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Yuugi likes when things dangle. He likes the weight of silver chains on his clavicle. He keeps lanyards and keychains hooked on his DS case, any bit of gold he’s gifted or finds that can clip on with the rest and fidget in his fingers whenever he likes them to.
Yuugi likes his rice sticky and his soda melon flavored. He likes his loopy droopy little penmanship stroking along the lines of his notebook pages, corners crimped and smudged, more often lolling lazy eyes toward the window than rushing to copy down shorthand before the board eraser can eat the lecture notes away; he’s a senior without entrance exams on the horizon, so there isn’t sense in pushing himself. Not that he ever very much academically sweat. Work handed in on time and bare minimum studying. He’d always left himself on the nook right betwixt Anzu’s straight hundreds and the warning letters stuffed in Jounouchi’s pockets.
His senior year is not much different than the rest of high school, except that his best friend is dead now, but that wasn’t anything he hadn’t already been expecting.
Sometimes Yuugi taps music out on the table as he writes letters and school notes, and sometimes he plays with the gold keychains as if they were friends of his own, and sometimes he does none of it, sometimes can’t bring himself out of bed before one o’clock and refuses to go back til the sun’s already risen, because it’s way too sickeningly quiet up there now and his grandfather isn’t apt to be in the kitchen at three in the morning. So he sits there sometimes. The nightlight in the bathroom offers its best effort to reach him round the corner, and though it isn’t much, he feels its presence there as he sits in the kitchen with his cheek on the cold table, or his hands in his hair, tangled, pretending they aren’t at all his hands or maybe they are his, yes, they’re his hands but someone else is moving them, and he’s only a figment watching his body move on the sidelines. But it isn’t like that anymore. Not like it used to be.
When he isn’t in the kitchen, he’s in his room again, because it’s light enough now to close the curtains over it and pulls himself underneath the bedding. He doesn’t know if he’s asleep or just pretending to be the morning his mother comes in and fights the blankets off of him, and he lays there a while before curling his legs up higher to his chest, comes alive sometime later to find the covers returned and tucked gently around him, smelling kindly of laundry soap and softener.
He spends most of his free time in that state after Atem dies. Then he spends his unfree time that way, too, the strange wrap of lovelessness writhing its way through him as he lays there unawake and unalive and all at once their antitheses. If he were to call himself a color, it wouldn’t be the antique rust of blood red or the interminable pit that black provides, but he feels sort of somewhat...gray, though not pure gray like silver or storm clouds. He feels very sort of offwhite, like someone’s mixed spit into water and he’s meant to drink it. That’s sort of kind of somewhat how he feels after Atem dies.
Jounouchi comes by far more often than he’d like him to. He supposes the best remedy for feeling alone is...togetherness. But he’d rather have some time to think. Time is all he ever needed.
Jounouchi comes by and opens his windows and talks his ear off for hours, the first minutes of which Yuugi will respond in dull murmurs before slowly fading into the world where he’s weightless all over again, the muddle of laying on the boundary between existence and uncertainty; but it isn’t so much like that if he really gets into it, if he truly rolls himself up into his thoughts, sometimes he’s enough power to teleport. These are not sheets beneath his thin growling stomach. He’s stretched out on hot golden sand, and there’s all these little blades of flowers sprouting up around the bed of the water beside him- cool, clear water, so clear, he’s never seen water so clear as to appear without end. But the water here is like that. Cold to the touch where the sand is hot and the air is red and thin. Little sproutings of leaves here and there around the wet earth on the water’s edge. White petals will stroke beneath his hands, feeling their veins with his fingerprints, life to life for one silent second of breathless intimacy there by the water.
Laying on the sand, he feels someone kneel beside him, feels a hand on his back right where his skin is interrupted by the rich white fabric of his robes.
“What are these flowers called again?” he feels his mouth move around, but he’s deaf to his own voice, because it rightfully can’t be his if it’s purring into his ears right back at him to be told, “Nymphaea lotus.”
He glances to him as he’s knelt beside. Perhaps in Yuugi’s mind, he’d never forgotten the name or its depth, but the sound of it smoking off Atem’s mouth right into his head, like a breath, like a bullet, is a record he’ll spin til the ridges blend flat.
Jounouchi comes by a lot. Yuugi appreciates the effort, though when he’s breathing the air of his bedroom again after spending so many hours by the riverbed, he’s kind of very glad to find himself alone here. He wouldn’t care to be coddled by anyone else. Not right now.
Every other time or so, Honda’ll drop in alongside Jounouchi, and the two of them together try their hand at coaxing him up with them somewhere, anywhere, and it’s become so routine within a few weeks that Yuugi must only hear the noise of a question mark off someone’s lips for his answer to be, “I’m fine, I’m really just tired lately. I’ll be okay.”
