For Round 6 of The Yu-Gi-Oh Fanfiction Contest. The pairing is XENOSHIPPING (Isis Ishtar x Rishid). WARNING: Heavily implied combinations of Isis x Rishid x Malik, as well as Malik!harem; yaoi, three[+]somes, and incest. Don't like, don't read. There's a reason the word 'squick' was invented.
Notes: Credit goes to LadyBlackwell for challenging me to include Shameshipping and therefore forcing me to take my original plotbunny to new and improved levels of disturbing. I had a ridiculous amount of fun writing the incest in this. Also, remember that Isis = Ishizu Ishtar.
Disclaimer: I don't own YGO.
Enjoy!
To Be Determined
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- one -
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The sun beat down on her head, scorching the back of her neck and making her skin bead with perspiration. Her bare feet scraped against the dry, rocky ground, blisters already present from the past few days of running blindly to the north. She had already taken off her head scarf and cut her skirt to knee-length, not caring for the consequences now, but those made the journey no easier to bear.
"Isis," Malik, her eight-year-old brother, whimpered, her palm sweaty in hers. "I'm thirsty—"
That had been his complaint for the past however-long-they-had-been-wandering-the-desert: "I'm hot, Isis. I'm cold, Isis. I'm hungry, I'm thirsty. I miss home, Isis. I want to go home."
Home? She sometimes wanted to scream that one word at him, to let all her pent-up emotions out in one glorious rush. Home, where you are hated and Mother cannot even speak in Father's presence and I am to be sent far away so I cannot interfere to keep Father from killing you? Home, where they despise us and grudge us every breath we take, as if the air itself were worth more than our lives?
"Are we there yet?"
She gritted her teeth and clenched the hand not interlocked with his, willing herself back to control, staring straight ahead to where there was nothing but desert stretching as far as the eye could see. "No. No, we're not."
"Where are we going?"
"Somewhere," she answered shortly, plowing forward and squinting into the heat haze before her that rose in shimmering waves to the blinding blue sky.
"I'm tired—"
"Tired," she whispered, her voice as cracked as the dirt beneath her feet. Her words were barely audible; she had learned well in those first few years of childhood to become quieter whenever her emotions threatened to explode out. "Tired, Malik? I am tired; I have dragged you all this way to save your precious life, and you have no right to complain." Her eyes stung as hot wind blew into her face, and she wiped bits of sand out of them frantically. "I don't know where we're going and there might be nobody out here after all, but will you please just follow me, lest we die by worse hands than Fate's!"
Malik looked up, lip trembling and those eerie violet eyes staring straight into her, welling up with tears. Isis felt a wave of guilt wash over her, and she resisted the urge to pull him into her arms and hug him; it would only serve to make him even more uncomfortable because of the heat.
"I'm sorry," she murmured, stroking her right hand through his hair and tugging his headdress back on—it would not do for him to get heatstroke, what with the small amount of water she carried in the sack on her back. "I didn't mean to—"
"It's okay," he said, smiling faintly at her and holding up a tiny hand to shield his eyes from the sunlight. "We'll be there soon, right? At the Ish—Ickt—"
"The mythical home of the Ishtars," Isis murmured, searching in vain for any sign that they were nearing it. "Miles to the east of the Third Cataract of the Nile, hidden somewhere underground. They are our only hope, Malik."
Her brother peered into the distance with her for a moment before his face lit up. "There!"
There were two people walking toward them, calm and unhurried, dressed in sleeveless, weightless robes that left little skin covered: a man, carrying what looked like a bottle of water, and a woman with long white hair and pale, pale skin.
"Welcome," the man said, and Isis could hear his words even over the distance between them.
"Oh," she breathed, relief making her chest light. "We are blessed."
"Who is this child?" her father snarled, looking at the baby that Isis, five years old, cradled in her arms.
"My brother," she said, smiling up at him. "Mother has named him Malik."
"What is wrong with his hair and his eyes?"
"Oh." Her face fell slightly, her eyebrows creasing. "I don't know. But you see, doesn't he look beautiful? It's as if the spirits have touched him and made him like this—different and pretty and—"
"Like your eyes," her father said, his voice hard.
She faltered slightly, one hand inching away from the baby to reflexively touch the side of her face, her fingers stroking at her cheek. "Mother says that my eyes—"
"Your mother is wrong; she lies to you in hope of shielding you from the truth. What fates have cursed me with having two children who cannot be—will never be—normal?"
