Chapter 25: The end!
The next ending! Woohoo! Here's what my quoteunquote "beta-readers" have to say! This chapter is…
"Messed up" – Akio the Dragon Master
Well, that makes me happy.
And that's when Yami thought he had everything figured out. After all, Marik did go in for a kiss at that moment. However, one thing tossed all of Yami's haphazard analysis out the window:
Yugi suddenly had antennae.
This was, in Yami's opinion, rather odd; after all, in the short year that he had been well acquainted with Yugi, (and he was his soul partner, so he knew him fairly well, to say the least,) the short boy with tri-colored hair had neversprouted alien extensions. So, this was something new.
Also, Yami had heard from the movies that aliens were more of a jade color. The antennae were turquoise.
Marik blinked bizarrely at Yugi's new limbs. …Antennae were limbs, right? They were like… ears. Are ears limbs? he wondered, his mouth ajar by at least two inches.
Yugi grinned sheepishly. The blue antennae wiggled blithely.
"Uhm… So… What are those?"
"What are what?" the youth asked innocently. Marik jabbed his pointer finger at Yugi's new hair "accessories," wondering if maybe Yugi had egested a turquoise-colored cyst through a previously unnoted whole in his head. While disturbing to think about, it seemed more likely than the more obvious alternative… That Yugi was… he had…
Yugi reached up with his right hand, touching the antennae like one would a favorite barrette.
"These?" Yugi smiled sweetly. "These are my antennae."
"Antennas?"
"No, antennae," Yugi corrected. "See, you only use antennas if you're talking about, say, the antennas on a TV… but if it's like, you know, the antennae on an animal… or a person..." Here Yugi beamed. "Then, it's antennae!"
"Ok," Marik said unappreciatively. "Like I'm ever going to use that during my lifetime."
"Well, actually," Yugi started nervously, "since you seem to like me, want to go back to my home planet and just chill for a little while? If you do, though," he warned, "my friends are awfully picky about whether you say they have 'antennas' or 'antennae.' "
"Eh… well…" Marik scratched his head. "I didn't know you were an alien."
"You didn't? I thought it was rather obvious," Yugi suggested.
Meanwhile, Yami's jaw had dropped through the alley's cement surface and was well on its way to Mexico. It snapped back into place like a rubber band.
"YUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGI!" he thundered. The petite alien tilted his head toward him.
"Hai, Yami?" he answered. Yami fell over in an anime faint.
"You knew I was there the whole time!" he demanded.
Marik joined Yugi in his vigorous nodding. "You were kind of obvious," the darker one said. The former Pharaoh reeled in astonishment.
Yami got to his feet so that he could sink to the ground in an even more dramatic fashion. How on Earth could he have missed the fact that his aibou was an extraterrestrial, complete with two tiny stalks growing out of his head? The Pharaoh, it was safe to say, was astounded.
Meanwhile, the more malevolent Marik was eyeing Yugi with rising suspicion. "You're not a Yeerk, are you?" His inquiry was bitter; Yugi's responding laughter was sweet.
"Of course not!" he answered. "So, do you want to come?"
Marik blinked. "Uh…"
"C-O-M-E." Yugi tapped his foot in annoyance.
"Come where?"
"No; go." The alien made a whooshing motion with his arm. "With me. To another planet."
After a few minutes of thinking, (with Yami angsting in the background all the while,) Marik enquired, "Will you wear your glasses for me?"
The extraterrestrial turned rouge. "Actually," he explicated, "those are a part of my body. They're like a membrane I can voluntarily slide in and out from between an opening in my zygomatic bone, or my cheekbones."
Marik blinked. Yugi smiled, sheepish and fey.
The taller teen's eyes darkened with thought. "So," he began slowly, and then paused, and started again. "So, I was just about to ask an alien to be my boyfriend?"
The petite blonde's face was positively scarlet. "You—were?" he squeaked. Somewhere, the Alien Yaoi Fan Club squealed.
"YAMI MARIK LIKES MY AIBOU?" Yami sang to the tune of a piece from Carmen. Yugi, Marik, and the singing bum all rolled their eyes.
"Dude," Yugi exclaimed, "You're just getting this now? It was implied in the summary!"
"I'm a slow learner!" countered the former king.
Yugi planted his hands femininely on his hips. "You didn't have any trouble learning the rules to Dungeon Dice Monsters when Duke first played against us!" he attacked.
Yami frowned. "I don't have trouble figuring out heart points," he illustrated, "but matters of the actual heart are a different story."
Speaking of hearts, one of Yugi's six skipped a beat.
