Yu-Gi-Oh! Fan Fiction ❯ Behind Blue Eyes ❯ Day Seven: Mokuba ( Chapter 26 )

Behind Blue Eyes
- - -
Ah yes, another chapter of Behind Blue Eyes, just in time for Christmas! Rejoice! This means that I can take another year off, right? Haha, don’t worry! I’m only kidding . . . I think.
Enjoy!
Disclaimer: I’m writing this for the hell of it. I wish I could make money off of this, I really do. But alas, I do not and I never will. Yugioh isn’t mine to have or profit from. What a pity.
- - -
Recap:
“Don’t tell me what?”
I jumped a little, spinning on my heels as Seto leaned to look around me.
Mokuba.
- - -
Seto’s body became rigid, “What have I told you about coming in without knocking?” His eyes drifted to the supplies he had just slung to the floor, his chest still heaving.
“The door was open.” Mokuba’s eyes followed those of his brother.
“Even my bedroom door?”
Mokuba’s black eyebrows turned upward as he avoided the question completely, “I don’t like it when you hide things from me, Seto!”
I became a spectator of this argument between brothers. If there was anyone on this Earth that I thought Seto could possibly lose an argument against, it was definitely Mokuba. Don’t get me wrong, though. Mokuba isn’t more intelligent or clever than Seto by any means, but Seto was more likely to give in when it came to Mokuba. Even though I had always called Seto an asshole in the past, my friends and I knew very well how much Seto loved his little brother. He loved him so much that he risked his life during Duelist Kingdom just for the chance to save Mokuba. He made it clear that a life without Mokuba just wasn’t a life that he felt was worth living.
“I’m not hiding anything from you.” Seto lied, refusing to look at the younger Kaiba.
“You’re lying! Is it really so bad that you can’t even tell me, your only family?” He almost looked as though he would start crying right at that moment, yet the water glistening in his eyes failed to fall. Was he stubborn just like his big brother?
I backed up against the wall, trying my best to become invisible. I felt kind of like an intruder.
“It’s not like that at all.”
“Then what is it like, Seto?” Mokuba was holding onto Seto’s left arm now, trying to make eye contact with him, but failing miserably.
Seto simply looked at himself in the mirror, a depressed expression playing on his features. “It’s not like that.”
“You’re not answering me!” Mokuba gave a strong tug on Seto’s arm, barely budging him.
“Maybe when you’re older.”
Mokuba let out a frustrated growl, practically throwing his own brother’s arm back down toward the countertop, “Seto, I’m thirteen already and I know a lot more than you think I know!”
Seto finally gave in and looked down at his shorter, wide-eyed brother, apparently disturbed by his statement, “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Mokuba certainly seemed to know a hell of a lot more than Seto thought. It was entirely possible that Mokuba had somehow learned about the goings-on when Gozaburo ruled the house. Worse yet, he could have seen some of the events as they unfolded. Perhaps he was too young to understand what was happening at the time, but he was older now and perfectly capable of understanding his memories.
Mokuba looked at the floor for a moment, perhaps to collect his thoughts and plan exactly what to say before looking his brother in the eyes again, “It means that you can tell me anything; that’s what family’s for.”
“Mokuba-”
“Seto? Can we go talk in my room?” I could see him briefly glance over at me. Kaiba Mokuba was the only one that could ever get away with interrupting Kaiba Seto.
“Mokuba, that’s rude.” At least, that’s what Seto said. In reality it wasn’t about being rude to me, it was about Seto not wanting to talk to Mokuba anymore about the subject at hand.
“It’s okay, I’ll just go see if I can find the kitchen or something.” I could see the color drain from Seto’s face right before I turned to leave.
“No.” Seto grabbed my arm, but he kept his eyes fixated on his younger brother. “Mokuba, I will speak with you later.”
“But Seto-”
“But nothing. Don’t you have friends coming over shortly?” His glare wasn’t so much of a glare as it was more like a stern parent speaking to a child.
