"War," said Gozaburo Kaiba, "is a game. When we play chess, we play war. When we play war, we play chess. Do you understand?"
Seth absorbed the chessboard in front of him with huge, hungry eyes like windows to a fishbowl simultaneously overburdened with water but completely barren of any fish. The onyx pieces glimmered dully under the merciless fluorescent lights overhead and Kaiba's unending, maddening, piercing stare, standing like ugly, phallic towers that Seth might have curled his lip in disdain at if he were any older than a child of ten.
"Yes, sir," Seth said, still waiting for this enormous man looming in a suit over the board to finally take his side in hand and begin. His suit was white, like the huge plane that shoved Kaiba into Seth's life like it thrust itself into the center of the runway, like the missiles his company made to make the rest of the world's look smaller in comparison and bow to him. White went first, and it was always Kaiba's color when he came to make war with a child who could barely hold the pieces in their hand.
Black was the color of the hair on Seth's little brother's head, and the orphanage closets when the door was closed to keep the other children from finding them or finding his brother's toys and clothes to take and break and make fun of so they could make war on the playground. They weren't old enough for missiles or strategy or something between their legs, or anything like that.
Seth wasn't, either, but he a plan that he knew would always work, because it always worked on the playground or the unsupervised places in the tucked-away corners of the orphanage where the shadows over the floor covered Seth in darkness and let him strike harder, if not faster. And Seth's little brother created no shortage of games for Seth to learn and win in shady, ruthless, unsupervised ways.
Seth cheated.
When Kaiba wasn't looking, or even if he was, Seth hungrily stole a pawn like it could fill him more than any bread and hid it away inside of himself. In the fishbowl in his mind, the stolen piece sank to the bottom and wedged itself in the sand like a tower of the sunken Atlantis warped in the current, down where nobody would ever think to find it; down where Seth kept a closed locket, shut watertight, with a picture of something hidden even from Seth nestled inside.
When white checked black the first time, Kaiba praised him. "Well done, Seto," he said. His accent bored away at the last letters and left them clipped and ragged where they should fade gently into thin air, or hiss like snakes when they were denied.
Seto cast that part of himself away, too, to dissolve into the waters of his soul like pollutants of everything he should have been poisoning everything he might become.
"My brother," Seto said. "You will bring my brother, too." They were a matched pair. Seto didn't know how to play a single game in his repertoire without him. He didn't know how to bargain without him. Everything else that mattered might as well have been at the bottom of the Marianas Trench for all Seto could do about it.
"Of course," said Kaiba, still grinning beneath his moustache. "The victor names his terms. But," Kaiba crossed his legs and the light glinted off his white patent leather shoes like water sloughing down the sides after he'd trespassed in a puddle or the ocean or the soul of a boy with want of a single fish, "what will you do if he turns on you? Everyone close to money and power turns on the source." He reached across the board and picked up Seto's black onyx king, and then stroked it like a sweetheart.
"My brother comes with me," repeated Seto, pinching the head of Kaiba's spent white king in his needling, desperate fingers.
Kaiba chewed the request over beneath his moustache, and then released Seto's black king.
"Get me the adoption papers," he said to his manservant, a hunched-over grotesque of a man who almost melted into the dark corners of the room in a lumpy, fleshy mass of wrinkles, white gloves, glasses, and gingivitis. "He needs a name worthy of a Kaiba, one that everyone can pronounce." He sat back in his chair and produced a glittering pen from his breast pocket. "Mokuba. How about Mokuba?"
Seto surrendered the white king, even as the empty waters inside himself lurched and hungered for something else to sink into their depths, demanded more pieces.
Soon, Seto promised himself. I will have enough. I will be full. I will have a place for myself and Mokuba to live, away from everyone else, and it will be ours.
Kaiba offered Seto books. Seto consumed them. Kaiba served Seto languages. He devoured them. But, without asking, Seto began collecting investors from under Kaiba's nose like pawns snatched from a chess board in play. Gozaburo Kaiba could keep his missiles, though. Missiles couldn't capture boards or check kings or win games. They could only blow it up, and what fun was a game without a surviving loser to gloat over?
