A Yu-Gi-Oh! Fanfiction Contest Entry
Season 8.5, Tier 1: Peachshipping (Mutou Yugi x Mazaki Anzu)
WARNINGS: Mild necro. OVER 9000 word count. Inspired by too much Naruto and too much studying.
Nebula for Variation
Sunset gilded the prow of the ship in lines of gleaming gold, their vanishing point marked squarely in the center of the horizon. The water was dark blue and darkening still in comparison, lapping lazily at the sides of the ship and similarly along the edges of the docks lining the shore. Domino stood sentinel as spring ended and summer approached, its children out to celebrate the final day of school.
Anzu squinted against the glare, shading her eyes with one hand and clutching the metal railing of the boat with the other. She thought that maybe, if she tilted her head and pretended that streets upon streets of buildings weren't there, she could see the very top of Domino High School, its flag hanging limply in the stilling air.
"Hey," Yugi said by her right, and she turned. His bangs were brushing lightly against the side of his face, casting shallow shadows across his cheeks. He was smiling, the unconscious smile that he almost always had on his lips, and Anzu tried to smile back. "Thanks for coming with me, Anzu."
The smile slipped. "You're welcome, Yugi. Besides"—she tried to make light of the situation—"it's not like we have much summer homework anyway."
Yugi's eyes were uncertain now, and he was silent for a moment before forging ahead. The blue sleeve of his school uniform snapped in a gust of wind, and the bangs were blown back. "That, and... thank you for believing me."
The smile was completely gone now, and Anzu knew herself well enough to forgo attempting to plaster it back on. She had never been very good at pretending to be something she was not.
At that thought, she nearly winced before catching herself and forcing out her answer. "It's no problem." Nearly the same reply as before, but what could she do? How exactly was she supposed to respond to the hundreds of insinuations Yugi's gratefulness implied—thank you so much for believing me when I say an Ancient Egyptian spirit was living in my soul for three years, Anzu, and also for helping me save the world however many times even if you don't remember it, and for accepting that this entire world is probably some illusion created by Yami-no-Somebody; thank you ever so much, Anzu, for believing me even when you think I'm insane!
She didn't believe him. She didn't have the courage to tell him, when it might have very well broken his heart—and his mind too, if that hadn't been broken already.
She had never known that three days of hospitalization-worthy delirium after jumping into and nearly drowning in Domino's probably-polluted canal would have such a negative effect on a person's psyche.
Yugi was fingering a chain around his neck; Anzu had noticed him wearing when he first came to school after he had recovered, and the bit of gold-looking metal had appeared on its end shortly after. It matched the color of the gold box he was constantly bringing to school, and the shape of the puzzle pieces he had taken out of it every lunch period to work at as if its completion meant his life.
She remembered the look on Yugi's face after she and his grandfather had walked him back to the game shop once he had gotten out of the hospital and he had seen the gold box sitting forlornly on the desk of his bedroom, scattered pieces lying around it.
It had been utterly horrified. Pained. Crumpled.
Why did you take it apart?
Yugi followed the line of her gaze and laughed, tracing the edge of the puzzle piece with his finger and snapping Anzu out of her memories. "I haven't figured out how to solve it yet." His own smile faded a bit, and his hand dropped to hold the metal of the railing like Anzu was. "And I haven't been able to hold the pieces together with anything but tape. I guess that'll come when all of them are fitted together."
So that was the reason for the single puzzle piece on the end of the chain. "Why haven't you kept all of them in the box, then?" Anzu asked. "Wouldn't it be easier than having just this one?"
Yugi's eyebrows creased with something like disappointment before he answered uncertainly, "I used to have the whole Puzzle on the chain. Back when—" And he cut himself off quickly, before he could venture into the area that both of them had tacitly labeled as forbidden, the land where their memories diverged. Anzu hoped, cruel as that might have been, that her lack of willingness to discuss that topic would eventually tip Yugi off that she didn't believe him after all. She didn't have—what, the strength? The heartlessness?—to tell him herself.
"Oh," she said, because really, there was no better reply that she could think of.
The metal railing was warm beneath her hands, heated by the summer air and the light of the setting sun. It had grown darker, Anzu realized, in the short span of minutes in which she and Yugi had been talking, and Domino's skyscrapers were nothing but vaguely geometric portions of shadow blotting out the horizon. She thought she could see the fluorescent yellow squares of light that formed their windows and the larger triangle that was the KaibaCorp building, but she couldn't be sure.
"Honda!" a voice behind her called, and she almost turned before thinking better of it. It was difficult to see with the current lighting, and she hoped that Jounouchi couldn't. "I've got directions to the dining room—"
Anzu frowned and motioned toward the other side of the deck, where the rooms of the ship lay. "Come on," she said to Yugi, "let's get out before those jerks realize we're here too."
Anzu had turned already and begun walking down the deck; she didn't see Yugi open his mouth as if to object but follow her nevertheless.
"Bakura?" Anzu said in surprise, staring at the white-haired boy who was passing by their table with a tray full of food.
Bakura jerked to a stop, and his bowl of soup sloshed dangerously before stabilizing. "Anzu," he greeted with a smile, ducking his head in a shortened bow. "And Yugi."
"Here, sit," Anzu said, patting the spot on the bench next to her. Bakura complied, setting the tray down and snapping his wooden chopsticks apart.
"What brings you here?" he said pleasantly enough despite the fact that they barely knew each other in school, tapping the utensils against the table to straighten them out. He wasn't wearing his uniform like Yugi was, Anzu noted, though the blue stripes of his shirt were vaguely the same color.
Anzu hesitated, not certain how to answer that without sounding like an idiot—oh, because Yugi thinks that the Ancient Egyptian pharaoh who shared his mind might have left some clues with a child-abusive underground clan there, and why are you looking at me like that, Bakura, isn't that a perfectly valid explanation?
Yugi responded for her. "I have some friends in Egypt that I'll meet there." He picked up his hamburger. "What about you, Bakura?"
Bakura shrugged, poking at the noodles in his bowl. "I'm visiting my father." He glanced away from them and toward the side of the room, where men in black suits and sunglasses stood at the sides of each door. "Have you heard of the man who owns this ship, Yugi?" he said, nodding toward the crimson cloth knotted and draped waist-height on the wall and the edges of the table.
Yugi stiffened slightly at that, his fingers twitching as he reached for his glass of soda. "No, I just assumed it would be a normal cruise liner."
Bakura laughed a little, setting his chopsticks down and leaning backward. "It's a bit weird for a normal cruise liner to go all the way from Japan to Egypt, though; there's not much to see on the way there. But Pegasus J. Crawford is a weird person, or so I've heard."
