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Image by the lovely rainstormcolors! Thank you (✿◕O◕)づʕ◕ᴥ◕๑ʔ
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Mokuba brought the formicarium home from sixth period biology to another unusual July day. Jounouchi was in their house again— third time this week, and it was Thursday— he couldn’t see him quite yet, but he knew from the telltale, muffled quarrelling from the second floor— and then a door SLAMMED open and Jounouchi bore his bluster down on their house like an anvil, pacing hard down the grand stairs to the foyer. Seto followed, glowering, just in time to hear his parting shot:
“I’ll just fucking go home then!”
“You idiot, I never said anything about you having to leave—”
“I’m not stupid Kaiba! I know when you don’t want me arou— oh, hey Mokuba!”
Jounouchi then fell into the inevitable charade most older than himself defaulted to, for reasons beyond Mokuba’s understanding: pretending things were fine when they weren’t. A tight smile took Jounouchi’s face, which sported a mottled bruise spread blue over a slightly swollen nose. Mokuba stared directly at it— it hadn’t been there, when Jounouchi and his brother were squabbling shoulder to shoulder on the couch over a game of Forza on Tuesday— and Jounouchi noticed his staring and went red, but kept smiling, almost dutifully.
The quiet between them wasn’t awkward, not quite. But it was something.
Mokuba adjusted the formicarium under his arm. A thin stream of pink play-sand rattled out the bottom seam and scattered across the marble.
“Hi, Jounouchi.”
Then: footsteps familiar in their weight and evenness, the way they fell like syllables in a private language only the Kaiba brothers understood. Seto stood behind Jounouchi now, silent and straight-backed.
Mokuba didn’t need to look to know his face would be unreadable as brick. Seto was the exception to all this endless pretence and posturing that afflicted his elders, but it did not give way for honesty: he didn’t say anything. He never confessed, never unwound, never let the wound throb in the open air. But he had always been as honest as his own closed tenderness would allow— like some warped, chasmogamous bud that opened only for the sun’s inspection. Now, that face— always so unreachable— was shut again, sealed off from even the pollination of its own infernal thoughts.
Mokuba turned slightly and met his gaze.
“Hi, Niisama.”
But Seto was closed now, only the dart of his eyes betraying life— shifting, furtive, always toward Jounouchi and away again. He nodded to Mokuba in greeting. Jounouchi’s stubbornness did not indulge his brother’s fretful attention in the slightest. And so they were back at the impassable crag Mokuba had stumbled upon coming home— this strange, silent impasse. Seto likely couldn’t solve it, he knew. He would not do the easy and beautiful thing— the pleading. The kind that opened a person, again and again, to the risk of being refused. The kind that asked someone to stay— to abide the grief of remaining rooted to the world when all they longed to do was leave.
Seto couldn’t ask. But Mokuba could. He was practiced in that work: Mokuba had done it a hundred times for both of them. What loss would it be to him, really, to tempt Jounouchi to stay, when his brother could not?
A fresh trickle of sand slithered down from the base of the formicarium, pooling pink like a blush against the floor.
Jounouchi blinked. “Hey— what’s that?”
Mokuba adjusted the base so it stopped spilling.
“Oops. Sorry. I just got this from class. I have to build an ant farm.” He paused, looking at them both. “I was hoping actually…” he began, slow but sure, “…that you’d be here today, Jounouchi. To help me and Niisama set it up?”
Jounouchi blinked. “Huh?”
Seto, his baritone smooth and even: “This is for your ecology unit? Inoue-san’s class?”
“Yeah,” Mokuba said, watching Jounouchi. “It’s due next week. I gotta get the farm going, and then I’ll go with the class to the ant nursery tomorrow. And then I write a report.”
Mokuba could feel the balance of the moment—like the thinnest limb of a scale tipping between them, delicate and undecided. He waited, not sure who would move first, who would speak into it.
Seto did. “I was just finishing a presentation for the Audit Committee. I’ll be down in a few minutes.” He turned to Jounouchi— just slightly, just enough. “…Do you mind?”
Mokuba caught the look that passed between them. Jounouchi’s face tightened— not defensive, but Mokuba was having difficulty deciphering it all. He and his brother seemed always at odds, always circling some unspoken collision— but then why suffer each other’s company like this, again and again? Why keep playing at this game and its stalemates?
Jounouchi shrugged, eyes not quite meeting Seto’s. “Yeah,” he said. “No problem.” And then— he turned to Mokuba, the pretence of joy shining now, but Mokuba could tell: this performance wasn’t for him . Not entirely. The brightness Jounouchi conjured was something self-directed, a warmth he lit to keep the chill off his own skin. Still, it touched Mokuba, too.
“You’re in good hands,” Jounouchi grinned, slinging an arm around his shoulders with practiced ease. “I know all about ants.” Jounouchi steered him toward a small, sunlit parlour off the games room. He took them through the mansion like he’d always known the way, as if he’d laid the stones himself. Mokuba followed without resistance. It was like being Theseus, and Jounouchi— his Ariadne —unspooling thread behind him. Only the thread wasn’t golden; it was memory.
