Rating: Still PG-13
Disclaimer: Yui-Gi-oh is not mine, never has been, never will be. I'm making no money from this.
Thanks for the reviews. Puts both plushies on her desk where they glare at her for being late
It was not without doubts that he went. He could wait out on those windswept streets, with doubt gnawing inside his stomach, black cars printed in the corners of his eyes, the back of his eyelids. He can close his eyes and see pale hair and thin bladed nose, he can feel a hand on his shoulder, breath on his face, doubt stillborn inside him.
He cannot take anymore, the pockets are closed to him his mind else where his hands to himself. To pick a pocket one requires a cool, a calm. A calm he lacks now. Every minute is lived on edge for the man who calls himself darkness.
Ryou sits in his room, stares at the lion growing in his peeling wallpaper. The curve of it's tail closes around him trying to drag at him with it's symbolic courage, the claws a darker shade of the wood underneath. If he reached out to touch it he knows it would be only glue and wood, a water stain over his wall, but from here behind his black car eyes he can see it and hear it's roar in the distance like the cars racing down their streets.
He thinks reality is like this: squinting at things behind a veil, until it is drawn away. Maybe he's been hiding all these years in his apartment, quiet, away from the strangers who passed his windows, his hands stealing into their pockets, their purses into their own half dreams.
The watch is colder than cold. His fingertips brushing it, a mist fanning out passed his nails speeding before him, the edges sly and hard. If he puts it to his ear he can hear he seconds counting down since the last time he saw him.
Stick shift, brake pedal, bumper shining in the dim of domino. Ryou thinks Yami can drive with his eyes closed, with elegance and grace still dancing on his shoulders. It's a moment until he passed the threshold of uptown that you realize. Then it's those white white houses, and hills, and palm trees, and lawns hat are greener than green. You breathed on the window and knew that it would turn to crystal in this place that shone like the sun.
You play chess and win. You play chess and watch his hands. You play chess in a house that is all sharp edges and black marble, thin plants molded with wire and money, diamond glasses that you've seen him smash from time to time.
He asks you if you're old enough to drink, you say:
Just.
He says: 21 and gives you a look.
When I was 21 my father had already married a younger woman, I was graduating from Yale, and my mother had never stopped crying.
I'm sorry.
Why should you be?
3 days pass like this:
He plays chess, he listens to his stories in front of the fireplace, he tells him some of his own, he sits in his marble house, Ryou fell asleep there and woke up with the sun tangoing across his collar bones and scraping its heels. Ryou gets drunk. He get's drunk. Ryou tells him about his father who could have played the keys off a piano, and his mother who fell in love with a musician and ran off with a nameless business man. Ryou tells him all these things and feels something trickling into your heart. Things that might be the stirrings of something else, something as strange and elusive as the freckles of firelight in the Yami's eyes, and the thundercloud of emotion that stills and wipes itself away when Ryou catches his reflection.
Behind that veil he's become reckless, filled with that slight tightening of his chest, the breath he can't breathe. He drove up with him to the top of a hill, flooring the car, engine roaring under like the lion on his wall. They are drunk, Yami smokes. Iron red out under the moon. Ryou kisses him like he's spun thin and falling in love, with his fingers curling in his hair, and a hand at the base of his neck.
A/N: erm sorry about the wait, this is the first day since Jun 28 I've been home for 24 hours. Went to England. Anyways I decided to make Ryou a little older than I had originally envisioned him, I always imagine Bakura older, I suppose Bakura's in the 25-27 age range here. Um yes their relationship is um burgeoning here? Sorry this was written rather sloppily and kind of mediocre, I'll do better next time. Please review
