Yu-Gi-Oh! Fan Fiction / InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ Luck of the Damned ❯ As Luck Would Have It ( Chapter 1 )

I had so many people asking about a continuation for this fic and, well, the bunny pen began to grow restless because of you all. Hope you all enjoy this continuing comedy of errors!

Word Count: 3914
Rating: T

Disclaimer: Of the few things I own, these fandoms are not on the list.

---

Being back in the office was strange. Well, it was a bit more than that, but strange was the simplest descriptor. Growing his reputation in the business world -however tenuous it tended to be- Seto Kaiba was no stranger to the eccentricities of the gaming industry he found himself so immersed in nor the machinations of the tabloids that scrambled to write puff and hit pieces alike in the wake of Battle City’s conclusion. 

The way it had ended was anticlimactic at best. But at the end of the day, Battle City was over. Well, it was on paper but the paperwork was as far as Kaiba was willing to involve himself post tournament. Really, Yugi and his little group should have counted themselves lucky that he had even done that much for them. 

Nothing about that tournament had gone as predicted, for anyone. That it hadn’t ended with the reclamation of his title was almost worth it for how thoroughly bothered one Isis Ishtar seemed to be by the whole affair.

“This is not what the Necklace foretold, Kaiba,” she’d pulled him aside to insist once the finals had ended. “It was the Pharaoh's destiny to defeat my brother.”

And yet, it was the mutt -Jonouchi- that had done it. For as much as Seto Kaiba did not like Jonouchi, not that he liked a great many people to begin with, he liked Isis Ishtar even less. He was everything that Isis Ishtar was not, and she believed in everything he’d come to despise. She relied on prophecy and took comfort in a future decided for her.

The only one who could decide Kaiba’s future was Kaiba; that was a lesson he’d learned a long time ago.

He could stomach Jonouchi’s victory against a single madman if only for the satisfaction of the way it flew in the face of the unending lectures of fate and destiny.

Beyond that, it wasn’t a terrible outcome at the end of the day. Mokuba had finally honed in on a friend that wasn’t involved with the nerd herd, and Kaiba certainly wasn’t about to discourage it. Souta Higurashi was tolerable, and Mokuba certainly could have -and had- picked far worse individuals to befriend. 

But with Souta Higurashi came Kagome Higurashi.

Now, Kagome Higurashi was strange. She wasn’t intolerable the way Yugi’s little group tended to be, at least. If anything, the thing he disliked most about the girl was that he did not know what to make of her to begin with. The only certainty was that he was stuck with her.

Not for the first time, Kaiba thought that it would not be madmen with magic or plots to steal his company, but a woman that would be the death of him.

That girl hadn’t even ended up in his tournament as a participant, and somehow had turned it on its head. For all the oddities he was used to from the industry he’d taken by storm, a perky shrine girl was not a variable that he had planned for.

Convoluted plots to steal his company, he expected.

Madmen with artifacts that wielded dark magic, he’d grown used to. 

Shrine girls who could apparently thwart that magic, not so much.

It was equal parts satisfying and maddening. Given the way Isis had continued to eye Higurashi after the confrontation with Marik, and even more so after Kaiba’s duel with her, it was clear that she had determined that Higurashi’s presence had changed things. It was probably more impressive that Higurashi hadn’t liked the woman. She seemed the sort to make friends with anyone, possibly even one of the robots that maintained the ship, given the chance. Her immediate dislike of the curator had caught him by surprise.

Perhaps she expected that psychotic brother of hers to obtain a higher body count. Ironically, Higurashi had ended up taking the worst damage out of the lot. To that day, Kaiba wasn’t certain whether he should have been concerned or impressed with how blasé she’d been about taking a knife to the ribs.

Of course, Higurashi was an anomaly in her own right.

For as overly chipper and friendly as she was, she had a temper to match. That in and of itself wasn’t so strange - he’d gotten plenty of exposure to Anzu Mazaki’s personality after all. However, unlike the equally feisty Mazaki, Kagome Higurashi had at least some level of experience to back it up.

And her little display with Ra during Kujaku’s duel had thrust her right into a spotlight that hadn’t even known she existed.

Mokuba’s friendship with Souta Higurashi turned out to be quite the boon when the tabloids started questioning who she was. Taking on Souta Higurashi an intern for Kaiba Corp made for a convenient excuse, even if that wasn’t the only reason for it. The Higurashi boy was surprisingly adept with technology and respectably well versed in Duel Monsters and a variety of other games - not that he could hold a candle to Kaiba. Granted, few could even hope to do that to begin with. Only Yugi had ever been able to rival him on that front.

With Battle City out of the way and the God Cards out of his hands, there was no reason for him to involve himself with them any longer. And he intended to keep it that way.

