fishtailing: pill bottle lid

A/N: Part two, buckaroos. The Thiefshipping was a surprise, I guess. Rating gets upped here, so.

rating: M
warnings: very vague hinted-at allusion to self harm that you probably wouldn't even have noticed if i hadn't pointed it out
pairings: Puzzleshipping, Thiefshipping.


They speak again in homeroom. It is probably a few days later, and Atem comes in with a couple bruises on his face and hands. Normally, he sits in the back of the class (like Yuugi), but on the opposite side of room, because the bad boys don't want to be bothered by the teacher, but neither do the outcasts. However, today, Atem sits directly behind Yuugi. This is the source of a bit of scandal amongst his friends.

"Atem, why the fuck ain't you sitting with us?" Says Bakura amidst the early-period classroom chatter. He's talking too fast. He's drumming his fingers too quickly on the desk and chewing manically, fast and hard, on the end of a mechanical pencil. The eraser snaps in half and Atem is pretty sure he swallows it. Bakura gets hyper like this sometimes. If he's secretly on some sort of drug, Atem doesn't know about it.

"I'm not sitting with you cause I'm not sitting with you, chill," says Atem, pulling into his seat all the way. He doesn't bother to bring a backpack to school: just one beat-up white binder with a few sheafs of loose leaf in it. Bakura is eyeing him suspiciously.

"You ain't trying on purpose to sit with Yuugi, are you?"

"What? No, of course not," says Atem, even though he is, and he doesn't know why, and ten years from now he probably still won't know why the fuck he chose to sit next to Yuugi Mutou on the second day of November that year but he won't care because he'll be head over heels in the adventure of his life. He has a brief premonition about this but shakes it off.

"Cause I always thought you two was secret brothers or something."

"Secret brothers? The fuck?" Says Atem, laughing. "You've really lost it now, Kura, man."

"You call me Bakura, not," he draws out the nickname with distaste, "Kura. And what, secret brothers ain't so weird."

"What does that even mean, 'secret brothers?'"

But Bakura doesn't bother responding, because Malik yanks on his hair. Bakura yelps and elbows Malik in the face, half on reflex and half on punishment. "The FUCK was that for?!"

But Malik just laughs. Atem notes that Malik is wearing long sleeves again. He decides to turn his attention away from his two friends and, secretly, to Yuugi. Yuugi is shuffling a pack of playing cards under his desk. Atem looks down at it. Yuugi isn't very good at shuffling; there's the ace of diamonds, over and over again. But Yuugi is shuffling more out of compulsion than anything. He shuffles gracefully, too, with his lithe fingers; Atem gets a little entranced in it, but then the teacher starts talking, and Yuugi freezes and gently place the cards into his desk.

With the distraction of Yuugi's shuffling gone and Malik and Bakura bickering only quietly on the other side of the room, Atem is left to his own devices, and because he's not going to pay attention to the lesson, he decides to think about sex. He turns his face to the large window on the left side of the classroom, where he can see the bare trees and the first delicate hints of frost, and thinks about banging Anzu Masaki from English class, her pretty red moaning mouth in the pillows and his hips against her soft thighs. The little spark from her hand pushing him deeper into her. He'd talk dirty to her. He can tell she's totally submissive, would melt like butter in his hands.

Hearing Yuugi cough loudly calls him back to reality. Yuugi is double over in his chair, and the whole class turns as Yuugi has a minor coughing fit. Someone asks, feebly, if he needs to go to the water fountain. He shakes his head, holding up one hand. Atem closes his eyes and listens to the coughing. He can tell there's a song buried in it, a rhythm of some sort to the cough. The way the body expels dust and germs is a minor miracle, like someone painting stars on their collarbones, almost. Like stitches tattooed into the night sky—that's what Yuugi's coughing sounds like. Atem opens his eyes and watches Yuugi's face contorted in coughing, the grey light from the window on his jaw, making it translucent again, every vein pumping blood and keeping Yuugi's body in stasis and warm and alive. Atem wants to hear more of the beautiful cough, but then Yuugi stops coughing, and Atem's trance shatters and falls to the ground. Yuugi laughs awkwardly.