There’d been a time, only just once, an afternoon where Anzu had been let upstairs to drop off a folder of homework sheets and all the notes she’d taken in her pretty ballpoint pink, that she’d caught him in it, standing over his bed as she lilted out, “I asked you if you know how to find the derivative of a polynomial.”
“Oh,” Yuugi mouths back to her. “Uh, sure.”
“Oh, Yuugi,” he hears her sigh, sees the look in her eyes he swore would be the one thing to never come of this- he’d never let Anzu think he needed her to be strong for him, he’d never let her see him without his guard up to protect the both of them. In blinks, he’s realizing that she’s in his bedroom at all, weeks deep in clothes strewn along the floor and water bottles piling up on the desk. He’ll be sour with whoever let her in later. Right now he’s...a little bit glad he’s got the sense enough to sit up for the first time all day.
He can vaguely recall his alarm that morning. Or, no, that’d had to have been yesterday, because he didn’t set one for today. Not after so many times of having his dreams interrupted.
(Maybe he’d ought to stop having dreams at all, because they’re amazing while he’s in them, passing between worlds where he’s on the Egyptian riverbank or in the temple bedding, or some nights even Atem is here, how is he here?!, but Yuugi will rush to him no matter the nonsense and he’ll finally, finally get to be forgiven. And then the alarm goes off.)
Anzu stands over his bed, and his hands rest on his knees and mentally far up above them. They shake when he moves fingertips to brush the hair from his face. Last he’d checked his bangs were fading blacker again, but perhaps a change of pace would do him good.
“We’ll get through this, don’t forget that," she promises.
Anzu has an unchipped manicure and sun in her voice. Yuugi doesn’t know how she does it, but he’s sure he’s proud of her. His friends will come around, and he’ll see them all up and dressed and lively, and think to himself well what the hell is your excuse? What the hell is your excuse?
They were all just as close to him. Yuugi shouldn’t be so goddamn dramatic, they were all just as close, but he supposes it’s just a little bit harder to move on when he’s the one who killed him.
His gums bleed the first time in six days that he brushes his teeth. He ducks down low with elbows on the sink, frigid, anything, though, to keep his eyes out of the mirror.
Another day, he’s got the mind enough to pull the medicine cabinet open and stand up straight, much better much more ideal, but he’s rather back to hunching when his gaze lingers a little too long on the prescription bottles inside and his mind has wandered so far off the path that the blood is cold by the time he spits into the drain.
Were he any other person, or in any other state of mind, he’d find it insulting that Jounouchi has been stationed in the living room on a Saturday morning when his grandfather’s in the shop and his mother’s gone to clean houses down the street. Were he any other person, he’d go from spitting toothpaste in the sink to standing at the threshold to the living room where he can see Jounouchi on his couch, socked heels on the coffee table, television quiet with some dueling channel and vanilla Coke wet against his lips as he watches it...he’d probably get angry. He’d probably envision his body overtaken and hotter, eyes tipped dark, he’d probably imagine he were a pyromaniac and that dirty dirty blond hair makes a nice wick- but he doesn’t. Jounouchi isn’t here to do him any harm. He’s here to...babysit. Yuugi can tell that by he way he scrambles to change the channel to some innocuous TV movie when he notices the second presence.
“Hey, man,” Jou waves, tipping the frothy top of his soda can away from his mouth. “Uh- your mom invited me over. Been waiting for you to wake up, how’re ya feeling?”
All truths turned over, Yuugi had only left his room because he knew his mother would be out working this morning like she mentioned when she pushed him out to the dinner table last night. Jounouchi looks at him as if he can see right through him down to the nuclei. He looks at him like his shirt is too big or too black (it is), like his eyelids are swollen at the rims (they are), like his throat is dry like his pupils are dull like his socks don’t match like his heart is exhausted (yes).
“Good,” Yuugi says back, and leans into the couch beside him to focus on the shitty TV movie.
After Atem dies, Yuugi feels like he’s strapped to a surgical table. Which is funny. Usually the one who goes under the knife is the one that it kills. But no, Yuugi’s the one tied down, a hundred masked faces of a hundred foreign people all sycophanting over him, and he’s watching them do it, but he can’t quite speak, can’t quite tell them what he needs- my leg is broken, why are you cutting open my chest? Something like that. But he thinks maybe if he got the strength to say it at all that they’d feel so deeply invested in this aortic scaffolding that they’d just keep on with it, so he’d be selfish to intervene. The lights are blinding in his eyes, and he doesn’t understand how no one notices them open in the first place, but it’s kinda sorta a little bit cool to watch his heart beating out loud like this, enough to know it’s actually doing so, enough to keep him quiet and observe the splash of his own blood up these surgeons’ hands he never asked the care of.
