[fic] The Right Kind of Sinner - Yugioh, YYxY, general, PG, theme 31
Title: The Right Kind of Sinner
Author: Chey (duelist_gurl163)
Theme: 31 - “You have to walk carefully at the beginning of love. The running across fields into your lover’s arms can only come later, when you’re sure they won’t laugh if you trip.” for 50_lovequotes
Rating: PG
Genre: general
Parings: YamixYugi implied
Archive: You're lookin' at it
Warnings: None
Spoilers: None really
Summary: A person of darkness and sins, the exact opposite of Yugi, living inside him. So why wasn’t he scared?
Disclaimer: I don't own Yugioh, I hope you're happy now that you've rubbed it in my face.
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Three-thirty in the morning, long after most normal people would be asleep, and he was still sitting up. He had just spent the entire day escaping a torture chamber, surely that would make any ordinary person sleepy.
But I’m not ordinary anymore.
Only hours before had the memories come back, and his suspicions he’d begun to have over the last few months had been confirmed. It was a strange feeling. Sure, the suspicions had been scary enough, but there was a huge difference between thinking there was someone else inhabiting your body, and there actually being someone else there. He looked down at his hands. Were they still considered “his?” Technically now they belonged to both of them…
He grit his teeth, clenching his fists and shaking his head. No, these are mine!
But did he really want that, considering what they’d done?
There it was, the real reason he couldn’t sleep. Because every time he closed his eyes the memories came back. All the bad things that he’d done. Killing people, torturing people…bad people, but still, fellow human beings nonetheless.
He wished he didn’t remember. He wished the suspicions were just suspicions. He wished he didn’t know that someplace inside him lurked a strange, dark soul. A person who wouldn’t blink twice at taking a life; who would laugh, in fact, at the prospect. A person of darkness and sins, the exact opposite of Yugi, living inside him
So why wasn’t he scared?
Confused, unsettled, slightly sick, sure…but not scared. It made no sense. He unclenched his hands and looked at them again, and then up and into the dark room.
“Hello?” He asked aloud. “Um…mou hitori no boku?”
No answer. Of course there was no answer, the only way the other him could manifest himself was by taking over Yugi’s body, and if he did, Yugi would black out. Or would he? Now that he’d come to accept the other spirit, would he still black out?
“I just want to know who you are!” He said, louder. And still, nothing. With a sigh, he lay back on the bed and tried to close his eyes and block out the thoughts crowding in his head.
Eventually his exhaustion must have overpowered the anxiety, because he slowly became aware that he was no longer in his room. Everything around him was dark and foggy. A dream would be fine, something to take his mind off all this stress…
But if this was a dream, why was he aware of it?
“So you want to know who I am?” The voice, lilting and deep, cut through the fog.
Yugi looked around. If ‘looking around’ was really the right term for it, he wasn’t entirely sure he had a body. He couldn’t see himself. “Hello?”
A silhouette appeared nearby. Most of the body remained shrouded in fog as it became clearer, but a face was vaguely discernable. Most particularly the eyes. Bright as fire, yet dark as twin bottomless pools, they surveyed him with mild interest.
“Who are you?” Yugi asked.
The lips of the figure quirked slightly. “I’m you, I suppose.”
“You’re the…’other me?’”
“If that’s what you’ve decided to call me.” The voice returned, disinterested.
“Don’t you have a name of your own?”
“No.” The violet pools darkened. “I have nothing of my own. So if mou hitori no Yugi is what I’m to be called, so be it.”
“You know my name,” Yugi said, surprised.
The man looked annoyed. “Of course I know your name, how could I not? I’m not completely ignorant. People keep thinking I’m you-“
“You’re not me!” Yugi snapped.
Suddenly, finally, he had the figure’s undivided attention. “Is that so?”
“You do…bad things. Things that I would never do.”
“Bad things.” It wasn’t even a question. The other spirit folded his arms, head tilted. “What’s that…‘bad things?’”
“Y-You hurt people.” Yugi’s voice shook. “You’ve killed people…or done things to them to make them go insane…”
“And that’s so bad?”
“You can’t go around hurting people, it’s not the right thing to do!”
“They deserved it,” he spit back.
“But-“
“Listen, Yugi, put aside your inane morals and listen. Look at the people I punished. Remember what they did. And now tell me none of them deserved the fate they got.”
Yugi faltered. The spirit’s expression twisted into a smirk, though the smile held no amusement. “See?” He began to pace, vulturine eyes glittering. “I did what I did for you. Those people hurt you or someone you cared about, and I could feel that much. So I did something about it because I didn’t like that feeling. If a few people get hurt…who cares? They deserved it. As long as you’re protected, it doesn’t matter.”
Yugi took a deep breath and looked directly into the spirit’s eyes. “I care.”
“Oh?” He paused, mid-step.
