Chapter 7 – If I Can't Love Her, Entr'acte/Wolf Chase

With no sun and no moon to guide him, time slipped away from Yuugi quickly. Indeed, the underground chamber of the Pharaoh's tomb seemed not only apart from time, but apart from all else as well. No matter how many times he wandered the halls, he was never able to familiarize himself with the floorplan. The walls were never where he had left them; the end of each chamber seemed to stretch on forever into cold and dismal darkness. Sometimes it seemed to Yuugi that the place was a stranger even to itself.

He enjoyed studying the reliefs on the walls—at least, he enjoyed it as much as anything could be truly enjoyed here. There was something soothing about the way the stories stretched out into the shadows in long, cool lines. They reminded him that this place had once been someone's home, that to someone these cold, inky chambers had once felt safe, sun-drenched, and warm.

That someone was still here, but to him these walls were now vague and unfamiliar. The stones and archways had grown ancient around him while he remained the same, and what was once his palace and home had grown into his tomb and prison cell—without him having aged a single day.

Yuugi shivered. He hadn't seen or heard from the Nameless Pharaoh since he had first arrived here, but…

The wind moved strangely here. Yuugi could hear pacing in the silence. Every shadow ended on a sharp, jagged edge. And, when Yuugi gazed up into the vacant eyes of the hieroglyph figures on the walls, he could swear that he was being watched.

-xxx-

No words shaped his thoughts.

He thought in sweeping black waves, felt in a storm of raging red chaos, in freshly lit embers and dying smoke.

Without words to buffer them, each thought consumed him completely, turning the landscape of his mind into a charred and broken wasteland.

Sometimes he could walk that land, vaguely aware that he was standing in twilight and ruins, gazing at the ghost of who he could sense he had once been. During those rare moments of lucidity he wanted to tear up the ground, to unearth whatever might be buried there—any clue, any shred of proof he could discover that he had once been alive. But he would always find that the ground was solid rock—totally impenetrable—and he was left cowering on the ground squeezing dirt between his fingers.

There were other times—looming, immense moments, when he would wander in the dark—floating in an alternate dimension with no ground and no sky. When these moments came they were the only thing that had ever been, and they diminished him so completely that he didn't know that he should have felt lost and frightened.

It wasn't just himself that he had forgotten. Mahad, Seth, Isis, and Mana swam like specters around him, no more alive than the carvings on the wall. When he couldn't see them they ceased to exist.

Yuugi was the only one who he always knew.

Yuugi floated above the surface of the gloom, lighter and softer than sunlight. His every movement around the palace sent ripples through every surface, made the air skip.

It was almost enough to make him wish he could remember what it had been like to have skin that could be touched, how it had felt to have a heart that could race and breath that could catch.

The Pharaoh seethed as he paced his chamber. He glowered at the walls. He hated the way they were carved with a language that he couldn't read, how they told a story that he couldn't recall. He hated how the world had become increasingly dim until there was nothing left of it but tattered shadow and fog, how everything that he had once known had contorted into a twisted and dismal mystery that taunted him with his own inability to understand it.

He hated how, no matter how hard he might try to destroy them, he could not even touch the walls that imprisoned him.

The bursts of hope that Yuugi brought were so fragile, so easily devoured.

The Pharaoh growled and clawed at the darkness. Its grip around him tightened, threatening to obliterate him—as if he had not been thoroughly obliterated already.

-xxx-

On the other side of the wall, Yuugi was suddenly seized by fear.

He must have wandered too far. He had been carried away by the tale embossed on the wall alongside him, and now, at the end of the story, there was nowhere to go but through a dark and silent doorway he had never seen before, into a chamber that seemed to Yuugi as immense and vacant as a black hole.

He shivered, rubbed his arms and shoulders, but could still feel cold seeping into his blood.

"M-mana?" He whispered. "Priestess? Master Mahad? Is—an-anyone there?"

He couldn't hear himself speak—the nothingness around him was too immense.

Yuugi wanted to run, to cry, to disappear. For not the first time since he had been trapped here, Yuugi wished that he could open his eyes and find himself safe in his bed back in Domino, with his quilt tucked up under his chin and sunlight streaming in through his bedroom window.

But Yuugi knew that he wasn't dreaming. The ground under his feet was too hard for this to be a dream, the cold was too bitter and intense.

And Yuugi knew that he wouldn't run. He knew because, lingering on the threshold of this strange doorway to the underworld, he sensed a fear with which he was intimately familiar.

It was the type of sweaty-palmed and shame-faced fear that had eaten away at Yuugi a little each day in school—every time he ate lunch by himself in the cafeteria, every time he was the only one in the class without a partner, each time he opened his mouth to speak and no one turned to listen—the fear that he would be alone and small and misunderstood for the rest of his life…

…So what then, Yuugi wondered, was it like to be afraid of being alone for all of eternity?

His voice shook. "P-pharaoh? Are you in there?"

