"We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown."

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T. S. Eliot

Warnings: Language, drug use, mild violence

Sunset on a Friday was a kind of witching hour in downtown Domino, and most of all in November. The days were too short and the nights stretched out into a frenzy of drinking and three day parties that everybody wanted to end but didn't. Everyone got that little bit crazier, more excited, more ready for violence. November nights in the city were a different kind of time, a different kind of place, lit by fluorescence and dread.

It was a sort of home, a sort of nightmare.

Jounouchi woke when the sun set, at five PM, and he lay on his bed and listened to the lattice of sirens and shouts and traffic curl about him for several long minutes. His back was sore and his skull still rattled with yesterday's hangover, and his mouth was coated with dry moss. Somewhere a car alarm was shrieking.

His sleep-clumsy fingers located his phone and brought it to his eyes. One hour before he had to be at work, and no messages. He replaced the phone.

Sitting upright sharpened his migraine into metal. Around him the room was blue and amber, weirdly underwater and sick-looking, the shadows cast by streetlights and a crowd of downtown neon. Someone in the street was screaming, not in panic, but in that ill-defined distress of drunks and mad people. It broke unevenly with the rhythm of the car alarm. Jounouchi rubbed the grit from his eyes and fumbled for an ibuprofen, then fumbled for a glass of water, then knocked the glass of water onto the floor. He swore, dry-swallowed the ibuprofen, and stood up. The water soaked into the carpet and dripped thuck-thuck from the nightstand.

Twenty minutes to wash and dress, forty minutes to make it to Takeda's. The route unfolded itself in Jounouchi's mind and he felt his stomach shift in nauseous protest.

Fridays.

He pushed away the nausea, then did ten star jumps, then fifty push-ups. He checked his phone again. No messages.

With the jeans he slept in, he dressed in his one good dark blue button up and a charcoal blazer he had inherited from Honda, long ago. Once it smelled of petrol, grease, leather, and the other industrial smells of biking. Now it was stitched with smoke and other men's booze. No point returning it now.

Jounouchi stuck his head outside his room.

'Yo, Sugata-kun?'

There was no answer, for which he was thankful. His flatmate could be out or unconscious and either suited Jounouchi just fine. The less he saw of the asshole, the better.

He padded to the kitchen and added hot water with bits of limescale to instant coffee, then sat at a tiny pine wood table, pocked with cigarette burns. From here he had the dim view of the apartment blocks opposite, each a concrete spine, with little balconies and windows and air conditioners. Dozens of tiny people moved in their tiny boxes, all of them like this own. He stirred his coffee with a finger and watched a woman opposite unclip laundry from the tiny line strung across her balcony. He could almost make out her expression, but not quite.

For the third time, he took out his phone. The cracked screen bit at his fingers as he checked his accounts. Nothing new from Anzu, who was rarely online with all her training and performances. Nothing from Honda, whose online presence was entirely restricted to being tagged in his girlfriend's photos. They were always neatly labelled: so-and-so restaurant, whatever street, Osaka, hundreds of miles away from Domino.

Shizuka had posted a slew of new shots. She sat beaming among her work friends, all of them in matching blazers, making Vs at the camera. He hadn't spoken to her since the funeral. She felt further away from him even than when he had chased after her and their mom in that car, when his chest hurt so much he thought it would fall out of him, and the sunlight burned his skin and his eyes and turned his neck hot and rosy…

He kept scrolling. Yuugi had posted a new photo. He was at dinner with someone Jounouchi didn't recognise, a white guy with piercings and blue-rimmed glasses. The two of them smiled broadly at the camera. Jounouchi stared at the other guy, trying to place him, coming up blank. He scrolled down.

106 likes, 18 comments.

'Shit,' he muttered, then read through some of the messages.

Omg you guys are so cute! wrote a stranger. 3 Yuugi and Leo my fave duellists wrote another. wtf did u play DMG into a filled board w 2 f/ds wrote a third. All the usernames were ciphers to Jounouchi, a string of faceless someones. But Yuugi had replied to each and every comment, thanking people, exchanging greetings, suggesting meet ups. It must be exhausting, Jounouchi thought, to have so many people clamouring for your attention, and it was a mark of Yuugi's infinite kindness and empathy that he had a good word to say to every single one.

Jounouchi's fingers paused over the keys. Looking great Yuugi he typed, then deleted it. Saying hi from Domino. He deleted this too. Return my fucking messages fuck you. He deleted that one more quickly. And it was bullshit and petty of him, because Yuugi did return his messages. He was always friendly and caring and happy to hear from one of his oldest friends. But Yuugi befriended everyone he met, if they let him, and sometimes even if they didn't. It had been nearly a year since he last saw Jounouchi. It wasn't that he didn't care, of course he cared. But he cared about so many people now, and all of them strangers to Jounouchi.

He went to his own profile. He hadn't posted anything in a few days, the last picture being one of him outside some pointless attraction in a corner of Domino he had never before attended. He posed with the mascot, this ugly bronze bear, and pulled a face at the camera. No one had commented yet.

His phone vibrated suddenly in his hands and his heart leapt – Yuugi!

No. His alarm. get to work asshole it read, a message from his conscientious past self. He flipped off the phone, silenced the alarm, then stood up.

