Ryou woke in a cold sweat. The voice of his yami rang throughout his mind, easily drowning the morning crickets.
"… yami?" he asked out loud, catching his breath.
He looked around for a moment, unsure of where he was. He briefly considered the possibility that he had arrived in Egypt again, with someone else in control of his body, but that was impossible.
"I'm… in my bedroom." He drew another breath. "That… that was a… a dream…"
He glanced at the clock. The sun was already up. If he sat pondering it too long, he would be late for school. However, Ryou also thought to himself, it was not as though anyone would notice his tardiness.
"It was just a dream… wasn't it?" he asked himself aloud again. It felt so real. Or was it only real because Ryou desperately wanted it so? "Yami? Was… was that really you? Were you… really calling for me?"
Ryou slowly rose from the bed. His chest ached, in a manner that he had not felt since he first heard his yami's voice resonating from inside his own head. The scars, from where the millennium ring would often bind to his chest, burned with renewed fervor.
"What… what's… going on…" he struggled to straighten up, keeping his hand over his heart. "Is this… some kind of sign?"
He walked into the bathroom, and ran the tap. Staring into the mirror, he couldn't stop seeing his yami's face, gazing back at him with a pained expression. And he could feel the presence of the jackal-headed god behind him.
"I'm… loosing my mind…" Ryou attempted to reason with himself. It had been a couple of weeks since they left Egypt. And so far, he had done a decent job of sticking to his routine. "That's all… I… I shouldn't think about this… I… just have to go on with my life, and… and stop missing him… That's all…"
He splashed his face with cold water, but the illusion in his mind did not dissipate.
"It's all over… Yugi's yami went on to the afterworld…" he whispered aloud again, but that thought only made his dream seem that much more real. Anubis, after all, was one of the gods that governed the dead. And in his dream, his yami was traversing the afterworld. "And it was just a dream…"
The dream, however, could not be shaken so easily. And neither could his yami's last words – 'Hikari. Help me.'
If he even bothered to describe the dream to Yugi or the others, he knew how they would respond – The spirit was only asking for Ryou because his life was in danger. If he were safe, he wouldn't be asking. He would be taking, and using. But Ryou didn't think like that. At least, he hadn't thought like that since Battle City.
Before the morning was over, following instincts he could barely comprehend, Ryou had boarded a plane to Cairo. The only things he carried were a map, a compass, a small green-stoned necklace, and his yami's deck of duel monsters cards.
Only one thought echoed in his mind, as though it too, were decreed by fate.
'Hold on, yami. I'm coming. I'll save you!'