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You’re a stranger in your own home.
You spent countless hours in these halls, and countless more in their virtual recreations, so it doesn’t feel like you’ve been gone for six years. It feels like you were here yesterday, and then you blinked and your world rearranged itself around you.
The dark, tasteful, imposing living room furniture has been replaced with a big squishy couch and a tangle of wires connecting to a jumble of video game consoles. The formal ballroom is now, of all things, an exercise room—you can’t even see the elegant rosewood flooring under the layer of smelly workout mats. The dining room is pretty much the same, but the curtains are drawn and the tabletop is coated with a thin layer of dust. They must eat most of their meals in the kitchen these days, like common folk.
Your father’s study is gone. Not just redecorated, or repurposed, but gone. There’s nothing left of it but a blank stretch of wall where the door should be, a square of grass that looks slightly greener than the rest of the lawn, and a hole in the floorplan. It must have been ripped out from its very foundations, like pulling a weed from its roots so it won’t sprout back up again. Which is probably just the sort of melodramatic metaphor that was running through Seto’s head when he had it demolished. From what you’ve pieced together about your…brother, he’s a very salt-the-earth kind of person.
Which just makes it all the more confusing that he chose to keep you around.
He’s given you your own bedroom (hmph, ‘given,’ as though he has any right to give you a scrap of what’s rightfully yours). It’s…nice enough. A bit bland, maybe: A bed. A desk. An inoffensive painting of a landscape. A bookshelf filled with the kind of books you buy to fill a shelf, not because you actually intend to read them.
It’s not the room that used to be yours, but you aren’t brave enough to open that particular door. You’re not sure which possibility scares you the most: that it’s been changed beyond recognition, or that it’s exactly the same.
“We could watch TV,” Mokuba offers.
You hum noncommittally.
“Oooor…” Your brother is sprawled upside-down, his feet resting on the back of the couch and the tips of his hair dangling against the carpet (your father never would have stood for it if you’d tried to grow your hair out that long). “We could play Pokémon. Or Mario Kart. Or there’s this really cool game called Capsule Monsters—”
Truth be told, it’s hard to get too enthused about anything with Seto “working” just a few feet away. It’d probably be more convincing if he’d actually bother to type anything. Or if he hadn’t been glaring daggers at you over the screen of his laptop for the past ten minutes.
“’kay, I get it, maybe you’re kinda gamed out. We could, uh, read books? Or I’ve got some Legos up in my room I could go get. Or…uh…”
Mokuba lets himself go boneless and slides off the couch like a wet noodle until his head bumps against your leg. You giggle a little, even though Seto’s glaring at you even harder now that you’re this close to his precious baby brother.
“Do you like soccer?” Mokuba asks. “We don’t have any nets, but at least we could kick the ball around.”
Now there’s an idea. Obviously you can’t play it indoors, so it’d be an excuse to get away from Seto’s watchful eyes for a while.
More importantly, you’ve always been good at soccer.
“That sounds fun,” you say.
“Great!” Mokuba chirps. He springs to his feet with surprising speed considering how relaxed he looked a second ago, grabs you by the hand, pulls you up from your spot on the floor (Father probably wouldn't have been thrilled with the idea of you sitting on the floor either, but it was surprisingly comfy down there), and drags you over to the sliding glass door. “I’ll show you where we keep all the sports stuff!”
You groan inwardly when Seto tucks his laptop under his arm and trails after the two of you, but you really should have expected it.
Outside, Mokuba shuffles around in the garden shed while Seto settles himself in a lawn chair, looking more like a vulture on the prowl than a man ready to soak in some sunshine. You wait, avoiding eye-contact with him and taking stock of all the ways the mansion’s grounds have changed in the last six years. Just as you’re trying to remember if there used to be a tennis court or a rose garden where the new pool is, Mokuba comes running back out again, with a soccer ball in his hands and a broken racket stuck around his ankle that he impatiently kicks back into the shed. “Okay,” he calls, “you first!” The ball soars through the air and rolls to a stop at your feet.
Your father wanted you to be well-rounded in all subjects, and that included sports. You’ve been training for this your whole life. Imagining the look on Mokuba’s face (better yet, on Seto’s face) when he sees your perfect kick, you lift your foot, aim for the ball…
…and you miss.
Um. Maybe you can pretend that never happened. You kick again. Your foot sails cleanly over the ball with inches to spare.
Mokuba tries to hide his laughter behind his hand. His smile fades when he notices the look on your face.
