Fate: Whoo! Go me and my updating prowess! *tries to get everything done before Pennsic* Loving Doctor Jekyll will probably go up tomorrow night, and Reborn to Die has hit the point where major plot changes occur, so I need to do some rewriting. Hopefully I'll finish before Pennsic, though!
Disclaimer: We don't own it. Now read.
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"So tell me," Ryou urges softly. "It'll help. I promise."
Odd, that he's the one reassuring me. I should have thought that it would be the other way around, the way things are going right now. "I know. I told...once I knew what was going on, I told some of them...and it helped. A little," I say, studying the rug with forced fascination. "But some of them..." I clench my fists. "Some of them I relished killing."
Ryou laughs, and the laughter is only slightly hysterical. "You haven't changed much since then, yami."
"I know..." I knot my fingers in my hair, ripping some of the fine strands out of my scalp. It hurts, and the pain grounds me, makes me focus. "I loathed my first host," I blurt out. "I didn't hate him. Hate is too close, too personal. Hate makes me want to get in there and kill them. I didn't...not him. I just wanted him so far away from me that we'd never even have the potential of coming within a hundred kilometers of each other, ever again."
"Why?" Ryou inquires.
"His name was Micky, I think, and he was a kid when he first put my Ring on, just like you..."
...
I blinked. I was lying on the ground, like I'd been flung across the room. I ached like it, too.
...why couldn't I remember what I was doing there?
"Mommy! Mommy! My necklace exploded! Mommyyyyyyyy!"
"Darling, what is it?" A woman's voice. Cultured. Egyptian, but accented. "Oh my...darling, why don't you go outside for a bit? I...there's something in here that needs to be done in private."
"But Mommy...who's that?"
"Mommy will tell you in a minute, dear. Go on." It sounded like the woman was kicking the whiny kid out. Good. My head hurt too much for me to deal with his complaining.
"Who are you?" Sharp now. Ow! She kicked me! The bitch...
"I don't remember." Did I say that? I can talk?
"Where did you come from?"
"I don't remember." I don't. That's odd. I think perhaps I should remember.
"You're lying."
"My head hurts." There. That's the truth, certainly. Ow! And now my ribs hurt; she kicked me again! "Stop that!" Automatically reach for my knife--
I'm carrying a knife?
Apparently so, because she screams. It hurts and I say so.
In return, she gathers up her courage and kicks me in the head.
"I'm Bakura, tomb robber extraordinaire and the cause of your execution," I rattle off with a mocking bow and charming smile before I vanish into the shadows...
I'm wearing enough gold jewelry to make me at least fifteen pounds overweight and carrying even more, laughing as I dodge and vault the bodies I left behind, fleeing from the ruined tomb...
Screaming, kicking, fighting, snapping with my teeth and clawing with my nails at my captors as they tie me down and pray over me, writhing and shrieking as my soul is torn loose and someone stabs me in the center of the chest, burying the knife to the hilt. My coat's blood-red to hide injuries...
I flung myself to my feet, screaming, clutching my head. "What did you do to me? Where am I? What did you do?" I cried out, tearing at the walls and flailing helplessly against nothing, writhing and convulsing in my mad agony. "Not me not me not me not me!"
The woman's running out of the room now.
I curled in on myself, whimpering with my arms over my head and my knees drawn up to my chin. I still hadn't opened my eyes.
A whiplash bit into my shoulder. I yelped and rolled away, shrinking into a corner and shielding my face. I gradually opened my eyes.
Shit. What looked like the entire indoor household was ganging up on me. All were armed, some more effectively than others. The whip holder was advancing on me again.
I pressed myself back against the wall and wished that I was in my hole in the sand, covered with desiccated boards, dirt, and more sand. I was safe there. People could stand on the boards and never know I was there...
The whip lashed right through where I'd been and scarred the wall behind me as I vanished.
I gasped and sat up. I was in a locked stone chamber, with the floor covered in sand and soft rugs. The walls were lined with all my favorite weapons and some of my favorite pieces of treasure.
"Where...where am I now?" I gasped, lurching weakly to my feet and looking around incredulously. I staggered to the door, unlocked it, and wandered outside.
And found myself huddled next to the whiny little kid who'd woken me up.
"Mommy! He's my age! Is he my friend?"
Blink. Huh? How am I the same age as some little brat?
I look around warily, then down at myself. My clothes are loose on me, and--how can I have missed this?--the ground is closer than it should be...
"I've changed," I whimpered.
