Dreams of Mortality
Bakura fled, glancing behind him at the soldiers chasing him. The sand was cold under his feet, and his chattering teeth sounded very loud in his ears, almost drowning out the screams of his family. He bit down on his lip to stop the noise, falling and scrambling up with the taste of blood in his mouth, coppery and sweet, the metallic scent making him shudder as he spat and kept running. The soldiers were getting closer.
He was staring behind him when a meaty hand grabbed his shoulder and he looked up in terror to find that he had run into another of the pharaoh's soldiers in his haste to escape those behind him. The man gave him a snaggle-toothed grin, and he writhed to escape, but too late. He felt the hot pain of a sword piercing his vitals, and blood bubbling up into his mouth, and – woke up.
He braced his arms against his knees and stared blindly ahead of him, trying to convince himself that he was still alive. But the pale hands clutching at his sheets so hard that they left marks on the palms were not the strong tanned appendages he was used to, the thin body he inhabited was not the sturdy one he had owned once, and the room was one that he would never have seen in his own lifetime.
It hadn't happened that way. He hadn't been killed then. It had been much later when he had died, and he had taken the Pharaoh with him, but the sensation of taking a spear through the stomach remained with him. He was dead, and even now, thousands of years later, he couldn't forget it.