“Hey, Noah, it’s okay—”
You kick. You miss. You kick, stumble, and almost fall flat on your face. You snarl.
“Noah…”
You wind your leg back and send it flying at the ball with all your strength.
You land on your back with a whump.
“Noah!”
For a second you just lie there, stunned. Then you feel a hand on your arm. Mokuba. Trying to help you up.
You shove him roughly away.
“Noah, listen, don’t worry about—”
You let out a strangled scream of rage, and he trails off, wide-eyed.
You yank out a hunk of grass and dirt and fling it to the ground. You’re throwing a tantrum like a spoiled child and you don’t care, what’s wrong with you, you’re supposed to be able to do this, why can’t you do this—
A tall shadow blocks out the sun.
You freeze, curled up in a tight little ball with your arms around your knees, your hand still flecked with dirt. Father would be angry with you, for embarrassing him and making a scene and getting grass stains all over your nice clothes, and most of all for failing. Father isn’t here. But Seto is. He towers over you, his face impassive.
You brace yourself.
“Your motor skills might not be calibrated properly,” he says.
Oh.
“This body’s a prototype, so there could still be some kinks in the programming. I can take a look at it if you—”
He’s still talking, shooting off a flurry of technical phrases and a surprising lack of sarcastic comments, but you’ve stopped listening.
This is what you get for forgetting you’re not real.
In a sense, the world you experience is still a virtual one.
The Virtual System has always been capable of tricking the mind, creating the illusion of smell, touch, and any other sensation that one might expect to feel. Seto just made your virtual senses portable and mapped them over visual and auditory input from the real world. So now you’re a string of computer code piloting an android, as opposed to of a string of computer code sitting around in a metal sphere collecting dust.
It’s a very convincing android, too. You only notice the gaps in its realism in little details. Like the way water beads and slides across your hands, behaving more the way it usually does on rubber than on skin. The fact that your hair doesn’t grow. Your inability to blush, or sweat, or eat, or cry.
And you really shouldn’t miss nuisances like that anyway.
You poke your head into Seto’s home office. It’s smaller than the one your father always used, you note with something like satisfaction. “You called, o brother-of-mine?” you say, your voice dripping with over-exaggerated politeness.
“How old do you want to be.”
You blink at him. “Ex…cuse me?”
“Your age. On your paperwork.” When you continue to stare at him blankly, he sighs and rolls his eyes. Aww, sorry I can’t read your mind, Seto, you think but just barely stop yourself from saying out loud.
“I’m forging a new set of legal documents for you,” he explains, still with that look on his face like it should have been obvious what he was talking about from the get-go. “But I’m going to need a new year of birth.”
“What’s wrong with the old one? It’s your birth year too.”
“Yeah,” Seto says flatly, “and clearly we’re mentally and emotionally the same age.”
You try not to pout.
He gives you a measuring look. “But you’re not exactly a ten-year-old anymore either, are you.”
You suppose you’re not.
He twirls his pen between his fingers (what a show-off). “So what age do you want me to put on your birth certificate?”
You give it some thought.
“How old is Mokuba?”
Seto raises an eyebrow. “Eleven.”
“Then I’m twelve,” you say, punctuating your pronouncement with a decisive nod that would have made your public speaking instructors proud.
“Twelve it is, then.” He scribbles something down. “Guess that means you’ll be going into seventh grade.”
“I guess it—wait, what?!”
“What did you think I needed the legal documents for?” Seto asks, one corner of his mouth twitching. “To sign you up for softball?”
“I—you—” You gape like a fish. “I had access to all recorded human knowledge for six years! No tutor could teach me anything I don’t already know!”
“Who said anything about tutors,” Seto says, and how dare he sound so amused. “I was thinking about Domino Middle School.”
You stare at him in abject horror.
“You’re sending me,” you say slowly, “to public school?”
“Unless you really wanna go to East Domino Prep that badly, but I figured you’d rather stick with Mokuba.”
“But—but—” He can’t be serious. “But why do I have to go to school at all? Are you really that desperate to get me out of the house?”
“That is a fringe benefit.”
You sputter wordlessly.
“But mostly it’s because you’re an under-socialized mess and you need to talk to kids other than Mokuba.”
“You want me to make friends.” You let out a disbelieving little laugh. “You want to talk to me about the importance of friendship?”
His mouth twists like he bit into a lemon. “I wouldn’t put it in quite those terms, but most humans do need some form of social interaction. And six years in an isolation tank clearly didn’t do you any favors.”
If you had blood, it’d be draining from your face right now.
