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Darkness.
Darkness was all he remembered.
Darkness was all he knew.
Darkness was all he was.
He waited in the darkness, remembering neither why he waited or who he was.
He called himself darkness - Yami - and he lingered in it. It was cold and he was angry and he watched.
And waited.
When people came through his home, he watched them. They couldn’t see his red eyes but they could feel them. He knew that if they thought he was there, he was. If they thought he was real, he was. They would try to walk through his maze of halls, sleep in his beds, sit by his fires… but he was real and he was angry. He punished them.
They would flee his beds and his halls, whispering of the ghost who sputtered their candles, haunted their steps, whispered nightmares in their ears.
Alone, he faded.
Into the darkness.
Darkness.
Seto Kaiba, newly orphaned for the second time, newly CEO of KaibaCorp, newly legal guardian of his younger brother, considered remaining in the Kaiba mansion. He wasn’t scared.
But Mokuba was obviously haunted by the lingering ghosts of their briefly-suicidal late adoptive father, and the mansion was, in any case, inconveniently far from KaibaCorp HQ and Mokuba’s school.
The townhouse was ancient. Imposing. Recently renovated, but still exuding a forbidding air of decrepitude and nobility.
Kaiba immediately took a dislike to it. He wasn’t scared.
The estate agent rattled off its many antique features and modern additions. She was talking too fast for it to be a good sales pitch, but Kaiba appreciated her efficiency. Their steps echoed in the hallways, but their voices were oddly muffled. They both seemed as eager to leave as the other.
But Mokuba loved it. He pointed out the carved wooden door handles and the sash windows. He dragged Seto bodily into the back sitting room to show him the brand new home cinema system. He immediately appointed the largest upstairs drawing room with the enormous oak desk as “your office, Seto!”, despite the shiver the estate agent gave at the statement. There was a draught.
He watched.
A woman he’d seen before. She knew he was here. He felt her nervous energy, it woke him, drew him to her.
He followed them. The tall man and the child. And the nervous woman.
They made claims on his home, this demanding child and arrogant man, and he felt his anger rising as he echoed them back down to the entrance hall.
“And, of course, at a very reasonable price, Mr Kaiba.”
“The price is unreasonable,” the tall man snapped. Icy blue eyes.
“You couldn’t possibly--”
“I couldn’t possibly find anything in this neighbourhood for twice that price, and we’re surrounded by houses half this size and apartments half that size again. This place is enormous, fully-furnished and newly kitted. What’s the catch.”
A nervous laugh. Yami drew closer and as he did - as she automatically thought of him - he felt a flicker of power. The child shivered and the lightbulb in the sconce over the door closest to him popped, showering shards of paper-thin glass to the tiled floor.
“There’s a ghost!” It slipped out from the nervous woman and he felt a cold satisfaction, coming closer still.
The tall man scoffed. “The lightbulb was faulty.”
“No. I mean. That’s why the place is cheap. Mr Kaiba.” If they thought she was talking fast before, she was racing towards incomprehensibility now. “There’s a ghost. There always has been. They say it was the son of the man who built this house, or a lost prince, or an ancient boy-king, or a young man who lost his lover, or all of those things maybe, but he haunts the house and no one wants to live here, the last owner was absolutely determined, rewired the house, installed all the new lights and electrics and appliances, but things kept--” she gestured helplessly to the remains of the lightbulb “--so he decided to sell, they always do, and every time we lower the price but no one lasts longer than a few months, if even, and … that’s the catch.”
A heavy pause. He watched. He waited.
The tall man laughed, a cold, hard sound.
“Good one.”
~
It took a solid half-hour - out in the driveway - to convince Kaiba that the actual catch was the ghost. Or rather, it took that long to convince him that enough people believed in a ridiculous children’s story that he could own an architecturally magnificent city-centre home for a fraction of its market value.
And Mokuba loved it.
He signed the papers less than an hour later.
