Chapter 6 - Chapter Six
Submitted January 23, 2009 Updated April 22, 2009 Status Complete | Takes place in the middle of Season Five- right after the Grand Prix tournament, and before they go on the memory journey to Egypt. I hope you guys like it! I'm not used to writing fanfictions! X]
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Anime/Manga » Yu-Gi-Oh! series |
Chapter 6 - Chapter Six
Chapter 6 - Chapter Six
I jerked my eyes open. I was lying, on my back, in my bed; Mokuba was leaning over me; he retreated his hand from me, no longer gently poking me in the shoulder, and stepped back from my bedside.
I lifted my head off of the pillow. I had just experienced a dream? How realistic… it almost frightened me!
It had been a quiet night; no sign of monsters in the house- the maids and butlers had evacuated yesterday morning at the same time I had left, and the monsters had all disappeared. The window allowed the bright morning light to flood the room.
“Good morning,” Mokuba said quickly.
“The same,” I told him, with a sleepy yawn, putting my head back down for a moment. “What time is it?”
“Ten o’clock,” was the reply; he then eyed me unhappily.
“What,” I asked, rubbing my eyes and slowly sitting up. I ran my hand through my hair. What an emotional dream, I thought quickly to myself. Strange. I frowned. It felt… more like a memory, than a dream.
“I’m sorry to wake you up,” Mokuba said despondently. “But, I got an important call a while ago… it’s about Roland.”
“Roland?” I asked, now fully awake. “What… what about Roland?”
“We have to go see him,” Mokuba said, frowning. “The doctor wants us to go…”
I frowned; my heart sank.
We pulled up to the hospital owned by KaibaCorp a half-hour later. Mokuba leapt out of the car as soon as it was parked, and we both walked up to the sliding double doors.
The bored-looking receptionist at the desk didn’t look up when we entered; only said, “Visitor? What’s the last name of your patient?”
“Roland,” I said. She looked up and jolted out of her stupor. “Oh! Mr. Kaiba! Yes, of course. His room is number 541.”
I nodded and we entered the elevator and rode it to the fifth floor; the next thing we knew, we were in the hospital room where Roland was lying, hooked up to a countless number of machines. I could hear his pulse on one of the machines; I was glad to see that they had, even if artificially, started his heart.
Mokuba sadly went to the side of the bed. “He’s not getting better,” he whimpered.
A doctor entered the room. “Good morning,” he told us. I nodded at him; Mokuba asked, “Is Roland okay?”
The doctor frowned. “He… well, he isn’t brain-dead, but he’s not showing signs of recovery. His symptoms are similar to many other patients who have come in contact with those creatures. That’s why we need you boys here… thank you for coming. Do either of you know anything about them? How do they hurt their victims?”
“It’s some sort of a laser,” I began. I wondered how I should tell the doctor what Dartz had said. Would he believe me? And then again, did I believe Dartz enough to say what he described?
The doctor scribbled this on a clipboard. “Have you boys witnessed this?”
“Yes,” I said. “The monsters appear with some sort of a green stone. They’ve got a symbol on their foreheads that from which they beam a continuous laser.”
“Well, it appears that the lasers paralyze the heart,” the doctor muttered.
“That’s what happened to Roland?” Mokuba gasped. “But, he’s got a pulse now…”
“Artificially, but that’s what we don’t understand; why he isn’t regaining consciousness. We’ll do an MRI on him later to see if they do brain damage, too. He shouldn’t have brain damage, really… he was only deprived of oxygen for about five minutes.”
I frowned. I hated to think that Dartz was right about the monsters stealing their victims’ souls, leaving them dead, but it began to appear more and more realistic. “One of them shot me about a half-hour before Roland was hurt,” I added lazily.
“What? Really?” the doctor gasped. “You were hit with the laser from a monster? Where?”
“Yes, here,” I said, pointing to the middle of my chest. “But it stopped hurting after I lied down for a moment. I’m fine.”
“Mr. Kaiba… please, let us make sure of that. These creatures may do more harm than you realize. It very well may have damaged your heart.”
