Chapter Ten

Verona

Romeo, Juliet and a lot of confusion

"For the love of Ra, will you put that stupid book down before I throw it off the plane?"

Things were not going smoothly on the brief flight they had taken impromptu from Rome. There had been enough arguments to begin with about whether it was even worth taking the plane- it took less time on the Eurostar to get to their destination, and since they were not even staying in a hotel, Ryou thought it was pointless to fly.

Bakura just thought it was pointless to interrupt his holiday with Ryou's automatically labelled 'idiotic' idea.

Marik and Malik were staying out of the argument: Malik out of tact, and Marik because he was too busy dozing to sleep on the chairs, jet lag taking its toll on his body. It was probably also this that made Bakura so irate and Ryou so much more stubborn than usual. Malik watched the argument, and broke his silence and the tension after having so far kept silent.

"Why do you want to go to Verona so much, anyway?"

Ryou glared at Malik, and considered getting angry at the blonde, but realised that he was simply curious, not annoyed at having to go, or some how taking Bakura's side. No, Malik was simply being his usual stance in the proverbial 'dead man's land'. The angry expression fell off the white-haired boys face, replaced with one that was not quite sadness, and not quite nostalgia, but somewhere in between.

Marik stirred, and sat up, rubbing his eyes, trying to catch up with the conversation and the obvious tension in the plane.

Ryou was silent for a while longer, until the others believed he wasn't going to answer. However, after a while he lifted up the book he had been reading, showing them the cover. The title was written in gold cursive, and the picture was bright, cartoon-ish in nature.

It was a children's version of Shakespeare's 'Romeo and Juliet'.

He smiled vaguely at them, his eyes focusing out of the window.

"It's set in Verona, and it was my sister's favourite bedtime story, before."

There was silence for a moment.

"Ahh, shit, Ryou. I'm sorry."

The three stared at Bakura, Marik's mouth hanging open in shock. It had to have been the first time any of them had heard him apologise properly, and mean it. It was quite a shock to them all, to hear that, and it was probably the lack of sleep.

Ryou accepted the apology graciously, but the sad look didn't leave his face until they had alighted the plane, exited the airport and were wandering the streets of Verona. Once they were there, Ryou's look of despondency was replaced with an overjoyed look that made Bakura feel quite bad he had ever made an issue of spending their second day in Italy in the home of the fictional Montagues and Capulets.

The day was warm, the sun was bright, and they all started to feel a little more cheerful.

They lost Ryou shortly after.

Later, they agreed that the blame lay directly on Marik, since he was the one who insisted on stopping and examining a menu in the window of a small restaurant, which, to Marik's credit, did look exceedingly good for exceedingly good value. Marik would claim that it was the fault of Malik: if he had not argued about the price of the beer they would not have stopped so long, and Bakura simply blamed them both because as far as he was concerned, they were both being idiots anyway.

Expecting Ryou to stop and wait, they argued about whether they had time to eat and other such petty things, the world fading to a blur of unimportance in their heads, and this soon turned to bickering about the location of their next destination, which was even more frustrating to them as Marik was keeping it even more of a closely guarded secret from them all than normal.

Marik and Bakura quickly got to bickering about this, and it took quite a while for Malik to notice Ryou had wandered off, and he was quite surprised by Bakura's reaction to it.

"Shit! He must still be mad at me from earlier, and now look what I've done… I've driven him away! He's out there now, wandering the streets… and, oh Ra, no one could resist him, he'll be stolen and sold or kidnapped or killed, and it'll all be my fault, but if I ever find the person who did it to them they're gonna pa-"

He was broken off from his hysterical rampage by the realisation that Malik had already run off in the direction Ryou had been heading.

Pulling a more unconcerned Marik behind him, the hysterical yami bolted after Malik.

Several streets away, Ryou was not particularly worried that he had lost his friends. 'They,' he mused, 'can take care of themselves'. In fact, as far as Ryou was concerned, it couldn't have turned out any better than it had, since now he got to explore the city without their complaints.

'Knowing them, they've just found a bar near the airport and won't worry about me in the slightest. In fact, they'd be happier there than with me, anyway.'

It wasn't just that Bakura had left him, he was used to his yami doing things like that. It was, for a reason that he wasn't quite willing to admit to himself, the idea of Malik leaving him that really upset him.

He pushed those thoughts to the back of his mind, however, as he wandered through the quintessential Italian streets, because, as far as he was concerned, today was for her.

They caught up with him eventually, of course, but it did take them a couple of hours and a lot of panicking and harassing passers-by on the streets to do so.

It took Marik nearly an hour to calm Bakura and Malik down, since the two had long since banished rationality in their search for Ryou. Marik himself was almost scared by the psychopathic looks of anger in both their eyes, and he certainly would not have liked to be anyone who even laid a finger on their precious Ryou.

Marik, for once, found himself to be the rational one, and he tried to persuade them that Ryou probably just wanted some time to think about his sister, but that did little good, because, as Malik pointed out;

"You think a murderer would care about whether or not he's contemplating his dead sister?"

"You two are being over dramatic. He'll be fine."

An argument soon broke out between Malik and Bakura, born of frustration, jet lag and worry. Standing in the streets of Verona, yelling at each other, they received quite a few strange looks from passers-by.

"You fucking stupid… urgh, why did you have to yell at him so much for reading a freakin' book?"

"It's hardly my fault! How the fuck was I supposed to know, anyway?"

"'Cause you're his yami, maybe? You shared a body for years- surely you would have picked something up if you were ever bothered about him!"

