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Kaiba didn't know why he was looking through old footage from Death-T. He hadn't forgotten by accident, instead choosing to ignore all the possible reasons. To prove something to himself or other. To prove that in this new ordering of the world, one without the other Yuugi, he had changed. He had remembered the events of Death-T, what he had done and why, but the specific thoughts and feelings he'd experienced watching Yuugi and his friends pass through each stage one by one had faded from his mind in the aftermath of his coma.
What had started this? A stray memory from Battle City. One that had somehow turned fond in his mind, the image of Yuugi and Jounouchi soaking wet and heaving water from their lungs but still (thankfully) alive. Kaiba himself had been the one to save Jounouchi, a technicality by it's nonchalance and lack of effort, but a rescue all the same. Jounouchi had been seething and all Kaiba could do was tease behind a satisfied smirk. He knew the other boy still bore a grudge against him and Kaiba's own feelings toward him hadn't been much kinder, but he couldn't help but be amused by his sincere outrage. Jounouchi loathed him, but at that moment Kaiba couldn't return the sentiment. He wondered why. He hadn't wanted to consider the gut-wrenching feeling he'd experienced only an hour before, when it seemed certain either Yuugi or Jounouchi would have to die. How his eagerness to see Yuugi and his other self's ideals crushed beneath the weight of reality had turned to horror when faced with the scene before his eyes. Was this the other Yuugi's "answer"? Kaiba's own hypocrisy, the weakness of his resolve, shoved back in his face? But Yuugi and Jounouchi had shown him something else.
Kaiba allowed himself to consider. He hadn't felt an indifferent obligation nor anything as profound as love (an emotion he could only approximate for anyone who wasn't his brother). Pity seemed a tad too insincere. Had it been sentimentality then? He had always vocally denied it, but something inside him had come to admit the reality of Yuugi and Jounouchi's...connection. "Friendship", although that was what they themselves called it, still seemed too intangible a concept for Kaiba to attach himself to, but somehow he had been assured of the nameless bond shared between the two boys. When had he become attached? He couldn't place it on a singular moment and that upset him. Shouldn't he have known when something he'd always denied had finally earned his acknowledgement? Why had the other Yuugi always been one step ahead of him even when it came to his own feelings? Why had he bothered to care, if he could leave it all behind so easily? Kaiba assured himself that he hadn't been convinced, that the bonds between people were as tenuous as passing needs and desires. Yet he had on some level believed in that strange something Yuugi and Jounouchi had created, and seeing it defiled, to be put on the chopping block of life and death for someone else's sick amusement, had unnerved him. It had reminded him of himself.
He needed to know. In this world the other Yuugi had abandoned, he needed to know. What had changed about himself and what he still lacked.
"It's the reason I started to like myself!"
Jounouchi's voice.
That's what caught Kaiba's attention while he had been piling up the reasons in his head. He rewound the tape.
He pressed play when he reached the start of the scene, with Yuugi and his friends entering Death-T 3. A phantom emotion grabbed him as he began to watch, the ghost he'd clung to in the darkness, when his heart had been soaked through with sludge. The boy he remembered was himself, but honed with the sharpness of a weapon, clinical, calculating, looking at people and seeing only objects, pawns to be played. To be used and discarded as he saw fit. Kaiba grasped at his chest, clenching the locket around his neck in a painful grip. It had always been his own choice. He didn't need a reminder of whose name he'd allowed to scar his soul, to carve beside every signing of "Seto" and "Mokuba".
"I never liked myself at all until...until I met you Yuugi!"
