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1.
"You can't go."
Kisara's mouth twitches.
"Go back to bed," she murmurs. She pulls her legs up, hugging her knees under her chin. "It is late," she says too adds. "It is going to be a long day tomorrow too. Battle City semifinals, and all."
"It is why I am here," Seto says.
Her eyes open. "Did you use the Necklace?" she asks.
"The Rod," he says. "I knew some... words."
Of course he did. Seto comes to sit by her, settling on the floor. He's strangely dressed, no coat, no Duel Disk, and he drops his boots next to him, his legs stretching out in front of him.
"You can't go alone," he says.
"And where am I going?"
"The fourth dragon," he says, and she smiles, despite herself. "Did you think I wouldn't know?"
2.
"This is a bad idea."
He's amused. She's not amused and her fingers are already turning into her palms; don't ask her, don't ask her how an elevator on a blimp can travel down for ten floors. Sometimes magic is stupid, but engineering and magic - well.
"Backing out?"
"Never," she snaps.
Kaiba Seto is always Kaiba Seto; he would have been Pharaoh no doubt back then, with that smirk and the inability to accept that the Gods have rules he has to respect. It would also have been problematic for any of them to make him, she thinks.
Sacrificing God for a monster, what an idea.
There will be time for them to talk, meet the other. Now it's been decided: no time for small talk or for looking back when the elevator opens. There isn't an opponent's deck to face them, but a road.
It stretches away beneath an enormous, colorless sky. On either side there's water, still and dark, and things rise from it at crooked angles: pieces of cards, some whole, some cut, some burned. Some faded at the corners, chipped.
Some, ripped straight through the middle.
Kisara stops breathing.
"A Graveyard?" she whispers.
"No." Seto steps past her, clicking his tongue. "Cards sent to the Graveyard come back."
There is an edge of regret lacing in his voice as he keeps going. It makes her curious, is it sadness or just need to fix things so he can duel tomorrow?
She looks at him, but he does not turn.
These can't come back, they both know.
Cards drowned in sinks, and burned in anger, cards thrown away before anyone had ever called their names in battle; common cards, useless cards, mistakes. Magic support or monsters, does not matter.
He turns and, Come on, he doesn't say, but she feels it nonetheless as she shifts, foot to foot and feels almost invaded, her sense of space twisting. She doesn't remember meeting Seto, if she did ever meet him, and she is just uneasy, even though she is already moving forward.
They walk.
She's tempted really, to forgo the obvious argument that neither of them knows whether ripping a card counts as killing.
And Seto is not only tall, he walks fast; shameless, really, which part of me did you kill, Kaiba Seto? She brushes her sweaty fingers against her dress.
"You know you wanted me to come," he says quietly, looking forward.
Her lips purse; it's someone else. Sand beneath his feet and gold at his throat, looking at her as something holy and terrible.
"Fine," she blinks. "Why not, Seto?"
3.
This girl with the white hair is an anomaly, Seto decides, and far too proud of the fact.
She's said nothing, since the Ishizu duel ended, about his, uh, issue with having spent several minutes hallucinating himself as an ancient Egyptian priest. He's said nothing, to be fair, about hers, being a dragon and all.
Must be the same between Yugi and the other, right? To believe in this stuff, honestly, you have to surrender some fundamental part of your rationality.
And well, Seto recited a chant he somehow knew and now he is walking through some sort of metaphysical dumping ground for trading cards. Rationality can wait.
"I think she's angry."
He and Kisara are silent for a bit when he says it, even as they don't stop walking. If you asked him, he'll tell you he just knew her name the way he knew how to read Ra's Dragon card. He has this secret affinity for romanticizing his sense of being powerful, so much powerful.
Beside him, Kisara raises her head and stretches her arms behind her back. She's faster now, keeping pace. The entire time she's developing nervous habits; don't tell her though, that he's noticed.
"The dragon?" She shrugs. "She remembers."
"I would expect her to."
Seto stops. Kisara glances back when she realizes.
It had made perfect sense at the time, for him. There were four Blue-Eyes White Dragons in the world and only three could belong in his deck, therefore the fourth was a liability. If nothing else, exactly what Kaiba Seto did to things standing between him and what he wanted.
"She may... not let you near her."
"Is she pissed?" Seto leans forward.
