This has been languishing on my hard drive for awhile, so I thought I'd start posting it.

Summary: Atem is an unremarkable member of the Tombkeepers - until he solves the Millennium Puzzle and is forced to join the ranks of the Guardians. Now bonded to the Puzzle, Atem is expected to spend his life in service to the Item, guarding the Seal of Shadows. Instead, he runs away from home, changes his name to "Yami", loses the Puzzle - and gains the love of a lifetime. Now, all he has to do is live long enough to enjoy it. Oh, and get the Puzzle back before darkness takes over the world forever. Piece of cake!

Pairings: Yami/Yugi; minor Bakheru/Ryou

Notes, warnings, and potential triggers: This story contains scenes of forced body modification (scarification), some violence, and strong language. The prologue contains character death of a minor canon character. Despite how that makes it sound, this is actually a comedy/romance fic, not a dark!fic.

For this AU, I'm using the English dub names and setting, so Domino City is somewhere in the US, rather than in Japan. Hopefully, this will be clear from the context, but I wanted to make sure there was no confusion on that point. Also, I try to give real-world explanations for any odd hairstyles/eye-colors, so descriptions may not exactly match the characters' appearances in the anime. This story is NOT a fusion with anything other than my crazy imagination.

Disclaimer: Yu-Gi-Oh! is the creation and property of Kazuki Takahashi. No copyright infringement is intended.

Sweet Temptations

(A Yugioh AU romance novel by Lucidscreamer)

Prologue

Shadi knew he was dying.

It was hard to miss it when his blood was rushing from the wound on his chest, soaking his once-white jalabiya and staining it like a mark of sin. And had he not sinned against the Pharaoh? For he had failed in his appointed task, failed to protect that which belonged to the Pharaoh, and now death came for him on swift wings. He could hear them coming closer, even over the frantic fluttering of his heart. The blood pooling beneath him felt cold, his warmth leaching away into the stone on which his body lay. His blood oozed into the hieroglyphs chiseled into the surface of the tablet, painting them crimson.

Through fading vision, he watched his killer pluck the golden Eye from its place in the tablet and hold it up to the light. Gray shadows nibbled at the corners of his sight, drawing in like a collapsing tunnel. As everything faded to black, he heard his killer's triumphant laughter turn to screams.

Chapter 1

Yugi Mutou groaned as he slid the final tray loaded with red velvet cupcakes into the glass display case at the front of the bakery. He did not straighten immediately, instead leaning against the sloping side of the counter and resting his forehead on the Formica countertop next to the cash register. After the heat of the kitchen, the cool surface of the countertop felt like heaven.

He heaved a heartfelt sigh. "I never want to see another cupcake as long as I live."

"Don't say that!" Ryou thumped another long tray, this one filled with a mix of lemon chiffon and green tea chai cupcakes, into the display case and slid the rear panel closed. Then he slumped across the top of the display case next to Yugi and aimed a desultory swat at Yugi's hair - some of which had escaped from the confines of his health-department-approved paper hat - along with a look of not-entirely-mock horror. "That's my livelihood you're maligning, you know."

The two young men were coated from head to toe in organic, artisan cake flour. Yugi had a smear of bright red batter across one cheek and cream cheese frosting on the other, like some kind of edible war paint. The flour had turned his two-toned hair as white as his friend's cottony blond coif. Ryou had a dusting of food-grade glitter in his hair and raspberry-pink frosting under his fingernails. They had been baking since before dawn, and both of them were exhausted.

Yugi tried unsuccessfully to stifle a yawn. He wasn't a morning person at the best of times, and getting up at "oh my god, it's still dark!" o'clock in the morning to bake cupcakes was not his idea of a fun way to start the day. But Ryou was his friend, and Ryou desperately needed someone to help with the family bakery after his mother's accident. With Ryou's mother and older sister both out of commission for the foreseeable future, and Ryou's archaeologist father in Egypt, Ryou had no one else to turn to. How could Yugi possibly say no?

So, for the last two weeks, Yugi had found himself rising before the sun to help Ryou at the bakery, then dashing back across town to take his turn behind the counter at his grandfather's game shop. By evening, he could barely keep his eyes open and it would be all he could manage just to stay awake through dinner. He usually tumbled into bed by nine o'clock, almost asleep before his head hit the pillow.

"...Yugi? Are you all right?" Ryou's concerned voice finally penetrated the fog of Yugi's thoughts, and drew him back to the present.

"Yeah, I'm fine. Just sleepy." Yugi grinned around another jaw-popping yawn. "That was the last of the cupcakes?"

"The full-sized ones, yes." Ryou straightened, stretched, and, with what Yugi considered to be an obscene amount of enthusiasm, announced, "Now we can start on the minis!"

