The Abnormal: Amane's Tale
Disclaimer: Yu-gi-oh! Duel Monsters is owned by Kazuki Takahashi, Studio Gallop, Nihon Ad Systems, and TV Tokyo. All names were changed to the characters of this fandom in order to protect the real people involved in the following incidents.
Warning: Mentions of sex, underaged drinking, and incest
Part 1: The Girl and The Moonlit Ghost
Amane is four years old and she thinks that her room is haunted.
Sometimes she hears sniffling from underneath the other bed in her room, but can never seem to find out who was making the noise. Other times, she sees a pair of big red eyes looking at her from the darkness, but they're gone the moment she looks back.
She asks her parents about it, but they jokingly chuckle at her childlike fears.
"There's no ghost in your room, sweetie," her mother says in her sing-song voice. "There's no such thing as ghosts."
But she's young and scared and doesn't know what to do. Her parents say that there's no ghost - ghosts aren't real, not real at all - but the red eyes still stare at her from under the other bed.
Amane decides that she needs to trap the ghost and prove to her parents that it exists. She steels a pastry from the kitchen counter and places it on the floor in her room just after her bed time. She throws the blankets over her head, leaving a tiny hole so that she can watch.
As she waits, she wonders if ghosts can get hungry.
They can, apparently, because a few minutes after the tiny two bedroom flat that her family lives in begins to quiet down, the red eyes appear in the blackness. They are then followed by a paler than pale hand and then a whole arm. Then there is another arm and a head of white hair.
She can't tell whether it's a girl ghost or a boy one. It's hair looks like it's been cut jagged with a pair of scissors in a lavatory mirror. Amane remembers a few months back when her mother found hair in the sink and wonders if it was the ghost's. Because if it does belong to it, she doesn't think that it's a ghost at all.
Ghosts can't hold scissors. They can't look in mirrors either. And they certainly can't get hungry, but the ghost is wolfing down the pastry like he's starving.
Amane leaps out of bed and tackles the ghost, dragging it into her parents room to show them her find. It starts crying while they're in the hall and she feels kind of bad for it, but is more excited about the fact that she can now prove the existence of the ghost. Ghost don't exist, hah! She was right, always right.
When she flicks on the light, her parents sit up with blearily, blinking eyes, but she doesn't care and she leaps upon the bed with the crying ghost behind her, yelling at the top of her lungs that she's found it, she's found it. The ghost is shrieking with tears running down its face, but it's real and she can touch it.
Her mother screams and pulls Amane away from it while her father grabs the ghost by the arm and flings it from the room. There's a crunching of boney knees hitting the hardwood floor and an increasingly loud sound of crying. It is quickly followed up by a smack, her father yelling, and then complete silence. Her mother holds her close and waits for his return.
"It's alright," she whispers into Amane's hair. "It's alright. He won't hurt you."
At first, she wonders how a ghost could possibly hurt her. Next, she realizes that the ghost must be a boy because her mother called it a 'he.'
She thinks that he's pretty for a boy, even more so for a ghost.
The next morning, she finds the ghost hiding under the sink in the kitchen. She only looks there partially by accident and partially because she's curious (her mother is forever telling her not to touch the bottles underneath the kitchen sink). He looks like he's just a ball of white hair and boney arms, wearing one of her mother's old shirts. It is hanging off of his body like a dress. He squirms away from the light and starts to cry again.
Amane smiles at him, "Can ghosts come out in the day?"
He looks up at her between his fingers and his hair, face stained with dirt and clean trails where tears have trailed downwards. He stutters through a "W-w-what?" and his head down again.
"Can ghosts come out in the day?" She asks again, leaning forwards, hoping to see his red eyes. She's never seen anyone with red eyes before. Maybe it's a ghost-only thing.
"I-I don't...k-k-know," he mumbles into his knees.
"Can you come out?" She wonders if he knows that he's a ghost, or if he even is a ghost in the first place.
His whole body starts to shake, "It hurts."
"What?"
"It h-hurts out there. I...I don't l-like it," he looks up at her again before diving back to safety behind his fingers. "The light...hurts me s-sometimes."
