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.

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Author's Note: There's a brief reference to self-harm near the beginning of the chapter.

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Beholden, Chapter 7: The Fate of the Fallen

by Animom

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He disengaged from the sensors and lay on his side, grateful for the silence.

He was in no hurry to leave the pod. With Mokuba at the California Kaibaland, Jounouchi at the one in Domino, and Kurosuke presumably at the hospital with Pegasus, he was not only alone in the house, but quite likely the only human being for miles in every direction. For the first time in a long time, he found that idea less than enjoyable.

He took out his phone. Kurosuke had texted him an hour ago: P stable but declining. "Still not dead?" He muttered. "Such a tenacious bastard." He considered calling Mokuba, but he knew that his brother would ask what he planned to do next, and he had no answer. Certainly what he wanted to do at the moment was obliterate Pegasus by destroying the recording, but objectively that was too reactive, fueled by emotion. If he erased only the new data that Pegasus had written to the disk in the past few hours—the virtual Pegasus's "memory" of what had just happened—it would reset the encounter and he could confront him again, but unless he changed the variables, the initial conditions, it wasn't likely to change the outcome. It was axiomatic: if an equation remains the same, so does its solution. That left Jounouchi's suggestion of punishing Pegasus by tossing him in prison—which was appealing, as was the lingering temptation to use the Freaky House—but coerced contrition wasn't going to feel like victory. He needed to feel as though Pegasus was being genuine, but if that wasn't ever going to happen ...

Was Pegasus right? Seto wondered. Am I looking for excuses to keep him around?

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When he finally opened the pod, the late afternoon sun outside the bedroom's wall of windows had polarized the landscape into a monochrome of red and shadow. As he stood in the house's sleek chrome and granite kitchen waiting for the cheap plastic coffeemaker to stop gurgling, he thought of what a waste of money the lease had been: five bedrooms (only one had been used), six bathrooms (five unused), three fireplaces (never lit). Eight thousand square feet in the main house, and he'd used at most a few hundred. He supposed it had been worth it for the guest house and the helicopter pad. And Mokuba had used the pool house.

When his coffee was done he walked across to the guest house. It was empty, of course, the supplemental caretakers had gone to the hospital or simply left, their assigned deathwatch over. The signs that the house had been recently occupied—a dish dotted with breadcrumbs next to the kitchenette's sink, a speckled banana in a fruit bowl on the table; a throw rug bunched into rippled disarray as if by a hasty retreat—amplified Seto's sense of isolation. In the sickroom, a single monitor steadfastly drew flat-lines and displayed zeroes. Next to the bed, a beige pitcher and cup, each half-full of tepid water, had been marooned on the nightstand along with a battered entertainment magazine. And the bed ... the bed was empty. His visual cortex analyzed the pattern of wrinkles on the sheet, trying to resolve them onto an outline of the body that had been there, but of course that was pointless. It was random.

He pulled the sheets from the bed and threw them to the floor.

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After a shower and more coffee—Mokuba had called but not left a message, and now wasn't picking up—he sat down at the computer. The hot water had cleared his mind, and he'd decided to reset the encounter: going in alone should be enough of a change to yield a different outcome.

He opened the dining room to reference the parameters for the reset, but it was empty; even the wine and Funny Rabbit comics were gone. He pulled up the art studio.

Pegasus was painting. He'd changed his appearance yet again: now he had two human eyes—no Eye, no eyepatch—and looked young, even teen-aged. He was wearing a casual shirt and pants with suspenders.

Seto steepled his fingers. Assuming Pegasus' previous appearance—red suit and golden Eye—had been intended to intimidate by evoking his menacing Duelist Kingdom persona, this latest change was trying to accomplish—what? The opposite? To appear as nonthreatening as possible, like a dog scraping its belly on the ground? Was this deception intended to lure Seto back in? No, most likely it was meaningless. Still ... curious to see what Pegasus was playing at, he decided to postpone the reset. As long as he kept in mind that everything Pegasus did and said was a lie, a charade calculated to hide his true self from his audience, he was safe.

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He zoned into the hallway outside the art studio, but Pegasus was gone. "Hide-and-seek?" he muttered, turning and heading for the elevator. He assumed that Pegasus had continued to create new spaces, but surprisingly the elevator had no new buttons: there were still three—top floor art studio, middle floor dining room, and the unlabeled bottom level. He pushed it.

