Author Notes: This picks up from where Seto's story left off in the previous chapter. Hopefully this fills in some holes for you. Please review if you like it, because more reviews = more chapters!

"He's just a child…"

Seto closed his eyes, breathing hard. He tried to force his body into a state of calm. It should be easy, since he'd had to develop excellent control of his body's reactions in the course of his life, but it was too difficult this time. Gozaburo had gone too far.

He opened his eyes and looked down at his hands. They were shaking, and he couldn't make them stop. This was too much for him to handle on his own. He straightened up and opened the door to his office, stepping into the hallway again. He noticed with an acute sense of relief that Gozaburo was nowhere to be seen. He walked quickly to his room, hoping that Gozaburo didn't show up to bother him again. Even when he got there, he was still shaking. Only one thing left to do.

He went to his nightstand, and yanked open the top drawer. He pulled a pill bottle out of the back of the drawer and shook a few capsules into his hand. After a moment's contemplation, he put all but two of them back in the bottle and dry swallowed the remaining two. He sighed and dropped onto his bed, laying down comfortably as he closed his eyes and waited for the drug to take effect.

Drug. Such a funny word. It applied to substances as benign as melatonin and acetominophen as well as substances as harmful as heroine and cocaine. It tended to have a negative connotation, and if you wanted to talk about drugs in a nice way, you used the word medicine, but a drug by any other name is still a drug.

He could feel his pulse starting to slow down, his heartbeat going down to a more normal rate. He was familiar with the effects of this drug; he'd depended on it for emergencies like this for a few years now. He would start to feel drowsy. His brain would get clouded and he wouldn't be able to think analytically or clearly. It was pointless to go back to his office now.

He started to feel detached, like he was hovering outside himself. Tranquility stilled him, emotions ceased to bother him. It was only at times like this that he could even begin to contemplate his past without any sort of pain or anguish. His memories weren't extraordinarily clear this way, but that was all for the best.

Since he could recall the shadows of his past without such ill effects, he did so now.

His earliest memories were foggy: his parents smiling, Mokuba as an infant, his mother's grave, his father grieving. It was all compressed, too compressed for him to draw out many details at all. A few uneventful years alone with their father, then he died and they went to the orphanage.

The orphanage: the first of two hells he and Mokuba had endured. He still remembered their first day there when he'd tried to give Mokuba a pep-talk: "Come on, no crying. Tears aren't gonna help us now. There's only one way you and I are gonna get through all this. We've got to get tough. Emotions will only get in the way of our survival. Don't expect anyone else to help us ever again. You and I are on our own now." (1) The adults didn't care about them anymore than they cared about the other orphans, so they could only depend on each other. It was them against the world.

Seto became a lot tougher than his brother, and good thing too, because Mokuba had been about as tough as a fluffy kitten at that age. Kids Seto's age bullied Mokuba, and the young teens had bullied Seto, so he'd had to look out for both of them. He'd gotten into a lot of fights their first few months there, and Mokuba had hated every bruise and scratch that his brother bore like battlescars.

Normally, that would have hurt a child's chances at adoption, but not for him. He was a genius. Plenty of nice couples (and even some not-so-nice couples) had wanted to adopt him. Some thought that he'd be easier to handle because he was so smart, and some thought that his intellect could be exploited for their own gain. Whenever he'd been led into an interview with potential adopters, he always told them the same thing: "If you want to adopt me, you have to adopt my little brother too." Both or neither. That was the ultimatum he gave them every time. It was the only reason they didn't get separated.

When the summer came and school let out, Seto figured out how avoid to the bullies, even though Moki didn't really like it. They would lock themselves in a room to play chess and read all day. Only Seto could read then, so he'd read books aloud to his little brother. He'd read a lot of old, musty books to him: Treasure Island, Homer's Odyssey, The Great Gatsby, The Canterbury Tales, and dozens of others. It kept the younger child entertained, even if he didn't understand them. Mokuba probably didn't remember any of that now, though. He'd been far too young at the time to be able to recall it.

They'd been at the orphanage for almost a year when Gozaburo visited. He skipped past his memories of that chess game. He'd already analyzed every move they'd both made and every word they'd said during that game. He'd analyzed all of it dozens of times now, but why he did, he didn't know. It was like he was trying to find some kind of answer, but he didn't know the question he was asking.

He'd had no idea what he was getting him and his brother into at the time. If he had the chance to go back and change history, he couldn't say for sure that he would do the same thing over again. He was just glad that he would never have to make up his mind about such a thing.

Their first day in Gozaburo's household had been their first day in a new kind of hell. The lessons began that very day, and continued every day after that for the next several years. That first day, Seto was wiped out. After starving for mental stimulation in the orphanage and public school, he felt like he'd been force-fed so much information that he would burst. That was the first time he'd ever suffered from a stress head-ache. Within the week, he'd endured his first beating at the hands of his step-father in addition to suffering intense lack of sleep. The end of that first week was when Gozaburo took away all of his games and his free time on the weekends. Nothing but work, eat, and sleep for the child prodigy.

That first beating stuck out in his mind with crystal clarity. He'd been so confused. What had he done wrong? Why was he being worked so hard? Why wasn't he allowed to sleep as much as he needed to? Why was he being collared and chained to a desk? How were his accomplishments insufficient when he'd done far more than the average child his age could do? Gozaburo had never hit his face, and Seto knew why. It was too obvious. It would betray his abusive nature and lose him his heir.

Seto hardly got to see Mokuba anymore, except for meals. Mokuba, frightened and alone in this big empty house, had sought his brother's presence at night as a comfort. Seto had obliged his little brother, visiting him at night to sleep with him as often as he could, even if it meant shorting himself some of his already scant sleep. Their step-father would get angry whenever he found them together, but that only made Seto certain that it was the right thing to do.

