness haunted his features. Yuugi sat up. “Is something wrong?”

“You have to see this,” Jounouchi said. A crack ran through his voice.

“Can it wait until morning?”

“It really can't. You have to come now.”

Yuugi didn't hesitate. He slipped out of bed and quickly pulled his jeans on, shaking off the heavy remnants of sleep. Then he followed Jounouchi through the back of the ship, where the door was open. The mouth of Kaiba's craft gaped before them, cold and sickly and hostile. Yuugi paused at the doorway.

“Jounouchi? What happened here?” Just before their own ship merged into Kaiba's a panel had been slid back, exposing the primary coloured wire guts of their Bluebird. Some had been crudely cut open. “Did you do this?”

“Yeah. Kaiba locked us in. I tried to unlock it through the computer but I couldn't get anything to work. He hacked our system. I got curious, so I cut the controls to the door. It wasn't difficult. I guess Kaiba thinks pretty lowly of my abilities, huh?”

“Don't let him get to you.”

Jounouchi snorted. “Trust me, I won't. Now follow me and keep your voice down, okay?”

Yuugi nodded and obeyed. He waited while Jounouchi's wiry body ascended the ladder into Kaiba's main control room, his filthy, heavy boots resting almost silently on each rung. Yuugi waited until Jounouchi had eased himself into the control room and then followed suit. His bare feet made no sound at all upon the cold metal rungs. He felt like a ghost sliding around Kaiba's ship. When he reached the top of the ladder he easily lifted himself out of the hatch. Then he picked himself up and looked around.

And then he saw Seto Kaiba's corpse.

He shut his eyes immediately. It was beyond instinct; it was visceral. His body refused to let him look at that, refused to let him take any of that into his brain. But it was already branded against his lids. The damp paper texture of Kaiba's yellowed skin. The cracked lilac of his parted lips. The blood in his ear. Yuugi felt nausea rise croaking through his stomach.

“Yuugi?”

Yuugi forced himself to open his eyes. He looked again at Kaiba's body, and then with wild relief saw the shallow undulations of his chest. No, that wasn't a corpse. He was alive. Several of the screens that pulsed out of the walls of the control room were emblazoned with heart-rate readings, blood pressure, and a series of rapidly shifting charts that Yuugi couldn't understand. He noticed now the wires that snaked from the various machines under Kaiba's skin, nuzzling themselves under little brown scabs and deep into Kaiba's insides. A white sheet covered him from the waist to the ankles but he was otherwise naked, each bone grossly close to the skin and shaded in dark blushes of purple and soft blues.

“What's wrong with him?” Yuugi whispered.

“I don't think anything is. Look.”

He pointed towards one end of the table, where Kaiba's skull rested against the hard metal. Something thick and black wound from beneath his neck. Yuugi drew closer, squinting through the poor yellow light, but he couldn't make it out. He ducked underneath the table and looked up through the hole that had been carved into the metal. And then he could see the port in Kaiba's neck. Its metallic lips, wet with blood and limpid pus, were clenched around that vicious plug whose interior wires swelled against its rubber skin. The flesh that formed the helpless wound around the port was more inflamed, more desperately agitated, uselessly trying to close the abyss in Kaiba's neck.

“So this is why he locked us out,” Yuugi murmured.

“I guess this is KCUplink, huh? “

Yuugi watched Kaiba's face. His eyelids trembled as the eyes behind them rolled madly across a virtual datascape of... whatever he chose to see. His chest trembled, sharing an erratic rhythm with the violent heart-rate readings. His expression was incomprehensible, yet somehow horribly familiar. Yuugi couldn't even tell if he was in pain.

“We need to leave,” Yuugi said. “He didn't want us here. This is private. You shouldn't have shown me this.”

“You're just going to leave him like that? Are you serious?”

“We don't even know how KCUplink works. What do you suggest, that we just yank it out of his neck? You don't know what damage that could cause.” Yuugi massaged his temples and squeezed his eyes shut. “I'll talk to him tomorrow. Don't tell him that you saw this. Alright?”

“If you say so,” Jounouchi said stiffly. “You're the captain.”

Yuugi held Jounouchi's odd gaze for a moment. Then he gave Kaiba's body one last glance before turning back to the ladder and slipping out of sight.

