Yu-Gi-Oh! Fan Fiction ❯ Urgency of Life ❯ falling 7.0 ( Chapter 7 )

The Urgency of Life

A Seto/Joey fanfic by subaruxkamui4ever

The shadow had been permanently cast around us, foreshadowing every future event with a dark pallor, and a subtly but effectively underlying sense of sadness, and lost hope. For a long time after the day Seto's other had attacked me so hatefully, I had been frightened of Seto himself, not through any fault of his own, but just due to the aftershock that I felt, now that I knew for certain I wasn't safe with him anymore. But still, regardless of how unsafe it might have been, I stayed as close to Seto as ever, wanting to know why this change had come over his subconscience. It seemed as though I had been mistaken at the time, the assault was not a reaction from any secret feelings kept hidden from sight, exposed to me accidently. On the contrary, he sensed that something had happened that he was not a willing participant of, the moment he awoke to find me locked away in the bathroom with Seto himself blocking my exit, finding his body tensed, lying in wait. And I had been looking in his eyes with the most terrified and hopeless gaze he had ever witnessed on anyone, as though I had already been the victim of what it was that had been inevitably my swiftly approaching fate. He asked me to tell him the whole story, many times, begged me when I wouldn't, and then finally threatened to send me back to the adjacent room, all of it empty, and designed to show me how much he cared about the trouble he caused me. I didn't care how bad he wanted to know, I would take that with me to my end. I simply cared too much for him.

The other one was gone now, Seto had known for certain on that day, a short time after my narrow escape. He must have sensed that Seto would rebel against him soon, and he fled immediately. He knew what would happen to Seto's mind now, it would be cut off completely from its ability to express its non-negotiable demands and would go on starved and ignored, robbed of its only connection to Seto himself. It wouldn't be a pretty sight, and his other was glad to take Seto out in addition to himself, neither one could last long without the other, and that same day that the other broke away was my Seto's last day as well, in a sense. The day in which I learned the exact nature of the seemingly unstoppable force that Seto now suffered at the hands of, would soon be destroyed by. Earlier, in the small and simple hours of the silent morning, Seto had woken from a deep sleep in a strange way that surprised me from my chair beside the bed. I was almost never inclined to sleep because of my ever stimulated and drugged system, and I took to another more fulfilling and habit forming activity which was simply watching over him as he slept. I had a feeling of nervousness inside my heart, ever since the morning that Seto was last taken by him, not knowing that it had truly been very the last, and I feared the gripping feeling that whispered in my ear and would not be ignored. The feeling that assured me this was not the end of Seto's misery and constant struggle against his own mind. He awoke suddenly but without any motion, not even the quickening of his breath. He simply opened his eyes as though he was finished closing them, purposefully and devoid of visible emotion. I watched him closely, not fully believing he was awake. But then after a moment of silence and stonelike calm, his face turned to mine and thoughtfully considered what he would say to me, not fully aware of the entire situation as of yet. He spoke, and his voice was confused, lost, and sounded as if he were asking me if I understood what he could not.

"Joey....I...saw him go. He's left me." I didn't know who he spoke of, and I raised my eyebrows in silent questioning, awaiting his explanation. "The other one. I knew he had done something to you. Why you bothered to hide it I'll never understand, but he knew I was after him....he not here anymore. I feel a place inside me I swear I've never felt before....." He shuddered involuntarily and the voice that had whispered my fears into existence was gone. And I had been right all along. I watched him as he lay in our bed with that broken feeling in his eyes that I hadn't been able to prevent. No matter how long I had felt it, I couldn't do a thing to save him. Just as he hadn't been able to find a way to save me. But now I understood why he was still trying, even now he still fought my addiction, and I felt that I would be just as relentless as he was. And we would chase each other around in circles this way, with each complete turn descending a bit farther in a slow and playful race that spiraled hopelessly towards our certain and predetermined death. A death that we would share together as we has shared life.

Sometimes in passing, I thought back to the time that his other had tried to destroy me, still not understanding what had changed this outlet of his into a destructive and misused ability that was inevitably stripped from Seto's mind. Now Seto, feeling the absence more with each moment, understood how necessary the other one had really been, and felt his control slipping constantly from his grasping, desperate hands . I knew what he was missing but no matter how many ways I tried to explain to him how to accept what I had given him through the other, he simply did not understand. His mind and soul were missing important links between them, wires that connected his heart to his mind and were impossible to replace. I had the power to save him but he was no longer able to be saved, his lines had been severed. His heart had the same empty places that cried out to be filled, but the cries were lost in the darkness of his mind, which could no longer hear nor respond to the dying place inside him. Slowly over time, the empty places would fall into themselves, triggering a chain that would take out each and every remaining piece of his heart puzzle, until only his body was left, an empty place where he had once been, but wasn't anymore.

