Work Text:
The city juts up around them like jagged teeth gnawing at the sky. It’s colder than it was yesterday, but it isn’t raining, which Yusei considers an improvement. He walks outside the squat they’ve set up to sit around the charred little firepit. Soon after, Jack joins him, with a tin can full of water and a set of pliers. Together, they manage to start a fire. Jack puts the tin can on it and, when the water’s hot and the can is black, he dumps the coffee grounds in.
The smell must awaken Crow because he comes out stumbling, wearing one of Jack’s sweatshirts that hangs down to his knees. He looks paler in the gray light of morning, with his hair scraped back and his mark emblazoned bold and bright on his forehead. They sit together, staring at the fire, none of them ready to talk yet.
Yusei thinks this city sucks the color out of everything. The life, too. The broken buildings going to truly become teeth and devour them whole. That’s what happens to people in Satellite, even people like them who were lucky to have Martha for a few years.
Jack takes the coffee off of the fire, not caring if he burns his fingers. He blows on the steam and takes a sip. Wrinkles his nose.
“Ugh,” he says after swallowing. “One day I’m going to have real coffee. Nice stuff from a proper café.”
Crow rolls his eyes. “Oh, yeah? Where?”
“In the city.”
Jack says it as if it’s obvious. He’s been talking about going to Neo Domino City for as long as Yusei can remember. He pictures them as little kids. Jack kneeling on his bed and looking out the open window--open because he liked to listen to the exotic birds that flew here from Neo Domino when their rich owners grew tired of their singing, even though Martha always told him to shut it--with a wanting mouth and yearning eyes. Saying how he was going there one day. Not that talking will get him there. Or get any of them out of here. They’re a part of Satellite themselves. Doomed as it is doomed. Broken as it’s broken. Yusei almost frowns. He doesn’t consider himself this introspective and especially not this nihilistic but he’s been feeling off lately. Been feeling like he’s suspended in midair or his wheels are spinning without finding purchase on the ground. Antsy and anxious.
“Sure,” Crow scoffs. “You’ll go to the city. Can I come? Bet they’ll love me over there.”
He rubs at his forehead and makes a sneering face. Yusei remembers when he first came to them. He and Jack had met him on the street and Crow followed them back to Martha’s, making bird noises and gnashing his teeth as he trailed behind them, keeping his distance. When they got there, he had scrambled up a tree and didn’t come down for two days. Jack had taken to giving him food and had managed to get a name out of him even though he didn’t really talk, then. Weird to think about--Crow not talking. Now he never stops.
“We’ll all go,” Yusei says because he always has to mediate between them.
That ends the conversation because, really, they know that none of them will go. They’ll be chewed up and spat out like everyone else. He still catches Jack sometimes staring out at the city skyline with a hungry look on his face. He looks starved, Yusei thinks, and desperate. Like he’ll do anything to cross that water. It makes him think of the man at the Daedalus Bridge except he knows Jack doesn’t have the patience to build anything. He worries about him and what he might do.
“Yeah,” Crow says flatly.
He wraps the overly long sleeves of Jack’s sweatshirt around his body and leans in closer to the fire. Yusei yawns and rests his chin on his hand. The early morning fog is touching the edges of his brain in a way he doesn’t like. He doesn’t sleep much these days. Too much can happen to them, but he also knows it isn’t just that. He’s never slept very well and right now he’s probably operating on three hours of sleep spread over the past two days.
“There’s something tonight,” Crow says. “At one of the warehouses in the southern tip.”
“Something?” Jack asks.
“A dueling thing, I think. And some band wants to play.” He shrugs, the oversized sweatshirt just barely moving with the lift of his shoulders. “It’s something to do, at least.”
That defines their days. Waiting for the hours of the day to dwindle so they can maybe sleep and start it all over again. Even dueling is losing its appeal. This is what happens in Satellite. Yusei’s seen it his whole life. Pure statistics.
“We’ll go,” he says, because what’s the alternative? Death. Rot.
He doesn’t want to think this way, but he’s tired and it’s colorless out. Drained and empty.
“A lot of gangs there,” Jack says.
“And?”
Crow says it like a challenge, smiling enough to show the jagged ends of his canines. He’s been doing that a lot lately, pushing Jack and getting pushed back. More often than not, Yusei has to step between them.
“And I’m not looking forward to you saying something to one of them and me having to stop you from getting your ass beaten.”
“I don’t need your help.”
Jack snorts into his can of coffee. Crow takes it as some kind of diss and narrows his eyes.
“I don’t.”
Yusei thinks he does and doesn’t, but doesn’t say it yet. It hasn’t turned into a full blown argument yet. With the two of them, sometimes he has to pick and choose when he steps in. Crow is scrappy and can hold his own but gangs have numbers. The three of them don’t. Jack luckily shot up nearly a foot last year and has size on his side.
