Chapter 29

Yami Yugi's ghost, hanging in the darkness, looked up.

The other him was talking to someone...

The voices were faint, and he could barely make out what they were saying through the thick stone walls of his prison. But no soul is ever completely impenetrable, and Yami caught enough traces of the encounter outside to get an idea of the situation within his shattered mind.

But the second voice was what made him lift his head in blurred recognition.

He recognized it from somewhere. That soul, outside... He knew it. Or had known it.

"....Yu...." The name was on the tip of his tongue. But what was it? It had been a short name, very short. And yet Yami's tampered memory banks would not allow him the other half of the name, thus making the harmless length of it all the more frusturating. Yami closed his eyes tight, and tried to concentrate- Yu... Yooo... The flit of a passing breath of something destroyed what little hold he had gotten on the task of remembering the remaining syllables. Yu. Yoo- flit. -ooo- flit. Flit. Swish...

With the last flutter of the darkness went the part of the name that he had already. He had lost all of it. The shadows had stolen it. He couldn't remember a single solitary letter, and even the memory of the familiarity of the soul outside was fading away.

Yami sobbed, and clenched his fists, the stone scraping against his back and the shackles cutting into his wasted wrists. He pulled anyways, which only made it worse, and a thin trickle of blood ran down his forearm.

He watched its scarlet path across his pale skin, having to crane his neck painfully in order to do so. It calmed him. The way the liquid traced a slight, slender line, gently winding down his arm, was soothing.

As the hours till dawn passed slowly and dead in the stone prison, Yami forgot about the reason for his anger. Given enough time there, and he wouldn't have even cared. The shadows were beginning to affect him, quicker than before, and his will to keep on fighting was dimming. In his soul rested the very last traces of Yami Yugi and his memories of past lives, and if the stone prison won, then Yami Yugi would cease to exist.

And this gradual descent into complete mind-numbing slumber would have eventually ocurred, if Yami's last spark of life hadn't somehow activated the shard still nestled in his pocket.

The reaction was nothing outwardly signifigant; the shard, responding to Yami's edged and dying memories, reflected the last remaining glow of Yami's one last attempt at recall. Yami didn't notice. The barely detectable light died, after a split second, and the room was completely dark once more.

But unknown to him, the other, darker Yami, or his former partner, the gleam of light held out longer than was visible to him. Like a faint signal of identity, a traceable streak of light, the blip of Yami's ghost's memories was caught in a dark current, and was propelled through a vastness that was not quite part of the phyiscal world. Where was it now?

Only one person would notice it.

"Where were you yesterday?" Sugoroku asked his grandson, the next morning.

Yugi stared at the table.

Sugoroku sighed, and leaned back heavily in his chair to grab the unread newspaper lying on the table. "Yugi... I know there's something wrong," he said gravely, opening the day's events. He read the headlines in silence, then tapped the paper, making a faint rustling sound. Yugi raised his head slightly. "And this news confirms my statement!" his grandfather added, with cocked eyebrows.

He flipped the paper around and offered it to Yugi, who, moving extremely slowly as if he had forgotten how to lift his arm, took it.

The cover headline blared black-on-grey: "TWENTY-THREE FOUND DEAD IN LOCAL BURGER WORLD: ONE SURVIVOR OF MYSTERIOUS TRAGEDY". And, on the second page, "MORE FOUND DEAD AT HOME/AT WORK, CAUSE OF DEATH UNKNOWN".... And then a list of the victims. Unwillingly searching, one name caught Yugi's eye.

Noxaka, Miho- Found Sept. 19, 2003

And right below that, another name, one that held all the pain and devastation of the last few days:

Mazaki, Anzu- Found Sept. 20, 2003

Yugi did not care to check the list for other painfully familiar victims. He wanted to cry, or be sick, or to lie down in his bedroom and never come out. Before the concerned, kind face of his grandfather, the latter was the easiest choice. So he lowered the newspaper without a glance at the story below the picture, which was a greyscale photo of the Burger World swarmed with police officers and ambulances, and crept upstairs to the attic.

Anzu was gone. How many of his friends had gone with her, consoling Miho, grasping her bare hands, wishing her well? And she had unknowingly taken their lives. Yet, had it been the name itself that had triggered this sense of loss? Or was it merely a reminder that the world he knew was collapsing into that dark void into which Yami had vowed he would never come out of? Never come back again?

Beyond despair, even beyond numb horror, Yugi stood in the middle of his cold floor and stared blankly out the window.

He wanted to stand there forever... Not moving, not thinking, not feeling. There was nothing else in life to live for; losing Yami had left him out in the cold. What else was there to do? He had loved Yami, and even friends could be replaced... Perhaps not easily, but ancient spirits don't come along twice in a lifetime.

But the most awful thing about the whole terrible situation was that Yami didn't even seem to care.

Yugi's hands trembled as he threw back his head and let the monotone, stained ceiling whirl dizzyingly around his head. Guilt and misery were mixed up somewhere in there, but everything was such a mess now he could barely think coherently. Did he miss Anzu? Did he miss Yami more?

I should just give up.

I hate this city.

The city; an old, rotting pile of buildings. The people; dead in the eyes and still walking around like nobody's business. His friends were nowhere that he cared to be; and he likewise where they'd probably never bother looking for him.

His entire life had disappeared with Yami, into some dark recess of Domino. And he couldn't go back; Yami didn't want to see him, and what made it worse was the fact that Yami was still out there in the city, walking among the lifeless souls of its occupants. This meant that the temptation, the urge to find him, would consume Yugi's mind.

Deeply wanting to respect Yami's wishes, Yugi knew he would never try to seek out that lithe figure again. But without him, Yugi would never feel the same happiness he had in Yami's company.

Torn between impulses, desires and emotions, Yugi knew that his life was over.

Not literally, of course... But without Yami, there would always be that vaccum in his soul, consuming energy and spirit. Nothing was left. Yugi had been so utterly connected to Yami, been so much a part of him that, when the link was finally broken, his own soul seemed to have dropped out along with Yami's absence. Identity was no longer his.

Distraught and hanging in an unstable balance, Yugi almost didn't catch the faint snapping of a connection clicking into place between two minds. But he knew the sensation well.

A tiny pinprick of someone's recollections of a past long forgotten flared, for one second, in his mind; resonating with the source, it died abruptly. But Yugi had recognized the signal just in time.

"Yami?"