Chapter 6
Paris
Lifts, taxi drivers and Seto Kaiba
Compared to some of the other plane trips they had been on, London to Paris was merely a skip over the ocean. However, they were left waiting, in the plane, for the runways to clear at Gatwick for nearly an hour due to delays at the airport and the general lack of commitment to the job that those working in air traffic control had on days when Arsenal was playing Chelsea, a football match that none of them were happy to be giving up for work.
During this hour, one by one the inhabitants fell asleep. Within ten minutes of warm air and soft background music, Bakura had fell asleep on Marik's lap, who managed to keep his eyes open only a few minutes longer, and he lulled himself to sleep with the soft, rhythmic stroking of Bakura's hair.
Ryou managed only a little longer, chatting softly to Malik, interrupting himself with large, long yawns, and pretty soon he had fallen asleep mid-sentence, leaving Malik to his thoughts.
Thoughts of what? Of the sleeping boy next to him, of course.
The blonde couldn't stop his eyes being drawn to the young man, watching his appearance as he slept. His long white hair fell across his fine-featured face, fluttering over his lips as his breath moved the strands. He watched his face for a while, but he couldn't help but gently push the hair away from Ryou's lips, and then off his face.
Feeling the soft hands, Ryou muttered incoherently in his sleep, and moved slightly, so his head was resting on Malik's shoulder in a way that didn't look particularly comfortable.
After waiting a few minutes, tense and rigid, in case Ryou woke up, Malik pulled Ryou into a more comfortable position, and, with one arm draped casually around Ryou's waist to make sure he didn't fall, he rested his chin on soft, white hair and joined the rest of his house-mates in sleep.
Their sleep was undisturbed for quite a while longer, until the rumble of the plane taking off woke up Bakura, who was the lightest sleeper of them all. No doubt due to years of being on the run back in Egypt, I hasten to add.
He sat up slightly, before lying back on his make-shift pillow- Marik. Not tired enough to fall back asleep, he rested his eyes and smiled to himself as he remembered the date.
One-year anniversaries can make even the most mental of thief kings happy.
It had been back when Bakura and Ryou were both still at Ryou's fathers house, and Malik and Marik in an apartment loaned from Isis, both pairs looking for a way, any way, to get housing away from the parental supervision that even older sisters can give.
It had to have been Ryou that found a way, of course. The idea of house sharing hadn't occurred to any of the others, but it felt like as soon as Ryou mentioned it, they'd found a house, Ryou (of course) had put down the deposit, and they had moved in.
Sure, he'd always been attracted to Marik, but only in a one night stand way, and they'd had a few of those before they moved in together with their hikari's.
It had been the sudden amount of time they'd been spending together and the relatively small amount of space they shared that made them fall more and more for each other, and all it took, in the end, was for Malik and Ryou to both be visiting their families, leaving them the house for a weekend. After the several months of being friends but wanting to be more, Bakura had been reaching breaking point, and it took them one and three quarter bottles of vodka to admit it.
'Since then?' Bakura mused, 'life has never been better.'
He moved closer to Marik, and fell back asleep as the plane cruised over the Channel.
None of them woke up until they landed almost an hour later. After a slightly awkward moment when Ryou woke up to find Malik's head resting on his and the blondes arm around his waist, they all stretched and waited for the pilot to open the door. Cursing the interruption of their sleep, the four stumbled out with their bags onto the runway, where they found a nasty surprise.
Next to them, standing in all its egotistical glory, was none other than Seto Kaiba's Blue-Eyes White Dragon jet. They gaped at it, surprised, but not a little bit worried.
Swiftly moving on, however, they went through customs and into a waiting taxi, who drove them through the relatively empty streets of Paris (because most streets are empty at three in the morning), and tumbled into beds at the Parisian branch of Devlin hotels.
The next morning, well, really it was early afternoon by the time they were all ready to leave, the group found it rather more difficult to find a taxi, and, once they had done, they found the journey rather more difficult than the one the night before.
Only Ryou had the common sense to put on a seatbelt, and after a while, the others wished that they had followed suit.
Driving along the Rue Jacob was an experience in itself. Drivers leant their whole frames on horns, hanging out of windows with unlit cigarettes dangling limply from the corners of their mouths. Tempers were running high from the drivers, and most passengers hung onto their seats, the tourists pale-faced, the locals laughing, admiring the pretty girls wandering up and down the roads or filing their nails in boredom. Mopeds dodged from bumper to bumper, and Malik became entranced watching them.
As soon as a traffic light turned green, the cabs threw themselves forward, causing the occupants to fly forward, off their seats. From their new vantage points on the floor, the three glared up at a laughing Ryou, but the looks were quickly stopped as the driver slammed on the brakes and they were thrown backwards into the feet of their seats.
They were still groaning in pain as they disembarked from the cab at the Eiffel Tower, leaving Ryou to pay, since they'd entrusted the majority of their money to him, and because he was the only one in any way familiar to the euro.
