♥13 / [YuGiOh!] "Sight the King" 06/21
Sight the King - chapter 6
Summary: After Yuugi wakes up at the scene of a crime with blood on his hands and a voice in his head, there's only one thing he can do: Run.
._._.
The king is such a tower of wisdom
._._.
Yuugi had gotten two, maybe two and a half hours of sleep by they time they arrived in Gammon. The bus station, thankfully, was near enough the outer ridge of town that it would only take a few hours to walk to Titan. However, it was already nearing sundown and Yuugi felt leery of traveling at night. The other Yuugi, predictably, had other ideas.
It’s not as if we need to worry about being attacked by robbers, wrote the shadow of Yuugi upon the table. Yuugi, however, only gave the writing a cursory glance before he took another bite of his triple-stacked cheeseburger from the nearby Meat Goes In Your Face Deliciously! (“Unwieldy Name, Unwieldy Burgers!”); there were two more similarly sized burgers resting thus far untouched on the plastic tray, as well as the side jug of cola and some fried potatoes. Yuugi had, in the past few days, only consumed a sandwich at the police station, an ice cream cone with Jounouchi, and half of Anzu’s bento at school the day before everything went to hell: he was starving.
On top of that, other than the few hours he’d had on the bus, and however long the surgery had taken, Yuugi had not slept in over sixty hours. It was a surprise he was still functioning.
And if you’re worried about sleep, the shadow added on the table, perhaps catching the tail of Yuugi’s thought, or perhaps seeing the dark circles of fatigue under his eyes, then you can sleep while I take us to Titan. Your body won’t be weary, I promise.
“I appreciate the sentiment, other me,” Yuugi whispered into his burger, glad that the restaurant was mostly deserted, “but sleep back there isn’t-” he had to pause for a long yawn, “-isn’t the same. I wake up having no idea where I am or what I’m doing, and...”
It wasn’t so much that the thought trailed off, as Yuugi’s shadow retracted from the table. It was more that Yuugi’s mind had conjured an image that Yuugi’s thoughts did not articulate into words. After all, not all thought is stream-of-conscious dialog - if one were asked to imagine one’s home, one would picture the place in one’s mind, not a list of descriptions for it.
The image that had flashed into Yuugi’s mind was Sasori Hikari, tumbling over sideways with a blood-soaked dress and a slit throat. If the other Yuugi had a face, he would have scowled.
Are you still upset about that girl’s death? asked the voice, the words slanted with distaste, that you would prefer she had gotten her way and killed you as well?
That’s not what I meant, snipped Yuugi irritably, finishing off his first burger and following it with a chaser of potatoes, I want to be awake for the journey. I want to wake up in the same place I went to sleep and not discover I’d killed someone in my sleep.
She killed herself! the voice responded angrily. she lost the Dark Game, and it consumed her mind to the point where she would rather die than face her heart’s truth.
You wouldn’t have allowed her to win, would you? There was no possible way for her to win.
Just because it has never been done before does not mean it cannot be done. You bested the Millennium Puzzle, which has never before been solved.
That’s completely different! Yuugi exclaimed within his mind, his outward body showing almost no signs of this inner battle. He began the second burger. The Puzzle took me eight years to solve. If it followed the rules of your Dark Games, I would have died that first night!
There was a silence then, in Yuugi’s mind, tense and angry and hesitant. If he bothered to look, though, the apathetic clerk behind the counter would only see a really tired kid (probably coming off a drug high, he would think with empathy) eating a cheeseburger. Yuugi chewed slowly, waiting for the voice to argue back, or concede defeat, something to indicate what they were going to do now.
Minutes passed in silence, and Yuugi demolished the second burger, the remaining fried potatoes, almost all of the soda, and two-thirds of the final burger. His stomach was aching in the sudden onslaught of food after such a sparse amount over the previous few days. Finishing the final cheeseburger, Yuugi remained sitting in the booth, waiting patiently.
Finally, the voice responded softly. If you wish to physically sleep, then you shall sleep. The anger and ferocity was no longer even remotely present in the voice that echoed in Yuugi’s mind and in his ears.
Thank you, replied Yuugi, crumbling up the wrappers. As reluctant as he was to admit it, Yuugi was now rather dependent upon the voice in his mind. Yuugi would not have gotten out of his holding cell, would not have gotten back home, would not have come up with so many plans to cover his tracks without it. Even if Yuugi by himself made it to Titan, he doubted he would be able to make it out of the country with his psyche intact: Yuugi was an easy victim. Thus dependent, Yuugi may have disliked the presence of the voice, but he dared not try to remove it from his mind: without being able to even consider using such removal as a threat against the other Yuugi, he did not think he would be strong enough to fight it off if it tried to forcibly take control of his body once more. Yuugi was completely at the mercy of his shadow. I only want a couple hours that won’t give me motion sickness. We can still leave while it’s dark if you prefer. I’m sorry for getting so angry.
“Come back and gorge yourself again!” called the lone clerk, his voice hoarse from the late hour, but neither Yuugi was listening.
I have overstepped my bounds, replied the voice, and our emotions started feeding into one another again. You have… reminded me of something that I should never have forgotten.
Yuugi tried to stifle his yawn, but still he followed the path that his shadow had begun to lay out before him, pivoting and turning around him like the needle of a compass. Illumination at this late hour had been reduced to the electric white of the restaurant and the gaudy blurred orange of the street lamps. After several minutes passing condemned buildings and empty offices, Yuugi’s shadow led him into a narrow alleyway. Yuugi easily collapsed down against one brick wall, and pulling his rucksack onto his lap he curled around the bag. Yuugi’s shadow, however, had stretched tall along the opposite wall, and Yuugi knew that should anything happen in the night, that shadow would be there to protect him. So, so tired, Yuugi quickly succumbed to the weight of his fatigue, swiftly going into the welcome darkness of sleep.
._._.
On the front page of the newspaper the following morning was Yuugi’s photograph. The accompanying article, Yuugi read from the abandoned paper he nicked from a recycling bin at the bus station minutes before, was an alarmist piece about the crazed “loner kid” who had killed two celebrities and one of his classmates in a plea for attention, before escaping police custody sometime yesterday. It gave a graphic and incorrect account of the crimes committed, and the reporter tried speculating as to how dangerous Yuugi had to be in order to escape from detainment at the police station itself, becoming the first person to ever do so in the history of Domino. Yuugi tried focusing on the comments from ‘friends and family of the killer,’ but his attention kept going back to his photograph.
It was lined up in a row with the photos of Jounouchi and the Sasori sisters. Their pictures were all taken from school I.D. cards (though it looked as though the Sasoris’ had gone through a touch-up first), while Yuugi’s was his mug shot from his short stay in detention. There was nothing in particular about the photograph that actually identified it as a mug shot, something that surprised Yuugi, but he recognized it all the same. His eyes were puffed and dark from crying, but enough time had passed that he wasn’t actively doing so.
