DROWNING
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Kaiba's mouth was dry, but he managed to find the words.
"You're not Mokuba."
He knew right away. It had taken only one sentence to figure it out. He couldn't explain exactly how or why, but Seto Kaiba knew his brother and this was not him.
"Very perceptive, Pharaoh."
It was Mokuba's voice that was echoing physically into his ears but it was almost like there was another booming undercurrent in his head.
"Why are you calling me that? And who the hell are you and what have you done with my brother?!"
The thing wearing Mokuba's face frowned in mock hurt.
"Come now, you don't remember me? I'm offended, especially after all the history we have together."
Kaiba raised a clenched, shaking fist.
"Listen, I don't care who or what you are or what stinking pile of shit you crawled out of, tell me now -…"
He felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned to see Yugi standing next to him, facing Mokuba, eyes narrow.
He shrugged the hand off angrily, but allowed his rival to speak.
"I know why you're calling him Pharaoh."
"What the hell are you talking about Yugi?!" snarled Kaiba. "Stay out of this."
Yugi fixed him with a pointed look. "Look, Kaiba, I know you don't care too much about ancient Egypt, but after we came back from the Memory World, Atem told me it was Seto who succeeded him as Pharaoh. The same Seto that you are the reincarnate of, the same way I am Atem's reincarnate."
"Very perceptive, Yugi," came the booming drawl.
Kaiba's mind was spinning. He opened his mouth to tell Yugi once again to keep his mumbo-jumbo to himself, to stay out of this, but the words didn't come. At this point, after the Orichalcos, the Memory World and Diva, a part of him knew he'd never be able to reject Yugi's words about the supernatural the way he used to.
"So who are you, and what have you done with Mokuba?" demanded Yugi, seemingly taking control of the situation.
"Oh, I haven't done anything with Mokuba. I'm right here, big brother!" the voice from the other end of the call teased mockingly.
Kaiba's face was going pallid.
"No, seriously, he's right here." "Mokuba" raised a finger and put it to his temple. "He's just… unavailable for as long as I'm in control of his body and mind."
"Ok, so that's the second part of the question. Answer the first: who are you?" growled Yugi.
"I am someone who has a debt to settle with the reincarnation of the Pharaoh Seto," Not-Mokuba hissed.
Kaiba finally spoke in a rather monotonic voice. "What have I done to you?"
"Your actions consigned me to a cold, dark oblivion, Pharaoh," spat Not-Mokuba. "I suffered for millennia, unable to fulfill my true purpose. Now that I am free I will have my vengeance. I will say though the irony is not lost on me that your own actions with the Quantum Cube enabled my escape. That doesn't mean your recompense will be any less severe."
"Who are you?" pressed Yugi.
"I will keep the specifics to myself for now," came the nasty reply.
"What do you want from me?" muttered Kaiba slowly. "I'm willing to negotiate with you. Just let my brother go."
"There will be no negotiations," Not-Mokuba pronounced. "You will return to Kaiba Corp, alone. I will emphasize that last part. I have no quarrel with you, Yugi Moto. You may be the reincarnation of the Pharaoh Atem, but Atem played no role in my suffering. The same goes for everyone else listening in on this call. Yes," he chuckled sardonically as Yugi's eyes darted to the sides of the room reflexively. "I have access to all Mokuba's memories. I know the two of you have a little gang of supporters that are likely here as well. I will forgive all your attempts to foil me thus far if you do not interfere further and return Seto Kaiba to me in a timely fashion."
A few heavy footfalls later and Joey entered the camera's view, standing on the other side of Yugi.
"This doesn't concern you, mutt," growled Kaiba. Joey ignored him.
"Listen, you can hide who you are all you want, but what you've told us so far is enough. The Kaiba we know might be a jerk, but I remember the one from ancient Egypt. He was a decent enough guy and if you gotta problem with him, then you're most likely a sonofabitch. Not to mention you've also more or less kidnapped Mokuba… He's a good kid and he's our FRIEND! We're not letting you run lose, no way!"
