In Italics
If their love was a book, the entire thing was written in italics.
To start, the story wasn't your typical romance novel – that's for sure. You'd find no star-crossed lovers or sappy dialogues here. In fact, it was hardly a typical story at all: there was a quite clear beginning, yes, but at the moment it didn't seem like there would ever be an end.
The pages weren't new or crisp or nice-smelling. This tome was an old one, its pages faded and yellowing; but even as ageless a tale it was, it smelled not of dust or stale glue. It had been passed along like a ritual from hand to hand, endlessly, nonstopping, from the moment it first came into existence. Countless fingers had flipped the pages. An infinite number of eyes – blue, green, brown, red, wide, narrowed, with long eyelashes or short, naïve, experienced, exotic, decorated, or plain (but all teary) – had eaten up the words printed within, reading each and every word until the end no matter how desperately they each wished they could look away.
But from the first word to the back cover, every single neatly printed size-ten letter was bolded, underlined, and italicized.
Nothing Bakura did was normal to begin with. There sets your font: atypical, out of the ordinary. Not aesthetically pleasing at all. Every action he took equated to a font face that hurt the eyes, marred the page, strained the senses. They stood out in bright red, seeming, at times, to drip as if the blood in which it was written was still wet.
But the startling words and their startling style were still not enough – not nearly enough – to convey the way Bakura worked. He did not simply do things. He did them with the force of twenty men; he did them quickly, savagely, and thoroughly; he did them so roughly and so forcefully that he received a result ten times more satisfying than any mortal could have ever hoped to achieve.
In Ryou's case, this meant the drive to insanity was getting shorter and shorter a trip; but that was simply the latest chapter. There were hundreds before his.
Reading through these previous installations, big brown eyes struggling to stay focused on the slanted crimson ink, Ryou cried. Each and every chapter ended the same way. He himself was nearing the climax of his own, and so far it offered no evidence that it would turn out any differently than the others.
Bakura leaned over the boy's shoulder and grazed a fingertip over the corner of the page. A single word, in italics, caught his eye. Love.
"My favorite book," he said.