Mokuba’s eyes narrowed as he growled, “Fine, but before you go to sleep tonight, you have to tell me everything!” With that, he finally left.
Seto let out an exhausted sigh, “I swear, he is getting to be more of a pain in the ass every day.”
“Do you still intend to lie to him?” A part of me hoped that his answer had changed.
“Jounouchi, please don’t involved yourself in my family affairs.” His blue eyes were cold and emotionless, just like they always used to be.
“Oh, right.” I couldn’t help but let my blood boil a bit, “It’s not like you got involved with my family affairs when we were at my place. You even went so far as to lie to my father about what really happened.” I felt my fists tighten at my sides as I let my thoughts sink in. For a second I really wanted to hit that pretty face of his.
“I saved your ass!” He practically yelled.
“You saved your own ass!”
“Have you already forgotten who held the gun to his head so that he would stop hurting you? Have you forgotten who cleaned up all of that blood?”
“That blood wouldn’t have even been there if you hadn’t come to my apartment in the first place!”
We had been mere inches apart, our chests heaving from yelling, but now Seto took one step back, his icy glare sending chills down my spine. I had already felt bad about what just came out of my mouth, and now I felt even worse.
“Well excuse me for getting attacked.” He bit off the words like they left a bad taste in his mouth.
“Seto, I didn’t mean it like-”
“Attacked?!”
The two of us rushed out of the bathroom only to discover none other than Mokuba with his back flush against the wall.
“Mokuba!” Seto was shaking slightly. Was he really that angry or was that remnants from our argument? “Why aren’t you with your friends?”
Mokuba leaned away from the wall, smirking, “They decided not to come after all.”
“All of them?” Seto looked skeptical and I could tell that he was getting irritated.
“Yes.”
Seto closed his eyes for a moment, heaving a sigh before opening them once more. He looked bored now. “There weren’t any friends coming to begin with, were there?”
Mokuba’s eyes quickly darted to the floor, his smirk fading, “No.”
“Why did you lie to me?”
“Why do you always lie to me?”
For one of the few times in my life, I decided it would be best if I simply watched this event unfold.
I thought for sure that Seto would get very defensive, denying the accusation, regardless of the fact that it was true . . . but he surprised me by turning back towards the bathroom.
“I think I’m going to take a long, hot bath. Why don’t the two of you go find something to do?”
The bathroom door slammed shut before either of us could say a word in protest.
Mokuba just glared at the door for a long while before he turned his eyes upward to me. I realized that I had been staring at him and tried my best to look elsewhere, but I had already been caught.
“What happened?”
“I’m not telling you.” I walked past him and out of Seto’s bedroom, wondering exactly where I would go.
“I don’t get it. I don’t get why he would tell you and not me.” Mokuba ran up until he was in front of me and then turned around.
I sighed, “To be honest, I don’t think that he would have told me if I hadn’t been a witness.” Okay, so I hadn’t exactly seen the event take place, but I saw Saki leave and I saw Seto’s condition and I’m smart enough that I can put two and two together.
“But he told you everything else, right?”
“Everything else?” Seto had told me quite a few things about his past, especially during the time that he was with Gozaburo. However, if I tricked Mokuba into specifying, perhaps I’d learn something that I hadn’t previously known.
“Yeah, about his past and stuff.”
Great. Leave it to someone his age to be as vague as possible.
He started to kick at the carpet, one arm reaching around his back to lightly hold the other, “Jounouchi . . . you can’t trick me.”
What the hell? Was he a mind reader or something? “I’m not trying to trick you.” I lied, cursing myself for being a bit of a hypocrite. “I just didn’t understand what you were talking about.”
He studied my face for a moment, his own features twisted with thought, “I’ll cut you a deal, blondie.”
“Blondie?”