"Mom says that you shouldn't touch stuff under the sink," she scolds him. "You should come out."
"No! No! You'll just get me in trouble again! You'll get me in trouble and then he'll make me go away!" The ghost looses all fear of Amane, raising his head completely and shouting at her. He then realizes what he's just said, clams up, and goes back into hiding.
Amane stares it him for a while, listening to him sniffling and sobbing and watching his tiny frame as it is racked with tremors. She reaches forwards and pulls at the shirt he's wearing, feeling the bones of his shoulder through it. His head shoots upwards and he looks at her with wide red eyes.
"Please?" She asks politely, just like her mother taught her. "Pretty please?"
He stares at her like he's never seen another person before. Then, slowly, he uncurls his body from its former position and reaches up to touch her hand. As he runs his fingers lightly over her skin, just touching as if to see if she was real, he whispers, "You're warm..."
"Of course, I'm warm," Amane giggles. "Come play with me. It'll be fun, I promise."
The corners of his mouth twitch into something that could be a smile. Then he follows her out from under the sink and into the real world. He nearly trips on the hem of the long shirt he's wearing in his excitement.
"My name's Amane," she introduces herself.
"I know. I think my name is Ryou," he says back, still staring at her like he thinks she's going to disappear any minute.
Her mother nearly has a heart attack when she sees them playing with Amane's dolls a few minutes later.
Ryou starts sleeping on top of his bed about a month later. It takes a lot of convincing that, yes, the bed was comfortable and, yes, he wouldn't get in trouble for sleeping on it, but eventually he does agree. Sometimes after her mother tucks her in at nighttime, she jumps out of bed and does the same for him.
She may be young, but even she can tell the difference between the quality in her sheets and in Ryou's. Her's look warm, for starters. His don't at all.
She tells him, as the winter steadily approaches, that if he gets cold at night, he can climb in bed with her. He blushes, staring at his knobby knees, and nods in the shy way that she's grown to like.
Ryou's a pretty boy, Amane thinks. She likes to play with his hair, even though it tangles easily and won't stay in a braid no matter how many times she brushes it. But it's the most amazing shade of white that looks like moonlit water and shining stars. When he sleeps, she likes to watch his chest rise and fall as he breathes.
And as the winter months roll around, in the middle of the night, when Amane is sometimes awoken by cold hands and feet as he crawls into bed with her, she wonders if it was possible to glow with happiness. Because that's what she feels like she's doing.
Amane learns to dislike school because she doesn't have the same classes as Ryou. They cling to each other with all their might as their respective teachers try to pry them apart. She spends half the day wailing for her white haired ghost to return to her and there is nothing that the adults can do to calm her.
They won't let Ryou anywhere near her. She doesn't know why, but she hears the teachers mentioning something about her father. She tries to sneak out of the class but is caught several times in the attempt. After the fifth try, she gives up and pouts in a corner, refusing to talk to anyone or anything until she sees Ryou again.
This becomes a daily occurrence with the pair of them. Amane over hears Ryou's teacher telling her mother that sometimes they are unable to find him after he is dropped off in the mornings. She thinks that the adults are stupid. They should just check in any cupboards; that's where Ryou always hides.
When they come home at night, they cling together like they're a single being with extra arms and legs. They won't be separated again. They won't - they won't - they won't.
But they are, every single day, and Amane is determined to change that. She has to be with Ryou and no stupid adult is going to tell her otherwise.
When, finally, one of her escape attempts actually leads to success, she finds him crying in the corner of his class while one of the other boys pulls at his hair. Amane leaps forward and, in a display of uncharacteristic violence, bites at the boy's hand until she draws blood.
Her parents are called in and the teachers beg them to put the two of them in the same class - "Please, we can't take anymore of this" - but they refuse. Nothing, not even when one of the women offers to pay them large quantities of money, will make them budge.
Amane is so angry that she finds a frog and sticks it in her parent's bed when she gets home. They blame Ryou for it. She never does something like that again.
If there's one good thing about the whole school mess, it is at her parents are forced to buy Ryou some half decent clothes. At least, she thinks, he doesn't look like he's wearing a dress all the time now.
