His guiding snakes decorate his brow
._._.
It was Yuugi’s third trip to the Tower, now – the first had been a challenge of subterfuge, while the second had been completely involuntary. This time, he’d had to borrow one of Yamafuku’s head-kerchiefs in order to cover up his very noticeable hair; he didn’t want to cut it again, not when he had somehow been able to grow hair that was already bleached (and if he never had to burn his scalp again using chemicals, he would gladly just cover up his hair). The lobby was the same – the neutral pinks and mirrors and plants, the bored-looking receptionists, and the security guards were all pretty much in the same places as before. The front entrance doorman had been playing a handheld game of Soviet Solar Geometric Gravity Motherland Mission! to pass the time, and Yuugi had easily slipped by without the man’s notice.
Getting into the elevator, too, was surprisingly easy this time, although the guard by the elevator door had held his sunglass-masking stare on Yuugi for the several seconds it took for the elevator to arrive; Yuugi hoped it was only because the head-kerchief was printed with images of kittens playing with other kittens.
The ride up was uneventful, and when Yuugi had entered Kaiba’s still not-entirely-secured flat, he was suitably surprised. What had been a labyrinth of white a mere week ago had quickly and drastically been transformed. It was still a labyrinth, of course; Yuugi had now been drifting for at least twenty minutes from room to room, searching for Kaiba. At least the scenery was much more interesting.
Each room was themed and designed after different games – Yuugi had already passed rooms for chess, go, dominoes, poker, Damage Control at the Opera House, Monsters Kill You Dead (Yuugi had not crossed through that room); even a couple of video games were represented, like Puck-Face, Space Debris Will Destroy Your Family, Dungeon Crawler, and Break Your Face Arcade Fighter. Kaiba’s office was probably going to be the Duel Monsters room, if only Yuugi could find it!
After several more rooms, Yuugi experienced a brief moment of hope before realizing his mistake. This room was filled with various three-dimensional sculptures, and these and the posters on the walls looked to be of monsters hatching from oversized eggs. The monster designs were similar to those of Duel Monsters, thus Yuugi’s confusion; it was probably a game made by a rival company to Industrial Illusions, but Yuugi had been out of direct contact with gaming long enough that it could have sprung up while he was in Titan.
It was with surprise that Yuugi realized he was not alone in the room.
There was a young boy standing near the opposite wall, staring up at one of the sculptures of a monster – it looked like a giant egg on legs, though a rather sinister egg for it was covered in spines and had a huge, gaping mouth filled with row after row of the sharp, curved teeth of a carnivore. The kid, about Yuugi’s height so probably much younger, was draped in some sort of cape or bathrobe, but it was so large on him it looked like a carpet or an unkempt animal pelt from the way it carelessly piled on the floor. The kid’s ratty black hair was all tangled in the puffy fur of the cloak’s collar.
Yuugi could see no harm in asking. “Um, excuse me,” he said quietly, not really sure how to handle children (even if Yuugi sometimes acted like one), “do you think you could help me?”
The boy had a cruel face like Kaiba’s, and his dark, dark blue eyes were as hard and sharp as chips of glass, though they burned as if freshly pulled from the kiln.
“Mutou Yuugi-kun, right?” said the kid with a scoff, glaring at Yuugi in a very familiar way. He must look up to Kaiba, Yuugi thought wryly, pulling the embarrassing head-kerchief from his hair and allowing his spikes to naturally spring back up. “Huh. You’re barely taller than me. How on earth could big brother lose to a kid like you?”
The brat, with his animal carcass of a cloak dragging behind him, had crossed to Yuugi and poked him sharply in the forehead. Yuugi winced and flailed away from the kid, but didn’t dare hit him (not that he’d want to hit anyone intentionally, but a kid was a thousand times worse!). “He must be losing his touch,” said the kid.
“You... you’re Kaiba-kun’s brother?” The kid (who, dammit, actually was taller than Yuugi if one discounted Yuugi’s hair) puffed out his chest like a preening bird, a peacock or something equally ridiculous.
