Title: When Aki Stopped Hating Licorice
Author: Nina/TechnicolorNina
Fandom: Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds
Pairing/Characters: Martha, Yuusei, Aki, other miscellaneous one-liner characters, some faithshipping of the cheesiest kind.
Word Count: 2 957
Spoilers: A/U beginning halfway through episode 44.
Story Rating: PG-13 because it is a law of nature that Yuusei and Aki cannot be together without Yuusei making all kinds of innuendos completely unintentionally.
Story Summary: If Martha had sent Yuusei to nap instead of shuffling everyone into the dining room for plot-talk in Episode 45. Now with more licorice!
Notes: None. For once. No, wait, I lied. HOW DO I KEEP ENDING UP AGREEING TO WRITE THIS PAIRING WHEN I DON'T EVEN LIKE IT. THAT IS A NOTE.
Warnings: . . . um . . . does faithshipping take a warning?
Feedback: There may be something out there that's better than a review containing concrit, but if there is, I haven't found it yet. So if you have two minutes and you wouldn't mind? Please? Arigatou. (And concrit is cool. Flames are not.)
Special Thanks/Dedications: This story is for emeralddarkness. Thankya dear ^_~
"You got ten stitches thirteen hours ago. I said you'll rest until dinner."
"Martha – " Yuusei stopped with a wince as his ear was pulled. Aki had to hide a smile.
"You expect to go out and fight without stopping to sit down for ten minutes and eat?" the matronly woman retorted. "You're going to be the death of me yet, Yuusei. Sleep."
"I'd like some water."
"Water then bed. You two can go with Naru and Hikaru for now to get cleaned up," said the woman Aki assumed must be Yuusei's guardian. He'd barely said a word but her name since they'd landed here, and while there was a superficial resemblance between them – mostly the dark skin and hair and the no-nonsense attitude – Aki had the feeling they weren't actually related. After a year and a half with Divine, she knew the difference between a parent and a parental figure very well. The twins scampered off with a pair of the children playing in the dooryard. There was a snort, and then Jack stalked away around the far side of the house. Martha shook her head and turned around to go back into the house. Aki turned to ask Yuusei for directions and found him gone. He's so quiet all the time -
A splash from the other side of the house caught her attention, and she followed the sound cautiously, fingering her deck in her pocket. The house might appear to be a safe haven, a little piece of simple heaven still hidden in one of Satellite's back corners, but Aki knew perfectly well what it really was – a target in the middle of Dark Signer territory.
The sight that greeted her was anything but frightening – unless one of the Dark Signers was the twin she didn't know Yuusei had, Aki doubted she had anything to worry about. Yuusei dropped his cupped hand from his mouth and splashed his face out of the well-bucket, then threw the remainder of the water on the small garden by the side door. He turned to face her, and she wondered – not for the first time – how anyone not so very much older than her could possibly be so completely expressionless all the time – could look exactly the same after winning the title of King as he did after discovering his father had been indirectly in charge of the destruction of half of old Domino City. Even now there was only the very barest change in his eyes to indicate he knew she was there at all. She felt the inexplicable urge to drop her gaze to her feet and resisted it.
"I wasn't sure where to go."
He nodded at a door behind him. "The kitchen is through there."
Aki hesitated. One of the things that had been drilled into her from the time she was a very small child was just how very rude it was to enter a house through any door but the front without being invited or accompanied, at least until one knew the owners very, very well. Yuusei turned away from her – and even now, even now in his childhood home his face never wavered, and he might still have been winning the Fortune Cup or facing her in that loathsome hospital room or sitting in the helicopter instead of being surrounded by his adopted family for a night – and headed for the door. Aki followed him. She was not afraid of the Dark Signers – even knowing what they could do, she somehow couldn't be afraid – but it still seemed dangerous, not to mention foolish, to remain outside alone.
Yuusei paused just inside the door. Aki stopped just in time to keep from running into his back. He glanced at the counter, the kitchen door, back to a small tin canister sitting on the corner nearest the positively ancient refrigerator, and then, keeping an eye on the door, he reached for it and popped off the top. The unmistakable smell of licorice drifted out. Aki wrinkled her nose. Yuusei reached in and took out a small handful of licorice pieces before carefully putting the canister back where it had been and turning it so the word "tea" on the side faced once again toward the stove. He turned around and held out his hand. Aki shook her head.
"No. Thank you," she added. It had been so long since she'd had a reason to politely decline anything, she'd almost forgotten how. The thought was somehow distressing.
"I haven't seen him since he came back just after Yuusei left. He wanted to know if I had anything he could take back to his – of course I did, you think I want him to starve to keep food in their bellies? It isn't their fault he can't keep his hands out of Security's – Yuusei! That boy!"
Aki turned to him – or where he had been – and found him gone again. She hadn't even heard the outside door. Then his guardian was in the kitchen and shaking her head over the canister full of licorice bits.
