When Chaos realized that she was still in one piece, she lowered her arms and opened one eye to look around. At first, she didn't believe what she saw, she opened the other eye. The Headless Knight had brought down his sword, but it had gone right through her!
Just to confirm her belief, she dove right at the thing as if to tackle it. Chaos went right through it and crashed into the pile of snow behind. She stood up and grinned. "THEY'RE JUST ILLUSIONS!!!" she shouted, hoping Yami would hear. Chaos even allowed herself to laugh.
"Well," she said as she pulled her sleeve away from her Bracelet. "I think I'll just make my own little illusions." Chaos closed her eyes and concentrated on making the fog seem thicker so the fiend couldn't see them as well. Then, she made her own monsters, just like the ones he had. Chaos assumed that he was controlling them by sight, and eventually, he wouldn't be able to tell which were his and which were hers.
"Now to find that Pharaoh . . ."
Yami was running from a Wall Shadow when he heard Chaos shouting. "THEY'RE JUST ILLUSIONS!!!" He suddenly found himself very confused. Yami stopped running and whirled around and ran at the Wall Shadow. Just as Chaos had said, it was an illusion and he passed right through it.
They were rather impressive illusions as well. But they really couldn't do anything once the victim had discovered what they were. That really didn't matter now though. Now, he needed to find Chaos.
As he ran through different paths between the warehouses, he noticed that the fog was growing thicker. That was no doubt some of Chaos's work. He also saw an illusion of him running away from a Headless Knight. "Good work, Chaos," he whispered.
Yami looked up and saw that the fiend was beginning to become frustrated. He couldn't tell which monsters were his and which were Chaos's. The spirit wasn't sure if the fiend knew that those illusions of him and Chaos running weren't real. Yami hoped he didn't, it would buy them some more time.
The spirit of the Puzzle took another look at the fiend just to keep track of him and did a double take. A dark, and very powerful, energy beam was headed straight toward the fiend and he hadn't even seen it coming. It hit him at full blast in the back and the fiend fell from his spot.
All the illusions immediately went away, even Chaos's. Yami ran the direction the fiend had fallen. He was going to finish that monster off with his bare hands if he had to, that is, if the fall hadn't killed him. But somehow, Yami had a feeling that it was going to take more than a fall to finish him off.
As he ran, he slipped on a patch of ice and his ankle twisted painfully in an unnatural manner. Yami howled in pain as he landed in a snow drift next to a warehouse. The spirit gritted his teeth and just laid there for a moment. It didn't feel like anything was broken, but it still burned.
Slowly, Yami got up and tested his right ankle. Pain shot up his leg as he put pressure on it. Yami growled in frustration and began to hobble in the direction to where he'd seen the fiend fall.
Chaos came to the place where she'd shot her enemy down and was aghast when he wasn't there, and there wasn't even a place in the snow to show where he had landed. She'd watched him fall! Where could he have gotten to so quickly?
She shook her head and tried to decide what to do next. 'I should probably find that Pharaoh,' she thought. "Ring?" Immediately, the Ring pointed to her right.
"You're becoming reliant on that thing," a voice, just coincidentally to her right, said. Chaos turned and saw Yami limping towards her. She was at his side within moments to help him along.
"What happened?" she asked as they stopped. Yami growled unhappily.
"I slipped," he muttered. "Where is he?" he then demanded.
"I don't know," Chaos admitted. Yami glared at her.
"What do you mean you don't know?! You're the one that shot him down!"
"But he's not there!" Chaos shot back.
The Ring then came to life and the pointers directed them to their right. Chaos sighed. "I guess we're back to square one."
About fifteen minutes later, they found themselves in front of probably the most run down warehouse of them all. Yami's ankle was throbbing and Chaos was feeling jumpy. The Ring decided to go dead yet again.
Chaos took a deep breath and let it out silently, leaving a little cloud in the crisp air. A cold chill ran through her and she looked over at Yami. His eyes were boring at the doors, as if he were to look long enough, the doors would burn open. But finally, Yami was the first to start walking towards the doors. Chaos was quick to go after him.