Jounouchi lingered. There was something familiar in Kaiba's features that echoed the expression he wore when duelling, when flanked by his Blue Eyes, when something mad and joyous overtook him completely. He wondered what having that plug sunk into your neck would feel like. “Cyberspace. Pure, infinite,” echoed Kaiba's voice in his skull. Did it hurt? Could Kaiba feel the slim metal drill scraping against his spine? Was he aware that they were watching?

A shiver ran through Jounouchi's body. He dragged himself away from the sight of Kaiba's sleeping body and lowered himself onto the ladder, and then he too descended into the darkness once more.

---

Yuugi and Kaiba had been arguing for two hours. Jounouchi sat at the table and rested his head on his folded arms, listening to Yuugi's firm, gentle tones intercut with Kaiba's harsher, colder ones. He contemplated cutting into their tiny supply of pain-killers to soothe his headache.

“Exactly what are you suggesting? I boot up my computer and access cyberspace from there, and you plug yourself in and we duel like that?”

“Precisely.”

“Given that you've admitted yourself that the technology is, at best, unstable I can't understand how you can in good conscience ask me to do something like that.”

“It's my decision.”

“It's not that simple, Kaiba. You don't know what could happen. You could die. I could kill you. You know I'm not going to undertake a risk like that.” Jounouchi heard Yuugi sigh in exasperation. “Let's just play old school style, alright? Just cards on a table. It's the same game.”

“Oh, please-”

“Or you can load up your computer and we'll play through an on-screen simulation. Safely, with neither of us having metal plugs jammed in our necks.”

“Are you afraid, Yuugi?”

The table reverberated as Yuugi slapped his hands upon the table and Jounouchi sat up. He was starting to feel as if he wasn't wanted here. He gently pushed himself away from the table and stood.

“Yes, Kaiba, I'm afraid. I'm afraid for you. I don't even know what you're asking me to do here.”

“I'm asking you to duel me. I'm challenging you. Doesn't that mean anything to you? What are you doing now, competing in the Elite Tournament? Duelling idiots for a nice cash prize?”

“Kaiba, this isn't-”

“Kaiba,” Jounouchi interrupted. He had wandered around to stand behind Kaiba.

“Shut up, idiot. Go back to your ship and play with your primitive mechanical toys.

“Kaiba,” Jounouchi said again. Kaiba almost spat in exasperation.

“What?”

“Your neck is, uh.” Jounouchi gestured inarticulately. “It needs...”

Kaiba's fingers searched through his hair for the hole in the back and returned wet, gilded with translucent red-tinged discharge. He made a noise of irritation and barked out a call for Isono.

“It's still healing,” he explained again, distaste for his guests dripping from his words.

“Maybe we'll go back to our ship for a while,” Yuugi said, stepping towards the ladder. But Kaiba raised a hand.

“No. It's fine. Stay.” Yuugi hovered uncertainly. Kaiba rolled his eyes. “Don't act as though it's...” He clenched and unclenched his jaw. “It's-”

“It's disgusting, man,” said Jounouchi, staring at the suppurating wound on the back of Kaiba's neck. “Do you go out in public like that?”

“I haven't-” Kaiba started, then cut himself off as Isono, dressed in loose pants and a vest, face and hair wet, appeared at the door.

“I'm sorry, Master Seto. I was showering.” He smiled sheepishly. “This is the first time we've had hot water in a long while.”

“What do I pay you for?” Kaiba muttered. “The port needs cleaning.”

Isono's eyes, bright and nervous without his black glasses, bounced rabbit-like between the three young men in the room. He hesitated and Kaiba glared at him. “Of course, Master Seto.”

Isono moved to stand behind Kaiba and gently pushed back his employer's hair. Kaiba inclined his head forwards to give him access, and then the quiet sound of shifting metal slid around the craft as Isono unscrewed the cap, which he placed, bloody and wet, on the table around which they were stood. He extracted from a shelf a zip-lock bag containing a white cloth and a small bottle of what first appeared to be antiseptic, but when Isono unscrewed the bottle its odourlessness confirmed it to be water. Another thing they had long run out of.

“Are you sure you don't want us to leave?” Yuugi murmured, eyes averted.