He had a company to run. He had goals beyond a championship title to work towards.

That was what found him in American city of San Francisco under the blazing sun of a Californian summer. Fire season be damned, his plans for launching the amusement park had been delayed long enough. He’d douse the entirety of the west coast with a fleet of his own aircraft if he had to.

This had been his goal for far longer than ‘Number One Duelist’ had been his title.

This was the goal he and Mokuba had decided on together, even long before he’d wrested the company away from Gozaburo Kaiba. It was the goal Gozaburo himself had despised. Lucrative investment or not, accomplishing the creation of Kaiba Land was worth it if only to spite the man.

It was just going on eleven in the morning when the first work crew broke for lunch, finally allowing him a moment of peace before he was to leave on the next inspection. Things might have gone a bit faster if Mokuba had joined him, but his brother had been eagerly at work on some video game he and the Higurashi boy had begun developing. Far be it from him to impede his vice president’s own goals for expanding their market. It would seamlessly complement the virtual world project that had been shelved after the Big Five’s meddling. He would have to revisit that project too, assess the damage that had been done as a result of their botched coup.

At least with Higurashi around, there wasn’t likely to be any kidnappings due to magic, or whatever other nonsense followed Yugi around.

Kaiba idly wondered if he had time to acquire a cup of coffee.

Before he could decide, his phone buzzed, loudly demanding he return to work. Expecting another one of the many contractors that he’d been organizing that day, he didn’t bother to look at the screen. If they had his number they were either important enough for it, or their systems had been hacked again.

“Kaiba,” he answered with a grunt.

The familiar voice of his secretary at the Domino City headquarters echoed from on the other end. "Mr. Kaiba, there's a Kagome Higurashi on line 5 for you. She's really quite insistent, sir."

'Speak of the devil,' he thought. Then he paused. 

Kaiba looked at his phone a second, then a third time. No matter how hard he stared, the screen still happily displayed a local time of 11AM. ‘It’s three in the morning in Japan…what the devil could she be calling about at this hour?’

Kaiba reluctantly accepted the call.

“Kaiba-kun,” Higurashi’s voice sang, the cheery tone sending a sense of dread crawling down his spine, “why is there a Petite Dragon chewing on my torii gate?!”

Kaiba blinked.

Kaiba pulled the phone away from his head to stare at it.

Kaiba blinked again.

Kaiba brought the phone back to his ear.

It must have been a bad connection. Surely, he’d misheard her. Higurashi might have been foolish enough to jump in front of a god card’s attack without a plan, or to stitch a stab wound by herself, but he hadn’t pegged her for delusional, despite her fantastical stories.

Kaiba closed his eyes and took a breath. “I’m going to need you to repeat that, Higurashi.”

---

Kagome Higurashi found that waking up in the middle of the night was becoming obnoxiously commonplace.

This night was no different. Though upon waking, Kagome couldn’t really place what exactly had stirred her from sleep. The dreams hadn’t been particularly bad this time, and she had grown used to the nightmares - or at least, she had begun to come to terms with the content of them. It was freeing, in a way, to realize that the shadows of her travels and the horrors of the final battle that had torn her from her friends were slowly losing their grip on her. Whether it was a result of her acceptance, closure, or simply that she had grown desensitized, the dreams no longer bothered her as they once had.

The broken sleep pattern, however, made for a particularly grumpy Kagome.

But now that she was awake there was likely no getting back to sleep any time soon. So it was with a grumble that she grabbed her cardigan and decided that some fresh air would do her good. The Goshinboku had become a reliable midnight companion in this way. It was all she had left of an era long gone.

A petty part of Kagome did lament her once straight A academic record, but even she didn’t know what she would have done with it now. She hadn’t had any grand career aspirations even before her adventures. Perhaps she might have followed her mother’s footsteps into nursing -a skill that she had very quickly found herself grateful to have been raised with- but she wasn’t certain she would be content with that now. She was a priestess forged in the flames of battle, even if no one would ever really know. 

The world she had be born to knew only the shadow of a frail middle school girl burdened only by sickness.

Not much had the ability to rattle her now. Granted, that was a particularly high bar. Very little could compare to being dragged through the time stream to battle demons over a magical jewel that had been torn from one’s body, after all. And that had only been the beginning. Once, she had only fears of flunking Algebra to haunt her dreams, but in the wake of a journey built on blood and death, those worries had grown very small. After all she had lived through, anything actually bothering had grown increasingly rare. There were few things that could hope to throw her anymore.

The Battle City tournament had happily risen to that challenge.

