It's a simple and stupid thing, and Mokuba feels dumb for caring.

It's nine at night and he walks into the bathroom, catching his brother in the middle of drying off from a shower. His tall and lanky frame is bent slightly at the waist and his ribs, which are just faint impressions, neatly frame his sides. Mokuba can't remember the last time he saw his bare legs. Even in the middle of summer he wears long pants.

He can see the dark hair down below that frames his private area, which in its simplicity and blatant visibility, looks intimate and casual; completely the opposite of its owner.

Seto turns his head. For a split second their eyes meet, and something passes so fast between them Mokuba can't pinpoint what it is. Then Seto's face twists into a snarl and he throws a towel around his waist, at the same time recoiling farther away from him as if he's made of poison.

"For the love of God, don't you knock?" he spits. Mokuba blinks, too caught off guard to reply. Seto gives an exasperated sigh through his nose and snatches his clothes off the floor.

"I'll get out of your way," He mutters, warily avoiding Mokuba's gaze, as if he has done something wrong by being naked and is now ashamed at being caught. Awkwardly he sidesteps out the door. He is gone and Mokuba suddenly hates him.

As he pees he wonders why this is. He doesn't really care to see his brother naked, but he still feels hurt that Seto made such a big deal out of a simple mistake. Whatever. He decides that it's pointless to worry over and to forget about it as soon as possible.

But he doesn't forget about it, not as he lies in bed staring up at his dark ceiling that night. He supposes he shouldn't feel slighted that Seto barked at him, after all, that's the common reaction when someone walks in on you when you have no clothes on. But nonetheless he can't shake off an oddly powerful feeling of being wrongfully wounded. He pulls a Seto and tells himself to knock it off; he has better things to do with his time than figure out his stupid reaction. He rolls over onto his side with finality and goes to sleep.

And then the next day as he sits in school, without even trying, he figures it out, just like that. He gets it. The thing is they've both seen each other naked a billion times before; have seen each other at their ugliest and most disgusting, and if Seto had walked in on him when he was toweling off, he wouldn't have cared. He would have ignored him, because it wouldn't have mattered. But Seto apparently did care, and thought that Mokuba would care too, and this somehow stung. Without ever being aware of it Mokuba has assumed that even though Seto would never let anyone else see him exposed in the slightest, he, as his little brother, had and would always be the unquestioned exception no matter what.

It's a simple and stupid thing and he tries to ignore it, but he can't help himself. Now he finds himself looking, seriously searching as the days go by for other hints that his brother doesn't like or trust him as much as he thought he did. Along the way he picks up more silly meaningless things that he can't bring himself to cast off, instead collecting and hording them like shells from the beach. Here is a harsh word, there is an exasperated look, over here still is a refusal to tell him what's wrong, here's one of millions of listless responses, and hanging over all of it is a looming sense of a wall between the two of them that he sincerely hopes was not always there.

Despite himself he begins in his mind combing through the past, trying to figure out what he did if anything to deserve these things. Maybe it wasn't what he'd done, but what he hadn't done. Maybe he should have spoken up more, maybe a teasing remark he'd made had been misinterpreted because he hadn't bothered to explain it. Maybe he hadn't offered him enough help with everything, maybe he was getting in the way these days, maybe, despite everything, he had just fallen short one too many times of being good enough.

He's not stupid, despite what some of his teachers might claim. He's aware of the logical answer to all of this, the textbook excuse. Seto is naturally an angry and private person. This is his brother's problem, not his. It has nothing to do with him.

He's not stupid, but he is a young teenager. He knows better, but that doesn't change anything. He continues to search for a mistake he's made because as disheartening as it is to think he's in the wrong, it's worse to think that there's nothing he can do.

He finds himself staring at his brother one day as he works opposite of him. He has been sitting there for maybe a half of an hour, but Seto doesn't seem to have noticed that he's even in the room. He finds himself chanting the mantra look at me, look at me, look at me, look at me in his headjust, he tells himself, to see how long it will take for him to finally look up. They used to play games like this in the orphanage, glare at each other for no reason at all, pretend they were mad at each other until someone actually pulled them aside to ask why they were upset because they always seemed to get along so well unlike the other siblings, and then they each had to hold their breath just to keep from laughing.

Twenty two chants later he finally looks up. Mokuba has a hunch that he'd been waiting for him to go away.

"What is it?" he asks, and there is defiantly a note of annoyance in his voice. Mokuba narrows his eyes, waiting for his brother to remember how to play. He has patience. He'll stare for the rest of the day if he has to.

Seto turns around, as if expecting something to be behind him. Seeing nothing but a blank wall, he turns back. "What?" he asks again, now feeling his face for something there. Mokuba rolls his eyes at the blank expression, then gets up and leaves the room. Even as he walks out the door he is still waiting for his brother to suddenly, miraculously understand.

