Book I | Promises Mouthed
Duelist Kingdom Arc
Part VII
Seto Kaiba: 18 years old
Kisara Pegasus: 16 years old
…
She coughed out a stream of water into the man's mouth.
"By Poseidon and all the nymphs of the Ocean, praise be that you are alive!" Kisara's eyes flew open as a man hauled her into a sitting position, forcing her to projectile seawater all over herself. Strong arms held her from falling back over. She rested her head on an obliging chest, feeling the sick come up with the sea.
Blearily she tried to see her savior through her stinging eyes. A scar… on his cheek… dark skin… "You…" she coughed. Thief king…
"There, there," an unfamiliar voice broke softly onto her mind, a hand rubbed her back. "Do not try to do anything right now."
Kisara's eyes groggily slid to the hand that was holding her up. The man wore a Dueling Glove, into which were embedded ten slots for starchips necessary for entering the castle. Her rescuer was a duelist. Kisara tried to swallow. The attempt left her throat rigid and raw from the water. She coughed violently again, her small frame wracked with each onslaught. The metallic taste of blood still lingered in her mouth from her father's throne room. It alone brought on further nausea.
She did not know how long she lingered between delirium and waking. Kisara was revived by the touch of a hot spoon to her lips. She groaned and tried to pull away. An arm wrapped around her and held her in place once more.
"You need to eat," the man said.
Kisara didn't think that she could keep anything down, but she did not seem to have much choice in the matter. Her mouth was pried open, and a spoonful of hot porridge was forced down her salt-raw throat. She coughed, and then trembled as she felt the hot food trickle down into her stomach through her bone-cold body. Another spoonful followed. She lapped it up gratefully. She was in a small tent. Now that she tried to focus, the sound of heavy rain pulsated around her and the surface of the cloth tent rippled with a thousand water droplets drumming like fingers on a desk. The man leaning over her had black hair falling in all directions. He was bare-chested and his skin was bronzed from long hours in the sun. Across his cheek, his left cheek, he bore a scar.
"Allow me to introduce myself," he said softly in a deep, rumbling voice, "I am Mako Tsunami, the highest ranking Ocean Duelist in the world. I found you shortly after midnight. You may feel a heaviness in your chest from the CPR. I cannot lie… after the first several attempts, I was beginning to doubt whether or not you would pull through. And yet… here you are." His smile was filled with kindness, relief, and such comfort that Kisara felt at complete ease despite the vulnerability of her situation.
She wanted to express herself more eloquently, but all she could manage was a pearl of coughs.
That seemed perfectly acceptable, as the man took her inability to move as an invitation to continue feeding her. Along with the warm food came a steady flow of conversation. "I was disqualified from the Tournament on the final day, and chose to take a last swim in the ocean before getting on one of the ferries back to the Californian mainland. I heard an unearthly scream puncture the night sky and saw you hurtling through the air and into the water. I feared that you had smashed against the rocks. You had not, but by the time I got to you, you'd taken in quite a bit of water."
Kisara remembered the arms that grasped at her. She shivered. The blanket the man had draped around her was warm, and she appreciated it all the more as, every few minutes, a stray gust of rain-seeped air would wisp through the tent.
"I believe that you mistook me for someone else when you first began to awaken," Mako Tsunami said formally and politely as he brought a smoldering cup of tea to Kisara's lips. "A loved one?"
Her eyes flickered to the scar on the wrong side of his face, and once more took in his deep tan. Her thoughts flickered back to the boy who had watched with horror as she'd fallen through the trap. No longer tanned. And no longer scared. …A loved one?... "No," she responded, barely audible over the sound of the roaring rain. "At least… I don't think so." A thunderclap resounded through the sky and shook the ground they sat on.
She looked up as Mako rose to pull another blanket around her. He wrapped it up to her chin, careful to keep her hair, still damp, away from her back. "Is there anything more you need?" He fussed around her as though she were his own sister. This stranger showed her more affection than she had otherwise known in weeks.
