Three Days Grace

He wasn’t surprised that the King of Games wouldn’t meet his eyes. This wasn’t a game, after all, and that left the other vulnerable.

“What are you doing here?”

He smirked, stepping closer. “I could ask you the same thing, you know. It’s after hours – I have a right to be here. What about you?”

He knew the other wouldn’t have a reply to that. There was no reason for the shorter duelist’s presence and they both knew it. In truth, he figured he could very easily guess why. The other had felt something – maybe a twitch in his hear, or a pain in his hand, or imagined a friend dead a couple millennia that had commanded he go to the museum. Exactly at midnight.

Kaiba knew the obnoxious group of comrades that called this one their leader believed in destiny and fate and a whole host of other concepts he couldn’t abide.

Faith.

Trust.

Being weak.

The worst was the notion of a preordained future, already set in stone. I wasn’t real, and never would be. The future was shaped by action, and believers in fate rarely felt compelled to act to ensure that fate.

“Look at me.”

There was no answering movement to obey his command. He smirked and dragged the other’s face up, cradled in one hand.

Eyes shut before he could look into them. Inexplicably he needed to look into the other’s eyes.

“Look at me.” Still nothing. “Look at me, or I’ll have you thrown in jail for trespassing. I bet I could have a lengthy sentence…arranged.”

It had the desired effect. Eyes opened. But…

“You’re still not looking at me,” Kaiba rebuked quietly, almost affectionately, if it weren’t for the icy chill behind his words. Unfocused eyes snapped onto his gaze, poisoned with confusion, anger…fear.

He stared into eyes that burned. Stared until the other’s paralysis broke, and the shorter duelist shook his hand off and backed out of reach. But their eyes remained locked, heating the silence with the one emotion that overcame all else – hatred.

“What do you want, Kaiba?” A voice of steel, no longer quaking from the inside out. Rebuilt in a few moments as an unbreakable structure. Recreated as a world without windows.

He offered a smirk and turned. “Wouldn’t you like to know?” Without waiting for a reply, knowing he would be followed, Kaiba set off at a sedate walk down the long hallway. He felt the moment of hesitation, indecision behind him, but in the end, that spark vanished in the all-consuming desire to know.

“Kaiba, what is this about.” That damnable self-righteous voice – sickening.

But they were there. “Take a look for yourself, and tell me.”

Lights sprang to life, illuminating the room with the tomb carvings Ishizu had “accidentally” left behind. He had had the things brought down here because he hated them. Inexplicably, he ended up spending more time in the museum storage after the move, staring at them. Studying until something became obvious, at least to his eyes.

His rival seemed not to appreciate the spectacle, asking instead, “Is this why you brought me here this late at night? To show me bits of a tomb?” He seemed to conveniently have forgotten he’d dragged himself to the museum in the first place, Kaiba mused coldly.

“Not that one,” he growled. “This one. Look at this one, and tell me what you see.”

Slow, hesitant steps carried the other duelist within range, but Kaiba was feeling impatient, not murderous.

“What do you see?”

Smoldering eyes transferred from his face to the rock and back. “It’s the same as it was when the Ishtars left. There is nothing to see.”

Spoken like a blind man. Well, if that’s the way he wants it, I can accommodate.

“If there’s nothing to see, then get out,” he snarled.

“Kaiba – ” Uncertainty. How he loved the taste of it on the air, on his rival’s words.

“Get out.”

Slow footsteps reverberated, marking the other’s bewildered exit.

Kaiba drew closer to the stone, a hand outstretched, fingers brushing lightly across stone a shade too deep – smoothed over. Cut out. Stone between two outstretched hands that might once have borne a mark of some sort. An image. An explanation.

It felt like another eternity spent pacing back and forth, examining and reexamining the stone, the floor, the inside of his head. Confusion, illusion, delusion. Dragged in circles until nothing was even close to sense anymore and the hours beyond midnight began to make themselves visible.

I need to get home. Mokuba will be waiting.

xxxxx

The limo was waiting for him, its black shell dull under the matte finish. Nothing to reflect – a black hole made to swallow what came near, not return it.

He got in, leaning on the window as the driver pulled out and began to analyze the conversation he’d engaged his rival in. Tore it apart in his head. Searched for the weakness that had ended it. Tried to formulate a different scenario.

