#(until you remember seto probably has horrible unacknowledged trauma about watching someone jump to their death...)

[ohbutwheresyourheart]

continuing the fragments from the google docs series: yugi is caught in a horrific depression spiral after the ceremonial duel and finally hits rock bottom, until everyone's favourite ceo sticks his nose in. fem!yugi because... I don't even remember, I think I just felt like it.

tw: suicide attempt

The ground suddenly looked very, very far away. Which it should; she was only a couple of floors below the penthouse. Would have gotten the penthouse, had a certain someone not booked it before her, probably before the circuit for this year’s world championships were even announced.

Except it brought to mind one of those statistics that got bandied around on self-help sites about the Golden Gate Bridge, and the drop being long enough to pass right through suicidal ideation into oh-fuck-why-did-I-jump.

Yugi didn’t think she’d renege, and the point was sort of that even if she did it wouldn’t make a difference, but it made her stomach twist to think she might. That it might be something hard-wired into her brain rather than a conscious decision. It was all chemicals, after all; maybe the fear of death was just something the chemicals bullshitted together despite all good reason after the last drops of dopamine ran out.

She shifted from one foot to the other, her hands sweaty on the absurdly fancy Romanesque column.

God, how much easier it would be if she could just will her heart to stop beating. No fuss. No mess. Just here one minute, gone the next. She’d thought the next best thing was an overdose, until she read a well-meaning forum post about the after-effects. Yes, and the pain, because she was simultaneously brave enough and coward enough to admit she wanted it painless; dared to go as far as to think she deserved it to be painless, really.

Why should it hurt to make things right?

Yugi closed her eyes and listened. Distant music and muffled voices floated up from the open windows on the floors below. Traffic blared on the roads. The fan in her bedroom hummed white noise behind it all. She breathed in something floral they’d scented the hotel rooms with and, below it and more familiar, what she’d always thought of as the smell of a city. Fast food – pizza, burgers, something garlicky – and emissions mixed with something else she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Life.

Well. So long, and thanks—

Yugi shrieked like a scalded cat as she was pulled backwards off the balcony wall. Eyes snapping open, she fought instinctively against the hands gripping her elbows. As soon as she was on the floor again, she was released, and turned to see – oh.

“What the fuck, Seto?”

She wasn’t sure what annoyed her most: that Seto Kaiba had managed to get into her locked hotel room, that he had done so without her noticing, that he had interrupted her immaculately planned suicide attempt, or that he had done all of that with a bored, slightly irritated expression on his face.

“I was getting sick of watching you grandstand,” he said. “If you were going to jump, you would have jumped.”

Seto turned away and kept talking, pacing across the balcony and gesturing, but Yugi stopped hearing him. She stopped hearing anything. Pure, unadulterated rage managed what all the calm, logical reasoning in the world could not.

Yugi leaped over the balcony.

She almost didn’t make it. The balcony wall was higher than she could comfortably jump, even with a few steps of a running start, and her feet caught it on the way over. For a dizzying moment, Yugi was suspended over the glittering downtown lights, and then gravity took over. Her stomach lurched, her heart felt like it was going to burst out of her chest, and yes there was that sudden spark of horror, of internal screaming, of nononononono---

Then a hand caught her leg and momentum slammed Yugi into the wall below face-first, hard enough to drive all the breath from her lungs. The momentary red mist cleared and her hearing kicked back in just in time to hear Seto scream:

“WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?!”

Which, Yugi had to admit, was a very fair and extremely good question.

Drop me, she thought desperately. Please just fucking drop me.

But Seto Kaiba had never been accommodating in his life and he wasn’t about to start now. With a remarkable show of strength for such a wiry man, he hauled her back up over the railing by her ankles and dumped her on the balcony, red-faced and panting.

“That wasn’t - a - rhetorical - question - by the way,” he gasped as Yugi dropped her head into her hands and wished, intensely, for the sweet kiss of death. “What - and I cannot - stress this - enough - is wrong with you?”

Yugi sighed and forced herself to look up at him. There were so many things she could say. The truth. A host of lies, some more ridiculous than others. Something like the truth, without mentioning Atem. But in the end what came out of her mouth was:

“You ought to know better than to tell me I don’t have the guts to do something.”

