started: 10/24/2018

Disclaimer: Yu-Gi-Oh! is the creation of Kazuki Takahashi. The Crow: Stairway to Heaven is based on the characters created by James O'Barr. No ownership of the canon characters, settings, or events is claimed and none should be implied. The introductory monologue is quoted from TC:StH.

The words of this story are mine and may not be archived on a site other than AO3, published, translated, or performed without the express permission of the author.

Continuity note: This takes place in an alternate universe where Duel Monsters is just a card game. While tournaments took place, they were simply contests, not "fate of the world" battles, and Seto's rivalry with Yugi is based strictly on Seto's ego (not a past life in ancient Egypt). I've borrowed the concept of the Crow from that universe, but have tweaked the mechanics to better fit with the YGO universe.

This is a WIP; as such, everything is subject to change. I've not decided upon exactly how the relationship between Yugi and Yami works here, other than that I'm using mostly early manga Yami as inspiration for Crow!Yami.

NOTE: I can't edit documents on because they will not display for me. It's probably a browser issue, but there's nothing I can do about it. So, if there are typos, please just ignore them unless they're extremely distracting. (Fixing them requires me to use 2 separate computers (one to write and one to upload), and then completely upload a new copy of the chapter.) Or you can read this story on AO3, where everything will look much nicer and all the scene breaks will be displayed properly.

o0o

Shadow of the Crow

(A Yu-Gi-Oh!/The Crow: Stairway to Heaven Fusion Fic)

By Lucidscreamer

People once believed that when someone dies a crow carries their soul to the land of the dead. But, sometimes, something so bad happens that a terrible sadness is carried with it and the soul can't rest. But sometimes, just sometimes, the crow can bring the soul back to put the wrong things right.

Chapter 1

The times have been,

That, when the brains were out, the man would die,

And there an end; but now they rise again,

...Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold;

...Hence, horrible shadow!

- Shakespeare, (Macbeth, Act iii. Sc. 4)

He awoke, sprawled like a broken doll, on a bridge built of shadows.

The air was heavy with a dense, gray fog. Moisture clung to him, condensing to drip from the tips of the blond bangs hanging like a veil over his eyes. The drops streaked his face like cold tears. His body felt stiff and chilled to the bone, and his limbs jerked as if unused to movement when he tried to sit up. It took him far too long to roll onto his side, and even longer to push himself up until his weight was braced on his shaking arms.

Beneath his hands, the boards of the bridge felt slick. They looked a bit like wood, but were the color of ashes, with a surface that seemed to shift and change the more he tried to focus on it. Just raising his head exhausted him, but the new position let him take in more of his surroundings. It was a monochromatic world. Dark, spindly forms, indistinct in the fog, loomed in the distance. They might have been trees or the skeletons of giants. The bridge swayed with the breath of the wind and - far, far below - a pale sliver of river snaked through a deep chasm bounded by jagged, gray cliffs. The wind moaned around him, agitating the fog into grotesque shapes and arabesques, like smoke rising from an unseen fire.

Somewhere above him, a bird gave a lonesome cry.

Looking up, he caught the fleeting impression of great black wings before the flying shape merged with the fog, which had slowly darkened from pale gray to charcoal. The boards beneath him were growing colder, less substantial. His weight sank into them, even as he tried to crawl free. The fog darkened again, shading to pitch, as if the color of the bridge was sublimating into the billowing clouds. And then his eyes widened as he looked more closely and saw that it wasn't just the color; the bridge itself was twisting apart like smoke as it merged with the fog. The distant, anchoring ends were already gone and, as he watched, the span on both sides of him drifted into vapor and swirled up into the lowering sky.

His hands scrabbled uselessly at the boards beneath him. Unable to find purchase, he could only watch in horror as his only support boiled away into the fog. He glanced down. Unfortunately, the drop into the chasm hadn't gotten any shorter while he wasn't looking. And the bridge was fast vanishing into nothingness around him.

The bird cawed again, and this time it sounded like a command.

He looked up, but saw nothing but black shadows writhing and twisting like ink dropped into troubled waters. His fingers grasped at empty air as the last of the bridge dissolved beneath his body. He screamed as he plunged into the abyss.

His voice, echoing in the vastness of the chasm, flew above him on the storm winds, becoming one with the doleful cry of the crow.

o0o

His landing was every bit as painful as anticipated, though there were fewer broken bones than he'd expected. For a time - and it could have been minutes or hours or years - he lay where he'd fallen, flat on his back in what looked like a vacant lot, and stared blankly up at the leaden sky. His eyes tracked the racing clouds, pushed by a wind he could feel like icy fingers tugging at his hair and clothes. Behind the dark silhouette of the skyline, traces of pink heralded the approach of dawn.

Unbidden, a scrap of doggerel drifted across his mind like a bit of detritus tossed about by the wind:

Red sky at night, sailor's delight

Red sky at morning, sailor take warning.

