Shadow:Okay, I'm actually sick of this pairing. This is the third rewrite of the seventh shot I've started for this round, and I still dislike it. Anyway - round three for Compy's contest – Buddyshipping; Jounouchi Katsuya x Honda Hiroto.

Notes: Mild shonen-ai, boy x boy. Don't like? Don't read.

'Kaa-san/ Okaa-san – (Japanese) mother

For Simplicity's Sake

The first time Honda saw him they were both eleven, the other perched high on a wall kicking his legs back and forth, back and forth, so his heels hit the brick in a steady staccato. His clothes were a little too big, hanging loose around arms and ankles – but then his clothes had always been baggy, always, because he said he liked them that way.

(And loose clothes didn't press and rub at half-healed cuts and bruises, so he didn't have to wince so obviously all the time.)

Honda stopped, halfway home on an errand to go grocery shopping, and looked up at the unusual creature on the wall.

(Because it was weird, and new, and he wasn't used to blonds in the neighbourhood.)

"Hey."

The strange boy looked down, legs still swinging, and Honda saw distant brown eyes caught up in some faraway dream, a red slash on a fair cheek. "…Hey." His words were tinged with some accent Honda couldn't quite place – the boy was a foreigner?

(It explained the hair.)

Honda pressed on, curious. "You new?"

"Yeah." The boy above him nodded briefly.

"Just moved in?"

"Few days ago."

"I've been here all my life."

"Wonderful." The drumbeat of the heels finally stopped, but a look of boredom had entered the boy's expression.

Honda shifted, a little self-conscious. "You want to come down from there?"

"Not really," was the laconic retort, and yet the blond boy leapt down from the wall anyway, landing in a graceful crouch on the ground before straightening, kind of like a cat.

"…Honda," said Honda briefly after pausing adequately long enough to admire the other's acrobatics, by means of introduction. He extended a hand, like his mother had taught him to do when being polite to people you didn't know very well. "Honda Hiroto."

"Jounouchi," the blond stranger returned, hands stuffed firmly in large pockets. "Jounouchi Katsuya."

"D'you get 'Kat'?"

"No." Jounouchi's reply was cold, but a flare of amber shone in his brown eyes, the temper behind the frost.

(Honda was to discover later he allowed only Shizuka to call him that – Yugi sometimes being an exception, when the boy took him up on the offer.)

"…Can I call you Jou?"

An easy shrug. "If you like." Jounouchi raised a hand, absent-mindedly rubbing at the cut on his cheek, smearing his skin with red.

Honda finally paid attention to the scratch. "Do you want that seen to?"

"Huh?" His companion stared at him blankly, until Honda pointed deliberately to his face. A little bewildered Jounouchi stared at him, until he saw the red blood on the back of the hand he'd used to rub at his face. "Oh."

"Well?" Honda shifted the groceries he carried, unable to hide the vague impatience in his voice, mild irritation waging war with curiosity over this recalcitrant stranger. "I think my 'kaa-san will feed you too if you come along soon -"

Jounouchi was at his side instantly. "I'll come."

(Neither he or his dad could cook very well.)

They travelled along in silence until they got to Honda's home, Honda shoving the door open and entering, Jounouchi on his heels, ambling along to the kitchen. Honda's mother met them there, smiling at her son and taking the shopping.

"Thank you, Hiroto." She spied Jounouchi, smile extending to welcome the blond boy. "And who is this?"

"He's Jou," Honda told his mother simply, "and he's my friend."

(First and foremost forever.)

They were fourteen, and Jounouchi was still in his baggy clothes, but then he's lanky and there was a jacket over his t-shirt and sharp knives in those pockets of his. The cut on his cheek was replaced with a deeper slash on his arm, and purple bruising all the way down his left side from fists that didn't belong to a gang.

(His lout of a father, though they never mentioned that.)

Jounouchi still didn't give a damn, still had that gleaming golden hair and devil-may-care attitude. Honda started wearing his hair in tough-looking spikes, pulling on a leather jacket as well in an effort to fit in with the rest of the gang.

(He made sure to always take it off before he got home though. His mother would've killed him if she knew what he'd been up to.)

When they accidentally wandered into another gang's territory by mistake –

(At least, it had been a mistake on Honda's part. Honda privately thought Jou had been out looking for trouble…)

They got into a fight, with rival gang members. They were outnumbered, five to one, and they ended up in hospital, Honda with a broken arm, and Jou with even more cuts and bruises.

