It was a random corner store in the city one afternoon, where he saw him. Could it possibly be? Yes, definitely. He'd recognize Marik Ishtar anywhere, could pick him out of any crowd. There was a kind of unmistakable sparkle about him, even under dim fluorescent lights. Had he gotten taller? Platinum hair that dusted his shoulders, dangly earrings, high-top sneakers in pale purple, sunglasses perched atop his head like a tiara. Of course it was him. He was idly typing something on his phone while the cashier rung him up.
"YOU!" Bakura, fuming, stopped what he was doing (which happened to be pocketing a number of items) and yelled across the store.
Marik looked up with neither recognition nor interest. He said something haughty in a language that Bakura didn't understand, but which he could reasonably surmise was something along the lines of Do I know you?
"You nearly got me killed! Twice!" A rapid-fire, high volume torrent. "I was helping you! It was your terrible plan, and your terrible idea for a deck, and why the hell didn't you know all of Ra's effects? It was your damned card, and-"
Marik and the cashier looked on in confusion and something between fear and concern. Marik had never seen this person in his entire life, some weird little scarred guy in bizarre clothes ranting at him while he tried to buy gummy worms. It took him a moment to understand what was even being said, because the rant was happening in Japanese, and the words didn't immediately make any sense anyway. After a few seconds the meaning got through, though, and something about the way he said them, and the long white hair, and maybe something about the way the stranger moved, and Marik Ishtar dropped his phone and didn't even hear it clatter on the ground.
"Bakura?!"
"What? Yes, obviously." It had not occurred to him, somehow, that he wouldn't be recognized.
"What," Marik squinted, seeing all at once someone familiar and unknown, "are you doing here?"
"I can be wherever I want! What are YOU doing here? Because if it's to get me stabbed again, it's not happening."
"What?! That was YOUR idea, what are you even-and I LIVE HERE!"
The volume of this very public conversation was rising rapidly, and the cashier's eyes bounced back and forth like a ping pong ball.
"Maybe I live here too, Marik, did you think about that?"
"No, you don't, you're supposed to be-"
"DON'T change the subject, you're not getting away with-"
"I thought you were DEAD!"
"YES, WELL, DIDN'T WE ALL!"
Marik huffed in a dramatic, put-upon way intended to make you feel bad for minorly inconveniencing him. He reached down and retrieved his phone, covered in dangling charms, and forgot whatever he was buying on the counter as he walked over and headed out the automatic doors with annoyed determination. "Come on."
Bakura went after him, if only because he wasn't done yelling at him yet.
Marik Ishtar stood in the sun like he owned it, waiting outside on the sidewalk by the store wall, glaring with his arms crossed. He was an angly twig with a pretty sort of bossiness, not uppity or demanding but dispassionately expectant. It was not that he asked for anything, but that whenever he spoke he was so confident that whatever he wanted would happen, or already had, that it made whoever he was talking to feel stupid and incompetent for not having accomplished it yet. A contagious, insufferable sort of arrogance that leaked out of every perfect pore in his face, which made you want to either agree with everything he says or immediately punch him in the nose. Bakura was currently trying to restrain the latter.
His eyes were framed in perfect black lines that lent him a nearly intimidating intensity, which was somewhat negated by his pastel monstrosity of an outfit, and he somehow abstractly reminded Bakura of a princess.
"Why are you in Egypt?" he asked, for the second time that day. It was a question but not a request.
"It's very simple, Marik. I have no idea." he answered, truthfully, with a shrug. "I woke up like this."
He glanced down at Bakura's chest. "Where's the ring? I mean, the ring is gone, but how are you here? Without the ring? I thought you were, y'know," He made a vague, wiggly hand gesture. "Whose body even is this?"
Like a flipped switch, Bakura stood up straight with a grin, like he'd been waiting on tenterhooks for someone to ask, an excuse to show off. "I'm not possessing anyone." he said, shoulders squared. "This is my body. The original."
