MANGA NOTE (Death-T): In the manga, Kaiba steals the Blue Eyes White Dragon from Yugi. When he refuses to return it, Yami no Yugi challenges him to a penalty game. Kaiba loses and undergoes the promised "experience of death" and then re-experiences being ripped apart and killed by duel monsters every night. Kaiba builds Death-T to avenge his loss and in an attempt to make his nightmares stop by forcing Yugi to undergo his Death Simulation Chamber. When Yami no Yugi wins, he shatters Kaiba's heart, giving him the chance (and forcing him if he wants to recover) to rebuild it without the darkness that has consumed it.


CHAPTER 2: THE MORTIFYING ORDEAL OF BEING KNOWN CLICHÉ

THE MORTIFYING ORDEAL OF BEING KNOWN CLICHÉ: In 2013, Tim Kreider wrote an essay in the New York Times about accidentally learning that some of his friends disapproved of his rented goats. He then, in the manner of New York Times essays, jumped to philosophical musings on the nature of relationships and the search for unconditional love. He concluded, "If we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known," demonstrating that some clichés are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.

MORAL: It's possible to acknowledge the connection between being loved and being known and still wonder if the reward is worth the risk.


Atem stared up at the meteors chasing each other across a night blue field. Kaiba lay at his side, their little fingers still entwined like kids doing a pinkie swear. The flower clouds surrounding them had grown and twisted into tall stalks. Their gold and pink blossoms reached for the sky, as if they'd always been that color and would remain so as long as eternity lasted. Atem breathed in their scent. He knew he should be worried or frightened or curious. But right now, he was tired.

And Kaiba was waiting for an answer.

"I don't know what I wanted," Atem said. "I wanted to be a faithful son to the gods, to uphold destiny, to restore the balance between this world and the next by leaving one for the other. I wanted to set Yugi free, ready to face his future on his own… I wanted to be obsolete."

Kaiba sat up, but refused to relinquish his hold on Atem's finger. "And to do it, you were ready to toss aside all the years you lived in Domino. You tried to blow them out like a birthday candle." Kaiba's words rolled over Atem like a poisoned tide. "You wanted to deny the friendship you kept insisting we shared, the person you became on your own with no memories to use as an instruction manual."

"No," Atem said, looking up at Kaiba from his reclining position among the flowers. "Life – even the half-life I lived – is never that simple."

"The past is a dead end. Sounds simple enough to me," Kaiba returned.

"Does it? Your past doesn't lie very quietly in its grave."

"I spit on the past!" Kaiba roared.

"Yes. But you have to keep facing backwards to do it." Atem tugged their locked fingers closer. "The elements of our lives don't stay neatly in their own boxes. That was the first lesson I learned, back when my only concern was making the punishment fit the crime. You taught it to me. You don't get to take it back."

Atem sat up abruptly, finally breaking the shared joining of their pinkies. He hunched over a second later, choking back vomit, his head spinning… recognizing the signs for the warning signals they were. Atem stood up and braced himself, but the feeling of disorientation, of fragmentation, that swept over him forced him back to his knees. He managed to catch one final glimpse of Kaiba, on his feet, his eyes wide with horror, shouting words that Atem could no longer hear.

Atem disappeared into a whirlpool; sights and sounds flew by and vanished. Part of him wanted to surrender, wondering if this was a punishment or a test – or even a gift from the gods. He kept fighting, pushing back in a blind panic against such a total disintegration of self. Atem accepted being an agent of destiny. He refused to be its plaything.

He closed his eyes, battered, as his last remnants of resistance were swept away. He gulped in air, got his nausea under control and forced his shoulders to relax. He opened his eyes to darkness.

Where was he?

He frowned.

Who was he?

He ran his fingers over his face as if that would give him his answer. He shuddered and shook his head, rejecting the question. He didn't need a name. He had a wrong to avenge and a punishment to inflict. He stood up, his momentary weakness gone beyond recall. It was time to find his prey.

The Spirit of the Puzzle pushed away the memory of Mokuba pleading with him to save Kaiba. He'd made no promises to the child. He'd given Seto Kaiba a warning in their first penalty game. Kaiba had chosen to ignore it, had attacked the youth who lived under his protection, had built a theme park of death to do it. Now the Spirit of the Puzzle was ready to destroy, to grind his enemy's soul into dust and leave Kaiba's body as a warning to anyone presumptuous enough to defy his judgements.

