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 is intended by this fanfiction.

As always, grateful thanks to my beta Dark Rabbit.

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Beholden, Chapter 6: Confrontations

by Animom

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Pegasus was not in the studio, but it seemed he'd been busy.

The portrait Pegasus had painted on Kaiba's previous visit been placed so that it faced the door. Behind it, three more easels had been set up.

"That's different," Mokuba said, eying the portrait's bright red hair and dark blue-gray skin.

"That's the way Kaiba looked before," Jounouchi said as they walked around to the other paintings.

The first easel held a small canvas covered with overlapping shapes of red and brown.

"I hope he's not back to painting with bodily fluids," Mokuba said.

"Body fluids?" Jounouchi said. "That's goin' overboard with the realism."

The next picture was surrealistic, even grotesque: a filthy animal-headed man, his naked body covered with sores and bleeding lash-marks, crouched in a cage, pulling at his furred genitals..

"That's ... geez, who'd want that over their fireplace?" Jounouchi shook his head.

The last easel held what seemed to be a second portrait of Kaiba's previous avatar, but now stylized and distorted into a bald androgyne. The angular features had been delineated in red, and the shadows on the elongated neck were a rusty reddish-brown the color of dried blood.

"He works fast," Mokuba said. "But where is he?"

"The only other space defined in the program is the dining hall downstairs."

As they got in the elevator, Mokuba asked, "Which floor?"

Seto looked at him, then saw: although he'd only programmed two—the art studio and the dining hall—there were now three buttons. It could have been a glitch, but more likely Pegasus was learning how to expand the virtual space by drawing on memories.

"Down one," Seto said. Whatever Pegasus had lurking in the basement could wait.

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As the elevator doors opened they heard faint laughter.

"He's got visitors?" Jounouchi said.

"Unlikely he has enough control of the environment to create animated figures yet," Seto said as they started down the hall.

"Yet? What do you mean, yet?" Jounouchi asked. There was an edge of nervous concern that recalled the jumpy teenager he'd been. "Is he gonna try to kill us? Like Noa did?"

"Immaterial," Seto said. "I can end the program at any time."

Pegasus sat at the table in the dining hall—his usual place near the mirror—reading a book. On the table was a bottle, a tray of cheese, and a stack of Funny Rabbit comics. As he turned to face them Seto saw that his ability to manipulate the environment had allowed him to modify his appearance: he now looked as he had at Duelist Kingdom, down to the Millennium Eye.

Pegasus set his book down. "Well, this is a surprise. I was hoping for that intriguing boy from earlier. He had such presence." He smiled, then let it fade to a baleful glare. "Really, Kaiba-boy, did you think a simple color inversion would fool me? I can even guess what you used as a color reference—a picture from that ceremony that had the key lights with the hideous gels that made your hair look green. Am I right? Tell me I'm right!"

"You knew it was me."

"Of course I knew it was you," Pegasus snapped. "Just as I know you've taken what's left of me and crammed it into one of your virtual spaces, the way Gozaburo did to his beloved son Noa." He took a Funny Rabbit from the stack, turned to the first page. "Preserved for all time. I'm touched."

"I did it because I have things to say to you." Seto said, folding his arms.

"Yes, I noted the trio of serious faces," Pegasus said. "Am I in trouble?" He turned the page.

Jounouchi made a tch of disgust.

"You," Pegasus said, giving Jounouchi an appraising sideways look, "aren't you that scrappy little fellow with the blind sister who took down Howard and his noisy machines at my tournament?"

Jounouchi folded his arms and shrugged.

"I understand you've been keeping busy doing carpentry and sailing in Australia." It was clear that this comment was meant to let them know that he'd kept track of their movements. "Manual labor certainly has paid you handsome dividends. It's no wonder Kaiba-boy hired you to be his ... muscle." His tone, as usual, was slick with innuendo. "And how is your dear sister?" he asked. "Does she still see everything clearly?"

"None of your business," Jounouchi muttered.

"Off-topic," Mokuba said just as quietly.

"I'm here as Kaiba's friend," Jounouchi said firmly, "but feel free to keep thinking of me as a bodyguard. Who ain't gonna let you get away with your usual shit."

"Well, aren't you thuggish," Pegasus said, chuckling. "Your taste in friends certainly has changed, Seto."

"Thanks to you."

"Me? Really?" Pegasus set down the comic, then folded his hands in a pose of exaggerated attentiveness. "Do tell me—what was it that I did that provided such clarity?"

