the god who feeds on his father and eats his mother.
._._.
When Yuugi awoke next – immediately feeling sick of waking up somewhere he had not fallen asleep, and realizing that such a change of location happened in only a few hours at most – he was standing in his bedroom closet. Well, he wasn’t – the other him was.
Yuugi pushed lightly on the barrier that separated him from the other inhabitant of his body, the one who was currently controlling Yuugi’s fingers fastening the buttons of a clean shirt.
“Ah,” said the other Yuugi, using Yuugi’s lips to whisper softly in a voice that was distinctly not Yuugi’s, but close enough that anyone else would miss the difference. “You’re awake.”
Other me? What are we doing here? Yuugi was worried. Won’t this be the first place they’ll look?
Yuugi’s hands were finishing with the last button of one of his bland, white, spring uniform shirts. Dimly, Yuugi felt pain and tighter pressure from his shoulder wound – had the other Yuugi sewn the wound closed once more?
“It’s... how do you say, several hours until the first rays of dawn,” said the other Yuugi quietly, slipping on a clean jacket, “and our absence from the prison shall not be noticed until the last of night’s darkness is gone.”
Holding cell, Yuugi corrected numbly, prison’s later. But you didn’t answer my question.
Yuugi walked out of the closet, closing the door behind him softly. “We will have to travel far to reach the edge of the board,” he said, “so I’m gathering supplies where I know our opponents will look anyway.”
Oh, I get it, replied Yuugi, noticing how much of a disarray the other was causing, force them to underestimate your strength by playing weak at first – they’ll think we’ll keep making stupid and obvious moves, so when we do something out of the ordinary, they won’t see it coming?
“Precisely.” The other Yuugi dusted himself off, straightening the sleeves of the jacket, and Yuugi felt a pang of worry that they were wasting what little time they had. “Now, aibou, what else should we take with us?”
If Yuugi had a face to control, he would have closed his eyes and pursed his lips in thought. We’ll need a backpack, or a suitcase, or a bag to carry things in. Some food, and definitely some money. You’ve already got the first aid kit—Yuugi could barely make out the details of it on his bed, but there weren’t many things in their house with thick medical crosses on them—so probably other bathroom stuff, you know, toothbrush and things like that. Anything after that depends on where we’re going.
Both Yuugis – the one controlling the body, and the one hidden within the mind – yawned: although Yuugi’s mental presence had fallen unconscious several times in the past few days, the other Yuugi had almost always stepped in to take control of his/their body. Excluding however long the surgery had taken the previous afternoon to remove the bullet and sew up his wound, Yuugi had been physically awake for two full days now, and dawn would start the third. Yuugi would have felt surprised that he hadn’t passed out by now, if he could have felt anything other than fatigue.
“Will they notice a missing backpack?”
Yeah, especially if my books are all left behind, but they’d expect me to take it.
“Mmm. Is there something like it that won’t be missed?”
The other Yuugi made another sweep through Yuugi’s room, tossing things onto the bed next to the first aid kit as he found them: a change of clothes, the money Yuugi had stashed underneath the unopened box of condoms in his dresser, the belt his mother had altered with the thick leather pouch on the side for his Duel Monsters cards (she’d claimed that keeping them in his pants pockets was unseemly given how tight the material would become, and after that any time he’d even tried putting them in his pocket he would flush with mortification at what she’d implied).
While he did this, Yuugi thought over the matter of luggage. Garbage bags wouldn’t be missed, but they were conspicuous and unwieldy; nobody had a briefcase other than Yuugi, but that’d be just as noticeable as his backpack, and couldn’t carry much besides.
In the attic are all Grandpa’s old archeology and travel things, Yuugi remembered suddenly. No one ever goes up there, and he’s got a couple of heavy-duty rucksacks and stuff up there. So long as we don’t stir up the dust too bad, no one’ll notice anything missing.
