You know what they think of you. Cold, detached, egomaniac, heartless. You know that their opinions are justified, since you yourself built up that image. You wish that sometimes, someone would realize that this is not you. But even as you wish for that, you hope it never happens.
You are full of contradictions, a walking paradox.
For example, despite your intimidating arrogance you struggle daily with self confidence. You seem to fear nothing, except harm coming to Mokuba, but your fear of failure is almost paralyzing. 'Failure,' of course, is defined as anything less than perfection. And you work so hard to prove yourself perfect in everything; work, academics, dueling, raising a brother. No one is perfect, or can be perfect, and you know that you are setting yourself up to fail. But you can not acknowledge that, because then everything would crumble.
You have no time for weakness. Weakness makes you vulnerable, and that is something you cannot afford. So you bottle your emotions and present a calm, collected face to the world. And when finally those frustrations and sorrows are too much, you withdraw to solitude so no one will know. You are good at denying the obvious, even to yourself.
Isolation makes these things so much easier. You reject people before they can reject you, you find fault in them to convince yourself that they really are not worth the effort. It isn't as though you need other people anyway, besides your brother. Sometimes you may desire friendship, or even civil human contact, but you quickly squash such thoughts. At this point, who would have you but Yuugi and his gang of obnoxious lunatics? You wonder if maybe that wouldn't be so bad, but stubbornly refuse to accept them. It doesn't matter if you like or hate them; it's a matter of principle. You rejected them in the beginning; it's too late to take that back. You are stubborn, too stubborn for your own good. You might be happy if you relaxed a little, but there are things of which you just cannot let go.
In the end, you still feel lost. No one truly knows you, and for that you feel truly alone. Even so, you do not want them to know you. That would mean that your mask failed, that despite your efforts there was a crack in your armor. But this is all irrelevant. You are you, you don't need anyone else. You know all these things, and you do not make sense even to yourself. And so you do not think about it, and go on pretending to ignore your doubts.
There is a mountain of paperwork to take care of and it's already 6 o'clock. You massage your temples, willing the headache to dissipate, and get back to work.
Notes: I love Kaiba. Frighteningly, I relate more to him than to any other character. I'm working almost entirely from the dub (and 94 epsiodes of HK subs), so I don't know how this fits with manga!Kaiba.Usually I dislike 2nd person POV and present tense… but somehow it seemed to work for this. Let me know what you think.
I'm so going to hate myself for posting this. It's so freaking cliche, there have to be like 47 identical introspective!Kaiba fics out there. Argh.