"I don't know what I'm going to do with that boy," Martha said, her tone that of a parent with a child incapable of not getting into trouble. She made for the outside door and stuck her head out. Aki wanted badly to tell her to get it back inside before an Earthbound God came by and snipped it off. "At least he's not up the trellis this time."
Aki tried to imagine Yuusei climbing a trellis and couldn't do it. It was like trying to imagine Divine without his eternal soothing smile – although between the two, she had an easier time visualizing Yuusei than Divine. Yuusei at least might have a reason to climb a trellis or shimmy up a drainage pipe. Up. Yes. Thirty seconds found her standing in the unfamiliar hallway of a house that wasn't hers. She set off toward the front of the house, looking for a staircase. It didn't take long to find one.
The house was three stories. Aki wondered if, before the Zero Reverse Jack's secretary had spoken of, this house had stood in a part of the city as wealthy as the one where her parents lived now. If it was anything like the house of her own childhood, she could spend hours trying to find Yuusei and never succeeding. Certainly the second floor seemed abandoned, the doors bare of even a wayward jacket and all closed –
Except the one at the end on the right, which was standing halfway open. Aki started cautiously down the hallway, hand in her pocket, half-expecting someone in black, billowing skirts to jump out at her any minute with a god card in their hand. Ten minutes in Satellite, and already she was reacting like a soldier on a battlefield – and wasn't she, really? Weren't they all?
Yuusei lay on the bottom bunk with one hand beneath the pillow, back turned to the room, his breathing already deep and even. He might have been there five hours instead of five minutes.
All right, where's his on/off switch?
Aki slipped into the room as quietly as possible; she knew perfectly well there was no need for sleep after stitches – she'd gotten six of them herself as a small child after a run down the hall that ended in a nasty tumble down the stairs – but she was also perfectly capable of reading the pallor under Yuusei's skin and the dark circles beneath his eyes. Those circles did not speak of someone who'd slept in the last few days. She knew the look well enough from her father's face. And so instead of addressing him, she simply slipped off her shoes, trying to be as quiet as possible, and crossed in bare feet to the bookshelf on the other side of the room that must once have been his.
The books on the shelf were mostly paperback, quite a few of them with library tags still on their spines, and all had one thing in common: they were ridiculously old. Some of them had been carefully mended with glue and tape. It was easy to see which of them belonged to only Yuusei – most of the books on the shelf were beaten, dog-eared, stained, tattered – but on the bottom shelf were a series of books with mostly-straight spines, evenly-worn and unfolded covers, their few rips and age-tears neatly mended. Aki got on her knees to read the spines and discovered a mix of science and science fiction. No surprises there. His former roommate seemed to have favoured fantasy more in the elves-and-wizards line. Aki wondered how well that had gone over. She slid a book off the end of the shelf. It was in English, and so tattered she was afraid to even open it for fear it might fall apart in her hands. She opened the cover carefully. It looked, from the first page - There once was a boy named Milo - like some kind of fairy tale.
Aki turned around, meaning to sit on the floor facing the room to read. The book fell out of her hand, and she let out a frightened squeak. The sight of a Dark Signer wouldn't have done it, she didn't think, but the last thing she'd expected was Yuusei's eyes moving from her back to her face. She'd been being so quiet she was sure she would have heard anything down to the slightest pin-drop – and she hadn't heard a thing. He's so quiet . . . even in the way he moves . . .
" . . . I didn't mean to wake you."
"I heard the door."
Aki's eyes were drawn back to it. The hinges were well-oiled, and as far as she knew, it hadn't made a sound. Yuusei sat up.
" . . . I thought you were supposed to rest."
"Mm." He swung his legs off the bed. Aki stared at him. He looked different, without his jacket and in bare feet. She could just see the edge of a bandage peeking out from beneath his shirt and wondered just how badly those stitches had been needed, anyway.
"I can go if I'm bothering you."
"You're not." He crossed to the window and looked out. Aki followed him.
"I've never seen a sunset that red." In spite of the fog that had so recently covered Satellite, the sky looked like it had been dipped in blood. Yuusei pushed the window open.
"Air pollution. You die from black lung by the time you're forty, but before then you get to see some really spectacular sunsets." He sat on the windowsill and swung his legs out.
"You're insane!"
"Mm." He looked back over his shoulder. "Do you trust me?"
"That depends on what you're doing."
"I didn't ask you that."
Aki hesitated. Divine would murder her for this a thousand times and then – except he wouldn't. Divine would never do anything, at all, ever again. She closed her eyes. " . . . I suppose."
This time the age of the house was on her side; she heard the creak of the wood as he shifted off the sill. She opened her eyes. Yuusei was holding a hand out to her from somewhere off to the left of the window. She hesitated. Two stories was a long way to fall when the ground beneath was so hard. Then she reached for his hand.
