He is cloaked in gods and cobras coil on his forehead.
._._.
The office was the exact same as it had been the week before, all chrome and steel and glass – everything sharp and cold like so many knives. The Titan of the Marsh was parked at her desk, fiddling with a small, white, cardboard puzzle piece, and a second passed before she snapped it into place. She only glanced up to see who had entered, though when her eyes had settled on Yuugi she had looked confused for a moment before she shook her head and returned her full attention to her puzzle, snapping another piece in place.
“I wouldn’t have recognized you, had you not been wearing the God Pyramid, little Saikoro-kun,” she said softly, and with a start Yuugi realized his vision was once more (or was it still?) framed by stiff, bleached-blond fringe. Yuugi was sick of being surprised by things like this, so he wasn’t.
I lost my body because I forsook my identity, and it grew back, because...
“My name isn’t Saikoro,” he said softly. “It’s Yuugi.” He crossed to the desk, his eyes falling to the puzzle spread out on its surface. It, when finished, would be one foot by two, so probably only a hundred or so pieces, not too difficult, but it was the print on the puzzle that was strange. Most of the pieces were plain white, maybe to represent snow, while the rest seemed to just be scribbles and lines in multiple colors, overlapping like maybe a basket full of stray yarn, or like someone had drawn on a blank sheet of paper with crayons. It was, Yuugi suddenly noticed, like the puzzle Honda had made Yuugi write for Ribbon. There were a couple connected pieces near Yuugi on the desk – red and green markings connected in a word.
...why would someone talk about turtles in a confession puzzle? Yuugi wondered.
The Titan snapped another blank piece to the puzzle’s edging frame.
“Yuugi-kun? Not all that much of a difference between that and Saikoro, is there?”
“No,” agreed Yuugi, “but it’s still who I am.”
She snapped another piece in place. “Yuugi-kun, tell me why I had to send my ogres into the Mountains in order to get you and the item I requested?” she asked, still not looking at him. Yuugi sighed.
“I... I couldn’t get it.”
A blue piece slipped from her puckered fingers, and she stared at him in a surprise that bordered on shock.
“You... you lost? How could you lose?!” Her stare darted away from his face, but still the surprise did not leave. “The Millennium Puzzle grants the power to judge evil and dispense justice, and control over the Dark Games. How could you lose to Kaiba?!”
With an angered growl Yuugi slammed his palms against the glass surface of her desk, the loose pieces jumping in the force of the blow.
“How,” Yuugi asked with a quiet hiss of anger, “do you know about the Puzzle?”
It was – as far as Yuugi had been able to find – an undocumented artifact. After Grandfather’s friends had found the Puzzle and mysteriously died, it had somehow made its way to Grandfather, while all the others who had come into contact with the item died.
... but when Yuugi had searched, no book mentioned the Puzzle, no newspaper reported any tomb-related deaths in the time frame Grandfather had said it happened, and any time Yuugi had tried taking the box and Puzzle pieces to an Egyptian scholar at the Domino Museum, they always asked how long it had taken Yuugi’s father to make such a beautiful piece of work with such a well-written but obviously fake and completely silly ‘curse.’
How, then, could the Titan of the Marsh know of its power?
She glared at Yuugi, her thin, wrinkled, but muscular arms splayed over the puzzle on her desk.
“Were you never taught that, not only is it impolite to threaten the handicapped, but also that answering a question with a question is downright rude?”
Yuugi slid his hands from the table, and she too relaxed slightly, her hands returning to work on the puzzle on her desk.
“I didn’t lose,” Yuugi said with a slump, “because Kaiba-kun wouldn’t play me.”
“... that seems even less likely than you losing,” she said tartly. “Kaiba Seto never turns down a real challenge.”
“Well, he didn’t exactly turn me down,” Yuugi wasn’t sure how it had happened, but he felt like he was getting interrogated by one of his teachers, or his mother. (Little game, it was a metaphor!) “See, a few months ago, Kaiba-kun tried taking something precious from me, too, and I won it back. He wants to have a rematch in Domino, and doesn’t want to play me yet, though he didn’t tell me why.”
The Titan actually laughed, a rich sound that Yuugi was not expecting. “Now that I will believe,” she said, snapping a chunk of ten connected pieces against the upper-left corner of the board. It was the inattentive way she was able to piece it together that told Yuugi how many times she had assembled someone’s confession of love to her, and how many times she had crumbled it in frustration. It was the puzzle of a spurning lover, or of a love lost to the grave. But still, Yuugi’s eyes were drawn to that word, turtle. Why?