Yami drifted back and forth through the entrance hall, angry and weak. He hated this part. Tramping boots, chattering voices, new and foreign objects everywhere in his own home. Not to speak of new and foreign people; the arrogant man with the icy blue eyes, his chatty younger brother, their firm and obedient aide, a secretary, a housekeeper, two servants. And he couldn't do anything about it. Few of these interlopers knew he was here and fewer cared, because those that did turned down the job.
He could barely see himself and he knew none of them could see him. He slid a shadowy hand disconsolately through a modern alarm clock and looked forward to the day when he could knock it off its stand, or at least fry the wiring.
So it started slow. And in the darkness.
In the dead of the night, some of the household - the aide and the housekeeper slept in the house along with the brothers - started to wonder about the stories. The young, angry ghost that stalked the hallways of his ancient home, red eyes burning in a shadowy figure.
He felt it, and he couldn’t resist the energy their little scraps of half-belief afforded him.
This was how it always started. They wondered. He would push himself; a rattled window here, a flickering lightbulb there, a cold draught behind someone as they stood alone. One of them would become convinced, and by then, by the time their belief was enough to fuel him, he would be angry enough to want to drive them away.
This time, it was the secretary. Too ambitious and smart to turn down a client with the connections of Kaiba, despite a wavering conviction in her boss’s insistence that the “so-called ghost nonsense” was nothing but the idiotic ramblings of the weak-minded.
She worked late. She heard the window rattle. She saw the lights flicker. She felt a cold draught behind her…
Kaiba ignored it at first.
He ignored the whispers of his employees, as he always had.
The fact that his extremely accomplished secretary developed a stubborn resistance to working at the house after dark was nothing more than a minor inconvenience.
He ignored the housekeeper’s childish new habit of wearing religious iconography.
Mokuba’s sudden interest in mythology and ghost stories and the history of the house was firmly designated a childhood phase.
One he didn’t approve of.
He ignored the rattle of the windows when there was no wind, because it was obviously just the old house settling.
He ignored the lights flickering, because it was obvious that the new wiring job was simply shoddy.
He ignored the cold draught in his warm office late at night when he was the only one awake and all the doors and windows were firmly closed, because ghosts aren’t fucking real.
Usually Yami was drawn to the people who believed in him. He felt more real when he was near someone who thought he was real.
That just made them leave sooner, of course.
But Yami found himself lingering with the tall young man who thought himself the new master of the house, despite the fact that he could not be less inclined towards the supernatural. He was tall, powerful, with cold blue eyes and sharp cheekbones.
He wanted this man’s acknowledgement.
He saw him as a challenge.
~
A wineglass trembled on the dining table when Seto entered the room. Mokuba stared at it in surprise.
“There was a draught from the corridor when I opened the door, Mokuba.”
~
A ghostly set of footsteps followed Seto and Isono through the hallways.
“There’s a damn echo in here. It needs heavier curtains to muffle the sounds. See to it.”
~
His secretary’s phone rang once when he passed her desk, but nothing came up on the call log. The third time it happened, she snapped a pencil in half and left early for the day.
“Isono. Find out what’s wrong with the phone line and tell Miss Kiseki to be in an hour early tomorrow morning.”
~
“Isono! Have the landline to the house disconnected.”
~
“ Isono ! I have disconnected and destroyed three faulty telephones, have them disposed of.”
As the atmosphere of nervous belief grew, rising from all but one of the occupants, Yami’s influence rose. He knew if he exerted his will, he could light a candle, and he spent hours hovering around the candles in the grand dining room, in the ballroom, in the upstairs drawing room turned office, determined. He relished the heat and the light, and the power. If he could light a candle, he could burn his home to the ground. He could burn them all, if he chose.
Finally, alone in the darkness, a candle sputtered to life…
In the morning, there was a stub of wax breaking the line of tall tapers in the row of candlesticks.
Kaiba ignored it.
Yami drifted behind Kaiba, feeding on the whispers of the younger brother and the servants. He waited through the interminable daylight hours, wan and weak, until the sun set.
Kaiba was focused on his computer screen, as he was every evening; he didn’t seem to notice the room growing darker around him. Yami waited. He chose the central candle on the mantlepiece. He waited. The room darkened, the sky blood-red and steel-grey behind Kaiba.
