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.
Notes:
...and is gozaburo in the room with us right now?
thanks for reading! part 2 is fully written and will be posted in a week. part 3 is underway. Comments and kudos are always welcome!
I promise the comfort is coming :)
Chapter 2: The Cold War
Notes:
tonight's special is isono, dream sequences, and my classic-recipe cocktail: meditative and miserably philosophical kaiba monologues. cw for a graphic thought of self-harm and description of strangulation
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Once Isono was hired, shortly before the Battle City tournament, the Kaiba brothers swiftly put an end to his concerns that he was not very good with children: they resented every reminder of their age, and it was not his job to treat them like children. It was his job to judge duels, drive, schedule the dry-cleaning service, order lunch and dinner to the office, do all the various little tasks and chores that they had no time or no interest in doing. All of this– almost all of this, save for Battle City, was easy. Perfectly mundane. All you had to do was say yes, right away to Seto-sama and get it done right away, and your position was secure.
By saying yes, right away , he’d moved his parents into a home far better than any his father’s meager legal clerk salary could ever provide. His sister as well wanted for nothing. His niece, the best and brightest of them, was going to college in America and flew home for the holidays. In attending to one family, he rescued his own.
It was a lovely golden day. Down by the boathouse, Mokuba went straight to the water and then up to the end of the beach, leaving little footprints whose traces crawled inwards and vanished like breath on a window. It was no more than ten meters of sand, freckled with flecks of sticks and leaves from the trees that clung to the low cliffs. But it was calm, perfect for launching kayaks.
Isono kept a close eye on him as he dragged the first kayak from the boathouse to the water’s edge. It was normal for Mokuba not to offer any help–it never occurred to him. It was not normal for Mokuba to be so hard and quiet and brittle. And it was not Isono’s job to wonder about what happened that morning. Seto biting off words like flesh from a carcass, and Mokuba fuming with tears. It was not his job. He did not get involved. It was not his job. It was not. It was not.
He trudged back up the path for the second kayak, hauled it off the boathouse rack, and dragged that one down to the water. It hissed across the sand like a kind of cumbersome, protesting snake. Mokuba was still standing at the end of the beach, arms crossed like a man four times his age, his gaze fixed on an inscrutable horizon.
Isono went back up to the boathouse for the life jackets and the paddles, adjusted one for Mokuba’s height, and busied himself for several moments checking the kayaks over for… nothing, really. They were fine.
He walked up the beach with a life jacket.
“Mokuba-sama…”
He stopped short.
Anyone else, faced with any other crying child, might do something better than this: stand there, doing nothing. But this was not just any child. This was Kaiba Mokuba, who had only ever shown him a bristling, headstrong streak of feline independence, uninterested in the attentions or affections of anyone save his brother.
Isono flung out the question. If he held onto it any longer, it would burn him to ash.
“Mokuba-sama, are you alright?”
Mokuba flashed him a lethal look of contempt, shuddering, wiping his eyes with his palm.
“Don’t be fucking stupid,” he said, in trembling imitation of his brother’s voice.
“My apologies, Mokuba-sama,” Isono sighed, at a loss. The waves came up in whispering sheets, fanned out, and retreated graciously into the sea.
Mokuba gathered himself up, clutching his own arms, as though he was trying desperately not to drop anything.
“Do you think my brother is a bad person?” he said, in a low voice.
Isono’s insides crunched. It was not a question like Mokuba was just now thinking about it. Sometimes he looked at his brother like he’d created the universe, and set the stars in motion–a look of terrible, reverent awe.
“Well… your brother is brilliant. It’s an honor to help him achieve that brilliance,” he said. Whether Seto was good or bad seemed beside the point. Seto did not pay him to moralize or pass judgment. Seto paid him for efficiency. Most men would be ashamed to hold a child in such high regard, but most men did not work so closely with a child who was truly changing the world. They never saw the blaze in his eyes, burning through the chaff of the modern world to make room for a better future.
“Don’t play dumb. You’re around us all the time. You’ve heard him. You know how he treats people,” Mokuba said, accusing.
Ah. It was not a question about Seto, not really. It was a question about Isono. What the hell happened in the kitchen?
“I… it’s not my place to comment, Mokuba-sama,” he said.
“Okay, but I’m telling you to comment,” Mokuba said, “and you have to do what I tell you to do.”
Seto’s same waspish tones; none of his effortless command. Pure petulance. And yet Isono, who was not prone to fretting, found himself kneading the knuckles of one hand in the palm of the other.
“He… certainly has his moods… But I–”
“His moods,” Mokuba retorted, with a dark and scathing laugh. “It’s just a bad mood!”
He kept laughing. It was an odd, wailing, wet laughter. The sound came from him in waves, a small, shuddering fountain of unnerving sound that spilled across the beach and bounded off the small cliffs and doubled and doubled again endlessly back on itself.
Isono ventured a hand to his shoulder–Mokuba shrugged away, instinctively, unthinkingly. It was like trying to catch a handful of water. He just flowed away from him, senseless to the effort or intention, and cried harder, hugging himself.
“I said really bad things to him. Really bad,” he sobbed, “and he’s so mad. He’s never going to forgive me–”
“I’m sure he will. Seto-sama adores you–”
A futile effort. Mokuba was beyond him.
“I shouldn’t have said anything. Why did I tell him all of that?! But then it would’ve just–it would’ve just been really ugly inside me forever– I hurt him really bad and he’s going to leave me again,” Mokuba said, choking with despair. “He’s going to leave me and I’m just going to be alone forever w-with his fucking zombie corpse–”
“Where on earth would he go?” Isono said, bewildered. “What?”
“You don’t get it!” Mokuba shouted. “He goes away! He leaves! You can have a whole conversation with him, but he’s not here! He’s gone! He’s in a totally different dimension, where no one can find him, and the Seto you’re talking to is… he’s someone else, he’s the Seto he created…”
He turned, gazing wildly around the shore and the coves and the trees, as though this other Seto would, all of a sudden, arrive –like a strike of lightning from the sky.
“Mokuba, Seto-sama is Seto-sama,” Isono said, “and I know he loves you very much. More than anything. Everyone can see it.”
Mokuba’s only reaction to this was, without so much as glancing at him, a furious, incomprehensible wince of disgust.
He wiped his face with both hands. With a little half-sob he let his knees give out, collapsing with a quiet thump onto the dirty sand. Isono, after a moment, sat down beside him, feeling ten times heavier than his own body. Nothing else seemed like the right thing to do. Nothing seemed fixable except the moment itself: if anything, Mokuba would remember that Isono was there, listening as best he could.
They watched the ocean for a while. The water was glass-green.
Mokuba sniffed and pulled his knees in and hugged them.
“You know he was in a coma for a while, right?”
“I read about it, yes,” Isono said. He had done the research well before he ever shook hands with Seto-sama at the final interview. The wunderkind CEO of Kaiba Corporation had fallen into a mysterious coma and woken up six months later. It was all chalked up to shock and stress and extreme exhaustion, or maybe he was poisoned by his rivals, or he had secret brain cancer, or a whole host of other speculations… but after Battle City, Isono had his own suspicions. No one there was playing a children’s game.
“So Misaki and I–nurse Misaki–we would give him sponge baths all the time,” Mokuba said, “obviously. Because he was in a wheelchair and he couldn't do anything for himself. And the first time I took off his–his clothes to help her give him a sponge bath, there were all of these… things I didn’t know about. Things he never told me about. I didn’t know about any of that. I only knew some of it.”
Isono gave it half a second’s thought and felt ill, for some reason he could not say. His imagination was never very good. No visions, no images. It supplied only darkness, with a wretched, crawling sense of slime.
“What… things, Mokuba?”
Mokuba shook his head, horse-like and heavy, trying to clear it all from his mind.
