The Abnormal: Amane's Tale
Disclaimer: Yu-gi-oh! Duel Monsters is owned by Kazuki Takahashi, Studio Gallop, Nihon Ad Systems, and TV Tokyo. All names were changed to the characters of this fandom in order to protect the real people involved in the following incidents.
Part 10: The Girl and the Idiot
When Amane visits Magic on the Saturday before Ryou is expected to come home, he isn't in his workroom. An orange ball of fuzz named Sangan leads her to him by a very green, scaly arm.
"Over here, My Lady," he bows (somehow) as she sees Magic's form appears, sitting at the edge of a forest. Amane thanks Sangan with a smile and approaches the man she now calls lover.
It's a bit strange. Had he been any other person, she would think that the word 'boyfriend' to describe him. But then again, Magic isn't any other person – he's Magic. Lover sounds more appropriate for him.
"Hey," she calls to him as she gets closer. He turns, somehow avoiding smudging dirt all over his white clothes. He waves to her as she sits down beside him, leaning against his shoulder. "Whatcha doing over here?"
"This is the Forest of Pojar," he tells her. "It used to be the sacred burial ground for the Ancient Ones. After the Fall of Mu, we brought it here."
"Who or what was Pojar?" She asks.
"He was supposedly the first Ancient. We didn't know him. He was long before our time. Supposedly he is buried in there, but we've never found the grave," Magic shrugs. She can feel his eyes on her, "Is there any specific reason for the visit or are we just getting lucky, spending time with you?"
Amane rolls her eyes, smiling the entire time, "You're getting lucky."
"Good. We need a bit of luck right now," he sighs and pulls her closer to him.
"Something is going to happen soon, isn't it? Something big," she can just tell by the way that he is acting.
"Yes."
"Is there anything I can do to help?"
He hesitates and then grips her tightly, as if afraid to lose her, "Please don't die."
Ryou comes bursting through the front door and tears up the stairs in a mad hurry to get to her room. Amane is in the middle of a complicated hack that may or may not set off a small nuclear reactor in China if things go wrong. She manages to save it after she kicks Ryou off of her and he stops shouting in her ear.
"Damn it, Ryou! You almost made me irradiate a village! Don't ever do that when I'm on my computer!" She yells at him.
"White eyes – imposter – there was something here, but where? Are you hurt? Did he hurt you?" Ryou looks around the room frantically.
"What the hell are you talking about?" Amane throws her pillow at him. He catches it before it hits him.
"Serenity, she showed me pictures. There was someone here, pretending to be me. A Shape Changer or something a Creator made," he panics. "It wasn't me, Amane. I swear it wasn't. Whatever he did, please, it wasn't me. You've got…to…believe me – why are you laughing?"
She can't help it. After everything that she'd come to terms with when it came to the pair of them, here was Ryou saying the exact same thing that she'd been telling herself: that he and Magic weren't the same people. He was begging her to understand that, even though she already did.
"You idiot," Amane tries to suppress her giggles as she steps forward and gives him a hug. "I'm so glad that you're home."
Ryou's warm to the touch, his heart beating in a steady pattern just below this skin. She can feel the familiar love for him humming through her body as he wraps his arms around her, trying to tell himself that she's fine, that she's alive. It does nothing to bring him out of his battle-ready high, bit its enough for her.
"You're not hurt, are you?" He asks again.
"No," she pulls back just enough so that she can see his face. There are red eyes there, bright and burning with the fire that resides within his soul – his shattered soul. The Shattered Soul. The second immortal.
But to her, he will always be her Ryou.
It literally takes Amane a whole day to calm him down and even then Ryou seems to be on constant alert for any sort of attack. She tries to tell him that its fine, really, he's just over reacting.
Prom is just around the corner and if Amane was a betting girl, she'd but down twenty that that move lands Duke the Cradle Robber award for the youngest date. Serenity is only in tenth grade, just barely sixteen. The girl says that its proof that age means nothing when two people like (Amane hears a hint of 'love' in those words) each other.
She laughs a bit because Magic has to be several thousand years older than her and they love each other. She knows if they went to prom if he win that award hands down.
Ryou is a little uneasy about the whole thing. She laughs at him a little. He can take down monsters disguised as men and summon creatures from an alternate universe, but the idea of attending prom is something that makes him get weak knees.