At hearing the name, pronounced in a flawless English accent with flawless English word order, Yugi nearly choked on his drink. He coughed before straightening up, his free hand going to the chain around his neck again, closing around the single puzzle piece hanging from it. "Who?"
"Pegasus J. Crawford," Bakura repeated, now looking faintly amused by Yugi's reaction. "Creator of Duel Monsters and owner of... Industrial Illusions, I think the company name is."
"I know that," Yugi gasped, setting the drink on the table with the dull thunk of glass on fabric and wood. "But he—Pegasus, he—"
Anzu frowned as Yugi struggled for words, wondering at his choice in calling the man by his first name rather than his last and his obvious uncertainty in elaborating on his shock. What did Pegasus J. Crawford have to do with the area of subject matter that Yugi had been stumbling on ever since his return from the hospital?
"Pegasus what?" she said.
Yugi shook his head, brushing it off, but Anzu noticed with some surprise the way his gaze went to the expanse of the blue-white of Bakura's shirt, as if searching for something invisible written there. His fingers around the chain were white. "Bakura," he said suddenly, "have you ever had a gold necklace?"
The white-haired teenager gave him a look of mild confusion, tilting his head. "There are a lot of gold necklaces in the world, Yugi. What do you mean?"
"This color," Yugi said, holding up the chain so Bakura could see the color of the puzzle piece hanging there. "And the gold is in the shape of a ring, with five pendants hanging off the edge and a pyramid with the Eye of Wdjat in the center. It's not actually a necklace," he admitted, "but you can thread a string through its top to make it into one."
Bakura regarded him thoughtfully for a moment before answering. "No, Yugi, I haven't had a necklace like that. It sounds Egyptian, though. Did your grandfather find one on his travels? Would you like me to ask my father if he's heard of it when I meet with him?"
"No," Yugi said, defeated, and Anzu remembered vaguely that he'd told her about the same object when explaining the story of what he thought had been going on for the past three years. "That's alright."
"Are you sure?" Bakura pressed. "My father might—"
Yugi shook his head again, more emphatically this time. "It's fine, Bakura. You don't need to trouble your father about it."
Glancing upward to check the time on a clock hanging from the wall, Anzu noticed two of the suit-and-sunglasses guards leaving the room, only one other replacing them.
Bakura pushed his chair back and stood, startling both of them. His smile was apologetic. "Sorry, Anzu, Yugi, but I need to leave now."
"Bakura, your lunch..." Anzu began, staring at the untouched noodles and salad on his plate; only the rice had been eaten.
"You can have it if you want," he offered, turning and walking away.
"What was that?" Yugi wondered aloud, watching Bakura's retreating back.
"Maybe he had an appointment," Anzu half-joked.
The hallway was even more lavishly decorated than the dining room; the edges of the wallpaper were interwoven with what looked suspiciously like gold leaf, and paintings in elaborate frames hung every fifty feet. Ryou looked at once closely as the lamp hanging over it swayed unsteadily with the rocking of the ship, noting the layering of the brushstrokes and the dark dotting that formed the shadows in the background.
This one isn't as good as the others.
"You might have noticed the decrease in quality as you continue closer to my studio," a voice remarked behind him. American English.
Ryou didn't even both to turn. "A reminder?" he said in the same language.
He imagined that Pegasus nodded. "Of what I had done wrong."
"You've still kept your first portrait of her, then, I assume." He glanced over his shoulder, shifting so he didn't have to crane his neck to see, and surely enough, Pegasus stood there with the same fringe of hair covering his left eye and a glass of wine in his hand. "And the last one?"
"You know me too well, Ryou," Pegasus said easily; he didn't smile, but Ryou imagined that was only because he knew perfectly well that his expression showed more amusement at Ryou's actions than a smile ever would.
"I knew it had to be you when the ad was placed in Domino's newspaper," he said flatly. "You need to work on being more subtle, because if Kaiba ever decides to investigate it—"
"—he won't care," Pegasus finished for him, raising his eyebrows. "You forget that Kaiba doesn't rule Domino City, and that his employees have no interest in taking long journeys to locations halfway around the globe."
"A quarter of the way, in this case," Ryou corrected, resisting the urge to grit his teeth. "Egypt again, really? What inspired this trip?"
Pegasus shrugged; the light glinted off the rim of the cup, tracing a white ellipse over the glass. He tilted it so that the glare shone directly into Ryou's eyes before adjusting its position once more, this time smiling slightly. "I suppose it was just a desire to go back to where all of this was started. Tell me, Ryou, do you still keep your tarot cards with you?"
Ryou's hand automatically went to his back pocket, fingering the fabric there; the smile widened. "Yes," he said, unnecessary as the admission was; he didn't like the feeling of Pegasus subtly gaining the upper hand in the conversation, or the smugness that the man gained with it.
"Would you do a reading for me?"
"No. You can do your own reading." The dismissal, childish as it was, still brought him some nuance of satisfaction.
"Do you still believe in it?" Pegasus said, beginning to walk further down the hall. Ryou could see the rich brown wood of a door at the end of it and reluctantly followed him.
He hesitated only slightly before answering. "No."
It was a lie. Pegasus would not be fooled.
True to his prediction, his companion only laughed at him. Patronizing. "Learn to deceive better the next time you try it on me." Pegasus pushed open the door, the knob turning without sound under his hand; the light that shone through even from the crack that held it ajar made Ryou blink to adjust his sight from the comparatively dim lighting in the hallway. "Would you like to see my latest masterpiece?"
Upon entering the room, Ryou glanced around in search of the object in question before his eyes landed on the wall to the far right. "Fresco?" he said, walking closer. He leaned forward to run his fingers along the wall, knowing Pegasus would not stop him. "I can see the lines you etched. This is bad paint."
"You are far too critical, Ryou. I'm not looking for this to last."
There was a pause; Ryou's hand skimmed over the top of the sun. "Why now?" he asked finally, his voice barely louder than a whisper. "What's so special about today? Or have you just chosen a random group of civilians to try your experiments on?"
"You're on the ship along with them," Pegasus pointed out. "Could it be that you still hope to find your solution?"
"I do," Ryou said, unmoved, unwilling to admit how much his short words revealed. "You haven't answered me yet."
"I keep good track of my Duel Monsters champions. One of them, Yugi Mutou, was hospitalized for three days and came back from it speaking interesting tales about Egyptian Pharaohs and how my game saved the world several times over." Ryou could hear Pegasus's footsteps echoing softly on the carpet to his right; he turned his head slightly and saw the red fringe of a curtain out of the corner of his eye, but didn't bother to look further. He already knew what lay beyond it.
