Hey Lovelies! Two things before you continue: I'd like to amend a note from last chapter. When I said we've 'never met Cobalt directly' I just meant that we have never actually seen Cobalt while Atemu has been hunting (that seemed to confuse a few people so my apologies). Secondly…
IMPORTANT NOTICE: In lieu of the recent FF.n tangle I'd like to let you all know I have an Archive Of Our Own (AO3) account under the username Vanya_Deyja. If anything is removed from my account here it will be on AO3 (I'm backing everything up there slowly but surely and eventually I plan to be updating both accounts simultaneously) and I'm also posting a special one part/two part on AO3 in the not so distant future so stay posted for more on that.
You do not need an account to read, comment or leave kudos on AO3. That special ficlet will be EXCLUSIVE TO AO3 and if you've read my stuff for years you don't want to miss it.
Chapter 7: And Never the Twain Shall Meet…
The elevator opened- clunk swish- onto the cleanest space Atemu had grazed in recent hunts. There was no natural light only luminescence that came from the buzzing fluorescents that ran in clean parallel lines some twenty feet above their heads. The sound off-put Atemu who would rather have possessed mastery of all his senses but Atreyu strayed from the prim elevator into the large laboratory expanse of steel, white flushed concrete, and glass panelling.
"Like Aperture," Atreyu breathed effortlessly as he swayed forward and Atemu caught it as strange.
"Aperture?" He fumbled.
"Don't you play?" Atreyu teased vaguely and Atemu was all the more amused.
"You mean the Game? Portal?" He muttered starkly at the easy expression which the Faen cast over his shoulder.
"Yes, that one," he answered casually to the Reaper's dismayed surprise. "I do live on Earth like you Atemu. Not under a rock."
"I just…"
Atreyu never spoke of Earth. Atemu had only known he resided there based on what Amar had told him and what others had declared. Atreyu never spoke of it himself so openly. Yami stirred and his dream seemed to have compounded to crush against his day to day more intensely.
"Shh," Atreyu hissed softly, raising his index finger to taste the air languidly as the vents rattled curiously. He fell suddenly to whispering, eyes darting, tracing magic Atemu could not make out as he unlooped the whip from his waist in slow steady motions. "Shall we play superheroes for a while?"
"They're coming?" Atemu supposed coming behind him. Unsure how else to respond. Atreyu had been so insistent to remain cool, aloof, with him that anxiety twisted over joy at the Faen's playfulness. It was a Faen quality to be well spirited but Atemu was newly unaccustomed to it. Still, in his heart, he wanted to see this happier side of Atreyu.
"Aye," the Faen whispered poignantly, "they're coming closer. They don't know we're here. If we slip through there-" he gestured to the hydraulic door emblazoned 03 in perfectly aligned black paint strips "-we can take them by surprise."
"After you," he offered spreading his palm before him. Frankly whatever lay before them was more likely to take Atemu by surprise than the reverse.
Atreyu laughed.
It was so quiet, so wind like and fluting Atemu nearly missed it in the whisper. Oh but… Oh Gods… just like Yugi, just the same, he sighed torn but the sound.
"Come." The Faen beckoned temptingly as Atemu was left stinted and stunned.
The way Atreyu twirled in his gait, his light footed stride, would be the death of Atemu. It entrapped Yami's foolish imagination for now Atreyu was like Yugi also and all the darkness of wicked thoughts were setting in over Atemu. He couldn't think like Yami did. He couldn't let himself be weakened by Atreyu when now he needed to be on his highest guard, as Amar had warned him, but wasn't it temptation realized? Jenzar Fraveous had been gone four hundred years… why not Atemu…?
No.
Atreyu might forgive him for his incarnation's ridiculous books, for his stupidity in breaking their secrets, but Atreyu was more furious with him than he comprehended and as beautiful as he was Atreyu was claimed. Atreyu would never, ever, forgive Atemu if he insulted Jenzar Fraveous' absence by trying to supplant the Champion himself. Jenzar Fraveous would never forgive Atemu Pheramora either for that matter should they meet. If the Champion knew Atemu had thought such a thing…Perhaps even Amar would loathe him for the trespass. Even mild Amar would be furious if Atemu had made some gesture after Jenzar's Faen considering the redheads' long friendship with Jenzar. He stuffed the idea back into the Pandora's Box where it had sprung from. Damn Yami would be his ruin.
Atemu followed.
Atreyu waited by one side of the hydraulic lock and Atemu knew well enough to take the other as the Faen ran his fingers skirting over the keypad panel embedded in the wall. The little device flared to life, submitting to Atreyu's magic without ever asking for a passcode as it spread the steel panels open onto a another white concrete corridor.
