Blood Only Glows in the Dark Chapter 32: 32, a yu-gi-oh fanfic

Yeah, this update is up a lot faster than I thought I was going to write it...

Has this ever happened to anyone else? You sit down, only planning to edit your work and maybe add a little bit more to it...but then that little bit gets bigger and bigger until you realize you're staring at three new chapters?

...Summer is the season of bugs, I guess. Writing bugs!

Disclaimer: I do not own Yugioh (what a surprise)

Claimer: I own all the stuff I invented. (That would be the Dammug Beasts, stone limpets, Crawkers, shape-shifters, Kori-whatever-the-heck-this-was-from-umpteen-chapters-ago, etc, etc...)

It was the smell that woke him.

Not a particularly pleasant odor, either. Granted, it was a better smell than the one in the gargoyle roost, but that meant less than nothing as NO stench could be more foul than that.

This latest stench of this oddly odiferous adventure wasn't something he recognized right away, either. Idly, Yami let himself dangle just below true consciousness as he tried to determine what the smell was - the pain already surfacing in the back of his head an indicator that it might be better to just forget about the whole thing and go back to sleep.

The smell was like a mixture of crude oil and something else, something bitter that settled on the tongue uncomfortably and made his lungs itch. Yami still didn't know what it was exactly, but he had a vague idea now.

It was probably toxic…hmm. Shouldn't he get up? Of course, this stuff might not be fatal for demons such as he was, but if he had been a human, by now he would have been -

Just to his side, something broke into harsh choking coughs. Like they were trying to expel their own lungs or something.

- would have been doing that, finished Yami's thought.

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Wait…

It hurt just as much as Yami had anticipated it to, when he shoved his back off the ground and his mind into full consciousness. Honestly, the way he was being tossed around lately…completely embarrassing.

Whatever gas that was making the smell was heavier than the surrounding air, and things cleared up only two feet or so off the ground. The gas - or smoke, even? - was an eerie-looking thick, blood-red haze that Yami still didn't recognize, even though he was staring right at it. This new room, for its part, would have been completely lightless if not for the haze, which actually gave off an odd pale glow.

Something more important, though, made him start instantly - the source of the coughs.

Specifically, Yugi. And Yugi was sitting not two feet away.

It was easy to tell what happened: They'd both fallen into this poisoned room - thankfully, no one else had - then Yugi had come to first if he'd been knocked out at all, and though the boy had probably gotten to the clear air as fast as possible, Yami had a guilty suspicion that Yugi had spotted him, bent down to see if he was alright…but now Yugi was coughing so hard he hadn't even registered the mage-demon's awakening.

Yami didn't even bother with the usual pleasantries (worried inquires of if the person was alright - a stupid human invention, of course, when the person was plainly hacking his lungs out), just scrambled to his feet and hoisted Yugi to his own. A few deep breaths of the clear air did the trick.

"Well, that was unpleasant," Yugi mumbled, rubbing his sore throat.

"Are you alright?" Yami asked him - hey, he could use human pleasantries if he really wanted to.

Yugi blinked, apparently registering who his rescuer was, and exclaimed, "I should be asking you that! You weren't moving and I was really worried - I thought this stuff just didn't affect me as badly or something!"

"Other way around, it would seem," Yami mused, taking a look around the room.

The way the floor suddenly pitched reminded Yami of the slight head injury he was ignoring - the blinding pain not being enough of a indicator anymore. Yugi picked up on his wincing right away and fairly demanded to know what injury Yami was 'keeping hidden this time!' As if Yami deliberately lied about being injured at all! He just…didn't volunteer such information.

In the spirit of that, instead of telling Yugi a thing, Yami reached towards the back of his head, found where his head had collided with the solid granite floor, which must have been magically hardened to be far more tougher than diamond - the only explanation he could think of for how he'd gotten such an injury at all - and fixed it with an excruciating burst of magic.

This didn't placate Yugi one bit.

"Just because you can fix yourself like that is no reason to keep acting so macho whenever you get injured," the boy berated him.

"Normally I don't receive such a constant string of injuries," Yami retorted, letting some of his irritation work its way into his tone, "Nor am I so frail that you must fuss over me like some sort of helpless creature!"

"You…you completely unbelievable IDIOT!" Yugi snapped.

This went on Yami's fingerbreadth-long list of the times he'd ever been shocked speechless. Especially coming from Yugi - but the boy softened the insult with his next words.

"You're one of my closest friends, Yami - that means I'm allowed to be worried about you! I get to worry about you because believe it or not I care about you! And you may think you're strong enough on your own, but it doesn't matter because friends help each other out all the time no matter which of them is stronger or weaker or whichever!"

Yugi paused for breath, face reddened from unaccustomed yelling. For his part, Yami had zero clue what to say in response to this, and waited in the vague hope that Yugi would say something else, something he could angrily retort to. No matter how desirable this attachment might be, it wasn't safe for him to be so distracted and it was even more unsafe for the fragile mortal to keep such dangerous company as Yami was.

"Besides, like it or not this whole mess is about me," Yugi continued, his voice back under control, "If you and - and everyone else is going to get in trouble to keep me around…I might as well not be…"

'A helpless piece of deadweight?' a snide voice in the back of Yami's mind sneered, completing the boy's sentence. There was a sense of smug superiority with that voice as well: compared to himself, Yugi basically was a helpless piece of deadweight.

Yami slapped those feelings and thoughts away immediately. As long as he was around, no one was going to hurt Yugi, not even by so much as thinking something so cruel of the boy - not even Yami himself. But this wasn't a good time to mention that - was there ever such a time? - so instead of a direct reply Yami merely reached out a hand and tentatively rested it on Yugi's shoulder.

He neither shook the hand off or reacted to its presence, something Yami chose to view as a good sign.

"…We should look for a way out of this place," Yami suggested.

"…Yeah. Okay."