Disclaimer: Not mine.

A/N: I set myself the challenge of writing an entire fic without direct speech. I have mixed feelings about the result. Started in January and finished in April. The ending of this turned out wildly different than anything I originally envisioned.

Earrings

© Scribbler, January/April 2008.

The first time Anzu came home she had a couple of new earrings. They marched up her earlobe, a stud and a cuff, and when she laughed they winked and flashed as if they, too, were laughing. It was no big deal, she said. This was how loads of people dressed in New York. She got them when another girl from her troupe, Stacey-from-Pennsylvania, had hers done.

The next time Anzu came home she was growing her hair out. The well-kept ends brushed her shoulders. When she concentrated or leaned over to read she tucked one side behind her ear and tipped her head to one side so it wouldn’t obscure her vision. When she went out into the street a stiff breeze caught her hair and blew it into a funnel, as if she’d seen something terrifying and it was all standing on end. She giggled, exposed earrings twinkling, though Yuugi could tell she was also a little embarrassed at how silly she looked.

The third time she came home for a visit was Christmas. She ran across the airport arrival lounge in a hat like a tea cosy, bobbles bouncing on strings either side of her face. These kept moving as she talked, springing up and down as though adding their input to her stories about New York life. Yuugi watched them. When she took her hat off he held it, drawing the strings through his fingers so that the bobbles sat on his fingers like elaborate rings. They felt soft and strands of her newly dyed hair clung to them – bright red like a stoplight.

Jounouchi said her new colour made her look like a hooker. Anzu smacked him on the head. Yuugi felt like he’d been seeing the world out of focus until Jounouchi tried to hide behind him and Honda held Anzu back.

Anzu didn’t come home for a while after that. Money was short and flights were expensive. She didn’t see Domino again until the following Summer. Jounouchi commented that her shoes had seen better days, but she leaned back on the Genkan step to throw one sneaker at him, saying it was ‘shabby chic’ and he didn’t know anything about American fashions.

Yuugi said nothing as he let her walk ahead of him up the stairs, long legs even longer in dungarees she’d cut into shorts. The pale strands of fraying denim looked extra white against her legs, which had tanned a little on the other side of the world.

The next time she came home her hair hung in a braid down her back. When she helped redecorate the shop she wrapped it around the back of her head like some statue of a Roman goddess, plunging her brush into the paint pot with gusto. She’d always hated getting dirty. Even wandering around in the desert, she once confessed to him, she’d craved a basin of water wash in. She’d always been concerned about her appearance and being an individual. She used to take Jounouchi out with her to scour thrift stores, looking for good-quality bargains to mix and match into her own unique style. He was too untidy, she declared, and grunge went out with the 90s. Jounouchi complained bitterly until some girls from school saw him at the arcade and, not knowing who he was in his new duds, wolf-whistled.

Yuugi watched emulsion drip onto Anzu’s thin face as she leaned out from the stepladder, lip scabbed over from being previously bitten. Her earrings flashed and her short-nailed fingers squeaked as she adjusted her grip. For a second he genuinely didn’t recognise her. Then she looked down at him with a smile, wobbled, and he dashed forward so she could land on him while he pretended he wasn’t too short to catch her without injury. Her bossy demands that he keep still, he should’ve just let her fall, what was he thinking, and was he all right? made the world snap back into focus again.

They next time they met was when he went to see her in New York. She met him at the airport the way he had for her back in Domino. Her dress was bright green with a leaf motif and clashed with her purple hair. It wasn’t meant to be so vibrant, she confessed while they rode the bus back to her apartment, chattering nineteen-to-the-dozen and obviously anxious that he like the city she’d made her home. She was experimenting with her image. Yuugi saw she had another earring on one side but not the other. The lack of synchronicity bothered him somehow, though he couldn’t explain why.

He was shocked when she said not to take his shoes off before going inside. His sneakers squeaked up the stairs because the elevator was rotted through from all the alcohol-fuelled Friday-night urine – or so the old woman in the lobby wheezed. Anzu’s legs weren’t tanned anymore and Yuugi could see faint blue threads of veins because she didn’t think twice about letting him walk behind her. She had a scar on her left calf the size of his thumbnail and shaped like a crescent moon. He wondered how it’d come to be there. There was a time he wouldn’t have even needed to ask.