While the other Yuugi put on the belt holding Yuugi’s deck of Duel Monsters, Yuugi tried focusing through the filmy haze of disconnect barring him from the outside world, like a cataract, and tried counting the amount of yen on the bed. It was a pitiful and pathetic amount, since Yuugi had never really saved his money. After years of it being stolen from him by bullies, he tried spending what he had as soon as he got it on things people wouldn’t try to steal. Yuugi had never expected that he’d need it for anything like this.
This won’t be enough, Yuugi said quietly, and he could feel the other, outer Yuugi nod softly in response.
“First let’s get the bags,” he murmured, “then we can worry about it.”
It seemed like a much longer span of time, but it really had been only a few minutes since Yuugi ‘awoke’ before Yuugi was silently pulling the cord to lower the attic staircase. The bottom rung of the stairs gave a small thud as it touched the thin carpet, but it was no louder than the sound of Yuugi’s heart. There was no dust on the stairs as Yuugi ascended: part of his mother’s weekly cleaning schedule was to dust the staircase, clear the cobwebs from around the attic light, and make sure said light was working properly. Just because we don’t use it, she would say, isn’t an excuse for neglect. The click of the ceiling light brought Yuugi out of his thoughts.
Oh, this will wake up Mama for sure; most of the attic is right above—
“Don’t worry, aibou,” said the other Yuugi calmly, “we are under the protection of darkness. While the sun is dead, our movements are cloaked.”
That’s a weird expression, Yuugi thought numbly, but pressed no further.
If the other Yuugi heard the thought, he didn’t acknowledge it. He padded lightly across the attic with all the caution and quiet of a house cat, which is to say ‘without’ and ‘with natural,’ respectively.
They should be in the old Choking Hazards Inc. boxes, near the coffin, Yuugi thought, taking in their surroundings as best he could with his dimmed senses. The single bulb did surprisingly well in the way of illuminating the attic, casting long shadows across the dark wood floors. There were no moth-consumed couches, or antique cabinets; Yuugi’s family was a tad too eclectic for that. Instead, their attic was mostly filled with overstocked games and promotional displays no one had the heart to throw away. From his mother’s former work as an Olympic tennis player (six years and two bronze medals) there were some exercise machines and her old sports gear in the far corner. There were boxes filled with Yuugi’s old baby clothes, and some things left from his father and other deceased relatives, but the most exciting things were the souvenirs and replicas from father and grandfather’s travels around the world, though mainly to the Middle East and Africa.
The coffin – which was really a replica sarcophagus with a fake mummy inside – stood in one corner, and all around the attic there were boxes full of counterfeit vases, replica jewelry and art, scale models of historical sites, and some weapons too. It was because of the trunk full of supposedly battle-ready weaponry that Yuugi was not meant to explore the attic on his own, since he was (in his mother’s eyes) so exceedingly clumsy, but at this point his mother’s scorn was the least of Yuugi’s concerns.
The other Yuugi had found the box Yuugi had mentioned and was examining the largest bag. It was not covered in dust, but in Yuugi’s limited visibility he would call it a dusty brown, faded from intense exposure to the desert sun, but otherwise showed no signs of extensive damage.
“This will do,” said the other Yuugi, swinging the empty bag over Yuugi’s uninjured shoulder. “Where are the weapons?”
Huh? Ah? What? Yuugi stuttered, his thoughts racing. Oh, he wasn’t planning on killing more people, was he? Yuugi should probably just call for the psyche-ward now and—
“Aibou,” said the other Yuugi, calmly, quietly, and full of resolve, “there may be a point where I have to fight someone to protect you, or we may find ourself in the wilderness and have to hunt for food. I do not want us at a disadvantage if we can avoid it. Please.”
Yuugi, had he a face and lungs to control, would have sighed. Was there a point in fighting? He just wanted to go back to sleep, and maybe when he woke up this all would have been just a terribly vivid nightmare. In the trunk, behind the Amazing Arachnid Lad, to our right.
The other Yuugi quickly made a very disjointed path to the chest, pausing at boxes and displays all around the attic, making Yuugi himself dizzy. The other Yuugi carefully sifted through the chest of wrapped weapons, bypassing the longer metal swords and spears and axes (it was a very long chest). Underneath the thickly wrapped blade of a battleaxe laid a comparatively small box, and with great care Yuugi pulled this from the chest.