"I know Yugi."
"And I'm sure you'll help to make this interesting."
"You're sick."
"And you don't stop me. Do you regret it?"
Ryou met his gaze squarely. "No. Do you regret your Eye?"
She imagined that if she were to ignore its color and position in the sky, the cloud on the horizon looked almost like a pyramid.
"How long is this trip going to take again?" Anzu said as they leaned against the railing of the ship once more, watching the sunlight dance off the peaks of the waves. Her hair blew back from her face in the wind, strands tangling in her eyes like overlapping pencil strokes before she brushed them away.
"Two weeks." Yugi was playing with two puzzle pieces, fingers unconsciously fitting them together in what Anzu believed had reached the maximum number of possible ways half an hour ago. When she glanced over—Yugi had his back to the rail, probably wary of dropping anything into the water below—they seemed to fit for a second before he moved on to another angle. "We'll have to make a stop at least a few times for refueling and stocking, I think."
"What will we do until then?" Anzu wondered aloud. She doubted that summer homework was going to last more than a few days, and Yugi would get bored of his endless puzzle-solving soon afterward. Maybe he would let her try her hand at it.
Yugi shrugged. "I'm sure Pegasus is planning some form of amusement. Doesn't that usually come with cruises?"
"I haven't seen very many people on the ship, though," Anzu said uncertainly, glancing behind her. The portion of the deck they had chosen was mostly hidden behind a maintenance building in the front of the ship, but Anzu could hear no sounds coming from behind the building. Weren't cruises supposed to be noisier than this?
"I guess not everyone wants to sail to Egypt." Yugi pulled his golden box out of his pocket and opened its lid, replacing the pieces in his hands with new ones. Anzu tried not to wince at the thought of all the combinations of pieces and possible fits he could try; maybe he could keep himself occupied for the entirety of the two weeks after all. She didn't know if he could even remember the differences between them.
He tilted the box, and the sunlight traced the outline of the images engraved in its sides. It really did look like genuine gold, although Anzu knew it would have been about ten pounds heavier if it was.
"What's written on it?" she asked.
Yugi appeared distinctly uncomfortable. "It's in hieroglyphs."
"Really?" Curious, Anzu reached out and took the box from him, choosing to ignore the jerk of Yugi's fingers as it left his grasp. She held it up to the light, looking at the characters there, neatly arranged in columns to the sides of every face. "How do you read it?"
"I don't know how to," Yugi admitted. "I think I knew what it said before, though. I've forgotten it."
"You grandfather knew it?" Anzu guessed. He nodded. "Then why didn't you ask him?"
"Well..." Yugi bit his lip, looking down. His bangs fell to cover his face, hiding his expression from Anzu's sight. More out of politeness than anything else, she averted her eyes, staring back out at the waves. "When I asked him, he said he didn't know either."
They both lapsed into silence after that, Anzu unwilling to pursue the topic further and Yugi lost in whatever—false? Anzu didn't know—memories he had of the time when he had known the meaning of the words on the box.
"When we get to Egypt," he said finally, voice quiet, "I'll ask the Ishtars."
"They were the ones who have the objects like your puzzle," Anzu said, not bothering to phrase her remark as a question. Yugi had mentioned them in great detail while he had seemed unwilling to divulge what exactly had delayed the Ancient Egyptian Pharaoh from retrieving his memories immediately.
There was a pause.
"They're not supposed to," he said with the reluctance of someone who had had the statement wrenched from him after hours of wheedling. "None of us are supposed to have our Items anymore, not after my other—" He cut himself off before he could finish saying the words; Anzu had only heard him utter them in their entirety once, when Yugi had stared with wide-eyed panic at the scattered puzzle pieces on his desk after returning to his room above the game shop.
"You said they fell down." Anzu couldn't quite keep the flatness in her tone from showing, and she determinedly stared away from the hunch in Yugi's shoulders that she knew would come, instead plowing on to her question. "Feel down to where?"
"I don't know," Yugi said, still not looking up. His elbows had slipped off the railing so that only his back rested against it, and Anzu thought that maybe he was rearranging his puzzle pieces again or fingering the links of his chain. "Maybe underground. But the tomb was collapsing and he—" He stumbled over the words before deciding to skip them entirely. "And we just wanted to get out alive." He took a breath, and his next words were almost whispered. "Until we did, I thought he was dying and taking us with him."
"But you trusted him," Anzu said, confused, but unwilling to stop Yugi when he was speaking directly about the Ancient Egyptian Pharaoh for the first time in... probably weeks. Since the post-hospital incident. "With your life."
"He wouldn't have done it intentionally." Yugi finally raised his head, and Anzu saw out of the corner of her eye that his hands were indeed clenched around the metal chain hanging from his neck. "I wonder what would have happened if we hadn't escaped in time, though."
The implications hurt, even if Anzu knew that Yugi hadn't meant them that way. I wonder if that life, when everyone believed me in the way that nobody does now, I would have been happier. Do you believe me, Anzu?
Would it really be so bad for him to let everything go and just accept that he'd dreamed everything? That he'd never met an Ancient Egyptian Pharaoh who could win every game, that he'd never solved his grandfather's puzzle, that he'd never saved the world however many times he said he had?
Anzu sighed and stared determinedly at the water.
Jounouchi's shirt was dirt-smeared on the right side and ragged at the hems, his jeans chopped crudely at the knee to form makeshift shorts—Anzu could see the fraying of its edges, threads of denim dangling from them—but he wore it all with as much pride as Anzu had seen anyone take in their clothing. It was probably a gang thing.
At present, he was eyeing Yugi suspiciously with his friend Honda and none too few witnesses by his side, arms crossed and nearly ten inches taller. "Any game?"
Yugi nodded, and Anzu marveled at how unfazed he was by the former bullies when before he would have been running from them. She knew even less why Jounouchi and Honda would want to go on a cruise to Egypt, much less be able to afford it, but she thought she probably didn't want to know. "Any game. Multiple ones, even, if you want to."
"Why should I waste my time on you?" he grumbled.
It was day five out of twenty, and Yugi's hand was clenched tightly around the puzzle piece hanging from his chain. Anzu was beginning to worry that it would mold his bones to its shape, simply for the sake of an easier fit.
"Because you have nothing better to do," Yugi said, and Jounouchi's eyes narrowed.
"What are your terms?"
He was slipping unconsciously into the 'formalities' gang talk, Anzu thought with some distaste; Yugi had never said anything about terms. She fingered the clasp of her purse and wondered why exactly he had tried to do this—'this'being, of course 'provoke the two people who had made his high school life misery in the company of about a dozen hostile others'—in the first place.
