Disclaimer: Not mine, never were.

A/N: Miho Nosaka was a character in Season 0 of YGO, the show that came before the series that was eventually picked up and dubbed by 4Kids. You can find episodes of it on YouTube. It covers the events from the manga before the Duellist Kingdom arc. However, when the Duellist Kingdom arc started the entire animated YGO world had been given a dramatic overhaul – character designs changed, their backgrounds and personalities were altered, and Miho was nowhere to be seen. A lot of this was because of a switch in animation studio but continuity-wise there was never any explanation for these glaring alterations. While I can't explain away things like Kaiba's hair turning from green to brown, this is my attempt to give Miho's story a proper ending.

The Friend That I Was Looking For

© Scribbler, January 2008.

Every memory of looking out the back door,
I had the photo album spread out on my bedroom floor.
It's hard to say it, time to say it:
Goodbye, goodbye.

Every memory of walking out the front door,
I found the photo of the friend that I was looking for.
It's hard to say it, time to say it:
Goodbye, goodbye.

-- From Photograph © Nickelback.

Miho Nosaka went missing when she was fifteen. There was an investigation by the local police, which eventually opened into a national search. Since Miho was a pretty girl her picture was passed on to the media, who seized upon her disappearance as a good public interest story. For months a photograph of her in her school uniform was shown on television, in newspapers, on milk cartons and swabbed with glue to be stuck on buildings and bus shelters. When she remained missing charities adopted her as their poster child for bad things that could happen to young girls in modern society. Their involvement brought about a resurgence of interest from the media, ignoring every other child or teenager who'd disappeared in favour of the pretty girl smiling and making a peace sign to the camera. It was the biggest search of its kind that Domino City had ever known and not a scrap of good came of it.

Miho Nosaka was a dark-eyed girl who always wore her hair in a ponytail tied with a yellow ribbon. Some of her classmates called her 'Ribbon' or 'Ribbon-chan' as a result. She wasn't universally liked, but when reporters asked those same classmates described her as 'always friendly', 'a bundle of laughs' and 'the kindest person you'll ever meet'.

For months Miho Nosaka was beamed into people's homes on the news, causing eyes to well up with tears, fathers to scowl and mothers to spontaneously hug their own children, as if whoever had taken the poor girl was just waiting to snatch little Osamu, too. People shook their heads, tutted, and said things like, "It's just proof that the world's changed since I was younger!" and "Her poor parents must be worried sick."

They were, too. Mr. and Mrs. Nosaka were a nondescript couple with nondescript jobs from a nondescript home, but their faces were soon memorised as they went to press conference after press conference asking for information. As time went by her mother started to look frayed at the edges, and her father shaved off the moustache he kept nervously tugging so hard the skin beneath his nose split. One day he turned up alone to face the media and broke down in tears. That was four months after the night his only daughter didn't come home.

Miho Nosaka went to Domino High School. She had lots of friends, apparently, and to hear everyone talk afterwards you'd have though she was some angel come to Earth. You never would have known from their stories that she was possibly the shallowest girl in school, or that she had a new crush every week and could be selfish and insensitive to the feelings of others. You wouldn't guess that she kept rejecting the advances of her friend Hiroto Honda but still expected him to do little favours for her – hold her place in line, fetch her lunch while she chatted, carry heavy bags home from the mall. You wouldn't know that she was so caught up in her own dramas she constantly missed the signs that something bigger was going on around her. You wouldn't know how she always took the last pudding cup, or batted her eyelashes at boys so she could copy their homework after spending all night on the phone talking about fashion.

She wasn't malicious – she didn't, actually, have a single evil bone in her body – but she wasn't perfect like people said. Still, in the months after her disappearance she became a perfect being and nobody who knew the truth thought it fair to spoil that image. After all, she was probably dead anyway.

The event was quite sudden. It happened on a Thursday in late November, when the short days were cold and the long nights even colder. She went to school without having done her homework, just like always, and called to return a book to the library on the way home. Nobody went with her. Domino Library was only a few blocks from her house. The librarian said she saw a girl matching Miho Nosaka's description, but she left as it was getting dark. She was wearing her school uniform under a pink fleece.

They found the fleece by the canal. Forensics found no body traces except Miho Nosaka's. Police dogs tracked her scent but circled about aimlessly further downstream. There were no signs of a struggle, nor any indication she'd intended to go anywhere other than home. Her room was searched, but every item of clothing she hadn't been wearing was located – even the sparkly tube-top, cut-offs and slingbacks she'd lent to her friend Anzu Mazaki. These briefly gave investigators hope she'd changed somewhere to go and meet with an older boyfriend (classmates mentioned she sometimes talked of 'sugar daddies' and pored over older men in magazines as much as the latest heartthrobs), until they were brought into the station and laid on the counter with a mumbled apology and a fresh plea to find the missing girl.

