WhiteAsukalover: Yeah, and Mokuba's not one to get angry. Um, the 'I never told you' speech itself wasn't in Captivity, but basically everything he mentioned in his speech and said that happened was in Captivity. But, hey, thanks! I'm glad you liked it!

MythCreatorWriter: Aw, darn! I feel like every time you're about to cry something stops you! Darn, I hope this makes you cry(that sounds so cruel, but you know what I mean, right?) Yeah, I like the surrounding too, I picked this sort of all blank/white place so that nothing would be there to distract them and the characters would really have to interact for each other for the first time, face to face, when they really confront each other's issues. I also wonder if you like the fact that there is a glass wall in between them because it sort of represents the whole "so close, but they'll never touch" sort of thing that's going on. I'm sorry to say that what he does is not much different from the show, but how I go about it/present it makes it interesting(kind of like Captivity as a whole, just from Seto's POV or story telling powers) The song is fantastic, you should definitely get it. Thanks again for the review!

Chapter 24: The Truth Will Set You Free

-M-

"So…" I began after waiting patiently for a long time. I was sure Seto was nervous and I didn't want him to rush, but he had left me hanging with a story I had wanted to hear for a while now. I heard him sigh and it got awkward again. I thought this talk would never begin…

"Alright… I'm going to tell you, but… try not to interrupt, okay? I can only say this once and you know how hard this is for me to do…" I wanted to respond to him by saying, 'What? You're finding it hard to talk to your only brother? How did that happen?' but he didn't want to be interrupted and I wanted to respect him for that. He took in another glorious breath and began.

"It all started after Yugi beat me." I wanted to give a frustrated sigh but didn't. The thing was; I had already heard this sob story before! Surely Seto wasn't intending on making me sit through another angry rant of his about how it couldn't have been possible that Yugi had beaten him, how it was improbable that Seto lost to an amateur like him. But something in his voice told me this wouldn't be the same story.

"I guess…" Seto paused, "I guess that's where it all began, really. I'm not going to lie; I was… a terrible, terrible person, back then. I was greedy and cruel, willing to do anything for power. I lost sight of everything that use to mean the most to me, and certainly everything I had wanted to accomplish after I had gained my title as CEO of Kaiba Corp.

"But back then… I didn't know that. I was so consumed by my own selfish goals, I was never really able to look in the mirror and see what I had become. I didn't realize it then, but when I looked in the mirror, I would see Gozaburo's smug face looking right back at me. I hated the man, but I wasn't aware I had become him.

"After Yugi beat me, everything that had consumed me had suddenly disappeared. It was like I had been blind, but now I could see clearly. Only the strange thing was, when I looked in the mirror, I didn't see Gozaburo, I didn't see my reflection, I didn't see anyone; just one confused and pathless man.

"For the first time in my life, reality had really hit me, and I realized that I didn't know who I was. I couldn't look at my work the same way; I couldn't look at my dueling deck the same way, hell I couldn't even look at you the same way." I became tense as my brother had directed his speech towards me, but remained silent.

"I was kept up for hours in the night, not because of the nightmares, not because of work, but because… I had no idea what I was doing there. I felt like I was trapped in someone else's home, in someone else's life. Mokuba-" Seto had stopped himself in mid-sentence before continuing on, "I didn't realize it then and you probably don't know it now, but… I was raised to be someone else. That was the only explanation for this strange wake-up call.

"That was why I had to leave. I felt like I had been living in someone else's shoes for so long, I had completely lost sight of who I was or what I even wanted anymore. Nothing made sense." I still wasn't pleased. This talk had given me great insight, but it wasn't exactly what I wanted to hear. Not to mention I was waiting for him to tell me the whole story in that he would tell me what he had been doing while I was kidnapped.

"So where did you go?" I asked with a slightly sarcastic manner, hoping to speed things up.

"Well, for a while I just wandered. I literally hopped in a car one day and just drove away in a random direction. Halfway through the day I got the idea to visit my hidden lab off the coast of Japan and study duel simulations to try and understand how I had lost. It sounds stupid, I'm sure, but even in the midst of my crisis, I still seemed to fall back on the one thing that always calmed me down, even as a kid. And that was duel monsters.

"I had this bizarre idea that…" Seto chuckled to himself quietly, "If I could figure out how in the world Yugi had beaten me, maybe I would be able to figure out who I was again. I'm not sure what the logic was in that, but that was what I did for many weeks on end. I worked tediously, day in and day out, programming a holographic devise which would later be known as a duel disk, while still trying to understand how Yugi could've beaten me under such circumstances.

