"Do you believe that I'm a god?"
A wispy spirit leaned against the bedroom wall. Well, leaned as much as an incorporeal being could. Jounouchi still couldn't believe how much the spirit looked like him. Except for the shock of red hair, but Jou supposed that all Yamis looked a little different than their Hikaris.
"I… believe that you're a spirit that possesses this," Jou said, carefully choosing his words. Yamis had tempers. He motioned the gleaming gold item that was called the Millenium Scales standing proudly on his night table.
A month ago—wait no. About three weeks ago, he had dueled against Shadi, the mysterious holder of the Millenium Ankh. It had been strange to wake up one morning to find a turban-wearing freak with pupil-less blue eyes hovering over him. Pupil-less eyes meant trouble, as Yami Malik had proven. Mai…
Shadi introduced himself and proposed a duel. If Jou won, he'd get the Millenium Scales. If Shadi won, then he would get Jounouchi's soul. He jumped at the chance. Jou won, surprisingly easy. He now suspected that Shadi had just wanted to unload the moody spirit.
The only time he had felt more elated was paying for his sister's operation. Now he stood a chance against all the Millenium Item wielding psychos that want to steal Yugi's Millenium Puzzle and take over/destroy the world.
"Quit avoiding, yadonushi."
Jou sighed. The spirit always said the word so… well, it was exactly how Yami Bakura said it. Jou knew why the two preferred this word as to any other Japanese term. Yadonushi, it meant landlord, innkeeper, and host, like for a parasite. A host for the parasites of the Ring and Scales.
"I believe… that you believe you are."
The spirit frowned, clearly annoyed. He straightened up, and stepping over the shards of a broken lamp, he walked over to Jou's bed. He then sat down beside him, not even making a slight dent in the mattress. Spirits didn't weigh anything, he reminded himself. It was so odd. How could Yugi stand it?
"Shall I go over it again?" the spirit asked. Ripples of anger distorted his voice.
"If you'd like to. Just this time, try not to destroy any more of my stuff. I'm not made of money, you know."
"Obviously."
Jou waited, rather then reply. If he did, he might do something stupid like snap some ill comment back. That wouldn't go over well.
His Yami's eyes glazed over, like Jounouchi had seen Yugi's do so many times. Did his Yami have a Yami? Were they back there, conversing? Telling the spirit what to say and what to do. Maybe even forbidding him to speak, or goading him on. Like the spirit himself had taken to doing. Jou could fight, he knew he could win, but what was the point? More lamps would be broken, or maybe their skull and they'd both die. Better just to humor him.
"I am Set."
The spirit's eyes snapped into focus. They glared into Jou's eyes, silently daring him to disagree.
"The Egyptian God of Evil, right?"
By now, he knew at least this much.
"Yes. I set the example. I made all people fear the red-haired."
Right… And that's why the Scots were ruled terribly by the English for several centuries.
"Long ago, in ancient times, thousands of years before anyone ever thought to make the Millenium Items. When there were two great countries bordering the Nile, not one."
A time when nothing survived to modern times.
"I lived in the palace of Upper Egypt, with my brother Osiris and his wife and son. Osiris ruled, and if little Horus wasn't old enough to rule when he died, then I was to take his place.
"I was much more worthy than that little brat. I was cunning, intelligent—no, more than intelligent enough to rule Upper Egypt. I was strong too. Ten fold the strength your mortal little body could ever have. I was the one to protect Ra from the serpent Apep, the one who couldn't be killed. He thanked me with a gift, a soul monster that wasn't really a soul monster but could be used like one. The Winged Guardian of Ra."
"Right…"
He didn't believe it. Every time he told the story, his Yami claimed he was the reason the Egyptian God Monster existed. Usually, the spirit would get mad at such a disbelieving comment, but he was too far gone into the story.
"But ruling just one little country didn't really suit us, though many would've given their right hands for it. My brother had a great plan. To unify Upper Egypt with Lower Egypt, and create an uber-Egypt."
Jou shifted. He wondered if he could get to the kitchen, brew some coffee, drink it, and be back before his spirit knew he was gone.
"He embarked with an army of thousands to Lower Egypt, leaving me in charge. And I liked it. I loved it. I… Are there any stronger words than love? Well, if there is, I felt it. The people loved me for I was a great ruler."
"Then why'd they make you a god of evil?"
Jou always wondered. He wondered if the spirit would admit to being a crummy ruler, or if he would try to pin it on Horus. Before the spirit even said it, Jou knew the response.
"Because."
Same as always.
"My brother won, of course. Took a bit longer than we hoped, but he still won. And why not? He had Slifer the Sky Dragon as his soul monster."
