Goodbyes Are Irrelevant
By Kaitourei
Summary:
"Our minds, two sides of a coin, never meeting yet always together, bound to each in a cruel twist of fate neither of us wish to have place upon himself." [Short one-shot, Ryou and Yami Bakura speak for the last time.]
Disclaimer:
All respective characters belong to their creator Kazuki Takahashi.
Notes:
Wow, another Ryou Bakura angst fic!
(Yeah, yeah, I know, my originality is daunting.)
Hopefully this is a bit different from the rest. It's supposed to be right after Yami (or Atemu, whatever) defeats Yami Bakura, before he goes to the shadow realm.
(I refuse to believe Yami Bakura s gone for good. He'll come back in Yu-Gi-Oh! R or something…)
Enjoy.
~
Goodbyes Are Irrelevant
"Fairytales, you all know them, don't you? Wherein the handsome prince rides away with his newly rescued maiden after his heroic fight with sinister villain. A villain, who, after repressing the beautiful maiden in one way or another, was killed in a quick seemingly nonviolent way, to avoid any nightmares the naïve toddler, having heard the tale, might manifest in his or her sugarplum filled slumber.
"And it is this childlike quality that makes them so acceptable. The idea of good triumphing over evil - evil, which in the human mind configures as an entity of lawless and inhuman actions, bound to the cause of wide spread chaos and mass hysteria; which the evil, itself, finds amusing - is established as an universal law. Considering this, the human mind accepts the condemning of a seemingly 'evil' person, without remorse. That is - of course - absurd, no human in their life achieves standards of 'evil' flawlessly, unless of course that human or spirit, per se, is me."
My yami pauses. His eyes, my eyes, never leave me. I know he can tell I'm anticipating pain, we can read each other well, like a novel ripped and torn from the constant pound of fingers fumbling through the pages for answers, actions and responses to questions. Our stories have been read, again and again by each other, yet we can't understand the words written on the battered pages - like they were written in a lost language.
He confuses me with his thoughts, his goals, they're as vague to me as the rocky shores of destruction masked by a morning fog. Ideas that I cannot, or will not, accept run in his very being - poster child for the fall of morality, king on a thrown of anarchy. And yet I'm there too, unseen angel of virtue, the right to his wrong, hope for any morality left within the both of us. Our minds, two sides of a coin, never meeting yet always together, bound to each in a cruel twist of fate neither of us wish to have place upon himself.
"You see, Ryou," he continues. "Fairy tales are not like life at all. Life is not like that. Life is cruel and brutal, what little happiness it holds is lost to me. I pity you, Ryou, living in a world filled with people willing to use you and your kindred to save their pathetic asses, whether or not it was their fault they were caught pants down. And how do you suppose these people are treated?"
I could see the unremitting malice in his eyes, "They're praised, Ryou, prayed to like they were saints. Why? Because they saved their kinsmen using the lives of the unwilling. Now who is the evil? The martyrs, already damned in the minds of men, or the men who did what they could to save their own." He chuckles lightly to himself.
"What are trying to tell me?" There's something about him, something that reminds me of an injured animal, right before it dies.
"I've come to the end of my fairytale, Ryou." If we were anywhere where matter existed and there were such things as up and down, he might have sat on the floor in front of me. He was, as I'd never seen him before, weak.
And I dared to ask. "How did it end?"
There was a flash of a wiry smirk; I already knew. "Like they all do."
There was nothing either of us could say. Words were unimportant and foreign. Somewhere deep inside my being I felt something break, like a rib in my chest, snapping. I wish it were a rib, atleast I would know it would eventually heal.
"Goodbyes are irrelevant."
My yami didn't seem to notice the pain. But he didn't have to feel it; he could savor in the tears that fell simultaneously from our eyes.
He stayed however long he stayed. Time was irrelevant in the hollow of my mind - my mind, not ours anymore. I think he was still trying to read my story. I'll never know if he understood the muddled words. I was trying to decipher his and I failed.
Denial. I tried it when he first contacted me and I tried it when he finally left me for good. He's gone, I know that now, and I still wonder. If I had had more time, could I have learned to understand him?
I found a phrase in his story. It took his death to bring me a wisp of understanding. Goodbyes are irrelevant. He didn't apologize. He didn't ask forgiveness. I wanted to forgive him, but he already knew that. Maybe among the broken sentences and scrawled words he found a phrase of mine he could understand.
I'll never really know, I'm just noticing how loud silence can be.