When I started this project, all I wanted to do was find a reasonable excuse to put Seto's parents into the present day. You may have come to realize that "Lightbringer" has become much more than that. The simple truth is that my little idea has a lot of consequences, and we're just now getting to them.
Trust me when I say there is a lot more to come; like the original "Paved with Good Intentions," and "Blue Eyes, Violet Eyes" before it, this has become a behemoth that is now much bigger than itself. If that makes any sense.
When time (or dimensional) travel is involved, I'm not sure if anything ever makes all that much sense.
The first things that caught Yuki Yagami's attention as she entered the Kaiba Mansion, aside from the fact that it was the single largest dwelling she had ever seen in her life, and just how immaculately clean it was—she took off her shoes before stepping onto the marble floor in spite of the half-amused expression on Mokuba's face—were the portraits. A number of them were on the walls, two on the mantle, one on an end-table near the leather couch that dominated the center of the back wall; she counted a total of nine pictures, each framed and perfectly placed throughout the room.
Each one depicted a buoyant, effervescent Mokuba Kaiba; not a single picture showed any part of the boy's elder brother.
Yuki might have expected there to be pictures of Seto shaking hands with politicians, social workers, the president of the United States, something. There was one picture, the one on the end-table, that showed Mokuba with another person: a middle-aged woman. They were standing in front of what looked like an orphanage.
Seto was nowhere to be found.
"For some reason," Kohaku muttered, "I expected something else."
Mokuba smiled, but he looked embarrassed. "Everybody does."
Little Seto was looking around the room with an unreadable expression on his young face; it looked somewhere between interest and hunger. He saw one of the pictures on the mantle: Mokuba in a graduation gown, cap perched jauntily on his head and some sort of award in his hands. Seto smiled.
A young woman stepped into the room, dressed in a dark blue skirt and matching jacket over a cyan sweater. Her dark brown hair was pulled back into a stylishly loose bun, and she grinned broadly at them. Bowing deeply, she said, "Good afternoon. My name is Akiko."
"No need to be formal, Kiko," Mokuba said. "This is family."
"Of course," Akiko said, but she seemed like she had already forgotten.
"Yuki Yagami," Yuki replied graciously. She gestured.
"Kohaku," grunted her husband, but he had a pleasant enough look on his face.
"Sotaro," offered little Seto without a hitch, and his parents both blinked. Akiko didn't seem to catch this, but Mokuba did. Yuki caught the boy watching her, and he winked.
"It's an honor to meet you all," Akiko said, bowing her head again. "Would you like to rest a moment? We can have something made up for you, a drink, a light snack, and I can show you to where you'll be staying."
"A glass of iced water would be wonderful," Yuki said.
"Ditto for me, please," Kohaku added.
"…May I have tea?" Sotaro asked.
Yuki smiled as Akiko turned her attention to the boy again, and watched with amusement as her heart melted. "A proper gentleman settles for nothing less than fine tea," Akiko said, a broad grin on her face now. She glanced fleetingly at Yuki and Kohaku; both nodded. "Of course you may," Akiko said. "Please, come with me. I'll show you what we have." She looked back at the Yagami adults. "If one of you would like to accompany us?"
Kohaku nodded. "Sure."
"Bocchan?" Akiko asked. "Would you like anything?"
"That's okay," Mokuba said. "Thank you."
They left the room, leaving Mokuba alone with Yuki. She looked at the boy closely, and couldn't help but recall the old photos her mother insisted on showing off every holiday, when Yuki herself had been a girl of ten. She'd fancied herself some breed of princess, and had taken every excuse to wear frilly dresses: costume or traditional formalwear, it made no difference. If it looked old-fashioned or pretty or both, she wore it.
If her tomboy phase had begun at that age, rather than her early teens, and if she had ever bothered to nurture a tan, Yuki surmised that she would have looked all but identical to this boy. His face was rougher, of course, but only marginally. He seemed like a delicate child, just as her own was. Yuki realized at that moment that there was no way possible that this boy, Mokuba Kaiba, was not related to her somehow. The resemblance was far too uncanny.
He seemed nervous in a room alone with her; but once he noticed the silence had gone on a bit too long, he locked eyes with her and bowed. "I'm sorry about how I acted when we met," he said, sounding rather stiff and formal. "It was rude. I know you don't really have a reason to believe me, after what happened with my brother before, but you'll be safe now. We'll do everything we can to stop Ot—Gozaburo."
Yuki smiled. "…I trust you, Mokuba-kun. You and your brother. I'm so grateful you've agreed to help us. If there's anything we can possibly do to repay you…" She left the statement unfinished.
Mokuba looked almost afraid at the idea. "Oh, no. Don't worry about that. This is—this is our responsibility. Niisama will take care of things now. He'd be offended if you said you wanted to repay him."
Yuki found she wasn't surprised by this.
Mokuba sat down in a nearby chair. He gestured to the couch. "Please, go ahead and sit down." He was fidgety, and trying very hard to hide it. His eyes were darting every which way, and it struck Yuki that this boy was either paranoid, or just extremely vigilant.
Perhaps both.
You may be wondering why young Seto has opted to give his name as "Sotaro." The truth is simple: it's for the sake of the narrative. I have a tendency to refer to this boy's elder counterpart, the Kaiba we all know and love, as Seto. Hence, I needed some way to differentiate between the elder Seto and the younger. I didn't want to just call them "little Seto" and "big Seto." Or "Seto" and "Kaiba."
So, instead, I gave him this little alias. Or rather, he gave it to himself.
Smart little guy, isn't he?
