3. Reasons to Stay

For the better part of two weeks, Bakura spent most of his time in Marik's company. During the days, the Egyptian would play tour guide, taking Bakura on his motorcycle to the various monuments and tombs for which Luxor was famous, or to other places that were of more personal significance, or even boating along the Nile in a traditional Egyptian felucca.

Evenings were spent learning about modern-day Egypt and the nightlife of Luxor. The drinking age in Egypt was sixteen, so they had no problem getting into the bars and nightclubs, most of which were at the tourist resorts along the Nile. After Marik got into a terse discussion in Arabic with someone he seemed to know, however, they'd stayed away from the club scene, which suited Bakura just fine. He preferred the quiet atmosphere of coffee houses or cafés where they could talk or even just walking along the Nile after sunset when it was cool enough to actually enjoy being outdoors.

"So how long are you planning on staying in Egypt?" Marik asked him one night as they sat at The Crocodile, that same café where they'd gone on Bakura's first night in Luxor.

Bakura shrugged. "I don't really have a plan. My tourist visa is good for up to three months, but unfortunately my money won't last quite that long. I suppose I'll have to go back to England and get a job and do something with my life."

Marik was silent for a moment. "Do you want to go back to England?"

"Not really. I could go to Japan, too, I suppose. I have dual citizenship, at least until I'm twenty and Japan says I have to choose one or the other."

"Would you be interested in staying and working at the museum?" Marik asked him.

Bakura raised his eyebrows. "Here in Luxor?"

"Of course in Luxor," Marik snorted. "Ishizu's pretty much in charge of everything here and has a lot of pull with the government as well. They always need tour guides who speak fluent English and the fact that you're also fluent in Japanese would be a plus as well."

"Of course, my Arabic is rubbish," Bakura reminded him, but Marik gave a dismissive wave of the hand.

"You wouldn't need Arabic to work with tourists, and you'd learn eventually. Are you interested?"

Bakura considered it. "I don't know what I want. I don't feel ready to leave yet, but I don't know if I really have a reason to stay long-term, either. I feel as if… I'm still searching."

Marik nodded. "Okay. Consider it, though. If you'd like to stay, Ishizu can arrange it."

Bakura cocked his head and regarded Marik for a moment. "What about you, Marik? What exactly do you do here, when you aren't stuck playing tour guide to hopeless British tourists, that is?"

"I enjoy playing tour guide, at least to some British tourists," he said with a bright smile and Bakura felt himself flush. "But normally I help Ishizu in the museum doing whatever it is she needs done. My training wasn't as broad as hers because I was raised to bear the Pharaoh's secret and didn't need to know anything but the ancient scriptures that pertained specifically to that. But my knowledge of the language and the hieroglyphs and hieratic texts are flawless, so I do a lot of translations and study texts for the archaeologists and Egyptologists."

"You're a glorified librarian!" Bakura grinned and Marik scowled.

"At least I'm not a tourist." Then he paused for a moment, looking at Bakura thoughtfully. "Actually, there is something else I do that I'd like to show you. Did you have any plans tomorrow morning?"

"You'll have to check with my tour guide," Bakura laughed. "He keeps my schedule."

"Well, your tour guide says your schedule is wide open. Pick you up at six?"

"In the morning?" Bakura complained.

"Not all of us are tourists and can spend all morning sleeping in," Marik shot back.

At six-thirty the next morning, Bakura found himself sleepily trailing behind Marik in a grocery store buying enough food to feed a small army. They'd even come in a car instead of on Marik's motorcycle, apparently to accommodate the groceries. Bakura didn't have the first clue why they were there and all of his queries were met with rebuffs and an impatient, "You'll see."

After the grocery store, Marik drove them to a rundown building in a dodgy part of town Bakura hadn't been to before. Directing Bakura to help with the groceries, Marik knocked on the door. It was opened by a man in his late forties or early fifties who greeted Marik with a large hug and a kiss on each cheek. Marik introduced him to Bakura as Nasir el-Abid, but gave no explanation as to who he was or why they were here as he followed the older man inside into what looked like an army mess hall, with an antiquated kitchen connected to a room with several tables and chairs set up like a cafeteria. There were two other men there to whom Marik spoke in Arabic. He introduced Bakura to them as well, but apparently none of them spoke English and again Bakura got no explanation of who they were beyond their names.

