25. Two Halves

An uncomfortable silence settled over Téa and Yugi as soon as Joey left. Téa's guilt over not making it clear to Yugi how much he mattered to her separate from Atem mixed with the fearful realization that she'd just come very close to losing him to a Shadow Game.

Again.

"I'm so glad you're back safe," she finally said, reigning in her tangled emotions as tightly as she could.

He looked embarrassed and ill at ease "Are we… I mean… I know things have been screwed up between us the last few days, but the thing with Mai… you understand why I was… you don't think—"

"That you would betray not only me but your best friend in the world all in one fell swoop? I don't think so." She couldn't help but give him a dry smirk; he almost seemed like the old Yugi. "I mean, at first I… but, no."

He gave a jerky nod of his head. "Okay. Because I wouldn't. Not even…." He looked down, unable to finish.

She bit her lip. "I know."

He looked back up at her again and the discomfort was different now, more Atem's impatient I-don't-want-to-deal-with-this than Yugi's mortified self-consciousness. "And whatever problems we do have, I don't want to add to them with something that isn't real."

She nodded, aching as Yugi—her Yugi—slipped away again, and when he got up and turned to leave, she felt all her fears and guilt and self-loathing spilling out into the one question she needed answered. "Do you love me?"

He stopped short and stood completely motionless, not even looking back at her. "How can you ask that?" His voice thick and gravelly. "Especially now? You know I'm not… I can't…."

She closed her eyes, fighting back tears. "That's exactly why I have to ask now, except… I guess I already know the answer. I did a lot of thinking today, Yugi, and I figured some things out. You were right. I've been so caught up in not having to choose between the two parts of you that I loved, that it never occurred to me that one of those parts doesn't love me. Never has and never will. And—" She looked up at his back. "And the part of you that does love me I don't deserve."

He turned around then, pain deep in his eyes. "What?"

"You were right." The tears spilled over and trickling down her cheeks. "I've been avoiding making a choice because I didn't want to. I love that you're both of you all rolled into one, and I never stopped to think how you felt, how maybe that made you feel like you weren't good enough just being Yugi. Look at my birthday gift to you." She nodded toward the silver cartouche he wore around his neck. "It was supposed to be for Yugi, but it was from his world. I—" She stopped, trying to figure out how to explain herself. "Have you ever read any American comic books?"

He looked startled by her apparent veering off topic. "American comic books?"

"Just… bear with me, okay? I had kind of an epiphany today, and the only way I know how to explain it is to compare it to American superheroes. You know, Spider-Man, Superman? You know the basic stories, right?"

Still looking baffled, he crossed his arms and leaned against the back of one of the chairs. "I guess. Grandpa had some American comics at the store."

"My friend Josh in New York, he was a huge comic book collector, and he once said something like 'I know girls totally don't get comics,' and you know how well something like that would go over with me. So I borrowed a bunch and read them. Superman and Spider-Man mostly. And the whole dual-identity thing really intrigued me, too. It was just the opposite of you—one person trying to be two different people instead of two different people trying to be one." She wiped her eyes, smiling as she remembered the secret thrill she got comparing the comic book tales to her own high school adventures. "I liked Spider-Man a lot. In a lot of ways, he reminds me of you, and I liked to think I was a lot like Mary Jane Watson, always there for him, loving him for Peter Parker, but accepting who he was and what he needed to do. And in the movie, they were even sorta childhood friends."

She sighed. "Then there was Superman, which I didn't like at all, 'cause I couldn't stand Lois Lane. She just made me wanna slap her. But as it turns out, I'm not like Mary Jane at all. I'm really Lois Lane."

His brow furrowed. "Uh… I'm not sure I'm following you."

"The reason I always hated Lois is because of how she treats Clark Kent. In the movies, she keeps blowing off him off 'cause she thinks he's weak and pathetic until all of a sudden she finds out that he's really Superman, and then she decides she loves him. He gives up all his powers for her, and only after that part of him is gone do they both realize that that's the part she really loved. She never ever once made Clark feel important just because he was Clark. It was always about Superman."

The confusion on Yugi's face slowly began to clear, replaced by a troubled expression, but he said nothing, waiting instead for her to continue. There was a bitter taste in her mouth, like bile, and she pressed her lips together, not wanting to go on, but she knew she had to. She shook her head in self-reproach. "I've known you for ten years, Yugi. We weren't as close as we should've been for all those ten years because I never really saw you. I never noticed you, not until he came along, and then I was such a stupid lovesick schoolgirl. My only defense is that I was fifteen and stupid and had stupid fifteen-year-old ideas about romance and what it meant to be a hero. Except… I'm not fifteen anymore and I should know better now. I know what a real hero is now, but I got so caught up in you being both of you that I never let you feel like Yugi was good enough. And just like stupid Lois Lane, it takes losing half of you—again—for me to really get it."

