Disclaimer: Noticeably not mine.

A/N: the first two piece of dialogue are taken from 8 Simple Rules, and basically inspired the rest of the fic. RIP John Ritter.

This takes place as part of the Cherry Blossom series of fics, which take place between ten and sixteen years into the future of YGO: DM. The reading order goes as follows:

1. Stone Tablets and Cherry Blossoms

2. The Cherry Blossom Monologues

3. Cherry Blossom Hearts

Cherry Blossom Hearts

© Scribbler, August/September 2011

"Dad, do you notice anything different about me?"

Cold fear washed through Yuugi. "Oh, please don't do this to me."

Sakura moved from the side of the couch to stand in front of him, blocking the TV. "Dad!"

He briefly considered leaning around her, but thought better of it. Instead he focussed on her face, searching for something that might pass for, if not the right answer, at least a right answer. Her tiny frame hadn't sprung another five inches in height, her blue eyes weren't suddenly hooded and mysterious, and her hair ... Yuugi loved his daughter with all his heart, but even he had to admit she had inherited his unfortunate tendency for looking like a porcupine kissing an electrical socket. Genetics had been kind enough to give her brown hair, but endless childhood pigtails, plaits, ponytails, braids and even one attempt at dreadlocks had all exploded into the messy spikes inherited by all Mutous.

"Um …" He played for time. "Uh …"

Sakura's eyes narrowed. "Dad!"

"Did you change your, um … have you lost … gained … switched your, uh … fixed up your …" Yuugi sighed. "Help me out here, sweetheart."

Her eyes narrowed even further, thinning to slits she couldn't possibly see through. "I told Mom you wouldn't notice."

Oh great; so if he didn't notice what she wanted him to notice, not only would his daughter be mad at him, his wife would be too. What had he done to deserve this? All he had wanted to do today was watch some old tapes of his duelling career, study techniques he had used in his heyday and prepare a little more for Kaiba Corp's commemorative duel. Now his family was behind him and his decision to ride the current Duel Monsters revival craze, he didn't want to make a fool of himself in public. It had been hard enough getting Sakura's support; he didn't want to embarrass her.

It was hard not to think of Sakura as still a little kid. Sometimes when Yuugi looked at her it was like watching a DVD that skipped too fast from one scene to another. Different images from her life blended and superimposed over each other. He saw her as a fat-fingered toddler; carrying her too-big book-bag on her first day of school; when she learned to ride her bike without training wheels; a tiny baby in his arms; stamping her foot in a tutu when she didn't want to do ballet anymore; getting hit in the head with a baseball when she tried out for the team; on stage in the school play as Spear Carrier Number Four. He had to focus until those images fell away, leaving the teenager she had become. As teens went, she wasn't nearly as scary as her classmates, but Yuugi's memories of adolescence were enough to make him want to drive barbwire-topped stakes into the ground around the house and post rabid guard dogs at the door. Regular teenage problems were exhausting enough to parent. He didn't know how Grandpa had coped with the supernatural problems Yuugi had gone through as well. Thank goodness Sakura had never showed any interest in jewellery. Yuugi had a hard enough time understanding his daughter without introducing split personalities and ancient spirits into the mix.

Yuugi had never been good with girl stuff. He was kind of oblivious to all the thing girls found important, or at least the stuff movies and TV had taught him to be important: hair, make-up, clothes, magazines, celebrity gossip, reality shows and the perfect diet, to name but a few. He wasn't a natural at any of it. He didn't notice things he was supposed to notice.

During that time in puberty when other guys were learning how to flirt and filch magazines off the top shelf of the newsagent's (though not at the same time), Yuugi had been perfecting his gaming skills. He had never gone through that awkward phase of asking girls out, getting rejected, picking his ego off the floor and trying again. Until he was sixteen, basic survival had taken up most of his time. After that, duelling took its place. Even Jounouchi and Honda, who didn't have the lightest touch wooing the ladies, were aghast as how bad Yuugi was at flirting, never mind anything that came after. Yuugi, who didn't know which end of a lipstick was up, couldn't name the latest celebrity heartthrob to save his life, and for years had thought 'g-spot' was a note on guitar, had started to despair at becoming that most hallowed of things: a boyfriend.