Perhaps today would be different. Maybe something good would happen. Oh, God, maybe today would be different.

The metro purred and turned itself through Domino's insides. Commuters packed against him, eyes on the floor or their phones or magazines. Salarymen and women in suits and skirts and blazers were a familiar type to Jounouchi, but he had learned in recent months how to read their clothes in a new way. The times he'd worked nanbawan had taught him what good suits – fine tailoring, cashmere wools – ought to look like, and these middle-aged men with their ill-fitting sackcloth costumes no longer made him feel inferior as they once had. He might look like shit in comparison, but he could read them; he knew their type. He knew to what they aspired, and he would come closer to it than they ever would.

Jounouchi rubbed his eyes. Fridays. A pretty woman was absorbed in some fruit matching game on her phone and Jounouchi watched her out of his peripheries. How long had it been since he'd felt naked breasts against himself, smelt hair and sweet perfume, had someone sighing beneath him? Five months, perhaps. He rubbed his eyes again. He thought of Mai, then deliberately didn't think of Mai. The train rattled around him. Three days to go.

He disembarked outside the industrial district. The streets were gloomier here, with fewer streetlights. Darkness was cheap. Impassive warehouses regarded him, big and rusty, like things not quite dead.

Someone folded against the wall stared after him.

'Can you spare any change?'

He couldn't, of course, the rent was due next week and his account was almost dry. His stomach felt like sand. He could only hope there would be free food at whatever hole he would be sent to tonight.

He rifled in a pocket. 'Sorry, man, I don't have much.' He gave the guy the pitiful change he would have spent on gum, then stuck his hands back in his pockets.

Ah-a, what do we have here!

In his other pocket – yes! – one remaining piece of gum. He removed it, examined it, then replaced it. Later. When he had to get to wherever he was going. He'd need it more then.

Much of the warehouses looked the same, but the one he wanted seemed especially uninviting. Understandable, the place was all but abandoned. Jounouchi presumed Takeda didn't own the building, but what did he know? What did he really know about his boss? The guy could be a millionaire or he could be a million in debt, and it would look the same. It was all the same. Wealth wasn't real to these people, he'd learned. Wealth wasn't a handful of coins and bills in your pocket, it was numbers on a screen. The numbers didn't mean anything, not really. It was all some fantastic myth, illusory, sleights of hand and whispers.

He found the warehouse door: tall, dark, impassable. A single pale yellow bulb outside flickered on, off, off, off, on again, then another dark stretch. It always flickered like that. Jounouchi glared at it. He looked around and confirmed to himself that no one was in sighting range. Then he jumped several times in place and shook out his limbs, rolled his head, and spread a wide smile across his features. Game on.

He knocked thrice, paused, thrice again, pause, then thrice again. The peep hole plate slid back with an unoiled complaint. The grey eyes within took him in, then unbolted the door.

'What's up?' he said to the doorman, but got no reply, as he never did. 'You are looking great today. Did you do something with your hair?' He might as well have been talking to a block of concrete.

'Jou-nou-chi!' Takeda's voice reached out across the warehouse: rough, inebriated, not unlike his father's. The memory made his stomach twitch. He turned to his boss. 'Come join us, my angel! My fucking star!' Takeda gestured welcome. He sat on a camping chair, and five more were positioned around him. Three were occupied, two by what Jounouchi loosely called his co-workers and one by a man Jounouchi didn't recognise. The oldest of the three men threw a disdainful glance at Jounouchi, the second ignored him. The newcomer stared at the floor and tapped his shoe on the concrete. The sole was peeling off what might have once been an expensive pair of shoes, and he took frenetic sucking breaths on a lopsided cigarette.

'Good to see you, Takeda-sama.' Jounouchi decked himself in a grin, extended his hand, and let Takeda shake it thoroughly. He smelled of synthetic strawberries and tobacco. 'May I say you are looking in fantastic health?'

'You may, you may!' Takeda laughed like a barking fox. 'Jounouchi, meet the new guy, Grasshopper. Grasshopper, say, "Hello, Jounouchi-san!"'

Grasshopper, his eyes like two moulding eggs, rolled around the room several times before stopping on Jounouchi. 'Hello, Jounouchi-san!' he said at a volume louder than was appropriate.

'You hope to be like Jounouchi one day, Grasshopper. You do what he does and you'll do well.' He clapped Grasshopper on the back and Grasshopper sagged to the floor. His eyes were tracking the star cracks in the concrete.

'Takeda-san.' The oldest spoke, voice full of resentment. 'Can we have our fucking assignments?'

'You are all so impatient, you will wear me to the ground!' He stuck his hand in his pocket and a tight metallic tension drew all their eyesight to his hand as he rifled. No one breathed; even Grasshopper had stopped sucking on his burned-out cigarette. Takeda withdrew his hand – and held a lighter. Everyone breathed out in annoyance. Takeda flipped them off, as if he hadn't been intentionally pushing their buttons. 'You're like fucking vultures, I swear to god. Like hyenas! Scavengers! I'm surrounded by carrion.'

'Takeda-san, we're all just eager to get started,' said Jounouchi. It hurt his teeth to stay so jovial and lie so well. 'I don't know about the rest of these guys, but I spend my whole trip over here anxious about where I'm gonna get sent to. It's always a bit like Christmas, y'know? You're like Santa!'

