Fate: It lives. Rightoh, a couple of things to remember. First is to visit
this link: www.
Take out the space between www and ujournal.
Second is that this is a narrative. Bakura can't cover everything in an hour, and to accommodate for that, I will be creating a companion fic called Kiokuryoku. He is telling this story to Ryou. It's not really a flashback as it is a storytelling device.
Disclaimer: Not ours. Read it.
&
Ryou blinks at me a couple times sleepily, then stiffens and looks anxiously at the clock.
"Can't you go any faster?" he pleads softly.
I too check the clock. "I'm going as fast as I can," I reply. Speaking in a normal tone seems outrageous now, and our voices drop to whispers, terrified and longing. "I'm leaving so much out..."
"But you're telling me something too. You're telling me so much, and I..." He swallows convulsively. "And I don't...I don't want to..."
I grab hold of him and don't let go, closing my eyes and burying my face in his hair. He believes me, believes with an aching passion that so resembles the screaming desperation to communicate something, anything to him...
I sigh into the white strands pressing against my skin, feeling bright hot tears stinging on my eyelids. "Continue," Ryou murmurs into my shoulder. "Keep talking. Don't stop. Don't think about completion, or telling a proper story, or anything. Just keep talking until midnight. Keep talking until it's all over. Don't stop. Don't let me go. Just keep talking..."
His voice cracks and trails off as his fingers dig into the muscles in my shoulders.
I shudder. "After Aya...after Aya...it was...him."
"Tell me."
...
I drew in a deep breath, determined not to react at all. I forced myself to be still as I returned to this world with knives in my hands and the taste of all three hosts' blood in my mouth.
I opened my eyes and looked straight into the sights of a crossbow.
A short, pale man was wearing my Ring over some very nicely tailored clothes. He was talking angrily, but I ignored him in favor of inspecting him, as I would have a potential
victim in the streets all those years ago. Jewels glowed on his fingers and around his neck, as well as in piercings on his body. He was much more well-fed than I could ever have
dreamed of being, and a general air of softness around him spoke of money to me.
I looked at him dispassionately as my body became insubstantial. /Go ahead,/ I said softly, numbly. /I don't much care./
The bolt quivered in the wall, shuddering with impact. I didn't even bother to turn and look, merely watched dreamily as the man tried to shove me aside and instead went flailing through me to slam into the wall. I then did something I hadn't done in years.
I retreated to the room in my soul that had housed me all throughout Micky's torment.
I stumbled into the room blankly and sank down onto the pile of rags that had served me as a bed, curling in on myself and staring at the wall. With Zane, I had been able to forget everything about Micky, and with Aya I had forgotten everything but fear and insanity and living breathlessly on the edge of success and failure at all times. But now...I was doomed to be the hallucination of a rich man for four long years.
Four long years...
I wondered if possibly I could sleep for all that time.
The door to my soul room slammed open and the man began screaming.
I stared blankly as he rushed at me, hands flailing. I was quite honestly in a state of shock,
and thus barely recognized that he was raining blows upon me and screeching incoherently.
Finally his babble began resolving itself into the mental link that I had with all my hosts as his voice gave out. //Foul creature...begone from my mind! Out! Out, you heathen! I shall kill you! You are a worthless ghost and not fit to be near me!//
I blinked hazily. /Don'tcha need a killer for hire?/ I asked. Anything to get me out of this empty hell, where mocking ghosts whirled around me and dragged me back into the darkness...
The man stopped raving and flailing at me with an odd abruptness that should have warned me then and there of trouble.
I was somewhat beyond caring at that point.
//You will serve me?// he whispered, clutching my throat and staring into my eyes with a strange, intense fire.
/You can speak like this with ease?/ I shot back.
//The mind-voices subdue demons,// the man hissed. //This was passed down from ruler to ruler, until the cities fell and their bastard offspring rose to rule. I am one of their
descendants, and I have the mind-voice to control...you.//
My eyes widened. /Aya...Zane...Micky...which of you handed me off like a legacy to these people?/
//You speak Her name with the utmost casualness,// the man growled. //There are legends of the mystic queen's pet, a silver-haired, red-eyed summoner-mystic. Both the summoner and the mystic queen disappeared shortly after her city was restored. And I...I have the charm to subdue the summoner! All my life I have studied…" He lunged forwards, pulled me to my feet. "Serve me," he breathed, his accent of a dead language almost monstrous in its error. "Kill for me as you killed for the mystic queen."
I tried to shake him off and was rewarded with a sharp blow to the side of my head. "Do not fight me!"
