A/N: …oh my god… it's an… update…. *faints*

Seto knew that shoving past Yugi and sprinting out of the hospital room hadn't been the best response he could have come up with, but he didn't particularly care. This was all too much. This was all just too much.

He ignored the stares and questioning looks of patients and nursing staff alike as he ran for safety. Why he would be safer outside the hospital than in it wasn't exactly clear in his mind, but he wanted out and he wanted out now. Kaiba let out a faint sigh of relief when he finally stumbled out through the rotating front doors and glanced over his shoulder to find that nobody was following him. The young CEO forced himself to slow his pace to a walk. It had stopped raining about an hour ago thankfully. His feet lead him numbly down the sidewalk, not really paying attention to where he was going.

Kaiba stared at his hands, at the familiar long, pale fingers, remembering the blue glow that had surrounded them. He wanted to write off what had happened as an optical illusion, a trick of the light, his imagination, anything. But he couldn't. He didn't know why, but he just couldn't. Something about the entire experience had felt so… familiar and yet alien at the same time. There was no scientific explanation that Kaiba could think of for what had just happened, unless the laws of physics, gravity, and several other very important things had gone temporarily haywire in an extremely localized manner. And that sort of thing just didn't happen. Then again, until today, floating blobs of glowing water and two not quite identical Yugis who kept switching places just didn't happen either… and now they did. Repeatedly. And there had also been another reliable witness there this last time, too. (By reliable witness, he was, of course, referring to Mokuba. The geek squad was not reliable – most of the time they were insane and annoying.)

Had he… really done that? With the water? Seto cringed at how silly and stupid the idea sounded even within the confines of his own head. But still, what other explanation was there? Kaiba stopped walking for a moment and closed his eyes, remembering the sensations that had run through his body at the exact second before he'd turned around and seen the water hovering above Mokuba's side table. It had been like his entire body was tingling. No, tingling wasn't the right word. That made it sound like the sensation had been unpleasant. It was like… It was like… his body, his entire being, his very soul had been humming a single, unified note that made the very air around him vibrate. For a moment, that single blink in time, he'd been whole, one with everything around him. And he'd reached out with his emotions until they brushed against something cool which had… reacted….

Slowly, Seto opened his eyes and then stared in bewilderment as he realized his hands were glowing blue again. Thin threads of water (which were also glowing blue) stretched up from the puddle at his feet and were weaving between his fingers like delicate glass snakes. He raised his hands up so that they were level with his face, and the tendrils of well trained water lengthened and followed the path of his moving fingers. That… wasn't natural.

He glanced around quickly to see if anybody was watching (they weren't – he was alone) and then shook his hands in an attempted to dislodge the tentacles trailing around them. The water, it turned out, could not be so easily dissuaded. It was persistent.

Damn it all, this was illogical! Water wasn't supposed to do this! But that had already been firmly established. In a burst of frustration, Kaiba shook his hands even harder still, despite the redundancy of this action. It, once again, failed to work. He just barely resisted the urge to scream.

"Will you just let GO already?" he shouted, not caring how ridiculous yelling at an inanimate object was. The part of his brain that always kept him calm, cool, and collected, his temper in check, and all of his actions under impeccable control had jumped ship as soon as it first caught sight of that damnable blue glow. His normally organized, efficient mind was in utter chaos and anarchy. If the paparazzi had been there, they would have had a field day. The great Seto Kaiba was having an emotional breakdown – one that had been years in the making.

Seto tilted his head back and screamed at the sky like a mad man and he didn't care. For once just didn't care that he was breaking. Wouldn't have cared even if the whole world had been watching him at that moment.

"WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH ME?"

The water dropped and splattered across the floor the instant Kaiba sprinted out of the hospital room.

"Wait!" Mokuba's voice halted the group just as they were about to turn and give chase. "Seto needs some time to think. If you run after him and try to force him to realize what's going on, he'll just push back even harder and reject the idea. That's why you've never gotten through to him before – big brother hates it when other people try to force ideas on him. He needs to come to his own conclusions first."

"Wait a minute," Joey interrupted, "ya mean if we hadn't tried so hard to get Kaiba to believe all the stuff about the millennium items and been so in his face about it, moneybags would have come around in his own time?" the blond asked incredulously. Mokuba gave a small shrug.

"Maybe, I don't know, but I do know the way you've been going about it up until now was basically doomed to fail from the start. Seto will happily deny the evidence of his own eyes if people push him too hard about it. Like with Duelist Kingdom. Right afterwards he was really starting to think that there was more to dueling than just winning and that maybe having a purpose mattered. But then Ishizu showed up, pushed WAY too hard on the whole ancient Egypt thing, you guys started pushing on the heart of the cards and all that again, and everything majorly backfired and turned into Seto in the Battle City Tournament. Before that he was practically on the verge of considering you guys his friends." Mokuba leaned further back into the pillows on his bed with a sigh and hugged the blue, stuffed dragon he was holding even closer. "Just give him some time. He'll come around eventually."

