The Gray
Chapter Two: Look, You're Just Denying the Inevitable
In which the plot moves. Or likes to think it does. And you get the meet the bad guys, who are really just kind of like angry math geeks in night dresses who hate geometry, but unfortunately for you I couldn't afford any of the cooler villains. Also, chapter turned out longer than expected, mostly because Glitch and Kowareta don't really like to shut up.
Spoilers? Uh, Yami Yuugi's real name, I suppose, if someone doesn't know already.
Oh! And thank you for all the wonderful comments! I'm a bit unsure about parts of this chapter, so please feel free to tell me what you think. (But don't feel obligated!)
…
Travelers reach otherworlds all the time. The most common method is through dreams. Without form or void and just enough sense of self to keep a personal shape (in order not to be lost to the ethereal mists which would otherwise devour the shapeless), individuals can pass through even the most solid of barriers and take on the most extraordinary roles. Another popular method is through furniture such as wardrobes that lead to snowy, wintery lands of lions and witches, or windows and secret doorways that don't always lead to the same place twice or which might not even take you home.
There are tricks and songs and poems that instruct would-be world-hoppers on the proper way to prepare, journey, fight demons, and return alive from their otherworld adventures. Whether or not the sad statistic of those who have managed to return is caused merely by those travelers deciding to settle down or because they died horribly in the jaws of something Big and Nasty is something that's hard to keep a record of.
Not many people drop by to have a chat when dead, after all.
Sometimes, the unsuspecting world-hopper will be sucked right through their television and surf along a complicated mesh of electrical signals until they find themselves in unfamiliar territory. The same thing happens with computers, although those machines have a nasty penchant for sending their owners to exactly the last place they'd like to go. Computers are, after all, connected to the internet, which is an otherworld in itself which lurks under the disguise of network cables, complicated coding algorithms, and bloody-mindedness. Sometimes it just likes to screw with people.
World-hopping happens. It happens whether you get to your otherworld through your wardrobe or through your toilet; it happens, and if you're lucky, you end up on the other side unharmed and intact.
Glitch and Kowareta are not that lucky. Lucky people don't come through the other side feeling as though their intestines had been liquefied.
Glitch thought the next part had something to do with darkness and shadows and bones and fear. Kowareta, and she was fairly certain about it (although Kowareta is the kind of person who is nearly certain about everything) thought it had something to do with heartbeats, molecules and electricity. They might both be right or, which is more than likely, they could both be wrong.
In any case, shafted through the colorful vortex of the universe, their hearts sludged to a halt, barely beating, and split into a thousand pieces (molecules, Kowareta said later. Bollucks, Glitch told her, who made it a point to be as English as she could.) You could hear the heartbeats though, each one coming only after an eternity of burning white-hot electrical impulses that barreled all the way through their veins to their fingertips. Someone screamed. They both screamed. There wasn't any sound. But you'd swear you could still hear the heartbeats hammering away in your ears as slow as an eternity until even your ear molecules tore apart and burst into sizzling colors until there was nothing.
And after the lights and the color and the fading purple smudges on the edge of vision, there was darkness. This is where the part with the bones came in, Glitch would say, whose certainty on this point was like a leaden block. This is the part where the bones (molecules, Kowareta objected, bone molecules) grew cold, became still, and stretched past what felt like infinity. It was like, Glitch would confide, being caught in the undertow of this great dark, churning ocean and the pressure built and built inside your skull until the strain was too fierce. Except that you didn't have a skull, it was all dust and pain and there was this storm inside the body you thought you had but was all in pieces, whirling and twirling, swept along the dark that went on forever.
And then it was all gone. There was light and you could breathe.
Kowareta struggled to open her eyes. After what felt like a lifetime, she managed.
…And then coughed until there was blood on her hands.
"Ugh," she said, wondering how to operate her arms and legs in order to sit up. Then tried to get her head around the concept of arms and legs and bones and a body.