“That’s right,” said the brat, “I’m Kaiba Mokuba, and Kaiba Seto is my big brother, and you—” Mokuba prodded Yuugi’s forehead again, even when Yuugi tried dodging, “—should never have tried to beat a Kaiba at a game. We run Kaiba Corporation; we live games. Trying to win against a Kaiba is like trying to stab a tsunami – you can try, but we’ll crush you.”
Funny, thought Yuugi in a way that almost sounded more like the other Yuugi than Yuugi himself, I remember that we beat Kaiba-kun with little difficulty. Yuugi tried to not let his pain show, his desire to really hear his other self say something along those lines, but Mokuba crowed with pride and had probably noticed.
“That’s why I’m here,” said Yuugi before the bird-like brat could continue boasting (how old was he, anyway? So rude!). “Your brother wants to have a rematch with me, and I wanted to... to arrange the details. What it would cost him.”
Mokuba laughed, a false and heartless sound that set Yuugi’s teeth on edge and his hand convulsively clutched at the freezing Puzzle.
“You want to make a deal with big brother, when you’re the fugitive?” Mokuba continued shaking with laughter, his cloak quivering on his shoulders almost like the wings of a cawing crow. “You should be accepting whatever scraps he deigns to toss to you! Show more respect for my big brother – he should be Kaiba-san to you, if not Kaiba–sama—”
“Mokuba!” For the first time in his life, Yuugi was glad for the sudden appearance of Kaiba Seto. He stood in the doorway Yuugi had not entered through, under a giant sculpture of an egg adorned with a golden number five overlaying a red geometric starburst more fitted to display a ‘pow!’ or a ‘blam!’
“That’s enough,” Kaiba the elder continued. “You’re the one who needs to learn proper respect. Yuugi-kun is a classmate of mine and... got lucky and defeated me in a duel. You were out of line, Mokuba; don’t do it again.”
“But, big brother—”
“You’re a hundred years too early,” said Kaiba after he’d stridden through the room and grabbed a fierce hold of Mokuba’s ear, “if you think you can compete with either Yuugi-kun or me. I told you to stay out of it!”
With more force than Yuugi was prepared to expect, Kaiba nearly flung his brother across the room, the younger boy forced to stumble before he crashed against one of the giant monster sculptures, this one a robot with rotary-saw arms. Mokuba’s cape was caught by one of the replica blades and was ripped from his shoulders as he tumbled to the ground.
He looked small and frail on the floor as he stared up at Kaiba, tears in his eyes, like an infant bird tumbled from the nest, its wings broken before it’d even learned to glide. Kaiba, however, merely stared at his brother, his face a perfect blank.
“You’ve always been so weak,” Kaiba said with all the inflection of reciting somebody else’s grocery list, “and I’ve always hated you for it. Yuugi-kun,” his tone had turned downright pleasant then and Yuugi could not stop the shudder from racing through his spine, “I wasn’t expecting you back this soon. You said something about our rematch?”
Yuugi had not turned his attention away from Mokuba – a kid he’d only just met and didn’t particularly like, but who had been thrown aside just like Yuugi had been so many times before. Yuugi had probably been physically hurt much worse than Mokuba’s tumble into the sculpture, but never had Yuugi been hurt so by a member of his own family. Hurting his own brother like that, a child! It was unforgivable.
Yuugi wanted to help Mokuba to stand, but even he could see the pride in those shoulders – his offer would only be rejected. “Yeah,” he said, once he remembered what was going on, “I do.”
Kaiba nodded once to Yuugi and strode back through the egg-5 doorway without a single glance to his brother, but Yuugi still did not turn away. Mokuba continued staring after the open archway, full of hope and sorrow, betrayal and forgiveness, and Yuugi saw in the boy’s cruel face the same pain Yuugi had felt when his other half had been torn from him. But, unlike Mokuba, Yuugi had not been betrayed by his other self; their division could be repaired, and they could be reunited once more. Mokuba did not have that same hope.
