AN: GAAHHH! Sorry for missing last week's update; I was out of town visiting my awesome cousins.
Thanks so much to EgyptianSoul.88, Aya El maghrabi, HermioneSakuraGardner07, Crescentia Crux, and AlwaysRunning9 for leaving such lovely reviews! It's so nice of you guys to take the time to comment, so really and truly, thanks!
Disclaimer: I do not own YuGiOh
Tea followed the young man who she was pretty sure was a vampire out into the night, her purse full of improvised weaponry hanging heavy on her shoulder.
Her heart hammered in her chest; a strange mix of terror and excitement, resolve and guilt all wrapped around the fragile organ, squeezing it into a war drum rhythm.
She did not like this quest thrown upon her, did not like such terrible responsibility. It made her reflect cringingly upon all the times she had expected such miracles out of Yami. For the first time, she had insight into his position, and she marveled at how well he had always born up beneath the pressure. Tea resolved to make things right with him over the next few days. If she made it to then.
No, no, she couldn't think like that! The girl shook her head fiercely, lengthening her strides to catch up closer to the rude boy, who was walking faster than most people could run.
Tea would do this. She had to, and she was going to, and that was that, and anyone who said otherwise could take it up with the machete in her purse.
Setting her face in a fierce glare, Tea dogged the umbrella toting boy farther and farther through the silent city. They passed only as few late night stragglers, an old homeless man, a couple of drunken college students, a silent pair of children who stared quietly up at the stars on a bench by a bus stop.
"In here," the boy said abruptly, stopping equally so. Tea bumped into his back, and he sent her a scathing glare.
He had led her to a park on the fringes of Domino City. It was not the main park, but it was sizable and overgrown with trees and shrubs. Tea had been there once or twice as a child. However, the area became well known for muggings at night, so her parents had stopped taking her there.
"It's in the park?" she asked, hands hovering over her purse as she tried to decide what weapon to use.
"No, I just brought you here to gawp at the moon," snarked the boy. "Yes, it's in the park. Stupid humans." He shoved his black bangs out of his face, gazing broodingly into the trees. "Here's how it's going to go down: I'm going in first. Once I've found its location, I'll come get you, tell you where it is, what it is, and what its weak point is. Clear enough?"
"Er, yes," replied Tea, somewhat taken aback. Somehow, she had expected to be sent blindly into the darkness, swinging her machete wildly and roaring like a berserker. Not that she had a very good roar, or anything, so it wasn't much of a loss.
He grunted at her and slipped forward into the shadows without giving her time to even thank him. So, so rude.
She spent the next five minutes standing awkwardly by a street lamp, swinging her arms at her side and flinching at every small sound.
"I can do this," she muttered to herself. "I can do this; I can do this."
"Are you actually talking to yourself?" interrupted the vampire, slinking back out into the light as quickly as he had left.
"Gee!" Tea jumped back from him, instinctively ripping out her baseball bat with the nails in it and holding it aloft.
"Give a girl some warning!" she hissed, slowly lowering the weapon. "I might have hit you!"
"No, you might have embarrassed yourself even moreso by trying to hit me," the boy replied smugly. "Now listen up; I don't want to have to repeat myself. The monster in there is a Snatcher. Good news is, it's not very big. Only about the same size as you."
"Only?" Tea questioned weakly.
"Shut up," he replied. "Anyways, it's a flier. Fast in the air, but awkward on the ground. Likes to swoop down on its prey from above and snatch it up with claws and teeth: hence the name. Their heads are hard, but their stomachs are soft. Stab it there."
"Okay," Tea replied, deciding that this definitely rated on the list of weirdest conversations she had ever had. Top eight, for sure. Slowly, she put the bat away, taking out her machete instead.
The boy eyed her for a moment, and his face softened fractionally. "Ready?" he queried.
Nodding, Tea attempted a smile. It came out wobbly and lopsided, and the boy shook his head but questioned her no further, instead beckoning her to follow him once more.
The park was incredibly intimidating at night, made all the more so by the knowledge that somewhere within its dark confines waited a monster. Tea crept as quietly as she could after the boy, holding the knife in trembling hands. He moved with inhuman grace and silence, and Tea envied his ease as she cautiously hurried after him, twigs and leaves crunching under her feet.
