Title: Cross-Contamination
Rating: mildly NSFW (violence and gore)
Wordcount: 4,319
Summary: It's crowded inside the Millennium Ring, and identity is catching.

Note: Manga-based. Because my favorite answer to "What is the spirit in the Ring?" is "Why not both?"

Suddenly its hatred is personal, and always has been. The soul it consumed still burns inside, still shapes language, still throbs with the memory of blood; it rages at itself for breaking promises it never made in earnest. The darkness it consumed has flooded it, filling it beyond its own boundaries, and still it has not burst; it has drunk every horror that will drown the world. It consumes itself ceaselessly, like Mehen straining to crush the sun.

The boundaries of its fragments are blurring together. It is only a fragment itself, the detritus of something incomprehensibly greater. It must not forget this even when it is crowded and collapsing into another tattered half, even when its memories crack and crumble until every surface is an edge. It has never laughed; it has never stopped laughing; it wants power and ruin and flesh and darkness, and it knows these are all facets of the same gem.

It wants revenge. It finds itself agreed on this point.

When its world opens again, every sensation comes as a spasm: mine, mine, flesh of my flesh, mine. These are its fingers, its breaths, its veins; this is its little other-mind, which it will not crush, but cradle in its jaws. This is its host-of-hosts, the flesh born to shape the spirit and be shaped by it in kind.

This attachment to a host is irrational. When the spirit tries to refine the idea, it loses interest in rationality.

The host, too, is irrational. He is more fascinated than frightened when the spirit fastens itself to his senses to explore what he takes for granted. He is pleased to suspect that the Ring might be haunted. Desire bleeds into his nightmares and makes them all the more piquant. Best of all, he teaches the spirit how to play god with words and dice.

In return, the spirit rifles through his mind, sniffing and tasting his little piles of want. Between are strung webs of loneliness that weave through dark places. He cannot hear when the spirit whispers to him, so it grants his wishes in secret, in forms that appeal to him. One is never alone with ghosts.

The host does not understand, but his anxiety is sweet, and the spirit can be patient. He is, has been, and will be its, part of a hazy bargain sealed and half-delivered somewhere in the wasteland of its memories. Mine, it croons, liberating him from all earthly ties, delighting in the fit of his skin. Mine. Mine. Me.

When the new world expands in a sharp gold shock of desire, they are two again, but the spirit binds them back together with blood.

The host's betrayal cracks open the spirit's seams. They are not two, it knows now, nor were they ever one—the host is a half, and the spirit is two ill-fitting halves seared together. The final half is lost, or there is one half too many. The spirit can never be sure which.

By the time the host touches the Ring again (as it knew he would, as any creature would after discovering itself unwhole), it has patched itself roughly back together, using as mortar the need for vengeance against a pharaoh only half-remembered but achingly hated. In places it discovers residue left by the host's soul, a sticky sympathy that dissolves and diffuses, and the spirit cannot scrape anything away without losing more of itself. It does not persist; mediating its own conflicts is exhausting enough.

The host is free with his fingers but cautious with his throat. If the spirit spooks him, he will grow warier. Better to wait and let his curiosity feed itself. Muted as their connection is, the spirit can still feel the caress of his hands on the metal, the intensity of his gaze when the pointers rise, the tension in his jaw as he half-expects to hear whispers in his head.

Unfulfilled expectation will blur into longing. The spirit can be patient. It vaguely recalls lying in wait in the dark for soft minds and fat purses. It has waited millennia, or longer. It can swallow its irritation with the boy who paces at the threshold of its lair, curious but skittish, alert for any hint of an outside threat that might give him an excuse to seek shelter.

It comes soon enough. With a few words the spirit talks its way back around his throat, and this time it is rational. It is patient.

Mindful always of boundaries, it slips cleanly in and out of control and leaves him hints of the story he wants to hear: that he holds the leash of a tamed monster. The spirit is gruff and secretive but as good as its word. It is the rascal who leaves him in a hallway in the middle of the night, the thief who steals freedom for his friend, the trickster who might be concealing a heart of gold. It becomes a secret that he wants to keep.