Yami reached for the candle, his eyes on Kaiba … and was rewarded by a start of surprise when the flare of light broke the darkness of the room.
Kaiba stared at the candle and Yami stared eagerly back.
“ISONO!” Kaiba thundered, he stood, he stalked out of the room. “Who thought it would be funny to put a trick candle in my damn office?”
Just as exasperated, Yami drifted away, rattling each door in the corridor in turn.
For the next few weeks, Kaiba was increasingly convinced someone in the household was playing tricks. It came to a head when he walked into his office before dawn one morning, before anyone else was awake, and a fire burst into existence in the fireplace.
He hauled everyone into an early-morning meeting, as soon as the off-site staff arrived, demanding to know who did it. And how.
One of the servants quit. Isono and the housekeeper pleaded with everyone else to stay. Mokuba talked his brother down from firing everyone.
Kaiba repeatedly examined the fireplace in his room for tampering. He took to locking the door. His attitude shifted from anger to begrudging admiration for whoever was playing the trick. He suspected Mokuba.
He decided to forego the fire entirely and had the wood and coal removed.
Entering his office that night after dinner, he was greeted by a pale, flickering imitation of a fire in the grate, barely visible but somehow defiant.
He couldn’t find where Mokuba had hidden the holographic projector.
He firmly ignored it until it faded away.
Yami was growing more and more frustrated, but it didn’t dampen his determination to force Kaiba to acknowledge him. Every time he thought he had the man’s attention, Kaiba would convince himself of some mundane explanation, no matter how unlikely. He should be focusing on the younger Kaiba brother; the young were more willing to believe, and the boy was obviously less unreasonable than his older brother. But Yami wanted Seto.
He circled Kaiba’s office. It was almost midnight, another late night. It was dark; no fire in the grate and Kaiba had turned off the light when Yami made it flicker.
Yami wondered if he was strong enough yet to actually move something. He could see himself in mirrors now, as more than just a shadow. He could do it, he had done it before. If there was enough nervous, credulous tension in the house, he could physically touch anything except people. He could never make people feel his touch, no matter how hard he tried.
Kaiba was typing furiously, brow furrowed and hair slightly messed from where he’d run his fingers through it.
Yami hesitated over Kaiba’s chessboard. He had watched him set it up; it was brushed steel and cut glass, sharp, angular modern pieces on a razor-thin board, set incongruously on an antique inlaid rosewood table.
He focused on a glass pawn, reaching for it, concentrating all his will into his shadowy fingers.
~
Kaiba heard the slightest noise and glanced up.
It took him a moment to notice.
One pawn was out of place on the chessboard. It couldn’t possibly have been out of place earlier. He would have noticed. Wouldn’t he?
He shook his head. It was late. He must be tired. He stood, returned the pawn to where it should have been, and left.
An icy, irritated draught followed him out the door.
He ignored it.
~
The next morning, the pawn had moved again. It was standing defiantly forward, an opening salvo in a tiny glass-and-steel war, against an opponent who most certainly did not exist.
Kaiba returned it to its proper place, in line with its sisters.
He didn’t speak of it.
~
That night, when he returned to his office after Mokuba went to bed, he glanced at the chessboard.
Everything was in place.
He huffed. He was being foolish. Of course everything was in place. The room had been locked. Nothing could have happened. He had imagined it.
The pawn rocked, very slightly, as though someone had just touched it.
He frowned. A draught. The whole house was draughty. He closed the office door … and couldn’t resist glancing to the chessboard again.
The pawn slid forward.
Kaiba turned on his heel and left the room, slamming and locking the door behind him.
Yami was sorely tempted to spend the night rattling Kaiba’s bedroom window to keep him awake, but he suspected Kaiba had started to blame the obviously supernatural occurrences on his own lack of sleep. Yami was good at reading people, at least when it came to this kind of thing.
Instead he waited, a shadowy figure in Kaiba’s office, his ghostly hands skimming over the chess pieces, remembering how to play.
~
The pawn was still where it shouldn’t be when Kaiba entered the office the next morning. Yami vaguely admired his stubbornness. He refused to allow Yami’s actions to affect his routine.
