Hi all! Do you know there was still snow in my yard when I last updated? Makes it seem even longer than it really has been. Well, here's more. Enjoy!
Part IV: Tender Moments
Chapter 13
At school on Monday, Yugi met me in the hall on my way to Life Skills. We did not talk, just walked companionably to the classroom. Michelle looked up when we came in. I had missed third period on Friday due to a meeting, and had not let Michelle know that I planned to continue attending class. Her left eyebrow raised and she looked from me to Yugi, then back, and smirked. I tried to find surprise in myself that she obviously knew, but I could only sigh and make my way to my seat by Yugi.
Yugi and I were both a little behind, but when we were split into groups of three to work on interviewing skills, Ryou Bakura approached us and reviewed the week's notes before we began mock interviews. I tried to decline my turn as interviewee; after all, when would I need to attend an interview? But Yugi and Ryou insisted that they needed to practice interviewing as well, and who better to practice on? I opened my mouth to firmly decline, but when I looked up at them, they were both wide eyed with expectation that bordered on pleading. I found myself thinking, what could it hurt?
I got my answer a few minutes later as Ryou fired off questions at me. Most were from the handout given for the exercise, but he had peppered them with more personal questions as well. I paused after one, glaring. Ryou simply gazed back at me, very much playing the part of an eager young executive. Yugi was smiling lovingly and graciously. He seemed to be paying very little attention to the actual conversation, but looked delighted that I was 'playing' so well with his friend.
I decided that Ryou was being a protective friend, making sure I was good enough for Yugi. I certainly preferred it coming from this one of his friends. I spared a glance at a cluster of desks nearby where Wheeler, Taylor and Tea sat. Tea saw me and smiled, waving. The other two looked up, then quickly away.
Yes, the quiet white-haired boy was preferable.
XXX
"So… Yugi, you and the Pharaoh…" It was awkward to talk about them as separate, but the same. I did not want to offend the Pharaoh by addressing Yugi directly; I was, after all, trying to follow through with loving them both. But it was hard enough to ask what I was asking. I looked down. At the touch of a hand on my arm, I looked up, my eyes meeting those of the Pharaoh. He smiled, gently, or what passed for gentle on the imposing face.
"It's okay, go on." He raised his hands, palm up, like he had in Yugi's room.
Then the face relaxed once more, Yugi's big eyes patiently waiting.
It had only been a week and a day since we had made up. I felt that I should still tread lightly, but I also wanted to be honest. I was still feeling relatively smart about this whole relationship thing since my recent screw-up. I would forget the lesson learned soon enough, but for now, I knew that I couldn't let my doubts and fear build up. I took a deep breath and plunged ahead.
"Um… do you, have you ever… do you have feelings for one another?" I couldn't look up. I do not know why the question scared me so much. They both loved me, I think, and I loved them. So why would it matter if they loved each other as well?
Because, I answered myself, they are always together, and I am always apart. Oh, that's why. Sometimes my genius irritated me.
Fingers touched my face. "Seto, breathe." I had not realized that I had been holding my breath. I let it out slowly, then inhaled deeply and looked up. Yugi smiled, cocked his head to one side, then stood, pivoted, and folded himself gracefully in my lap. My arms instinctively circled him, but I was still tense, waiting for the answer.
"No. Not as you mean it." I held back joy, waiting for the catch. "We love each other, of course, but not romantically." Yugi looked away, thinking. "For me, for us, the mind link makes that impossible. Knowing another's mind almost as well as my own… it's not conducive to romantic love. It has, instead, led to our oneness, to staying merged for longer and longer periods of time."
Yugi stopped and studied my face trying to read my mind. Suddenly, he smiled brilliantly, his lips just slightly twisted. "Besides," he laughed, "we have only one body!" He twisted in my lap and knelt straddling my hips. "Makes it hard to do this…" He pressed his lips against mine, and drew out the kiss, though I did not respond. He broke the kiss slowly, and leaned into me, his head buried in my neck. A few minutes later, he stirred.
"Is your ego soothed, hun? Does that answer your question?" I became aware that I had said nothing since I choked the question out. My walls were up: blocking emotion, protecting me from hurt. I willed them down and felt relief wash over me, and then, left unchecked, joy. I hugged Yugi tighter and pressed my lips to his forehead, blinking back tears. When I could trust my voice to a whisper, I breathed "Yes."
A few minutes later I was able to put more than one word together and confessed, "I don't know why I worried so much. It shouldn't have been such a big deal even if you said yes. I feel--"
Yugi cut me off with his fingers over my lips. "Of course you know why. Fear. That I would leave you; that you were left out of something important. It is not… stupid." Yugi traced a pattern on my shirt with his fingers. "Actually, it is very valid. Not everyone feels that linked minds can't be in love."
