Monster Reborn
Adopted Citronshipping post-series for the third round of the Yu-gi-oh! Fanfiction Contest Season 9 ¾.
Oh, the blood, sweat, and tears that were put into this fic. In the end, I think it was worth it.
Well, that certainly wasn't right.
Marik exhaled heavily through his nose as he stared down, observing the remainder of his most recent attempt at necromancy. Last time he checked, Bakura looked nothing like the large corpse that currently took up three-quarters of the already cramped floor.
"What am I doing wrong?" he muttered to himself, shuffling through the thick stack of papers next to where he sat.
Since the Egyptian culture was much more concerned with honoring and preserving the dead than bringing them back from the grave, Marik had been reduced to searching through other religious rituals to summon up a creature of flesh and blood, preferably with the former Spirit of the Ring's soul inside of it. He made sure to steer clear of the rituals that involved human or blood sacrifice, or in some cases both- but he was slowly growing desperate enough to consider the latter—even if the thought of taking a knife to himself made his mind cloud over with gloom.
There was already a plethora of gloom in the dark tomb he was situated in. His old home, of course. The return to the familiar chambers had brought back plenty of memories, but not all of them had been met with nostalgia.
Of course, according to his siblings, his return was of the 'utmost necessity'. His 'duty'. The tomb keepers' legacy had ended with the Pharaoh's death, as they all knew. But there were still the others who had lived in the tomb, uninformed—something that the trio had neglected to do after their immediate arrival in Egypt.
It was a wonder the gods hadn't blown out his brains for such an endeavor; at least, not yet. Perhaps they simply didn't bother because they knew he was destined for failure. All of his attempts thus far had ended with dismembered things which reminded him more of a distorted image taken from a Duel Monsters' card, and in a few cases grotesque human-like creatures hissing garbled Egyptian before deteriorating to dust in a matter of seconds. They had left Marik pressed up against the wall, an ornate knife clutched between his fingers so he could fight the monstrosities off should the need arise.
Taking that same knife, he reluctantly tugged the blade across the palm of his hand—his desperate last resort—shivering at the unpleasant feeling of metal against his skin. Letting the blood ooze into the circle he'd drawn for the ritual, Marik watched as a creature started to form.
Initially, the creation resembled an undernourished person, an encouraging sign. All too quickly, however, its lower half shifted into something decidedly inhuman. Marik watched with wide eyes as, in place of legs, an enormous tail took their place. At an unnatural rate, giving the impression of a sped-up recording, the beast grew and grew… and grew…the girth swelling until eventually filling the majority of the room, even partially coiled. Gray scales coated the serpentine part of the creature's body, and they gleamed white in the dim glow produced by candles which were little more than piles of wax.
The upper half—the human half—actually seemed more or less handsome, in a rugged, brutish sort of way. Features that weren't completely bathed in shadow revealed a dark skinned man with thick, shaggy hair and a prominent scar running like a pale stitch down the left side of his face. Broad, strong shoulders, a deep chest. He was attractive—the non-snake part of him, anyway—but he could never hope to compete with, say, Bakura.
Marik shook off such thoughts. His internal rambling was pointless, partially because the object of his momentary focus was clearly dead—though Bakura was, too—but mostly because of the fact that this thing was a monster.
Then again, one could argue that the Spirit of the Ring was a monster for what he had done...
"Gah, I'm just arguing with myself," Marik said with a snort. He shifted his gaze to stare at the flickering candles, if only to avert his gaze from the abnormal body.
He credited his more or less hundredth failure to his unfamiliarity with the Shadows and his mind unintentionally wandering while he performed the latest ritual. His banished, psychotic personality had always been the one with the knack for manipulating the darkness. And he lacked the focus necessary for such a complex ritual.
The picture that Bakura painted was difficult for Marik to imagine. Skin two shades off of amber, a loud, red coat. Marik almost laughed when he described having a much more muscular frame, unable to picture Bakura with a body other than that of his frail, willowy host.
Evidently Bakura detected his mirth, anyway, and he directed a withering glare in Marik's direction.
Marik grinned at him. "You sound like you were quite the exotic creature in your time, old man."
Bakura scoffed, turning up his nose. "Indeed I was, Ishtar, and don't you forget it. Not only that, but I was a skillful thief—"
"A tomb robber, if I remember correctly. You must be so proud." Marik felt a touch of cruel delight at the time imagining the Pharaohs' desecrated tombs.
