"I'll be seeing you."
Marik had whispered into an unconscious Ryou's ear—whispered to the dark Bakura that he knew was still awake beneath that pale, teenage sheep's-clothing.
Settled in the Millennium Ring, the dark spirit listened and heard what his slumped-over host could not, and probably would not have appreciated as much anyways; he listened to the way Marik's words spun towards his host's ear, moist and hot and a little deformed, like birds spiraling down with one of their wings snapped—he imagined them being squeezed from Marik's narrow, crooked slice of a smile, getting damaged on their way out; he listened to how the teen breathed harder as he flung one of Ryou's pale arms over his shoulders, and hefted the boy's slight frame with a tiny, tiny noise of exertion that, to the spirit, seemed to radiate inexplicable, irrational waves of heat.
As the teen carried Ryou up the dock, blood slopping thickly from the gash in the unconscious boy's arm, the spirit briefly wondered if Marik would betray him—he had injured the body of his own host as part of their agreement, but just now he realized how vulnerable he had made himself in the hands of this stranger.
It could've been a trap. From the very start, when Bakura tracked Marik down, the teen could have seen how dangerous an adversary the dark spirit could be—could have plotted their meeting in the harbor where they'd be surrounded by water, could have convinced Bakura that he was actually willing to negotiate and get his guard down, could have steered the conversation so that Bakura would decide to go with it and injure himself—all so that, wounded and unsuspecting, the spirit would be in the perfect position for Marik to slit his throat and shove his body into the water. It would've been perfect; by the time Ryou's bloated angelic corpse would be fished from the sea, Marik would have disappeared without any connections to the crime.
It could've been a trap, if Marik really had no intentions of giving up the Millennium Rod, if Marik decided that he didn't trust Bakura, if Marik just fucking felt like it.
As if reading the thief's thoughts, Marik paused and looked over the edge of the dock, staring at the ripples contemplatively.
His reflection was distorted then—the way the water moved around the image of his face, the hair and the eyes looked all wrong.
He brought his free hand up to Ryou's neck, not quite a strangle and not quite a caress, and traced a single fingernail along his windpipe. Of all things, the nutcase was smiling.
He was going to do it. He was actually going to fucking do it.
Bakura readied himself to take over his host's body, but Marik took his hand away before he could.
He would have fucking done it, anyways.
Instead, Marik carried Ryou's body all the way back to his motorcycle and put it down gently, draping it over the seat and, in a rather pointless gesture, added a pat onto his back as if to say, "There, isn't that better?"
Bakura was sorely tempted to take over and interrogate the maddening teen on the spot—he'd grab the back of his neck and dash his beautiful face against the pavement and say that he had better not think of trying anything funny.
It wasn't being paranoid if it was justified.
Intently observing everything that Marik did, the spirit had to concede that for a kid, he had a depraved cunning that got lethal results. He had a knack for acting in a disarming manner and completely fooling the pharaoh's friends—though to be fair his friends were completely foolish to begin with.
But as the day progressed and Marik's plans fell apart in the face of the determination of the pharaoh and his host, the boy was increasingly getting on Bakura's nerves. He took the liberties of altering their bargain at his own convenience, intruding upon Bakura's host mind, making insistences and demands without giving notice or taking "no" for an answer. It was astounding, how much he seemed both a destructive monster and a selfish brat of a child.
Night had long since fallen, and the spirit had just finished running the latest of Marik's errands—obtaining enough locator cards so he could enter the finals—when, yet again, the nosing telepathic reach of the teen's voice echoed in his mind.
Are you finished yet?
Yes, Bakura replied forcefully, baring his teeth at the chilled city air with his hands shoved in his pockets. Though he'd never admit to the pain, the delicious wound he had put in his own arm had been throbbing this entire time, with a mixture of masochistic pleasure and the grating monotony of the constant pounding that came with it. As it were, he was in a frayed and strange mood, and all the less willing to deal with Marik's persistent nagging.
Well, hurry up. If you're too late to board the blimp and it leaves without you, all of this will have amounted to nothing.
I know that already. Bakura had almost taken an immature tone himself, retorting with the dour soreness of a sleep-deprived teenager—which, taking into account the age and state of his host's body right now, he in a sense was. Nevertheless, his strides quickened across the reverberating pavement. Is that all that you wanted to tell me, your majesty?
