Authoress's Notes: Okay. This is coming along rather nicely, if some parts of it are a little… weird… Well, anyway, here I am. I think people are actually reading this, so thank you for sticking with it.
Disclaimer still applies. All of the warnings still apply, this chapter especially!
I had another dream that involves Pegasus last night! It was something involving a big mansion-like house, and he was there and people were arguing about who was going to room with him in the hotel, but there wasn't a hotel. Shows you just how much I like him, huh?
This chapter is going to alternate between Yugi and Bakura's points of view, also some 3rd person. I hope I'm doing a good job with Pegasus. The guy seems really confused, doesn't he? I mean, one second he's all nice and the next second he's evil, followed by several minutes of severe protagonist-ness… is that even a word? Well, at least SOMEONE is writing something about him where he isn't an evil, heartless… monster!
*** YUGI'S POINT OF VIEW, PAST TENSE***
Innocent. Is that a label I must carry around for the rest of my life? Even with my Yami in control, I could hear those words. He couldn't shield me from them. No one can.
"He's too innocent."
Why hadn't he taken a knife and slashed it across my chest?
Because it wouldn't hurt enough…
I walked out of school that day with a death wish. It didn't matter now. Nothing did. I mean, did they honestly think I was stupid?
Optimism isn't a crime, or is it?
Aibou, you need to stop. Pretty soon you'll end up in the gutter if you keep acting like this.
I'm not a child. You don't need to keep watch over me every second of the day.
Yami was silent.
I walked along the streets, seeing nothing, thinking that damned word over and over again in my mind. Innocent. How could they think I was more innocent than them? Me, always so nice, always so… naïve; yes, that was the word they thought in their minds. I'm naïve.
And that look on his face when he saw me there, that look that almost made me throw up. Bakura thought – knew – it was his fault, even though it was as much my fault as anyone else's. I mean, how could I have just waltzed outside after dark without some sort of protection? It was more my fault than anyone else's! It was ALL MY FAULT!
I sat down on a bench and started to cry. I hated the tears even more than I hated myself, but they just wouldn't stop.
I must have fallen asleep, for when I awoke sunset was approaching. Pegasus was standing against it; he was wearing a black trench coat. Yami was yelling something in my head frantically about the setting sun.
I don't want to listen to you at the moment. I just want to be alone, I told him.
But you must listen! The sun is setting and as soon as it does, he is free to move!
Does it even matter?
Yes! It does matter! The instant the last light fades out of the sky, he is at his full power! They may have forgotten to finish you last time, but they don't leave ends loose for very long! Aibou!
Is that… bad?
Yes.
"What are you doing out here at this time of day; the sun has almost set."
I was aware of Pegasus kneeling beside me. He put his hand on my head and pulled me up with his left arm. I felt a little violated and slightly angry that I didn't notice him come over to where I was sitting.
"I was just watching the sunset."
"It's a school night, Yugi-boy. Shouldn't you be at home? The final I am giving you won't be easy if you don't study your notes."
The sun was slowly sinking over the horizon. I felt like running, but I knew it was useless. Pegasus's hand was locked onto my shoulder.
A gust of wind blew up and actually moved his hair. It wasn't like the wind had moved it; it seemed he let the wind move his hair. What I next saw filled me with horror.
Pegasus had no left eye.
It had been replaced with something that looked Egyptian, all gold, and it glistened in the setting sun with a radiance that gold could never have.
***THIRD PERSON***
The sky was overcast, and small tendrils of lightning came through the sky. It was about midnight on a secluded island somewhere in the Pacific, but there were still people awake, working, and dying.
She looked around, slightly sickened. The smell of death was everywhere, and the rotting corpses of her fellow slave laborers were unattended to. She picked up another dead body and shoved it onto the cart. It was the body of a child, probably no more than three years old. She wondered how long it had been here.
The only good part about working here is that the overseers are too afraid of the sickness to come close, she thought glumly. I wish I were somewhere else.
A grime-covered hand quickly adjusted the shredded fabric that she had put over her nose and mouth. A flash of lightning revealed stained, tattered clothes that once were a school uniform. She felt like she was about ready to throw up.
