Title: Midna: A Typical Faerie Tale
Genre: romance, drama, hurt/comfort
Rating: T+ for language, slight drug usage, and violence (rating might go up)
Pairings: YamiXYugi (puzzleshipping); BakuraXRyou (tendershipping); KaibaXJonouchi (puppyshipping); MarikXMalik (bronzeshipping)
Summary: 16-year-old Yugi Mouto lives with an alcoholic rock star mom, whose lifestyle lends itself to travel and minimal attachment. The only consistent thing in Yugi's childhood is the visitation by his faerie friends, and his ability to make strange things happen, inhuman things like making a decrepit merry-go-round horse come to life. He is a sarcastic, sometimes bitter, edgy young man with a hidden innocent side struggling to find his place in a world that offers little in return. Then one night, following a disastrous, rainy night with friends, he rescues a Faerie Knight named Yami on his way home. In this brief but pivotal moment, he tricks him into revealing his name, fully aware of the power this gives him, and then finds himself in the throes of a crush on someone he knows is not of this world. But Yugi's trouble truly begins when he discovers that he himself is not human, having been "glamoured" to hide his true, shimmering green, pixie self. He then becomes a pawn in a rival war between two distinct faeries...
Me: All right, guys! The next chapter of this fan fiction is up and running.
Lucy: So sorry it took so long, but we have finally updated it, and we hope everyone enjoys this chapter as much as we enjoyed writing it. A lot of stuff happens in this one, so we hope you are all satisfied with it!
DISCLAIMER: We do not own Yu-Gi-Oh! or Tithe or Ironside. They belong to their respective creators.
Me: We hope you all enjoy this chapter of "Midna: A Typical Faerie Tale"!
Lucy: Here we go!
Chapter One
Yugi spun around on the worn black planks of the boardwalk. The air was heavy and stank of the sea; dried mussels and the crust of salt and new strands of seaweed washed from deep on the ocean floor. Waves tossed themselves against the shore, dragging grit and sand between their nails as they were pulled back to sea. The moon was high and pale in the sky, but the sun was just starting to go down.
It was so good to finally breathe.
Yugi loved the scenery and the serene brutality of the ocean, loved the electric power he felt with every breath he took of the sweet, salty air. It sure beat breathing in the smell of metal and exhaust fumes every day. He spun again, dizzily, not caring if people thought he was weird because of it. He lived for weird. He was weird.
"Come on," Shizuka called.
She stepped over the overflowing leaf-choked gutter along the street parallel to the boardwalk, wobbling slightly on flat-heeled platform shoes. Her glittery makeup sparkled under the streetlights.
"You're going to fall," she snapped at Yugi.
Yugi and his mother had been staying at his grandfather's for a week already, and even though Era kept on saying they would be leaving soon, it wouldn't be a shock to Yugi if they stayed for a few years. They really had nowhere to go. Yugi was glad. He liked the Game Shop. He loved the sea being so close, and he loved being able to breathe without lurching over and hacking his brains out every few minutes.
The cheap hotels they passed were as boarded up as they'd always been. Yugi could understand why. Whenever he walked by, he could have sworn that little eyes were watching him from the distance. It was creepy, but at the same time, he loved it.
Shizuka dug through her purse and pulled out a wand of silvery lipgloss. Yugi spun up to her, his blue coat spinning behind him. His bright white sneakers struck the sand and became the color of dark ivory.
"Let's go swimming," he suggested.
He was giddy with night air, burning with excitement like the white-hot moon. Everything smelled wet and wonderful and all Yugi wanted to do was run and jump and scream and whoop and not care who or what thought he was weird because of it. He loved weird. He lived for weird. He was weird!
"The water's freezing," Shizuka sighed. "Don't act weird around the guys, Yugi. You know it creeps them out."
Yugi paused and watched Shizuka with his amethyst eyes, wary as a cat. "Then how should I act?"
"I don't want you to act like anything—don't you want a boyfriend?"
Yugi rolled his eyes. Shizuka, as well as everyone, knew he was gay. They had known ever since he was little. "Screw the human boys," he said with a small laugh. "Let's go hunt us down some incubi!"
"Incubi?"
"Yeah, incubi. Male sex demons. Plural. Like octopi. And we're much more likely to find them," Yugi smiled, his voice dropping conspitirorially, "while swimming naked in the Pacific Ocean a week from Halloween than practically anywhere else I can think of."
