As of today, July 21st of 2009, the second chapter of this story, "To Shoulder the Burden," has been revised. Anybody who has read that chapter before today might want to look at it again. It's not necessary that you do that; the important thing I would ask you to do is this: ignore the final scene of chapter two. Pretend it never happened. The events of Mokuba's fourth kidnapping have unfolded differently, as you will see beginning here, with this chapter. This storyline is going to stretch over the remaining chapters of this first arc. This is the season finale, if you will. This doesn't mean the story is over, though. I'm not done by a long shot. This is a pivotal event in the story.
This first section, "Set the Record," begins shortly after Seto's birthday, with Joey and Tristan telling the story of what happened to Mokuba—and Seto—the fourth time he was kidnapped. Thus, the majority of this storyline is a flashback. Every so many scenes, the date will change. Keep an eye on that. I'll indicate it each time. So, sit back and enjoy the ride. It was a tough storyline to write, that took a long time to figure out, but I think it was worth it. Hopefully, you do as well.
1.
October 29, 2007
"Téa!"
It was probably a law by now, as irrefutable as that of gravity: Yugi Motou would always have the exuberance and enthusiasm (and height) of a child.
It had been a long time since Téa Gardner had been in Domino City. Her studies in New York had her busier than she'd ever been, and she barely even found time to call her friends anymore; instead, she made a point to write a long email every weekend. Usually on Saturday evenings.
But she had finally been able to set aside two weeks to come home, and to say that Yugi was excited to see her would have been a criminal understatement.
He was explosive.
"Yugi!" came Téa's just-as-explosively excited reply, and they hugged each other for the first time in almost a year.
Joey and Tristan, watching from the other side of the room, smirked with light amusement. Yugi hadn't exactly grown much in the time that he and Téa had been apart and, in what had to be an ingrained habit, Téa had instinctively bent low to accommodate him.
When she pulled away from Yugi and found a hug for Joey, too, the blond would have been lying if he'd said he wasn't surprised. Not that he didn't appreciate, and reciprocate, the gesture, but something he had gotten used to over the years was the knowledge that there would always be something of a…well, a rift between them.
He supposed Téa had never fully forgiven Joey or Tristan for having bullied Yugi in his freshman year of high school, and Joey understood—even appreciated—that fact. They had been linked through Yugi, but had never been especially...close.
"How's it goin', Téa?" he asked, deciding that he wasn't going to question good fortune, and chuckled as he took in the sight of her.
The woman that he had always thought of as a girl had gained a fair amount of muscle in her time away, which he noticed quite keenly as he noted the length of her exposed, tanned legs. Quickly, he forced himself to lift his eyes to Téa's face, before she figured out that he had been staring, and noticed that she had allowed her hair to grow a bit longer than usual.
He wouldn't have admitted it (it would have been like hitting on his sister), but...damn.
"Great!" Téa cried happily, not seeing or ignoring Joey's newfound appreciation. "Things are going really well. I have a performance lined up for next month."
"No kiddin'? That's awesome. Gotta film it for us or somethin'. See what all that school's done for ya."
Téa grinned, and looked fondly around at the interior of the shop, and when Tristan finally stood up—he'd caught the hem of his shirt on his chair—Téa hugged him as well. Tristan smiled as he returned the embrace, but it was clear that he wasn't quite awake.
"You guys are looking good," she said. "How's it been going for you all?"
"Not too shabby," Joey said with a grin. "I'm lookin' into buyin' a place up the street, closer to the 'workplace,' ya know. It's small, but it'll work for me. I know the owner. Started savin' up a couple months back."
"Really? Good for you!"
"Grandpa and Professor Hawkins are planning a trip to Egypt soon," Yugi put in, "for old times' sake."
Téa smiled. "I can only imagine what those two will get up to." She glanced at Tristan. "What about you, Tristan? What have you been doing?"
Tristan let out an involuntary yawn. "Uh...nothin', really."
"What's with you?" Joey asked.
