Yu-Gi-Oh! Fan Fiction ❯ Sight the King ❯ in which Yuugi is occasionally thwarted ( Chapter 8 )

One of the characters appearing in this chapter is borrowed from Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's Good Omens. The game featured in this chapter is "Mastermind," originally created by Mordecai Meirowitz in 1970. The publishing rights to this game belong to Invicta Plastics, Hasbro, and possibly others.

 

._._.

 

His glory is in the sky, his strength lies in the horizon

 

._._.

 

The days spent wandering Titan were long, informative, but ultimately led to many dead ends. For a city that was seething with crime, Yuugi was finding it unexpectedly difficult to smuggle himself out of the country. His first stop had, of course, been the district of Marsh, which was the only district connected to Titan's vast waterfront. Yuugi spent almost five whole days going up and down the coast, gambling and bribing smugglers and kidnappers to give him passage on a vessel to China, but nothing seemed to work. Several times Yuugi had been promised a place on a ship and given a time to arrive, but by the time he got to the dock in question on these occasions, either the boat was already gone, the boat would be on fire, or the boat had been hijacked and whomever it was Yuugi had dealt with was being dumped into the murky ocean waters (to this last, Yuugi didn't wait around to find out if the new captains would be willing to take him aboard).

 

Criminals, it seemed, were becoming increasingly unreliable. After the third fire, they decided Yuugi would probably have better luck with someone who wasn't a drug lord. This turned out to not be the case either.

 

“Look kid,” said one such not-quite-smuggler to Yuugi, a behemoth of a man covered in scars, burns, and tattoos of obscene cartoon characters, and with hair as white and unkempt as the breaking sea foam. “The only way you're gettin' outta the Marsh by boat `sif you've got the Titan's say-so.”

 

“... I have to get permission from the city?” Yuugi asked with a frown. His gaze drifted over the numerous boats on the pier, and the dozens of unwashed sailors working under the fog-shrouded sun. “I thought Titan was all about crime and lawlessness.”

 

“Not Titan,” said the behemoth, hefting up another bag of what was probably opium, but possibly just sugar, “the Titan. The Titan of the Marsh.”

 

The behemoth hadn't wanted to deal with Yuugi's constant questions, but was hard pressed to turn down a game of twelve-stud Damage Control at the Opera House. After losing six straight hands to Yuugi, the not quite smuggler - Zawakuro, “the Beast of Three Hundred Nightmares” - finally caved to Yuugi's unorthodox method of interrogation.

 

The city of Titan was divided into eleven sections - ten districts, and in the center of them all stood the Tower, that menacing and dark building that cut straight into the rising sun. When Titan was still governed by traditional law, the Tower had been the central hub of government structure. As crime had spiked, however, even the Tower itself had become as corrupt as the city it governed, and instead of mayors and elected officials residing within its tall confines, the Tower was instead placed in the hands of Titan's crime lords and obscenely rich. Considering there were only ten “Titans” and eighty-three stories to the building, much of the Tower was simply rented out.

 

If Kaiba lived in Titan, Yuugi thought, he would probably rent out a floor or two of the Tower.

 

Yuugi had arrived at the base of the Tower about two hours ago now, having since run out of business six different shell gamers, defeated two separate crazy old men at speed chess, and barely avoided being mugged by a cocaine addict. The robbery had only been averted when the other Yuugi came forward and bludgeoned the junkie in the face with the Millennium Puzzle. The weight and force of the blow instantly knocked the thief unconscious.

 

Yuugi wasn't sure what to do at this point - according to one of his chess opponents trying to distract Yuugi from the fact he was sneaking an extra queen onto the board, there was no way a street urchin like Yuugi would be able to get even to the elevator of the Tower, let alone to a Titan. The other Yuugi did not have any particularly helpful plans, either, so Yuugi was stuck reading an abandoned newspaper until he got an idea.

 

News of Yuugi's escape and such were no longer plastered across the front page (then again, this was Titan, a city which had more than enough crime to make up for it), but there was still news.

 

According to this article, still misidentifying the photographs and attaching Yuugi's name to Jounouchi's face, police were of the opinion that he'd gone north to Monopolis, possibly to hide with relatives in the area.

 

Yuugi frowned, knowing for a fact that he'd never heard of any relatives of his who might live in that isolated town. Such information apparently came from Yuugi's grandfather - Yuugi smiled. Still protecting me, grandpa?

