Chapter Text
Shades of grey pooled in the tired corners of Katsuya’s eyes, filling the spaces between the faint spirals of misted dust agitated by his overly-eager slamming of the shutters. He gave the aluminium rolls a kick in farewell, hearing the rusted hinges buckle and sway piteously upon impact. In the outskirts of Domino where aged brutalist buildings sit silently in the shadows of the steel and mirrors that dominate the heart of the city, crime was slow and business was slower. Even for the most opportune criminals, the prospect of extracting Schrödinger’s loot from a locked store with daily footfall that rocks a naught point something seemed too much effort to bear.
If Katsuya had any other options, he would have left this god forsaken city years ago.
The dull rhythm of the floor’s yellowed clock, stubbornly clinging in precarious balance to the bent nail hammered in before the turn of the century, echoed across the silent corridor, mocking Katsuya’s fading footsteps as he trundled out of his occupational prison.
Katsuya inhaled the December air deeply, feeling it expand into the tension of his extremities. He breathed – carefully pulling it close into his weary chest, folding it into tessellations of wordless regrets before willing it past his throat and into the coils of his neck; twisting, tightening his tongue until the last of its crispness dissipated into the dryness of his mouth.
He felt his fingers itch in response, uninvited twitches as they distractedly fumbled towards the familiar side pocket of his backpack, reaching for the zipper that always hitched unless it was yanked at an awkward angle—
“You are late.”
The tinted window of a near silent car glided down, and Katsuya felt his breath stutter even before he met the unwavering stare of cold ice reflected within. It didn’t matter if it was one year or ten years – Katsuya never could remain composed in his presence.
Compulsion now forgotten, he let his backpack slip from his shoulders and entered the black coupe.
He reclined into the firm leather seat, feeling the knots from the day’s cramped inactivity easing as the car hummed to motion again. Framed within a borrowed comfort and warmth, Katsuya watched as the side of Domino that gaily-painted travel brochures and saccharine-voiced real estate agents desperately tried to hide blurred into a waking memory.
“How many?”
Katsuya pulled himself up at the accusation.
“The hell? None!” He blurted out indignantly.
Unlike his passenger, Seto remained disimpassioned, resting the curve of his wrist easily against the arc of his steering wheel as he coaxed the engine to a slight rev. The only sign of acknowledgment of the other man’s response a single pointed stare at the blond’s restless hands.
Katsuya traced Seto’s gaze, not realising he had been transcribing the haphazard melody of his anxiety against the polished wood of the vehicle’s interior.
If Katsuya were a decade, or even a few years younger, he would have wielded his disgruntlement with the impulse of youthful (and perhaps, naive) vigour, untempered by the confidence of fearless inexperience. It was a dance he was all too familiar with – the unkind flashing of teeth, leaving physical marks of territory, exchanging enduring imprints of words unintended; clashes to ashes, trust to dust. It would be a lie if Katsuya didn’t admit he missed the adrenaline of those exchanges.
Instead, he sheathed his displeasure, musing mirthlessly at how easily his temper folded in compliance; yet simultaneously relieved at how the edges of shadows that unfurled within his gut still simmered with unhappiness.
“If I stole a drag, ya think I coulda hidden the smell so quickly?” Katsuya reasoned, surprised at how steady his voice sounded.
Seto kept his vision on the road, a partially lifted index finger lingering amidst the stillness. He exhaled, bisecting the silence as he returned his posture to rest, focussing instead on signalling his intention to pull into the expressway.
If Seto were a decade, or even a few years younger, perhaps the relief that gently tugged at the crinkles of the blond’s amber eyes would have sufficed in coaxing his own voluntary release of frustration. Or on days when his blood boiled of molten glaciers, he might have torn the momentary peace asunder – inundating the unprepared with logic traps, weaponising emotional fallacies for isolation, repeating, until the stresses calved open the unstable narrative. It was only then, between the fractures where the naked truth was revealed, could he reform that which was corrupted.
Instead, he melted into his indifference, wilfully disregarding the unabashed conical streak of red against white that spilled into the open from his passenger’s bag. The sediments of their history ebbed with the cycle of seasons, frictions of their encounters abrading the present into a new equilibrium – accidental aloofness into assertive attentiveness into apparent apathy.
