Chapter Text
On Saturday morning, once the sleep had been shaken from him, Mokuba approached his brother’s study and announced that he was going to the arcade with Yugi and his friends. Though he said it definite intent, he still hung in the office doorway and stared at his brother, hunched over his desk.
“Call when you arrive,” Kaiba said, not looking up. It was an automated response, but one Mokuba wanted to hear to know that he was given permission he hadn’t asked for.
He ran into the room, gave Kaiba a quick hug, and then ran back out. The thundering down the stairs, and subsequent door slamming, told Kaiba that Mokuba had left.
The call was made to Kaiba as soon as the car pulled up to the curb, and Mokuba sent the driver away as he bolted into the candy-coloured building, soft pop music playing over the radio. It was clustered with plenty of different machines, UFO Catchers hanging by the door ready to take the last yen. Mokuba bolted past them, to a row of pinball machines, Jounouchi heavily concentrated while playing one, with Honda hanging off the side.
“‘Bout time!” Honda said, and slapped Jounouchi’s arm to show him Mokuba. The blond slapped back, and playfully shoved Honda when the ball fell past the flippers.
“Where’s Yugi?” Mokuba asked. He was already feeding bills into a machine, 100 yen coins clattering into the tray. Honda nodded further back, to where Yugi was at a table across from Anzu, both of them staring at a middle screen, mashing buttons. Both were chuckling, with Anzu leaning back after a second, sighing, and glancing up to Mokuba. Yugi turned around and smiled, exclaiming: “Hey! You made it!”
Mokuba beamed, and he looked back at Jounouchi and Honda, having changed places at the pinball machine. “Can I play with you?” Mokuba asked Yugi, after overlooking the old school game in the console.
“Sure,” Yugi said. Anzu was already getting out of her seat, and Mokuba slipped in, feeding the coins into his side.
It went like that for a good hour or more, constantly shifting around, taking Jounouchi on at a racing game, Honda at a shooter. All the while being closed lipped about all the games he and Kaiba had been working on in KaibaLand’s arcade. Even when he almost slipped and Jounouchi followed him around, demanding for Mokuba to tell them, with Yugi trying to calm the insistent blond.
Honda, Jounouchi, and Anzu hung over the chairs of a brawling game as Yugi and Mokuba played, being the peanut gallery, when Honda batted Jounouchi’s arm. The blond looked over and up, seeing an old and familiar group of thugs enter the arcade. Jounouchi shifted his body to cover as much of both chairs as he could, and he nodded at Anzu, eyes cast to the doors. She backed away.
“Well, well, well. Really starting a babysitting service, eh Jou?” A larger man asked.
Jounouchi sneered. “Piss off, Hirutani.”
A large hand sat on the edge of Mokuba’s chair. “Lookit this one, he’s even tinier.”
Mokuba didn’t even look at the gang that was surrounding them, instead focusing on mashing buttons for a combo against Yugi. “Yeah, and don’t go messin’ with him, either, or I kick your ass,” Jounouchi warned, and he saw that Anzu had strolled out the door.
“Hey, boss, ain’t that the Kaiba brat?” One of the goons asked, snickering and reaching for Mokuba’s head to pat it. Jounouchi swatted the hand away. “Wonder how much he’s got on him.”
Hirutani and his goons moved in closer, with Honda and Jounouchi encapsulating the chairs, instinctively making themselves as wide as the two chairs. Mokuba’s fist hit the console in frustration as he was KO’d, and turned to Yugi asking: “Again?”
Yugi stared at Mokuba, then to the circle of people around them. Unease was in his stomach, but Mokuba seemed calm and collected, ignoring those around him. “Uh, sure, yeah...”
Mokuba dug in his pockets to grab more coins, but stopped when he found none. With little effort, he propelled out from the seat and ducked under a leering Hirutani to head back towards the change machine. His arm was grabbed, though the goon was quickly shoved away by Honda.
“Anyone else need change?” Mokuba asked.
“Uh...Mokuba-kun?” Yugi asked, his eyes flicking around the group surrounding them. The others were shaking their heads as Mokuba eyed them. “No, no we’re okay.”