It was a relief to be guided like this. The mansion still felt cavernous to Mokuba, even now. When he and Seto had first arrived from the orphanage, it had been worse: all stories and staff and strange corridors. The hallways felt conspiratorial then, like the house was alive and twisting them inward. At its centre, Gozaburo— the minotaur.
Jounouchi had started showing up in April: Mokuba had come home from school one day to find them in the kitchen— Seto and Jounouchi— two feet apart, a single half-eaten slice of strawberry cake between them, one fork. Since then, Jounouchi had mapped himself into the house: in the games room, where he spent the most time, trash-talking through several rounds of defeat in the games he played with his brother. Seto wasn’t demeaning, only concentrating. And once— only once— Mokuba had seen something strange. Seto, mid-countdown in an FPS, eyes glued to the screen. Jounouchi, grinning, had poked his side. Seto had flushed, startled and died onscreen in a flash of digital gunfire and Jounouchi had howled with laughter. And then Seto had turned and smiled. Just… smiled.
Outside the games room, Jounouchi could often be found ravenous in the kitchen. Sometimes, in Seto’s room. Mokuba had seen him there once, perched on Seto’s desk, legs swinging idly while Seto worked beside him, mute and companionable.
They reached the sun parlour. Light like liquid pooled over the marble floor, the bay window curved wide as an open palm. Mokuba shrugged off his bag, sat down beside Jounouchi in the window nook, and retrieved a small toolkit and a packet of attachments from his bag.
He glanced up. “So… have you done a project like this before?”
Jounouchi leaned back, squinting into the sunlight.
“Nah. Not really. But my dad and I used to go to these crummy cottages near Mount Fuji in the summer when I was a kid. Place was crawling with ants. You couldn’t leave shit on the counter— they’d swarm it. Had to keep everything in the fridge.” He chuckled. “They were under my bed once. Scared the crap outta me. But, I dunno, I got used to them. There wasn’t anyone else around, so I’d kinda play with them. Rescue them, sometimes, if they got stuck. Take them outside in the daytime if I could. Ants are weird. But kinda neat.”
Jounouchi’s phone buzzed. Jounouchi frowned at the screen, then swiped to answer. His face shifted instantly—smile wide, casual, like a stage light had clicked on.
“Hey buddy.”
Honda’s face appeared in the frame, close and slightly jittery, all movement and eyebrows. “ Holy shit , your nose! Did he—?”
Jounouchi talked over him, loud and cheerful. “I’m just hanging out with Mokuba.”
Honda blinked. “Wait, what? You’re where ? You're back at—”
Jounouchi reached for the toolkit and cracked it open and started fiddling with the miniature screwdriver, knuckles flexing as he turned the bits in their plastic sheath. His hands were large— it seemed absurd for them to be concerned with the toiling required to tighten pin-sized screws—and Mokuba watched the mismatched delicacy of it for a moment, fixated. Jounouchi’s bruised nose sat crooked on his face like a forgotten wound in the middle of all that motion. “Yeah, yeah, we’re building an ant farm. You ever do one of these?”
But Honda didn’t follow the detour. His voice sharpened, dropped a register. “I thought you said you were done going over there. You said—what was it— ‘every time I walk in I walk out worse’? That was two weeks ago, Jou. What happened?”
Jounouchi’s grin thinned for half a second.
“Come on,” he said brightly, as if Honda had never spoken. “You know how bad I was at science. You ever do one of these things? Little tunnels, sand packets, whole deal?”
Honda hesitated. His eyes flicked on the screen like he was trying to see something past the camera— into the room, maybe, or into Jounouchi.
“You good?” he asked, quieter now.
“ Anyway, ” Jounouchi said, dragging out the word. “Did you know ants can lift like fifty times their weight? That’s gotta be you, right? Head like a pebble, shoulders like a dump truck.”
Honda laughed— short, uncertain. “You realize how dumb that sounds, right?”
Mokuba watched them from his corner of the window seat, heart ticking a little faster. There was something under all that: a conversation that had taken a wrong turn and wasn’t being allowed to turn back.
Honda shifted again. “Hold up. I saw this insane ant video on YouTube last week. They were in this case thing like you guys are building, it was showing how they use it to hunt. Lemme find it. I’ll send it to you.”
Jounouchi grinned again, eyes bright and unconvincing. “Perfect. See? Useful and handsome. You’re really doing it all, Honda.”
“Anyway,” Honda said, “I don’t wanna see your ugly mug anymore. Lemme say bye to Mokuba.”
Jounouchi flipped the phone toward him.
Mokuba saw himself in the screen— startlingly small, pale within his black nest of hair, eyes wide and unreadable. He relished this moment, to see himself as others saw him: dark and grey eyed save his illumination in the gold of the bay window. He smiled, and that’s when all the sunlight felt warm. His smile: it was when he looked most like his brother. He liked his face like this, even though Seto almost never smiled.
“Hi,” he said.
Honda beamed. “Keep this asshole outta trouble for me, okay, kid?”
“Will do,” Mokuba replied.
“Hey! Rude!” Jounouchi laughed, but Honda had already hung up.
Silence slipped back into the room.