Following Marik's instructions, Bakura unpacked the groceries as Marik began to cook some sort of tomato sauce to go with a fava bean stew that had apparently been simmering on the stove overnight. Bakura was given the task of frying eggs.

"For whom are we cooking?" Bakura tried again.

Marik took a small taste of his tomato sauce. "Why do you go by your surname and not your given name?" he asked.

"You're changing the subject," Bakura pointed out.

"So are you, and now I'm changing it back again. Why do you go by Bakura instead of Ryou?"

Bakura sighed and gave up. "I don't know. I just always have."

"Isn't that what Yugi and everyone called your darker half, even in the memory world?"

Bakura shrugged. "I don't remember anything that happened in the memory world. I suppose they just didn't have any other name for him so they called him Bakura."

"Does it bother you to be known by the same name?"

"Your darker half was also called Marik."

"My darker half had no identity separate from me. Yours existed millennia before you were born."

"You're the librarian. Don't you know his real name?"

"No. We didn't even know the Pharaoh's name until Yugi found it and there isn't much from that period other than the Memory Stone. What we do have only mentions a King of Thieves."

"Perhaps his name was Ali Baba," Bakura commented dryly.

"May I call you Ryou instead of Bakura?" Marik asked suddenly.

"What?"

"In my mind, 'Bakura' is the King of Thieves. I'd rather call you Ryou."

Bakura was taken aback by this. No one but his father called him by his given name. His mother and sister had, too, but they were both dead. "I… I thought you said I needed to accept my connection to him."

"Yes," Marik agreed. "Accept it… and choose differently. Besides," he said quietly, "Ryou is a beautiful name. It suits you."

Bakura's stomach twisted in a way that wasn't entirely unpleasant, but before he could answer, Nasir poked his head in the door and said something to Marik in Arabic.

"It's almost nine o'clock," Marik translated for Bakura then the two of them helped Nasir and the other two men bring the food out into the cafeteria-type room as another man Bakura hadn't seen before opened the door.

Bakura gasped as a steady stream of boys ranging in ages from seven to maybe thirteen or fourteen were ushered into the room. They were filthy and dressed in rags, many of them with bruises on their faces or arms. Most of them seemed to know Marik and they joked easily with him in Arabic while he and Bakura scooped stew and eggs onto trays for them.

"They're street children," Marik explained when the last child had been served and they were hungrily lapping up the food. "Runaways, abused mostly."

"I gathered," Bakura said softly.

"There isn't much in the way of shelters here. This is one of the few places where street children can get meals and sometimes have a doctor look at them. There's no place for them to sleep, though."

"What about the girls?"

"They have their own shelter. It's hard to tell in a tourist town like Luxor, but Egypt is a Muslim country and they like to keep the genders separate. Women take care of the girls and men take care of the boys."

Bakura nodded. "How often do you come here?"

"At least two or three times a week," Marik answered and Bakura realized that while there were some mornings that Marik had picked him up early to see this tomb or that, on many days he hadn't arrived until close to noon.

"Is this because of your father?" Bakura asked.

Marik nodded. "But not just that. Remember what I said your first night here about accepting your past and choosing differently? This is what I've chosen. My darker half took the abuse I suffered from my father and the anger I felt at what he did to Odion and turned it into hate. He—I—took suffering and made it into more suffering. Now I choose differently. I choose to take suffering and make it into easing suffering. If one of these boys can make it because I was here and understood, then it's worth it."

The rest of the morning Bakura watched as Marik talked and joked with the various boys as they ate. By eleven they had all left, probably to panhandle and try to make it through another day. As Bakura followed Marik out to the car, he reached out and put a hand on the Egyptian's shoulder.

"Marik, I want to stay in Egypt if Ishizu can arrange it. And if it's all right with you, I'd like to come back here with you again."