He motioned for her to halt as they came to the edge of a small clearing. The moon hung above, throwing some relief onto the scene. They crept up behind a bush, peering out into the silver tipped grass and surrounding sentinel trees.
"There," the boy murmured into her ear, pointing at a particularly tall oak tree. "Look in the upper branches."
Tea obeyed, staring up into the black outline of the tree. It took her a second, but then she spotted the bulge in one of the top layers of the canopy, a solid splotch of darkness that didn't move as the leaves around it did in the gentle night breeze.
"That's it?" she breathed, her palms beginning to sweat.
He nodded silently, giving her a slightly impatient look.
"How do I get it down?" she whispered.
"This is as much as I can do," he told her, not unkindly, and it was unnerving how much more terrifying he was when he wasn't trying to be cruel. "The rest is up to you."
Blowing a bit of hair out of her eyes, the girl nodded jerkily. "Okay," she said numbly. "Okay. Thanks for showing me the way."
Before she could question herself further, Tea forced herself up. It was a very different feeling to go into battle knowingly than to have it sprung upon her. Somehow it scared her more. But she refused to stop now, not when there was so much at stake, and so she put one shaking foot in front of the other, edging around the border of the clearing towards the tree the Snatcher sat in.
Her mind scrambled for a plan. Perhaps she could lure it somewhere confined, where its powers of flight would be limited? Maybe she could set some sort of trap for it?
In the end though, Tea had none of the tactical genius of Yami and Kaiba. She had resolve, wavering courage, and a bag full of sharp pointy things, so she worked with what she had.
"Hey you!" she shouted, running into the clearing and waving her machete around with a not-so-good roar. "Come and get it!"
The Snatcher screeched, a terrifying sound that made the hair on the back of her neck stand on end. It took to the skies, spreading large leathery wings that seemed to be made out of the same darkness as the night sky. Tea could only tell where it was by the way it blotted out the stars.
It circled once, and then dove down at her with incredible speed. Tea threw herself to the side at the last second, and it missed her by mere feet.
She got a good look at it as it went by. It somewhat resembled a bat, with large ears placed high on its hairless head. Teeth filled its gaping mouth, with particularly thick canines, and its wings ended in clawed fingers. Its eye sockets were empty but for a speck of light in the center, like candle flames with no wick or wax.
With a beat of its wings, it lifted away again, rising high into the air again. Tea braced herself, placing her feet strongly against the earth as she craned her neck back, peering up and up. The Snatcher screamed again, and it dipped a bit below the tree line, concealing itself from her view.
Alone and vulnerable in the clearing, Tea focused on listening. Although she strained her ears, she could not hear the Snatcher. She considered going back into the trees herself, but decided against it since it would reduce her field of vision. Slowly, she turned in a circle, attempting to keep watch of the entire circumference of the clearing.
Irrationally, she experienced a moment of humiliation over how ridiculous she must look to the boy: turning round and round like a dazed sheep with her machete clutched inexpertly in her fingers. Then a dark shape launched itself from the trees to her left, and concerns about appearances fled her mind.
Tea dodged again, but the Snatcher had expected this, and it swerved sharply to follow her. It bowled her over, claws digging into her shoulders as it bit at her throat. Thankfully, Tea had enough presence of mind to keep the machete up between her torso and the Snatcher's, and she shoved the point of it towards the stomach of the beast. It recoiled with a scream that rattled her teeth, and Tea wildly swiped at its wing as it moved up.
Her aim was true, and the thin membrane of the appendage parted easily beneath her blade, sending a spurt of dark blood splashing through the air. The Snatcher screamed again and threw itself back at the girl, too enraged to think clearly.
Tea lost herself to instinct then, as the creature clawed and bit at her savagely. She pressed herself up close to its chest so it couldn't get at her neck, and she ripped at the long ears on top of its head, correctly identifying them as sensitive.
There was a rush of wind, and she realized with a jolt that the Snatcher had lifted both of them into the air. Increasingly desperate, the girl frantically stabbed at the monster's back, only to have the knife skitter off of hard scales there.
The stomach, she remembered. In a move of insane acrobatics, she looped her legs around the Snatcher's waist and let her upper torso fall free. This exposed her to the creature's teeth again, but it also gave her a clear shot at the monster's abdomen. Even as needle sharp teeth tore into her shoulder, she buried the knife in the gut of the Snatcher.
