Atem came back from the afterlife with his senses intact — the heat of a cup, the taste of bread, the weight of a hand. Everything crossed over with him except his eyes. Those stayed on the other side, and now they show him what has not crossed: thin outlines with no colour, standing at the edges of rooms and intersections, asking nothing, only looking.
He has never in his life looked away from something that was looking at him. So he practises. He keeps to the right in the corridor, avoids the end seat, holds his focus somewhere past the window of the car. Seto says nothing about any of it for a month, and writes all of it down.
What Seto builds out of those notes is not comfort and not belief. It is a map.
This is a translation of an original work.
Original Title: 死者の目
Original Author: 葉人(@Hathor_yuki)
Personal site: https://prideshipping.sakura.ne.jp
Breakfast at Kaiba Manor is early. The staff set it out to suit Seto, and at the seat on the far end, since last month, a place for one more had been added.
Before he sat down, Atem looked out of the window, just once. The lawn in the garden was shining with morning dew. He seemed to be watching it, but the focus of his eyes was somewhere around the glass itself.
"Would coffee be all right, sir?"
A small pause followed the servant's question.
"…Ah. Yes, please."
"Slow."
Seto said it with something still open on his tablet.
"I was thinking."
"About a binary choice between coffee and not."
Atem did not answer that, and put his lips to the cup that had been set down.
"Hot."
He lets out a small breath. The gesture is a living man's. The heat stings his tongue, he draws in the smell, the weight of the cup is in his hand. Atem does these things one at a time, as though checking each one off. It had been that way ever since he came back.
"Are you coming in to the company today?"
"I'll go. We agreed on it."
"You decided it on your own, as I recall."
"Not on my own. You didn't refuse."
"Hmph. Is that so."
As he said it, Seto scrolled the page.
Atem's gaze slipped, lightly, to one side.
Not the tablet, not Seto, not the servant. The end of the table, the area around the seat where no one was sitting. He looked there for an instant, and came straight back.
Then Atem tore off a piece of bread and went on as though nothing had happened.
"Will it be cleared up by noon?"
"No. If the volume of work could be cleared, there would be no point in my doing it."
"You haven't changed."
"It was the same when you were here."
At the words when you were here, Atem smiled faintly. Seto meant the time when he had been in this city as the other Yugi. Between that time and now, the same being here is a considerably different thing.
Seto did not lift his eyes from the tablet. Only, the finger that scrolled the page had been resting in the same place for some time now.
Atem set the cup down. Just before it touched the saucer, the movement slowed by a fraction. He shifted the position of his plate. Small things, but in this dining room it was already the third since morning.
"Atem."
"What?"
"Nothing."
Seto killed the screen and stood up.
"It's time. We're leaving."
"Right."
Atem stood as well and made for the dining room door. In the corridor, he walked keeping to the right. There is nothing on the left. Only a wall, a display cabinet, and the space in front of it.
Seto walked behind him, watching that back.
Nothing there — that was true as far as Seto's eyes went.
In the car, Atem was practising.
He watched the streets flowing past the window. At an intersection stopped for the light, people stood waiting to cross. Students, an old man, a woman with a dog. Among them, mixed in, were a few too many.
——I can see them.
Their outlines are vague, their colour thin. They do not throw back light the way the living do. They only stand there, turning slowly in the same place, or else looking steadily this way, at Atem inside the car.
They do not exist, Atem tells himself.
Strictly speaking, they probably do exist. But they do not belong to the side of the living world. The living cannot see them, cannot touch them, are not interfered with by them. Which is to say that under the laws of the living world, they do not exist. So they are treated as not existing. That is how a person who lives in the living world lives.
Atem understands that as well.
The problem was that their eyes met his.
The one standing at the corner of the intersection looks this way. Atem can see it. So their eyes meet, and Atem's body responds.
Whoever it is, whatever it is, Atem has never once looked away from something that was looking at him.
To face it. That was what Atem was. If it was an enemy, he met it; if it was someone asking for help, he answered; a question he answered, a gaze he returned with his own. He had always done it that way.
And now he is practising looking away. It was an absurd thing.
When one comes into the edge of his vision, he keeps his focus off it and lets the outline slide past as part of the background. The same as a street tree, the same as a utility pole; he makes himself think of it as nothing but scenery.
