Kaibashipping (Gozaburo x Noa x Seto x Mokuba)
. . .
The problem didn't come from being an untraditional family. The problem came from the fact that "family" meant something different to all of them.
Gozaburo didn't care much for the word. What was a family, anyway, other than a loose connection of blood? In that sense, these two upstart boys were not family. They were usurpers who would have to constantly earn their place in the house. Thieves of the place that should have belonged to the one that shared his bloodline, the one that shouldhave been in this house at his side and learning his trade. The younger boy was useless, an aside that he would have rathered not deal with. The older was a nuisanceāa smart nuisance, but a nuisance nonetheless. He would tolerate them.
But they weren't family.
Seto had lost his faith in the word long ago. His mother had told him that family were the people that loved you, cared for you, the ones that were always at your side through thick and thin. The ones who never left you. But she hadleft. She had died with her hand slipping out of his father's hand and the heart monitor flattening to a long screech in his ears. And he had left then, too, left in a crumble of metal and blood and the sighing of a train settling on its side beside the tracks. The mother's brothers and sisters that were supposed to care for them had left them, instead, on the doorstep of hell and disappeared. Family did not exist anymore. This man that glowered over him while marking his math problems wrong for the tiniest mistakes in the formulas, despite the correct answers, was not family. He was not a father.
This wasn't a family.
Noa didn't even know what a family was anymore. He had thought that it was something that you could count on. Pedigrees. Bloodlines. Things that opened doors, people who patted you on the head and congratulated you on your excellent work, people who smiled and listened while you told them about your latest accomplishment and then put it on a pedestal for the world to see how perfect theirfamily was. But there was no one to listen anymore. No one came to see what new code he had devised, no one turned on the monitor to hear him chatter about the newest formulas he had solved, there were no doors to open in this virtual cage that, while vast and open and encompassing the world and the stars and everything, had no exits. No listening ears or happy thoughts. The man who should have been his father no longer came, and the boys that had usurped his place could not be called brothers.
He didn't have a familyanymore.
Mokuba knew in his heart that family wasn't something you could define. It was something ephemeral, something precious that you could feel in your heart but never touch. He had known family, once, in a clutter of images in the back of his head of a smiling woman's face and the glint of light off of a man's glasses as a calloused hand ruffled his hair. He thought he still knew family, somehow, in the brief smiles on his brother's face when he saw the dragon that Mokuba had doodled on the back of his homework. He thought he still knew family in the briefest, briefest moment of smirked approval when his step-father had seen the high marks on his science test. He thought he still knew family in the time that he had taken Noa's hand and told him, yes, of course we're brothers.
Familywasn't something that you could get rid of. It existed, somehow, always.
He would believe that, if he could. For as long as he could.
It was all he had left.
. . .
A/N: ayyyyy guess who's alive! Have some feels there lol. Next is Kaashipping (Mana x Dark Magician Girl).