"Sorry, Téa," Tristan said, waving a hand in front of himself. "I didn't...didn't get to sleep 'til about three last night."
Téa frowned, worried. "How come?"
Tristan gestured nonsensically. "This whole...college thing. Goin' to Westridge now. And I, uh...ran into Jackass McMoron last night."
"Who?" Téa asked.
"Eh?" added Joey.
"Y'know, Joe. Mohawk. Bracelets. Simple Plan."
Joey's eyes narrowed slightly. "What was he doin'?"
"Dunno. Didn't ask. Guy split, soon's he saw me."
"Simple Plan?" Téa wondered.
"Guy named, uh...Kerns? That it? Matt Kerns? I think so." Joey shrugged, scratching at his chin. "Sleaze-job. Teenage punk, tryna act tough. Y'know, like me. Only stupider."
Téa laughed. "Way to steal my joke, Joey."
"Uh-huh. Well, anyway, Tris'n me, we're keepin' an eye out on this guy. Been homin' in on the wrong target, right? Guy thinks it's cool to mess around with Mokuba."
"Mokuba? As in Kaiba?"
"No," Joey said, frowning, "Mokuba Hawthorne. O' course Kaiba! Yeah, so, anyways...Kaiba kinda hired us, I guess ya could call it, to watch out for 'im."
Téa's eyes hardened. "Kaiba. You guys are...working for Kaiba."
Joey blinked at the suddenly dark, accusatory tone in his friend's voice. "We're, uh...lookin' out for Mokuba, so not exactly, but anyway, we ain't gettin' paid, either, so...it ain't even really work. But why's that matter, anyways? Worse things'n workin' for a rich guy."
Téa stared incredulously. "You...do know what that man did?"
"Well," Joey said flatly, "I know he's buildin' a hospital. Don't think that's whatcher talkin' about, though."
"Tch. Figures. It just figures. Finds a way to ruin everything."
"What's your deal all'a'sudden?"
Téa found one of her bags, reached inside, and produced a newspaper. She thrust it in the blond's direction, scowling angrily now. "This," she snapped. "I wanted to go directly to him about this, but I guess there's no reason."
Joey glanced at the paper.
Seto Kaiba, the seventeen-year-old CEO of the Kaiba Electronic Gaming Corporation, shot and killed a rival business tycoon this evening. The brutal murder, which took place on the front lawn of the victim's home, and the refusal by local law enforcement officials to take action against Mister Kaiba, have been described as the most blatant display of corruption in California's legal history.
Téa looked at her friend after he'd finished reading, expecting him to say something, to react. Clearly he was expected to be shocked, and disgusted, angry and maybe even betrayed. Holy shit, he was probably expected to say. I knew he was a jerk, but I didn't think he'd pull somethin' like this. Somebody oughtta lock the fucker up! He's a monster!
But Joey said none of these things. In fact, he didn't say anything.
He started laughing.
2.
"Gah...I...I, wha...huh...what's so funny?"
Joey drew in a deep breath to calm himself. "Oh…nothin'. Just, ah…don't go to Kaiba 'bout this. He ain't gonna say anything. One thing, Kaiba was eighteen, not seventeen. Mokuba tol' me. And he wasn't on the front lawn, either. It was in the parlor. Saw it myself…sorta. Hell of a shot. You'd a' thought he got trained by the frickin' Marines. Far's I know, he was."
Téa continued to stare at him. "You...you were there?"
"Oh, yeah. I was there, a'right."
Tristan stepped forward. "Lemme see that paper, wouldja?"
He took the paper and read over it. As he did, a frown slowly grew on his face, evolving into a full-on scowl. "This is…just…stupid! They don't have one detail in twenty. You see this, Joe? Don't even mention the sleaze-bucket's name."
Joey took the paper and scanned it. He barked another, humorless laugh. "Dressed up a tabloid in a fancy suit," he said as he shook his head. "This's shoddier'n somethin' you'd find on the back of a napkin. Where'd you get this, Téa?"
