even when they have bloated their bodies with magic
._._.
The next day of court passed much more swiftly than the first, even if Yuugi did not have his other self to help distract him. The limited witnesses were all members of the prosecutor’s scientific panel, analyzing various aspects of the crime scene. One explained that the defense’s argument that Hikari’s slit throat was suicide was impossible, because Hikari showed signs for struggling with someone wielding the knife from the cuts on her fingers; another showed that the broken lock on the door proved that Yuugi and Jounouchi had obviously broken down the door on their way in (and even when Hoshikage called the man out on the fact the police had broken the door on their way in, he claimed it was impossible to prove that the door hadn’t already been broken).
The prosecution had even called in ‘witnesses’ who had apparently seen both meetings between Yuugi and the sisters, and almost all of them claimed that he was seducing them. All of them except the woman in the cosplay wig, that is. Yuugi nearly didn’t recognize her: Grandmother Norie, the ice cream vendor.
“Yuugi isn’t the first person I saw talk to those girls and ‘disappear.’ They’ve been doing it for weeks,” she said, and Yuugi heard the way she consciously controlled her voice to sound less naturally unpleasant. “Usually it was older men, so I simply thought they were… well. The type of girls who exchange one type of favor for another.”
The prosecutor pulled her off the stand as quickly as possible, but the damage had been done. At Hoshikage’s triumphant smirk, Yuugi had stared at him for a very long moment before his attorney whispered that one of Kaiba’s detectives had found the woman and, after hearing her story, had convinced her to come forward for the prosecutor with a very vague testimony as to what she saw in order to get on the stand. Yuugi wasn’t sure if it would be considered cheating by the rules of court, but didn’t really spend too much time worrying about it.
Hoshikage did an outstanding job shooting down the ‘scientific investigation,’ arguing that the only possible way Yuugi would have been able to slit Hikari’s neck would be if she not only didn’t struggle at anything near full strength, but sat down and let him do it, because Yuugi couldn’t even win physical fights against primary school kids. This, in addition to the fact that this murder weapon itself had originally come from a knife block on top of the refrigerator, and without any way to climb up that high, Yuugi would not be able to have even acquired the knife himself in the first place.
The third day passed similarly to the second, as did the fourth, and fifth. When he wasn’t in court, Yuugi was either sleeping in his cell, or in the visiting room with his mother, or grandfather, telling and retelling a highly abridged version of what he’d been doing and where he’d gone while on the run from the police, about his adventures in Titan. When Yuugi told his mother about the sheer difficulty he’d had trying to get on a boat, gesticulating wildly with one arm about how the boats kept winding up getting set on fire whenever he tried to board passage, she had begun crying and laughing at the same time.
“Oh Yuugi,” she’d murmured softly down the telephone wire, “I wish I knew whether I can be happy that you couldn’t leave.”
“You can,” he replied back, just as kindly. “I am.”
It was the next week, on the start of the seventh day of trial, that Hoshikage finally took the offensive.
“Your Honor, I’d like to call Police Chief Yoshikuma Daisuke to the stand.” It was the man that had saved Yuugi’s Puzzle from destruction, despite the logical reasoning that Yuugi was an accused criminal who – if the man had done any investigating into the break-out the month before – was likely to be guilty for having been the escapee during his previous internment. If Hoshikage looked like a giraffe, then Yoshikuma looked like a lion, as cliché as it seemed. Well, actually, Yoshikuma looked like a cross between a lion, a jackal, six different breeds of bear, and some obscure type of hydrangea, or like every action hero with a puffier haircut.
“Chief Yoshikuma-san,” Ace began, “you have heard the defense’s stance on this heinous crime, have you not?”
“I have.”
“Then perhaps you won’t mind answering this: shortly before the incident in question, is it not true that for several weeks, the Domino Police Department had been dealing with a sudden spike in deadly crime?”
“Yes. The spree started about three weeks before the murder in question, with a new body turning up every three to five days, give or take.”
“Your honor, I object to this line of questioning,” interjected the prosecutor calmly; “these other crimes are completely unrelated to the murder of the Sasori girls!”
“That’s what I thought too, until the spree stopped immediately after the night in question,” responded Yoshikuma with the calm deliverance of a personified lake, and Mikami looked positively betrayed.
“Go on,” said the judge; Hoshikage looked happier than Anzu had when she’d finally gotten accepted to her elite dance school.
“What can you tell us about these crimes, Chief?”
“Almost all of the victims were male,” Yoshikuma stated clearly, his professionalism showing through brightly, “mid-twenties to early fifties. We’re used to serial killers going after young women as, on average, it’s much easier to overpower a younger woman as opposed to an older man. The radius of theses attacks is a rather broad area, but the homes of the defendant and both households of victims lie well within several blocks the area’s general center.”
