The problem with owning a city is that nobody who lived there was ever happy with you and everything bad that ever happened in it was somehow your fault.

Sunlight streamed in through the wide penthouse windows of Seto Kaiba's office, casting the shadow of his desk over everything and bringing gentle warmth into a room that was almost always a little chilly, because Seto was the kind of person who consistently refused to set a thermostat even slightly higher than sweater temperature. No one was at the desk, now, the empty chair casting an ominous silhouette against the Domino skyline. Mokuba was sitting cross-legged on the couch, holding a KC-branded tablet and reading the morning news dump staff prepared for all the higher-ups.

Stock price had cratered after the tournament disaster, but was slowly recovering with good sales numbers. The California park was having trouble implementing the new quickpass system, might need additional support. Duel Links testing continued smoothly. Duel Disks were flying off the shelves, but the new release happening so soon after the registration mandate meant a slow drip of conspiracy theories that KC was just trying to wring money out by forcing everyone to buy a new one.

This was not true, obviously. Older disk registrations were still completely valid. They would have to phase out the old models eventually, sure, but probably not for years, especially since the new ones used brainwave tech. People didn't like the idea of computers in their brains. Thought it was invasive, especially on their kids. You couldn't make everyone switch over at once, Seto said, had to ease them into it. He was smart like that.

That did not stop the usual suspects from making bad faith arguments about biometric data (if you have a way to make a system like neurons work without keeping track of people's brain signatures, he'd love to hear it), or KC's camera access (they barely used them, and their security was the best in the world), or Duel Disk tracking (the disks pinged the satellite as a matter of course to connect to the hologram database, the GPS data was basically ancillary), or frivolous lawsuits over what happened at the tournament (nobody got hurt, and none of it was KC's fault), or other annoying wastes of time. Domino City was not short on complainers, and there seemed to be more and more of them by the day. Nothing you could do about tabloids, though. They just got more recalcitrant if you tried to shut them down, and more would pop up in their place. There will always be stubborn elements trying to halt the inevitable march of progress.

Mokuba knew as a matter of irreproachable fact that his brother was right and all of these people were unequivocally wrong. In his entire life he had never questioned this obvious reality, and he never would.

Mokuba technically had his own office, with his name on the door and everything, in the same place where the previous VP's office had been. He almost never used it, though. No reason to. He mostly hung out in Seto's office, tagged along with whatever he was doing, and when he wasn't doing that he put himself square in the middle of one of the busier floors, where people were. He liked being around people, having static, background noise. There was something that made him nervous about empty rooms, quiet places, locked doors.

His brother's office was always comfortable, though, even empty. It looked like Seto, somehow. He scanned the trophies on the wall and was struck by the thought of whether, when he was in charge, he would be expected to use this office or his own. If he would be expected to redecorate it.

A bad thought, and an irrelevant one, since Seto was still here. He remembered the scene he'd made at ground control and cringed. He'd practically burst into tears in front of all the employees. They had to be talking about it, right? The president's dorky baby brother, throwing a fit in the middle of the most important scientific breakthrough this century? What was he, five? That wasn't how a vice president acted. That wasn't how a Kaiba acted. No one was ever going to take him seriously if he couldn't keep it together.

He flopped backwards on the couch and stared at the ceiling. He didn't have time to worry about all these stupid problems. You weren't supposed to sit around worrying about problems, you were supposed to crush them. Waste them, is what he'd always been taught. Ruin them. Show no weakness. Take your problems, is what you were supposed to do, and decimate them, demolish them, annihilate them, shred them into tiny pieces and blast them with lightning until they're very sorry they ever dared to be problems at all. This is also what you did to people who got in your way. Problems often took the form of people.

