Title: Waiting
Author: drummerdancer
Timeline: Mid-Series
Characters/Pairings: Téa, Yami Yugi, slight one-sided Revolutionshipping
Word Count: 661
Rating: K+
Summary: He's always so cool, so calm, so put together. Téa just doesn't understand it.


He's always so cool, so calm, so put together. A vase without any bumps or cracks, any places to cram just a little bit of herself into. No lines, just smooth skin, a cool face. No emotion, just a mask of one.

She didn't even know his name—The Pharaoh was a title, a birth right, a gift bestowed upon his shoulders at conception. It wasn't his name much like student or dancer wasn't hers. Just a label to describe the person, not define them. Yet he, The Pharaoh, was inexplicably bound to his title, his history, his legacy. He couldn't escape from it or start over; he would always 'be' The Pharaoh, no matter what his spirit did in this life with them.

She couldn't imagine not being able to escape from it, the kind of responsibility he had. On days when school was just a little too much for her, all's she had to do was count down to release time and then she was clear, willing and able to hang out with her friends and be open to the world…a free spirit, in essence.

While he was trapped, a caged spirit stuck inside the Millennium Puzzle, only allowed to come out when Yugi needed him, never for his own leisure or pleasure.

Sometimes, it made her mad—mad at Yugi for being so thoughtless. How dare he never let The Pharaoh out except in times of danger? He was a person with needs, too!

She even made the mistake of telling him how she felt about it, about Yugi's selfishness over his time outside the puzzle, about how he should be able to go school and parties just like the rest of them, lead a normal life.

His eyes had fallen at that, and too late, she realized she hit a nerve. His eyes were dark as he looked away, one hand stuffed into a pocket while the other rested on the Millennium Puzzle, gripping it tightly.

"My life with the living is done," he said. "My only job now is to protect Yugi."

He proceeded to close his eyes and switch back, silencing any argument that was to come from her.

But that wasn't…that wasn't fair. How could he say his life was finished when their's was just beginning? He'd barely lived before being trapped in the puzzle; didn't he want to live, to be their friend, to be human just like the rest of them?

It was something she just couldn't understand no matter how long she laid awake thinking about it. For a sixteen-year-old girl, death was something she hadn't come to terms with yet. It wasn't something she liked to think about, let alone talk about—yet he had all but come out and said he considered himself dead.

Dead. A rotting corpse in a tomb in Egypt.

He was so completely dead that he wasn't even rotting anymore; he hadn't had his own body in over three thousand years.

Téa curled up on her side, the pale moonlight painting her blue bedsheets grey. She wasn't cool; she was an open-book. She cried when she fell down, laughed when her friends made her smile. Cheered for Yugi and Joey and him when they won duels and offered a hand when they were in trouble.

She didn't have a part in the universe like he did. Her job wasn't to save the world or even to play a simple card game—she was to stay on the sidelines and wait, wait for him to save them all, wait for him to retreat back into the puzzle when the going was good, wait for him to appear again, waiting waiting waiting.

Wait for him to live a life he thought wasn't his to live.

Waiting.

Cruelly, Téa secretly wanted the vase to smash, if only so she could be there to help him put it back together—cracks, bumps, and all.