"Don't worry about it," Anzu had said when Jounouchi and Honda had begged her to teach them what they needed to know about girls and how to get them. They had gone to Otogi first, but going to Otogi for advice about girls was like walking into a strip joint and thinking actual Catholic school-girls had wandered onto the stage by accident. Anzu, however, had been less than forthcoming with the kind of tips and advice they wanted. "There's not a time-limit on this sort of thing."

"Says you," Jounouchi had snapped.

She had rolled her eyes and said, "There's no sure-fire way to get someone to love you."

"Who said anything about love? We just want girlfriends."

She had pinned Jounouchi with a penetrating stare that made him wriggle like a worm on a hook. The absent Mai's spectre had filled the room so much you could almost smell her perfume. "You all just want girlfriends?" Anzu had asked, glancing at each of them in turn.

"Uh, yeah," Honda said awkwardly. "I guess. We're seventeen already and not one of us has ever had one. It seems like we're past our due, y'know?"

"It's not that easy."

"Tell me about it. I've been shot down more than biplanes in a dogfight."

"You don't want to date the wrong person," Anzu had insisted.

"At this point, I'd settle for any person!" Jounouchi had thrown up his hands, and then snapped them back down to his sides. "Provided she's a she, I mean. Preferably a hot she, but definitely a she." Rumours in the press about 'the real reason' for his duelling rivalry with Seto Kaiba had made him announce his heterosexuality at every opportunity.

"You all feel this way?" The question was for everyone, but she had looked directly at Yuugi. He had fidgeted, unable to answer. The entire situation had felt uncomfortable for him, but there was no stopping Jounouchi when he got an idea into his head – especially one to help block Mai from his mind. Anzu had sighed and shaken her head. "Trust me. Just give it time. You'll get there in the end."

"Yeah, when we're, like, thirty and still living in our parents' basements!" Jounouchi had protested.

"Dude, the Game Shop doesn't have a basement. Neither does my house. And you live in apartment on the fourteenth floor of a tower block," Honda had pointed out, right before Jounouchi nailed him in the head with a couch cushion.

Of course, Mai had eventually returned, and Jounouchi had given up trying to block her out of his mind. Anzu had been right: once they stopped trying so hard and gave it some time, they had each found their perfect partners. It had seemed perfectly natural when Yuugi and she grew together, their friendship deepening into more. They had been like two strands of ivy, wrapping around each her as they grew side by side up a trellis, separate until suddenly, without warning, one day you couldn't tell where one ended and the other began in the tangle of their feelings. To this day, neither was sure who had said 'I love you' first. Neither actually cared, either. The important thing was that it had been said, meant and felt.

Anzu was a brilliant buffer against the weirder side of the Duel Monsters fan base while Yuugi's fame was at its height. Unfortunately, dating the best friend who had seen you with your head stuck through railings, taken care of you after bullies flushed your head in the toilet, and followed an ancient spirit into the desert to try and retrieve your lost soul, plus fending off overzealous Duel Monsters fans, weren't helpful for understanding how the female mind worked. Anzu loved Yuugi for who he was and never asked him to be anything more than that. She understood his quirks and accepted them without question. She had seen him at his worst, so he had never had to try with her, and he never had to work at understanding her either.

Sakura tapped her foot. Yuugi felt sweat bead in his hairline. Her posture was so much like her mother's, despite their physical differences, it was a little scary. Had they really ever been that young? Youth seemed like some kind of elaborate illusion designed to make him check his ears for cobwebs and excess hair.

"Should I find my glasses for this?" he asked plaintively.

"Gawd, Dad!" Sakura groaned. "Have you lost them again?"

"I never lose them," he protested weakly. "I just periodically don't know where they are."

"You're seriously not blind enough to say you don't notice. Not if you expect me to believe you," she said acerbically. "You're worse than Ryu. He can't lie either, and he always misses the obvious too."

