Disclaimer: I do not own YGO or any of the recognizable characters listed below.

Inspiration: Musc Pallida by Hermes, photos of sunsets on expansive tracts of desert sand, and the ever lovely "Delicate" by Taylor Swift.

For the fantastic Choco/Elficiel, who requested Revolutionshipping and Trust for a trade. Sorry this took so long.

...

They were gold.

No other word described that feeling of flying through the air, swirling with the clouds, and landing on their feet time and time again.

Gold was the color of his hair, the look in his eye, and the hints of marbles of sand reflected within. Anzu hadn't believed in love before meeting him for the first time. She believed in childhood crushes and strawberry sunrises and the occasional well-placed snipe against Kaiba's many diatribes, but never love. The kind of feeling that laced through every book and movie aimed at teenage girls never really appealed to her, probably because it seemed so improbable at the time. Like...really. Honestly. Who just sees another person and just knows that, irrespective of everything as well as everyone else in the world, that this was their person, here was their home together, and this was their destiny or whatever to save the world from evil and live happily ever after?

Well, Anzu thought wryly as she hit the cold ground of the new Kaiba Corps Dueling Coliseum in Domino with a barely muffled oomph, we certainly got the saving the world part down. The other...well, the other thought seemed weirdly heavy for something that permeated her consciousness for the better part of the last couple of years. Going on adventures and dueling various megalomaniacs certainly sounded more appealing than the reality of being trapped on exploding islands and encased in solid blocks of ice or being trapped in a virtual reality because...why the hell not, if you're a group of creepy dictator wannabes with more money than sense, why not just go all out to bending space and reality while you're at it. Come to think of it, the majority of their adventures involved being trapped in some sort of form, be it in a location or a dimension or a remote, isolated location inside another dimension. Must be a specific type of issue affecting people such as Aigami, Diva, whatever his real name was, down on the dueling field summoning an energy sucker monster that looks terribly close to a child's worst LEGO nightmare come of life.

Good thing that Atem was always around to save the day. And Yugi, of course, although back then it was kind of hard to separate who was Atem and who was Yugi and who was the person they were always meant to amalgamate into. There was no doubt that it was Yugi who was saving the day now, clad in some odd cape-like contraption and yet another one of Kaiba's duel discs that probably costs more than a house and a couple of college degrees, maybe even a small city judging by the way Joey's jaws dropped when the price tags were unveiled. Luckily for Joey his jaws were tightly closed now as pretty much everyone dropped to the floor after whatever it was that the Aigami guy did...good thing because he...wait...why were her eyelids getting heavier and the world darker...

Wait. She had to hold on.

It was important, somehow, that she not surrender to this darkness emanating from the Cubic overlord, however tempting it was. Anzu knew instinctively that this sleep was menacing. This wasn't like the time she felt herself separating from her body and going into the Millennium Puzzle. That trip to another dimension and time had felt oddly like going home. That was were Atem was, and he would always be there, never to return, because that was where he belonged. Their places had all too briefly been on a plane of existence that never belonged to either. She lived in a world of dance and gold after seeing him smile and he...well...he was never really coming back, was he? That was why she danced, right? Because jetes and pirouettes were as close as she can get to that feeling of flying with her soul without actually seeing him again?

And then she felt it. The faint stirring of the air, a quickening of the breeze, followed by a near-thunderous roar of color. Amethyst, blue, and that beautiful shade of gold that could only mean that for one glorious, special moment, he was back.

That was her last conscious thought before the colors rushed up and clubbed her over the head and she went, like Joey and Tristan and thousands of people around them, unwilling and dragging her feet into a most unwelcome darkness as Aigami moved.

But she wasn't scared like the others. Anzu had seen- or rather felt- what they couldn't.

He was back. And he was golden. And when he marched towards that awful looking cubic nightmare, he was shimmering and a small smile graced his lips, the same as the one he wore every single time they escaped from some shitty dimensional magic together and the exact one they shared when they pressed their lips together for the first and last time before he left.

They were still gold. She knew Atem, and Yugi too, would save the day as they've always done. Atem would go again and this feeling of weightlessness would leave, too, but wherever he was, she trusted that he was home and they would fly again one day.

Together.

...

Le maison Hermes is back and well...your girl couldn't resist, especially not with ad copy that good.

And besides, it's not a series if all the titular inspirations don't each get their own ficlet, right?