I'm way too good for this. What happened to my life? I wanted to be a ballet dancer. I hope I can find some way out of this place.
She bent over and lifted another body. A Duel Monsters card peeked out from inside her shirt, laminated and given its own chain. The Magician of Faith, her favorite card in the whole world. And, ever since she came here, the card had become her religion. She had only been able to keep one card, a card to symbolize her, as all the other slave laborers had. They called her Faith now for some cruel reason, but it was better than those who had no cards. They were just numbers on a piece of paper.
Rain washed over her thin form after a loud rumble, and she felt the comforting water wash her clean of impurities. A gunshot rang out against the night, and she wondered who was trying to escape. There was sometimes talk of it in the cabins, though most of the talk was just wishful thinking.
Oblivious to the soft indigo-violet glow of the card, she plodded on through the rain for at least another hour before the cart was full. They didn't have enough graveyard labor to take care of the bodies, not even when there were four shifts.
As a graveyard laborer, she was sanitized as soon as she tried to enter the main camp. All the graveyard laborers were put in one place, a place set aside from the others so the death toll would not be as high. They needed everyone else's labor for the agriculture and machinery.
There was only one good thing about her assigned task.
Food.
Unlike the other laborers, she had two large meals a day with halfway-decent food. The people in charge needed the graveyard laborers to stay alive as long as possible because they didn't want to waste living humans on a task that usually proved fatal in some way or another. About half of the people in graveyard laboring died after only two months from disease or overwork.
Another flash of lightning revealed someone standing apart from the bodies. He was not a laborer; she had never seen him before. She waited for another flash of lightning and let his features burn into her mind. He was wearing black velvet, and his hair was a frosted blue that matched his eyes, but he was deathly pale.
"Sir," she said. "You should not be here. There is sickness. You will catch a disease. Please, go back the way you came."
He was suddenly standing next to her, and a gloved hand pulled her chin up and exposed her vulnerable neck. "Téa, I came here for you."
The card started to burn her chest. She let out a scream that was quickly muffled by his other hand. She heard about him sometimes; he usually attacked people on the shift after her. This was how Joey died. He was attacked.
"Monster," she whispered, her voice almost a hiss over the pain from the card. She felt the Magician of Faith somewhere nearby, and the card's voice whispered something in her ear.
"Faith…"
His lips were at her throat, and she could feel something sharp barely poking out of them. The lips traveled over her neck until they found what they wanted, and then she knew the true meaning of pain.
She screamed.
And screamed.
And screamed.
And everything went black.
For the first time, Fate was running for her life. She saw the unopened letter on the table when she got home, and she knew it had to do something with her. After all, everyone but her had been taken. She ran up the stairs as fast as her legs could carry her and changed out of the drab school uniform.
She had grabbed everything that was valuable to her, especially the two cards she loved most out of all the cards in Duel Monsters. It was an advanced move, a combination of two different powers, but it made the Magician of Hearts. She wore the two cards around her neck when she was at school, but she would take them out of their locket whenever she dueled.
Fate was a secret unto itself.
She had been awake when Pegasus tried to make her fall asleep, yes, and she heard every word of what happened.
A heart of gold. Literally.
Black leather and sunglasses, combat boots, and a belt that held all of her possessions. Then she took the knife her father had given her after he came back from Egypt, the knife that had been used in rituals thousands of years ago. She could feel its power, and she knew it wasn't a fake. She put a steel gray sweater on to disguise herself and waited in her room, her eyes closed, sensing the presence move closer to the house.
She heard them tear her mother and father from the house. She heard the screams as her younger brother was taken, and then she heard the slow, deliberate footsteps. They were coming for her now. She couldn't let that happen, not when she had the Heart.
Opening her eyes, she dashed to the closed window. She leaped, pulling herself into a ball, covering her head to protect it from the glass shards. The fall wasn't as bad as she thought it would be; she landed like a cat, causing minor discomfort in her leg muscles. They weren't used to being used in this way.
Too bad. They would just have to learn.
