The orphanage, eight years ago, looked a lot like any other underfunded public institution. Clean, serviceable, but patchwork and rough around the edges. Posters lined the walls, reminding you that sharing is caring and to cover your cough, and mismatched chairs were pulled up to desks with decades of names and doodles scratched into their surfaces, pen marks that never came off. Toys sat on spartan shelves, not toys from the store but the kind you got secondhand, where the colors were faded and pieces were missing and sometimes there was an odd bite mark or two.

It wasn't perfect, but it was good. He remembered it being good, even if no one else seemed to, even if the food was tasteless and the clothes were scratchy. There were worse places you could be.

At one of those desks, wobbly and uneven, two children were playing a game of chess. One of them was a skinny, cerebral ten year old, with the kind of serious look and large vocabulary that made adults call him an 'old soul,' a term which he had concluded was how grown-ups expressed their discomfort about how he already expected them to disappoint him. The other, just barely five years old, small and frail even for his age, with bushy hair and a perpetual shiver. No one remembers what their last names were, or where they came from. They weren't important enough, then, for it to matter.

The room was quiet and empty. The other kids had gone out to recess, and if you listened closely you could hear their shouts and running footsteps in the distance. These two were alone, though. Seto had asked his brother to play inside today. There was something he said he wanted to try.

Seto played white, which meant he went first. "Pawn to E4."

"Pawn to C5." Mokuba announced, ready. They liked saying the moves out loud. It made the whole thing feel a little more real, in a silly way. Seto took his time to think, let the seconds tick by, and Mokuba squirmed impatiently before raising a topic. "What happened with those people you were talking with this morning?"

"More parents who didn't want to take us." He shook his head. "Knight to F3." he said, finally, a resting his cheek on one hand.

"Pawn to D6." Mokuba's move was already prepared. Playing sharp, today. "But it sounded like they really liked you! I heard them!" This was true. He'd been standing outside in the hallway, where he wasn't supposed to be, hearing eager newlyweds heap praise on a bright young prodigy.

"You shouldn't eavesdrop, Mokuba. Pawn to D4."

"Pawn to D4! Gotcha." He eagerly swiped Seto's piece from the board as soon as it landed.

"You got my pawn! Good job." A warm smile.

"Don't try to trick me. You let me take it." he accused, but he was grinning proudly at both the capture and the praise, puffed up. "I always know what you're up to. I'll get your horsie next."

"I'll bet. Knight to D4." he said, pointedly. He returned the favor with his own capture, equalizing them and lining up Mokuba's pawn on his side of the table. Seto always put his captures in neat lines, like a trophy case, while Mokuba grouped them in haphazard clumps around the desk.

Mokuba leaned across the table on his elbows, almost knocking a few of the pieces over, a little too short to really see the whole board without standing. "How come no one wants to take us?"

"Doesn't matter. We'll find someone." he said, "And even if we have to stay here forever, I'll take care of you, okay? So don't worry." He was trying to be reassurring, but was there was something hollow there, like he wasn't really so sure.

"Knight to F6." Mokuba moved his piece and then added, more quietly, "They offered to adopt just you again, right?"

"Yes." Seto never lied to his little brother. Not about this. "Knight to C3."

"Pawn to G6. But not both of us?"

"It's harder to take care of two kids than one. Brothers are a tough sell." He shrugged, frowned, repeating known and uninteresting facts. He was staring intently at the pieces, doing calculations, trying to think ahead. "Bishop to E3."

Mokuba looked down at his feet, nearly whispering. "You don't have to pretend, Seto." He wouldn't have been audible if the classroom wasn't already silent.

"Pretend what?"

"That it's not 'cuz they don't want me."

Seto looked up from the board in surprise, mouth twisted in concern. "Mokuba, that's not true. It's just that two kids is more work than one, and most people only want one."

Mokuba pouted and spoke with an earnest insistence. "Nuh-uh, it is too, 'cuz if it was just that everybody just wanted one kid, then statifica—staticistcall—"

"Sta-tis-tic-cal-ly."

"Statistically, someone would've asked for me. But everyone always offers to take you and not me, 'cuz they don't think I'm as good, 'cuz of how smart you are."

"That's because they're idiots." Seto declared, spitting out the word, sitting straight up, with such confidence and venom and disgust in his voice that Mokuba couldn't help but giggle. "And I don't want anything to do with anyone who doesn't want you."

"Promise?"

"Promise. I'm not going anywhere." He smiled gently. "They'll have to take us together, or not at all."

Mokuba nodded, relieved. He had asked Seto to make this promise approximately eight times already, in the months since their dad's funeral, and Seto always did. The same way little kids always wanted to read the same storybook, hold the same blanket, hear the same song over and over again. Like it would all disappear if they didn't keep checking.

