Work Text:
"What's wrong, Mokuba?"
Yugi didn't even need to ask if something was wrong, when Mokuba'd shown up at his work station, wearing worry on his face like it was the real face he wore underneath his normal expressions. Something was wrong with Kaiba, and Yugi'd taken off his headset. That's all there was to it. Asking what was wrong was a formality, the same way that greeting a customer at the Game Shop was a formality.
Mokuba hesitated before answering, shaking his head as if there were so many things were wrong that he didn't know where to start. "He missed a couple of check-in times. I want to send someone in after him."
KaibaCorp was developing a new game for the VR pods, and since Yugi knew a thing or two about the VR system and a thing or two more about games, Kaiba'd offered him a spot on the development team as a play tester. It was a smallish spot, likely uncredited, but the look on his mom's face when he told her that playing video games had gotten him a paying job was worth a million yen. Those million yen felt awfully far away now though, working hours after school, nearly alone in an office lined with other peoples' toys and posters, with his mom still breathing down his neck about senior year and cram school and terrible test scores.
Because the games dissociated the player from their own body so thoroughly, they'd installed personal game timers for the developers working inside the game so that they could take breaks to take care of personal needs – and, as they'd learned from a few unfortunate incidents, so that the players could stay connected to their own lives and responsibilities. Turned out that dissociative fantasy was a powerful drug. Kaiba though, Kaiba was grounded. Yugi didn't think they needed to worry about that. Another corporate takeover? "Do you think he's in trouble?" asked Yugi.
Mokuba read the question he'd implied. "Only from himself. No one else is on the network right now."
So it was just the workaholism. "Why don't we just kick him out?" asked Yugi. He opened up that part of the program before Mokuba could answer. KaibaCorp had added that functionality, too, after the Legendary Heroes incident: the ability to boot a player off the game manually, from the outside.
Mokuba looked at his hands. "I don't want to if we can help it. He's probably just working on something, and I don't want to mess up his progress." Yugi halted his clicking. Manual boots would not save the player's progress, though usually that was the least of concerns when someone had to be removed from the game by force. "You're, um. You're better at talking him out of work than I am," said Mokuba.
It seemed rather silly that Yugi could be better at pulling Kaiba away from his work than his own brother was, but this was the third time Mokuba had asked him to do it. Maybe Kaiba had better ways of weaseling around Mokuba because they'd been fighting that war for years. Maybe giving Kaiba an enemy less personal than Mokuba made him easier to manipulate. Or maybe – and the twinge of exasperation that drew lines around Mokuba's mouth suggested it – maybe Mokuba was just tired of doing it. Yugi smiled gently at him. "Ok. I can go in," he said, standing up and grabbing his developers tablet.
"Thanks, Yugi." Mokuba followed him out of the room, and they headed down to the lab together. Yugi and the Kaibas weren't *friends*, really, even after all they'd gone through together with the Millennium Items, at least not friends the way he was friends with the rest of his friends. They were commrades. If he were feeling pessimistic, he'd say that the reason why Mokuba had asked him to help was because he was the only other person working at the moment, due to his weird hours during school. And, if he were pessimistic, the only reason he had this job….
"The most recent changes are on Coldstone Caldera," Mokuba explained as they entered the cool soullessness of the pod room. Yugi much preferred the carpeting and futuristic techno lighting of the rides at KaibaLand to the tile and wires of the developers' laboratories. "That's probably where he's at, since that's the level we want to show off at IEGC."
"Are you going to drop me there?"
"It'd take longer to set up a special run for that. I'll just send you through the front door," said Mokuba. He spun around once in the chair before starting up the VR. "The character selections screens are complete, so choose "admin" for your profile name and enter the password. Everything is unlocked for the admin account."
"Give me two checkpoints, just to be safe" said Yugi. Everyone's checkpoints were set to different times, based on personal preference. They could be as short as ten minutes or as long as forty-five. Yugi's were thirty. "He's probably there, but since we don't know for sure, I might have to look everywhere, and I don't think I'll need anything in the next hour. If we're not back in an hour, boot us both."