For a second, Seto almost looks…sorry?...but there’s no time to analyze that reaction, because something sick and panicky surges up inside you and suddenly words are spilling from your mouth without stopping at your brain first. “I won’t go! You can’t make me do anything! You’re not my father!”
Ooooooh.
Oh no, he’s staring at you, and the implications of what you just said have hit you like a brick (or a car, some morbid part of your brain points out unhelpfully). You’ve gone too far, oh no, where’s Mokuba, surely he wouldn’t try anything with Mokuba around but where’s Mokuba—
“Wow,” Seto says, deadpan. “That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
You’re too busy pushing your fight-or-flight reaction back down to be insulted on your father’s behalf. It occurs to you that you’re not entirely sure if you should be insulted, and the thought makes you even queasier.
“Anyway…” He’s all business now, like nothing happened. “You’re legally required to get an education in some form or another. Would you rather have me homeschooling you?”
Nope, nope, on second thought public school sounds fine, public school’s great.
Besides, after everything you’ve already been through, how bad could it be?
You’re in hell.
In first period this morning, the kid giving a presentation wrote “Bye Sam” on his opening slide instead of “By Sam,” and the teacher glared at you when you muttered “If only.” In second period there was gum under your desk and you touched it. In third period your math teacher made the mistake of uttering the phrase “the volume of the balls.” It took twenty minutes for the cretins you call classmates to stop laughing.
Now it’s fourth period, and you’re not sure how you’re going to survive the rest of the day, much less the semester. If only you could figure out Mokuba’s secret—he seems unruffled by the trials and tribulations of middle school. Not that you get to see him much. He’s in sixth grade, so you don’t have any classes together, and whenever you sit with him at lunch or pass him in the halls he’s surrounded by his gaggle of so-called “friends,” the obnoxious, sniggering fools whom he tolerates for some reason. He’s a mysterious creature, your brother.
As your teacher passes back yesterday’s quiz, you don’t even attempt to hide your yawn. Even if it weren’t for the, ah, uninterrupted study time you’d had in the Virtual World, these assignments would be child’s play. Your father had you cover most of this material years before…well…before…
Your quiz sheet plops down on your desk, saving you from following your musings down any unsavory paths. You glance at the score.
Your heart—metaphorically, since you don’t actually have one—stops.
Your chair shoots back with a screech. The teacher pauses. The entire class swivels to face you, like they’re expecting some kind of circus show. You open your mouth—
Getting sent to the principal’s office always sounded so ominous when you read about it in books as a child. It’s really almost a letdown.
You sit primly in your chair while she drones on and on about “respect” and “things that are and are not acceptable in an academic environment” and “not publicly mocking your teacher’s fashion choices.” Your eyes drift from the mural of the school mascot on the wall (Go Domino Dolphins!) to the belabored-sounding ceiling fan to the mysterious purple stain on the ugly carpet. You’ve gotten more intimidating lectures for using the wrong salad fork.
Then she sends you out to the waiting room with the promise that your parent or guardian will be here soon. What a joke. As if Seto would leave Kaiba Corp unattended just to come to some gym-socks-and-hormones-smelling school and—
Out the window, a sleek limousine pulls into the parking lot with a squeal of tires.
As Jordan from third period would say, “balls.”
Seto Kaiba strides through the doors of Domino Middle School like he owns the place (he probably could if he wanted to, but who would want to?), stalks past you without a word, and sweeps into the principal’s office with a dramatic swish of his coat. For several long, tense minutes, you wait outside the door, swinging your legs and wishing he’d programmed your body with better hearing.
It’s an awkward limo ride home.
You gaze out the window. Seto stares straight ahead, his arms crossed. You watch several blocks of Domino swoosh by before he finally speaks.
“Why.”
You stare resolutely at a row of passing billboards. “Why what, Seto? You’re going to have to be more specific.”
“Look, from what I’ve seen of him at parent-teacher conferences I’m not gonna try and argue with you about the outfit thing—not that you have room to talk—” You bite back an indignant gasp. “—but why exactly did you feel the need to express it right then? In the middle of class? While yelling?”
Any number of excuses flash through your head, but he’s going to find out sooner or later. Better to control the flow of information than to leave it to blow up in your face later on. Still, your voice shakes slightly when you answer.
“He…he gave me…an A minus.”
You squeeze your kneecaps with a death grip and wait for the fallout.
“Uh…congratulations?”
You whip around so fast your seatbelt cuts into your shoulder. “What do you mean congratulations?”