"Let me go! How could you not be consumed by darkness on the spot? Let me go! You stupid, disgusting old man! Get your hands off me! I'll kill you! I'll fucking kill you! Don't you dare touch me!" I was screaming, hysterical almost. It didn't help me though. For all his soft bearing, this was a strong man…and we were in our collective minds, where we were only as strong as our wills.
And mine was easily broken.
Months of training, baiting, crowing, and torment later, I was a demon doll chained to his chair, without the ability to even retreat into my soul room. I could kill with a scant thought, summoning demons for him. I was ordered to love him selflessly and wildly, to accompany him wherever he went. He drew from me an amalgamation of what I had been to all my former hosts, and in a tiny, hidden part of my soul I welcomed it. I welcomed being commanded body and soul, I welcomed not having to have the responsibility for myself. I welcomed being a pampered, murdering doll if only my mind would disappear in the process.
He taught me his language and refused to speak to me in my own. He said once, in a fit of anger, that it was the language of the old, dead gods, and that he flouted them and their ways.
He told me that his name was Darien, early on. Later, he claimed to be the mystic king, the successor of the mystic queen.
Once he told me he was God.
"…and so, you must understand that we can do nothing for you. We regret this deeply, but I do not have the funds. Please understand that if we could obtain them somehow, we would — "
"Shut up!" The woman who had come to see Darien snapped, cutting him off. "My lady doesn't want your excuses, she wants what's owed. There's a girl with your foul blood in her sweet body, and she's dying. Now sell one of your pretty rings, or even your pampered whore next to your chair, but don't give us your bullshit!"
I didn't even react to being called a pampered whore. It was what I was. I simply stared at the floor.
And waited.
"If your lady insists, we will indeed give her the gift of my pampered whore," Darien said thoughtfully. "However, the gift may not be quite what she thinks it is."
He rested one hand on the back of my neck.
I didn't even have to look up to summon a demon for him, though I flinched inside my mind at his touch on my skin and the sound of his voice when he called me his whore.
"Perfection," Darien said when the woman dropped to the ground, her bones clinking on the tiles. He waved a messenger over to collect her remains and wheel them out, no doubt back to the one she'd served.
I stared at the blood rippling across the tile, my fingers slowly clenching in on themselves.
"Go," Darien said. "You want it, demon? Have it."
I slowly lowered my head to the floor and began licking at the blood, shame echoing forgotten in my mind.
He kept me like that, killing his business clients and opponents until he rose to the highest position in the city.
It took him years. Years of mind-numbing work for me, summoning demons, being forced to eat only human flesh, years of killing, years of being told I was nothing, years of being owned body and soul by a man who was no better than the little boy who'd put on my Ring and used the instrument of the gods as a mindless toy.
Years of being…I don't want to say.
Years of waiting to die.
I looked at the latest victim, then lowered my head to the ground and drank.
I'd tried to kill myself a couple times. It had never worked. I couldn't die without killing my other half first, and if my other half wasn't in the world yet…then tough luck for me.
I couldn't kill him.
I couldn't end it all.
So I counted years like days, drifting past quicker and quicker. Time was becoming irrelevant, as I'd found that I had first lived over a millennia ago.
Small things don't stick in your memory when that happens.
He trained me like his heir, teaching me science and to read and the history of his kind. I learned how my world had been destroyed after Yami had reigned. I learned about how Egypt had been assimilated into the Roman empire and its culture and language spread. I learned how the old gods had fallen.
And when I learned that, I was sure that Kaisei would not reappear to save me from this hell.
Never believe anything you read. I was told that early on, in my days as a tomb robber. Tombs will be mislabeled. Most tomb robbers only know the essential signs, and wouldn't understand the complicated phrasing that priests use. Never trust what you read, because you don't know what they really mean.
I tried to explain this to Darien once. He hit me until I stopped talking. His beliefs weren't those of someone whose life was in constant danger. His were of someone who is secure in their knowledge, who has nothing to fear and everything to gain.
I wasn't sure if I could believe my eyes when I woke up one night and saw a tall man with red eyes shaking me awake.
"You don't exist," I whispered, my old language feeling rusty and dead on my tongue.
"Neither do you," he replied. "Will you miss this one?"
"You don't understand," I argued, not even struggling to sit up. I knew the chains wouldn't let me move from my position. "You don't exist. All the gods died."
"You never believed in them anyway, tomb robber. Heretic. Blasphemer. Thief. Sinner." Kaisei spoke my titles without rancor. "Murderer."
"Should I believe in them?" I asked.