Without changing his breathing, without changing the speed of his gaze, he teaches his body the eye movements of a man who can see nothing.
He held it for three seconds. But it moved, and came closer.
Atem's eyes met its own.
——Again.
It appealed for nothing. It only looked. Not clinging, not resenting, only looking at the one who could see it.
Hostility he could deflect; a plea he could choose to answer or refuse. But against a thing that is only looking, what Atem has, in short, is no cards in hand. He knows the card called ignoring it would work, and still he cannot bring himself to play it.
The light changed and the car moved. It flowed away and was gone from his sight.
Treat them as not existing. Not answering is not casting them aside. Those are not his to carry. They are not his people. He is not a king; here he is one——
One what.
That is where, every time, he stops knowing.
"We're here."
At Seto's voice, Atem brought his eyes back from the window.
"Right."
"I have two meetings today. Wait in the reception room. I'll give you documents if you want something to read."
"Is an outsider allowed to read your company's documents?"
"If you read them and understand them, I'll stop treating you as one."
"You said it."
Atem smiled with the corner of his mouth. The usual exchange. The usual voice. As long as he can manage that, he thinks he is doing well enough.
Seto got out of the car first. On his way out, he looked at Atem's eyes for an instant.
On a man wearing his usual face, only the eyes were tired. The face of someone whose sight was too good, who had overworked his eyes in the city.
Seto still said nothing.
Night. Atem came to the study.
Seto had called him there. In a gap between meetings he had said one thing, only come to the study tonight. He did not give a reason, and Atem did not ask for one.
The study was quiet. The lamp on the desk, and the lamp by the wall. Seto was sitting not at the desk but in the chair by the window. There is a second chair facing it. The arrangement had been that way from the start.
"Sit."
Atem sat. Tonight, the line he took from the door to the chair was straight. It seemed there was nothing in this study to avoid. Seto recorded that too, without saying it.
"Did you get through the documents?"
"Half. Your company uses too many acronyms."
"Learn them. I'll give you three days."
"Two will do."
"Then that will do."
The conversation broke off. Seto deliberately left it broken.
Atem knows that silence is this man's negotiating technique. But tonight it was Atem who chose the silence. He seemed to be looking at the dark garden beyond the window, but his focus was on this side of the glass.
Seto opened his mouth.
"What are you afraid of?"
Atem's eyes came back and looked straight at Seto. These eyes are always straight, and that has not changed.
"I am not afraid."
It was immediate. There was nothing of bravado in it.
Seto nodded. Then he changed the question.
"I see. Then what are you looking at?"
Atem's eyes wavered.
Straight as ever; he did not turn them away. Only, at the back of them, for the smallest instant.
He had the look of a man struck at the mark, and also of a man who had been waiting, somewhere, to be asked.
"…So you'd noticed."
"At breakfast you look at an empty seat. In the corridor you walk keeping to the right. In the car you look out of the window at particular intersections, and every few seconds your eye movements break. You don't sit at the end of a sofa. You hesitate before getting into an elevator. Shall I go on?"
"That's enough."
Atem said it shortly, and let out a breath.
"…Since when?"
"Since the first day."
"And you said nothing, all this time."
"Because you didn't."
There was no accusation in the tone. It was nobody's fault.
Atem folded his hands on his knees and looked at them for a while. Hands that had died three thousand years ago, and hands that now know the heat of a cup, the feel of bread tearing.
Dead, and alive. Atem was searching for the order in which to begin.
Seto waited.
"I can see them."
At last, Atem said it.
"What none of you can see, I can."
Seto neither nodded nor showed surprise. He only brought himself up off the back of the chair, and let it be seen that he was listening.
"Go on."
"I died, I went back, and then I came back here. The order of it is probably the problem."
Atem began to speak. Choosing his words, but without stopping.
"Back when I was here as Aibou's other self, I couldn't see them. I was a soul without memory then, borrowing Aibou's body. I was looking at the world with a living man's eyes. So I didn't know. Once you've gone back to the afterlife, and crossed the border again as one of the dead, it seems the eyes stay the way they were over there."
"The way they were over there?"
"They're the eyes of the dead. Taste, heat, pain — all of it reaches me. Only the eyes are still seeing, half of them, with the eyes of the afterlife."
