A/N: Warnings for minor self-harm and allusions to other related topics. Written for contest.
Dawn Rising
I.
She primps before she makes the phone call. Even if a voice is only a voice; she's nervous. She reapplies her eyeliner and tucks her hair behind her ears.
He answers the phone in Arabic, his voice muddled by the long distance, and she can hear people shouting in the background. He switches to Japanese as soon as he hears her voice, even though she had introduced herself in English.
When he asks her what she wants, she lies.
"I've been having dreams about you."
II.
Anzu Mazaki doesn't remember her what she sees in her sleep; she'd rather reserve her dreams for the light of day. But when she wakes up with the grit of sand in her teeth, she at least has the prescience to track down the person who once spent days carving out a space for himself in her head.
He says nothing when she tells him the truth, but when she begins to ask if she should be worried, he laughs.
"Fate is inevitable," he says. "So why worry?"
III.
She lives alone in a one-room apartment in New York. She can't afford the rent, but no potential roommate has been willing to live in this neighborhood. Anzu watches her money dwindle out and focuses on work, on dancing, on making connections. She has yet to make friends she can trust.
Marik finds her there one week after her phone call, all cool confidence, but she can tell he finds the city distracting, sees how he keeps turning his head toward distant sounds, gravitates toward windows, tongue flicking out into the air as he talks.
In the customary "how-have-you-beens" of their first conversation, he asks her about the ballet shoes hanging over a chair.
She shrugs. "Christmas is coming. Everyone wants to see the Nutcracker."
Ballet isn't her favorite form of dance, but she's kept up with it enough to secure a place in a minor dance company. In Japan she'd be the lead—here she's second understudy. It presses at her pride in a way she can't describe. She works hard, has always worked hard, but she'd never once considered that it wouldn't be enough.
IV.
"You haven't told your friends about this," he observes, watching her sit on the floor and bend over her legs, trying to stretch out lingering soreness from rehearsals.
"I didn't want them to worry," she says, speaking into her calf, closing her eyes as she forces her muscles further, bends them to her will. "They can't do anything, anyway. Not from Japan."
"That's a remarkable amount of trust you're putting in me."
"It's not trust," she says. "You need him gone as much as I do."
He says nothing, and when she looks up next, she catches him watching her, body languid as his fingers tap idly on the surface of the table. When their eyes meet, he smirks.
V.
Marik thinks that the 'door' to his mind is closed, and has been since Yugi closed it. Anzu, on the other hand, has a very convenient Marik-shaped space in her brain, and no one to close it for her.
VI.
He's gone more often than he's there, disappearing without a word for days on end, returning with no apologies and no explanations. She's never given him a key to her apartment, but then again, she'd never invited him here in the first place.
She can't bring herself to ask him to leave, even if the thought crosses her mind more than once. He's the only one who has any possibility of getting to the bottom of this. He's the only one who can give her explanations devoid of reassurance. He doesn't care about sparing her feelings. He only tells her the truth.
He says if she doesn't find a way to close her mind, she'll lose herself completely. He says he doesn't know how to do it. Now that any power they once had is dead and buried, he doesn't even know if it's possible anymore.
VII.
She has started to see things that aren't there. The words on street signs start to look jumbled, strange hieroglyphics she reads without understanding. She can still see her reflection in store windows, but she's stopped seeing the people around her. Only Marik's reassurances tell her she's still in the real world, that she's still alive. His words are only slightly more believable than her reflection, but they're the only thing she has. She can't believe in the cold deserts she sees out her window at night, a wasteland where the city should be.
When she picks up an apple from the basket beside the fridge, she is certain, just for a moment, that she holds a human heart in her hands.
From the window, Marik watches the apple roll along the floor and faintly hums, fingers catching on his teeth as he chews on a thumbnail.
"Were you found wanting?" he asks.
Blood on her lips. For the first time, Anzu considers the possibility of killing herself.
VIII.
She's never had a nightmare, but still her amnesia gets worse, and as the nights grow longer she grows more restless, sometimes walking the twelve and a half blocks to the gym and running until she can't breathe anymore. Sometimes she takes the subway to her studio, sneaks in through the service exit, dances alone in the dark as her reflection jumps from mirror to mirror like a mirage.
If she moves fast enough, she can't count the shadows.
IX.
Over a carton of take-out, Marik asks her about her hands. She doesn't realize her fists are clenched until he reaches across the couch and unfolds her fingers, and she sees the marks on her palms, small moons welling with blood. There are older scabs, a couple bright scars.
Marik is annoyed. "You've got to stop that. Sensation only feeds him."
"Then what am I supposed to do?"
Marik enunciates the word like a benediction. "Nothing."
Nothing is impossible. She refuses to live like that. She wonders if he feels the same way.
X.