Fate was not stupid, and she did the thing any smart person would do.
She ran.
Now it was several hours later, almost midnight, and she had lost them. They gave up somewhere around eleven, much to her relief.
The park was silent after dark, the silence made even more complete by the lack of people. She felt like she was walking through a cemetery. The thought slithered through her mind, and after she thought it, the park suddenly seemed dark and sinister.
That is, until she saw what was going on at one of the benches…
It made her feel almost sick.
A cold hand grabbed her, and she realized that there was only one figure on the bench. Then what was—
"Hello, Fate. What are you doing out this late? Shouldn't you be home?"
"There is no home," she said, turning around, "not anymore."
Téa regained consciousness. Her head was very sore, and her vision was spinning. What she saw after her eyes decided to focus made her wish she was still unconscious.
She was standing in something that looked like a hedge maze, and it was nighttime. It was so hard to think about anything, but she knew she needed to go to the center. There was something there she needed to find. Something she had lost. But what was it? She felt at her neck and realized that her card was missing.
So that was what she needed to find.
With a cry of discontent from her aching limbs, she climbed to her feet and limped along the path, taking many twists and turns without conscious thought. After every turn, she felt better, so she knew she was doing the right thing.
That is, until she came to the dead end.
"No," she murmured, turning around, surprised to see a wooden wall. She turned this way and that, but she was surrounded by walls.
"That's not going to help you."
She turned around and saw two doors. The wooden walls had somehow adorned themselves with vines, even though they had been new when she had been enclosed. There were two figures on the doors, and both of them seemed to be sentient.
"Did you just say something?"
"No. That was him," the same voice replied.
She turned to the other one, somehow sensing that the darker door was not going to be of any help. "Do you know how I get out of this enclosure?"
The face on the door smiled. "The only way out is through one of these doors. One leads to death, and the other takes you back to where you were, life."
The other door, which had originally spoken, said, "But I should warn you that one of us always tells the truth and one of us always lies."
She felt something about the two doors that was suspicious, and briefly went over the riddle in her mind. If what the face said was true, then there would be another door somewhere around.
"Come on and choose already! This doesn't take much thought! Open one of us and walk right through!"
She smirked. "What happens if I don't choose one of you? I don't want to die, and I don't want to go back to my life, either. Neither holds much value to me, as my life was a living hell before I got here. I am not choosing between the two of you."
"She can't do that, can she?" one door asked the other.
"No! She can't!"
Téa smirked and turned toward the other walls. "Too bad, because that's what I am doing right now."
She studied the walls carefully, and there was the outline of a door underneath the vines. The vines cut at her fingers and made her hands bleed, but she didn't feel the pain at all. There was something in the air that made her feel like she was on the right track, that the sum of her blood and suffering would somehow amount to something.
While she worked at clearing the vines away, the other doors screamed at her to stop and do as they said. She ignored them and kept working until the third door was in front of her. This door had no face, but there was the staff of the Magician of Faith drawn onto the wood.
Confidently, she opened the door… and found herself in the most beautiful garden she had ever seen.
The Magician of Faith was standing in the center, sitting on the edge of a pool. There was a fountain; something red trickled down into the "water," which Téa saw was not water but blood.
"What do you want?" The Magician of Faith asked. She was holding a cup in each hand, her staff at her feet. In one cup there was something that looked and smelled like blood, and in the other was something that smelled sweet and radiated numbness.
The Magician of Faith began to explain the choices. "You have already said you do not want to go back to the life. In the golden goblet, there is a new life. In the silver goblet, there is death. What do you want?"
She reached for the golden goblet, confident that she didn't want death. The Magician of Faith pulled it back. "There are dire consequences that come with each."
"I don't care. I want to live. I just don't want my old life, and I'm not ready to die! Give me the golden goblet! Please!" Téa felt the tears fall.
She was aware of someone pressing something to her lips.
Everything did not go black.
Instead, everything went white.
Fate tried to decide how long she could last. There were cuts all over her from her jump out the window, and she had been awake for about nineteen hours.
