Chapter Thirty: Blurred Reality
My brother has been acting really strange lately. He gets mad so easily, and so I tried to avoid him a lot recently. Maybe he's just really busy.
I hope everything gets better soon. Or maybe I should try to help snap him out of it. I don't know if I dare, though.
What reason did Yami or Yugi have to lie to me? Only if they were hiding something…but what could they be hiding? That they knew something more? That they had helped my brother be kidnapped? It didn't seem like something Yugi would do. And how would it have been managed, anyway? All my guards had passed the lie detector test and confirmed that no one had gotten in as far as they knew.
Could someone have broken in anyway? Was my security that faulty?
All these questions had been echoing in my mind for two months and twenty-six days. Yet, right then, it grew too confusing for me.
What was real and what wasn't? Everything befuddled in my mind. Even with the journal keeping track of all I learned, I couldn't differentiate between a real memory and a false one. One part was certain: I didn't trust what I reported to the police; I didn't trust myself. Sure, some of the facts had been right. But there didn't seem to be a dragon. Most utterly seriously, no dragon pendant existed. No shop, no Yugi telling Mokuba where the shop was, no necklace around my brother's neck. And my "memories" dwelled around that.
The Millennium Necklace appeared more hopeful to me as I traveled up my room in the mansion after returning from the Yugi's house. Whoever the Shadi character was, he sounded shady, and I didn't want to deal with him. But then, Ishizu's necklace…I hated this thing.
Hypnotism or hocus-pocus magic?
I detested them both, and both seemed the only way I could find any answers at all.
Waiting around for answers wasn't something I was adept at. Instead of sitting there trying to force answers and bothersome visions from the Millennium Necklace, instead of waiting for some strange personage to appear and no doubt confront me, wanting me suffer, I left the mansion and sought out solitude.
All my life, growing up in Domino City and working in the middle of tall skyscrapers, I found my rest in the midst of the crowded streets. Headlights down below assured me that everything was all right in the world. Safety and proof of some sort of intelligence dwelled wherever the lights from a city shone out into the sky, forcing the darkness back. The attitudes of those around me rushed to do work, and if people could work, the world could not have completely failed. The rushing people proved that life went on no matter what. Even in the midst of my own woes, someone else might find some happiness.
That mindset remained why I continued working ever since my brother had vanished. That mindset had defined the point of Kaiba Lands for those less fortunate.
But now, it seemed that wasn't enough.
With the return of part of my memory, everything I believed crumbled like some wizened, dried-up plant whose flakes blew away on the wind. Certainty, illusion, memory, and even logic had all grown to a snarled mess in my mind that would take days to comb out. Still, such knots wouldn't be untied in the midst of crowded, busy city where I avoided problems.
So late, my driver slept. And I wanted to drive, anyway. Doing something to take my mind from the problem for a little while would be best, especially considering I planned to go someplace where I could think on matters for an indefinite time. However long it took, I planned on staying until some sense rose out of the murky depths of my brain.
The streetlights passed by me one by one, the circle of their glowing beams reminding me of flashlights in the darkness. Silence in the car I drove seemed so profound and deep that I was locked far under the ground. Thinking that naturally led me to visualize my brother once more. My brother eaten by the worms, roaches, and other crawling things of the soil that had the task least thanked: that of decomposing what once lived, what was once so dear and close to another person.
Fortunately, 2:30 in the morning meant fewer drivers. So, although I traveled down a highway much frequented, no one suffered as I swerved in my unsteady state. Shaking, I came to a halt, focusing on the line of lights instead of the oppressive darkness, instead of the guilt that washed over me, smelling of wood and looking like smoke.
The car was a shuddering beast, a horse who had just been calmed from a frantic gallop, quivering and snorting, trying to catch its breath. Maybe me driving myself wasn't the best idea I had ever had.
Slowly, my heart slowed in its pounding and the horrors passed from my eyes as I struggled to focus only on what appeared directly before me. The smoke cleared from my sight, and slowly, as I returned to control, I pulled the car off from the side of the road and started moving again.
The midnight hill sheltered a plethora of night voices and sounds. A carousel out at night, but a different kind than in the city. Various moving creatures scuffled in the thin undergrowth, and the wind took over from them to keep the scraping branches chiming. A distant owl hooted lowly, and some other shriek in the night I couldn't identify echoed after it. As the frosty ground crunched under my feet and I left a warmed trail through the tiny amount of snow (more like frost), my steps added to the din in the typical country night.
Breath warming my nose as I continued with a steady plod up the hillside steps to the vantage point maintained by the city, thoughts of the car below left me. Instead, all the clattering thoughts within me that I tried to hold back most of the day seized control.
My brother had been missing for nearly three months…how much hope could I still have for him? Everything more I learned of that night left me no more answers.
The conversation that I had so recently recalled again came to the surface of my mind. This time, as I played it through, more added to it like I only needed the serenity of this area to draw it forth with its seductive night sounds.
"What was that Yugi gave you?"
"…Nothing."
"Nothing? You looked really excited to have it, and I heard you saying it was something you really wanted."
"…"
"You really wanted it and you'd never even told me about it?"
"You wouldn't've cared."
"You never gave me the chance to care."
"It isn't something you'd be pleased to give me, anyway. It's too close to that 'mumbo-jumbo nonsense' you're always talking about!"
"Then why would you want it?"
"Don't you get it, Seto? You may not like that stuff, but I do! Apparently, I know you better than you know me. And even Yugi knows me better than you do!"
"Oh, Yugi knows you better, does he? Was it Yugi who has lived with you all your life? Was it Yugi who protected you from bullies at the orphanage? Yugi who got you out of the orphanage and into a better life?"
"Better life? I hated Gozaburo!"
"Was it Yugi who defeated Gozaburo? Yugi who took over the company and switched it to gaming? Was it Yugi who invented Kaiba Land!"
"It was Yugi who saved me from your 'Experience of Death!' It was Yugi who saved me at Duelist Kingdom! He saved me when you couldn't. He saved me when you locked me away to go insane! Yugi has done plenty for me! He's—"
Shuddering, I snapped out of the memories, losing them once more as suddenly as they had arrived.
Surely that wasn't true. Surely another of those false memories that had the tendency to rise up from suggestion had done so. Surely my brother had never told me that. But what my brother had said in those memories was perfectly true. His saying such things would have made perfect sense.
I had locked Mokuba away and was going to make him go insane. I had done it of my own volition. And Yugi had saved him from that. (1)
And though I had tried so hard, so desperately to save Mokuba from where Pegasus imprisoned him, I had not. The duel against Yugi I may have won, but that mattered little when in the next duel, in the duel that counted, the duel I did to gain back my brother, I had lost. Pegasus simply added my soul to his collection.
What kind of brother had I been? Why did I refuse to contemplate Mokuba running away? From all these truths I knew to be set in steel, my brother had reasons over and over to run away and try to find a better life.
No wonder my brother had never run to me at the end of the nightmare on Pegasus's island. No wonder Mokuba had been overjoyed to see Yugi instead and hugged Yugi for rescuing him. No wonder my heart never seemed to be whole. (2)
(1): Again, manga reference to exactly what it says: once Mokuba lost to Yami in a game of Capsule Monster Chess, Kaiba turned the Experience of Death (guaranteed to drive a person insane in minutes) on his younger brother.
(2): Yes, note this is different, for my purpose, than what happened in the anime and manga.