Yugi blinked, surprised. "Terms?"
"You know." Jounouchi waved his hand vaguely, clearly too unsettled by the odd proposition to be annoyed. "What do I get when I win?"
Anzu frowned a bit at the lack of a conditional.
"What do you want?" Yugi said. His grip on the chain had lightened, and he was rubbing his thumb against the links. Anzu brushed her hair out of her face as wind, colder than it had been in the afternoon, what with the impending fog and the lack of sunlight, ruffled it into her eyes.
She glanced up at the sky as if searching for rain, although as she attempted to pick out the moon and stars in the gaps between the clouds, she didn't know quite what she was looking for. Her view was blocked when more wind forced the clouds to covered the sky entirely, and Anzu turned her gaze to the sea, which was black in a reflection of the night, the ship's yellow-white fluorescent lights reflecting off the waves in specks. She tried to avoid looking at Jounouchi and Yugi as snippets of Jounouchi's increasingly ridiculous demands floated over to her ears on eddies of the wind.
"—a billion yen, or make that infinite yen, a way out of school, a castle where you can shoot out of holes in the walls, a car, and oh wait, you meant what I want that you can give me?" There was general laughter following the speech, and Jounouchi looked satisfied.
Yugi only nodded. "I meant that."
Jounouchi snorted. "If I win, then I'll throw you off the boat."
Yugi was nodding again even as Anzu opened her mouth, about to protest.
A hand landed on her wrist, as if she were going to throw something instead of say something, and she looked to her right in surprise to see Bakura standing there, watching Yugi's confrontation with mild interest. "What?"
Bakura only lowered her arm, his fingers still locked around it tightly. "Let him do it."
Anzu just gaped at him, unsure if she was hearing him properly. "I'm not going to let Yugi get thrown off a boat in the middle of the night."
Bakura smiled. "Have a bit more faith in him."
"I know Yugi's good at games," Anzu said, wrenching her arm out of his grasp, "but for all I know Jounouchi's going to challenge him to a wrestling match."
"He won't." Bakura sounded quite certain of the outcome of the bet as he backed up a few steps, watching someone drag in a wooden table from the dining pavilion on the other side of the deck. Anzu shivered when another cold breeze whipped against her back, wondering how Bakura couldn't feel the cold when he was dressed only in a cotton t-shirt. His white bangs blew over his eyes, but he made no move to brush them out of the way as he pointed to something in Jounouchi's hand. "See?"
Anzu looked and realized it was a deck of cards, all backed in dark brown with a paler border and oval in the center of each. She thought she recognized the design from endless games she'd seen played at school, though she'd never participated in any.
"Imagine when I come back to Domino and say I've beaten the regional champ at Duel Monsters," Jounouchi said with some relish. "That'll prove my deck's the strongest in the school."
Yugi just sat down next to him and brought out a sheet of the stationary that had been provided in each of their rooms, writing numbers that Anzu knew would be their life points on it with a pen.
"Duel Monsters?" Anzu said, turning to Bakura uncertainly. "Isn't the owner of the ship—"
He nodded. "The creator of Duel Monsters."
"Does he know Yugi's here?"
Bakura shrugged, looking uncomfortable for the first time. "Maybe. He's the owner, not the captain, so I doubt he cares who exactly he's ferrying along with him on his trips."
"Do you know him?" Anzu asked, not sure what had prompted her to say so. Bakura's father was an archaeologist and she knew nothing of the other members of his family or indeed if he cared about Duel Monsters at all; what had made her think that he would know the creator of the game?
"I've heard of him," Bakura said stiffly. His eyes were fixed on Yugi as he drew his next card. "Enough to be curious when I realized he was the ship's owner."
"How did you find out, though?" Anzu had a feeling that she was piling on the questions a bit too thickly, but she didn't want to watch Yugi's game either. "I didn't—"
"I googled it," Bakura said, his shoulders still tensed as if he expected her to slap him. "The boat was named after a Christian saint, and it was written in English in the newspapers."
"Oh," Anzu said, deciding not to push him any further as Jounouchi let out a disbelieving yell and stared at the cards laid out on the table, looking to be demanding a rematch.
At least ten rematches later, Jounouchi was no closer to winning and the fog was creeping closer over the sea, enshrouding the ship in a thick curtain of white. Anzu could barely see the top of the smokestacks, and even the prow of the ship, less than fifty feet away, was slightly hazy. She didn't know what time it was, although she guessed it had passed midnight already, and she hoped that Yugi was going to end the series of games as quickly as possible.
Bakura looked completely unfazed by the late hour, staring at the table with mild interest; Anzu wasn't sure if he was actually paying attention, or if he had developed a method of dozing with his eyes fully opened.
She shifted her weight to her other leg, covering a yawn with her hand. Yugi had attacked Jounouchi, it seemed, and he subtracted another few hundred life points on the paper. She blinked once, wearily, and wished she could just close her eyes and fall asleep there; then again, she would probably collapse if she did. She wondered if anyone would mind if she sat down on the deck.
The foghorn blared, jolting her only briefly before her eyes fluttered closed; the sound was muted by her exhaustion. It was quite irrational, she mused as she felt her handbag slip to the ground—she hadn't really done anything particularly strenuous today, but it was just getting so late—
She fell. Bakura tried to catch her—ah, so he hadn't been sleeping after all—with one arm around her shoulders and the other grabbing her wrist, and Anzu blinked once to see another man with smooth silver hair stepping out and the strange expression that twisted Bakura's face before her head hit the deck.
He recognized Pegasus the second he saw the fringe of silver hair covering his eye and the telltale red of his suit.
Yugi stood up so quickly his chair wobbled and nearly fell over behind him; the ship lurched unexpectedly, and he had to grab onto the side of the table to avoid falling over. The fog and darkness shrouded everything in a vague film of gray, and he had to squint to make out the outline of a door in the glow of light spilling at Pegasus's feet.
He reflexively grabbed hold of his chain again, the links of the metal cold on one side and warm where they had rested against his shirt. This was not the Pegasus he remembered from after his defeat, the slumped man who had been driven to near-madness by his wife's death. This Pegasus had the arrogant, cold air of the person he remembered from Duelist Kingdom, who'd had no problems with sealing souls into trading cards and never giving them back.
"What…?" He could only whisper the one word, shock and denial and hope bubbling up inside him. It was probably irrational, probably completely wrong to think it, but if Pegasus had done something with the powers of the Eye to make him think he was living in a world with no Pharaoh and no Items, then did the real world lie somewhere beyond all that?