The whip, the Veil's Needle, lashed unfurling by Atreyu's hip as the Faen darted through the opening down along the opposing end of the corridor out of Atemu's gaze. He twisted, hand grazing the wall, as he came round the bend of the doorway to follow the Faen. He was behind Atreyu, his vision obscured, when he caught sight of what the other had lunged after.
The camouflage green monstrosity had made a cameo in some alien movie or another Atemu was vaguely certain. Yami had seen it before on some late night rerun when he was little he felt. Skeletal, sheened, sharp and minimalistic the creature was insect like yet had the bipedal nature of a human that was as off-putting as the man-like features of its insides. Atreyu lashed back, forward, the Needle contracting electrically on the surface of the beast's… skin? Armour? Its mouth opened, the cry of a bull escaped it, but the interior of its gnawing mouth was fleshy and familiar. The tongue, the teeth, the inner pink of the snouted cheeks were human when everything else of it wasn't.
Atemu found it disgusting.
Atreyu flourished on light feet, under and past it down the corridor just beyond Atemu's view where the Reaper could hear more of the creatures stirring. As he darted the Faen hooked one arm in his belt, tossing some implement back over his shoulder to Atmeu, as he abandoned the Reaper with the first wounded beast.
Atemu caught the implement haplessly between his silly fingers and found it gun like. What? They were playing with weapons here were they? He didn't question it. He assumed Atreyu had some ruse, some means or reason, for leaving him with the weapon and the beast, monstrosity, was lashing snakelike towards Atemu before he had much more time to consider the weapon's appropriateness.
It felt right to run. Atemu could almost sense Atreyu dragging him on. So he lunged with the weapon in his hand at the creature. Fear was there but strangely numbed with a security of trust. He was beginning to understand Atreyu's movements. He had more faith in his astral form to endure whatever happened and movement came effortlessly: run, point, pull the trigger, lunge under the beast, push his weight off his palm and run forward after the Faen.
He didn't check the weapon for ammunition, it seemed unnecessary, bullets weren't real here. More likely the weapon was directing his own magic through Atemu's unconscious imagination into the form of a blast like a bullet ripping through its prey. Atreyu had given him a tool to wordlessly direct his magic, to try something different, and Atemu followed suit as best he could. He was cautious of overthinking it, removing the mystery, and rendering the weapon useless through a sudden jolt of doubt.
He found himself, fluid and bounding after Atreyu as he rattled off shots. He knew well enough to focus his aim, shattering the great domed head of the next beast as he darted past it. It was a pleasure to run. It made it all appear brisk and game like. The creatures had a lag in their senses that although their movements were sharp, thrusting, meant they often moved a moment too slow if Atemu was on his toes and remained in motion.
They were packed though the hallways, in the laboratory offices and testing chambers and Atreyu was all Atemu had to orientate himself. It didn't concern him like it should have. Atreyu might hate him, might loathe him, but the Faen was ruled by justice. He would not abandon or doom Atemu here. Besides, pushing it aside, Atemu found himself having revelling in the instinctiveness of the motion.
Run, skid, shoot, twist, shoot, run…
Atreyu's whip, the Veil's Needle, was striking lightning like ahead as the Faen pivoted on his feet. He was laughing again, flippant, natural and wondrous. Yami rippled at the sound of that laughter; it called to him, and drove Atemu into tighter pursuit of the Faen's light. He wanted to be closer to Atreyu's heat.
Atreyu's feet rattled over a forgotten desk in a leap, the landscape blurred to Atemu as they ran through the rooms, and all hands Atemu hefted himself over and after. His hand caught Atreyu's free palm when his feet hit the floor and the Faen gripped the warm digits in sweet fingers without glancing back. He dragged them on, Atemu surging, Atreyu glowing.
They came back to back, twisting in at their joint hands, fingers lacing as the motion occurred smoothly. It was dancelike, darting, synchronized when Atemu took the next three shots. Atreyu's back warm against his when the Faen jerked his wrist to send the whip ricocheting against his own foes. Atemu cleared their rear in an effective series of taps, video game-esque in its amusement, and not a second later Atreyu's fingers flexed round his and the Atemu knew at once to turn his toes and take flight after the Faen onwards.
They rushed on, and on, for what must've been hours but felt considerably less. Atemu's whole body was in plush synchronization with his mind and with Atreyu's will, his intentions, and the reverberating effect was a rush of his heart that he hadn't experienced since his youth. It felt natural, rippled with rightness, imbued with satisfaction that gave Atemu a security which leapt easily to joy when they came to a skidding halt in the final, massive, test chamber.
