Rock Bottom: Season Zero

Stand

Warning: This is the most intense chapter of the whole series, since it contains a full scene with the odious Gozaburo Kaiba. It's not what I would call graphic, but it's definitely disturbing. You have been warned.

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The next morning, Seto found that he was able to recall that missing chunk of memory: he'd gone to KaibaCorp and faced Noah in chess, trouncing him soundly and taking the Blue-Eyes as his own. Seto reached for his coat, which he'd been too tired to put anywhere but on the floor last night, and pulled the Blue-Eyes White Dragon card out of the inner pocket. He could hardly believe it. It brought a full, warm smile to his face like nothing else had in a long time.

At school on Monday, his friends were eager to hear if he'd won his chess match; honestly, Seto hadn't expected them to remember. He'd just assumed they would have forgotten something so trivial. He told them that yes, he had won, and even showed them the set-up of the checkmate, to which his friends had responded with such phrases as, "We always knew you would win," and, "Nobody's better than you at chess." Again, Seto didn't know how to respond to such praise. He was unaccustomed to being acknowledged.

Rather than tell them outright what he'd won, he'd told them that it was a Duel Monsters card, and that the only way they would see it would be if it came up in his deck during a duel. He'd alternated between dueling Yugi and Joey and Ryou at lunch and after school each day that week, and the Blue-Eyes card had yet to come up. Of course, it didn't help that Seto usually beat Joey fairly quickly, and that every time he dueled Yugi, they ran out of time and couldn't complete the duel.

Ryou was possibly the most difficult duelist Seto faced, actually. His Destiny Board strategy was deadly, and Seto wasn't always able to pull himself out of it each time Ryou employed it. For the first time that he could think of, he almost felt normal. He wasn't fully normal, of course, because he was still dragging himself to school a half hour before classes so that he could work on coding his computer program at the school library, since he lacked a computer of his own. But this was the closest he'd ever gotten to being consistently happy for more than a day at a time, and he didn't want to waste a single moment of it.

Of course, things didn't truly change for him. There still remained the fact that he now realized he was identical to Gozaburo's son, which made the fact that Gozaburo had requested someone that looked so specifically like him so incredibly disturbing. He wasn't going to cater to that sadist anymore, he decided. He was done. It was high time that he stood up for himself.

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"You disgust me," Seto said as he entered Gozaburo's office that Thursday night.

"What did you just say?" Gozaburo turned on him, looking dangerous and violent. Then again, he always looked that way in Seto's eyes.

"You're a pervert. I know you're the one who requested somebody with my coloring, but I didn't realize before that I looked exactly like your son!" Seto couldn't stand this anymore. No amount of money could justify the amount of abuse he suffered at this monster's hands.

"You will get on your hands and knees like the dog you are this very moment, or so help me, I'll beat you within an inch of your life." Gozaburo's voice was cold and cruel, and the fact that he spoke in a low whisper rather than a loud shout sent a chill down Seto's spine. Even so, he stood his ground.

"I'm not doing this anymore." He uncrossed his arms as he turned to walk away, only to have the door be dead-bolted on him as he reached it. He turned around to glare at Gozaburo, who smugly held the fancy remote control for the myriad of features in his office that responded to it. This wasn't the first time Gozaburo had used it to lock Seto in.