“If you think you can do better, there’s always the next exam to prove it, but—” He groans and runs a hand across his face. “Did you seriously just throw a fit and drag me over from the other end of town because you got half a letter grade from perfect?”
You gawk at him. “Don’t—don’t you care?”
He gives you a look. “Like you said, you had six years to study this crap. I’m really not that concerned about your academic abilities.”
Right, right, this is a social exercise. “W-well, you’ll be pleased to know that I’ve had at least eight positive social interactions over the past three days and—”
“You don’t have a quota, nerd.”
Then…what is his metric for your success?
You don’t bother trying to ask. Instead you sniff and turn back to the window. “Maybe it wasn’t about the grade at all. Maybe I was just that horrified by his outfit. I mean, plaid and stripes? Really?”
“Says the one who wore bowties with shorts ‘til he was ten.”
“Have you looked in a mirror lately? I’ve seen more tasteful shoulder pads on female talk show hosts from the 80s.”
You snipe at each other the rest of the way home, and you push your fear and confusion aside.
Teasing Seto serves a twofold purpose. It’s entertaining, naturally, but it’s also a chance to test what you can and can’t get away with. And so—always with witnesses around or Mokuba safely nearby, just in case—you push your new guardian’s buttons. You dance around the topics you already know are too dangerous to broach, but anything else is fair game: his status as runner-up Duel Monsters champion, the number of speeches he’s given while standing on a table or dangling from an aircraft in the last week, the Blue Eyes White Dragon boxers you spotted when Mokuba was trying to teach you what a washing machine was…really, he makes himself too easy a target.
Not that he doesn’t give as good as he gets. Or at least, he’ll snark right back at you and call you all sorts of immature names (who even says “dweeb” unironically?), and occasionally he even lands a blow where it hurts. And yet, the more you push, the more you find that it’s remarkably difficult to make him truly angry, or even to get him to raise his voice.
…No, that’s not entirely true. It’s difficult to get him to raise his voice now. At first…
You remember a day just a little over a week after you woke up in your new form. Mokuba was eating breakfast. You were sitting across from him, your chin propped against your hands, trying to imagine what his cheap sugary cereal might have tasted like if you could actually eat (Father never allowed that kind of garbage in the house back when you still had a normal body with taste buds, and now you’ll never know). Seto was busy being Seto—in other words, a ridiculous ham.
He’d been ranting for the last several minutes, on the usual subject. Yugi Muto (or so you’ve repeatedly been told) is nothing but a talentless punk who got lucky, and he’d better watch his back at the next tournament because if he actually thinks his hippy-dippy Heart of the Cards is gonna save him he’s got another thing coming, and—
Honestly, you weren’t paying enough attention to remember it verbatim. His Yugi tirades had all rather started to blur together. But this one hadn’t petered out into bitter grumbling like the others. Without warning, Seto leapt to his feet, shouted a few parting insults, and brought his fist down on the table hard enough to rattle the silverware.
Mokuba kept munching his cereal like it was a regular Tuesday, which should have clued you in that it was nothing but harmless bluster. But you hadn’t been able to help yourself: you’d flinched.
Mokuba had been too deep in his first-thing-in-the-morning zombie state to notice, but Seto’s eyes had gone right to you. You’d felt exposed, like you’d revealed more than you should have, given him a tool he could use against you.
But he hadn’t said anything. He’d cleared his throat, sat back down, and chugged the rest of his coffee like he was a Perfectly Normal Business Man who definitely wasn’t unhealthily obsessed with a trading card game.
Now that you think about it, he hasn’t yelled at you or made any physically threatening gestures around you since. Which is…suspicious. Has he been modifying his behavior for your sake? Why? What would he stand to gain? You don’t know, and not knowing is dangerous. That’s why your little Seto-baiting experiments are so important. You can’t be sure what he’ll do if you ever step too far out of line, so you need to figure out where the line is.
It’s afternoon. All three of you are gathered around the kitchen table, like some sort of idyllic family photo in a magazine ad. Mokuba is busy filling in countries and sketching in landmarks on a blank map of South America. His tongue sticks out of the corner of his mouth as he traces his blue colored pencil along the path of what you assume is supposed to be the Amazon. Technically it should be a few longitudinal degrees up, but you doubt his teacher will care half as much as your old tutors would have.