Maybe the idea’s his subconscious telling him a hospital is just what he needs. But it’s far too flashy, far too attention-calling and thus a flush of heat to his face at the thought. He isn’t that bad, he’s just depressed, he’s just a little fucking depressed and if he could get some space and time and peace and quiet to be by himself on the hot sand of Aswan with a hand holding his and sun on his skin and lotus blossoms tucked in his hair, well then he’d be all better by now. But he doesn’t get that. Between Jounouchi drinking vanilla Coke on his couch and his mother shoving him into the shower and Honda calling to talk about the pretty girl who’d asked about his school absences and Anzu bringing over another week of homework and a big rich plastic wrapped plate of steak and sticky rice her mother had made for him, well wishes tucked inside every bite, he just hasn’t had the time to visit Atem as often. So sometimes, Atem comes to him.
It’s most often long after dark fills in behind the moon that he feels eyes piercing him through the room. Atem doesn’t talk, but he sure does speak, says everything that’s missing from their lives in the ministrations of hands reaching out, palms cupping faces and fingers through hair. Tangled up together on his cold bedsheets, Yuugi’s wearing a big black t shirt and boxers underneath it, the faint tap of a corded bracelet hitting against his wrist when he moves it. Yuugi’s grasping on for dear life to a dead man in his bed, and he wraps around him like he fits there, like they’re- like they’re, for fuck’s sake, like they’re puzzle pieces, like they’re puzzle pieces, two sides of one coin, however else people had liked to describe the divergence down the center of their shared sequoia trunk. Atem wraps around him and does not talk, and Yuugi can feel the cold sterling metal of his jewelry as he chokes on silent sobs into his chest.
In those times, he does not care how often his eyes flutter and how much the mirage blunders, because that’s just exactly what it is, he knows Atem isn’t in his bed and couldn’t hold him this way even if he were here, but he’d try, he would, and that’s enough to break his throat into coughed up weeps behind a hand as the other scratches at the empty, dusky air.
They’d only once had their separate selves. Yuugi wonders, if he’d lost, if Atem would have kept that form and lived on beside him, or if he’d be folded up and pressed right back into his brain to share limbs the rest of their life. Yuugi doesn’t hate either way. He’d been mesmerized with the time they’d spent together in the real world, not the apparition of his fingers falling through a stiff shoulder, but if he’s very very honest, it’d been hardly different to him than all the times they’d kept close before, two solid forms sharing space in their soul rooms; he’d wander off into Atem’s on occasion, pull back the heavy door and slip inside just to map out which staircase he’d find him on this time. They kept conversation simple in there. They talked, but never had to, not with how starkly each could sense coming feelings as if they were spoken right out. Yuugi sensed the uncertainty in Atem just before an arm lifted up to fit around his waist, something like the first time they’d sat so close or touched so much, subtle a way to ease the stress he’d been mumbling out about whatever life threatening tournament was targeting them that time. They talked and touched like that sometimes, and it never felt wrong and it never felt odd, though if he’s very very honest with himself and all else, sometimes he’d wonder what it might feel like to have his first kiss with the ghost inside his head, but- but that’d make things odd and wrong when they shouldn’t be. Sometimes he thought like that, and sometimes he could swear up and down Atem did, too, but it wasn’t anything meant to be that way. Not with so little time. Not without two bodies to drink the heat of each other.
In Egypt, they have forever. So maybe on occasion he’ll lay in the Pharaoh’s room, sneak past the Priest and his cold lakes of eyes just to settle among Atem in his bed, a wide wood frame of crude construction yet utmost royalty money could offer, he’d lay there with Atem and feel himself be kissed, even if it isn’t what he thinks he wants it’s something.
(The thought gets more sickening the more he chews on it, because he really doesn’t think he’s in love with Atem as anything more than the most ethereal thing to ever happen to him, doesn’t think he’d ought to make love to someone he shares a bloodline with, but for every Gods’ sake he’s yearning for anything he can get his filthy hands on and if his mind wants to make believe that way, sometimes he’s fine to let it roam.)
Anzu suggests writing a letter. Yuugi gets his pencil to say To Atem before the graphite lines are illegible thereon.
He has an inch of a mind to ask Anzu to show what her letters said, to let him read all the ways she’s laid herself out there in writing. He wants to see her shame as he reads where she’s talked all about the evening between the ocean and trees with the dark clouds overtop the moon, her hand laid on his when she told him it’s fine, it’s fine with the regular Yuugi- He wants to see her write that out and strike it out for lies, he wants to read where she said she’d thought it was fine, but that’s all it was, fine, and the afternoon at the museum and the arcade and the card shop was everything she’d been dreaming of- the cool and mysterious Other Yuugi who’d saved her so many times! Regular Yuugi wants to watch her cry as he rips up her stupid letters and tells her he doesn’t need her pity, and that he could write to Atem ten thousand times but it still wouldn’t bring him back so what’s the point, what’s the goddamn point, Anzu?!