Her eyelids fluttered.
"G-Glitch?"
She was inside a living room. An apartment, she guessed muzzily, although she could spot a window where gray light oozed in from the outside. Kowareta thought she could hear rain. Something felt like it was caught in her throat and the girl turned over onto her side and coughed deeply into her hands.
"Ngh," something said, sounding like a sea-sick version of Glitch. "Nnngh."
Kowareta spotted something blue before giving in to another bone-wracking cough.
"Whoa," someone said kindly, helping her sit up "careful there. World travel can be tough. Here, I can help."
Hands were suddenly on her shoulders and held her firmly until the shuddering stopped.
"There, all better."
Kowareta coughed at the universe in general, perhaps out of spite, which was one of her more defining characteristics.
"Okay. Not cool," said The Universe, brushing blood off his clothes. "Although that's something that'll clear up on its own. I'd give it an hour or two."
"I'm going to throw up," said the something that might've been Glitch, miserably.
"Oh my," said the Universe in a tone of voice that suggested someone just told him that the cookies in the oven were burning and he was about to don his fuzzy pink oven mitts to save the day. "Let me direct you to the bathroom."
Kowareta saw that the blue thing—The Universe?—took hold of the something and walked it away. Glitch? She wondered, unable to muster the energy to speak. She sank back to the floor, coughing. She felt numb. She couldn't even move her fingers. Closing her eyes, the girl thought she'd fallen asleep until she heard the rain again and started listened to it.
She lay there for what she thought might have been another century, her body feeling more and more solid the longer she lay there. She wondered if her bones really had stretched past infinity or whether her ears had dissolved into nothing but their smallest elements and if, at this very moment, her body was recovering.
Recovering from what? she thought irritably, suddenly angry at the hazy, dizzy memories. Other memories, the black desert, the shrinking moon, were coming back to her.
From death, another part of her answered. The solemn, silent part of her. The part that paid attention to things.
It felt like she had died. Kowareta had never died before, so she couldn't compare similar experiences side by side, but if anything felt like dying, well…
But it all seemed silly now. She was alive, awake, breathing. The girl counted her next few breaths to make sure, and, with effort, reached down to take her pulse. One heartbeat, two heartbeat, three—and none of them pounded in her ears like a wall of sound that crushed her soul.
She wondered if she imagined it.
Except… except there was a small part of her that told her something was missing.
"Hullo?" someone said, interrupting her thoughts—The Universe.
"No," said Kowareta instantly. It was always good to have a firm stance, even if you didn't know on what yet. She scowled.
"You know," said The Universe, "you'll have to open your eyes again eventually. You can't wait forever."
"Oh, you'd be surprised," Kowareta told him, eyes still closed, folding her arms over her chest determinedly.
"Look, you're just denying the inevitable."
The purple-haired girl was resolute.
"Is it working?"
"What? No! Get up, try not to cough, you've got blood all over the nice floor which will take ages to get out and I don't think I brought any cleaning materials. Anyway, you should listen. It's important."
"…Where's Glitch?"
"I'm here," Glitch said quietly from the corner of the room.
The purple-haired girl opened her eyes and fought to sit up. The Universe was gazing down at her and, Kowareta realized, embodied the "something blue" she had spotted earlier. He had blue hair that was gelled and spiked and wore a menagerie of tiger-headed, serpent-bodied, and raven-engraved rings on his fingers. His arms were swathed in intricately-carved pieces of metal—bracelets with tangling trees cut in where ruby-eyed eagles soared in the background. His hands twitched nervously and an anxious smile sat on his face when he looked at her.
Kowareta stared at him while he twiddled his clinking thumbs.
"You…" she started, rage and confusion bubbling inside her.
"…Yes?" asked The Universe, twiddling his thumbs faster, appearing anxious.
"You… your boots are mismatched," Kowareta finished lamely. Why was it so tiring to get angry. Her body didn't want to move. Her nerves pricked and the sensation of touch burned. She had to fight her body just to look around.
