Impressions


Pegasus paused outside Mokuba's door, eyes closed, tray in hand, hoping he walked into tired smiles instead of pieces of old nightmares. Neglected dishes in the sink, dry paint flecking off old pallets. Signs of surrender from the wrong brother. To the wrong truths.

He made his tone bright when the door unlocked. "Good mo—" The word caught in his throat, fading as Mokuba scrambled off his knees. "Do forgive me." Pegasus said, putting down their hot chocolate. "I didn't know you prayed."

With a halfhearted glance out the window, Mokuba said, "I don't."

"Ah—"

"I just needed someone else to talk to." Pegasus let the comment roll off, Mokuba was grieving. Anger was an essential part of that grief.

"Do they answer you?" He asked.

"They?"

"Who says the void can't be a crowd? Maybe they're throwing you a party." Perhaps that was in poor taste with Seto's birthday a few weeks away.

"I'm probably too old for that." Mokuba said, and nearly broke his heart in two.

He couldn't comment before there was deliberate distance between them, Mokuba taking the window seat to watch the rain. Of course the world wouldn't give the boy any sun when he needed it most.

"So, does it work?"

"Does what work, Little Frog?"

Mokuba's hands curled to little half fists on his pant legs, bunches of fabric between his fingers. "Prayer."

He felt his chest deflate letting out a breath. "I suppose it depends on who you ask. For me it does, about half the time."

"Because you mess it up the other half?"

Pegasus laughed and immediately regretted it when Mokuba angled himself more toward the window to hide. "There's no way to make a mistake unless you don't say what you need to say. And if you don't, you just try again. And again and again."

"I can't afford to do that, I already screwed up the first impression." His mother had died giving birth to him.

"I met a man in Thailand." Pegasus said, dropping into one of two chairs. "Who believed we meet people twice, once on earth and once in the afterlife. By that logic, out first, first impressions are only practice runs."

Mokuba pressed a hand to the window pane and watched the warmth of his fingers spread over it in a fog.

By that logic, Pegasus was always meant to be his prison warden.

"Guess ours didn't change much then." He said, and wished it felt better to see Pegasus's horrified expression reflected in the glass.