A Yu-Gi-Oh! Fanfiction Contest Entry
Season 8.5, Tier 3 – Casteshipping (Pharaoh Atem x Thief King Bakura)
Summary: They are thieves and stealers of ka, but Atem likes to think that they only take what is theirs by right.
WARNINGS: Character deaths, blatant AU, 10K word count.
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Sublimation and Redirection
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The first thing he saw was the expression on the boy's face as he wrapped his hands around the child's throat and choked him.
The second was the smirk on the mouth of the white-haired man who stood on the other side of the alley and watched, dirt-streaked clothes only slightly lighter than the tan of his skin.
And after that, the first thing he remembered was his name.
"Atem," he gasped, falling to the cobbled ground and feeling the stone dig into the thin fabric that covered his knees. It was cold in the alley, so very cold, even though the sun gleamed brightly on the walls of the houses surrounding it, and he shivered and clutched his arms, staring with wide eyes at the body prone on the road before him. The two-syllable word danced at the forefront of his mind, accompanied by an irrational sense of elation, and he struggled to push that aside and concentrate on the problem at hand.
The dead boy was very pale, he noted—near-translucent skin, light-colored hair, lips blue-white and bloodless. At first he assumed that it was because he'd been choked, but that didn't seem right when he realized the boy was literally fading away as he watched, the cobbles becoming visible behind his arm and the ends of his legs nearly gone.
"So that's what you're called, then?" The white-haired man spoke up, now much closer; he glanced at the body with clinical detachment, even going as far as to nudge the boy's head with his foot. Atem observed dazedly that his toes passed cleanly through the child's ear.
"Atem," he repeated, mouthing the name in silence even as his fingers fumbled at the boy's shoulder and were met with nothing but air. It was an anchor, a source of certainty for him to cling to, though he could not remember where he was or how he had gotten there or why he had ended up killing an innocent bystander in the middle of the street.
"Do you know his name?" the man said, one finger descending into Atem's line of sight and pointing at the sort-of corpse.
Atem shook his head.
"Huh." The man reached down and grabbed hold of Atem's arm, hauling him up and away from the body—which by now was nothing but a sad clump of white smoke, sifting forlornly around Atem's ankles. "Guess you're new to the business, then. Well"—they began walking into another alley, more cramped than the last, with abandoned carts and twisted iron bits littering its floor—"it's my inherited duty to show you around. Pleased to meet you... Atem, I suppose I'll call you for now."
Atem only just managed to tear his gaze away from the space where the boy's body had been in favor of glaring at his captor. "You don't sound very convinced."
"Sorry," the man said, unapologetic, and proceeded to drag him up a creaking flight of stairs. "I'm not all that pleased, then."
Atem managed to wrench his arm out of the man's grasp through a spectacularly complex few seconds of twisting and stood a few steps lower than him for a moment, rubbing at his shoulder. "Where are you taking me?"
"To find a mirror," the man said as if that was the most obvious thing in the world, gesturing impatiently at the railing of the balcony above them. "Now, come with me, or do you want to be killed?"
"You," Atem ground out, "are not being enlightening. I'm not going with you until you tell me exactly what's going on."
"Then I won't have it on my conscience when you die here," the man said, raising his eyebrows in challenge as he disappeared around the corner of the balcony. Scowling, Atem ran after him.
They ended up in a darkened room with its two lone windows made of cracked, broken glass—some of which lay forgotten in faintly gleaming shards on the floor as he man shoved the door open and turned his head away from the flurry of dust that descended upon his head, brushing his hair soft gray.
Atem bent down, carefully picking up one of the larger shards between his fingers. He held it up between himself and his companion, watching the man's pale eyes across from it, splayed across a warped reflection of the sunlight outside. "Is this the mirror you were talking about?"
The man snorted and shook his head; Atem watched with mild interest as sheets of dust fell from his head in rings around his body. "You can barely see anything in that. I have a better one—"
His hand angled upwards, suddenly much closer to Atem than before and knocking the glass out of Atem's grasp in one smooth movement. There was a sharp shattering sound that seemed to drill straight into Atem's ears, and as he winced and automatically brought up his arms to cover his head, he caught a glimpse of something on the man's knuckles and froze.
"Your—"
"Oh," the man said with some smugness, and waved the backs of his fingers in Atem's face as if flaunting them. "This."
Something wet landed on his cheek, and Atem absently raised a hand to brush it off before realizing that it had come away looking the same as the man's.
"This," the man repeated, and Atem would have been annoyed by his patronizing tone if it weren't for the fact that he was offering an explanation, "is the color red."
"Ah." Understanding flooded his mind, bolstering the two syllables of his name that already floated there. Atem didn't remember anything before his, but he wondered if he had ever learned as much in one day as he had in this one. "I don't recall seeing it before."
The man's mouth widened in a smirk, and he met Atem's eyes for one moment before walking further into the room, the folding of his shirt highlighted by the yellow-gold of the sun. "I can assure you that you have."
They entered a cramped hallway with wooden frames—empty, Atem saw, which he thought strange; he had a feeling that there should have been things inside them—and the man stopped at its very end, prying something off the wall and reaching for the other side of it with his free hand.
Light flooded his line of sight, and he had to blink furiously to become accustomed to the brightness before he realized that a mirror had been shoved in front of his face and that he was staring at himself.
His eyes—
His eyes were the red of the man's blood, startling spots of color in the center of his face. They shifted from side to side as he took in the rest of the details—the sharp lines of his hair with more of that blood-color lingering at their edges, the angles of eyebrows and lashes and jaw, the tan of his skin and the set of his mouth.
"I take it"—and the mirror was pushed toward him another few inches, nearly smashing into his forehead—"you don't remember this either?" There was a low whistle, then another laugh. "You're much more hopeless than I was."
Atem placed his hands on top of the frame and forced the mirror to thud against the wood of the floor so that he was only a few feet away from the man. "We're safe here, aren't we." He didn't bother phrasing it as a question. "Now tell me what's going on."
The man rolled his eyes. "Sometimes I wonder about the extent of what you've done to make you forget even more than I did in the beginning. I haven't heard of any full-village massacres in this area lately..."
"Explain."
"I'm getting there," the man said with a long-suffering sigh.
