Warnings: AU, vampires, yaoi (lime, skirting the edge of lemon), swearing, some violence, possibly not enough violence, fluctuating levels of excess prosyness which is not a word
A/N: Okay, this is going to be a long A/N, mostly because the story is actually complete so I'm not going to have much use for them in later chapters so almost everything I need to say will get said here. And with that stunning example of circular logic…
I know what you're thinking: Oh, hey, another YGO vamp fic. How original. And yes, it's true; vampire AUs in Yu-Gi-Oh are about as common as Peggy-Sue fics (Time travel AUs, for those who haven't sacrificed their Internet life to TVTropes long since) in Harry Potter or Final Fantasy VII. And like those Peggy-Sue fics, vampire AUs in any fandom have a tendency to be kind of…well, bad. Not to say that they're all bad; I've actually read a few that I rather liked and even a few of the ones I didn't were at least well-written. But that's what happens when you turn a world on its ear; sometimes, it's just not the same world when you're done. And usually, that's not a good thing. I began the Two Weeks project with a single objective: I would write a vampire AU, using the same circumstances as the majority of other stories. The characters who are usually vampires in YGO fic are vampires here; the ones who are usually human, surprise, get to stay human. The main couple is slash/yaoi—in this case, Puzzleshipping (and yes, it is 'true' Puzzleshipping, despite my honest insistence that I'm a Spiritshipper. Rules are rules.), as the plot idea I had didn't really work for Thiefshipping. The one concession to the genre which I was unwilling to make was the inclusion of Yami Marik as a separate character from Marik, which I cannot say anything more about or this A/N would easily quadruple in length. Necks were to be nommed. Sex was to be had. And damn it, even if it killed me, it was still somehow going to be more substantive than 'YGO guys are sexy, fangs are sexy, fanged YGO guys are sexier; discuss'. It was going to be around 20 pages at maximum. Its primary focus was going to be romance, because that's the focus of most vampire AUs.
187 pages and an overarching political drama, multiple felonies, two brawls, and a swordfight later, I'm having a hard time not bursting out laughing. It, um, got away from me a little.
Many of the characters in this drift into OOC moments at times; this is, I assure you, completely intentional. Although their base personalities are unchanged (at least I thought so), sometimes they will do or say or think things you wouldn't expect in the main continuity for the simple reason that they aren't in the main continuity. Relationships, goals, ambitions, dreams, interests, mannerisms—some of these are integral, but others come to us based on when and where and how we live our lives, so naturally there will be differences.
And…I think that's it. This fic is complete; I will post one new chapter each on Mondays and Fridays. Chapters actually get progressively longer, and my apologies, but that's mostly because the time between events gets inversely shorter. The 'verse can get twisty in places; I think I explained it all in-prose but in some places I was worried I might be info-dumping so stuff that seems obvious to me might make no sense to you. Any confusion, you know where to find me. Odds are any questions you got on this stuff, I have the answers to 'em in a file somewhere. Reviews are, as always, more than welcome.
Without any further ado…
Prologue
The Birth of an AU
"…Bakura and I got to talking about fanfiction and how silly it all is…half of them involve the main cast turning into vampires for no good reason! And then I said, 'I wouldn't mind being a vampire. Then I could live forever, just like you.'
"And then he said, 'Living forever is overrated…'"
—Abridged!Marik Ishtar, Marik Plays Bloodlines
Ladies and gentlemen, let's face it. One of the oldest tricks of the internet fanfiction trade (which, at nearly twenty years in age, is absolutely ancient) is to take a fandom, pick out the darkest/sexiest/most mysterious/craziest characters and turn them into vampires. It makes for a fabulous spanner in the works, instantly disrupting the fandom's familiar old patterns that are oft-times so difficult to manipulate. A popular variation on this is to simply pick up the entire fandom and re-shuffle it into an AU where these characters were always vampires, and a couple of the more self-righteous ones are vampire hunters, and everyone else is a quirky cunning everyman or an innovative paranormal biologist or just a hapless bystander that gets caught up in the action because hey, they are main characters.
This is an example of the latter type. It will hopefully be different from the hundred-odd others of its kind. It will certainly be different from the way life is for Yugi and Co at the moment. But then, what are alternate universes for…?
Alternate Universe Mods Installing
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Preparing to Enter Alternate Universe…Loading Opening Voiceover…Entering Alternate Universe
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The world changed forever in 3000 BCE. Give or take, at any rate. It's difficult to accurately track the years through half a dozen calendar changes and language barriers. Though even if one were able to pin down the precise year, it would be rather moot as it's well known that our kind existed long before then. That was simply the era in which vampires first came into their own. Perhaps our origins lie a thousand years prior, two thousand, another five, ten—but then, I have never been one to study the past. By now, I've lived most of it, as far as the present generation is concerned…
I was born Atem, son of Akhnamkanon, King of Egypt. I succeeded my father at the age of twelve, after his death by 'causes unknown'. At the age of seventeen, I joined him in death. Physically speaking, at any rate; my heart has never been weighed by Anubis, nor have I been granted entrance to the Afterlife. After I was Turned by my greatest enemy, the King of Thieves, the force of our combat locked us both away in a coma for many years.
Coma being the politically correct way of putting it.
I awoke one century later, surrounded by others of my kind—this was before the word vampire came to be. These few had formed a cult of sorts—the Children of Nut, goddess of the sky and the stars, queen of the night.
The circumstances of my rise—both from the grave and, once more, to power—are a mystery to many and I'd rather prefer them to remain so. There were things that had to be done, things I've never been proud of, things that should stay in the past. Within a decade, however, we had taken our rightful place. The Night Children had come. The tyranny of the day was past.
I am called Atem no longer; the name died with me as I intended, and the key to my power along with it. Unsatisfied with a simple title, it seems nations like to take turns trying to name me. Japan took a stab at it most recently: Yami, unoriginal as it may be, is what they came up with around the turn of the 20th century and thanks to advances in communications technology at that time, it appears the name will belong to me for a while this time. Centuries, maybe; perhaps even millennia. Honestly, used to it as I've become, I might well have chosen to keep it for good. It would have been nice, to finally have some sense of permanence.
Time passes. Tensions ease. Humans die, vampires fade. Five thousand years later, nothing in this world remains as it was. Nothing except me. And soon, even I will be gone. That's the one great secret we keep from humanity: Immortality is a lie. There isn't any such thing. Sooner or later, Death will get bored and tell your life-timer to get a move on, and then… Well, you can cheat Death, but you can't ever truly defeat it. Just put it off time and again.
But nothing can stave it off forever...