"Besides," Seto continued, moving another piece across the board. "Those people don't really want me. They just want my brain." He reached over and flicked a piece of hair out of Mokuba's eyes. "You'd like me even if I wasn't so good at math and computers and all of that stuff."

Mokuba grinned. "I'd like you even if you were the dumbest person in the world."

"Exactly." He nodded, satisfied, and leaned back in his chair with his arms crossed. "Your move."

Opening entered midgame and midgame turned into endgame. Seto castled queenside, pressured Mokuba's knight, while Mokuba held out and kept snapping up pieces. Gradually the board cleared, captures piling up, pawns and knights-not-horsies and rooks-not-castles and Mokuba-I-know-you-know-what-they're-called. But Seto kept fidgeting, thinking, like something was bothering him, and it wasn't the game.

"Mokuba." He looked up at him, intensely, seriously, the way adults did when they really wanted you to remember something. "You are smart. Really smart. You know that, right?"

Mokuba tilted his head oddly, glanced up at the ceiling, then nodded. "Yeah." He wasn't sure that he did know, but it sounded very important to his brother that he agree. "But," he countered, in a very small voice, "you always win." This was a universal truth. Chess, shogi, backgammon, parcheesi, mancala, anything. Seto won and won and won, and Mokuba lost.

"That's because you're little, not because you're not smart." There was a hitch of irritation in his voice, defensiveness. Seto Not-Yet-Kaiba was an awkward child, who didn't make much eye contact and sometimes struggled to get his words in the right order, make the things in his head make sense to other people, complicated though they were. Mokuba could wait, though. He was always patient with his older brother, even when Seto got quiet, even when he was too serious, even when the things he said were strange. "You can't let people get to you, Mokuba. They don't know what they're talking about. You're really smart, and really good, and they're all stupid."

"Okay." Mokuba nodded again, and moved a pawn to F6, swiping another piece. An en passant capture, a move Mokuba always pronounced wrong but was his favorite in the whole game. Only pawns could do it, and only under just the right circumstances. A special power that only belonged to the weakest piece, and nobody else in the world. "I think..." Mokuba leaned forward to lean his chin on his hands, hooked his tennis shoes around the chair leg for balance, and looked thoughtfully at the board. "I think it's okay if I always lose. It's not so bad. I don't mind, as long as I get to keep playing with you."

"You'll win someday, you just have to keep trying." Seto sounded so sure. A queen, unannounced, to H7.

"Not this time." He pointed. "I'm in check."

Seto winced. "Check doesn't mean checkmate," he tried to reassure, in his best big brother voice. "You can still win. Don't give up!"

Mokuba shook his head, explained matter-of-factly. "No, 'cuz even if I go to F8 you'll check me again next turn. There's no moves left."

"...Oh." Mokuba was undeniably correct. "I hadn't noticed." He paused for several seconds, studying the board, turning something over in his head. Then he nodded, curt and serious. "This will work. Thank you, Mokuba."

"What'll work?"

"Tell you later." He stood up, yawned and stretched, and pushed his chair in. Kids were laughing outside, and the sound drifted in, muffled by the walls and windows. "You did really good this time! Do you want to go play on the swings?" The sudden turn to happiness felt off, performative. Seto had something else on his mind, something he did not want to share yet. Mokuba knew him well enough to tell, and he also knew well enough not to ask.

Mokuba hopped out of his chair and started putting the pieces away. "No, let's go to the sandbox. I wanna help you build the park again."

"But you love the swings."

Mokuba ignored the implied question, shoved the chess set back on a shelf and tugged him by the sweater towards the door. "C'mooooooon," he said, in his very best whine, "before recess is over."

"Okay, okay!"

They both spilled out into the hallway, one with beaten linoleum floors and aging brick walls, and headed straight for the sunlight filtering in through an open set of double doors. Seto walked slow, let his brother drag him forward. He was still frowning. Something was still bothering him. "Mokuba," he said, subdued, watching Mokuba carefully, "I know losing isn't fun, but—"

"I told you, I don't care." Mokuba huffed, still pulling on his brother's shirt, looking ahead instead of at his eyes. He didn't like this conversation. "I just want to play with you."

"I don't want you to give up, though. Promise me you won't give up."

Mokuba jumped ahead, walked backwards to face him. "Fine! Okay, I won't, I promise!"

"Really?" Seto looked on suspiciously.

"Really! One day," Mokuba proclaimed, with round cheeks and a raised fist, in the comically serious way only small children can, "I really am going to win."

Seto's relaxed his shoulders, a tension neither of them had noticed he was holding. "I know you will." He reached over and grabbed his little brother's hand, and smiled at him, both things that all the way back then Seto did easily and often. "I'm looking forward to it."