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BROTHER SAINT SINNER SAVIOR STRANGER AS STIFF AND BRITTLE AS A STATUE FATHER MOTHER MONSTER YOU CLUTCH HIM IN THE DARK YOU AVOID HIM BY DAY WHEN HIS EYES SHINE LIKE BULLETS IN THE BARREL OF A GUN. Do not disturb him! He is studying. It is two AM and he is arguing with God. In the morning you will find the end of the argument under the couch: a broken tooth browned with blood. He is in the wheelchair by the window, in ten feet of cloudy morning light, staring with the flat eyes of a fish. Even when he is here, he is not here: he is a time traveler and his mind is the machine. Always in the past. Always in the future. Never now. Later. Stop asking me. Stop bothering me! Get out of my sight. Get out! Get OUT! Get OUT! GET OUT! Show him you’re a real gamer. His last thought is of you. MOKUBA!
One night he tells you, rinsing his coffee mugs in the kitchen sink, that you were the last piece of his puzzle. But this is also the night before he leaves and he also tells you his puzzle is broken again, by the same man who broke it last time, and that same man somehow made it larger. He is not a puzzle but a chimera, cobbled together from several other creatures, snarling and wailing and scaled. Flinching as some long-buried instinct scrambles through nerves and muscle and bursts, at last, into the open air, breathless: I am so proud of you. He is everything, always, at all moments and all at once.
He is asleep at the shallow end of the pool, in a Marshmallon pool floatie, a black t-shirt tossed over his eyes. His dangling foot bumps against the pool’s sun-hot stone edge. He is not asleep: his foot tenses, followed by his calf and his thigh. No other part of him moves. Without opening his eyes, he presses his foot against the edge and pushes himself away. The effort requires almost no force. He is learning to live without it. The pool floatie spins, slow and quiet, back to the center of the pool. Someone else in a Marshmallon pool floatie would be a ridiculous idea, swaddled in pastel pink, blessed by that goofy, earnest smile and cheeks that blush like roses, but Seto drifts with the dignity of a god at rest in a cloud.
Mokuba is at the deep end of the pool, on the diving board, its white sandpaper surface scratching the soles of his feet. He balances at the very edge, swings his arms several times, and throws himself like a javelin into sleek, narrow dive - no flips no tricks. Not the haphazard, tumbling glee of a fifteen-year-old but the precision of a Kaiba. For a moment he is aloft - now he is slicing through the water: a roar of bubbles, a rush of cold friction, running the length of his torso - he dolphin-kicks down the length of the pool, with his head tucked below his shoulders, his hands flung forward in a spearpoint. He surfaces next to Seto’s Marshmallon floatie. Yuugi had given it to them, laughing: when are you going to invite us over for a pool party?!
In June, Seto said, smiling. June 2053.
Boo! Atem, Yuugi said, turning to Atem, as always statuesque, even though he still struggles with his phone. Make him invite us over -
Next weekend. This weekend, however, they enjoy their brand-new pool by themselves. New patio furniture. New dishware. Seto had the entire south wall of the study knocked down. The house is changing, although some of the old sadism still lingers: they made Isono blow up the pool floatie. Later tonight Seto is going off to do some things with Atem and Yuugi and possibly Honda and only sometimes Jounouchi, and Mokuba is invited, if he wants to come.
Mokuba rests his arms on the edge of the floatie, huffing water from his lips. The whole thing tilts towards him. He studies Seto, eyes hidden under the t-shirt, his pale skin finally acquiring a healthy glow under the scorching summer sun. Seto is, for once, at peace, submitting to the whim of the water, letting its gentle glassy hands carry him wherever it likes. e4 c6. D4 d5. Mokuba loves him at all moments. Nc3 dxe4. A standard Caro-Kann so far. Nxe4 Bf5. But right now it feels easy, unencumbered by doubt or hesitation. Without question he would kill for him. Ng3 Bg6. h4 h6. Nf3 Nd7.
“Pawn to h5,” Mokuba says, making a threat to Seto’s bishop on g6.
Seto hums in reply, taking a moment to load his mental image of the chessboard, playing Black against Mokuba’s White.
“Bishop to h7.”
“Safe,” Mokuba snorts. “Bishop to d3.”