“Um, Madam Titan?” it was the only lead he had right now, he had to follow it, and to hope— “how do you know about the Millennium Puzzle? I’ve been looking for anyone who knew what it was, ever since it was given to me... but no one’s even heard of it.”
The Titan exhaled a breath through flaring nostrils, and her aged fingers set down a mostly black piece. “I... had hoped I would not live to see the Puzzle completed,” she whispered, her eyes staring at the jumble of cardboard on her glass desk, “but it has been forty years, it had to happen some time...” She did not turn her gaze up to Yuugi; more pieces of her puzzle clicked into place.
“A long time ago, I was... married,” she said, stepping into a story warily, “still am, I guess, but it’s probably been dissolved. My husband was a bit reckless, an adventurer, and he’d heard rumors of the fabulous treasures of the Nameless Pharaoh. He got into gambling, and eventually ‘earned’ enough to go find the tomb. I didn’t think he would, but... he found it.”
She sighed. “You see, Yuugi-kun – my husband found the Puzzle of God, and it destroyed our lives.”
._._.
For the first time, Yuugi found himself invited to sit in the chair across the desk. He slid into the silver armchair, and was surprised by its comfort.
Yuugi remembered that Grandfather had said all the people involved in finding the Puzzle, or who had owned it afterward, eventually went mad but always died shortly after. Yuugi had asked him why neither of them had died – after all, Grandfather had owned the Puzzle for years and years before he gave it to Yuugi, and neither of them had died – but Grandfather always looked so sad before he changed the subject that Yuugi stopped asking.
It was jarring to realize that somehow the mythic finder of the Puzzle had left a widow behind; it made it all feel more real, somehow.
“It destroyed your lives? How?”
The Titan’s smile was weary, and in her wheelchair, surrounded by all this glass and metal she looked so lonely – the only color in the room was the half-finished puzzle on her desk, and it too was sad in its overwhelming blankness. A piece in red snapped into place – it looked like the confession had been written in a shape of some kind.
“It started, oh, it must have been fifty years ago – it was during the War, but before the bombings.
“He had joined the Emperor’s service, and we got married before he left home. He wasn’t gone very long – maybe only a year – before he had been dishonorably discharged for ‘reckless gambling.’ ” She smiled, and had she been younger and less sad she might have laughed. “They say it as if he was challenging the younger boys to Russian roulette, but it was always respectable games – cards, and dice, and marbles. He didn’t cheat, he’d never needed to – he was a sure winner in just about any game, and he was ruthless. No, they expelled him because he was just too good, all his commanding officers were losing all their money to a street kid from the Titan Swamp. He told me he’d even gambled on his discharge, too – he’d wanted the negative charge, wanted to convince his father that he was no longer fit to carry the family name. You see, his father—”
“Madam Titan? The Puzzle?”
A chunk of puzzle snapped into place.
“Oh, yes. Well, while he’d been in the service, he’d met this foreigner that had been impressed with his skill of gaming, and the two had gotten to be friends of sorts.”
“I thought foreigners weren’t allowed to join the military back then?”
The shape – it was a heart.
“Yes. The gentleman merely worked in the laundry, I believe – something menial. My husband told me that the man hailed from Egypt, the historic birthplace of games, and thus gambling itself. The foreigner mentioned the legend of the Nameless Pharaoh, a king who had gambled with the very Gods of Egypt for immeasurable power.”
“And he won? Against the gods?”
“... if one is to believe in both this part of the legend and in Egyptian mythology as a whole, then... no. He didn’t. The Gods, after all, play rigged games.”
“But... rigged games are the easiest to win,” Yuugi said, recalling the other Yuugi’s assurance in the holding cell, “once you know the trick.” The old woman smiled, but shook her head.
“The Pharaoh was a great king, and would not break the rules of the game. The Gods weighed his honesty and pure heart, and deemed him worthy of the power he sought, knowing it would not corrupt him. The story goes on that the Pharaoh was given the Just Seven, or the Millennium Items. Six of these he gave to his council, but the seventh and most powerful he kept for himself, for it was the Pyramid of God. The others of the seven were designed to find criminals and prove their guilt – only the seventh could dispense balanced judgment.”
