Title: Captivity
Fandom: Yu-Gi-Oh! (BakuraxHonda)
Author: Scylla the Healer
Rating: PG-13 for adult material
Warning: Slash. Mildly unhappy fiction
Summary: Alone in his college library for a few hours, Ryou Bakura considers where his relationship has taken him. This is my answer to seeing someone refer to Bakura and Honda as 'the perfect couple, because Honda can protect Ryou.' The boys are probably into their third year of college by now – yes, I play with mature themes because I think 'deep' emotional issues are a little out of character for our dear fourteen to sixteen-year-old boys. Don't you?
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Bakura rested his chin on his arms; cool from the false wood laminate pressed against his wrists. He tilted his head a little, rolling from chin to cheek, and looked out the tall window to his left. There was a tangled haze of tree branches beyond the window, spindly and faraway like spiderwebs, and all the depressed gray of trees in late winter. But winter was over, and had been over for some time, so said the calendar, with spring already warming the air.
Somehow, it still felt like winter, and Bakura wondered idly, pale eyes still scanning the obscured landscape of sidewalk and green grass and buildings beyond, if perhaps it was because of the captivity. The weather wasn't keeping him a prisoner, so much as was the façade of a young college student with so much ahead. Or perhaps the mask of the role he played from day to day didn't touch the feeling that kept him watching wistfully out of the glass, strands of silver-spun hair spilling over his elbow. After all, he did enjoy his classes, and the atmosphere toward him hadn't changed when he discovered that his sexuality for the duality that it was and found himself attracted to someone whose strength was mirrored in his breadth of shoulder and stubborn chin. That he was thinking about Honda now and so suddenly was irritating, and Bakura's eyes narrowed at his own white-faced reflection, dim in the window.
He felt loose inside and strangely unfettered to his own social rules as a young and pretty woman two tables away from him in the empty corner of the library smiled at him. She pulled her hair back from her face as he looked up and caught her smiling, and smiled back. He was tempted to talk to her, and then from there he was tempted to wrap his arms around her and kiss her. For no particular reason than she was there and he felt loose inside, and suddenly the idea of kissing a strange person seemed like a brilliant idea. He waited for his rational brain to quash the impractical, immoral idea, and was surprised when it didn't. But she had looked away by now and kissing her would have won him nothing. And so he turned back to what he was doing, which wasn't more than studying the wilted leaves of the tropical plant potted and mastering the window until the window reached the ceiling and the plant couldn't reach it anymore. But there were creepers and ferns and tropical plants everywhere in this library…directly in front of him was a long trailing ivy whose pot was actually a story up on the balcony overhead, and yet it hung long enough to reach him here.
If the plants had broad shoulders and stubborn chins, they could very well have reminded him of Honda. But they didn't, Bakura was only left with the symbolism of creepers and large plants smothering his view of the world outside his window and suffered the vague disquiet of someone who perceives an unclear warning and doesn't understand its meaning.
He felt guilty for thinking badly of Honda, who obviously cared for him. He felt guilty for any number of things. He couldn't tell Honda what the creepers reminded him of, and couldn't tell him that he was feeling loose enough to kiss a woman for no reason. He could never reveal just how much he dreaded the thought of the broad shoulders filling the far-off doorway in another fifteen minutes, there with a good-natured smile to pick him up and walk him to his dorm. How much he dreaded the possibility that Honda would want to stay. Bakura's lips drew down in a frown of displeasure, resulting in a mirrored frown from his strange would-have-been lover two tables and a hundred thousand miles of dreams away. The sex was always good, and it always had been – but Honda seemed more about sex than about anything else, and while that was what attracted Bakura in the first place (and, he suspected, what drew Honda to him…) he could never seem to put away the secret longing that perhaps there would be an evening for just conversation and a casual movie and then solitude. He had forgotten what it meant to walk alone in the evening, and even now, just the few minutes left to himself with no need to speak were precious. Honda and his particular circle of friends were loud and cheerful and harmless, but they were mostly loud, and Bakura felt ill-at-ease in their presence. They spoke of things that were of no consequence to him, but to prevent a confrontation with his own lover, Bakura stayed up well into the night hours in their company as they sipped coffees in Honda's apartment and tossed humor back and forth like an uproariously funny beach ball. He felt the noisy rip of Velcro if he dared pull away from Honda's side – saw the side glances, and knew that he would be interrogated later. He had taken to sleeping in the crook of Honda's arm – or trying to – but sleeping was of no use with the demanding volume of Ryuuji's voice, or Jonouchi's nasal laughter. Atemu and Yugi seemed to understand his plight, and they sympathized silently with small fleeting smiles that he cherished. It made the growing discomfort easier to withstand.
Deep down, Bakura knew, Honda cared for him. Loved him, perhaps, in his broad-shouldered way. But also, he recognized the slow languishing in Ryuuji's voice when he spoke to Honda – heard the shrill desperate rise in his laughter, and saw the long white hands that flickered close and then drew away in secret shame. Ryuuji wanted Honda, and Bakura could not find fault with him for this. He knew that if he refused Honda thereafter, that perhaps Ryuuji would fit better into the crook of Honda's arm than he did, and that perhaps his laughter would no longer be so shrill, but mellifluous and deep with sated content. As Bakura's used to be.
He knew that if he chose to refuse, Honda would be broken. This was hardly an opinion of his ego, as they had come perilously close to releasing one another twice before, and each time Honda had been broken. But Bakura had been broken then as well, and he wondered now if perhaps the pair of them was as intertwined as they once were. His heart quickened more with anxiety now than anticipation upon seeing a familiar set of slant brown eyes loom from the crowd. He imagined, sometimes, that when he was beside Honda on the sidewalk, that he was alone instead. That the dark-haired boy loving him pointedly with fingertips just brushing against his…was a stranger. Bakura found it working more and more often now, with more and more disturbing believability. He wondered what Honda would say, if he were to approach the other one day and ask.
He did not feel betrayed, although Bakura admitted with a little sadness that he felt cheated. After all, he was the kind of boy who 'needed protection,' wasn't he? Reassurance and constant unchanging love and firm shoulders to lean against and a partner who was far taller and stronger and more worldly than he was. But in truth, shadows were often shorter, and always weaker and less worldly than those who trod over their feet in the closing day. And what was Bakura then? A shadow? With such big and booming strength, Bakura imagined that he was shrinking and growing thinner, and that one day, one day…perhaps he would not be here at all. He would only be a captive shadow, silently transparent, to follow on Honda's heels until the night, when he would be stretched out long at Honda's feet.
His fifteen minutes were up and Honda stood waiting for him in the doorway.
~Owari~