“Whatever. Just don’t run your mouth.”
Crow sneers at him. “Will do, Your Majesty.”
He waits for Jack’s rebuttal but it doesn’t come. Instead he passes over the can of coffee so Crow can have a sip. That’s how it is with them. They’ll explode at one another and then back to peace. It’s exhausting being their friend sometimes, but Yusei doesn’t know what he’d do without them.
--
The warehouse is sweaty, packed with people. It’s something primal, Yusei thinks, something in the very core of their genetic code as people. There were maybe duels before they got there but now someone’s plugged a guitar into an amp and everyone’s going wild. He can barely hear the music, just feel it through the floor, feel it ricochet through the sweaty crush of bodies.
More people have joined in on instruments and extension cords stealing energy from nearby snake through the crowd. It’s too much at once and he’s lost Jack and Crow.
The music is jagged and sharp and makes his teeth feel weird. He needs air. Needs to get out.
Outside, it’s almost too cold to be comfortable in what he’s wearing and the sweat cools on his skin, making him shiver.
The sky is cloudy with smog, smearing it and leaving a haze over everything. He sees old-timers coughing on the streets, more people wearing white masks over their mouths. Maybe he should start doing that, too. Satellite finding another way to kill them..
People are spread out a bit, some dueling without disks, some shotgunning beer or smoking something fragrant from glass pipes. He thinks to wait out here for Jack and Crow. Even if they don’t know that he left, the three of them are always able to find each other. It’s a pull between them. It’s why he first was drawn to Jack in the orphanage even though the other kids told him he was bossy. It’s why Crow decided to follow them home.
Someone approaches him, but it isn’t one of his friends. He sees the boy move and he seems separate from everyone else. It’s like his edges are more pronounced against the grayed, colorless backdrop of Satellite at night.
He’s frighteningly pale, this boy, paler even than Jack, both in skin and hair. The hair shifts under the buzz of the lights surrounding the warehouse and looks almost blue against his skin. He smiles enough to show the edges of his teeth and Yusei can see the pink point of his tongue between the upper and lower rows. His eyes are an olive green, not quite yellow, and they watch him with keen interest. His face is narrow and wolfish and he looks very nearly feral. Like the look Crow gets sometimes when he gets an idea in his head.
“You in a gang?” he asks.
Yusei shakes his head.
“Alone?”
Shakes his head again. The boy cocks his head to the side and the smile widens.
“You’ve got a voice?”
It’s said in a teasing manner but somehow Yusei feels as though he’s being laughed with rather than at.
“Yes,” he says. “I’m here with my friends. They’re inside.”
He nods. “You looked lost. Are you lost?”
Is he? Yusei isn’t sure what to say so he just meets his gaze. He thinks it might impress him because the boy grins, broadly, with all of his teeth.
“Kiryu Kyousuke.”
He’s surprised at how he gives his name: family name first. Very rarely he’s heard his own name like that but most people he interacts with aren’t Japanese.
“Fudo Yusei.” It feels good to say it.
“Yusei.”
Even better coming from him, somehow. Yusei isn’t sure why. Maybe it’s hearing his name from someone new. It’s been so long since he met someone new and introduced himself. There’s something in Kiryu’s face, like there’s something he wants, but he hasn’t played his hand yet.
“Yusei!”
A cry shatters their eye contact, their connection, and it irritates him for some reason. He looks over Kiryu’s shoulder to see Jack and Crow coming from the warehouse. Kiryu turns towards them and then back.
“Your friends?”
He nods.
“Jack. Crow.”
“Jack’s the big one, yeah? He looks like a Jack.”
Yusei nods again.
“Someone had a knife,” Jack reports. He sounds peeved.
Crow holds a tissue to his shoulder, looking angry enough to spit.
“We got him back,” Crow says.
“I did,” Jack corrects.
“Sorry, I was too busy bein’ stabbed.”
“Cut.”
Kiryu watches the exchange with bemusement, his grin reappearing with renewed vigor.
“This is Kyousuke,” Yusei says.
“Just Kiryu’s fine,” he corrects. “I don’t mind it.”
They give their names and Kiryu nods to them as if he didn’t hear them a moment ago.
“Why we were you stabbed?” Yusei asks, his mind pulling away from Kiryu for a moment to truly register what they said. “Or cut.”
Crow makes a face and begins launching into the story that boils down to someone calling him something he’s not. Using a word he hates. He’d punched him, the guy pulled a knife, and then Jack laid him out flat. Sometimes he wonders what they would do if he wasn’t around if his absence for a few minutes led to literal bloodshed.
