Disclaimer: Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters = Kazuki Takahashi
Prompt: Yugi has forgotten what it was like to not share his body.
Writing music for this chapter: "My Body is a Cage" cover by Peter Gabriel
Off Kilter
mY BOdY is A CagE thAt k eeps Mə fROM dAncINg wItH thE ONE i LovE
Had there always been a crack in his ceiling?
Tick.
Perhaps it wasn't actually a crack. The glare from his cell phone had left his pupils over-dilated; the crack was just a shadow in stark relief. Of course his ceiling was unmarred.
He should have known that.
Tock.
Yugi shifted lower under his coverlet, trying to find a new position – one that might be more conducive to sleep. His fingers twitched over the leg of his pajamas, picking at a pull in the fabric.
Silence.
It stretched uncomfortably over the room, a vacuum that seemed to keep him stuck in cognizance. He imagined that even if he stood up, tried to open his door to leave the room, there would be nothing over the threshold.
Empty space where sound amplified exponentially and took long, tense moments for the echoes to die.
It would make for a stunning replica of his mind, at that moment.
Tick.
It was verging on two weeks since they'd crawled under the sands to complete a ritual millennia overdue. They had been in Egypt for barely three days before the entire charade was over and they were all sleepwalking onto their flight home.
No one had talked to one another.
The whole thing had not seemed real, when they were sitting in their cushioned seats with their tray tables covered in questionable in-flight meals of sushi and curried beef.
Yugi had not been able to eat any of it. He was too nauseous to even try.
How did an animal learn to balance without a tail when it is bitten off?
Of all the things Yugi had prepared himself for, tried to expect of his parting with the Pharaoh, this had not been one of them. He had lived with only one person in his mind for fourteen years; it had been the majority of his life. Did he not have much more practice being alone in his head than accompanied? He had not thought that living with a second voice could change the landscape so drastically.
Tock.
He flipped open his cellphone and squinted at the LCD numbers on its screen. One minute and twenty three seconds had passed since the last time he'd checked it.
The hour crawled, dragging Yugi mockingly behind it, taking measured, poised steps so that he would feel every sharp rock he was scraped past. His agony rattled in his head, ricocheting through the extra space like a pinball.
He had been woefully unprepared for the consequences of that duel.
At first, it was difficult to concentrate. His thoughts, once contained by the solid presence of another person forming a jetty across his mind, oozed out in the empty space, and he found them oft times difficult to collect. He'd become so preoccupied with reclaiming those very thoughts that he would not hear the person speaking to him.
He was set completely off-kilter.
Then there was mild relief. When they arrived back in Domino, it was as if the spell was broken. They set foot in the terminal, and a collective sigh of relief passed through them, duelist and spectator alike. What had happened in that sacred underground – what had passed to bring them to that strange shrine in the desert – was like a distant memory, though it loomed behind them conspicuously. Somehow, they were able to stop themselves from looking behind, to avoid seeing the devastation their path had trawled through.
But when Yugi caught Rebecca in his arms, he'd felt faint and come very close to keeling over. His knees felt like jelly, and everything was very loud. The girl's voice, normally childlike and shrill had become a banshee shriek in his ear, and he wondered if they could tell how his head swam.
Tick.
It was a sudden deafness, arresting him of his spacial and depth perception, allowing chaos to rampage through his head.
Atem had been an omnipotent presence in his heart and mind, always privy to Yugi's thoughts when he wanted him to be (and even sometimes when he didn't). When he was alone, it was superficial, because the spirit had been there. His mind was a comfortably packed archive of two boys' thoughts and feelings, a highway of discussion and bare intentions. When he was bored, Atem had been his entertainment; when he was troubled, Atem his counsel; when he was frightened, Atem his bastion.
Atem had been like a fixture in his brain, though much more precious than any piece of furniture could be to its respective room. A chair could not comfort, protect, or relieve its surroundings. A chair could not love its habitat.
So how much more devastating when Atem was no longer there, a quiet presence hovering in his mind, ready to answer Yugi's summon, even when it was just a skipped beat of his heart. The spirit had always known when Yugi needed him, even when Yugi himself did not.
He could barely recall any of the times where he'd wished he wasn't playing host to the spirit now.
Tock.
Yugi was more than certain he was mere moments from hurling his alarm clock at the wall. How had he never noticed that overbearing ticking before?
Then again, he couldn't remember it ever being this quiet.
Though he had lived alone with himself for far longer than his partnership with Atem, it was incomparable. Until he'd completed the Puzzle, he had never known different. He did not recognize the empty corners of his mind because there had never been anything to occupy them. Atem had, like smoke, slipped into the recesses of his mind and filled them, a rich ink on empty canvas. Yugi had not recognized the nature of his cohabitation, until it was over; he had sometimes imagined that his brain – his heart – had stretched to make room for the Pharaoh. Now he knew better.
The spirit had lifted the veil from his eyes, and he could see the far reaches of his mind now, sitting pensive and awaiting use.
They were covered in dust and broken things and detritus from two years of perfect communion.
