Bananashipping (Honda x Malik) for Round 8 of the Yu-Gi-Oh Fanfiction Contest. WARNINGS: Yaoi, het, implied past Honda/Shizuka, Yami/Honda and Jou/Honda bromance, profanity, character deaths, and some shameless Latin.

This takes place during the Second Punic War, in which the empires of Rome and Carthage battled for control over the Mediterranean Sea. Hannibal was a Carthaginian general; Scipio Africanus was a Roman one.

Disclaimer: Saying that I own YGO is like saying that Bloodshipping is canon.

Many, many thanks go to Defenestration of the Mind for beta'ing.

Circle of Fifths

Welcome to the Rome of the late third century B.C.E. It is a world of constant tension, its older residents scarred by the war not thirty years past that left them with a burning hatred for the other empire across the ocean—Carthage. Rome is a kingdom of the land and Carthage is one of the sea, and they could not be more different if they tried.

'Punicī,' the Romans call them—'punicī,' meaning 'Phoenician,' for the ties they have with those seafarers of centuries past. For the posts they hold proudly in the cities of Tyre and Qart-ḥadašt—Carthage—'New Tyre.' These empires rule the Mediterranean, forever as dependent on each other as much as they hate each other; they have been there for a long, long time. They have warred for a long, long time.

They will not last like this, trapped in trade as they hunger for power over the entire sea. They have clashed already, and they will do so again; they will keep fighting until one emerges the victor.

With each new war, Rome extends its borders ever further in all directions, struggling to sate the greedy monster of its inner workings—it relies on conquest, on the acquisition of gold and riches from foreign lands, to keep itself from collapse.

And, eventually, that will be its downfall.

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Rome. Early April, 217 B.C.E.

Punicī venturī sunt.

The shouts echoed down the streets, accompanied by the ring of steel on steel and the muffled shouts of soldiers rushing to the city walls. The citizens flocked to the roads to watch the progress of the men of the army, silent for once because of the terrible weight of the situation.

Punicī venturī sunt.

Honda and Jounouchi hurried out of their apartment to join the masses, the press of bodies on the cobblestones swallowing them up easily and shoving them further apart from each other. There was fear nearly tangible in the air, a combination of desperation and horror and helpless denial that they couldn't be doomed, they couldn't—

A shudder ran through the crowd as the marching of men faded into the distance and the center of the road was left achingly empty, dust and dirt drifting lazily up into the spring sky. Then, into the hushed atmosphere that was more noticeable then than ever, a lone, fearless voice shouted: "Get back here and pay for that wine right the fuck now, you cheap little—"

And the tension eased. Honda found himself laughing as the bustle of the forum resumed around him, seeking out Jounouchi and yelling to be heard over the noise: "Bakura can always be counted on to ruin a moment."

Jounouchi nodded with a grin, although Honda could see the way his eyes darted to the north—toward the farmlands there, where his sister and parents still worked, where Hannibal in all his damned glory would be sure to march first…

Punicī venturī sunt.

"I need to leave," he said, and Honda was not surprised.

"To see your sister?" he asked, and his companion nodded once more, his smile dissipating into seriousness.

"I'll bring them to the city—would you be willing to share the apartment with them?"

"Of course," Honda said, remembering clearly the young girl with the long auburn hair and sun-tanned face, who tended to the animals of the family's farm with as much diligence as her mother and father. He and Jounouchi had lived as neighbors in the countryside long before this war had begun, moving to the city of Rome in an attempt to make their fortunes there by selling what their families produced. Honda's own parents had died not two years later, and, sibling-less, he had joined Jounouchi in his friend's business.

Jounouchi managed to crack a grin. "No hitting on my sister, understand? She doesn't need to become involved in all of the politics that go on here—"

Punicī venturī sunt.

"I won't," Honda promised.

"Thank you," Jounouchi said, his words fervent, the joke between them forgotten. He shifted backward on his feet, and Honda could see that he was eager to leave, eager to make sure that his family would not die at the hands of the invaders.

"Go," Honda said, "and may the gods be with you."

His friend tore down the streets and toward the market's stables, his blond head disappearing in the crowd. Honda watched him as the orange-gold light of the setting sun danced upon the buildings and heads. And he knew, somehow, that he would not be seeing Jounouchi again.

