Starting Notes:

Welcome back! It's been a long time, hasn't it? We'll talk more at the end. This is a non-dueling chapter, so it's technically shorter, since duels usually have a high word count.

#3: The Girl With Her Face

They had brought her back to the Sakakis' house to rest, with Yuzu extracting a promise from Yuya and Keika that they would let her know what happened when the girl woke up. Keika had lent her bed to the girl for now, and she was sitting at the desk, doing her homework for school when the girl stirred.

Keika turned over calmly as the girl with the same face as her got up, blinking sleepily before she made direct eye contact with Keika. Golden yellow eyes widened, and the girl nearly fell off the bed.

"I know, we share the same face, it's weird," Keika said with a shrug. "Hello."

"Hello?" It was more of a question than an actual greeting. "Uh, who are you? Where am I?"

"We found you passed out outside of our school," Keika said. The brunette frowned, rubbing at her forehead. "Who are you? What were you doing there?"

"I…" The girl seemed at a loss for words for a brief moment. "I don't remember that… I don't remember anything." She shook her head for a moment. "My name's Kanae, I think? That's the extent of my knowledge though." Despite being an amnesiac, she sounded remarkably grounded.

"Kanae," Keika repeated. An amnesiac, showing up on the doorstep of their school?

… she was not equipped to judge this by herself.

"Come down with me," she said. As she left her room, she called out for her mother and brother, who met her in the living room. When Kanae saw Yuya, she seemed to blink in recognition for a moment, before tilting her head in clear confusion. Keika explained the situation to the other two.

"Well, we can't just leave her on the streets," Yuya pointed out, and Keika raised an eyebrow.

You're just going soft because she looks like me…

"True!" Her mother said, clapping her hands together. "We'll try and help you figure out where you came from, Kanae-chan, but for now, you can stay over in our house, alright? You can call yourself an honorary Sakaki!"

Kanae smiled brightly, before her smile seemed to falter for a split second as she glanced over to Keika—clearly, she thought that Keika would reject her presence. She wasn't nervous at all, just accepting the reality of it. (This girl seemed too confident to ever be nervous.)

"... stay if you want to," Keika said, despite the ugly feeling of annoyance rearing itself up in her heart again. "I'm not going to throw you out."

(She wondered if there was something this irrationally ugly in Kanae's heart too. If they were alike in more ways than just their appearance.)

Kanae smiled brightly. "Thanks!" She said. "I appreciate it, uh…"

"Keika Sakaki." Keika gestured forward. "My brother, Yuya Sakaki. My mother, Yoko Sakaki."

"Oh." Kanae swept herself dramatically down into a bow. "I'm at your service then—Sakaki-san."

Staying with Kanae for the next week or so was… odd.

She seemed to get along with Keika's mother like a house on fire—she was cheerful and rather arrogant, had a rather glib tongue and a tendency for jokes, and Yoko had always been charmed by that. It was one of the reasons why she had married that man in the first place, after all. Regardless, Kanae was effortlessly confident—it was as though to her, nothing could go wrong.

Keika envied that a little.

Regardless though, Keika would never say that she minded Kanae, by any stretch of the word.

And also, it certainly helped that…

"Good morning!" Kanae said with a bright grin, even as Keika got out of bed. (They had brought an air mattress into the room for Kanae to sleep on.)

"Good morning," Keika said neutrally.

It helped that she was an early riser too.

The two of them headed down to the living room, helping to start preparing breakfast. Yoko came down halfway, smiling at them, and Yuya showed up halfway through breakfast, completely dishevelled.

It was a rather chaotic breakfast, but Keika wouldn't have it any other way.

(It… hurt, to have a fourth place set at the table. Not because of who was there, but because the very idea of having four people in the house was such a foreign concept now. And Keika wanted to scream, slap the plate off the table, and fling it at all the people who kept saying her father's name, kept pointing out that open gash in their family, and kept on reminding them that four was now three.)

While Keika and Yuya were at their normal school, Kanae was stuck in the house.

… boring.

She stood up, looking around—Yoko wasn't currently anywhere to be seen, but she knew that the blonde woman hadn't left the house yet. She searched through the rooms, before finding herself at the garage outside.

There, Yoko was wiping off a rather cool-looking motorcycle.

"Oh, Kanae-chan!" Yoko called, smiling at her. "Are you curious about this?"

