Dolor de Cabeza

[Headache.
Dizzy.
Tired.
Headache.
Heavy on the headache.
...and that just about sums up my day...
Did I mention headache?]

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Inferno
Thunder boomed as jagged lightning seared across an otherwise pitch-black sky. Rain poured down in thick sheets, pounding the windshield and making it impossible to see.
Which explained why Yuugi's hands were clenched so tightly on the steering wheel, and why his face was drawn in concentration.
"Guys, be quiet!" he said, exasperated. "I can't see in this rain, and your arguing isn't helping any." In the backseat of the van, Jounouchi, Honda, and Otogi suddenly looked very innocent. Mai just rolled her eyes.
"Should we pull over?" Anzu asked, leaning forward so she could see the driver more clearly. "I mean, it's pretty late, and there's no point in driving through this rain if we don't have to."
Yuugi nodded. "I think you're right. I don't like this rain, anyway."
"Then I'll call the Kaibas. There's a little motel, just about half an hour away. We can stop there. And yes, Jounouchi," she added with a significant glance, "they serve dinner."
"What gives you the idea that I was going to ask that?" the blonde asked indignantly.
"Couldn't possibly be that look on your face," Mai responded sarcastically. "Or the fact that all you think about is food."

***

"Sure," Mokuba Kaiba chirped into the cellphone. "I'll tell Seto. We'll meet you there." He hung up, and turned to his older brother Seto. "That was Anzu," he explained. "They're stopping for the night at that motel just up the road."
Seto nodded. "Sounds good to me," he said. "You know how much I just love driving in the rain."
Minutes ticked by. The radio murmured quietly as the windshield wipers snapped back and forth across the windshield, flicking away gallons of water only to find even more there half a second later. The small Kaiba car crested a relatively tall hill.
"Er, Seto?" Mokuba asked. "Isn't this a one-way road?"
"Yes," Seto answered, only half-listening. He was busy retuning the radio.
"Then why are there headlights up there?"
The older Kaiba brother's attention was instantly back on the road, just in time to see a pair of brilliant headlights dip down into a little depression and disappear from view.
"Holy - call the others," he snapped, veering toward the side of the road. He wasn't worried about his own safety - he never did - or even that of his brother; they knew the other vehicle was there, they were prepared. But the van was completely unaware, and he estimated that if the driver didn't figure it out in about fifteen seconds or less there would be a head-on collision. Mokuba's train of thought was identical, and he had dialed before his brother finished speaking.
"They're not answering," Mokuba said nervously.
Seto cursed and leaned on the horn, flashing his lights on and off as rapidly as possible.
"They're still not picking up!" Mokuba was definitely panicking now. "Big brother, isn't there something we can do?"
"Not anymore," Seto said grimly. The car crested another shorter hill, and once again their timing was perfect: Not so far ahead of them, red taillights blazed, and white headlights created a fiery corona around the van's silhouette. There was a squealing of brakes, and the van swerved ever so slightly, and then the huge truck slammed into the van with the force of a hurricane and the sound of the explosion rolled over them like a peal of thunder.

