Chapter Text
Even an animal does not attack without warning or reason. Animals usually attack out of hunger or fear, which are primal, pure emotions, found from the top to the bottom of nature’s taxonomies, running through the minds of rats and men alike. No one questioned them.
Seto gave no warnings. His reasons were indulgences, luxuries of reason unthinkable to a snarling dog or an ape flashing its fangs. He attacked because he was bored. He attacked because he was annoyed. He attacked because he could, and because no one could stop him.
It was Friday, which usually meant nothing at Kaiba Corporation. This one was special only because Mokuba had bled a minor victory from the calendar: once the clock hit 5:00, they were driving off to a coastal house in Mie–just the two of them, plus Isono and their chef–for a week. Thank God. Isono was already there, preparing the house for their arrival.
Seto was at ease, almost lazy; he told finance this meeting could be an email, and spent almost the entire hour idling around R&D instead. When he came back to his office, where Mokuba was making notes on the all-staff email ahead of their meeting with the Chief Communications Officer and her team, he was yawning, cat-like in his graceful, languid collapse onto the couch. There were no crises or dilemmas, no sudden boardroom coups or swandiving stocks.
“I need a coffee,” he announced.
Mokuba, cross-legged on the white armchair, glanced over and smirked. It was an order for no one in particular; there was no one else in the room. Seto was just narrating his thoughts. He was toying with an odd black-and-white Rubik’s Cube. A ghost cube–either someone in R&D had given it to him, to distract him, or he had just taken it off someone’s desk. Both seemed equally likely.
Then it was 10 AM, and there was a knock on the door, and Bushida strolled in–a short, grey-haired woman who seemed fueled by a perpetual motion machine, firing off thoughts at machine-gun speed–flanked by some senior directors and some associates and at least one intern. It was a completely ordinary meeting, about completely ordinary stuff–the tone of the staff email, Kaiba’s personal touch for the staff email, new prospective talking points for the investors and shareholders, scheduling the press release for the new Solid Vision updates, the tone of the press release, and so on. Clustered on Seto’s couches and arm chairs, chattering and warbling in their black suits and pencil skirts, they seemed like a raucous gathering of crows - a murder of corporate crows. A murder of senior directors and communications officers.
Seto did not love the the concept of a Chief Communications Officer–he hated being told what to say, and how to say it–but he allowed the existence of Bushida and her team, because he hated the idea of wasting time writing the monthly all-staff email even more. He ran through the meeting on autopilot. Mokuba made a shopping list for Isono: beef, king crab, apples, pickles, the weirdest chips you can find at the supermarket.
“Anything else?” Seto said, tossing the cube so that it spun and blurred, jumping from his hand in short, sharp bursts.
“Sir,” said Hatanaka, “Representative Yanagi reached out to us to see if we’d like to talk about endorsing her plan to pass a bill on the right to repair.”
Hatanaka was a senior director, on the younger side, in charge of external relations. His true talent was a kind of inviting charisma–like Anzu, in a way–everyone always wanted to sit next to him.
“No,” Seto said. “Bushida, actually, one more note on the email–I don’t like the last line. The ‘together, we’ll move forward’ crap. It sounds too chipper–”
“It might be worth having a conversation,” Hatanaka said, and Seto’s attention snapped back to him. Mokuba paused, halfway through reading the finance email. A feeling like a hand touched the back of his neck, light and cold. “Representative Yanagi is a star on the rise. She would be a terrific ally in the Diet, and we don’t need to agree to anything yet. If I could schedule a meeting–”
“Not interested,” Seto said again. “I don’t need to court allies in the Diet. All I have to do is dangle a campaign donation and they’ll fight each other to bite the hook. The Kaiba Corporation voice is not chipper. The email is not a high school pep rally. It’s rousing. You feel it like fire in your blood. It’s like–did you read that book on military speeches I gave you–?”