Hating himself for it, Yuugi followed Kaiba into the other room.
._._.
“Don’t worry about Mokuba,” Kaiba said straight off as Yuugi entered the room, “he’s been a part of the Kaiba family for five years now, he knows what behavior isn’t tolerated, and the punishment for insolence.”
“... part of the Kaiba family?” Yuugi asked, confused by the phrase, “I thought you two were brothers?”
“We are.” Kaiba paused then, silent, before shaking his head and crossing to the main desk of the room. “Mokuba needs to give up the past and grow up.”
“How old is he, ten?” Yuugi looked back through the doorway, but Mokuba was already gone. “That’s a little young to be telling him to grow up, Kaiba-kun—”
“Enough. You wanted to talk about our rematch. Talk.”
Kaiba had seated himself behind the most impressive utilitarian desk Yuugi had ever seen; its dark wood surface was polished and puffed to such a shine that Yuugi could barely see the grain of the wood under the reflection of the mural on the ceiling. Glancing up, Yuugi took in the image of the Burst Stream of the Blue Eyes White Dragon annihilating a dozen silhouetted monsters, beasts and warriors and magicians alike. Situated on the reflection of the Burst Stream was Kaiba’s sleek laptop computer, to which Kaiba had already devoted most of his attention.
The walls of the room were festooned with painted murals of Duel Monsters, all of them by famous artists that even Yuugi had heard of. Yuugi crossed to Kaiba’s desk, but only hesitantly sat in the chair opposite. “You said you wanted a rematch with me,” Yuugi prodded, “in Domino.”
Kaiba merely nodded, not pulling his eyes away from the screen. “Why Domino?” Yuugi asked.
Kaiba’s gaze flicked to Yuugi briefly, and to the bloodstained Puzzle, but he remained silent.
“I challenged you last week,” pressed Yuugi, perturbed by Kaiba’s recalcitrant silence even though he knew the tactic, “and you rejected me because you wanted to duel in Domino. It can’t be that you left your deck; you wouldn’t leave it behind when the game is obviously so important to you—”
“How would you know that?” demanded Kaiba, his eyes narrowed and flinted. “It’s a relatively new game. In fact, if you knew anything about me, you’d know that my fate at Kaiba Corporation was decided by a chess game.”
Yuugi stared, slightly dumbfounded. “... are you trying to say,” he said, slowly, “that Duel Monsters isn’t that important to you, and you really did leave your deck in Domino?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” replied Kaiba easily, but Yuugi shook his head, brimming with anger.
“And I call that utter bullshit, Kaiba-kun. What sort of moron do you take me for?” Yuugi spat the words, and wanted to smack his hands on Kaiba’s desk for emphasis, but restrained himself in fear of looking silly this time. “You walked into my Grandfather’s game shop, completely unaware that he had a Blue Eyes White Dragon. Upon seeing the card, you threw a suitcase full of Duel Monster cards on the counter to trade. Who on Earth in their right mind would not only own a suitcase full of trading cards, but also carry it around on a daily basis if they didn’t adore the game above all others? Unless you also carry around a chess set tucked into your belt?”
Kaiba, still hiding behind his computer, dismissively waved his hand. “I’m rich,” he said lightly, “and a personal friend of the game’s creator. He’s given me more cards than you’ve ever even seen. It was a phase. I grew out of it.”
This time, Yuugi did slam his hands on the desk, but the sound wasn’t nearly as impressive as he would have hoped.
“Kaiba!” he shouted angrily, having risen to his feet and now leaned on the desk. He stared the other man eye to eye. “We are sitting in an office themed after the game. There’s a mural of the Blue Eyes White fucking Dragon directly above your desk. If you loved it so much more than Duel Monsters, you’d have set up your office in the Chess room I saw half an hour ago. And don’t try saying you haven’t had time to redecorate, Kaiba – last week every room on this floor was empty. This is your redecoration. Don’t you try to pull this sort of shit with me now, Kaiba – you broke something in me, and I’m not going to let anyone ever do it again. Now,” he said, surprised at his own venom, “why does the rematch have to be in Domino?”