"What do you see?"
Seto's questions were short. It was the way a doctor asks. Where does it hurt, since when, under what conditions. No room left for feeling to get in. Just now, that was the kindest way anyone could have asked.
"…The ones that haven't crossed."
"The dead?"
"I don't even know if I'm allowed to call them dead. They're not like the dead I meet in the afterlife. The dead in the afterlife have faces and names as well. They have lives. What I see on this side has none of that. Thin outlines, no colour, staying in the same place and nothing more… what should have crossed has stayed without crossing. That's the only way I can put it."
"How many?"
"A lot. Far more than you'd think. At intersections, in corridors, in this house."
"Where in this house?"
He asked it at once. But the voice was less fear than a man confirming a defect in a property, and Atem nearly laughed, and stopped himself.
"The seat at the east end of the dining room. The left side of the upstairs corridor, in front of the display cabinet. And two in the garden."
"Harm?"
"None. They don't do anything. They don't touch me, they don't speak to me. They're only there."
"Then the problem is not actual harm. The problem is that you cannot ignore them."
Atem said nothing. The silence was the answer.
Then, slowly, he opened his mouth.
"That's right. All I have to do is treat them as not existing. I understand that in my head. They ask nothing of me; I'm under no obligation to answer. But our eyes meet."
The folded hands tightened, very slightly.
"If I can see them, our eyes meet. I have never once taken my eyes off someone whose eyes had met mine. Whoever it was, whatever it was. And that is…"
"Because that is what you are."
Seto took it up. Atem lifted his head.
"A Duelist does not look away. A king does not look away from his people. You have carried it through on that. There is no reason the eyes alone should start obeying you now."
"…Yes. They aren't my people. I know all of it. But when one of them stands at the edge of my sight, my body tries to face it. And every time I hold that down, it's as though I'm abandoning something…"
The words broke off there. It was the way a man breaks off having said too much. Atem steadied his breath and put his tone back.
"I'm sorry. This isn't something to say to you."
"Why not?"
"It's a story about things that can't be seen. There's no way to verify it. Telling you to believe it is asking too much."
"I am not discussing whether I believe it."
Seto straightened, then leaned back against the chair.
"Your behaviour has a consistent bias in it. A bias has a cause. You have just explained that cause. The explanation does not contradict the observed facts. That is all. There is nowhere in this that requires me to believe you. It only has to be consistent."
Atem blinked. Then he let out a slow breath. It was a long one.
"…I'm amazed. You really haven't changed."
"That is what I am."
"You don't doubt it? That I've lost my mind, or something."
"People who have lost their minds start talking to what they see."
"There's a point in that."
"If you think it's only a point, then be satisfied by it."
This time Atem did laugh, a little. It was the first time since he had come into the study that the strength had gone out of it.
Seto saw it, and took a notebook from the desk. Nothing written on the cover; a new one.
"Tell me the places. All of them, starting with this house."
"…What are you planning to do?"
"Make a map."
Seto said it as though it were obvious.
By the end of the first week, ten pages of the notebook were filled.
It was Seto who wrote in it. The method of having Atem report each occurrence was thrown out on the first day. Making him fix his attention on them in order to report them would have defeated the purpose. Instead, Seto decided to watch Atem.
The direction a glance drifted. A deviation in his walking, a slowing of a movement. Down to the choice of where he sat. Seto recorded the times and places at which these happened. Between meetings, in the car, over meals. He was a man who read human behaviour to begin with. With the eye that picked a lie out of the number of times a negotiating partner blinked, he picked up Atem's day.
Atem noticed at once.
"…You're observing me, aren't you."
"Only now?"
"That's in poor taste."
"It has better precision than asking you. There are cases where you don't notice what you've avoided. This morning, at the display cabinet in the corridor, you stopped once before you moved to the right."
"…Did I?"
"You did."
Atem gave up arguing. Instead of cooperating with Seto's observation or obstructing it, he decided simply to spend his days as he always did. Going about things as usual meant the data would accumulate on its own. It was not a bad feeling. No effort to hide, no need to keep up a front. Inside the manor, apart from the practice of looking away, Atem did not have to hold anything of himself down.
The following week.
Seto brought out the floor plan of the manor. He spread it on the desk in the study and began marking it, checking it against the record. Atem watched from beside him.