I instantly regretted admitting to the attack; I didn’t want to have a physical examination. There was nothing wrong with me; I felt now as though the incident yesterday had never happened. Mokuba looked up at me, worried. He could tell that I was thinking of the politest way to ask the doctor to put his head in his @$$; Mokuba said, “Please do it, Seto...”
I frowned down at him, before turning back to the doctor and saying, “Quickly.”
The next thing I knew, I was standing in just my black slacks on a weighing scale that had a vertical height scale built next to it. The weight scale read a little more than 143 lbs, the height, around 73 inches. More than six feet… I liked being tall.
“I really don’t feel that this is necessary,” I told the nurse, who led me back to the examination table. I sat on it, and she put a blood-pressure cuff on my arm. “I feel fine. Really.”
Mokuba was sitting in a chair in the room, listening to music on his headphones. The nurse read my blood pressure readings on the cuff’s meter, before saying, “your blood pressure is a bit high, Mr. Kaiba.”
I frowned. “I don’t think that has much to do with what the monster did to me yesterday,” I said.
The nurse took the cuff off of my arm and took a small, plastic ring out of a drawer. “Give me your hand,” she said, and I did; she slid the ring onto the tip of my right pointer finger. “This will take your pulse and temperature.”
After a few seconds of this, she took the ring off of my finger and said, “Heart rate 75 beats per minute, core temperature around 99. You’re in good shape, doesn’t look like that monster did any damage to your heart… if anything, I would suggest relaxing once in a while, though… that blood pressure may give you problems later. You could experience fainting spells or a suppressed immune system from your high stress levels.”
“Fine,” I said, picking up my shirt and sliding it over my head. Mokuba saw me do this and looked up from his music. “There,” I told him, as he took his headphones off; I stuck my arms through the sleeves of my shirt. “I’m fine. Are you happy?”
He smiled and nodded. “Good!” he said, happily watching me tuck my shirt in and turn my coat right-side in.
“Let me ask you about the attack,” the nurse continued. “Please tell me how it played out.”
“I was in my office, and a couple of them burst through my door. I had a gun on hand and shot a few of them, but the third one was faster, and managed to position itself on the ceiling and shoot me, here,” I said, setting down my trench coat and pointing to the middle of my chest.
“How long did the laser come in contact with you?”
I frowned. Time had seemed so slow during the attack, that I wasn’t sure. “What do you think?” I asked Mokuba.
“Like four seconds or something,” he said. “Not very long.”
The nurse was scribbling all of this down. “What did you feel?”
“It was painful, and it made me turn cold,” I replied.
“How painful? Compare it to something else.”
“Would you like me to demonstrate on you?” I asked.
She looked up from her clipboard. “Mr. Kaiba,” she said, as though telling a rowdy child to calm down.
“…Getting punched in the chest very hard, I suppose.”
“How did you get rid of the monster?”
“I picked up the gun and shot it,” Mokuba said. “It turned to smoke and disappeared.”
“When the laser stopped, what happened?”
“My knees gave way,” I said. “I fell and sat on the floor for a little while. I was kind of out of breath and shaky.”
“Did you still feel pain?”
“Somewhat, but it wasn’t bad. Mostly I was dizzy. I lied down on the couch in my office for a moment and my mind cleared up.”
“So you never lost consciousness. How long did it take for you to feel completely normal again?”
“Maybe twenty minutes. Not even that.”
“Was there anything else interesting about the attack?”
“Not really,” I said, glad that this seemed to be finally over. I picked up my metal wrist plates off of the table and fastened them on my forearms. “Is that all?”
“Yes, and thank you,” the nurse said. “Hopefully we can tie your symptoms into finding out what happened to your employee.”
We exited the hospital. “What about Yugi,” Mokuba asked, as we re-entered the car.
“What about him,” I replied, fastening my seat belt and sticking the key into the ignition.
“He wanted to go to Atlantis like, today or tomorrow. Are you going?”
