2. Isolated
Joey buried his face in Mai's hair, which was slightly damp with sweat, as she curled up against his shoulder, her arms wrapped around him. He let the scent of her wash over him—that particular mix of floral shampoo, exotic perfume, and something indescribable that was uniquely her—and he finally felt like he was home. He breathed it in contentedly and hummed at the back of his throat, enjoying the feeling of being pleasantly sleepy instead of sick and drained.
She looked up at him. "Can I take that to mean you missed me?"
"Mmmm."
"You're not going to sleep on me already, are you? What about all that big talk about keeping me up all night?"
He nuzzled her hair. "Gimme a break here. I've been sick for three days."
"You were awfully energetic a few minutes ago." She stroked his chest, tracing patterns with her fingertip.
"Well, yeah. You have any idea how hot you are?" Fatigue notwithstanding, he was almost starting to get aroused again.
"Of course I do." She was starting to sound sleepy herself as she snuggled against him. "I'm glad you're back, Joey. Things are better when you're here." It crossed his mind to wonder what things were better, but then it was gone as he drifted into sleep.
The next thing he knew, he was being elbowed in the chest. His eyes flew open to see Mai flailing in her sleep, muttering incoherently. Alarmed, he raised himself up on his elbow and reached for her. "Mai, wake—"
"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" Her eyes flying open as she sat up and shoved him away. "I WON'T DO IT!"
Biting down on his panic, Joey grabbed her shoulders firmly and shook her. "Mai! Wake up!"
She thrashed her head violently back and forth, her hair whipping around her and slapping against his face. "No no no no no…"
"MAI!" He gave her one more shake.
With a huge gasp of air as if she had been underwater for too long and was finally surfacing, she abruptly stopped. Her hair fell around her, partially masking her face as her eyes focused and she actually looked at him instead of through him. "Joey?"
"I'm here, Mai, it was just a nightmare." He pulled her into his arms, trying to will his heart to stop racing. "It's okay."
She clung to him, her face buried against his shoulder. "Oh, shit. I thought if you were here it would stop. It always used to stop when you're here."
Joey froze, his heart squeezing in his chest. Pushing her back so he could look at her, he said, "What do you mean 'stop'? Something can only stop if it's already started."
She didn't look at him, just hung her head, her wildly matted hair hanging like a curtain to shield her face.
"Mai? Have you been having nightmares again?" he asked, a little more firmly.
She looked up, pushing her hair back away from her face, then nodded.
"The same one, with the sand?"
"Yes… no, wait." Her brow furrowed. "Tonight was different. Before it would start in the hourglass with the sand, but then it would change into our duel. Only tonight there was no sand. Just the duel."
He didn't need to be told which duel she meant. "And when did all of this start up again?"
"The night you left London."
A string of swear words poured through Joey's mind, but he clenched his teeth against them. "And you were planning on telling me when?"
"I was going to tell you that night when you called, but you had just seen the tombs, and everything sounded so horrible down in Egypt, I didn't want to add to it, and I was hoping they'd just go away on their own. Then when they didn't, I was hoping you being home would stop them. The last time, on the island, just being with you stopped them. That whole 'touchstone' thing."
"Dammit, Mai, I need to know when something like this is going on! Tell me you at least told Serenity so she could… do whatever it is she can do now."
She sighed. "No, I didn't tell her, okay? It's bad enough to have to run to you to scare away the boogieman. I'm really not interested in running to your kid sister!"
He ground his teeth. "She's your friend, Mai, and she has that weird psychic sense with the Shadow Realm and nobody hates that more than I do, but she can help with this stuff. No more isolating yourself, remember?"
"I know!" She was starting to sound testy. "I wasn't purposely not telling you, Joey, but I'm not a child who needs to be coddled, either. And I don't need you to make a bigger deal of it than it is. You only just got back and I just wanted to be with you, not stop and have a chat!"
"A chat?" He gaped at her. "It is a big deal, Mai! And not just because of what it does to you when you have these nightmares, but because of what it means when it happens. Did it ever occur to you that this is connected to what happened to the Pharaoh's tomb?"
"I know, but you were in Egypt, so there wasn't a lot you could do about it, and you all had enough on your plate, okay? I wasn't going to add to that. And I was going to tell you when you came home, but there hasn't really been an opportunity yet. And stop scolding me like a child, Joey Wheeler! I can make these decisions for myself!"
Frustrated, he ran his hand over his hair, pulling it back away from his forehead for a moment before letting it go again. "You scared the shit out of me, Mai, okay? The last time this happened, Evan did this to you with the Orichalcos—" He stopped short, his eyes narrowing in rage as a thought occurred to him. "Valon."
"No," she said firmly, taking hold of his shoulders. "Listen to me, Joey, I don't know why this started up again all of a sudden, but I don't think it was Valon."