Together, they pushed the doors open. They creaked in protest from age and lack of use in the past years. As they looked in, they found that it was too dark to really see anything. This though, didn't seem to phase Yami one bit. He walked right in as if he owned the place.
'I'm going to kill you,' he thought as he walked in. Behind him, he could hear Chaos's cautious footsteps. The warehouse was obviously condemned. The rafters threatened to fall and it was completely barren except for a couple crates.
Chaos couldn't help but tread with caution. But she had to keep up with Yami so he wouldn't get himself killed. It was obvious that he was furious.
"That's quite far enough," a deadly and venomous voice called. The two stopped and strained to look ahead of them.
After a little while, their eyes adjusted to the darkness and for the first time, they saw their enemy's face. It was pale and had a huge scar run diagonally from its forehead to its chin. The man's hair was shoulder length and scraggly. It was mostly black, with a few dark purple strips here and there. Stubble covered his chin and obsidian eyes bore into them.
"So you show yourself," Yami said. "You're not as big of a coward as I thought you were." The man cocked the safety of the gun he was pointing at them.
"I would watch my tongue if I were you, Pharaoh," he said with a smirk. He then looked over to Chaos. "I see you brought your little pet with you. Or did she follow you? It seems no matter where you go she's at your heels." Chaos looked at him with disgust.
"What exactly is it you're after?" Yami demanded as he shifted all his weight to his good ankle.
"Didn't Bakura tell you already?" he asked in an almost innocent voice. "You all dead!" Chaos sighed, they'd heard this already.
"But why?" she asked. It was something that had been eluding them from the beginning, now, maybe they could get some answers.
"Why?" he asked. "Because you ruined my life, Pharaoh. For thousands of years, I've wandered from the Shadow Realm to the real world. You did it all because I lost a Shadow Game to you." Yami frowned.
"Those were the rules," he said. "When you challenged you had to have known the consequences of losing." The man gripped the gun a little tighter.
"But I wasn't suppose to lose!" he shouted. "I've been condemned to my own nightmare for all these years because of you! And now, you'll die for it." The man cocked the gun, and fired straight at Yami.
Yami had not seen it coming so quickly, so he braced himself for the impact. But what happened next, neither he nor the fiend had predicted, Chaos got in the way.
Chaos tackled Yami and they both went crashing to the ground. Yami was sure that his heart had stopped, even if it were only for a second. He sat up and found that Chaos was in his arms. All anger was lost for the moment as he wrapped his arms around her a little tighter. Panic rose in his throat as he felt her trembling. Then, he felt something warm ooze over his fingers. Yami didn't even need to look to know that it was blood.
The spirit pulled the other away a little and saw that the other was grasping her left shoulder. A pair of dark blue eyes looked at him with immense pain. Chaos's breath hissed as she breathed through clenched teeth. Yami felt anger beginning to boil inside him again.
Yami allowed Chaos to get over by the wall and he stood up and glared at the fiend. His eyes were partially shaded by his golden bangs and the eye of Horus glowed brightly on his forehead. At first, the fiend seemed a little dismayed, but the same familiar smirk played on his lips and he sent a similar image to the one he'd given Yami the night before to his head.
Yami clenched his fists as the images came to his head. Suddenly, he shot out his hand and a force of energy sent the fiend flying back against the back wall. Yami then took the gun the fiend and had dropped and pointed it at the man and began to empty the whole magazine on him as he shouted a war cry.
The fiend's body was slammed against the wall again as bullets drilled into his chest. Slowly, he sank to the floor, all the while leaving a trail of blood on the wall. To add to Yami's fury, the fiend didn't seem dismayed at all. In fact, he had a sadistic smirk on his face as blood trickled down his chin. Then, he began to laugh.
Yami emptied out the gun and tossed it aside. His vision was crimson and his mind was in fury. He then raised his hand to finish the job.
Chaos looked from the sidelines as she grasped her shoulder. It burned horribly. She clenched her teeth and repeatedly squeezed her eyes shut. Blood seeped through her fingers and soaked her thin jacket.
