Author's Notes: Not too much to say about this one. This story immediately takes place after Mai and Vivian's duel with the Meikyu twins at the Great Wall in the last episode. I settled on the two of them going out for drinks in the capital of the Shanxi province because it's about a two hour trip from the Yanmen Pass.

Is there any logical reason to believe they were at that part of the Great Wall? No, and when I think about it harder, it's more likely they were at Badaling since that's the most commonly visited spot and is probably the first picture that came up as a reference when that scene had to be animated into the final credits, but I thought it would be suitable for Mai and Vivian to have dueled the Labyrinth Brothers at a site where there would be fortified gates, since, y'know, Duelist Kingdom shenanigans.

Listen, I'm fully aware you don't care and just want to read about Mai and Vivian drinking, but I spent a full hour agonizing over this detail. So now you know.

While I do heavily lean towards Japanese continuity when I write, I decided to pull the modeling and acting details of Vivian's career from the dubbed version ("model turned actress turned kung fu master turned duelist") because it's my story and I'll do as I please. Anything else I wrote about Vivian's background are purely my own head canons, though, so you can blast me for that all you wish if it suits you.

Lastly, I did mix a little bit of manga continuity with the anime's interpretation of Mai's imprisonment during Battle City, so... Hey, there it is. Sorry, Mai.

Warnings: Alcohol consumption, mild swearing, mention of PTSD, mention to sexual harassment of a teenaged girl, a very crude comparison of personal misgivings with slaughtering cute animals, and offhanded comments about Westerners being a gullible audience.

Disclaimer: Yu-Gi-Oh! and its characters are copywritten to Kazuki Takahashi and Konami. I can think of no clever quips to follow at this time.

"A shot for me and a shot for you. Ganbei!"

"Might wanna slow down there, Viv," Mai slumped on the bar with a drunken smirk. "I know the first couple of rounds didn't kill us, but I'm still pretty sure you asked the bartender to give us a bottle of lighter fluid."

"You just have a weak constitution," Vivian chirped, undeterred as she set down the white bottle with a dubious-looking label and tipped her small glass with a gesture. "You drink that other rice stuff in Japan, right? Then baijiu shouldn't be that different to you."

"I like red wine better," Mai murmured, rolling her own glass between her fingers with the statement. "Never been much for the harder stuff, to be honest."

"Whaaaat?" Vivian balked, and it was only then Mai credited the red hue on Vivian's cheeks to the alcohol as opposed to the ambient lighting above them. "No way! You look way harder than that."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Mai asked with a playful pout and narrowed eyes. "You trying to start something with me, Vivi-chan?"

"You trying to start something, Kujaku-san?" Vivian shot back with a wide smirk, leaning down to Mai's place on the bar and peering at her though the messy mass of blonde hair. "I take it back. You can't be that hard if you're broken up over a loss to the maze twins."

Mai's playfulness died with the reminder. She could do nothing else but grimace at the thought and rested her forehead against the bar with a groan.

"Wha—Hey! Pick your head up!" Vivian whined. "That was a joke!"

"I screwed up," Mai moaned against the bar, her head suddenly feeling hot and weighted, a rush of heat spreading from her cheeks and burning her ears. What the hell was in that Chinese lighter fluid?

"Yeah, it kinda was all your fault we lost at the end there," Vivian said, and Mai glowered when she lifted her head to stare at Vivian. She didn't expect to have much sympathy from the younger woman, but she also thought her friend would have had more tact than to openly agree with her.

"But it's not like we were in a big tournament or anything. What do they say in the West? It was 'for funsies'?" Vivian shrugged. "The twins can brag all they want, but I still have the official title of Duel Queen of the continent, and neither of us have to go through life with stupid tattoos on our foreheads. So who are the real losers, hmm?"

A sharp exhale that wasn't quite a laugh slipped from Mai's mouth, but she refused to lift her chin off the bar. Vivian decided she wasn't happy with the reaction.

"'Mei-kyu'," Vivian enunciated with a mild slur to the words, tapping the space between her brow. "They have half of a word on their foreheads, Mai, and those characters mean something different on their own! Neither of them can go out in public without the other because they would look like bigger idiots than they already are. Who does that? It would be like if I got 'card' and you got 'games'. It's lame. They must have done it when they were teenagers or something. Only high school delinquents and misinformed Westerners would do something like that. If it wasn't for Duel Monsters, I betcha they'd be hocking fake wushu gear in a Chinatown somewhere for a living."

Mai hummed with a small smile. Vivian closed her eyes and swirled her drink nonchalantly.

"Really, you have the nerve to look all gloomy when I had to listen to them in Mandarin. You should consider yourself lucky you missed half the conversation!" Vivian declared imperiously. "You think all that rhyming was bad in English? Ugh! Their poetry won't be winning a Lu Xun Prize anytime soon."

Mai's smile broadened. She didn't know Mandarin beyond a handful of helpful phrases (and insults, thanks to Vivian), and she had never heard of the aforementioned prize until that moment, but she would take the woman's opinion on it.