Then again, what good was an empty fishbowl?
The knight, the rook, the bishop, all in doubles, and then the spare pawns of both colors tumbled down into Seto's heart one by one, the waters swirling and sands scattering, until finally Gozaburo Kaiba was dethroned and his white king fell to Seto Kaiba to keep forever.
Mokuba dressed like royalty in the aftermath, a gaudy crown over his black hair and an ermine cloak over his shoulders as he cackled over how easy his brother could make a coup look. The whole thing was a farce.
Seto adopted a fondness for white at the top of a war empire. And, no, the missiles Kaiba left behind weren't fun. They weren't useful, they didn't belong in Seto's perfect world, and they weren't chess.
So, Seto played more chess. Seto won awards. He played even more chess, and won more awards. They all went inside the cabinets in his big, empty mansion, and made waves as he dunked them down to the feet of the crooked kings and pawns springing from the flat sands like plants made of ebony and alabaster and untouched by any other living thing.
Soon, it wasn't fun. Seto needed a new game, so he cleared the board and demanded new ones, and then made his own. They started making money, and they started winning their own awards even when their colored gears and wheels only spun so Mokuba's wouldn't.
The locket hung around his neck and in the darkest part of his heart, forgotten beneath piles of empty things.
Seto needed other things to take. He was running out, and his fishbowl was still so empty and incomplete. Perhaps Gozaburo Kaiba played war because his new game was taking the whole world and destroying it. Maybe that was the last game. Maybe that was why he'd let Seto cheat and cling to him like a lamprey shrouded in the mud. Maybe that was the point. Maybe when you were good enough, the only way to win was to find an opponent worthy enough to swallow you whole and start over again from the beginning.
Nonsense.
Cards were fun. They were pretty, and Seto's favorite card was white and powerful like a king in chess. There was more than one of them, and Kaiba pulled them obsessively close to himself when he found one. They swam in his dreams like fish in a bowl, three in all. He liked to watch their foil scales glitter like rainbows and imagine that they could destroy the entire world in a flash of light if they wanted to, and it wouldn't matter because they would survive even a nuclear apocalypse. He stuffed all thoughts of making a place for his brother in a locket so tightly that they could never crawl out, and wondered what kind of game could help him make a world full of dragons, cards, and toys for his amusement.
Unopposed, they became Seto's entire life until he found the fourth one, and its owner wouldn't sell for any price, pain, or power.
Seto played his best game, and he cheated. He stole it. He stole it!
And that stupid boy, the king in the shadows, he took it back and shoved Seto Kaiba headfirst into his own tempest where the ghost of every game he ever played waited to tear him apart, saying, chanting, screaming: cheater, liar, fraud! You'll be empty forever! Let us rip you open and show you!
Monsters crept out of the depths at night, hungry and furious, and tore Seto apart from the shadows of all the things Seto stashed in his heart to try and fill himself, and then, with a rising terror and an icy denial he never knew he could embrace, he understood Gozaburo Kaiba. War was a game and a game was war.
Seto played again. He played white with advantage, and he played dirty. Mokuba was the collateral, because Mokuba was all Seto knew how to bargain with and literally the only thing that Seto could stand to lose.
His opponent, the game king, still vandalized him. Seto's mind shattered into a thousand pieces, and he spilled out in gallons over the floor, over his hands, and trophies, game pieces, money, papers, machines, and books of every language flooded out and ruined themselves against the ground in a jumble of nonsense until Seto Kaiba was finally, finally empty.
Last to fall was the locket and the wishes inside, and when it broke open, a picture of Mokuba stared up at Seto with wide eyes. Or perhaps it wasn't Mokuba. Seto had thrown his name out with the rest in his quest to make a perfect place for just the two of them, so it was as good a guess as any.
Seto stared down at the picture from the center of a wreath of broken glass, and asked himself what he could build with this and nothing else, just this, and if it was even worth it.
Author's Note: I just wanted to take a little break from my other stuff and write about Seto Kaiba. Thank you for reading and reviewing! I really appreciate it!