With a fierce glare that only strengthened, Kaiba turned back to his laptop and, seconds later, turned it so the monitor faced Yuugi. The image was unexpected, to say the least.
“What is this?” Yuugi asked, squinting at the awkward contrast of white on blue, “blueprints for a rocket or something?”
“It’s a building,” Kaiba responded tersely, spinning the laptop back around.
“... is it in Domino? I don’t recognize it.”
Kaiba laughed angrily. “Of course you don’t,” he said, “it’s under construction as we speak. Do you think I would show you blueprints for a completed building?”
“Okay. So the reason you want to have a rematch with me in Domino is... because of a building? Is it going to be Kaiba Corp headquarters or something?”
Kaiba shook his head, closing the laptop. “It’s an amusement park,” he said kindly. “Kaibaland, a cheap gaming park for all ages, the center of which is this building, Death-T.”
Yuugi frowned. “Isn’t that a bit... morbid? For a kid’s park?”
“Yuugi-kun, these are the kids who play Break Your Face Arcade Fighter and Stabbity-Face-Stab Bloodshed Massacre. A theme park with a ‘Death-T’ is right up their alley.”
After a moment of recalling the violent atmosphere of the arcade between the Game Shop and Domino High School, Yuugi had to agree. Kids of Domino would probably get into fights over who was cool enough to hang out at Death-T.
“Okay. So you want our rematch to be at this theme park of yours, then?”
Kaiba nodded. “No one has ever defeated me in a duel before, Yuugi – never before that time when you snapped. A rematch between us would have been a marvelous draw of publicity on opening day,” said Kaiba, his face partially hidden behind his steepled fingers, “until you had to go fuck everything up and kill all those people. That Jounouchi punk, the gutter rat, I could have covered up for you too, but you just had to kill famous, well-liked people and get caught—”
“But I didn’t do those things,” Yuugi exclaimed, his arms gesticulating wildly. “Jounouchi-kun was my best friend! You know me, Kaiba-kun – I don’t even fight back when bullies hit me – how could you possibly think I killed them?”
Kaiba’s face was a blank mask, though his eyes remained narrowed.
“Maybe not you,” he admitted slowly, “but there’s more than one of you in that head of yours, isn’t there?”
Yuugi’s heart very nearly stopped, his right hand snapping up to cover it but landed on the Millennium Puzzle instead.
“What are you—? Kaiba...”
Kaiba’s right hand, without his direct attention, opened a drawer in the desk, and after a moment and a small thud the hand dropped onto the desk a plain brown folder with Yuugi’s name printed on it in Kaiba’s neat handwriting. Kaiba flipped open the folder, and with the practiced flicks of a gambler began snapping photographs across the desk to skid in front of Yuugi. With each picture, Yuugi felt the blood drain from his face and limbs, and begin to pool and thicken in a heavy weight in his stomach.
“Ushio Ryoma, clinically insane. His mother says that the night before he snapped, he had gone out to talk to a young bullied underclassman named Yuugi. He suffers from hallucinations with no hope of recovery.”
Photograph two. “Hayashi Daisetsu, studio director for local channel ZTV. Clinically insane. Although his eyes still respond to external stimuli, he is unable to see. Before he went completely mad, he claims to have been attacked while editing footage for the final release on a segment about bullying, in which a young boy named Yuugi was assaulted. No hope for recovery.”
Photograph three. “Souzouji Minoru. Clinically insane. He’s driven into a violent rage at even the slightest noise. What little information specialists were able to pull out of him showed that his insanity was triggered after a night of karaoke with two underclassmen, Hanasaki Tomoya and Mutou Yuugi. No hope for recovery.
“Are you seeing a pattern here, Yuugi-kun?”
