9. Long Lost Friend

The moment that we met
There was something so familiar,
I felt like I'd known you for a thousand years.
And there inside your eyes
I saw a light that I'd been missing.

-- From Long Lost Friend by Chicago.

Yuugi felt more tired than ever before in his life. It was even worse than that day years ago, when he stayed over at Grandpa's and found him in the kitchen, tearful and clutching the phone as he received news that his daughter and son-in-law had been in a road accident. Even then, sudden bereavement constricting his windpipe, Yuugi hadn't felt this tired. This was more than tired. This was tired squared. This was tired cubed. His brain had been replaced by gauze and jam, which weren't dong a swell job conducting the electrical impulses they were supposed to.

Thinking hurt. Thoughts spent much longer than usual coming together, until he stopped trying to gather them. The only thing that made it through to his conscious brain was a driving sense of regret.

He'd failed his friends.

They'd been hurt because of him. He couldn't remember specifics, but he knew it was his fault. It was only right and fair that he stay away from them so they wouldn't be hurt anymore.

"Yesss…" whispered a voice. He was too tired to think who it might be. "It is your fault. They're better off without you. So ressst… forget everything and ressst…"

He wanted to rest. The tiredness was cloying. It was too much trouble to fight it. He wanted to fall and keep falling until the guilt and hurting stopped.

But someone was knocking.

Yuugi squirmed. Smatterings of old thought skittered through his brain. He should… he had to…

The voice changed, becoming fierce. "If they get in here then I will drain them until they are nothing but husks. Empty, lifeless, ended. They will be hurt – again. And it will be your fault."

"My fault…" Yuugi murmured.

"Yesss … your fault." The voice pressed closer. So did the tiredness. Yuugi fought just to concentrate. "If you let them in, that is. Do you want your friends to die, Innocent One? Do you want me to take their souls?"

No, he didn't want that. He had to keep his friends safe. He had to … protect … keep them … keep them sa-

"Out. Keep them out, Innocent One."

Yes, he had to keep them out, where they'd be safe. It was all he could do to keep them safe, since he had no magic and it was his fault. His fault … his … keep … keep them …

So tired … where had all his energy gone?

Aramanth flicked a tendril into his chest and pulled out another struggling piece of what might have been gossamer. This it ate, slowly, savouring the taste of Yuugi's overdeveloped sense of culpability. "Yesss…"

"Man, you weren't kidding." Jounouchi picked himself up. "I feel like a lump of dough that's been pulverized by a baker having a bad day."

Yami glowered at the door to Yuugi's Soul Room. "I warned you. Aramanth is much stronger than I anticipated." He glanced at them, interposed as he was between them and the door. "Are you all right?"

"Peachy keen."

"Honda?"

"Hang on; I'm just picking my spleen up off the floor."

Jounouchi rolled his neck. "Want to go again?"

Honda did likewise. "Sure."

They ran at the door, shoulders down. At once a wall of mist roared up, flinging them backwards. They crashed into the opposite wall and slid down, groaning.

"Third time's the charm," Jounouchi wheezed.

"This isn't working." Yami was incensed. His mindlink with Yuugi wasn't completely restored, but he could feel his aibou growing weaker, while the magic Aramanth had set to guard the door grew more powerful. It wasn't difficult to make the connection. "We have to get this door open before it's too late!"

"On three?"

But Honda shook his head. "Brute force isn't working. Can't we use magic instead? We're running out of time." He flexed his fists, which were blistered with angry red welts. "Hey, how come these aren't going away even though we're not, y'know, actually flesh and blood right now?"

"And how come yours are?" Jounouchi asked of Yami's unblemished hands.

"This isn't the physical plane," Yami replied distractedly. "That doesn't mean damage here can't be lasting. Souls outside their bodies often retain the vestiges of humanity that make it mortal because their minds can't let it go, so they're limited. I forgot before, when I'd been in control of Yuugi's body. Now I've reasserted control of myself. I am more in tune with my surroundings than you because I'm used to being free from flesh. Wearing flesh changes the shape of your mind, so that you try to superimpose its limitations onto the astral plane."

