As much as he despised to admit it, even to the smallest and most interior corners of himself, Seto had always hated the darkness. It was too saturated in ambiguity, too dense with questions and uncertainty. He was drawn to straight paths and pure figures, darkness only reminded him of how much of his life was an endless maze, how easy it could be to follow a false instinct and chase a dead dream for his entire life without knowing that it would lead to a sad, fatal end.

In this orphanage, darkness took on a new and morbid meaning. The lights dangled helplessly like dead bodies from the cafeteria ceiling. The room seemed swallowed in it. Shadows feasted on any feeble glow, forced it into submission. It was a battle that the children had already lost. Studying their faces, Seto could see that there was no radiance in their eyes, no flesh to their skin. The shadows pooled at the corners of their faces, lurked in the lines on their lips, and flourished in their pupils like a deadly virus. Darkness crept out of their faces like vines and encircled everything in their vicinity, wrapped it a chocking grip and squeezed the sunshine out of it.

"Children," Miss Cole cooed in her downtrodden, dusty voice, "these two boys are Seto and Mokuba, they're going to be eating with you tonight." She gently pulled out two twiggy, rough-looking chairs from under the battered table and trailed her arm across them, indicating that this was where they should sit. Mokuba instinctively stiffened at the thought of having to join these sad shells of children, but Seto softly nudged him into his seat.

The two felt as though they were pinned under the sour glow of a spotlight. The feeble, musty presence of these ghostly creatures was suffocating, they seemed to pull all of the happiness and sparkle out of the air, but were clearly incapable of retaining it. Their faces were flat and despondent, their movements sluggish and timid, as if they expected the world to dissolve into a foggy memory before they had finished eating. The most disturbing part, Seto thought, was that they seemed so weak and so simple that he doubted they would notice if it did, never mind care.

Seto analyzed the food placed before them by a time-worn and fear-stained assistant. Like Miss Cole, her eyes refused to touch them fully, she seemed to be trying to convince herself that they weren't really there. Seto softly spun a slimy spoon through a pale, grimy bowl of what he assumed was supposed to be soup, but looked more like something that had been scraped off the bottom of a heavily polluted pond. He remembered the stories he had told Mokuba—Hansel and Gretel, Hades and Persephone—it always seemed like eating the food of a foreign and dangerous world was somehow admitting defeat. It was brining the place inside you, acknowledging that you had a made a home there. Seto bit his lip and vowed to ignore his hunger.

Time sputtered awkwardly across the floor and dripped down the walls as their dinner hour drifted on. A few times Seto made a half-hearted attempt at conversation, but each time he opened his mouth to speak his voice floundered and withered away to a wisp of smoke. Mokuba had followed his brother's lead and was not eating, but he tightly clutched himself around the waist, slowly being whittled away by his insatiable hunger. Seto wished that he had something to give him, but his pockets were full of nothing but dust and empty promises. Shadows began to battle starlight, and after an eternity of cavernous silence, Miss Cole led them to their bedroom.

The room was large and withering. Everything from the floor to the furniture—to the occupants themselves—seemed to be hovering on the brink of falling apart. Seto feared that his bed would not be able to withstand the force of his gaze, let alone his weight.

"Seto, dear," she gestured to a sagging, greasy bed in the farthest, darkest corner of the bedroom, "this is where you'll be sleeping. And Mokuba, your bed is over there." She directed Mokuba towards a similarly decrepit bed at least a half dozen spaces away. "I'm sorry that they're not together," she sighed, "but these were the only spots available, and people can be very averse to change." Mokuba's eyes searched Seto out, delicately but desperately pleading for Seto to throw a fit, cause a scene, do whatever it took to make everything alright and guarantee that they would never be divided. Initially, that was exactly Seto's intention, but as he prepared to raise his voice and demand—as civilly as possible—some improvement in their accommodations, his eyes locked with Miss Cole's, and saw that she was begging with every fiber of her being for him to do exactly the opposite. Her weariness, her sadness, stunned him to into silence.

"We have a very strict curfew here," she explained. "No one is to be out of their bed after eight thirty except for emergencies. No loud noises. No lights. We'll have breakfast tomorrow at eight, and I'll give you the rest of the rules then. And a tour, if you'd like." She smiled sweetly at them, but her warm emotions felt shallow, forced, and uncomfortable. Seto thought that he caught something odd in her eyes—fear. But what reason would she have to fear them? They were only children. With a final fleeting glance, she left them floating on the expanse of the calloused wood floor to check on their roommates.

