Chapter Text
He was at the bottom of a black lake and he couldn’t breathe and he stumbled in the water.
Something was coming: he could hear it. Everything rumbled. The water was slowing him. The water oozed black. Cords of sludge and intestine wrapped around his legs and he fell. They twisted over his arms and neck. And it was coming nearer. It was something pale and mammoth.
There were fragments of glass scattered over the bottom of the lake.
His chest burned but the intestines gripped him tight. He felt violence in his blood. He couldn’t breathe.
And he saw it. It emerged from the darkness, silvery and teethed, with a sapphire glow inside its eyes.
“Kaiba.”
Behind the beast dragged a trail of organs, balloons of meat and fatty webbing. For she was only half a dragon. And he wondered briefly if she was here to save him. Instead she opened her mouth over his head, her teeth and the dark of her enveloping him.
“Kaiba!”
His body seized as he woke, as if his muscles might snap. He breathed the air. Above him was his bed’s canopy. The world was familiar and the dark was calm now. And beside his bed, peering down at him softly, was a young man with brown skin, luminous gold hanging from his ears, his eyes the color of red wine. And the man’s face was familiar and warm.
“Are you alright?” Atem asked him softly.
Seto looked at Atem with the eyes of a drugged man, bewilderment cradling Seto's heart, snowed over by the melt of the nightmare. Atem was supposed to be dead.
“I'm sorry. That penalty game was meant to wear off a long time ago,” Atem said.
Seto didn’t respond. Atem was supposed to be dead.
Atem smiled faintly and moved away from the bed, out from Seto’s sight. And Seto lay in bed, in the calm of his room’s dark.
Slowly the curtains began to glow with morning light.
“Morning, Nii-sama.”
Mokuba’s words seemed fogged somehow as Seto sipped black coffee from a black mug. Mokuba sat at the small table in the kitchen beside him with a plate of toast and strawberry jam.
And Mokuba was used to mornings where Seto only drank coffee and so he said nothing else.
Seto wore a long grey coat over his black outfit. The drive to work was quiet under a sky like skim milk, the sun a smear behind morning haze.
Seto’s eyes moved over the three stone Blue Eyes White Dragons posed before his company’s headquarters without thought. The structure of the headquarters shined with the milk sky.
Work was tiring. It was a day full of meetings and people and performance. The days where he worked on tech and blueprints were easier.
And inside the droning of talking and business men, Seto felt himself drifting as he tried and failed to remember what the last words he said to Atem had been. And as he caught himself he almost shuddered. It shouldn’t matter. It didn’t matter.
It had been over a year since Atem left the world. He didn’t want to think about this anymore.
Atem was-
He didn’t want to think about this anymore.
That night he took two sleeping pills instead of one.
It was late autumn. The Kaiba manor slept within folds of perfectly square hedges. The trees surrounding the manor were stained, their branches holding copper, bronze, gold. Almost three weeks had passed since the nightmare. The world was bland. He spent most evenings doing laps in the pool or sketching architecture into notebooks with charcoal or doing nothing at all and everything was banal.
“Nii-sama, want to watch Suspiria with me?” Mokuba asked Seto that evening as they ate a dinner of pasta and sausage on porcelain. The incandescence of the kitchen was bright. The floor was sandstone. “It’s an old trippy Italian horror movie. Or at least people say it’s trippy.”
Seto lifted a piece of ravioli to his mouth.
“I saw people talking about it online and it seems interesting and weird,” Mokuba continued.
“Alright,” Seto said.
The two brothers watched the film in the dark of their home theater, the technicolors of the screen shading the room. Mokuba leaned back into the sofa’s arm as they watched and he seemed cozy. Seto thought the movie was nonsense.
There was the sound of shattering glass. Everything was black. Again came the rumble, as if from the pit of creation, as if he was submerged at the bottom of the world. He was sitting in a chair. There was the ghost of a long table and the ghosts of other chairs. And the ghost of the chair across from him at the other end of the table was one he recognized. But it wasn’t really there. And then he felt something squirming inside his skin. He looked at his hands: the wriggling lumps of fatty white. Maggots were burrowing into his skin, all of his skin. He could feel it. He violently scratched at the infestation in his face and neck, clawing lightning deep, frantic and jagged. The maggots were burrowing inside him, squirming everywhere. And then he froze for a moment as he felt hot breath and he looked up. It was the dragon, her mouth gaping.
Ah yes, this dragon had already betrayed him. That’s why he had ripped her in half.
“Kaiba!”
Seto jolted awake, his heart pouncing, too full of blood. And he was in his bed. He breathed. The dark was calm now. Atem was peering down at him softly with delicate glints of gold, his eyes like wine, cooling as the moon.
“Are you alright?” Atem asked him gently.
Seto sat upright, looked at Atem. His heartbeat hummed soft static. He breathed. Atem was supposed to be dead.
“I’m sorry. I’m not sure what else I can do,” Atem said, “Something’s going wrong.”
What are you talking about? Seto thought but he didn’t speak.
The thought flickered inside Seto’s head, small and star-colored: What was the last thing I said to you?
Seto pinched his eyes. What a fool, to be sentimental for dreams.
“Take care of yourself, Kaiba.” Atem’s words were warm.
It was a dream, and yet as Atem began to turn away Seto couldn’t help but bolt his hand out to grasp Atem’s wrist. They touched.
Seto woke up for real this time.
His last memories of Atem had been happy. The sky was blue and brilliant, clouds blossoming white and lilac. Atem seemed radiant with life, but the words and gestures were scrambled and shapeless and ethereal now. He hadn’t known it’d be the last time he’d see Atem.
He gazed around the dining room, at its navy and ivory colors, the chandelier dripping its prismatic crystal, and for only a moment he remembered how much he hated this house.
“Having breakfast here today?” Mokuba asked him sleepily, stepping in from the hallway, wearing white slippers. It was unusual for Seto to eat here when it was just the two of them. Except Seto only had black coffee inside a black mug.
“I didn’t-,” Seto paused, “-sleep too well.”
“That’s too bad,” Mokuba said, shuffling into the kitchen to fetch food. He understood what his brother meant.
The gaps in the ivory curtains of the room revealed a sky like the inside of an oyster shell. Mokuba stepped back into the dining room with a plate of scrambled egg.
Work was tedious that day.
Seto did laps in the pool because it felt more constructive than pacing, and the atmosphere held in the massive windows surrounding the pool burned with the pigments of autumn.
As night came, Seto fished out one pill, two pills from the orange medication bottle. But he paused and wondered: did he really want to take two sleeping pills tonight?
Within his synapses---a flare of Atem’s gentle face.
Yes, he was going to take two pills.
He moved from the bathroom into his bedroom, with its white and grey abstract paintings and the elegance of foamy brown sheets under a thin white canopy and the three small marble dragon sculptures posed within the wooden bookcase. He went to turn off the light.
And within the calm dark suddenly there was a glowing form standing in front of the window, luminous like a deep sea creature, and she hadn’t been there before. And she was the color and glow of pearl.