Absolute, a yu-gi-oh fanfic

For Round 7 of The Yu-Gi-Oh Fanfiction Contest. The pairing is Conflictshipping (Mai x Jounouchi x Varon). WARNINGS: Implied yaoi, het, and a threesome; general YM creepiness, drinking, insanity, and brief gory imagery. Don't like, don't read.

Disclaimer: I don't own Yu-Gi-Oh.

This takes place ten years after the events of canon. The numbers at the top of each indicate the order (1-10) in which they take place.

Many, many thanks go to LadyBlackwell for beta'ing, and to her as well as the7joker7 for helping me with the plot. Enjoy! C:

Absolute

- nine -

Once upon a time, Mai used to dream.

She dreamed of flames, hungrily consuming lives as they reared up into the sky. She dreamed of dark nights lit up in orange and red. She dreamed of the crumbling, parched thirst of a land trapped in drought. She dreamed of living in an empty street with nobody around for miles as the sputter of a match brought the roof down on their heads in a flurry of soot and splinters.

Their faces shadowed by the eerie scarlet glow, they watched her calmly, immovably—as if she were nothing but a television screen, placed there for entertainment in the middle of the sleepless night. They were always watching her, it seemed. Always there, never leaving her a moment of peace—

Perhaps they were the only ones who were capable of dragging the little shards of her mind back into one somewhat coherent mass. Perhaps she liked them by her side; perhaps she would be worse off if they had left her alone all those weeks (months, years?) ago—

Them.

Jounouchi and Varon.

Jounouchi, his blond hair darkened with gray ashes, stared at her with something close to concern, his right hand twitching up briefly before his companion grabbed it and forced it back. "Mai? Are you alright?"

She paused and realized that her arms were stretched out before her, wrists twisted backwards and fingers gracefully, stiffly arched—a strange gesture, retaining in its position an odd sort of foreboding, and an odd sort of tension. She felt as if she was holding something in her fingers, but she could see nothing there. "I'm fine," she said slowly, her voice sounding hoarse from disuse to her ears. The movement of her lips as they formed the words was foreign, and she quickly fell silent once more.

Varon asked this time, his blue eyes sharp as they met hers but his voice softer, gentler than she remembered. "Why don't you come back and sleep, okay? It's still three in the morning."

"I'm not tired." An automatic response, a child's response, and in some corner of her mind, Mai instantly wanted to retract her statement, to appear stronger before her peers—but in the part of her mind that controlled motion, she did not. She did not have the will to.

"But we are," Jounouchi pointed out, his tone also milder than the faint memories she had of verbal whiplashes across the dueling field, of taunts and laughter and triumphant victory.

Varon took a tentative step forward, and Mai saw the tension in his stance—what was he afraid of? Mai saw no threats around them. A step, and another, and another, until there were only a few feet between them and Jounouchi was two paces behind. Varon extended his hand to lightly grasp her fingers, swallowing them up in his warm grip and tugging her carefully forward.

Mai's arm lurched in his direction involuntarily, taken by surprise.

And every action has an equal and opposite reaction—

She jerked back.

She looked up.

She saw, and—

—and she screamed.

There, on the wall, hidden amongst the eddies of the shadows and the embers that fell like burning rain, was a face. A face that haunted her dreams (her dream-within-a-dream), a face that had spelled out the beginning of the end—at least, the beginning of the end for her.

Deep purple eyes, dark and haunting, sharp lines of kohl marking his skin. And the golden eye, the third eye, the one that didn't belong—gilded and gleaming in the middle of his forehead, a testimony to insanity and magic and sheer undiluted power.

Malik.

He had come to kill her; that much she knew. She could never, ever avoid him, could never escape those terrible days (weeks months years?) when she was lost in his realm, trapped in an hourglass of sand that choked her as it fell, swallowing her up in its burning mold.

She screamed and scrambled away, and the objects in her hands swam into visibility: match and matchbox.

Fire. Fire would rain down from the sky as the wooden roof disintegrated above their heads—fire would banish the darkness forever. Like baptism, like the signs of warding off evil, except she was mixing three cultures here, letting them fuse into one futile gesture of desperation in her mind—

Jounouchi's and Varon's shouts muted into background beneath the rapid thudding of her heartbeat, her shaking fingers striking the match against the strip of gunpowder on the side of the box. Thin lines of glowing netting branched out from her palms, weaving across the room and enveloping them all in lines of green, green, green.

