This is a multi-chapter giftfic for Defenestration of the Mind, containing Dealshipping (Ryou x Bakura x Amane). Inspired by the book Class Notes by Katherine Stimpson (similar to the book Prep in some ways) and the song White Houses by Vanessa Carlton.

WARNING: Future threesomes, yaoi/shonen-ai, het, and profanity. This chapter, however, has nothing beyond implications.

Disclaimer: I don't own Yu-Gi-Oh.

Notes: Verrazano University is a fictional college in New York City, named after both the explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano (whose name I have much trouble spelling) and the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. According to Wikipedia, the explorer's name and the bridge's name are spelled differently.

- The English dub name is used for Jounouchi because I say he came from Brooklyn. Honda is 'Honda Taylor' because I like the idea of him being named after a car.

- Mahjong is a traditional Chinese gambling game with ridiculously complicated rules. (NOT Mahjong Solitaire, which is much easier.) If you want to learn how to play, you need to do so through being taught by someone who knows the game, because you'll just get confused otherwise.

Many, many thanks to LadyBlackwell for beta'ing this and checking for my college innacuracies, and mostly for giving me the motivation to post it when I was fully convinced that the majority of this chapter was horrible.

Enjoy!

The Sixth Declension

Chapter 1: Orsa

Verrazano University was a college for the liberal arts, for those majoring in the abstract realms of writing and painting and dance, not for people like Ryou who by all reason should have been locked in the stuffy rooms of Yale or MIT by then, poring over books of law and mathematics. Verrazano was huge and famous, a college that prospective writers were only too eager to apply for, but by all logic Ryou should not have even considered it. It was for people with grand fantastic dreams of a better future or morose musings on the doomed present—not for Ryou, who had been raised on textbooks of astronomy and anatomy, who had been taught from day one that whatever he would grow up to be, it had to be a job with a steady respectable income. He could not live on the uncertain paychecks of a freelancer or in the pathetic position of a cashier at McDonald's; no, Ryou had to be a lawyer, a doctor, or a professor.

But yet, here he was, standing in the midst of the grass-covered campus with all of his belongings behind him and a map of the campus neatly tucked underneath one arm staring out at the formal white-bricked buildings and the late August sunshine that fell in waves of beaming gold onto the entire scene. His father would be horrified, no doubt, if Bakura-sanever bothered to check up on his son; contrastingly, his mother would have been proud, or at least supportive, were she here to see him.

His younger sister, Ryou did not know. He had been too young at the time of the accident to fully understand her, and it was too late to do anything about it now—much too late.

He had grown up in Japan, a foreigner to the people of his school because he had been born in the rainy cities of England, and he had sought to escape the shunning by attending college in an English-speaking country. College was his chance to begin once more, to set aside the frighteningly solitary person he had become as a teenager, but Ryou had little faith in his ability to do so.

A trio of juniors ran past the spot where he was standing, in laughing pursuit of a Frisbee, wearing nothing but shorts and T-shirts despite the prematurely chilling weather. It was still summer, though, as could be attested by the lazy relaxation that permeated the campus like an inexorable fog; Ryou could see it in the groups of students lying in the sun with notebooks open, chatting comfortably when they should have been studying. The grass was relatively free of inhabitants, a large empty space between the Frisbee players where there would otherwise have been students, and school had not started.

Ryou was no lover of the leisurely days of summer, as he had never had people close enough to him to celebrate them with. He had been raised under his father's doctrine of discipline and work, and prep schools throughout Japan were always willing to take on such intelligent and quiet students as Ryou over the summer breaks. He had learned trigonometry and biology far before he was instructed in them during his formal education, reinforced his English upbringing through classes in its grammar until he knew both languages fluently.

And yet—Ryou was no fan of mathematics and science. He had come to Verrazano to become a writer, in hopes of flourishing in the unforgiving society that was New York City, capital of the publishing world, and he was determined to succeed.

Self-taught and self-motivated, he knew he was most likely doomed to sink in any vicious competition—and yet, he was here now.