She trembled under his words, shifting her body away from him as if to hide Malik from his wrath. "Father…?"
"Leave."
"I am Mahaad Ishtar," the man told her, gesturing for her to sit on a sofa next to him and the white-haired woman who had accompanied him outside.
"Isis."
Mahaad and the woman exchanged glances at her unwillingness to state her last name. "Why have you come here?" he asked.
"To escape," Isis said. "I've heard the tales of your family underground and how you offer refuge for those who are hiding from the government of Egypt. My brother and I have been wandering the desert for days, trying to find your home."
"We keep it well-hidden," the woman said mildly, her voice softer than Isis had expected. But there was warning in her tone too, a hidden threat—If you reveal our secrets, then there will be a heavy price to pay. "And I gather from your words that you will be staying here for the rest of your lives, for fear of capture if you were to return to your home?"
"No," Isis said, although somewhat reluctantly. "I owe you for your kindness in taking my brother and me in, and I will find some way to repay you when I leave. It will be less of a burden on your family if only Malik were to stay."
"But it's no burden at all," the woman said sweetly, her smile feigning innocence that veiled careful intent.
Mahaad looked distinctly uncomfortable. "Lady Kisara—"
She interrupted him. "We need new blood in here," she said bluntly. "And while your brother is strange in his own rights, his presence will be good for the long-term welfare of the entire clan. That is why we welcome visitors, Isis—because as the decades go on, our children are born weaker than the last." She smiled wryly and held out one pale, pale hand, catching a strand of her white hair in another. "I cannot go out in the sun for very long because of this, and my eyes are weak. Yet I am the leader of the Ishtars because my father was, and I will always work for the good of the clan."
"… Will Malik be safe here?" Isis whispered insistently after a moment of silence, after she had decided that Kisara was completely serious. That was all that mattered to her; she had done all this for Malik's survival, not hers.
Kisara gave her a single nod. "I can guarantee this."
"Thank you, then," she said fervently. "Thank you so much—"
"There's no need to thank us," Kisara said. We benefit from this more than you. Then, as if she had suddenly thought of something, she added, "What should we tell Malik?"
Isis swallowed down the pain in her throat. "Tell him… that maybe I'll be back someday. And that I hope he doesn't forget me."
Kisara smiled with pale lips, her blue-gray eyes—so much lighter than Isis's—sympathetic for once. "Go safely, then, and we will await your return."
"I have arranged a marriage for you, Isis," her father announced one night at dinner.
She stiffened in her seat, her head turning almost imperceptibly so she could sneak a glance at Malik, who was smiling as he ate his millet soup and dipped bread cut into the shapes of animals into it. "To whom, Father?"
"To a young man from the south, the son of a museum curator. You will move there after the wedding and remain with his family. We are the guardians of the tomb that the foreigner Pegasus J. Crawford has already violated to create his card game, and it will be your duty to make sure archaeologists touch it no more."
"When?" Isis asked, her voice level. Beneath the table, she clenched her hands together to keep them from trembling. Even Malik had grown silent, and she knew he was looking at her, puzzled, wondering what had happened to his elder sister.
"In six months." Her father's tone was businesslike, satisfied; in his eyes, the marriage was nothing but a good deal, as if she were cattle to be sold for profit.
"Can I visit afterward?" She choked on her words this time, and she felt Malik's hand on her arm, his poke questioning.
"No, you may not." Her father's words were delivered as if he had announced a life sentence in prison, and to her, he might as well have.
Isis willed herself not to cry; she willed the shock to take hold of her body and numb it until dinner was finished, until she could return to the safety of her bedroom and think. "Okay."
What would happen to Malik, eight years old and ignorant of the distrust his own father had for him because he had been born albino in a society where those who fit in were the only ones who were honored? How would her brother survive if her father had drawn shades over the windows and forced him to remain inside the house at all times? How would she survive, a blue-eyed girl married to a man who had most likely not been told of that particular feature when the marriage had been arranged?
Isis had heard stories of albinos and others ever since she was a child whose mother had not allowed her a mirror so she could not see her own eyes. And then, after she had seen her own face—only then had her mother had stopped the stories.
What would she do?