"After countless computer simulations, probability scenarios, and quantum analyses, I had finally come to a conclusion that went against everything I had been raised to believe. Although I had the upper hand through-out the entire duel, although it was clear I possessed the most power, Yugi had something I didn't have. And that was the motivation, the heart. Yugi was fighting for something that was worth more than just winning, he was fighting for his Grandpa, while I was simply dueling to destroy and humiliate him.

"It was then that I completed the Duel Disks that I would then use to have a re-match with Yugi, no matter where we were. I was sure that now that I had learned what it took to be a great duelist, I would surely be able to win over him. But just as I had, Pegasus had sent out a couple of his goons to stop me. I didn't have much time, they both had guns, and I had to get out of there. In order to stay alive, I had to-"

"Wait!"

"Um, yes?" I couldn't believe this.

"They had GUNS?!" I exclaimed with total shock.

"Yes Mokuba, they had guns. You do realize that Pegasus wanted to kill me in order to take over my company? It was the reason he kidnapped you to begin with."

"But how in the world did you get away?"

"I did what I could on the fly. They fired their guns at me, but I was able to deflect their bullets with my briefcase. I kicked them down using my office chair and did the next best thing I could do—dive out the window." I shot forward and turned my head.

"You dove out a window?! Where did you land?!"

"I just barely caught onto the side of a cliff. It probably the reason Pegasus's goons didn't shoot at me, they must've thought I had fallen to my death." My eyes widened. I couldn't believe it. My brother was a natural born James Bond! My emotional side tried to take hold of my rational side, but I couldn't help it. That was just plain cool. My brother had jumped through a window and survived by hanging onto the side of a cliff while holding a briefcase! It was just too good to be true.

"Then what happened?! And how did you manage to climb up the side of a cliff with a briefcase?"

"To this day, I haven't a clue how that worked out. But it did. Then some alternative rock music started playing in the back ground and I had managed to make my way back to the Kaiba Mansion. I snuck in through the back way to go into my under ground computer lab, which is when I found out about you being kidnapped and began figuring out Pegasus's sinister plan.

"I was able to hack into Pegasus's data base and then tinker with the duel that had currently been going on between some fake Seto Kaiba and Yugi." My eyes widened and I got to my feet.

"I remember him! He was that weird clown thing!" Seto got up and turned towards me.

"Wait, what? A clown thing?"

"Uh… never mind, it doesn't matter. Then what did you do?" It was strange; hearing all of this for the first time after so much time had passed since it had all happened. It was reliving the past but from a different perspective. It was cool, and it seemed to explain a lot of the things that were going on underneath it all. My anger seemed to vanish slowly as Seto continued to reveal his own battles he faced at Duelist Kingdom.

"After that, I didn't waste a second more. I flew my helicopter to the island itself where," Seto sighed, "I unfortunately ran into Yugi. The good thing was I got my deck from him, and I don't really want to explain the annoying thing that happened afterwards. But anyway, so as I was making my way towards the castle, when Kemo attempts to attack me out of nowhere with a gun-"

"WAIT, he had a gun too!?"

"Yes Mokuba, how are you not getting this? Didn't you figure Pegasus was a violent and sadistic demon after what he did to you? Now imagine what he probably wanted done to me, well, besides taking my life." I hadn't thought of it that way. In fact, I didn't think much of the danger my brother was in at all. That time spent in the dungeon after getting the snot beaten out of me, well, it's somewhat reasonable I hadn't been able to think of what Pegasus might do to Seto. But still, it was a scary thought.

In a way, Seto coming to Duelist Kingdom was probably what Pegasus wanted him to do, it was a trap. Seto could've lost his life… he must've known this too.

"So I got Kemo to lead me to where you were, but then that bastard sent off the alarms halfway through the tunnels to the dungeon. That was when I got to you, but not long before…" Seto looked away from me. We were now standing apart from each other, face to face. "Pegasus… he sent you to the Shadow Realm. And then he said the only way to get you back was to duel him, but he wouldn't let me until I defeated Yugi in our rematch and gained ten star chips."

My eyes widened for a third time. Uh oh. I knew what that meant. I knew what any face off against Yugi meant. It would always lead to trouble.

"What… well, I mean…" It was hard to find the right words to say this, but I knew I had to formulate them somehow, "So how did it turn out?" Seto turned back towards me, but he didn't look happy doing so.

"I won." I gasped. I was about to congratulate him on his victory over Yugi, when he continued, "But it wasn't a fair game." I cocked my head to the side.

"Did you… cheat?" It was an odd thing to suggest to my brother, Seto Kaiba, the one man on earth that would give his life rather than give away the honor of playing a fair duel. Seto was very hard on sticking by the rules, cheating just wasn't something he did. Only in the most desperate of situations… Seto sighed.

"I threatened my own life, and Yugi forfeited." I furrowed my brow.

