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[8] In Which Isis Ishtar Receives A Phone Call

Isis Ishtar was inwardly blessing the poker face she had cultivated during her years living with a more-than-slightly-deranged younger brother and a bloodthirsty yami born of evil thoughts. It really came in handy at times.

Especially when the resident reincarnated pharaoh came flying through the door to her Egyptian exhibit and bolted right up to her, screaming about evil hikaris and sex fiends.

And even more so when one of the pharaoh's hikari's duelist friends was scrambling after him, looking rather green in the face and holding a familiar-looking, fighting, screaming, silver-haired boy under one arm.

One hand rose up to touch the Tauk at her neck almost without her noticing.

I think the Mongol hordes would have been quieter coming in,her yami said wonderingly. Aset and she had been on friendlier terms since her attempt to get on with her life unhindered by shadow powers. It hadn't exactly worked, especially since her brother was practically 'shadow powers' incarnate. And then there was the whole balance wossname to be considered. But Isis definitely got points for trying.

/I wouldn't be surprised./ "My pharaoh," she said aloud as Yami no Yuugi came skidding up to a halt in front of her, inclining her head slightly. "Please, control your friend."

The blonde dropped the silver-haired boy as soon as she finished speaking. The black-clad teen took an angered swipe at the blonde's legs with a rather large, sharp knife. The blonde made an 'eep' sort of noise and leapt straight up into the air, landing artlessly on the floor in a heap. The silver-haired boy snarled and flipped his hair out of his face as he flicked the knife menacingly at the boy. "Don't touch me."

"So. It is you," Isis found herself saying to the yami of the boy her brother had destroyed.

"Hn," the yami said, and began stalking around the displays. "You know what? I stole this! And this, too," he added, stabbing at various items with a pale forefinger. His nails were filed into points, she noted. "I don't know how you got a hold of them. I guess someone stole them from me when I got my soul stuck in some damn gold jewelry. Fucking pharaoh. Destroy my fucking town, will you?"

"He's a little cranky," the blonde noted. "Hiya, Isis. Hope you remember me. I'm Jounouchi. The thief's Bakura. You know Yami pretty well, don't you? We have a problem."

"I am aware of that," Isis replied.

"Well? Are you going to do anything?" Bakura piped up, running one finger along the flat of his knife.

Isis tilted her head to one side. "I heard you had a problem. I didn't know what it was."

"My hikari's gone crazy," Bakura said flatly. "He's everything I could never dream of being all gone wrong."

Isis got a very peculiar look on her face. "Really now."

"Really now," Bakura repeated.

"Excuse me," Isis said abruptly, striding from the room. "Don't touch anything!" she yelled over her shoulder.

She flung herself down the stairs, snatched up her phone, and began punching numbers so hard she almost broke a finger.

"Hey, babe!"

Isis made a face. "Eisei, this is serious. Get me your hikari. Or your brother. Or anyone but you!"

"Aww." Clunk. "Hikariiiiii! Your girlfriend's calliiiiiiing!"

"Dammit, shut up!" Shadi bellowed from somewhere in the background. "Isis?"

"Remember what happened?" Isis asked abruptly. "You know the deal."

"Yeah. It went away somewhere. We never found where," Shadi replied, sounding mystified.

"I just found it," Isis said tersely. "It didn't leave us, just our circle."

"Is it Malik?"

"Gods no," Isis said, her heart racing. "Not yet. Do you have an estimate on how long?"

"Do I have an estimate? Woman, this is the first I've heard of this since – Kaisei, we need to have a talk!"

Isis snickered. "Look, I'm at the museum. Come find me. Aset keeps asking where I've put my big-eyed part-time boyfriend."

"Uh huh. I'm sure. Be right there."

"Hurry." Isis put the phone down and looked over her shoulder. Nothing. I'm imagining things.

Big-eyed part-time boyfriend?Aset piped up.

/Your very words./

I was drunk,

/So was I,/ Isis retorted.

I still have first dibs though,Aset said wistfully.

/Yes, yes,/ Isis replied as she finished her ascent up the stairs and pelted through the door. "I think I know what's going on and I'm going to get it fixed. I've asked someone to help me."

"Who is it?" Jounouchi asked, turning to look at Isis. "I mean, we're probably going to have to keep an eye out for them and all. And please don't tell me it's Pegasus, because that would be just creepy."

Bakura twitched slightly. "Isn't he dead?"

"Is he?" Yami asked curiously.

Bakura twitched again. "I don't know. Is he?"

There's something rather odd about Pegasus and that boy-thief Bakura,Aset concluded.