With this ease and comfort that Kisara felt also came vulnerability, and with the vulnerability came realization of the terrible reality. Kisara licked her sea-cracked lips, tasting salt. Her raw throat screamed in defiance against her making any actual sound or giving any actual voice to her pain, and she felt her eyes welling. She was so afraid. Everything hurt, and she was now alone. Seto was gone. He was gone. And he had lost the duel because of an act of stupid outrage for her sake. Just as she had tried to be useful and only done ill when freeing Mokuba, so had her attempt to save Seto Kaiba failed. She failed everyone she ever tried to help.
The voices from the water found her again in the downpour.
Kisara curled in on herself and broke to pieces. She sobbed loudly and harshly, her throat tearing with each noise, resembling the honk of a goose more than the whimper of a sixteen year old girl. She was hardly aware as Mako crouched down beside her and pulled her into his arms. She cried into his chest for a long time. Her nose running, her eyes leaking, her mouth drooling, her body battered and her hair matted with salt, she could think no further than the tears that came from her core, as though she was crying out every mouthful of ocean that she had swallowed.
Kisara missed her father. She missed Seto. She wanted to be home, in her bed, with her body intact. She had spent so long trying to be strong. She could not do it a day longer. Everything and everyone she had ever loved was gone. Her father had tried to kill her. The Kaibas were soulless shells. She was alone. Completely and utterly–
She felt her head sink with the weight of Mako's large hand on top of it. He was patting her, careful to avoid the large swelling where her skull had smashed into the tunnel wall.
"There, there. Now, why don't you tell me your name, for starters?"
"Kisara," she whispered. "My name is Kisara…" Her throat seized at the attempt to say her family name… her father's name… and she coiled again, fresh tears brimming in her eyes.
"It is alright to cry," he whispered. "It is necessary." She looked up to see he was absentmindedly staring into the cloth ceiling of the tent, "You must remember that you are alive. You have made it. You were engulfed by the ocean, and you still breathe. There are few who can claim so much." Gently he pulled her away from him and, taking her face in his hands, wiped her eyes. "If you are alone, you will endure. If you are afraid, you will conquer your fear. For so long as you are alive, you have a chance at living." He smiled at her, brokenly. "This was what my father taught me."
Mako picked up the bowl of porridge once again, and brought a spoon to Kisara's mouth. Lips still trembling, she took a small bite.
"He taught me everything I now know – about the ocean, about life. I lost him…" Kisara looked up into the face of her savior. "I lost him to the very thing from which I was able to save you…" He whispered. As Kisara swallowed another mouthful of porridge, she felt that the spoon he was holding for her was shaking. She gulped.
"I lost my father the same way." The words were out of her mouth before she understood them.
Mako looked at her in shock. "You too?"
Kisara was nodding. She couldn't understand it herself, but she was nodding. "Along with my mother and two brothers, yes." The sound of rain swelled to a roar. "It's terrifying," she whispered. "But every time I go into the water, I hear them. The way that others hear the ocean in seashells, I hear their cries. Cries for me to save them. To help them." Tears, quiet tears, were now streaming down her face. She did not know where any of this was coming from, but she knew that it was from deep within her core and, as though something within her had uncorked, she was free to cry. "Because I live with the knowledge that if it were not for me, they would have lived. If it were not for me–"
"–the ocean would not have claimed them." Mako finished for her. Once more her eyes were drawn to his, and therein she saw a reflection of herself. …a girl whom she only half remembered, in a mirror that was still covered in a fog. "And in dealing with our loss, our failings, I came to embrace the ocean in its entirety, and you to fear it." Kisara suddenly understood how much it must have meant to Mako to have been able to save someone from the ocean – to have been able to save her. She realized that, as he had saved her from the water, she had saved him from something as well.
Kisara and Mako sat in silence for a long time. Finally, he raised his cup of tea. "To you, girl who survived the ocean, I wish all success."
…
"…Cecelia, I'm sorry. I failed you," Pegasus looked away from the three now blank and empty cards of The Soul's Prison. His eyes trailed over the painting of the woman with the beautiful cascade of golden hair. His painting. His wife. Having lost the final duel of the Tournament, he released the spirits of Solomon Muto and the Kaiba Brothers. Yugi Mutou's Millennium Puzzle was beyond his reach now. "My attempt to take over Kaiba Corp… My efforts to get all the Millennium Items, it was as all done for you, in the hopes that I might restore you, body and soul." All lost now.
