Author Notes: I began this story in 2007 and it's remained incomplete for a long time. I'm not sure when I'll pick this up again, but I wanted to share this with readers. It's a bit of an experimental style, but please enjoy!

1. Once

And falling in love is the extra creases in your bed sheets after Friday's horror move, the sticky chocolate on your fingers and lips from smores melted in the microwave, the cold breath of winter and the small bundle of warmth that clings to your side with red-patterned mitts. This is falling in love. Love isn't found in ruby lipstick or curves or batted eyelashes, in the bathroom with your pants down and a magazine gripped in one hand. Love is as simple as the small figure that stands by the school gate, kicking despondently until he sees you and smiles.

And falling in love is not supposed to be this, but it is.

2. One-Eighty

Things begin to happen. The candy perpetually stocked in your pantry begins to disappear. The mochi with the red-bean paste is replaced by power bars. The marshmallows and cocoa powder are spirited away never to be seen again. Mokuba's hair gets longer, but now he gels it back, slicked into a pony tail. He picks out his clothes with care. The cell phone you got him for his birthday rings all times of the day and when you pass by his room to yours, you hear him murmuring endearments into the phone.

One day, Mokuba doesn't come home by midnight and you are scared. When he does at two o'clock, you smooth his forehead, rub his back as he throws up in the toilet, and make him drink water. Put him into your bed and watch him all night to make sure he keeps breathing.

In the morning, you set a curfew.

Mokuba cusses you.

You say, you do it out of love.

Mokuba glares at you. At your hand curled over his shoulder. He says you are sick.

3. Sake

You've never gotten drunk before. You hate the taste of alcohol, but you need to do this. So, you let yourself be flattered by the man in the black suit. A fellow overseas, in a business completely unrelated to gaming or technology. No need for favors or mergers or acquisitions, absolutely safe. A promise as empty as the man's smile. Your hand shakes from nervousness. The liquor burns down your throat, makes tears come out of your eyes.

He wipes them away for you.

And seduction is as simple as that.

4. Sex

So that is lust.

5. Flower

And love is as simple as the picture kept in your mother's keepsafe box. The secret that yellows with age.

By now, the men have not agreed with you, so you try women. The ones without make-up or lipstick or curves enhanced with surgery. Without eyelashes, long and glossy with mascara. Those things bring you to another time and you have to move forward. Mokuba comes and goes and he watches with a strange face, the way she fits in your arms. Her petite figure nestled against your side.

She wants children. She says you will make a good father and she watches Mokuba with the type of pride your mother would have, had she lived more than a few hours after his birth.

It is easy to make her smile, with a kind word, a flower in her hair. But you cannot smile back, and in the end, it is kindness that makes you let go.

6. Dream

You are half asleep when you feel long limbs wrap around you and a voice whispering in your ear. In the morning, you wake with a smile and eyes wet with wanting so much for it to be real.

7. Denial

There are many things that people wish for besides love. They are health, family and money. And isn't it more important? To be able to breathe, to have a roof over your head and a full stomach? Isn't it more important that Mokuba doesn't mind lingering around you so much anymore, now that you no longer touch him? Now that he lives at the other end of Domino City.

8. Health

The doctors say it is because you worked too hard. The doctors say it is because you didn't listen to them years ago and took too many bad pills to keep you awake, running diagnostics and shuffling between meetings. It's from forgoing food for work, from trying to keep something safe for that person who doesn't seem to care anymore.

Kaiba-san, they say. If you continue, you will have a heart attack.