Alright, I'm going to be extremely honest with you, reader. I have no idea what the hell actually happens in the series. All I know about YGO, I learned from The Abridged Series. Well, I did used to watch it years ago when it came on Cartoon Network, but... My memory's not so good.

Anyway, so the point of that is that I bullshit stuff a lot. Whee!

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Asomatous (a·so·ma·tous) - adjective: having no material body; incorporeal.

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Yugi cursed all small children everywhere as he regarded the disarray of the Game Shop, a group of younger kids having just come in and messed the place up. He began to sort through the wreckage, picking things up and putting them in their proper places. It wasn't THAT bad, really; things had just been moved about and set askew, nothing had been broken. Yugi had almost gotten everything righted when his foot became anchored to the floor.

Chewing gum.

"Urgh!" The teen peeled his shoe off the floor and walked over behind the counter, only using the toe of his soiled foot so as not to track the gum all over. "I swear, we need to have an age limit in this place," he grumbled as he scraped the gum out of the tread with a pen.

"I hate kids," Yami muttered, his transparent figure seated on the front counter, arms crossed in disgust at the scene he'd just witnessed.

Yugi sighed. "Not all kids are bad... Some of them are kind of cute, actually. It's the badly-behaved ones with no parental supervision that annoy me."

"I hate all children," Yami said sourly. "They make so many useless noises, and they get their filthy hands everywhere, and they don't respect their elders." He huffed. "And they smell."

"Hey now, I was a pretty good kid!" Yugi pouted. "Would you have hated me at that age, too?"

The pharaoh turned and saw Yugi's expression. "No," he said, giving in and smiling a bit. "No, I suppose not." He reached out to ruffle the boy's hair, though it did nothing.

"H-hey, cut that out," Yugi grinned. "Kinda tickles."

Curiosity caused Yami's head to tilt. "You can feel that?"

"Well... I dunno, actually." The youth frowned slightly in thought. "Maybe I just think I feel something, because I can see it, and my mind tricks me into thinking there's actually a sensation to it. Maybe if I close my eyes and you try it again?" He squeezed his violet eyes shut. "Just touch anywhere and I'll try to guess?"

"Uh.." The idea seemed a little strange to Yami, but he went along with it anyway. "Er, how's this?" He placed an ethereal hand on the boy's left shoulder.

"Mm... Nope, can't feel anything."

Yami's "hand" slid down the teen's bare arm, coming to rest at his hand. "This?"

"Uh-uh."

An idea struck the spirit, inspired by the strange occurrence the previous night. He lifted his hand and placed the pads of his fingers on Yugi's lips. "Nothing at all?"

"No... Are you actually doing something, or just standing there faking me out?"

As a last attempt, Yami leaned forward to place his lips against the boy's, to determine whether the midnight incident was just a coincidence. Yugi shuddered, sucking in a soft gasp, but by the time he opened his eyes again, Yami had retreated to a safe distance.

"I... What did you just do?" Yugi asked incredulously.

"Why, did you feel something?"

"Yeah, it felt like something..." The boy struggled to place words to the sensation. "Like something in my stomach was squirming. I felt... anxious? But in a good way. Excited. Eager, I guess..." He met the other's gaze, noticing his pensive expression. "Okay, seriously, what did you do?"

"This." Yami repeated the action, trying to seem as nonchalant as possible about it. The same feeling as before surged into Yugi, only ten times more powerful. As if by human instinct, he foolishly lifted his arms and tried to embrace the pharaoh, but only succeeded in losing his balance and falling forward into the cash register. Yami chortled at this, finding the sight of Yugi's head halfway through his torso rather funny. "Aibou, you're so silly. What did you think was going to happen?"

Yugi sat up and rubbed his head, looking up at Yami not with irritation or anger, but what appeared to be... sadness. "I... forgot," he said quietly, sounding surprised by his own words. "For a second there, I actually forgot that I couldn't... That I can't..." He lifted his hand and reached for Yami's ghostly one, his fingers slicing right through the other's form. Yami extended said hand, and Yugi placed his own against it, palm to impalpable palm. He gazed sadly at their not-truly-entwined fingers, lamenting that they could never share even the simplest of touches...

"You've forgotten, haven't you." The pharaoh's voice snapped Yugi out of his haze, and he met the other's eyes with an expression of mild puzzlement. "Your mind," Yami reminded him. "Our mind... The Shadows within our haven grant us both the ability to touch, to feel..."

Yugi's eyes sparkled like jewels. "Pharaoh, you're a genius!" he exclaimed, leaping off the stool to embrace Yami in his joy. Of course, he encountered no resistance against thin air, and he landed on his stomach over the counter, arms wrapped awkwardly around himself. Yami doubled over with laughter, completely unnoticed by Yugi's grandfather, who had just come back from a trip to the store.

"Yugi, why are you jumping around like a spazz?" Solomon queried, lifting a bag-laden hand to scratch at his head.

"I, uh... I saw a fly," Yugi invented quickly, only slightly distraced by Yami's raucous guffaws. "So I tried to kill it... With my bare hands. Yeah."

The old man shrugged and shuffled past the counter, mumbling something about "kids these days and their hatred of flyswatters."

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Not gonna lie, I consider LittleKuriboh's Grandpa Solomon to be canon. And uh, I actually have no idea whether or not he knows about Yami in the series, but um... This kinda could work either way, really. I don't care. It's my story. Shut up.

I had too much fun writing this chapter.