Well, this certainly isn't a week behind schedule. Coughcough.

It's the end of Trebuchet! Except for the epilogues. This has been in planning... for a long time. Anyway, I admit, I'm a new addict to some freeware known as Musescore, and that's been engulfing the time I should have spent trying to think this out better. Oh well. The ending's not supposed to warm the cockles of your heart; it's supposed to make a point. What that point is is up to interpretation, I guess.

I'll thank all the reviewers in the epilogue[s], as I did for Target.

... P.S... it's about time I finished a fanfiction of my own! :D

... P.P.S. I'll just go ahead and dedicate this fic to both Kaiba (born 10-25) and Joey (born 01-25), seeing how this story fits in nicely between their two 30th birthdays, at least in my world. So yeah.

Chapter 13, Part II

X ~ X ~ X

She looked up expectantly, her face beet red, and did not move. It was almost as if she was listening to the remnants of her voice fading as echoes around the room.

Seto Kaiba, still under the effects of the medicine easing him out of his seizure, looked as if he could have another one. His face, unlike his mother's, was pale, and his blue eyes were wide and somewhat vacant. At the very least, he seemed to have understood what she had said.

Mokuba Kaiba was incredulous, skeptical, and completely captivated.

"Well." Noelle broke the silence, crossing her willowy hands and daring to look at her son for the first time. Seto did not know whether she saw him, her son, or her father as she held her gaze. He didn't know what to think at all. Everything had sort of stopped. Not in the 'ah-ha' kind of way. His mind was vacant; he was quite speechless.

Did she know how hard it was to do that?

"Do you?" she asked, rather timidly. "Do you believe me?"

Mokuba coughed his approval, though the question had not been addressed to him. At the instant he did so, however, his eyebrows contorted, as if he suddenly realized something. He then whirled to look at Seto, and very slowly, took a step backwards.

Seto tried to clear his throat, but nothing coherent occurred, so he simply answered.

"Yes," Seto admitted. "There's nothing in your story that doesn't somehow make sense."

Mokuba looked again at his brother, aghast.

"Your story… it fits. I don't really remember that far back… but what I do remember… it seems to work."

Noelle smiled at him, overwhelmingly relieved, and went to ruffle her hair, as if to shake all the nervousness out of it.

"You knew," Mokuba muttered, accusingly, but inoffensively. Seto turned to look at his brother; he had never really considered it before, but it had to be true at this point. Mokuba… the one person he had only really ever cared about.

Was. Not. His. Brother.

"You knew!" Mokuba then shouted, violet eyes flaming, voice betraying the fact he had been smoking a tad too well. "You knew… that I never was related to you!"

"You're his half-brother, Mokuba, you're not strangers," Noelle cut in, unusually cold.

Mokuba froze, and turned to look at her. All at once he exploded.

"It's your fault! You did this intentionally! You're making it worse! God damn it, why would I have ever helped you if I knew this was your only plan!"

Noelle seemed to shudder at the insults, but she was smiling, eyes closed, in a way that struck Kaiba as intentionally psychopathic. Between Mokuba's expression and Noelle's, Seto immediately understood that they had been planning something earlier.

"What's the meaning of this?" he asked.

"You see - " Noelle began.

"THIS BITCH TRICKED ME INTO INVITING HER TO THE WEDDING!" Mokuba roared, finger pointing at her in accusation. "And she won, too! You're just giving me up now!"

"What - ?" started Kaiba. "No, Mokuba, I would never-"

"Of course not, no," Noelle intervened again, but she had played her falsetto smile on him once again. "I'm not trying to shove into your family, I'm showing you I've always been there!"

There was a pause. Mokuba looked between Noelle – who was gazing downwards with a mixture of shame, timidity, and – was it triumph? – and who he had always thought was his pure and only brother, the one he wanted independence from, yes, but never the one he wanted to be completely severed from, in the deepest of the levels of his heart. He seemed lost – not confused, but torn, as if trying madly to concoct a counterargument to both of them at once.

"Screw this!" Mokuba spat, straightening to his full height, eyes venomously darting between the pair. "Seto, have fun with your mom. I'm done. This is over. Whatever we had, it's over. Okay? Are you happy now?"

