Yu-Gi-Oh is the intellectual property of Kazuki Takahashi and Konami, and is being used in this fanfiction for fan purposes only. No infringement or disrespect of the original copyright holders of Yu-Gi-Oh! or its derivative works is intended by this fanfiction.
Warning: This series has references to physical/sexual assault/abuse.
A thank you to my beta, Dark Rabbit.
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Beholden 3: Disclosure
by Animom
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He knew, objectively, that it would take time for the technicians at California KaibaLand to take his personal VR pod off line and ship it to him. They would, of course, precisely follow the instructions he'd written, would back up his settings, remove the sensitive electronic components from the pod body, attach the proper grounding and padding and shielding against the heat and vibration of the freight truck.
He knew all this, and yet the waiting chafed him. He needed the podnow. Not only was he beyond bored—the owners of the house Mokuba had rented had hideous taste in books and movies and music—but knowing that Pegasus was only a few hundred paces away, and that Kurosuke could appear at any time to give him an update, was curdling his days with fury and dread. His nights were hardly better, delivering him to mornings where he woke exhausted, half-strangled by sweat-soaked sheets, no memory of his dreams other than knowing that they had been unpleasant, but also making him ache for physical touch for the first time in years.
Mokuba suggested that he ask Kurosuke to prescribe a mild sedative. "Or call Stanton to write you one," he said. "He knows you're stressed."
"You've been living in America too long," he said. "You think there's a pill for every problem."
"Stop being an ass," Mokuba said lightly. "It'll only be a few more days until we'll be down there to keep you company."
Seto felt an unexpected surge of bitterness and envy toward Mokuba and his happy, uncomplicated life. "Don't inconvenience yourself."
Mokuba didn't answer right away. When he did it, was only to say, "Why don't you code a new VR module? You completely ignore everyone and everything around you when you do that, so it ought to make the time pass more quickly."
Seto frowned, and was just about to ring off when Mokuba added, "Oh, I almost forgot-there's a note by the computer with the information for the video stream."
"Video stream?"
"Of the guest house. I know how much you hate to walk." There was a woman's voice in the background; Mokuba said, "Gotta run. Have fun!"
Seto walked over to the computer and tapped the keyboard. The blank screen bloomed with a grainy picture—from the angle the camera must be on a high shelf—Pegasus, motionless in the bed. A nurse sat reading in a chair next to him.
Seto laughed. So Pegasus's room was being monitored around the clock and broadcast over a private internet channel? it seemed that his little brother didn't trust him: was he really that worried that Seto would go over there with a metal pipe and ...
He clenched his fists.
Hit him until he screamed?
No.
Beat him until he was terrified and bleeding?
No.
Piss on him once hewas broken and humiliated?
He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. Was he ever going to be free of this? This event that had crushed his life and become the hated core and center of his being ever since? When would it be over?
He didn't realize he'd been shouting until the echoes faded.
He swallowed-his throat was raw. He felt sick and weak, which made him furious. Emotions. He hated having them, wished he could cut them out like a tumor, because every time he thought he had everything under complete control, every time he relaxed his guard, they blindsided him, throwing everything into chaos with their churning ... He had to do something, but what he wanted to do—to corner Pegasus and take vengeance—he knew could not do. Not because it was wrong, or because he'd be caught, but because it was pointless. Pegasus' current state, without any memory of who he was or what he had done, made him useless. it would be like haranguing a random stranger.
The longer Seto stared at the computer screen, the more he realized that his only option—other than waiting for Pegasus to recover, an outcome that seemed unlikely-was to interact with a simulacrum in a virtual world. Granted, it wouldn't be as satisfying as the real thing—Ryuken and Tantalus had taught him that—but it was better than nothing.
And, as Mokuba had pointed out, at least it would give him something to do.
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Creating a usable avatar of Pegasus was a challenge, but fortunately he remembered where he'd archived the body and face mapping. As he used logged into the archival section of the KaibaCorporation servers he was surprised to see how much footage there was of his duels—including Blue Eyes vs Toon World from Duelist Kingdom. The first sight of the file name made him pause, but he took a large swig from the bottle he'd found in the liquor cabinet (whiskey? Scotch? it didn't matter) and grimly clicked.
As the duel played on—he muted the sound after a few seconds—he found it far more difficult to look at himself than at Pegasus. Some of it was dread, knowing what was to come; some of it was mild self-reproach at how rude he had been to Yugi back then; but mostly he felt contempt for his younger self, at how oblivious he had been to danger.