Punicī venturī sunt.

The Carthaginians are coming.

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Rome. Late April, 217 B.C.E.

There was a knock on Honda's door.

He opened it, hoping against hope that it was Jounouchi returning after the weeks in which he had been gone into the countryside of the north, racing against time to reach his sister before Hannibal and his army would. "Who—"

"Honda," the girl before him said. She sniffled and gasped in a quick breath, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. "Honda, he's dead."

He stood frozen in place, unwilling to believe it.

The door edged open another few feet, revealing Shizuka, bundled up into a worn traveler's cloak with mud spotting its hem. Her hood was pushed back to reveal her red-brown hair, her face pale in the morning sunlight. "Jounouchi," she said, choking out her brother's name. "He—"

"Who did it?" Honda demanded, anger bubbling its way out of the unmoving shock that was his mind. "If it was those invaders"—he could not say the name—"I swear I… I'll…" He trailed off, uncertain of what he was going to say next. What could he do? He was one man with no military training whatsoever, fighting against an army of thousands of foreign soldiers from Africa who had marched through the Alps without heed for snow and starvation.

"It was them," Shizuka said, shivering despite the warm spring air. "The Carthaginians."

Ten minutes later, as they sat in the house of one Anzu Kyoko Mazaki with her brothers Yugi and Yami, Honda explained the story in the place of the terrified girl he had brought with him. "Can she stay with you?" he asked.

Anzu nodded immediately, her voice quiet as she digested the news of Jounouchi. "Of course."

Honda remembered distantly that he had said those very words himself in one conversation so many weeks ago. He watched the bowed head of his best friend's younger sister as she sat hunched in her seat and the soft conversation of the others blurred into background noise,trying to remember a time when he had seen her so defeated.

Once, he had thought that he loved her. That had been a long time ago, when he and Jounouchi had still been children with no care for the future, when they had lived in the green grasses of the country and never had the thought that someday, that very land would be trampled under the feet of ranks of men who by all logic should never had made it there.

Once, Honda would have looked at her and thought of the situation as an opportunity to gain her trust and affection—once, he would have taken advantage of that opportunity. Now, he simple observed her once more and saw in the tenseness of her neck, in the trembling of her fingers, in the tears on her cheeks, a wreck of the person she had once been.

The sun rose higher, casting its pale yellow glow into the room, accentuating the specks of dust in Shizuka's hair and the worry in Yugi's eyes, Anzu's mourning expression and Yami's gritted teeth. They were all breaking, slowly tearing apart at the seams, left to make the most of what little they had from the war that had left their parents fearing the empire across the sea.

Damn them, Honda thought, suddenly, fiercely. Damn them for taking Jounouchi away, for doing this to us, for threatening to conquer Rome and all its territories.

They can't. They can't defeat us. We will stand strong with our armies and our walls, and we will win. He locked eyes with Yami across the room, and he could tell that he felt the same way. Yugi's older brother was, after all, a soldier in the army, waiting to be called after the inevitable declaration of war. He had fought Carthage firsthand.

Who are they, to dare to kill our families and our friends?

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Rome. Early April, 210 B.C.E.

Punicī venturī sunt.

There was that alarm running through the minds of the citizens once more, worried faces glancing more and more frequently to the north, to the cities of Italy that had abandoned their allegiance to Rome. To the army of Hannibal the destroyer, who had marched through the fields and the forests and smashed all of it to the ground, who was at present standing before the very walls of Rome with the rest of his battle-hardened army and waiting to attack.

"Do you think…" Honda let the question trail off into nothing, leaning against the wall of a building with Yami across from him. There was still some raw, aching part of his heart that mourned for Jounouchi even after all those years, even after all the campaigns against Hannibal that he had fought in with Yami's livid eyes by his side. It's been seven years since Jounouchi left for the north and died there… What would he say, if he could see me now?

"Hannibal won't attack," Yami said with certainty, his expression cold, spitting out the Carthaginian general's name with purposeful mangling of its correct pronunciation—Hannibal, after all, could never be a Latin word. "Rome is too well-protected, and he has little resources left. Besides"—here he smiled with a sort of grim satisfaction—"Scipio has sailed for Africa with his men, and soon Carthage will call Hannibal back. We will see how he survives his second crossing of the Alps."