/They're both completely insane,/ Isis said dryly.

I meant that there's something they have in common,Aset argued.

/What, aside from the whole Millennium Item bit?/

Yes, of course! It's like they had something in common.Aset's speculating powers went into hyperdrive as her speech slowed.

Isis decided to ignore her. "I believe that Mr. Pegasus is incapacitated for the moment at least," she said gravely, albeit evasively.

"Thank you, priestess-seer girl, we would have never figured that out without your help," Bakura snarled.

Hm. Time to get off of this topic before he tries to kill someone. I have a hard enough time documenting the legitimate bodies down here that I don't want to bother with more extras. I'm running out of excuses and my brother's got someone soaking in the salt baths right now. "Is there any way that you think I can help you myself, knowing what little that I do? I would like a fuller explanation at the very least."

"You have a yami, right?" Jounouchi asked.

"Yes," Isis acknowledged.

Damn straight,Aset added.

/Thank you, Yami, now please hush./

"Well, don't kiss her or anything, because then you'll go insane. Right?" Jounouchi asked triumphantly.

Bakura made a peculiar growling noise as Yami turned an interesting shade of fuschia. "Not...quite."

Jounouchi looked slightly affronted. "What's wrong with my explanation?" Then he looked at Yami again. "Oh. Oh. Is...is he..."

"Oh, Ra, I hope not," Yami said quickly, gaining a rather large sweatdrop on the side of his head as he said this.

Correctly interpreting Isis's confused look, Bakura jerked one thumb at the other two boys and said, "The bastard pharaoh screwed his hikari royally last night. As far as I can tell, the hikari isn't a highly disturbed sex fiend. Mine, however, is. He kissed me, things went boom, and Ryou went bonkers. I want my hikari back, because he's been trying to kill me and I don't like it much."

"And he looooooooooves – " Jounouchi interjected.

"SHUT UP!" Out came the knife again.

Ooo, sharp pointy things,Aset said. Well, she was a yami.

"....wibble...." Jounouchi was now cowering under a glass case. "You'll split your stitches!" he yelped in a display of extreme and sudden levelheadedness.

"So. Your hikari is disturbed. Would you like a straitjacket? One of the spares I keep for Malik and Marik should fit Ryou," Isis said coolly, turning away from Bakura.

Oooh, you're devilish,Aset said. The boy wants to tie his hikari down and screw him senseless, and you're offering a straitjacket?

/Yes, I am. It keeps my brother quiet. Brothers. Whichever,/ Isis said maliciously.

Uh huh. And what about keeping me quiet?

/!!/

Aset snickered and retreated into her soul room.

Isis rolled her eyes. Now I know why the pharaoh gave me back my Item.

"Straitjacket?" Bakura asked, looking puzzled.

Jounouchi was having fits of hysterical laughter and rolling about on the floor during this exchange. "It...it ties your hands...it ties you up...oh my God..." He dissolved into wordless laughter once more.

Bakura's expression had turned from confused to horrified in less than two seconds. "No!"

"So no straitjacket then," Isis said coolly.

"Llp. No."

Well, that's got him cowed, Isis congratulated herself internally. "I'm playing with you, Bakura-thief, because what happened to your hikari already happened to me."

Bakura's head flew up. "What?"

The phone rang distantly from downstairs.

"I''ll explain in a tick. Don't break anything, don't touch anything, and don't kill anyone." Isis instinctively rattled off her cautionary statement that she used before leaving her brother alone anywhere and bolted for the staircase. Why I leave these people alone I will never know.

Do you think it's your part-time boyfriend, then?Aset asked.

/Maybe./ Isis hit the ground running and skidded to a halt in front of the phone, white robe and hair flying. She took a moment to smooth her clothing, then picked up the phone.

"Isis..." The voice was soft, teasing. "Don't worry about your clothing. You look beautiful as always..."

Isis pulled the phone away from her ear, stared at it briefly, then returned it to its former position. "This is the Domino City Museum. May I ask who is speaking?"

"I'm so hurt, Isis! You don't remember me? You've even got my yami upstairs! Tell me, Isis...what use do you find for straitjackets? I think they're so much fun. They can't even fight back! All they do is squirm and cry and scream. Oooh, and there's usually some blood, too."

"Ryou?" Isis's forehead creased as she reached back to smooth some of her hair.

One cold hand wrapped around her wrist and returned her unresisting arm to her side. The other hand traveled from her shoulder to her hair and began finger-combing it out. The whisper sounded in both her ear and the phone. "You have such lovely hair, Isis. Like silk. It feels a lot like yami's..."