When the elevator doors opened he thought he'd traveled back in time. It had been almost twenty years since he had seen these stone walls, heard the snap of flickering torches, and yet it was as if it had all happened yesterday. There was no odor in the VR dungeon, of course, but his memory filled in what he remembered so well, the damp stink of stale air and rotting moss. The dead-end corridors and blind stairwells were eerily familiar—although sadly, there were no guards to knock unconscious—and as he descended a set of curved stairs he knew he was in the lowest level of the dungeon, near the cell in which Mokuba had been imprisoned. The bleakest day of Seto's life, the day he had watched helplessly as Pegasus took his brother's soul, the day he had threatened suicide to rescue what was precious to him, the day he had—.

The cell was occupied. An old man wearing striped pajamas that looked like an old-fashioned prison uniform sat with his back to Seto. His frail-looking skull was dusted with silvery-grey stubble.

"Pegasus?"

The man twisted to look back over his shoulder, and Kaiba recoiled. Pegasus' uncovered left eye was a bony void, and the right ... the right was a bloody mess of tissue.

"What is this?" Seto asked, angrily reminding himself that in a virtual world injuries were illusion. "Do you think making yourself disgusting will force me to leave you in peace?"

"I don't deserve to be left in peace," Pegasus said. "I was hoping you'd come back. Did you see my latest paintings?"

"No."

"Oh, you didn't look at them?" Pegasus sighed. "I wish you had."

"End pro—"

"No!" Pegasus pleaded. "Wait! Don't erase me yet! I just ... I didn't think you'd return so soon. I haven't had time to rehearse. Give me five minutes." He turned around to face Seto, then wiped his face with his sleeve. "It's funny what we take for granted, isn't it? When I was young I never gave a thought to why people were always so eager to pay attention to me. I realize now it was because of my money and my looks. People were always telling me I was le visage beau, a shayna punim, a biseinen." He coughed. "They'd run screaming if they saw me now, wouldn't they?"

"You asked me to listen. I'm listening. Four minutes left," Seto said.

"I took out my other eye to illustrate a point," Pegasus said. "In ancient Greek tragedy, Oedipus tears out his eyes when he realizes that he's unknowingly fulfilled the prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother. Most people feel sorry for Oedipus, say he was doomed because of Fate, but I disagree. Oedipus doomed himself. Yes, his path was foretold, but at every step he chose that path."

"Is this a literature lecture or an audition?"

"Like Oedipus I too, with my precious eyes, was at first blind to the corruption of my own life," Pegasus said. "From the moment I received the Eye I sensed it housed a Presence, a dark spirit always urging me in certain directions, goading me to certain actions."

"Three minutes left," Seto said.

"But the compass was mine," Pegasus said. "The decisions were mine. I chose to become an Adept of the Eye, a priest of darkness."

"Adept of the Eye?" Seto scoffed. "How pompous. You cheated at cards."

"No," Pegasus said. "It was much more than that. To plumb any mind I choose, reveal its deepest secrets and inner workings? Quite advantageous for business negotiations—and yet that power was insignificant compared to the Soul Prison. Once I mastered that I felt godlike."

"Yes, I remember that trick," Seto said. "If that is what it means to be a god, then I am happy never to have been one."

Pegasus hunched over, bowing his head. "But that was the thing! You weren't supposed to remember! You'd never remembered before!"

"Before?" Seto demanded. "What before?" He felt a memory awakening in the depths, rising massive and dark, like a sea monster swimming up from the abyss. "You did that to me more than once?"

"Well, of course! I had to," Pegasus said, sounding petulant. "How else could I make sure that I would do it perfectly when Cynthia appeared again?"

"When? How many times?" Seto was newly shaken: what if there were other things he had forgotten?

"The day I made the Blue Eyes cards for you," Pegasus said, "I discovered that I could bind her soul to the physical plane. A piece of the body, a net for the soul. And I had a locket with some of her hair ..."

And now Seto understood. Pegasus had incorporated strands of hair into the Blue Eyes cards, not to make the cards unique, but to make them suitable for ... trial runs. "So you—who else did you practice on? Mokuba?" he demanded, clenching his fists. He didn't care if Pegasus was now a weak, disfigured old man dying in hospital, or that it had all happened twenty years before: he would beat him to death if he'd harmed Mokuba ...

