Yu-Gi-Oh! Fan Fiction ❯ Seeing in Color ❯ Akefia ( Chapter 1 )

A/N: I don't think a story like this has ever been done before - which is both a good and a bad thing, I suppose. Good because it's unique, and bad because I'm afraid readers might not find it interesting. ^^; The idea has been in my head for several months now, and I've only just gotten around to writing it down. This is my second fanfiction dealing with Akefia - and, I'll warn you, he might seem a little bit OOC, but he is only a child in this chapter, so that's his excuse.

 

PLEASE do not assume me to be a racist or anything like that because of this story. This fic takes place in the 1700s when slavery was predominant in the US. Both Akefia and Mariku are slaves, and so are not treated with much respect. Characters will be referred to according to their race - whether it may be “white boy” or “nigger” (though I'm trying to avoid racial insults as much as possible). So if this offends anyone, I apologize. That is not my intent. I am NOT a racist in any way, shape, or form.

 

With that said, I will move on to the chapter...

 

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I always knew I was going to be a slave. I was destined to become one, I suppose you could say. I never met my father - I suppose he was sold just after I was conceived - and two years after my birth my mother was taken. I was too young then to understand what happened to her; now I wish I was as ignorant as I was back then.

 

Some kind soul must have taken pity on me, being an orphaned child, for I was sent away to live with a small clan of Arabs.

 

Life was simple with the IshtÄru clan. They treated me kindly, and I grew to become a part of their close-knit family. There were six of us in total, including myself, and the oldest woman was heavy with child. We were nomads, traveling with no set destination - our only desire being to flee the slave traders and stay alive a day longer. The problem with that was we eventually ran out of places on land that we could hide, and going over seas was an expense we couldn't afford. We were forced underground as a last resort.

 

By that time, the pregnant woman had given birth, and several days later passed away. Her husband tried to kill the babe, but his oldest daughter - Isis, who was at the time only five and already the spitting image of her mother - was able to convince him not to.

 

We lived underground, the six of us, for an amazing six years before our hideout was finally discovered by a group of white Americans. The man I had come to view as my own father was killed almost immediately for trying to protect us. It was the first time I had ever witnessed murder, but certainly not the last.

 

The remaining five of us, all children except for Rishid who was now sixteen, huddled together in fear of being killed - or worse, separated. The men were happy to find a female in our little group. Having come from over seas, they hadn't seen a woman for quite some time. They took her first. Brought her into another room, where we could hear her crying and screaming four hours until suddenly, strangely, all the noise stopped.

 

We never saw her again.

 

The group of men came back outside, but she was not with them. I thought that would be the last of it, but I was far from correct. Some of the men were not satisfied with her; some of them didn't like women.

 

Malik had always been pretty. Ever since the day he was born, he was pretty. His skin was dark and soft to the touch, like an infant's. His hair was long, reaching down to his shoulders, and silky too - the color of gold. And his eyes were big and round, like jewels - amethysts, to be exact; they looked like amethysts.

 

Naturally they chose him next.

 

He was never the same after that - after he limped, bleeding and disheveled, out of the room the men had dragged him into. I guess his spirit broke; he had no will to live anymore.

 

The men seemed quenched of their lust for flesh after that, but they hadn't had their fill of torturing us.

 

It was punishment, they said, as they bound our hands and feet, kicking us onto the ground and taking knives from their pockets. Punishment for trying to hide from our destinies.

 

They heated their knives with the torches hanging on the walls, and then brought them down on our bodies - branding us, you could say.

 

I'd never felt more like an animal.

 

Malik died from the pain before they could even finish carving his back. Across his shoulder blades were unfinished angel wings, still freshly bleeding. I'll never forget that sight.

 

On the left half of Rishid's face they carved crude impersonations of hieroglyphics, most likely to mock his ethnic background.

 

Mariku, the brother only a year older than myself whose appearance was nearly identical to that of his younger brother, received markings similar to Malik's - only instead of angel wings, the wounds along his shoulder blades more closely resembled the wings of a bird - in addition to several new ones. I never really figured out what they were supposed to be, but they looked like monsters - three gruesome monsters - as well as an ankh in the very center of his back, and hieroglyphics that matched the vulgar impersonations Rishid bore.

 

I received nothing so terrible, because I did not try to fight back as Rishid and Mariku had tried. I was too weak after witnessing the deaths of three people I held very dear. I submitted.

 

They used their knives to scythe my hair - my hair that grew even longer than Isis's, my hair that Malik always used to love playing with. They hacked it off from the base of my neck, and that was all they would have done had I not started crying. But the tears that stung at my eyes could not be held back as I thought of how I would never again feel Malik's soft, small hands in my hair, or hear father teasing me about how I looked more like a girl than his own daughter, or see Isis's beautiful smile. So two men held my arms down, and another placed each of his hands on one of my cheeks to steady my face, and the man with a dagger brought the burning metal down onto the right side of my face, mutilating it from the forehead down to my chin with a horrible, jagged scar.

 

We, the three remaining brothers, were led out of our underground haven, our wounds still fresh and bloody. The bodies of our loved ones were left where they had fallen, forgotten and left to rot beneath the sands. On the surface more white men gathered, waiting for their comrades. Rishid was pushed in one direction, Mariku and I in another.