(*)

Ryou first met Bakura Touzouko a day after he moved into his then-empty dorm and was sitting on the couch he had brought, tapping the keys on his laptop aimlessly with nothing to write.

The door was thrown open abruptly, and Ryou looked up in surprise to see another teen his age standing on the threshold, scowling into the sunlight that shone into his eyes from the open window. "... who the hell are you?"

Ryou would have answered, but he was too busy staring.

He had grown up as the odd one out, no matter wherever he and his father moved, because of his albino appearance—white hair and pale skin that tended to burn and blister painfully at the slightest hint of more sun that it was usually exposed to, although his eyes were blessedly normal despite his bad vision. But despite the rarity of Ryou's condition, the teenage boy before him had an equally startling head of wildly uncombed white hair. Ryou had perhaps a moment to wonder if the college administration was playing some sort of joke on him before his thoughts were interrupted once more by the newcomer.

"Are you deaf too, you stalker?"

Ryou blinked, slammed back to earth by the other's suspicious voice. "Um, no... I'm your roommate. You never emailed me back like you were supposed to."

He rolled his eyes and shoved the suitcases he was holding onto the floor by the empty bed, disappearing briefly into the hall and then coming back with at least ten sealed cardboard boxes. "I'm Bakura Touzouko," he said, kneeling on the ground and beginning to rather viciously rip apart the duct tape on the mouths of the boxes as Ryou rose to help him, "and I had better things to do this summer than check my email."

Ryou frowned at Bakura's turned back. "Ryou Bakura. What sort of things?"

"Painting," Bakura replied carelessly, crumpling up a wad of duct tape and tossing it into the trash can by the door. "Am I related to you?"

Ryou couldn't help it; he smiled slightly at the sheer randomness of the question, opening a container to reveal rugs folded up inside it. "I don't think so, unless you happen to have Japanese or English parents."

Bakura spared him a glance as he dropped a stack of books onto his desk. "I'm a first-generation American," he said, his voice noticeably cooler. "So yes, I have Japanese parents, although I never bothered to learn the language." He scoffed, tossing a box to the side with a quiet thunk, where it bounced on the tiled floor and came to a rest by the doorway. Reaching into another, he began pulling out bottles and bottles of paints.

"Art major?" Ryou said wryly.

"Whether for better or worse," Bakura confirmed, some of his original sarcastic humor returning. "According to my scholarship letter, I have 'talent that should not go to waste'—although I can never be sure whether they're simply being kind or actually telling the truth, since I'm certain all the other students were told the same thing." He eyed Ryou carefully, giving his clothes and appearance a cursory glance. "Let me guess—Creative Writing major?"

"How did you know?" Ryou said, curious. He threw his own empty box in the general direction of where Bakura had discarded his, watching as it rebounded off the doorframe and skittered across the floor to end up underneath his desk.

"You look like a writer," Bakura said simply. "I can see the imagination in your eyes." He was thoughtful for a few moments, studying Ryou with new criticalness. "I should paint you sometime."

"Uh—" Ryou flushed, not sure how to react. "Thanks?"

Bakura gave him a very brief smile—more like a smirk, Ryou corrected himself, a secret scheming grin between two co-conspirators. "No problem."

And to think that I was one hundred percent straight before today, Ryou thought ruefully.

Bakura proved to be quite the interesting roommate in more ways than one. When he woke up the next day, Ryou found him standing over his bed, already fully dressed and awake and holding a cup of something steaming. "Do you mind if there's paint on the walls?" Bakura asked very seriously, brandishing a paintbrush already coated with red in the hand that was not occupied by the cup.

Ryou blinked, his early-morning grogginess the only reason why he hadn't jumped a foot in the air when he saw the other's face peering down at him. "What...?"

"Because I think I'm going to paint something," Bakura continued unnecessarily, "and sometimes when I'm doing that it helps to have the base color on the wall in front of me."

Ryou gaped at him for a few moments, his mind slow to process what was going on. "You need to paint on the walls?"

Bakura shrugged, nonchalant as always. "Unless you have something to say about it."

