Disclaimer: I don't own Yugioh. I am also way too tempted to fulfill this challenge with 15 different Malik pairings. -_-;;;;
For all the places he's been, sacred and taboo things he's seen, Malik Ishtar has never entered a girl's bedroom. Until now.
"I lived in New York once," he remarks idly, his hands jutting into his back pockets as he strolls the perimeter, meets the cheerful optimism glaring from the posters on every wall with a reflective stare. "It wasn't all you've got it looking like. Too many people and the life somehow gets squeezed out of a place. You can't breathe."
"Well, sure, if you focus just on the crowd", Anzu retorts, crossing her legs as she sits backwards on her desk chair, trying not to show she's nervous. She hadn't exactly expected Malik to make a beeline for her bedroom when she invited him home after their date, and once it'd happened she also hadn't expected an interior design critique. "What about what you're there for yourself, all the things you could do?"
Malik shrugs. "I had a single goal," he admits without looking over, giving the Black Magician Girl on Anzu's wall a rather cynical smirk. "A lot of things got lost."
Anzu smiles, stands up, joins him on his stroll. "Then there's your problem," she points out cheekily: explicit acknowledgment of what he'd been up to back then is forbidden, a definite slip. They'd agreed as much without so many words when first he'd asked her out - I liked your spirit, he'd said, and left it at that. She tried to feel flattered and not violated. It worked most of the time. "You should go back sometime, see what you can find. You might be surprised."
Chuckling, Malik glances over. "Come see your show, you mean?" he asks. "Who's self-centered now?"
"What's wrong with that?" Anzu stretches, standing on tiptoe. "So I've got a goal and I want my friends to be happy for me. If you had a dream and saw it fulfilled, I'd be happy for you, or Jounouchi, or Yuugi-"
"Or the Pharaoh," Malik interrupts, and knows as soon as he's said it he's gone too far by the shadow on Anzu's face, the sudden tension in her shoulders. He's spent enough time first occupying, then observing, that body to know a dancer should never let herself get that tense.
He grits his teeth as she looks down, fiddles with a bracelet on her wrist. "Or the Pharaoh," she acknowledges softly. "He did what he had to do."
Malik snorts: every now and then she sounds like his sister and it's off-putting every time. He's not competing with that damn Pharaoh again, he reminds himself. Things are different now. "Eyes on your goal," he reminds her. "Makes everything simpler."
She smiles, looks up, enthusiasm returning; Malik feels suddenly childish again, but that's all right, that's the beauty of this - whatever he and Anzu have now, even with a king's shadow still stretched over them. "Eyes around you, too," she insists, and goes back up on tiptoe to plant a kiss on his cheek. "Makes everything prettier."
She'd shown the world to her last Egyptian, too...
But then Malik's kissing her, and she's kissing him back, and somehow for both of them the past can stay the past. There's too much yet to come for either to spend much time in reverse.