4. Keeping Watch

"Joey!"

Joey groaned and rolled over, swatting at the intruding voice and the hand shaking him that went along with it. "Goway," he groaned.

"Joey, man, wake up."

It was Tristan, Joey recognized vaguely through his fog of sleep and he realized it was probably his turn at standing watch. "I'll give you ten thousand yen to take my watch," he mumbled.

"That's not why you need to wake up," Tristan said. "It's Mai."

Instantly the fog left and Joey sat up, alert and suddenly aware that Mai was no longer beside him. Last thing he remembered when he'd fallen asleep, she had been lying curled up in his arms trying to stay warm.

"What happened? Where'd she go?" he asked, grabbing Tristan by the collar of his coat.

"Chill, dude, she's right there," Tristan pointed. "It's just… she looks like she's having a bad dream or something and I thought it would be better for you to wake her up instead of me."

Joey looked in the direction Tristan indicated to see that Mai had rolled a few feet away from him and was moaning and thrashing in her sleep. Damn! he thought. I promised to be here for her and then I go and sleep through it! Scrambling to her side, he shook her shoulder. "Mai, wake up! It's okay, I'm here." He reached for her face, stroking her cheek. "I'm here, Mai."

As soon as he touched her cheek, her eyes flew open, an almost feral look in them. She sat up, nearly knocking him aside in the process, and took a huge, gasping breath as if she'd been underwater for too long. Even in the dim light from the distant torches, her face looked unnaturally pale.

"Mai!" Joey cried in alarm, but she cut him off with an unearthly scream.

"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

Alarm turned to full-blown panic as he pulled her into his arms. "Mai! It's okay, I'm here, it's okay," he soothed.

She didn't resist, but her teeth started chattering and she began ranting feverishly. "Too much sand… can't… sand… Joey… no… didn't mean to… won't let it…"

She began pounding on his chest with her fist. It was then that he realized she was clinging tightly to something clenched in her fist. He grabbed it and pried her hand open. "What the hell?"

She was clutching the Millennium Ring.

He exchanged looks with Tristan, who was now kneeling on the other side of Mai. Horror and revulsion filled him as he wrenched the gold ring out of her hand. When she'd released it, she collapsed against him, shaking uncontrollably but no longer rambling.

As he held her with his left arm, he pulled back his right, intending to fling the Ring into the lake, when suddenly someone caught him by the wrist.

"No Joey, don't!"

It was Yugi.

"Yugi, it's doing something to her, we have to get rid of it!" he stormed, but Yugi held his wrist in a surprisingly strong grip.

"Joey, we can't! We might need all seven to close the Shadow Realm," Yugi replied desperately. "Give it to me. I'll take it away from her."

"No, we have to get rid of it!" Joey repeated, struggling to wrench his arm from Yugi's grip, but Yugi held firm.

"Joey, let me have it."

Finally Joey stopped struggling and opened his hand. Yugi took the Ring from him and then another voice—Duke, Joey realized—offered to take it and wrap it in a blanket and pack it in one of the backpacks. It was then that Joey realized everyone was awake and gathered around, including Evan, who was trying to push through the rest of them. He saw Téa put her hand on his shoulder and warn him off with a shake of her head.

"Here Duke," Tristan said, fishing something out of his pocket. "Why don't you take the Millennium Eye, too. Just to be safe."

Turning back to Mai, Joey wrapped both arms around her protectively, cradling her and rocking her. She was still shaking and her teeth were chattering as she clung to him, her head buried in his shoulder, but she was starting to visibly relax.

"Mai, I'm so sorry," he whispered, his voice ragged and tears stinging his eyes. "How could I have let you? I should've taken it instead of you. If I'd have known, I never… oh God, Mai, I'm so sorry, I never…"

Someone else pushed past Yugi and knelt down beside him and put a hand on his shoulder. It was Serenity. "Joey, let me see if she's okay," she said softly, her voice soothing.

