Title: The Isolate.
Written For: Albino Magpie.
Rating: T.
Characters/Pairings: Hints of Fetishipping (Yami no Bakura x Malik x Yami no Malik) and its components.
Word Count: 5,482.
Summary: Post-series. They've died, all three of them, but it will be their choice how they suffer afterwards. Malik, Bakura, Yami no Malik, and wanderings in the afterlife. Feti, Thief, and Psycho.
The Isolate
.
xXx
.
Yami no Malik's eyes gleamed in the light that seemed to emanate from the ground itself, his features rearranged in angles and sharp lines by the shadows it cast. Malik could see the indent that his body had made in the ground as he'd gotten up, all branching cracks and eddies of dust, like if he moved another inch it would all collapse beneath them.
The sleeve of his cloak glinted, and Malik glanced down to see him pulling out a golden blade with a golden handle, light running along its edge in a long white line. To his left, Bakura's mutterings didn't cease, and he threw an arm over the edge of Yami no Malik's shoe, sending up a small cloud of displaced dirt.
The expression on Yami no Malik's face was unreadable as he leaned down and jammed the knife into the ground by Bakura's head, unrepentantly stabbing through layers of his hair. Malik saw the way the severed strands shifted askew from the others and wondered if Bakura would have a gap in his hair the width of the knife's blade in the morning.
Then, without speaking, he turned and lay back down on his original sleeping area, the dirt pooling in the ripples of his clothes and the creases of his shoes. Malik thought that he could imagine this routine going on in hundreds of nights past and hundreds of nights more to come, and that he could see in the darkness of Yami no Malik's sleeve an echo of the golden knife, as if he was loath to give it away and its recipient was loath to keep it.
Bakura's whispers quieted into silence, and Malik looked upward at the black iron spires of the gate far to the east and then right at the line where the emptiness of the sky and the emptiness of the plain melded into one, where he knew the other gate hid.
Maybe, if he squinted and used his imagination, he could see the stone roughness of the walls to the north and south. Maybe this afterlife was really just a huge cavern hundreds of miles beneath the surface of the earth, and the sky above was nothing but the ceiling, waiting to collapse on top of them all.
He held out his hand, gaze settling on his own arm, and watched the play of the eerie gray-white lighting on the contours of bones in his fingers for the rest of the night.
.
xXx
.
"I tried to change, after I lost," Malik said, the admission bitter on his tongue, walking in the film of ash that fell like snow from the sky and gathered in dunes of shadow on the ground. His legs were powdered pale with it, caked in the substance up to his knees, and he had to resist the urge to rip his shoes off and walk barefoot. He knew that later, when they reached a plain of coals or shards of broken glass that stuck up like so many reeds, he would regret it.
Bakura huffed a laugh and slogged through another mound of dying embers, barely flinching as he brushed bits of glowing orange from his skin. Malik noticed that he held the golden knife tightly in his other hand, the fingers around it white with the force of his grip. "You think ahead quite far, then."
"Not because I was afraid of this," Malik said irritably, too drained from the days and days of endless walking to argue any more than that. He waved a hand at their surroundings and received a burning prickle on his wrist for his troubles.
"Then why?" Yami no Malik spoke up, shoving his feet through the ashes as if they had done him a personal offense by refusing to let him pass with ease. The hem of his cloak was trailing behind him, sending up small puffs of dust as it did. "Don't tell me you actually felt bad about what you'd done and wanted to atone."
"And if I did?"
"You obviously didn't succeed."
"Not if this isn't hell," Malik said stubbornly, sidestepping a suspiciously bright spot. He could make out the end of the field of ashes a few hundred feet in front of them, and really, after miles upon miles of walking, that distance was nothing. Absently, he brushed soot from his eyes before it could begin to sting and scowled at the tatters of Bakura's shirt in front of him as the white-haired man kicked up more.
"We've been through this already," Bakura ground out, the knife flashing ominously as he swung his arm. For a moment, Malik thought he was going to whirl around and slash at him, as much good as that would have done any of them—we're all dead already—but Bakura forced his shoulders to relax and continued onward. "This is hell, in all its iterations. Whatever theories you've dreamed up won't help with that."
"Better than what you dream of," Malik snapped back without thinking, the steady trade of insults more of a habit born of their interactions during life than in death. He and Bakura, or rather the three of them as a whole, rarely spoke now, preferring to exchange a few comments about their next destinations rather than have drawn-out conversations.