Yuugi was shaking. He’d only been given very, very vague answers whenever he’d asked his other self what had happened during Yuugi’s blackouts and the subsequent Dark Games – evasive responses like “You do not have to worry, aibou; they shall not hurt you again,” or “Only equal to what they have done to others. Look, I believe that smuggler harassing that prostitute over there might be willing to give us passage. Let’s go!”
The dates and times written on the photographs matched Yuugi’s blackouts exactly. “Stop...”
“Oh, but Yuugi,” Kaiba said with a grin, feral and predatory and full of malice, “it gets better. Take Prisoner 777, for instance.”
Three new photographs were flicked across the desk this time: the first, a mugshot of the convict that had broken out of Domino Prison a few months back; the second, an autopsy photo of a charred and disfigured corpse, the burnt and shining face causing Yuugi to nearly gag in disgust; the third, a still frame from a security camera of the man on fire. There was a girl in a waitress uniform – was that Anzu? – crying into the chest of a man with his back to the camera. A man who, Yuugi could instantly see, had hair styled up into spikes like a starfish.
“Murdered in broad daylight,” Kaiba added in a low murmur, “in a crowded restaurant, but nobody made a fuss – he was a killer, after all.”
“Stop!”
“Then,” another photograph, and Yuugi couldn’t hold back his shaking horror. “Inogashira Gorou. Upperclassman. He died in the hospital during his reconstructive surgery. You see, he’d gotten himself blown up by the sudden explosion of a substance similar to dynamite. They’d found traces of his skin and blood on his class’s grill. Before he passed away, doctors were able to learn that his injuries were caused in a game of something like air hockey on the Domino High festival grounds. Apparently his class had tried to usurp the plot of fair ground allocated to Class 1-B – one of the students of that class, it should come to no surprise, is Mutou Yuugi—”
“Dammit, Kaiba, stop it! I had nothing to do with any of this!” But the words were getting stuck in Yuugi’s throat, and bile and fury filled him.
Was his other self truly such a monster as this?
“Oh, Yuugi-kun,” Kaiba said, shaking his head, but he did not stop, photographs still flicking across the table from that innocuous brown file. “What about poor Saitou-san? People think it was an accident how he died, but the robbery that took place in his shop at the same time says otherwise, especially when the hot item in question was recovered from the feet of a man found dead at your feet only a few weeks later. And goodness knows how the students from Rintama High’s most prominent gang like to proclaim how they’ll get revenge on Jounouchi Katsuya and that spiky-haired friend of his – at least, those ones that survived—”
The photographs, the people all stared up at Yuugi accusingly, and he could hear them, all of them, blaming him for releasing the other Yuugi upon them. Was it a crime to sing karaoke? A crime to direct documentaries? A crime to... to...
Yuugi’s tears and shaking stilled. Well, yes, it was a crime to blackmail people. It was a crime to hire one person to assault another. It was a crime to murder, to steal, to rob, to assault, to swindle – all of these people... all of them had deserved punishment. Maybe not to the sadistic extremes of being set ablaze and left to cook alive, yes, but they were all guilty.
Their only mistake, Yuugi realized, was that Yuugi had been involved, and thus the other Yuugi could have felt and witnessed their crimes.
The first six of the Just Seven, Yuugi recalled, were used to determine if a person was a criminal. Only the Pyramid of God, later the shattered and unsolved Millennium Puzzle, had the ability to judge a person’s heart and deliver its just treatment. The innocent would be rewarded, while the guilty would be punished. Penalty Games could not affect those not already corrupt, and only those with a pure heart could win the Dark Games, while those with crime against their heart would be punished with exact equality, even against crimes unknown to the bearer of the Pyramid. Common thieves sentenced to face the Pyramid’s judgment wound up dying, and were later discovered to have been murderers.
“... and they all deserved what befell them,” Yuugi whispered, tearing his eyes up from the pictures. “The ones who died were ones who had killed. The ones who were tortured by their senses had done equal damage to others.”