"Sorry," he says. "Swallowed some air."

The teacher starts talking again, and Atem turns to look out the window once more, wondering why he had such weird thoughts all of a sudden, but then Yuugi taps on his desk.

"You were looking at me," he whispers.

Atem pulls back. "Yeah, so?" He whispers back. "Everyone was, smartass."

"Well, you were looking at me in a way."

"In a way."

"Yeah, you were looking at me like," Yuugi swallows as he tries to think of how to phrase it, "like I was the bones of the planet Jupiter."

A pause.

"Dude, what the fuck?"

"Well, it's a metaphor."

"Yeah, it doesn't make any fucking sense."

The teacher interrupts. "Mr. Dogkeep, please stop your jabbering to Yuugi. We are discussing more important things."

Atem makes sure that the teacher can see him roll his eyes, but he tears a piece of paper out of his binder, borrows a pencil from the kid next to him, and pretends to take notes. Here is what he writes: the bones of the planet Jupiter, the bones of the planet Jupiter, the bones of the planet Jupiter.


Yuugi doesn't ask him about his bruises until after class. Atem is headed for his locker (spoiler alert: he doesn't keep anything in his locker except for games and candy) when Yuugi pulls up in stride next to him and says, "Hey, what happened to your face?"

"What happened to yours, man?" Asks Atem. He snorts a little at his own joke.

"No, I'm serious. Were you in a fight?"

"Why are you asking me? I don't know you."

"I'm just worried about you."

"Why the fuck're you worried about me? I don't know you."

"I'm not allowed to worry about people?"

"If you worried about every idiot you saw on the street, you'd never stop worrying, man." They've arrived at Atem's locker. Yuugi's is on the other end of the hall, but he doesn't let on. Atem dials in the combination, furtively blocking Yuugi's view with his hand.

"It's just, you're pretty beat up. The counselor hasn't asked you about it or anything?"

"The counselor doesn't give a shit about me, man." Says Atem, swinging the locker door open. He grabs a box of Milk Duds, ripping it open with his teeth. He almost offers Yuugi one before he remembers that Yuugi is a total fucking loser, so he slams the locker door shut and scrambles the lock.

Yuugi is a little bit taken aback by this. "What do you mean?"

"I mean, she doesn't give a shit about me. Nothing approaching a shit. Not even an ant shit. She doesn't care about anyone. No one in this whole entire school. She's just here to get paid."

Yuugi studies the bruises on Atem's face. They're purple and blotchy, from directly under his left eye down to the right side of his jaw, and his nose looks almost broken. The lighting inside the school makes them look like watercolors. Yuugi wants to touch them.

"So how did you get those bruises."

"Shouldn't you be getting to class?"

"How did you get those bruises."

"Why am I talking to you, man."

Atem doesn't tell Yuugi how he got the bruises.


Bakura yanks Malik's jeans down. In the boys' bathroom stall, Bakura yanks Malik's jeans down, down, down. Malik is pressing his back up against the blue textured plastic stall wall, breathing light and quick, one of his hoodie sleeves coming rolled up. He prepares to bite the heel of his hand.

Bakura's mouth is like acrylic paints and piano paper. Malik squeezes his eyes shut and winces loudly, gulps, burying his teeth into his own skin. Bakura pulls back and hisses at him to shut the fuck up, man, so Malik does, he stays very, very quiet. When he comes, his thin knees turn to jam and he slides slowly down the wall of the stall like a swatted fly, his eyes glassy from orgasm. Bakura crawls over and rakes his long chipped nails over Malik's bare thigh, making him wince again. No one comes into that bathroom for a while. Outside, it starts to sleet.