You will not be heard from for a long time

I will be around because fear will never die

And if they should find you, it'd be a sight to see

A mass of flesh and muscle, a pile of pulp and teeth

“Something Beautiful” — ORBS

Originally Seto is left to lie in a jail cell, and then he is set down on the floor of a plush carpet because the cell is right at the top of the tower with the breeze thrashing at him, and Pegasus doesn’t want that. It just feels inhumane, is what Pegasus says. Seto’s still a guest of ours, a guest who brought such wonderful gifts.

Every day he is commanded to eat three times, and he’s given three pints of water too, in a jug. There are glasses, but the body drinks out of the jug, dribbling water on his clothes. Fewer steps. His tongue has not burnt itself on coffee in two weeks. He sleeps eight hours a night on the carpet with a cushion beneath his head, and that only after the cushion had manifested beneath him one morning.

Pegasus opens the door and starts when he sees the corpse sitting up, the light still on. He checks his watch. He opens his mouth to speak but nothing comes out.

Seto sits there unresponsive. All that’s moved are his eyes, now trained on Pegasus’ bronze eye. He hasn’t heard Pegasus’ voice, or any voice, in a while. No sounds to rattle around an empty skull except the strike of the clock. In the Millennium Eye the body sees what has taken its spirit, and awaits commands.

Pegasus steps closer and cups Seto’s chin, saying, “Well, what’s yours is mine now, Kaiba boy,” lowering himself to meet Seto’s dead stare, his open casket lips, with a smile. “But don’t worry. It’s all going toward a good cause.” He says it like saying goodnight.

He starts to get up from his crouch but then doesn’t. He pauses with his fingers still resting on Seto’s chin. His facial hair is so fine and fair that from far away he looks no different from before Pegasus took him. But there’s stubble now, running around his jaw.

Pegasus leaves, and behind the door after the brass knob has spiraled shut (and Seto keeps his eyes trained on it as though it’s the Eye, as though it holds the same spirit of the Eye), he tells his guards, “There’s no need to keep him in indignity. Shave the corpse.”

Occasionally there will be a voice telling the guards to leave. He’ll come in and Seto will be there sitting on his legs in front of the bed.

Pegasus doesn’t speak, all these visits. For much of the first visit his tongue quivers behind his teeth and that tongue is all Seto’s body can watch, still in wait. (More visits pass without an order from Pegasus’ lips until the corpse just ceases to expect commands.) Pegasus’ teeth shimmer in the light of the electric chandelier as he unzips and zips his mouth. He walks back to the door and turns down the light on the dimmer switch.

After the second visit, he will turn it down as soon as he shuts the door.

What he does as soon as the light’s down is he sits down on the edge of the bed with Seto’s head between his legs. All the muscles in his legs are tensed, ready to stand up again, his eye on the door.

He will take one hand and rest it on Seto’s scalp, and with the other he will fondle his soft cheek, his lax jaw.

The last time he does this he brushes Seto’s lips. His nail catches on a speck of dead skin and takes it along. He stands and walks into the en-suite bathroom. Water runs. Metal rattles.

He pours Seto a glass of water, pushes down on his chin to open his mouth and feed it to him.

Then he takes a jar out of his pocket, curls two fingers into it, and rubs wax on Seto’s lips. The lips mash together involuntarily and for a moment Pegasus’ finger gets trapped between Seto’s opening.

He puts the lip salve away, leaves in a stride and forgets to turn the lights back up. The meals keep arriving and the jug keeps getting refilled, but the room keeps that same low light. Daylight fails to pierce the blinds.

Seto sleeps eleven hours a night now.

Pegasus comes in and crouches down to Seto’s level. Seto hasn’t stood in maybe a week. He crawls to reach the jug of water now. One time it smashed and then there were guards in the room mopping up the water, sweeping up the broken glass, dislodging the shard in his foot and bandaging the wound.

“Tell me about the hard-light technology.”

But the tongue cannot access what’s trapped someplace else.

“It nearly killed you,” he says. “So it simulates haptic feedback.” Pegasus trembles under his own legs. He seizes Seto’s arm and pulls him to his feet. Still no response, or what looks like no response. The soulless body is in fact making itself lighter, taking on more of its own weight, so it can be led without any strain on its owner.