Mokuba’s eyes drifted to the bruise again. His stomach twisted, tight and sour. Honda’s words echoed— “Did he do that? Every time I walk in I walk out worse?” —and Mokuba felt the unease sharpen behind his ribs. He thought about Seto: always withdrawing, always folding himself away into the unreachable centre of things, some hidden room deep in the maze where no one could touch him. He loved him so much. Was he lashing out from there now?
Would anyone even know, if he was?
The thought turned hot and ugly in Mokuba’s chest. He couldn’t stop himself.
“…Your nose,” he blurted. “Did Niisama do that?”
Jounouchi didn’t answer at first. He was still looking at the assembly instructions, holding a tiny screw between his fingers. But his body went still.
Then his smile drained. He turned toward Mokuba slowly, horrified.
“No,” he said. Firm. Too fast. And then again, softer: “No. Mokuba, listen to me. Your brother would never. He would never, ever, ever, ever . He would never hurt someone he cared about on purpose. He doesn’t have it in him.”
His voice cracked around the last word. He stared at the screwdriver in his hands like he didn’t recognize it.
Mokuba watched him, heart knocking painfully behind his ribs. Jounouchi looked… ashamed. But why?
He could only watch the way Jounouchi’s fingers flexed around the screwdriver, how the tension hummed down his arms and into his shoulders like a trapped current. He looked like he might say more— might explain, or joke, or crumble— but instead he just sat there, shame settling over him like ash.
And Mokuba— quietly, internally— understood: when the adults felt shame, it was best to give them an out.
You had to, before they spiralled into irrationality. Before the room turned into a cipher, and every word— past and present and unsaid— was recoded into something else. It was a thing he’d learned early, from Gozaburo.
There had been an evening— sharp in memory, etched like acid on glass. Seto had been thirteen (unlucky— unlucky! , a cursed age, as if misfortune itself needed a number, needed a vessel to lodge its cosmic density into: one boy, and every boy who might live long enough to suffer spring-become-summer-become-autumn-become-winter, again and again). Mokuba had been eight (lucky, they used to say. But what good was luck when time itself was an axe, cleaving brothers into before and after? Into apart? Into disjointed bodies when all he’d wanted was Seto— to be close ).
Gozaburo had summoned them to the study. Correction hour.
Seto’s work on Pledge was being reviewed—Trémaux’s algorithms, the paths through mazes, the metaphor of decision-making etched into labyrinths of logic. Gozaburo was droning on, correlating it—wrongly—to category theory.
And Seto, still raw with the unconquered disdain of his boyhood, interrupted him.
“It’s graph theory, actually... Father .”
He said it low. Cool. But there was a smirk clipped to the word like a tack, something nailed down and mocking— you are no better than me , it said. You, the man, are also a child.
And that was when it happened.
Gozaburo’s face— always wide, always theatrical in its moods— went a seething red. His voice snapped like a flag in a squall.
“Tone. Insolence! ”
His fist seized Seto’s jersey at the shoulder. The hem near the collar frayed instantly. His rage was thick and choking and helpless , and Mokuba saw it then—how shame didn’t shrink people. It made them monstrous.
But Seto had already vanished behind the closed face.
That was his real trick: not the retort, not the smirk. It was the disappearance. The snake coiling back into the safety of its own den. A creature content in provocation, not for the pleasure of winning— but for the permission to hide again.
A spoiled, violent little victory that wrought nothing but anger.
Mokuba had watched it happen once. Twice. A hundred times.
Mokuba looked for it— the out, the small mercy to give Jounouchi before they both crumbled under the white weight of despair. His hands moved gently across the ever-turning walls of the formicarium, as if some answer might be hidden in its translucent loops.
He glanced outside the bay window— maybe something there? — but all he saw was a black kitebird unravel itself into the gnarled hedge bushes, landing hard, feathers in disarray, before it locked eyes with him. Flat, dead, beady. The bird held his gaze for a moment in the warm light, then vaulted skyward, vanishing into the gold-stained air.
Mokuba swept his eyes back inside. But he already knew: nothing in the house would help them. Nothing in its rooms or rafters or corridors would keep Jounouchi from leaving, or help Seto stay, or save anyone from being lost in its labyrinthine depths.
Maybe he’ll go after all , Mokuba thought. Maybe I’ll fail before I can even try to help.
But then—
Jounouchi’s phone buzzed again.
A text notification slid across the screen. Honda.
Mokuba seized on it. Thread— thread! Escape hatch, distraction, lifeline. “Oh,” he said quickly, “Honda texted you.”
Jounouchi, who had been staring off into the ceiling with an expression like quiet drowning, blinked and jolted back to the room. “Oh—yeah. He said he’d send us something to help with the build.”
He tapped the message open.
Honda: happy ant time you weirdos lol
And below that, a YouTube link.
The thumbnail was unpromising: something dark, insectile. Jounouchi tilted the phone. “What the hell—COCKROACH GIVES BIRTH WHILE BEING DEVOURED BY FIRE ANTS?”
He recoiled, thumb hovering over the X. “I’m not watching this. No way.”