"I am!" Kanae walked closer, examining the motorcycle. Her face fell after a moment though, once she identified roughly what kind of motorcycle it was. It was something intuitive to her, at this point, to look at a machine and roughly know how to take it apart. "Yoko-san, haven't you upgraded your motorcycle at all over the last few years?"

"Two decades, actually," Yoko said wryly. "I just never found the time or money for it, and I was raising Yuya too…" She glanced at the motorcycle. "It's old, but I can't bear to throw it away."

Kanae looked at her, before she looked back at the bicycle.

"Well," she said, "you're lucky that you have me here."

"Hmm? What do you mean?"

"I'll have you know that I, Kanae, am a master at coding and machines," Kanae said with a smirk, before she blinked, quickly adding on another sentence. "Uh, even if I don't know how exactly I know these things. Will you let me help?"

Yoko looked at her, before she chuckled. "Shall we go to the market while they're at school then? We can make it a ladies' trip out, just the two of us."

… this must be what it's like to have a proper mother.

"I'd like that," Kanae said, and when she grinned, it was far more genuine than before.

In the end, driving her motorcycle, Yoko dropped Kanae off at the Duel School. Keika and Yuya were arriving around the same time, so the three of them walked inside—

To see the other four You Show students laughing at something. Keika walked forward first, peering over the shoulder of Yuzu—

"... why is there a bouquet of flowers here?" She said dryly.

"They're from Sawatari," Yuzu said, sounding like she was struggling to hold back laughter. "From Sawatari, to uh…"

"To you!" Ayu clarified cheerfully.

"... what." Keika picked up the bouquet of absurdly bright red roses. They were garish in colour. On them was a note from Sawatari, asking her on a date.

Yuzu couldn't help it, bursting into laughter.

"What's so funny?" Kanae questioned, peeking over Keika's shoulder as well and causing the kids to let out yelps when they saw her face.

"Some guy tried to steal Yuya's cards," Keika said with a shrug. "I defeated him and now apparently he has a crush on me."

"... god, you're a living anime protagonist, aren't you," Kanae quipped.

"Who are you?" Ayu asked, tilting her head cutely. "Why do you look like Big Sis Keika?"

Kanae looked at the kids and shrugged. "Just do," she said. With the simplicity of children, the three of them simply nodded and accepted it, though Yuzu looked somewhat sceptical. "My name's Kanae."

"Then, Big Sis Kanae—" Kanae looked surprised at the address. "Are you going to join our Duel School then?"

"Me?" Kanae chuckled. "Sorry, but I can't be bothered. I'm just chilling around here for now."

Ayu stared at her with puppy dog eyes.

Kanae blinked, tilting her head in confusion. "Is there something on my face?" She said, sounding rather oblivious.

Keika sighed. There's only one way to get Kanae to do anything.

"If you join our duel school though," Keika pointed out, "you'll have more chances to show off how great your dueling skills are to the public." She hadn't actually seen Kanae duel, nor did she know the girl's deck. Even so, considering how large the girl's ego was, appealing to it was likely the only way to persuade her to join.

As she expected, Kanae smirked. "Well, the truly strong don't need to show it off," she said.

"But you haven't exactly proven that you're truly strong yet," Keika pointed out. Kanae's eyes widened, before she laughed.

"Is that you volunteering to be my demonstration?" She asked. "Because if you're really serious, I'd gladly trash you. There is no one stronger than me."

… god, this ego…

Keika rubbed the side of her head. "Sometimes, you really make me want to punch you," she said, though her placid tone didn't match her words. "You know that?"

"Oh, I'm pretty sure that I give that feeling to everyone." Kanae's smirk remained on her face. "So? Are you challenging me, Keika Sakaki?"

Keika looked at her, and then she sighed, taking a step back. She glanced at the red roses again, before she lifted up the bouquet. "... I don't feel like it," she said after a moment, conceding to the other girl. She didn't have the assertiveness to try to push the issue, anyway. Kanae nodded, tilting her head. The brunette gestured to the garish bouquet.

"What do you want to do with that?" She asked. "I'm guessing you're not keeping it around, unless you have a secret thing for overdramatic losers."

"... what a cutting tongue," Yuzu muttered from nearby, though it wasn't necessarily hostile. Keika privately agreed. She herself said a lot of rather blunt and rude things, but Kanae was the kind of person that could say those things with the sunniest smile on her face, to the point where it didn't really feel like she was insulting someone, even though she was obviously doing so. The kind of person that could charm anyone.