Mokuba sighed. "Yeah, ok."
"You sure?" asked Yugi. He didn't sit down in the pod just yet.
Mokuba looked at him through his bangs. "He's been in there for a long time."
Yugi plopped down and gave Mokuba his best imitation of Atem's smile. "It won't take me that long to talk him down. Usually, 'Mokuba is worried,' is enough to get him going." Well, telling him 'Mokuba is worried' and preventing hm from working and refusing to leave him alone until he left was what it really took to get him going. "And if worse comes to worse, you'll boot us. I'll tell him it was my idea. He can get mad at me instead of you."
Mokuba gave him a low-energy reflection of that smile. "Ok," he said, and shut the door down on Yugi.
The introduction screens were eerily silent. They did not have a composer yet. Or, if they did, he was not done composing yet. Choose a profile.
The full pantheon of Duel Monsters appeared before Yugi, gliding in on a smooth stream of pure color to fill his field of vision. It was beautiful, a variation on the card selection screen from the Virtual World. He grinned a little. If there was one thing Kaiba loved to do, it was take someone else's idea and make it better. This had Kaiba's fingerprints all over it. "Admin," said Yugi.
The profiles self-sorted into a smaller pool of options – Blue-Eyes White Dragon, Jinzo, Cyber Dragon, Silent Swordsman… Dark Magician. Yugi frowned at it and inhaled deeply. It had been nearly a year, and he still couldn't bring himself to build a deck involving the Dark Magicians. His own copy still sat in a box on his shelf, despite his friends' demands to see a Magician deck in action again, demands that he knew were rooted in their concern for him rather than any interest in Spellcasters. But Dark Magician wasn't just a card, now. It couldn't really belong to him alone.
Yugi grimaced. Atem would tell him he was being stupid. He could be whomever he wanted to be. He could chose whatever he wanted to chose. He was no one but himself.
He chose the Silent Swordsman anyway.
The transformation into his character was jarring. Humanoid characters in this game were simply the player in fancy dress, and, he suspected, the player's face was "tweaked" to look a little bit better than normal, though he'd never been able to get any of the developers in the office to admit it. The changes were mostly cosmetic, but the Silent Swordsman's armor still clapped onto him with the force of a bear trap, ringing in his ears. It reminded him of a nightmare he'd had as a little kid, of being eaten alive by a clam. He opened up his developer's tablet and spoke into it: "Soften up the character transformation." Though, given how, in the spot where the character was dropped, he was currently walking on air and how he could clip through most of the corners of the buildings, it was probably a low-priority detail.
He ran down the unlocked forest path that lead him to the Coldstone Caldera, Dark Magician haunting him the whole way. The scenery here was still twisted with bugginess; there were places along the otherwise deceptively linear path that he knew were shortcuts, but he didn't dare glitch himself into a corner and get stuck. He spoke notes into his game pad along the way, in between fighting enemies or laughing at their hilarious ineptitude – he stopped to record one aimlessly humping a wall. But this wasn't playing at home, he reminded himself. He had to try his best, if he wanted to shake the sensation that Kaiba had given him this job out of pity. But sometimes, he wondered if Kaiba really wished he were Atem, llike the Dark Magician were a suggestion.
He stepped through the opening in the trees at the top of the hill he'd been climbing, and there, standing on the top of the ridge, was Kaiba, dressed in shining white scales and wings, twiddling away at the code on his in-game tablet as if there weren't bloodthirsty monsters around every corner, the corners themselves weren't sometimes eldritchian horrors, and he didn't have a worried younger brother on the surface.
"Kaiba-kun!"
Kaiba turned sharply to face him. "Yugi!" He opened his arms questioningly, then turned away just as quickly as before and furiously resumed what he'd been doing. He didn't need to ask Yugi why he was here.
The wind whipped up behind them, flipping the Silent Swordsman's collar up against Yugi's neck when he joined Kaiba on the ridge. The other side of the hill was a blackened crater, gray and featureless, aside from a checkpoint in the very center. The ridge on the far side was desperately far away and desperately tall. It all looked suspiciously like a boss battle.