“What devious little plan are you cooking up?” Seto mutters.
“You’ll just have to find out."
“Bishop to d3. Bottoms up,” Seto declares, smirking as he captures Mokuba’s bishop.
“Bite me. Queen to d3,” Mokuba retorts, although Seto’s smugness is not unwarranted. He knows Mokuba still clings, occasionally, to the childish faith in a numerical superiority of material, and resents losing his pieces.
As Seto thinks it over, Mokuba sinks into the pool, to the level of his mouth, his hair floating around his cheeks in silky-black strands. The day is hot and still. The grounds of the Kaiba estate lie wilting in the heat. Clouds flock and wander like sheep on the horizon. Sooner or later, the thick duvet of heat and the stars of sweat dotting his skin will frustrate Seto, and he’ll either 1) roll into the pool for a few laps, to make this a “productive” afternoon, or 2) go back inside, to the cool, dark cave of his lab, and spend the next six hours fucking around with circuitboards. Now is the best time to ask.
“Niisama,” Mokuba says, “I've been thinking.”
Seto makes a noise of interest.
“I want to go back to school. I don’t want to do home schooling anymore.”
“University?” Seto says. “Pawn to e6.”
“No, high school. Bishop to f4.”
Under the soft blindfold of his black t-shirt, Seto frowns. “What for? You’re smarter than every high schooler in the country combined. You don’t need a high school diploma. I don’t have one. You’re better off going straight to university - ”
“That’s not why I want to go back to school,” Mokuba says.
Seto crosses his feet at the ankles and puzzles it out.
“Friends?” he says.
Mokuba sinks completely into the water, heavy with embarrassment. He shouldn’t feel this way. It’s obnoxious. Seto will understand, maybe - he threw himself through a black hole because he missed his friend - but to want something creates a power dynamic between you and the person who has what you want. To confess your desire is to confess weakness and failure: I want this. I can’t get it. It hurts me that I don’t have it. If you admit you want it, they control you. If you pretend you don’t want it, you’ve lost it. There is no way to win. Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid game.
In certain ways he is more Gozaburo’s son than Seto is. Seto, at least, remembers what life was like without him.
Mokuba surfaces within seconds.
“Yeah,” he announces.
“What about… what were their names - those boys from elementary school - ?”
“I haven’t talked to them in years. And they weren’t my friends,” Mokuba says. “They were just some… dumb kids who did everything I told them to do. I want friends, like - like what you have, with Atem and Yuugi."
“They both consider you a friend,” Seto says evenly, despite the sudden tightness in his face: jealousy, maybe. You can’t have what I have. It’s mine. Or something else - to be friends with someone the way I am friends with Atem is to suffer and rage the way Atem and I suffered and raged. Not for the faint of heart.
Mokuba observes him carefully, sideways.
“I want my own friends,” he says.
Seto inhales, his sunburnt chest rising, and sighs.
“Okay. Why are you against this?” Mokuba says, with a growing irritation.
“Why do you need my permission?” Seto counters. “Do what you want. I don’t care what you - ”
“Yeah, I fucking know that,” Mokuba snaps. “I know you don’t give a shit.”
“Mokuba - ”
“You wouldn’t even notice if I fucked off to Siberia, as long as I was still dialing in for the Monday morning C-suite call on time - ”
“That’s enough.”
He doesn’t even need to give it any kind of tone. All he has to do is say it and Mokuba stops, cringing, his shoulders rising to his ears. Already he regrets it. An angry, defensive Seto is a Seto five thousand miles away, fifty thousand miles away, two hundred and forty thousand miles away, on the other side of the moon. Hurtling through darkness in total radio silence.
Seto is quiet. Waiting to see if Mokuba will hold his tongue. He reminds Mokuba of a big cat, an apex predator, lying resplendent in the sun because nothing dares attacking him - well-defended by layers and layers of long, thick, languid muscle. He weighs almost twice as much as he did five years ago, when he was withering away in a wheelchair by the window, and almost all of the new mass is power.
“I wasn’t finished,” he snaps. “I don’t care what you do, as long as you’re happy and safe. If you’re happy and safe in Siberia, then fuck off to Siberia.”