Takeda didn't laugh at this one, but he did stop stalling. He extracted from one pocket, first, a delicate pair of ancient spectacles that he balanced on his rocky nose, and then a slip of worn, crumpled paper. He cleared his throat, frowned at the paper, moved it closer to his eyes, further away, then closer again. Satisfied, he cleared his throat again, and delivered their assignments.

'Kenji, you're on the docks,' he said to the oldest. 'Don't fucking give me lip, you're on the docks. Wipe that look off your face. You're a classless thug and you get to sell to classless thugs. Masuda, you're on a cruise until Tuesday. Old fucks. Try not to get anyone killed; nothing kills a cruise like a dead body, let me fucking tell you. Grasshopper, baby boy: you get an easy one. Office up on Nishi Street. You'll be shadowing Tatsuma who works there. Easy job, you just sit there and sell to the nice fellows who have appointments. Easy-peasy-pudding-and-pie.'

Jounouchi's heart was retreating further into his boots. The office was what he always held out hope for. Tatsuma might be an asshole who should've retired or died a few decades back, but handing out pre-determined packets to people who paid in neat envelopes full of cash was so much easier than working a crowd and pushing. And if the office and the docks were taken, that meant…

Takeda turned to Jounouchi and pressed his palms together, as if in prayer. 'And you, Jounouchi-kun, my Gabriel, I have a very special job for you.' His eyes widened, then widened more, and for a moment Jounouchi thought they might pop out of his sockets and plop wetly onto the floor. 'You're on nanbawan.'

Watery excitement and oily nausea swirled around his stomach. With effort, he increased the width of his grin by an extra tooth. 'Oh, Takeda-san, you didn't!'

The man laughed, this time like steam through a rusty pipe. 'I did, I did! All for you, for the weekend. Three days. See how you do. No pressure!'

Nanbawan was the slang denotation for a kind of geographical miasma. It referred to the clubs, parties, manors, top offices, penthouse apartments, five star restaurants, and occasional sex clubs occupied by the wealthiest elite in Takeda's contacts. It meant ¥7,000 a glass sake and ¥100,000 an hour escorts. High class, high pay, high anxiety. Women that all looked like models and men that pissed themselves in public. Endless hours of that shit, for three days – if he was lucky. If he was too friendly, not friendly enough, or some asshole took a dislike to him, then he'd be out in his ass and Takeda would probably fire him. And if it was a yakuza joint he might lose a finger, or worse.

Takeda extracted a card from the pocket of his blue suit jacket. The fabric shimmered cheaply in the light. 'This party – very exclusive. Only the best. Millionaires, all of them. And I'm sending you, Jounouchi. You! Do you know why?'

Jounouchi leaned forward conspiratorially. 'Because otherwise you'd have to send these clowns,' he whispered, loud enough for everyone to hear. It was a bad joke, but Takeda laughed like Jounouchi had breathed nitrous oxide down his throat.

'You're my guy, Jounouchi. You are my top gun.'

'Am I fucking hearing this right?' said Kenji. 'He's twenty-six. You're sending a fucking infant to run a nanbawan gig? Are you high?'

Takeda was usually high, as was Kenji, so this insult didn't carry much sting.

'He's worked them before, you know. That time you were off sick, Kenji-chan, that time you wasted my supply having your own little private party and you missed two days of work.'

'I paid you back,' Kenji snapped.

Takeda waved his fingers. 'But you lost my respect. My trust. That costs more than money can buy, my friend. And that's why I've put Jounouchi on this gig.' He pulled out from beneath his chair a big gym bag and unzipped it. Jounouchi tried not to think about how much money the pile of neatly wrapped white bags suggested. Takeda extracted one and tossed it in Jounouchi's direction. Takeda grinned and his eyes were like tar pits. 'You make me proud, kiddo.'

Jounouchi rode the metro back across town and thought about the new guy, about Kenji, about Takeda. The boss recalled his father. The coarseness of his laugh, how he held his cigarettes between thumb and forefinger, something about his easy joviality that overlaid the constant threat of violence. Maybe that was why Jounouchi took the job. Maybe it was the money, the ¥50,000 he could clear in a night, or so it was claimed. That's what Takeda had hooked him with, though most days it was more like 10,000, if he was lucky. Better luck next time, kiddo, Takeda would say. Beginners have it hardest! Just think, tonight could be the night you pull half a mil!

And that had kept Jounouchi coming back. If he planned his meals right, he could crib off the catering at these parties and not have to pay for food three days of the week, plus there was the free booze, and every night was the possibility he might make enough to take care of his rent for the next three months. If he could get landed with more nanbawan gigs, then he'd be pulling 50k on the reg. He could pay off his back rent on his shitty apartment and finally have the spare cash to…

To what?

There was nothing on which he needed to spend his money.

Shizuka didn't need it, she raked in four million yen a year. His mother was fine supporting herself. His dad was dead.

He could fly out to Osaka. Hey-o Honda! It's me! And Ayaka-chan, you look gorgeous! Let me see the baby! How long am I here for? Oh, not long! I'll take the couch! Oh – no, of course, no problem; the floor is fine! Well, I'll book the hotel down the street, then. No problemo, I've got the cash. You wanna do lunch tomorrow? Well, dinner then? How about the day after?