Seto opened his mouth. Closed it again. Sighed. Pinched the bridge of his nose.

“I don’t have words,” he began in a tone that implied every word was being dragged out of him like a rotten tooth, “For how much I hate that I know you’re right. But even for you, this is extreme.”

Yugi sighed and leaned her head back against the balcony railing. She felt completely drained of every possible emotion. The attempt was ruined. All she wanted to do now was to be left alone to sleep.

“It’s possible,” she admitted, “That I’m not entirely in my right mind.”

Seto scoffed. “You don’t say.”

Then, instead of leaving, or lecturing her, or calling security, or any of the reasonable actions Yugi would have expected Seto Kaiba to take after witnessing - and averting - a suicide attempt, he got down and sat beside her, knees drawn up to his chest.

“I knew there was something wrong with you lately, but I didn’t think it was this.”

Yugi looked across at him, frowning. “What do you mean, you knew something was wrong?”

Seto shrugged. “It was obvious, as soon as I started looking at the footage from your duels. You’d stopped caring.”

“Yeah,” Yugi sighed, because there was no point hiding it and there was a certain relief in admitting it. “Yeah, that’s about right. Why do you care, though? Other than the tournament, I mean… is this just for the sake of the tournament?”

“It certainly wouldn’t help our advertising campaign if the current champion pitched herself off the tallest building in the city,” Seto conceded. He shifted slightly and looked across at her. “If I left, would you just jump right back over again?”

“Would you believe me if I said no?”

“No. I was mostly just curious about whether you'd admit it or not.”

“Ha.” Yugi looked down at her knees, considering. “...I don’t know. Maybe. You sort of ruined the moment.”

Seto let out a bark of laughter. He held up a hand as Yugi shot a glare at him, looking genuinely apologetic as he tried to rein himself in.

“You--You said that like I - fuck - like I came in and tore down your mood lighting.”

Oh fuck. Oh fuck, it did sound like that, didn’t it? Yugi tried to hold onto the seriousness of the moment - or at least her anger - but it was rapidly slipping through her fingers, replaced by a bubble of laughter of her own.

“You bastard,” she managed to get out before dissolving into giggles. “As a matter--heh--of fact it--it was my… mood music.”

That did it - within seconds they were both howling with laughter, the tension seeping out of them little by little, until they were clutching their stomachs with tears in their eyes.

----

He stayed with her all night. Yugi tried to protest but Seto just told her not to be ridiculous and made himself comfortable (or, at any rate, as comfortable as possible) in an armchair he pulled up near the bed.

(It wasn’t until the next day that Yugi realised he’d put it there to be between the bed and the balcony door.)

It should have been awkward, laying there with Seto Kaiba watching her like a hawk in the wake of a suicide attempt. They were friends (at least, Yugi kept insisting they were friends), but it wasn’t like the easy platonic intimacy that existed between Yugi, Joey, Tea, and Tristan. The four of them had had innumerable sleepovers, oftentimes sharing beds during their various journeys. Seto, though? Yugi could barely imagine him in pyjamas.

(Actually, that was a lie. She’d put money down that he owned Blue Eyes White Dragon print pyjamas. With a pair of matching slippers.)

And yet. Maybe it was just that the absurdity of the evening transgressed all other boundaries. Whatever the reason, it was… fine. Comfortable, even. The silence got a bit wearing after a while, so Yugi asked Seto to talk about -- something. Anything. He launched into a comprehensive monologue about the technological updates in the latest Duel Disk, which Yugi listened to with genuine interest, even asking a few questions, until the shop talk lulled her enough that her adrenaline drained away and she dozed off.

When she woke up the next morning he was still there; asleep, or so she thought, until she shifted and his eyes snapped open. They stared at each other for a few moments until Yugi attempted a weak smile.

“How’s your back doing?”

“It’s--” Seto began, stretching, only to cut off with a hiss. “...In one piece.”

So was Yugi. It seemed unbelievable now, in the soft morning light, how close she’d come to death the night before. Like a story that had happened to somebody else.