Amane is five when Ryou asks her to marry him.
It sudden and happens a few hours after her parents get the invitation to one of her father's many cousins wedding. He tears open the delicate envelope and stares for a minute at the card inside.
"Kallie's getting remarried," he mentions to her mother. "To her boyfriend."
"What was his name again, dear?" Her mother asks.
"Charlie. Charlie Corcoran. We met him once," he explains. "At Bart's funeral. Nice man. Good family."
"That's lovely. When is it? We should attend."
She leaves to go tell Ryou. She finds him behind the couch, tugging at his trousers. He's still not used to wearing normal clothes.
When she relays the message, he's confused. "What's married?" He asks.
"Well," she thinks of how to phrase it because she's never heard of anyone know knowing what marriage is about. "When two people love each other, they get married. There's a big party in a church...oh, and there are rings, too. They give each other a ring and then they're together forever as husband and wife."
He blinks at her in confusion before saying, "Do you want to marry me? That way we can be together forever, too."
She doesn't realize it then, but that is the question that changes her life forever.
Amane is seven and believes without a doubt that, someday, she will marry Ryou.
There are no ifs, ands, or buts. There is no or elses or maybes. It is simply the truth. When she pictures her future, she sees an older version of herself walking down the aisle in a beautiful white dress with Ryou standing near the alter. Sometimes Amane sees her parents in the audience, sometimes she doesn't. Most of the time the faces of the guests are blank and featureless, but she doesn't care. Her moonlit ghost stands tall and handsome for her, a smile gracing his features as he takes her hands in his.
She draws pictures of it at school with crayons and coloured pencils. Her teachers give her frightful looks when she shows them what she's created, but they're always scared of Ryou. She doesn't know why. There's nothing scary about him at all.
Ryou likes to draw, just like Amane, but his always turn out better. Sometimes, he manages to sneak a few of his creations into her class, but they're few and far between. She thinks that the kids in his class don't know how to share crayons. Either that, or they break all of his.
But it is the thought that counts and Amane keeps each and every one that he sends her. He surprises her with a handmade card for her birthday and signs it "Love, Ryou." Her heart nearly explodes with joy.
When she gets home, she ignores the presents that her parents got her and rushes over to give him a hug. As an after thought, Amane plants a sloppy kiss on his cheek. Ryou smiles at her the way that he will smile on their wedding day as her parents groan in frustration.
Together forever. She likes the sound of that.
Most people will think that nine years old is too early to fall in love with someone. They think that children at that age are too emotionally immature to even understand was love is. What they feel is puppy-love, a facsimile of the actual thing.
Most people, though, haven't met Amane Bakura.
Because she is in love with Ryou, in love with the beautiful ghost that used to stare at her from under the bed, that ate pastries in the middle of the night, that hid in cupboards and behind couches, that made her birthday cards in class and signed them with his love. He is moonlight and shining stars and she would do anything for him.
Amane loves him - there's no other explanation for what she feels. She's loved him since she was nine years old and he said that she was pretty.
No one, except her parents, had ever called her pretty before.
She loves him because he likes cream puffs and steak, because he's soft and gentle and a little bit awkward. She loves him because black is his favorite colour and that he likes to sleep in the dark. She loves him because even though her parents hate him with a vengeance, he'll be fine and happy as long as she's with him.
She loves him because when he smiles the world seems to light up with him.
He snatches up her mother's old digital camera and they run around the house, taking pictures of themselves. There's one where Amane's wearing an old party dress that she finds in a box in the storage room. There's another that shows Ryou smiling at the camera, waving his hand shyly. They took the next one together, squashing their faces cheek to cheek so that they could fit in the frame, grinning like there's no tomorrow.
Amane later guesses the password on the family computer and prints out all the pictures. She keeps them in a shoebox under her bed. It's her secret stash where she keeps everything that Ryou's ever given her.
She wonders, wistfully, if his heart would ever go in there - not his real one, of course, because that would just be icky and morbid, but his heart-heart. A very large part of her thinks it already is.