Molest. That was another nasty word. The molesting had started with the first beating, and it didn't stop until the beatings did: that is, they didn't stop until he died. A few months after they'd been adopted, all of it was starting to get to him and he'd tried to fight back. Big mistake. That was when Gozaburo had broken his right wrist, forcing him to become ambidextrous without lightening his workload at all. Not too long after that, maybe a month after he'd turned eleven, was when he'd started cutting.

It was all too much for him to handle. The pain, the threats, the shouting, the degradation, the creepy touching, the fear, the exhaustion. Not long after he wrist was broken—he told Mokuba he'd fallen down the stairs and landed on it—he cut for the first time. He couldn't remember where or how he'd gotten the idea in the first place, but his younger self had been suffering to such a degree that any sort of release for the anguish he felt was welcomed. Nothing else had worked, so he'd given cutting a try. This was when he was just starting to get comfortable using his left hand, so he'd started by grazing his thighs with some scissors. Those cuts had been light enough that he had no scars from them now. When the cast was off, he'd moved to his arms and wrists. It had become a project for him. Something of his own that he could focus on when Gozaburo got furious with him or when he'd been put through those tedious deportment lessons.

If Mokuba hadn't started smuggling Duel Monsters cards to him, he would have given up hope. He might have tried to run away. He might have tried to kill himself. It was anybody's guess what he might have done, but Seto didn't like to think about the possibilities. He simply recalled Mokuba as his savior and left it at that.

Three years. Had he really only lived with Gozaburo for three years before overthrowing him? Yes, that was correct. Only three years, but it had felt like an eternity. He remembered watching Gozaburo jump out the window. He remembered Mokuba's shock as the glass shattered, and he remembered pulling his brother close to protect him from the shards and the screams. Everyone around them had lurched into action, but Seto and Mokuba had stood there in their own little bubble, frozen and silent. He couldn't bring himself to feel anything in those moments, except relief.

But he didn't stop cutting after that, because at the time, he'd been anxiously haunted by an imagined sense of Gozaburo's presence. He didn't feel it at KaibaCorp HQ, but in the mansion, he'd felt like he could hear those footsteps behind him wherever he went. He could still hear Gozaburo's disapproval and scorn at everything he did. That was when he'd started to push himself towards becoming the Duel Monsters champion. He achieved the title at sixteen, and that was when he finally started to put Gozaburo's influence behind him. Soon after turning seventeen, he finally forced himself to quit cutting. He could focus on work and his little brother without feeling like his step-father was breathing down his neck. But at eighteen, his title had been stolen from him by that short challenger: Yugi Moto. That was when he'd started to hate himself. After losing the Battle City tournament, he'd relapsed badly. Mokuba had struggled to coax his brother out of his depression, failing to understand why it mattered so much to him that he'd lost.

"Why don't you smile anymore? I know our childhood wasn't the best, but at least we had fun sometimes. And now you're always in a bad mood and I want it back the way it was!" (2)

His brother hadn't known about his cutting. He'd never known, and he never would, if Seto could help it. He didn't want Mokuba to pity him for what he'd endured at Gozaburo's hands. Those days were over, so he didn't need to know. The innocence and happiness he'd once possessed were long gone. Things could never be the same as they'd once been. He'd done his best to apologize to his brother, but it was a hard thing to do when Gozaburo had drilled into his head the idea that apologizing is a sign of weakness.

"The past is over, and I may not be proud of every decision I made, but everything I did, I did for us, so we'd have a better life. Now let's move ahead, and don't look back." (3)

He'd learned from Gozaburo to always hide your wounds. That was one lesson he'd never forget, even if he hadn't wanted to learn it. Gozaburo had probably expected Seto to break under the pressure. He hadn't. He'd survived, but at what cost?

That was the question that burned into Seto's brain now. Had it all been worth it? Had the abuse, the shame, the self-harm, the depression, the paranoia, the hallucinations—were they all worth the security that he had now and the guardianship he firmly held over his little brother? When he put it that way, he had to say yes. When he was eleven, he'd been abused and taken up self-harm as a way of dealing with the pain. The fact that Mokuba, now at that same age, was a happy, creative kid who got to play video games and build pillow forts and never have to worry about a thing justified that sacrifice.

This assessment, of course, excluded the several times Mokuba had been kidnapped, which Seto didn't like to think about at all, so he would continue to avoid any mention of those times. He'd made sure that Mokuba had no lasting effects or trauma from the incidents, so he'd done his post facto duty by him.

In spite of everything, Mokuba was a good kid: he was upbeat, confident, kind, smart. He was well liked when people judged him for himself, instead of who his brother was. Seto preferred that Mokuba turn out like this instead of a rebellious, moody foster child—surely that's what would have happened to him if he'd been put in the system.

Gozaburo was wrong. Mokuba had turned out just fine, and Seto would continue to allow Mokuba to grow up the way he had been. The last thing he needed was to change his parenting methods to mimic his step-father's.

"Seto?"

The man in question opened one sleepy eye to see his brother standing in the doorway to his room.

"What is it?"

The child hesitated.

"Are you taking a nap?"

"…Yes."

"I thought you looked tired."

Mokuba closed the door as he entered the room, crossing the floor to crawl up onto Seto's bed.

"Can I join you?"

"Sure."

Mokuba curled up into his brother's side, and Seto curled an arm around him while he removed his tie and undid the top few buttons of his shirt. With his guardian angel at his side, Seto drifted into a restful sleep.

(1) Seto, Season 3, Episode 3

(2) Mokuba, Season 3, Episode 40

(3) Seto, Season 3, Episode 4