The Light
By The Inspector
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Disclaimer: I don't own the characters, and I make no money from this. Can you imagine how fun that would be? To make money by writing fan fiction? Dude, where do I sign up? But until that becomes a job that exists somewhere besides in my mind, I make no money. So please don't sue me. Gracias!
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It must have been shortly after Battle City that Seto Kaiba had first seen it. And even then, it had only been for a second. A flash of movement caught in his peripheral vision. But when he turned, nothing was there. He wrote it off as nerves and forgot about it, for awhile.
He was after all, a very busy man. He didn't have the time to deal with such follies as figments of his imagination. He didn't believe in letting any sort of mental paranoia get the better of him, period.
The flurries of movement, flashes of color, which he saw every now and then, were easily ignored. As long as it didn't disturb what he was doing, whatever it was could lurk just out of his vision for as long as it wanted. He wasn't even willing to admit that there was anything there. It was probably only a medical problem with his eyes, though he refused to get it examined.
Why he never got his eyes looked at, he didn't really know. Maybe he was worried that there would be a serious problem with his eyes. Maybe he was worried that there was nothing wrong with them. But whatever the reason, it didn't matter.
Because then things started ending up in wrong places. His pens would have their caps off, his homework was not in his bag even though he had put it there the night before, papers were out of alphabetical order, and other small nuisances.
Unlike the things his eyes would almost see, he was bothered by the disturbances to his stuff. It was against the natural order of his life and it irked him like few things could, like a cat with its fur rubbed the wrong way.
Because as hard as he tried to write it off with some logical explanation, Mokuba, his secretary, shady memory, he could not find a good reason for why it was happening. Someone could not be roaming around his house and office without his knowledge.
Oh he tried to catch it on tape with security cameras, but for some reason, at different times the tape would become fuzzy, and the picture it tried to capture distorted beyond recognition. And no amount of money for better cameras helped the situation. It was like whatever it was couldn't be caught on film. Not that IT was anything.
He was still musing about what else he could do figure out this complexing puzzle when things took an abrupt turn for the worse so that he could no longer ignore it any longer.
Seto had been in the kitchen with Mokuba, finding something quick to eat for lunch. Pulling a cupboard open, he had found an empty jar of peanut butter shoved towards the back and waved it in his little brother's direction. "Turning into an elephant, are we?" he teased.
But Mokuba shook his head. "I didn't do that," he said. "You did. Remember? The day that you fired that girl for being mean to me I came downstairs at night for a glass of water you were eating it straight with a spoon."
Seto suddenly felt himself go very cold. He remembered that night, he had stayed up until two finishing finance report. He had been in his room the whole time. "Are you sure, Mokuba?" he said, trying to keep his voice light like he was still joking.
The raven haired child smiled though and nodded enthusiastically. "Yeah," he said, "You got my water for me." Mokuba shook his head with a grin on his face. "You need to stop working so hard, it's making you forgetful."
With a weak smile, Seto grabbed something from the refrigerator for show and then went back to his office. His appetite had totally been killed and he dropped what he had picked for lunch in the trash without a second glance.
For a long time he sat stone still at his desk, just starring into space like a zombie. Every other little oddity paled next to this new information. And he didn't know how to explain it. Because Mokuba had talked to someone, and he knew that it hadn't been him.
As much as he wanted to take his little brother's explanation about how work was making him forgetful, he remembered the night Mokuba was talking about. All of it, clearly. And he did not eat peanut butter that day.
He didn't even LIKE peanut butter! It was more Mokuba's thing.
Hours passed like minutes and when Seto stirred it was already dark out. Pulling himself out of his chair and groaning slightly as his muscles protested after being stationary for so long, he made his way up to Mokuba's room to check on him.
His little brother was already asleep, and Seto pulled the blankets further up his shoulders, smiling when Mokuba sighed and hugged the little stuffed dragon he still slept with closer.
Stifling a yawn of his own, Seto slunk quietly to the door and let himself out before turning back to his own room. His mind wasn't settled, but rather in a fuzzy state where it finally had stopped churning for the moment, and hopefully would remain so long enough for him to get a few hours of sleep.
He changed for bed and was brushing his teeth when he happened to glance up at his reflection in the glass. "What are you still doing up?" he asked his reflection, noticing his tired eyes. "It's late. Mokuba's going to keep you home if you get sick, you know that? And then he's going to want to play 'doctor.' And you know what his 'special' chicken soup tastes like."
