Part Two – Album Leaf – a dedicatory musical thought; a short, simple piano piece of intimate character
Kaiba had been driving for nearly five minutes before he realized that he had made his decision already, just hadn't admitted it to himself. He didn't recognize the street names or the buildings, but the neighborhood he found himself in was familiar. The poorer part of the city, where very few houses were lit, where people could be seen huddled around the corners of buildings, shivering in ill-fitting coats. He parked a ways off from his destination and paid a homeless person to watch over his car.
"I'll hunt you down if anything so much as scratch it," he threatened, letting the mask slip—or putting one on—and showing the ice in his voice. The night screamed of deadly things and he knew he exuded an aura of ruthless violence just barely held in check. It was something that had terrified countless people, people who otherwise might have laughed at his age, when he took over Kaiba Corp. He'd discovered that there was something about him that upset other people, and it had proved to be useful.
The man clutched at the money convulsively, eyes bright with something—hope? desperation? Seto could not tell his age; the homeless all looked alike, as if hardship, rather than life, had rendered them into old men long before their time.
For a moment Seto wondered what the man saw when he turned those over-bright eyes to him. A young man with a perfect life, descended from a wealthy family, dressed in a stylish, costly trench coat. The arrogant blue eyes, pale skin, and slender figure, which lended themselves to the impression of aristocracy. When he extended his hand, he tried to see what a stranger would see: capable, delicate fingers, silver watch gracing the wrist, screaming of luxury and elitism.
They couldn't be more different, but Kaiba knew it was a lie. Underneath that thin, polished veneer of civilization he was just one of them still, trying to climb the ladder towards a better life while everything around him—fate, luck, destiny, call it what you like—sawed away at the wood just beneath his feet.
He took a big cardboard box from the trunk. It was very heavy, but he carried it gracefully as if it were empty. His breath puffed white from the cold. He walked through the dimly lit streets, and the night was wintry and silent. No caroling voices here, where the human spirit had all but been extinguished with misery and poverty. If souls could be heard, the place would resound with one continuous moan of pain and human suffering.
It looked still the same as ever, the yellowish coat of paint peeling and cracked, the windows dirty and scratched with obscene words. A playground was to the right, if it could be rightly called so. The bars had seen so many years that the paint had all fallen off, revealing rusting metal beneath. Without children, it was eerily deserted. One of the swing chains was broken, rendering the swing useless. The bright blue plastic seat portion swung with a creaking sound, to and fro in the chill wind.
It was cold here in a way that had nothing to do with temperature, too. Perhaps it could be described of as a permafrost of the soul. This was where the downtrodden lived, where hope was more an agony than a blessing.
For a brief moment, he thought he saw a child's face press against one window, eyes searching and meeting his. But the house was too dark, and when he looked again the glass had nothing behind it. The windows looked like sad, empty eyes, he thought, although not prone to such flights of imagination. Harder to face was the deep sense of recognition, bringing back the uncontrollable welter of memories he had tried so hard to forget.
He had left the car behind because he remembered how many times he had stood by one of these very same windows, watching as an expensive car pull up. The brief moment of hope that someone would take them from this place. And then later, again, watching as the car pulled away, taking one of the sad inhabitants of the orphanage with it, now suffused with joy. Not Seto, because he adamantly refused to go without Mokuba. How many times had he stood, watching the outside world through those windows?
On entering the orphanage, he spoke with the woman in charge. An attendant came and took away the box. He followed her to the main communal room. It was still the same, even after all these years. There were no signs that it was Christmas—no trees, no lights, nothing. The children inside seemed oddly inanimate, as if they were furniture, or paintings on the wall, and their voices were soft and slow. They weren't children anymore, expect for the illusion of age.
But the room was warm this year, because of the new donations of money from Kaiba Corporation, which he had passed off as being something he did for improving public reputation. He hadn't needed to choose an orphanage. Hadn't needed to choose this one in particular.
His eyes looked to the corner before he could stop himself, and then he found that he could not seem to look away. There was a girl sitting by herself, a little older than most. She was perhaps eleven or twelve years old. A very old chess set occupied the table, the black and white checkered board covered with a grime that muted the dramatic colors, the game pieces dirty and worn with the touch of many hands. The queen was a rock, because the piece had gone missing for many years now, ever since the day Seto had left the orphanage, in fact.
It lay in his pocket, and now his hand slipped down and closed around it. Any beginner could tell you that the queen was the most dangerous piece in the game. It had been the one he had based his strategies on and the one he had defeated Gozaburo with. He'd always thought that the queen was the most valuable, but it was not true, and this was the mistake he had repeated in life. The king was essential, even with the paradox of being the most vulnerable. A queen's existence was completely meaningless without the king.