Even though there was plenty of light falling into the now-open box, Yuugi could not see what was inside. What did you find? Yuugi had to ask.
“A dagger,” said Yuugi, “made of bone, and rock. There’s also a letter to you. Can you not see it?”
Everything’s fuzzed over, like fog, Yuugi replied. It’s all dull.
“Strange,” said Yuugi the other, “for even when I am in the back, I can see perfectly through your eyes.”
What does the letter say?
“Happy birthday, Yuugi,” said the other with all the inflection of a bored receptionist, “this is a hunting knife. The blade is solid obsidian, so be careful! Keep it safe, and when I come back I’ll teach you how to use it. Love, Dad.” The other Yuugi folded the note and put it back in the box.
Can I... can I read it? Please? Yuugi asked, pushing tentatively against the cataract barrier between his mind and the rest of the world.
“Of course,” replied the other Yuugi as control bled between them, but we must be quick.
It took maybe ten seconds for the barriers to fall away, but once Yuugi’s senses returned at full strength he nearly collapsed in shock.
Aibou! Are you all right?! The other Yuugi called, and Yuugi’s overly sensitized nerves told his disoriented brain that there were a thousand hands resting on his shoulders, each made of fire or gold or sand or a thousand other materials. Yuugi shrugged them off.
“I’m fine,” he whispered, closing his eyes against the bright light reflecting off of the dark wood, “I’m fine. I’ve been... ah, awake back there for what, half an hour? My mind got used to everything being... it’s just... intense, up here, again.”
Slowly Yuugi opened his eyes, rolling his shoulders in an attempt to relax, and he carefully reopened the note. The words were exactly as the other Yuugi had recited them, but it was so much more real to see the sloppy writing on the paper itself.
It had been when Yuugi was very young – maybe only a year or two before he first started school – when his father was formally accepted into one of those volunteer charity groups based in Africa. Greenwood or Greenwich or something like that. His father, not wanting to leave Yuugi and his mother alone to worry about standard employment and babysitters, had persuaded Yuugi’s mother to move in with Yuugi’s long-widowed paternal grandfather while he was overseas. After a few rather hectic years of bouncing back and forth from Japan to his station in Chad, Yuugi’s father had retired out of Greenspace and resumed his more pedestrian duty to his family.
He and Yuugi’s mother had, once he returned home for more than a few months, acted as though they had just fallen in love again, and at one point Grandfather asked how many grandchildren he would need to write into his will.
It was maybe only a year after he’d retired that his former corps had begged and pleaded for him to come back for one last assignment, a stint of six months. He’d reluctantly accepted. Rather than give it to him in person months later, Yuugi’s father had sent along Yuugi’s birthday gift – this knife – in advance. When Yuugi had opened the box, his mother had a fit, since hunting knives were certainly not appropriate birthday gifts for elementary school boys. She promptly she locked it in the attic. When his father came back, she’d said, he could wait until Yuugi was in high school before giving it back to him.
And then—
Aibou?
Yuugi blinked rapidly. “Other me?”
You’ve been sitting there for a while now. Is something wrong?
“No, I’m sorry, I was just... remembering something. We can take this, no one will notice it missing.” Yuugi shoved the boxed knife into the rucksack before carefully rearranging the weapons in the trunk to cover up the box-shaped void. “I think that’s everything worthwhile up here,” Yuugi whispered, slipping the rucksack back on over his right shoulder. “Do you want control back?”
No. It hurt you to take over again, didn’t it? So long as there is no danger, I will remain back here.
“It wasn’t painful,” Yuugi muttered, clicking off the light and descending the pull-down stairs, “just... intense.”
Either way, we still have time before sunrise.
