Fateshipping (Raphael/Yami no Yugi)
. . .
"You were right," he whispers. "I wasn't the person I thought I was at all."
He is very small. Raphael never noticed it before. But he is tiny, in comparison. He doesn't look the sixteen years of his host body. If Raphael had been guessing at his age from afar, he would have said twelve. Thirteen, maybe.
He is even smaller because of the way his shoulders crunch in on himself. The way his face closes off and tilts down at his eyes are narrow as he tries to squeeze away the tears without being obvious about it. His hands curled up into fists and pressed close to his body so that he is thin and small, quivering ever so slightly.
This is not the same intense, fiery pharaoh that he once faced off against. This is, especially, not the dark and evil tyrant that he once imagined.
This is a child, he realizes, all at once.
A child who died too soon.
A child who has no idea what is happening to him and is only trying to do the best he can.
"Pharaoh," he whispers.
The boy shakes his head and tears escape into his eyelashes with the motion. He tries to wipe them away quickly with the back of his sleeve.
"You were right," he says again. "I failed. I messed up everything. I gave in. You were right about me."
He is so small. That fiery façade, the prideful stance, the harsh, intense, confident gaze—they had been masks. Masks to the insecurities that he hadn't want to admit to himself.
Raphael realizes for a second, that he feels like he's staring at himself—small, thin, malnourished, his hair too long and matted as he crouches against a tree in the middle of a tropical storm and wishes to God that things had been different, that his life hadn't been ripped away from him in an instant, that he wasn't alone. He sees himself, dragged back into society, his hair shorn off and his skin feeling bare without the tropical sun as the world around him screams with cars and technology and he realizes that he doesn't belong here anymore. The world moved on without him and he doesn't know how to interpret it.
He looks at this young boy curled in on himself and he wonders how he could not have seen it.
He's even farther from home and his life than Raphael has ever been.
And yet he kept trying. He tried to believe. He tried to keep fighting despite not knowing what was next.
He opens his mouth again, presumably to say once more that Raphael was right.
But Raphael stops him, puts his hands on his shoulders and realizes that his own hands practically swamp the young boy.
"No," he whispers, as those crimson eyes lift with surprise to his. "I was wrong."
. . .
A/N: that was actually a sweet one. Next is Fataleshipping (Vivian x Mai)
