Foreshadowing

Chapter 1 – Fixing a hole where the rain gets in / To stop my mind from wandering / where it will go

AN: Very, very old!fic. Written while writing Harry Potter and the Coming Shadows, and meant to accompany said story, this was supposed to tell of Anzu, Jonouchi, Kaiba and the rest - and may still do. As it stands, I'm posting it so that it doesn't lie around gathering dust, and people can read it.

...

Anzu sighed. She collapsed against her door after waving Jii-chan off, one hand still on her suitcase. The trip back to Domino after the stay in Diagon Alley had been . . . weird. Quiet. She had grown so used to the strangeness of her friends, the way someone always had something to say. The funny way that Marik seemed to be the only person to be able to make Bakura-kun argue and fight and the way the two looked so much like Jonouchi and Honda sometimes. She missed counting Marik's real smiles with Ishizu, with whom she had become friends. Rishid, she had discovered, was the type who didn't usually say much, but that didn't mean he didn't have anything to say. He had often caught them out with something witty, wise or hilarious.

She missed Yugi already.

She stood back up, banged the back of her head against the door, and went further in. Everyone had given her a warm welcome back when she had arrived back home, but now she was alone.

She went upstairs to her room, took her things out of her suitcase. Smiled at memories. Clothes went slowly back into wardrobes and dressers. Souvenirs went carefully into safe places where they couldn't get lost. Gifts for the others were put to one side, ready for the next time she was going to go and meet them. Even Mai-san, Otogi-kun and Shizuka-chan had something.

Thoughts full of her friends, she rummaged in her suitcase until she found her favourite pyjamas and fell asleep, curled up in her bed.

...

A few weeks later and the school term for Anzu and the others had already started. Every so often they would receive mail in the form of a nearly black eagle owl bearing parchment letters saying how they were missed by everyone, that they had made lots of new friends but they'd never ever forget the guys and girls back home.

Anzu sighed at the last letter she'd received detailing some of their recent classes. It seemed trouble followed them wherever they went. Back in Domino however, things were, well . . . normal. Yugi was missed by everyone, and even if he didn't show it, even Kaiba was affected. He'd lost a rival – all right, the only person he'd ever seemed to respect at all other than his little brother. The guy was taking it out on Jonouchi, who wasn't smart enough to ignore his jibes. But then again, Jonouchi also needed someone to take things out on. He'd lost his best friend.

Sometimes she went to see how Yugi's mom and Grandpa were doing. It was weird to go into the Kame game shop and not see the light on up in the upstairs bedroom, not hear his grandpa call up to him or see him rushing down to meet her. Things just weren't the same without him. He was like the glue that held the whole group together. In a way he was still there, but mostly, he was just . . . missing. A hole where he was.

There was a hole where Bakura used to be, too, come to think of it. Bakura had always been the first into class, and early at that. He had known all of the answers and hadn't been too shy to put his hand up or help someone if they asked him. He'd smile that smile of his and explain just how that question became that answer, and you'd never know that so much had happened to him, even after Battle City. You'd never know that he had such a very – different – other self, hidden away in that pendant of his.

Absently, Anzu wondered what exactly had made her friend choose to keep the Ring and the Spirit that came with it. She didn't know when or how exactly he had reacquired it, but it couldn't have been much too long after Battle City. From what she'd gathered, he'd had it at the end of term, at any rate. What struck her the most about Ryou Bakura was how much faith he had in others. Yugi had the kind of personality that made him trust that others were good people, the kind that made people better. Ryou, she'd long figured out, was the kind who waited patiently, hopefully, but stubbornly. And she supposed it worked. After all, look at what had happened in London – exactly nothing! So sure, they'd all been scared witless countless times and Yugi had been mocked about his English, but that had been about it. She didn't know what Bakura had done, but they hadn't had that much of a calm time with that particular spirit involved ever.

Anzu started to sigh again, but caught herself.

Gaaah! What am I doing? I'm not the kind of person who just sits around sighing all day! I do things. But . . . what can I do?

The answer struck her when her gaze drifted over to her shelves, where rested a photograph of the whole gang plus Shizuka around Bakura's Monster World game table, miniatures all in hand.

...

It took her all of five minutes to grab her coat back on and get out of the house. Another five to walk over to the apartment block and up to the sixth floor. Only when she arrived did she realize she had missed one very important thing. The key.