But he doesn’t.
In a great, heaving sigh, he doesn’t, feels stomach sick to ever imagine hurting her that way, because no matter how much pain he’s in, he’ll always take more, more if it could be the weight off someone else.
He’d liked Anzu since they were children. Anzu never seemed to change. She kept her hair short since elementary and always had fight left behind those eyes of hers. Blue ones. Blue more than a color. Blue more than words could say.
Anzu doesn’t change. Anzu does everything she can to help him even when he’s reluctant to take it. Anzu gets accepted to Juilliard and forgets the color of his bedroom walls.
Even when she tells him she’s leaving, he doesn’t want her to stay; if she stayed, it would be because of him, and if he’s holding her back from anything she wants to do, he may as well be dead. That wouldn’t feel nearly as godawful. Death wouldn’t feel worse than lots and lots of things he’s thought of lately. But Anzu doesn’t deserve to hear about that, particularly not when she’s only got six months left to pack and plan.
Anzu’s busy. He shifts down the rungs to toy round with spending more time with Honda or Jounouchi, but decides pinning either of them down with the weight of words would do none of them good. Maybe sometime he could give a ring to Mai or Otogi, or track down Nosaka Miho on social media for old time’s sake, or- or maybe- haha! - maybe he’ll go knocking on the ornate marble and mahogany of the Kaiba manor, and maybe the dragon with his name on the deed will answer and maybe Yuugi will go on and throw his arms around him because his eyes are blue, too, and his ego is through the fucking roof and he won’t back off a challenge and he’s got a piece of himself sitting on the sands of the afterlife right now, too, even if he won’t admit it, so maybe he can, uh, communicate back, maybe Yuugi will throw himself at Kaiba who he’s always seen the worth in when no one else would, maybe he’ll let Kaiba Seto gnaw on his throat and break all his ribs and maybe he’ll writhe in its pleasure, and then somehow some way he’ll hear the Priest’s voice tell him everything’s alright.
Or maybe Mokuba would answer the door, and he’d just say hello and move on with his day.
Yuugi manages one online message to Bakura during his time spent sheltered up alone. He asks him if he feels...different now, if he ever wonders where the other end of his finger goes when it dips unto stilled water, but Bakura answers back that it isn’t so bad- such a flashy gold necklace wasn’t really so much his style. Yuugi blinks at the screen. He sits propped there in his seat and floats up into his mind for what could only be decades from there.
Three times do knuckles beat his bedroom door before it throws open in impatience, and it’s another day of nothing changed where he’s sitting up at his desk and the speakers tremble today with bassline. Likely, his mother’s knocked a lot more times underneath that throbbing beat than he’s acknowledged, the dark glare pinched on her face the indicator. Knee bent up against him, he holds an ankle, turns his eyes up toward her without a word, just the softest swing up of his heavy heavy stare that melts the malice right out of hers. The folded towel in her hands drops down on his desk.
“I washed that for you.” Her short nails run idly along the line of her face. “Do you think you could go down and help Grandpa in the shop for a bit, honey?”
“I’m fine, Mama,” he answers back, stare glazed over as it burns her right through.
His mother swallows, just once. A sigh twitches onto her mouth as she’s leaning toward the hall again. Gentle strokes fan his shoulder on her way past.
He tilts the music louder when he hears the door shut. Second knee lifted, he clutches them both against the shuddering heat of his chest, eyes closed, chin bobbing, imagines he’s been gutted and made into music itself; his intestines can be raked thin for guitar strings, and use his flesh to line the drums, and all his teeth can be ripped from the roots to shake round in a little jar for tempo’s sake. He’ll be something beautiful when they’re done with him that way. He could start it himself. He could. It isn’t as if he’s never rolled the temptation around in his hands til it came up muddied.
He could do something stupid and go back to heaven.
“I wish we could go back to heaven,” he mumbles aloud to no one, but maybe Atem is visiting for a moment and maybe if Yuugi had his eyes open he’d see him nodding, see him grinning broad with both thumbs hiked up. Come on, go do it. Come back to me.
But the unsick part of his brain knows that’s nothing like what Atem would say. Atem would kill him all over again if he wound up dead alongside him right now. That could be his fate, though, to die just past seventeen and move on to his next life where the water is so, so breathtakingly clear and the nymphaea lotus grow. This could be his fate. Meeting Atem was a sign from the universe that that’s where he’s meant to be.
The sun sets into night after the music has stopped, dinner waits for him in the microwave, a towel sits folded on his desk. He’s on his back in a big black t shirt and boxer shorts. Arms outstretched, legs sprawled, covers kicked off just over the cusp of a shin. Yuugi watches the ceiling until it watches right back.
