If you must flame, please be intelligent about it. I think it's worse for you than for me to have everyone laughing at how stupid you are, what with your lack of grammar, abysmal spelling, and so on. If you don't have anything with less than fifty errors a sentence to say, then don't say anything at all.
I don't own Yu-Gi-Oh, or anything pertaining to it, obviously. Yaoi/quasi-angst warnings for this chappie. Please review; I enjoy all kinds of feedback as long you can back up anything negative convincingly. Enjoy!
Chapter 1: Ice
Over the hum of the computer and the rhythmic sound of my typing, I can hear the grandfather clock in the foyer downstairs chime four times in succession. It's hard to believe that I've been working eight hours straight already. It feels like no time at all has passed, but then again, I'm the one who worked for seventy-two hours to meet a crucial deadline on a then-crucial project with no sustenance but the occasional mug of coffee brought in by a servant.
Mokuba made me promise after that incident to try to limit the time I spent working to a more reasonable level, further defining reasonable as no more all-nighters or, in my case, all-weekenders, so I'm faced with the choice of stopping here for the night or breaking my word to my little brother. I didn't know it was possible to close a program that fast, really.
I rise from my leather desk chair and stretch languidly, feeling joints locked too long in one position crack as I study the ice patterns on the glass doors that open onto the terrace adjoining my home office. It occurs to me vaguely that a light snow has begun to drift down, and what I can see of the town looks like one gigantic snow globe, shaken up by whatever divine entity one might put stock in. Of course, it's all nonsense to me. Religion, loyalty, friendship... and love, of course.
Ah, yes, love. If there ever was a dirty four-letter word, it should have been that one. To this day, I, the great Seto Kaiba, with an IQ superior to most people on the planet, have been unable to define just what love means. Is it the childish, playful manner with which Yugi and Yami conduct themselves, even in public places? Perhaps it's the battered puppy dog routine that Bakura and Ryou play out each day; the master beating his pet, trying to get a reaction out of it, and the pitiful whelp crawling back each day. Both Yugi and Ryou have told me, on separate occasions, that they are madly in love with their yamis, yet somehow, I find it hard to reconcile either of the two definitions in my own life. Yugi's version is too, well, "cute" for my taste, and Ryou's much too degrading.
So what then, you may ask, is love for me? Love, as far as I'm concerned, equals nothing but pain and anguish that any smart person would endeavor to avoid. It's so far removed from the cure-all that annoying Gardner girl makes it out to be, and it's not all fluff and cotton candy like everyone else seems to believe, either. I think it's statistically proven somewhere that for every happy couple holding hands on park benches, there are ten more who are in line for the divorce courts and twenty others who are going to be headed there within the next month or so. Love isn't synonymous with happiness and bliss; more like betrayal, anger, and deceit.
I will admit that I love Mokuba, though, without a doubt. However, my love for him doesn't go beyond the love one would have for the air they breathe or the providence that sustains them. My little brother is all I have left; he's the one that has kept me from becoming a shell of a person by blowing on the dying embers of my spirit, trying to keep them alive and as strong as possible from day to day. I wonder if he even cares that he's throwing away the best years of his life on me; after all, what's the point of delaying the inevitable, keeping my spirit alive for a few more months, days, hours? Will any change drastic enough be wrought in my hell of a life to save me from myself in time? Not very likely, if you ask me. I wish I had it in me to tell him this, so that he wouldn't be so close when the time bomb finally goes off, but knowing him, he'd probably just shrug it off anyway. Mokuba can be more stubborn than me when he wants to.
Aside from him, though, I have had no experience with this mystery called love. According to some poor fools, though, one could be in love for years, and never even notice it, perhaps even believing they hate the other person. More nonsense, of course; why, by that logic, I could be in love with that annoying puppy dog, Wheeler, and I most certainly am not! There is not one thing about him I can stand, actually; I hate his stupid grin, his messy hair (honestly, are combs that expensive?), his lack of dueling skills (which he thinks are better than mine. Please.), his eating habits (more suited to a pig than a member of civilized society), and most of all, I hate that uncouth, vacant accent of his! Does he have to broadcast the fact that he's gutter trash to anyone in earshot?
Okay, so maybe I'm a little obsessed, but that doesn't mean I love him! If you're obsessed with someone's faults, isn't that more characteristic of hatred? I won't deny that to people with much lower standards of beauty, he might pass for attractive, what with those glittering golden eyes of his, and that lean, toned physique, not to mention his strong, if often misguided commitment to almost everyone... What am I saying? I hate the guy! Don't I?
Reluctantly, I drift away from the frozen window, letting my fingertips trace the ice patterns one last time before flopping down on my overlarge bed. I wonder if my soul looks like that window; frozen, with so many facets that anyone who tried to understand each one would undoubtedly meet with certain failure. Sleep tugs at my mind, and I attribute my disturbing reverie to exhaustion. As my eyes slide closed, the ghost of the ice patterns dance across my eyelids, and I see something more to the analogy.
Not even the most detailed ice pattern can render the window completely opaque.