Thanks to Silver for the prompt: 50. Peachshipping. Let your imagination run wild.

Inspiration: Rose Ikebana, the unplugged acoustic version of Listen to Your Heart by D.H.T., aerial shots of NYC and the new designs for Yugi. Do not own any of the above.

Disclaimer: Do not own YGO, either.

for babe, always

...

Yugi looked smaller than usual from the coffee-stained windows of the 747, bangs hovering, emotions wavering, tears threatening. Tristan and Joey cradled him, one on each side like faithful lancelots on an old-fashioned adventure quest. Tristan rose, tall and strong, murmuring platitudes, surely, about how New York was only a day's flight away and how Joey could always duel Kaiba's blue eyes jet into submission if Yugi really, desperately wanted to be halfway around the world in a few hours instead of the usual twelve. At that, Joey swaggered; on cue, Serenity and Mai rolled their eyes simultaneously. Even from the very back of plane Tea could see their mouths moving as they waved good-bye. Something like, "Don't worry, hun, we'll take good care of our boys."

(You just dance like your heart isn't breaking into pieces at the end of the runway, Tea guessed.)

Our boys.

Men now, especially Yugi, whose face grew more and more angular each day, settling into lines she came to know so well in the past few years. The confident tilt of the jaw. The slight curl on his right lip. The tiny, almost imperceptible caress of "-Ah" at the end of her name. Tay-Ah with a Capital A, the last syllable careening somewhere between wonderment and amazement before crashing somewhere neither of them admitted yet.

Yug-eeee, Tea would reply, letting the last vowels of his name dance across her tongue. Yugi. The boy who was no longer a boy but a man who inherited all that was good about him and then some. The best-est friend she ever made through Gameboys and card games and lipgloss and glitter sticks. The face she awoke to every morning and fell asleep to every night as well as every dream in between, snagged like tufts of cotton on branches in the woods where they used to play hide-and-seek (well, mostly hiding) from the bullies as children.

The game continued, except this time, she would miss Joey and Tristan, too. Those...knuckleheads...had their moments, though she would rather admit Kaiba was somewhat good-looking in an antithetical Gothic hero kind of way than admit they were right about Yugi, even under duress. The wonder duo had already figured out how she felt (was she really that obvious? Or is Yugi really that dense?) yet, even they had enough sense to leave it alone. Seto didn't, but, then again, Seto was in a league of his own when it came to everything except DDR and Duel Monsters. Yet another reason why she and Yugi were meant to be, according to Mokuba.

Tea just sighed. Timing, timing, timing. Never quite right and never quite, wrong, either. The feelings ambushed her sometimes, the way Yugi leaned over his history books (Ancient Egypt, what else?) with that adorable burrow in his forehead or talked a little too fast about New York City or binge-chewed her strawberry rhubarb with droplets of juice dribbling down his chin. She's always been tempted to say something. Anything. The words are always on the tip of the tongue, rolling around like marbles into a drain except that it was always too something. Too soon, too much, too shy, too few, too something or the other every every damn time.

Once, she bit her lips so hard it bruised for several days afterwards. Yugi inquired in his sweetly ignorant way if she was OK and she just...chickened out, like always.

That didn't explain her unexpected burst of courage two minutes ago. One moment they were standing by her pastel-colored suitcases, about to be separated by an ocean, and a moment later they were together, connected at the lips and less half a heart each. Blindly, passionately consuming each other, all the pent-up feelings they had been funneling as friendship bursting into flames by the tail of a 747.

It felt so right and good that she wondered why the hell they didn't do this earlier and why the hell she needed to leave now. Forget New York for a minute. She'd be perfectly happy here, in his arms, tangled in his jacket, breath mingling, hearts syncopating as one.

Yugi pushed her towards the front of the plane, tears simmering.

"Go. I'm always with you, Tay-Ah." There was something different about the curl of his lips now, the sudden warmth infusing her name, as if the soon-to-be ocean in between was a mere inconvenience instead of a catastrophic barrier to more kisses, more hugs, more caresses.

So Tea reluctantly jostled her way to the window seat nearest the terminal. Everyone else disappeared as soon as she and Yugi lunged for each other. (There may have been a whoop or two from Joey, followed by a loud Oomph, probably from Mai, but Tea wasn't prepared to swear to anything except mental fireworks). Then Tristan had the bright idea of (mis)appropriating a "lost" luggage cart so they could all be on the runway to wave good-bye. The contraption didn't look large enough to contain most of Yugi's bangs, let alone four sets of limbs, but they made it anyway, almost to the nose of the plane before security raised a bushy eyebrow.

That was the funny thing about being Seto Kaiba's unacknowledged friends- the ability to sneak onto the runway with a pineapple head, brownie mullets, and Mai's impressively high stiletto boots jutting from the top of an miniature crate. Serenity recounted later that Tristan received an earful for wandering eyes, which is why Joey wheeled him out on an airport-issue baggage dolly, but Tristan always maintained it was just an accidental graze of skin to iris...

Tea tracked their movements until they blurred into the grounds below, fragments of a once-whole heart waving even though they couldn't see her anymore, either.

At the very last second, just as the plane melted into the brushstrokes in the horizon, she caught sight of his face in the coffee-stained window.

(Or maybe it was just Yugi's face, blurred by tears?)

Her lips tingled.

She loved that face. They were one. Different names, different times, different destinies. Perhaps she kissed Atem once, when she, too, had a different name, in a different time, in a shared, soul-mate kind of destiny that only came back to her in fragments of memories.

Tay-Ah.

A face very much like her own whispered in the dream that followed...a lullaby, a song, a chant that wrapped instinctively around the part of the subconscious that still believed in miracles and happy endings even as as an almost twenty-something careening towards bright lights and casting calls and broken callouses. It was older, angular, with a confident tilt, a slight compression of the right lip, and a knowing smile.

(Temmy?)

No. Not Temmy.

This was Yugi. And he was all she needed in this life, this destiny, this love.

Halfway around the world wasn't so far when their hearts beat as one.

...

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