An unnatural hush filled the room as the Chief of Police spoke, his voice so full of calm power that Yuugi’s hands began shaking under the table. It wasn’t possible, what they were implying – it wasn’t! It couldn’t…
“And how were your teams able to determine that these men were all killed in the same spree?”
“One of my men in the forensics ballistics department determined that the bullet etchings in all those cases were all made by the same pistol, a Kazama Power JS-32, but it’s a rather common weapon more often referred to as a Power Jazz.”
“Could the stenographer please repeat for the court the type of gun that was used to murder Jounouchi Katsuya and Sasori Hebi?” asked Hoshikage, his question so absolutely confident that Yuugi had to sneak a glance to the prosecutor; Mikami was guarding his expression well. “It was brought up in the autopsy reports, I believe.”
Mere moments later the stenographer looked up, startled. “The same type, Hoshikage-san. Kazama Power JS-32.”
The crowd did not speak. Hoshikage’s smile was very small, but even then it reached his eyes.
“Chief Yoshikuma-san. Seeing as how these two guns are of the same make, same caliber, would their bullet etchings match if they were simply two different but identical guns?”
“No. Every gun has an individual etching. Even identical twins have different fingerprints.”
“And did your team, Yoshikuma-san, compare the murder weapon from this case to the murder weapon from the spree killings?”
“They’re a perfect match.”
“And to whom,” shouted Hoshikage over the rising surge of noise from the crowd of onlookers, “To whom is the gun registered, Yoshikuma-san?”
“Sasori—”
The noise was so loud, so overpoweringly loud, Yuugi had to cover his ears from the pain of it, shouting coming from every direction of the courtroom. The prosecution, the cameramen, the judge, everyone in the stands watching, they all were shouting, screaming, and even the slamming of the gavel was drowned out, but still Hoshikage and Yoshikuma were the loudest voices; even then, Yuugi could barely hear them over the din.
“And why didn’t—sooner—now?”
“—local records—sing, had to—Interpol, who were—country of purch—Morocco—corruption—”
“—catch all that, sten—further questions, your—”
._._.
It wasn’t possible. This wasn’t happening. Yuugi had been anxiously hoping that they’d be able to place the crime on Hikari’s hands, where it belonged, but not like this. To discover that they were the ones responsible for all those murders? It was… it was… it was somehow relieving, but still more guilt for Jounouchi filled Yuugi’s heart. God, he really wanted his Puzzle back, or anyone he could talk to, someone that could help him make sense of all this! The only person he could think of who could wasn’t even in the courtroom. He really, really wanted his other self back.
“For my final witness, I would like to call Tanitaki Norie to the stand.”
Yuugi looked over to the prosecutor’s table, and instantly wished he hadn’t. Mikami did not look particularly perturbed by this series of events, but there was resignation in his shoulders: he knew he had lost. It was Sasori Tadashi that frightened Yuugi – the man was enraged, his carefully arranged appearance was in shambles. Noticing Yuugi’s stare, the man’s attention turned to Yuugi, his eyes wide and jaw clenched. Upon meeting Yuugi’s gaze, all of the anger and hurt seemed to drain out of the man, and he nodded to Yuugi cordially. It was the acceptance of defeat, and Sasori smiled.
It was not one of his trademark smiles sold to photographers, or one painfully etched onto his face. It was the most sincerely happy smile Yuugi had ever seen in his life. It was the scariest thing Yuugi had ever seen in his life.
He turned his attention quickly back to his attorney.
“I have here a collection of photographs that have never been released into the public scrutiny, either by image or description,” said Hoshikage, holding up an unremarkable brown folder; for a moment Yuugi panicked, before remembering Kaiba had burned that file. “These are a selection of photographs of the various murder victims from the spree killings that the defense is attempting to connect to this current case as conclusive proof that my client, Mutou Yuugi, is innocent of wrongdoing.
“Now, Tanitaki-san, when you were last on the stand, you claimed that you saw several older men meet with the Sasori sisters in the weeks before their deaths; is this correct?”
“Yes, sir, it is. I saw five separate occasions.”
Hoshikage nodded. “If prompted, would you be able to tell the court about these meetings you witnessed? Namely, will you be able to describe the men you saw with the girls?”
Grandmother Norie nodded, slowly. “Yes… well, they were at a distance, so I don’t think I could identify them by face,” she said, slightly scared, “but I can give you dates and times and what they were wearing. I keep a diary, you see, and I brought it with me…”
She held up a small pink notebook, emblazoned with the image of a penguin knitting a parachute. Hoshikage took the notebook, flipping through it easily, before handing it to the judge.
“Let the record show that the notebook contains a timestamp of purchase,” said the judge, “of two months prior to the date of the murder, as well as periodic timestamps throughout. Ma’am, why would you timestamp a diary using an actual stamp?”
Grandmother Norie smiled, her jagged teeth shining like those of an injured jungle cat. “I occasionally volunteer at the Domino Library of Books and Things. We have timestamps. I like using them.”