Kagome had long since given up being surprised by the chaos that seemed to find her. Of course, she wasn’t entirely blameless for the way she inevitably ended up involved. She’d never been the type to sit on the sidelines and simply watch people be hurt. Most of the time, she involved herself. Of all the outcomes that Kagome could have envisioned of accompanying Souta for a competition, what occurred afterwards was not among them. Well, that wasn’t to say that anything about Battle City had been particularly expected. 

It wasn’t even the involvement of dark magic and monsters that threw her.

It was that even nearly two months after the fact, she still couldn’t really wrap her head around all the dramatics over a trading card game.

Of course, she didn’t begrudge Souta’s involvement in the game, especially with the way he had made such fast friends with Mokuba Kaiba. In fact, she genuinely adored their budding friendship. They clearly had both needed that connection - a friend who not only knew of the supernatural, of the horrors that so often came with it, but the burden of only being able to play support to a sibling more directly entangled in it all.

Of all that she mourned from the feudal era, the bond that she and Sango had built had hit surprisingly hardest of it all.

She’d get stabbed a thousand times over for Souta to be able to have that kind of kinship with someone.  Heck, Mokuba had grown on her in his own right - she’d likely do the same for him at this point. She’d always been a sap like that though. With Souta spending so much time at Kaiba Corp these days, she had even gotten to know the regulars in security. For as ineffectual as they seemed to have been against supernatural forces, they were decent people, even if some of them were bit stuffy.

Roland had even grown on her, as had his partner Fuguta. Neither one had really seemed to know what to make of her in the beginning, especially with how critical she’d been of their ability to do their jobs during the tournament. But after a few rounds of showing up with coffee for them when she came to drop off or collect Souta and they’d warmed up some.

Seto Kaiba was an entirely different matter.

He had been ruffled by her continuing presence at first. As aloof as he’d tried to be, he couldn’t fool her. But for as annoyed as he tried to act, the way his eyes lingered on Mokuba, hesitant to deny the boy his happiness, was all she needed to see.

The other competitors at Battle City hadn’t been particularly fond of him. Most of them had been nice enough, for the brief moments she’d managed to chat with them between rounds, but there was an obvious grudge between their circle and Kaiba - not that the loud blond duelist, Jonouchi, had been particularly quiet about it. Even she couldn’t blame Kaiba for being prickly at the way they pushed and prodded at him.

They might have forgotten the way he’d stepped in to save them back at the docks, even before they’d reached the finals, but she hadn’t.

Kagome chalked it up to a rivalry of sorts, especially with dynamic Kaiba had with Yugi Motou. Yugi had seemed nice enough himself, and at least whatever spirit seemed to be possessing him hadn’t seemed malevolent like the others. With those maniacs running around with dark magic that they all seemed ill equipped to deal with, a championship rivalry hadn’t seemed terribly important.

None of them had known what to make of her after the event with the god card during Kujaku’s duel. They’d seemed equal parts leery and awed. At least after that little display, Kaiba hadn’t said anything about her taking it upon herself to put up her remaining ofuda around the airship and then the platform where the last of the finals took place. Pushing herself to channel her energy into so many wards had been worth it only to see the look on that Marik’s face when he’d tried to to turn his duel against Jonouchi into another ‘Shadow Game’ only for the magic to fizzle out.

If looks could kill, his probably would have sent her several reincarnations into the future. While she’d smiled cheekily and waved to him from the spectator section, she was perfectly happy to never meet any of the Ishtar family again. When Marik collapsed upon his defeat, Rishid -the impostor from before- had dutifully gathered him up followed by one Isis Ishtar. 

When Rishid then offered the scepter that Marik had used to wield the dark magic to Jonouchi as part of his victory spoils, Kagome had openly snickered at the way the blond had practically thrown it at Yugi with an anxious, “You have it, Yug! You’re better at dealin’ with the freaky magic.”

Watching Yugi and Kaiba duel had been an entirely different experience. Even Kagome would admit it was intense, and with the magic nonsense dealt with, she’d gotten into it a bit more. She wasn’t sure who had been surprised more -Yugi and his friends or Kaiba himself- when she had joined Mokuba to openly cheer for the CEO.

Despite the dramatics, it had been fun at the end of the day. And Kaiba wasn’t so bad, even if he had felt the need to make a dramatic show of ending the tournament by blowing up the island the finals had taken place on. He was a lot better of a person than he liked to play at.

Now, Kagome did not delude herself into thinking that he was a valiant knight or anything like that. Seto Kaiba was definitely a jerk, and she was well aware that she ultimately knew very little about the man. But if she had gained anything from her adventures on the other side of the well, she liked to think that she had at least learned to be a decent judge of character. If she had learned anything beyond that, it was that there was nothing black and white about the world.

Sometimes, survival changed people and sometimes good people did bad things to achieve it - be it for themselves or others. Inuyasha especially had been like that once too, and Kaiba was prickly and guarded in much the same way.