He was about to close everything and toss the tablet somewhere he wouldn't have to look at it anymore when he caught his own reflection in the screen. Round, cute face, clean-cut suit and tie in company colors, a fancy watch cinched tightly around a too-small wrist, hair sort of tamed but mostly incorrigible. He frowned and tugged at the edge of it. He really missed his hair. He'd cut most of it off a few months ago, after years of growing it out, because it felt like the adult thing to do, but now his neck was cold and he mainly felt he looked stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Mokuba Kaiba was the world's youngest member of any C-suite, with more valuable stock options in his name than most financiers and a resume already more impressive by grade school than most people would have in their entire lives. If Seto had been brought into money at age ten, and took to it like a fish to water, then Mokuba barely remembered the surface. He was used to commanding extraordinary resources and having hundreds of people with no choice but to listen to his most extraordinary and unreasonable whims. He was, however, thirteen years old, and with being thirteen years old comes an intrinsic, inexorable awkwardness, the kind where you are old enough to desperately want respect but young enough that no one has quite decided you deserve it, where you don't look like yourself anymore but what you're going to look like eventually is still horribly unclear, and how no matter what you do on some level you always feel like you're doing everything wrong.

Most people can remember what it felt like to be thirteen, with a wince and a shudder and a desperate wish to be remembering anything else. It is far more difficult to imagine what it is like to be thirteen when the primary example of what you're supposed to be is Seto Kaiba.

"Hey, kiddo."

Mokuba hadn't even heard the door open, but he snapped his head up to see Seto standing in the doorway. Not in passing, not through a videocall, not locked up in his lab or surrounded by three or four assistants. Just his brother, up close and alone. He looked like shit.

Maybe that was uncharitable. Seto Kaiba had a twelve thousand dollar coat and an eight-step skincare routine. It was probably not possible for him to look like shit, in an objective sense. Too many people's salaries depended on the opposite. Still, somehow he was fraying, a string pulled taut, rigid and twitchy, face thin and with deep dark circles, jaw too set. He looked at things without seeing them. The way the fan whirls on an overheating PC, the way a bike grinds when set to a too-high gear, the stutter and wheeze of a failing engine. Seto Kaiba looked fine, really, but he was fine on the edge of a cliff, fine enough to be falling apart but not fallen apart.

"Hey, bro." Mokuba sat up attentively. "You doing okay?"

"Fine." Seto dropped onto the couch next to him, ungracefully and unguarded, arms spread widely over the back, an act of barefaced exhaustion that wouldn't have been allowed if anyone else was in the room. He blinked, and two or three screens popped into thin air. Seto had 80 tabs, 1,223 unread emails, and 107 other notifications. His expression twitched in annoyance.

"Missed you at breakfast." Mokuba said.

"Slept in the lab."

"Again?" Mokuba said it a little too sharply, and immediately checked his tone, softened. "There were fancy waffles, y'know. With strawberries 'n stuff. You would've liked them."

"My loss." he sighed. He closed his eyes and let his head fall back and rested, for just a few seconds, and Mokuba did not disturb him. He waited, patiently.

"Mokuba," he said, after a while, "Do you want to go somewhere?"

"Like where?" He tilted his head.

Seto looked up, moved his fingers, swept away his inbox, pulled up new tabs of more adventurous photos, more pleasant itineraries. "We haven't been to KaibaLand Paris since it opened. Or we could go shopping at that place in New York, with the ferris wheel." He counted off ideas, lazily. "The beach. There's still plenty of beaches we haven't been to."

"You want to go on vacation, now?" Indignant, a little exasperated. "We just launched powervision, and Duel Links is still in beta, and the parks are gearing up for the summer rush, and-"

Seto smiled just a little, the smallest upturn of one half of his mouth. "When did you get so responsible?"

Mokuba crossed his arms, stiffened his spine to his full almost-five-whole-feet-now height, huffed. "I'm the Vice President. I have to set an example."

"And you're very good at it," humoring you, the way adults did, when even your greatest triumphs are merely adorable. "But you were just as good at everything when you were wearing jeans."

Mokuba frowned, tugged self-consciously on his sleeve, stark-white child-sized Armani. "This is more professional." It was more than that, but how to put it? That it made him look less out of place? No one else with a job on the top floor would dare to run around headquarters in t-shirts and sneakers, because KC was a place with high standards, because Seto was a person with high standards, because this was a place and a building and an institution that tolerated no mediocrity, had no place for it. Mokuba had run around for years wearing whatever he wanted, and still could, because he was a kid and the president's brother and who could stop him, but Mokuba did not want to be the exception. Mokuba wanted the standards.