Amane plans to give Ryou her first kiss the day of the Bakura family reunion. She's eleven years old and giddy; face decorated with a light dusting of make-up, wrapped in a dress that's too elegant for her young age, and butterflies dancing in her stomach.
But she's going to ignore them, because today is the day. Today is the day that she and Ryou would finally kiss and be together. She still remembers his promise to marry her all those years ago. Amane looks down at her dress and pretends that it's white.
Dinner goes smoothly. Her father's family is huge, with lots of cousins and second cousins and aunts and uncles. She spies her aging grandfather in a chair in the back. He's not doing very well; decades of smoking finally catching up with him in the form of lung cancer.
Then the music starts to play and Ryou timidly asks Amane to dance.
It's a slow tune from a year long before she was ever born. She recognizes it faintly, but can't think of a name for either the song or the singer. But that is all put out of her mind when she wraps her arms around Ryou's neck in a tender embrace while he gently places his hands on her waist.
He's beautiful, Amane thinks as she closes the distance between their bodies and leans her head against his chest. As she listens to the beating of his heart - what a soothing sound - he whispers, "You look great" into her ear.
She looks up at him just then and decides that this is the perfect moment. She wants to lick her lips, but doesn't because she might remove the strawberry gloss she put on this morning. Amane knows that he likes strawberries and picked it out just for this occasion.
But just as she is about to press her lips against those of her moonlit ghost, Amane sees one of her second cousins, Maxinne Callahan, speaking with her boyfriend. She's pointing at the two of them and she strains her ears to hear what she's saying.
What Maxinne says changes everything - everything - by sending the world crashing to the floor in a blazing mushroom cloud of fire.
"Don't you think those two are a little close for brother and sister?"
Amane's heart stops. Everything seems to come to a screeching halt. Nothing moves, no one breathes. Everything in existence seems to have paused for one agonizing moment as she registers what she just heard.
Brother and sister? Brother? As in sibling? As in...oh dear god, no please anything but this!
Amane's never been much of a believer but right now she wishes to any being who may be listening that Maxinne was just lying and that Ryou's not her brother at all. Brothers and sisters don't love each other this way. Brothers and sisters don't think each other are beautiful - not like that. They don't kiss and they don't get married and they don't end up together forever, happily ever after either. Not in the way she wants to, at least.
She looks back at Ryou and he's smiling at her. He's smiling and not even remotely shocked. It's almost like he...
No...no this is even worse. Please, god no! Anything but this! He couldn't have known. Ryou couldn't have known that they were brother and sister. It just couldn't happen. He would have told her, wouldn't he?
And he's still smiling. He's smiling and mocking her, how dare he use her feelings like this! Was this his real plan, when he crawled out of that cupboard? To manipulate her like this? To make her feel things like love and then laugh at her when she finally realized the truth? She looks into his eyes and sees something in their red depths that was never the before - something she doesn't like at all.
Lies. Ryou has been lying to her this entire time. This is all his fault and Amane hates him, she hates him so much god damn it.
Why? Why? Why hadn't he told her? Why hadn't her parents told her? Why hadn't anyone told her? Where they'll in it as well? A snarl must have worked its way onto her face because Ryou's grin had dropped and was replaced with a look of worry. He has the utter gull to ask her if something is wrong.
She steps back and slaps him.
Everything changes that day.
She wakes up in the middle of the night to the crack of thunder and the thought of black and red flames. She is alone in her room for the first time in her life.
She couldn't deal with him, shutting the door to their room - her room - in his face when they got home and refused to let him in. He spent a good hour and a half screaming just outside for her to come back please, Amane! I'll do anything you want, just don't leave me alone! He quieted down shortly after midnight when her - their - parents shouted at him from down the corridor to shut up.
In her dreams, he kisses her softly, telling her that Maxinne was just lying, that their not siblings, and that he loves her beyond anything in the world. She wakes up crying because it's so lovely and reality is so cold.
Amane finds him sleeping under the kitchen table, wrapped in a blanket that they keep on the living room couch. She thinks that the reason why he picked the underside of the table is because he's too big to fit in cupboards anymore.