Distracted by abstract thoughts, Kaiba had failed to focus on the video playing before him for the second time. He cursed at his own incompetence as he rewound the tape again. The scene he stopped at showed Yuugi huddled into a ball away from the others. Kaiba pressed play. Immediately the boy onscreen began to shiver, trying to hold himself back from falling apart. When he started to cry and apologize to his friends, Kaiba felt his stomach sink. Someone else might call this regret, but it wouldn't be the truth. When had Kaiba given such things proper names or apologies? Even though Yuugi himself handed them out so freely. It was at times like these when Kaiba found himself hating the other boy's sense of forgiveness. Beyond needing or deserving, it simply made Kaiba feel like a child to be placated. Unfamiliar and overdue. He didn't want it, would rather hold firm to his actions and either force the other side to submit or be held aloft by his own sense of obligation. And Yuugi, quietly, without giving an inch, would let him.
Kaiba focused once more on the video as Jounouchi grabbed the smaller boy in some clumsy attempt to pacify him, the words falling helplessly from his mouth.
"In a useless world...with useless parents...and our useless selves..."
"I never liked myself at all until...until I met you Yuugi!"
"Dumb like a little kid, too kind for your own good...At first those things made me hate you..."
"But it wasn't you I hated...it was myself..."
Kaiba stared at the screen unmoving. He had once heard these words and felt nothing, he reminded himself. That was a change. Whether it was an important one, Kaiba wished not to dwell on. Of course, how could he have recognized any emotion while he'd been fumbling in the dark? He'd been so numb to everything he'd almost cut down the one person who carried a part of his heart. It was the easier way to explain it.
"Yuugi! The fact that we're a team...that's what I started to like! It's the reason I started to like myself! Because we were all in it together!"
Kaiba ground his teeth.
"For the first time, I could feel another person's pain! You gave that to me! Isn't that what being on a team is all about?!"
Kaiba scoffed at that one. Some things didn't change. Relying on someone else, letting them hold your heart in their hands, he still believed it to be the height of stupidity. The single moment in his life when he'd briefly entrusted himself to another had been followed by a car ride to the Domino City orphanage. If he had forgotten his own feelings on that affair, he need only to remember the mess of black hair and oversized hand-me-downs that had been holding on to him for dear life.
"If you can't like yourself when you're alone...is this game supposed to make you think over your life and hate yourself?"
Sometimes Kaiba couldn't help but admire the Mazaki girl's brutal assessments. So what if Kaiba only treated his life as a chip to be staked. In victory he could win the right to love himself, if only for the moment. That was enough, it should have been enough. It was better than needing someone else, like Jounouchi did.
Kaiba was once again caught in the throes of memory.
"Now I understand Yuugi! I know the key element in winning a tag-team match!"
The other Yuugi had smiled so warmly, so honestly, as if Kaiba had finally reached out and grasped the hand he'd always offered. It stung Kaiba to recollect.
"It's how well you use your partner!"
The collapse of the smile, the fleeting look of hurt before anger, why were these always the most prominent images of the other boy in his memory. All the ways he had disappointed him. And yet he never did give up. He'd recovered quickly and held steadfast, somehow even more determined to prove Kaiba wrong, challenging him when Kaiba was at a loss, backing him up when he needed it. To show him that the things he felt were real. Why had he tried so hard? Why had Kaiba wanted to believe him? "The power of unity". The power of being stronger together, one hand held in another. How could such a thing exist when "power" had been taught to him as a curse to chant over and over alone in his head?
Kaiba's monsters may have taken center stage, but it had been Yuugi's strategies that carried the day. The other Yuugi had protected him, supported him, yet in a way so as not to wound his pride. Such tenderness had only succeeded in further agitating Kaiba. He remembered the ease with which a smiling cruelty slipped from his lips after his concession of teamwork's practicality.
"If the friends you protect turn against you...If the only way you can move forward is by beating them...with life and death at stake...Could you trample your friends...on the way to your destiny?"
Why had he needed that answer?
If he could go back, he'd ask a different question.
"Was everything you said to me a lie?"
This was starting to become a dangerous line of thinking.
"Why go through the trouble when you're just going to leave anyway?"
No no, this was no good.
"Why didn't you say goodbye?"
The tape had long ago cut to black, leaving Kaiba alone in the darkness of his room. Alone with the thoughts that echoed in his head at night in the days since he'd learned that the world had become emptier.