"How sweet," a voice sneered.
A chill went up Maximillion's spine. He turned to see a form in the shadows of his private chambers. It was the boy who had come with Yugi– Bakura. And he bore the Millennium Ring. Bakura then goaded him, offering Maximillion his deepest desires, claiming that he wanted – a Millennium Item – was not yet beyond his grasp. If not the Puzzle, then why not Ring? All he was to do was defeat this boy, this teenager, in a duel. Pegasus could not refuse.
Bakura's upper lip curled at Pegasus's acceptance of the match. He had known the man could not resist. Still… Bakura would take particular pleasure in Pegasus's dismemberment after what the creator of Duel Monsters had done to Kisara. Pegasus's Millennium Item may have been able to look into minds, but Bakura's looked into souls, and it was there, heartlessly, ruthlessly, that he struck Maximillion Pegasus down. The Millennium Eye and Ring clashed, and the Eye was found wanting. The force of the shadow power hurtled Maximillion Pegasus back and he slammed into the painting of his dead wife with a crunch. He was a weak armature compared to Bakura, who had known this game for centuries.
The man who had once been a thief king approached his prey and his prize. He was as cold and vicious to this old fool as this bastard had been to his Kisara. Bakura's fingers dug into Pegasus's socket and ripped the Millennium Eye from his skull with a sickening squelch. Maximillion's scream reverberated through the stone tower.
…
Kisara marched through the halls of her castle, her fingers digging into the plaster ridges in the walls. It had been almost an entire day since she was ejected from this place. She could still here Mako pleading with her to rest for one more night before setting off. It would have been so easy to leave the island, now that all presumed her to be dead. She could leave and never look back. She could start a new life far from the world of Duel Monsters and her forgotten memories. Her forgotten promises.
Kisara had thanked Mako, wincing as she rose to her feet. There was work that needed doing. In the end, gingerly so that he did not hurt her, he had pulled her into a final embrace of farewell. They would meet again, she was certain of it. They had both done one another a great service. He had saved her life. And she had been a life that he was able to save.
Since once more walking these halls Kisara learned that her father had lost to Yugi Mutou. Some month before, she would have trusted his oath to be his bond, and for the Kaiba brothers to already be settling back into their bodies. Now, however, she dared not trust Maximillion Pegasus.
"Miss Kisara!" a disbelieving voice called from behind her. Kisara stopped short, allowing her weight to sink fully into the wall. Her clothing was stiff with the sea salt, as was her brace. It aggravated her wound.
"Ah, Croquet. Just as well that I've run into you," she said quietly. "Give me your keys to the dungeon."
"Miss! You're alive!" Croquet ran around to stand in front of her. "I- I cannot tell you how relieved I am! When I saw what he did- Your father- But you're alive-"
He truly seemed elated to see her.
And she had no time for it. She would deal with her father later. "The keys, Croquet. Now."
…
The first sensation to return to him was pain shooting up his back where he'd been slumped against the stone wall. Like some broken toy. The second sensation was the dank on his skin – the twisted cousin of morning dew. He breathed it in. He smelled it. Seto Kaiba's first thought upon his soul reentering to his discarded body was, "Gotta…find…Mokuba…"
"From what I understand, he's in good hands with Yugi Mutou and his friends."
His neck snapped. His body flinched. Perhaps it was merely because he was unused to the sensation of having himself within himself. The torches spit and cracked about him, flickering shapes into light and darkness, like a moving picture he could not fully see. But he could never mistake that voice. "…Kisara?"
The last time they had spoken in solitude had been in another of these dungeon halls.
Keys rattled on a chain. Bars came into focus. And against the bars… a silhouette of a person, crumpled against the iron grating for support. On the right side of the bars, this time at least.
"Give me a moment, I'm just trying to figure out which is the key to open this cell." Her voice was strained and she could not conceal the tremor.
As his eyes adjusted to the half-light Kaiba saw the metallic stains on her blue cardigan. Everything flooded back to him. The duel. The Toon Dragon. The Dragon Capture Jar. The Dragon Piper. The pain that he had caused her. The blood. What had happened to her after the duel?
