all that glitters
part 1/?
disclaimer: I do not own Yu-Gi-Oh! for which you may all thank (the) god(s).
note: this is unabashed crack fic that I wrote for the lulz while being so depressed I could not see straight. (in case you were wondering if I had died! but no! I am still around, living a drifty vague amoeba-like existence.) I am somewhat better now, although the inspiration for fic (by which I mean Faust) seems to have dried up. in the meantime, please have this tiny snippet. I hope you will find it amusing.
When Ryou wakes up on the roof of the Domino City Museum, naked and half-crushed under a mound of gold, carnelian, and lapis lazuli, he thinks it may be a second set of magical powers kicking in, like maybe being bitten by radioactive Egyptian mummies—aside from bestowing upon the bitten the logical ability to speak in tongues and the somewhat logical but strangely cinematic abilities to dislocate their jaws and summon swarms of flesh-eating scarabs—also gives you the power to turn everything you touch into, very specifically, winged scarab pectorals and beaded collars from the New Kingdom—but no. It turns out he's been possessed. On top of everything.
"You're joking," he says, finally.
Yuugi shakes his head. "Not joking. Well, unless you've suddenly developed a habit of sleep-thievery. Or general kleptomania—put that back, please, Bakura-kun, it shouldn't be handled without gloves."
Ryou looks down at the golden funeral mask in his lap, which stares back with hollow lapis lazuli-lined eyes. He doesn't remember taking it. He sets it on the curator's desk and feels like crying.
"Has this happened before?" Yuugi asks him.
"You mean, have I woken up buried to my neck in a pile of gold on previous occasions?" Ryou says. "Not that I can recall, no, Yuugi."
"I mean," Yuugi says, "maybe it doesn't have anything to do with the mummy."
"Right," Ryou says. "I covered myself in Twentieth Dynasty jewelry for reasons wholly unrelated to being bitten by a Twentieth Dynasty mummy."
"Well—we aren't sure of the dates on some of those," Yuugi points out, ever so reasonably. Ryou thinks he wouldn't be so bloody reasonable if he'd been the one the mummy had lunged at. "They could be Nineteenth. You took a few pieces from the Amarna collection, too."
"Can we just go through the tapes one more time," Ryou says, tired.
The entire museum has been in lockdown since The Mummy Incident four weeks ago, but as the head curator's grandson and resident occultist, Yuugi gets certain privileges. They're sitting in Sugoroku Mutou's office right now, reviewing security tapes. Ryou watches his pale naked arse dart into view, only to be suddenly swallowed up by a strange and clearly supernatural black fog that rolls out of fucking nowhere.
"About that," Yuugi says. "Is the creepy fog also something you can do now?"
"No," Ryou says. "Well. Maybe. I'm not sure." Now that he thinks about it, flesh-eating scarabs and evil black fog go together far better than flesh-eating scarabs and, say, jaw dislocation.
Yuugi rewinds. "Huh," he says. "It's kind of cool."
"But why am I naked?" Ryou says, pained. "Why?"
Yami—Yuugi's time-traveling Pharaoh, because Yuugi would unwittingly pull a descendant of Thutmoses III with an unpronounceable name across all of space and time into his bed at three in the morning—and then decide to share him with his girlfriend—pokes his pointy head in. He's taken to copying Yuugi's hairstyle, which, in addition to being extremely disconcerting, in that Ryou is always tricked into thinking Yuugi has finally hit puberty and transformed overnight into some sort of bronzed Adonis, must also cost Yuugi thousands of yen a month in hair products.
"Good morning, aibou," he says politely. "Hello, B—ye gods!" He sweeps a hand toward at Ryou's face with what Ryou thinks is unnecessary theatricality. "Why are you wearing m'sdemet?"
A muscle twitches in Ryou's left cheek. When on that fated evening the mummy burst from its display case, sank its three-thousand-year-old teeth into Ryou's arm, and promptly disintegrated, he only screamed a little bit. He let Yuugi staunch the bleeding with a tote bag from the gift shop and take him to the hospital for tests and stitches. When the flesh-eating scarabs got him evicted three days after that, because black clouds of flesh-eating insects of any sort hovering obediently around him apparently violated the terms of his lease (that they also in a matter of seconds devoured Mrs. Ogawa's small and extraordinarily noisy shih tzu did not help either), he tried not to mind so much, and focused instead on the positives, or what had the potential to become the positives: so what if he could only speak in tongues and not read them, being able to dislocate his jaw no doubt had its perks, and having flesh-eating scarabs at his beck and call would probably come in handy some day. Yes: Ryou thinks he's handled everything rather well in fact, all things considered.