But Joey couldn't loosen his grip on her. Her teeth were no longer chattering and she'd stopped shaking as he buried his face in her hair and kept rocking her. "I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry…"

"Joey, please let me help."

His sister's voice was so low and calming that he found himself relaxing a little. He opened his arms just enough to let her face come away from his shoulder and Serenity gently brushed her hair away, then held her fingers to Mai's neck. At Serenity's touch, Mai seemed to relax even more.

"Her pulse is really fast and her color isn't good, but she's starting to calm down," Serenity said. Stroking Mai's face lightly, she called Mai's name. "Mai? Can you hear me? Wake up, Mai."

After a few moments, Mai's eyelids fluttered and she opened them. The wild expression was gone, but she looked startled. "Joey!" she called out and tried to sit up, but he held her tightly.

"Shh, I'm here, it's okay," he quieted her.

"I… I tried to stop it, Joey, I swear I tried to stop it," she moaned, tense once more.

"Shh, it's okay," he repeated, "everything's okay."

"I tried to stop it but it was too late. I won't let it take you. I can't let it. It should be me, it's my fault, why can't it take me?"

He realized then that this was not the same nightmare. This wasn't her duel with Marik's Yami side and it wasn't her Shadow Realm vision of being locked in an hourglass. Instead she was reliving their Orichalcos duel. "Mai, look at me," he said, tightening his grip on her. "Look at me. I'm fine, Mai. It's only a dream. I'm right here and it's going to be fine."

She looked at him and finally seemed to really see him. "Joey?" she asked, and he shushed her again, resting his forehead on hers.

"It's okay, Mai, it was only a dream."

She nodded and took a deep breath, relaxing a little. "It wasn't the same dream," she told him softly. "It started out the same, but then it changed and we were…"

"I know," he told her. "It's okay."

"Why was it different?"

"I don't know. You were holding onto the Millennium Ring," he said, sitting back again so he could see her. "I think it was doing something to you."

He looked up from Mai to where Tristan, Serenity, and Yugi knelt across from him. He met Yugi's gaze, his friend's eyes wide and solemn with worry. Not only did it seem like the Ring was real after all, its evil spirit, Bakura's Yami, seemed to be back as well. Or at least something just as sinister.

"The Millennium Ring?" Mai repeated, and he looked back down at her again. Her brow was furrowed in thought. "I… I've been feeling weird all day, ever since I've had it. And you know, I think maybe it seemed to be worse whenever I had my hands in my pockets. Or maybe I'm just imagining it."

"Mai, I'm so sorry, I wouldn't have let you take it if I'd have really thought for a second it was real." His earlier words to Yugi, so flippant and sure, drifted back, haunting him. Mai's had it in her pocket since this afternoon and nothing's jumped out to possess her. He wanted to pound his head against the cave wall for being so stupid. All day she'd been acting odd and he hadn't even put it together.

"None of us thought it was real," Yugi said quietly, pain and his own share of guilt evident in his voice.

"It's okay, I'm okay now," she said, struggling to sit up. Joey released her enough to allow her to sit on her own, but kept his arms around her in a protective embrace. She looked around, finally realizing that she was the center of everyone's attention. Discomfited, she assured them, "Really, I'm fine. You all can go back to sleep."

They started to disperse, though first Serenity gave Mai a final once-over. "Your pulse is normal again and you're not so pale. I think you're okay now."

"Which is exactly what I said," Mai grumbled, but she took Serenity's hand and gave it a grateful squeeze before she left. Yugi gripped Joey's shoulder a moment before he, too, left.

"I'll refigure the watch schedule so both of you can skip it," Tristan said, and Joey realized for the first time that Téa must have won the argument about the women taking a turn. Joey nodded, then Tristan gave him a gentle punch on the shoulder. "You owe me ten thousand yen."

"I'll have my broker wire you," Joey quipped as Tristan walked away.

