Disclaimer: I don't own Yu-Gi-Oh.
A/N: Screw it, I love this pairing so I'm doing it.
Title: When the Dead Visit the Living
Summary: Their hearts meet across empty space; "I will sing a song for you."
Pairing(s): Priestess Isis/Kisara, vaguely mentioned TKB/Mark, VERY vaguely mentioned Seth/Kisara
Warning(s): femslash, dark, possible OOCness
Xxxx
They meet on the day she dies.
Isis sees the girl wrapped up in a blanket like a babe, and when she pulls the flap of dirty cloth back, she hears the distant sound of wind rushing through the ruined palace, unaware that it is her own breath passing through her teeth. The girl is beautiful and pale like the neutral face of the moon, and her hair is a startling shade of white. Her lips are tinted blue with death, and her frame is stiff—the muscles and tissues robbed of any life. She's splashed with dirt like it had been artistically placed there to highlight the high rise of her cheekbones and the fullness of her lips.
If she were alive, she could have been someone's wife, someone's mother.
Priest Seth moves across the stone like a shadow, and his eyes hold no emotion as he stares at the girl. His hands and arms twitch like he wants to gather her up and hold her close, but his pride keeps him in check. He simply stands and looks down at her, lips tight, neck bent with an invisible weight. He is still just a boy, and Isis tells him so.
He gives her a look that lacks his usual daggers. He is broken.
Egypt is broken.
They are all broken.
This girl escapes them all in death, in some beautiful place with passed loved ones and endless happiness.
"What was her name?" Isis asks, and Seth responds with one word:
"Kisara."
All around them, servants gather up the dead.
Xxxx
Kisara comes to Isis in the strange hours between waking and sleep.
She lingers like a fog but has the shape of a girl, and she stands patiently as Isis stirs and blinks fading visions from her mind. Isis regards her with the look of a confused child, and Kisara laughs behind her hand.
"Hello, Isis, do you remember me?"
Isis shakes her head, and her limbs feel like lead, but her heart is pounding against her ribs like the fist of a drunken man. Her mouth is dry, and she desperately wants to move—to sit up—but her body denies her this, and she settles into her flesh and watches the dead girl move about the room, taking in the modest accommodations. She is mist and water; she moves over everything—never lingering and never settling.
There is a pain building behind Isis' eyes, and she tries to blink it away.
"I'm sorry; I'm doing this to you, aren't I?" Kisara asks, and Isis shakes her head. She wants to speak, but her voice catches on her throat with vicious claws. "Yes, I am. The dead cannot stay too long with the living."
Kisara is by her in an instant, and she smells like hot sand, and there is dust in her eyes, but they are still blue-blue-blue, like ocean waters in Alexandria. Her lips are cracked and stained a soft red, and her bones press out against her skin like they are trying to break free, but she's still beautiful, and Isis wants to say so. All that comes out is something that sounds like a groan.
"Hush, Isis," Kisara says and gingerly touches a hand to Isis' face. Her lips are close to Isis', and Isis can smell death on Kisara's breath. "You need to sleep."
And so, Isis sleeps.
Xxxx
She wakes up, and she feels stiff—like her muscles solidified in against her bones.
She can taste sand in her mouth.
Xxxx
Her fellow priests regard Isis with a careful scrutiny, trying not to judge but conveying some form of worry. The Pharaoh looks at her like a father trying to identify the ill of his children, and he is far too young to look so old. The weight of a kingdom is much to bear.
She knows how she must look. She catches herself in reflections of golden jewelry and the still waters in the fountain in the royal garden. She doesn't recognize herself.
Seth looks at her like he knows, but he refuses to speak.
She looks at him and tries to question him with her mind:
Did she come to you? Can you see her?
Silence is her answer.
Xxxx
Isis dreams about a girl she once knew.
She has white hair and blue eyes, and she plays amongst unmarked graves that are hidden in the folds of the desert's vast skirts. When she cries, she sounds like a dragon plummeting out of the sky. She will grow to be beautiful and never know true love, and this breaks Isis' heart.
She regards Isis with the look of a woman past her breaking point, but her smile still clings to hope's retreating fingers.