"Who are you?" Seto Kaiba, CEO of Domino City's prestigious KaibaCorp, looked up from his ever-present laptop and glared at her. His brother Mokuba lay on a couch pushed up against the floor-length windows, sound asleep.
Isis was impressed (and somewhat intimidated, if she were to be honest with herself) that he had taken one look at her and switched from his native language of Japanese to fluent Arabic. "Isis Ishutarl," she said, only hesitating briefly before adding a form of Mahaad's family name onto hers.
Kaiba returned to his computer screen, the tapping of the keys breaking the silence. "Why exactly have you decided to barge into my office during my lunch break?"
Isis didn't see any sign of lunch on his table. "I'd like to apply for a job here."
Kaiba spared her a skeptical glance. "Get in line. With the rate that I'm firing these useless people, there'll probably be a free spot for telephone operator within the next few months." He paused for a moment, deliberating. "Unless, of course, you have any skill with holographic technology or three-dimensional design, because that's the only area where we have open spots now."
"I have access to the original tombs that Pegasus J. Crawford received the inspiration for his Duel Monsters cards from," Isis said, and with that revelation, it felt as if a weight were being lifted off her chest—there was no turning back now; with that one sentence, she had betrayed her family's secrets so extensively that they could never be taken back. Her father, Isis thought, would not have been happy.
Kaiba's head snapped up, his cold blue eyes regarding her critically. "And how have you gained that access?"
"It's personal," she said. My family lives to protect those tombs from the public. My father hates my brother because he cannot leave the house for long periods of time to check to make sure that the tombs have not been violated and that the ancient paintings inside them are still in place.
Kaiba smirked. "Familial problems, Ishutarl-san?"
It was only with difficulty that Isis managed to hide her surprise at how Kaiba had referred to her—she had to become comfortable with her new name if she were to survive in this world. "Yes, in a way. My father… does not approve of this."
"And therefore, you left your home," Kaiba finished for her, looking thoughtful. His eyes flickered over to his brother's sleeping form, and for a moment he seemed lost in memories. "Do you have samples of these tomb walls with you?"
Isis nodded, handing him a pad with sketches of the creatures she had seen in the tomb the last time she had visited—a helmeted man with a snake's tail for legs, a reptile of some sort with six pairs of eyes on each side of its head, a man in armor with a staff in hand.
Kaiba glanced through them quickly, and Isis could tell when he looked up that he had decided. "As long as you don't defect to Industrial Illusions, I'll consider it. Expect a call either confirming or denying your request within the next few days. If I'm not hiring you, you will get the sketches back."
As soon as Isis closed the door behind him, Kaiba placed the papers on the side of his desk and resumed typing, casting an amused look at the couch to his right. "Mokuba, stop pretending to sleep."
His brother popped up immediately, a grin on his face. "How did you know, nii-sama?"
Kaiba shrugged, closing his file and immediately opening up a new page on his browser. "You never sleep in my office unless it's past midnight. What do you think of Ishutarl-san?"
"She seems nice," Mokuba offered unhelpfully, standing up to snatch the samples of Isis's drawings on Kaiba's desk.
"We were speaking Arabic through the entire conversation. Did you even understand what she was saying?" Kaiba asked.
"Not a single word," Mokuba said proudly. "Ooh, this magician guy looks cool."
Kaiba actually laughed at that before turning serious again. "She said that she had access to the tomb where Pegasus J. Crawford received inspiration for creating his Duel Monsters cards. Since we have a deal with Industrial Illusions that we'll co-produce the cards, that sort of information could give us leverage over Pegasus—especially since the government of Egypt banned him from entering the country after he made the Gods."
"Well, I've never seen any of these before," Mokuba remarked. "It's possible that she's telling the truth. You should make her go back there and take pictures of the walls to prove that there are more we haven't made yet."
"She also said that she's had some family problems with giving this information to us," Kaiba added. "And according to what Pegasus told me, if she had access to the chamber, then she's a member of the Wdjat clan. They won't be happy with her leaving."
"So?" Mokuba said, unfazed.
Kaiba's mouth twitched. "Her father would have something to say about it, I imagine. Most of it would involve killing her to make sure she did not commit this transgression again." He paused. "Do you think I should hire her?"
His younger brother shrugged. "It's your decision, nii-sama."
With Mokuba, that meant 'yes.'