Seto nodded and said no more about his newfound fashion choices. Again, the smallest smile, dry amusement, even through how tired he was. A rare and precious treasure. Here it was, for the first time in far too long, the opportunity for the one thing that made everything else abruptly irrelevant, that which was in the constellation of Mokuba Kaiba's priorities the most valuable commodity that ever did or could exist on earth: Seto Kaiba's attention.

Mokuba looked at him, and then past him, arms still crossed, studied floating screens of sunny travelogues. "...We could find a good place to get sundaes." he conceded, a sucker.

A pause. "Waffles, even." Seto suggested.

Mokuba considered this, hesitantly, before scooching in closer and leaning in to see the screen. He plopped his head on Seto's shoulder and felt approximately half comforting body heat and half cold, jabbing metal, unseen tech built into his clothes. He grabbed his arm and curled in closer, felt a tiny rivet press into his cheek. "We could go to the zoo. The one in California."

"There are at least seven zoos in California."

"The good one! You know what I mean."

"You aren't getting too old for the zoo?"

"You are never too old to look at crocodiles." he said, and Seto laughed, just a little, more like releasing a breath. Maybe it was okay, to still just play the president's dorky baby brother sometimes. "Bet a zoo would be cool in one of the parks."

"Paris has a petting zoo, if I recall correctly."

"Yeah, but I mean like a real one."

"No penguins." he deadpanned.

A laugh and a gentle shove. "We could go to a restaurant and rent the whole thing out so everyone else has to leave," Mokuba grinned, "or pretend to be nobodies and then leave a thousand dollar tip. There's the aerospace museum, or the new ride they're testing out in the Shanghai park, I think they said it'll be ready on the 15th-"

"Too long of a wait. Let's limit ourselves to what we can do tomorrow."

"Why, who cares? If you wanna take a break, we might as well go for the whole month, or-" He stopped, abruptly, mid-sentence, wilted, realized what was going on. "...You're still leaving, aren't you?"

Seto did not immediately say anything, besides that his smile disappeared. His face was impassible. He did not need to say anything, though, because the pause between the question and the answer said everything it needed to.

Seto Kaiba did not often say the things he felt, not the important ones. Feelings that were too big got caught in his throat. He spoke in quiet gesture and bombastic symbolism. He did not say I know the past few years were tough, but I promise from now on things are going to be different, he built a 200-foot tall monument to your ex-father's hatred, covered it in industrial C4, and asked you to press the detonator with him. He did not say I won this for both of us, and it's not mine, it's ours, he let you keep your 2% stake and then bumped it to 10, so even he didn't have a controlling interest unless you stood next to him. He did not say I'm sorry, for all of it, and I love you, he took the lockets you glued together with clumsy fourth-grade hands and had them reinforced with silicon and steel, muted his conference call to beat the videogame you were stuck on no matter how busy he seemed, waited for you to wake up in the morning so you could eat breakfast together even though he'd been awake since five.

It was not always easy to interpret the things Seto Kaiba did not say, what he wanted you to hear but could not force between his teeth. It was occasionally more akin to an Olympic marathon. Mokuba was widely considered the champion of this particular sport. So if Seto Kaiba was dropping everything to get sundaes, then that meant yesterday's words had gotten through to him, reverberated, really, through his thick and complicated skull. And if he had heard them, really heard them, and was still leaving, then...

Then that had to mean something too.

"I have a duel to win." was what he finally said, flat. "There's no other way to get there."

"But what if you never come back?"

"The dimension system works. I invented it." As if that was all the explanation required. "The likelihood of failure is-" and for a second it seemed like he was going to give a number, the exact percentage, but thought better of it. "Low." he finished. Because of course there was a number, and of course Seto knew the number, had probably calculated it himself, and of course it was a number of some significance because it had been 0.1% or something then Seto would have just said it without hesitation. If it was any number that wasn't worth worrying about, no one would be having this conversation.

