Disclaimer: Yu-gi-oh! Duel Monsters = Kazuki Takahashi

A/N: Immediately post-canon, aka Cubey's take on Peachshipping (which is really just Puzzleshipping and Revolutionshipping).

Summary: Some love stories only work on paper.

Writing music and Inspiration: 1D's "Story of My Life" (so sue me) for the lines "The story of my life/I give her hope/I'll spend her love/Until she's broke inside" and p much the rest of the song too

Radioactive Decay

Their half-life is forty-nine and three-quarter days.

Yuugi showers that unremarkably Earth-shattering Tuesday night, and he stares at the tile for exactly twenty-three minutes before someone calls through the fog to ask if he needs something. The bathroom leaks radioactivity.

Anzu leans out the window for three hours refusing to eat and wondering if she'd survive the jump.

Yuugi sleeps through Wednesday. He sleeps through their goodbye luncheon on Thursday. He sleeps on the plane home.

Anzu stares at her bedroom ceiling in Japan as if it's betrayed her. The posters of high-leaping dancers and lit stages used to fill her with such hope.

Yuugi watches his mother float around the kitchen like a ghost. He feels slightly drugged. Incidentally, he doesn't realize he's the ghost in the room, the house.

Anzu stays home Friday night and passes out drunk before midnight.

Yuugi leaves his house for the first time on Saturday afternoon. He makes it to the vending machine and turns back sick.

Anzu goes to the park on Sunday with Honda. He seems to understand that she cannot talk. He forms a wall around her when people from school try to flag them down to talk about graduation plans.

Yuugi goes to school and he listens and writes nothing down. He is dimly aware at moments throughout the day that people are looking at him and whispering because he can't stop himself from crying. He hasn't been alone in high school since the very first month of freshman year.

Anzu almost doesn't get on the train to school but swallows it all down and does.

Yuugi wakes for a few minutes on Tuesday before he rolls over ignoring his mother's calls. They stop eventually. It's been one week.

Anzu stays home on Wednesday because she and Yuugi are assigned clean-up together.

Yuugi goes to the roof at lunch on Thursday and doesn't come down until security guards find him.

Anzu eats dinner with Jou and Honda on Friday and sees Yuugi for the first time outside of school since Egypt. She cannot look at him, and he cannot look at anyone because he's been looking through everyone for almost ten days now.

Yuugi buys a gaming magazine on Saturday from the Lawson down the street. He burns it on Sunday.

Anzu chases some girls away when they linger near Yuugi's desk and ask him why he's acting so weird. She sits in the desk next to his and puts her head down until the Karuta club shows up to use the classroom.

Yuugi asks Anzu to come over on Tuesday night. They watch TV and neither of them cries.

Anzu shows up at Yuugi's house every night for the rest of the week. She brings snacks and helps his mother cook.

Yuugi accompanies her all the way back to her house when they leave Burger World on Friday afternoon. He says goodbye to her on the front step and then takes a bus home.

Anzu stays later than Jou, Honda and Ryou on Saturday night and nobody questions it. She drifts around the house with him aimlessly until she's following him into his room.

Yuugi tries to offer to play a board game that stopped being popular four years ago, but the words are glued to his larynx.

Anzu kisses him when he's staring through her. Then he looks at her. It's the first thing that hasn't felt fucking awful in seventeen days.

Yuugi puts the puzzle box in the closet on Sunday.

Anzu walks to school with Yuugi on Monday and holds his hand. He waits for her until she gets out of grounds keeping duty on Tuesday. She sits with him on the roof on Thursday and lets him cry into her lap without saying anything.

Yuugi pays for Anzu's food on Friday. Nobody says anything but everyone notices.

Anzu tells her parents she's sleeping over a friend's on Saturday and stays at Yuugi's.

Yuugi avoids Honda's questioning when he finally asks 'what's going on with them' on Monday.

Anzu decides to wear perfume. They graduate on Tuesday. They stand side-by-side during the ceremony – Mazaki and Mutou – and focus on not throwing up or melting down. He passes her a handkerchief when he sees her glazed, glassy eyes and knows that she's looking at the tomb and not their principal.

Yuugi signs some yearbooks when classmates stop by the shop on Wednesday. Anzu sits on the register stool beside him.

Anzu watches TV all day on Thursday. Jou and Honda have spirited Yuugi away to parts unknown.

Yuugi asks if Anzu wants to stay over on Friday.

