Disclaimer: If it is truly still necessary, I shall admit for the 42nd time that I do not own Yu-Gi-Oh!

"The more privilege you have the more oblivious you become to it."

~Tim Winton

Chapter 9

By the time Alistair arrived at the estate he'd decided against mentioning his unexpected encounter with Bakura; there was no need to bring down Seto's wrath upon him now that the spirit of the Ring was gone.

He joined the Kaiba brothers at the dining room table just as Trudy was ladling out steaming bowls of stew.

"I know it's a bit out of season," she said. "But I found this recipe online and I couldn't wait until winter to try it out!"

"No complaints here," Mokuba said, licking his lips. Trudy smiled and turned to Alistair.

"I already fed Sewell, so there's no need to worry about her."

"Oh, thank you." In truth, the fact that he'd have to feed the calico had completely slipped his mind.

"How did your meeting go today?" the older woman asked Seto, who hadn't yet said anything, tentatively. Seto shrugged.

"As well as I expected."

"I'm glad. It's not as though any of this is your fault after all. I hardly think you were the one who wanted those women dressed like that."

"Of course not." She took that as her cue to go. She told them to enjoy the meal and retreated back to the kitchen.

"What's your next move?" Alistair asked curiously. Seto was being awfully quiet and the lack of gloating was leading the redhead to believe something was up.

"I'm meeting with Britney Whinnery and one of her loser friends on Monday to discuss the press-conference. That means that we'll have to postpone our duel; I'll need this weekend to prepare."

Halfway through the meal Alistair had a sudden realization that almost caused him to choke on a mouthful of potato. Britney Whinnery was Darren's roommate which meant that Darren could possibly be the friend that she was planning on bringing with her to her meeting with Seto. Darren had promised not to reveal what he knew of Alistair and Seto's relationship, but that had been some time ago.

He knew he should probably warn Seto so that the brunette wouldn't be blindsided if Darren chose to threaten him with that, but he was afraid that if he did, Seto would never forgive him for having revealed the information to Darren in the first place. Besides, he reasoned, there's no real reason to think that she will bring Darren. But then again, even if she doesn't, he could have told her…But maybe he didn't…Surely if she knew that she would have brought it up already...

Ultimately he decided to give Darren a call the moment he was alone to implore the former art student not to use the information against Seto in their meeting.

Seto was far too busy with his own issues to notice the change in Alistair's demeanor and Mokuba was distracted by his food and his cell phone, so he too noticed nothing.

As soon as he was done eating, Alistair excused himself and feigned having to make a phone call to a colleague to ask about the weekend's schedule. The moment he was alone he whipped out his cell phone and dialed Darren's number, but unfortunately, as an automated message informed him, Darren appeared to have changed it since the last time Alistair had talked to him. Cursing under his breath, he called Moira, but she didn't have his number either.

"Just call the library in the morning." Alistair jumped and looked up. Seto was leaning nonchalantly against the wall of the foyer. "I need to blow off some steam; care to spar?" Alistair bit his lip and glanced back at his phone, but there really wasn't anything more he could do except drive over to the apartment and pray that either Darren or Britney still lived there, but there was no way he could get away with doing that until the next day without raising suspicion.

"Um…fine. Ok."

"Afraid you're going to lose?" Seto taunted. Trying to tune back into the present, Alistair narrowed his eyes.

"You wish."

As he parried one of Alistair's kicks thirty minutes later, Seto congratulated himself on his decision to teach the redhead how to fight so that he had a real opponent to spar against as opposed to the mechanical dummy he'd been stuck with before. Alistair had been a quick learner and had easily picked up on what Seto taught him, but of course Seto had saved the best moves for himself.

He ended the match by twisting Alistair's arm behind his back and forcing him to his knees on the mat.

"Do you feel better now?" Alistair asked sourly as he stood up, breathing hard from the exertion. Seto smirked.

"Much."