Because, of course, whatever had gone wrong all had to do with some equation that was off.

Didn’t it?

xxxxx

“Nii-sama!” The heart-achingly sweet cries of his better half roused him from the circle of questions and doubt. Here at least was one thing he understood absolutely, one person he could always predict. No hidden additives – the perfect, infinite counter-balance to his nothing.

He swept his younger brother up in a hug, fingers twisting into long black hair.

“Nii-sama,” whispered against his shoulder. Shaking body under his hands.

“What is it, kiddo?”

Slate eyes, wide and soft, too perfect to be quite real. “Welcome home, Nii-sama.”

Did it matter that it was past midnight by far too long and he’d be leaving again in another hour or so? Never.

Perfect angel, perfect demon. Bled together, you’re perfect human.

He lifted his brother’s small body, carried him through the mansion, through the wraith-like first floor, ascended to the living second. The room housing the cur was silent. It left him free rein to break open the shell, to forget its existence and simply be.

He carried Mokuba down the hall and nudged the door to his brother’s room open. Left his brother’s sleeping form in the middle of the bed, gently covered by a thin blanket. Paused at the door as he left, drinking in the sight closest to heaven. Thought the words he had no right to know, much less offer.

Then he strayed to his own room, and took up residence before the clock, watching the seconds pass. Counting each breath, every movement of the dying room on the living second floor. Ingrained, so when the sun came, when the hours grew, he could leave his room in its death throes, life slowly being strangled out of it.

xxxxx

The cur was active about a half-hour before they left. Long enough to eat breakfast and sit at the table, pointedly ignoring each other. Long enough for Kaiba to assert dominance once again, and again think it was long past the time when he should have gotten rid of the pesky dog.

Today the other made no move to following him to the office, and so, when he left, Kaiba thought no more of it.

Fingers that usually raced across the laptop keys sat quietly today, reflecting on their owner as he pondered the strangeness of the midnight hour. Was it coincidence that he had been at the museum when his rival had appeared, or that later they were there again? He hadn’t thought so at first – had thought at all - but in the light of a new day, it seemed too fantastic a notion to be believed. Coincidence, his practical mind dismissed it as, and that ended that.

Having laid aside that one piece of his life, promptly and remorselessly he moved on to the next, never-ending segment – that of work.

Never mind an ingrate cur, an ancient stone. There was the truth of life here, laying in clean black and white across his desk with no smudges of grey. Here was the reason it was so easy to immerse himself in facts and figures. The truth of existence.

xxxxx

The phone was ringing. Its obnoxious sound pulled him out of the trace he’d fallen into. Irritated now, Kaiba lifted the receiver and growled into it. From the other end came the slightly wheezing voice of the head of staff for his mansion.

“Excuse me sir, but your houseguest has disappeared.”

Disappeared? All to the good.

“ – do anything to find him?’

“That won’t be necessary,” Kaiba snapped. Then he hung up. So the cur was gone.

I guess he’d had enough. About time, too.

He tried to refocus on work, but his efforts were half-hearted at best. Recognizing flaws and fixing them were two very separate things.

I’ll finish flagging the errors in this before I leave. Then tomorrow, I can focus on fixing them.

Everything went swiftly after that.

xxxxx

The mansion didn’t feel any emptier than usual when he walked in. It didn’t surprise him. The lower level was dead and abandoned – it couldn’t possibly feel more empty than it was. Climbing to the second level –

It felt more alive. Emptier, yes, but the weightlessness of being freed from a burden, not being deprived of life. And, besides, it could hardly feel empty with his angel’s presence here.

“Nii-sama! Nii-sama!”

“What is it, kiddo?”

“Welcome home, Nii-sama.”

Perfect angel, perfect demon. Bled together you’re perfect human.


Author’s Notes:
I’ll leave it to our resident geniuses to explain why Mokie’s the only one with a reliable name in Kaiba’s narrative thus far.
Not that it really means much, but… I like metaphors. And allusion. Poetic devices. Not only are they simple to understand, they’re easy to learn. Application is the difficult piece. Kaiba’s mansion is ALL metaphor. A living second floor built on the corpse of a dead one? A room strangling itself with foolishly based concepts and a skewed outlook?
The Kaiba mansion has become a metaphor for its occupants, and I try to personify the structure as another entity. Maybe Kaiba’s way of looking at himself (indirectly).