Disclaimer: Melodiously not mine.

A/N: Who knows where this came from? Not me, certainly. Feedback appreciated.

Silent Music

© Scribbler, December 2008.

Those who hears music feels their solitude peopled at once. -- Robert Browning

Anzu often dances to music nobody else can hear.

She's a little embarrassed about it. Dancing with music is graceful. Dancing without is just dorky. Still, she can't help herself. The guys wouldn't understand – they're guys after all. If they get songs stuck in their heads it's because they fancy the singer, want to emulate the band, or heard it in a video game. Jounouchi and Honda play air guitar along to the radio, and Yuugi can sometimes be dragged to his feet for an awkward two-step shuffle if the right CD is playing, but none of them dance when there's no music.

Anzu bends her knee, raises her other leg and twists her entire body around, leaning into the curve of a flute that never actually played in the first place. The music she hears is haunting and melancholy, or cheerful and fast, but she's never heard it before. Sometimes she wonders whether she's dancing to it, or it's fitting around her dancing.

She raises herself on her toes for a pirouette and decides it doesn't matter.

When the music is fast she finds herself mimicking duellists, jerking her arms down like she's slamming imaginary cards onto a Duel Disc, and flourishing her hands with fingers spread wide. She spins and jumps like Black Magician Girl dodging enemy fire, or Magician of Faith casting spells with her staff. Afterwards she collapses on her bed, or the couch, or sits on a garden wall and realises she just danced home from school without seeing a thing, but she honestly couldn't care less.

When the music is slow her movements are more elegant. More than once she has imagined herself in the baking heat, getting sand between her toes and paying homage to the sun and the Nile with the shape of her arms and spine. She looks up what she can about dances in ancient Egypt and tries to copy the moves, even though half the time she's sure she gets them wrong. It's a link between the present and the past that's more comfortable to her than learning about funeral rites and visiting dusty museums. She wants to believe that the music of her imagination is a message from the past, even though part of her knows it's not.

When it's her turn to clean up after class she mops the corridors with more vigour than is strictly necessary, twirling around the handle and sloshing water in and out of the bucket in an obvious rhythm. Jounouchi asks if she's practising her pole dancing routine and she slaps him in the face with the soggy end. It gets her three weeks of detention, but she's fine with that. The image of him trying to scrape scummy suds off his tongue will make her laugh until she's old and decrepit in some home for aging dancers.

"You're always dancing," Otogi remarks one lunchtime when she returns to the classroom to find him already there. It's weird to think that he owns his own lucrative company but still attends public school, though it does explain how he's allowed to get away with missing classes when he has conferences in Berlin and Luxemburg about the state of Dungeon Dice Monsters in his Europe offices.

"If I want to make a career out of it I have to practise," she says as she sits down and starts getting out her pencil-case and books. There's a squashed packet of gummy sweets in the bottom of her bag that gets all over her fingers, making her grimace and shake out her hand like she's been burned. "Didn't you design games and things from an early age?"

Otogi shrugs. "A lot of that was catharsis. It's not easy being a child prodigy."

"Oh, cry me a river," she says, not unkindly. "If it's so tough you won't mind giving back the private limo and pretty secretary who fences calls from all the girls you've dated."

He shoots her a sly grin. "I never said there weren't fringe benefits. There always are when you do something you love."

"Uh-huh." She rolls her eyes, but all through History class she hears some kind of harp and the staccato beat of a drum.

On the way home she crosses the street using petit allégro and startles drivers by landing on the opposite kerb with an admirable saubresaut. The day is wet and cold, not at all like you'd find in Cairo or … but no, it's a bad idea to keep thinking of stuff like that. A tiny portion of her mind wonders whether dancers had special shoes three thousand years ago, but it flees when she rushes up the front steps to her house, throws herself into an armchair and turns MTV up to maximum volume. No internal music can compete with heavy metal played at ear-bleeding volume.

"Anzu!" her mother yells when she gets in from work. "Turn it down before the roof caves in!"

She does so, but grudgingly.

She doesn't dance that way again for three days.

"Anzu?" Yuugi says hesitantly when she finally forgets herself while walking to school with him and performs a pas de valse outside the newsagent.

She freezes, the music ceasing in a flurry of horrible squeaks, and lands awkwardly on one leg. Her weight isn't balanced properly and she stumbles into a wall – very graceful, she has time to think while rubbing her head and wondering whether anyone inside saw her land on her butt.

Yuugi is distraught. "Oh my gosh, are you okay? I didn't mean to distract you."

"No, it's fine," she says, getting up and walking on with her cheeks burning. "Really. C'mon, or we'll be late."

"Are you sure you're -"

"I'm fine, Yuugi."

Yuugi bites his lip but doesn't argue with her tone.

She has always played games when Yuugi invites her to, plus the usual handful of childhood staples – Monopoly, Snakes and Ladders, Chinese Checkers and Hopscotch. She was never really into make-believe stuff like Mummies and Daddies, the way other girls her age were. Anzu didn't ever want a doll that wet itself and cried, but she had lots of Barbies that she dressed in tutus and beautiful pink dresses. Playing with dolls doesn't count as a game, though – not the way Yuugi thinks of games, which has become the shorthand in her head for the word. She's played Duel Monsters and done her own share of high-octane soul-on-the-line duelling, but never really by choice. She can't lose herself in games the way the Yuugi and Jounouchi can.

