Chapter Text
The problem with being one half of a whole is that the other half has to agree. The problem comes when the other half wants it all to itself.
~
[When Ryou was younger, he used to sleepwalk, so perhaps he was predisposed to it. Perhaps he should have been used to waking up in places he didn’t go to. Perhaps he should have seen it coming. Perhaps he could have prevented it. At first, he thought it was still sleepwalking, just that it had matured with him, and now he was waking up with bruises, with hieroglyphics carved into his bedpost and written in his journal and eventually scratched into his arms.
[Yugi doesn’t have bandages all over him. He isn’t afraid to wear short sleeves in public, doesn’t jump when he’s touched for fear of someone finding out when he winces. Maybe for a while he came to with others hurt, but not himself. Never himself.]
In fact, at first, not a lot changed at all, at first . He had always had blacked out spots in his memory, searing headaches that made spots and static flare behind his eyes. He was diagnosed with chronic fatigue at a young age, and it was just something he learned to live with, taking his medication, avoiding sports, skipping school just to go home and lie in bed. ]
~
It started one day, curled up on his soft black moon bedroom rug, playing with his Ouija board and his tarot deck (a replica Deck of Many Things) —asking them the same questions to see which was more accurate—that his father stepped in, holding a shining, gold dream-catcher. It resembled one, and Ryou took it excitedly to hang over his bed for good dreams. He’d always had the strangest of nightmares, when he wasn’t sleepwalking, dreams of fire and brimstone, burning buildings and screaming. Dreams of rivers turning to blood and the skies going dark, stars shattering, great winds that sweep away entire fields, dreams that made him scared.
He preferred them to the dreams he had while he sleepwalked, though. It was the same dream, every time—him, sitting in his bedroom, like he was still awake. His bedroom, but with just enough details wrong. There would always be things he didn’t own, things he wanted but couldn’t have, and in these dreams, he was himself. Flat chested and lighter voiced. Not male, not female, but something in-between. Something that felt right. But he dreaded these dreams, because they were filled with a feeling of dread, even as he was surrounded by everything he wanted, the room was claustrophobic. There was no light but the small ancient salt lamp replica on his desk, necklaces hanging and coiled around it casting strange, snakelike shadows on the walls. O pening the windows led to a heavy, sleepy darkness seeping in, threatening to shut out the little lamp for good. A smothering, cold darkness that frightened him. And the door was always locked.
So he hung the dream-catcher over his bed, ignoring the strange texture, the gold gritty and sticky and uncomfortably slick against his skin, like blood. Not animal blood, from the roadkill he’d use in the taxidermy TTRPG creature miniatures he’d craft in the bathroom when his father was out, but human blood.
{Like the time that his friend back in Britain—Cyra Bellings—had stopped in her tracks, rigid and still, wavering on the way back from their lockers, her eyes huge and scared, and strangely lifeless, like she was already dead. His memories flashed out, blackness for just a moment, and then he stood there blankly, staring at where her pen was embedded in her eye, stunned, the type of frightened curious that turned his stomach, the type of morbid fascinated that made him pick the maggots from animal corpses and hold them in his hands and put them in a little glass tank on his desk, between the stacks of occult books and the heavy wooded box where he kept his mother’s ashes, because his father never understood her, never understood how much she meant to him, how much the divorce had drawn his dreams.
He had watched as the blood and ink dripped out of her face, and how she spoke, to him, in a soft whisper, in a voice that wasn’t hers. She whispered a word he didn’t recognize, in a language he didn’t know: " اللص” . As they rushed her off to the hospital, she had shouted to him—he knew it was to him—that the sky will darken. He’d dreamed of a plague of locusts the night before, and he dreamed of them after, their whispering little wings repeating it over and over as they bit at him with their ravenous jaws. اللص , اللص , اللص , اللص }
It gleamed down at him from where he’d hung it, more magical than small shelves of crystals and fantasy novels and any story on his True Horror forums.
“Take good care of it, Ryou. It’s an authentic relic from ancient Egypt, you know.”
His father’s voice was grave, and Ryou nodded. His father loved bringing him things back from ancient Egyptian museum gift shops—gold ankh pendants, hieroglyphic shirts, pyramid stim toys. But this didn’t seem like a gift shop last-second grab buy. It had a seriousness to it, shining where the light through his heavy curtains hit it. The gold seemed to draw the light, to take it in greedily, like a flower starved for so long, locked away beneath the soil.
When his father left, he found himself simply sitting and staring at it, enraptured, caught, feeling as if the central eye was staring right back. But he slept soundly under it that night, and his dreams were quiet and still as a glassy pond.
~
And then, something changed. It was one night, smiling up at the dream-catcher as he went to sleep, that Ryou detected something, a presence, hovering at his bedside, but when he looked, it was only a shadow, a ripple in that pond, a feeling starting deep inward and travelling out, small waves of dread echoing out from where he pulled his sheets tighter around himself, feeling small and cold, and not knowing why.
It was that night that he had the sleepwalking dream, trapped in that small room again, banging at the door, thinking why didn’t the dream-catcher work this time?
“Dream catcher?” came a voice, somewhere behind him, and it made Ryou fall to the ground in sharp panic. There had never been anyone else in the room with him before, not ever. It had always been his private Hell, a nightmare, yes, but a nightmare all of his own, based on him and his fears and dreams. It felt wrong for someone else to be there. Wrong and invasive in a way that made a shuddery dark feeling ooze down his spine. A feeling like the texture of something sticky and slick and—
He turned, stared up at the invasive other, and froze. The voice had come from a boy, staring down at him with glinting insectlike eyes, feathery white hair. It resembled Ryou identically, all but those eyes, which glittered as it knelt down to offer Ryou a hand up.
