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“This is my duty… To bring you home.”
The long stretch of silence is deafening. They both pretend they can’t feel each other’s heart splintering under the weight of their destiny.
“Of course. Thank you, aibou.”
Yugi does not flinch. Not then, when his other self again reaffirms what they know must happen and what they both desperately deny is slowly killing them. Not when the Millennium Stone looms ahead and the Tombkeepers tell them to take off the Puzzle and place it inside. Not even when he forces himself to ignore the foreign stiffness in his hands as he brings them to the chain. (His other self would never admit his reluctance, but deep inside Yugi can feel it. They both do. Their souls beg and plead not to be separated, all the while they each try to smother it beneath their destiny. It is so heavy. It almost works.) He doesn’t even flinch when he feels the chain lift from his neck for the final time, feels what should be a relief, a release from the way it hung so dense against his chest, but instead is pure dizziness, spinning away into zero gravity. Nor when he finally pries his fingers from around the item, his anchor, their heart, so rigid he can almost hear them cracking. Rigor mortis.
And then—
There is no universe in which he could have stopped himself from flinching then, from jolting straight, his very soul electrocuted down his spine, a metallic taste on the back of his tongue. He wonders what the Puzzle would taste like. He suddenly regrets never trying.
But it’s too late now.
There’s a ripping sensation deep inside him and an enormous hand reaches in to find something buried under his heart, wrenching open the shelter of his ribcage to pull it out — pulling him out. His soul is being torn from him and Yugi has to clap his hand over his mouth to keep from crying out, has to clench his throat to hold back the thunderous wave of nausea that crashes over him. His other self is being torn out of him, like fistfuls of grass in an overzealous and self-righteous gardener’s grip, the fibers of his nerves turned to fragile roots snapping beneath dirty fingernails, clinging to the earth until they must give up their hold on their home. It is anything but clean; his soul comes away in chunks and sinewy strands.
He doubles over, clutching his stomach, eyes watering with panic and nausea and wordless agony.
They thought they were prepared.
They were not.
The madness doesn’t stop. Yugi can barely see, but every part of him reaches out, drawn to the blurry figure just ahead of him, the gravity of it an inexorable force threatening to drag him to his knees.
What is it? Who is that?
Where are you?
Please!
Where is his other half? Where have the gods taken him?
I don’t want this! I don’t want to let go! I changed my mind! Please, give him back!
There is no reply — not from the gods, at least, and not from his other self. Muffled voices work their way into his ears and he’s too tense to even flinch when hands touch his back, his shoulders, trying to steady him or comfort him or hold him back—
Because it’s him. He knows now. The denial shatters and he can see the figure for who he is — somehow, unbelievably, it is his other self who stands there, just a few feet away. Knees bowed, struggling to hold himself up. Arms hanging dead from his shoulders. Impossibly. Wretchedly.
Mou hitori no boku!
The scream inside his own head is so quiet, but the silence that answers him is excruciating.
It’s a terrible, ugly relief to see the look on his other self’s face — he is gaping in naked horror. He is just as desperate as Yugi feels, just as helplessly lost to the hurricane of his emotions, his disbelief, clawing his way up through dark, choppy waters threatening to drown him. They are both battered and suffocating on all this emptiness. He would have thought this kind of suffocation could only come from pressure, from something squeezing down on him, tightening around his throat or his chest — but he knows better now. There is no pressure, a glaring lack of something where there should be everything and so it is a vacuum that sucks the air out of his lungs, hollows him out, inviting the scraping hands of the gardener behind his ribs, nails nicking his vertebrae in their quest to uproot all of him. Spinal fluid and blood leaks into the ragged space left behind, choking him.
They are in freefall. They are empty. They are alone.
He’d never truly understood loneliness before, he realizes now. How could he? Every piece of it before this moment was a meaningless mockery of what they have been reduced to. Loneliness before had been standing behind a locked door with a lively room of classmates on the other side. It had been the foggy pane of a window, looking out into the crowds on the streets passing him by. It had been calling out against a tile wall in a tiny room and being deafened by the infinite echo of his cries. It had been squeezing his arms around himself and feeling so, so small.
