Title: The Path to Enlightenment
Author: Dragondream08 (a.k.a. Master of Slanted Edges)
Rating: G
Pairing: Hinted Yami x Yugi
Word Count: 763
Disclaimer: None of the characters are mine.
Comments: My love for Yu-Gi-Oh! is pathetically everlasting. Seriously – it's the one obsession I seem incapable of growing out of. I love Yugi and Yami too much to let them go!
Start.
Yugi remembers what it felt like to be in his mother's womb. He remembers the constant warmth and promise of safety; the feeling of being so close to someone that there is no end between one soul and another – the unwritten and unspoken "I love you" that was part of his very being.
He remembers never wanting to leave that place. He's never told anyone – Yugi alone knows why he was born so late. Not prematurely as so many might assume from his small size, but a strange three weeks after his mother's due date. The doctors had feared that he had died in her womb and that he was stuck in limbo, never to be born. They couldn't have been farther from the truth.
But eventually, he'd had to relent. When he finally slipped away from his mother, he wailed – loudly, ever so loudly, because there was now an emptiness in him. The warmth was gone, as was the feeling of safety. He didn't like this new world.
He spent his years growing up with a constant sense of being lost, like something in him was missing. He looked for it – looked for it for years, first in other people (it soon became clear that everyone around him was more keen on looking down him than anything else) and then in himself, but the missing piece was nowhere to be found.
Then his grandpa showed him a golden puzzle box, and Yugi felt – just for an instant – his missing piece flickering solemnly in it. Some people might call the millennium items Pandora's boxes, but Yugi knows better. They bring luck – both bad and good.
Eight years of his life were spent obsessively fidgeting with the puzzle pieces, holding them in his tiny, clumsy fingers and desperately trying to fit them together.
On the night that he finally got everything in place, Yugi felt warmth and safety again – just for a flash of a second, but it was enough to make him smile. Never mind that he couldn't remember what happened after he completed the puzzle; never mind that the bane of his existence, Ushio – the school bully – was found in the schoolyard the next day, insane and swimming in a pile of rotting leaves. He'd felt his missing piece and that was enough for him.
And he kept feeling that strange safety for weeks after. It came in flashes and spikes, and he usually blacked out after he felt it.
It kept happening like that, and it started to worry Yugi. The blackouts weren't normal, nor were the strange series of events trailing his heels; an exploded student, a conflagrated convict, and an electrocuted street gang – all people that he'd recently come in contact with and who had hurt him in some way or another.
One night, Yugi sat down at his desk and held his puzzle before him. He stared at it, and, though an ember of love smoked in him when he looked into the golden eye, he asked warily, "What are you?"
After a pause, a strange wave of emotion undulated through him – twisting in stomach, like the feeling he got when he was on a rollercoaster and it was rocketing down in a vertical line – and he heard a faint hum, like someone was trying to talk to him but they were too far away and they were blocked by something large and thick. It felt like he'd almost found the other half of his soul.
Yugi kept trying: over and over, he sat down and looked into the puzzle's eye. And slowly, ever so slowly, those hums clarified – into a smooth baritone that spoke solemnly and precisely, like a soulful caress.
That feeling of safety and comfort, of finding the missing piece, grew stronger and more constant the longer he interacted with (what he presumed was) the voice of his puzzle.
The first time he fell into his soul room and discovered the dark door across the hallway, he was greeted by a taller, older version of himself – one with red eyes, sharper angles, and a recognizable baritone.
"My partner," the person said, "it's so good to finally see you."
Yugi couldn't control his body; he threw his arms around this strange being's shoulders and held him close. After a confused moment, the being brought his arms around Yugi's waist and pulled him against his body – so tightly that it was like he was trying to pull Yugi into him.
Held like that, Yugi felt, for the first time since he'd been born, like he was whole.
End.