There aren't many notes to start this one. I'll just say that, now that my roster is down to six, I'm trying to redouble my efforts to focus on these stories. So with luck, you'll start seeing updates, for this story in particular, much more often.

Oh, and . . . I'm sorry. Ahead of time.


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Yuugi stared blankly. "What . . . what did . . . ?"

"I was an idiot," Mokuba snarled, glaring down at his lap. His small, almost dainty hands were curling into fists. "I let myself get caught by a . . . by a . . ." He trailed off, tears of frustration beading in the corners of his eyes. Akiko squeezed her master's shoulder reassuringly, but this seemed only to further flame his anger. Mokuba grimaced, clenching his teeth, and angrily swept the dampness from his face. As he struggled to gain control himself, something that sounded suspiciously like a sob escaped his throat.

Jounouchi was suddenly on guard, in a way that he hadn't been for a great number of years. He'd seen the Kaiba brothers go through struggle and tragedy that would have sent lesser mortals screaming straight into a padded room, and never before had he seen either of them cry. Certainly not like this, with this kind of gut-twisting, God-cursing agony. Mokuba hung his head, hiding his face with the wild curtain of his face, and Akiko drew in a steadying breath. Clearly Mokuba's grief was affecting her. She kept her hand on the boy's shoulder, and Jounouchi guessed that it would have taken a hammer and chisel to extricate it.

"They're your friends," Akiko repeated in the gentlest of whispers. "You're safe, Bocchan. You don't have to be scared or ashamed anymore." That most clichéd of assurances—"It'll be okay"—did not pass her lips; she was too decent for that. She continued to whisper in this vein to the quivering boy beneath her palm, using her apparent understanding of a Kaiba's unique psychology to calm her young charge like no one else could.

Jounouchi found himself more and more nervous as he waited. He glanced at Yuugi. There was not so much fear in Yuugi's eyes as there was a grim sort of certainty. Yuugi seemed to understand something. Or maybe, Jounouchi thought with sudden clarity, it was the dead king inside of Yuugi that understood.

"There was a man . . ." Mokuba said finally, in a voice that was deader than a graveyard in winter, "working for marketing. An American. His name was Cecil Normack." Up came those striking eyes again, and they held their audience fast. "I guess you'd call him a playboy. You know. Strutting around, peacocking with his tail preened and spread out, keeping his eye out for a good time. I guess normally he was like . . . well, a barfly. The sort of guy who'd write a book about the mysterious powers of seduction. But maybe . . . maybe he wanted his time in Domino to be special. He didn't want a low-risk target this time. He set his eyes on his own vice-president. 'Cuz . . . well. No greater conquest than the crown prince in his own castle, right?"

Jounouchi felt a fist the size of a wrecking ball crack against his jaw. He reeled, barely managing to stay upright. His eyes went wide, his mouth went dry. Mokuba looked like he was grinding his teeth into powder, and each word that came out of him was tinged with tar-black hatred, with so much venom that even Kaiba would have flinched.

Yuugi licked his lips, opened his mouth, and tried to speak: "You . . . you were . . . moles—"

"Don't use that fucking word!"

The young Kaiba's voice was a whip-crack in the suddenly sterile air, shooting out like lightning and striking Yuugi dead in the chest. Mokuba's young face was taut and reddened with absolute fury. He spat fire: "I wasn't molested. Little girls whose stepfathers are too friendly get molested. Babies who get too much attention from Grandpa get molested. Boys at camp trying to get ahead of the class get molested!"

Jounouchi felt his insides shrivel up and die, fossils too brittle to keep together.

Yuugi looked ready to bolt from the room.

Akiko stood at attention like a foot soldier awaiting orders from her commander.

Mokuba's eyes looked like gemstones from a throne in hell.

". . . I was defiled."


END OF PART 1.


A long time ago, in an age far gone, I wrote a story called "Twist of Fate," which was my 15-year-old attempt to answer the question of what would happen to Seto if Mokuba died. This story was reborn, years and years later, as "Cemetery Dance."

A similarly-long time ago, but a little more recent, I wrote a story called "Back from the Dead," which was my 17-year-old attempt to combat something I had noticed for a long time. That was, a tendency to pair characters together into romantic couplings without taking the social consequences into account. To wit, I kept finding romantic stories involving Mokuba, and in very few of them did I find him any older than he was in canon. This bothered me. Deeply. In what world, I thought, is a boy like Mokuba mature enough for a sexual relationship?

"Back from the Dead" was a soapbox. I wanted to show people what a relationship like this was actually like, and how it wasn't at all pretty. In fact, it was ugly. But I was 17, and I really had no clue what I was doing. I tried to turn it into a family drama, a mystery, an adventure, and a crime procedural all at once.

Thus, we are here, at the end of Part 1 of this new project. "Light a Candle for the Prince" is a loose reboot, or revision, of "Back from the Dead," similar to what I ended up doing with "Cemetery Dance," and the first thing I wanted to get rid of when I decided to do this was the mystery element. Far too much of that original story was dedicated to stretching out just what was going to happen. And while I acknowledge that, thanks to delays between updates, it may seem that I've made a similar mistake here, I nonetheless knew that I wanted to end the mystery element a lot sooner than I did last time.

So here we are, merely 20% of the way through the story this time, and we know what happened. What's the rest of it for, you might wonder? To dig. To give this clandestine topic a lot more respect than I gave it last time I tried.

It will be ugly. It will probably be disgusting. But my hope is that, come the final chapter, it will be worth it. So I hope you'll join me when Part 2 begins, because while this is probably the darkest story I've ever tried to write, I think that it's also one of my best.