Kaiba’s grin faltered under Yuugi’s cold stare. “And the sisters? Your friend? ”
“Hikari,” Yuugi spat the name, “was so upset that she lost a completely innocent game that she shot me, shot Jounouchi-kun, and shot her own sister. She missed killing me. That was her mistake. She wound up killing herself.”
“So what you’re trying to tell me,” said Kaiba, “is that—”
“Is that we never physically killed them,” Yuugi whispered, bowing his head once more. “I do not know the specifics,” he admitted, “I was unconscious when the other me would play the Dark Games, but I know in my heart that he never physically killed anyone. He would only... lead them to their ends, while they are the ones who took their own lives.”
Kaiba stood then, and shuffled the photographs back into the folder. With a crazed smile Yuugi had never seen on any face before (for he had never seen the other Yuugi’s face upon winning a Dark Game), Kaiba pulled from his pocket a small silver cigarette lighter. With a flick of his thumb the flame snapped into existence, and steadily Kaiba held the brown folder of photos and possibly related documents over the fire. The folder quickly caught, but the flame was slow in climbing and devouring.
“You are my sworn rival,” said Kaiba with a note of mania in his voice, “and only I shall have the pleasure of destroying you.”
Something clicked in Yuugi’s mind, and his jaw fell open in shock. “All the news reports I’ve seen,” he said with a small amount of horror, “have been showing Jounouchi-kun’s picture and saying my name when talking about the killer. That... that was your doing?!” Kaiba nodded, the light of the fire flickering in his bright eyes, glittering with madness.
“I couldn’t let my only rival be killed without me, could I? Why don’t you offer me a deal, little Yuugi-kun? That’s why you came, isn’t it?”
Yuugi nodded numbly, watching the fire climb closer to Kaiba’s hand.
“I will compete in your rematch, however you designed it, if you can first arrange for me to have a completely fair and equal trial. I want my name cleared, and Sasori Hikari to be revealed for the criminal she really was.”
Kaiba did not look satisfied. “I know that if true evidence emerges, I’ll be found innocent. Then, during our rematch, if you win... you can... you can...”
“Yes, Yuugi-kun?” prompted Kaiba, and suddenly Yuugi could see what it was that he really wanted, even more than Yuugi’s defeat at a card game.
“You can have me,” Yuugi said, dropping his gaze to his lap, his hands moving as he spoke. “To humiliate, to hurt, to torture. You can have my deck, and my grandfather’s Blue Eyes White Dragon, and you can... you can do anything you want to me.”
His hands shaking, Yuugi withdrew the obsidian knife, the gift from his father, and he held it flat upon his palms. “You can even kill me when you’re done.”
That was it: Yuugi could see the insane glee in the man’s face, and Yuugi fumbled as he sheathed the knife once more.
“Will I face you,” Kaiba asked, “or the other Yuugi?”
Yuugi’s smile was small, and hard. “If it were up to me,” he said with a wish in his voice, “I would want it to be us both.”
“And if you win?”
“A penalty game,” Yuugi said, remembering the way Kaiba had hurt his younger brother, and of the casual way it spoke of constant abuse, “and you will never come near my family or friends again.”
Kaiba dropped the smoldering remains of the evidence of Yuugi’s... effect on dozens of others, and the two classmates shook hands – each expecting (but only somewhat regretting, in Kaiba’s thoughts) that they would (likely, but not assuredly, in Yuugi’s) cause the death of the other.
The true rivals planned, for Yuugi still had one more person to see, and his belongings to gather before he and Kaiba would set out that night for Domino. When they had each arrived in Titan, they had not planned on traveling to the same destination, let alone together, but things have a tendency to change in unexpected ways like that.
“Yuugi!” Kaiba called out, as Yuugi finally started to leave, and the latter barely turned to acknowledge the call.
“Yes, Kaiba?”
“Who have I been dealing with?” he asked, confused. “Yuugi, or the dark Yuugi?”