"Mother," Isis whispered as they sat in her room before she was to sleep, "what should I do?"
Her mother was silent for a moment. "Why won't you obey your father, Isis?"
"You see how he treats Malik," Isis said desperately. "I'm the only thing that stands in the way of Father disowning him, and when I am gone he will have no more opposition!" Her voice was bitter, and her mother flinched slightly at the accusation—after all, she had not protected her own son. "I can't just leave him here and pretend that nothing will happen."
"You have more spirit than I did," her mother said at last, turning away to stare at the walls of Isis's bedroom, decorated with nothing but a few pictures of their family together. She smiled very slightly—a sad, ironic smile, one that Isis didn't understand until she spoke: "I have not taught you well enough, it seems."
"Mother—"
"There is a clan of people who were once citizens of this country," her mother interrupted, her voice lowering. "They left to live underground many centuries ago, unwilling to face persecution from the government of the time, and they have lived there since. They offer refuge for anyone who can find them, as long as you do not reveal their location to any but those who need it." She paused, weighing her words before finally concluding: "They are called the Ishtars."
"Where are they?" Isis said, hope making her heart pound faster. Maybe, maybe, she and Malik still had a chance—
"That, I don't know," her mother admitted. "I was only told that they are a few miles east of the Third Cataract of the Nile, and that their underground home is marked by a circular opening to let in air and a hidden door through which they interact with the outside world. Find them if you can, and then you will be safe."
"But what about you, Mother?" Isis asked. "Father will surely realize you have told me this."
"I will be fine," her mother said. "Wait for a few weeks until your father thinks that you have accepted your fate, and then leave. Take Malik with you."
Isis nodded. "I will."
Isis rubbed her eyes wearily, shaking herself out of her memories and concentrating once more on the sketchpad in front of her. The Egyptian sun glinted off the mahogany tabletop in her hotel room, and she felt her stomach twist uncomfortably with nervousness as her eyes passed over the small digital camera lying there.
She knew how to find the tomb, and she knew that her father would not be checking on it that day. But she also knew that he would be watching for some sign of her return (after all, she and Malik were his only children, and without them there would be nobody to inherit the duty of watching the tomb), and knowledge was making her paranoid—she had locked the door and windows, left a DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging outside so that no cleaning maids would come in, but she had a terrible feeling that somehow, her father would still find her.
She thought of Malik, whom she had left with the Ishtars barely two years ago, and wondered if he had ever seen the sun again. She wondered if he missed his mother and his sister or considered why they had left their home in the first place; Isis did not know Kisara or Mahaad well enough to judge whether they would be truthful to her brother or simply rope him into the Ishtar clan with the cool efficiency of lies.
There was a knock on her door, and Isis jumped in her seat, her hands shaking, before she opened it to reveal Mokuba, tapping his foot on the carpeted ground with Kaiba's unwillingly lent bodyguards flanking him. "Let's go," he said.
They arrived at the tomb when the sun was high in the sky, beating down upon their heads with intensity that reminded Isis of the last time she had been under it—escaping to Cairo on the back of a horse the Ishtars had given to her, searching desperately for a job in the streets there before finally finding one at a museum. "Stay outside," she told Mokuba and the two men.
Mokuba frowned at her. "I thought you knew what heatstroke was, Ishutarl-san." His voice, despite being light with his joke, had a serious undertone: Why are you ordering me to do this? Isis mused suddenly, wryly, that Kaiba had taught his younger brother well.
"Then you may come in, but go no further than the first door. There are traps inside that are difficult to navigate in groups, and as a group we are more likely to attract the attention of my father. I may have told you this much, but how to get past the traps is a secret I will not reveal."
Staring into Mokuba's dark gray eyes, his authoritative stance making up for his lack of height, Isis wondered briefly if she would have had the same amount of courage had she been facing Kaiba—arrogant, self-assured—in his place. Siblings, after all, were the one thing that she and Seto Kaiba had in common.
She stepped into the cool, dry darkness, holding an oil lamp and a camera instead of the LED lights Mokuba and company were carrying, because the museum curator she had first worked under had drilled it into her head that 'artifacts this old could not be exposed to harsh illumination lest they crumble into dust at the touch of a finger.' Thick granite tablets lined the narrow hall, some propped up against the walls, some lying dusty on the ground, and the majority of them carved into the stone everywhere, even on the ceiling and the floor.