“Who…who are you?” Ryou asked, standing on his own. He wasn’t sure why, but he didn’t want to touch his other self’s hand. He had this icy feeling that if he did, something awful would happen. He had panic in his voice as he asked: “How did you get into my room?”
“What’s yours is mine, Ryou,” the other Ryou said, with a smile slightly too wide and teeth slightly too sharp, and the rustle of its voice like millions of tiny, chanting wings.
~
He tried to put it out of his mind.
[Yugi doesn’t have to worry about that. Yugi doesn’t lay awake at night, afraid to close his eyes for fear some terrible dark entity might notice him. He doesn’t fear the voice in his mind, he loves it. When the spirit inside of him said “What’s yours is mine”, he had replied with “Always and forever! And what is yours will be mine too, and we can share everything together!”]
He tried, and for a while after, things seemed to go back to normal. He woke up in strange places, but he didn’t see the boy again. It was a night approximately a week after they first met that Ryou came to with a sticky feeling on his hands and panic, adrenaline, and he didn’t know where either came from. He felt an aching, stinging pain, and his hands shook, the roar of his heartbeat like the rushing of water as he wobbled to standing. He slid himself out of bed, the scent of blood pricking at him, overwhelming. He tried to make his way over to his room’s lightswitch, to turn it on, to see what had hurt him, fear rising in his throat, making it hard to breathe.
His foot caught something as he walked, and it sliced at him like a knife. He stumbled, and in his flailing, his hand caught against the switch, and smashed a gross, gritty late-night brightness into the room.
He was bleeding from his hands, deep gashes cut into his palms and wrists, like he had plunged his hand into a grinder. He winced, eyes falling on broken glass, glittering up from the floor, iridescent insect wing glass. Insect wings. He blinked, swearing that now his frantic heart had slowed, he could hear them, the swarming frenzied beating of wings, overtaking the rest of his sounds, the rest of his thoughts. He crept closer, and was struck horrified.
His maggot tank was cracked open, the source of the broken glass. Larvae spilled out across his desk, most dead, some still squirming pitifully, trying to inch their way away. Inside the tank flapped a mass of yellow wings, feeding mouths. Invaders, ripping at his precious maggots with a strange ferocity. He thrust his hand back inside, trying to stop them, panic overtaking him again.
Pain lanced through his arm when the army turned on his intrusive flesh, nipping and tearing and stinging. And then nothing. The swarm disintegrated before him in a puff of wispy black smoke, as if unsummoned, leaving nothing but a single dead insect in his hand.
A yellow locust.
There was something not right about that. Locusts did not attack humans, nor larvae, outside of his nightmares. They may swarm upon fields, crops, but they did not bite and they did not sting, and they did not appear and vanish suddenly. There was a dark, heavy feeling in the room, even with the light turned on, and the scent of blood added to it, an oppressive sense of despair.
“Despair?”
That voice again. Ryou look ed up, right into those shining eyes.
The other Ryou was sitting on the desk, leaning forward, its head in its hands like it was holding it on, keeping it attached , a sharp smile glinting between its open lips.
“You can read my thoughts?” Ryou asked, stepped back. The other Ryou grinned wider, tapping its spidery fingers against its cheeks, curious. It looks just like Ryou, but with details wrong, just slightly off. Like looking into a distorted mirror, like a dream of a person.
R you had read many books about the science of dreams and sleep, mostly spurred by his own conditions, curious what facts laid behind it. Was it a curse, had some dark being cast its foul favor upon him? Or was it simply a common condition that so many others suffered? One of the many things he had learned was that the mind has difficulty creating the image of an entire, distinct person. That the images of people in dreams are often plucked from the pool of people you’ve seen before.
This other Ryou resembled something like that. Like Ryou translated through someone else’s mind, trivialities changed and filters applied. It disturbed him deeply, this thing that almost looked like him, almost sounded like him. Almost was him.
“Of course, Ryou. They’re so loud.” It absently picked one of the half-dead maggots from the desk and examined it. It laughed. “Put on the Ring, Ryou,” it said, and he turned to the dream-catcher, not understanding, yet understanding at the same time. “It has chosen you for a reason, and you will begin to learn of its power, if you can withstand the trials.”
“What trials?” Ryou’s hands shook, still pulsing pain through him, up his arms. He waited for a response, but the other Ryou was already gone.
~
[Yugi has already made peace with his darker half. Already lived through horror and nightmare and dreams of being lost in a vast realm of pain and quiet. Already lived through waking to find remnants, fragments of memory and vanished people. No blood, his darkness never left a trace. But his darkness did everything to protect him—its finder, its hikari, its other half.
And now, Yugi loves that darkness. Curls up beside it in a bed inside his soul, feeling the protective weight of his darkness’ arm around him, the slow softness of its breathing, the dreams shared between them. The intimacy of being held in a dream in his soul in his body. The sacredness of it, the symbiosis.
Ryou wished he and his spirit could have a symbiosis. He was awfully lonely—nobody kept close to him, thanks to morbid hobbies and fits of unconsciousness and strange presentation and is that a boy or a girl? Is something wrong with her? He wished he had something to confide in, something to sing him to sleep, to hang over his bed and make his dreams gentle. He gave and he gave and he was willing to give, and his spirit, his darkness, his other, it took and took and it wanted nothing but to take. A parasite, perhaps.]