So I stayed with him at every moment in time, as close to his side as physically possible. Seto had been missing work for weeks now, the importance it once held for him lost in the shifting priorities and thought processes that would be constantly changing until they were all gone, and Seto would be lost inside for good. I'm sure that the terrible empire was crumbling beyond repair in his absence, but neither he nor I cared at this point.

He continued to slowly fall as I did, both of us together towards our end. I desired no other destiny than to die with Seto as I had lived with him, thinking of no one and no other fate. Seto too, saw the foreseeable end, now much closer than ever before. He resigned himself to the fate we had decided was best, unconsciously accepting and trusting my judgement in the fading traces of his own. He was by no circumstances going insane or becoming someone else, his end was easier than those would be to bear, but still devastatingly real and catching up to me with each passing day. He began to forget things, silly things at first which made no difference or even went totally unnoticed. But time takes so much from a person who's fate was Seto's, and we had spent another five months since the last appearance of Seto's other one, now having been living together for nearly a year. The time we spent there was undoubtedly the most worthwhile in both of our short lives, but still, it was then and gone, and the passing of time had been cruel to Seto. The most common theft upon his heart had been memories, not even close to all of them by a long shot, but more and more turned up unaccounted for as the days we spent together drew to a close. Also under assault was his self confidence and his terrible ego, after three of the now five months that had left us, he had been almost fully relieved of both. Watching the deterioration of Seto happening before me, not able to escape or ignore it, I had voluntarily taken on the end that fate had forced upon him. I pushed at the boundaries of my addiction, slowly building my tolerance higher, and along with it my sense of separation from reality, only knowing what was real between Seto and I. What else did I need to concern myself with? He and I lived each day as it came, looking distantly at, but never forward towards death, seeing it but uninterested for now, there would be time later for all of it.

And then suddenly, without warning, Seto decided to spit in the face his predetermined fate and simply walked away from it. It was as simply executed as I put it. He was staring at me, as he had begun to do more and more commonly, each time the gaze became longer and more confused, as if trying to recall something so long forgotten that even the memory of the knowledge he once had was gone forever. He still would respond to anything I asked him, and from time to time would ask me questions that were mysterious in origin, concerning things like the time before I came to live with him, how we had spent it, how we had fought constantly, in our attempt to disguise the hidden feelings underneath. The time line in his memory leading up to my kidnaping had been affected dramatically, but strangely and without explanation, the entire story of the ten whole months I had been there with him was perfectly intact, as though nothing was wrong with him at all. I had suspected this would be the case since the beginning, knowing he would spend every last second of his life defending his memories of what we had come to be in the extremely short amount of time that life had allotted us to spend with one another. It was a cold defeat that no one could have prevented, but our time wasn't spent in anger, we had since decided to spend our time like it had all been a dream, and we were both alive and well. But now these staring sessions that I had noticed would last hours out of the day, and I wondered what he was doing inside himself for all that time. He was thinking, I could see it in his eyes, but about what, I could not say. We would lie on our bed, I would relax and chat with him while he would just stare at me, directly into my eyes. Almost as if he could see through them and beyond, into me as I was, am, will be. Into my soul, which was nothing but a piece of a soul that had been torn in two, in an awful and critically wounding way, so that even now that we found the impossibly hidden person who carried the other piece, we now bled to death together as one, instead of all alone in the empty cold.

One particular day we had been spending in that lazy way, enjoying each other's company as I talked about random things to cheer him up, while stared as he did before, as he did now almost every day. I couldn't tell him to stop, it was a desperate thing he was doing, and I feared the worst, maybe this was it, I thought to myself. Maybe he was beginning to finally slip away completely. But to my surprise and disbelief, as he stared into me that day, I took a chance and looked back into him, returning his look, and seeing what I had feared to be the end, not what it was at all. I couldn't have been more wrong. The beginning was what truly lay in him, waiting to strike the moment that he knew could set it into motion. I gazed deeper, into him, and I saw a glimpse of his purpose, which he called out to me through his stare, silently waiting for me to see his intent, waiting for me to say that it was all right. I was at a loss, his personality was still intact, he had been purposely letting his mind take the pieces of himself he would no longer have a use for, as the true Seto Kaiba would, calculating and scheming until the very end. All he needed for his victory were his memories of he and I, and his will was sure to succeed in the end.