"Alright then," Honda said, somewhat reassured by the conviction in Yami's tone. He was a far better strategist than Honda, and that in combination with his utter determination to defeat Carthage had led to his place with the hastati, in the front line of battle.

"The people shouldn't worry," Yami said carelessly, fingering the knife he kept with him at all times—war had made him wary, Honda mused suddenly. "Hannibal is too much of a coward to attack us. He is clever enough to know not to attack, and the cities to the south whose loyalty we still hold will never turn to his side."

He glanced up toward the sky, where the sun was just beginning to rise. They had left their homes early to walk around the capital before their shift guarding the walls that protected Rome, and the morning had barely started. The streets were deathly silent, most citizens locked in their own houses and shivering in fear at the thought of the army waiting outside Rome's doorstep.

"Let's go, or we'll be late."

Honda stood up and they made their way through the eerily quiet roads, which would have already been buzzing with the sounds of merchants bargaining their ways into profit before the war. Beggars slept on the stones, and Honda saw a few children sneaking down back alleys or huddled into corners. Papers and graffiti littered the walls, dirty from the mud kicked up by the running of chariots and horses down the streets, and Honda felt a brief sorrow for the ruins of his home—

What would Jounouchi say if he were here to see this now?

In a few minutes, they had arrived at the wall that surrounded Rome and climbed to the watchtowers that spotted its top. Yami leaned against the railing and stared out at the army just barely visible by the sparkle of its armor on the horizon, at the plain of no man's land that stretched between the two factions. "Too far away to even attempt shooting," he murmured to himself, his words lost to all but Honda on the light breeze that swept through their hair. "As usual."

"Hannibal's far too clever for that." Honda echoed Yami's former words softly.

His companion startled him by slamming a fist down onto the parapet and crushing his knuckles heedlessly into the stone. "Of course," Yami said, looking positively furious. "Damn him for what he did to us and our people—"

"You're thinking of Jounouchi," Honda said.

"Obviously," Yami ground out.

Honda had become accustomed to his friend's occasional moments of anger over the past few years of constant fighting; Yami had had many reasons to be furious at Carthage during that time.

"They've killed too many of us," he said, his rage evidently still not over, though Yami's anger was a subtle, burning thing, always kept tightly under control. It was a soldier's anger. "And we're just standing here and not doing anything about it while they're less than five miles away and open for attack…" Gritting his teeth, he leaned out into the air, and Honda saw a man riding toward the city on a horse, bringing yet another document that proposed that Rome surrender because Carthage had it surrounded. The white flag was there, fluttering behind him in the breeze.

"The general Hannibal Barca asks that Marcus Valerius Laevinus and Marcus Claudius Marcellus read this and decide—" The rest of the envoy's words were lost to the wind, and Honda snorted at his accented Latin.

The fury in Yami's eyes had not lessened, and Honda automatically reached out to grab his arm—when Yami had that look on his face, something bad was about to happen—

"HANNIBAL!" The shout echoed out over the plain. "COME HERE AND FIGHT US, YOU SPINELESS COWARD!"

"Oh, dear gods," Honda groaned.

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Rome. Later that week, 210 B.C.E.

There was a sharp rap of knuckles on Honda's door, and he groaned and got out of bed, rubbing his eyes to clear them. Who could possibly be awake at this time of night?

For a moment, it occurred to him that it could be Anzu or Yugi or Yami, coming there to tell him that someone had died, and he felt his breath stop in his chest—Jounouchi will come back to haunt me if it's Shizuka, I swear he will—

It was a boy.

"Friend," he said in clear Latin, his speech containing a slight accent that Honda could not place, "please let me stay in your home for this night."

"Who are you?" Honda demanded, his hand tensing to reach for the dagger that he kept on the table beside him; it seemed that Yami's paranoia had rubbed off on him.

The boy paused, and Honda caught a glimpse of pale hair beneath the hem of his hood. His eyes were some indiscernible shade, remaining mysterious as long as the night still cast a black-and-white curtain over everything. "A refugee," he said, his voice trembling.