There was one sickening moment when she didn't think she was going to clear the gap between the window and the roof to her left. Then Yuusei's other hand was under her arm and pulling her up to sit on the roof's edge.
"There's a better view out here."
Aki watched in disbelief as Yuusei simply stood up and walked across the roof before hitching himself up onto the next level. She stood – slowly, looking over the edge at the ground so far below – and followed him. Yuusei leaned over to help her up.
"Aren't you supposed to be resting?"
"You wanted to see the sunset."
"You'll get in trouble."
"I won't. Close your eyes and lie back."
Aki stared at him. She'd heard Yuusei say bizarre things before – and if not necessarily bizarre, then at least out-of-place – but this beat even his comment out of nowhere about some bridge that was apparently supposed to be built out of Satellite.
"Why?"
"I want to show you something."
" . . . I'd be looking straight up. That's just more sky."
"I know that."
"Then why – "
"Because I can't show you if you're sitting up."
Aki finally closed her eyes, feeling behind her to make sure she didn't tumble off some part of the roof she'd somehow missed. At last she lay on her back, feeling a warm breeze that seemed somehow too friendly for a place like this – a place not just forsaken but full of a ghastly dead silence.
"Open your eyes and look to the right."
Aki did, wondering what she was going to see and half-expecting that to her left Yuusei had quietly died, his throat cut, a Dark Signer sitting in his place.
All thoughts of Dark Signers and battles were promptly abandoned, replaced with a quiet gasp and a kind of wonder she hadn't felt since – when? she couldn't even say. The sky above the house was slowly going dark, brilliant orange smeared with bright red on one side and deep purple on the other, and streaking across it – across an undarkened part of the sky, something Aki was sure had to be impossible – was a flash of bright white. She turned her head in Yuusei's direction, eyes wide.
"Was that a – "
"You shouldn't sit up because you have to look straight up for them at this hour. You'll get dizzy," he said, as though shooting stars at sunset were the most normal thing ever. "There aren't any stars in the city."
Aki had no idea how long she was silent, simply staring, wide-eyed, up into the sky; this, then, was the thing that had given Yuusei his Fortune Cup nickname. "No."
"There aren't many places to see them in Satellite, either." Yuusei took a piece of licorice out of his pocket and made short work of it. "And this is the only one I know of where you can see them before the sun's gone."
"It's beautiful," she whispered, and it was. In spite of the too-big silence all around them and the threat they would have to face come morning, only a blind man could have ignored the trail the sun spilled across the sea and then across trees and buildings to light up their faces, the trail that faded into the distance beneath constellations Aki had never seen outside books, dying in a velvety purple-blue the city lights forever kept at bay.
"It's the best view in Satellite."
"You've seen them all?"
"A lot of them."
They sat in silence until the western edge of the sky was dark and the crazed, almost otherworldly shades of red and orange had faded down to pink and gold. Aki simply thought – thought of the conversation she'd shared with her parents, the first in more than two years, before coming to Satellite; thought of Yuusei, standing across from her unafraid when he knew what she could do; and she thought of Divine – of Divine perhaps longest of all. Of how he had used her, how she had been nothing but one tool in a stockpile – of how in spite of all he had been kind, had not been afraid of her when he saw what she could do, so unlike anyone else she'd ever –
A hand landed on her shoulder. "Look left. It's Mars."
Aki turned her head. " . . . which one?"
"The red one that isn't flickering."
Aki did not see any red stars, although she did spot a steady one with a slight pinkish glow. "I didn't know you could see planets."
"They're closer than the stars."
"I know." She sat up. "I've taken science."
Yuusei stared off into the distance at the last orange-golden glow of the sun over the water. "Martha's going to be calling us soon."
"You're going to get in trouble for taking that licorice."
The barest edge of a smile caught Yuusei's mouth and then flickered away. "I won't." He pulled himself up to one knee and glanced in Aki's direction. "Was it worth it?"
" . . . ?"
"Being here. In Satellite. To see the stars . . . "
"I don't regret coming, if that's what you want to know."
"Mm." Yuusei turned to look at her more fully.
" . . . I think I understand now why you're willing to fight for this place." Aki put her hand on his arm. "I'm glad you have something to believe in this way."
What happened next could hardly be called perfect – Yuusei's lips were chapped and dry and when Aki gasped against them - He did what? - they tasted heavily of black licorice, the so-called "candy" Aki hated more than any other and the sweetest thing she had ever tasted.
Yuusei pulled away first, the last few streaks of sunset painting his face a deceptive red and masking his eyes in shadow. Aki looked away.
"We should get inside. Martha's going to want to talk to us." He slid off the edge of the roof and held out his hand to help her down. Aki took it and followed him. Yuusei paused and pointed up.
"Make a wish."
Aki looked up at the streak of white.
And did.