I sighed. “I guess I don’t have a choice. I don’t particularly want to, but it seems they need me…”
He was smiling at me. “I’m glad you’re working with them! I mean… I’m scared about you going…” he paused. “Are you taking me with you?”
I looked down at him and frowned. Was leaving him here as dangerous as taking him? Monsters showed up here, just as easily as they did, there… I could protect him better, if he stayed with me.
“Do you want to come?” I asked. “I feel like we’re in danger here or there… I guess, yes, I’d like you to come.”
Not surprisingly, he seemed somewhat excited now. “Yeah!” he said. “You might need my gunman skills.” He laughed; I felt better, slightly, and smirked. “Let’s go to the office and prepare the helicopter,” I said. “We can leave tomorrow.”
We re-entered my office twenty minutes later; we had barely taken two steps in the door before the phone on my desk rang. I picked it up; the phone’s screen showed the Pharaoh sitting at his computer’s webcam. I wasn’t surprised.
“I spoke with Dartz and Pegasus today,” he told me instantly.
“I saw them yesterday,” I said. “Did Dartz explain to you where the monsters are coming from, this time?”
“He told me everything,” the Pharaoh replied. “He also told me that he would fly us to Atlantis tomorrow morning.”
“He’s flying all of us in?” I asked, surprised. “With what? He has a plane?”
“I suppose,” he said. “He wants us to all be at your headquarters at five o’clock tomorrow morning. He says it is a long flight.”
I frowned, saying nothing for a moment, until I asked, “Do you really trust Dartz? After everything he did to us, I have some trouble believing that he’s turned around completely, like he claims he has.”
“I have full confidence that I banished every shred of darkness that he once harbored in his heart,” he replied immediately. “I do believe that he’s turned himself into a good king who is rebuilding his kingdom to be the best that it can be, without the intentions of harming anyone. I know he can still somewhat control the Orichalcos, but he had chosen not to; his advisors are the ones who now hold its power and are the ones who are dangerous. I truly believe that we can trust Dartz. Now I even consider him a friend.”
I didn’t say anything, again. The Pharaoh never ceased to stun me with how readily he forgave people who did unspeakable things to him. “Fine,” I said, finally. Yugi never seemed to be wrong with this sort of thing. “But if you want my help, you’d better not be wrong about Dartz.”
“I’m glad you’re working with us, Kaiba,” he said, with a smirk, knowing well that I was really mostly cooperating because Mokuba had put me up to this. “Thank you.”
I gave him a sort of approving hum as a response, before we both hung up. Mokuba was standing next to my desk. “Five o’clock in the morning?” he muttered. “Lame.” He looked at the clock on my desk; it was noon.
“Can we go back to the house? There’s… something I want to do,” he said.
I was startled; I looked up at him. He had almost never looked and sounded so nervous. What was he going to do? “Are you okay?” I asked him.
“Yeah,” he said, face very pink. “But, I want to go home.”
I stood up from my desk. “Alright,” I said.
Once home, Mokuba leapt out of the car and ran up to the house. I re-entered the house; now, he had abandoned me, leaving me on my own to find something ‘fun’ to do. What should I do? My stepfather had given me violin lessons for six years; I hadn’t played it since I had taken control of KaibaCorp; but maybe I still remembered how to play some songs.
I entered my room and took the violin case off of the top shelf of my closet. I opened it; the case’s outside was dusty, but the violin inside was polished beautifully; shiny, brown, wooden. I lifted it up and set it on my shoulder and leaned my chin against it. I slid the bow across the strings. I was surprised at how it didn’t sound flat or sharp; it hadn’t been used in over a year, but seemed to still be perfectly tuned.
The music was relaxing; I closed my eyes and let my hand draw the bow across the strings. It surrounded me; nothing was in the room with me other than the swirling melodies. I had forgotten that I was actually halfway good at playing music.
I was later interrupted by an intensely strong smell from the doorway. Eyes watering, I turned around to see Mokuba standing in my doorway. He was wearing his most expensive red suit shirt, buttoned all the way up to the top of his neck, and black slacks; it was an outfit almost formal enough in itself to wear to a fancy party. I could practically see fumes wafting off of him. His hair seemed completely straight; usually, it hung in messy layers, but now, it was completely tame.
