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When Kousaka Akira wakes up, everything is dark.
Instantly, she feels awake, as if ice cubes have been poured down her spine. Panic and adrenaline defog her mind as her eyes fly open. The rise and fall of her chest is quick as her eyes dart around the room, taking in her surroundings, unable to shake the feeling of apprehension.
But everything is quiet and still. And she doesn’t remember having any strange dreams. Cool, familiar bedsheets shift against her arms. She can hear the faint hum of her idle printer. Someone has left her blinds open—there’s more light than usual from the street outside—but the room otherwise seems normal.
It suddenly strikes her that the events of the past few days could have all been a quickly fading dream.
Hope soars in her chest, and she almost wants to run to her brother’s room like a child seeking comfort after a terrible nightmare. She begins to sit up, pushing her hair out of her face, but her stomach does a flip as something pulls on her neck, weighing her down.
She looks down, just making out the Millennium Puzzle in the dim light.
Akira bites her tongue, eyes darkening as disappointment settles in her gut like a stone. The weight of the Puzzle is nothing next to the terrible heaviness that seeps back into her limbs as she deflates, eyes losing their momentary spark. Like a match struck and then extinguished a moment later.
It really wasn’t a dream. The proof is right in front of her.
Tadako is still dead. Of course he is. It had been stupid to hope otherwise.
She falls back onto the bed and stares up at the ceiling, the Puzzle cradled gently in her hands. She mindlessly runs her fingertips along the uniform seams in the metal, tracing the edges of different pieces. She still isn’t sure she made the right choice, but something about the Puzzle’s weight feels good in her hands. Correct. Ever since she’d picked it up, it’s like…like it was filling a hole in her core that she didn’t know existed.
Like a puzzle piece.
She rolls onto her side, short black hair splayed out behind her. In the half-light, the Puzzle seems closer in colour to copper or bronze, but it’s beautiful all the same. She draws her hands close to her chest, memorising how the light hits its metallic surface, thinking. She wonders what Tadako would make of it all.
He’d be…excited, she thinks. He’d be more focused on the possibilities than the dangers of shadow magic. He would be absolutely ecstatic that she had something from Yugi Motou, and—she laughs quietly to herself—he would try and coach her through deckbuilding immediately. Yes, no matter how desperate or dangerous everything else seemed, Tadako would take the opportunity to coax her into playing Duel Monsters with him, because nothing brought him more joy than sharing his hobbies with someone else, even if it meant dragging them kicking and screaming.
Her heart twists. If only she had someone to teach her now.
For a second, the Puzzle seems to respond to her thoughts. It emits a soft glow, illuminating her bedside for a brief moment, before the light fades again.
Akira grouses quietly, scrunching her eyes shut as a wave of tiredness washes over her and curling in on herself a little. She’s barely processed having the stupid thing, it’s the middle of the night, and she’s so tired. If the Puzzle wants to glow of its own volition, it can do it again later.
It’s not the first strange thing she’s noticed in the past few days. There are chunks of her memory missing, and she’s been abruptly finding herself in parts of the city she shouldn’t be. The pockets of all her clothes seem to have suddenly spawned coins, polyhedric dice, other small items. Yesterday she fished an entire beyblade out of her gym shorts before throwing them in the wash. She hasn’t touched a beyblade in years. She aches all over for reasons she can’t explain—she has for a few days now, but she hasn’t come down with any sort of flu.
She knows, of course, that all of this only started happening after she…came into possession of the Puzzle. Not stealing, definitely, no. She wouldn’t steal, she wouldn’t dare. Not even from someone who’d lied to her. She was— he dragged her into this in the first place, all this business with shadow magic and shadow games, and she needed a way to protect herself if she was cutting ties with him, knowing what she knows now.
That, and she needs a lead, if she’s going to solve Tadako’s murder herself.
Something she has absolute faith she can do on her own. Definitely. Why wouldn't she?
She makes a quiet, pained noise, burying her face in her pillow. God, now she’s crying again. Of course she is. Her shoulders shake as she tries to steady her breathing. She wishes, for a few minutes each day, probably, that she’d died instead of him. Tadako would be so much better at this. Better at grieving her, better at knowing who to trust, better at facing scary things, doing hard things, better at Duel Monsters, for crying out loud. She hadn’t realised how much she’d relied on him for strength until he was gone.
And yet.
The wave of anguish subsides. She forces her eyes open, still red and swollen from crying. She fixes her gaze on the Puzzle with a renewed determination, a defiant glint flashing in her eye’s misty surface. Like Cabanel’s Fallen Angel, like every teenage girl filled with righteous anger and a quiet readiness to watch the world burn.
Ever since she was told magic was real, she’d had one goal. It’s not something she ever voiced. She knew not to. It’s a taboo so deeply ingrained in her that she knew not to ask, even before she knew anything about shadow magic, even as a naked chick without any down, let alone flight feathers. Even in the midst of all this dark magic, even tangled in a web of death and deceit and cruel games, she knows what she wants to do can't possibly be advisable.
But it’s the only thought keeping her going. So she’s going to do it properly. She’s going to do it better.
She fixes her gaze on the Puzzle, lying quietly in the dark.
Once she figures out who killed him, she’s going to find a way to bring her brother back.
And if other people couldn’t do it without making some horrible sacrifice, without losing themselves, or without unleashing some sort of awful darkness, well.
That sounds like a them problem.