She tells him that she'll make sure he doesn't get too drunk, but then Ryou informs her that he gets really sick whenever he drinks. Amane feels a little better about her utter lack of alcohol tolerance know that, but wonders if it is a coincidence that they both can barely touch the stuff without feeling its effects. She remembers how Magic had been unable to contact her the night that…Keith happened. Maybe she should be considering becoming sober long-term.
Tea is still bugging her about her mystery boys: the one that she's with and the one that coming with her to prom. Amane is still as evasive as ever about it, trying to make her understand that she really doesn't want to talk about it. And then suddenly Tea comes up to her with a very serious look on her face.
"Amane, you're going to prom with your brother."
She actually spits out her drink.
"How – when? Why do you know this?" She stares at her best friend like she's never seen her before.
"Long story. But the thing you have to know is that everyone knows," Tea stresses.
"What?"
"It somehow got out! I don't know how – believe me, if I knew this I wouldn't tell a soul – but Joey's gone insane," she pulls Amane down the hall and around the corner. Her heart stops momentarily when she sees a familiar ring of students.
"Nonono, this is bad," she runs towards the centre, pushing people out of the way in her hurry. One of the people that she comes in contact with looks at her in disgust.
"Ew! Don't touch me, you sicko!" The girl squirms away like she's is covered in warts. Amane jerks her hand back in surprise. Then she feels someone grab her arm and pull her to the side.
"What the hell do you think you're doing here?" Duke hisses, "You're only going to make things worse for him! Bakura's taking on the whole football team because of you two."
"The whole…oh god, no. They'll be killed," she gasps, trying to run back into the crowd but Duke stops her again.
"Don't you mean he'll be killed?"
"Duke, let me go. I have to stop this before Bakura gets too serious," she cries again.
"Before he what? Amane, there's like twenty guys on that team. How could he possibly take them all? They'll tear him apart," he tries to talk sense into her, but that was impossible. Ryou would toy with them for a while, but if Joey or one of the others said the wrong thing, who knows how he would react.
He was no longer the kid that the team could beat black and blue whenever they felt like it. Ryou is an Other trained in Combat magic. He could take on all twenty of them and probably walk away without a scratch on him.
She had to stop this. Now, before it was too late.
Amane forced her way through the crowds, this time getting as far as the inner most circle before Duke stopped her again. She becomes incredibly annoyed with him, trying to hold her back, so she bits him in the arm until she draws blood. He yelps and tears his arm away. She uses that to get around him and enter the arena.
She sees Joey first. He's behind the other players, preparing to rush Ryou. Amane's eyes narrow and she runs towards him, screaming bloody murder and –
Something hits her in the jaw. She doesn't know what it is, but it felt like a shovel of some kind. Amane senses danger and bad and get away now and is surrounded by darkness.
When she opens her eyes again, she sees a familiar face surrounded by white hair. But her vision hasn't cleared enough that she can tell who's who.
"Hey," comes the voice and it is singular, not the thousand million voices that should at the same time when Magic speaks. "How are you feeling?"
"Terrible. Ryou? Is that you?" Amane asks.
"Yeah, its me."
"Can't tell sometimes. You look the same," she tells him. Ryou asks if she can stand. She thinks that she can and he supports her as her vision starts to spin.
Someone from the crowd yells, "What the fuck was that? You were holding back the entire time!"
Amane looks around the arena at that moment. There are fifteen football players cowering on the sidelines, looking in at the devastation that was in the middle. Five bodies moan and twitch on the floor. One of them was Joey and he lies in the middle of several downed people. It looks like he was thrown into them.
Ryou threatens the entire freaking school that if they have a problem with either of them, they will meet the same fate as their fallen football team. Then he mentions something else, but Amane doesn't catch it because her head is throbbing really badly. Joey has one hell of a punch.
He walks her to her locker, opening it as she sits down on the floor and holds her head. Amane doesn't even want to know how long he's known her combination as he pulls her bag and jacket from the inside. Ryou helps her with the sleeves as she complains that she can do it herself and that they probably shouldn't be skipping so early in the day.
He mumbles that the world can go fuck itself; he's not staying another moment in this school because if he does, he's going to do something stupid.
Ryou is pissed – really pissed. His jaw shuts itself so tightly that a crowbar couldn't have pried it open. He doesn't say a word as they get onto the bus. Amane leans against him, curling her arms around his.