Marik smiled. "I'd like that, Ryou."
As Marik had promised, Ishizu had quite a lot of pull with the Egyptian government and it took only a couple of weeks to work out the necessary visa issues. By the time Bakura settled into his job as a tour guide for the museum and into the small studio apartment Marik and Odion had found for him not far from the large house where the entire Ishtar family lived together, Bakura finally had to admit to himself that he was completely smitten with Marik. When they were together, he alternately felt light and giddy or nervous and shy. When they were apart, he could think of nothing else. The problem was, he had no idea if Marik was similarly attracted to him or how to go about finding out. They had grown quite close and Marik clearly enjoyed spending time with him, and he was pretty sure Marik was gay, but there was a fair good distance between guessing he liked boys in general to knowing whether or not he liked Bakura specifically, and the conservative climate of Egypt wasn't exactly conducive to testing the waters.

Bakura had come to terms with his own sexual orientation as a fairly young teenager in secondary school in England. He'd done the usual adolescent experimenting; kissing girls and finding it disgusting, then kissing boys and finding that much more to his liking, but he'd been too young to really learn the ins and outs of dating while in England.

When he was fifteen he'd moved to Japan, but this was also when the Millennium Ring and its possessing spirit began dominating his life, leaving him neither the time nor inclination for romance. Other than a mercifully brief post-Duelist Kingdom crush on Tristan Taylor, who not only was straight but in hindsight totally wrong for Bakura, he had had absolutely no interest in romance whatsoever during his three years of high school in Japan. Fighting for one's life and sanity against an evil spirit possessing one's body tended to eclipse all other concerns.

This left him feeling woefully inept in the rituals of flirting and dating, and that wasn't even taking into account the huge cultural gulfs that lay between his western upbringing, his Japanese coming of age, and his current middle-eastern environment, nor the obstacles such an environment presented to courtship in general and gay relationships in particular. So while he knew he was absolutely crazy about Marik and ached to find out if the feeling was mutual, he didn't have the foggiest idea how to go about it.

In addition to this dilemma, he was beginning to feel like he was stagnating in his progress toward coming to terms with his darker half. The pure joy he felt when spending time with Marik was beginning to feel more like a way to hide from the pain and depression that always seemed to lurk just under the surface rather than a way to work through it. After two months in Egypt and one month working at the museum, life was becoming more of a routine than a new adventure and he found himself slipping into melancholy more and more often. Working at the shelter with Marik helped, but the fact that he was only beginning to learn Arabic and couldn't talk with any of the kids or the other workers made him feel isolated.

At work it was a little better. Most of the employees spoke English and when he wasn't leading a tour of English or American or Japanese tourists, he worked at the museum gift shop with a cheerful older man named Ahmed. He reminded Bakura a little bit of Yugi's grandfather, who owned a game shop back in Japan, and Bakura greatly enjoyed chatting with him about his kids and grandkids or his wife or telling him about life in England or Japan. He saw Odion and Rashida often, as well, and of course Marik frequently would come by the gift shop with coffee for Bakura and shisha tobacco for Ahmed. At the end of the day, Marik would usually offer Bakura a ride home and they'd go out to eat or have dinner at the Ishtars' with Ishizu, Odion, and Rashida, or get coffee and umm ali at The Crocodile, which Bakura was starting to think of as "their place."

At night, however, when he was alone, he would still dream of blood. He would awake with the taste of blood in is mouth and Marik's promise that it would get better ringing in his ears. But it wasn't getting better and the nights were getting more and more difficult as more and more of his counterpart's memories came to him.

"You look like hell, Ry," Marik observed one day over dinner.

"And you look lovely too," Bakura shot back testily.

"I'm serious. Have you not been sleeping?" Marik asked, and Bakura's irritation drained away as he heard the note of concern in his friend's voice.

"Not really," he admitted. "I keep dreaming of things he did while he was controlling me. Things I didn't remember. Last night I dreamed about knocking out Yugi's grandfather when he was watching me in the hospital and then beating the crap out of some poor child to get his duel disk from him."

"Battle City?" Marik asked, and Bakura nodded.

"Bloody hell," Bakura whispered, leaning back in his seat and closing his eyes. "I'm trying to accept the things he's done, to own them and move on, but he was such a callous bloody bastard. Didn't give a damn about anyone but himself and his big plan for revenge. Sometimes remembering the things he's done, it's more than I can bear, Marik."

Marik was uncharacteristically silent and Bakura opened his eyes. "What? No words of advice?"

Marik's eyes narrowed. "To hell with it. I don't care what Ishizu says. It's time for you to see."

"See what?"

"Kul Elna."