Bakura's eyes narrowed.

"Oh, and I suppo-"

Bakura was cut off mid-rant by Marik, who glared at both of them, before hissing: "You think that this is helping?"

The voice of relative reason soon took over, and it wasn't long before Malik and Bakura were grabbing passers-by by their shirt collars and demanding to know if they had seen Ryou. This had little effect, seeing as how most of the quizzical Italians didn't have a clue what they were talking about.

Half an hour later and still a hikari short, they were beginning to loose hope. Bakura and Malik were now looking completely terrified, and even Marik was loosing his cool.

Turning a corner, they saw him.

He was sat on a bench in a small square, his legs crossed on the bench and his eyes focused on a statue in the middle of the square. The sun was shining on his face and his hair was almost glowing in the light. He was getting many admiring glances from the Italian teenagers both male and female, but he was unaware of this, his large brown eyes fixed unchangingly on the statue. A small smile haunted the corners of his mouth, faint veins showing up delicately through the pale skin of his neck.

He was, without a doubt, the most beautiful thing Malik had ever seen.

The group almost ran over to him, where he was nearly knocked over by a still-hysterical Bakura, who hugged him and apologised and promised he'd never get mad again and then begged forgiveness and then begged that his hikari would never leave, all in the same breath, whilst Ryou just sat there, awkwardly patting Bakura's head, completely bemused.

It took several more minutes to console Bakura, who still hadn't let go of Ryou, and once they did, the yami decided that they all needed a drink, and he was quite vocal to assure the others that it should be very strong.

As they walked down the street, Marik and Bakura in front, with Bakura checking over his shoulder every thirty seconds, and Malik and Ryou behind, Ryou couldn't help but notice the silence that came between them. Although it was true that Malik was not overly conversational, Ryou couldn't help but worry that he'd annoyed his friend. To be fair, he argued with himself, as far as Malik might be concerned, Ryou had left them. He'd be annoyed at himself if he were the blonde as well. Taking a deep breath, Ryou broke the silence.

"I didn't mean to leave you all like that, you know. I… I'm sorry, Malik."

Malik looked at him, an unreadable expression in his eyes.

"You should be."

Ryou felt his heart sink. So his friend really was angry, although Ryou couldn't blame him. He stared at the ground, unwilling to look at Malik.

'Damn,' he thought to himself, 'what am I going to do now?'

He felt a slight pressure on his shoulder, and when he glanced up, he realised the other was leaning companionably against his shoulder. Ryou felt an unaccustomed flutter across the pit of his stomach, and leant back, applying just the slightest amount of pressure back.

Malik's voice, when he spoke again, wasn't angry.

"Don't ever make me worry like that again. I thought we might have lost you for good for a while. You shouldn't make me… make us scared like that, okay?"

Now it was Malik's turn to stare at the ground in embarrassment as Ryou looked up, feeling a lot better now. They almost walked into the backs of their yamis, who had stopped outside the restaurant that had caused the problems to begin with. According to Bakura's warped logic, it only made sense to have their drink there, and then go back to the plane.

After seeing how angry an emotional Bakura could get, they decided not to argue with him.

When they eventually boarded the plane again, only to find that Marik still would not tell them where they were going next, they all took comfort with various luxuries. Bakura headed straight for the mini-bar, claiming he only wanted to eat the peanuts, and Malik announced he would try out the planes shower, since all of them had opted to use the hotel ones since the start.

Marik, a little annoyed because everyone else was annoyed at him, as he wouldn't even give them even so much as a hint as to where they were going, went to talk to the pilot before he flopped out on a row of seats, the armrests up, and went to sleep.

When Malik emerged, wearing his trousers, no shirt and a towel wrapped around his shoulders, he saw Ryou sitting on the floor, looking a little despondent.

"What's up?"

He stood in front of him, leaning against the wall of the plane. Ryou looked at the ground.

"It's nothing. I'm just annoyed at myself."

"Why?"

"It sounds stupid."

"Nah, go on."

Ryou averted his gaze to a bag next to him, which was a cream carrier bag that Malik recognised to be the one from the chocolate shop they had visited, which seemed like it was much longer ago than it was.

"I always eat it all really quickly, you know? And this time I promised I wouldn't, that I'd make it last the whole trip, but I didn't. And now I'm annoyed and hungry and don't have any."

"I see."

"You think I'm being an idiot."

"A little."

Malik walked off, and Ryou leant his head back in silent frustration. A few seconds later. Something cream waved in front of his face, and his head snapped back up to see it.

It was another bag from the chocolate shop.

Malik's bag… carried by… Malik, who was smiling down at him with his eyebrows raised slightly.

"I knew you'd do that, so here. I bought this for you while we were there, so you'd have some when you did eat it all."

He dropped the bag at Ryou's feet, and wandered off.

Ryou watched him walk away, smiling. The wiry muscle moved slightly on his tanned back, and the white towel stood out as a harsh contrast to the skin, covering half of the carvings on his back. Ryou looked at those inquisitively, wondering what the scar tissue would feel like.

His eyes widened slightly, and, blushing, he looked away quickly, down at his new chocolate.

xxx

Feh. Just got home from a trip to Italy, so figured I just make an update. Bloody tired though. Only four more chapters to go now… who wants to place a guess where they are going next? Giving a yell to Silenced Shadows, because she's ever lovely, and to ambercharae and mystralwind for their never ending support. Geez. I'd love some crit on how everyone thinks this is panning out, if you think I'm dragging it out too much, etc. Prize for who can guess where they're going next.