Disclaimer: Glitteringly not mine.

A/N: Not quite sure where this one came from. Sometimes my mind is a scary place to be. You can wander for hours without meeting a single logical thought.

Girls That Glitter Love the Dark

© Scribbler, December 2008.

Girls that glitter deceive death.

We thread ourselves through innocent flesh,

And then we are surprised when we see

That those we've loved

Seem to be erased.

-- From Girls That Glitter Love the Dark Hannah Fury

"Seto …"

Seto knows this is a dream. His mind doesn't take well to dreaming, turning them to nightmares all too often as a child, so he's trained himself not to dream – or at least not to remember them afterwards. It was hard, learning that. Seto remembers everything, because anything could be useful someday. He stores away information, memories and thoughts hoarded like a packrat, his head full of facts and a ruthless intelligence that manipulates them in subtle, sometimes cruel ways. He thinks in angles and sharp corners, straight lines and completely flat planes. The only time anything in his mind curves in when he thinks of Mokuba, and then he can only bend so much. Seto is straight-backed, narrow-eyed rigidity in his head, firing his thoughts through his eyes like laser beams intended to cut everyone down to size.

So when he realises he's dreaming he's irritated. He tries to wake himself up, or at least disturb himself so he can break from dreaming, but the voice makes him stop.

"Seto …"

"Who's there?"

Ridiculous. Nobody is there. It's a dream. The only person who can be in his dream is himself. Everything else is just a product of his own subconscious.

"Seto, please …"

But that voice is so insistent, and something in it strikes a chord deep inside him, where not even Mokuba can reach. Until this precise moment, when the voice cracks it open like a nut and exposes its strange innards, not even Seto knew about this chord. It sounds like tramping feet and desperate calling, smells like sand and blood, and tastes like … like …

No. Ridiculous. He must but overstressed – although when isn't he? Running a company when you're still a teenager was never going to be easy, but Seto has never doubted his own abilities. Why should he? On the duelling field he may still be bested by Yuugi Mutou, but in the boardroom he has no equal.

"Seto, please listen …"

Dream-Seto shakes his head, rejecting the silvery voice and the soundtouchtastesmell memory it evokes. Facts he didn't know he has stored away suddenly pop into his head: the best time to put bare feet on hot sand, the ironclad truth that the sun is rolled across the sky by a scarab, the true location of the soul – no, the akh – in the body. He remembers aching loss and a cooling body in his arms, and it could be soundtouchtastesmellsight if only he'd let it –

"Go away," Seto says firmly. "You're only a figment of my imagination."

And his critics said he has no imagination. Shows what they know.

"No!" the voice cries. "Wait! Seto, please don't ignore me -"

"You're not real," he says. "And I'm waking up now."

He catches a flicker of silvery hair to match the silvery voice before he opens his eyes and sees only his own darkened bedroom.

And he can't understand why his hands are fisted in the sheets and his chest aches like he's having a heart attack.

Fin.