"Mokuba told me you'd missed some check-ins. He sent me in to get you."
Kaiba tapped at his pad angrily. Even with the screen angled away from him, Yugi could see an alarming "7 missed checkpoints" splashed in an alert bar at the top of the page. Kaiba's checkpoints were set to an hour. When Mokuba had said "a few", Yugi had thought he'd meant three. Didn't Kaiba at least need to pee? "I'm not done yet," Kaiba mumbled.
"Well, Mokuba was worried about you. You have to take a break at some point for… stuff. What have you been working on?" Aimlessly, Yugi started walking towards the crater. This level was easily the most complete segment of the game – pumice and gravel crunched underfoot, and soot drifted across the sky. Clearly this was what Kaiba'd been doing, but the question wasn't about finding out information. It was about disengaging Kaiba from the work.
"This level is going to be our display for IEGC." Kaiba was still mumbling. "It has to be ready in… Don't step there!" Kaiba said suddenly.
Yikes. Yugi froze in place, then gingerly put his foot back down where it'd been. "What?"
"Going any farther triggers the battle." Kaiba kept tapping. Had he even looked up? "If you want to know why I've not checked in, it's because I'm working on this boss battle. I made the boss…" He trailed off, frowning at something on the screen.
"Too strong?" finished Yugi.
Kaiba glared at him. "Stronger than it's meant to be at this point in the game," he said, enunciating very clearly. "I'm trying to dial its abilities back, because that seems to be the real issue, not its level."
"It looks really good, so far," said Yugi. "I bet you can get it sorted out if you walked away from it for a bit."
Kaiba sighed and closed the game pad, startlingly docile. His avatar didn't show things like black rings under his eyes, so it was up to his body language to show how tired he was. His shoulders drooped. "Let me give it one more go. I haven't beaten it at all yet, and it's driving me crazy."
Yugi looked at his game clock. He hadn't even reached his own first checkpoint yet. Before he could even breathe an, "OK," Kaiba transformed into a dragon.
It took Yugi's breath away. Other players he'd worked with had chosen humanoid avatars, which worked like his own - the player in fancy dress. But Kaiba was the Blue-Eyes White Dragon, head to toe. The humanoid version he'd just been talking to was a convenience feature for walking around and doing work with the tablet, but this was Kaiba's character's true form. Yugi remembered Kas and Zorc, and he wondered if this was another case of Kaiba stealing other peoples' ideas.
The creature, a multi-tentacled stone goliath on spindly insect legs, erupted from the center of the caldera, throwing boulders like candy. Kaiba streaked into the air, shooting off burst streams as quickly as he could. The blasts smashed into the base of the tentacles as Kaiba swooped between them, the threat of being thrown to the ground just inches away from him. How many times had he fought this boss? It was mastery; it was poetry. No matter what the game was, Yugi could never get enough of watching a skilled gamer play his game. For all the times he'd seen Kaiba play against another player, he'd never seen Kaiba play against the computer. This was Kaiba having fun.
Yugi stood back and watched. After a minute or two, he could see why Kaiba had been struggling with the boss. At first, Kaiba's hits were doing a tremendous amount of damage to the foe, ripping whole chunks out of the monster's life bar, but each hit was doing less damage than the one before it. Yugi didn't know this monster's ability. Was it weakening Kaiba? The monster used some extra limbs to place a new layer of rock on its back. …Oh. After a certain amount of time, the monster grew in defensive strength. The idea was to encourage the player to take risks and defeat the boss quickly through overwhelming force, instead of using stall tactics or poisoning.
"Are you going to get in on this or what?" asked Kaiba suddenly, his voice coming in clear over the game's sound system despite the distance between them.
He was really inviting him? "Wh- Sure!" said Yugi. He drew his sword, grinning, and ran, slipped, skidded down the walls of the crater. "What do you want me to do?"