When Bakura finally spoke, his voice was quiet. Dangerous. "What?"
"Better than what you dream of," Malik said, and didn't bother to stop to check the other man's expression as he walked straight past. They were nearing the end of the constant soot, and he was more than eager to feel solid ground beneath his feet once more.
He conjured up a mental image of Bakura standing behind him, his knife-wielding arm raised and debating whether to hurl it into Malik's back or walk up to stab him so he could have a chance at running away. He found either way, he didn't care. He was curious about how much physicality this afterlife-body possessed, and how much it could be hurt.
Wow, he thought, sudden morbid humor forcing him to choke down a laugh, I'm starting to sound like him; it must be the sudden proximity after five years of freedom...
"I," Bakura was snarling, "don't—"
"What do you dream of, Bakura?" Yami no Malik interrupted him smoothly, and Malik heard a rustle of cloth and a scuffling of sneakers that probably meant he'd grabbed Bakura by the arm and was dragging him along before Malik could walk too far. "Killing people, maybe, or killing all the death gods, or escaping from this place. I see why you'd dream of things like that... dreams are usually of impossible things, aren't they?" Malik could hear the smirk in his voice even with his back to him, and forced himself to concentrate on the interface between the ashes and the slightly darker grass-gray of more normal ground instead.
He'd heard the insult there, buried by layers of masking and words. He'd had Yami no Malik in his mind for seven years; he knew how he worked.
"I wouldn't know," Yami no Malik said. "I haven't had any."
Bakura scoffed at that and wrenched his arm of Yami no Malik's grasp; Malik could hear the soft thudding of his footsteps on the layers of soot behind him. All three of them knew why Bakura had relaxed. Yami no Malik had purposefully misinterpreted Malik's question.
Malik refused to take the hint and let it go.
Before the white-haired man could either end the conversation definitively or add another disparaging remark to his conversation, he took a deep breath—as if it would help any when he was already dead, but the gesture in itself steeled him—and spoke.
"Like hell you don't dream. I hear you thrashing around every night, what's up with that?"
The footsteps froze just as Malik's landed on ash-free ground, and he stood there quietly and began preparing a series of retorts to whatever denials Bakura would make. The thudding of Yami no Malik's footsteps, slower and louder than his, changed to sharper sounds as he too reached the grass, and Malik saw the dark flare of his cloak out of the corner of his eye.
"Those aren't dreams," Bakura said finally. "Those are real."
Malik's breath caught in his throat even as Bakura shoved him out of the way with his weapons hand and kept walking, the hilt of the golden knife pressing a painful knob into his skin for a few moments before the white-haired man moved on. Yami no Malik's cloak whispered against the top of the grasses as he followed, Malik trailing behind them with his eyes trained on the approaching spires of the next gate rather than either of his companions' heads.
Listening to the sound of their footsteps, out of cadence with his as if they each walked alone, he never ran into the need to make eye contact with either of them for the rest of the day.
.
xXx
.
The smell of the smoke in the air was thick and unfamiliar, clogging Malik's throat and lingering with the taste of charcoal at the back of his mouth. Eyes watering, he pulled up the neck of his shirt and used it to cover the lower half of his face, breathing in the scent of dirt and sweat and, somewhere beneath it all, cotton and soap.
The top of the rocks before him was black, shadowed in the eddies of light cast from all that should have been living if this afterlife were the real world. The wandering vines that climbed the stone shone sickly white on all their faces.
His gaze drank in the orange-red of the fires, reveling in the bursts of color even as his retinas cried their protest to the sudden change in illumination. His head hurt, his throat ached, his arms and face felt brittled and burned by the lingering heat of the flames, but he didn't look away.
This is what we will be when we stop running.
The men in the pit screamed, their voices lost to the roar of the fire and the careless sweep of the wind, and Malik saw black splatter across their shirts and their skin. A blade gleamed, silver-gray and washed-out gold, a twist of a hilt with decorations carved of wood, and Bakura shifted by his side, his clothes rustling against the ground.
Malik knew without bothering to look that Yami no Malik had grabbed hold of the back of Bakura's shirt, the grip a warning not to move. This would be a bad place to be discovered, so close to the pits that they constantly aimed to avoid; if the patrols found them even a few miles from the nearest camp, at least then they would have time to run away.
He wondered absently, as the wind shifted and the screams washed over his ears once more, if the other two would try to help him, were he ever captured.
He decided they probably wouldn't.
.
xXx
.