Shizuka rolled her eyes.
Yugi spun again, laughing.
"Why are you always making stuff up? That's what I mean by weird." Shizuka was speaking loudly, but Yugi could barely hear her over the wind and the sound of his own psychotic laughter.
"C'mon, Yugi. Remember the faeries you used to tell stories about? What was his name?"
"Which one? Bakura or Ryou?"
"Exactly. You made them up," Shizuka said. "You always make things up."
Yugi stopped spinning, cocking his head to the side, fingers sliding into his pocket. "No. I never lie." Somewhere in the worn-out hotels, a series of high-pitched giggles accompanied his new string of amused laughs.
The old merry-go-round building had been semi-abandoned for years. Angelic lead faces, surrounded by rays of hair, divided the broken panes. The entire front of it was windowed, revealing the dirt floor, glass glittering against the refuse. Inside, a crude ply-wood skateboarding ramp was the only remains of an attempt to use the building comercially in the last decade.
Yugi could hear voices echoing in the still air all the way out to the street. He dropped a lit match into the gutter. It hissed and was quickly carried away, sitting on the water like a spider. Yugi hoisted himself up onto the outside ledge and swung his legs over. The window had been long gone, but his legs slid against the residue as he slid in, fraying his already tattered jeans.
Layers of paint thickly covered the once-intricate moldings inside the carousel building. The ramp in the center of the room was tagged by local spray-paint artists and covered with band stickers and ballpoint pen scrawlings.
And there were the boys.
"Yugi Mouto, you remember me, right?" Rad-Reily asked. He was tall and thin, and Yugi already didn't like him.
"I think you threw a bottle at me in sixth grade," Yugi guessed.
Rad-Reily laughed. "Right. Right. Don't tell me you're still made about that."
"Nope," he said, but his happy mood was gone, leaving him anxious and drained.
Shizuka climbed on top of the skateboard ramp to where Ryuji Otogi was sitting, a king in his red jacket and dice piercing, watching the proceedings. Handsome, with dark hair and emerald eyes. He held up a bottle of tequila in greeting. Yugi nodded at him once, but refused to acknowledge his presence with words.
Willy handed Yugi the bottle he was drinking. Yugi slapped the bottle away—a little of the alcohol splashed onto the ground.
"Bourbon," said Willy sharply, "is expensive shit."
"Then keep it away from me if you want to save money," Yugi growled, eyes flashing.
He backed off then, grumbling under his breath. Yugi could have sworn he heard the word "imp" somewhere in there, but if he did, he didn't bring it up. Why try fighting with these idiots? Willy resumed trying to take large swigs of the bourbon without gagging. Even hunched over, he was a huge guy. The brown of the top of his head gleamed, and Yugi could see where he must have nicked his chin shaving this morning.
"I brought you some candy," Shizuka said to Otogi. She had candy corn and caramels.
"I brought you some candy," Rad-Reily mocked in a high, squeaky voice, jumping up on the ramp. "Give it here," he said.
Yugi walked around the round room. It was magnificent, old and decayed and fine. The slow burn of bourbon in the background was perfect for this place, the sort of thing a man in a summer suit who always wore a hat might drink.
"What flavor of Asian are you?" Willy asked. He had produced a joint and was smoking it. The thick, sweet smell almost choked him.
He looked around the room again and tried to ignore him.
"Yugi! Do you hear me?"
"Yes, yes. I'm half Japanese." Yugi touched his hair—shaped like a star, with bangs as blond as his mother's. It was the multi-colored hair—Natural, Yugi liked to add, just to see peoples' reactions—that always made people stare when he passed.
"Man, you ever see the cartoons there? They have like them little, little girls with these pigtails and shit in these short school uniforms. Oh, oh—and then there's this really strange show. Yu-Gi-Oh! I think it's called. It's about card games or something. Hey, Yugi, you share the main character's name! You ever play that card game before?"
"Shut up, dickhead," Shizuka called, laughing. "Yugi's not ten years old." Otogi looped one of his fingers through the belt-rings of Shizuka's jeans and pulled her over to kiss her.
"Yeah, well, damn," Willy laughed. "Won't you say, 'It's time to duel!', just for a second?"
Yugi shook his head. No. He wasn't going to amuse them.