Ah, yes: Ryu, the boy-next-door who had inherited Jounouchi's laid back attitude, Mai's good looks and their combined ability not to notice when somebody was crushing on them more than an avalanche in the Alps. Sakura's crush on her childhood friend was the worse kept secret in the history of the Mutou family – even worse kept than Yuugi's awkward crush on Anzu, though that did give him hope that history might repeat itself and his little girl may someday get Ryu to reciprocate her feelings too. If Sakura was going to date anyone, Yuugi could think of worse candidates than Ryu. If the boy did anything to hurt Sakura, Jounouchi would string him up and Mai would get him down only to string him up again.

Jounouchi had been apoplectic when his invitation to re-enact the final duels from Battle City didn't arrive. Thinking it was yet another slight by Seto Kaiba, he mad marched down the Kaiba Corp HQ to give the CEO a piece of his mind. After being thrown out three times, bracing himself against the door like a cat about to be thrown into a rainy night, threatened with the police and eventually almost rugby-tackling Mokuba Kaiba to get past front-desk security, Jounouchi realised the elder Kaiba brother was out of town and that his secretary had accidentally mailed the invitation to Buenos Aires in the same envelope as a bid to build a new Kaibaland there. Now Jounouchi spent his time off work grumbling and coming up with witty put-downs for when he finally met his 'nemesis' again.

"You can't call him your nemesis!" Honda had said the first time he and Yuugi found Jounouchi in the back yard practising looking down his nose at someone taller than himself. "Nobody outside Saturday morning cartoons even uses the word!"

"You're just jealous 'cause you ain't got a nemesis."

"Yuugi, talk to him."

"Jounouchi, maybe you should practise your duelling instead of what you're going to say to Kaiba?" Yuugi had said hesitantly, not wanting to offend anyone.

"I could beat that bozo with one hand tied behind my back. No, with both hands behind my back. And my legs! And, hell, my head too! I could beat that guy if I was only a torso, man."

Out the corner of his eye, Yuugi had spotted Ryu and Sakura watching them over the fence that divided their yards. They had exchanged a look that needed no words and ducked back down, leaving the stringent aroma of embarrassed teen.

Right now Sakura's expression was less embarrassed, more angry, with a dash of exasperation for flavour. She finally threw up her hands and turned away from him. "Forget it."

The blur of her shirt caught Yuugi's attention. He focussed, his mind whirring backwards, then forwards, then backwards again. He briefly saw the world through the eyes of his sixteen-year-old self before snapping back to the present and calling for her to stop. Sakura never wore shorts. She hated them; claiming they made her short legs look even stubbier. She always wore voluminous jeans with pockets in which you could lose the entire Russian circus. There wasn't a scrap of denim on her now.

"What?" she asked sullenly.

"Your outfit."

"What about it?"

"It's what your mother wore to the Battle City finals. Or a replica, at least." They weren't the same size, height or build, after all. At the swimming pool, Sakura regularly got asked if she was lost and wanted help finding her parents. Every time she went to the dentist or doctor she came back fuming and clutching a lollipop. Once, Yuugi had found her stuffing tissue into her bra in front of the bathroom mirror. They had never talked about it, and couldn't look each other in the eye for a week, but the incident had told Yuugi she wasn't happy with the way her body was developing – or not, as the case may be.

Sakura's head tilted a little further around, though she still didn't turn back to him. "It is?"

Yuugi smiled. "You look wonderful, sweetheart. I appreciate the gesture."

"Yeah, well …" She shrugged. "I just thought … y'know … after all that stuff you said about how much Duel Monsters means to you … it'd be nice to get into the spirit of things and … stuff." She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, gradually sliding herself around so she was almost, but not quite, facing him. "I thought I'd wear it to the anniversary thing. Mom and I found the shorts in a store today and I was just, y'know, trying on the outfit and comparing it to some of her old pictures."

"You went shopping?" Yuugi boggled. "You actually went shopping? Voluntarily? Without a gun against your head?"

"Jeez, Dad, you make me sound like I hate shopping."

"You do!"

"Only a little bit."