“You tell me everything that happened . . . and I’ll show you a super-secret room that Seto doesn’t even know I’m aware of. In fact, I wonder if Seto himself even knows about it.” He grinned mischievously up at me, rubbing his hands together in front of his chest.
“Sorry, but I’m not really interested in secret rooms.” I rubbed the back of my head, getting bored.
“Oh? Did I forget to mention that this secret room had a lot of photo albums in it containing things that Seto would never ever want anyone to see?” Now he was smirking, his narrowed eyes almost black with the lack of light in the hallway.
“Photos?” What kind of photos? Were they photos from when Seto was younger? Something Seto would never want anyone to see . . . photos that Gozaburo took when Seto was-
Oh man.
“Do we have a deal or not?”
A part of me really wanted to see this room he was talking about, as graphic and disturbing as the material I found there might be . . . but then again, a part of me was also telling me to turn him down. I mean, if Seto found out that I told Mokuba and then went so far as to accept something like that as a reward . . .
He’d kill me. I mean, not literally kill me, but . . . well, maybe I shouldn’t say that he wouldn’t.
“I don’t know, Mokuba, I don’t think Seto would like it very much if-”
“He doesn’t have to know.” His violet eyes were growing more and more intense, “I’ll act like I still don’t know what happened and you can act like you never saw that room.
“I may be young, but I am still a Kaiba . . .”
A Kaiba . . .
“Well?” I could tell he was getting impatient, his chest heaving with an irritated sigh.
“You’re bluffing.” I narrowed my eyes down at him, a smirk coming to my lips. He had to be lying. He was a Kaiba, after all. He had an idea of what I wanted and he was promising that to me in hopes that he would get what he wanted. Kaiba Seto was known to play dirty against enemies in the past, so who was to say that Mokuba was beyond doing the same?
“Bluffing?” Mokuba’s eyes opened wide. He looked a bit nervous this time, “I’m not bluffing, Jounouchi!”
“Then show me where this room is so that I can trust you.”
“If I show you where it is, then how can I guarantee you’ll tell me?” Was he shaking a bit?
“If I tell you, how can I guarantee you’ll show me this room you’re talking about?” I think that I was grinning from ear to ear by this point. Was I actually able to outsmart a Kaiba? He’s the younger Kaiba, but still, it was a good start, right?
The shorter Kaiba brother let out a low growl, his brows furrowing beneath that messy mop of hair, “Fine. You’ve got a point.” There was a moment of silence and then he smiled slightly, making my heart beat just a bit faster, “I suppose I’ll just have to get Seto to tell me and make him relive the whole even all over again.” He sighed, turning fake-sad eyes upward at me, “Poor, poor Seto . . .”
Was this really the Mokuba that my friends and I had come to like? He sure seemed different. More manipulative for sure.
Ah, that was his angle this time. He knew that I cared about his older brother and was trying to guilt me into telling him so that Seto wouldn’t have to go through that. Again, he had a good point. It would probably crush Seto to tell something like that to his younger brother, but . . . did Seto even intend to tell him the truth? As far as I know, he planned on either bending the truth or lying completely.
But he shouldn’t lie to his only family, right? Regardless of how Mokuba acted, he was genuinely concerned for his older brother. Would I really be helping if I went against Seto’s wishes and told Mokuba the truth? Shit.
“Considering what you used to think of me, you sure have an awful lot of faith in me.”
“I guess you’re right, but I just have this gut feeling that you’ll never betray me, so I’m not really worried about letting you say what you please. I mean, you even went against the wishes of two of your best friends just to keep my secret safe.”
I smiled, turning on my heels to head back towards Seto’s bedroom, “Sorry Mokuba, but your big brother has put a lot of faith in me. He told me that he was sure I would never betray him and I’ll be damned if I allow myself to disappoint him. He’s been disappointed a lot in life, but . . . you probably already knew that, didn’t you?” I glanced back over my shoulder to find a rather depressed-looking Kaiba Mokuba in the same place that I left him.
