Disclaimer: Yu-Gi-Oh! belongs to Kazuki Takahashi. The lyrics from "Valjean's Soliloquy" belong to Alain Boublil, Claude-Michel Schonberg, and Herbert Kretzmer, the geniuses behind that beautiful musical Les Misérables.
There's no particular reason that the dub names are being
used -- they're still in Japan -- I just like the name "Tristan." It reminds
me of the knights in armor and the code of chivalry, which is very fitting for
his character.
------------
.
And is the hour so late
That nothing remains but the cry of my hate,
The cries in the dark that nobody hears
Here where I stand at the turning of the years?
If there's another way to go
I missed it twenty long years ago.
My life was a war that could never be won. . . .
Yet why did I allow that man
To touch my soul and teach me love?
.
The night he turned eighteen, Ryō Bakura ran away.
At least, that was the date the police assumed he'd left, based on reports from his neighbors and classmates. They couldn't be certain, since over a week had passed before anyone went to look for him, and the single letter he'd left had no date on it.
Tristan was the first to suspect something was wrong. That didn't surprise him -- Tristan always seemed to have some sixth sense when it came to Bakura. Joey had never questioned why.
He shrugged it off as paranoia at first, but when a week had passed and the next Monday Bakura still wasn't in class, Joey started listening. That afternoon, he tagged along with Tristan to Bakura's apartment. They spent a good half-hour knocking on the door and ringing the bell, but there was no answer. Joey had finally said that Bakura might have gotten sick or had some kind of family emergency come up that forced him to go to his parents, but he didn't believe it. Neither did Tristan, judging by the look on the guy's face; but he agreed to leave anyway.
When Joey caught up to him after school got out the next day, Tristan said he was going back to the apartment. Joey went with him.
That time, Tristan didn't even bother to knock on the door. Instead, he found the apartment that the landlord was living in and explained the situation. Finally, the man agreed to open the place for them, but said that he was only doing it because the rent was coming up and Bakura -- who always paid in advance -- had yet to turn his in.
When they got inside, the place looked fine. In fact, it looked immaculate. It was vacuumed, the trash had been taken out, the curtains were pulled shut, and there were no dirty dishes or clothes lying around. There was no Bakura, either.
On closer look, it had been cleaned out. There was no food in the refrigerator, only a few clothes in the closet, and no trinkets like soap or shampoo or a toothbrush in the bathroom.
The landlord trailed behind them as they went through the rooms, and Joey ignored the fact that Tristan was looking around with a swiftness and certainty like he had been in the place before. Been in the place enough to know where everything was supposed to be.
Only the trashcan in the bathroom hadn't been emptied, and that detail seemed almost deliberate. They found three different boxes of hair dye in there. As best as Joey could guess, Bakura could've triple-dyed his hair, or he could have given it two tones, or he could've just used one bottle and then poured the other two down the sink so that no one would know for sure what color he'd picked. The bathroom was also vacuumed, but there were a pair of scissors tucked in the back of in one of the drawers; so it didn't really come as a shock when the police found a few stray cut hairs (still white) that the vacuum cleaner had missed.
They also found Bakura's school ID on his desk. The picture had been scratched out until it was unrecognizable.
Tristan had stopped looking through the apartment when he saw that. He just stood still and stared until the landlord ushered the two of them back outside and went to call the police.
The scary part was how deliberate everything was. Bakura's father had given him a credit card to pay for his various expenses, but after the night of his birthday all expenses had stopped. The last charge to the card was for a dinner at a restaurant a few blocks away from Bakura's apartment. And there had been no checks written for anything since Bakura had paid last month's rent. Wherever the teenager had gone, he'd paid his way with untraceable cash. There were no sudden withdrawals of his savings, either; but when his parents checked the account they found that it was nearly drained. So Bakura had to have been taken money out in small increments for . . . months, at the least. It made Joey wonder how long he'd had been planning to leave.