“He’d be so mad if I told you,” he said. “I don’t know. I’m not supposed to tell anyone. Anything.”
“That’s alright, Mokuba-sama. You don’t have to tell me anything,” Isono said. “I’m happy to sit here–”
“I hate him,” Mokuba said, with a sneer of impossible, unthinkable hatred. His eyes welled with tears again. “He did this. I hate him. I hate him so much. I hate him. You think if someone died you’d hate them less, but I just hate him more and it’s never going away. I hate him. I hate, hate, hate–”
Caught in the current of this fathomless, venomous chanting, Isono fished out, dimly, that he was not talking about his brother.
“–I wish I could kick him in the fucking teeth. I hate him. He took him away from me,” he said, and broke down again, pulsing like a bruise with his low sobs, his heaving chest. “I would do anything. Anything…”
Isono tried again, resting a hand gently on his small, shuddering back. Mokuba didn’t even seem to notice. His grief had taken him somewhere far beyond the shore. He was pleading with someone who would never answer him: God, maybe, or the universe, or the ghosts.
Are you dying alone?
“What?” Seto had snapped.
The dive attendant had repeated herself, slowly, as though he was dumb.
“Are you diving alone?”
“No,” he said. “My brother is waiting for me.”
A lie, of course–they wouldn’t rent him any of the gear otherwise, stuck on their petty, condescending concerns about who was allowed to die when and where, and would it be their fault if Kaiba Seto vanished into the water a stone’s throw from the dive shop? As though Mokuba would not breathe a sigh of relief that his brother and his stepfather were gone, gone forever, with no trace left on this earth save the memory–mercifully flimsy, fading.
Seto took a deep breath, folded at the waist, and unfolded again, knifing at a smooth, serene angle down into the shallow waters of the cove. The thoughts stopped as soon as he stopped breathing. The world below the waves had its own separate logic, defined on clean, stoic lines, uncomplicated by the extravagant corporate complexities of the world on land: every choice you make is between life and death. Go deeper or go back up. Swim farther out or back to safety. Dive under the wave or let it consume you. Here, five meters deep, with the vast weighted blanket of the water squeezing all of his separate component parts together into one soul-mind-body, he knew exactly what choice he was making, and where that choice would take him.
The dive shop attendant had given him a little mesh bag, a small dive knife, and three-millimeter gloves, for whatever he wanted to pry off the crumpled seafloor: clams, urchins, abalone. None of that was so interesting as simply descending, turning onto his back, face-up to the rippling, dappled-gold sky, and dolphin-kicking through the fresh clear depths. After the coma, his physical therapist had recommended taking up swimming, since it was full-body and low-intensity; his body had been as flimsy and floppy as a kitten’s.
But it was more than just gentle on his degraded machinery. There was a pleasing mechanical wholeness to the motions, a sense of completion and connection, everything working in tandem to go forward. The water made a lovely antagonist, ideal in its indifference. It would not forgive errors. Either he moved, or the water moved him.
But he had to come back up to breathe, sooner or later, and after thirty seconds at ten meters deep, Seto undulated slowly back to the surface, breaking with a satisfied gasp. He was some fifteen or twenty meters offshore, in the center of a rocky broken bowl of a cove, safe from the greater currents of the Pacific Ocean. The dive shop attendant had told him this was a popular spot among the locals, enough for an old metal ladder bolted into the rocks. Both were frilled with squishing algae and clinging blisters of mussels, deceiving the feet.
For the moment, he was alone. He inhaled, treading water, and the thoughts came back, in a frantic, breathless soliloquy to an absent audience:
Hatanaka was an idiot, Mokuba. He didn’t fucking get it that no means no. They need to take me seriously. I'm seventeen but I'm not a child and I own them. All of them eat at MY table. And I will never support the right to repair or whatever they want to call it, because the Duel Disk belongs to me. I made it. Don’t you remember? Did you fucking forget? He stole MY designs and MY software and he sold ME to the machine. The Duel Disk is not a toy. The Duel Disk is MINE. The Duel Disk is both a sword and a shield. I made it to save you and now I use it to summon the future. My future. OUR Future. I am the Duel Disk. And I will be damned if I have to lay out the schematics of my soul for the world to see and for strangers to pry apart all my parts and wires with their dirty groping fingers and see how I’m made. Fuck Hatanaka. Anyone can own a Duel Disk but no one will ever own ME again
Excuses, as Gozaburo used to say, a word like a bullet to the back of the head. End of discussion. It was still so easy to hear his voice, his gruff, lumbering grunts, all those growls that revved to smoky barks of displeasure. Seto simply had to imagine a boar in a human skin, and there he was, as though in the water with him–although he had no memory of Gozaburo ever taking a swim. In his youth he’d been a boxer, with a fanatically precise left hook. But it was not an elegant sport and in his middle age he’d instead taken to the sweeping greens of the golf course with all its graceful slicing geometries and left the brute force at home.
See? I’m different, Seto wanted to say, letting a wave lift him, drop him. I hate golfing.
The wave hushed against the rocks several seconds later, gentle and soothing. Shh, shhhh. Relax. We know.
Then why torment Hatanaka?
Because he had misunderstood the order of things, and he needed to know–he needed to be taught, to be reminded of–this simple, indestructible order. There you are, hundreds of you, thousands of you, whole crawling colonies of you, like bees or ants, and above you there is me alone. The cosmology of Kaiba Corporation was beautiful and clear and squirming with vermin.
Yes. The order you failed to learn over and over again– you , the orphan, the cast-off child. There is no difference between you and a dog thrown from a car to die on the side of the road. There is a place for you in this mansion, this family. And if you forget your place, you will be reminded with the collar and the crop and the burning cigar making a bullseye on your skin until it all sinks in.
It never did.
Cradled in the cold currents, Seto still burned, livid with shame, filthy with a feeling worse than filth: bruised to the core with a rot that would not wash out. It was impossible to describe Gozaburo as an honest man or a liar. The only true thing was that he could not be trusted. But with every mouthful of blood Seto had swallowed down the promise, the single exquisite lie: when you win, you won’t feel like this anymore.
He took a deep breath and sank below the surface.
In the shower Seto washed off all the salt in the frigid water and marshaled more arguments, better arguments: Everything I do is to control the company– our company. If I didn’t, they would eat us alive and throw the scraps to the dogs. Someone has to do it, and you won’t. You’re growing soft. You forget where we came from. If you hate me so much, then why don’t you leave me? You have had plenty of opportunities.
When Gozaburo was alive, Mokuba had rapidly perfected a mask of dumb naivete that made no difference to anyone because everyone knew it was a lie and no one cared what he thought or did anyway. So it was a relief to see him at dinner, kaleidoscopic in his misery, casting an ever-shifting pattern of guilt, anxiety, resentment, fear onto the table. Somewhere the time was passing.
He was sunburned. He was so scared.
With a sigh, Seto’s will to fight lay down.
Instead he ate dinner in silence, strangled in the coils of the slow massive snakes that endlessly ate each other: anger became shame, shame became anger. Smooth unbroken loops of feeling. The glass walls of the dining room made ghosts of them, glowing and indistinct. Not shadows but what shadows would be if they were made of light.
Their chef, Wada, had made one of her easy specialties: crab cakes, with a cucumber-tomato slaw. He finished his plate and leaned back in his chair, holding his own wrist, and he looked at Mokuba, who was pushing food around with his fork. Due for a haircut again. He had been so pleased with the first one, when he’d chopped six inches. Vain, as they both were. At work he paid attention to everything and understood everything; anyone who condescended was swiftly corrected. Of course: he had been listening to Gozaburo since he was five years old. They had won the company only because Mokuba chose to save his brother. Seto had done nothing to deserve it.
“Mokuba,” he said.
“Yes, Niisama,” Mokuba said, low and painfully quick.