She looked at him, suddenly realizing that she wasn't exactly sure who she was really talking to, and she felt sick again, the tears spilling out once more. "Oh, God, Yugi, I know you don't know which side of you you are, that you don't remember Yugi's memories and you feel like Atem, but please, I need you to be Yugi. What I have to say, I need Yugi to hear, please?" As if he had a choice.

He looked stricken. "That's what I want."

She nodded; it had to be enough. "If you're looking for me to tell you that I only love one side or the other, that when you're dueling or being all cocky and brash and pharaoh-y that I don't love you, that I only love you when you're quiet and reserved, I can't do it. But even so, I did make a choice. I made it in California when the Orichalcos took your soul, and I made it again when you first realized you had Atem's memories and we thought you were him. And I'm making it again now. 'Cause as hard as the Ceremonial Duel was, as hard as it was to say good-bye to Atem, I knew in the end it would be okay. But when you were gone… when Yugi's gone…" She choked. "Nothing is right without Yugi. I just want you back. But I let you think that he mattered more than you did. I let you… oh, God." She sobbed into her hands, unable to continue.

"Téa…."

She tried to even out her breathing, to get to the point where she could speak. It took a moment, but she finally managed to get some control back of her voice. "I am so sorry for ever letting you doubt what you mean to me. Just Yugi, without him. I hate myself for it, I really do. I don't deserve you—Yugi—loving me like you do, like I'm perfect when I've been so unfair to you. And worse, even knowing that doesn't make the problem go away. Whether we want it to be or not, you were right. There are three of us, and that isn't ever going to change, even if— Even when we get Atem back to the spirit world. I can't change the fact that I had a crush on him first, and I can't stop loving you when you're him, even if that's not the part I can't live without, because I can't love only half of you. God help me, Yugi, even now, even when I want Yugi back so much I wanna scream, I still love you, and I don't know if you can live with that. And… half of you will never love me, and I… I don't know if I can live with that. So I'm not really sure where that leaves us."

They were silent for a long time, neither one able to meet the other's eyes. After a long while, Téa got up slowly from her seat. "Well, that was all I wanted to say. I'm sorry, Yugi. I know we've got more important stuff going on, but… I dunno. I wanted you to know how sorry I am." She walked away from him, heading toward her apartment on the west side of the building.

"You're wrong," he said so quietly she almost missed it.

She stopped and turned. He hadn't moved; he was still leaning against the back of the chair looking down at the floor.

"What did you say?"

He still didn't look up at her. "You're wrong. About half of me not loving you. It's not the same, exactly, but… well, you're wrong." And then he turned and walked away toward his apartment without looking back.

Despite his exhaustion from the Dark Game with Mai, Yugi lay awake in bed for a long time, staring at the ceiling, his hands interlocked behind his head. He wasn't sure which troubled him more—what Téa had said to him, or what he'd said to her. The whole thing was a mess, and the more they tried to untangle it, the more tangled it became. It should have been so simple—lifelong friends fall in love and live happily ever after, the end. The story was never meant to include a body-sharing ancient spirit, someone both of them would love and who would love both of them.

But it did include him, and he could no longer pretend it didn't, or that the feelings that made the whole thing so untenable weren't there.

Giving up on even trying to sleep, and wanting to distract himself from thinking about it any longer, he got up out of bed and sat at his desk intending to turn on his computer and play a game. But as he reached down under his desk to turn the hard drive on, his eyes fell on the velvet bag Ishizu had given him for Oshogatsu. Atem's things. My things, he tried not to think, but thought it anyway. He'd left the bag here on the floor beside his desk, unopened, when he'd unpacked after returning from Egypt. He hadn't wanted to open it or take out Atem's things and display them, because he was afraid if he looked at them he'd remember them, and if he could remember Atem's childhood in ancient Egypt…

But now he reached over and opened the bag, removing the jewelry box, the Kohl jar, the pottery and other household items, and the toys that Ishizu had given him. He picked up the little wooden crocodile, examining its moving jaws, trying to envision Atem as a child playing with it, perhaps using it the way a modern-day child would use an action figure to fight imaginary battles, maybe with his friends Mahad and Mana. While he could picture the scene, it didn't feel like a memory, and he wasn't sure whether that brought him comfort or made him sad. He didn't want to remember Atem's childhood, not really, but after fighting for three years to regain those very memories, he didn't want them lost again, either. I want those memories. I just don't want them to belong to me.

He put down the crocodile and picked up the top. It seemed like a simpler toy than the crocodile—just a small sandstone disk painted with a black and white pattern and fitted onto a stick. But its simplicity was deceptive. He spun the top on his desk and the black and white images blended together, flickering like some sort of ancient animation. He couldn't remember Yugi's childhood any more than he could remember Atem's, but he knew a toy like this would've fascinated him. He could see a very young Yugi spending hours watching the top, trying to dissect it in his mind and puzzle out exactly how the spinning made the images seem to move like that.

