Chapter 27: The end!
At that moment Yami solved the mystery. Because right then, Marik shoved little Yugi into the wall painfully like a wrestler, minus the insinuative positions and weird garb. Yugi let out a confused cry like a dying cat/your grandma and slumped to the ground. Yami could just make out an alarming tinge of red begin to drip from behind his aibou's ear.
Marik reached down and searched Yugi's pockets in what could have been a very suggestive procedure, woo-hoo. Finally, he found in Yugi's jacket a small, bumpy green wallet that had probably been made out of some poor dead animal. He opened it up and pulled out a fiver, which although it sounds like it, is not a type of fish.
"I had money?" Yugi wondered. Then he blacked out for a second from the head pain and the thought of being broke.
Yami's amethyst eyes clouded with rage. He stood up and took a few bold steps toward the offensive darker half of Malik Ishtar.
"So you pretended to love my aibou so that you could steal money from him?" Yami demanded, angrier than he'd ever been in his weird (that's putting it nicely) life. (Alright, so maybe that's an exaggeration; but sorely and surely, this was somewhere on the top ten.) Yugi had been right; this was just like with that double-crosser Risa. Someone, again, had pretended to like him so that they could steal something they wanted from him, except this time it was money instead of Duel Monsters cards. (People were obviously getting smarter.)
"NO!" Marik raised up his arms in an unnecessary grand gesture, stretching the taffy veins and Cheshire grin on his face to a ridiculous, non-human width. "That's the beauty of it! I never said I liked him!" The darker Ishtar's voice sunk into the rhythm of the purr of a cat who'd just had a full meal and was blissfully unaware of the indigestion it would have in a half an hour. "I merely pulled him into an alley. Who ever said I liked him? What were you thinking? Pharaoh, you pervert."
"I—"
"Shut up, Yami." The former Pharaoh turned in surprise to see Yugi standing up, leaning back against the dusty wall, huffing and trying to regain his bearings. A trickle of blood fell past his ear. "Stupid brick wall… You hit me hard," he commented darkly. The way he said these words made it sound as if he wanted to add the word tulips—er, bastard to the end of his sentences.
Yami blinked. "Who are you talking to?" he asked politely.
Yugi rolled his eyes. "Marik. Pay attention to the context."
"But the way the context went—"
"Just stop talking," Yugi growled. Yami blinked a bit, confused like a cheerleader presented with a math problem.
Marik smirked, and hopped fearlessly over toward Yugi like a valiant frog who knew he was about to snatch a fly out of a spider's web. He smugly nestled his forehead against that of the shorter boy. Yugi's nostrils flared.
"Hello, gaki-me," Marik taunted, his voice sweet like sugar.
"…" Yugi socked him.
Marik stumbled backwards. His slender fingers fluttered to his face, coming to rest on a throbbing pinkness.
"You—You will pay for hitting—"
Yugi threw his fist at Marik's eyes, cutting off his threat. The Egyptian let out a disgruntled howl that was cut off abruptly when Yugi shoved him to the dirty ground. Marik landed on his ankle painfully in a twisted position, and the hand he thrust out behind him landed on a white piece of ABC (already been chewed) gum that was twisted like a screw protruding from the pavement, wet, and sticky. Marik's right eye watered, and deluged when he narrowed it to a wet, demonic slant. Yugi had placed him in an intolerably vulnerable exercise position. For Ra's sakes, he looked like he was doing the crabwalk, except more scrunched up and in more of an upright position, if that was possible. This was more unforgivable than Chandler's smoking habit in that episode of Friends he had watched with his shujinkaku last night. Slowly he rose to his feet, his left hand balled into a fist, his right hand's fingers working at picking the wad off of his palm by themselves.
"We don't need the left hand," his right fingers thought. "We'll get this gum wad off of us by ourselves!"
"Shut up! I'm going to hurt something!" the left hand shouted. "RarrglarglexclamationpointGUH!"
Marik liked to think that the second time he fell, it was because his ankle had buckled underneath him, and not because Yugi had simply leaned over and casually pushed him back down, which was the anticlimactic truth.
A large cement truck rumbled down the street, (although how Marik knew it was a cement truck, he wasn't sure, since he was in the alley,) then passed, and Marik then realized that everything above him was silent, which seemed very wrong. The Pharaoh was not yelling like Marik had hoped he would be, and Yugi was enunciating his Japanese so slowly that at first Marik had trouble figuring out what he was saying.
