All characters are the property of Kazuki Takahashi. Please read and review. I would be very grateful and I welcome your feedback. Suggested musical accompaniment: "Soul One" by Blind Melon.

Altar

Kaiba gazed at three pictures. The three pictures sat on the desk in his private study, which was attached to his bathroom. Nobody had ever been in this study, not even Mokuba. As much of a meditation room as a study, this was where Kaiba had come up with the holographic dueling platform, the duel disk, and Battle City, which was due to launch in three weeks. This was where he brainstormed and drew up blue prints, and where he kept his shredder and his lead lined safe.

It was where he drew the picture of the Blue Eyes White Dragon girl. He had etched her from memory with gray, blue, and white colored pencils. She was propped on the desk by the wall and a paper weight the color of her eyes.

Kaiba ran his fingertips over her face. He stroked her pencil hair. She was a goddess. If he found her, life would make sense. She would wipe away all his weaknesses, and all his flaws.

He tried to picture meeting her. What would he say? What would he do? Would he try to put his tongue in his mouth, or rub against her, like he did with Tea?

NO. The thought was blasphemous.

Would he fall to his knees and flatten his face on the ground before her feet?

No. That thought was blasphemous to his other god—his dignity.

He decided that he would bow, and when she extended her thin, bone-china hand to touch his face and softly bless him, he would kiss it. If she wanted him inside her, he would oblige her. But if not, he would not even mention it. He would obey her. He would be content just to have her nearby. Her power gave him power, her safety made him safe.

He gave the paper one last stroke. My Dragon Goddess, he thought.

In the middle was a small picture in a plain plastic frame. It was of a slight woman in a yellow silk gown with a pink ribbon tied at her throat. Her wild black hair was escaping from her long braid. Golden stars formed a tiara that perched on her head, and a ruby hung in the middle of her forehead from a chain around her forehead. Her extended leg was entwined with ribbons, like a maypole, and her slippered foot, decorated with a rosette, pointed gracefully from underneath her tulle skirt. Seto's eyes shone from her face above her warm smile. The bottom of the picture read, "Adina as Princess Rowena, Magic Theater."

Kaiba remembered his mother laughing as she danced with him standing on her feet. He remembered how she would read to him, and how surprised and exultant she was when he started reading back to her. She would brush his hair from his forehead and kiss him on his brow in the same place a ruby would hang. He remembered how the crease where her arm met her shoulder seemed to be made especially for him, and how her body was his cradle. When his hands chapped in the winter, she would rub her hand crème into the cracks that lined his skin, and tell him about knights and princesses, fairies and unicorns, ogres and dragons.

He always wanted her to tell him more about the dragons. He had never wanted her to let go of his hands, or stop dancing, or stop laughing.

When Mokuba had come, she went. Mokuba had looked just like her. Mokuba WAS their mother.

The realization sent shivers up Kaiba's spine. Of course his mother wasn't the Blue Eyes! She was Mokuba! Her soul had never left Seto. It had just gone into his baby brother, that's all.

Kaiba wanted to smack himself. Why was he even thinking these things? It was all nonsense.

He wished, at the very least, that she had waited until he was older to pass away.

He put his fingertip to his lips, and then touched his mother's picture, right on the ruby on her forehead. Mama.

Next to Kaiba's right hand was a picture of Tea Gardner from the school yearbook. She was leaning against the cherry tree, her eyes big and sparkling, her mouth frozen mid-laugh. Her innocent, easy beauty was refreshing, cleansing. She wore her sweetness like she wore her skin—it was obvious and inextricable from her. Her back was arched away from the tree, her hips tucked slightly, her feet placed shoulder width apart, and her head was tilted. Her hands were laced behind her back. The pose was childlike, but, after all, she was still practically a child.

Her untouched lips and legs and breasts were so inviting.

Kaiba was starving for her skin.

He pressed his palm over her picture and thought of how her heart beat in the closet. He had excited her. She had looked up at him with moist eyes and pleaded, and he had given it to her, even though she didn't know how much she wanted it, even though neither of them knew exactly what it was.

She wanted him. She didn't pull away when he took her hand. She had wrapped her legs around his waist and her arms around his neck. She had looked at him with that soft warmth in her eyes, even when she was angry just moments before.

Wonder of wonders, she was a virgin. Kaiba felt thrillingly ambiguous about that. On the one hand, he was now guaranteed the glory of taking her first. He would know her body before anyone else (anyone else! He shuddered to think.). He would have her at her ripest and sweetest. She would never again be as tight.

It was a scenario his mind dreamed new details for every hour. He weighed the pros and cons about having her on her belly versus having her on her back while he pushed her knees toward her chest. He had even contemplated sneaking birth control pills into her food, or somehow injecting her with a shot of Depo-Provera. He wanted to feel her inside walls with his bare cock and fill her up, soak her cervix with his sperm, without getting her pregnant.

And yet, Kaiba was reluctant about taking her virginity. Would she feel as good the next time he penetrated her? What about the tenth time?

And she seemed so lovely the way she was. He had imagined keeping her in a room in the mansion, where he would be her only visitor, and he would just look at her, and touch her, and dress her up in the prettiest clothes, except when he decided he wanted her naked. He would be Aesop's dog in the manger, or Ebenezer Scrooge, and her virginity would be his money—locked up and never spent. She was a precious work of art, one that must be admired but never touched. If he fucked her, part of what made her so beguiling would be gone. Besides, sex changed girls, and maybe he had changed her enough. At the same time, she didn't seem to have changed. She still gave annoying speeches, still danced for no reason, and still laughed with her friends—the pathetic glory-thief Yugi, the dog, and the boy with the hideous hair.

Tenderness washed over Kaiba with the force and salt-sweetness of high tide. He wished that Tea was with him. He wished he could talk to her about his mother, tell her all his memories, so his mother could live not only in his heart but in someone else's. If Tea were there, he would stand her on his feet and dance with her. Then, he would tuck her into his bed, and curl himself around her, their long blue-eyed bodies intertwined, their brown hair melting together. That way, she would feel safe, just like Kaiba did when his mother held him while he slept.

He picked up her picture and stared into her bright blue celluloid eyes with his prickling ones. "My little pet," he whispered, "my precious little pet. My pretty little, sweet little pet."

Kaiba heard his own voice whisper those words and startled in his chair. He knew he had heard his voice saying those words, but he didn't remember saying them. He wondered if he had fallen asleep, and had been dreaming.

Even if it had been a dream, and there was nobody in the room to hear him, Kaiba was humiliated. He looked over both shoulders. He was filled with a sickening, sinking feeling, not for the first time, that the room was bugged.

He looked back at the picture of Tea. It didn't matter whether he fucked her or not. Either way, he was in control. He would do whatever he wanted to her, for as long as he wanted, and, when he tired of her, he would cast her off.

He told himself this, but his belief in it was flimsy. He could see holes beginning to form and the edges beginning to tatter. But, if a drowning man finds something that floats, he will cling to it, even if it's just a soggy log.

So Kaiba clung as he sat in front of his goddess, his mother, and his pet.