Reluctantly, but eager to get her duties over with so that she could leave Egypt as soon as possible, she pressed the videotaping button and scanned down the halls, stopping to make her way around the bones of previous trespassers who had been locked inside. She had lied about the traps, of course; the self-sealing door and the well-hidden chamber were enough to keep most from sharing their discoveries.
She stopped at a carving of a woman with two body-length wings spread out behind her, a simple, curved headdress woven into her hair.
Isis ended the video and paused there, touching two fingers to the woman's face. Her eyes were closed, her hair ruffled by an invisible wind, and she looked like she was flying free, breaking away from whatever bonds had restricted her before. The carving was crude and colorless, but Isis imagined that there were clouds underneath the woman and sunlight streaming down, that she was soaring up, unrestricted, into the sky.
"Spiria," she whispered into the silence, and the worry weighing heavily on her heart dissipated a tiny bit. Her name will be Spiria.
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- two -
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"Do you have family in Egypt?" Kaiba asked her suddenly as she was about to leave his office after depositing more sketches on his desk. She had not been asked to return to Egypt since that first test he had given her; instead, her job was to think up designs and present them to him for approval.
"Yes," Isis said warily, her foot poised on the floor in mid-turn.
Tactfully, Kaiba didn't ask her who her family consisted of. "Would you like to see them again?"
Isis's next breath caught in her throat, and her fading memories of Malik rushed suddenly through her mind. Her heart leapt at the idea even as a rush of anxiety overwhelmed her when she thought of returning to her homeland. "Yes."
Kaiba tossed down two plane tickets onto the desk. "One month exactly. No more than that unless you resign or die."
Kaiba had always been the blunt one. "Thank you," Isis said, managing to keep her voice steady despite the fact that she wanted to hug him or otherwise show her gratitude. "Thank you so much."
He gave her an amused look before handing her something else: The first card she had created in his company, now intricately painted and colored, reprinted in thousands across the world. Spiria. "Keep it."
Isis walked through the desert night in simple leather sandals, trying to remember any landforms that had been there the last time she had been there. What if the landscape had changed since then, torn apart and reassembled by the sandstorms that raged through Egypt many times each year? What if she was too far away for the Ishtars to spot her wandering on the horizon; what if she died here, alone and forgotten, with nobody to remember her but her employers far away in Japan and her now eighteen-year-old brother underground?
Then she saw it: the form of a woman standing on top of a dune, her face lit softly by the moonlight, her long white hair blowing in the breeze. "Isis," Kisara said with a smile, and she heard despite how far away she was; the featureless plane of the desert carried sounds well. "Welcome back."
"Where have you been all this time?" Kisara asked her as they sat down on the same couch where Isis had explained her situation to the others nearly a decade ago.
"In Japan," Isis answered, not knowing how much the Ishtars might have heard about the line of Egypt-themed cards that KaibaCorp had released in the first year after she had left, "working as an artist."
Kisara nodded; Isis noted with some surprise that she didn't attempt to carry on the conversation through a polite comment on her job—she had much to learn about the traditions of this underground clan, it seemed.
Isis paused before asking the question that had brought her here again. "How is Malik?"
Kisara smiled faintly. "He is doing well. He's good with languages, and also that new game that came out a while before he arrived here… Duel Monsters, I believe it's called? It was very popular for a few months, but then it faded. Malik still has all his cards, though. Oh, and he has a new companion," she added as if she had just thought of it, although Isis could see her fingers drumming quietly on her leg. "Rishid came almost immediately after you left, and he and Malik have been very close since then." Kisara frowned before composing her expression again. "Would you like to see them?"
Isis nodded, a knot of anticipation curling in her stomach.
"Malik," Kisara called down the hallway, her voice surprisingly relaxed despite what Isis viewed to be a relatively important event in her younger brother's life. "Someone wants to speak to you."
Malik was definitely taller and thinner, Isis thought when she first saw her brother again, but other than that and the two sharp lines of kohl drawn under his eyes, he looked exactly the same as he had in childhood. They simply stood there for a moment, staring at each other and attempting to reconcile the stranger they saw before them with what memories they had left.
Isis was the first to move, stepping forward and hugging him tightly; Malik remained limp, neither returning nor resisting her embrace. "You're okay," she breathed into his ear.
