Note: This was supposed to be a Christmas present for Sierra's Darkness. Now it is not. Because it is not Christmas. Not because it is not a present.
Chapter One: Hero
The man had never stopped grinning.
The guards had dragged him into the cell, body limp and bleeding from days of beatings and interrogations, but even between ragged breaths the man was grinning. They had thrown him into a sitting position against the wall and chained him there, arms held high and legs bound together. The grin was maddening, and, as Malik Ishtar watched between the bars of the cage, the guards spat on the prisoner's beaten form before tossing what had apparently once been his jacket at him. Now in filthy tatters, the red garment fell over the prisoner's near-naked form, the only source of warmth granted to him in the cold cell.
Malik was one of the newer guards, smaller than the rest and clearly less hard-hearted, which made him a prime target for the worst jobs. The older guards sneered as they pushed a basin of water and some cloth at him, ordering him to clean the grinning prisoner up for the Pharaoh's presence. Malik's stomach turned over – appearing before the Pharaoh meant the highest rank of punishment, reserved for those who committed mass murder, desecrated the holy shrines or attempted treason. They would be judged by the Sennen Items themselves, a horrifying process that was only whispered about and all conjecture, and it was widely accepted that those who were subjected to it were the very lowest of humanity. And now Malik would be alone with one such justly deserving prisoner, and he hardly expected any of his fellow guards to help him, if he needed helping. He swallowed.
Malik entered the cell cautiously, keys hooked tightly at his waist. The prisoner hadn't moved from the position he'd been set in, body draped against the wall and floor, head bowed and wild white locks covering his face. Thinking he might be asleep, Malik allowed a small breath of relief. He could just clean up the man's wounds and be done before he woke up. Malik kneeled beside him, setting his basin down and dipping a cloth into the cool water. He wrung it out again and began to scrub at the drying blood on the man's legs.
"Be more gentle. I don't need more scars just from being cleaned."
Malik jumped at the sudden, low voice, knocking into the basin and splashing water onto the stone floor. The supposedly sleeping man's shoulders were quivering a bit with laughter, and Malik caught a flash of white teeth, again that grin.
"You're clumsy for a guard," the prisoner said. Malik watched as the prisoner lifted his head. His eyes were blue – a startling shade in contrast to the rest of him, to this place, so bright they almost glowed. "What's your name?"
"Malik," he stammered after a too-long moment of silence, staring at those eyes. The back of his mind buzzed with the imaginary jeers of his fellows for showing weakness in front of a prisoner, and he quickly shook himself out of his stupor and moved back to the man's side, pulling the now half-empty basin along with him. "And I'm supposed to be cleaning you for the Pharaoh, so sit still."
The prisoner laughed loudly – so loudly that Malik instinctively flinched and glanced towards the door to see if anyone was watching. "You're shaking," said the prisoner. "I won't bite you, you know."
Malik looked at his hands before he could stop himself and scowled when he saw he was in fact trembling. The prisoner was already unraveling his nerves without doing a thing to him. "Shut up," he barked with as much force as he could, and he returned to scrubbing the man's skin, digging into an open wound slightly with the cloth just to feel better.
The man laughed again, and Malik could feel the grin burning through him, those eyes on him.
"Are you frightened because of the tombs I've raided, dragging the corpses of our kings through the mud to take their precious treasures? Or of the homes I've burned, killing the ones who got in my way? Or, perhaps," the prisoner's voice dropped to a confidential whisper, "because of the people I've murdered myself, breaking their arms and putting my knife into their eye sockets just to hear them scream before I cut out their throats?" His voice ended on an upward lilt, and Malik felt a shudder pass through him. He scrubbed harder, and the man laughed again.
"Don't talk like you know me," Malik snapped. "I'm not afraid of you. The Pharaoh easily overpowered and captured you, and now look at you."
The man sighed and said in a humored voice, "Rumour is I'm going to get to meet his Royal Highness soon enough. Shame I have to go escorted by those brawns-for-brains out there, rather than on horseback, meeting the Pharaoh head-on. Well," he paused to grin again, "Perhaps not head-on, seeing as how I'm a good three feet taller than he is."
Malik glowered; the man's self-amusement only annoyed him even more. He scrubbed the man's wounds until his tanned skin shone raw and red, biting back the few snide but rather lame remarks that sprung to mind—something about a height complex.
"Are you curious?" the man asked at length.
A moment's silence, then, "About what."
"How the grand King of Thieves got captured, of course."
Malik stopped scrubbing. His eyes turned to those stark blue ones fixated on him, and one eyebrow slowly went up. "The what?"
The man's grin could have split his face. And he began to talk.
He told Malik—in unnecessarily gruesome detail, Malik thought–-of how it had been a grand chase through the desert, with the Pharaoh's highest priests at his heels, and how he'd lasted two days running from them before hunger and a lack of sleep had started taking its toll on his ka, the beast of his soul, and he was overpowered. But not, of course, without putting up a great and long-winded fight. And, despite himself, Malik listened; his own life had always been rather ordinary, boring if safe, and the stories Bakura told sounded so far from Malik's reality, they might as well have been straight out of a novel. This naturally made him wonder if the thief was actually telling the truth.
As if to reinforce the doubt, the man finished his story with, "And now I'm here, waiting for my dashing hero to break me out."
Malik snorted and returned to cleaning a deep cut on the man's chest. He noticed, with a mix of annoyance and pride, that his hands were no longer trembling. "There are no heroes for the likes of you."
