KISSING ANARCHY!

more than two pairs of eyes on them for too long, and the discomfort started feeling like scarabs beneath their skin by the second. sure, conversation made it easier. once people opened their mouths, yugi had something to follow besides the nausea of being stared at. a comment or a question? decent distractions. yugi had plenty of practice making it appear as though they were maintaining eye contact out of respect, when really they were looking slightly past a shoulder, or toward the clean line of someone’s collar, or anywhere that did not make their own body feel like an exhibit under glass.

tonight had given them more practice than they wanted.

the hilton tokyo moved around them in polished reflections: chandeliers, silver trimming, glassware blue collar paychecks couldn't buy in under a year, maybe, and voices warmed by money and intoxicating curiosity. hino incorporated’s sponsors smiled like kids in a chocolate factory. some wanted to know where the foreign duelist had come from, whether the media had left out the more interesting parts of their story. others treated them as if they had arrived carrying a museum behind their ribs and they couldn't wait to play surgeon to uncover gold. they asked about the kohl around their eyes, whether the “cleopatra eye shadow” could be bought from amazon, whether henna or an udjat tattoo would offer genuine protection if applied correctly.

yugi tried to understand the questions. a quieter part of them suspected they did not want to.

there was a difference between being asked about home and being handled as evidence of someone else’s fantasy. the former could become conversation. the latter made their smile stiffen until it felt begrudged and borrowed. they answered what they could, corrected what they had the energy to correct, and excused themself from what felt, by the end, like a black ocean of dung beetles in evening wear.

unfair to the beetles, maybe. but they were tired.

they had only meant to slip out of the current of bodies long enough to breathe. that was all. one step back, then another, their attention caught somewhere between the crystalline display at the front of the hall and the old warmth of the pendant draped around their sweaty warm brown neck. the technology had been humming at the edge of their senses all night. it was enough to make atem still inside them in that particular way that meant he was listening.

then they collided with someone.

it was sharp and embarrassingly sudden. a drink tipped. liquid splashed down in a bright, terrible arc, catching the hem of rose-gold fabric before yugi had fully registered the body in front of them.

“ shoot—gomen, gomen! i’m so sorry about that! ”

they bowed hard and fast, guilt arriving before they could settle on the appropriate language to express their regret. their hands hovered uselessly, wanting to help and knowing better than to touch. the dress was beautiful, pink and luminous underneath the hall lights, and now stained because yugi had failed at the simple task of existing in a room without becoming a minor disaster.

then they heard the name. atem.

the apology caught behind their teeth. yugi looked up, and for a moment, whatever they had planned to say abandoned them completely.

the librarian.

barely recognizable, and yet unmistakably her. the card badge was gone, replaced by silk that dressed another character and personality entirely. yugi did not know whether the feeling that overcame them belonged to a child standing before something otherworldly, or a child bracing to be scolded for an honest mistake. either way, their mouth parted before any useful word arrived.

up close, the sensation was worse. not worse. stronger.

her presence exuded light, but not the decorative kind broken by chandeliers and expensive glass. this felt like light with alien memory embedded in it. light belonging to aliens taxonomists would've loved to name. yugi’s millennium puzzle warmed over their flowing white galabeya, quiet and immediate, answering her before yugi could.

“ usagi-san? ” they managed, softer than intended.

their eyes dropped to the stained hem again, mortified all over. “ i’m sorry. really. i didn’t mean to— ” a pause, their brow knitting as they looked back at her face. concern overtook embarrassment before suspicion had the chance. “ are you alright? ”

the room continued around them, sponsors laughing, glasses chiming, hino incorporated’s miracle glittering beneath corporate light. yugi lowered their voice.

“ what're you doing here? ”

usagi remembers etiquette. but not because she is intimate with it. she remembers the rules that were enforced on her body since she was a girl; she needed to be pretty, and skinny, and smart. classy. classist. the european cultural seminar at rose manor's school for ladies, the parties and events she had infiltrated as sailor moon, using photokinetic fractal-molecular reconstruction: a disguise pen, a fake identity, a fake body, and an ulterior motive beyond the dancing and the whimsy and the bewitincg demons that fed off of crushing it inside their hands, replacing it with pain and suffering. 

she remembers etiquette. but she does not always exercise it. this was obvious, as she meandered through the crowd, settling for the sidelines, far away from the center, the crown of the crowd. 

hino rei gathers the people around her like a magnet; they were vying and curious and a little tipsy from the golden champagne fed out of a miniature fountain by the hors d'oeuvres. usagi, in contrast, talks awkwardly and distractedly to the men who bother to approach her, the women who complimented her dress.

she was distracted. out of place. if not entirely out of her element. the dress, the lights, the crystals. it almost feels as if she were living the life that was meant for her; flowing gowns, crowns, a kingdom. a daughter.

maybe that was on purpose. maybe that was why rei invited her, in the first place. this is what we could have had, rei says, without words. this is what we've lost. 

she feels the tension rise up her spine without meaning to. the anxiousness she always felt when her friends were disappointed in her. usagi is no longer the center. she is no longer the glue. she is not sure how to be, anymore, without destiny, without power. she was just a woman. she was just a woman. didn't that matter, at all? 

she bites her thumb, embarrassed for the both of them, as she recognized yugi. atem. them. she glances at the skirt of her dress, long and flowing and stained. decides she does not care.

"no, no, it's fine! i just threw this on, i'm not usually the type to go to big fancy places like this, honest,"   she tries to reassure them, quick and earnest with her words, words that were strung together by more words in an almost rambling intonation. 

she pauses, calms herself. flushed, she breathes, inhaling

"i'm... not sure, actually. i was invited. um. hino-san is an old high school friend of mine. we've been friends since i was fourteen, i think." 

atem's power radiates from yugi in a way that usagi can not ignore, now. it pulses underneath the louder frequency of the crystech displayed at the far end of the ballroom, set on top of a stage, protected by a specialized container that appeared more technological than the product itself. 

she stares at them, concerned. 