The beast shuddered, a full body ripple. The flames in its eyes flickered and died, and its teeth slid back from her flesh.
Its death was almost tragically silent, Tea felt, and then she remembered that they were still up in the air.
"Oh crud," the girl groaned as the body and she began to plummet. The Snatcher's flight had carried them over the trees, and the breath was knocked from her as the first row of branches interrupted her fall. The next few seconds blurred together in a series of branches and bark and the unrelenting grip of gravity tearing her down.
Heavily, she landed on the park grass, the Snatcher's body falling a few yards to her right. Tea blinked up at the stars and leaves above and tasted blood in her mouth.
"That was hilarious," the pale boy commented, leaning over her. "You flopped down through the trees like a rag doll."
"Glad I could entertain you," Tea replied, head still spinning. "Um. I don't think I can stand up."
A smile twitched at the corner of his mouth, and suddenly it didn't matter so much that her shoulder was bleeding and her head was ringing, because Tea loved to make people smile more than lazy Sundays and ice cream and almost as much as dancing.
She smiled loopily back, and wondered if she maybe had a concussion. Probably not. Hopefully not. Erm.
To her surprise, the boy sat down beside her, his long, lean form reclining in the dew ridden grass. "Not half bad," he said quietly, and somehow Tea felt it was the highest praise she had ever been given.
She nodded roughly, not trusting herself to speak.
They sat in silence for several minutes, and eventually, Tea forced herself to sit up. Her body obeyed with only a quiver of protest, and she heaved a relieved sigh that she hadn't broken any bones. A few fireflies danced between the tree trunks closest to her; she marveled at the world's ability to segue so easily from horror to beauty.
"Look." The boy's solemn voice cut through the peaceful quiet, and Tea obligingly turned her head towards the direction he indicated.
"Is that-what is that?" she asked.
The Snatcher's body had begun to glow slightly, the same fire colored light that had lit up its empty eye sockets. She scrambled to her feet, but the boy flapped a hand at her, an unspoken assurance of safety.
Slowly at first, and then more quickly, the corpse dissolved into small specks of firey light. They hovered for a moment, and then, moving much in the same gentle bobbing way that the fireflies did, drifted in a stream towards Tea. They changed color as they did, from orange to the same pink as the stone in her hand. And indeed, it was the stone that they moved towards. They swirled around her hand, gently meshing with the gem in her palm, which lit up as they did.
Tea held her breath as the last of the sparks slipped into the pink stone. It blazed with light for a moment, casting forth a rainbow of illumination. The girl felt a jolt run through her body as it did, and then the glow faded, and the alarming sensation was gone.
"What was that?" she demanded. The boy scratched his nose, contemplatively, and Tea about blew a fuse.
"No. No you are not doing the whole mysterious silence thing with me. I just had a monster corpse cremate itself into little glowy sparkles that did some weird merge thing with a weird stone in my hand!" she shouted, stomping her foot. "Now talk! Or-or I'll bleed on you! Or poke you with my knife! Once I find the knife!"
"Calm down and shut up," the boy ordered, rolling his eerie black eyes. "I was going to tell you; I just wanted to think of the best way to put it."
Breathing heavily, Tea glared at him, looking quite a sight in her blood splattered clothing. "Think quickly," she advised dryly. "Really quickly."
The boy sighed in a long suffering manner, and Tea felt her eyebrow twitch.
"Fine, fine," he sneered. "It's like this: the barrier between my world and your world takes energy to maintain, alright? So when you kill one of my people, a monster, as you put it, their life energy is transferred through the gem in your hand to the barrier."
Tea thought about this for a moment, eyes still narrow. "…and is that all?" she asked suspiciously.
The pale boy coughed, and Tea pounced. "Aha! Spill the beans!" she crowed, waving a finger in his face.
"I was getting to it!" he objected. "Their energy…may have an impact on you as well."
"May?"
"Will. Will have an impact. I trust you noticed you've been healing faster than ordinary? Maybe felt a bit more resilient?" He flicked at a piece of grass, and Tea sagged back down to the ground.
"Wait," she begged, rubbing at her forehead. "Wait. So the pink rock in my hand is making me….not so human anymore?" Her voice rose to a squeak at the end of the question.
"No, no, no," the boy assured her. "Well actually, yes."