"Mai, what are you doing?" The alarm in their voices, the sudden loss of the warmth of Varon's hand on hers, did not stop her.

She cast the fire at the shadows on the walls, not caring as it scorched her skin black with soot, and the roof fell down entirely.

"Mai, stop—!"

"Mai, listen to us—!"

The flames shot up into the sky, illuminating the stars in shades of beautiful destruction, and she knew then that someone was going to die.

Oh, but not her. Never her. The cool drawings of green wrapped around her body in a cocoon, shielding her from the devastation—protecting her, restraining her, hurting her—and she was safe while the others burned.

After all—Mai was a survivor.

- seven -

"Mai. Mai, wake up." Warm fingers lightly grasped her shoulder, a palm pressed against her skin and a voice in her ear—worried, encouraging, and accompanied by another:

"What happened, Jou?" The tone was familiar to her, dredging up images of motorcycle races down dusty roads and jaded blue eyes over the sharp edge of a Duel Monsters card. A name, a face, and two syllables dropped inadvertently from her lips:

"Varon?"

"Well, look at that," Varon said dryly, and Mai conjured in her mind's eye the image of a man with wild brown hair and a sardonic smile. She didn't want to see, though; she wanted to keep herself blind and ignorant because in the darkness lay salvation, and in knowledge lay pain. "She knows my name. Be proud of me, Jou—at least it's an improvement from before, when she didn't remember anything after waking up." She heard footsteps approaching, and the sudden addition of weight made the foot of the mattress sink down a few inches.

"What about my name?" The first voice was eager, hopeful, and Mai felt an odd pain in her chest when she realized could not answer. The imaginary world she had spun from the ether of her dreams glowed faintly at the edges of her vision, promising everything as long as she knew nothing. It tempted her to let go and forget—

But she rolled over to face them, forcing her eyes open, and was confronted with the sight of two men staring at her fixedly, wearing rumpled t-shirts and pajama pants. The one on the right (not Varon; she knew that much) reminded her oddly of something—warmth and childhood and companions, compassion and innocence and fierce determination to succeed and to protect and to live as high and as low as humanly possible—

Jounouchi.

Once she remembered that, she remembered everything.

She remembered cold wind whipping through her hair as she stood on the platform of a blimp, exposed to the night sky; she remembered the laughing, insane eyes of a maniac as he whipped a card high into the air and burned the space around her with deadly, impossible fire. She remembered the thousands of eyes spinning around her as if she had been locked in a room of shattered mirrors; she remembered pain before she had been yanked out by a saving hand.

She remembered months of timelessness and depression, and she remembered with the distant manner with which one regards history lessons the muddle of dueling and chases and soul-traps afterward. And after even that—then, a shift in the world that shook its foundation only briefly, before everything had settled into hues of normal once more.

She wasn't sure when Jounouchi and Varon had come into her life at the end of all this. She wasn't sure if she wanted to know. She tried to think, but her heart began to pound and her breathing sped up, and she remembered nothing of the recent past besides an overwhelming feeling of terror.

Her lips formed his name. "Jou?"

Varon and Jounouchi, their stances previous tense, relaxed and high-fived each other despite the fact that their eyes were sleepy and only half-awake. "Alright, making progress," Jounouchi yawned. "Since she remembers now, can we go back to bed?"

"Progress?" Mai said, uncertain of how they had ended up in the same room, but she did nothing to break the moment—there was an odd sort of serenity that hung in the air, a feeling of peace despite the bizarre circumstances, and she was strangely comfortable among these two men whom she had last thought wanted little to do with each other.

It was like... friendship? Happiness? The lightness in her chest was too foreign for her to pin it down.

"You were having a nightmare," Varon told her, "and I woke you up."

"Oh, right," Jounouchi grumbled, collapsing on the opposite side of the bed and propping his head up on his elbow so that his eyes blinked down at Mai's. "Because the fact that I informed you of the nightmare means nothing."

Varon threw a pillow at him. "And afterward, you stayed in bed." He turned to Mai with a glint of familiar exasperation in his eyes, and she felt her lips twitch up instinctively. "Do you remember what your dream was about?"