He had not thought of their parting as a break-up, but the wreckage of his mind certainly made it feel that way.
Yugi's head slowly turned on its side, gaze sweeping the room in dull, maddened frustration. The shadows stretched ghoulishly across the walls, seeming much longer than they should have been. As his eyes fixed on one spot, the room seemed to zoom out around him, growing elephantine as he shrunk.
Even lying still, he found balance hard to come by. He wondered sickly if he'd ever find it again.
The illusion of expanded space had first struck him on the staircase outside his bedroom. He could remember the scene clearly: the afternoon sun had thrown the shadow of the stair banister against the wall, bathing it in orange and black glow. The house had been utterly still – it was empty and undisturbed by the slow pace of afternoon slipping past outside.
He'd stood at the bottom of the steps, holding a glass of tea and looking at the landing suspiciously. The orange glow ended abruptly on the wall where the ceiling cut across the staircase – it made the second floor seem darker, the shadows thicker. He felt pressure in his ears and suddenly the meager sounds from the gameshop were muffled.
And then it stretched.
The walls crept away from him, the stairs growing long and the landing seeming to climb higher into the house, lengthening the distance between it and Yugi.
It was a trance. One foot slid forward and rose to plant itself on the first step. He felt heavy, his foot covered in cement. His knees were rusted gears and the tea was becoming dry ice in his hand.
The world widened around him.
The empty space was consuming and disturbing and he would have been terrified if not for the stasis keeping his mind locked in place. There was no room for his thoughts to churn – it was moving sleep paralysis.
How could he be claustrophobic in this canyon where the walls climbed forever and the stairs did not end?
He tried to open his mouth, to call for his grandfather – the man was barely 100ft away, cloistered in the game shop on the other side of the door. But no sound left his mouth – his throat was a barren dirt road, and his vocal folds would not vibrate. Only creaking air passed through.
And as for the one who had always been there – the one who could have shaken him from the illusion, talked him out of this strange wormhole. Well, he was not there.
Nobody was there.
Then the glass slipped from nerveless fingers and splattered tea across his feet, and the illusion broke.
That had been the first time he'd allowed himself to cry, crumpling to the first step and holding his head.
Yugi shook his head at the memory, feeling the sick chill crawl from his stomach at the horrible disorientation that still crept into his mind at the thought of that minute on the staircase. He squeezed his eyes shut, turning himself onto his other side, facing away from his room.
Being alone in his mind had never been like this. How could he have known what that hour on that cursed Egyptian dais would bring?
The body beside him shifted and rolled toward him.
Atem's hands reached out and slid over him, laying his body against Yugi's.
How could he have known?
It was the stunned silence at Atem's rebirth, at his quivering, tanned body standing before the firmly sealed door to the afterlife that had lasted through the plane ride to Japan. No one could speak because they could not translate their wonder, their confusion.
Yugi had felt faint because his partner was standing beside him in Domino's airport, there in more substantial measure than he'd ever been before.
And he could not feel him.
Yugi felt his eyes sting and he knew that if he did not change the course of his thoughts, tears would form. He looked over the resting, prone form of his partner, sharing his bed because he had fallen asleep there, talking to the boy about everything and nothing – as he had every night since they'd come home.
Yugi swallowed, expression drawing together in disquiet, brows knit. He wondered at the hands on him that held them together, and finally noticed the disturbance in Atem's own features.
Did he feel it too? The chasm that seemed to stretch between them as they laid less than an inch apart, grasping each other for dear life? Did he feel regret at the empty space where their minds used to fuse, like their bodies now?
He had no right to ask for more than this, when they'd been allowed to keep their friend, to steal him back from the afterlife. This had to be enough – but his throat still seized and his heart still twisted at the barren spot where Atem's mind used to touch his.
Anzu had remarked to him, the day after they'd returned, that this must be better. They were all really together now. They could have both boys at once – now it could be the five of them together, instead of only four plus one spirit observer. Yugi recalled thinking at the time that the blush on Anzu's cheeks was probably not at the thought of five people but two.
With slow movement that gained more confidence, Yugi reached across Atem to complete the embrace, sliding his head into the impression beside his other's, letting their foreheads nestle together. His fingers curled into Atem's tank top and pulled, desperate, bringing him flush with the other boy. He didn't know how they would explain this intimacy, this hold that belied mere friendship, in the morning. But in the dark, they did not have to. Night time was for diminished inhibitions that rendered reason useless and empowered the satiation of desire. And at this moment, holding Atem was the only thing that made sleep feasible. He could ponder why some other time.
He could not call this 'better'. The ability to touch and feel and experience the world beside Atem rather than for him was not 'better' compared to the yawning emptiness in his mind, the loss of a union that had made his heart so full that he was sure the prophesied outcome of the sacred duel would break it.
It was not 'better' to be able to look upon his face and not feel him, when there was barely space for air between them.
It was only 'different'.
MY BODY IS A—
A/N: Thanks for reading! Hopefully it won't be too long until another full-length one-shot :)