But he draws the line at painting his eyes with soot and parkouring his way across the city to roll arse-naked in a pile of stolen grave goods.
Yami is momentarily distracted by the mask. "So this is the death mask of Kaankhre who-pleases-Sobek that you were telling me about, aibou," he says, coming over to peer at it. "It is exceedingly fine, though I think we had finer things in my day." He turns back to Ryou. "So, Bakura, today it is kohl in place of scarabs?"
"They materialize on command now," Ryou tells him. "And the eyeliner is—new."
"Not bad," Yami says. "And the hair is—new, too?"
"Hair?" Ryou says, experiencing a searing flash of panic. He reaches up and feels it: matted and tangled but still all there. "What's new about my hair?"
"Oh," Yami says. "Er. Nothing."
"We think Bakura-kun was possessed," Yuugi explains. "By an ancient Egyptian spirit."
"Really! How very bizarre," Yami the time-traveling Pharaoh says, without a hint of irony. "Show me." He sets a casual hand on Yuugi's shoulder and leans over them, and Ryou tries not to think about how good Yami smells and how nicely he is dressed while he, Bakura Ryou, is wearing a towel because they have not been able to find his clothes.
They watch the video through twice. Yuugi rewinds and pauses just as black tendrils of mist reach Ryou's extremely white buttocks. Ryou thinks about stealing the tapes and setting them on fire.
"Well?" Yuugi says, sitting back. "What do you think, Yami?"
"Hm," Yami says, frowning. "I don't like how it looks, aibou. That fog is the result of powerful sorcery—sorcery of the darkest kind. What we call shadow magic."
"Brilliant," Ryou says.
Yami's frown deepens. "It's not brilliant," he says. "It's very, very dark. And terrible."
Ryou puts his head in his hands.
He tries not sleeping for a while. This works until the fourth day of bloodshot white-knuckled wild-haired sleeplessness, when he develops an awkward eye-twitch and starts to hallucinate his mother in shop windows and display cases. Walking feverish counterclockwise circles in the park, away from any reflective surfaces, he yawns hugely and a pack of preschool children and their teacher take one look at his dangling jaw and run away screaming. Shortly thereafter, he falls flat on his face and wakes up two days later on the floor of the traveling European exhibit, with several many-carat necklaces dribbling out of his mouth, wearing a ruby-studded diadem as a bracelet and hugging a ceremonial Viking helmet of beaten gold to his chest like a small child might cuddle a security blanket.
He asks Yuugi to lock him into his storage closet before he leaves each night.
It doesn't work. Obviously.
Ryou's actually starting to like the flesh-eating scarabs. They're very big and black and shiny, and kind of adorable when they aren't massing to kill. He summons them a few at a time and lets them trundle up and down his arms.
"I think you must be a new species," he says to the scarab sitting on his left shoulder. "What will they call you? Scarabaeus creophagus. Scarabaeus bakurae. Scarabaeus scary-as-fuck."
This is the sum of his life: He is living in a storage closet in the basement of a museum, talking to bugs.
After Ryou breaks into the museum's collection of Byzantine coins and uses them to fill up a sarcophagus, bathtub-style, with golden solidi, Yuugi makes him move into the Turtle Game Shop.
"Just for a little while," he says. "So we can keep an eye on you." Then he hesitates.
"What?" Ryou says.
"Just—don't bring your scarabs," Yuugi says, looking embarrassed. "Yami and I don't mind, of course, but Anzu hates bugs."
"But," Ryou says. He is teaching them to perform aerial somersaults.
"No buts."
"Keeping an eye on you," it turns out, means dragging Ryou to bars after work, force-feeding him foods other than packaged ramen, and watching unbelievably gory B horror movies on Friday nights, while Ryou huddles on the sofa with a seat cushion pressed against his face, trying to blot out the sounds of slaughter. (He doesn't understand how Anzu can stomach the sight of humans being turned into deli meat by multiple swinging pendulums and yet run screaming from perfectly harmless insects.)
