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The more that insane things kept happening to Tristan and his friends, the more he came to pride himself on his own practicality.
He wasn't cynical beyond reason, like Kaiba. Tristan wouldn't bend over backwards to explain away magic and monsters trying to kill him or send him to hell or whatever. But at the end of the day, while the duelists were all busy gambling with their souls, there were still real, mundane, physical things that needed to be handled. There were old men that needed to be taken to the hospital. There were kidnapped little boys that needed to be rescued from the goons guarding them.
And there was a spirit controlling his best friend's empty body that Tristan really wanted to get out of the hot desert sun.
So while Joey stormed off, while Téa was busy comforting a distraught Rebecca, while Duke was still grappling with the realization that the persona Yugi adopted while dueling was actually a whole separate other person, Tristan hauled Yugi's body up from where it had fallen, brusquely dusted him off, and frog-marched him into the camper.
The Pharaoh didn't fight him—only blinked dazedly as Tristan parked him on one of the bench seats in the little kitchen area. When Tristan leaned down to study him more closely, the Pharaoh immediately dropped his gaze to the floor. Yugi's face was flushed—both from the crying and from the heat. Maybe a little sunburned, too.
"You should stay out of the sun for a few days," Tristan told the spirit. "Rest. Recover."
The Pharaoh finally seemed to register his surroundings, coming back to himself a little. "No, I don't have time to rest!" he cried. "Joey was right. We have to go after Rafael! We have to get Yugi back!"
Despite the desperate fire in the Pharaoh's eyes, he was swaying on his feet, hands shaking as he gestured wildly.
Tristan scowled, "Sit down before you fall down!" He claped his hands on the Pharaoh's shoulders and forced him bodily back into the seat. Between Tristan's height advantage, how wobbly the Pharaoh already seemed, and Yugi's admittedly shrimpy physique, it didn't take much force. The Pharaoh usually held himself like someone who knew how to fight, but he was still working with Yugi's muscles, and Tristan knew his friend only worked out when he was forced to in gym class. Sure enough, his knees buckled like a newborn fawn's.
"Look," Tristan snapped, "I can't do much about everyone else self-destructing right now, but you? That's Yugi's body you're wrecking. Not yours."
The Pharaoh's breathing hitched, eyes going wide. The shaking in his hands got worse.
He opened his mouth to speak, but only managed a hoarse croak. When he swallowed to clear his throat the action sounded painful.
"I— yes, you're right. I should… I…" the Pharaoh looked up shamefully at Tristan, "what should I…?"
Tristan carefully and deliberately released his grip on Yugi's shoulders to pinch the bridge of his nose. Shaking the Pharaoh like a maraca was unlikely to help the situation.
"Right," he huffed. "Let's start with the basics: when did you last drink something?"
"I… I'm not sure," the Pharaoh murmured, gaze dropping again. "We would have… before the— before the duel?" His voice broke on the last word.
Fuck, before the duel? And the Pharaoh had wept for hours after they'd finally found him, alone and half-empty. No wonder his voice was shot.
Tristan turned away and started rifling through the cabinets for a bottle of water. "Uh huh. When'd you eat?"
"I don't know," the Pharaoh admitted. "I'm not usually… present for meals." His hand drifted to the Puzzle hanging from his neck.
Right, because the freaky amnesiac ghost that was currently driving his friend's body spent most of his time in an M.C. Escher nightmare maze magically stashed inside a gaudy necklace. Yugi probably took care of all the nuts and bolts of a living, physical existence, given that it was his body. Did the spirit remember anything about taking care of a flesh-and-blood vessel?
Tristan found a bottle and slammed it down in front of the Pharaoh.
"Drink this. Slowly."
The Pharaoh nodded, twisted the cap off the bottle and started sipping the water. So at least he knew how to do that much, either from watching Yugi or from the body's muscle memory.
Tristan continued his hunt in the cabinets for food, coming up with some granola bars. He tossed them on the table.
"Eat those, too."
The wrappers were a bit more of a challenge for the Pharaoh's shaking hands, but he got them open and started breaking off little pieces, chewing and swallowing mechanically.
Tristan had never seen the Pharaoh this… docile. This subdued.
It was disturbing. It was vindicating.
On a larger bite, the Pharaoh winced, grazing his fingers across a purpling bruise on his jaw. Joey would feel bad about that later, when his rage cooled enough to remember that no matter who was in control, it was still Yugi's body that he'd decked.
When Tristan looked at the Pharaoh, it was like he could still feel Mokuba's dead weight on his back; like he could still hear screaming and Bakura's cold laughter as the thing wearing his face fed grown men to literal monsters.
The pitiful display in front of him was neither an empty shell nor a total stranger, and somehow it was worse than either.
The Pharaoh's hands weren't shaking quite as badly anymore, so at least part of that had probably been from low blood sugar. The last thing they needed was the Pharaoh fainting from hunger he hadn't noticed and giving Yugi a concussion or something.
"Feel better?" Tristan asked. "Physically, I mean?"
"Yes," the Pharaoh said softly. "Thank you, Tristan."
Hearing the Pharaoh use his name with such familiarity made something twist in Tristan's gut. Tristan was Yugi's friend. He hadn't decided yet if he was also the Pharaoh's.