I suppose I could comment on your legendary patience, Marik snipped in a businesslike manner as the touch of his mind began to recede.
In a flare of temper, to both of their surprise Bakura found himself actively seeking out Marik's mental link, gripping the metaphysical strand as if by the throat.
Listen. I have waited longer than your short-lived existence can comprehend for the Millennium Items—including the one that you currently dangle above my head as casually as if it were a carrot. I've chosen to cooperate because I thought it would be easier to work with you rather than against you, so don't convince me otherwise. The spirit encircled his heated umbrage about Marik's consciousness, in a similar manner to how he would have leaned in and breathed threateningly against his face had they been conversing in person. Make all the snide remarks and command me all you want, but don't believe for a second any childish assumptions you've made of me. I'm not under your power, and my word can be trusted no more than your limited manipulative talents. I could very well kill you if you keep wasting my time—a little boy like you has no idea of my past or what I'm capable of. You don't know anything about me.
There was a static pause between them. Bakura felt Marik's mind push back against his, but with an acidic, grinning calm instead of ferocity.
But you realize, the teen answered quietly, that you know nothing of me, either. You seem keen on looking down on me as a child, but you should know that I stopped being a child the moment I was born into this world.
I can still look down on you as a human. Until now, Bakura hadn't yet hinted at what his true nature was, and he expected Marik to show surprise—but all he emitted was a strange satisfaction, like this was merely confirming what he already suspected.
And I stopped being human when I became ten years old, Marik replied.
At that, their minds warily came apart like skirting animals. Frowning, Bakura wondered at how Marik's tone had just changed—more and more, the spirit was starting to notice the subtle irregularities within him. He felt like he could run his fingers along the teen's mind and be able to feel the bumps of all the seams that held his dissonant parts together.
And then Marik's mental voice came pressing back once more, jolting awake their dead connection, and yet again there was something slightly different in how he sounded.
Are you almost at the arena?
Yes. Stop pestering.
Don't enter just yet. I want you to meet me in the parking lot.
Marik promptly withdrew his consciousness, this time for good, leaving Bakura to mull over yet another thing in his turning mind. What could that infernal boy possibly need to say face to face that he couldn't say over their telepathic link?
Perhaps he had changed his mind and decided to lure Bakura into a trap. He could be planning on killing him—not that it would work or anything.
Simultaneously confident and cautious, Bakura eventually arrived and approached Marik as he was told. As the parking lot was largely empty, it wasn't all too difficult to spot the teen leaning back on his idiotic-looking motorcycle, skin and hair glowing under the diluted city florescence. In the blanched dimness his colors were leeched out, his normally toxic ianthine eyes now a tarnished silver as they flicked up to capture Bakura in their gaze.
Just standing there in his thin and cut-off clothing, no servants in sight, and as black and white as a film negative of himself…
He looked cold.
"…Well?" Bakura asked with no more recognition than a raised brow, hands still bunched mulishly in his pants pockets.
With a faint smirk, Marik fingered the Millennium Rod in his hand and said breezily, "Gods, you're awfully choleric. Can you honestly keep up that patented goody-goody façade of yours when you have to deal with the skin-crawling pleasantness of Yugi and the rest of those idiots? It's amazing, how such a despicable bastard can ooze so much sugar—I bet just having a conversation with him could rot your teeth."
Before he could stop himself, Bakura snorted quite audibly in amusement, though he was quick to stifle it in his disagreeable mood. "It seems we can at least agree on that. Yes, it's sickening how the pharaoh can still live so happily and be surrounded by so many companions, when he carries the stain of wasted futures and families on his soul." At this, Marik regarded the spirit with a keen curiosity, and without reciprocating his interest Bakura continued, "But remember, I have my host's unconscious mind and memories at my disposal, and I can puppet these facets of his person without having to put up a constant front myself."
"Having a host sounds useful," Marik mused. As he gave a thoughtful, unreadable pause, his spine seemed to just barely go rigid as if seized by a chill, and suppressed within his eyes was a shred of foreboding—something screaming yet voiceless in the back of his mind, being strangled into silence even now. The teen's composed face was mirrored in the polished surface of the Millennium Rod, broken up, pulled in different directions, warped. "Is your host aware of your presence? Does he have enough power to resist you?" To Bakura, it appeared that he was a bit too invested in his questioning, though neither of them could have imagined why.
