Chapter 54
The mustiness of ancient stonework and the still, silent qualities of the shadows told Yami that they were in the Stone Door chamber. Yami no Ni Koe, even in his weakened state, still had a certain degree of control over Yami's Soul Room, though Yami suspected that this manipulation had not come without a cost. He stood and peered into the void before him.
"This is the last time."
Yami could see his adversary's outline, a sillouhette slightly darker than the surroundings, violet eyes faintly visible even through the musty darkness of the room. A sigh was heard, accompanied by a familiar rustle- or had the rustle itself been the expelling of ancient breath?
Taking a step towards the noise, Yami stood with his hands in his pockets, waiting.
The sigh came again. "Are you now certain that you remember me?" Yami no Ni Koe smiled, faintly, but was somehow unable to force his usual malice into the gesture. Yami wondered if Yami no Ni Koe could see the sorrow on his face, through the shadows blanketing the walls. "I cannot give you up, Pharaoh..."
Silence coated the surrounding air. Yami could sense Yugi on the other side of the door, a trace of light that was barely able to permeate the solid stone. Yami no Ni Koe bristled slightly, as if he could feel their connection. "Stop that!" he hissed, almost inaudibly. He stood, a glare settling itself in place of his weary smile.
Yami turned his mind to the matter at hand. "Jealous?" he inquired coldly, cocking his head. He peered into the shadows. "Your envy grows tiring, Ni Koe. You have caused my partner and I no end of grief, and all for what?" His voice had raised itself, and Yami no Ni Koe's eyes widened. "All for what?!" Yami Ni repeated, his own words sharp with a bordering hysteria that undermined his former icy composure.
He stood straighter until his eyes were level with Yami's. They stared at eachother, echoing violet. "You have not forgotten me after all..." Yami Ni whispered, face almost pale now; as if he had been bleached, stripped of his power, Yami thought. Yami Ni took a step closer. "I can see it in your eyes. You remember me... what happened that night... millenia, millenia ago..."
Yami Ni's voice trailed off until Yami could no longer hear him.
Still with his hands in his pockets, Yami opened his mouth. "Truly, what happened was unfortunate. However, you brought it upon yourself, Ni Koe. You and your Shadow Games... My father should have known better-" Yami Ni's head jerked up suddenly, from where he had apparently been staring at the floor. Yami saw with alarm that Yami Ni seemed much fainter... as if losing focus...
"You cannot even call me by my real name?" he said, almost pleadingly. His head lowered again, and Yami could no longer see his face.
Yami remained still. "What is past is past," he said, impassively, and this seemed to tear something deep from Yami no Ni Koe's soul, for the room trembled and Yami Ni looked up with eyes so filled with rage that Yami involuntarily took a step backwards.
"Past?! PAST?!!" The word echoed off ancient stone and hissed bitterly in the cracks. Yami Ni had discarded his cool facade and was nearly howling. "Pharaoh!! You mock me. We were partners, Pharaoh! Partners!!" Yami Ni reached out, to inflict whatever action upon Yami; he couldn't tell, for he deflected Yami Ni's wrist with his own hand.
Yami Ni went on babbling, seemingly not noticing or comprehending Yami's apparent rejection. "We have been together from the very beginning, Pharaoh..."
The child of light. The child of darkness.
"Yes... However, Ni Koe-" Yami Ni seemed to flinch at this falsified name, and Yami's words caught for a moment. "However, you forget that the light existed momentarily before the darkness was unleashed."
Do you want to play? a voice echoed somewhere far below the room. Trapped within glossy black, waiting to be recalled...
"Father... He was fool to go ahead with the proceedings. I never asked to have you as a partner-" "Light cannot exist for long without its counterpart," Yami Ni reminded him, his eyes retaining more of their sharpness and edge as he spoke. A trace of his old smile hovered on his lips, and Yami was torn between hatred and regret; for what, he was uncertain.