Her coffee was instant. Her ceiling was low. Her walls were the indomitable grey of old whitewash but her bed linen was the same colour as her hair. She’d hung gauzy scarves around the room to distract from the black mould in the corner, and burned incense to cover the smell of damp before coming to meet him. It made Yuugi sneeze but he waved it off as allergies. Anzu gave him a sceptical look and told him she knew he didn’t have any allergies – not even to life-or-death situations. He laughed at that and, ice a little more broken, they settled to holding mugs and sitting across from each other on her bed because one leg of her table was broken and everything slid off like in a sinking ship.

Yuugi blushed. He was on a bed. With Anzu. Drinking coffee. He had the feeling in another life there might have been more between coming into the room and this image, but hastily squashed it as she babbled happily and asked him questions about himself and Domino that he’d already answered in emails.

A smile broke out across Yuugi’s face when he spotted the framed photograph of them all, propped on her shelf in front of a small ballerina pig figurine. Anzu reflected the smile threefold, pulling at the fine silver around her neck to reveal a tiny cartouche with her name on it. They’d all exchanged them before she left for America and Honda went into the military, vowing to stay friends forever even though they were far apart. She said she wore it every day, holding it tight in her fist and staring at a point just above his head.

When they went to the Chinese takeaway on the corner Yuugi asked if she ever missed Domino. Anzu replied instantly, without hesitation, that of course she did, but if she left New York now she’d miss it as well. She has a life here just like she had a life in Japan. Choosing between them would be too hard. Yuugi didn’t mention that this wasn’t what he asked, instead changing the subject to egg rolls and chow-mein.

Anzu tried to sleep on the floor, but Yuugi nabbed the sleeping bag while she was in the bathroom. She jumped on him and he squealed and pulled the cover over his head, yelping that he was the man and men were supposed to endure hardship so ladies wouldn’t have to. Anzu responded by zipping the bag all the way to the top and holding it shut. It got so unbearably hot his spikes wilted and he sat up, gasping. She rolled him over while he was struggling for breath, tipping him out like the contents of an upturned handbag, and wiggled into the sleeping bag standing up, pointing an imperious finger at the bed. Yuugi clambered in with a promise that tomorrow night would be different.

They lay in the darkness catching their breath. Again, Yuugi got the feeling something was missing from the scene, and again he squashed the idea as Anzu informed him that tomorrow she was going to take him to visit the Statue of Liberty.

Yuugi rolled over to ask something that had been gnawing at him since she showed him her cartouche. Anzu didn’t reply for so long Yuugi though she’d gone to sleep, but then she broke the silence and he watched the outline of her face in the near-pitch-dark. She said softly that she missed Yami, too. She still called him Yami, because he’d only been Atemu for a short time and her memories were all kept in the ‘Yami Box’. She didn’t miss the life threatening drama, but she did miss the shared experience. Her voice caught a little and she turned her head aside, away from the bed. Her ear-cuff caught was little light there was and glinted, making Yuugi blink.

The next time they saw each other was at Honda’s wedding. It came out of the blue: a letter he was coming home and a girl on his arm he said he’d met while stationed in France. His fiancée was short and solidly built, with cheekbones like knuckledusters and a no-nonsense attitude that spit-wiped dirt from your cheek at sixty paces. Jounouchi couldn’t believe the news and then couldn’t believe her, though when Yuugi asked why he couldn’t explain. The best Jounouchi could do was to mumble how he’d never thought of what person Honda would go for beyond NOT MY SISTER, but whatever he’d envisioned, Anaïs wasn’t it.

At the ceremony Anzu ended up next to Yuugi, each of them stiffly formal and trying not to giggle, but at the reception she stood talking to Anaïs for a long time while he held drinks and Jounouchi thumped the back of Honda’s tuxedo. Yuugi noticed the differences – Anzu’s graceful vividness provided a stark contrast to Anaïs’s thickset white wedding dress and uncomfortable pointy shoes. Anzu never wore shoes that were uncomfortable – wedges instead of heels, sling backs instead of stilettos, sandals instead of points. He was surprised he remembered something like that.