"No," Mai said, only half telling the truth—she had a faint recollection of golden eyes watching her from the darkness and licking tongues of purple yanking her down, but she didn't want to pursue that train of thought for fear of dredging up the mood of foreboding once more. "Nothing."

Varon shrugged, evidently unbothered. "Okay then."

And to her surprise, he flopped down beside her so that she was sandwiched between him and Jounouchi in an unexpectedly comfortable position, and she slept without dreams as the pale winter sun cast rectangles of light onto the curtains.

- one -

Once upon a time, Mai used to fear.

She knelt among the grains of sand as they rolled down her arms and hair, not caring that they were as large as grains of rice and made painful impressions in her skin. The dust on the bottom of the glass cage, kicked up from the steady stream of falling debris, rose like ethereal streams of mist into the air around her, choking up the air she breathed and blurring the lines of her vision.

She watched the sand as it fell, watched it pile up on the floor of her prison inch by agonizing inch. It was coming in too quickly, rising above her feet and knees until it had reached waist-height, and she could imagine it filling the glass until she was covered in it completely, unable to breathe without breathing in the sand.

She was going to die.

Oh, dear gods, she was going to die. Without friends (they had abandoned her), without a chance to save herself (she had lost already), without Jounouchi.

The golden eye burned its light into her retinas, and she cried out and hid her head in her hands, unwilling to see the face that had locked her into this place, unwilling to see the body the face belonged to. Her heart pounded in her chest, and she didn't notice the sudden silence that had settled over her—the sand had stopped falling.

"Are you enjoying yourself, Kujaku-san?"

Mai gritted her teeth and looked up, willing herself not to tremble at the sight of mad purple eyes and wild blond hair—an abomination of Malik Ishtar's face, although the boy had not even been close to sane when she had known him. There was something about the way this thing's expression lit up when he saw her that made her shake and want to turn away. There was something about the utter soullessness she could see in his face that made her cringe. "No." One word, just one word, and yet her voice shook when she spoke it.

His teeth glinted white in the black light that surrounded her, the Sennen Rod flashing golden in his hand. "No? Then perhaps you'll like this more."

The sand underneath her hands began to writhe and liquefy, squirming and reassembling into larger creatures—red-black insects with sharp mandibles and probing feelers, with hard, shining shells and prickly appendages, crawling up her legs.

Mai screamed, screamed for real, and scrambled to a corner of her cage, frantically wiping scarabs off her body and away from the space around her. But there were too many, burrowing into her clothes and eating away at the fabric, nestling into her hair and making clicking sounds as they rubbed their bodies against her skin, and she resorted to remaining very still and closing her eyes, hoping with every fiber of her being that they would leave her alone.

But they didn't. They quieted and stilled somewhat, and she shuddered in disgust at the feel of them perched on her arms and legs. Then—a sting on the back of her hand, so sharp and sudden that she cried out and jerked away.

And the scarabs moved. With the scritch-scratch of legs scurrying, they writhed over her body and bit deep, deep into her skin. She screamed louder than before as they cut into her neck and her arms, as they ate away at her flesh until there was nothing left of her legs but blood-soaked bones, as one squeezed its way into her mouth and down her throat, eating out a hole in her stomach. Pain, hot and burning, muddled her thinking until her only coherent wish was: Take them away. Please take them away. Please please please pleasepleaseplease—

Laughter rang in her ears, delighted and loud and painfully, achingly insane. "Are you happy now, Kujaku-san? Happy that soon, you friends will be dead at my hands, but you will never die, trapped here forever to go through this day after day after day—"

Mai whimpered, sobbed, tears trickling like rain down her cheeks before the scarabs chewed out her eyelids and her eyes, their teeth scraping at the raw bone of her scalp. Her mind fled (but then, wasn't her mind already there, trapped in Malik's mind games?), fled to delirium where there was nothing but bugs crawling all over her again and pain lancing through her insides and—

oh god let it end let it end please let it end soon let me die

—and there was a face with careful, pale blue eyes staring at her and wild brown hair sticking up in a terribly, terribly reminiscent way.

A hand, extended. Green stones lying in the tanned palm, too large and calloused to be Malik's. "I'm here to help you, Mai. Just take these."

