Chapter Text
Jounouchi isn’t quite sure when it happened. He hadn’t been a big reader prior, and it didn’t make any sense to have started now, but yet for the second month in a row he found himself in the Domino library. It had become a dirty little secret, sneaking away from his friends long enough to pick up something new to read. His English had been improving rapidly as he drank in the expansive vocabulary offered by the old science fiction novels, enjoying stories of aliens and androids, robots and spaceships. Utopias and grand adventures through time and space alike, even a few fantasy novels.
But to say he was completely unaware of how it happened was another matter entirely.
Nestled in the bottom of his bag is a single, stolen book. The cover had enthralled him, a man covered in lovely expressive tattoos, and the title, though confusing, had intrigued him. Illustrated had been the word most difficult to figure out, realizing the artful tattoos were intended as just that: Illustrations of events, of stories.
Unfortunately, he had picked up the book off another student’s desk. Off Kaiba’s desk. When Kaiba had returned, Jou panicked and hid the book in his own desk until Kaiba left, and then slipped it into his backpack. Intending to arrive early the next day and hide it in the jerk’s desk, no harm, no foul. Except it never happened. Jounouchi read the book that evening, sitting on the fire escape outside his window and using the streetlamp for light, and finished it in one sitting, making a list of words to look up in the morning.
Two months later, and he still could not convince himself to give up Kaiba’s book.