Author's note (skip if you just want to get on with it):

For the character named Anzu/Tea (who I feel as though would be more interesting as a lesbian) there are some grossly ignorant misconceptions about what it means for her to want to become a dancer when she grows up in the original series that I'd like to explore/correct in my writings (I've known several ballet dancers and let me tell you all of that training that they go through makes them both very strong and fast, there is no way that a bad guy could possibly hope to overpower a dancer without coming away from the experience with a few broken bones).

In the show she always seems to be the one who the bad guy's capture and she is always painted as either the damsel or the extra character whose only purpose is to be the love interest (eye candy) for the main boy character, rarely did she ever come in to save the day, or actually play the freaking game, or play a major role in more than a few episodes (and some of those outfits she wears… seriously? When you know that there is going to be an epic showdown of some sort you don't wear a mini skirt and a skimpy crop-top). This is obviously unfair in my opinion, even as a small child I could see this and thus was one of the two reasons why I had stopped watching the show, so now years later I'm going to vent my past frustrations through the glory that is fanfiction and remake this character into someone that my child self would have found far more interesting.

Also there needs to be a fan fiction story written with at least a few somewhat true fact about the realities of becoming a ballet dancer. I've checked and the number of good stories about her as a lesbian is very few, and ones with some true facts about dancing are just about slim to none.

On with the story! Hope somebody out there likes this.

XXX

Princess

At an early age Tea learned that being a dancer meant that she would have to learn more about art than just how to spin on her tippy toes, being a serious dancer and thus a part of the art community she had to learn about culture, anatomy, history, music, art theory, first aid, theater, certain types of medicine, and of course traditional artwork itself. A dancer was a student of the mind just as much as they were of the body, and in order to become successful at dancing one must give their hearts over to it, thus making the world of art their new home, a citizenship maintained by passion and more than one bloodied ballet slipper.

The dance studio she studied in was a company supported by a University based in Tokyo, and being apart of the art department the studio often had traditional art students sketching or taking photographs of the dancers, bright musicians and singers bringing live sound in tune to the dancer's steps, the theater section of the department studied their dancing bodies and spoke of great choreographers and would kindly set up the grand auditorium for shows and constantly auditioned for actors who could also dance for bigger plays with a Broadway flair, and occasionally they would get people from medical schools coming in to either teach seminars to the budding dancers on how to take proper care of oneself and first aid, or for a class to show future doctors how so much constant physical training shaped the body until it was all lean muscle and sinew.

The closer Tea got to her goal of graduating high school the more she found her life in the art world spilling over into her normal, comparatively boring life as just another high school girl (save those occasions where the world must be saved by her best friends playing children's card games. That was surprisingly pretty hardcore), and seeing as how she was going to someday soon be completely immersed in said art world, Tea did not mind going to see plays, concerts, or art galleries at all, in fact she thrived for getting all dressed up to the nines and having in depth conversations with like-minded individuals.

She stood in front of a painting at one of these art galleries, all decked out in dress pants (that hugged her in all the right places), a stylish pink and red vest-shirt (with a matching tie), and comfortable flats (because long-term wear of high heels caused the ankles to weaken and put unnecessary strain on the legs leading to injuries during dancing that could have been avoided). All in all she looked a little like a dapper cowgirl (especially since she had decided to wear the fedora) and she was loving being able to wear things that people normally would have given her grief over in the boring schoolgirl life.

Standing out from the crowd… was never a good idea in an environment filled with overly dramatic adolescents, but dressing differently was not an issue when she was surrounded by artists (for the most part, there were exceptions) or if she was somewhere not Domino (again for the most part). There was a large percentage of people in Domino who either knew her or had heard of her and they considered it perfectly fine to come up and essentially tell her to stop this dressing differently/ dancing/ having all guy platonic friends nonsense and get serious about making a family (because apparently dressing well and eating lunch with her friends meant that she was shamefully flaunting her radical dreams of perusing a dancing career), it was for the most part (blessedly) rude to do so in New York and complete strangers didn't give a damn (she could not wait to move far, far away from Domino sometimes).