“I’ve only just started. It’s been interesting so far,” Bushida said, diplomatically taking up the reins, and Hatanaka said, “Seto-sama, sooner or later, the right to repair will come to us, and we can either cooperate or resist–”
“You useless moron. A dog understands ‘no’ better than you do,” Seto snarled. “Is that what you are? A fucking dog? Did Bushida find you on the street and make the mistake of feeding you? Do I need to muzzle you so you’ll stop barking at me about all of your boring bullshit?”
Everyone turned to stone, freezing into an absurd tableau: legs crossed in black pencil skirts, their glossy pumps pointed up in nylon-tight tension. No one dared to relax. Two dozen eyes boring holes into their laptops and notebooks, retreating inwards, away, anywhere but here. Bushida looked out the windows, tracking a helicopter crossing the Domino skyline like a strange bird. Seto had also gone still, not like clay, brittle and hollow, but with the coiling, muscled menace of a big cat crouching in the grass. Hatanaka quailed. Only Mokuba was looking at them: first Seto, then Hatanaka, then back to Seto, with the cold crawling up his scalp and a growing anger. How could Hatanaka be so fucking stupid.
Hatanaka swallowed. “Seto-sama. I have the utmost respect for you. I only meant to say–”
“I don’t care about what you meant to say,” Seto growled. “I want you to care about what I said. But it seems like you can’t even follow a basic command. Can you follow basic commands, Hatanaka? Most dogs can.”
“Sir,” Hatanaka said, in a faint, bloodless voice.
“Let’s test it. Let’s see if you’re as good as a dog.” Seto grabbed a pen off the coffee table and flung it back-handed across the room. It hit the carpet with a muffled thud and rolled twice, shining in the mid-morning sunlight. “Fetch!”
Hatanaka did not move, rigid with uncertainty. Seto’s eyes were bright and cold, like sun on ice; his mouth was a tight, thin curve. He was, Mokuba knew, enjoying himself.
“Did I stutter? I said fetch the pen, Hatanaka.”
Hatanaka glanced at Mokuba. Mokuba met his gaze and scowled, his face hot, biting back a sudden, sour surge of hatred.
“Don't look at him. Look at me,” Seto snapped.
Hatanaka stood up, crossed the length of the office, and picked up the pen. He brought it back to Seto and presented it with both hands, bending in a deep bow.
“Seto-sama.”
“Oh, good boy. There’s still some hope for you,” Seto snorted. “Now let’s try another classic. Heel.”
And he pointed at the floor, at the empty patch of carpet before him
Hatanaka stood limp and disbelieving, his face shining with helpless rage.
Seto was still smiling that same, slender smile, but something was turning hard and dark in his eyes. He had committed himself and Hatanaka to this moment, this sudden, demented morality play, and he was going to whip them both through it until they reached the end–whenever someone broke. Seto never broke first.
“Niisama,” Mokuba heard himself say, tossing the word quietly into the still, speechless waters of the room.
Three seconds passed.
Seto laughed, an icy crack of sound that made everyone, despite their best efforts, flinch. “My god, Hatanaka. Your face. You were actually going to do it?!”
“I–” Hatanaka stammered.
“Alright, get out. Go get me a coffee.”
He waved a hand, as though sweeping the air, ushering Hatanaka towards the door.
“Sir,” Hatanaka said. “What kind of coffee–?”
“A fucking coffee,” Seto said breezily.
Hatanaka needed no further invitation. He bowed once and marched from the office.
“Alright. Back to business,” Seto said. “Bushida–?”
“I’ll rewrite the staff email, Seto-sama,” she said smoothly. “You’ll have a new draft on your desk Monday morning.”
“Just send it out, I don’t care. I’ll be out of office all next week,” he said, and started fiddling with the ghost cube again. “Mokuba, sit down.”
With his face still burning, his tongue throbbing and swollen from biting down, Mokuba automatically folded onto the armchair. In the presence of people he never defied Seto. The lighthouse of Seto’s brilliant gaze turned away, and once again Mokuba was hidden in the darkness outside his attention. He opened the company directory on his laptop, found Hatanaka’s email and phone number, and fired off a message through both channels, labeled URGENT.
Double shot espresso one teaspoon brown sugar.
