Yu-Gi-Oh! Fan Fiction ❯ Solaris ❯ Chapter 2 ( Chapter 2 )
Anime/Manga: Yu-Gi-Oh! Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Supernatural / Sci-fi | Type: Alternate Universe | Uploaded On: 11.13.2006 | Pages: 2 | Words: 2.3K | Visits: 261 | Status: Work In Progress
Well. It seems this story will be three chapters long, in the end. Chapter 2 just kept on growing longer, and in the end I decided that I could as well post half of it now to get something new up…
And a big thank you to the reviewers! You make my day, you know.
Chapter 2
As the morning came it found Seto Kaiba sitting by his laptop, staring blankly at its screen. The screen was full of text, but he couldn’t make himself read it through. He was certain that nothing he had written during the past hours made any sense.
After the… incident he had tried to go back to sleep, but always when he closed his eyes uninvited images invaded his mind. He was sure he wouldn’t be able to sleep without having nightmares. Nightmares about a speeding steel gray car, about a screaming woman and crying children… and about a closed door behind which dust collected on furniture and toys.
He had decided that it’d be best to start working instead, but he just couldn’t concentrate. He had turned on the computer, started typing, and now he didn’t even remember what he had written.
Without even looking at the text he saved the document and closed it. He would read it through sometimes later. A short while he sat there staring at the empty screen, when a quiet knock came from the door. With a start he opened the document again – just in case – and glanced at the door.
“Yes?”
The door opened and a black head peeked inside. Stiffening a little he turned back to his computer.
“Get out,” he grunted. “I’m busy.”
“As always,” the boy muttered, but didn’t obey. Instead, he stepped in and shut the door behind him. “I…” he started to say, but paused, hovering uncertainly by the door.
Kaiba stared at the document, pretending to be reading it, while his mind was overworking. This situation was impossible. Unexploredspace seas or no, something like this couldn’t possibly happen. Even if it were possible for something to form out of thin air, or out of energy, rather, to have at least some kind of scientific plausibility to this all, there was no way something could read his mind and use his memories as a construction plan. No. Not possible.
Rationally thinking… the only ones on this space station were Ishtar and Bakura. Ishtar had seen Mokuba at least once, and they probably had photographs. That didn’t explain how they would have been able to create this… this copy, but at least this was beginning to sound more sensible than the stories about ‘extracting people from memories’. The same applied to that Yami look-alike… Suddenly he remembered the noises he had heard from Ishtar’s room. Most probably it had been this copy, and the reason for Ishtar not letting him in was that he didn’t want him too see their creation yet… Now, the only question was what those two were trying to accomplish with this.
“…niisama?”
With a start he realized that the boy had been talking for some time.
“Don’t call me that,” he grunted, shut down the computer, stood up, and stormed out of the room, determinedly ignoring the boy who followed him quietly. If he remembered floor plan correctly the laboratories weren’t that far away.
Time to go to have a chat with Bakura. -
Very soon he, with the boy still tailing after him, arrived at the laboratory. The doors were locked. Quiet, muffled voices reached his ears from the other side of the door, but he couldn’t make out what was being said. As he banged the door, loudly, the voices fell abruptly silent.
“Who’s there?” a voice he didn’t recognize shouted after a moment.
“Seto Kaiba,” he answered, holding back an annoyed sigh. “Bakura-san? I need to speak with you.”
“Just a moment…”
Silence continued for a little while, then the door cracked open. A wild mop of white hair appeared in the doorway. The eyes under the mop were angry.
“What is it? I’m busy.”
“Aren’t we all.” Kaiba pushed the door open and entered the room. The laboratory was white and clean – during his short stay he hadn’t yet seen a room that was in such a good condition on this station. It was also empty. He turned to frown at Bakura, who frowned back at him.
“Who were you speaking with?” he asked, and Bakura’s frown deepened.
“I haven’t been speaking with anyone.”
“I heard…”
Bakura shrugged. “So you’re hearing things, huh? Aren’t the first one on this station.” He stomped past Kaiba and shot an angry glare at him midway to a little desk on the other side of the laboratory. “I’m busy, as I said. I’d like to continue what I was doing, if you don’t mind.”
Kaiba eyed the clean tables. “It doesn’t really look like you were doing anything.”
Another glare. “I was just about to begin.”
The glare reflected from Kaiba’s eyes back to Bakura. “To do what?”
“None of your business.”
“No. It is, quite literally, my business, given that you get your funding from me.”
For a moment glares whirled around the room, before Bakura’s gaze suddenly fell on the black-haired boy who hesitantly hovered by the door.
“Well, well, well. What do we have here?”
Kaiba’s voice was just as sweet as his was musing. “Why, I don’t know, doctor Bakura. Why don’t you tell me?”
Bakura, once again, glared at him for a moment, then turned around with an amused shrug and walked to his desk. “If you don’t know, Kaiba-san, you are more stupid than I thought.” He sat on his chair and spun around to face Kaiba again. “Why don’t you just call it a ghost from the past…”
“Maybe because I don’t believe in ghosts,” Kaiba answered, making his way to another chair on the other side of the desk and sitting down. “I would like to hear you version of what is going on around here.”