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By the end of the conversation, Atem had learned these things:
First, that the man's name was Bakura.
Second, that Bakura was—in his own words—a sort-of criminal and a thief of ka, or souls.
Third, that Atem was now also a sort-of criminal and a thief of ka.
"Well, maybe not the 'criminal' part," Bakura admitted, lounging on the moth-eaten couch without a second thought to the gray imprints of dust it left on the back of his shirt. "But as for stealing the missing portions of your ka to complete your own, yes."
"Tell me again," Atem said, frowning absently as he organized the influx of information in his mind. "Why do I need to do that?"
"You don't need to," Bakura said, "but I imagine that you'd want to. Once you get more ka, you'll become stronger. You'll remember more. You'll see more colors."
"Colors?" Atem said sharply, eyes jumping to the shattered glass of the windows, where he could see the warping of his own reflection and maybe, if he was lucky, catch a glimpse of dark red. "Like what?"
"Like... blue," Bakura drawled, lips curving upward into a half-smirk again. "Purple. Magenta. Lavender."
"So for you to see all of them, then you must have all of the portions of your ka," Atem said.
"Not quite," Bakura said. "One more to go."
"And how do I find them?" Atem said, glancing outward and toward the pale gold of the sunlight that shattered over the glass shards spread upon the floor. The floorboards creaked as he shifted his weight to his left leg.
Bakura shrugged. "I haven't devised a precise system for it yet. Mostly, I wander the cities and look. Oh, don't worry"—his gaze caught the thoughtful frown of Atem's mouth almost as soon as it appeared—"you'll know when it happens. Now, do you have any more questions, or can we get going?"
"One more," Atem said, and attempted to ignore his companion's dismissive tone. "How do you know all this?"
"Some I learned by myself," Bakura said easily enough. "But I had a teacher too, back when I didn't remember much of my own past either."
"What happened to him?"
Bakura pushed himself off the couch in one fluid motion, his shoe crunching remorselessly on the glass-wood ground. "Maybe I'll tell you later," he said, and Atem didn't bother to pry.
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Atem was lucky, or so Bakura told him as he fought not to collapse against a conveniently placed wall by his back and the other man watched in amusement.
"Even I never found any other fragments until months after I woke up, and my mentor was a good one," he half-grumbled, prodding at the disappearing remnants of the teenage boy's body as Atem's grasping fingers fell to his side.
"I've always had good luck," Atem said without thinking, and didn't miss the way Bakura's eyes zeroed in on his face he second the sentence left his lips. They were unnaturally pale; he'd noticed that before, of course, but this time he thought he could see some sort of light color in them, one that he had no name for. Maybe it was the purple that Bakura had said would come next.
"Hmm," Bakura said, not breaking the connection between them. "Are you remembering more, then?"
Atem shook his head, as much to deny his companion's statement as to brush away the lingering bits of pale mist that were all that remained of the boy who was now integrated into his ka. He waved a hand at them absently, attempting to clear his vision. "Bits and pieces that don't make much sense now. Except... something about a golden pyramid..."
Bakura snorted. "Maybe you had an obsession with mathematics as a child."
"Not like that," Atem said, irritated, looking down the side of the street they stood in to make sure that they were still alone. "A puzzle pyramid, made of individual pieces."
"I don't quite see the contradiction." Bakura's teeth gleamed as he grinned, white like the sunshine on the top of his head.
"My point is," Atem said, "that this pyramid-puzzle is a part of my ka."
"Huh," Bakura said, and Atem knew with a resigned sort of humor the remark that was coming even before he spoke it. "I always knew you were too uptight to be completely human. It makes sense that you have a pointy triangular hole in the middle of your soul. But," he continued, louder than before to override whatever retorts Atem would come up with, "that works, because I've always wanted to visit the place that might have your pyramid-ka."
"Have you seen it before?" Atem said warily.
"No, but the man I'm interested likes to collect random artifacts, and the last I heard, golden jigsaw puzzles seemed pretty likely to be there too."
"You know him?"
"Know of him," Bakura corrected. "He's somewhat infamous in the region, I should warn you, and a bit unhinged. Talking to people who aren't there, strange habits and stranger style of dress, likes to call himself by a mythological name... I'm sure you can guess at the rest."
Atem nodded, giving Bakura a look that stated clearly he was unconvinced. "And I assume that the fact that you've left out exactly why you're interested in him is a coincidence."
"I apologize for my lie by omission," Bakura mocked, one hand reaching upward to clasp his chest in falsified hurt. "Spare me your wrath, O man of the incomplete ka."
"I'm waiting," Atem said, frowning at him. He kicked at bits of gravel with his feet, testing the holes he was pretty sure he'd been wearing into the toes of his shoes.
"He's only so crazy because he's another one like us," Bakura said almost casually, pushing off the wall he had been leaning on.
"Really." Atem stood with him, following as they began to walk away from the—now immaculate, since the boy he'd absorbed had faded to nothing—scene of the crime. "I thought we were rare."
"And maybe you haven't given a thought to the fact that the rareness is why it's so important that I see him."
"I didn't need to," Atem said shortly, turning into a side road lined with abandoned houses and broken wooden chairs in a pile by one door. "You, doing things for research purposes alone? I haven't known you for very long, but you can't fool me that easily."
"Fine then," Bakura said, somewhat irritably, and Atem hid a smile as they passed by a busier street with a few lone merchants chatting a dozen feet down it; Bakura annoyed him easily, but it was difficult for Atem to do the same to him. "I'll say it. His mentor was the first of us. He learned from the best."
They continued in silence for a few moments, both because they were walking through more crowded areas and because Atem was thinking Bakura's admission over. It wasn't until they had exited the village's gate and had entered the road that led further into the country that he spoke. "Information gathering again? Not likely."
"Assessing a threat, more likely," Bakura offered. Atem thought he could see a flash of color in his eyes before they faded into the hues of gray that the world had been before he'd begun absorbing other parts of his ka. "We're not all that fond of each other, you know. You'd think there'd be some bonding, but except between mentor and pupil... nothing."
Atem thought on that for a moment before giving a grudging nod. "I'll take that. How far away is this insane man's town?"
