Chapter 3: Like an Onion
"How dare you! How dare you accuse me of being unfaithful!" The indignant red faced woman screeched in Kagome's pensive face.
"Do not twist my words, I merely said I refused to bless your vows warped with lies!" There was such anger in her voice as she stared at the taller woman who looked beyond irate, standing behind and slightly off to the side of the woman was a man who watched the scene with uncertainty, though his eyes narrowed and his lips thinned as the argument escalated.
"What else could you have possibly been accusing me of?" The woman threw her hands up in exasperation.
"Lies come in many forms, but perhaps you are feeling guilt over one lie in particular?"
"Fuck you!"
"Enough Yuri!" The male spoke suddenly in a deep rumbling voice aimed at the foul mouthed woman, before turning his hesitant gaze back to Kagome. "I apologize lady priestess for whatever grievance we have caused you." His bow was deep and respectful and Kagome was quick to return it.
"What? Why are you-." He silenced her with a slanted look.
"The fault lies with me, perhaps I should have said nothing at all…" Kagome sounded hesitant and unsure as she shifted from foot to foot.
"You are not the only one who has said such things…" There was a bitter sweet smile on his face as his gaze landed on Yuri.
"You can't seriously believe what any of them say!" She sounded incredulous as she whirled to stare him in the face. When she didn't see the answer she had hoped for she spun on her heel, storming away in a flurry of anger.
He waited until she was stomping down the steps before returning his gaze toward Kagome. "If it would be alright I would still like to pay my respects to the Gods."
"Of course." She responded quietly, watching him as he bowed twice more, once to her and once to Yugi who she could feel at her back, before walking away to another part of the shrine. They stood in silence for sometime before Yami finally spoke up.
"Why did you deny them your blessings?"
She turned to lock her gaze with him before moving on to Yugi. "Have you ever heard of the red string of fate?"Yugi nodded but when Yami began to look puzzled she turned to him and smiled. "To put it simply, everyone has a soul mate, and everyone is connected to their soul mate by a red thread tied to their little finger." She explained, waggling her pinky in emphasis. "And neither time, place, or circumstances can break this thread, it will stretch, and tangle but no force on earth can break such a bond, as it is set by the Gods. Or so the legend goes." Her brows furrowed as a thought occurred to her, with interest she studied the two of them, and Yami could tell it was more than a visual probe as her powers washed over them. "I didn't really notice it last night but even with only quick prod of my powers I can tell that your own bond is… odd."
"Odd, what do you mean by odd?" Yugi asked his voice full of worry and surprise.
"Exactly as it sounds I've never felt a connection such as yours and it could certainly explain how the demon was able to call Yami's soul back to this plane."
"Then please continue." Yami prompted.
She paused to gather her thoughts. "This could be a long explanation, perhaps we should continue it inside?" When they nodded she lead the way back into the house. "I'll clean up in here and meet you in the living room. Oh by the way Yugi did you happen to get a hold of anyone?"
"Yes thank you. Tea will be here in about two hours." She nodded and began cleaning while they went to the next room over.
When she joined them several moments later she had a box of markers and several sheets of paper which she placed on the coffee table before taking a seat in a kneeling position on the floor. "The red string of fate isn't literally a string wrapped around your finger but a metaphor for a bond of love two people share whole heartily, it is strong and as the legend goes unbreakable, few people find someone like that. It gets its name from the red glow it exudes- its aura. Being a priestess allows me to see and interact with peoples bonds, which in turn allows me to bless them, protect them from outside forces. But bonds exist in more ways than just love, there's friendship, hate, rivalry, any strong feeling you feel for someone creates a bond." She studied them for a moment her lips thinning. "As I said yours feels strange to me but to understand why it's off you'll need to understand how most people form bonds."
She gave pause for just a moment before coming to a decision. "Perhaps I should start with the soul itself. You need to understand that a soul is composed of layers, many layers. Think of it like an onion. It is the two outer most layers that form the bonds you make with people, below them are the important memories that have made you into who you are, and below them are seven more layers, and they are represented physically on your body, you would know them as chakra points," She pointed to the crown of her head. "Spirituality, transcendence, and being connected to a higher plane of consciousness." Between her eyes. "Intuition and wisdom." Throat. "Self expression and communication." Then to the right of her heart. "The drive of your love and compassion, and healing." She stood up and pointed to her navel. "Seat of your will power." She blushed when she pointed to her feminine parts and then to her back side. "Sensual drive and material drive." She avoided eye contact as she plopped gracelessly back to the floor, waiting for hers and Yugi's blushes to die down. "Though they're not necessarily in that order, their individual importance to you dictates that order. All of these layers act as barriers around your core, all that is you." She paused. "There's a bit more to it than that, but that's the general gist of it."