"How much?" she whispered, her mind still in a pain-muddled daze, her eyes unfocused on the stranger's features. Not Malik, not Malik, it can't be Malik—

A laugh again, but pleasant this time, soothing, promising safety and oblivion and a return to what little bits of sanity remained in her mind. "Nothing. Trust me."

She took the stones, clenched them in her cold fingers, and felt warmth spreading through her body, banishing away the remnants of her nightmares as her sight filtered into a pleasantly hazy mess. Like drugs, like morphine, like painkillers—wonderful, temporary, but she had to have more. Or else she would die.

And she didn't want to die anymore.

Another voice now, with odd inflections of a language no longer spoken and belonging to a man with strange washed-out eyes, one yellow and one green: "The Orichalcos does not heal. It only blocks out the pain. And you, my lovely shattered soul-slaves, need it more than ever. But protect it with your lives, for without it—without it, you would be nothing but the broken fragments of your souls, starved of the skeins of magic binding them together."

- two -

The café's fluorescent lights reflected in the window Mai was facing, preventing her from seeing outside. She was aware, somewhere in the back of her head, that the passersby on the street had a full view of her sitting there and staring blankly at the buildings across the road, but she didn't care anymore. She found it difficult to care about anything.

The mug of coffee steamed weakly between her hands—it was barely warm now, its smell unappealing to her, because she could not remember the last time she had eaten. She wondered absently how she would manage to pay the waitress, but she found that it mattered little to her—perhaps jail would be a better place than the empty, ghost-ridden wreck that was her apartment.

She thought she heard her name, saw a fist pounding on the glass and a flash of brown hair (the color of her coffee, she realized), but she could not remember who it was.

"Mai, what the hell are you doing here?"

She did not move.

"Mai...?"

She could not be bothered to react.

"Mai, look at me."

Slowly, she lifted her head and raised her eyes to meet the other's. Memories stirred somewhere in the back of her mind, and she pulled a name out of her consciousness. "...Varon...?"

"Took you long enough." His voice was sarcastic, but jokingly so—Varon had never been one for truly serious conversation. "Why're you up so late?"

She mustered up the energy to shrug, though she did not care for his worry; it was an automatic gesture, born of the days of working in casinos and brushing off the advances of drunken gamblers.

He placed a hand on her arm, gentle as always—Mai could not imagine Varon as harsh."Let's go."

She gave him a puzzled glance, unwilling to get up. "Where?"

"To a friend's place," he said after a moment of thought, tugging her up. "You can stay there for the night, and we'll decide what to do tomorrow."

Mai stumbled to her feet, her legs weakening beneath her—

she saw him everywhere she went, everywhere she looked: in shadows and in light patterns on the grass, in mirrors and out of the corner of her eye

—and Varon caught her easily, slinging one arm around her waist and half-dragging her out of the door after placing a few bills onto the table. "Jeez, you're messed-up," he mused softly as they walked down the darkened street, somehow managing to sound comfortable despite the strange situation. "What happened to you, after... you know?"

"I'm not sure," Mai murmured back, feeling herself relax as she loosened up in his embrace.

"Well, that's fine," Varon reassured, turning a corner and pulling a cellphone out of his pocket. He flipped it open and pressed a few buttons before speaking into it: "Hey, Jou. Can I stay at your house tonight? ... No, nothing's wrong; I just found Mai today... Ow!" He winced, flinching away from the phone. "Calm down! ... Half an hour, I'd say. See you there. Thanks."

"Jounouchi?" Mai said, her mind conjuring up the image of a laughing, blond-haired boy whose greatest goal in life had been to become a dueling champion.

Varon nodded absently. "His apartment's pretty lonely when his sister's not at home, and his dad died a few years back... good riddance, I'd say." His tone was conversational, light, as he allowed her to catch up with what had changed with the decade that had passed since Yugi had returned from Egypt with no more Puzzle and no more spirit inside him. "Sometimes he stays at my place or at Yugi's, or Honda's, but I don't think he'd get along with the current campers in my apartment... Raphael and Amelda," he explained at Mai's confused look. "Amelda's here to attempt making amends with Kaiba, and Raphael came with him so he'd have an excuse to visit—Raphael works for Pegasus now. Don't ask me why, because I'll never understand how his mind works, but he must get a kick out of remembering how Amelda impersonated his boss."