Mine, the host decides, backwards. He does not consider that his end of the leash loops around his throat.

The spirit can be patient, but not indefinitely. It spills over, making the host's breaths quicken and hands twitch at every gleam that escapes the curtain of Pegasus's hair. At first the host is uneasy, but he brightens as he thinks, You're cheering Yuugi on too, aren't you?

It doesn't answer, but it lets him mistake its desire for what he will. To throb with anticipation is a good and familiar feeling. The host is a chariot of blood and breath, bearing the spirit on a wild hunt. Even scavenging is a thrill when the best meat is sure to be left on the bone.

Such entanglement might be unwise, but wisdom is dim and distant, eclipsed by instinct. When opportunity beckons, the host's flesh tingles in response, and the spirit creeps away to satisfy itself. This is a reward long overdue, a debt that should have been collected long ago (mine).

The host's body is excellent camouflage, almost as good as invisibility. When the spirit reaches the dueling arena, it finds Pegasus alone, slumped in his chair, staring down at a single card. The host's running shoes fall as quietly as paw pads.

When it reaches the table and lets its shadow fall over the card, Pegasus at last looks up. With a flash of the Eye, his expression collapses from confusion into gray horror.

The spirit grabs his throat with one hand and the side of his face with the other. Thumb tracing the edge of his ruined eyelid, it hisses, "Isn't anticipation fun?"

The man is too broken to put up a fight, so the spirit takes its satisfaction by digging and digging until the last breath spasms out of him, until the blood pouring down his cheek congeals and cools. It cleans every trace of him from the Eye with its host's tongue, savoring the tang of gore and gold.

On its way out, it sucks clean its host's fingers and scrapes his nails with his teeth. The host doesn't appreciate getting his hands dirty.

To sever a piece of itself is a good and familiar feeling, pain spiced with nostalgia and satisfaction. It shivers and licks its host's lips as it seals the splinter in place, relishing the electric heat that courses through the metal. One fragment for another, it thinks, and laughs deliriously in its mind.

The pharaoh remembers nothing, but the spirit knows that his memories lie sleeping within the labyrinth. This certainty, like every other, comes neat and packaged like a nursery rhyme: four and twenty blackbirds went into the pie, just as nine and ninety souls went into the gold, and six priests and a boy-king went into the seal. Perhaps the most exhilarating part of having flesh is the opportunity for experiences that are not second-hand.

But the spirit quibbles; if anything, it has too much personal experience, a vast jumble that churns beneath it like a sea of sand. More than a score of centuries have failed to settle the landscape. Below it all runs the fault line of Kul Elna, groaning toward cataclysm.

It is losing integrity again, and its work here is finished. Shoving the host to the forefront, the spirit retreats to lick its jagged edges.

The host takes his disorientation in stride. After glancing at his surroundings, he splays his scarred hand over the Ring and thinks, with only the faintest hint of suspicion, You helped Yuugi again.

Such an easy host. The spirit is careful with its walls, so he cannot share its fantasies of shattering Yuugi like the Puzzle, snapping apart vertebrae for dice.

The spirit has a talent for working with tools: sharp ones that slip between ribs, insubstantial ones that tug the first twist of a spiral into a mind, double-edged ones that make a tool of the wielder.

Malik believes that he has the same talent, but he hasn't had as much practice, and he presumably does not exist in a perpetual state of fraught teamwork. What he does have are a Millennium Item, a secret, and the negotiating skills of an entitled lunatic. Volleying death threats is amusing; the Rod and the secret are alluring. The spirit finds itself more than willing to make a game of getting what it wants.

Its splinter is less enthusiastic, but it has a labyrinth to be busy exploring. You rob your tombs, the spirit tells it, and I'll rob mine.

"Time's up," Malik says. "What's your choice?"

In answer, the spirit draws a knife. It won't be cutting him open after all, at least not now, not with this weapon. The spirit runs its tongue along the blade, drawing a fraction of the satisfaction it might have taken with a mouthful of Malik's blood.

The host, too, is a tool, made of precious, exploitable flesh (mine) that parts eagerly at the blade's touch. In the end, only blood matters, and he has a talent for bleeding.