"So…" He slid out his glasses and fiddled with them shyly. "You were actually going to say that you like me?" He smiled shyly.
Marik sweat dropped. "Uh… yeah," he answered, distracted by the atypical appendages which were now wriggling independently of each other.
The shorter male beamed. Hearts blossomed in mid-air over his head, and sparkly sounds were heard in the background to accompany this image.
"That… That makes me really happy," Yugi admitted. The loftier teen pointed to the alien's reddening cheeks.
"Is that a membrane too?" he asked.
While Yugi explained to his prospective boyfriend that blushing occurred in his race for the same reason it did in Marik's, Yami was doing weird things. Tossed cruelly into the throes of unsolvable mystery and victimizing plot twists, the king redux had quickly grown exponentially angstier, until he had convinced the singing bum to join him in a few lines of "Room of Angel" from a Silent Hill 4 CD.
"The wind, howling at the window…"
His counterpart turned, regarding Yami with a bit of that Canadian "eh?" written across his face. "Are you going to be alright?" he asked, a worried pout on his face.
The Pharaoh stopped singing and gave Yugi a limp look of misery.
/You never told me you were an alien/ he said softly.
/Yes I did/ Yugi exclaimed. /I told you right after you told me you were an ancient Egyptian Pharaoh/
Yami blinked. ¿Qué/
/You're not Spanish./
"Why is there all this silence all of a sudden?" Marik demanded (since he couldn't listen to the Pharaoh & friend's mental conversation).
Yami remembered when he'd first gone "out" with Tea. Well, he'd tried to deny that it was a date then… but it was. A date interrupted by Mai and Ishizu. Boy, was Yami popular.
Meeting Ishizu for the first time had been very important to him. It was that night that Ishizu revealed that Yami was actually a carrot Superman reincarnated. It was funny to see Tea's eyes grow to the size of saucers as she naively imbibed this message. Then, after Ishizu laughed at her, she apologized for making such an awful joke, and told him he was actually the spirit of a Pharaoh.
He had been SO excited. He'd waited until later that night to spring the news on Yugi.
/Yugi! I'm a Pharaoh/
Okay, so he'd been kind of blunt. And overexcited. …And hyper. Yami's first date marked the first time he'd tasted Splenda. As long as nobody knew he'd snorted it in the bathroom through a straw, (to the consternation and concern of Yugi,) he'd be okay.
/Yeah/ Yugi had replied, bitter that he couldn't find his pajama top/and I'm an alien./
"I THOUGHT YOU WERE JOKING!" Yami screamed.
Marik pointed at Yami. "Never assume!" he recited triumphantly. "It makes an ass out of u and…"
"You're the ass," countered the person of medium height. "I never said assume. And I wasn't talking to you!"
The gay six-year-old huffed indignantly.
"…So, you wanna go?" Yugi played with the edges of his sleeves, blushing and unable to look Marik full in the face. The gay Egyptian (My friend was right. That is fun to write.) face faulted, then blushed.
"Uh… where is your home planet?" He asked lamely.
" Neptune."
Marik sweat dropped. "…I'm not really feelin' it, here." Yugi shot him a hurt look. Luckily Marik corrected himself: "I mean, I don't really feel like going to NeptuneIt's kind of far. I still like you," he amended. Yugi shared a small smile. "You know that if you say you're a Neptunian, you sound like a dish a cat would like," Marik decided. "Neptuna! Great for, uh, alien cats."
"In that case, how about going on a vacation with me?" Yugi suggested frankly. "See, I was actually going on a small trip to another planet. It's closer than Neptune, anyway. But it's still pretty exotic and neat and I think you'll get something out of the trip. …Stop staring at my pants."
"Stop staring at Yugi's pants!" Yami commanded angrily, hands on his hips. Marik rolled his eyes. "Pervert!"
"Baka no Pharaoh," Marik mumbled. "I don't know… where is this planet?"
"Can I come?" Yami pleaded. He was stricken by the fact that he didn't really know his aibou as well as he'd thought, and that his exposed other half was revealing plans of suddenly leaving. Also, he was nonplussed by the fact he hadn't known about this, despite his given ability to read some of Yugi's thoughts. That just kind of rubbed him the wrong way, and gave him goosebumps.
Yugi nodded. "Yeah!" he said. "Of course! That was a given! Tea can come, too." His soul friend sighed. "It's too bad that Tea won't date anybody outside of her own species."
Marik's eye twitched. "The planet?" he demanded.
Yugi smiled. "Oh! The planet is called… Earth," he announced.
Yami's face scrunched up. "Where's that?"
The smile faded from the petite Neptunian. "Maybe I didn't pronounce it right?" he wondered.