"I didn't think we'd ever pushed him that hard," muttered Tristan, who was still leaning against the doorframe but no longer looking like he was about to bolt.

Mokuba rolled his eyes and snorted.

"If you think big brother rants a lot, you should try listening to yourselves sometime. Compared to you guys, Seto doesn't talk at all."

Silence descended on the room for several moments as Yugi, Yami, Joey, Tea, and Tristan thought about this latest revelation of how the mind of Kaiba worked.

"I guess we never really did try to change tactics," Yami finally admitted sheepishly. Floating in the air next to him, Yugi nodded, though only Yami could see him.

'I told you lecturing wasn't the way to go,' Yugi teased, poking the ex-pharaoh in the side with a transparent finger.

"Was he really starting to think of us as friends?" asked Tea, pausing in her effort to wipe up the spilt water on the floor with paper towels. Mokuba nodded. "Then why was he always such a jerk to us?"

"You guys aren't particularly accepting of people who don't think like you do, and Seto doesn't think like you do. Not many people think quite the way he does. That and, though he may technically be a genius, big brother is seriously lacking when it comes to social skills, especially with other people his age." Mokuba yawned widely and lowered the head of his bed a bit. He rolled onto his side so he was still facing them, but he was obviously starting to wear out fast. It seemed that the eternal wisdom of Mokuba was coming to a close for today. How could a kid that young understand so much about life?

Joey glanced idly at his watch and then did a double take.

"Ah, shoot! Sorry, guys, I gotta get going. See ya, Mokuba!"

Mokuba waved and yawned again as Joey hurried out of the hospital room.

Seto slouched to the ground. He was exhausted, quite possibly lost, didn't have his mobile (he'd forgotten to take it out of the pocket of his other trench coat), and glowing blue strands of water were still having a love-fest around his hands. Somewhere along the line, he'd managed to acquire several more tendrils of water instead of losing any. He'd spent nearly a quarter hour screaming (mainly profanity) at the sky. The sky hadn't even so much as blinked. Exactly why the sky should have blinked, Seto didn't know, but he thought it should have at least bally well reacted. He glowered up at the low hanging, gray clouds. He didn't care how irrational it was – right here and now, Seto wanted to make sure that the sky was clear on the fact that this entire fiasco was its fault, not his. After all, it had been the one who had rained in the first place. Damn rain. If it hadn't rained, maybe he wouldn't have run into Gardener. What had happened to his umbrella anyways? Probably back in that side road somewhere. He'd liked that umbrella, too. He added that to his mental list of why this was all the sky's fault. If it hadn't been raining, he wouldn't have needed an umbrella and wouldn't have taken one with him and, therefore, would have been unable to lose said umbrella.

He resisted the urge to lie down right there on the sidewalk and go to sleep. No way was he waking up on the cold, hard pavement twice in one day. Seto blinked twice as several more tears slid down his face. When the hell had he started crying? Not that it really mattered anymore. He just didn't care.

A long sigh escaped his lips as tears continued to drip off his chin. Seto tilted his head back to stare at the sky again. It didn't look like it was feeling particularly guilty over what it had done. That, or it had a very good poker face, the heartless bastard. People called him that sometimes – heartless bastard. Especially the mutt. Idiot. If he really was a heartless bastard, then he wouldn't be crying like this, Mokuba would have been abandoned back in the orphanage, Gardener would be dead, Yugi would be dead, Alistair would be dead, and Kaiba Corp would still be producing weapons of mass destruction. Oh, and Pegasus would have been mailed to several different countries via parcel post – at once. The real heartless bastard had committed suicide when Seto took over his company.

Yeah, so he wasn't a heartless bastard, he just acted like one. Sometimes, life was so much easier if people assumed you didn't have a conscience. Nobody seemed to worry about calling him nasty things directly to his face. They seemed to think that he took them as a complement – job well done, everybody still thinks you're an asshole. He hated them. Hated their smug smiles and confident attitudes and years upon years of job experience. They sneered at him so he sneered back. Only Kaiba went to meetings, Seto always stayed home. Only heartless bastards with lots of money were allowed to go to those meetings.

Seto lay back on the sidewalk spread eagle and continued to stare up at the sky. Sitting up took too much effort. He just wouldn't fall asleep like this.

Joey hurried down the street towards his apartment building. Serenity would be showing up in just under two hours and there was still nothing to eat in his apartment and nowhere for her to sleep. He'd meant to go shopping earlier, but gotten distracted by the whole Kaiba thing. If he hurried, he just might be able to pull things together before she showed up.

He came to a stop across the street from his building. Ah, damn it. Some crazy guy was sleeping on the sidewalk in front of his apartment again.