When the spirit stops laughing long enough to catch its breath, it says, "I'll lend you my host." It looks forward to finding out whether Malik gets the joke.

As the host sleeps, his mind whirls with violent dreams. The spirit watches with interest. Its only other source of amusement is the psychic filament that tethers its splinter, and tugging that is counterproductive; it has already scolded itself twice. Another line extends from the back of the host's hand, and this too is not to be touched, at least not while the old man stands guard. The spirit can be patient.

The host's dream-self has arrived at school naked and discovered that his classmates are animated corpses, mutilated almost beyond recognition and keen to include him in their ranks. As the spirit looks on, grinning, the host flees to the roof. The corpses shamble, but he runs as if through treacle; they are ever at his heels, ever grasping, and he can scarcely kick free. He screams when a panicked strike catches his foot in a friend's intestines.

At the edge of the roof he is cornered. The nearest of the undead advances, slaver dripping from its split jaw, and the host lashes out with a cry that rises an octave when his enemy's eye comes away in his hand. The corpse stumbles backward and begins to melt, bone and flesh and blood, into gold.

The spirit growls and enters the dream, taking the host's shape (mine but not me). With a sweep of its arm it reduces the nightmares to kernels—fear of isolation, fear of proximity, fear that flatters—and swallows them whole. Then it grabs the host's shoulders and growls, "What the hell are you doing?"

The dream degenerates. Where once was sky now is void, and the surface beneath them is at once porcelain and milk. The host's eyes glaze.

With a snarl, the spirit lets him fall to the undulating floor, which now is made of origami cranes. Something like a wrecked car with a woman's face careers toward him, but the spirit rends and consumes it—there a soft voice at night, there shattered glass on a wet road, there a whiff of half-forgotten perfume. For a disorienting moment, the spirit tastes garlic and hears the rattle of a sistrum. Overhead the void flickers into a white ceiling.

The host lies still and prone on what has settled as carpet. With a snort, the spirit nudges his ribs with its foot and says, "You're a pain in the ass."

This time the filament is tugged from the other direction—stop stop what the hell are you doing—and the spirit is swept from the host's dream in a wave of nausea. It struggles against the urge to seize the body and vomit out the grime coating it inside, flood bile through the channels where the host has seeped, anything to disgorge the need for family and friends that are not ghosts, and why should it even care about ghosts?

When hours later, still sick, it is called to escape, it rips the line from the host's hand so brutally that the flesh tears.

Malik doesn't appreciate the host. He laughs at the host's reaction to discovering that his arm no longer hurts, but otherwise he expresses little interest. The spirit hovers at the edge of the host's consciousness, faint and muddled as it is, as he follows Malik's vague commands: Reassure your friends. Eat. Wash. Sleep. By the last of these, the host holds so little of Malik's attention that he jerks like a tangled marionette and passes out on top of his blankets.

Above, the spirit sneers. Sloppy.

You don't need him functional, Malik points out, and like everything he says, it is a challenge. Why don't you hollow him out?

The host is having another nightmare, in which his dead sister cracks him to pieces with her touch. The hand that refuses to release hers shatters at every joint and scatters in bloody chunks around his feet. When he tries again, blowing his other hand to bits, the spirit scoops up the pieces like knucklebones. It devours them, and the host grows them back, ready to repeat his mistakes.

To Malik it replies, Why don't you fuck off?

The host matters above all else. It needs the body; it needs flesh; it needs him to stop crying out in pain, because for the first time it takes no joy in suffering—

(Not the first time, the host is each of ninety-nine bodies bleeding out, some of them still alive when they fall, because it needs flesh.)

There is no birth without blood, but it hates itself fiercely for being what it is: from the dark, of the dark, and always, always a liar. The efforts of its splinter to mediate only make it angrier.

Hating Malik is an easy compromise. The spirit lies, again, then floods the host and swallows his pain. It is a good and familiar feeling to sacrifice itself upon its own altar, to grapple with itself at the edge of oblivion, to find clarity in agony. The host doesn't appreciate agony.

The host is one small body in the shadows, unburnt and unbloodied but breaking apart inside. It feels itself slip through his shaking fingers.