 

There were brief interviews with Yuugi's “closest friends” - Honda, Hanasaki, Anzu - but they were the standard “Oh, he was a good kid, really shy, quiet, bullied a bit but a good guy” lines, and Yuugi felt a pang of guilt. Sure, he wasn't particularly sure if Honda saw Yuugi as a real friend yet, or if Hanasaki saw him as anything more than a comrade in weakness, but he'd known Anzu for years. Yuugi sighed, tossing the paper onto the empty chessboard table and scowled.

 

Sure, he could probably live out his life in the seedy borders of Titan if he couldn't cross the ocean: get a “real” job, or set up his own shell games, but what was the point? Whether or not he was in prison or in Titan, it would be torture knowing that not only was Jounouchi dead, but also people who didn't know Yuugi's friend would assume that the scruffy blond was the one who killed the set of beautiful pop star twins, and not the other way around.

 

Yuugi's hand fell to the case on his belt, flipping it open with ease, and with a practiced flick of his wrist brought out his grandfather's deck of Duel Monsters, placing the stack on the table. Faintly he was thankful for the lack of wind at the base of the Tower, and Yuugi began sorting through the deck. He always thought more clearly with cards in his hands.

 

Although grandfather had taught Yuugi how to play the game, and often played against Yuugi after that encounter with Kaiba Seto, Yuugi had never faced his grandfather's “true deck of the heart.” It was a privilege Yuugi would have to earn, said grandfather, by defeating all six of his grandfather's skill-training decks. Yuugi had still been two decks away from facing this final match, since they only ever had time for full-out duels once every week or so.

 

Yuugi sighed, flipping through the so-far somewhat ordinary cards. There was a reason grandfather had left this specific deck for Yuugi to find, something special about these cards.

 

Yuugi's absent-minded flipping halted, and he gazed upon his grandfather's rare Blue Eyes White Dragon. Yuugi remembered the day Kaiba had exchanged this card for a fake. Yuugi was barely able to tell that it wasn't his grandfather's card - it missing a small scratched heart on the image of the dragon, and lacking the warmth of the Game Shop. Yuugi remembered confronting Kaiba, and the other boy hitting Yuugi, but after that... he had woken up locked in a bathroom stall, his face still bloody.

 

He'd tried fighting his tears of failure the whole way home, and when grandfather asked for his card, Yuugi had started babbling for forgiveness as he handed over Kaiba's fake. But grandfather just looked at Yuugi with a smile, and said, “You were very brave, Yuugi, standing up to a boy like Kaiba over a playing card.”

 

Yuugi had nearly started bawling in his grandfather's arms for not being good enough when he saw the small, faint etching of a heart on the body of the dragon, and grandfather spoke of how proud he was of Yuugi for recovering the card from someone as greedy and prideful as Kaiba.

 

Yuugi stroked the dragon on the card, and smiled. “Other me,” he muttered, “you fought Kaiba for this card, didn't you?” There was the faintest pressure on Yuugi's body, as though he was exchanging a hug with the wind and a muttered yes, aibou, in his mind and ears, and Yuugi smiled, his melancholy ebbing away.

 

This card, Yuugi realized, was what grandfather had wanted Yuugi to receive - cherished as a gift from his greatest friend, grandfather had given this card to the grandson he knew he might never see again. This was the symbol of his grandfather's trust.

 

And, though grandfather didn't know it, this card was also a symbol of the amount of care and protection Yuugi would receive from his other self. Yuugi still didn't know what had happened during many of his blackouts - the other Yuugi was hesitant to answer, and Yuugi did not want to pry after hearing Jounouchi's description of how the Rintama High gang had been electrocuted, or Anzu recounting about that criminal that had taken her hostage and wound up setting himself on fire - but this card showed that the other Yuugi protected more than just Yuugi's physical safety, but those he cared about, and even the promises he made.

 

Yuugi shuffled the dragon back into the deck, and stored the cards away. Like the shadow had alluded several nights before: even though Yuugi was by himself, he was not alone. He would not break the promise of trust bestowed upon him by the Blue Eyes White Dragon. Yuugi would not give up.

 

Yuugi walked towards the Tower.

 

._._.

 

Like an extravagant hotel lobby, the foyer of the Tower was open, vast, and very shiny. The floor was polished marble, a pinkish quartz of a color that felt as slick as ice under Yuugi's worn trainers. The floor reflected the dozen crystal chandeliers that illuminated the room like frozen roses housing sleeping hitodama. Tall potted trees lined the walls, the pink and green masking the building's far more insidious roots, like a poisonous flower or a colorful, venomous snake.