Last to leave was Evan. "Mai…"

"We're good, you can go now," Joey said brusquely.

He looked at them a moment longer, then finally left them alone. Joey turned his attention back on Mai. "You okay?"

"Yeah, for like the thousandth time, I'm fine."

He stroked her face with the back of his finger. "I'm so sorry, Mai. I let you down again. I said I'd be here for you, but I didn't even realize."

She closed her eyes and leaned against his chest. "You didn't let me down. You're right here, just like you promised."

"Always," he said over the lump in his throat.

"Stay with me," she whispered.

"I'm not going anywhere," he promised. Groping beside him, he found the blanket they'd been sleeping on and bunched it up behind his back as he leaned against the cave wall, Mai settling against him sleepily. He stroked her hair. It was limp and matted from three days without washing and sweat had plastered down the front against her forehead, but he marveled at how soft it felt in his fingers. She gave a contented sigh and murmured something unintelligible.

"What?" he asked softly. When she didn't answer, he asked, "Mai?" but she was already asleep.

Looking down at her, he continued stroking her hair, suddenly overwhelmed by how much she meant to him. Unable to help himself, he kissed her forehead and then softly, so softly that she probably wouldn't have heard it even if she'd have been awake, he whispered, "I love you, Mai."

It was about four in the morning when Duke woke Yugi for his turn at watch. With a wide yawn, Yugi sat up and stretched. "How's Mai? Any more nightmares?"

"Nope. She and Joey are sound asleep and looking very cute cuddled over there by the wall," Duke grinned.

Yugi followed his gaze but couldn't see much in the gloom. Even if he could have seen them, he doubted he could take any pleasure in their closeness after what she had gone through because of the Millennium Ring.

"Okay, I'm hitting the hay," Duke said. "Wake Téa at five for her turn and have her wake everyone at six."

Yugi nodded and Duke stretched out on an empty blanket beside Tristan. Within minutes, he was asleep, leaving Yugi alone, his thoughts drifting back to the Millennium Ring and the effect it had on Mai.

Quietly he crept past his sleeping friends and looked for the backpacks. Evan was sleeping on his, but the other three were piled together near where most of the group was sleeping. One of them was full of food and water and a second had flashlights. In the third he found what he was looking for, a blanket stuffed down into the bottom of the bag.

Pulling it out, he unfolded it until he found the Millennium Ring and the Millennium Eye wrapped inside. In the gloom they looked gray instead of gold. Putting aside the Eye, he picked up the Ring and brushed his fingers across it, feeling it slightly rough and uneven surface, not smooth like modern gold jewelry. The arrows dangling from it were rounded and smooth as if worn from centuries of dirt and soil sanding the edges down. Next he brushed his fingers over the triangle in the middle, feeling the raised surface of the Eye of Horus embossed in its center. As he touched it, he felt an unpleasant tingle, not really like an electrical shock, but more like something being drained from him. Quickly he jerked his fingers away, frowning.

"Do you think it's a good idea to be holding that?"

Yugi looked up, startled, to see Téa standing over him.

"What are you doing up? You still have almost an hour before your shift."

"I couldn't sleep," she shrugged, sitting down cross-legged beside him. "Do you think you should be holding that after what happened with Mai?" she repeated.

Yugi set the Ring back down on the blanket. "Probably not. I'm just trying to see if I can figure out if it's real."

"Don't you think it must be to do what it did?"

Yugi sighed. "I don't know. I guess. But something's not right. The Millennium Ring's original purpose was to determine the power of someone's soul and even transfer it into inanimate objects. That's what Bakura did to us at Duelist Kingdom when he trapped us in our favorite cards, remember?"

"Mm hm."

"That's also how Bakura—the evilspirit, I mean—that's how he used it to possess our Bakura. He put a piece of his soul into the Ring and when Bakura got it from his father, it was able to control him."

"But?"