Pumpkin carriages, mice morphing into horses, a strapping looking man in a white royal suit holding a blonde woman with an impossibly large chest nearly falling out of her raggedy dress, and a horrendously tiny waist, held within his arms. She maintained a perfect submissive posture, head thrown back, arm dramatically held over her head, breasts jutting perkily upwards as if trying to reach the sky, and to top it all off she had one very skinny looking leg raised up so that the viewer could admire the glass slipper fitted over the woman's impossibly tiny foot.

The painting was horribly clichéd in Tea's opinion, but the piece as a whole was saved by the fancy lettering at the bottom of the canvas; Every girl's dream? Or a childhood nightmare?

The girl approved of the message the work was trying to convey.

"Nightmare." She stated with absolute certainty.

The boy next to her startled at the unexpected (according to him), blunt statement. Yugi had offered (leaped at the opportunity) to go with her to the gallery when he asked why she had been so busy lately and she had informed him that the art department was hosting all of these shows in the Domino area. She thought that he felt guilty that he had automatically assumed that something was wrong when in reality she had just been living her life, and that thought probably made him realize that he hadn't been by to watch her dance or had gone to one of her shows in a very long time. Or at least she hoped that it was because he had wanted to hang out with her as a friend. Gods she hoped that he had gotten over his half crush half lust for her (she knew what he was thinking whenever he would blush bright red and get this really creepy look on his face), because she definitely did not feel the same way and the thought of him only wanting to come to the gallery with her because he wanted to impress her in the hopes that he could turn this into a date (or something else) from her was just… so bleakly depressing that she just wanted to curl up in a corner and cry.

"Why would you say that it's a nightmare?" Yugi asked, looking at her with those wide eyes of his (she guiltily sometimes mentally attributed them to bambi eyes, or sad-small-furry-animal-eyes, but she never voiced this, her friend had enough self-esteem issues). "I thought that all girls wanted to be princesses and find their prince?"

Tea grimaced, thinking of how her aunt kept commenting on how well she'd be able to snag a husband by being something as exotic as a dancer, of how people just assumed that she'd throw away eleven plus years of training the instant something male and wealthy got down on one knee, of how she could not dress how she wanted to, speak as she wished to, live as she needed to because people thought of her as a princess, a dancing princess just waiting to be snatched up and caged in the form of a housewife. She thought of how those creepy boys looked at the way she would dress and act differently from the other girls and crave to have her, for the challenge and the bragging rights, how they only backed off when she looked boring, average (the Domino High school uniform was so hideous in her opinion that anybody would be turned off), and how she surrounded herself with all male friends, therefore with these three things combined (in their minds) she was obviously taken by one of them but they could never tell just which one and they were not going to risk stepping onto what they perceived was some other guy's territory (especially since she looked so plain and non-challenging in that ugly school uniform).

She thought with a clenching heart, of how she was almost completely ostracized by the other girls at her school. She was different, different was bad according to them, different spelled competition, being different meant that she could not be as easily controlled by the popular few, and she was different, very different, but she was not competition. Her heart and body swung more towards the affections from another of the same gender and persuasion as she. No, she was not competition.

But she was different and her nature would surely spark biting hypocritical comments of how she should be setting her sights on finding a husband… not a wife.

Because she was a princess according to them, a princess that had to be hated and lusted after, that was they way they assumed how the world worked- how she worked.

"Not all girls dream of being princesses." Tea murmured looking at the fake woman in the painting with hard eyes (because really that thing may be female but it was definitely not a real self-respecting woman who bled and cried and fought and screamed and dreamed their way into womanhood just as every self-respecting woman she had ever met had done at some point or another).

"For some of us being labeled as someone so helpless that they don't even try to fight back…" She stopped herself, breathing deep, now was not the time to get passionately angry and worry her sensitive friend further. "…It's a living nightmare. Just… trust me on this."

She could feel him looking at her curiously, she didn't want to dwell on this too much so she plastered on a big fake grin when she turned to face him. She had gotten good at summoning up big fake grins over the years. "C'mon, lets snatch some cookies for Joey and Tristan from the snack table, say our respects to the artist, and go off to meet those two knuckleheads over at burger world."

He kept staring at her in concern, even as she filled his hands with three little stacks of napkin wrapped cookies and spoke with the artist and laughed at a few inside jokes that surely left her companion in a state of confusion.

It wasn't until they were walking through the early afternoon lit streets that someone spoke.