Yugi tried again. "What are you doing here?"
Pegasus regarded him thoughtfully but did not answer his question. "I've heard of you," he said instead, and Yugi abruptly realized that the rest of the group had fallen silent in favor of hearing him speak. "Duel Monsters champion in the city where the headquarters of its most famous manufacturer are located. Student of Domino City High School. And more recently..."
Yugi flinched, although he didn't know why; it wasn't like Pegasus was aware that he'd been talking about his other self if he'd only confided in a select number of people. Then again, if Pegasus was the one responsible for this, then the likelihood of him knowing was much higher. "What do you want with me?" he said.
Pegasus smiled, and Yugi recognized it too; he had been on its receiving end too many times in Duelist Kingdom. It was the smile that told him that he'd been outmaneuvered. "I'd like for you to take a walk with me. Yugi."
"What about—" Anzu. Where was Anzu? Was this Anzu the even same one as the one he knew from the real world, or was this all an illusion?
Pegasus waved a hand, dismissing his concern. "Your friend? Look up."
With some horror, Yugi looked to his right and saw Anzu there, unconscious, hands trapped behind her; a rope as thick as his wrist tied her to the smokestack. The fog made it difficult to make out her expression, blocking his view with a haze of white. There were no lights there.
"What did you do to her?" Fear was eating its way through his body, making his fingers clench harder around the chain and his hands fumble as he quickly gathered up all the cards on the table; there was no other self here, nobody to duel for him, no way to invoke Shadow Games or duels to the death if Pegasus didn't want to. Here, he could do nothing.
"She will be your incentive," Pegasus said, seeming quite satisfied with whatever plan he had come up with. "Nothing like the impending death of a friend to gain cooperation."
Yugi's eyes widened at the term 'impending death.'
"That will all be explained later." Pegasus turned and paused in the doorway, his silhouette black against the light—a silent invitation.
Yugi glanced upward at Anzu again; he didn't see any danger near her, but he knew Pegasus well enough to know that he did not bluff. He wasn't willing to take the chance that none of this was real.
He ignored the stares of Jounouchi and the others and followed Pegasus into the hall.
Yugi imagined that during Duelist Kingdom, he would have reacted much differently than he was now. Perhaps it was the recklessness, the lack of care for his life, that allowed him to be so familiar—casual, even—with Pegasus as they were walking through the corridors of the ship that the man owned, no doubt with guards or at least security cameras stationed where he couldn't see them. Now that he had hope that it was all some sort of trick, he had a hard time believing it wasn't.
He has to be real. The other me—if he's not real, if it was all a dream, if the only friend I have here is Anzu, then—
"You painted all these yourself?" Yugi asked as they passed by a grouping of three paintings on the wall, a Westernized parody of Chinese-style paneling. He thought he recognized the style he had seen with Pegasus's portrait of his wife, the obsessive attention to detail and the bright coloring that took away whatever realistic effect the portrait was intended to have. Pegasus had obviously studied all the styles that he had tried, but there was something about the harshness of the black and the vibrancy of the green in the Chinese copy Yugi was looking at that screamed it was wrong.
He thought Pegasus was smiling. "I'm glad you noticed. Are you acquainted with my art?"
Yes, since I defeated enemies more powerful than you with three cards you painted yourself. Have you forgotten?
He swallowed instead. "A bit."
"Have we met before?"
It was memorable. You tried to kill me.
"Maybe."
Pegasus turned the knob of a door, the lamplight casting lines of shadow on the rich red of his sleeve and spots of gold on the silver of his hair. Yugi wondered if he would see the gold of the Sennen Eye if he reached up and yanked the fringe of hair covering Pegasus's face back.
The darkness was a surprise after the gentle light of the hallway, the varnished wood of the floor even more so in contrast to the carpeted ground before. Yugi blinked as his eyes adjusted. He could smell paint and dust and wood in the air, and he wondered where Pegasus had led him for whatever showdown the man wanted.
There was a click as the lights turned on, and Yugi was staring straight into the sunrise.
His first thought was that the walk had been longer than he'd first thought.
It took him some seconds to think, It was just after midnight before I came inside, and another few to realize, Wait, there can't be buildings floating in the air, but then he saw the telltale roughness of plaster behind the ridiculously realistic gleam of the sun.
"You painted this?" The words were wrenched out of him by surprise, or else he would have taken better care to hide the awe in them.
For his part, Pegasus didn't look as flattered as Yugi thought he would have been. He had walked over to another side of the room, gazing at the heavy curtains that rested against the wall, shades darker than his suit. Yugi recognized it; for a second he was reminded of a similar scene in the reality that Pegasus had hidden, with Anzu and Honda and Jounouchi and a hand yanking the curtain back—
"Of course I painted it. Who else would I have allowed to cover my entire east wall with plaster?"
The question was clearly rhetorical, so he didn't bother answering. As Pegasus turned around to face him, Yugi thought he caught a glimpse of gold beneath his hair.
The Eye—?
"What do you want with me?" he said, echoing his words from outside, and as he glanced further to his right, he noticed that white curtains covered what was likely a floor-length window there.
Pegasus smiled and walked over to a lone easel in the middle of the room, his steps clicking on the wooden floor. "I want your cooperation. You say you're the host of an Ancient Egyptian Pharaoh with magical powers? You say you have influence over souls in this Shadow Realm, which I suspect to be a euphemism for the afterlife? Prove it."
Yugi only stared at him for a long moment, unsure of what he was hearing. "How am I supposed to prove it?" he said finally, ignoring the other, more pressing questions he had: Why do you want me to do this? Why aren't you saying anything about where you locked up the other me? Why are you asking me to prove anything?
Pegasus continued walking until he had reached the opposite wall. With one hand on the white curtain, he yanked something behind it so that it flew open and Yugi saw that it hid not a window but a full opening in the room, and that Jounouchi, Honda, and the rest of the group were standing directly outside it.
Somehow, Yugi had looped back to where he had begun.
As he followed the line of everyone's gaze—the foghorn had just rung and nobody had heard the curtain open (had it really been only fifteen minutes since he had entered the ship?)—he realized that Anzu was still on the platform that the smokestack rose through, eyes squeezed shut against the noise, and that she was half-hanging from it, some fifty feet from the awaiting deck below.
"I don't understand," Yugi whispered; maybe in another life when there had been no Items and no psychopaths perfectly willing to take vengeance to the extreme, when he would not be who he was now, he would have done nothing but yell, Anzu! Maybe in that life, he would only have watched.