"We're not," he finally grinds out. When she blearily looks up at him, he continues, "We're not together. Why do they always think…?"
Because they see the way she looks at him. Because they see the way that he looks at her, but they mistranslate that for the love that she shows him.
"I don't know," she mutters. And then he drops a bombshell.
"Even if we were, it's none of their business. Why should they care what two people who like each other do? Its none of their business."
Amane wonders if her attraction to Ryou is completely one sided. She never asks, though. At this point, even if it is, she doesn't want to know.
She tells Ryou about her plans to move out after graduation, but she doesn't tell him the real reason as to why she wants to. Amane doesn't know how he'll react to her wanting to run away. However, he looks over the apartments that she picked out in newspaper before hand.
One of her possible future landladies asks her if Ryou is her boyfriend. Amane says that he isn't and that she's already got one. The woman seems to approve of that fact, snubbing her nose in his general direction. Amane tries not to punch her in the face. Instead, she crosses that location off her list in permanent black marker.
When she comes home, she flips open her laptop and does her daily check of what her parents have been doing on the Internet. There's nothing outrageously interesting, though Amane does see that her father has been looking up the venue that her prom will be at. She doesn't think too much about it, assuming that he's simply looking up the address so that he knows where to pick her up if she needs a ride home.
Just as she decides to go back to her hack on the White House security cameras (they'd recently started to transmit the signal wirelessly, those amateurs), Ryou comes into her room looking paler than he usually does. He sits on her bed and slumps over himself. Incredibly worried, Amane nearly shuts down her computer to go talk with him. He tells her not to, though.
"Whatever you're doing, don't stop. I just want to sit here for a little bit," Ryou stares down at his hands. She notices the Pepsi can that is held there.
She shuts it down anyways. The White House can wait. Amane tells him that he's more important, moving over to where he is sitting.
"Mom found my baby clothes. She reacted to my baby clothes," he continues to stare at the Pepsi can.
Immediately, Amane thinks the worst, "She didn't throw them out, did she?"
"No. I don't know what happened. She just reacted. I think that she felt regret," the simple joy that is in Ryou's voice at the idea that his own mother paying attention to something he used to wear is just too much. For either of them for that matter.
Neither of them cries, but they refuse to leave each other's presence. Ryou sleeps in her room that night, her body curled around his protectively.
When they show up together at school, all those in the immediate vicinity stop to stare at them. Amane recognizes the girl that was in the crowd the day of the fight, a pudgy brunette that follows Duke around like a hopeless little duckling, waiting for him to 'wake up' and break up with Serenity. She grabs Ryou's hand and flips the girl off.
Ryou just laughs as they begin to walk towards his locker, his middle finger joining hers in the air.
Amane drags Ryou to the hospital to heal Joey after Serenity calls her in tears. The sixteen year old tells her in many almost disjointed sentences about how Duke's parents are trying to force him to break up with her and that her brother's hospital bills are going to force them out of their apartment and that she just can't handle things anymore – that she just wants God to give her family one more little miracle, no matter how selfish she thinks she is for asking this of him again.
But God is busy preparing for an upcoming battle (Amane checks with him herself). So she brings the next best thing.
As she and Serenity walk back to Joey's room after getting coffee, there is a large crowd in front of the door. Doctors are trying to push them all back. It is only because Serenity tells them that her brother is inside that they let her through.
Amane then finds out that, for some inadequately explored reason, Ryou jumped out the window after healing Joey.
She runs home, thinking that he's probably somewhere in his room, curled up under his desk and hiding. Instead, she finds him on their front porch, looking a little sheepish.
"I dropped my keys in the fall," he scratches the side of his head.
"You idiot," Amane punches him lightly in the shoulder before letting him in. "Next time you decide to jump out of a building, make sure you can get back home."
"Yes dear," Ryou rolls his eyes as he walks in after her. She punches him again because he really is sometimes. But she doubts that she'd have him any other way.
Hello to you all!
I'd like to thank ilovemanicures for her review on the last chapter. Continue to be awesome, my friend!
The Abnormal is probably going to end within the next two or three chapters, so I'm going to start to wrap it up. After that, I'm going to move onto Resurrection, which is the tale of the six spirits that live in Ryou Bakura's head. I can't wait to write the entire final battle scene of The First Year from Amane's point of view. It's going to be pretty awesome, having her wield a gun.
Until then,
AlcatrazOutpatient