"And you know what the worst part about that duel was, Mai?" Vivian asked, leaning down once more to stare into the blonde's face. "Their kung fu was shit."

"Was it, now?" Mai entertained her, and she could feel the burning in her ears fading with Vivian's rant.

"I know so!" Vivian exclaimed, withdrawing from Mai and holding her drink in the air as she placed a hand to her chest. "I'm a certified expert, and an actress! I know the flashy opera bullshit when I see it! That nonsense only has applications with cameras and wires!"

"Cool it, Bruce Lee," Mai said with a mock-hushed tone, waving her hand up and down, as though bouncing a small ball on the bar. "People are staring."

"Then they can get a good look!" Vivian swirled in her seat and put her back to the bar, spreading her arms wide while still holding her full cup of baijiu. "Who here wants to fight me?!"

Mai had prior experience in dives and seedier spots of ill repute, much to her regret whenever she thought back on those times, but she felt no danger at that moment. It was a casual pub in the city of Taiyuan, with a handful of patrons in business suits while the rest were tourists and locals in polos, T-shirts, shorts, and flip-flops. She could say without any exaggeration that Vivian was the most dangerous person there, and the Chinese woman was well aware of the fact when no one rose to challenge her while they turned away and minded their own drinks.

"See Mai, no worries. We're safe," Vivian said with a smug flip of her hair as she turned around. "It's a girly bar."

"Vivian," Mai chuckled. "You're too much."

"What's 'too much' is waiting for you to get over your pity party and drink with me-e-e-e," Vivian complained as she bounced in her stool. "Lift your head up and show me that glass, Mai. I don't like drinking by myself. Ganbei?"

Mai gazed at Vivian's sparkling almond eyes and smiled lazily over her drink, wondering briefly if she had looked that carefree when she was that age... or if she would ever be that carefree again.

She visibly winced at the thought and turned her attention back to her glass, as though trying to ask the liquid within for a sense of direction. Vivian pursed her lips in reaction, but said nothing as she set her own drink down on the bar and turned her eyes to the ceiling. The Chinese woman learned, not too long ago, there were times it was best to give Mai some time whenever she got like this.

For one minute.

Mai continued to stare at her drink.

Vivian wasn't that much younger than her, yet it was indisputable their experiences differed drastically. They both came from means of wealth (Vivian's maternal grandparents had struck gold back in the '60s by being one of the first entrepreneurs to market acupressure and natural medicine to the West, whatever that meant), but Vivian never faced any of her hardships. She was an only child who didn't endure the misfortune of losing her parents, as Mai had, which meant Vivian had all their attention and the means to pursue whatever she pleased: modeling, acting, dueling, all done between bouts of learning the ins and out of the family business and earning her black belt—really a Japanese marketing scheme that had taken over the martial arts world by the late '80s, Vivian had told Mai once in a conspiratorial fashion, but she said the medals and certificates looked nice on her wall.

Vivian had become the Duel Queen of Asia not as a means of survival, but a means of entertainment. So far as she was concerned, Duel Monsters was just another hobby to keep her occupied.

Mai didn't have the luxury.

She had inherited her parents' immense wealth, and she possessed none of the financial acumen to maintain it. Everything had been spent on frivolous purchases and things she didn't need in an attempt to replace something that could never be bought. She had grown up always wanting, and she thought, at that moment, that she had probably never been carefree at all.

Vivian, in so many respects, was one-dimensional. What you saw was exactly what you got. The young woman thrived on instinct, lived in the moment, meant whatever she said, and did precisely what she claimed she was going to do, and Mai envied her for it all. Vivian didn't hide who she was, couldn't hide who she was, even when she tried on those rare occasions to control her temper or hatch up a scheme. She wore her heart on her sleeve, her intentions laid bare for the world to see, and Mai couldn't fathom being that brutally honest with anyone, not even...

There was a brief flash of dyed gold hair and a goofy grin in her mind's eye, and she tightened her grip on her glass with a pitiful, upward turn to her lower lip. Vivian sighed beside her and tapped her finger against the bar.

Okay, then. Two minutes.

In so many ways, Mai's life had been simple till that point: nab the cash prize, visit the next hot spot on the globe, and find a moment of peace and quiet at the bottom of a glass. There was no need nor want of reminiscing or self-reflection. It was just her, her Harpies, and whatever happened to be in her carry-on luggage that week.

Until she met him.

Until she met them.

Her shoulders tightened with a snarl.

It was refreshing after so much time to have friends, real friends, but she wasn't aware there had been fine print attached to the alliance. She wondered, more times than she could count, if she could have done things differently, would she have taken the chance to forgo her invitation to Battle City, or just let Duelist Kingdom pass her by to avoid them altogether? She had nothing to do with the supernatural or divine before then, and she felt guilty for not feeling guilt when she knew in her heart she would have pressed a reset button on her life if she was presented with the opportunity.

Of course, something like that would require magic, and that never worked out for her.

