Yugi rushed after his soi-disant antagonist. He found him sitting next to a koi pond, making stabbing motions at the fishes with his index finger. The smaller blonde found it hard not to laugh, and had to place his hand over his mouth.
Aw, that's cute, he thought mockingly. He surprised himself by standing there a few seconds longer, watching Marik stab at nothing. Then he shook his head. What am I doing? Time to tell him to leave.
Yugi burst out of the bushes dramatically. Then he tripped due to one of his shoelaces being cuaght in a bramble. "Why were you following me!" he hissed, getting up.
Marik turned, his eyes as wide in surprise as some of the lily pads, or lotus blossoms, were in diameter.
"Stop following me! You know I already spent those five dollars at the arcade, so I can't give them back!" Yugi decried. So much for apologizing. If anything, he'd made things worse. Marik glared at him, his eyes two slits. But Yugi couldn't tell if he was angry, or just trying to look moody.
"You're the one who followed me, apparently. Did you do so just to castigate me, or is there some other reason that I don't know about?" Marik crossed his arms. It made him look moodier and protected his goose-pimpled flesh from the chill that was out of place in the humidity, yet present around Marik.
"Why are you harassing me, lately?" Yugi wondered aloud. "It's not like you. You don't usually play bitch to your other half like that."
Marik thought the slang word sounded extra rough coming out of Yugi's mouth, as if he'd pronounced it wrong, or it belonged to someone else. Yugi didn't need to be saying those words… he was forcing himself to act like this, Marik concluded suddenly. This wasn't gaki-me at all. This was someone different. His words were a mask of some sort that kept chafing Marik underneath his skin.
Before Marik could voice this accusation, Yugi was sitting across from him, jabbing at the water with a stick. "Hey, I can see why you were doing this. It's fun." Yugi smiled. "Poke, poke." Marik stared at Yugi blankly. "Whaaaat?" Yugi asked exaggeratedly.
Wow, his smile is so differently from hikari's. Yugi has a nice smile. …Wow. Where the hell did that come from? But it's obvious that gaki-me is forcing himself to act like this. I can't figure out why, though. He doesn't need to protect himself from anyone. Other people do that for him. I'm someone whom he needs protection against. Protection against me, and Malik, and Bakura, and Kaiba, and me…But I'm the most dangerous one. I should be. But I'm not.
"I don't care what Marik thinks. I'm never going to listen to him. Ever!"
"Oi, gaki-me," Marik began. Yugi looked up at him with large, piercing doe eyes. How could doe eyes pierce? Yugi made it possible. "I only care about fear."
Yugi smiled apologetically at him. "That's so typical of you, Marik, to say something that doesn't make sense like that."
Doesn't make sense?
"But it has the word 'fear' in it, so you consider it a complete sentence, right? It's your noun and verb, subject and predicate." Yugi grinned. "In a way, you could say that word is yours."
Mine?
"How could a word be 'mine'? You don't mean like how Joey coined that phrase 'snufflekai,' do you?" Marik glared dangerously at the smaller boy.
Yugi had to bite his lower lip to keep from laughing. "No… It defines who you are and who you want to be, I guess." Yugi shrugged to add emphasis on the last two words. "Anyway, I followed you to say—"
"Hah! You admit that you followed me!" Marik gloated.
Yugi frowned, brushing a blonde bang out of his face. "I didn't say that," he denied.
"You, 'like, totally' did," Marik argued. "You said, 'I followed you to say…' You said followed."
"That doesn't mean anything. Maybe I was talking to this tree." Yugi pointed to a nearby tree. "Or perhaps that rock." Yugi pointed to a smooth, gray stone at the bottom of the koi pond. "Or maybe I was talking to the koi. They listen better than you anyhow."
Marik pinched his eyebrows together. "Is that so…?"
Why does it hurt, the fact that Yugi doesn't care? Why does it make me upset? Of course he doesn't care. Nobody does. But I keep going. It's good. I feed off of that. So why does my chest hurt from hearing him say that?
"You have some nerve, saying you don't care what I say," Marik growled, deciding to bring it up. The growling made him feel better; acting intimidating made him feel more at ease.
"Ah, yeah—that." Yugi scratched the back of his head. "I'm sorry about that; didn't know you were behind me… I wouldn't have said it if I'd known that you were there, stalker."
"I am not stalking you. I am simply trying to collect something from you. Like the IRS in America. Both of us can wreck your life."
The blonde shruffed. "Hm, glad I don't live there, then." A thin smile blossomed on his face, obviously mischevious in nature. "…Stalker!"
Marik clenched his fists together tightly, standing up and raising one. "Grr! Shut up! Do you realize how much your 'not caring' would have set me back?"
Yugi took a step back for safety. "Set you back…?" he mumbled questioningly.
"Set me back! I mean, if I can't scare a defenseless midget with a bad haircut, who the hell can I scare!"
Yugi scowled at him. "What do you care? The Millennium Items aren't going to be collected anytime soon."
"Scaring people is my way of living alone," Marik told him. Yugi looked at him distastefully, overlooking the confession in Marik's statement.
'That's sad," he said, crossing his arms and looking away.
"Think about it," Marik purred dangerously. "If a cat is cornered, it hisses and tries to scare away whatever trapped it, isn't that right? So the scariest creature on this Earth earns the right to be left alone."
Yugi's gaze spun towards him. "You want to be left alone…?"
Marik sighed, rolling his eyes. "What an annoyance. Bakayarou; you couldn't understand. People like me are better left alone. We don't find anybody."
Find anybody? Yugi chewed on his lower lip. Is he talking about… love? "I can't believe you're talking that way," Yugi said seriously. He hadn't meant to say it as loud as he did, but it snapped Marik back into focus.
"Anyway, I'll kill you if you say you don't care again!" he yelled, stretching his veins out as far as they could go. "I'll strangle you!"
Yugi made a happy face. "- Ooh, fun! You know I love it when you try to touch me Marik," he joked, standing up to leave.
To leave Marik at the koi pond, where he just sort of fell apart, and stared into space until he remembered to go home.
…...What the HELL?