The boy smiled and walked over to the machine, squeezing by the goons. Just beyond the sound of coins clinking into the tray, Mokuba could hear the clatter of footsteps as Jounouchi grabbed one of the goons by the collar and shoved him into another, Honda backing him up. In the middle of it, the pair noticed a few coins whizzing by their ears, hitting the goons in the face and chest.
One hit Hirutani square in the forehead.
“You looked like you needed some sense,” Mokuba chuckled, another coin in his hand and arched back. One of the goons had knelt down to pick the coins up from off the floor.
Jounouchi looked back at Mokuba, and for a flash of a second, saw Kaiba’s self-assured expression on the boy’s face. That, and something a little maniacal.
The door jangled open as Hirutani began to rush towards Mokuba, stopped by a ‘hey boss!’. Anzu stood beside a police officer, stepping through the arcade and eyeing everyone involved. Jounouchi and Honda backed up closer to Mokuba, out of the fray. The gang corralled together and shouldered out of the arcade, sneering both at Mokuba and the officer in the meanwhile.
The few stray coins that had thrown were being picked up by Mokuba, placed back in the palm of his hand. “You okay, Mokuba-kun?” Yugi asked.
“Huh? Yeah, why?” Mokuba asked, and slipped back into the chair, feeding coins into the slot. “Ready?”
From behind, Jounouchi and Honda exchanges knowing looks of: ‘you see this kid?’ and ‘he’s got some guts’. At least they knew he could hold his own, and be a little mischievous in the meanwhile; he was worth a laugh after the crisis had averted.
Deep down, as Jounouchi lingered over the kid, he though about how there was more to it. Kaiba had, while unsaid, trusted them enough to leave Mokuba with them for extended periods of time. And while the extent of that trust had been debated between Jounouchi and Honda on more than one occasion (“Can we even call it trust? He may be sending Mokuba as a spy,” Honda had once suggested), the last thing Jounouchi wanted to do was betray it, no matter how little he and Kaiba properly got along. Because Mokuba and Kaiba weren’t the same person, plain and simple, and it was nice to see him smiling and having fun—being a kid.
While they played for the next hour or so, Jounouchi would occasionally pace around, looking up and down the wide streets for any signs of the thugs, though they were clear. They stayed and played until Mokuba announced: “I’m hungry, anyone else?” And pointed across the street to fast food joint, to which they all agreed to stop for the day and grab lunch.
Mokuba walked ahead of them, as if trying to keep ahead of their pace, almost running to cross the street. A motorcycle roared through a light.
One blink, Jounouchi saw Mokuba at the curb. The next, he was gone.
Fearing the worst, Jounouchi expected a small splatter on the pavement, with his relief temporarily calmed when he couldn’t find a body. Instead, a different panic set in. Mokuba had been snatched up and was under the arm of a familiar blur, flailing about and screaming English obscenities that would make Jounouchi’s father blush. Two more motorcycles roared by.
“That stupid prick!” Jounouchi roared as he grabbed ahold of Honda’s arm, pulling him the brunet’s motorcycle and pushing him onto it while he jumped on the back. “Follow ‘em!” He commanded, and glanced back at a shocked Yugi and Anzu, at a loss of what to do and asking one another while Anzu waved her hands and was nearly crying.
The motorcycle whipped out of the spot, and Jounouchi spared a glance back at Anzu, tugging her phone out of her bag, too late, because Yugi already had one to his ear. “Gun it, man!” Jounouchi shouted, his arms cinching tight around Honda’s waist, knowing there really wasn’t much space for them to both be on the bike. “We can’t lose ‘em!”
“Jou, if I get pulled over doin’ this...!”
“You tell that to Kaiba when he asks why we didn’t do every fuckin’ thing we could for his baby brother!” Jounouchi pinched Honda’s side as he yelled. “Go! They turned right!”
As they quickly bared right, Jounouchi found himself simmering, hoping that they would be able to take care of this without getting Kaiba involved.
—
Two different phones went off simultaneously. Kaiba’s cell phone chirped to the left, and the office phone rang to right. Hairs on the back of Kaiba’s neck prickled up, looking at Yugi’s number flashing across his cell phone. The office phone was answered on speaker as he put the cell to his ear.