Oh shit.

Isis slowly hung up the phone, then whirled around and shoved Ryou away from her. She stumbled back and around the desk, then along the wall and towards the stairs. Ryou kept following her, holding aloft the strands of hair that he'd ripped loose from her skull and smiling. "Isis...why run away? I'm harmless little Ryou...just like always..." he said breathily, giggling slightly on the last three words.

"S-somebody help me," Isis stammered, backing up some more and holding her hands out in front of her, feeling panicked. "Oh, please...somebody please help me!"

There was something dangerous about this new Ryou.

Something deadly dangerous.

Isis?

/Yami! Help me! Now!/

Isis? Isis!

There was a loud slamming noise as Aset flung her soul room door open and hurled herself out into the real world.

Ryou, amazingly enough, was completely unfazed with being suddenly face-to-face with a tall, dark-haired Egyptian girl wearing golden robes and with flaming red eyes. "You stay away from my hikari."

"And you get away from mine!" came the screech from the stairs.

Isis's eyes slanted over to the doorway. Bakura was stalking over to Ryou, eyes ablaze in red, clutching his knife resolutely. Jounouchi and the pharaoh were huddled by the doorframe, gaping at the scene with mouths wide open.

Bakura quite calmly walked over to Ryou and shoved him away violently enough to send him into the wall about fifteen feet away. "Don't move, hikari. Don't speak. Don't make a pass at anyone, or I will pick up your tutoring where I left off."

Ryou looked stunned, for once. "But I'm – "

"You stole power from me. It doesn't mean you rule me," Bakura said tensely.

Ryou blinked. "But it does..." He smiled slowly. "...yami."

"Enough!" Aset finally said loudly, pulling Isis behind her. "Isis has been pretending nothing's gone wrong with the balance of shadow powers because of what she went through. I know better. You two have royally fucked things up," she said pointedly to the two silver-haired boys bonded together by the Millennium Ring. "I don't know what you've done or how you did it, but you've somehow decimated the purity of your hikari," Aset informed Bakura. "And I don't mean physical purity. I mean that there's something mental going on in there. I'm not speaking as an outsider. It happened to us. I'm telling you the truth, here. He did some of it, but you started it."

"I...did this...I..." Bakura did a very nice, albeit unintentional impersonation of a fish out of water. "I didn't...I didn't...no..." The thief slumped to his knees, staring bleakly at the wall.

Ryou giggled and jumped to his feet. "That was fun!" he exclaimed. He leaned over and pressed a kiss to his unresponsive yami's hair, then vanished into the shadows.

"Where'd he go?" Aset demanded.

"Into the shadows, where he belongs," Bakura said tonelessly. "Where I sent him."

Needless to say, Jounouchi and Yami no Yuugi were still gaping.

Aset wordlessly laced her fingers through her hikari's, pulling them both back towards the stairs. The pharaoh blinked, gaped a little more intently, then dragged Jounouchi back, his eyes widening.

Those black threads...

Almost as soon as the door had slammed closed behind the four as the group hustled up the stairs, Bakura threw out his arms to the shadows creeping up on him and screamed bloody murder.

Fluffy: Tired. Bleh.

Little Brat Yami Bakura: Evil birds! Evil! mnch mnch But tasty!

Kitten: Don'tcha just love role reversals?

Celtic Guardian Princess: Faves? Mweeeeeeee!

a very angry person: Sadly, I am not good with fluff, and my hikari doesn't do the whole length bit. Um...the plumbing in hell's kitchen blew up. Is that a good excuse for the lateness?

Lady K.:twitch Noo! Not yaio! Anything but the dreaded YAIO! snickers

Saturn: Um. That's not good. proffers tissues

Chibi: More plushies! sparkly eyes

higashikaze: Guess who's back...right, shoot me now.

Yami) White Rain: He's fun like this.

molten-amber: I love small animals. For breakfast.

Kaial and Luke Skywolf: Mweeheehee...this will be useful when a large number of yamis assemble and...and...I'll tell you later. ;;

Gyakutenno Megami: Wow...lookit all the pretty reviews...

Fyredra: ANOTHER PLUSHIE!! Yami/Pineapple? blink blink Okay then!

Shamanic Guardian Lena: Yay, people are amused.

Cherry: flyingtackleglomps Fave story? Fave author? blinks happily I've been elevated to the status of my fave stories and authors? blinks happily again, goes swirly-eyed, and faints

firedraygon97: I live to confuse.

Slyphie Andrella: Thank you!

Duel: Yo. You're good at this. Keep it up.