.:.Hellfire.:.

Summary: Yami no Malik and Yami no Bakura have been sent to Hell. And they're about to drag their hikaris down with them.

Chapter 7: Ukemi, Soul Walker


Once Bakura and the others were gone, Yami had retreated to his soul room, seething. They had answered precious few of the many questions he had, and the few they had answered, they had done so by being infuriating!

He was startled when the door creaked open and revealed, not his hikari, but an intruder, a little being with black hair to his knees drawn back in a ponytail, red eyes decorated with little gold jewels, wearing what looked like a primary school uniform and clutching a plushie with burgundy hair and a black cloak swathing its little stuffed form.

"Well, an intruder. What are you doing here?"

"I just came to find you!" the little one chirped.

Yami scowled. He didn't want anyone invading his soul room again. Innocent-sounding or not, the creature would have to be punished.

"Then you'll have to play a game with me." he snapped. "Find me in the true soul room... if you can."

The kid took in the winding, twisted maze of doors, hallways, and staircases that was Yami's soul room.

"Like hide-and-seek?" he asked eagerly.

"Yes, fine," Yami said crossly. What was the thing trying to pull? Invading souls took a lot of audacity, but to further it by acting innocent? Really. He faded out.


Ukemi blinked as the teen disappeared. This place was not at all like his father's soul- an inner Zangan curled in a fetal position in a void of utter darkness, no boundaries, no light except that which seemed to pool around figures.

And the inner Zangan, or "Daddy inside Daddy," as Ukemi put it, was not a happy (or coherent) person. This one played games!

Happily Ukemi walked over to the closest door and pulled it open. A whistling noise alerted him and he manifested an instant high-intensity flame. The falling cylindrical block was engulfed and twisted out of shape, melting to its earliest form- molten rock.

He blinked at the twisted shape spreading across the floor.

"Oops." he said guiltily. "I hope that's not too hard to clean up."

The next door he tried resulted in spikes being thrown at him (which, like wise, resulted in a startled spike in his body temperature, which resulted in the spikes' melting). Ukemi stared at the molten metal seeping into the cracks in the floor.

"I know that's going to be hard to clean up."

And so went Ukemi Kazan's immortal trek across Yami's soul room. Eventually he even stopped wincing when he decimated some clever contraption into primordial ooze.

"Boy, he sure picked a dangerous place to play hide-and-seek." he commented to himself as h pulled his tiny body out of the pit that had opened up under his feet. "I hope he's okay."

Three doors later, Ukemi found himself back where he had started.

"Oops." he muttered. "Guess I'm not doing very well." He looked over at the puddle of hard iron coating the floor that marked where the last door he had tried had attempted to turn him into a pancake. Thinking of that, Ukemi wondered how Daddy was doing. He knew the tall alien creature didn't bother to eat if he wasn't there. How long had he been playin gthis game? No more than three hours, he thought.

Ah well. Best get looking again.


Yuugi wondered where Yami had gone after Bakura and Mariku had finished telling him what was going on. He wanted to talk to his aibou about it, but... his aibou was not forthcoming.

It took him three hours to get frustrated enough to check, which in retrospect wasn't actually that much. But after the worrying news they'd had and not a peep out of Yami, Yugi decided to go look for him.

Looking inside himself, he found the door to Yami's soul room and opened it. He didn't expect what he found.

Which was kind of an understatement, considering that what he found was a small child that looked suspiciously like– Yes, it was that Ukemi kid that had accompanied Ryou, Malik, Mariku, and Bakura.

The child looked up at him with eyes that were unnervingly innocent for all that they were bright red and shadowed by a chin-length curtain of black bangs. A black diamond jewel in his forehead and little gold ones lining his eyes glinted in the cold half-light that illuminated Yami's tomb of a soul room.

"Oh, hello!" the child said, scrabbling to his feet.

"What are you doing in here?" Yuugi asked, too flabbergasted to be polite. Ukemi didn't seem fazed by it at all, though.

"I'm playing a game!" he announced cheerfully. "I'm playing hide-and-seek with , umn, that other person who looks a lot like you!"

"Yami." Yuugi supplied flatly. What was Yami thinking, starting a Shadow Game with a little kid? One who obviously had no idea what was going on? Frazzled nerves only excused so much.

"Right, Yami-san. I'm Ukemi! I'm sorry, I don't think I know your name."

