Disclaimer: Yu-Gi-Oh! is property of a number of people who aren't me. This is a work of fanfictiona nd no copyright infringement is intended. If you paid for this... did you ever get ripped off.
A/N: So, another entry for Computerfreak101's contest, and let me tell you I am out on a very thin limb this season. This barely counts as Tendershipping, but it's there and that makes me feel unduly pleased with myself. This could be considered minorly AU as I can't find a place for it in the canon timeline. On the other hand, that says very little considering how long it's been since I actually watched the show and how few manga I have on hand at present. If there's a way this works... all the more power to me, I suppose. Or to whoever bothers to find a place, really. I'm so done. Apologies for any OOC behavior and/or mechanical errors. I didn't manage to get to my beta with this one
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Takahashi Saori was the name of the girl walking beside him now, babbling quietly and pushing her too-large glasses back up into place for the umpteenth time. Ryou wouldn't have known that if they hadn't spent the last class period of the day working together, and he couldn't quite recall just how she'd come to be walking with him now that was over, but it seemed well enough to go along with it. People had mostly fallen into the habit of leaving him to his own space, and he left a faint sting of loneliness with the others away; it felt sharper now that he knew better. So he didn't say anything as Saori kept pace beside him, talking about their assignment and school in general. Talking to her shoes more than to Ryou, and he didn't see how it was that her glasses hadn't fallen off already and sort of wishing that they just would; they kept sliding far enough down her nose that he could tell that she would be pretty without them. Easier to take seriously too.
"Ah, well, I guess this is me," Saori told her shoes in a way that suggested that she didn't think they'd been paying much more attention than Ryou had and wouldn't care to start now. "This is my way home."
"You're not going that way?" Ryou frowned down the alley she had indicated and then at her.
"Oh, well, yes," she said, flushed and fidgeting under his gaze, glasses slipping down her nose as she tucked a lock of jet black hair behind one ear. Concentrating unnecessarily on pushing them back up, she added, "It's the quickest way to my apartment from, well, from here. A short cut. I need to get home and get dinner started for my little sisters. They'll be getting home themselves before too long now."
It was on the tip of his tongue to ask why she'd been walking with him if it took her out of the way of her home and her duties, but of course he knew the answer. There was no mistaking the way she'd looked at him, any more than there was reason to make her unduly uncomfortable about it. Instead he shook his head and met her gaze with his own full of disapproval.
"What, alone? I don't mean to be presumptuous, but that simply won't do. It's not safe for a girl."
Saori blushed a red that recalled summer sunsets and opened her mouth to protest, but Ryou would have none of it. Without really thinking about what he was doing, he pointed himself resolutely down the alley and started forward. He'd made it to the mouth by the time Saori realized that, yes, he did intend to walk her home, and she scrambled at catch him, grabbing at his elbow and sputtering words that Ryou wouldn't be persuaded by even if intended to bother listening to them. Her small hand on him was almost desperately firm but he just dragged her with him as he stepped forward.
Right into a strong patch of light, and didn't squinting against it just ruin the image he was going for. If not, raising his arm against the jarring intensity of it picked up the slack.
Ryou was so taken aback by the strength of the ray of light that he didn't actually register that Saori was no longer by his side until he put his arm back down and found himself standing in a dim room-- his soul room. His heart made it two and a half beats before giving into the horror implied in the situation and taking futile refuge in his throat. At least that was Ryou's excuse for choking on, in effect, nothing for the full count of a minute before moving in something between a stagger and a run for the door with no plan other than getting through it, all but falling against it in his haste to turn the knob that really shouldn't be slippery with sweat that he shouldn't be sweating. Not here.
Throwing the door open, Ryou was shocked back a step by a painfully white light; he threw his arm up over his eyes for the second time in what felt like at least as many millennia, blinking against it to clear his vision of silent fireworks. When he finally lowered it, it took another three blinks before he registered what he was seeing and wished like nothing else that he'd left his arm where it had been; it was made of lead now, hanging at his side like so much dead weight as he stared wide-eyed, never mind the colorful blobs hopping happily across his field of vision.