The young woman watched as Yami took his anger out by shooting the fiend repeatedly. As the fiend sank to the floor, he looked over at her with a sadistic smirk. She couldn't understand why he didn't seem to care that Yami was about to blast him into oblivion.
He laughed insanely and that same wind whisper he used earlier reached her ears. "I guess you'll never know about your past . . ." it came in a gasp, and yet, it was taunting. Chaos's grew wide as she looked into the eyes of the fiend. He wasn't lying, he knew everything.
Yami raised his hand and shouted the words of the fiend's destruction. "MIND CRUSH!!!" The whole warehouse became distorted.
"NO!" Chaos screamed as she watched the man's mind smash and fall to the Shadows. Tears welled in her eyes. He had known . . . He had known everything . . .
Chaos squeezed her eyes tightly as sobs escaped her lips. She had been so close . . . Sobs wracked her tired frame like never before. She grasped her wound tightly with one hand and clenched her hand into a fist and drove into wet snow that had blown in. Chaos just leaned against the wall and sobbed.
Yami looked at the now empty shell of his enemy. He'd done it, he'd killed him. The Pharaoh felt a strange sense of calm. He breathed deeply and realized how drained he felt. He had used quite a bit of magic.
Behind him, the spirit heard pitiful crying. 'Chaos!' Yami remember as he whirled around and limped as quickly as he could over to her.
Yami knelt down next to her and studied her. Blood was still seeping from her fingers that were tightly grasping her shoulder. Chaos's body was hunched over and wracked with sobs. 'Did it really hurt that bad?' he wondered as he laid a gentle hand on her right shoulder and looked at her with great concern.
Chaos squeezed her eyes shut, but tears still leaked and poured over her scraped cheeks. The pain she was feeling was by far the worse she'd ever gone through. He had known . . . She felt a hand on her shoulder and opened her tear filled eyes to see a bleary Yami.
"We did it," he simply said, trying to lighten the mood. But then he noticed something more, something far beyond physical pain in her eyes.
"He knew . . ." she whispered with a shaky voice. Yami couldn't figure out what she was talking about and gave a slight shake of the head and shrug of the shoulders. "He knew everything . . ." she said a little louder. She looked straight into his eyes. "He knew everything!"
Slowly, everything sunk in. The last few minutes went through his mind. The gentle wind whisper, Chaos's scream. Yami felt like he was going to be sick. The turmoil in those deep pools was more than he could handle.
Chaos went back to sobbing and Yami looked away. He had been so incredibly bent on killing him, he hadn't really heard anything else except his own mind yelling the command for a mind crush. Chaos had taken a bullet for him. And now this . . . He knew that nothing he could do would comfort her now. So he didn't even try.
The former Pharaoh just wanted to crawl under a rock and die slowly and painfully.
Chaos didn't even really realize that Yami was there anymore. The tears were never ending and they only increased. He may have been her only chance. She couldn't believe it. Chaos let out a small wail and sobbed some more. Everything was closing in on her. She couldn't take it, the stress, the pain, both physical and mental, and the turmoil that was building up inside of her. Everything was caving in.
Yami felt something in the air change. He looked back to Chaos and saw that her Phoenix pendant had begun to glow in the crystal. As her sobs increase, the light became brighter. It went from red, to yellow, and finally, white. Then, as Chaos screamed, the whole warehouse completely exploded into flames.
All the way across town, Seto was reading a book and ignoring the teacher when the whole school was filled with the sound of an explosion. Out of shock, Seto dropped his book. Immediately, the class was filled with questioning voices. Seto, however, chose to ponder to himself.
It had sounded like a sonic boom, only it was much too close. When he turned and looked out the window, he felt like the wind had been knocked out of him. He could see it as it went all the way up to the clouds. A solid tunnel of fire swirled miles high into the sky.
Seto thought for a moment and it hit him again. It was by the docks . . . Chaos! Without any further thought, he stood up, left his things, and ran out of the classroom. As he ran, he paged his driver. By the time he'd gone down all the flights of stairs, the limo would be waiting for him.