"Of course not," Pegasus said, wiping his face again. "By the time of Duelist Kingdom I had already perfected the technique." He chuckled. "I was so naive! Stealing your hair!—though it made sense according to the nursery rhyme the voice recited to me."

Seto was taken aback. Pegasus had always been odd, annoyingly—even infuriatingly—so, but always there had been a keen intelligence evident. A method to his madness. Now, with this talk of blinded kings and spirits and voices Pegasus seemed pathetically disordered.

"Later I found out where to get a particular variety of arenite in the Valley of the Kings," Pegasus said, "the exact type of sandstone the ancients had used for their sacred tablets. When I ground it to fine powder and coated the background of the card—" He stopped. "Well, never mind. With you, I was still learning, you see. I made mistakes. That's why you changed."

"Changed? What do you mean?"

"I didn't realize it at first, of course, but I was inadvertently stranding a piece of your soul in each card," Pegasus said. "I did intend to put them back, but ... well, you made me angry, so I didn't."

"Ridiculous." He folded his arms. "You are confusing reality with the plot of a fantasy book. The Blue Eyes are not horcruxes."

"It's not ridiculous. You were frantic to get the cards back after I gave them away."

"Of course. They were the most powerful cards available at that time," Seto said. "I needed to have them to win."

"No," Pegasus said. "Almost from the instant I made the cards you became almost inhumanly ruthless. You lost all empathy for others. You drove Gozaburo and that other man to suicide. "

"It was Gozaburo's choice to jump out that window," Seto said.

"That's a rationalization, Kaiba-boy, and we both know it," Pegasus said. "You're as guilty as if you'd pushed him with your own hands. You manipulated his most trusted advisers until they turned against him."

"Trusted advisers too easily swayed by money and promises of power," Seto said. "But then you know all about how easily they could be swayed."

Pegasus was silent.

"It's ironic, Pegasus," Seto said, "that after all you've done you call me the heartless one."

"You're right, of course," Pegasus said. "I've lost count of how often I've wished I could go back in time and undo the wrongs I've done. I committed sins that no one but God knows about, enough to damn me a hundred times over. I'd offer to make reparations to the victims' families, even though I could tell them that money doesn't do anything but briefly dull the pain. And you—well, of all those I've wronged, you hardly need the money."

"True, but there is something you can do," Seto said.

"Oh? What is it? I'll do anything!"

"Tell me the real reason you brought the Big Five that night."

Pegasus hugged himself. "It was complicated," he said.

"Simplify it."

"Some of it I wasn't even aware of until after the Eye's influence had faded."

"Blaming an ancient artifact to avoid responsibility for your actions? So your speech about Oedipus and choice was bullshit."

Pegasus scowled. "It's not as if I was some evil monster through and through from the day I was born!"

"Fine. If asked I will say that you weren't a selfish, backstabbing rapist until you were an adult."

"First of all," Pegasus said angrily, slapping his hand on the floor of the cell, "I never touched you that way. Ever." He stopped, took a deep, shuddering breath. "Seto, don't you remember any of the good things I did for you? I was your friend, I tried to protect you from Gozaburo, I nurtured your independence and self-confidence, I encouraged your creativity and innovations. Does all that count for nothing?"

Seto considered this. "Yes, you did all those. You gained my admiration, and my trust." He paused. "Only Mokuba was closer to my heart."

Pegasus hung his head.

"You did not force yourself on me physically, at least not that I remember. But in all other ways it was violation." He found himself feeling on the edge of tears, and it infuriated him. "You have admitted that you violated my mind many times, and on that night you allowed others to violate my body. None of the good you tried to do can ever compensate for that."

"You're right," Pegasus whispered after a long silence. "I am so, so, sorry. Truly, deeply sorry. If it will convince you, I will say it a hundred times more, a thousand."

"Say it all you want. You have yet to tell me why you let the Big Five—"

"Business," he said, hugging himself as he seemed to deflate. "It was a business decision."

"Business?" Seto repeated. "What do you mean, business?" Although he had half-suspected as much for years, having it confirmed was a fresh wound. He'd not thought Pegasus capable of being so coldly calculating, of seeing people as nothing more than disposable resources or obstacles, only valuable as means to an end ... it was a shock to see a reflection of the way he had once been.

