Chapter 31: Home Invasion
Yuugi might have screamed. If he did, no one heard it, so there were no witnesses to his shriek which may or may not have been pre-pubescent in pitch.
As the massive stag beetle ripped the game shop door from its hinges, the bells jingled to match the sound of shattering glass. The doorframe remained stuck on its left pincer (which was as big as Yuugi's entire body), and it reared back, scraping the metal frame across the pavement until it finally came free.
In the meantime, someone familiar ducked through the empty doorway, stepping his high-end sneakers gingerly around the glass shards, leering past his beetle-rimmed glasses.
Haga. The first opponent Yuugi—well, Yami—had eliminated at Duelist Kingdom.
A teal crystal hung from a black cord around his neck, glowing brightly green against his shirt. Sparks of the same green reflected in his eyes as he advanced on Yuugi's grandpa, hunched behind the register.
"Where's Yuugi, old man?" Haga gave a nasally cackle.
Yuugi's mouth went dry.
"Not back from the tournament yet. Irresponsible Yuugi. I guess I'll bulldoze his home to teach him a lesson!"
Haga swept a hand out, and the stag beetle charged forward, ramming its pincers like elephant tusks into the side of the game shop, piercing straight through the wall and sending game boxes crashing to the floor, spilling their innards like marbles across the hardwood.
"Stop it!" Yuugi shouted, hugging himself.
But of course—
—Haga couldn't hear.
The beetle retreated and charged again, knocking bigger holes, spilling Duel Monsters cards into the air.
Haga cackled again, hysterically drunk on whatever green power glowed in his eyes. "Where's your shelf of insect cards, old man? I'll add to my army!"
Yuugi rushed to his grandpa's side, tried to help the man stand, but he was useless, useless, useless. Grandpa slapped at his heart, trying to catch his breath. He might be having a heart attack, and Yuugi couldn't even pick up a phone.
/Yami!/ he cried. A stupid instinct. Ever since solving the puzzle, he'd always turned to Yami for help.
But only silence answered now.
Haga advanced again, kicking a few red game pieces carelessly from his path. Yuugi stood, placing himself as a barrier no more effective than a puff of air. He threw his arms out, willed his hands to stop Haga in place. They didn't. Haga passed right through his palms, not even a shiver to show he'd felt anything.
Grandpa struggled to his feet, still clutching his chest. He hobbled toward the phone, but Haga ripped the entire receiver off the wall and tossed it over his shoulder.
"No warning him now." He smiled with teeth tinted green in the crystal's light. "I want Yuugi to be oh, so surprised."
Behind him, the stag beetle brought an entire section of the wall crashing down. The ceiling groaned.
"What do . . . you want?" Grandpa huffed, eyes wide with a fear that twisted Yuugi's heart.
Haga gripped the crystal, its sickly glow bursting like sunbeams between his fingers. "I want Yuugi to suffer."
If only he knew Ra had beaten him to it. Even if Haga had wanted to kill him, Ra had beaten him to it.
Ra—Yuugi turned his gaze to the ceiling, shouted desperately, "Do something! Save my grandpa!"
But once again.
Silence.
Grandpa straightened with effort. "Get out of my shop."
But Haga only cackled. The giant beetle reared this way and that, smashing its pincers into what was left of the doorframe, into the shelves, scattering plaster and fragmented game boards with every swing. It punctured the wall that divided the shop and kitchen, and on the far side, Yuugi heard the shattering of dishes.
"Come to think of it . . ." Haga's smile turned cold. "You're the only family he has, aren't you? He wouldn't stop yammering about it at Duelist Kingdom."
"Haga, don't," Yuugi said.
"Boy, I bet he'd suffer . . . if I killed you."
"Haga, please!" Yuugi tried to grab him, but there was only air.
Though he still struggled for breath, Grandpa seemed to have lost his fear. He gripped the counter for support and remained standing. "You're younger than Yuugi."
"Shut up," Haga snarled. He dropped the crystal. It bounced slightly against his shirt.
"Fourteen, aren't you? The youngest national champion Japan's ever had—younger than Kaiba when he had the title." At Haga's slack jaw, Grandpa's lips twitched. "Yes, I keep up with broadcasts. You're a talented boy, Haga. Perhaps you can stop wrecking my home, and we can have a civil conversation."
For a moment, the green light in Haga's eyes flickered. The crystal dimmed. The beetle wavered, twitching its left pincer just shy of the battered wall. Yuugi barely dared to breathe.
"I broke records," Haga said quietly. Then his face set in a scowl. "But Yuugi humiliated me. He trained Wheeler to humiliate me."
"Losing is part of the game, son."
"Then it's time for Yuugi to lose!" The crystal flared with light, brighter than ever.