"Get underneath him," said Kaiba. "There's a safe zone there. We just need to hack away at his hit points as quickly as possible. I want to see if it's even possible in two-player."
Yugi dodged and dove into the gaps between the giant's spider legs and started slicing away. The Silent Swordsman's weapon was immensely satisfying to wield. The gashes he put in the legs of the creature releasing shining white fog instead of blood or gore. He healed, went in for the attack, was killed by some new super attack it came up with, respawned, was hit, backed up and healed again. He felt like a klutz compared to Kaiba, but he forgave himself. It was the first time he'd seen the boss.
"I'm not doing any damage at all," said Yugi. Kaiba wasn't doing much better. A kick from a spider leg sent Yugi rolling, hit points low. Red Medicine. He was running out of spell cards. Not that it really mattered. They both had infinite lives on the admin account, but he had to do the game justice by trying.
"We're maybe ten hits away from –" Kaiba mis-timed a burst stream and a tentacle arm slammed him into the ground, killing him instantly. Infinite lives didn't make watching him die any less visceral. "Damn it!" shouted Kaiba. The beast roared and charged him again as soon as he respawned. He dodged out of the way. "That's the problem I'm still having. It can one-hit KO anyone at this point in the battle. The way its power grows as the battle goes on, it gets unreasonable for any player to try to beat it. I can't start any lower or everyone could beat it too quickly."
"Cap it?"
"I'll have to," Kaiba growled. "I didn't want to."
"You could try dialing its strength down more. We have to get some regular players in here. It might not be as easy for them at the beginning as it is for you."
Kaiba laughed. Yugi smiled as he took another shot at its leg. He'd soothed Kaiba's ego just right. "We're not going to get any further with this with normal player conditions," said Kaiba, meaning they'd used up all the lives a regular player would have.
It was a shame to give in when they were this close to beating it. What else could they do that was useful? Yugi glanced through his inventory as he circled. Raigeki wouldn't work on a boss, Shrink wouldn't be strong enough. Polymerization? "I have Polymerization in my magic cards. Do you want to try it?" Even at the altitude and velocity he was flying at, dragon-Kaiba managed to give him a look like he'd suggested sacrificing Mokuba to the monster to appease it. "It'll at least give us the satisfaction of beating it before we leave," Yugi offered.
Kaiba gave him as close to a verbal shrug as was possible. "I've never used it before," he said coolly.
Yugi had never looked up what the Blue-Eyes White Dragon and Silent Magician Lvl 7 fusion monster was. "What's the monster we'd make?" he asked, as a light burst close enough to his head to singe his digital hair.
"Silent Dragon Paladin." Of course Kaiba would know. "And that…," ruminated Kaiba. "It ignores changes to a monster's ATK and DEF."
That would be extraordinarily useful in this situation. In fact, it was the very first thing they should have tried, but Kaiba was such a… ugh. Yugi opened his inventory panel and selected Polymerization. "I summon Silent Dragon Paladin!" he called out to nothing in particular.
He was lifted off his feet and turned into a soft ball of light that zoomed through the air. Kaiba was doing the same thing. Despite convention telling him that he was invincible at the moment, he had no sword and no freedom of movement, and a rock flew right through him and made him flinch. Their two balls of light swam toward each other through the waving tentacles and arrived at a safe spot on the far side of the caldera, and, together, they merged into a glorious knight atop a shining white dragon.
And Kaiba's soul smashed right into his.
Yugi yelled, though he wasn't sure if it was his voice or Kaiba's or both, as a terrible rush of thoughts and emotions foreign to him hit. The sensation was horrifyingly intimate, as uncomfortable as wearing someone else's shoes. It was like he'd been stuffed into a phone booth with Kaiba, or like he was wearing Kaiba's underwear, or like the first time Anzu had been close enough to kiss – but Kaiba.
