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The guest bedroom did not have the musty smell of a room unoccupied and long-ignored; the housekeeping team was too well-paid for that. There were clean sheets on the bed, extra linens and towels in the dresser drawers, and no dust on the empty nightstand. A slightly more homelike hotel room, for all intents and purposes.
Seto grumbles to himself, flopping onto the bed without bothering to turn the lights on. Exiled! In his own home!
He doesn’t even remember how the argument started, only that there was an argument and there was shouting and all of that had landed him here, in one of the mansion’s many guest rooms, on the other side of the hall from where he and Atem usually sleep. He doesn’t even have the satisfaction of knowing that Atem will be in for an uncomfortable, lonely night in an overly-large bed, because he’s staring down the same prospect.
But neither of them will give in until the morning light shines through the windows—that’s just how these things always go. Seto sighs, squirming his way under the covers. At least this time, he’s had a chance to change into his pajamas.
No tablet, but he does have his phone, so he passes the time by taking his simmering frustration out on the unfortunate souls cluttering his inbox and demanding his attention, until he gets to the point where he left the office at 7:34 pm earlier.
He flicks his eyes towards the top left corner of the screen. 2:04 am. Wonderful. It’s not the first sleepless night he’s had, nor will it be the last, but it will make tomorrow that much harder to deal with.
Seto puts his phone down on the nightstand and stretches, twisting his back to try and relieve the ache before he attempts to sleep, only to jump nearly out of his skin when his hand, stretching upwards toward the headboard, brushes up against something—furry?
He sits up and twists around to peer through the darkness. “Lights on!” he demands quickly, in what was definitely not a shout. Of course not.
The lights flicker and emit a low hum at his voice command, revealing the guest room in its clean and impersonal state. It looks unoccupied, other than Seto’s dark blue slippers laying haphazardly in the middle of the pathway between the bed and the door. But he would’ve been happier to see a stray cat, dog, raccoon, whatever animal, than to see the six (six!) life-sized Kuriboh stuffed toys staring at him with wide eyes from the top of the bed.
He recognizes them, of course, as a KaibaCorp prototype, meant for an exclusive run at Kaiba Land souvenir stores. It was unfortunate, but the puny little fuzzball, the weakest monster in the game, was one of their biggest sellers. Slap a Kuriboh on a shirt, a mug, whatever, and it would sell faster than anything else.
It helped (or made it worse) that Atem, in his infamous duels with Pegasus and Seto and anyone else who crossed his path, loved to call on Kuriboh to help him with his tricky little traps. It’d become one of his iconic monsters.
Ugh, Atem. Seto suddenly knows exactly how and why these creatures are in his house. He remembers Atem coming to the office with him the same morning that Parks R&D were showing off a new line of Duel Monsters merchandise, the multi-colored Kuriboh stuffed toys included. He’d approved most of it, but he distinctly remembers Atem sitting in one of the boardroom chairs off to the side, petting the brown Kuriboh in his lap and waving its little green paw at Seto to distract him once in a while.
He’ll give the R&D team that; the toys were indeed very soft.
Seto eyes the rainbow-colored Kuriboh staring at him now from what was supposed to be his bed in his exile. Something in its little plastic eyes is definitely wishing him ill, even more so than the other stuffed toys.
“I’m not fucking apologizing,” he tells it, and immediately feels foolish for speaking to a stuffed toy. He hasn’t done that since before Mokuba was born.
The creature continues staring at him.
“I’m not afraid of you,” Seto continues, glaring back at it and at its siblings. “Your judgment isn’t going to work on me.”
The Kuribohs continue their relentless staring.
“Look, I’m trying, but he makes it so difficult sometimes!”
Silence. It reminds Seto of the intentional silence of his personal lab, where he can work through his coding and his solutions out loud with a little Blue-Eyes statue staring encouragingly at him on his desk.
“Sometimes, I see him, and all I see is my rival, my opponent. A worthy opponent, but it’s like we’re back at Battle City again,” he finally admits. There’s nowhere else to sit, so he settles on the foot of the bed, as far from the Kuribohs as he can manage. Tomorrow, he’ll get housekeeping to bring an armchair into this room. And to move the Kuribohs elsewhere in the mansion. If Atem wants his own office for his Kuriboh collection, they could make that happen. “I like fighting with him. I like dueling with him. The challenge is why we work. I don’t want to change that.”
But he doesn’t like this . Not when silence and separate bedrooms at each end of the wing come after the challenge.
The guilt is both unfamiliar and too familiar for Seto. He sits in a mansion that now belongs to him and Mokuba, obtained with sweat and tears and bloodied hands. What he’s done to create a better life for his little brother has also created a yawning chasm full of rickety bridges between them. Not a day goes by where Seto doesn’t feel the weight of his failure to give Mokuba a normal childhood. But this type of guilt—the intimate kind, when he says the wrong thing and Atem’s eyes flash as they gear up for a fight, when he’s very late coming home and has energy for nothing more than sleep, when Seto wonders to himself if Atem would’ve been happier staying in Aaru among his people—this isn’t the same.
The Kuribohs watch him expectantly. But Seto is still stubborn, and it’s 2 am, and he won’t be bullied into submission by six stuffed Duel Monsters. Not right now, at least.
“Fine, fine… I’ll apologize to him tomorrow.”