Not My Problem

“I don’t get it.”

Kevin blinked at Oliver over his soda. “Don’t get what? They’re three girls coming out of the bathroom. No one gets why they go together.”

“No, no, not that,” Oliver said impatiently, eyes flicking between his companions and the cluster coming out of the bathroom door. “How can they think that doing that is at all good for them?”

“Taking a dump,” Ian asked stupidly, grinning briefly at Kevin.

Oliver huffed and turned away from them, every inch the gay kid they only hung out with because every soda was on him. “You two totally don’t get it.”

“Get what?”

“Kevin, please tell me at least you know what they do in there.”

Kevin shrugged. “Yeah, I’ve walked in on Mariah doing it a couple times. It’s not my problem, I don’t say anything.”

Ian spluttered. “You’ve walked in on--”

“No! No, no no, no, no!” Kevin shoved him roughly, his own face flushing beet red. “Get your mind out of the gutter! Jesus Christ!”

Against his will, Oliver giggled, stifling it behind his hand. He took a sip of his soda and watched Ian shrink away from Kevin’s furious embarrassment.

“Then what did you mean,” Ian pressed bravely, rubbing his shoulder.

Kevin sighed, trying to collect his thoughts. Oliver glanced at him and stepped in. “Do you know anything about bulimia?”

Ian squinted. “Bulimia as in throwing up to stay skinny?”

“That’s the one,” Kevin muttered into his soda. “Mariah does it all the time.”

“How is that not your problem,” Ian asked, perplexed by the very idea of personal boundaries within a team. Within a family.

Kevin looked to Oliver again. “Oliver, help.”

“Nonono, I want to hear the rationale behind this, too.” He twisted his fingers together delicately and rested his elbows on the tabletop like swans on a still lake. Kevin rolled his eyes.

“It’s... It’s just not my deal, okay? She didn’t say anything when I kept having those nightmares last year--”

“The ones about the funeral?”

“Yes, that one,” Kevin snapped, glaring at Ian peevishly.

“Okay, sorry,” Ian said, backing his chair farther away from the table. The feet scraped on the tile floor of the food court, squeaking loudly. “Anyway?”

Kevin sighed again, clearly not wanting to talk about it. “Point being, there is an unspoken rule that our problems are our own, not each others. We don’t ask, we don’t tell, we don’t come to each other for help. We protect each other from other people, yeah. But not from ourselves. Definitely not from ourselves.” Kevin’s voice trailed off with the last statement, as though he was trying to reassure himself that he was doing the correct thing.

Ian’s nose scrunched. “I thought Rei was all touchy-feely ‘Sharing is Caring’ and shit?”

“Yeah,” Kevin shrugged. “We don’t talk to him a lot. He’s clueless of most of what goes on.”

Oliver giggled again. “He’s clueless anyway, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

Kevin smiled indulgently. “Of course not, Oliver. Feel free to bad mouth my cousin behind his back at any time. I do it enough to his face.”

“Jesus, what did he do to you?” Ian pulled his chair back to the table, screeching across the linoleum flooring like a bad marker on a dry erase board.

“My problem,” Kevin snapped. “But if you have to know, he abandoned us. I’m sure you remember that part.”

Oliver took a sip of his soda and leaned back in his chair, tracing the girls across the large room with his eyes. “They obviously don’t look healthy,” he said, totally oblivious to the argument raging across the table.

Snapping his eyes to his best friend and her troupe of girls, Kevin frowned and returned his eyes to his soda. “Can we maybe talk about something else? Please?”

“Someone should talk to her about it sometime,” Oliver said casually, removing his eyes from the group.

“And you’re her best friend,” Ian added, knowing Kevin was going to be pissy with him for pushing the issue. “If anyone should care about her, it’s you.”

“What, are you saying I don’t care now,” he exploded, eyes spewing hatred. “Of course I care! Her mom practically raised me! It kills me to see this happening to her!” He choked and dragged a hand over his face, checking for any stray tears that might have escaped. “I love Mariah,” he said quietly, turning away from his friends.

“Sounds like you’re trying to convince yourself,” Oliver noted, trying to be gentle.

Kevin folded his arms on the table. “I do love Mariah,” he mumbled. “I’m doing the right thing. She’ll hate me if I rat her out.”

Ian mimicked Kevin’s pose. “Tala stopped eating a few months ago. He almost died.”