(And Jou hid the knives before they got picked up, and Honda told his mother they'd been set-upon by a pack of thugs.)

"Jou…?" Honda poked his friend in a patch of unbandaged skin later, his own arm strapped firmly to his side.

"Yeah?" The blond looked at him, one eyebrow raised.

"We're going to high school soon."

"And?"

"Don't you think -?" Hesitancy.

"What?"

"…Never mind."

(Jounouchi never did.)

High school then, and there's a whole hell of weirdness with it. They're bullies, because at least when they're bullying they're not generally bullied by others. A dog eat dog world – bite or be bitten. But then there's Yugi –

Honda doesn't see what Jounouchi sees in him. Can't fathom what has caught his friend's attentions so with the pipsqueak, even if the kid is exceptionally good at games. And yet, he hangs around with Yugi because Jou will insist on hanging around with Yugi and Honda's not about to leave the two of them alone because Jounouchi might get contaminated with nerd-germs.

(And he keeps telling himself that, even when it slowly starts to dawn on him that Yugi's actually an amazing person.)

And that's the beginning of their adventures together, their bullying days behind them, and something about Jou – that brittle, brittle frost – goes…goes soft…

(And it's wonderful and horrible at the same time, and though it pleases Honda to see Jou's warmth, it stings a little that it's Yugi that's responsible.)

So yes – adventures. Strange things, all the warped people of the world seemingly converging on Domino in one fell swoop to mark their peculiar brand of madness upon the populace. There must be something off in the water supply otherwise, because Honda finds himself – alongside Jounouchi, Yugi and the brunette, Anzu – facing the droves of psychos the world apparently has to offer them.

(Honda later feels that it's deeply unfair he can't put 'saving the world numerous times' on his CV.)

And when they save the world, or just themselves, there's so much happiness after, and after one particularly harrowing time Honda finds himself hugging Jou in sheer relief - and it's a manly hug, because they are men, and there is back-thumping and throat-clearing all around in the fit of sheer awkwardness afterwards.

(Even further afterwards Honda wondered why some niggling voice in his brain kept reproaching him for not hugging Jounouchi a little longer.)

"What," Honda asks one day, whilst lounging on his stomach on his best friend's bed and eating a packet of chocolate drops he found on the bedside cabinet, "is that thing?" Yugi, seated cross-legged on the floor beside the bed, looks like he wants to ask exactly the same thing, his fingers knotted in the chain of the Millennium Puzzle.

Jou is currently waving around a purple monstrosity he's just fetched from the dark depths of his god-forsaken wardrobe. He looks reproachfully over the top of said abomination when Honda puts forward his query, at least feigning hurt that the brunet should have forgotten something that made such an impact on their lives –

(Even if it had only been for five minutes.)

"This," and the monstrosity is brandished with all the aplomb something fuzzy and smelly can be brandished when it is fact supposed to be a slinky concoction of silk, seduction and male desire, "is my dress."

His friends finally got it.

"Oh," said Yugi.

"You kept that thing?" asked Honda.

(For Jou had worn it once – once – along with high heels and an atrocious blonde wig in an effort to win a beauty contest and snatch the prize. Needless to say, he lost. Miserably.)

Jou clutches his hell-spawned-baby to his chest. "Why would I ha' thrown it out?"

Yugi smiles at that, though rather weakly. "Jou…"

"Jou," Honda brusquely overrides the smallest of the trio, "where do we even begin?"

The blond actually pouts at that. "I like it."

His oldest friend shook his head. "I'm not even going to begin to explore the levels of disturbing that statement invokes."

"You'll see – look, I'll go try it on -"

"Jou-!" Too late, too late, Jou already gone from the room to put on the infamous dress, Honda smacking his head off the nearest wall and Yugi looking somewhat pensive.

Jou returns some ten minutes later, dressed in the purple atrocity and preening. Yugi lets out an extremely weird noise in the back of his throat, goggle-eyed, and Honda –

"…Jou, you're killing my eyes…"

(And his mind can't help but note the fact Jounouchi has grown taller since he wore the dress last and so it's shorter on him, and Jou's legs gone on forever and ever and ever and ever –

He subtly asks Anzu about men's fascination with women in skirts later, and all she can do is shrug and deplore the opposite sex.