"Obviously," he retorted—was it just her ears, or was there heavy sarcasm in his voice?
"Don't you remember me, Malik?" she asked, the hope bubbling up inside her decreasing slightly in level.
He tilted his head to view her at an angle, paused, and shook his head. "Not really."
"I brought you here ten years ago," she said somewhat desperately, grabbing for something to say. "Do you remember your childhood at all?"
"No." He smirked, arching one eyebrow in a way that was so obviously suggestive that Isis wondered for a moment if he had no idea that they were siblings. "But I'd be willing to make more memories."
Isis faltered, unsure of what to say next. Malik didn't help, simply looking her up and down once more with his pale violet eyes.
There was a movement in the shadows of the hall, and Isis snapped her head toward it to see a man with tattoos on his face step out in silence. He wore a plain white shirt and pants like the ones Malik and Kisara had, but looked imposing nevertheless. She frowned at him, but he didn't meet her eyes with his green ones, staring at the wall opposite him. Isis thought he was glaring, but why—?
"This is Rishid," Malik said by way of introduction, waving a dismissive hand toward their new companion. "Rishid, this is Isis, the one who brought me here when I was a kid."
Rishid bowed slightly to her, his gaze never drifting from the stone blocks of the underground chamber. "It's an honor to meet you, Lady Isis." Sarcastic too—was that sort of Ishtar trademark?
"Lady?" Isis questioned warily, glancing at the long black ponytail that trailed down the back of Rishid's otherwise hairless head and the thin black marks on his cheeks, glinting in the light of the fluorescent lamps screwed into the walls.
Malik shrugged, not seeming to think much of it. "That's what he calls everyone."
"This is my bedroom," Malik told her as he gave her an unwilling tour around the Ishtars' home, gesturing to a curtained doorway; Isis could hear whispers coming from inside it. He paused before adding sardonically, "I sleep here."
"I know," Isis said, biting back the retort that came readily to her lips. What had happened to the Malik she knew from childhood, the cheerful boy who was willing to help anyone? Why did she feel like all of the years she had spent protecting her brother meant nothing now?
He yanked the curtain open with one vicious sweep of his arm. "Come in."
Isis stepped through the entrance after him and stopped there, frozen in place by what she saw.
The room was as large as the one she had been invited into to talk with Kisara, filled with mattresses pushed up against the walls and a carpet on the ground. Blankets and pillows were spread haphazardly around the floor, the walls plastered with papers and pencil drawings, and the only cot had a few books placed on it, shoved to the side to prevent destruction.
The most shocking aspect of the room, however, was its components. There were people everywhere—girls laughing with heads bent together, a woman reading in a corner, another group of girls watching attentively as one with brown hair twirled on one foot in the center of the carpet. They didn't even pause at Malik's entrance, only glanced up once or twice to see the woman standing next to him.
Malik led her to the bed with the books on it, sitting down nonchalantly and swiping a lock of blond hair out of his face.
"What is this?" Isis asked, unsure of how to react.
Malik looked, for the first time, somewhat uncomfortable. "My…"
"We're his 'wives,'" a girl with long, messy brown hair and dark eyes offered, finger-quoting around the word 'wives.' "Only not really, because we don't marry here. We just get children occasionally." She smiled helpfully and turned back to her friends.
"Why would you have wives?" Isis said, stumbling over the phrase. Was yet another strange Ishtar clan custom?
Kisara entered, her long white hair fluttering around her slightly as she walked. Her blue eyes regarded Isis calmly, and her voice was equally level when she answered. "You brought Malik here and left him with the knowledge that the main reason we were accepting him was to get new blood into our clan—new genes, I suppose others might say. Outsiders are always welcomed because of this. The Ishtars are a dying people, Lady Isis, and I am their leader—I told you already that I will do anything to keep us from disappearing completely. We will not waste away under my watch, and when you brought in your brother, why would we not take advantage of the opportunity?"
"He's eighteen, Kisara—"
"And eighteen years old is the age of legal adulthood in Japan, is it not? And in this clan, it is fourteen." Kisara softened her tone, lowering her voice even though the chatter in the room made it impossible to hear their conversation. Malik flipped aimlessly through one of his books. "You are not his caretaker anymore, Lady Isis. You have been away for too long, and Malik has found new friends and new companions"—she cast a brief glance at the door, hair flying over her shoulder, and Isis turned as well to see Rishid watching there—"who care about him as much as you do."