She runs back to her room when Ryou starts to wake. His sobbing sounds are hauntingly similar to her's.
Amane wonders, as the morning light started to shine in from the window of her room, if Maxinne really was lying. She can't ask her - their - parents because how stupid would that sound after eleven years of living in the same house? She's already shamed as it is, she can't add anymore on top of that. Besides, they didn't tell her before. Why would they tell her now?
And so gh05twr1tt3r is born. The pen name that would come to plague the FBI in later years comes into creation because of a girl who wants to find out if she has a brother. She teaches herself the code of the technological world, finding the open pathways that will let her cruise towards the information she wants. It's difficult, but the day she turns thirteen, Amane breaks into the MI5 database and looks at the information pertaining to the profiles of all UK citizens that they may or may not supposed to have - she doesn't care if they do or don't, she just wants to know because she's waited this long and to be honest, it wasn't even that hard a system to hack.
It's even worse than she thinks. Ryou and Amane aren't just siblings. They're twins.
She then realizes that it's his thirteenth birthday as well. They were both born on the same day one morning in early September. It's jarring, thinking that this day isn't just about her.
Amane hasn't spoken to Ryou in almost two years. She sees him occasionally at school or sometimes in the house, but generally he keeps to himself these days. They still sleep in the same room, but they pretend that the other isn't there. They face the wall as they drift off to dream land instead of what they used to do, staring into each other's eyes until they started drooping.
She tries to call him brother, at least in her head or to herself, but the word is forced and feels wrong on her tongue. Amane simply can't see him as a sibling - a twin. There's no way Ryou could be her brother. Ryou couldn't be that, no matter what the government and her family say. But he is and it nearly destroys her to admit it.
Then to top all things off, her - their - parents announce that they're moving to America in the coming year. And Amane breaks.
It's too much. She can't take it. She gets herself invited to a party with a bunch of 11th years two days before they hop on the plane and drinks herself into a stupor. All she can remember is the pounding of music and the taste of tequila before she ends up dancing with some bloke she's never met before. They kiss sloppily and he drags her off to another room. She's completely inexperienced; the only times that she's come into contact with something sexual is during health classes and when she hears the creaking of bedsprings coming from her parent's room.
It hurts and things get a little fuzzy afterwards, but she remembers the rocking and the slick feeling of something inside her body. The boy's hair is short and blonde, but it's easy enough to pretend that it's long and white. That his blue eyes are red. That his skin is pale like moonlight. That his kisses are gentle and beautiful, not the desperate lip-locking of a male attempting to reach orgasm.
When she cums, she calls out for Ryou. The boy asks her who he is afterwards, but she can't give him an answer. She's already passed out when he starts pulling up his trousers.
She cleans herself up when she gets home. There's glitter that washes out of her hair in the shower. It swirls around near the drain in water that is tinted red. There's a bruise on her neck that she doesn't remember getting and her head pounds like someone's inside tap-dancing with iron-toed boots.
As Amane wraps a towel around herself, Ryou walks in without knocking. He falters when he realizes that she still in there. His hands fist his shirt.
"You didn't come home last night," he mutters.
"What's it to you?" She spits back at him. When has she ever mattered to him? She was just a play toy to him. He never cared about her.
"You smell like a bar," his voice is shaking.
"Again. What's it to you?"
He looks at her reflection in the mirror nervously, "You're bleeding."
Her eyes are wide when she looks downwards. There are a few streaks of dried blood on the inside of her thighs. She yelps, leaps back into the shower with her towel still on, and turns it on full blast. She scrubs and scrubs, but the blood won't disappear.
"Who did this to you?" He calls out from behind the curtain.
"Go away!" She yells back at him. She's angry and ashamed at him - at herself. She remembers what it had felt like when she was pushed over the edge last night. She remembers that it was because she'd pretended that he - her brother, her twin - was the one on top of her, inside of her.
Her knees feel weak when Amane images what it would be like to shower with him. To kiss him under the warm spray. To feel his body against her's. To see the look on his face when he came.
Everything seems too hot and over sensitized, but that may have something to do with her hand creeping in between her legs.