The rest of the footage wasn't so harrowing. Press conferences, appearances at various championships. The dedication ceremony for an art museum. A television spot for an animal cruelty organization—a tidbit that Seto found momentarily amusing in its a while, his subject stopped being Pegasus and became just raw data, a source of sound bytes for voice synthesis, of polygons to be texture mapped into a wire-frame, of movement vectors to be controlled by ragdoll physics. He was startled by a voice saying, "Help me change the sheets before you go?" and looked around to see the twilight in the room and beyond the windows.
He switched back to the video feed from the guest house. Shift change for the nurses. They were folding back the sheets. "Let's get you cleaned up," one of them said, presumably to Pegasus.
He turned the computer off, pushed himself up from the desk, and poured himself another drink.
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He made half-hearted attempts to put Pegasus in generic surroundings, but in the end he did what he had wanted to do from the start: use the bizarre construction that Mokuba had dubbed the Freaky Zoo house. He'd understood at once what the original owner might have used it for, and for his purposes … well, for his purposes it seemed a reasonable choice.
He sketched it in quickly; really, a glass-fronted box was hardly deserving of the term architecture. As he added furniture—no beds, no chairs, just a sink in the back corner and a long steel table in the center of the room—he felt a queasy excitement.
You'll be in my world now, Crawford, he thought. And you're not going to like my rules.
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He apparenetly drank enough alcohol that he fell asleep on the couch. When he woke it was to morning light, a dry mouth, and the noise of phone and doorbells announcing the arrival of the VR pod.
He had them set it up in the master suite—which was, he had been surprised to discover, actually outfitted as a huge safe room—and repressed his impatient excitement as the tech conducted the connection they had gone he locked himself in the suite and stepped into the pod, settling himself in with a surprising mix of anticipation and reluctance. The eagerness he could understand—it was always enjoyable to see the results of new code—but the reluctance was less explainable. Yes, he was about to encounter the Pegasus of his youth again, but this time Pegasus would be the puppet.
Seto phased in inside the main house. He'd only seen the need to re-create a single room inside the cliff, the "viewing" room. A single chair faced the middle of three small round porthole windows bored through the rock. He walked to the chair and sat down, bringing the empty guest house outside into view.
He exhaled. Time for the trigger phrase. "Toon World."
The door in the back wall of the guest house opened.
Even though he had coded it, even though he knew it wasn't real, even though he was in complete control of the simulation, the sight of Pegasus—flanked by an entourage of five men in dark suits—caused a stab of fear.
He gripped the arms of the chair. He had assigned the animations in this program to Millie, knowing that in her usual thorough way the AI would investigate each of the phrases on the list and create what was required. All he had to do was say the word, and the dark men would hold Pegasus down, beat him, strip him, shove things inside him ...
But he couldn't do it. Even though the scenario had played out over and over in half-remembered dreams and vague fantasies, even though his rage demand to see Pegasus be broken and bleeding and helpless, he couldn't bring himself to take the next step in the sequence.
Gozaburo was right, he thought.I am weak. A worthless imitation of a man.
He pushed himself up from the virtual chair and rested his forehead on the virtual window, squinting against the virtual glare at the six figures in the guest house. "Death."
"Not yours, I hope. I like having you around."
He turned around. An image of Mokuba stepped from the shadows at the back of the room. "End program," he said, annoyed with his own sloppiness: clearly, he'd copied unnecessary avatar modules. "End program!" he said again.
"Seto, I'm not software," the Mokuba said. "I'm a pod in New York." He walked to the window, looked at the motionless figures of Pegasus and the Big Five, then turned. "I got a call telling me you'd locked yourself in the safe room with the VR pod. People were concerned."
"Which people?" Seto demanded, though he suspected it had been Kurosuke.
Mokuba didn't answer. "I want to know what happened between you and Pegasus," he said. "The truth, not the evasive bullshit you've been feeding me."
Seto turned back to the window, leaned his face against the stone wall.
"I know there's something," Mokuba said quietly. "Please, Seto. Talk to me."
Telling Mokuba would be absolutely irrevocable. He knew this, and yet he was, at that moment, so very tired of huddling. "After I was defeated, he didn't send me to the dungeon. He sent me to the kitchen." He stopped, and listened, and then almost laughed, because of course he wasn't going to hear Mokuba holding his breath, because avatars didn't have breath to hold. "He brought the Big Five to see me, and they ..." He wondered suddenly if customers might buy the option for giving their VR avatars the option to shed tears if the player's body was doing so.
"They did something to you." Mokuba said carefully.
Seto nodded.
"Physical or ... sexual?"
"Classifying such actions is difficult. It's a matter of definition," he said, his words seeming to come from someone else."Denotation and connotation. One's a subset of the other."
"Is this why—" Mokuba started to ask.
"I had Millie install the latest ragdoll physics engine," Seto said. "Optimized realism." He shook his head. "I thought it would help me get back at him."
There was silence, but then Mokuba's avatar came into view. "Why didn't you tell me?"