"You were caught in Hannibal's attack?" Honda asked, suddenly remembering a scene much like this many years ago, with Shizuka huddling by the crack in his door and whispering of horrors only she had witnessed.

They can't. They can't defeat us. We will stand strong with our armies and our walls, and we will win. Who are they, to dare to kill our families and our friends?

The boy hesitated, biting his lip, before nodding frantically. His pale bangs swept across his forehead, and for the first time Honda noticed the bloodied gash there, marring his otherwise smooth skin. "Yes. I just need a night to rest and sleep, and then—"

Honda opened the door further, ushering him in. "You can explain tomorrow."

The boy stiffened under his hand, keeping his head ducked and his hood on. "Thank you. I can take care of myself, so you don't need to stay up to wait…"

"Oh, no," Honda said with a bitter laugh that reminded him startlingly of Yami's. "I'm a soldier, friend, and soldiers don't leave their guests unattended. I won't sleep a moment before you do, no matter how little of a threat you might be."

The boy shrugged, although the tenseness Honda could feel in his shoulders did not lessen. "Okay."

Hours later, Honda woke with a jolt and the uneasy feeling that someone was watching him. He turned over, expecting to see Yami standing there with the ironic smirk that was practically a part of his character, and was instead met with a pair of contemplative violet eyes. "What the—"

The boy jumped back, alarmed, and Honda saw the flash of a knife in his palm before he grabbed the hand holding it and yanked the weapon out.

"Tell me," Honda said, easily pinning him against the wall. "Why were you trying to kill me?"

In that moment, as his eyes took a soldier's quick assessment of his surroundings, Honda realized three things: that the boy had the brown skin common of the people of northern Africa, that he wasn't resisting the hold that Honda had him in, and that the gash on his forehead was bleeding slowly, beads of blood welling up. "Punicus es," Honda said softly, summing up the situation with two words. You are a Carthaginian.

The boy's chin jerked up, his teeth gritting with determination. "Sīc." Yes.

"You tried to kill me."

"And you didn't realize until I almost did."

"How old are you?" Honda asked suddenly, leaning back but still keeping the boy's hand pressed hard into the wall and his knife well out of reach.

The boy blinked those strange violet eyes. "Seventeen." As if expecting Honda's next question, he added sharply, "Old enough for war, where I come from."

"And old enough for war here," Honda said. "Are you one of Hannibal's mercenaries?"

"Yes," the boy snapped. "Do you have a problem with that, Roman?"

"No," Honda said, feeling himself calm slightly as he realized that he had the upper hand in the situation; having lived and fought with Yami and watched his friend's temper reach its breaking point a few too many times, he knew how to tell who would win a battle of words. "I assume this is your first war?"

The boy nodded, his eyes wary at the slight smile that had appeared on Honda's face.

"Then why did you decide to join?"

"Because the Romans murdered my parents and my sister," he said, and Honda noted with some surprise the hurt that the boy could not quite conceal. "And I marched through those damned mountains just so I could come here and kill some of you—"

"Have you taken a life before?" Honda interrupted.

The boy scowled at him, lifting his chin higher to escape the edge of the blade that Honda had pressed there. "What is this, an interrogation?"

"You've just noticed," Honda said sardonically. "Answer the question."

The boy remained stubbornly silent.

"I'll assume that you haven't," Honda said, and felt a strange combination of victory and pity well up in a region somewhere near his heart. "So what makes you think you can kill now, faced against a soldier who has campaigned against your people far more than you have?"

"I—"

"Why did you hesitate when standing over me with this knife"—Honda brandished it once more—"when I would have stabbed you immediately? It takes a certain amount of ruthlessness to murder, kid, and I very much doubt you have that."

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Rome. The next day.

Honda stormed into the room and was confronted with the somewhat mollifying sight of the boy attempting to read through a flyer made to recruit soldiers and looking like he had no intention whatsoever of escape. However, that feeling dissipated quickly as he remembered what he had just been told at his shift at the wall.

"Get out."

He looked up, startled. "Wh—"

"Out."

"Why?"

"Do I need a reason?" Honda said. "This is my home and you are an enemy of my people, and it's a miracle that you aren't dead already—"

"Something happened," the boy realized.