You look more like Dad than I do, Seto thought. If Gozaburo is alive in me, then he’s alive in you. You just haven’t found him yet. None of this was supposed to happen. Nothing you said was wrong. A fresh lick of fire burned through him and he almost flinched from the feeling. You hurt me. Please don’t. Please.
“Wear sunscreen tomorrow,” he said.
“Yes, Niisama,” Mokuba said, chastened.
Seto couldn’t stand himself any longer so he stood up and pushed his chair in and went outside to the wooden deck that thrust out over the slope. The forest flanked the house on both sides and opened wide to the sea in the same upraised sweep of holy arms. It was strange to be on this coast, facing west, with the sun making a blazing violet-gold seam between the sky and the sea. At home, it was dawn that came from the sea, not dusk. He was on the wrong side of the world.
He turned on the gas firepit and lay down on one of the white chaise lounges to watch the light vanish.
Isono came out after a few moments. “Seto-sama, Wada-san would like to know if you have any additional requests for the menu this week.”
“I don’t care,” Seto said. “Ask Mokuba. He’ll want something.”
“Yes, sir.”
“He kayaked all day?”
“Most of the morning, Seto-sama. Then I brought him back for lunch and he read for the rest of the afternoon.”
“Did he like the kayaking?”
“I believe so, sir.”
Seto glanced up at him without really moving his head. Isono stood steadfast, attentive, politely blank. No, he decided. He was not going to ask Isono to start reporting on Mokuba’s moods, like they were going to war and the enemy’s movements needed mapping.
“Alright. Thank you, Isono. You’re excused.”
He was alone on the deck, awash in the cool breath of dusk. Little blue petals of fire danced and flickered in the fire pit, making the glass pebbles shine like fallen stars. Their heat was weak. He barely felt it from his boneless slump on the chaise.
What was he supposed to do with all of this anger? Where could it go? What was it good for? Gozaburo was dead. The only real thing left of Gozaburo was himself. Battle City was a joke. His anger sat in his chest like an animal, hot and heavy and suffocating. For now, it was asleep. Was that all he could promise Mokuba?
The anger could go to the other Yuugi: your stupid mind crush didn’t take. Do it again, better this time. Do you know who I am? Do you know what I’ve done?
He did, though. The other Yuugi did know. The other Yuugi had seen the violence in his soul, and had taken his card without looking. That was months ago and yet the same feeling thrilled through Seto all over again: like light was flooding through him; like if he jumped from the top of his own ridiculous tower he would fly. He was who he was, and he was worthy of being a friend. Foreign word. Foreign feeling.
And if he spoke to him now, the other Yuugi would say:
He left the thought unfinished.
Or Isis Ishtar? Everything he’d done at the end of Battle City… it was all to save her. It was all to save himself. We have failed: our brothers are lost to us. This does not mean we deserve to die. See? You made the right choice. You put your faith in me to save you, so I’ll put my faith in him to save us. That was the way out. I didn't know before but now I do. I'll show you. Behold! We do not know where we’ll go but it's better than being here–standing on the edge of the world, and falling in love with the drop.
Or the other, other Yuugi, the weaker one, who looked at him with so much hope. He had given up his own grandfather’s soul to save Seto’s. What a trade! Might as well have traded for the dog shit under his shoe. Did it feel good? Do you get the same high from catching spiders in the shower? Why, Yuugi? Is it me you saved or just yourself? No one loves having blood on their hands. But some of us wouldn't have survived without it.
He toyed with his phone. It was dark now.
It took a few minutes but he pulled Yuugi’s number from the Battle City Duelist Registry and dialed, listening to the long, slow pulsing of the ringer.
“Hello, this is Yuugi?” Yuugi said, in bright question, like he didn't know who he was. Either he was guileless or hopelessly optimistic. Answering an unknown number like the stranger was his new best friend.
Seto found his tongue turned to sludge, pooled in the bottom of his mouth.
No. Not you, he wanted to say. I want the other one. I want him to do it again. I need to tell him something. I forgot to take something out last time and it’s still here and it’s going to kill me. Tell me we are going to duel again and you’re going to cut me open with your cards and dig through the throbbing slop of my flesh and pull it out of me and smash it dead.
Yuugi tried again. “Hello? Who is this? If you're speaking, I can't hear you.”
Or just come over. Lock the door. Put your hand around my neck and squeeze. I might cry but don't worry. I won't fight you. I never do. Squeeze until your hand is branded in blue on my neck and everyone will see I have been punished and I am clean and I am ready to try again. Reset the game board!
He couldn't speak. If he opened his mouth, he would have to explain himself. He would have to reveal the soft, flinching underbelly of his soul, his shame. Something happened to me and I don’t know how to undo it. Someone happened to me, and somehow he is still happening. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to live. I don’t want to live–like this.
“I’m so sorry, whoever you are,” Yuugi said, “but you’ll have t–”
Seto tore the phone from his ear and hung up, biting his tongue until he lost all feeling in his mouth except the blinding grainy knife of pain.
He released himself with a sigh, letting the phone drop into the wooden deck with a clatter. He was so tired of himself, of his own monstrous rage, of becoming a monster to fight monsters. He had not been home in years. Of his parents’ house, only dreams were left. He barely remembered his uncle’s house and did not care. Memories of the orphanage were useful as a cudgel against his failing nerve, and for nothing else. He and Mokuba lived together in the mansion like a bad stomach ache: swallowed but undigested, trapped in a hot, sour, seething dark. Someday, there would be a place where he was welcomed, where he was wanted… where they knew him and they knew he was not fit for the world, and still they would stand up and receive him with joy.
Stupid fantasy.
Something about moments like these–these sudden psychic strikes and snakebites–tended to wring his soul out like a sponge. All of the dirty brown water of his subconscious drained out and dribbled. Mokuba usually had to clean up the mess. But the chance of a drop into delusion or hallucination seemed low… At worst, there would be dreams.
For now there was only the forest and the sea, blending together in black on black. The forest was silent. The sea muttered to itself like an old man against the shore.
Somewhere in the house behind him, Mokuba was asleep, a hundred thousand miles away. Seto gazed, with no small longing, into the tremendous black abyss of night.
He hates me.
The thought possessed them like a fever. They made wide, wary circles around each other, and shared the kitchen like wild animals share a watering hole–in unstudied shifts, leaving only traces of their presence. An empty, cooling coffee cup. The tangle of an apple skin, peeled in one rough spiral. Seto surrendered the dinner hour–a warm meal and the adults’ attention–to Mokuba, and emerged later to eat the left-overs, standing alone in the kitchen. It was not like when Gozaburo was alive. They were not being kept away from each other. It was different because they were avoiding each other.
Sunday passed in silence. So did Monday. Hours in all the shades of green tourmaline. Full of light and polished smooth, with no fractures or cracks. There was no way in and no way out.
There was a boy, barefoot, white and waxen, as though all the blood had been drained from him already. Draped in Roman white and holding himself with the aristocratic dignity of those who have no fear of death. Those whose deaths damn the ones who deal the bad hands. Only his eyes burned, blind and alive with holy blue fire. He wore a crown of flowers and fishbones and he sat small astride a deer with fur the color of rust in the center of the bedroom. The deer lowered its great horned head towards the foot of the bed and snorted in disdain at the gray cashmere blanket and the dawn sighed silver-gray around its hooves.