"Oh! Um, I'm Yuugi." he answered. For a four year old, the kid sure talked very well.

"Yuugi-san! Will you help me find Yami-san?"

"Sure!" Yuugi agreed. The kid's optimism was catching, though he knew interrupting a Shadow Game was a potentially life threatening activity.

"Yay! Because I keep destroying things when I try to open a door, and I'm afraid it will be really hard to replace..."

Yuugi eyed the metal coating that the floor nearby seemed to have acquired, then the doorless entryway Ukemi was standing in front of.

"How the heck did you do that?" he asked, amazed.

Ukemi shrugged. "I'm sorry. I freaked out a little."

'A little' was an understatement. Yuugi reminded himself not to get on the bad side of this kid.

"Come on." he said, leading the way up a staircase. "How long have you been playing?"

"I don't know- a couple hours?"

"Why didn't you just leave?"

Shocked red eyes blinked at him.

"I couldn't do that! Then Yami-san might wait forever for me to find him!"

So the kid didn't even know he couldn't leave? Yami was so getting told off for this.

Coming to the first door in a while, Yuugi opened it cautiously. Not cautiously enough. A pillar slammed out of the doorway, intent on crushing him to the other side of the hallway–

A wave of blistering, devastating, skin-popping heat raced past him, and the pillar melted into a white-hot blob of lava, which pulled back into the room Ukemi closed the door and looked ruefully at the lava seeping out from beneath it and morphing the bottom of the door.

"I'm sorry. I overreacted." Ukemi said sorrowfully, touching the pink marks on Yuugi's cheek. He jerked away from the small boy's touch, which, while not searing, was certainly uncomfortably warm against the heat-scarred skin. He laughed nervously.

"No, that's okay. If you hadn't done anything, I'd have been wall pancake."

"More like waffle." Ukemi said gravely, finger tracing the grooves in the gray bricks. Yuugi made a face.

"Yami!" he called, voice ringing through the empty corridors and twists and turns of the maze. When there was no response he called again. "Yami! Where are you!"

Yami faded through the wall next to him.

"Yuugi! You can't be in here, I'm dealing with an. . . intruder. Aibou, what is that thing doing with you?" The slightly taller teen folded his arms and managed to look regal while still directing a childlike glare at Ukemi.

"Yami. Ukemi-kun doesn't even know what a Shadow Game is. He didn't know that he wasn't allowed to leave here, because he was too worried about you to even try leaving, he saved me–!"

Yami was quailing before his hikari's righteous anger. Okay, so Yuugi was more annoyed than angry, but maybe it would be a good thing if the King of Games learned to judge his opponents better.

"What, did you expect me to let him off easy because he looked innocent? If I did that then we'd be surrounded by pretenders! What's to prove that he really is innocent?"

"And he really was sorry just because I got banged around a little while he saved my life, and–"

"Please! Please don't fight." Ukemi came in between them, pulling agitatedly at a strand of his black hair. "None of that matters. I don't really matter. I just exist to make sure Daddy doesn't kill himself."

Yami and Yuugi broke off their stances simultaneously to stare at the little apparition before them.

"You... say what?" Yuugi managed.

"The Daddy inside Daddy is not a happy person. The place where I find him isn't all pretty like this either."

This time it was Yami's turn to croak, "What? My soul room is not what you'd call pretty."

Innocent, sparkling eyes gazed up at them.

"Yes it is! Daddy inside Daddy lives in this dark place, just black, except, where we are you can see us. This is light, and pretty and amazing and huge and not as cold as where Daddy inside Daddy lives."

There was only one thing to say for it: Oh Ra, this kid had problems.

"So... " Yami switched tacts. "How did you get in here in the first place?"

"You disappeared and looked really unhappy so I followed you so you wouldn't start saying, 'I want to die,' like Daddy inside Daddy!"

All of this was said with such bright and childlike cheerfulness that Yuugi almost wanted to cry. God, the kid didn't even know how bad he had it.

"Well, Yami's not going to kill himself." he said with a tremulous laugh. "Or, at least, he better not."

Yami smirked at him.

"With fear of your wrath? Do I look stupid?"

Yuugi decided to refrain from the comment,

"Some people think so."


So. I have no idea where my post schedule has gone, and whether this was due last Wednesday or the next. XD So I'm just posting it.

This was originally going to be an extra, bonus chapter, but it seems to have become a plot point in the story... Heh, heh.