Mokuba reached out—fast, almost pleading. “No, wait. It’s okay. I actually think it might be… interesting.”
Jounouchi gave him a face like he’d just suggested watching live surgery over ice cream. “You sure?”
Mokuba nodded.
“…Alright, kid,” Jounouchi muttered. “You’re weirder than I thought.” He pressed play.
A red warning flashed across the screen: Some viewers may find this depiction of insect predation disturbing.
Then another: This video is for educational purposes only. No pleasure is taken in the suffering of animals.
And then: it begins. A bloated roach is delivered down into an ecstasy of ants. She flails and then her awkward, hard body tips itself into a crucible of ants, and they swarm her at once, biting biting biting biting . Her little legs like tiny thin toy sticks winding slow in the air and then she CRACKS open and unspools— a frothy butter colour, and she pours from herself something that resembled cotton, or perhaps spun sugar— infinite, downy. It was strange that something quite so soft burst endlessly from a creature that seemed so disgusting that its whole being had to be tightly encased.
Her slick, chitinous bottom continues yawning open and the yolky cloud born from her ruptured body finally makes sense: an egg sac. The last desperate act of an animal who wanted to be free. She stills, ants dancing upon her.
Others in the colony welcome the egg sac the only way they know how: incessant probing, terrible midwivery. Hundreds of small roach nymphs hatch into pinching ant jaws, painful welcoming compulsions.
What grief.
Jounouchi made a noise of pure revulsion. “What the fuck , Honda?”
Mokuba watched the ants. “I don’t know,” he said. “But… I don’t think it’s all bad.”
Jounouchi looked at him, incredulous.
Mokuba shrugged, eyes still on the screen. “It’s a threat in their territory, right? What are they supposed to do? I think they’re just… being ants. I read they’re really territorial.”
Jounouchi was quiet for a moment. He stared down at the video, which had shifted into a slow pan of the egg sac now consumed, reduced to tatters under the colony’s devotion.
He made a face, then thumbed the phone off. “Yeah. I guess.”
The light in the room had changed. The gold of the evening had started to deepen, pulling red into its folds. It rouged the white of the window seat, darkened the corners of the sun parlour. Night was preparing itself, telegraphing its intent to take hold.
Jounouchi exhaled, rubbing a hand down his face. Then he glanced at the window, where the evening had begun to tip toward dusk.
“Light’s giving out,” he said, stretching his neck to the side, cracking something quietly. “Let’s get a move on and build this thing.”
He pulled the formicarium closer, squinting at the box’s printed diagram. “Alright, we got tunnels, chambers, hydration layer— hey, did yours come with the labyrinth inserts?”
Mokuba nodded, reaching into the attachments packet and pulling out a stack of interlocking plastic panels—clear, modular, etched with tight, geometric channels. Each piece looked like part of a puzzle.
“I think it’s two models,” Mokuba said. “One’s for vertical colonies. The other one’s like… horizontal. But they both go together. You build a labyrinth across the base layer and then thread the vertical columns on top.”
Jounouchi let out a low whistle. “Damn. These ants are gonna be living it up.”
He turned the instructions sideways, frowned, and began to work. He hummed as he did— something tuneless but steady, low and rough in his throat. Every now and then he worried his bottom lip between his teeth, eyes narrowed in concentration. His hands were careful now, slower than they were with the screwdriver earlier. He fitted the first two maze panels together with a soft click and traced the next set with his thumb.
And for a while— just a little while— he was still.
That was the surprising thing, Mokuba thought. How still he could become. Jounouchi was always moving, talking, bluffing, laughing—always slightly in escape mode, like his body didn’t trust peace enough to linger there. But when he focused—really focused— the frenzy let go of him. And what remained was quiet. Gentle. Almost... at rest .
It was nice to see him like this.
Mokuba wondered if Seto had seen him like this, too. If that was part of what kept him here, orbiting in doomed, clumsy loops— this , this unlikely stillness inside the chaos. A secret thing.
Jounouchi reached for another piece, connecting it with a faint snap. The formicarium’s bottom layer began to take shape—corridors spiraling outward from a central node like the arms of a living circuit.
His phone buzzed against the cushion.
He didn’t notice.
Mokuba, sitting adjacent to him, did. He caught the glow from the corner of his eye—Honda’s name lit up the screen in quick succession.
honda: your dad is a douche
honda: you can crash at mine if you need a break
honda: unless you’re too used to the high life at kaibas lol
honda: hope he’s giving you a break
honda: love you man. call me when you got time to talk
The screen dimmed again. Jounouchi hadn’t looked up once.
Mokuba turned back to the labyrinth. He was trying to snap one of the angled chambers into place, but the plastic edge wouldn’t slot properly— it kept popping back out like a defiant tooth. He frowned, tried again, then sighed.
“Hey, uh... this part’s weird,” he muttered. “It doesn’t match the diagram.”
Jounouchi leaned over to look. “Shit. You’re right. Instructions don’t say anything about this piece. It’s probably supposed to bridge the upper tunnel.”
“I think Niisama would know,” Mokuba said. “He said he’d be down soon.”