“You’re using me to hurt them. Yes, they were bad, you have the right to that judgment. But you’re using my body, and my hands, to carry out your judgments, and I want you to stop.”
He looked back at him. “So you want me to go.”
Yugi was so startled, he forgot about the point he was trying to make. “You…can ‘go?’ You mean…you’re not trapped inside me?”
“No, I am trapped inside of you. There’s no changing that. However I can shrink away, lock myself in some far corner and be good as gone, if that’s what you want.” The eyes never flickered.
“No…I just want you to control your temper and stop hurting people.”
The figure took a step forward, studying Yugi carefully. Now Yugi got a good look at his face. He didn’t look very different from himself, or from any person for that matter. Except for the eyes. The eyes weren’t fully human, something feral lived inside them. One hand reached out, slender fingers wrapping around Yugi’s wrist, which Yugi was now aware of having. His skin was cold. Yugi shivered. His other self’s voice growled.
“Look…maybe there’s something you don’t understand. The light inside you that makes you say these things in defense of people that were cruel to you…I don’t have that. If I feel that someone hurt you, I do something about it. I don’t make concessions in the name of morals. And by asking me to, you’re asking me to change the very essence of my nature.” He lifted Yugi’s hand to their eye level. His grip tightened as his eyes glowed. “Now you can tell me to go, and I will vanish in a distant place inside you so well that you will never know I’m there. And you can live out the rest of your life without my interference. Your hands will be yours.” He released him and Yugi’s arm dropped. “But I make no apologies for my actions, be them sins or otherwise.”
Yugi looked down at his hand that the spirit had held up. He flexed his fingers, and looked back up, smiling a little. “I don’t think so.”
One eyebrow raised a precise fraction of an inch.
“You only hurt people that hurt me. You said it yourself. You said you don’t have any light at all, and I think you’re wrong, because you protected me. And you protected people I care about, so it can’t just be because I’m your vessel. You honestly don’t want me to be hurt.”
The spirit recoiled, stepping back. “I didn’t ask for your opinion. Just tell me to leave and be done with it.”
“I don’t want you to leave.”
The words surprised Yugi just as much as they surprised the stranger. Yet the longer he stared at his shadowy other self, the more he was certain that he didn’t want to lose him. “I…I don’t want you to go away, I want you to stay with me. And I don’t know who you are, but you’re here. You exist. To ask you to lock yourself somewhere inside me, to just sit there in darkness for eternity, would be cruel. Nobody should be subjected to that.”
“Again, your morals are a detriment,” the spirit muttered. “You don’t want to be responsible for hurting people. If you make me go away, that problem goes away, does it not?”
“Yeah, but you’re-“
“I’m nobody.” He spread his arms. “I have nothing. No identity, no self, no memories…you wouldn’t be banishing a person. You would be subjecting me to exactly what ‘nobody’ deserves.”
Yugi reached out and wrapped his fingers around the spirit’s hand. “You’ve got me.”
Incredibly, the eyes softened. Yugi was shocked at the transformation. Suddenly they had gone from half-human and ancient to clear and gentle as he gazed at the boy holding his hand. Yugi’s touch was so…warm.
Then, just as suddenly, his eyes filled with confusion, and the spirit jerked his hand away from Yugi’s grasp. He backpedaled, muttering, “Okay, I won’t go, if…that’s what you want.”
“It is.”
“I still won’t apologize for my actions.”
“I’m not asking you to.”
He turned his head, looking away. “And I suppose…if it’s that important to you…if it will make you happy…I will try to control my temper.”
“Thank you.” Yugi answered softly. The spirit looked back at him, pausing as if he wanted to say something else, and then vanished. Yugi found himself opening his eyes in bed. There was nothing to confirm that what just happened wasn’t a dream, yet he was quite certain that it hadn’t been a dream at all.
This time however, instead of lying awake, he simply rolled onto his side and closed his eyes again. The unsettled feeling, the stress and the confusion from regaining those memories, had vanished from him the moment he saw the spirit’s eyes soften.
Finally, Yugi understood why he wasn’t scared.
x-x-x
Notes: ...And from then on Yami learned to stop mind-crushing every person that glanced at Yugi. ...Eventually. Sort of. ._.;
The idea was supposed to be that this was the very night after Death-T. In the manga, I always took Yugi's final line of that volume, (I think it was something like, "Tonight, for the first time, I can remember all the battles we fought together" or along those lines.) to mean that Yugi got back all the memories of what happened when he passed out and Yami took over. That's just my interpretation of it. Consequently, this is also when they began to grow closer to each other. (I know they weren't able to actually communicate until around DK, but consider this to be one of those "extraordinary circumstances" or something.) The very shaky beginning of what would eventually become extremely deep love.
The title is a line from the Pat Benatar song, Heartbreaker. As Yami is the right kind of "sinner" for Yugi. ;3