Jounouchi stared at him. "What the hell did you just say?"

"We don't have time for lengthy explanations!" Yami snapped.

Honda thought he understood what Yami meant, but he was damned if he could repeat it. Suddenly he paused. "Do you hear that?"

"Hear what?" Jounouchi asked. "The sound of my brain exploding?"

"That … drumming."

He cocked his head. "Yeah, I do. Hey is that what you heard before, Yami?"

"Yes. But it's not Yuugi," Yami replied, in a tone that dismissed it as unimportant because of this.

A look passed between them, but before they could say what they were thinking, the shadows that had begun writhing around the edges of the Yuugi's door flared. Aramanth's mocking laugher echoed, seeming to reach into their ears and beat a tattoo against their eardrums.

"Yesss … Ohhh, yesss …"

Yami rushed forward but was beaten back. "Yuugi! Fight it, Yuugi!"

"This door is seriously pissing me off." Jounouchi cast a fleeting look up and down the corridor. "We need some magical dynamite or something."

The shadows reached out and snagged Yami's wrists. He grunted, but Honda grabbed him and dragged him backwards.

"It's killing him," Honda gritted. "This had gone way beyond just using him as a battery pack. I don't think it's gonna stop this time until Yuugi's history."

Yami produced a Duel Monsters card, which crackled with magical energy, and suddenly Celtic Guardian towered over them. Honda and Jounouchi were impressed.

"This part of the whole 'in tune with the astral plane' thing?"

Celtic Guardian raised its sword and charged, chopping at the mist, and actually made it to the door itself. A groove opened up where the sword point slashed.

Yami collapsed, clutching his chest.

A thin scream that sounded a lot like Yuugi pierced the air.

"Pharaoh!"

"I … can't attack the door. It's as much a part of Yuugi as the interior of his Soul Room."

"Damn it!" Jounouchi couldn't have been more obvious if he'd physically picked up thoughts of Flaming Swordsman and his precious Red Eyes Black Dragon and put them aside – not that he could summon them anyway. He'd left his cards behind, so they hadn't appeared with him like his clothes, and neither he nor Honda knew enough about the astral plane and magic and whatever to just pull one out of thin air the way Yami had. "This is stupid! How the hell are we supposed to get in there?"

Celtic Guardian vanished.

Yami stood up on his own. "I don't know. I don't know how to help him." He trembled with ineffectual rage. "That creature is torturing him, and I can't help him."

Honda shut his eyes, trying to think of a solution. He had less magic than anyone; he could barely duel his way out of a paper bag, as he'd shown so many times before. He was the lateral player, the one who thought his way out of problems without the same tools as Yuugi or Jounouchi. Him and Anzu, the cheerleaders – except that Anzu was MIA and he was here being even more useless than usual. He really, really wished Anzu was there so they could put their heads together –

Let me out.

Huh?

Let. Me. Out.

Was that…?

Help me.

"Yowch!" Suddenly his hand felt like it was on fire. It wasn't the one he'd injured punching the door, so it shouldn't have hurt. Honda raised it to look at, and then lifted his head. An idea turned over in his mind like an alligator in a death roll. "Maybe…"

"What?" Jounouchi was all ears. "Maybe what?"

Abruptly, Honda set off down the corridor. He ran, shocking his friends as they both knew how easy it was to become hopelessly lost in the Puzzle. Time, space and reason worked differently here. You could run for miles and find you'd moved three doors away, or take a handful of steps and never get home again. The Millennium Puzzle laughed at breadcrumbs and picked balls of string from between its teeth. Plus, things lurked in the rooms – things that could make an unwary explorer wish he'd tied his mother's apron strings around his throat and jumped off a high ledge.

"Honda!"

He hadn't gone far. He was still visible. "Over here!"

Jounouchi guided Yami towards him; both loath to leave Yuugi's Soul Room for even a moment.