“It’s for her own good, Kevin,” Oliver added. “She’ll forgive you, eventually.”

Kevin took a deep breath and nodded. “Okay. Okay. I’ll...tell, I guess.”

“No. Not ‘I guess.’” Oliver crossed his arms. “You’re going to do it.”

“I’ll do it,” Kevin repeated, nodding like he was going to back out at any second. He looked at Ian, and then at his soda.

“Who would I tell?”

Made to Order

The small black line on Brooklyn’s computer screen blinked curiously at him from the top of an empty document. He stretched, cracked his knuckles, and rested his fingers on the keys. He was still for a moment more, before his fingers began to move, and words began to appear on the screen.

Once upon a time, he wrote, his fingers gaining speed  with every word they brought into being, there was a young girl. Her mother left when she was very young, but most of the time it didn’t matter. She was Daddy’s darling girl, and as such, her father would do anything to make her happy. She was greatly loved, and loved greatly in return.

But one day, the girl’s father hesitantly decided that, perhaps, it was time to think of his own happiness. Caring for his only daughter was fulfilling, but he missed the feeling of a woman in bed beside him. He crept onto the dating scene, leaving the girl at home in their reasonably spacious apartment at nights, on weekends. He didn’t want to scare a woman off with the idea that he was looking for a nanny, not a wife.

And then he found The One, as this mythic idea of a soul mate is called in romance novels and chick flicks. She was beautiful, and smart, and funny, and when he told her about his daughter, her eyes lit up and she begged to meet his “first girl”. So, one night, the woman came to the apartment for dinner, and met the man’s daughter. But she saw not competition, or a potential family, but profit. The eight-year-old was adorable, with silky aqua-blue curls and a smile that could turn a drill sergeant's heart to sugary, strawberry-flavored goo. A model in the making, the woman thought, and immediately sought permission from the girl’s father to take her to an agent.

The girl watched her father grow ever more infatuated with his new wife, who grew ever more infatuated with her stepdaughter’s career. She modeled, showing off a glowing smile that was trained in the mirror every night before she went to bed. She posed for the cameras, giggling coyly for an audience that would never hear, only see. Her father was proud of her when she modeled--she was his beautiful girl, he’d say with pride, and then kiss his wife and proclaim her a genius for recognizing their girl’s talent. Not just his. The girl belonged to her stepmother, too. Without her consent.

Desperate for the attention she had once received, the girl sought out a talent scout with a self-recorded demo and that winning charm she’d developed during a four-year long modeling career. She had always known she was a good singer--une belle chanteuse, her mother had called her in her earliest memories--and maybe, she thought, if I took the initiative myself, Papa will love me again.

But she got more than she had bargained for. The record company adored her. The crowds adored her. And her father was proud, but she had a half-sibling on the way and he couldn’t just leave his wife to go with her to a show in Rome, would she be alright just traveling with her agent? Of course, Papa, she told him with an only-slightly disappointed smile. If he didn’t love her, the crowds could compensate.

The screams of the fans soothed her desperate soul for a few hours, leaving the smile genuine when she left the stage. And it would stay genuine, for a little while. It would stay genuine through the after-parties, and sometimes all the way to the bus, if the masses screamed loud enough. She signed autographs and left pink lip gloss marks on photos and shone that dazzling, mostly-fake smile everywhere. But when she got back to the hotels, and asked if anyone had left a message for her, the answer was always the same--plenty of messages, but none of them her family. Her half-sister was four, and had the same giggle that she had at that age. The girl, now walking the delicate balance between childhood and the realm of women, adored the child, simply for the fact that the girl was everything she couldn’t be. She couldn’t be innocent anymore, and she couldn’t be happy. Not without the screaming fans, the glowing reviews, the eight-year-old girls who ducked up to her and asked her to sign their backpacks with a shy smile and a fervent “I want to be just like you someday.”

And then, the inevitable happened. The crowds were distracted by the next rising stars, the next big thing. The girl, just barely a woman now, struggled to gain them back. She retained a few loyal followers, like Cher or Kim Wilde, but they were the few, the proud, the brave. Much like Marines, ridiculed in schoolyards for their staunch dedication to a has-been cause, a one-hit-wonder.