For some reason, the Yuugi in the picture was smiling. He didn’t look particularly happy, but the lips were upturned in irony. The two girls, of course, had photographs that looked as though ripped from magazines even if they obviously weren’t, made up in all their fame-spoiled pomp: perfect white teeth and eyes visibly open, smiles perfectly crafted to move as few muscles as possible. Finally, there was Jounouchi, looking sour and impatient. This picture had been taken long before he and Yuugi had become friends, and the tightness of his face and the disarray of his hair almost screamed out the truth of his gang roots.
Yuugi turned his gaze from that photo quickly, not wanting to lose his memory of a smiling, laughing friend to the image of an ill-caught boy he barely knew.
Yuugi Mutou, left, and his three victims-
“Wait,” muttered Yuugi, glancing at the pictures again: Yuugi, Hikari, Hebi, Jounouchi-
Mutou, left-
Yuugi closed his eyes and shook softly with what may have been laughter.
Yuugi’s picture was on the right. Whoever had written the tagline had attached his name, the killer’s name, to the photo of Jounouchi. This was one of the top selling papers in the nation - and anyone using this as their source of information would connect Yuugi (should they recognize him) with the photo of a victim and dismiss him instantly, for obviously he wasn’t dead and therefore couldn’t be connected to the crime.
Yuugi lowered the paper and peered conspiringly at his shadow. “I think this buys us a free day of travel,” he said quietly, knowing that no one else was near his little stakeout at this corner lamppost, “since no one’s looking for me. Should we risk the bus?”
The shadow, after a moment, nodded and slowly waved a trail of words from its right hand. The risk is low, wrote the shadow Yuugi, but how much money remains?
“Enough for a bus ticket,” Yuugi recalled, “and maybe a couple days of food, if I stretch it. I think that punk overcharged me.” Just thinking about those gargantuan burgers made Yuugi’s stomach gurgle, though he wasn’t sure if it was hunger for more, or a protest at being forced to digest so much of the stuff in one go.
Another wave. That’s not much. Yuugi adjusted the rucksack on his one good shoulder: when he had woken up, his wound had already been redressed. He sighed, surveying their surroundings.
It was just after seven in the morning, so the sun still hung low in the sky. There was only a trickle of commuters down the often-busy road. Although a weekday, the rush of businessmen had already passed, or still had hours before they needed to arrive at their destinations. The bus station was old and gray; its windows were filmed with cigarette smoke and dried sweat. The bus stop that Yuugi approached then - serving routes more pedestrian than the charter he had ridden the day previous - was labeled with many numbers and brief descriptions of their destinations. To Jenga, Tic-Tac-Tokyo, Kismet, Simon’s way, and there! To Titan, bus 34, arriving every half hour. Since it was a local bus, the fare would only be a handful of yen, cheaper than even one of his cheeseburgers the night before.
The wait and the ride each were uneventful, if one discounted the six games of in-hand solitaire Yuugi played that prompted an elderly woman sitting in the elderly person section of the bus to call him over to sit beside her. After a short, pleasant, and completely unremarkable conversation about buses, knitting, and card games, the woman pressed upon Yuugi a small wad of yen - maybe enough to buy a cigarette lighter and a couple sodas. He tried rejecting the offer, but the woman just waved him off, not even giving him her name, and she hobbled off the bus looking for all the world like an injured deer.
Finally the bus pulled into the final terminal, and with alert eyes Yuugi took in the battered, late morning skyline of Titan.
They had reached the edge of the board.
._._.
The city of Titan, Yuugi’s grandfather had told him years ago, was initially designed as the ultimate War Game city. In its younger days, before it had exploded in popularity, population, and crime, Titan had been very distinctly divided into eleven separate districts, each named for the type of landscape it was meant to represent. Although the boundaries of these districts overlapped slightly in the subsequent years, the names still stuck. Japan didn’t have a natural tundra or desert as far as Yuugi could recall, but the districts weren’t named precisely this way: each was meant to contain something reminiscent of that landscape, like the Plains were primarily residential, while the Hills were famed for their golf courses and trillion-yen homes.
“Actually,” Grandpa had said, “only ten are actual ‘districts,’ like in regular cities. The eleventh is a building. When I lived in Titan in my youth, the Tower was the central government building - mayor, police, all that, but now...”
Though Yuugi had asked, his grandfather could not tell him who ruled the Tower - power over the building changed hands so quickly that it was useless to keep track unless one actually lived in the city. The Tower stood at least twenty stories taller than any other building in the city, and was visible from almost everywhere.
At the moment, Yuugi was caught in the shadow of the Tower as he moved swiftly through the Desert district’s street market. The market was large, loud, and dirtier than the Domino police force. Everywhere Yuugi looked were cramped stands hawking everything imaginable: foods, clothes, books, electronics, kitschy crafts, musical instruments, jewelry, games, tarot readings, flowers, and a myriad of other things Yuugi was pretty sure were illegal. The street was cramped and crowded on this weekday afternoon, and Yuugi had to tighten his rucksack strap on his single shoulder, the other strap wrapped around his opposite elbow. Earlier the voice had persuaded Yuugi to move the obsidian knife from in the bag to on his person, so now the knife was horizontally pressed flat to his stomach, pinned there by his tight pants and belt. He was probably going to wind up stabbing himself, or at least getting splinters from the obsidian - he really needed to get a sheath for it, and soon.
Yuugi could not see his shadow, but he knew that it was circling around him underfoot. They were both searching for that one thing- there! Through the sea of sound he heard it, young and streetwise.
“Come on, press your luck! Simple game of chance, easy as killing a man in the Wasteland!” The shell game.
The last time Yuugi had seen a real shell game was years ago, when he and his mother had gone to pick Grandfather up at the airport. All things considered he’d been surprised that his mother would take him along, but in any case there had been a punk kid playing dice games near an ATM. When Yuugi had called him out on the fact that his dice had counterweights, Yuugi had to run all the way across the terminal and hide behind a rolling coffee cart to avoid getting brained by the punk.
This time, Yuugi knew that he could very well win any game for hours straight, but Yuugi’s talent at games was suspicious, and he didn’t really want to draw too much attention to himself on his first day in the city - especially not if it meant forcing the other Yuugi to act. Two or three rounds should be enough to get him a sheath and a place to stay the night.
“Try your fortune at the simplest of games!” cried the man, early in his twenties, as he shuffled a deck of playing cards, “anyone!”
“I’ll play you,” said Yuugi, approaching the table that was really only a piece of plywood balanced on some milk crates. The other guy - his eyes rimmed red in fatigue, or drug use, or ridiculous conceptions of proper application of eye makeup - looked over Yuugi with a smile of pearly, jagged teeth.
