To paraphrase Louise Rosenblatt, "a story's just ink on a page until a reader comes along to give it life." This in my way of saying, I'd really like to know what you think, and appreciate all reviews.

MANGA NOTE: Kaiba and Yami fight two penalty or shadow games early in the manga. In the first, Kaiba steals Sugoroku's BEWD from Yugi. Yami challenges him to a penalty game to get it back, telling him that the loser will "experience death." Kaiba loses when he summons the BEWD and it refuses to attack on his orders. The BEWD self destructs instead, leaving Kaiba's life points unprotected. He loses the duel and Yami imposes this nightmare where Kaiba is trapped inside this Duel Monsters world, and gets killed by his own monsters.

This would stop most people, but Kaiba wants revenge. He creates a theme park of Death (Death-T) and coerces Yugi/Yami into participating. He intends to force Yami into a Death Simulation Chamber which will duplicate the nightmare he had. Mokuba insists on being one of the challengers. He's trying to help and prove himself to his brother, but Kaiba misreads this as a challenge, and when Mokuba loses, Kaiba imposes the sentence that awaited the loser. Yami rescues Mokuba and goes on to defeat Kaiba in the final phase of Death-T when he assembles all five pieces of Exodia. He shatters Kaiba's heart/Mind crushes him – which forces Kaiba to rebuild his soul if he can, without the darkness that led him to create Death-T.

CHAPTER 26: THE KNIGHT BEFORE THE BATTLE

Is there anything more moving than the night before the battle, than the endless vigil kept by 100 kings and princes and knights in 100 different tales? Each of them maintaining a solitary watch, each unaware that they are part of a fellowship, a band of brothers. Each of them newly discovering the thinness of the line separating past, present and future, separating the living from the dead. Each of them looking up at the sky as if they could read their fate in its lights.

KAIBA'S NARRATIVE

Mokuba hadn't asked where I'd be spending the night. Maybe he assumed I had a room in the palace. I didn't. The palace's walls were stifling. I waited until Mokuba was snoring to wander outside.

Mokuba knew there was going to be a battle tomorrow, as well as I. He'd been as keyed up all day. But Mokuba was younger… and more to the point, he wasn't me. He could put it all aside and go to sleep. I couldn't. I've always looked to the future, but that didn't mean I'd ever trusted in it.

Kisara was in the courtyard. Her head was resting on her claws. Her eyes had been closed, but one eye opened at my approach.

"Mokuba's asleep?" she asked.

I nodded.

"You have not joined him?" she continued.

"Whenever I could, I've always spent the night before a duel going over my deck. I don't plan on changing that now," I said.

"We will do our best for you tomorrow."

"I know. You always have. Our losses were my responsibility, not yours," I told her.

"Have you grown stronger from them?" Kisara asked.

"Always," I answered.

"Then I am content," she replied.

"I'm the one who let you down," I said, as much to myself as to her. "Winning isn't just a matter of strategy or the cards you hold in your hand. Anger, hatred... even determination can only take you so far. Even being willing to die isn't enough. You have to have something worth it… like we did at DOMA or the Grand Prix – or here." I paused, then added, "I'm sorry I didn't always lead you well."

"The struggle is what matters. And we have always been proud to be a part of it. The greater the battle, the more valor to the warrior and the sweeter the victory," she reminded me.

"How can there be a victory, when it's life itself that is the battle?" I asked.

"Tomorrow will not spell final victory or defeat for either side. The best struggles never truly end," she answered. "But that does not mean we should ignore the triumphs we have earned or refuse to savor them. Ultimately, we are all fighting ourselves, and those victories are the sweetest of all – and the best shared."

I shrugged, suddenly restless. "I wouldn't know," I said. I had walked away from her, but I could feel her eyes on my back. I turned around to face her. Force of habit, I guess.

"I would tell you to leave tomorrow's battles for tomorrow," she said gently. "But I wonder if it is the future you are seeing tonight, or the past."

I shrugged. "Mokuba said he forgives me… you know… for everything. Whatever the hell that means. Mokuba wasn't too sure either."

"Aaahhhh," she breathed.

I dug my hands in my pockets, looking for a way to change the subject, even though I was the one who'd brought it up. "Damn… Mokuba never finished his story… I wonder how it ends," I said.

"Happily, I assume. Isn't that how all stories end?" Kisara asked.