After that, Yuugi worked quickly and in near silence. Emptying out his school bag, Yuugi realized that the other Yuugi had planned for them to take both bags – his backpack, and grandfather’s rucksack – and ditch the backpack somewhere off their trail so as to misdirect the police. Into the “decoy,” Yuugi put in things he didn’t really need – too many extra outfits, and all the non-perishable food from the pantry he could stuff into the bag. Into the rucksack, Yuugi crammed in the first aid kit, a single change of clothes that, due to their size, took up little room, and what little cash he’d found in his room. Downstairs, he raided both his mother’s purse and grandfather’s wallet for loose cash, though it was to this that he felt the worst about taking.
“Is there any way we can go without robbing them?” Yuugi whispered, staring distastefully at his grandfather’s billfold.
It would make the journey easier, replied the voice reassuringly. Besides, with you not at home, they would spend less money anyway, so... if it sets you at ease, think of this as an advance.
Yuugi shook his head, dropping the empty wallet back to the kitchen counter. “Way to make a kid feel appreciated, other me,” he muttered, stuffing money into the rucksack.
Aibou...
Yuugi dropped both the rucksack and his backpack on the couch, sighing. “Is there anything else?” he asked, his irritation clear even in the quiet words.
The other Yuugi made a suggestion. Yuugi recoiled.
“I am not robbing the Game Shop!” he replied, an angry hiss of a whisper, and his fists clenched in the material of the couch.
Not for money, replied the voice. We have enough of that. I mean—
“You want to steal games? Are you insane?” Yuugi clenched his eyes shut, wishing that he could at least have had a rational split personality. “I’m already on the run for triple homicide, I don’t need theft too.” Within the confines of his mind, Yuugi felt as though the voice was bristling in impatience and annoyance. Yuugi snapped. “The shop has a security alarm, and I don’t know the password anyway. Even if I did, it would give the police a very specific time window for us to have been there. What the hell kind of idea was that, stealing from the shop?”
Sorry, the voice replied, sounding not at all repentant, I just wanted some cards.
Yuugi swore, and did not thunder up the stairs to his bedroom. He had more self-control than that. Crossing through the room to his dresser, Yuugi yanked out the bottom drawer, revealing a stash of boxes of playing cards, bags of dice, of poker chips, and marbles, and jacks. “I have enough cards to run a small casino,” Yuugi shot back, knowing deep down that lashing out at his only companion (even if it was a voice in his head) wasn’t wise, but he couldn’t help succumbing to his overflowing feelings of anger and ineptitude and frustration and—
Ah. I must have missed this earlier.
Yuugi began shoving decks of cards into his bag. Although his room was usually a mess, he had always kept his cards and dice organized: if he wanted to play a game of six-dice knock-out, he didn’t want to spend half an hour searching and have only two d-4s to show for it. “Is ten decks enough, or should I go with twenty?”
Aibou! Can you delay your anger until we have gotten out of Domino? The voice was very forcibly calm in Yuugi’s mind, but even as he ‘watched,’ Yuugi felt the voice losing its undertone of anger. I only wanted the cards because they would be a quick way to earn money, once the supply we have runs out.
Yuugi released a very long sigh, and carefully he rearranged the decks in his drawer to cover up the absence. “Is this everything?” Yuugi asked, bottling up his anger and his fatigue and pushing them out of his voice.
That’s everything, replied the voice. This took far less time than I was expecting, to be honest.
“Me too,” Yuugi replied, and with some difficulty shouldered both bags onto his one good arm awkwardly, the rucksack flat against his back and the backpack atop it. He quietly made his way back downstairs. “So where are we going to go?” He asked softly, leaning against the wall to tighten his belt a notch without dropping his bags.
We will need to dispose of the decoy some place where it would seem likely that we might try to hide and be attacked, the voice said softly, and the memory of the place came to Yuugi’s mind without his conscious summoning. Yuugi nodded softly.
“Yeah, that seems like the place,” he said, cutting through the front room to the door when he noticed something that he hadn’t before. He wasn’t sure if his lack of notice meant it had been recently placed or if it had been there all along. On the side table, next to the front door, was a thick stack of cards with a folded yellow half-sheet of paper sitting on top like a tent.
“I thought you said they wouldn’t notice us?” Yuugi whispered harshly, looking around for any other signs that one of his guardians might be lurking in the room.