"Uh..." Téa blinked, clearly still off balance. "I...just a...one of those dispensers...you know, like the ones outside grocery stores, why? Are you actually saying Kaiba didn't kill somebody?"
"What I'm sayin'," Joey said, tossing the paper away in disgust, "izzat it ain't as simple as 'kill' or 'didn't kill.' There is such a thing as self-defense, butcha wouldn't know it from that thing."
"Tch," Téa said. "I wonder why I don't believe that..."
There was a beat of silence.
Tristan was the only one to see it immediately. Yugi would see it soon enough, but even he didn't understand Joey's moods as well as Tristan, who had seen the blond fight enough times to be able to read him as easily as an LED screen when it came to stuff like this.
Téa didn't see it at all.
I think Kaiba would, Tristan thought idly, and not for the first time over the past year marveled at the similarities between his best friend and the man who had once been at the top of his "guys I'd like to punch in the throat" list. As soon as he thought it, though, he was sure of it.
Kaiba would have known what this was.
Battle fever.
Joey held to that ultimately chauvinistic convention of never striking a woman, but he was coming too close for comfort to breaking that vow. His mouth was tilted up in a smile, but it was about as real as a nine-dollar bill. His right hand twitched spasmodically, and his eyes fought valiantly against the desire to narrow.
"Believe it or don't," the blond said, voice almost—but not quite—choked. "Don't change facts."
You're getting as protective of the guy's reputation as Mokuba, Tristan thought.
He almost wanted to laugh, himself.
"Sorry, Joey," Téa said, and it was in that not-in-the-slightest apologetic tone that said she was saying it simply to preface an inevitable but-you're-wrong argument, "I just don't believe it. I know enough about Kaiba that it just doesn't—"
"You don't know Kaiba from Rockefeller," Tristan felt the urge to cut in, harsher than he'd meant to. "Mokuba would slap you for sayin' that, and I'm disinclined to say he'd be wrong about it. You're not listening…but I guess that's no surprise."
He'd meant to imply that Téa would, of course, disbelieve anything good about Seto Kaiba because he'd never done anything to make her think him capable of such things, but it seemed from the sudden, offended widening of Téa's eyes that she'd taken it another way entirely.
"This is supposed to be a nice day," Yugi said, before Téa even started to ask Tristan how he dared, and the icy tone of his voice reminded all three of them forcefully of Yami, the Fourth Dynasty pharaoh that had once taken up residence in their small friend's mind, "and you're turning it into an argument, Téa."
"I'm turning it—"
"Yes, Téa. You are," Yugi said, and his tone was severely reprimanding.
He, unlike Joey, stopped Téa cold. And Joey thought it was a damn funny prospect that he'd ever thought Yugi Motou needed to be "toughened up." There was more Yami in Yugi's face than there had ever been, and Joey remembered that the Egyptologist by the name of Isis Ishtar had once told him Yugi was the ancient gambler's reincarnation. It didn't surprise him in the slightest.
"Let's play the what-if game, Téa," Yugi said, eyebrows rising slowly. "What if I was walking home with you, and somebody came up behind us and grabbed me? What if this person had a weapon, and I was about to die? What if you had a gun in your backpack? What...would you do?"
You shoulda taken up debate in high school, Tristan mused, fighting the smirk from his face as Téa stared at Yugi with the look of someone who'd just been hit in the stomach with a lead pipe. He glanced at Joey, whose anger—like the heat of a supergiant star—had run its short-lived, blazing course and was beginning to smolder. He was still nowhere resembling calm, but he was nonetheless calmer.
"I...I would..." Téa began, unsure of herself, her own indignant anger wavering and dying as she watched Yugi's unnaturally stern face (with a more forceful memory of Yami than either of the others), "I...would try to...to s-shoot...if I knew...knew h-how..."
Yugi allowed a slight smile onto his face. "Kaiba knows how."
"He did what he had to," Tristan added.
Joey, breathing deeply and quirking an irritated eyebrow, said, "Ready to hear the whole story, Téa?"
