Yu-Gi-Oh! Fan Fiction ❯ Wings of Mortality ❯ Wings of Mortality ( Prologue )

Wings of Mortality

We had ordered pizza that night. I remember, because I was arguing with him about the toppings. Subtly, of course. I would have never out-and-out demanded that we get Pepperoni, not when he wanted Hawaiian, but we were still bickering. It was one of the few times in my life that I was allowed to let down my guard, here, arguing with my little brother over what we were going to eat. He was grinning and crawling all over me like I was some sort of playground, and I allowed it.

I even think I might have laughed, though even if I did it would have been forced, unnatural and out of place.

The pizza had arrived late, and I had no intention of giving the deliveryman a tip, but I had ended up doing it anyways, the look in Mokuba's eyes was enough to soften my resolve, and I had hastily shoved a twenty into the man's hands and promptly slammed the door in his face.

The distant glitter of hope is so far away

It dances beyond my fingertips

Like lanterns strung over a chasm of forever.

I cannot reach them for fear of falling

We had stayed up late, far too late for him being so young, and watched movies all night long. Eating pizza and watching movies. We were almost a family. He didn't seem to notice how I jumped at the phantom fingers of shadow and darkness, how I was more over-protective of him than usual. He took it all in stride, he has, after all, always loved being the center of attention.

Old habits die hard, I guess. The coldness of winter was making joints broken and improperly healed ache with never-forgotten pain. Outwardly, it didn't bother me, or at least I didn't admit it. Inside, I was a curled-up little ball, sobbing and crying for someone, anyone, to rescue me. But no one came.

No one ever had.

No one ever would.

The blackness and sorrow that lurks in that chasm

They threaten me with harsh words and skeletal hands

Bravely, I lift my chin

But there is nothing that I can say to deter the flow of time

It was a slip-up. I couldn't help it. Relapses of traumatic pasts are only human. The last of the rented movies had ended, and the first channel that Mokuba came to was one on forensic science. The first word the narrator had spoken was that which I feared so much.

Rape.

I had squirmed uncomfortably on the couch, and drawn Mokuba closer, more out of instinct than any need to comfort him. I knew that he had never been harmed by such things, but that didn't stop me from never wanting it to. I had to keep him safe. He was the only innocence I had left.

The narrator had gone on to describe a grisly murder. A young woman had been kidnapped, raped, sodomized, and tortured for days before she had died. They had only just found her body, and she had been missing for almost six years before that.

I wasn't sorry for her. I knew from experience that it would be better to die. Only one thing had kept me from opening a vein in my wrists, to watch in fascinated ecstasy, as vital life's blood would spill out, spreading a sanguine stain across the carpets. It would have been white. It would have made more sense to die in a room with a white carpet. Symbolic, perhaps, of innocence tarnished and forsaken. Nothing was in shades of black and white for me, Seto Kaiba. Instead, everything was in red and white. Crimson and ivory. Vermillion and porcelain. Me and my little brother.

The encompassment of totality settles upon me like a mantle of forever

Or like stars strewn askew across the distant sky

I wish I could journey there, to that Sea of Dreams

But I am but a mortal, with mere mortal wings

Little did I know at the time, what I suffered as a child would mold my future. Give me some demented liking, lusting, for pain, for the need to be dominated, the need to suffer. So far everything in my life has been designed to bring about some degree of masochistic discomfort. Only in competition could I forget the pain, only in competition could I be fulfilled.

It was almost as though I was no longer human, but instead some grotesque parody of one. Someone who existed with the sole intent to destroy things. Lives, faith, love, pride, self-worth. All of these things and more I had taken away from other people.

All of these things had been taken from me.

Crimson twilight extends fingers outwards, the reach of the sky

Is beyond my comprehension, or my wont

The fear instilled in mortal things

Holds me close tonight.

Whispers to me like a lover, and touches my skin with intimate intentions

I cannot breath, I cannot run.

I will die.

In some twisted sense, I remind myself of Kayatsu Jounouchi. He and I are not at all dissimilar. We are both brash, quick to anger. Dangerous when provoked. Only my methods are more subtle and damaging than his. He is too…kind? gentle? to actually hurt anyone unless they first caused him some distress. Even with this handicap, he knows one thing for certain in life. He wants to hurt me.

One day I might let him. It wouldn't be as though I didn't deserve it. It wouldn't be anything less than what I have received and meted out before.

I felt Mokuba snuggle against me, yawning tiredly. His fingers were latched onto my shirt, and his face was pressed against my chest. His hair was strewn askew, shadowing planes of his face that had not yet developed, but would in latter years. He would not bear much resemblance to me. I was grateful for that.

Even holding the kinship he did to me was despicable. I must have done something incredibly wrong in a past life to inflict such pain upon those I love, now. It's all I've ever done. Caused pain. I wonder if I am capable of doing things otherwise?

It seems that the Devil is cruelly kind

He allows us life in exchange for death

The Lethe calls to me to wash my hands of my life

I would resist, but it draws my breath from my body, and lifeless I am left.

I carried him to bed. His weight was not even a mentionable hindrance to the strength I had once prided myself on. There were many flights of stairs just to get to his bedroom, but it wasn't a bother.

I nudged the door to his bedroom open with a hip and flinched at the fluttering of drapes as I stepped across the threshold. His bed was almost impossible to locate with the vast amount of toys and contraptions littered around the room. Most of which had been developed by KaibaCorp. I felt a pang of guilt for his own childhood. It might not be lost, not yet, but he had not lived one that was even relatively normal.