Under her fingertips the confession puzzle had been nearly completed, but the writing was so intricate and distorted, Yuugi would not be able to read more than that initial ‘turtle’ if he tried focusing on it upside down; he was, though, much more entranced by this woman’s story about the mystery of his Puzzle than the mystery of hers.
“Well, my husband, his gambling pride swelled and completely caught up in the story, wanted to go to Egypt and challenge to Gods for ultimate power. After all, he was the King of Gamblers; so dusty Egyptian Gods should be easy to beat in whatever antiquated version of senet they might try.”
“But... the Pharaoh was given the items because he lost, right?” Yuugi asked, his hands coming up to hold his freezing Pyramid, “so what would they give someone who won?”
“That’s just it,” said the Titan, “people can’t win. If a person plays by the rules, they lose – but if they try to cheat the Gods, they would be punished. You see, the Pharaoh won because he was willing to lose – the ones who most often went after the power were too stubborn and too greedy to lose fairly.”
“So your husband... he went to Egypt?”
“Not right away, but yes – I had not yet discovered I was with child when he finally made the trip. He did not return until our son was five years old. I was nearly thirty, then – married for a decade, and spent less than half of that time actually living with my husband. I was, as you can imagine, very displeased with the way our lives were going.”
“You didn’t divorce him, did you? It’s not even common now, but back then—!”
“I wouldn’t have dared,” she said, almost scandalized. “Still wouldn’t... I actually cared about my status in society. So, he finally returned home, having spent all the money he got in the war and lost most of his belongings to thieves, and he tells me that he bested the Gods and has recovered the God Pyramid. The only problem, of course, was that it was no longer the God Pyramid – it was a Puzzle, having been shattered and unsolved for thousands of years.
“The Nameless Pharaoh had gambled his very soul for the power of the Just Seven, because crime and terrible woe had befallen his country; the more they relied upon the power of the God Pieces, the Just Seven, the Millennium Items, what-have-you, the stronger the forces that ravaged the country became. Eventually, the Pharaoh realized that, although it had not been taken immediately upon his defeat, the Pharaoh still had to sacrifice his soul as the price of his loss. The Pharaoh bound the evil to himself and cleaved his soul in half, hoping that once his body died, his soul would carry the evil to be judged, and would be condemned for annihilation.”
“Wait, why would he need to cut it in half?”
“I don’t know,” admitted the Titan with a shrug. “This is only what I’ve been able to piece together. Maybe he hoped at least part of him would be allowed the glory of the afterlife. But the bet was one soul: no matter what else the Pharaoh attached to it, even after binding all that darkness to his soul by using his most powerful and holy name, it was not a whole soul. The Gods, angered at the Pharaoh’s only moment of greed, did not judge his soul or condemn the darkness. Instead, they sealed those both inside the heart of the Pyramid of God, and shattered it. The Pharaoh’s advisers, having no body to mummify, built a tomb to house the shattered Pyramid, the standard traps being replaced with games of the King’s own devising. After all,” she said bitterly, “the Pharaoh was a gambler. Who better to inherit his legacy than another gambler?”
She rolled away from the desk in anger, moving to stare out of the large window instead, watching the sun glitter on the blue waters of the Sea of Japan.
“He continued gambling, of course, but he had changed in the desert. He cheated; he changed rules, played rigged games with strangers. He’d become a completely different person, and every night he spent hours trying to assemble the Puzzle. We hardly ever spoke, and our son received no attention from him – I’m not sure if my husband even knew, in those first months, that the boy even existed.
“After six, seven months without being able to assemble it – not even get three pieces to hold together – he tried forcing our son to do it with even less success. He tried training him to become a gambler, too, to cheat and swindle like his old man, but my son was the kindest and sweetest boy in all of Titan, and he wouldn’t even touch a game after that when he saw what had happened to his father.
“For two years this went on until the accident that... that...” Yuugi could see her aged shoulders shaking, even blocked as they were by the back of the wheelchair. Yuugi was not one who ignored those in pain – it was something he learned from his father, long before other people had begun to habitually ignore Yuugi. He walked softly to the woman, kneeling down by the tire of her chair.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly, sincerely, as tears were lost in the folds under her eyes, and between her cheeks and nose. “I didn’t mean to cause you pain. You don’t have to tell me—”
“No... no, I will. I just— I’ve just never told anyone this before. No one would believe that a silly little Puzzle would drive someone so crazy that they’d run a woman down in a street race in order to win.”