"And where in all of this does a person's soul room come into play?" Yugi couldn't help but query.
It was Yami who answered as he turned his attention to Yugi. "A soul room is a visual manifestation of a person's core and is located in the mind, in which memories and quirks in a person's personality are represented with objects and other visuals usually tied to their time and experiences. It reveals all that they are and all that they have the potential to be." Yugi nodded, having already known this. "By interfering or altering objects within the room one can, if they are powerful enough, alter another's personality and memories, or utterly obliterate them."
"Destructive and cruel things aren't they only adjustments someone can make to another's soul room, knowledge and wisdom can be imparted, and power can be passed on to a successor. But a great deal of know how is needed if you intend to affect the core of another's soul." Kagome interjected her lips slanting down in a frown.
Yami tilted his head in agreement before continuing. "All in all a soul room is simply a projection of the core of a person's soul it is a way to view another's inner self without having to break through the many layers of their actual soul and possibly irreversibly damaging them if not killing them out right, if such is not your intent."
Kagome nodded in agreement to his assessment as she removed the green and orange markers and drew two circles returning to their original topic. "Let's say each circle represents a different person's soul, when you make connections with another person, friendly or otherwise, a bit of your soul and a bit of their soul reach out to each other, meeting in the middle." She drew a green line from the green circle stopping mid way between the two, switched colors and connected the orange line to both the green line and the orange circle. She looked up at Yami. "When you glimpsed at my soul you felt surface emotions, the emotions that are constantly changing, they're malleable, and a projection of how you are feeling at that moment, it is these emotions, these bit of soul that first form a bond, and they're easily broken and highly susceptible to changing."
"That is why you invited me to peer at your soul, the surface emotions would have told me if you were speaking true or not." Yami muttered mostly for Yugi's benefit.
She nodded once more in agreement to Yami before she gave a look that encompassed both of them. "Between the outer layer of the soul, the emotions and the memories that play out beneath them there is another layer of emotions, these ones are stronger and mostly unchanging, they're the emotion connected to your most intimate and important memories, those that have molded you into the person that you are, they are also the emotions that express who you are the best. Being slightly closer to your inner self they are more powerful and few people in your life are privy to a bond formed by such emotions. It is these emotions that solidify a connection between people. When I went to bless the couple's vows, which entails adding a layer of protection over top of the bond to protect it from outside harm, I felt a great deal of negative emotions flooding from the woman's half of the connection, I followed her bit of the bond to her soul and I did find love but for another, and I'll not bless vows built on lies." There was silence for several moments while they took in the information, then Yugi's lips turned down in a frown.
"Is that connection how the demon managed to get to Yami?" Yugi queried pointing to the connected lines.
Kagome studied the two of them for several moments before shaking her head in the negative. "No the connected lines split when one of the souls passes on, think of it like a slip knot, when you pull on one end of the rope the knot comes undone."
"Why is that?" Yami prodded.
"It prevents people from holding on to one another, from keeping them anchored to the living plane." She paused tapping her finger on her chin as she thought. "However that's not to say that it doesn't happen, sometimes a person's longing for another keeps the dead here or the deceased's desire for life or revenge or some such thing can also have the power to keep them tethered to this plane."
Yugi shifted nervously in his seat. "Do you think my wish for Yami to remain let her get to him?"
"Again no." She shook her head. "It is ultimately a selfish desire to keep someone from moving on, to keep them from their rest." She smiled brightly at Yugi. "And I certainly can't sense a selfish bone in you. While you may have longed for Yami to remain with you, I cannot imagine that it is within your nature to hold another back from their happiness even if it costs you your own." Her eyes sparkled merrily with laughter at Yugi's embarrassment, a blazing blush coloring his face.
"What makes you so sure?" Yami couldn't help but question.
"His aura of course, Yugi hides nothing, it is not in him to do so, and such is reflected in his aura."
Yami returned to the matter at hand. "If not by these means then how?" Yami looked thoughtful though he cast a soft glance at Yugi.