The door slammed, and only then did Kaiba know Mokuba had been making his way to the hallway the entire time he was belting out his tirade. He then shifted his head to take in his parent – as she was more than likely so, at this rate – and glared at her.

"What did you do?" Kaiba hissed.

"Mokuba and I had made an agreement," Noelle told him. "A business plan, if you will, but more… intimate, as you now know. I wanted to tell you… and I know you loved him… so…"

"You used him?" Kaiba's voice had darkened, and no amount of whatever drug they were pumping in to him could prevent him from connecting all of the dots. "You used him to talk to me, and now…" Kaiba paused, grappling for the word. "I guess you could call us estranged now."

"I'm sorry, honey," Noelle whispered, and at the term of endearment, said with lips curling upwards and an expression filled with compassion and yet with smugness, he, too, snapped.

"You know, Noelle," he murmured – being careful to not return the affection she apparently thought of him – "What did you ever do for me?"

The question seemed to place her off guard, and she began to babble. "I just told you, Seto, I gave birth to you, I raised you as best as I could, I – "

"What part of me do you see yourself in?" he continued aggressively.

"I… well, lots of things- "

"Name three."

"Th-three? Well, they're obvious, I mean, well, um, first, there's um, you know- "

Kaiba moved his own willowy hand out from underneath the sheets, and held it up, hushing her. He then spoke slowly, as if every word needed to be enunciated. And they did.

"You never did anything for me. You are nothing like me. You expect me to abandon Mokuba for you at the drop of a dime. Did you learn anything from doing business with me?"

Her smile faltered, but only slightly. This told him that she was still wearing that fake business grin. The one she never could take off, apparently since her sniveling little childhood back in whatever part of France she had said she came from.

"That is business, dear. People are different once you know them."

"FUCK YOU!" Kaiba shouted, getting red-faced now. "My LIFE is PUBLIC! I am NOTHING but what I DO! Do you know why? I suppose you wouldn't. Let me tell you. EVERYTHING I DO, and EVERYTHING I have ever DONE, and you can bet your skinny ass everything that I will EVER DO, is for MY BROTHER, and NOT for someone I thought was DEAD!"

"But I'm not dead!" Noelle retorted, standing as if she could hide the fact she was beginning to shiver once more. "I lived my life waiting to find you again. You're everything I have left- "

"MOKUBA IS EVERYTHING TO ME!"

"But he doesn't like you anymore!"

"YOU THINK I CARE?" Seto was screeching now, almost fighting to sit up completely if not stand; he felt several negative thoughts towards the IVs that were severely limiting his hands' ability to strangle. "YOU THINK YOU CAN WALTZ IN AND TAKE OVER?"

"NO!" Noelle was shouting back now. "That's never what I thought! I want you to know I love you, and that I'm here, and I'm doing everything I can for you- "

"WHERE THE HELL WERE YOU WHEN I WAS LIVING WITH GOZABURO? WHERE THE HELL WERE YOU WHEN I WAS AT THE ORPHANAGE? FUCKING NOWHERE!"

"I am now, Seto!"

"DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHO THE FUCK GOZABURO IS?"

There was a stunned silence. Noelle looked hurt and thunderstruck. Footsteps – loud – in the hall, and muffled voices. Noelle, who had been glaring just as intently as Seto had until that moment, seemed to break. She bowed her head. He did not care to wonder whether there were tears dripping downwards.

No. No, she didn't.

All at once the door flew open and a squadron of doctors flew in, crowding around the beeping machines surrounding Seto Kaiba and admonishing the woman that had caused his blood pressure to spike so high. And in the flood of white coats, she seemed to vanish, like a sprite, to be just a memory somewhere in the back of his mind, just as she had always been.

Then the medicine they must have just shot into him kicked in, and once more, the world spun into nothingness.

X ~ X ~ X

Usually, Kaiba dreamt only rarely. As he had come to learn over the past several months, usually they were odd, and yet somehow symbolic as to his greater life. This time, though, there was no dream: it was simply him. In his mind. Alone.