"Are you one of his 'wives' too?" Isis asked, her voice bitter.
Kisara gave her a sympathetic look. "Yes—how could my people do this if their leader did not? And if you wish to stay here…"
"I will leave after one month," Isis interrupted before the white-haired woman could go on further. "Maybe sooner." Kaiba had certainly paid her enough for her to stay in a hotel until her returning plane flight, and perhaps she could board early.
"As you wish, Lady Isis." Kisara's words were noticeably colder. "Rishid, can you show her to her bedroom?"
When Isis left, she could have sworn that Malik was staring at her retreating back from under pale blond eyelashes—staring with his odd violet eyes.
Isis watched as the women in Malik's room filtered out morning after morning to go about their usual duties in the underground network, none seeming fazed about who her brother had chosen to sleep with the previous night. She stayed mostly by Malik's side through day, Rishid's silent presence always hovering over them, trying to reconcile somehow with the sibling who didn't remember her and who she might as well have never known.
When she looked at him, she could not see her brother anymore; instead she saw some foreign teen who thought himself better than the others of the Ishtar clan simply because he was new and his presence was therefore treasured by Kisara. She saw him bend over his books and memorize vocabulary; she saw him wander aimlessly through the halls when he was bored; she saw him kneel to search out the little garter snakes that constantly plagued the chambers and kill them with ease born of years of practice.
"Why are you doing this?" she asked one day, watching as he twisted the neck of one and tossed it to the floor.
"They don't belong here," Rishid answered in her brother's place, his tone flat. "And what doesn't belong here, we force to leave."
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- three -
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"I'm Mana," the girl who had introduced herself as a 'wife' the first night Isis was there announced one day, smiling brightly. "Nice to meet you."
There was an awkward pause.
"So…" Mana said, drawing out the word and shifting from foot to foot. "You're only staying for a month, right?"
Isis nodded.
"Are you at least going to join Malik at night before you leave?"
"What?"
"You know." She waved a hand in the air vaguely. "What we do at night. With him. Sometimes. One at a time, usually, but…"
"No!" Isis said, horrified. "Why would I ever do that with my own brother—!"
"He's your brother?" Mana asked, blinking. "Oh. Well, that wouldn't be quite as good as Lady Kisara wants, but you could still—"
"Do you do this with your brothers here?" Isis asked, certain that Mana was making a joke.
She shrugged. "If we must. How else can we get children in those times when there's nobody else to create the next generation with? Mahaad is my brother, and—"
"No," Isis said, holding up a hand to stop her. "I don't think I want to hear more."
"Sure." And Mana wandered off.
Isis met Rishid outside the room—he had been watching her in silence the entire time, it appeared, carefully judging her through impassive green eyes. "She's right," he said quietly as she exited. "This is custom for the Ishtars."
They stared at each other for a second that seemed to last minutes. "This custom is sickening."
There was something unfinished hanging in the air, suffusing their every breath with the heart-pounding feeling of it that Isis could almost taste on her tongue. It was tension, it was stress, it was the smoldering temper of two people who did not let their anger show—but strangely enough, Isis wished that the moment could have lasted forever.
Rishid was the first to force his gaze away, and as he walked past her and continued down the corridor, Isis felt the brush of his sleeve against her shoulder.
That was what ran through Isis's mind the day, more than a week later, when Malik led her into a room, abruptly whirled on his heel, and kissed her too.
His lips were warm against hers, the feeling of his hands gripping her shoulders so very foreign that she froze for a minute under his touch, too shocked to respond. Malik took the opportunity to deepen it, winding one hand through her hair in a motion much too practiced for it to be gentle, and there was an odd sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach when he did so, something that screamed that it was wrong, wrong, wrong—
She struggled to regain control of her arms, shoving him away forcefully once she had. "What in the name of the gods was that?"
Malik stumbled back and was caught by Rishid. "That was a kiss, Isis," he snapped, recovering quickly, "although I doubt you've received one before—"
"Why me?" Isis demanded. "You have your whole cursed harem of girls who are perfectly willing to carry on the Ishtar line with you; why your sister?"