The boy was the lord of the rite. He was ten years old and bleeding from the mouth. The elders had chosen him because he was dirty and dark in spirit. Only locked in the mouth of God swaddled in troubled tongue would he become perfect and pure. They washed his feet and kissed his palms and whispered what an honor, what an honor. Now he said you will come with me. He said I have chosen you. I will take you into the forest. He said the eye of the storm is silent but at the center of the universe is a furnace the size of the heart of a hummingbird and it beats once in a billion years. There I will show you how the gods explode into being from zero, zero in a fragrant flourishing of furious lemniscates and mandelbrots, and you will see the futility of all your chalked-up scriptures. The vulgar vanity of mathematics and morals. Animals know better and have no need. Don’t be afraid. You will see the bones of the old universe inside the body of the new. Time is here, all at once. You will see nothing is lost so long as it was buried alive. You will dig into the dirt and you will find him in the dark throats convulsing below the earth. Take heart: he survives! He is still alive. He feasts on the flesh of your father. Look! Come with me. Mokuba! Take my hand. Do you see him? Look! Look!
Seto had him by the shoulders, shaking him. Seto caught him by the wrists and Seto was whispering urgently into his ear like something was about to happen and there was no time left to stop it. Mokuba’s heart bolted from his chest and he flung himself across the bed in a tumble of limbs as though throwing himself from a moving car and he clung to the sheets, heaving for breath.
Seto was standing by the side of the bed, in his pajamas. They were six feet deep in the shallows of the humming blue sea before dawn. There was something terrible and quiet in his face.
“Nii…?” Mokuba gasped, sweating, his body wooden. He was lying on his back, arms spread.
“You were having a bad dream,” Seto said, leaning in. At the press of palms against his cheeks, warm and distorting, the thumbs smearing tears across his skin, Mokuba turned to ash and crumbled in a breathless heap, in desperate relief. Then Seto took his hands away and Mokuba felt himself flow helplessly into their wake. “You’re alright. Go back to sleep.”
Niisama. The word did not emerge. Mokuba couldn’t speak. He was made of ashes. Niisama. Don't! Niisama!
Seto sat down in the armchair in the corner of the room and crossed his legs. His face and shoulders receded into the shadows. There was only most of a body in the armchair, bisected at a clean slant.
“You were just dreaming.” He spoke from somewhere beyond the body. “Go back to sleep.”
When Mokuba woke again, the sun was in the teeth of the trees and fingers of golden light were grasping across the floor. He was alone in the room.
On Tuesday morning, Seto received a text from Bushida. He was still in bed, hoping sleep would find him. It penetrated his mind slowly, stymied by his restless exhaustion and by the forest fortress surrounding the house. For a moment the message seemed like a different language, a missive from another time, an ancient people who lived incomprehensible lives.
Then he understood: Hatanaka had submitted his resignation.
Notes:
thanks for reading! kudos and kind comments are always welcome. Part 3 is on the way - aiming to post before the end of September!
there WILL be comfort. i promise.
Chapter 3: The Reflection
Notes:
tw for a scene of self harm (smashing a mirror, lots of blood.)
enjoy!!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Hatanaka, you weak bitch. If you survive this, I will make you richer than your wildest dreams. How dare you? You think you can just up and leave just like that? Because it’s not nice, because it’s not fair? Go to hell. Quitting is a luxury for spineless cowards. Fuck you. I won’t accept. Suffer. Or take it as a lesson, with grace and humility. Thank me and never suffer again.
Seto stared down at his phone, his thumbs hovering over the keyboard. The thoughts poured through him in a churning torrent of nausea.
And he typed:
Accept his resignation.
He tossed his phone with a cold clatter onto the bathroom counter and turned to the full-length mirror, barefoot in his pajamas. The morning sun was a brilliant-white gold over the trees; it did not pour through the window behind him so much as blare, brassy and strident.
Thank god no one would ever look at his face and say: you have Gozaburo’s eyes, or you have his build. In a bizarre way he’d felt a smug victory on the day he’d clipped past Gozaburo’s paltry 178 centimeters and kept going, and part of him was mad he’d never have the chance to tower over him and push back.
But people had told him things—people who knew nothing. He would be so proud of you. And, he taught you well. And all of this other blather, all of which Seto had accepted with a smile. Seto smiled at himself now, the lean creature in the mirror, the Renaissance prince of Domino. It was better to be feared than loved, if one could not be both. But they didn’t fear him enough. If they truly feared him, they wouldn’t flee. They would cling to his feet. Machiavelli was a fool; he’d parsed a non-existent difference. Love is only another form of fear: the fear of loss. Someday he is going to leave you. The blindfold will fall from his steel-blue eyes and they will fill with terrible light and all the shadows of power and dignity will slip from your shoulders and he will see you for what you are: desperate, scuttling, unworthy. As Seto awoke one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into—himself, seven years older. Neither feared nor loved. Just a child with a note scribbled in the margins of the file: A challenge for any prospective parent.
Seto lay both of his hands flat on the mirror, looked Gozaburo’s son in the eye, stiffened his neck, and smashed his head into the glass—it shattered in a glittering of hard light, with pain radiating back from the center of his brow in a glorious, obliterating crown—he bounced off the wall, staggering backwards, blinking as all the light turned red, and sat down heavily on the floor, into a field of little teeth, nipping and chattering in broken chimes, and swooned, sweetly, eagerly, into the waiting arms of a shallow and mindless dark.
Seto-sama. Seto-sama! Seto-sama, are you alright?!
The same old lie sprang to mind, in a mouse-trap snap of memory.
“Seto-sama?!”
“Sluhhh,” he said. “Slipped.”
“Seto-sama, can you sit up? You’re bleeding. There’s quite a lot of glass–”
A strong hand on his shoulder. The bathroom whirled around him as he sat up. He rubbed a hand down his face and came away with an extravagant smear of blood. He had a deep, almost overwhelming sense of the journey: his heart pulling blood from every other part of his body and sending it racing up the veins in his neck, around his slack face, and up to the cut just below his hairline, where it was sliding out in slow, slippery sheets.
“Seto-sama, I need to ask you a few questions…”
He waved off Isono’s touch. Then he oozed forward, looking for his feet.
Isono put a hand on his shoulder again. “Please. Stay there for a moment.”
“Mokuba,” Seto said, after a moment, as Isono swept broken glass aside with a bath towel.
“He went for a walk. Do you want me to fetch him?”
“No,” Seto said, and stood up, dizzy and rubbery in all his limbs, like all the bones had been taken out. The world seemed shrouded in a mist of myrrh and blood, all of it rich and warm. His entire body pulsed like a bee sting. Out of the corner of his eye he saw his own face, fractured by slender lightning cracks in the glass–a dozen blank insect stares, caught in drapes of blood. Isono caught him by the shoulders and walked him backwards until the back of his knees hit the cool porcelain and he folded quietly and easily onto the lid of the toilet. The pain detonated over and over inside his head. A skull like a concrete bunker, with the bomb going off inside it. He thought about nothing else. It was an exquisite peace, not blind or deaf to the outer world but to the inner world, unable to see himself or listen to his own thoughts.
Isono sponged blood off his brow, applied pressure to the cut, ran him through a litany of questions: What day is today? Repeat after me: cricket, lawyer, infatuation, discrepancy, watermelon. December, November, October. Seto was familiar with all of it and pulled all of the answers out of his mind like stones from the bottom of a pond. Reaching through the soft murk for something he could touch and hold. He submitted to Isono’s ministrations like a tired child, with no energy or desire to insist on doing it alone. One more time, Seto-sama. Tuesday. Cricket… Lawyer. Lawyer, yes. And then? Infatuation. The pain had forced him outside of himself.
“Hold this to your head, Seto-sama–give me a moment–”
Seto pressed the folded-up hand towel to his forehead. It was a white towel. Then it was a red towel.
…Wada-san, if you could bring me an ice pack, please… And distract Mokuba. I don’t know. Teach him how to fry an egg, perhaps. Or take him into town. Yes, right now. Immediately. Thank you…
Isono came back. He hesitated. Then he moved slowly, as though the whole room was underwater, and then he was holding Seto’s chin with three gentle fingers and frowning at him.
He stared back at him, gloating, because he knew what Isono wanted to say but didn’t dare: emergency room.