Not-Mokuba gave a mirthless laugh.
"If little Mokuba is your friend as you say… How will you feel if I do this?"
He stood up from the desk he was seated at, Kaiba's desk, and calmly walked over to the glass panel windows overlooking the city behind him. They extended from the ceiling to just about a eighteen inches above the floor.
"You remember how I asked you to install these large windows in here so that you could get a nice view of the city, big brother?"
He clicked a button and a buzzing noise indicated that one of the giant glass panels had begun to shift.
Kaiba's eyes bulged.
Not-Mokuba turned back to face the camera and was now standing with his back to the open window behind him and the city beneath.
"Stop," growled Kaiba.
Not-Mokuba ignored him and continued to pace backward slowly, until the back of his foot hit the wall under the window. The wall only came up until a little above his calf, so if he leaned back his center of gravity would be out of the window.
"This is familiar, isn't it?" he called. "Mokuba's memories tell me you were willing to throw yourself off the roof of a castle for him. What would you do to prevent the same fate from befalling him?"
Kaiba slammed his fists down onto the table in front of him.
"STOP IT NOW!" he roared. "WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?"
Yugi and Joey both looked paralyzed with shock at the situation. Both due to the utter horrendousness of what Not-Mokuba was doing and also at seeing Kaiba lose his composure this way, the latter of which was honestly not much of a surprise given how much they all knew Mokuba meant to him.
Mai and Pegasus remained in the corner, both aghast but remaining silent and out of the picture. Somehow they doubted Kaiba would tolerate either of them intervening in the call as Yugi and Joey already had.
"I want vengeance, Seto," hissed Not-Mokuba dangerously.
"I'm not the person you think did whatever the hell was done to you," snarled the CEO in response.
"His spirit lives on inside you all the same. I will have my retribution in one way or another."
Not-Mokuba had walked back up to the screen in front of him and raised a shaking fist. His features were marred with an expression that looked really out of place on those of a teenager.
"You have until midnight tomorrow, Pharaoh. Show yourself at the Kaiba Corp HQ."
The screen went black and the room fell silent.
Pegasus quickly rose, poked his head outside the door to confirm something with one of his attendants, and then re-entered.
"The connection was severed," he called with a nod.
Yugi and Joey both took a couple paces to the side away from Kaiba, both looking at him with a mixture of nervousness and concern.
Kaiba simply stared impassively at the black screen for another moment before nodding briskly.
"Pegasus, I won't be needing to hang around your pile of mud any longer," he stated, beginning to make his way to the door.
"Where are you going?" asked Yugi, alarmed.
"Back to Kaiba Corp," growled Kaiba, as if the answer was obvious.
"Hey, hey, hey… NO, rich boy!" shouted Joey, placing a hand on the other man's shoulder.
Kaiba shrugged it off angrily and whirled around to face him. "Don't touch me, Wheeler… Your little dweeb squad is starting to get WAY too familiar…"
"Kaiba, you can't," came Yugi's voice from the front. "I know you're worried about your brother but just think for a moment."
"This doesn't concern you, Yugi!" roared Kaiba, turning back around.
Yugi met his gaze firmly. "It does. You brought us into it. And you know what? It would've concerned us even if you didn't. You can't pretend we haven't been through everything we have through these years."
"Mokuba is my brother. That… thing will kill him if I don't stop him-…"
"I'm not saying we don't do anything, obviously," interrupted Yugi. "Can we just… take a minute? Think things through? You have over thirty-six hours until the deadline he set, whoever he is…"
That seemed to get Kaiba to take a minute and reconsider things.
"On that note, I do think it would be a good idea to try and figure out what exactly is possessing little Mokuba," put in Pegasus. "If you do decide to show your face at Kaiba Corp it would be wise to know what or who we're dealing with here."
"How exactly do you propose to do that?" came the irritable hiss in response.