"What sort of question was that," Bakura grumbled as they trudged on, the iron gate behind their backs and the ground covered in sand dunes reminiscent of Egypt. He brushed irritably at the back of his wrist, the skin there spotted with the clear shine of burn scars, having passed the knife to Yami no Malik during their stop at the gate. "Of course we've fasted; it's not as if we had a choice here."
"Are you sure—" Malik began. Are you sure this isn't the Japanese underworld, because otherwise, why would you refrain from eating?
"No," Bakura said, very clearly, not turning back to look at him. "But I'm not taking the chance."
"I don't understand," Malik said, ignoring the 'of course you don't, so now shut up' glare that Yami no Malik was no doubt sending at his back. "Why are you—both of you—so desperate to get out? I've seen what happens to those who get captured, but as long as we manage to avoid them—"
"For how long, the rest of our existence here?" Yami no Malik's voice was cool, detached—the tone that indicated his opinion of exactly how much he thought Bakura and Malik had changed since their duel during Battle City. "Until the death gods die out? Even I don't think so highly of myself to imagine that we can outrun them forever, and unless you've regrown and multiplied your ego since we parted, I don't believe you do either."
They had all stopped walking, frozen in their positions—Bakura in the front, pale hair speckled with ash; Malik in the middle, eyes fixed firmly on Bakura's back; and Yami no Malik after him, who Malik was sure was fingering the hilt of the golden knife threateningly in case either of them cared to turn around.
"No," Malik said quietly, listening to the low whisper of the breeze over the dunes and watching the shift of the sands in the air. The dryness and cool were familiar to his skin, identical to what he remembered of the desert at night, and some part of him ached to lean his head back and breathe in deeply the dusty scent of the stars, as he had done as a child. "Not just that. Not just the fact that eventually, we're all doomed to fail. Something else."
"How would you know?" Bakura all but snarled, and Malik found it eerie how the white-haired man's posture had not shifted one bit when he'd said that, as if the rigid anger in his tone was an alien force that had happened to latch onto his words with the death grip of parasites. It made him wonder what his voice would sound like without it.
"You've gotten worse at lying," was all he said, and waited for what would come next, fully expecting something along the lines of 'and I don't owe you anything that would obligate me to tell you.' It would have been true, harsh but true, and Bakura was not known for softening his words.
Ah, well. It had been worth a try.
He was surprised, then, when Bakura paused for a moment as if debating whether even answering him was worth the trouble before saying, "This afterlife takes more from us than our sanity. So if I am captured, I will only wait until I no longer exist."
"You'll be waiting for a long time," Yami no Malik said, and Malik had to resist the urge to turn and glance at his expression after hearing the oddness in his tone.
Bakura snorted, and the spell of immobility was broken when he shifted his foot and continued walking, Malik only pausing for a moment before continuing after him. The scuffing of their steps on the sand was the only sound for another few minutes, before Bakura spoke again—dismissive, casual, as if he didn't know that his two companions were well able to read beyond the simple words of what he said.
"Not if I don't want to."
.
xXx
.
"Do you ever regret it?" Malik said that night, tracing aimless patterns in the dirt with the tip of his finger. His face stung from the wind and he was sure that his skin was covered in white-red scratches from the hours of suffering through sand whipping mercilessly around them, but he was okay with that. It felt like home.
"Regret what?" Yami no Malik said, raising an eyebrow as he sat on the ground a few feet away, spinning the knife through his fingers. His dark cloak was brushed pale and ashen by lingering traces of dirt, and its back was collecting dust as it trailed on the ground; Malik watched as he shifted to glance at Bakura's sleeping form, sand spilling on top of the cloak's hem in little pools.
It was dark in the desert, ridiculously so; light came from what should have been life, Malik had surmised so far—from plants and water and whatever animals happened to pass by—and there was little life to be found here, though all of the sands glowed faintly pale despite the lack of anything in the black emptiness that was the sky. Whatever life was here hid, unwilling to reveal itself.
"You know what I'm talking about," Malik said, which was true enough, and was glad for small mercies when Yami no Malik didn't bother to avoid the subject any further.
"I don't regret it," he said, voice thoughtful for once and rid of its usual layering of whatever emotions he suffused it with to make it harder to read. "Not even though it would have kept me out of here. What else would I have done? I doubted I would live, and when I did, I did nothing I would regret. You're born, you die, and in between you do what you want."