She pushed herself away from Pegasus, which caused one of the deeper cuts on her to come open. The smell of blood wafted through the air, and it was obvious that Pegasus was using every ounce of self-control he had to restrain himself.
"What have you done to Yugi?" she accused.
"Just a taste; they are coming after him tomorrow, just like they came after you today. How did you escape from them? No one ever escapes."
Fate brushed the hair out of her face. "I jumped out a window."
"A closed window?"
"You got it, teacher. I've been running around all day, and they finally gave up."
Pegasus looked her up and down. She felt awkward under his gaze. "Insane," he said. "That was insane. And your family was taken as well?"
"Yes."
"I'm sorry."
Fate shook her head and gave him a glare. "I still want to know what you're doing to Yugi there. I don't think it's very nice to sit there giving hickeys to an innocent kid."
"I'm taking you both to my place. You'll be safe there. I'm too high up for them to suspect me, even if I am just a teacher. I created Duel Monsters."
Fate rolled her eyes. "Yeah, we know you created Duel Monsters, but I doubt they will give a rat's rear about that."
"Your language is not appropriate."
"Seeing as I can't show my face in school again, I don't think my language can get me in trouble anymore."
"Okay, now help me get the 'innocent kid' in the car, Fate."
***FIRST PERSON BAKURA***
We had been fighting since sunset. Or, more accurately, he had been beating me up since sunset with miniscule pauses for me to regain consciousness and heal.
He came at me like a whirlwind again, and this time I decided to sidestep it while kicking his backside. He stopped and smiled at me.
"That was a definite improvement over last time," he said. Then he punched at my face like he did after he said something; it was meant to catch me off-guard. I ducked. "Definite improvement," he repeated in a whisper.
"Go to bed. Tomorrow you have your exams, so you should rest for a few hours, not that you really need the sleep."
I nodded.
It had been two days since I saw Fate and Yugi. They had just disappeared without a trace; people were talking about how her family was taken but she was missing when they got there. Yugi's family hadn't been taken, but they had come for him. I heard people talking about how they were enraged when he wasn't there.
Monday night, Yami Bakura had broken my wrist. He had to set it immediately, and Tuesday I had gone into school with a severely sore wrist, not to mention all the weird stares I got. I was the only one who knew Yugi well that hadn't been taken.
He told me it would take around thirty hours for the broken bone to heal, and, naturally, he wanted to continue conditioning me tonight. I was still avoiding the use of my right hand, not that it really mattered… being ambidextrous was a merit.
I heard the doorbell ring, so I wandered down the stairs to answer it, still cleaning the blood off myself. I tried to scrub all the noticeable stuff on my skin, opened the door, and proceeded to be shocked.
Téa was standing at the door, wet and cold from the rain, her clothing tattered. She was covered in mud and looked like she had just gone through living hell. There was a little blood on her mouth. I stared at her, wondering how she could have found me, then remembered she had asked me out last year. I had, of course, declined her.
"Hello, Téa. What are you doing out there?"
"Please let me in. Do you know how hard it was for me to even get this far?"
"What happened?"
"I was at the camp."
"You were at the camp?"
"Yes."
"How did you get here?"
She didn't answer, but walked into the house and slammed the door shut. I stared at her, my eyes wide, wondering why she did that… before I realized that anyone could have seen her and recognized her despite her state.
"Stay right here. My father left Monday; he's on a dig. He won't be back for another month or so. I'll find you some clothes. Take those things off; I don't want you to dirty anything."
Téa hesitated, her eyes filled with questioning. "You want me to strip? Here?"
"Gods, you're safe with me. I'll find some clothes for you."
I walked into my room, where my ring started to glow. Yami Bakura came out, his eyes wide. "Are you insane, Bakura? Why is she here? What is going on?"
While I was in my closet, I decided to tell him a shortened version of the story. "Téa is someone I know from school. Last week, she was abducted and taken to one of the government institutions. Nobody knows where the institutions are, but she is in really bad shape."
"I don't like this. What if they sent her here to spy on us?"
"Téa is not that kind of person."
