fickle | Quick Anzu ficlet, just to see if I can write for her. Anzu/Yami no Yugi, Yugi/Anzu, Mai/Otogi

Once upon a time, there was a girl who dreamt of being a famous dancer...

A dream dies in the moment of its fulfilment, for then it is no longer a dream but reality.

As she stood on the stage, bowing to the wild applause that filled the theatre, Anzu realized that, as flowers rained down on her and the sound of cheering filled her ears, the taste of success flavoring each appreciative word she spoke. Fame came to her, clad in the disguise of a string of agents and lucrative appearances for royalty, for celebrities, and every now and then, for old, retired dancers whose bodies had finally given way under the strain.

The last type of performances always left her with mingled feelings. Awe, at being allowed to meet the former grand dames of the dance world. Pride, that she is considered good enough to be requested to dance for them. Fear, that they were comparing themselves to her and either feeling lesser or finding her not up to par. And pity. Pity that those who were so loved would not be so forgotten, only dancers like her remembering any of their names or even the names of the pieces in which they danced. The idea of ending up like that never occurs to her. Hasn't she sacrificed everything for her dancing career?

When she moved to New York as she had always dreamt of doing, she had to leave behind her friends, her family, the school that she had attended all her life - when she moved to New York, she left everything behind. Including a short boy with a tri-colored hairstyle whose other half she had loved, and who still continued to love her. Sometimes, after a performance leaves her drained (audiences are like parasites, they feast on your pain and you serve it up to them wrapped in a few pretty jumps and twirls), sometimes she thinks to herself that maybe one of the reasons she left is that his other half had left as well, and since she couldn't follow his other half as she had used to, all she could do now was follow her own dreams. Though she'd yell at anyone who dared call her a 'follower' and possibly even whack them with the magical mallet of DOOM for it.

Anzu didn't mean to grow away from everyone. She believed in friendship and surely, after everything that they had suffered through, they would remain friends? If death and worse, the Shadow Realm couldn't separate them, surely a little ocean couldn't do that? But Jou's never been good at writing, Honda neither. Yugi wrote of course. Pages and pages, and she wrote back to him, grateful that of the original four of them, at least he kept in contact with her. As the years passed though and their worlds diverged, they had less in common and less to write about. The casual references she made to people whose names he knew only from the TV puzzled him, and his paintaskingly detailed accounts of the gamed he had been playing only bored her. Somehow, after having watched games decide the fate of the world, all other games lacked interest for her.

This new world was more interesting. A world of bright lights and laughter, lights that sparkle off her sequinned costumes, teeth and eyes, and laughter that came easily to her lips, fuelled by the champangne that she learned to drink as easily as water. In the midst of the glittering world that she moved in, danced through, Anzu found herself havingeverything a reasonable human could want. Fame. Riches. Beauty. Fans.

But there's no such thing as a reasonable human and despite it all, Anzu wanted more. She wanted a dark demi-god, a Pharaoh of light, a child of Ra. But she knew that was impossible. She bought diamonds instead, Mai taking her shopping and teaching her the art of drowing her sorrows the process of acquiring more material possessions. All completely unncessary of course, since shopping for the necessities of life is too much like grocery-shopping for it to be glamorous enough a task for the socialite that Anzu rapidly became. Otogi helped her as well for the first few months, for reasons of his own that she never found out. She meant to ask him about it, but at the beginning, she was too busy adjusting to her new life, and after the car crash, well...

The dead don't answer questions.

At least he and Mai died together though. The world's most famous couple weren't parted in death despite the frequent quarrels that had sent them storming away from each other in life. They stayed together though despite that. After all, they understood each other and in the face of that, what did conflicting egos matter? Anzu used to watch them interact with a slight ache in their heart, wondering what it would have been like if she had got the person whom she loved to stay with her. She ignored the little voice in her head that told her that perhaps it wouldn't have worked, and that after all, everyone thought that Mai and Jou would end up together, and really, wasn't the fact of Otogi's and Mai's happiness proof that perhaps obvious couples weren't actually meant to be?

Anzu ended up ignoring a lot of things really. Like the fact that the stage lights were growing blinding. That the music was beginning to grate on her ears. And worse of all, she ignored the fact the pain her body felt. She pushed herself to her limits, each performance flawless until her last, when she fell midleap, crumpled into a heap on the stage and never danced again. The newspapers mourned her departure. For a week or so, then she was forgotten. Fans sent her flowers. Until it was made clear that she would never recover. Then the flowers stopped coming. She still had everything else though, the money, the jewels, her looks, but without the fame overshadowing them, they began to look increasingly gaudy.

She sold them all, and moved to a smaller house. By this time, she and Yugi had stopped communicating. Anzu wondered occasionally if he had even heard of her accident. Other times, she wondered if he had died. Surely someone would have told her if he had? But then again, how would they reach her? Thoughts like that depressed her though, so she didn't think like that, instead spending hours at a time in her living room, kneeling at the chest of drawers and stroking the cloth of her old costumes.

Dreams die, and she's left with nothing more than a handful of faded sequins.

All comments and criticism will be appreciated and taken gracefully since I'm not sure how accurate my characterization of Anzu is. I need more practice writing her. *crosses fingers and hopes for the best*