Chapter Text
Seto couldn't believe he was here. Every morning, in the seconds before his conscious mind sharpened to awareness, he somehow managed to forget, expecting to wake up in his four-poster, canopy bed with a fine cotton duvet against his skin–not hard cement and cold extremities, not waking up and having the real nightmare begin.
This all started with her. The day he got an unexpected visitor in his office. How she got through security and up to the top floor of Kaiba Corp headquarters he didn't know, but there she stood: middle aged–or near to it, messy hair and clothes that looked like they came out of the bargain bin at some discount department store.
“How did you get in here?” he asked, more for the purpose of chewing out his security than anything else.
The intruder said nothing, but her steely gaze sent a chill down Seto's spine.
“Who are you, and how did you get in?” he repeated in a more forceful tone. He wouldn't repeat himself again.
“The same way you got your hands on my brother’s Blue Eyes.”
Well, that certainly narrowed down her identity.
“Determination?” he suggested flippantly.
“Underhanded tactics.”
She wasn't wrong. Over a year ago Seto had been willing to cheat, steal, and lie to get his hands on all four Blue Eyes White Dragons–and he hadn't been too particular about the means needed to obtain his end. That was all ancient history now.
“Tell me, Kaiba, do you believe in magic?”
He didn't follow her non sequitur and didn't care to try. “You can see yourself out, or I can call security.”
“Answer the question.”
“Don't be absurd.”
“Absurd is driving a man to suicide for a trading card. Absurd is the fact that you still think your actions were justified because you got what you wanted.”
Suicide. So this was Leo Alden’s sister. Frankly, Seto didn't see a resemblance. Leo was an American duelist who prided himself on his cunning and ferocious game play. They called him the grinning lion, for his maniacal smile when he went in for the final kill. When Leo refused Seto’s more than generous offer to buy his Blue Eyes, he forced Seto to take more extreme measures. Some money exchanged hands, a deal was struck, and Leo found himself unemployed and facing bankruptcy.
Seto never even met the man, and he took measures to ensure his part in Leo’s fall from society stayed hidden, but he couldn't help gloating in their final email correspondence.
This could've been so much easier. You should've taken my offer. I warned you not to cross me. You call yourself a lion, but all you are is a pathetic, little house cat, fooled by the size of your own shadow. We'll see how ferocious you are without your prized beast.
SK
Seto wouldn't have bothered with the email these days, but back when he was first getting a taste for power it occasionally manifested in petty impulses.
Seto didn't think Leo had any family. Whoever this sister was, she must've uncovered some piece of evidence implicating Seto or she wouldn't be confronting him about it now.
“Do you even feel remorse?” she asked, wrenching him out of his reverie. Her voice held no malice or anger, but it still set Seto’s teeth on edge.
“Unlike you, I haven't broken any laws.” He motioned toward the door to emphasize her trespassing, and to indicate where she could see herself out.
Seto hadn't exactly broken any laws, at least not directly–not to acquire that particular card.
“No laws, perhaps.” Her eyes narrowed in accusation. “Just bodies.”
“He took his own life.”
“After you took everything from him.”
“That's what happens when you play in the big leagues. It's a jungle out there. I’d expect the grinning lion to know that.”
“You're a selfish, spoiled child, and it will be your undoing. Having said that…” She eyed him critically, as if determining his guilt. “You are a child, if only just.”
Seto’s jaw clenched at the condescending comment. He'd be turning eighteen in less than a week, and frankly, it couldn't come soon enough. He hadn't been a child since the day his mom died–the day he learned no one would ever coddle him again. Life officially lost its safety net when he lost his father four years later. That day he realized you only ate what you killed, and the world didn't give handouts.
Rather than dignify her patronizing tone with a response, Seto pushed the silent alarm on the underside of his desk. He should've done it the moment he set eyes on her, but curiosity got the better of him. He'd come to regret that decision. Everyone knew what curiosity did to the cat.
Her eyes seemed to catch the subtle movement of his hand under the desk, and she smiled in mock pity. “You had all the wrong influences and learned all the wrong lessons. Perhaps this will teach you to respect pathetic, little house cats.”
Seto was about to remark on her having as much regard for private emails as private property, when her face split into a manic grin.
Now he saw the resemblance.
Seto's vision blurred as a bright, blinding light filled the room. A sudden head rush struck and a bout of dizziness overtook his remaining senses.
When he came to, moments later, he found himself lying on the floor, still in his office–or what looked to be his office in a distorted, funhouse mirror. The walls stretched up and up, far too high. The windows did the same. The furniture towered absurdly above him. Colors looked strange, tinted with a blurry blue-violet haze. And there she stood, Leo’s sister, a giant beside Seto's oversized desk. He expected to find the desk empty, but slumped in the high backed, leather chair sat his own unconscious body.
Seto tried to move forward, only to stumble in a tangle of limbs–limbs that were very wrong. He looked down to see dark fur and paws where hands should've been.
The woman reached down to grab him. He squirmed away, kicking out legs that weren't his, and managed to crawl under the desk in time to avoid her.
An amused smile tugged at her lips. “Oh, don't look so horrified. If you can learn to cherish life, your heart will find its way back to your body. In the meantime, maybe you can put that killer instinct you're so proud of to practical use. Just be careful.” Her grin widened. “ It's a jungle out there.”