Kiryu looks around them and, despite only just meeting him, at not knowing a thing about him beyond his name and the fact that his icy beauty is so sharply defined in this smoggy, hazy, night, Yusei can tell that gears are moving in his head.
“You,” he says, with a smile at Yusei. He gestures to Crow and Jack. “All of you. We’re going to run this place.”
He has no idea what that means.
--
It turns out that he means a gang. Yusei’s never liked the duel gangs, never liked the way they swaggered around like they did, but Kiryu makes it sound almost fanciful. Like they’re swaggering, gunslinging cowboys.
He knows when Kiryu slaps down the map with the districts drawn out that they’re part of something bigger. Or at least can pretend to be part of something bigger. Having a goal, it’s nice. It makes the fog on the edges of his brain ebb away. It renews their vigor to duel and work together. Yusei feels warm for the first time since he was at Martha’s.
Today, they walk through the ruins of an old Monster Land amusement park. The rides are old, rusted, and glint in the watery, gray afternoon light. It’s a neutral spot--or one that hasn’t been claimed--so they walk freely and without worry. Not that there needs to be much. They’ve already got a reputation. Team Satisfaction.
Kirtyu stops at a booth with a fortuneteller inside. The mechanical woman is dressed to look like Dark Magician Girl, but her hat is drooping and her wig looks ratty. Her eyes, though, stare alert yet vacant at the four of them.
“I heard about a guy,” Crow says. “He was obsessed with this woman so he killed her and stuck her eyes in this fortuneteller. Then he hid out in the carousel.”
Yusei’s heard it, too. They all have. The urban legends that pass through Satellite like drugs.
“That’s bullshit,” Jack says, but he watches her eyes as Kiryu puts a coin in.
They move around in her head and the hand holding her staff jerks up and down.
“Remember that guy from when we were kids?” Jack asks, his own locked with hers. “The window guy.”
Yusei remembers. It’s why Martha always wanted him to shut the window. Not just burglars, but the man who climbed in open windows and slit people’s throats. He always listened to her, told Jack to shut it, but he liked hearing the birds. The only person who ever came in through that window, though, was Crow when he was little, finally trusting them enough to come down from his tree.
“What a bitch!” Kiryu exclaims.
He holds out his fortune that reads: Beware!
Yusei frowns and puts in his own coin. It’s dumb to waste money like this but most things they can trade for--or Crow would steal. Dark Magician Girl’s eyes engage again and he can hear the mechanical whirr as they roll around her head. A card is spat out and Yusei flips it over.
Happy travels are in store for you!
He tucks it into the pocket of Kiryu’s vest and he grins.
“Thanks.”
Something about Kiryu’s smile has been getting to him. He smiles freely, warmly, but somehow still guarded.
They leave and it occurs to Yusei that they’re walking differently. He and Kiryu lead, side by side, and then Jack and Crow behind them. Usually they walk four abreast, but it’s a bit cumbersome. He doesn’t think there’s a significance there.
They pass the carousel where the murderer was rumored to live and out of the gates. As they do, Kiryu puts a hand on his shoulder and squeezes it gently. He’s looking ahead, not at him, and Yusei wonders what that means as he drops his hand.
--
Their current hideout is freezing. It’s an apartment, at least, rather than an abandoned warehouse, and better than the place he had been squatting with Jack and Crow before Kiryu. But it’s cold. The radiator rattles sometimes but it doesn’t warm them, not really. Yusei sits with the blanket over his shoulders and looks at Kiryu, who’s roused him.
In the icy light of the moon, he looks supernatural. Pale as any marble statue with eyes that are almost golden. His hand reaches out to cup Yusei’s cheek.
“Yusei.”
His name is a purr from deep in his throat. He looks to the side, where Jack and Crow sleep, wary. They’re pressed together under one blanket because, despite how they fight, this is how they are. Yusei thinks there might be more there as they get older. Something building from all the way back then, when Crow crawled in from the window like one of Jack’s birds from the tree and curled up like a cashew under the blankets with him. At night, unguarded from their own egos, he knows Jack has an arm protectively around him, Crow’s bony back pressed against his chest.
Yusei’s noticed it and that’s why he leans more into Kiryu. Why he talks to him more, why he basks in the sharpness of his light. Kiryu is the magical boy who will rescue them from Satellite hell. He thinks it, hopes it, wants it.
“Yusei.”
His name again, heavy as if forcing the syllables out is taking everything Kiryu has. He looks wounded in the moonlight, like he’s made of those moonbeams and he needs Yusei to make him tangible.
“Kiryu.”
His breath fogs out visibly in front of him as he speaks. Kiryu kisses him. He tastes metallic, somehow, and his lips tremble against Yusei’s. He thinks they’re on the brink of something. He thinks they won’t be swallowed up by Satellite. He thinks this is hope.
Outside, a cloud moves over the moon.