But this? This is being far too big, the cavernous space inside him stretching beyond his reach in every direction and mocking him with its claim of “freedom.” This is the marrow sucked out of his bones. Every shudder in his frail and empty body makes them clatter and clack together, dead and dry and hollow. This is his eyes and tongue and guts scooped out and dropped in the middle of a field, no one around for miles and miles and miles, while the shell of what’s left of him wanders blindly, desperately seeking what has been taken, arms outstretched and flailing in the emptiness. This is being unable to hear his own screams as the black sky swallows them up. It is being unseen, unheard, unknown — it is being nothing.
He has not been reduced to one of two. They have both been reduced to zero.
Movement catches his eye and pulls his attention from his anguished thoughts trying fruitlessly to understand what has happened to them. He can only stop gaping at the bloody cavity left inside him because what stands outside him now, the figure that staggers and heaves in wheezing gasps with his eyes locked into Yugi’s, is what belongs in there, the missing Puzzle piece once returned from the river now lost under the waves again.
Yugi can’t breathe. All of his air is gone. Was it taken for this purpose, too? Does it now sit inside the foreign chest that faces him, trapped inside a new pair of lungs, red and raw and unsuited for this world?
No. No, he can see it — he can’t breathe either. Despite everything, they are still mirrors of each other. So they stand there, shaking, gaping, turning redder and redder until one of them breaks.
A strangled noise chokes out of his other self and he stumbles forward, nearly toppling over. Still reeling from the separation, a distant thought in Yugi’s mind says. Unused to the body this magic has stuffed him into. (Because he doesn’t belong there. It is not his. He belongs here, inside this body, with Yugi. This is wrong. Everything has gone wrong. He is so far away and Yugi cannot protect him anymore — and the gods dare to call this justice?)
The air around them seemed to have frozen while they had been rearranged by the gods’ unwelcome hands. The stillness shatters now. They both launch themselves recklessly toward the other and crash together, the pain of bone against muscle against bone just a muffled backdrop to the agony pulsing in each of their empty cores. They cling to each other with frantic, rabid hands, fingers squeezing and digging into each other as if they could burrow back inside and be whole again.
“Mou hit—!” Yugi can barely rasp the words out, unable to even finish. Another garbled and choked noise is his reply. His heart throbs and he imagines the heat and pulse he can feel under his hands and ironed to his body throbs in time with him.
It isn’t enough. It isn’t enough. How could the gods do this? How could the gods tear them apart? How could this ever have been what they needed? And, the wailing, wounded creature inside him screams, how can we fix this?
And then he senses it, burning like a beacon in the back of his skull. A line of fire driving into him from across the room while the two of them — two of them, his mind sobs — sit there shuddering and scrabbling at each other like insects trapped under a cup. While all of him only wants to stay here clinging to his other self, to keep pretending there’s a chance they could melt together again, somehow there is yet more of him that wants. That needs. It— He— They need the Puzzle.
They pitch backward without a word (in sync, understanding on instinct — oh, there could still be a chance left for them to fix this), unwilling to let even a breath of space be regained between them, and land hard on the stone. They twist and writhe until they are facing the arbiter of this torture. Their tomb.
The Millennium Stone.
The Puzzle sits inside its groove, glinting innocently in the torchlight, but its eye glares at them like the gods themselves are peering through and have deemed them disgraces to their destiny. Yugi glares right back.
They crawl their way toward the Stone until it’s within reach — ignoring the distant shouts of the others in the room — and only then does one pry his fingers from their deathgrip just to snatch the Puzzle back and squeeze it between them. Its points dig into them, but it doesn’t matter. They just mold their bodies around it, trying to carve a space in their chests for it. Maybe if they push hard enough, they can share it. Their heart. It can sit in both cavities behind each ribcage and they can be together again, be one again.
They can’t. They know it. What has been done to them cannot be undone.
When the finality of the truth finally breaks through the walls of his blind hope and denial and anger, all Yugi can do is wail as it disintegrates into pure, distilled anguish and regret. His other self joins in and the sensation of both their chests vibrating together, harmonizing with their grief, is almost a kindness. They press their heads together, necks curved against each other, every limb tangled in a heated mess, the Puzzle driving deeper into their desperate and disparate bodies — and they curse the gods. They curse them and they cry for each other, for each shattered half that can never be whole again.
“I’m sorry” is their muffled sob, meant only for one to hear. “Come back. I’m sorry.”