The door to the cell opened with a scream and a clang and Kaiba's fingers twitched.
She was standing over him, like some dark angel of salvation. She was by his side now, checking his pulse, pressing her fingers to his neck, asking him to repeat his name, his age, the month, the year. She was pressing forward, trying to help him, once again shoving aside everything they had been through, separately and together, as though it could simply be ignored. As though he could any longer ignore that, even as she asked him to follow her finger with his eyes, with her other hand she was trying to clamp down the pain around her waist from when he had ripped her in half.
Seto snatched her hand in his. "Why? Why didn't you tell me?!"
"…You were only allowed one question," she answered quietly. "And you chose correctly. Your brother should always come first, Seto. He needs you."
"You needed me." It was as much a plea as a demand. Perhaps it was due to whatever this was, 'the return of his soul to his body,' that his emotions ran rampant through him as they now did. But he was slumped against a wall in this hellish place, and on her knees, leaning over him, trying to protect him, was a person whom he had failed time after time after time. Seto placed his hands on her waist and brought her closer. She gasped. He looked up into her face. "You needed me, and I have done nothing but hurt you… without even a second thought. I… I am so sorry," he whispered an apology for that which he could not be forgiven. Beneath his fingers he could feel the outline of the brace. "Show me," he whispered into the darkness.
She tried to pull away.
"Please," he held her near him. "…If I may," he asked again.
Hesitantly, fingers trembling, Kisara reached her hand up to the top button, and nodded. One at a time, she slowly, haltingly undid her cardigan. Seto pulled it the rest of the way from her and then gently pushed down on the frayed strap of her burlap-sack dress, revealing the brace that constricted her. Even in this light he could see the large and angry burn across her shoulder where the 'tear' had taken place. Seto swallowed.
Wordlessly, he began to unhook the brace.
Her bare, pale chest was stark against the surrounding darkness, with the exception of the dark and irritated welt that streaked across her skin and was the cause of so much of her pain. The place where the fourth Blue-Eyes White Dragon card had been torn in half. And with it, Kisara's soul.
Seto pulled on Kisara hips until she straddled him and he, gently, placed his mouth between her small breasts and followed those same blue veins that he had seen at their first meeting, years before in front of the orphanage. He now followed with his mouth the path those delicate veins charted, directly over the heart of the bruised skin. While the dungeon was cool the angered portion of the skin was hot to his touch. He heard Kisara inhale sharply, and felt her quiver.
Softly, gradually, he moved his lips from the valley between her breasts, up to her right shoulder, and down again, now to her left hip. All the while his fingers covered and splayed across the mirroring surface on her back. Seto felt Kisara lace her fingers into his hair, and felt her face against his forehead, riddling him with little kisses between the moans and pants she offered. Again he pressed his lips against the sides of her breasts, pulling her closer onto his lap. Kisara shuddered. Seto pulled away, concerned, only to see that the mark of her disrupted flesh was vanishing where he had laid his mouth upon it.
Like a distant dream, he remembered her lips on his neck, along the welts his step-father had left there. Seto looked up into Kisara's face, and she pulled him into a kiss. Their first kiss in six years, and she had initiated it again. He was going to have to do something about that.
Seto gasped for air, looking up at that cascade of white hair and into those blue eyes, feeling her trembling against him. …Feeling her trembling against him. He swallowed. But not now. Not when she was covered in her own blood, her father having betrayed her, and her entire world shattered. No. For now… for now this was everything…
As gently as he had pulled her onto him, Seto carefully steered Kisara to turn, knowing she could do so now with no fear of pain, and pulled her to rest her bare back against his chest. He wrapped them both in his trench coat, and rested his chin on her head. Neither of them said a word. Kisara intertwined her fingers in his.
They were there two parts of the same whole.
…
She walked side by side with him, outside the castle walls. Kisara looked up at the citadel, then down at the long shadows they cast, together. She wanted to say something. She walked without a cane and without the need of his support. …So why was she afraid to lack it? All of the insecurities that she had ever felt now crashed upon her like a wave. Every time they had almost spoken. Every time had had avoided her. Every single time that she had feared she was just a stupid girl, infatuated. Like that time, one year ago, at the Intercontinental Duel Monster Tournament. She opened her mouth in the hopes that something reasonable and perhaps even mature would come out.
