I will admit, I got off track a lot while writing this chapter.

And I know you guys are probably getting really tired of my excuses, but I promise I'm not making them up. I just started at a new job recently, and it's been exhausting for me, since it's a lot more work than I've ever had to do before. And I had finals last week, so I gave myself a long vacation from this chapter.

But I did screw around on the Internet a lot more than I should have. So that's not helping my case.

I know, I know. I'm a horrible human being...

But I got the chapter out, though! I hope you like it!

Disclaimer: I do not own Yu-Gi-Oh. Only Erin.

Chapter 14

"Sagira, you haven't said a word since you got back from your village. Is something wrong?"

I turned to the short, brown-haired girl that was walking next to me. Her green eyes were expectant. "No, I've just been thinking about some things."

She grinned wryly. "This doesn't have anything to do with the rumors you might have heard about Atem's engagement, does it?"

I gasped and feigned surprise. "Mana! Of course not!"

Mana stopped with me and jumped up and down, clapping her hands. "I knew it! I knew there was something going on between you two!"

I shushed her and looked around the courtyard, which was thankfully empty besides us. Not many palace occupants would be out at the hottest time of the day. When I was certain there was no one listening, I allowed myself to give in to my curiosity. "Are the rumors true?" It was a stupid question for me to ask, considering that Mana, Mahad, and I were three of Atem's closest friends, and he wouldn't do something without telling us. But I hadn't seen him for the five days I had been visiting my family in my home village. Maybe he had finally given in to his father's insistence without me there to talk him out of it.

"No." Mana laughed at my terrified expression. "But you should see your face right now! You're really worried that he forgot all about you!"

I couldn't help it. Her laughter was contagious, and the relief I felt at her words made me giddy.

"So, you two really do have something." She said, still grinning.

I didn't know why I was so shocked at Mana's guess. I had figured that either she or Mahad would have found out somehow. Atem and I were sometimes rather stupid about when and where we showed our affection. It was only just a matter of time. They were, after all, our best friends. "Yes. But you have to promise me that you won't tell anyone. You know the rules; I'm not of royal lineage, so I'm not allowed to be with him."

The words were painful coming out of my mouth. That was a topic that Atem and I tended to ignore when we were alone. However, in the light of his father's recent persistence in the matter of his choosing a wife, I knew the inevitable would have to happen eventually.

"Forget about the rules." Mana said, her usually cheery voice turning dark. "I think everyone has the right to choose who they love. Atem's being royal doesn't mean that he doesn't have the freedom of choice."

"But it's his duty to the land." I said, mocking the words that his father often repeated. I had the utmost respect for the current Pharaoh – he was a great man – but sometimes I wished he wouldn't remind his son of his duties quite so much. Atem was only seventeen, and he was already sporting the worry lines of a king when he frowned.

Mana snorted. "Atem's duty to the land is to watch over it. It should have nothing to do with who he chooses to marry."

"Yet it does." I sighed and sat on the edge of the magnificent fountain in the center of the courtyard. "Let's talk about something else. I'm still tired from my journey."

"Of course." Mana took a seat next to me. "Did you know that Mahad's finally going to teach me a summoning spell?"

I was always thankful that Mana could drop subjects so easily. It was why she was the one I went to talk to when I couldn't say something to Atem. He was much too focused to get him to break away from something he felt he needed to know. "Really?" I asked, happy that my friend was about to learn the ways of the Pharaoh's secret court.

"Yes! I'm so excited. I've been asking him for months."

"That's –" My words were cut off by the sound of a horn blaring. They were back already?

Mana grabbed my arm and pulled me to my feet, her excited squeals proving my suspicions were correct. As she lead me to the throne room, the horn continued to blare, one long, distinctive note...

The war horns echoed in my ears. They were all I could hear besides the horrifying sounds of soldiers approaching the temple in which hundreds of people were cowering, praying to the gods that they wouldn't kill us all.

They would if we didn't give them what they wanted. And I was the only one who knew what it was.

"Celeste, we must go!" My sister's voice sounded urgently next to me. "Before they find us."

I shook my head. "They'll kill us faster." I needed to stay. After all, it was me they were looking for.

Frieda wrapped her hands around my arm. "Please, Celeste. They're not here for you, they want the gold. Please, for the love of Juno, we need to get out of here!"

She managed to pull me a bit farther through the crowd before I planted my feet firmly on the marble floor. "No. There is no way to escape."

