Chapter Text
Yuugi wasn’t listening anymore.
Not to his family, to his friends, or to acquaintances, or even to himself, really.
He had stopped listening long ago, because he had heard it all so many times before.
For six months, he had listened to the sympathies, the condolences, the commiserations. He had listened to the counsel on how to heal, to the advice on how to move on, and to the guidance on how to grow from such a unique experience.
And so he was done listening now.
He could only manage to feign interest in the redundant conversation, as he traced the lines of his left palm over and over again with the thumb of his right hand.
He had almost gotten through the entire exchange, too.
But Jounouchi just had to say it.
He just had to go there.
He just had to say, “Hey, man, I get it.”
A whisper of words left Yuugi’s mouth on their own accord, and he instinctively dug harder into his palm to distract from the burn in his eyes.
“What was that?”
“I said, you don’t get it.”
Yuugi readjusted his mask and hoped it would not crack and crumble in front of an audience.
“That’s not fair, Yuugi.” It was Anzu who spoke now. “He was our friend, too.”
“I never said that he wasn’t,” Yuugi said, and he wouldn’t cry, he wouldn’t. “What I said is that you don’t get it. You don’t understand what it’s like to lose your other half.”
“We know how important he was to you,” Anzu sympathized, her features soft. “But you can’t live your life clinging to the past, Yuugi. He wouldn’t want that.”
“Oh, and you would know what he would've wanted, right?”
Now that wasn’t fair.
Yuugi closed his eyes, inhaled a deep breath, and tried not to choke on it. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It's just…”
It’s just so hard, he wanted to tell her.
He wanted to share with them his anguish, to show them how deep his sorrow ran; how it had engraved itself into his soul; how it had woven itself into every fiber of his being, into his very sense of self.
And that’s what they didn’t understand.
They wanted so desperately to rid him of his pain that they didn’t realize that it was something that he could no longer exist without.
It was a part of who he was; a piece of himself that he held on tight to no matter how much it cut into the palms.
And the harder he tried to hold onto it, the more he bled, but he couldn’t let it go, he just couldn’t, because he didn’t know who he was without it anymore.
It followed him everywhere he went; it seeped into every conversation and floated into every open space. It was in his touch now, inside his throat, behind his eyes, and even when he tried to blink it away, it was still there, it was always there.
When Atemu left him, he left him bare.
He left him empty, and so now every time Yuugi so much as breathed, every part of him ached, for he was so hollow that the pain echoed inside of him. It resonated against his bones with every beat of his heart, and it was agony.
But that was better, that was far better than the days that he woke and instead of a void, he found inside of him a flood.
Because those were the days where the grief would consume him whole and fill him until there was no more room. With no other means to escape, it would pour out of him and run down his cheeks and make little stains on his bedsheets.
It was exhausting to alternate between feeling so utterly shallow and so irrevocably full, and the clouds of fatigue that hugged at his frame provided little comfort.
Even as he sat there, under the scrutiny of worried gazes, he couldn't discern where he was or what he felt in that moment, only that he wanted it to go away, but he also wanted it to stay, because it somehow soothed him.
His pain was ironically his only comfort, because it reminded Yuugi - it constantly reminded him of the person he had lost, and he wanted to be reminded.
He never wanted to forget.
He never could forget.
Yuugi shook his head and smiled at his friends, because he didn’t trust himself to speak. He didn’t trust his voice not to crack under the weight of his despair.
He just smiled at them, and sometimes it was real and genuine and sometimes it wasn’t.
But the sorrow and anguish that submerged him in vast oceans was real.
It was as real as Atemu’s heartbeat that Yuugi had felt under his palm.
It was as real as Atemu's laugh; as real as his smile and his voice and his tears; as real as his arms when they wrapped themselves around Yuugi; as real as the love Yuugi harbored for his other half.
It was as real as he was.