Chapter Text
“Mister Mutou?”
Yugi is so distracted he somehow manages to miss the sound of his own surname in the quietest room imaginable. The looming cloudy weather outside the window pulls at his attention far better than anything happening around him, already troubling his plans for the way home with the realization that he has no umbrella for what looks like an unexpected rainy night.
Yugi’s councelor, a short-haired lady well into her thirties, shifts in her seat away and in front of his, clearing her throat subtly enough to chide him without embarrassing him too much. A startled Yugi finally gets back into the chat, cheeks pink despite the woman’s best efforts to spare him some shame.
“Uh--Sorry!” He yelps, and then chuckles nervously. “Sorry, the weather didn’t look like a problem on the way here and it suddenly got so bad through the session. I was wondering how jammed the train stations would get by the time I get out of here...”
“That’s alright.” The woman’s smile is polite. “You don’t get to see the sky a lot from your office, do you?”
“I do, but I haven’t been there lately…” Yugi starts, grinning slightly at the chance to talk about his work. “I’ve been really busy with our latest project, so I’ve hardly left the testing labs the past two weeks. Time flies when you’re down there because of all the last-minute bugs and little imperfections that show up on actual performance, and besides the walls being sound-proof there’s nothing but screens all around us.”
“No wonder…” The therapist glances down at her tablet for notes. “It’s the same project you were telling me about last time? The one Kaiba Corp is releasing this summer?”
“That’s right.”
“You seem proud of it.”
He lights up considerably at a chance to gush.
“I--I am, actually! It feels really good to be part of a team that’s known for being so...well, good. I like working with all those talented people, and what we’re doing always feels new and different. It’s amazing to be making games most people can always expect good quality from.”
“And your hobbies? How’s that coming along?”
And just like that, he’s shoved back into his usual meekness; Yugi’s enthusiasm is steadily replaced by an awkward laugh that fills in the very noticeable pause.
“My job is...kind of my current hobby, honestly. I like it that much.”
The therapist hums. Though subtle, Yugi can hear a hint of doubt in it, and it makes him feel a little too self-conscious for words to describe.
“Well...It’s good that you do, but we’ve touched on this previously,” She slides her finger across her screen, swiping left for past entries in Yugi’s previous sessions—or so he can guess, at least. “Interests unrelated to your income are a must for you. You can’t let your life revolve around work, remember?”
Oh, he does.
But instead of saying so, Yugi looks down at his shoes, embarrassed. This makes the therapist move along the conversation herself.
“The first step towards bettering your situation was to keep yourself busy, but now that we’re finally there with this dream job, we need some balance so you don’t end up overworking or stressing yourself further, no matter how much you currently like it.” She looks up from her notes. “Maybe afterwork activities with your office peers could come in here, or some sort of weekly workshop to spark new interests…?”
“Um...I haven’t looked into it much.” Yugi tells her, lying through his teeth. “I haven’t really had the time to.”
“It’s important that you try to consciously make the time.” She tells him, “You can start out simple. Maybe 15 minutes per day to look at alternatives?”
The idea seems a little hopeless from the get-go, but Yugi still nods.
“I’ll give it a try.” He promises. This gets his therapist to smile encouragingly, and she quickly jolts it down on her notes-- something Yugi secretly finds a little pressuring. Or a lot. If this wasn’t ressolved by the next session, he’d definitely feel bad about it, like it was some sort of unfinished homework he’d failed to turn in.
...Ugh.
With that, the woman looks up from her notes with a smile.
“Alright, that’s a wrap for today.” She says. “How are you feeling right now?”
“Already? Well...I’m okay right now, I guess.” Yugi shrugs. “Nothing particularly bad’s going on, so that’s probably good.”
“That’s very good to know, but I still think we’re at a point where we can start aiming a little bit higher than “probably good”—-starting with the search of new hobbies.” She tells him, now getting up from her seat. She strides towards Yugi to offer a handshake. “Will we see each other next month, same time as usual?”
'Please, no.’ Is Yugi’s immediate thought, already dreading the new session despite not having even walked out of the current one. But instead of saying so, he shakes her hand with a practiced smile. It just comes off way too easily to even try to do anything differently.
“Sure, I’ll make my appointment on the way out. Thanks for today.”
And so he does; same time as usual, one month from now.
Yugi Mutou is a person of routine, after all.
Just as he was before his life turned around--but we don’t talk about that.
We don’t even think about it.
--
The road home is as gloomy as the window from the therapist’s office promised; the packed train is warm enough that it doesn’t matter much that Yugi wasn’t prepared for rain, thankfully, but the walk to the game shop is another story altogether. It’s a good thing it’s just a couple blocks from the station.