 

I cried out to him -- I cried so hard, screamed for him to come back to us, to not leave us alone.

 

“Rishido! Rishido! ...Rishido!”

 

I was clubbed in the back of the head by an unseen truncheon and fell immediately silent. Mariku's hand managed to find my own despite the bindings still around us and he held my hands tightly as they shoved us down a seemingly endless dirt road.

 

He kept whispering that he was there for me, that he would never leave me. I hadn't yet stopped crying.

 

We boarded a small boat that took us up the Nile. I fell asleep against Mariku, who hadn't even shed a tear throughout the entire ordeal. Mariku was always strong, fearless. He was the strongest of the IshtÄru siblings, always had been, even if he was the second youngest. From that boat we moved on to another boat, one so large that I found myself amazed as I stood before it. I had no idea humans could build something so large and magnificent.

 

The ship took us across the ocean, a journey that took so long that I lost count of the time. In the lowest level of the ship, where we were crammed with hundreds of others who had been through the same thing as us, it was nearly impossible to differentiate between night and day.

 

Mariku never relinquished his hold on me. We sat, chained together and to those on either side of us, with our arms tightly wrapped around each other. Whenever I'd begin to cry or panic he would kiss my brow and try to reassure me. But I was inconsolable a majority of the time.

 

“Things will get better,” he would tell me.

 

And maybe he was right. Because then we reached America. A country so many people thought of as the land of promise. Mariku and I were not divided, as I feared so often we would be. We were brought to a slave auction and purchased by a white man by the name of William Bakura, one of the wealthiest men in the South.

 

William Bakura was one of the kindest men I had ever met in my life. He took us to his estate - gave our naked bodies clothes, our starving bellies nourishment, and put a roof over our heads. He didn't treat his slaves the same as most folks did, he explained to us after Mariku demanded to know the reasoning behind his kindness. Mariku still kept his guard up - in fact, he never let it down. I on the other hand wanted to believe in the goodness my new master seemed to possess.

 

We were put to work, of course. Six days a week we spent out in the cotton fields from dawn till dusk, picking and picking and picking until I began to think my fingers would fall off. Sundays, because we were still children, we were granted the privilege of rest. We would stay in our little hut, or sometimes wander off into the corn fields, and play together.

 

It was on one of these days, when we had ventured into the corn fields, invisible to all when between the ears that sprouted taller than us, that I first met him.

 

“Mariku..! Mariku..!”

 

Young Akefia pushed aside a shoot of corn, peering through the stems and leaves in search of his friend. He stepped back when he found nothing, a small frown appearing on his dark-skinned face. Gray-blue eyes lit up as the child heard a rustling behind him. Grinning, he turned around and, without thinking, pounced. His arms went around his victim, pinning him to the ground, and a look of triumph crossed his features.

 

“A-ah!”

 

The soft, startled gasp reached his ears, causing Akefia to blink and look down at the form beneath him. The slave's light eyes grew impossibly large as he realized that he had tackled not his best friend, but the son of his owner.

 

Akefia had never gotten this close to Ryou Bakura before. The only time he had ever seen the young boy was when he was first brought to the estate, but Akefia could not mistake the white-blonde hair and deep green eyes for anyone else's.

 

Ryou was staring up at him, his emerald eyes full of fear. Akefia, seeming to regain control of his senses, immediately pulled himself away from the smaller boy and dropped to his knees, humbly begging forgiveness.

 

Ryou slowly brought himself up, sitting upright, and stared over at Akefia. The panic ebbed away, gradually being replaced by a sense of innocent curiosity all little boys seem to possess. He leaned closer to the dark-skinned boy. Akefia - who, upon guessing he was safe from punishment, moved so that he sat on his knees - unconsciously leant backwards, away from the owner's son.

 

This, much to Akefia's surprise, caused the delicate boy in front of him to smile - a lovely sight indeed. Two pale lips split apart, revealing twin rows of perfect, even teeth - only one black hole evident from where the slave boy sat, but evidence of a new tooth was poking through the light pink gums.

 

Akefia ran his tongue experimentally across his bottom row of teeth, counting five empty holes - whether or not more teeth would grow to fill them remained a mystery; many of the slaves were toothless, Akefia just hadn't taken notice of the fact that he was missing quite a few as well, and that if he could count any higher he would realize that he was missing even more than five.

 

A gentle touch to his cheek broke the slave boy from his thoughts. Blinking his pale eyes, Akefia focused on the owner's son, tilting his head slightly to the side in mild interest as he watched Ryou lean even closer, the smaller boy's large green eyes alight with sparkling wonderment.

 

Ryou's powder-white fingers gently and tentatively skimmed his cheek, his full pink lips falling open to form a lowercase `O' as his eyes stared calculatingly at the dark-skinned face of one he was supposed to be nowhere near.

 

It was forbidden for him to be near the corn fields; it was forbidden for him go near any of the slaves, much less touch one - his mother told him so many times. But Ryou was a little boy - a curious little boy - and like all curious little boys he felt the urge to break the rules every once and a while.