A shadow passed over Yami Ni's face like a curtain as his mind revived the sordid events of the ancient, ancient past. Yami watched him, his disinterested demeanor dropping back as he, too, recalled the images burned within his soul...
Yami no Ni Koe's birth. The teaching of the Shadow Games... the Playtime. As Yami began to remember, he now realized that the whole scenario had ran with ominous undercurrents. The rituals, the ceremonies. He and Yami Ni had been paired up for someone else's gain, used to hold back power that might have fallen into the wrong hands.
Yet the plan had failed, the dike flooded, Yami now knew. Yami Ni had taught him the strength of the Shadows during their childhood... But who had thought to reveal to Yami Ni the secrets of the light? Instead of becoming the tool they wanted us to be, Yami realized, Yami no Ni Koe had nearly become the very darkness they were supposed to be holding back...
Do you remember me?
"You were out of control..." Yami murmured, more to himself than the figure before him. "My father, the priests... They had to make sure the balance of light and darkness was in check without allowing you to regain that power..." "There is no need to tell me again," Yami Ni said quietly, bitterness hanging heavy on his lips.
The dead man lay on the desert sands; the ground beneath him was crimsonless and unstained, for his death had been dealed out unseen in his mind. The shadows had witnessed the event, but said nothing. Justice hung her scaled crookedly, the balance corrupted.
"You were out of control."
The rituals, the ceremonies. The young Pharaoh was frightened...
An image sprung, blossomed in Yami's mind. Something golden, heavy and cool in his ten year old's hand... One of the object's sharp corners grazed his skin, and he mentally turned it over, wondering. A single eye, gold like the surface on which it rested, stared up at him. A shiver ran through metal and flesh.
Yami watched as the rituals ended. Someone was talking to him, although he was trying not to listen, tears streaking his childlike cheeks. They are sealing away the darkness... where it will never see the sunlight. It shall be there, guiding you as it always has, young Pharaoh... But with it shall go your memories of it. It is better this way, Pharaoh...
The young Pharaoh had never liked the High Priest. Neither had his companion- but, where had his friend gone?
He looked back down at the Puzzle. It seemed to him that a voice was calling out to him... asking to be freed, to be released from its golden prison...
Perhaps he had never had such a friend.
"You traitor," Yami no Ni Koe was saying, dimly in the back of his mind. The part of him that was not busy calling up images registered this, and strove to pull him back through time to the unlikely present.
Yami no Ni Koe was crouched on the ground now, huddled into himself. "You could have stopped them," he was saying over and over, in a curiously hollow voice, seemingly devoid of emotion. The effect was unsettling.
Weary and shaken, Yami stooped down to Yami Ni's level, and could think of nothing to say.
So it had been Yami Ni responsible for his Dueling abilities, his Penalty Games... Hidden within the core of his soul, trapped in the Millenium Item all through Yami's reign- and even then, harboured one stone wall away from Yami, he'd never seen the light for five millenia.
Harnessing the shadows had been no easy task, and everyone had paid for it, in the end. Not even one of the Pharaoh's priests, with her powers of precognition, had foretold this.
Yami no Ni Koe had paid the most, perhaps. Left alone in the darkness, with only his and the Pharaoh's memories for company- and bitter memories they were. It must have been torture, Yami realized, to have endured a million lifetimes of the same dusty horrors, trapped in a former friend's soul with no way to reach him. No wonder he had resisted. No wonder he had manipulated everything.
The priests had been wrong. In sealing away the darkness, they had upset the balance, and the effects had collided five thousand years later. The situation was now more dire and unstable than it ever would have been in the past...
"I am sorry," Yami whispered, finally letting go of the chill around his heart. Yami no Ni Koe's shoulders shook. "I need you back," he sobbed, like a child.
And at that final breaking of the spirit, Yami knew what had to be done.
Feeling as if his soul was weighing down Shadi's scales through the stone floor, Yami stood up, trembling. "I must go," he said, and heard his own voice shake.