"All of Mokuba's at any rate – or at least all the ones he tells me."

She snorted quietly.

I looked at her. She wasn't showing it, but today's flight had to have taken something out of her, and she'd be in the thick of things tomorrow.

"Go back to sleep," I said. "Weren't you the one who just said to save tomorrow's battles for tomorrow?"

"I see you have learned how to throw my words back in my face," she retorted, but she obediently dropped her head back onto her claws. Pretty soon I could hear her even breathing whistling through the courtyard like the wind. It made sense to sleep, but it was still the night before a duel, and except for Death-T it was something I'd never been able to manage. I sat down a little ways from her, under the flickering light of a torch.

I had to admit, I liked this world. The battle lines were cleanly drawn, with none of the ambiguities that plagued my decisions back home. And I had nothing to atone for here. I hadn't been looking for a clean slate, but after trying to destroy my past for years, it was disconcerting coming to a place where it simply didn't exist.

Not that it mattered. Enticing as this world was, there was nothing for me here. Mokuba wasn't going to begin the next semester as a ghost-in-training. Of course this world was seductive… death always is. But I'd rejected its call before. I wasn't going to succumb now.

It was, as Mahaado had predicted, a dark night, with clouds covering the waning crescent moon. I leaned against the palace wall, taking advantage of the torchlight in their sconces. I pulled out my deck and started to go through it.

"I remember creating Saggi," Seto said. He was sitting next to me as I drew the dark clown from my deck.

I'd known that Pegasus had taken Saggi from those ancient stone tablets. I'd never thought to ask who he belonged to. It made sense that Seto and I had shared more than my dragon. I wondered what debt he'd used Saggi to pay off back then.

"Why?" I asked.

"I fought Bakura, with all my power, with all my conviction – and still, I lost." He grimaced. "I decided the edge Bakura had was in the depth of his hate."

"Bakura?" I asked. The name sounded familiar. There'd been a Bakura at Battle City. It probably wasn't a coincidence.

"He was the most degraded of thieves," Seto said. "A tomb robber."

I decided not to pursue the matter.

"I thought to fight Bakura with his own weapons. But it did not work. Saggi was a weak monster," Seto said. "The pharaoh had been right. I should not have tried to build a monster using anger and hate as my foundation."

I grunted. Even if I had come to agree, the advice was still irritatingly familiar.

"Even Bakura had more than that as his base. My father had destroyed his village, sacrificed his family to create the Millennium Items. His anger was fueled by his love. Devotion is a sweet emotion. But it mixes poorly with pain."

"I thought Bakura was your enemy," I commented.

Seto nodded, sadly. "He was my enemy, and my pharaoh's. But I have had time to think… and his rage and desperation… those things feel akin."

I grunted again. They sounded familiar to me, too.

Seto shook his head. "I have sometimes wondered what Bakura would have made of his life if the fates had been kinder, or if he had been granted a second chance."

"There was a Bakura in Domino," I said. "If he was granted a second chance, he didn't take advantage of it."

"I am sorry," Seto said simply. "I thought him my greatest enemy, the chief danger to my pharaoh. But he turned out to be just another piece on the game board, as easily discarded by his master as if he never existed. That is the true darkness we must fight."

I thought about how Gozaburo had treated people like they were pawns, how I had done the same. How I had, in the end, refused to be anyone's pawn but my own. Perhaps that was why, despite how little I understood Yugi, we had ended up on the same side.

Unlike Bakura, I knew how to make the most of second chances.

But as Seto faded back into the night, I couldn't help wondering what ghosts I'd be facing tomorrow.

I thought of Hamlet meeting the ghost of his father, although I had no impulse to say, "Angels and ministers of grace defend us." I planned to do whatever defending was necessary on my own. Hamlet was an indecisive wimp anyway. If I had to pick a character I liked, it'd be Cassius. After all, even if he had paid for it with his life – he'd taken down a Caesar.

I approved.

I'd read my way through most of Shakespeare's plays – the tragedies and the histories, anyway. Gozaburo had insisted that I memorize the most commonly used quotations. He thought sprinkling them through my conversation would make me appear well rounded. It was the same reason I'd learned to play the piano with a certain technical proficiency, although any real feeling for, or appreciation of, the music I was playing with rote efficiency had always eluded me.