"Are you alright Tea?" Came the low baritone voice of Yami Yugi, this time making Tea startle.

"Yep." She smiled, it was still a little faked but she had calmed down some.

He raised a brow, showing that he did not believe her in the least. "You seemed troubled earlier." He observed lightly, only she knew that he was not seeing it as lightly and he was not going to let this matter drop. If something was hurting Yugi's friends then Yugi would be hurting too, it was what made the spirit so invested in making sure that all was well in Yugi's inner circle, so that meant that Tea could not wiggle completely out of this with just a smile and a wave.

The last time she had tried that, it had been after a particularly nasty interaction with a new girl from school who had cultivated an unhealthy infatuation with some boy and as it had turned out this same boy (who Tea still could not name or pick out of a line up to save her life) had developed a crush on Tea, thus resulting in the girl making violent threats to Tea.

Both the spirit and Yugi had known something was up but she refused to tell them at the risk of worrying them further for something that she was certain that they could do nothing about, she had the situation perfectly under control as far as she had been concerned, she had a voice recorder on her at all times and was accumulating quite a fair bit of evidence to go to the police with (like hell the school would do anything if she went to them).

But her two dear friends had not been convinced that all was well (it… had been difficult masking the fear she had been feeling because seriously this chick threatening her was practically homicidal crazy towns) so they had teamed up and became almost like her shadow.

Despite her best efforts to soothe any worries without giving away the reason why she had been so spooked they were still worried and soon enough the boy and spirit had gotten Tristan, Joey, and even Ryou involved.

For a full week she had one of them showing up at her house early in the morning to walk with her to school, someone to walk her to dance practice, back from dance practice, half dragging her to have a sleepover at one of their houses (In Joey's case it was his mother's residence over the weekend, the boy earning some points for bringing over someone as nice looking as Tea to play with Serenity).

Finally Tea broke down, tiredly explained the situation and showed them the taped collection of verbal threats and some written ones she had been receiving in the locker room, and girl's bathroom.

When asked why she hadn't gone to the school or authorities yet she dryly reminded them that unless there were a significant number of threats as proof of any harassment she'd just be turned away as just another hysterical schoolgirl looking to get attention. It was sad that she even had to deal with such stereotypes at the school and law enforcement levels, but that was just how things ran in Domino as far as she could see.

They had tried to assure her that her fears of being treated poorly for being a girl were not true so she told them about the time a few years ago when two girls in her dance studio had to live weeks in fear of the same admirer who had tried to stalk them, but despite the evidence given to the Domino police nothing had been done until someone with some pull at the university found out and made a big fuss and that was why she did not trust the cops (nobody brought up the idea of going to the school authorities because it was well known that Yugi used to get bullied on a daily basis and no teacher even tried to stand up for him).

The situation had (supposedly) solved itself the day after she had confessed about being threatened and Tea never had to turn in the notes or the tape full of those threats to anybody.

"You do remember what happened the last time you tried to keep something serious from your friends who could've helped you." As if reading her mind the boy walking beside her coolly pointed out this fact, his face and tone clearly indicating that there would be no backing out now that he knew something was up.

She sighed. "I still don't completely believe that her parents just suddenly decided to send her to an all girls school in the middle of the semester… but thanks… for whatever it was you did that made her leave me alone." She admitted because for all of her carefulness and precautions she had been terrified and now she didn't have to be anymore. "It's nothing serious this time, I guess the painting… hit a little too close to home… and it hit a nerve."

He stared at her for a long while as they walked, she was careful not to look at him mostly because the spirit's often-unblinking eyes wigged her out sometimes and she couldn't help but feel all sorts of exposed when he stared at her, made her want to confess to anything and everything just to get him to stop, she wondered where he had learned how to do that.

The spirit hummed in thought, he looked calm, as if he were about to discuss the weather. "If you never wanted to be a princess as a girl then what did you want to be?" He asked throwing Tea for a loop.

She had a difficult time understanding the spirit of the puzzle, he was her friend and someone she respected greatly but… he was just so… stoic; it was very difficult to gain a good read on what he was thinking half the time. Plus he was incredibly eccentric and so in love with games she swore he'd marry it if he could, Yugi was the same but his emotions at least were easier to read.