They should not have awoken, or noticed us even had they been awake, replied the voice. Yuugi examined the note, but in the dim lighting of the room he could only make out that the writing was tiny and cramped, and besides his own name he couldn’t read a word of it. He shoved the note into his pocket before picking up the deck. They were not playing cards, Yuugi realized suddenly.
“This is Grandpa’s deck,” Yuugi said softly, stunned when he recognized the design on the back of the cards, flicking through the top few from the stack. This particular deck was one of his grandfather’s prized possessions – why would he purposefully leave it out with a note for Yuugi? It implied that he wanted Yuugi to take the deck, and thus meant grandfather expected Yuugi to break out of prison – er, a holding cell, – a serious implication of guilt in the crime.
Aibou, we have to go, urged the voice. Yuugi nodded, and flipping open the pouch on his belt he slid out his own deck and replaced it with grandfather’s. Yuugi slid his personal deck into his coat pocket.
The door pushed into the house under Yuugi’s touch and a chill night breeze, and with a final apology Yuugi crossed the threshold, trying to ignore the burn in his heart that screamed that he could never cross this path again.
._._.
I feel blood. Should I be saying ‘oww?’
“Eh, sorry aibou.”
I thought you said you knew how to use this thing?
“It’s much more difficult than it looks! Just one more...”
They had dropped the decoy bag out near J’z bar, the hideout of the Rintama High gang that had all been “mysteriously hospitalized” after they had attempted to shanghai Jounouchi into joining their group. The other Yuugi, who claimed a greater proficiency at knife usage, had taken over to slash the decoy bag to look as though it had been torn from a fleeing individual. Enough of the gang was out of the hospital to be potential witnesses, but thankfully none had been in that particular alleyway. The other Yuugi explained that, in the police’s investigation of the area and the gang to see who had attacked Yuugi and where he had gone, they would waste enough time to give them a good head start to reach the ‘edge of the board.’
At the moment, the other Yuugi was trying very carefully to modify Yuugi’s rather insane hairstyle so that they wouldn’t be so instantly recognizable. The bleached blond fringe was causing a bit of difficulty – Yuugi had only recently touched up the roots, so the other Yuugi was forced to shear close to the scalp in order to cut away all the yellow, and unfortunately did not have nearly as much knife skill as he hoped.
You nicked me again. You’re doing this on purpose.
“This is very difficult to do without a mirror,” grumbled the other Yuugi, “and your forehead curves weird.”
It curves because it’s a forehead, other me, Yuugi replied irritably. Have you got it all yet?
“I think so,” the other Yuugi sighed, collecting the thick blond locks from their resting place on the letter from Yuugi’s father.
They, in one body, were sitting on the lid of a garbage bin behind a beauty parlor a few blocks away from the Domino city bus station. The other Yuugi put the obsidian knife back into the box, before flipping open the other side of the dumpster and carefully dumping Yuugi’s hair. The yellow easily blended with the greens and pinks of this establishment’s more eclectic patrons.
That took so long to get perfect, Yuugi mourned pathetically, self-consciously knowing that of all that he was giving up and had lost, his blond hair was the least important. He was going to blame it on fatigue.
“The rest is going too,” the other Yuugi muttered, retrieving the knife once more. The sky was finally lightening from black to blue, signifying the impending sunrise.
No! It’d be way too suspicious if a kid looking like he’s twelve tried buying a bus ticket with a scratched and bloody shaved head.
The other Yuugi paused, knife in hand. “Actually, about that,” he said, lowering the knife, “I have a better idea.”
What, better than buying a bus ticket and taking a cab? Yuugi asked as the other Yuugi wrapped a bandage around their bleeding scalp, like a bandanna of a kung fu fighter. The longer Yuugi spent awake in the back, the thinner the cataract barrier became, so for a moment he thought he was in control when he felt his mouth turn up in a grin.
“How probable is it that we’ll find at least one gambler at the bus station?”
._._.
The plan was simple: convince a guy that Yuugi was running away from his well-to-do parents who would easily find him if he actually bought a bus ticket himself, so Yuugi wanted to win one off of someone else in a round of cards.