The door in front of Honda looked no different than Yuugi's, except it didn't pulse with shadows.

However, something was hammering against it from the other side. The sound seemed to grow louder as they became aware of it, rather than as they got closer.

The handle stayed cool to the touch when Honda tried it. "It's locked."

"No door is locked in the Puzzle," said Yami. There was no need. If you were able to find the door you wanted then you'd earned the right to open it. Either that or whatever prowled beyond the door had given permission for you to reach it. It was fortune's choice whether the actual act of opening a door proved good or bad – or fatal.

Honda tried again. "Well this one is."

Let me out.

This time they all heard it; a voiceless voice, familiar and insistent. Honda's hand burned again, but only the back, and the pain was strange – radiating in strips across his skin, as though remembering an old pattern of pain.

"That's Anzu!" Jounouchi exclaimed. "Damn it, Aramanth stored her soul here, too! I knew it!"

Stronger together.

The pounding at the door got louder, as though someone was throwing their entire body against it. The words echoed around them, garbled but comprehensible.

Out. Let me. Together. Stand together. Stronger. Friendship. Stronger. Out. Let me. Stand. Friends. Out, you idiots!

"Yup, that sounds like Anzu."

"This isn't a Soul Room," Honda observed, running his hands over the door's surface. He kicked it and bounced back holding his foot, but there was no reaction like when Yuugi's door was damaged. If anything, the hammering got louder.

Yami produced a card and the Celtic Guardian reappeared. One quick slice and the handle tumbled to the floor, and the Duel Monster kicked out with preternatural strength.

The door cracked open, revealing strange darkness beyond that could only be described as thick–

A wave of sudden tiredness slammed into Yami, Jounouchi and Honda with almost physical force. It knocked them to their knees. Jounouchi coughed, as though his lungs were filling with the stuff, but Honda heard him as if from far away. For a handful of seconds all thoughts of Yuugi, Anzu and saving his friends vanished from his head; all he wanted was to lay his head down and sleep until the day he died and could sleep forever.

With a sound like air hissing from a tyre, or liquid rushing from a punctured water balloon, the magic Aramanth had used to cushion the room and suppress the soul inside escaped. It was like being run over by a million stampeding mice.

In the same instant, something large and white erupted from inside the room.

"Aiiiiiiiyaaaaa!"

Struggling to their feet, Jounouchi, Honda and Yami hit the deck again. Jounouchi covered his head, as the white thing skimmed their skulls, hurtled down the corridor and crashed into the door of Yuugi's Soul Room.

Aramanth's shadows grasped greedily, pulling it down.

The shape was a blur as it backed up and crashed into the door again, and then again, never seeming to touch the floor. Yet the door wouldn't give any more than it had for the three boys. A horrible sizzling accompanied each impact, like meat patties hitting a barbeque.

The back of Honda's hand burned overpoweringly. It jolted him back to himself. Jounouchi also yelped, shaking his hand like one might after accidentally touching a hot surface. By this time Honda knew what the sensation was – things were different on the astral plane, where a memory could take on physical qualities and a symbolic gesture could literally bite you in the ass to remind you it was there.

The white shape hurtled against the door, over and over. "You pinkie swore!" it screamed. "You pinkie swore it would always be open to me!"

The shadows grasped and pulled and sniggered

"You're breaking your promise!" Crash! Sizzle! "Yuugi!"

And then, impossibly, the door swung open.

The white shape shook off the shadows and bolted through without touching the ground.

"Quick!" Jounouchi was on his feet and running, Honda and Yami not far behind. They moved sluggishly, as the magic they'd released dissipated into the Puzzle's labyrinth.

The door was already closing again, misty fingers solidifying to shove it.

"He's mine!" Aramanth bellowed. "My meal! My feast! He belongs to me!"

"Oh no you don't!" Jounouchi put on a burst of speed, yanking the handle to keep it open. "No! You! Don't!"

Yes it did.

The door shut with a resounding clang.

"No!" Yami smashed his fist against it, tears of rage and frustration beading at the corners of his eyes.