The judge returned the notebook. “I’ll allow it.”
“Tanitaki-san. Could you please describe the first man you saw?”
Grandmother Norie nodded, flipping through her notebook quickly towards a middle section, her eyes scanning the page swiftly. “Oh! I think I can identify this one, Hoshikage-san. He was a customer of mine. Here – ‘he nearly threw his copy of Chekhov at me, but I couldn’t do anything about the chocolate ice cream stain on his green suede jacket. He looked a lot like Kenji’ – that’s my late brother, – ‘but his eyes were all wrong. I didn’t ask him where he got the black eye, or the tattoo on his neck, though it was a rather well-inked dragon, if one were to appreciate being marked as a criminal for the rest of one’s life. When he stalked away, he started talking to a girl decades younger – his daughter? I hope she’s more polite to her elders.’ ”
Hoshikage held up a photograph of a man on an autopsy table, a lightly bearded fellow with a long stripe of green on his neck and half his face blown off from a fatal gunshot. “This man was found dead in his favorite green suede jacket in the basement of the Croissants and Enough Booze to Kill Your Family pub, four weeks before the night in question. He’d been dead for two days from the, ahem, obvious injury. The date of his disappearance and that of Tanitaki-san’s testimony match up perfectly, as does the fact his jacket is stained with chocolate ice cream. The bullet etchings also match perfectly.
Hoshikage kept pressing Grandmother Norie on her other sightings – she was able to get through two more descriptions, perfectly placing a man with a hunched back and a homeless kid who wore an extremely large cereal box instead of pants, and potato chip tubes on his emaciated arms.
“I’ve heard enough,” said the judge, and Yuugi could hear all the cameras turning and zooming in on the man; he glared at all of them. “I’ve heard that both murder weapons belonged to the Sasori sisters, and I am suitably convinced that Sasori Hikari could only have been killed by suicide due to both the initial location of the weapons and the lack of suitable evidence to the contrary. The fact that Mutou Yuugi did not suffer from a powder burn from the gunshot proves it impossible for him to have shot himself. There is evidence that the two sisters have been heavily involved in previous murders, using a weapon to which the defendant could not have possibly had access prior to the night in question.
“At this point,” continued the judge, “I feel I can confidently rule that Mutou Yuugi is hereby found innocent of all counts of murder, and that these crimes can now posthumously be attributed to the Sasori sisters Hebi and Hikari. Since they cannot be punished personally for their crimes, their financial estate shall hereby be broken and divided evenly amongst the surviving families of their various victims, if such families exist. Case Dismissed!”
There was screaming. There was laughter. There was crying and tears and when Hoshikage returned to the defense’s table to shake Yuugi’s hand, Yuugi couldn’t reach up to meet that grasp because his mother was hugging him too tightly.
“Congratulations, Yuugi,” said Hoshikage, towering over Yuugi and radiating pride. Yuugi felt a bit giddy at the sound and thought that as soon as he got home he was going to dig through their video collection to see if they’d recorded any episodes of Magical Fondue Coaster Mansion, and he would watch them all, and—and he was going to go home!
“Thank you so much, Hoshikage-sama!” Yuugi exclaimed, trying to keep himself from laughing, “You were amazing!”
Hoshikage shook his head. “Thank Kaiba-sama,” he said, ruffling Yuugi’s hair in familiarity and happiness, “he’s the one that was able to exhume all the evidence. You wouldn’t believe how many people we had to, erm, bargain with in order to find some of those documents.”
Yuugi was being dragged out into the lobby, where grandfather and Anzu and Honda and a thousand other people were gathering around, wanting to congratulate him or shun him or get his interview, and even the fangirls who threw ballet slippers at him and called him a liar and a phony couldn’t bring down his good mood. Yuugi smiled and laughed and accepted hugs gratefully, but there was really only two people he wanted to be with right now: the death of one had been the catalyst for this whole event, and the other was waiting for him!
But when Yuugi tried begging to leave, his mother shook her head. “Go celebrate with your friends right now – I’m going to set the house up, and your grandfather will bring you home when it’s ready, all right?” Yuugi nodded, his smile slightly less than enthusiastic.
“All right. Thank you, Mama.” She gave him another tight hug.
“It’s so good to have you back for good, Yuugi,” she whispered conspiringly, trying to joke her way out of crying.
“I missed you too, Mama.” He whispered back, just as furtively, “I love you.”
She really was going to start crying, so Yuugi gave her a playful shove.
“Go on!” he said, smiling brightly, “I want to go home soon!” She smiled, and with another hug, she was finally on her way.
Just a little while longer.
._._.
“—and then I came back to Domino. The end. You saw the trial.”
