Author's Note: This was written for X-Parrot's birthday, and I'm finally getting around to posting it here! The dialogue in this scene is based -- somewhat loosely -- on fan translations of the manga, so it probably won't match the same scene in the anime very closely.
Takes place right after Jonouchi's "death" in the Battle City arc.
Men Don't Cry
by Sholio
He's not breathing.
At those words, his world had fallen apart around him.
Someone had screamed. Himself. No, the other him, the one in his mind: an awful scream of loss and pain that went on and on, heard not with his ears but with his heart. Yuugi's pain tore through his soul like a dark wind, until he could not distinguish it from his own.
The beeping of machines meant nothing to him; neither did the babbling of the doctors about brainwaves and heart rate. What little he knew of medicine and human anatomy was the basic duellist first aid he'd learned -- or perhaps re-learned -- since sharing Yuugi's life. Somewhere deep down he still believed things he'd been taught in a time he couldn't remember: that the mind lives in the stomach, that the brain is nothing more than a cooling mechanism for the blood. Once these things had been common knowledge of the educated man.
Modern medicine was not something he understood, or even cared to understand. All he understood was Jounouchi lying still and white, hooked up to wires and machines that may as well have been magic for all he knew about them. We don't know if he'll make it ... of all the things the doctors had said, this and this alone he understood.
He turned and walked out of the room. One pair of eyes followed him: Isis Ishtar's. He saw her look up, registered it in some deeper part of his mind. Or maybe it was only his other self who noticed, for he was too busy trying to keep himself together.
Be strong.
He'd been taught that, too, in the time he couldn't remember. Men don't show weakness. Men don't cry. He couldn't remember if anyone had ever said that specifically to him, but it was understood, and so ingrained in his nature that it had survived through the long years of darkness and amnesia, survived into a world where the rules were different.
He stood in the hall, staring dry-eyed at the floor. The other one in his mind was silent -- had been silent ever since that terrible cry of pain. He could feel the other Yuugi's grief, though, like a great weight bearing down on his chest. Or maybe it was his own pain. He didn't know, he couldn't tell.
With a hand that trembled slightly, he took out his dueling disk and held it. The cool weight in his palm, so familiar, but ...
"I can't," he said, and even now, he wasn't sure if he spoke aloud or only to his other soul. "I can't ... duel anymore."
And it was true. He didn't want to, and he couldn't understand it. Even the upcoming duel against Kaiba, which should have thrilled him to his core, left him feeling empty and leaden instead. All that he could find inside himself was a bitter hatred of Malik. He wanted to see Malik suffer, hurt and yes, die. And then ... what then? He could feel his fingers trembling on the smooth surface of the dueling disk.
In a vague way, he knew more of loss than most people. He knew that he had lost, literally, everything: his life, his time, his identity, and, surely, every person he had ever loved.
But he had never, in the time since he woke in Yuugi's body, known loss firsthand. He had never had anything or anyone important to him torn away. He looked at his deck of cards in the duel disk, but all he could see was Jounouchi's white face, silent and still. He could not think forward, to the future beyond the duel, because that was a future without Jounouchi and he could not conceive such a thing.
His other self was crying, quietly, in his mind ... like rain falling in his heart.
Men don't cry.
His fingers curled into a fist. He drew his hand back, let it smash against the wall. White-hot pain. It did not make his heart -- he could not pretend it was the other's -- hurt any less.
I can't duel anymore.