One morning Ryou comes into the living room to find Yuugi and Yami intent on a tabletop duel, and Anzu sitting to the side, alternately coaching them and egging them on. It is the most endearingly geeky thing Ryou has ever had the privilege to witness, and Ryou is a trained Egyptologist and, before all that, a consummate gamer and former GM.
"I didn't know you dueled, Yuugi," Ryou says.
"Oh, well," Yuugi says, looking sheepish. "I won a few tournaments. It was before you transferred here, I guess, Bakura-kun."
"A few tournaments?" Anzu scoffs. "You made it all the way to the national championships!"
"Yeah," Yuugi says. He's blushing now. Ryou watches in fascination: it's sickeningly adorable in a way he never even thought possible. "It's pretty dorky, though. I mean, a children's card game and everything. And the rules don't make any sense."
"Even so," Yami says gravely, "I like it. There—I activate my trap card and cut your life points in half."
"Damn," Yuugi murmurs. He pouts, makes the necessary changes to their score sheet, considers the cards in his hand, and pouts some more. "You're getting good."
Yami looks smug. "I think, should I ever return to my own time and people, I will introduce this 'Duel Monsters' to them," he says.
"Oh, but you can't do that, Pharaoh-kun," Anzu says, and then, proving once and for all that she and Yuugi are meant for each other: "You'll mess up the time stream! Create an alternate reality!"
Yuugi grins at her. "One where I'm King of Games after all?"
"Or worse," Anzu says, smiling back. "Stranger things have happened."
"You can say that again," Ryou mutters, but agrees to play victor and is trounced by Yami in five turns and Anzu in twelve.
Sugoroku is out of town dealing with the fallout that inevitably occurs when one of your mummies comes back to life and bites someone, and Ryou has moved into his room. It is a much larger and nicer room than Ryou had ever hoped to able to sleep in on a post-grad salary, with a four-poster bed, an analog clock, an enormous curtained window, and a single golden artifact, just recently reassembled from nearly fifty pieces, that Ryou often wakes up sucking on like a pacifier.
He has to leave the room to vomit (and, if we're being honest, shed a few tears) during their annual re-watch of Audition, but, all the same, life is, for the moment, very good.
Surprising and unsurprising television preferences of the Mutou household, plus one
Yuugi: HaroMoni on TV Tokyo, which he watches religiously and which Ryou agrees is strangely addicting in an effervescent, honey-colored, high-pitched way.
Anzu: Most trendy doramas, but Kimi wa Pet especially, to the extent that Ryou starts to wonder about Yuugi's enormous collection of leather collars (but decides not to ask).
Yami: Iron Chef reruns, of all things. ("This man, Chairman Kaga—he understands drama. I will learn from him.")
Sugoroku: According to Yuugi, NHK Special documentaries.
Ryou: Card Captor Sakura. (What? It's relaxing.)
One Saturday a few weeks after he has moved in, Ryou is sweeping the front steps of the game shop when he notices a young man waving at him from across the street.
Ryou points at himself, mouths, "Me?"
The boy crosses the street, grinning widely. He is almost exactly Ryou's height, and darkly tanned, with longish blond hair and ears full of colorful plastic rings. "Hey!" the boy says, clapping Ryou heartily on the shoulder. "Didn't know you worked around here. This is so great! I never thought we'd run into each other again! When do you get off work?"
Ryou squints at him. "Er. Do I know you?"
"Do you know me?" the boy echoes. "Ha ha! That's cute. Do you know me."
"No, really," Ryou says. "I think there's been some mistake."
"Come on," the boy says, beginning to scowl. "It's me, Toshiyuki. You know, from the park?"
"I'm sorry," Ryou says, "but I really don't think we've met," and then he's sitting on his arse on the concrete, rubbing his jaw.
"You said you liked my hair! You said I was the best you'd ever had!" Toshiyuki shouts at him. "Well, fuck you too!"
"What the hell," Ryou says, as Toshiyuki stomps away.
Later that day, he takes a nap and regains consciousness naked on the roof wearing Sugoroku's puzzle around his neck. Recognizing this as the beginning of the end, he thinks about crawling to the edge and throwing himself into the street below, but realizes this will likely result in horrible maiming instead of merciful death, and goes inside instead, scraping his knees on the window sill.
