A/N: This wasn't the story I originally planned, but with exams around the corner the shorter and more experimental piece won over the plot-driven one.


Maybe in Another Round

She was a peasant girl and he was a peasant boy and in a world without tragedy or the cruelty of humankind they might have come to love one another.

Or maybe even then the darkness in his soul would warp his body and his mind, while her shining light would burn away all colour and her future along with. Maybe they were always fated to be darkness and night: he the tragically wicked soul that descended into madness and grief, and she the weary timid spirit who kept the will to protect.

He didn't understand how he could be so different from her, so unlucky. Once they were cut to the roots they were the same: children from a poor village that eventually suffered its destruction. Holders of powerful spirits within their souls: spirits of destruction. Spirits so powerful they bled into their hair, their eyes, their hands. She, that girl with white hair and blue eyes and a body that should have dropped her into the sand long ago but still carried her on. He with his equally white hair but dark skin and wounds that should have long since scabbed over.

And yet the darkness devoured him and she walked in the light: the saviour while he became the destroyer. Why didn't the hatred consume her soul as well, he wondered? She too was wronged by the Pharaoh, by the people. She too was condemned for no just reason at all.

And yet she screamed against the things he fought for, tears streaming down her cheeks and a dragon emerging from her shadow: fierce and bleeding white light and parrying his shadows. She defended the Pharaoh and his lying ideals however weak she was, she appeared. Even if that defence was not turning her dragon loose on those fools and destroying them, in trying to save the very people who turned around and accused her of destruction.

He thought her a fool and no more, but in a world where those circumstances didn't exist they might have been able to know each other better. They might have reached an understanding, instead of him looking after her in uncaring bewilderment and she doing the same – because she had met with hope and could not understand the starving hope-deprived desire for destruction that consumed him. But maybe she could have, if Seto had not saved her life that day.

Or maybe he, Bakura, could have understood her if he'd been fortunate enough to cross paths with a kind soul like that before his descent into darkness passed the point of return.