The Purpose of a Heart
Chapter Eight:
His door opened early the next morning. Bakura shot to his feet and reached for his gun. He'd kept it assembled and close by all day and night, half-certain that eventually the boss would notice the printer on and would figure out that he'd been in his office. But he was determined to protect the papers he'd found, even if that meant shooting every single sorry person that stepped foot in his room. Those papers could be his way out, and Yami's salvation. No way was he going to let anyone get hold of them.
"Greetings Uzi-boy." Blair walked in, holding a piece of paper.
"Greetings moron." Bakura returned, not setting the gun down.
"Third murder time." Blair thrust the paper toward him. Bakura took it.
"You can leave now." He said.
"What did I tell you about respecting me?"
Bakura tapped his chin for a moment, thoughtfully. "Uh…yeah, I remember this conversation. If I recall, that was the same night I kicked your ass. What, you want me to get after that nerve again?"
Unconsciously, Blair lifted his hand to defend his shoulder. Bakura laughed.
"I'll respect you as soon as you give me a good reason to." He finally said, turning his attention back to the Firearms catalog.
"I'm the boss's right hand man, he tells me everything, and you don't get any information at all. I'm ten times more important to this establishment than you are."
"Now there's an honor." Bakura didn't even look up.
"Grr…" Blair chewed on his lower lip, irritated.
"Look, just tell when I'm meeting Louis for this job, and get the heck out of my room. You're contaminating the air."
"Fifteen minutes."
"What?" Bakura did look up for that.
"You'd better be down in the parking lot in fifteen, because that's when you're off. No more of this sissy killing at night, you're going to strike during the day this time around."
Bakura wasn't too concerned about that. Killing during the day was no different than at night, and really, it made things easier because this way you could see your target better. What bothered him was that the last time he'd been told to murder this same person, that had been a set-up and he'd been told Yami was dead. He didn't want to repeat that.
"Is this another trick?" he finally demanded.
"Like I'd tell you if it was." Blair waved his hand and left the room. Bakura scowled, but got out the strap for the Uzi anyway. It wasn't like he had a choice.
"This is going to look so totally natural." Bakura spit in annoyance. "Carrying a gun around town."
"Look on the bright side, at least this time it really is a murder and you weren't set up." Louis suggested.
Bakura just scowled deeper.
Louis pulled over onto a dirt road. "And it's an easy one too. The guy lives alone in a house with no neighbors. All you have to do is wait for him to come home, shoot him, and make your break."
"I don't like going inside people's houses to wait for them. I get bored." Bakura complained, pulling gloves on to prevent his leaving any fingerprints.
"Ask the boss to get you a video game to play while you wait."
"Tetris isn't any fun on a small LCD screen."
"Geez you sure complain a lot. Look, here's the cell phone, call me when you're done."
"Sure, sure." Bakura got out of the car and waited till Louis drove off. Then he walked over to the house, pushed open a window, and settled down to watch TV and wait.
It was two hours later when a lock clicked in the front door and it opened. Bakura got to his feet and slipped around the corner to meet his victim, gun ready to shoot.
The person screamed, and Bakura froze with his finger on the trigger, staring into the face of a woman, probably in her twenties still, as she shrunk back in terror.
"Oh shit…you're not the guy." He finally said aloud.
"P-Please, don't hurt me…I'll give you my money-"
"I don't want your money, just calm down." Bakura said frantically, mind racing. "Look, just…sit down against the wall."
The woman complied, pulling her skirt down around her feet shyly. She was quite young, probably just out of medical school. He guessed that she was a medic of some type, due to the emblem on the left side of her jacket. Having been struck into terror by the sight of the gun, she fell silent. Bakura glanced around anxiously.
Now what? No one told me there was a chick that lived here…I'm not supposed to kill her, I don't have to. But if I let her go, she could go to the police, tell them my description…people know me, eventually everyone will figure out that it was me that killed the other people, it'll be on the News and the police will be after me…the boss'll be really pissed off, and Yami…Yami'll know what sort of person I am…
He chewed a fingernail and glanced down toward the woman. I don't have to kill her, she's not my target. But if she tells the authorities…the Boss'll be so damn mad…not even my ability as a shooter would be able to save me, he'd send someone to kill Yami…
The answer was simple.
Bakura raised the gun. The woman began whimpering. "Please, don't hurt me, I'm just a nurse! Mr. Holmes is at a meeting for his club, I'm just his nurse!"