He finds Yami assembling a late breakfast in the kitchen, wearing Anzu's pink apron and nothing else, and humming. Ryou studies his buttocks and is briefly, intensely grateful to be alive.
Eventually, Yuugi comes downstairs, rubbing his eyes and yawning adorably.
Ryou tells him.
"Temporary relapse," Yuugi says bracingly, patting him on the back. "Yami is fascinated with that puzzle, too. You're getting better, I promise, Bakura-kun."
Yuugi means well, but he is a lying liar who lies.
The very next day, Ryou wakes up in a strange place, in a strange bed, to an eyeful of gleaming gold. The sight of it is almost comforting, until he notices that this gold, in the manner of most human hair, is attached to a human being. A live human being, for which he thanks God, but also—ominously—an extremely naked one.
Ryou begins to extricate himself from the tangle of blankets but finds himself pinned to the headboard with two bare arms on either side of his head and a mouth kissing his throat.
It is unquestionably the best kiss of Ryou's life, until the clever mouth drifts upward to press against his and an equally clever thigh slips between his legs; then it becomes the second-best. This kiss is bloody magical, possibly even miraculous. Ryou gasps in mingled awe and pleasure. His eyes roll into the back of his head. His thoughts dissipate. His toes curl. His hands clench. His hips buck.
"Mm," the clever mouth murmurs, and withdraws.
"Noooo," Ryou says, bereft. He purses his lips, but no more kisses are forthcoming. Eventually, reluctantly, he opens his eyes.
The man to which the most wonderful mouth in the world belongs has propped himself up on one elbow and is looking up at Ryou through a thick golden fringe of eyelashes. His eyes are remarkable—the color of blue chalcedony.
Ryou makes a small and hopeless sound.
"'Morning," the man says, smiling. "You stayed." His lips are the delicate pink of a lotus; his teeth are ivory and alabaster. He is, as a quick downward glance ascertains, very, very naked. Ryou is seized by a sudden and terrible desire to lick him all over, and settles for gulping instead.
"Yes. Er. Good morning," Ryou replies, mostly because it's the polite thing to do, but also because he is buying time for his dissipated thoughts to reform into coherent ones.
The naked man laughs. The sound is rich and golden. "No need to be so formal," he says.
"What?" Ryou says. "Right. I."
"You," the naked man says, patiently, and Ryou thinks that it would be quite nice to spend the rest of his life here, naked in this very bed, with this naked stranger nodding patiently at him. Then the stranger shifts and the morning sun glitters on his hair, which is falling over his shoulders like spun gold, and reconstituted thoughts and the implication of 'You stayed' hit Ryou all at once, like a brick to the head—like Toshiyuki's fist to his jaw.
"Mnnaaah," he says, in horrified realization.
The naked man smiles at him. "What is it?"
"I-should-get-to-work-now-probably-yes-maybe-definitely," Ryou says, in a tinny robot voice.
"On a Saturday?" the naked man says. He takes Ryou's right hand and kisses the fingertips one by one, all while making searing eye contact. "Don't go. Stay a while. Take me to breakfast. I'm new here—just moved, and I don't know where anything is." He turns Ryou's hand over and kisses the inside of Ryou's wrist where it meets the palm. "You're different this morning. Cuter. I like it."
"Holy mother of god," Ryou says. "I mean, nnngh. No. I mean, yes. Ye-e-e-e-s. No! I must go. Right now." He snatches his hand away and scrambles backward. He may or may not be hyperventilating. "My-professional-life-is-busy-but-fulfilling-and-I-am-late-very-very-late-thank-you-goodbye."
The clever mouth finds Ryou's naked ankle; Ryou shrieks and falls off the bed, and then he doesn't look back. He scrambles backward until his shoulders hit a wall, retrieving the scattered articles of his clothing along the way.
"Let's do this again soon!" the naked man calls from the bed. "I'm in Japan for a few months. I'll find you!"
"Waaah," Ryou whimpers. He crawls to the door and runs for his life.
It has been a long time since Ryou used his legs to escape bullies in secondary, and he's not as fast as he used to be. He hasn't put his arms into his sleeves. His sweater flaps around his neck like a demented and slightly woolly white bird trying to take flight. He loses a shoe while darting through traffic. He drops his other shoe on the front steps of the museum, but doesn't stop running until he bursts Sugoroku's office, red-faced, barefoot, and gasping.