Hatanaka read it, but did not reply.
Mokuba studied the message.
Sorry, he typed out, and deleted it.
The meeting moved on, back to the right tone to set for all-staff emails, and what other books on military speeches Bushida should read, and whatever. Kaiba Corporation was always at war. Everyone in the room was familiar with the come-down: no one was too chipper, or too over-eager to please, or too deferential. No one opened themselves to accusations of putting on a show. Everyone simply did their jobs.
If anyone thought anything about Hatanaka’s absence, no one said, although Senior Director Asato set her laptop bag down on his empty spot on the couch beside her, frowned sharply–as though flinching against a thought–and several seconds later moved it to the coffee table.
He came back about eleven minutes later, carrying a white ceramic cup from the cafe on the 9th floor, his face blank and pale. As though, determined to muster some dignity in the elevator, he had given up and settled on simple, unreadable flatness. He presented it to Seto without a word and took his seat.
Seto took a sip and raised an eyebrow.
It was his preferred coffee order, what he liked best.
It was not what he’d expected.
Slowly, Seto’s gaze swung to Mokuba, who held still, breathless but resolved. He shouldn’t have done it. No one gets between a tiger and their meal. He should have done it. He did do it, and he couldn’t undo it. Hatanaka didn’t fail the stupid fucking test he was supposed to fail, and if Seto wanted to get angry about it, there was only one place–one person–where his anger could go.
Mokuba held his gaze.
It ended like that, as he knew it would–in a silent, eye-rolling shrug, and a twitch of a smile, as though humoring him. Mokuba released a secret sigh and studied Hatanaka, who sat listening to Asato, hands clasped in his lap. Sometimes people thanked him for whatever he'd done to help them, in little fleeting conversations in the hallways or in emails that felt like he'd been slipped a secret note in class. And smiling, afterwards, whenever they saw him: their ally against Seto. Sometimes they didn’t. You could see it in their faces, their shoulders–all the flashing shades of shame, fury, hatred, gratitude, relief–like their soul was a prism and both Mokuba and Seto were shining through them, casting all the colors on the wall.
“Moving on,” Seto said. “Can someone update me on the social media analytics?”
The meeting ended normally, and the day trudged on, normal, banal. Hatanaka did not thank him. Thank God.
It was aggravating when people thanked Mokuba–there was always a sense of pity to it, a bitter black seed inside the rosy apple. Thank you, they said aloud, for telling me to cancel the meeting, or to send the data, or whatever, and then they smiled, and with their eyes and their smiles, so warm and gentle with condescension, they said: Sorry your brother is a fucking animal.
Seto must’ve been falling asleep too because, with just about half an hour left of the drive, he said, “tell me about the house.”
Mokuba woke up from his shallow dozing against the car window, blinking and squinting against the darkness of the forest. The headlights of the Porsche cast a white-golden halo of light around the nose of the car. There was the road, a rough gray ribbon that slid past the light, and outside of the light there was nothing. Briefly, before the surreal sheen of dreaming wore off, everything seemed to be deep underwater–like when a submarine or a rover goes down to the silent silt and the baroque towers of rock seven thousand meters deep, and finds all the little creatures crawling through the ragged cathedrals of whalefall. Animals that have never before seen the light, and have no need for it now.
“What?” he said.
“The house. Where we’re staying.”
“If you’re too tired to drive, why didn’t you have Isono pick us up?” Mokuba said.
“I’ll get us there,” Seto said. He was also slouching in his seat, one hand on the wheel. He was in a good mood. He was just tired.
“I sent you an email with all the stuff about the house. There were photos and everything.”
“Well, tell me again. I want to hear you tell me about it,” Seto said.
He hadn’t read it. Maybe he hadn’t even opened it. Mokuba was too tired to even roll his eyes.
“It’s small. But it’s really nice and private. It’s a ten-minute walk to the beach,” he said, staring into the forest lining the road on both sides. Pale trunks gleamed faintly from the darkness, crossed by jagged branches and shadows. Everything felt disembodied from the concept of tree: trunks, leaves, branches, shadows. Nothing felt complete. “It’s like… modern traditional…”
“Modern and traditional?” Seto said, with faint bemusement.