Eventually the search was called off, though the media were tenacious as long as her picture sold papers. One tabloid even made up a story about a letter Miho had mailed to them, saying she was alive and living in Tel Aviv on the tab of ex-classmate and lover Seto Kaiba. The Kaiba Corporation lawyers soon disproved this and the newspaper's circulation figures dropped so sharply they never fully recovered. Both the reporter who wrote the story and the editor-in-chief who approved it were fired. The editor hanged himself with a novelty Kuriboh tie after his wife, disgusted with the false hope he'd given Miho Nosaka's parents, left him and took their fifteen-year-old daughter with her. The reporter vanished into obscurity soon after.

Miho Nosaka was never found – not her body, not a single trace of her. It was as though she'd simply disappeared into thin air. No suspicious characters had been seen lurking around the school before her disappearance; she didn't associate with criminals beyond an ex-gang-member friend with a juvenile record; no useable CCTV was available to show her last movements. Witnesses came forward, each claiming they were the last to see her, but they were almost universally disproved. The police had no suspects no matter how hard they tried to find (and then fabricate) them.

"Unfortunately, sometimes this happens," one officer stupidly told a reporter. "Sometimes kids just vanish and there's not a damn thing we can do about it. The bad guy wins – if there even is a bad guy. Maybe she was trying to save a dog from the canal, fell in, drowned and was washed away before her body could be dredged out. Maybe she was bored with her life, picked a road and just kept walking. Maybe she bumped her head and got amnesia, and is currently living in some other city under a different name. Maybe she ran away to join the circus – we don't know, and frankly we've run out of options. We have no leads and would appreciate any members of the public with fresh evidence, however insignificant, to contact us immediately."

People lost interest. They grew bored of her peace-sign photograph. Her parents submitted another, and another, and another – Miho at the beach, Miho playing the flute, Miho sitting in the garden with a glass of lemonade – but gradually eyes glanced over her without seeing her. Sometimes they made comments: hadn't she been found yet? Were they still talking about that? Not much point in looking anymore. If she was going to home she would've done it already. They nodded, sighed over the evils of the world, and then turned the page to press Miho Nosaka's picture against a story about a dog that looked like Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda.

Her school held a commemorative service. Everyone gathered in the main hall while the famous peace-sign photo stared at them from the stage. Some students and one female teacher cried. A few more clenched their fists and wished they'd said more while Miho was still in their lives. Most wondered whether this would take up the entire first period so they could miss lessons.

A small clutch of students gathered in the hall after final bell that day. The photograph was still on the stage, balanced on a chair. When you got closer you could see a ball of blue-tack in the middle of the lower frame, sticking it to the seat. It wouldn't have looked very good for the picture to fall and smash halfway through the service. The three boys and one girl stood in silence for several minutes, eyes fixed on the same spot as they had been that morning.

They didn't notice the white-haired boy. He stood in the doorway for a second, not entering, as though not wanting to interrupt something important. His left foot twitched, skating half over the doorsill. Then he shook himself, everything from his heels to his hair seeming to bristle outwards, and walked away without looking back. The action distanced him from their pain but didn't send him with the rest of the crowd either. Instead he walked his own path, foreshadowing events that would follow both him and the kids behind him in ways none of them could predict at that moment.

The four in the hall went on staring at the photo of Miho Nosaka.

"It's not fair."

It didn't matter who said it. What mattered was that it was said and that they all agreed on this point – it wasn't fair. It wasn't fair that their friend was gone. It wasn't fair that they didn't even know what had happened to her. It wasn't fair that they didn't know whether she'd be coming back, whether they should move on with their lives like their classmates or live on tenterhooks as they had been since that Thursday in November.

They never got any sense of closure. That was the worst part – they couldn't grieve. They could miss their friend, but they couldn't grieve for her because some foolishly hopeful part of their brains kept hoping she was still alive and would someday come home. They knew the odds got worse with every day that passed, but still they just. Kept. Hoping. They stopped talking about Miho as that dredged up bad memories and hammered home how anorexic this hope was becoming. It wavered like a candle flame in a draught, and no matter how they cupped their hands around it they knew no candle could burn forever.

She was in their thoughts, though. For an extremely long time they looked slightly to the left whenever arranging to do things together, to the spot where the last member of their group should've stood.