He'd been so close. So close! He'd felt the mindlink open, had Yuugi's drained spirit touch his own and felt his aibou's agony … and now it was once again muffled by Aramanth and this accursed door.

It wasn't fair.

"Yuugi! YUUGI!"

Aramanth hissed like an angry cat. "You should have stayed where you were, Faithful One."

"You don't get the irony of what you just said, do you?"

It hissed again. "What do you think you can achieve? You are but one soul; tiny, insignificant, unimportant. Weary, exhausted, fatigued. You have no magic."

"Actually, since you put me to sleep when you abducted me, I'm feeling really refreshed." Anzu spread her feet. "Bad move, because I'm also really ticked off. I may not be very powerful, but you'd be surprised what one tiny, insignificant, unimportant soul can do."

It broke off hissing to laugh. "Throwing my words back at me? Childish, facile, immature."

"Sticks and stones."

"You forget, Faithful One; I know better than any living creature what one soul can achieve. I watched Bitter One raze a nation and spend ten thousand years resurrecting a god, and I watched Ancient One destroy him for it. But you are not they, Faithful One. You are human. You are alone. You are weak."

"I am bored. You talk too much. Put Yuugi down, right now."

Coils of tangible shadow bound tighter around the little figure.

Yuugi hung like a marionette with snarled strings, eyes closed and mouth open. His chest writhed with dark tendrils, like some black sea anemone was bursting out of his ribcage. His hands hung slack and his skin had taken on a terrible pallor. He looked already dead, and only the fact that his Soul Room still surrounded them told Anzu he wasn't. Still, something deep in her chest constricted at the sight.

Over him loomed Aramanth – and loom was the only word that fitted. It had gorged so much on Yuugi that it was grotesquely swollen, all but filling the Soul Room. When it moved, it slurped noisily. Unlike the mist she'd seen in the alley, now Aramanth was denser, pulsing like a heart beat at its core. Its tendrils were more like actual limbs, and it was as if everything dark, everything loathsome that had ever crawled, squirmed or grown into existence had a place somewhere in that roiling, pulsing mass – beetles, flies, snakes, spiders, rats, rot, decay, disease, murderers, psychopaths, all of them seemed to stare back at Anzu. Though it had no eyes, more than before she could feel it glaring at her.

Toys had been crushed under it or swept aside by its limbs. Anzu thought she could see the twisted front wheel of a bike and a Gameboy amongst them.

She swallowed her fear. Concern for Yuugi boiled inside her to become hot fury.

"Innocent One is mine. I cultivated him as he cultivated me. He is my prize, my reward, my greatest meal."

"Wrong answer." With that, she flung herself forward. It was a really, really stupid thing to do, but she did it anyway. "Let him go!"

A thick limb batted her aside. She collided with the wall, slid down, and clambered shakily to her feet. "Is that all you got?" she asked, doing a passable impression of Jounouchi. Jounouchi wouldn't let some fat … thing stop him saving her friend, and she could do nothing less.

Yuugi dangled limply.

She tried again. "Yuugi, wake up! I know you can hear me!"

Aramanth hissed and smashed her away so hard she would have been killed outright in reality.

However, this was not reality – not as Anzu perceived it. Reality was the world outside Soul Rooms and Millennium Items and the astral plane. Reality was where you could die if your wounds were bad enough, but the astral plane as Anzu understood it was where sheer force of will could turn the tide in a fight, and wounds were no more serious than you let them be.

Yami was right when he said wearing flesh changed the shape of your mind. A soul tethered to a physical body still thought like a physical body – it thought it could be hurt in the same ways, and even when it couldn't, it translated new injuries into old forms. That was why when Aramanth's magic hit Jounouchi and Honda it appeared as blisters, bruises and broken bones. They hadn't been out of their bodies long enough to stop registering hurts in ways their minds could understand, and they were still too attached to their physical anchors to let go and manipulate the plane the way Yami could.