Anzu looked so much more fragile today, though whether that was compared to Anaïs or her sixteen-year-old self, Yuugi wasn’t sure. Long periods apart meant that whenever he saw her the incremental changes snuck up and pounced on him, as though he’d been waiting for a ginger cat and instead had a tiger land on his knee. Life as a full-time dancer had filled Anzu with a poise only hinted at as a teenager, the same way Jounouchi had gone from a gangly youth to well-built man. Yuugi waved awkwardly when the two women turned, blinking as Anzu’s earrings flashed in his eyes. He could just see the glint of a silver chain at her neck.

It was a long time before he saw Anzu again. His life went on, as lives are wont to do. He worked in the shop, studying for high-level archaeology qualifications and duelling sometimes, although not seriously. Kaiba challenged him and he kept refusing, irritating the hell out of his one-time rival by returning every request with a note inviting both Seto and Mokuba to tea.

Jounouchi drifted between one job and another, making just enough to keep up with his rent as long as he ate at Yuugi’s at least two weeks out of every month. He seemed content though, entering Duel Monsters contests and bringing in the odd windfall in prize money.

Anaïs went with Honda when he returned to the military, taking up a spot with the other army wives as they moved from base to base. Yuugi got letters and emails that sounded happy and … mature. He did a double take when the word popped into his head. Mature was not something he had ever associated with Honda or Jounouchi. He never considered the day when one or both of them would reach the point where he could use the word. Some days, he’d doubted any of them would even reach physical maturity.

Ryou moved to England, his mother’s home, where no ghosts of demons and evil deeds could haunt him every time he walked down the street. For a long time he tried to stay in Domino, but memories of what the spirit of the Millennium Ring had done with his hands trickled into his mind on a daily basis. Once, Yuugi sat bolt upright at 3am and scrabbled to answer the phone, only to hear Ryou gabbling apologies at some newly recovered memory. Yuugi felt bad they weren’t able to help him more, but accepted Ryou’s decision. He couldn’t imagine what it was like to have your consciousness forcibly and brutally crushed while a spirit took control of your body. Yami let him know, let him see, let him feel exactly what was going on as soon as he was able. Bakura never did and they were only just beginning to learn how deep Ryou’s scars went.

When the phone-call came Yuugi wasn’t expecting it, just as he hadn’t expected the news about Honda. He didn’t drop the receiver but his laces were still untied as he raced down the street, not trusting himself to drive. He banged on the door to Jounouchi’s apartment, inherited from his father when the man’s liver finally succumbed to years of abuse. It was a discordant fact in Jounouchi’s life that his father tried to take care of him in his will after neglecting him in life. Jounouchi performed the ritual observation over his father’s body the night before the funeral, but he and Yuugi still stayed up the whole night after the interment, too, as Jounouchi tried to come to terms with this last act of kindness from a man who had made his life ‘a fucking nightmare’.

Jounouchi blearily opened the door but snapped to attention when Yuugi gabbled his news. His shoelaces flopped and he was practically still pulling on his pants as he hop-skipped behind his friend down to the street. They took a cab to the airport to find Honda kerbside, home on leave in the kind of stunning coincidence that defined their lives.

They went in as a trio, lingering behind Anzu’s mother and stepfather but straining their necks to see over the crowd. Yuugi stood on a bench but was asked by an employee to get down, so Honda and Jounouchi formed a seat with their arms and hoisted him above their heads for a better view.

Yuugi almost didn’t recognise Anzu. She shuffled in baggy jeans that scooped dust and dirt into their hems, hair cut short because the dye had grown out into an ugly two-tone ‘do. Her eyes were dull as her clothes, all earth tones and drab folds. She croaked hello and was hastily bundled into the backseat of her mother’s sedan, as though the merest touch of sunlight would reduce her to a pile of ashes.

