July
Bright. Full of life. Cheerful.
Happy.
All things that once had been. All things that he no longer related to, or knew how to feel. Because the person who had once—had always—shown him these things, was gone.
How did it come to this?
Seto perched at his desk, the four walls of his office surrounding him like a fort. Keeping everything out, keeping everyone away. Nothing could touch him. Maybe that was why he felt so strung-out. It had been that way for a while.
Aside from the constant, distant buzzing of the lights, the room was entirely silent. Moonlit dusk crept over his shoulders.
Papers scattered across the desk, littered with brightly colored post-it notes marking urgency. A laptop computer slept beside his elbow, red LED light flashing at one-second intervals. The machine indicated its personal panic, a fright of time running out, but the communication went ignored.
He had his own personal panic to tend to, after all.
No "Shadow Realm". No "sealed soul". Nothing that could be undone by fighting the "bad guy". Ever again.
July was supposed to be a cheerful month. It was summer, bright and hot and relaxing. More than that, July was sacred. July, Mokuba's birthday month. The month in which, fifteen years before, Seto Kaiba—before he'd ever heard the name Kaiba—had been given a sibling, to love and protect for the rest of his life.
The rest of whose life, exactly? Because it damn well wasn't his own, Seto knew for sure. Mokuba had died in June. He'd never seen that fifteenth birthday.
Seto held fast and braced himself for the coming month. He understood grief, and knew that it took time to settle its cold, sharp claws into unwilling victims. So he fell into mechanical routine. He worked, he ate, he slept; he did, but he never felt anymore.
For a while, Seto Kaiba let the robot take over.