Her next launch was found in a sport familiar for its dangerous and wildly extreme nature. I met this girl when she was sixteen, and although her foray out of the music industry had left her bruised, she still had the air of someone willing to work for approval. She learned a sport she hated, sang songs she didn’t feel like singing. I asked her once, out of morbid curiosity, why she did everything she hated. She sniffed, laughed without humor, and told me that if she didn’t, no one would love her. I promised her I would love her always. And I did, but that’s not important now.

Like all things do eventually, this venture fell apart. Quite literally, all of our reputations and a few of our bodies were in shambles for months. We all bear scars from the fallout, some more visible or felt than others. I escaped relatively unscathed, which isn’t fair because I certainly did the most damage. But I digress. The girl was attacked, for selling her soul, disrespecting the true nature of a sport no one could agree on, anyway. They ripped her to shreds, for lack of a better scapegoat to sacrifice for all of our sins.

The girl retreated, beaten and left for dead, back into the industry that had raised her up from upper middle-class obscurity. She posed for covers, center spreads, any page that would have her. She donned scraps of cloth and leather and lace that could hardly be called clothing, and occasionally fishnet stockings or a bed sheet or two. Her family refused to allow her to speak with their daughter, to have any contact with them at all. She went home to her tiny LA apartment and cried, clinging to Jack Daniels, her only earthly friend, she felt. Some nights, she didn’t go home at all.

The girl cried to me that no one loved her anymore--they only loved her for what she could do, the shapes she could stretch herself into, the things she was willing to do in public, on camera. She would do anything for a few moments of acceptance. A few moments of feeling loved again. She didn’t know how to be loved for something other than her body.

And then, as if my heart wasn’t already breaking for her already, she smashed it to pieces. After giving birth to a beautiful, if slightly premature, baby girl of her own, she dialed her agent’s office number, set the phone in the crib, and drowned herself in the bathtub.

Michella Beaumont, better known as Ming-Ming, was laid to rest two weeks ago. I held her daughter during the eulogy.

I hear you whisper “good riddance to bad trash” as you walk past the newsstands. I know what you say about her--that she was disturbed, that she wasn’t a fit mother or a fit role model for your children.

And I would like to tell you something: You have no right.

I knew Ming-Ming. I knew why she got up on stage, and why she launched a beyblade for the first time in her teens. She did it for you--her life was crafted for your enjoyment, for your attention. She loved the fact that you loved her, until you didn’t anymore.

I’m not blaming you for her death. No, I blame myself just as much as anyone else. I held her baby girl the week before she died--I should have seen it coming, should have offered her help, if nothing else.

But I do blame you for her life. I blame you, Mr. Beaumont, for teaching your daughter that she had to win your attention, by being louder and brighter than anyone else. I blame you, modeling companies, for accepting an eight year old girl into the world of sexualized women in the first place. I blame you, record companies, for thrusting her into an addiction for applause that haunted her until the day she died. I blame you, dear reader, for egging her on, for watching her downward spiral and shaking your heads and muttering “that whore, she deserves it”, but secretly you loved every minute.

She tailored her life to suit what you wanted. She was an artist in one respect--her life was a fabrication, meant to please the eye and not much else. It was for you. Dedicated to you. Her drug supplier, her catalyst for self-destruction.

I hope you enjoyed the show, while it lasted.

Brooklyn scrolled back to the top of his article and read what he had written. Usually he’d tweak wording or sentence structure before sending it to the editor, but he decided against it. The wound he’d reopened within himself was too raw for him to attempt to polish it without throwing the whole thing out and starting over.

He sighed heavily, attached the document to an email, and sent it with a brief message to his editor. A baby cried somewhere in the other room. Wearily, he spun away from his computer and the dark window beyond and shuffled into the spare bedroom, now a makeshift nursery until he could properly convert it.

“Hey, hey, shh,” he whispered tenderly, scooping the tiny squirming bundle out of the crib and cradling her to his chest. “It’s okay, MiMi, I’m here.”

An hour later, Brooklyn Masefield and Michella Angel Beaumont were curled up on the bed, asleep. His computer gave a quiet ding before falling silent again, signaling a new email.

Brooklyn cracked one eye open, looked at the computer, and then at Michella. He shook his head and rolled over.

He had more important things to pay attention to right now.

Skin Deep

If Seto really thought about it, he’d realize that he should have seen this coming.