Yuugi turned and couldn’t help the sad smile that crossed his face. “I thought you said Yuugi was dead?” he whispered, “You told me – the other me – that he’d killed me. That only Saikoro was left.”
Kaiba scowled. “There never was a Saikoro,” he said, and a heavy weight seemed to lift in Yuugi’s chest from the hope that bubbled within him.
“Then you’ve been talking to regular Yuugi,” he said with a laugh, his hope almost erasing all the discomfort it took to get here, “and maybe someday you’ll know me well enough that you’ll be able to tell us apart.”
“I expect you’ll die first,” replied Kaiba coldly, but Yuugi still couldn’t stop smiling, knowing that soon...
“But once I beat you, and you overcome this game too, then maybe...”
“A hundred feet of snow in hell, Mutou, now get out of my flat.”
With a giddy laugh – the name should be broken now! – Yuugi nearly skipped from the room, surprising himself with how quickly he found the elevator, and began traveling up for one final visit to the Titan of the Marsh. But, Yuugi thought, hopefully not his last visit with his Grandmother Mutou Kameyo.
._._.
The lift ride had been short, but infinitely disappointing. Expecting that Kaiba’s admittance of the nonexistence of Saikoro would strip the false name from the other Yuugi, Yuugi had tried calling for the spirit through the same mental frequencies they normally communicated. There was no response. Even when Yuugi spoke audibly to the Pyramid, shaking it and starting to nearly quiver with frustration, the Puzzle remained cold, silent, and dead.
The thought sent a chill through Yuugi’s body and he shook it away physically in denial. He could not – he would not – give up hope, not after everything he had learned. Certainly not after all the things his other self had done for Yuugi, that Yuugi had not and could never repay.
The elevator gave a cheerful ‘ding!’ as he arrived on the floor of Mutou Kameyo, the Titan of the Marsh, and with an acquired air of determination he modeled after his missing other half, he strode to the color-code panel. He wasn’t trying to become the other Yuugi, he wasn’t! But everything had been so much easier with the other there; Yuugi hadn’t needed to be the confident one. He inputted his code: red-purple-white-purple-red.
Three black circles filled. Two disappeared. Yuugi frowned. Orange-yellow-green-blue-black: one white. Red-purple-white-black-blue: two blacks. Green-orange-yellow-purple-red: one black, one white. Yuugi stared, blocking out the sound of the guns, and he quickly and efficiently began reducing the possibilities down to eight. Closing his eyes, Yuugi went through the eight possible combinations he had left – red-or-yellow, green-or-purple, white, green-or-purple-or-yellow, red-or-yellow-or-green.
But the Titan had told Yuugi that his code would be the same if he came through again – what had changed? The other Yuugi’s teasing at the end of it all came back to him then, and Yuugi looked again. It really couldn’t be that simple, could it? Yellow-purple-white-purple-yellow.
E N T E R.
Apparently it could. The door slid open easily, and Yuugi crossed through the doorway without hesitation.
If he thought the redecoration done in Kaiba’s apartment had been impressive given a week of time to complete it, Yuugi thought it no more. It was apparently ‘décor alteration weekend’ at the Tower: the room was a veritable maze of cardboard boxes, all of the furniture already gone and the walls stripped of their myriad of photographs.
The Titan was parked near one of the archways, past which Yuugi had not ventured, sifting through and packing a small cardboard box with something colorful he could not identify. The door slid shut behind him, and the elderly woman looked up without fear.
“Oh, hello Yuugi,” she said softly, setting down what appeared to be a jar of jam into the box, and beginning to wheel towards the open center of the room; Yuugi met her there.
“Hello, Madam Titan,” Yuugi replied, unsure if something as informal as ‘grandmother’ would be permitted; she had, after all, had only a day to come to terms with the fact she even had a grandson (and Yuugi still thought of the ice cream vendor Norie as his surrogate grandmother). The woman waved a dismissive hand, and then set the box of assorted jams on top of another stack of boxes.