3.
"You'll have to be more specific, Mokuba."
Once.
Just once.
Just one time, Mokuba would have liked to see his brother react to a personal attack on his character with more than a cursory, purely analytical glance. Most of him was impressed that Seto refused to let things of this nature bother him, but the rest of him was peeved because it made his anger at things of this nature seem so...shallow.
"This!" Mokuba cried irritably, waving the newspaper clutched in his right hand with a kind of triumphant fury as if it were a defaced flag. "It...it says...you...!"
He couldn't speak.
Seto took the crumpled paper from his brother and glanced at it. He chuckled humorlessly without even a hint of his usual smirk. He said, "Typical. You shouldn't let it bother you, kid. Enough people got it right that this is no more valid than any other political spin. So someone else wants to paint me as a murderer. Let them. This may just help me, in the long run."
Mokuba was so frustrated that he looked ready to cry. He did let out a small, sob-like cough, blinking furiously. "N-Niisama! You...you...!" His voice was strangled, confused, and his arms gave a spasm like he wanted to punch something.
Seto looked over at Mokuba, and something about his face made the younger Kaiba feel a bit—but not much—calmer. Impeccable Niisama, eyes straight forward and as dry as the noontime Mojave, his thin line of a mouth not even a micrometer out of shape. He smiled, suddenly, and reached out his arm to pull his brother into a hug.
"Hey..." he murmured softly, gently, and Mokuba forced himself not to cry even though the urge to was so overwhelming that he had to bite his lip hard enough to bleed in order to do it, and that caused tears of pain, anyway. "It's all right, kiddo. C'mon...don't let this get you worked up. We know what happened."
"And they should, too," Mokuba said, muffled. "I wanna see somebody thank you for once...just once! How come everything you do has to be evil to them? Jerks...stupid jerks...I hate them."
"Oh, now...you don't hate them," Seto said.
"Yeah huh," Mokuba pouted.
Seto's smile widened, and he chuckled. "Mokuba...you thank me. That's enough for me. Ironically enough, so did Wheeler, now that I think of it."
"…Told you he wasn't a total moron."
"I've yet to see conclusive evidence of that. An anomaly of mental aptitude, that's all."
Mokuba laughed, and tears came again.
"Niisama?" he managed after a moment.
Seto's response was a murmuring sound of affirmation that he felt more than he heard.
"Don't ever change...okay?"
4.
September 9, 2006
The problem was complacency.
It was a common trap, of course, one even the most vigilant can fall pray to, and while Mokuba Kaiba was far more vigilant than most ten-year-olds, he was still...ten years old. It would have been a safe assumption to say he never saw it coming, and a second safe assumption would be that he kicked himself because of that any number of times.
He should have seen it coming.
He hadn't yet started talking to Connor Brinkley because he hadn't yet transferred to East Rivers Middle School, and so he walked across the parking lot of Oakwood Elementary alone (well, almost alone), backpack slung over his shoulder, in a good enough mood to actually wave as he glanced at the throng of people pointing and gaping at him, which elicited a collective scream of joy from some of the more excitable set.
They'd learned from previous experience that actually approaching Mokuba was a bad idea (because Seto apparently knew every phone number in Domino City, and children were easy to intimidate), but that didn't stop his fans—who were becoming more and more numerous, the more often he found himself on television—from following him at a distance.
If only they had seen it...they'd have gone ballistic.
And a fangirl stampede would have been rather funny to watch.
But for the moment, he wasn't thinking of anything in particular except, distantly, when Seto would be home. One of his few duties as honorary vice-president of Kaiba-Corp, which he thought of more as a perk, was to test new projects once in the final stages of production. And this day, he was particularly engrossed.
He thought that, had Seto been younger—fifteen, say, when he had first taken over their adoptive father's position—he might have called it a "training program for up-and-coming duelists" (of which the young Kaiba might have considered himself), because whether he liked to admit it or not, Seto had been a kid at fifteen, still holding true to that fanciful egocentricity that gave supreme importance to everything he liked to do.
