30. Fidelity – Regina Spektor
Isis had never met anyone outside her own family who could sway her beliefs the way Seto Kaiba did. Malik's fall into darkness, her father's cruelty and her brothers' twisted devotion to him and each other – these things shocked and dismayed her, turned her briefly into a wailing ball of grief for a man who never actually loved her, and dried up all her tears in her resolve to save what remained of her family. She was shaken by what occurred, but the Ishtar family were tomb keepers and so already removed from what was normal for other people.
Seto Kaiba was not a tomb keeper. He didn't even believe in the legend of the Nameless Pharaoh when faced with the proof of his stone tablet, and yet he managed to change everything for Isis. Through him, she learned that the future truly isn't preordained, and that it is within people to break free from destiny and write their own stories. For too long she'd been bound by thoughts of fate, entrapped by the tomb keeper way of thinking, so that she actually believed there was one ultimate destiny for everyone.
Seto Kaiba rejected his destiny, and when he did he shattered Isis's expectations of the world – and rebuilt them in the same instant.
Malik really can be saved.
He can be brought home.
He can be the little brother I remember again, not the monster he's become.
I don't have to be alone for the rest of my life.
She wasn't technically alone. She had her job and her colleagues, who respected and admired her, but behind closed doors she felt more isolated than she had when locked underground as a child. She'd taught herself to be self-contained, so as not to give away the fate of her youngest brother and the threat he posed. Isis kept her worries inside, icing over her heart to lock them in – out of shame? Regret? Embarrassment that she couldn't prevent his slide into evil? – and isolating herself in the process. The phrase 'alone in a crowd' seemed coined for her personal use.
That is, until Seto Kaiba defeated her in a duel, and for the first time in years Isis felt a connection with someone. He turned away from her, disparaged her, threw her words back in her face, but for a second he'd felt it too. She'd seen it in his eyes – cold, blue and hard like hers when she looked in the mirror each morning. He knew he'd keep rejecting the fates laid out for him until he found the one he wanted. Raised in the modern world, where the supernatural was neglected ad left to rot, untapped, even in the gifted, Seto Kaiba had still managed to do what generations of Ishtars could not.
He had made a choice when there was none to be made, and he had chosen another path.
Could Isis do the same?
I don't have to be alone. She watched him leave, coattails flying. And neither do you, Seto Kaiba.
It was what she said to him months later at a formal Kaiba Corp charity function, when she slid up beside him and he refused to acknowledge that she'd managed to catch him by surprise.
"Everybody's alone in the end, Ishtar," he snapped, and then noticed the reporters swarming around. "Miss Ishtar."
"Is that their fate, in your opinion?" she asked slyly.
He narrowed his eyes at her, low voice dripping with sarcasm. "Cute. And for your information, I'm not alone. I have Mokuba."
She stared at him, and he stared back just as hard, each waiting for the other to look away first.
"I have Malik," she said softly. "And Rishid. But in a way, I am still alone. And in a way, so are you."
He curled his lip, but she saw the brief spark in his eyes at her words – doused before it had time to catch, but still there for an instant. Only a creature with total free will could do what he'd done when he defied fate. He may not have liked to acknowledge all parts of it, but he was still human under his veneer of perfection.
"Drivel," he muttered, once more leaving her to watch his departing coattails, but Isis just smiled.
He had looked away first.
She followed him like a moth determined to burn itself up in the blue flicker at the very heart of a flame.