Yuugi did not physically recoil from the emotional wallop, but he very nearly started crying when she placed an aged hand over his while she continued speaking.
“Street racing wasn’t common much anywhere at the time, but Marshies – we’d moved after he came back from Egypt – are a lot starved for entertainment. I didn’t know that he’d taken that up too, but I will never forget how that day played out.
“Did you ever read the Odyssey?”
“... what?”
“The Odyssey. Homer. Greek epic about a guy on a boat? Or maybe it was in the Iliad...”
Although moderately well versed in mythology, the only things Yuugi could remember from either work were that there was a wooden horse, a corpse that was dragged around, and men hiding under sheep. He shook his head.
“Pity. In one of those two stories – it’ll come back to me when it doesn’t matter, of course – Odysseus of Ithaca was drafted to go fight the Trojans. Odysseus thought the whole thing was stupid, so to get out of going he acted like he had gone insane.”
“All right, but he went anyway, right?” She nodded, her tears having not ceased even in the detour.
“He had hooked up his oxen team and was sowing his fields with salt as though it were seed, even though everyone back then knew salt made the soil useless. Sure that he was faking it, soldiers placed Odysseus’ infant son in the path of the plow. Odysseus turned the oxen away, sparing the life of his son, even though he knew it meant that Odysseus himself would go to war and likely never see his son again.”
“But that’s what anyone would do. What does it have to do with— oh. ” Yuugi’s grip tightened on the wheel of her chair. “He didn’t!”
“At this point, he’d owned the unsolved Puzzle for at least three years – it may have been as many as eight. Even if it were not... what it is, having an unsolvable puzzle would have driven him a bit batty, but only... only the darkness lurking within that relic could have so blinded and corrupted him so. I’d known him longer than I have memory. That man was no longer my husband.
“It was the middle of the day, and our son was playing marbles with some local boys in the street. He had a leg cast at the time – he fell out of a tree a week or two before – but cars have never been particularly popular in the Marsh, let alone back then. So when these two cars come speeding around the corner, we were in shock that anyone even had cars, let alone driving at such speeds. The other boys could run, but mine... I was able to get out there, and push him to safety, but I was hit. He didn’t... he didn’t even see me. I was run down, the tires broke my spine, and he didn’t even stop the car...
“After... after I woke up in the hospital, I told my son to hide the Puzzle from his father – destroy it, sell it, anything – but before my physical therapy had even started, my sisters had chased them both out of town, telling them I’d died in the collision. I was so furious – I couldn’t follow them, find them, or even speak to them after that. I loved them both so much. It’s been forty years, and I’ve spent most of it stuck in this god-forsaken Tower as the Titan Who Can’t Actually Do Anything. I just wish...” she bowed her head, her lips quivering, “that I could see him smile for me, like when we were young...”
Silence stretched before them, a balm onto their frayed emotions, as they watched the sunlight glitter playfully on the water. A small sailboat floated by, lazy and peaceful; it probably carried trysting lovers, abandoning the world around them.
The Puzzle was heavy and silent against Yuugi’s chest, and the absence of that other presence left Yuugi feeling hollow and lost once more.
The old woman patted Yuugi’s hands before wiping her tears.
“Thank you for that,” she said, backing up and rolling her chair to the desk. She slowly snapped the final few pieces in place.
“Thank you for telling me... about my Puzzle,” he replied, “and the spirit within it, even though it is... not what I had hoped to hear.” Yuugi followed her to the desk, and he admired the completed artistic calligraphy of the heart-shaped confession. Her husband had obviously loved her very much, at least once, to make something so beautiful. The Titan turned to him and smiled.
“You remind me of my son, though he was much younger than you when I last... if he grew up to be like you, I would be happy.”
“I’m sure he did better.”
The woman glanced at the Puzzle, weariness weighing her down once more. “Spirit... so there really was a Pharaoh in there?”
“He... he couldn’t remember his past when I asked,” Yuugi said, feeling that after the story he’d just heard, he couldn’t just lie about the other Yuugi. His hands winced in the permanent chill that pervaded the Pyramid. “But when I saw Kaiba-kun last week, he’s been... locked away from me. It used to be that I could always feel him, in the back of my mind, his heart next to mine... but now it’s cold and empty in my own head, and I don’t know how to get him back.”
