Originally wrote this as a sister piece to Eyes Like Smoldering Embers, and I guess in a way it is, focusing on Atem's fear instead. I've always had a head-cannon of Atem being afraid of Water as a child because he couldn't swim that plays into his life as an adult but leads to a fear of drowning as he gets older due to his time in the puzzle, so he's fine being IN the water and water he can see the bottom in but he can't stand being UNDER the water. Originally, I was gonna try and bring some castshipping in here but in the end the story wanted it to be puzzleshipping and its my fav pairing and i have not written it in so long...(and technically it IS Puzzle June)

Yu-Gi-Oh June Prompt Challenge Week Two: Water

Day 8: Drowning

Like Moonlit Pools Sparkling in the Twilight

Atem always hated the water.

Or rather, he hated the deep, dark water. The kind where you could not see the bottom of the pool: the rushing, crocodile invested rapids of the Nile when it flooded, and the untamable, never-ending expanse of the chaotic sea.

He hated it ever since he was a child.

Oh, he always loved the pleasure ponds where he'd ride the barges with his father, loved the lotus pools where he and his mother would watch the lotus blossoms rise from the darkness and opened their faces to greet the sun. He loved swimming in the sacred lakes with Mana and Mahad. But that water was clear: shallow, stagnant, safe.

He'd never actually learned to swim beyond floating or wading. Had he been thrown into the rushing waters of the Nile or a deeper lake he would've drowned—and there in lined the fear.

It had nothing to do with the water itself, merely the uncertainty of it, the unknown of what lied beneath, of sinking down…down…down… and with it came the all-consuming inevitable terror of drowning.

Terror of sinking down into darkness he could not see, terror of waves enclosing over his head. Petrified of being trapped in that dark endless void unable to reach the surface, afraid, more than anything of floating weightless and helpless, unable to move or escape, his struggled doing nothing to free him. Of the pressure crushing down on him as he sank deeper down into that endless void where he could not move or breathe or think.

Sometimes he has nightmares about it.

But he kept those fears to himself. A prince had to be strong and learn to control his fears as to not be ruled by then. And Pharaoh was not allowed to have them at all.

He had kept carefully clear from the sides of the boat as the ships traveled down the Nile, and avoided the ocean all together.

But nothing could save him from the shadows that drowned him when the Millennium Pendant shattered. Nothing could halt the waves of darkness pounding down upon him. Nothing could stop him from sinking deeper and deeper into the darkness, not stop the overwhelming liquid consuming him in shadow, the terror of feeling weightless and unable to move. Of being unable to break the surface as he lost the power to think, to move, to breathe. And no amount of kicking, screaming and fighting could save him from the all-devouring depths of despair and the overwhelming, all-consuming sensation of drowning.

And he lived with that sensation. Every day. Every year. Every millennia until he feared he would never escape it.

Atem had always been afraid of water. Of the dark, deep depths and the uncertainty of what lied beneath the darkness.

Until, one day a warm light opened his eyes and he gazed upon a pair of dark, deep, penetrating eyes as calm as still and soothing as moonlit pools sparkling in the twilight.

Wonder who those eyes belong too ;)