Author's Note: This will be the last chapter of this story. Thank you very much to everyone who's taken the time to read it, particularly my kind reviewers. I am very grateful and privileged.

It's lonely at the top.

At least, that's what everyone who isn't at the top tells themselves, and each other. I suppose that it makes them feel better, that believing in the unhappiness of their superiors makes their own problems easier to bear. And, after all, why not let them have that? They certainly don't have much else.

Like every other cliché, though, this dubious pearl of wisdom has been distilled past the point of relevance. Success, to be sure, can lead to loneliness, but it isn't a certain consequence of it. Most often, it leads to isolation instead, a state which most people mistake for loneliness, but which in fact is different in some important respects.

If you prefer solitude, for instance, isolation can be closer to Heaven than it is to Hell.

Loneliness, as I define it, is the feeling of being unconnected to anything or anyone else, coupled with the wish that the opposite were true. Most people who believe they know something of me would say that the latter condition should render me immune from loneliness, but in truth, only two things have kept me from descending into it, and neither is any personal immunity.

One of them, of course, is Mokuba. The other was my relationship with him, the nameless Pharaoh who used to live in Yugi's body, and to whom I've been connected, apparently, for millennia.

It may be incorrect to talk of our relationship as such. I never considered myself his friend, despite all the assistance I gave him. I imagine that he might have felt differently, but to me, he was only ever my rival, my nemesis… though perhaps not precisely my enemy. He was the only external obstacle to my personal perfection that I wasn't able to defeat, no matter how far I developed, or how strong I became.

And now that he's gone, I'll never have the chance to change that.

I would have given anything to have been the one to fight him in the end, to have played Yugi's part in the ritual that freed not only Atem, but any hope I had of realizing my dream of defeating him. And, of course, I did everything I could to make that happen… but Destiny, or something at least as powerful and meddlesome, saw fit to deny me my due once again. Usually, I've been able to tear whatever I need from life anyway, with or without Destiny's permission, but in this case, I couldn't.

And so, here I am, with only bitter regret to fill the void he left behind.

His friends made some minor overtures to me once we got back from Egypt. Tea suggested that we spend more time together; Joey demanded a rematch to avenge his defeat at Battle City, and Duke suggested that we might even make a day of it, a sort of informal tournament which could include his dice game in addition to Duel Monsters. Thankfully, my responsibilities provided the perfect excuse, and after a few half-hearted protestations, mostly on Tea's behalf, they all left me alone, as I'm sure they would have liked to in the first place.

A few days later, however, Yugi showed up at my office, with his usual leather outfit and red, swollen eyes. Any decent human being might have asked how he was coping, or offered some words of comfort; I greeted him with cold politeness, and listened to his rambling for a minute or two, until he managed to stumble across his point.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"For what?" I replied.

"For…" He took a deep breath, and for a brief moment, I thought I saw him shiver. "I know you wanted to duel Atem. I know you wanted to defeat him, if only for the sake of your duelling record. I'm sorry I had to insist on doing it myself."

"It's done with now. You don't need to apologize." I didn't tell him that, having seen the duel, I had begun to doubt, if only slightly, the certainty of my victory.

"But I really am sorry. And, Kaiba…" He sat up just a bit straighter, and spoke with just a bit more gravity. "If you like, we could still have a duel. It could be an official match--"

"That won't be necessary." An edge crept into my voice.

Whether he recognized the edge, or merely decided to press on in spite of it, I couldn't say. "I wouldn't have Atem to help me, or the God cards…"

"Yugi, stop."

He met my eyes then, and though I forget the exact quality of his gaze, I remember being impressed by it. "You'd probably win. You'd be the champion again."

I turned away from him then; I don't remember the act of doing so, but when I spoke again, it was to the view of Domino City below us. "I refuse."

His voice faltered, and for a moment, it was almost possible to mistake him for the same child I had faced on Duelist Kingdom. "Isn't this what you want?"

There was no point in trying to explain that it wouldn't be the same, defeating him instead of Atem. There was no reason to tell him that, after all, I'm not quite sure what I want, if indeed I want anything. No reason, of course, except the one that lurks behind all of our most embarrassing disclosures and intimate moments; the need to be understood by, to feel connected to, another person.

And I've learned to live without that.

"It's alright." I turned back to him, and rose from my chair; he did the same. "Besides, it's likely that we'll face each other again by chance, in the course of another tournament."

He glanced down, and then back at me. "I doubt it. I think I'm going to give up Duel Monsters… at least for a while." He swallowed, and the duellist's fire in his eyes was perfectly incongruous to his pitiful state. "It reminds me of him… just like everything else."

"I understand," I said, detachedly.

He smiled at me, and shook his head. "No, you don't. But that's okay." He nodded deeply. "Thank you for your time, Kaiba."

"Don't mention it."

He turned his back on me; I sat down and swivelled my chair to face my keyboard. I heard my office door open, and when I looked up a few seconds later, he was standing there, staring at me.

"Is there something else?" I asked, with barely a pause in my typing.

He hesitated, then said, very deliberately, "You know, I would rather that you had been the one… to fight him, to send him away. I would rather that it had been anyone else… even though, at the same time, I'm glad it was me."

I stopped typing. "I don't understand."

He smiled again. "I don't expect you to." And, with that, he was gone. I haven't seen him since.

Often, I find myself returning to this memory, as though I've missed something important in our brief dialogue. I wonder whether I was wrong to reject his offer, whether defeating him might have gone at least some distance toward mending my wounded pride, whether it might be possible to avenge myself on Atem by defeating his protégé. Many times, I've been on the brink of picking up the phone and calling him, but something always holds me back. I can't even say for sure what it is, but I suspect that I know the answer nonetheless.

It seems that to be immune to loneliness is to be dependent on solitude.