They were playing as the monsters, of course, and if you were going to fuse the monsters, you'd fuse the players. But he'd never expected this. He felt Kaiba's sense of the dragon mount's body, could see through his eyes, but he could also feel an ever-present concern about Mokuba, dulled by seven straight hours of programing. There were twenty-seven defeats at the hand of his own monster aggravating his feelings of inadequacy. There was his resentment of Yugi himself, an affront to his autonomy right now, but otherwise a tangled mat of confusion – rivalry and collaboration, acceptance and rejection. And it was tangled, as always, as everyone else's were, with Atem. Atem and his identity, Atem and stone epitaphs, Atem and grieving priests, Atem and grieving CEOs.
But nowhere in that tangle was a wish that Yugi were Atem.
Dragon and rider lurched to the side as the two of them wrestled for control – or, rather, as Kaiba wrestled for full control of both of them, while Yugi held his ground. The bond between them had none of the finesse of the bond created by the Millennium Puzzle, which had been so seamless that he'd barely noticed it for half a year. Kaiba's soul was glommed on to his like their souls were two blobs of play-dough smashed together by a three year old. But at least the sensation was familiar to Yugi, he recognized what was happening, and that well over half of the terror he was feeling right now was Kaiba's, because Kaiba had no idea what the hell was happening.
"Calm down, calm down. Kaiba, calm down!"
It had apparently just occurred to Kaiba that he could communicate with Yugi in this form, and the thought he communicated was, "What the hell?!"
The monster launched its super attack at them, and they – he? – no, it was definitely they – dodged it in unison. It made perfect, intuitive sense to Yugi that the way to control their new monster was by working in unison, but that was the difference between him and Kaiba. He had the advantage of working this way before, the same way that Kaiba had the advantage of having fought this monster before.
"This only going to work if we work toge–"
"Can it!"
Oh, come on! "Did you feel what we just did? Do you trust that I know what I'm doing as much as I trust you?" Yugi asked impatiently. He did his best to flood Kaiba with his feelings of awe from just a moment ago – a picture of Kaiba as a white dart amongst the boulders, the appreciation of expertise. A rock flew past them, terrifyingly close to knocking them out. Again, they jerked away in unison.
The feeling of gratitude that came back through was involuntary. If Kaiba had been standing still, he'd have turned away from Yugi at that moment to hide whatever expression might have accidentally shown up on his face. But there were no secrets right now, and tentative tendrils of trust returned to Yugi. Yugi grasped them as firmly as he could, and he could feel how deeply they were rooted.
"Let's go," said Kaiba.
There was no sense in giving Kaiba orders. Yugi was the paladin riding the dragon, yet his mount would only follow his directions if it thought it was a good idea. He spotted a good target and aimed for it. Kaiba agreed with the decision and wheeled. Relief cooled Yugi's head. Kaiba groaned loudly from the effort of cooperating, his voice weirdly loud within in their chimera soul.
Yugi raised his sword and Kaiba reeled to breath fire, and they rained destruction onto the boss. Chunks of rock blasted off the golem's back. Thanks to the Silent White Paladin's effect, the attack did a remarkable amount of damage compared to what they'd been doing a moment ago. The power of the combined hit was enough to take out the boss's final hit points, and, for a moment, Yugi and Kaiba shared the clear, unrestrained joy of defeating a boss, until Kaiba remembered that he was being watched, and the emotion was squirreled away. The spider golem caved dramatically, screeching and writhing into a cloud of dust. Yugi would have taken the time to appreciate the animation on this, as well, if he were in a different state of mind.
They landed heavily at the checkpoint in the center of the crater and de-fused. Human-dragon Kaiba rolled to the ground. Yugi bent over double and shuddered, head to foot, at the sensation of being himself again. Kaiba held his tablet up to his face. "Open Notes," – a pause – "Fix Polymerization." His voice shook. He put his tablet back down.
"We won," Yugi suggested. Kaiba stared at him, wild-eyed. Yugi gave him a half smile. It'd been the wrong thing to say. "Let's get out of here." He offered Kaiba a hand. Kaiba didn't even look at the hand before getting up. He wouldn't have ever accepted it. Yugi had just offered it to him, the same way he'd asked Mokuba what was wrong. Formality.