Jounouchi put the thought from his mind. And Yuugi? If he wanted to see Yuugi he'd have to book a month in advance, Yuugi's schedule was so packed.

He twisted his face. No, he wouldn't need to book in advance. Yuugi would clear a space for him somewhere, and he'd cancel something else, and Jounouchi would feel like a burden, and the whole thing would make him feel worse.

Better to keep working. Keep making money. Something would turn up. Maybe he could ask out that barista who worked in the coffee shop on his street, she always seemed to have an extra smile for him.

Jounouchi rubbed his eyes. The now empty metro carriage swayed around him as they threaded through the earth. He stared out of the black windows and wondered what it would feel like to throw yourself into that darkness – would it be a quick death, crushed under the tracks?

He shivered and stuffed his hands back in his pockets.

Gum!

He'd forgotten. Jounouchi unwrapped the white pellet and shoved it into his mouth. Maybe tonight would be different.

He found the party on floor thirty-three of an apartment block overlooking the park. The doorman, who was hunched over his desk like he'd died there a hundred years ago and had never left, didn't question Jounouchi when he said he was there for the party. In the long crawl through the elevator, he stared into the darkened mirror. His reflection stared back, and the two of them both sort of felt like they didn't recognise one another.

The doors hummed open and he entered a corridor with a single door. A rumble of voices and cool, strange jazz swirled beyond it. He did a few jumps and cracked his neck a couple of times. Smile! You're happy, you're fun, you're great to be around. You're gonna make a killing tonight. Everyone wants what you've come to give 'em. You're Takeda's star.

From some deep recess of his brain, a voice murmured, the wolf star, the dog star.

He shook it off. He knocked and waited, and the door was opened by a woman in a long black dress. There was a stunning beauty about her, like she lived on the television and had just stepped out to open the door.

'Hey there! I'm Jounouchi. I believe you contacted my employer Takeda-sama for some special catering.' He smiled his most winsome, shining smile.

The woman stared at him, her eyes dead and fishlike. 'Takeda?'

'Ah, yeah? Takeda-sama, he…' Jounouchi wondered horribly if he'd got the wrong address. 'You didn't… I…'

As he floundered, a second woman came to the door. She was also impossibly beautiful, unreal, like a saint.

'It's the coke guy,' she said, and the first woman shrugged and stood aside.

'Thank you very much! Now, I'm sure Takeda has explained to you how this works. It's cash up front and…'

The second woman pulled a pile of bills out of the front of her dress and held them out. Jounouchi took them. They were warm from her flesh.

'Righty-o!' He tried to count them while talking. Be friendly. Be entertaining. Dance like Otogi's fucking dog. 'This is awesome. Would you like me to distribute some—'

The first woman snapped her fingers in his face. 'Four grams for us, then do the rounds.'

Jounouchi felt his smile start to slip, but he stapled it back up.

'Sure thing.' From the bag in his pocket, he handed out four sachets. 'You ladies have a good night!'

But they had already turned away, reabsorbing themselves into the mire of people beyond. The room was all dimmed lamps and dark corners, groups of the beautiful and the rich, supernatural women and men who made more in an hour than Jounouchi would make in a lifetime. Some were clustered in small groups, conspiratorial and sexual, men whispering things into women's ears with hands on their thighs. Elsewhere people joked and shouted, red-faced and riotous with alcohol, and all of them living entirely in moment after moment of boundless wealth.

Jounouchi knew no one and no one knew him. He was pressed against the glass of these people's lives, so close to the warmth and vivacity of it all, but he would never break in, not really. He could tell jokes and people would laugh, and some guy would clap him on the back and tell him, 'You're alright, Jogo! You're alright!' And then he would go home, and he would check his messages, and he would go to sleep as the sun crept up again. His chest heaved. Jounouchi ignored it. He scanned the party. Time to go to work.

The men here talked endless waterfalls of shit. They brayed at one another's jokes, they dumped cigarette ash on carpets, they made cracks about rape, they laughed about how homeless people should be poisoned. They talked about money like it was a god.

'Let me tell you about capitalism,' one would say. 'Let me tell you how the world works. The world is built from money and it's built to make money, and if you're not scooping it up then you might as well be the fucking janitor. I make two thousand USD an hour and I wipe my ass with fucking vicuña if I want to. I fuck a new woman every day and I got a wife who thinks I'm the best husband God could have given her.' They all talked like this, and once Jounouchi had got half a gram inside them they talked like that even more.

It was some kind of hell, surely, to be stuck with such people and have to sell them a product to make them even worse.

After he'd made the necessary rounds and worked his way around the party, he rewarded himself with a break and wandered out to the balcony. It was black and glacial this far up, the middle of a November night, and he shivered as he listened to the traffic whispering below. It was easier to breathe, quieter, than the crush of the party. He looked to the ground below, yawning up at him, and reasoned it would be a quicker death than throwing yourself off a metro platform.

Shut up, Jounouchi, you fucking weak failure. Just do your job. Go back inside and do your job.

The thought of re-entering that kiln of insincere smiles and casual assaults only made the balcony ledge more attractive. He took a slow breath. Maybe he could do one bump. Takeda wouldn't notice, Takeda didn't care. For a nanbawan gig, who gave a shit if a quarter gram was missing?