Bakura still looked irritated at the interruption, but a smile curled his thin lips at the mention of his former 'profession'. "Not only that, but I had a glorious god-monster for a ka."
"You?" Marik lifted a skeptical eyebrow. "A god?"
At the disbelieving look he gave, Bakura reached into his pocket and pulled out his deck. He began leafing through it with the practiced agility of one who had repeated the action countless times before. Peering over his shoulder Marik made out a few of the grotesque designs, though he didn't recognize any of them.
"I'm not using this deck for Yugi," Bakura informed him without looking up. "My host's occult cards will more than do the trick."
Marik squinted as Bakura's near-frantic movements came to an abrupt stop.
"Ah, here we are." Almost reverently Bakura held up the card he had been looking for.
"That's not all that impressive," Marik commented with a frown, earning himself a painful smack on the head with the flat of Bakura's hand.
"This isn't the most powerful it can be, you twit. Believe me when I say Diabound was more than impressive in his final form."
Unable to dredge up the exact memory of what the card looked like, during the ritual Marik had unthinkingly latched onto the idea that it was a serpentine creature.
Snake, snake... it looked something like a snake...
By then he had subconsciously come close to finishing the ritual, and before realizing his mistake, he had summoned the... whatever-it-was.
Marik looked back at the beast with distaste before giving the snakelike lower body a nudge with his bare foot, though he felt more like kicking it.
His lips thinned when the body twitched. Marik nudged it again, this time with just one tentative toe, and came to an unfortunate realization that the fiend was indeed moving, the scales that he had touched rippling like water.
And then the monstrous corpse... sighed.
Which meant it was breathing.
And if it was breathing, Marik concluded with a combination of horror and excitement, it was alive. And if it was alive, then it wasn't technically a corpse, now, was it?
The veracity of the situation gradually sank in as Marik stared down at the awakening creature, his mouth growing as dry as the sand beneath him.
"Oh, shit," he whispered and scrambled blindly beside him for the knife.
Marik finally got a hold of the blade, but even as he did the weapon somehow felt wrong in his hand (maybe because it wasn't the Millennium Rod… although he desperately hoped that it was because he was holding a weapon at all) and rose to his feet.
He—the creature was most definitely a male, if the corded muscles beneath his chest were anything to judge by—was like a puppet with a novice master. His limbs moved, but not in accordance with each other, so he appeared to be nothing more than a twitching mass on the floor, much like the less impressive creatures that Marik had summoned before.
Gradually Marik's own muscles unknotted and he relaxed, though the knife was still clenched in his hand, so tightly the sensation hurt. He figured that the monster would disintegrate into sand, just as the others had. What he didn't count on was that the twitches would escalate to full-out thrashing and that the gargantuan tail would be wracked with spasms as well.
In an instant it slammed against Marik's ankles and caused him to teeter on his feet, arms waving almost comically.
A flood of curses entered Marik's mind right before he fell over right on top of the freakish lower body. The scales were surprisingly smooth and soft, the underbelly borderline squishy, but the stone-hard muscles beneath them knocked the wind out of him anyway.
The knife fell with him and pierced the scaly flesh with a wet, abhorrent sound as it sank through, nearly to the hilt. The noise was quickly followed by another, this one a guttural roar.
Marik left the knife where it was, too shocked to consider removing the guilty blade, and glanced over at the creature's human half. The beast was completely awake and breathing heavily, presumably to make up for the energy he had wasted thrashing around.
And he was staring right at Marik.
Glaring, actually, would probably have been a better word of choice. He glared with eyes that were the same shape as Bakura's, and a face crumpled into a scowl that was frighteningly similar as well—but still all kinds of wrong. And that was discounting the giant serpent tail.
"What have you done to me?" the thing snarled, lips peeling back to reveal bare teeth that gleamed in the sputtering candlelight.
Actually, he'd have to discount the giant serpent tail and the teeth that looked better suited to a vampire (or a cobra). Bakura might have had the sharper than normal canines that occasionally caught on Marik's lips, but they had nothing on these.
For a long moment Marik simply stared back in shock.
Meanwhile, the creature was positively seething in the silence, a prominent vein standing out in his neck. He broke the tense quiet with a hiss, the sound reverberating off the walls of the confined space. "Answer me before I gouge out your eyes!"