He'd tried to talk to Tristan about that once, while the police and Bakura's parents were still going through the apartment and the accounts, but Tristan had just snarled at him to shut up and refused to say any more.
In fact, he wouldn't talk about Bakura at all. Joey had complained about it Thursday when he was eating lunch with Yûgi and Téa, but Téa just hit him in the arm and told him he needed to stop asking.
"He'll talk when he wants to talk," she'd said quietly, a moment later. ". . . Or he won't talk about it at all. That's more like him, really. . . ."
Joey had frowned at her. "Whadda ya mean?"
"Never mind." Téa had shaken her head. "It's . . . never mind. Nothing."
She hadn't said anything else, despite his and Yûgi's prodding, and finally Joey had given up and just finished his lunch.
On Friday, the cops came and pulled Tristan out in the middle of second period. He came back near the end of third.
During the break between classes, he told them that the police given him a letter Bakura had addressed to him, which they'd found hidden in one of the dresser drawers. The police had read through it, and then Bakura's parents had seen it too; and then when they'd found no trace of a clue as to where Bakura had gone, they'd finally given it to Tristan after questioning him about some of the things (like the lines about "the Items") that the other teenager had referred to.
Yûgi and Devlin had pushed him to open it then and read what it said, but Tristan had refused and jammed it into the recesses of his desk. When lunch came, Tristan slid the letter into his pocket, left the classroom and disappeared down the hallway before any of them could catch him.
When lunch was over, Tristan came back to the classroom, sat at his desk, stared blankly at the blackboard, and didn't speak to any of them until the next break between classes. Then, he told them that Bakura had said he'd been planning to run away for almost a year.
"He said that as long as he stayed here, he was always gonna remember what happened with the Items and the other Yûgi," Tristan said, staring down at his folded hands. "He said that as long as he was friends with us, he was never goin' to be able t' forget. He felt like our friendship with him was always gonna to be . . . tainted or something, by what happened, or that we were friends because we pitied him for stuff."
"That's crazy!" Téa had exclaimed. "Why . . . why would he think like that?"
"We've been friends for so long after the Items were gone -- why would he think it was still about that?" Yûgi asked.
Tristan shrugged. "I'm just tellin' you what he wrote. He said he couldn't change what happened, but he could start over somewhere where no one knew about it. He. . . ." Tristan swallowed heavily, and his hands clenched. "He said thanks for the past three years, and asked us not to look for him. Ever. He wants t' start over."
Yûgi stared down at his desk. ". . . We were never friends because of that," he murmured. "Not just because of that. . . ."
Tristan shrugged again and didn't reply.
Then the teacher came in and the next period began.
It was obvious that they were all thinking about Bakura -- Yûgi doodled in the margins of his journal, Téa moved her feet nervously beneath her desk as if reflexively performing a dance to calm herself, Devlin toyed with his bangs, and Tristan just stared out the window. Joey slumped in his seat and pretended to take notes.
There was more that Tristan wasn't telling them, he knew that. He'd spent lunch looking for the guy and had finally found him near the portables at the back of the school, reading the letter. The letter that had had four pages.
It didn't take four pages to say that you were running away to change yourself. And Joey wasn't stupid -- he'd guessed over a year ago, when Tristan and Bakura had started hanging out more. He'd actually ribbed Tristan about it, asking if the brunet was trying to replace him with a new second-in-command.
"I know he's pretty good wit' a knife, but I don't think he c'n hold his own inna plain fist fight," Joey had added with a casual smirk.
Tristan had just snorted and looked away. "Don't be an idiot," he'd muttered. "It's . . . it's not like that."
Joey had guessed a long time ago . . . he just didn't want confirmation. That would make things weird, and he knew he wouldn't be able to look at Tristan in quite the same way anymore. So it was easier to pretend that he was too dumb to figure it out, the same way he pretended about everything else he couldn't fix or beat into submission.
He did feel bad about it, though. Because it sucked that Tristan had to deal with the fact that his boyfriend had abandoned everything in his old life, including himself, while acting like they had just been friends.