“Would that be selfish?” he asks, because he’s been wondering, so he may as well ask, but the dark velvet eyes that stare back at him offer no panacea.
To trade his life here for another. Would they miss him? Would they mind? He’s got friends for the first time in his life. He’s got a mother that worries and a father he last spoke to when he was still missing teeth, and he’s got his grandfather, too, the man who lit this fuse to begin with. Would it be selfish to leave them behind here? Imagining his mother’s screams to find her only son face down is enough to pluck him sitting upright. He wouldn’t want to mess up Anzu’s plans to move, either. Yeah.
The spirit above his bed vanishes. Yuugi swings his feet to the floor, careful to hit the creakless boards all the way to the kitchen. He’ll sit in the wash of the bathroom nightlight. He’ll lay his cheek to the cold reality check of the table.
Or he’ll pause, he’ll fumble with his steps just at the bend of the refrigerator where he spies on hunched shoulders that turn at the noise of his messy entrance.
His grandfather’s eyes are gray beneath the tepid bathroom nightlight. Yuugi hears him begin to speak, unknot his throat in a soft cough, tap a finger on his ceramic glass. “Just a little thirsty.”
He knows he’s supposed to say something, but his legs do the talking to move him forward, timed flawless to his grandfather nudging the cold bottle neck closer to him. The unwarmed sake burns his mouth and scrapes down his throat, and he drinks more than he should but it’s only so simple to pretend he hasn’t seen the finger ushering the wet from his dear fuse lighter’s eyes.
He doesn’t tell Jounouchi about how much he drinks long after his grandfather’s gone to bed, doesn’t tell him about the warm feeling in his stomach or the coherency in his brain as he fell back into bed laughing, rasping, doesn’t tell him much of anything but, “Yes,” when he asks him if he should pack another bowl.
(They’ve smoked together since long before any kind of upset filled the air like this, only now it’s different because it’s a whole lot sweeter in contrast. It isn’t just something stupid to do in his bedroom after school when his mother’s not home, box fan pointed out the window as they gag on a joint back and forth and throw clumsy hands onto Nintendo controllers right after. Now, it’s something really stupid to do in his bedroom when his mother’s not home, gone long enough to break the pipe out and for the second time now begin to fill its blown glass end. Yuugi watches him work. Mindnumbing. Absolutely.)
Yuugi isn’t caught in purgatory when he’s high or drinking or lost. Not that sobriety is something he’s ready to reject. Jounouchi says Honda says Otogi says he knows a guy who can get them really good edibles. Not entirely.
After two bowls, they’re in the kitchen together, his kitchen, and the only good idea he’s ever heard in his life is crackers and Spam. Jounouchi laughs.
“We gotta do this more often now,” he says. “I haven’t seen you eat like this in weeks.”
His mouth is full when he nods back. The curl to his finger offers the box of crackers toward Jounouchi’s hungered paws, both equal their grasps on it when both, equal, their panicked gazes flit to the color of the kitchen entry.
“Yuugi?”
The door to the kitchen enters up from the shop through a narrow set of stairs tenfold his age. He sees the way she pulls at her dress behind her as she’s popping her pretty face inside and wondering, “Yuugi?” all the way to finding him there leant against the kitchen counter, and she straightens herself with a shutting of the door behind her.
“Your grandpa let me up, I just wanted to come check on you. You’re awake, wow.”
She’s smiling until Jounouchi is, too, wheezing on a mouthful of crackers in his bend forward. “Shit, Anzu, you scared the hell outta me. I thought it was Mom coming home about to bruise me up with a ladle again.”
“What are you ever talking about?” Anzu scoffs, stepping past him to glance Yuugi over and up again. She might still be thinking what remarkable progress it is, or she might be thinking he really needs to rebleach his bangs soon, or his thighs don’t really touch anymore when he stands up straight but he’d just tell her that’s because he hasn’t felt hunger in weeks but Grandpa said the steak was pretty good. Yuugi thinks most of all Anzu must be homing in her gaze on his own, thinned and corner swollen, vasodilation all on their insides rimming them a subtle pink. Anzu frowns just a second long. Then she’s laughing.
“Well...as long as you’re feeling better, I guess.” Her scowl returns as Jounouchi pushes the cracker box toward her face, declined by a hand before she’s turning away from his grinning to catch Yuugi by the elbow. “I wanted to talk to you about something, can you come with me for a second?”
“Leaving me out of the conversation? Damn, what am I, Honda?” Jounouchi guffaws.
Round the bend of the kitchen, the bathroom door closes softly behind her back, he the sheep herded first in and glancing sickly around. The nightlight isn’t on this morning. When he looks away too quickly from it, the wall shifts in a funny sort of way, but he doesn’t quite laugh.