He was quiet afterward, and the only sound echoing down the empty street was that of their footsteps against the concrete. But the silence was comfortable, and Mai found that she wasn't looking around for any sign of golden eyes or Malik's face staring back at her—she felt safe somehow, protected by whatever aura Varon carried around with him.

"We're here," he announced, and she glanced up and realized they were in front of the wooden door of an apartment.

Jounouchi opened it, his eyes widening when he saw her. "Varon, I thought you were joking."

Varon snorted, stepping in and taking Mai with him. "You have such little faith in me, Jou."

- three -

Once upon a time, Mai used to hope.

She lay awake, her mind pleasantly drowsy and calm, and listened to Jounouchi and Varon discussing in low voices on Jounouchi's bed. The golden light of the rising sun reflected onto her eyelids, and when she briefly glanced out from under them, she saw Jounouchi and Varon sprawled on the mattress across from hers, their hair mingling on the pillow there and the blankets shoved into a pile on top of it. Varon's arms were propping his head up as he stared at the ceiling, and Jounouchi was lying next to him, one leg crossed over the other.

"Do you think she's alright?" Jounouchi mused softly.

Varon shrugged, the movement of his shoulders visible only out of the corner of Mai's eye. "She seemed pretty messed-up last night. I don't know what happened to her... I thought she'd get better after the Orichalcos's influence disappeared, like Raphael, Amelda, and I did."

"Mai came from a different past," Jounouchi pointed out.

Varon tilted his head to regard the other carefully. "You never told me what exactly happened to her before Dartz—I thought it was 'private business?'"

"I think I can make an exception here," Jounouchi said. He hesitated, but then—"I can tell she's not okay, Varon, and we need to help her somehow. If I'd known she was in Domino the entire time, then I would have done something before today..."

Varon nodded in agreement. "Then spit it out, Jou."

Jounouchi took a deep breath. "Well, before Dartz, Kaiba hosted a tournament in Domino and called it Battle City. And it turned out that a woman named Isis Ishtar had organized it because her brother Malik wanted to steal the God Cards from the Pharaoh. Long story short, Malik comes from a family of tomb-keepers who kept the secret of how to regain the Pharaoh's memories by carving it on people's backs. He went insane from this, and his personality split into two pieces with the aid of the Sennen Rod. In Battle City, the, uh... 'eviler' part of him won a Shadow Game against Mai and tortured her in the Shadow Realm, and I don't think she's ever fully recovered from that."

Varon winced. "She kept mentioning someone named 'Malik' when she had nightmares before I took her into DOMA."

"She told me about her nightmares later on. Do you think she still has them?" Jounouchi added quietly.

Varon looked over at her, and Mai quickly shut her eyes again. "Not last night, no. But the nights before that... I'm not sure. We should keep her here, though, or at my place—her apartment has to be lonelier than yours."

"Maybe she'll tell us what happened to her," Jounouchi said hopefully. "It's strange to see her so... vulnerable now, when she hated being helped before."

"I know," Varon said. "Most of us healed after Dartz. Her, I'm not sure about."

There were no golden eyes watching her anymore; there was no more voice laughing as scarabs ate away at her flesh. There, in the tiny haven that Jounouchi and Varon provided, she was safe.

- four -

Mai sat up with a gasp, vertigo making her dizzy as she swiveled her head frantically from side to side, searching—searching—searching—and she found: there was a dark shape looming over her, its features invisible in the darkness one hand reaching out toward her.

Like that one terrible, terrible duel between her and Malik, chained to a wall and collapsed on the cold metal floor as he looked down and smirked, holding out the Rod, pressing its sharp blade to her forehead: "You've lost, Kujaku-san."

Once upon a time—

The wind that blew through her clothes on the top of the blimp chilled her skin, making her shiver as her freezing fingers fumbled to draw her next card. She gritted her teeth and willed them not to chatter, willed herself not to show weakness to this monster of a man who was leisurely killing her monsters just to see her suffer.

Another few hundred life points off, and a lance of pain seared through her stomach, causing her to double over and clutch it, waiting desperately for the sensation to pass. And with it, a memory, floating through the night air and gone from her grasp—a memory of someone, someone important, whom she could remember no longer. And she was alone there amongst the shadows that caressed her bare arms and tugged her gently into the darkness; she was alone without anyone to support her, without anyone to care. She had no friends. She had never had friends. Never, never, never—

"Do you see that card, Kujaku-san? The Winged Dragon of Ra? Summon it if you dare, for you are nowhere near powerful enough to be its master."

