Disclaimer: Yu-Gi-Oh! belongs to Kazuki Takahashi.
"Brown study" does not refer to the color of Seto's
office. It's a term I found while reading The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Look it up if you're curious--you won't miss anything if you don't.
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KaibaCorp has gone through many transformations in the past nine years, the first beginning with its shift from a weapons manufacturer to a game producer; a shift which coincided with the change of ownership from Kaiba Gozaburo to Kaiba Seto.
But in all that time, Mokuba mused as he stared out the floor-to-ceiling windows, Seto had yet to change his office. It was still the same one he had strode into on the day he became official C.E.O of KaibaCorp, the same one he had expected to inherit since the day the two of them were adopted. Alterations had been made to the building itself -- it had had to be expanded as the business grew, and plans were currently in development for a new off-shoot to be built across the street -- but in all that time, Seto kept his old office.
Mokuba had gotten over their adopted father long ago -- but then, Mokuba wasn't Seto.
He sighed impatiently as he stared out the windows, and absently toyed with the ponytail that he'd been wearing his hair in since starting college. Then he clasped his hands behind his back and began rocking slightly on his heels. Seto always told him that it was unprofessional to fidget, but Mokuba assumed that since he had to wait here because of another running-over meeting, he could be as unprofessional as he wanted. The only ones who would see it were the security cameras, anyway.
Mokuba absently watched the people on the streets below for a few minutes, before his gaze shifted up to stare at the downtown: at the places where skyscrapers rivaling that of the KaibaCorp tower stood; at the clearing where the new KaibaCorp off-shoot that he was in charge of designing would eventually be built; at the empty places in the skyline where he would raise up new buildings, ones that wouldn't be connected to KaibaCorp at all. It was at the empty spaces that he stared the longest, imagining how the city would look once he began to build his own destiny, separate from that of his brother.
It wasn't that Mokuba was ungrateful, or that after all the years of being the only person who saw any good in Seto, he wanted to repudiate him. It was just that twenty years old was too old to be nothing more than "President Kaiba's little brother."
Not that that was true, anyway. Mokuba wasn't President Kaiba's little brother. He was Seto's little brother. That was all he needed to be. The name "Kaiba" had never meant much to him.
. . . Though the money was nice. Mokuba definitely liked the money part. Half a year in an orphanage had been enough to instill him with a deep and abiding appreciation for being damn rich.
But beyond that, he had no use for their family name. Being a Kaiba had never let Mokuba do what he really wanted, after all.
In his first semester at university, Mokuba took several courses in economics and accounting. The first time he went back to Domino City to visit his brother, Seto had asked him why he was wasting time in those kind of classes when he could be studying something he liked instead.
It was then that Mokuba realized the only thing Seto expected from him was to be different from himself.
He'd analyzed his brother's voice carefully in that sentence and the ones on the subject that followed. Seto had given no trace of feeling threatened by Mokuba's choices -- he just assumed that his younger brother assumed that he had to learn about business as well, since he was a Kaiba.
Maybe if he'd asked if Mokuba had liked those classes. . . .
But there was no reason for him to have done that. Seto viewed being a businessman as a necessary curse. The state of being one had been drilled, beaten, force-fed into him since they were children -- Mokuba didn't think Seto would know what to do with himself if he weren't a businessman -- but that didn't mean, it had never meant, that Seto enjoyed being one. Seto was an inventor. He ran KaibaCorp strictly so he would have the resources to work on his projects, even if running it meant that there was little time for him to use those resources.
But it wasn't like he had a choice in the matter. KaibaCorp could only be lead by a member of the Kaiba family, and if Seto considered the company a burden he certainly wasn't going to pass it on to his little brother. Because Seto assumed that if he disliked being a high-power businessman, Mokuba would too.
Because, after all, nobody had ever asked if Mokuba wanted to run the company. Nobody had ever asked if he wanted to be in charge of the dozens of projects and troubles that the company had going at any moment, if the politics and espionage inherent in the business world amused him more than anything, if he thought that reducing people and lives to properties and assets and buying and selling them in a way that best profited the company (if not the people in it) was a great way to earn a living. . . . In short, nobody ever asked if Mokuba wanted to be C.E.O. of KaibaCorp.
. . . Actually, it was probably better that way. There was no reason to let people know megalomania ran in the family.
So for the next couple of semesters, Mokuba's class schedule couldn't have been more eclectic if he'd tried. He took classes in psychology, in Japanese literature, in Western literature, in English, in art, in Japanese history, in calculus, in computer programming. Eventually he melded the art and the computer programming together and decided to become an architect. He didn't really love it, but he was good at it, and that was enough. He already had the KaibaCorp addition to draw up, and he had offers from several companies waiting for him after he got his degree. His future was bright.
But it always nagged at him, like an itch beneath his skin, that he would never be able to do what he really wanted.
And it wasn't like it would be hard to take over KaibaCorp. Mokuba had learned the art of hostile takeovers from a master. And a lot of the people in key positions liked Mokuba better than Seto.
That hadn't been deliberate on Mokuba's part, or even subliminal; Seto didn't lend himself to being liked, and Mokuba -- after he started to mellow out and not act like such an incredibly spoiled brat -- had just presented a more preferable alternative. It would be very, very easy, really. . . .
. . . If only it weren't Seto.
It had taken time, and distance, and a few lingering nightmares from that penalty game to set it in stone, but Mokuba had always known that Seto wasn't the best brother in the world. He was probably one of the worst, actually; just a few steps above Hannibal Lector at times, though Hannibal had at least had that drive to bring back his dead little sister by reincarnating her or something into Clarice Starling.
(When he'd been studying Western Literature, Mokuba had read Hannibal for fun. It left him with an urge to see Italy.)