Yami no Ni Koe raised his head, and Yami saw with shock that there were no tears staining his dark face, even though it had been clear he was racked with sobs. His eyes, though... his eyes tumbled Yami's heart into a deep, dark chasm, and pinned it there in freefall. "You cannot," he breathed, horrified.
He is once again bound to serve me... Yami thought, the knowledge painful. Just as they had all planned...
"You are no longer my partner, Yami no Ni Koe," Yami whispered; every word another razor to his soul, a hundred to the figure whose eyes reflected tenfold the sorrow locked there. "It is over, gone... Too much time has passed for us to be reunited. I..." He had to look away, into empty shadows, in order to continue. "...I must return to Yugi Mutou."
Yami Ni stood, which Yami wasn't expecting. "You cannot leave me here!! Not again!!" he cried; he grabbed Yami's sleeve, and Yami made no move this time to pull him off. "It is a prison here, a hell... You- you- would condemn me as they had condemned the both of us?!" Yami no Ni Koe's fingers were pinching Yami's skin through the cloth, painful and biting. Yami winced.
"You were never meant to be," he said sadly, and Yami Ni abruptly dropped his wrist.
He turned to leave, slowly, half expecting Yami Ni to come after him again. But Yami Ni just stood there, watching his former partner turn away to leave him to his own slaves, forever imprisoned in the never ending darkness of the past. Yami knew that as soon as he left the room, sealing away the dark in the process, he would once again forget about his father's decision and the shadow child with whom he had shared a Soul Room from the very beginning. Yet...
Yugi Mutou waited for him, outside that lonely chamber. Yami was the darkness now, that hungry soul in need of light, and that was something Yami no Ni Koe could no longer- and never had been able to- give him. Nobody had given Yami no Ni Koe their light, although he had given everything away, as the tool he was supposed to be... And now it was too late.
Arms outstretched, Yami's fingertips brushed the Stone Door. Up until now he had succeeded in ignoring the burden of what exactly he was about to do, but his strength was waning. Ni Koe was still back there, and would be there for eternity... How can I live with myself at this very moment? How can I simply walk away... Is it the force of my duties as a Pharaoh, or some hideous curse laid upon us by that High Priest?
Always, fate. Always, destiny. Yet it never should have happened this way.
A rustle at his back. Yami turned to face Yami no Ni Koe one last time, and it took all the willpower left to him to look his first and former partner in the eye.
"You killed those of Domino City. You trespassed in my soul, and Yugi's... Is this what partners do?" Yami said softly; the words spoken not as a pathetic final attempt to reason, but as the finality of truth. "There is no way to allow it. I would have it otherwise, but your fate was sealed from the beginning." Yami ni Ni Koe stared at him, as if in uncomprehension.
"I had to get out! Do you not understand that?!" Yami Ni cried; Yami tried to shut him out and turned away, the conflict beating hard in his ears. "You cannot leave me here! Pharaoh!!"
"Would I have it that the light was not here to give me strength to leave you," Yami whispered miserably, backing away from the broken figure in the shadows. "But... I must leave..."
And as the door swung open into the darkness, Yami no Ni Koe didn't follow, but only fell to his knees and cried. "You must come back- come back to me or kill me, Pharaoh... Kill me!!" he wailed.
His desperation was the only thing to leave that chamber. Though he knew that his memories would be left behind as he left, Yami felt that Yami Ni's voice would haunt him for the rest of his spirit's life. I have betrayed myself...
"Kill me!! I have seen the light twice- it is a hundred times worse having seen it twice! Let me die, Pharaoh, let me..." Yami Ni was rocking back and forth, sobbing, and still no tears formed on his dark skin. Yami shut his eyes.
As Yami stepped out of that chamber of nightmares, the last trace of his dark counterpart's soul drifted out of the opening, a breath on darkness' wind.
"...you..."
You what? Yami thought briefly, sorrowfully, having already known the answer... and then...
The Door shut itself behind him, and everything was as it was.