"Before you flail around like a dying fish some more, you mean." The words tumbled out of Marik's mouth almost instinctively, reminiscent of his time in Battle City. They gained an arrogant, mocking edge he'd forced himself to erase after he'd relinquished his evil ways, but the tone came back with disturbing ease. Back then his voice had been nothing more than a tool, an act used to give the illusion of self-confidence. The same could be said in this instance, really... except for the fact that he had lapsed into his childhood tongue.
"You can't even move correctly," Marik drawled with a smirk, the dead language slipping off his tongue in fluent Egyptian. "Much less try to dole out threats you can't follow through on."
As he spoke, he gradually attempted to stand up and extract himself from the large tail, head held high and movements relatively casual given the situation. On the inside, of course, Marik was having a miniature heart attack at the sight of a gargantuan, freakish, and, most importantly, angry thing that was speaking with a warped version of a voice he knew far too well.
He glared venomously at Marik, and as if in an attempt to disprove his jab about being unable to move correctly, he wriggled his lower half with a grunt. He failed reach his wanted destination, however, if his frustrated expression was anything to judge by. Unfortunately, he did manage to trip Marik yet again.
Once more the Egyptian fell in a flailing mess, all sense of the composure he had been attempting to maintain shattered. Marik spat out the sand in his mouth as he scrambled to escape the freakish lower body. But it moved again, and this time with significantly more control than before. A small struggle with the tail later, Marik found his torso crushed under the girth of the scaly appendage. He struggled, shoved, and even tried to bite (much to his regret), but all to no avail.
"Get off of me, you—you—" Marik paused as he attempted to come up with an appropriate word. "What are you supposed to be, anyway?"
The scarred face of the man-beast suddenly loomed over him. Marik stared back defiantly back, even as he internally cringed at the sight of curved fangs and a tongue flicking almost absently between them.
He reached down towards Marik. The latter froze as slender, worn fingers came closer and closer to his face, and the former tombkeeper wondered if he really was going to gouge out his eyes. It had been an oddly specific threat.
And then... the fingers went nowhere near his face but instead grasped a hold of the hilt of the knife. Marik blinked. With a noise not nearly as dramatic as when the knife had entered his scales, the blade was ripped out of the pale, white tail. A sigh hissed between the monster's teeth even as blood began to pool around the torn scales in a thick, oozing puddle.
Marik stared mutely as the knife was licked clean in a near casual manner. Pale blue eyes stared shiftily around the room, looking... unimpressed?
"This is not at all—" lick "—how I pictured the afterlife."
Marik blanched. "The what?"
"Unless my death was part of some sick dream." The creature redirected its gaze back to him. "But that would mean I've died, and turned into a..." he let the sentence trail off, then added as if there hadn't been a lapse at all, "Then got stabbed all in the same dream."
Understandably Marik wasn't sure how to respond, so he remained silent. He still half-hoped that any moment now, the nightmarish thing would just disappear, that he was the one having a bad dream. Marik found himself jolted out of his thoughts by a harsh, painfully familiar laugh.
"I've had worse dreams, of course," his sharp teeth were twisted into a near-grin with the tip of the knife resting against his lower lip. Abruptly the smile transformed into the snarl his lips had been twisted into for the majority of the time when his gaze slid back to Marik. "Is there any particular reason you stabbed me? I can hardly say it was pleasant."
"It was an accident, okay?" Marik sputtered. "You tripped me!"
The beast snorted and tapped the knife against his teeth with audible clicks. "That doesn't change the fact that I'm the one bleeding."
"Well... no, but..."
Marik mentally clawed for an argument even as he literally began to scratch his nails down the sides of the tail in another attempt to free himself. A heartbeat pulsated beneath the scales, throbbing warmth that pushed against both his midsection and hands. It served as an unnerving reminder that, yes, this thing was alive and it was really interrogating him about whether or not he had intentionally injured it.
A chuckle reverberated from deep in the monster's chest at Marik's struggles, though it came to a stop when another sound penetrated the near-darkness.
"Marik? Brother, I told you not to wander off on your own!"
Both of the occupants of the room turned their heads to the doorway. While the creature restraining him grew stiffer at the sound of a stranger's voice, Marik felt like his insides melting in relief as he recognized the officious tone of his sister.
"I'm sure he's fine," a considerably deeper voice assured her.
No, he was most certainly not fine, but Marik assured himself that he would be when his siblings arrived.
