Title: How to Deal
Rating: SFW
Wordcount: 3,086
Summary: Anzu is surprised when Mai shows up as a customer at Space Burger, but she's exactly the person Anzu needs to talk to.

Notes: Written for Reishiin for the 2015 round of everywoman. Manga canon. I've also taken inspiration from that Duel Arts picture (I can't link here, alas) where Anzu is working at a new burger joint with strict rules against playing card games inside.

Anzu's voice was getting hoarse, and in the hint of her reflection she caught in the window, her grin had a definite rictus quality. Imagining a future in New York wasn't doing the trick, so she focused instead on counting down the seconds until her shift ended. It was amazing how much a few hours of greeting customers and walking them to tables could wear her out.

The door chimed again. Twisting her grimace into a smile, Anzu twirled through her practiced greeting pose: "Welcome to Space Burger, home of—Mai?"

There was never any mistaking Mai. She'd changed her look a little, sleeker and darker, but Anzu still could have identified her from the neck down. No one else she'd ever met could look so casually confident while on the verge of spilling out of a corset.

Before she could catch herself, Anzu blurted, "What are you doing here?"

"What, I can't crave a burger every now and then?" Mai squinted past her at the menu behind the counter. "What's the secret sauce?"

"It's a secret!" Anzu replied, loudly and brightly, before dropping her voice. "Mayonnaise and Tabasco. I mean, what are you doing in Domino?"

"Just making the rounds. C'mon, can't a lady get a table for one around here?"

"Of course, sorry!" As she escorted Mai to a booth, Anzu added, "I didn't mean to be rude. You just surprised me, and it's been a crazy shift."

"Poor thing. Don't you get a break?"

"I get out of here in a few minutes. Misa's probably clocking in now."

"Make it a table for two, then, and add whatever you want to my order. My treat." As Anzu debated whether to bother protesting, Mai settled in to peruse the menu. "Actually, just put me down for whatever you're having, as long as it's not the Chimera Burger."

Space Burger's schtick centered around "out of this world" variations on the hamburger, many of which were more outré than edible and most of which involved parts of at least two different animals. "Two Cosmonaut Classics it is," Anzu replied. "Hang on, I'll be right back."

Once she'd put the order in and passed everything off to Misa, she ducked into the bathroom to change out of her shiny silver-and-orange uniform. Lately, Anzu's bag always had at least three outfits in it: uniforms for school, work, and dance classes, along with casual clothes if she intended to squeeze free time into her afternoon. After doing her best to shake out the dent her little hat had left in her hair, she hurried back to Mai's booth.

"That was quick," Mai remarked.

Anzu slid in opposite her. "I've been working here almost two months, so I've got the routine down. But seriously, I haven't heard from you since we got back from Alcatraz. What's up?"

Mai tsked. "Do you always interrogate people who treat you to dinner?"

As Anzu opened her mouth, hoping a response would piece itself together on the way out, Misa arrived with their trays. Toward Mai she displayed full professional enthusiasm, but as set down Anzu's order, her eyebrows arched skeptically. Aside from Shuu, who ate his own weight in free Chimera Burgers, the restaurant's staff generally didn't hang around to subject themselves to the food they'd been smelling all shift. Anzu shrugged at her.

"So what makes this burger a cosmonaut?" Mai asked, peeking under the top bun.

No sense fighting the change in topic, Anzu decided. "The fried egg is supposed to be the sun, I think. And there's a rumor the sesame seeds glow in the dark, but everyone who works here has tried taking one in the bathroom and turning the lights off, and they never do."

Daintily, Mai sniffed it at a dribble of secret sauce on the paper wrapper. "There's Worcestershire sauce in here, too. And pickle relish."

"How do you—oh right, you've got that super sense of smell. I guess it's good for more than pretending you've got ESP, huh?"

Mai winked. "It's good for a lot of things. Want to know how long these fries have been sitting under a heat lamp?"

"Ugh, don't tell me." Anzu made a face at the one she'd picked up and let it flop to the tray.

"The good news is it's about the industry standard. Which is also the bad news." Mai squirted out a puddle of ketchup and cheerfully dragged a fry though it on the way to her mouth.

"Yeah, they're all yours now." Anzu turned the fries toward Mai before taking a bite of her burger. The Cosmonaut Classic was pretty good, as fast food went; the beef patties tasted a little more obviously of freezer than Burger World's had, but Burger World had been such a lousy work environment on multiple levels that it tainted the taste of the food. And at least Space Burger's tomato slices weren't soggy. "You know, I should have figured they were about the industry standard. I've worked at three burger joints now."

Mai looked up from adding ketchup to her burger. "That's quite a résumé."

After checking behind her for management, Anzu admitted in a low voice, "I have trouble holding down a part-time job. This is number seven."

"Miss a lot of shifts while you're out on adventures, huh?"

"That's how I lost the job at Burgertopia." Anzu hesitated a moment, then decided that Mai would definitely understand. "And I got fired from Burger World for punching the creep who groped me."

Mai nodded firmly around a bite of burger. "Good on you, hon."