There weren't words I knew that could convey the feelings he gave to me that day, relighting the fire from a sad and lonely ember once though lost under the ashes, left for dead. He always had the power to ignite my passionate feelings for him, no matter what I had felt before, it was always lost in the inevitable blaze that was sure to follow in our wake. The very first moment of contact between us, we met as two complete strangers, and then were passionate and dedicated adversaries, in a matter of mere seconds. The sparks physically flew in the moments that we were engaged, in either a heated argument or a duel, both of which were driven by an unseen force that was far more foreboding than anyone could have guessed. It was the raging fire inside of us, created by us, the all-consuming passion with which he forcefully sought out my soul, the only source of receptive power that could feed the furiously projective flames of Creation, which in return spawned within my own soul the ever spiraling rebirth of the blazing force that was Destruction itself, born from his insatiable sacrifice again and again. The circle was completed and would never have anything but a perfect completion within. I embodied the perfectly mirrored force that was the polar opposite to his, and our intense magnetism pushed and shoved one another in a eternally self perpetuating exchange of power.

And somehow, I had nearly let my fire go out, too close to releasing the original spark that would be all I could keep of the power that Seto had over me and caused me to have, all at once. It would be longer still, five months had run from us nearly unnoticed, but we had life left in us, and he had much more of himself that I had believed. He looked at me as always, now an angry ember burning directly under the already white and blue flames that were impossibly contained in his eyes, and their slight shift in color betrayed the temperature of the fire in his soul. It was a frozen flame, the balanced extremes of fire and ice somehow burning at once, the melting destruction of heat and the furious penetration of the cold stood at once, freezing any fears or doubts in his mind immediately, while his soul was purified in the flames. He was unbelievable, where had he been hiding all of this? How could I have not seen...any of this coming?

It was simply because he was Seto Kaiba. THE Seto Kaiba, mind you. How many times had been considered dead in the past? I couldn't even recall all of them anymore. It seemed that he was almost irritatingly impossible to kill, an unstoppable Phoenix that promptly and casually strode away from the ashes importantly, immediately too busy with his own life to notice that you had tried to end it. Completely and effortlessly able to be disinterested in anything at all, and a rather bad habit of saying what he truly meant to say, to everyone, all the time, and then walking away in a cloud of superiority, and no one had ever done a thing, since the dawn of Seto himself. All of this and much more, unconsciously executed with a superior class and style that commanded organized disbelief and respectful amazement at Seto, the miracle that just wouldn't quit. It was an absolutely, inevitably, and ever truthfully spoken fact, he was relentless, he just kept coming back, and repeated efforts always resulted in madness. Attempting to rid oneself of Seto Kaiba was ridiculously dangerous in a deep and underlying sense of the word, and should be avoided at all costs.

He was seizing this moment, asking me for my approval, my permission. Before he could do anything he needed me to say that I was alright, that he could go, and I would be fine on my own until he returned. I said yes. I wouldn't dream of standing in the way of a person as powerful and stubborn as he was, even I had been changed by his mere presence, once he revealed it to me. He wanted my permission to give him one final chance to finish what he had started, permission I had given once before, that last day I spent as myself and no other, my drugs momentarily missing in action. I had offered him the chance to ask me for the answer he needed before he could accept the fate I had wanted, to let myself die. All he wanted was the moment of truth that my sobriety had offered, on that day only, and then his other had taken both his body and his most desperate hour, and then he had run away afterwards, taking whatever was left, leaving Seto nothing but the broken body and a stolen mind, irreplaceable and now near dead. Or so I had thought. But the Seto that stood, upon hearing my answer, was the same one I had been with this whole time, all these months, and he was living out the last part of his life doing what he had always wanted, and what he had always knew he would finish, deep down. I watched him as he stood off the bed we shared, and he looked at me for a long time, driven as a person who was mad, and I knew was the purpose to this, it was for my sake that he burned away the remaining places in him, sacrificing them to the fire, in the selfless way that he had always done for me. However driven by power and love his force was, there was the inevitable end that would not be brought by death, but by the final piece of himself falling out of the light, out of what had been his heart. No miraculous and death defying comebacks could rescue him from the destruction that was already becoming evident within him, when considering the almost completely deserted wasteland that had been his memory of times passed much before my hour. But he gave them all up in willing succession, all in order of the importance and relevance that Seto had assigned to certain events, people, and ages, all systematically devised during the time he had to wait for the right moment, when he'd collected all the will and strength that he could hold within his remaining pieces of himself.