Yami watched Kaiba stare at the chessboard. He seemed to be struggling with himself.
He came over and reached for it, to return the pawn again, then stopped.
Yami waited.
Kaiba muttered something about a challenge … and moved a steel pawn.
Yami felt a rush of warmth, of realness. Kaiba hadn’t accepted he was real, but he had accepted the game.
It took another intense few moments of effort of concentration - Kaiba had drawn back and was about to turn away - but Yami moved his next piece.
The third piece took longer still, he was tiring. But Kaiba was growing more invested in the game, that slight warmth didn’t fade from Yami’s being. The game stretched over hours; Kaiba working between moves, Yami exerting his will, sometimes only managing one move in an hour, sometimes several in a row. He started to get faster when night fell. He was stronger now, and absolutely determined to win. Kaiba had left his desk and was sitting at the chess table.
Kaiba moved his knight. A few minutes later, Yami moved his queen and then shook Kaiba’s king very slightly.
Check.
~
Kaiba stared at the board.
He was in check.
Against NO ONE.
No one in the house could hold their own against him in chess except Mokuba, and this was not Mokuba’s style of play. This game was full of tricks and feints, Mokuba was an attacker, and Seto had played against him enough times to know he wouldn’t be comfortable pulling off these imaginative traps.
Who the hell was he playing against?
He captured the glass bishop with extreme prejudice and stayed, watching, calculating.
~
Yami felt it. Something had changed in Kaiba, something had shifted in Yami’s favour.
He reached for his next piece, his fingers faintly warm and more defined than he had seen them in a long time.
~
Kaiba froze. A faint, ghostly hand reached for a glass knight.
He stood abruptly from the table and turned to leave.
~
Yami rose too, appalled and afraid that Kaiba would leave, their game half-finished. He stepped through the chess table, trailing after him, cold dread settling on him.
Kaiba stopped at the door, his hand on the doorknob.
There was a cold pause in the darkness.
“You’re not real.”
Yami could almost laugh, warm delight blossoming in him. People didn’t talk to things they didn’t think were real … or at least, things they didn’t want to believe might be real.
“You’re not real and this is ridiculous. You’re playing a trick on me in my own home and I don’t appreciate it.”
Yami petulantly lit a candle on Kaiba’s desk, earning a growl from Kaiba himself.
“But I won’t back down from a challenge.”
He turned and strode back to his seat. Yami happily took his place opposite him, stopping only to snuff out the candle. Kaiba huffed.
~
As the game intensified, Kaiba started to see more glimpses of his opponent.
There was a definite shadowy figure in the seat opposite him, and narrow, elegant fingers reached for the pieces, flickering in and out of visibility. Kaiba wanted to tell himself it was a holographic trick, but if it was, it certainly wasn’t any of his technology. His technology hadn’t been so faint and flickering since the earliest days.
When his opponent got him in check a second time, he was distracted from his indignance by the barest glimpse of a cocky, playful grin under sparkling blood-red eyes. His breath caught. The creature was beautiful.
~
It was long past midnight when those ghostly, elegant fingers moved the glass queen right across the board and gently tipped the steel king over.
Kaiba expected to feel furious - he lost to some ridiculous holographic parlour trick - but instead he felt invigorated. It had been years since anyone could seriously challenge him in chess, and this trickster, whoever they were, was an exceptional, creative player.
“Again.”
Kaiba was already resetting the pieces.
“And steel is supposed to be white. I’m going first this time.”
They played every day.
The whole house slowly relaxed. Kaiba’s foul mood, having arisen from tolerating people nonsensical enough to believe in a fucking ghost, had completely lifted overnight, although he spent more time in his office than before. Mokuba could tell he was enjoying some new passion project and was pleased for his brother. The ghostly events didn’t stop, but they abated, and somehow seemed more friendly than before. Lights came on usefully, fires were lit on cold evenings, doors that were left open closed neatly to stop draughts.
Seto saw more and more of him.