Anzu beamed and cracked her knuckles. "I knocked him out cold." This earned her a high-five.

"You know," Mai said, "when I was in high school, you could get in a world of trouble for having an after-school job. I'm surprised Domino High is okay with it."

Out of paranoid habit, Anzu glanced around for anyone she knew before replying, "Well, it's more like what they don't know can't hurt me."

"A secret job, huh?" Mai took a sip of her drink and grinned. "I had one of those. Just one, though."

"Were you a waitress, too?"

"Nah. When I was in high school, there was one brand of make-up that I loved, and the company had an office in the city. I thought if I got a job there, I'd get freebies."

Anzu's dance studio never seemed to be hiring. "Did you?"

"Ha! They got me to pass out pocket tissue ads at the train station." Mai rolled her eyes and took a long sip through her straw. "Let me tell you, that's a lonely job. You just stand there surrounded by people who don't want to see you. It was the first time I ever felt invisible."

It was difficult to imagine people not noticing Mai, but maybe she had been different in high school. Or maybe no one wanted to notice anyone trying to advertise to them, except in a creepy way. That had been Anzu's experience whenever she was put on customer attraction duty outside. She spent a few seconds thoughtfully shredding a bit of lettuce between her fingers, then said, "Back on the island, you told me you used to work in a casino. On a cruise ship, right?"

"Right. I started off dealing poker and blackjack, but when Duel Monsters got big, there was a demand for skilled duelists. Plenty of people out there are willing to shell out for a deck full of rare cards and the chance to play them against a pro." With a contemptuous expression, Mai bit into her burger.

"So they pay for the cards, they pay for a cruise, and then they pay to duel?"

Mai nodded as she swallowed. "And then they bet half a month's salary they can win. A casino can rake in a fortune from those suckers."

"Wouldn't it make more way sense for them to enter a tournament?"

"But then they'd have to earn the right to duel a winner. This is an ego thing."

It felt worlds away from the friendly games Anzu had played between classes, and even farther from the duels she was used to cheering on, where honor and pride mattered more than victory. "Ugh, no wonder you ended up hating it."

"Well, I wasn't much different from them." Mai's smile was a little bitter. "I started playing Duel Monsters because dealers work for tips, but duelists keep a cut of their winnings. The house takes a bigger cut, of course, but the house provides security and a steady stream of suckers, not to mention the luxury cruise lifestyle."

If there was any wistfulness in her tone, Anzu couldn't hear it over all the sarcasm. "That was a lonely job, too, wasn't it?"

The ambiguous dip of Mai's chin as she sipped her drink was probably a nod. "It certainly paid better than passing out tissue packets. If people are determined to look past you without seeing you, you might as well take advantage of it, right? The perfume trick really was a crutch at first, but..." She rolled the end of a fry around a ketchup puddle with no indication that she ever meant to eat it. "None of the men I dueled were any good. I hated them all so much, the only way I could stand it was watching them panic when I punished them for underestimating me."

"So what changed?"

Mai met her eyes, lips wry, and abandoned the fry to drown. "I won half a million yen off a guy who totally lost it. He pulled a gun on me. Security had to tackle him."

Anzu choked on her drink. "Geez, I would have left after that, too!"

"That's not what did it. It shook me up, sure, but it's not like he shot me." The hand that had been playing with the fry slipped under the table, toward the thigh holster where Mai kept her deck. "See, he was the worst player I'd ever dueled against. Nothing in his deck but rare monster cards—no trap cards, no spell cards, nothing. When I was going through my own deck after that, I looked at Harpie Lady and felt like I was letting her down, making her fight losers like him."

Eyebrows raised, Anzu paused on the verge of taking a bite and set down her burger. "I was gonna say something about your priorities, but then I couldn't remember how many times I've had a gun pulled on me in the last year. I guess you do kind of get used to it, in a weird way."

Mai laughed. "Don't you kids almost get killed at least once a week?"

"Hey, not every week!" Anzu stuck out her tongue. "Honestly, I try not to think about it too much. If I told my parents, they'd freak out. My mom already complains that my dance studio's in the bad part of town."

"And here Domino's bad part of town is nicer than some cities' good parts."

"I know, right? Sometimes I just wanna say, 'Calm down, Mom, it's not like I'm getting mind-controlled to hold poison in my mouth, or stuck on a blimp with a psycho murderer, or almost blown up because Seto Kaiba is a drama queen.'" As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Anzu realized that Battle City might not have been the best example to choose, and hastened to add, "Not that any of that is as bad as what happened to you—"

"Hey, don't coddle me. I slept through most of the real excitement." Mai's voice was light, but her hand trembled enough to rattle the ice cubes in her drink. With an annoyed look, she set her cup down. "So you dance?"

Anzu didn't want to stop pushing, but the change of subject pulled her along like a current. "I've been dancing since I could walk, almost. My parents used to take me to musicals almost every weekend, and I'd come home and practice until I knew all the routines by heart. I've done some ballet and traditional stuff, but my heart really belongs to jazz. My last year of junior high, I did the choreography for the culture festival, and after I graduate, I—"

She cut herself off she realized that Mai's expression was somewhere between amusement and indulgence. Anzu bit into her burger and muttered around the mouthful, "You think I'm being a total dork about this."