"When I first met you I admired you," Seto began. Mokuba had sent him to a website that advocated writing a letter as a rehearsal for a confrontation with a perpetrator, and while he hadn't thought much of that suggestion, the guidelines of points to be covered had seemed reasonable: What you did to me, How it has affected my life, How I feel about what you did, How I feel about you, What I want you to do about it.

"It was so sweet," Pegasus said.

"Over the years you changed," Seto continued. "Ishizu claims it was the Eye that twisted you. She's wrong. All it did was give you a convenient excuse to be a criminal."

Pegasus scoffed. "Really, Seto, I might have been a bit ruthless in my business practices, but—"

"You drove a wedge between Gozaburo and myself," Seto said, determined to finish before Pegasus could derail him, "and when you found you could not control me you began to work against me. Kidnapping my brother, conspiring to take over my company, cheating when we dueled, and finally standing by while five men who hated me beat and—raped me." The word tore through his throat.

Pegasus went entirely still, as if his program had frozen, but after a moment he laughed. "What an imagination you have!" He looked out the window, as if admiring the pixels of the unchanging, featureless sky.

"No," Seto said, deadly calm. "I am not imagining. I am remembering. Remembering you drinking wine and doing nothing as they—" Once was enough: he couldn't say it again. "Remembering how you turned the lights out and left me in the dark." He peripherally registered that Mokuba and Jounouchi had moved to stand shoulder to shoulder with him.

Pegasus shook his head. "What dramatic accusations."

"Admit the truth."

"I can't. It's not true. A delusion, a slander," Pegasus said smoothly. "Understandably pathetic, but all untrue."

"Says you," Jounouchi said.

"Come now, Seto," Pegasus said. "Isn't this story about being assaulted while a guest in my home simply another illustration of the way you have always escaped into fantasy whenever you couldn't handle reality?"

He had expected this: that Pegasus would deny everything, that he would try to twist the conversation off-topic.

"It's heartrending," Pegasus continued. "You can't accept that I'm dying, and so you're desperate to hold on to any scrap of the deep bond between us."

"Are you fucking clueless?" Jounouchi asked. "Kaiba hates you."

"Really? Then why all this?" Pegasus waved his hand to indicate the room. "Does it make sense to re-create my mansion just for one conversation?"

"Whatever it takes," Mokuba said, "to get closure and move on."

Pegasus smiled. "How quaint that you think that's what this is all about." He took the bottle of wine, unsealed it, and began to open it with a corkscrew that appeared in his hand. "Moving on is the last thing your brother wants. With me captive in his computer, he can finally act on the crush he had when he was a teenager."

"Crush? What deluded vanity." Though it was an irrational reaction, Seto felt his face burning as Mokuba glanced at him. True, his feelings toward Pegasus had always been too complex to sum up in a single word—but even if they had, crush certainly would not have been that word.

"Have you ever told Mokuba about the swimming lesson?" Pegasus asked, pulling the cork out with a pop.

"There was no reason." What a manipulative bastard, to bring that up now—but then, when had Pegasus ever been otherwise?

"Swimming?" Mokuba asked him.

"Oh, how very interesting," Pegasus said. He was gloating. "I can see by your expression that Seto never told you the story." He paused to pour a glass of wine. "Your brother was in Budapest with Gozaburo, some chess event or business conference or such. Well, as it turned out that I was also in the city, at a very exclusive hotel nearby. When Seto found out he begged me to meet him at one of the city's bathhouses—the water comes from geothermal springs, you know, they're therapeutic and quite delightful—ostensibly to teach him to swim. The lesson didn't go as planned. Or perhaps it did, hmmm?"

"Is any of this true?" Mokuba asked.

"Yes," Seto said. As usual, Pegasus was taking something that had been entirely innocent and was making it sound perverse.

"But Gozaburo had forbidden it," Pegasus said.

"He didn't want you to learn how to swim?" Jounouchi asked. "Why? Swimming's fun, and it's good exercise. And comes in handy if you ever get shipwrecked."

"He said anything that didn't teach me how to increase company profits was a waste of time," Seto said bitterly. Gozaburo had also said many other things when Seto had made that particular request, things he wasn't going to repeat.

"Seto had managed—in his typical rule-flaunting way—to allow us use of one of the smaller spas at the ungodly hour of 3 am." Pegasus paused to sip from the wineglass, then made a face. "Ugh, that's as hideously tasteless as the cheese. Oh well." He set the glass down. "The lesson went along quite well—I might even say swimmingly—for a while, but then the clandestine, intimate atmosphere and the physical contact … had an effect on him." Pegasus sighed. "I rebuffed him, of course, but gently: after all, he was only fifteen. Awkward, repressed adolescents can be so fragile emotionally."