While Ryou certainly had put up a fight and given the spirit some problems in the past, he certainly wasn't about to divulge such moments of weakness to Marik. He lied easily. "No. He no longer has any control over himself."
"…Oh." It came out of Marik's mouth as a surprise—it was hushed rather than demanding, a more frank and off-guard uttering without any of his usual acrimoniousness and wit. A feeble wind wrapped around his lighted hair, on the verge of stirring the strands to life, before quickly falling dead. He looked down. "…We had gone through much trouble to get to this point. The moment we step in front of the pharaoh in that arena, and all throughout the trials of the tournament, we must give a flawless, tireless performance. You had better be ready." Marik really did seem to be talking more to his own reflection in the Millennium Rod than to Bakura.
Eyelids lowering sardonically, the spirit gave an aloof toss of his head and said, "I know. Can you do nothing but give lectures, boy? You do a lot of talking, but you've yet to show me that you can take an equal amount of action—"
He trailed off as Marik straightened, tucking the Millennium Rod in his back belt loop so that he could grip both of his hands around the cord of the Millennium Ring, and without explanation he intently began twisting, pulling, tightening the rope about Bakura's neck, just on the brink of cutting off the air in his windpipe. Charged and ready to strike back, Bakura's bristling nerves did not abate when Marik just as abruptly released him and was overcome by uneven snickers, his darkened face hovering right in front of Bakura's own. He smelled of the ocean—fresh and treacherous.
"The fuck was that for?" the spirit growled, grabbing the collar of Marik's shirt. Little by little, Marik's onset of laughter began to fade before his eyes.
"How was that for taking action?" The angry thief began lifting him off the ground in response—which was difficult as Ryou's build was much slighter than Marik's, though Bakura would never admit it. "Hey, relax—I was only kidding. You can trust me," Marik said with the last traces of a vexing grin, fully aware of the irony.
"That was some joke," Bakura muttered, and against his better judgment set the boy back on the ground. Not for the first time, he had the nagging suspicion that he was working with someone whose instability outweighed his usefulness. "If you really wanna die early, then try doing something like that again. I promise I won't disappoint."
"Do you really fear me that much?" Marik breathed, eyes dimmed but voice glowing with consuming menace. He seemed to become possessed by a different impulse than before. "Maybe…maybe I am a fearful thing." The grin disappeared from his face.
Really, his torturous mouth had a habit of curling and uncurling and saying infuriating things, and it was there as they found themselves standing nose to nose that Bakura thought of shutting him up.
But Marik thought of it first, and was the one to close their lips together.
Bakura was surprised, suspicious, irritated—and he found himself responding with voracious pleasure. He lapped at the enveloping warmth inside Marik's mouth, becoming awash in waves of insatiable want at the softness of his lips and the sharpness of his teeth and the meld of his tongue, burning from the depths of his stomach with the carnal urge to have him.
Biting down unrepentantly on Marik's lip, he was awarded with a short moan and punished with the disappointment of the teen breaking off, panting but contained. He looked good when he was breathless.
The spirit was aware of his own heavy breathing, along with the dense, distant buzz of heavy traffic as, wordlessly, Marik backed away with a closed expression. Eyes trained on Bakura with renewed awareness, his hand went behind his back to make sure that the Millennium Rod was still there.
Bakura was unsure of whether he was offended or flattered—but then, why didn't he just grasp the defenseless Item when he had the chance?
"I'll be entering the stadium now. I want you to walk around to the other side and wait outside for seven minutes before going through the opposite entrance. Obviously, they are not to know that we've met. Understood?" the teen commanded guardedly, pivoting on his heel and stalking off without awaiting an answer.
Licking his savoring lips, Bakura watched him leave with an electrified feeling prickling through his breast. The damned boy had distracted him—a moment before, he was all too willing to rip out Marik's tongue, and the next he had said tongue pressed to the wall of his mouth. Now his gut was careening through a hormonal storm. Betrayed by his own lust…how sickeningly human of him.