Kagome paused mid step.

‘Ah, no, bad Kagome,’ she thought with a grimace, ‘you out of anyone know better than to compare people like that.’

They might have shared similarities in the way they had been hardened by their experiences, but Seto Kaiba was not Inuyasha any more than she was.

But at the end of the day he was still no monster, even if he liked to pretend he was happy to be one. Seto Kaiba was a cutthroat businessman, a hyper competitive gamer who could have a bit of a one track mind, and an egotistical jerk sometimes, but a monster he was not.

She had met monsters. She had faced monsters. She had defeated monsters.

Seto Kaiba was no monster.

What did happen to be a monster, was the little green creature perched happily above the gate that lead into the shrine. It was cute at least, scarcely bigger than Kirara had been with wings almost the same size as its serpentine little body. ‘Huh? Wait a minute…’

Kagome blinked.

Kagome rubbed her eyes.

Kagome blinked again.

Kagome slowly reached for her phone.

Despite the uncivilized hour, the call was answered immediately. From the sounds of the noise in the background, she wasn’t the only one calling on Kaiba Corp at the ungodly hours of the morning and while the exasperated woman on the other end of the line certainly tried to brush her off, Kagome was more stubborn than that. Besides, most of them knew who she was by then. When she insisted that this was important and their boss would be decidedly more upset to have not received this information, she was begrudgingly asked to hold. Eventually, she heard the line click over.

“Kaiba-kun,” she sang into the receiver without missing a beat, “why is there a Petite Dragon chewing on my torii gate?”

There was a pause. She could practically see the man straining not to pinch the bridge of his nose when his reply finally came through. “I’m going to need you to repeat that, Higurashi.”

---

The shrine was busier than usual that day. 

In fact, it was downright bustling. The crowd that had overtaken the shrine grounds was one that only ever appeared during the festival season. It may as well have been festival season, really. Even a few of the local restaurants had taken advantage of the situation to seek refuge from the monsters and perhaps earn a little bit of profit by offering to set up some impromptu food stalls around the courtyard. Grandpa was overjoyed, and at least she’d gotten some anpan out of it, but Kagome was rapidly nearing her wits end trying to juggle attempts to put up actual wards and being forced to play the role of dutiful shrine girl.

With monsters suddenly falling out of the sky and weather anomalies that some would believe heralded the apocalypse, it was hardly a surprise. When the end of the world seemed to be upon them, many people suddenly found themselves believers enough to pray to the gods.

‘Ironic,’ Kagome thought as she forced a smile to bid yet another visitor a polite greeting, ‘since it’s more likely to be their fault.’

Much to her ire, many of the visitors to the shrine seemed to hone in on her in particular, no doubt because of the little dragon that had decided to take a shine to her. As cute as her new little friend was, Kagome mused, it was clearly a symptom of something much more problematic. Judging by the steadily growing number of monster sightings around the world, it wasn’t a particularly isolated incident. Judging by the reports of actual casualties, it was clearly something more than simple holograms. Holograms didn’t hurt people.

The only time she’d seen that happen had been during the Battle City finals.

Like then, this was clearly the work of magic, not haywire technology. Although, she thought with a snicker, Kaiba might preen to realize just how godly the masses seemed to believe his abilities were. It had barely been a day of the strange events, but already the press were scrambling to get a word out of Kaiba Corp. Of course, even she’d called him, though she hadn’t thought it was his fault. But where there were dramatic duel monster shenanigans, Seto Kaiba was sure to at least be informed, if not actively involved.

There was a sudden wave of hushed whispering amongst the crowd, drawing Kagome from her musings. When she followed the direction they’d all started staring in, she could not help but grin. ‘Well, speak of the devil.’

All too happy to excuse herself from the needy patron that she hadn’t really been giving much attention to begin with, Kagome strode over to meet him. The whispers only grew louder.

“Isn’t that the CEO of Kaiba Corp?”

“What’s he doing here?” a voice scoffed. “This whole mess is his fault!”

“He’ll need the gods help to get himself out of this mess,” another muttered.

“That shrine girl seems to know him-“

“Kaiba-kun,” she greeted, opting to ignore the chatter.

Kaiba raked his eyes over her. Were it anyone else, Kagome might have thought he was ogling her. But this was Seto Kaiba. While she might not have known him long, Kagome had gotten enough of a read on him to realize he had the libido of a rock and if it ever did assert itself, it was more likely to be because of a lucrative business deal or a fancy card than a woman. His gaze lingered on the little dragon perched along her shoulders before he finally looked her in the eye.

“I’m impressed, Higurashi,” he drawled, “you got the monster right this time.”

Kagome threw her anpan at him.