Yugi smacked himself in the forehead, sending up a mushroom cloud of flour. He hated the miniature cupcakes. Oh, like all the products of Sweet Temptations, the Bakura family's bakery, the tiny cupcakes tasted wonderful, but the stupid little things took forever to frost and decorate. "You're a sadistic slave driver, Ryou. You know that, right?"

"Yup!" Ryou chirped in the face of Yugi's deer-in-on-coming-traffic look before bouncing back into the kitchen. To add insult to injury, Ryou was an unabashed morning person and never showed any pity for the fact that Yugi was barely sentient before noon. Yugi only survived the ordeal through the intake of massive amounts of caffeine. At the moment, he was considering the feasibility of an intravenous delivery system.

Ryou's disgustingly eager voice sang out from the open doorway. "Come along! Those miniature cupcakes aren't going to frost themselves, you know. And, after that, we have the special orders!"

"Argh," Yugi observed philosophically and, thinking longingly of warm blankets and soft pillows, trudged after Ryou.

-o0o-

World famous duelist and champion gamer Yami ("Just 'Yami'. Like Cher or Madonna, only with a Y-chromosome and a killer endgame.") was having a Very Bad Day.

It had started when his alarm had not gone off on time. He had been forced to race from his hotel to the airport (without breakfast, in the rain, and only half-awake), arriving just in time to find out his flight had been delayed. This did nothing to improve his already sour mood. Yami needed a break. He had altered his travel schedule from the press release the tournament publicist had sent out the previous month, so he was arriving in Domino City one week ahead of his announced itinerary. After a couple of months of intense tournament dueling, Yami felt ready for a well-deserved break from the game of Duel Monsters.

Oh, he still loved the game, and it paid the bills, but heading into the third leg of a triple-crown tournament series, he found himself on the verge of burning out. He was twenty-three years old and one tournament win away from the prize that would make him a millionaire. Then he could take some much needed time off - and maybe finally find the elusive something that had been calling to him since he was fifteen and solved the Millennium Puzzle.

He shook thoughts of the Puzzle (and the inevitable thoughts of the family obligations that went along with it) from his head and continued stalking away from the customer service desk of the god-forsaken airline that had just informed him they had lost his luggage. He had arrived safely at Domino International Airport. His luggage, on the other hand, was winging its merry way across the Pacific ...to Honolulu. The airline agent tried to make light of the situation by joking that at least they got the destination country right, if not the state. To say that Yami was not amused by this turn of events would be an understatement of epic proportions, as the unlucky airline employee had found out when Yami's personality setting flipped from sweetheart to bitch in under sixty seconds.

Yami had been assured that the airline would retrieve his suitcases and usher them into their owner's waiting arms as fast as was humanly possible. Yami fumed and wished the foolish folk tales about the Items granting their wielders magical powers were true so he could feed the entire airline to the fabled Shadows. Granted, the Items were not exactly normal. No inanimate object should be able to bind itself to a person 'til death did them part. But he had never seen even a hint of the kind of magic the old stories described, the kind family legend insisted resided within the Items.

As he left the customer service area, Yami sighed and banished his musings to the imaginary Shadows. He didn't care that much about the loss of his clothes or even his laptop; they were all replaceable. But he had foolishly packed the Millennium Puzzle in his suitcase rather than in his carry-on bag. And while he had absolutely no desire to return to Egypt and take up the yoke of family responsibility that came with the damned Puzzle, neither did he like the idea of the stupid thing going on a separate vacation while its bonded Guardian cooled his heels half a world away.

Sometimes, he mused as he shouldered his way through the crowd with only his carry-on bag and a bad temper to show for several hours of waiting in line, life really sucked.

Then he hit the main concourse and found out that life sucked even harder than he had ever thought possible.

-o0o-

Yugi stuck around to help Ryou through the worst of the lunch crowd that mobbed the bakery right on schedule, and then shucked out of his apron and paper hat to bolt across town to the Kame Game Shop. A hasty shower and a change into non-flour-coated clothes in the apartment above the shop, and Yugi hurried back downstairs to take over the afternoon shift from his grandfather.

Solomon Mutou smiled at him as Yugi skidded through the door and slid into place behind the long counter at the rear of the shop. "Ah, there you are! I was beginning to wonder if you'd gotten lost on your way home."

"Sorry, Grandpa. The bakery was really busy." Yugi climbed onto the empty stool beside his grandfather and tried not to look as tired as he felt. "I never imagined so many cupcake-crazed people lived in Domino City."

Solomon chortled. "At least business is good for Ryou. That boy could certainly use some good fortune right about now."