Not only was he more than infused with the determined drive that I could feel and see in his eyes, his gaze that was as terrifyingly real as the flames that hid within, giving him the power that he would have otherwise been forced to leave behind, if only for a short while. I believed in him. I believed that he would find a way to rescue me from myself, a hope that had never died, once I found it inside me. It was there, and it was nearly gone, but the returning fire of my soul filled the glow of the flames, all that there was, illuminating everything with a brilliant light and it was hopeful, and I had never been. I began to cry, out of so many places inside, and he could not stay to help me, every second he had would never return again. He was standing in front of the bed that I had never stood off of, and still wouldn't, deciding in a second that I would remain there, awaking only at the sound of his arrival, for nothing and no one else. He leaned over me and smiled, which I hadn't seen in such a long time, and it was still as beautiful and honest as ever. He believed in him, just as I did. Which was always the deciding factor in tests of love and determination and life. His smile was open and I fell right in, drowning in the quieted and calmly blazing extensions of his will, and they took me in as I tumbled forward, into sleep and rest, and to pass the lonely time. I did fall into a deep sleep, so far in his depths that I never really fully escaped, and upon waking found that he was not there. I remembered the touch, the sensation that alerted my swiftly escaping mind that I felt something, and it's touch felt like Seto's, and it was, as Seto left he made a silent wish for my safety and my hope, that it would hold strong beneath his, because I was the single source of hope, and power, desire, and everything else that he had taken into himself. I was the reason that he had this reason to try, this final burst of life that he would eventually burn into nothing, and be done and gone forever. But even if he failed, failed in every attempt and every goal, came back broken and empty handed, and fully spent at last, I would still be happier than ever before. Because I would have been the reason he stood up and fought. Seto never sat down in defeat, regardless of what sort of demise had currently befallen him. Yet for a moment, he was planning to do just that, because it was what I wanted for us. To live as quietly and as long as possible, calmly accepting defeat, and very literally lying down where we stood and proceeding to die in haste. But he just couldn't do it. Even for me, he couldn't just die quietly like that, it wasn't inside of him. Somewhere outside of me, Seto had leaned in to my sleeping face, finding bliss within the rest he had forced me to succumb to, finally. He studied it momentarily, and then decided to be off, and quickly. He had a hell of a lot to do, and not much heart left to use. Silently promising to punish me for it later, he quickly gave in and placed his lips swiftly and with little pressure on the middle of my forehead, which I later remembered and now can fondly describe this way, knowing Seto.

He was still Seto Kaiba, a name which still would strike a frigid fear in the hearts of all who had experienced the power in his mere presence, regardless of how long it had been since he had showed his face in his own office. Well, it had better strike something in them when he walked in there. He grinned inside his head, oh, how quickly they would fall to their knees, unable to understand with their weak and feeble minds, but in awe of Seto. Wondrous at his brilliant and miraculous return, once again defying death and destruction, for at least awhile. He had time, and plenty of it. He could safely say that he held a solid week in his grasp, which was more than enough time to get this business with his company settled once and for all, even with the news that he was going to unleash on them, and then walk out the door, leaving a state of blind panic in his destructive path. He had been randomly keeping tabs on the cumbersome thing, finally sick of it at last, it had become more trouble than it was worth, and he had been planning on rebuilding the whole thing again, until the last echoing laugh of Fate had fallen upon his ears. Again. He was growing very tired of being the only person that was still being repeatedly and unfortunately `chosen' by Fate, to be tied up to those senseless and blindly trusting fools that groveled in the dirt at the very utterance of the concept Fate. Seto was always sticking it to Fate whenever they were in earshot, just so he could laugh in their innocent little faces when they nearly cried because Seto "was being mean," Amusedly mocking both them, and their undying patience for Fate to `get it together'. Seto would do anything to come out alive, shamelessly and fully determined to not die, not just yet. And most certainly, not at the hands of Fate. Absolutely unacceptable, he thought with distaste in his mouth and mind, thinking of all the times he had triumphed in some way, overcoming impossible odds and succeeding in once and for all proving that only Seto made Seto's choices. Even in the face of an obvious reality they would cling to their ridiculous lie, instead changing the story around to fit their purposes, that Fate had decided it, or Fate had chosen him, or something else completely transparent and far fetched involving Fate, who evidently provided everything for anyone who was ever `chosen' by it's almighty pointed finger. It was funny, Seto had realized awhile back, how this 'Fate' who was a seemingly all knowing and seeing entity who was never mistaken, would repeatedly choose, out of all the world, the same band of idiots time and time again, to do the bidding of, and undoubtedly the `dirty work' for, Fate. And he always found himself, out of the rest of the world, as the sole individual that would, until further notice, fill in for the role of instigator. Meaning the bad guy, but since he had no desire to harbor an elusive and inexplicable `power to rule the world', he would have to do,

until a real one had been located and inserted into the role I was evidently not generically insane enough to fill. Well, Seto was finally going to tell Fate to instigate itself, and that was that.

He continued thinking about everything that he was going to do, and his thoughts grew heavier and less amusing, but everything would finally work out the way he wanted it to. And Joey would, hopefully, respond to the question, the question that Seto still had to work out completely, but he knew that he had learned the secret to the asking, and was, underneath the insults and angered thoughts, so very nervous, at the moment which was before him. He would be nervous until it was done, but it would be the only thing he could do for Joey, and he wanted to show him, even if it killed him, what he had always wanted more than anything in the world.