Atemu's feet caught in the panelled floor before Atreyu's lighter set and yanking at their joint digits he spun the Faen round and back into his arms effortlessly. He hardly thought of it and it seemed neither did Atreyu the way, flushed, panting and laughing, the Faen threw his arms round Atemu's neck. Atemu's hands moved of their own accord, wrapping up round the fairy's waist, spinning them with the last of the perpetual motion surging through them. Atreyu's feet left the ground, Atemu had dropped the gun and he lost track of Atreyu's Needle.
It was so pristinely unconsidered how the Faen let Atemu sweep him up wordlessly. The Reaper could feel the hum of his own magic rumbling in accord with Atreyu's pulse and he was at once immediately reassured all in the universe could be well.
"Oh Jenz!"
It tumbled out of Atreyu's mouth. Atemu was winded by it, jolted back to himself, where he had spun them to a stop as his heart plummeted down through his legs. His magic and Atreyu's Champion's long absence had fooled them both into getting lost in the dream of it. The Faen had forgotten for a moment, just an instant, that this was Atemu Pheramora and Atreyu had felt for him what Atreyu had always felt for Jenzar Fraveous. Atemu understood.
Atreyu's magic crumbled at the impact of the words. As he said them the Faen seemed to at once realize it was a lie and his energy yanked back from Atemu's where, for a second, their souls had brushed. Likewise, all at once, Atreyu fell back to fight from Atemu's arms in horror.
The Faen stood before Atemu's now empty arms, backing up on his light feet, panting with a force that heaved his beautiful chest as his fingers shook by his thighs. Atemu watched, caught the horror in Atreyu's face, caught the guilt, the sadness, the loathing, the anger all rush over him in a swelling tide that played through the Faen's eyes. Atreyu's fingers came, cupping, over his lips and Atemu could feel the cut of icy guilt as without more than that the Faen evaporated from being to phase out.
The hunt was over, they'd won, and there was nothing else to do. Nothing had ruined the moment but their thoughts. Atemu knew that. He also knew that for a second he had given Atreyu a comfort the Faen had been sorely missing for four hundred years.
It was worse than that though. He had seen how lax Atreyu's likeness to Yugi was. Yugi was much more like the Faen than the reverse. Atreyu was much more complex than Yugi. So it troubled him, worse it troubled Yami, that when Atemu had taken Atreyu into his arms he had thought only of Atreyu rather than Yugi at all. Atemu hadn't seen head or hair of Yugi in his mind's eye when he had held Atreyu just now. Not even a glimmer.
This yo-yoing effect of the guilt was extreme on Yami's part. He felt it more acutely than his dreaming self Atemu. Perhaps because of, as Amar had explained, the factors of the Natural World? Either way Yami was finding it harder and harder to question or conclude where reality and fantasy settled. Worse he was finding it a more irrelevant question by the day.
He had theories, lots of them, after all his dreams tended to reflect his day to day in some Freudian way but that was no longer the case entirely. Yami had passed out at the impulse of a dream, there were the emails, there were the strangers who may have been nothing or monsters of some variety come out to find him. What was worse Yugi, his romance, believed in this type of reality and Yami found it would've been easier to draw conclusions if he didn't.
Lord, if Atreyu was real Yami was torturing him and he had been, at least in mind if not body, untrue to Yugi's very trepidatious but trusting love with his feelings creeping for Atreyu.
It must've been karma, subconscious but reliable, when Yugi wouldn't answer his phone. Yami considered it rightly deserved. Yet, selfish as it was, Yami wanted some kind of pleasure to forget the present. He would have to settle begrudgingly for Tumblr, his Iphone, and the mild day trip out of town.
His publisher wanted him at another convention. He could deal with that but he was finding it difficult to be enthused at the prospect. Poor kids were going to receive a terrible host when he traipsed up on stage like this.
Gods he wanted to hear Yugi's voice.
Such a sporadic thought but he wanted to realign his inner equilibrium with the devotion that gorgeous creature inspire inside him. When Yugi was present he found footing, sanity, gravity and when he was gone Yami was very much at his wits' end these past few days.
What was Yugi's favourite song? He considered in a juvenile tryst through his Iphone racking up the internet. FLAG wasn't it? He mentioned it the first day they met. What did it stand for again? He scrolled the you-tube search bar for suggestions-
Fight Like A Girl! That was it!
He padded the screen with the heel of his thumb and settled back with his headphones. The train ride to the convention and home was cheaper than gas but it left him with nothing else to do but indulge in this attempt at closeness until Yugi answered his texts messages.