“I just wanted to…” Anzu says, and she’d probably started with something else but Yuugi’s just tuning in now when she moves enough to catch his attention, wearing a white sundress with yellow plaid all down it and chunky white sandals, and Yuugi recalls, huh, oh yeah, it’s got to be summer break by now, she hasn’t brought him homework to add to the untouched desk drawer in a while and she’s breathtakingly radiant as if she’s only ever been in summer all her life; oh yeah, it’s summer by now, Jounouchi had said something about coming around way more often now, and Yuugi had thought great okay yeah just bring more pot.
“I just wanted to give you this,” Anzu says, hand pulled up from the pocket of her dress (yes oh yes, he remembers this dress when she’d bought it and worn it on the first warm Sunday in spring, he’d said he liked it and his throat blushed all carmine to watch her grin and stuff her hands into the slots at each hip and proclaim, “Thanks! It has pockets!”). Hand, her hand, it’s warm and cream soft as it looks when it cups his own to lift it, and into his palm she places the offering. He blinks it over as she’s talking. “I just thought it might make you feel a little better to have, like, a momento. You can wear it, or put it on your game case, or something.” Delicate fingers tip a strand of brown hair back behind one ear. “I thought it might be easier to have something physical to remember him by… And maybe remember me by, when I move.”
She’d even put it on a silver chain. The flat triangle of fake gold isn’t anything to marvel at were he any other person in any other life, but in this one he holds it up between them by that silver chain and watches it metronome in the silent air, a little flat triangle of fake gold mesmerizing his focus back and forth, a lullaby, a love story.
“Thank you,” he murmurs. Anzu, in the blurry vision of herself behind the pendulum, seems to smile.
He’s seventeen when he shuts his eyes that night, and behind them becomes himself at fifteen again, a messy hot summer week off fifteen, at the park, a midday morning that’s sinking with evening orange sun. There’s a fence, and he can feel it’s cold cold metal racking through the scald of his body when he reaches out to touch a hand on the rings, and there is no breeze, none that can be felt on this side of the metal fence whereon the second side he can see her stand so close to him as to feel her fingers, too, her finger that reaches to curl through his among the metal, and through the chain link fence of his dreams that night, Anzu kisses him, mouths soft and begging, and at seventeen he wakes up sore between the breasts, and at seventeen, he’s nothing he ever imagined he would be when he was younger, not this skinny not this sleepless, not this sick and tattered.
It’s wrong this way. He doesn’t want Anzu or the park or the fence. He wants- He wants- He wants to feel complete again, not half, whole.
The nightlight is on now. It hits up against him in a way that rewrites his features in the bathroom mirror, a reflection he looks at as he flexes his wrist in it. Two wrists performing the same dance. When he reaches forward, muscles trembling, his fingertip meets the mirror the same time the reflection’s does, forming again one self connected by one pulse against the glass. He sees his own face in the mirror, but he knows behind it there’s someone else, if he could just get to him, just get to him! Just break the glass and fall into the life behind it, or maybe if it isn’t true he could watch the mirror shatter around him and feel his bare feet grinding it into the tile. Oh, it’d be heaven, the sensation of a thousand knives (how’s that one, Mahaado) prodding their tips into his feet, and he lets them sink in as well as they wish as he’ll be too busy ripping the medicine cabinet door off its hinges, rifling past his grandfather’s old shaving razor and pain pills for his back to scratch the first centimeter of the wallpaper away, because he knows it’s there if he just keeps digging. What a divinity, yes, he’ll gouge his fingers til the bones stick out the ends but he’ll finally be there, knee deep in the water, waiting for his loyalty; his feet do not track blood prints but rather burn with the feel of the ground all the way to stepping into the river, always cool no matter the heat outside it. He stands there in water so clear he could paint brand new mirrors out of it. And off the shoreline, where ferns and grass build themselves high, he lays a hand above his eyes to shield them from the thick red sunlight, and when he sees Atem, he smiles.
Atem never hides his face from the sun. He’s far more reverent, and he’s far more built to be here. His skin is gold and his jewelry golder still. He steps through the wet earth around the riverbed to come toward him, lost way far off where sand meets soil and even more greenery thrives, ivy spiraling up banisters and trees of fruit he’s scarcely ever heard of, but he knows what an orange is when Atem, forming ripples now in the water beside him, holds it out.
“You pick your own fruit?” Yuugi teases, and Atem pushes the orange into his hands and tells him, “I pick fruit for you. Try it.”
“I’ve eaten an orange before,” he mumbles, drags his eyes down to where he holds it softly in both hands, over his fingers coming two broad brown hands to hold it alongside.