Seto is tapping away at his laptop. At first you thought he was working on important Kaiba Corp business, but then you noticed the reflection of his screen in the window. He’s doing homework as well. An essay, by the looks of it. It’s…strange, being reminded that Seto is technically still a student too. Why does he even bother to attend school, anyway? What’s the point? It’d be easy enough to simply claim he was being homeschooled and bribe any government official who dared to challenge him. Of course, your father did always believe in the importance of a good education, but if Domino High is anything like Domino Middle School it’s not as if Seto’s actually learning anything there. All he’s doing is wasting precious time that he could be pouring into his company. Typical. If you were in charge of Kaiba Corp…but obviously you’re not, because instead you’re stuck cutting out construction paper circles for some asinine model of an atom. They’ve been drilling you on the types of subatomic particles. There’s a song. It’s revolting.
Aside from the scritch of Mokuba’s pencil, the click of Seto’s keys, and the snip of your scissors, the room is quiet. No one’s said a word for the better part of an hour. So it startles you almost as much as it startles the other two when you suddenly hear your own voice break the silence: “I want a dog.”
Your brothers turn their heads in comically perfect unison and shoot you identical looks of “where-the-hell-did-that-come-from?”
“Uh,” Mokuba says after a beat, “didn’t you tell us you already had a dog once?”
Seto shuts his laptop. “And didn’t you turn it into some kind of messed-up science experiment?”
For once your robot body has its benefits—at least it doesn’t turn red at the drop of a hat like your old one. “Sunny was a virtual dog. This would be different.”
Seto looks unconvinced. “Why the sudden interest in pet ownership?”
You wish you had a good answer, but for some reason when you cast about for one your mind keeps coming back to an exchange from yesterday that has nothing to do with the topic at hand.
You and Mokuba had been hanging out in his room (Seto seems to have finally come to the conclusion that you aren’t going to try to mind-control his brother if he leaves the two of you alone together for more than five minutes at a time). Mokuba had been chattering away about everything and nothing, and something he’d said had reminded you of a joke. You can’t remember it now (it’s odd not having the photo-perfect memory that a supercomputer server once allowed), but at the time you thought it was hilarious. You’d started, “Hey Mokie—”
“Don’t call me that.”
Frozen, awkward silence.
“I, uh…” Mokuba had rubbed his nose, looking guilty. You can’t imagine what kind of expression was on your face. “Sorry. Just…would you mind just sticking with Mokuba?”
“Of…of course.”
“Thanks.”
And he’d gone right back to his friendly chatter, but the chill down your back hadn’t faded.
Anyway, you’re not sure why you keep fixating on that moment. It doesn’t answer Seto’s question. So all you say is, “I just want one, that’s all.”
“Hmmm.” Seto steeples his fingers and looks pensive for a moment.
Then he picks up his laptop and walks away.
Well. That ends that conversation.
By the next day you assume he’s forgotten all about it, but then he sends Mokuba to summon you up to his office. When you arrive, there’s a potted plant sitting in the middle of his desk.
That in itself isn’t all that unusual. Seto seems strangely fond of plants; his other office at Kaiba Corp headquarters is full of the things. But this one’s too small to be particularly decorative. And that can’t be its permanent spot—it’s resting right where he’d normally put his paperwork.
“Noah,” Seto says, “meet Planty.”
“…What.”
He pushes the pathetic little sprout in your direction. “Keep this thing alive for a month, and we’ll talk about the dog.”
“You have got to be kidding me.”
“Do I look like I’m kidding?”
It’s always hard for you to tell, actually—he has a truly impressive poker face—but that sounds like a rhetorical question.
“Look, I need to make sure you can take care of a living thing before I have to worry about that thing peeing all over my floors. So if you want a dog, bring Planty here back looking better than when you got it.”
You eye the plant dubiously. This is still completely ridiculous, but…
“Fine. Challenge accepted.”
Seto grins at that, a sharp flash of teeth. “Good.”
“Are you sure you don’t wanna come?”
“Quite sure.”
“But it’s gonna be reeaally fun! We’re gonna stay up late and watch movies and eat snacks and—I mean, I guess you’ll have to skip the snacks, but—”
“Really, Mokuba, it’s kind of you to offer, but I’ll be much happier spending the night in my own bed.” You don’t add that you’ll be much happier as far away from his annoying friends as possible.
“Well…if you’re sure…” He hikes his backpack up on his shoulder and shifts his weight back and forth in the doorway. Outside, a scuffed minivan is waiting to whisk him away to his sleepover, complete with a gaggle of preteen boys in the backseat and a gobsmacked-looking soccer mom gaping at the mansion from behind the wheel.
“Go on,” you say, laying a hand theatrically across your forehead. “Somehow…someway…I think…” You give a mournful sniffle. “…I think I’ll survive without you for one night.”