Mai massaged her brow with one hand and continued to cradle her drink from her fingertips in the other. Vivian huffed and crossed her arms, tapping the lower horizontal support of her stool with her heel.

Fine. Three minutes.

Mai had regrets with her choice to join Doma, but they paled in comparison with what haunted her on a regular basis. The nightmares weren't as bad as they had been, but they never disappeared either, even after Doma's dissolution and her own repentance. She still saw his face, still heard his laugh, still felt the grains of sand sliding along her shoulders and her knuckles scraped raw from pounding her fists against the hourglass.

She wondered, too often, if she would have been better off if they had just let her rip into Malik once she had woken up.

But that's not what you're supposed to do to new friends.

It must have been some crazy strong magic for Katsuya and company to forgive the man who would have been all too happy to let her rot in Hell. It was only for a day, Shizuka told her, but the effects lasted for a lifetime. Not only was she robbed of her dignity and security, but she was robbed of her vengeance to boot.

The quiet, stone-faced bitch who Mai didn't remember seeing anywhere on the blimp—whom Shizuka-chan was kind enough to inform was Malik's older sister—had seemed to usher her brothers with a sense of urgency onto the boat after saying their brief goodbyes at the docks. Mai wasn't sure what was worse: having to swallow what was left of her pride so she could smile and wave to the monster who caused her so much misery, or having to pull over into a parking lot once she was well out of her friends' radius and sob herself to sleep in her convertible that night.

Her pain, her suffering, it had meant nothing to them in the end, because all Malik had to do was say he was sorry and everything was forgiven. Because, as Mai was told, it wasn't really him who chained her to a tablet and had her electrocuted in front of Kaiba Corp's cameras, or locked her away to have insects eat away at her brain while she drowned in sand; it was Malik's other personality, and that somehow excused all of "regular" Malik's wrongdoings prior to the hostile takeover. Well, if only the rest of the world could be so understanding!

All Malik had done was trap Yuugi in a burning building, had his friends—her friends—beaten, kidnapped, and mind-wiped, almost crushed Anzu under a storage unit, and nearly drowned Katsuya at the docks.

… and she had sent Katsuya's soul into the belly of a dragon.

Mai glared into her cup, and Vivian's posture slumped in her seat as she looked to the ceiling again.

Four minutes? Really?

Mai closed her eyes with a squint. Yet Katsuya forgave her, even after all that. Yuugi, Anzu, Honda, and Otogi forgave her, just as they had forgiven Malik for what was done.

Perhaps it was just their nature.

She vaguely remembered, back in Duelist Kingdom, Pegasus J. Crawford had sealed the souls of Sugoroku, Mokuba, and Seto Kaiba within trading cards. Perhaps in another life, her friends would have been grateful to her for giving him the same treatment in kind. Yet that wasn't the reality they were living in. The reality was that after the trials of Duelist Kingdom and the miseries of Battle City, they had found it in themselves to forgive Pegasus and come to his rescue—and eventually hers.

It was astonishing to Mai, looking at it in that way, because she realized they never extended the same courtesy to Vivian. Yet all she had done was apply a pressure point technique and asked for a date with Yuugi in return. She even honored her word and stopped pestering him about the matter after she lost their duel, but the way they had reacted to Vivian, she may has well have slaughtered a litter of puppies in front of them and served the meat on a platter.

Was it because she was one of the few 'bad guys' they encountered who wasn't under the influence of some magic bullshit when she acted out? Mai still had a hard time believing it. They could forgive Pegasus for stealing Sugoroku's soul, but they couldn't find it in themselves to forgive Vivian for sinking her fingers into his back.

Mai inwardly sneered at that. From what little Anzu had confided in her, Sugoroku had made unwanted comments about her breasts once puberty started and tried to get a panty shot every now and again. Putting that into account, Mai figured Vivian had performed a public service that was long overdue. Though Mai also remembered Vivian making some comment about how strangely close Sugoroku seemed to another older gentleman, the grandfather of the girl Vivian had dueled in the preliminaries, and Mai wondered if Sugoroku had been compensating for something...

Mai startled with a jump when she saw Vivian's hand waving in front of her face.

"Mai? Mai? Hel-lo?! You've had that sorry look on your face for five minutes!" Vivian said with a furrowed brow. "You're lucky baijiu isn't meant to be served hot. You here with me?"

Vivian was visibly annoyed with the wait, but Mai also picked up the worry at the edge of her tone. Had she really been out of it for five minutes? She supposed that was better than the last time...

She gathered the resolve to look up. Mai's violet eyes softened with a small, unguarded smile that Vivian returned with a generous smirk, and she was reminded again of the younger woman's heedless nature. She needed to take a page from Vivian's book. Mai didn't need to dwell on the past. She wasn't there anymore, and she learned long ago (and not soon enough) there was no benefit from revisiting those dark places. Mai was there, in a casual pub, with a good friend and drink in hand, and there was nowhere else she needed to be than in that moment.

"Yeah," Mai finally said, and she raised her glass. "I'm here."

END