Brooding as he walked the length of the arena's circumference, he wondered what kind of ludicrous reasons Marik had for any of his actions, only able to conclude that the teen was mad. Perhaps madder than Bakura himself.
This simple explanation cooled the sparking pumps in his brain, and he felt he could progress more comfortably without troubling over such petty matters. So long as he got what he wanted from Marik in the end, the boy was of no concern to him.
Brisk pacing subsiding as he neared his designated entrance, he impatiently stepped in without waiting seven minutes as Marik had ordered; the stadium was, of course, enormous, and after taking so long to encircle the structure's girth he wasn't about to dawdle needlessly about and twiddle his thumbs.
As he was supposed to be in the hospital this entire time, the appearance of his host confounded Yugi and his friends to no end. While they rushed to his side to make all the expected inquisitions—what was he doing here, was he alright, oh how boring—he gave a surreptitious glance over their heads to see Marik shooting him a reproachful look, undoubtedly peeved because he had arrived too soon and disobeyed his orders. Bakura hid his smug satisfaction behind Ryou's always-agreeable smile.
Having weathered endless millennia of existence, his demonic soul was dried long past being impressed by man-made wonders, and rich-boy Kaiba's extravagant duel blimp was no exception when it finally landed. As he boarded with the others, however, he did have other things dogging his reluctant mind…
"Ryou, you're breathing pretty heavily," said Anzu—though the spirit preferred to think of her generically as "Yugi's friend number two"—while they ascended the steps, looking at him with concern. "Are you sure you're alright?"
To his chagrin and injured pride, he realized that he was unusually short of breath, no doubt from running Marik's ridiculous errands and exhausting the body he currently possessed. The boy must have existed just to irk him at every turn.
And speak of the devil, Bakura felt a muscled arm slink around his torso as Marik stepped up to his side, bolstering him. "Not to worry, Anzu. I'll give your friend a hand up these stairs, no problem!" he assured beamingly, and the girl's brow relaxed in relief.
"Thanks, Namu! You're such a nice guy."
Bakura was pretty damn sure that Marik was going out of his way to annoy him, and it was working. He made sure to grind his heel on top of Marik's toes for every remaining step, sensing the teen grit his teeth behind his unwavering smile, and that did cheer him somewhat—but more and more troubling was the bubbling notion that maybe he didn't want to disentangle himself from the other's warm grasp.
It turned out that Marik was so kind as to help Bakura all the way to his room, and as soon as they disappeared behind the automated door he shoved the spirit to the floor. Landing right next to a bedpost, the thief's head cracked against its bottom—and he would have much preferred if Marik had the consideration to make him fall on the bed, but clearly that would be asking too much.
"You might think that it'd raise some questions if I suddenly show up to the duel arena with a cast on my fucking foot," seethed the teen.
Clutching the back of his head, Bakura growled, "There's a thing called 'personal space,' and believe it or not I prefer not to have some pest barging in on it."
"Oh? You sure about that?" Marik asked dangerously, lowering himself so as to straddle the thief's hips. "Somehow, I think you might regard me as an exception." To make his point, he grabbed Bakura's face and crashed their lips together, this time with a lot more teeth.
Pulsing from his aching head through his aching arm, Bakura couldn't help letting a few fevered noises escape from his throat. Determined to prevent Marik from pulling away like last time, he gripped his hair and kept their mouths shoved against each other, his other hand running down the boy's hitching abdomen and sliding lower, lower…
"You're a bastard," Marik exhaled brokenly against his teeth, eyelids falling closed as Bakura's palm ran up and down in-between his legs. "What—ah—makes you think I wanna fuck you?"
"No one said that you have to," said Bakura with a raised eyebrow, continuing to tease the stiffening bulge in Marik's pants. "You're the one coming on strongly, anyhow."
Marik's eyes nearly fell shut as he seemed to fight against his own facial expression. A grin overtook him then, and it looked like he was about to give in to desire, lowering his teeth to Bakura's neck. Bakura gasped in anticipation, arms loosening, and he then found himself being shoved back as Marik broke out of his grip and scrambled to his feet.
