Title: Room To Escape
Author: Nina/technicolornina
Fandom: Yu-Gi-Oh!: GX
Genre: Romance/Adventure
Pairing/Characters: Asuka, Jim, Johan, Jyuudai
Word Count: 1 311
Spoilers: Umm, kind of. It's A/U. Through 115 to be safe?
Story Rating: PG-13
Story Summary: Don't piss off Asuka. Slapping is just the beginning, and this time she's got Jim to help her.
Notes: Title from the Billy Joel song "Leave A Tender Moment Alone." Yes, there's a reason why. No, I won't tell you, you have to decide for yourself. Also, this is from the same universe as "We Might Fall," since Johan and Jyuudai would, logically, be together at that point when Johan goes to duel Geise (we can assume Cobra disposed of Satou).
Feedback: I get lots of "favourite story" and "story alert" e-mails. I don't get all that many review e-mails. Make me a happy Ninalyn and change that? I will give you hearts if you do.
Special Thanks/Dedications: This shippy bit of slightly tense WAFF is brought to you by and for Higuchimon, who gave me the idea.
She'll see I'm not so tough
Just because I'm in love with an uptown girl
You know I've seen her in her uptown world
She's getting tired of her high class toys
And all her presents from her uptown boys
She's got a choice
-- "Uptown Girl," Billy Joel
"The next time Jyuudai just—runs off, I swear I'm going to leave him and let him deal with it," Asuka says, not entirely sure if she should be frustrated or amused or both. "He looks like someone punched him in the head and he still decides he's just going to go right on ahead with Johan—ouch!" She lets out a quiet hiss of pain as her bare foot comes down hard on a sharp pebble.
"You okay, Tomorrow Girl?" Jim asks her, and after a moment of undignified hopping to rub the stone off the bottom of her foot she nods.
"It's just the path." She shakes her boot one more time, then gives up on getting it any drier and pauses long enough to pull it back on. "I don't understand, I really don't. You all came to the school and suddenly he got so strange. Even before the electromagnetic disturbances you found. If I didn't know better I'd think those two decided they were going to be in love."
"That's not something you can 'decide,' Tomorrow Girl," Jim tells her. Then he grabs her wrist and puts a single finger on her mouth from behind before pointing it in the direction of a doorway. Asuka remains silent and listens. It doesn't take her long to hear what Jim has already picked up on.
"Stay where you are, kid," says a deep voice that reminds her of very old coffee on a hotplate turned off hours or even days before. "You move and we'll see how long this little Jerry Beans Man lasts with half a card."
"What is he talking about?" Asuka whispers. Jim shakes his head, lips thinned tightly together, and creeps to the door. Then he backs away as Johan's voice, wavering and shaking, comes through the door. Then that old-coffee voice laughs. Asuka nearly bares her teeth at it without even realising it. There is something in the quality of it that brings out every vicious instinct she possesses—quite a lot more than most people meeting her on a day to day basis would probably suspect.
"What, you think praying's gonna help you, kid?" that voice asks, as Jim puts his mouth to Asuka's ear and tells her what is happening on the other side of the door. She glances around and sees no door that might let her come up on the blind side of the man Jim has described to her, but there is something else.
A ladder.
Asuka has no idea if Duel Academia-issue boots are intended for this kind of use and she doesn't trust the still-damp soles not to slide on the metal, and so she takes them off, wishing bitterly for once that Blue uniforms had shoes with laces. Instead she grabs them by one side and heads for the ladder.
She is seven rungs up, trying to move quickly without dropping her shoes or making sound, when her foot—not as slippery as the wet rubber soles on her shoes, but damp and somewhat slick even bare—slips off and leaves her dangling by one hand and two fingers. She inhales sharply—the last thing she needs is to fall and break a bone deep in the cellars of the SAL lab with the power out and Cobra somewhere ahead—and then there is a hand beneath her foot. She looks down, for one wild moment expecting to see Cobra waiting to drag her off the ladder, but it is only Jim, holding on with one hand and with his hat jammed firmly on his head to avoid unfortunate drafts. She nods down at him and looks for the rung she needs . . . there.
"Give it up, kid," Asuka hears that voice say as she gains the floor over the room Johan is dueling in. In one corner is an empty glass container that Johan is staring at with something Asuka identifies as pure horror. There is no time to wonder why; she only has time to pull her shoes back on and take one of the pieces of rope binding together a stack of planks that were probably intended to fill in the holes in the flooring.
The knot she ties is quick but tight; it has to be. She isn't a particularly heavy girl, but she is heavy enough, and she has very clear memories of what happened to Fubuki when he decided at the age of seven to jump out of a treehouse with a badly-tied rope while playing Tarzan. If she lands wrong next to the man below her, she has the feeling a broken ankle and bruised shoulders will be the least of her problems. Finally she takes a deep breath.
"Nobody's coming to help you, Johan Andersen," the man in the khaki shirt says. Asuka doesn't have to look to see Johan still trembling on the very edge of her vision. Next to him is Jyuudai, his hands behind him, and she has just enough time to wonder what on earth Jyuudai is doing on his knees twisting his shoulders as though someone is holding his hands behind his back before she jumps.
There is no stretch in the rope, and as soon as it pulls tight she knows she has a very big problem. She doesn't veer off-course—she might land on the man with the whip on his belt instead of clipping his shoulder, but she has committed to a course of action and she will not let her friends down—but she also knows that like Fubuki before her she is going to end up in a cast before the day is over, provided Cobra doesn't force them all into a Dis-Duel and turn up the juice. Unlike Fubuki, though, she is not going to have the benefit of soft grass or fresh dirt turned over for a tree-round garden, and—
And then the rope snubs tight and she swings up, one pointed boot connecting solidly with the man's ribs and one with his hand. Somewhere above her she hears a heavily accented voice call out.
"Way to go, Tomorrow Girl!"
She grins with a kind of savage joy when she hears the groan out of Johan's opponent, and although any kind of even remotely graceful landing is precluded when she goes sprawling on his other side and skins her knee, she cannot complain—she only grabs the card, battered and a little worn, off the floor and all but sprints to Johan's side as Jim drops down from the ceiling to join her, flipping open a pocketknife and kneeling behind Jyuudai to cut the plastic cord twisted around his wrists. Asuka sees the wrap pattern before the knife gets through, and identifies it almost without trying: something thrown with deadly accuracy, probably in such a way as to make Jyuudai turn to see what hit him so it could catch his other wrist, as well.
Jyuudai pulls himself to his feet, still slightly wobbly from his own earlier duel that nearly killed her, as well. Johan slams a card onto his duel disk as Jim puts a steadying arm around Jyuudai's waist before he topples right over. Then the container in the corner shatters, and before Asuka can completely comprehend how something empty and without any noticeable means of air entering could explode outward Johan's opponent has fallen backward, the counter on his duel disk spinning to zero. Johan runs for him, Jyuudai hurrying with him, and Asuka takes just enough time to say something very important before going to join them.
"Thank you." The rope is lying on the floor beneath the hole she jumped from, and she has no illusions about how much slack she had left when Jim grabbed it. He nods at her.
"I'd never let you fall, Tomorrow Girl."