Disclaimer: I do not own YugiOh.
Special Occasions
The rain fell forever.
Mokuba stared outside the classroom window, seeing beyond the rivulets of water that trickled down on the other side of the pane. He pressed his hand against the cool glass and leaned his forehead against the window. Mokuba's breath coalesced into a mist, a white fog that began to condense into little beads of moisture.
The old-fashioned chimes in the school tower began their rhythmic mellow cadences again.
"It's been half an hour, Kaiba-kun."
"Yes, Sensei," Mokuba agreed. He turned around to watch his teacher behind him who had finally gotten up from her desk and was pacing around the classroom in brown loafers. She smelled of icy mint and crushed warm cinnamon from the roll she had for lunch. She wore ridiculous wire-rim glasses and a pout that made her seem less adult than usual. Her forehead wrinkled at Mokuba's easy acquiescence.
"Well?" Sensei snapped. She looked at her antique watch frequently and tapped her foot.
"He'll come," Mokuba assured. He turned back towards the rainfall and continued in a hushed voice that sounded like a wish, like a plea, "Nisama will always come."
In the rain there was no one. The playground was empty. The asphalt was slick and wet. Then Mokuba startled as he caught the flash of white near the cheery tree, whose blossoms were limp and shedding tears of palest red.
"Good-bye!" Mokuba yelled, swiping his book-bag from his desk and swinging it onto his back with one strap. He dashed out just as Sensei was saying his name and slammed the door shut. He ran with all his might down the hall, each step hard and ringing against the polished floor, and skidded to a slow stop as he nearly careened into his brother's long legs.
"Nisama!" Mokuba exclaimed happily, then took up and quickly assessed Seto's state. The duelist looked lost; his normally sharp blue eyes looked like two dulled mirrors, dusty with disuse over time. The colorless trench-coat that normally flared around Seto like kingly robes was drab and stretched, thin and un-commanding. The wet material hung off Seto like it wanted to drag its wearer down.
"Come, Mokuba," Seto ordered, placing a firm hand on Mokuba's shoulder and easing the younger Kaiba down the rest of the hall and to the school exit.
There were droplets of rain in Seto's brown hair. Under the fluorescent lighting of the hallway, they looked like pearls.
When they made it to the school's doors, the elder Kaiba took off his wet overcoat and peeled off a second layer underneath the first. The inner layer was soft and blue, full of down. Seto draped the dry layer over Mokuba's head and peered down at the startled gray eyes that peeked back.
"I forgot about the umbrellas," Seto explained. He took one of Mokuba's hands. Mokuba's other hand was clench tightly around the borrowed coat so the fabric formed a sort of makeshift combination of hood and poncho against the unfair weather.
Mokuba walked quickly with Seto and looked at the swings in the playground. They swung in the wind without riders, incomplete like a memory punctured with holes. The waning sunlight glinted off the swings' metal chains as the hinges creaked before Seto tightened his grip and hurried Mokuba along.
There was no dark limousine, no modernized chariot to greet them when they found themselves at the end of the curb between Rukawa and Haibanei Streets.
Mokuba tugged on Seto's hand, asking a silent question, but Seto only steered them towards the open mouth of the nearby subway station.
When Mokuba reached the stuffy, sauna-like atmosphere of dry underground (the ventilation was probably plugged from trash swept along the streets by the rain) he took off Seto's coat and shook it out. The droplets bleed into a random pointillism piece in the pavement. Seto leaned against one of the metal beams in the subway that supported the station's roof. When Mokuba moved to return the article of clothing, Seto only waved it away starkly in a salute-like manner. Mokuba carefully folded Seto's coat inside out to avoid getting his own clothing wet and held the bundle conscientiously against the front of his body.
The subway was noisy like the limo never was. At Yukoshima station, there was sound and color and people. A pig-tailed little girl was crying and begging her mom to return to the toy store. There was a little boy playing hand-games with a friend. Each of their moves mimicked either a Kung Fu display, a gun going off, a missile launching or an invisible shield being cast around their maker.
"Fire Bomb!"
"Ultimate Shield, ha!"
"No fair! You can't use that more than two times!"
There was a teenage couple snogging nosily with devouring slurps by the entrance and a more secretive pair of girls holding hands at the other end of the platform. Mokuba smiled at them, but they didn't answer. The girls seemed nervous, afraid that they would be caught and maybe pushed maliciously onto the tracks. There was a Morgan Stanley businessman too, dressed impeccably from the waist up, but whose pants were dark with water. When the man coughed and shifted to turn the page of the periodical he was reading, his damp shoes squeaked like mice - snap! - caught in a trap.
Nisama was perfectly still and serene, staring straight ahead at the tracks.
Seto had let go of Mokuba's hand, but Mokuba grabbed it back again and held Seto's larger hand tightly in his own.
No one stared at Mokuba when he did it.
Seto squeezed back reassuringly when the clickity-clack of an arriving train screeched through and took all the noise from the station, sucking out all the other sound waves from the air in a great whoosh of wind.
Seto and Mokuba boarded. Mokuba glanced around quickly, then pulled Seto towards the front of the car.
