Fate: Gwa. Here it is. Meef. One more chapter, then we're done.

Disclaimer: Not ours, go away.

I blink at Ryou. "Her…"

"And then me," Ryou finishes. "Ten minutes left, yami."

I nod. "She was…I don't know how to describe her, really. She was violent. Infectious. And…very human," I finish lamely. "More so than Aya. More so than anyone else I've ever met."

"Even me?" Ryou asks.

I smile. "You're beyond human."

He ducks his head slightly in response. "So I am. Tell me…"

…

It was the first time I hadn't woken up fighting or screaming or defiant. I just lay there on the floor, weak and broken.

Someone's breath touched my hair and someone knelt beside me. A girl's voice sounded in my ear, gentle at first, then more insistent.

A small, vague spark of anger stirred in what was left of my soul.

I reached up and grabbed her hand. I was physically fine, but wasted mentally. "Do you understand this?" I asked, summoning my memories of Darien and his intensive language training.

I heard a gasp, then a girl with a painfully familiar look to her moved into view, sitting over me. "Y…yes," she stammered. "L…listen, I'm going to go get you some help…you just appeared out of nowhere when I was walking. How did you get into these woods?"

"You're not going to get me help," I said, sitting up quickly. "Don't help me," I added. "I don't want other people using me like the fuckers who had me in the past."

The girl looked at me expressionlessly. Her eyes were liquid black, her features classical and tan, and her hair straight, coarse, and black. She screamed of Egypt to me.

"Where are you from?" I demanded.

She stared back at me. "I'm a slave. I don't know these things. Where did you come from? One of the camps?"

"What camps?" I asked, still confused.

She poked my face hard. "Where people lily-white as you come from," she snapped.

I lashed back, nearly hitting her as she leapt away with a fighter's grace. "It's not my fault I'm this pale! I used to be darker than you could ever be, little girl, and I've been enslaved for longer than your entire family line's been alive!"

She glared at me, clutching the Ring to her chest. It was dirty and covered in grime.

"Where did you get my Ring?"  I asked after a pause of mutual anger.

She jerked her head to a spot behind me. "There."

I turned, then gasped, leapt back, and nearly cowered behind a tree before I got a hold of myself.

There was a skeleton there with its head torn off and thrown across the clearing. It had been buried fairly deeply, but the uprooting of a nearby tree had obviously unearthed it. I bit my lip and remembered the savage triumph of desecrating the body of the older pharaoh, then hastily shoved that from my mind as I remembered what I'd been put through for the past thousands of years.

"My master sent me out to get it," the girl said, looking annoyed. "Everyone who's put it on died. Like that skeleton, I guess. There were more bodies, but they got taken away."

"Then why are you wearing it?" I asked, moving to my feet and realizing to my chagrin that I was only about thirteen in physical age.

"I'd rather die than be a slave," she hissed. "Don't you know the feeling?"

I started to laugh. "Oh, gods, I know…"

She stared at me. "How long have you been enslaved for?"

I smirked lazily. "For thousands and thousands of years, for my living sins," I whispered.

"You're my age," she remarked skeptically.

"Oh, no I'm not," I shot back. "Now. What's your name?"

"Number six," she said simply. "I'm my master's sixth slave."

I almost started laughing again at the irony of it. "What's your real name?"

"Haven't got one," she said sullenly. "Don't see why I should tell you."

"Because, number six, I'm going to set you free," I said carelessly. "Because no one's going to own your soul now but me."

Her forehead wrinkled. "What do you mean?"

I took two steps forwards and grabbed the Ring, rubbing off some of the dirt. "You wanted to know where I came from? I came from inside this thing, where I've been sleeping ever since my last mistress died. I've been kept as a slave for thousands of years, and I'm not going to keep going now. So we're going away from anyone who might try and use me. That includes your people."

"That's impossible," she scoffed.

Weak and dilapidated as I was, I almost didn't have the strength to keep up the devil-may-care attitude. "You don't believe me? Fine. Go ahead. Go be a slave. Condemn me to six more fucking years of hell!" I screamed at her. "Go sacrifice yourself, and me too. I'm offering you freedom!"

She stared. "Really?"

I nodded, mentally and slowly running through the old demon-summoning chants. "Take me back to your village, number six, and tell me your real name."

"One minute," she said, and ran back to the skeleton. She surveyed it silently for a minute, then picked up the skull and trotted back over to me. "My name is Perdita. Mention it to anyone and you get a flogging from my master, who alone holds the keys to my soul through my name. Or he did."

I smiled, wide and reckless. "A flogging will be the least of anyone's troubles soon."

I destroyed the village where she was held captive, and part of the forest around it. I incinerated the skeleton of the pretender, though Perdita kept the head. I burned and burned and burned until I fell unconscious, and vanished into my soul room for ages.

Perdita had all but dismissed me as a god or hallucination of some sort when I reappeared, and I spent nights in fervent vigil to Ma'at and Seshat for allowing me to not only destroy a whole area of people who would have enslaved me, but to sleep away a year after it. In most people, a year would have been an age to sleep. For me, it was a brief but welcome vacation, when compared with the hundreds of years I spent comatose inside the Ring.

I thanked the demons every day for still coming when I called them, even when I wasn't their rightful master.

I told Perdita everything that first time I woke up. She was fascinated by Aya, who she thought paralleled her in everything but her level of ambition. I didn't see the resemblance. Aya had been desperately, painfully undead. She wasn't alive, but she wasn't dead either. Perdita was alive. Alive, and very definitely Egyptian. We weren't far from Egypt, if she'd been sold from there.

I wanted to go.