***

Jounouchi blinked slowly, his vision blurred but coming back into focus. His eyes stung. He coughed; the air was filled with a thick, foul-smelling smoke. His seatbelt buckle was searing his skin.
The Brooklyn blonde's mind snapped into gear instantly, and he ripped off the seatbelt, throwing it into the luggage behind him. Looking around, he realized he was the only person conscious. He stepped carefully over Otogi's unmoving but seemingly uninjured form and grasped the doorhandle, ignoring the pain in his pals as he pulled backward with all his might. The door didn't budge. He pulled again, and again, and again. He coughed. The smoke was starting to make him dizzy, and he cursed. He gave another mighty tug -
And nearly flew backwards as the door slid back easily. Seto Kaiba's brown-haired head poked in and took a quick survey of the carnage, then he climbed in and lifted Anzu and Mai in his arms. In an instant he was gone, carrying both girls and moving like lightning. Jounouchi managed to sling Otogi over his back and crawl out, coughing and hacking the entire time.
"Mokuba, call an ambulance," he heard the older Kaiba call. "They're all unconscious, and it looks like Honda might be hurt pretty badly."
"Working on it," the dark-haired kid shouted back, sprinting across the road to the car and disappearing inside. Jounouch gave another weak cough and stumbled over to where Seto was checking the girls' pulses.
"Chihuahua!" Seto exclaimed, surprised. "I thought you were out cold."
"I'm not so easy," Jou growled, setting down his friend's unconscious body with considerably less care than he meant to and nearly collapsing to his knees. He was still having trouble breathing, and his side hurt terribly. He didn't even have the strength to toss an insult Kaiba's direction.
"Stay here," the young CEO said, standing. "I've got to get the others. That van's going to blow."
Jou's vision swam suddenly, and by the time he was able to focus again the tall, slim figure was already gone. In under a minute he was back, this time carrying Shizuka. Jou gasped; she was bleeding from several deep gashes on her face, and her arm was bent at an odd angle.
"Get over here and help," Seto snapped. "We're running out of time!"
"Right," Jounouchi grunted, rising to unsteady feet and following the CEO back to the burning van. Kaiba disappeared into the back for Honda while Jounouchi pried open the front door, ignoring the huge rush of superheated air that nearly singed his bangs. "Yuugi," he called into the smoke. "Yuug! Hey, Yuug, answer me!"
"Jou...Jounouchi?" a weak voice murmured.
"Yuugi!" THe Brooklyn blonde climbed back into the blazing hellhole, waving his hand in front of his face in an uneffective attempt to clear the air. "C'mon, little guy, it's time to get you out of here."
"Just...go," Yuugi's weak voice came again. Suddenly Jounouchi realized that that wasn't his friend's voice; it was the former Pharaoh. He had never heard the Egyptian spirit sound so tired or so forlorn. Jounouchi fanned away some of the smoke, trying to get a better look at his friend.
He immediately wished he hadn't. Yuugi's seat had snapped off at the base and thrown itself into the dashboard, pinning the teenager's small chest against the seatback and the steering wheel with crushing force. To make matters worse, the Sennen Puzzle was deeply embedded into Yuugi's ribs. Blood gushed steadily from the gaping wound. Then it dawned on Jou that that wasn't the young duelist's only wound; his left arm was almost totally severed.
"Gods, Yuugi," he breathed.
"I told you, go," the spirit murmured again. "There's nothing you...can...ahhhhhhhhhh! do...now."
"No, man! Hang in there, Yuug! Don't let go yet! I'll get you out of here!" Seto's words came back to him: "That van's going to blow..."
Suddenly there was a slight change in the duelist's face. Crimson eyes faded to violet; hard lines in the face melted into the more innocent visage of youth. Yuugi coughed up blood.
"Jou..." He had a weak smile on his face.
"Yuugi! Hold on, buddy!"
"Please, Jou...leave me...no hope...." He coughed again, his small form wracked with painful spasms. "Yami's already...dead...won't live anyway..."
"No! I won't leave you!"
Yuugi's eyes fluttered open and locked on Jounouchi's. They were filled with an immense pain, barely held back, but they were pleading, begging. Jou felt as though his heart had been shredded.
"No," he gasped, tears coursing down his cheeks. His calloused hand found Yuugi's small, lily-white, fragile, blood-stained one, and he squeezed it gently. There was no way he was leaving his friend to die like this. He put his free hand against the back of the chair and shoved it away from the dashboard, hoping to free his friend, but it only moved a centimeter or two. Yuugi gave an anguished moan.
"Please, Jou!" he whispered. His eyes were still clear and bright, and he still had that half-smile on his face. So innocent, Jounouchi thought. He doesn't deserve this. That should be me in that chair, dammit, not him! Not him!
A single crystalline tear trickled down Yuugi's flawless cheek and splashed against the burning carpet of the van. "Please," he begged again, voice weak and almost inaudible, "save yourself...forget about me...gas...explode any second...live...Jou, please, go, promise me...take care of...Shizuka and...Grampa...please?" Yuugi's head lifted ever so slightly; his eyes were still pleading, glistening with those perfect tears of his, and his hand was squeezing Jounouchi's. Then his head fell gently forward, and his hand fell away from his friend's, and the life slipped away from his perfect flawless face, and the fire reached the engine and the heat flared all around Jounouchi, and two immensely strong arms reached in through the deadly flames and grabbed the blonde by the shoulders and yanked him away from the wreckage a split second before the van exploded in a blazing inferno.