It was dark, here, inside of Kaiba's soul. That was fitting. The quiet, however, was unexpected. The Spirit had thought of pure evil as a noisy cacophonous thing. He'd expected the air to shriek with jarring discords disguised as music. But the silent shadows were comforting. In an odd way, the Spirit felt at home here, as though he'd walked into a space as familiar as the labyrinth of his own soul room.

It took the Spirit of the Puzzle a moment to notice the small figure in the distance, dwarfed by the emptiness surrounding them. He walked forward, surprised again, to find a 10-year-old child in this place. The Spirit recognized him immediately. Seto Kaiba's face had lengthened over the years, his chin had become more pointed. The eyes were the same. They held the hint of a challenge in their blue depths… but no sign of fear.

"Do you know why I'm here?" the Spirit asked, wanting to see something… remorse… guilt… terror… in the too serious, too young face before him.

"You're here to kill me. Losing means death. That's what he taught me." The voice was flat, matter-of-fact, giving nothing back to his victor.

"It's not that simple!" the Spirit shouted. He stopped, surprised. Crime and punishment. Loss and penalty. The rules had always been absolute, calming in their certainty. When had that changed? When had a desire to understand overtaken his thirst for vengeance?

"Of course it is," the boy argued back. "I know the rules of the game."

"Whose rules?"

"My adoptive father's, of course. But I learned them long before meeting him. The powerful crush the weak. Losers are weak. They deserve to die."

"Those aren't my rules!"

"Aren't they?" the boy sneered.

"Actions have consequences. That is my rule."

Seto smirked. "So, you agree with me. Losing is an action. Therefore, it has consequences."

"You're not dead," the Spirit pointed out. "Look at your feet. The pieces of your heart are there. Rebuild and leave."

The boy bent down and picked up two of the puzzle pieces that lay scattered around him. "What's the catch? You'll let me go once I make myself into whoever you think I should be? Forget it. I'd rather stay here. I'm never following anyone's orders again."

"There are no conditions. Rebuild your soul anyway you want – or remain in darkness forever. The choice is yours."

"What's the point?"

"Freedom." It was a new word for the Spirit. He was still trapped inside his own ignorance, confined within the barriers of the Puzzle around his host's neck. And yet, he suddenly wanted to give that unfathomable gift to Kaiba. He wondered what Kaiba would do with it.

"Power is freedom," the boy said.

"Is it?" the Spirit asked. He had power and yet he was confined to a golden cage, tied to a destiny he didn't understand, to his mission to protect, to judge, to punish. In giving the boy a choice, was he giving himself one, even in this small way? "There's no freedom in being a sword, even one wielded in a just cause. Maybe…" the Spirit of the Puzzle paused, picking his way through his thoughts like a man stumbling to bed through a darkened room. "Maybe freedom is being able to choose whether to become a weapon at all."

Seto frowned, but for the first time his scowl didn't seem hostile, as if the question and answer were too important for animosity, abruptly shifting them from foes to fellow pilgrims arguing along the road. "You can make all the choices you want. They don't mean shit without the power to back it up."

"Your brother chose to stay by your side whatever the cost. That, too, is a choice. Just as my host and his friends chose to accept me."

"Mokuba?" the boy said, sounding out a no longer familiar word. "What about Mokuba?" he asked, urgency slipping into his voice.

"You would have killed him tonight," the Spirit said with more gentleness than he believed himself capable of.

For the first time the boy's eyes dropped. "I forgot. Then, I truly do deserve death."

The Spirit found himself wanting to protest, even though he had come here to carry out that very sentence.

"I guess he was right, just not in the way he thought," the boy continued. "Letting go of Mokuba, losing something that crucial… that's death, isn't it? Once you've done that, what happens to your body no longer matters."

The Spirit paused. His thoughts fell into place with the sudden, startling clarity of a hand of cards. He still had no idea who he was or even if he was anything at all. That was losing as well. But it wasn't death. Not while he had Yugi to protect.

"You might have let go of everything crucial, but Mokuba isn't willing to do the same. If you listen, you can hear him calling you."

The boy looked down. "He'll forget."

"Like you did?" the Spirit asked, anger back in his voice.

The boy smiled slightly. "You're right. Mokuba's better than that." He looked around and his smile vanished. "This is where I belong. I don't deserve him."

"You don't. But you can try to be worthy of him anyway."

"You said it yourself. This is a penalty game," the boy argued.

"I think for you, living will be your punishment… living with the knowledge of how badly you failed. Living for atonement. You live for challenges. Live for this one. But, live."