Of course, the way Pegasus was telling it was entirely distorted—it had been late evening, not 3 am, and certainly no one had made a pass at anyone—but he suspected that a protest was exactly what Pegasus was trying to goad him into. And he was not going to cooperate.

Plus, Mokuba and Jounouchi ought to know bullshit when they heard it.

"Seto, tell them what happened next." Pegasus had a faint smile.

It was masterfully played. Staying silent would leave an opening for Pegasus to fill with more lies, while answering would make it look as though he was obeying Pegasus ... still, better to provide the information himself. "Gozaburo arrived."

"He attacked me! With a rapier! Hidden in his walking stick!" Pegasus said. "He stormed in and sliced my arm down to the bone! Severed tendons and muscles, damaged the nerve. Left an enormous scar." He lifted a hand to his shoulder and massaged it, as if it still pained him even in the virtual world. "I've had lingering weakness in that arm ever since."

Seto almost laughed at the melodramatic absurdity of the performance.

"But that's far in the past," Pegasus said. "I've quite forgiven everyone involved. I only brought it up to prove how close Seto and I were."

"I don't believe any of this," Mokuba said. "I hardly ever heard Seto mention you when we were growing up."

"Of course not," Pegasus said. "I was, by necessity, a secret friend: from our first meeting Gozaburo strongly disapproved of me. Then too, you only saw each other, what? A quarter of an hour a day? And then only if he'd performed to Gozaburo's satisfaction?" Pegasus sighed. "Although he never said so, I always had the impression that, except for his interactions with you, the atmosphere in the Kaiba household was extremely unloving. From the moment he entered that mansion Seto was chronically starved for attention. Did you know that not being able to visit you always hurt him more than any of the physical abuse he received?"

"You know, it's pretty fucking rude to talk about someone as if they're not right here," Jounouchi said.

"Using vulgar language is also quite rude," Pegasus said coldly.

"Is there a point to all this?" Mokuba asked.

"My point," Pegasus replied, "Is that it's not surprising that Seto fixated so strongly on me, his only uncensored contact with the outside world, and that as he got older—and churning hormones came into play—"

Jounouchi laughed. "Get over yourself."

"—I began to star in his sexual fantasies as well. It's basic psychology," Pegasus said, folding his arms. "Gozaburo had forbidden Seto to have any contact with me. Teenagers need to rebel. Seto and I already had a bond. Unfortunately, his upbringing was such that he likely also felt intense shame over his homoerotic fantasies, and so, with such tidal conflicts pulling at him—well, it's no wonder that he abdicated responsibility by shifting the blame to me. He couldn't accept his orientation, his attraction, and so he invented false memories that cast me as some sort of … monster."

"You are a monster," Mokuba said.

"And if there's anything false here, it's you!" Jounouchi snapped. "If nothing happened, how come Kaiba had cuts and bruises for weeks after Duelist Kingdom?"

Seto knew he could shut everyone up by ending the program, but to do so would be conceding the game to Pegasus, and that he was not going to do.

"Oh, really?" Pegasus raised his eyebrows. "Weeks later, you say? Did you truly accept his explanation for how he got those—whatever injuries you say he had?" Pegasus shook his head pityingly. "Such a naive, trusting person you must have been! Too young to grasp what someone more mature and worldly would have quickly comprehended."

"Which was?"

"That Kaiba-boy was too embarrassed to admit to you that he had had an encounter with—is the correct term still 'rough trade'? I've long suspected that Gozaburo's collar and Hobson's riding crop might have given him less-than vanilla preferences in the bedroom."

"Shut up!" Mokuba said furiously. "Just shut the fuck up. He was attacked. In your kitchen. There were witnesses. There's evidence. There are people willing to testify. You're going to pay for what you did."

"These witnesses ... I presume they will be well paid for their testimony?" Pegasus asked.

"At least one will do it for free," Seto said darkly.

"Oh." Pegasus seemed surprised, but only for a moment. "Well, I hardly see the feasibility of pressing charges now, with my physical body dead?"

"It's not dead yet," Seto responded, and it seemed that Pegasus flinched.

"I don't really understand how this virtual reality stuff works," Jounouchi said slowly, "but the part of him that's here probably could get put in a virtual prison, right? Which someone would have to program? Phew, talk about rough trade."

"Oh, that's noble," Pegasus sputtered. "Bully someone who can't fight back! Easy to make threats when it's three against one."