Yet if Jounouchi and Honda's souls were connected to their bodies by chains, Anzu's connection had thinned to something like fraying rope. Her body had sustained so much damage that her soul was already automatically making preparations to leave it if required, but as her connection to the physical world waned, her relationship with the ethereal increased. It was instinctive, but the form in which she'd awakened was enough of an indication as to what the astral plane made her capable of.

Anzu had been separated from her body for far longer than her friends. Seconds counted as much as minutes, hours, or longer on the astral plane. True, she'd spent a lot of that time in a fugue state, but because of that her soul's instincts had hit self-preservation mode, and that went way beyond human limitations. The same way mothers have been known to suddenly gain enough strength to lift cars to save their children, Anzu was now infused with the single purpose of saving her best friend, and it pushed her to do things she'd think impossible were there time to think about them.

So when she got to her feet, she was still cut and bruised, but able to stick out her tongue and try again. She wore the proof of her purpose plainly. The unaccustomed weight on her back gave her metaphorical strength – nothing like this could happen in reality. On the astral plane, she knew – had seen – most anything was possible, both good and bad. Here, unlike reality, if you wanted something badly enough you could make it happen from will alone.

She was totally focussed on Yuugi. The need to protect him was what had broken her from Aramanth's enchanted sleep. However, unlike Sleeping Beauty, Anzu wasn't thinking of princes and thorn hedges; she was thinking about how badly she wanted to kick Aramanth's butt. Bad enough it had stolen her soul and locked it away; now it was threatening her best friends.

And that, as anyone who knew her would attest, was something Anzu would not stand for.

She was aware that Jounouchi, Honda and Yami hadn't made it through the door behind her, but that paled compared to seeing Yuugi.

"Yuugi, wake up!"

He didn't move.

Aramanth punted her backwards, but this time she rolled with it, spread her limbs and powered under the writhing tendrils. Unused to moving this way, she clipped the floor and staggered, back onto her feet, barely avoiding another thwack.

It might have been her imagination, but Aramanth was moving a lot slower. Perhaps it was learning the downside of overeating. Or perhaps it genuinely hadn't expected her to get loose and now didn't know how to handle her and feed off Yuugi at the same time.

This feels way too much like a bad hentai movie, thought the irrepressible part of her brain - the part that didn't brush over magazines profiling Seto Kaiba as an eligible bachelor and noticed when Yami had swapped with Yuugi.

Avoiding tentacles was so bizarre she had no room to think of how scared she was. Yet that irrepressible part of her brain kept up its commentary as she ducked and dodged, shouting Yuugi's name. Is this how the guys felt when they faced the Oricalchos God? This is so different than playing a card game. Cards are all about life points – they can't smash your face in or squash you flat –

Aramanth shrieked, flailing wildly. A tentacle swung out and caught Anzu on the side of her face. The impact cracked like a rifle shot inside her head; her teeth cut into her bottom lip and she tumbled. She cried out, tried to right herself, and landed on a cracked chess board and broken tennis racquet.

Disproving her theory, Aramanth moved with a speed that would give lightning a nasty shock, stabbing a sharpened, slate-coloured tentacle into her stomach.

Astral plane or not, Anzu screamed.

This wasn't right. Hitting the wall hadn't hurt this much.

"He is mine! But if you wish to join him in my belly, then I shall be as the djinn and grant your wish." Aramanth scooped her up like a fish skewered on a stick. Shadows coiled around her, pinning her arms and legs. "You cannot save him, Faithful One. He is already too far gone."

Anzu didn't believe it, but glanced at Yuugi through a haze of pain.

He was practically translucent – literally – and still fading. Even as she watched, his body winked in and out of existence and grew hazy at the edges, like a cross-stitch pattern gently coming unravelled.

He was fading away.

No. No! They couldn't have gone through all they'd gone through, only for it to end like this. Seto Kaiba, Pegasus, Bakura, Malik, Dartz – Yuugi had not only survived all that, but beaten and reformed them. He couldn't then die because some uppity spirit fancied a snack.