"No, I get it," Mai said. "It's your Duel Monsters. What are you doing to do after graduation?"

Anzu swallowed. "Promise you won't laugh."

"Of course I won't."

"You sure look like you want to."

"I'm just enjoying listening to you talk about your dream. You don't need to be so defensive, hon."

Warily, Anzu replied, "Well, I know it's a long shot, but I really want to study dance in New York, and someday, I want to dance on Broadway. That's why I have to save up money now. I've been researching costs, and I'm going to need everything I can get." She bit into her burger again and chewed defiantly.

"Why on earth would I laugh at you for that?" Mai took a bite of her own burger, then made a startled noise as the runny yolk dribbled over the edges of the patty. Anzu relaxed and passed her a napkin. "They should call this the Cosmonaut Surprise," she muttered as she wiped her fingers. "The real sun isn't leaky."

Still seared into Anzu's memories was the image of the Ra emerging from Mai's hand as an egg that refused to leak at all. "You can leave that in the comment box," she said. "Every week, we get at least one person who's mad the Chimera Burger has four kinds of meat in it instead of three."

"Takes all kinds, I guess." Mai reverted to eating fries. "Anyway, I was going to say, no wonder you've got a secret job. Did I talk you out of dealing at a casino?"

The blush returned. "That's the not the only reason I was—"

Mai waved a hand dismissively. "Well, trust me. With a figure like yours, you'd make plenty of tips, but you'd hate it."

Anzu's free arm folded reflexively over her chest as she scowled. "Are the uniforms worse than the Space Burger ones?"

"You have no idea." Wagging a fry for emphasis, Mai added, "Whatever you end up doing, never forget that there are two types of men you have to watch out for: entitled and desperate. And a man who loses to a woman is usually both."

"Tell me about it." Even going to the arcade got weird sometimes; when Anzu had the free time for it, she never went alone. "None of my friends are like that, though."

"That's because you hang out with good sports. And even if you didn't, you've got this terrible habit of seeing the best in people."

"That's not true. When I first met you, I couldn't stand you."

Mai laughed. "Well, there wasn't much good in me to see, back then. You can't hang around jerks all the time without ending up like them."

"It works the other way, too. If you hang out with good friends, you become a better person."

With a good-natured roll of her eyes, Mai replied, "I'm not even going to try to argue that with you. Who don't you end up rehabilitating with friendship?"

Her tone was bright, but not enough so to hide the barbs. Anzu set down her burger before saying, as gently as she could, "The Malik we flew home with was different from—"

"Save it. I was out cold. Something spooky happened. Whatever."

Anzu drew patterns in the ketchup with a cooling fry, considering her words. "You really don't remember anything while you were out?"

"Why would I? I was out."

Which wasn't, Anzu noted, technically an answer. She squashed the fry flat against the tray before locking eyes with Mai. "You know, you still haven't told me what you're doing in Domino. There's not a tournament in town or anything."

Mai dropped her gaze to the fry. "Two hours. That's about how long it's been under a heat lamp."

With a huff, Anzu raised her burger and took a bite large enough to fill her entire mouth. She chewed slowly, buying herself time to think through her words, and swallowed before saying, "If I almost died doing something, I think I'd be a little nervous about doing it again."

Mai's voice was sharp: "Who do you think is nervous here?"

"I didn't mean it like 'scared.' More like 'reluctant.'" When she got no response, Anzu added, "Anyway, I was just talking about me. Hypothetically."

At last Mai met her gaze and held it, hawk-eyed. "What if you almost died dancing?"

"I'd—" Anzu cut off an automatic reply to mull it over. Mai seemed serious, and deserved a serious response. "Dancing is too important for me to give up. It'd be hard, but I'd dance every day until I made enough good memories to outweigh the bad ones."

With a noise that was half-snort, half-laugh, Mai wiped her hands on a napkin and reached under the table. "You're so idealistic it almost hurts," she said, bringing her deck up to shuffle. The last quarter or so of her burger sat alone on the tray, oozing yolk. "Do you play?"

Anzu shrugged, fighting the grin trying to twitch over her face. "Not really. I mean, I've played a little, and I know the rules, but I'm not into it like you are."

"Do you have a deck?"

"Sort of. I have forty cards, just not... strategically."

"Hmm. Got 'em on you?"

With a meaningful tilt of her head toward the counter, Anzu said, "No, and you're actually not allowed to play Duel Monsters in here."

Mai paused mid-shuffle. "Let me guess. Jounouchi?"

"Jounouchi and the shake he threw three booths away when Yuugi activated his trap card."

With a laugh that broke into a cough, Mai put her deck away. "Color me unsurprised. Well, we can pick you up a starter deck, and I can lend you a few rares. Whaddya say?"

There were worse reasons to be late to dance lessons. "If you beat me, I get to teach you how to do jazz hands."

"You drive a hard bargain, Mazaki." Mai popped another fry into her mouth. "Deal."