AN: This was originally meant to be a contest oneshot, but I dropped off the contest and like the plunnie so much I decided to make it a multi instead. This is a genderbent AU that closely reflects the canon, in some ways. Enjoy. -Milly
.
blackout
.
prelude (before and after the light)
.
Ryou wasn't allowed to see her grandmother anymore after 'the incident'. She wasn't even told in which home her legal guardian had (been) moved to. Atsushi Bakura, rather than taking a cumbersome two week leave in the middle of his data mining ventures somewhere across the globe, instead had had temporary arrangements made for his daughter.
He had her move into a boarding school. An all girls boarding school. She hadn't objected, but then again she had no other choice.
Neither father nor daughter wanted to know what the next step would be if her situation ever worsened.
Not that it'd hurt to change schools now, in the middle of the academic year. Ryou wasn't sure she'd be able to befriend the few remaining classmates she hadn't alienated after... 'the incident'.
She had to move to another town altogether, a town where she had no history of shoplifting or assault or arson.
Domino City had the cheapest all girls boarding program and had vacancy to accommodate her. As her train entered the city, fleeing the seaside and deep into the mountains, Ryou had no trouble understanding why.
Graffiti tags laced the bottom of warehouses and modest houses. Three tall chimneys could be seen in the distance, their greyish secretions covering everything with fine layers of soot. The sun was about to set, briefly reddening the skies. Workers would soon be going in their small homes, with or without their families. The small windows of the bigger apartment complexes at the outskirts of the city looked like gigantic dies, some windows lit, some not, black like holes. Ryou looked away.
On her lap was a dark brown wooden hoop, firmly holding in place a humble squareful of beige cotton and the embroidered half of an egg. The thread she had used to etch the egg was the same colour as the fabric, as if though camouflaging on the canevas. Ryou thought, briefly, that she too sometimes wished she could just blend in with her surroundings and live a quiet, peaceful, uneventful life.
Fate had decided otherwise, for better or for worse.
Beneath her dress and right next to the bare the skin covering her ribcage, Ryou could feel the clinging, moist metal of the Ring, warm from the body heat it had been stealing.
.
tbc: chapter one: white lies