 

And, like a hotel, there was a long front desk manned by four young workers in finely crafted uniforms. The room was only sparsely crowded, and to Yuugi it felt more like walking into a deserted ballroom than a den of crime.

 

Yuugi's shadow was too dark and solid to be naturally cast by the spread-out lighting, and Yuugi took comfort in this.

 

With as much confidence as he could muster, Yuugi approached the first empty station at the desk. The young man behind the counter, a blond westerner with a bland western name emblazoned on a chrome placard before him, was engrossed in the ill-lit screen of his portable game system. He was pressing keys in the frantic opposition that Yuugi immediately associated with the nerve-wracking boss encounter in a turn-based battle system of a role-playing game.

 

Yuugi tapped the desk bell, but the westerner - Adam Young, his placard proclaimed - ignored him completely. Yuugi pressed the bell again. Still, he was ignored. Refusing to give up in the face of such a minor inconvenience, Yuugi tapped the bell again. And again. And again some more. His hand repeatedly hit the button of the bell, increasing in volume and frequency as only a hand can do after it has wasted innumerable days on arcade battle games with rapid punch combos. Yuugi continued this rapid-fire assault until finally the blond spared Yuugi a brief glance before returning to his game.

 

“I'm busy,” said Adam, his left thumb scrolling through an attack menu, “come back later.”

 

“What are you playing?” asked Yuugi as pleasantly as possible, sensing that if he allowed himself to be shuffled out, he'd eventually wind up at the bottom of the deck, figuratively speaking. Young spared him another glance.

 

“Dungeon Crawler,” he muttered, watching the screen once more.

 

“ `Attack of the Dragon,' `the Dragon Attacks,' or `Return of the Dragon from the Previous Two Games Who is Still Alive and Attacking for Reasons Too Long to Detail in the Title of a Game'?” asked Yuugi, trying to lean forward to look at the small screen.

 

“The third.”

 

“What part?”

 

Adam glared, and surprisingly hit the pause button. “Listen kid,” he said with an exasperated sigh, “I'm busy. Why don't you bug someone else?”

 

Yuugi smiled. “I prefer talking to gamers,” he said, still trying to peer at the game screen, “and I remember beating that game a few months ago, so I want to see how far you are.”

 

The angry look disappeared in an instant, and Adam Young looked at Yuugi hopefully. “Dude, you serious? I've been stuck on this boss for a week now and I'm thinking about killing people for serious.”

 

The details of the game rushed back to Yuugi, and he let his hands fall upon the cool surface of the desk.

 

“Yeah, sure,” he said, “which boss are you on? I remember it took me forever to beat Dynasty's Orb in the Mineral Temple, and the Troll Bridge was such a pain to figure out.”

 

Adam leaned over the counter, letting his game system rest on the desk between them, better allowing Yuugi to see the `pause' sign flash. “Troll bridge,” he said, “I always die after probably the twelfth poisoning.”

 

“Oh wow, he usually got me by the sixth,” said Yuugi, but he shook his head. “He was such a cheap boss.”

 

Adam Young looked nearly desperate. “Hey kid, help me beat him, and I'll return the favor somehow, all right?”

 

Yuugi stifled his grin. “I'm trying to get passage on a boat out of Titan, but I'm told the only way to do that is through the Titan of the Marsh.” Adam winced, looking at his game again.

 

“I don't have the authority to get anyone that high up,” he said with hesitation, “but I can get you to the guy that can. So please?”

 

Yuugi nodded his acceptance, looking down at the screen. “Yeah, I'll help. Does Lydia know `Meteor Shower of Death' yet?”

 

“I've leveled them up so much, she knows freaking `Brimstone Causes Premature Baldness.' But fire attacks don't work on the troll.”

 

“I know, but you still need it. Have everyone defend for the next three turns.”

 

Adam unpaused the game, following Yuugi's seemingly bizarre advice to constantly defend, cast levitation magic, and put up magic shields when this particular boss neither used ground or magic-based attacks.

 

“Is everyone as far back as they can go?” Yuugi asked.

 

“Yeah, but Cedric is totally going to die next turn if I can't get him some soul soup.”

 

“Don't worry, just have Lydia cast her `Meteor Shower of Death' and have Fayluke initiate `Wind Sprint'.”