"What, again?" Bakura growled, propping himself up on his elbows. But instead of any sharp retorts or cold demands, Marik all but ran out of the room without a word, leaving Bakura stranded alone with his hunger—and what's worse, with his confusion.
They had made an awful team. Bakura couldn't help thinking this right as Slither the Sky Dragon's blast was about to hit his body. Yet another plan that blew up in their faces—that literally blew up in Bakura's face—and this failure, along with his sexual frustration, probably could've been avoided if he had made the more educated decision and killed Marik when he had the chance. But as his body filled with light and hot pain, Bakura's mind began flickering away from consciousness, and his blurring thoughts began falling towards how instead of silencing the teen, he might prefer hearing Marik heatedly saying his name….
The next thing he knew, that boy's voice was pestering him again.
"Bakura."
"Bakura. I need your help."
"Please."
The black unconsciousness that surrounded Bakura gave way to an irritating light. The spirit squinted as Marik's form appeared in the space of his mind, ghostly and with a desperate look on his face. It didn't take long for Bakura to realize that something must have happened while he was out.
As Marik began to explain what had happened, Bakura felt no surprise that the boy's plans fell through yet again. But he did feel surprise when Marik told him about the other Marik—the one currently running around in his body. The one that was a part of him, and yet wasn't.
"So. You're asking me to get rid of this guy for you. Or, to get rid of you for you."
"I need you to save my brother, first."
"And you came to me for all this?" Bakura sneered. "You can bribe me with your Millennium Rod all you want, but you know I really don't care about you or your family. Besides, you want to turn over a new leaf, don't you? I'm sure you know that my intentions for having the Millennium Rod aren't good ones. Why not just ask your sister to do your dirty work for you, free of charge? Or are you so delusional that you think our couple of 'sessions' mean I'll be your happy lapdog?"
Marik hugged his arms around himself, his nails biting into his clutched elbows. He looked off-balance as he stood there, rocking back and forth as if on the edge of a precipice, his eyes staring down darkly as if filled with the void they were imagining at his feet.
"I didn't want my sister to see me like this," he said quietly. "She's upset enough at seeing what I've become. And after everything I put her through, I don't want to put her in danger."
"But you're happy to do so to me," Bakura scoffed. "You're an unbelievable brat. I could just dilly-dally in bed and let the pharoah and his lackeys weaken your dark self. Then I could dispatch him with ease and take the Millennium Rod without throwing myself in danger for the third time in a row. You're as demanding as you are moronic, you realize."
Despite the earnestness of his callous words, his finger rose to jab at Marik's forehead as he spoke, unintentionally giving him a more chastising appearance rather than a solely malicious one. Bakura felt chagrin rise up and threaten to color his cheeks. Was it his lust that still confounded his actions, driving him to bicker with the boy in front of him instead of erasing his existence from his mind?
"Well anyway, I thought that you might...understand my situation."
"What makes you say that?"
"What you said earlier. That…'stain of families' or whatever crap you were waxing poetic about." A bit of the sarcastic glint from before had returned palely to Marik's eyes, but only briefly; for just a moment, it seemed as though he was going to resolidify into the person he was before, teasing and angry. But he returned to his thinned-out and, well, fragile-looking appearance, and oddly enough Bakura felt almost a little deflated to see that—like he was expecting their usual infuriating banter.
"Did you lose your family? Is that why you're doing all this?" Marik asked. He was calm and inscrutable as he stretched out his fingers to brush where the Millennium Ring rested on Bakura's chest. "Have you suffered like I have?"
Narrowing his eyes, Bakura slowly swept Marik's hand aside. "Your self-centered requests have nothing to do with me. You still have a family left to lose. I'm sure that's a situation that your sister can grasp, even if she were as dim-witted as you—which I doubt."
Marik shook his head. "That's not what I really meant. I guess what I was trying to say is that...maybe...you could come to understand me. Because I don't think anyone else can. I don't know if even I can. And I can't face the other part of me alone."
Marik had started searching Bakura's eyes, but Bakura didn't want him to try to find anything there. He glanced away and grunted, "Alright."
They kept up their losing streak to the very bitter end, Bakura reflected with just as bitter amusement. He slowly came to in a world of shadows, his body and soul having been destroyed after facing the other Marik. Now darkness was threatening to drown him, and he simply drank it in. He was darkness.