"So because you lost a few card games, my grandson should lose his home and family?"
The beetle slammed into the wall with more force than ever. The house trembled, and the ceiling gave another loud groan. Haga smirked. "If the punishment isn't worse than the crime, how will he learn not to cross me again?"
Yuugi glanced once more at the ceiling, but he didn't speak. The god wouldn't answer no matter how he pleaded. He would stand back and let Yuugi's entire life cave in, let it all collapse to rubble. Yuugi would still be standing even if his upstairs bedroom collapsed right through him, and since nothing could hurt him, there was no incentive for Ra to intervene. No motivating factor until Yuugi was the one who caved. If he did, maybe he could bargain for whatever he wanted.
But Yori would die.
Grandpa's knuckles whitened against the counter. "Where did you get that crystal?"
Haga swirled the black cord around his finger. "I was chosen by a god."
Yuugi's eyes widened. Had Ra orchestrated it all?
How far would he go to force Yuugi's hand?
"It's driving you mad, son."
"You're just jealous." Haga's expression hardened, and he snatched a Duel Monsters card from the floor by his sneaker. "Yuugi's not the one on top anymore. Now I've got power he can't dream of! And I'll crush everything he loves!"
He slapped the card to his chest, covering the crystal, and immediately, a green light took form on the face of it. Green lines spread, crossed, branched, until the shape of a unicursal hexagram burned from the illustration. Then Haga hurled the card forward, and it vanished—
—replaced by a screeching, purple-armored centipede the size of Yuugi's leg.
Yuugi acted on instinct, dashing in front of his grandpa. It was useless, but he had to.
And then he cried out in pain as the insect sank its pincer-like front legs into his chest.
Grandpa and Haga both stared.
Yuugi stared.
The centipede screeched once more and yanked away. Yuugi gasped, clutching his chest as blood stained his shirt. The insect retreated to Haga, curling behind his legs.
"What . . . ?" Yuugi stared at his hand, at the blood. He was dead. Wasn't he? Invisible.
A faint outline took shape against his shirt, the outline of the Millennium Puzzle. The barest gold shimmers to suggest at the item Yami wore miles and miles away. In his mind, faint shadows whispered.
"Grandpa—" Yuugi turned. Just as he did, his grandpa swung a broom like a baseball bat. It passed through Yuugi without effort, caught Haga in the face, and sent the invader crashing head-first into a set of shelves. The centipede shrieked. The beetle opened its thunderous wings, buzzing like ten beehives. But neither moved.
Grandpa hurried into the entertainment room, fumbling with the seldom-used side door. He exited the game shop before Haga was able to raise himself to his knees.
What had they seen? Yuugi wondered. Had the centipede just hung in midair, writhing against nothing? He groaned, doubling over. Blood still seeped against his fingers, and all evidence of the puzzle was gone.
"What am I?" he shouted at the ceiling. Dead didn't seem to be the explanation. Something was wrong—either with Haga's monster or him, either with Haga's magic or his. But something was wrong.
Haga panted for breath, stumbling to his feet. He stuck a hand out, and the centipede vanished, flying to his palm as its respective monster card, which he then hurled angrily at the register. He stormed from the wreckage, and as he did so, the beetle buzzed along behind.
But Yuugi stared at his chest, because even while he watched, the wounds were closing.
Invulnerability—a given for death, but one that he'd assumed meant he couldn't get hurt. Instead, it seemed to mean he couldn't stay hurt.
"This is a twisted game we're playing," he said to Ra.
/You may forfeit at any time,/ came the response, unexpected and sharp.
Yuugi felt sick to his stomach. But he said, "I play every game to the end."
"Think of it as a game," Shada said. "It may help."
Yori clenched her jaw. "I'd rather not." Turning everything into a game was Haku's specialty. She breathed deeply, exhaled slowly through her mouth, and said, "For me, it'll be a fight."
She touched her pocket; her switchblade wasn't there. It might appear if she willed it, but it would be fake, so she flexed her empty hands, pressed her palms against the yellow stone wall of Shada's roof, and stared out at the clear sky.
"Are you prepared?" Shada asked.
Yori nodded. "I'm always ready for a fight."
Shada's frown told her what she already knew; false bravado was part of her problem. But it was no simple matter to tell herself to drop all the defenses she'd held for years. No simple matter to say, "Change who you are, Yori."
Even if it was change or die.
The priest rested a hand on her shoulder, and she barely had a moment to glance at it before he and the world around her melted away. Everything around her was black, but she stood in a circle of light, a spotlight on a night stage. The duel with Marik came to mind—perhaps she was going to be trapped reliving it over and over until she learned to be fearless for real.
