In, But Not Of
Author: Mystic Dodo
Published: Jan 2015
A/N: Not really much to say about this other than I hope it's somewhat different to the other post-series fics out there. Let me know?
Warnings: post-series, death due to old age, mentions of suicide, bisexual characters, therapy, depression, grief…
I think everybody was surprised when I did not break after Mou Hitori No Boku left for the afterlife. Although it was strange to have a silent mind I felt okay. I was happy for him. I truly was. Sure, I missed him. He was my other half. It was always a shock to reach for the puzzle and not feel its comforting weight around my neck. But I shrugged it off and focused on school work, on my friends, on duelling.
I don't really know when my lies became too hard to live.
Months? A year? Two?
My feelings of loneliness slowly crept back. I was so busy thinking about the future; about my dreams. For so very long I had thought about Mou Hitori No Boku and what was best for him. I hadn't had the time to think about myself. Anzu, Jou, Honda… they knew what they wanted to do. Yet when I was asked, all I could do was shrug and rub the back of my neck with an awkward smile.
I could always continue duelling… Maintain the title as the King of Games, but it felt, wrong, somehow, after Mou Hitori No Boku left. Like I was trying to fit into his skin but no matter how hard I shifted it pinched uncomfortably.
My friends and Grandpa were wonderful in their attempts to comfort me during the weeks after the departure but I found it hard to connect to anybody the way that I did to Mou Hitori No Boku. I guess it was understandable; we shared a mind, body, soul… time passed and around me, my friends were falling in love, building up their futures, moving on with their lives. Me? Well, I felt like I was dragging behind, only occasionally being flung ahead of them by things out of my control. There was where I would stagnate, until they had passed me again, and I was behind in the shadows.
My relationships were short but intense. They could do no wrong until they did, and when that happened I never wanted to see them again. Then I'd be empty until somebody else came along and my life was gravitating around them until, weeks later, I'd leave to be with somebody else. Anzu was quite shocked at my behaviours; at the cycle I was stuck in. I'd get mad at her when she tried to talk to me. She couldn't understand the emptiness that I felt. She always had her dreams ahead of her; always had a path to follow. It wasn't as easy as that for me.
Ryou struggled sometimes as well. I can't say I was shocked when I heard he had nearly burnt down his house; "I just wanted to feel something", he explained to me in a flat voice and I understood better than anybody by what he meant.
Risk taking became frequent for me as well as impulsivity and instant gratification. Anything to stop the ache within my chest.
How could everybody else be moving on? Weren't they affected by Mou Hitori No Boku?
Grandpa's ailing health was a huge source of worry, for a bit. We'd sit and talk and remember and he would say in his weakening voice, "Yuugi, I'm worried about you." He wanted me to talk to somebody; a professional. I had become erratic and unpredictable, almost volatile on some occasions. It had frightened him like hell when he came into my room to see me with chains around my neck. It wasn't anything dangerous. I just needed that weight. The sense that something was there. That I could still feel. The blood had rushed to my head and I could have sworn it was him, Mou Hitori no Boku, that had cried my name out in terror before the metal around my neck was tugged away.
Grandpa…
When he did pass on I closed the shop for a while. A long while.
Newspapers annoyed the hell out of me. People were frustrating. I avoided any and all contact with the outside world.
I still don't know what made me go to the doctors surgery and be referred to the mental health services for psychological help. I couldn't say I was depressed; I just felt so apathetic and angry. Lost. Empty. I could hardly say to the therapist I could pinpoint these feelings starting when Mou Hitori no Boku left my mind. I knew how crazy that sounded. But…
"Someone very close to me died," I had said. "I didn't get the chance to say goodbye."
Trauma, the therapist called it. Add my past of my father abandoning me, my mother rarely being there, the bullying and loneliness, low self esteem and how I lost the closest friend and then my Grandpa… well, they said it was understandable I was feeling the way that I was.
It didn't make me feel any better.
The endless crying began. The panic. Self loathing.
Gods, how long was I in that hell for? I barely remember the endless months and years that passed. Each moment was about surviving, not drowning in the black hole inside my heart and mind.
Anzu had a child. Jou got engaged. Honda was travelling.
I was still trying to replicate the weight of the millennium puzzle.
The baby boy was born and his middle name was "Yami". Breakdowns are usually decrypted as being messy and loud and chaotic. Mine was nothing in comparison. I held this little baby and turned to my friends. Gosh, they had all changed so much during the past however long it had been. Or maybe they hadn't, and it was I who had changed. I looked at their faces and whispered how I wanted to live, damn it. I wanted to enjoy life again.
I was perhaps in my mid-twenties when I realised that perhaps life wasn't for me. Don't get me wrong; things had improved after my breakdown. Intensive therapy, rebuilding up relationships, hobbies, passions… finding out who I was without Mou Hitori No Boku. It took a long time but for a while I could have even said that I was happy.
It was a shock to look back and realise that I truly had been suicidal.
I never returned to that dark place, but I can't say I was entirely free from it either. I was living a life; in a stable relationship with a job I enjoyed, partaking in hobbies I never liked before all of this. That, that darkness, though… it did weave its subtle influence on things. My satisfaction was never 100% genuine. The sense that I was missing something crucial never went away. Relationships were never as fulfilling. I still did not truly know where I was going with my life, just following random paths and hoping that something would click into place and I'd feel whole again.
Ryou and I stayed in touch. Although his relationship with his spirit was so very different from mine he never once said to me "you've got to move on" or "he wouldn't want to see you like this". He could relate to the feeling that something (someone?) was missing and in our weak moments we shared drunken kisses that we never spoke about afterwards.
Compared to my group of high school friends, I was a late bloomer when it came to tying the knot with my… significant other. She wasn't my partner nor my other half but she did make me smile and she passionate enough for the both of us, despite being wounded by her own past. She understood that after losing somebody you loved you could never truly love another person in the same way again. We had a comfortable companionship and, later, a handful of children; a home in the countryside; a place where we could live the rest of our days.
I cried when she died. My children, and their children, tended to me as my own health failed. Sometimes I laughed in the middle of the night, torn between bitterness and amusement, sadness and anger. It worried them. They thought I was losing my mind. Perhaps I was but couldn't they understand? Out of my friends I had always been the one to want to die first and now, there I was, one of the last.
My family tried to beg me to try treatments to prolong my life. But I was tired, I told them. I had lived my life and I was ready (more than ready) to leave this plain of existence. I was more at peace than I had been in a long time. I knew they were confused; upset; heart broken, but they didn't push. They stayed with me until I waved them out of my house with a wheezy laugh; "go, this old man needs his rest without being woken up every hour by you checking on me!"
My eyes never opened again.