Yu-Gi-Oh! Fan Fiction ❯ Heccubus ❯ Chapter 6

I'd had to persuade my father to actually go on his expedition a month after he got back to Japan. He'd never had a problem leaving me on my own before I reflected bitterly, not since I was ten years old - before that I'd stayed with my aunt and uncle, but then he got a position at a museum in Japan for a year, and he moved me to be with him and he decided that I was old enough and responsible enough to be left alone at eleven. Complaining aloud would have been counterproductive, so I'd vented at Bakura a lot mentally, and he'd just taken it, without arguing with me, not really. Not until I `screamed' at him through our link to say something, to act as if he was listening to me. His reaction had been enough to calm me down a bit, enough that I stopped venting at him anyway.

 

-This is the first time you've been `ill' since you were seven. He thought after four years you weren't going to get ill again, and he did offer to send you back to England to live with your aunt and uncle back then. You said you wanted to stay in Japan, and you already did your share of the household chores. Now he has to worry about your health and he isn't really confident in my ability to help you.- I knew that it had to bother Bakura that my father thought so little of his ability to take care of me, but it didn't show through our link.

 

:I'd forgot about that. I didn't want to disrupt my studies too much, but then with all the fuss over my `friends' ending up in comas...:

 

-I'm sorry about that, but...they were using you, you did know that?-

 

:For the homework sessions after and before our games, and for the set-up you financed, yes, I remember. They were always a bit reluctant to be around me outside of the games and homework.: And that had hurt, bringing up that memory, so I'd let the subject drop, and Bakura hadn't challenged it. At least I wasn't expected to see my father off at the airport now, before he'd always dragged me to the airport, to help him with his baggage among other things, and left me to get home by myself, or with the cab he'd used to get us there. But he did expect us to be awake to see him off as he got everything into the cab, and it was hard to drag myself from my warm comfortable bed. In the end Bakura'd been the one who got me out of bed, and set my clothes out for me, while I ate the bowl of miso he'd brought to my bedroom for me.

 

“If you don't get up and start acting like a normal person do you really think he won't call in to his expedition and say he's got a family emergency so he can stay with you?” Bakura hadn't looked at me when he finally stopped trying to pull me out of bed by force and turned to reasoning, but I could feel his fear across our link, hear the defeat in his voice. I didn't believe that my work to persuade my father to go away so we could live our lives without his ignorant oversight would be wasted if I didn't get up, but Bakura obviously did. And Bakura was much better at manipulating people than I was, so I got up and ate half the bowl of miso he'd brought up, eating another quarter of the bowl when he urged me to eat more.

 

“Do you want me to help you get down the stairs safely?” For some reason that simple, concerned question made me angry, and I snapped at him in response.

 

“Do I look that helpless? I'm still perfectly capable of moving around under my own power. I never got that bad before.” He flinched at my anger, not violently, but he looked down to the ground and turned his head to one side, pushing his hair back to expose his throat in a frighteningly erotic gesture.

 

I found myself transfixed by that pale triangle of flesh, until he moved, freeing me to move as well. I grabbed his shoulder, surprised that I could, and he glanced up at me.

 

“What do you wish Yadonushi-sama?”

 

“I...I want to be with you.” He looked confused about how to respond and I quickly continued. “I know. I can't risk it, it would be too dangerous to me. But I can still dream, can't I?” My question was bitter and rhetorical, but he answered me.

 

“Of course you can, although to do so is to feed a hunger you cannot sate as you are. I wish you'd just think...” He trailed off, but I didn't have the slightest idea what he was getting at, then he turned, taking my bowl back to the kitchen and leaving me to dress by myself.

 

When I got down I saw that my father was speaking to Bakura, but my yami looked a bit trapped, back against the wall, as my father spoke.

 

:Do you need any help there?:

 

-No, he just wants to give some last minute orders about taking care of you.-

 

:I'm not that helpless Bakura.: It wasn't fair to snap at Bakura, even mentally, and I knew that. It was my father I was angry with...and suddenly something crystallised, the oddities in how my father interacted with my yami made sense when I thought about what he was.

 

“Stop trying to molest my friend father.” My voice was cold, and he flinched away from Bakura.

 

“What...I wasn't!”

 

“That's what it looked like. And you've accused him of being a whore before. How long do you have until you have to check in at the airport?”

 

“Three hours. I don't want to leave when we're arguing.”

 

“We're not arguing, just be careful in future.”

 

“Do you need help with your bags Dr. Bakura?” Bakura's quiet question was enough of a distraction that we managed to get the cab packed before my father turned back to me.