Malik wearily eyed the Eiffel Tower.
"We're not going up that, are we?"
Ryou merely nodded, staring blissfully up at the tower. The queue was, thankfully, nearly non-existent, it being a weekday and not a holiday (Ryou had decided to ignore the fact that he was skipping school to go on this trip), and Marik and Bakura had already ran off, explained to the man that the pair behind them would be paying, and boarded the lift, grinning manically (which was probably part of the reason that they'd been allowed on there without paying anyway- those grins could make grown men shiver).
Ryou walked over to the entrance at a much more leisurely pace, stopping halfway when he realised that Malik was not walking with him. He turned, staring at the blonde, who was regarding the tower with a wary eye.
"Problem?"
Malik jumped, not expecting Ryou's question. He shook his head forcefully, jogging to catch up with Ryou, and they walked together to the entrance.
By the time they got there, the lift that Marik and Bakura had taken up was nearly back down, and they only had to wait a few minutes until they could get into it, Ryou with a huge grin of expectancy on his face, and Malik cautiously, with a slightly pained expression on his.
As the lift slowly rose, Ryou noticed something was wrong, very wrong, with Malik. His face had turned an ashen white, tinged a very unhealthy grey, and his eyes were large with fear. His hands gripped tightly onto the rail, and as the lift made an almost unnoticeable bump, he moaned quietly to himself and screwed his eyes tightly shut.
Ryou stared at him, wide-eyed.
"Malik?"
Malik didn't seem to hear him, but his fists tightened on the rail until his knuckles were white.
"Malik?"
Ryou repeated his name as he slung an arm around the blonde's shoulders.
"You're not scared of lifts, are you?"
The only response he got was a muffled moan. The moan was because of another small bump, and the muffled was because the blonde had buried his face in Ryou's collarbone, his hands moving from the bar to clutch the others shirt.
Ryou was, quite understandably, shocked by this response to a simple question. But he responded like any good friend (especially one that was thinking, subconsciously, that he might want a little bit more than friendship) would do, and, with the one arm already on Malik's shoulders, held him close, the other hand softly stroking the blonde hair, whispering words of encouragement as they made their slightly bumpy way to the top of the Eiffel tower.
At the top of the tower, Malik and Bakura were exchanging a rare moment of quiet affection, leaning on the rail, hand in hand, Marik resting his head in the crook of Bakura's neck. They turned as the door of the elevator opened, to greet their hikari's, and stood, Bakura gaping, and Marik smirking the self-satisfied smile of a man who has just won a lot of money.
Ryou and Malik leapt away from each other, Malik running out of the lift to collapse on the floor. Both of them were blushing, but Malik seemed more intent on getting his breath back than explaining to the bemused yamis, which left Ryou, stuttering, to try and explain why they had appeared to be in a passionate embrace.
Needless to say, Marik and Bakura didn't believe him. It took a shared lift down, where Malik again clung on to the front of Ryou's shirt, to even waver their opinion on the two, but they still were uncertain, since the look of contentment in Ryou's eyes as he again wrapped one arm around Malik and with the other stroked the blondes hair, well, that look was all Bakura needed to be convinced that he was going to loose his bet to Marik.
Not that he would admit that, of course.
I could tell you about the rest of their day in Paris, but it is relatively uneventful, except for perhaps the incident at Notre-Dame, where Bakura challenged a stone gargoyle to a duel in the shadow realm because it was 'looking' at him the wrong way. Aside from that, and the slightly embarrassing lunch at a street café, where Marik had ordered steak tartar, and proceeded to eat it with such gusto that blood had splattered across the table next to them, the day had been a typical tourists day in the European capital of love.
By the end of the day, Ryou had become very confused. Bakura and Marik had been acting strangely all day… a lot more couple-y and a lot less destructively than usual.
It took a conversation with Malik, their earlier embarrassment gone, to straighten things out for him.
"Well, don't you remember the date?"
Ryou stared blankly at Malik, who sighed, frustrated.
"It's their anniversary, isn't it? Jeez, you're supposed to be the one good at remembering this sort of thing. They've been together a year now; to be honest I think half of Marik agreeing to this was so he could have them here on their anniversary- even I think that's kind of romantic. And strangely thoughtful, for a guy who just spent an hour spitting on people from the top of a cathedral."
Ryou grinned, obviously finding the whole idea too adorable for words. They continued to walk in a comfortable silence behind the Bakura and Marik, who were holding hands and laughing softly at something one of them had just said.
It didn't matter how cute Ryou found it, Malik just found it a little creepy for the two psychopaths to be so damn sweet for once.
Ryou suddenly bolted forward, running past the two in front and turning around, walking backwards, talking to the couple in a voice that Malik just couldn't quite catch. Ryou quickly skipped back to him though, smiling broadly.
"We're gonna split in a minute, I thought those two would prefer an evening alone."