Yuugi had already sent his closer friends and acquaintances on to the Game Shop for what was meant to be his surprise “Welcome Home” party, but Yuugi’s mother had never been the most subtle of people. Now all Yuugi had to do was slip away from the last of the reporters, find Grandmother Kameyo to give her directions to the Game Shop, and without the two crossing paths find his Grandfather and finally go home. Ah! There she was, off near the painting of the Historic Founding of the Domino Courthouse centuries earlier. Not much had changed.
“Grandmother!” Yuugi called, jogging to the elderly matriarch. Kameyo smiled at him warmly, spinning her chair to face him.
“Yuugi-kun. Congratulations on your victory in court today. I was very impressed.” Yuugi shrugged, but the giddy feeling of freedom could not be shaken from his expression.
“It’s all thanks to Hoshikage-sama, and Kaiba-kun, and you that I even had a shot in this.”
Mutou Kameyo looked surprised, but it eased gracefully into a gentle smile. “Me? What ever did I do?”
Yuugi just kept smiling all the brighter. “Hey. Everyone’s going back to the Game Shop to celebrate. Would you—I mean, you don’t have to, and I know it’s awkward, and it’d not be the perfect time to see—”
“Yuugi,” she interrupted, reaching up to cup Yuugi’s shoulder gently, “if you can face the threat of a life of imprisonment with courage, I can certainly face my own husband. At the very least I can make the effort.”
Yuugi couldn’t stop the laughter that bubbled out of him as he hugged his biological grandmother, and feeling her tentatively squeeze back. The directions he gave were rapid and precise from years of instructing customers by telephone. She promised she would arrive there soon, but had to stop first at her hotel.
As she rolled off, Yuugi was finally free to go find his grandfather again (who, last he saw, was speaking amicably to Hoshikage about something or other, but had forced the attorney to sit down because “all this looking up is giving me a terrible pain in my neck!”), and go home.
“Excuse me, Mutou Yuugi?” Dammit! He turned, hoping it would only be a reporter so he could tell her he was done with interviews, but when he saw the girl his hope sank. Teenage girl, possibly a Sasori fangirl, he should get ready to dodge and run. Wasn’t security supposed to have kicked them all out by now? Then again, she didn’t really look like a fangirl, but it was hard to tell with the amount of bandages obscuring her face. He looked stuck again. Damn.
“Um, yeah. I’m sorry, do I know you?” The girl shook her head, and it seemed like she was relaxing in his presence.
“Oh, no, we’ve never met, but… I wanted to thank you.”
This was getting unaccountably weird. Yuugi was getting used to weird as being the very outlandish sort – this was just… well. Weird.
“Thank me? Why?”
The girl shifted her weight a little, clutching at a white cane in nervousness. She obviously couldn’t see with all those bandages, but was she blind?
“I… I want to thank you for being such a good friend to Katsuya. He mentioned you in his letters.”
Synapses were firing in overdrive, and eventually the answer bubbled up in Yuugi’s mind. “You… you’re Jounouchi-kun’s sister. Shizuka, right?”
She smiled, and nodded. A wave of guilt crashed against Yuugi, and he began stuttering and stumbling over his apologies and condolences.
“I’m so, so sorry for what happened to Jounouchi-kun, you have to know I never meant for anything—”
“Mutou-kun, you don’t have to apologize to me,” Shizuka said, coming closer and groping in the air much too high for his shoulder until, after a careful moment of weighing which would be less embarrassing, he tentatively guided her hand down. “The judge said you didn’t kill him, right? So it wasn’t your fault. Unless the judge was wrong?”
“No, but—”
“No. Mutou-kun.” Shizuka was probably trying to imitate that she was gazing into his eyes, and though her stare was a bit too high it was much closer than her hand had been to his shoulder. “Do you blame my brother for you getting shot?”
“What?” Yuugi asked, bewildered. “No, of course not, Jounouchi-kun couldn’t have done anything—”
“See?” She gave his shoulder a squeeze, smiling gently. “You couldn’t have done anything. My brother wouldn’t want you to beat yourself up for it. He’ll do that himself the next time you see him.”
In the distance, Yuugi heard a slightly panicked woman calling Shizuka’s name, likely her mother, and Shizuka pulled away.
“Wait,” Yuugi said, lightly catching her wrist, “ ‘the next time I see him’ ?”
Shizuka laughed. “Just because a season ends doesn’t mean it’s gone forever. Rain falls, plants grow. Just because a story ends, doesn’t mean another one can’t start. You’ll see him again someday.”
“Shizuka!”
“… and I hope I’ll actually get to see you soon, Mutou-kun,” she said as she backed away, turning her head slightly to catch her mother’s voice, but still smiling brightly, “after all, you’re going to have to tell me how my brother conned you into being his friend in the first place!”
._._.
“SURPRISE!”