“You’ll see. It’s really far away from everything. You’ll like it.”
“Is there an office? Anywhere I can get some work done?” Seto said.
“Nii, sa, ma,” Mokuba muttered, low and sing-song. “It’s a vacation–”
“Well I’m not going to sit on my ass and do nothing for a week–”
“There’s kayaks,” Mokuba said. “And we can go swimming, or we could drive somewhere and go on a hike–”
“Do I even own hiking boots?” Seto hummed, with a touch of laughter.
“I bought some for you. I packed them. And your wetsuit and your fins,” Mokuba said. “Why did you even say ‘yes’ to going on vacation if you’re just going to work–”
“No better time for it,” Seto countered. “No distractions, no interruptions, no meetings–just time and silence, with no one around to bother me with their bullshit. What do I do, Seto-sama? Tell us, Seto-sama! Am I wiping my ass right, Seto-sama? And all their blah blah blah.”
Yeah, right. You’d throw a fucking fit if they did anything you didn’t like, Mokuba wanted to say, but what slipped out past the cage of his clenched teeth was: “So I don’t count?”
“What?” Seto said, and they dropped into a baffled silence, three seconds long.
“You said, no one around to bother you, but I’m here–”
“That’s completely different,” Seto said, throwing him a narrow look. “What’s–”
Mokuba’s heart shot into his throat, every single thought suddenly burning out, leaving behind only a single blistering star of alarm–
“NIISAMA–”
A pale, spindly shape burst from the darkness. Seto threw out a hand to catch Mokuba, locking up from head to toe as he slammed the brakes–
They smashed into it with a dense crunching thud of steel and blood and aluminum and bone and a hair-pulling tear of gravity as though their bodies were trying to eject their souls, death plunging on them with folded wings, and the white thing tumbling up and away into the darkness like a giant invisible hand had yanked back its panicking kicking puppet and the sky splitting in half with a livid blistering screech of rubber and asphalt.
The car lurched and settled, as though sitting back on its haunches. They flew backwards into their seats with a hard bounce.
Everything was quiet again.
Both of them were wide awake now, Mokuba’s pulse thundering in his neck. All of his organs had, all at once, been pushed against the front of his body, and now it felt like they were all slowly splooging back into place. The only sign of reaction in Seto was his one hand clamped bloodlessly around the wheel, the other pressed in a rigid claw against Mokuba’s chest.
“What…”
“We hit a deer,” Seto announced. The crash re-played again, behind Mokuba’s eyes, in flickering black frames severed from the tape: a hoof, a long torso, a blank eye; knobby thin legs flailing like an insect. “Are you alright?”
“Yes?” Mokuba panted. “You…?”
“Stay in the car,” Seto said. He turned off the engine and got out, leaving the door open. The clashing smells of burnt rubber and fresh, piney air flooded the car. With the keys left in the ignition, the car started to chime, rich and high-pitched, over and over again, at a slow, pulse-like pace.
Mokuba reached over and turned it off, still gasping for breath.
Then he unbuckled himself and threw open the passenger door, slipping out of the car. The nose of the Porsche was crumpled up into a jagged sneer of blue aluminum, hissing. The left tire was punched inwards. Smoke whispered in and out of the headlight beams. And Seto…
Had vanished, into the darkness beyond the steaming carcass of the car.
Mokuba stood by the car, hugging himself. Stay in the car, where it was warm and safe, or follow Seto into the forest.
He followed Seto, walking down the road, turning on his phone’s flashlight.
“Niisama?” he called out. It was pitch-black. There were no streetlights on the mountain road. Overhead, the night sky was a jagged navy-blue seam, bracketed by the black teeth of the treeline on either side of the road. The quiet was absolute.
There was his brother, crouched in the dirt over a limp, broken, curled-up body, the whites of his eyes flashing in the light.
Mokuba stopped short, not sure where to look, where it was polite or safe.
“I told you to stay in the car,” Seto said, standing up.
