31_days | 4 March - Yu-Gi-Oh! - "attempting to see a connection..." [Anzu/Dark Yuugi]

Title: attempting to see a connection when all he can see is maybe a tree
Day/Theme: 4 March 2007 / however you live, there's a part of you always standing by, mapping out the sky
Series: Yu-Gi-Oh!
Pairing: Anzu x Dark Yuugi
Rating: PG
Notes: This is a little story about one-sided love from two sides, because Dark Yuugi is dim that way. Set at the start of the Battle City arc, after the visit to the museum. The title is from the discarded themes, a line in the song "Lesson #8" in Sunday in the Park with George.

The window started it.

Anzu's desk was placed in front of the window to catch the light. She was seated at her desk, doing schoolwork and attempting to do it well, both because she felt she ought to and because it would keep her parents out of her hair for a while. Still, her thoughts wandered away a little, and she glanced out the window, and she thought idly: That's what the Other Yuugi looks like! Like he's always looking through a window no one else sees.

Anzu stared out the window, and then her gaze sharpened and shifted. Now she was looking at the glassiness of the window pane and frowning. Then she bent over her books and scribbled furiously at her work, all while thoughts sped through her mind, wild to get their work done.

Finally Anzu yelled, threw down her pen and shoved away her schoolwork so that it could stop distracting her. She glared at the window again as she decided: Essentially, the problem would be solved if she dressed like a Duel Monster.

The really annoying thing! - Anzu smacked her fist on to the desk - was that the best monster for the job wouldn't be something like Black Magician Girl or a Harpy Lady. No, for him: Kuriboh. She'd have to frizz her hair into an afro and wear carpeting before the Other Yuugi really noticed her.

Anzu pushed herself back in her desk chair and looked down. In her line of vision was proof that she deserved to be looked at - not as much proof as in Mai's case, but still. Even when the Other Yuugi had defended her against Step Johnny, it had been for her sake, in that perfectly noble way of his, without any sense of jealousy.

She got up just to stamp around in her room and felt a little awful, through the frustration, that she wished the nameless pharaoh was Yuugi after all. Yuugi had hormones. Yuugi knew what girls were and was interested.

Yuugi didn't look far away all the time.

The stomping around stopped, and she stood in the centre of her room, remembering. She thought of the Other Yuugi standing in front of the tablet of the Pharaoh's Memory and letting his eyes run over every bit of it. He hadn't understood a thing, even after Isis spoke up - maybe especially after that, because he looked like he wanted to go running after everything she was talking about.

He was far away. He knew that he was from thousands of years ago, now, and somehow he also knew that it was what he needed to be.

Anzu crossed her arms and looked out the window, judging the cars, tarred roads, neat sidewalks, and walking people. It didn't look anything but normal and natural, but the Other Yuugi saw in a different way; he might even see things that none of them could...

Her eyes sort of prickled and her throat got tight, and Anzu was horrified at herself. She told herself that even though things were different now, she didn't know what they might turn out to be in the end, and she dropped into her desk chair again. For some reason she was exhausted.

Anzu didn't cry, but her head dropped on to her crossed arms and she drooled on her maths, and she woke up with a sharp gasp from a dream of the Other Yuugi leaving.

*

Yuugi knows what he's thinking, so he doesn't think it for long. Anzu flits lightly through his mind - appropriately for her, and he smiles in his half-hidden way - and he lets his thoughts touch tentatively on the way she moves, often utterly carefree and sometimes immeasurably burdened (mostly when she was with him). Anzu doesn't have half measures, and as much she loves those who want her as she is, she keeps moving to somewhere else. He couldn't catch hold of such a different kind of brightness, but he can watch it in appreciation and a little awe, hoping that at least he'd always know the heights she got herself to reach.