The boy looked at him measuringly. He didn't speak. It was impossible for the Spirit to tell if any of his words had found a toehold, impossible to read anything in that curiously empty, unwavering stare. Slowly Kaiba dropped his gaze to the two puzzle pieces in his hands. He turned them over as he studied them. They gleamed with new life as he fitted them together. The Spirit held his breath, afraid to move, afraid to say anything that would distract the boy from his task.

Sudden cheers broke his concentration. The Spirit looked around, startled to find himself back in the arena at Death-T. After the shadows of Kaiba's soul, the bright lights in the arena made him blink. Yugi's friends were shouting at him; they were calling his host's name. Before turning to them, he glanced at the motionless teenager sitting across the table. Kaiba had seemed to age and then retreat back into boyhood as they'd talked. He'd worn a 10-year-old's face and frame, but there'd been a swirling chaos behind his eyes that spoke of something beyond childhood's reach. Now Kaiba's eyes were vacant. The Spirit resisted a sudden impulse to smooth the matted hair off of Kaiba's forehead. The twisted creature who had built a theme park of death had vanished. He knew it. The Spirit felt a sudden hunger to see the man who would replace him. "Please hurry back," he whispered, too softly to be heard.

His hand stung. Automatically he raised his finger to his mouth and tasted blood. A glass-sharp shard glinted in the overhead lights, then returned to the darkness of Kaiba's soul room.

He had crushed Kaiba's soul. He hadn't expected a splinter, as indomitable as Kaiba himself, to pierce his own in return.

His friends' voices faded away. The stadium dimmed. Darkness returned. Not the newly familiar darkness of Kaiba's soul, but a yawning, limitless abyss. He dove into it and held his breath, wondering if he still had lungs to breathe with, exhaling only once he reached the limbo world and stood on the flower clouds beneath his feet. They held his weight. He closed his eyes against tears of gratitude as he heard Kaiba – his Kaiba, the Kaiba who had propelled them into this strange place – screaming at him.

"Damn you! Get out of my head!" Kaiba roared. After the darkness that had followed Death-T, after the void at the center of his soul, their formless limbo world had never looked so good. It was amazing how solid the clouds felt as he stamped his feet on them.

Atem stared at Kaiba, open-mouthed. He hugged himself and giggled. The sky above them lightened in response. "I'm Atem! I have a name!"

Kaiba spat out, "You just had to even the score, didn't you? You had to drag me back there, where you could stride into my soul like you fucking owned it, where you could be the magnanimous victor."

"I didn't! You have to know that!"

"Seems pretty convenient to me. We get thrown into some weird alternative reality where I'd won Death-T, and then almost as soon as we get out, the script gets flipped again, back to you winning. Are you trying to tell me that was a coincidence?"

"Stop blaming me! Of course, it isn't a coincidence. It can't be. But I don't have any more of a clue than you do!" And yet, Atem couldn't deny that he felt alive now, yelling at Kaiba, in a way he hadn't during his march to the after-life. He'd refused to look aside, to glance back at the world he was leaving, even as something inside himself had withered with each step… until Kaiba had called his name, until Kaiba had crashed into his death scene and turned it into a farce… or an adventure.

Kaiba frowned. He knew Atem couldn't have orchestrated any of this. But Atem's true crime was too shameful to mention: Atem had shown Kaiba his soul – and then shattered it, like a toy, easily broken.

"That world we were just in… that never happened. Not like that. Not to us," Atem said urgently. "I was never in your soul room. You know that." A voice popped into Atem's head: "But don't you wish it had?" "No. Yes," Atem answered.

"Who the fuck are you talking to?" Kaiba hissed.

"You. Me. I wish it had happened that way. I wish…" Atem paused and closed his eyes, thinking, "I wish I'd seen you as a struggling child, thrown into deep water, too proud to reach for a rope." Atem squared his shoulders and said, "I wish we'd gotten a chance to talk. I wish I'd seen you. It might have saved time. We might have…"

"Did it ever occur to you that I don't want you to?" Kaiba turned his head as though that could erase their moment of shared awareness, delete it from memory. He retreated to safer ground. The flowers turned red with his anger, matching the setting sun, trailing blood through the sky. "Every time you go on about friendship, all I can think about is what a liar you are. It's bad enough being stranded here with you without having to listen to your bullshit."

"Then maybe you shouldn't have grabbed my arm! If you'd stuck to your usual routine of not giving a damn, I'd be in the after-life where I belong."