"Glad you asked," Bakura said, satisfied. Leaves crunched beneath his feet as they veered into a path that led through the forest. "A few days' journey, at most."
"Last question before we go, then," Atem said—though they would have plenty of time to talk while they traveled, it was an unspoken agreement that they remained silent instead. "If you found me and now you're teaching me, would you be my mentor?"
Bakura tilted his head thoughtfully, white hair falling into his eyes. "I suppose I would."
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Domino of the playing-tiles name was a larger town than Atem was used to; he and Bakura usually remained in small, isolated ones, due to the fact that—as Bakura had explained—the common people did not take to their kind well. Atem wondered if they knew what Pegasus—the name of the man whom Bakura had spoken of—was, or if Pegasus had managed to overcome that problem somehow.
Atem shoved Bakura off the road as the white-haired man was about to be run over by a passing rider on a tall black horse, frowning at his companion's lack of attentiveness. "That's the fifth time today. Look at what's going on around you," Atem said. "I thought you were supposed to be the one telling this to me. I haven't come all this way for you to die of such a trivial cause as this."
"Yes, thank you for saving me from my impending death," Bakura snapped back, tone making it clear that the reprimand hadn't been taken kindly. "Pegasus's home is there."
"The northern wall?" Atem said, squinting in the direction of Bakura's pointing finger.
"Not much of a wall anymore," Bakura said with a hint of humor. "More like an artistically arranged pile of rocks than anything else."
"How do you know anyway?"
"I've been here before," Bakura said, turning on his heel to avoid a group of yelling children and beginning to walk in the general direction of the somewhat-imposing stone tower that rose in the northern horizon. The heat of midday burned down Atem's back as he followed, causing sweat to bead on his neck. "I was just getting my bearings."
"Of course you were," Atem said doubtfully, ducking under a basket balanced on the head of a passing mother.
They passed houses in quick succession and absorbed silence after that, throngs of red-faced merchants and crafty-eyed swindlers blurring before Atem's eyes. He caught snatches of the color of Bakura's eyes in corners of fluttering cloth and shadows spilling onto the pale-stoned floors of the fancier shops, and once he thought he saw something darker flashing across the pane of a window until that too passed them by.
Atem dismissed it as a figment of his imagination until Bakura took the long way around Domino's town square and they came face-to-face with a boy who—and Atem knew now, having seen his own face barely more than a week ago—looked almost exactly like Atem did, except with eyes of that strange dark shade.
Bakura glanced back at Atem's sudden stop and then raised his eyebrows when he saw the reason for it. "You're much too lucky, you know that?"
"You've told me," Atem said. "I'll catch up with you, then, since you seem so eager to leave."
"I commend your powers of observation," Bakura said. "If you're not there in an hour, I'll assume you're dead and leave without you."
"Your concern is touching," Atem muttered back, listening for the swish of clothing that meant Bakura had departed.
The boy with the dark eyes—Atem thought they might be purple but wasn't sure about it—was staring at him with a mix of fear and confusion, frozen where he stood in the center of the street. "Who are you?" he managed to stammer out.
Atem blinked; he didn't remember the previous two being so talkative. What with Bakura's dehumanizing description of them, he'd almost thought that they—being smaller bits of his own ka—weren't sentient. "You can call me Atem, I guess..."
"Are you one of the ka-stealers?" the boy said, voice lowering to a whisper and his purple eyes darting from side to side as if fearful that someone would hear him speak.
Atem nodded once, slowly—where had this boy learned about them?
"Please don't kill me," the boy pleaded, still so quietly that Atem had to strain to hear what he was saying. "I saw what happened to Grandpa when they came for him, and I don't want that to happen to me... they won't be able to find my body like how they couldn't find Grandpa's, and nobody even remembered him after he was gone. I don't—I don't want to be a part of you."
"Sorry," Atem said, at a loss for words. "I'm sorry, really, but I have to—"
"Why?" the boy insisted, now appearing to be on the verge of tears. He was still a child, Atem realized, voice high and unbroken and the shape of his eyes rounded and soft. "Why can't you just leave us alone?"
"Because—because I need to collect all the parts of my soul, or otherwise I'll die like you will," Atem said. And then I'll see all the colors, his mind added, somewhat obsessively, though that line of reasoning sounded feeble even in his head.
"But there are more of us than there is of you!" the boy said. "Isn't it better to let us live instead? I don't want you to take my brother too—"
"No, no," Atem reassured hastily, not daring to approach closer, "I never said anything about your brother."
"He told me," the boy said, and then, as if for added emphasis: "And now you're going to kill him!"
"Your brother is part of my ka too?" Atem said automatically, and the first thought that went through his mind was I really am too lucky; I don't understand before he cut it off. This was not the place to think about that.
"Yugi? What—"
"No!" the boy—Yugi—shrieked, and Atem winced and nearly covered his ears at the sound. "Go away, Yami; the ka-stealer is here and he wants me! You have to go away!"
Yami's eyes—the purple of Yugi's, he noted in a corner of his mind—snapped to Atem and narrowed. "Don't touch him," he warned, at the same time that Atem said, "Don't get any closer," and grabbed Yugi by the shoulder to pull him back.
The silence that came with their suddenly frozen position was broken by Yugi's cry of, "Yami! My shoulder's disappearing! It—"
With a sound of frustration, Yami half-launched himself toward Atem and shoved him off his younger brother, seemingly uncaring of the way his palm had begun to fade at the contact. His gaze was fixed on the fabric of Yugi's shoulder, which was obediently turning translucent; as Atem watched, Yugi's scrabbling fingers sank through some of the material and the boy shrieked again in horror.
"I'm fading! Yami, help me, I'm fading—!"
If he didn't get this over with, Atem realized, there would be trouble indeed.
"Yugi," Yami called, still grappling to keep Atem's unresisting body against the nearby wall while his own arms sank into the stone up to the elbow; he growled and shoved his shoulder against Atem's to compensate. Atem could hear the desperation in his voice, poorly concealed behind a mask of confidence. "Just—just close your eyes, Yugi, please. Sit down and close your eyes and listen to me; I won't let you get hurt, you're fine, just close your eyes and we'll both be alright soon, very soon. Do you hear me?"
"Yes," Yugi whispered, and obediently sank down onto the dirt road beneath his feet, head angled in the direction of Yami's voice.