"She's angry," Kisara says quietly.
It's a three thousand years between them, which she didn't care to investigate. How she got there, exactly, but that's probably part of the deal.
Three thousand years, love lost, their sense of each other fragmented to what they don't know, but what they can access of the other.
She doesn't say Seth, and he doesn't say Mokuba.
Instead her fingers are on his cheek, around his burning ear. She is fierce, too unrelenting because she hasn't figured anything out yet.
But she is sure it is them. Seto and Kisara. It is what this has to be about.
4.
The dragon finds them before they find her.
There's no warning, unless well, the road splitting down the center counts. White erupts out of black water, wings tearing through the sky; Kisara's fingers close around Seto's arm, and then they're falling.
"Seto?"
"I'm fine, I'm fine."
He is not, his palm's bleeding and his shoulder is going to give him trouble holding the Duel Disk tomorrow, but the dragon is above them now and that is definitely more pressing.
She is enormous.
And not the polished hologram, her body is interrupted by long black fractures, one wing disappearing at the edge as though someone has physically torn the world around her.
Seto knows those lines, for he made them.
"She'll kill you," Kisara whispers when the dragon screams.
He reaches instinctively for a Duel Disk that isn't there, and the dragon's head lowers, teeth bared, blue light collecting somewhere deep inside her mouth.
Maybe that's how this was going to end, and for the first time, maybe, it occurs to Seto how easy this would be if Blue-Eyes White Dragon were only a card or a weapon, eight stars, three sacrifices. Three thousand attack points, you summon them, own them.
Souls are infinitely less reasonable.
And he thinks of her, lifeless in the other self's arms tonight, as he created that strange connection between them. He thinks of her, prepared to come down here after because he had done this; of Ishizu telling him what the future was supposed to be.
Fuck the future, she whispered to his ear.
"Please," Seto says. "I want to deserve you."
The dragon stops.
5.
A priest with his face kneeling in the sand. Seto sees him too. Kisara knows because it hurts.
A bigger man would not beg, she thinks. She has looked at Seto and searched for Seth in all the wrong places: the angle of his face, his temper, the impossible pride. She has waited for recognition like a trophy in her own twisted story, as though being loved once creates a debt across lifetimes.
Seth would have knelt in a heartbeat.
She hadn't realized she was crying as she walks over, grabs the back of Seto's coat, and hugs him.
There's no field between them, no courage borrowed from anything except exhaustion and the peculiar insanity of the night; his fingers catch against her wrist, and for a moment he doesn't move at all.
"Blue - ?"
"Do not back out," she whispers.
In front of them, the dragon roars.
Neither of them is brave enough to look.
6.
Morning happens at the gate. They've brought back the card, or what remained of it.
Four pieces, improbably clean, resting together beneath the dragon's claws; when Kisara touches them, the tears knit slowly together, pale lines remaining where Seto's hands had once pulled it apart. It will take time.
Blue-Eyes White Dragon.
A faint line runs through the illustration, where it had once been torn. Kisara watches him look at it, that specific fragment of her soul.
"You should sleep," she says. "You duel tomorrow."
"Today," he says. "Will you..."
"I'll be there."
Seto holds the card out. She looks at it, then him.
"What?"
"Take it."
Her expression changes. "Seto."
"It's a part of you. You wanted to bring her back."
He pushes the card closer, but Kisara doesn't take it. "No. You could keep her. You could protect it and - "
Seto almost smiles. He thinks of Mokuba, how he smells of tomorrow all the time. Of Yugi waiting for him, the other, does he sleep like a normal person?
"What am I supposed to do with her?"
Seto shrugs. Stupid question, really. "What do I care? Whatever you want."
Kisara turns it over in her hands, the repaired seam catching beneath her thumb. Her mouth twitches.
Kisara's fingers close carefully around the card. Maybe Seto cares, maybe it is this. He watches her and remembers that still, in a way, they all have the opportunity to be young again. Not her.
She might still love the Priest too. The Priest might want to reach her.
But he will never ask, not like this.
Seto starts down the corridor.
"You meant that?" she calls.
He keeps walking. "Rest, Kisara."
She smiles. "A gift?"
He scoffs.
"Backing out?" she asks.
"Never," he hisses, turning. "See you tomorrow."
He stops wondering about looking back.