Mokuba watched her retreating figure before furtively approaching Seto like a half-snared animal. His eyes were wide and beseeching, his bottom lip was trembling. "Seto," he whispered, "you can't let her do that. I'll never be able to sleep in this place with you so far away!"

Seto shook his head solemnly. "I'm sorry, Mokie," he muttered, "but I think we'll have to do this for a little while. This whole place makes me uneasy, but for now I think it's best to play by their rules—when we can." When Mokuba didn't seem to find this a satisfactory response, Seto gave him a feathery smile. "Don't worry, Mokuba, I'll be right here the whole time. This will only be a temporary situation, I promise."

Mokuba twisted his mouth in displeasure. It was his personal belief that his big brother could cradle the world in his hands, and his words became law. To see him acquiesce so easily to a rule that to him was obviously arbitrary seemed impossible, unacceptable.

"You don't need to be afraid, Mokie." Seto whispered. "Everything will be alright. I promise." He gently grasped Mokuba's hands, savoring the feeling of their vibrant warmth against his icy skin. He could feel Mokuba's heart fluttering in his fingers, and for a moment he was certain that they held the sun between them.

Their fellow orphans moved stoically, without speaking or seeing, hardly breathing. It seemed as if the room itself was clenched tightly around them, squeezing the life out of them and daring them to make a false move. Their eyes were hallow, their gestures empty of emotion or meaning. They were living merely to exist, tirelessly and thoughtlessly running through the riddles in their minds, forcing themselves into the next day. They were exhausted by living, drained by the fear that lurked over their shoulders and slithered down their backs, never ceasing to fill their dreams with images of loneliness and eternal, tangible melancholy. As Seto crawled under his flimsy, oily blankets, he was certain that this was the worst possible place that fate ever could have abandoned them.

Sleep seemed elusive. There was a storm raging in Seto's mind, tossing him senselessly through his sea of blankets until his thoughts were beaten out of him. Icy waves of sleeplessness broke across his shoulders, slashing at his skin and threatening to drag him down to the salty, vicious nightmares that lurked below. Every breath was jerked out with a shudder and a shiver. The wild incisors of ocean waves sliced through him, leaving him weak and mangled, clinging to life on an abandoned coastline because he had nothing else to believe in.

The rain had begun again. It roared like a drum against the moldy ceiling, occasionally tearing through the crumbling roofing and colliding with the floor. Large pools of rainwater glowed like unearthly eyes on the floor, sinking into the darkness but always there, always alive to his restless and unsettled presence. The wind howled against the walls but seemed determined to flee once it realized where it was. Even the elements could not stay. A small, dangerous part of Seto prayed that the wind would tear the building apart like the jaws of a wild animal, or topple into the raging, thrashing sea. He hoped that the night would incinerate them in all in its finely sharpened claws. He longed for something to sweep him away.

Mokuba felt like he was years away, in a distant time and place that had long been forgotten by history books. His eyes were peeled by the darkness. He clung to his pillow viciously. It was a wretched thing that smelt like stranger's hair and stabbing nightmares, but it was the only thing that he had to cling to amid the furious tumult of silence and shadow. He could make out Seto's silhouette, gently illuminated by a single, fragile beam of moonlight. His face looked pale and stricken in this light, and it looked to Mokuba that he was holding his breath to keep from screaming.

The floor rocked and swayed beneath his bed, a void opened into the floor, and before Mokuba knew what had happened or what to do, the moonlight was gone and Seto was enshrouded in a terrible fog of gloom.

Seto was certain that he was not asleep, but fantasy lurked in the corners of his mind, maliciously convincing him to disregard everything that he had believed was true and surrender to the bittersweet poison of the unexplainable. The world was caving in around him, pressing into his skin like hundreds of tiny needles. Memories of the future swirled around him, pulled at his hair and prodded at his body, as if conducting a careful experiment to see how long his sanity would survive. Tiny convulsions shot through him like sparks of electricity, making every inch of him feel precarious and roughly disjointed. He could not see Mokuba, and it bothered him.

He could not remember a time that they had been so far apart. He could not remember ever feeling so alone. Helplessness did not sit well with him.

Thick, billowing clouds beat against the sky. Waves snarled and bit the shoreline, and Seto was slowly carried into sleep, despite his best intentions. He was not awoken by noise, but rather by an eerie, oppressive silence that gave sound no space to breathe. He shot upright in bed, heart pounding out through his eye sockets and breath stained black by the sudden tension that stung the air. His skin was damp and trembling. He could sense more innately than he knew the difference between night and day that something dangerous was around him, encircling him and determined to not let him escape.