The girl in the video had a Mohawk of brilliant feathers, wore a rumpled corset, and the clamshell of her bra reminded him of crumpled leaves. She was a fairy almost, he decided, as the video loaded.
"My heart is a weapon of war. My voice is my weapon of choice…"
That song! Yami blinked. It had come onto Yugi's mp3 that day on the bus to the gardens, where they'd kissed, and it was the only song he'd skipped.
"An eye for an eye, a heart for a heart, a soul for a soul. We fight for the dream. We fight to the death. We fi-ight for control!"
It rattled him with symbolism, double meanings, that he found difficult to write off solely as paranoia.
"There is no such thing as justice. All the best we can hope for is revenge, a hostile take-over, an absolute rebellion till the end! This is our battle cry. I've given you a head start, you're going to need it, cause I fight like a girl!"
He swallowed.
"We are under attack. What is the body count? I've lost track. If nobody's mentioned how this will end then I will be the first: there are more of us then there are of you. So show me your worst!"
Amar played at his mind. His warning that Atreyu's current incarnation would be less stable than the Faen was when he was phased in to the Supernatural side of the Veil.
"It's so easy to kill. This I learnt by watching you. If I have to I will. It's not pretty but it's true. I am through lying still…So who's scary now?"
This didn't sound like something the Yugi he knew, laced with hidden history, would enjoy.
"NO MERCY! It's a bit too late. The game is on: don't run! Don't hide! Don't wait! Cause if we've got no honour then we've got no shame. If it's in self-defence then we will take no blame. This is our battle cry."
Then again, Yugi spoke of a familial mentality and defending that peace. What would Yugi do if he was pushed to it? What did Bakura do to get himself in trouble so frequently?
"So if I end up with blood on my hands, well I know, that you'll understand."
What about Jenzar? Would he understand if Atreyu went off the rails?
Yami knew he was reading too much into it, too Sherlockian in his obsession, but that didn't stop him attempting to dissect it. Replaying it over, and over, and over...
"I've given you a head start. You're going to need it."
"Ello?" Yugi yawned into the mouthpiece.
Just hearing his voice made Yami desperate.
"Hey," he laughed weakly, "you're hard to get a hold of."
"Sorry," the younger sighed, "work crisis. Freaking Xcel makes me what to kill myself. How was the convention?"
"Same old," Yami shrugged, he hadn't paid it much heed. He was so engrossed in his fantasy currently that reality had paled into insignificance. This was more important. "You sort everything out at work?"
"Unfortunately," Yugi grumbled, "you get any writing done either?"
"I wish." He snorted cycling through the mundane. "You?"
"Ick." The boy grunted displeased elaborating: "University, history, black plague. I've got a research essay on boils. Writing footnotes makes me crunch like hag, like that witch from Snow White, gravity just gets stronger when I have to reference fucking Knight and Smith."
"Can I come over?" Yami didn't want to plead. He was convinced however that if he saw Yugi's home he'd been soothed after that damn, insufferable, song had warped his paranoia.
"Place is a mess. I'm breeding the bubonic plague myself." Yugi joked, tired, but offered a consolation. "Can I come to your place? Smells like baking."
"I think I lost a bag of cookies behind the thermostat." He chuckled.
"Well you're no Bette Meddler or Betty Crooker or whatever." The smaller yawned good-humouredly, decidedly reactant of the universe at current when he declared: "I need pizza, I'm craving, and chocolate. A whole block."
"You get the chocolate, I'll order the pizza," Yami swore. "Come here and let me cuddle you?"
"God," Yugi groaned, pointedly relieved at the concept. "Yes. I'm turning my brain off."
"Bring a crowbar for mine."
"Like um…" the smaller strained, clicking his fingers within Yami's hearing, "Gordon Freeman!"
"Yeah," Yami chuckled, brow twitching tightly at the coincidence.
"See you in a sec."
"Kay," he breathed, "love you."
"You too," Yugi replied dismissively.
So Yami's first attempt, however awkward, to tell Yugi he loved him was brushed over. He was too afraid to push it. He wanted to take the surface of the night for what it was without reading into it. He tossed the pizzas across the coffee table, found a bad rerun slew of crime shows, so he and Yugi could lick their fingers and press to each other on his sofa.
The young man was slack tonight. There was something human about the casual exhaustion in him that was intimate in its acceptance when, in a paint stained tee and weathered jeans, he let Yami gather him up tightly into his lap. He was so small that Yami's arms settled round him perfectly as Yugi let all his weight hang on the older man. Yami's limbs flexed through the commercials, squeezing him, finger tips straying up and down his back in a way that was entirely void of sexual inclination. He just wanted Yugi. He wanted that passionate knowledge he'd had at the gardens when Yugi had felt like he was all his. He wanted to be the man Yugi had hung out for all these years. He wanted to be the lover who played hero to his sweetheart, his baby, all those million things he wanted to call Yugi or tell him.