***

Drunk Truck Driver Kills King of Games
Domino City

Mouto Yuugi, Duel Monsters Champion and King of Games, lost his life yesterday in a tragic head-on collision. The driver of the other vehicle was drunk; he is in good condition at the Domino Hospital. The other passengers in Mouto-san's van are all in stable condition at the hospital, as well as Kaiba Seto, CEO of KaibaCorp and rescuer of the surviving passengers. An exclusive interview with Kaiba Mokuba, younger brother of Kaiba-san, has revealed that...
Jounouchi smoothed out the ancient newspaper clipping, rubbing the creases flat and letting salt tears spill down his face once more. Ten years later, five miles further down the road, and he still couldn't forget his best friend....
Carefully, reverently, he held the corner of the clipping to the flame of the lit candle and watched as it flared brightly for a few seconds before crumbling to ash.
It was time to let go of the past.

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Random Quote of the Day:
Out of the frying pan into the fire.
- Quintus Septimius Tertullianus

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So Much for Thinking

[Agh...Y'know, this morning I thought I'd be able to come home, read for an hour or two, and go to bed, all homework done...no good. It's like my teachers planned this or something. They get me all excited about having free time, and then they go and pile it on at the last possible moment... O.o;;]

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As it Is, Part II
Popcorn and Sugar Cookies
The school's halls were empty, or nearly so; it was seven in the morning. Classes didn't start until 8:15. There was no reason to be there for a half-hour at the earliest. And yet she was there, computer bag full of books and schoolwork and CDs slung over one shoulder and a folder full of Japanese lessons clutched in one hand, ID case hanging dutifully around her neck. She paced the halls, taking a turn around the back corridors and breezing through the technology section, passing through the Commons wiith nary a glance at the police officer and then pulling up in front of the library, legs stretched and shoulder aching from the weight of her computer bag. The doors were locked. No surprise, the library wasn't supposed to open for another twenty minutes anyway. She retraced her steps and found a seat into the water fountain set into the wall, opening her notes and beginning to study. Five minutes ticked by slowly. She began to hear voices, distant but coming closer. The band hall was open. It was time to leave. She tucked her notes back into the front pocket of her folder and slipped her pen into her ID case, swung her feet back down onto the floor, and was gone before the first of the early-morning band members had the chance to sense her presence.
She had been in the band, once. Two years previously. She had given it her all, spent all of her spare time practicing and helping others, had even organized a morning sectional to bring up the low-level players up to speed, but it hadn't worked out. The other players weren't willing to put forth the effort. She knew she was just wasting her time and energy, so she quit. The few members who had stayed had never forgiven her. She had spent the last two years avoiding anything to do with the band.
Snapping out of her thoughts, she realized she had walked back to the library entrance. Still locked. The librarians were late, as usual. No matter; she set her bag on the floor and leaned against the locker, relishing the relative peace of the school and breathing in the strangely scented air.
The air was the whole reason she liked standing in this particular hallway, really. The library was great, sure, but by 7:45 it was packed with students, loud and noisy and no better than the other congregation areas. No, it was the hall she came for. The air had a slight chill, enough to make her think about putting on a sweater but never enough to be uncomfortable. And the temperature was counterbalanced by the queer, somehow warm smell of sugar cookies and popcorn. She had yet to figure out where it came from - it certainly wasn't the cafeteria, even though the kitchens were only about fifty yards away, and there were no classrooms nearby, so it couldn't have come in with any teacher. It was as if the smell just appeared there in the early morning, as if by magic, and disappeared by lunchtime.
The last ten minutes slipped away and the library door opened from the inside. The librarian greeted her with a small smile and a handshake; it was nothing unusual for the girl to be there well before the library was open. Actually, it was more unusual for her not to be there. She took her normal seat, in the middle of the lower area but sheltered behind the wall, equidistant from the History and Foreign Languages sections and only a few feet from the little computer island, and spread her papers over the table. It was 7:30; her day had begun. Japanese lessons were replaced with World History worksheets, essays, and Chemistry notes.
The door opened. She looked up in surprise; no one else was ever this early! She glanced up. It was a fairly short guy, long light-colored hair and black T-shirt. She couldn't see his face. He was bent over the front desk filling out the sign-in sheet. The girl gave a small shrug and turned back to her work.
"May I see your ID, sir?" the librarian asked politely. The girl heard the chair sliding back along the carpeted floor as she got up.
"Sure. Here."
The girl froze.
It was him.

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Random Quote of the Day:
On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done just as easily lying down.
- Woody Allen

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One of "Those Days"

[God.
Fucking.
DAMMIT!!!
I've lost this damn entry three times already! I'm sick of retyping it! I refuse to do it again!]

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As it Is, Part I
Perfect
...you have to believe / in the power of love...