"The two of you have utterly bypassed meeting in the middle and attached a piece of your core selves to each other."
"Why"
"How?" Yugi asked at the same time Yami voice his question.
She shifted on her knees as she studied them; she had hoped that her explanation would have given them the necessary information to fill in the blanks. "I'm not certain I can answer that, unless you're willing to explain a few things to me." She hurried to continue when Yami's eyes narrowed with suspicion. "Let me be clear I'm not asking for an exchange of information there are simply things that I need to understand in order to grasp the situation fully. I mean it's obvious the two of you have coexisted once before, was it in the same body? Or did the two of you live separately?" A thought she found she didn't like occurred to her. "Are you Yami's reincarnation?" They both noticed a queer pitch in her voice when she asked her final question, the way she shifted as if she were uncomfortable with the thought.
I suppose it comes down to whether or not we feel we can trust her. Yami aimed the thought at Yugi.
She's had plenty of opportunity to cause harm I don't think she'd go through all this just to hurt us in the end.
…Perhaps. But ones motives are not always known until it is far too late.
Kagome could tell by the tense way Yami sat and Yugi's vague change in facial expressions that the two were discussing what they should and should not share with her. It was several minutes before Yami- it was obvious by the way he sighed in exasperation - relented to Yugi who grinned triumphantly and spun a story nearly a fanciful as her own. It took nearly an hour between the two of them to explain the first arc of their journey together through Duelist Kingdom, before she stopped them as a thought struck her.
"So let's see if I understand correctly, this millennium puzzle housed your soul for three thousand years?" She directed her question to Yami who nodded. In a way it sounds a bit like the Shikon with the whole stationary object housing a soul thing though it is far older and certainly a power of a different sort. "But when the stakes of a duel became too high the two of you would merge souls to become one entity?"
"At first yes, eventually though once Yugi became aware of my presence we began thinking as separate beings despite the over lying of our souls."
Kagome couldn't help but laugh. "Wouldn't that be like cheating? Two against one isn't exactly fair." She teased.
"What!? No it wasn't like that!"Yugi, flustered, rushed to defend.
"We had a single deck." Yami countered.
"But two minds." She grinned tapping her forehead before returning to the problem at hand. "But I digress. I think I can piece together what happen based on what you've told me." She removed three more markers- purple, red, and blue- and a clean sheet of paper. On one half of the paper in blue she wrote Yugi, and drew a blue circle beneath it, and then repeated the process with the red marker on the other half writing Yami. "At fist neither of you knew of each other, you both remained as separate beings." She then took the purple marker and drew a circle slightly below and between the other two. "Then you dueled Mr. Kaiba as one, for your grandfather." She noted that Yugi's brow rose at her honorific use of Kaiba's name. "And when you separated you each left a piece of yourselves in the other. But rather than the pieces you left in each other utterly breaking off to merge with the others soul it stretched, rather like the red string of fate. Whether this happened after the first time you dueled together or over the course of many duels is unimportant. " Again she drew a blue circle under Yugi's name and a red one under Yami's, however this time she took the red marker and drew a line from Yami's to Yugi's blue circle filling in a small bit of the blue circle with red and did the same with the blue to Yami's red circle, with neither line touching the other. "See? Neither of you have met in the middle but the connection is certainly there. And at some point Yami went on to the afterlife but because the bond isn't formed by the joining of two souls, but rather two independent linking's, it stretched rather than breaking, again just as the red string of fate would have." She tapped her finger on the lines. "It is these connections that the ogre used to bring Yami back."
She studied her paper when a panicked thought slammed into her head, snapping her head up she looked at Yugi's neck, and dismaying when she saw the lack of a gold pyramid, she sucked a breath in through her teeth letting it out in a shaky wheeze. "Your soul rooms!" Both stared blankly at her. "You need to both go to your soul rooms now and tell me what you see!" They turned to look confused at each other before Yugi shrugged as if to say 'why not?'.
It was with practiced ease that Yugi did as he was told closing his eyes to concentrate he soon found himself in his soul room, Yami appearing besides him a moment later.
And looking just as surprised as him.
There were no walls, no doors, nothing to keep their minds separate, to keep them as their own persons. And Yami's labyrinth was already fusing with his own modern room; his stone floors quickly over taking Yugi's own plush carpet though the floor kept its color, hieroglyphics had been chiseled into parts of the plaster wall, his toys and games spreading out to encompass parts of Yami's domain, the lighting changing from swaying torches to iridescent light bulbs that blinked as if to imitate a flicking flame.