Willy and Rad-Reily started to play Hacky Sack with an empty beer bottle. It didn't break as they kicked it boot to boot, but it made a hollow sound. Yugi ignored them, but his head was buzzing pleasantly, humming in time with imagined merry-go-round music. He moved farther back into the dim room, to where old placards announced popcorn and peanuts for five cents apiece.
Against the far wall was a black, weathered door. It opened jerkily when she pushed it. Moonlight from the windows in the main room revealed only an office with an old desk and a corkboard with yellowed menus still pinned to it. He stepped inside, even though the light switch didn't work. Feeling in the backness, he found a knob. This door led to a stairwell with only a little light drifting down from the top. He felt his way up the stairs. Dust covered the palms of his hands as he slid them along the railings. He sneezed loudly, then sneezed again.
At the top of was a small window lit brightly by the murderess moon, ripe and huge in the sky. Interesting boxes were stacked in the corners.
Then his eyes fell on on the horse, and he forgot all the rest.
He was magnificent—gleaming, pearl white and covered with tiny pieces of glued-down mirror. His face was painted with red and purple and gold, and he even had a bar of white painted teeth and a painted pink tongue with enough space to tuck a sugar cube. It was obvious why he had been left behind—his legs on all four sides and part of his tail had been shattered. Splinters hung down where his legs used to be.
Ryuzaki would have loved this. Ryou and Bakura would have loved this. Yugi had thought that many times since she had left Domino, six years past. My "imaginary friends" would have loved this. He'd thought it the first time that he'd seen the city, lit up like never-ending Christmas. But they never came when she was in the city. And now he was sixteen and felt like he had no imagination left.
He tried to set the horse up as if he were standing on his ruined stumps. It wobbled unsteadily but didn't fall. Yugi pulled off his coat and dropped it on the dusty floor. He swung one leg over the beast and dropped onto its saddle, using his feet to keep it from falling. He ran his hand down its mane, which was carved in golden ringlets. He touched the glossy, painted black eyes and the chipped ears—he felt drunk on its unnatural beauty.
The white horse rose on unsteady legs in his mind. The long curls of the gold mane were cool in his hands, and the great bulk of the animal was real and warm beneath him. He wove his hands through the mane and gripped hard, feeling the prickling of his skin. The horse whinned softly underneath him, ready to leap out into the cold, black water. Yugi threw back his head.
"Yugi?" A soft voice snapped him out of his daydream. Otogi was standing near the stairs, regarding him blankly. For a moment though, Yugi was still fierce. Then he felt his cheeks burning.
Caught in the half-light, he could see him better than he had downstairs. A earring in the shape of a die hung from his ear. His long, ebony hair was mussed and tied back. Under the red jacket, his too-tight black shirt showed the easy muscles of someone who was born with them.
He moved toward Yugi, reaching his hand out then looking at it oddly, as if he didn't remember deciding to do that. Indtead he petted the head of the horse, slowly, hypnotically.
"I saw you," he said. "I saw what you did."
"Where's Shizuka?" Yugi wasn't sure what Otogi meant. He would have thought Otogi was just teasing, except for his serious look and his slow way of speaking.
He was stroking the animal's mane now. "She was worried about you." His hand frightened Yugi, despite himself. It seemed like he was tangling it in the imaginary hair. "How did you make it do that?"
"Do what?" he was genuinely afraid now, afraid and flattered both. There was no mocking or teasing on Otogi's face. He was watching Yugi so intensely that he seemed drained of all emotion.
"I saw it stand up." His voice was so low that Yugi could almost pretend he hadn't heard right. Otogi's voice dropped to Yugi's thigh and slid toward the spot between his legs. Even though he had seen the slow progression of his hand, the touch startled him. Yugi was paralyzed for only a moment before he sprang up, letting the horse fall as he did. It crashed down, knocking one of the boxes over. Feathers and packing peanuts poured over him and Otogi and the dusty boxes like a tidal wave.
Otogi grabbed for him before Yugi could think, his hand catching hold of the neck of his black shirt. Yugi stepped back, off-balance, and fell, his shirt ripping nearly in half even as Otogi let him go.
Shoes pounded up the stairs.
"What the fuck?" Willy was at the top of the stairwell with Rad-Reily, trying to shove his way in for a look.
Otogi shook his head and looked around numbly while Yugi scrambled for his coat.