Every few days, a new cut, a new Band-Aid would appear, sometimes on his wrist, sometimes closer to his elbow. Mokuba always had an answer: “Don’t worry about it, Niisama, I’m just clumsy. It’s only a paper cut. I’m fine.” Eventually, convinced that Mokuba wasn’t in any real danger, Seto committed the unforgivable sin: He stopped asking.

Or, more accurately, he stopped seeing. The Band-Aids, the injuries themselves had become so common place that they were invisible. And, if he noticed, he would have seen the Band-Aids upgraded to gauze pads and medical tape, and then to cloth bandage rolls to be washed and reused until worn to bare threads. He would have seen the long sleeve shirts become ever more frequent in the boy’s wardrobe, and he would have seen the stiffness in his brother’s arms in the mornings. Mokuba himself never changed—Seto would have noticed that—but little things he did changed. His movements were more careful, pained somehow, and he was spending more and more time out of his brother’s reach—across the board room, in his own bedroom instead of Seto’s office, not as willing to jump up and follow Seto wherever he went. Gradually, always with good reason, and Seto never had the time to get suspicious anyway.

He never suspected anything. This was Mokuba, after all—happy, loyal, loving Mokuba. The kid he’d raised from infancy, the kid who, in many ways, raised him to adulthood. Mokuba wasn’t depressed or—God in heaven forbid—suicidal.

Cutting wasn’t something his baby brother would ever do. It would never happen. He had no reason to be scared.

If Seto really thought about it, he would have had every reason to be scared.

-x-x-x-

The computers were blowing up.

Mokuba was one of six people in the world of the living who knew how to fix Kaiba-Corp’s system mainframe, and so he’d been rushed to the bowels of the building the second he’d stepped through the front door. He’d been swept into the network room, a cavernous basement space full of gargantuan machines, and left with an insufficient explanation of the virus eating the mainframe and a plea to fix it soon.

Thoughtlessly, he pushed up his sleeves, rolled the pressure bandage he’d put on his wrist for camouflage into a neat little roll, and set to work.

Six hours later, Seto Kaiba ventured down to check on his brother and the programmers’ progress with combating the virus. He strolled up to Mokuba’s side and smiled at the distracted grunt he got in greeting. His brother was in his element, and he had about a snowball’s chance in hell of distracting him. Briefly, he prayed that Mokuba didn’t wind up the workaholic he was.

The boy was staring at a seemingly nonsensical collection of numbers and letters on the computer screen, eyes moving from one section of code to the next with an uncommonly practiced eye. Seto studied his brother for a moment more before his eyes travelled to the small fingers tripping nimbly over the keyboard.

His forearms were totally exposed for the first time in months, which surprised him mildly to begin with. He glimpsed a group of raised ridges illuminated by the glow of the computer screen. Alarm bells started going off in his head—although he personally had never experienced the need to cut, he had known many who had over the years, and the implications he had seen were something he never wanted his baby brother to go through.

Don’t jump to conclusions, he told himself, taking a deep breath and forcing down the rising fear and apprehension in his throat. Wordlessly, he moved over to one of the other programmers, a thirty something wholly focused on his own screen. “Mister Kent,” he muttered, touching the programmer on the shoulder.

The man tapped his keyboard, pausing the flow of cyber-DNA across his screen. “Mister Kaiba,” he said, looking up with a conspicuous lack of fear. “Can I help you?”

“I need to speak with Mokuba for a minute. Do you need him especially right now?”

Mr. Kent glanced over at his young partner. “Yeah, sure, I can spare him. He’s been here six hours without a break, why don’t you just take the kid home, anyway? Get him some sunlight,” the man chuckled. “Don’t want the kid to end up like me, do we?”

“Yeah, well. Ah, thank you, Mister Kent.” Seto awkwardly patted his shoulder and returned to Mokuba’s side. “Mokuba, come on.”

“What? I’m not—“

“Go with your brother,” the other programmer said from across the room, not looking up from his screen. “Get food, get sunlight, get sleep. Back-up’s on the way, I can hold out here until they get here.”

“O-okay,” Mokuba sighed shakily, standing up and stretching his arms mightily over his head to uncoil the kinks in his spine. “See you, Brendon.”

“Later, Moku. Take care.”

The Kaiba brothers walked out into the hallway, letting the door close behind them. “Mokuba,” Seto said quietly, struggling with how to shape his fears into words. “We…need to talk.”