"Look there, Nisama," Mokuba said pointing through the crowd at the dingy row of gray benches, filled with sitting shoppers with overflowing bags between their ankles and chatty college students in sweatshirts making grandiose gestures while arguing less eloquently about Nietzsche. "There's one seat at the edge."
Seto maneuvered them (around a woman whose pink-ribboned shitzu yapped at them from her handbag) to the area and sat Mokuba down. Mokuba's mouth twisted into a frown because he had meant the seat to be for Seto, but Seto stood nearby, holding onto one of the handles in the row bolted onto the top of the car. It was shaped like a single wing dissected from a dragon-fly.
Nearby, there was a group of brightly-garbed tourists in raincoats discussing how to get to Kaibaland in French. Mokuba caught snippets like "Oui" and "Cherchez la -". Mokuba smiled and leaned over to point at a spot on his neighbors' shared map.
"Here," Mokuba said slowly in French, recalling unrelenting pronunciation drills.
"Merci," the map's owner, a sweating rosy-cheeked gentleman said, then began to a rapid verbal spar with his friends so that Mokuba lost what little comprehension of the conversation he had left.
Mokuba looked slyly at Seto whose eyes seemed to brighten with amusement until the conductor announced their next stop and all their liveliness seemed to die out like too feeble stars.
The brothers got off and climbed up the stairs, passing by a neon-green iPod ad. When Mokuba lost his footing on one slippery stone step leading above ground, Seto caught him by the waist and held Mokuba close.
In the rain, they stood by the curb. Mokuba unfolded the bundle and draped it back over his head while still staying close to Seto. Seto only had on a flimsy lilac-blue dress shirt and Mokuba wanted to share his body warmth with Seto. A girl in Mokuba's class had hypothermia last week and Sensei had explained to the class how serious her condition was.
They waited for five minutes with nothing more between them but the pitter-patter of rain until Seto successfully hailed a taxi. The woman that picked them up was a twenties-something girl wearing a fuchsia "Get Bent-o!" shirt with blonde-brown highlights in her black hair. The woman greeted them with a perky "konnichiwa" while chewing gum. She blew a big pink bubble then popped it with an exaggerated expression of offended surprise. Mokuba laughed.
Since Seto was wary of strangers (and of acquaintances and even near-friends like Yugi), Mokuba did most of the chatting on their drive. A new Utada Hikaru pop song blasted from the radio as the woman shook her head to its trendy beats. She was a part-time biochemistry major at Tokyo U and between lectures, cappuccinos and studying, she drove one of her father's taxis in Domino to make extra cash. She liked throaty Frank Sinatra ballads and ruby-colored nail polish. Mokuba told her he was Seto's brother and that he went to Kaioh Preparatory School. ("Ah, that's quite prestigious, isn't it?" Interrupted Yuri, to which Mokuba nodded in affirmation.) Mokuba liked Nisama's inventions and clean metallic gadgets like the holo-projector his brother was working on.
"It's a secret," Mokuba whispered. "So, don't tell. It's going to be unveiled for Kaibaland in a week during its two-year anniversary."
"Sure," Yuri agreed readily and winked with a heavily mascara-ed eye.
"I expect some business people to be there," Seto interjected, voice reviving like a dull blade that had regained its original sharpness after being quietly tended to. "I have a few associates that will be needing transportation, are you and your father available?"
"No problem," Yuri replied. "Tou-san's not doing so well these days. He's just gotten off chemotherapy," the woman continued in a more subdued tone. Her cheerful face became dour for the first time. "He's getting better though and my uncle is running our Sakimoto taxi business in the meanwhile."
Mokuba smiled, watching Seto inquire about Yuri's family politely but uncommonly with genuine concern.
"Heeey," Yuri eventually protested, turning her head sideways to peer at Mokuba from the corner of her eye. "You've heard all about my family, but what about yours?"
"Nisama is my family."
"We're visiting our parents," Seto added.
"Ooh," Yuri nodded a few times, cracking her saccharine gum absently. "That's good."
When they reached the flower shop located at the ground floor of a brown tenement building, Mokuba included Seto's good-byes in his farewell to Yuri. The cab driver waved back madly. The taxi's rubber tires screeched, then pealed away. The cat-shaped bell on the door to the shop faintly rang. Minutes later, it did so again and Mokuba and Seto walked out hand-in-hand with white lilies wrapped in newspaper clasped to their chests.
Mokuba shifted the coat along with the flowers in his arm until he could bend his head down and smell the flowers' subtle scent of newness and final knowledge.
The rain had become a fine drizzle, hardly rain at all, when they went past the iron cemetery gates and to the neighboring stones that marked the resting place of two people, long gone but never forgotten. The brothers laid down the lilies. Seto knelt by one plot and Mokuba did the same at the other plot. Seto was never wary of family, so together, Mokuba and Seto told the two people about their lives on the seven-year anniversary of the day the brothers became orphans.
Mokuba held his breath.
Seto brushed a feather-light kiss against Mokuba's forehead, because Seto was still very shy, and Mokuba told Mother and Father about another anniversary and about the wonderful thing that had begun between Mokuba and Seto six months ago.
When Mokuba finished...the rain had stopped.