And he had the annoying knack for spouting out random yet eerily insightful things at the drop of a hat. It was very disconcerting when he aimed those things at her.

She thought on his question for a moment, her face softening, looking almost mournful.

"Firebird." She said. "I wanted to be the firebird."

The boy blinked head tilted to the side. "What's a… firebird if you don't mind me asking?" Tea could almost see Yugi imitating the same posture and saying the same thing.

Tea paused, how was the best way to explain this to a non-dancer? Someone who had never heard of the story or seen the ballet?

"…In the story the firebird… she is a creature that is free, she lives as she wants and she does as she pleases… no one dared tried to force her to marry a prince that she barely knows, or lock her up in a fancy palace. She was never the helpless, brain dead damsel because whatever the situation she was clever enough to defeat her enemies and get out of trouble. Instead of being another female stereotype she goes and befriends a prince and helps him save his kingdom and his lover from an army of evil demons. She is powerful and fearless, strong enough to fight off an entire army and brave enough to look her fears in the eye and not back down. In the story she is seen as an equal with her male counterpart, the prince, and a treasured protector to his family and kingdom."

Words tumbled out of Tea's mouth, wanting to give a satisfying answer and yet not wanting to start yammering on about the whole story and history behind the legend, they did not have time for that and she just wanted to get past this subject.

The girl blushed looking away, she felt embarrassed for admitting this much, even though these two boys were her best friends… That was just the issue, how was she to best convey to a boy how utterly frustrating it was to live in a culture where the female was always considered the weaker? The less important? The object?

"Sometimes… I just wondered what it would be like… living in a world where… gender didn't matter." She muttered her face feeling hot from suppressed frustration and anger. At the very least the issue was so old and familiar with her that she no longer felt the oncoming sting of tears at such unfairness, crying about it never did her any good, so the only way that she figured that she could do something about it was to forge her own version of a normal life. She planned to just take all of those stereotypes people threw at her on a daily basis and burn right through them with unladylike tactics and a real mean look until all that was left was herself, lit aflame and striding through life while a very large trail of the ashes of her enemies lay pitifully in her wake.

Just like the firebird. She didn't have to swoon and sigh about wanting to be a princess or crave to have some prince rescue her, she was her own hero, her own salvation, she was a powerful, unstoppable force, she knew this to be true and that is what made her different, what made her dangerous, made her able to look herself in the eye every time she stood in front of a mirror.

It was what made her free.

The spirit seemed to startle back a little and blinked rapidly for a moment at her muttered confession, a look that was equal parts stunned confusion and painful pity settled on his face.

"Oh look we're here!" Tea spoke with renewed excitement, cutting the spirit off just as he was about to open his mouth, no doubt to say something encouraging with something about the heart of the cards and friendship triumphing over all or something like that.

Tea turned away in order to properly roll her eyes, his concern was sweet and a little comforting but she was hungry and she didn't feel up to bearing her troubles to someone who could only partially understand the topic and could do nothing really to make things better, on an empty stomach.

Besides it was turning out to be a nice day so far, so why focus of the negatives?

"Tea-" The spirit tried but the girl cut him off with a smile and a shake of the head.

"I'm fine you guys, you don't have to worry about me, now lets get a move on, judging by the way Joey and Tristan have plastered themselves to the window they've been waiting for us and they haven't ordered anything yet."

The spirit turned towards the fast food restaurant across the street from them where their friends had indeed smooshed themselves against the large window and were looking at them with pitiful watering begging eyes.

"This topic is far from over." The spirit called after her in an amused huff, warning her that although their friend's antics had amused him enough into distraction the conversation would resume at a later, unexpected time.

"Yeah, I kinda figured that." Tea acknowledged with an accepting shrug. "But right now the whether is lovely and my stomach's growling, lets go and enjoy the day with friends yes?"

A blink of an eye and Yugi was standing there with a small smile. "Sound like a great way to spend the day." He said and with that the two of them made their way inside the restaurant where Joey and Tristan cheered at their presence and then happily helped themselves to the cookies instantly forgiving them for being ten minutes late.

Tea smiled to herself, sitting back and surveying the scene before her, trying to cherish the moment with her friends and the precious feeling of being seen as a fellow human being by the four most important people in her life.