"Ah," said The Universe, inspecting his feet, "so they are."
"That's a really nasty-ass sofa," Kowareta said, just spotting a ratty ugly-colored cushioned sofa that Glitch was sitting on.
"Yeah," said the redhead, who was leaning forward, feet planted firmly on the ground with her hands clasped in her lap. She looked as though she was prepared to put her head in her hands at any minute. Kowareta thought she looked as exhausted as she felt.
"What color is that?" the purple-haired girl continued, giving the sofa a scathing look.
"Nausea," Glitch answered, putting her head in her hands. "Mostly because I threw up on part of it. But I think it was pretty nausea-colored before that, too."
Parts of her tight-fitting jeans were nausea-colored too, if that was the case.
"Girls!" said The Universe. "I have to explain The Rules to you and we're late already!"
The girls fell silent. From the sofa, Glitch painfully removed her hands and groggily watched The Universe like a zombie might watch porn: completely uninterested and wondering if there are any brains involved.
The Universe no longer resembled a moon, the girls knew this, roughly—after the disorienting experience of crossing worlds, they were a bit slow on the uptake. But after a while they couldn't help but notice that his teeth were as bright as moonlight. The girls sat, mesmerized, (zombified), watching the teeth as The Universe attempted to Explain It All. He talked (hands making nervous, complicated gestures) about The World, and then The Other Worlds, and then The Other Other Worlds, and fell somewhere in a tangent about why buttered toast always lands butter side down. He went on to explain the multiverse along with all the alternate universes and managed to sneak in a metaphor involving the worlds, their directions, and how sometimes in theatre actors will fall sick or be assassinated and their understudies would come to shine, rocketing the show not necessarily in a new direction, but a slightly different one than the one the audience had been expecting.
"Wait," said Kowareta, "this involves us in some way, doesn't it?"
"Shush," said zombie Glitch, eyes following the moonlit teeth, "I want to hear more about the play."
The Universe swallowed. He talked about The Rules, which were upsetting, and then let slip nine out of twelve Mysteries of the Universe, which were useless, and then gave them the Spice of Life, which was apparently nutmeg.
"Which is why," the Universe continued, "I'm sending you off to high school."
"Wait," said both girls, snapping out of their trances. "What?"
The Universe held up two packages in his hands that he certainly wasn't holding a minute ago and smiled.
"They've got the cutest pink uniforms."
The girls exchanged glances.
"He sounds like a soccer mom," Kowareta said.
Glitch blinked, stared for a bit, perked up then asked: "The kind of soccer mom that bakes cookies all day in her Hello Kitty apron and drives her kids to practice, or the soccer mom whose knees are armored in bandages, tears you a new one, and kicks the ball into the net?"
"Oh man, it's so hard to choose. Both. I bet he's on the hunt for the perfect Bundt cake recipe too."
"You know," interrupted The Universe prissily, unfolding one of the uniforms, "while I appreciate all your very human attempts to distract yourselves from the problem at hand through silly, unnecessary dialogue, I think your brains would be better engaged elsewhere. Besides, I'll have you know, I am already in possession of the perfect Bundt cake recipe."
The Universe stared at them expectantly, frowning and tapping his foot like the ultimate matriarch.
"Seriously, it's flawless," he added.
"Impressive," Glitch told him, not entirely certain if she was being serious or not.
"Anyway," said The Universe, handing them the uniforms, "like I explained before, it's important for you to get into the roles of 'Yvette' and 'Raven', since, um, I stuck you in their places, which is why you need to go to school, and management doesn't know about the mix-up yet. Hopefully they never will."
Glitch frowned from the sofa, hands in her lap. "So, in the underbelly of corporate accounting, we're like 'the other set of books,' huh?"
"Why should we help you out?" Kowareta asked, scowling. Anger began to bubble to the surface again. She folded her arms over her chest again and glared, hard. "It's not our fault this happened. It was your mistake. I don't see why we should cover any of it up."