 

Adam glanced at Yuugi in disdain, but followed the commands nonetheless. A minute later, the faint electronic fanfare warbled from the game's speakers. Adam stared, his jaw slack.

 

“... what the hell?!”

 

“You're not meant to kill the troll for some stupid reason,” Yuugi said, resting his chin on his arms, folded on the desk, “because apparently three towns prior some old man is supposed to mention stuff about a lost prince, and apparently the troll on the bridge has to go downstream and rescue the guy from a coven of door-to-door salesmen. This lets you buy necessary but overpriced weapons later on.”

 

“... I had to set the bridge on fire? This game is retarded.”

 

Yuugi gave a short nod and a small chuckle. “Dynasty's Orb is worse. You have to keep casting cure spells on it until it kills your entire party, then there's a really stupid cut-scene, and your party wakes up boosted five levels and on another continent.”

 

Adam flicked off the game's power, having presumably found a save point. “... so stupid.”

 

“The final boss is worth it, though,” Yuugi said. “Greatest plot twist ever, and the good kind of difficult.”

 

Adam slipped the game system under the counter, and turned towards one of the service doors with a slight gesture for Yuugi to follow. Nearly jogging to keep up with the man, Yuugi barely acknowledged the thumping of the Puzzle against his torso.

 

They walked down a narrow but well-lit hallway for at least a minute or two, ending their journey in the building's massive kitchen. Everything was white or polished chrome, no actual food to be seen under the bright fluorescent lights.

 

Adam grabbed the awkward wedge handle of a tall chrome door, but he did not pull it open.

 

“Kid, what's your name?”

 

“... Saikoro,” Yuugi said, his hand tracing lightly over the bloodstains on the Puzzle (he didn't even know whose blood it was). Adam stared at him a moment, obviously expecting more from Yuugi, but after the silence dragged he just shrugged and pulled open the door. A small blast of cold air escaped the when the door opened, but Yuugi could only tell by the air's visibility; it could have been smoke.

 

“Boss, there's a kid here that needs to face a Titan,” said Adam into the room. “He's calling himself `dice'.”

 

If the boss said anything, Yuugi missed it, but Adam gestured for Yuugi to enter. He passed through the silver-colored doorway, his skin chilling instantly in the cool air as the large door swung shut behind him. On shelves all around him were boxes of produce and ridiculously oversized jars and bottles of condiments and sauces, giant platters of baked goods, and bags filled with loaves of bread.

 

Sitting on a large box with holes in the side revealing flats of soda cans, another man calmly smoked what could have been a cigarette (but probably wasn't). He wore the pure, unsoiled white of the kitchen staff, either being so skilled as to avoid staining himself on the retaliating food he prepared, or else freshly dressed. The man's thick black hair was peppered with gray and was not hidden under any cap, making designating his position in the kitchen more difficult (though Yuugi wouldn't have been able to identify anyone other than the head chef anyway).

 

The man took another drag off his `cigarette,' absently gesturing to an overturned 5-gallon bucket. Yuugi cautiously took a seat. At closer range, Yuugi could tell just by the scent that the smoke was not tobacco, and he hoped his gag reflex wasn't too noticeable. At least the fan was on, cycling out the nauseous smell. The man offered it to Yuugi, but he instantly declined; the man brought the fag back to his lips. “You sure?” he asked, taking a hit, “it's good stuff.” Yuugi shook his head once more, and the cook of some kind shrugged, pinching out the ember before sliding the joint down into his white breast pocket, next to a permanent marker and a small meat thermometer.

 

“So, Saikoro-kun, for some ungodly reason you not only want to face a Titan, you got the bloody antichrist of all people to want to help you.”

 

“... um...”

 

“Adam. `s a nickname.” The man shrugged, picking up an open and half-empty bottle of beer from the ground. “He's not the helpful type. So,” he took a swig, “I actually feel open letting you plead your case.”

 

Yuugi nodded, and smiled. “Thank you, I—”

 

“Don't go thanking me yet, kid.” The man gestured to Yuugi vaguely with his bottle. “What the fuck's with the eyesore, anyway? What are you, a pimp?”

 

“It was a gift from my grandfather,” replied Yuugi, but said nothing further.

 

“Looks tacky,” he said, “and a crappy gift if it's already rusted.”