“Ah, come on, Yuugi,” Jounouchi drawled. His arms were folded and feet planted firmly on the floor. “Kaiba says he's comfortable. Who are we to argue?”

“You're pathetic,” Kaiba hissed. “You, Yuugi. Pursuing duels you don't care about with opponents you don't care about, wasting time, wasting your talent. What's wrong, too afraid to face me?”

Yuugi met the barbs of his gaze coolly, saying nothing. He quietly drank in the venom that dripped from Kaiba's words as Isono delicately dabbed at the seeping hole below Kaiba's skull.

Kaiba's eyes flicked to Jounouchi. “And you? Given up on duelling entirely, have you? I don't know what's more pathetic: that you've given up on the only thing you ever cared about, or that it took you this long to realise just how much you were wasting your time.”

“If you're trying to bait me, Kaiba, it isn't going to work. I'm not sixteen any more. I'm not getting into some dumb shouting match with you.”

“You have made nothing of your life,” Kaiba spat, saliva specks wetting his lips, blood smudges wetting Isono's gloveless hand. They had run out of latex gloves months ago. “You're even more pathetic than he is.”

Jounouchi stood tall and still, unaffected, letting the waves of Kaiba's bile break upon him. But his jaw was tight and his knuckles white as his fingers dug into his own arms. “I'm a mechanic, Kaiba. A good one. I'm making a life for myself. I didn't have a fortune handed to me on a platter. I have made something of myself that I am proud of.” He paused. “And what have you ever done to be proud of?”

Kaiba watched him. His electronic eye was focusing and unfocusing, its black circles twisting back and forth, screwing in and out of that bright, empty pupil. Kaiba took a breath. “Get back to your ship. You're both leaving tonight.”

---

It was strange to watch Kaiba when he didn't know you were there. Jounouchi thought he might slouch or cough or yawn, might betray some sign of humanity, but he merely sat there, typing one-handedly. Jounouchi had eased up quietly through the shaft that connected the docking bay to the control room and he now hung there, suspended between them on the ladder, his head above the hole, watching Kaiba type an endless, uninterrupted stream of information into the central computer.

“Yuugi thinks it's fate.” Kaiba spun instantly, his eyes bright, but they soon dimmed upon alighting on Jounouchi. Jounouchi had hoped for a response, but Kaiba only went back to his typing. Jounouchi climbed out of the hole and continued. “Us finding you, I mean. He thinks it's fate. Destiny. I mean, how else could we run into you like this, in deep space? Just luck? The chances of that happening has to be one in a million.”

“Why haven't you left yet?” said Kaiba, not breaking in his typing.

“We're almost ready. Yuugi is just making final checks. I thought I'd say goodbye.”

“Save your breath,” said Kaiba, his eyes never drifting from the screen before him.

“I know Yuugi wants to say goodbye as well. Actually, he doesn't want to leave at all. He just doesn't know what to do.”

“I told him what to do: leave. And tell him not to bother showing his face around me again unless he's worked up the courage to duel me.”

“He'll see you again, don't worry about that. I told you, he thinks this is fate. The three of us share a destiny.”

“Destiny doesn't exist.”

Jounouchi walked around the room to behind where Kaiba sat and pulled himself up onto the table. He clasped his hands and swung his legs and stared over Kaiba's head, out into the black. It was like sitting on a pier and dipping your toes into a lake. A deep, empty lake, nothing but wetness and pressure all the way down.

“Yuugi disagrees with you.”

“And what do you think?” Kaiba paused very briefly in his typing. “Assuming you're capable of intelligent thought, which might be assuming too much.”

“I think how or why we got here doesn't really matter so much. I think what matters is that you need help and Yuugi might be the only person that can help you.”

Kaiba dropped his fingers from the keyboard. “I do not need help. Not from Yuugi, not from anybody. If Yuugi is too much of a coward to duel me then you both better be gone by tomorrow.”

“Yeah, we'll see.” Jounouchi continued to stare over Kaiba's head. It was awfully dark out there. “You ever think what that means? 'Tomorrow'? We're billions of miles from the sun, so what does tomorrow mean?”

“Sleep cycles.”

Jounouchi flicked the back of Kaiba's head and he recoiled. “But you don't sleep anyway, Mister Roboto. Actually – do you? If you're plugged into that thing is it like sleeping?”