Seto had been the chess prodigy, but he'd never understood the game. He'd taken the queen and hadn't realized that he needed more to play the game of life than a queen. He'd tried to rid himself of all weaknesses by playing chess without a king, and had lost the point of the game altogether…he had had the supreme protector, but there was nothing left to protect.
The girl was playing chess with herself, and she did not look up when the woman in charge called for the children's attention. The room exploded with noise and life when the box was opened and the presents were handed out one by one. Cheeks were flushed with unexpected happiness and the milling bodies put the room into motion, as if they had all been a photograph, which now came to life.
He stood outside the room, looking at the scene through the slight opening of the doorway. No one noticed him, but he focused all his attention on the girl. She was too old to surrender to the joy of presents, too jaded from life. Already, at such an age, he thought. Not even for Christmas Eve could she let reality slip away and become a child again. How many years had she spent here, waiting for a savior? The older the children became, the less likely they would be wanted.
He wondered when he himself lost that particular sort of innocence. He was a shadow when he slipped into the room silently. Only the girl noticed, and she raised her head and glared at him defiantly when he made his way to her corner table. He knew what she saw: a rich young man, son of some billionaire, come to pretend at being charitable in society.
She waited for him to speak, but her eyes blazed angrily. Yes, there was spirit in this one, he thought, that life had not killed. Had there been that mingled pain and fury in his own eyes, when he had looked at those that came, wanting to adopt him but not wanting his brother? Her posture and her expression were tense, but her eyes gave away all her vulnerability.
There was the moment when she realized who he was. She wasn't stupid, and the orphanage no doubt bragged that one of their own had risen in the world. His hand slipped into his pocket and pulled out the queen, setting it in its rightful place on the board. She reached out, changed the position of a white piece, and then gazed up at him, some unnamed emotion in her eyes.
"Your move," she said, and her voice had the impression of a thousand tiny knives. Most people would have been daunted or impressed. They only saw a child; they didn't see what was living inside that youthful husk of a body. Most people would have hated her, shocked by her behavior. He didn't, because he was like her.
He didn't say anything, just studied the board for a few minutes, eyes not seeing the dilapidated pieces but only thinking about strategy. Chess—the game of kings and generals, the game of life, really, and he had learned it well when he was young. He took the black queen that he had kept with him for so many years, and moved it into position.
"Checkmate."
Her gaze was burning into him, resentment and rebellion and other things in those large, liquid eyes. Unusual golden eyes that, perhaps in another life, would have been called soft, would have made her face pretty. Now, the harsh angles of her cheekbones reminded him of a tiger about to kill.
No, this girl was not a loser, no matter what life threw at her. She took pain and suffering and transformed it into strength: a hard, bitter kind of power.
"Don't despair," the words slipped out although he had not planned to speak. Don't despair, because you can become like me. You can rise up in the world and create something for yourself. You can have wealth, power. Whatever you need. Whatever you want.
She was laughing, laughing at him, albeit silently. He could see it in the mocking gold gleam of her eyes. Her voice was hoarse and scornful. "Was it such a good sacrifice? You've sold your heart for what you have now."
She said it with all the force of a blow, and time stopped for a moment before he slipped the mask over his face again and smirked at her. You'll never have a fourth of what I have, because you don't have the guts to earn it, the ice in his eyes said. He had long ago learned how to shutter even the emotions in his eyes. Someday soon she would learn, too, how to lie with those honey-colored eyes.
Kaiba left as silently as he came.
There was nothing to do in the deserted mansion, no one to go home to. He went home anyway and sat for a long time, staring at meaningless words on the screen of the computer. Sometime then he began to cry, though he denied it. He was not the type of person to cry; he had been damaged far too much to find release in such a way. It was a grief of many years, silent, motionless. Warm tears simply spilled out of his eyes and trailed down his cheeks, the same kind of uncontrollable tears that well up due to sudden pain, only this was not pain of the body, but of something else altogether. Despair was an altogether poor companion.
Long ago, he had tried to create a beautiful life for himself and Mokuba after Gozaburo, but even now he had not recovered. Perhaps he would never be strong again, not truly, because all the strength he had now was brittle, as strong and as fragile as a piece of glass. He had created wealth and had achieved the security that came from such power, but at what sacrifice? The girl's words haunted him.
He had forgotten the scars on his body, but it was nothing. Staring at the mirror, he saw the broken lines marring the smooth white perfection of his back. Maybe one day they would fade away entirely, or at least enough to be unseen by the human eye, but he doubted it. They'd been deep at their creation, made with the intent to scar forever.
But what were these, compared with the scars of the soul, the invisible jagged edges of his heart that seemed to never just heal?
xxxxx
A/N: Please review...