The mustiness of ancient stonework and the still, silent qualities of the shadows told Yami that they were in the Stone Door chamber. Yami no Ni Koe, even in his weakened state, still had a certain degree of control over Yami's Soul Room, though Yami suspected that this manipulation had not come without a cost. He stood and peered into the void before him.
"This is the last time."
Yami could see his adversary's outline, a sillouhette slightly darker than the surroundings, violet eyes faintly visible even through the musty darkness of the room. A sigh was heard, accompanied by a familiar rustle- or had the rustle itself been the expelling of ancient breath?
Taking a step towards the noise, Yami stood with his hands in his pockets, waiting.
The sigh came again. "Are you now certain that you remember me?" Yami no Ni Koe smiled, faintly, but was somehow unable to force his usual malice into the gesture. Yami wondered if Yami no Ni Koe could see the sorrow on his face, through the shadows blanketing the walls. "I cannot give you up, Pharaoh..."
Silence coated the surrounding air. Yami could sense Yugi on the other side of the door, a trace of light that was barely able to permeate the solid stone. Yami no Ni Koe bristled slightly, as if he could feel their connection. "Stop that!" he hissed, almost inaudibly. He stood, a glare settling itself in place of his weary smile.
Yami turned his mind to the matter at hand. "Jealous?" he inquired coldly, cocking his head. He peered into the shadows. "Your envy grows tiring, Ni Koe. You have caused my partner and I no end of grief, and all for what?" His voice had raised itself, and Yami no Ni Koe's eyes widened. "All for what?!" Yami Ni repeated, his own words sharp with a bordering hysteria that undermined his former icy composure.
He stood straighter until his eyes were level with Yami's. They stared at eachother, echoing violet. "You have not forgotten me after all..." Yami Ni whispered, face almost pale now; as if he had been bleached, stripped of his power, Yami thought. Yami Ni took a step closer. "I can see it in your eyes. You remember me... what happened that night... millenia, millenia ago..."
Yami Ni's voice trailed off until Yami could no longer hear him.
Still with his hands in his pockets, Yami opened his mouth. "Truly, what happened was unfortunate. However, you brought it upon yourself, Ni Koe. You and your Shadow Games... My father should have known better-" Yami Ni's head jerked up suddenly, from where he had apparently been staring at the floor. Yami saw with alarm that Yami Ni seemed much fainter... as if losing focus...
"You cannot even call me by my real name?" he said, almost pleadingly. His head lowered again, and Yami could no longer see his face.
Yami remained still. "What is past is past," he said, impassively, and this seemed to tear something deep from Yami no Ni Koe's soul, for the room trembled and Yami Ni looked up with eyes so filled with rage that Yami involuntarily took a step backwards.
"Past?! PAST?!!" The word echoed off ancient stone and hissed bitterly in the cracks. Yami Ni had discarded his cool facade and was nearly howling. "Pharaoh!! You mock me. We were partners, Pharaoh! Partners!!" Yami Ni reached out, to inflict whatever action upon Yami; he couldn't tell, for he deflected Yami Ni's wrist with his own hand.
Yami Ni went on babbling, seemingly not noticing or comprehending Yami's apparent rejection. "We have been together from the very beginning, Pharaoh..."
The child of light. The child of darkness.
"Yes... However, Ni Koe-" Yami Ni seemed to flinch at this falsified name, and Yami's words caught for a moment. "However, you forget that the light existed momentarily before the darkness was unleashed."
Do you want to play? a voice echoed somewhere far below the room. Trapped within glossy black, waiting to be recalled...
"Father... He was fool to go ahead with the proceedings. I never asked to have you as a partner-" "Light cannot exist for long without its counterpart," Yami Ni reminded him, his eyes retaining more of their sharpness and edge as he spoke. A trace of his old smile hovered on his lips, and Yami was torn between hatred and regret; for what, he was uncertain.