The Turtle Game Shop, longer by half than the family’s sitting room but usually crowded with tall shelves packed with gaming supplies, was boisterously loud and crowded instead with people. Anything that wasn’t bolted down had been pushed along the far walls, and any of the shelves containing merchandise were covered with colorful cloths to both simplify the appearance of the large room and to deter any party-goers from becoming thieves of convenience. On the main shop counter, where normally Yuugi’s grandfather would ring up purchases or solve cross-hatch logic puzzles during slow times, a series of large platters were displayed, each laden with buffet fare; by the time Yuugi arrived, the platters were already cleared by half.
Hung from the ceiling was a large banner celebrating Yuugi’s acquittal and return home, and he wondered softly how far in advance his family had commissioned the sign: things like that couldn’t be thrown together hastily over a weekend, and Yuugi did not know how much something like that would cost, anyway. That gesture alone made his heart ache for joy.
Everyone was there, though at least half of them were people Yuugi didn’t know. His classmates, his friends, his family – even those relatives that apparently really did exist up in Monopolis had come down for the party. Hell, even both the Kaiba brothers were there, keeping mostly to themselves.
Yuugi laughed and accepted the congratulatory embraces gratefully, relishing in his welcome home, even if he could tell the neighbors were lying when they said they’d always believed it would turn out all right for him in the end. Just being back in his own home was enough to balm his nerves when his friends finally approached him, having been fidgeting and delaying for twenty minutes beforehand. Even though they had said such… uninformed things while he was gone didn’t mean they weren’t his friends. After all, Anzu had come all the way down to the detention center, just to visit him! Sometimes your friends did stupid things that made you angry, and made you want to hate them, but Yuugi knew now that that’s just the way it worked, and he was perfectly willing to forgive.
They didn’t even have to ask. “It’s okay, you guys,” he said, hoping he was reading their silence correctly, “you—”
“Dammit, Yuugi, it’s not okay,” muttered Honda quietly, obviously considerate of their surroundings and not wanting to cause a scene. “We sold out on you. You were in trouble, and we abandoned you. How is that okay?”
“I ditched you first,” Yuugi said softly under all the noise, “you had no way of knowing what happened. I looked guilty. I can’t stay mad at you for that. If it had been one of you—”
“You wouldn’t have doubted for a moment,” Anzu said, shaking her head. “You didn’t, not when Jounouchi-kun…” Anzu bit her lip, turning her gaze away from Yuugi. “Even when he didn’t move to protect you, you still…”
Yuugi bowed his head, remembering. “It’s okay, really,” he murmured, his voice and his sorrow both soft. “You know me. Didn’t you used to tell me I was too trusting for my own good, Anzu?”
“We should have trusted you,” said Honda, a subdued anger in his voice that Yuugi knew Honda wasn’t directing at Yuugi, “like you would have trusted us.”
Yuugi exhaled a nearly silent sigh, closing his eyes; he was tired, he had lost sight of his grandfather as soon as they got back to the Shop, and the person Yuugi wanted to speak to most (to whom it was still possible to speak) wasn’t here. Many of the people Yuugi wanted to see most were permanently beyond his reach, but his other self was not among them.
He looked up then, forcing a bright smile on his face though it was weighted at the corners with fatigue. “You can make it up to me later, I promise,” he said, crooking his head to the side. “We can all go to Kaibaland when it opens, and—”
“Yuugi.”
Argh, thought Yuugi with little venom and less anger, more people?
“Kaiba-kun?” Yuugi asked, turning. Kaiba Seto stood near an uncovered display case, its clean blue bed sheet having fallen to the floor. It contained packages for Organic Life Shoot-Out Invasion and Monsters Kill You Dead. At the latter, Yuugi flinched, and after turning his gaze away from the booster decks he made a note to put those games under the counter, where he wouldn’t see them every day when he walked home from school. He didn’t want to be reminded of the cards had been spread out upon the table, or the bent and bloodied corner of the Fire Axe. Yuugi closed his eyes against the thought before turning his full attention up to Kaiba’s face.
“I’m feeling generous,” said Kaiba, without a trace of the aforementioned emotion in either his voice or his features; his eyes were dark and slightly mad. “So I’m giving you a week to prepare for our duel. I will win the Blue Eyes White Dragon.”
Yuugi gave another exhausted smile. “We’ll see, Kaiba-kun. I’m going to do my best to protect Grandpa’s precious card.”
Kaiba gave a scoffing laugh, his shoulders shaking. “Let us see how well you handle my secret weapons, Yuugi-kun. Mokuba! We’re leaving.” At the call, Kaiba’s younger brother turned and was thus easy to spot, having been pulled from a conversation with Yuugi’s grandfather; Mokuba gave a small, barely visible sigh before coming to Kaiba’s side.