Jounouchi went quiet. His hands lingered on the half-built structure. Then, gently, “Yeah. He said he was working on that presentation or whatever…” He trailed off, but his expression didn’t change— soft and quiet, like he was holding the end of a thread and didn’t want to pull it taut. “…He might be a while.”
Mokuba nodded.
Jounouchi smiled, not quite looking at him. “Let’s see what we can finish until then.”
They worked in near-silence after that.
The instructions had begun to make sense, or at least they no longer resisted them. Mokuba watched as Jounouchi’s big hands fumbled then adapted, the maze pieces clicking into place under his touch. Together they fitted the hydration towers into their sockets, upright like sentinels at the corners of the labyrinth. Mokuba unscrewed the pink clay sand and portioned it out into each segment. It sifted down in soft piles, catching the red-gold dusk light and tinting it stranger— rosy dunes of some alien and unknown world.
They didn’t speak much. It wasn’t unbearable, just the kind of quiet that settles when the work itself becomes the language. Eventually, they reached the stray piece again— the angular join that still wouldn’t seat properly. Jounouchi tried it from three different angles, then gave a long, shallow sigh and sat back on his hands.
Mokuba glanced at him. “I can go get Niisama, if you want. He could help us figure out the last bit.”
But Jounouchi shook his head, slow. “Nah,” he said. “I think I’ve done all the work I can on this today.”
Mokuba’s chest pinched. The night felt like it had stepped a little closer to the glass.
Shit. Shit. He’s gonna leave.
Mokuba looked at the half-glimmering construct on the sill, its tunnels and chambers now faintly reflecting the darker blue of early night.
“Okay,” he said, keeping his voice even. “Well... I’ll finish the last piece. And— why don’t you come back tomorrow?”
Jounouchi raised an eyebrow.
“I’ll have the ants by then. We can put the colony inside.”
There was a beat. Then Jounouchi gave him a crooked smile.
“Sure,” he said. “I’d like that.”
Mokuba nodded, throat thick. “Okay,” he said. “Let me walk you out.”
They left the formicarium in the bay window, the pink sands glowing faintly in the cool darkening air. The light had left the room in layers, and with it, whatever stillness had briefly held Jounouchi’s body had started to slip away too. He walked a little faster now, like something had resumed in him.
They took the long way back— through the hush of corridors that twisted gently around them, familiar now in outline if not in meaning. Mokuba led, but only barely. Jounouchi walked just behind him, sometimes shoulder to shoulder, like the thread between them hadn’t run out yet.
When they reached the front door, Mokuba paused.
Outside: night. Real night now. Ink on every edge. The air was cooler, heavier. Mokuba looked at Jounouchi standing there with his bruised face in the doorway, and the dark just beyond.
“Bye, Jounouchi,” Mokuba said.
Jounouchi smiled again. “Bye, kid.”
And then he stepped into the dark.
Mokuba watched him go, down the long gravel path that stretched past the hedges and out of sight. He stood in the doorway for a long time. He didn’t call out. He didn’t move.
But he was sure— so sure— that even in the black of night, even with Jounouchi already distant, he could still see it: a little red sun, like an afterimage of the evening, leagues and leagues away in the heart of the sky. The final smear of gold refusing to disappear completely.
It was gone, almost. But not yet.
Jounouchi walked onward, down the drive, into the dark.
On his long, long journey elsewhere.
After some time, the cicadas began to sing.
Their sound rose like steam off the earth— thin, tremulous, orchestral in the way only summer insects could be. It filled the long night air in waves, curling through the garden hedges, threading into the gravel of the drive where Jounouchi had long since disappeared.
Mokuba remained at the threshold a while longer, holding onto the shape of the dark like it might offer him some kind of answer. But the red sun was gone now. Even the echo of it had been swallowed.
He turned back toward the house.
No sign of Seto. The foyer was hushed, the marble floors dim in the softened lamplight, the high ceiling still echoing with the fading footsteps of absence.
Which meant— of course— it was time to go to him.
Sometimes Seto needed coaxing out: to remember his promises, that he had promised to help and that he had wanted to.
He returned to the sun parlour first. The ant farm sat quiet in the bay window, its pale interior now shadowed purple-blue. Mokuba gathered the remaining parts of the puzzle maze— stray connectors, the bent plastic edge that wouldn’t quite fit, the upper tier they hadn’t managed to finish.
Then he ascended the stairs.
The Kaiba manor always sounded a little different at night. As though it was sleeping, but lightly. The marble staircase was long, flanked by half-lit portraits and the cold hush of upper hall corridors. Mokuba’s room was near the top, and next to it: Seto’s.
He paused at the door. Then knocked.
Silence for a moment. Then: “Come in.”
Mokuba turned the handle and entered quietly.
The room was dim, lit only by the blue cast of a screen. Seto sat at his desk, long-fingered hands loose over the keyboard, eyes flicking once to the open doorway and then back to the monitor. His expression didn’t change.
But Mokuba knew him well enough to know that wasn’t disinterest. It was attentiveness in disguise. He always had to look away to be able to fully listen .
Mokuba stepped forward a little, the maze pieces bundled in his arms like an offering.
