A/N: I DO NOT OWN ANY OF DREAMFALL CHAPTERS OR YU GI OH 5DS! ALL RIGHTS GO TO THEIR CREATORS! ALL I OWN ARE MY OCS!
Chapter 29: To Be Awake
Yusei's eyes opened and he heard a familiar voice greet, "Good morning, Yusei."
Yusei looked to the side to see Ayumu beside him seeming to be starting to wake up. He sat up and looked at the room. It was Martha's medical room. He then noticed Martha standing at the doorway.
Ayumu slowly sat up. She looked around and seemed to relax seeing Yusei. She then looked at Martha. "Martha?"
"It's good to see you again, Ayumu. I barely believed it when I heard the story from Jack, Crow, and the others," Martha responded. "But it's good to see you and Yusei together again. Are you two doing alright?"
"Yeah, I think," Yusei answered and Ayumu nodded.
Ayumu looked outside.
"Want to curtains closed?" Martha asked.
"No," the sister Dreamer answered gently. "It's fine. The sun… it's good."
"It's good to know you woke up so soon. I didn't want you both to go into a coma again. Last time was bad enough, for both of you. But I wanted to at least be here when you did wake up," Martha told them.
"Did we win?" Ayumu asked.
Martha smirked. "We're still here, Masuyo and those people are gone, and you're out of that lab. So I guess we did."
"What happened at the end? There was a bright light, voices, and nothing. Darkness. And then… Well, this," Yusei questioned.
"I don't know. I wasn't there. But it seems like your friends didn't know either," Martha answered. "Whatever I heard came through… I'm lucky none of you were killed. The others said they tried to get to you but then there was a blinding flash of light. When it faded, there was just you two. No one else. They thought you were dead for a couple seconds. Akiza and Crow said they could barely even feel your guys' pulse."
"And… Masuyo?" Ayumu asked.
"Gone. Perhaps that thing they spoke about… I know she won't be back. If she survived, she'll stay away. Too many people want her locked up… or dead, by what I've heard," Martha explained.
"Is WATI still after us? You know, for us being Dreamers," Ayumu checked.
"Oh, no, they have enough problems on their hands," Martha answered. "It's been all over the news. Their plans for the Dreamachine were exposed. No one will be connecting to Dreamtime anytime soon. WATI will be lucky if they even survive this blow. And without the Dreamachine, they couldn't care less about you."
"Good," Yusei responded.
"Think you'll ever go back to that Arcadia?" Martha asked. "Because I don't want you in that coma again. Neither of you."
"It probably won't be by choice," Ayumu responded. "As nice as it would be to go back, we'll be able to see it again in our dreams, in glimpses. That's all we need."
"Oh, alright. I'll stick with that. But everyone's been worried about you. They'll be excited when they hear you're awake," Martha told them.
"That's good," Ayumu responded. She looked down. "Martha, in that lab, we saw… We saw incubation pods."
"Your incubation pods," Martha responded, shocking the younger ones a bit. "The others told me."
"We were made, weren't we?" Yusei asked.
"That, I don't know for certain. But what I do know is that you're still the same Yisei and Ayumu I raised. No matter what happens to you two, no matter what spirit beings bond with you, no matter how you were brought into this world, you're still my orphans," Martha reassured.
"Thanks, Martha," Ayumu responded.
"Of course," she responded. Ayumu looked down. "Anything wrong, Ayumu?"
"No," she answered. "Right now, I just want to… sit here. Watch the sunlight. I'm sick of sleeping, sick of dreaming. I want to be awake for once." Yusei nodded in agreement. They turned as Crow, Akiza, Jack, Leo, and Luna came in. They immediately smiled as they saw the two Dreamers awake. They grinned back and nodded.
Yusei and Ayumu knew they still had both the dark and light versions of Lux and the Yaga inside them. But Yusei knew for certain they would both be fine in the end; he was sure about that. They just needed to be awake for once.
"Hey, guys," Yusei greeted.
"We were worried you wouldn't wake up," Luna stated as they ran up to Yusei, taking looks between him and his sister.
"I honestly think we've had enough of sleeping," Ayumu commented. Yusei gave a soft, one laugh chuckle.
"I can honestly understand why," Crow agreed. "And at least we know this is really you. Not some physical projection of yourself you used to be."