 

“I'll ring you as often as I can and e-mail you once a week. Be careful okay?”

 

“Yes father.” I was not going to say anything to my yami about what I'd surmised so we just went back into the house and I curled up on the couch to get some more sleep.

 

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I'd hoped that with our arriving on the first day of the school year we wouldn't have to introduce ourselves, but the teacher pulled me and Atemu to the front of the classroom along with the other two new pupils without so much as asking first. It hadn't occurred to me that I should check on how well he'd done in the tests, but I had a feeling he'd only just passed if he was in this class. Of course for the single week the Priest had spent going to a normal high school he'd been in this class as well, and Ryou was bright enough to do better, even if he got distracted a lot.

 

Apparently we were to introduce ourselves in the Western alphabetical order of our surnames. That made me the second to introduce myself.

 

“Kurerunano Bakura.” Both names written in hiragana, rather than kanji. “Born in Egypt. Don't know what the village is called.” A lie, but one that would be believed. “Spent most of my life in Alexandria. I like puzzles.” I'd given them enough information, more than they needed. I wasn't going to say anything else, and I made my way over to Ryou, to Ryou and the seat I'd asked Honda to hold open for me, since I doubted my hikari would do so himself. The teacher was watching me, along with everyone else, as I set my stuff up on my desk, including my most recent notes on classical Japanese. I couldn't get my books out to work on it from them, but I thought I'd pinned down one of the patterns of change, and that would help me a lot. I was lucky, languages were one of the things heccubi are very good at, we can learn them to the point of thinking in them a lot more easily than any human, and most demons can, the better to please a lover who speaks a language new to us. Shinigami don't have the same advantage, their powers are very much focused on death and on battle, language acquisition plays no part in that.

 

“Mutou Atemu.” The Pharaoh hadn't been happy about having to use his true given name, but he'd accepted it when Yugi looked up at him with those pleading eyes. He was using hiragana for his personal name, but kanji for Mutou, good, Yugi'd rehearsed him well. I had to admit to being surprised he knew enough kanji to actually pass those tests, but it didn't make a difference to me. “I was born in Alexandria, and I recently moved here to be with my grandfather, uncle, aunt and cousin. I'm a big Duel Monsters fan, and I duel myself, even if I didn't have the chance to enter any tournaments.” Under his own name. I smiled at that particular lie, it was amusing to see someone else being lauded for what was at least half the Pharaoh's work, especially since he could never claim any credit for it.

 

:Yami, please don't say whatever it is that's making you so amused.: Ryou seemed weary, already, and I half turned towards him, ignoring the teen making his way over to sit on the seat Yugi'd saved for him, in favour of checking his condition. He wasn't in any worse condition than he had been when we left, and that left him with enough energy to sit and listen to what the teacher was saying, making notes as needed.

 

-I won't start a fight, not if it bothers you Yadonushi-sama.- I wasn't going to anyway, but if a few words reassured Ryou enough for him to relax, releasing an almost imperceptible tension then I'd give him that reassurance. Besides, I didn't think we'd have any time to fight, during the lessons at least, and especially Atemu, no matter what method he used to take notes. I was half tempted to use hieroglyphs myself, but even if they were the form of writing most natural to me they took too long to write.

 

It was history first, recent history, by my standards at least. The teacher was talking about how the Tokugawa Shogunate came into existence and I made copious notes on what she told us. It was an interesting example of politics in action, and that was how I saw it, focusing on the politics, the manipulation that all Children of Desire learned swiftly, while Ryou would probably do better by focusing on the process of conquest carried out to create the Shogunate. It had worked for the duels anyway, and he was born to lead armies and be the champion of nations, even if he didn't know it, even if in this time wars were no longer settled that way, could no longer hinge on a single warrior. I couldn't let myself think about that, about the difference between what Ryou was supposed to be and what he was, he didn't want to acknowledge it, so I couldn't do anything to acknowledge it, or suggest that he should.

 

We were supposed to discuss the topic together once we'd got all the notes down, a class wide discussion, and that bothered me a bit. It didn't seem like the best way of gauging how well people had understood the material, or of exploring it in more depth, or even of establishing any background knowledge the class might already have. The slower pupils would be holding the brighter ones back, and in this class I had a feeling that the brighter pupils would be leery of showing their knowledge in front of the whole class, for fear of their friends making fun of them.

 

Still, I tried to contribute, without showing how much better I understood than everyone else here did, and I tried to get others to say something, to fill the silences. I didn't know most of the class, but I tried my best to make comparisons to the one thing I knew most people here were aware of...Duel Monsters. I didn't do very well, and for a moment I fiercely hated Tendo-sensei for making me do her job for her.