"No, I don't want to keep it." Keika shrugged. "He's not my type. And I don't tolerate anyone who messes with Yuya."

Kanae blinked, and then she turned to Yuzu, grinning. "Is she always so protective?" She asked. "Who's older?"

"Yuya's older," Yuzu said.

Kanae laughed. "No way!" She put her hands in her pockets. "You're serious?"

"It doesn't seem like that'd be the case," Yuzu said. "But yes, Keika is younger than Yuya."

"By only a few minutes," Keika said with a shrug. "But he doesn't fight for himself much, so someone has to. And it's normally Yuzu or I."

"... huh." Kanae slowly shrugged. "That's different from what I expected." She raised her arm, hanging her bag over her shoulder. "Come with me."

"... what?"

In the end, Keika decided to go with Kanae out of curiosity. The rest stayed behind to carry on practicing and learning, but…

Well, Keika would be lying if she said that she didn't want to learn more about this strange anomaly that had shown up in her life. This girl who was so radically different from her but who had that face that made Keika feel uneasy.

"Where's the nearest place to the sea?" Kanae had asked, and Keika had led her to the port where she normally went to watch the sunsets. (After all, sunrise and sunset had to be watched at two different ends of the city, the east and the west, for obvious reasons.) Kanae had taken the bouquet and untied the flowers. Most of them had been dropped at their feet. Now, Kanae was slowly pulling the thorns off the roses, flinging them into the sea.

Now, they were watching the ocean. It was quiet there, just the wind and the sound of waves. The sun was beginning to sink lower in the horizon, and the colour of the sky was tinted slightly purple-pink. Keika had never been the type to actively start up a conversation. However, Kanae certainly was not the kind to stay silent.

"So," Kanae said after a moment. "You like the water? You seemed quite familiar with how to get here."

"I like the sun," Keika explained. "But not the sun at its brightest in the morning, because then it doesn't really feel like it's there. It's when it's on the horizon…"

Keika reached out a hand, forming a circle with her fingers.

"It makes me feel a little less heavy."

"Heavy," Kanae murmured. Then, she let out an abrupt chuckle. A rose slipped from her fingers into the ocean. "So, you have that feeling too, huh? Maybe we share more than just a face then."

"Feeling?" Keika repeated.

"Like I said, I don't remember much," Kanae said. Her voice was as confident as ever, despite talking about something that would bother anyone. "But it's been there the whole time, I think… that feeling that I don't really belong in the world." She gestured towards her. "And when I saw you, I got that feeling, I think. That you're something that I've been looking for."

The entire bouquet flew into the ocean, red petals swimming in waters that were warmly lit by the sunset.

"I know that I am the strongest," Kanae said firmly. "But you know, even though we don't know each other well at all, I think that I'm happy having you around. So don't let me down."

"... very high demands coming from an amnesiac," Keika said after a moment. "I don't—"

I don't know what you want from me, but you're not a simple or normal person at all. To read me so quickly…

"So, tell me about it!" Kanae sat down on the ground next to her, brushing her long brown fringe from her face. "What makes you so disconnected from this world?"

Keika looked at her, and then she shrugged. It wouldn't hurt to tell the story. After all, as much as it made her heart burn with fiery anger every time that she thought about it, she was already reminded of it most days. Everyone knew, and she and Yuya and their mother would never escape the consequences.

("It's in the past," her mother had tried to coax her once. "We can't do anything about it now.")

("No," Keika had said, her voice completely flat. "It's his past. It's our present. We're the ones that have to live with it.")

By the time that she had finished recounting the incident, the sun had already set. All the buildings around them were cast in shadow, with only the dimmest of light touching the edge of the rooftops. The pale moon was emerging, a sliver of thin, sharp light in the sky.

"So, would you ever forgive him for it?" Kanae said, leaning back.

"... forgiveness means to stop feeling angry or resentful towards him," Keika said. "... for every day that he's missing from our lives, I want him to suffer for another week. For every week, a few months. I think I once hoped that he would come back, but nowadays, I want him to stay gone. I never want to see him again—because if he comes back, it means that he had the capability to come back and didn't. It means that he really did make that choice himself."

She touched her hair—the same hair that she had dyed red to avoid it being the same colour as her father's hair.

"He's dead to me, either way."

A sharp silence filled the space between them. When Kanae turned to her, she was smiling. However, her smile wasn't the confident, easygoing one from before. The night cast shadows over the left half of her face. Her smile was a sharp, thin crescent that seemed to slice through the shadows, and for a moment, it set Keika on edge.