“It doesn’t simulate anything else. If you try to touch a monster yourself, it hovers away, out of view. The only way for it to touch you is to attack. And then you’ll feel the pain. But not the warmth of the hand that dealt it.” He takes Seto by the throat. Pushes his open palm up to Seto’s chin, drags it all the way along so he can feel the way his jugular tapers, so he can feel the languor of his blood flow. “Why would you program life to run from the grasp of other life?”

Pegasus leans closer, close enough for his breath to stroke Seto’s skin. Close enough that his remaining eye is discernible in the low light, bloodshot and blackened and glistening with his tears.

“Tell me everything your mind used to know. Tell me everything you remember.”

Still that stare.

Pegasus exhales, takes his hand off his neck.

“I can’t take it back, Kaiba boy, not after what I’ve done to you. You wouldn’t want to help me then.”

He pauses, and then he leads Kaiba’s body to the bed. He lays him down, pulls the sheet over him and sits on the sheet, snug against Seto’s torso and the edge of the bed.

And then he slaps him. Red stings Seto’s cheek.

“Where’s the fire, Kaiba boy? Where is it?”

He slaps him again and again. The tears clouding his vision make his slaps less precise. He catches a nail on the side of Seto’s face, cat-scratching his jawline.

“Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.”

Seto opens his eyes. He’s still in bed. He sits up so he’s kneeling on the mattress. Pegasus is watching him from the other side of the room. It’s night, and the only light in here is the bedside lamp, gathering warmth around Seto’s face. His Eye glimmering, Pegasus purses his lips and shapes them around empty words.

He holds a blanket draped over his lap. Except it’s too sheer to be a blanket, too small for either of their bodies.

Sitting with his legs apart, the item drapes over one of his legs but only just reaches the back of his thigh.

He dips his head and looks down at it, stealing glances at Seto. He shakes his head, rests a hand on his forehead. Watching Seto from beneath his brow, he pulls at a sheet of his own hair till his scalp is pale. He rises, mutters to himself as he leaves the open door.

Seto falls asleep on his knees. When his consciousness fades, if you can call it consciousness, he wilts onto the mattress.

There is sugar in every Kaiba, Kaiba, Kaiba, and venom in every boy.

“This isn’t working out, Kaiba boy.”

The way he says Kaiba never changes, but the venom grows each time he says boy.

Salt flesh jammed down Seto’s throat so he has to suck in each breath with force, tongue smashed into the floor of his mouth, five minutes’ worth of drool down his chin. His head moves as Pegasus shudders and yet each shudder aborts itself. Fingertips press into his skull as Pegasus steadies himself.

Two thuds.

He has been on his knees since Pegasus last left him. When he sleeps he bends them as tight as possible, so his whole body takes up as little space as it can, as though to be packed into luggage.

Seto’s feet touch the feet of the bed, the back of his head against the side of the mattress. The pillow from the bed now sits under his bruised knees.

“I don’t think you’re getting it. You’re just not invested enough in this relationship. Here. Let me demonstrate.”

The thudding comes again, not registering over Pegasus’ words.

He pulls one of Seto’s arms up and takes three cold fingers into his mouth. He drags his tongue across each fingertip and beneath him, the husk replicates the motion on the bottom of his shaft with a half-second’s delay. Pegasus’ breath breaks off into pieces and there’s a hum between his lips, moans trying to escape. Seto replicates that too, enveloping Pegasus’ cock in a buzz. Each pair of lips curls and uncurls around its respective fixation; each takes it deeper. Pegasus pants around Seto’s fingers, a corner of his lips wetting with drool.

He takes the fingers out of his mouth, sticky with saliva. A liquid string follows Seto’s arm and falls on Pegasus’ suit jacket, as his ragdoll wrist is let go and falls to his side. Seto comes off his cock for a second, but then Pegasus shoves him back on roughly, hitting the back of his throat. His cock bounces back a little, his hips rocking. Seto doesn’t gag. Looking up at Pegasus, keeping his eyes on Pegasus’ Eye, he repeats the rhythm Pegasus wrote with his tongue.

Then the thuds - knocks - and the door opens. One of Pegasus’ assistants stands there, mouth open almost as wide as Seto’s.

Pegasus turns enough to see him. Seto slows.

“God. Sir. I’m sorry. I’ll go.” The assistant’s eyes flash before they avert themselves. “You were gone for—”

“No. Stay.”