"You don't have a choice," Kaisei said warningly. He held his hand over me, then pulled it up. I moved with it, my arms and legs moving through the shackles like air.
"I'd forgotten that," I murmured.
"You've forgotten everything," Kaisei said, gently drawing me to my feet and holding me upright. "Stand."
"I don't remember how," I breathed.
"Then hold on," Kaisei told me. He reached out his other hand and waved the Scales over Darien's prone body.
Darien woke up, noisily as always. "Eh? Wha? Take your hands off that demon, there! He's dangerous! Explain what you are doing in our room at once."
Kaisei withdrew his hand. "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, you will be granted eternal life and a wealth of power. However, 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," Kaisei said, his voice devoid of emotion. "Are you ready to be put on trial?"
"I am God. There are no other gods before me," Damien said angrily. "Do not speak of the old ones!"
Black smoke gouted from his mouth to settle on one of the pans of the scale.
"Will you seal his destiny?" Kaisei asked me.
"If he is a pretender, let him die by my hands," I whispered. I clutched Kaisei's shoulders as blackness tore itself from my mouth and a knife materialized in my fingers.
I pushed off of Kaisei and lunged at Darien, the knife sinking into his heart. "I'll see you in Hell, God," I said, the room whirling around me as my fingers began to splutter and fizzle out of existence. "You and the pharaoh bastard. No one will be god on earth but me. No one!"
Darkness.
...
Ryou is huddled motionless on my lap. "I…I…that's horrible…"
"Now you understand," I whispered into his hair. "It's not just the pharaoh I hate…it's everyone. Everyone who owned me, everyone who broke me, everyone who…who destroyed me. every time I build myself back up, someone breaks me. I…I learned to stop building."
"Don't stop. Never stop," Ryou said. "I won't let you fall apart."
"You may not have a choice."
"That's not for either of us to decide," Ryou said softly. "Not anymore."
&
Fluffy: Well then. We're back. Dear god, the review replies…
MeeLee – I use Linux, so Microsoft Word isn't always available. Sometimes I write on other computers, like I'm doing today. Sorry.
Wingleader Sora Jade – Ssssh! ^_~ Oh, and thank you for the toothnumbing stuff!
Hikari-neko – Whoa, whoa, wait, there's still two more hikaris before Ryou…
Yami-hitokiri – I'm sorry, I took even longer this time. Horrible writer's block, I had.
Saturn Imp – Mmmyeah, that was kind of the point. ^^;;
Panda X. Bear – Yes, I took even longer this time, I'm very sorry! I was just having…problems.
BishounenzAngel – Thank you!
cool – Err. Hope I didn't make you regret your request.
Sailor Comet – Yep, three female hosts. I was trying for a rushed feeling there. It happened a couple thousands of years ago and Bakura doesn't have a lot of time, so he's crunching the less important things for Ryou's benefit. Check back on Kiokuryoku, it'll expand more on the 'crunched' bits of Yadonushi!
Liviana – Ahahaha…sorry, sorry. I also don't want to fill these chapters with less important stuff. I'm trying to stick to the one or two really important episodes per host. Like I said, Kiokuryoku will be full of things that Bakura skipped over!
SweetMisery – Heh, at least someone does.
Dark Mystic Dragoness – *suddenly feels very, very unsafe*
R Amythest – Oh, he does plenty of attacking. You'll see.
Yukoma – Yes, I do like having that part predictable. You know it's going to happen by the end of the first chapter, so it's not so much of a big focus as the rest of the chapter is. Sorry if it's annoying though, and thanks for the cookies!
Silver Queen – Yes, odd is a good word for this.
Dawn Shadow – Hopefully FF.net's fixed all these problems (YAY!) and thanks for your suggestions!
EVIL-lolz-girl – I'm glad someone out there likes blood and gore…
Starzpen – Oh good, I'm glad she came across that way. I liked her.
higashikaze – There you go!
happy yaoi lover – Sorry for the wait.
DreamingChild – Y'know, I never really thought of them as OC's. Hmm…
Shinnyu Kudzu – Co-writer? *blushes* Email me and…we'll talk. Or something.
Kerei Kitsune – Ooops, better update at KG too then, hadn't I…
tsutsuji – Yeah, there just isn't enough non-AU Egypt Arc-ish stuff. Although I'm not sure whether or not this counts as an AU…
The Dark One – Ehehe. Sorry about the wait, I really am…
Melissa – ^_^ Yay, 9.5!
ds – Yay, it worked! Yes, he is confused, and I'm really trying to get that across. Hee.
Duel: Ooookay. See all those reviews? Yeah. Go add to them. Now.