He heard a voice coming from the bed beside him. It trembled like glass and shattered just as easily. Seto could feel the fear so strongly in it that it burned him like acid, eating away at his unprotected skin.

"Please…not me…not tonight…"

There was a low, silky chuckle that seemed to come from all around him. "Henry, Henry, don't tell me that you're frightened of me? Honestly, I would have expected so much better from you…"

"Go—go away!...Please!"

"Oh Henry, don't you want to play?"

Seto could have swallowed his tongue at the primal, stifled cry that emitted from the next bed. It reminded him of the time that he and Mokuba had seen a cat methodically exterminating the mice that had lurked in the basement of one of their old orphanages. Mokuba had hated the very idea of it, had wanted to save the mice from their cruel and senseless fate. Seto, by contrast, had earnestly watched the scene play out with a convoluted combination of repulsion and fascination, not wanting to watch but unable to tear his eyes away. He had explained to Mokuba that it was part of the natural world, for the strong to kill the weak. It kept the world in balance. It was necessary.

"Lea—leave me al-lone! If my mum hears about this—"

Another stab of laughter. "Your mum, your mum, do you honestly believe that she'll return here, Henry. Return to you? There's no one here to come rescue you, Henry. There's no one who cares about how frightened you are."

"But my mum said she would come back!"

"And you believed her." There was a cool, condescending tone in the stranger's voice that slithered through the air, entrapping everything around it in its heavy, slimy wreath. "Your mother has forgotten you. You ought to do her the same honor."

"Never! She'll come back for me, I know it."

There was a long, unfortunate pause. "Oh, Henry, Henry, Henry, why can't you see what's directly in front of you? Your mummy is dead, or at least, you are dead to her. Forget her, Henry. There was never a space for you in her life, and there never will be. Why else would she have left you here? Here, among the living dead?"

Seto strained to block the words out, but they sank into him and turned his insides black and foul. This child's voice was harsher than the storm that had previously engulfed them. It had a kind of bitter stoniness and certainty that can only be borne from years of isolation and discontent. There was a hunger in it, a hunger for the spirits of strangers that would and could never be satisfied.

"Come on now, Henry. All I want to do is play a game. One little game. What could possibly be so painful in that?"

"I hate your games!"

"Only because you don't understand them…you can't see the beauty in my games, Henry, and that is your most miserable failing. But my creations are wonderful, if you could only appreciate them…"

Seto shut his eyes. He was determined not to see, not to hear. He willed his existence out of this moment, and sold himself to the darkness of his nightmares.

He dreamed that he had fallen into a pit, a writhing pit of eyes and voices that refused to relinquish him. They wrapped themselves around his limbs—heavy, dark, and oppressive. They slithered through his hair and between his fingers, delicate tongues flickering in and out like the lifeless shadows of yellow flames. Their fangs gleamed like haughty pride; their movements were heavily physical and sickeningly slow. There was one that attached itself strongly to his hand and refused to release him. It encircled his wrist tight enough to break it, and the more he struggled the stronger its grip became. It mocked him, laughed at his pitiful attempts to escape, and pulled him inch by inch into a seeping abyss of blackness and death.

"Seto, Seto, Seto," it cooed like a helpless child. He was drowning in its voice.

"Seto, Seto, wake up!" It was Mokuba. His voice seemed to come from far away, from a place that existed more in memory than any physical reality that he could think of. Looking down at him through his sleep-blurred eyes, Seto thought that Mokuba looked incredibly small and vulnerable, as if a stiff, icy wind could easily have swept him away.

"What is it, Mokuba?" Seto asked heavily. For a moment he couldn't remember where he was, he seemed to be floating in a quiet, empty void independent of time, space, and identity. Even his own voice sounded unfamiliar, as if distantly uttered by a stranger who looked remarkably like him. Seeing the barely suppressed anxiety that splashed and floundered in Mokuba's eyes slowly pulled him back to the present with a sinking thud and stirring, definitive click as the world slid back into focus and streams of memory poured in through the windows.

"Is something wrong?"

Mokuba's shoulders shivered and he studied Seto's face with concentrated desperation, his every gesture conveying a senseless helplessness that his words refused to confess. Mokuba, like his brother, was stubborn in this regard.

"I just couldn't sleep…so I thought I would check on you to see if you were okay…"

Seto laughed softly. "I'm fine, Mokie," he whispered. "C'mere." He gently patted the ratty fragments of the other side of his bed. "My bed is cold." Mokuba beamed in the milky moonlight and immediately jumped into the bed beside him, submerging his face in the leafy layers of rough brown blankets.

