alecto perdita

Despite this, the house held them well enough when they were three: Katsuya, Mokuba, himself. The games salon saw more use than it had in years. They spent evenings there, the table cluttered with cues and chalk and half-finished drinks, games stretching past midnight until someone called it on fatigue rather than score. Katsuya took to one-pocket with a stubborn focus that matched Seto’s own, learning angles through repetition, arguing over shots with a grin that never quite left him even when he missed. 

They ate together more often than not. Mokuba would pull Katsuya into conversations about his plans for theme parks worldwide: Scape Goat bumper carts, Cyber Solider laser tag in KaibaLand California, a new kind of mini-golf that featured a Time Wizard mechanic. 

Katsuya listened with interest and offered inspiration from his own travels. He’d gone thrill seeking at a mountain eco-park after his podium in Australia and was blown away by the cablecars that tethered him from summit to summit. He thought KaibaLand should hire a Michelin star chef to design a hot dog menu, and believed the parks would benefit from karaoke lounges at every site. Mokuba mostly laughed at these suggestions. Seto let their conversations run, intervening with a joke or dry remark when needed, otherwise watching the exchange take shape without him. 

In summer, they fled the staff and took their dinner poolside until August when the hornets’ pesterings would chase them back indoors. Every barbecue was a chance for the insects to foist their hunger on bloody, raw cuts of meat or burn themselves alive chasing game to the grill. Other evenings found the swarms urgently committed to drowning: wasp after wasp brazenly flinging themselves at any unattended drink. Katsuya and Mokuba had sought refuge from this in the pool. Seto had been left to nurse a whiskey and the hornet submerged within it. He watched the drink slowly melt its air-thin wings into amber. It thrashed against its flightlessness in minutes-long, delirious panic before falling still and floating through the end.   

A year into their cohabitation, Mokuba departed to helm the KaibaLand LATAM office in Brazil. Before he left, he made a show of it, leaning against the doorframe with a look that made it clear he was enjoying himself. “Guess I’m doing you two a favour,” he said, glancing between them. “Empty nest. Try not to wreck the place.”

Katsuya had laughed it off, already planning when they would visit and for how long. 

And then they had been two. Katsuya stayed when he could. His schedule pulled him elsewhere often: tournaments, press, obligations that kept him moving between cities and time zones. He left with the same lack of ceremony he brought to everything else, a bag packed in minutes, a quick word before he was gone. And then it was just the house and Seto in those intervals: long workdays and strange and silent nights without sleep. 

In the day it seemed impossible to move through the place without someone stepping into his path with a question  half-formed.

“Kaiba-sama, will you be taking breakfast—”

Ignored. They would pivot, recover, offer an alternative before he had crossed the threshold. Something light? Something prepared quickly? Something left in the study, if he preferred? No answer. By the time he reached the kitchen himself the counters were already set for him: fruit cut, coffee poured exactly as he liked, utensils aligned. He ignored it. He pulled what he needed from the back of the refrigerator where it had not yet been arranged for presentation, made something simple, ate standing, cleaned what he used before anyone could take it from his hands and turn it into a service.

It did not stop them. A jacket he had left on a chair would be gone when he returned, pressed and hung elsewhere. Documents he had left open would be stacked, squared, repositioned under the assumption that disorder required correction. He started closing doors in their faces, and left for KaibaCorp earlier and stayed longer. He ate there. Slept there when it became easier than returning. Days passed without him setting foot in the manor. There were some days his every action felt perfunctory, his mind abandoning him for some far place that he wouldn’t speak of, to anyone. 

This all wore on him in ways Katsuya noticed the moment he’d returned. Katsuya knew Seto was a bit too far gone to press, so he held his tongue on asking after him; opting to share the truth of what he knew instead: Seto had been avoiding their home and staying at his office. He tried a joke first: “Sounds like we need a fucking vacation if you’re so hard up to get away from here that you’re snoozing at work.” 

But once Katsuya was a few weeks into his return, he opted for a different approach. 

“It’s not like we have to stay here,” Katsuya had declared this to him over the woollen veld of the pool table. He’d started his off season with two consecutive weekends of billiards that had reduced the pair of them to pool fiends caught in endless re-matches of one-pocket billiards. The day’s games were evenly-matched and of good sportsmanship until Katsuya, stretching into the low stance he preferred for the shotline, toppled his forgotten coffee mug right onto the baize; its contents swilled across his entire half of the table in a dark, dramatic arc.

Katsuya wiped at the cloth with the hem of his shirt, spreading the stain wider, darker. He stopped when it became clear that nothing he did would reverse it.

Seto set his cue down with care, parallel to the rail. The game was over. And he certainly had no intentions of entertaining whatever conversation Katsuya was trying to broach. He turned to leave, Katsuya calling behind him: “Hey! Don’t do that. Don’t just walk off. What the fuck is with you? You’ve been like this all week. Every little thing sets you off and then you act like it didn’t happen.”

But it had! It had happened. It had all happened. Seto turned to Katsuya in blinding fury to find the man staring back. How did he appear to Katsuya, Seto wondered bitterly? Were those dark eyes seeing him for what he was: a man too strange and vex for comfort and company and convenience; someone too rattled from the fight to enjoy a victory won? This was his house! Their house! The first place Katsuya had known comfort, all his life. Who was Seto to abandon it? For what? Because he’d never found the balance of bodies meant to serve this place: it was always too many people, or never enough; and so he’d taken to dismissing staff in droves, week by week until there was nothing left but him and this place, its vacancy condemning it to squallor? Because even after the orphanage, with a room all to his own and Gozaburo dead and gone, Seto still struggled to sleep? Because Seto took every route in the house to bypass the room with the study desk and its grooves from a fast unfurling whip that had never even marred his skin? 

“Look,” Katsuya said. “It didn’t come out right. I’m sorry. I’m sorry Seto. I know it’s weird. Leaving stuff behind. Even when it’s fucked up. I get that. I’ve done it.” He shrugged. “But I’m here. I’ve got you. You’ve got me. If we’re gonna do this, you gotta let me help you sometimes.”

Seto didn’t respond.

“I’m not trying to drag you somewhere you don’t want to be,” Katsuya went on. “I’m just saying we can choose. That’s the part we didn’t have before. We can pick a place and go there because we want to. Not because someone else decided it for us.”

But where? Where could they possibly go? 

Katsuya laughed.

“Anywhere,” he said. “That’s the point.” Seto was unconvinced. Katsuya smiled at him. “Fine. We can start somewhere with a balcony. A big one with a good ass view. Somewhere you can step outside when you can’t sleep and not feel like you’re trapped in a box. You look out, see something that isn’t this place, remember you can leave whenever you want.”

He paused, then added: “And I’ll be there. We’ll figure the rest out.”

Seto could have gone anywhere else in the world, and yet he chose to return alone to this place, with another occasion purposed to its violence... To what end? Shizuka would still say her words at the vigil tonight: Hold small beautiful things in your hands. Name them out loud when you can. Had anything else ever really mattered? He had no answer. In fact, he had nothing left to say at all. This time tomorrow, what remained of Katsuya would be ablaze. Perhaps this had always been the point: the manor’s stupid excess, its undormant nights that doomed him to exhaustion, its rooms all finally empty save the troubles he’d been dared to leave behind. All here, waiting for him as though he had never left. Had everything just been the long way around to the weapons cache in the subbasement; stockpiled in afterthought during KaibaCorp’s demilitarization sale? Seto could see the room now, could see the gun he’d wield for Hirutani’s execution today: a SIG Sauer P320-XTen handgun, equipped with a suppressor to dampen the noise.