“Sure thing, kid, Slap down some cash and play away, double or nothing.” The man flicked through his deck with practiced speed, skillfully flicking four cards to skid across the plywood. Yuugi placed a hand over the cards, straightening them without thought.
“What’s the game?”
“Simple matching, fifty-fifty shot,” said the other, gesturing to the cards under Yuugi’s palm. The background hustle seemed to lower to almost nothing in Yuugi’s ears. “Check ‘em. Four aces: two red, two black. You segregate ‘em, you win.”
Yuugi picked up the cards, noticing the way his shadow was cast upon the table, knowing both that his natural shadow should be cast to his left, and that the other Yuugi was lurking there on the pale plywood. A glance at the cards - all suits represented, no telling markings on the backs - and Yuugi spared another look to the shadow. Why was it on the table? Did- would the other Yuugi try to help Yuugi win by cheating? Yuugi scowled.
Yuugi pulled out his dwindled supply of money and placed it on the table. The red-eyed man didn’t even look at the currency and just began quickly shuffling the four cards in his hand so swiftly that, had Yuugi tried watching to track the order, he would have gotten a headache. Instead, Yuugi placed his hands on the table, on his shadow, and thought softly, don’t help me.
The shadow wrote a response, but Yuugi didn’t read it. “We both know the odds here aren’t half-shot,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady, “so how about we even the chances?”
The dealer looked up at Yuugi warily, his eyes and reddening ears making him look a bit like a panda in the wrong colors, his shuffling slowing. “You play this game before?” Yuugi shrugged, but it was forced, and the movement only told Yuugi how tense his own shoulders were getting under the bluff.
“Something like it, only it used dice,” he said, trying to sound nonchalant but probably failing. Maybe it would be better to not be so calm, though, in case the red panda of a dealer decided Yuugi was trying to cheat him? The Panda smiled with his crooked teeth.
“All right kid, what game do you want to play?”
Yuugi shook his head. “Same game, new rule.” Panda started shuffling the cards, though slower as he listened. “You put down the four cards in any order you want, but you have to know where you’re putting them,” Yuugi said, “then I pick two cards. I flip one of those two cards, and of the two cards I didn’t choose, you flip a card that doesn’t match my suit. You with me so far?” The Panda nodded. “After that, I have the option of staying with the second card I picked, or switching to the face-down card I didn’t pick.”
The Panda stared at him, the red across his eyes obviously makeup in the fierce calculation Yuugi now saw in his completely alert gaze.
“Like on those old American game shows,” Yuugi said quickly, “where they have to guess which door hides the car, when there’s three choices?”
The Panda visibly relaxed. “Sure, kid, but it doesn’t help your odds any.” The Panda glanced at the faces of the cards for a second before spreading them out in a line across the plywood. Yuugi tapped the two cards on the left with his eyes closed, studiously ignoring the words the shadow had written upon the table. Yuugi flipped the card on his far left.
You were controlling the game with the Sasoris, weren’t you? Yuugi thought, glancing at the cards. The card he had flipped was the ace of clubs, on the farthest left; the Panda had flipped the ace of diamonds on the farthest right. “I am matching by color, right?” Yuugi asked as he tapped the card to the immediate left of the diamond, not the card he had previously indicated, “so I need the spade?”
The Red Panda, his ears having returned to their original hue but the title refusing to leave, laughed with his hand steady over the card. “What, afraid I’ll cheat you on something like that? Yes, you match colors, so you win this round,” he said as he flipped over the ace of spades. “Lucky shot.”
The Panda snatched Yuugi’s cash, but it was obvious he wasn’t going to make off with it. It was, after all, a mediocre amount for Titan, and the Panda just as quickly handed it back and followed it with another stack of yen. Yuugi quickly counted, determining it was the full double.
The Panda began shuffling again. “Lucky shot, you wanna try again? Same game?”
Yuugi smirked. “Sure.” Again, the four cards came down, and again Yuugi chose the two on the left, again flipping the farthest left. Ace of spades. The dealer, after a moment of hesitation, flipped the second from the right, the ace of hearts. Yuugi nodded, and tapped the card he’d already selected, the one to the immediate right of his black ace. He had seen the dealer’s hesitation before selecting the card, and how his hand had seemingly gone to that far right card in habit, as if he had been mentally replaying the previous round to ‘suddenly realize’ that the far right card was Yuugi’s suit. Yuugi easily saw through the trap, and the fact the dealer underestimated him. The Panda swore when he flipped the ace of clubs.
“One more round,” demanded the Panda, his ears once again flaming red as he flicked across to Yuugi a much larger wad of cash. Yuugi had already quadrupled his money; he really didn’t need to play any more today. Not for pride. Yuugi looked down to the table and watched as his shadow flailed for attention, all his words trailing requests for Yuugi to play again. Yuugi shook his head. Even though he knew he would win - without the shadow’s help - Yuugi rejected the temptation. He simply took up the money and walked away.
._._.
Yuugi’s shadow was pouting. Yuugi was hastening through the market, the crowd thicker than before with releases from nearby schools swarming the streets like locusts. He’d found a sturdy leather sheath for the obsidian knife, thick and tough and probably made from the hide of some great African beast; Yuugi was pretty sure it was illegal to own. It had taken a good chunk of his winnings, but nowhere near an exorbitant amount. The sun hung low in the sky, unseen behind the monstrous towering buildings stretching shadows long across the pavement, inching slowly like melting ice across a warm skillet. Like the needle of a compass, Yuugi’s shadow pointed west, and pouted.
Compass needles don’t normally pout, of course, but shadows rarely ever point towards the sun, so Yuugi was getting used to this sort of thing.
He’d thankfully made it out of the crowd, dodging down surprisingly bare streets in search of a hostel or a café, somewhere cheap to stay the night and not get robbed blind. He hoped that anyone who overheard him speaking would simply think he was very good at hiding one of those bulky portable phones.
“Are you upset that I quit playing?” Yuugi asked, turning right down a side street, his shadow spinning north to lead. Yuugi’s head remained steady, but its shadow visibly nodded. Yuugi sighed.
“If I kept playing, he probably would have freaked out. I’d rather not get into a fight my first day here and lose everything.”
Yuugi watched his shadow as it cocked its head in attention before striking a pose of battle, hunched and poised and quite suddenly wielding shadows of both a sword and shield. Yuugi rolled his eyes.
“Oh, you’d protect me, would you?” The shadow nodded again, twirling its sword before both it and the shield disappeared. Yuugi’s lips certainly did not quirk in a smile. If they did, they were instantly weighed down with worry anyway, so it wouldn’t have mattered.
“I’d rather not provoke someone to the point where I would need protecting in the first place,” Yuugi said, pushing down his sorrow as far as he could, knowing that if he thought too much on this he’d probably wind up crying again, and tears could wait until he could seal them in a musty motel pillow.