Seto reached over and took her hand in his, squeezing it tightly.
She smiled, and squeezed back.
They continued around the castle. The sun slowly sank out of the sky. The air was fresh from the rain. For the first time in months Kisara inhaled without fear of pain. She walked without fear of pain. The strength that she had called upon so desperately in that tent now came to her, effortlessly, hand in hand.
They were standing in front of the castle gates. The world was tinged orange and red with the sun's descent. This was where she left him. He turned to look at her, still gripping her hand. He didn't want to let go any more than she did. Wordlessly, she handed him his deck of cards. She had retrieved it from Croquet. She grinned outright. He smiled back. She opened her mouth to say something.
"Seto! Big brother! Seto!" Mokuba's voice pierced through the waning day. He was still inside the citadel walls.
Seto and Kisara let go of each other's hands in unison. Kisara broke the eye contact and looked away. Now Seto looked as though he wanted to say something.
Kisara looked back up at him with a final smile. "Goodbye, Seto. And godspeed." With that, and with a final nod, she turned and took her leave back around the castle perimeter. On her own two feet. With no one's aid or assistant.
As she walked Kisara reached up and activated the microphone at the cuff of her sleeve that she'd taken from Croquet. "Open the gates now," she commanded. As the great gates of her father's castle opened she heard the cheers and cries of little Mokuba Kaiba as he saw his brother, standing there, as though prepared for him and him alone. And she knew, because she knew Seto Kaiba just that well, that he was smiling at his little brother. In the end, she had been able to help reunite the Kaiba brothers after all.
Kisara looked up at the fire-touched sky. It was time to confront her father.
…
Blearily, Maximillion Pegasus opened the one eye that was left to him. In the doorway stood his daughter, jaw set at the sight before her. She was resisting the urge to be ill. He didn't need a Millennium Item to see that. How could she not be? From the deprived madman he had been less than a day before he had become an equally nauseating sight – a living corpse lying in a bed, his left Eye of power replaced with a bleeding, festering cavity.
Even he could smell the stench.
"You're alive…" he rasped as she entered the room, without a cane, he noted.
"Apparently so are you," she answered calmly, nodding to the guards to leave them. Would she finish him off with her bare hands? He could not blame her if she did. And yet… he liked to think that he knew her better. Liked to. When had he strayed so far from the path of an honorable man? He had always considered himself an honorable man, hadn't he? It had all been so long ago.
Egypt. The sweltering heat. The Pyramids of Giza. The Temple of Abu Simbel. An ancient land whose people had believed in a life beyond the here and now – believed in it so utterly that they had armed their departed with boats and provisions for the afterlife lest they lose their way. How Maximillion had wanted to embrace such an unwavering certainty. What must it have been like? To have been certain? It was such a wild and desperate craving that had brought him to the land south of the Mediterranean Sea, six months after his wedding day. Three months after his widowhood. He had been determined to reverse the process. To be the Orpheus who succeeded in bringing back his Eurydice.
It was on this journey that the painter had discovered the opportunist– that Pegasus had learned of the ancient Shadow Games, which he would one day bring into the modern era as Duel Monsters. It was some time after this journey that he received a phone call from a naive and silly child, the son of one of the arms manufacturers. The child had called in the middle of the night, love-struck and begging Pegasus to save some poor urchin girl. He had almost hung up the phone until the child burst out, "She's got white hair and blue eyes, and is just the weirdest… the kindest girl you will ever meet."
Through the besoughted stupidity of the child's description Pegasus, returned from Egypt, had understood exactly what he was being described. And its exact value. Surely it was his fate, after having learned to recognize true power, to have it tossed in his path so easily. Holding the phone with one hand, with the other Pegasus had touched the red raw skin around the golden Eye, freshly implanted.
He adopted the girl that same week. As a mere curiosity, of course. He held to his vision and love of his departed Cecelia too desperately to ever allow any new affection into his life. So violently focused was he on the departed that he took no note of the living, thriving life before him, blossoming under his care.