He looked around him. The handful of people out here were paying him no attention, all of them absorbed in private acts or conversation. There was a couple talking in low voices, having some kind of drunk flirtation, and a woman sitting with a phone pressed to her ear, her expression one of crisis, and closest to him was a tall, slender – Seto Kaiba.

Jounouchi felt the world stop, readjust itself, then continue turning.

Kaiba leaned against a wall, legs crossed, absorbed in his phone. The sheer casualness of it was offensive. He looked as real and normal as any other guest, like he was supposed to be there, but the nonsense of his presence made Jounouchi blink several times. He glanced around to see if anyone else was reacting to Seto Kaiba's presence with the disbelief and indignation that Jounouchi was feeling, but he was alone. Of course, this was a party of billionaires; what did one more billionaire matter?

Jounouchi watched him, unobserved. Whatever drew Kaiba's attention on his phone screen, it was far too enrapturing for him to break his attention. His hair was a little shorter and he was not quite so skinny has he had once been, his limbs more mature and substantial than the lank he had once carried. He wore a navy turtleneck with more heft to it than the sleek black to which Jounouchi had become accustomed to seeing him wear, and no coat, which made him look smaller, more like a normal human being.

Eight years. Eight years since they had last spoken, and there he was. The oneiric strangeness of Seto Kaiba, standing there like any other human being, was uncanny and stunning in a way that Jounouchi could not quite process.

Kaiba had not noticed Jounouchi. His thumbs moved with rapid grace and the white light lit his face in an oddly medical way. Jounouchi tried and failed to think of some form of greeting that fit the absurdity of the situation, and came up blank.

'Yo,' he said, for lack of anything else to offer, and got no response. Kaiba did not even seem to have heard him. 'You, uh, come here often?' he joked badly, but this too got no response. Kaiba might as well have been on Neptune. Jounouchi thought about tapping his arm, then reconsidered. This seemed some kind of admission of defeat. He touched the bag in his pocket. Over half way empty, and it was only Friday. He had some time to kill. And this was an impossible situation, so he pried into it with the one tool with which he had been supplied.

'Hey there, how are you doing? Having a good night? Just wanted to see if I could interest you in some cocaine. Compliments of the host.' The patter came to him naturally; he had recited it a hundred times. '100% pure, Sawamura's guarantee. This is imported from America and the finest money can buy. If you're a newcomer to—'

'One gram.'

The suddenness and unexpectedness of the answer made Jounouchi drop the salesman persona like he was holding roadkill.

'What?'

'I'll take one gram.'

And still, Kaiba did not look up from his phone.

Jounouchi closed his open mouth. 'I wasn't expecting you to say yes, Kaiba. Jesus, the fuck is wrong with you?'

And with that, finally, Kaiba looked up. His face ran through emotions like projector slides: irritation, confusion, recognition, confusion again, then a careful stoicism. The recognition flowed between them. He was older and his face thinner, having lost the gentle haze of adolescence that had once softened all their features. But he was the same Seto Kaiba that Jounouchi had known since high school, and when he spoke his voice was the same, albeit with an almost imperceptible layer of grit over it that had come with age.

'What are you doing here?'

There was an easy disdain to his voice, and Jounouchi imagined Kaiba would have addressed him in exactly the same way if he had shown up in Kaiba's bedroom on the KaibaCorp blimp in Battle City. Familiarity and nostalgia flooded him with a kind of heat he hadn't felt in months.

'What, no hello?' He grinned, and for the first time that evening there was genuine warmth to it. 'No "how are you?" Good to see you never grew into any manners, Kaiba.'

Kaiba continued to stare. It was as though Jounouchi seemed as unreal to him as he did to Jounouchi, like they were both waiting to wake up from some strange childhood dream. There was a deep unreality to looking at one another like this, in the same delicate light, hearing the same strange shifting jazz, standing with the same glittering city laid out beneath them.

'Are you…' Kaiba's gaze tried and failed to comprehend Jounouchi's existence and its context. 'Wait staff?'

'Nah, not exactly. Well, sort of, I guess. I'm catering. I cater.' He smiled, at first with warm sincerity, but then increasing fixedness as Kaiba regarded him like he were some kind of weird gross insect. 'Come on! No hello, really? Okay, I'll start. Hello, Kaiba. How have you been?'

Kaiba stared, his phone forgotten, and looked Jounouchi over as if he might find some clue to the absurdity of the situation lodged in Jounouchi's clothes. He opened his mouth, then closed it. He slid his phone into his pocket and looked around them, perhaps hoping to find someone who could explain to him why Jounouchi Katsuya was standing in front of him, but they were alone.

And then a new expression locked onto Kaiba's face, one Jounouchi had seen countless times.

'Did Yuugi send you?' he asked, and he was breathing out excitement – hot, low, rapturous. Jounouchi stared back.

'Well, no, of course not.'

'He didn't send you because he's too scared to meet me himself, hm?' Kaiba continued, absorbed by his lunatic interpretation of events. 'Let me guess. He's decided to stop wasting his time in kiddie league tournaments and finally get up the nerve to have a real duel. And yet he sends you to beg on his behalf.'