"Yuugi!" Anzu's eyes filled with tears. "Yuugi, please! Wake up! You can fight it! Please, Yuugi, don't die. Don't – ugh." She grunted, as Aramanth twisted the tentacle embedded in her stomach. "Not the real world," she muttered. "This is the astral plane."

"That is exactly why it is real, Faithful One."

Had she miscalculated? The astral plane was where miracles could happen. Yami had lasted thousands of years here, which he couldn't have done in reality.

"Your mind is still too attached to its body. Connected, joined, linked. You cannot hope to match me here, in the world of spirit and soul. It was foolishness to try, little Faithful One."

"Oh will you just f-aaaaaaah!"

"The connection between your soul and body is thin." Its voice was rose petals and oil slicks. "What would happen if I were to sever it?"

Anzu went cold all over, momentarily blotting out the pain.

"Your body needs your soul to stay alive, living, breathing. Shall we see, Faithful One? You wished to fight me on this plane. You changed your form to prove you can fight here. You seem at home in the world of dreams and fantasy. Shall we ensure you can never leave it? Shall I burn your ticket home?"

The shadows around her flexed their claws.

Time and Distance are mutable if you metaphorically tip your head and squint.

Imagine the universe as a ribbon, and now imagine magic as a pair of hands. They can squeeze it, so things shunt and shove to get through to the future, and some get left behind in the past or have to pause, frozen, and then hurry to catch up. They can wiggle the ribbon so Time reverberates, still moving forward but acutely aware of turning points in its own history. They can fold the ribbon in half, so people and things jump from era to era, and place to place, defying the laws of physics.

Magic has little truck with physics. To magic, physics is the snotty-nosed upstart blowing spit balls at the teacher while magic was graduating with its PhD. Physics keeps sidling up to the universe, poking it in the shoulder and telling it what it can and can't do, making up silly rules and expecting everything to adhere to them. Magic can usually be counted on to sniff and do whatever the hell it wanted, rules or no rules – though, thankfully, a lot of the time what magic wants to do is sit back quietly and see how things pan out on their own.

Sometimes, however, humans and magic reacted like chemicals in a beaker and the universe … well, it either trembled or got out of the way really fast before magic could get hold of it by the scruff.

Right now, magic had tied the universe in a big bow. At the centre was a tiny clutch of items, and one of them was the Millennium Puzzle.

So while Yami, Honda, Jounouchi, Anzu and Yuugi engaged with Aramanth inside the Puzzle, another battle was also taking place outside that involved them all. It was both a few feet and a hundred miles away, because the nature of magic is inherently random. People can collar it, and think they've tamed it, but magic is a wild mustang chafing against bridle and saddle. There's always the chance it'll throw its rider and bolt, back into the great beyond – or it could nibble quietly and plod around like a fat lazy pony. You can't predict magic, though arrogant men and women have tried.

Generally it takes patience and prudent use of spatulas to gather them up afterwards.

In another room of the hospital, a flurry of people in scrubs passed each other dishes of surgical instruments and frantically twisted dials. Sweat beaded in the eyebrows of the head surgeon, and was dabbed away by a subordinate. He didn't even thank the woman, too focussed on the task at hand.

"Damn it," he hissed into his mask.

Though he and his team were unaware of it, physics and magic struggled to overcome each other on that operating table.

"We're losing her!"

To Be Continued…

Side-flings, Homages and Downright Rip-offs

This feels way too much like a bad hentai movie.

-- (Taken from Wikipedia) Hentai is a Japanese word that literally means "strange appearance", but is also used to mean "perverted". Hentai, because of this, is a word used by countries outside of Japan to show pornographic and sex-related animé, manga and video games. The word is not used to mean this in Japan. In Japan, terms such as ecchi are used.

I've chosen to use the word 'hentai' here because it would have more meaning to Joe Average Fan, like me, than 'ecchi', but now you know the truth. Feel pervertedly enlightened!

Aramanth moved with a speed that would give lightning a nasty shock.

-- From Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett.