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“I could just call a car back to the mansion,” Kaiba said, standing in Joey’s new apartment. The fluorescent lights were bright against the white tiles of the kitchen, casting a sharp contrast against the dark night outside the windows. He had his coat in one hand and briefcase in the other, ready to leave.
“No, no, it’s late.” Joey took that moment to drape himself over Kaiba, clinging onto an arm. “Don’t make Isono do that. He’s got a wife and kids.”
“It’s his job,” Kaiba said blandly.
“Hey, c’mon!” Joey began slowly picking his fingers off the handle of his briefcase. Kaiba let him. “It’s my first night in my new apartment! We should christen it.” He gave him a wink.
Kaiba sighed. He let Joey steal his coat next.
Normally, christening a bed would involve a lot more strenuous activities, but both of them were too exhausted from moving Joey in all day.
(“I could have just called a moving company.”
“Aww, but that defeats the whole purpose of moving into a new place!”)
Joey had recruited his friends (their friends) to help, but they had left in the evening after dinner, giggling and making inane comments about “leaving them alone to do their thing.”
And if that didn’t perfectly describe whatever this was that he had going on with one Joey Wheeler. He refused to call them something as juvenile as boyfriends. They were full grown adults, not children, and Kaiba would die before he admitted that at some point Joey had become a friend before they had become something a bit more than friends.
So here he was in a borrowed t-shirt too baggy for him and a pair of shorts too short for him.
Joey stood beside him, hands on his hips, staring at his bed with more focus and intensity than the situation required. “So, which side do ya want?”
It was only a full, not even a queen, and Kaiba realized he really wasn’t going to enjoy this experience. “Middle.”
“There’s no such thing as middle, rich boy,” Joey scolded, entirely used to his superiority antics by now. “I call right!” he yelled, and threw himself onto the bed with such an exuberant leap that he sent the mattress bouncing.
Kaiba settled, more sedately, on the left. This was awkward. This was uncharted territory. Sure, they’ve slept together, but not slept together.
This fact didn’t seem to bother Joey in the slightest, because he snuggled right up to his side and held onto his arm like it was a teddy bear.
“Téa says that I snore, but I don’t,” Joey said as he turned off the light.
Then, he immediately began snoring.
It amused him how quickly he fell asleep in a foreign environment. Kaiba had no such luck. He laid awake on his back, hands resting neatly on his chest as Joey snored on against his side. It wasn’t… all that bad. The mattress wasn’t lumpy, the pillow Joey had lent him wasn’t going to give him neck pain. The sheets were soft, not in a high thread count way but in a worn way after one too many wash and dry cycles.
The bedroom was dimly lit by the pale light coming in from the blinds over the window. Cars whizzed by on the streets below, casting streaks of light on the ceiling. Voices floated up from the sidewalk as the nightlife in Domino City raged on. Ordinarily, the mansion was too isolated, and his penthouses were too high up to hear so many sounds of life.
It was… normal. So sickeningly normal, that he could imagine it. Instead of him moving Joey in, it could have been them moving into their first apartment together, just two ordinary young adults making their way through the world with only each other to rely on. Domestic. Perhaps that was why Kaiba had stayed.
Joey continued to snore on.
It would be so easy to get up and sneak out while Joey was asleep. He could go back to his nice, quiet mansion to sleep in the center of his nice, large bed, but that felt like giving up, that felt like losing, and Kaiba was not one to lose.
Joey let out one particularly loud snore, and Kaiba suppressed all thoughts of kicking him, or shifting his pillow around, or perhaps waking him up to get him to stop.
This was one of the few times he would let sleeping dogs lie.
It was 2 am. Kaiba was about to do it. He was finally about to fall asleep, Joey’s snores having taken on a rhythmic pattern almost like a lullaby. Then Joey abruptly rolled to the side, taking all the blankets with him.
Here’s the thing: Kaiba ran cold. His tall and thin stature made it so that everything went right through him- the wind, the cold, any sort of damp and dreary condition. His habit of wearing long, heavy coats wasn’t just a fashion statement.
Meanwhile, Joey was like a furnace. He didn’t need all those blankets.
Kaiba groped around blindly until he found one corner of the comforter again. The rest was tightly tangled around Joey’s form. Kaiba planted one ice-cold foot on his back (even in his sleep Joey twitched at that) and pulled. It was like playing tug of war with a dog. Eventually, he won, on the account of Joey still being dead to the world, unable to put up a proper fight. He considered hogging all the blankets to himself, but begrudgingly threw a corner over Joey on the threat of waking up to find him attempting to steal the blankets again.
At around 3 am, a scream of “AHHH! THE HAT MAN!” sent Kaiba rolling for his briefcase at the foot of the nightstand. His fingers had just reached the handle when he realized there was, in fact, no hat man, and that Joey was still asleep. He released his death grip on his briefcase and sat up, watching Joey snooze on contently, the threat of the hat man seemingly having passed.
Unbeknownst to Joey, Kaiba kept a small handgun in his briefcase, hidden amongst his cards in a secret compartment that only a select few people could open (Joey was one of them, though he didn’t know it yet). After years of Mokuba getting kidnapped and the myriad of threats on his own life, Kaiba took no chances. He settled back down and tried to wonder what this “hat man” was and what he had done to Joey in order to invade his dreams like that. Kaiba had his fair share of hallucinations, though he mostly tended to dream about his father.
“Ha! Take that!”
Kaiba snapped awake and caught the fist before Joey could deck- no, not that kind of deck- him in the face. It was in moments like these that he remembered that Joey had been in a street gang in high school before cleaning up his act.
“Huh, tough one aren’t ya,” Joey muttered, as Kaiba wrested his fist to the side. Joey followed it up with another fist.
Kaiba caught that one, too, and held on as Joey pumped his arms back and forth, throwing more imaginary punches.
“Take tha! An’ tha’, an’ tha’, an’ tha,” he mumbled, as his swings slowly grew more sluggish.
Eventually, Joey’s punches slowed to a stop. Kaiba finally dared to let go of his fists, but just for good measure, he wrapped his arms around his back and pulled him to his chest, pinning his arms between them. Hopefully that would prevent him from waking up with a black eye tomorrow.
When Joey’s elbow hit him square in the ribs at around 5 am, Kaiba had finally had enough. He tossed the blankets off of both of them, then clambered over Joey and laid down on top of him, kind of like a sloth draped over a branch. He pinned his legs down with his own and wrapped his arms around his torso. His head ended up resting on his chest. This put his ear dangerously close to Joey’s mouth in the case he decided to start yelling about the hat man again, but it was the only way to hold him down. To his surprise, his wriggling about ceased as Kaiba’s weight settled over him. It also seemed to stop his snoring. He pulled the covers back over them both and tucked the edges in.
Kaiba took a moment to consider the positions they were now in. Forget left side or right side of the bed. He had indeed gotten the middle.
He glanced at the clock. It was 5 am. Knowing his sleep schedule, his body would wake him at 7, always ready for the workday despite tomorrow being Sunday. He sighed and begrudgingly accepted that he would only get two hours of sleep tonight.
Kaiba woke to bright sunlight pouring through the blinds and a shifting of the mattress under him. A quick glance at the clock showed that it was 10 am.
He was warm. He felt… well rested, despite all the horrors that had gone on last night.
Beside him, Joey pushed himself up on his elbows, the late morning sunlight turning his hair gold. He must have wormed his way out from under him in the last few hours, and had ended up crowded right up to the edge of the bed.
Kaiba slowly pulled himself upright as well. He was, very firmly, still in the smack middle of the bed.
“Mmmmm!” Joey stretched his arms out over his head, slowly and leisurely. “Good morning! Uh-” He stopped rubbing his eyes to stare at him.
Kaiba looked impassively back.
Joey let out a scream. “Ahhhh! Who are you???” He toppled off the bed in a flurry of legs and kicked sheets before landing with a THUD!, taking all the blankets with him.
“It’s me, idiot.” Kaiba began combing his fingers through his hair, flattening it back into neat bangs. He always got the worst bedhead in the mornings.
Joey reappeared over the side of the bed, resting his forearms on the mattress. He didn’t bother to get up off the floor. “For a moment I thought you were Mokuba, but brown!”
“Unlike my little brother, I actually bother to tame my hair.” He finally finished smoothing the more stubborn hairs back into place. A quick shower should fix the rest.
Joey suggested exactly just that then, and also invited Kaiba to join him. Their plan was quickly abandoned when they realized his shower was too small.
After taking their (albeit, individual) showers, they ended up in the kitchen where Joey began making a late breakfast.
Kaiba sat at the small dining table, nursing a mug of coffee in his hands while turning over the events of last night in his head. A silence filled the apartment, broken only by the occasional clinking of pans.
Joey seemed to take notice of his slightly shell-shocked expression. “So,” he chuckled, sheepishly rubbing the back of his neck with a hand, “how’d ya sleep?”
Kaiba finally looked up from his coffee. “Who’s the hat man?”