Not This Time

Chapter One – Memories

Yami's POV

The screams and yells of men dying and killing echo around me, the smell of blood and my own sweat inside my armor invading my nose. I cannot pay attention to any of that. Find an enemy and kill him before he can kill me. A tall man, his breastplate dented, swings his sword at me, recognizing me as the king… I parry it, wishing I still had my horse, that he had not been slain. Expressionless helmet and visor stare at me as he swings his sword again; I heavily dodge the blow and thrust my broadsword at him. It pierces the armor, then I feel it sink into his flesh, the satisfying feel of another enemy gone, another small victory for me and mine.

I pull the sword away, and he stumbles backward a step, sinking back to first his knees, then to one hand, the other holding his pierced stomach. He will not survive the next few minutes, and he knows it as well as I. Somehow, all of my senses are focused on him. I can hear his labored breathing inside his helmet, smell the blood I just spilt. He reaches up and pulls off his helmet, desperately trying to breathe. He has brown hair.

He looks up at me briefly, and I stumble backward, overwhelmed by memories, tearing off my own helmet. "No…" I know those blue eyes… I have not seen them yet in this lifetime, but I know them more intimately than my own in a mirror. Not again…

I kneel beside him, and he just looks at me, not flinching away, not moving toward me. I don't know if he remembers me…

"I'm sorry… I'm so sorry…" He says nothing. He probably doesn't speak my language, only his French. I need to tell him… The words that fall from my mouth are completely unfamiliar, the language harsher then my English but almost melodic, but I understand them, as I see that he does.

"I'm so sorry… Forgive me, my love…"

His bloody hand grasps mine with strong fingers, marking me with his draining life, marking me for what I've done. "You are forgiven…" he whispers in the same unfamiliar language. He winces and closes his eyes as a spike of pain shoots through him, and he sinks completely to the ground from his knees. He is dying… again… at my hands again…

He looks up at me as I move him to his back, his hand still clutching mine tightly. A tear escapes me and falls to his cheek, and he reaches up to brush tears from my eyes, still looking at me silently. "Just find me…" he whispers. "Find me again…" I nod and grab his hand to hold it to my cheek.

"I will find you… I will find you and it will be different… I promise…"

He shakes his head. "No…" His voice is weak, fading. He is dying, but he needs to finish before he lets go of life. "It will never be different between us…"

His breathing slows to a stop, his eyes losing their focus on me. I close my eyes as I close his, bowing my head, still holding his bloody hand tightly. Not again… I have killed my love, again…

I hear heavy steps behind me, feel a sharp pain in my neck –

I sit up shakily, the sheets tangled around me. That dream… Another lifetime. Memories of a past that doesn't matter to anyone, except for me and him… A life in which I was not pharaoh, in which I never saved the world, so it has no importance to anyone… No one but me. And him.

I have killed him so many times… My memories come to me mostly in my dreams, and I often wake from them nearly shedding tears for all of the evils I've wrought upon my love… I have woken from dreams of watching expressionlessly as he stands before me in the arena, speaking those famous last words with twenty other men – "Hail Caesar. We who are about to die salute you." Watching him kill those twenty other men in the free for all that ensued. Ordering him killed despite his victory, when he should have won his freedom, for having accidentally wounded a member of my royal family with a thrown weapon during the fight. And then, as I watched the guards kill him as he tried futily to defend himself, I remembered. It was too late. It's always too late…

I glance over at Yugi, at my aibou. He is sleeping peacefully in his bed. Somehow, he feels every other thing that goes through my mind, but these dreams and memories, these feelings between me and the man who has been reborn again as Seto Kaiba, are mine alone. Truly mine, for I have no hint the Kaiba has any idea… All I can do is wish, wish that he would give me a sign…

I lie down again, closing my eyes and picturing his. For some reason, every lifetime, he is born with those same blue eyes… Sometimes that is nothing special, in Europe, in America now… But sometimes it's exceedingly strange and beautiful. As a native of Mesoamerica more than two thousand years ago, he had the darker skin and black hair, but those same eyes peered from a Mayan face… As an African slave who would rather die by my hand than be taken by the white men as I tried to sell him… And he was always beautiful… In life, in death, in any color skin or hair, in any situation… He has always been beautiful.

And I have always killed him, for loving him.

I drift slowly back to sleep, prepared for more memories of my doomed love…