Excited voices filled every room as he passed them. As he passed one room, Joey and Tristan ran out and watched Kaiba nearly jump a whole set of stairs. "Come on!" Joey said as he quickly followed with Tristan right behind him.
Kaiba burst out the front door and saw his limo pull up. He jumped the three steps and heard shouts behind him. "Kaiba!" Joey shouted. "Is it them?!"
Seto felt that it was no time to argue. "YES!" he shouted before getting in his limo. "Follow me!" Then his limo tore off down the road.
"You heard him!" Tristan said as he and Joey went to get his parked motorcycle.
At first, Yami tried to shield himself from the flames, but found that his Millennium Puzzle was protecting him. The Pharaoh looked around him in sheer awe, and panic. The whole warehouse was covered in a cyclone of swirling fire.
Beside him, Chaos's scream continued. Yami saw that her eyes were still shut tightly and the tears still trailed down her cheeks. Fire leapt off her body and joined the rest, but she didn't seemed to be harmed by it. Yami concluded that she was the source of the fire.
Yami reached out to touch her, but found that she could burn him, unlike the rest of the flames. He was forced to watch with wide eyes as Chaos's scream went. Finally, her scream became quieter and the flames slowly began to die down and finally, they died out, all except for some.
A set of two fire wings were on Chaos's back and they looked like they belonged. The Phoenix pendant still shone brilliantly and it didn't look like it intended on dieing out with the rest of the flames.
Chaos opened her eyes and looked at Yami. Something was different, they seemed more full than before. There had been an often emptiness in them that he had become accustom to. She looked at him with a sad and tired smile.
"Oh, my Pharaoh," she whispered. Yami's breath gave out on him. She remembered . . . That's what it was! She remembered her past! That was it!
Then, her wings died out and she collapsed. Yami felt like he'd been knocked back into reality and looked at the Phoenix pendant and saw that it was still glowing. He reach forward to touch it. It gave off one more brilliant flash before dieing out as well. Yami yanked his finger away as it was scorched by the crystal.
He thought for a moment. Panic entered him again . . . What had she said?! He couldn't remember! He yelled in frustration, but then decided that it wasn't important, she remembered, that was all that mattered.
Yami turned her over and looked at the wound in her shoulder, it was still bleeding and it didn't look like it intended on stopping. He took off his coat and wrapped her in it when he saw that she was shivering. Yami then stood up and looked around.
The ceiling had caved in and debris laid every where. But what he didn't see was more disturbing. Where was that fiend's body?! Had it burned in the fire? His guess was confirmed after several minutes of searching and he found a pile of fine ash.
The Pharaoh limped back over to the unconscious Chaos and fell. It was over . . . He could see Yugi again . . .
He looked down at Chaos. He still wasn't really sure what had happened. The spirit then noticed something, she was breathing really shallow. Yami tried to smack her awake, but found that she didn't even flinch. Panic took him once more.
All he knew was that he needed to get help. He quickly limped out of the warehouse and found that it was right next to the road. Yami swallowed hard and looked both ways. He couldn't believe his luck.
Kaiba's limo pulled up and he was out of the car before it even came to a stop. He took one look at half demolished warehouse and swore softly. A few moments later, Tristan and Joey pulled up on the motorcycle.
"You okay, man?!" Joey asked as he jumped off and ran over to Yami. "What are you standing out here in a tank for?! It's freezing!" Yami looked over at Joey and blinked a couple times, still trying to catch his breath from all that had happened.
"I'm well aware of that," he said softly. "Chaos . . ."
"Where's Chaos?!" Kaiba demanded. "Was she in there?!" Yami nodded as he swallowed hard.
"And so was I," he answered. Joey looked at him in disbelief and Tristan walked over with the same expression.
"How did you survive that?!" Yami shook his head.
"That's not really important right now," he spoke in between breaths. "Chaos needs to go to the hospital. She was shot." Seto's eyes grew wide. He went back to the limo, took out his trench coat and ran into the shambles. A few minutes later, he came out with Chaos wrapped carefully in his trench coat and cradled in his arms. Without a word, he got into the limo with Chaos still in his arms.
