.
he wakes up in chains, and he is unsettled, because he is not entirely sure he dislikes it.
Something animal in him analyzes his surroundings like an expert. His head hurts like it's about to burst, but still works at a thousand revolutions: he needs an escape plan.
The shadows shift with the flickering torchlight, and there is nothing he can pick up from the perfect silence that can give him any clue… He is unsettled. Because he is chained, and he is kneeling, but the place is not a prison, unless it be the antechamber to the gates of Hell, and it is not, because he is very much alive. Very much in sore-back and headache and dancing images before his eyes, but he pushes them away, trying to, if that is all he can do, guess. Wrench out a setting from the beautiful drapery and ornate furniture, from the mellow light and the scented oils burning in a copper jar.
He is also unsettled because this exotic place is not wholly unfamiliar: he can smell the desert beyond the large open window, taste the wind on his dry lips, and he can make no sense at all out of anything; for all he knows he is captive, and that is unacceptable.
When he tries to stand up, a numbness in his ankles lets him know his feet are also bound. Pain, complicated sensation… He should be reveling in it like he has only just been doing (before he wound up there and then and so), but somehow the thrill is absent from how he is feeling like he's crashed down a building. He decides it's because there is no actual sense or fun or purpose in that pain; oh, suffering in exchange of more suffering is endearing, but bearing pain alone is routine and unappealing.
Still, still, he must get out, and get out he will…
… but as a door opens behind a curtain and a woman sways into the room, his thoughts spin on a different latitude and he. must. not. smirk. There is nothing to be sarcastic about, something resembling a conscience timidly suggests behind his eyes.
Dead serious, kneeling, (and, only now he notices, shirtless and barefoot), he does not make for a threatening sight. But she becomes afraid.
She had not thought she would, at least not as she looked at the unconscious body of a man, both foreign and not, lying on the scorching desert sand. The guards who found him thought him dead and meant to burn him (not even burying would do for this man, who should be a bandit and a heathen). She, she could not have that. Because there was some sort of thread of… intimacy with this stranger she could not describe-
-and he was alive.
And she trusted her magic. He would do her no harm- could not. It echoed. Bring him to my chamber. I must speak to him when he wakes up.
(The guards hastened to do her bidding, was she not a High Priestess of the Pharaoh? The Seer? The woman with the Eye of Osiris.)
Yet as she stands, tall, proud, elegant, and empowered, he holds her gaze, not with scorn, not with hate, but with caution; and she brings her hand to the token of the Realm's trust on her neck- the Millennium Necklace.
"I know you," she says, and something inside her deeper than her heart tells her she is right, and she stands still on her place like a hawk before a recoiling cobra.
He shakes his head, smirking to himself perhaps? Silence becomes him.
The words bear the mark of her voice, but she has not thought about speaking them aloud. "You are a Tomb Keeper."
His eyes glower. A fantastic shade of lavender, such as Priestess Isis has never seen before…. Or has she?
"I know those markings. My father had them."
(he is kneeling and she sees it all- an expanse of marred skin that makes up a testament)
His features light up in a way that is not entirely human (he is not), he shakes his shoulders, his shackles rustle metallic and constraining and safe for her. "Charming."
"Respect," she commands, "It is a legacy of blood and madness. My younger brother died during the ceremony."
Died? His head is killing him relentlessly as he casually reminds himself he does not care one sliver of sin about what the woman speaks of.
"Who are you?"
"Strange question to ask," he observes, and a man alone is a man with power, and shrugs, followed by an echo of metal chains.
She smiles slowly, enigmatically. "I know you. I don't know you. I can find out, if you do not tell me."
"You do not know me." He should stop talking, but she is like a Sphinx and he is impulsive and daring and born out of mindless thought, so he adds, "But I have always found you beautiful."
He stands up, and what is pain, anymore? Suddenly he is again playing his favorite game, towering over her as if he had not been her little brother in a life yet to come, and then he understands, as if it had been especially laid out for him.
He should be dead. Defeated by the Pharaoh in a duel racing against time and sense, he was sucked into the Realm of Shadows, but his soul was not lost, still.
(He has awakened in a distant past, where the gift of hate carved out on his back originated. Defeated? No, he was not defeated. Delayed, but never defeated.)
He grins.
Not just because he's figured it all out, but because she's flustered. What did he just say, now?
He's called her beautiful.
"Ah, precious thing," (and the words roll naturally off his tongue, as if he had always called her such, as if he had actually dwelled on her enough to deem her such.) (he hasn't, in the present… future… she was only another hindrance,) "Unsettled?"
His mind rushes. Disgusted? He's thrilled.
Her stance changes (but she will always look regal, majestic). She may have just taken in a serpent. "I do not need to bear you," she observes. Because he might be right. She doesn't know… some sense of perception inside of her is completely knotted. That unsettles her.
"You can always let me go," he suggests smoothly, his facial features expressive enough for all that his feet are bound and his wrists shackled. The thought occurs to him that he might have enough strength left to do a little dark-magic trick if she refuses. But he waits. He knows how to wait.
Priestess Isisshakes her head gravely. "Not until I know… who are you?"
Why do I feel like I know you?
He is still grinning, slyly. "Free me."
Oh, he's said that before. It feels strangely comfortable, how it sounds, what it means… Freedom. Again.
"…what?" She's heard him. She only can't understand the spine of the man, to stand up to her, to defy her position, to challenge her magic.
Through the incensed resin and transparent Egyptian draping, she knows he has read her chamber like a book and calculated all he could not guess. She knows he knows her.
"Free me," he says again, all velvet and sensual and persuasive, "And it'll be my pleasure to answer that one question of yours."
We're playing, he tells himself, And I've won this game before.
A flicker of her wrist, a hushed spell, then his fetters fall on the polished floor with a dry sound that betrays their actual weight; and he combs his smirk in a way that looks less derisive and more expectant. Running away? That can come later. He's always had a soft spot for diversion, and right now he is having so much fun. (and he knows what waits in the desert beyond that window- inside, he may still be surprised.)
For all her magic she cannot tell how he's come to stand inches away from her, how he's so much taller than he looked and much more… provocative. Like a glass of water under the scorching desert sun.
"You may not like who I am, however, dearIsis."
"You know my name." her response is electrical and automatic. Chuckling softly under his breath, he repeats something he has already said.
"I know you."
He mystifies her, and comes even closer to her to whisper in her ear that he's come from another timeline, and she believes him because it makes sense, how his clothes are strange and her chest constricts and how he is so familiar, and when he leans down to teasingly close the breach between them, kissing her on the lips like he has never kissed a woman before, she, she doesn't struggle. Whomever he was, she must have loved him.
"Precious thing," he says, thrilled to the core because he knows she thinks she's deciphered him, and her, and she got it all wrong, "It's a very dark night. I'll tell you in the morning."
.
"Free me," he says again, all velvet and sensual and persuasive, "And it'll be my pleasure to answer that one question of yours."
she wakes up in chains, and she is unsettled, because she is not entirely sure she would have wanted to know, if he had not left with the dawn, if he had stayed around to tell her.
A/N: This take at Priestess Isis x Yami Malik is the first I see around, so I'm going to baptize it and call it Sphinxshipping. Because it's about Egypt and enigmas, stoicism and mythology and sand, you know what feeling I'm talking about.
I hope this was not too obscure a fic. (he is banished by Yami Yugi to the Shadow Realm, but instead of going there, he ends up in Ancient Egypt)
Your reviews make my day:)