"are you alright? you seem... different,"  she tries not to seem prying, smiling gently. 

she considers them a friend. it was always easy for usagi to think of people she had met that way, because she never saw an enemy to begin with. she wanted to help.

in america, yugi often heard the saying curiosity killed the cat. as yugi lived and breathed, they stood as a living contradiction to that notion. their youth had been filled with questions, and with the hours they were willing to sacrifice for the reward of scratching that itch. their predilection for hidden knowledge had to be genetic — a predisposition to unearth what did not want to be found, and very little interest in being cured of it.

they were drawn to the known unknowns. to the sealed, the misfiled, the buried, the half-translated — all of it puzzle pieces begging to be put together. to anything that suggested history had left a door unlocked and walked away from it. from the aswan borderlands to every archive they had ever been warned not to dig through, yugi had learned one thing early: a record that disappeared too conveniently was rarely gone by accident. there was always a thread. always another question tucked beneath the first. and their penchant for sleuthing would not let them leave it alone, not until they dug for the truth with enough devotion to make their fingers bleed.

all that to say, although they were not a cat — though they did have a cat, which was close enough — they were not dead.

not yet, anyway.

waseda university library had seemed the right place to continue that work. supporting research, bridging foreign and domestic knowledge, contributing to scholarship — yugi qualified on at least two counts. they were foreign — dark shades of melanin and an wildly colorfully patterned afro-textured mane couldn't delude anyone in the country on that fact; they were certainly researching, and their mind was already becoming its own archive: crowded, unruly, and on its way to rivaling alexandria if nobody stopped them.

their grandmother would not have had it any other way. she had encouraged them to read, read, read, and if blindness ever came for them, there were still tactile systems like braille. there was never an excuse.

unless yugi was dead, blind, deaf, and or their fingers suddenly fell off, there was not an excuse in the world they would be able to think of as to why they weren't buried in texts.

unfortunately, the catalog was not as cooperative as their grandmother had trained them to be.

because hours later, with a stack of books yielding mostly dead ends and one article that had promised far more than it delivered, yugi admitted temporary defeat. time was beating them and their mind was racing faster than their eyes could burn through the pages. but there was a distinction to be made in their case here — defeat was permanent. this was only a pause.

now, one librarian would unfortunately have to become the recipient of their afternoon anxiety. because depending on her knowledge, yugi would undoubtedly subject her to a wave of questions like she was under interrogation.

she was unsuspecting as yugi approached her, though the card badge around her neck gave them enough reason to assume she would know what they were about to ask. mostly, they hoped they could articulate themselves well. there was always the possibility of a language barrier, and their question was already strange enough without being made stranger by poor phrasing. they haven't had the time to master their hyōjungo, let alone regional dialects.

but as they drew closer, yugi wondered if communication would be a problem at all.

something about her felt… attuned. not ordinary light. their pulse answered with a small, private sync, the way it sometimes did near thresholds, though they could not yet name why.

“ hey — excuse me, miss, ” they said softly, one hand lifting as if to tap her shoulder before they remembered their manners and let it fall back to their side. “ i’m looking for texts on egypt. specifically the twenty-fifth dynasty, around 690 to 664 bce. anything on kushite or nubian lines from that period. ”

a pause. then their brow furrowed, because restraint had never been their strongest quality once the trail appeared

“ also anything connected to privately held egyptian artifacts brought into japan — museum transfers, excavation records, collector archives. objects that might have slipped the official catalogs. ” another breath. “ there are references to something called the millennium objects, but every trail goes quiet. if you know where those trails might continue, i’d be really, really, grateful. ”

the university was a wellspring of knowledge that permeated their space; exhibitions, repositories, collections, databases. there was a largeness about it that felt comforting, felt present. life went on, but the books stayed precisely where they were, carefully curated, masterfully written. 

ami would love this place, usagi thinks about it, as she reorganizes the mangas by number, and alphabetically by series. she finds herself thinking of her old friends, in spite of their strained relationship. she misses them often. usagi has always been a better companion, not a leader. she thrived in groups. she was communal at heart. 

and makoto would probably like the books on cooking, she watches her hands carefully arranging each graphic novel, memorizing them the way she memorized answers on an exam. usagi is brilliant. but lazy. that's what rei would say, wagging her finger at her. 

she almost feels grateful, as a patron of the library approached her. she needed to get out of her own head, sometimes. 

the request was—  different. not strange. not entirely unusual. she does not judge, because there was nothing to judge. but the prospect of ancient books about a people who essentially created the tools of ascendance, requested with the gentle eyes of a man who seemed to have no business in the past, was hardly in her life's proverbial bingo card. 

usagi feels vaguely unsettled. she can not place the feeling, can not name it. but there is something that radiates from them, neither dark or light, but something beyond that, beyond reality as it was understood. years of fighting magical demons have honed her senses to the unseen. she feels like a girl again, with the need to see, the need to help. 

she does not sense evil. she does not even feel threatened. usagi shakes her head, as if shaking off the thoughts. 

"oh, i'm sorry, i spaced out a little," she admits, smiling sheepishly.  "lemme see... that should be in the rare books and special collections. but you're only allowed to take out thirty at a time, i hope that's alright?" 

she feels cheerful, now, in spite of her intuition glaring like a beacon that recognizes atem even when she does not know of their existence. japanese etiquette takes a hold on her. it did not matter that her skin was darker than others; the culture was still present in everything. she bows slightly, greeting him, and apologizing for any potential inconveniences. 

"would you like me to get them for you, or would you prefer that i take you to them?"