The doors of the temple were suddenly thrown in, resulting in screams from those around us. Soldiers clad in heavy armor, some on horseback, emerged into the crowd, preventing any of us from escaping.

"You are surrounded!" A booming voice shouted over the panicking hostages. I traced it back to a man astride a black horse, who scanned the crowd with eyes like a hawk's. "Either you turn yourself over to us now, Lost Queen, or you perish in the flames with the innocent!"

Frieda's grip on my arm tightened. I heard her crying, pleading to Jupiter that I wasn't the one he was speaking of. I had no words to say to her to comfort her. I knew my destiny, and I knew my past. There was no way of outrunning it.

I wasn't standing far from the man's panting horse, so he didn't take long to spot me. "Sagira." He purred, his lips turning up into a greedy smirk as his dark, glittering eyes found mine. "We meet again."

My eyes snapped open, and I realized I had been clutching big wads of my comforter in my hands so tightly that my fingers were beginning to hurt. I released the pressure and flexed my hands, wincing against the dull pain of sore joints. I must have been holding onto my blanket like that for a long time.

Soon, my dream hit me in pieces, first the girl I had called Mana, her words slowly sharpening into comprehensible sentences, and then...

Had the last scene been ancient Rome? The temple couldn't possibly have been Egyptian. The architecture and the clothes were all wrong. And the names...what had the girl I had recognized as my sister, Frieda, called me? Celeste. That wasn't Egyptian. At least, it didn't sound like it.

And it was definitely a far cry from Sagira.

Something flashed in my peripheral vision, and I sat up to see the eye of the amulet staring back at me. In the dark, it was menacing. I reached over to the lamp on my bedside table and turned it on.

My alarm clock informed me that it was just past two in the morning. Sighing, I swung my legs over the side of the bed and got to my feet. I needed to do something. Something that would make me forget about the stupid visions, or hallucinations, or whatever they were. They were really eating into my sleeping time.

Though I didn't remember walking over there, I found myself standing in front of my desk, glaring down at the lapis lazuli eye. It returned my gaze with the cold indifference of, well, a nonliving piece of jewelry. I pursed my lips and picked it up, goosebumps spreading across my skin from the cool metal. How and why had Sagira worn this? It was so heavy.

Atem's words echoed in my mind:"The Eye of Horus was a common but powerful symbol if one wanted someone to watch over them."

Right. That was why.

Still, there had to be some record of this. Some kind of historical evidence to back up both what I was seeing and Atem's estimate on the amulet's age.

Wait. Wasn't there a museum in town, one famous for its extensive ancient Egypt exhibit?

Of course! I almost kicked myself for not thinking of it sooner. This whole time, I had been driving past one of my biggest sources of clues every day to get to school, and I had never once paid attention to it. How could I have been so stupid?

I laid the amulet back on my desk and sat on my bed. Well, it looked like I had another thing to add to my checklist of places I needed to go to find out why all of this crazy crap was happening to me.

I had to remind myself to breathe at school the next day. After my dream, it had taken me until morning to wake up (both literally and figuratively) and realize that Mom's test results would be coming in that evening. I prayed she would be clear and we could move on. I couldn't even begin to fathom what we were going to do if she wasn't.

I tried my absolute hardest to pretend everything was fine during fourth hour, when Joey began a mock-argument with Tea over whether or not hot dogs were made of real meat. I only listened to about half of it.

"I'm telling you, Joey, I had to do a report over this last year in Nutrition and Health. They're thoroughly processed. You can't even call it meat after they've done everything they do to it." Tea insisted.

Joey held a hand up, as if to say, "Girl, please." Instead, he said, "When a package tells me one hundred-percent beef, I believe 'em. Ya can't lie about a product. Angry customers would sue."

Tea groaned and put her face in her hands. "When have you ever seen one hundred-percent beef on a package of hot dogs?"

"Everywhere!" Joey said, flinging his arms out to emphasize his words.

I glanced down at my notebook, where I had absentmindedly been making random pen strokes around the words of my notes, which the three of us had partnered up to "study." Mr. Hauss had left the room to get papers from the printer in the teacher's lounge, giving the class free range to do whatever they pleased. Even though he had asked us to work quietly, no one had listened. Joey and Tea's conversation was only one in the ever-growing hum of voices.

"Erin?" Tea snapped me out of my trance, and I looked at her, eyebrows raised. Her blue eyes were worried. "Is everything okay? You're quiet today."