"Still have your mark, Yusei?" Akiza asked seeming hopeful.
He looked at his arm which wasn't covered by a sleeve to show his Mark of the Dragon Head. "Yeah."
"By the way, what were those other glowing marks? They didn't look like the ones from when you were in Storytime," Jack asked. "For either of you."
"So you somehow saw the memory of when I left Storytime, then?" Yusei replied. The group nodded. "Those marks come from Lux, the First Dreamer."
"The First Dreamer?" Leo questioned.
"The Undreaming is the dark half of Lux. Lux is the First Dreamer, he created the Dream, created the universe," Ayumu explained and they went wide eyed.
"And how did you get those marks from him?" Jack asked.
Ayumu looked at Yusei. "Should we just explain everything?"
"Probably just the key points that led up to Lux and after," Yusei suggested. She nodded and they looked at the waiting group. "When we arrived at Arcadia, we were almost immediately met with Crow. He was literally a talking crow. A magical."
"Magical?" Luna repeated.
"I think we said this before, but while Earth is a world of science, Arcadia is a world of magic. There were people there that weren't human in the least bit or had magic in them. Those people were called magicals," Ayumu clarified.
"Before I woke up right before we left for Arcadia through dreaming, we were both contacted in a vision in our dreams by a magical named Abnaxus," Yusei continued. "He told us we had to find the Purple Mountains, a magical race called the Oular, the First Dreamer, and save the Dream. We didn't entirely know what he meant by that, though. When we arrived in Arcadia and left the Journeyman Inn with Crow, we both began to really recall everything from Arcadia when we were there before ending up in Storytime. Along with the Azadi."
"The Azadi?" Crow questioned.
"They were a group of invaders who hated magicals. They wanted to eradicate them," Ayumu explained shocking them. "In fact, a lot of people in the Arcadia town we were at called Marcuria were beginning to think like the Azadi." She shook her head. "It wasn't right. They didn't know the truth like we did. However, there was a group of people, including a former Azadi named Kian, who were rebels and fighting back the Azadi for their homelands and their freedom. We knew we had to ask them for help and see if they could give us any."
"We eventually found them and met someone we recognized who had completely changed," Yusei continued. "We were first looking for any clues on Abnaxus. The one we talked to actually had a key to Abnaxus' home which they called an 'abode'. He allowed us to take it and we went to Abnaxus' house. When we entered, we found a book along with an old friend of ours named Brian Westhouse coming in behind us."
"Didn't you call that man who came through the portal 'Brian Westhouse'?" Akiza asked.
"We didn't know he was the Prophet or had the Undreaming in him at the time," Ayumu replied. "In fact, when we knew him, it was after he was named the Prophet and began the genocide of magicals and took out the Undreaming and put it in the piece of a powerful stone, which he then put into a wizard named Roper Klacks. He was able to read to us the book since it was in an ancient language. It explained a bit and then we found out about the soul-stone."
"Soul-stone?" Luna questioned.
"It was Lux's heart. It was how he was able to start the Dream," Yusei told them. "And we needed to get it to wake him up. But, it wasn't going to be as simple as finding it, obviously. When we finally learned where it was, we learned it was with the Yaga."
"The Yaga?" Akiza questioned.
"You might know them better as Baba Yaga," Ayumu replied and they went wide eyed in shock.
"As in the Baba Yaga? The witch that was said to have killed and ate everyone that came near her?" Crow asked.
"Yep," Yusei answered. "They were once one named Nox before Lux created the universe. Then they became three: youth, age, and decay; Baeb, Ayea, Gh'aa. And they had the soul-stone."
"And how on Earth did you get that stone from her?" Akiza asked shocked.
"Once we entered her lair and we walked after the stone a bit, them moving it a few times, they finally appeared, one face at a time," Ayumu explained further. "After a lot of talking and a bit of explaining their side, they asked for a piece of us."
"Piece of you?" Jack asked seeming tense. "What do you mean by that?"
"A sin. A secret," Yusei explained. "We each gave them our biggest secret or fear that weighed a lot on us. They took it and we have no memory of that fear or secret. Not anymore. After that and a bit more talking, with us saying that there has to be a balance with everything, they gave us the soul-stone as long as we agreed to remember them. And they reminded us every dream needs a nightmare. Which is kind of true."