A girl gave a heavy sigh as the song ended, drifting off into a quiet instrumental before falling altogether silent. Believe. Yeah, right. She had lost the ability to believe long ago. Believers were idiots. And love? Hah! Love was a lie. Love was a cruel joke played on the innocent, the guiltless.
She knew.
She'd been in love once.
He'd been a pitiful specimen of a guy, thin and wiry and blonde and a full foot shorter than she was. He played sports, sure: Tennis. And that only because his mom made him. He hated sports. He certainly wasn't hot, by any definition of the word; he wasn't even cute. He talked with a weird lisp, and people made fun of him for it all the time. He wore thick glasses because he liked them. He told bad jokes. He smiled too often. He was a bookworm, pure and simple.
He was perfect.

A boy sighed as his computer screen went dark, leaving his room in an inky blackness. He didn't like the light. It was too revealing. It might tell the world about his innermost, most secret thoughts, his dreams, his desires.
His love.
He shook his head bemusedly at himself. He had no right to talk about love. It was an infatuation, that was all. Sure, there had been moments, moments that a solid couple would be jealous of, moments of pure bliss in the most unlikely places (Biology class stood out sharply in his mind, as did a certain field trip), but what were a few instants? Flukes, that was all. They were nothing. It was all just wishful thinking on his part.
But they were so real...she was so real...
She was tall and dark, not particularly thin but not fat, either. She didn't hate sports; she just preferred that other people played them. She didn't have an accent, unless she was speaking in Spanish. Her voice was completely and totally neutral. She had her own peculiar dialect, a strange mixture of English and American English and Spanish and Japanese and Quenya and computer lingo and what she referred to as "otaku-ese." She toned it down, usually, but he had heard her angry, heard her exuberant, heard her devastated. He knew and understood her language. He could speak it fluently. She wore glasses because she didn't feel like dealing with the hassles of contacts. She played the flute. She didn't tell jokes. She didn't smile enough, didn't show her twisted and chipped and slightly yellowed and absolutely stunning teeth. She had more hobbies than she could handle at once. She was a weirdo, pure and simple.
She was perfect.

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Random Quote of the Day:
Assert your right to make a few mistakes. If people can't accept your imperfections, that's their fault.
- Dr. David M Burns

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Welcome to Disneyland

[Roller coaster.
That's all I can say. Roller coaster. It describes my day pretty well, I think...
This morning started off great. I woke up early from a good long night's sleep with the kind of weird dreams I love, got to school on time, didn't get in anything resembling a fight with my parents...
And just when I was beginning to think the day would be decent, I got to school.
And everything went to hell.
No, I don't know how that happened, I don't know why, but suddenly my day went from great to bad. And all day it got worse. My only spot of light (until I got home, that is) was the fact that I got to spend all of my lunch period working on something I wanted to work on, rather than some project or other. So by the time I got on the bus I wanted nothing more than to sit and listen to my Japanese rap (don't ask) in peace.
Fortunately, things started looking up when I got home. The dog only peed once (a rare event) so I only had to mop half the house; the computers weren't locked up or displaying any error messages; the TV worked and I hadn't missed any of my shows. Of course, the computers were slow as heck and wouldn't let me open a file I needed, and my math homework was a bugger, and the VCR still won't spit out my friend's tape, but overall things were looking up. And to top it off I saw the preview for this weekend's YGO episode. It looks like it's going to have two of my favorite characters who aren't shown very often (Shadi and Pegasus! Yay!).
And to make things better, I downloaded another Inu-yasha movie clip that had part of Sesshoumaru's transformation to demon. Pure bliss...
But really, the highlight of my day came when I showed up at my friend/math teacher's house for our weekly Irish music session and found out we had another guitarist. (This was very good news - we've been a flute duo and one guitar/bodhran since March of last year, and we need some new input badly.) I had just barely begun to celebrate when he came out.
Have you ever had one of those teachers you absolutely loved? Y'know, the kind that you would spend all day in their classroom because they're just so cool, but unfortunately the rest of the world seems to have dibs on him/her? That's what Mr. Riddle is like. So when I found out he was the new guitarist, I was overjoyed. Actually, overjoyed isn't strong enough. Let's just say a thousand "Eek!"s wouldn't have sufficed.
So from great to good to bad to horrible to worse to indifferent to decent to okay to good to excellent...yup. Roller coaster. ]

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Random Quote of the Day:
To find yourself jilted is a blow to your pride. Do your best to forget it and if you don't succeed, at least pretend to.

- Moliere

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