“Like I haven’t seen a dead body before,” Mokuba said.
Seto was not impressed. He held an arm out to block his path and his view of the deer and swept him back towards the car.
“It’s not dead,” he said, as Mokuba wheeled around. “But it will be, sooner or later.”
Mokuba looked up at him with horror swooping in his stomach. “Can’t we put it out of its misery?”
“With what, Mokuba. How?” Seto said flatly. “ Just leave it.”
Then he pulled off his sweater and pressed it into his hands. Only then did Mokuba realize he was shivering.
“Get cozy,” Seto said. “We’re going to be here for a while.”
Mokuba settled into the passenger seat, closed the door, and tugged Seto’s black sweater over his own. It was still warm. Clinging to the usual clean, cedary smell of Seto was another smell–funky and rich. Deer smell. A thick layer of glass had built up inside him. Below it, there were thoughts, feelings, theories, revelations, scuttling around in the safety of a dim, clouded murk. For now, he pulled on the sweater and curled up in the seat, listening to Seto through the glass.
Isono. I hit a deer. The car might be totaled, so you’ll have to come get us. I’ll drop a pin to our location…
Somewhere in the dark behind them, the deer was dying, alone and cold on the road.
It wasn’t even a weak or sick or slow deer. The wolves hadn’t killed it to feed their cubs. It was just an unlucky deer. Someone was going to come out from the local police station and do nothing except heave it into a dumpster. It was just dumb and unlucky and now it was inconvenient and a mess.
Why hadn’t he swerved?
Seto had seen the deer leap out of the forest with enough time to swerve. Right? It didn’t have to die. It didn’t have to be dying right now, a stone’s throw down the road. Its black eye swam back to Mokuba, staring, questioning, wondering.
Seto didn’t even seem rattled. He was in the driver’s seat, so close Mokuba could touch him. He was just leaning against the door and staring into the distance, with a blank, distant face and a blank, distant gaze. He was several hundred thousand miles away.
Mokuba shuddered–an icy rippling up his spine. He curled up tighter in the seat, eyes closed. Who are you? What was that? Do you even care? Any second now he expected… like a change in the air, a fold in the shroud of night, a streak of white wind rushing past the car. A new star in the sky. A sign that told him the deer had died already, it was leaving, and it was going somewhere else now, far away from here.
Seto glanced at him. Mokuba didn’t move, torn in two by a tremendous surge of dueling forces, twin forces, born on the same day, in the same place, in a single moment: on their seventh night in the Kaiba mansion, when Mokuba found Seto not in his bedroom but red-eyed in the library, and Seto told him not good night but get out. Everything had started almost immediately.
The first force: he would do anything for Seto to touch him, squeeze his shoulder, hold his hand, stroke his hair. Something gentle or something loving or something anything to make him feel okay . His entire body was ablaze with silent pleading. Please just hug me. Please show me you still know how. Please.
The second: revulsion.
Seto looked away. His phone glowed through the dark like a wayward star, a stolen star, dragged down from the heavens and pressed flat into a shell.
As fast as you can, Isono, he said.
Seto woke up later than usual, with a feeling like he’d soaked himself in a pool of fatigue all night long. Now he was sodden and sore with it, and if a hand came down and pressed him, it would all come oozing out. The bedroom disoriented him on the point of fact alone that it was not his bedroom–this was not his carpet, not his drapes, not his nightstand; he felt conspicuously on the bed, rather than in it. Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows was not the lone, vigilant oak on the lawn of the Kaiba mansion, but a crowd of dense spruces and firs, leaning towards the house like ancient Roman spectators around an arena.
He went still, like a cat in an alleyway, exposed. The place of a tree in his private ontology was not among friends or foes but another space: in vast, perfect neutrality. A tree did not leave unless it was cut down, or unless it died, quietly, slowly, and visibly. If it passed any judgments, it never announced them. It would never report his movements–his work, his failures, his hopeless rebellions–to another master.
Regardless, the feeling of being watched was unshakeable. It was a breath across the back of his neck.