Figuring that Seto decided to drop the matter, Katsuya subconsciously toed his bag further into the darkness of the footwell and cheekily took an exaggerated whiff of his sleeve.
“You still smell like you desperately need a shower,” Seto retorted almost immediately.
“Ya still smell like an asshole.”
It always started from the little things. Ones you would never think to notice until they had long become an immutable part of your reality: The way the quirk of one’s lips always seemed to fall in parallel to the turn of one’s gaze; the way fingers always seemed to slip past the warmth of the other’s regardless of distance; the way conversations always seemed to lapse into discordant frequencies no matter the subject; the way the tug of longing always seemed to find itself magnetised in opposition.
The way the car always seemed to find its way to Seto’s city centre penthouse instead of the Kaiba family home.
“Go rinse off.”
Katsuya grunted in response, having already made the journey halfway down the hall to the guest bathroom.
In the liminality of space where he was both the interim owner and the transient guest, Katsuya finally let slip a breath he hadn’t noticed he was holding. Across him was a burgundy towel; he was sure it was the same one that greeted him during the early defiant ignition of his youthful ambition, and again when he found himself relegated here after the turbulent fragmentation of his adulthood.
What a fool he was to think there was ever a moment when that burgundy evoked the promise of a reciprocal devotion and shared comfort.
If he had retained any of the brazen carelessness of his adolescence; if he hadn’t spent the better part of the decade eroding the shame brought about by the callousness of his heritage; if he had fought harder, faster, smarter, better against the unyielding societal structures adamant on shackling him to inevitable defeat— Perhaps he would have mustered enough audacity (or was it self-confidence or a dime of a damn he was really lacking in?) to leave.
But now, Katsuya was a well-rehearsed thespian ready for his reprisal; the curtains were drawn, the stage lights were bright, the clockworks were well-oiled, and the audience was waiting with bated anticipation – it was time for his opening act. Tonight, like the countless nights before etched into the expanse of his body’s memory, he was one-half of the curated performance of a blithe ménage à deux reconstituted from the fumes of desolation on Aronofsky’s cutting room floor.
Before he exited the bathroom, Katsuya couldn’t help but wonder how the burgundy would be a resplendent mimicry of the cavernous absence carved from behind his ribs, the same one that always seemed to ache for someone long forgotten.
When Katsuya made his way to the master bedroom, towel abandoned and damp hair scattering pearls of water across the cool hardwood floor as he tousled it in distracted contemplation, he found Seto seated at his work desk, imperiousness flagrant even in his primality. The latter’s attention looked to be trained on what definitely must have been an important work document on his tablet, posture stoic save for the absent swirling of a single partially enjoyed glass of whisky in his other hand. Noticing Seto’s lack of acknowledgment of his arrival, Katsuya chose to perch on the far end of the bed, a newfound interest in rotating between splaying his fingers and contracting them against the smooth silk of the sheets.
There he sat, curling petals from the fabric beneath him into loose blossoms – ask me to stay, tell me to go – and thumbing them undone against the soft occasional clinks of ice against crystal behind him. Was this their new equilibrium? Where the potential of his learned passivity was anchored against pressure of Seto’s kinetic authority; his minutes, hours, days, oscillating in shared gravity, moored within the nebulae of temptations filled with what was and should have been – their very own illusion of infinities.
Katsuya didn’t know how much of the night had already passed him by when he finally slipped into an empty slumber.
Tilting the glass at a much more obtuse angle than comfortable, Seto paused when he finally noticed the almost gleeful emptiness reflected back at him. Reaching with practised ease, he frowned when his grip on the bottle accelerated with unexpected buoyancy. Deciding the accompaniment of his company’s financial report draft (which he had already revisited umpteenth times before) was much too undeserving of yet another bottle of aged Yamazaki, he rose from his desk, attention finally redirected at his bed.
Only after settling down on his side of the mattress did Seto become aware of the light snoring that punctuated the silence. He turned around, eyes caressing the contour of Katsuya’s form, tracing angles more foreign than familiar across his length: the pinch of his neck that folded in surrender into the uncomfortable hinge of his collar; the desperate contraction of his shoulders that buried their roots in the unintended vulnerability of his wrists; the unprotected cage of his centre thrumming past the quivering staccato of his spine; the palpable strain in the pull of his legs in opposition to the anxious curl of his toes.