But now, at eighteen, Seto had grown more and more distant from his once-favored game. In fact, Mokuba had a feeling that his big brother hadn't revised—or even looked at—his dueling deck for at least six months.
"It's an extension of what Crawford was out to do," Seto had said, when he finally showed his brother what he'd cooked up this time. "He wanted Magic & Wizards to be widespread, worldwide, and he's largely succeeded. But there has been a distinct shift, especially so over the past few years, toward fully electronic entertainment. So, to keep the game alive..."
"...You made a videogame version of Magic & Wizards," Mokuba had finished.
"Exactly," Seto had said, when he once might have been offended.
It seemed that, through this new vision of the game, Seto had finally sparked the keen interest in it that he had always hoped Mokuba would have. It was something of an heirloom; it had been passed on. Where Seto had no time—nor inclination—to pick up his cards and head out into the arena anymore, Mokuba had finally seen the magic of it. It had just taken an iteration in his favored realm, videogames, to do it.
Mokuba now played the latest prototype of what had been tentatively called Magic & Wizards: Call of the Millennium, and it held him rapt; he finally understood those few years when Seto had never been seen without his deck in hand—or at least in pocket. The game really was addicting.
So addicting, in fact, that he did not bother to look up as he approached his brother's limousine; he did not notice that the man holding the door open for him was not Travis Copeland (although he did wear the standard-issue badge bearing the Kaiba-Corp logo on the left lapel of his suit jacket), nor did he notice that—once free of the parking lot—the vehicle went in the precise opposite direction of his home.
In fact, he might not have noticed anything, until the man behind the wheel finally spoke, several miles away from the school, and Kaiba Manor:
"...How was school, Little Master?"
He almost answered.
But then he remembered.
Being related to Seto, Mokuba had been called any number of titles, most of which made him uncomfortable. "Mokuba-sama," "Young Master," and "Young Sir" were some of the more common ones, "Bocchama" and "Kaiba-fukushachou" much rarer, but still common enough to remember. Seto's associates, employees, reporters, talk show hosts, members of his fan club (the fact that he even had a fan club was kind of flattering, but mostly just creepy); all used one or several titles and honorifics, as if omitting them would call Seto's wrath upon them. Some of the bitter ones used them sarcastically, and those were slightly better only because it was then that Seto's wrath was called upon them, and Seto had come up with many, many ways to make random people feel like dirt.
He had only heard the very particular "Little Master" from one person.
And suddenly, he knew the voice. He remembered it, and as soon as he remembered it, his game dropped into his lap. He could almost feel the malignant amusement from the driver who was not Travis, and it made him cold. That cold was far from comfortable, but he wrapped it around himself like a blanket, and that feeling that he'd become intimately acquainted with in the last few years of his life settled over him; there was no time for fear. There was no room for fear.
And from that coldness came sudden warmth. This was what separated Mokuba Kaiba from most children; as he snaked his hand into his pocket and pressed and held a button on his phone to turn it off, he thought of it like a stopwatch. He did not allow himself to smirk, but he thought of doing it, and that familiar glint of deep steel that so often surprised people shone in his eyes.
It was the glint of adrenaline.
The game was on.
"...Saruwatari."
END
For those who don't know, Saruwatari is the original, official name for the man Joey called "antenna-head," Pegasus's head flunky at Duelist Kingdom, known in the dub as Kimo, and in the original manga, was Mokuba's personal bodyguard as well. Obviously, he's defected. Also, "fukushachou" is a Japanese title which means "vice president."
I think maybe it's pretty obvious from this chapter, and "Earning an Accolade" for those of you who have read that piece, that I'm not a fan of Téa Gardner (Masaki Anzu). I'm not going to lie. I hate her. She irritates me to no end, and not only because of the "friendship speeches" many fans mock her for, but because I find her to be exceptionally shallow. I will expound on this in later chapters, but I warn you now: it won't be nice. Téa fans tread lightly; I fight for the other side of the war.
