A scream woke Duke in the middle of the night, and he leapt out of bed to rush to Ryou's room, where his friend was sitting upright in bed, trembling horribly, his eyes wide with fear. Duke approached him gently, embracing his friend in an attempt to reassure him.
"Another night terror?" he murmured, and Ryou nodded, his breathing shallow. "Breathe, Ryou. You're safe here," Duke murmured, still holding Ryou as he focused on trying to breathe deeply and move past the sudden irrational panic that had flooded his system. He pressed into Duke as the entrepreneur rubbed his back soothingly, gradually regaining a degree of composure.
"Thank you, Duke," he murmured at last, lifting his head to smile at his best friend. His eyes were filled with gratitude, and Duke swallowed hard to keep himself calm as well.
"You're welcome. Anytime," he answered cheerfully, reluctantly leaving Ryou so that they could both go back to sleep.
Duke hadn't been attracted to Ryou before he'd moved in. Now that they'd spent a month living together, though, during which time Duke was supporting Ryou's efforts to recover and achieve some kind of normality, he found himself falling for the teen. Ryou's life had always been abnormal; he'd always felt like an outsider. Duke wanted him to know that he didn't have to be alone. Duke didn't know what to do with his feelings. He'd never felt like this about anybody else before, but then again, Ryou was different from everybody else. He was special, and not in the "special needs" kind of way. He had a rare, beautiful soul that made Duke soften on the inside. He did what he could to make him smile as much as possible, and his presence alone was enough to lift Duke's spirits.
And of course, Duke was also physically attracted to him, because Ryou's soul wasn't the only beautiful thing about him. He was uncertain of himself, though, because these feelings were so alien to him. He wanted to be sure that this was all genuine, so he planned on keeping his feelings to himself until after he ended his sex-strike, so that he could know with certainty that he was being real with himself. The last thing he wanted to do was break Ryou's heart, after all. That meant that, when the time came, he needed to break his strike with someone other than Ryou.
"In the past, you were afraid to get close to people because of the potential that the Soul-Stealer would harm them. But he is, as you've said, gone permanently. So what's stopping you now?"
Ryou tried to stay calm as he looked back at his therapist, thoughtfully putting together an answer in his mind before he spoke.
"I think… there's some part of me that feels like I don't know how to. I've been forced into isolation for so long, I'm just not sure show to form those kinds of attachments. And it bothers me, because I don't want to be alone forever, but I also don't want to be a bother or a burden. And… I don't really know many people, but I also don't really like meeting people."
"That makes sense given your social anxiety," the doctor replied thoughtfully. "It helps to enter social situations with a friend, though, with someone you can trust and with whom you can withdraw from the crowd if you need a break, but don't want to be alone. I think that you should try to attend some kind of event or visit a lounge or something of that nature within the next month with a friend and try to accustom yourself to the experience without feeling anxious. It's good to stretch our limits, because in doing so, we expand our comfort zones and become more adaptable."
"Okay, I'll try to do that," Ryou agreed, thinking that such a task sounded reasonable enough. "And if you do start feeling anxious or upset, you can always use the breathing exercises I taught you, alright?"
"Alright." Ryou nodded, reminding himself that he didn't need to feel anxious about going to a party or crowded event if he had a friend with him, especially if it was Duke.
"Now, with regard to interpersonal relationships, do you think that you have commitment issues, or is it something else?" He sat back in his chair, looking thoughtful as he waited for Ryou's answer.
"No, it's not a commitment issue… Quite the opposite, actually. I'm mostly afraid that people are never going to stick around. I haven't had any long-term relationships of any kind with anyone—except the Spirit of the Ring, and that was hardly beneficial."
"What about your parents?"
"My mother and sister died in a car accident when I was very young," the teen answered softly, looking away for a moment. "When I was twelve, my father left for an archaeological dig and never came back, and I ran into him again in Egypt last year, but only briefly."
"It seems like you're afraid of abandonment, then." His tone was questioning, as if he sought confirmation from his patient.
"Yes: I don't want to invest in a relationship only to have someone turn around and forget about me. I don't want to place my trust in someone to just have them leave. I fear that I won't matter as much to the people that mean a lot to me."
"That's very interesting. Well, I'm afraid we're out of time, but I would like us to pick up with that next week."
"So, the ghost is real?" Mokuba asked, looking to his brother for clarification. They'd finished the sonnets yesterday and Seto had decided to start reading Hamlet to his little brother. Mokuba found it as challenging as it was entertaining. That is, it was entertaining to him to hear his brother reading multiple parts of a play, but the text itself was difficult to unravel.
