fic: go directly to Hell, do not pass go do not collect $200

[xparrot]

I said it before, that I fell for Kaiba because he reminds me of Lex. Brilliant and deeply disturbed, casualties of their sadistic fathers' damage and their own ambitions. Kaiba is the more culpable of the two, having chosen his path rather than being born into it; ironic that he's the one to eventually rise above his darkness, while Lex is ultimately damned. Maybe it's because Lex is destiny's puppet victim, while Kaiba has always forged his own. Or maybe Lex just needs someone to shatter his heart.

Anyway. They're obviously a match made in some dark and deliciously twisted place.

I might've futzed with the YGO timeline; the story is set in the spring of '95, with Lex at 15 and Kaiba at 14 (for anyone flummoxed by imaging the real with the animated, please follow praiseofshadows's lead and picture Kaiba as played by Gackt). The idea is that Gozaburo sent Seto to an American boarding school for a semester to practice his English; Seto took the opportunity to learn some other valuable life skills from the school's expert. I'm not confident of the characterizations of either one of them, but hell, they're just kids here. Seriously fucked up kids.

Exchange Student {9,795 words}
NC-17 (Warnings for underaged sex and references to child abuse), Lex Luthor/Seto Kaiba
Sometimes broken edges can almost fit together. Lex meets a boy one semester at Excelsior.

Read it on AO3

Comments

[yma2.livejournal.com]

Firstly that was amazing. Really, really amazing!

The first thing that caught my attention was the wonderful, re-occuring use of the serpentine/lizard/dragon metaphore you use, which fits Kaiba so wonderfully well for a variety of reasons.

The characterisation of Kaiba, unsmiling, tence, self-confident whilst also being quietly paranoid is beautiful. Bits of this were almost painful to read.

Kaiba's obbsession with winning, and Lex's... obsession with... (and this is harder to define...) controle and getting what he wants... (which is a slightly different thing to winning,), Lex's manipulation, the darkness within him counterjuxtaposed with, in a way, the goodness, is sweet. The part where Lex asks Kaiba to stay is actually quite sad because of course we know he's going to say no. And even if he had said yes... but he wouldnt. Lex demands utter trust from those he loves, and I don't think Seto can really give that. Not at this point anyway. Alright, he might have trust in Lex to do certain thinkgs, he might even trust Lex not to betray him but I don't think he would quite trust him in general.

And I think that in the long term the two would be too much of a threat to one another. They both demand to hold certain amounts of power, it would come back to who could top the other, as it were and I don't know that either of them could handle that. Not at this stage.

Ah, but I'm just going into drivel here.

The characterisation, whilst very much EARLY Kaiba and EARLY Lex, was brilliant, especially seeing as Lex, in many ways, came off sounding like the nicer of the two, which I find ironic. The sex was fairly hot, (not very, but this was a character piece so it didn't need to be.) The concept was well thought out and the use of chess all the way through, ending with Seto's ambiguous win (and I'm glad it was ambiguous, I feel it might have been OOC otherwise. Not so much that Seto could loose at chess, more that he could accept that loss so gracefully, even to Lex.)

The only thing that I feel could improve this oh so slightly is a translation at the bottom, via notes, of some of the japanese Seto spouts off. There's not much and I don't think it's deserpatly needed, but it might be nice.

Beyond that this was a fantastic story. I'm VERY glad you wrote it and I enjoyed every word!

Oh, and there was one other thing that would really make this story rock.

A sequel.

;D

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

Eee, thank you!

I'm happy the characterizations of both of them worked for you. I felt uneasy with both of them, as they both were different when they were younger, but they're also not really like kids at all...

Yeah, I don't think it would work in the long-term. At least not at this point. Kaiba can't be close to anyone (save Mokuba) and Lex desperately wants closeness, but he's not ready for it either. (When I started writing this I wasn't expecting Lex to sort of fall in love the way he does...but this is Lex, and he wants love so badly. And Kaiba doesn't at all, not by now, so...) Lex comes across as nicer because he is, at this age; he's screwed up, but he's close to the young man you see in first season SV, craving approval, trying to be better than he was raised to be. He's got a long road before he becomes the villain of the story...while Kaiba himself is almost there.

And glad the sex was not-too-hot. It's actually about the most graphic I've written, but I was trying for a certain level of...discomfort. Awkwardness. (not to mention, yeah, disturbed 14 year old boy. I was a bit uncomfortable writing it...)

Oh! The Japanese. I can put a note...I tend to ignore such notes myself so don't think about them. 'Chikusho' is a general Japanese curse, fairly strong as they go. (and I really have to double-check because I'm almost certain Kaiba uses it, but not totally sure. Kaiba's Japanese speech is we~ird but I was hoping that since he was younger here he hadn't picked up his more atypical patterns yet...)

And a sequel. Heh. If it happened it would be much in the future and rather different in tone...we'll see...!