For such a smart guy, I was having trouble swimming through that one. I had accepted that Yugi had the spirit of a Pharaoh living inside him, but I had not re-examined all of the events of the past few years to believe the rest of the mumbo-jumbo the dweeb gang had been spouting. There were others who seemed to have a split personality. That psycho Marik, who became so… docile… after forfeiting to Yugi. And Ryou. He seemed so fragile, it hadn't been so surprising that he was mentally unstable as well. And yet, he'd been better so far this year. He'd seemed depressed at the beginning of the school year, but that seemed to subside. If I thought about it, I would have chalked it up to sulking that he had not done better in the tournament. But maybe… "Ryou."
Yugi looked at me in surprise.
"He's not mentally ill, is he? He's… he's like you!"
Yugi recovered a little from his shock. "I didn't know if you'd be able to see it. To believe."
I smirked, "Yes, see what you've done to me. 'The great Seto Kaiba:' gullible and superstitious."
"No," Yugi countered. "Just open, and able to know with your heart, not just your head."
I basked in Yui's smile and considered the conversation. We were talking about love… "Ryou is in love with his Spirit?" Yugi nodded slowly. "He seems so, 'normal' lately… well except Monday, with those questions…" I thought about the dweebs, "Does everyone else know?"
"No, just you and me." He looked at me, as if waiting.
"Like a secret…" Ryou's questions… "like a Thursday secret, Yugi? Is this it?"
Yugi nodded. "So he told you that you could tell me? After grilling me in class?"
He nodded. "Yes, he figured you deserved to know where I went every Thursday. And his Spirit reasoned that you may have eventually seen us together and been jealous."
"Smart guy. But he sounds too… reasonable. Didn't someone say he was trying to take over the world?" Another memory hit me like a punch in the stomach. "Hey, he tried to steal Mokuba's body!" Ugh, did this mean I actually owed that Taylor guy for saving him? I shuddered inwardly.
"Yes. He has gotten much better. Pharaoh's been working with him. I think accepting his hikari's love has helped, too."
"Back to the love, again." I considered what I remembered of the stories I had not believed. "Didn't the spirit put Bakura in the hospital? How could he love him?"
Yugi squirmed a little, then sighed and shrugged. "Let me start at the beginning. I can't say I fully understand, but I'll tell you what I know."
And so he began the eye-opening discussion that eventually included a promise of sex.
XXX
That night I reflected on what Yugi had told me, and the thing that he had asked of me.
When the Pharaoh acquired the other Millennium Items after the Battle City Finals, he used the power of the Puzzle and the Rod to seal the Spirit of the Ring inside so he could not continue to make trouble, or find his way back to Ryou again. The white-haired boy had been through so much, they wanted to protect him from ever having contact with his tormentor again. But Ryou became depressed. One evening, a Thursday, he confessed to Yugi that he missed the Spirit. That he only felt half alive without him. Pharaoh had checked on the Spirit a couple of times, and he was only going crazier alone in his soul room. He refused to speak with the Pharaoh, who he still viewed as the enemy.
Yugi and the Pharaoh discussed it, and decided to try out his reaction to a proposed visit from his hikari. It had gone unexpectedly well. At hearing his hikari's name and desire to see him, the Spirit had gone still and stopped screaming. He agreed to meet twice a week with the Pharaoh if on one of those visits Ryou came for a short while.
"I feel bad for him," Yugi had said. "I don't think he was evil before. He was a thief, a tomb-robber, and maybe even then he aspired to rule the world. But I think thousands of years in the ring turned him crazy, and evil. He was conscious the whole time. Can you imagine?"
"The Pharaoh was not?" I had asked. "How come he is not criminally insane?"
Yugi explained that the Pharaoh had erased his memories before choosing to put his spirit in the puzzle. He may have been conscious, but he was not self-aware until Yugi put the puzzle together. Even then, waking up as a spirit in someone else's body with no memory… Yugi said he had been a little crazy at first. "But I thought I was, too." Yugi had smiled, and rolled his eyes at the memory. The tomb robber, it seemed, had not chosen to be imprisoned in the Ring, nor had he been prepared for it. He blamed the Pharaoh, who, though he does not remember if he had caused the tomb raider's imprisonment, was doing what he could to make up for it. Being able to get angry at, and receive validation from, a real cause for his issues, meant that he no longer directed anger towards his hikari. It was not the boy's fault that the Spirit had no body.
He yearned for that body, to be able to walk, and talk and BE, in the world, but he did not begrudge Ryou his right to BE, also. In time, he began to yearn after the boy's body in a different way.
