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Character: Mai Kujaku
Song: Hot Damn – Ivy Levan
Summary: Mai rips off her co-workers on her last shift and leaves in a hurry.
Splitting tips from a pool was bullshit.
That was her work, not theirs. What sort of company placed an emphasis on keeping up their profit margins from gambling and package deals when she was working minimum wage and simultaneously expected to divvy up the extra dough with a pack of leeches at the end of the night? It was more than enough that she had to learn how to play a godforsaken card game to keep her job (no matter how much she came to love the sly ladies in blue), but for the rest of the bumbling crew to take her earnings, from her efforts? It was the last straw, and tonight was the last night they were going to take her cut.
So she felt wholly justified as she stuffed all her belongings in a duffel and quietly made her way to the emergency rafts with her earnings from that night.
She ignored the shouting and subsequent cursing from the cruise liner as the inflatable raft made its way up and down on the shining black waves, clenching her deck in one hand as she gripped the bag with her winnings in the other. She had what was hers, and that was all that mattered.
Character: Leon von Schroeder
Song: Big Bad Wolf – In This Moment
Summary: Leon reflects on his place in his family. He insists he isn’t mad at all.
He knew he wasn’t as important as Siegfried, but he knew that didn’t mean he was unloved. His mother always made sure he was cared for, his education on par with his older brother’s, and there wasn’t a day he went hungry or didn’t have a nice place to rest. He just never got the same attention, never had the same expectations, and therefore never got the same treatment. But there was no good reason to be upset with his family.
So he told himself.
His mother always gave him what he asked for, within reason: new books, new clothes, new music, the newest tech available. He knew there so many who were worse off. There was no reason for him to complain.
So he told himself.
Yet he couldn’t help feeling envious, and perhaps a tinge of resentment towards Siegfried, not that any of it was really Siegfried’s fault. With how badly their father’s mental state deteriorated, no one in their family was in an ideal situation.
He felt useless most days, rueful on many occasions, and outright bitter on several nights, but it would do no good to express it to their already stressed mother and mentally disparaged father, and definitely not to Siegfried.
So he kept to his books.
He enjoyed the tales of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty best, but he did find himself admiring the power of the wolf in the nursery rhyme with the wailing pigs. On the bitter, cold nights, he could understand that hunger, to be so driven that you would annihilate all the barriers in your way, by willpower alone, and slaughter the ones who denied you on the other side, whether they hid behind the walls of a straw house or a fairytale castle.
But those were cruel thoughts, and Leon was better than that.
So he told himself.
Character: Pegasus J. Crawford
Song: Don’t Leave Me – Blink 182
Summary: Pegasus can’t allow himself to move on from his previous love, and it shows. So Isis takes it upon herself to make the decision for him. Broken Sightshipping.
“What do you mean you don’t like it?” he whined. “It’s beautiful. I don’t understand. Cecelia always loved this shade of blue.”
“Perhaps that is so,” Isis said. “But in case you have not noticed, I am not your ex.”
No, he supposed she wasn’t.
He supposed, also, that he could have exercised more restraint in his tone when he told her that his late wife was not his “ex” and she should have better mind to remember that.
“... I see,” she said after a long pause. “Then if she is not an ‘ex’, I shall mind my manners and allow you to continue your relationship with a clear conscience.”
There was little time for him to react as she threw the anniversary gifts back in his face. The thorns on the rose bouquet scratched at his right cheek and he struggled to untangle himself from the satin fabric of the dress as she took advantage of the disarray and pushed him out the door.
When he stumbled to the ground and tore the dress off his head, he could see her younger brother struggling, and failing, to repress his giggling behind her.
“I would say I wish you all the best, and there are no hard feelings,” she seethed. “But that would be a lie.”
Character: Arthur Hopkins
Song: There’s No Going Back – Sick Puppies
Summary: After buying Sugoroku a chocolate shake at Kaiba Land USA, Arthur briefly reminisces on his life. Jiishipping.
“You know,” Sugoroku says, “I find myself wishing we had met earlier.”
“Oh?” Arthur asks.
“I think life would have been kinder to me,” Sugoroku says, stirring his straw in the chocolate shake in front of him. “I had a hard road to get... to this.”
He gestures vaguely to Yuugi, Rebecca, and their friends binging on burgers and fries at the other end of the diner.
“And you think I didn’t?” Arthur asks. He doesn’t judge. His brow only rises in inquiry.
“You would have been good for me, I think,” Sugoroku chuckles. “I wasn’t the best man when I was younger.”
“Hmm,” Arthur hums. His mustache twitches and he pokes at his own shake (strawberry with whipped cream on top).
He thinks back to his Navy days, being busted down from rank and climbing back up due to behavioral issues, nearly losing his head to militants in the South China Sea, and a string of three bitter ex-wives spread over two-and-half-decades of travel and distance.
He had hit his worst low the day he lost his only child, then to shortly after receive a blessing he knew he didn’t deserve. Until the day he had held his newborn granddaughter in his arms, Arthur hadn’t been much of an exemplary person. But then again, he had never told Sugoroku that, did he?
“Interesting to hear you think so highly of me in my youth,” Arthur says, after taking a quick sip of his shake. “Would you like to make a wager on that?”
Character: Kisara
Song: Apex Predator - OTEP
Summary: Before they met, she felt as though she was nothing. Then he came, and she learned her worth. Dark Mizushipping.
CW/TW: Abuse, cannibalism, gore, sadism.
She couldn’t understand, back then, how a mob could take so much pleasure in stoning a woman they had never met, how they could demand blood from someone who had done them no wrong.
She also didn’t understand what he had found so valuable as he told the guards to pull her to her feet. She was foolish enough to think he was showing mercy, for what else could be expected from a high priest?
He wasn’t merciful.
Yet, looking back, he had worked wonders, which was also expected of a high priest.
He was also quite gracious in allowing her little treasures after each encounter with the other prisoners.
“What are you doing?” he had asked one day as he passed her cell.
“Isn’t it obvious?” she had said. “I’m going to make myself a necklace.”
She smashed the remnants of a man’s head against floor and made an appeased sound when the jaw came free from the battered, rounded mass.
“Fingers would work fine, but I like the teeth better.”
“... You can’t make a necklace if you have no thread,” he said, after a while.
She had held up a strand of her hair, and he did nothing then but walk away.
He came back later, when the necklace was finished, and they had a good night together.
Then again, it had always been night in that cell.
She wondered if her body had begun to change. She could have sworn she had claws as she dragged her fingers down the wall to mark the time when the guards fed the torches.
She was there for several months, perhaps, but she confessed to herself that the tally marks also had a tendency to fade and merge in the flames.
She had kept much better time with the accumulating mementos from each training session.
“Her cell reeks,” the older priest had bemoaned one day. “Why do you let her keep those wretched things?”
“She is a dragon,” her high priest had said. “She insists she needs treasure.”
“She gnaws on the fingers when she gets bored with breaking the skulls. It’s disgusting.”
“It’s necessary,” he had said. “If it keeps her happy.”
She wasn’t certain “happy” was the word for it, but he knew how to keep her satisfied.
Until the end of it all.
After the mess with his king and the thief, after sealing herself in the tablet, only then did she know happiness, to finally be rid of that frail, useless body.
“Blue-Eyes!” he had cried sometime later after the grand mess. She didn’t know where she was, only that he had summoned her to confront an oncoming army. “White Lightning attack!”
As the hot, blinding light burst forth from her mouth, she remembered the mob that had stoned her and demanded blood, all that time ago.
When dust settled, and all that remained was the scent of charred flesh and a black scar in the earth, she finally understood.