Set after Duelist Kingdom.
Summary: Now that he knew he was a person, being called evil suddenly hurt.
Evil
He lay on stone floor that probably would have been cold had it existed in the physical world. He kept his eyes closed and listened to the merry chatter of the group of friends that surrounded him. Despite their evident cheerfulness, they sounded tired. No wonder. They had been through quite a lot in the last few days in Duelist Kingdom. Card games with too high stakes... Soul-stealing millionaires... It would probably take more than one good night's sleep to recover from it. For them, at least. As for him, well, he couldn't really call his rest "sleeping". He doubted disembodied consciousnesses were even capable of sleep the way people were.
Still, he tried. For the first time in a long while, he really tried. The best he could manage was a strange state of floating where he disconnected himself from his reality and let his mind wander. It was more like a contemplative coma, if such a thing existed. He slipped into it, still passively hearing the conversation that was going on between Yugi and the others. They were holding a sort of get-together at the living quarters of Grandpa Mutou's game shop. The place had been chosen mostly because Yugi didn't want to leave his grandpa alone for too long. The old man had recovered his stolen soul just the day before, after all. At Grandpa's age one didn't just jump back up with no repercussions after being in a coma for a few days.
Yugi and his friends burst into laughter. Jounouchi had told some joke that hadn't quite reached the labyrinthine soul room. He could have blocked the sounds out completely, sunk even deeper into his coma, but he decided not to. The sounds were soothing. They grounded him and drowned out the shadows that sometimes still tried to call him back under. His mind was a place where it was easy to get lost in even while standing still. Even for him, if there was nothing to anchor him or he wasn't paying attention. Besides, it was nice to feel he wasn't alone. It was nice to know he was surrounded by people who cared about him. Even though he probably didn't deserve it.
Friends.
So much had changed in Duelist Kingdom. Now that word actually carried some weight to him personally. A lot of things did, now that he realized that he actually was a person.
He was not Yugi Mutou.
That he knew for sure now.
That put him on kind of a shaky ground in identity matters.
It had started when Yugi had stopped him from killing. For the first time Yugi had truly broken through his control. And then Pegasus had gone and told them of the evil consciousness residing in the Millennium Puzzle.
Pegasus had known. He had known all along.
He snarled silently at the memory of Pegasus. Pegasus had been the one who had put them through all this. Put Yugi through all this just to get the Puzzle for himself. Oh, how he had wanted to punish the man for everything he had done. He had wanted to break – shatter – that flamboyant, smug spirit and shut the man up for good. He had had the opportunity, and according to the rules of the Shadow Games, he had had the right as well.
But he hadn't done it.
He wasn't sure why being called evil had stung so badly. He knew he wasn't good. Not in the sense Yugi and his friends were. It hadn't bothered him before. He had just assumed it was his role. He had been the dark side of the innocent little Yugi. The one with shadows whispering in his head. His duty had been to protect Yugi and to punish those who did bad things. But now that he knew he wasn't just that, it suddenly mattered. So he hadn't punished Pegasus. And it hadn't been just because he had hated the man and had wanted to prove him wrong. To prove that he wasn't evil.
It didn't matter much now for Pegasus, though, seeing how the man was dead anyway. Someone had killed the man and ripped out his Millennium Eye. Or possibly killed the man by ripping out his eye. The news had made Yugi and others cringe and feel sad and worried. The spirit of the Puzzle had used their time of silent grief to feel bad for entertaining thoughts of inflicting a rather similar fate for Mr. Pegasus when he had briefly considered punishing him.
He wanted to convince himself that he was better than whoever it was that had actually gone through with it.
Evil felt like such a strong word. It was more than crooked or bad. Evil people abused their power over others. They enjoyed tormenting others. He... well, if he was completely honest, he had probably enjoyed his penalties just a little too much in the beginning. In his darkest moments remembering them still made him smile with twisted satisfaction. And even in his best moments he couldn't bring himself to regret them.
Except when Yugi started to regret them.
Why did he have to have been freed by the purest, most innocent high school student in existence? With natural puppy dog eyes that gave even the actual puppies a run for their money?
He almost slapped himself at the thought. He had chosen Yugi himself. Yugi wouldn't have solved the Puzzle if he hadn't. And he knew he would never regret his choice.
So maybe he really wasn't evil. A truly evil person wouldn't have chosen someone so innocent, right? A truly evil person wouldn't care about anyone the way he cared about Yugi.
So no, he wasn't evil. He was maybe a little bad and more than a little crooked at worst.
Jounouchi's voice broke him out of his thoughts.
"Hey, is the other Yugi doing alright?"
He opened his eyes, staring at the ceiling that was so high it was unclear whether it really was there or not.
"He's sleeping, I think," came Yugi's reply, "No, wait, he's waking up."
"How is he?" asked a feminine voice that could only belong to Anzu Mazaki.
"He's fine," Yugi assured, "We've been talking a lot after we got back. He's really nice."