Yuugi could forgive not being told before she arrived back in Japan. Anzu’s hospital stay meant she was still weak as a newborn kitten, and had relied on her family to get word through of her return. Somehow events had progressed until, at the last minute, Mrs. Mazaki remembered to call her daughter’s old school friends on the day her plane got in. She could be forgiven. After all, she still didn’t know how close their bonds had grown when they were sixteen – close enough that the attachment once like soldered metal had pulled over time and distance into a thin wire, but one which was still made of steel. Mrs. Mazaki never kept in touch with any of her high school friends.

Then again, Mrs. Mazaki never sacrificed her soul for them, nor walked across a desert to find it again, either.

Yuugi, Honda and Jounouchi were allowed in to see her that afternoon. Anzu was bundled up in an armchair. Her mother fussed around her until the realisation they wanted some privacy clanged into her head. She excused herself under the pretext of fetching something for everyone to eat and drink, asked Anzu whether there were any foods she couldn’t have, and then scurried away like a rabbit bolting for its burrow.

They sat in silence for a long time. Nobody knew what to say. In that instant Yuugi wished for the old Honda and Jounouchi, who wouldn’t think anything of running off at the mouth and eating their own feet saying the things that needed to be said – the difficult, awkward, sensitive things that weren’t made for their rude mouths but came out of them anyway. However, Honda and Jounouchi had grown up. They weren’t those thuggish teenagers anymore. Yuugi even half-wished for Anaïs’s forthright sensibleness, until Anzu leaned forward and closed the gap for anyone but them. They were friends to the end, right? Her dangling cartouche said so.

She confessed she hadn’t wanted them to know. They were the other side of the world and no longer a part of her immediate support network. Then she came clean and admitted she hadn’t wanted to worry them. Jounouchi demanded to know what the hell they were supposed to think about her coming so close to death and not telling them about it until after the fact. He radiated anger but deflated when the first of her tears fell. He never did get the hang of dealing with crying women.

Yuugi moved on instinct, wrapping Anzu in a hug. She clutched at his arm, fingernails grown a little longer. Her grip wasn’t nearly as strong as it had been when she dragged Jounouchi to class by his ear, or struggled with Honda’s drooly nephew, or grabbed Yuugi’s hand and towed him behind her through a shopping arcade. Her hands were wasted, the backs mottled pink from poor circulation. Even her ring sat at an angle because it was too big now.

She’s been so miserable, she whispers, with the air of having each word picked from her throat by a pair of white-hot tongs. She wanted them out and wanted to keep hold of them, unable to keep it in any longer but unable to own up to how her life hadn’t gone according to plan. She was the one with solid dreams and a cast-iron map of where she was going. She was the one who left school with more than half-formed ideas of study or travel. She had a destination. She had ambition. She had a goal.

All her ambition got her was bit-parts in musicals – third-chorus-girl-from-the-left, middle-crowd-member, random-passer-by – and then not even that. She waitressed and filled out applications, went to auditions and kept on keeping on. Rejection followed rejection: she was too tall, too short, not pretty enough, too top-heavy, not what they were looking for, not right for this role, not talented. The last one hurt the most, but she was used to hard knocks. Nobody ever said her chosen path was going to be easy.

Keeping in contact with her friends helped. Visiting them when she could helped, too. They believed in her. They’d helped save the world together. When she spoke to them, she had faith that miracles could happen. She went home with a spring in her step and a renewed determination to take New York by storm.

But the rejections kept piling up, and gradually her friends’ belief seemed misplaced. They still believed in her. Guilt crept in at the edges. It made her feel like she was letting them down somehow; failing in some indefinable way she couldn’t even put into words for herself. They believed in her dreams. Their letters and emails were full of congratulations, their phone calls brimming with respect that she’d done what she set out to do. They wished they had her guts, enjoying her success and eventually it became easier to just let them believe in the lie.

She tried changing her image, seeing what else fit, since the version who existed in Domino obviously wasn’t right for New York. She distanced herself from the naïve girl who thought all she had to do was cross an ocean for all her dreams to come true. She wanted to succeed. She wanted to be believed in and not have a bad taste in her mouth for it. She wanted them to be proud of her the way she was so proud of them for making the most of themselves.