“My version?” Bakura leaned backwards on his chair. “What’s wrong with Malik’s? Or that friend of yours who went totally crazy?”
“Let’s just say that I’d like to get a third opinion,” Kaiba answered quietly, crossing his fingers.
“Well… simply put – or as simply as it can be put – during the night, Solaris radiates certain kind of rays that penetrate the station and the minds of those who are sleeping there. I am not yet exactly sure how this happens, not to talk about why, but…”
“If you are going to tell me how it makes copies from our memories, you can spare your breath,” Kaiba cut him off. “I’ve heard that from Ishtar.”
Bakura eyed him with a lazy catlike expression, and Kaiba got an annoying feeling that he was amused. As he didn’t say anything, Kaiba continued after a while, “Why would I believe you? A copy, yes, that it surely is, but something extracted from my memories? This is reality, not a Star Trek episode.”
Bakura shrugged. “Whether you believe it or not isn’t my problem.”
As they continued their debate, neither of them noticed how the boy who had been standing still by the door turned away and left the room. He walked quietly down the corridors, aimlessly, staring at the floor.
A copy.
It.
After talking with Malik during the night he had felt like he could deal with this, like there hadn’t even been that much to be dealt with anyway, but...
A copy.
It.
Even though he knew that, in a way, that was true, it still hurt to hear him say it. Even though he knew, after talking with Malik last night, that he really wasn’t who he thought he was…
“Hi.”
The soft voice startled him and his eyes snapped quickly up from the floor. A small boy was sitting on a windowsill, leaning against the glass and eyeing him sadly. The glass was all but invisible behind him, and it looked as if he were leaning against the dark space, as if the was nothing between him and stars.
“I know. It’s hard to face it, isn’t it?” the boy said quietly, and he blinked.
“What…?”
The boy jumped down from the windowsill. “I’m… Yuugi,” he said, with a small hesitant pause. “What’s your name?”
He was quiet for a moment. “I guess you can call me Mokuba,” he said finally, and Yuugi nodded.
“Come. Let’s walk together.” Yuugi started to walk down the corridor, and after hesitating for a moment Mokuba followed him.
“I don’t think I will be here for long anymore,” Yuugi was saying. “I just wanted to… see if I could do anything for you.”
“Me?” Mokuba asked, confused, and Yuugi shrugged.
“Well, for anyone who’d pop up here after Kaiba’s coming, to be exact,” he said. “I knew someone would come.”
They walked a few steps in silence. A thousand questions were raced in Mokuba’s mind, but none of them was coherent enough to be put into words. After a while he finally blurted out, “I just don’t know what I should do!”
Yuugi eyed him sympathetically. “That’s exactly about what I wanted to speak with you…” -
Later that day Kaiba was again sitting by his softly humming laptop, but he wasn’t facing any greater success with his work than earlier. He had gotten some research results from Bakura – from the time this space station still was doing some serious research – and he had been trying to go through them, but his mind wasn’t cooperating.
No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t stop remembering.
There, in front of the faintly glowing screen, hung a pale face, eyes open and staring, tiniest bit of blood on the upper lip… shouts echoed in the air, faint and indistinct, as if coming from far away, at times shadows ran past him, and somebody, somebody was trying to tell him something, but…
He blinked. Straightened his back. Read the diary notes.
The planet is huge, almost of the size of Jupiter. Its atmosphere is very thin but it is still possible to see something like clouds over it sometimes. There are no…
He remembered the door. The locked door that hadn’t been opened for months. The room behind it. And the quiet corridor, his steps muffled as he walks briskly by the door, not looking at it…
God. He wiped his forehead and realized to his astonishment that it was covered with cold sweat. I hope I’m not getting sick.
That would certainly be a very bad timing. Very bad. He hadn’t been sick since… since…
Since the time he had caught cold on one rainy day, just a minor cold, and still Mokuba had insisted he should take at least a day off from work… and he had went anyway and come back even sicker. And Mokuba had taken him to bed and taken care of him…
He rose up in a sudden movement, tumbled a little and caught the desk’s edge for support. For a moment he stood still by his fallen chair, staring at the floor, straightened then slowly and glanced at his watch. Only 5 pm. Bakura had suggested he’d join them for dinner at seven. He could take a little nap before that. He obviously wasn’t getting anything done, and anyway, if he really was getting sick resting might be a good idea. In the back of his mind he heard Mokuba’s voice telling him this – stop being stubborn niisama. You need to rest or you’ll get even worse – and he shook his head.
Yes. Rest was definitely a good idea. He walked to his bed and lay down, casting one glance at the door. He had not locked it. He considered getting up and doing that, but didn’t feel like it. They surely had master keys anyway, it would be pointless. Besides, locking the door hadn’t helped last time either…
His eyes wandered to the side. There, on his night table, was his gun. He had avoided looking at it since he had laid it there, after that… incident. He reached for it, trying to remember if he had reloaded it or not, but let his hand fall down before he touched it.
Whatever. He turned his back to the gun, closed his eyes, and tried to sleep.