The woman’s hand gently touched Yuugi’s elbow. “What did Kaiba do?”
Yuugi recounted to the Titan how he and the other Yuugi had confronted Kaiba, and how Kaiba had insulted Yuugi, and how the other Yuugi and Kaiba had shouted about names, and Yuugi’s collapse while Kaiba raved. He went on to tell about the delirium the other had fallen into once they had switched forms, and how after that the other had simply been gone.
When Yuugi finished telling her about his dream of the figurines, she remained ponderously silent for what felt like several minutes, during which she rolled to various corners of the room in thought while Yuugi surreptitiously read the confession puzzle, though it took a bit to decode.
... no fucking way.
“Did you ever ask this ‘other you’ for a name, before you gave him the title?”
Yuugi’s brain and mouth had thankfully been disconnected, because otherwise he would have started spouting incoherent obscenities. “No. He said that he couldn’t remember it, and... that he couldn’t take another, but he didn’t know why.”
“And when other people addressed him, what did they say?”
“I’m not sure. I usually wasn’t awake. I think they called him Yuugi, too.”
Yuugi’s brain was making thirty thousand connections, none of them related to the topic at hand.
“While you were calling yourself ‘Saikoro,’ did you ever accept it as your own name?”
“Huh? ...no, I guess not.”
“Ah. It seems Kaiba has accidentally forced a name onto the Nameless Pharaoh.”
Continue your mind-fuck-meltdown later, Yuugi thought, the other you is more important!
“So what, do I just say, ‘oi, you, you have no name!’ or make Kaiba take it back or something?”
The old woman did not answer instantly. Yuugi wanted to scream and cry and bemoan the fact that his entire life had been a lie, but did none of these things. He waited. For a while.
“I don’t know,” she said, turning her gaze back to the Pyramid, more brown than gold with all the dried blood upon its surface, “all I learned I got out of books. For this sort of realm of illogical,” she offered with both hesitation and self-depreciating sarcasm, “you should probably ask the Gods of Egypt for help. Maybe buy a kitten. Beating Kaiba in a card game wouldn’t hurt, since as far as your Pharaoh is probably concerned playing games solves everything.”
A very, very tiny part of Yuugi could understand her anger at his Puzzle – it had, after all, essentially destroyed her life – but this sudden backlash when Yuugi needed help most made him furious. Although he had not had time to put on shoes, he had been wearing his belt to sleep, and with jerking movements he whipped out his deck of Duel Monsters.
The card was easy to find, and with a flick of the wrist that would have easily sunk an ace into a top hat, Yuugi sent the card flying into the Titan’s lap. Her eyes very nearly bugged out of her face.
“He’s alive and lives in Domino,” said Yuugi tersely, “and considering he owns a store called the Turtle Game Shop, I think I can say that he still loves you with all his heart. He’ll be overjoyed to know that you’re alive, and will probably spend the next forty years trying to make it up to you. Now how do I get my other self back?”
Mutou Kameyo stared at the Blue Eyes White Dragon, sobbing and laughing and trying not to do either, before she eventually rolled back to the desk and placed the card atop her puzzle. She then wheeled over to one of her glass, half-sized bookcases. Easily she hefted out a thick tome, placed it on her lap, and wheeled back to Yuugi.
Just Seven – An Accurate Account of the Most Ancient and Mysterious Relics to Have Ever Been Made, Lost, Distributed, Collected, Stolen, Vanished, Recovered, or Otherwise Acquired Through Means Less than Legal. Yuugi read the title a second time.
“... Seriously? There’s a book on this?”
Yuugi’s still living, previously presumed dead, biological grandmother laughed the laugh of the giddy. “Oh, Yuugi-kun, there are books for everything! With an attitude like that I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re doing terribly in school.”
Looking away with a flush, refusing to admit she was right about that at least, Yuugi slipped the rest of his grandfather’s deck into its holster on his belt and took the book from her outstretched hands. Another fragment of his dream returned, innocuous and weird after everything else.
“So, a book could tell me what would happen if I cut a starfish in half?” Yuugi asked, and she couldn’t stop laughing even as she retrieved the Blue Eyes from the desk.
“Or ask anyone who’s ever gone to an aquarium. You cut a starfish in half, and you get two angry halves of starfish. But eventually, after time, you wind up with two whole starfish, like a salamander growing a new tail. Worms do the same thing.”
