Here you all go, the latest chapter of Spirit. I'm sorry that I took me so long to get this up. It's been written in my notebook for months, but I never go the chance to finish typing it. School and Girl Scouts also interrupted to make themselves known. Not only am I a junior in high school, but my troop is working on our Gold Award, and our council somewhat hates us.

Several of you, my readers, mentioned that Seto was acting a bit unlike himself in past chapters; I did that for a reason. This story takes place after the Millennium World manga series and the Dawn of the Duel anime arc – which, I will add, I still need to watch subtitled. 4Kids ruined the dub – so he has seen the Kisara in the past. He saw her get tortured. He even saw her give her life for his past incarnation. When he sees the modern day Kisara Draconis, even though he tries to push the memories back, he can't help but think of the ancient Egyptian Kisara who died. He also sees a kindred spirit in her, so he feels comfortable telling her some of his past.

Do I need to say it again? Alright, if I must. I don't own any of the Yu-Gi-Oh! and I never will. Get it through your heads, people, it's called FANfiction for a reason.

Please don't kill me!


"I have no doubt that you can. Pegasus mentioned-"

Seto was cut off by the arrival of one of the manor's many maids. "Mister Kaiba, the soup you requested for your guest." The auburn haired young woman moved gracefully into the room, placed a tray bearing two large bowls of the hot liquid on the bedside table, bowed slightly, and left the room. Seto passed Kisara one of the bowls and a spoon, which he pulled out of one of the napkins that was sitting on the tray. After he made sure that she was situated with her meal, he picked up the other bowl and spoon for himself. He chuckled lightly when he realized what Mokuba must have done.

Kisara looked over at him in confusion at the sound. "What's so amusing?" she asked quietly, setting her spoon down into her bowl.

"My brother must have asked them to make lunch for me too. He must have figured that I wouldn't eat at all otherwise."

"Why wouldn't you eat?"

"I'm usually up in my office, buried in my work. That means I usually don't come down."

She laughed slightly, then paused to finish her soup. "It's easy to forget that you're a normal teenager when you're running a company, isn't it?"

"Yeah. Sometimes I get so caught up in my work for KaibaCorp that I forget about everything else."

"That's not a bad thing," Kisara told Seto, setting her empty bowl back onto the tray. "Sometimes it's a good thing to be able to escape into something, be it work or fun. For me, art was always an escape. I would always turn to music as well."

By this time Seto had also emptied his bowl and he used the time spent putting his bowl back on the tray to compose his face back into its carefully neutral mask. When he turned back around to face Kisara, his bewilderment was guarded against her eyes. "What happened?"

This time it was Kisara who had to guard her emotions against the person who sat next to her. "I wasn't well liked by the people in my home town. They thought I was a witch because of my hair. And they bullied me because of it. They weren't afraid to let their opinion be known, either. They would throw rocks and sticks at me whenever they saw me. And the teachers at school wouldn't stop the kids in my class, even if they saw it happen. Going back to my parents' house wasn't even a relief. They hated me just as much as everyone else. I had to do all of the work around the house, all of the cooking and cleaning. While keeping up with my school work." She laughed bitterly at this. "The teachers were just looking for a reason to fail me, to expel me." She finally noticed that Seto's emotionless mask had fallen, only to be replaced by a look of horror. "What? You didn't realize that people could sink low enough to torment their own flesh and blood, to torture kids that they've known since kindergarten? Well, they can." Her voice was full of undisguised hatred at this statement. Suddenly, though, the harsh tone cracked, and as she repeated her last sentence, Seto saw tears well up in her eyes.

He reached out, acting on instinct, and pulled her into his arms, pressing her face into his shoulder.

"It's not possible," he whispered quietly, talking to himself. "She can't be that person. It's not possible. That never even happened."