"You know, eventually I'm going to get good enough to beat you whether you teach me better moves willingly or not."

"Heh. We'll see. Sauna?" Alistair nodded, and the two walked across the Kaiba's private gym to the sauna located in a walled-off alcove on the far side, stripping out of their sweaty muscle shirts as they went.

Upon sitting in the steamy sauna, Seto immediately rested his back against the warm wood of the bench and closed his eyes, his face adopting a contented expression, but Alistair was a bit more restless. He was still unaccustomed to the concept of a sauna.

"Wouldn't a hot shower be better?" he'd asked the first time. "Then you'd be getting clean at the same time as being warm."

"Stop fidgeting," Seto murmured, cracking one eye open. "You're worse than Mokuba." Chagrined, Alistair attempted to sit back and relax, but it went against his very nature to sit still for too long; he needed to be moving or at least doing something.

After ten minutes of trying to achieve the fugue state that Seto seemed to be in, he gave up and rested his head on the brunette's sweat-slicked shoulder. Again, Seto cracked one eye open.

"Seriously?"

"I'm bored." Seto let out a long-suffering sigh.

"I'm never inviting you to do this ever again." He stood up as best he could in the low-ceilinged room and made for the door. "Come on." Happy to be relieved of his boredom Alistair followed, though he knew that the most unpleasant part of the sauna experience was yet to come.

The next room over contained a shower spigot that only produced cold water. Seto claimed that dousing oneself in icy water immediately after leaving the sauna was healthy, but Alistair had his doubts.

"Your turn," Seto said, shivering as he emerged from under the frigid spray. Alistair reluctantly took his turn, shuddering as the cold water made contact with his heated skin.

"Too cold for you?" Seto asked with a challenging look in his eye.

"Not at all," Alistair lied with a dainty sniff. "Besides, like you said: it's good for you." Seto didn't believe him for a moment, but chose not to call him out on it.

Once they were dressed and making their way upstairs to shower, Seto acted on a sudden impulse and stopped, putting his hands on the shorter man's shoulders and bending down to kiss him.

"What was that for?" Alistair asked. Seto shrugged.

"I felt like it."

"Careful Seto: affection is a slippery slope; next thing you know you'll be telling me you love me." Seto quickly recovered from his surprise at the redhead's snarky tone.

"I'm willing to risk it."

After showering, the two split up. Seto went down to his home office to begin researching the feminist movement so that he'd be prepared to sound educated should Britney Whinnery try to bring up something she assumed he knew nothing about, and Alistair went to his room to play with Sewell and take a few practice math tests in preparation for the calculus class he had to take once he started at the university.

"Hey you," Alistair said when the little calico rushed over to him the moment he opened the door. He picked up the purring animal and cuddled her against his chest. She meowed and rubbed her head against the underside of his chin. "Did you miss me?" She meowed again in response.

For the next fifteen minutes, Alistair amused himself by watching Sewell chase the red dot from a KC logo embossed laser pointer he'd appropriated from Seto's office the last time he'd been there, then decided it was time to get down to work.

While an exhausted Sewell curled up on the bed for a nap, Alistair sat at his desk and cracked open the calculus book he'd found in the Kaiba library.

When he'd first mentioned struggling with the subject due to the fact that the highest level of formal math he'd ever taken was pre-algebra, Seto had offered to help him. It quickly became apparent however that Seto was a horrible teacher. He got more frustrated than Alistair when the redhead didn't understand something, saying that it was just 'obvious' and that Alistair was obtuse if he didn't get it.

Needless to say, the 'lesson' ended with a yelling match during which Alistair threw the graphing calculator Seto was shoving in his face across the room where it broke against the wall. After that disaster, Alistair had taken to sitting in on Mokuba's math lessons, which he had twice a week, and catching up that way, although he had to do most of the work on his own.