Warning, warning, warning... The word echoed in his head, like the crow's call or the heartbeat he couldn't feel when he pressed his hand to his chest. It was a dark voice, deeper than the night and filled with shadows. Something's coming, coming back...

I am, he thought, head pounding with the beat of the words. Who am I?

As the first raindrops struck his upturned face, he heard the crow again. The thing inside him - the thing with the voice like midnight - urged him to his feet. Stumbling through the tall, dead weeds, black boots catching on nothing as he tried to find his balance, he gave in to his new instincts.

He followed the crow.

o0o

Even with the bird to guide him, his steps felt aimless as he wandered the streets of the city in which he found himself. He didn't know where he was going or why he was going there. He had no name for this place or himself. He simply was. He was and the Voice was, the dark voice in his heart. And the Voice said he needed to follow the crow, so he did.

The rain fell in a steady drizzle, not enough to hinder his progress but heavy enough to make his shoulders hunch miserably about his ears. His boots splashed in the forming puddles on the sidewalk, soaking the hems of his black jeans. His reflection, glimpsed in a store window, looked every bit as miserable as he felt: bedraggled hair limp and tangled around a young, pale face with wide, periwinkle blue eyes and a frowning mouth. When he spotted a hooded jacket carelessly tossed over the back of a bench, he snagged it without even considering the action. He shrugged into the jacket and tugged the hood up to cover his head. With his face concealed in the shadow of the hood, he felt a little bit better. More at ease in his skin, even though he still moved as if he were having trouble fitting into his body.

He wasn't sure how long he wandered, just that it was still raining when the bird led him to the small, oddly shaped building on a street corner. Fluttering its black wings, the crow settled onto the awning above the front entrance and uttered an imperious caw. Cocking his head, he studied the building, trying to deduce why the bird had brought him here.

There was something familiar about the shape of the facade and the small greenspace between the sidewalk and the street. There was a sign stuck in the grass; after studying it for several seconds, he realized the sign was shaped like a green turtle. That made something in the back of his muddled thoughts twinge, as if he should know the significance of that shape. He tilted his head back, letting his gaze roam over the protruberances on the roof. The building didn't have a large footprint, but it went up two floors - no, three with that dormer window above the entrance, though the third floor might be a little cramped. Darker shapes in the fading green paint, where lettering had clearly been removed, spelled out the word "game."

He froze, body beginning to tremble from the sudden tension in his muscles, as he tried to understand why that simple word had such a profound affect on him. He didn't know why, but he knew that word - this building - was important. It had meant something to him, once. Something that, even now, when he remembered nothing, stabbed at his heart like a raven's beak.

Slowly, he moved closer to the shop, his eyes darting this way and that as he tried to figure out what he should know, remember, about this place. He couldn't quite grasp the memory, but everything inside him was telling him that he knew this shop. Or had known it, before the bridge. But there was something off about it, now. Something...

Close up, it was easy to see what that something was. The inside of the shop, visible through the front display window, was dark and empty. A few metal shelves stood forelornly in the center of the retail space, but the only things they held were dust and shadows. The window was dingy and smeared, while his mind told him the glass should be gleaming. A plastic sign, attached to the inside of the window, read "For Lease" with a realtor's number underneath, but a large banner hung across the top with "Coming Soon!" in an obnoxious orange font. He didn't bother to read the smaller print underneath.

His hands shook as he pushed them into his hair, combing the wet strands back from his face. If his heart were still beating, he thought it would be racing. Moving like a sleepwalker, he shuffled over to the entrance. The door that he somehow knew led up to a family apartment above the shop. The family apartment that no longer held a family.

As one in a dream, he drifted inside as easily as if he were truly a formless spirit, a ghost invading the space he was meant to haunt. He felt nothing but a brief sensation of utter cold and darkness, and then he was inside the deserted game shop.

The interior was filled with empty shelves and shadows. A pervasive shroud of despair seemed to hang over the silence, and the noise his boot heels made as they struck the floor sounded like gunshots. Each one set off a flash of images in his mind: step, flash - a loud crack and blinding light - step, flash. He froze after only a few steps, hands curling into fists tight enough to drive his nails into the soft flesh of his palms. When he looked at them, his hands each bore four perfect crescents that oozed a thick black substance before healing over as if they'd never been. Shaking, he blew away the black ash left behind, leaving only unmarked skin.

It was too strange; he couldn't dwell on it or he'd go mad. Pressing his hands against his jeans, he wiped them roughly enough to remove the feeling of the ash, then jerked his head sharply to one side. The bird was there, sitting on the bottom step of an inset staircase near the back of the room. It tilted its head at him, then hopped impatiently onto the next step, as if goading him to follow.

Reluctantly, he walked to the back of the room - step, flash - and stumbled up the stairs.