The car. Mokuba. The deer, with its long neck pulled back across the dirt, in an arch both graceful and grotesque.
He rolled out of bed, pulled on a sweater and a pair of sweatpants, and slipped out of his bedroom into the quiet house. What had been a dim, shadowy maze by night was, by the grey morning light, an airy, spacious house with an unfussy, minimalist take on traditional Japanese style. Dark stone, blonde wood, huge windows. It was easy to see why Mokuba had chosen this house: it was nothing like the mansion. It was full of light.
Mokuba was not in his room. The bed was made and the suitcase had been unpacked into the closet.
He went down to the kitchen, which was small and efficient. There was Mokuba, in a sweater and boardshorts, cracking a raw egg into a bowl of rice. A moka pot bubbled on the stove. The ocean, though out-of-sight, was not so far away: the warm, earthy smell of coffee met the cool, rich waves of salt and pine rolling in through the open doors.
“Good morning,” Seto said. “How do you feel?”
“Fine,” Mokuba said.
“Good enough to go kayaking,” Seto said.
“I guess.”
“Where's Wada? Isn't she cooking for us?”
“It's her sister's birthday. She's getting here tonight,” Mokuba said. “It was in my email.”
Seto flipped open the top of the moka pot and found it full of coffee. “Is this for me?”
“If you want it,” Mokuba said.
Seto glanced at him. Mokuba was in a mood, beating the raw egg into the rice with a quiet, brutal efficiency.
After several seconds of thought, no explanation revealed itself to him.
But Mokuba always wanted the same thing, or some form of it.
“Give me time to eat and get dressed, and I’ll go with you,” he said.
Mokuba looked at him. A strange, cold feeling struck Seto like he’d been slapped. He’d seen that look before, in Battle City, or something like it–that potent little bottled-up blend of anger and desperation. It was the mood that came like an eclipse: rare, resplendent in its feeling, uncompromising in its hugeness. It was even–it was supposed to be–predictable, drawn from the geometry of Seto’s own orbit.
But unlike Battle City, there was no desperation in Mokuba’s face. Only the dark, guarded look of a dog, steadied by a heavy balance of anger and fear.
Then he looked away, with the tell-tale tightness of nervous guilt.
“What’s wrong?” Seto said.
Mokuba said nothing, staring into his bowl as though there was something to make sense of in the bland, tacky chaos of rice and beaten egg.
“Mokuba,” Seto said, leaning in and tilting his head, trying to catch his gaze. The eclipse shied away, taking two steps back. Seto kicked the dirt over the blooming fires of his frustration and kept his voice level and low. “What’s wrong with you?”
It was an unfair accusation–the problem was never Mokuba.
“I want to go by myself,” Mokuba muttered.
“Do whatever you want,” Seto retorted, stung. “But I’m not going to stay here for a whole week, on the vacation you asked for, while you skulk around like a ghost in a mood . Tell me.”
This was also unfair. Mokuba’s moods were never just a mood.
Mokuba didn’t look at him, his shoulders drawn up to his ears in helpless tension, as though there was not just Seto, but Seto and the fist of an invisible giant, seizing him and squeezing him.
Seto threw a swift sour glance towards the ceiling as frustration burned through him. But it was too late to let this go. They had to bite the bullet and cut through the bone. The rot had to be cut off for the rest to live.
“Can you just leave me alone,” Mokuba said, in a flat, dead voice.
“Not until you tell me.”
“Please can you just drop it–”
Seto grabbed him by the shoulders and spun him around, bringing them face-to-face. Mokuba was in totality: there was no love in his face, no loyalty. All of it was masked in a perfect darkness of the soul–hatred in a hard, smooth curve. Seto’s heart dropped.
“No,” he snarled. “Spit it out–”
“You’re just like him,” Mokuba said.
For a second, all Seto saw was white.