I tucked his now-sleeping form into bed, drew the frighteningly non-descript blankets close about his small body, and brushed my lips against his forehead.

He smiled in his sleep and blinked sleepily, instantly forcing me to regret my simple gesture. "I love you, Seto…" he murmured before promptly nodding off again.

I stiffened immediately, hands clenched in an emotion that was not quiet describable as any human thing, it held a vague relation to rage, but even so it wasn't directed at him, of course not at him, but at myself. We should have never remained so close. Not after I had failed him…not after I had lost to Pegasus. I didn't deserve this---I never deserved this…

I became aware suddenly, as though all consciousness had chosen that precise moment to allow comprehensible thought to flow back to me, that I had likely punctured the skin of my palms. It didn't bother me, pain never did, but Mokuba might be worried if he woke up and there were droplets of blood on his floor.

Quickly, swiftly, I picked my way back to the door, pausing a moment, as though held in place by some invisible hand of some great deity whose name I was not even worthy to know, let alone speak aloud.

Softly, my voice barely indistinguishable with the other noises of the night, I whispered the handful of words that I had spoken so few times before.

"I love you, too…"

And then, on second thought, I went and closed his window.

Morning offers hues of light

I look away and hide my eyes

The purity of a dawn is not for one such as I to look upon

Maybe inevitability is not what it seems

I was up late into the night, until, even though it was midwinter, cold fingers of indistinguishable gray were creeping across the sky. The gray mingled and expanded into a myriad of other colors. Purple, orange, blue…

Kaleidoscopic swirlings that whispered to me of a realm I would never reach. Bitterly, I did and could do little more than return to my computers. My machines. They are more like me than any human I know. They exist with one purpose, to perform a function designed into them by a master programmer. My programmer had, among other things, been the only one to ever share my bed. Not that it was exactly sharing.

I wouldn't call the usage of ropes -no matter how silken- sharing. Nor would I call the use of knives and verbal degradation.

If only Jounouchi knew why I call him a dog. It is not of any truthful desire to do so, but rather an unwilling delving into a past I wish I didn't have. He and I were alike in ways I would have never thought possible, and I, who had the same cruel nickname as a child, find it only natural to call him the same.

It's some perverse gratification, I think. Sometimes sexual, sometimes mental. He is never a challenge to duel against, nor is he a challenge to defeat in a battle of wits. Courage, it seems, is his strong-point.

"No! I'll do what you want, just don't hurt my little brother!"

Perhaps it is mine as well, but only when the lives and well-being of those I care about is at stake. Everyone else in the world can rot, for all I care. They are not my concern. For all I know, they could all be like…like him…

I hate humanity. I hate every last living creature on this planet except Mokuba. He is all that matters. He is all that ever matters.

To the dogs with everyone else.

Everyone.

I cannot breath.

I cannot run.

Death comes for me, circles me like a hungry wolf

It senses blood; it senses the lust of the kill

It senses my inhibitions and my mortality

It comes for me

It calls for me

And yet-

Something, an incident, drifts back to me as though some sort of living nightmare. A mention, a whisper, a murmuring of a name, a fate, a destiny.

A sister.

Kayatsu Jounouchi has a sister. A younger one. That's why he was in the tournament in the first place, to save his little sister.

Some issue of funding, if I remember correctly.

Immediately, I lurched forwards, stumbled, and ended up on my knees next to a coffee table. The nearly insatiable urge to vomit swept over me as it occurred to me just what I was doing to him. He just wanted to protect someone he loved…and so had I…

We were more alike than I imagined he would have ever dreamed.

I pity him for that.

Fingers, hands, arms, shoulders, all a-tremble, I reached for a near-by phone. It was four in the morning, but no one would ever question the judgment of Seto Kaiba. Not unless they had a strong desire to find themselves out of a day job.

The number I punched in was unfamiliar, but still remembered. I rarely forgot anything regarding numbers, must be the 'computer' in me.

"This had better be fucking important-" the throaty growl on the other end was fatigued, immediately denoting either little sleep or recent wakefulness. I didn't care, it wasn't my problem.

"It is fucking important, and if you ever speak to me like that ever again-well, I will allow you to imagine the consequences."

"Mr. Kaiba!" There were sounds of a scuffle, as though someone had sat upright, and the next time the man spoke his voice was so apologetic it made me want to gag. "I apologize for my attitude, sir, it's so early and-"

"Shut up." My words were offhanded and over-used in day-to-day conversation. He smartened up right away and waited my next orders.

"I have an assignment for you. There is a young man named Kayatsu Jounouchi, I wish to wire-transfer three point seven million dollars into his family bank account. Anonymously. If, by any chance, it is ever traced back to me, I will personally see your career go up in smoke."

"But sir…"

"Do. It."

I hung up.

Some small, insignificant spark within me that could still claim consanguinity with emotion flared at that, but was quashed immediately thereafter.

Me? Human? Impossible.

But it wasn't too late for someone else. Someone that had, unconsciously, made me face my own demons, even as he faced his own.

Someone named Kayatsu Jounouchi.

Night is falling, the Stygian gloom is here

I cry softly into the shoulder of another, begging forgiveness for wrongness done

Comforting, reassuring, are the hands that hold me

The wolf leads me away upon the same, soundless feet upon which it had come

~Owari~

The poem is my own, use it without my permission and die a slow, painful horrible death.

Wings of Mortality is © to Chevira Lowe.