The familiarity of his surroundings was punctuated by an unfamiliar noise. It sounded like claws scratching on a hard floor, starting almost inaudibly and growing louder with each second. Bakura got up and looked around, and saw the unexpected shape of another person scrabbling across the ground.
The darkness was wrapping around Marik, heating him, boiling him as his body twitched and convulsed against itself. One of his clawing hands went to cover his face, and a few strangled laughs began escaping from his fingers. Cautiously, Bakura approached and knelt next to the boy, wondering how the dark half of Marik ended up here instead of the other half. But as he placed a hand on Marik's shoulder, he realized that Marik wasn't split neatly into halves—and that while he himself was unaffected by the darkness, this boy's soul, no matter how unusual, was still mortal and vulnerable to its influence.
At Bakura's touch, Marik's thrashing diminished, and through the cracks of his fingers that divided his face, he looked up at him. "Bakura."
"It's me. Are you...you?"
"Bakura," Marik breathed, "let me show you my back."
Bakura paused. He reached with his other arm and lifted Marik's head. Before he could stop himself, he said, "I didn't win. You don't have to hold your end of the bargain anymore."
Hand sliding limply from his face, Marik slowly started to sit up as he regarded the spirit with a strange calm. Reaching forward with one arm, he touched the skin right around Bakura's eye, and reaching backward with the other arm, he guided Bakura's hand down from his head to his shoulder blades. Bakura could feel the tangled web of raised bumps and indentations through Marik's shirt.
"I want you to read me," Marik said. As his fingers continued to brush Bakura's cheek, Bakura remembered the scars that he used to have when he once alive. "I want you to see me."
As Marik leaned in to kiss him, Bakura closed his eyes, already expecting it this time. He felt his shirt come off, and then Marik's, and he read the boy's back with his hands as Marik gasped into his mouth. Marik's tongue pressed softly against Bakura's, and then he bit it. Nails digging into Marik's back, Bakura jerked his head away and stared at him, for once without ire. Marik just stared back as the grin fell from his face, cloudy-eyed and almost miserable-looking even as Bakura's blood dripped from the side of his mouth.
"Which Marik is the one in control?" Bakura asked, leaning back into him.
"There is no Marik in control," he mumbled thickly into Bakura's ear as his angry fingers fell upon his belt buckle, hands clenching agonizingly around the zipper as they undid his pants, as if he were tearing open his own stomach.
Marik grabbed Bakura's hand and crushed it against his chest, against his stomach, against his hardness, and Bakura watched him do this with avarice and with solemnity. He didn't resist as Marik pulled them both backwards and fell with his back to the floor and Bakura on top of him.
At times, Marik was overcome by darkly rapturous laughing, gripping a hand around Bakura's neck, biting Bakura to draw more blood. During these moments Bakura tensed and accepted the pain that Marik had to give with a mixture of pleasure and an empty coldness. At other times, Marik was a trembling silence, wrapping his arms tightly around Bakura's shoulders as if a strong current were trying to drag him away. When he was like this, Bakura found himself holding him in return, found that he was kissing him with both teeth and softness, found that he was whispering Marik's name.
Still dripping sweat and blood after they had finished, Bakura was now facing Marik's back. With his hunger temporarily sated, he was calmly surveying the information written in his scars instead of voraciously feeling them up.
He saw the shoulder blades rise and fall as Marik took a breath. "I'm sorry."
Bakura tore his eyes away from the information to look at the back of Marik's head. "What for?"
Marik shook, and his head lifted up as laughter shivered through his body. "I wanted you to understand me," he snickered darkly, "because I thought that if you could figure me out, then I could pick up all my different parts and fix me."
When Marik turned his head back to look at Bakura, the smile was gone from his voice and his lips. "But I've been broken into more pieces than can be found and put back together."
"I know."
Marik's pupils flicked up and locked on to Bakura's. This time, they both searched each other's eyes without breaking away, and they found nothing.
Bakura wrapped his arms around Marik's torso and pulled the boy's scars flush against his own chest. This part of Marik's soul was soon to be called out from the darkness, but neither of them knew of this yet.
For now, Bakura held the pieces of Marik against himself, and their bodies almost fit together.