Gold metal, flashing through the air as her one last gesture of defiance. Flames streaking toward her faster than anything could move to protect her. And then—then darkness, pure darkness, as the scarab beetles bored into her eyes as the laughter echoed through the Realm, through the past and the present and the future—

The hand reached out to her, a voice saying her name: "Mai?"

She screamed.

The person jerked back, retreating to the other bed and bending over to shake the second body lying there. "Jou, you lazy idiot, get up!"

"Ow, my ears..."

"Yeah, I get that; now help me calm her down before something bad happens—"

A warm palm on her arm, the voice reassuring. But she could still see the scarabs' shiny backs squirming through the shadows, still hear the scratching of their legs as they crawled toward her. She could see the outline of a golden eye in the glow emanating from the window, and the remnants of his laughter reverberated through her ears—"Are you enjoying yourself, Kujaku-san? ... No? Then perhaps you'll like this more."

"Mai, please, just trust me—"

"Mai, don't worry, we're here to help you—"

"No," she found herself mouthing, more out of instinct than anything else. Her voice was hollow, and she could not see anything but that terrible yellow light—the scarabs had eaten out her eyes. "No. Nobody's going to help me. I don't have any friends."

A scoff. "Oh, so we don't count anymore? Come on, snap out of it; it's not like you can stay trapped in your nightmares forever—"

—"trapped here forever to go through this day after day after day"—

"No," she whispered.

"Look at me." A grasp on her chin forced her face up, finger gently touching her eyes. She blinked a few times, and miraculously, she could make out the blurred outlines of nose, mouth, hair. "See me now? You're safe here. You're safe."

She stared at him wide-eyed, the memories flooding back. She was not in the glass cage; she was not in the Shadow Realm—she was in Jounouchi's apartment, Varon looking at her with equal concern as the blond teen, and she was safe.

Wonder of wonders: she was safe.

Her entire body went limp, and Jounouchi hugged her carefully. "Told you."

Varon knelt by them, one arm linking around Mai's neck and his smile bright once more, relieved. "Aren't you glad we're here?"

- five -

Once upon a time, Mai used to laugh.

She wandered through the Domino City park as snow fell down in tiny, fluttering flakes, hands protected by purple gloves and body bundled up in a thick jacket and scarf. It was the night before the New Year, the park empty as people fled in favor of the warmer homes of friends, sleepy children in their pajamas most likely curled up on the sofa in anticipation of midnight. The quiet was complete but for the soft whooshing of the snow drifting through the air, the shadows cast by the streetlamps melding into a black-and-white mosaic on the ground.

"Remind me why I came out into this frozen wasteland again?" Varon said somewhat grumpily, shivering in his own coat and glaring at the puffs of vapor his breath formed.

Jounouchi nudged him. "Because Mai and I wanted to."

"Oh, right."

Mai smiled, turning on her heel and regarding her companions brightly. There was a carefree feeling in her heart that set her mind aloft with cheerfulness, and she wanted to pass that on to Jounouchi and Varon—to tell them that finally, she was okay. "It's New Year, Varon, and I always celebrate New Year like this."

"By doing what, getting hypothermia?" Varon grumbled.

Jounouchi laughed too, catching on to Mai's mood. "Don't be a killjoy."

"Easy for you Domino people to say." Varon rolled his eyes. "I, on the other hand, have spent my life in the more southern parts of the world, where it never drops below freezing—"

"Look!" Mai said, pointing to a tree trunk, where a group of squirrels were perched, watching them fixedly. "I wonder if they're cold..."

"Not after this," Varon muttered, and he charged the tree headfirst. The squirrels scattered frantically, and Jounouchi and Mai, seeing what Varon had planned, split and tore down different paths of the park as they chased their confused prey. Mai stopped as her squirrel disappeared into the branches of another tree, panting but still smiling. She looked up, squinting to see if the squirrel was visible, and blinked suddenly—

In the dappled pattern cast by the clouds showing through the branches, she sawa face, eyes watching her, and the slender rasping legs of a scarab beetle. Chills ran down her back, and she called out frantically, her heart pounding faster and faster: "Jou! Varon! Where—"

Varon's hand grabbed her arm, making her jump before she realized it was him. "Mai, are you alright?" His previous grin had disappeared to be replaced with concern, his pale blue eyes scanning her critically.