Seto saw a young man, about his own age, with big eyes and wild hair, with an absolutely wicked grin and an easy grace in movement. He caught glimpses of him around the house, but he saw him most often sitting at Seto’s chess table, tempting him to leave his work to challenge him again.
~
They played every day.
Yami felt closer to alive than he could ever remember, playing Seto.
He won more often, and the first time he lost, he feared Seto would end the games there, but Seto reset the chessboard and began a new game immediately, a smug smirk on his lips, a challenge to best him again that Yami relished.
Yami felt closer to real that he could ever remember, when Seto would speak to him.
It wasn’t often, and it was almost always couched in denials, but it happened.
“You’re still not real. But that was an excellent play.”
“Damn, I have to take this call. I’ll be back. Don’t mess with the pieces when I’m not looking, I’ll know. There’s nothing supernatural about you.”
“You should drop this ridiculous act and come play me in person. This holograph thing is getting old.”
“We’re going out tonight, I won’t be in the office after dinner for your ridiculous tricks.”
Yami was amused, and pleased.
He wanted to respond but he wasn’t able to make Seto hear him. Not yet. Seto could see him as often as Yami chose to show himself now, so he would reply with gestures and expressions, glares and silent laughs, nods and shrugs.
“What’s your name?”
He shrugged.
“That’s ridiculous. What do you call yourself?”
He painstakingly moved the chess pieces, one by one, to spell out the characters.
YAMI
They fell into the strangest routine Seto had ever kept. He found himself talking more and more to the wispy figure of the chess player. Yami. He spent less time on work and stayed up later, but he thought he was sleeping better, his productivity didn’t seem to be affected. He found himself growing more and more frustrated when Yami would seem to run out of strength and fade for a time. It made him angry. He didn’t let himself think the word worried.
He tried playing card games against Yami, but they took even longer and Yami struggled with holding a hand of cards.
He sketched designs for a video game controller with highly-sensitive manual buttons and a standing frame. When Mokuba asked, he snapped that it was for players with certain highly specific disabilities and quickly put it away.
Kaiba realised he was becoming far too invested in someone’s ridiculous long-running prank. Eventually “Yami” would step out from behind the curtain (the metaphorical curtain; he had searched the office top to bottom several times for the holo-projectors, there were definitely none there behind the real curtains). And Kaiba would look foolish for having let this go on this long.
That night, Yami pushed his pawn forward.
Kaiba ignored it.
Yami pouted and drifted over to the desk, lighting the candle Seto had never removed.
Kaiba ignored it.
Yami felt that cold fear he hadn’t felt in weeks. He rustled the papers on Kaiba’s desk, concentrating to make himself as visible as possible.
Kaiba ignored him.
A burning rush of rage overtook Yami and he threw all his power into his voice.
“Seto...!”
Kaiba looked up, his startlingly blue eyes wide with shock. Yami’s voice was rich, but hollow, somehow echoing even in the plush room. Yami glared at him, challenging, arms folded.
Kaiba snapped, “You aren’t real. I’m done with this ludicrous charade.”
Yami’s form flickered as Kaiba’s words hit him like a blow. He shook his head and reached for Seto, but drew his hand back. There was no point. He was nothing but a shadow to Seto’s flesh, for all he could move pieces on a chessboard.
“Seto…”
Kaiba stood up and advanced on him.
“You’re not real.”
Yami glared, but the fire in his eyes was fading. He glanced to the chessboard. He would have liked to have played one more time.
He let go of reality, his figure starting to fade.
And he saw the sudden fear in Seto’s eyes.
~
“Yami! No!”
Seto realised in a rush that he didn’t want to be right and he couldn’t risk that he might be wrong. He reached for Yami for the first time, determined past all common sense to keep him with him.
His hand should have closed around nothing, or should have touched the hum of a hologram, but instead, he caught a cool, solid hand, quickly warming in Seto’s.
Yami’s eyes - a deep, garnet violet - were wide and staring, his mouth - soft and small with full lips - was open in shock, his skin - rich, regal, dark - was greyish with pallor but quickly flushing -- and Seto pulled him close and into a sudden and desperate kiss without thought.