Mokuba braces against the force of a powerful rage. YOU GODDAMN HYPOCRITE, he wants to yell. YOU FUCKING LIAR. YOU DIDN’T CARE IF I WAS HAPPY AND SAFE WHEN YOU FUCKED OFF TO OUTER SPACE. IF I LEFT FOR A WEEK YOU’D THROW YOURSELF FROM THE NINETY-FIFTH FLOOR JUST LIKE HE DID
But he keeps it all to himself, swallowing it, letting the weight of it anchor him to the bottom of the pool - it’s not fair - it makes perfect sense - Seto has never been happier than he is now. He is in the pool. He is relaxed and idle. Later today he is going out with his fucking friends. Mokuba has always dreamed of this - and now it is here.
For a moment Mokuba considers sinking to the bottom of the pool, releasing all his air, waiting until he passes out - fucking off to lie under a slab of silent, breathless light. There was a time in their lives when Seto would not have noticed. There was another time when Seto would have noticed and let him drown, just to teach him a lesson: don’t rely on anyone to save you. Not even me. There was a time when Seto would have noticed and pulled him up from the bottom before he ran out of air and he would've known he was being tested against the sharper, crueler edge of love and he would've been insulted because Mokuba needed to test him and he would've not been insulted because he remembered the time he would’ve failed the test. That time has continued on to now. If Mokuba tests him, Seto will save him and vanish again to the dark side of the moon.
Seto sticks his toes in the water and flicks them up, breaking the surface over and over, practicing the motion. Agitated and annoyed. He knows something is wrong, someone did something wrong, and hasn't decided yet if it was him or Mokuba.
His fucking fault for being an asshole. Mokuba’s fault for getting mad even though he knows Seto is Seto and can’t be anything except Seto. Gozaburo’s fault for strapping Seto down to the operating table and switching everything out. His spine his stomach his nerve his heart. Goro-ojisan’s fault for shaking them out onto the front steps of the orphanage like trash from a box he needs for something else. Dad’s fault for driving tired.
They wait for the impasse to end - by itself, as though they had nothing to do with it.
Mokuba half-swims, half-walks to the shallow end of the pool and trudges, dripping, up the steps. His footsteps darken the hot white paving stones and shrink within seconds of his passing. He doesn't look at Seto - any acknowledgement would give away the game. He makes it to the far end of the pool - closest to the patio and the sliding doors into the kitchen - before Seto stirs.
“Where are you going?” he calls, and Mokuba smiles, triumphant. He called Seto’s bluff and won in less than an Olympic lap.
“To the diving board,” he says, marching down the length of the board.
“Since you’re out, get my sunglasses. They’re on the table - ”
“You get them,” Mokuba shoots back, swatting down the deflection. As is the winner’s prerogative, he gets to rub Seto’s nose in it: “If you don’t fucking mean it, don’t fucking say it!”
The vast rectangle of the pool stretches out below him: his kingdom, every wall gilded with restless light. The Marshmallon floatie bounces against the edge of the pool again. From his high white throne, an aluminum-epoxy sword thrust over the water, Mokuba can see the frown on Seto’s face. His mouth tightening, his eyes still hidden under the black shirt. A distortion in his cheek: biting his tongue, a distraction from the slap of humiliation, the throbbing raw flesh of fact.
Mokuba is careful now. Nothing more on that point should be said. Seto won’t fire back: he lost the stand-off and he knows it. But if Mokuba pulls the trigger again, he’ll leave.
Mokuba hinges at the waist, gripping the edge of the board with toes and fingers. He rocks backward, pumps forward, leaping in an arc off the board -
silence in the air
THUNDER in the water. Another perfect dive, arrow-sharp.
When he surfaces at the far edge of the pool, gasping for breath on the steps, Seto announces: “Knight to f6.”
Alright. We’ve both set the guns down. Mokuba rests his elbows on the middle step, flexing his core and lifting his hips to lie even with the surface of the water. He fumbles for an image of the board, pieces looming out of the murk of recent memory.
“Where’s my bishop?”
“It’s on f4.”
