Disclaimer: Medically not mine.

A/N: Originally written for Challenge #033 at ygodrabble – 'justice'. Yes, I am aware I have taken some liberties with this one.

Rough Justice

© Scribbler, March 2011.

The symptoms of a heart attack vary from person to person. It is a misconception that everyone gets chest pains, clutches melodramatically at their shirtfront and slumps against a convenient wall. Some suffer only a little numbness in their arms; some have shortness of breath; some people's vision gets cloudy, they feel tired, go to sleep and just don't wake up. All nice and neat and clean.

Yeah, in a picture-perfect world.

Conversely, some people get pains in their upper abdomens like someone ripping their guts out with rusty hooks; they sweat enough to fill a basin; they get indigestion with terrible diarrhoea and expel air from every orifice; or they faint, messily, limbs flailing in ways that increase deaths in heart attack victims through head injuries received by hitting stuff on the way down. Heart attacks in movies are clean. Heart attacks in real life are not.

Seto didn't know any of this until later. He suspected Gozaburo was having a heart attack, mainly because of the agonised hiss the old fart let out before he keeled over.

"I think … I'm having … a heart attack …"

Seto stared impassively. Gozaburo wasn't moving anymore. He had vomited all over himself. The smell was acrid. Behind him, he heard men's murmured voices. Someone had called for an ambulance. Still, he didn't move.

Gozaburo looked lesser somehow, and not because he had hunched over when he collapsed. Before he went, he had been defeated. In all ways, he had been bested, until there was nothing left of him but an empty shell that had once been a great man.

Now that was literal. Gozaburo's eyes stared sightlessly, fixed in a glare of anger, betrayal and surprise. He hadn't thought Seto could best him.

Part of Seto wanted to kick him. Shows what you know, old man. The rest decided that would be a bad idea. It wasn't that he had anything against kicking an opponent when they were down; more that he could see no point in the act. He had no time for pointlessness anymore. Everything he did had to be precise and had to matter. No more wasted effort. No more niceties. If nothing else, Gozaburo's abuse had taught him the value of striking first.

A thin trickle of noise snapped Seto's attention from the corpse. Mokuba! He whirled, covering the smaller boy with his whole body. "Don't look," he instructed, but the shaking told him Mokuba already had.

"Wh-wha …" Mokuba's breath was hitching too much for him to get the words out. Seto tried to fill them in himself: What happened? What do we do now? What comes next? What have you become, Big Brother?

Seto's hold on his brother tightened. "It was nothing more than he deserved, Mokuba."

A shameful end and an even more shameful death. Yes, that was all Gozaburo Kaiba deserved. Seto kept telling himself that as they came to take the body away and every set of accusing eyes burned holes into his skin.

Fin.

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