Title: Meteor Shower
Theme: 97 – Writer's Choice: Time
Summary: It's all gone; all of it disappears, when the younger one day takes the largest piece from the golden puzzle, and the spirit is sealed back into it.
Rating: K
Genre: General/Spiritual
Notes: This will be confusing. I can almost guarantee it. But hopefully you'll understand what's going on before long.
The pharaoh walks back from death and into the duel.
His Life Points counter clicks back up to 200, and the hovering golden box with the symbol of the udjat snaps shut; Slifer reappears on the field as Yugi stares up at it, unafraid and a little nervous of his next move.
Spectators watch on; some with disbelief written on their faces, some upset, and others with stoic expressions, as if they have been expecting what has already happened.
The ceremonial duel marches on, and Yugi feels himself becoming nervous again, the anticipation of what occurred at the end of this trial clotting in his stomach as the partners make their first moves.
When the two spirits join together, the group travels onto the cruise boat, where it is decided that the youngest of them all will duel the oldest. A conversation between best friends leaning on the railing, reminiscing on events that will happen two years from now. Reuniting with a grandfather and a friend in front of the ship, and leaving them now to travel back to the magic of Ancient Egypt.
Memories of a lost pharaoh become forgotten for the first time. His name is buried away for three thousand years, and as the spirit battles an ancient force that threatens the world's safety, old friends that have been scarified for the cause come back to help, while a white-haired thief sits above the game and laughs, turning hourglasses in his hand, over and over again.
A competition between two rivals is settled by Yugi Mutou, then reborn as a duel between him and the youngest von Schroeder races back to the beginning. A younger brother has played a forbidden card that he will hand over to his brother before this duel has started; and Yugi looks up at the golden castle and wonders how they have defeated it.
The magic of a wicked seal pushes the two together, repairing the tear, but waiting only until after the pharaoh has broken, pounding the dry earth and screaming at the sky for a partner he has already saved.
Three motorcyclists return to a game shop and an old man retrieves his grandson's prized cards as they zoom away, repairing the glass that broke with their entrance.
The great pharaoh hands them over to Marik Ishtar, and during the course of Battle City, the young Egyptian's darker half embraces the outside world and attempts to destroy the one who gave him the power that comes in three little cards.
Seto Kaiba stands in the sky, holding onto a helicopter, and after he announces a new contest for only one young man's ears, he flies away to meet a woman that he will give Obelisk the Tormenter to, and lose all of the knowledge she will give him in return about what has happened, and what will.
A young black-haired boy remembers his hate, remembers how his grandfather was run out of business by another's, how the one known as Yugi Mutou destroyed his dreams of dice, dreams that have already come true, and will never again, until he is beaten by his own game.
A white-haired man uses the magic of a golden eye to rip two apart, reviving one from the darkness as the duel continues.
The late-night talks, the invisible conversations between classes, the touches of an incorporeal hand floating on his shoulder – they all erase themselves, never to happen again, and the bond between the two partners grows looser. Dimmer. They drift.
They both know that they will start out as nothing; having nothing, being nothing. One will take a puzzle, the one thing that connects them, apart, and the other will be locked in darkness for the next three thousand years, until he awakens as a pharaoh and seals himself again to postpone the battle with the dark being that has already come.
They know they will forget this. They know it is madness, to try and remember. They try anyway, and as they grow younger, a little bit of each other stays with them, and they keep it close while time erases what has happened.
"For what it's worth, it's never too late," the younger says to his spirit one night, as rain is sucked from the ground and races up to the sky. "Or too early. There's no time limit. You can change or stay the same. There aren't any rules to this thing. You've started, and you've probably made the best of it all, and you're probably proud of the things you've done. I wouldn't know. And I suppose neither would you. But if you're not, then that's what this is for. That's why you're here, I think. To see if you have the strength to start all over again."
There's a double-edged comfort in these talks, knowing that nobody else really knows. About this, about him – about them.
And it's all gone; all of it disappears, when the younger of the two one day takes the largest piece from the golden puzzle, and the spirit is sealed back into it.
Despite having lost everything, or what he has once known as everything, even if he does not remember – despite it all, he continues on with his days normally. He goes to school. He is pushed against lockers. He is stolen from, abused, pushed around. A hall monitor demands his money. And at night, he works on dismantling his puzzle, what he will spend his nights on for the next seven years.
"Here you are, Yugi, m'boy," his grandfather says, those seven years later. "I've got something for you."
An eight-year-old Yugi gives his grandfather the pieces of the artifact, pieces he has worked on taking apart all this time, and they are wrapped in cloth and sealed back into a small golden box.
Yugi Mutou gives his grandfather a good morning hug, walks upstairs, climbs back into bed, and goes to sleep until the evening before.
Words: 995
A/N: I gave myself the theme of "time," and I figured I could go two ways with it: I could write about how long the pharaoh was in the puzzle and make something romantically cheesy out of that, or I could do something crazy and abstract that only I would probably understand. I chose the latter for reasons I don't know (Honestly, I think writing cheese is much easier than writing off-the-beaten-path symbolic stuff). The idea behind this is from "Slaughterhouse-Five," a short story by Kurt Vonnegut, where his main character watches an entire film about WWII backwards as he rewinds it. He muses on how the only way to completely clear all of the destruction and wars the world has gone through is to fully erase history in its entity – which would also mean forgetting all of the love people have shared, too. It's weird, but I had fun while writing it, so there it is.