“You said you’d help me with the ant farm,” he said, softly.
Seto didn’t respond right away. He reached up and rubbed hard at what seemed to be a knot of tension in his neck— strain, from overwork. A long breath passed between them.
Then, quiet: “Yes. I did.”
He closed the laptop without looking at it and turned in his chair, finally facing Mokuba directly.
“What’s left?” he asked.
Mokuba held up the bent piece. “There’s one join that won’t work. I think it’s misaligned. But Jounouchi thought maybe it’s supposed to bridge the top tunnel— he wasn’t sure.”
Seto took the piece carefully, turning it over between his fingers. And then his hands launched into movement— assembling, inspecting. Gently prying the maze open to test the tension on the corner joint.
Mokuba watched him. His brother looked tired. The shadows beneath his eyes were not new. He wore them like a suit.
“…Jounouchi was here a while,” Seto said after a moment, not quite a question.
Mokuba nodded. “He helped a lot. He just left. I think he went home—” something in Seto’s eyes sparked bright— “or to Honda’s house. I’m not sure.” The look in Seto’s eyes quieted then, and he kept working. The maze clicked into place with a soft pressure— like something giving way at last, though it had never really wanted to. He tested the joint again. It held.
“There,” he murmured. “That should stabilize the tunnel.”
He didn’t look up.
Mokuba watched him for a long moment, and then Seto was the one to speak again.
“He didn’t say goodbye to me.”
Mokuba blinked.
“No,” he said softly. “He didn’t.”
Silence again. But it wasn’t thick. It wasn’t angry. Just… sad.
Seto’s eyes flicked to the half-complete colony. His thumb traced the seam where the top casing would fit.
“Did he say he’d come back tomorrow?”
“Yeah,” Mokuba said. “He said he would.”
Seto didn’t move.
Mokuba watched him— really watched him. The way he always carried the weight of things in his jawline first. The way his shoulders only relaxed when no one was looking.
“You know,” Mokuba said, “he built most of this. Even the hard parts. He was really careful.”
Seto made a faint sound in his throat. It might’ve been a hum. It might’ve been something else.
The formicarium sat complete between them now—maze glowing faintly in the blue light, sand softly packed, chambers sealed. A world in miniature. Sealed, but not yet occupied.
Seto brushed a fleck of static from the lid before handing it back to Mokuba.
Mokuba stared plainly at him.
“Will you help us tomorrow? To put the ants inside?”
Seto didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”
Mokuba nodded, shoulders easing. “Okay.”
He picked up the structure carefully, cradling it in both arms.
“Goodnight, Niisama,” he said, turning toward the door. A beat. “I love you.”
Seto’s voice was quiet, but steady. “I love you too.”
Mokuba turned back just long enough to offer a small smile—quick and bright, like a match struck in the dark. Then he disappeared down the hall, the soft weight of the formicarium held close to his chest.
In his room, he set the maze gently on his desk.
He brushed his teeth and changed into pyjamas. He turned off the overhead light and switched on the small speaker on his nightstand, scrolling to the track he liked best: "Rain on Car Roof (2hr Loop).”
The sound began soft and steady. A wash of it, like a shelter being built out of water.
He climbed into bed and tugged the blanket up high beneath his chin. The sound of rain was enough to keep out the night noises— the creaks in the walls, the low groans of pipe and beam and distance. The strange hush of a house too large to feel lived in.
When he and Seto had first come from the orphanage, he’d been sure the house was full of monsters. Under the bed. In the walls. In the long cold spaces behind the portraits. And for weeks— months, maybe— he had fallen asleep only in the safety of Seto’s room, curled small on the floor beside the bed, lulled only by the sound of his brother breathing.
He didn’t really believe in monsters anymore.
Not really.
But today, when Jounouchi had sat beside him in the bay window, there’d been that moment— when he’d said all the ants had once crawled out from under his bed at the cottage near Mt. Fuji. That they’d made a home there. That he’d played with them.
Mokuba rolled onto his side and closed his eyes.
He imagined it now: a quiet crawl of them, cresting the bedposts like shadows. Maybe they would share their secrets with him, their antennae brushing his skin, whispering in the language of contact and touch and dirt.
Maybe they would tell him everything. Why the world seemed so bent on folding into itself. He tried to listen.
But sleep arrived first, and then he was riddled with dreams. Termites had battened to the walls, endless mawing of the manor fibre cement and sheetrock and hardy board until everything was chewed to dust, and then time— cruel pursuer— reduced their home further: dust and then dirt and then overtaken again in the emerald capture of nature reborn. No corner of the Kaiba kingdom remained unclaimed. In the crumbled molar of their home there were no relics— only verdant grass that grew lush on all it found: the all-sterling kitchen, the games room, the sitting salon, Gozaburo’s large and long abandoned study with the stench of Nicaraguan Padrón cigars leached into the carpet still all these years later, the small stone juliette terrace the connected Seto’s and Mokuba’s rooms— the narrowest of balustrades, three whole storeys up, and the times Mokuba crossed it to reach Seto’s quarters it felt as if he was walking a tightrope, one precarious step before the other— but what did the Kaiba household and all its perilous journeys matter now? It had rotted back to its wildness, the teeming fury it contained finally legible, beautiful, green : thick sodded and soft grass that bent easy to the breeze, and beneath it, in the ground: a gleaming fanfare of beetles, of millipedes, of worms and their dirt-hungry ouroboros.
