Chapter 25: Motive

Kaede brushed her pale fingers along the side of the jagged hole, taking in the warm dessert blossom scent that wafted through it, ignoring the sticky blackness coating her fingers. She listened to the soft breathing of the spirit; deep inside herself she felt the tiniest prick of comfort come from that sound. She watched through that hole at the long stretching miles of sand, her eyes half open with due weariness, when suddenly her short attention was captured by a mass of small floating things in the distance.

Vigilantly, she watched with a small curiosity as they all came to her wall in short surges of the wind, until finally she could make out what they were.

Bubbles, thousands upon thousands of orange/ yellow bubbles caught on the dessert wind. Each sphere held a bit of sand, and yet it still floated much like a soap bubble. When one drifted lazily toward her, just to be in reach, she carefully shoved her arm through the dripping black opening and lightly captured the ball in the palm of her hand.

The moment she touched it, it sparked into a vivid light, and her eyes rolled into the back of her head as images suddenly flocked her vision.

(…)

The room was dimly lit by two dull burning candles at opposite sides of the square billowing clothed walls, but the fires were far enough away that the red silk would not catch. The wind outside moaned violently even still, trying anyway to burn the tent down. The old woman, her hair a dark gray with a once beautiful tanned olive face clothed in light silk clothes and stones, who sat behind a light wooden table, only glanced casually at them, being far use to this already. She had been traveling for years now, taking her business where ever it called, simply following the winds to where the beaconed.

The flap of cloth used as the door fluttered open by strong sandy gust of dessert air, letting in the cold night air as well as a small human figure, clothed in a dark red robe, worn and stained by travel, entered her hut. She didn't look up at her new customer, but let him draw forth to her table of his own free-will. The ones that came to her where the ones that deserved her services, not the ones with doubt. She listened to the sand shift under the person's feet and to the chair creak from their weight being placed on it before she lifted her ivy colored eyes. She was slightly surprised by the young boy looking back at her.

He was very young. His clothes were baggy, meant for an adult, not a child, but she could see he wore them more by choice than necessity. His bright white hair was very hard to miss, spiky and untamed on the boy's head, his face smooth, except for a small scar beneath his right eye. His eyes, she noticed, were not the brown orbs of a normal child. Nor did they look over the strange objects littering her table like a regular client. They were hard and rough, like they had seen far too much for such a short life. He had the eyes of a man that had been to battle and survived.

She watched him with placidly as he reached into his oversized pocket and dropped a handful of gold coins onto the table, his expression stern and demanding, anger flickering in his eyes.

"Tell my fortune." He commanded in a dark childish voice. The elder nodded indifferently, taking the coins without bothering to count them off the cluttered table and stashing them into her pouch. Usually she'd be suspicious of such a scene, a child asking her services with a lot more gold than normal, she had been scammed before in her younger days, but something was very different about him.

"Hold out your hand." She replied in a haggard old voice. He hesitated, but after a moment reached out gingerly across the table. He flinched as she grabbed his small hand with her own wrinkled hands and turned it forcefully over, palm up. She held his hand for a long time, her eyes studying the lines, before she finally pointed with the long blood-colored nail of her index finger at a certain wrinkle.

"You have traveled many miles…you are on a quest?" The boy nodded slowly. The lady was silent for several more moments.

"Someone has done wrong by you. You seek revenge of a certain man of power…a king, perhaps? And know you've come to seek my council?" He nodded again. She was silent for several more moments.

"I can only tell you what I see in your future, young sir. I can not tell you of which direction you will take, but of how it will end. Are you sure you want to know of your fortune?" She always asked this of every single buyer she had ever had. It was her only warning, a sort of leave now while you still can. She wasn't shocked when the boy gave her a single nod. The young were always arrogant.

"I see a man, a tall man, a vicious man. He had lived for many years and is cold at heart…I see this darkness falling to a bright fierce light. The young man with a thousand year old mind holds a ring of power, a strong weapon against the great evil; he will attempt to fight the King. The King of Hatred. He will meet his death only in the embrace of a woman he loves, when the light embraces the dark. The world will be justified when the light shall seek the darkness in a thief's clothing. When the seven objects of power are untied, the one thing most desired of the heart will be granted, and balance will be restored…"

The woman let go of the youth's hand, finishing her work, her expression now dreary and sad. She watched the boy's eyes flicker and dart as he comprehended the message, a riddle that will plague him for all his life until the very end, as all fortunes do. She was silent as he rose from the chair, gazing at the boy as he left, her expression telling anyone who could look at it clear enough that she knew full well he'd misunderstand it. All of those who seek the future do, and he was far younger than most.

