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"Are you sure this is a good idea?"
The question hung in the air for an uncomfortably long while before Jounouchi could answer it.
"Well, Yugi." He said, trying to look anywhere but his friend's face. "When you say Good Idea, do you mean-"
"He means, have you completely lost your mind?" Honda hissed, the alarm all too present in his voice despite his best attempts to whisper.
"Oh come on, look." Jounouchi motioned to the spare room, and to the tiny dark bundle that lay on the mass of blankets atop the bed. "He's not hurting anyone-"
Honda made to interrupt but Jounouchi did his best to power through.
"He's not hurting anyone right this second and he wasn't when I found him. I really think he might be taking this whole Big-Brother-Gone-MIA thing really hard."
"So what, you just abducted him!?" Honda gripped the blonde's shoulders tight, visibly vibrating with tension.
"I mean, kinda, I guess." Jounouchi pulled himself free, "no, not abducted. I sorta, y'know, rescued him."
"Jounouchi," Yugi hadn't taken his eyes off the sleeping figure in the spare room this entire time, just waiting for something sudden and drastic to happen. "He's not a stray cat. Mokuba's a human being. I think there are a whole system of laws that say you can't just pick him up and put him in-"
"Guys, you weren't there." Jounouchi sighed and slumped into a chair. "You didn't see what he was like."
~
The wreckage of the tower had finally settled, the smoke cleared, the immediate panic in town quietened down. The whole area had been cordoned off after the incident, in case the upper floors of the building decided to give way and slam down onto anyone foolish enough to go climbing through the debris.
The vast flying machine that Seto Kaiba had piloted during that final climactic battle, a technological marvel though it was, had torn through the roof of the building without even pausing. It had taken every scrap of ingenuity the team had in order to escape with their lives.
Police had come. Press had come. The trio of Jounouchi, Honda and Yugi had snuck away.
For the next few days, people had talked and wondered about exactly what had happened at the building. Where had Seto Kaiba gone?
But then things eventually died down, as they often did. It was a slightly alarming fact of life, but one that you got used to around those parts. Weird things happened in Domino City. You either got used to that or you very quickly moved elsewhere.
Jounouchi clambered his way over the rubble and twisted bars that littered the ground. Something had been nagging at the back of his brain ever since he had fled the cataclysm earlier that week. Something he couldn't quite get straight in his mind.
Finally he found it, down a long and fractured corridor behind a rolling steel door that buckled and split under the strain of all the weight coming down atop it. It looked to have once been some sort of canteen, with plastic tables and chairs strewn across the room, many of them crushed and shattered from falling debris. At the far side, an archway of stone and steel had formed from the collapsed material of the server room above, black metal boxes of electricity and data long since dead.
From within, he could hear the clacking of keys and a very tired, young voice speaking quietly. He picked his way through the archway, trying his best not to stumble on the sharp stone.
There, beneath a bowing beam of rusted metal and caked in dust and dried blood, sat young Mokuba Kaiba. The boy had one hand resting on a dented radio, the other holding half a set of headphones to his ear. Tears were in his eyes and frustration clearly drawn across his exhausted features. He was halfway through a croaking plea to empty static when Jounouchi found him.
"-to, Come in Seto! This is Mokuba! Where are you, Seto?"
Jounouchi's foot scuffed against a loose tile, sending it clattering to the floor and in an instant the two of them had their eyes locked on one another, an awkward hush settling into the devastated room.
Gradually, a look of recognition flowed into Mokuba's eyes. Very rapidly it turned into a look of abject rage and he threw out an arm, pointing an accusing finger in Jounouchi's direction.
"You!" he spat, but the rest of the words, if there were any, were swallowed up by the groaning and grumbling of the load-bearing debris. A tremble passed down all the way from the upper floors before reverberating through the ground, and Jounouchi watched in horror as the metal beam over Mokuba's head began to buckle and give way.