Once the quotes were stuck in my head however, I'd spent the little time I could hoard for myself reading the plays they were stolen from. It made the knowledge mine somehow, not his. It had been a victory of sorts – and even small triumphs are worth savoring.

Oddly enough, until tonight, I hadn't thought of Gozaburo much. But now that there was a battle on the horizon, his was the phantom that came to mind.

Maybe it was the quiet of the night, or hearing Kisara's breath as she, like Mokuba, slept – but it wasn't the big splashy moments like his jumping from the window, or his stealing my designs to create his weapons that came to mind, but a quieter one… the night I first realized war's requirements.

"Why did you bring the little mouse along?" Gozaburo had asked casually – except there were no casual questions anymore.

I took a moment to answer. I had left the orphanage with the only two things in the world that mattered to me – Mokuba and our suitcase full of games. Gozaburo had stolen and destroyed the games before dinner was over.

I smiled coldly. "Maybe I just wanted a spectator for my triumph."

"So you think you've won?"

"I know it." I grinned up at him. In the months I'd been here I'd learned never to show anything less than total confidence.

His hand bunched around the material of my collar. He turned his wrist inward, tightening his hold. There was a precision to his movements. It was uncomfortable, but not quite enough to get me to gasp for air – not when I didn't have a clue what this latest game was.

His wrist curled in a little further and he brought his forearm into his biceps, lifting me slightly from the ground. My feet dangled in the air, like a rag doll's. I tried to ignore how much bigger he was than me, how much stronger… how he was watching me as if I was the prey, not him.

I knew if I gasped or swallowed or showed any sign of fear, beyond the racing heartbeat I couldn't control, the game would be over here and now.

"I didn't expect you to act like an ordinary bully," I said.

"Didn't you?" He grinned and tightened his hold again. I clenched my fists to keep from clawing ineffectually at his hand. Whatever this new game was, I would win. "Your mistake, then," he continued. "Violence is a tool like anything else. If I were you, I'd learn quickly."

"If I don't, you wasted your money. Either way, it's your loss." I said around the hand at my throat.

This was a game, just like everything else. I'd see how far I could goad him before his control snapped. I knew this mood. I was coming out of this night with bruises, that was the only way this could end, but if I played my cards right, I'd leave him with the knowledge that I'd been the one in control, the one determining when it happened, and that would hurt him worse.

And even small victories are worth savoring.

"I could throw you back in the gutter like the stray dog you are," Gozaburo snarled.

"You could, but I don't think you will."

"You think you have all the answers, don't you, brat?"

I smirked. "I just think you find playing with yourself… unsatisfying."

"At any rate it's more fun than playing with a computer," he snarled, suddenly angry.

He flung me from him. It had happened too fast for me to get my hands up to protect myself. I hit the wall, hard, and slid to the floor. I stayed there a moment. His back was to me, but if I moved too precipitously, he'd notice.

That was the second time it'd happened. He'd made some remark comparing me to a computer – and then he'd lost control. I didn't know what it meant… yet. But he had revealed a weakness, and it was worth the taste of blood in my mouth to see it.

I swallowed, tasting remembered salt and copper. Life is a battle. Nothing I'd seen since had convinced me otherwise. There was going to be another one tomorrow, where losing might very well equal death, once again. Did that mean that Gozaburo had been right all along? His voice… Seto's… Kisara talking of different battlefields… the Holy Elf speaking of sacrifice… all began to merge in my head.

And when we faced Set's general tomorrow, once again it'd be worth the taste of blood in my mouth to discover a weakness.

I was surprised to see a figure leave the palace and come towards the courtyard. It was too tall to be Mokuba or Yami. Mahaado, then. I got up and joined him.

"You never could sleep the night before a battle," he commented.

I grunted.

"The pharaoh will leave here. I can feel it. Is it you or your world that has proven the lure?" Mahaado asked.

"If you think I've tried to influence him, if you think I've begged…" I growled.

"I am quite sure you have not. But by your presence you have tied him to you, nonetheless. I do not think he will leave you a third time."

"I would rather be separated from him for all eternity than become an obligation," I said.

"Now you are being foolish. What do men like us value more than our obligations?"

I shrugged in place of an answer.

"You are not the only fool," Mahaado said. "I do not feel the passing of the years as you do, yet I can not deny to myself that I have spent 3,000 years waiting for an illusion."

"You have spent 3,000 years protecting your world and mine."

