Work Text:
“Nii-sama?”
“Hm?”
“What was mom like?”
No one question from Mokuba chilled Kaiba more. It had happened only a few times since they were little, with Mokuba able to read the surprise in his older brother as soon as it was asked. A token response was usually given, about her appearance or demeanour, to satisfy Mokuba. Something else was quickly deferred to, a game or a project, or most recently, work.
They sat together, alone, in the cockpit of a plane. Kaiba’s hands tightened on the control. Releasing the tension, he reached out for the radio. “Domino approach, KC-001, ten miles due west, inbound. Requesting clearance landing one-four left.”
“Nii-sama, you never ask for clearance....”
“I do, you just don’t hear it,” Kaiba said, listening to the chatter that was breaking over the radio. It wasn’t an easy out, but it was an out nonetheless.
“Did you hear what I asked?” Mokuba asked.
“I did; we’re landing, give me a moment.” The boy sighed and crossed his arms over his chest. He resigned to the fact that Kaiba would never give him a proper response to the question. As angry as it made him, he couldn’t exactly blame Kaiba either. There was always a stunned and unsure expression when the question was asked.
Even after they landed, crammed into a car, and drove all the way home, Mokuba didn’t get a response. Willingly forgotten, he assumed, to which he stormed up to his room and slammed the door.
Kaiba sighed, stalking up behind his little brother, flinching to the sound and deferring to his home office. He was convinced that there was never going to be a good enough answer for Mokuba. Words couldn’t put the experiences, the moments, into clarity for the Mokuba any better, either. Not fully.
It wasn’t that Kaiba was uncompassionate. He fumbled through neat folders in a desk drawer, leafing through them until he pulled out a degrading Manila envelope. Old and worn, with the address of the Domino City children’s home stamped across it.
The contents spilled onto his desk. Hand-drawn pictures on notebook paper, their plans for KaibaLand, notes from when he was teaching Mokuba how to write. The best a three year old could manage. In the back, however, was a folded drawing. One of his own, from when they were first sent to the orphanage. He was never sure why he kept it; it was nothing but a painful memory. A drawing of four stick figures as detailed as he could make them. Hair color, eye color, clothes. The best a ten year old boy could do.
They were labelled: Mom, Dad, me, and Mokuba.
Even though Mokuba had never met their mother, and only had vague recollections of their father. His ten-year old mind was dreaming then, wishing them all together. And he closed his eyes, recalling the memories. Even an eidetic memory had its faults.
But he still had resolve.
—
More than a month went by, so much time that Mokuba has forgotten his frustration with Kaiba and just moved on. He couldn’t deny to himself that his brother had sensitivities, no matter how hard he hid them, and that Mokuba was perhaps the best one to hit them the hardest.
So when Kaiba approached him one night, asking him: “Do you remember what you asked me on our trip back?” Mokuba shook his head. Something was placed in his hands.
“Isn’t this, like, your really old prototype disk?” Mokuba asked, turning the duel disk over and around. “Wait, it’s missing something.”
“Cut down on some of it’s bulk, but, I hadn’t intended for it to the same as the old disk,” Kaiba mentioned. This just felt like a tech demo, which did nothing to lessen his nervous excitement. “It’s not a duel disk, exactly.”
“Yeah, I can tell,” Mokuba said. He shook it a bit, before poking at some of the buttons. He could tell where it had been disassembled and rebuilt with new parts. “So the thing can’t swing out anymore but there’s still the SolidVision and....woah!”
A flash of light before them, pixels digitising in a rain light pattern as it developed the complex image. It held a breath of depth that seemed beyond the monsters and spells that were usually displayed. A pair of people, man and woman, standing beside one another, smiling. The woman had deep black hair, straight and laid neatly over her shoulders. She had a kind, round face and porcelain skin, with eyes of deep blue. She wore a soft pink shirt, Kaiba thinking it had to be cashmere if he had to reach out and touch her. She waved. The man was a bit taller, hair chestnut brown, short cropped and bit foppish. His eyes were small, almost hiding the violet color beneath heavy lids. He had light facial-hair, professional and neat-looking, with a sharp jaw and cheeks. His hands were jammed in his pant’s pockets.
They moved in ways that felt organic, swaying, smiling, looking up at one another. The woman laid her head on the man’s shoulder.
“Nii-sama?”
Kaiba worked on it tirelessly. Every detail agonised over, every piece of programming tied to a faulted image in his mind. For all he knew, it was wrong. That he’d missed details. Even if he did, the movement before him felt right. Real. True.
“Mokuba,” Kaiba began, reclaiming his voice. “It’s time you met your mother and your father.”
Mokuba glanced back at his brother, and then back up the to images—the people—before him. There was a squint in his eyes as he regarded the man with a ghost of familiarity. But when he looked to the woman, there was more awe and wonder. Especially when she waved, because Mokuba waved.
“This...this is Mom...Hi, Mom,” Mokuba squeaked.
Kaiba wished so badly that they could speak. That he had a way to make their voices real, beyond the small noises and coos that they were capable of. But he didn’t want to be dishonest with Mokuba. “She loved to cook,” Kaiba said. “She’d always make me try new things, and the always smelled like something just came off the stove.”
“Nii-sama?”
“Father worked a lot, but mother stayed at home. She used to sing when she would walk to the park with me. Or when she was doing chores. Or when she was cooking. Anytime, anywhere. She didn’t care. She’d read stories to me at night so I would go to bed, and when she was pregnant with you, she would read to you, too, when she thought no one else was listening. Sing to you. I wish you could have heard her sing.”
Somewhere in the middle, Kaiba had gotten onto his knees, like he was a small child looking up to his mother again. It didn’t feel right to tower over her life-sized body. Mokuba stepped closer, hugging his older brother tight around the neck.
“Thank you, Seto,” he whispered, and Kaiba could hear him fighting back tears and hiccups. “You didn’t have to do this.”
“I did,” Kaiba said.
Mokuba rubbed his face deep in Kaiba’s shoulder, pushing all of the snot and tears away, before turning to look back at the figures. Their mother had looped to another wave, and her sons waved back to her.
“I love you, nii-sama.”
“Love you, too.”