But this time, although there were no over-active faucets or scattered shards of glass, there was a memory: as if the time he was in the vast vacuum of his drugged-out psyche should be spent with a dream, one that he had already had.

What was it? What was it?

X ~ X ~ X

Friday, May 6, 2005, 8:40 AM

Tokyo, Japan

It was a normal day – there was nothing to distinguish it from any other in any particular way. Seto Kaiba was already at work; like normal. He had already fished through his email looking for something pertinent to concern himself with, to no avail; like normal. Yoorii had brought him coffee, too – while it had been against his custom while he and Mokuba spoke, now it seemed almost a necessity. It didn't awaken him; it was just a custom. It made him remember, but without the pain.

It made him remember that seventeen years ago he was adopted and everything stemming from his one promise to his little brother blew out of proportion. But it had never gone out of his control. Not once. Not even now, perhaps.

The media had jumped all over the story about Max Pegasus being incarcerated almost as much as they had loved seeing him want to flee the United States, even here in Japan. Kaiba almost felt like thanking the bastard, as the media had never quite picked up on the family feud that had past a little less than a month ago. He hadn't seen Noelle or Mokuba since; both had dropped off the face of the planet.

Not entirely. Mokuba still had e-mail, and Kaiba had a hunch Mokuba read it. Teenage pride, perhaps, was keeping the two from bonding again. Kaiba had his arms open, just waiting. Waiting to be taken away from the workload that he had given himself, just for his brother's sake. Not for his own. Screw the business world; screw the people that were in it.

It sounded deplorable, and yet: screw his mom.

Kaiba had searched viciously for the official birth records of a Seto Hermand in Virginia around the time and date and had not been surprised – although the feeling he had experienced was not at all pleasant – when positive results returned after a bit of perseverance. It was official: Kaiba was, at least officially, not a Japanese but an American, and a Frenchman: everything he had studied to be, he already had been. The irony.

In his heart of hearts, though – the one some liked to call "Seto", in counterpoint to "Kaiba" – he was Kaiba. While Seto may have had the connection back to the sleazy outcast that his mother was, the person he had worked so hard to be – the person he was, damn it – had only one relation: Mokuba. Even if Mokuba would no longer admit it.

The entire situation was flawed, odd, comical – a broken love triangle, battered and beaten by time and happenstance as if thrust forcefully through a cheese grater. And as Kaiba stared that morning for the umpteenth time into his coffee – black, of course, just to buffer his reputation – he suddenly remembered it.

The dream he had during his last seizure.

He remembered being a chess piece – a pawn? a knight? a rook? – and he was playing against the opposing team. He couldn't remember being black or white; he couldn't remember it mattering. All he remembered was that Noelle Hermand was on the other side, and she was using desperate tactics.

The game was brutal. Pieces captured, positions moved, the invisible net of possible strategies broiling in a pot of brainstorming. And then it was down to the nitty-gritty, the make-it-or-break-it moment: would Kaiba's side sacrifice himself? Or would Hermand's? Either way, Kaiba knew, the person who made the critical move would have to lose. There was no other way.

He was in, as the experts deem it, Trébuchet.

Whomever was playing for his side, he had decided to sacrifice his game, just to save Seto's piece. Seto did not lose: he was just a pawn, a queen, or a king.

And towering above him, graciously grinning, was Mokuba, even in the jaws of defeat.

And Seto, blinking as he awakened from the reverie, knew, that situation was simply his mind's way of retelling where he was now. It was all so clear: Mokuba made the sacrifices. He made the sacrifices. Noelle did, too, but she never did them for him. Maybe she did. Maybe it was impossible to find an objective viewpoint on the entire situation. Kaiba loved to be objective.

But Kaiba was in Trébuchet, and the move had already been made.

Resolved, he picked up the small letter on his desk, with its pretty border and writing far too emboldened to suit it naturally. The umpteenth one from his mother. So many sacrifices, so many wrong turns.

It unceremoniously was stuffed in the trash can. And Seto Kaiba, none for the worse, went about his day, confident in the future, resolved about his past.

Just like normal.