He blinked. Nice? That was an adjective he would never use to describe himself. But he could agree that they had been talking a lot. The conversations had become considerably less awkward now that Yugi had learned to properly communicate with the presence in his head. The first conversations had been mostly about laying some ground rules. Most of them had been his own idea, actually. He had freely agreed not to possess Yugi without the other's consent. He had promised to stop punishing people the way he had before. He had promised not to initiate games where lives were at stake. Now that he was sure Yugi's life wasn't his as well, all those things had just felt wrong anyway. The fact that the spirit had proposed those rules himself had pleased Yugi a lot. It seemed that Yugi wasn't afraid of him any more. It was a comforting thought. He didn't want Yugi to fear him. It was one of the last things in the world he wanted, yet so far he had had to accept it. Because he hadn't really deserved not to be feared.
It had taken Yugi openly screaming at his friends how much he was afraid of his other self that it had really clicked.
He had known it before, but only now did he realize why.
Yugi didn't fear for himself. He was afraid of what happened to the people around him.
He had never truly understood that, even though he guessed he had known it somewhere deep down.
"Do you guys want to talk to him?" Yugi was asking, "Get to know him better now that there's no immediate crisis we should be dealing with?"
There were chuckles and affirmative mumbles somewhere outside.
"Other Me?" Yugi called, "Do you want to come out?"
He sat up slowly, looking at his knees.
"I don't wish to intrude," he said to the empty room.
"Oh, come on! They're your friends too!"
They were, weren't they? Before they had been his friends simply because they had been Yugi's friends. Now, though, he wasn't Yugi any more. With the realization he had started to make some observations of his own more freely. Yugi's best friend Jounouchi was fun and trustworthy, but also loud and sometimes extremely irresponsible, as was Jounouchi's old pal Honda. The quiet Bakura was nice enough, but he had been affected by the evil spirit in the Millennium Ring. The boy put on a brave face – in his own, timid way at least – but the spirit of the Ring had caused far deeper scars than the others could guess.
Evil. There it was again.
Anzu Mazaki was kind and knew Yugi better than the others, but she was still rather blind to the obvious affection Yugi harboured towards her. That annoyed the spirit, especially since for some reason Anzu seemed to be rather interested in him. The Other Yugi. Who wasn't really Yugi at all and who could list several reasons why no one should be interested in him. It was all part of the drama of being a teenager, he supposed. It felt very alien to him. His form may have been that of a teenager as well, but his spirit was far older. How much older, he didn't know, but he did know that he had been trapped in the darkness for much longer than his new friends had lived. He wondered if he had ever had to go through the drama phase. Or if he had ever been anything more than a spirit to begin with.
Yugi stepped aside, letting him in control of their shared body. He was suddenly in Grandpa's living room, sitting on a couch and facing Jounouchi, Anzu, Honda, and Bakura. He greeted them all with a simple "Hi", and the others responded.
He crossed one leg over the other and folded his arms, leaning back in his seat. The couch was rather comfortable. He hadn't sat on it often in physical form, so he might as well enjoy the opportunity.
"How've you been doing?" asked Jounouchi, "In... you know, where do you go when you're not here?"
"I go into my mind," he replied, "It isn't quite as lonely as it sounds. I can hear and see what happens around Yugi if I want to. And yes, I'm fine."
"Oh, that's cool," said Honda.
"But you can stop listening if you want?" Jounouchi asked, "Man, I wish I could do that when I'm at school and the class gets boring."
"I think you're actually very good at that, Jounouchi" Anzu remarked, "You do it way more often than you should."
"Hey!" Jounouchi looked at her indignantly, "I do pay attention when it matters! Yesterday I was all ears in history."
"You slept throughout the entire class," the spirit said, "I'm surprised the teacher didn't hear the snoring."
Jounouchi glared at him, but it wasn't a bad kind of glare. Anzu started to laugh. Inside his own mind, Yugi was laughing too.
It felt a bit strange to be talking about such mundane things. The spirit leaned further back and let his head rest on the cushions. The living room's ceiling was very visible and white. When the conversation turned to other things and more laughing was involved and Yugi's mirth washed over him, he realized that he was very close to feeling what most people probably considered normal.
The shadows in his mind weren't quite so thick any more.
Maybe it would all make sense one day. Maybe he would know who he really was.
Maybe right now it was enough to know that there were people he could care about.
And maybe, just maybe, he wasn't all that bad after all.
Author's Note: I don't know what it tells about me as a person, but writing from an unstable person's point of view is very much fun for me. It's not easy, but it's interesting. I swear I'll try to make things actually happen more in the next one. This one is sort of deliberately similar in style to Identity, to try to illustrate the gradual change in the Pharaoh's thinking when he's slowly getting a bit less insane as well as more of an individual. Not sure how I did with that and I hope this repetitiveness doesn't take too much out of what little enjoyment you manage to get while reading this...
I copied the reviews on Monologue and posted them as a collection of reviews in the review section because I don't like removing other people's comments.