Disclaimer: Excruciatingly not mine

A/N: Request fic for Sam Cyber Cat, who asked for Isis Ishtar on her knees. Perhaps not quite what she was aiming for, but my kink skills are on the fritz, while my angst impulse is going at full throttle.

She Will Not Bend, Though She May Break

© Scribbler, September 2008.

Lovesick bitter and hardened heart,
Aching waiting for night waiting for life to start,
Meet me in the morning when you wake up –

Meet me in the morning then you'll wake up.

If only I don't bend and break,
I'll meet you on the other side;
I'll meet you in the light.
If only I don't suffocate,
I'll meet you in the morning when you wake.

-- From Bend and Break by Keane.

She would never bow to him.

It wasn't much of a rebellion, but it was all she had left. Her eyes were too full of despair to glare, her hands tied behind her back and her mind screaming with old wounds, reopened now, and a newer, brain-of-raw-meat hurt. She couldn't resist in many ways that meant anything – certainly nothing that could stop him now the Pharaoh was gone – but she could do this one small thing to help maintain her sanity.

She would not bow.

Of course, he noticed. It made him smile, though not any smile she recognised. The face that looked back at her was not that of someone she knew, just a rubber mask that had been held over a flame and then stretched out of all proportion as it was fitted back over its skull. His expression hung off his cheekbones, trying to inch up the bridge of his nose but unable to reach his eyes. Where hers brimmed with regret, his held only mild contempt and boredom, peppered with flecks of disappointment, as though the victory he'd worked towards for so long wasn't as sweet as he'd anticipated.

"You should thank me," he said in that hideous twisted voice. Had she ever heard that voice whisper to her to tell bedtime stories of the outside world? Had she really? "I've broken us free of our curse."

"It was no curse," she said wearily. She was tired of this fight. It seemed like she'd been fighting for years – decades. Or was it millennia? Half-lidded memories played around the fringes of her mind, but they were only phantoms now, as insubstantial as her dreams for the future when she first left Egypt on a useless chase for someone else's salvation. Her Necklace had told her this would happen, but somehow … after Seto Kaiba defied the power of destiny … she'd still hoped …

"You're right. It was a birthright," he sneered. "The right to serve another. The right to spend our childhood cooped up in an underground prison. The right to be ruled by a dead man." His sneer turned into a smirk. "A somewhat more accurate description of him now than before."

Isis said nothing.

He shook his head. "You possessed the Millennium Necklace, but you always were so short-sighted."

Still she said nothing.

His expression hardened – crystallised, really; his smile becoming frozen while emotions shifted behind his eyes. For a second he looked angry, and then he slid back into lazy indifference. He'd achieved his goals. He'd done what he set out to do. She knew as well as he did that there was nothing above an apex you'd been chasing since childhood. Nothing except anticlimax, anyway. It was the same when she'd snuck him up for that trip to surface, and he was entranced by the market, only to learn that people were people wherever you went – cruel, callous, and with an unparalleled ability to make you feel you were totally alone in a world full of them.

Isis had never felt more alone than at that moment, bodies of fallen allies branded onto the backs of her retinas. No time for them to become anything more than that, she told herself. Allies was a much more palatable word. 'Collaborators' was an even better one. Yes, they were simply collaborators in achieving a shared goal. She'd used them, in her own way – as bad as him in her own way as well, if not as open about it. Collaborators sounded better than tools, though. Pawns? No. still, such description made it all sound so clinical, like police officers only ever referring to the 'victim' to stop themselves crumbling under the weight of human evil.

But alone or not, she had one small piece of defiance left to her. Seto Kaiba taught he about defying fate before he fell, and if she wasn't strong enough to resist that much, she could still cling onto this miniscule resolve.

She refused to bow. She kept refusing. She didn't even have to say it; somehow he read in her eyes hat she would refuse just as she read in his that he expected it of her. He wanted deference, and after a while that was the only clear thing she could read in his eyes anymore. The rest was muddied by madness. Even when he tried to force the issue, had his mind-controlled minions – collaborators, not friends, not anything more than people she once counted on to save her baby brother … oh … - hoist her elbows up behind her, driving her to her knees to stop them dislocating her shoulders, she refused.

"You never showed me the respect I deserve." He crouched in front of her. "I was supposed to be the head of the family after Father was murdered, but you never took my vengeance seriously. You always treated me," he said in a low, accusing voice, "like a child."

Because he always would be, to her. He would never be this creature. This was a mockery, populated with only shadows and darkness that tried to burst his skin like badly sewed seams in a soft toy. To her, he would always be whole and unmarked, his back smooth and strong. In her heart he was always smiling and dreaming of the outside world with childish wonder. There, he looked at her with love, played around her ankles as she cooked, and plied both herself and Rishid with questions they would not, could not, should not answer for fear of their father's wrath.

This was not her brother anymore. She could not respect this creature who had taken him from her. She couldn't even use his name, because this was. Not. Him.

So she refused to bow.

Eventually her mutiny pierced even his armour. He was quick to temper, quicker to cool down, but always effervescing with the frustration of someone denied an ultimate victory that never actually existed. He raged at her, swinging the Millennium Rod around like a sceptre, or a choir master's baton – you will sing this note, at this moment, in this way, because that is what I want and I am the one in charge.

But Isis refused, even when he pressed his face into hers, snarling; even when he stood back, drew himself together and pretended he was as he used to be, gentle and kind and not yet tainted by fanaticism – their father's and his own.

"I will never bow to you," Isis said quietly, refusing to look at the blank faces of the Pharaoh's friends flanking her – because he did have friends, not just allies or collaborators. He'd had friends he was willing to die for, and who were willing to die for him.

Dangerous thoughts. Isis wanted to shut her eyes, but she couldn't look away from the tip of the Millennium Rod. Reflected in its curved gold surface she could see the tall boy falling, the blonde woman hanging as if crucified, the confused and horrified faces that now were blank behind her, as the Pharaoh did the impossible and lost his duel…

"I can make you bow to me. I can take away your choice."

Isis stared into his eyes and saw nothing there but a stranger. "You already have."

Fin.