Half the battle turned out to be learning how to use the calculator he needed to solve the problems. After breaking the one Seto had given him, he'd had to borrow one of Mokuba's which was slightly older and even more finicky. Still, he'd stuck it out and was finally starting to grasp what the formerly mysterious strings of numbers and symbols were asking of him.

When he'd gone to the Domino University open house with Moira he'd talked to the head of the mathematics department, expressing his concerns that his math skills weren't up to par, to which the man had replied that one of the key tricks to being a good math student was to think of each problem like a puzzle. "The answer is always right there," he'd explained, "you just need to know the trick to unlocking it and the rest happens naturally." He'd also offered Alistair a pamphlet with websites that offered free practice tests and had underlined the three he personally found the best because they offered step by step explanations.

Given that Alistair was already a skilled hacker who was familiar with several computer codes, he found, upon taking the professor's advice and thinking of the problems like code instead of numbers, that much of calculus was quite logical.

He worked feverishly on the practice tests until the numbers started blurring together. He glanced at the computer's digital clock display and started. Surely it couldn't be three in the morning already. Why hadn't Seto come to get him? Unless the brunette was still down in his office…

Yawning, he shut the computer down, turned the lights off, leaving Sewell snoozing on a pillow, and padded downstairs to drag Seto to bed.

Seto, who had been reading and watching documentaries for the past six hours, was tired beyond belief and his fingers were starting to cramp from having taken so many notes. Who could have known that there was more to feminism than soccer moms with first world problems?

"You look like you're about to fall asleep on top of your keyboard," Alistair observed, the sudden noise causing Seto to jump.

"Stop doing that!" he snapped. The redhead had the uncanny ability to seemingly appear out of thin air.

"Sorry; I wasn't trying to sneak up on you," Alistair apologized sincerely.

"Just learn how to make audible footsteps! Anyway, what do you want? I'm in the middle of watching," he glanced at the name of the documentary, "Virgins Until Marriage." Alistair snorted.

"It's a bit late for that don't you think?"

"Shut up. It's part of this documentary series about the history of feminism." He yawned suddenly, his jaw popping audibly. "I've been trying to get a handle on the subject in case it comes up on Monday."

"Have you learned anything interesting?" Alistair asked, lounging on the leather couch situated along the right wall.

"Oh sure; I've learned all about the atrocities that women have faced in this country and around the world for hundreds of years and why all men should just roll over and give up any and all power in an attempt to make up for it."

"You don't sound convinced."

"I'm not; it's stupid."

"So you think women should still be second class citizens?"

"You're doing that thing where you try to make me sound like a heartless asshole."

"You do a fine job of that all on your own."

"No, I don't think that women should be second to men. I agree that that's ridiculous. Of course women should be able to wear whatever they want and have whatever jobs they want, and have the right to vote and whatever else. And I don't think that they should be forced to stay at home and make sandwiches for their husbands either. The fact that that's even a debate is absurd. What I don't agree with is some of this nit-picky bullshit that people like Britney Whinnery spew like the concept that if a man doesn't bow down at the feet of the modern feminists he's misogynistic and deserves to be castrated." Alistair winced.

"I'm sure no one really thinks that." Seto gestured dramatically towards his computer screen.

"People do; I've just spent at least three of the six hours I've been here reading the blogs of people who not only believe that, but try to convince other people that they should too." He clicked back through several tabs. "'Any woman who is not a misandrist is just not aware of the world,'" he quoted. "'If you believe that race/gender/weight doesn't factor into every single one of your daily experiences, then you are either an oppressor or unaware of your oppression. Either way, you're wrong. We live in a racist/sexist/transphobic/fatphobic society and literally every interaction you have with another gender/race/size is wrought with oppression and privilege.'"

"What's misandry?"

"The hatred of men." Alistair was silent for several minutes.

