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[FIC] heartlines - tendershipping
SUMMARY: Based loosely on this picture. High school AU with Ryou as the mild-mannered but actually freaky class representative and Bakura as the terrifying klepto delinquent with a thing for freaky class representatives.
They first met at an ice cream truck. The melody was silly and the treats were soft-served by a soft-hearted man, who took change from children and nothing from their worst.
“It’s free, kiddo,” he told the sweaty ones with scratched faces and bruised knees. “On the house.”
Then he would drive away with his silly songs following.
Bakura would chase the man and his truck, would scream fuck and shit and asshole until his tiny lungs wore themselves out. At this point, the ice cream cone in his right fist was crushed and dribbling dairy down his wrists; the coins in his left fist were gripped even harder.
Ryou would watch the awful boy run and laugh himself hoarse.
Afterwards is a playground.
Bakura sees a flash of white swinging high and grabs its collar.
“What the shit?” he yells, jerking Ryou from his chained seat.
Bakura shakes him.
“This is my fucking hair, you copycat,” he hisses between each vicious lurch. “You copy, you fucking fake, you little bitch.” The words taste wrong somehow, but Bakura manages to puke them out.
“It’s mine,” says Ryou, choking.
“You stole it!”
“It’s mine too,” says Ryou with a note of elder brother finality, “We have to share it.”
Then he smiles and pats Bakura’s fingers gently, but Bakura doesn’t want to let go of his newfound twin, he wants to grip even harder, wrap his arms and legs until Ryou would ache just right.
He lets go anyway.
From then on, they are joined at the slip of hands clasped loose, the rip of Band-Aids with rough happiness, the hip of Ryou’s father who never gives Bakura anything he asks for, but lets him take meals and toys and his son.
One day, Ryou brings a deck of cards underneath the slide. Bakura flips one over, and laughs.
“These aren’t Duel Monsters. They’re fake, kiddo.”
“They’re tarot,” says Ryou, frowning.
Ryou insists his cards are better, and makes Bakura play fortune teller, which isn’t very pleasant.
Ryou tells him terrible things with excitement, about his shitty past, shittier present and shittiest future.
“Are you saying I’m doomed, no matter what?”
Ryou shrugs. “Sorry.”
Bakura punches the sand they sit on. A snake is hit instead, and bites his fist.
Neither boys are very surprised, but Bakura screams fuck and shit and asshole all the same.
The snake is pale and wounded. Bakura names it Diabound and brings the snake home. Ryou forges his father’s signature and files a wild animal report to the Domino Parks and Recreation Department.
Their playground is trampled by adults and decommissioned for a week.
Ryou laughs the whole time.
The snake never regains its colour, and dies within the month.
The funeral is Ryou’s idea. The day is hot, so the walk to the cemetery shrivels Diabound and hastens its rot. The boys aren’t bothered by the stink, but passerby give them a wider berth than usual.
-
“There’s Amane,” says Ryou, pointing to a large headstone. Bakura nods, lays Diabound down, and starts digging with a stick he had picked up on the way there.
Fifteen minutes later, the hole beside Amane is deep enough for the small stiff body. Diabound is buried, while Ryou prays to the Virgin Mary and Bakura throws dirt on its scales.
“I’m glad we’re together, dearly beloved,” Ryou tells Bakura, staring at him for a moment, and then the ground where his sister laid.
“You’re really fucking weird,” Bakura tells Ryou.
They play Apartment between the dead until the sun goes down.
Bakura’s tanned mother fears death more than anything.
“Skin cancer,” she says. “Any day now.”
“I’m sure it won’t happen to you,” says Ryou politely, but she ignores him and shaves her head anyway.
“I’m dark and afraid of dying,” she sobs through the razor’s snipping.
Ryou consoles her and she calms down. They continue their magic lesson.
When Bakura gets home, his mother and Ryou are witches in all but name.
“Stop drawing, I want to play Apartment,” he yells.
Ryou shakes his head and closes his sketchbook. “No. I’m always the one who gets miffed.”
“Then lower the damn rent already, Landlord.” He eyes his mother’s head. “If the suits see you like that they’ll send me to another damn foster shithole.”
Ryou tells him not to talk so rudely, but Bakura couldn’t give a lifetime of courtesy for anyone he isn’t even related to. (Ryou is different because he’s the same.)
Ryou’s sketchbook terrifies him.
“What’s this?”
“Your mother.”
Bakura squints at the monster smiling cruelly and embracing a damaged doll.
“Looks good.” He turns the page. “What’s this?”
“My mother.”
An angel/demon hybrid holds a bleeding heart that looks like it’s still thumping.
Bakura rips the pages out. Ryou doesn’t respond.
“Doesn’t it bother you that I always wreck your shit?” he asks him.
“You’re haunted,” says Ryou. “I like it.”
Bakura doesn’t see him for a week. He holes himself up underneath the slide, burns the pages and curses stars, cards, snakes, and thumping hearts. He tries to curse his dead family, but he doubts the gods even noticed their domestic destruction.
Why else would they haunt him so?