He resisted the urge to reach out, to collect the faded gold in his hands. Was it not the tensity of their nucleus, fused from promises of light, that was meant to deliver them amongst the brilliance of the heavens? The irreverence of their collisions charted their orbits, ionising fragments of the irrelevant until they pulsed, entwined in each other’s velocities. A cosmic waltz of peaceful stasis, revolving around galaxies of possibilities; plucking from the illumination of tomorrow to bring about the ignition of today.
The reverie was only temporary, for the accretion of misery soon became their perpetual company.
Maybe it was better this way; halves decoupled and free, falling past the event horizon— In a place where everything was still, precipitated by their discordant gravities, bound into the perennial echo of an absent future. Here, the silhouettes of scripted memories stuttered into replays, wondering when their wavelengths would finally beat in cadence behind the shadows of the stars.
Sat within this hierarchy of collapse, Seto willed the turbulence to seep its decay between his bones. He waited, relief swelling when he felt it choke the ceaseless howling of his hollows to an opaque silence; he grabbed at its ink, threading the creases of his tenderness into a forced eclipse, suffocating his halo until all he inhaled was the predictable grey of detached indifference.
When you had long relinquished everything, staring into the abyss as you straddled the precipice of no return, a choice – made once, twice, or into perpetuity – was but a ritual of inconsequentiality.
Katsuya awoke to the roughness of clammy knuckles dragging past his cheek, limbs heavy as he struggled to move beneath the weight of a desperate warmth. His bleary eyes barely registering his consciousness; impatient chestnut brown, unyielding alabaster skin, vivid cobalt with an intensity that pierced past even the most resolute of his resolves—
They writhed in abject synchronicity; unkind mouths marking territories red, inhaling unvoiced pleas as scarlets bloomed from baleful fingers, grinding unfitting notches into a forgotten embrace, searching, until their skins wilted purple.
The heavy ephemeral scent of sweet fermentation pulled Katsuya into temporary lucidity. Gasping, heated from the adrenaline and apprehension dilating in his veins, he shoved the other man from his space.
“What the fuck, Seto! How much did you—“
Seto blinked at the sudden interruption, face carefully unchanging as he enunciated his reply, “Not enough.”
Katsuya searched for the liquid culprit, condensing his frustration into the crush of his fist as he caught the outlines of emptied bottles lying on Seto’s desk.
“Casual drinkin’ my ass! How’s drinkin’ a litre of whisk—“
“Seven hundred each.”
Katsuya could barely believe his ears.
“Seven hundred millilitres per bottle. Not a full litre.”
“Ya know that’s not the point! Ya keep downin’ that much shit in what, an hour? Two hours?”
The belligerent pounding of Katsuya’s voice reverberated into a full-fledged headache inside Seto’s skull.
“What if it killed ya?!”
“So?”
The abrupt iciness of Seto’s tone froze the remaining words in Katsuya’s throat.
“Even if it did, that is none of your business, Jounouchi.”
Katsuya awaited his eruption of anger against the receding back of the other man, an unusual fatigue prematurely stymieing the coalescence of his emotions before they effused from the rawness of his mouth. He watched, somewhat helplessly, yet mired in a strange serenity, as Seto liberally poured himself a fresh glass of wine.
Holding each other in the distance of their eyes, Seto sipped deliberately from his glass, his lips only pulling away once they found their home in the stain of burgundy.
“Ya’re right,” Katsuya agreed, “It really ain’t any of my business.”
The blond found the other man’s eyes again; listless amber refracted in acerbic blue – a morose meeting of mutual resignation after the imminent acknowledgement of their inexorable immiscibility.
“Ya were never mine ta begin with.”
Katsuya heaved himself off the bed, not bothering to dignify the other any further as he took his departure. The fraying ridges of his spine finally fell unstitched when he heard the door click shut, exhaling the epilogue to a chapter of his life he had forcefully resuscitated too many times before.
Behind the closed door, Seto stood in unerring rigidity, belied by the nearly imperceptible tension in his jaw.
“And you were never mine to keep either.”