He woke to the usual.
Programmed rain sounds still rinsed through the corners of his room. Blue dawn reached in weakly from behind the drawn curtains, dappled on the desk where the formicarium waited, intact and gleaming in its quiet.
Seto was gone. Of course. Off to KaibaCorp before the sun had even asserted itself. Mokuba blinked the last filaments of dream from his eyes and rose slowly.
Downstairs, Isono waited like always— standing by the front door, tablet in hand, hair perfectly parted.
The day unfolded as routine: predictable, bracketed, classroomed.
He sat at the far right of his first period class— French— by the window, where he could chart the sun’s trajectory as it began its slow climb through the pane. They were conjugating être : to be. Je suis, tu es, il est… over and over, the mantra that underpinned all other claims. The verb that unlocked the rest of the language: suis, es, est, sommes, êtes, sont. To be! His body took flight again second period— Phys Ed. Soccer. Cleats gouged soft patches into the grass. He breezed along the flanks, keeping to the angles, calculating the space between his feet and the net, between other players and the unfolding play. When the ball slipped toward him on a clean arc, everything lined up— vector, weight, wind— and he kicked . Goal . Third period: math. They were working on obtuse angles— how desperate they were to open, yet how they could never quite form a line. Fourth period: history. The long disintegration of diplomacy before the Second World War. Mukden, Manchuria, Panay. Doomed detente. The high cold calculus of decisions. He looked up from the textbook and into the cloudless sky. The sun was halfway now, bearing down sharp through the upper glass. Fifth period was free. Their teacher was out—family emergency.
The room bloomed with chatter. Everyone was excited about sixth period. The field trip. The ant nursery.
They all piled into the bus, chatter pinwheeling in every direction. Someone had brought sour gummies and was bartering them in exchange for TikTok follows. Mokuba took the window seat near the back and leaned his cheek against the glass, watching the city blur into outskirts— first skyscrapers, then low-rises, then tall grass and green signage. The hum of the tires blended pleasant like a buzz in his skull.
The Ant Nursery sat on the edge of a nature preserve— low-slung and beige, a bit like a bunker, with wildflowers blooming stubbornly in the gravel that passed for a parking lot. They were ushered inside by a tired-looking man in a crisp vest with a name badge that read Yasuda (Docent, Level III). He led them into a wide, dim gallery where the temperature dipped and the walls were glass.
It was colder here. The walls were lined with oversized formicaria—some backlit, some tunneled through with dirt. But at the center of the room was the main exhibit.
A giant containment module. Lit from beneath, alive with motion.
They pressed up to it, fogging the glass.
“There are several colony entrances,” Yasuda said, pointing. “Here, here, and here.” He tapped lightly on the display with a long, capped stylus. “These lead to a series of subterranean chambers—every chamber has a different function.”
He pointed again: “A , the main entry tunnels. B , food storage. C , the egg room. D — there she is— is the queen’s chamber. E , excavation— see the workers there? They’re digging a new passage. F , the nursery. And G, the replete gallery. Those are the ants with the swollen abdomens— living food banks.”
A ripple of grossed-out awe passed through the class.
“All species are different,” Yasuda said, guiding them forward. “But most have these same architectural instincts. We’ll be giving you Camponotus — that’s carpenter ants. Slow-growing species, big-bodied, common in most regions. They’re smart. Good for learning.”
“Will they bite?” someone asked.
“Only if provoked,” he said with a faint smile. “They’re monogyne— one queen per colony. Fully claustral, which means she’ll seal herself in to raise the first generation alone. No foraging needed. They also require diapause — a kind of ant hibernation. So if your colony survives, you’ll have to simulate winter.”
A few kids made half-hearted groans at the mention of care maintenance.
They were led to a long table, where clear plastic containers awaited: each one the size of a small flashlight, cottoned and misted for humidity, already set with a single queen ant and a few workers pressed close around her.
The classroom guide gestured. “Go ahead. Take one each.”
Mokuba stepped forward and picked his carefully.
Inside, the queen ant was larger than he expected— sleek, shining, almost resinous. Her thorax gleamed dark amber under the lighting, her legs twitching in tiny, decisive arcs. Around her, the workers clung like satellites—three of them, huddled close in protection or worship. One tugged gently at the cotton, trying to dig, or perhaps just trying to do something. They didn’t seem to like stillness.
Mokuba stared for a long time.
“How do we get them into the formicarium?” someone asked.
Yasuda nodded toward a shelf lined with sugar traps— small drops of dyed syrup in gelatin domes. “You bait them. Place the bait near the mouth of the formicarium. Keep the container angled toward the entrance. They'll follow the scent. Some colonies are quicker than others. But they all find their way.”
The class murmured with interest.
Mokuba held the little container up to the light.