If she told anyone I was here, the boss would send someone to kill Yami…
"Please, please don't hurt me!"
I can't let anything happen to Yami.
"I really am sorry about this." He muttered, and fired twice before he even looked up, having-for the first time-squeezed his eyes shut when he fired. There hadn't been much danger of missing with his target at point-blank range and the fact that she had been frozen to the spot in fear. And, somewhat to his relief, the first shot had torn her whole neck apart, so she probably died quickly enough. Slow and painful deaths belonged only to those that deserved them, he thought.
He lowered the gun and pulled her into the other room to prevent anyone else that might walk in from seeing her. If one nurse showed up, who was to say there wouldn't be others? Bakura had enough bullets for a whole party, but he wasn't sold on the idea of killing every freaking person that walked in, so he hoped she would be the only one.
It was only a half-hour later when the door opened again and this time the real target walked in. Bakura didn't even let the man make it two steps in before firing. The puzzled look on the dead man's face suggested that a white-haired guy with an Uzi was not who he expected to meet when he walked in. Bakura didn't bother to hang around, he walked outside and called Louis, who was busy goofing off at the Arcades and Gambling shop down the street. After a good deal of shouting over the sounds of pinball machines, Louis got the idea, and said he'd be there in just a minute. Louis hadn't lived in Domino, so he didn't have to worry about being recognized.
Bakura closed the cell phone up and sat down to wait. Off in the distance he heard sirens, but paid no attention to them, until they began to sound closer and closer. Suspicious, he stood up. The sirens were growing steadily louder. Now worried, he dashed toward the thin string of trees separating the house from a neighborhood nearby. Just as he concealed himself behind one, two police cars pulled up.
Bakura cursed to himself. Someone must have heard the woman screaming. Waiting for Lou herewas out of the question. Soon the cops, who were presently knocking politely on the door, would figure out that the only people in the house were dead, and Bakura had no intention of waiting around for that to happen. So he did what any sensible gun-toting person near a crime scene would do. He left.
Louis eventually found him down in the warehouse district of the city, sitting behind a loading dock, bored, and having done far too much thinking.
"There you are!" He called out the window.
Bakura got in and shut the door without comment.
"What are you doing way over here, anyway? I pulled up at the place to find it swarming with cops, I thought you'd been caught!"
"I never get caught." Bakura retaliated, his pride stung.
"What happened?"
"I guess some Good Samaritan heard the chick screaming-"
"What chick?"
"The one that walked in while I was trying to watch Quiz de Pon." Bakura glanced down at his hands. "I killed her too. It wasn't a difficult choice. She might have told the police about me, and if the boss found out, Yami would be in danger. The answer was right there." He shrugged.
Louis nodded.
"Lou, you know what the hell of all this is?" Bakura suddenly asked.
"What?"
"The hell of it is that after all of this, Yami is still never going to care about me." He tossed his hands in the air with a bitter laugh. "And I fell in love with him, of all the people. It's like a cruel joke. All my life, I never loved anyone. I was just cold and angry and I hated the world. And I wanted to kill every sorry person who crossed my path. And in doing so, I was glad that Yami hated me. It was just the way things were. And what's really funny is that after all that, it's Yami I'm protecting. The person I wanted to kill and hated more than anyone else…the truth is that deep down, I still truly love him. So much that I changed to try to be someone he would like. So much that I wish I'd never done some of the things I did. All this for a person that will never be able to return how I feel." He folded his arms. "That's the hell of it. Life sucks and then you die. I guess that saying is true."
Louis shook his head. "I don't think Yami hates you."
"You don't even know him."
"Look at everything you've done for him though. You're putting him ahead of your own freedom. How could he hate you when it's obvious you care so much?"
"Louis, I think it's a wonderful thing that you can live in a fantasy world where rainbows connect the clouds and people never get hurt and everyone that loves gets loved back and it rains pretty sparkly fairy dust. But that's not how MY life works. In my life, there's no rainbows, there's no sparkly fairy dust, people get hurt for stupid reasons, no one gets what they deserve, and love is just a wish." He closed his eyes for a moment and shook his head. "In the end…that's all it is." He muttered. "An illusion we create for comfort. In the end, love is just an impossible dream and we should just let it go and stop fooling ourselves."