"Believe me, I wish I'd stayed far away! I can see now why your happy band of friends were so ready to cheer you on while you strolled to your death. They probably couldn't wait!"

"Not once you'd served your purpose." The thought intruded, gouged its way into Atem's mind as if it had been spoken aloud. "How dare you? Never insult my friends again!" Atem yelled.

"What are you going to do? Pretty sure mind crushes don't work here. How does it feel to be powerless? To be somewhere where Millennium Items don't work? Where there's no little partner whispering in your ear that you're the greatest?"

"I'm not the one who needed a stadium full of imaginary fans chanting my name! Is there anyone besides Mokuba who'll miss you?"

"I don't need anyone else. I certainly don't need you. I'll find my way home on my own."

Atem laughed. "Big talk as always. Just how do you plan to do that? Oh, that's right. You're the great Seto Kaiba! You can do anything!"

Kaiba's lips thinned. "I think it's time to collect a little data. How do you know we aren't dead? After all, you were the one trying to commit suicide by Yugi." He laughed as Atem's eyes widened and then narrowed in anger, as Atem's fists clenched at his side as though he was holding himself back from swinging at Kaiba. Atem's anger felt like victory. It eased something in Kaiba's chest, a fiery balm that soothed as it ignited and burned everything in its path.

Kaiba held back a scream. Atem's concern, Atem's anger, Kaiba's urge to save Atem, his urge to run away… what, if anything, was real?

Kaiba hunted in his pockets and drew out a utility knife. He removed an arm bracer and watched as it dropped and lay on the blood red flowers at his feet. Kaiba rolled up a sleeve, unfolded the knife and methodically set about cutting a line in his arm.

Atem looked away as the blood welled up on Kaiba's arm, then switched his gaze to Kaiba's face. "What? Why did you do that?" Shock replaced the anger in his voice.

"That hurt," said Kaiba, his tone utterly businesslike. "That indicates I still have working nerve endings."

"You couldn't think of a better way to find that out?"

"No."

They watched as the skin on Kaiba's arm knitted itself back together. Kaiba rubbed the skin; it was seamless without a trace of the injury.

"Interesting," Kaiba murmured to himself. "I wonder what would happen with a deeper, more life threatening…"

"Stop this!" Atem screamed.

"If we're going to get out of here, we need to understand what 'here' is," Kaiba returned. "Mokuba's waiting."

Atem wondered if Kaiba was seeing Mokuba, sitting by his unresponsive body, saying "I will wait forever for Nisama to return." Atem frowned. He picked up a crimson flower; there were more of them now. It held its shape for a moment, then dissolved into blood red flecks and disappeared back into the ground as it fell from his hand. "Is that what this is about? Mokuba? I'm sorry you wound up here, Kaiba. No matter the outcome, your intent was generous."

Kaiba scowled, unable to stand still. He'd promised to be Mokuba's father, so long ago that sometimes it seemed like a dream. Only the responsibility remained. Kaiba started striding, unable to stay trapped in the same space with himself. His only cure: movement and distance.

"Where are you going?" Atem asked sharply. He'd been trapped in the Puzzle for millennia, blissfully unaware. Then had come Yugi and friendship. Now, as Kaiba deserted him, he felt the weight of those centuries fall suddenly on his shoulders, compressing his lungs.

"Kaiba…" he gasped out, needing to hear another voice, even Kaiba's, even if it was only going to spit out more insults.

Kaiba turned and pointed to the city in the distance. "There's something out there. I'm going to find out what it is."

"That's stupid. It's a mirage. Even I can tell that."

"I wasn't asking for your company. I'm doing this on my own. The last thing I need is you yapping at my heels."

"We need to stick together!" Atem shouted. His unspoken plea: "Don't leave me alone!" went unheard.

Kaiba scowled and turned away.

Atem's voice rose. "Have you forgotten about the power of…"

"I don't ever want to hear the word, 'friendship,' again," Kaiba hissed. "Not now. Not ever. Not from you. We could be stuck in this shithole until eternity ends, and the word never passes your lips, not unless you're talking about Yugi or your cheerleading squad. Not me. Got it?"

Atem opened his mouth. The words, "friendship… friendship… friendship," bubbled up through his throat in a sing-song taunt, propelled by the anger Kaiba could so effortlessly ignite. He swallowed them down and nodded instead. Had he lost the right to name Kaiba a friend? He'd expected to be in the after-life before the answer came due.

Kaiba waited a heartbeat and then another to see if Atem would answer, would argue back, would insist he cared, that his silence about the Ceremonial Duel had an explanation that wasn't rooted in indifference and hypocrisy.

