Theme: 05 Move Forward
Title: The Mourners
Word Count: 455
Summary: The first day of the post-Atemu world, everyone dealt with the loss differently.
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Honda drives as fast as he can, forcing the motorcycles around sharp corners, losing his grief in the thrum of the engine, trying very hard not to cry. He drives out of Domino and back into it, following no particular route, avoiding anything that might remind him of their loss.
Anzu cries. Her tears soak her pillow and leave salt marks on her face, and when she can no longer weep, she gives up and curls up in bed, hiding beneath the blankets. She pretends she is a little girl again, and she does not know what love is, and she has never fallen in love with a man who would never have been able to return her feelings. She tries very hard not to wish she'd had the strength say it to him — just the once.
Jounouchi fights — first with his furniture, then with his useless father, then with his reflection. When he is angry he can fall back into his first and oldest coping mechanism, the one where the blood and the pain and the shame blot everything else out. But he looks in what's left of the mirror and remembers that this all began when he started being better than that, and then he can't fight anymore, and the beer in the fridge starts to look pretty good.
Otogi and Rebecca and Mai all meet up at a cafe somewhere and try to make sense of it. They don't know what to say — they were his friends, but they were in the outer circle and they know it — and they wonder why it hurts so much.
Kaiba says nothing. It means nothing. He does not believe in fairytales, and his time is all consumed with Kaibaland America. But Mokuba looks red-eyed, and when he leaves the satellite images Kaiba requested on his desk — the desert, the tomb crumbling away — he knows that the intense pleasure of dueling him is gone forever. And he allows himself the luxury of mourning.
Yuugi tells himself everything is fine. It must be. This is what they'd wanted, what is right. The other him gets to his family and friends (weren't they enough?), gets to have the rest he deserves (had he been too demanding, too needy, too weak), gets to take the magic out of the world. This is just one ending of one story, and it is a happy ending. It is.
When the sun sets, he climbs into bed and tells himself to be brave, and then he remembers that the other him will never again sit at his desk and guard his dreams, and he sobs until the sun comes back up for the loss of the other half of his soul.
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