Kanae glanced back towards the ocean, that uneasy smile changing to the more familiar one from before. "... you know, you have the quintessential hero backstory," she quipped. "Father vanished one day for mysterious reasons, ruining your life. A more heroic person would end up deciding to either follow his ideals or to try and redeem his failures. But you don't care about either, do you?"

Keika frowned. "Why should I?" She asked. "I didn't make that mistake for him."

Kanae tilted her head backwards, grinning. "Exactly! You don't care about any of those things that most people would care about. I'm sure that your brother and his best friend care very deeply about those things, but not you—and you aren't changing your mind for those people. You just want to live your life. I approve!" She took Keika's hand, raising it in the air. "You and I aren't like them, after all."

And—there was a sense of condescension there. Kanae wasn't necessarily looking down on Yuya and Yuzu—but in her matter-of-fact way of speaking, she was simply saying that the world that they lived in was very different from Keika's own.

"So," Kanae continued, "you, and you only, none of the rest. We're friends."

"... you're an overconfident, overly assertive, condescending person, and all around, you seem to intimidate everyone that comes near you," Keika said. She stopped for a moment. "... but all those parts of you… they don't irritate me." She nodded. "Friends, I guess. Just don't expect too much of me. I'm not used to friends."

"Wow, cool as a cucumber." Kanae grinned, and her golden eyes gleamed like a cat's—amused, as though she knew something that Keika didn't. "Sure."

(It was probably the first time that Keika had made a friend without Yuya being the one to mediate between them.)

(Rose petals floated, forgotten, blood red in the water.)

"... what is this guy doing in our house?" Keika said bluntly.

Her mother and Yuya looked up at her. "Oh, you two are home!" Her mother said warmly. The boy with blue hair who was currently sitting at their dinner table didn't even look up at them, still cheerfully munching on his dinner.

The one who broke the silence was Kanae, naturally. "I know it's hypocritical of me to say this," she said, putting a hand on her hip, "but you should really be more cautious about taking in strays."

End Notes:

If there's one thing that I enjoy about this fic, it's that the chapters are a lot shorter by nature.

I decided not to have Sora stalk Yuya to his house, but approach You Show first, because I think that makes more sense in terms of infiltration. Thus, he only shows up at the house at night. Though of course, Keika misses out on the whole incident with Sora because I didn't really want to change it, and I thought it would be hilarious for her to come back and be confused.

Anyway, meet Kanae. She's probably my favourite character in the entirety of Twin Dragons, and that's saying a lot. Why didn't her dragon show up? Good question! Uh. You'll have to wait a while for that. She's not going to duel for a long while more. The fact that her deck is not revealed yet also makes it a huge spoiler to reveal her dragon now—her dragon immediately spoils what deck she's playing, it's that obvious.

Kanae's my favourite character in the entire story, and that's saying a lot. I just think—*clears throat* alright, fine. We can talk about the elephant in the room, which made me stressed out about the idea of posting this chapter for so long. Yes, there is a Link Dimension, and yes, there is a Ritual Dimension, but this story is still not the same as Six Dimensions' plot. If you refer to Chapter 2, the narration at the start states it pretty definitively.

If you're worried about too many characters, I'll say now that the first arc's main characters are Kanae, Keika and one more. This is not an ensemble story, unlike the others that I write. It's quite literally Six Dimensions' 'sister story'. It's very focused on the six counterparts of Zarc's sister specifically. When I was conceptualising the fic that I wanted to write, I came up with both Twin Dragons and Six Dimensions as possible concepts, because I didn't want to just write a standard fic with four additional counterparts and have that be it. I wanted the stories to be unique in their own way. They were both made to tell different stories. Once again, I understand the worries of reviewers like Blue and Jason, and while you may have criticisms of the idea, all I can say is to trust me. In the end, it's still just me writing one of the fics I wanted to write.

Thus, yes, this is once again Master Rule 5, containing Extra Monster Zones, with the exception that Pendulum Monsters can also be Pendulum Summoned to Main Monster Zones. Yes, Link Monsters exist, because I don't know how to write Metalfoes without Electrumite, lmao. I unfortunately have the disadvantage of starting to properly play the game during Master Rule 5, meaning that I'm used to Link Monsters.

That's it. I would respond to reviews, but it's been forever, and this chapter has given me anxiety for too long. I might reply to reviews next time. For now, I'm out.