"But where you're going is...you're going there because he's..." There was a knot in the back of his mouth. "Dead."

"Death," he responded, without moving so much as a muscle, "isn't enough to stop me." He was staring straight forward, mouth set, like he wasn't talking to Mokuba at all but addressing someone else, a ghost in the room no one else could see.

Mokuba glanced at the floor. He had a lot of of thoughts about that, how the other Yugi was smart and cool and nice and and brave and sometimes funny and he didn't deserve to be dead and thinking about it sort of made Mokuba want to cry, but Seto's feelings about it were already so big and loud that they seemed to fill up every room, like there wasn't any space left for Mokuba to cry about it, and besides Seto never cried about anything so Mokuba wasn't going to either.

He tried to think of an argument that would work, find magic words, logical like something Seto would like. The system is dangerous, and he could be seriously hurt; it would be suboptimal in a number of ways for Seto Kaiba to be hurt or missing, and Mokuba would miss him; therefore, he should not go. QED. Nothing seemed right enough, true enough, sorry enough, convincing enough. Instead, he settled on "I'm worried."

"You'll be fine, Mokuba. No matter what." was all the quiet reassurance he could give, not looking at the screens but past them.

"I meant about you."

"It's not your job to worry about me." he said, which was the most dense, oblivious, blockheaded thing to ever come out of Seto Kaiba's mouth since he turned ten years old.

"There has to be some other way! What if you just-"

"Mokuba."

"You could just wait until we tested it more-" and what he wanted to say was please don't go and I don't have anyone else and why is he important enough to go to but I'm not important enough to stay for? but the problem with feelings that are too big is that sometimes they get caught in your throat.

Seto dismissed his screens and, with the utmost gentleness, disentangled himself from his brother's grasp. "I know it's not easy, but I'll go, and I'll come back," and he glanced out the window but didn't see the skyline, saw something else that only existed in his head, towards some other horizon. "And I'll win." he said, and he smiled again, but not warm. The other kind of smile he had sometimes, the one that was sharp and mean and hollow.

Seto ruffled his brother's hair absently, without thinking about it, and stood up. Stood up to leave. He had things to do, of course. Places to go. A busy man. He couldn't sit and talk about the zoo all morning. So he moved to leave, because he was leaving, and there were no magic words to say or emergency switches to flip that would stop him. And every window in the building shattered at once with an awful, raucous sound, and the floor rattled beneath them, the whole building wavering, and the miniature KaibaLand model fell off the table and broke into pieces, and the sky turned black and dim and the wind rushed past their faces as everyone fell, careening.

"Okay." Mokuba said, sitting in the shadow of his brother's desk while sunlight streamed in completely intact windows, glinted off an endless array of awards. He held his tablet too tightly, watching him leave, tapping his legs on the bottom of the couch because they did not reach the floor. "Get some sleep." which meant, I love you.

Seto left, restraining a yawn, with only an affirmative noise along the lines of "Mhm," which meant I love you too, or at least Mokuba wanted to imagine it did, because this time he wasn't really sure.

And Mokuba Kaiba was alone, because everyone is alone in this world. Everyone is alone in this world, always, if not now then eventually, and it is stupid, always stupid, to ever expect anyone to stay. Not parents or relatives, never, and not the pharaoh, and not the pet rat Mokuba had convinced them to let him get in fourth grade that died after two years. And not brothers.

And Mokuba sat on his brother's office couch, which still sort of smelled like Seto, and pulled his legs up to his chest, thinking, and shaking a little. And he did not cry. Really.

Crying is for losers, anyway. You aren't supposed to cry about your problems. You're supposed to be able to crush them.

KaibaCorp was a sprawling organization, and with any institution of suitable size there are certain universal constants. Redundancy, for example, tends to crop up. Communication mishaps, or a slowness to react, the longer and more unwieldy the chain of command becomes. Complacency, even, the longer they dominate their sector. The Kaiba brothers ran a tight ship, but the nature of so large an enterprise means that some things cannot be avoided, only mitigated. You can hold your standards high, clamp down on problems, and wring out every last drop of efficiency there is, but a company is made of humans, and humans are flawed. There will always be something right under your nose.