 

“It's blood,” Yuugi shot back, feeling a pulse of irritation: for a man willing to let Yuugi talk, he sure wasn't letting Yuugi get to the point.

 

“What kind?”

 

“What?”

 

“What kind of blood,” the man reiterated. “You know - chicken, pig, cow, what?”

 

“... Human,” Yuugi said after a moment. “Probably mine.”

 

The cook smiled then, his teeth crooked and yellow but otherwise well maintained.

 

“All right, Saikoro-kun, tell Uncle Chino about why you want to see a Titan.”

 

Taking a deep breath, Yuugi briefly told how he needed to get out of Japan, and what he'd heard about the `Marsh law' about needing permission from the Titan of the district, and how he'd bribed Adam Young with game cheats. Chino drank his beer in silence for the story, and after Yuugi finished with a shudder from the chill air, Chino stared for a moment before draining the rest of his beer.

 

“The blood on your eyesore,” said Chino, staring Yuugi down with a paternal sternness Yuugi had before received only from his grandfather, “you said it's probably yours. Whose else could it be?”

 

Yuugi sighed. “Some girl went crazy at a party and tried killing everyone there before she killed herself. I survived. My best friend didn't. It might be his, it might be hers, it might be someone else's.” Telling this story for the first time, even as vaguely and as clinically as he did, made Yuugi ache all over. He acknowledged the small pulse of comfort the other Yuugi sent through him then, only enough reassurance and strength to not break down and scream in the Tower's walk-in refrigerator, but not enough to fully ease the ache. Yuugi was thankful for it nonetheless.

 

Finally, Chino stood, popping the joints in his back and donning a pair of location-inappropriate sunglasses.

 

“All right, little Saikoro-kun, I'll get you to the Titan of Marsh,” he said, pushing open the metallic door without use of a handle, “but it's up to you to actually get through the door.”

 

._._.

 

It was surprisingly easy to get access to the Tower's supposedly restricted elevator system.

 

Uncle Chino, as he wanted to be called, had gotten Yuugi into a spare kitchen uniform for an expediter - the ones that wind up delivering the food to customers. With that, combined with a roll-cart laden with covered platters of tea sandwiches, and elevator security hadn't even asked Yuugi his name, let alone where he was going.

 

The Titans of Titan, as they were redundantly called, each resided on their own floor near the top of the Tower, and though there was nothing special that needed to be done once in the elevator to get to these upper floors, it was upon exiting that the real difficulty began.

 

Yuugi rolled his cart down the narrow hallway on the seventy-fourth floor, taking in the checker-pattern walls and the large titanium door at the end. There were no knobs or locks or handles or keycard slots on the door, or anything like that near it: other than the flat gray of the door, that opposite wall had only a state-of-the-art flat-panel touch-screen computer display.

 

The panel, by far the most intriguing part of this checkerboard-patterned constricted corridor, was much taller than Yuugi would have expected: from top to bottom it was nearly the length of Yuugi's arm from his shoulder to his fingertips. Wide as his two hands side-by-side with fingers extended, the panel was mostly a neutral pale brown, but upon this bland display were an exact series of rows and columns. Excusing the row of five large, black-outlined squares at the top of the screen, the display was divided up into ten columns of twelve rows: the five columns on the left were all smaller white-rimmed squares, whereas the five columns on the right were circles. At the base of the panel was a large outlined rectangle.

 

Unsure of what to do, Yuugi pushed the cart to his side and hesitantly touched the screen. All the lines on the screen instantly faded to near transparency as thick black writing replaced it, appearing almost menacing in its thick and precise strokes.

 

IDENTIFICATION TEST FAILURE. DEFEAT ME IN A GAME TO ENTER. LEARN RULES?

 

Yuugi tapped the word `yes,' and the black writing shifted.

 

SECURITY LOCK WILL RANDOMLY GENERATE 5-INTEGER CODE FROM SERIES OF 8 INPUTS.

 

In the large box at the bottom of the screen appeared eight unique colored triangles: the three primary and three secondary colors, as well as white and black.

 

USER WILL SELECT FIVE INPUTS EACH TURN TO BE MATCHED AGAINST PREDETERMINED CODE.

 

The word “DEMONSTRATION” appeared under the five topmost boxes, each of which instantly filled with a color - from left to right, they were yellow, blue, white, red, and orange. The bottom five boxes too filled with colors - black, red, purple, green, and blue.

