Prongshipping (Priest Set x Insector Haga)

(...I don't even...)


He reached up on tip toe, reaching as far as his little arms would go. His glasses threatened to slip off, but he didn't notice, so intent was he on his task.

"Come on," he muttered. "Come here, little guy."

The beetle sat stubbornly out of reach on the glass. Sticking his tongue out in concentration, six-year-old Insector Haga reached just a little bit further...

But it was just a little too much further. With a yelp, he wobbled, wheeling his arms desperately to keep from falling over backwards. He managed to stop his backwards descent, but then instead he headed forward. His face smacked into the display case. The beetle fell from the shaking case, and it skittered away under another case indignantly. Haga groaned, his forehead hurting.

"Oh, Haga! What have you done?"

Haga glanced up at his aunt, shaking her head with dismay.

"Look, you've knocked over some of the pieces in the display case! How can you even do that?"

"Uh...I fell," Haga said, ducking his head.

"Into the display case?"

"There...there was a beetle on the glass, and I wanted to take him outside..."

"It's always a bug, isn't it?" his aunt said, her lip curling. "I can't believe this. I can't take you anywhere!"

Haga ducked his head even further, as though trying to hide in his bangs. His aunt blew out in irritation.

"I'm going to find the museum staff. Hopefully you didn't break anything in that case. Until then, don't move."

Haga nodded slightly. His aunt hesitated a moment longer. Then he could hear her heels clicking away across the marbled floors, until the sound disappeared completely. Only then did Haga look up. The items inside the case had, in fact, fallen over. One of the jars looked slightly cracked, and Haga withered. He was going to be in so much trouble.

He put his hand to the glass, staring at what he had done. Then he looked around, wondering where the beetle had gone off to. It had been really big and black. He had liked it a lot. Much more than the dusty old history here. He had asked his aunt to take him to the natural history museum, because there was a big insect exhibition coming up. But she had said something about curing his unnatural obsession with creepy-crawlies, and took him here instead.

Haga leaned against the display case to wait. He stared at the floor.

"Mom would have taken me to see the insect exhibit," he whispered to himself.

"Is something the matter?"

The voice was accented with something Haga didn't recognize. He looked up to see a tall, bronze-skinned man standing in front of him. Blue eyes looked out from under a mop of thick brown hair, piercing and somehow understanding.

"No," Haga said quickly. "Nothing's wrong."

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah."

Haga looked back down, hoping the man would leave. He wasn't supposed to talk to strangers. But the man didn't move. After a moment, he bent down to look into the display case.

"I see some things have fallen over," he said. "That wouldn't happen to be your fault, would it?"

Haga blushed furiously, but still didn't look up.

"It...it was an accident," he said. "I was reaching for a beetle. I fell."

The man didn't respond to that. There was a strange stillness between them for a long moment. Then, a weird, tickling sensation seemed to fall over the room. For a moment, Haga couldn't move. When he could, he looked up. His mouth dropped open. Everything in the display case was standing upright again – not only that, but they looked fixed, as though brand new. They didn't even look like that a moment before he had knocked into them.

The tall man caught his shocked gaze. A slight, sardonic smile twitched at the side of his mouth.

"Those used to belong to Isis," he said. "Nothing real special, actually. They held her kohl and things."

As Haga watched, the brand new shininess of the objects started to fade, until they looked exactly as they had before he had knocked into it. He looked up at the man, awestruck.

"Are...are you a wizard?" he asked breathlessly.

The man shrugged.

"More like a magician, actually. Wizards are something else."

He seemed to consider the boy for a moment.

"Are you alone?" he asked. "Where are your parents?"

Haga ducked his head. He really shouldn't be talking to strangers.

"My mom...died last year," he said anyway. "I don't know about dad. No one talks about him. I'm with my aunt, now. She went to find the museum staff."

When he glanced up again, the man's eyes were hollow, almost sad.

"Parents gone, hm?" he said. "I know the feeling."

He looked away for a moment. Then he turned around and walked to another display case. He stared in there for a moment, and Haga thought their conversation was over. But then the man leaned down and stuck his hand under the display case.

"Iew, Khepri," he said softly, in a language Haga did not know. "Iew."

Nothing happened for a moment. Then the man stood up and walked back to Haga. Haga drew in a breath, and his eyes widened as he saw what the man held. It was the black beetle he had been trying to get to before!

"This is a scarab," the man said softly. "Did you know that the ancient Egyptians used to worship this little bug?"

Haga listened with wide eyes, absolutely fascinated. He didn't know about this. People used to worship bugs?

"It pushes a ball of dung across the earth, in the same way that Khepri rolls the sun, Ra, across the sky every day," the man said.

He spoke to Haga, but his eyes seemed to be somewhere else entirely. Slowly, he took Haga's little hands and opened them up. The beetle hesitated, and then crawled into Haga's waiting hands. Haga held the scarab gently, staring with wonder at it.

But when he looked up back at the man...

He was gone.


A/N: I don't claim to be able to speak ancient Egyptian, and I apologize for my inevitable terrible Google inspired translation and grammar. Khepri is a real Egyptian god, though, and everything I said about the dung beetle/scarab should be true. (Notice the disclaimer XD). This one gave me so much trouble until I remembered the scarab beetle. I thought it was a good segway between Haga and Egypt. And in my head canon, Haga's mom died of cancer when he was little, and his dad has never really been in the picture. I thought Set might sympathize with him, having lost his own mother to bandits and never really knowing who his father was because he had to leave them behind. Anyway, that's about as close as I can bring these two. Next is Promiseshipping (Yami no Yugi x Yugi x Mokuba).