“Not like this,” Atem says, and he’s still holding his hands as he lifts to poke a thumbnail into the fruit’s forgiving flesh, thumb pushing so far in it comes up wet with the peel falling away. He pulls the rind off to leave just enough room for one bite. Hands push his own up to feel the orange on his lips, standing in the cool clear water in the hot Egyptian summer, sunlight flickering in ultraviolet pulses off of Atem’s warmed, bare shoulders, where the orange trees grow and the fruit’s never out of season. Yuugi bites into it and returns a mouthful of juice, teeth breaking the tough surface before everything is soft, the slice of orange very practically melting to become one being with his mouth. His wrists run with the wet of the juice. He swallows, and, yes, Atem’s always right, he hasn’t ever had an orange like this, an Egyptian summer orange picked off the branch by the Pharaoh himself, just for him, everything for him. Rawly stings the citrus when it finds its way into his bleeding gums.
“Is it good?” the Pharaoh asks him, but he catches himself and laughs the softest notch into his teeth. “Of course, it is good. Do you like it, partner?”
Yuugi’s hands are shaking, but he keeps the orange tightly clutched. Juice drips its way off his elbows to cloud the water around their shins in plinks.
“Do you grow melon here?” he whispers, hardly blinking until Atem’s got a grip on both his wrists, palms flat to their throbbing pulse points, a shield a wish a want as he holds him there.
“For you, I’ll grow anything.”
His eyes refuse to focus on Atem there. Their bodies smolder pleasantly in the heat. Atem thrives in sun like this.
When Yuugi reaches out for him, orange a long gone memory, his hands stick to his skin that’s so pleasantly warmed, toned arms underneath his hands when he reaches out and grips Atem as if this weren’t forever.
“I need to tell you I’m sorry,” Yuugi breathes out. “I’m sorry. I didn’t get to say it before. I need you to forgive me for all I’ve done. Please. Please, forgive me.”
And then his eyes do focus, a subtle murmur of Pharaoh Atem’s ageless smile before he’s staring directly back at his own eyes, bent forward, hands gripping so white the sharp edges of the mirror they burn. Blood lolls from a cut across his hand all the way down his arm, into the sink basin, plink, plink.
Honda doesn’t say much concerning the bandage wrapped around his right hand a day or two later (“Ya okay? Paper cut from dueling too hard?”). Yuugi doesn’t say much, either, about his odd or quiet presence at the front kitchen door, an hour before noontime where his mother had chided him awake to tell him he’s got a guest waiting. Gone around elsewhere, the two of them are alone in the kitchen until Yuugi offers him come in, and then they’re alone in his little attic bedroom which Yuugi might in a better state of mind burn a hot red to know; Honda doesn’t act like he minds traipsing round inside out socks and mostly used boxers to find his way to sitting at the desk, where he ignores the water bottles and the mug of whole milk that doesn’t stink yet but is still a force to be reckoned with.
“Otogi told me to tell you hi,” Honda says, shoulders broad and legs spread strong. Yuugi doesn’t quite yet sit despite the space to on his unmade bed. He just...stands. His throat is slick with sleep when he swallows. Honda flicks a shrug to the air. “I told him to tell you himself. He has your number. But I’ll bet he didn’t.”
“It’s okay,” Yuugi says, and it is, and he feels just a little awkward when he watches him glance along the stack of game cases beside the speakers, knowing he’s searching for something to talk about, because Honda isn’t Jounouchi who can talk his way out of or into anything at all; Honda isn’t Anzu, either, Anzu who gets to the point she knows is there, Anzu who writes letters, Anzu who gives momentos. He isn’t that nor is he Jounouchi and the new smell of cigarettes clinging to his coat or the offhand mentions of wanting a tattoo all the sudden. Honda’s a neutral middleman.
“Oh, that’s right,” the middleman says. “I thought of something I wanted to tell you, Yuugi, maybe you’ll remember it.”