Malik nodded once, slowly. Behind him, the dunes shifted once more, restless as the wind, and the changing light threw half-shadows across Yami no Malik's face.
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xXx
.
"You don't hear them," Bakura said when Malik rolled over to face him and attempted to blink himself to sleep, lifting his head to stare Malik straight in the eye. He shifted, uncomfortable beneath his gaze, and shivered in the cold. The sand pressed against his arm, leaving patterns of indents that would appear in the morning, but Malik ignored them; his skin had long become numb to the discomfort.
"Hear what?"
"Exactly," Bakura said, unruffled. "You shouldn't be here."
"You don't decide that."
"Why are you here?" he asked instead of replying, gaze intent on Malik's face. Malik didn't answer, and eventually Bakura shifted his eyes away, concentrating on the outline of the sixth gate on the western horizon.
Malik rolled onto his back, staring up at the sky, and wondered for not the first time if its starless expanse was a reflection of the ones who wandered under its gaze.
.
xXx
.
"What happens if we get through all the gates?" Malik said as they walked; they'd passed through the land of sand and emptiness a few hours ago, and the ground beneath his feet was the comforting firmness of dirt, tall grasses brushing against his legs and the tips of his fingers. It smelled of drying rain, and if he were to close his eyes, he could imagine dew lingering, cool and clear, on the overhanging leaves of the trees.
"No idea," Bakura said brusquely; Malik glanced over and felt his mouth twitch at the sight of him holding out the golden knife horizontally, letting it raze the tallest of the grasses to the ground. The lighting flickered every time he did so, though Malik wasn't about to complain; it was much brighter here than it had been in their previous few locations, and his eyes had not adjusted to picking up nuances of shadow in the glow.
"The Weighing of the Heart?" Malik suggested, tentative; he was walking at the back of the group now, and he didn't miss the tensing of both his companions' shoulders at his words.
"This isn't the Duat," Yami no Malik said flatly when it became clear that Bakura wasn't going to answer for him.
"I suppose not," Malik said resignedly. "If it were, I suppose you'd just sneak your way into Aaru or something. Right, Thief King?"
The steady slicing sound that came with the decapitation of grass stalks by Bakura's golden knife stopped abruptly. Malik could see the tendons of the other man's arm, sharp against the malnourished thinness of his bones, as he clutched the knife in his hand as if debating whether to throw it into Malik's chest.
"No," Yami no Malik said, warning in his tone, but Bakura interrupted him, turning around with a flash of white-gray that was his hair, dirt-dusted and unkempt, fanning out behind him.
"I am not the sum of my parts," he hissed, voice sharp and angry, the words cutting through Malik's preparations for an argument like a blade through bone. "Nor am I the sum of my experiences or my losses or my gains. I am not a mix of the Thief King and Zorc, or an average of them both. If it's the Thief King you're looking for, then you can look somewhere else. If it's Zorc you want, then you won't find him anywhere."
"I didn't—"
"Yes," Bakura said, eyes dark in the half-light of the ground. "You did."
"I wasn't going to say that," Malik said, irritated. "I was going to ask what you are."
"And I'm going to say that I don't know," Bakura snapped. "Do you think that just because I exist, I understand everything about myself? Do you understand everything about yourself, even though you've had all the knowledge handed to you from childhood? Do you think that information about what here is real and what's not is floating around in the air, within our grasp if we can do something like read the messages in the stars?"
He didn't glance up or gesture there, and Malik didn't move his line of sight, but he could see in his mind's eye the blackness of the sky looming above them, its height as unreachable as the Heaven that none of them could enter.
"Maybe I lied," Bakura said. "Maybe I'm Zorc, or maybe I'm whatever's left of the Thief King's soul, but the right to wander this land until you fade away into the dust that makes up its earth is reserved for those who are nothing at heart. Those who couldn't die properly because they were never real in the first place."
"I'm real," Malik protested. "He's—" He faltered for a moment, unsure of how to address Yami no Malik, but made do with pointing at him for clarity. "He's not a part of me anymore. I'm my own person. So why..."
"We don't know," Yami no Malik interrupted, "but you don't belong here."
"If you make it to the last gate," Malik said, still struggling with the information that Bakura had just unrepentantly dumped onto him and not caring that what he was saying was only vaguely related to the topic, "then you won't be able to get into Aaru, or Jannah, or whatever this afterlife's paradise is called, will you?"
