Reconstruction 1: Uncorrected Proofs
Let me start off by saying one thing: there were a lot of stories I meant to write for this fandom and this pairing.
I never did.
Frankly, I haven’t touched YGO in quite a while now, yet Seto and Anzu still tend to drop by for a visit in my head. So what follows is my final nod and thanks to the blue-eyed pair and all that wacky potential I never got to tap. The following story is barely beta’ed and dangerously close to ending its life as an incomplete. But, hey, at least it’s got a pretty picture.
WARNING: AU story. Severely AU. Plenty of Yuugi/Anzu, Anzu/Yami overtones to boot. But don’t worry; in the end it’s all about the girl with the baby blues and the guy with the dragon fetish.
Reconstruction, Pt. 1: Uncorrected Proofs
“... I am an instrument in the shape / of a woman trying to translate pulsations / into images for the relief of the body / and the reconstruction of the mind.”~Adrienne Rich
…I know they're coming for me someday, just a matter of when…
It begins when she’s young. Too young. Five years old and screaming, she wakes up in the middle of the night again and again and again. The sobs bring her parents to her bedside but mother’s arms aren’t enough to ward off the terror and father’s voice can’t banish the dreams. What’s wrong, honey, baby, sweetie, it was just a dream, not real, it can’t hurt you, precious, sugar, don’t cry, don’t cry, it’s over now, don’t cry, Anzu-chan. First comes the nightlight, next comes the therapist but neither is enough to shed light on the situation. Nothing helps.
In the end, Anzu Mazaki continues to dream of monsters.
-X-
In second grade the teacher shows them pictures of foreign places far away, places full of sand and sphinxes and pyramids. She recognizes it. Suddenly, she sees years of dreaming materialize on the glossy page of a National Geographic. Suddenly, Anzu has to press her lips together to keep from laughing out loud because there it is, it’s real, absolutely positively totally real with thousands of years of history behind it, and here she is, sitting in the middle of geography and laughing till she begins to cry.
Egypt, she thinks. It happened in Egypt.
It happened.
-X-
She tries, really, really tries, to grow up normal but it’s not easy. She is who she is and nobody knows it. Sometimes she feels guilty at having to lie to her parents and her teachers and her friends, but what else is there to be done? They all see her as one person, a normal girl with a normal life and in a certain way they’re not wrong. They’re just not all right, either. There’s a secret story living under her skin, a second self thick with dreams and overwhelming understanding. Half of Anzu lives in a now-gone kingdom, walking hot streets in her sleep and passing through the shadows of astonishing temples to cryptic gods. The other half is learning ballet and algebra.
It’s hard but worse than that, it’s lonely. Anzu can’t help wishing it were otherwise. The dark wouldn’t be so bad, she knows, if only someone was there besides her. She’d give anything, everything, for someone like that.
Then high school starts and there he is.
…if you come back, bring a new name for everything…
The first time she sees him, the world shifts above and below her, reconstructing. The sense of recognition is so deep, so certain, that she spends the rest of the week avoiding the boy for fear of having the feeling break her into pieces. I know you, I know your face, your hair, your hands and your self. You’re younger, you’re shorter, you’re Japanese, but it’s you, and I know you. Oh, how I know you.
He says his name is Yuugi.
-X-
She tells him everything.
The dreams, old and new, the history that shadows her every breath and yet does not belong to her. The mystery she has built so carefully in her heart of hearts, the deepest part of who she feels her self to be, Anzu gathers all this to offer as slow words on a sunny afternoon. It’s not easy, not at all, but once she starts she cannot stop. Her heart flows out of her mouth as she tells him all she feels she knows.
Yuugi lets her speak without interrupting. In the end, he does not ask for clarification or explanation or why she’s telling him these impossible things. In the end, he stays by her side, looking sweet and serious, maybe a little surprised, and does not call her crazy.
In the end, he believes her.
In the end, they are ready to begin.
-X-
In her dreams, her shadow memories, Anzu watches a boy become a prince. She watches a man watch his son begin to walk, watches the pride and the love and the sadness. She watches the king and the heir, the father and the child. She watches the boy fall and rise, learning. She watches the father smile and cry, learning. She watches the boy being kind, the father being fair. She watches how much one resembles the other.
Awake, Anzu ponders immortality and wonders if it is cruel or kind.
-X-
Anzu has no reason to like Jounouchi. He’s rude, crude, a boor and a bully, and is always giving girls a reason to slap him. Idiot, she thinks. She thinks a lot worse when he and his fellow ape, Honda, start ragging on Yuugi. When the puzzle box gets snatched away, Anzu thinks of what kind of sound Jounouchi’s dense head will make cracked against a hard desk. But ultimately she’s not that sort of girl, even if Jounouchi is obviously that sort of boy, so she takes the box back, catching it in midair, without resorting to violence. Yuugi wouldn’t like to see her fighting, after all.
She’s still angry hours later, waiting for Yuugi at the game shop. When he finally comes, and she sees the bruises, Anzu’s halfway down the stairs to tear Jounouchi’s face off. But Yuugi stops her and says it’s ok, everything’s fine.