It’s a minute before he says anything else. Pegasus’ jaw tightens, his muscles tensing beneath his suit. His knees bend slightly, as though getting ready to move. The only movement in Seto’s mouth is Pegasus’ cock twitching, testing the gag reflex of a body with no one home.

Still looking at his servant, Pegasus feels for Seto’s mop of hair, his hand finding home there. He says to Seto, “Keep going.”

He does, of course.

“And Crocketts… get us some lubricant, will you?”

For a few weeks or days or months or hours after coming down Seto’s throat and anus and leaving him knelt on the floor, Pegasus doesn’t enter the room again.

Seto is bathed, shaved and fed by assistants who do not feed him their own flesh, but who leave him naked all the same, as Pegasus did.

When Pegasus comes in, he opens the curtains and turns up the lights. He gives him a sky blue suit and tells him to get changed.

He pins a pink carnation to the lapel of his jacket. He lays him out on the bed, positions each limb. He takes a few steps back, squints about five feet around Seto. He kneels and draws lines between each object with his fingers.

Three blinks later, he’s back, plumping up the pillows around him. He unbuttons the top three or four buttons of Seto’s shirt. His eye glued to the flesh beneath the shirt, the motion is clumsy. Hot breath brushing Seto’s clavicles, Pegasus straightens out his collar. Then, walking back out to the same spot, he asks Seto to follow his finger with his eyes, and draws a line with his finger from in front of his chest to his crotch.

“Perfect. What a natural! Now, if you freeze there…”

He goes out and returns with a stool, an easel, and a case full of brushes and paints. He works on the canvas with small brush strokes, lip bitten down. He stands to get water for himself from Seto’s jug, and once to use the bathroom, each time revealing his half-mast in profile.

Some creases in Seto’s shirt deepen and fade as his diaphragm rises and falls. Besides that, he stays frozen as commanded.

There have been thousands of glances to Seto since Pegasus took his seat at the stool, started calculating proportions, evaluating light and colour. The painting is all done, alla prima, and the clock in the hall has only struck a handful of times since he began. Staying seated, Pegasus drags his stool back with his feet to examine the canvas. Then his gaze falls, again, on Seto.

And then he’s crouching by Seto and undoing his suit pants, reaching beneath the new opening in the fabric to grasp his cock. The still-wet paint on his hands adheres to Seto’s suit pants, his tucked-in shirt, the naked skin beneath.

“Oh, whoops.” He chuckles, looking down at the new smudges of dark blue and pink on Seto’s pelvis, deepening the shade of his pubic hair. “I must have looked at you too much and my work not enough.”

His touch coaxes Seto warm and stiff. He leans in to kiss the rising head of his cock, scanning up Seto’s frozen torso as he does. He brushes fingertips up and down Seto’s thighs and hips till goosebumps speckle the surface, but Seto does not move. Pegasus shudders, falls to his knees so he can take Seto in his mouth. One hand curls around the base of his shaft, leaving behind a few more marks of paint.

It takes almost nothing to make him come. Pegasus is halfway through a breath, nearly inhales his cum, eye bulging in surprise. He goes to the en-suite bathroom to spit it out, then heads for the door to the corridor, then back to the stool and canvas. He sits down, adds a couple extra strokes to the piece, doing so while avoiding looking at Seto in the flesh.

When the likeness is dry he gets his servants to frame it and hang it in the corridor outside Seto’s room. Pegasus brings Seto to see it. Empty eyes fall on smudges of dark blue and pink imposed over the crotch of his pants, the colours a little too bright for the rest of the portrait.

You took my soul because you knew you couldn ’t take it. You couldn’t take that you had to cheat at your own game. Because all those other times… all those other times you knew you would have won if you’d tried.

Pegasus’ eye is trained on the card on his writing desk, a finger pressed to the glossy surface. He concentrates harder, squinting at Seto’s image, and he can feel Kaiba fighting the bars of his mental prison.

He’s been taking the card out more and more ever since finishing the painting. He could do this with any of his captives with enough proximity and focus. The Eye can penetrate any soul’s encasement, be it a picture frame, be it a corpse.

But only Seto is worth watching like this. Only Seto has kept fighting.

“Oh, Kaiba boy. Come on. You know better than that, repeating yourself like this. I’m granting you this mercy, giving you more than your prison walls. Giving you the gift of my voice, and you’re still going on and on about your tragic defeat.” he says. “You could never have won against me.”