“If you would let me take a look, please, Seto-sama,” Isono said, and Seto let him peel back the towel, sodden and sticky with blood.
He sat still for Isono without resistance. Neither of them were going to say anything. Not thank you or does it hurt or why do you do this to yourself or the perennial lie they always agreed on, silently, without so much as spit and a handshake. I’m fine. Gozaburo had blustered on the subject, of course, but he was wrong. The true nature of loyalty was not obedience. It was discretion.
For now Seto’s body and soul pulsed in reverse polarity, repulsing everything he usually attracted: the anger and the shame and the guilt. The fantasy of outgrowing his own skin and peeling off the dead husk to find someone new inside, fresh and shining. The feeling of crawling in the dirt and fleeing from the light when someone flipped the log over. Nothing stuck except the dull, endless throbbing in his head. For now it was almost an ecstasy.
But he could see it swelling on the horizon, its sharp, heaving crest emerging from the flat sea of feeling. Sooner or later, he would come crashing back into himself.
Something had happened. Something had happened to Seto. In the absence of Gozaburo, the only real danger to Seto was Seto, and he had done something to himself. Now he and Isono were keeping Mokuba away from it–whatever it was. There was no other explanation for why Wada had enthusiastically and rapidly bundled Mokuba out of the house and driven all the way into town, asking him endless questions about his schoolwork and KaibaCorporation, everything with an unflagging energy. She had none of Isono’s subtlety or tactful silence.
But Mokuba was familiar with this kind of domestic conspiracy, so he played along. He lingered in the bookstore for half an hour, even though he already knew what he wanted to buy, and because he’d finally shaken off Wada in the cookbook section. The nervous talking was starting to annoy him on two levels. He had no patience for nervous talking, and he was annoyed with his own lack of patience. In the cafe, he bought a lemon-lime Italian soda and three almond croissants and drank slowly and made encouraging noises as she explained, in detail, the science of making bread.
Relax. You don’t have to act like nothing is wrong, he wanted to tell her. Wada’s charm was in her ersatz, inventive style, breaking rules in favor of creative glory–which is probably why Seto had chosen her over other more pedestrian candidates. But she was newer and she didn’t know what was supposed to happen here. We both know something is wrong. I’m not going to have a meltdown all over you. You’re just supposed to keep me away from my brother.
She seemed comfortable talking about yeast, however, having slipped safely into the stream of her own expertise, so he did not interrupt.
On the threshold of the house he stopped, holding the books and the paper bag of croissants, already translucent with little clouds of grease. Somewhere in the house was his brother, stretched in his pain across time and space. Seto was here and he was not here. Seto was himself and not himself. Gozaburo had spread himself like an infection through Seto, and now Seto was sick and spreading it to everyone else.
Either Seto had woken him from his dream, or Mokuba had only dreamed of a brother who did.
A deep chasm yawned open inside him, with a cold, crawling swell of breathless feeling. It was not grief. It was a sense of waiting–of realizing he’d been waiting forever–for something to change, for something to end, for something or someone to free them or forgive them or forget just long enough for them to make an escape. When? What was he waiting for? How would he know if it ever arrived?
His waiting had the scrawny resilience of a weed. He waited when there was nothing else left to do. His waiting grew in places where no better feeling survived. Every time he thought he might be done waiting–this was the last gasp, this was giving up, this was the thickness of blood and salt in the soil–something happened and a new energy surged up through the roots, fumbling for light and air.
He would walk into the house and find the room where Seto was, and he would open the door and find… someone. A chimera, sewn together from three tenses: the poisonous blood of the past and the blind eyes of the future and the tight, trembling flesh of the present.
Isono materialized from the depths of the house, with a face as bland as a mannequin’s.
“What will it be today, Mokuba-sama? Hiking or kayaking?”
Mokuba threw him a look. Silently he discarded one of the many possible Setos he might have found. Seto still schemed and lied and manipulated, but he had long left that black mirror-blade behind: look what you made me do. Making that kind of argument offended his pride and his sense of self-control. He was not trying to bait Mokuba into falling into any secret traps of blame. If he was still trying to send Mokuba away, then he was just hiding. Maybe.
“Where's Niisama?” he said.
“He has asked not to be disturbed,” Isono said.
“You people are always telling me I can’t see him,” Mokuba retorted, and he slid into the house.
Seto was lying in his dark room with a cold compress on his throbbing head, half awake, half dreaming. He was dreaming of a day long ago. He was on a sunny patio in the back of a house and other people were holding Mokuba, and he knew Mokuba did not want to be held like that or by them. It was in the cracking tenor of his cry, and the blind bending of his soft, fat torso. Mokuba felt cornered in their stiff and foreign arms. He had known well before anyone else that they were not to be trusted. Even before he could speak he had been sly and skeptical, narrowing his eyes at strange faces and leaving new toys untouched for days until they had proven themselves harmless.
Then his father took Mokuba from his sister-in-law’s arms and Seto took Mokuba from his father, retreating to a corner of the patio away from them and hissing that’s not what he wants. Don’t bounce him. He likes it when you hold him like this, so he can see.
And they laughed at his wisdom because in the absence of the mother there was the brother, six years old and furious because his brother was crying, but no one knew what they were doing and no one was holding him right and no one knew him the way Seto did. Easier in the afternoon and with a funny clean sweet smell. If Seto told him a story or facts from one of the science books, he would sit still for anything. Somehow he noticed everything that flew, like birds and airplanes, and little twinkly lights. He laughs the same way you did, his father once said, watching them from his dead-tired slump in the armchair.
If time was merciful it would run him through in gentle spears and he would remember the weight of a small body in his arms. An algebraic balance of ignorance and innocence. Neither existed without the other. The sheer unrelenting bravery of children, in the face of endless revelation. The baby was a mystery, indefinite, undefined, until someone had said, over their heads: he only stops fussing when Seto holds him –and suddenly the baby was Mokuba, who loved only him. If only all revelations were so serene. The man had been a mystery until he’d shaken Seto’s hand and said congratulations, Seto and laughed, in cigar-sick gusts of sour air, and Seto realized he’d not won a game but simply rolled snake-eyes at the advent of another.
On the other side of the bedroom door, summoning his nerve to knock, was a stranger. There was a heart behind a wall and a soul like a labyrinth, where truth waited with hunger in the dark, damp center.
Seto’s heart tossed in his chest like a small boat on the sea. Can we go back, he thought. But the answer was no and that was not the question he wanted answered. Will you let me hold you one more time?
There was a knock on the door and a voice. “Niisama?”
He stood up, holding the compress to his aching head, and staggered towards the door.
Seto opened the door in his pajamas and withdrew without a word back to the bed, sitting on the edge. He did not look good. He looked sullen and grim. For half a moment Mokuba hesitated, with his weight on his back foot.
“How do you feel?” he said.
“Don’t worry about it,” Seto said. “What’s that?”
Mokuba looked down at the books and the bag in his hands. “I got you some books. And a croissant.”
He ventured into the room and sat down next to Seto, handing him everything one at a time: a book of brainteasers, a book on the octopus and the origins of consciousness, a book on the nature of time by an Italian physicist, and the croissant. As always Seto read the titles and the synopses on the back of the books, giving Mokuba time to study the lurid violet cloud on his forehead, creeping out from under his hair and the compress.
“What did you do?” he said.
“Nothing, Mokuba. I said don’t worry about it,” Seto said testily.
“Well, you shouldn’t be lying around doing nothing in the dark. It doesn’t help,” Mokuba snapped, and froze, kicking himself. Seto was taking all of the guilt for himself, leaving him with all of the concern. But it was never a good idea to press Seto on the whys and hows of these moments: his shame ran like a rabbit, and his fury like the fox in hot pursuit. It was better not to look at him at all. Mokuba was supposed to act like nothing happened and feel nothing about it.
Seto just turned his head towards him and exhaled, smiling, sad and small. With a cold, swift feeling, dropping into his stomach like water, Mokuba realized he wanted to ask him something.
He went still and waited as Seto studied him, with that same terrible smile, pulling in a quiet breath of preparation.
Seto did not know how to say it.
So instead he said, “Thank you for the books. They look interesting. What did you get for yourself?”
If Mokuba did not get up and leave he was going to grab Seto by the front of his pajama shirt and shake him until it came out. Please. For the love of god please just say it. I’m sick of silence. I’m sick of you being scared. You’re safe here. Please believe me. Please. Please whatever you want to say just SAY IT
“Roadside Picnic and Solaris. They’re Russian science fiction,” he said. “Do you want some coffee?”
“Alright,” Seto said, like they’d just struck a deal.
Mokuba stood up and went to the kitchen and started the coffee. After several minutes, Seto appeared and took a seat at the kitchen table, still clutching the compress to his forehead, and asked a meaningless question about where he’d gone. Mokuba answered it, and they said more meaningless things to each other, nothing about anything that mattered, but it was enough. It was a bone but it was bloodless and it was better than nothing at all. Seto, it seemed, was also sick of the silence.
Isono took them to a local beach, a sweeping scythe of sand whose edge slid under a sheet of blue glass water. In the middle of the week, it was nearly empty. Regardless, Isono set up the umbrella and the beach chairs at the far end of the beach, some ten meters away from the nearest family. Seto stayed under the umbrella with his legs in the sun, wearing white linen trousers and a pale blue linen shirt with long sleeves that he rolled up to the elbows. Whatever he’d been doing for the past few days had given him a funny tan: pale limbs with browned hands, browned feet, and a browned neck, in neat cuts, as though he’d been dismantled and reassembled from spare parts.
“Why didn’t we go to Okinawa, if you wanted the beach?” he said, surveying the flat, clear water from behind his aviators. His bruise was hidden under a square of gauze. “Or Fiji... Or the Maldives?”
“I couldn’t decide between hiking or the beach,” Mokuba said, smearing sunscreen over his face, “so I chose both.”
“As though we couldn’t be in Fiji by today and in Norway by tomorrow,” Seto said, yawning.
“Next time, you plan the vacation,” Mokuba said. “Since you want to whine about it.”
Seto laughed, delighted.
Mokuba stared at him, opened his mouth, and thought better of it, tossing the sunscreen onto the beach bag and marching down the sand to edge of the water. Inside him, two unhappy halves came together like the legions of ancient lands, trying to force their way through each other. Beside himself when Seto refused to speak to him, and pissed-off when Seto did speak.
He walked waist-deep into the sea and stopped. Little clouds of sand billowed past his feet and settled. The water was a formality of matter: it was exquisitely clear. Fish like tiny darts flew past his feet in short, silver-blue jerks and twitches. He looked back at Seto on the beach, half in shadow, looking back at him, long and languid and relaxed, and his heart tripped.
Are you happy now? he wanted to say. Have you ever been happy? Or does it just happen to us on accident?
He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted: “ARE YOU GETTING IN OR WHAT?”
In response, Seto lifted a finger and touched it to the gauze on his forehead.
“TOMORROW,” he called back.
Fine. At least he was resting, and not pushing it.
Mokuba fussed over him all day, in a deft and subtle way. He didn’t hover. But he watched, from the corner of his eye, tracking every one of his movements and his moods. Seto’s head hurt with a dull, hot agony and despite his efforts at the beach he wrote up the rest of the day as a loss. There was nothing to do except lie on the couch, in a cool dark space safe from the afternoon sun, and watch back, as Mokuba found endless things to do within a stone’s throw: sketching landscapes on the deck. Reading one of his books, and finishing it. Sorting through the jazz and classical vinyls in the credenza. He found a pair of binoculars and a bird-watching book somewhere and perched at the end of the deck, taking careful notes, returning during the humming silence to flip the vinyls, from the second movement to the third.
It’s not your fault. You don’t have to do any of this, Seto wanted to tell him. Go the hell away and let me lie in the miserable bed I made for myself. Don’t let it touch you. But then he woke up, with an apple on a plate on the coffee table, peeled and cut, a little glistening star of eight fat precise points, and he said nothing at all.
Along the side of the house there was a little dirt footpath that slipped through the trees, taking a secret way. The golden glowing tunnels of green covered their journey like a route to the realm that lived beyond the knowing of their human senses. Then the trees released them in the same way hands release a stray moth, in open pleading, and there was a clean little beach, as short and squat as a thumb.
It was mid-morning and the tide was low. The water had pulled away from the rocks like a magician’s sheet, revealing a rough black maze of brilliant blue rooms swirling with sand.
Let's go, Seto had said, just after breakfast, and now they were in the tide pools, picking over the rocks, looking for something with their trousers rolled up to their knees. He had replaced the bandage with a new one.
“–so, basically, all of these things that everyone is fighting for, these weird magical items, they’re just like trash that aliens left behind on planet Earth,” Mokuba said, following Seto’s pathway across the rocks, although his legs were shorter, and his leaps only half as bold. “They don’t actually mean anything important. So it's like, we were visited by aliens, and their visit changes our lives, but we don’t mean anything to them. We’re completely insignificant–”
“So the aliens never actually appear in the book?” Seto said, stepping calf-deep into a little pool and peering into the water, hands on his knees. Several meters away, the clear blue waters rose and fell in gentle frothy swells against the rocks like a breathing body.
“No. They just show up, fuck things up, and leave. Totally incomprehensible and indifferent to us,” Mokuba said. “And when you think about… first encounters, it's different. It's not like crop circles or woo-woo abduction bullshit–”
Seto’s hand shot into the water, like a piston or a heron, and came out, shining with water. He had grabbed a hermit crab by the shell, pinched between his thumb and forefinger.
“Look,” he said, holding it out for Mokuba’s inspection. The crab had pulled itself into its shell, showing only bright, lavender-blue curves. “You read all those books on marine biology. What is it?"
“Um… Coenobita purpureus,” Mokuba said, knowing Seto was trying to prove he paid attention. “Blueberry hermit crab. Endemic to Japan, mostly Okinawa.”
“Do you think it tastes like blueberries?” Seto said, smiling.
"Yeah, right," Mokuba snorted, allowing Seto to tip the hermit crab into his hands. It was too scared to move, alarmed by his soft, hot palms, so he released it back into the water, where it scuttled under an overhang in a swift, fleeting flurry of sand.
Seto pointed into the rocks. “Slug?”
Mokuba slid into the pool and bent over. Tucked into the rocks was a slimy bright blue stripe the length of his finger, bearing a Morse-code speckling of golden-yellow dots and dashes.
“Nudibranch,” he said. “It’s a hypselodoris festiva. A festive sea slug.”
“Well, is it a nudibranch or a slug?”
“All nudies are slugs, but not all slugs are nudies–don’t! Leave it alone!”
Seto was crooking his fingers into the little fissure, trying to pry out the nudibranch.
“Relax. I just want to see it better–”
“You can see it just fine from here!” Mokuba retorted. “Leave it alone. Don’t touch it. They’re really delicate.”
Seto stood up, retracting his hand. His expression took on a strange, hard cast–glowing with sweat in the sun, and smiling in faint echo of yesterday’s smile. It was not a good smile. It was a knowing smile.
“You’re still angry at me,” he said. “But you're holding back, for some reason.”
Mokuba said nothing, although something tightened and rose in his shoulders. It was a lie to say no but nerve-wracking to say yes. Seto was waiting for him to speak like they were playing a game, and now it was Mokuba's turn.
Several words floated by them, drifting in lazy spirals around his legs. You’re right. I don’t know how to talk about it. Why do I have to choose between the true thing and the painless thing. Don't ask me for a reason like you don't fucking know.