"It's a skirt, Honda. Therefore men chase it."

Honda decides to apply this logic, because then he can stop reminding himself that it was Jou he kept insistently checking out.)

They were eighteen and although everything had changed nothing had changed at all. Strange to consider, seven years making men out of children, spelling love and loss and friendship and all the things Honda couldn't recall or name but had…cherished and would forever cherish –

(Although he'd be dead and buried before anyone caught him admitting that.)

They'd all grown; they'd all suffered their adventures; they were all about to graduate high school. Yami had come; Yami had gone. Honda was on his way home after going shopping for groceries for his mother, and Jounouchi Katsuya was sitting high on a wall kicking his legs back and forth, back and forth, so his heels hit the brick in a steady staccato. His clothes were a little too big, though not baggy, tailored for slim lines and hidden muscles.

(Because there weren't bruises anymore so much, unless Jou and Honda had been mock-fighting and accidentally taken a tumble.)

Honda stopped, halfway home, and looked up at the form of his best friend with a rueful smile on his face. The other wasn't looking at him.

(Jou was still the only true blond in the neighbourhood.)

"Hey."

Jounouchi looked down, and gave a lazy wave. "…Hey." His brown eyes were distant, caught up in some faraway, ever-playing dream Honda had never been able to quite catch up to.

(But he was comfortable with that.)

"Déjà vu?" Honda asked the other.

Jounouchi nodded. "Yeah."

"You want to come down from there?" Honda felt it best to keep to tradition.

Jounouchi grinned, patting the space on the wall beside him, determined to add something new. "Why don't you come up here instead?"

His brunet companion brandished his shopping bag, glad of the excuse. "Hands are full."

"Very well -" and Jounouchi lightly sprang from his seat, landing in a crouch that was still graceful after seven years, straightening with an easy smile. Lanky, lithe, acrobatic Jou, "Am I following you home?"

"…I could make a dog joke there but-"

"Do it and I'll hit you."

Honda only laughed, hearing only good-humoured exasperation in his friend's voice. "I've never met a dog called 'Kat' anyway -" Jou hit him upside-the-head. " – Love you too."

Jou snorted, before draping an arm loosely over the other youth's shoulders, resting his head lazily near Honda's neck. His hair smelled sweet and clean and vaguely of watermelon – perhaps he'd washed it that morning but still Honda's smile froze, turned a little brittle, the other's warmth and affection and –

(He was Honda's friend.)

"Hey, get off me, you fat lump." The brunet elbowed the other to the side, Jou sidling away with an overly dramatic woebegone expression. "I can't carry this lot," handy groceries brandished once more, "and you."

"Well, obviously I'm the more important one." Jounouchi tried to defend his case.

Honda shook his head, grinning. "Food takes precedence." Jou pouted at him. "…Do you want feeding? 'Kaa-san's making roast tonight and -"

Jounouchi was at his side instantly once more. "I'll come."

(Some things really would never change.)

They travelled along bantering with one another until they got to Honda's home, Honda shoving the door open and entering, Jounouchi on his heels, both of them ambling along to the kitchen they both knew so well. Honda's mother met them there, smiling at them both.

"Jounouchi-kun!" The woman was fond of the blond, the youth almost a second son due to the amount of time he had spent in the Honda household. "I assume you'll be staying for dinner?"

Jounouchi promptly fixed her with a pleading gaze. "Please?"

Hiroto's mother only nodded and laughed, shooing both teenagers out of her kitchen. They went to the living-room, camping out on the sofa and mocking the terrible shows on the television. Jou sprawled out on the seat as he often did, flopping against Honda's shoulder. Honda let him, because Jounouchi was his friend.

(And only his friend, first and foremost his friend, and friends didn't spoil friendships with strange ideas -)

"Hey…Jou?" Honda braved the strange turmoil in his head with more than a little trepidation, his stomach a little sick, his mind preoccupied by long legs, blood, acrobatics and golden, watermelon-smelling hair –

"Hm?" Jounouchi Katsuya looks up at his oldest friend, brown eyes focused directly on him, innocent still in so many ways, friendly, trusting, and so free of guile.

Honda wanted to –

But ah, he couldn't –

Bravery died a swift death, and Honda inwardly sighed, feigning embarrassment externally. "…I forgot what I was going to say. Never mind?"

(And so Katsuya, his friend Jounouchi, never ever did.)