"Yes?!"
"Just a little," he flapped a hand at her again, a gesture she was beginning to hate. "It's not like you're going to grow a third eye or anything. You just won't be all the way human anymore."
Tea felt a little bit hysterical. The magic thing she had gotten over a long time ago, with Yugi and all their madcap adventures. The monster thing she had more recently adapted to. Being no longer human was really pushing it though. Seriously, killing her was one thing, screwing with her DNA was something else.
"Okay," she said, breathing through her nose. "Okay." And then she put her head down between her knees and screamed, because that was obviously to only logical reaction to this kind of thing.
She traipsed up the stairs to Ryou's and her apartment at some unholy hour in the morning, the pale boy following her for a change.
Weariness bore down upon her with a tangible weight, and Tea groaned as she tried to force her fingers to fit the key in the lock. She kept missing it, and she just knew the stupid monster boy was smirking at her.
Finally, she succeeded in opening the door, and she slouched into the interior of the apartment with a sigh of pure relief, yanking off her shoes and heading straight for her room, where she collapsed gracelessly upon her bed.
"You'll be fine in a day or so," the boy told her from her doorway, and the girl half-heartedly chucked a shoe at him.
"I'll be back in about a month," he continued, not even batting an eye at her attempt to assail him with grungy footwear. "That's when the next of my people should appear on this side of the barrier. We'll repeat the process: I'll find them, report back to you on what they are and how best to fight them, and then lead you to them."
He turned around, presumably to leave, and Tea called out after him.
"Wait!" she said, brown hair flopping around her face as she darted up. "Um. Thanks. I don't know why you're helping me, but thank you."
He paused, and Tea swore something like guilt filled his dark eyes for a moment. Her stomach clenched in fear, but she couldn't explain why.
"Don't thank me yet," he muttered, bitter and hurting and defensively cruel. And then he slipped away down the hall, footsteps too light to be heard.
Confused, Tea resigned herself to going through the necessary motions for bed. She packed away her weapons purse in the back of her closet, stripped off her bloody clothes and soaked them in the sink, and took a quick shower before bandaging her wounds and slipping into pajamas.
This done, she burrowed beneath her blankets and pretended as best she could that the world didn't exist.
But the morning proved her illusion a lie, and she rose reluctantly, slouching her way into the kitchen in her pajamas.
Ryou was already there, whipping up a batch of pancakes.
"Good morning!" he called cheerily over his shoulder, and then turned fully to look at her. Tea blinked at him, suddenly painfully aware of the bruises that must have appeared on her skin overnight.
"Good morning," she replied quietly, and then her breath caught as Ryou smiled oh-so-gently at her.
"Extra maple syrup for you, I believe," he recommended, and she laughed aloud and hugged him around his spatula.
"You make things ninety percent better just be being in the same room with you," she muttered into his mop of white hair.
"Should I be charging for the privilege?" he teased back.
Tea gave a watery chuckle, letting him go and beginning to set the table for them both. "Sure, we'll set you up with a KaibaCorp patent. You can be their next step in world domination."
"I think they probably already own the world," Ryou mused. "They just haven't told the rest of us yet."
And that was their morning, full of smiles and understanding and slowly healing wounds, on the inside for one, on the outside for another.
Across the city, Yugi stirred in his bed, slowly opening purple eyes.
"Yami?" he questioned, voice rough with disuse. There was a sound of a gasp, and then quickly thudding footsteps. Yami's red eyes appeared in his vision.
So red. Crimson and sanguine and so, so red.
"Yugi," breathed the Pharaoh, reaching out with trembling fingers to touch the smaller boy's face. "Thank the gods you've woken, we were so worried…"
Yugi sat up. His mind was full of singing and breaking and light. The dreams that had kept him company in his slumber still remained with him, darting through the corners of his vision, laughing and sobbing.
"It's breaking, Yami," he whispered. "It's breaking all the time."
And Yami looked at him more fully, and he saw the lingering rainbows in his partner's eyes, terrible and truthful, and he feared more than ever for them all.
AN: Yay cruddy cliffhanger! Thanks for reading; feel free to drop a comment. I'd really appreciate some feedback!
Next Time: More adorable crazy pants Marik, more creepy crazy pants Yugi, and more in denial Kaibas. Oh yeah, this shiz is on.