"We all fall, Priestess." The girl says, and she takes Isis' hand. She had tiny bones—easily breakable. Even Isis could break them. "We all fall and die, Isis."
"How do you know me?"
"I've always known you."
The girl begins to sink into sand, and a startled cry jumps out of Isis' throat. She falls to her knees, and the sand is hot like fire beneath her dress. She takes hold of the girl's wrist and squeezes tight enough to leave bruises.
"I won't let you go!"
The girl laughs, and it's a heart-breaking sound. "Don't cling to dead things, Isis."
With that, the girl is swallowed whole, and—
Xxxx
-Isis wakes up with a screaming threating to ripe itself free from her lungs. She bites her tongue hard enough to feel blood slide down the back of her throat.
Xxxx
"I have blue eyes."
Seth regards Isis with a look that is unreadable.
"I have blue eyes; you have blue eyes, and we are members of the Pharaoh's court. Kisara had blue eyes, and she was punished for it."
"Humans have rotten hearts." Seth speaks as if that is the one and only truth.
"Do I have a rotten heart?" Isis isn't angry, not even irritated. She's tired and curious, and she so desperately wants to sleep that she can hear it calling to her like a child calls for its mother.
"Yes."
"Why do you say that?"
Seth's eyes are locked on the floating flowers, but he is speaking directly to her. "You let your brother die."
Isis' heart flutters in her chest like a dying bird, and she can feel her face twisting, but she refuses to cry. It has been years since Marik's death, and she can still feel the weight of his spirit around her neck like a hanging noose. He died of infection—his back scratched open and bleeding, the skin an angry red and leaking puss. He'd vomited and cried while a boy with white hair and a fresh scar held his hand and whispered sweet promises to him.
"I'll be with you." Marik hold told the boy, blood painting his lips a brilliant shade of red—a parody of a rouge. "Even when I'm buried beneath the sand, and all my organs reside in canopic jars, I'll be with you, forever and ever."
"You're all I have left." The white-haired boy had said, and his voice was shaking with unshed tears.
Marik's smile had been beautiful and threaded with red. "And I'll always be with you."
The white-haired boy had kissed Marik like he had been his lover, and he had been there when Isis had buried him beside their mother and father.
When the thief had entered the palace, Isis had seen the recognition in his eyes, and he had looked at her with pure hate.
"I didn't kill my brother." Isis says.
"Oh?"
"No, I didn't."
"Then what did?"
Isis sighs, and her face in unrecognizable in the rippling water.
"An ancient tradition; a foolish, ancient tradition; Marik kept asking why, why he had to go through with it, and no one could remember why. They just knew that he had to."
"Humans are rotten."
"No, not rotten; just foolish."
Xxxx
Kisara comes again, her pale form stretched out next to Isis. Her breasts are pale in the silver light, and her nipples are tinted the same shade of blue as her lips. She smiles and reaches out and touches Isis' cheek.
"You dreamed about me a few nights ago, didn't you?"
Isis nods.
"The dead can move through dreams." Kisara says, her voice whisper-soft. "We can make you relive memoires you've tried to forget or form new memories that were never there."
Isis wants to ask her if the dream was a memory or just a compilation of things that were never there, birthed from deformed memories that Isis tried to push back into the darkest parts of her mind.
Isis' fingers twitch uselessly against the cool sheets.
"What you saw wasn't entirely my doing." Kisara says and there is a heavy sadness in her eyes. "You knew me, once, long ago."
Isis wants to kiss all of Kisara's bones, force them to stay inside her body where they belong.
Kisara smiles like she's reading Isis' mind, and perhaps she is. She is pressed close, close enough to kiss but still too far away.
She disappears in a wave of cool wind mixed with hot sand.
Xxxx
Isis calls out to sleep and it mewls from the darkness, but it refuses to come.
"Please," Isis begs, "I'm caught in the in-between. I just want everything to be real."
Her heart whispers:
I want her to be real.
Xxxx
Kisara is now a solid form. She's cold like the river Nile but soft. Her hand slides across Isis' throat, and her fingers leave pink stains in their wake. Isis feels the heat of a flush rise to her cheeks and she lets out a breathy sigh.
