I suppose an explanation is in order.

For those who read this story initially, you probably wonder why I'm starting over, considering I never got very far. Well, that's kind of the thing. It's been 7 years since I last touched this story, and even then I never really did much with it.

I've decided to finish every story on my backlog. And that included this one, and its sister story. But since it's been more than half a decade since I wrote for either, I thought it would be best to just start over. I'm using the same prompt list as before, but the stories themselves will be markedly different.

I'm a different person now. I'm a different writer now.

It won't take too long to catch up to where I was before, but I hope you enjoy the new versions of the first few chapters all the same.

Have fun, y'all.

I know I did.

.

"Do you have a heartbeat?"

The first thing Noa Kaiba realized, internalized, about Ryo Bakura was this: he was a lot weirder than he seemed at first. It wasn't something especially obvious; it wasn't something that would occur to someone after only meeting him once or twice. But Noa had spent so many years paying close attention to other peoples' behavior—it was all he could do, really; interacting with other people was dependent on the whims of the precious few who'd known about him—and he'd clocked Domino City's resident cryptid boy almost immediately.

Ryo was deeply, deeply strange.

It was one of the things Noa liked best about him.

Now, Ryo wasn't the first person to ask how Noa's body worked, to want to know if he had functioning organs, if he was a person or a machine, but there was something about the way Ryo asked that Noa didn't think he'd noticed from anyone else.

Most people, when they asked questions in that vein, were wondering how human Noa was. They asked it the way they asked a terminally ill acquaintance how their day was going; they were careful, quiet, tentative about it. Like they worried about hurting Noa's feelings, crossing some invisible line of propriety.

Ryo, though.

Ryo asked because he was hungry to know.

Ryo asked like he was trying to be coy about getting Noa's permission to reach into his chest and explore.

"I do," Noa said. "Really, I mostly function the same way any human does. I think, anyway. I have to eat; I have to sleep; I have to keep myself hydrated. All that nonsense. Aniki has been pestering me about vitamins lately. I guess I don't go out enough, get enough natural sunlight. Like he has any room to talk."

"I see," Ryo said, and he definitely sounded disappointed.

"The thing is," Noa went on, conspiratorially, and he wondered idly if this counted as flirting, "we have to make sure nobody looks too close at how everything works in here."

Noa patted his chest, so familiar and yet so foreign. It was his body, certainly. He occupied it. In all the ways that mattered, he was this body. All the same, he'd never been an adult man before, and it was strange. Whenever he woke up, and realized all over again that he was his own age, it threw him. Perhaps being 19 years old wouldn't have been very important to most people; they wanted to jump right over it to 20, or 21. But for someone who'd been 10 for so, so long, being 19 was transcendent.

"Sure," Noa said, "everything works the way it's supposed to. But it's not made of the stuff it's supposed to."

Keen interest sparked in Ryo's eyes again, and he let out a giddy little gasp. "Really?"

"Aniki says I'm his unfortunate awakening," Noa said. "It was making me that got him to finally admit to himself that magic was a full and immutable part of his life." He gestured grandly, like he was presenting himself; Ryo looked him over like he'd never seen Noa before. "How do you make a human body? How do you make one that ages like it's meant to? How do you make it work the way it's meant to? Technology can only mimic so much, and Aniki knows its limits better than anyone. So, he knew: when he finally hit that breakthrough and woke me up, magic had to be involved. There was no other way to make sense of me."

"Wow."

Ryo was blushing.

"Any more questions about how I work?" Noa asked. He winked. "I can give you a practical demonstration if you like."

Ryo eeped.