The Universe looked at them.
Later, Glitch and Kowareta would make fun of the blue-haired, nervous-handed Universe who chewed his nails, and comment that he probably went to things like book clubs and ice cream socials, but underneath it all, they trembled when they remembered they had seen the steel-eyed death-eating gaze he'd given them that day. The Universe paraded around in a blue-haired j-rocker's body with a soccer mom's mentality and a crafty corporate accountant's job, but underneath all that lurked an entire universe of power and gravity. Universes weren't obligated to help anyone out, they weren't obligated to do anything other than what it was that universes did, which, the girls came to find out, was generally put people in their place and tell them where to stick it. When he frowned, it was the craggy and ancient, glacier-carved disapproval of the Grand Canyon; when he smiled, it was the bright, sapling-frying flash of electricity; and when he was angry, it was soul-stirring, world-frosting anger that stopped centuries in their tracks. Late nights, in the future, while he knitted pink and yellow striped scarves in their cramped-as-hell kitchen and chatted happily, Glitch and Kowareta would remember the gaze that melted their insides and soldered their fate.
Without a word, both girls gathered the uniforms, shivered then changed.
Smiling, The Universe gave them directions, and ushered them out the apartment door, pressing a cheery yellow umbrella into Glitch's hand.
The girls looked from the landing and out into the rain.
Glitch opened the umbrella.
"I feel like my blood was just drained out of me," she said, shaking.
"You know what they say about consensual reality?" Kowareta asked, watching the rain.
"No means no?"
Kowareta rolled her eyes. "I'll consent that this is happening only if you consent that this is happening."
They stared at the rain together, shivering.
"Deal," Glitch said.
Together, they walked off into the rain.
…
Ishizu Ishtar would say it began in ancient Egypt with the Millennium Items, that things happened because destiny had marked them for something special, something greater. Seto Kaiba would sneer, unconvinced, and ask who cared where it all began and insist what really mattered was where things ended up. Anzu would want to know why these kinds of things always involved them and Jounouchi would tell her she was asking the wrong sort of questions.
Yuugi didn't know where it began. It might have started in the hot sands of Egypt, as Ishizu said, or it could have been sparked in the dark of space where all things had first taken form, like Rebecca thought. Where it began for him, however, was the bottom of a monstrous concrete staircase.
Strange things happened to Yuugi. It probably wasn't his fault. When all the great and mighty forces of the universe converged, Yugi Mouto, or his hair, had a habit of standing up.
Right then, though, it didn't matter. Anzu would tell him he remembered the details wrong, but that might have been because it was Anzu who had been there with him when it happened. In Yuugi's opinion, if Anzu was with you and there were details to be noticed that didn't have anything to do with her, who would bother about them?
Sometimes though, when he lay in his bed at night and rewound the reel of memory, he thought, maybe, he had seen it right. Later, the other girls would tell him he might be right, that perhaps Anzu hadn't seen it the way he had, or at all, or that perhaps he wanted to remember it this way—because he didn't like what it meant if the other one wasn't there like he remembered. Yuugi was never comforted by these words, but he liked hearing that it might have meant something.
Unedited, what Yuugi remembered went something like this:
"Have you seen Bakura lately? I think he's avoiding me."
Anzu held her umbrella up higher, a bright, pink shield against the rain, and shrugged her backpack in place as she walked up the steps. She gave Yuugi an appraising look.
"I think… ever since… you know, Egypt, he's been avoiding everyone. We should do something—let him know it's okay, things happened but we're still here, and he's still our friend. The Spirit's gone, after all."
Yuugi fell silent, eyes on the steps.