Yugi nodded. Ryou's mother and sister were both recovering from a freeway encounter with a truckload of rogue soccer balls. The soccer balls (apparently unsatisfied with their lot in life and unwilling to be kicked around anymore) had made a determined bid to end their bondage in the middle of Domino Bay Bridge, causing a twelve car pile-up as the spherical escapees bounced toward the inviting waters of the channel and freedom. In the resulting collision, Ryou's mother suffered a mild concussion, a broken arm, and a broken ankle. His sister fared little better, with a broken nose and two broken legs. They were both home from the hospital, but neither of the Bakura women would be in any shape to return to the bakery for some time to come.

With Ryou's father in Egypt for the next several months on an assignment for the Domino Museum, the Bakuras could not afford to close the bakery until Angela and Amane could resume their positions. Nor could they afford to hire replacements. In addition to the hospital bills and continuing expenses such as pain medications, special equipment like wheelchairs and shower seats, and follow up doctor's visits, they had to have a home care assistant visit during the day so that Ryou could operate the bakery. When Angela and Amane's recovery was far enough along, there would be the added expense of physical therapy, as well.

"The bakery's doing great." Yugi shook off the gloomy thoughts and turned to straightening the foil booster packs of Duel Monsters cards on the counter. "And Ryou said his mom and sister are feeling much better."

"I'm glad to hear it." Solomon eyed Yugi thoughtfully, and then swiveled on his stool so that he could see the clock on the wall behind them. "Have you had lunch?"

"Um." Yugi's stomach betrayed him with a loud, and rather obnoxious, gurgle. He flushed. "Not really."

"That's what I thought." Solomon heaved a sigh as he hopped down from his seat. At four feet eight inches, he was even shorter than his grandson, despite the spiky hairstyle they both shared. Of course, the elder Mutou habitually wore a bandana that covered most of his gray mane, so the similarity was not immediately obvious. He reached up and ruffled Yugi's red and gold crown of hair. "I'll fix you up a couple of hamburgers while you watch the shop."

"Thanks, Grandpa. You're the best."

"You've got to start taking better care of yourself, m'boy. After all, I wouldn't want my favorite grandson to get sick."

"I'm your only grandson, Grandpa."

"That's why you're my favorite!" Solomon called as he disappeared up the short flight of stairs at the back of the shop.

Yugi shook his head fondly and went to straighten the magazine rack.

-o0o-

When Yami found out who had leaked his altered itinerary to the press, he'd… Well, he didn't know what he'd do, but it wouldn't be pleasant. If the airline had recovered his missing luggage by then, he might see if those family legends about the Puzzle held even a grain of truth. If so, the blabbermouth could join Quality (ha!) Airlines in the Lake of Fire. Or maybe he'd feed them to his fangirls, though even that seemed like less torment than the bastards deserved. Maybe he'd just send them the bill for all the therapy he was sure he was going to need to deal with this day, which got better with each passing moment - if by better he meant "so bad it made him want to find a tiny cave on a remote mountain top somewhere and renounce further contact with humanity for the remainder of his life (or longer)."

Yami had barely escaped from the airport with his temper intact. His clothing had not been so fortunate.

The local press had shown up to shove cameras and microphones in his face, and shout variations on the same softball questions they always lobbed at him. He wished they would either leave him alone or come up with something new to ask him. After all, how did they think he felt about the upcoming tournament? After two years in the dueling world, one competition blended into the next, at least for a duelist at his level. False modesty aside, he was not exactly quaking in his boots at the thought of facing Weevil Underwood or Mako Tsunami across a dueling arena. It was a card game, not loaded pistols at dawn.

The reporters were bad enough, but the thing that made him determined to find whoever had betrayed his confidence and hang them out to dry (preferably by their most sensitive and/or favorite body part) was the mob of excited fans waiting for him after he had run the paparazzi gauntlet.

Now, Yami was neither stupid nor an ingrate. He knew perfectly well that he owed his lucrative endorsement contracts to his continuing fan appeal, and he was happy to sign a few autographs or shake a few hands. But he drew the line at getting his clothes ripped right off his body by fan-girls and -boys determined to snag a piece of him as a souvenir. He shivered a bit and clutched the remnants of his now-sleeveless black shirt across his chest. When he had put it on (was it really only this morning?) the knit jersey had possessed sleeves long enough to cover the backs of his hands. Now it was a ragged scrap of cloth that barely covered his torso.

Walking past him, a woman glanced at him once, then again. On the second pass, her gaze locked somewhere in the vicinity of his navel and she licked her glossy, red-painted lips. He glanced down and felt his face flush. Correction: make that a ragged scrap of cloth that barely covered his upper torso. Not only was his shirt now a sleeveless model, it also exposed his midriff to the curious stares of passers-by. And he couldn't even duck into a restroom and change, since his entire wardrobe, other than the inadequate clothes on his back, was currently on its way to the Aloha State.

Yami clenched his jaw and resisted the urge to punch something. There was no way in hell this day could get any worse.

-o0o-

Somewhere, the Universe snickered evilly to itself over the knowledge that a foolish mortal had just challenged the Power of Worse.