He starts ignoring him, just to see if he notices it. He stops saying 'hi' in the morning and he stays in his room most of the time that he's home. He learns you can survive long periods of isolation with the help of video games and a computer, and he wonders if this is why his brother never seemed to need friends. It would explain a lot, like why after a week of the silent treatment he still doesn't seem to notice Mokuba's sudden absence.

On Saturday, Seto goes out for reasons Mokuba doesn't bother to note. He's stuck on his video game and he's bored with the internet, so he takes a walk around his colossal house. He soon finds himself in his brother's abnormally deserted study, which is way too clean for his tastes. It's weird; Seto keeps every room orderly except his bedroom, where Mokuba is asked not to trespass for no reason (he does so anyway). His room is an absolute mess of clothes and bed sheets he never washes, but when the maid comes to clean, Seto tells her not to go in there. His big brother is like this; he has a lot of small, weird habits he doesn't tell anyone about and that don't make any sense. Whenever Mokuba asks him why he does something like sleep with a pillow over his face or flinch when someone touches him, he'll just shift uncomfortably and mutter, "It doesn't matter, alright? It's private."

He turns on the big screen T.V. that sits in a cabinet against the wall. Originally he saw the television Seto installed as something for him; a gift so he could hang around while Seto worked and not get bored. But increasingly now he's seeing the world through eyes without a loving filter; maybe his brother just put it there so he wouldn't bother him while he concentrated.

After he turns it on and watches for a few minutes, he decides to spend the night there. Why not? He's bored; it will be nice to get a change of scenery and he has more than enough room to spread out and relax.

He raids the kitchen for soda and popcorn, grabs some blankets and some scary movies he borrowed from his friend. He sort of wishes he had someone to watch them with, but none of the servants stay longer than they have to according to his brother's wishes. He's really starting to hate how the world he lives in is always bending to fit the shape his brother wants it to be.

In the dark, the artificial glow of the television is comforting in its familiarity. It reminds him of when he and Seto used to stay up late watching T.V. when Gozaburo was still around. Seto usually only got time off from work at night, and by then they were both too tired to do anything but sit and stare dumbly at the screen, not taking anything in but at least together, and much happier for it.

The movie is about zombies who attack Alaska or something. Mokuba doesn't really care because he's only concentrating on the gory parts. When he's depressed he likes to watch gross crap. It helps soothe his frustration when he can see blood.

The movie ends and the credits start rolling. He tells himself he's going to get up and put another movie in, after he gets a little rest, but it's just an excuse to fall asleep without getting up to lie on the couch. He sleeps the dreamless sleep of the exhausted and when he wakes up it feels like only a few minutes have passed, give or take a few hours.

He wakes up because someone has turned the lights on, and Mokuba is left blinking stupidly and turning his head from side to side, like one of those slow cartoon turtles who are always waking up from an afternoon nap.

"Well, what's all this?" asks a husky voice Mokuba recognizes immediately. "What're you doing here? Did your bed break or something?"

Mokuba yawns. His feet are freezing cold and he wonders how he's managed to sleep at all. On the T.V. the movie's main menu repeats a small reel of horror, over and over again. His brother, still fully dressed, comes over to where he's lying and looks at the T.V.

"Thirty Days of Night." He reads. Mokuba can't see him, but he knows he's looking down at him now. "That's strange; I thought you liked good movies."

Mokuba doesn't reply. He's trying to decide if he should fall asleep again or get up.

"Well don't just lie there; go to bed," Seto snaps.

There is no love in his voice and there is no patience. Mokuba searches, but he can't find any sign of affection in the way that his brother is treating him, or has been treating him, and it's so depressing and infuriating that he decides to lie there on the floor for the rest of the night and maybe for the rest of the week, because if you're so terrible that your only family member doesn't love you, your life is not worth the time it takes for you to get up off the floor.

So Seto helps him do it.

He hooks his hands under his armpits and hoists him up to his feet, and Mokuba stands reluctantly on his own. As his brother pops the DVD out of the player, a question builds inside of him with such urgency that by the time Seto puts the disk back into its case and holds it out, waiting for him to accept it, it comes unbidden out of his mouth.

"Do you love me?"

The correct response is a confident and reassuring answer in the affirmative, and Mokuba likes to fancy that his brother never gives a wrong answer. The hand that is holding the DVD case falls slowly to his side and when Mokuba is brave enough to look up into his face, he sees that his brother's brow has furrowed in confusion. "What?"

"You heard me," he mutters.

His brother straightens out to his full height. He must crane his neck to stare down at him. "Why?" he asks.

"It's a yes or no question; I'd like to think you'd be smart enough to answer it," he snaps.

For most people this would be enough to force them into replying, but Seto makes a habit out of doing the opposite of whatever anyone expects him to do. "You've been acting weird lately; is something wrong?" he asks.

Mokuba just turns and leaves, fighting back the tears in his eyes. He feels ashamed and oddly triumphant that for once he's the one leaving his brother inspecting his past, trying to find what sign he missed that would have told him he did something wrong.