The Purpose of a Heart
Chapter Two:
"Hey, have any of you heard from Bakura lately?" Joey asked curiously as he tossed the dice and moved his game piece forward. He and his friends were at Ryou's apartment, playing Monster World on his custom game board. The TRPG was by and far much more fun now that they weren't risking their lives on the outcome.
"Not for the past couple weeks." Ryou said. "It's weird, I called to invite him to come play, but there was no answer."
"I thought Bakura loved to answer the phone." Mai said, puzzled as she rolled the dice. "He said he always answered just in case it was a salesman."
"That's why I think it's so weird." Ryou replied.
"Maybe he went on vacation." Yugi suggested.
"For three weeks?" Tea asked. "He doesn't have that much money."
Yami wasn't joining in the conversation, because he was wondering if maybe that murder a week back had something to do with Bakura's sudden disappearance. The news had reported the girl had been killed with a sub-machine gun, and everyone that knew Bakura knew that he had one beloved object in his life, his Uzi…a sub-machine gun. Yami'd decided to give Bakura a second chance when he'd asked Mahaado to incarnate him into his own body too, and was now wondering if that had been the best idea, given the current circumstances.
Still, he truly thought Bakura had gone good enough, at least, to live in society. He couldn't see the evil spirit killing anyone unless they'd done something to make him mad. And while it was possible that Cynthia had done something that Bakura found worthy of punishment, he'd thought Bakura had a little more self-control than that.
"Yami, it's your turn to roll." Joey said loudly. Yami jumped and snatched the dice.
"Right."
"Tonight you'll shoot Mr. Foley." the boss tossed the photograph of the man named to Bakura. "You're to kill him the same way you killed before. Payment is 200000 yen now if you do it perfectly. He has a wife. If you want, shoot her too."
Bakura scowled, but put the picture in his back pocket anyway. He'd been dreading this, the second murder. He didn't like killing for no reason, and he really hated doing anything that he was 'ordered' to do. If it weren't for the fact that Yami would be in danger, he'd have already quit. And blown up the Compound too, (his personal nickname for the business building); he imagined the scene with satisfaction.
"Any questions?"
"No." He muttered, breaking out of his daydream and reaching for the shoulder strap to clip to the Uzi. "I got it. I'll be back in a few hours."
Blair was watching from the corner of the door. Bakura had long since figured out that since Blair was partially in charge of hunting down the people the Boss wanted, he got paid according to how well other people did. Bakura was almost tempted to accidentally-on-purpose screw up just to annoy the body-builder, he'd developed a serious dislike of the man. A dislike even more than that of the Boss. Some of his hatred came from how Blair had been the one who kidnapped him, but mostly he hated the way the guy strutted around as if he were king of the world. The steroids that Blair constantly downed to keep his muscular physique only enhanced his egocentrism, and Bakura despised people who were that stuck on themselves.
He briefly contemplated taking the Uzi and mowing down both the men, but that idea passed. He didn't know if anyone else in the Compound knew about Yami. If they did, no doubt killing their leader would result in payback. Though Bakura privately figured no one would miss Blair, he still decided that a sudden retaliation was a bad idea. With a sigh he adjusted the strap over his shoulder and left the room to go do his job.
A few hours later found him perched in the branches of a tree, several yards from the house, but Bakura wasn't worried about the distance. By now it was pitch black out, and although the house itself was lit, the trees outside the fence were bathed in shadows, the perfect place to hide.
Checking the glowing face of his watch for the time, he shifted on the branch, gun in lap, a small pair of binoculars trained on a large window. He'd been waiting for quite a while and as of yet, he'd seen nothing. He wondered how much longer he'd be waiting.
Then there was a movement from inside and he saw a woman walk past the window into another room. A few moments later, a man entered the room with the window as well and Bakura zoomed the binoculars in. It was the same person from the photograph.
There was no guarantee how long the man would remain in the room, so Bakura didn't waste any time as he lifted the Uzi from his lap and peered down the barrel. Luck was on his side, the man was still in the room, he appeared to be talking to the woman. A pang of guilt was trying to force its way into Bakura's mind, he shoved it back and locked in on the side of the man's head. He actually felt sort of bad about what he was going to do.
"Sorry about this, Aaron." He muttered under his breath. "But as far as I'm concerned, Yami needs his life more than you need yours."
With one last check on his target, Bakura pulled the trigger. He felt the gun recoil, but the shot was silent due to a silencer. The shattering of the glass window seemed louder in his ears than the gunshot had been. Within a split second, he saw a spray of crimson liquid and the man fell to the floor, not moving. He heard a scream from inside, and jumped down from the tree, slipping around the back of it and heading off through the thick trees of the empty lot, toward the back roads. He didn't feel like hanging around, or shooting the woman. He'd done his job, and that was it. Emerging from the lot, he climbed into the open door of a dark station wagon. A younger man, in his twenties and whose name was Louis, stepped on the gas of the get-away car and sped down the empty back road just as sirens could be heard in the distance, heading for the house.
