Seto's eye twitched, the last thing in the world he wanted was to hear her call him big brother. But on the other hand he still owed her a favor for helping Mokuba. However he couldn't stand the thought of hearing those words out of her mouth in regards to him. He'd rather owe her the favor. So he simply said, "No."
"Seto!" Yami started to inject.
"Please!" Maura begged, "I want to impress Mahaado and hopefully he won't want to take me with him if he thinks I'm welcome here. If there's a price to pay for that then name it and I'll do it!"
"Maura, you don't know what you're asking. Seto can be deadly serious about his favors. He may even ask you to run around the castle several times! I've been there!"
"I've never forced you to do that!"
"No, but you did a guard once."
"I was also only 16 and had just taken the throne not six months before. The guard just pissed me off! The worst I've ever done to you is make you be more like Mahaado's assistant Dylan and stand next to me instead of sitting down."
"Even if he tells me to do a hundred laps around the castle in my nightgown I'll do it! I want to impress Mahaado and hopefully he won't want to take me with him if he thinks I'm welcome here. If there's a price to pay for that then so be it! I don't want to go with Mahaado where he may keep me for a little while just to please my sister but then eventually he will either send me back to my stepmother or find someone to marry me off too!"
"Your sister would never let that happen." Yami assured her.
"You shouldn't lie to her like that, Yami."
"What do you mean? I'm not lying to her!"
Maura shook her head. "No, Seto's right. My sister might protest but in the end no matter what my sister may want Mahaado is the one in charge. No matter what my sister says or does if he chooses to marry me off or send me packing back to my stepmother's place she won't be able to do a lot about it. That's why I want to call you big brother to make him believe you want me here too."
"It's too late for that."
"What did you do, Seto?" Yami asked.
Seto shrugged, "I got rid of some dead weight mostly."
"What hell does that mean?"
"Honda, it seems, hasn't been happy here since I took over and started acting up once Mokuba got here and the new rules and laws we put into place to protect him. I can only suspect that Maura's presence only added to that. From what Bakura told me and everything it's more he felt that we should be more at war or something not relaxing in peace. Bakura said that for some reason Honda felt that Mahaado was his ideal king, like father was."
"He seriously felt that Gozaburo was perfect?"
"Apparently to him, yes."
"What did you mean by dead weight and what does this have to do with Honda?"
Seto shrugged, "I heard about Mahaado hitting Maura…"
Yami gasped and looked at Maura, "He hit you!"
Maura nodded her head, "He told me he wanted me to go live with him, but I refused."
Seto interrupted by saying, "I would have thought he'd talked to one of us before confronting her but I guess he chose to just go straight to the source first."
"Why did he hit you Maura?" Yami asked.
"He just told me what I already knew, that I would have just been a babysitter for baby David nothing more nothing less. But after I refused I heard him say that I would have just been a bad influence on him anyway. He doesn't like that you and Seto treat me and Mokuba like kids, instead of all royal training."
"Well Seto's mother was the only reason we weren't trained from birth. She fought for us, but after she died he had nothing to hold him back except his retainers."
"Yeah the only reason he listened to them is that they told him that by taking Mokuba away that if I got sick and died he'd have no heir to the throne and if Yami got sick and died then the results might be the same as I might refuse the throne. I often would see him stare out the window when I was sick, so I sometimes wondered if on days like that he didn't regret taking Mokuba away."
"He had to have remembered where he left him, he could have gone back!"
"True, but since he'd already told everyone he was dead it'd been harder to explain that he was angry and lied."
"Hmm… yes and your father detested the thought of apologizing unless forced too. You're a lot like him in regards to that. You hate apologizing unless you absolutely have to."
"Yes, well back to the subject at hand. I had a talk with Mahaado and told him I didn't like the fact he hit her."
"Seto that could have been dangerous, he's a powerful magic user, who knows what he could have done!"
"I held my tongue and didn't say anything too bad to upset him."
"Then what did you do?"
"I made a deal with him?"
"You're going to send me with him?" Maura asked.
Yami looked up and said, "Seto, you didn't!"