Seto could be cold, very cold, and he could distance himself emotionally almost at will, and he could be forgetful, and he could be carelessly cruel, and he could ignore anything that didn't fit the way he perceived the world, and. . . . There were a double dozen more 'ands' to add to that sentence, but the point was that Mokuba knew that he could have had a better brother than Seto. After all, once Seto met Yuugi and all that madness with Duel Monsters and god cards and other personalities and previous lives, and whatever else Mokuba might have missed, had begun, the reason Mokuba had tried so hard to keep himself near the center of Seto's life was because he was afraid Seto would forget about him if he didn't.
But he could have had a worse brother, too. When it really, really came down to it, Seto had been there for him. When people wanted to adopt them separately, Seto had refused. And the time he had been kidnapped ("times," if he were being honest; but there were some things that Mokuba didn't want to remember, and the irrational number of times he'd gotten himself abducted in a single year was one of them), Seto had come for him. There was a point in his brother's mind where family won out over a company, or Yuugi, or inventions, or the dozen other things that had replaced Mokuba in Seto's life.
That was all Mokuba could really ask for, because he was practical; and he knew that that was all he would likely ever get.
And Mokuba had made a promise to wait for Seto to finish putting his heart back together again. Even if he'd already waited years, and had a feeling he might be waiting the rest of Seto's life, he would keep that promise.
There were a lot of people that Mokuba owed something to, and most of them he would double-cross without a second thought if the profit was high enough; but not Seto. Never Seto.
Because Seto might be "President of KaibaCorp" to everyone else, but to Mokuba, he was "my older brother." And that meant something. It meant something to Mokuba, even if it didn't mean anything to anyone else, even if it didn't mean anything to Seto himself. It didn't have to. Mokuba had already made up his mind.
Another novel that Mokuba had read during his Western literature phase was Notre-Dame de Paris, and in the description of Claude Frollo he'd found part of a sentence that had really stood out. It had been describing Frollo's affection for his little brother, Jehan, and the author had made a comment about how Frollo considered Jehan to be one for whom he would be responsible for before God.
Mokuba didn't quite believe in God, but he believed in the opinions of other people. Seto had practically raised him himself since they were children -- and if Seto was going to be held responsible for him before the rest of the world, Mokuba was going to make him look good. Seto was one of two people who Mokuba would pay back his debts towards, no matter how long it took.
The other person, ironically, was Yuugi. Yuugi had done too much, for both him and his brother, for Mokuba to be able to brush aside without a pang of conscience. Between the penalty game Yuugi had pulled him out of, and winning back his and Seto's souls from Pegasus, and helping him free Seto from the VR world, and then helping Seto again in Noah's cheap rip-off VR world, and then for just not killing off his brother when he was sure that Seto had given him plenty of incentive to, Mokuba owed him, and he owed him a lot. And he would pay it back, somehow.
He'd been trying to settle his debt with Yuugi in small pieces ever since the beginning, by helping out his friends when they were in trouble and by letting him borrow a dueling stadium in Kaiba Land whenever he asked for one, but the debt had just kept piling up. It was probably a good thing that Yuugi had dropped out of touch with him and Seto about seven years ago -- Mokuba had yet to figure out a way he could sufficiently pay someone back for saving his soul that didn't involve shrine-building or burnt offerings.
Still, Mokuba didn't feel that he'd fully given back what he owed; so if Yuugi walked through the door today or tomorrow or a year from now and asked for help, Mokuba would do whatever he could. Even if he wound up irritating Seto in the process.
Especially if he wound up irritating Seto in the process -- because Seto only got irritated by the things he considered beneath him.
It had gotten a lot easier for Mokuba to want to help Yuugi after Seto lost interest in him. Before, he'd done it simply because he couldn't cancel his debt and didn't like living with it, but after the Duel Monsters craze began to die down and Seto had gone on to master a new game, Yuugi didn't seem so threatening. Before, Mokuba didn't like helping him, because it was obvious that Yuugi occupied the center stage in Seto's thoughts and that left him with very little room for his younger brother. But then something changed (he knew that "something" had to do with the trip he and Seto had taken to Egypt, but heck if Mokuba had ever made any sense of Yuugi and his friends' stories), and Seto stopped being so obsessive-in-a-stalker-kind-of-way. Because, after all, it had never really been Yuugi that Seto had been obsessed with.
Mokuba exhaled loudly all of a sudden, unclasping his hands and jamming them in his pockets. Why was he thinking of all this, anyway? It had been years since he'd heard from or of Yuugi, anyway. . . .
'It's pointless to dwell on the past.' That was another of the things Seto had told him. 'Learn what you can from the mistakes you made and move on with your life. Rolling about in the muck is not the best way to get clean.'
Mokuba had eventually figured out that Seto had stolen that last sentence from Brave New World, but he never called him on it. It made the point, and that was all that really mattered.
His thoughts scattered when the door to the office opened. Mokuba glanced over his shoulder and watched Seto stride in. "Hey, big brother. The meeting ran over again?"
Seto swore under his breath. Mokuba snickered.
As Seto threw his briefcase and coat onto the couch, Mokuba glanced back out the windows, taking in the empty spaces once more.
Then the chair he was standing behind creaked as Seto settled into it, and his brother commented, "It's the same view as it's always been, Mokuba."
"Not really. You don't look out there enough," Mokuba replied as he turned away from the windows. He shifted his laptop on the desk so that it now faced Seto. He'd already opened it and brought up the blueprints' program as soon as he'd entered, because he knew that Seto had too much to do in too little time, and couldn't afford to waste minutes on details like that.
"Okay! If you don't see anything you want to change, this will be the final draft. . . ."