Disclaimer: I don't own Yu-Gi-Oh!
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It had been several days since Rebecca and Yugi had dueled, and she had been staying in Domino since, with a friend of her grandfather's. He had told her that he would be taking her to the airport that day and in the meantime that she should check out the new game shop that had just opened up down the road from his apartment.
That was how she ended up in front of a flashy new game shop with a mob of at least one hundred people crowded around a large television that seemed to be broadcasting a game that was being played inside.
She didn't recognize that first competitor, but assumed that he must be Duke Devlin, as she had read an article in the newspaper a couple of days ago about a teenage that had just created a new game.
But his opponent was very familiar to her.
Yugi…
"What are you doing here, kid? You're too young to be here. Either that, or you're just obscenely short."
There was nothing Rebecca hated more than being called short.
In truth, she never really minded it that much, as she was usually surrounded by college students that were twice her height. The only thing that was bad about being called short was that being young was usually associated with being it.
And she hated being considered a little kid.
So when this high school girl with stopped her, and told her that she was too young to be there, Rebecca was a little more than annoyed.
"Hey, who are you calling a little kid?! I'm in college!"
The girl shrunk back, "I—uh—I—uh…" She then rushed off in the opposite direction of Rebecca.
She hadn't realized that her outburst had been loud enough to alert the whole crowd of her being a college student. Not that that mattered much, as she felt that it was good that they knew. They wouldn't treat her like a little kid.
This did, however cause a wave of whispers to pass throughout the crowd.
"She's a college student?" and "I didn't think she was that smart," were among the most common things said.
Rebecca's eye twitched, as she tried to get herself to calm down, or at least stop herself from screaming obscenities at the crowd.
Trying, and not succeeding at pushing someone nearly three times her size out of the way, her emotions regained their normal control.
"Move!"
Shoving, and elbowing her way through a crowd of teenage girls, she was nearly catapulted to the front of the mob. There were so many of them there that she could hardly see any actual duelists.
She could still hear the voice that she assumed belonged to Duke Devlin loud and clear, and she assumed that half the people gathered in front of the Black Crown Game Shop could also hear it, as it was obscenely loud.
But she hadn't walked three and a half blocks out of her way to see Duke Devlin and his insane fan girls, which she knew, almost by instinct, that all the girls that had stopped by the game shop had come to ogle Devlin, and didn't even care that Yugi was competing against him to win the freedom of his friend, and how if he lost, then he'd never be able to play Duel Monsters again!
Rebecca nearly shuddered at the thought.
In truth, she was slightly confused as to why she had even bothered showing up. Just a couple of days ago, she had accused Yugi and his grandfather of being liars and stealing her grandfather's prized card, the Blue Eyes White Dragon.
But that didn't matter anymore, well…not since she had received the Ties of Friendship card from him.
"Hey! Why can't we hear Yugi's voice?" she asked the people next to her through gritted teeth.
"Why would we want too?" asked a snobby teenaged girl.
"Duke's much cuter than Yugi!" she added, as though it was the absoulute truth.
Rebecca twitched at this remark. The speaker appeared to be a high school girl, and unbeknownst to her, she was in the same class as Duke.
"And he's such a better duelist!" The girl squealed happily to her friend, who seemed to agree with her.
Rebecca twitched yet again as the girl began to list all the things that Duke had could do and Yugi couldn't.
"Yugi is a way better duelist than Duke!"
It took her about three seconds to realize that it was her that had yelled that statement out, and not one of the countless fan girls crowded around the screen.
"Take that back!" demanded a few of the girls to her left, which was soon echoed by the girls to her right.
"No!" she replied angrily.
Rebecca frowned. Why had a single statement been so offensive to them, or why she had been the one to say it?
She was fairly convinced that she didn't like Yugi that way, but after all, she didn't know much about love to begin with. She had always ignored boys, and had always been ignored by them.
"Yugi has no talent!" cried one rash fan girl.
"But didn't he win the Duelist Kingdom tournament a few weeks ago?"
"Yeah, if you believe that-"
An incomparable sea of insults directed at Yugi swirled all around Rebecca. It was as though she couldn't escape any of them, even if she walked away from there.
And the weirdest thing about it was that every single time that someone said something insulting towards Yugi, Rebecca felt as though they had just insulted her. It was the weirdest feeling that she had ever experienced.
"Stop it!" she yelled, "He didn't cheat!"
Several of the people around her stopped talking long enough to look down at her. One of the girls to her left giggled.
"How do you know?" she asked.
"I've dueled him before," Rebecca countered.
This caused the many of the people to laugh.
"Right; you- you're what, ten, twelve? I don't expect you to understand this game, let alone that he cheated," the girl said smugly.
"He didn't cheat!"
"Yeah he did," many of the people around her stated.
Rebecca sighed. Proving that Yugi didn't cheat to these Duke fan girls was impossible. They were all convinced that everything that Duke said was the truth, and anything else was a lie.
She was nothing but a hopeless Yugi fangirl to them, and they were going to treat her as such.
But she'd show them. She knew that Yugi must like her at least a little bit, as he had given her the card that he had won from Duelist Kingdom. She had a connection with Yugi that all of the Duke fangirls would envy if they liked the right duelist.
It seemed as though the end of the match was approaching, as the cries of, "No, you can still win this!" and "Don't let him win!" could be heard throughout the entire mob of nutty fangirls in front of the store.
"Yeah Yugi!" Rebecca yelled triumphantly.
"Didn't we tell you to leave?" asked another girl.
"No, I don't believe you did," Rebecca said smugly, the tides having turned in her favor, "what was that that you were saying about Yugi having no talent?"
This left the girls speechless; none of them were able to come up with a remark that could counter what Rebecca had said to them.
She was about to go into the shop when the game ended, when she realized that she was supposed to be taking a plane back to the United States that very same day, and that she was very far from the airport.
"Fangirl!" yelled one of the girls on the outskirts of the crowd, as Rebecca sped away from them.
Duke would probably never think of them as anything more than obsessive fangirls, but she knew that Yugi would always think of her as a friend. And if she was right, he might be willing to think of her as something even more than a friend.
After all, she had changed her opinion about him, so why couldn't he change his opinion about her?