After all, there were yards and yards between his location and hers, and yards more until he had any hope of reaching the elevation she was at, and someone behind her was pushing her a little bit forward with each second that passed.
Maybe in that life, Pegasus would have been disappointed and they all would have seen Anzu tumble, clothes rippling in the air, and hit the deck at whatever angle Pegasus wished her to. Maybe in that life, they would not have reached Egypt, or Yugi would not have cared if they had.
But in this life, the light bulbs of Pegasus's studio shattered in a rain of glass and a fizz of electricity, and Yugi's hand clenched around the piece of the puzzle he hung around his neck as he thought of mind games and shadow games and Death-T.
In this life, Pegasus's agent kicked Anzu off the platform, but it was Bakura who smashed into the deck.
The wooden planks were still stained dark brown.
"I don't know," Yugi murmured for what felt like the hundredth time that day, running his fingers along the edge of the stain but not yet daring to touch it. It was still foggy, though he didn't know how that could happen in the middle of the ocean, but he didn't even move when the foghorn blared once more.
"Yeah, I get that," Jounouchi said, leaning against the rail next to him and eyeing him with some trepidation. "But how could it have happened? One second the girl—"
"Anzu," Yugi corrected automatically. He sat back on his heels.
"Anzu, whatever. So one second she's falling, and the next second, bam"—Jounouchi waved his arms to indicate a slamming motion—"that white-haired kid—"
"Bakura."
"Yeah, him. He hits the deck and breaks his wrist and arm. Really," Jounouchi said, thoughtful, "he's lucky not to have broken anything else. Like his shoulder. Or his skull. Good thing he tried to catch himself, huh?"
"Mmm," Yugi agreed, one finger tentatively tracing the center of the stain. It felt like normal wood. He couldn't even smell the blood anymore.
"Well," Jounouchi said after a moment of uncomfortable silence. "Don't go psychopath and kill us all, alright?"
"Of course I won't," Yugi said. Satisfied with the answer he had received, Jounouchi said something about meeting Honda and walked away from the deck, disappearing through the doorway of the dining hall.
Yugi sighed as his companion left, glancing to the side to see the dark waters of the ocean there, lapping at the side of the boat. His gaze drifted to the smokestack above him, half-obscured by fog, although he could still see the rope Anzu had been bound by lying coiled on the platform.
How could he possibly have answered Jounouchi's questions if he himself didn't know what he'd done?
At least Bakura seemed to have no hard feelings towards him for accidentally pushing him into a fifty-foot drop; the teenager had been unconscious for most of the previous day, but he'd assured Yugi of his relative health in the morning, even offering him a book on Ancient Egyptian death rituals.
It was surprisingly cold, and Yugi was glad he had worn the jacket of his school uniform as he sat on the deck alone, hands splayed along the bloodstains of the wooden floor.
He'd been avoided for the past few days—with just cause, admittedly, but it still felt a bit unfair because he had no idea what had happened and had no intention of repeating it, especially not when he remembered the gleam of Pegasus's good eye as the man had seen Bakura's body crumple after its fall.
Yugi closed his eyes, willing himself not to think of what had happened or how it had; the more pressing matter at hand was that of how to break whatever illusion Pegasus had woven over all their minds. Where was he, really? Was he lying in a hospital bed or on the ground of Pegasus's castle or even still sprawled before the tablet holding the Pharaoh's secrets? How much of this was real? How much could happen here, if it was not—could he die?
He would have thought that Pegasus or the Thief King had wiped his memories and sent him and his friends back to Domino, but that made no sense because everyone there seemed to be under the impression that no time had passed since the day he'd jumped into the river in search of his missing puzzle piece.
The Puzzle...
His hand fisted around his chain in an action that was becoming all too familiar to him, and any thoughts of reality faded quickly in the face of a realization. If he could solve the Puzzle like he'd done in the real world, if he could bring his other self back somehow, then everything would be okay. Then maybe Pegasus's illusions would fade, maybe he'd have some of the power the Item had once held, maybe they would all go back to normal.
And even if he didn't manage to break the illusion, maybe he'd be able to escape Pegasus's clutches anyway, because surely he was capable of winning a Shadow Game against him.
Yugi flinched slightly as he remembered Bakura's words from the morning, the utter seriousness in the other boy's tone a sharp contrast against the nonsensicality of what he'd said:
Pegasus wants his wife back.
But I thought—
Yes. Back from death.
Maybe. Maybe this would work. But he didn't see any other options.
Yugi took out the puzzle box, dumped the pieces on the deck, not caring that they were sprawling over the splotch of blood—Bakura's blood—that the maintenance crew hadn't been able to clean up, not caring that they might fall into the waiting ocean below.
His fingers ran through them, gentle as the touch of a friend or parent or lover, and he started to think of ways to put them together.
"You look awful."
It was true. Anzu wasn't going to lie to him about that.
Yugi rubbed at his eyes tiredly; he had dark circles under them, and they were half-lidded as if he was going to fall asleep at any moment. Anzu noted with some surprise that the ever-present chain was no longer around his neck. "Sorry."
She sighed. "Don't apologize, Yugi. It's just... I'm worried. What have you been doing for the past three days?" At his confused hesitation, she added, "How much have you been sleeping?"
"A few hours, I guess." Yugi seemed to abruptly notice that she was standing in the middle of the hallway while he held the door of his room open with one arm. "Come in."
Anzu stepped in, glancing around as she did; the door to the bathroom was ajar, a towel thrown on the counter by the sink, and the covers of the single bed were in an untidy pile by the pillow. The only area in use was the coffee table, which was covered with golden puzzle pieces, at the center of which lay the chain and the single piece hanging from it. The balcony door was open, and cold sea-smelling air blew in with the wind.
"Have you had any luck with the puzzle?" she asked, although she knew the answer from the hopeless sprawl of the pieces on the table.
Yugi sat cross-legged on the ground, picking up two of them and absentmindedly examining their edges for possible fits. "Not really," he said. "I've found about ten different ways the second layer can be built up from the piece I have now, but each of them branches off into a bunch of other ways, and I don't know which one to try first. I don't know which one will work. And I don't have the time to try them all."
Anzu winced in sympathy and sat opposite him, running her eyes over his appearance once more, critical. "This isn't healthy," she said quietly. "It doesn't matter what Pegasus has threatened you with, it doesn't matter that everyone else on the ship doesn't know whether to hate you or worship you—"
"They hate me?" Yugi said, his tone torn between hurt and a kind of wonder.
Anzu inwardly reprimanded herself for letting that bit of information leak out. "It doesn't matter!" she repeated, as if for emphasis, as if Yugi didn't already know what she was talking about. "This... thing you're doing"—she gestured toward the table—"it's going to kill you."