"It's not exactly rocket science, rich boy," grunted Joey. "I ain't pretendin' that I'm as good with the ancient Egypt stuff as Yugi, but clearly this guy existed in the world inside the Millennium Puzzle… just after we were done there."
"Yes, whoever he is, his grudge is against the Pharaoh Seto, who ruled in Egypt after Atem left," nodded Yugi. "That means if we're going to find any information on him, we're going to have to go back to…"
He trailed off. The memory was clearly still painful for him.
It dawned on Kaiba.
"The excavation site in Kul Elna. The Shrine of the Millennium Stone."
Yugi swallowed, and nodded. "The Tablet of Lost Memories, which we've all seen, basically told the story of Atem's reign as Pharaoh: it depicts the Millennium Puzzle, the three Egyptian Gods and the duel between Atem and his cousin Seto."
Kaiba's eye twitched at that last part but Yugi continued undeterred, "The Tablet was made by Seto to honor his predecessor and their friendship. Who is to say that those who came after Seto didn't put together further hieroglyphics in his honor? Kaiba: you obviously just wanted to excavate the Puzzle pieces, but what did you do with everything else you dug up at the site?"
"I had to bribe an Egyptian government official to get a permit for that excavation," came the muttered response. "He agreed to let me to it if I gave up any other artifacts I found to their Ministry of Antiquities, which was easy to do given I only cared about one thing."
"Well, did you find anything else?"
"I don't know. I had everything excavated scanned digitally against a model of the Millennium Puzzle to determine if it was a Puzzle piece or not. That was all I cared about: everything else probably went to the government as agreed."
"That means we're gonna have to talk to the Egyptian Minister for Antiquities to get a look at everything else that was pulled out of the rubble inside the Shrine," said Yugi thoughtfully, rubbing his finger and thumb against his chin. "That's not going to be as easy as it would have been if you were still in charge of Kaiba Corp, seeing as you already had the connection there-…"
"Well, if that was the case, we wouldn't be here in the first place now would we?" growled Kaiba in response.
"Uh, I actually know the Egyptian Minister for Antiquities," came a small voice from the other side of the room.
Everyone turned in surprise to see that it was coming from Mai.
"You do?!" garbled Joey.
"We all do," she shrugged. "It's Ishizu Ishtar."
"How do you know that?"
"After Battle City… Odion and her came to me and… apologized for what happened to me. She told me she could help with whatever I was going through. I wasn't interested but she still gave me her contact info. I never did end up talking to her but I looked her up while I was dueling tag with Vivian in China, and yeah, she's working for the Egyptian government now."
"Well, that makes this a lot easier," mused Pegasus. "All we need to do is speak to the delightful Ms Ishtar about getting a look at hieroglyphics excavated from the Shrine that in anyway depict the Pharaoh Seto, and then-…"
"No, no, you're not talking me into this!" snarled Kaiba, and raised a trembling fist. "My brother is being held hostage and I'm NOT going to waste time looking at a chicken scratch on some old rocks."
Yugi took a step so he was directly in front of the CEO.
"Kaiba, listen to me. We are not going to hang Mokuba out to dry, obviously. He is our friend… and as hard as it might be for you to accept, so are you in a lot of ways."
Kaiba's eye twitched again at the last part of Yugi's statement, but he remained silent.
"We are going to fix this, but we need a plan. If you or even all of us just march into Kaiba Corp, whatever is possessing Mokuba will just sic his goons on us and you'll wind up in a cell again. We will get your brother back but we can't do that if we don't know anything about what we're dealing with."
Kaiba dropped his fist to his side, but his breathing didn't slow.
"You came to me for help Kaiba, so let us actually do that."
The room stayed silent, the other six eyes focused on the two rivals.
Kaiba finally dropped his head, so that his hair cast a shadow over his eyes. He then gave a barely perceptible nod, just a small vertical movement from his neck muscles, and without any further words strode to the door and left the room.