“Mokuba, are… are you… wearing my cologne?” I asked, stunned, dropping my arm holding the violin to my side.
“Yes,” he said quickly. “I’ve booked a helicopter. I just wanted to let you know, I’m… I’m going out.”
I was at a loss for words. “…Going out?” I stammered.
He frowned. “I… yes. Going out.”
I felt my mouth creep into a smile. I set my violin down. “Are you… going on a date?” I asked, incredulous.
I could have fried an egg on his face. He broke eye contact with me and said “Um…”
I chuckled. “Let me help you, kiddo,” I said. He looked up, stunned. “Really?” he asked. He then frowned. “What do you know about …about going on a date, Seto?” he asked, almost angrily. “You’ve either rejected or alienated all sixteen million of the girls who have ever liked you…”
Sixteen million? Was it that many? Yeah, something like that… “Touché- I’m afraid my hatred for every human being on the planet other than you has made me into a relatively bad prom partner, but even with my ignorance, I do know that if you sit within six miles of your date today, you’ll choke her with your smell,” I chortled, approaching the bedroom door and motioning for him to follow me. “Wash some of that off.”
“I didn’t know how much to put on…” he laughed nervously. We went to the bathroom; I sat on the rim of the bathtub as he pulled his shirt down and started splashing water onto his neck and wrists.
“You look good. Is it the girl that you met at the party last night?” I asked, once he had gotten to the point where he smelled nice and had pulled his sleeves back down and propped his collar back up.
“Uh-huh,” he said, picking his locket necklace off of the bathroom sink and slipping it over his head. “She lives, like, an hour away. We’re going to see a movie.”
“Oh, leave the top button undone. A movie date at one o’clock in the afternoon?” I asked.
“Seto, I’m twelve,” he said shortly. “Plus, we have to wake up early tomorrow.” He brushed his shirt off, tucked it in, and turned to face me. “How do I look?”
“Very sharp,” I said, standing up off of the bathtub. He smiled. “Thanks for the advice,” he said. “Wish me luck… she’s a nice girl. I think I like her.”
I patted the top of his head; to my surprise, he batted my hand away from him and gasped, “Don’t! I spent a lot of time trying to get my hair to lie straight!”
I lifted my head off of the pillow. I had just experienced a dream? How realistic… it almost frightened me!
It had been a quiet night; no sign of monsters in the house- the maids and butlers had evacuated yesterday morning at the same time I had left, and the monsters had all disappeared. The window allowed the bright morning light to flood the room.
“Good morning,” Mokuba said quickly.
“The same,” I told him, with a sleepy yawn, putting my head back down for a moment. “What time is it?”
“Ten o’clock,” was the reply; he then eyed me unhappily.
“What,” I asked, rubbing my eyes and slowly sitting up. I ran my hand through my hair. What an emotional dream, I thought quickly to myself. Strange. I frowned. It felt… more like a memory, than a dream.
“I’m sorry to wake you up,” Mokuba said despondently. “But, I got an important call a while ago… it’s about Roland.”
“Roland?” I asked, now fully awake. “What… what about Roland?”
“We have to go see him,” Mokuba said, frowning. “The doctor wants us to go…”
I frowned; my heart sank.
We pulled up to the hospital owned by KaibaCorp a half-hour later. Mokuba leapt out of the car as soon as it was parked, and we both walked up to the sliding double doors.
The bored-looking receptionist at the desk didn’t look up when we entered; only said, “Visitor? What’s the last name of your patient?”
“Roland,” I said. She looked up and jolted out of her stupor. “Oh! Mr. Kaiba! Yes, of course. His room is number 541.”
I nodded and we entered the elevator and rode it to the fifth floor; the next thing we knew, we were in the hospital room where Roland was lying, hooked up to a countless number of machines. I could hear his pulse on one of the machines; I was glad to see that they had, even if artificially, started his heart.
Mokuba sadly went to the side of the bed. “He’s not getting better,” he whimpered.