Yuugi didn’t know why the dream figurine (it’d had Anzu’s voice, he realized, but it also did not) thought it was important – no matter. Yuugi had a book that would give him back his other self, the history of his other self, all the things the other Yuugi couldn’t remember, (a king who played games with the Gods? How freaking awesome was that?) and a previously assumed dead grandmother to boot.
But, before Yuugi could leave, the Titan called him back.
“He obviously wanted you to have this,” she said, handing him the Blue Eyes White Dragon, “goodness knows I don’t need it. You take care of yourself, Mutou Yuugi.”
As Yuugi took the card and slipped that back into his holster, she paused.
“... Wait a minute,” she said, her eyes narrowed in suspicion, “aren’t you the kid who’s on the run for killing those two pop stars? The Sasori twins?”
Yuugi froze where he stood, his mind racing. No ready explanations were coming to mind. “I... I can explain that.”
Yuugi did so by running.
._._.
Yuugi had taken the book and run the entire way back to the “Why Yes, We Do Wash Our Linens!” motel, the cold iron weight of the frozen Puzzle feeling heavier than ever before, pulling at him like a vacuum or like quicksand. It had not yet been a full week with the absence of the other Yuugi, but it was as though one of Yuugi’s most important limbs had been ripped off and the wound doused with salt and lemon and acid. His bare feet ached, and were a bit cut up, but he had thankfully avoided mangling them too badly on the broken glass and rusted metal he’d passed.
Yuugi was just like a kid, he thought to himself cuttingly. He was still stranded in a strange and dangerous place without even Domino’s havens of schedules and family and the knowledge that someone would notice if he vanished. In Titan, he’d only had his other self (the Titan of the Marsh, though a relative, was a stranger and thus didn’t count). Yuugi could almost feel the eyes of the thieves on his weak form, watching the way his large and shining, solid gold Pyramid of a necklace thudded against his chest and cut through the air as he ran; the blood did not disguise its material worth, and it was tied to him only by a leather cord, slip-knotted around his collar but still easily cut.
There was still the knife on his belt, but after that first attack a few days ago Yuugi had nearly puked while he was cleaning the blood off of the blade, shaking and crying and praying that the man hadn’t been hurt too badly, hadn’t died too. He’d spent hours scrubbing the blood from his hands, and his clothes. Yuugi knew he would not be able to draw the knife again; or, if he did, he would shake so badly the new attacker would probably use Yuugi’s own knife to cut away his Puzzle.
The thought of losing his other self without even the hope of recovery gave Yuugi another burst of adrenaline, allowing him to race the final few blocks and into the motel proper.
He did not bother with indoor slippers, his bare feet now black from dirt, before he began thundering up the staircase. His feet were numb to the stony steps, but only because they hurt too much already to notice new pain. He dimly heard the matron Yamafuku yell up after him from the kitchen, but Yuugi did not slow until he crashed into the second door on the left. It was locked.
He hadn’t had time to grab his key, either, before he had been shanghaied onto the bicycle convoy. He let his head fall against the orange sign on his door with a thud; the Puzzle, copying the move, thudded against the door too. Walking slowly back downstairs, the discomfort worse now that his adrenaline had dropped off, Yuugi returned to the front room of the motel. Yamafuku stood a few feet from the base of the stairs, holding both a pair of thin house-slippers and a key dangling from an orange plastic key chain.
Out of breath, Yuugi tried panting out an apology, but he couldn’t make it past the first consonant, let alone syllable.
“You’re welcome,” she said tightly, “but next time tell your loan sharks to wait in the lobby.”
Yuugi shook his head, panting, but the matron just thrust everything into his already occupied arms before she returned to the kitchen. Again, Yuugi did not bother putting on the house slippers – he’d only ruin them, really, with how dirty and bloodied his feet were right now. Upstairs he managed to get the door open with only a small amount of juggling, and once inside the room he flopped onto the bed. Without further delay he began reading.
The hours flew by with only the frequent sound of the turning pages, and other than when Yamafuku physically dragged him downstairs – she’d evidently taken a fondness to Yuugi, and was worried about his constant and seemingly causeless depression – to eat some unremarkable soup dish, Yuugi did not turn away from the text. Even while he unceremoniously drank down his dinner, he had carried the book downstairs and read the very vague details of the seven Millennium Items, of how each was used in turn to discover, locate, capture, judge, and punish criminals.