"No shit," Honda snapped. "If you really must know, my friend was just killed by the army that you deserted like a coward yesterday afternoon!"

A heavy silence sprang from that statement, the boy's pale eyes growing ever wider. Honda resumed glaring at him, wishing that the heat of his gaze could burn him to ashes on the spot.

"…I'm sorry," the boy said after a moment.

Honda snorted. "Whatever for? Isn't that what you want—to wear us down bit by bit by doing things like this? Well, let me tell you: you're succeeding. Do you see Rome now? Do you have any idea how different it was all those years ago, before this war had ever happened? Do you know how many of us utterly despise your empire right now, so much that Cato now ends all his speeches with et Karthago delenda est even if he is speaking about the grain harvest? Do you realize that the Senate's greatest goal now is to raze Carthage to the ground and sow the earth around it with salt? Do you have any idea how quickly you will be killed if you dare to venture outside my home?"

The boy shut his mouth at that, absorbing the words with blank shock on his face. Et Karthago delenda est—and Carthage must be destroyed.

"We spell Karthago with a k," Honda added more quietly, remembering the utter rage that had often lit Yami's eyes over the past few years. He wouldn't like that I'm doing this. That, I'm sure of.

The boy frowned. "So?"

Honda gave him an ironic smile. "That, and nothing else."

"…My name is Malik Ishtar," the boy said finally, a hint of desperation in his tone, "and I am a refugee and a mercenary. I don't want to fight. Can I stay here?"

Honda sighed, remembering Yami's yell for Hannibal to fight them the previous morning. Anger and impulsiveness had gotten him nowhere—Yami had always been prone to ignoring his training as a strategist in the heat of the moment, and that was what had killed him. "Fine."

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Tyrrhenia, Italy. Early November, 201 B.C.E.

"The treaty has been signed," Honda said as he and Malik stood over the trampled brown ruins of what used to be grass.

"I know."

"The terms are harsh and Carthage may never recover, but your people are strong. They'll manage somehow, and I fully expect another war within the next century."

"They're not my people," Malik said softly, kicking at a stone and watching as it tumbled away. Honda remembered with some nostalgia how he and Jounouchi had once done that very thing as children, chasing objects among the grass that grew up to their knees. "I don't come from Carthage or Tunisia. I was born in Egypt."

"You've told me that already," Honda said.

"And yet you never listen," Malik retorted.

"That's because you regard all of Rome's territories as Roman," Honda pointed out, walking toward the side of the half-collapsed house over there and touching the stone wall gently. "Why should I not do the same for you?"

Malik said nothing; it was a topic that had already caused much argument between them. "Why are we here, of all places?" he said instead, glancing up toward the sky, which was covered with a layer of gray-white clouds.

"I used to live here," Honda murmured. He peered through a window and flinched back when he saw the charred remnants of a bed inside. "That was before my parents died and I moved in with Jounouchi, before Hannibal came and burned all this to the ground. The peasants have deserted their farms after the war," he added, "and the rich are buying them slowly. Soon they will control all the land that is left, and the Senate can do nothing about it."

"So why return?" Malik asked, looking up toward the forests that dotted the horizon. The sprawl of the plain was dry and barren, stripped of what little arable soil it had possessed by the echo of thousands of trampling feet. He thought with a shudder of the other lands where battles had been fought, where the bodies of the dead lay like stones on the ground, slowly falling apart to re-fertilize the dirt beneath them. But they would not be good for farming until many years later, and during that time—

Honda was silent for a long moment. "Because I would rather not stay in the city."

Malik, having lived with him for nearly a decade, understood the subtext behind his words: I would rather not have to walk down the streets and see the walls and the houses and think, This was where Anzu and I met, where Jounouchi and I parted paths, where Yami stood and yelled his challenge to Hannibal, where I told Anzu and her brothers about Malik and we fought a battle of philosophy and objectivity and fairness—

"Then what will we do here?" he said, frowning at the hopeless task that Honda was suggesting—a task of fighting the rich with nothing but the determination of the poor and struggling through life the hard way, simply to escape the memories that clogged the easier path. It was not the best decision, perhaps, but it would be the least painful one.