"Mai wasn't acting possessed. She wasn't acting like the Yami spirit. It gave her nightmares and before that she said she felt 'weird' whenever she put her hands in her pockets, but she was still Mai."

"She said she had a headache when I was talking to her earlier," Téa confirmed. "And Joey said something about her being rude to Kaiba over something those hieroglyphs said about Blue-Eyes. He thought it was strange because Mai's Harpie cards mean so much to her."

Yugi frowned, thinking about that description. "Maybe that does sound like the evil Bakura," he conceded.

"You know what it really sounds like," Téa said, putting her hand on Yugi's arm. "It sounds like how you all were acting during those duels. When you played against Alrik Cronhielm and sacrificed Dark Magician and Kuriboh, you were really snide about it, like they were useless cards."

"Right. Nothing mattered but winning and power," he agreed. His eyes widened. "Are you saying maybe the Millennium Items are what's doing this to us?"

"It makes sense. If they created the Shadow Games and the Shadow Games is what's doing this to you…"

"Joey and I talked about that earlier, actually. These duels aren't like any other Shadow Games we've played, and the effects on us are not like the kind of mind control Marik used the Millennium Rod for."

"And yet, when Mai had her hands in her pocket up against the Millennium Ring, she started acting the same way as you all were acting during those duels," Téa argued.

"But what's the connection? None of us were holding Millennium Items during those duels. And in the three years I had the Puzzle, it never did anything like that to me." He thought about it some more. "The Millennium Items all seemed to exert a sort of conscious power, if that makes sense. Atem came from the Puzzle, Bakura's spirit from the Ring, Marik's Yami side from the Rod."

"What about Pegasus and the Eye?"

Yugi thought about that. "I don't know. I don't think there was a distinct Yami Pegasus, though the Eye did seem to have a dark influence over him, and over its original owner, Master Akunadin, too, come to think of it. I wonder," he mused. Could the effect the Millennium Eye had had on Pegasus and Master Akunadin been the same kind of thing they were experiencing now? Yugi looked at the Millennium Eye lying on the blanket in his lap and picked it up. It gave him the same unpleasant sensation as the Eye of Horus from the Millennium Ring had given him. He dropped it quickly, as if shocked.

"What?" Téa asked, alarmed.

"Nothing. I just… felt weird. The Ring felt the same way."

"Weird how? Real? Not real?"

"Neither. Like… like it was pulling something out of me. Not a good feeling."

"Did dueling feel like that?"

"I…" Yugi stopped, not sure. He forced himself to remember his duel with Rebecca and how it felt inside. "It was kind of like something was missing, like everything good in me had been sucked out and all that was left was anger and this sort of craving, a longing for power."

"What if that's why Weevil sent you the Ring? Maybe he wanted you to duel with it, to create exactly that effect," Téa suggested.

"I had that reaction without it, though. Although… it is getting worse. Maybe as we get more exposure it's affecting us more." He paused, looking at Téa, his eyes widening. "After I'd held the Ring, that's when I couldn't stop after the duel was over. Maybe it is the Millennium Items! Maybe the longer we're around them, the more they effect us."

Téa shuddered. "You know what, Yugi? I say we just toss them in the lake."

"We can't," he replied, shaking his head. "We don't know that we won't need them to seal the Shadow Realm again. We might need all seven."

"So we're just going to carry them around with us?"

"What choice do we have?" He massaged the bridge of his nose, drained from trying to put together all the pieces. "It still is strange. They're not acting the way the Millennium Items act. There's something we're overlooking." He picked up the Ring again. "Something about the way they work."

"I'll bet you'll know when we find the Puzzle," Téa said.

Bitterness washed over him as he felt another weird pull from the Millennium Ring. "Would you quit harping about the Puzzle! Do you think I don't know what's going on?" he snapped.

"Yugi?" Téa cried softly in dismay, putting a hand on his shoulder. He dropped the Ring as if scalded. Pushing at the blanket with both hands, he scrambled out from under it, eyes wide.