“Mmm?” Mokuba blinked owlishly up at his brother. In his exhaustion, he’d forgotten that his sleeves were rolled up and the pressure bandage was tucked neatly in his pocket, that his every scar was revealed for the world to see.

Seto knelt in front of his brother and closed his eyes, drawing in a deep breath to steady himself.  When he opened his eyes again, they were brimming with something Mokuba had never seen before in his Niisama’s eyes—uncloaked fear. “Mokuba, you know you can come to me with anything, right,” he asked, his voice soft and quivering ever so slightly.

Mokuba’s mind raced through all the possibilities of what Seto could be getting at, never once touching on the closest issue to home he had—his own arms. “Seto?”

“I love you,” Seto continued insistently, brushing Mokuba’s hair behind his ear. “I know…it doesn’t always seem like it, but you’re the best thing I have in my life. I don’t think I could…survive without you.”

“Seto, what are you saying? You’re…kinda scaring me here.”

Thin, pianist fingers found Mokuba’s wrist, and as Seto’s cool skin touched his, Mokuba knew that he was in serious trouble. Eyes wide, he pulled back, hurriedly tugging at his sleeves to conceal the damage, trying to reverse the hurt and fear in his brother’s eyes. “Brother—Niisama— I’m sorry! I didn’t mean—You weren’t supposed to—“

Seto’s eyes softened sadly, and before Mokuba really knew what was happening, he was leaning on Seto’s shoulder, his brother’s fingers entangled in his hair with gentle desperation. “Mokuba,” he murmured against his little brother’s shoulder, “please, please don’t apologize to me. Not for this. Please. If anyone should be apologizing, it should be me.”

“What--? No, you shouldn’t. I’m the one who—who—“ He couldn’t bring himself to say it. His brother was already hurt because of him, he couldn’t bear to see it made worse.

“But I didn’t see it,” Seto said, pulling back just enough to look his brother in the eye. “If I hadn’t been so blind…maybe I would have been able to help…”

Mokuba blinked, tears welling up at the spent hopelessness in his brother’s voice. “Brother,” he murmured sadly, winding his arms around his brother’s neck. “It’s… I just…wanted you to be proud of me… And then I… It was so hard, and… I’ve just hurt you again.”

Seto held Mokuba as tightly as he could without hurting him. “Mokie, I am always proud of you,” he whispered fervently. “You don’t even have to try, you make me proud just by being you.”

And all at once, every hopeless ambition Mokuba had of living up to the expectations his brother ought to have was gone, replaced by the all-encompassing feeling of being held for the first time in a long time, of being loved just as he was, scarred and bruised and needy and exhausted. All he could think about was Seto’s arms around him and Seto’s fingers through his hair, and Seto not caring about his scars. He didn’t know when he started crying, but Seto’s fingers were suddenly against his face and whispers of “Shh, don’t cry, baby brother, it’s alright,” were swirling through his ears, like cool water in the middle of the Sahara.

“I…I…I don’t know how to stop,” Mokuba sobbed, heedless of the click of heels down the corridor, or the look Seto shot his office assistant when she saw them. “I tried, and I tried again, and I tried again, and I—I can’t make myself stop it!”

“Shh, shh, it’s okay, Mokie,” Seto soothed, his heart laying in shards around his knees. “That’s what Big Brother’s here for, okay? To help you fix things. That’s my job. I’ll help put you back together again, I promise.”

Mokuba clung to Seto’s jacket, fingers clutching desperately at the fabric like Seto would rescind his promise if he ever let go.

“…Do you want to go home?”

Wordlessly, Mokuba nodded. He was spent, physically and emotionally, and all he wanted in the world was to curl up on the couch under that one really warm fleece blanket and go to sleep for a thousand years. Or maybe a month or two. Because Seto would miss him if he was gone for a thousand years. He took a deep breath and wiped his eyes with the back of his sleeve, suddenly unable to stay upright without Seto’s support. His arms latched around Seto’s neck and he snuggled into his brother’s side, silently demanding to be carried out to the car.

Seto chuckled and lifted Mokuba in his arms, relieved to have his brother this close to him. As long as Mokuba was with him, nothing would happen.

He wouldn’t let anything happen. Whatever nonexistent god as his witness, he would not let anything happen to Mokuba ever again.

Even if the enemy in question was Mokuba himself.