"—Of the Ring," Anzu corrected, mentally kicking herself. Smooth move, Anzu, she thought. "Spirit of the Ring. Um. We should find out where he goes during lunch…"
They paused at the top of the steps. Yuugi watched his feet, his arms holding on to a pair of books that couldn't fit into his backpack. Anzu watched her hand on the railing until her gaze slipped and followed the railing to the bottom of the steps. Keep things moving, Anzu, keep things moving, she thought desperately. Gotta keep things together.
Her gaze returned to her friend. Yuugi and the other Yuu—Atem, she corrected herself, letting her mind roll over the strange, unfamiliar name—Atem had been a team. They'd been friends, and they'd drawn people to them through some invisible connection that was close and warm. It was Yuugi's open-to-everyone friendship combined with… Atem's steadfast determination that made the world, if just for a moment, stop and take notice, right here, right now—that made everything wrong come right again.
…And now? Atem was dead. What words could you possibly say to make anything better, to make anything right, about that?
Anzu put a hand on Yuugi's shoulder. The short teenager looked up, blonde bangs falling in front of his face.
Sometimes nothing, Anzu decided before leaning down to hug him. It didn't matter that they were in front of the school or that anyone around could see them. It didn't matter that he was too short to hug comfortably, or that she was sure that anyone coming up the steps could probably see up her skirt. Right here, right now, nothing mattered more. Sometimes a hug is all you've got to give because you'd waste words trying to say something so limitless, because words would make everything smaller than they really were.
"I'm okay, Anzu," Yuugi told her, his voice slightly muffled on account of being squashed into her chest. "Really."
They pulled apart. Yuugi looked away, blushing.
It happened then, even if Anzu told him it happened otherwise. Anzu said it might have been his footing on the slippery stairs, or maybe someone had bumped into him by accident from behind, or maybe a particularly strong gust of wind knocked him over (which even she didn't believe), but whatever it was, it started then.
There had been this… thing, Yuugi would recall later. His mind was very particular about the word thing. It stood naked past the bottom of the stairs and had about the right number of limbs to be human, and was similarly shaped, but something about it stole the breath out of him as if it were a live, struggling creature and made his knees weak.
"Yuugi!"
He'd still been staring at it when he started falling and his mind raced behind his eyes. Thoughts are fast, or at least faster than people think, and with Yuugi, someone who is used to noticing small details in an instant where any longer and your soul could be taken, an instant is a very long time to notice something.
There were hands, and feet, all with the appropriate numbers of digits, but, and this was the part that hurt to remember, they were made out of something that wasn't quite right. It was almost as if there were shadows under its skin, shadows that crawled and shifted and turned, pulsing through the body like sinewy eels.
And there were stars, Yuugi thought firmly afterwards. He couldn't say why he thought so, but when it opened its mouth to grin at him, when it opened its eyes and light poured out, that was when Yuugi felt sick.
Then, another figure reached out, ghostly and concerned…
Books spilled out of his arms and hurtled down the stairs as Yuugi's hands grasped wildly for the side railings, caught one, and was wrenched from its support as his body was propelled madly by the force of his own momentum. His shoulder thundered into the hard bite of an angry stair and he was rolled over again, hitting his elbow on the next landing. In the turmoil of that moment, Yuugi was grateful to have learned the elbow defense from Jounouchi when the blonde-haired boy decided he'd need to learn to fall, as it was currently acting as a shield for his head against the forces of gravity. On his final rolling ascent, and consequently descent, he crashed into something soft, and a bit glittery, which collapsed and tumbled with him.
It was also a bit bony, Yuugi realized upon later, dazed, observation.
And made noise if he squished it trying to get up.
And grabbed him when all his thoughts caved in and his body fell forward.
Something clattered on the ground and the small teenager thought it might be Anzu's umbrella. From some perspective unknown to him, he saw the swirl of pale pink through the cold veil of rain. He heard footsteps come quickly, but cautiously, down the staircase. Yuugi tried to look upwards, eventually coming to the conclusion after much puzzled thought, that he was facing the wrong way.
"Yuugi!" Anzu's voice cried out.
"Ungh," said the soft, bony thing.