“Yeah . . .” Came his nearly-inaudible reply. Perhaps he understood where I was coming from.
“You’ll just have to cross your fingers and hope that Seto tells you what you want to know. Either way, Seto will always do what he thinks is best for you. He loves you more than anything and anyone else, Mokuba.”
Mokuba’s eyes started to well up with tears, sending a shock through my body as I turned back toward him. Shit! I didn’t mean to make him cry.
“Oh man, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to make you-”
“No.” He wiped at his eyes, refusing to look at me anymore. Were all Kaiba’s that ashamed of crying? “You aren’t the one that makes me cry; my brother is.”
With that he left, running down the hall and down the staircase.
His brother is the one that makes him cry? Seto didn’t do anything . . . is it because Seto holds back the truth?
I pulled at my hair, closing my eyes and shaking my head side-to-side.
“What’s the matter with you?”
I turned around to face very familiar voice. Seto was peeking out from his doorway, his hair appearing to be damp still from his shower.
“Damn, that was fast.” I walked closer to the door and Seto shrank back a bit.
“That’s because I’m still wearing only a towel.”
I made my eyes grow wide and walked quickly towards the door, earning a glare from Seto. I stopped within about a foot of his door, laughing.
“I’m just kidding. Put some damn clothes on and let me in.”
To my surprise, his head disappeared from view and the door swung open to reveal Seto heading for his closet. “What were you and Mokuba talking about?”
Oh shit. Was this another test? Either he only heard our voices or he actually heard everything we said and was trying to get me to tell him the truth. If I told Seto what Mokuba had said, would that be betraying Mokuba and then kind of make me a hypocrite?
Seto was turned away from me, rummaging through the clothes in his closet, which I had followed him into. His back was faintly crisscrossed with scars.
“Your back . . .” My hand flew up to cover my mouth, but of course I was already too late.
Seto stopped all movement. “It’s ugly, isn’t it?”
I turned him around and pull him against my chest with no protest from my brunet. “Why did you stay here? Wasn’t there something you could have done to escape? Someone you could have sent for help?”
“Why?” His voice was only a whisper in my ear, “Because . . . because I wanted Mokuba to live a happy and luxurious life. That’s why.”
“I had to kill Satoshi, my close friend, for Mokuba’s safety.”
“You aren’t the one that makes me cry; my brother is.”
Damn. Just how much did Mokuba actually know, and how on earth did he find out?
“I think that maybe Mokuba would have been happier if you had done what was best for the both of you and not just him.” Was I walking on thin ice?
“It was best for both of us. I became the CEO of a multi-billion dollar international corporation. What could possibly be wrong with that?” He leaned back from me, an expression on his face that said ‘can’t you see that it’s obvious?’.
I couldn’t’ help but just stare at him. Was he serious? He thought the end justified the means? He shouldn’t have had to go through with what he went through! Just to become rich and famous? Did it really mean that much to him? No. Maybe it wasn’t the money and fame. Perhaps it was . . .
. . . the power.
“I’m exhausted, but I guess that we should probably eat something for dinner, right? The cooks should still be here. Is there anything in particular that you want?” He smiled softly at me, pulling away from my now-loose arms.
“What? Oh, uh . . . anything is fine. I’ll have whatever you have.”
- - -
Man, it would be nice to have cooks on hand all the time. The food wasn’t burnt at all! It was so perfect, I felt like I was dining in a classy restaurant. Seto stared at me from across the dinner table half the time, probably repulse at how I was shoveling the food down my own throat. Mokuba, on the other hand, ate in silence.
“Mokuba,” Seto began, wiping his mouth with a cloth (yes, cloth! Holy-crap-fancy!) napkin after finishing off his plate, “shall we go up to your room now and have that talk that we discussed earlier?”
Wow, Seto was actually the one bringing it up. I thought for sure that he would try to let Mokuba forget about it.