While this could’ve been a cartoonishly bad day between the rainy weather and the depressingly stale therapy session, Yugi has enough willpower and optimism to at least try to fight it off with some good old friendship. On his train ride and even on the way home, he texts Anzu to ask for updates about her newest work drama; he has no business expecting a quick reply with the enormous time difference between them, but Anzu somehow manages to deliver most of the time.
( It’s usually during weekends or when it’s about the pettier matters, Yugi has noticed.)
Yugi smiles slightly at his screen. Despite the american mannerisms that have peppered into Anzu’s texting, he can hear her voice in his head clear as day-- offended and perhaps a little too exasperated and passionate over someone else’s problem. She’s as meddlesome as ever, which tended not to be too fun when he was the one with the problem and on the end of her fussing, but he’s recently found it pretty fun to listen to her takes on the messy love lives and habits of the other chorus girls and coworkers in her most recent shows.
Anzu’s rants make for a very entertaining way home until he’s about a block away from the game shop, the sky now a dark gray and the persistent raindrops dampening his hair and clothes gradually. It’s all becoming heavy enough to promise a downpour, and a distracted Yugi barely turns his head up for most of his walk, weary of the exact places he knows he’ll find a crosswalk or traffic lights.
Despite his best efforts, he’s aware that even the engaging chat with Anzu can’t do much to cover what a bore of a day he’s about to finish through.
All of that makes his arrival to the shop all the more surprising, when, out of the blue, a voice pulls his attention away from the phone screen and the jingling keys he’s instinctively already half-pulled out of his pocket.
“Yugi?”
He freezes as if on command.
The only way he can tell for sure that this call hasn’t actually stopped time itself are the raindrops falling over his suspended keys one right after the other.
No matter how thoroughly he’d been working on erasing it from his memory and most of what it meant to him all across the years, he knows this voice.
Or rather--he knew this voice. He knew it so well that his body reacts on impulse to it, against his better judgement; his eyes grow wide and his ears perk for the first time in a very, very long while.
And the familiar voice speaks again, after a very long and incredulous pause on Yugi’s side.
“...Yugi.”
This time, Yugi notices a shift. The tone of this nostalgic voice sounds not only confirming, but… fond. Relieved, even.
Yugi dares to glance over his shoulder—just a peek, he tells himself, because the curiosity is downright killing him. He’s turning his head so slowly it’s like he’s been dared to look up directly to the summer sun and there’s nothing he can do about it but delay it as much as possible.
The voice, as it turns out, wasn’t merely a trick the rain played on Yugi’s ears after a tiring day out.
His phone slips right out of his hands and falls straight into the wet pavement, screen-first. The big crack that forms on impact would’ve been cause for instant discomfort and a freakout any other day, but there’s nothing that can distress him more than the sight he’s caught:
What he stares at— who he stares at, is none other than himself.
But, as he was used to seeing on mirrors and the reflective surfaces of whatever dueling platform or building so long ago, not quite himself.
This time it’s not only the sharp features telling him this isn’t himself staring back; now there’s the less familiar brown skin to go by, along with the fuller lips and a complexion that’s just the slightest, tiniest bit taller, and eyes that, though tinted crimson, are far kinder than their harshness would suggest on first sight— this is now someone else entirely. Someone he’d told himself he’d never see again, much less in the flesh and in front of the game shop.
Yugi’s different self only stares, enveloped in ancient gold that glistens even in the gray of the rain, and his mouth hangs half-open in speechless joy. His face stretches and scrunches in an array of mixed and misplaced emotions before he can will himself to talk once more.
“Yugi,” He repeats, in that voice that could be so much more imposing but softened so much in Yugi’s presence, just like he remembered, “I’m--”
The end of the sentence terrifies Yugi so much he doesn’t dare to stay in place to listen.
‘I’m back’?
‘I’m never going to disappear from your life’?
Either hurt enough for Yugi to decide he wasn’t in the mood to hear it--not after he’d worked so hard to keep himself free from this grasp and still get this sort of cruel prank played on him every now and then. So all at once, he turns his back on this ghost, the most real he’s encountered yet, unlocks the door with a harsh shove of his keys and allows himself home in jerky and almost desperate moves.
The door slams on he-who-cannot-be-named-because-it-will-make-him-too-real-to-stand, and once inside the shop, Yugi’s entire body shakes so hard he can’t will himself to run upstairs and calm down as planned approximately moments ago--so he feels himself crumbling, his back uselessly hitting against the door and sliding down all the way to the floor.
The rush of panic and his immediate sobbing should be enough to drown out the rain, his forgotten phone buzzing away with new notifications and the distressed calls of the mirage on the other side of the door, but he unfortunately hears all too well.
So he covers his ears and closes his eyes tight, damning his rotten luck, his poor timing and especially his stupid heart that refused so badly to heal.
If he tried hard enough, maybe the illusion would go away on its own as it usually did.