"Sorcery! Look! Listen! He appears out of nowhere and vanishes into nowhere as well!" someone said. "His voice is not like ours! He is pale!"
I am? I know my hair is silver, but-- I automatically looked at my hands, and my mental voice died.
My skin was bleached to white once more.
I screamed and leapt away frantically, scrabbling for the safety I knew was gone.
"His teeth are an animal's! And his eyes--they are so red! He can't be human!"
"I want him to be my friend!" squealed the kid, attaching himself to me. "I'm Micky, who're you?"
"A famous tomb robber." I couldn't resist bragging, even though I didn't know where I was or what was going on. "I'll loot all the royal tombs yet, and I'll never be--" I broke off in the middle of my usual speech which I reserved for dramatic escapes when it sank in. I had been caught, and I'd been killed...
I tore my coat open and stared at my unscarred chest.
"I'm...alive?" I whispered.
Then I blinked. If I was untanned, and still alive, then maybe...
I traced the scar on my cheekbone--or I tried. It was gone.
I promptly threw my head back and started laughing wildly. "My identification marker gone! Ra's touch on my skin erased! I've cheated death! I'm alive...and the pharaoh won't know me now! He'll have no idea it's me...Yami, you bastard, I've won!"
"Yami?" Everyone crowding around me drew back in consternation. "The...the one who destroyed five cities in a final battle?"
"Oh, that's right, he did do something like that, didn't he?" I asked carelessly. "Stupid of him." This was blasphemous, intoxicating...wonderful.
"But...o spirit, that pharaoh has been dead for centuries..."
"What?! How can he be dead? He put me in--" I stopped and stared intently at the little kid--Micky, he'd called himself. "He put my soul in that thing," I said, pointing at the necklace he wore. It was a hoop holding a pyramid, on which was etched an eye. Five points dangled off of the lower half, and a leather cord was fed through the upper half.
The Millennium Ring, he called it...a Ring to trap me forever, a maze I'd never escape, he said...and he laughed when I screamed...
"I am a spirit," I said with some surprise. And more than some fear. "Well...well, at least Am'mit will never eat my soul," I said shakily.
"Are you gonna be my bestest friend? To play with me forever and ever and ever?" Micky demanded, tackling me and screaming into my face.
Gods above, how those words would haunt me.
Every day after that for a year, the stupid brat hammered on the door of what I began to call my soul room. He never thought to put the Ring back on so I could be physical again, but I didn't much care. Refuge was easier to seek in his mind than in the outside world. I could bar the door and cover my ears and polish my gold and wish myself out of this eternal torment.
I don't know what that kid did to me, but it made my soul rebel on the basest level possible. He treated me like his own personal slave, his toy, his possession...I wasn't human, I was 'my spirit' or 'my thief' or whatever he felt like calling me that day. I almost forgot my name, I almost forgot my profession, I almost forgot everything but that I was owned body and soul and that I wanted my bratty little master dead.
And I got my wish at the end of a year.
I heard tapping at my soul room door. Not Micky's enthusiastic hammering, just polite tapping. I didn't move. Didn't do anything. Just lay there with my arms over my head, the perpetual tears of exhaustion and fear running down my face. I was stripped of all dignity, of all sense of self. What did it matter if I cried?
The tapping stopped, to be replaced with a swishing noise and the sound of feet on sand.
Someone picked me up off of the floor and brushed my unruly hair out of my face, gently drying the tears that were streaking my hollowed face. "This may be the only time that you will consider my visit a mercy, or it may be so always, but now, I think I am as a god to you." It was a man, a tall man with curly black hair and orange-red eyes. He was carrying a golden set of scales with an eye carved into it, an eye that resembled...
I looked at the Ring that weighed heavily around my neck. It had appeared there sometime over the year and I'd never taken it off...
It was the same eye.
The man nodded. "I am what you are, yes, but I still have duties. We both still have power...power from these," he said, taking one hand from my shoulders to heft the Scales briefly. "And in time, you may learn to use it." He smiled. "I tell you all this now because you may loathe me when I next see you."
"I don't loathe anyone but Micky," I said tiredly. "I barely remember anyone else to loathe."
The man's expression was oddly gentle. "You will, I'm sure. You will."
"If...if I'm supposed to loathe you, then...what's your name? And why are you here? How did you get in?" I ask, my curiosity stretching painfully after a year of disuse.
"My name is Kaisei, I can be wherever you are when my duty requires me to do so, and...and I am here to judge those who wear the Millennium Items and to engineer or supervise the termination of all pretenders." He sighed. "It's not a pretty job, but I must..."