“Can we just forget it,” Mokuba said.
“No. You need to forget about this,” Seto said, touching the bandage on his head. “It has nothing to do with you.”
Mokuba sighed and frowned. One part of him was relieved, but another, stronger part of him knew that none of this ended with any kind of deliverance or absolution. Seto’s split second of unhappy impulse was going to last a long time. Over the next month he would be even more irritable and distracted, and he was going to leave meetings well before they were over, and Mokuba would silently go around the house and close all the drapes and answer all his emails while he curled up in the dark and slept like the dead. The guilt would skitter back and forth between their feet like a roach that refused to die.
Seto sidled through the silence.
“Mokuba, do you love me?”
“Obviously,” Mokuba said, and Seto gave him a funny look.
“Does that mean you love Gozaburo?”
“No. And if I could go back I’d push him out the window myself!” Mokuba shot back, with a hot flare of energy. “And don’t fucking do that–I hate it when you do that! We’re just talking. It’s not a duel! It’s like you set these traps, and in the middle of talking to someone you just catch them in one of your fucking spike pits–”
“Oh, good. You’re not scared of me,” Seto said, with a real smile this time. He clapped one hand to the top of Mokuba’s head and ruffled his hair, sending a wave of cool, shivery feeling rocketing down his body. “Good. That’s good.”
He turned and stepped neatly out of the pool onto a spine of rock, indifferent to the mafia of sharp little shells and creatures, conspiring against his bare feet. And he lowered himself smoothly into another, larger pool, his feet sinking into the golden sand with barely a whisper of disturbance.
“What are these?” he said, motioning to a loose, lazy school of electric blue fish.
“You give me whiplash,” Mokuba snapped, and slunk after him into the pool, peering at the fish. “Those are neon damselfish. Pomacentrus… coelestis.”
“Everything we’ve found is blue so far,” Seto said, with no small satisfaction.
“Those are Pacific sugar limpets,” Mokuba said, pointing at a pimpling of white, star-like shapes on the rocks, several steps away. “And those are obviously anemones. There’s like… five brown slugs in here, if you know how to look for them.”
“I see,” Seto said, frowning into the murky brown frills where the rocks met the sand. None of the slugs made themselves visible, or maybe he just thought they were too boring for real attention, lacking the dazzle and gem-like effulgence of the damselfish.
They held still, letting the fish venture closer and closer. Their shadows fell across the rippled sand, foreshortened and distorted by the high sun into soft odd blobs.
“Did you ever think about leaving me?” Seto said, crossing his arms, as the little fish crissed and crossed around his feet. “When I was sitting there catatonic and helpless in that wheelchair? I couldn’t have stopped you. I tried to kill you. No one would blame you. I wouldn’t. You could have gone anywhere and you’d be free of… all of this forever.”
“No. No way,” Mokuba said, and Seto looked at him with a strange face, like two faces at once, layered atop each other in panes of colored glass: the open, hopeful face of a child, and the tired skepticism of someone with almost nothing left to believe in.
“Why not?” he said.
“I’d never leave you,” Mokuba said. “You’re my brother. And even if I am mad at you, I just think about what he did to you–”
“I don’t want to think about what he did to me,” Seto muttered.
“–the way he treated you, the way he hurt you. And it makes me so–”
“I don’t want to think about it,” Seto snarled, with sudden animal savagery. Even the fish scattered, darting into the safety of the shadowy overhangs in the rocks.
Mokuba dug in.
“Well, then why didn't we run away?!” he said. “We could’ve taken some money and run. We could’ve stolen some of his watches or something–”
Seto scoffed, a miserable sound.
“Run away to where,” he said. “To what? Where on Earth–”
“Or we could’ve gone back to the orphanage–”
“You have quite a rosy little memory of the orphanage,” Seto sneered. “Playing in your sandbox with the toys I lost teeth fighting for. We only visit the nice group homes, Mokuba. After I’ve paid through the nose for trained staff who don't hate children and brand-new bathrooms and making sure there’s no roaches floating in the fucking soup. No. We were not going to languish out of sight from so-called respectable society and be treated like dirt for the rest of our lives. Do you know what they call those kids? Throw-away children.”
“I know that,” Mokuba retorted, smarting. “But I hated him. I still hate him. I hate how he–how he’s still here and he’s going to be inside our heads for the rest of our lives. Like a fucking parasite. We should’ve run away when we had the chance–”
“It was too late,” Seto said.
“No it wasn't! Did you ever even think about it?! You could've come up with something–”
“Be quiet. Shut up! Yes it was!” Seto snarled. “Do you really think he was ever going to let me go?! Are you stupid? You will never understand him like I do. The second I beat him in that fucking game, when I humiliated him–he knew what he was going to do with me. He made a mockery of everything I wanted, and he was never going to let me go–”
He cut himself off, his hands swinging up; Mokuba flinched, half-expecting that Seto would grab him by the shoulders again. But Seto grabbed his own head, fingers clawing into his scalp as though he could pry apart the citrus rind of his skull and dig out the sour flesh inside. All at once he braced and cowered in a pose of baroque, mythic contortion, his face caged behind his forearms, seething against some massive force Mokuba could not see–something churning inside him, something pressing against him. Mokuba, with his heart hammering, did not dare touch him.
He released himself, straightening up and turning away from Mokuba. Mokuba saw him in profile, with wide, wild eyes, desperate, panting, swept up in some distant vision at the other end of the horizon.
After several long moments, Seto swerved around to face him, his expression settling with a dark calm.
“It doesn’t matter,” he announced. “I beat him. I won. I took his company. I am accomplishing things he never even dreamed of. I am the most powerful man in the world, and no one will ever hurt me again.”
That’s not true. I hurt you three days ago.
Mokuba, with his toes curling in the soft sand, said nothing.
Seto, coloring, seemed to hear him anyway, and corrected himself, with blood-rich relish.
“Don't you get it? Do you understand? No one will ever throw us away.”
Mokuba stared at him, with his heart in his mouth, and released a sigh. He could not parse if Seto had won the conversation, or lost, or if he’d forced a concession, or if there was anything at all to win or lose aside from these terrible, bitter pills of victorious confession. He only had a strange, split-apart feeling, like he had two brothers instead of one and both of them were standing before him, barefoot in the water, sunburned and bruised and fuming in triumph: Seto who understood ten times more than him, and Seto who understood nothing at all.
“But do you ever wish…” Mokuba stopped himself. Dumb question. He already knew the answer.
“There’s no point in wishing for anything,” Seto said. “We can’t change anything that happened. It’s already gone. It’s out of reach. We can only… change ourselves. And as long as you have faith in me to do that, I will.”
“I do,” Mokuba said, honestly, and Seto exhaled, with no small relief. “But what did you want from him?”
It slipped from Mokuba’s mouth, almost an accident, but he’d made no effort to stop himself.
Seto’s breath hitched. His eyes darkened.
Then he smiled at him. He sloshed over, wrapped an arm around Mokuba’s head, and pulled him in for a kiss to the top of his brow–awkward, hesitant, as though he himself couldn’t believe what he was doing. But for half a second, the whole world turned inside out.
“Nothing. Not a damn thing. Just a fucking roof over our heads. And KaibaCorporation,” Seto said, already sloshing away. He slung one leg over a low rock, and then the other, hopping into another shallow pool.
There was nothing Mokuba could do but follow him. He crawled over the rock and slid into the pool beside his brother, following his gaze, looking without seeing into the six inches of dark shallow water where some small animal was clinging to the underside of a rock.
“What’s that?” Seto said.
“Um,” Mokuba said, and discovered nothing inside himself. Everything had been thrown out to make room for the feeling, like a tarnished coin, paid back and forth to each other in endless debt. Borrowing against nothing because they had nothing else to give.
Do you love me?
Mokuba had said the wrong thing. To Seto it was not obvious.