The time we were all in my backyard, Honda’s voice says inside Yuugi’s mind, the time we were all in my backyard, and Jounouchi started climbing the big tree the hammock was hooked to. Yes, that time, if he could see it clearly, it’d be blinded by the last lingering reflections of the late afternoon sun. Jounouchi scuffed his sneakers on the bark all the way to straddling a wideset branch, and he looked down on the rest of them like a Lord to serfs. Anzu told him he was gonna fall and break his neck, and he tried to get her to climb up there instead so he could look up her skirt. Dumbass. The rope of the hammock as it idly rocked, the feeling of it curling through his hands as a high school first year with Anzu and Honda crammed on either side of him. It’d been all four of them at first, til Honda said it’d snap right down if somebody didn’t get their ass off, and that’d prompted Jounouchi to leap his way up the evergreen and sit overtop them. Pressure on the ropes lifted. Yuugi looked high up into the sunlight on Jounouchi’s grinning face, taken almost to smirking himself until the branch writhed underneath the weight of motion, and Jounouchi’s palms were stained dark from moss and dirty bark as he swung there, gripping the branch in both hands and weight falling into dangling legs. Gotta admit, he’s got some good upper body strength. It’d stuck to Yuugi as nothing but dangerous, inching forward on the hammock til his own feet met the dirt just to watch, precarious, watch his arms begin to tremble, watch the stretch of skin on his tummy from where his t shirt lifted; innocent, then, yes, and that’s when Honda knelt himself up among the wobbling ropes to reach and tug his jeans right down to his ankles. Might’ve been the funniest thing they’d ever seen if he’d been prepared for it. I swear to God, I almost had a stroke from laughing so hard. Blankey was barking her head off, but I mean, if I saw a naked guy in a tree, I’d probably bark, too. In the sunlight, Jounouchi gagged, pulled his legs up to his chest to play modest as his face smoldered a dark flush from the exertion, the exposure, the breathless hollering of threats down to the ground. Yuugi remembers the feeling of his heart blundering as he watched the first finger slip from the branch, and he remembers blinking however long later to the dark ceiling of his bedroom, eyes milky wide, blanket clutched. You jumped off the hammock so fast, me and Anzu fell on our asses, but Jounouchi probably owes you his life for catching him like that. You were pretty strong, too.
“My sister reminded me of that today, when I said I was gonna go visit you,” Honda says to his face this time, still sitting at his desk, still a body with parts and pieces and a heart of solid sapphire. “She was like, tell him about the time I saw Jounouchi’s bare ass through the kitchen window. It’ll make him laugh.”
Yuugi holds a hand on its opposite arm, clings to it loosely as he stands there, a sleepy sort of smile on his face. If he could just take that memory and pluck himself out, a little pinch of tweezers on his coat, to take that memory and every other one and replace himself with who deserves to be there most, he might laugh louder. Harder. But he doesn’t.
“Oh, crap, speaking of my sister, she’s gonna be pissed at me,” he says. It’s a clear cut through the clouded atmosphere taking up his brain. “I was supposed to bring you the oranges my mom got for you. Sorry.”
Standing there, Yuugi takes the thought in like a rush, like a knife poked into one ear and the handle smacked in. He does not bend the way his body wants to, rather he’s falling, socks on the carpet that’s littered in life, a push forward to stagger over and grip Honda by the sides of his coat, head tucked forward all the way to brushing his chest, and there, a compressed fold of himself, he weeps.
Honda doesn’t seem to mind. Honda doesn’t seem to think anything as he brings one hand to his shoulder where it quavers most, and pats.
“Do you know what it feels like to have your heart split in half?” he asks Jounouchi the following day, and Jounouchi Katsuya, golden and chiseled and smelling of smoke, tells him back, “Yeah,” and Yuugi doesn’t think for a moment that he’s wrong.
When summer reaches its hottest peak, he’s alone on his bed, sprawled out, air still heavy despite the mask of coolness nighttime wears; the box fan rattles on the window sill, bothering the tips of his hair in even intervals. Flat to his back, he fingers fake gold, silver chain warmed by hours of his body thrumming against it, staring up to the ceiling with fake gold in his hand.
He knows he’s awake, outside his mind, breathing in the hot air and living in this timeline, where he ought to, where it’s best for him, less often sunlight to squint in. That’s right. The water isn’t nearly as clear here but he doesn’t need it to be. He still knows its touch, when it burns him through the showerhead, when he's watching it rain the heat away just on the border of night. It'll never be gone. Not forever.
The first time he thinks it might just be okay, he feels the clamp of fingers release him at the base of the throat, the dam they’d been clenching onto so long. He feels the choking hand release and he feels the film peeled off his eyeballs, a burning yank, and he feels his joints pop back into place, shoulders first, elbows next, hips and knees and every finger, all coming back together to form this body he owns now, and he feels his lungs meet again one another like a reunion, a jagged breath in as the both of them resync, he feels everything fall back into place and he thinks he just might even feel his heart begin to beat again.
Through the dusky air, he does not watch himself move but feels it instead. Through the dusky summer air he picks himself up and feels every last sensation of blankets and carpet and heat tapping his nerves all the way to the window. Metal feels his hand to push the fan aside. There’s just enough room for him at that window when he kneels and leans out of it, the night an elixir through every breath. Maybe he’ll come back from it with wings, maybe he’ll be immortal. Maybe he’ll be something he can finally face and hold and promise tomorrow will be easier.
“Hi, Pharaoh,” says Yuugi at the window, gold dangling off his chest, one final sigh as he leans his body there and stares up at the hot white flesh of the moon that’s never too far away to touch. “Can I talk to you?”