Kisara gives her a sad smile. "I shouldn't have done that. Dead things shouldn't mingle with the living."
"Are you real?" Isis asks and she wants it to be true. "Are you really here?"
Kisara shakes her head. "The dead can never truly be with the living. I thought I told you this. I'm here because you keep me here, my dear friend."
"I don't know you."
"Yes, you do."
"From where?"
"A long time ago, you saw a girl in the marketplace when you went there with your brother. You saw she was starving and you gave her an apple."
"I—I did that for you?"
Kisara rests her head on Isis' shoulder, and one arm slides under Isis' back while the other drapes across her ribs. "I'm not surprised you don't remember. It was so long ago, but I remembered it, and I remember you, and that's why I'm here."
Isis can no longer keep her eyes open and she lets them fall shut in defeat. Kisara is like a comforting weight. "What about Priest Seth?"
"I visit him too as he wishes to see me?"
Isis feels sleep stealing her of consciousness and she manages to mumble, "And how does he see you?"
Kisara's voice sounds distant and far away. "As a beautiful white dragon."
Xxxx
Isis starts to see Kisara during the day: a lithe shadow sliding across the floor, a wavering reflection in water or glass, a floating face in her wine glass.
There are still long fingers on Isis' throat, a faded pink but still a mark that Kisara had been with her, that Kisara had laid beside her, and Isis finds it comforting.
Akhnaden speaks of possession; Karim speaks of insanity; Shada speaks of sleeping positions to ease her at night; Seth speaks of the ancient tale of the dead stealing the life from the living.
"If that is true," Isis says to him, "then perhaps I wish it."
Seth gives her a smile that's all daggers. "She was never yours to begin with, Isis. She was always mine."
"You speak of her like she is a possession." Isis wants to sound angry, but her fire is nothing more than a smoldering ember.
"She is a dragon."
"No, she is a beautiful young girl who loved you and—"
Isis doesn't say, "—and she never loved me."
Xxxx
Kisara kisses her, and Isis thinks she is dying.
She can't breathe, and her heart feels like a hot iron in her breast. Her hands clutch at the sheets, and she's arching into Kisara's form, and they're melding together like they were always meant to be one, like this was always going to be the end result. Kisara is naked and shiny like the moon reflected on the Nile, and her body is cool, but her lips taste like hot sand and putrefied dead things. Her arms and legs enclose around Isis like a cage, but Isis does not fight to break her lock.
Take me with you. She pleaded though her voice was trapped in her throat. Take me with you, please. I love you.
As Kisara pulls away, Isis gropes blindly for her. The world is composed of swimming shadows, vague shapes and Kisara. Kisara shakes her head and pins her arms down above her head. Her bare breasts press against Isis' clothed ones, but Isis still shudders. This is an intimate position, and intimate is something they can never be. Isis sobs and turns her face away.
"Hush, my dear friend." Kisara soothes her, nuzzles her neck and strokes the palms of her hands with deft fingers. "No more tears. You will see me again someday, and I will sing a song for you. It will be only for you."
"I don't want you to go!" Isis knows she sounds like a child but she doesn't care. "I want you to be mine!"
And Kisara laughs sadly and says:
"You and I both know we were never meant to be.
She disappears like smoke in the wind and there is a cold emptiness in Isis' heart. She curls up like a child and sobs.
Xxxx
In a place of in-betweens, a dragon soars through an eternally blue sky.
I will find you. The dragon sings. I will see you again my dear friend, the one who I could have loved. I will sing my song for you.
xxxx
Ishizu cannot hide her shock when Kaiba summons his dragon, and as the dragon takes flight into a black sky and gathers its energy for an attack, a voice reaches her ears:
This song is for you.
As the dragon releases its attack, the roar it emits isn't that of a regular roar. It's not angry and full of power. Rather, it's soft, lilting like the notes of a song—something warm and comforting, full of endless love and thanks.
As Ishizu is swallowed by the lighting, she feels a pair of lips swallow her own, and for the first time in years, she knows everything is going to be all right.