Seto remembers everything: chess boards, duels, decks, schematics and technical specifications, airport call signs, pi to the seven hundredth digit, sequences of all kinds {primes, Mersenne primes, Fibonacci, factorials, ...}, the origins of various brands of cigars and how to keep them fresh, what Gozaburo drank at night, and how much. He remembers what you said to him in frustration four years ago, on a Thursday afternoon at the office right before the meeting with your incoming Chief Counsel; he was halfway through some teeth-melting energy drink and you were eating the brunt of his limp, lukewarm lunch; he knows his life will be gentler if he forgets it, but he can’t.
"Thanks. I'm castling," Mokuba’s somewhat exposed king is safer behind a wall of pawns and a rook who is prepared to die.
"Bishop to e7."
“Knight to e4. High school’s totally safe, by the way” Mokuba says, because he wants to dig back into the premise. With an axe, not a shovel. “I could go to the Academy, with all the ambassadors’ kids. They have a full security team. Isono could come with me. I don’t have to go to a dump like Domino High.”
Seto opens his mouth - hesitates - swerves. “I don’t dispute it. Queen to a5.”
“You don’t think high school will make me happy,” Mokuba says, half-accusing, sinking onto the step with a lurch in his stomach. Did you even know I was unhappy? Mokuba keeps it to himself. Seto knows; he just doesn’t know what to do about it. “King to b1.”
Seto scrapes the black t-shirt from his face, blinking into the sun, tired and anxious.
“Mokuba, if you want to go to high school, I won’t stop you,” he says. “I’m castling.”
“Great. Thanks for the ringing endorsement,” Mokuba says, mulishly. He snatches the caveat from the air, where it hovers over them. “But?”
“But good friends are few and far between. And you’ll have to wade through blood to find them.”
“It’s worth it,” Mokuba insists. "Right?"
“Yes,” Seto huffs, and smiles at the sky. “It is.”
There is no other possible answer to this question.
He turns his head, looking at Mokuba sideways.
“But I don’t want you to have any illusions about what’s going to happen. People are animals. They’re going to hear your last name and make all kinds of assumptions about who you are and what you’re like. Some of them will hate you behind your back. Some of them will hate you to your face.”
“Exactly the same as KaibaCorp,” Mokuba chuffs.
“It’s completely different! I’m not trying to turn a fucking profit from Yuugi’s memes. I don’t have to justify my friendship with Atem on the quarterly earnings call!” Seto retorts. “Atem and I are friends because he - he makes the effort to understand me. Almost no one does that. No one ever wants to do that. I want you to have friends, but the thought of anyone… writing you off as not worth knowing - refusing to know you - it makes me angry. I want people to see you the way I see you."
Mokuba tilts forward and twists, pushing backwards through the water. Water swirls around his neck and shoulders. He pulls even with Seto, feeling lighter than air, not swimming but flying.
“Um,” he says. “How do you see me?”
He has better control of the center but a good number of Seto’s pieces are clustered towards the corner of the board, in a dense knot of defense. If he can convince him to break the wall, he has a stronger chance. Maybe fake a mistake. Seto is unforgiving with errors.
After a moment, Mokuba adds: “My horse eats your horse, by the way. On f6.”
“My other horse eats your horse right back,” Seto retorts.
“Horse cannibalism,” Mokuba says, half to himself, and Seto snorts.
“When I think of who you are, I think about what happened on Duelist Kingdom, after we - found each other. I had the helicopter, and you - ” he chuckled - “bragged about it at the top of your lungs, and effectively told them to fuck off. But once you realized they didn’t have any way to get home, you changed your mind.”
“Well, we couldn’t just leave them there. We owed them,” Mokuba says.
“I had every intention of leaving without them, debt or no debt. I was tired and I didn’t want them yapping in my ear for several hours. But your heart… you still had it. You held onto it the whole time. You've never lost it."
Mokuba lets his feet sink, painting circles on the water with his palms to stay afloat, quietly delighted, mystified. Seto thinks he is a person with heart. Whatever that means. Is he? “You’re not like that anymore.”
“In certain respects,” Seto concedes, and swiftly moves on. “But you - you’re like water. You’re flexible. You adapt. You’re far more resilient than I am, and less… prone to darkness. Make your move.”
“Knight to e5. You mean, like… you think I don't get sad?” Mokuba says.
Seto frowns. “Ah… Rook to a8. No, I mean you don’t get distracted by brooding. You don't… feel the same way I do - "
Mokuba bristles. "What? What are you talking about? The Goose-man was my stepfather too - "
"I told you not to call him that," Seto snarls. “You think I don't know that you also lived in his house? That he raised you just as much as he raised me?!"