"Yes, this ghost is real, within the world of the story," Seto answered, qualifying the statement so that his brother didn't get the wrong idea.
"This ghost? Is there another ghost in the story that's not real?" Mokuba's quick mind easily latched onto the potential behind Seto's words.
"That's debatable, but that's a long way off."
"So, let me get this straight: Hamlet's mom marries her dead husband's brother less than a month after he's dead?"
"Yep."
"That's gross!" Mokuba's face crinkled with disgust, and Seto hmph'd in amusement.
"Yes it is, so don't do anything like that, okay?"
"Never!" Mokuba took a moment to rid himself of the notion. "And Hamlet and Horatio are going with the other two guys to see if the ghost is there the next night too?"
"That's right."
He was silent for a few moments before he asked, "Why isn't Hamlet scared of the ghost?"
"He is scared, especially because he doesn't know for sure if it's his father or not, but he realizes that finding the truth is more important than letting himself stay scared."
"Would you face a ghost on purpose if you thought it might be a demon?" Mokuba asked out of pure curiosity. He didn't know it, but he was getting very close to the heart of his brother's current problem: just as Hamlet was confronted with the ghost of his father, so Seto was confronted with the ghost of his step-father.
"Ghosts aren't real, so there's no chance of that ever happening," Seto retorted, clearly disdainful of the suggestion of him being intimidated by something fictional.
"But what about the Millennium Puzzle and—"
"Mokuba." Seto gave his brother a look that warned him he was going too far.
The younger Kaiba sighed, knowing better than to push his brother any further about those events. Mokuba had tried asking his brother about the Millennium Items before, but he always got shut down. He'd asked numerous other people—his gym coach, his classmates, the occasional maid at the mansion, Roland—about the existence of ghosts and the supernatural, and he had yet to receive an answer that fully satisfied him.
"What have I told you about spirits?" Seto asked sternly.
"That they're not real, and only people who believe in them can see them because of the power of suggestion," Mokuba recited faithfully, if half-heartedly.
"That's right, so you don't have to ask about them again." Spirits and ghosts disrupted Seto's understanding of the world around him, and challenging that worldview was too upsetting a thing for him to handle, especially right now, so he denied them entirely.
"Okay." Mokuba sighed, looking a little glum, and Seto rumpled his hair, leaning forward to give his forehead a quick peck as he felt guilty for upsetting the child.
"Sleep well." He tucked the bookmark into the Shakespeare volume and set it on Mokuba's nightstand as he stood.
"You too!" his brother called as Seto left the room and paused in the doorway to turn out the light. "Goodnight, Seto."
"Goodnight, Mokuba." Seto closed the door behind him and turned to go back to his office for a few more hours of work.
"You still choose to deny me, Seto?" Gozaburo asked, leaning against the wall as Seto passed him nonchalantly.
"You're nothing but a hallucination induced by stress and a cumulative lack of sleep. There's nothing to deny." A chill ran down the brunette's spine as the sound of Gozaburo's footsteps and laughter followed him to his office. What is he going to do to me this time?
After an hour of heckling and intimidation and abuse, Seto was fed up. He yelled at his step-father until he went away, then went to his own room. He wasn't quite ready to sleep yet, but he needed a distraction, and since his nightly reading with Mokuba had put him in the mindset for Shakespeare, he decided to put on a movie, Joss Whedon's take on Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. He only let half his mind pay attention to it, and by the end of it, he felt worse than he had before.
Love. Was such a thing really so strong as to make people act like that? True, he'd gone to extreme lengths because he loved Mokuba, but that was different. There were very real obligations that he had to the child besides his feelings. Whereas, if the characters had just been rational about things, there wouldn't have been so much drama and distress between them. Then again, the only purely rational character had been the villain, the duke's brother.
That raised a question in the billionaire's mind, one that unsettled him: If pure reason led one to unethical actions, did that mean that emotions played a vital in decision-making and executive function? If so, how did you know what emotions to listen to, which ones were good and which ones were bad? Was emotional really such a key part of the human experience? Since he'd done his best to suppress his own emotions, did that make him less than human? Was he really keeping himself safe by abstaining from all romantic attraction, as he believed, or was he missing out on something truly wonderful?
He felt shaken to his very core, and decided to escape the sense of metaphysical disorientation in sleep.
Author Notes: Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing (2013) is an excellent movie; I highly recommend it.
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