Mokuba laughs. “Okay, okay.” He bounds out the door and down the steps. “See you tomorrow! And play nice with Seto!”
You waggle your fingers at him as the minivan pulls away.
Without Mokuba around as a buffer, you and Seto spend a quiet, awkward little evening. You don’t eat dinner because you can’t, he doesn’t eat dinner because he’s a workaholic with control issues, and the mansion is big enough for the two of you to mostly avoid each other.
Before you plug in to charge for the night, you attend to your new evening ritual: watering Planty. You’ve only had the thing for about a week, but it’s already grown a couple of inches and a few new leaves. You think Seto should be more than satisfied.
But tonight, when you peer into the pot on your nightstand, you notice that the plant doesn’t look quite as good as it did the night before. It’s wilted slightly, and one wrinkled leaf has fallen onto the soil below.
Well, that won’t do. Seto said he wanted it back better than when you got it, and there’s no way you can allow yourself to fail at something so simple. Frowning, you reach out to the plant’s code with your mind—
Oh wait. No you don’t. There’s nothing there but the sickening emptiness of a phantom limb.
For a moment you’re disoriented. Then rage bubbles up inside you.
With a vicious swipe of your arm, you send the pot flying, and it shatters on the floor.
Oh.
Oh no.
Oh no, no, no.
Suddenly you’re on your knees. You don’t remember kneeling down, but here you are. You watch your hands fumble among the dirt and broken pieces of pottery like they belong to someone else. And don’t they? You certainly didn’t build them.
You think. You might be. Malfunctioning? Time is moving too fast. You keep losing chunks of it. Someone’s laughing, and you wish they’d stop, but there’s no one here but you. There’s no one here but you. There’s no one here but you. There’s no one—
Oh, look. Seto. When did he get here.
“I forgot,” you tell him. The corners of your mouth are stretched painfully tight, and you realize you’re smiling. “I forgot that I can’t…that I’m not…I used to be able to break things. Worlds. People. Into little tiny itty-bitty pieces. And put them back together again, like all the king’s horses and all the king’s men. Except I was better. I was a god. But now I’m just…I’m just…” You press one hand over your mouth to stifle a laugh, but your whole body wracks with it anyway.
“Noah,” Seto says. Your gaze flickers over to him, and you see that he’s crouched down at your eye level. “Calm down. We can fix this.”
You sing-song, “We couldn’t have fixed it if it were a do-og.”
He opens his mouth and then closes it again.
Your breathing—unnecessary, superfluous, an instinctive holdover from when you were still alive—is harsh in the silence, too loud and too fast. Everything’s too fast. Even your thoughts: it’s broken, you broke it, you broke it because you’re broken, broken and bad, and no wonder you’re bad, you aren’t real, you aren’t human, but maybe you can’t blame it on that, maybe there’s a reason Father was never in any hurry to save you, maybe you’ve always been—
“Noah. Listen to me.”
The voice is so commanding that you obey in spite of yourself.
“I’m going to start counting, and you’re going to breathe in time with me. Ready?”
You try to snarl “I’m a robot, genius,” but all that comes out is a strangled “Hhhhh.”
“I know you don’t actually need to breathe,” Seto says, somehow understanding your meaning anyway. “Humor me.”
For lack of a better option, you do.
You inhale. Hold. Exhale. Repeat. Seto counts steadily, and the numbers blend into a soothing white noise. To your surprise, the deep breaths, unnecessary as they are, really do seem to be calming you down. A quirk of your virtual senses. Or a placebo effect, maybe. Your thoughts settle into a less frantic rhythm. You suddenly notice a throbbing pain in the palm of your left hand, the sensation of something digging into your synthetic skin. You unclench your fist, and a sharp shard of pottery clatters to the floor.
Seto stops counting.
Right. Seto. Crap.
You’re lucid enough now to understand what you’ve done. You’ve exposed your weak points, like an idiot. Shown an unforgivable amount of vulnerability. You may as well have bared your throat to a wolf. All Seto has to do now is pounce, and—
“Feeling better?”
You stare at him. He stares back.
You nod mechanically.
“Good.”
He hesitates—looks away, rubs a hand against the back of his neck—then reaches out slowly, like he’s going to…what, pat you on the shoulder? Ruffle your hair? Give you a great big hug?
You scrabble backwards so fast your elbow bangs against the nightstand.
Seto’s arm drops.
“Why are you doing this,” you hiss, pressed up against the wall like a cornered animal.
“Why am I doing what.” His voice is flat, his eyes unreadable.