"We'll see each other later," Yami said. "I promise we will. Keep your eyes closed, don't open them until I tell you to, okay?"
Yugi nodded; Atem glanced down and realized that Yami's lower body was fading still, until he could barely see any of him except a very faint outline of his head and shoulders, could hear nothing except his final warning, very quiet: "Don't make him look."
The last bits of pale white mist curled around Atem's neck as he walked over to Yugi as softly as possible, attempting not to alert him to his presence. The boy's shoulder was by now completely gone, his legs nearly invisible and the side of his neck drifting into the air.
Yugi's eyes opened when Atem rested a hand on his arm—to speed up the process, he told himself mentally, and not because he was morbidly fascinated by how he would react—and Atem realized the boy was crying, silent tears slipping down his cheeks.
He couldn't have been more than eleven years old. Just a child.
"It's not fair," Yugi said, and his mouth was swallowed up by the mist.
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Atem jerked to a halt with one hand resting on the wall by the door of the spacious bedroom of what he presumed to be Pegasus's home—a surprisingly large house behind the stone tower of the northern wall, one end of it framed by the green branches of the forest.
Inside, Bakura knelt over the fading body of a man in red clothing, the color burning Atem's eyes even as they noted the new shades of purple—and was that blue, over there in the curtains?—spread over the lavish carpet. Bakura's head was tilted as he examined his victim, and Atem was fairly certain he hadn't seen the knife Pegasus was aiming at his back until Atem rushed in and kicked it away.
"Idiot," Atem said, frowning in only half-falsified anger while worry gnawed at the portion of his emotions that he refused to show. "What are you doing?"
"And what took you so long?" Bakura glanced back at him before straightening and dusting off the hem of his travel-dirtied shirt, the fabric ripping at the sleeves. "I'm almost done here. I wasn't joking about leaving you, you know."
"Why are you killing him?" Atem insisted, tearing his gaze away from the pale violet of Bakura's eyes and the slight shimmer he could suddenly see of the scar stretching on the right side of his face. "He's not a part of your ka. And how are you even absorbing him?"
"I forgot to mention," Bakura said, eyes half-lidded as he reached out an arm and grasped the back of Pegasus's shirt, causing tendrils of white mist to curl frantically over his skin. "We can absorb all souls, not just our ka-portions. They make us stronger. And besides"—he jerked Pegasus's body around so that Atem caught a flash of gold in the dying man's eye before Bakura turned his head again—"he had something I want."
"The golden eye?"
"And his other golden artifacts, if there are any," Bakura said, and gave the room a cursory glance as if to encourage Atem to look.
"What do you want the gold for, selling?" Atem snapped, feeling disinclined to discuss the auctioning of a dead man's belongings over the said man's body. "Do I have to remind you that nobody would even consider buying from us?"
"Don't be ridiculous," Bakura dismissed, beginning to look through the drawers of the desk by Pegasus's fading form. "I want it to absorb."
"Since when can we absorb gold?"
"Not all kinds of gold," Bakura said, rolling his eyes. The last drawer slammed shut, and he moved on to the glass cabinet opposite the bed. Atem caught a glimpse of the shimmer of oil paints behind the fall of the curtain that Bakura pushed aside to reach further over the cabinet. "Only"—and he pulled out something from the back of the cabinet, silver shimmering in the light and maybe gold beneath it—"these."
Atem's eyes were drawn to the golden pyramid hanging from the metal of the chain, exactly like the one that he had remembered from when he'd absorbed his second ka. Instinctively, he found himself stepping closer to Bakura until they were almost shoulder-to-shoulder, his hand reaching out to grab the pyramid by its base.
He thought he could see the gold curling, sublimating, melting beneath his fingers, before Bakura jerked it away and their eyes met.
"That's mine," Atem said. "Give it to me."
"No, it's not," Bakura said, pale violet eyes wide and breaths coming quickly as he held up the pyramid for Atem to see. It was disappearing into his hand too, dallying in the air between them as if unsure of whom it belonged to. "Don't you see? It likes me better."
Atem simply glared at him and grabbed at it once more, feeling his fingers connect before he pulled his arm back.
The pyramid came with it.
He and Bakura both stared at each other for a few moments, Atem clutching the pyramid to his chest and ignoring the way the chain pressed uncomfortably around his other wrist, Bakura releasing his hold on the item and watching almost detachedly as Atem absorbed it.
In the sudden silence, Atem abruptly remembered the reason why he had run to Pegasus's home in the first place—to ask him about the morals of absorbing the other portions of his ka, though he'd had the feeling that he already knew what Bakura's answer would be.
"If you insist," Bakura said finally. "I imagine I'll get it in the end, however it goes."
Atem just glared some more, the pyramid a half-formed lump of gold in his arms, and walked out of Pegasus's home without a second glance to the tumbledown remnants of the room he had left behind.
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"Where to now?" Atem said that night as they sat by the bank of the river, breaking the tense quiet that had characterized their journey out of Domino.
"I think I know where my last ka-fragment is," Bakura said unexpectedly.
Atem glanced over to him, attempting to shake off the uneasiness he had felt ever since he'd walked in on Bakura absorbing Pegasus's ka; they'd never been on more than tentatively friendly terms, of course, but Atem didn't enjoy the present disquiet any more.
"It's a ghost town on the west of the River," Bakura said. "Kul Elna."
"Ghost town?" Atem repeated.
Bakura nodded, and Atem was relieved to note that they were still at least capable of relatively casual conversation. "Abandoned. I doubt anyone even knows of it now."
"Then why would your final ka-fragment live there?" He pretended that the impersonal term didn't feel awkward on his lips, after he'd spoken with Yugi and Yami and realized just how human they could be.
"No idea," Bakura said casually. His fingers found a blade of grass on the ground and tore it in half, then into fourths, then into eighths. "But I know it's there."
"Let me guess," Atem said, skeptical, leaning back against a tree trunk and angling his head up to look at the stars through its slender-leafed branches. "Pegasus told you?"
"I suppose you could say that." Bakura smirked and flopped backwards onto the ground, until all that Atem could see of him was the ragged, dirt-streaked material of his linen shirt and the dark fabric of his pants. He sat up straighter until he could just barely make out eyes as well, gleaming paler than ever in the darkness of twilight.
