Author's Notes: So I started my day off with 2 cups of black coffee, then had a tall glass of Thai tea at a restaurant, made myself 2 more cups of Assam tea so I had an excuse to eat butter cookies with it, and then had 2 Hefeweizens this evening. So I'm operating on a shit ton of caffeine, some sugar, and alcohol, and I figured "Hey, I've never written a fic on my cell phone before. I should totally try that."
My spouse just said "Wow, I'm sorry to hear that. Good luck."
So, here's a story I'm typing out with my thumbs, and occasionally my index fingers, on a smart phone in my memo pad app.
Warnings: Not a whole lot, really. Maybe some sacrilege on Pegasus' part, but nothing severe. This is really just Pegasus and Isis being super judgmental and rude to each other.
Disclaimer: Yu-Gi-Oh! and its characters are copywritten to Kazuki Takahashi and Konami.
-0-
He couldn't have dreamt of a more boring woman.
Her looks were all she had going for her, and even then she seemed to rue that, or chose not to acknowledge it, or make much use of it at all. With the exception of her curt greeting in his hotel room, she was either agonizingly silent or would drone on about the futility of struggling against the will of Fate.
"So you really believe that? The Terrifying One having nothing better to do than sit at a spinning wheel and agonize over every detail of our insignificant souls?" he asks in a huff, leaning against the window of the Jeep. She narrows her eyes from the other end of the back seat, which he figures is about as much emotion as he will ever get from her.
"You know of The Terrifying One?" she asks, as though surprised, or insulted, or neither, or both at once. He couldn't tell with her speaking in such a neutral tone with him all the time.
"Yes, Nrt or Nit, or what-have-you. The Primordial Creator. There are plenty of books on the subject, you know. Madame Isha decoded it long ago with the grand adventures of Chickpea(1). Your religion is hardly a secret."
Her lip twitches and settles back into a curt line.
"You know nothing," she says.
"I know plenty enough," he retorts.
"You know a good deal of many things," she says, "and none of it matters."
"I didn't know you were a Metallica fan."
This genuinely stumps her, and she squints in another emotion he didn't expect. He recognizes it is confusion.
"... Nevermind," he sighs. "It wasn't that clever of a joke anyhow."
He leans into his palm and looks out the window, gazing at the dunes passing in his vision.
"I gave up on my own religion a long time ago," he mutters, not moving his head, but glancing at her from the corner of his good eye. "The will of the divine is nothing to a nonbeliever. So if you will, stop preaching about the subject of Fate and just do what I hired you to do for the rest of my visit to this lovely country."
He cannot read her mind, but the look she gives him speaks volumes as the Torque at her neck glows. So he decides to humor her and mind his manners.
"Please," he says, with the biggest smile in the snidest way he can muster. "If it truly is my role in life to lay down the foundation for some grand game, regardless of my own thoughts, then let's make our working relationship as painless as possible so we can get it all on track, yes?"
She sighs, nods in resignation, leans her head into her own hand, and looks out the window on her side of the vehicle.
She says nothing else for the rest of the ride.
Pegasus is frowning the entire trip to the Valley of the Kings.
What a boring woman.
-0-
She remembers her first vision of him when she was fifteen years old. She thought he was rather pathetic. Four years after the acquisition of the Torque, she trusts her judgment.
He is a man who holds no respect for boundaries while he maintains countless borders around his own person. He's made such an effort to build those walls over the years that he's trapped himself in a maze within his own soul. He is a man who has lied to himself so many times that he cannot find his own truth. He takes a sick, sordid pleasure in that he can read the minds of others while he is an open book-and a predictable one at that.
She doesn't bother looking at the ending. It doesn't interest her.
He does not interest her.
Regardless of her own knowledge, he wouldn't have been interesting otherwise. It isn't anything personal. She has little interest in most people, and even less so a man who has the nerve to think her so banal while he clings so desperately to a young woman who crossed into the void beyond the veil.
How pathetic, how small of a person this man-child must be, to desire nothing more in his pitiful life than to rip a woman from the comfort of the Afterlife and bring her back to this miserable, hopeless place.
But of course, that is none of her business, and it is no business of hers to challenge the will of Fate.
It is laughable, to think there is any hope in changing the future, but this man hopes to change the past.
She can see time in both directions, and neither side turns in his favor.
Though she is also aware that time does not, will not turn favorably for her either.
But at least she doesn't delude herself into believing there is an alternative.
.
.
.
(1) Pegasus is referring to Her-Bak: The Living Face of Ancient Egypt, written by Isha Schwaller de Lubicz. It is a book that follows the life of an initiate into the Egyptian mysteries. Her-Bak means "chickpea", hence Pegasus' remark about "the grand adventures of Chickpea." For obvious reasons, Isis is not endeared by his comment.