“This! All of this!” You gesture wildly, trying to encompass him, the house he took you into, his latest show of brotherly concern, and every halfway-tender moment that came before it. “You rescued me. Remember? After I decided not to murder everyone after all?” Your voice slips back into its sing-song cadence. “And then I was in-stantly redeemed and there were no hard feelings and from that moment on I was a per-fect little angel and now we’re all one. Big. Happy. Family.”
You giggle, high and hysterical.
“You never bought that for a second, Seto.”
He says nothing.
“Now Mokuba, Mokuba I understand,” you babble on, the words spilling out of you uncontrollably like sludge from a leak, revealing all the grime and sickness and ugly things a shoddy patch job had tried to keep hidden. “He looks at me and he sees a younger version of you. One it’s not too late for him to save.” Another mirthless giggle. “Well, joke’s on him, isn’t it. But you—”
Your hands curl into trembling fists. “Am I a science experiment to you? A pawn in some corporate intrigue I don’t know about? Am I somehow one last middle finger to my father?”
The breaths you don’t need are coming too fast again. “I don’t know what you want from me! Just tell me and I’ll do it! Just tell me what you want.”
The words ring in the air for a moment.
Seto, damn him, is still silent.
He shifts back on his heels slightly, just enough that his face becomes half-submerged in the shadows cast by your bedside lamp. You can’t make out his expression at all anymore. He’s motionless for what feels like a very long time.
Finally, he says, “I don’t want anything from you.”
“Don’t lie to me."
“I’m not.”
You slump like your wires have been cut.
No. There has to be something you can offer. There must be some way you can be worth something to him. You can’t be useless.
You pull your knees up to your chest and bury your head in your arms. And you whisper something you never actually meant to say.
“I can’t be left alone again.”
From inside the cocoon of your arms, you hear Seto make a small, choked noise in the back of his throat. Then the sound of a deep, whooshing exhale. A rustle of movement. A soft thump as he lets his back fall against the wall next to you. A swish of skin-on-skin that might be him running a tired hand over his eyes.
“Noah. Listen.”
You curl up tighter.
“You want to know why I brought you back? Why I didn’t just leave you to blow up with the rest of that floating deathtrap?”
A pause. He seems to consider his words carefully.
“Because you’re a kid.” He sighs. “Whatever else you are, you’re a kid. And you didn’t deserve that. You didn’t deserve…”
Another pause.
“You didn’t deserve what he did to you.”
You lift your eyes slowly over the edge of your arms. When you speak, you mean for your voice to sound imperious, but it comes out as a croak. “I don’t believe you.”
“That’s fair.” He leans his head back against the wall. “I don’t expect you to trust me. And I definitely don’t expect you to like me. But if there’s one thing you should have learned about me by now, it’s that I take my responsibilities very seriously.”
You wait.
“Your wellbeing is my responsibility now. If you never believe anything else I tell you, believe this: I’m not going anywhere.”
You don’t answer. You feel like you could stay curled up here forever. Like your limbs have rusted into immobility. Like you might never move again.
But when he pushes himself to his feet and jerks his head for you to follow, you do.
You let him lead you downstairs, away from Planty’s remains, to the big comfy living room couch that wasn’t there before. He pulls a blanket out of the closet and dumps it unceremoniously on the cushion next to you. Then he drops your charge cable on top and walks away.
Good. You might have kicked him in the shins if he’d tried to tuck you in.
You’re always a bit groggy when you first come out of charge mode. That’s the only excuse you have for why, when you wake to the clink of a coffee mug on a table and you don’t remember where you are, you find yourself mumbling “Father?”
A beat of silence. Long enough for your memories to come crashing back in. “Sorry, kid,” Seto’s voice finally says from somewhere behind the couch. “Just me.”
He brings you back up to your room. You assumed that the mess you made would be quietly swept up in the night, but it seems you really can’t get good help these days, because the evidence of your breakdown is still strewn across the floor, starkly illuminated in the squares of light streaming in from the window.
Seto hands you a dustpan and broom (ew), slaps on a pair of gardening gloves (does he garden?), and sets about delicately replanting the mangled sprout into a new pot. You poke half-heartedly at the pottery shards like they might jump into the garbage bin by themselves, Seto corrects your technique (apparently you were holding the dustpan upside-down), Seto makes fun of you for being a spoiled rich brat who’s never touched cleaning supplies in his life, et cetera, et cetera.
When he’s done, you have to admit that Planty doesn’t look half-bad. A little wilted, still, and missing a few leaves, but definitely alive.