A shadow passed over Yami Ni's face like a curtain as his mind revived the sordid events of the ancient, ancient past. Yami watched him, his disinterested demeanor dropping back as he, too, recalled the images burned within his soul...
Yami no Ni Koe's birth. The teaching of the Shadow Games... the Playtime. As Yami began to remember, he now realized that the whole scenario had ran with ominous undercurrents. The rituals, the ceremonies. He and Yami Ni had been paired up for someone else's gain, used to hold back power that might have fallen into the wrong hands.
Yet the plan had failed, the dike flooded, Yami now knew. Yami Ni had taught him the strength of the Shadows during their childhood... But who had thought to reveal to Yami Ni the secrets of the light? Instead of becoming the tool they wanted us to be, Yami realized, Yami no Ni Koe had nearly become the very darkness they were supposed to be holding back...
Do you remember me?
"You were out of control..." Yami murmured, more to himself than the figure before him. "My father, the priests... They had to make sure the balance of light and darkness was in check without allowing you to regain that power..." "There is no need to tell me again," Yami Ni said quietly, bitterness hanging heavy on his lips.
The dead man lay on the desert sands; the ground beneath him was crimsonless and unstained, for his death had been dealed out unseen in his mind. The shadows had witnessed the event, but said nothing. Justice hung her scaled crookedly, the balance corrupted.
"You were out of control."
The rituals, the ceremonies. The young Pharaoh was frightened...
An image sprung, blossomed in Yami's mind. Something golden, heavy and cool in his ten year old's hand... One of the object's sharp corners grazed his skin, and he mentally turned it over, wondering. A single eye, gold like the surface on which it rested, stared up at him. A shiver ran through metal and flesh.
Yami watched as the rituals ended. Someone was talking to him, although he was trying not to listen, tears streaking his childlike cheeks. They are sealing away the darkness... where it will never see the sunlight. It shall be there, guiding you as it always has, young Pharaoh... But with it shall go your memories of it. It is better this way, Pharaoh...
The young Pharaoh had never liked the High Priest. Neither had his companion- but, where had his friend gone?
He looked back down at the Puzzle. It seemed to him that a voice was calling out to him... asking to be freed, to be released from its golden prison...
Perhaps he had never had such a friend.
"You traitor," Yami no Ni Koe was saying, dimly in the back of his mind. The part of him that was not busy calling up images registered this, and strove to pull him back through time to the unlikely present.
Yami no Ni Koe was crouched on the ground now, huddled into himself. "You could have stopped them," he was saying over and over, in a curiously hollow voice, seemingly devoid of emotion. The effect was unsettling.
Weary and shaken, Yami stooped down to Yami Ni's level, and could think of nothing to say.
So it had been Yami Ni responsible for his Dueling abilities, his Penalty Games... Hidden within the core of his soul, trapped in the Millenium Item all through Yami's reign- and even then, harboured one stone wall away from Yami, he'd never seen the light for five millenia.
Harnessing the shadows had been no easy task, and everyone had paid for it, in the end. Not even one of the Pharaoh's priests, with her powers of precognition, had foretold this.
Yami no Ni Koe had paid the most, perhaps. Left alone in the darkness, with only his and the Pharaoh's memories for company- and bitter memories they were. It must have been torture, Yami realized, to have endured a million lifetimes of the same dusty horrors, trapped in a former friend's soul with no way to reach him. No wonder he had resisted. No wonder he had manipulated everything.
The priests had been wrong. In sealing away the darkness, they had upset the balance, and the effects had collided five thousand years later. The situation was now more dire and unstable than it ever would have been in the past...
"I am sorry," Yami whispered, finally letting go of the chill around his heart. Yami no Ni Koe's shoulders shook. "I need you back," he sobbed, like a child.
And at that final breaking of the spirit, Yami knew what had to be done.
Feeling as if his soul was weighing down Shadi's scales through the stone floor, Yami stood up, trembling. "I must go," he said, and heard his own voice shake.
