A/N: Ahahahahaha, no. I was busy, with schoolwork and gigundo projects and yeah, no. I am unforgivably late with the update. *dies a little inside* THREE MONTHS LATE.

Plus, the chapter got burnt off my flashdrive. Technology's a bitch.

Yeah. No.

*has plotbunny*

Enjoy, please, or something, or don't. Yeah. Please review, or don't, or meh.

-Shiny-


*UNFORGIVABLE TIMESKIP OF FIVE YEARS- OH YES, I DID! OH YEAH! I JUST SKIPPED TIME! I'M SO BAD! OKAY, I'LL STOP WITH THE SARCASTIC COMMENTS!)

*****Holly's POV****

"Let's go rob the Pharaoh."

"Let's not and say we did," Xarius grunted.

"'Kay." Leth seemed perfectly fine with this answer.

The scene was something almost funny: my fellow tomb-robbers sitting in the same room as me while I fixed my hair, making snarky comments, ignoring the fact that I had grown twice my height in one night. They were normally so observant.

Well, maybe I hadn't grown that much, but hey, I wasn't the only one who'd gotten any bigger.

"Let's go rob your mother," was Bakura's entering comment. The eleven-year-old who used to make me laugh was long gone. My mentor replaced him, and my mentor wasn't a jester half as much as he used to be. The boy was a man, a fearsome and merciless bandit whose looks entirely reflected his reputation. His white-blonde hair had grown a little longer and shaggier, he'd outgrown his (if he'd ever had it) boyish physique and gotten an impressive set of muscles. Somehow, he still remained quite lanky; built like a runner and faster than most living things. He kept a few things that couldn't be outgrown: his solemn, grave eyes and his mark of distinction, the scar on his face. Every aspect of his being suggested he was definitely a fifteen-year-old, free to do as he pleased. And that's exactly what he was.

"Don't be bugging me about my mother," Leth scowled. "Plus, she's sort of dead."

"Riiiiight, forgot that," Bakura turned around and made a vague gesture at me, the gesture that meant "Yeah, sure."

I smiled and nodded, and he scratched at his messy hair, pondering something.


Bakura had been spending his evenings for the past five years teaching me the ten thousand ways to rob, plunder and steal, and some things I was better at than others.

Running, for one, was brutal. The boys all had the physical capability to run all night in order to escape pursuit. This was not my strong point, and even now, I struggled to run for even two hours without stopping. Bakura would glance at the slow pace and tut quietly, disapproving. "Say the pharaoh's men are chasing you," he would reprimand, glaring at me through cobalt eyes of stern rage, "you won't have time to breathe," he always added in a low growl.


Stealing was even worse. It had taken six months of sneaking up on blindfolded Leth and taking money without him hearing me for Bakura to say "Meh, mediocre." Then, guess what, another six months of discussing how to pickpocket from random strangers in the market. When I protested that firstly, he hadn't even let me go pickpocketing at all, and secondly, in tomb robbery we didn't even need this, he struck me across the face, snapping "Shut up, ungrateful little rat!"

There was a bad bruise there in the morning.


Rock climbing: What was that? Bakura hated to let a clumsy beginner have any real fun, so instead of practicing risky and cool stuff like scaling tomb walls and climbing into crevices, I had to learn knot-tying. Khet tried to make it interesting, but by the sixteenth kind of rope twirl, I was dozing off like Xarius did when he was extremely drunk. But oh, wait, there's more. By the time knot-tying was over and I knew the knots back and forth and diagonally and upside-down, Bakura still found me "unworthy" of climbing skill training, so he taught me to- I'm shaking with excitement- dig holes. Yep, dig holes, in order to get into tombs. Of course this was a "practical application" and I never got to truly tunnel into a tomb for Bakura's fear of a newbie screwing up a potential robbery.

Dammit.


However of an impatient teacher he was, my mentor was still extremely mysterious, and that never changed. He talked about things in his sleep that he never explained and he usually vanished for hours at a time. Even the other men didn't know where he was roughly 90% of these occasions.

"Guess what we're doing today," the white-headed thief king singsonged, snapping me back to reality, "we're robbing a tomb."

"OHMYGODNOWAY!" Leth fell over in pure absolute fake surprise, Xarius dropped a fancy vase and broke it, Senuhet made a face that suggested crazed shock, and Keht's mouth gaped open in amazement. "Really?"

"Not you, you dolts," Bakura scowled at the men and their sarcasm.

"AWW, MANNNN!" was the collective chorus of sad voices.

I was the only surprised-for-real one at his sudden announcement.

"But you've never taken me tomb-robbing for real before," I blurted out.

I was very worried, underneath all of my ecstatic thrills, about how all of this was going to work out. I'd never really been alone with him for a whole night. What if he started questioning me about my past life? Then I was really screwed.

Really screwed.

"Well, I am taking you now. Don't look so surpised. You're still not good enough. Now hurry up." Bakura tossed over his shoulder as he walked out to fetch his white horse.

"Okay," I stammered.

"Dude. You have to get ready."

Xarius threw a huge brown robe at me, and it engulfed my head and shoulders entirely.

"Whassthis?" My voice was muffled as I fought my way through the sleeves, finding myself out of captivity in a panicked few seconds. (Thank God. Who wants to get strangled by a robe?)

"Your disguise."

I noticed that the sandy-colored robe matched the desert sand perfectly. Why hadn't I seen it before?

"Oh."

"Your hair kinda messes ya up, though," Leth noted dryly from the pallet.

I tucked my bright-red hair, grown a few inches longer these couple years, into my robe hood.

"Better? And what are we doing, stealing a sand dune? Who's gonna catch us, the dead people police?"

"Besides the point, kid, besides the point."

"COME ON!" Bakura hollered, and Xarius stuffed a small canvas bag into my hands and shoved me out the door.