The silence in the room continued, until it was finally broken by Joey.
"So rich-boy is leaving us to work out the details like we're a bunch of his Kaiba Corp employees?" he complained.
"We don't need him here while we talk to Ishizu. Give him some time alone; he needs it.. He's dealing with a lot," muttered Mai.
Joey turned to look at her. "How do you know that?"
She met his gaze. "I know that because I've been dealing with the same thing he is right now for the last year."
Joey stopped short. "Mai-…"
"Later, Joey. I think we're going to have something else to do right now…" she said flatly, and turned back to look at Pegasus, who was working on the desktop near the front of the room.
"Ah yes, here is Ms Ishtar's cell phone number… Cairo is seven hours behind us, but somehow she strikes me as an early riser."
He rather and deliberately and flamboyantly pressed a single button with his index finger to make the call and the screen changed once again.
Ishizu's familiar olive skinned face appeared to me, looking a bit surprised.
"Yugi Muto?"
"Ishizu, we're sorry to contact you like this; but… we need your help."
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If someone had asked Kaiba to remember the details of his journey back to Pegasus' office, he wouldn't have been able to recount them.
He didn't even quite know why he chose that room as his destination. It was as if his body operated on autopilot, retracing its steps to the last remembered location, while his mind felt like it was consumed by a fever dream, unable to make conscious decisions.
He was standing facing the window, his hand bracing his weight against the wall next to it. He was breathing in short bursts. His heart was pounding so hard it felt like it was about to explode out of his chest, while his skin was flush with heat.
His acknowledgments of these sensations were flitting amongst the maelstrom that was his mind. Amongst the variety of random thoughts that raced through him, there was one that he found himself centering on. One statement of truth, as cold and unforgiving as it was undeniable. Try as he might, he couldn't discard it like the others. It soon became an unfixing axis around which the chaos of his mental process revolved around.
"I did this to Mokuba."
Seto Kaiba had no illusions about the kind of person he was. He had done a few things in the past he wasn't proud of, but he stood by the vast majority of them as justifiable in a world which had been unforgiving to him since childhood. Orphaned at the age of eight, adopted by a monster at twelve, Kaiba had simply always told himself that he would do the unpleasant things that needed to be done for Mokuba to be shielded from the kinds of things he had endured.
He had never thought too deeply about the morality of the actions that led to his meteoric rise because he always saw thing as the two of them, the Kaiba brothers, against the rest of the world. Anything was warranted as long as it protected their interests.
Yet now it seemed like he had crossed a line further than any he had before: and it wasn't for Mokuba. It was for him, and him alone. His personal ambition was what had driven him to use the Quantum Cube in conjunction with the space elevator to try and access the Spirit World and face the Pharaoh again.
Kaiba, for no reason other than his own desires, had meddled with something that evidently carried consequences for such actions, and it was his little brother that had suffered those repercussions. Not only could Kaiba not this time justify what he had done by claiming it was for Mokuba's sake, but the fallout of those deeds had harmed the very person who he normally had always used as a moral cudgel for the rest of his actions.
Had he in the past done inexcusable things that he insisted were justified by the harsh hand life had dealt to his brother and him… but were really not?
Kaiba could start to feel cracks in the foundations of his ethical framework.
He collapsed into an armchair, one hand curled into a fist so tightly his nails might draw blood from his palm, and the other elbow resting on an armrest, his head in his palm.
He felt underwater. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion. Sounds were softer than they should have been, and everything looked hazy. He had no idea how long he had been sitting like that, still breathing rapidly, and he had no idea when Pegasus had entered the room, closed the door, and stood in front of him, placing a hand on his shoulder.
"Kaiba-boy… I understand your agitation right now. We decided to leave you alone for a while, but I think that was the wrong course of action to take. I think you'd benefit from being around someone who has been where you are right now."