A moment later security finally arrived to take her away with a brusk, “Ma’am, you can't be in here.” Their bored expressions made it clear they barely regarded her as a threat.
One guard took her by the elbow, and she stood tall, smiling smugly, like royalty being escorted out by her entourage.
“Whose cat is that?” murmured one of the other guards.
Seto actually looked around, before he realized the man meant him.
“I'm so sorry, Mr. Kaiba. We’ll get it out of your hair,” said Isono, who had trailed in behind security. “Mr. Kaiba?”
Isono took a moment to study the unconscious body sagging limply in his chair, but Seto couldn't make out his expression from his angle from underneath the desk. “I think…we need a medical team,” Isono said, voice colored with quite shock and dread.
“What?”
“Get a medical team now!” he repeated more forcefully.
The matter of what was to be done with the old woman and the animal was quickly ignored for the much more pressing matter of the unresponsive CEO. All the people who actually mattered were seeing that a medical team be brought to the chief executive office, leaving secondary staff to deal with the cat.
Good fucking Lord, he was a cat! Was this what lucid dreaming felt like?
Not wanting to be chased around the office like a piglet at a hoedown, Seto tried to slip into the hallway undetected–unsuccessfully it would seem, based on the security guard who had taken it upon himself to try to herd him into a corner.
“What do you think?” said the man to his partner. “Should we call city officials to take care of him?”
Take care of him could've meant dumping him in an overcrowded shelter or, more than likely, carting him off to be euthanized. Seto tried to communicate how much he would not tolerate that idea, but instead of words he vocalized a persistent yowl, occasionally punctuated by hissing and spitting as the men tried to approach him. Finally, a giant, grubby hand scruffed him by the back of the neck and hauled him to the elevator. Seto tried his best to arch up out of his hold, only to be unceremoniously dumped on the floor.
When the hum of the elevator stopped and the doors opened to the ground floor Seto dashed full speed through the lobby, ducking between legs as he sprinted through the double glass doors of the building and out to fresh air and freedom.
After a moment to catch his breath Seto's heartbeat finally settled, and he swore that when he got his body back he planned to see that man fired. Though he kept trying to convince himself he wouldn't need to. This was obviously a horrible nightmare. Soon he'd wake up in his office and find himself passed out at his desk again. Perhaps his thoughts had strayed to Leo Alden in the moments before sleep and manifested this bizarre, guilt dream.
Once outside, roaming the streets turned out to be a far more precarious venture than Seto ever imagined. He nearly got trampled three times in as many minutes trying to get his bearings. When a child blithely trampled his tail Seto learned to keep a safe distance from the main walkways.
At first he planned to make his way back to the manor, back to Mokuba, but he quickly abandoned the notion. The distance between the manor and the office had to be well over fifty kilometers. It would probably take him weeks to get there–if not months, and that assumed he knew the way. From a street view he couldn't make heads or… tails of Domino.
Everything looked so different from twenty centimeters from the ground. Colors were strangely muted. Red seemed non-existent. It didn't help that he could barely see more than six meters ahead, which made identifying the landmarks he knew by heart impossible.
He had a wider field of vision as a cat, which should've helped him see better, like going from full screen to widescreen, but what was the point when everything in the distance blurred together? Humans tracked direction based on sight, but he quickly learned, in this body, he was better off navigating by smell.
And oh the smells! The smell of smoke billowing out of the yakitori restaurant down main street, the fresh scent of the tatami floor coming from the the martial arts studio across the way, and the fetid smell of sewage in the backstreet districts–the peach cleanser used in the boutiques that burned his nostrils and stung his eyes. And then there was food, the glorious, teasing whiffs of fish, barbecue, and takoyaki–and oh, yes, the sea. Always the sea! Seto sampled all these scents as a human, but now he practically lived and breathed the smorgasbord of aromas all around him.
All his senses had been sharpened and dulled in different ways, and it left him feeling overwhelmed and disoriented. He tried to stay far from the main throughways, or the noise pollution from traffic echoed in his ears to the point of pain.
He kept thinking if he just got back to Mokuba, back to his lab, they could figure out a way to change him back together. Except the odds of getting close to his brother were highly improbable. The house staff would never permit a stray to wander in, and even if he managed to sneak in, Mokuba himself wouldn't exactly greet him with open arms–not with his allergy.
Seto had no practical way of communicating. Maybe if he could somehow get his–his paws on a cellphone, but that in itself presented obstacles. Considering his human body was currently being overseen by a physician, Mokuba would rightfully dismiss the insane notion of him being turned into a cat as an absurd prank.
As his stomach ached with hunger, Seto soon realized he’d have to worry about all that later. Finding food, potable water, and shelter would have to become his primary concern.
He roamed the streets day after day, week after week, increasingly cold and desperately hungry. It didn't take long for his standards for sustenance to dip drastically. He couldn't quite stomach the idea of hunting vermin, too wary of potential disease. He hadn't needed to resort to that anyway. He knew the best food stands to frequent for scraps. For the highest quality food the best strategy was to take it directly off humans. As freshness went it couldn't be beat, but he had to be careful. He couldn't trust humans, and the last thing he wanted was to get caught and end up in a kill shelter or, only marginally better, as someone's pet.
