A/N: I just realised when I posted the last segment – this is officially my 240th fic here on FFN. Wow. I officially have no life. ;) Also, first person ficlet! Let's play Guess the Narrator.
4. Crashed – Daughtry
The romance between Katsuya Jounouchi and Mai Kujaku could never be described as a fairytale. At least, not unless you're reading some really messed up fairytales, in which case you need to close the book and stop telling them to your kids at bedtime, unless you want them to grow up to be bank robbers or magical murdering psychopaths or something.
Where was I? Oh yeah, Jounouchi and Mai. So, right, they weren't conventional. But then again, who is when it comes to love and stuff? That didn't make what they had any less real. I should know; I was there. Half the time they didn't know it, or refused to acknowledge it, or were flat-out denying it, but their feelings for each other motivated everything they did, from how they brushed their teeth in the morning to how they played card games, how they looked at the world, and how they saw their places in it. And they matched. They really did. Not like two sides of the same coin, or whatever other clichéd junk you can come up with, but like … like … man, I hate coming up with good similes. They just belonged together, okay? I didn't like it at first, but by the end not even I could deny they were this big co-dependent ball of angst and issues and sex appeal.
Who else would ever throw down their souls for each other in a heartbeat, or risk everything – life, limb, friendships, sanity – to pull the other one back from the dark?
… Okay, bad example. Yuugi did that a couple of times too. And Anzu. And Seto Kaiba, come to think of it. And … ah, screw it; I need to get less weird friends.
But Jounouchi and Mai … despite everything, they worked. And they were addicted to each other, the way Yuugi was addicted to gaming and Anzu was addicting to making sure the rest of us didn't choke on our own cereal or other motherly stuff like that (except my mom never whacked me in the head for offending her 'feminist sensibilities'). I guess the age gap was kind of creepy if you just saw it written down on paper, but Mai never really grew up as much as she thought she had, and Jounouchi … he grew up way too much, and way, way too fast.
I know that part too. I know that part better than Yuugi or Anzu ever did. I used to take him to the hospital when I first got my bike, on Friday nights after his dad had been out for a good time. Or, when we were kids and he'd come to school all unwashed and hungry because it was the only way he'd been able to make it out of the apartment without a broken arm, I was the one who stood up for him and shared my lunch.
I never could figure out why Jounouchi stuck with his dad instead of just moving in at my place where it was safer. My parents offered him our spare room, and they actually liked him (I know – weird). But I guess that's Jounouchi all over: stupidly loyal and devoted when any sane person would've given up and walked away.
That's one of the reasons he and Mai worked. He couldn't leave her to self-destruct, and she couldn't let him sacrifice himself for her. They were one eye-twitch away from matching rooms with padded walls, but what they had? It was real. Realer than real.
And I would've given anything to have something like that, too.