Mokuba made a small sound, a shaky exhale, rattled by his own nerve. Then he plunged forward. “The way you-you talk, the way you talk to other people, you don’t fucking care when anyone or anything gets hurt–sometimes it’s like he’s not even dead – ”
“Like who, Mokuba?!” Seto growled, giving him a single firm shake. “Say his name–”
“Let go of me–”
Mokuba jerked his shoulders. Seto let go. Mokuba bounded away, panting, still clutching his bowl of rice.
“Say his name, or I’ll–”
“You’ll what, Niisama?’ Mokuba countered. “So what if I don’t say his name? Is it some big huge mystery to you? Do you really need my help figuring it out? Are you hoping it’s someone else? Because it fucking isn't! It’s always him! Like you’re not even there, and when I look at you, all I see is him–”
Something must have changed in Seto’s face because Mokuba froze, and Seto froze, and the same vision flashed through their heads, sharp and white and silent. They heard it coming before it reached them, because they had weathered this storm before: a crack of thunder, splitting the heavens. The back of a hand to the side of a face. Left to right. Unlike lightning, striking twice.
It swept past them. Then it was gone.
Seto’s hand was in a fist at his side. Mokuba’s gaze dropped to the motion as he unclenched, all the blood flooding back to his trembling hand. This storm was in the past, and they were in the future now. A future of clear, cloudless skies, and the wind in their sails, carrying them forward. Only forward. Right?
Earthquakes, thunder, fire, fathers. In the absence of the father, your brother.
But the storm did not just happen to them, as an implacable force majeure, indifferent in its destruction. The storm was him.
He was looming over Mokuba, who had backed himself into the glass wall of the kitchen, which was so clean and clear and flawless that he seemed on the edge of a precipice–unprotected from the two-meter drop behind him, and the rocky, toothy slope of dirt at the bottom. With the forest framing him, a sprawling crowd of watchful trees, he looked small and feral, glowering at Seto with pointed fear. Seto only had to give him a touch, a little shove, and he’d fall.
Mokuba was still clutching his breakfast, both hands bloodless around the bowl. What were you going to do with that, Seto thought heavily. Throw it at me?
With no small self-loathing, Seto flung his hand out, pointing at the breakfast table. “Sit.”
Mokuba slunk sideways towards the table. Seto did not move until Mokuba was seated, and then he poured a cup of coffee. Sitting next to him–no. Too close. Mokuba would close up like a bear trap. Across from him–too antagonistic. Mokuba had never been the enemy.
So he took the seat perpendicular to Mokuba, lacing his hands tightly together on the table.
“Mokuba,” he said, realizing halfway through it was futile to try and keep the anger from his voice. If he held it back, both of them would know he was lying.
“Niisama,” Mokuba said, in a low, wet, bubbling voice. A little creek over an uneven pebble bed.
“Where is all of this coming from?” Seto said.
Mokuba’s expression tightened in a tiny, furious flinch.
“Speak,” Seto said. “I’m already angry. You’re not going to make it worse.”
“I shouldn’t have said anything,” Mokuba blurted. “I should’ve just–”
“But you did, and you can’t unsay it. So–”
“Because you made me! You pushed me to say it–”
“Because something I said or did set you off, and it’s all over you. You can’t hide it from me. You shouldn't. That doesn't help you and that doesn't help me. So get yourself together and lay it out.” Seto swept his hands apart. “I’ll wait.”
Mokuba was crying, in that discreet way of his, without a sound or shudder. It was just a fine mist in his eyes. Raindrops rolling down a window. A thing that just happened, like the weather, with no moral force or meaning, and in ten or fifteen minutes it would be like nothing happened at all. Seto had never learned the trick of it.
For several minutes no one did anything, except what they were already doing. Mokuba, in his silence, was still an eclipse: impossible to look at, impossible to look away from. Seto, arms crossed, could only look at him in quick glances and then away again, burning. He studied the trees, the rich green glow around their trunks, their stoic natures. There was only so far you could go in the forest: sooner or later you would reach the ocean, or a freeway, or some patchwork of farms and powerlines. But the watchful trees were taking pity on him, promising an endless dreamy green. They were starting to whisper, in a chorus, in a gentle jostling rush of voices: come. Come to us. We will take you to the secret place, the safe, dark place where no one will hear you fall, and no one will see you fail
Isono was standing uncertainly in the entryway.