"You owe me one, you know," Atem said without preamble, standing to walk closer so that if he shifted over another few inches, his foot would be bumping Bakura's knee. He didn't look to his left, instead choosing to puzzle at the stars some more.
"For what?"
"Don't bother admitting that you honestly weren't paying attention back there in Domino. We nearly died about ten times, no thanks to you wandering off to where anyone could have seen you and associated you with the ka-stealers," Atem said, drawing aimless patterns in the sky with his eyes. He thought that the arrangement of stars he was looking at presently vaguely resembled a hook on the edge of the horizon, about to slant down and upend the world onto its edge.
"Well," Bakura drawled, curling his legs closer and propping one foot on top of his knee, "let's take into account how you saved me from Pegasus's vengeance. And then let's remember how I saved you from almost-certain death after you absorbed your first fragment of ka."
"Shall we call it even and leave it at that?" Atem said, an amused smile quirking his lips.
"If you want," Bakura said lazily, and, lying on the grass with the stars stretching above them, they spoke of nothing but trivial things—constellations, cities, odd bits of memory scattered in their heads—for the rest of the night.
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Kul Elna in all its crumbling glory rose on the edge of the horizon as the sun began its descent from the height of noon the next day, a looming silhouette against the western sky with the points of broken roofs jagged on the smooth slope of its walls. The land around it was nothing but cracked dirt and sporadic brush for miles around, and small puffs of dust rose every time Atem set his foot onto the ground. His legs were caked pale brown up to the shin by the time they were close enough to make out the shadows of windows and guard towers and gate amidst the blackened shape. There was something taller in its center, mostly intact with gently curving roof tiles that looked like nothing Atem had ever seen before, but they were too far away for him to see what it was.
Bakura was silent as he walked at Atem's side, lips pressed together and brows furrowed over his pale eyes—Atem really had to stop thinking about them so much, because it was becoming ridiculous, but they were such a strange color, one that he imagined belonged with the gleam of mirrors in the shade and the shining of oil atop steel.
Atem could smell smoke and ashes in the air, though there was nothing burning as far as he could see; the sunset-blackened walls of Kul Elna's houses were beginning to look more and more ominous, even as Bakura's scowl of concentration deepened with each step closer they took.
"Is this the entire town?" Atem said, estimating the distance until they reached the gate. Three hundred steps, two hundred ninety-nine. Now two hundred and seventy. "It seems a bit small."
"The ghosts don't care for how much space they have to live," Bakura said shortly.
Atem frowned. "I thought 'ghost town' meant that it was abandoned, not that it was inhabited by actual ghosts." Don't try to fool me, was what his tone said, and he imagined that Bakura understood that as well.
"The ghosts of its former people wander the streets now," Bakura clarified. "It was never a big town even at its height... ninety members on average, sometimes one hundred. It was of interest only because of the catacombs underneath it, and it survived on the tourism, although the catacombs were also the reason why nobody stayed long. Living with the dead wandering beneath your feet isn't very conductive to ease of mind."
"How long ago are we talking?" Atem said; he thought he was beginning to understand what Bakura meant by his story, though he hoped he was wrong.
"Centuries, maybe even a millennium," Bakura said. His hand reached out and rested on the iron spires of the gate; Atem started, belatedly realizing that they had reached Kul Elna's walls.
Its buildings were even more devastated up close than they had appeared from far away, most walls crumbling into the house and leaving uneven piles of stone and cementing behind. The wooden roofs were mostly gone, bare skeletons leaning crookedly up into the sky like the forms of twisted scarecrows, charred black from flames.
Soot ran along the sides of the streets and coated the ground in a thick layer, the smell of smoke even more evident than before. Atem found himself half-wondering if the ghost village had been preserved in time somehow, its ruined frame frozen in the moment that it had been destroyed.
"I assume you're going to look for the final piece of your soul in the catacombs," Atem said with sarcasm heavy in his voice, attempting to ignore the weight of foreboding that pressed into his chest.
Bakura didn't bother to answer him, instead swerving into the widest road and walking forward, his footprints leaving spots of pale brown on the black of the ashes. Atem followed him, testing the odd padding of his steps on the ground.
There was an opening in the ground in the town square they reached, lined by what Atem assumed had been white marble before it had been streaked gray by soot; the steps that descended into the earth were granite, and eerily untouched by the falling ashes. Around them, the buildings rarely rose more than five feet above the street, with the exception of a perfectly square wood-and-stone one by the stairs into the ground, its roof built of curving red tiles that swept upwards into the air.
"What are you doing?" Atem asked, very quietly, staying back from the stairway even as Bakura paused with his foot about to descend into it.
"Finding the last portion of my ka," Bakura said, as if it should be obvious.
"Do you think so?" Atem met his pale eyes, his gaze tracing the way the sunset glinted golden-orange off the dark tanning of Bakura's skin, the silver sliver of the scar on his right cheek. "Do you really think so?"
"Yes," Bakura said, his tone so flat that Atem couldn't read it. "I do."
"You're either a very good liar or deluding yourself," Atem pronounced. "You need to stop this, now."
To his surprise, Bakura shook his head. "It's not a lie. I'll show you."
"And will you kill me too, once you're done with that?" Atem took a deep breath, gathered his thoughts, and took a guess. "The way you killed your former mentor?"
"I might," Bakura said, unfazed. "Are you coming or not?"
Atem sighed. "I suppose I might as well."
.
It turned out that he didn't need to worry about Bakura suddenly deciding to murder him and absorb his ka, because the white-haired man had been sure to lose him in the maze of corridors and interlocking rooms as soon as they had passed the first one—used for ceremonial purposes, Bakura had explained as they'd walked past rows of threadbare round cushions laid in neat rows on the floor.
Atem pressed his hand against the wall, fingering the gaps in the bricks there and attempting not to be mildly disturbed by the fact that he could see almost as well in the darkness as he could in the sunlight. Perhaps it was another version of 'color,' one given to him when he'd absorbed either Yami or Yugi or even the golden pyramid, but no matter the explanation, he was grateful for it now.
