Barriershipping (Kaiba Noa/Kaiba Seto/Yami no Yugi)

. . .

Mokuba had been the one to suggest and build both of the only two family altars in the Kaiba mansion. They were much less fancy things than they could have been with Kaiba wealth, but Mokuba had insisted on making them himself. Seto had been against it. They didn't need altars to the dead here in a place that he wanted to face towards the future.

Mokuba needed his ways to grieve, though, and Seto would not deny him that. So he kept quiet.

Still, in recent days, he had found that he was the one standing in front of them the most often. Or, more often, sitting on the floor leaning against the wall that held them, with a bottle dangling from his fingers.

One was older than the other. Seto didn't have to look like to remember either of them, he had found himself here staring at them more than he liked to admit, only when Mokuba was at school and Seto could get away with not being at work, and there was no one here to see him chugging bottles of beer he had sworn once that he would never drink.

The older one had been built after the opening of Kaibaland. It housed the only photograph of Kaiba Noa that Mokuba had been able to find, sealed off behind a thin barrier of photo frame glass. He looked younger than Mokuba in that picture, his eyes alight with a laugh. Besides the little jar for incense and the offering plate that was currently empty, there was only a single white lily laying beside the photo. Mokuba got a new one every time the old one wilted.

The newer one housed no picture. There weren't any. Not of him. Instead, Mokuba had left only a small stone that he had painted across with the hieroglyphs that Yugi had guided him to write. Pronounced out loud, they spelled Atem. Mokuba left a few petals of a lotus beside the stone every time the old batch started to dry out. Mokuba built that one after Yugi had returned, eyes haunted, from his trip to Egypt, and he had asked if something was wrong. When he found out that the other Yugi, the one that sometimes appeared when things got rough, the one that had, at one time, bolstered Mokuba's courage, was gone, Mokuba decided to build an altar for him too.

So neither of them can be forgotten again. So then they can stay in the afterlife, right?

Seto took another deep swig of his bottle and then realized he had finally hit the bottom. He let his head fall back until it hit the wall. There were things he felt like he needed to say, in the silence of the living room where the only other two faces were those of the home altars. Faces of the dead.

Mokuba had needed his ways to grieve. Seto wasn't willing to let go of some things yet.

"I never gave a shit about you," he muttered towards the older altar. He wondered though, in hindsight, how much of that was true. He wondered sometimes at the nightmares where Mokuba's face would turn into Noa's and he would realize just how close that he or Mokuba had been to ending up just like him. "You were just...something that got in the way. Little bitch."

He forgot the bottle was empty and tried to take another drink, sucking down only air.

"And you—you I give too much a shit about," he slurred at the other altar. "I wish I could forget you. Maybe you wouldn't—haunt me anymore then."

He really did hate alcohol. It made him all emotional—very unflattering.

The good thing about it, though, is that it made him care less about being unflattering. With the two altars looking silently over him, without a word in response to his jibes, Seto let his head fall between his knees.

He cried.

. . .

A/N: Depressing lol. Next is Bangshipping (Yugi x Mai).