For a second his reflection looked lazily back at him, and it titled its head to the side and grinned at the shocked boy it was supposed to be reflecting. Seto screamed once and threw the first thing he grabbed, a glass toothbrush holder, at the mirror, shattering it.
Shiny silvery splinters of glass fell around Seto's feet, but he didn't see them. All he could hear was his loud breathing as he stared at where the mirror had hung. What the hell had happened? What had he seen?
Stumbling back into his room, leaving the glass as it lay, he sat down on his bed to think. What he had seen had not been his reflection. It had been something, someone else. But there had been no one else in the room!
Was it, could it be a ghost? But that was ridicules. He didn't believe in ghosts, or specters, or… "Spirits," Seto said aloud, his voice full of tightly wound anger and annoyance.
Wasn't Yugi always trying to tell him about a Spirit that lived in his Sennen Puzzle? Yami, he called him. Yami and Hikari. Dark and Light. Like that other boy. Pale and sweet-tempered before he had suddenly did a 180 and had become dangerous and ruthless. Yugi's little friends had kept shouting something about a Spirit controlling the boy.
Did these Sennen Spirits always look so much like the original? He had seen the changes in Yugi, but he had dismissed them as his imagination. Yugi always got taller, more confident. Darker.
But come on! How was he supposed to believe a load of crap about Ancient Pharaohs and Priests and magical wars? It was an insult to his intelligence to expect him to believe something like that. And still…
If this other…thing he was almost seeing was an ancient Spirit, wouldn't it have to connected to one of those gaudy objects? And he knew he didn't have one of those. Yet, the Sennen Rod…if Miss Ishtar was to be believed (and he wasn't saying that he did believe her) it was destined for him. And he had felt it calling out to him, stopping him from making a mistake that would have cost him the duel with Miss Ishtar during the Battle City Finals.
Finally Seto stood and picked up a small object from his dresser. Casually looking around the room, he tried to think where he would hide the item in his hand. What it was didn't matter, but if his mind and the mind of this…thing, worked the same way, maybe they would try to hide things in the same place.
And if he didn't find any Sennen Item hidden in his room, all the better and he would get on some sort of medication first thing in the morning.
Seto closed his eyes and took a deep breath, steadying his nerves, before opening them again. He took one step towards the dressers, four steps to the left, two steps back, and looked up. Grabbing a chair, he stood on it and unscrewed the plastic covering on the light bulb.
And he found nothing.
With a sigh of relief (not disappointment!), Seto dropped the thing he had been carrying into the light fixture and screwed it back into place. But as soon as his feet hit the carpet, he shook his head. "It's not that small," he admitted. That's where he would have hidden something small. He needed a hiding place for something larger.
Returning to his dresser, he selected a larger object and repeated the process. This time he ended up at the window and pulled back the curtain to hide the larger object in the shadowy corner. Again, there was nothing there. Something was messing with his mind, but whatever it was, it was NOT an Ancient Egyptian Spirit.
Shaking his head, Seto climbed into his bed and closed his eyes. He had expected to be calm now, but he was not. With a scowl, he flipped over onto his side and starred into the darkness.
The Sennen Rod was not just an odd staff. It was also a weapon with a knife hidden in within it. If he was hiding a weapon that he might need to defend himself at a moment's notice, where would be hide that?
Hesitantly, Seto slipped his hand under the pillow that lay on the side of the bed he never slept on, and drew out the Sennen Rod. It fit perfectly in his hand, like it had been made for him, and even in the dark, it caught the light offered by the moon and gleamed at him.
Seto cursed aloud and closed his eyes. This was not happening. This was NOT happening!
Then he felt the bed dip with another person's weight. Slowly he opened his eyes and sat up. Sitting across from him with his head in his palms, was a living reflection with pale blue eyes. It, he, whatever, smiled sweetly.
"You must be my Yami. I'm Seth."
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TBC
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Yes, you read right. Seto is the Yami and Seth is the Hikari. I've read a few stories where Seto gained a Yami, but he doesn't seem the Hikari type and they both end up very much the same. And then I thought, well, what if Seto was the Yami? Thus this story was born.
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The Inspector
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