"Nii-sama…" Seto placed his fist on the glass and leaned forward as he looked down.

"I would've given anything to save you, Mokuba. And I mean it, anything. Doing what I did in that duel was despicable for me, and you know that because you understand how strongly I disagree with cheating. But this was different, this had to be done. I had to save you." I was in… shock. My brother had broken the rules of the duel, not only that, but risked his very life, to save me. It was crazy because… probably while this was going on, I was in the Shadow Realm… hating him. I cringed with guilt.

"Because I was able to beat Yugi and gain access into the castle, I faced off against the very man that had caused all of that trouble, Pegasus. But it wasn't easy; he had some sort of method of knowing my very moves and attacks. This was what caused my downfall, and made me lose the duel," Seto continued to not look me in the eye, he was too ashamed. This time the pain was quite evident on his face. "I had never felt so… unworthy. I had lost the duel, lost my only chance to save you, and even lost my soul after that. But I didn't even care about that or being sent to wherever I had gone, because failing you was a more painful thing to live with, I felt I deserved it for letting you down."

"But Nii-sama! You didn't deserve it; you didn't deserve any of that! Pegasus had cheated; you would've won if he hadn't. I know you would've. Why were you so hard on yourself then? Weren't you angrier about what Pegasus did?" Seto looked up.

"I was angry at myself for letting you down. With or without Pegasus cheating, I should've been able to win, but I didn't." Seto sounded frustrated, but his responses were answering my questions, and it just seemed out of character that he hadn't been royally pissed about Pegasus cheating. Kind of like how he wasn't mad about Noah cheating, either. It just didn't make sense.

"But why are you saying that? Why do you beat yourself up so much?"

"BECAUSE I'M SUPPOSED TO PROTECT YOU," Seto yelled, slamming his fist onto the glass, "Because you're my brother, and it's my responsibility to look out for you. I will admit, yes, I do get angry easily at my employees when they fall short of their duties, but when I fail to do my job, the one I've carried all through-out my life even before I knew Kaiba Corp. existed, there's no excuses. I can't let myself off the hook for that.

"Mokuba, when Mom and Dad died… I made a promise to myself, to be the parent you needed, and to help you survive. So far… well," Seto let his fist slide down from the glass to his side, "I haven't been able to do that. But I promise you with my life, that we're going to get out of here, that I'm going to get you home, and that you'll be safe and sound." It was quiet, very quiet. But I still had something to say myself, hopefully something that would make Seto feel better about himself and our situation.

"Nii-sama, please don't treat yourself like this. Remember, we're in this together. And even though you're the older brother, that doesn't mean that I don't have a job of my own to look out for you. You don't have to carry all the burdens of the world… I can help you. We can carry the load together, like any other family would." I placed my hand on the glass in front of me, looking at my brother. "Are you with me?"

Seto stood there, motionless, as he was staring at my hand. I knew he was worried about what would happen, like he always did. Although my brother was known to act fearless, he was actually very afraid of many things. But he looked at me and he smiled, he knew that together we would make it through, just as we had made it through all those many times before. He placed his hand on the glass exactly where my hand was and looked up.

"I'm with you till the very end, Mokuba." We stood there apart from one another, smiling with the promise that had been made and would be kept. Suddenly the sound of cracking could be heard. I looked down and saw that giant cracks in the glass wall between us began to branch out from where our hands where on the glass, glowing with a bright, white light. The ground underneath us began to shake.

"Woah, what's going on?" I began to lose my balance. Out of nowhere, the glass wall between us tumbled and shattered onto the ground. A giant hole seemed to be forming under us, like the one that had brought us here from the first place. I looked up and saw my brother not to far off and lunged towards him.

"Mokuba!" Seto stretched out his hand, much like before after Noah had obliterated his Blue-Eyes.

"NII-SAMA!" I leapt forward, my hand reaching far enough to lock onto his just as we began to fall into the black, swirling vortex below. I could feel my brother pull me in, his arms wrapping tight around me. I closed my eyes shut and prayed that whatever happened next wouldn't be enough to kill us.

Everything was different. This time everything went black.

A/N: La la la, oh hey, I didn't see you there. How's it going? So, I had a lot of ways I could've formatted this chapter, but I decided to keep it the way that I had because it seemed to fit best. I know I rushed a little with some parts, but other parts I think I really explained well. In other words, I was quite pleased with this chapter. I know the past two chapters have been from Mokuba's POV but that was to make up for all the dueling that was done in Seto's POV. But with the next chapter, I'll probably go back to alternating between the two brothers. Although this seems like the climatic resolution, if you know the Noah Arc well enough, there's more where that came from and a lot more original scenes to present to you! So enjoy and thanks for reading!