"Gaki ja nai yo to boku wa itta. Kimi ga suki ja nai…"
"What does that mean?" Marik demanded in a daze.
"I'm not a brat," Yugi repeated, "and I don't like you."
"Oh…"
"Oi!"
Yugi and Yami turned to see Malik scale the wooden fence and hop over it, landing nimbly—er, actually… He crashed painfully onto his elbow. However, he stood up diplomatically and brushed himself off blithely before rushing towards the dramatic scene. "Did it work?" he asked Marik in a voice that held such excitement, you'd think the long-haired Egyptian was about to wet his pants.
"Did what work?" Yami had found his voice after being shocked by Yugi's pugnacious display.
Malik gave Yami a sly, ugly grin. Well actually, y'know, Malik is hot. O.o But Malik grinning at people, knowing that they are about to feel bad, well, we can just imagine its ugly. (But it's HOT! o.o) "Did my dumber half lay a wet one on your vessel?"
"O.O" Yami was unacquainted with that phrase. "A wet what?" he asked politely, a tad put off by how strange that sounded. "People don't lay things."
"They get laid," Malik responded, "but that's not the point. Or the question. What I wanted to know was if Marik kissed Yugi."
"No," said Marik hastily, as he stood up and faced forward, shoulders squared and frown taut. He looked like he was standing at attention, ready to give a gloomy salute. Yugi fleered at him. The shorter boy had just realized that Marik was totally whupped by his lesser half.
Malik blinked. "I thought you were going to kiss him before you stole my money back," he said.
Marik shrugged. "Didn't want to," he offered. Yugi snorted.
"Knows he doesn't deserve to," the shorter boy corrected.
The long-haired teen blinked once again. Then, tossing a rebellious lock of hair behind his ear, he squinted at Yugi.
"You don't seem at all that awfully offended by this," he observed disappointedly.
Yugi shrugged. "I don't date dogs," he offered as an explanation. Marik winced, maybe due to the pain his ankle was making him suffer, or maybe because there had been way to many similes and metaphors in this chapter comparing him to animals. "And I happen to be straight, no matter what Tea likes to dream up."
"Oh really," Yami said reservedly.
Yugi looked like he wanted to punch the Pharaoh next. "Yeah," he asseverated. "Really."
"Well, whatever." Malik kicked Marik softly with the toe of his foot. "I'm sure my boyfriend will get over you dumping him and not caring that he didn't kiss you… again."
Marik's face was thrown in shadows by Malik standing in front of him. Now, more then ever, Marik wanted to kill Malik, for lying about being his boyfriend. Sickening knots formed in the Marik's stomach as he realized that he had spent quite a lot of time making out with him the other day… or, more accurately, over the course of last week. But he had been thinking about Yugi the whole—well, most of the time, anyway.
Dear God, Marik realized, I think I, the most evil person on the show, am in love with Yugi. …And I didn't kiss him. Again.
Shit! This sucks. What kind of an ending is this!
Watching Yami look at Yugi with large, wavering eyes, that seemed to hold something just for Yugi, Marik realized that the Pharaoh, also, felt feelings for Yugi. Farfetched as this is, it's my fan fiction and it's just a gag ending so just deal with it. "I thought you were dating Tea!" Yami no Malik found the strength to stand up and point at the Pharaoh in dramatic fashion. Yugi blinked in the face of ripening melodrama.
"Yeah, he is. So?" he said, pushing his shoulders up, then down. His eyes mimicked Marik's favored half-lidded stance, and his mouth was pulled up into a half-amused grimace.
"Then why are you staring at Yugi like that!" Marik yelled, addressing the Pharaoh directly even though Yugi was talking for him. Yugi gasped lowly and turned to Yami, a blush on his face. However, almost instantly after that, the Old Yugi deliquesced and a smirk replaced the blush, which had disappeared like a puff of breath in winter air.
"Yu… Yugi…" Yami felt like a deer trapped in the headlight of an oncoming truck driven by an inattentive trucker who'd just crapped his pants. "Yugi, I…" At least the oncoming truck was carting romance, Yami prayed, as he dragged Yugi off to confess that Tea had agreed to help make Yugi jealous, and that he was sorry it had worked about as much as a mosquito bite on a cold sore.
"Well," Malik said with a smile, "our work here is done." He reached down to help his darker half up. Of course, Yami Malik had stood up a moment ago, but he'd fallen to his knees again in dramatic fashion. I just forgot to mention it.