Yugi could hardly look at Kaiba as they exited the program. He didn't need to be Atem. He knew this; all of his friends told him this; Atem himself had told him this. But it was different to have someone's actual soul tell him this. He could almost believe it. Hours later, Yugi would realize that he probably shouldn't have looked, and he would spend half the night juggling the impulse to apologize for his voyeurism with his terror that apologizing would also mean admitting that he'd done it in the first place, with the desire to look again. Harder.
"You need to take a break!" Mokuba scolded Kaiba, when the pods opened, sounding more exasperated than authoritative.
"I will, I will," Kaiba murmured, putting a hand on Mokuba's shoulder. "Just give me a minute to wrap up, ok?"
"Ugh." Mokuba folded his arms and watched Kaiba from his office chair, kicking his feet.
Kaiba turned to plug the physical version of his game pad in to the computer and told the computer to start downloading the information he'd taken in-game. Yugi clutched his own, palms sweaty, and looked around the room, at Kaiba's back, the pods, the screen, anything, for a cue. What could he even say? There was nothing really left for him to do here. He might as well go back to what he'd been doing. Yugi opened his mouth to say as much, when –
"That was..." Kaiba's hands hovered over the keyboard as he chose his words carefully. "That was what it was like with him, wasn't it?"
Him. Atem. Yugi pressed his lips together. Why were they all so afraid to say Atem's name? "Not really. That was really clunky." He hesitated for a moment. A minute ago, as the line between between them had blurred, he could have shared anything at all with Kaiba without even trying. Hell, Kaiba could have found it out without asking. But now they were in the cold, white, soundproof tile of the lab. Mokuba was there. His relationship with his Other Self wasn't something that he could explain to Kaiba. He wasn't even sure Kaiba deserved an explanation, when Yugi still was struggling to explain it to Jounouchi. "You were still you, and I was still me, just now. That's not what it was like."
Kaiba hmm'd with acknowledgement.
Yugi took a breath. "And call Atem by name. It's really important."
Kaiba gave him a look that chilled him.
"Please," Yugi tacked on.
Kaiba sighed, and looked back at the computer. "3tymw." Yugi barely recognized the name. Kaiba looked at him over his shoulder. "3tymw," he repeated. "When you say 'Atemu', it's like hearing someone say your name in a foreign language."
"Oh." Atem had had a much better grasp on what Kaiba's connection to the Millennium Items was than Yugi'd ever had. He'd only just now gotten a glimpse of how deep it ran.
Kaiba put his tablet down on a work bench. "Anyway, plug your pad in, too. I want to see what else you saw on your run just now. I'm adding Polymerization to the bugs list. Given the circumstances, I think it's a job best suited for you and me to work on." Yugi's stomach tightened. He'd have to go through that all again? "I'm not going to make it fun, but no one else should have to deal with that surprise. Tomorrow at seven PM. Is there a problem with that?" The sudden sharpness in his voice reminded Yugi that Kaiba was, technically, his boss.
Yugi shook his head. Kaiba turned to leave, but… "Hey Kaiba?"
"Hmm?"
It was a little out there, to ask it. "Why is there an admin profile with the Dark Magician?"
Kaiba gave him an incredulous look. "The Dark Magician is an incredibly popular card. Two of the three head developers fight over who gets to use it. Why wouldn't there be a Dark Magician profile?" He shook his head at Yugi. "Don't be so vain as to think it has to do with you. Or Atem." He then pursed his lips like the thought he had was difficult to articulate. "You can choose whatever profile you want. I don't care. Yugi is Yugi."
Yugi held Kaiba's gaze for a moment too long, chest expanding. How could Kaiba….
Kaiba broke the moment, caving in to his discomfort. "Tomorrow at seven," he said, too clearly, too loudly, as he headed for the restrooms.
"Thanks, Yugi," said Mokuba, following him.
There was no sense in figuring out how to tell Kaiba he was grateful. He wouldn't let Yugi try. "Right," said Yugi. "Tomorrow."