One of the boys had thought he was in love with Miho Nosaka. He folded his arms and stared at the ground, or shut his eyes, or made a pulsing motion with his throat whenever she was mentioned. His friends saw this and, for his sake even more than their own, stopped talking about her. It was less complicated that way. False hope is easier to maintain when feeding itself and not forced to confront harsh reality. He never told them to stop, or brought her up in conversation, so they assumed this was what he wanted. His attitude to a lot of things changed – he stopped caring so much about his role as 'school janitor'. He stopped caring so much about school. As his best friend cleaned up his act and made himself more respectable, the heartbroken boy became rougher around the edges. He dropped swear words into conversation where he never would've before. He put aside his speeches of cleanliness being next to godliness and got greasy learning to ride a motorcycle. He made dozens of small changes to himself that might have spiralled into bigger changes had his best friend not been there to punch him in the face every so often and order him to quit being an asshole.

Sometimes at night this boy would park his bike on a certain street and walk a short distance to look up at a certain house. The porch light was always on, as if it was a beacon to guide a lost soul home. Mrs. Nosaka couldn't sleep anymore and he could see her perpetually on the edge of her couch, waiting. And waiting. And waiting. Her eyes were dark blisters of heartache. She never changed from her bedclothes. The house gradually piled up with tissue boxes, old food and unread magazines. Mr. Nosaka came home late, when he came home at all. He checked into motels a lot, not to sleep with other women but to get away from his wife's corrosive misery.

Once Mrs. Nosaka caught the boy looking and, startled, he did the only thing he could think of: he waved at her. She waved back sadly.

"Why do you keep doing this, man?" A blonde boy leaned against his bike when he returned to it. This was nowhere near his neighbourhood – all the trash was in the cans for one thing, and empty bottles were in recycling banks instead of sleeping hands. The blonde boy had walked many blocks to get here.

"Because…"

"Because what?"

"Because I have to."

"No you don't. You keep doing it because you want to, but it's killing you. It's been hard on all of us, dude, but you most of all and it kills me to see what you're doing to yourself."

"Sorry to be such a fucking inconvenience."

"See? That's what I'm talking about. It's not healthy. It's not you."

"Fuck off, Jounouchi."

"No can do, man." He scrubbed at his hair. "Shit, Yuugi's way better at this stuff than me. Anzu kicks my ass at this, too. Look, I know it's not fair. It'll never be fair. Nothing I can say or do will ever make it fair, or better, or bring her back, but you can't keep beating yourself up over something you can't change. You couldn't do anything. None of us could. There's no point in hurting yourself over it now-"

"Shut up."

"Miho's gone, Honda." There they were; the words they weren't allowed to say. "You gotta accept that or it's gonna do to you what it's done to her mom."

The effect was explosive. When they'd finally finished rolling around they were each missing clumps of hair, his lip was cut and he had a black eye from where he didn't dodge the first right hook. They drove off on the motorcycle, parked in a neighbourhood less likely to report them to the police for brawling, sat on the sidewalk and threw horrible silence at each other for over half an hour.

It was almost midnight when the first tears fell. The blonde boy rubbed his friend's back, awkward but sincere. When it came to emotional outbursts he could get out of his depth on a wet pavement. Still, he stayed there, making the kind of soothing noises more appropriate from a vet to a cow in labour.

The world stopped talking about Miho Nosaka, and so did her friends. It took months, but they did.

The world stopped remembering Miho Nosaka, but her friends didn't. Ever. They couldn't. Moreover, they wouldn't. Memory Lane had turned into a bad road through a dark alley, but they walked it anyway. They'd been through and done too much to forget the missing member of their group. Somehow, her absence drew them closer together, re-forging the bonds between them so that they would do anything – anything – to never slide their eyes left and find another space where one of them should've been.

Miho Nosaka went missing when she was fifteen. She was never found. The world went on without her, as if she'd never been. She was a dark-eyed girl who always wore her hair in a ponytail tied with a yellow ribbon. Some of her classmates called her 'Ribbon' or 'Ribbon-chan' as a result. It was an unimaginative name that missed out her personality – how she shared the last pudding cup with whoever asked, how she produced Honda Hiroto's favourite candy bar as a reward for carrying her heavy shopping bags, how she worried about her friends even during those times when she hadn't a clue as to what was really going on, or the magnitude of their problems. Miho Nosaka was not a cookie cutter high school girl. She was a person, and when she disappeared everything that made her special and carved out her place in the world disappeared with her.

A chosen few didn't call her Miho, Miss Nosaka or Ribbon-chan.

A chosen few called her friend, and despite everything they never, ever forgot her.

Fin.