"Ishizu! Odion!" he shouted the best he could while his diaphragm was being crushed. "Help—"
Apparently the man-beast decided that Marik didn't have his best interests at heart, as he clamped a hand over the latter's jaw to prevent him from crying out again. He was directed a glare that clearly read, "Shut the hell up"—one that Bakura had used often, a small part of his brain reminded him—and the knife was placed across the bare skin of his throat.
Marik's eyes dilated at the feeling of cold metal on his exposed skin. It wasn't nearly as bad as that of the just-sterilized, still white-hot one that his father had used, but it served as a more than good enough reminder.
A blood-curdling shriek echoed through the room, but it wasn't produced by Marik; rather the beast restraining him. Marik had bitten down on the roughened palm over his mouth, hard, and his teeth tore through the skin with much more effectiveness than when he had attempted to sink his teeth into the foul-tasting scales.
While their younger brother hadn't been the one to call out that time, it succeeded in attracting the siblings' attention. Suddenly Odion emerged from the darkness of the hall in a full-out sprint. The monster didn't have any time to react as his torso was tackled with all of the man's weight behind it.
Quite a few things happened in a matter of seconds:
Firstly, Ishizu and a number of the former residents of the tomb arrived right behind her adopted brother in time to get an eyeful of the massive creature currently holding down Marik.
Secondly, Odion succeeded in bowling over his target, but unintentionally triggered the third event.
That being that the knife snagged on Marik's neck as his captor was knocked to one side.
Red spurted in a small arc, splattering onto both the white scales and the sand. The wound didn't cut deeply enough to kill—not instantly, anyway. Marik let out a choked gasp as blood began to dribble down the inside of his throat through a hole that the blade had still managed to rend.
He barely registered the weight of the serpentine tail being removed from on top of him, or the many sets of hands that grabbed a hold of his arms and dragged him to the safety of the doorway.
The sounds of the short but violent brawl with the creature resounded throughout the confined space in a series of beastly snarls and the sound of flesh being rent open over and over by Odion's own knife. Marik stared through half-lidded eyes as the tail flailed just as it had when the thing he had summoned first awakened. Slowly but surely the flailing descended into more of a squirming motion, then twitching, then going still.
Odion stood, clothing spattered with blood and knife near dripping with it. There was a large tear in one of his sleeves where the creature managed to bite him, giant tears of blood sliding down in rivulets. But Odion could only concern himself with Marik. "Is he all right?"
Ishizu pressed a bit of cloth against Marik's throat, evidently not realizing that he had a hole in his windpipe. She seemed aware of it after the pained wheeze he let out and relieved the pressure. "He needs to go to a hospital."
Marik would have nodded in agreement had it not caused him to tear the wound open farther. As it was he kept still while the former tomb keepers began to pick him up again, this time in less of a frenzy.
Marik almost let himself his eyes drift completely closed when he heard a strangled shout of, "It's still breathing!"
At that they snapped back open in time to see that the monster was indeed still alive, but just barely. He had coiled himself up in the corner, one hand pressed to a particularly nasty laceration on his chest and another where his tail had been stabbed into again. Each breath came out in a wheezing gasp, just as Marik's did, evidence that Odion had pierced one of his lungs. The pale blue eyes looked dull, and the fangs didn't seem nearly as threatening when his mouth hung open so that he could gasp for air.
The man turned and walked stoically back over to it, knife raised, obviously intending to finish the job.
At that the monster's eyes grew large and a look crossed his face.
Marik felt a twinge of... something.
That face. He had seen that face before, just as the flames that his darker side had cast with Ra engulfed both himself and Bakura on the roof of the blimp.
Genuine, unadulterated fear.
"Wait!" Marik cried out, then let out a pained grunt as both the action of speaking and the way he had unintentionally jolted when he caught sight of the wounded creature's expression caused the rift at his neck to rip open far and wide.
Instead of a small spurt there was a distinct gush of blood that poured both into the outside world and back into his throat. Marik's eyes rolled back in their sockets and a grotesque gurgling noise erupted from his mouth when he choked. Within moments he was losing his grip on reality, whether from blood loss or from the fact that he was literally drowning in the fluid unclear to him.
Marik didn't get to see whether or not Odion had listened to him as the smothering grip of unconsciousness enveloped him in blackness and he went completely limp in the arms of the former tomb keepers. He thought he heard his sister yelling, but that too faded after a time. Before long he was completely and utterly numb. Panic didn't set in as he expected it to. The concern for his own welfare was all but gone.
The last thought to cross his mind was whether or not he would be able to see Bakura again in the afterlife.