"Yeah, are you saying there can't be the Signers without Dark Signers? Or light without dark?" Crow asked seeming annoyed.
"What they're saying is true, Crow," Martha told him and they looked at her. "No matter what it is, it cannot exist without its counterpart still there. Yes, you may have gotten rid of the Dark Signers now, but the Signers will never exist without the Dark Signers. You cannot have a dream without sometimes having a nightmare. You cannot have day without the night. That's a matter of life."
"Thanks, Martha," Ayumu told her. She nodded. "Back to the story, though."
"So you got the soul-stone. What happened after that?" Akiza asked.
"We found our way to the Purple Mountains, the Oular, and Abnaxus. When we got to Abnaxus, he explained things in his weird way of speaking," Ayumu stated. "Then he took us to the First Dreamer, Lux."
"We woke Lux up together," Yusei continued. "He then brought us into our minds and began to talk to us there. He told us he didn't just want the soul-stone, but also the Yaga. Apparently, the Yaga was with us in the soul-stone as well. We had to bring the sisters with us. And we did. He then told us we needed to become one with him. The both of us sharing his power and responsibility." They went wide eyed. "We were reluctant, obviously. But agreed and became one with the First Dreamer. When the Undreaming came out of Westhouse, we were caught in that light. And from what we can tell, the Undreaming joined Lux and the Yaga in us."
"And now we're keeping the Dream alive, together," Ayumu finished. "As well as holding the balance of the First Dreamer, the Undreaming, and the Yaga."
"That's a lot of responsibility you've put onto yourselves, you know," Martha told them sternly.
"If we didn't, though, the universe would've been destroyed," Yusei responded. "We didn't really have much of a choice." Martha sighed in defeat, knowing he was right.
"After that, we left Arcadia and woke up in the lab," Ayumu finished. "You practically know the rest from there."
"Yusei, we saw your and Ayumu's incubation pods in there," Luna commented.
"I'm not that surprised," he responded. "It's not something that's easy to miss."
"So, you guys were made in a lab, huh?" Akiza questioned.
"That's what it seems like," Ayumu replied. "While we had half-sisters, Yusei and I are full blooded siblings. We're not half. We actually learned it from the Vagabond when we first arrived in Storytime. But we totally forgot about it for a while."
"Honestly, you guys went through a lot in all that time," Leo commented. "But I really wish we could've seen Arcadia."
"What's it like exactly? Arcadia, I mean," Luna asked.
"It's more like a medieval version of here," Ayumu explained a bit. "It's a bit hard to explain, though. I just hope the rebels beat the Azadi. What those people were doing was wrong on all levels."
"Doing genocide in general is wrong on all levels," Yusei corrected.
"No kidding," Jack agreed.
"Do you know what they were doing with all the magicals that were free still?" Akiza asked.
"We met a couple of the few remaining Banda on the way to the Yaga. But they said the surviving Banda ran, though very few made it," Yusei explained. "The Azadi had really tried to kill all the Banda. And that's just one race of magicals. There were so many more they had tried to annihilate. But we don't know what happened to those in the resistance."
Ayumu looked down. "I hope they're alright."
"I'm sure they are," Yusei told her gently. She gave a small nod.
"Are you guys going to be alright?" Crow asked.
"Yeah. I mean, with all that weight put onto you…" Akiza trailed off.
"We'll be fine. We're sharing that responsibility together. Holding a responsibility like that on your own may be too much for a person," Yusei told them. "But we're doing it together."
Ayumu nodded in agreement. "Like a brother and sister." She looked at Yusei who nodded at her.
"With how you two were when you were younger, I'm honestly not surprised you're siblings," Martha commented with a grin. "Sometimes I thought you were and you didn't know it. Good to see I was right."
Everyone laughed a bit at her comment, knowing the truth of it. Yusei was happy to be awake now. He could tell well that it was the same with Ayumu. They were actually awake, in real time. They weren't awake as projected versions of themselves. It was really them that were awake.
And the dreams and nightmares that they would have probably wouldn't be normal ones, not since they had Lux, the Undreaming, and the Yaga were in them. But the two of them were fine with that. They were together, it wasn't them shouldering the responsibilities alone. The last of the bloodline family they had left was each other, and they couldn't be happier of that. The two siblings looked at each other and nodded.