It helped only that Yugi was now so at peace in Yami's presence which effectively eased the silence between them to a wearability Yami could weather for the time being. Yugi fingers twitched against his exposed neck, petite hand resting between the opened folds of his shirt collar, and compelled Yami peppered his brow with the most tender kisses he was certain he'd ever given.
"Hey," he swallowed dryly, "can I ask you something…?"
Palpitations wracked his chest.
"Yugi?" He whispered, nudging, "you…?"
The boy moaned, rubbing his cheek into Yami's shirt, and the man realized that his captive fairy had fallen into a groggy doze in his arms.
"Hey," he whispered, losing his nerve entirely in the smile that fumbled across his cheeks. "You want to stay here tonight?"
"Ah-huh," Yugi muttered, dazed.
"Let's go crash," he decided, sighing as his fingers fondled the remote.
It must've been past midnight when Yami stirred on the sweaty mattress. In that lull place where the night was so dark time became irrelevant and everything seemed after twelve but before three. The bed sheets felt well used, loved, and Yugi was pliant in his arms yet somehow stiff and alert.
"You awake?" The boy whispered.
"Yeah," he replied in a hush, there had been some signal in the silence that had given them an awareness of each other through their body language.
"You feel that?" Yugi asked, coiled tightly, prompting the man to strain his awareness into the dim.
"Feel what?"
"Like you're four years old and you want to pull the blanket over your head to hide?"
Yami's gut wavered in an intake of breath, steeled, as in the dark he sensed some imperceptible eye intruding on their privacy. Nothing was there he was reasonably aware, nothing he could feel, but the room was cold under the weight of his imagination and drawing Yugi closer to him he nodded into the soft cheek against his.
"Stay here," Yugi instructed gently, so quiet as he very gingerly untangled himself from Yami's unwilling arms and pushed back the blankets.
The room had a consciousness, some alien and enemy quality to its every orifice in Yami's mind as the boy gazed and gently rested his feet upon the carpet. He heard Yugi's natural rustle, the softness of his breathing, acutely aware in his dark grogginess. Yami expected something just outside the seam of the open door, something under the bed, something unacceptable, unnatural, formless and wrong that had intruded but was hidden.
Yugi's profile flittered into Yami's view, illuminated in the moonlight, as he so poignantly slid down a shaft of the blinds over the man's window. Yami felt the tension in belly, that warrior readiness, souring his air while he waited for the recognisance. Yugi frowned perceptively to Yami's view from his vantage point and whispered:
"There are people in the back yard."
"What?" Yami floundered quietly, pushing up onto his elbows and scrambling uneasily to the window. He leant behind Yugi, reached over his shoulder, strained his eyes through the gap to the moonlit expanse of the grass below which seemed eerie at the current hour.
They were there alright, clear as day, two vague individuals standing fearlessly in the stark centre of his backyard so clearly invading the private property it could be no accident. They were languid and paused, leaning into each other, but Yami perceived from the rumple of their clothes and the shine of the light that they were the man and woman who had so nearly broken his window several days ago.
"It's them," he murmured, and he was sure of it.
The woman had one bare foot, the man a ruined overcoat, they were whispering.
"The ones who tried to break your window?" Yugi whispered.
"Definitely."
"They're not human." The smaller asserted with such odd sincerity Yami believed him where he never would have believed himself.
If Yami had any doubt, which he did not in Yugi's judgement, it was erased when the man and woman lurched to bipedal motion dragging themselves in awkward, unfamiliar, actions across the lawn. They looked like dogs trying to walk, like things in suits.
"What do we do?" He hissed.
"I'll go downstairs and scare them off." Yugi whispered so unyieldingly, so unprompted, that Yami knew he'd said these words before.
"No you won't." He swore. "You're not going down there alone. We call the cops."
"Won't believe us, won't help," the young man was insistent. "They'll be gone before they get here and then we'll just have some cock-and-bull story. We'll look ridiculous."
"I don't care." Yami hissed. "Whatever makes them leave."
"I'll make them leave." Yugi retorted stubbornly. "Where's my bag?"
"On the couch downstairs." The elder had no comprehension what Yugi might've brought with him but it made his heart squeeze to consider that the article was so far removed from their current seclusion.
"I have to go get it then." He explained.