A doctor entered the room. “Good morning,” he told us. I nodded at him; Mokuba asked, “Is Roland okay?”
The doctor frowned. “He… well, he isn’t brain-dead, but he’s not showing signs of recovery. His symptoms are similar to many other patients who have come in contact with those creatures. That’s why we need you boys here… thank you for coming. Do either of you know anything about them? How do they hurt their victims?”
“It’s some sort of a laser,” I began. I wondered how I should tell the doctor what Dartz had said. Would he believe me? And then again, did I believe Dartz enough to say what he described?
The doctor scribbled this on a clipboard. “Have you boys witnessed this?”
“Yes,” I said. “The monsters appear with some sort of a green stone. They’ve got a symbol on their foreheads that from which they beam a continuous laser.”
“Well, it appears that the lasers paralyze the heart,” the doctor muttered.
“That’s what happened to Roland?” Mokuba gasped. “But, he’s got a pulse now…”
“Artificially, but that’s what we don’t understand; why he isn’t regaining consciousness. We’ll do an MRI on him later to see if they do brain damage, too. He shouldn’t have brain damage, really… he was only deprived of oxygen for about five minutes.”
I frowned. I hated to think that Dartz was right about the monsters stealing their victims’ souls, leaving them dead, but it began to appear more and more realistic. “One of them shot me about a half-hour before Roland was hurt,” I added lazily.
“What? Really?” the doctor gasped. “You were hit with the laser from a monster? Where?”
“Yes, here,” I said, pointing to the middle of my chest. “But it stopped hurting after I lied down for a moment. I’m fine.”
“Mr. Kaiba… please, let us make sure of that. These creatures may do more harm than you realize. It very well may have damaged your heart.”
I instantly regretted admitting to the attack; I didn’t want to have a physical examination. There was nothing wrong with me; I felt now as though the incident yesterday had never happened. Mokuba looked up at me, worried. He could tell that I was thinking of the politest way to ask the doctor to put his head in his @$$; Mokuba said, “Please do it, Seto...”
I frowned down at him, before turning back to the doctor and saying, “Quickly.”
The next thing I knew, I was standing in just my black slacks on a weighing scale that had a vertical height scale built next to it. The weight scale read a little more than 143 lbs, the height, around 73 inches. More than six feet… I liked being tall.
“I really don’t feel that this is necessary,” I told the nurse, who led me back to the examination table. I sat on it, and she put a blood-pressure cuff on my arm. “I feel fine. Really.”
Mokuba was sitting in a chair in the room, listening to music on his headphones. The nurse read my blood pressure readings on the cuff’s meter, before saying, “your blood pressure is a bit high, Mr. Kaiba.”
I frowned. “I don’t think that has much to do with what the monster did to me yesterday,” I said.
The nurse took the cuff off of my arm and took a small, plastic ring out of a drawer. “Give me your hand,” she said, and I did; she slid the ring onto the tip of my right pointer finger. “This will take your pulse and temperature.”
After a few seconds of this, she took the ring off of my finger and said, “Heart rate 75 beats per minute, core temperature around 99. You’re in good shape, doesn’t look like that monster did any damage to your heart… if anything, I would suggest relaxing once in a while, though… that blood pressure may give you problems later. You could experience fainting spells or a suppressed immune system from your high stress levels.”
“Fine,” I said, picking up my shirt and sliding it over my head. Mokuba saw me do this and looked up from his music. “There,” I told him, as he took his headphones off; I stuck my arms through the sleeves of my shirt. “I’m fine. Are you happy?”
He smiled and nodded. “Good!” he said, happily watching me tuck my shirt in and turn my coat right-side in.
“Let me ask you about the attack,” the nurse continued. “Please tell me how it played out.”
“I was in my office, and a couple of them burst through my door. I had a gun on hand and shot a few of them, but the third one was faster, and managed to position itself on the ceiling and shoot me, here,” I said, setting down my trench coat and pointing to the middle of my chest.
“How long did the laser come in contact with you?”