A hand was thrust in front of Yuugi's face, which the teenager took hesitantly after several long minutes. He wasn't about to trust his balance at the moment.
"Glitch?" asked a new voice, not the soft, bony thing.
"Kowareta?" asked another voice in strained, breathless tones that was much closer to the ground than the first. Yuugi quickly looked around, searching for the thing before clutching his head and closing his eyes in nausea.
Anzu was saying something comforting, hands on Yuugi, making sure he was alright. Yuugi wobbled on his feet a bit and then, blushing, pushed Anzu away gently. When his head was clear, Yuugi opened his eyes, blinked, then looked down.
And then apologized.
Then apologized again after he threw up.
"My friend," said Glitch from the ground, "You could not have described my day any better."
…
The Gray gathered around the city street corner unseen and silent, at least for now. People walked through The Gray like they were ghosts, hands clutching umbrellas tightly and bodies shivering. The Gray didn't have any shape. Formless and immaterial, they were conscious non-shape with intellect instead of minds.
After a while it started to rain harder, pounding like a relentless fist on bright umbrellas as bruise-colored clouds stitched themselves across the sky as though it were an ugly, open wound. When it seemed the right time, and who knew when that was for things like The Gray, one spoke.
"This is unacceptable," it said. If it had a face, which it didn't, its features would have been arranged in the most likely way to express acute dissatisfaction.
Thunder rumbled overhead like a dragon turning in its sleep.
Another one spoke up, if it could be said that The Gray speak in the same way humans do: "It is not that big a matter. Once they are located, there should no trouble in returning them."
"That," said the first one, "is not the point. They are humans, and humans meddle. They complicate. And once they shape things they cannot be… unshaped."
It continued, "There is also the matter of the other one."
There was a bubble of embarrassed silence, and if the Gray had feet, there would be much shuffling of such appendages. The first one that had spoken watched the others sternly and gave the impression this was a subject of much hard discussion.
A man unknowingly walked through the center of the Gray, shivered, and hurried home, nearly ignoring the streetlights in his haste.
"That was a mistake," a new Gray said, blooming into the circle of formless, shapeless intelligence like runny ink on paper. For lack of proper terminology, the other Gray stepped back.
"Mistakes should never happen," said the first Gray. "Mistakes lead to complications, which lead to even more complex shapes."
The newer Gray gave the equivalent to what, in human body language, would be a nod, and said, "It was a mistake, but it was not a mistake made by the Gray. It might be better to simplify the problem. This one and the last."
"Simplify?" asked the first Gray, "Right now there is unbalance. To simplify is to put the balance back in place, which means moving those two back before things are shaped."
"There is that, and then… there is the other way."
The new Gray explained. There was an argument, although the Gray don't have emotions to get angry with, then there were heated calculations with a kind of math humans had yet to discover. A pause came when all the integers had been distributed and the equations were balanced, and it was the kind of all-consuming, ear-deafening silence only the Gray could produce. Then a decision was reached.
"The factors are settled then," said the first Gray.
A while later, one by one, the Gray were gone as if they had never been there in the first place; which they hadn't, to the eyes of any ordinary streetwalker.
Dark, angry clouds shifted in the sky, scrabbling amongst each other and wind swept through streets, turning rain into bullets. From under the red and white awning of a nearby store, a black-haired woman peered carefully at the corner where the Gray had been.
Thunderous percussion drummed across the sky punctuated by brilliant notes of light and with a wary look over her shoulder, the woman crossed the street into the business district.
Ishizu Ishtar had things to do.
…
This chapter took a lot longer than I thought it would (and also turned out longer written down than I expected). I really want to apologize to you guys saying it wouldn't take so long to get up. I feel really silly now. But hooray for squooshing the canon characters in there finally!
Also, sorry if anything's confusing in this chapter. Things clear up as the story progresses, I swear.
Anyway, thanks a lot for reading!
~MeriCheri~