Ryou shot up immediately, and Bakura narrowly avoided being clipped in the chin by his head. "No, no, don't do that—I don't care, but the university will kill us!" He rubbed his eyes awake and glanced around somewhat frantically for something to cover the walls with.

"We could always bleach everything afterward," Bakura suggested, looking quite amused as Ryou duct-taped a sheet of paper to each blank surface within a foot of him.

Ryou scoffed at him, briefly considering sticking his sheets to the wall before disregarding the idea as impractical. "I'm not sure how effective that would be." He discovered an unused roll of large white poster paper behind his dresser and tugged it out, coughing in the dust cloud that resulted. "Don't just watch; come help me," he groaned at Bakura's expression of surprise, motes floating in the shaft of sunlight that hit his head as they settled into a whitish fluff on his head and shoulders.

And so noon found them wide awake and satisfied with their work, although Ryou was still in his pajamas and both their stomachs were almost painfully empty. The sun illuminated the room, in which every available surface was plastered with a rather mismatched combination of duct tape, paper, and canvas, and Bakura observed the new scene with approval.

"Are you telling me you can still paint after this?" Ryou said somewhat skeptically, falling backward onto the couch he had brought from his old apartment and tossing the depleted roll of duct tape to the side.

"Yes," his roommate said, unfaltering, and proceeded to take out an easel and set of paints, sit on the side of his bed, and slash across the center of the canvas with one bold stroke of dark blue.

Hours later, Ryou returned to find Bakura immersed in painting a wildly disorganized canvas of swirling clouds, his previously white hair dotted with splashes of paint. When he asked him what he was going to do about it, the other teen had simply shrugged. "It helps to have the base color on myself too. Why do you think I bleached my hair in the first place?"

Bakura, much to Ryou's dismay and delight—dismay because he really didn't need the distraction of the other teen's odd musings during lectures, delight because he was proving to be quite the interesting friend—shared almost all his classes with Ryou. They sat together, as Ryou had no other acquaintances at Verrazano and so far it seemed that nobody else was willing to put up with Bakura's random commentary, and Bakura proved to have the useful talent of taking notes while talking about the sensibility of painting the coffee stains on the professor's sleeve.

"You see that one over there?" he asked, jabbing the end of his pen at a faded one by the man's elbow, only to flip it around again and scribble down something about the writing style of Dylan Thomas. "Is it more yellow or tan? Should I layer the white over the brown or the brown over the white?"

Ryou sighed, drumming his fingers against his paper as he tried to remember the meaning of transcendentalism. "Do you even want to paint him?"

Bakura shrugged and added another bullet point to his notes. He had ridiculously neat handwriting, Ryou thought absently, a sort of slanted flowing script that should belong to calligraphers and people who had trained their cursive for years, not some aspiring painter who could not care less about the readability of his notes. Bakura's hands were most definitely an artist's hands, though, his fingers easily wrapping around the pen he was holding as if he was accustomed to always having something in them.

Ryou wondered how he would describe a character like Bakura—difficult enough, as he knew almost nothing about the other boy except the barest vestiges of understanding about his personality. He's... sarcastic? Strange? Imaginative? He has a short attention span but can still take notes as well as I do? He's rude to everyone so that you just get used to it?

"Ryou Bakura, what is the definition of transcendentalism?"

Ryou's head snapped up, jerked out of his thoughts. He's like some eccentric artist from a horror movie, drawing with his own blood to add color to his work and painting with his impulses, without planning anything through. "Uh—an American movement where people believed that they could only achieve full understanding of the world through following instincts."

Bakura is a transcendentalist. The idea was quite amusing, and Ryou found himself fighting a smile as they were handed copies of Fern Hill from the students in front of them, raising his eyebrows at the length of the poem as he scanned the first few lines. Ryou stifled a laugh at the expression of dismay that swiftly engulfed Bakura's features. "Too hard for you?" he asked quietly.

"I have you to cheat off of," Bakura retorted, scowling at the neatly printed stanzas. "Why do I need to worry about passing this class?"