"It became awkward for Pharaoh," Yugi had explained. "The Spirit is very… predatory. Pharaoh's presence did nothing to hinder him. He was unsure if he should stay, to protect Ryou if necessary, or if giving them privacy would be better. The Spirit had become very protective of Ryou, it seemed unlikely he would hurt him."
So Yugi had asked Ryou what he wanted. Ryou, it seemed, wanted the Spirit. Alone.
"Now the Pharaoh only visits on his own once in awhile, and on Thursdays, he either waits outside the soul room, or with me, out in the physical world. I like that better. It's kinda boring, just watching Ryou in a trance holding the Ring. I can hear what Pharaoh hears, through our mind link, but…" he had blushed deeply "…its better when Pharaoh hangs out with me."
"The Spirit doesn't have a body, though; I don't understand 'where' these meetings are happening."
Yugi had explained: "We meet, physically, Ryou and I, at the storage facility where the items are locked and guarded. Then Ryou sits and holds the Ring, and enters the soul room with his mind. Pharoah joins them, or not, and I guard our bodies and the items. The thief and the Pharaoh are not physically anywhere, but in the soul room they take on a physical appearance. They can touch and pick up things, but the things aren't really real either."
"But Ryou has a mind-body, or whatever, there also, so they can touch each other?" I had dropped my voice to whisper, "Are they having sex?"
Yugi had squirmed. "Not exactly." I had watched him fighting his embarrassment before he spoke again. "See, your appearance in the soul room is a little how you see yourself, and a little idealized sometimes, as well. I don't know what the tomb-raider looked like in ancient Egypt, but in his mind, the Pharaoh says he looks like Ryou, except taller, more muscular, and older. That's how he sees himself. But we are limited by our experiences as well. If Bakura wanted to have pink hair, but had never seen the color pink, then he couldn't. Make sense?"
I had nodded, and waited for him to continue. "So when I pick up a book in my soul room, I'm not really feeling the book. I'm having the memory of what it feels like to pick up a book—"
"Oh!" I had cut in, remembering the question that had initiated the explanation. "They can't have sex because Ryou has no memory of it. He's a virgin."
Yugi had sighed, gratified that he hadn't had to say it. "Yes."
"What are they going to do?" It occurred to me that I was being far more curious than I usually was about other people's lives, but I really found the situation fascinating, now that I believed in that sort of thing.
Yugi had an odd expression on his face. Sort of… clinical (pinched?). "Well, the Spirit has been pressuring Ryou to have sex with someone, which he doesn't want to do. And he's been pressuring me to be the one, which I refuse." Yugi had continued speaking quickly, as if I might not have noticed. "And he is pressuring the Pharaoh to let him merge control of Ryou's body so he can, uh… I don't really want to finish this sentence."
I had considered making him finish, I loved to see him blush, but I was too caught up in the sentence before. "He wants you… to…"
"It's crazy, I know. Even if I didn't feel so strongly about my own sexuality, I'm nothing like the Spirit, and I'm not experienced."
I was strangely not jealous about this, just a bit in shock. I trusted Yugi. "He's thinking the Pharaoh would help with that." He looked up in surprise. "He's seen you duel, he knows what you are capable of, together."
"Even so, the Pharaoh has no memory, and I have no experience." He stared at the wall thoughtfully. "No, if someone was going to do it, it'd have to be someone more dominant and more experienced. Someone…" He turned and looked at me, eyes wide. "Someone like you!"
XXX
A/N –
Well, betcha some of you are a bit mad, but I promise I will try really really hard to update soon. I figured a cliffhanger is better than no update, and the next part just isn't, well, written. I keep telling it to get busy while I'm at work, but I get home and nothing has been done… You would think the cats would help, but no…
Review Responses:
Yana – ah, I am glad he is back in your good graces, he really tries…
Dimitri – Your review made me hum and my toes dance, thanks! And the chocolate, well, it hit the spot, too. And don't worry, Yugi was depressed, just not... (it would help if you could read my mind here, 'cause I'm not coming up with the word to express what I mean.) And I think that Seto would know what he needs to do to get what he wants. Even apologize. Say, hope all is well, I've been missing the usual frequency of your updates…
DH Twilight – Welcome! Here is another chapter for your reading pleasure!
Clarity – Glad to be of service. Hope you like the new chappie. Feel free to ask any more questions, I don't mind.
Aku – Hey, thanks for the sweet review. I much appreciate. I look forward to reading anything else you may write, and while story abandonment makes me a little sad, it happens. You could try some creative writing exercises to get past whatever stops you from continuing. I have a couple I find helpful sometimes… Well, I hope you liked Lucky 13!