“Bye Kaiba-kun, Mokuba-kun,” Yuugi called after them, but neither Kaiba made to turn at his call. Not even the Shop door’s bell jingling its farewell got a response from the brothers, but then again the bell was accustomed to being ignored. At least Yuugi had discovered where his grandfather had been lurking. With a quick apology and excuse to his friends, Yuugi made a swift beeline to his grandfather, who had been partially hidden out of sight behind one of the displays for Monster World, one so tall even on a step ladder Yuugi couldn’t touch the top.
“Grandpa?” Yuugi queried at the man’s pensive disposition. His grandfather turned, easily shedding his despondent focus with a smile.
“Yes, Yuugi? Shouldn’t you be catching up with your friends?”
Yuugi laughed, embarrassed, and nodded. “Actually, I was wondering where you put my Puzzle. I… miss the weight of it.”
Grandfather stared at Yuugi then, as if he were weighing Yuugi, and Yuugi could not help but remember his encounter with the man with the Scales.
“In your room,” he said after a long moment, his eyes focused on something far beyond where they rested on Yuugi’s face, but…
Yuugi shrugged off the thought and gave his grandfather a quick embrace of gratitude before swiftly weaving his way around the well-wishers that didn’t even notice his presence to the exit of the Shop. Soon thereafter, Yuugi was dashing up the stairs, easily flinging open his bedroom door.
Not much had changed in the month of his absence, since he and his other self had raided the room before their departure for Titan. The books and papers on Yuugi’s desk had been straightened, and the dimming ceiling light bulb had been replaced. His bed was made with different sheets than when he left, and next to a small pile of folded laundry was the rucksack Yuugi had taken with him on the journey, but left in Kaiba’s care while Yuugi had been alternately in court or in detention.
The carpet looked freshly vacuumed, and as he walked towards his bed Yuugi saw the small pile of money on the corner of his dresser; money that had obviously not been there the night he left. Momentarily bewildered, Yuugi quickly counted the number and amount of the slightly crumbled bills, scattered as though not all placed at once, and in realization he felt a sudden swelling of warmth spread throughout his torso.
It was five weeks’ worth of allowance.
They hadn’t been keeping his room clean and maintained in order to enshrine his absence; they had been expecting him to eventually come home again. Yuugi wanted to run right back downstairs and give his mother a hug at the gesture, but not yet.
There, resting on the center of his pillow, was the Millennium Puzzle. It seemed to sparkle at him in greeting. Nearly leaping across the room, Yuugi flung himself onto the bed and his arms around the Puzzle, holding it tight to his chest like it were more a prized stuffed animal than a pyramid of gold.
“Other me! Pharaoh!” he called, his hands jittery as he looped the lanyard over his head, “I’m—”
But what he was, Yuugi couldn’t say, for the sudden weight against his side startled him both into silence and into nearly toppling to the floor. Arms wrapped around him quickly to prevent this latter situation, holding him tightly in place.
“Aibou!” the other Yuugi exclaimed, nearly crushing Yuugi’s ribs with arms that did not hold the strength or physical presence to even swat a fly. Yuugi’s laughter bubbled and flowed from him as though he was its natural geyser, his own arms returning the embrace with equal force, and he nearly sighed in the bliss of the echoing feedback the returned gesture initiated. That Yuugi was even there in the room dispelled all the other Yuugi’s fears of Yuugi’s fate, and the reverse was also true for the fact that the other Yuugi had manifested outside the Puzzle; almost all the dark thoughts and the inner loneliness that had been growing in their absence from one another began to shrivel away.
“I was afraid I’d lost you forever,” whispered the other Yuugi, his grip impossibly holding on tighter, “so afraid that I would never even know if you suffered, if you died—”
“I will always come back to you,” swore Yuugi, his lips sealing the words into the translucent skin of the other’s cheek softly, each word thereafter sealed into a different place, “even if it takes a hundred years, a thousand, anything, always—”
“Next time I will not wait.”
Yuugi’s lips stilled against the other’s neck, a sense of dread slowly creeping across his nerves.
“…what?” he whispered, completely still save for the words, “other me?”
“No.” It was forceful and strong, and Yuugi’s body was turning to ice. “I will not wait for you to come back to me.”
Yuugi didn’t notice how tightly he was clutching the other’s shoulders, did not notice how he was shaking with something other than fear until the other’s hands pulled at Yuugi’s own. He didn’t even notice how very still he was until the other Yuugi was tilting Yuugi’s face up with a series of nudges with his nose and lips. The other Yuugi was smiling.
“I am not patient,” he whispered conspiringly, his lips lightly moving across Yuugi’s; not a kiss, not quite. “And I won’t wait for you to come to me; I will find you first.”
Yuugi released a breath he hadn’t noticed was being held, and the other Yuugi captured the escaping wind and its source. Slipping somehow closer, Yuugi poured his relief and joy into the kiss, adjusting the hold his arms had on the other. He let himself get lost in the intense feeling of warmth and comfort that emanated from every little gesture the other Yuugi made, from the way he would trap one lip, then the other, or how his fingers would tease the short hairs at the juncture of the back of his neck and skull.
