The Siren Swan Song of Cyan
Written for Into the Rainbow: Vrains Shipping Week
Turn 5 #VSWCyan
Ship: Angelmakershipping | Aoi/Yusaku
Fandom: Yu-Gi-Oh! Vrains
Title: The Siren Swan Song of Cyan
Word Count: 1,293
Rating: T
Warnings: Major Character Death
Tags: Not Canon Compliant, Obsession, Unhealthy Relationships, Sexual References
He couldn’t let her go. He just couldn’t. He simply wouldn’t, it wasn’t in his nature.
Yusaku had spent so long in a state of want not, have not, that when he finally gave himself to desire and held sustained contact with another human being, he just couldn’t let go. At first he could but he hadn’t been that bitter, hateful emissary of revenge for a long time. Or so he thought.
He thought of their first meeting. Blue Angel didn’t do debts. She didn’t want anyone to owe her nor did she want to be owed by anyone. Yet she had unfurled her whip for him and pulled him back. Yusaku still remembered what her touch was like back then. Just as bitter and even more fleeting, especially through the cyber space and something like leather and latex which Playmaker wore.
The debt ended up being equaled and squared off. Playmaker caught Blue Maiden when she got caught in that current of turbulence on the way to the Mirror Link VRAINS.
To prove that they were finally fair and on equal terms, they shook on it. Aoi knowing full well that her classmate Fujiki Yusaku-kun was also the mysterious Playmaker. And Yusaku taking heart in that she knew that rather than terror and that assurance was proof of how he had changed.
Except these times of good fortune and fairness were not meant to last. The illness that had claimed her biological father not long after her own birth was genetic and when she began showing symptoms, she quickly accepted her fate that her life was meant to be a short one. Nothing more than a dribbling tear on the side of God’s face.
Yusaku couldn’t accept that - and for a while, neither could Akira. He was the richest man in Japan, if he couldn’t save his precious little sister from the horribleness that was mortality, then who could? He poured funding into medical program after medical program but in the end, as Aoi’s life began to slip away, all it amounted to was a comfortable end in a hospital more like an expensive hotel. She had clean, soft sheets and was surrounded by her various loved ones as she closed her eyes that one final time and she breathed her last, taking off from this mortal coil with not so much as a gasp.
Her skin was paper thin, her body was frail, the illness had frayed her nerves and wasted away her mind but she was remembered. Yusaku remembered Aoi vividly. He wrote note after note on everything it was that he loved about her. The firmness of her skin, the vitality and grace that she had, the precious moments in between. Their first kiss, their first love making, high school and university graduation, sharing an apartment until her stay became that of hospice in a room morbidly called the Clover Room.
And so, Yusaku threw himself into blind denial. He would resurrect the only girl, the only friend, his one and only lover, whom he could share quiet solace with and found a handshake more romantic than other milestones that they had accomplished together.
The grief consumed him. It wasn’t fair. He hardly ate and he did eat was usually greasy and all empty calories, he was skinny and not all there in the head because of all his lasting mental scars, he shouldn’t have outlived her who lived in the lap of luxury. There should have been more that could have been done in regards to her medical care but alas. The doctors did their best, or so Akira tried to console him as Yusaku sobbed.
Aoi was all he could think about. Her gentle smiles and her cheeky laughter. Her haughty inner self and her humble exterior. She was a beauty rarely made and for some time, however short and even now Yusaku could hardly believe it, it had to be some concoction of his own imagination, but she had been his. Now, she would always be his. Yusaku would make sure of it with his own two hands and what tools that he had available to him, not to mention experience.
If he could bring Ai back, artificial intelligence so small and inhuman, then surely he could bring Aoi back. That’s what Yusaku resolved even as everyone around him railed against such black and white thinking but the blue called to him and he was having revelations by a cyan light. Not even Akira wanted Aoi back, her own brother, but not even he could stop Yusaku once he got a thought in his head.
Yusaku tinkered with one of Ai’s SOLtiS bodies. They had been rendered unuseable due to the Ignis Code that now infected them but for Yusaku’s purposes, that was absolutely perfect. He dressed it up how he remembered her. Short, navy-blue skirt with black leggings, prim leather shoes, and a blazer. He gave that body a fluffy brunette wig that was bobbed but when that abomination opened its eyes, they weren’t Aoi’s. Not quite, at least.
After months - years - of working on this, he couldn’t do it. This machine wasn’t Aoi. This android in front of him could never be Aoi, though it dressed like her and spoke like her, it was all wrong. Fervently, morbidly wrong and it broke Yusaku’s heart all over again.
Through the blood, sweat, and tears of priming the SOLtiS body for the inhabitation of humanity, of memories and love, Yusaku had been more fed on fantasy than food. He had imagined taking Aoi on dates again, kissing her sweetly in the moonlight and holding her hand, taking it further than either could dare, and more. He wanted a normal life with her. So what if his Aoi would have that diamond-shaped notch on her neck? It could be hidden with a scarf and her silicon skin could be bruised all the same. She would have been enough but this? What he created as a perverse mockery of all he revered in her.
Malfunction after malfunction. This SOLtiS body cycled through quirks and clips of Blue Angel, Blue Girl, and Blue Maiden, interwoven with the true self beneath the facades of Zaizen Aoi but it was wrong. She would stop and start, get it all wrong half way through, and Yusaku sobbed. It was all his fault. He should have listened to Akira and Ai who begged him to stop and now all he had for it was a bride that not even Frankenstein’s Monster would want. But all he could hear, in his grief and self-absorption, was the siren swan song of cyan, of if it could go right.
Yusaku sobbed into SOLtiS Aoi’s lap. It was complete in that all its inner animatronics ought to have been working perfectly but the code was all glitchy and it was fault, not even Ignis Code could handle what it meant to be loved and remembered as human. He buried his face, snot and tears and all, into her short navy skirt. It was scratchier than he thought it would be on the side of his face.
Just like SOLtiS Aoi had been programmed to, she tried to console him because that’s what lovers did. She attempted to pet the top of his head but she was on the fritz, her arm would jerk awkwardly and then she would blabber about incorrect Duel Monsters’ effects, even those from her own decks which she held so preciously - and so did Yusaku. He coughed and hiccupped, wrenching every sob from the deepest part of his soul, as he was bathed in the pale blue light that was cast out like an evil spell from the SOLtiS marking on her throat.