Jounouchi continued to stare. The words were nonsense. And then he understood. And it was all so terribly sad. Because Yuugi wasn't here, and he wasn't here because he didn't want to be, and Jounouchi missed him so much it hurt and Yuugi was still the first thing on Kaiba's mind after all this time. It didn't work anymore. High school was over and they were closer to thirty than not, and Yuugi was gone, and Honda was gone, and so were Anzu and Shizuka and the rest of them, and Jounouchi and Kaiba had been left behind. They had both been forgotten, and Jounouchi knew that with an abyssal ache that no amount of time passed had managed to fill.

And Kaiba didn't know. Kaiba was the same. The world was impossibly different but Kaiba hadn't changed. He was still that tech billionaire with no friends, hoping for a duel or a fight because that was the only way he knew how to interact with the world.

'Yuugi's in America. I haven't spoken to him in… well, it's been a few weeks. I'm just…' He swallowed. 'It's a coincidence that we're both here. I'm just… working the party.'

The puzzle finally started to align for Kaiba. The light in his eyes had completely gone. His expression ran through another few cycles and settled on disdain.

'You're selling drugs?'

And that made it real in a way it never had been. Everything suddenly, horribly, set into disgusting place. Here he was, and here was Kaiba, and this is what they were.

'Yeah. Cocaine specifically. I just do cocaine.' He felt his own self-disgust refract off Kaiba and back into himself. 'I've worked other jobs,' he continued, his tone awkwardly light. 'But this pays the best. Two to three days a week is all I have to work to pay for… you know, rent and food and that.'

Kaiba did something with his jaw and lips, as though relocking them into place.

'That's pathetic. Once I respected you as a duellist. And this is what you've become?'

Of course. Of course this is how it would be.

'Ah, come on, asshole,' he said brightly, but the words were tinny. 'Come on, you overprivileged, stuck-up piece of shit. We're not all billionaires. Some of us work for a living. You think competitive duelling pays my bills?'

But there was nothing he could say, no insult that would recontextualise what he was.

'Certainly not losing at competitive duelling,' said Kaiba in retort. 'You haven't been ranked since, what, the Chinese internationals? And you placed fifth, I believe.'

The shame of that memory bristled him, but the oddness that Kaiba had kept track of his rankings softened the bite. He had had nothing better to do. And then something occurred to Jounouchi, obviously, and he felt a weird bitter elation. The context shifted.

'Wait.' He frowned with mock concentration. 'Here I am listening to you talk down to me. But you were about to buy from me. One gram, you said. You're going to look down on me for dealing when you're a…' He let the sentence hang and droop in the air as he selected the best term like a fine wine. 'You're a customer.'

Kaiba was not to be deterred. 'I have no ethical qualms with cocaine, obviously. It's a stimulant like any other. More effective than caffeine and useful if taken responsibly.'

There was something hugely funny about the situation, farcical and stupid, and Jounouchi wanted to laugh and also cry for reasons he could not quite place. It felt like they were on even footing, albeit on the side of some impossible mountain that could kill them both at any second.

'So,' he said firmly, shifting down a few gears. 'How's Mokuba?'

The abrupt turn clearly displeased Kaiba, who still refused to return the ball.

'He's fine.' His mouth twitched into something that definitely wasn't a smile, but couldn't have been any other expression either. 'How's your family? Still living with your deadbeat father?'

The line hurt, but it was a sting dipped in nostalgia. No one had said a bad word about his dad since the man's heart attack. The second he hit the bathroom floor, the world's opinion of Jounouchi Sr did a smooth 180 and he was suddenly the gentlest soul on earth, beloved by all; 'a man who had his demons but a good heart', the eulogy had said, which was ironic given how objectively bad the man's heart had turned out to be in the end. It was surreal to hear someone speak of the man with the disdain he earned in life.

'Ah… He passed away. Four months ago.' Jounouchi said this flatly, as though supplying information about the weather.

Perhaps sixteen-year-old Kaiba would have snarled some crack about how it was good the trash had been taken out, but this Seto Kaiba was pushing thirty and had apparently managed to scrape together just enough empathy and self-awareness to express at least polite regret at the faux pas. 'My apologies,' he said curtly.

Jounouchi shrugged. 'It's fine.'

And it was weird suddenly, because Jounouchi had no one to talk to when his dad died who understood what it was like to lose someone close to you that you didn't love. But Kaiba got it. Kaiba knew what it was like to lose a parent you kind of couldn't fucking stand, a parent you had wished dead a thousand times, and now that it was real you still couldn't feel entirely guilty about wishing him dead. It became easier to keep talking.

'Honestly, it's refreshing to hear someone say something disrespectful about the asshole. People act like you're such a fucking saint the second your heart stops beating, you know?'

Kaiba said nothing to this, but Jounouchi knew he understood. And Kaiba didn't say anything because he knew Jounouchi knew he understood, and Jounouchi had just built a little bridge of intimacy between them that Kaiba couldn't cut down.

Whatever Kaiba might have said in response, however, Jounouchi didn't hear, because at that moment the apartment door opened and a man called Micky Tanner walked in, who was the client Kaiba had come to meet, and the entire energy of the party tightened as around a distaff.

An awful off-key English song echoed into the lounge and it seemed everyone stopped what they were doing, some from curiosity, some respect, others disgust.

'O when the saints! O when the saints! O when the saints go march-ing in!'