When its world opens again, it needs to kill something, and Malik has conveniently volunteered himself.

Its splinter is alarmed by how readily it now risks the flesh. Its splinter doesn't understand flesh, or sacrifice, or the vindication it feels when each piece of itself is devoured by the dark. It needs to rid itself of every such understanding; when it claims the Rod, it will carve any that remain out of the host. It needs to stop coddling him and start hollowing him out. Of this, at least, its splinter approves.

(One is never hollow with ghosts, for whom every wound is an invitation. They adore it and despise it and will protect it from everything but their own hatred; it will devour all the world and lay itself upon their altar as a fattened sacrifice.)

Too late, the spirit knows itself for a greedy fool. It blames Malik for its own self-sabotage while it still has fingers left to point.

This is one way, at least, to burn away its chaff. Let it be consumed, and the host's entangling flesh along with it. Let the ghosts glut themselves on ashes. It is a thing of the dark, by nature or by choice, and master of shadows. It will never die. The darkness is only a womb with teeth, and the pharaoh can be counted upon to act as an unwitting midwife.

Crowded into the dwindling scraps of the host, the spirit laughs, because Malik still doesn't get the joke.

Idiot, comes sneering across the filament.

Its splinter greets it coolly when it returns from the void. It expected no different.

What does surprise it is the sudden eager pressure of the host's hand on the Ring. Before the spirit can even consider persuasion, it finds itself circling his throat. The host's soul flickers with joy and something almost like gratitude.

Curious, the spirit dips into his recent memories (it rubs off stop stop comes thin and tinny across the wire, so easy to ignore) and finds only scraps of sensation adrift in a thick darkness. He knows that he was in pain and that the spirit saved him; he doesn't know how he got in harm's way, but he would rather clutch his warm certainties close than push them out into cold perspective. Seeing its own distorted image in the host's nightmares makes the spirit at once smug and queasy.

A tendril of thought unfurls from the host's mind, reaching out but not quite daring to touch. We lost, he says, half-questioning, and the spirit considers how to answer. It doesn't owe him an answer. It disregards the exasperated tension of the filament.

There is no fear left. The host, too, is an idiot; he will sleep with his monster's teeth at his throat, trusting its intentions, even as the pointers of the Ring brush his scars. Of course, the monster has no reason now to bite him.

Without warning the spirit feels a crack in a wall it had thought secure, and the corpses of memories, long since decomposed, ooze out into whatever crevices they can find. Now it is the host's turn to be sick.

Don't leave. His distress spills over into the body, which quivers and retches. Please don't leave me again.

The spirit laughs. It has never let anything go.

The splinter sloughs and remembers, wearing down like a pearl in reverse. It is sharp and simple again, and the spirit hates to grasp sluggishly at the razors of its thoughts. Patience now, and later destroy—

(but not family never family not amane not mother)

—and its own fragments swirl together, leaving it dizzy and tainted. It longs for its splinter. It should not long, but it has slid so far down the spiral that it no longer remembers where it began. Its senses are clogged with dead things.

In the world outside, rain batters the window, and the host begins another letter. The spirit bristles and seizes control.

"Shut up," it says in response to his whining. "If we have time to waste, we have time to work." Speaking aloud helps it focus, even as flesh and breath further entangle it. Over protests that are half its own, it marches their unprotected body into the storm.

In the basement of the museum, the host drips and sniffles over the diorama, and the spirit yells at him twice for getting Kul Elna wrong.

It feels more itself, or less itself, in the presence of Akhenaden's mummy. It can no longer tell which. It forbids itself to control the host's body in this room, because it cannot trust itself with hands.

"I wish you wouldn't lose your temper like that," the host says, rinsing his paintbrush. He, too, has begun speaking out loud when there's no one to hear him outside his head. "I think I understand why you do, though."

The spirit doesn't answer. From so far away that it scarcely matters, the splinter berates it: He doesn't understand anything. If he did, you'd have to rip it out of him. Reflexively, the spirit curls around his mind like a serpent.

