Yu-Gi-Oh! Fan Fiction ❯ Not This Time ❯ Coincidences ( Chapter 3 )

Chapter Three – Coincidences Yami’s POV   I kiss him, and he hungrily kisses me back. Finally. Finally things are different, I’m not killing him… he’s safe with me… Finally, we can live, love each other and both of us survive it…   “I was supposed to kill you…” he whispers, holding me tightly, desperately. “That was my mission…”   “It’s okay,” I tell him. “Finally, it’s okay… you don’t have to… neither of us has to die…”   He shakes his head. “I wish that were true… I have to. They’d just use me to get to you… use me against you… This isn’t our time. If I live, you won’t be safe… They’d force me to kill you.”   I look into his eyes. “No… I won’t do it… I love you…” I feel tears in my eyes. “Please… don’t make me…”   “We have to.” He meets my eyes, and I see that look, that look I’m all too familiar with. There are no tears in his eyes. He accepts this, to keep me safe…   “Please…”   “Just promise me.” His intense cerulean eyes bore into me, unblinkingly, forcing me to do it. “Promise you’ll find me.”   I can’t meet his eyes. They’re too much for me, too intense, too real. I look down, blinking, away from his face. “I promise…” My voice is no more than a whisper. “I’ll find you… and it will be different.”   He lifts my face to his. “No, it won’t. You know it won’t. But we’ll see each other again.” He kisses me again, passionately, drinking the kiss like a drowning man taking his last gasp of air. Then he pulls away from me, pulling his own dagger.   “What are you-”   “I can’t ask you to kill me again…I know what it does to you.” He puts the blade to his heart. “If anyone asks, you beat me. I love you…”   I force myself to watch as he pushes the blade into his chest. He is doing this for me… “I’ll find you…” I whisper as he falls.   * * * * *   Every time… Every time, he dies… My hand, or my fault. I love him so much… and I keep killing him, causing his death.   The sun shines down on me, but I feel cold. He is pulling away from me. Every life, his distrust of me, his fear, his anger, even his hatred… they all grow. They overpower the love that I know is there… every time, it’s harder and harder for him to see me, to recognize me. I’m afraid….   I’m afraid that I’m losing him. That I’ll lose him completely if it happens many more times. And I can’t bear to lose him forever, as I lose him for a lifetime, every lifetime…   Those intense eyes haunt my vision every time I close my eyes. Were they so piercing in his first life? So deep, so haunting? I don’t know… I can’t remember, but I don’t think so. But every time he dies, every time he is reborn they grow to be so. He lives so intensely… Now, in this life, being fixed with his gaze is like being pierced with a sword. His glance is almost enough to set paper ablaze.   And I know why he lives to intensely as he does. He has never – never – lived past the age of twenty, sometimes far less. Thirteen, I think he was, once. And he lives so intensely to make up for that. He tries to crowd all of the life he should have into his first twenty years, and as a result he barely gets anything out of it, none of the pleasure he should have… he’s always so rushed, so… intense. That’s the only word for him. He is so intense… it makes me so sad to see him so. To know that I’m the reason he never gets to live…   I look toward the end of town. I can’t see it from here, but I know that the Kaiba mansion is in that direction. I could go there, go see him, ask him point blank if he remembers me. If he doesn’t, make him remember me. Because this time, it really is different. I didn’t kill him.   I didn’t kill him this time… but it does me little good, if we can’t be together…   I didn’t kill him… but I came very close. And it was Yugi who saved him. Yugi who stopped me and came to his rescue. I saw that look on his face again, that despairing look, that said he knew what was going to happen, and he accepted it. And still, though I saw that look across our impromptu stadium, I still ordered my Celtic Guardian to attack him… And Yugi saved him. If I had no other reason to love my aibou as I do, that would be reason enough.   I wish I could go see him, go talk to him, go be with him… but I can’t. If he doesn’t remember me… I won’t force him to. I won’t go near him. I won’t put him in danger again, from me. I’ll let him have his life, this time. Let him have the years I’ve had, every time he’s died. Sometimes I’ve been killed soon after, sometimes died within a few years… but often I’ve lived on for years without him, for decades. Once for nearly a century… And now it’s time for him to have his own life, now that I remember him, and won’t kill him like that. Now he’s finally safe from me…   But where does that leave me, if to keep him safe I have to deny myself his company? If I love him so much… and to prove that, I can never see him? Never be with him? Never let him know? What good is his safety, if I can’t have him?   No… I run a hand through my wild hair. That’s selfish of me… for all I know, I have lost him already, lost him with everything I’ve done to him. He may hate me entirely. Wouldn’t that be cruelly ironic… The first time he manages to survive our encounter, and I’ve already lost him…   “Seto…” I sigh. That name… it was his name in Egypt, as well. Priest Seto. Now, Seto Kaiba. It could be a sign… Perhaps it means something. As far as I can remember, Egypt was our first encounter… my first life, as far as I know. Could it signify something, that he has the same name now? That maybe, finally, it is our time together?   Or, it could be a coincidence… His name has always been similar… Eventually, it was bound to be the same. But, I don’t believe in coincidence. Fate plays far too large a role in my existence for me to believe that his name is a coincidence. That any of this is a coincidence. It has to mean something… but I don’t know what. Maybe it means that the cycle begins again, that we are doomed to repeat this… That everything is just beginning again. I don’t know if I could handle that. I need to have some hope for the future… and if we’re doomed to just repeat what we’ve already done before… There is none.   I have to see him. I have to know if it’s too late.