You can ’t face me because you would have tried and you would have lost.

“Really? I face you every day,” Pegasus replies, grinning and picking up the card. “Come with me and I’ll give you a show.”

The memories hit the soul like an anvil. Seto can’t tell how long he has been in this room. All he has are chimes of the clock and the rises and falls (or falls and rises, it being difficult to tell beyond those blinds) of the sun and he catches himself trying to count between the memories, but they all seem to happen at once. He sees his own body lying there on the bed, and at the same time he sees Pegasus and the gilded device in his hands.

The cage clinks as Pegasus secures it around Seto’s cock. The card holding Seto’s soul rests in the breast pocket of Pegasus’ shirt, his printed face peering out.

“There was one of your aces I hadn’t degraded yet,” he says, looking down at the card. “And that wouldn’t do.”

Pegasus turns him over with gentle force and applies lubricant from a bottle to his hands. Cold wetness around Seto’s anus, the excess drips down past the hole to his perineum, nearly reaching the metal cage frame.

Seto yells and pants between yells, but no real sounds escape that loose throat, just the ones inside his prison, inside Pegasus’ head.

Still Pegasus says, “Relax,” though the corpse’s breaths are languid, every muscle malleable. He turns Seto onto his back, lubricates himself, and lifts his ass a little to enter him. “It’s alright.”

The servants never did make Seto take their flesh, but as the soul remembers now, they’ve kept him filled while Pegasus is gone, and clean for when Pegasus returns. To Seto’s consciousness, the harshness of ever-increasing plugs seems to happen in conjunction with the enema and the afterwards shower his body was commanded to give itself a few hours ago.

As Pegasus slams into him he cries until his throat grates against an ever-increasing lump. Nonexistent tears stream down his cheeks, staining the trenchcoat  that should be there, where there is instead bare skin.

Pegasus shushes Seto’s open mouth, though no sounds have issued from it. The body’s cock swells with the prostate stimulation, quickly reaching the bars of the cage, cold metal burning against flesh. Then something does come from that open mouth. Panting. Saliva.

Pegasus slows down and takes the card from his pocket. From his other jacket pocket he takes a pin and sticks it through the card, so its head gags the two-dimensional Seto’s mouth. The crying ringing through Pegasus’ head dwindles into an echo, and then nothing.

One arm holding the corpse’s shoulder to steady himself, Pegasus folds the card with his other hand, fingers pressing till they’re white so the image of Seto distorts and doubles over. The trading card is small enough for a child’s hands to shuffle, and so manipulating it easily between his fingers, he creases the fold, makes it irreversible. Then he throws it over his shoulder and resumes his grinding rhythm. Warmth all around him, he puts a finger to Seto’s forehead and then tastes his sweat.

“Oh, good boy. Look at that. Effortless reciprocity. You weren’t willing to share those dirty corporate secrets, and this is what you get. Two cages. One for your soul. One for your future.” He runs a fingernail, the same finger that had been in his mouth, down the bars of the cage. “We can’t all have a future, after all.”

He hooks his fingers into Seto’s mouth, feels both cheeks and follows the slick veins beneath the surface. He reaches into the back of his throat and runs each finger across each tooth. Feels how his jaw will only lower with a prompting tug of his fingers, how it will only close with the correspondent pressure on his chin.

Pegasus closes his eye and pushes deeper and says come for me, come for me, come for me. He opens it again as he feels the measly singular contraction, a milky string running down Seto’s shaft. And at that sight Pegasus comes, whining and moaning, tears dropping on Seto’s chest, juddering as he pulls out. He leaves not long after, semen dribbling out of Seto.

Seto stares at the engravings in the ceiling for three or four more strikes of the clock.

—

“There are two drawers. The first is in Seto Kaiba’s old room, before we moved him. The second is in my room. It’s the bottom drawer of the rosewood dresser, the one with the broken hinge. Empty them both, Crocketts, if you will, and put the clothes in the trash.”

“The bottom drawer.” A pause. “Are you sure, sir?”

Standing beside Pegasus is Seto all dressed in blue, staring somewhere beyond.

“Well, all they fit now are moths,” Pegasus replies, teeth bared, head over-gesturing with every word. He wraps an arm around Seto’s waist and squeezes. “And the owners are buried now, aren’t they?”