"Why not?" he asked darkly.
"Because I tore apart his whole room looking for Orichalcos stones. He didn't have any."
Joey gaped at her again. "You tore— Jesus, Mai, what the hell else was going on in London that you aren't telling me?"
She sighed, exasperated. "I told you, I'm not not telling you. There just hasn't been an opportunity yet because you had bigger fish to fry in Egypt. But here's the deal, okay?" And she told him about how she had immediately suspected Valon after the first dream and had gone to confront him, tearing apart his room and his personal belongings looking for Orichalcos stones.
Joey absorbed everything she said for a moment, then shook his head. "Just because you didn't find anything—"
"It's not just that, Joey. I… I know I'm not always the greatest judge of character or I wouldn't have gotten involved with those morons in the first place, but…." She shrugged. "I don't know, Joey, I thought it was him, I really did. I thought it when Yugi got hurt in the pub, and I thought it when I had the nightmare, but after talking with him, I don't think so anymore. He's no different from me, really; made some really astonishingly stupid choices and now is trying to put the pieces back together."
He thought about this for a moment, remembering his duel with Valon. He'd gotten the same impression, actually. "Okay." He blew his hair out of his eyes with a puff of air. "Okay. But if it isn't Valon, then it's something else, and the timing is too coincidental with the tomb desecrations. It's gotta be connected. We gotta tell the others."
"You don't think Yugi's dealing with enough right now?"
"This is what we do, Mai. You do remember that, don't you?"
"I know!" She put her hands on her hips, peevish again. "I signed up for this whole 'fight the good fight' thing, too, okay? But this isn't exactly easy for me. It's my own personal hell we're talking about."
The irritation drained from him as he remembered that this wasn't just a theoretical discussion. Not moments ago, she was actually having the nightmare and it was affecting her enough that she tossed him around in her sleep. "I'm sorry, Mai," he said quietly. "I hate this, I really do. I'd do anything to stop it."
"You usually do." She leaned her forehead against his. "On the island? They stopped when you were with me."
He closed his eyes. "Touchstones, yeah, I know. But I was right here tonight. Why was it so bad tonight?"
"I don't know."
"Was it this bad every night?" When she didn't answer right away, he leaned back and prompted her. "Mai?"
"It seems to get worse each night."
"Shit." He sucked in a breath, squeezing his eyes in frustration. Then he opened them again and looked at her, cupping her cheek with his hand. "No more. I swear to you, Mai, it stops here. We're gonna find out why this is happening and make sure it never happens again. You don't deserve to keep reliving this over and over, because what happened then is done. You aren't alone anymore, not ever." He leaned over and kissed her, closing his eyes once more as his lips softly met hers, willing every inch of himself into that kiss so that she would know, really know once and for all, that she was not alone.
Téa woke up feeling restless and agitated. Beside her, Sara Drake was sound asleep—when they couldn't agree on who would take the couch, they'd settled on sharing Téa's king-sized bed. Téa looked at the clock and saw it hadn't even been two hours since she went to bed. Stifling a groan, she rolled over, trying to go back to sleep, but after a few minutes she was too twitchy for sleep to come, and if she started tossing and turning, she was going to wake Sara. Deciding some herbal tea might help, she slipped out of bed and headed for her little kitchen. When she got there, she found she was out of anything that didn't have caffeine in it. She thought she remembered a box of Chamomile tea in the common kitchen, so she left her apartment and padded down the hall toward the stairs.
When she got to the landing, she saw a light was still on in the library. Frowning, she ducked her head in to see Yugi sitting at the table hunched over a scroll.
"Yugi?" She stepped inside the library. "You're not gonna stay up all night, are you?"
He looked up, startled to see her. He was wearing reading glasses, which she loved. He looked somewhere between adorable and sexy in them, but she didn't say so because the former would make him scowl and the latter would embarrass him. He took off the glasses. "Oh, I didn't see you there." He sounded tired, his voice a little deeper than she was used to hearing outside of a duel.
She sat down in the chair diagonal to him and reached out to touch his arm. "I know you're anxious to find out how to get him back, Yugi. We all are. But you need to get some sleep."
"Well, I couldn't sleep, so I figured I might as well do something useful." His voice was a little stiff now, and he pulled his arm away. "But you can go back to bed."
She narrowed her eyes at the brush off and leaned back, folding her arms. "Yugi, don't shut everyone out. You can't do this alone."
"I know that; you don't have to keep telling me." He was glaring at her, uncharacteristically peevish. "I just couldn't sleep, so I thought I'd go through some of these scrolls to see what's here. Should I have woken up everyone else and made a party out of it?"
"Don't be stupid. And I'm not talking about just tonight. You haven't slept a wink since we left London, and ever since we saw those tombs, you've been pushing everyone away."