Entirely on instinct, Jounouchi moved. He darted forwards, over the rubble and looped his leg past the sitting boy. Without thinking he spread his arms and slammed his palms to the walls of the arch, bracing the beam with his shoulders.
"Run for it, kid!" He shouted, wincing as the weight began to come down on top of him. Mokuba, for his part, had already started to pick his way out of the little nook he had formed for himself and was scrambling in a panic for the wider reaches of the room.
With his back to the exit, Jounouchi could only hope that the boy had managed to escape. From the sounds of things, he'd managed to get clear.
Another wave of pressure came down from above and Jounouchi felt his knees giving way. His cheek scraped against a rough and jutting piece of metal and he came to a realisation. This had not been, he admitted to himself, one of his best ideas.
His lungs felt ready to burst under the exertion and every muscle across his back and arms felt as though they had been twisted by some sort of industrial machine. His legs trembled and he knew that any moment now, they'd give way entirely and he'd be crushed beneath who knew how many layers of the Kaiba tower.
As his vision began to get murky, fog filling his brain as the pressure reached critical, he knew this was it. He gently let go of the walls, letting his arms drop to his sides. Just as unconsciousness began to take him, a pair of small but powerful hands gripped a hold of his jacket and he was being tugged backwards, his feet sliding over dust and scraps.
It felt as though time stopped, the rush of blood in Jounouchi's ears drowning out everything. And then came the scream of the roof collapsing. Everything from the archway back was engulfed in a torrent of black and grey, disappearing from view entirely within half a heartbeat.
Jounouchi tumbled backwards, landing heavily on the tiled floor. Pain flared up through his back from the impact, but he was far too exhausted to care. Dust blossomed in the air in front of his aching eyes, and he slowly turned his head to the left, looking at Mokuba looking equally shattered while slumped up against an upturned table.
His throat dry, it felt like far too much effort to say something. He opted instead for gently raising his forearm and giving the boy a thumbs up. All Mokuba could do was nod back, weakly. It would be a long while before either of them would be able to get together the strength to stand back up.
~
"-And, after that," Jounouchi surmised, "there was no way I could just leave him behind. Y'know?" He had sat down at his kitchen table during the course of the story, Honda sitting across from him and Yugi lingering back. They hadn't said a word during his tale, though it looked like more than a few times they looked as though they were going to interject.
A warm and firm hand pressed down on his shoulder and he looked up to see Yugi smiling down at him.
"No," the young man agreed. "There was no way you could've done that. You did the right thing."
"A stupid thing." Honda added.
"Several stupid things," Yugi nodded, eyes widening at the possibility of all the things that could have gone wrong. "But the right stupid things."
"Well, if that isn't the Katsuya Jounouchi brand, I don't know what is." Jounouchi grinned and slapped his hand against his chest. "And I really feel like we connected, y'know? Like we could trust each other. The kid's clearly not all bad. And who knows, maybe he'll grow to be one of the gang in time." He motioned behind himself to the room.
"He's gone." Honda said flatly.
"He's gone," Jounouchi echoed before spluttering out a noise of alarm. "He's gone!?"
Honda raised an eyebrow, looking past the two of them into the room beyond. They turned their heads and looked at the open window, at the night air beyond.
"We've gotta go find him!" Jounouchi bellowed, already searching for his coat. "There's no telling what could happen out there in the middle of this city in the middle of the night!"
Honda side-eyed his friend. "Is this some sort of latent Papa-Bear instinct kicking in or something?"
"What? No. Not to him," Jounouchi hopped on one foot, trying to get his remaining shoe on. "That kid could cause some real havoc if we don't keep an eye on him."
"Wait, whatever happened to the trust thing you were talking about just now?" Yugi shouted after him as Jounouchi practically kicked his own door down and began hurling himself into the outside world.
"If someone tries to mess with him, what's Mokuba gonna do?" Jounouchi called back before he disappeared into the night.
Yugi and Honda looked between one another and realisation dawned. Honda's face turned to a grimace.
"He'll-"
"Yeah," Yugi cut him off. "We'd better get after them."