"I vowed to serve my pharaoh to the grave and beyond."

"You have."

"I believed it was my destiny – our destiny – to be reunited here. I suppose that seems laughable to you."

I shrugged. I'd never believed in fate. I still didn't. "I don't know shit about destiny," I told him, "but I know all about responsibility. You have a child in your charge. Isn't that enough of a commitment for any lifetime, even an eternal one?"

"Do not lecture me! I will discharge that duty as conscientiously as all others. But my duty to my pharaoh must be paramount. Your former self would agree."

"He didn't know Mokuba."

"For all that Seto is at your core, you do not know our ways," Mahaado said. "How can our past mean so little, when you were named for a god?"

I ignored the fact that I had no idea how my parents had come up with the name "Seto." They were dead. There was no one to ask. I was never going to know. It didn't matter. However I'd gotten it, it was mine.

"I wasn't named for anything," I said.

Mahaado gestured at the dark surrounding us. "And yet you feel comfortable in his hour."

"I don't know why we're sitting around like idiots just because it's night, instead of attacking, if that's what you mean," I observed.

"The new moon is Set's time. Not ours."

"That's because all you see is the coming darkness," I said.

"And you… when you look up at the night sky and watch the moon slowly erasing itself… what do you see?" he asked.

I grinned. "The future," I answered.

Mahaado grimaced. "The future comes for us all, even here. It is best to be rested and ready to meet it," he said as he returned to the palace.

"And what of destiny?" Yami asked, as he stepped out of the shadows. His timing was too perfect to be coincidental. The only question was how much he'd heard.

"Destiny is a file waiting to be over-written," I responded automatically.

Yami smiled and shook his head in mock amazement. "Hasn't all that's happened made you doubt your rejection of fate?"

"I refuse to be caught up in someone else's agenda – even a god's. What about you? I figured you're staying. Mahaado's convinced you're returning with us. Which of us has it right?"

"Neither. Both. I have been so focused on which world I would choose, I forgot that tomorrow I might leave both of them. This is not the first time you or I have faced death in the same campaign."

"Five times," I answered. "And yet, it was Alcatraz that was the hardest."

"Alcatraz? You faced no danger there!" You couldn't have thought I would impose a penalty game on you!" Yami exclaimed.

"I know. That's why it was worse," I answered. "Losing equals death. At that first penalty game we played, those were the stakes. They were the same as in all my duels with Gozaburo – only this time it was out in the open. I wasn't surprised to experience death. I was surprised to survive. Next came Death-T. Afterwards…it was peaceful. It was over. You were right. I didn't have anything to return to. I'd thrown away the only thing that had ever mattered to me. I was dead inside anyway. It seemed fitting for my body to follow."

"But…" Yami said.

"But I was sitting in darkness with nothing to do, and I've always liked solving puzzles, even the one of my heart. Besides, I was wrong. I did have something to come back for. Mokuba needed me. Next came Pegasus… if that was death, then death is truly a trap. I was helpless, yet I couldn't stop struggling. I had finally found something worth fighting for. And then suddenly I was free. Noa's world… DOMA… those were just par for the course."

"Why was Alcatraz harder than that?"

"Because I had nothing to fight against. I'd lost – and for the first time there was no penalty game, no punishment, except for whatever I chose to inflict upon myself. I was the one who would have to decide whether to carry out the sentence Gozaburo had branded into my soul, or whether to live with my loss, my failure – and find a new challenge. The rules I had lived by were clear. I would have to renounce them, enter into what was truly uncharted territory. That was my true future."

"Are we willing to enter uncharted territory? That seems to be the question that follows us, even to the after-life," Yami said. He shook his head. "Along with meeting Yugi, being with you has been the greatest joy of my life. And yet, tomorrow I would wish you both elsewhere."

"What we are trying to save is worth the risk." I said.

"That does not make it easier to contemplate," Yami answered.

"You challenged me at Alcatraz to live beyond my despair. Never protect me from it again," I told him, not sure if I was talking of tomorrow's duel or tomorrow's decisions.

"I can't promise that, anymore than I can promise not to care. Why do I feel like more than tomorrow's battle is weighing on you tonight?" Yami asked.

There was a pause. I couldn't think of anything to say, except that Mokuba had said he'd forgiven me, which was the last thing I planned to say.

"Mokuba forgives me. He told me," I mumbled anyway.