As she looked all over the door and under the doormat, she remembered him telling them that he'd kept the place as somewhere to come back to, somewhere to store all of the Monster World boards that would be too big to take to somewhere like a boarding school. A place like that would be getting dusty after so long without anyone in. Bakura did like things clean, so wouldn't it be polite and friendly to go in there and clean up? But after checking and re-checking every place that she could think of that Bakura might have hidden a spare key, she had turned up with nothing. She almost thought about going on back home, that he must have taken all of the keys with him, when she remembered that day outside the arcade, when they'd turned up to find Bakura arguing with Marik. During which, he'd let slip that he had learned certain less-than-legal things from his other

Which meant that he wouldn't have ever left his front door key just lying about.

He'd have given it to someone.

The landlady!

As quickly as she could, she hurried back down to where she could find the woman.

"Bakura Ryou, apartment 601. Yes. I've got his key right here. Gave it to me before he went away. And you are?"

"Mazaki Anzu. I'm a friend of his from school."

The landlady, a middle-aged woman who was slightly big and had a shrewd yet friendly look about her looked Anzu up and down.

"He sure is a strange one, he is. Usually as quiet as a mouse and polite as anything. Then, some nights, he wouldn't turn up 'til the early hours. 'Course, I only knew because I'd been kept awake. The kids in 340. Here – seen you around too. Nice girl."

"Er – thanks, I think. I was wondering if I could have the key just to go up there and clean up every so often."

The woman dangled the key from her finger for a moment before handing it over. "Only to clean. No parties – I've got enough of that in 340. No moving of the furniture out of the apartment. No moving in. No re-decorating. I'll have to trust you not to take anything, but as a friend of the occupier I doubt you would anyway."

"And that's everything?"

"Yeah. Just about."

Anzu said her thanks and went back up the stairs. Now with the precious key in hand, she opened the door. It opened easily, making her jump. She'd almost been expecting it to creak open like in some abandoned old house. Looking around, she realized just how little time had passed. Mail was on the doorstep, but there wasn't piles and piles of it. There was no hundreds-of-years-old dust, either.

There wasn't even any unfinished washing up left from before he'd gone, undone in haste. Everything had been meticulously cleaned and put away, ready for either his return or the leasing of the apartment to someone else. Slipping off her shoes and putting house slippers on, she found that there were very few signs that he'd ever been there at all. Most of the things that would have personalized his spaces had been taken with him. It was eerily like walking into some sort of ghost house, and the feeling was only driven away when she wandered into the game room.

The game room, which had apparently been a spare bedroom before he had moved in, was mostly just as she remembered it. The grand table upon which the massive board game sat was still there, the shelves of characters lining the walls had a small few missing, but there were still enough to make her mind boggle. The laptop computer that he used as the game master lay in plain sight on top of the table, curiously dust-free. Yet when Anzu got closer to it, maybe not so curious; purple swirls made themselves known with a familiar if faint scent of bonfires. The computer was very well protected. Going back into the kitchen she picked up a pair of gloves and some other cleaning equipment and started to tidy the place up, being careful of anything else that seemed too clean, or if that smell showed itself again. She was particularly cautious not to disturb anything too badly when she went into his room, but it seemed that in there just as in any other room there were hardly any signs of his existence.

She came round to the game room last. It would be, she had long since admitted to herself, a long and hard job. She would have to be wary of not breaking the detailed miniatures or boards. Not to mention the many Shadow-protected areas that were bound to be spotted around the room.

So, of course, she started with the flat surfaces, just to be on the safe side.

Then she harder parts, or at the very least, as much of it as she could.

Then she tried to reach the higher bits by standing on a chair.

Then, at the end, she got down onto the floor and started on the underside of the table.

It was then that she found something that she'd never seen before.

It was shaped like a square, soft like packaging. She wiggled it out of its hidey hole with a curiosity that wouldn't just let things lie.

Sitting back down with her head against one of the table legs and the package in her lap in trembling hands, she found herself reading the note stuck onto brown card paper. It was an address. To somewhere not far from Domino. The return address – all the way from somewhere in Egypt.

Anzu's hands flew to her mouth in horror at what she realized she had just found when she added in the indentations in the packaging that indicated that something hard had been in it, a very long time ago.

If you didn't count the cord, the Millennium Ring would fit into that perfectly. The date stamped on the package said about four years ago. Bakura-kun would have been ten. Ten.

Yet she noticed that it wasn't empty, and obviously Bakura already had the Ring on him. So what else could be in there? She looked inside and sniffed to make sure she wasn't about to put her hand inside seven kinds of hell before taking out –

A diary.

...

AN: Yup, I love cliffhangers. And yes, the chapter title/quote comes from a Beetles song called Fixing a Hole from the St. Pepper's album that I've got on my computer. I thought it fitted Anzu's mood. I think this idea's been done before – not specifically in YGO fanfiction – but tell me what you think so far. Like it, or not? Oh, and the landlady is remembering the beginning of Blessed By the Trickster (HPCS chapter) and other times like that.