Seto couldn't stand to meet the eyes of even a virtual representation of his brother, and so bowed his head to look at the dark floor. "You ... you'd never—"
Mokuba made an exasperated sound. "You thought I'd be disgusted and wouldn't want to be around you? About something that was completely out of your control?And people thinkyou got all the brains in the family." The avatar's voice was thick, as if it was crying. "Seto, you idiot, I love you." Mokuba stepped close, hugged him. "You're the most important person in the world to me. I care about what happens to you. I hate seeing youmiserable."
Seto forced himself not to twist away and end the program right then.
"It was a probably a good call not to tell me back then," Mokuba continued, finally letting go. "It's not something a twelve-year old can handle. Even a Kaiba. But I'm glad you felt like you could tell me now." He put his hand on Seto's shoulder. "What you just did—telling me about it—I can't imagine how tough this is for you."
"It ... it's a relief to have it out." He wanted the conversation to stop, but knowing Mokuba's tenacity the only thing he could do was to let it run out. Channel it into another topic. "You don't seem surprised. How long have you known?"
"I didn't know. Well, I didn't know for sure. A few years ago there was a television show about … someone who'd been … who had that happen to them. The more I thought about it, it was an explanation for some things about you that have never made sense."
"Such as?"
"Such as why you've stayed in touch with Kurosuke all these years. Or Jounouchi."
Seto half laughed. "There is no logical explanation for Jounouchi." Seto glanced up, then looked away. "What do you mean, he doesn't make sense?"
Mokuba thought for a minute. "When he and Honda found me in Brazil, I was surprised to find out that he'd been living with you." Mokuba winced. "And when he moved out right after I got back, I figured I'd somehow broken the two of you up. I've always felt guilty about that."
"Don't," Seto said. "There was nothing to break up."
"Oh, I know. He joked a lot that you let him live with you rent-free because you were too stingy to hire a maid," Mokuba said, "but he's a shitty poker player. I always got the impression there were things he was holding back. Things about the two of you."
Seto had a brief surge of gratitude. "If there was, it's all far in the past."
"Well, okay," Mokuba said. "But if there's ever anything you want to talk about I'm here to listen. You know that, right?"
"Of course." He'd never take Mokuba up on this offer, of course, but he knew how much his brother liked to feel needed.
"I hope the Pegasus' cancer treatment works," Mokuba said unexpectedly.
"Why?" Seto was finally able to look him in the eye.
"So that you can confront him," Mokuba said. "Everything I've read says that you need to do that to," he paused, "to move on with your life. But right now that's impossible, with him being practically comatose."
Comatose. "Consciousness is no obstacle to a Kaiba. Or death, for that matter," Seto said. Why had he not thought of this sooner?
"I don't—oh, I see! Put him in a pod and interact with him in VR?" Mokuba's avatar then looked startled. "Or do you mean upload his mind to a computer? Like Gozaburo did for Noa?"
"Upload." Mokuba's emotions, even without the visual clues of the virtual avatar, were easy to deduce. He still mourned the egotistic, murderous "brother" they'd only ever known through a VR world, a grief that Seto had never been able to understand, but he allowed Mokuba his secret obsession. "Your mementos will be useful." When guilt flashed across Mokuba's face Seto added, "I know you recovered most of Gozaburo's research on the technique."Including those I came across before you did and re-buried for you to find.
"Will it work?"
Seto shrugged. "Twenty years ago, doing a complete transfer using the primitive technology Gozaburo had then? It's a miracle he was successful." Although, I'd hardly call such a deeply flawed result a success. "But now, for me, with a subject like Pegasus? It's trivial."
Nodding, Mokuba said, "And once he's saved to disk it'll let us meet with him when you're ready."
Seto had been momentarily relieved that the conversation had so easily been diverted, but that "us" was worrisome. While telling Mokuba didn't seem to have resulted in the complete disaster he'd been dreading—not yet, at least—he had had his fill of sharing.
He intended to deal with Pegasus on his own.
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~ to be continued ~
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Author's notes will be posted at LiveJournal and Dreamwidth when the story is complete; for now, here's the playlist I used every time I sat down to work on this chapter:
Samuel Barber, "Adagio for Strings, Op. 11"
Harold Budd, "Dark Star" and "Abandoned Cities" from Abandoned Cities
Brian Eno,Neroli
Philip Glass, Glassworks 6 - closing, from Glassworks
Jon Hassell, "Brussels" from The Surgeon of the Night Sky Restores Dead things by the Power of Sound
Susumu Hirasawa, "Murder" from the Berserk OST
Arvo Part, "Tabula Rasa Part 4: Silentium"
Erik Satie, "Gnossienne No. 1"
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(04) 14 April 2013