He calls Jounouchi friend. Anzu doesn’t believe it but Yuugi obviously does so she lets the anger go. They spend the rest of the day with the puzzle, Yuugi as the hands and mind, Anzu as the intuition. While he works, small fingers on the old gold, Anzu talks about new CDs, dumb school rumors (millionaire transfer student?), and whether the dead can dream. She feels, sometimes, so far away from the things inside her that it is hard to believe anything remembered could’ve ever been hers in any way. The distance is lonely because the faces she dreams of are dear to her now, familiar as friends. Yet she has never seen them.
But you found me, says Yuugi.
You’re different, she says. What she doesn’t say is, you’re not the same. Because Yuugi has the face, the heart, and the brilliance of the boy-prince-king she dreams of, but he is not him. The realization is surprisingly painless. Anzu has never regretted meeting Yuugi and with each day it’s becoming more likely that she never will. Still, she doesn’t say any of this out loud. Yuugi being Yuugi, however, hears it anyway.
What do you think, he asks, is something that’s everywhere but invisible?
The puzzle sounds too simple for Yuugi to bother with and so Anzu suspects the answer isn’t simple at all.
Later, when Jounouchi, bruised and dripping, brings the missing piece to their doorstep, Anzu thinks that maybe the answer doesn’t have to be particularly difficult either.
It only has to be true.
…there's always more than one last call calling you…
For a time everything is normal. Or at least typical. She walks to school with Yuugi, delivers a mild smack down to Jounouchi, watches Honda trip over air anytime Miho passes by, eats lunch, takes notes, skips across the game shop’s step to smile at Sugoroku, does homework on the sidelines of the duels that Yuugi always wins, shoves her books in her bag, and promise to see them all tomorrow. Her days level out into a standard: stable.
Then it comes again, a pepper-itch on her brain, grains of sand blowing from the desert beyond to scratch against her mind’s eye. Something is coming, something is due to change. She wants to hide from it, to stick her head and thoughts and heart somewhere intuition can’t touch, somewhere so blindingly ordinary that the warning will overlook her. But the message throbs beneath Anzu’s pillow, threading new old dreams of heat and stone into her ear. It tugs her skin, pinches the bones of feet and wrists, look here, look, look, this way, pay attention. She dreams, briefly, of a boy, but not the one she knows. He is not her familiar prince and his face is closed, unreadable. Like the message haunting her, Anzu cannot untangle the meaning from the shadow.
Then Seto Kaiba walks into class, tall and cold, and Anzu understands.
~-X-~
*The quoted lyrics are from the Weakerthans…whose albums I don’t listen to, but love to read.
I never did.
Frankly, I haven’t touched YGO in quite a while now, yet Seto and Anzu still tend to drop by for a visit in my head. So what follows is my final nod and thanks to the blue-eyed pair and all that wacky potential I never got to tap. The following story is barely beta’ed and dangerously close to ending its life as an incomplete. But, hey, at least it’s got a pretty picture.
WARNING: AU story. Severely AU. Plenty of Yuugi/Anzu, Anzu/Yami overtones to boot. But don’t worry; in the end it’s all about the girl with the baby blues and the guy with the dragon fetish.
Reconstruction, Pt. 1: Uncorrected Proofs
“... I am an instrument in the shape / of a woman trying to translate pulsations / into images for the relief of the body / and the reconstruction of the mind.”~Adrienne Rich
…I know they're coming for me someday, just a matter of when…
It begins when she’s young. Too young. Five years old and screaming, she wakes up in the middle of the night again and again and again. The sobs bring her parents to her bedside but mother’s arms aren’t enough to ward off the terror and father’s voice can’t banish the dreams. What’s wrong, honey, baby, sweetie, it was just a dream, not real, it can’t hurt you, precious, sugar, don’t cry, don’t cry, it’s over now, don’t cry, Anzu-chan. First comes the nightlight, next comes the therapist but neither is enough to shed light on the situation. Nothing helps.
In the end, Anzu Mazaki continues to dream of monsters.
-X-
In second grade the teacher shows them pictures of foreign places far away, places full of sand and sphinxes and pyramids. She recognizes it. Suddenly, she sees years of dreaming materialize on the glossy page of a National Geographic. Suddenly, Anzu has to press her lips together to keep from laughing out loud because there it is, it’s real, absolutely positively totally real with thousands of years of history behind it, and here she is, sitting in the middle of geography and laughing till she begins to cry.
Egypt, she thinks. It happened in Egypt.
It happened.
-X-
She tries, really, really tries, to grow up normal but it’s not easy. She is who she is and nobody knows it. Sometimes she feels guilty at having to lie to her parents and her teachers and her friends, but what else is there to be done? They all see her as one person, a normal girl with a normal life and in a certain way they’re not wrong. They’re just not all right, either. There’s a secret story living under her skin, a second self thick with dreams and overwhelming understanding. Half of Anzu lives in a now-gone kingdom, walking hot streets in her sleep and passing through the shadows of astonishing temples to cryptic gods. The other half is learning ballet and algebra.