There was no reply. Yuugi swallowed hard, took a deep breath, and entered the chamber that no light and no happiness had touched in over a thousand years.

He promptly fell on the ceiling.

-xxx-

It took Yuugi's eyes several moments to adjust to the darkness, and once they did he was certain that he must be dreaming after all. Surely the chamber that he had stumbled into could only exist in nightmares.

There was no up or down, only endless staircases and doorways leading down darkened halls, running directly into walls, or vanishing completely.

"Ph-pharaoh…?" Yuugi asked again. "Are you in here? I thought—that I could feel you…"

Yuugi shook his head. He wouldn't be surprised if the Pharaoh was lost somewhere in here. It would be so easy to take a wrong turn and simply wander forever in murky, unyielding darkness…

Yuugi froze, then turned around slowly. He had only taken three steps. He had counted. And yet, the door through which he had entered was gone—or at least, Yuugi had no way of identifying it. It had slammed shut behind him and was now indistinguishable from the thousand others that lined the walls and sprung up from the floor and sank into the ceiling.

Yuugi gulped. He had thought himself a prisoner before, but now he was truly trapped.

"Well," Yuugi sighed, chuckling softly to himself, "I guess there's nothing to do but keep looking." His laughter did little to keep him warm, or to assuage his nagging fear that he would in fact die in this strange and unforgiving chamber.

But Yuugi took a deep breath—took a step forward—thinking of all the times in the past he had been afraid to take that fateful first step, all the times he had been afraid to raise his voice, and wondered—now, after so many years of fear and isolation and doubt—did he really have anything to lose?

-xxx-

Yuugi continued to count the step as he walked. By the fifteenth he could no longer tell whether he had been wandering the chamber for minutes or hours or days. On the thirty-second he forgot the sensation of gravity—he seemed to float through the darkness from one door to the next, pulling at the handle and falling deeper into this inside-out and inverted world. As he counted fifty-six he could no longer remember how or why he had entered this chamber in the first place. And what was he counting for, anyway? He couldn't recall, so he stopped.

Yuugi chocked back a sob. Here, swimming in darkness, light and air and life were unimaginable feelings—they were behind a wall and up over a distant hill. If he focused his attention, Yuugi could remember sunsets on the beach and soft picnics in the park. He could recall blurs of birthday parties and slabs of chocolate cake—so sweet they made his teeth ache. He bundled up all his memories of everything he had once loved and had thought would last forever and burned them like a match. All his innocent sun-streaked days that had somehow dimmed and slipped out of his grasp—too fast for him to realize what he was losing until they were already far away. They had dropped one by one, and no matter how meticulously he tried to count and cradle them they all ran together now in one dark blur—just like the footsteps that had taken him here.

-xxx-

Somewhere, from a very great distance, the Pharaoh heard someone crying. And from somewhere else, even farther away, something told him that the sound meant that someone was suffering.

-xxx-

Yuugi continued to open doors, to wander aimlessly in the devastating darkness. He stumbled over the feet that he could no longer feel, struggled to keep his eyes open (though the world around him was indistinguishable either way). His hands hung limply off his wrists. He felt as if a weight have been placed at the center of his chest, and it took every fragment of energy he could muster to keep his heart and lungs from collapsing.

He had to sit down, he had to rest, to breathe, to see light.

By now, Yuugi had largely forgotten that the chamber even existed. He thought not about doors and staircases, but locks on memories and steep drops down into wells of thick, dark emotion. He wasn't Yuugi anymore-he was the stifled sobs that he would lock deep in his chest until he knew that no one could hear him, he was the pain that built up behind his eyes when he tried so hard to keep from crying in front of everyone at school, he was the long dark wave that picked him up at night and carried him away, drowning his every bright and hopeful thought. He was misplaced anger and doubt and self-reproach that jabbed at his chest and stung like a wound that would never, ever heal. And he was small and soft and fragile in a world built of iron spikes that ran straight through his heart.

And after a time, he wasn't even that.

He collapsed, first onto his knees and then onto his stomach, clutching at the floor that had been waiting to devour him. His tears fell readily, and here, in this complete and utter desolation, Yuugi for the first time wasn't afraid to cry for all the things and all the people that he had lost, for all the light that he would never see and all the air that he would never touch. He had once thought of the world as a bright, open pasture—an endless future yearning to be explored. And now, now it was all compressed into a small black box that was nothing, nothing at all…

Yuugi closed his eyes, blew out his match, and became smoke.

-xxx-

Yuugi awoke to the sensation of being gently rocked, as if he were drifting across the sea.

The light in the room surrounding him was dim, but compared to the utter darkness he was accustomed to even this was nearly blinding. Yuugi had to squint and shade his eyes as he slowly, cautiously opened them.

This room had a certain softness to it—the walls did not encroach, the air felt clear and cool. It reminded Yuugi of the early morning, when the world was still dewy and quiet—just beginning to wake up.

And someone was definitely watching him.