The boys moved out of the way, and Shizuka was there, too, staring. "What happened?" she asked, looking between them in confusion. Yugi pushed past her, shoving his hand through an armhole of the coat as he threw it over his back. "Yugi!" she called after him.
Yugi ignored her, taking the stairs two at a time in the unebbing blackness. There was nothing he could say that would explain what happened.
He could hear Shizuka shouting, "What did you do to him, Otogi? What the fuck did you do to Yugi?"
Yugi ran across the carousel hall and swung his leg over the sill. The glass he had carefully avoided earlier slashed a thin line on the outside of his thigh as he dropped among the sandy soil and weeds. The cold, ocean air of Domino felt good against his burning face and stinging eyes.
Katsuya Jonouchi picked up the new box of computer stuff and hauled it into his bedroom to drop next to the others. Every time his mom returned from the flea market, she seemed to have some kind of new contraption for him to mess around with. He didn't care. He knew his mother was just trying to make him feel included—ever since his dad's death by alcohol abuse, she'd been trying to keep him from ever touching the stuff. Jonouchi never cared for his father. Abusive son of a bitch. He always tried to ignore his dad when he was alive, and the son of a bitch was somewhat tolerable when he was hungover and not beating the shit out of him.
He dropped the boxes and sighed loudly, then picked up his leather jacket with the flaming K on the back and made for the door.
"Can you use that stuff, sweetie?" His mother was in Shizuka's room, folding a new pair of second-hand jeans. She held up a T-shirt with a rhinestone bird on it. "You think your sister will like it?"
"Thanks, Mom," he said as calmly as he dared. "I got to go to work." He walked past his stepfather, who was stooped over getting a beer from the case under the kitchen table. The white cat was waddling along the countertop, its belly dragging with another pregnancy, screaming for canned food or water or something. Jonouchi petted her head gently, but before it began rubbing his hand back, he opened the screen door and went into the lot.
The cool October air was a relief from the recirculated cigarette smoke.
Jonouchi loved his car. It was a primer-colored Chevy blooming with rust spots and an inner lining that hung like baggy skin from the roof. He knew what he looked like. Beaky. Skinny and tall with frizzy hair and pale skin. He didn't live up to his name. Katusya. Victorious. He was anything but. An ex-gang member. An ex-con. Been to jail more times than any other kid his age. Been in more fights than a professional wrestler, all of which determined life or death. But not in his car. In his car, no one knew who he was. No one could see in, and no one knew him as "that kid" the neighbors referred to him as: the gang member, the poor boy whose father died, the one his mother didn't really want to take in again but did, the son no one wanted to have. At least I'm not a drug addict like Mrs. Rei's kid, he thought every time he saw the old woman down the street glaring at him out her window.
Ever day for the last three weeks he had left a little earlier for work. He would go to the convenience store and buy some food. Then he would drive around, cruise past all the rustic joints, imagining he had a semiautomatic rifle in the car and counting how many he could have gotten. "Pow," he'd say, softly, to rolled-up windows as a druggy with bad hair ran up to a group of giggling girls behind the window of a red truck. "Pow, and pow."
Tonight, he bought a cup of coffee and a package of red licorice. He lingered over a paperback with a picture of a metallic dragon glossed over the front, reading the first few sentences to see if anything caught his interest. The game was becoming boring. Worst of all, it was become routine. Nearly a week before Halloween, this was the point when a real maniac would grab a gun and start shooting.
He took a sip of his coffee and almost spat it out. Too sweet. He sipped at it some more, steeling himself for the taste. Gross.
Jonouchi got out of his car and chucked the full coffee into the parking lot. It spilled over the asphalt—a waste of $1.09, but he didn't care. He went inside and poured himself another cup. From behind the counter, a matronly woman with frizzy hair looked him over and pointed to his black leather jacket. "Are you supposed to be a gang member?"
"Not anymore, lady," Jonouchi said, dropping a dollar and nine pennies on the counter. "Not anymore."
Me: Oh no! Yugi's got some funky stuff going on in this chapter, and we finally get to meet Jonouchi, who plays the role of Corny from Tithe and Ironside.
Lucy: Unfortunately, the one person we want to meet hasn't appeared in this chapter. But good news: he's going to appear in the next chapter, so I hope you're all happy when he finally does show up in the story!
Me: Yami is arriving next chapter!
Lucy: Please review, and we shall update as soon as we are able! Thank you all for reading.