As if the thought had conjured it, a neon sign flickered to life a little ways down the road, proclaiming vacancy in an establishment called the “Why Yes, We Do Wash Our Linens!” motel. Yuugi wondered briefly if all the good short names had already been taken. Continuing down the road, Yuugi entered the small motel.
Despite the building’s dingy brown, weather-beaten exterior, the lobby was rather well-lit with white light, perfectly illuminating the non-threatening cream colors of the converted formerly residential sitting room. Small and western-style, the room was methodically arranged to suit the needs more of isolated strangers than of family members, for each of the three small couches were spaced several feet apart - though all still faced the currently dark gas-powered fireplace. Small end tables stood near each leather armrest, each bearing a neatly folded newspaper, and the image oddly struck Yuugi as being like young children sent clean and proper to their distant fathers in an effort to win affection and approval.
On the opposite wall from the fireplace was the staircase to the upper floor, an unaccommodating thing with steps of cobbled stone, obviously meant to be cold and punishing to anyone who dared descend those stairs in winter bare of slippers. Yuugi saw two empty doorways, probably leading to a kitchen and a bathroom, with kitschy English phrases carved in painted wood hanging neatly over each threshold.
Letting the door click shut behind him, Yuugi quickly kicked out of his trainers, sliding the dirty things against the wall to accompany the assortment of shoes already resting there. As he put on a pair of house slippers, Yuugi was surprised to see grass stuck to some of the tennis shoes in the pile, considering where he was in Titan: Grandfather, when explaining the city, had easily categorized what each district specialized in. The Forest had all the standard city exhibits like museums and zoos, while the Grasslands had all the nature parks and schools; the Tundra was the business district, the Wasteland was the slums. The street market had been in the Desert, and Yuugi guessed that this motel was in the Mountains: from what he remembered hearing from Grandfather, neither of these areas had any sort of natural grass anywhere within their boundaries.
Shrugging this off, Yuugi approached the desk near the base of the stairs, a dark and sturdy thing with solid paneling to the ground, probably for hiding easily accessible weapons in case of robbery. A small silver press-bell sat merrily on the desk, buffed and shining despite its obvious age and frequent usage - not a trace of sweat or fingerprints marred Yuugi’s curved and distorted reflection.
He flushed with guilt when he rang it, and even knowing how utterly stupid a reaction that was didn’t help. Shortly, a young woman entered from the presumed kitchen, a dishtowel on her hands and a powder-dusted black apron around her waist. The woman smiled, and though they looked nothing alike Yuugi was reminded fiercely of his mother. His body ached in the sudden wave of homesickness.
“Good afternoon,” said the woman, her voice as high and cheery as the now sweat-smeared bell on the desk, which gave another little chirrup when she absently wiped it with the towel, “how can I help you, young man?”
Yuugi smiled back, trying to hide his discomfort with the young matron. God, he just wanted to see his mother again-
“Yeah, I wanted to rent a room, and I saw the vacancy sign-”
“All we have left are singles,” she said, opening and flipping through a tall leather notebook, the slap of stiff pages accentuating the quiet of the room.
“That’s fine,” Yuugi said, digging through his pocket for his remaining winnings, “Ah, how much per night?” Yuugi hoped it wouldn’t take too long to jump ship, so it would be easier to just pay as he stayed rather than go for a week or so at a time.
Money changed hand - there went most of Yuugi’s cash, and he was thankful that his stay included meals. The woman handed him a small key with an orange tag. “Yours is the second door on the left-hand side,” she said as Yuugi pocketed the key, “meals are at seven and seven. If you need anything, just let me know, I’m usually in the kitchen. I’m Yamafuku Miyako.”
Yuugi gave a polite bow, but his mind was racing. In all this time, no one had asked him for a name, so he hadn’t yet bothered to come up with an alias. Shit! It wasn’t like he could use his own name, either of them; they were both too uncommon and weird.
“Ah, thank you, Yamafuku-san,” he said, stalling, “My name is-” Common last name! Think think think, “Honda.” (He wouldn’t mind if Yuugi borrowed his name, would he? Actually, he’d probably kill Yuugi for everything- focus!)
The matron was laughing gaily, a motherly chuckle as she shook her head. “I need your given name, little Honda-kun, unless you want to pay for Honda Kenji-san’s room and board, too?”
The only thing Yuugi could think of was the Red Panda dealer from earlier, and even Yuugi thought that ‘Honda Panda’ was a bit ridiculous, what with the rhyming and all, and that shell game from the airport with the-
“Saikoro. Honda Saikoro.” She stopped chuckling, looking him over, and her eyes lingered on his waist. Oh no, thought Yuugi, the knife! What if she kicked him out for illegal weapon possession, and didn’t refund his deposit? Dammit all.
“So you’re a gambler then, Honda-kun?” What? She was looking at the deck pouch on his belt. Right.
“Hard not to, in Titan,” he said with a shrug, silently praying she wouldn’t kick him out, “and with a name like Saikoro. But I prefer playing for fun,” he added with a small smile, “since it’s hard to be friends with other players when they feel betrayed by you winning.”
The matron smiled and chuckled again, wagging a finger at Yuugi. “Maybe it’s your cocky attitude, Honda-kun, that makes them angry?”
“No,” said Yuugi, heading up the staircase and pausing to lean over the wrought iron railing, calling down, “it’s definitely them being sore losers.”
The matron’s laughter followed him the rest of the way upstairs, and Yuugi felt his shadow slide under the room door as Yuugi fiddled with the lock itself. If her laughter continued after that, Yuugi wasn’t sure for two reasons. The first, and obvious one, was that once he made it inside the room, before even dropping his rucksack, Yuugi closed and locked the door, thereby muffling the sound beyond. The second reason was that, once Yuugi turned to face the room itself, all his attention was focused on the shadow-mannequin boy waiting for him, gradually gaining hue the longer he sat on the edge of the western-style bed.
No active thought process remained to Yuugi to listen for the woman’s fading laughter, for his brain was trying to not shut down completely as the semi-transparent boy formed before him, the pattern of the orange coverlet distorting the ghost’s appearance. Yuugi remembered seeing this happen once before, but even through everything that had happened, Yuugi had thought he’d dreamed that part.
Yuugi was perfectly willing to accept that he was crazy. He was pretty sure insanity wasn’t supposed to give a person the ability to walk through walls.
The other boy did not seem to think that being less than completely opaque was anything out of the ordinary, for he simply looked at Yuugi with a mildly puzzled expression on his ghostly face.
“Are you all right, aibou?” asked the other boy, and suddenly this strange occurrence didn’t seem quite so strange (though the semi-transparency was much more freakish and frightening in a well-lit room).
Yuugi swallowed whatever organ it was that had crawled into his throat, and he said with a stutter, “oth-other me?”
._._.