He wondered what she saw— the queen ant— enthroned in damp plastic, her few loyal attendants ever-busy. No chamber yet. No tunnels. But she moved like she remembered it all already. Like her body still held the blueprint.
He cradled the container in both hands.
He hoped Seto would be home when he returned. He hoped Jounouchi would come back, like he said he would. He hoped they could place the colony together— watch the ants make their way in, map the tunnels with sugar-bent instinct, find the centre. Make something of the strange, clear house waiting for them.
Isono picked him up, the black town car idling just past the visitor lot of the nursery. Mokuba slid into the backseat with the container held upright between his palms. The queen shifted faintly inside, her attendants clustered around her like the nucleus of a thought.
The mansion greeted him in its usual hush: doors tall as monuments, floors scrubbed pale, cool air curling through the grand foyer like breath through a sleeping lung. The weight of the container in his hands felt strange npw— as though he were bringing something back from pilgrimage.
He stepped lightly through the hall. That was when he heard it.
Chatter, coming from the sun parlour off the games room. He slowed instinctively, holding the container just a little closer to his chest. The voices were clear but not loud. He moved closer, ghosting down the hall like a shadow too polite to intrude. The murmur sharpened as he reached the archway.
He stopped just within earshot.
Seto and Jounouchi sat in the bay window. The afternoon light was gold again, bending over them in wide, silent waves. Between them: a slice of strawberry cake. One fork.
Mokuba stayed where he was, quiet as breath, just watching.
Jounouchi was mid-sentence.
“—ended up staying at Honda’s. Figured I’d give my old man some space. He always gets sad after he loses his temper, y’know? Like real sad. But it’s best not to be around when he’s in the thick of it, otherwise…” He shrugged, gentle, not bitter. “It just sets him off again. But he’ll come around.”
Seto was quiet.
Then: “You were welcome to stay here.” His voice didn’t rise. It didn’t falter. Just: simple, unornamented fact. “You shouldn’t have to go back there if…”
Jounouchi exhaled, smiling a little. “Yeah, yeah. I know. I know.”
His tone wasn’t dismissive.
Seto looked away. Then back. “Then why did you leave?”
There was a pause. Jounouchi rubbed the back of his neck. “I didn’t want to bother you,” he said. “You were busy.”
Seto was quiet again. Then he sighed. “You’re not a bother, Jounouchi.”
Mokuba didn’t move. He felt… proud. Almost shy with it. He looked at the slice of strawberry cake between them.
The queen ant shifted in her container, her legs brushing the cotton with slow insistence. Mokuba imagined her in a kingdom of tunnels now, vast and warm, full of workers bustling joyfully from one chamber to the next. He would build her world. He would guide her through each fake winter, each simulated cold. And for all the ants’ work and bluster—for every tunnel carved, every egg tended, every fierce, unthinking devotion— they could be rewarded, as all labors of love should be: with strawberry cake.
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Mokuba Kaiba
Biology 8A – Inoue-sensei
July 24, 2025
Camponotus Monogyne Ants: Family Systems and Communication
In studying Camponotus ants, also known as carpenter ants, I learned that they live in highly structured colonies with a central figure— the queen. In monogyne colonies, there is only one queen, and she is the literal and symbolic heart of the system. She is surrounded constantly by her workers, who feed, clean, and protect her. These colonies can be large and complex, but their organization always orbits around a single matriarch, and the entire colony’s cohesion depends on her survival.
What struck me most during my research was how these ants communicate. Lacking verbal language or advanced cognition, they rely entirely on chemical signals called pheromones. These pheromones transmit everything from alarm to location, instruction, even social status. Ants touch one another with their antennae to exchange information and orient themselves— an entire sensory language of contact and movement. It made me think about the ways people communicate without words too: through gesture, habit, proximity. What is said without being said.
Camponotus colonies display a remarkable division of labor. Worker ants are sterile females who take on different roles based on age or colony needs: some care for the brood, some forage, some guard the nest. This behavior is not enforced but emerges from a shared instinct and the chemical influence of the queen. There is no rebellion, no independence as we would define it. The colony is not only a home—it is the body, and each ant is a living cell inside it.
During our field trip to the ant nursery, I received a small test-tube colony of Camponotus ants with a single queen and a few attendant workers. Watching them, I was surprised at how quickly they adapted to the container, clustering close to the queen without hesitation, touching her with their antennae and responding to her movements. It reminded me of family systems in human households— how younger members take cues from those they trust, even if they can’t fully explain why. A healthy family, like a healthy colony, runs on mutual recognition and attention, not just instinct.
One challenge I learned about Camponotus is their need for diapause— a rest period, or "fake winter"— to survive long-term. Without it, they fail to grow properly. I thought this was interesting because it proves that even insects need structured rest, not just work. Perhaps this, too, is part of communication: the ability to listen not only to each other, but to cycles. To know when to stop, and when to begin again.
In conclusion, Camponotus monogyne ants are more than tiny builders. They are social creatures defined by closeness, attunement, and constant nonverbal dialogue. Their systems might seem alien at first, but the more I watched them, the more familiar they felt— like family. Maybe love is just a series of tunnels, carved slowly, patiently, toward someone else.