Chapter Song: "On My Honor" by Cindy Dasch, or maybe the author is unknown. I read something that said Cindy Dasch is merely the person who wrote it down, and it has been sung by Girl Scouts for far longer. I'm claiming fair use on two lines of lyrics. Actually, who knows what the original lyrics are. They're a little different everywhere you look.

Rare Grammar Fact: If you're writing a monologue that needs to be broken into paragraphs, open new paragraphs with a quotation mark but leave off the closing quotation mark until the speaker is finished speaking.

Chapter 34: On My Honor

Once back in the suite, Seto strode to the nearest bed and collapsed there, not bothering to disrobe. Joan took off his boots while Mokuba climbed onto the bed, peering over him in concern. "Big bro, are you all right?"

"Yeah, just haven't done that in a while," Seto admitted.

Joan joined them on the bed. "How did you do that anyway?"

"We experimented with neural interface technology a while back," Mokuba explained. "It was awesome at first, but then Seto's headaches kept getting worse, so we cut the program. We kept some of the wetware in place just in case we had another run-in with some creepy mage or something."

"Hm." Joan snuggled up to Seto, her head on his chest and arm around his waist. She wanted to know more but remembered Laura's warning about that Shadow Realm stuff and decided not to ask.

Mokuba continued the story without prompting, recounting Seto's obsession with defeating an ancient pharaoh in a duel and the havoc that ensued from tampering with magical artifacts. Seto grunted in occasional corrections to Mokuba's narrative but otherwise let him explain everything about their adventures in the past. However, instead of talking about the Shadow Realm and Millennium Items like Joan expected, Mokuba focused on an artifact called the Quantum Cube. Apparently, the Kaiba brothers had been through far more encounters with magic than Mokuba could cover in one evening. Somewhere in the middle of the story, Seto drifted off to sleep.

Not quite tired yet, Mokuba and Joan got up quietly and headed to the living room couch. Mokuba finished his tale of the Quantum Cube with an arm around her and spent a few moments in poignant silence before saying, "It's weird, but this hotel kinda feels like home now."

"That's not so weird. Home is wherever the people you love are. Even a university lecture hall can be home if someone you love is there," Joan replied.

"I guess you're right. It's not just that, though. I feel like I've lived more in the past week than I have in the past three years."

"We can find more meaning in a campfire's glow than we ever learned in a year or so."

"Huh?"

"It's from an old Girl Scout song."

"Sing it," Mokuba requested.

Joan pulled up some lyrics to "On My Honor" on her phone and sang it for Mokuba. By the end of the song, he was shaking to hold in tears.

"What is it?" Joan asked softly.

"I never had that kind of stuff in my childhood. It's been Seto and me against the world for as long as I can remember."

Joan held Mokuba tight. She'd been expecting this from him at some point but somehow still didn't know what to say. By comparison, her childhood had been a fairy tale. Sure she'd never actually owned a pony, but she'd ridden horses a few times at camp and there were so many other things she'd gotten to experience with various groups of friends. Mokuba, on the other hand, had probably maintained professional distance from people after his run-ins with creeps wielding magical artifacts. Joan had never had cause to fear others until adulthood when she'd overheard her coworkers talking behind her back. Perhaps she should start there. "You're not the only ones against the world anymore."

"How so?"

She stroked his hair as she spoke, as if he were the one reliving her traumatic memory. "I found out about polyamory when I was nineteen, and at twenty, I had a summer internship with a big publishing house. I'd recently met Michael and a few other guys through a dating site, and some of the guys I worked with were really hot, so I was getting around.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

"It wasn't the guys I was actually dating that I had to worry about, though. It was the guys I didn't date . . . and the girls. The girls were even worse. The guys just peed in my coffee mug and put tapioca pudding in my cycling shoes, but I heard the girls talking poison. I told my boss, but she didn't care. So I started drinking less coffee and taking my mug with me on the few bathroom breaks I took, because I always had to check over everything when I got back to my chair, especially the chair itself, for sharp objects.

"My office sweethearts chickened out and stopped dating me, but I still had Michael through it all. I lasted through the end of the summer, but it wasn't easy. I had no friends in the office, nobody until the very last day when I had a one-time fling with my boss's boss."

"Was he taking advantage of you?" Mokuba asked.

"No no," Joan grinned. "I told him upfront that I was interested. He was the hottest man in the building and on top of that, he was also a Michael."

"You really have a thing for M names, don't you?"

Joan giggled. "Not really. It's more of a coincidence."

Mokuba thought for a moment. "The other workers, though. Do you want to pursue legal action against them?"

"If only I could go back in time to collect evidence, but I have no fingerprints, no recordings, nothing. Even if I'd thought to record that stuff about the poison I overheard, they'd already stolen my phone and pretended to be me and told Michael that I was breaking up with him. We sorted that out quickly once I told Michael they stole my phone, but it still sucked."

"I can only imagine," Mokuba said.

"Yeah, but it brought us closer in the end. Michael said it helped him get in touch with his feelings, you know, like how Seto reacted after that shit with Pegasus. My point though is that the next time you and Seto go head-to-head against the world and you need backup, you've got me, and I've got Michael and Marc, so in a sense you have them too. It's a whole network, actually."

"You mean like how Nathaniel is suddenly our nephew?"

"Yep."

"That's pretty cool."

"My friends are your friends. Your friends are my friends," Joan sang to the tune of "This Land is Your Land."

Joan and Mokuba both burst into giggles.

"This is amazing. I've never met someone who just sings whenever like we're in a musical or something."

"Then you need to meet my friends from university. André writes songs, so there's music in their house every day. They live on Wendy Street, so they call their place Neverland."

"Aw man! I hope Seto doesn't start calling them the nerd herd or something when he finds out. I mean, he seems like he's gotten over a lot of his inhibitions where you're concerned, but I wouldn't push my luck with other people."

"All right. Just you for now then. Friday night we stay at Neverland and then Saturday we'll go to the Blooming Planet Festival."

"OK," Mokuba grinned, "if you'll come to the charity ball Thursday night."

"Charity ball?" Joan asked.

"It's kind-of an after party for the Summit. Most people fly home Friday, so they scheduled the ball on Thursday."

"Sounds good, as long as I get to dance with both of you."

"Don't you mean all three of us? I set Marc and Laura up with tickets already."

Joan squealed with excitement and pawed at Mokuba's KC belt. "Get inside me now!"

"Whoa, can we at least get to a bed first?"

Joan sprang up and towed Mokuba into the vacant bedroom. She stripped off her bottoms and grabbed a condom from her purse but didn't bother with her top. Mokuba dropped his jeans, and Joan stroked him to stiffness while he pulled his shirt off. She pushed him backwards onto the bed, slipped the condom on, and mounted him. Only then did she bother removing her shirt and bra. Her breasts bounced freely as she rode him into the night.