Kaiba looked up. The room was coming back into focus, but his mind was still in flux. He had a few random thoughts of anger at the presumptiveness of this ridiculous man to actually touch him physically. How dare the man who had wronged him and his brother in the past so much claim to understand what he was going through-…
"Kaiba-boy, you need to understand this. Your past actions do not need to define you going forward. Sometimes, we need to make the decision to simply let go."
Kaiba's breathing slowed and he was able to focus some more. "You don't know-…"
"Oh, I don't?"
Pegasus took his hand off his Kaiba's shoulder, took a step back, and gave a small, tight smile before pulling the mane of gray hair covering the left side of his face aside, exposing the empty eye socket where once the Millennium Eye had sat.
Kaiba involuntarily flinched a bit at the sight. Under normal circumstances he'd have never allowed himself to show that level of weakness.
Pegasus allowed the hair to fall back into place, and walked over to pour himself a glass of wine. Then he turned to face the window. It was the peak of afternoon, and the Pacific Ocean was lit up by the sparking Sun beating down on the water.
"Believe me, Kaiba-boy, no one has allowed themselves to be defined by the past more than myself. I met a girl named Cecelia when we were both just twelve, and instantly fell in love. Even though we were both children, I knew she was the one for me. I was lucky enough for her to reciprocate my feelings, but was unlucky to lose her to cancer soon after we married at eighteen. She was my whole world, and I didn't allow her death to change that."
He took a sip of wine and continued, "Everything I did, Kaiba-boy, was to somehow bring her back to me. I entered into my business partnership with you because I saw the potential of your hologram technology. I had already discovered the magic of the Millennium Items, and I somehow deluded myself into believing that by combining the two I could create an actualized version of my dead wife."
He smiled ruefully. "This is what an inability to let go of things we cannot change does to the human mind, Kaiba-boy. In theory, my plan seemed sound. A computer generated program that resembled Cecelia, even if it was supposedly brought to life by Shadow magic, would categorically not be the real her. No AI, no matter how advanced, can take the place of human life.
"If I had succeeded, I'd have simply put a band-aid on a wound that I never allowed to truly heal. I'd have also lived in constant fear of the program being tampered with or deleted. It would have been no way to exist for me. Ironically, it was only when I literally lost an Eye," he pointed up to the left side of his head, "that I truly began to see how misguided I had been."
"What are you trying to tell me?" snarled Kaiba.
Pegasus sighed and put the glass down, before turning back to face the other man.
"What I'm trying to tell you, Kaiba-boy, is that I too have done insane things to deal with my inability to cope with loss. Granted, we went about it two very different ways, and for two very different reasons … I tried to bring back the woman I love from the dead, and you tried to go to the dead to duel the man you considered your greatest rival," Pegasus chuckled, before pressing on, "but they both had rather unfortunate impacts on those around us."
"You don't need to tell me your sins, Pegasus," hissed Kaiba. "I remember what you did to Mokuba and I all too well."
Pegasus nodded.
"Exactly. This was the point I am coming to. Kaiba-boy, you don't have to admit it to me, but I'm human as well, so I know the truth. I know you're racked with guilt right now, and I know you're having a hard time with it. What you were experiencing earlier and probably still are, was a really bad panic attack," Pegasus raised a hand as Kaiba began to interrupt again, "I know, because I had those for months on end after I lost the Millennium Eye. I still do, sometimes. I've done terrible things and I have to live with them. You know what helped me? Helping yourself, Yugi-boy and all his friends defeat Dartz and the Orichalcos.
"Pegasus, I swear-…"
"Let me finish, Kaiba-boy, please. After having my soul taken and then restored, I felt like a new man: almost. I felt like I was finally able to use all the resources and power that I had amassed originally only to feed my delusion of bringing my wife back to life, now for good. Yugi-boy, yourself and the others did not seem to resent me much despite suffering at my manic actions."