Standing in the corner was a figure with sharp features, large, dark eyes, and a furious crown of hair that reminded Yuugi of wildfire. Even from across the room Yuugi could feel the boldness in his stance, the way he had of commanding the attention of every gust of wind and streak of shadow. He had a sharp, towering type of confidence that emanated out like sunlight.

When he noticed that Yuugi was awake he nodded and gave him a small frown.

"You are the Nameless Pharaoh…aren't you?"

The man hesitated a moment. "I believe so, yes."

"What happened to me?" Yuugi gulped. "Am I…dead?"

A smile as faint as fading smoke passed across his lips, and for a moment Yuugi could see the young boy—he couldn't even be older than Yuugi himself—behind the thousands of years of darkness and solitude. "Most definitely not."

"Oh, uh, that's good." Yuugi shifted nervously. "So, where are we—if you don't mind me asking?"

The Pharaoh turned away from him. "I don't mind your asking, though I'm not sure that I'll be able to explain." He paused. "This is as safe a place as any that you'll find here."

"Oh…" With every passing moment Yuugi could feel the life rush back into him. The jaws of panic that had griped him now loose, Yuugi felt relaxed enough to take in more of his surroundings. Without the shadow magic at his sides, the Pharaoh no longer seemed as immense and menacing. Yuugi watched the tremors in his face, the way that not even his regal bearing could hide the intense melancholy in his sunset-red eyes and tightly drawn lips.

"What…what happened to me?" Yuugi repeated.

The Pharaoh shrugged. "Only the same fate that has befallen countless others before you." He turned to Yuugi. "I think you are the first one who has managed to survive it." When Yuugi continued to gaze up at him in confusion, he continued. "This portion of the palace was built for my protection, it is enchanted with very dark and powerful magic. It is by no means easy to overcome."

"I felt like I was dying…"

The Pharaoh nodded. "That was the intended effect."

The Pharaoh continued to stare at Yuugi until Yuugi began to blush and looked away. "But I don't feel that way anymore…"

The Pharaoh nodded, and gave Yuugi the same smoky whisper of a smile. "I don't think you'll feel that way here. My memories are vague and—incomplete—but I know that this place is my refuge. It is the one place in this hellhole that—" He paused, struggling to find the words. "It's the one place that seems familiar."

"I like it here." Yuugi replied. "If I were you I would stay here all the time…"

"I would too, only—you've probably noticed that the palace moves in mysterious ways."

Yuugi nodded. "It's like the walls never really stay in the same place."

"Yes….sometimes I have trouble finding this place. In fact, I was beginning to think that I had lost it forever, until…until you arrived here."

"Oh, uh, good." Yuugi felt as if his ability to form words had suddenly melted. Under the Pharaoh's unflinching gaze all else seemed to float gently away.

"Thank you."

They remained silent for several moments. For Yuugi it was a relief just to be able to feel the passing of time again, to know that he was sitting and breathing and alive.

"Yuugi." There was something about the way the Pharaoh said his name that made Yuugi's insides rush. It was if the all other sounds had suddenly lost their volume and vibrancy—his name on this man's lips was the only sound that would live forever. "Why did you come here?"

Yuugi stared at his hands. "I was looking for my grandfather. He always goes on a lot of trips for his archaeological work, and I try not to worry about him, but Professor Hopkins came back and said that he was in trouble and Grandpa was lost and he didn't know where to find him and—" Yuugi gulped. "Well, there were other things going on, too—but I just felt like I had to find him. He's my only friend and—and I don't know what I would do if he was gone…"

The Pharaoh gave him a level expression. "Why did you come here."

"You mean—"

"Yes. This is my part of the palace. No one is supposed to enter here. No one is supposed to be able to survive it." For a moment Yuugi thought that the Pharaoh looked angry, but his expression softened to something that Yuugi thought closer to wonder. "How did you do it?"

"I—Well, I didn't mean to, really," Yuugi mumbled. "I was walking through the halls, and, I got lost and I came to this doorway and I just kind of felt something, like…someone was sad, and needed help."

The Pharaoh raised his brows, crossed his arms, and didn't reply.

"I guess," Yuugi continued, "It reminded me of myself." He raised his eyes till he was gazing fully at the Pharaoh's face. "I thought that maybe I could help you." He shrugged. "I guess it was a stupid idea, though. I'm not even very good at helping myself…"

"You—believe you can help me?" The Pharaoh's voice was dark and skeptical, but Yuugi could sense something underneath it, some kind of frantic hope that was too fragile to come fully to the surface.

"I don't know, honestly." Yuugi sighed. "Everyone thinks that I'm the one who's destined to save you, but…that seems like a scary idea to me. But I'm here, and I think I understand what you're going through, maybe just a little bit anyway, and I guess I'd like to see what I can do."

Yuugi smiled, and when the Pharaoh smiled back briefly—hesitantly, as if smiles were a thing that he was touching for the first time—it was the first time that Yuugi could remember not being afraid to introduce himself to a stranger.