“It's better than sleeping.”

“I bet you'll make a killing when you release it to the public, huh?”

“Naturally. It's going to revolutionise our whole technological world.” A dark smile touched his mouth. “Once I work out the flaws.”

“Flaws such as how the back of your neck won't stop leaking?”

The smile on Kaiba's mouth lingered. “Such as.”

They both sat there and shared the silence for a while, gazing out at space. The stars blinked impassively back at the two and the black seethed about them, stretching onwards, every direction a descent into silence and easy, crushing death. On Earth, space was beautiful. Just you and your world and the sky. But out here there was no world, and therefore no sky. It was just the quiet and the infinite and you, alone, drifting weightlessly through the nullity.

Jounouchi leaned forwards to Kaiba's neck. “Hey. I'll duel you.”

Kaiba laughed very quietly. “Don't patronise me.”

“Come on, it'll be fun. I bet I can kick your ass this time.”

“No.” Kaiba drew in a long breath of half-recycled air. “Go back to your ship, Jounouchi. Prepare to leave. And tell Yuugi...” His face clouded. “Tell him that, when he wants to face me, I'll be waiting.”

Jounouchi stood and stretched. “If you insist, man. But I think it's going to be a no.” He made for the door, but Kaiba stopped him.

“Wait. Let me see your neck.”

“My what?”

“Your neck. Show me.”

“Why?”

“I'm not going to drill into you while you sleep, idiot. Just show me.”

Jounouchi stared, then shrugged and offered Kaiba his back. He felt his hair being shifted and then three soft points of cold flesh touched against his neck. They massaged a small circle in the centre, tiny little circles, tracing the area of clean, unbroken skin.

“Is that where the port would be?”

“Yes.” Something different was in Kaiba's voice.

“What are you doing?”

“Shut up.”

The fingers left his neck and pushed higher, into his hair, burrowing into his roots. Jounouchi felt his heart against his ribcage. He thought about pulling away. Five cold fingertips pushed against his skull. Breath fell across his neck.

Then he smelt the wound.

Jounouchi had jerked away before he properly registered the scent. Just the image of that hole, the blood, the metal slick with clouded yellow discharge – it couldn't be allowed. He felt sick.

He turned. “Kaiba. I'm sorry, I-”

“Get out.” Kaiba's face was dark. His left eye finally matched its twin. Both were empty. “Get back to your ship and get away from here. I never want to see either of you again.”

---

The Bluebird craft shrank rapidly as it jettisoned away. First it was a little blue fish in the glass of the cockpit, and then a tiny blue smudge, and then it was just a speck of dust floating through the black ocean before them. It hurtled towards another tiny speck, its colours indiscernible, billions of miles away. The speck where Kaiba was born. He watched the ship far longer than, Isono thought, was strictly necessary.

“They don't know anything about me.”

“No, Master Seto.”

“It's pathetic. He flew all the way out here and yet he's too scared to go through with duelling me.” He laughed: a short, ugly, off-key note of laughter. “I can't imagine anything more tragic.”

“...No, Master Seto.”

Kaiba leaned back in his chair and cracked his neck, once. His muscles were wound into tight, internal knots, burning for kinesis. But it could wait. Everything could wait.

“I have work to do,” he said. A grey mist, the kind that rises from the ground after the rains that Kaiba hadn't seen in years, steadily filled his eyes. “I've been far too lax with work on the Mantis implants. If they are to accomplish meaningful progress then they are going to require some test runs. Once I finish the latest design we can begin implementation immediately.”

“Master Seto?” said Isono suddenly, and Kaiba half turned.

“What?”

“It's...” Even with those dark glasses, the expression on Isono's face was perfectly clear. “...Nothing.”

Kaiba turned back to the console. “I need to focus, Isono. Go clean up any mess those two might have left.”

Isono turned to leave, and Kaiba called up some schematics on the screen before him: all mechanical joints and twisting green wires, wrapped around a reassuringly two-dimensional image of a human hand. Only the little muffled clicks of the tightening lens of his artificial retina punctuated the silence, ticking like leaves breaking underfoot, strewn beneath a burning autumn tree down on a planet far, far away, barely a mote reflected in the black and green of Kaiba's eye.

#battleshipping #kaiborg

mostremote