“We’ll find each other,” promised Yuugi, his heart aching, “and I’ll never let you go again.”
“Always,” the other murmured into Yuugi’s hairline, “always, always.”
Yuugi pressed his face into the other’s neck, against the translucent collar resting there that mimicked his own, and he wished, wished, wished that they could stay here in Yuugi’s bedroom forever – or at least for the rest of the week – but the voice of Yuugi’s mother was calling up the stairs, that though she knew he was exhausted could he please make an effort to at least say hello to his visiting relatives. It was a voice reminding him of his obligations to the rest of the world, and reluctantly Yuugi forced himself to pull out of the comforting embrace.
They were together again. That was enough.
._._.
Yuugi, mentally and emotionally exhausted of people, vehemently refused being forced to face them yet again, and so instead he pushed the other Yuugi into the forefront and into control of their body. For the first time, Yuugi tried pulling out, manifesting into a ghostly form. It was a trip, to state it mildly. The other Yuugi had to suppress a grin at the jubilant way Yuugi experimentally pushed himself through walls.
Aibou, your friends are going to think you’ve gone insane if they catch me laughing at a wall, the other Yuugi murmured internally, their mental connection stronger now than even just before they had been separated last. They had just re-entered the Game Shop proper, and the other Yuugi was pointedly not focusing his full attention on Yuugi’s up-close and completely useless examinations of the wiring in the walls. Yuugi shrugged.
“All right. I’ll tone it down.” Pulling himself completely out of the wall, Yuugi scanned the room to see who still remained. “You don’t need me to introduce you to anyone, right?” The other Yuugi gave a short nod, approaching Yuugi’s friends when they called for his attention, his smile short and strange on Yuugi’s face. There had been almost no differences between the physical appearances of Yuugi and his other self’s ghostly projection, but even those differences were both apparent and slightly muted when the other wore Yuugi’s skin. Approaching the small cluster, Anzu and Honda standing so close their shoulders nearly brushed, Hanasaki from… Yuugi couldn’t remember what class, but he was lurking halfway in, halfway out of the group, unsure of his welcome; significantly distant from those three stood Yuugi, nervously succumbing to Honda’s goading and beginning to tell a much abridged and highly inaccurate version of how he had come to receive Kaiba’s aid. The more the other Yuugi as Yuugi spoke, though, the more confident he seemed to get, and the more extravagant and exciting the tale, and Yuugi as the ghost didn’t bother to hide his smile. Yuugi liked the idea of his other self being comfortable enough to interact with his friends; maybe, someday, he’d be able to tell them the truth about his other self, and they might have enough of a history to not simply want to have Yuugi committed to a mental hospital. But for now…
“I haven’t seen Grandmother the Titan,” Yuugi said into his own ear when the other Yuugi paused to collect his thoughts, “I’m going to go see if she’s hiding somewhere, all right?”
The other Yuugi bowed Yuugi’s head minutely, smiling. You have good friends, even if they do not yet know it. It will be all right.
Of course, the other Yuugi had spoken too soon: it was not three minutes later, when Yuugi was completely distracted with mortification upon stumbling upon someone in the bathroom and blurting his apologies, only to remember that the other person couldn’t actually see him and then becoming more mortified until he finally managed to make himself leave the room, that Yuugi heard the bewildered voice of his other self calling for help. When Yuugi returned to where he had left his body and his other self in charge of it, Yuugi was met with a very disquieting sight.
Yuugi – the other Yuugi wearing Yuugi’s skin – was rooted to the spot with a very maintained blank expression on his face, as though trying to remain unaffected by the fact that Anzu, who had a good half a foot greater height than he, had her face buried against his neck and her arms thrown about his shoulders as though she were crying. Her body was hunched somewhat awkwardly to manage such, but at least she wasn’t crushing the Puzzle into Yuugi’s ribs.
“What did you do to her?”
Nothing! I am very sure I did nothing! The other Yuugi in Yuugi’s body did not turn to look for Yuugi physically, but when Yuugi touched his left hand to his own body’s limply hanging right, Yuugi’s body relaxed minutely.
“Have you… asked her what she’s doing?”
There was a pause. I… no.
There was another pause. “A-anzu? What a-are you—?”
When Anzu squeezed tighter, the other Yuugi physically grimaced. “It was you, all along,” she said softly, shaking her head against (and presumably wiping her tears on) Yuugi’s dress shirt.
Neither Yuugi had any idea what she was talking about, but the Yuugi that was not being held by Anzu was able to figure out what she meant.
Oh, hell.
Even though he wasn’t interested in her like that anymore, Yuugi still felt the painful stab of rejection, and he buried it poorly under fits of laughter. “Ah, I see,” he said, shaking his head. “Looks like we don’t have to share at all, other me. You can have Anzu, and I can have Kaiba-kun. Everybody wins!”