"Everything go well?" Louis asked in curiosity. Bakura shrugged.
"If you count killing someone in front of his wife, 'going well', you could say everything did. Slow down Lou, if we're caught speeding I'm sure the police would be really interested in my Uzi."
The get-away driver slowed. "Okay your highness."
"Don't cop an attitude with me Louie, I'm not in the mood." Bakura muttered.
"Sor-rey, Mr. Sunshine." Louis said. "What's eating you?"
"Maybe because I just killed someone, wouldn't that make you a bit snappy too?"
"Me? Sure, it'd freak the hell out of me. But I thought you were into the killing thing. That's what Blair told me."
"Don't trust a thing that guy says. His job seems to be to recruit new 'employees' for the Boss's fan club, for whatever reason. He spends his whole life kissing-ass just to make his boss happy." Bakura spit. "Besides, he was probably high on pills and mouthing off."
"Bitter much?"
"You can't talk Louis, you agreed to take this job. I got forced into mine."
"But you're obviously good at it!"
"Just cause a person's good at something doesn't always mean they want to do it. I'm only in this…whatever it is…for one reason, and that's to make sure that…well, just to make sure a friend of mine doesn't get hurt."
"That's a noble cause." Louis said, looking somewhat impressed. "You're a good friend."
Bakura didn't reply to that at first. Then, "No, no I'm not. I'm a really bad friend, actually. I've tried to kill the people a few times and to be honest, sometimes they still annoy me. I'm really just doing this for this one person…"
"Yami?"
"How do you know about Yami?!"
"I hear things." Louis grinned into the rearview mirror. "Word is that he's your boyfriend or crush or something."
"Crush only." Bakura admitted sullenly. "He's kinda the person I tried to kill the most often."
"Boy, you really are a mystery. In love with someone you tried to kill."
"It's complicated." Bakura defended.
"I dunno, it's still a way more noble cause than mine."
"Why are you here?"
"To save my own backside. Blair kidnapped me and they told me take this job as a get-away driver or die. So I just agreed and went along with it. I'm an agreeable sort of person. School wasn't going so well, and my girlfriend had recently broken up with me for this idiot baseball player." Louis stared glumly ahead. "I'm really not brave or anything."
"I'm not being brave either." Bakura replied.
"Yes you are, protecting your boyfriend-"
"He's not my boyfriend! He actually very much dislikes me."
"Fine, your impossible crush then. Anyway, you're still protecting him rather than yourself. That's brave."
"You think so?"
"Yeah, definitely."
"You want your old life back, huh?" Bakura asked.
Louis was silent for a moment as he drove. Then, "Yeah. College wasn't the most fun place in the world, and the food sucked, but I'd rather be there with my friends, or at home with my parents. They've got to be really worried about me. I feel bad about what I might be doing to them. I'd really like to see my family again." He paused. "So, what's your story? How'd you get here?"
"Because I was a show-off." Bakura said dryly. "I was at the shooting range since I was bored, there was some hot-shot with a blue ribbon there, bragging about how he won some contest or another. So I challenged him to a little shooting contest with a few of his friends, we all put up some money, he put up his fancy ribbon. I beat the pants off them, took his ribbon and my earnings, and split. Next thing I know, I got these crazy people coming after me and forcing me to become an assassin for them."
"That's a tough break." Louis said sympathetically.
"No kidding."
"I think it's neat though that you're so talented." Louis continued. "I heard that machine guns are hard to shoot. You just sort of shoot and hope you hit something with bullets going all over the place."
"First off all, an Uzi is a sub-machine gun. Secondly, mine is still its original semi-automatic make. One trigger, one bullet each time. You've obviously been watching too many movies with machine guns in them. And third, I always hit something. And that something would be my target." Bakura felt obliged to defend his pride. "'Course, it was that fact that got me stuck in this dump."
"So we're both here because we got forced into it." Louis replied with a sigh. "Our old lives don't really matter for much, I guess."
"Hmmn. Guess you're right, we are in a similar boat. Tell you what. If I figure a way out, I'll bring you along with me." Bakura offered.
"Seriously?" Louis looked over at him.
"Yeah, why not." Bakura shrugged. "You seem like a decent person."
"Thanks!...But still, what're the chances? We're just stuck in this till we die, get killed…or until the Boss gets whatever he wants out of all this madness. I can't figure it out myself. I heard a rumor it's got something to do with revenge."
Bakura had no reply to that, and Louis filled up the next few minutes with a bunch of facts he knew, everything from how to hotwire a car to the exact coordinates of the Compound.
"Why did you memorize the coordinates?" Bakura asked, eyebrow raised.