I really wanted to tell them about my mom, but I felt like it was still personal. So I shrugged instead. "Yeah, everything's fine. I just have a lot on my mind."

Tea leaned in closer. "It's not about the..." she trailed off and glanced around the room to make sure no one was listening in, "cult, is it?"

I shook my head and continued sketching useless lines on my paper. "Just some things going on at home. Nothing bad." If you count possible cancer as "nothing bad."

"Well, we're here if you need us." Tea said, watching my pen mark around my narrow, jagged handwriting. "Okay?"

I gave her a fake smile and nodded. "Okay."

The day moved by agonizingly slowly, like a tortoise trying to walk through syrup. Everything happened at half the speed as usual, it seemed, and between the constant "are you sure you're okay?"s and my aching cheek muscles from all of the forced smiles, I was exhausted. By the time I showed up at the Game Shop, it was all I could do not to sway while I stood.

Worry can do that to you.

Atem, alone in the living room, noticed something was off as soon as I walked in. He got up from the couch much more quickly than his doctor would be okay with and met me halfway. Without a word, he took my school bag from me and set it next to the coffee table, then put a ginger hand on my back to lead me to the sofa.

"You look like you're about to collapse." He said, retaking his seat beside me.

"I'm fine." I tried half-heartedly, but knew as soon as the words left my mouth that he didn't believe me. His jaw was tight, and his eyes brimmed with concern. I sighed, closing my eyes. "It's nothing." Again, my words were unconvincing.

"Tell that to your shaking hands." He said, gesturing to my hands, which were in my lap – and, as he had observed, trembling slightly. "What's bothering you? Does it have to do with the cult or the amulet?"

I shook my head. "No, seriously, I'll be alright. Nothing's happened with either of those, and if anything did, I would tell you." Lies.

And if there was anyone I hated lying to more than Miri, it would have to be Atem. Because I knew he knew when I did.

To shift his unbroken attention from me, I asked, "Where is everyone?"

It seemed to work for a moment. "Yugi and Tea are in the kitchen. Joey had to go home and finish some chores, and Tristan walked home with a girl named Miho."

"Huh," I murmured. I remembered Joey teasing Tristan multiple times about some girl Tristan had supposedly been hanging out with a lot recently, but I had never seen her for myself. It was obvious that the brunette liked her, but he refused to admit it to Joey.

"Are you sure you're alright?" Atem asked again. "You don't have to stay here if you don't want to. We can study another time."

I shook my head. "No. No, I'm fine. Besides, I need something to distract me. Please."

He obviously didn't like the way I worded my reason, but he didn't have a chance to inquire further before Tea and Yugi emerged from the kitchen, granola bars and water bottles in hand.

"Hey, Erin. Hungry?" Yugi tossed a granola bar first to me and then to Atem.

"We're gonna have to crack down hard today, especially since we don't have Joey and Tristan here." Tea said, setting the water bottles down on the table. "Plus we need to make up for the lost time yesterday."

I nodded, then got out my textbook and swallowed the worry that was slowly eating away at my mind. That could be fretted over later.

If there was something I had learned about Atem in the last few weeks, it was that there was absolutely nothing you could do to fool him. The guy was persistent, always tuning in to body language and verbal cues. Even when I tried to hide my discomfort, he read me like an open book.

Which either meant that I sucked at acting, or he was just ridiculously observant.

He walked me to the door after our study session, leaving Yugi and Tea upstairs. He hadn't grabbed my bag away from me like last time, but he had insisted on following me, claiming he had to check on something in the shop, anyway.

My favorite thing about the Muto brothers was that they used the same excuses to justify doing something they had been implored not to do.

"So, are you going to tell me why you're acting so strange, or am I going to have to coax it out of you?" He asked at the door.

I slung my bag over my shoulder. "I swear, everything's fine. It's nothing you need to worry about."

"You're sending me mixed messages."

"No I'm not."

He inclined his head, violet eyes boring into mine. "First, you say everything's fine. But then you hint that there really is something wrong, but insist that I shouldn't worry about said something." An eyebrow raised when I didn't respond, seeing the flaw in my assurances. "Look, I don't care how petty it is – if something's worrying you this much, it must matter a great deal to you. I'm just saying that you don't have to suffer alone. Take it from someone who knows: it's not wise to only rely on yourself to solve all of your problems. Sometimes, just knowing that someone else is there with you to see it through can make all the difference. So if you need to talk, remember that you have all of us. You have me."