For a long time the host is silent, intently detailing the palace walls. When he pauses to rest, he says, "I haven't had any nightmares lately." The spirit doesn't respond. "Thank you."

It is swollen with ghosts. Horrors overflow from it, and still it hungers, because a ravenous hatred at its core remembers what it is owed. It is an idiot for selling its soul without suspecting the buyer; it is an idiot for promising vengeance that encompasses itself; it demands its own destruction. All it can agree upon is that this isn't what it intended when it surged into and out of the dark.

None of which should matter, because everything will be settled soon enough. In the end, it shouldn't care whether it consigns itself to oblivion in the world's wake. In the end, it doesn't care what happens to anything as long as the pharaoh and his kingdom have paid their forfeit in blood.

(Akhenaden would come apart so satisfyingly in its hands. Ninety-nine withered pieces to burn one by one, then piss on the ashes.)

It must be spilling over into the host, because he sets down his brush to ask, "This won't be like the last game, will it? You promised."

"No." Flesh and breath, a broken rule. It is focused, but focused wrong. "This won't be anything like before."

What do you think you are? the splinter demands, as if the tether runs the other way and it is the master.

Hesitation is probably answer enough. The spirit disdainfully twangs the filament.

A growl resonates in the host's bones. The filament pulls taut and cuts deep. Distance and wet boundaries make for clumsy work, but the splinter is intent, sawing away like a carpenter attempting surgery. The spirit shrieks and threatens and finally cracks apart laughing, unable to struggle when it can't even tell one piece of itself from another.

Reality snaps back into focus as if someone has put out all its eyes but one. The spirit takes stock: its new edges are serrated and dripping, and excess pieces cling to it by strings, but an older identity comes sharp and cold down the filament, reminding it of its shape. It stops laughing.

The excised thief goes kicking and screaming into the depths, and the host will keep him company soon enough. The fragment of the god remains, misshapen and riddled with residue. Good enough, it decides, echoing its splinter. In the Puzzle and beyond the door, it is purely and wholly itself, purely and wholly dark, but here it is jumbled up with flesh. What it cannot consume it can at least corrupt.

Anticipation dizzies it like the helium it never sucked from balloons, like the heatstroke it never suffered, like—

They will not seep, they will not merge, they will not distract. With a growl it flips the switch on the wall, banishing the light, then pats the pocket where it has stashed the Eye. All that remains this night is to bait a hook for the pharaoh's vessel; by this time tomorrow, it will again be a facet of the true darkness. Let the others be devoured. Let the chaff be burnt away, and then let them see who is master.

In the alley it stops to retch.

So when this is over, the thief says to the host, kill the pharaoh for me.

No! He's my friend! The host is never more childish than when he feels indignant. And haven't you been paying attention? It wasn't even his fault.

Being the pharaoh made it his fault, the thief points out.

That's ridiculous. That would be like me blaming the emperor for the accident.

The thief snorts. You don't demand enough from your kings.

It's been three thousand years. We don't even do kings that way anymore.

They've gone around in too many unproductive circles of justice and blame, of souls and scars, of deception and satisfaction, and perhaps all they will ever agree upon are the ghosts they carry. The thief wonders what will become of those, if they will bay for blood in the host's ears, or crowd into Ammit's gullet in the thief's wake, or let themselves be soothed away with less than they deserve.

There isn't enough blood in the world to sate them, but it's been three thousand years; perhaps they, too, have picked up modern sensibilities. At least burn the mummy.

The host sighs. All right, but my father's going to have a fit.

Tell him he's lucky he's alive to have one.

Their thoughts tangle together like vines. No apologies are offered or accepted.

I hope Ammit chokes on you, the host says, at least as much a benediction as a curse.

I'll kick her teeth out so you slide down easy, the thief replies in kind. Now come on, let's fuck it up.

What is the point of playing, if the opponent has no chance of victory? What is the point of victory, if not to gloat along the way?

It is certain of itself on all counts, but tatters of humanity still cling to it, and perhaps it should be warier of their weight. It has a niggling suspicion that it is not acting entirely in its own best interests.

"I'll give you a hint," it says, regardless, and its splinter no longer exists to scold it.