Story: Way Too Easy
Characters: Yuuya, Yuuto, Yuugo, Yuuri||Pairs: N/A (potential Dimensionshipping later, undecided)
Words: 1,511/180,000||Chapters: 1/120
Genre: Angst, Supernatural||Rated: PG-13
Challenges: Diversity Writing, Arc-V Divergent/alternate timelines, L9, 100+ chapters; Angst Week day #2, Awakened
Notes: This will involve vampirism, therefore, blood-drinking and death/revival. While this is ninety percent canon-based, the major changes that I'm going to admit to right now are: it's been sixteen years since the worlds divided into the four dimensions, the invasion into XYZ has not yet happened, and the Professor thought of something he wanted to do first. Also, Yuuya hasn't yet discovered Pendelum Summons before the story opens. Will he discover it afterwards? Why don't we find out together?
Summary: They were never meant to meet again. If they did, one would absorb all the others, to recreate the past. But something changed. The boundaries of life and death are crossed in ways that were not anticipated. And four dimensions are going to pay for it.
Yuuya didn't breathe. But he did open his eyes. He shut them again almost at once, his head spinning as if he'd spent the last hour or so on a trampoline. No, worse. He'd spent hours on trampolines and come out none the worse for it.
His back hurt, but even as he stirred, trying to figure out which way was up and what he wanted to do with that information, the pain eased, as if it were little more than a cramp fading as he shifted around.
Something wasn't quite right. His stomach gurgled, so he guessed he was hungry. Only he couldn't think of what he wanted. That wasn't usually a problem, since he would eat anything his mom put in front of him happily. This time the thought of pancakes or anything else she might have suggested made his stomach churn even worse.
That definitely wasn't right.
He reached up to rub his eyes and open them. Maybe he was dreaming. He didn't know what he could be dreaming that made him not want to eat his mom's cooking, but that was the only thing he could think of.
When he opened his eyes this time, he fought off the urge to close them yet again. It didn't feel right to not be in his room. At the same time, he didn't think it would have felt right to be in his room, either.
He wasn't sure. He couldn't really put together enough words to guess what an answer could be.
Nothing seemed entirely right. There weren't any lights around that he could tell, and yet he could see as if it were full daylight.
Which it wasn't. He could see faint stars twinkling overhead.
Which also told him that wherever he was, it was outside, and he had no idea of why he was outside. He'd been… he'd been…
Yuuya strained to remember, but everything before he'd woken up here seemed covered by the thickest of mental blankets. There were things he knew and things he found he was aware of – like having jumped on a trampoline or that this wasn't his room or that his name was Yuuya – but he couldn't remember anything.
He hissed between his teeth as he pulled himself to his feet. Then he blinked, hearing himself. Had he ever made a noise like that before? That was something else that he couldn't be certain of.
One hand drifted slowly, absently, to his lips. He could feel teeth there, which was a good thing. He found himself reasonably certain that he should have teeth.
But what he also found there brought another noise to his lips, shocked and startled and unbelieving.
"Stop that," a voice he didn't recognize said from a short distance away. "I'm trying to sleep."
Yuuya brought his head around to where the voice came from. He could still see clearly in the darkness. He just hadn't paid attention to what was going on around him. Now that he did, he couldn't fully believe what he saw in the first place.
What wasn't really the right term. Who came ever so much closer.
Three other guys about his own age. That wouldn't have been so surprising, if his unexpectedly sharp night vision hadn't shown something else about them.
One of them cracked an eye open – it wasn't the one who'd already spoken – and then leaped to his feet, pointing at Yuuya.
"Hey! What are you doing with my face? Stop copying me!"
Yuuya's eyes narrowed, an unexpected anger boiling up inside of him.
"This is my face. And I could ask you the same thing. All of you!"
In the back of his mind he wondered why he was so upset. He'd heard about meeting people who looked like you before, though he'd never done it. Supposedly there was a really good chance that anyone had a twin out there they didn't know about.
Only right now, he saw three other versions of himself, and he didn't know anything but anger.
They weren't absolutely identical. The one who'd spoken first had wilder hair than his, in shades of purple and black, while the second one had mostly blue hair with a banana-shaped swath of yellow in the front.