"I'm glad he said it, glad you heard it. Yugi did the same for me."

I stared at him.

"For making him the instrument of my… of my coming here," he explained. "I'm glad he understands – or maybe I'm just glad he's still my friend."

I nodded, somberly.

Yami looked at me. "You don't seem elated," he observed.

"I am," I said, but even I could hear the heaviness in my voice.

"But you refuse to let go of the guilt he has forgiven?" Yami asked.

"Maybe I'm right," I said quietly, letting my words fall into the night. I hadn't said that to Kisara. She would have argued. I wasn't sure what Yami would do.

"Nothing is inherently good or unredeemably evil. No world, not even this one, is so black and white. It is not just the decisions you have made in the past, but the ones you continue to make that define you," Yami stated.

I didn't answer.

He shook his head. "Sometimes I think you are the only man more stubborn than I," he said.

"Probably."

"You're even more stubborn than what I remember of my high priest."

"Force of habit," I answered.

"And what habit is that?" he asked.

"Survival," I said. I looked away, not from Yami, but from the conversation. He moved so that he was once again in my line of sight, and held out his hand.

"Come with me," he said.

I followed him to a grotto behind the palace. A waterfall flowed from Kisara's mountain. It ended in a pool. The scene looked too perfect to be natural, and besides, although there was nowhere for the water to drain, it wasn't overflowing.

"Mana's doing," Yami said. "She likes to practice here."

"It's beautiful," I said, stepping forward until the spray hit me. It was cool enough to be refreshing and warm enough to be enticing.

"Remember that rain storm?" Yami asked, his voice husky.

I nodded and looked at him.

"We didn't have the time then, but I wanted to do this…" Yami reached up to slide the duster off my shoulders. The rest of our clothes followed. Without asking, without answering, we walked into the pool until we were under the waterfall, until it was washing over us, splashing around us. It caressed us like a living thing, like another pair of hands, sometimes fierce and insistent, sometimes gentle and teasing, as we swayed in and out of its cascade.

I looked at Yami. The downpour had flattened those stubborn stalks of golden hair; they framed his face. The water had given him the look of a drowning man, at once desperate and at peace.

It was strange to see my own nebulous emotions reflected back to me on Yami's face, as if he was wearing them instead of the clothing we had just discarded. It was odd, this feeling of being understood, this wordless accord. In spite of the fact we'd returned to what passed for civilization in this world, in spite of the fact that Kisara was in the courtyard behind me and that Mokuba was asleep in the palace, we were alone in our own world.

It was as if no time had elapsed since the rain had greeted us as we left Set's lands, since the last time we'd been like this using a stone tomb for a bed. It felt like the continuation of every time since the first. Maybe that was a retreat from the coming battle, from the choices that lay ahead.

Or maybe it was just that I was tired of thinking. I wanted to feel.

I wanted to feel Yami's mouth on mine, Yami's body pressed so tightly against mine that it denied the water entrance. I wanted to feel the steel, the passion that was so much a part of Yami. I wanted to answer it with my own. I wanted to stand under a waterfall and burn.

Yami moved in closer still, until it seemed like our embrace was a promise of the joining to come. His teeth found my neck; my moans sighed above the rush of the water.

"There is so much I want to promise you," he murmured against my skin, "but I can't promise anything on the eve of a battle. Do you think that for just one more night we could pretend that the present is enough?"

"There's no need for pretense," I answered, as his hands replaced the water's searching fingers, as my own held him to me. "Tonight, the present is everything."

Thanks to Bnomiko for betaing this chapter, and for, well, everything…

AUTHOR'S NOTE: One thing I really like about the anime/manga is the moment where Kaiba pauses before leaving Alcatraz, and it seems like he's deciding whether to go down in flames with the island. Then he thinks about how hard he's fought his stepfather - to the grave and beyond -- and how he's still fighting to rid himself of Gozaburo's influences on his life and heart. Then he thinks how that too, was a shadow game. In a sense his refusal to give in, his decision to find a better challenge to live up to was his first true victory.

On a side note, I've always been a sucker for those night-before-the-battle moments, although I'm in total agreement with Pippin's observation that as bad as being in a battle is, waiting at the edge of one you can't escape is worse. Anyway, I had a good time writing a night before the battle scene of my own. I hope you enjoyed it.

Since it's still January, I guess I can still say: Happy New Year!