"The Saint Dragon of Osiris."
The other name for the card. He never really thought about it before. Maybe there could be truth behind his spirit's story.
"What about Osiris?"
Jou's Yami dissipated, preferring to retreat to his soul room rather than face the Pharaoh. Or, as his spirit preferred to call him, 'the mortal fool who shouldn't have been able to survive infancy much less become ruler of his great and powerful Egypt'. Or sometimes just 'the reason Egypt fell'.
"Oh, nothing. Just my Yami trying to convince me he's a god."
"The door was unlocked…"
"Hey, you know you're always welcome to come in and interrupt him."
"Thanks, I think."
"So what brings you here?" Jou asked as Yugi settled on the chair at his desk.
"We were going to meet up with the gang," Yugi said. "Go to the arcade."
"Have you win every game, and get beat up and have your Puzzle stolen."
"But you'll help me out, right Jou? Like last time."
"Always, Yug."
Jou set his Scales in his backpack, to take them along. His Yami hated it when he forgot to take them with him. He guess he could understand. It would be like being locked away in a closet.
Jou lied back on his bed. The apartment was dark, well except for the blazing light from the nearby lampposts and neon signs. His apartment sucked, he thought. At least in the bedroom he had thick dark curtains to block out most of the light.
The Spirit of the Scales appeared, looming over the bed. Jou groaned. He wanted to sleep, but his Yami had other ideas. The spirit smacked him, but being a spirit, his hand went straight through Jou's head.
Gracefully, and looking unperturbed at the lack of punishment, the spirit sat on the chair that Yugi had earlier occupied.
"We unified Egypt. It should've been a time of great rejoice, but I was worried. The way things were going, Horus would become the next Pharaoh. Horus was a stupid little boy who wouldn't figure out how to put the crown on, never mind run a whole country! But Osiris wouldn't budge in his decision.
"He told me that I had been the same when I was Horus' age. All… bugger headed."
Jou snickered. Yami Bakura had said the same thing that day, but about the Pharaoh. Any other day and Yami would've retaliated. Maybe he didn't today because he had just finished whopping Yami Bakura's butt on the twenty-third game that Yami Bakura had challenged him to.
"Of course I didn't believe him. Osiris loved that boy too much. He'd never admit that Horus was feeble minded. I had to do something, for the sake of Egypt!"
Huh, that was something the other Yamis (save for the Pharaoh) wouldn't say. Doing evil deeds for the good of their country.
"I didn't want to. He was my older brother. I loved him… But I had to. I set up a banquet, kind of private with the highest ranked men in Upper Egypt, to celebrate my brother's success. For a game prize, I had the finest carpenters in Egypt to construct a wooden chest. It was a beautiful coffer. It's ornaments were so complex and beautiful, it put the skies to shame."
The spirit sighed contentedly. Was he thinking of the chest? Or what he would do with it?
"The game was this: the person who fit in the chest the best would win it. Each guest had to lie down in it. But at Osiris' turn… We slammed down the lid and nailed it shut. He screamed and screamed, begging, threatening…."
The spirit had a look on his face, indescribable. Was the spirit perhaps sad about what he did to his brother? Or was he relishing in the pain and suffering he had caused?
"And then you dumped his body in the Nile."
"Right. It wouldn't have been very productive to leave it where anyone could find it, would it?"
"I guess not."
"Aset was devastated. That's Osiris' wife. She really did love him, you see. She didn't marry him for his royal blood or for his money or rank. Not because of any arranged marriage. They met and fell in love. I don't remember how, I was quite little then.
"She couldn't even bear to watch my coronation. Which was… all right, I guess. She was there for when I married Nephthys, her most beautiful sister. Any Pharaoh worth his weight had a wife."
The spirit always said that. A hidden slur against Yami, the unwed child Pharaoh.
"They were rather like a Yami and Hikari, as you Japanese call it. Nephthys was the night to Aset's day. The darkness to the light. Death to life. But…"
But? The spirit never had a 'but' there. Jou waited, eager.
"I'll always think of Aset as the better. She was like a sister to me. I knew her for… forever. I had only met Nephthys a while before our marriage. It… our marriage… meant nothing. It was not for love or anything so sweet. It was merely what was expected of us."
Whatever feeling he might have had disappeared as he talked about his marriage.
"One of my associates from the banquet happened to worship Aset. I should've been… more careful. He felt that he would get into Aset's good graces if he revealed what had happened, the idiot.
"Before I could even caught wind of this betrayal, she had fled the palace to find her departed husband. And Nephthys."
The spirit sounded bitter.