~ 01 ~ 02 ~ 03 ~ 04 ~ 05 ~ 06 ~ ~ 07 ~ 08 ~ 09 ~ 10 ~ 11 ~ ~ 12 ~ 13 ~ 14 ~ 15 ~ ~ 16 ~ 17 ~ 1 8 ~ ~ 19 ~ 20 ~ ~ 21 ~
Summary: After Yuugi wakes up at the scene of a crime with blood on his hands and a voice in his head, there's only one thing he can do: Run.
._._.
The king is such a tower of wisdom
._._.
Yuugi had gotten two, maybe two and a half hours of sleep by they time they arrived in Gammon. The bus station, thankfully, was near enough the outer ridge of town that it would only take a few hours to walk to Titan. However, it was already nearing sundown and Yuugi felt leery of traveling at night. The other Yuugi, predictably, had other ideas.
It’s not as if we need to worry about being attacked by robbers, wrote the shadow of Yuugi upon the table. Yuugi, however, only gave the writing a cursory glance before he took another bite of his triple-stacked cheeseburger from the nearby Meat Goes In Your Face Deliciously! (“Unwieldy Name, Unwieldy Burgers!”); there were two more similarly sized burgers resting thus far untouched on the plastic tray, as well as the side jug of cola and some fried potatoes. Yuugi had, in the past few days, only consumed a sandwich at the police station, an ice cream cone with Jounouchi, and half of Anzu’s bento at school the day before everything went to hell: he was starving.
On top of that, other than the few hours he’d had on the bus, and however long the surgery had taken, Yuugi had not slept in over sixty hours. It was a surprise he was still functioning.
And if you’re worried about sleep, the shadow added on the table, perhaps catching the tail of Yuugi’s thought, or perhaps seeing the dark circles of fatigue under his eyes, then you can sleep while I take us to Titan. Your body won’t be weary, I promise.
“I appreciate the sentiment, other me,” Yuugi whispered into his burger, glad that the restaurant was mostly deserted, “but sleep back there isn’t-” he had to pause for a long yawn, “-isn’t the same. I wake up having no idea where I am or what I’m doing, and...”
It wasn’t so much that the thought trailed off, as Yuugi’s shadow retracted from the table. It was more that Yuugi’s mind had conjured an image that Yuugi’s thoughts did not articulate into words. After all, not all thought is stream-of-conscious dialog - if one were asked to imagine one’s home, one would picture the place in one’s mind, not a list of descriptions for it.
The image that had flashed into Yuugi’s mind was Sasori Hikari, tumbling over sideways with a blood-soaked dress and a slit throat. If the other Yuugi had a face, he would have scowled.
Are you still upset about that girl’s death? asked the voice, the words slanted with distaste, that you would prefer she had gotten her way and killed you as well?
That’s not what I meant, snipped Yuugi irritably, finishing off his first burger and following it with a chaser of potatoes, I want to be awake for the journey. I want to wake up in the same place I went to sleep and not discover I’d killed someone in my sleep.
She killed herself! the voice responded angrily. she lost the Dark Game, and it consumed her mind to the point where she would rather die than face her heart’s truth.
You wouldn’t have allowed her to win, would you? There was no possible way for her to win.
Just because it has never been done before does not mean it cannot be done. You bested the Millennium Puzzle, which has never before been solved.
That’s completely different! Yuugi exclaimed within his mind, his outward body showing almost no signs of this inner battle. He began the second burger. The Puzzle took me eight years to solve. If it followed the rules of your Dark Games, I would have died that first night!
There was a silence then, in Yuugi’s mind, tense and angry and hesitant. If he bothered to look, though, the apathetic clerk behind the counter would only see a really tired kid (probably coming off a drug high, he would think with empathy) eating a cheeseburger. Yuugi chewed slowly, waiting for the voice to argue back, or concede defeat, something to indicate what they were going to do now.
Minutes passed in silence, and Yuugi demolished the second burger, the remaining fried potatoes, almost all of the soda, and two-thirds of the final burger. His stomach was aching in the sudden onslaught of food after such a sparse amount over the previous few days. Finishing the final cheeseburger, Yuugi remained sitting in the booth, waiting patiently.
Finally, the voice responded softly. If you wish to physically sleep, then you shall sleep. The anger and ferocity was no longer even remotely present in the voice that echoed in Yuugi’s mind and in his ears.
Thank you, replied Yuugi, crumbling up the wrappers. As reluctant as he was to admit it, Yuugi was now rather dependent upon the voice in his mind. Yuugi would not have gotten out of his holding cell, would not have gotten back home, would not have come up with so many plans to cover his tracks without it. Even if Yuugi by himself made it to Titan, he doubted he would be able to make it out of the country with his psyche intact: Yuugi was an easy victim. Thus dependent, Yuugi may have disliked the presence of the voice, but he dared not try to remove it from his mind: without being able to even consider using such removal as a threat against the other Yuugi, he did not think he would be strong enough to fight it off if it tried to forcibly take control of his body once more. Yuugi was completely at the mercy of his shadow. I only want a couple hours that won’t give me motion sickness. We can still leave while it’s dark if you prefer. I’m sorry for getting so angry.
“Come back and gorge yourself again!” called the lone clerk, his voice hoarse from the late hour, but neither Yuugi was listening.
I have overstepped my bounds, replied the voice, and our emotions started feeding into one another again. You have… reminded me of something that I should never have forgotten.
Yuugi tried to stifle his yawn, but still he followed the path that his shadow had begun to lay out before him, pivoting and turning around him like the needle of a compass. Illumination at this late hour had been reduced to the electric white of the restaurant and the gaudy blurred orange of the street lamps. After several minutes passing condemned buildings and empty offices, Yuugi’s shadow led him into a narrow alleyway. Yuugi easily collapsed down against one brick wall, and pulling his rucksack onto his lap he curled around the bag. Yuugi’s shadow, however, had stretched tall along the opposite wall, and Yuugi knew that should anything happen in the night, that shadow would be there to protect him. So, so tired, Yuugi quickly succumbed to the weight of his fatigue, swiftly going into the welcome darkness of sleep.
._._.
On the front page of the newspaper the following morning was Yuugi’s photograph. The accompanying article, Yuugi read from the abandoned paper he nicked from a recycling bin at the bus station minutes before, was an alarmist piece about the crazed “loner kid” who had killed two celebrities and one of his classmates in a plea for attention, before escaping police custody sometime yesterday. It gave a graphic and incorrect account of the crimes committed, and the reporter tried speculating as to how dangerous Yuugi had to be in order to escape from detainment at the police station itself, becoming the first person to ever do so in the history of Domino. Yuugi tried focusing on the comments from ‘friends and family of the killer,’ but his attention kept going back to his photograph.
It was lined up in a row with the photos of Jounouchi and the Sasori sisters. Their pictures were all taken from school I.D. cards (though it looked as though the Sasoris’ had gone through a touch-up first), while Yuugi’s was his mug shot from his short stay in detention. There was nothing in particular about the photograph that actually identified it as a mug shot, something that surprised Yuugi, but he recognized it all the same. His eyes were puffed and dark from crying, but enough time had passed that he wasn’t actively doing so.