"Come on, Pharaoh," he called from inside. Yami nodded farewell to his friends and got in the limo as well.
"We'll meet you there, Yami," Joey assured him. As soon as he was in the limo, they drove away.
Yami sat opposite of Seto, who was still cradling the young woman in his arms. He looked down at her with a grim look on his face. "The bullet went clean through," he said quietly. "That's one thing in our favor. But I don't think she's just unconscious. What happened in there, Yami?"
The spirit looked over at the CEO. He briefly explained and Seto's eyes grew wider and wider. "She caused that?" he asked in disbelief. Yami nodded. Seto shook his head with disbelief and he looked intently at Chaos. 'You'd better be okay,' he thought as he reached out and brushed some hair from her face.
Some blood was even beginning to seep through his trench coat. Seto pressed his hand over the wound and bit his lip. "Drive faster!" he yelled to the driver. Chaos's skin had become pale and clammy, and Seto had begun to worry.
Yami looked at the floor of the car. He'd been thinking of how Chaos remembered the past. They could all know now. But why couldn't he remember what she had said? No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't even begin to imagine what she could have said. He thought back to when he had touched the crystal, it had let of a searing light, that was when he first realized he couldn't remember. If he couldn't remember . . . There was a good chance Chaos didn't remember.
And what had happened with all that fire? Surely it should have consumed them both. Had it really come from that Phoenix pendant? Maybe it really did have some mystical energies after all.
The memory of her face was killing him. He hated himself for it. Once again, Yami just wanted to die. He knew that he could never apologize for something like that. The damage was everlasting. Never in his whole life had he ever felt so empty.
/Yami?/ an unsure voice filled his head. Yami looked out the window.
Hello, Yugi,he said with a sad happiness. Where are you?
/Heading to the hospital,/ he answered, somewhat aware of his other half's distress. /Ryou couldn't wait to see Bakura, and I volunteered to go with him. Where are you? I felt my link come back, but you haven't been answering./
I'm heading to the hospital as well,Yami told his hikari. He allowed himself a glance over at Seto, who was holding Chaos. Is Tazi with you?Before Yugi even answered, he knew the answer.
/No,/ he said reluctantly. Yami scowled in disgust. Her other half was bleeding and unconscious, and she hadn't even thought to make her way to find her. Sometimes Tazi just outraged him. /She was going to go to the school and try to put us in favor of our teachers after being absent for these past couple days. We decided that she could pull this off the best./ Yami sighed, so she actually did have a reason. He had been hoping for some other emotion to fill him instead of this emptiness.
I'll probably get there when you do,the yami finally said.
/Okay, Yami,/ Yugi said. /Are you okay?/
Yes, aibou,he answered softly before shutting off the link.
For the rest of the ride, Yami just stared out the window. Seto watched him for a little bit. He could see that Yami was in pain. Unfortunately, he knew there was nothing he could do about it.
When they pulled up to the hospital, Yugi and Ryou were outside waiting for them. Seto was the first to get out and the two hikaris cried out when they saw Chaos in his arms. Ryou was immediately asking what had happened and if she was okay and followed Kaiba into the hospital.
'That should be Tazi following him,' Yami thought as he got out.
"Yami!" Yugi cried with joy as he ran to him and jumped into his arms, almost knocking them both to the ground. Yami caught him and held the boy tightly. He felt his ankle throb as the extra weight was added and clenched his teeth. Yugi wrapped his arms around his yami's neck and smiled happily. "I missed you so much," he whispered.
"I missed you too, aibou," Yami whispered back as he shut his eyes tightly. No matter how much he tried to let the warmth and joy of Yugi wash over him, he couldn't seem to replace that feeling.
"I love you, Yami," Yugi said softly. Yami just stared off into space over Yugi's shoulder. He wasn't sure if he'd ever really be the same again.
Alright. This is the next to last chapter. Well . . . really, I guess the next would apply as an Epilogue. And BTW. This last segment was not yaoi. Yami and Yugi are like brothers.