Honda loses himself in his motorcycle. He can bore an entire room with the inner workings of a gearbox and talk for hours about the pros and cons of different brands of tyres. Anzu tries to get involved, and even picks up a little bit about fuel economy and different types of wrenches, but it's mostly politeness.

"It's okay," Honda chuckles when she runs out of things to say about his bike's new paint job. "At least you didn't just say it sucks." He pats the saddle lovingly, and Anzu understands that this bike does for him what duelling does for Jounouchi and gaming in general does for Yuugi.

She teaches Bakura how to waltz. She'd not quite sure how it happens, but somewhere between everyone trying to include him in their activities more after Egypt, her own attempts not to forget, and Bakura's own inherent shyness, he and she end up sharing cleaning duty the day she gets Jounouchi with the mop. She turns to find Bakura standing with a hand over his mouth, laughing softly at Jounouchi's retreating back, and he remarks that she always looks happy when she dances.

"A side-effect of doing something you love," she says awkwardly.

Bakura's own smile fades. "I used to love RPGs," he murmurs, and then sakes his head. "Not so much anymore."

"Because of him?" Anzu says, wondering whether she should even be bringing that up.

"They just don't seem so fun anymore." He gives her a watery, self-effacing smile. "Deciding the fate of the world based on one rather sucks the pleasure out of the entire concept, I suppose." He shrugs. "It's no big deal. I was probably too old for making figurines anyway."

Anzu frowns. She can hear strange wind instruments again, like something out of an old Hollywood version of Cleopatra's court. On a whim she checks the corridor for onlookers and then grabs Bakura's hands and leads him into an awkward approximation of a waltz. He's embarrassed, but listens to her instructions and follows them as best he can with minimal questions.

"Uh, why are you doing this?" is one of the few he does ask.

"Because … I just thought … don't read too much into it, you understand – and it may not be your cup of tea, but -"

"No, no, it's all right. I think I understand." He accidentally kicks her in the shin and steps on her foot. His faces blazes with colour, but she soldiers on. "Uh, well, maybe I'm not so good at this. But it's the thought that counts."

The thought being that she wants to share what's so precious to her in the hopes it will help him feel more normal after all the abnormalities that have plagued his life without any of them noticing. She wants to welcome him into the fold with something that makes her who she is in a fundamental way. It floats about as well as a titanium feather, but at least it makes him smile when they finish and she examines her collection of bruises.

"Not bad for a beginner."

His smile is so unlike the Thief King's that she'd give him boots with spikes on and do the dancing lesson all over again to keep it on his face.

"What do you suppose we'll be doing in ten years?" she asks not long before graduation. They're all eating lunch together on the roof of the school, where the wire mesh stops kids jumping off the building but still affords a clear view of the city. "Where do you think we'll be?"

"I dunno," Jounouchi sniffs, examining his squished sandwich, which has no filling since there was nothing in the apartment that didn't have blue mould or beer on it.

Wordlessly Bakura takes the sandwich and replaces it with a pastry from the bag in his lap. He never brings anything remotely healthy. He breaks the sandwich into piece and the birds enjoy the bread. They all watch the sparrows take on the starlings for a while, tossing extra bits from their on lunch, until Otogi throws a piece of expensive bento his personal chef made and Jounouchi tries to mug him for it rather than 'let it go to waste on some freaking birds'.

"Is that your informed opinion?" Anzu prompts after she's broken them up.

Jounouchi rubs his reddened ear where she grabbed it and hauled him backwards. "Sure. Hopefully by then I'll be Duel Monsters World Champion, but aside from that, I got no clue."

Yuugi casts a sideways glance at him. "Only if you beat me," he says in that halfway voice between old Yuugi and Atem that sort of makes Anzu tinge and always drives away any silent music.

"It'll happen," Jounouchi grins back. "Someday."

"Yeah, when you can throw snowballs in hell," says Honda.

"Thanks for the vote of confidence, man. Why do you ask, anyway, Anzu?"

"Just because."

"Well you'll be on Broadway or something by then. You're the only one of use with a clear career path." Jounouchi gets to his feet and does a truly terrible arabesque with his lips pursed and his hands linked above his head. "You're all about dancing your way into your dream job."

She leaps up and dances circles around him, but not anything they've ever seen before. It's not ballet, not tap, not hip-hop or jazz – not even krumping, which they've all watched on TV whenever they gather at hers or Yuugi's because they'd rather be there than at their own places. It's a strange dance she's only ever performed on her own, cobbled together out of books and web-searches – a mix of belly-dancing and jerky but still graceful arm movements and foot rotations. She comes to a halt in front of Jounouchi and smiles at his shocked expression. The dance was a lot more provocative than she's ever done before with them around, even though it's nothing at all like the stuff on the videos she knows Jounouchi has stored under his bed.

"It's not just about a career path," she says breathlessly. "Sometimes it's just about …" She catches Yuugi's eye, and sees Otogi's grin over his head. "Sometimes it's just about catharsis."

Fin.