"That's not true." He put his glasses back on and looked down at the scroll of papyrus that was unrolled in front of him.
"Okay, then you've been pushing me away."
She'd expected a denial. A sigh, an apology, an of course I don't want to push you away. Instead, he said nothing. He just kept looking down at the text in front of him.
She let out a breath in frustration. "Okay, so what? Is this like on the island where you were all worried about getting distracted by me? 'Cause I don't think that's really an issue, Yugi. We've been together for seven months now. Well, four months living in the same place anyway. We know how to be in the same room without falling all over each other. And we've been friends longer than we've been a couple. I want to help."
Still, he said nothing.
"Dammit, Yugi, talk to me!"
He looked up at her, taking off his glasses once more and setting them down on top of the text. "What do you want me to say, Téa?"
"I don't know, 'I get that you want to be there for me and I'm not gonna shut you out anymore'?"
"I do get that you want to be there for me, but I need you to just back off, okay?"
She blinked. In all the years she'd known him, she couldn't remember him ever speaking like this to her. To anyone. "What is with you?"
"What's with me? My other self is trapped in the Shadow Realm, Téa, and I don't know how to get him back!"
"What, I've been living under a rock the past five days? Do you think this means nothing to me, Yugi? That my heart isn't breaking, too? Do you think there isn't anything I wouldn't do to bring Atem back?"
His eyes narrowed at this—his game face. "That's exactly the problem, isn't it?"
She glared at him. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"What will you do if we're both here?"
She remembered their conversation on the plane, and it hit her what was bothering him. "Yugi, I told you, that wouldn't change anything. I would never make you choose between him and me, you've got to know that. We'll figure it out, okay?"
"No, it's not okay. And this isn't just about what I choose. You have a choice to make, too. You've managed to avoid making it for a while now, but it can't continue like this. You can't have it both ways, Téa."
Her jaw clenched and her eyes narrowed. "Can't have what both ways?"
"You know exactly what I mean."
"I know what you mean, but I don't understand. You're not completely separate, Yugi! Do you honestly expect me to sort out all the separate parts and say 'I love these, but not those'? Because I can't do it! You're… you! And… and… part of who you are is him, and I can't dissect that out of you and say I don't love that part. That's like giving me a coin and asking me to decide whether I want to spend the heads or the tails side. It's not possible. You either take it all or nothing, and I love it all. I love you."
"I think you love the idea of me. All these contradictory characteristics that don't really fit together, but somehow got brought together anyway. But we're not the same. I—" He closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose, looking very tired. "He made me something different than I was, but I'm not him. I am, to be completely honest, a fairly poor substitute, so I just want to make everything right again, to concentrate on making it all right, but you confuse everything because I… I don't know who to be with you."
She blinked again, this time fighting back tears. "That's not fair! I've never asked you to be anything other than what you are. If you recall, we even had this conversation two and a half years ago after you started having his memories, and I took a step back specifically so you could figure out what it meant for you. And so I could figure out how I felt, too, but mostly for you. For two years, Yugi. And I even told you then that everyone's entitled to an identity crisis when they're eighteen, and you more than most. And I suppose you're entitled to one when you're twenty, too. But you can't keep having the same identity crisis forever. Eventually you have to figure out who you want to be."
He slammed a hand down on the table making her jump. "What do you think I'm trying to do? But I can't do it with you, because you want to have it both ways." He grabbed the silver cartouche she'd given him for his birthday and held it out to her. "It's like this cartouche. The name says Yugi, but a cartouche belongs to the Pharaoh. You want to have both of us and convince yourself it's all only one person so you can avoid making a choice, but you can't avoid it anymore. You have to choose!"
She stared at him, not bothering anymore to try and keep her eyes from overflowing. "I can't do that. I can't love just part of you."
"And I—" He closed his eyes again. "I can't do this. I want it to be good enough just being Yugi."
"Yugi." She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. "How can you say… how can you even think…?" She swiped at her eyes again, more violently this time, hurting and angry all at the same time. "You once told me I help you know who you are. When exactly did that change?"
"When I figured out that when you say you love me, I don't actually know who you mean."
"And that's somehow my fault?"
He glared at her a moment, his eyes cold and angry. Then he looked down, picked up his glasses and put them back on. "I have work to do," he said through clenched teeth.
"Fine." She stood up so fast, she knocked over her chair. Leaving it where it lay, she turned on her heel and left the library, stopping to look back at him when she reached the door. "Believe me, Yugi, you're more Pharaoh than you know. And that's not always a good thing."
She turned again and left, but not quickly enough to miss the way he looked like she'd just punched him in the gut. She was just petty enough to take a small bit of satisfaction in that—she'd felt like she'd been punched in the gut since she walked into the library.
Somehow, she didn't think Chamomile tea was going to be enough to help her sleep now.