“Mokuba-sama–” he started, and fell silent, overwhelmed.
“You’re taking him kayaking?” Seto said.
“Sir,” Isono said. “Whenever he’s ready.”
“He’ll come find you,” Seto said heavily, bracing himself against the first flimsy pillar of the same old domino chain: shame, anger, vengeance, violence. Don’t fucking stare at us, he wanted to snap. You’re not paid to pass judgment. He found his voice, his boardroom voice, flawless and drawling and serpentine in its syllabic maneuvering: “You’re excused, Isono.”
Isono withdrew, casting a helpless glance towards Mokuba, who did not look at him.
Seto took a deep breath and sighed, closing his eyes on the exhale.
“Why didn’t you swerve?”
Seto opened his eyes. “What?”
“Why didn’t you… you had time,” Mokuba said. “You didn’t have to hit the deer. I saw it. You saw it. But you just… you didn’t even think about it. You just smashed into it–”
“The deer?” Seto said, with a kind of rising, wild hysteria–trapped between the instinct to laugh this off as a ridiculous bit of fucking nothing and a cold, drenching dread. “The fucking stupid death-wish deer that threw itself in front of the car? That’s what this is about?!”
“That’s what I mean!” Mokuba shouted. “You–you don’t even care, it was just in your way and you had to punish it for getting in the way, the way he used to do it–you didn’t even kill it on purpose. It was just because! You didn’t even have to do it, but you just did it anyway–”
“Mokuba, you’re not supposed to swerve. You have to hit the deer dead on,” Seto snapped. “Swerving is more dangerous than hitting the deer. If I swerve, I smash the car into a tree, or I hit someone else on the other side of the road. Do you understand?”
“W-what?” Mokuba said, in a cracked voice. “But…?”
“You’re supposed to hit it,” Seto said again. “For fuck’s sake. This is what has you up in arms?! I didn’t swerve because it was you or the deer. And I chose you!”
“Oh,” Mokuba whispered, bewildered, and heaved a little sob. “But it… it just died there… ”
Seto hissed, short, and terse, through his teeth.
“Do you really think you’d be feeling better about this if I had bashed its head in with a rock? Do you think I wanted to do that?” he said, fixing Mokuba with a firm look.
The deer stared back at him with its wide, rolling eye, neck curved as though a ballet dancer throwing her head back in ecstatic dance. Shuddering and twitching as it breathed through crumbling ribs and lungs turned to pulp. Dying in the presence of your friends and family was a human fantasy. For a wild animal, to die in the presence of others almost always means in the presence of the hungry, the ruthless, the eager enemy. So don't give them what they want, and die alone!
Mokuba could say whatever the fuck he wanted. But Seto would not look back at the deer. It was not their place to hold vigil or perform last rites. It was offensive and humiliating and sacrilegious. Let the stupid thing die in peace, without the death-bringer standing in disgust and regret over its body.
“What about Hatanaka?” Mokuba said, with narrowed eyes.
“Hatanaka?” Seto said, and scoffed as the mental file finally loaded. “Hatanaka’s an idiot. He shouldn’t have pressed me–”
“So you turned him into your dog,” Mokuba said. “Not just Hatanaka. You did it–you do it–to everyone. Anyone who pisses you off.”
Seto turned to ice–his whole body slowly going hard and cold. “And?”
“And that’s what he used to do to you,” Mokuba said. “Now you–”
Seto stood up, his head buzzing with red static, so dizzy with anger and shame he wanted to vomit.
He looked down at Mokuba, who had gone still again, looking up at him with wide-eyed apprehension. Both of them were rotten right down to the core, eaten up inside and out by the moldering worms of the corpse whose hands still held them. Festering with hatred and rage.
In the dizzying churn of feeling he seized one meager thought: no. Not both. Mokuba was innocent, Mokuba was clean. Mokuba only wanted one thing–for Gozaburo to be dead and gone, for good.
So Seto said nothing more to Mokuba, and he left.