Yami no Malik shrugged, seemingly unbothered. "We don't think so. But that's okay," he added, his smile darkly satisfied, though Malik knew and he knew that he was settling for the second-best alternative. "We won't let ourselves suffer their punishments for all of eternity. We'll have our nonexistence soon after the patrols find us."
.
xXx
.
"What do you hear?" Malik asked a few nights later, in between gates ten and eleven out of what he'd gathered were twelve. The swamp-riddled ground around them smelled faintly of decaying plants and stagnant water, and he shifted uncomfortably on the rock he was sitting on, his palms damp against its surface. He wondered absently if he would find coal buried beneath layers of deposited silt, the black, hole-ridden stones lighter than the weight of the golden knife presently in his hand.
Bakura was staring at a tree nearby, eyes tracing the growth of moss at the base of its widening trunk. The light here was almost blinding, a far cry from the feeble glow of the desert and the shadows of the field of ashes all those days ago, and Malik thought with some irony that it was getting brighter as they moved along—a sure sign that they were at least heading in the correct direction.
"Voices," he said at last, "of the people whose soul's I've trapped. The thoughts of the ones who are still alive. The words of the ones who wander the Shadow Realm. The ones the Thief King killed."
So that was why he hated to be associated with the Thief King and Zorc, Malik realized; the grudges that the dead and the living held against them both had been transferred to Bakura.
"How do you sleep?" he said, a bit wonderingly, and didn't notice the sweep of Bakura's arm as he snatched the golden knife out of Malik's hand.
The blade flashed, and Malik marveled that he could actually discern its color for one fleeting moment—washed-out yellow with washed-out luster, its gleam drowned out by the pale glow of their surroundings.
"I don't," said Bakura, tossing the knife into the air and catching it with a careless glance to where it was falling. "They try to drag me to wherever they are, little bits of my being scatter with them, and they knock me unconscious." Malik recognized the slow curve of his mouth, the same look that Yami no Malik had worn at the end of their discussion days ago—the grin of someone who had long forced himself to survive with less than the best. "The knife stops them from getting everything.
"As for him"—Bakura jabbed the end of the knife toward Yami no Malik—"he's not so lucky, or maybe luckier, depending on your point of view. He just drains out, little by little." Bakura fixed Malik in his gaze, dark eyes unwavering and narrowed with resolve. "When we're caught"—Malik noted the 'when' with an odd hollow feeling in his chest—"we'll stop fighting it."
"Nice to know you have a contingency plan," Malik said, and was pleased to note that his voice was steady.
Bakura only smirked, as if saying that he knew exactly what he was thinking. "I'd say that never is better than eternity."
.
xXx
.
"We passed the gates," Bakura said; Malik was surprised to hear the anger simmering in his tone and smiled nonetheless. Despite what he might have said about hope being nothing but a useless commodity when he was sure that he and Yami no Malik would not be allowed into this afterlife's paradise, Bakura hadn't managed to completely let it go. "Now let us into this garden of reeds or whatever you have waiting out there."
"The patrols," Yami no Malik said, words falling flatly in the silence that followed Bakura's demand, and Malik was the only one who whirled around to see the shadows of people that had surrounded them, identical to the ones who blocked entrance through the last gate.
"Well," Bakura sighed, and in a blur of white and tattered blue and the dark gleam of his eyes, he had shoved Malik into the gate and turned to face the patrols even as Malik cried out in surprise because he had fallen through the iron spires like they were no more insubstantial than air. When he ran at them, reaching through to grab Yami no Malik by the sleeve of his cloak and drag him through as well, he found that they smashed against the same portion of the gate—Yami no Malik unable to enter, Malik unable to leave.
Malik cursed in frustration, releasing him so that Yami no Malik could twist out of the grasp of one of the patrol members, clenching his fists around the iron spires and wishing he could break them apart or melt them with his palms or climb over them to the other side. "Let me go," he ground out, directing his words toward the shadows that manned the gate, and was rewarded with a stony silence that he took to be a denial.
He belatedly realized that his sight was back to what it had been in life, colors vibrant and whole in comparison to the gray-black cast of the land he had passed through, and that across the gate, Bakura and Yami no Malik struggled against the patrols in shades of monochrome.
"Stop it," he breathed, though he knew that his words were much too quiet to be heard, watching as a portion of Bakura's arm dissipated into smoke in a way eerily similar to the loss of his limbs during their duel against Yami no Malik all those years ago. "You're disappearing. Bakura,"—and he knew he was shouting now, but he didn't care, panic sweeping through him when he noticed that the world beyond the gate was becoming fainter, the details of the fight obscured in the hazy sfumato of fog—"Malik, you're disappearing!"