One of those unavoidable constants is gossip.

There were two pieces of sensational news catching fire in every breakroom and cubicle in KC headquarters, jumping from person to person like a contagion, first through research and development, then down through accounting, sales, software development, janitorial, parks and resorts, marketing. Various versions of these pieces of news circulated, with the details sanded off or exaggerated, but their core remained the same. They were, one: the president plans to go on indefinite leave. Two: the brothers are fighting.

The current director of manufacturing was a practical, portly, and plainspoken man who much preferred the factory floor to a desk and who could have retired last year but knew the free theme park tickets meant the world to his small granddaughter, and when he heard this news his first act was to choke on his coffee, and his second to tell the person who said it to get back to work. He spent the rest of the morning in dismay. He was already having enough trouble meeting Duel Disk demand, especially with all the distribution problems they were having in Latin America, and the very last thing he needed was the boss disappearing on him. He would not believe it, no. Seto Kaiba wasn't leaving. The president was young, and impulsive, and an oddball, sure, but he was smart and upright and he cared about the company. He wouldn't just run off like that, not for nothing.

There was a mid-tier worker with company IT, a reserved woman in her mid-30's who had one pair of glasses, two kids, three stuffed toys of kuribabylon on her desk, and the dubious honor of being one of the few people who understood Seto Kaiba's code well enough to write patches for it. She heard this rumor from another programmer and scrunched up her face. Was it really a big deal? The president left all the time, to go between headquarters or spend a day at the parks, and they always managed. Indefinite was weird, sure, but that didn't have to mean indefinite-indefinite. Maybe, she suggested aloud, he was just putting on another tournament and didn't know how long it would take him to lose again, causing half the room to laugh viciously and the other half to tell her not to say that so loud lest they all get fired.

The manager of concessions for KaibaLand U.S.A., a loud, blisteringly caucasian man under the deeply unfortunate impression that he was liked instead of merely tolerated, heard it from his secretary and frowned. Good 'ol Seto? Not that the prez didn't earn his time off, but they're usually so stuffy back at the Japanese office so it's really not like them, and the next two months were going to be peak park attendance so they'd need all hands on deck, y'know he'd love to go visit his mom in Tampa more often but he always did it on the off-season and never more than two weeks because he had a responsibility to this place, y'know, Sandra? A responsibility! What a disaster. Well, these things do happen. They'd just have to hold down the fort for him, huh? Do their damndest, they would, for the poor kid.

One of the customer service representatives, also known as a person whose job it is to get yelled at over the phone, was a young games fanatic with curly hair, a boyish face, and a headset perpetually hanging half-on his head as he waited for the next call. He'd desperately wanted to work here because he thought Seto Kaiba was an unsurpassed genius, but after a year of troubleshooting duel disk glitches with angry parents (sorry-Duel Disk®, Registered Trademark 1997) he'd rather decided he hated the guys smug idiot face, for no real reason besides that doing such work for long enough perforce rots your soul unless you give your buried seething an acceptable target. Kaiba's leaving? Good riddance, jerk, feel free to never come back, and while you're at it why don't you give us all a few of your billions and then take your stupid new Duel Disk and shove it up your-hello, yes ma'am, thank you for calling KaibaCorp's customer support hotline, how may he assist you today?

The Chief Legal Officer was a perky, perfectly-coiffed attorney whose chipper tone somehow never came off warm and whose smile never quite reached her eyes, who ruled Oka's former department with a cheerful, manicured iron fist. She could prove anything if you gave her enough time to write the brief, convince you that black is white, persuade a judge that any blimp was almost certainly over international waters, talk Domino City's municipal government into selling its very soul. She received these troubling rumors with a curious tilt of the head, and a smile like a vulture. How curious, that Kaiba was leaving. How interesting. He did look so tired lately, didn't he? And dear little Mokuba is upset, too? Oh, one must hope everything is okay.

In a laboratory somewhere, several researchers and engineers were hard at work, to recalibrate the machine that would break the glass between dimensions and send Seto Kaiba away. They worked quietly, and did not speak to each other.