"No," Mokuba burbles. "Sorry."
He means it. Regardless, Seto steams in the floatie, rigid and tense.
"Niisama," Mokuba tries again.
"All I meant to say," Seto says, loud and brisk, "is that I don't think - "
- and stops.
Mokuba waits.
The afternoon stretches to a thousand years. Their heartbeats slow to once a century. They will live here forever, languid, motionless, floating, preserved in sunlight like creatures in a cosmic jar.
Seto sighs, finally.
“You've never wanted to die,” he says, finally. “Not that I know of.”
Mokuba swims to the floatie, three quick kicks, and presses down on the wide, rubbery curve, right beside Seto’s head, so that Seto can see him as he says it, and see the truth in his face: “No. Never.”
Seto lifts his arm - the most dramatic gesture he’s made since flopping gleefully into the floatie - and rests his hand atop Mokuba’s head. Some other brother might have given him a hug, maybe; but neither of them have ever enjoyed hugs all that much, and neither of them have ever wanted other brothers - only this one, and for this one to be happy. Barring that, a revision of desire, digging through the dry topsoil of the sentiment to the darker, older earth below: for this one to know love.
No hug. The moment calls only for a gentle touch, and Mokuba knows what he means by it. You are here, and I am here. Thank god. Thank you.
“Queen to e2,” Mokuba says.
“You’re steady,” Seto continues, eyes closed, his hand still on Mokuba’s head. “I’ve never once seen you get knocked off course. Actually, if you go to school, your problem isn’t going to be some stuck-up silver-spoon snots who see you as a threat. You’re going to have a hard time finding people you think are worth befriending… you’re hard to impress… pawn to c5…”
“Knight to g6. Yeah, I’d agree with that,” Mokuba says. He does not cite the evidence: not even Gozaburo impressed him. That ugly old grunting boar. In death he elevated himself to the lurid splendor of roadkill. But even dead and dusted, Gozaburo still impresses Seto, still presses his back to the wall.
“G6… what? Okay,” Seto says, pulling his hand away. “The peasant farmer pawn pulls the knight from the saddle and kills him with an axe. Justice.”
“Queen to e6,” Mokuba says, smiling, “kills your peasant farmer’s friend - ”
“Oh,” Seto starts, eyes flying open, scowling. “You little - king to h8!”
“Peasant farmer to g6. Another one bites the dust.”
“Knight to g8,” Seto says, scrambling to defend.
“Bishop to h6.”
“Pawn to h6!”
“Rook to h6.”
“The battle of h6. Knight to h6, and you can take it from my cold, dead hands. When did you become such a sharpshooter?”
“Maybe I’ve always been a sharpshooter,” Mokuba hums, releasing the floatie to float, untethered, on his back in the water.
“Queen to e7. Off with his head!” he declares, pointing to the sky.
“Knight to e6!”
“I thought you weren’t going to give up h6? Pawn to e6 - ”
“What the fuck is happening?” Seto growls. “King to g7.”
He’ll figure it out later. He shouldn’t have taken the knight. A move driven by hubris and spite, capturing for the sake of capturing, drawing blood for the sake of blood. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
“Rook to d3,” Mokuba calls out.
“Rook to d6,” Seto counters. “You think I won’t find a way to flip this on you? I’ll break your kneecaps.”
Mokuba is undeterred. “Rook to g3. Check.”
“Rook to g6,” Seto says, still defiant, still trying to squirrel his way out of it.
“Queen to e5. Check.”
“King to f7, and I gobble up your muddy little peasant.”
“Queen to f5. Check.”
Seto says nothing, his expression tight, locked-down. His mind is a fertile field, planting infinite, extravagant possibilities, letting them grow, scything them down one by one.
He arrives at the only remaining possibility. With a sigh, he steels himself.
“Rook to f6,” he says, with supreme dignity, stoic and calm.
Mokuba grins. “Queen to d7. Checkmate.”
“Good game. Excellent game. Probably the best of your five victories so far,” Seto says, as Mokuba drops his feet and swims, thrilled, to the floatie. Yes, he’s won before - but this is the first time it has ever felt easy. He slings his arms onto the side, denting the Marshmallon under his weight, tilting the whole thing and Seto towards him.