“Not anymore, Yuugi – I’ve resigned the Title,” she said, but pulled something out from beneath the blanket on her lap, “and I’ve arranged your free passage through the Marsh.”
She pressed upon him a small slip of paper, metallic red. Yuugi took it reluctantly.
“Whenever you need anything, you just go down to the docks and find any of the nice gentlemen with hooks for hands, and you’ll be able to cross the Sea with one of them.”
Yuugi did not read the silver, spindled words scrawled upon the paper; he merely shook his head and handed it back.
“I have to go back to Domino,” he said, meeting his grandmother’s eyes, always full of sorrow, “I... thought that if I left, I would be okay, but... if I run, I’m going to regret it for the rest of my life.”
“Yes,” she murmured, taking back the paper, “you will.”
“I wanted to say thank you,” said Yuugi with a smile, but he could see her flinch at the false nature of the grin, “for offering me a way out, and... for telling me the truth about my other self... and about my grandfather. He does miss you.”
Yuugi was not stupid – her sudden packing of her belongings and resigning of her post as a Titan could only mean that she planned on leaving this city behind her. She was not running away (er, rolling? his mind prompted in ill humor), but rather going towards. She was going to undo some of the damage the unsolved Puzzle had wrought in her life; how strange, then, that the completed Puzzle was to blame for her second chance.
“When I go back to Domino, I’m going to be put on trial,” he said softly, “and though I’m innocent, I’m... scared. Will you... will you come? To watch?” As roundabout as it was, this woman was part of the reason Yuugi even had the option of going back – he did not know anything he could do to thank her just yet, that she could not do herself.
There was no hesitation; she nodded. “I have missed too much of life to be picky. Besides,” her voice turned a note darker then, and from the flick of her eyes Yuugi knew the reason, “I still need to have words with this ‘other you’ of the Millennium Puzzle.”
Yuugi’s arms pulled up and instinctively wrapped around the cold, leaden weight of the Pyramid; the meaning was lost to no one.
“Once I figure out how to break this lock the false name has placed on him... he and I will discuss it,” Yuugi said, his tone allowing for no argument. The now-former Titan did not look pleased, but she did relent.
“Could you not use the Puzzle itself to break it?” she stated, more than she asked, “since destroying things is all it’s really good for, after all.”
Yuugi opened his mouth to retort, to proclaim that it was more than just destruction, it was—
If realizations are represented by light bulbs, Yuugi’s mind lit up like a stadium at dusk, or the paparazzi at... a place where paparazzi take lots of pictures, or a city recovering from a blackout. Once more, Yuugi was very nearly giddy with hope, his emotions spring-boarding from one extreme to another very quickly, and he impulsively kissed the woman’s cheek.
“Grandma, you’re a genius,” he said, scrambling and rushing around the stacks of boxes.
“Wait! Yuugi, where are you going?”
“I’m going to go read that book you gave me again,” he replied, getting hopelessly lost between the boxes, “and then I’m going to get the other me back, and then, well, I’m not sure precisely what happens after that,” he said with a laugh, “after all the jolly hoorays, but I think then I’m going back to Domino, but it doesn’t matter, because I’m going to get him back!”
Before he managed to slam the door shut behind him, Yuugi heard her mutter a ‘good luck,’ and with his winningest grin he poked he head back into the room and replied, “See you in Domino!”
Hiding his hair once more under the kitten head-kerchief as he rode the lift, and then making his way from the Tower and back to the motel, Yuugi could not stop himself from hugging and petting and caressing the Puzzle in glee. He knew how to get his other self back now, and after that everything would be perfect.
Of course, it does not need to be said how awkward the reunion would be, or how uncomfortable the return to Domino, or how weird it would be to explain everything to Anzu and Honda and Hanasaki and Yuugi’s family. Well.
Yuugi never was one to think that things being perfect excluded perfectly bad things.
._._.
