Title: Perfectly, Chapter the FirstFandom: YGO!
Characters: Seto/Mokuba
Word Count: 1260
Rating: R
Notes: My first serious attempt at a multichapter. Takes place when Mokuba is fifteen (and a little angst muffin) and Seto is frustrated.
Mokuba was doing that thing again-- that thing where he bit his lip and mumbled his answers and sighed a lot. He'd taken to doing it whenever he wanted attention because teenagers couldn't just ask for something apparently; they had to be noticed first. Seto had noticed. He always noticed everything, especially when it concerned Mokuba, and this whole exercise was irritating him to no end. He had been working all day, his eyes were tired, and he had a headache, but he couldn't be allowed to sit and enjoy his dinner because all he could concentrate on was the long haired boy decked out in Evisu jeans and brand new Nikes acting like he was the most underprivileged child in Domino. Seto made it a point to ignore him. Ignoring had always been his best option.
Without words, the room felt awkwardly still. The morose adolescent picked at his dinner and twirled his hair absently around a finger, sighing again. Loudly. His eyes rose cautiously to see if Seto was looking at him. He was. Seto's darted away, focusing on some expensive landscape adorning the wall.
"Something wrong?"
Mokuba put down his fork and cleared his throat, staring right at him from across the table with eyes that meant important teenaged business. How absolutely ridiculous.
"At school today…" And those eyes narrowed; he looked genuinely troubled when Seto dared to break contact with the non-threatening sunset (painted rather beautifully; how would it look in the office?) and steal glances at him. He never looked Mokuba squarely if he could help it. Looking at Mokuba inevitably resulted in thinking about Mokuba, and he had determined long ago that thinking about Mokuba was a very bad thing.
"At school today…?" Seto knew what was coming; he'd been waiting for it.
Mokuba took a defeated breath and began. "At school today my lab partner Miya told me that her friend wanted to see me after class, but she was too nervous to tell me herself…"
And something in Seto was flip flopping between queasiness and relief. If this was it, if this was the day that Mokuba stopped being a little boy trailing after him and started acting like a normal teenager, then this was both the best and worst thing that could possibly happen. His attention seemed to turn from the landscape to his plate, which was covered in food that had long since ceased to be appetizing, and then back to the landscape.
"What did her friend tell you?"
"She told me that she liked me a lot… and that she wanted to spend time with me." Mokuba's voice sounded so pathetic, but for once it didn't inspire Seto's usual annoyance.
He picked up his glass in deceptively steady fingers. He took a long sip of his iced water, and it hurt his teeth. Mokuba looked frustrated.
"Well?"
Seto Kaiba tried to look nonchalant. Mokuba was a very optimistic boy, and that hopefulness had been an encouraging light to Seto, guiding him through every bleak struggle to this very spot, in the dining room of a mansion, with the title of president. Mokuba was his driving force, the motivation behind every move he made. He tried to keep his voice steady and indifferent as he spoke with the specific purpose of crushing any hope Mokuba had hoarded away in that optimistic heart of his.
"Well what?"
Seto found that the words crushed him as well.
Mokuba's face scrunched up and was suddenly red. He gripped the edge of the table, looking like he was ready to scream, and Seto braced himself. The expression reminded him of the night when his worn, broken father had brought the baby home, and how what should have been a beautiful and perfect first acquaintance had been tainted by death and loss. Mokuba had looked sort of like this when he cried. All night long. Seto had spent hours, sleepless, listening to the wailing, motherless infant before he had crawled out of bed and wrapped inexperienced, hesitant arms around his new brother. They had fit together perfectly.
"Don't you care? She wants me to be her boyfriend!"
He cared quite a bit. He cared too much, in fact. He had been both praying for and dreading this for years, ever since that awful day that it had dawned on him that he wanted Mokuba all to himself in a way that was anything but brotherly. He'd decided once again that ignoring the problem was the only thing he could do. He reasoned (and reasoning had gotten him this far, why would it fail him now?) that if he waited long enough, Mokuba would grow out of his big brother complex and find a girlfriend and leave him without the option of yanking him out of his chair and kissing him until his lips were sore. That was not an acceptable option. Seto didn't say any of this to Mokuba though; he shrugged instead.
And Mokuba was out of his chair and stalking across the room, disappearing around the corner and headed, Seto presumed, toward his room, where he would probably slam the door and throw a fit. It was all too banal, all too juvenile, and somehow, all too painful. He considered his own leap from youth to adulthood and was glad that Mokuba at least had this-- the chance to act like a kid in high school, pissed at his asshole brother and childish enough to throw some of his expensive possessions around. It wasn't very consoling.
He abandoned the cold plateful of gourmet something-or-other in front of him and headed for his office, thankful for a few more hours in front of his laptop, free from actual thought, troubling demon that it was. Work occupied his mind, kept it away from dangerous things that shouldn't be touched . Things like the aching lack of body heat next to him, the silence that filled the room when Mokuba left, the lonely, empty, pointless routine he had fallen into. It was the cruelest irony that he had become a threat to the very person that gave him a reason to crawl out of bed in the morning. But nothing could be done about it; he lacked self control (and it had been so very apparent every time Mokuba had emerged from the bathroom, damp and smiling and showing just enough skin), and he had to have self control if he was going to be a part of his brother's life.
It wasn't like this was going to last forever. Mokuba had to grow out of it sooner or later, this puppy-dog act. This girl, his date, whoever she was, would drag the boy out of it, make him notice the attractive, giggling, all too willing females surrounding him in that high school. And once he noticed them, he'd want to go to parties with them, he'd want to impress them with Seto's money, he'd want to lay them in a hotel room after prom. And that was good, wasn't it? That was normal (and Mokuba had to be normal, even if Seto had never once gotten around to doing any of those things in his entire high school career).
And he wanted, more than anything, for Mokuba to be normal. If he had believed in God, he would have prayed for it every night. He'd gotten Mokuba this far without screwing him up too badly; he just had to overcome this last obstacle between his brother and happiness. Never mind that the obstacle was himself.