Title: Shadow of the Soul
Author: Akanue
Fandom: Yu-Gi-Oh!
Rating: K+
Warning(s): None, really.
Disclaimer: I do not own Yu-Gi-Oh! or its characters. They belong to Kazuki Takahashi, Studio Gallop, TV Tokyo, and other licensors and distributors. This is a not-for-profit fan work.
Author's Note: For TexasDreamer01 for the 2015 Yu-Gi-Oh! It's Time to G-G-G-Gift! Fic Exchange on AO3. Interesting choice asking for something about Mana - don't see much of her in fanfiction. Gave it my all, hope you like!
Shadow of the Soul
Mana always thought she had a pretty firm grip on who she was. But as she lay dying after many long years of serving Pharaoh Set, she found herself not so sure anymore.
The Black Magician Girl was her Spirit Ka, right? Or was she the Ba, the physical body, of the Black Magician Girl?
As the life left her Ba, the vast majority of her soul—the Ib, Ren, and Ka—did indeed go to the afterlife to greet her mentor and close friend. But another part, the Sheut, lived on as a part of the Black Magician Girl. This was not too unusual, she supposed, when she mused on the matter. After all, there were many parts of the soul, and it stood to reason that her Spirit Ka would lay claim to something of her own.
But that meant that Mana was no longer in control. Such a predicament was downright terrifying for her, because magicians were the kind of people who were always in power, always in control. If you weren't, your magic could go awry and even harm people. Something was just… wrong about her being only a fragment in someone else.
The Black Magician Girl was kind, though, so like Mana in so many ways, which only served to add to her confusion about her identity. They were the same person, weren't they?
The Black Magician Girl lived in the Spirit World, and Mana found herself enthralled by that gorgeous world and the other Spirits that lived there. But when the Black Magician Girl was summoned for the first time in over thirty centuries by what appeared to be Atem, she began resenting her fate once more.
She experienced countless duels by Atem's side, even though at times it seemed as though the Pharaoh changed into an awkward teenager. Or maybe the awkward teenager was the one turning into the Pharaoh Atem. At first she thought the boy might only be Atem's reincarnation, until she realized that her childhood friend was there, somehow existing in the shy boy's soul. Mahad was there, too, now the Black Magician. She wondered if a part of Mahad's soul had found its place in the Black Magician, much the same way she was in the Black Magician Girl. That would also make sense—he had, after all, fused his Ba and his Ka. She was never with him long enough to find out, though something in her heart told her that her instinct was correct. That the three of them had been reunited again, in a very odd fashion, after almost three thousand years.
But when Atem was finally able to move on to the afterlife, to join Mahad and the main shards of her own soul, she realized with an icy emptiness that her Sheut, this part of her soul that was tied to the Black Magician Girl, would live on. As a Duel Spirit, as a card, it didn't matter, she didn't even know.
At first she cursed her fate, crying to the Gods, demanding to know why they had bestowed such a fate on her and begging them to let her be her own person again, to move on in the same way Atem did. She didn't know if Mahad felt the same things from within the Black Magician, or even if he was there at all, if she was imagining his presence.
But then she would see all the other Duel Spirits, and how they seemed to look up to the Black Magician Girl, and by extension Mana herself, as their leader. How at times they were lost and afraid, and how her magic always seemed to be able to bring bright light into their world again. Perhaps the price she paid for her magic, an eternal bond with the Black Magician Girl, wasn't so bad after all.
She was Mana. She was the Black Magician Girl. She was both.