I frowned. Time had seemed so slow during the attack, that I wasn’t sure. “What do you think?” I asked Mokuba.
“Like four seconds or something,” he said. “Not very long.”
The nurse was scribbling all of this down. “What did you feel?”
“It was painful, and it made me turn cold,” I replied.
“How painful? Compare it to something else.”
“Would you like me to demonstrate on you?” I asked.
She looked up from her clipboard. “Mr. Kaiba,” she said, as though telling a rowdy child to calm down.
“…Getting punched in the chest very hard, I suppose.”
“How did you get rid of the monster?”
“I picked up the gun and shot it,” Mokuba said. “It turned to smoke and disappeared.”
“When the laser stopped, what happened?”
“My knees gave way,” I said. “I fell and sat on the floor for a little while. I was kind of out of breath and shaky.”
“Did you still feel pain?”
“Somewhat, but it wasn’t bad. Mostly I was dizzy. I lied down on the couch in my office for a moment and my mind cleared up.”
“So you never lost consciousness. How long did it take for you to feel completely normal again?”
“Maybe twenty minutes. Not even that.”
“Was there anything else interesting about the attack?”
“Not really,” I said, glad that this seemed to be finally over. I picked up my metal wrist plates off of the table and fastened them on my forearms. “Is that all?”
“Yes, and thank you,” the nurse said. “Hopefully we can tie your symptoms into finding out what happened to your employee.”
We exited the hospital. “What about Yugi,” Mokuba asked, as we re-entered the car.
“What about him,” I replied, fastening my seat belt and sticking the key into the ignition.
“He wanted to go to Atlantis like, today or tomorrow. Are you going?”
I sighed. “I guess I don’t have a choice. I don’t particularly want to, but it seems they need me…”
He was smiling at me. “I’m glad you’re working with them! I mean… I’m scared about you going…” he paused. “Are you taking me with you?”
I looked down at him and frowned. Was leaving him here as dangerous as taking him? Monsters showed up here, just as easily as they did, there… I could protect him better, if he stayed with me.
“Do you want to come?” I asked. “I feel like we’re in danger here or there… I guess, yes, I’d like you to come.”
Not surprisingly, he seemed somewhat excited now. “Yeah!” he said. “You might need my gunman skills.” He laughed; I felt better, slightly, and smirked. “Let’s go to the office and prepare the helicopter,” I said. “We can leave tomorrow.”
We re-entered my office twenty minutes later; we had barely taken two steps in the door before the phone on my desk rang. I picked it up; the phone’s screen showed the Pharaoh sitting at his computer’s webcam. I wasn’t surprised.
“I spoke with Dartz and Pegasus today,” he told me instantly.
“I saw them yesterday,” I said. “Did Dartz explain to you where the monsters are coming from, this time?”
“He told me everything,” the Pharaoh replied. “He also told me that he would fly us to Atlantis tomorrow morning.”
“He’s flying all of us in?” I asked, surprised. “With what? He has a plane?”
“I suppose,” he said. “He wants us to all be at your headquarters at five o’clock tomorrow morning. He says it is a long flight.”
I frowned, saying nothing for a moment, until I asked, “Do you really trust Dartz? After everything he did to us, I have some trouble believing that he’s turned around completely, like he claims he has.”
“I have full confidence that I banished every shred of darkness that he once harbored in his heart,” he replied immediately. “I do believe that he’s turned himself into a good king who is rebuilding his kingdom to be the best that it can be, without the intentions of harming anyone. I know he can still somewhat control the Orichalcos, but he had chosen not to; his advisors are the ones who now hold its power and are the ones who are dangerous. I truly believe that we can trust Dartz. Now I even consider him a friend.”
I didn’t say anything, again. The Pharaoh never ceased to stun me with how readily he forgave people who did unspeakable things to him. “Fine,” I said, finally. Yugi never seemed to be wrong with this sort of thing. “But if you want my help, you’d better not be wrong about Dartz.”
“I’m glad you’re working with us, Kaiba,” he said, with a smirk, knowing well that I was really mostly cooperating because Mokuba had put me up to this. “Thank you.”