"Yugi went to all this damn trouble to save you," Tristan said. "I'm not just going to let it go to waste, no matter how I feel about you right now."
Another painful swallow. "I'm supposed to be the one protecting him," the Pharaoh choked out, sounding dangerously close to tears again.
Tristan snorted a humorless laugh. "Great job with that."
He wished that the words had been thoughtless, but in truth, the Pharaoh had shown him the knife in his still-bleeding wound, and Tristan had made the decision to grab it and twist.
He got the reaction he'd been aiming for. The Pharaoh went quiet again. He sagged back into the seat, head bowed and tears dripping silently down his face. Tristan fought down the part of himself that hated seeing Yugi cry. That was not Yugi.
"It was my mistake," the Pharaoh said, finding his stolen voice again—watery as it was. "He warned me not to play the Seal—he begged me not to! And I did it anyway!" The Pharaoh abruptly swayed to his feet and made a move as though to punch the wall—then froze. Instead, he carefully splayed his hand against the wall, having seemingly remembered just whose knuckles he would actually be breaking. "I should have been the one to pay the consequences. Not him."
"Yeah, no shit," Tristan said casually.
The Pharaoh wilted a little more at the easy condemnation. Tristan fought a wince, thinking about how disappointed Yugi would be in his behavior right now. The cruelty shouldn't come this easily, after being so long out of practice.
For Yugi's sake, he took pity on the Pharaoh.
"He was never going to let you, though," Tristan continued, "even if you deserved it."
The Pharaoh was looking at him again, wary but considering.
"What?" Tristan snapped, shame and anger churning corrosively in his stomach.
"You speak as if…" the Pharaoh trailed off.
"Like I know what I'm talking about?" Tristan bit out. "It's 'cause I do. You didn't show up until after Yugi finished the Puzzle, right?"
The Pharaoh nodded.
"And you remember Ushio?"
Malice and pride both flickered across the Pharaoh's face, before drowning in the guilt again.
"Yeah, I thought that was you," Tristan said. "You seriously fucked that guy up, you know that?"
"He'd been hurting Yugi," the Pharaoh retorted, unrepentant.
"Joey and I were almost as bad," Tristan interrupted grimly before forging ahead into the Pharaoh's shocked silence. "He was even quieter back then. No friends whatsoever—not even Téa. He never fought back, either. Just kind of went limp, waited for you to get bored and leave. He'd gotten so used to the hits that the only way to get a reaction out of him was to target the shit he actually cared about. His games. His puzzles."
The Pharaoh was watching him sharply now, holding the golden pyramid protectively. This conversation was feeling more and more like flicking pebbles at a wounded predator, but the Pharaoh needed to know just how far Yugi would stick his neck out for some two-bit bullies, never mind his closest friends.
"If Joey and I hadn't chucked one of the pieces of your puzzle out a window, we probably would have ended up on your shitlist, too. Thing is, we made it onto Ushio's first."
Tristan sat down heavily next to the Pharaoh and tilted his head back, staring at the camper's ceiling.
"Jo and I were decent scrappers, even back then, but Ushio fought dirty. He and his goons kicked the crap out of us. They'd worked themselves up into the kind of frenzy where they probably would have sent us to the hospital—if someone else hadn't gotten in the way."
"Yugi?" the Pharaoh asked softly, half disbelieving and half fond.
"Yeah," Tristan huffed a soft laugh. "I don't think he landed a hit on any of them—I'm not sure he was even trying to—but he broke their rhythm enough that they were satisfied with just bruises instead of broken bones. Joey and I tracked down that puzzle piece as fast as we could and, well, the first time you see Yugi just light up like that… it makes you want to be around him to see it again."
"Yes, it does," the Pharaoh whispered. "Why are you telling me this?"
"Because Yugi is a real forgiving kind of guy," Tristain said. "Too forgiving, honestly."
"This is different," the Pharaoh protested.
"Not to him," Tristan countered. "You got yourself into deep shit, he saw a chance to get you out of it, and he took it. He forgave you the moment he saved your sorry ass. Knowing Yugi, it probably wasn't even a choice for him."
The Pharaoh made a wounded kind of sound. Tristan knew the feeling.
"I don't deserve his forgiveness," the Pharaoh choked out.
"No. You don't," Tristan said bluntly, "not yet, at least. Maybe not ever. But you're going to work for it anyway. Because he would never ask you to. Because he's worth it."
Tristan put a hand on the Pharaoh's shoulder, gentler this time. The Pharaoh shivered before going very, very still.
"And the first step towards actually earning that forgiveness Yugi gave you," Tristan said, not unkindly, "is taking care of what's his until we can get him back. That means drinking enough water and eating three square meals every day. Eight hours of sleep a night. Hygeine." He took a breath, mentally resigning himself to some very awkward conversations in the near future. "I realize you're not real familiar with the care and keeping of a living human body, so if you have questions, I don't care how stupid they feel, you ask me. Okay?"
When the Pharaoh nodded, it was with all of his usual seriousness and gravitas. "Thank you, Tristan. I will."
And hearing the Pharaoh say his name a second time was just a little bit easier than the first.