"Last Christmas you stood at the entrance to the mall and distributed leaflets about the evils of consumerism. You even made a banner. I remember you making Ryu carry one end while you held up the other and marched around the parking lot."

"Yeah, but I didn't give out any of the leaflets with Santa nailed to a cross made of gifts and decorated with twinkly-lights."

Yuugi opened his mouth to reply. Then he closed it again. She shook his head with a short laugh. "Nevertheless, you look nice and the thought was very nice. Speaking of Ryu, have you showed him yet?"

"Why would I have showed him?" she asked, a hint of defiance in her tone. "We aren't little kids who run over to each other's houses to share every little thing anymore."

"You're going now, aren't you?"

"I'll be back in half an hour. He has swim-training and I need to get changed so we can ride our bikes to the pool together."

A small smile stayed on Yuugi's face as she left. He reached for the remote, but before he could press the play button a shadow fell across him and a pair of arms wrapped around his neck and chest from behind.

"That's either Anzu or a really friendly burglar."

"This is either Yuugi or a weird copycat stalker who broke into our house." She planted a kiss in his hair and squeezed him in a hug. "Nope, you're the real deal. You smell like that new clementine shampoo I bought."

He twisted to see her. "Was Sakura's outfit your idea?"

"Partially. She wanted to show her support, and I can't carry off a tank-top anymore."

Yuugi wiggled around to get a better look. "Says who?"

"Gravity."

"Well I, for one, would love to see you wear a tank-top and shorts again."

She squeezed him harder. "Thank you. You're wrong, but thank you." Before he could protest further, she nodded her head at the screen. "Have you started watching yet?"

"Not yet. Do you want to join me?"

"I guess. I just put a load of washing into the machine, so I have some time to kill before I can switch on the dishwasher, and I'm waiting for a phone-call from one of my investors." Anzu had retired from professional ballet years ago, and her subsequent teaching had been so successful she was now opening her own school with the help of acquaintances she had made along the way.

"When did our lives get so mundane?" Yuugi wondered forlornly.

Anzu just stared at him. Her features had lost their girlish roundness over the years. People still turned to look at her on the street. Yuugi felt a little swell of pride whenever they did. He never felt jealous, just appreciative that she had chosen him and never regretted her decision. He hadn't though it was possible to love someone even more after over a decade of marriage than when you first got down on one knee and hoped the ring-box was still in your pocket and not on your seat on the subway. It was indeed possible. He had never been happier to be proved wrong.

"Mundane?" Anzu said as she slung one leg over the back of the sofa, then the other, and slid down next to him. "You're getting ready to re-enact a grudge match with one of the richest men in the world, playing a children's card game, which will be televised and broadcast to the entire nation. I'm waiting for a call from the supermodel wife of a man who made the Fifty Richest Men in Japan list three years running, both of whom think it's 'quaint' that we still live in the backwater city where we grew up and regularly send us realtor adverts for condos in the Maldives. What part of that qualifies as 'mundane'?"

Yuugi shrugged.

She rolled her eyes and cuddled up to him, pulling her bare feet up. "Just make sure you fast forward any parts with me in them. I look terrible on film."

"No you don't."

"Yuugi."

"You look beautiful."

"I'm warning you."

"You do!"

"Liar." She cupped his face and pulled him in for a kiss. "Thank you, but liar, liar, pants on fire."

"Eeew!" came the cry from the doorway. "Could you at least, like, wait until I've left the house before you get all disgusting and smoochy with each other?" Sakura pulled a face and rushed out before either of them could reply.

Yuugi paused before looking back at Anzu. "How about it? Do you want to forego the video and get all 'disgusting and smoochy'?"

She grinned wickedly. "We have the house to ourselves for at least half an hour. What do you think?"

In a move his younger self, gazing into the water of a toilet bowl into which he was about to be dunked, could never have predicted, Yuugi tossed the remote away onto the armchair and burrowed down amongst the cushions with his wife. She had been right all along: if you gave it time, everything really did turn out all right in the end.

"And the crowd," Anzu murmured huskily, "goes wild."

Fin.