For some reason, the Yuugi in the picture was smiling. He didn’t look particularly happy, but the lips were upturned in irony. The two girls, of course, had photographs that looked as though ripped from magazines even if they obviously weren’t, made up in all their fame-spoiled pomp: perfect white teeth and eyes visibly open, smiles perfectly crafted to move as few muscles as possible. Finally, there was Jounouchi, looking sour and impatient. This picture had been taken long before he and Yuugi had become friends, and the tightness of his face and the disarray of his hair almost screamed out the truth of his gang roots.
Yuugi turned his gaze from that photo quickly, not wanting to lose his memory of a smiling, laughing friend to the image of an ill-caught boy he barely knew.
Yuugi Mutou, left, and his three victims-
“Wait,” muttered Yuugi, glancing at the pictures again: Yuugi, Hikari, Hebi, Jounouchi-
Mutou, left-
Yuugi closed his eyes and shook softly with what may have been laughter.
Yuugi’s picture was on the right. Whoever had written the tagline had attached his name, the killer’s name, to the photo of Jounouchi. This was one of the top selling papers in the nation - and anyone using this as their source of information would connect Yuugi (should they recognize him) with the photo of a victim and dismiss him instantly, for obviously he wasn’t dead and therefore couldn’t be connected to the crime.
Yuugi lowered the paper and peered conspiringly at his shadow. “I think this buys us a free day of travel,” he said quietly, knowing that no one else was near his little stakeout at this corner lamppost, “since no one’s looking for me. Should we risk the bus?”
The shadow, after a moment, nodded and slowly waved a trail of words from its right hand. The risk is low, wrote the shadow Yuugi, but how much money remains?
“Enough for a bus ticket,” Yuugi recalled, “and maybe a couple days of food, if I stretch it. I think that punk overcharged me.” Just thinking about those gargantuan burgers made Yuugi’s stomach gurgle, though he wasn’t sure if it was hunger for more, or a protest at being forced to digest so much of the stuff in one go.
Another wave. That’s not much. Yuugi adjusted the rucksack on his one good shoulder: when he had woken up, his wound had already been redressed. He sighed, surveying their surroundings.
It was just after seven in the morning, so the sun still hung low in the sky. There was only a trickle of commuters down the often-busy road. Although a weekday, the rush of businessmen had already passed, or still had hours before they needed to arrive at their destinations. The bus station was old and gray; its windows were filmed with cigarette smoke and dried sweat. The bus stop that Yuugi approached then - serving routes more pedestrian than the charter he had ridden the day previous - was labeled with many numbers and brief descriptions of their destinations. To Jenga, Tic-Tac-Tokyo, Kismet, Simon’s way, and there! To Titan, bus 34, arriving every half hour. Since it was a local bus, the fare would only be a handful of yen, cheaper than even one of his cheeseburgers the night before.
The wait and the ride each were uneventful, if one discounted the six games of in-hand solitaire Yuugi played that prompted an elderly woman sitting in the elderly person section of the bus to call him over to sit beside her. After a short, pleasant, and completely unremarkable conversation about buses, knitting, and card games, the woman pressed upon Yuugi a small wad of yen - maybe enough to buy a cigarette lighter and a couple sodas. He tried rejecting the offer, but the woman just waved him off, not even giving him her name, and she hobbled off the bus looking for all the world like an injured deer.
Finally the bus pulled into the final terminal, and with alert eyes Yuugi took in the battered, late morning skyline of Titan.
They had reached the edge of the board.
._._.
The city of Titan, Yuugi’s grandfather had told him years ago, was initially designed as the ultimate War Game city. In its younger days, before it had exploded in popularity, population, and crime, Titan had been very distinctly divided into eleven separate districts, each named for the type of landscape it was meant to represent. Although the boundaries of these districts overlapped slightly in the subsequent years, the names still stuck. Japan didn’t have a natural tundra or desert as far as Yuugi could recall, but the districts weren’t named precisely this way: each was meant to contain something reminiscent of that landscape, like the Plains were primarily residential, while the Hills were famed for their golf courses and trillion-yen homes.
“Actually,” Grandpa had said, “only ten are actual ‘districts,’ like in regular cities. The eleventh is a building. When I lived in Titan in my youth, the Tower was the central government building - mayor, police, all that, but now...”
Though Yuugi had asked, his grandfather could not tell him who ruled the Tower - power over the building changed hands so quickly that it was useless to keep track unless one actually lived in the city. The Tower stood at least twenty stories taller than any other building in the city, and was visible from almost everywhere.
At the moment, Yuugi was caught in the shadow of the Tower as he moved swiftly through the Desert district’s street market. The market was large, loud, and dirtier than the Domino police force. Everywhere Yuugi looked were cramped stands hawking everything imaginable: foods, clothes, books, electronics, kitschy crafts, musical instruments, jewelry, games, tarot readings, flowers, and a myriad of other things Yuugi was pretty sure were illegal. The street was cramped and crowded on this weekday afternoon, and Yuugi had to tighten his rucksack strap on his single shoulder, the other strap wrapped around his opposite elbow. Earlier the voice had persuaded Yuugi to move the obsidian knife from in the bag to on his person, so now the knife was horizontally pressed flat to his stomach, pinned there by his tight pants and belt. He was probably going to wind up stabbing himself, or at least getting splinters from the obsidian - he really needed to get a sheath for it, and soon.
Yuugi could not see his shadow, but he knew that it was circling around him underfoot. They were both searching for that one thing- there! Through the sea of sound he heard it, young and streetwise.
“Come on, press your luck! Simple game of chance, easy as killing a man in the Wasteland!” The shell game.
The last time Yuugi had seen a real shell game was years ago, when he and his mother had gone to pick Grandfather up at the airport. All things considered he’d been surprised that his mother would take him along, but in any case there had been a punk kid playing dice games near an ATM. When Yuugi had called him out on the fact that his dice had counterweights, Yuugi had to run all the way across the terminal and hide behind a rolling coffee cart to avoid getting brained by the punk.
This time, Yuugi knew that he could very well win any game for hours straight, but Yuugi’s talent at games was suspicious, and he didn’t really want to draw too much attention to himself on his first day in the city - especially not if it meant forcing the other Yuugi to act. Two or three rounds should be enough to get him a sheath and a place to stay the night.
“Try your fortune at the simplest of games!” cried the man, early in his twenties, as he shuffled a deck of playing cards, “anyone!”
“I’ll play you,” said Yuugi, approaching the table that was really only a piece of plywood balanced on some milk crates. The other guy - his eyes rimmed red in fatigue, or drug use, or ridiculous conceptions of proper application of eye makeup - looked over Yuugi with a smile of pearly, jagged teeth.