(…)

Kaede let go of the sand-filled sphere with a look of deep sorrow on her face, watching it curious eyes as it floated away from the opening, and her pale slightly stained fingers. For what seemed like an eternity she simply stayed, her arm hung lazily inside of the opening, dark liquid dripping sluggishly on her arm, her head resting on the sticky wall, wearily waiting for time to pass, listening to the steady breathing of his deep slumber, wanting to dream her own dreams. Instead the grayness swallowed all of them up, including most of her memories. All she had were a few faint flickerings of the white haired man as 'Dad', a pretty brown haired girl with a lovely singing voice as 'Christa', a tall smirking spiky brown haired boy with a happy smile as 'Mat'. She did find however, one memory more than just a flicker, something she could reach out and hold for a time before it slipped out of her grasp. That was T.R.

For some reason it was far easier to hold onto what T.R was and how he acted than all the others. It was the only thing she actually felt other than this huge vague blankness. She wasn't sure what it was, but she found it far more appealing than the grayness. She clung to it in the mist, as she let her mind wander in the enchantment, lost with only an odd emotion to hold onto she didn't ponder about much. She just let the current take her.

It wasn't long before he spotted her. Bending down, he looked into the jagged space, past her arm, and onto her pretty face. Her eyes were closed, her breath soft and pleasant; she looked much like a china doll. Like something you'd want to cuddle with.

He smirked. Carefully, he attempted to press his arm through the remaining space, but found it impossible. He couldn't even get his hand over to the other side. Removing his black stained hand from the wall he instead, comforted himself by taking her limp arm and placing it around his chest, as the sand around his feet moved higher and higher up until he could sit down and have the bottom edge of the gap at the back of his head. He leaned back until his back met warm stone, and curled his fingers in hers as he carefully rested his head against her limp.

For a while after, he kept his eyes half closed, his cheek touching her skin, as her hair ruffled at her every exhale, studying the equally blackened but smaller hand in his own grasp, and smelling the strange earthy unique perfume that was hers and hers alone. He was oblivious so the countless yellow orbs dancing among the hot dessert wind, no longer plagued by the death filled memories for one peaceful night, being too intoxicated, whether it was her or the alcohol would never be truly known, until finally he closed his soft brown eyes and surrendered to the darkness, where he dreamed no more of this.

Complete and utter darkness greeted a similar pair of brown eyes, more like an oppressive monster than a serenity filled abyss. That blackness seemed to be like a huge eye it self. Lidless…all seeing…all knowing. He blinked once, and tried to remember where he was. Had he waken up on the floor of his bedroom again? Or could he be somewhere else, having blacked out again, and not being found as usual? He expected to hear Yugi's voice any minute now, either on the answering machine or above him somewhere, saying something like, 'Bakura, we're worried about you, we found you so and so…'. And he'd wake up enough to answer his dear friend with a sheepish nod or a somewhat blank stare, telling them he was fine, there was nothing to worry about, he knew exactly what he had been doing when he suddenly nodded off.

Only he never usually did. He had wondered where the countless hours had gone. Why he had awakened mornings to find mysterious scratches on his body, or why he felt so weak. He could barely believe how many times he had woken up, standing on his feet, not knowing where the hell he was, or what he was doing there in the first place.

He brought his hand to his face, but instead of finding tight soft skin of a young boy, his fingers brushed tough, slightly wrinkled skin, that of an aging man. He wondered for a moment, where that shy boy had disappeared to, a shocked scared moment, when suddenly the last thirty years hit him like a brick to the head.

He wasn't sixteen. He wasn't living in the home of a man that was never really there. He wasn't a young troubled bashful teen. He had grown. He'd grown up. He supplied super markets with their apples, he had married, he had children, and they had grown up but not under his watching eyes.

Be blinked again, and felt no tears prickling his eyes, for he was sure there were no more tears inside him to cry. Only the cool wooden floor of an old library his wife had once called home, to which he had called home. However, this miserable square piece of floor, separated from the rest of the room by gold glowing bars, now starting to tare through that blackness, was called a prison.

And outside that prison, just beyond his reach, slept his youngest child, his second daughter, inside a make shift bed made of green thorned vines. These vines, however, had been suddenly consumed by tiny buds all along their bodies, mostly likely to have grown in the night. Something that had not been there before. Her head was tilted off to once side, and a very faint, soft smile was placed on her lips, despite the tense danger surrounding her. Peaceful beneath her make shift boundary, as vines grew quietly through her hair.