 

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I'd known Bakura was a genius, how else would he have learned enough about computers in the first year he'd shared my body to hack into that paedophile's accounts and transfer the money to a new account for himself? But I hadn't understood all the implications of that, or how good he was at teaching as well, especially since he'd never actually bothered to teach me, just transferred the knowledge directly into my brain. The comparisons he made between Duel Monsters and the creation of the Tokugawa Shogunate weren't really accurate...at all accurate to be honest, but they got the others interested in the subject, and got me thinking in terms of the battles fought to create the new government.

 

Looking over at Atemu I could tell that he'd understood the background and context much better than everyone else had, including Yugi, but he wasn't saying anything. He'd left it to Yami to do that, to draw attention by leading the discussion, and I felt a flash of hatred at him for doing that. I glared at him, and he had the gall to look surprised, but I wasn't doing any more to help Bakura than he was, and so I fought through my lassitude to ask a question about the logistics behind the campaigns integral to establishing the Shogunate. Directed vengefully at Tendo-sensei and Atemu, it was enough to silence Bakura, enough that he wilted in his seat, waving a hand as if to tell everyone to go on without his participation. I pushed the notes on his personal project towards him, and he took the hint, focusing on his notes, and letting the discussion carry on without his participation, or mine.

 

“Kurerunano-kun! What is it that is distracting you from the class discussion?”

 

“From doing your job you mean, Tendo-sensei. I am attempting to learn how to read classical Japanese without using any true primers for the language, because it is an interesting study. The headmaster has approved of this, and I feel I have contributed more than enough to this superficial discussion of the material you attempted to teach. If you wish it I can write an essay analysing the how the economic and political situation allowed the Tokugawa Shogunate to be established, but I expect you to assign the same task to the rest of the class...and to actually mark them and give proper feedback.” The contempt in his voice was cutting, and Tendo-sensei opened her mouth to respond, before she visibly realised who she was talking to, and remembered what he'd arranged.

 

“You are nowhere near ready to perform that sort of analysis. I realise you cannot be expected to have civilised manners, but do your classmates the basic courtesy of paying attention to the discussion.”

 

“I am giving the discussion all the attention it deserves Tendo-sensei. If at any point you doubt that feel free to direct a relevant question to me. Now, why don't you get back to your job?” She flinched at that, visibly, and I knew that the others would take advantage of her show of weakness. But I didn't really care...she'd been taking advantage of my yami, the way I had for so long, and hearing him put her down was fun.

 

Except the lesson ended just then, and she seized the opportunity to virtually flee the classroom. Bakura paid more attention to our next lesson, maths, but not much. He didn't really need to pay much attention to be absolutely honest, this was all stuff he'd learned a long time ago; if all that mattered was the sciences he could have got a place at any university without any real effort. He was only at this school, in this class, because he felt he needed to be with me, to protect me.

 

And Haruka-sensei didn't demand that we talk about what we were doing, just that we pay attention when he was showing us the examples, and then do all the problems he assigned us, either in class, or later. So he didn't even notice when Bakura finished his math problems and switched to his notes on classical Japanese. I was probably the second one finished, simply because I refused to give in to my weakness since Bakura'd gone to so much trouble for me, and once I'd finished I could get some rest.

 

:Bakura, do the teachers know about my...problems?:

 

-Yes. Before you woke me everyone thought it was an illness, a unique, mysterious illness, and it's been documented. It was only a matter of convincing everyone that you'd had a relapse. There are physical signs anyway, not much, but a slightly heightened white cell count for one and some prions that no one else has, among other things. The prions would be wrong for a human anyway, and your muscle structure's off a little, and so's the density, but you have more `unique' prions now than you did while I was sharing your body along with some hormones that you seem to be almost immune to.-

 

:Why do you say that?: I leaned back in my chair, shutting my eyes and relaxing while I listened to Yami.

 

-Because I tested those hormones recently.- So that was what he'd wanted that blood sample for. -I used Shadow Magic to separate them out from your blood and injected each hormone and combination of hormones that humans don't have into some mice in Kaiba's lab. The concentration of each hormone in the mice's blood was less than a tenth that in yours, and all of the mice turned...very aggressive. Your strength of will is awesome.- He was hinting at something, but I really didn't want to know.

 

:Wake me up when we start something new.:

 

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I'd been told that I was to report to the headmaster immediately after lunch, since that was when the rest of the class would be studying English. At least I'd be learning new things there, and working nearer to my full capacity on one thing instead of splitting my attention and only using half my capacity in total, but it bothered me a bit not to be with Ryou in case he needed me. On the other hand I would be leaving him with people who would protect him, now that he was so `ill' anyway, even if they hadn't treated him that well before.