“Sure thing, kid, Slap down some cash and play away, double or nothing.” The man flicked through his deck with practiced speed, skillfully flicking four cards to skid across the plywood. Yuugi placed a hand over the cards, straightening them without thought.
“What’s the game?”
“Simple matching, fifty-fifty shot,” said the other, gesturing to the cards under Yuugi’s palm. The background hustle seemed to lower to almost nothing in Yuugi’s ears. “Check ‘em. Four aces: two red, two black. You segregate ‘em, you win.”
Yuugi picked up the cards, noticing the way his shadow was cast upon the table, knowing both that his natural shadow should be cast to his left, and that the other Yuugi was lurking there on the pale plywood. A glance at the cards - all suits represented, no telling markings on the backs - and Yuugi spared another look to the shadow. Why was it on the table? Did- would the other Yuugi try to help Yuugi win by cheating? Yuugi scowled.
Yuugi pulled out his dwindled supply of money and placed it on the table. The red-eyed man didn’t even look at the currency and just began quickly shuffling the four cards in his hand so swiftly that, had Yuugi tried watching to track the order, he would have gotten a headache. Instead, Yuugi placed his hands on the table, on his shadow, and thought softly, don’t help me.
The shadow wrote a response, but Yuugi didn’t read it. “We both know the odds here aren’t half-shot,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady, “so how about we even the chances?”
The dealer looked up at Yuugi warily, his eyes and reddening ears making him look a bit like a panda in the wrong colors, his shuffling slowing. “You play this game before?” Yuugi shrugged, but it was forced, and the movement only told Yuugi how tense his own shoulders were getting under the bluff.
“Something like it, only it used dice,” he said, trying to sound nonchalant but probably failing. Maybe it would be better to not be so calm, though, in case the red panda of a dealer decided Yuugi was trying to cheat him? The Panda smiled with his crooked teeth.
“All right kid, what game do you want to play?”
Yuugi shook his head. “Same game, new rule.” Panda started shuffling the cards, though slower as he listened. “You put down the four cards in any order you want, but you have to know where you’re putting them,” Yuugi said, “then I pick two cards. I flip one of those two cards, and of the two cards I didn’t choose, you flip a card that doesn’t match my suit. You with me so far?” The Panda nodded. “After that, I have the option of staying with the second card I picked, or switching to the face-down card I didn’t pick.”
The Panda stared at him, the red across his eyes obviously makeup in the fierce calculation Yuugi now saw in his completely alert gaze.
“Like on those old American game shows,” Yuugi said quickly, “where they have to guess which door hides the car, when there’s three choices?”
The Panda visibly relaxed. “Sure, kid, but it doesn’t help your odds any.” The Panda glanced at the faces of the cards for a second before spreading them out in a line across the plywood. Yuugi tapped the two cards on the left with his eyes closed, studiously ignoring the words the shadow had written upon the table. Yuugi flipped the card on his far left.
You were controlling the game with the Sasoris, weren’t you? Yuugi thought, glancing at the cards. The card he had flipped was the ace of clubs, on the farthest left; the Panda had flipped the ace of diamonds on the farthest right. “I am matching by color, right?” Yuugi asked as he tapped the card to the immediate left of the diamond, not the card he had previously indicated, “so I need the spade?”
The Red Panda, his ears having returned to their original hue but the title refusing to leave, laughed with his hand steady over the card. “What, afraid I’ll cheat you on something like that? Yes, you match colors, so you win this round,” he said as he flipped over the ace of spades. “Lucky shot.”
The Panda snatched Yuugi’s cash, but it was obvious he wasn’t going to make off with it. It was, after all, a mediocre amount for Titan, and the Panda just as quickly handed it back and followed it with another stack of yen. Yuugi quickly counted, determining it was the full double.
The Panda began shuffling again. “Lucky shot, you wanna try again? Same game?”
Yuugi smirked. “Sure.” Again, the four cards came down, and again Yuugi chose the two on the left, again flipping the farthest left. Ace of spades. The dealer, after a moment of hesitation, flipped the second from the right, the ace of hearts. Yuugi nodded, and tapped the card he’d already selected, the one to the immediate right of his black ace. He had seen the dealer’s hesitation before selecting the card, and how his hand had seemingly gone to that far right card in habit, as if he had been mentally replaying the previous round to ‘suddenly realize’ that the far right card was Yuugi’s suit. Yuugi easily saw through the trap, and the fact the dealer underestimated him. The Panda swore when he flipped the ace of clubs.
“One more round,” demanded the Panda, his ears once again flaming red as he flicked across to Yuugi a much larger wad of cash. Yuugi had already quadrupled his money; he really didn’t need to play any more today. Not for pride. Yuugi looked down to the table and watched as his shadow flailed for attention, all his words trailing requests for Yuugi to play again. Yuugi shook his head. Even though he knew he would win - without the shadow’s help - Yuugi rejected the temptation. He simply took up the money and walked away.
._._.
Yuugi’s shadow was pouting. Yuugi was hastening through the market, the crowd thicker than before with releases from nearby schools swarming the streets like locusts. He’d found a sturdy leather sheath for the obsidian knife, thick and tough and probably made from the hide of some great African beast; Yuugi was pretty sure it was illegal to own. It had taken a good chunk of his winnings, but nowhere near an exorbitant amount. The sun hung low in the sky, unseen behind the monstrous towering buildings stretching shadows long across the pavement, inching slowly like melting ice across a warm skillet. Like the needle of a compass, Yuugi’s shadow pointed west, and pouted.
Compass needles don’t normally pout, of course, but shadows rarely ever point towards the sun, so Yuugi was getting used to this sort of thing.
He’d thankfully made it out of the crowd, dodging down surprisingly bare streets in search of a hostel or a café, somewhere cheap to stay the night and not get robbed blind. He hoped that anyone who overheard him speaking would simply think he was very good at hiding one of those bulky portable phones.
“Are you upset that I quit playing?” Yuugi asked, turning right down a side street, his shadow spinning north to lead. Yuugi’s head remained steady, but its shadow visibly nodded. Yuugi sighed.
“If I kept playing, he probably would have freaked out. I’d rather not get into a fight my first day here and lose everything.”
Yuugi watched his shadow as it cocked its head in attention before striking a pose of battle, hunched and poised and quite suddenly wielding shadows of both a sword and shield. Yuugi rolled his eyes.
“Oh, you’d protect me, would you?” The shadow nodded again, twirling its sword before both it and the shield disappeared. Yuugi’s lips certainly did not quirk in a smile. If they did, they were instantly weighed down with worry anyway, so it wouldn’t have mattered.
“I’d rather not provoke someone to the point where I would need protecting in the first place,” Yuugi said, pushing down his sorrow as far as he could, knowing that if he thought too much on this he’d probably wind up crying again, and tears could wait until he could seal them in a musty motel pillow.