The singer strode into the room, into its centre, and addressed his song to the women he passed. Many bared their teeth in joy or threat. The man was short, long-faced and sallow, and he wore a pastel lilac suit asynchronous with any current style. One hand held a fat cigar, dragging smoke through the air, its fingers crowded with heavy golden rings. His tiny black eyes roved through the crowd, then shone through to the balcony. He opened his arms wide, as if in greeting, and approached them.

'I'd like to be within that number!'

He sidled to a slow stop in front of Kaiba, whose jaw was tight and forehead was pulsing. Micky Tanner sang the last loud, drunken lyric into Kaiba's deliberately impassive face.

'O when the saints go marching iiiin!'

He dragged out the final syllable so long that Jounouchi thought the vessel in Kaiba's forehead might erupt from the skin. 'Hey there, Seto Kaiba,' the man said in American English. He shook Kaiba's hand with two of his own.

'Tanner,' said Kaiba, then something else in English that Jounouchi could not quite follow.

'Seto Kaiba. You look fantastic.' Tanner's voice flowed like grit down a landslide. Jounouchi managed to catch snatches here and there, the phrases 'fucking magazine model' and then, unmistakeably, 'Jap Johnny Depp.'

Kaiba's mouth jerked in a motion that sort of suggested some possibility of a smile. Tanner clapped his hand on Kaiba's arm and said something else that entirely eluded Jounouchi, but he could judge from Kaiba's expression that the comment wasn't welcome. Suddenly Jounouchi no longer felt the outsider in a room of ultra-rich assholes, but somehow more in his element than Kaiba, whose stiffness and discomfort reverberated around the room like the note of a single siren. Jounouchi looked between Kaiba and the American, who was continuing to spout endless trash (Jounouchi, distracted, only caught the profanity and slurs). Jounouchi made some quick assessments. He smelled business, and he spied a way to both outshine Kaiba in a professional environment as well as do him a social courtesy.

Three birds, one rock.

Jounouchi insinuated himself into the conversation with practised technique: a light hand on the American's shoulder, his most warm and welcoming grin. 'Cocaine?' he said in English, and twitched his finger to his nose. 'On the house,' he added, one fragment of his patter for selling to westerners. Tanner laughed and bared a mouth of nicotine-black teeth. He inclined his head in Jounouchi's direction and placed one hand on his own chest and the other on Kaiba's, apparently to express some kind of camaraderie, though Kaiba looked about ready to throw the man from the balcony.

'I think we'd both appreciate that,' said Tanner in slow exaggerated English, and Jounouchi grinned again.

'Super fantastic,' said Jounouchi with his most effervescent, glimmering smile.

And that's how Jounouchi found himself sitting with Seto Kaiba and an American billionaire, watching the man clear impressive lines of coke.

They sat around a glass coffee table in the midst of the party, along with two of the dark-eyed, ethereal women who remained almost entirely silent for the entire evening. One kept one arm in contact with Tanner at all times, around his shoulders or waist or on his knee; the second briefly attempted to establish the same physical intimacy with Kaiba, but he jerked away from her touch as if she had burned him. Kaiba also refused Tanner's many invitations to partake of the coke, which raised certain questions for Jounouchi, but on which he did not comment. For his own part, Jounouchi negotiated lines of inositol onto the table and did those instead.

Tanner talked in rapid English that was mostly incomprehensible to Jounouchi, although he caught occasional phrases about pop culture, sex, and the quality of the party. Tanner seemed delighted by Jounouchi's attempts to join in the conversation, reacting as though he were watching a dog try to speak. But Jounouchi was used to that.

'This is great coke for Asian shit!' Tanner informed him charitably.

Fucking Americans, Jounouchi thought. 'Thank you, pal!' he said aloud.

But as much as his own loathing crystallised, Kaiba's was sharp enough to cut yourself. When he spoke, which was rare, it was always an attempt to change the subject to business: a comment about the project he was working on, about the status of the American stock market, and about some funding he apparently wanted which Jounouchi gathered the American was supposed to supply.

It surprised Jounouchi to realise, eight years on from high school, his English had improved to the degree that he could pick out the flaws in Kaiba's accent. Not that Kaiba's English was bad, of course, and it was better than Jounouchi's – higher class, too, with that clipped RP tone that was so prized – but he could feel out the inconsistencies in his vowels in a way he never could at school. In high school, he accepted without question that Kaiba's English – when reading those trash poems by dead white guys aloud in class – was not only flawless but the platonic ideal of the language, and now he found himself almost unsettled to have the ability to shatter that illusion.

Kaiba's body language, on the other hand, was terrible. If the guy was trying to schmooze with the vulgar American he could not be doing a better job of advertising his discomfort. He sat on the very edge of his seat, his legs crossed sharply, and managed only the thinnest of feigned smiles at the man's appalling jokes. Not that the American seemed to mind; he was clearly accustomed to entertaining himself. At one point he made a particularly racist comment, one that made Jounouchi – who heard all kinds of bullshit in his line of work – raise his eyebrows involuntarily, but Kaiba said nothing.

By four AM, the conversation seemed to be drawing to a close. Jounouchi's bag was emptied out, and it was only Friday. That was the best piece of luck he'd had in weeks. He could report in with Takeda and take the next two days off.