“It’s my mission,” he tells Ryou. “My manmade destiny.”
“Don’t be stupid,” screeches Ryou. “We aren’t even in high school yet.”
He scratches and pleas and draws pentagram on post-it notes but it’s no use – Bakura is now an elementary school dropout, delinquent extrodianaire.
Bakura doesn’t know why the spirits want him to dig up the dead mayor of his hometown. He doesn’t know why train conductors are so easy to swindle, why the trip back home takes years longer than he thought it would. But they do, they are, and it does.
When he gets there, his hair is long and yearns for stark pallor. The local pharmacy supplies him with dye; Bakura doesn’t bother taking more from people who already have so little.
Bakura robs several houses in the rich neighbourhood of his hometown. With the pawn funds he buys postcards and draws golden eyeballs on their backs, writes “I wish I could SEE you again!” in fat stupid letters.
The deed is done, the body scorched.
His mouth tastes like bleach and burning. He tries to pray to the Virgin Mary like Ryou did on that hot day, but the words are fouled with his fucks and shits and assholes.
Domino High is where they meet last.
Classmates cherish the nicknames they christen their worst. They call the transfer student the Thief King, which Bakura doesn’t mind. He has never been royalty, never been chained to a food pyramid before. He almost welcomes the classification, because he has always ruled well and has always been hungry.
Ryou is still creepy as fuck and polite as hell. He smiles and nods in tune to the daily dichotomy, offers kind words to any poor soul wishing to lament about homework. Bakura is glad to hear Ryou is class representative – behind every king is his better, after all.
His hair is still as deathly white as Bakura’s, but his striped shirt is gone. He wears the uniform precisely, as with the rest of him.
Bakura is tan from skipping school and working downtown. He wears his new uniform with blood splotches and the drippings of meat on his sleeve.
After school they are left alone in the shady classroom they stake rule and cleaning duties over.
“Souvenir,” he says and gives Ryou the Ring.
“I want to rip your guts out,” Ryou tells him. He grabs Bakura by the collar, and shakes and screams and throws him onto the desk. Postcards tumble out and Bakura nearly breaks his lungs from laughing so hard.
“Get bent,” says Ryou behind a cheerful smile.
Last meetings are overrated, so Bakura defies the stars and the astral nobodies. He meets Ryou where he can – at school, at home, under the slide.
Ryou brings books with him everywhere he goes. He makes Bakura study with him, makes Bakura’s eyes tear away from the god-stolen gold dangling below Ryou’s neck to read some shit about plants and parabolas and parentheses.
“Why do you care so much about grades, Landlord?”
“My father.”
Bakura opens his mouth to shit talk the merits of doing what one’s absent parents tells them to do.
He closes it when the taste of hypocrisy in his mouth is too heavy to ignore.
Ryou holds his hand tighter than he used to. A barely there father and an absent Bakura have brought the witch boy to term. Before Bakura’s return, Ryou subsisted on magic to get by; there are spell-binding circles painted all over his room, misshapen monsters molded from game shop wares budding in its corners.
Bakura holds Ryou’s hand tighter too, but keeps his free one in other pockets.
They sleep together, like this, on Ryou’s bed. It feels dirtier than any tomb he’s desecrated.
Old habits are hard to break, they both agree.
When they finally do kiss, it’s savage and silly.
Ryou is nice, too damn nice and lonely and willing and identical in his desperate clack of teeth against tongue, tongue against insides, twin breathing against twin swallowing.
“I,” says Bakura, “Can’t, thi- wrong, oh fuck no.” He shoves himself off.
“Why not?”
“…I never paid you back.”
“What.”
“Your coins. The ice cream truck.”
Ryou remembers meeting an exile of a boy, under the pretense of fists and apologetic armed robbery.
“You didn’t even pay him though,” he points out.
“I wanted to,” says Bakura, his voice quiet and small. “I was going to fucking share with you.”
“Bullshit.”
Ryou doubts Bakura can share anything, even himself; they’ve given full moons to each other, siamese feelings across time, mirrors reflecting themselves in selfish joy.
Ryou is happy. In another life, he doubts fate would’ve been so lenient.
Ryou’s friends avoid the rumoured devilspawn/gang leader/abusive boyfriend as much as possible, but their encounters are inevitable.
Ryou, class representative, stays after school to tutor troubled teens (also known as his social circle).
Bakura, troubled teen, stays after school to make out with the class representative.
Naturally, conflicts of interest arise.
“It’s like watching incest,” whispers one, chewing her lip like fodder.
“Why can’t the freaking Thief King keep his hands off the tutor?” complains another. “I sure as fuck ain’t asking Kaiba for help.”
“I didn’t know Ryou was weird like that,” a third says to himself, but everyone hears and nods.
Bakura doubts they’ve even seen the sketchbook.
They fail anyway. Ryou’s friends and Bakura sign up for summer school, and Ryou does too just to laugh at them.
They eventually introduce themselves to him.
Ghosts of ghosts stir. Bakura tucks his hair behind his ear to listen.
He hears the third friend’s last name, and curses the mayor’s penis.
End