"Nephthys went with her. Although she had taken vows to always serve me, to… to… Bitch!"
Jou's set of schoolbooks fell to the ground in a messy heap, loose pages floating around the room. He wondered how an incorporeal being could throw his things around. Maybe it had to do with his emotions… Things were destroyed only when he got this way. Like with TV ghosts.
"It was a decade long search. Aset had forbid anyone to tell me where they went, what they were doing. But even with that restriction to my disadvantage, I still found the coffin first. See, blood knows blood."
Jou threw caution to the wind.
"Family knows family. Only a blood relative could find him, blah, blah, blah."
"Yadonushi!"
"Sorry, continue."
"If that's all right with you."
"Parasite."
"What?"
"Nothing."
"Fine. As much as I hate to do it, I dismembered my dear—"
"Sure you did."
"Yadonushi."
"I'm sure you were all shook up about it."
"Yadonushi."
"…"
"I dismembered my dear brother's body and spread them throughout the land. I had to. Aset held powerful Magics, powerful enough to raise the dead. She knew Ra's real name."
"Oh! I know Ra's real name!"
"Really, yadonushi?"
"Yeah."
"Then what is it then?"
"It's Ra."
"Idiot. If that was his real name, then why would he tell anyone that? Why would we know?"
"So that we can call him by his name?"
"Idiot, do you know anything practical at all? A name has power. That's why everything has one. And a person who knows a person or thing's real name has control over it. So Aset had control over Ra, could tell him to do whatever she wanted."
"I see. So, she could tell Ra to bring Osiris back to life?"
"Exactly. So I scattered his parts all over the world. Mind you, the world was only big enough to fit Egypt back then. Then wasn't any such thing as Rome and Japan and whatever. It grew."
Ignoring the spirit's rather ignorant comment Jou chose another question.
"If Aset could control Ra, then why didn't she ask him where the body pieces are?"
The spirit thought for a few minutes. Apparently, no one had ever asked him that.
"Remember that… what do you call it, TV show? Uh, The Simpsons?"
"Yeah."
Jou remembered the first time the spirit has seen that particular show. It was the first time the spirit had seen any show or a television set. His eyes were practically popping out their sockets, and his forehead was practically glued to the screen. Well, after Jou reassured him that it wasn't some sort of dangerous beast that needed immediate destruction. The glued to the screen thing would have been annoying if the spirit wasn't semi-transparent.
"And that Homer fellow started praying to the gods for everything? And the gods smote him for it?"
"Oh, I see."
"Aset knew this, so used his name sparingly. Besides, bringing the dead back to life is a big deal and she didn't want Ra to try and back out under the pretense that she was always asking him for things.
"It took her a century to find all the pieces and to put them back together in the right order. This time, she had been more careful and I had no clue. I don't know how she did it, but I do know that the traitorous wife of mine helped her in the raising ritual."
"And thus Osiris walked the Earth once more."
"Just missing something important. Fish ate it. And thus Horus would become the only son, or child, he ever had. Of course, that's still one up on me…
"Ra decided that since Osiris was no longer of the living, that it would bring great imbalance for him to walk among us. But he couldn't just take back life, since so many of us would have rebelled. He ultimately decided that Osiris should rule the underworld.
"But unfortunately for me, this decision came too late. Osiris said that I allowed his death to happen before he was whisked away. With this new information, the court, led by Aset and Horus, decided that I might be too weak to rule Egypt."
"And then the really interesting thing's started."
Jou propped himself up, looking at the spirit.
"The court decided that we should contest to see which of us, Horus or me, would rule Egypt. We each supposedly had good points. I was bigger and stronger than Horus was. I protected Ra from harm. And I'd been doing a damn good job of ruling so far.
"Horus was the rightful heir, as Osiris had dictated at the beginning of his rule. He hadn't been involved with his father's death."
"And?"
"He had his mother to cuddle him and protect him from the big bad world."
"You really don't like him, don't you."
"How ever could you have guessed? The challenge was to see who could win in a one on one battle in the middle of the Nile. Naturally, I was winning very easily. For some strange reason, a lot of fish helped me."
The spirit looked up in bemusement while Jou snickered.
"But then Aset stepped in."
"What happened?"
Jou was eager; the spirit was adding a lot of things this go around.
"She harpooned me!"
The spirit threw up his arms in indignation.
"Well, after nearly harpooning Horus. Imagine, harpooning her own son! Isn't she a shoe in for mother of the year?"
Jou laughed, and he could see the spirit's satisfaction at his response.