Louis watched him in concern. He'd never heard Bakura talk that way before. His tone wasn't an angry one either; it was just sort of empty and sad. "Bakura, you can't go around thinking like that. Love has to be worth more than what you say, because if it wasn't, you wouldn't be doing this."
"You're right!" Bakura began laughing. "Because no matter how stupid it is, I still love him! Even though he hates me and will never be able to understand why I've done what I have, and even though fate has conspired against me at every step, I still love the guy!"
"I don't think that's funny." Louis said seriously. "I don't think that should be a joke. Are you on drugs? Because you're acting more spazzy than usual."
Bakura stopped and shook his head. "Nope, I'm not on drugs. That's the scary thing, I came up with all this stuff without the influence of anything. So I've got nothing to blame it on." He folded his arms over his knees. "I think I'm loosing it. All this stuff…it's getting to my head. Something snapped in me today when I shot the girl. Before it was just something I had to do. Something I had no choice about. And then today I had a choice. No one made me kill her. No one was threatening to hurt Yami if I didn't. And I made my choice and my choice was to shoot her, and I hardly had any second thoughts. I feel sort of numb, but no matter how hard I try, I can't make myself feel guilty, when I know I should." He rested his chin on his arms, eyes downcast. "I wanted to change, and I thought, for a while, that I really had begun to. Now I think I'm still the sadistic freak I always was. I'll never be anything else, so I don't know why I'm trying. Maybe I should just give up." He rolled his head to the side, eyes now trained on the sky outside the window. "Maybe I should just run away and let them do whatever to Yami. That's what I would have done before."
"No!" Louis pulled off the road and turned around in his seat. "You can't do that! Bakura, I know you're all upset right now, but you'd eventually regret it if you ran away. I don't know a whole lot about who you were, but I know you're not a bad person now. You can't be as bad as you say you are. I've seen you risk a lot just to protect Yami. And I know that, no matter what you might say, you'd never do that to him."
They stared at each other for a moment. Finally Bakura stretched out his legs and sighed. "And now I'm being lectured by a college student." He said. "But as much as I hate to admit it, I suppose you have a point. You're right, I can't run away. I wouldn't be able to live with myself if something happened to him." He sighed again, frowning. "I just wouldn't be able to."
"Well, now that you're done letting out steam, would you mind stopping for a break?" Louis asked. Bakura nodded. They had planned this earlier, to stop someplace so that Bakura could tell Louis in privacy about what he'd found on the computer, and so that he could rid himself of the incriminating videotape he'd stolen.
They parked at the other end of the warehouse district, near a house being built. No one was there because it was a Sunday. They got out of the car and walked a good distance away before Louis asked,
"So, what did you find out from his computer?"
"They're building something." Bakura replied,breakingthe video in half, tossing itinto a dumpster and sitting down. Nearby was a telephone pole, pieces of paper fluttering from it. Old advertisements and posters people had stuck on it, no doubt.
"Do you know what it is?"
"I'm not an architect. I couldn't tell the plans to a tree house from those of a mansion unless someone told me which was which. But it's something big, there was a lot of different calculations."
"Did you find blueprints or something?"
"No, I found a program on his computer that had them. Exactly what it's for, I don't know."
A gust of wind blew one of the tattered pieces of paper off the pole and it skittered along the ground. Louis got up to retrieve it.
"It's just a piece of paper." Bakura called. "It's biodegradable."
"But it might be a Missing poster for someone." Louis protested, jogging after it. "It shouldn't be left on the ground, it could be for someone that was kidnapped. Maybe it was put up by the parents of a missing kid, we can't just leave it on the ground."
"Probably someone just lost their dog or something." Bakura said, unconcerned. "Or are having a yard sale."
"Nah, it's one of those "Have You Seen this Person" posters." Louis replied, pouncing on the paper and dusting it off against his jeans. "Lessie who's missing today…oh God, I don't believe it…"
"What? Is it someone you've seen before? Is there a reward?" Bakura stood up and walked over, curious now.
"I sure as heck have seen them before. It's a poster for you, Bakura."
"What!" Bakura snatched it and studied the picture and name. "Hey, it is for me! Who the hell would go around putting up posters of me? What am I, some sort of missing pet?It's not like anyone really misses me…" He scrutinized the paper. "Shoot, they got my height wrong, I'm two inches shorter than that…I'm 25 years old now? Do I look 25? And this picture is terrible…who made this?" He glanced down at the bottom and saw three phone numbers to call. One he recognized as Ryou's number, which made some sense. Ryou WAS his other self after all and they shared a last name, so it was reasonable he would be listed as family, but what about the other two?