It felt extraordinarily odd to be referring to Yami no Malik with his name, the words a gesture of acceptance that he would never have given a few weeks ago, never mind in life. It was no worse than sharing his name with somebody by coincidence, he realized—if belatedly—now that the idea of him and Yami no Malik originating from the same source was no longer such an uncomfortable subject.
As one, Bakura and Yami no Malik turned to him, and Yami no Malik raised an eyebrow in amusement as Bakura laughed, heedless, and yelled back, "Disappearing? That's the idea!"
Another blur of light, a change in color from yellow to bright gold as it passed through the gate, and the golden knife hit Malik's shirt right above his shoulder, throwing him back onto the ground. The pressure of it against him as he attempted to rise felt like an invisible hand holding him down, and he imagined that it was an extension of Bakura and Yami no Malik, both observing his actions disapprovingly.
"Don't be an idiot," Yami no Malik said as he struggled to wrench himself free and stand again, though Malik wasn't sure how he managed to hear him. "You think we traveled here with you just so you could burn in the pits of hell with us?"
"We told you," Bakura said, and Malik noticed with another sinking in his stomach how they spoke in we's, had always spoken like that, and he had never noticed because it sounded as natural as breathing. "This is the alternative we chose a long time ago."
The knife fell to Malik's side after he managed to wrench it out with a gasp, and he ran to the gate until its cold iron links were pressed to his cheek. Bakura's voice, Yami no Malik's voice—both were gone. The silence rang hollowly in his ears, and echo of the emptiness that resounded through him.
Beyond it, all he could see was white.
.
xXx
.
The winding dirt road to the afterlife's Paradise was several miles long by Malik's estimation and bordered on both sides by nothing but fields of reeds, but he had walked that distance hundreds of times over to reach it, so he wasn't going to complain.
What would Aaru or Jannah or whatever Aaru-Jannah mix that the afterlife offered have for him, anyway? What use was everything he had ever wanted when the memory of the two people he had left behind ached like the surface of a fresh wound?
Malik paused in the middle of the road, his hand going to the pocket of his shirt, where he had placed the golden knife that Bakura had thrown at him. The metal was cool and smooth against his skin, and as he drew it out to inspect it under the sunlight, the wind ruffled his bared shoulder where the knife had slashed through the fabric of his clothes. It felt like fingers brushing gently against his skin.
A reluctant smile tugged at his lips and he allowed it to spread across his face, feeling the bittersweet flavor of success that he did not care for fill the back of his mouth. It tasted of blood and ashes and the crumbling rust of metal.
He had not understood before, when Bakura had held up the knife and told him that it kept the soul-snatchers at bay, how a simple weapon could defeat things that were not even substantial.
The light traced the edge of the blade in a blinding line of white, and he tipped his head back and thought of the strength it stood for—the strength to fight back after losing everything. The strength to resist the inevitable for the sake of someone who did not even understand what was being sacrificed for him. The strength to realize when it was best to give up.
The sky was blindingly blue above him, nothing like the starless black of this afterlife's hell.
His footsteps pounded against the road as he began running forward, eyes closed, breathing in the dusty smell of the past and letting the burning clarity of the sun scald through his lungs, knowing that he would reach his destination without needing to look for it.
The shadows of the reeds by his side caressed the journey-healed scars on his arms and legs, like hands reaching out to pull him closer. Malik imagined that when he stopped at the end of the path, he would find Bakura and Yami no Malik there, as if they had been waiting for him all along.
.
xXx
.
END.
Albino Magpie, your writer was safa'at keruth – if my writing style hasn't given it away by now, that is. xD Happy summer, and I hope you enjoyed! :)
1. Aaru ('the field of reeds') is the Ancient Egyptian paradise and Jannah ('the Garden') is the Islamic paradise. In Ancient Egyptian belief, a deceased's soul made its way through the gates of the Duat until it reached the Weighing of the Heart, upon which it was either eaten by Am'mit or passed on to Aaru. In Islamic belief, the good went to Jannah and the bad went to Jahannam, in which they suffered various punishments for all of eternity. In Shintoism, everyone wandered around forever. This afterlife is a mix of the three.
2. Let's say Malik died in an accident while dueling on his motorcycle :p
3. Reviews, constructive criticism especially, are very much loved. Thank you for reading!