Malik was silent. "Why does it matter if you're my sister?" At her shocked expression, he continued heatedly, "They taught me that anything is right here! They said that they have done many things for the sake of their clan, and that I should know these sacrifices as well; they told me of their ancestors who had children with their siblings when there was only one family here and their parents, who had 'married' their cousins—"
"This is them, not us!" Isis said. "In the outside world where you were born, they don't do this anymore. The Pharaohs of Egypt may have had harems and married their siblings, but not us. Not now!"
"Not you," Rishid said, and they both started; he rarely spoke, and Isis had heard his voice only a few times since she had arrived to the underground chamber. "I suppose you will never marry, Lady Isis, even when the man in question is not even remotely related to you." His tone was bitter.
"How would you know?" Isis said, a terrible feeling of foreboding welling up in her chest.
Her father had still found her. Despite the time, despite the distance she had tried to place between them by moving to Japan, the ghosts of her past remained, ready to engulf her in their arms when she let her guard down.
Rishid spoke the few words that told her that fate was deliberately throwing these obstacles in her way: "You were the girl who was supposed to marry me."
"Oh, no." Isis slumped to the ground, her entire body feeling numb with the news. "No."
His green eyes were piercing. "Yes."
"So what?" Kisara asked, as collected as ever despite the turmoil that was raging through the Ishtar household. "You're leaving?"
"Yes," Isis said, glad that she had no material possessions to pack with her.
"Why?" Kisara pressed.
"I just can't deal with Malik anymore," Isis said—which was true in its own way. "I need to leave as soon as I can, before it becomes too convoluted for the three of us to handle."
"The three of you?" Kisara said sharply—despite her unassuming personality, she was quite clever, Isis knew now. Clever enough to turn Malik into someone who his own sister couldn't love, clever enough—or perhaps ignorant enough, in this situation—to accept (although indirectly) into her household the one person who Isis had tried to escape all this time.
"Malik, Rishid, and me," Isis confirmed, not caring any longer if the whole cursed tomb knew about it; after all, according to Malik, they were an accepting people.
Kisara was quiet, weighing her words carefully. "Malik will be happy, I think, even if you are gone. He and Rishid…"
"I thought so," Isis said, her voice tired—was there nobody at all who had been spared the consequences of Malik's presence? Not even Rishid, who could not even have children with him? Had Kisara twisted Malik's personality this far?
"Of both their free wills, though," Kisara assured softly. "Even without you here… they will be happy."
"Thank you. For everything," Isis said hurriedly, walking through the halls that she now knew by heart. The entranceway was visible in the morning light, a yellow glow emanating from it. She thought she could see a small portion of blue sky.
Kisara smiled slightly. "I doubt that your gratitude is genuine, Lady Isis. But no matter; you are welcome to return again."
Rishid met Isis as she walked out, breathing in the familiar smell of fresh air and squinting to see the distant waters of the Nile on the horizon. "You're leaving." It wasn't a question.
She nodded solemnly. "I am."
"Malik's still here," he pointed out. Then, with a wry smile, "But I'm here too, aren't I?"
Isis simply pressed something into his hand—a Duel Monsters card she hadn't even known she still had in her pocket, showing a woman with long blue hair and graceful white wings. "Keep it." That was what Kaiba had said to her—she had almost come full circle.
Rishid gave her a knowing look, one that said without words that they still had unfinished business between them, one that told her he knew that she would return someday. "Goodbye."
She walked away before she could be tempted to stay longer, staring up into the sky that was a blinding shade of blue—blue like her own eyes, blue like Kisara's, blue like Kaiba Seto's, always watching her to see what decision she would make.
She thought she saw a flash of semi-transparent wings there too, hidden amongst the heat haze—
Spiria.
Hope.
Freedom.
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- four -
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The sun beat down in the sky, her sandaled feet gentle against the desert sand, her hair sticky against the back of her neck.
Just like that first day there with Malik, lost with no destination in mind.
I'm going back to KaibaCorp and leaving my past to be buried here.
But there were other copies of the Spiria card around the world, and her past would always find her, no matter how she tried to escape it.
I'll be back, Malik. Rishid. One day, I'll come back.
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End.
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Congratulations to the (un)lucky people who got to see the unedited version of this. :D
Endnotes: The title was originally TBD, because I was in a rush to finish and couldn't think of anything else. I decided to change it to To Be Determined and keep it more or less the same, because I realized that fit the ending quite well.
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