"What are you doing?" Louis asked as Bakura snatched the cell phone from his pocket and began dialing. The second number turned out to be the Hotline for Missing People, a place that would report to the police if you told them you saw someone. Hitting the plunger button on the kind male voice that kept asking a quizzical, "Can I help you?", Bakura punched in the third number.
The person picked up after four rings, a low, calm voice asking politely, "Hello?"
Bakura knew the voice within a second and hung up before the other person could say anything else.
"Well? Who was it?" Louis asked impatiently. "I wanna know!"
"It…it was Yami." He replied, staring at the phone in almost disbelief. Why would Yami's number be on the poster? That didn't make any sense, he wasn't family, and of all the other people…it hit Bakura like a semi truck. "He does care about me! He really…cares about me."
"I hate to say I told you so…but I did." Louis said smugly. "I did tell you he cared."
"Remind me to thank you one day." Bakura said. He turned back to the pole and tugged one of the tacks out, spearing the poster and carefully putting it back up.
"What are you doing that for?" Louis asked curiously. Bakura looked away and up toward the sky again, before smirking and replying,
"They went through all the trouble to make posters for me…I shouldn't leave them lying around on the ground."
Louis smiled and laughed. "I'm glad to see you have your spirit back."
Bakura have Louis his trademark sideways glance. "Oh, don't you worry, I'm still in on trying to find a way out. Don't think I've given up."
"And I'm still willing to help!"
But, almost as if to mock their attempts at secrecy, the moment Bakura returned to the compound and reached the third floor, the boss emerged from his office and announced,
"Bakura, I need to talk to you."
To Be Continued…
Author's Notes:
Happy Valentine's Day everybody! Guess what? You just got ch. 8 as your gift from me to you. :niko:
Quiz de Pon is another creation of Maki Murakami's. She had her characters participate on a game show called that in her manga, and the name was catchy. So I borrowed it. Murakami-sama, I'm sorry I keep borrowing all your ideas! I promise one day I'll get an original idea of my own! If I ever publish anything for money, I swear I'll actually use an idea of my own!
Poor Bakura. Everything had to go and get messed up. The guy just can't win, can he? Well, at least he knows Yami cares. I think his reaction is cute. 'Cute' really isn't a good word to describe an evil spirit…but heck, his reaction was cute, there's no other word. :shrug: Bakura's not so sadistic anymore, anyway. Now he's just unstable. :laughs: Aw, he's so likeable at heart though! He's also so very anguish-y in this chapter. I can't blame him, he was bound to start to lose it eventually. I mean, after all that shyt…who wouldn't start to lose it? You could see something of an emotional break-down starting to come in ch. 6 after all, it all just came to a head here. It was difficult to write him seeming so downhearted, but I like the way it came out. In fact, I really like the way it came out. This is a first…yeah, this was a good chapter, it was fun to write.
Replies!
Hershey-Kiss: Aww, it's okay. The demn Author Alert thingys have done that SAME thing to me with authors I am watching, it drove me up the walls. Ack, I just love the ctrl-alt-del combo. It's nice to know it's there to save my bum when I screw up. :laughs: Paper jams do make for great humour…yay, Doom arc RULES! Alister is such the bishounen, really. My dad thought he was a girl too, and Varon is funny. It's just such a nice arc. :niko:
You Know Us: Oh dear...I'm sorry Michelle-chan! I didn't mean to nearly give you a heart attack over your not-crush. :laughs: Of COURSE not...not a crush at all...Hehehe. Aww, Louis does seem a lot like Joey, ne? He's like, part Joey and part Shuichi. (Charrah from a different series). He's likeable at heart though. Well, nomatter what, we must save Yami, ne? Michelle-chan may kill me if Bakura does not...though of course this is all for someone she has no crush on. :nods: I hope you've enjoyed this chapter, I thought it was a fitting V-day sort of chapter. Ee...I don't wanna know what she'll do if she gets impatient...:skuttles off:
Well everyone, I have to say, I hope you've liked this one. It was going to be posted tomorrow but I went through the trouble to get it up today for you! Aww, and plus, it makes for a cute V-day chapter what with Bakura's emotions over Yami and all. Once again, happy Valentine's day to everyone, andto Bakura and Yami!
Later-