After watching the top for a few spins, he set that aside as well and opened the jewelry box next, picking up the necklace that Ishizu said had probably been a betrothal gift from Atem's father to his mother. But then he remembered that Téa had admired it, and he found himself thinking about her again as he fingered the beads. Thinking of her through Atem's eyes.

Ever since finding that he was able to somehow remember from both points of view the three years that the two halves of his soul existed together as separate spirits in the same body, he'd made a conscious decision to not consider Téa—or any of his friends, really, but especially Téa—through Atem's eyes. To the Yugi side of him, it felt like prying into something private that was none of his business. To the Atem side, it felt like betrayal to think about the girl his aibou had always loved. Mostly, he just didn't want to know.

But now, with Yugi's memories stripped away, the only way he could see Téa or any of his friends was through Atem's eyes, and the feelings there scared him for more reasons than he cared to admit. So he pushed away the raw emotion, the strategist's mind that was Atem's and the scholar's mind that was Yugi's turning it over and examining it from a distance the way an archaeologist would examine this necklace, analyzing the differences between how his two halves viewed the world and the people they both loved.

Yugi saw the world through a filter that bathed everything in the best possible light. His enemies were merely misguided, strangers were all well-intentioned, and his friends were without flaw of any kind, particularly Joey and Téa, both of whom he idolized as strong, courageous, and unflaggingly loyal.

Atem, on the other hand, took a more cynical view of the world. He was no less devoted to people he counted as friends, but that title was not easily earned. Allies and adversaries alike were regarded with an analytical eye; strengths and weaknesses were noted and filed away for future reference, and flaws were never overlooked, not even in friends as close to him as Joey or Téa. That he'd eventually come to love them both could not be disputed, but that love had been much harder won. It was ironic that from Atem's perspective, the only person who deserved anything close to the reverence Yugi bestowed so freely on others was Yugi himself, and the depth of the love he felt nearly took his breath away, regardless from whose perspective he was seeing it.

Because of what Yugi meant to him, Atem had rather intentionally kept Téa in particular at a distance. Yugi had been hopelessly infatuated with her since long before Atem entered the picture, so Atem had tried to encourage him to be bold and take some initiative, but when Téa developed a crush on Atem instead, Yugi had then turned around and tried to push them together. Atem's devotion to Yugi was too strong for him to do anything other than recoil at the very idea, and so it went, their strange triangle preventing either one of them from ever getting too close to her.

And yet… she was the one who'd been at Atem's side when he'd first learned he was the spirit of an ancient pharaoh. She was the one who'd kept him grounded and from sinking too far into depression when he'd lost the Orichalcos duel and Yugi's soul along with it. She was the one who'd stopped him when he'd gone too far in his duel with Weevil Underwood and there was no Yugi to keep the darkness in check. She had become important to him in a way that was very different than what his other friends meant to him, but it wasn't exactly the same as how Yugi felt about her, either. There wasn't Yugi's passion and adoration, but neither was there the kind of platonic love he had for Joey or any of the others. What he felt for her defied definition or categorization. It just was. And he didn't know what that meant, or how the three of them were supposed to fit together into the puzzle that was their relationship.

He thought of Ishizu's assertion that Atem had formed a rift in their souls by sealing himself into the Millennium Pyramid, fracturing both Pyramid and soul into pieces of a Puzzle that later had to be reassembled. She'd claimed that the Ceremonial Battle had healed the rift, making whole what had once been fractured, but he'd never really felt whole over the last three years. Complete, yes, but that was different than whole. Whole implied something solid, not something that was segmented, and even as he'd learned to assimilate the memories from both his halves, he'd never really felt like they formed something seamless any more than the Puzzle itself was seamless. He could be both of them, Atem and Yugi, but it was like putting on different coats. This came from Atem. That from Yugi. He somehow doubted that would ever change, that he'd ever really feel whole and not divided into parts, and trying to fit Téa into that picture only made things murkier.

So what was the point of the Ceremonial Battle? It was supposed to have set Atem free, and set Yugi free, too, and make them both whole. But it hadn't really done any of that, at least not for Yugi, still living in a sort of limbo where he wasn't really with Atem and wasn't really apart from him, either. It was frustrating from both sides—for Yugi because he couldn't ever seem to really get on with his life, and for Atem because he'd been the one to blame in the first place. He'd told Ishizu that he would never doom the world, implying that he'd sacrifice his other self to save it, and apparently that's exactly what he'd done. He'd sacrificed the one person that mattered most, thousands of years before that person had even been given a life and choice of his own.

With that thought weighing on him, he returned to his bed, taking the necklace, the top, and the crocodile with him and laying them on the nightstand. But it was a long time before he was able to sleep.