Scars, a yu-gi-oh fanfic

Title: Scars
Author: bardicsidhe
Fandom: Yu-Gi-Oh!
Pairing: Hiroto Honda/Ryuuji Otogi
Rating: PG for language. Slash content.
Challenge: Nostalgia (as a theme)

Disclaimer: The fandom's not mine, and every element of this story is fictitious.

You bastard, how dare you do this to me?

Ryuuji Otogi leaned hard on the aluminum pipe railing of the hospital bed, ignoring the limp way the stark white sheet fell in folds around its occupant's feet. Paralyzed from the waist down, the doctors said. Hiroto Honda would probably never walk again. Considering the seriousness of his concussion and the spinal cord damage from the accident, they said he was lucky to be waking up at all.

Oh, everyone knew about how dangerous motorcycles were. It was something the old farts yelled at you when you flashed down Main Street going fast enough to drive tears from the corners of your eyes. It was something you read in the user manuals, and on the gummy labels stuck to your helmet that took a fucking hour to peel off.

Nobody ever admitted that it was possible to die on a motorcycle. Well...as Hiroto would have put it...

You don't die from riding a motorcycle. You die from falling off.

Hadn't he said it once? And hadn't they all laughed? And the worst of it was, this time, Hiroto wasn't even doing something noble when it happened, like skidding away from a kitten or an old lady in the middle of the road. No, he was just going too damn fast and decided to blow through a red light. Bad idea, considering the soda truck trying gamely to make it through the intersection at the same time. Ryuuji sagged against the metal bars, chin on his knuckles and causing himself pain and numbness, and watched the olive sunburned face, with its red skinned cheek and temple and the pale cast underneath the tan. It was too late to call him an idiot, too late to tell him that he had no business going that damn fast. Hiroto Honda wasn't stupid. No, believe it or not, he actually had more than two brain cells to rub together, though – Ryuuji sighed in defeat as he pried one of his hands free to rub the sleep from his eyes – he never had been legendary for his common sense. And Ryuuji and Jonouchi both drove just as fast as Hiroto did. No. He didn't have the right to lecture.

He just wanted Hiroto to wake up...

"Hnngh..." Dark, short lashes fluttered and clamped tight as Hiroto's face buttoned up with pain. Ryuuji started, and reached out, sliding his hand along the younger boy's bicep, as the other's browned palm curled into a fist and his forearm was connected to the IV drips by long tubes that disappeared under skin and bandages.

"Hey," Ryuuji whispered, as the creases of pain smoothed from the brunette's forehead, and yet his eyes refused to open, "hey, come on, man. Come back to me." A rueful smile crossed his features, "If you don't, I swear, Shizuka's mine."

"Nngh...fuck you..." The deep brown eyes flickered open following the low response, and despite his worries, Ryuuji's smile beamed like a coastal searchlight.

"You already do, babe. I knew that'd wake you up. Welcome back." There was little else of Hiroto that he could touch, so he squeezed the muscled bicep under his hand. It was pale, pale down to his elbow, from the tee shirts that Hiroto wore in the summer. The quality of the skin was different there, softer, as though it had never been touched.

Earlier that summer...

Ryuuji lay on his back in the grass in the outfield, exhausted after a baseball game. Which his team had lost. How typical was that?

"Hey, what d'you think you're doing? We're going to demand a rematch!" Honda galloped up to him, breathing hard, sweat soaking a triangle down the chest of his blue tee shirt, and probably the back too, Ryuuji thought deliciously, squinting up at his friend from beneath the forearm thrown across his face.

"Why? We suck! Ugh. Now I remember why I hate contact sports." A fly landed on his forehead, and he shooed it away. "That, and the whole 'outdoor' concept."

"You're such a wuss," Honda snickered, and sprawled in the long outfield grass beside him, the weight of his long, lean form bending the blades down in a perfect outline of Hiroto Honda's impossibly coltish legs. Maybe he had a rock-hard ass, but Ryuuji was forever envious of those impossible stems.

"Maybe I am, but hey, you don't see me with scars like these," Ryuuji retorted, reaching out negligently with the long fingers of one hand to trace the thick jagged pink crescent marking the soft skin on the inside of Honda's forearm, wrist to elbow. Honda looked down at it, and smiled, as though he'd just recalled a fond memory. His fingers were wholly unlike Ryuuji's, thick and callused, and he rubbed the pads of them, dirty fingernails and all, over the scar.

"Yeah, but this is from the first time I went snowboarding with Jou. We thought it'd be smart to go down holding onto each other, y'know? Like a train? I was in front. It was just the bunny slope, but we were still booking pretty good, and when I went down, Jou went over my arm. Broke it. Bone sticking out." He was talking with the fascination of the three-year-old over a scab, and Ryuuji found himself rubbing his own arm in horrified sympathy. "Surgery and a cast for six weeks," Honda went on.

"But that was stupid! Why did you guys do that? You could have been killed!"

"Yeah," Honda grinned, sheepishly, "but it sure was fun while it lasted."

They talked some more, on and on and on, about scars and snowboarding, and then about cute girls, and about how weird girls were, and how much trouble, and got onto the subject of falling in love by the time everyone had given up and left the park, and the skies were going amber-pink and violet.

The kiss had happened before either one of them could stop it. Ryuuji couldn't even remember what it was he'd said to goad Honda into doing it, but after a few shocked moments, he'd curled his hand around the back of the brunette's neck. They stared at one another for a few seconds, pretended they hadn't, and got to their feet, brushing stray strands of grass from their pants legs and joking about how pissed their parents would be.

Ryuuji looked up.

Honda was looking at him like a stranger. And he liked it.

Liked the way the pink of the sky brought out the warm gold in the taller boy's skin, and turned his cheek and the side of his throat – where the pulse point fell into shadow – a bright electric pink. Liked how it turned the blue of his shoulder to violet. Liked how Honda's pale upper arms showed just a little as he flexed his shoulders to spring.

They rolled backwards into the grass together, and the world changed to blue-black and purple without them. And yes...their parents were pissed.

"What happened?" Hiroto was asking, and Ryuuji only dimly heard him through the fog of memories. He blinked, and sat a little straighter, and refused, once again, to look down at the unmoving half of Hiroto's body.

"It's only a scar," Ryuuji whispered, and reached up to not quite touch the blazing red of abused raw skin along the other's cheek, "just another scar."