"Yeah," she said, glancing up again to make sure that the face had disappeared. "Yeah, I'm fine." She shuddered at the memory, and Varon took the hint and slung one arm around her. "Let's go home, okay?"

Half an hour later, Mai, Jounouchi, and Varon sat on the floor of the bedroom of Jounouchi's apartment. Mai's head was spinning pleasantly, the walls and furniture blurring into a welcoming golden glow. She was safe and happy and among people who loved her, when a year ago she had still been locked in nightmares of him—

She winced and hoped that the others hadn't noticed, thinking of the memory of Malik's face watching her in the park, eyes alight with anticipation. Maybe—maybe, she was wrong, and the start of the new year meant a start to the dreams again, and a break from the haven she had lived in for the past few months—

As the fear bubbled up inside her, she leaned against Jounouchi's shoulder and he drew her into a half-hug. And then, somehow—somehow she was kissing him while Varon watched in shock, and she was dragging Varon's mouth toward hers too, and they were falling flat on the ground in a tangle of blankets and pillows and clothes.

Mai caught glimpses of Jounouchi's brown eyes and Varon's blue, their features smudged together by the alcohol buzzing through her veins, and she had no thought for the future; she would enjoy the present to the fullest extent when she could, because she knew—she knew that with the next day would come the nightmares.

Tomorrow, he would return again.

- six -

"Varon, I'm worried about Mai."

"Me too, Jou... she seemed to be getting better up to New Year's Eve, but after..." An uncomfortable pause. "Well, after that night, she was worse again."

"Do you think it was something we did?"

"I don't know; she isn't exactly frightened of us, only of that guy from Battle City—Malik. Like the old nightmares, happening over again, except she doesn't remember what she dreamed about. Before, she could at least tell us if she wanted to, but now..."

"I wish I knew what Yami no Malik did to her to make her remember it for this long. Then, at least, we could help. Would Shadow Magic last for ten years, even after the Items were destroyed?"

"... Didn't she mention something about scarabs?"

A faint laugh. "I'm pretty sure scarabs can't do much besides sit in Egyptian museums."

- eight -

Mai woke up, the darkness full of eyes and clawed hands that reached out toward her, scraping against her skin. She saw his face, repeated and doubled and tripled everywhere, watching her as she pressed her palms against her eyes, willing herself not to see. But his memory was floating as afterimages in her sight, inescapable—she would never be free of him. Never, ever, ever—

"Mai? Are you alright?"

She scrabbled frantically at her nightstand for something to fight the darkness, her fingers landing on a small, square box, and she could hear his laughter; what would that small piece of cardboard do against something that existed only in the eddies of the light and the corners of her vision? She could not fight with tangible objects, and she had long lost the will to fight with her mind. "I'm fine."

(It was a lie.)

"Why don't you come back and sleep, okay? It's still three in the morning." Varon's voice now, though he was barely visible in the night.

"I'm not tired." Her fingers trembled, feeling at the sides of the thing she held in her hands.

"But we are," Jounouchi said, his voice calming, as if he were talking to a frightened pet.

A hand grabbed her arm, and although the touch was gentle, Mai jerked away. Maybe that hand was one of his; maybe he had poured his essence into the bodies of her friends and controlled them with that terrible Sennen Rod of his; maybe—maybe—maybe—

The shadows lunged toward her, and she screamed. She screamed as the lights turned on and cast his looming face into grotesquely exaggerated detail; she screamed at the sight of him reflected in Jounouchi's and Varon's eyes. And finally, she saw what she held in her palm: a matchbox, with one lone match sticking out of the side.

He smirked at her. Try to destroy me with your friends, and you will fail. Try to vanquish me from your life, and—see, you are already unsuccessful.

Shaking, desperate, as the scuttling of scarab legs in the hall began, she struck the match against the strip of gunpowder on the side of the box. Once, then twice, then—flames.

They burned her fingers as she stared at them, transfixed for a moment by the dancing orange-yellow spots of light. The pain did not register in her mind, a mere muted impulse buried underneath Jounouchi's and Varon's alarmed cries:

"Mai, what are you doing?"

"Mai, stop—!"