Resilient, adaptable, hard to impress. Full of heart. Is that it? Anything else?
As usual, he forgives Seto for the mild disappointment: Seto, as usual, will assess his own performance, running the analysis on a secret, separate track of his mind for the next eight hours, days, weeks; and do better next time.
“You know what this means, right?” he says. “‘Cause I won?”
“What?” Seto mutters, only half-paying attention.
“The floatie’s mine,” Mokuba says, and flips his brother, with a loud whoop, a windmilling of limbs, into the water.
FROM FRIGHTENED, CLINGING SHADOW TO SECRET WEAPON. BUT TO DEFINE YOU IN TERMS OF UTILITY IS TO REDUCE YOU. I love you. I adore you. I am sorry. I never meant for any of this to happen I didn’t know I am so sorry. You saw the future before I did. Anyone would be lucky to have you on their side, to have your devotion, your determination.
Seto, dripping wet, hair plastered to the back of his neck, stands on the edge of the diving board. Mokuba lounges in the floatie, as indolent as a cat and twice as smug. Wearing Seto’s sunglasses. Isono brought him a can of soda. He has been… hot-tempered lately. Experimenting with moods. Cranky, quick to bite. More willing to push and prod and poke at Seto. Good. You can be comfortable or reverent, but not both. And Seto knows himself too well to accept any worship from anyone he loves.
Mokuba is happy when Seto is happy. If Seto is happy, Mokuba will feel safe enough to go to school. Mokuba’s absence will make Seto unhappy, and so Mokuba will come back. And stay until Seto is happy again. The loop restarts. The logic of this almost sickens Seto - all the intricate ways they have tied themselves to each other, in tangled, intractable knots of memory and feeling, resentment at their closeness and their yearning for more, simplified to a single dismal conditional: IF YOU ARE HAPPY, I AM HAPPY. The contrapositive: If you are not happy, I am not happy. The converse: If I am happy, you are happy. The inverse: If I am not happy, you are not happy.
Under scrutiny, the converse falls apart. He is happy and Mokuba is lonely - a form of unhappiness, and possibly the worst kind. Hell is not other people. Ergo, Seto is unhappy. The contrapositive is true.
Seto studies the board. Strategies, chokepoints, open games, closed games, control of the center, traps, breakthroughs, variations on this and that.
Go ahead, he thinks. Go out into the world. I have my friends now. I’ll be fine.
“DO A FLIP!” Mokuba calls out.
He lied to Mokuba, Seto realizes, bouncing once, twice on the board, reaching greater and greater heights. No one will ever see him the way Seto sees him. Bold, brilliant, fearless, testing the edges of his world and breaking past them. Radiant with the fury of hope. He’s been lonely long enough.
Seto jumps - somersaults once, in brief, nimble defiance of gravity - and plunges into the water, exhilarated.
“SLOPPY ENTRY. 7 POINTS FROM THE JAPANESE JUDGE,” Mokuba announces, once Seto pulls himself back up to the surface. Seto, treading water, flips him off with both hands. Mokuba cackles with laughter from the floatie.
Seto swims to the floatie, drawn in by the sound that rings rarely through the house. Like Mokuba, he rests his arms on the floatie, tilting it with his weight. Water pools around his elbows.
“Okay. I’m on board. Go to school,” he says. “You’ll have fun. Make some friends. Make some enemies, too.”
Mokuba chortles. Seto smiles.
“But don’t forget,” he says.
“...forget what?” Mokuba says, lifting his sunglasses.
He will be taller than Seto - very soon. Unnerving. Just as he’s enjoying the present, the future looms on the horizon, darker than a summer storm.
Seto sifts through potentials. I love you - no. They never say that. No one understands me like you do. A burden. I would die for you. Mokuba knows that already, and doesn't want him to.
“You’re my best friend,” he says.
Mokuba glows, the sunglasses dropping back onto his nose as he settles back into the floatie. “You’re my best friend.”
Seto kicks away. He floats on his back, letting the water stop his momentum, catching his shoulders in its palms. He is the luckiest man in the world.
“Pawn to d4,” he says.