"No," Yami answered.
"Then come with me," he urged, "bring something heavy. I need it. We're sitting ducks here."
"Okay," he hated that he was forced to relent but his hand was laid out simply enough, this was a climax of some description and Yami would have to face it. "Stay here a sec."
The moment was tangibly tense when Yami fished under the bed for the old aluminium baseball bat he'd long forgotten trying, stupidly, to accustom its weight in his fingers as they accommodated the handle. Yugi slipped up his jacket from the floor, arms sliding in casting shadows against the far war as he drifted to the door from the window.
Yami followed down the stairs. The bat felt too light as it grazed his thigh and bounced in his gait. Yugi clutched his jacket over his chest like a mother in a nightgown and then they were drifting cautiously into the lounge which appeared so warped in the hazy moonlight till it was almost unrecognizable to Yami. Yugi's eyes darted but he wasn't at all quivering when he found his satchel on the floor by the sofa and drew up onto the seat. Yami found himself standing lost in the carpet, on an island, between the stairs and the archway to the kitchen where the back door remained locked but distinctly vulnerable.
Yugi was too familiar, too comfortable, when he slipped the pendent out of the side pocket and fastened it round his neck under Yami's curious but wandering eyes and then resumed very diligently to ruffle through his things. Yugi had lost something, he swore, his pace increasing but eventually he was slipping the prized object onto his hands over his ever so quaking fingers.
He drifted back to Yami, bag forgotten and the elder wanted to hold him but was too afraid to risk it given how at the change of the wind he anticipated disaster.
Hick-Hick-Ching
The handle of the back door was wrenched, rattled in its socket, and Yami found it difficult to contain himself. He was shaking beyond his immediate perception he knew.
"What if they get in?" Yami murmured so afraid, illogically, that they would hear him.
"Let em." Yugi replied tightly. "I can't do much if they're out there except frighten them off and even that might not work."
"Why not run them off?"
"I want them gone for good." He answered and Yami had only a brief conception of what Yugi was implying. "I'm sick of these twats."
The door shook, one of the pair had thrown their weight into it, and Yami frowned.
"They're going to break it at this rate."
"I've got an idea." Yugi prefaced. "We go out the front we can surprise them round the back."
"I'd rather stay here."
Yugi sighed, irritated, and nodded.
"Then stay here." He snorted.
"What?" Yami flickered. "You can't be serious?"
"I'm getting rid of them." Yugi hissed. "I'm not going to stand around here getting scared."
"You're crazy."
"You're a coward." He admonished back. "Now are you coming or not? Because I'm going."
"What am I supposed to do?" The man reeled weakly. He couldn't bear to let Yugi drift away from him but he couldn't fathom what use he would be.
"Don't let them gang up on me." Yugi answered. "We can take them."
"What are they?" He demanded gently.
"Possessed I think." The younger shrugged. "It doesn't matter. I'll find out in a minute."
"We both will." Yami cringed.
"You can do it." Yugi encouraged gently sweeping on his toes to the front door to work it open quietly after a brisk peek out the front window for an ambush.
Yami found himself surprisingly eager to follow in putting a second door between himself and the intruders. When they were barefoot on the side walk, under the street lamp, he felt so exposed and childish dodging round to the back gate. Why was he doing this? Why was Yugi so accustomed to go it alone? He caught a glimmer of the chain link gloves crisscrossing Yugi's palms as the smaller struggled with the latch of the side gate and guessed that they were made of iron and silver those old favourites of the young man.
This was the difference between he and Yugi he realized. Yugi went to face madness and Yami had been running from him. Yugi was ready for war, to take charge of his reality and demand its submission but as of yet Yami was, as he had said, a coward. He was afraid to ask, afraid to say, what he was thinking because then all of this would change.
He stuck close to Yugi as they skirted the bushes, crinkling on bare feet over the prickled dried out grass of Yami's side passage into the back yard. There was that childhood nostalgia of hide and seek, of playing pretend, all tangled up with the distinct horror of the situation.
The woman was groaning as she thrust her body into the back door attempting vainly to force it open while the man hunched beside her like a heaving ape sagged down by the weight of his own shoulders in the trench coat.
Yugi glanced at Yami, nodded pointedly, and skirting gently into the light of the moon made a shrill little coo in the back of his throat, nearly a whistle, for no other purpose than to garner their attention. The man hefted himself in their direction like a dog, face sullen and haggard but in the sheen of the shadow cast from the porch Yami saw a flicker of catish light across his dilated pupils that was altogether unnatural.
"Come and get it you ugly motherfucker." Yugi teased low and smooth.