Not helping, glowered the other Yuugi, trying to find some way to push Anzu away without hurting her. And if Honda–kun assaults us later for this, you’ll be the one living with the bruises.
Turning his attention to where his physical body was looking, the ghost Yuugi saw Honda caught returning from the mostly-depleted buffet table, scarcely five feet away from their little cluster, staring at the other Yuugi and Anzu with mixtures of anger and hurt. Well, thought Yuugi privately, that’s… huh. Unexpected.
“Okay. Um. Okay,” Yuugi stuttered, turning his attention to his other self. “I have an idea. Um. You have to tell her this with a straight face, okay?”
As Yuugi detailed to him the plan, Yuugi didn’t think the other Yuugi would be able to pull it off, not from the way he could see the other Yuugi trying to hide pained laughter behind clenched eyes and pursed lips.
“Anzu,” said the other Yuugi through a tense throat, his voice not all that markedly different from Yuugi’s, “as much as I… er, wish… I could return your, um, affections, my—” —Aibou, I can’t do this. I can’t—
“Sure you can,” said Yuugi in return, giving his body a small affectionate punch to an exposed area of his arm, “unless you would prefer to be dating Anzu, I mean—”
“—my heart belongs to a man no longer bound to flesh,” the other Yuugi said, very quickly and a tad too loudly, with his face burning red as he averted his gaze from everyone. At that proclamation, Anzu shot up and away from Yuugi, her hands tightening in her surprise. Yuugi nearly felt bad for the shocked expression on Anzu’s face, and on Honda’s for that matter, and for the flush of embarrassment on the flesh of his own, but if it had to be done this way—
“I… have to go now,” said the other Yuugi in Yuugi’s skin, carefully removing Anzu’s hands from their body. “Grandpa… you know…”
“Wait a second,” said Anzu in sudden confusion, “I thought you were straight?”
“… love knows no boundaries,” said the other Yuugi in a deadpan after an awkward pause. “And I’m going to go now—”
“Wasn’t Jounouchi-kun straight though?” asked Hanasaki, who’d apparently not left at all but was merely overlooked in the exchange.
“Going now!” exclaimed the other Yuugi, pulling away and looking for somewhere to hide. Yuugi’s combined expression of sympathy and amusement wasn’t helping.
They now think you were in love with Jounouchi-kun, muttered the other Yuugi as he busied himself straightening out the buffet, and I am never interacting with people in your body again.
Yuugi wrapped his insubstantial arms around his former stomach, bending to press his face into the other Yuugi’s upper back.
“It wasn’t so bad,” murmured Yuugi, “and now you don’t have to worry about Anzu stealing me away from you. Or anyone else, for that matter.” Yuugi kissed the skin on the back of his own neck, smiling, and would have continued if not for the sudden squeak of rubber wheels on linoleum tiles. “That’s Grandmother Kameyo!” Yuugi exclaimed, spinning to locate the wheelchair-bound woman. “She came! She’s going to confess to Grandpa! We have to go watch!”
If anyone thought it strange when Yuugi began walking across the shop with his arm extended, as though being dragged, no one commented upon it. Surreptitiously the other Yuugi hid himself behind a cardboard display for the new Buxom Battle BRAwl fighter game, his spiky hair thankfully hidden behind enormous cardboard cleavage. The spirit Yuugi was able to more openly watch the scene. Grandpa was adjusting the cloth coverings on one of the displays where people had been haphazardly placing their used tableware when Grandmother wheeled up to him, leaving several feet of distance between them.
“Excuse me, are you the owner of this shop?” she asked, her voice betraying nothing save curiosity. “I realize the shop is closed, but—”
“Oh, it’s no problem,” said grandfather, “and yes, I’m the owner. Is there anything in particular you needed? I won’t be able to sell you anything today, I’m afraid.”
“No, that’s all right,” she said, waving her hand. “Actually, I need some help with a puzzle I received from you—your shop.” It was then that Kameyo pulled from a large pocket on the back of her chair a non-descript white box that looked more like it should contain a shirt than a puzzle. It rattled as she held it out to Yuugi’s grandfather. “I can’t ever get more than halfway through before I’m stumped.”
Grandpa took the box with a smile, leading Grandmother Kameyo to one of the permanently low-set gaming demonstration tables near the entrance to the stock room, already cleared off due to its previous designation as Location of Plastic Cups and Bottles of Soda.
“Other me, do you think he’ll take the news all right?” Yuugi asked, and the Yuugi in Yuugi’s skin shrugged, turning away from the scene to bid goodbye to some nearby party-goers.
I do not know, aibou, but I do not think this is something we need to watch.
Yuugi nodded. “Mm, you’re probably right,” he said, turning away, leaving his estranged grandparents to their game.
._._.