With it, he could see the carvings that began on the walls in the next room, perfectly aligned along the stone and running in a continuous stream from left to right, down one wall and snaking up the next.
Atem walked into it, running his palms over the etchings and absently reading the first sentence he saw. And so it was that the Thief King in his first incarnation slew Marik of the ancient family of Ishtar, and thus took the last of the Ishtars into his ka...
Lamplight flickered on, illuminating the room in soft golden glow, and a voice spoke from behind him.
"I was unsure if I would see you again."
Atem whirled around on his heel, one arm going to the wall for support even as he backed up against it automatically.
He was confronted with the sight of a white-robed man standing in the center of the room, a golden charm hanging around his neck and golden scales dangling from his hand. The man's eyes looked gray to him, the same color as the daytime sky—though Bakura had told him once that it was actually blue—and they were completely pupil-less. Blank.
But Atem's gaze went directly to the golden objects that the man held, and, to a lesser extent, the man himself. It's ka, his mind said, elated and already buzzing with anticipation of the adrenaline rush that came with absorbing others, very powerful ka. Take it take it takeittakeittakeit—
The next thing he knew, he found himself smashed into the wall at his back, the robed man standing at arm's length from him and holding him away with one hand pressed into his chest. His blank eyes appraised him quietly.
"I had not thought that you could have descended to Bakura's level," the man continued as if he'd never been interrupted, pinning Atem's head back with the intensity of his empty gaze. "You were not like this before."
"Let go of me," Atem said, venom spitting from his words because he was frustrated that he couldn't reach the golden items and that the man was strong enough that he wasn't being absorbed and probably only refraining from absorbing Atem out of the goodness of his heart. "What would you know about doing right, mentor of Pegasus?"
It was a stab in the dark, but he knew he was right the moment the words left his lips.
The pressure against his chest lessened slightly. "How much do you remember, Atem?"
"How do you know my name?"
"Not me, it seems," the man said. "Nor Bakura, nor most of your past. I suppose it is only to be expected." His eyes shifted to some other spot on Atem's face, perhaps only millimeters from his eyes, but Atem forced his shoulders to relax.
"Will you allow me to explain?"
.
"I have recorded the happenings of the ka-stealers—or so they are called by the common people—for many centuries. Perhaps even a millennium by now; I do not keep count except when the years are necessary." Shadi's footsteps—Shadi was his name, and strange as that might have been, Atem couldn't quell the nagging feeling that he remembered it somehow—echoed in the silence of the long hall.
"You were the one who's been writing all of this," Atem realized.
"Indeed. I will tell you of them, very briefly. There were originally seven in number, as many as the seven golden items that linger in this world. You have absorbed one already, I presume, and I have two with me now." Shadi indicated the amulet and the scales.
"The first one to be reborn was me, followed closely by one whom you have met—Pegasus. Around the time when Pegasus left my mentorship to search on his own, two more were reborn as siblings. The younger of the two absorbed the elder, and it was he who would later become the mentor of the man whom you entered this place with, Bakura."
Atem frowned at him, adding in his mind. "You've forgotten one."
"I apologize." Shadi didn't quite smile, but the seriousness of the situation lessened by a fraction of a degree. "I am two."
"You're two of the ka-stealers merged into one?" Atem said, blinking at the man in surprise. The candlelight that gleamed off his pale robes seemed to almost fade into his body, creating an illusion of translucence. Then, suspiciously, because the words like Bakura is registered in his mind: "I thought you looked down upon that."
"I do," Shadi said. "We merged so that we would not need to take any more ka from those who would have lived had they not possessed it."
"Ah," Atem said; he had no answer for that. The memory of Yugi's tears and Yami's desperation rose to the forefront of his thoughts, and for the first time since he'd begun to remember, he felt guilty.
"I did not know that you had been reborn," Shadi said. "If I had, I would have reached you before Bakura did and taught you better than to destroy the lives of innocents without thought. Before you erased your memories, you swore to me that you would not descend to such underhanded means of remaining alive, and made me promise to ensure that you did not." Shadi's eyes were distant, but Atem thought he could see sadness there, beneath the blank expanse of the non-color of his irises. "I am sorry to say that I have failed. The Atem of centuries ago would not have wanted blood on his hands as a result of doing good."
"You said I locked my own memories away," Atem said, biting his lip and resisting the urge to snap back something about he shouldn't be judged by what he had been. "Why did I do that?"
Shadi gestured down a side corridor, and for one moment, the flames of the lamps burned golden holes through his arm. "The record is here."
They entered yet another hall, this one lit by rows upon rows of oil lamps that flickered along the walls, so bright that Atem winced and held up a hand before his eyes until they adjusted to the light. The reliefs read from left to right, starting at the top and then winding around to the bottom; he didn't know how he understood that, but all that mattered right now was that he could read them.
Like illuminated manuscripts, the carefully chiseled words were supported by intricate drawings beneath them; the profiled images of kings and thieves and burning towns stood out from the smooth gray stone, forever frozen in their positions.
Kul Elna was a village that existed in the chasm between the world of the spirits and ours. A river, a cluster of houses, a curving temple roof rising above them all. No sky behind it, only blankness, the rock chipped away to form a roughly undulating surface that represented the Chaos.
One of its children would grow to become the Thief King and harness the magic of the Chaos he had been born in to augment his powers. The Thief King made a pact with a great demon of the Chaos: he would take its magic, and it, in return, would have his soul. A man in a hooded cloak—red, Atem's mind insisted, though the reliefs had no color—standing on the cliffs of some city by the River, looking down at the houses below.
The Thief King with the demon's aid plotted to kill the king and rule the land himself. When the king discovered this ploy, he sought a power that could stand against the Chaos and found none. So instead, he bound his soul and the souls of his councilors and the soul of the Thief King—now halfway melded with the soul of the demon—into one and split it into thousands of pieces, in the hope that they would all be lost forever.
To obtain the power needed for his sacrifice, the king burned the village of Kul Elna to the ground and took the strength of all its people's souls into his, and there he waited for the Thief King to come and avenge the people of his home. Two men standing in a panel alone, flames rising behind them and hair blowing back to reveal their faces.
Atem recognized himself, and he recognized Bakura.
"Bakura," Atem said. "He's the Thief King, isn't he?"