They exited the lecture hall with a command from the teacher to write up a technical and contextual analysis of the poem they had just received, Bakura complaining about having homework on the first day of college. He brightened, however, when they were out in the sun with the rest of the afternoon free. "Let's go to the dance rooms," he suggested.

Ryou paused from where he had begun turning toward the library building. "Why?"

"Haven't you heard?" Bakura said as if he were an idiot. "All the girls in freshman dance are hot."

The first time Ryou saw Amane Tenzin, she was doing a demonstration of sorts in the dance studio as her class came to a close, wearing nothing but a white tank top and shorts that contrasted somewhat blindingly with the black leotards of the girls around her. With hair as pale and skin as unmarked by the sun as Ryou's and Bakura's, she seemed almost determined to stand out among her fellows, and in that simple action was his first taste of Amane's character. Watching through a window in the room with Bakura and dozens of other students, Ryou saw the teacher's mouth moving as she waved Amane forward and pressed a button on the CD player on the table—and then she danced.

He could tell that it was an impromptu, un-choreographed thing in the way that she paused slightly before doing anything, as if testing the tone of the music. But if it hadn't been for that small moment, he would never have noticed, because she never stopped even once following it, leaping without thought into the next pose, and the one after that, and the one after that. She launched into combinations of jumps and spins with effortless grace, seemingly inventing her next move seconds before she carried it out with the improvisational skill Ryou knew he would never have.

He could see the unknown feeling she poured into her dancing, the sheer expression there despite the careful control she kept over herself, and it spoke of the artistry that she possessed to her very soul. When Ryou glanced to his side, he could tell that Bakura was impressed too.

"She's good," he said, something closer to respect in his voice than Ryou had ever heard before as Amane bowed low to the rest of the dance class. "Look," he added, nudging Ryou and tapping the glass before him with his ever-present pen, "you can see the imagination in her eyes. I should paint her."

"You want to paint everything," Ryou retorted.

"I should ask first," Bakura continued, pointedly ignoring him. "Come on, let's go."

Ryou blinked as he was dragged to the doorway of the studio when the class was dismissed. "Bakura, what are you doing?"

He raised his eyebrows with a simple "Don't you want to write her too?", and Ryou was speechless enough after that statement that Bakura had a much easier time taking him to the building's entrance.

They met Amane after she stepped onto the grass, glaring into the sun with eyes that Ryou only realized were pure purple until she looked at them. "Who are you?"

The similarities to his meetings with Bakura almost made Ryou laugh then and there. "Ryou Bakura, and this is Bakura Touzouko."

"Amane Tenzin." Her voice was guarded.

"You have weird eyes," Bakura added, his voice genuinely interested—it was a statement, harmlessly meant, but Amane immediately frowned at him.

"Albinism causes a person to have little or no pigment in the first two layers of the iris, allowing blood vessels to show through and sometimes turning blue eyes violet," Amane retorted, her posture stiffening as her gaze swept over them.

"You don't sound like a dancer," Bakura mused out loud, and Ryou knew what he meant—Amane was too coolly analytical now, too much of a science and math person, too different from what they expected from the aspiring artist they had seen only moments before.

"Good," Amane snapped back, and she walked away in the opposite direction.

Ryou saw her again the next day as he sat down in the library, a Biology textbook spread in front of him as he fingered a page listing all twenty amino acids. The diagrams showing their molecular structures sprawled haphazardly across the paper, and he had a rather tempting urge to rip out the page and pretend it had never existed.

It was probably a good thing that the textbook wasn't school property.

"You don't want to do that," a voice abruptly advised from across the table, Amane's white hair and pale eyes easily visible over the rim of her laptop.

Ryou started, realizing that he had inadvertently crumpled the edge of the page. He smoothed it out carefully, glancing at Amane to see if any of her anger from the previous day remained. "Why not?"

She shrugged, and her expression was amused. "You need it to study, and sheets ripped from textbooks don't make very good paper airplanes."

Ryou had to laugh at the sheer randomness of her statement, slamming the book shut and effectively leaving the world of protein formation behind. "Want to bet?"