The man groaned, frustrated, and yawning as he threw open his mouth and exposed his tonsils. He shambled down the two steps, came flailing, but Yami could see the misstep in his motion that was foolish and broken. Yugi dug his heels in and, as the woman shuddered to alertness of them, caught the man by the shoulders as he tried to tackle the boy clear of his feet.
They grappled, Yami tensed, Yugi's hands found the thing's face, his neck, and groaning the man shuddered onto his knees in the grass in a violent reaction to the gloves.
"I am so sick-"
The woman called, more a sighing shriek than a real scream that would alert attention, and Yami was suddenly very aware that he had to step in. She was quicker on her feet, down the steps and running to Yugi.
"-of you pathetic bottom feeders!" Yugi hissed down into the man. Straddling the writhing body as he tried to work it to submission in the grass.
Yami had never been good at sports but Yugi was ignoring the woman, as he struggled with the man, and Yami found the bat thrown from his fingers as he lunged to cut her off in her charge. She was little, cattish, and Yami's arms hooked round her waist as she charged past him utterly oblivious of everything but Yugi. Once Yami had her however she tossed at him, scratching, struggling, hissing, kicking… till her last shoe flew across the grass and he found a better hold to secure her in.
Yugi had one hand on the man's face, the other on his neck, holding the thrashing body in the grass.
"You don't belong in there. So you can take your sorry ass back to the nest and tell your bitch boss all about it." He admonished brazenly. "Now get OUT."
The emphasis of the words, thought into action, was crisply crystal clear as that word rang out in the space which seemed to have condensed around them free of external humanity. The houses around felt unreal, far off, from their isolation as if no sound they made could touch them.
"I said," he declared, "BE GONE."
Yugi's words cut through the thrashing and groaning the man shuddered, spitting, to slump in nothingness. That was a spell as Yami knew them, plain as day, radiantly real and the man twittered, twitching, as the woman in Yami's arms thrashed with renewed passion.
"Bitch!" The woman spat suddenly at Yugi and Yami fought the urge to release her when the sound which flew from her mouth was a cruel misuse of vocal cords in an approximation of human speech. "Archaic whore!"
"That's cute." Yugi snorted, pushing up onto his feet and striding in carefully. "We've met?"
"I ripped you in the river!" She declared proudly, it declared more like, and seethed in Yami's hands like a viper. "Alexandria!"
"Thanks for visiting then." He replied superfluously. "Let me save you and your trash sisters the trouble of coming here again however with a quick word of advice you can take home with you: in this world or any other, whatever side of the Veil you want to pick, whatever era, I can still kick your ass."
"We'll sever you to pieces! Fling your bones to the corners of the universe! They'll all forget you ever existed!"
"Get out."
Yugi's voice snapped with such venom Yami could, instantaneously, feel the twang of a severing power. All at once the woman fell limp as a stone in his arms, sagged; a marionette cut loose from whatever dangling cord had been tugging it.
Yugi stood, sighing, shoulders falling. All the coiled intensity draining from him till he appeared petite, frail, and chilled in the night in his much too big jacket that, in the fighting, had fallen down off his shoulders.
"We need to get them onto the street before they wake up." He whispered nonchalant.
It was purposed but supremely casual, business like, and Yami tightened direly with a curt nod as he fought through the substantial grief stricken burn blooming within his chest.
It was three am, the witching hour Yami remarked to himself with some pained humour, when they fastened the front door and fell coldly into the opposing ends of the sofa. Yami was cold to his bones, from his head to his toes, and Yugi's body was as stiff and vague eyed as he perceived his own to be. The unsaid was consuming between them because Yami knew a dam, a misconception, had just been broken.
He couldn't pretend Yugi's eccentricities were the coping strategies of a mentally ill young man who had flourished in adversity. He couldn't pretend entirely that everything he had encountered these past few weeks had all been illusion and coincidence. He was forced, to that precipice, and angrily made to speak.
"Who are you?" He demanded.
It was so hoarse, broken, round the phlegm gathering sickly in this throat behind the Adam's apple Yami wondered if he could restrain himself from real sobs of agony at the ideas frothing to life.
Nothing.
Yugi fumbled with the chain link gloves untangling them off his hands with a kind of desperate disconnect. The wall between them was back up or, it occurred to Yami's horror, maybe this was what had been waiting for him behind it all along.
"Answer me." He repeated roughly.
"I don't know what you want me to say." Yugi breathed evenly. "I told you. I warned you-"
"Don't give me that crap!" Yami was surprised at himself. It sprung from him fully formed, a monstrous cancer, but his heart was cracking. "You know what I mean! You know exactly what I fuck-"
"Don't you dare." Yugi warned suddenly with a steady pace.