 

WHEN USER INPUTS INTEGERS PRESENT IN FINAL CODE BUT PLACED IN THE INCORRECT LOCATION, THE USER WILL RECEIVE A WHITE MARKER.

 

The outlined boxes around the two blue and two red squares flashed a couple times before two of the empty circles in the bottom row filled with white. The other three circles - indicating the three colors the demonstration had gotten incorrect - vanished. An arrow pointed to the next empty row from the bottom.

 

THE USER WILL THEN ENTER A NEW CODE BASED ON THIS INFORMATION.

 

The second row filled with colors, though it still didn't match the topmost row: yellow, orange, white, blue, green.

 

WHEN THE USER INPUTS AN INTEGER IN THE PROPER PLACE, the yellow and white squares flashed this time, THE USER WILL RECEIVE A BLACK MARKER. Of the circles in this row, the first two filled with black, the second two with white, and the fifth vanished completely.

 

THIS PROCESS WILL REPEAT, continued the writing, and Yuugi watched the rows of squares fill with set after set of incorrect code, UNTIL THE USER EITHER SOLVES THE CODE OR ELIMINATES ALL TURNS.

 

The auto-fill sequence had finally settled on the five correct colors, but it still took three turns after that to place them in the proper order. Once it had, the two matching rows flashed in synchronization before the entire screen emptied of all the color that had been added during the demonstration.

 

READY TO PLAY? Yuugi tapped `yes,' and instantly the bottom box displayed the eight colored triangles once more. After a few seconds of fiddling with the touch-screen controls, Yuugi filled his first five squares: yellow, orange, red, green, blue.

 

A circle filled with white. Yuugi smiled. Four circles vanished. Yuugi's smile followed.

 

“Okay,” he muttered, inputting a new row: black, white, purple, blue, green.

 

Two white circles. Three vanished. This... didn't make sense.

 

A loud grinding noise interrupted Yuugi's confusion, the screech of metal against metal. Yuugi turned to look.

 

The walls were still checkered, but now the squares alternated between metal squares of one color and gun barrels emerging from square-shaped holes in the wall. The elevator door was blocked.

 

Well, fuck, Yuugi thought as he returned to the panel.

 

“Let's see... if either blue or green are in the code,” he said, his fingers tracing the appropriate squares, “then only one of either black, white, or purple would go through.” Yuugi scowled. “But it doesn't allow me to submit unless all five spaces are full, but if neither of those two go through, then only two of those three in the second row can go through...”

 

Yuugi's other hand traced the contours of the puzzle, and with a shrug he typed in a third code: white, black, orange, red, purple.

 

Three white. Gunshots. Yuugi jumped at the noise, turning to the veritable wall of gunfire at the opposite end of the hallway. Yuugi's thoughts raced towards panic at breath-taking speeds - how could he focus to solve a stupid puzzle with death right there? And why was it always guns?! His left shoulder throbbed in memory, and the taste of blood filled his mouth.

 

“I can't do this!” Yuugi spat, pulling over the roll cart so that he could cower behind it. “I can't, I can't—”

 

Very solid arms wrapped around Yuugi, over his own shivering arms, and an equally tangible chin pressed down on Yuugi's hair.

 

“Yes you can,” whispered the other Yuugi, holding him tightly. “Ignore the noise. It will only hurt you if you quit, so you can't, all right?”

 

“But... but it doesn't ma-make any sense!” Yuugi exclaimed, his gaze going back to the panel. “How can I make a code of five colors if there are only three colors in the...”

 

The realization was obvious, and Yuugi nearly slapped himself in self-disgust.

 

“Figure it out?” asked the other Yuugi, still wrapped around him, and Yuugi nodded.

 

“Yeah, I think I get it now,” he said, and though the gunshots still rang out Yuugi and his other self stood, pushing away the lunch cart and moving back to the panel, the other's arms now firmly wrapped around Yuugi's waist. (And, in Yuugi's mind, he was wrapped around the other Yuugi, but since he wasn't he tried ignoring this as best he could.) “Either one color is being used three times, or two different colors are being used twice, right?”

 

“Mm, but will it be easier to eliminate colors if you go by twos or by threes?” Yuugi smiled, and carefully not putting any color in the same column as it had appeared before, he input a new code: orange, purple, black, orange, black.

 

A circle was filled with black. Yuugi smiled. The other four vanished. The gunshots doubled in strength.