Before anyone spoke, he was already out of the chair. “Kaiba Seto,” he answered, loud enough that both phones would pick it up.
“Kaiba-kun, something’s happened!” Yugi said.
“....ya drop better not drop me...!” Came from the office phone.
Mokuba’s panicked voice prickled in his ears, strained and angry. He could barely hear his brother over the sound of a loud engine. There was a small shriek from him, growing faint, before the noise of the traffic whizzing by. He could hear Mokuba cussing away in the faintest distance.
“Speak up, Mutou,” Kaiba ordered, and pulled the office phone in close to hear the sounds. His fingers were already whizzing over the laptop keyboard, flashing window after window until he was able to live track the signal coming from Mokuba’s cell phone.
“We were crossing the street, getting food, someone on a motorcycle grabbed Mokuba-kun! We don’t know where they’re going. Jou and Honda are following them.”
“Did they appear armed?” Kaiba asked, doing his best to remain calm. They were moving fast, Kaiba concluded. He set the cell phone down, also putting it on speaker, and linked it to his laptop to grab the fast moving signal, going straight through the main causeway of Domino.
“I’m not sure Kaiba-kun,” Yugi said. “We barely saw them. We...”
“Of course you didn’t,” Kaiba sneered. He slammed the laptop closed when the data finished the transfer. It was in time to hear Mokuba’s voice drop off and the call disconnect. “Tell the mutt to keep his distance.” Kaiba didn’t wait for Yugi to respond, ending the call and snatching his car keys off the desk as he stormed out.
Judging by the path that Mokuba’s phone was taking, they were headed straight for Domino Pier.
Kaiba dialled Isono’s number, saying: “Meet me at the pier, we have a situation.”
—
Somewhere along the way, the following pair had been cut off, left a mile or two behind. Jounouchi angrily growled in Honda’s ear as they tried to roughly manuever down a congested street that was dropping towards the coastline. Pristine water of the bay began to reveal itself as the pair zoomed through a red light, narrowly missing a car from their left side, correcting themselves and turning down a narrow street.
The gang had taken quick and jagged turns, aware they were being followed, and at one point, the three bikes had split up to follow different paths. Jounouchi was racking his brain for where they might be going, instructing Honda to head for the pier. It was the closest place he could imagine them going.
While the pair searched for the quickest route, Mokuba had already been thrown from the stopped motorcycle, kicking and screaming in steel-cord arms while the other goons played with a rig across a narrow strip of water.
They were at what looked like an old boat dock falling into disuse, the wood splinted, the concrete chipped, and the metal eaten away with algae. They were surrounded by crates of some kind, stacked like a miniature sky-line. This spot had been used as some kind of hangout, he gathered, by the food wrappers and soda cans littered around.
Mokuba threw elbows, knees, and heels into the meat of the man who held him. Hirutani, he recalled Jounouchi saying. It didn’t seem to faze him much, even as Mokuba tried his best to wriggle and hit the sensitive parts. He was being walked to small catwalk, precariously balanced in the center of the strip of water, stopping any boats from docking there. It was just as dilapidated, if not worse, than the rest of the place.
“You’re gonna regret this, ya know!” Mokuba shouted. He was set to the ground, forearms held tight as a length of rope was tied around them.
“Nah, kid, I’m gonna enjoy this,” Hirutani said, and pushed Mokuba onto the thin catwalk. It shuddered and squeaked under his small weight. His ankles were grabbed, another length of rope fashioned to them while he viciously kicked, even to the point of flicking one of his shoes off and trying to aim for the thug’s head. As he was finished being bound, one of the goons came around, pulling tight to heavy chain, a hook at the end of it. It was snagged into the folds of rope and cranked, pulling Mokuba’s arms over his head and dragging his body out to the middle of the catwalk.
The metal groaned beneath his body, now forced into a standing posture while his knees wobbled about. Somewhere, the catwalk was detached and the water bobbed it around. When Mokuba tried to push himself in one direction, he was drawn taut in another. Looking over, he saw that his weight was being counterbalanced by an old anchor attached to the chain, pulling him tight.