He was back where he'd started, an approximate half-step into the alley that would take Saori home. Would have taken Saori home. The girl herself was strung up with what looked like fishing wire just beyond the entrance, no less than six feet off the ground, her battered and broken body stretched out wantonly for observers as though she'd been caught in some huge spider web. Some part of him wondered where she had lost her glasses, but Ryou couldn't drag his eyes away from her for long enough to follow the drops of blood that ran lazily down the lines that bound her up in indignity, never mind look for them.
Swallowing hard past a lump that couldn't be his heart, which seemed to have fluttered and fainted under the strain of what he was seeing, Ryou forced one step forward, raised one hand as if to offer assistance that wouldn't do Saori any more good than it would do a brick. A cold breeze blew, managing to ruffle her blood-matted bangs out of her sightless brown eyes. Sightless eyes that seemed to see him just the same, seemed to stare at his extended hand.
That was when Ryou realized that the hand in question was covered in blood.
Acid bile rose sharply and caught in his throat like a curse and he clenched his eyes tightly, willing the world as he had just seen it to go away. Or even for him to be taken far away from it. Really, he wasn't about to be choosey. He was, however, unspeakably shocked to open his eyes to find his wish had been granted.
No broken body, no blood.
No alley, for that matter.
"It really wasn't necessary for you to walk me home."
Ryou looked at his companion mildly through barely more than his peripheral vision. Well, not exactly his. In a manner of speaking, but if it had really been him, he'd have turned his head to look at Saori so fast that he'd been clutching his neck and howling at the shock of whiplash. He'd also probably have the poor girl screaming for help by now, too; whether his body was obeying him or not, his second impulse had been to grab her and ascertain that, no, he wasn't walking along beside a zombie. The aftershocks of these unresponsive instincts had just passed when Ryou blinked and found himself so suddenly in control that he almost didn't stop when Saori did, outside a run-down but tidied apartment complex.
"Not that I don't appreciate it, of course," Saori was saying to her shoes (there's no blood soaking through), hands (she has all her fingernails) moving nervously along the handle of her school satchel and glasses making another casual bid for freedom.
"So you've mentioned," Ryou found himself saying with a soft wryness, not sure where the words or the tone had come from. Saori hunched further into herself and offered him a tight shrug, but she smiled shyly up at him through her bangs (her hair is clean, her jaw doesn't look broken at all) before dropping her eyes quickly the ground between them. Ryou suddenly found himself without anything else to say, but she was just standing there (standing, and not being suspended by bloodied string) and so, "Well, I'll let you get to your sisters then. I need to be getting home myself."
She babbled out some sort of response, but Ryou didn't hear the words. As soon as he was pretty sure she had spit out all she was going to say he had turned to go; from the corner of his eye he saw her unattended glasses finally slip over the edge of her nose and fall through her fumbling fingers to the ground. It would have been the gentlemanly thing to do to pick them up for her. He didn't, just left her home for his as quickly as he could manage without actually looking like he was running away. Which he most certainly was.
The front door of his apartment was barely shut before Ryou was leaning back against it, school bag falling to the floor in a graceless faint, not that he was feeling far behind it. His breathing was coming in pants and sweat beaded cold from his head and down. There was no telling how long he stayed slumped there, certainly not of how long his left hand-- and no, the irony was not lost on him in the slightest-- had been stroking his chest in a slow, deliberate circle. Not that he needed it, not that he couldn't feel the ring hot against his skin.
"I understand," Ryou said between shaky breaths, speaking out loud because he could, forcing his eyes open and focused on the ceiling because he just had to. His left hand slipped under his shirt and the blunt nails raked his skin just short of brutally. "I-- really, I do. I understand."
A vibration not unlike a low laugh shook through him, and he rode it out as though it were any other shudder. But he meant it, he understood.
And as long as he understood, no one else needed to.
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Praise appreciated, concrit treasured, flames raspberried