The boy's fingers had curled in his lap, his eyes wavered over the carpet, but Yami's voice was torn from his mouth by the power of nothing else but the radiance of Yugi's atmosphere that assaulted him now in full bloom. He knew then that if Yugi looked at him Yami wouldn't be able to take it.
"I am Atreyu Damestaire," the young man announced with an unwavering, righteous, fury, "and you will not disrespect me."
Yugi was exposed to him now and when his eyes landed with blistering determination on Yami's the man knew he was lost. He knew it was the truth. His gut and his heart wrenched in agony too sublime to be an illusion and here in all his splendour Atreyu Damestaire's incarnation sat, fleshed, imbued and honestly loathing of Yami's continued existence.
"I knew it." Yami fumbled direly. All of time had stopped outside this room. "I fucking knew it…"
"Does it hurt?" Yugi supposed coldly casting an appraising eye over him. "Good."
"Why? Why would you…?"
"Why play you? Why do you think?" He snapped. "Do you have any idea, any comprehension, of what those books have done to my life? The first book came out when I was seventeen. Since then Seers have been crawling everywhere."
Yami couldn't take it. He'd been waiting for this, all along, but he still couldn't bear it as he buried his hands in his face. Yugi however wasn't done and he would be heard.
"I can't stay in the same place anymore. I can't talk to my family. I can't have a moments' peace. I can't mourn in private because all your belligerent vox populi are gossiping about me on every possible fragment of social media! I have to hear other people use his name! I have to know that at any moment I could hear some brat's opinion on my life story! You took everything I ever told you and gave it to the whole goddamn world! You used me! You betrayed me! You made money off my pain!"
The boy was shaking with rage, it infused his limbs, and the weight of it bore down on Yami dreadfully.
"I'm lucky to still be here," he elaborated, "do you know what I've been like without Jenzar? Last lifetime I tried to kill myself four times before being institutionalised and eventually succeeding. The one before that I was a nun and the time before that a serial killer! I'm losing my mind and you are not helping!"
"Please," Yami pleaded, slipping from the sofa to present himself on his knees before Yugi's trembling body burying his face in the boy's knees. "I didn't know. I swear I didn't know any of it was real. Not until the last few weeks. I just thought they were dreams."
Yugi scoffed.
"Likely story," he muttered dryly, "you had an impossibly high awareness of the situation. You knew you were dreaming the first time I met you, you did research into the history of it, and you remembered everything that happened in acute detail for those damnable tripe novels. You expect me to believe that Seto Kaiba, the most sceptical man I've ever met, figured it out before you did?"
Oh if ever there was a time to grovel.
"Yes!" Yami insisted. "Until I met you I…"
Yugi glowed with distain, hell hath no fury like a Faen scorned was the parable he returned to, and on his knees before the stiff Fairy Yami could be forgiven for thinking he was begging to a pagan idol, a ruler, to absolve him and pardon his transgressions. Really, after all, he was. Who knew what Atreyu could do here in the Natural World if he was real?
"Look me in the eye," he ordered coolly, "and tell me the absolute truth. No hyperbole, no euphemisms, no white lies or romanticising or so help me Atemu Pheramora you'll wish you'd never been born."
"I swear to you," Yami murmured though his voice seemed to have no strength as he met Yugi's eyes, "I didn't ever think they were more than dreams. I thought it was just clever escapism. Then I met you and I've been convinced that I was losing my mind. I didn't think you could be real. I promise you, please, if I'd thought for a second you were real I wouldn't have ever…"
Yugi, Atreyu, had a gaze that stripped of all pretention or disguise was magical and it scoured right through Yami as if he were a millimetre thick.
1 FLAG by Emilie Autumn is a real song. It's on youtube and I'd give it a listen cause her emphasis is perfect!
2 'Vox Populi' is an old latin term for 'The People' it was what politicians used to refer to their masses.
3 A big shout out to Pika92who was right with her guess last chapter! Congratulations!
4 Okay, okay, calm down everybody! I'm getting to what you all want to know: yes. Yugi is Atreyu. Yes Yugi is totally aware he is Atreyu. They are one and the same. Don't hate Atreyu yet. Will you get yourself a happy puzzle-shipping ending? Of course you will this is a Romance. You just have to be patient.
5 If you think I haven't answered a burning question by the end of the next chapter don't fret. 90% of your obvious questions will be answered either in the next chapter or as we go along.
Hope you all enjoyed! Please don't worry too much between now and next chapter darlings. I won't cliff-hanger you like this too often.