But Kisara had a way of being noticed. Her appearance, ironically enough, was the least drawing of her qualities. She was obstinate, patient, and above all, clever. More than once Pegasus had found that what he'd hoped could be explained with a brushed-off statement instead took an entire afternoon to explain away, and even then she would go poking where she didn't belong. The first time that he'd found her with sprained wrist after climbing onto the battlements had been hellish. He had taken her on his lap and had rocked her for a half hour to stop the crying.
And after she had hopped off he had… missed the weight she offered him.
"Stranger, heed my advice," the man with the turban, the vacant eyes, and the golden Key, had said to him in that sweltering land. "You have journeyed far, seeking to cure the ache within your soul. Take great care. The search to cure the pains of a broken heart might lead to even greater heartache."
The sound of a chair scraping across the floor jolted Maximillion out of his thoughts. Kisara sat down by his bedside with ease, her face free of any sharp twinges of pain that had afflicted her for the last months. He blinked his single eye up at her. I have been so blind. In his quest for one whom he had long since lost, he had tried to destroy the one precious person whom he had left to him in this entire world.
Very likely, he had succeeded.
"What happened?"
Pegasus looked back to his daughter and raised a hand to the bandages that now covered where the Millennium Eye had been mere hours before. "Only what I deserved."
She did not argue. She did not disagree. She nodded silently in acknowledgement, and averted her gaze.
"I understand," he began haltingly, "if you can never forgive me–"
"–Don't. Don't even start." The muscles in her neck worked furiously. And Pegasus could no longer tell if it was because she wanted to cry or because she wanted scream and walk out and never speak to him again. It was the latter.
"Kisara, I will spend the rest of my life trying to make it up to you."
"Yes," she whispered. "I except you will." Together, and yet each so alone, they watched the sun dip beneath the horizon, into the ocean, and sink upon their Duelist Kingdom.
…
The helicopter drowned out almost all human noise as it rose into the dusk sky to cross the Pacific Ocean to Japan. Almost. Kaiba had to resist the urge to close his eyes in irritation as Joey Wheeler yelped and whooped over the sound of even the headphones they all wore. Everyone was making such a ruckus in the back. He hoped Mokuba wasn't picking up any bad habits from those ingrates. Without any other means of getting off the island Yugi Mutou, Joey Wheeler, and their friends Tea, Bakura and Tristan had all piled into the Kaiba brothers' helicopter just before takeoff. Kaiba had known he and Mokuba should have walked faster. Kaiba was now flying them all home into the sunset. What a laugh. How exactly he had allowed himself to be coerced into all these idiot passengers was beyond his understanding.
Well, not entirely. He was in a very good mood.
Kaiba looked back onto the shrinking island on which stood the shrinking castle, in which Kisara Pegasus resided, now of full body as well as excellent and enthralling mind. Perhaps it was nonsense… but after all of this madness surrounding captured souls, Shadow Realms and Millennium Puzzles, Seto Kaiba felt as though… As though, for the first time since he had lost that initial duel to Yugi, the puzzle of his own heart had clicked into place somewhat… when he had embraced Mokuba at the gate of that accursed castle, and when he had embraced… her. Kaiba had regained the part of himself that Pegasus had accused him of losing the day he ripped the Blue-Eyes in half. His grip tightened on the joystick. A better part.
Kisara.
For the first time since losing that duel Seto Kaiba felt as though he'd fully come out of the comatose state he had fallen into by that window in that house by the water. His mouth quirked at the memory of her, his lips still burning with the sensation.
Something drew his attention, however, and he looked across the helicopter to see the one member of Yugi's party who was not sitting in the back, but had taken up the co-pilot seat next to his own. What was his name again…Bakura? The boy was staring directly at him. It was not a pleasant look. Kaiba did not like it. "Something on your mind?" he mouthed over the helicopter drone, lips curled in a sneer.
"No," the boy, Bakura, mouthed smoothly back without looking away. His hand clamped around something in his pocket. Then, almost as though he'd known what… whom… Seto had been thinking about, Bakura mouthed, "Yours?"
…
In each of the five Books that I have planned there is a part that I cannot wait to write. This is the chapter to which I've been driving all of Book I. Since the beginning it's been, 'Must get to scene where he removes her brace. Must get to the scene where he removes her brace!' I hope the wait has been worth it.