 

“What the hell?” Yuugi exclaimed, sagging against the other Yuugi. “This is hopeless.” The other Yuugi tightened his hold, his voice low and calm.

 

“No, aibou, not remotely! There are still several turns, and it's all logic. I know you can do this. Now, look. What do we know from those first two turns?”

 

Yuugi sighed. “That I like rainbows, but have difficulty arranging them?”

 

The other pinched Yuugi's stomach fiercely.

 

“Ow!”

 

“Pay attention. What do we know from the first two rows, if we know from row three that neither green nor blue are in the final code?”

 

Yuugi focused his ears on the other's smooth baritone, letting the quiet haze of sensory amplification drown out the sound of impending death. His eyes refocused on the screen.

 

“That only one of red, orange, and yellow is in the final code, that either black and white, black and purple, or purple and white are the remaining colors.”

 

“That's right. Now, add in row three, which has all three possibilities from turn two, and two of three from turn one. What does it say?”

 

Yuugi bit his lip as he mentally rearranged colors. “These,” he pointed to the white circles vaguely, “these mean all three colors are here, so... it's not yellow?”

 

“Right. Then in the next row, we dropped red and white, and doubled orange and black. Look carefully. What does that mean?”

 

Yuugi's eyes flicked from row to row, calculating and focusing half his attention on the code and the other half on the feel of the other Yuugi holding on to him.

 

“... the answer can't have orange, because then it'd only be four whites, which contradicts the number of white circles in the second and third rows.”

 

“Go on.”

 

“So... from row one, the color can't be orange, or yellow, or green or blue, so it obviously has to be red, which can't go into either of these two spaces.” Yuugi pointed to the third and fourth columns from the left, “and of purple and black, it's one or the other - meaning there's at least one white, but no more than one black.”

 

“Very good. Now, one of those three is in the right spot. Why don't we pick one and go from there?”

 

Yuugi nodded, bringing his arms back to rest atop the other's, letting their fingers lace together in comfort and sensory confusion (only to block out the sound of the guns, Yuugi told himself).

 

“Let's go with purple,” Yuugi said, leaving their hands entwined as he pressed the second column's lowest empty square, and the purple triangle. The square filled instantly.

 

“... and there's at least one white, and one red... red can't go into three or four by elimination, or two because purple's there right now,” Another row of guns started firing, and with a wince Yuugi squeezed the other's hand tighter, “and white can't go into one or two, and purple can't go into three or five...”

 

“So which combination is the easiest to test, aibou? One red, one white, or one purple?”

 

“... well, if there is black, then there can only be one black, which means there has to be two reds, but if there's only one red, there could be two of either of the others no mater if the one red goes to spots one, two, or five - though since we're going with purple, it can't go into spot two anyway. One white could support... so could one purple... but...”

 

Yuugi was testing combinations in his head - having a single purple led to only a single arrangement, as did having a single white, while a single red had two possibilities. He cycled through the combinations again, picturing in his mind his four variations of feasible solutions. He easily filled in three of the remaining slots: red in each of columns one and five, the necessary white in spot three.

 

Red purple white blank red. With a shrug, Yuugi input purple in the fourth slot, for aesthetic balance.

 

“Narcissistic, are we?” murmured the other Yuugi, tracing their still-locked fingers around the final code, “violet eyes, pale nose, hair like fire...”

 

Yuugi's face flushed a blotchy red, uneven and dark as is common for men, and he pulled his hand and body out of the embrace. The gunshots (how had he been able to focus with the threat of death right there?!) echoed loudly in the metal corridor, and hastily Yuugi tapped submit before ducking down again behind the roll cart in case the rate of gunfire increased.

 

The sudden silence was much more frightening.

 

“Oth—other me?”

 

“... it appears that your vanity has paid off,” said the other, the humor in his voice dry but not unkind, “for the door is opening.”

 

Yuugi peered over the domed lid of a sandwich platter, surprised. The metal-plated, bulletproof door without a knob or handle had swung open into the new room, and the panel game was flashing Yuugi's fifth row with English letters superimposed -

 

E N T E R

 

Standing tall behind the cart, the other Yuugi smiled broadly at Yuugi, melting down into shadow.

 

It was the first time they had really worked together, Yuugi realized - where the other had merely prompted, not commanded, and where Yuugi actually listened and needed to be helped in the first place.

 

With a smile and warmth that was entirely his own, Yuugi pushed the roll cart into the Tower hold of the Titan of the Marsh.

 

._._.