"Mai, listen to us—!"

The scarabs neared, paused at the door, and crawled through.

In hordes they came, bursting through the wood as if it were nothing but tissue paper, writhing masses of brown-black shells and legs tumbling over each other in their rush to reach her. She remembered with a terrible wrench in her heart the feeling of their teeth tearing into her body; she remembered the sensation of hundreds of them squirming over her, battling for a portion of her flesh.

She threw the match, and the world went up in heat and light and turned black as the scarabs reached her.

Varon's shouts pierced through her terror as she fell to the ground, struggling to get them off her: "Mai, out, now!" His voice was hoarse, broken by coughing.

"Get them off," she sobbed, and he watched from among them, eyes gleaming with triumph. "Get them off, please—"

Jounouchi's words now, almost as frantic as hers: "Mai, what are you doing? Let's go, and we can talk about this later—"

Smoke choked her windpipe as the scarabs burrowed through her throat. The deafening roar of her screaming and his laughing and Jounouchi and Varon and burning—

Then, stillness and silence.

For a brief, blissful moment, the scarabs disappeared. She saw the fire lighting up all their faces and felt the pain of scorching flames on her back, and she realized—

"Mai, we're dying here!"

No. No, they could not die. They were immortal, they were her safety anchor, and they could not die. Not Jounouchi and Varon; anyone but them. She would die before they did; when had she ever deserved to live longer than they would?

With new resolve born of desperation, she opened her eyes; she rid her sight of the scarabs and her body of the imaginary pain, and she saw.

She saw them burn.

She collapsed to her knees as the mocking eyes disappeared forever and the scarabs were swallowed up by the fire; she collapsed by Jounouchi and Varon and willed herself to die with them. Malik was not real; the scarabs were not real. But Jounouchi and Varon were; they had attempted to drag her out of her dreams, and she, unaware that they were helping her, had fought them every step of the way.

Tears traced their burning paths down her cheeks, and the sound of sirens pierced the night.

Too late, she thought. Now we're all gone.

- ten -

Once upon a time—

Once upon a time—

Once upon a time, there was a mountain. On this mountain stood a temple. In the temple lay a cushion. On this cushion sat a monk. By the monk sat his student. And the monk said:

"Once upon a time, there was a mountain. On this mountain stood a temple. In the temple lay a cushion. On this cushion sat a monk. By the monk sat his student. And the monk said—"

"'Once upon a time, there was a mountain. On this mountain stood a temple. In the temple lay a cushion. On this cushion sat a monk. By the monk sat his student. And the monk said—'"

"'"Once upon a time, there was a mountain. On this mountain stood a temple. In the temple lay a cushion. On this cushion sat a monk. By the monk sat his student. And the monk said—"'"

"'"'Once upon a time, there was a mountain. On this mountain stood a temple. In the temple lay a cushion. On this cushion sat a monk. By the monk sat his student. And the monk said—'"'"

In her dreams, sometimes the monk didn't continue. Sometimes the student became bored, and sometimes he left. Sometimes, the monk chased after the student and brought him back, and they reconciled over something that was not a story that went around and around in circles.

Sometimes, there was a second chance, and sometimes there wasn't. But Mai would always be given that extra opportunity, and usually it would not be for the better—because Mai was a survivor, and she was bound by the wicked hand of fate to live through anything that had already destroyed half the world before her.

She would live through this all, live through the loss of the watching eyes in her head and the voice that had followed her for years, live through the cold sting of the reality that had finally hit her full-force. She would live through the accusing glares of Yugi-tachi and hold her head high.

She would live on, and the past was the past—she was not bound to it unless she wished herself to be.

Jounouchi and Varon had taught her. They had died to teach her that much.

- end -

Endnotes: Oddly enough, the inspiration for this fic came from Love the Way You Lie by Eminem and Rihanna, and as I wrote it I listened to that song (both versions) and The Erlking by Schubert. Observe that Mai refers to YM as 'Malik' because she doesn't realize the difference between them.

The title is a reference to absolution, which is defined as an absolving, or setting free from, guilt, sin, or penalty. It's also a somewhat vague allusion to absolute music, which is instrumental music that has no meaning behind it (as opposed to program music, which does).

Reviews are wonderful, and concrit is especially loved. Spread the holiday cheer and review, please! :D