I walked to the bathroom and threw some clothing in there. I would have to go into my mother's chest in the attic if she was picky enough to need a bra. I mean, my mother died and I don't have any female members of the family, so it's not like I have those articles of clothing. Actually, my father might have some, but then again, my father was just plain weird sometimes.
I turned on the shower and went downstairs to bring her up. She looked at me shyly with a slight blush; one if her arms was hiding her breasts. I took the other am and led her upstairs. I thought about burning the other clothes. I mean, who knew what kind of diseases she had been exposed to?
When I walked downstairs, I noticed that there was a card with the Magician of Faith lying on her clothes. I took it off them and took the clothes outside. The skies had miraculously cleared, and I doused the clothes with gasoline. Several minutes later, the reminders of her captivity were no more than ashes.
***THIRD PERSON***
Téa didn't know how she'd gotten back to her home city.
She remembered waking up in the park, the place where a lot of weird things seemed to happen after dark. There was a golden goblet in her hand, and some of the liquid was still in the bottom. She drank the rest of it hungrily before licking it.
That action had disturbed her even more than the sight of Bakura fighting someone who looked exactly like him; she had watched them fight for almost an hour before finally becoming fed up with waiting. Then she rang the doorbell.
After she got out of the shower, she put on the clothing Bakura had given her. It didn't fit as well as she would have liked it to fit, the pants being a little too long.
Bakura was waiting for her. He handed her the necklace with the Magician of Faith forever locked away inside its laminated seal.
"I burned the clothes."
"Thank you."
"So, what exactly happened to you out there?"
"I was taken to an island and forced to work in the graveyard. I had to pile bodies onto carts for six hours from early evening to somewhere around one in the morning. It was a really dangerous job, too, especially when workers started disappearing. I don't know how I escaped."
"What do you remember about your escape?"
"There was this really cute guy who was standing off to the side, and he looked too well-kept to be a slave laborer, so I told him he should go away. Most of the bodies were victims of disease, and I didn't want him to catch it. He was suddenly on me and I remembered all of the stories about Gentleman Death waiting for laborers after dark, and I think I fainted. When I woke up, I was in the park."
"That is so weird."
"Do you know where Yugi and Fate are?"
"I haven't seen them since Monday. They disappeared, but they weren't taken. Nobody heard anything about them being taken. They just… vanished. Fate's family was taken, though, and there were rumors that she somehow escaped from their grasp."
"But… no one escapes from them."
"I know. It seems really fishy, doesn't it? All of the stuff that is happening here could fit better in a horror movie than the real world."
Téa smiled at Bakura. "Thank you for taking me in. If you hadn't been here for me, I would have been caught again." She hugged him.
"No problem. You can sleep in the guest room. I need to get a few hours of sleep; I have exams tomorrow."
The castle towered above the ocean like a manifestation of dark energy, its towers cutting into the air so keenly that the air wept from pain. Thunder rolled and lightning struck; there were evil-looking gargoyles positioned everywhere.
There was a large room with great windows, no glass, just window. The screaming winds burst in through the window, furious that someone could build a castle in the air so easily, with almost no effort.
A girl was standing at one of the windows, a silver crown on her head. Diamonds were woven into her hair, and there was a tattoo on her forehead in the shape of an eye. In the center, a clear, sliver-like gem had been welded into her skin.
She wore hoopskirts and a petticoat; the bottom of her dress was black. She wore a red corset, the red of newly fallen blood, and the sleeves of her dress billowed and beat at her, the very tool of the enraged air around her.
Her eyes were closed. She laughed a laugh so chilling that it would have called evil spirits to her out of curiosity, evil spirits that didn't know their demise would come if they even laid a finger on the young woman. She would have been beautiful…
Only something was terribly wrong with her appearance. It could have been her pale skin or the redness of her lips. It may have been her laughter, which could drive the sanest man to madness in less than a second.
The lids of her eyes were too flat, and as she opened them, the true horror was revealed. Empty sockets gazed out at the tempest surrounding her and a hand reached out and touched the sills of the windows. It might have been the very hand of death, for this young woman, this girl-woman…
She had no eyes…
She could not see anything...
She could see everything.