I gave him a sort of approving hum as a response, before we both hung up. Mokuba was standing next to my desk. “Five o’clock in the morning?” he muttered. “Lame.” He looked at the clock on my desk; it was noon.
“Can we go back to the house? There’s… something I want to do,” he said.
I was startled; I looked up at him. He had almost never looked and sounded so nervous. What was he going to do? “Are you okay?” I asked him.
“Yeah,” he said, face very pink. “But, I want to go home.”
I stood up from my desk. “Alright,” I said.
Once home, Mokuba leapt out of the car and ran up to the house. I re-entered the house; now, he had abandoned me, leaving me on my own to find something ‘fun’ to do. What should I do? My stepfather had given me violin lessons for six years; I hadn’t played it since I had taken control of KaibaCorp; but maybe I still remembered how to play some songs.
I entered my room and took the violin case off of the top shelf of my closet. I opened it; the case’s outside was dusty, but the violin inside was polished beautifully; shiny, brown, wooden. I lifted it up and set it on my shoulder and leaned my chin against it. I slid the bow across the strings. I was surprised at how it didn’t sound flat or sharp; it hadn’t been used in over a year, but seemed to still be perfectly tuned.
The music was relaxing; I closed my eyes and let my hand draw the bow across the strings. It surrounded me; nothing was in the room with me other than the swirling melodies. I had forgotten that I was actually halfway good at playing music.
I was later interrupted by an intensely strong smell from the doorway. Eyes watering, I turned around to see Mokuba standing in my doorway. He was wearing his most expensive red suit shirt, buttoned all the way up to the top of his neck, and black slacks; it was an outfit almost formal enough in itself to wear to a fancy party. I could practically see fumes wafting off of him. His hair seemed completely straight; usually, it hung in messy layers, but now, it was completely tame.
“Mokuba, are… are you… wearing my cologne?” I asked, stunned, dropping my arm holding the violin to my side.
“Yes,” he said quickly. “I’ve booked a helicopter. I just wanted to let you know, I’m… I’m going out.”
I was at a loss for words. “…Going out?” I stammered.
He frowned. “I… yes. Going out.”
I felt my mouth creep into a smile. I set my violin down. “Are you… going on a date?” I asked, incredulous.
I could have fried an egg on his face. He broke eye contact with me and said “Um…”
I chuckled. “Let me help you, kiddo,” I said. He looked up, stunned. “Really?” he asked. He then frowned. “What do you know about …about going on a date, Seto?” he asked, almost angrily. “You’ve either rejected or alienated all sixteen million of the girls who have ever liked you…”
Sixteen million? Was it that many? Yeah, something like that… “Touché- I’m afraid my hatred for every human being on the planet other than you has made me into a relatively bad prom partner, but even with my ignorance, I do know that if you sit within six miles of your date today, you’ll choke her with your smell,” I chortled, approaching the bedroom door and motioning for him to follow me. “Wash some of that off.”
“I didn’t know how much to put on…” he laughed nervously. We went to the bathroom; I sat on the rim of the bathtub as he pulled his shirt down and started splashing water onto his neck and wrists.
“You look good. Is it the girl that you met at the party last night?” I asked, once he had gotten to the point where he smelled nice and had pulled his sleeves back down and propped his collar back up.
“Uh-huh,” he said, picking his locket necklace off of the bathroom sink and slipping it over his head. “She lives, like, an hour away. We’re going to see a movie.”
“Oh, leave the top button undone. A movie date at one o’clock in the afternoon?” I asked.
“Seto, I’m twelve,” he said shortly. “Plus, we have to wake up early tomorrow.” He brushed his shirt off, tucked it in, and turned to face me. “How do I look?”
“Very sharp,” I said, standing up off of the bathtub. He smiled. “Thanks for the advice,” he said. “Wish me luck… she’s a nice girl. I think I like her.”
I patted the top of his head; to my surprise, he batted my hand away from him and gasped, “Don’t! I spent a lot of time trying to get my hair to lie straight!”
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