"I just lost him…" Marik murmured.
"What?" Malik cocked his head at his soi-disant darker half. Marik didn't reply.
He heard Yugi laugh fecklessly from another alley. "Sorry, Yami, I don't feel that way about you…"
"But Yugi! We're destined to be together! We're partners of soul! That means we're soulmates, like… uhm… Bonnie & Clyde or… insert a great example here that will change your mind!"
"Yami, I'm sorry. I told you, I'm straight…"
"BUT YOU KISSED MARIK! I read your mind anyway because I still haven't learned a lesson in this story and my actions must reflect that!" Yami argued. Marik could imagine that redness spilling over Yami's cheeks right now. And he could hear (for Yugi and Yami were fairly shouting) Yugi's reply:
"Just a joke. Some kisses are about as real as Mai's boobs. Nobody ever really falls in love like that. What do I look like, a naïve kid who spends all his time playing innocent games with his tawdry and weird friends who slowly corrupt him?"
"…As a matter of fact…"
"Hush."
"But Yugi! Tea even assured me—she—she said…"
"Tea's a bitch. Just forget about me. C'mon, we have a picnic to go to, where you'll have to look at me all day."
Marik could imagine the gaki-me's smirk. Yugi would never care about either of them, Marik realized slowly. Not this Yugi. Not the New Yugi.
It was Yugi 2.0! This New Yugi would never fall in love with a yarou, a bastard. The New Yugi would never be caught off guard by a kiss. The New Yugi would never admit to loving someone he previously hated, or hating something he'd previously loved. The New Yugi didn't trust enemies. And Yami, just recently, had been his enemy. The New Yugi wanted to be perfect, and wasn't going to fall in love with someone he didn't like. Not with Yami; not with Marik.
"Wow, Yugi's a jackass," Malik remarked with a smile. "We ought to ask him to hang out with us and Bakura sometime. He's really coming along nicely. Not the goody-goody he used to be, eh?"
"Since when are you Canadian?" Marik muttered. He was still crouched on the ground, like an abandoned toad. I am Trevor, he thought. I am Trevor, and I have been abandoned even by Neville. …I need better analogies…This chapter isn't funny, either…
"Don't be silly." Malik flashed him a grin. "Canadian's don't really say 'eh' all the time. That's just the t-shirts. Are you alright? Shot down by little Yugi again, eh? I can't believe you didn't kiss him. How's he going to remember it amongst the dozens of other times he's been throttled? Surely he gets beat up a lot. How do you think Tea tricked Yami into dating her? Surely Yami wasn't stupid enough to not realize that she was doing it for her gain, and not his. What do you think he'd say?" Malik's voice suddenly flew until a falsetto, mimicking the Pharaoh:
"But Yugi! Tea said she'd give me candy after we finally got together. Until then, she made me sit in my underwear and I had to let her whip me and I've got all these bruises and stuff!" The Egyptian cackled evilly in amusement.
Marik glared at his other half, knowing that he wasn't going to be able to look himself in the mirror for quite some time. "You didn't have to lie and say you were my boyfriend," he growled. "Who are we, Luke and Leia?"
Malik smirked. "I thought it was amusing. Anyway, thanks for getting back my five dollars. You did get it, right?"
"Right." Marik slipped the bill into Malik's hand, feeling like a monkey that had been trained to fling poo at toddlers and was sadly getting no joy out of the job. He turned at just the right moment to see Yami and Yugi heading back towards the street they'd been walking down before he'd interrupted him. Yami was trying to say something, the New Yugi was cutting him off. The Old Yugi, Marik realized, had been left behind, like a forgotten pepperoni pizza slice in a world where everyone loved sausage.
…I REALY need better analogies, he griped. Oh, and a spellchecker.
He watched the Pharaoh leave with the New Yugi, chasing after him.
"Actually," Malik said, "now that I think about it… now that I really, actually do the math—I've never been really good at math, y'know—Yugi owed me more than five dollars. …He owed me ten."
Marik's eyes widened. So the New Yugi had gotten away with everything after all.
Gah… geez, what happened to this chapter? It just fell down the tubes. But that's ok. Or is it? Tell me in a REVIEW… Anyway, for those of you who keep asking every single chapter (not that I mind!) of course this is not the true end. I mean, come on! Yami suddenly in love with Yugi? No. Not in this ficcy. Maybe in the fan fiction Playing House. Hm. You should read it and review it. End my shameless plug here.
The next chapter, however, is what really happened.