Aftershock
By Cybra

A/N: My muse just won't leave me alone! I got this idea while I was in the shower. It's set during the second half of the duel between Malik-controlled Bandit Keith and Yugi over the Puzzle. (You know, the episode where the Puzzle gets shattered and Yugi puts it back together during the fire.) So it's set before they meet up with Ishizu and she tells them Yami was the great pharaoh who saved the world five thousand years before. Anyway, enjoy!

Disclaimer: Yu-Gi-Oh! doesn't belong to me, so don't sue because that's not nice and makes me sad. :(

The doctors wanted to hold me over a night to make sure I was okay. I don't really like hospitals, but I guess I can live through one night in one.

I close my eyes to go to sleep and retreat to my soul room. It's quiet here, and it doesn't smell of hospital…which reminds me of why I'm there in the first place:

The duel with Bandit Keith.

He was being controlled by someone. Someone powerful. Someone who must've possessed a Millennium Item by the feel of it. I'm not as sensitive to the power of Millennium Items as Yami is, but I get this strange feeling when one's being used, and that feeling had crept up on me during the duel.

And I knew for a fact that it wasn't the Puzzle.

I'm gonna be honest. I freaked when Bandit Keith (or, actually, whoever was controlling him) broke the Puzzle. My mind just totally shut down as I panicked.

I rushed through rebuilding the Puzzle, hoping and praying that it was going to be all right.

I needed Yami's strong and confident presence in the back of my mind, giving me support.

I needed his voice to soothe my fears.

Halfway through the Puzzle, I felt this small sliver of Yami in my mind again. I kept one hand on the Puzzle at all times to both hold it steady and to keep in contact as Yami did his best to help me reassemble the Puzzle.

I jerk upwards in my soul room's bed. I hear footsteps outside the door, slowly pacing back and forth.

I take a deep breath, it's just Yami. He's the only other person who has access to our two soul rooms and the corridor that connects them. (Shaadi doesn't count. He didn't have free access that time he was in our minds, he used his Millennium Key to get in.)

Still, I can't help but wonder why Yami's awake.

I open the door to my soul room to see Yami walking down the hallway, hands behind his back as he paces. He turns towards me after a few more steps and nearly jumps with surprise.

"I'm sorry, Yugi. I didn't mean to wake you."

"It's okay, Yami." I give him a quizzical look. "What's wrong? You're not usually up this late."

He's nervous and a little upset. I can tell. I know him as well as he knows himself and visa versa.

"I was thinking…about today…" Yami slowly explains, conjuring up a copy of our deck in his hands and shuffling them. He probably isn't even thinking about doing that.

I watch him quickly shuffle the cards again and again. His hands are going so fast that it almost makes me dizzy.

Nobody but me knows about this habit: constant motion when he's nervous. When he's upset, he doesn't stop moving. It may be something as big as pacing the floor or simply glancing around a room multiple times, but something is always moving when he's upset by something.

This is the side of Yami that he only shows me: the teenager who isn't any more sure about what's going on than the rest of us do. Everyone else sees the calm, proud, and determined pharaoh side to him when we duel, but I'm the only one who knows about the side of him that's just like every teenager. He may be several thousand years old (if our guess is correct, which I'm sure it is), but he's still a teenager. (Sometimes I wonder how Yami's father must've died so that he became pharaoh so early in life. I just hope that the pharaoh before Yami didn't meet his end unpleasantly.)

"Yeah, I've been thinking about today, too, Yami," I tell him, looking up from my observing of his shuffling. "It was pretty scary." Trying to lighten the mood, I point at the deck in his hands and say, "I think those cards are shuffled enough."

Yami blinks, then looks down at his hands as if they aren't connected to him. "Right." The cards vanish before he continues to speak. "It was rather…unnerving."

He's starting to open up to me. Good. Because right now I really want to talk to him about what happened.

That whole duel shook me up. I could've lost Yami forever because I was stupid enough to give Bandit Keith the Puzzle in the first place! Some part of me needs to know that he'll be there for me, no matter how brainless I can be.

"What were you thinking about, Yami?" I ask, not wanting to try to invade his thoughts. (We can do that since we've relaxed our mental shields around each other, but it's kinda rude to go poking into someone else's thoughts without permission.)

He pauses before he motions to my soul room. I enter it, him right behind me, and sit on the bed. I look expectantly at him as he sits down beside me.

"I was thinking about how I almost lost you today, Yugi. When I lost your presence in the back of my mind…it actually frightened me."

I blink. Have we truly become that dependent upon each other? It's touching in a way. The two of us are so close that can't stand to be separated from each other. But at the same time it's terrifying. If one of us is forced to leave the other, what happens to both of us?

"Without you wearing the Puzzle, I only get vague impressions of the world around me," he explains, trying to stop his hands from shaking as he places them in his lap. "It's unpleasant, but it's bearable, even more so when we're still connected to each other."

I nod, not totally understanding but getting a vague idea.

"But when the Puzzle was shattered…" He looks down at his hands and whispers, "Yugi, I panicked."

I can hardly believe my ears! He helped me face Panik at Duelist Kingdom and win back Mai's star chips and didn't feel one ounce of fear the entire time. Yet he panicked when the Puzzle was shattered?

"I don't understand," I tell him, reaching out to touch his quaking hands comfortingly. "What happened?"

He looks up at me, his face a battlefield of warring emotions. He opens his mouth and shuts it several times as if he's not sure how to explain it.

Finally he sighs, "May I show you?"

I nod, and the here and now vanishes from around me.

~*~

//Yugi,// he calls me.

~*~

I stare up at Yami, fearful tears in my eyes and running down my cheeks. "That was awful!"

"I know," he tells me, reaching forward to wipe away my tears. "I'm sorry I had to show it to you."

It's no wonder Yami was so cold to even me in the beginning. He had been living in that…that…void for centuries.

I'm vaguely reminded of my own time in the Shadow Realm when my spirit temporarily left my body during the duel with Pegasus that Yami finished. The only difference is that while I was mentally separated from Yami, I still had a vague idea about what was going on.

That void I had just experienced from Yami's own memory was far worse than the Shadow Realm.

I tremble. "Yami…I'm sorry…I didn't know…"

I knew he had been scared. That first sliver of his mind that I received had been petrified with fear. Why hadn't I decided to confront him about this earlier?

I answer my own question. 'It's because I was afraid of what I might find out.'

More tears fall from my eyes.

"I'm sorry, Aibou," Yami tells me as he continues to wipe away my tears. "I shouldn't have shown you."

"No. It's scary, but I'm glad you showed me," I say, still crying and leaning a little closer to him. "I needed to know."

I did need to know. I could never hope to understand the terror that only comes from a lack of all of your senses. Simple words can't sum up the horror.

He wraps his arms around me and pulls me close. He's trembling, too. By showing me, he partially relived it. I wrap my arms around him and bury my face in his chest as he buries his face in my hair.

After today, I know we both need this: the reassurance that the other one is there.

"Can you stay in here tonight, Yami?" I whimper. I'm not sure if I can get to sleep without him now.

He nods, and the two of us lay down, still wrapped in each other's arms. I snuggle a little closer to him, feeling a bit safer now. My trembling starts to stop, and I can feel Yami's own trembling starting to cease.

"Don't leave me. Ever," I order him, though my voice is so shaky I doubt I could order a marshmallow to do something I wanted right now. "I need you here."

He hesitates for a moment, then leans forward and kisses me on the head. "I promise, Aibou. If I have anything to say or do about it, I'm never ever leaving you."

With that promise, I feel a little better and close my eyes.