"It was obvious how much they hated you," Pegasus said. "And because they knew I'd been your friend, they didn't trust me. I had to get them on my side, and so I joked that I'd not only knock you off your high horse, but make you completely tractable. They wanted proof, said they wanted to see for themselves. I knew I had to mislead them about where my loyalties were, and so ... Letting them have you got them on my side. You of all people should understand."

"Understand what?"

"Well, what I did wasn't so different than what you did to Mokuba, was it? when you rejected him so cruelly in order to trick Gozaburo?"

"You dare throw that in my face?" Seto asked. "It doesn't compare!"

"But he believed that you truly hated him. Did you know he still wasn't completely over it, even a year later? What hurt him most was that you hadn't let him in on your plan." Pegasus shrugged. "At least, that's what I saw when I looked into his mind."

This was news to Seto, but then, he and Mokuba hadn't ever talked much about it at the time, and once Mokuba was older, the topic had never come up. "Yes, I knew at the time that it would hurt him, but when I explained it to him later—that I had to be harsh to make it convincing, that I had only done it to ensure our future—he understood, and forgave me."

"Is that why you keep asking me to explain myself?" Pegasus asked. "If you understand, you'll forgive me?"

Seto had no reply to this.

"No, of course not. There's no way you could. Nor should you." Pegasus scuttled back from the bars and into a corner of the cell. "I just thought I'd get some credit for telling the truth."

"Credit?" Seto asked. "I see. I'd forgotten you were raised in a religious household. Confession is an attempt to clear your conscience before facing the afterlife? Noble to the last." He started to walk away.

"Wait!" Pegasus shouted. "Don't go!"

Seto kept going.

"Do you really remember?" Pegasus asked. "After so long?"

"The scars remind me," Seto said. The terror, the anger, the loneliness. His footsteps echoed down the corridor.

"I wanted to destroy you," Pegasus shouted. "The way you had destroyed Cynthia."

Seto stopped. "Cynthia?" He turned and walked back to Pegasus' cell. "A woman I never met, who died while Mokuba and I were in the orphanage?"

In answer, Pegasus materialized a card with a picture of a blond woman in a blue dress, then laid it on the cell floor in front of him. "She was the center of my universe," he said. "Sun, moon, crown of the heavens." He tilted his ruined face up toward Seto. "So when my attachment to you," he stopped and then said almost too low to hear, "my feelings for you, began to eclipse my love for her ... it was as if you had defiled her. I hated you for it." He bowed his head again, looking down at the card he could not see. "But I was wrong. She would have wanted me to cherish you as I had cherished her. She would have wanted me," his breath seemed to catch, "wanted me to be your knight, to keep you safe, to hide you away from them." His voice was now a croak. "Instead I gave you to those—hyenas—to be torn apart." He made a raw, sobbing sound. "I failed the only two people I've ever loved. Lost her. Destroyed you."

It was an admission that hardly sounded like Pegasus, which convinced Seto that it was genuine.

"I know my body is dying," Pegasus said. "I assume you'll want to keep my consciousness running to take revenge on me? If you truly want to punish me ... make sure your program won't let me paint. Art is the only thing I have left that gives me happiness, and if my being miserable will help you, make sure you take that away from me."

It was, Seto thought, in every way a quintessential Pegasus pronouncement: overly-dramatic, manipulative, and yet also reflecting genuine emotion—although, Pegasus being Pegasus, anything short of encasing him in concrete wouldn't be sufficient to stop him from painting.

"You're probably right! After all, you played chess blindfolded," Pegasus said, and then, "After so many years, Seto, I hardly need the Eye to read your mind." He gave a sudden gasp. "I guess it's time for me to go. Goodbye, Kaiba-boy."

Seto stood for long moments after the image had faded. As the torches in the dungeon began to go out, he bent to pick up Cynthia's card, then began to climb the stairs up toward the light.

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~ Epilogue to follow ~

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Author's Note: The ending here is somewhat abrupt, but this chapter ends Beholden (the Epilogue will be the wrap-up for the entire series).

P.S. Anyone who know me knows I tend to sneak in after posting and fiddle; it's likely that this chapter, like many others, will acquire bits in the coming weeks or months.

(07) 17 September 2013