He did not look at Seto. He only sensed him, the clarity of his presence, like a knife-edge against his skin. There was no one else who knew him–no one else who’d waited through the worst and nursed him through the quiet. No one else had seen him sweat and burn with the fever of dreams and no one else had mopped up the blood of the future as it was born, breathless and staggering and ablaze. The duty fell to no one else. No one else was so lucky. Seto knew it was him and him alone.
If he took hold of the question with both hands and turned it over, there he found a soft, white underbelly, tender and flinching, untouchable: Am I the only person alive who loves you?
“Just a crab,” he said.
Seto lounged on the deck chair, watching the brilliant golden coin of the sun slide towards the horizon. He had more energy than yesterday, but only just. The brainteasers in the book Mokuba had given him were easy enough, but every thought struggled through a grim muck of dull throbbing and he slogged through the logic grids in slow, plodding steps. If the Jurassic lizard is 6 or 40 meters long, and the Argentinian lizard was longer than the English one…
On the other side of the firepit, Mokuba was curled up against the pillows of the patio sofa, sketching. It was quiet and still. Wada kept coming in and out of the kitchen with new finger dishes every fifteen minutes, and Isono was off for the evening.
“What should I draw?” Mokuba said.
“KaibaLand on one of Saturn’s moons. KaibaLand Titan,” Seto said.
“Oooh,” Mokuba said, sing-song under his breath. The sound of his pencil scratching across the paper cut through the hissing and muttering of the gas flames in the firepit.
They were not done with the conversation they started in the tidepools. They had just moved on from words to other things: clinging to each other, without actually touching. Falling into orbit like two interstellar bodies around the deep, endless well of their memories. Careful, quiet acknowledgement of the other. Do you want to kayak with me tomorrow? Of course. Are you enjoying your book? Yeah. What do you like about it?
“Can Blue-Eyes White Dragon breathe in space?” Mokuba said. “Does she need a spacesuit?”
“She wears a hard hat at our construction sites,” Seto said, “which implies that she’s not impervious to physics.”
“She’s just setting a good example for everyone. But does she actually need it?” Mokuba said.
“If she doesn’t have a spacesuit, the implication is that she doesn’t breathe air. Which raises the question of what kind of animal she is, if not an animal that breathes air. It’s up to you whether or not you want to engage in that kind of speculative tangent,” Seto said.
“Fine. Spacesuit,” Mokuba muttered, and his pencil raced furiously across the paper. Seto snorted and filled in another clue.
But some things were still impossible to say, by any means. Mokuba understood everything and Mokuba understood nothing. Mokuba had never wanted a damn thing from Gozaburo and everyone knew it. Mokuba had been there for everything, and yet Mokuba had never sat across from Gozaburo at the conference table, in a moment bathed in stark, serene morning air, like they were not on the top floor of the building but on the peak of a mountain, thrusting towards the heavens. Mokuba had never posed the hopeless solution: if you will not love me the way you found me, then I'll become someone else. Here he is: the only thing you truly love. The soul becomes a mirror. Gozaburo stared at his son with rabid fury, and his reflection stared back.
Then Gozaburo had broken the glass and left the room, laughing, and only the reflection remained.
In this sense, Mokuba would never understand. Mokuba would never become the mirror. He had no need. He had more faith than Seto that love would make its way through the mazes life had made of their hearts, and find the righteous path. And there was only so much that Seto would ever let him see.
There went Friday, and Saturday, lighting up like bonfires in the middle of the forest, ablaze with hot glory. They went for a hike, they went for a swim, they fell asleep on the beach. Mokuba looked back at the sound of a splash and Seto’s kayak was empty, a long neon green fang floating across the sea. Then Seto popped out of the water several meters away, sleek and panting with a rare, breathless joy.
“Get in, there’s fish,” he called, and Mokuba unbuckled his lifejacket and threw himself in.
On Sunday afternoon Isono hauled the suitcases into the trunk of the car. Seto slid into the back seat, Mokuba followed him, and Isono shut the door. For a brief second they were alone in the silence, and there was no smell of pine in the air.
“Do we have to go home?” Mokuba said.
“We have work tomorrow,” Seto said, frowning at his phone and the slew of emails.
“Technically, we could work from wherever,” Mokuba said. “You do whatever you want anyway.”
“If you want a beach house, we can get a beach house,” Seto said. “Just make a list of all the houses you like, and we’ll go check them out. If you don’t find anything you like, we can always build one.”
“I guess,” Mokuba said, and Seto glanced at him: leaning against the window, gazing dreamily into the forest. Realization reached him like a leaf falling onto a pond: a finger-tip touch and a whisper of rippling. The stillness inside him had changed. It was not that Mokuba wanted to stay here, or go somewhere else. He just didn’t want to go back home.
Isono opened the door and took the driver’s seat, saying some things about gas and routes and traffic, and Seto set the thought aside, for now. It was a long drive back to Domino, past little towns in a tangram of farmlands, then swinging around Osaka and threading the needle through Kyoto. They wouldn’t be home until close to midnight. His head hurt but he ignored it. He busied himself with his emails because there was nothing better to do. Mokuba did not, although his own inbox was surely just as over-stuffed, but Seto didn’t suggest it. He was watching the country pass by, with his headphones on.
Somewhere just outside of Kyoto, just as Seto was wishing he’d called for the helicopter or even the plane instead of settling for the car, Mokuba fell asleep, head bowing like a wilting sunflower. Seto carefully reached over, tucked a finger under the band of his headphones, and pulled it off his head. As always, he stayed asleep. He had always been a deep sleeper.
Seto reached for Mokuba’s far shoulder, behind his neck, and gave him a gentle tug. Mokuba stirred and hummed. Seto pulled the seatbelt away and Mokuba keeled over, lying twisted across the seat, his head in Seto’s lap.
“Should we stop in Kyoto for dinner, sir?” Isono said, from the front seat, sensing the movement behind him.
“No. Keep driving,” Seto said, sinking into the feeling of triumph like a warm bath. They used to pull this maneuver more often, until Daimon told them they had to stop; to do it again now felt like the thing had never been taken away but just gone into hiding. “Drive carefully.”
He knew why Mokuba didn’t want to go home: he didn’t want to go back to normal life. He was struggling with the post-vacation dream that maybe something had changed, something was different; and the post-vacation fear that the dream was just delusion, and Monday and Thursday would not come with a new smell and shine but as their same stale selves, cut and printed from time’s tired assembly line. Maybe, far from home, they had found the time and space to become new people. Maybe not, and the blood they’d spilled in the forest had been spilled in vain.
Seto stroked Mokuba’s hair, his thigh going numb under the weight of his head. He didn’t move him. They couldn’t keep doing this forever: these endless tests of love. Breaking and reforming like waves on the shore, senseless but relentless, never on purpose. The momentum built until it broke with thunderous rage and then there was peace, until it began to build again. And like the waves, maybe the tests would never end. Maybe they would continue until the moon cracked and crumbled from the sky, and gravity as we know it would come to a sloppy and exhausted end. Maybe one of them had to go for a while, or forever, and set the other one free. Who? Go where?
It was not a question for now. For now, Mokuba was asleep, and Seto held him through the night, all the way to the mansion’s long driveway. The gravel popped and crunched under the car’s tires. Seto gently shook him awake, and they were home.
Notes:
[dark side of dimensions looms on the horizon]
a lot of this chapter (the tide pool scene) was a delicate balancing act between three layers of narrative: seto's feelings on everything (struggling to accept/admit that he is a victim, and had no control over anything), mokuba's feelings on everything (trying to understand how much agency they have to change things, both in the past and the present), and our own perspective on everything, knowing they're children and they are not at fault for anything gozaburo did. i hope i did not topple off the tightrope into the tiger pit.
thanks for reading!! kudos and kind comments are always welcome.
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