Yuugi asked whether she thought they wouldn’t be proud of her just for being her, but that made her cry more. She gripped him like he was her anchor and if she didn’t she’d sink. She’d created spaces between the pieces of herself, trying to weld them together in different shapes, then breaking them apart to weld them together again, and her self-confidence had seeped through the cracks. Anzu, the girl with rock-solid assurance in herself and her dreams, had fallen prey to the basic human frailty of doubt, and like all difficulties in their lives, the fall had been a hard one and stopped only by a different kind of tragedy.

The man in the other car came away with minor injuries to his face and hands. Anzu’s taxi, headed towards yet another audition for a part she wouldn’t get, was almost completely totalled. Her driver was killed outright and she emerged from the wreckage with a broken collarbone and an ankle that wasn’t much more than pulpy muscle and bone fragments with some skin attached. Her flagging stage career was over – she couldn’t begin to think of complicated dance moves when it took all her strength of will not to wince as she walked.

Jounouchi was angry and hurt and confused. Anzu had called them after the date of her accident. She’d sounded fine, even cheerful, although she must’ve been in the hospital. She never mentioned anything. Never mind what crap she thought she had to pull over their eyes, she’d lied about being okay when she was in pain and alone where doctors poked at her and spoke slow enough it was clear they equated ‘foreign’ with ‘stupid’. Months of physical therapy, of wheelchairs, walking canes and test charts, and not a glimmer to indicate she was anything but fine? Hadn’t she trusted them to know how close she’d come to … he couldn’t finish his sentence and stood, ineffectual rage swirling inside him like a swallowed phial of poison.

They wanted to rewind. They wanted to go back to the time that she’d needed them and be there for her. They wanted to believe in her, but in a different way – believe that she could get better, that she was still the Anzu they grew up with, risked their lives for and who had risked her life for them. They didn’t understand why she’d felt she had to lie to them, until they did and a torrent of guilt ripped through the room, leaving everyone hollow and raw.

She should’ve told them. Yuugi kept his voice low and didn’t try to move away. She should’ve told them. They loved her. They didn’t care whether she was a success or not. They loved her for who she was and no two-bit New York director would ever change that. Anzu protested that she cared whether she was a success or not. She didn’t want to be a failure. Everything her friends had ever set out to do, they’d done well – Duel Monsters, careers, marriages. They were champions. She never used to feel like a cheerleader until her own dreams fell to ruin. Whenever she believed in them with all her heart they pulled through, snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. The one time they believed in her the same way and she couldn’t even get off the starting blocks.

Jounouchi snorted. Was she serious? Had she forgotten all the things they hadn’t done well? Had she forgotten the bloodied noses of two-bit thugs who picked on the wrong guys? Had she forgotten the crushing defeats that ran hand-in-hand with their triumphs? Honda told her softly that life was unpredictable and it was how you rolled with the punches that counted. He told her about the unit he lost in Afghanistan, about the guilt and shame that suffused him when he saw their families and had to admit he’d come home when they never would. He didn’t feel like a success then. Jounouchi didn’t feel like a success when he was eating cheap freeze-dried noodles for the fifth day in a row. Yuugi didn’t feel like a success when he was still in the Game Shop selling Chinese Checkers instead of out on a dig in Egypt.

Yuugi wanted to know whether she really thinks this one thing made her a failure. His voice dropped even lower, little more than a buzz in his chest that filtered into her ear because hey were pressed so close. Had she forgotten the little lonely boy with no friends? Had she forgotten who risked social exclusion by befriending the school geek? Had she forgotten that every major success that followed wouldn’t have been possible if she hadn’t taken that one gamble?

Anzu wasn’t wearing any earrings, so they didn’t flash as she buried her face in his chest. Yuugi balanced his chin on her head, just holding her and remembering her austere apartment and the smell of Chinese takeaway. He met Jounouchi and Honda’s eyes and saw the agreement there. They’d been distant for so long, but as ever, they came together in a crisis. They could never be kept apart for too long when one of them was hurting.

The world snapped back into focus and stayed there.

Fin.