Disclaimer: Yu-Gi-Oh! belongs to Kazuki Takahashi.
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"You still want to create the world before which you can kneel: that is your ultimate hope and intoxication."
-- Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Fredrich Nietzsche
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He hated this place.
Bakura had exhausted himself again, working on the TRPG until he'd reminded him that it was one o'clock and the teenager had yet to eat the dinner he'd packed. His landlord could easily lose track of everything when he was building those games he loved. It was yet another example of the ability that Bakura kept dormant within himself, the ability to be something better than what he was. It irritated him that the teenager steadfastly refused to build on that potential. It might have angered him, if he cared more. But Bakura's usefulness to him was rapidly drawing to a close, and he found himself less and less giving a damn of what his host had the promise to be...or anything else about the teen, for that matter.
Still, if he'd left him to stumble back to the apartment, weary and hungry, Bakura probably would have wound up sleeping in an alley halfway there or stepping off into traffic. So he took over. He wasn't interested in dying, not when he was so close to his goal.
And to die here, of all places.... He would not hear concerning it. Some things were too ignominious to be thought.
He hated this place.
This city, concrete and asphalt and steel and broken glass and cigarette butts and people living on top of each other, literally....It was fascinating. Even this late at night, cars rolled by and shined their too-bright lights on his path, making him instinctively tense with the urge to slide into the shadows and pass unseen. But there were so few shadows here--the night glowed orange and green and red and neon from streetlamps and stoplights and store signs. It was a bright place, this city. There was not enough darkness let in for him.
That was not why he hated Domino.
The city was home to hundreds of cutthroats, thousands, though their weapons ranged from butterfly knifes to briefcases. It was a rookery of the old sort, den of thieves and murderers and whores of all kinds. On good days, it reminded him of Kuru Eruna.
On better days, as he walked through the streets he was sure he could hear the hoofbeats of the King's army just behind the corner.
On the best days, he could already see the city emptied, blood on the sidewalks and blacktop and splattered across storefronts, and the stench of melted-down flesh thick on the smoky air. Sunlight glinted off the tinted glass of the downtown buildings, making them polluted gold rising above the stained ground.
That was why he hated Domino.
It was not yet destroyed.
He knew first-hand--there was a beauty in a city without people, dark and pure as nothing else he'd seen in his life. And if Kuru Eruna village had been beautiful once emptied, Domino City was sure to be exquisite. With its strange contraptions, twists and structures of metal scattered all throughout the boundaries...its newness would surely make it better. Once the people were got rid of, there would be nothing to interfere with the neon and the sidewalks and the sunlight glinting off the buildings and the broken bottle shards.
And then, with time....
With time, it would begin to break apart. Bricks would crumble, metal would rust, glass would crack and shatter, the lights would burn out and slowly, slowly, the darkness would creep back in and reclaim the city. The darkness would take the offering he made of the city and absorb it.
When that happened, he would climb to the top of the tallest building he could find, and sit, and admire.
For it would be even more beautiful, once the darkness polluted it. The smog and smoke that the people poured out were a thin substitution. There would be, there had to be, the true version. Soon. Very soon....
The lights of the cars and the late-night stores began to fade away as he entered the more residential area that contained Bakura's apartment, though the streetlamps' glow still pooled obscenely in the night.
Once the apartment building came into sight his mind seemed to grow sluggish, as if it had decided that now that the goal was reached, it could finally shut off; and only then did he begin to feel just how much the teenager had been exhausting himself in the past week.
If he'd cared, he could have given Bakura a day of rest. Enough of the village was created already, and it was not as though little Yuugi Mutou and the dead king's soul he harbored were going to skip town any time soon.
But he didn't care. So instead he climbed the stairs slowly and reached into his pocket for the key, fingers fumbling slightly in the effort to hold it. Once the door was opened, amid a bout of half-hearted cursing, he put the key back, kicked off his shoes, and dropped Bakura abruptly into control.
The teenager--with nothing to focus upon wholly as he had earlier, building the TRPG--couldn't manage to do more than stumble across the room and fall on the couch. He pulled his feet up, curled around one of the cushions, and fell back asleep.
The teenager dreamed of freedom. The thief dreamed of darkness.