 

“You didn't bring anything for lunch, did you?”

 

“No, and I can't be bothered to get something in the canteen.” Ryou looked oddly languid for what he was; he'd only left the classroom with the others because I'd dragged him out, and asked if Yugi and Atemu would sit with us.

 

“Then here, I packed extra in case you needed it.” When I'd tried to swear off sex I'd found that I couldn't be bothered with eating after a while and I thought I'd seen signs of the same thing in Ryou earlier. I opened my bento, placing it between us, and waiting for him to take his pick of the ten onigiri before I took my own. He only picked one up, so I spent as much time encouraging him to eat more as on conversing with the others - easy enough since they didn't really want to talk to me. I only managed to get him to eat three of the onigiri, but that was enough for a meal at least and it didn't bother me that Jounouchi and Honda swung by and grabbed the last three when they saw I was ready to put the bento away.

 

It would be better to arrive early for my lesson with the headmaster, than to risk being late and lose the privileges I'd arranged for myself.

 

“I take it you want me to go to the Game Shop with you after school Yugi?”

 

“Please,” He smiled in pleasure and anticipation, not that surprising that he'd want to be with me despite his opinion of my morals considering my nature. “do you think you'll be able to get home afterwards in time for tea?”

 

“I doubt that will be a problem Yugi.” I laughed at the idea, tossing my head back as I stood. After all I'd likely be the one cooking our meal, since Ryou didn't have any interest in doing so. It was one of the skills expected of a Child of Desire anyway and so I'd learned to cook a long time ago and cooking with these modern stoves was much easier than it had been with what was available in Kuru Eruna. -You will be able to get home by yourself without problems, won't you Yadonushi-sama?- That was the only problem with my plan for feeding today, the possibility that Ryou would have difficulty getting home alone.

 

“I can come and distract your family if you want anyway. It's not like there's anyone at home to worry about us.” It was as good as admitting he wouldn't be able to get home by himself, but...as long as he understood that...

 

“Sure, you're welcome to come visit. I think Jiisan's got some new occult type cards, they're your favourite, aren't they?”

 

“Yeah, speaking with and through death...” His voice was ever so slightly wistful and there was a dreamy smile on his face. I'd always appreciated his fascination with the occult and with death, it had been the only sign I'd had that he really was a shinigami, that I wasn't deluding myself sometimes. I smiled at him, at them all, and stood.

 

“I should get to my lessons with the headmaster. I'm not sure if Uchiha-sensei wants me to learn Ancient Greek or Latin first, or if he's planning on teaching me the two subjects together, or something else altogether.” And so I hadn't been able to prepare for this in advance.

 

“You don't need to go yet.” I hadn't expected Atemu to object to my leaving...unless he was hoping I'd get in trouble for being late, or even just wanted to leer at me some more.

 

“I'm not going to risk being late. I only tested out of English really, so that's a limit on the time I have available for this.” I frowned at Ryou then. “You could have tested out of English too, if you wanted to Ryou.”

 

“Why bother?” He had a point, Ryou hadn't actually encountered the English literature they were expected to study, and he didn't read as fast, or as eagerly as I did. And now he'd probably be reluctant to even put the effort into reading, better for him to put whatever energy he was willing to use towards homework and avoid trying to anything extra.

 

“Should I help you back to the classroom first Yadonushi-sama? It isn't as if there's anything you want to do that you can't do there?”

 

“You don't need to do that. We'll make sure he gets back to class okay.” Yugi was exuberant about the prospect of looking after someone else, and I looked to Ryou to see what he wanted.

 

“Go ahead, I'll be fine.” I didn't like it, but it wasn't as if I could say no to him. I bit my lip lightly, planning out my route to avoid the bullies before I left.

 

I was early, but not too early, and Uchiha-sensei let met in early, handing me a piece of paper with a phrase written on it, in Roman lettering.

 

“Read that aloud, and then translate as well as you can.” It did look vaguely similar to Italian and I read the sentence, glancing at him to see how my pronunciation was.

 

“Do you want a translation that's as accurate as I can manage, or one that's better grammatically in Japanese?”

 

“Do both.” I obeyed, but I wasn't happy about it, and I was sure my translation was pretty shaky.

 

“You did well, Latin is closer to Italian than Cantonese is to Mandarin, far closer. You made a few errors in pronunciation, but I think that I can just give you a vocabulary list and a book of grammar rules and with a few exercises you should be fluent without much difficulty. We'll focus on Ancient Greek, starting with the alphabet.”

 

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