The Grand Retour

It's this infernal afternoon rain. The rain of commerce and black-bleeding newspapers and traffic jams. The hems of his jeans are irreparable with mud, wet denim crescents in the creases inside his knees. His luggage, a defiant green boxy thing, is scant and cheap in the aisle; waiting for the train to start, he kicks it idly but with affection. No comfort derived from the plasticine seat under him — he squeezes his eyes shut, but sleep has yet to grace him the entire day.

There had been a hideous sixteen-hour flight from Ixtapa. Mexico. Even his hair tie feels oily. Seto had offered a driver to pick him up from Narita, and Mokuba had refused with a breeziness that effectively (he thought) disguised his disappointment. If Seto didn't want to pick him up in person, why then, Mokuba would take public transport. After a year of tinny hacking buses and epic sweating walks, the idea of long black lovely cars has become alien to him.

His backpack on the seat next to him, formerly tan, is now the color of grime. Originally, he had left Japan with four slender journals he intended to fill, but somewhere along the way they got too heavy. The sole reminder of his—literary? Autobiographical?—conceit is a single sheet of folded paper in the inner zipped pocket next to his passport. It's a drawing of a griffin, coffee-stained, a griffin with Mokuba's earnest head plopped on top, a whimsical looping signature across its smoothly shaded haunch. The signature is now illegible, but at one time it read "Anneke. With love." My griffin. My little hodgepodge, she would say, the curve of her lip-ring mirroring the curve of her persistently amused mouth, with all the airy superiority of a girl exactly one year older than himself. There might have been an address written on the paper, once, but that corner has been torn off.

The train shudders into motion. Mokuba moves his backpack to his lap, takes off his black track jacket and balls it up between his head and the dirty glass. Falls, finally, into sleep.

No lengthy communication, that's what they promised. Every two weeks, Mokuba sent a postcard, making sure to choose the gaudiest ones possible (sombrero-wearing Mona Lisas, for instance), ones that didn't even correspond to his current location.

Sometimes money arrived, spontaneously, and Mokuba cursed himself. As if he genuinely thought he could escape the reach of the hand of the prominent head of Kaiba Corporation. As if an alias and an insolent smile could ward off the thin glittering filaments that radiated from a certain mansion in Tokyo, radiated across oceans, and enmeshed themselves around his browning legs and arms and hair. Who did he think he was fooling with this Third World tour. And in this momentary desolation he would frenzy himself into generosity, folding hundred-dollar bills under produce in the market and slipping even more into the pockets of shy pregnant women on buses.

There had been bohemians and prostitutes, both ill-advised—fumbling kisses, too much money exchanged. Some called him clever, some called him beautiful. Everyone told him how young he was, even for seventeen.

He spent his birthday on his back in a teetering gondola in Bruges, holding his breath and staring up at the innumerable swirling stars.

He spent Seto's birthday half-swimming half-floating in a hidden beach in Curacao, pretending the ultramarine blue of the water didn't remind him of anything else.

The train halts at the station. Mokuba shuffles off, hails a cab, and after a thousand minor indignations of transit finds himself at buzzed into the threshold of the manse. Thankfully, there's no servant to take his luggage. The slink of white carpet under his sore feet (is he sullying the carpet?) delights him to an uncomfortable degree as he ascends the stairs and enters the east hall. The regulated air feels—good, actually, quite good, something sterile but sweet inside Mokuba's dusty mouth. When hears the polite rap upon the study door by his own hand he notices with a start that his eyes have been closed in reverence this entire trip down the hall. Muscle memory has conveyed him here, has borne him up to this stark elegant door unlocked and oh he's trembling as he enters.

There is Seto eyes down, in a suit, at the desk. The shape and form so absurdly familiar that Mokuba looses an embarrassing indistinct cry. He moves, he registers that the numerous pieces of paper splayed on the desk are not reports, but the written side of his postcards, all 26 of them spread out like stained tapestry, and that Seto is looking at him and in that astringent beachwater gaze he realizes his brother didn't pick him up at the airport to avoid any possibility of others contaminating this one moment.

Seto stands. In his hand is the final postcard and his shirt is light green and his cologne is verdant and god even kissing doesn't feel immediate enough so Mokuba grabs his brother and bites him, bites him on the junction between neck and shoulder, bites him because language cannot express, bites him until Seto slams him against the wall and shoves his hand down Mokuba's pants, and Mokuba lets out a ragged sound that could be a sob or a moan or anything at all.

Mokuba finally does speak, in the shower. "It took me the longest time to understand," he half-yells, over the water spraying ardent over their entwined bodies. "What you tried to tell me the day I left."

Seto leans back, wrenches off the tap without breaking eye contact. "Yes." There's a droplet on his lower lip, and Mokuba pauses to suck it off.

"All the time I thought you meant, 'You are my heir.' Responsibilities and, and—progeny, and all of that." Mokuba flushes, nudging their hips closer. He's dizzy with the billows of steam, with the wet press of Seto's forearms across his back.

"Silly," Seto whispers. "That's not what I meant at all." He lowers his mouth to Mokuba's ear. "You are my air."

A foregone conclusion, low laughter, and in between kisses Mokuba nuzzles his face into Seto's neck and inhales home.