Time passed slowly in the days that followed, a waiting game for the Pharaoh's presence which, even for the "King of Thieves," was hard to come by. Every day, Malik was nominated to bring said King of Thieves his daily gruel and help him eat it, and every day, Malik was rewarded with some new story he never asked for. And, while he wouldn't admit it, Malik began to look forward to the company; it was conversation, at least, and on a less degrading level than that with his fellow guards.
The man told Malik about many of his greatest steals, the tombs he was most proud of; he told Malik of the rumours of corruption in the ruling classes; sometimes, he just talked about the best place for a decent beer, while intimating how much better the food was there, in some lower class bar, than in the Pharaoh's own dungeons. But Malik never learned anything more intimate than this – of who or what the thief was – and he never asked. He was just relieved that the prisoner never spoke of the stories he told Malik to any of the other guards.
The days blended together; a week passed, then two, and the date was set for the prisoner's appearance before the Pharaoh. Judgment day, as the thief so fondly called it, was coming for him and, though his lash wounds and other injuries were healing quickly, even Malik could tell that the thief wasn't strong enough to handle another tortuous interrogation or anything else the Pharaoh had planned. Malik wondered if the thief knew it too, for his grin seemed to waver a little each day.
The night before the appointment, as Malik brought in the thief's meal, he saw something he hadn't seen in the thief's face before—grim resignation, as if his hopes of escape had finally slipped from him. The thief quickly covered it as Malik clanged the door shut behind him; he smirked and shifted in his bonds, sitting up.
"Judgment day's almost here," he said, and Malik nodded as he kneeled beside him. Somehow, despite everything, Malik could not bring himself to be happy the thief was leaving. He couldn't explain the feeling, but there was some sense of injustice he couldn't shake, although if even half of the thief's boastful stories were true, he certainly deserved whatever he got.
He sat with the thief a little while after feeding him, although the thief had apparently run out of stories. Malik wasn't even sure why he bothered staying, except that, as the prisoner had amusedly pointed out to him a few days before, it was better to feel at least on somewhat equal terms with a prisoner than to return outside and become the dog of the other guards.
They sat in silence, until at last Malik couldn't take it anymore.
"Looks like your hero never came," he said with stiff humour in his voice. The thief was quiet a moment before his lips curled into a remnant of his old grin.
"No, he did. I just don't think he figured it out in time."
Malik blinked, mind quickly running through the past week or so. No one had visited the thief, and there were always guards posted outside his cell, except for when Malik was tending to him, so who…?
"We're two peas in a pod, Malik," the thief continued, closing his eyes, and Malik felt his heart thud painfully. This prisoner, this thief didn't really expect Malik to free him, did he? It was impossible! He could lose his job, his pride—
But, a softer voice inside him said, if he didn't do it, he could lose the closest thing he had to a friend.
Malik busied himself with setting aside the empty bowl and the spoon beside it. He then moved the spoon to the other side, thought better of it, and put it inside the empty bowl. A few moments later, the spoon was on the ground again.
Playing with the spoon gave him somewhere for his attention to be, but beside him, he could hear the thief breathing, even and steady, and he knew that those eyes were on him. There was no laughter in them this time.
Malik scowled and threw the spoon at the thief's head before grappling with his keys, clawing at the clasp with blunt fingernails until he got it undone. The thief was staring with a mix of surprise and amusement – he hadn't even flinched at the spoon. Quickly, thrill and fear coursing through him in turn, Malik flipped through the various keys as he got to his feet, shoving several of them against the keyhole in the manacles that held the thief's wrists aloft. He finally found the right one and the manacles popped open. The thief's hands fell to his lap and the now-useless metal clattered noisily against the stone wall.
Second thoughts caught up with Malik at this point. His hands were shaking, but he didn't notice until the keys began to jangle noisily. What was he doing? It wasn't just his job or his pride he was risking – he could get killed for this! It was treason, pure and simple. The thief was rubbing his numb arms, but, as if sensing the flurry of thoughts in Malik's mind (maybe he could get the manacles back on him before anyone noticed?), the thief looked up, eyes sharp and alive, and he reached up to snatch the keys from Malik's hands, which offered no resistance.
The thief plucked the correct key from the group easily – so easily, in fact, that Malik later suspected the thief had had his eye on it for a while now – and moved to unlock the cuffs about his ankles. His legs were free in moments, but even that was too long as Malik heard voices approached, complaining about the noise. Malik froze. He didn't have any will left; his stomach felt like a deflating balloon. He'd just freed a criminal. A convicted thief. A man headed for the Pharaoh's judgment. The King of Thieves. Him. Freed. Him. Already he could hear his sentence passed by the Pharaoh himself for such a sin. He could feel the burn of the whip, see the Sennen Items prepared to weigh his soul…
A sharp punch across the jaw snapped him back to reality, and his briefly fuzzy vision refocused on the man before him. Drawn to his full height and no longer limp in the guard's hold, Malik suddenly realized why he'd been afraid of the man at first. He was at least a good head taller than Malik, with muscles that were anything but hidden across his tanned body—they fairly rippled as the thief pulled his tattered jacket on. Malik stared blankly for a moment before he realized that his jaw was starting to ache, and a scowl overtook his awe.
"That hurt!" he protested in a sharp whisper.
"Stop panicking," the thief hissed as he circled around Malik towards the door. "Tell them you were undoing your belt to get the keys so you could leave when I knocked you out."
"What…?" Malik began, but a shock of pain suddenly overtook the end of his sentence, replaced all thoughts with cold, sharp pain. The thief had struck him in the back of the head, and the world went sideways as he felt his knees buckle. His last vision was of the man's bare feet moving swiftly towards the door, before that, too, spiraled into darkness, and his last lingering thought was that he had never even learned the man's name.