“See? Told you we could fix it. We just had to pick up the broken pieces and give it a fresh start.”
You look at him sideways. “Life lesson learned, o great imparter of wisdom.”
“Look, kid, sometimes a plant is just a plant.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
You go to school. You come home. Fate-of-the-world-determining card games are played.
You hold off for now on getting a dog.
Mokuba continues to act as though his affection for you comes without strings attached. Some days you almost manage to believe it.
Seto snarks at you and challenges you and talks you down from panic attacks. It takes you an embarrassingly long time to wonder where he got so much experience with that.
Time passes.
One day, Mokuba strolls into the bathroom while you’re combing your hair and gives you a sleepy little wave as he sticks his toothbrush in his mouth. You wave obligingly back, and for a moment you gaze at the two reflections in the mirror without really registering anything. Then you do a double take.
A minute later, you slam the door to Seto’s office against the wall with such a loud bang that he drops his coffee. Only his lightning-fast reflexes save it from spilling all over the blueprints and photos and holographic apparatuses that cover every inch of his desk. He clutches the mug in a vice grip, watching the liquid intently until its sloshing settles and his eyes finally dart up. There’s something odd about the look he gives you, distant and frustrated and slightly maniac and almost…lost. You’d wonder what he’s doing with so many reference images of Yugi Muto’s hair from different angles, but you have bigger things to worry about.
“Seto! Mokuba’s taller than me!”
His face rearranges itself into a more familiar, sardonic expression. “…Thanks for sharing.”
“I’m sharing so you can fix it! Make me taller!”
“You aren’t due for an update for another month,” he says, somehow not grasping the gravity of the situation.
“But…but Mokuba’s taller than me!”
Seto takes a too-casual sip of his coffee. You suspect he’s hiding a smirk. “Y’know, if we’re still going by the computer predictions of how you would have aged, he’s probably gonna stay that way.”
“He what?! That’s…that’s not allowed! I’m his older brother! I’m supposed to be the tall one!”
There’s a glint in Seto’s eyes that makes you want to shove him out a window. “Sorry to cut your dreams…short.”
You draw yourself up with all the poise and dignity you have. “Seto?”
“Mm?”
“I just want you to know that you’re my least favorite brother and I hate you.”
“Love you too, dork.”
Your next witty comeback gets lost in transit.
He…he’s joking, right? He’s just being sarcastic. Didn’t he sound sarcastic? You try to gauge his expression, but all of a sudden he’s completely absorbed in constructing his Yugi-hatred shrine, or whatever it was he was doing when you walked in.
You’re on uncertain ground, and that’s no position from which to make your case. So you slink back out the door, reluctantly allowing him to have the last word.
It doesn’t occur to you until later that those could have been some of the last words between you ever.
Three days, two hours, and twenty-seven minutes after Seto’s disappearance, the funeral atmosphere is finally lifted when a pillar of light appears in the living room.
Out steps Seto, his hair and coat fluttering in an otherworldly wind, looking exhausted, and strangely wistful, but…better, somehow, than he has in months.
You could kill him.
Before the light has even fully faded, Mokuba sprints across the room and throws himself into his brother’s arms. You hang awkwardly off to the side while Seto’s eyes flutter shut and Mokuba clings to him like he’ll never let go.
Except then he does let go, freeing his hands up to give you a pointed nudge forward, and the next thing you know you and Seto are face-to-face.
You stare up at him. All you can think is you promised, you promised, how dare you make me doubt for even a moment, you promised.
What you actually say is, “You idiot.”
He raises an eyebrow. “Good to see you too, brat.”
“Hmph.” You cross your arms and scowl at him. “Do you have any idea how easy it would have been for me to take over Kaiba Corp while you were off on your little interdimensional field trip? You’re lucky I didn’t want to upset Mokuba, or you’d be out of a job.”
“Heh. I’d like to see you try.”
“Oh, would you? I’d be more than happy to oblige.”
“Do you really think I don’t have contingencies in place?”
“Do you really think they’d stop me?”
“I don’t think, I know. There’s a reason I’m the one in charge of Kaiba Corp. You might think you’re some kind of kid genius, but any scheme you could cook up would barely be a blip on my radar.”
“Well, in that case—”
The two of you probably could have gone on like that for a while, but Mokuba cuts you off mid-retort.
“Will you two emotionally constipated weirdos just hug each other already?”
You consider yourself to be a very intelligent person, and you’re sure Seto believes the same about himself, so together you do what’s always the smart thing: you listen to Mokuba.