"I was bored." Louis replied cheerfully. "I like to memorize things." Bakura shook his head.
Louis turned into the dark garage under the Compound and parked. "Hey, that stuff could come in handy someday."
"If you say so."
"What a cynic. See you later Bakura."
"Later." Bakura got out and walked over to the elevator, pushing the button for the third floor and getting inside, feeling glum, his get-away driver's previous words burned into his mind. Was that how it was going to be? Stuck in this little five-story building, killing people till he himself died? Maybe the four pictures the boss had shown him were only the first people to die, maybe he had a whole stack more waiting. Sticking his hands in his pockets, he exited the elevator and wandered down the hall to his room. According to his watch, it was only a little after eleven. He fished the key to his room out of his pocket.
"Very good." Bakura froze with the key in the lock as he turned to see the boss walking down the hall. "Breaking news story, fifteen minutes ago Aaron Foley was shot and killed. No witnesses, no evidence." He held out an envelope. "Your pay."
"Thanks." Bakura muttered curtly, taking the envelope and opening the door to his room. "Good night."
He closed it firmly behind him and fell backwards onto his bed, tossing the envelope of money in the general direction of his dresser and the TV set. Shrugging out of the Uzi's strap, he set the gun down and rolled over to bury his face in the sheets and tried to block out the past few hour's events. Why him…why, of all the stupid people that could shoot guns in the whole world, did it have to be him that got chosen to be a hit man?
He sat back up and emptied his pockets of their pictures and binoculars and everything else, dumping his assorted possessions into a drawer and, after cleaning it all out and polishing the metal bits, returned the Uzi to its case, shoving it under the bed. All the while he thought about what Louis had said, about a rumor that the reason this multi-millionaire had gone through so much trouble to set up this whole following was because of a revenge wish. Revenge on who? For what? There was still no connection between the two people he'd been told to kill, and if killing them was the goal, he couldn't figure out what all the other people were doing in this building. During dinner in the dining room on the first floor, he could count at least thirty different people. They couldn't all be assassins. Hadn't the boss told him he was the only one? There was something very strange going on in this place.
He considered what Louis had said about bravery. He certainly didn't feel brave. Brave people didn't murder strangers for no apparent reason. Although Bakura wasn't much of an expert on the subject of goodness, he was fairly sure that killing people didn't qualify. And besides, however forgiving Yami might be, this was the sort of thing that couldn't be forgiven. Those people were dead and no amount of apologies would bring them back. It was just depressing.
With a huff, Bakura sat up. "If I ever want a chance with Yami, being these people's 'employee' sure isn't going to help. Just let them try to hurt Yami, I'll kill them all before that'll happen." He said surely to himself as he left the room and made his way toward the boss's office. "That's right, it'll be a cheerful day in hell before I let that happen." He banged on the office door, and the boss opened it with a look of mild surprise.
"Hello Bakura. Do you want something?"
"Yeah." Bakura replied stubbornly. "I want out of this job."
To Be Continued…
NOTE!! I posted my Yugioh humour fic today as well, but since I wrote it in 'script' form, fanfiction dot net won't host it, so I posted it elsewhere. It's basically a long crazy fic full of suggestive humour and a lot of random jokes. And some pointless violence too. It is yaoi based, just to warn you. Here is the link to it: Enjoy, and please review it!!
Author's Notes:
Poor Bakura…his crush hates him. (At least, he figures as much.) Why do we fall for the people we can't have? That's a question for the masses. I think some big company should host a world-wide contest: see what the most popular reasoning is behind humanity's falling for people we know don't like us/don't know we exist/can't be with. Hey, maybe I should host the poll myself, at least on a small scale. Awright then, everyone that reads this, tell me your reasoning behind it!
Here I go again, my infamous reader polls. It's a curse.
I'm sticking with my resolution for once, so here are replies!
You Know Me: xD Your reviews never fail to make me laugh. Yay for the Uzis! Nope, since Bakura is still at the point where he figures that Yami hates him, it's safe to say they don't live together. This is actually set rather soon after they got separate bodies from their hosts. I'm sorry to make you fight for your clothes…I'll see what I can do for Michelle-chan's birthday. ::wink::
Hershey-Kiss: Well, it wasn't your advice alone, but you did help. I had you and someone else request a Yami/Bakura fic, and I wanted to write one too, and I actually began this fic several months ago…it's been sitting in the 'dead' bin for all this time. But it's now revived, and partially thanks to you. Be proud! ::niko:: Eek, the lovable smart-aleky Bakura…he's so fun to write for. I'm glad you like it! And yes…layers are definitely going to be in here!
Well, I go back to school tomorrow. ::sigh:: I was sooo enjoying the time off, too. Writing every day, sleeping in, watching movies…the good life! Oh well. Each day is one day closer to when KidWB will play episodes 163 and 164. I hope this New Year treats all of you well, and I'll see you next week!