Yugi just shook his head. "It's not about that," he said. "I care about what happens to you if Pegasus decides to go through with what he promised he'd do, but it's not about that. The Puzzle is how I first met the other me. If I can solve it now, if I can do what I did before, then maybe I can figure out what's really happening here. If what I think is real actually happened, or if it was just a dream."
"It's not worth this!" Anzu burst out, hating the way she wanted to yell at him when he clearly didn't need it at the moment, hating how Yugi didn't seem to understand what she thought were his basic priorities. "Can't truth and Pegasus and the rest of it wait until you've made sure you don't die of starvation or develop insomnia?"
"I want to figure out what's real," Yugi said, and he looked so miserable sitting there with a broken smile before a broken puzzle that Anzu let herself be interrupted without complaint. "I think that's worth more than health. Do you—can you—"
He stuttered to a halt, but Anzu understood what he was trying to say.
Do you believe me?
Are you going to leave me?
Anzu bit her lip. "Okay," she relented, standing up, although she couldn't resist adding a conditional. "But you're still going to sleep, alright?"
Yugi nodded, and his smile grew a bit less burdened and a bit more genuine. She attempted to smile back.
It hurt to try.
Three days to Egypt, and Anzu decided that dinner with the company of Bakura after he had been deemed healthy enough to leave the infirmary was infinitely preferable to dealing with the mutterings of everyone else on the ship by herself.
"I hear he's some sort of child serial killer who's planning on pushing us all off the ship. That's why we haven't seen him, you know; he's too busy planning."
"See that kid over there, with the white hair and the cast? He tried to kill him first."
"Shouldn't he be scared?"
"Shouldn't we be scared? Who knows who he's going to pick next?"
"At least we're getting off at the next port."
Anzu's fingers were white around the wood of her chopsticks. Bakura's eyes met hers concernedly over the rim of his drink, eyebrows rising as if in warning.
"Hey. Anzu, was it?"
She glanced up sharply to see none other but Jounouchi and Honda standing alone behind her, and for once everyone else was too interested in their own food to notice. Jounouchi looked somewhat apologetic, to her surprise, while Honda simply grabbed a chair and pulled it up to their table as if he usually sat with them.
Anzu nodded. "What?"
"I, um, went to see Yugi today," Jounouchi admitted, the words coming out in a rush.
"What?"
Jounouchi winced.
"Why do you even care about him?" Anzu said. "If I remember correctly, all you were doing with him in school was beating him up every weeks."
"I guess I felt a bit guilty," Jounouchi said. "I might have gotten Pegasus interested in him by spreading the news that I was dueling the regional Duel Monsters champion, and if I hadn't, then..."
According to Yugi, that wasn't it at all, but Anzu supposed she could allow Jounouchi his remorse, whether it was just or not.
"When we saw him," Honda said, cutting off his friend, "he looked like he hadn't slept since we got on the boat."
"Is he okay?" Jounouchi asked uncertainly; Anzu had no doubt that the concept of asking after Yugi's well-being, of all people, was an idea he'd never entertained before today.
"Not really." All heads turned to Bakura, who had been watching the conversation in silence since then. "Pegasus's form of incentive made him a bit too desperate to finish his puzzle on time, and he doesn't want to stop until it's done."
Also, he wants to prove to the rest of us that his stories about Ancient Egyptian Pharaohs and magical objects are true.
Jounouchi frowned. "It's just a puzzle, though. It shouldn't take days to solve."
"It's three-dimensional," Bakura said, as if that answered everything.
"And he's tried for eight years already," Anzu added. "Without succeeding."
Honda whistled. "Damn."
"Wait," Jounouchi said. "So all Pegasus wants him to do is solve a puzzle?"
Anzu saw Bakura's fingers clench on the sides of his glass. "Yugi thinks that solving the puzzle will give Pegasus what he wants," she corrected.
"What if it doesn't?"
Anzu nearly rolled her eyes at Jounouchi's penchant for stating the obvious, although she knew that his question was what she had been asking herself for the past few days.
"We hope it doesn't," Bakura said quietly.
The canvas was covered in layers of white and blue, drying on top of each other in hidden eddies of color. Pegasus's brush added dabs of gray as Ryou watched, still uncertain of what the man was actually trying to paint after watching him for nearly an hour.
"Do you actually think anything will work?" His voice was somewhat hoarse after their long period of silence, and he coughed a few times to clear his throat before he continued. "Do you think anything can bring her back?"
Pegasus cast him an amused glance, brush poised over the easel and wrist hovering just over a wet spot of paint. "As much as you believe your sister can be brought back, Ryou."
Ryou willed himself not to clench his fists, to give any indication that Pegasus's offhanded remark had stung. "I want to talk to her," he said. "There's a difference."
Pegasus started mixing yellow with white, discarding his old brush. Ryou shuffled the tarot cards once more; he thought absently that someday he was going to snap them all in half from the ceaseless shuffling. "You're the occult expert, not me."
Ryou didn't answer that, only watched as his companion traced a reflection of the sun into the painting with a pencil, uncaring of the troughs it left in the still-drying paint.
"You still haven't tried the idea I first suggested," Ryou said finally. "The one with the picture."
"Is that one more likely to work than the others? If I remember correctly, you haven't tried it either."
The pencil was set down; Pegasus picked up his palette, five shades of yellow now on it, and began applying them to the canvas.
"Yugi's killing himself, you know."
Pegasus actually laughed a little. "Ryou, you must work on being able to stay on topic."
"That doesn't change the fact that he's killing himself over your experiment," Ryou snapped.
"Perhaps that suits my purposes."
"In doing what?" His hand missed the deck by a centimeter, and a dozen cards spilled over the floor. He tried not to look at them as he picked them up; he didn't want to be reading anymore whims of fate into this trip than Pegasus was already trying to put into play.
"You'll see soon, I'm sure."
Infuriatingly patronizing, as always. Ryou frowned and carefully palmed the cards before pushing them back into the stack he had.
"Back on topic," Pegasus announced. "If you're so eager to have me try your only original method, why haven't you done it yet yourself?"
Ryou said nothing.
"Are you afraid?" Pegasus said mercilessly. His brush slashed a line of gold across the top of the painting. "Are you afraid that if you try to recreate your sister as you see her in your mind, you'll find that you don't remember her as well as you say you do?"
The cards fit into Ryou's pocket with ease as he stood. "If that's true for me, then doubly so for you. I didn't really know why you kept your last painting of Cecelia and never tried painting in her memory again, but now—are you scared that you're forgetting her too?"