As if the thought had conjured it, a neon sign flickered to life a little ways down the road, proclaiming vacancy in an establishment called the “Why Yes, We Do Wash Our Linens!” motel. Yuugi wondered briefly if all the good short names had already been taken. Continuing down the road, Yuugi entered the small motel.
Despite the building’s dingy brown, weather-beaten exterior, the lobby was rather well-lit with white light, perfectly illuminating the non-threatening cream colors of the converted formerly residential sitting room. Small and western-style, the room was methodically arranged to suit the needs more of isolated strangers than of family members, for each of the three small couches were spaced several feet apart - though all still faced the currently dark gas-powered fireplace. Small end tables stood near each leather armrest, each bearing a neatly folded newspaper, and the image oddly struck Yuugi as being like young children sent clean and proper to their distant fathers in an effort to win affection and approval.
On the opposite wall from the fireplace was the staircase to the upper floor, an unaccommodating thing with steps of cobbled stone, obviously meant to be cold and punishing to anyone who dared descend those stairs in winter bare of slippers. Yuugi saw two empty doorways, probably leading to a kitchen and a bathroom, with kitschy English phrases carved in painted wood hanging neatly over each threshold.
Letting the door click shut behind him, Yuugi quickly kicked out of his trainers, sliding the dirty things against the wall to accompany the assortment of shoes already resting there. As he put on a pair of house slippers, Yuugi was surprised to see grass stuck to some of the tennis shoes in the pile, considering where he was in Titan: Grandfather, when explaining the city, had easily categorized what each district specialized in. The Forest had all the standard city exhibits like museums and zoos, while the Grasslands had all the nature parks and schools; the Tundra was the business district, the Wasteland was the slums. The street market had been in the Desert, and Yuugi guessed that this motel was in the Mountains: from what he remembered hearing from Grandfather, neither of these areas had any sort of natural grass anywhere within their boundaries.
Shrugging this off, Yuugi approached the desk near the base of the stairs, a dark and sturdy thing with solid paneling to the ground, probably for hiding easily accessible weapons in case of robbery. A small silver press-bell sat merrily on the desk, buffed and shining despite its obvious age and frequent usage - not a trace of sweat or fingerprints marred Yuugi’s curved and distorted reflection.
He flushed with guilt when he rang it, and even knowing how utterly stupid a reaction that was didn’t help. Shortly, a young woman entered from the presumed kitchen, a dishtowel on her hands and a powder-dusted black apron around her waist. The woman smiled, and though they looked nothing alike Yuugi was reminded fiercely of his mother. His body ached in the sudden wave of homesickness.
“Good afternoon,” said the woman, her voice as high and cheery as the now sweat-smeared bell on the desk, which gave another little chirrup when she absently wiped it with the towel, “how can I help you, young man?”
Yuugi smiled back, trying to hide his discomfort with the young matron. God, he just wanted to see his mother again-
“Yeah, I wanted to rent a room, and I saw the vacancy sign-”
“All we have left are singles,” she said, opening and flipping through a tall leather notebook, the slap of stiff pages accentuating the quiet of the room.
“That’s fine,” Yuugi said, digging through his pocket for his remaining winnings, “Ah, how much per night?” Yuugi hoped it wouldn’t take too long to jump ship, so it would be easier to just pay as he stayed rather than go for a week or so at a time.
Money changed hand - there went most of Yuugi’s cash, and he was thankful that his stay included meals. The woman handed him a small key with an orange tag. “Yours is the second door on the left-hand side,” she said as Yuugi pocketed the key, “meals are at seven and seven. If you need anything, just let me know, I’m usually in the kitchen. I’m Yamafuku Miyako.”
Yuugi gave a polite bow, but his mind was racing. In all this time, no one had asked him for a name, so he hadn’t yet bothered to come up with an alias. Shit! It wasn’t like he could use his own name, either of them; they were both too uncommon and weird.
“Ah, thank you, Yamafuku-san,” he said, stalling, “My name is-” Common last name! Think think think, “Honda.” (He wouldn’t mind if Yuugi borrowed his name, would he? Actually, he’d probably kill Yuugi for everything- focus!)
The matron was laughing gaily, a motherly chuckle as she shook her head. “I need your given name, little Honda-kun, unless you want to pay for Honda Kenji-san’s room and board, too?”
The only thing Yuugi could think of was the Red Panda dealer from earlier, and even Yuugi thought that ‘Honda Panda’ was a bit ridiculous, what with the rhyming and all, and that shell game from the airport with the-
“Saikoro. Honda Saikoro.” She stopped chuckling, looking him over, and her eyes lingered on his waist. Oh no, thought Yuugi, the knife! What if she kicked him out for illegal weapon possession, and didn’t refund his deposit? Dammit all.
“So you’re a gambler then, Honda-kun?” What? She was looking at the deck pouch on his belt. Right.
“Hard not to, in Titan,” he said with a shrug, silently praying she wouldn’t kick him out, “and with a name like Saikoro. But I prefer playing for fun,” he added with a small smile, “since it’s hard to be friends with other players when they feel betrayed by you winning.”
The matron smiled and chuckled again, wagging a finger at Yuugi. “Maybe it’s your cocky attitude, Honda-kun, that makes them angry?”
“No,” said Yuugi, heading up the staircase and pausing to lean over the wrought iron railing, calling down, “it’s definitely them being sore losers.”
The matron’s laughter followed him the rest of the way upstairs, and Yuugi felt his shadow slide under the room door as Yuugi fiddled with the lock itself. If her laughter continued after that, Yuugi wasn’t sure for two reasons. The first, and obvious one, was that once he made it inside the room, before even dropping his rucksack, Yuugi closed and locked the door, thereby muffling the sound beyond. The second reason was that, once Yuugi turned to face the room itself, all his attention was focused on the shadow-mannequin boy waiting for him, gradually gaining hue the longer he sat on the edge of the western-style bed.
No active thought process remained to Yuugi to listen for the woman’s fading laughter, for his brain was trying to not shut down completely as the semi-transparent boy formed before him, the pattern of the orange coverlet distorting the ghost’s appearance. Yuugi remembered seeing this happen once before, but even through everything that had happened, Yuugi had thought he’d dreamed that part.
Yuugi was perfectly willing to accept that he was crazy. He was pretty sure insanity wasn’t supposed to give a person the ability to walk through walls.
The other boy did not seem to think that being less than completely opaque was anything out of the ordinary, for he simply looked at Yuugi with a mildly puzzled expression on his ghostly face.
“Are you all right, aibou?” asked the other boy, and suddenly this strange occurrence didn’t seem quite so strange (though the semi-transparency was much more freakish and frightening in a well-lit room).
Yuugi swallowed whatever organ it was that had crawled into his throat, and he said with a stutter, “oth-other me?”
._._.
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