The two lay in silence for a few moments, watching the ceiling and waiting for the sun to save them. When Mokuba couldn't sleep, Seto would always tell him the story of the man who lived in the sun. He was trapped there, in his giant golden ball in the sky, and he loved to look down on all the children and watch them play. But it made him sad, Seto said, because he had been put in the sun when he was little kid himself, hardly older than the two of them were now, and he had never gotten to play with all his friends like the other children his age. But he knew he had important work to do, so he watched as his friends played and grew up. Seto said that he had been sad for a little while, but he cheered himself up by watching all the children of the world have fun, by giving them safety—for the ones who were afraid of the dark—and a time to play outside for the ones who weren't. He ran through the sky and he was always happy because he knew that he gave them something that no one else could, even if he couldn't participate in their fun himself.

So, when it was dark, when it seemed like the night was never ending and sunlight would never pierce the thick curtains of midnight shadow, Mokuba pictured the boy in the sun, always running through the sky to try and find him, and he knew that morning would always come. These warm, billowing thoughts were about to carry Mokuba off to his dreams until Seto's voice at his side gently called him back.

"Mokuba, did you hear anything earlier…like, talking or something?"

Mokuba shook his head. "I don't think so, Seto. I just heard the rain. It was really loud, wasn't it? Why, were people saying something?"

"No…I guess not. Never mind then, I must have been dreaming or something." Seto watched for a moment as his voice swirled above them like smoke, then gently nudged Mokuba's shoulder. "Hey, listen Mokie," he murmured, "just because we're here, just because we've been all sorts of bad places, it doesn't mean that our parents didn't love us, you understand? They never would have wanted this for us, you know? Dad really loved you a lot, and I know that Mom would have too, if she could have. Okay?"

Seto's words were largely lost on Mokuba, who heard them through a thick warm haze of drowsiness. But the comforting, rhythmic pattern of Seto's voice had a reassuring quality, and he nodded in agreement. "Yeah, Seto. Okay…"

The cold, brittle silence slowly dissipated under the lull of Mokuba's heavy breathing. For the second time that day, Seto studied his peaceful face, wondering what the landscape of Mokuba's dreams looked like, and just how far from reality they took him. If he was anything like his brother, then it was very far, indeed.

Reaching inside his shirt—he had refused to take it off, even in bed, lest too much of this world touch him—Seto delicately unfolded a worn scrap of paper that he insured was never parted from him. It was a drawing that Mokuba had done several years previously, in an orphanage that had been beaten and smudged by time into a distorted orange glow in the back of Seto's mind. Running his finger over it, Seto could still feel the waxy, heavy crayon that Mokuba had used to make it. The lines were thick and sloppy, but the overall effect never failed to stir him.

It was his favorite creature. As shiny as moonbeams, silky, and sharp as a bolt of lightning, the Blue Eyes White Dragon was the epitome of his distant, intangible fantasies. The way Mokuba had rendered it, while not technically perfect, had captured the emotional intensity in a way that clung to him and refused to let go. It's eyes bright and fiery, tail thrashing, and mouth flung wide, this was clearly a creature that was never pushed, never bullied, had never known loss or tasted fear. It was the roar of the wind that Seto hoped would tear the orphanage down—all the orphanages down. It's roar was the metallic ring of independence—of freedom from the cruel, dividing eyes of his would be future parents. Its wings were as wide as the Earth, and they were strong enough to carry him away from everything that he longed to forget, from all that he had ever known or distrusted.

Shards of moonlight danced across the image as Seto rotated it in his hands, smiling lightly to himself. Without even trying, Mokuba had perfectly captured everything Seto wanted to become, down to the smallest fine, pearly scale and most scathing point of the steely-sharp claw. The moonlight, Seto noticed, made the drawing come alive in a way that he had never seen before. It seemed to dart across the page, flapping its majestic wings and wiping away everything surrounding it with its searing roar. Without thinking, Seto tried to reach into the page, to snatch the dragon out and grasp it tightly between his fingers. But each time he tried, the creature evaded his touch and retreated deeper into the page, daring him to reach further.

And thus, Seto cautiously dipped his hand in and out of the paper, determined to touch the dragon of his dreams but eternally unable to reach it. He remained oblivious to two yellow, narrowed slits of eyes that cut through the darkness, watching him the entire time.

The wind and the waves chipped away at the shore, and the darkness was slowly stripped away. The magic little boy who had never grown up raced through the sky in his golden celestial globe, determined to scare the nighttime away. Thin gray beams of morning shattered the night. Morning came bitter and unusual.

Comments? Questions? Criticism? I'm open to anything you guys have to throw at me, so keep it coming!