"Yes," Amane said unashamedly, her retort so unexpected that it made him pause despite the obvious joking nature of her words. "If your textbook-paper plane flies for a longer distance than mine, then I have to tutor you in Biology. If my normal plane flies longer, then you have to make your friend with the paint in his hair stop gawking at my dance class."

For some reason, Ryou found himself accepting.

Needless to say, he lost.

"Why aren't you letting him go to the dance room?" a golden-haired, brown-eyed boy asked curiously, leaning against the wall of the English building to watch Ryou's attempts at holding Bakura back. Ryou thought his name was something like Wheeler—a generic Brooklyn name, fitting for someone who had only made it into the university on an athletic scholarship.

Wheeler's friend Taylor chimed in, and Ryou wondered somewhat absently how he managed to put on his football helmet without it messing up the artfully crafted spike he had made out of his brown hair. "Are you his mother or something?" He and Wheeler laughed as Bakura struggled to pry Ryou's fingers off his shirt.

"Just his roommate," Ryou gasped, seizing another fistful of fabric and tugging the other back. Sometimes he wished that he didn't feel so bound to any promise he made. "Bakura, could you just stop for a second and let me explain—"

"He's putting up a pretty good fight," Taylor observed, and Ryou wasn't sure who the teen was referring to, him or Bakura. "Maybe we should recruit him for the team."

Bakura paused for a moment to scowl at the two football players, which allowed Ryou to regain about half a foot of ground. "Not if you paid me a million dollars."

"I wouldn't mind a million dollars," a girl's voice said at the end of the walkway, and they turned simultaneously to find a brunette with the bluest eyes Ryou had ever seen frowning very pointedly at Wheeler and Taylor. Ryou recognized her as one of the dancers who had been in Amane's class; she had been standing next to a shorter, slender girl with long blue hair. "Yugi's waiting, guys, and you still owe him big time for what he did in high school—"

"Don't bring that up again," Wheeler complained, scowling at the girl and temporarily forgetting Bakura and Ryou, still frozen in their tug-of-war by the wall. "You can be such a killjoy sometimes, Anzu."

"Yugi didn't mind anyway," Taylor added, his tone somewhat defensive.

Anzu rolled her eyes. "Yugi's too good for both of you. How you got into this school in the first place is completely beyond me."

"Yugi Mutou?" Bakura said, his tone interested. Ryou released his clothing and stepped back, his promise fulfilled, wincing as he rubbed his fingers and saw the newly made wrinkles in his roommate's shirt. "The kid with the three colors in his hair?"

Anzu's blue, blue eyes snapped to him. "Yes, and how do you know him?"

Bakura shrugged. "He went to my junior high. He could write well, if I remember correctly."

Bakura had shown Ryou a portrait he had painted of Yugi during that time, his signature abstract style present in the random swirls of color in the background of the canvas despite the lesser skill in his rendering of Yugi's features. The boy had been depicted in profile with a pencil stuck behind his ear and a bruise on his neck, squinting up into the sky despite a spiral notebook blocking the sun from his face, wearing a black tank top with an assortment of silver buckles on his upper arms. His face had an oddly contented glow to it, peace evident in the automatic smile at the corners of his mouth. Ryou remembered laughing at the painting and asking if that was an actual portrait.

"Of course it is," Bakura had replied very seriously, showing Ryou a splash of purple that somehow managed to blend in with the rest of the vibrant hues in the sky. "This is from when he tried to stop me from painting him." And then, somewhat cruelly: "Yugi was an overly optimistic idiot who thought that if he smiled at the bullies, he wouldn't get beat up. That's probably why he could write such disgustingly happy stories."

Ryou had consequently not been surprised when he had seen someone who looked a lot like Yugi in his Introduction to Creative Writing class.

The weather was unreasonably warm for late September, and Ryou was sitting under the shade of a tree and attempting to do his Creative Writing homework while fanning himself with a handout. The few lines he had already written blurred before his eyes, and he was getting nowhere in his character study of the boy he had chosen as the protagonist for the year-long novella project they had been assigned.