Yuugi looks up from the funeral mask. "Bakura-kun," he says, taking in Ryou's disheveled appearance and apparently finding nothing unusual about it. "What are you doing here? It's Saturday."
Ryou doubles over, hands on his knees, and wheezes.
Yuugi presses a button on his desk phone. "Yami? Could you come up for a moment, please? Bakura-kun, what's happened?"
"Sex," Ryou gasps. "Had sex. With a man."
"Yes, and—?" Yuugi frowns. "Bakura-kun, you came out to us in high school."
"With a man last night," Ryou bites out, glaring significantly.
"Oh!" Yuugi says. "I see! Yes, we were wondering where you'd got to this morning. We thought you might have broken into the museum again. You sly dog!" He notices Ryou's furious bulging eyes and adds, uncertainly, "Um. . .did you have fun?"
"No," Ryou roars. "Yes. I don't know! The man was bloody sex god. It was probably the best bloody sex I have ever had in my life, and I can't remember a single bloody moment of it because I was possessed at the time! No. No. Hang on. I was in bed with a sex god and I ran away. I'm an idiot! Aaargh," he moans, and collapses into a chair as his jellied legs give way, pulling regretfully at his hair.
"No," Yami says from behind him. "It was a very good thing that you did run away, Bakura. Sex with gods never ends well for mortals. Perchance you know the story of Semele, or that of Danaë."
"And Io," Yuugi says.
"And Io," Yami agrees. "And countless others. I could tell you about the dozens and dozens of unfortunate Egyptian boys and girls, Bakura, who disregarded that wise maxim, 'Should you—' "
"Yuugi," Ryou interrupts, only just suppressing the urge to raise his hands in supplication. "Yuugi, you have to fix this. I'm begging you, Yuugi. I can't spend the rest of my life performing heinous acts of sleep-thievery and—and—and sleep-seduction. I can't."
"Well," Yuugi says, "I have been doing some research."
"And?" Ryou prompts. "And, Yuugi?"
"We thought perhaps we could perform a séance," Yuugi says. "Speak to this spirit. Find out what it wants."
"I should think it's fairly obvious what it wants," Ryou says, stuffing his arms into his sweater. "Why a séance? Why can't you just exorcise the damned spirit and call it done?"
Yuugi and Yami exchange looks.
"What is it?" Ryou says, defiantly. "What awful thing are you about to tell me? Spit it out. It can't be worse than 'Bakura-kun, I'm afraid you've been possessed by a Twentieth Dynasty klepto-nymphomaniac.' I've been attacked by the undead, for god's sake. I can take anything you throw at me."
"We're not sure we can," Yuugi says, finally. "Exorcise it, that is."
"All right," Ryou says faintly, "that's worse."
"It is not so simple, Bakura," Yami says. "It could be that this spirit has become too deeply integrated with your own. We may damage your mind, even your ka, trying to force it out."
"It would be better if we could speak to it," Yuugi repeats. "Find out what it wants, help it move on."
"What if it doesn't want to leave?" Ryou very sensibly wants to know.
Yuugi hesitates, and Yami answers for him. "Then you may have to learn to live with it, Bakura," he says.
Yuugi must have telephoned Anzu, because she shows up at the museum at noon looking determined to be cheerful, and takes Ryou out to lunch. Then, over finger sandwiches and milk tea, she offers him advice on how to deal with three thousand year old Egyptians.
"It was difficult at first," Anzu confides, "especially since we couldn't understand a word the other was saying. But it got easier. And you can speak in tongues, Bakura-kun, thanks to that mummy! That's an advantage already."
Ryou would like to point out that, whereas he's fairly sure Yami doesn't have an evil bone in his gorgeous, gorgeous body, his spirit has established itself rather firmly in what optimists might call a moral gray area and what Ryou calls a wretched hive of scum and villainy, but Anzu's buying, so he keeps his mouth shut. He eats the last finger sandwich out of spite and a growing conviction that he is now eating for two.
"There, there," Anzu says finally, and squeezes his hand. "It'll be all right, Bakura-kun. We're here for you."
They go home and watch Card Captor Sakura together in silence.
TBC?