Darkness had long since fallen, and the sun’s return was only a few hours away when Yuugi finally finished the book. Considering the length and depth of the text, there was not a great deal of information pertinent to Yuugi’s current dilemma: he wasn’t sure if it was enough.
The story Kameyo – the Titan, his unexpected grandmother – had told him of the creation of the Items was only one of many versions of the story, being the most romanticized and less terrible tale.
Another version claimed that Each of the Seven was cast with Seven Hearts and sealed with Seven Souls, all fated to eternal torment and suffering, for as the Seven remained upon the Earth, the Seven of Seven and Seven can not have their Hearts weighed. Should the Seven be destroyed, the Lost shall follow, for none may pass into the Afterlife without one’s physical remains remaining.
The Pyramid of God, wrote the author, a British archaeologist Yuugi had never heard of who had obviously died decades upon decades ago, was the relic of the Pharaoh, of Horus incarnate, and the most powerful. The Pyramid was the mark of the balanced heart of the king, and had powers of benediction and malediction; it affected the body and the mind, created clarity and confusion, and bestowed mercy and penalty upon those who faced it. The Pyramid of God could shatter hearts, and rebuild them; it was both creation and destruction in all aspects.
But when faced with the sheer power of the great evil plaguing his country, the Pharaoh could not destroy it entirely; instead, he created a prison for that great evil.
Most of the tales passed down claim that when the Great Pharaoh sealed the evil, he feared for the survival of his heart, and split it in half. It is possible, though, that the Pharaoh knew that his heart was too balanced to keep such dark and evil of a plague under control. A gray and just heart would not be able to control black or white – it would corrupt to the power. His heart thus split, the Pharaoh bound his most holy name and his Heart of Penalty to control the plague. With that, the Heart of Mercy was left with the remains of the now Nameless Pharaoh, and was left unbalanced.
According to Ancient Texts now lost, it is said that the Heart of Mercy tried to destroy the Pyramid of God entirely, to send the evil to the Hall of the Two Truths, but could not. The Heart of Penalty had taken with it the Pharaoh’s most holy name, and because of this was stronger than the Heart of Mercy – but not enough to entirely protect the Pyramid. It was written that the Merciful Pharaoh shattered the Pyramid into seven of seven pieces, so that none would ever be able to release such destruction upon mankind again; his final act of mercy.
The Pyramid, the Penalty, the Plague, and the Name are all tied together what is now referred to as the “Millennium Puzzle” – believers of the power of the Just Seven tell that should these ties be weakened, or severed, it will be a dark and terrible day for all who cross the path of this disturbance.
Yuugi dropped his head into the book, his mind and body fatigued in this second forced reading. The book was full of information – some “fact,” some theories, but even the second time through reading about the God Pyramid-slash-Millennium Puzzle, Yuugi found nothing about how to unname the ‘Nameless Pharaoh’. Destroy the name, sure, fat lot of good that did – it didn’t say how. Yuugi tried squeezing the answer out of his own skull by closing the book hard against his temples. The only thing Yuugi could think of was that the balance within the Puzzle had been somehow disrupted when Kaiba had inadvertently named the other Yuugi – could this also be why the physical nature of the Puzzle itself had gone from producing endless heat to becoming this cold and dead thing that seemed to get heavier with each passing day? Somehow—
Yuugi tossed the book aside and screamed into the mattress in frustration. He was tired, but too keyed up to sleep, he was empty, angry, lonely – he just wanted his other self back. Grandfather would have known what to do – and there had been another Egypt tour at the Domino Museum coming up, before everything had gone to hell. Could... could it really be that he had to go back? He let out a shuddering sob into the mattress, wishing and cursing and mourning.
“I’m sorry,” he choked, freezing his hand against the Puzzle as he cradled it up to rest beside him, “I’m sorry about all the terrible things I’ve said; I don’t want any of the others back – I lied! I lied...” he hiccuped and shook, snot pooling in his nose and causing him to sniffle like he was a fucking girl, but he didn’t care anymore. “I said I’d trade you for Jounouchi-kun, but I was wrong...
“I want—need you so much... I miss you...” though he felt weak and pathetic for it, Yuugi could not stop crying until he forced himself to sleep. He did not stay asleep for long – not even long enough to dream – but the tears had been burned dry by the fire in his heart.
Yet again, Yuugi would have to return to the Tower. It was time to face his foe.
._._.