Seto tried to push away the memories that were resurfacing from his time in Egypt. But the attempts he made were futile, because a barrage of sights, sounds, and smells had assaulted his mind. The dry heat of the bright sun. The harsh gritty sand. The scent of sand, stone, and food. The sound of trumpets blaring in a wide stone chamber. The cool stone of a dark underground chamber.

The images that assaulted were just as vivid. A dark monster rising from the stone cliff in front of his eyes. The three Egyptian god monsters fighting against the dark beast. More and more images assailed his mind. The most shocking and jarring of the images, though, was that of a young woman being held in his arms, her chest no longer moving up and down with life. However, this was not the part that made him freeze. What made him freeze was the girl's physical appearance: light silver blue hair, long through the air to brush the ground, and pale skin that looked white against then darkly tanned skin of his own arms. He knew that her eyes would be the same vibrant blue as the Nile River that flowed only miles away.

What awoke him from these visions, though, was not the screams that he knew would follow the young woman's death, but the young woman who could be the twin of the woman whom he had seen die. Kisara was shaking his shoulder, still tightly clasped in his arms.

"Seto! Seto! Are you alright?" she asked when his eyes finally focused on her face. She could see the ghosts haunting his eyes. "Seto, what's wrong?"

She saw his eyes clear more, as though her image was helping to repress whatever was haunting him. When they did finally clear completely she found herself being tightly squeezed. She could hear him whispering the same phrase over and over again, and by the time Seto was whispering it for the seventh or eighth time she finally understood him.

"They're the same," was being spoken like a prayer, unending and being spoken in secret. "They're exactly the same."

"Seto, what's wrong?" Kisara questioned her savior and confidant.

"Kisara," he spoke up suddenly, ignoring the query that was still hanging in the air, "do you ever have dreams or visions about living in ancient Egypt?"

To say she was surprised by the question would be an understatement; she was practically going into shock.

"What do you mean? You don't mean to tell me that you have them too? I thought it was only a coincidence." Her last sentence was spoken quietly. She was afraid that he would react the same way that her parents had when she told them about her strange visions and nightmares; there was no way that she would call most of those images dreams.

"So you do have them?"

"I wouldn't call them dreams, but yeah. Why? Do you have them too?"

He looked at her and smiled, a true smile, not one of those smirks that he always sported on television. "I have them. What do yours show you?"

"Fire. Lots of fire. A wooden cage, locked from the outside, with men sitting around a campfire. A teenage boy with brown hair moving towards the cage. He unlocks the cage, but the men catch him and start shouting." Kisara shivered as she remembered what one of her nightmares had shown her.

"The boy helped you escape on a white horse, then told you to keep going onto the next village, didn't he?" Seto was looking at her with apologetic eyes.

"Yes," her voice was not saturated with surprise as it was only moments before, but was instead filled with conviction. "You were that boy, weren't you? And the priest who saved me from a mob outside the palace years later?"

He chuckled again for a few seconds, then looked down at his hands, which had clenched themselves into tight fists in his lap. "A few years ago I would have been tempted to tell you to shut up and stop talking nonsense. I guess, though, that the only appropriate answer I can give you is yes."

"What changed?"

"You did. You died to save me back then, and when I saw you falling before that was all I could think about."

"What? Being saved by a girl?" she joked, knowing perfectly well what he meant.

"You dying." She saw him shudder as he spoke the words.

"Seto, listen to me. I'm right here and I'm not going to die. Now, on a lighter note: did you look at my deck?"

"No, I promise. Pegasus looked through it, because he wanted to see if you were visiting or had actually left home. He said that he could tell that you had left because of the cards that you had with you?"

"He can. My main deck is built completely, well almost completely, around two monsters and their attributes. The other cards are all cards that I designed or helped to design. If I'm only going on vacation I leave those in a safe that I had in my room."


There it was, the ever-so-amazing chapter 7. I will tell you all right now that I have most of what I want to have as chapter 8 written, I just need to type it.

Keep on reading, it's good for you. But don't do what I made the mistake of doing and read just fanfiction. Pick up a regular book every once and a while.