Title: Fairy Towers
Character: Rin||Pair: N/A
Word Count: 647/647||Chapters: 1/1
Genre: Angst||Rated: G
Challenges: Diversity Writing: Arc-V Canon: B62, no dialogue; Word Count Set Boot Camp, #30, 647 words; Arc V Angst Week, day #7, home
Summary: Rin always looked to the towers of the Tops, dreaming of what could be theirs one day. Only when she's finally in a tower with all she could ever want, all she wants is to go home.
Rin tried not to look up too often at the shimmering towers of the Tops. They were beautiful. She had to admit that. Far more so than the slums of the Commons stretching in every direction around her.
These slums were her home. She knew every inch of them, could walk them in her dreams, and had done so more times than she could remember. But even in her dreams, those towers rose up in the background, enticing, teasing of what could possibly be.
If they ever won the Friendship Cup. If they could actually get out of here.
Rin wanted to believe that they could. Wanted to reach up to the stars and beyond, to see them – to see everything – from so high up.
Winning the Friendship Cup meant having a D-Wheel strong and fast enough to compete against the ones bought by the Tops. Getting that remained the next thing to impossible. They had to fight to get some of the parts.
Fight and do other things. Yuugo didn't tell her everything that he'd done in order to get them and she'd told him even less about what she'd had to do. Such as why she could pick locks faster than he ever could…
But even when they were up there, in those fairy castles in the sky, Rin swore she'd never forget what it was like to be down here, where everything had to be worked for and you couldn't always get everything you wanted by dueling.
No matter how high up she rose, she'd never forget that she and Yuugo started as Commons and the only way they'd be anything else would be by working for it. Being Tops wouldn't be handed to them. Most Tops didn't ever have to think about that. They would be different.
She dropped her head back and closed her eyes, stealing a few precious moments of rest time before heading back to work on their D-Wheel again. She knew she probably shouldn't, but she did anyway. A few moments in the sun never hurt anyone.
Rin turned away from the sunlight arching in through the tower window, tempted to slam them closed and stalk around the room for a while.
She didn't, though. Sunlight only came in here for an hour or so a day and she didn't want to waste any of it.
It wasn't like before, when she couldn't get time to rest because she needed to work on their D-Wheel. Now she really only could rest. There wasn't any time to work on the D-Wheel and no D-Wheel to work on in the first place.
There were books set on the bookcase and a tablet that contained all the books used here at Fusion Academia, and for the first couple of weeks, she'd devoured it all eagerly, mostly for lack of anything else to do. She didn't believe ninety percent of what she read, but she read it anyway.
But no D-Wheels. Only mentions of the basics of other Summons methods, and always in such a way that she could tell they favored Fusion above all else.
Even worse, there wasn't any way out of here. She could see beautiful grounds from where she was, but she couldn't get to any of them. Just what sunlight came through here once a day, and rich meals four times a day that made her stomach unsettled, and a plush bed too soft to sleep on for the first three weeks she'd been here.
It was like being in Tops and yet not like it. She couldn't leave here. She didn't know where Yuugo was. She didn't know why she was here. No one would tell her anything and nothing she had access to answered any of her questions.
And more than anything else in all the world – in all four dimensions – Rin wanted to go home.
The End
Notes: And that's all of Angst Week! Next, I prepare for YGO Polyship Week in October & try to finish a few WIPs. And decide if I want to rewrite Payment or not. As well as a few others.