"Pretenders?"
Kaisei put an arm around my shoulders and drew me out of my soul room. I was too weak to fight, even if I had wanted to.
I blinked and found myself standing in Micky's bedroom, in the real world. It was midnight.
Kaisei snapped his fingers, awakening Micky instantly.
"Potential pretender who may have desecrated the purity of the Millennium Ring, I now put you on trial. If you are truly the one destined to wear the Ring, as you may well be owing to the fact that you have not been incinerated upon your wearing of this sacred item, but you still may be a pretender and unworthy to continue life. If you are thus, then this servant of Seshat will terminate you immediately following your Judgment," he said indicating me. "Are you ready to be put on trial?"
So I am a servant of the records and of fate, I thought.
Micky rubbed his eyes. "Is it a game? Oh...my thief! Have you come to play with me?"
As he spoke, black smoke ghosted from between his lips and clouded on one end of the scale, which sank.
"And are you ready to seal his destiny?" Kaisei asked me, orange-red eyes hooded.
"If he is a pretender, let him die by my hands," I found myself saying. Equally black smoke drifted from between my lips and formed a glimmering ring on the other end. Micky's end of the scales didn't move towards being balanced at all.
"You have been Judged as a pretender," Kaisei said sadly.
I looked at my left hand. There was a knife in it.
"I don't mind murder," I said as I plunged the blade into Micky's heart, right up to the hilt.
"You may not always feel that way," Kaisei answered.
"You know, that's what they did to me," I said, looking at the knife in Micky's chest, at his dead eyes. I could feel myself dissipating from the feet up, and oddly enough, it didn't bother me. "They stabbed me here," I said, touching my heart with a hand that fizzled and went right through my chest. I looked up at Kaisei. "Will I see you again?"
"When your second host has completed two years with you, we will meet again," Kaisei told me quietly.
And then I was lost to the Shadow Realm again, mindless and bound in blackness...
...
Ryou blinks at me. "You'll dissolve if I die?" he asks.
"I always did," I reply.
"I never...I never tried to own you like that, did I?" is his second question.
I shake my head and smile, slightly painfully. "No."
"And...and did Yami Yugi really laugh when you were dying?" Ryou blurts out.
I stare at the far wall. The kid's attached to his friends, too... I remind myself. He likes that pharaoh, but I don't know why. No accounting for taste, apparently...
"He was considered a god," I say carefully. "And what I did back then was one of the worst things a human could do. I angered the gods and condemned myself to...to hell, I suppose. And the pharaoh hated me, because I got away with everything I wasn't supposed to and no one could catch me. He still hates me. Just our luck that we ran into each other, this incarnation. It doesn't always happen that way, or it never did. All of us yamis...we seem to have all found our hikaris at once, you know. There's something...something big going on here."
"I see," Ryou says. He sounds...oddly sad. "Were all your hosts...that bad?"
I think of my second host--oh, Hathor, my second host--and laughs, though the sound is painful and almost wrenched out of me. "No. Hathor mark my words, no." I smile, but the smile is warped and twisted. "I said I loved some of them..."
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Fluffy: Dewd. Fifteen reviews for the FIRST chapter. Arigatou gozaimasu, minna! *faints*
yugiohluver: Sugar! Whee! First reviewer--thankoos!
Melissa: Bakura's going to rush. Or something.
Imperial~Monster: Yeah, I know, he's a tad OOC but then again, wouldn't you be?
Kyoko-san: Yay! I have creeped someone out! *dances*
Kit: Shwee. Fun is good. Fun is your friend. ^_^ And glad to know I'm on your potential-fave-author list. ~_^
Rumpole: Thanks!
Yuki-chan: Bakura goes 'poof'? And all the fangirls and fanboys kill me?
Dragona 2007: Soo...whaddya think?
Wingleader Sora Jade: *ducks shotgun* Kyaaa!
R Amethyst: But I wuuuuuub the idea of past owners, chwee~e?
Dark Millenia: Um...dun cry...kudasai? It's not that bad...I hope?
A Ferret Called Silver: 'Yadonushi' means 'host', usually in the parasitic sense of the word--Bakura uses it to refer to Ryou in the manga (I think).
higashikaze: You can never review too much. *grin*
PanDora: Yay for interestingness!
Saturn Imp: Apparently, so did I...
Duel: You know you want to be like the others...c'mon, follow the trend, review in a frenzy...*begins hypnotizing the audience*