Ryou's footsteps echoed in the emptiness of the room. "And how is this experiment with Yugi going to help?"
"You'll see," Pegasus repeated, but by then the door had slammed closed.
The wind was cold against her face, sparse drops of rain running like tears down her cheeks. Anzu stood against the railing of the deck, the fog twining its way around her ankles and across the smokestacks that rose high into the air behind her, a golden puzzle box and a chain clutched in her hands.
Yugi was sleeping in his room, Anzu knew, arms wrapped around his pillow as if searching for the embrace of another person, unaware that the two items he probably prized more than anything else on the ship were in Anzu's possession, and about to be tossed into the sea.
Her arms trembled from holding the two objects up for minutes upon minutes on end; another few droplets of rain splattered against her wrists and shoulder, reflected warped images of the sky above before her eyes.
It was best for Yugi. If he could not complete the puzzle, he would find some other way, some simpler way, of forcing Pegasus to let them go. If he couldn't complete the puzzle, he would have to let the past go.
He wouldn't know she had done it; he often forgot to lock his door, and by now there were plenty of people on the ship who knew what he had done to Bakura and were perfectly capable of throwing the box and the chain overboard without a second thought.
It was best for Yugi. He would never blame her. So why couldn't she bring herself to do it?
Anzu slumped against the railing, feeling it press into her stomach like a hand forcing her back from the sea. One part of her mind screamed at her to hurry up, that Yugi could wake up at any moment and rush out onto the deck to see her standing there, that if he found out—
If he found out, what?
If he found out, he would never forgive her.
And if she told him about it without telling him the truth in its entirety, if she comforted him over what he had lost when she had taken it, she would never forgive herself.
She couldn't do it. She truly couldn't do it.
Anzu lowered her arms so that her elbows rested against the metal banister, the puzzle box and chain dangling precariously over the side. She couldn't bring herself to let go, but she hoped, ridiculous as it was, that if the ship lurched a bit, if someone bumped into her, her grip would loosen enough for her to drop them accidentally.
It didn't happen, so that was how Yugi found her when he came running up from his room half an hour later, footsteps thudding against the wood of the ground.
He jerked to a stop when he saw her standing there, and she didn't look up to confirm that it was him. Nobody else would want to take a walk when it was raining, and Yugi would have found her eventually.
"Anzu?" he asked uncertainly. "Anzu, what..."
"I'm dropping them into the ocean," she said, although the admission didn't make her feel any better about herself; the truth rested on her chest like an iron weight, and she didn't dare look up to see Yugi's expression.
"Why?" Yugi whispered.
"It's hurting you," Anzu said, the reasons feeling all the more ineffectual when she had to say them aloud. "It's holding you back from finding any other solution, because you're so hung up on what you think is the past that you can't see what else could happen!"
"But if Pegasus—"
"No!" Anzu said, and she hoped Yugi couldn't hear the tears gathering in her eyes, thickening in her voice. "I don't know what's real or not, but you can't stand there and say that what I am, what I've known I was for sixteen years, is nothing but a trick and that I should give it all up for the world you've made from your dreams! What gives you the right to negate all of that because the Anzu you invented is better than I could ever be?"
"Not better than you," Yugi tried to say.
"Yes, better than me." The edges of the puzzle box dug into her palms. "Admit it."
"...Anzu," Yugi said after a pause. "Please, give me back the puzzle and the chain."
"Haven't you been listening to me?" Anzu cried. "I can't! All I know is that three weeks ago you were the same person as you've always been, and then you got sick and woke up determined to chase phantoms. I don't want to throw these away, I don't want to hurt you, but I want you back!"
She took a deep breath, closing her eyes and knowing that it wasn't rain on her cheeks anymore. The real rain matted into her hair and spotted her clothes, but she didn't bother to wipe it away. "What can I say to make you realize that this isn't important as living? I don't know how long it'll take you to solve the puzzle. What if you spend your whole life staring at it in your bedroom just because you think that doing that will prove you right? What if you waste your whole life on something that's not real? It's not worth it!"
"Just let me try—"
"You're going to spend your whole life trying," Anzu said. "And you're going to forget that the rest of us exist, because whatever you have there in your head is worth more than us." Her arms dropped to her sides, and she let the puzzle box and chain fall out of them to roll onto the deck.
"Here," she said. "You can have them. I'm sorry the real me isn't good enough for you."
When she looked up, Yugi was standing in the same place as he had been when he'd found her, soaked through but unmoving. "I'll throw them into the water," he said, very quietly. "I'll forget about what I—what I dreamed. If you want me to."
He sank to his knees and started scooping up puzzle pieces in his hands; Anzu didn't miss the way he handled them, still with the gentleness befitting newborn babies and worship-worn idols. His arms were full of them when he stood once more and walked over to the railing.
Anzu only shook her head, raising one hand to wipe at her tears. "You don't want to, I can tell. You'll just hurt yourself more."
"I don't want to now," Yugi said. "And after I do this, I might always ask myself what might happen if I hadn't. But I think that's better than making these past few days into my entire life."
His voice was calm. Accepting. Anzu looked at him carefully. "Are you sure?"
"No," Yugi admitted, with a smile that wavered as unsteadily as a child's first step, "but I will be later."
They took their handfuls of puzzle pieces and, one by one, threw them into the ocean.
Anzu was sure that in its heart, the ocean was glad to receive them.
Ryou looked at the blank face of Pegasus's new canvas, blinking beneath the brim of his hat. "This one's unusually large."
"Yes," Pegasus agreed. "I'm planning to paint my magnum opus here." He flipped open his sketchbook to the last filled page and handed it to his companion, smiling at Ryou's raised eyebrows.
"Artists typically don't become famous from paintings of their loved ones," Ryou said flatly.
"Don't worry," Pegasus said brightly. "I'm not planning for this one to last."
"Where did this sudden courage come from?" Ryou's expression was skeptical.
"I told you my experiment would come in handy," Pegasus reminded him, bringing out his palette and beginning to set down his brushes. "Maybe you'll manage it too, someday."
"Yeah," Ryou said quietly. "Someday."
He glanced away from the canvas as Pegasus began to paint, eyes looking up toward the burnished-gold spread of the sands before him, higher to the clear shimmer of the heat haze, and higher until his gaze met the clear blue expanse of the sky that stretched to the ends of the horizon.
He imagined that the sky continued on beyond that point—as far as the eye could see, and farther still than that.
end
A/N: Many apologies for the rushed second half. Ew, finals. xD
Reviews are loved, constructive criticism especially. Extra love to those who catch the Naruto influences or guess the name of Pegasus's ship :)