Before they could split, however, they came face to face with a very unwelcome multi-millionaire.
Seto Kaiba.
He was walking along the same street, resplendent in a trademark white suit, and it was not the fact that he was actually walking instead of using one of his many cars that made them gape- no, it was the fact that he appeared to be on a date.
You know, like the kind of thing an ordinary teenager might do.
And Seto Kaiba could be called a lot of things, but ordinary was not one of them.
The girl at his side was, to be frank, stunning. Long, dark brown hair fell in glossy curls down her back, stopping just above her hips, and her large brown eyes took in everything. Her skin was soft looking, naturally tanned, and her curves were accentuated by the dress she was wearing, a knee length red one, that was somehow modest yet alluring at the same time.
Seto Kaiba was known for wanting only the best, so it's of no surprise that his taste in women was the same.
Seto Kaiba looked distinctly uncomfortable when he saw them. And if he had hoped to pass the four without incident, he was living in a dream world, one possibly filled with people spending thousands a day on Kaiba Corp. software and where there was no Yugi, and he was still champion of Duel Monsters.
Oh yeah, and he owned the world.
Unfortunately for Seto Kaiba, this apparent dream world was about to come crashing down around his ears.
Marik got there first.
"Seto Kaiba! My good old 'Battle City' adversary! What are you doing in this famous city of love, then?" he asked, with a hugely fake grin on his face and a nudge to Bakura, who did not need encouraging.
"And who is this beautiful young girl you're boring to death, then?"
Bakura added this with a wink to the girl, who all of a sudden seemed to find the sky a much more interesting thing to look at. Bakura linked arms with her, continuing.
"So what is his chosen topic today? The fact that he will never be able to beat Yugi Motou at Duel Monsters, no matter how hard he tries, and no matter how many stupid plans he makes to beat him?"
Seto Kaiba, had he been an animal, would have growled. But of course, he was far to dignified for that. He, instead, gave them a pitying look.
"Or perhaps," Malik chimed in, "it's the fact that magic defiantly doesn't exist, no matter how many times it proves him wrong?"
The girl was trying hard to cover up her laughter now, and Seto Kaiba was quickly losing his cool and flushing with rage. Ryou stared on in disbelief
"Now, now," cut in Marik, "We all know what he'll be talking about really. What else but the vast amount of money he has, and just how fantastic he is?"
She laughed out loud at that one, and Seto Kaiba glowered, all hope of staying calm gone.
Bakura shook his head, but it was Malik that spoke first, taking the words right out of Bakura's mouth.
"Marik, you can be a fool sometimes. Kaiba talks about nothing but the Blue-Eyes White Dragon."
"You hit it there," she said between laughs, "It's your favourite conversation topic, isn't it, Seto?"
Seto looked slightly appalled by this. Not only had his date been hijacked by the same freaks that had almost ruined his Battle City tournament, now his date was agreeing with them? This was even worst than losing in his own tournament, and that had been humiliating, to say the least.
'My god,' Seto Kaiba thought, 'I fly us half-way across the world to stay away from the dork patrol, only to find myself face to face with the freak show drop-outs. How humiliating.'
However, Seto Kaiba did what he does best in situations like that, and put on his 'I have the methods and money to have you vaporised, and the influence to have your very existence forgotten- now get the hell away from me before I loose my temper' face on, and turned it on the four, who wilted under his gaze.
Malik and Ryou decided it was time to make an exit, and disappeared off down the road. Seto Kaiba's date waved them off.
Bakura still had his arm looped through the girl's, and now Marik took her other, the three chatting, and the yamis slipping in not-so-subtle digs at Kaiba whenever the opportunity arose, which was often. Kaiba, realising his 'vaporizing' face wasn't having the effect he wanted, decided to take a slightly more unorthodox method of what he would later refer to as 'pest-control'.
He picked up the two offending 'freaks' by the scruff of their necks, and deposited them on their knees at the side of the road, before taking the recently vacated arm of his date and led her away. She wasn't really complaining- who would be? It's Seto Kaiba, after all.
Bakura and Marik sat in hysterics at the side of the road for quite a while longer, both receiving an unaccountable amount of strange looks by both the tourists and the locals passing by.
As soon as they had calmed down, they wandered back down the street, looking for a suitably romantic restaurant that didn't have any millionaire's in it, and looked laid back enough for it to be acceptable for blood to be spattered across the tables.
LINELINELINELINELINELINELINELINELINE
Long wait, I know. I apologise. Next chapter will be up soon as, and I mean it this time.
Hope you enjoyed. I'd love some reviews from those who have this on alert, so they can tell me if the story is getting worse or better.
I do love Seto Kaiba. He's so easy to mock.
Oooh! Details. I've finalised the story now- it's going to be about another seven chapters, and probably an epilogue, depening on what you all want.
Sneak preview? Oh, go one then. We're off to Belgium next.
Ciao. NT-x