"I don't care about your life story, Pegasus," Kaiba growled, standing up now, glaring at the other man. "Don't you dare try and psychoanalyze me. You're right, I've let go what you did in the past, but if you keep this up-…"
"Trust me, Kaiba, I'm getting to the point. As you just said yourself, if you were able to look past my transgressions while I was a lunatic, even though we were never even more than business partners, what on Earth makes you think that the little brother who always regarded you as the apple of your eye, would never forgive you for what has happened to him?"
Kaiba stopped short, and instantly went pale. It was as if the words had literally shot him in the brain like a bullet.
Pegasus looked down and smiled sadly. "Kaiba-boy, I get it. Even if you didn't truly admit it to yourself, this was your greatest fear. We will get the boy back, there is no way that the collective wills of everyone present here could fail… but I know the reason for your agitation is that more than anything, you fear the thought of your brother being unwilling to forgive you for the fallout of your actions that fell directly on him."
Kaiba didn't respond. Despite the cool Pacific breeze, his brow was drenched in sweat. He couldn't think, it was as if his mind was frozen. He wanted to roar back and tell Pegasus this was none of his business, but he couldn't. For one, by coming here he had made the whole thing his business, and two… as he rolled the other man's words over in his head, he knew they were true.
Pegasus looked up again. "I'm here to tell you… you don't have to worry about that. Mokuba will not blame you. You didn't intend for this to happen. What you need to do, however, is find a way to move on. The Pharaoh Atem is gone. You need to make peace with that, or else you could be forced to.
"The past is like an anchor. You can choose to let it go and swim to the shore, or you will let it pull you and everyone with you down to the dark depths. You and those close to you will drown under the weight of that anchor, Kaiba-boy. I allowed that anchor to sink my world for far too long, Kaiba-boy, and the effects were very ugly. Don't let that happen to you."
He then made to leave the room. He stopped at the door before ending with, "Ms Ishtar will need some time to sort through the hieroglyphics and artifacts that were excavated; Yugi-boy and I surmised that in the meantime we'd be better off going to Cairo ourselves in order to look at them in person. My jet will be ready soon… I'll send Croquet to let you know when it's time to leave. This room is yours until then, I won't interrupt your thoughts any longer."
With that, he left.
Kaiba somewhat slowly walked to the point that Pegasus had been occupying in front of the window, and mimicking the older man's pose, simply stared out into the ocean in silence.
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Well, it's been a minute. I don't really have an excuse, except this: the alerts have been down for ages. Ergo, the last time I uploaded, barely anyone saw it and reviewed. As a consequence, my motivation to write has tanked.
It's been fixed now (I think) and I hope people actually see this, especially my old fans. I promise you I will finish this. I have a plan and know how the story is going to go. The dueling will begin soon too. Just need to hold myself accountable and write, and reviews are helpful for that.
ChroniclerDL: Glad you liked it, as well as Mai being in the story. I want this story to be the definitive conclusion to the original YuGiOh series and therefore want to tie up ALL the lose ends. Next chapter will be fairly Mai centric.
Batmanuchiha: Well, here is more haha!
Reaver72: Yup, as I said above, Mai was one of the major lose ends of the original series and I couldn't write a conclusion story without addressing her character too. She was dealt a really rough hand from Battle City onwards and deserves to also have the upswing of her character documented. And absolutely about the pace of the story: my worst nightmare is getting bogged down like Nightrise with an insane number of side plots (plus, when I was younger, I thought a higher wordcount was simply better. Now I know that quality quantity).
By the way Reaver, I still can't tell you how much I appreciate having you around still 10+ years later. It's for people like you and a few others that I am going to finish this. That is also a very good idea about updating Nightrise, I will be doing that soon for sure.
7th Librarian: We've talked a bunch about most of these things, but I still do find it very ironic we're both writing stories about the time period you referenced at the same time haha.
Chipmunkfanatic: Oh, I promise you, that is not who it is. I have already done a Return of Yami Marik story (15 years ago albeit lmao), and I am not retreading that. Keep reading, the identity of our enigmatic antagonist will be revealed relatively soon.