Atem kept silent, determined to honor Kaiba's request.

Kaiba strode off, accompanied by the bitter laughter jangling through his head. Exploring the environment. Kaiba snorted. They both knew Kaiba was running from his own weakness, from the parade of every wrong decision he'd ever made… racing from the look in Atem's eyes when he'd entered Kaiba's soul room and stripped Kaiba bare. Kaiba suspected that moment – when he'd been totally vulnerable, when he'd been truly seen and known – would stay with him forever, no matter how far or how fast he traveled. Kaiba picked up the pace, ignoring the futility of the gesture, the helpless hopelessness of everything he'd done since flying to Egypt to stop Atem from the death he'd wanted.

Kaiba wished he'd put a pedometer on his duel disk so he could measure how far he was walking, dimly aware that going back and facing Atem, taking off his duel disk to re-purpose its components would be a more effective use of his time. So would stopping to experiment on the flowers at his feet, determining why they'd fallen apart – and what held them together. He walked faster, almost sprinting now, even though he was beginning to suspect he wasn't going anywhere.

Atem turned his head, refusing to watch Kaiba abandon him. Was this the way he'd looked to Yugi and his friends? Was this the way he'd looked to Kaiba? Atem had pictured himself striding towards his destiny, purposeful, his mission completed. Had it been a retreat, instead? Atem shivered, bereft of friends, deserted even by his rival.

"You know why I didn't tell you about the Ceremonial Duel?" Atem hollered after Kaiba. "I didn't want you there!"

Atem watched, like an archer on desert sands, as his shaft thudded home, as his prey stumbled forwards. Atem turned away, sickened. But before Atem could call his words back, if that had been his intention, Kaiba righted himself and picked up the pace, without looking back.

Atem grimaced. Everything had gone sideways from the moment Kaiba had called his name, from the moment they'd barreled through that door together, from the moment they'd faced each other, standing under this alien, changing sky, waiting… for what? More unanswerable questions? More chaos and uncertainty?

Atem sank into the star shaped flowers, the dabs of white at the center of their red petals looking like tears on a field of blood. The sky had darkened again, the stars were faded and distant. Atem shut his eyes and drew in a breath, wishing the world… wishing Kaiba… far, far away.

Atem shuddered as the now familiar feeling of disorientation, of being out of time and place, swept over him. He didn't fight it. Any reality had to be better than this.

Atem opened his eyes and breathed a sigh of relief. He was back with Yugi again, as if he'd never left, as if the flight to Egypt and the Ceremonial Duel had been a bad dream. Atem frowned. Which was real? The world where he'd said goodbye to Yugi and headed for death? The limbo place between realities that Kaiba had propelled them into, only to walk away, himself?

Or this achingly familiar reality, where he was back in Yugi's bedroom, sitting on the bed with his partner, wearing matching pajamas?

"Other me!" Yugi shrieked. "I'm so glad!"

"Partner!" Atem scanned the room. Why did something so familiar feel so alien? Why was it so hard to think, to remember? Something was missing. Something important. Atem swiveled on the bed. "Where's Kaiba?"


.

Thanks to Bnomiko for betaing this chapter!

AUTHOR'S NOTE: I was a little wary of starting the first two chapters with visits to alternative versions of Death-T, but I do think of it as pivotal to both characters, and I also wanted to explore two totally different versions of it, one where Seto wins and has all of Gozaburo's indoctrination reinforced and here where Atem gets a chance to see and understand things earlier. So even though used the same event, I wanted to show the different consequences that could come depending on how it played out. What would Kaiba have gone on to do if he'd won Death-T? What might have happened if Atem had started to question his own identity and the absolutes – like destiny, a little earlier?

The scene in the soul room was one of the earliest parts of this story; the earliest draft was written before the story had fully coalesced in my mind. There's something about Atem, not quite capable of grasping that he is a person, yet stumbling towards a personal philosophy, an awareness that life isn't absolute, and being goaded with every step by a bratty 10-year-old who just wants to win an argument. I also got a kick out of the idea that at times, Atem was in danger of being out-argued by a 10-year-old.

Stay safe everyone!

SOCIAL MEDIA NOTE: I am on Tumblr, Dreamwidth and Pillowfort as Nenya85. Come check me out there!

One of my favorite quotes is the line from Dune: "Beginnings are such delicate times." I find this true for stories, and I'd love to know what you think of this beginning. Please comment.