“But why,” asked their mark as he picked up his hand for five-stud poker, “don’t you just straight-out buy a ticket off of someone else?”
Yuugi – the real Yuugi – smiled. “Well, where’s the fun of that?” he asked, discarding two from his hand.
The flippant reply, of course, was something the other Yuugi would say to disarm his opponent; Yuugi said it because it was true.
Both Yuugi and the mark wound up with flushes, but Yuugi’s high card was a jack to the other man’s eight. The man handed over his bus ticket with a smile.
“I don’t know anything about you, kid,” he’d said, refusing to take the money Yuugi offered (the stakes had been that if Yuugi won, he would have to pay for the bus ticket; if Yuugi lost, he would have simply given the man money. Yuugi refused to let someone else get stranded), “or what you’re running from, but I hope you get where you’re going.”
So now Yuugi was sitting in an aisle seat halfway back on an under-filled cross-country bus, his rucksack in the seat to his right, and his grandfather’s deck in his hands.
The bus was headed through Gammon to Jenga, but they decided it would be best to jump ship somewhere between the two cities to make their way by foot to the seaport town of Titan. It was risky to go to Titan, a well-known city in the worst ways, famous for its ridiculously high crime and abduction rates, easily a hub for the import and export of drugs and human trafficking. If the Yakuza had a hometown, it was Titan, and Yuugi and his other self agreed that it was, ironically, the safest place to hide out before trying to catch a ship to the mainland.
Getting out of the country by boat was probably what the authorities would expect Yuugi to do, but if they even found the man Yuugi had gotten the bus ticket from and he confessed what happened, the police would probably assume Yuugi would wait until he actually gotten to Jenga before trying to make his way out of the country. Even then, they would have a hard time finding the one witness knowing Yuugi’s destination, and the man probably wouldn’t be able to identify Yuugi straight off anyway. Yuugi had spent a rather painful half hour working his hair out of its customary spikes, chopped off about half of its length, leaving the dark hair to hang long and heavy in his face. After that, he’d gone to the beauty parlor and, already being mostly unrecognizable, gotten his hair dyed back to that dark red that had formerly only resided in his grown-out tips. Shorter, his hair bloomed out into many more spikes that snaked up like fire.
Then – even if they got traced to Titan – it would be almost impossible for the authorities to find him. Titan was criminally corrupt, but also a huge city. Compared to Titan, Domino was a small-town police state. Even a specific kid convicted of triple homicide would be difficult to catch in Titan.
You’re worried, said the other Yuugi, and Yuugi nodded numbly. Although still on the brink of passing out from exhaustion, Yuugi couldn’t yet seem to fall asleep.
Not about us, Yuugi thought back, aware of the other six-or-seven passengers within earshot around him, but my friends... they’ll be so angry with me. I mean, Yuugi flipped up another card: kuriboh (grandfather’s deck was so weird!) Jounouchi-kun’s... dead, I’m the only suspect, and I broke out of police custody. I don’t even know if they know anything. And mom, and grandpa... they probably all think I did it... His hands tightened around the cards. They probably all hate me.
Aibou... whispered the other Yuugi, his voice filled with sorrow and comfort like mother’s had been back when— your friends know you well enough to realize that you could never betray Jounouchi-kun the way Hikari betrayed her sister.
Yuugi shook his head numbly, raking a hand through his shorter hair. Maybe, he thought back, gazing out to the passing scenery. Outside the window, the bus drove past small plots of farmland and a very small rural town, the high noon sun turning the landscape brilliant in hue. His eyes ached from the brightness and essentially three days without physical rest, so Yuugi finally nestled down in his seat. His wound still hurt, but it felt better than it probably should (having never been shot before, or known anyone who had been shot, Yuugi had no frame of reference).
Closing his eyes, Yuugi pulled over and hugged his rucksack over his Puzzle, burrowing his face in the aged leather that smelled both of far off lands and overpoweringly of home, and he silently wracked with the final sobs for the life he was forced to leave behind before he finally – for the first time since any of this had started – succumbed to natural sleep.
._._.