"…Seen laid out like this, there are a lot of them."
"But there is a pattern."
Seto tapped the drawing with the back end of his pen.
"Edges. Almost none in the middle of a room. Against walls, in corners, behind pillars, at the backs of furniture. In a passage, the narrower side. They avoid open places… no. They collect. No different from water. It gathers where the flow is weak."
"…Now that you say it, yes. Not the afterlife, not the living world. Things with nowhere to go stay behind in the still places of the flow."
"I have data from outside as well. At intersections, the corners; at the entrances of buildings, beside the pillars. The exceptions are near cemeteries and hospitals, and places where accidents have happened. There, they are in the middle as well. The density is higher. The reason hardly needs thinking about."
"You did all that in one week…"
"Three. I was observing before I began writing it down."
Atem looked down at the drawing. What he had spent all his time only turning his eyes away from, and had still not been able to get hold of, was set out there in lines and marks. A map of the visible, drawn by a man who could not see.
"If the pattern is known, prediction is possible. Decide where to put your eyes before they meet yours. Right in the corridor, the west seat in the dining room, in the car look far down the direction of travel. In an open place, if you look straight ahead there will be nothing there to begin with. Reduce the ambushes alone and the success rate of this practice of yours should go up."
"……"
"What."
"Nothing."
Atem shook his head. Then he traced a mark on the drawing with his finger. The east end of the dining room. The seat his eyes drifted to every morning.
"I was going to say it helps, but that isn't quite it."
"What isn't."
"It helps isn't enough."
He said nothing further, and Seto did not ask. He shut the notebook, folded the drawing, and said only, "Try it from tomorrow."
That night, walking the corridor, Atem moved to the right in front of the display cabinet. The usual avoidance. Only, one thing was different from usual. Tonight, that slight step aside was being made along a design laid out by someone else. Turning his eyes away alone, and turning them away having handed it over, were the same movement with an entirely different weight to it.
He is not abandoning them. He is only following a procedure.
It was the first night he had been able to think that.
The effect showed in the numbers.
At some point, rows of tally marks had appeared in Seto's notebook. The number of times in a day that Atem's movements broke. The first week averaged fifteen. The week he was given the map, nine. The week after that it fell to six.
"Yesterday was six."
In the study at night, Seto opened the notebook and said it.
This meeting too had become a standing one. Twice a week or so, they compared the record here in the evening. It was also something like a consultation.
"…Was it as few as that?"
"The one in front of the elevator is gone. The breaks in your gaze in the car are down as well. You seem to be getting used to it."
"Used to it isn't quite the word."
In the chair opposite, Atem searched slowly for the words. It is only in this room that Atem speaks at the speed of a man looking for words. Outside, he is a man who answers at once; here he does not begrudge the pauses.
"If I decide where to put my eyes beforehand, our eyes don't meet. There's no need to face them. So I'm not looking away either. What you gave me wasn't practice at looking away. It was practice at never entering the contest in the first place."
"Arrangements that make fighting unnecessary are my speciality."
"I'd imagine so. I know it from your company's documents."
Atem laughed, and then was quiet for a moment.
A silence fell. Seto did not fill it. As always, he kept it.
"Kaiba."
"What."
"That night a month ago, when I told you here. I had meant never to tell anyone."
Atem's hands were folded on his knees. The same posture as that night.
"You can't talk to the living about what you see. If they don't believe it, I'm a madman. And even if they do believe it, then they're the ones who are frightened. So I had decided that this business with my eyes was something to carry alone until I died. Until I died a second time."
"A rational judgement. Assuming the premise was correct."
"Yes. The premise was wrong."
Atem lifted his head.
"You didn't believe it and you weren't frightened. You said it only has to be consistent."
How much that had been, for Atem — the man himself probably did not understand.
"I stated a fact."
"That's right. I was treated as a fact."
His voice stays quiet, and goes only slightly deeper.
"Not pitied, not revered, not doubted; handled as nothing more than an object of observation. As a man who merely has a bias in his behaviour. …I lived, I died, I came back, and you are the first who has ever looked at me that way."
Seto said nothing. The pen on the notebook had stopped.
"Every morning you observe how I move. Where my eyes drift, the habits I don't notice in myself — you know them better than I do. There is no one, before or since, who looks at me that much except you."