 

Akefia sat patiently, allowing the boy to caress his face - partially because he was afraid to pull away and risk upsetting his owner's son and partially because, deep down, he enjoyed the gentle touch. He was not used to being touched like this by anyone. Not even Mariku, who held him so often, was so gentle with him. Gray-blue eyes closed slowly and the slave's lips twitched upwards into a smile.

 

After several minutes, Ryou abandoned his scrutinizing of Akefia's face in favor of inspecting the older boy's hand. He grasped hold of the dark-skinned appendage, studying it with his mystified emerald eyes. Deftly, he traced each of Akefia's fingers, examining the dirt packed underneath the larger boy's long fingernails, before grazing the palm - a shade lighter than the rest of his hand - and memorizing the unique lines that crisscrossed the skin.

 

He seemed so fascinated with Akefia's hand that he had to carry his investigation harder, rolling up the dirtied sleeve to see Akefia's arm, and then tugging down the torn collar of the battered T-shirt to study Akefia's shoulder - which he pressed against his own, as if to survey the differences between them.

 

All the while, Akefia was unable to tear himself away - despite the fact that he knew he should, that he knew this was wrong and that he would certainly be whipped if anyone caught him. This was, after all, his master's son staring upon his filthy body, touching him with those pristine white fingers.

 

All coherent thought ceased as Ryou pressed Akefia's hand against his cheek, rubbing it softly with his round, button-shaped nose.

 

The slave boy's face heated up in a dark blush.

 

However much he would have liked the moment to pass, it was rudely interrupted by the grainy drawling of Akefia's name.

 

The corn shoots rustled as another body pushed through them, emerging in the small clearing after several moments. Mariku stood before the two younger boys, his outlandish lavender eyes impossibly wide and his mouth hanging open in surprise. From his parted lips dangled a thin, foot-long piece of hay.

 

A flicker of anger and another, unidentifiable emotion crossed the oldest child's face as he quickly analyzed the situation.

 

“A-Akefia!” he reprimanded, storming forward and grabbing Akefia's free hand, wrenching his friend away from their master's son. “What in God's name you think you're doin'?”

 

Akefia stared up at the blonde, shaking his head and trying to stutter out a response. “I-I-I was... I was jus'...”

 

“Just touchin' that white boy as if he was the same as us!” Mariku supplied, his voice dropping to a low hiss as he slapped Akefia's arm.

 

“B-but... I wasn't...”

 

“Yes you was! You know what'd happen if the white boy's father came out? He'd have you whipped - maybe even killed!”

 

Akefia gasped, the full realization of what he'd done finally sinking in. What had he been thinking? Allowing Ryou to be so close to him... Their proximity could have gotten Ryou into trouble as well.

 

“I'm sorry,” a little voice spoke up, breaking up the older blonde's chastising. Two heads turned to the left to stare at Ryou, who was picking himself up off the ground. Those lovely green eyes had grown round with guilt. A light English accent seeped into the words. “I didn't mean to cause trouble.”

 

Mariku's eyes angled in a slight glare. “Well trouble's all you gonna cause, white boy.”

 

“Mariku,” Akefia pleaded. He didn't believe it was wise to speak to the master's son in such a manner.

 

Ryou shook his head, holding up his arms in surrender. “I-I don't want trouble,” he said, honestly. “I was just... I've never seen a slave up close...” his voice trailed off and he sighed and apologized once more.

 

“Just get outta here,” Mariku advised. “We don't want no trouble.”

 

The white-blonde child was reluctant, but he agreed and begrudgingly turned away, soon disappearing in the tall ears of corn as he made his way back to the main house. Once he was out of eyeshot, Mariku rounded on Akefia.

 

“Are you stupid or somethin'?” he asked, slapping the thin arm once again. “You gunna get yourself killed, if not for me.”

 

Akefia lowered his gaze to the dirt ground sadly. “S-sorry, Mariku.”

 

“Don't say sorry to me... Just don't be stupid next time. Now c'mon.”

 

Taking Akefia's hand tightly in his own, Mariku began to lead them in the opposite direction. The younger male followed obediently, though his grey-blue eyes were forlornly locked on the last spot where he had seen Ryou.

 

 

I knew I was in love with him from that very moment. I was only eight, but the feelings I felt were unmistakable. There was just something about the way he looked at me with those big emerald eyes, the way he held my hand and studied my features... the way he treated he, as if I was a human and not some alien species, as if I were his equal... it touched me beyond words. He was so pure, so beautiful... I couldn't help but fall in love with him, with that warm feeling of acceptance he instilled within me. I wanted nothing more than to feel that over and over again, every moment of every day for the rest of my life.

 

I knew I had to see him again. Just one meeting between us was not enough to satisfy me. Now that I met him face-to-face, now that I heard his gentle voice... I needed more. I needed him - Ryou Bakura. I knew the odds were against me, that I could very easily be shot if I ever dared contact him again. But I didn't care. I was in love. I was a slave child, in love with my master's son. I had no way to give him a future, to give him happiness, even. I had nothing to offer him, the one I loved.

 

... But I also had nothing to lose.