"If this keeps up… both of us will cease to exist!" He didn't think he'd ever heard such fear underlying Yami's voice, and what was worse he could feel the fear echo in himself.
"Well I suppose this explains why we haven't been able to hide as much from each other." Yugi attempted to lighten the mood, and failed horribly when he couldn't keep his own voice from trembling.
"Come we must get out of here, and find a way to fix this, or at the very least prevent this from escalating." When Yugi opened his eyes again it was too Kagome peering worriedly between the two of them, leaning as far over the coffee table as possible.
"Well?"
"There is nothing separating us. The walls the doors they're all gone, Yami's adornments are already spreading in to my soul room and vice versa." There was panic and fear in Yugi's voice, and though silent Yami didn't exactly appear calm.
"That's not good… it's just as I feared." She leaned back giving both of them a view of the paper where she had drawn a yellow triangle around the original circle representing Yami's soul. "It took me a few minutes after your story for me to realize that you're missing the Millennium Puzzle… which is where Yami was housed when not acting the part of Yugi or with Yugi. It acted as a barrier, like a wall between you, and kept the two of you as yourselves until Yami was released to the afterlife, without it eventually you really will be as one person." She rubbed her temples. Losing yourself was a fear Kagome could certainly understand. "Where is the puzzle?"
"Gone." Was Yugi's mournful reply.
"That is problematic." She pursed her lips.
"You've got your own magic right? Can you separate us?" Yugi hesitated a moment. "Can you send Yami back to the afterlife?" He wanted Yami to be happy he truly did… he just wished he could be happy here, with him and their friends.
Yami had caught Yugi's thought and the guilt that had followed it but made no indication that he had noticed. Could he be happy here, did it matter? I may truly have no choice. He thought privately.
"I wouldn't really call it magic." She said absent mindedly while she drummed her finger on the table as she thought about his question. "Breaking a bond between people isn't easy or safe, your problem in particular would be difficult after all I would be breaking bits of your souls... it's also not something I know how to do." At least not intentionally or on another person… I bet she could do it. The bitter though was quick to enter her mind and slow to leave her heart. Clearing her throat and attempting to do the same to her mind she continued. "There are a few scrolls in some of the storage sheds that may give me some insight on how to accomplish this, but then again maybe not seeing how odd your bond is – its more than just emotions its pieces of yourselves, your very cores. And then even if I could manage to break the bond, then what? Unless we find an object to house your soul things will go back to the way they are. And I'm not sure if you've noticed but I'm not an Egyptian priest, I can't read you a prayer and send you on your way." She finished by throwing her hands up in the air.
"Why would you need to be an Egyptian priest?" Yami's brow shot up into his blonde bangs.
"I need to believe the word I speak or they are just pretty words, I need to believe in your Gods or I'll send you to the hands of mine."
"We know a few Egyptians, maybe Marik or Ishizu could help? Or know someone who could help." Yami nodded in agreement with Yugi. "Maybe they'll know a way separate us as well." Yugi murmured mostly to himself.
"Both are excellent ideas." Yami shot Yugi an approving look.
"Right that potentially solves future problems; however the current and more pressing issue is stopping the merge." She released a breath through her nose and focused her thoughts on the millennium puzzle. The puzzle acted as a barrier for all those years keeping their minds separate…a barrier… wait that's it! "I think I may have a solution." Their heads snapped up in unison at her declaration. "I can create a barrier in your soul rooms, not as solid as the one the Millennium Puzzle provided, so most of your thoughts would be shared, but it'll stop your souls from merging." She felt fairly satisfied with her idea though the satisfaction was quickly being squelched by Yugi's deepening frown.
"Your power can't be limitless. Eventually it will put a strain on you." Yami began nodding in agreement.
"Indeed, and what happens if one of those demons decides to exact revenge on you for killing the other one? With your powers supporting us you could be injured or worse."
Kagome wrinkled her nose and huffed. "Believe me when I say most demons spend more time just trying to fit in, they don't want the attention. Especially the attention they'd receive if they attacked me." She softened her voice as she continued. "Besides what choice do either of you have?" They were going to argue the point she could tell by the way they set their faces in determination, however before either could speak a yell rang out through the court yard.
I've had this chapter written out for a long time... I'm still not sure how I feel about it.