Atem drew a breath, once, there.
"I've fallen for you. That's what I'm saying."
Silence.
Seto blinked. Once. Twice. He stopped partway through the third, his gaze travelled slightly across the ceiling, and came back.
At this man's processing speed, three blinks amount to an ordinary person being struck dumb, Atem was thinking.
"…Let me confirm the order of things."
The voice that finally came was affecting flatness, but it was half a tone lower.
"Is that part of the progress report? Or a separate matter?"
"A separate matter. Though it is an item that has been growing with every report."
"Since when."
"There was a seed from the night you told me 'it only has to be consistent.' The week you handed me the map, I admitted it. …And you? If it's a nuisance, say so. I have no intention of breaking what we have now over this."
Seto shut the notebook, dropped his eyes once to the cover, and answered.
"Do you imagine I would keep observation records on someone I found a nuisance?"
"…Which is to say."
"Work it out. Who besides me could analyse your suspicious behaviour."
Atem's eyes went wide. Then he broke into laughter he could not hold back. Seto watched him laugh out loud with an air of displeasure, but the corner of his own mouth, too, had eased very slightly and would not be held.
"Is that your answer, Kaiba?"
"Do you object?"
"No."
Atem went on, the laugh still around his eyes.
"It's like you. I like it."
A log in the fireplace made a small sound. The corner of the study, a place with no mark on the drawing. Nothing but the quiet of the night had collected there.
The season had moved on to the next.
At some point there were hardly any tally marks left to count. Even so Seto went on recording on his tablet, and Atem thought, half exasperated, that it was closer to a hobby by now.
He had got used to being observed. Or rather, this man's gaze being there inside his life had become the ordinary state of things.
What can be seen is still seen, unchanged.
The east end of the dining room. In front of the display cabinet in the corridor. Two places in the garden. They are there still. Only, the weight they take up in Atem's day has changed beyond comparison. He puts his sight somewhere else before their eyes can meet. If they do meet, he lets it slide past as scenery. Not answering is not casting them aside, but simply a procedure.
The days he can get past it have increased. Naturally, there are still days he cannot. That he has come to be able to think that is fine is perhaps the greatest change of all.
That night.
Seto was standing by the study window, reading documents.
Atem came into the room. The usual scheduled evening. He started towards the sofa, and his feet stopped.
His attention had gone to the corner of the study. A place that had never had a mark on the drawing.
Atem's gaze did not drift. Only his feet, which would not go on any further from there. Without saying anything, he stopped in the middle of the room and pretended to look for somewhere to put down the book in his hand.
Without lifting his eyes from the documents, Seto followed his memory.
——New. That place has been blank until now.
A corner, a place where the flow is weak. The conditions match. Either more of them have collected, or one has moved; something of that order. In fact, Atem is not coming forward. Which means that between himself and Atem, there is something.
Seto cannot see it, and has no way to verify it.
But the behaviour is consistent. That is evidence enough.
Seto closed the documents and started walking from the window. He crossed, deliberately, the corner of the study, the space where there was nothing to see and nothing there. What was reflected in the eyes of the dead in that place, Seto did not know and had no need to know. A man who cannot see simply walks the way a man who cannot see walks.
And he came as far as the front of Atem, and stopped.
"…Kaiba, just now, you—"
"For me it is a place with nothing in it."
Saying it, Seto put a hand to Atem's chin, drew his waist in, and kissed him.
Briefly, but as though verifying something. With a living man's heat, with a living man's weight.
Still holding his eyes at close range, Seto asked.
"What do you see?"
Atem blinked.
There was nothing in his sight but the man's face. The one in the corner, the one in the corridor, at this distance neither of them came into it anywhere. In three-thousand-year-old eyes, what was reflected now was one thing only.
"…I can't see anything but your face."
"Then that will do."
Seto said it. It was the voice of a man stating an inevitable conclusion.
"When seeing is a problem, look at me. I am, for the most part, within range of your eyes."
"…That is a fairly drastic course of treatment."
"Do you have a complaint?"
"None."
Atem laughed, and this time it was he who pulled Seto in by the collar.
In the corner of the study, something quietly thinned, and seemed to disappear.
The one who saw it was no longer looking anywhere in the room.