Instead, gentle snowflakes drifted in the dark. She reached out to catch one on her palm, and the darkness melted away to her earliest memory, standing on the doorstep of an orphanage in Wakkanai. She was a child again, shivering in the cold.
"Who are you?" the headmistress barked, warm light bleeding from the entryway behind her.
Something surged in the back of Yori's mind, like a tide coming in to drag at her legs, to loosen her footing. Had the fear always been so cold?
But this fear was easy to face. That cold October day, she'd had no idea who she was, had only an empty mind with which to answer demanding questions. Now she was a hundred things, an identity built over years of living.
"Yori Yoshida," she said with a crooked grin. "Fighter, pickpocket, con artist—in short, whoever I have to be to survive."
The headmistress squinted at her, and Shada's voice echoed in her mind: /Now you know what it is to be fearless. A fear once carried, now looked in the eye with confidence./
As soon as he said it, she felt the warmth. The tide that had dragged at her knees so many years ago barely brushed at her toes, no longer any threat to her solid stance.
/Every lesson should be said aloud,/ he went on. /Say it./
"What?" She shrugged. "I was afraid of . . . not knowing . . ." She waited for him to prompt her, feeling ever more ridiculous. "Can we just move on to the next memory or whatever?"
/If a lesson cannot be explained, it was never truly learned./
"I think life is a little more complicated than that."
The silence echoed back with all of the quiet patience of a man 3,000-years dead. Stubborn as they both were, Yori still had a feeling he could outlast her.
"Fine. I was afraid that having no name or family made me no one, made me meaningless. I was afraid if I'd forgotten my past, maybe I'd never remember anything—that I could make memories until I was thirty and not remember a single one. I was afraid I would never know who I was."
/Good. What do you know now?/
"I know who I am."
She thought of facing Shadi at the museum. He'd told her she had a past life, and though the fearful tide had washed in at that moment, it had barely swirled at her ankles, because regardless of past lives or forgotten memories, she still knew who she was. It didn't change with Shadi's revelation of an ancient life, and it didn't change with Grandpa's journal of her modern childhood, although she was grateful for both.
"Who I am," she said, "doesn't have much to do with family or names or memories at all. It just has to do with me."
/This is truth,/ said Shada.
Around her, the snow flurried away, and the scene changed to the day she'd gone home with her first foster family.
"Yori, is it?" the mom said. "I hope you'll be happy with us for a while."
Yori realized suddenly she couldn't even remember the woman's name. Or the man's, for that matter. There had been two other children in the house—the couple's own son and another foster girl. The other girl had been waiting for a court ruling to put her back with her father. She knew where she was going. Yori sat on the couch silently while a caseworker talked about "hopeful upcoming permanence," but she knew the truth; there was no one waiting to have her back, and her odds of adoption were slim. As the headmistress had told her, she was too old, too troublesome.
As she looked ahead at a future of being passed from house to house like a hot potato—switching schools, switching towns, switching families, switching rooms—the fear washed in, cold and powerful.
By the time she was put in a second family's care, she'd already made her decision. And when she committed to run, she did it with full purpose, with no intention of looking back. She planned ahead, investigated the bus and train routes, stole the cash and her foster mother's blonde hair dye (a misdirect to make them think she would stand out more in a crowd). Then, in the middle of a black night, she climbed out the window and didn't stop running until she reached the Tokyo lights, almost a thousand miles from the home that had never been a home.
/What was your fear?/
Yori started, slapping a hand to her heart. Around her, the lights of the Shibuya district glowed in the dark as crowds filtered around her on the sidewalk.
She swallowed. "I was afraid of being powerless, of having no control over my own future. Just stagnantly waiting for some adult to decide I was likable enough or cute enough to add to the family—and who knew if that family wouldn't be a worse nightmare than none at all."
/What do you know now?/
Despite herself, Yori laughed. She glanced at an alleyway, where shadowed forms huddled in muted conversation while an oblivious world passed by. "Now I know being on your own doesn't mean you control your future." She swallowed. "By running away, I almost made it so I didn't have a future at all."
If she wasn't starving or caught stealing, there were always a hundred other worries. In truth, she'd always wanted to go back. Better to have temporary homes with showers and food and school than to live even more temporarily in alleys and truck stops and libraries. But her pride told her if she ever went back, every sacrifice and struggle thus far would be wasted.
So she fought the battle to survive, because she was stupid enough to think it was better than the battle to be loved.
/This is truth./
This is bleak, Yori thought. Still, if this was all it was—cutting her life apart piece by piece to examine how far she'd come—it wasn't so bad.
Just as she had the thought, the people and lights of Shibuya faded.
Only to be replaced by the familiar walls of Haku's apartment.
Note: This chapter was a lot of fun to write. You all know how much I enjoy mind games, haha.