Disclaimer: I do not own Yugioh 5D's.
A/N: To themostdarkestheart who thought there should be more Kiryu x Aki fics in the world. I'm not entirely sure if I did it right.
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He'd only read one book in his whole childhood. He couldn't even remember its name. Just that it had a king and queen and princess and they lived in this fabulous kingdom until some mysterious guy from the forest takes the princess away. He liked to talk about it to his friends. Crow thought the mysterious guy was cool, but the rest of the story was lame. Jack thought the king was pretty foolish to let a mysterious guy into his kingdom. Yuusei thought the mysterious guy was the bad one for taking the princess away. Kiryu thought why's that? and Yuusei answered it should be obvious.
At first it was a joke. Taking the governor's daughter captive - a princess kidnapped by a ruffian - it would be hilarious to see the rest of their faces.
It didn't seem like much of a joke to the leader of Team Satisfaction when he met her, eyes glaring and sobbing like some sort of disaster. Her palace a broken ocean of glass. The King and Queen quite shocked indeed.
If only Kiryu knew dramas. If only Satellite had had entertainment like that instead of the brawling kind he was accustomed to.
Then he might not have dug a hole into the maintenance pipe, and when the Security found it, into the sewer lines. Then maybe he would still be on that island, dueling away with the rest of his gang.
Then maybe he would have learned some decency, even if it costed him his life.
He approaches her.
"That's pretty interesting. Can you teach me how to do that too?"
"Aki! Hurry, come here! Call the police, darling!"
"They're on their way."
Regardless of the glass at their feet, their everyone's main intent seems to be the princess.
The princess runs and it takes all he has to follow her. For blocks and blocks around a city that is nothing like he's known before.
They finally collapse in a vacant place - and if Kiryu had remembered it would be a park, but there's no use for those things in a place like where he's from and no use for those kinds of memories either - and she rests her head on the bench as he sits beside her.
"Why-ah are you ha follow-ha-ing me?" Her voice out of breath.
"Cuz yer tha Prinsis." His equally so.
"The-ah what?"
"Tha Prinsis." His speech is clipped, his lungs are burning. "Wer'er you goin'?"
They rest in that empty space for some time, only the sounds of their breathes filling up the emptiness between them. The lights of the park are on and Kiryu can't believe it's this bright at night.
"Why?" She whispers finally. Her voice is back, but it still cracks like glass. "They were happy... without me." Fragile, fragile glass.
"Ain't that the worst? When your buddies are havn' the time of their lives and yer just standing around."
"You don't know what I mean."
"Heh, I know exactly what you mean, Princess."
"Why do you call me that? Who are you?"
"Cuz yer the princess and I'm the guy from the woods."
"Ridiculous."
She's not mad at him, not about to burst his gut with her powers, or whatever she does, but he knows that she'd want more than anything to be alone.
Too bad he doesn't have the decency to do that.
"So, wer'er you going?"
"What do you want with me!" She can't stand it anymore, but she can't stand either.
"Nothn'. I jus' wanna get outta here as soon as I can, it's not my cuppa tea. I wanna go into the woods!"
"You, you're not from-"
"I dug my way outta there."
"That's impossible."
"And I thought breaking a ton of glass with yer mind was impossible too til tonight. So, do ya know a way to get outta this godforsaken' place?"
Even when all the children had praised Neo Domino he still hadn't liked it. That city was the reason for the suffering and they just didn't get it, no matter how many times he tried to pound it into their heads. Security is from that place, how can it be so good? They didn't listen. Said they weren't afraid of Security. You all should be, you all suck at dueling! Still they didn't listen. He stopped telling them and one by one Security got them. Made them work in the factories, told them the wages they made were worth the work they put out.
He sneered at all, started laughing when Security started looking for him. He's pass the conscription age. That day, he decided, he wasn't going to work. He was going to fight and if it wasn't Security, it had to be somebody. And he had to get all the best duelists to join him because more than the wages, more than the law, the cards were the only things of value he knew.
"Where would you go? I've seen the world, it's not worth leaving this place." She's forlorn now. Tired and just a bit broken.
"There's always a place worth leavin' for the place yer goin' to."
"I've always wondered what the rest of Japan is like. Why Neo Domino is so locked off from the rest of the world." Her eyes are pretty vacant. She's gone to nonchalance.
"Heh, I could think of a few reasons why." Was it true what Yuusei told him once? That the oppressed knew more about their oppressors than their oppressors knew about them?
"I just... it's just too awful now." She's close to sobbing again, but he knows she's not going to unleash her feelings on him. She seems like the kind of person who wouldn't do that to a stranger. He could be wrong though. "So awful."
And it amuses him, sort of, that people on the 'other side' can be even more miserable than he is.
"Heh hah hah so awful!" She cries, half-laughter half-sorrow, halfheartedly.
Kiryu joins in, "Hah hah, ya think so? What have ya even seen, Princess?"
Their laughter goes on for far too long and if their lungs were on fire before, they're incinerated now.
He topples off the bench, onto the grass. She's been lying on the grass for a long time now, tears running off the side of her face and watering the grass.
"I'm going to be happy, because they're happy without me, ahaha." She nuzzles the lawn beneath.
He can't help but feel happy and sad. Because he can see himself embracing the ground too, because Crow and Jack left and Yuusei was afraid of him. If he hadn't left just that night, escaped at just the right time then he would have found out that his friends had all gathered to meet with him. Talk him out of his crazy plan of rousing the Security. It wouldn't have worked of course, it would already have been too late.
"I know. I feel the same way." His grin is nice and huge. He takes a handful of grass and tosses it into the air. It sprinkles on them, raining green.
"Do you?" She giggles, more from the blades in her nostrils than the crazy happiness.
He doesn't even think about saying I do.
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She takes one look back at the lights of the city, easing into darkness, and wants to capture the events of her childhood in her mind.
She can't though. It's too painful, too lonely to think about.
Instead she turns ahead.
The sweet and fading smell of long grass whirls up from under her feet. It's not cut; it doesn't need cutting, it grows wild, untamed and disastrously beautiful. The shadows of the trees, the mountains, the clouds all look like stair cases to the moon.
This is what she knows now. This is all she wants to know.
He knows that too, takes her by the hand and leads the way through the moonlight. He's always been the leader after all, and she's going to be his princess.
It'll take some time before either of them are out of the woods.
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END
A/N: Yeah. It's kinda farfetched. But Aki got together with Divine, there's no reason why she can't get together with another mad man, is there? This is just me asking for your crit.