Disclaimer: Yu-Gi-Oh! belongs to Kazuki Takahashi. "Nevermore" belongs to Edgar Allen Poe.

A sermon I heard recently included this line: "The art of living is the ability to live with unanswered questions." That was the starting point of this ficlet.

In Japan, drivers' licenses are not issued until age 18. The hun and po souls may be more of a Chinese concept that a Japanese one, but Bakura strikes me as a Taoist.
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"Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil! - prophet still, if bird or devil!
. . . tell me truly, I implore -
Is there - is there balm in Gilead? - tell me - tell me, I implore!"
Quoth the raven:

"Nevermore."

.

It was an accident, of course.

It had to be an accident, because it certainly wasn't a murder, and Tristan Taylor wasn't the sort of person who would commit suicide.

So after the mess with the police and the coroner and the graveyard office, it was marked down as an unfortunate motorcycle accident. The funeral was held on a bright, cool afternoon.

There were a few that mourned his death, and some that went "That sucks, I'm sorry" before going on with their own lives, and many who hadn't known that he was alive in the first place so the fact that he no longer was didn't mean much to them. It was no more than could be expected. There might have been more of an interest if anything had been suspicious about the event, but the only thing close to that was the fact that Tristan didn't have insurance and had been driving without a license.

Even Joey assumed it was an accident. Right until he learned that Tristan had been driving without a helmet that day.

-----

Tristan was fanatical about helmets. Even before they had met Yûgi, when Joey still assumed he was immortal and told himself it didn't matter if he died so long as he took the other guy down with him, Tristan wouldn't drive unless he and whoever was riding with him were wearing their helmets. It had annoyed Joey to no end, but he went with it.

It wasn't just the safety deal, after all -- Tristan had bought the bike with a fake ID, since he was three years too young to get a real driver's license. That meant he not only always wore helmets, he also (almost) always obeyed the traffic laws, because getting hauled down to the police station was not high on his list of Good Things. Joey wore the helmet for the same reason.

So when he learned that Tristan hadn't had one that day, he realized that there was something off about the whole deal. That's when he started looking for anything else that he might have missed, because he wanted to prove himself wrong.

-----

When he started thinking back, it was almost painful how obvious it should have been.

The week before the accident-that-wasn't-an-accident, Tristan had asked Joey and everyone else if there was anything out of his videos that they wanted. The brunet had a pretty extensive collection of American Westerns and horror movies, with a few miscellaneous titles thrown into the mix; and he'd said that he was cleaning up his room and wanted more space. According to Tristan, he was going to sell off most of what he had, so they'd better pick out anything they wanted before he cashed it all in.

Bakura had had a blast going through Tristan's horror collection and insisted on paying him for the half-dozen movies he carried away. Yûgi and Téa hadn't seen anything they liked, and Devlin didn't bother to look. Joey had taken a subtitled copy of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and thought nothing more about it, since he'd had seemed genuinely happy to rid of the stuff.

And then, the next couple of days, Tristan had been acting weird. Not moody or depressed or anything, but . . . chipper. That was the only way Joey could describe it. It was kind've like the way the brunet had acted when he'd first seen Serenity again, only he tripped over stuff less and wasn't so insufferably vocal with his cheerfulness. It was a little more quiet, like he was looking forward to the weekend.

Joey had harassed him mercilessly about having a new girlfriend, but Tristan just brushed it off. He didn't blush, either, which eventually made Téa and Devlin join the act. By that point, Tristan had started looking annoyed, and finally Devlin said that if Tristan didn't have a new girlfriend he must have a new boyfriend and that he would be glad to personally break the news to Serenity.

The shouting match that'd ensued resulted in the three of them -- Tristan, Devlin, and himself because hell would freeze before he let a sleaze like Devlin near his little sister -- getting detention, which had sucked, but Tristan hadn't seemed to mind. He just slept. Joey sulked manly-like in one of the desks, and Devlin played with his dice in between doing homework.

Joey never did homework in detention. Tristan didn't, either, but he usually made an effort to look like he was. He didn't just out-right snooze -- at least, not any of the times Joey had been stuck there with him.

Joey couldn't remember if Tristan had slacked off on his work during the week or not. He'd never paid that much attention in the first place, since the brunet usually didn't do enough that he could copy off it.

In hindsight, he wanted to kick himself for that.

In hindsight, Joey wanted to do a lot of things.

-----

There was no note, of course.

That was part of the reason why everyone assumed it had been an accident. There was no note, there had been no veiled comments, there had been no signs of depression, Tristan's grades hadn't suddenly fallen off, he wasn't having girl problems or bully problems or anything. Why he had killed himself, if he had killed himself, was known only to him.

It shouldn't have come as a surprise to Joey, when he thought about it. Tristan had always kept his secrets, his problems, his life's story to himself. He played his cards close to his chest, and only gave away pieces of himself at rare and scattered intervals; and then only to the people he really cared about. There was no explanation for why he had died, because Tristan wouldn't have thought that anyone needed to know. That closed-lippedness had been one of the things that Joey had admired about him when they first met, but now it was driving him crazy.

Because it meant that there weren't any answers. All he had to piece together a reason was Tristan's actions before the crash, and Joey just hadn't been paying enough attention for that.

-----

It was the jacket that should have tipped him off. Really should have tipped him off. As in, he was a fucking moron for not noticing.

Or maybe not, but in hindsight it seemed so damn obvious that Joey couldn't help but think that it had been obvious then, too.