It’s hard but worse than that, it’s lonely. Anzu can’t help wishing it were otherwise. The dark wouldn’t be so bad, she knows, if only someone was there besides her. She’d give anything, everything, for someone like that.
Then high school starts and there he is.
…if you come back, bring a new name for everything…
The first time she sees him, the world shifts above and below her, reconstructing. The sense of recognition is so deep, so certain, that she spends the rest of the week avoiding the boy for fear of having the feeling break her into pieces. I know you, I know your face, your hair, your hands and your self. You’re younger, you’re shorter, you’re Japanese, but it’s you, and I know you. Oh, how I know you.
He says his name is Yuugi.
-X-
She tells him everything.
The dreams, old and new, the history that shadows her every breath and yet does not belong to her. The mystery she has built so carefully in her heart of hearts, the deepest part of who she feels her self to be, Anzu gathers all this to offer as slow words on a sunny afternoon. It’s not easy, not at all, but once she starts she cannot stop. Her heart flows out of her mouth as she tells him all she feels she knows.
Yuugi lets her speak without interrupting. In the end, he does not ask for clarification or explanation or why she’s telling him these impossible things. In the end, he stays by her side, looking sweet and serious, maybe a little surprised, and does not call her crazy.
In the end, he believes her.
In the end, they are ready to begin.
-X-
In her dreams, her shadow memories, Anzu watches a boy become a prince. She watches a man watch his son begin to walk, watches the pride and the love and the sadness. She watches the king and the heir, the father and the child. She watches the boy fall and rise, learning. She watches the father smile and cry, learning. She watches the boy being kind, the father being fair. She watches how much one resembles the other.
Awake, Anzu ponders immortality and wonders if it is cruel or kind.
-X-
Anzu has no reason to like Jounouchi. He’s rude, crude, a boor and a bully, and is always giving girls a reason to slap him. Idiot, she thinks. She thinks a lot worse when he and his fellow ape, Honda, start ragging on Yuugi. When the puzzle box gets snatched away, Anzu thinks of what kind of sound Jounouchi’s dense head will make cracked against a hard desk. But ultimately she’s not that sort of girl, even if Jounouchi is obviously that sort of boy, so she takes the box back, catching it in midair, without resorting to violence. Yuugi wouldn’t like to see her fighting, after all.
She’s still angry hours later, waiting for Yuugi at the game shop. When he finally comes, and she sees the bruises, Anzu’s halfway down the stairs to tear Jounouchi’s face off. But Yuugi stops her and says it’s ok, everything’s fine.
He calls Jounouchi friend. Anzu doesn’t believe it but Yuugi obviously does so she lets the anger go. They spend the rest of the day with the puzzle, Yuugi as the hands and mind, Anzu as the intuition. While he works, small fingers on the old gold, Anzu talks about new CDs, dumb school rumors (millionaire transfer student?), and whether the dead can dream. She feels, sometimes, so far away from the things inside her that it is hard to believe anything remembered could’ve ever been hers in any way. The distance is lonely because the faces she dreams of are dear to her now, familiar as friends. Yet she has never seen them.
But you found me, says Yuugi.
You’re different, she says. What she doesn’t say is, you’re not the same. Because Yuugi has the face, the heart, and the brilliance of the boy-prince-king she dreams of, but he is not him. The realization is surprisingly painless. Anzu has never regretted meeting Yuugi and with each day it’s becoming more likely that she never will. Still, she doesn’t say any of this out loud. Yuugi being Yuugi, however, hears it anyway.
What do you think, he asks, is something that’s everywhere but invisible?
The puzzle sounds too simple for Yuugi to bother with and so Anzu suspects the answer isn’t simple at all.
Later, when Jounouchi, bruised and dripping, brings the missing piece to their doorstep, Anzu thinks that maybe the answer doesn’t have to be particularly difficult either.
It only has to be true.
…there's always more than one last call calling you…
For a time everything is normal. Or at least typical. She walks to school with Yuugi, delivers a mild smack down to Jounouchi, watches Honda trip over air anytime Miho passes by, eats lunch, takes notes, skips across the game shop’s step to smile at Sugoroku, does homework on the sidelines of the duels that Yuugi always wins, shoves her books in her bag, and promise to see them all tomorrow. Her days level out into a standard: stable.
Then it comes again, a pepper-itch on her brain, grains of sand blowing from the desert beyond to scratch against her mind’s eye. Something is coming, something is due to change. She wants to hide from it, to stick her head and thoughts and heart somewhere intuition can’t touch, somewhere so blindingly ordinary that the warning will overlook her. But the message throbs beneath Anzu’s pillow, threading new old dreams of heat and stone into her ear. It tugs her skin, pinches the bones of feet and wrists, look here, look, look, this way, pay attention. She dreams, briefly, of a boy, but not the one she knows. He is not her familiar prince and his face is closed, unreadable. Like the message haunting her, Anzu cannot untangle the meaning from the shadow.
Then Seto Kaiba walks into class, tall and cold, and Anzu understands.
~-X-~
*The quoted lyrics are from the Weakerthans…whose albums I don’t listen to, but love to read.