I clenched my teeth, not knowing what to say to that. What could I say to that? Atem was so freaked out by my behavior this afternoon that he took the time to stop and give me a small speech about how friends could make problems seem smaller. That alone caused something in my chest to feel warm again, after all of the numbness of the day.

After only a few weeks of knowing me, Atem truly cared about me.

It had taken me twice as long just to be trusted enough to hang out with new friends at my old school, but here was this guy I had literally met less than a month ago, going out of his way to make sure I knew how serious he and the others were about being friends with me.

But wait.

That little sentence at the end, after he used us. "You have me."

He had referred to himself. Singularly. Did that mean something more than what he let on?

I realized my mind had been drifting, and I shook my head slightly to get it back on track. Bad Erin. Bad. Do not go there. Atem was watching me, that calm, patient poker face still in place. "Thanks, Atem." I managed to say, still trying to clear my head of all of the questions and strange emotions running through it. "That means a lot to me."

He nodded. "I'm always here to talk, okay?"

I returned his nod with one of my own. "Okay."

A few seconds of silence passed. Then, he raised his eyebrows at me. "So now that that's out of the way, do you have something you want to tell me?"

"Uh..." World War 3 was raging in my mind.

Should I? Could I? He was being so open to me, why couldn't I be open to him? Did it even matter right now?

No. No, it didn't. Until Mom's results came in, it was pointless telling people about it.

But he was standing right there, ready to hear it, even if it was extremely petty and probably in vain. He was waiting. His eyes were so clear, so neutral. He would understand, I knew it.

But, as much as I hated to admit it, I was an introvert when it came to my problems. I wasn't keen on relying on others. I had to do things myself, my way, even if they would destroy me in the end.

So I shook my head, parts of me rolling their eyes at my stubbornness. "Thanks for your concern, but I don't have anything to tell you." At his disappointed look, I added, "But I will tell you when there is something, I promise."

I knew he knew I wasn't being truthful, but I didn't know what else to say. I wasn't good at expressing personal feelings, especially to the guy whose presence did something weird to my brain that made my pulse quicken and my barriers fall

down. I wasn't sure what I thought of Atem yet.

He tried to shrug off his obvious hurt that I wasn't sharing. "Alright. I was just letting you know that we're here."

"Thank you."

"Anytime."

Another moment of silence.

Then, with a slight smile and a goodbye, I turned my eyes away from his still-worried face and left the game shop. The warmth in my chest went away, replaced by something heavier.

I felt despicable.

I knew the worst had happened the second I heard Miri's quiet sobs coming from the living room. My mind went on autopilot. I don't remember dropping my bag; I only know that I found it in the kitchen the next morning, my books spilling out of it.

Mom and Miri were on the couch, caught in a long, tight embrace. Miri's eyes were squeezed shut, tears streaming down her face as she let small, heart-breaking sobs escape her mouth. I couldn't see Mom's face, but by the way her shoulders were shaking, she wasn't in much better shape.

The sight of them broke something in me. "Mom," I croaked. It wasn't a question, nor was it a call for her attention. It was my way of reminding myself that this was real, that they were real, that the horrible pain I was feeling in my chest wasn't just my imagination.

Mom pulled away from Miri, and Miri got up from the couch and stumbled into my arms. She pressed her face into my shoulder, then completely broke down. Her wails were muffled by my shirt, but still found their way into the gaping cavern of my chest and twisted my heart like a wet rag. I looked up at Mom, who had gotten up as well, and held an arm out for her.

I heard somewhere that grief makes minutes stretch into hours in the human subconscious. But some people argue, saying that grief causes one to lose all track of time, and what only feels like minutes could very well be hours. I disagree with the latter. Though we may have only been caught in that trembling, weak-kneed hug for a few minutes, I could have sworn an entire lifetime passed us by. But that didn't matter. All that mattered was that we were together, we were alive, and time wasn't touching us.

Yet.

I know this chapter's a bit on the short side, and so are the scenes, but I promise things are going to pick up in the next one. I had some things that I needed to happen in this one in order for some in the next chapter to happen. So sorry for the hit-and-miss writing. I'm trying to get back in the groove of things.

Was anyone confused by the sudden switch in setting in Erin's visions? More importantly, who was the guy on the horse? Do you feel the plot coming on?

Will Erin finally open up about what's been going on to her friends? How will they react?

And I am dearly sorry level of angst and emotion in the last few scenes. But, hey, I am young. I need to have my fun!

Hopefully it was good enough for a review, at least?

See you next week,

-creativelybored