"Even though he could have easily won, what with me being skewered and all, but Horus ran off after having a temper tantrum. Couldn't even appreciate his mother's help. It was expected of me to retrieve him. But he wouldn't come back! He just sat there, sulking and rolling his eyes at me. So I tore out his eye!"
"Is this the inspiration for the Millenium Eye?"
"What? Horus is in the Millenium Eye?"
The look on the spirit's face was of pure loathing. Jou would hate to have that directed at him.
"I don't know. Probably not."
"I went back to the court and told them I couldn't find him. What was the use of telling them that I did but couldn't get him to come back? They'd think I was weak, and that I shouldn't rule after all."
"Even if the alternative was a whiny, temperamental brat?"
"Exactly!"
The spirit beamed with pride. Jou guessed it was because he was moving towards the spirit's way of thinking.
"So, Hanthor, he was one of the court, went to find him and restored his eye. The two returned to the court. A truce was made, and they ordered the two of us to go and rest together. Well, maybe not together but the building where the court, me and Horus were staying was lacking in the amount of bedrooms, so we were kind of forced together. I wasn't about to let this nasty little opportunity to slip past."
"And that's when you raped your nephew."
"Of course. Hey, quit looking at me like that! At least I'm not the product of incense!"
"My parents aren't related!"
"Not you, idiot yadonushi. Horus! Did I mention Aset is my sister?"
"So you married your sister, and raped your nephew whose parents are your siblings."
"Limited gene pool. All the gods were related to each other, and not just by marriage. Anyway, when the court found out about this, they decided that I was the better ruler. Horus was weak, weak like a woman."
"Hey, I know plenty of strong women!"
"If women were strong, then there'd be a feminine form of Pharaoh."
"But there was a woman Pharaoh."
"When the mortals ruled. Honestly, it's very easy to tell a woman from a man, but they were too stupid to notice."
"Or she was just too smart."
"Yadonushi, don't argue. Anyway, Horus had the gull to say he raped me! Really, lying is fine but it should at least be believable. Never in a million years. Aset suggested that we should have another contest to argue it out."
"Personally, I'd never let either of you become Pharaoh. Admitting to a court of gods that you raped each other? Willingly?"
"Don't be such a homophobe."
"I'm not being a homophobe. It's the incense."
"Yami of the Puzzle was the product of generations of incense, and you're not disgusted by him."
"Really? I didn't know that."
"Of course. In Egyptian royalty, it was excruciatingly hard to find any bride worthy of the Pharaoh, or even the Pharaoh's siblings, so half-sisters and cousins were used. You have to keep these bloodlines pure, even if it is just a foolish mortal line."
Yami's mother… Who was she? His aunt? His uncle? Wait, that last one wasn't physically possible. His grandmother? His mother? Jou was then strongly reminded of the story of Oedipus.
"Racing boats of stone, that was the game."
"That's… kind of impossible."
"I know that now. Back then… Well, Aset asked Ra if it was possible, and told me that it was so. She lied to me. She told Horus to make his boat out of wood and then cover it with gypsum to make it look like stone."
"And when you two raced, your boat sunk immediately while his floated down the stream. You had a temper tantrum."
"And would've damn well killed that little brat if the whole court hadn't stepped in to stop me."
"Sure, you did."
"Don't use that tone of voice with me, yadonushi. Horus was made Pharaoh of Egypt. For his first order of business, he shunned me to the desert. Made me an outcast.
"He told the court that I was the one who killed Osiris, that I snuck up on him and raped him from behind like a coward and a sneak, which I didn't by the way, and that I've tried numerous times to kill him. They believed him."
"And that's the end of you story."
"No, it isn't."
The spirit's voice was quiet and confidential-like.
"When I first arrived in the desert with only the clothes on my back, Aset was there waiting. She told me… She told me that I was evil. The things that I had done… My brother could scarcely say my name without… well, I don't know what it was without but you get the idea. And that's how I got my title: Set, God of Evil."
Long moments of silence. Then Jou clapped twice. It snapped through the silence like a rifle.
"So how did you get stuck in the Scales?"
"I don't know."
"You really need to come up with something to explain that. You could use a vampire and a bucket of beer."
"I don't remember, yadonushi."
"You'll eventually make something up."
"I didn't make it up."
"Sure, right."
"I didn't!"
"Right."
Jou turned the light off and snuggled into his blankets. He let his mind drift. One sheep… two sheep… three sheep… Was school tomorrow? He absently set his alarm clock, his fingers expertly turning the switch on even without opening his eyes. Four sheep… five sheep… He yawned sleepily.
As Jou slipped into dreamland, he heard one last thing.
"Some day, Hikari, some day you'll believe."
The End.