He left the apartment with Kaiba and the American, in theory the third wheel, yet feeling strangely included in the American's crass effulgence in a way that Kaiba clearly was not. Outside the apartment building, pausing under the awning to stay out of the rain, Kaiba and the American shook hands; or rather, the American grabbed Kaiba's hand in both of his and gave it a violent thrashing.

'We must do this again, Kaiba. Great party.' Then gibberish. 'I fucking love Japan. The women here are…' He made a hand gesture with his closed fist that Kaiba didn't seem to understand. 'It's like fucking a…' and then something Jounouchi did not understand, but which he knew enough to laugh at.

Kaiba, every note of his voice steeped in tension, asked something which Jounouchi expected was business-related.

The American waved his hand as though not even slightly involved in the business proposition Kaiba was entirely consumed with settling. 'Yeah, no problem.' The American blabbered some more, then exclaimed loudly: 'And this guy!' He clapped a hand on Jounouchi's back, who grinned back. 'Take my card. Take it.' And he slipped a small white business card into Jounouchi's breast pocket. 'Call me if I'm town. Hook me up, kiddo. I'll let you borrow one of my…' He finished with some piece of American slang that was probably equally lost on Kaiba.

And with that, he disappeared into a small limousine that was filled with more people, more noise, and would doubtless carry the party elsewhere, into the morning.

Jounouchi and Kaiba were left alone. Kaiba watched the car disappear, staring after it long after it left their sight, consumed by some mix of disorientation and private anxiety. He had looked so much the same when they met, but there was something different there, something more worn. Jounouchi then realised, having not thought about it for all the long years he hadn't seen Kaiba, that he had never, not once, seen him duel since Egypt.

Jounouchi spoke quietly, through the rain. 'You get your business done, then?'

Kaiba's expression smoothed itself. He replied in English, then corrected himself. 'I did what was needed. With any luck, the rest of our interactions can be accomplished through paperwork.'

'He seemed like a real jackass.'

Kaiba muttered something else in English, perhaps assuming Jounouchi would not understand, but Jounouchi caught the profanity. 'Regardless. It's done with now.'

They stood together, the two of them in the streetlight. The rain crashed down like metal. A second car pulled up: Kaiba's, a Bentley.

'Nice fuckin' wheels,' he said, and Kaiba looked at the car as though he had never seen it before.

'Yes, I suppose,' he said, as though this was obvious, then opened the car door and moved to climb in.

'Is that it?' said Jounouchi, incredulous. 'Not even a goodbye?' Kaiba paused, liminal between the warmth of the car and the wet street with Jounouchi. 'I haven't seen you in eight years.'

'And we will continue not seeing one another for the next eight years, I imagine.'

The rain began to soak Jounouchi, though it was also starting to drip from Kaiba's face. Jounouchi thought, disconnectedly, of the sideways glass on his side stand and the patch of damp carpet beneath that he had not bothered to dry.

'Don't pull this crap on me, Kaiba. Don't pretend like running into me meant nothing to you.'

'But it did. Mean nothing,' Kaiba added vaguely, as though his mind were elsewhere. Kaiba folded himself into the car and moved to close the door, but Jounouchi grabbed it. His fingers were icy against the rain-slick metal.

Kaiba held up his hand to someone in the car front seat that Jounouchi couldn't see. 'It's fine, Kaoru.'

'No, it's not fine!' The rain slimed Jounouchi's eyes and he couldn't clear his vision. Kaiba swam blurry and vague in front of him, lit by the car interior, his face blooming golden. 'I haven't seen you since high school. I haven't heard from you, you haven't spoken to me or Yuugi, you – I mean, fuck, the first thing you ask me is if Yuugi sent me. Do you get how nuts that is? Don't pretend like you don't give a shit about seeing me again.'

Wherever Kaiba's thoughts were, they weren't on that wet street with Jounouchi. He no longer looked like the boy Jounouchi had known in high school; he looked like a man, and a stranger at that, no different really than any other nameless customer or one of Yuugi's faceless fans or whatever poor desperate fuck Takeda had employed to work off debts he would die with. Jounouchi didn't recognise this person any more.

'This meant nothing,' Kaiba repeated, and he shut the door. The car slid away from the kerb, kicking up a little water onto Jounouchi's already saturated trousers, and its lights shrank to dots before being absorbed in the haze of downtown. Jounouchi watched it go with the ache in his chest rising up through him again like bile.

'Well, fuck you, Kaiba!' he shouted after the car, but he wasn't shouting it at Kaiba, not really. It was for everything and everyone, and for the long route home and his empty bed and the whole past eight years.

He breathed slowly in the night. The rain soaked him like a drowned animal. He shivered, pulled his blazer tighter about him, and picked out the sign for the metro. It pulsed through the darkness like a cyan halo. Jounouchi pulled up his collar and set out through the rain. Tonight had been like any other.

Things to expect with this fic: slowburn, unromantic, manga characterisation, gen, angst, nostalgia, poverty, wealth, people trying to make do. This is labelled Jounouchi/Kaiba and will have nonplatonic elements between the two of them, but fair warning those elements will be far down the line.

I've been out of the fandom for four years and I didn't think I'd return, but apparently I react to hopeless workloads by taking on more work, and a JouKai longfic seemed like a good idea. /finger guns/