She starts to get the feeling that Marik is here less as a savior and more as a vigil, that his presence is only meant to comfort her in her final weeks of life, that he never meant to give her hope at all.
She vows that she'll make it till opening night. One performance, even on a stage so off-Broadway it might as well be back in Japan. It's all she'll get. It's all she can hope for.
XI.
One night, she escapes to the gym and runs too far, too fast, and can barely limp back home, sinking onto the floor, burying her face in her knees as she tries to massage life back into her aching legs.
Marik is reading on the couch when she comes in, and he watches her for a few minutes before he rises and crosses the room. She's too tired to stop him from touching her, his hands warm and wide and rough over her sweatpants.
"I told you, you can't drive him away like this."
She doesn't look at him, doesn't open her eyes. The images behind her eyelids are too difficult to differentiate between reality anymore. "It's not like I ever had a choice."
The pressure of his hands is unbearable, and she bites the heel of her hand to keep from sobbing when pain darts up the fractures in her legs.
She asks him if he's going to kill her when she stops being herself.
He smiles. "I don't think I can."
She mistakes the tone in his voice for sentiment, but later she catches him sharpening the knives in her kitchen drawer and realizes that the only thing he doubted was her ability to die.
XII.
Ra, Marik tells her, is more than a phoenix. He is the god of rebirth, the incarnation of the sun, who died and rose again with each turn of the earth.
If your final act is to merge yourself with a god, he asks, how dead can you be?
XII.
His handwriting is not what you'd expect; it's contained, letters stacked in a tidy copperplate script, perfectly legible and viciously damning.
Hail, soul. Hail, mighty terror.
I am here. I have come. I see you.
I have passed through the Underworld. I have seen Death, scattered His night and slain His horizons. I have destroyed my adversaries. I have made them sacrifices.
I have opened every way in Heaven and on Earth.
I am the Sun. I am equipped.
I have made the way.
I have come.
The words take up less space in English; the message on the mirror is a concoction of glyphs and symbols that spreads from wall to wall.
"Book of the Dead, I think." Marik says. "It's a sloppy interpretation, but his sense of the sacred is even less developed than mine."
His laughter splits as his skin does, the scars on his shoulders stretching as he reaches across the counter to touch the mirror, lipstick smearing under his fingers. He's supposed to be afraid, as afraid as she is, but he's so well acquainted with fear that he only knows how to greet it as an old friend.
Anzu holds the translated words in her hands and doesn't tell him that now the English is harder to read now than the glyphs shimmering on the mirror, that she can hear their voices, whispering meanings to the words older and deeper than she can comprehend.
Marik's reflection watches her. "When did you write this?"
Anzu wants to correct him, because she didn't write this, but she can't refute the reality of her own handwriting, the rounded curves and loose tails of the words on the mirror matching her own style, visible even in a language she can't read.
"I don't remember."
Marik turns the sink on, holds his fingers under cold water. "It's not too late to call Yuugi."
"Then call him," she says. In the mirror, their gazes meet. Her expression is defiant, his satisfied. They don't call Yuugi.
XIII.
He finds her in the studio just before dawn, tells her she hasn't been home all night. She can't take her eyes off her reflection as she goes through the steps. Bend here, twist there. Stiffen the neck, stretch the wrists. Plié. She has a faint recollection of the rest of her troupe being here, practicing at her side, but they faded a long time ago.
She watches Marik's reflection lean on the barre behind her, his hands folding behind his back.
"Please." She can't stop the exercises. "We open tomorrow." Tonight.
"You won't last that long."
"Yes, I will."
His reflection doesn't move away from the barre, but Anzu feels his hands on her hips, balancing her so that she can reach farther, fly higher.
She knows what he means. The more she wants something, the longer she tries, the harder she pushes herself, the wider the door to her mind opens, the weaker the walls of her soul, the emptier the space in her heart. A demon feeds on hate, and hate is only passion.
In the mirror, Marik's reflection is laughing. Behind her, she feels his hands on her back, thumb running along the edges of her spine. She feels brazen; she leans forward into a stretch, feels her hair falling down around her face.
"And here I thought you came here to kill me."
She watches his feet step around to stand beside her, his hand sliding up to curl around her neck. "My dear girl." He is pleased; he is fond. "What do you think now?"
She stands up and spins toward him, reveling in the motion. She reaches a hand out to him, sees his laughing reflection on the other side of the room. There is blood on her hands.
"It's been a long time," she said. "I've missed you."
And she sweeps into a bow.
I wrote this out of order with little to no intention of actually publishing it, so if it feels more fragmented than it should be, that's probably why.
The 'writing on the wall' (ahem) is from Book of the Dead, but I took a lot of creative license with it, so consider it a self-indulgent and mostly inaccurate rendering of the text.