Honda shrugged. "We'll live. And if we get sick of living like this, we can sell it and move back in with Anzu and Yugi; I'm sure they'd be happy to have us." He paused uncertainly. "Unless you want to return to Egypt? You must have family there that you left behind to go to war…"

Malik laughed but quickly stopped, not liking the bitterness in his tone. "Why do you think I learned Latin during that long journey to reach Rome? Do you really think that I have anything to go back to?"

"We will hate your people for a long time," Honda said finally, a note of ultimatum in his voice and they way he had automatically divided them into us and you, Roman and Carthaginian. Malik knew that he was offering him his last chance to decline and escape. Honda, despite being hardened mentally and physically by the war, still had a shred of compassion in him that Malik inferred that Yami—who had seen more death than both of them combined—had lacked.

"I know."

"It's likely that we will never stop hating you. Already, though the Senate's terms were less than kind, there is speculation about conquering it once and for all. If anyone finds out that you're from Egypt…" Honda let the sentence trail off into silence.

"I don't care," Malik said firmly, folding his arms with a determined scowl that Honda mused somewhat wistfully could have rivaled one of Yami's. "There's nowhere else I can go besides here. Who else but you, Anzu, and Yugi would ever accept me?"

Honda raised his eyebrows. "It doesn't bother you that we'll be trying to counteract what your army was here to do?"

Malik snorted. "Some sneak attack that was, taking months to reach northern Italy and having the entire city of Rome completely surprised that we'd arrived."

"Indeed." Honda cracked a smile, and Malik grinned back. The sky above them was still gray and blank, the earth empty and lifeless, the future filled with conflict and problems, but it was pleasant to know that there was still hope. Even if that little bit of hope only endured in the hearts of a Roman veteran and a Carthaginian mercenary, it might be enough.

It's been more than sixteen years since Jounouchi died, and more than nine years since Yami did. I wonder… what would they say if they could see me now?

"Hey, don't ask me," Malik said, and Honda realized that he had said the last bit out loud.

"Jounouchi would probably make a joke about conspiring with the enemy," Honda said, ignoring him pointedly, "and Yami would tell me not to get myself killed so that Anzu didn't kill him."

"What great friends you have." Malik rolled his eyes.

Honda's smile widened—it would have been their ways of expressing their agreement, and this was Malik's. They had both become accustomed to communication by means of sarcasm and teasing through the years they had spent learning to tolerate each other, and this would be nothing but another milestone in that road. "I know."

Welcome to the Rome of the late first century B.C.E.

It is a Rome of latifundia and a crumbling republic, a Rome that controls all of the Mediterranean Sea. It is a city of unrest and turmoil, a city of the abundantly rich and the wretchedly poor. It is the sad remnant of the corruption that had its roots in its legendary founding, a Rome that is spiraling heedlessly toward its collapse.

It is the Rome of the Gracchi brothers and of Sulla and of Caesar, a city where the people live in constant anticipation of another uprising and another rebel leader. No longer is there the absolute power of the Senate and the immense respect that came with it; in its place are unknown men from unknown families, taking the armies they lead and terrifying their ways into control. This is a Rome that is a republic only in name.

This is the Rome long after Honda's and Malik's deaths, long after Hannibal and Scipio parted on the battlefield of Zama as friends in respect but enemies in practicality.

This is the Rome of Octavian. This is the Rome of a boy without a father and a family, of a man who hates as fiercely as only those of his heritage can, of another individual trying to tell right from wrong and do what is best for his people.

I wonder... what would Honda have to say of him?

End.

A/N: This fic required a surprising amount of research. Footnotes are posted on my LJ. For now, know that:

- The circle of fifths is a diagram showing the relationship between the tones of the chromatic scale (which is really weird), representing a sort of 'loners stick together' theme.

- None of the character names are historically accurate except for Malik's and maybe Bakura's (because they're foreign). Additionally, Malik's and Honda's conversations are riddled with allusions to the future of Rome.

- It's up to you to decide whether Honda and Malik toiled miserably in the fields to their dying days, lived miserably in Rome to their dying days, or were happy in either situation. xD

- Footnotes: safaat-keruth .livejournal .com/1536 .html

Please review. Concrit is especially loved. :]