Anzu tells another lie to her mother and does.

Yuugi wakes in the middle of the night to Anzu shaking apart over the puzzle box. He watches her, boneless, and falls back asleep with his eyes burning and his hands clammy.

Anzu goes back to her house on Saturday for a change of clothes and brings another overnight bag to Yuugi's. She's oozing cross-contamination and being away from the source feels pretty terrible.

Yuugi feels detached when he watches her lay out the guest futon next to his bed. He feels detached when he closes the bedroom door with her haunted eyes on him. He feels connected when he's slotting his body over her atop the futon and licking into her mouth.

Anzu notices that Yuugi isn't as different from Atem as she thought he was.

Yuugi doesn't know who's shouting or crying or moaning.

Anzu kisses away the tears Yuugi can't seem to stop crying when he's bracing himself above her shakily, grinding their hips together.

Yuugi scorches himself red in the shower afterward and bruises his knuckle where it punches against the wall. Sex doesn't keep you full once it's over, apparently.

Anzu makes breakfast on Sunday. Yuugi stands with his cheek pressed to her back as she cooks and nobody speaks.

Yuugi tells Jou on Monday that he and Anzu had sex. Jou is slightly bewildered but then lapses back into easy laughter and asks Yuugi for the gory details.

Anzu calls Yuugi every night for ten days but doesn't push her luck with sleeping over again; her parents won't believe that she's visited the same girl from her dance classes that many times in one month.

Yuugi visits Anzu at her home and her parents ask him about his tournaments. He sounds like a robot when he rattles off the experience of the most recent tournament – one from the end of February. Anzu swears that she sees pieces of him flat lining as he remembers Duel Monsters and dead best friends.

Anzu asks Yuugi to take her out without Jou and Honda. He obliges without complaint and they see a movie.

Yuugi feels marginally less horrible when he's got his tongue down her throat and hands dipping under her waistband.

Anzu thinks sex is incredible because she forgets everything that's happened. She thinks about Aida and schools in New York.

Yuugi focuses on feeling a little less empty and a little more plugged up when he's got his head between her legs. When he's naked on top of her, he isn't leaking out all over the floor boards.

Anzu wants to know why he asks if Jou and Honda can tag along when they're hanging out during the day. He bristles but doesn't lose his temper because he never loses his temper. She's happy when Jou and Honda are there despite her questioning.

Yuugi doesn't pick up the phone every single time she calls.

Anzu asks him to come to dinner on Sunday. Yuugi says he can't. She's building stories he can't help her write and she's lost focus.

Yuugi spends her time and love like pocket change until she's empty.

Anzu shows up when he doesn't answer her phone calls. He's staring at his bedroom ceiling.

Yuugi sits up and gives her doe eyes and tries to explain why he's running empty on love to give her.

Anzu tells him he's not a goddamn thing like Atem and slams his door.

Yuugi texts her in the middle of the night that she's right, he knows, he'd trade places with Atem just so he didn't have to wake up in the morning without him.

Anzu ignores his texts and apologies for three days.

Yuugi shows up at her house on some Tuesday, when it's been seven weeks and two lifetimes and he's even farther away from the starting line than he was before. He sits outside her front door and texts that he's there and waits. He waits until the sun sets. He waits until her dad passes him on his way in from work.

Anzu checks outside after dinner and swallows anxiety when he's still there, even though she knew he would be, because it's Yuugi. She rubs her arms against the residual chill of May and they look at each other.

Yuugi tells her that she shouldn't let his tears make her feel bad, that he's fucked up and less than half of a person right now and he was wrong in every single way to let her try to fill up some of his holes.

Anzu listens and cries and shakes her head because he's her best friend and it's their job to take care of each other because her first love is dead in some African shithole of an unmarked tomb and it's Yuugi whose lost his goddamn soul mate and won't ever be whole again.

Yuugi hugs her when he's got nothing else to say and whispers into her shoulder that she shouldn't forgive him if she doesn't want to, but that he hopes she will anyway.

Anzu tells him that she loves him, and they both know it's the kind of love that runs marathons and spans continents and makes room for spouses and kids and distance, and it'll be as if they spend every day together even when they go months without seeing each other.

They decay until they're stable again and Yuugi kisses her cheek and she hugs him until her mom's voice is asking through the door if Yuugi'd like to come in for some pastries.

A/N: I don't know a goddamn thing about science, I teach English as a second language so don't judge me. That is all. Thanks for reading!