"I understand," he said finally. "I don't agree, but I understand. When I worked for Dartz, I saw the world that way too. I don't know what it's like to be a woman or a person of color or fat, but I do know what it's like to be one of the have nots and have the obscenities of the wealthy rubbed in my face, or at least, that's what I was convinced was happening. Now I'm not saying that I suddenly don't think that classism is a problem, but I've come to realize that it's not everywhere like I thought it was.

I was sure that every single rich person looked down on poor people and went out of their way to distance themselves from them and screw them over, but honestly, I think that mostly rich people just don't know anything about it. They hear about poverty on the news, but they don't see it for themselves and they probably don't know any poor people. You're a really good example of that actually.

For these women it's probably the same. Sexism does exist, and no offence, but that KC uniform policy proves that, but again, it's a matter of perspective. These people who are going after you about it are acting based on the assumption that you personally chose those uniforms because you think of women as sex objects which would make you sexist if that were true. But what they don't know/want to believe, is that you didn't implement that; Gozaburo did. You didn't even notice what they were wearing until this whole thing started which just goes to show how much you don't over-sexualize women's bodies . Well, and how uninterested in women you are." Seto shot him a look over the top of his PC.

"Look: I appreciate you trying to break this down for me, but—and you can say I'm just basking in my white, rich, male privilege or whatever the hell you want to call it—I don't give a damn." Alistair could see that Seto was in no mood to be convinced and shelved the matter, mostly because he could see that the two of them were not going to agree. But just before he completely let it drop, he offered up one final thought.

"You may not give a damn now, but you might if it comes to effect you." Seto narrowed his eyes.

"Why would it?"

"You might have white, rich, and male privilege, but you struck out when it came to straight privilege."

"Not really," Seto argued. "I already have a job, so it's not like I need to be hired, no one would dare try to tangle with me over something as irrelevant as who I'm sleeping with even though Roland seems to think so, and I don't have any intention of having kids so what do I care what the law says about that?"

"Are you honestly going to ignore the most obvious one?" Alistair asked incredulously.

"What?"

"You can't get married."

"Oh, that. So? What do I care?" Alistair, overtired and exasperated, started to laugh. "What's so funny?"

"You. You're so thickheaded sometimes."

"Enlighten me." The lateness of the hour was causing Seto's temper to be even shorter than usual.

"Let's pretend for a second that you, at some distant and hypothetical point in the future, were with someone, but you weren't married. Now say that you had to go to the hospital unexpectedly because you, I don't know, hit your head or something and fell into a coma. They would have no legal right to make any kind of call about what happens to you even if you've been together for thirty years. Or say you die; they could be completely screwed out of any kind of inheritance. Insurance is an issue, taxes, all kinds of things."

"Why do you know all of that?"

"Because I happen to have a vested interest in knowing what kinds of rights I do and don't have."

"Did you honestly think your feeble attempt not to name names was lost on me? You're talking about yourself. You would get screwed out of an inheritance if I died. You wouldn't get to make any kind of call if I hit my head."

"I am not talking about me! I was being hypothetical!"

"Bull. You were talking about yourself. Is this your very indirect way of proposing?" Seto's evident amusement got under Alistair's skin even as he felt his cheeks burning.

"Don't be stupid! Who could possibly endure you long enough to marry you?"

"Not you I take it." The statement was Seto's way of fishing for an actual answer and Alistair knew it. But he also knew that no matter what he said the brunette would make fun of him for it.

"Just go back to your computer. I'm going to bed." He made to leave.

"Hang on. I'll be done in a few minutes."

"Fine." He sat back down and crossed his arms.

It wasn't just a few minutes as it turned out, and despite his best efforts to stay awake, after a quarter of an hour Alistair ended up falling asleep with his head resting on the arm of the couch.

"Alright, I'm done," Seto proclaimed a half an hour later, glancing over as his PC powered down and noticing for the first time that Alistair was no longer awake. "Alistair," he said sharply. "Wake up." Alistair crinkled his eyebrows.

"Wha?" he asked blearily.

"Get up; let's go to bed."