Yami no Ni Koe raised his head, and Yami saw with shock that there were no tears staining his dark face, even though it had been clear he was racked with sobs. His eyes, though... his eyes tumbled Yami's heart into a deep, dark chasm, and pinned it there in freefall. "You cannot," he breathed, horrified.
He is once again bound to serve me... Yami thought, the knowledge painful. Just as they had all planned...
"You are no longer my partner, Yami no Ni Koe," Yami whispered; every word another razor to his soul, a hundred to the figure whose eyes reflected tenfold the sorrow locked there. "It is over, gone... Too much time has passed for us to be reunited. I..." He had to look away, into empty shadows, in order to continue. "...I must return to Yugi Mutou."
Yami Ni stood, which Yami wasn't expecting. "You cannot leave me here!! Not again!!" he cried; he grabbed Yami's sleeve, and Yami made no move this time to pull him off. "It is a prison here, a hell... You- you- would condemn me as they had condemned the both of us?!" Yami no Ni Koe's fingers were pinching Yami's skin through the cloth, painful and biting. Yami winced.
"You were never meant to be," he said sadly, and Yami Ni abruptly dropped his wrist.
He turned to leave, slowly, half expecting Yami Ni to come after him again. But Yami Ni just stood there, watching his former partner turn away to leave him to his own slaves, forever imprisoned in the never ending darkness of the past. Yami knew that as soon as he left the room, sealing away the dark in the process, he would once again forget about his father's decision and the shadow child with whom he had shared a Soul Room from the very beginning. Yet...
Yugi Mutou waited for him, outside that lonely chamber. Yami was the darkness now, that hungry soul in need of light, and that was something Yami no Ni Koe could no longer- and never had been able to- give him. Nobody had given Yami no Ni Koe their light, although he had given everything away, as the tool he was supposed to be... And now it was too late.
Arms outstretched, Yami's fingertips brushed the Stone Door. Up until now he had succeeded in ignoring the burden of what exactly he was about to do, but his strength was waning. Ni Koe was still back there, and would be there for eternity... How can I live with myself at this very moment? How can I simply walk away... Is it the force of my duties as a Pharaoh, or some hideous curse laid upon us by that High Priest?
Always, fate. Always, destiny. Yet it never should have happened this way.
A rustle at his back. Yami turned to face Yami no Ni Koe one last time, and it took all the willpower left to him to look his first and former partner in the eye.
"You killed those of Domino City. You trespassed in my soul, and Yugi's... Is this what partners do?" Yami said softly; the words spoken not as a pathetic final attempt to reason, but as the finality of truth. "There is no way to allow it. I would have it otherwise, but your fate was sealed from the beginning." Yami ni Ni Koe stared at him, as if in uncomprehension.
"I had to get out! Do you not understand that?!" Yami Ni cried; Yami tried to shut him out and turned away, the conflict beating hard in his ears. "You cannot leave me here! Pharaoh!!"
"Would I have it that the light was not here to give me strength to leave you," Yami whispered miserably, backing away from the broken figure in the shadows. "But... I must leave..."
And as the door swung open into the darkness, Yami no Ni Koe didn't follow, but only fell to his knees and cried. "You must come back- come back to me or kill me, Pharaoh... Kill me!!" he wailed.
His desperation was the only thing to leave that chamber. Though he knew that his memories would be left behind as he left, Yami felt that Yami Ni's voice would haunt him for the rest of his spirit's life. I have betrayed myself...
"Kill me!! I have seen the light twice- it is a hundred times worse having seen it twice! Let me die, Pharaoh, let me..." Yami Ni was rocking back and forth, sobbing, and still no tears formed on his dark skin. Yami shut his eyes.
As Yami stepped out of that chamber of nightmares, the last trace of his dark counterpart's soul drifted out of the opening, a breath on darkness' wind.
"...you..."
You what? Yami thought briefly, sorrowfully, having already known the answer... and then...
The Door shut itself behind him, and everything was as it was.