Mokuba was playing with the last bit of food on his plate, “Will you tell me what really happened?”
“What are you talking about?” It was only for a fraction of a second, but I caught those wild sapphires flicking in my direction before returning to a certain black-haired Kaiba.
The younger teen sighed loudly, shoving his plate away and getting out of his seat, “Just forget it, Seto. When you’re ready to tell the truth, let me know. To be honest, I tried to bribe Jou into telling me what happened.”
“Bribe him with what?” Seto’s eyes were probably as giant as mine at that moment.
“Uh,” Mokuba’s eyes darted to the floor and then back to his brother, “With some secret thing. Anyways, he wouldn’t tell me. He said that you trusted him a lot and he wasn’t going to risk that trust. He made a good point though; if you wanted me to know the truth, you would have told me. Even if I beg and plead and cry for you to tell me, you would probably only tell me a lie.” Then he smiled a half-sad smile, “But that’s okay, big brother. You do what you think is the best for me, right? Well, it would be best for me if you would do what is best for you. Okay?” He went to his brother’s side, kissing him on the forehead and smiling before disappearing from the dining room.
Seto stared off in the direction of his little brother’s exit for the longest time. I could tell that what Mokuba had said got to him. Whether it was for better or for worse, I wasn’t sure.
“We should . . . go to bed now. I’m really tired, Katsuya.”
Ah, first name. So he wasn’t mad at me. Lucky!
- - -
I don’t think I’ve ever been so excited to go to bed in my entire life. I changed faster that I thought was humanly possible and leapt into Seto’s gigantic bed, snuggling beneath his ultra-super-mega soft sheets and high-quality comforter. Oh, and the pillows! Ah, pure heaven! No, pure heaven wasn’t in the bed yet. He was still brushing his teeth in the bathroom. Come to think of it, when did he take the medicine that I saw while we were at my place? I couldn’t remember a time when he actually took it. Also, if he was taking it, why would he still be having all of those episodes? I mean, he told me that he was switching medications . . . could it be that this new one just wasn’t working? I would think that he would have complained about it by now.
Seto emerged from the bathroom, slowly climbing into bed (next to me! Woohoo!) and turning off the lamp on his nightstand, the last remaining light.
“Seto? When do you take your medicine?” I was really pushing it, getting into his business so much.
There was silence. Silence and darkness and I don’t know which of the two I hated more.
“I haven’t been taking it.”
“What?”
“I haven’t been tak-”
“I heard you; I just want to know why on earth you aren’t taking it! Isn’t it supposed to keep you from having those episodes?”
“Yeah.”
“Then why aren’t you taking it?”
“I don’t know.”
What kind of answer was that? It didn’t make any sense at all, especially for someone as intelligent and obsessed with emotional appearance as him.
“That’s not really the kind of answer I’m looking for, Seto.”
“Katsuya, please go to sleep.” He snuggled closer, his hands against my chest. Was that a bribe?
I wrapped my arms around him, almost as a test, but he didn’t budge.
“Fine.” I gave in, but how could I not? “You win this time, but I’m not gonna let this go. You got that?”
I could feel him laugh softly against me, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go to sleep, mutt.”
- - -
Meh, no cliffhangers this time. Sorry for such a short chapter with such boring content! Well, there were a few things brought up of some importance to the plot and stuff, but other than that, nothing really happened. I’m so disappointed! Anyways, instead of writing this all day, I was busy helping my dad buy last-minute gifts for my mother. Ugh, men are so impossible. Haha!
Anyways, have a magnificent, wonderful, plentiful Christmas (or whatever holiday you do or do not celebrate)! Thank you for yet another wonderful year of reading and reviews! I look forward to posting again soon!
Next up is Chapter 24 of Behind Blue Eyes: Seto’s Story. If you haven’t started reading it yet, please do! Some people enjoy that story more than the original. Thanks for reading!