"Finally."

"At least I don't have to carry you this time," Seto said as he turned the light off in his office.

"You say that as though you have to do it so often. You've carried me once."

"Twice," Seto corrected him absently, mentally checking to see if he'd forgotten anything. The computer was off, his alarm had been set…

"Twice? What was the other time?" Alistair asked, confused. Seto looked over at him.

"I carried you off the plane after you passed out."

"You never told me that."

"It never came up."

"Why? Roland or someone else could have done that."

"I don't know Alistair; it was a spur of the moment decision." He thought back to that day when Alistair continued to look inquiring. "I went back for Mokuba after I crash-landed the plane and he was sitting next to you on the ground. After I made sure he was ok, I started to call Roland to send someone to get you, but then I decided not to. Not only would it have wasted unnecessary time since I was already right there, I felt like it would have been an insult not to carry you myself. Besides, the plane could have caught on fire or something and your death would have been my fault. I didn't want that on my conscience."

"What happened after that?" Alistair asked, fascinated by the story.

"Nothing. I grabbed you and Mokuba and I got out of the wreck only to run straight into Yugi and the dweeb team. Then I carried you onto one of the choppers and lay you out on a cot." He didn't mention it, but he'd also removed the duelist's jacket to use in lieu of a blanket.

"I can't believe after everything I did to you and Mokuba that you did that for me," Alistair said softly. "Why did you do it? Why did you take me in?" He'd asked the question before, but never gotten a satisfying or complete answer.

"It was Mokuba's idea. I would have been fine with just dropping you at a hospital and footing the bill and have considered that more than having fulfilled my civic duty, but he felt bad for you and pointed out that you'd probably have nowhere to go once you woke up.

At first I was just thinking that I'd rent you an apartment, but the more I thought about it the more I wanted to prove to you that I wasn't like my step-father. I don't know why I cared so much since most people probably think that about me, but in the end I cared enough that I decided I'd rather put you up here so that I could prove it to you."

"Well, you succeeded; I don't think that anymore. I know that you aren't evil like he was."

"I could say the same about you. You aren't the whiny, delusional loony I thought you were either."

"I guess it just goes to show that you can't judge a book by its cover, huh?" Seto rolled his eyes.

"You're using clichés; now I know it's time to go to sleep."

As they got into bed Alistair felt unsettled. He needed to get in touch with Darren to implore him not to tell Britney what he knew, or to convince her not to tell Seto about it if he'd already told her. If Seto found out that Alistair had told someone about them (even though it hadn't been intentional) he would no doubt feel betrayed, and given the brunette's history of depression and cutting, Alistair was concerned about what that kind of betrayal would do to him.

He rolled over and propped himself up on his elbow. Maybe if he told Seto now he could explain in such a way as to make him understand that he hadn't told Darren on purpose. Seto would be angry, but then at least he would know.

"What is it?" Seto asked sleepily. Alistair suddenly changed his mind. He still had two days to find Darren. If, by Sunday night, he hadn't managed to either contact him or convince him, then he'd tell Seto about it.

"Nothing." He reached out and stroked the side of the CEO's face. "I love you." Seto crinkled his eyebrows, sensing that that hadn't been what Alistair had been going to say. Then again, perhaps he was reading too much into it; Alistair did have a habit of saying that at seemingly random moments.

"You're such a sap," he replied, though he was half-smiling, and leaned up enough that he could press his lips lightly against Alistair's. Alistair lay down beside him, and Seto put his arm around him, marveling at how natural that felt. Not too long ago he had avoided touch as much as possible, not trusting anyone enough to let them get that close, but now here he was, lying with Alistair so near that he could feel the heat emanating from him. He hoped it would always be that way.

Author's Note: Sort of my own little disclaimer here: I don't personally feel that way about modern feminism, but I know plenty of people who do and it seemed like the most natural and in-character way for Seto to feel about it. Again, it's a money over morality thing.