Somebody abruptly sat down beside him, and Ryou turned his head in surprise to see Wheeler there, with Yugi standing above him. "Can we join you?" the teen asked politely as if attempting to atone for his companion's intrusion, and Ryou nodded.

He wasn't sure exactly how it had happened, but somehow they were swamped by a group of Yugi's friends not half an hour afterward, as Yugi had brought a Mahjong set and suggested that they teach Joey (Wheeler's first name, apparently) to play. It had turned into a series of matches between the three of them, with a crowd of students gathering around to watch. Honda was presently hovering over Joey's shoulder, trying to figure out the rules and pointing to random tiles to ask what they were called.

"So," Yugi said, throwing out a 7 Bamboo, "are you in my Creative Writing class?"

Ryou nodded, drawing a tile from the stack opposite him and adding it to his hand. "What's your novella about?"

"High school," Yugi answered simply, glancing down at the tile that Ryou had discarded before Joey snatched it up with a crow of, "Mine!" Smiling at the childishness of his friend, he added, "What about yours?"

"Necrophilia," Ryou said, frowning as Joey's eyes darted through his hand, the football player obviously trying to decide which tile to discard. "I'm trying to do research on it to make sure I have the details right, but the library isn't being very helpful and my roommate keeps on yanking out my internet cable." Bakura, claiming that the sight of the black power cord was interfering with his thought process, had unplugged it and shoved it on top of Ryou's loft bed many times. The walls, at least, had been spared Bakura's odd impulses, although the paper covering them was already speckled with paint. "Do you know what happens if we don't finish the novella by the end of the semester but meet the word requirement?"

Yugi shrugged, making a face at the tile he had just drawn before discarding a North Wind. "I think the professor is going to make us finish it over the next semester; he threatened to the year that my brother had him, but nobody actually gave him cause to carry it out. Why, is yours dragging on too long?"

Ryou nodded, taking the tile that Yugi had discarded before Joey could, causing the blond to groan and complain that the rules of Mahjong were stupid—not the first time he had done so, although he had picked up the rules surprisingly quickly. "I tend to have problems keeping things short."

Yugi laughed—whether at his statement or at Joey's sulking, Ryou wasn't sure. "I, personally, think that I'm going to have trouble making it last twenty-five thousand words without adding a lot of inconsequential scenes. Why are you writing about necrophilia, anyway?"

"The occult's always interested me," Ryou said simply, uncovering four tiles and drawing again. He left out the fact that his mother and sister had died when he was a child, that his father was far away on the other side of the country, working in the laboratories of Berkeley University. "And I was tired when I wrote up my general summary and could think of nothing else."

Yugi drew, and he smiled—the same smile that Ryou had seen in Bakura's painting, a smile that invited the world to do so with him—and flipped over his tiles. "I win. Thirteen Wonders."

"No way," Joey and Honda groaned simultaneously, with Joey adding, "That's the seventh time today, Yug'! How do you do that?"

"Luck and strategy," Yugi said, laughing at him. "We can play again tomorrow and see how much you've improved." It was an unspoken invitation for Ryou, a promise of something more than a one-day friendship.

Ryou smiled with him, and there was a lightness in his chest that he could only remember being there twice after the deaths of his mother and sister: during his and Bakura's mad rush to cover the walls of their dorm room, and when he and Amane had flown paper airplanes over the heads of students playing Frisbee that first week of school. "Sure."

Endnotes: The sixth declension is a reference to the Latin language, where it doesn't exist. I considered calling this The Vocative Case, but eventually decided it sounded less cool. Orsa is Latin for the beginning.

It's literally impossible to win through Thirteen Wonders in three-player Mahjong, but let's say they were playing with a full set, okay? xD

I'll try to update every week/two weeks, although Real Life tends to get in the way. (I'm reminding myself strongly of LK right now...)

Chapter 2 Teaser: Amane is strange. Bakura disagrees.

Reviews, especially concrit/feedback, make waking up at 6:30 every morning worth it. So review, please! :]