Bakura blinked once more, as he lifted his aching body into a sitting position, not noticing the strange swelling of the dimness about him. His curious but numbed eyes observed as the first bud swelled and cracked open. Its pedals slowly opened, revealing the deepest darkest crimson color he had ever seen. He watched the remaining buds bloom in the same way, the last flower unlocking its morbid color beside her ear as a sharp blast of sunlight shot through the lightening dimness.

He looked up in between two of the bars, through the window, and sighted an orange orb rising slowly through the few trees, rising gracefully above the towering buildings, calling all things to rise from their dreams and meet the new day. It was a promise of fair weather, but not of a happy day. Bakura stared at its sphere shape with blank eyes, and a hollow heart. He looked back at his child the next moment, as an ominous pair of feet stalked the stairs, announcing the enemy like a dark lord. Or an evil prince.

The body of his son opened the door, but the smile of some darkness grinned at him when he was found awake. The boy wore a black shirt, blue jeans, the golden glowing rod shoved through on of his belt loops, the eye of the millennium item vigilantly staring, as he crossed the floor with his purple cape trailing. He held a familiar looking chest in his arms, cradling it to his chest like a mother with her new born, and stared at him with hazel eyes when he stopped a few feet from his daughter.

"And good-good morning to you, Daddy!" Mat's voice nearly shouted, piercing the silence that morning at brought like a gun shot.

"Don't call me that. Mat is my son, not you." Bakura said angrily. The boy turned back to him, a fake look of pain on his face.

"But I am Mat, Dad." Bakura's look of contempt grew suddenly ice cold, as he stared at him, but still, the man said nothing. The boy smiled wickedly at this.

"Oh how easy it is to anger you, it's quite a lot of fun…but today, I can't play." He tisked, shaking his head slowly. Crouching, he placed the box at his feet with a low thump. He traced his fingers around the edge of the case, almost lovingly, before he flicked both switches up that held the box closed, and flipped the lid open with a creak.

When the boy's eyes sparked for a moment, Bakura's own interest in the contains of the box spiked, but when he tried to get a better look, the boy shut the chest with a snap and waved one finger at his father.

"No, no, no. Not yet. We don't want to ruin the surprise, now, do we?" The teen carefully shoved the box aside and rose to his feet, averting his insane gaze from him to the girl with instead a serious stare. He approached the mass of plant life cautiously, ignoring Bakura's vigilance, as he removed the rod from his side, sort of like a sword. He did not hold it out in front of him, or command any magic from the object. Instead, he carefully pulled the bottom of the rod from the sphere part, unveiling a very sharp looking blade pointing from out of it.

Bakura got to his feet, curiously wondering what he was going to do. Mat rose the blade to studied it with longing eyes, touching it to his brow for a moment, before turning back to Kaede with a look of a killer. Bakura was so close to the bars he could feel the negative energy coursing through it, trying so hard to harm him. It was uncomfortable, but it was as close to his daughter he could be.

"What are you doing?" He demanded. The boy glanced at him before smiling slightly. A cold shiver traveled down Bakura's spine like a jolt, the hairs on the back of his neck rising in warning.

And before Bakura could even blink, the boy had lunged at the mass of greenery and stabbed at the heart of the mess once. He watched in horror as his daughter jerked back from the force and found his scream locked inside his completely sealed throat. Mat sliced again, horizontally, and again, mercilessly with a placid look, hacking away, until finally he swiped one finally stroke diagonally and swept the blade away.

Bakura stared at her face, waiting for a stream of blood to escape her lips, or perhaps a scream of anguish, with his own tearing aghast eyes. Neither came. Instead, the so called killer waited patiently one more moment, before the body tipped forward and fell through a mess of dripping sticky slices of plant stuff. She was caught easily, her eyes still closed, but the smile missing from her lips, as the boy sheathed the blade, and stuffed it into his back pocket, as he held the girl on his shoulder. Now seeing her fully, Bakura saw no blood on her anywhere, no cuts, no stab wound. Suddenly confused, he looked back at Mat, who was now looking at him again with a smile on his face.

"You didn't actually think I'd kill her did you?" He asked mockingly, laughing at the tears that suddenly splashed on the man's face at that question.

"She's too important to be killed…too…special…She is the only one with the key to what I want."

"And," Bakura asked with a dark weeping look of sorrow, "What is that?"

The look he received from him was one of complete wickedness and pleasure. The boy opened his mouth, and finally, after many hours of asking, answered that horrible question.

"A body."

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