The fourth one had entirely purple hair – well, almost entirely, there were strands of pink in it as well – and as he sat up and looked around, he licked his lips, then brought one hand up to them much as Yuuya had.
His eyes narrowed for a few seconds as well before he turned to the others.
"Who are you, what are we doing here, and why do I have fangs?"
Yuuya nodded at that. "I wondered about the fangs, too." He touched his own again before he looked at the other two. "You've got them too."
Four teenagers sitting around touching their teeth didn't feel any more right than anything else that had happened. But some of the anger eased from within Yuuya as he did this, and other thoughts tingled their way to the forefront of his mind.
"I'm Yuuya," he said at last. "What about you?" They could figure out why they looked like each other later. It was probably nothing, anyway.
"Yuuto," the one with black and purple hair said.
"Yuugo." That was the banana guy.
"Yuuri." The one who looked more together than the other three combined.
Yuuya nodded. He'd never met them in his life, but the sensation that he should know them tucked itself into him. He remembered so little. Maybe he did know them, from before? Maybe they were… twins? Quadruplets?
"What are we doing here?" Yuuto asked, eyes flicking from one side of the area to another.
That was all Yuuya could think to call it. A meadow would probably be more accurate, at least until he knew it better. But area worked too. Grass stretched in every direction and there wasn't a single sign of city lights no matter where he looked. Dew sprinkled everywhere. Mountains rose up close to hand, but no trees, at least not anywhere close. A line of something far to the horizon could have been trees, maybe.
Yuuri eyed it all carefully before he returned his gaze to the three of them. "I have no idea." His fingers drifted over the uniform he wore, as purple as his hair, different from what they all had on. In fact, each of them wore something different. Which wasn't shocking, but Yuuya was still sure that he'd never seen anything like any of them had.
Almost as if in mirror to Yuuri, he began to look for something on himself as well. He wasn't sure of what it was, until his questing fingers encountered something, and he pulled out a deck of cards.
His dueling deck. That memory neatly slotted itself into place and he stared down at it. The Entermates: the deck he'd dueled with for years.
He wasn't the only one to pull out a deck. All of them stared at theirs as if they'd never seen such a thing before.
"That doesn't answer my question about the fangs," Yuuri said at last, setting his deck down carefully. "As I recall, normal humans don't have fangs."
"Yes, that's quite true," a voice that wasn't from any of them said ever so calmly. "But the four of you have never been normal humans and now you're even less human than you were." A soft, vaguely amused laugh. "I would say that you're actually more than human myself."
All four were on their feet before the unknown and unseen speaker could finish his first sentence. Yuuya's fingers dug into his hands and in that same dark back of his mind mental place, he wondered that he felt no pain at all from this.
Between a single breath and the next – breaths that none of them took – a tall man entered the little circle the four made. Yuuya thought his suit was kind of old-fashioned, but elegant anyway, and his skin was even paler than theirs. He glanced from one of them to the other, fangs as sharp as theirs visible, before he spoke again.
"Yuuya. Yuuto. Yuugo. Yuuri. Welcome to your new home: Vampire Kingdom. I am your sponsor into this world, the one who will teach you what you need to know. You may refer to me as Caedmon, but I'm certain at least one of you should recognize me from somewhere else." His gaze flicked to Yuuto, who frowned.
"I...you're..." He blinked, straining to recall, then his eyes widened. "I remember! I… I dueled someone who used a card… but your name wasn't… it's… you're Vampire Duke!"
"Correct." Caedmon bent his head. "And now that you know that much, I believe there are other questions that you wish answered. But would you mind waiting until after dinner? I'm certain after your recent experiences, you're all quite hungry."
He smiled, his fangs even more visible now, as if he did it on purpose. "Dying does tire one out so."
To Be Continued
Notes: I'll update this when I can and I hope regularly. I know exactly how it ends, but the path to getting there may be bumpy. Don't worry. They'll visit the other dimensions again in due course. I also don't promise happy endings. At least not in the sense of 'they turn human again and prance off into flowers and happiness and sunshine'.