She has to hold herself up when he starts speaking again, "Amane...it's been two years..."
She pretends that the fingers inside her are his, that the wet towel around her is his body. She pretends that she feels Ryou leaving kisses on the back of her neck as he whispers his love to her. She makes a strangled sound that she hopes the boy outside the shower doesn't hear.
"Please, Amane. Please, god, I'll do anything. Anything that you want."
His begging only fuels the fire already ignited in her. She closes her eyes and imagines him saying those words as he thrust into her, pleading for the release only she could give him. She thinks of his face, flushed with pleasure. A part of her - the part that's the most and least connected to reality - wondered what would happen if she told Ryou to drop his pants and fuck her.
But she's too far gone to stop now and all it takes is a final "Please" to make her see stars behind the lids of her eyes. She tries as hard as she can to bite back the sounds before they alert Ryou to what she's just done. She's just fucking masturbated to his voice and had one of the most satisfying orgasms of her, admittedly, very limited sex life.
Amane lowers herself into the tub, shutting off the water because it's gone cold. The real world sets in as she notices that the body around her is just a wet towel and Ryou is whispering outside, "Whatever I did, I'm sorry. Just please don't leave me."
She screams at him, "Get out! Get out! I hate you! I never want to see you again!"
How dare he ask what he did! He already knew the secret he kept from her. He knew what he had turned her into. She decided then, as she hear the door slam shut, that she would prove to him that she didn't need him at all. Amane would prove that she didn't love him.
Ryou the moonlit ghost is dead.
His body still walks the earth, but it is but an empty shell. There is no life inside as he steps out of the airport and takes his first breath of American air. His body is limp, only making the movements necessary to walk along behind her as Amane follows her parents to the car, nothing more.
He doesn't make a sound as they go through security. He doesn't look at anyone at all. He trips his way off the escalator at one point; that worries her a little because she hasn't seen him trip in years.
But Ryou's eyes are blank. His face gives away no emotion or thought. He is colorless and dull; the glow hat he once possessed is gone.
Amane tries not to cry as her dreams of white dresses shatter and die with him.
But, she thinks as she looks out at the blue sky above her, this is her new beginning. This is her new life, here in America. She would leave behind her past in the country she just left. Now she was Amane Bakura and Amane Bakura wasn't in love with her brother (because that was wrong). She was going to be cool and awesome and everyone would want to be her, so help the poor fool who tried to stop her.
gh05twr1tt3r goes off line because it's uncool for popular girls to be Internet hackers. She hides her box that contains Ryou's old drawings in the back of her new closet where she can't see it and be tempted to think about the life she's left behind. Amane straightens her hair and tries her hardest to look sexy when she walks into her new high school.
Ryou the moonlit ghost is dead, she tells herself. He is dead and he is never coming back. Get over it.
She's right. He will never return to her, not as the ghost at least. But Ryou will come back to her in a different form one day nearly four years later. Until then, though, the empty shell will walk in his place.
Hello.
I love Amane - I really do. I can relate to her a little bit, not in the sense that I'm in love with my brother (I'm an only child), but in the sense that I've done a lot of stuff that I regret to prove that I wasn't who I really am. I'm so glad that her character evolved the way it did.
Now I'm sure some of you are wondering about the title "The Abnormal". Considering that I've had stories posted under the title "The Others" and "The Normals" one would think that Amane would fit under one of those categories. But the thing is, she doesn't. She is neither an Other or a Normal; she's something else entirely. Solomon Moto was wrong when he told Bakura that there were only two groups of people. There are more like four: Others, Normals, Ancients, and Abnormals like Amane.
As for what an Abnormal is exactly, you will have to wait. I'm not going to give out that information just yet, but if you want to guess you can go ahead guess.
I also hopes that this story, as well as any of the chapters that follow it, will help you to get an insight into Amane's side of The First Year. She is a very important character, almost as important as Bakura and Atem, and even though she won't be seen as much in The Second Year, she will have a big role in The Third Year.
If there are any questions, comments, or concerns, you can drop me a line on the forum or leave a comment. Either way I will get back to you.
Until next time,
AlcatrazOutpatient