I wanted to spit on the pharaoh's tomb and live in the desert and steal things to survive and cry late at night in the melted wreck of my old home. I wanted Egypt, with the smell of the sand and the overwhelming Nile-stink and papyrus and perfume in the hot air. It was cold here. It was cold everywhere. I wanted to go home, and by the time I convinced Perdita of it, we only had four years left.

I didn't tell her about her deadline.

It didn't seem fair.

Even when we had long, empty times of traveling, when she aged painfully quickly on the road, I never told her that little end of the story.

Five years passed before we made it to Egypt. Five years in total of my life on this earth once more.

Maybe I'll tell you more about them sometime.

We followed the Nile,  searching for the palace. I lost track of days, then, without anything to mark my way.

That's the funny thing about deserts. Anything can happen there one day, and the next day, you'd never see a trace of it.

Not even the fall of civilizations.

I knew where things were, but they were gone. Buried. Lost. I spent aching nights clawing through the sand looking for something, anything.

I couldn't find a thing.

Perdita couldn't keep me sane, but she kept me at least in one piece. She restrained me when I clawed at myself, quieted me when I screamed, and fought off the jackals who I would have let feast willingly on my flesh.

"I'm old," I whispered one night.

"You are," Perdita acknowledged, her face outlined by fire. Desert nights are terribly cold, but they feel different than the cold of anywhere else. This is just a lack of heat. Anywhere else, cold is a tangible thing, something of its own. Something you recognize and embody. In Egypt, when Ra hides himself for the day, he takes the warmth with him, because he's a god and he can do that.

I always thought that it was a little selfish of him, even though most of the time losing the heat was a relief.

I didn't burn, I tanned, much to Perdita's incredulity. My old, ragged clothes started to fit again and look natural.

I realized that I was regressing, going back to living as I normally had for all those years back then. And I also knew that one night, everything would be turned upside down again.

I just hadn't expected it to be so bloody soon.

But when you're measuring time by decades and generations and centuries, a matter of months barely matters at all.

"Perdita…it's still…" I muttered, rolling over.

Perdita didn't have orange eyes.

"You're not Perdita," I said dumbly. "Oh God."

"What do you think about this one?" Kaisei asked, his switch to my native tongue delightfully welcome. "The real thing?"

I sat up, passing one hand over my eyes. In my preoccupation with the time and my hatred of the past few hosts, I'd not remembered that eventually one host would be the true thing. I'd only ever focused on the death.

"I…don't know," I whispered.

Kaisei looked at the ground. "You should."

"I don't want to admit it," I replied.

"Are you getting squeamish?" he asked, one eyebrow raised.

I shook my head. "Tired."

"After this, you can rest," he said softly, going over to Perdita.

She opened her eyes and sat up. "Huh?"

"I meant to tell you," I said quietly, going back to Perdita's language. "But I didn't know it would be so soon."

"What's going on?" she asked.

"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 told her. "Are you ready to be put on trial?"

She blinked, then looked at me. "It was too good to last, you know. Even the gods don't condone having two slaves running around on their own." Black smoke hissed from her mouth as she spoke, drifting onto the Millennium Scales.

"And will you seal her destiny?" Kaisei asked.

"If she is a pretender, let her die by my hands," I said, looking directly at Perdita. I translated for her as the knife materialized in my hands under the dark cloud produced by my speech.

She grabbed my hands as I drew nearer, forcing me to push the knife into her chest.

"Why did you do that?" I demanded.

She smiled. "I wanted to be free."

I took one step back, then another as her body dropped to the ground.

"The sand will preserve her," Kaisei said gently.

I nodded, feeling my flesh sizzle away and dissolve into the Shadow Realm. "It's what she wanted her entire life," I replied. "So I'm not angry because of that." I lifted my head and smiled. "I'm angry because I got so close to home, and then had it taken away. I'll rule one day. I'll control everything," I said. "I'll be the master, not the slave, and nothing like this will ever happen…"

I think my mouth dissolved right about then, because blackness washed over my eyes.

…

Ryou looks confused. "What did she do to save your soul?"

I pull him closer. "She brought me back to Egypt…and she made me remember that someone, in the end, isn't going to just die after a few years. It made pretending to be alive have a little merit, this time…"

Fluffy: And there you have it. The last of the past hosts. And I might even be able to get something else started. I originally thought I'd write the last chapter of Yadonushi, but…enh. Maybe Torikorosu. We'll see. Oh, and we got 100 reviews! Yay!

SweetMisery: Yes, he did.

Scarlet Oasis: I'm meaning 'soulmate' as in someone who completes Bakura not only in looks and in random narcissistic snogs, but in thoughts, abilities, ethics, the like. Someone who makes him whole, rather than using him as a shell. Something like that. Glad you like!

Higashikaze: Well, there ya go. She's dead. ;;

Rowan Girl: Sorry for the wait.

Liviania: Ah, sorry, sorry. sweatdrop

Inktail: Mana was just…eesh. We had to bleach out our brains after that one.

kit[kat]: Thank you! blushes

Raiknii: Heh. You've read IoV, yes?

DreamingChild: Hmm, maybe that's it…I haven't updated in ages, which could do the trick.

Yami Hitokiri: Well, think about it. Some omnipotent superpower prettyboi pops out of a gold pendant. Not everyone goes for the fangirl approach – and those that do end up like Mana. --;;

Sailor Comet: Yea, that about describes them. And the state of my mind after writing them. =.=;;

Kerei Kitsune: Sorry I took so long, I had a bad two weeks! ;;

Inverse-chan: Sankyuu!

lilmatchgirl: Yeah, I figured there was a reason. A fairly big reason. Hence, I expanded on it. ;;

Duel: Well. 100. Exactly one hundred, actually. We seem to be off by 7 between the stats page and this one. Which doesn't seem to be uncommon. But commentary aside, add to the number! ONLY ONE MORE CHAPTER LEFT!