"Oh man, you're right! Téa, I'm sorry!" he cried, clasping onto her arm. "That was exactly like what happens in the duels!"

"It's okay," she said quickly. "But can we please put those things away now? Like buried down as deep as we can get them?"

"Yeah," Yugi agreed, "yeah, totally." Gingerly, as if they were scorpions he was afraid might sting him, he crawled back to the blanket and threw the corners of it over both the Ring and the Eye. He then scooped up the blanket, wrapped it tightly, and stuffed it back into the backpack where he'd found it.

"Are you sure we have to carry them around with us?" she asked, eyeing the backpack skeptically.

"Unfortunately, yeah. At least until we figure out why they're doing this and if we need them to stop it. We can take turns carrying that backpack and switch if it starts making any of us get weird."

Téa nodded and he sat down next to her again. "Hey, why don't you go back to sleep. I'll take your watch if you want," he proposed.

"Actually, I was going to suggest the same to you," she said. "I'm up anyway and you could use the rest."

"I don't think I could sleep now," he told her.

"Me neither."

"I guess we both stay up then. We can keep each other company."

She gave him an uncertain look. "Is that okay?"

He sighed, reaching for her hand and covering it with his own. "Téa, I'm sorry about what I said before. I didn't mean to hurt your feelings. I'm just trying to figure out how to balance what I have to do with what I want to do."

"I told you, I get that," she said. "I do actually understand that we have priorities and spending every spare moment making out is not conducive to getting the job done, okay? I just don't want to be sectioned off into only part of your life. I don't want to be just your girlfriend and I don't want to be just a cheerleader on the sidelines, either. I want to be your partner—what?" she asked when he stiffened and jerked his hand away from hers at the word partner.

He sighed, forcing himself to relax. "I'm sorry, it's just… that's what he used to call me. It… it feels wrong coming from someone else."

Slowly, she took his hand back in both of hers and squeezed it. "I understand," she said softly. "My point is, I want to be with you in the things you—no—in the things we have to do. This is our fight, Yugi, not just yours, and I want to be a part of it."

"You are," he insisted.

She nodded, but didn't look convinced. He put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her close to him so that her head rested on his shoulder. "I love you, you know," he told her, resting his head against hers.

"I know."

They sat together, quiet, watching the dark water in the torch-lit gloom, until her head nodded forward off his shoulder. She jerked upright and shook her head.

"I'm sorry, I guess I dozed off."

"That's okay. Why don't you go to sleep?"

"I'd rather stay with you."

"You can stay with me and still go to sleep. I don't mind." He slid sideways so that she could rest her head in his lap instead of on his shoulder. She offered only token protests before curling up beside him, her cheek resting on his thigh.

"Wake me when it's my turn to watch," she told him, then yawned.

"No, you sleep. I'll watch."

"Mmm," she mumbled, already half asleep. "You always do, don't you?"

His brow furrowed in puzzled amusement. "Always do what?"

"Watch over us."

His frown deepened and the amusement drained away as he watched her drift into sleep, her chest rising and falling in a regular rhythm. Troubled, he ran his fingers through her hair, wanting more than anything to be that person for her, the person who made her feel safe, who could watch over her and protect her.

But that had always been Atem who could do that, not him.

Atem, he thought silently, reaching into himself the way he used to when he needed to meet his other self within the soul they shared. Atem… other me… there are times I feel like you never left. And there are times when I feel like you were never really here, that our time together was only a dream. I miss you Atem. I… I don't know if the Millennium Items coming back means you can come back too. I don't know if I could learn how to share again after I just started learning how to be on my own, but if you do come back, there is always a space in my heart for you, even if it makes some things more difficult. Just help me be what she needs, that's all I ask. She means everything to me.

There was, of course, no answer; only the memory of Atem's parting words. There is only one Yugi Mutou in the world.

He looked down at Téa sleeping in his lap. Please let that be enough.