They'd all gone to an arcade that Friday afternoon. Téa had been kicking some poor sucker's ass at DDR, and Bakura and Yûgi were busy playing some game or another that was competitive. Tristan had slouched against a console, watching Téa and looking a little bored, so Joey went over to talk to him. It was kinda dull seeing Yûgi win all the time, anyway.

Tristan had started to wave, and wound up tearing the sleeve of his coat on one of the machines. Joey hadn't been looking that hard, so he couldn't remember if it had been an accident or if Tristan had done it deliberately.

Tristan glared down at the rip and swore under his breath, while Joey snickered at him for being a klutz. Then Tristan shrugged out of the jacket and examined it again, his expression eventually changing to resignation. "Eh, I need to get a new one, anyway. These sleeves're too short." He glanced over the coat one last time, then shrugged and looked at Joey. "Hey, you want it?"

"Huh?" He'd been watching Téa grin in victory and look around for another challenger, so he figured he'd heard wrong.

"The coat, Joey. D'ya want it?"

"Aren't you gonna keep it around?"

"Naw. Like I said, the sleeves're getting too short. I must be gettin' more muscular by the day," he'd added with a smirk.

"You wish," Joey had replied, rolling his eyes.

"Shuddup," Tristan had muttered. "Here, take the damn thing off my hands."

"What, you shred it up and wanna toss it over to me? Whadda I look like, a garbage can?"

"Why not, you eat like a garbage disposal. 'Sides, it ain't ripped that bad. You can sew it up. It'll give you a chance to work on your domestic skills."

"What?"

"I'm just sayin', it's obvious Mai's gonna be the breadwinner in yer home. . . ."

He'd been caught up in the argument and in tossing back insults then, until Téa had yelled for both of them to shut up because they were throwing off her concentration. Somehow, he'd wound up taking the jacket home without really realizing it.

He wore it whenever he visited the grave.

-----

Joey forced down his hatred of cemeteries and made sure he visited once in a while. He owed Tristan that much. But he made sure not to step on any graves whenever he went. Joey also tried not to look at the flowers that were placed on the various tombstones along his path. The real ones were always in the process of dying, which seemed like some sick kind of irony, and the fake ones with their eternal life seemed almost obscene in a place where six feet beneath the immaculately mowed grass sat a layer of corpses. Or cremation urns. Joey wasn't sure which bothered him more, the decomposing bodies or the jugs of ashes of what used to be a human.

Once he saw Devlin there. Joey had hung back a few rows away from Tristan's grave, trying to find somewhere to look that wouldn't remind him that he was surrounded by death. Devlin had sat silently at the foot of the grave for almost twenty minutes after Joey had arrived, toying with a pair of dice in one hand, until he finally stood and walked away. He left the dice on a corner of the tombstone.

A lot of times, he saw Bakura there. The other teenager seemed to come once a week, as best as Joey could tell, and he always sat there for about half an hour and talked to the grave. One time during finals' week, he saw Bakura studying a textbook while speaking. In the choices of being rude to the dead or forgetting about them, Bakura seemed to favor the former.

A few months after everything had happened, Joey spotted Bakura at the grave and circled around the cemetery so that he could get close enough to hear what the teenager was saying without Bakura being able to see him.

The other teenager had been describing the past week, down to Tuesday's duel between Yûgi and Joey that Joey had almost won and the spat that Devlin and Serenity had had two days ago. It had creeped the hell out of Joey to realize how closely Bakura must have been watching all of them to be able to relay this, but at the same. . . . He couldn't figure out exactly what he felt about it. It might have been relief -- Joey was too busy living to take notes on life, and he always felt weird trying to talk to the gravestone, anyway.

After Bakura finished describing one of the movies that had just arrived in theaters, he said goodbye. Then he stood up and brushed off his jeans. Joey leaned a little further back against the tombstone he was sitting behind, hoping both that Bakura would walk past without seeing him and that he didn't accidentally have his feet on the grave in front of him.

"Hey, Joey."

"GYAH!" The shock wound up sending him sprawling right onto the patch of grass he'd been trying to avoid. Joey shoved himself up before he could piss off or get infected by the deceased Neil Oakley, 1938 to 1994, and turned around to face Bakura. "Uh. Hi."

Bakura had his hands in his pockets as he spoke. "You could go talk to him sometime too, you know. I don't mind. And I'm sure he'd be glad to see you."

". . . See?" Joey had replied, after an awkward pause. His mouth felt dry. "Hey, can . . . can you see him? When you talk? Like, a ghost or something?"

Bakura had smiled.

"Of course not."

The other teenager scuffed at the grass with the toe of his sneakers, before looking back up at Joey. He kept his hands in his pockets. "I never believed in the hun and po souls. The dead, wherever they go, are out of our reach forever. We just pretend like they can hear us so we won't forget about them," he said, still smiling and watching Joey with that kind but detached expression that was so common to him. "But all the same, I'm sure he'd be glad to see you."

". . . Right," Joey said quietly. "I . . . right."

Bakura smiled a little brighter this time, before pulling his hands out of his pockets and waving as he walked away. "I'll see you in class tomorrow!"

"Yeah. See ya."

After Bakura had left the cemetery, Joey stayed where he was, staring at Tristan's grave several feet away. He balled his hands into fists and jammed them into the coat's pockets.

He understood. There was no restless spirit that was going to give him a reason or explanation, no supernatural phenomenon that would let him know one way or the other what had happened and why. There was no answer. There was never going to be an answer, because the only person who could have given it was gone. There was no ghost.

It was just that Joey wanted one.