"Better odds than you gave me," Seto said. Seeing Pegasus' smug facade crack was satisfying.

"I don't understand," Pegasus said. "This horrible thing you claim happened doesn't seem to have had any effect on you. The only time you've been observably different were those years when your precious Mokuba was missing—I do hope you don't blame me for his defective aircraft?—and even then all you did was get tipsy and crash your car. Furthermore," Pegasus continued, gaining momentum, "You've received many awards and honorary degrees, had an active social life … I even heard a rumor that you had a live-in lover for several years. Of course, one can't believe everything one hears, I suppose."

"That's true," Mokuba said. "There are a lot of liars in the world."

"Despite a few dips here and there in your company's stock, you have never been anything less than wildly successful financially. You've expanded your parks, built an entertainment complex in downtown Domino—"

"You're very well-informed for someone who's had amnesia for the past decade," Mokuba said.

Pegasus, studying his fingertips, pretended not to have heard. "So tell me, Seto," he asked. "What exactly is wrong with your life?"

He had had enough of being on the defensive, was fed up with the way Pegasus had subverted the discussion with his outrageous claims—claims that contained just enough truth to sound plausible—but there was one thing that Pegasus seemed to have forgotten: he had always been willing to do anything in his power not to lose. "Since that night," he said. "I can't stand being physically close. To anyone. Or being touched. At all. Even by ... family members."

Pegasus looked shocked, then laughed. "Are you truly back to trying to pin that on me? I thought we'd all agreed to blame Gozaburo."

Jounouchi shook his head. "You're un-fucking-believable. We know you did it. Just confess already, you scumbag."

"Is that really all you wanted to accomplish with this virtual world, Seto?" Pegasus asked. "Other than creating a convenient target for your dysphoria, that is?" He held up his hands in mock surrender. "Fine. Yes, yes, I did it! It was wrong, I was bad. I was a bad, bad man. Satisfied?"

"It's a miracle," Seto said, angrier than he'd been in years. "Just like that, the magic words fix everything, and I get to go back to being normal."

"What on earth did you expect?"

"For you admit what you did, and explain why," Seto said.

"And apologize," Mokuba added. "A real apology, not lip service."

"No, that will never happen," Seto said. "He's always been a selfish, self-centered child. Unable to understand anyone's pain but his own."

"That's hardly fair!" Pegasus protested. "I have always felt very protective of you, Seto. Like a brother. Or a father."

"Yeah, right," Jounouchi said.

"It's true!" Pegasus shot back. "I mourned the loss of our friendship after Gozaburo died."

"Mourned?" Seto asked. It was foolish to let himself be sucked back into such a pointless conversation, but he couldn't resist a parting jab. "So it was grief that made you give away the Blue Eyes cards you'd designed for me?"

"Well, no that was ... I was very annoyed with you at the time," Pegasus admitted. "But I was designing a new card to make up for it."

"Yeah, right," Jounouchi said again.

"It's true!" Pegasus looked around, then picked up one of his Funny Rabbit comics and turned to a page that was nearly blank. "Here, I'll even paint on this panel—they're lost in a snowstorm, it's hilarious! Anyhow, I had it all planned out in my head." He dipped the tip of his finger in the wine and rapidly sketched on the page, a pinkish calligraphy.

"He can make a corkscrew outta the air, but not a pencil?" Jounouchi muttered. "That doesn't make sense."

"I was going to call it Friendship's Embrace," Pegasus said.. "It would have been a tribute summon, played on any card currently in defense mode. Both cards would switch to attack mode, with the attack and defense values combined, although I never could decide if both cards should be removed from play when defeated or at the end of one turn ... something too overpowered can unbalance the entire game."

"I don't want anything of yours," Seto said. "End pro—"

"Wait, wait!" Pegasus said. Don't you want to see?" He turned the page around. "Sorry it's so poorly drawn. Imagine an ancient tomb setting. Torches in the background, that sort of thing."

The wine had dried to a blue-violet as it evaporated, leaving a picture that, though stylized, was unequivocal in its depiction. On a bed-sized dais two nude figures reclined, their lower bodies hidden by draped fabric. In the foreground, a short-haired young man slept. Behind him, a long-haired man was propped up on one elbow, caressing the sleeper's shoulder.

Seto turned away.

"Don't go!" Pegasus pleaded. "Please, I don't want to go into the dark alone!"

"End program," Seto said.

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~ To be continued ~

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(07) 27 Aug 2013 ~ additional tweaks