He didn't need to turn around to know that Shadi had nodded. "Are you remembering more?"
Atem shook his head, "Only guessing. But I don't believe this. I don't believe that I could have killed an entire village in cold blood, just to gain some power. I wouldn't do that."
"No better than killing dozens of others to regain your memories," Shadi said with quiet reprimand, and Atem wished suddenly that he could see blue, if only to know if his companion's gaze looked quite as blank in color. "Think about the balance of lives, Atem. Is it wrong to kill a hundred to save a world?"
"I don't know," Atem said sharply, fist clenching at his sides as he glared at Shadi, who stared back impassively. "I can't answer that now, because I don't know what it was like then, what I was thinking, what my reasoning was for doing it. I'm still Atem, but you have no right to compare me to who I was before and judge me for it. What if I decide to do something else? What if I decide that there's another method that's better than this one? Who are you to tell me what to do?"
"You told me that you were afraid you would react this way," Shadi said.
Atem's teeth gritted. "Don't talk about me like that. My fate is not set in stone simply because you carved it here. I locked my memories away not only because Bakura demanded payment for his village's sacrifice but because I knew I would need a different outlook on the problem to solve it. You have no right to interfere with that." He didn't understand half of what he had just said—his mind was running in loops: Bakura and I fought before, were supposed to fight each other again, Bakura made it this way, he made me lock away my memories, he cursed us both—but he let the words tumble off his lips to buy himself time. He just needed time.
"I need to decide for myself, to not fall into the traps that were there a thousand years ago or however long ago this happened. I need—aahh—" He choked as Shadi—when had he gotten so close? He hadn't been paying attention—wrapped a hand around his arm, eyes immediately going to the skin there and watching as the man's fingers began to melt into him, fusing their bodies at that point even as the top of his head started sublimating into pale smoke.
Shadi was strong—stronger than him, though he hadn't absorbed anyone for the past millennium—and Atem couldn't stop it, couldn't reject the ka of the two soul-stealers and the two golden items mixing with his, because Shadi was forcing him to accept it.
Will, Atem thought suddenly, the beginnings of an idea forming in his mind even as the incipient waves of returning memories threatened to snuff it out. Force of will, strength of spirit; determination is what matters, not raw power, not nothing else—
He collapsed to the ground, knees going weak beneath him and vision hazed with golden light. "Stop it," he tried to scream, "I'm thinking here," but he knew that once it had started, it couldn't stop until it was finished.
He ended up half on the floor, arms supporting himself on the cold stone and eyes wide open. Colors flashed and swam before them, and a confused slew of thoughts burst like an opened dam before his gaze:
Father mother friends Thief King, rumors of insubordination as a child-king sat upon his throne, whispered advice in crowded halls and private rooms, cloth pressed to his arms and gold heavy upon his head, sweat beading like the water of the River—
And then in quicker succession, flashing white and purple and—was that blue?—
It's Akunadin it was always Akunadin he's the traitor it's him—Seto, need to find Seto and tell him before—the Thief King has been spotted outside the walls of the city, my king—the arms of the Chaos have invited mortals to walk into them since the first moment of their existence—no, there has to be a solution here, there has to be; I need a few more books, a few more days—the village is called Kul Elna, my king—come for me, Thief King, I await you—"You killed them, you killed them all!"—a god, mixed into your ka, Shaada, Karim? You can't—"We will meet again"—you can't all sacrifice yourselves, I am your king and I won't allow it—"and we will kill each other or die trying; that is my promise"—
Atem gasped, feeling the stone of the floor against his elbows, and the next thing he saw was black and the last coherent thought he had was a memory of what he had said all those years ago: I will do this my own way, or not at all.
.
Bakura was sitting in the temple in the midst of Kul Elna's ruined streets—the very streets that Atem had walked down and razed to the ground himself while flanked by the soldiers of his guard. The memory lingered in his actions as he paused before the temple's stairs, remembering harsh breathing and resting one arm on its wall before moving on to the other side of the village.
He could almost smell the smoke of that day, interposed through the lingering scent of ashes and soot still there, hear the crackle of the flames and feel the numbness spreading through his chest as he tried not to look at any faces, to humanize any of the town's inhabitants.
He looked forward, into the sunset-colored single room with its smooth stone walls and shuttered wooden doors, and saw the bright red-and-gold threads that made up Bakura's cloak. It was the cloak he remembered from his other life, a few shades darker than freshly spilled blood and scattered with unearthly bits of light from the gold weave. His mind superimposed the image of the Thief King—but Bakura was the Thief King too, wasn't he? The Thief King and three others and golden items and the demon all rolled into one ka—over the image of his kneeling almost-friend, the past and the present blurring into one continuous double-vision.
Atem had never noticed when they'd entered the village that Kul Elna's main road was wide enough to hold the entire width of the temple inside it, and that it was unobstructed so that the sunset's radiance poured straight into the temple's door.
"So," he said, stepping over the threshold into the small building and standing directly behind Bakura's bowed head, "how much do you remember?"
"All of it," Bakura said, not looking up. Atem noticed that he was kneeling on top of the same prayer cushions he had seen in the catacombs, the fabric of their casing threadbare from use and spotted with ash. "Ever since I left the catacombs."
He shifted slightly, tilting his head backwards to glance at Atem with those same strange violet eyes—Atem could pick apart their colors even more clearly now, lavender and purple and just a tiny bit of what he thought was blue mixed in. "Your ka looks stronger. Have you absorbed Pegasus's mentor?"
Atem nodded, not bothering to lie, and knelt on a cushion next to him, staring straight ahead at the forlorn wooden altar a few feet from his knees. "I remember now too."
"That would be—what, two and a half souls and two of the golden items?" Bakura sounded faintly amused, and Atem imagined he was tallying up the ka in his head. "We're complete, then, just the two of us. All the ka that was sacrificed for your sacrifice, brought together at last."
"I can see the sunset better now, you know," Atem said after a moment as the light shifted another few invisible millimeters down the opposite wall. "And the sky, and your eyes." Once he had spoken, it was too late to regret anything he'd said. They would have plenty of time to discuss later on.
"That would be the rest of orange and purple and a bit of blue." One tanned hand reached out, grabbing the last cushion on the ground and holding it in front of Atem's face. "What color is this?"
"A very happy red," Atem guessed.
Bakura snorted. "Close. It's pink."
They sat in silence for another minute or so, until Bakura finally threw the pink cushion across the room, where it cut a granite-colored path through the fine layer of soot on the floor.
"Not going to stop me?" he said. "Unless you're more ignorant of what happened than you say."
"I'm waiting for you to tell me," Atem said, making his tone as light as he could. "There's no use in lying, not anymore."
"Point taken," Bakura said. "The truth, then. I'm waiting for sunset, when Zorc will be able to exert enough influence to enter this world and absorb enough ka to allow him sway within this realm. And once he has power enough, he will do what he wants. Don't think of trying to escape," he added offhandedly. "I have innumerable ka-fragments to your ten, and the spirits of my village will aid me. This will be a fight of strength, and that I will win."
"I see," Atem said. "That was your plan from the very beginning, the one you started all those years ago?"
"I wanted to be great," Bakura said, laughing with bitterness in his voice. "I sold my soul for greatness, and this is what I got. I suppose I can't say it hasn't been a fun ride."
"You're just going to let yourself be killed here," Atem said, raising an eyebrow and finally turning his head to the right. The sunlight was more than halfway down the wall, barely two feet from the floor. Next to him, Bakura was holding a glass hourglass with white fingers, eyes transfixed upon the falling grains. Atem had no doubt that when those grains ran out, so would the sun.
The former Thief King only shrugged. "I don't really care now. I've gotten what I wanted."
"And what would that be?"
"Greatness," Bakura said, and disengaged one hand to tick the points off before Atem's gaze. "Power. Knowledge. Vengeance. Life."
The light slipped further down the wall, slick gold-orange beneath Atem's feet. They waited in silence for what was probably around half an hour, though it seemed timeless to Atem; Bakura's eyes had closed, hands returning to clutch the hourglass in a death grip, and Atem simply watched the play of light over his face. It was pooling around their knees now; he stared at it as if hoping to chasten it into submission until, finally, it seeped down past his ankles to cast most of the temple into darkness.
"Sorry about this," Atem said, and grabbed hold of Bakura's arm.
Bakura's eyes flew open, pale violet freezing Atem in its gaze before he shook himself out of it and clung tighter, as if the strength of his grip alone would determine the outcome of their grapple. He focused on seeing his companion's fingers turning from gold-gleaming tan to pale white mist, to see them meld with his own skin and settle there, and slowly, Bakura's fingers began turning clear.
"What are you doing," Bakura hissed, and Atem realized that their eyes had never parted during the entirety of their encounter, though his own were likely glazed from concentration. "Let go; Zorc will manifest here soon—"
"No," Atem said, feeling a sort of vindictive satisfaction when Bakura's fingers trembled and disappeared altogether. "I'm sealing him—I'm finishing what I started nine centuries or something ago, and I'm sealing us with him. Stop struggling; have some gratitude, at least now you're not dying..."
"We won't die," Bakura said, voice very quiet and sounding something between utterly furious and utterly horrified, "but we won't exist. Which one is worse?"
"I choose," Atem said instead, ignoring him, Bakura's pale eyes swimming before his gaze; out of the corner of his eye he could see the sun slipping further toward the door of the temple. "I choose the world over myself, over you, over Zorc, over everyone else whose ka we've absorbed. Better to save them all than to save us. Logistically."
"You're crazy," Bakura snapped, and Atem felt him begin to fight back in earnest, leeching off of Atem's hand and his fingers re-forming slowly, utilizing the strength of ka that he'd always had as an advantage.
"No, just altruistic," Atem said, and the last grain of sand fell from the top of the hourglass and the temple was thrown into twilight.
He could still see Bakura's eyes though, their color so ridiculously unmistakable even in this situation. "I'll win this," Atem said, as he began to feel the coldness coiling around his ankles that was Zorc's arriving presence. He gritted his teeth and tugged harder. "I'll win this, and then we'll have all of eternity to talk about how much we hate each other and make up with each other and keep on going." He panted, reveling in the way Bakura's arm was faded up to his shoulder while Atem still possessed all his body parts with decent visibility. It seemed that he'd been right; determination was the key, not raw power. "Alright?"
"Zorc will kill us," Bakura said.
"Can't," Atem said, and he gave a final tug and the world burst into color—the sky outside blinding brightness that he assumed was blue, the sun gold and yellow and orange, the folds Bakura's cloak speckled with nuances of green and black and purple. He gaped with the wonder of it, with the sight of other, unidentified colors shimmering on the curving edge of the setting sun, with the shattered hues of Bakura's eyes so very clear before his gaze.
Atem supposed that the world would never seem as beautiful as it did when he was about to—no matter what he'd reassured Bakura of—effectively kill himself.
"He can't kill us because we don't exist, remember?"
He envisioned stretching his arms out to encompass the entirety of Kul Elna as he felt himself fade, taking the spirits of the catacombs and Bakura and Zorc with him; the temple walls shuddered in his sight, but he struggled to focus even though he didn't need to add to the process of fading once it had already begun. He had one more thing to do.
Atem smiled, a genuine grin, for the world and for Bakura and for a final memory to take with him on the road, and he imagined that right before his vision blurred to nothing, he saw Bakura reluctantly smile back.
.
End.
.
Author's Notes:
1) Shaada and Karim, to avoid sucking in the ka of innocent people, fused their souls and mixed in some Horakhty (thanks, LB xD) for long-term survival. The result, Shadi, taught Pegasus, and Pegasus left and went insane; I'd originally intended to explain that Cyndia was a part of his soul that he absorbed, but time limits prevented it. Later, YM and Isis were born as siblings, and YM sucked in Isis's soul and then mentored TKB, who in turn sucked in YM's soul.
2) At the end, Atem became ka-infused enough to see ultraviolet (maybe even x-ray). The order of colors is arbitrary except for the fact that yellow and green appear naturally (the sun being those colors, which is why they're the most visible ones to the human eye).
3) I was rushing while writing this, so I know that the TKB/YB distinction isn't clear (doesn't help that I wrote Conceit last round xD;), and I apologize in advance.
4) Reviews and constructive criticism especially are loved. Thank you for reading!