Marik needed a second to process this. "This is...you? What you actually look like?" He flicked his eyes up and down, maybe a little more slowly than he meant to.
"Devastatingly handsome, I know." Bakura leaned against the wall, smug, in a way he probably thought looked very cool and casual.
"I was going to say you're a lot shorter than I imagined."
"You imagined me?"
"Shut up. I'm being serious." He wasn't, though, he was trying not to laugh because Bakura was ridiculous. "What are you doing here?"
"I told you," he said, with mounting frustration. "I was just here, somehow. I sort of thought, when I saw you," he admitted, "that you would know."
Marik frowned and did a calculation. Two miracles in two weeks, two bodies, a puzzle and a ring. Nothing about the duel rite mentioned anything about a bonus resurrection, but it hadn't mentioned the first resurrection either. He turned on his heel with new resolution and started heading down the street. "Let's go."
"And why would I go with you?" Bakura asked, with an irritable rise in his voice, following him.
"I'm going to ask Ishizu about this. Or call Yugi, see if they understand what's going on."
"Good luck. Like he ever knows."
The Ishtar siblings' new residence, not a tomb but a proper house, tucked away in Luxor not far from the government building where Ishizu worked, was modest and cluttered and full of sunlight. Sunlight filtering in through the windows, woven into the patterns on the kitchen tile, soaked up by a battery of houseplants scattered across windowsills and shelves. If there was anything the desert had too much of it was sunlight, and this place was soaked in it, an open invitation to Ra himself.
It was also, in a word, bizarrely anachronistic. Antique statuettes sat next to the microwave, comic books shelved with old papyrus, a spiked motorcycle vest hanging not far from delicate gold wall-hangings brought up from the tombs, ancient clay pottery used to hold up a stack of videogames. As oddly out of place as the Ishtars themselves, pleasant but out of time, bright, cozy, patchwork, discordant and mismatched.
"I'm not sure I understand." Ishizu said. One of the king's priests herself, back to haunt him, a woman so composed that when the earth turned she did not so much go with it but allowed it to move her, currently surveying the strange, partially shirtless young man on her couch with a mix of puzzlement and detached skepticism.
"He's the spirit of the millennium ring." Marik said, standing nearby.
She frowned. "The spirit of the millennium ring." she repeated, flatly.
He nodded. "He's supposed to be dead."
"Yes, that would be what a spirit is." Marik's sister was unamused and only slightly concerned, but one generally got the sense that this was Ishizu Ishtar's default state. "He looks fine to me, though."
All three of them were staring at him curiously, and not that he was opposed to the attention but really there wasn't any good reason for it. Ishizu seemed to give up examining him like a dissected specimen and started scanning the top row of a nearby bookshelf, looking for something specific.
The third one with the scars all over his face, and now the addition of a black-framed pair of glasses, looked him over and said nothing, unreadable.
Marik was still trying to explain what was wrong with this picture. "No, but he died again. He's like," He glanced at Bakura for help. "Double dead, or something."
"Maybe I was just so much trouble that they kicked me out." he suggested, "I'm not exactly fit for Aaru."
Marik squinted. "Then they would've just eaten your soul."
"Maybe I taste bad." He smiled, stood up and swept his robe behind him, one foot up on the coffee table, a brazen declaration. "The Great Bakura, King of Thieves! So bitter that Ammit choked!"
"I highly doubt," Ishizu said, "that you could have caused such difficulties for the gods themselves."
"Don't underestimate me." he said, leaning forward, grinning. "The fact that I am invincible aside, I was a little more curious about being out of the ring."
Ishizu took a thick, dusty book off the shelf and began running a finger down the table of contents. "I don't know that I could tell you. Not much has been recorded about the millennium ring, at least compared to the puzzle. There's no mention of a spirit at all, typically just its dowsing function. At best there are a small handful of writings, unelaborated, where it's occasionally said to contain a great evil."
Bakura picked something out of his ear and flicked it. "Probably me, yeah."
Ishizu gave him a withering glance, apparently unimpressed by such a claim from a scruffy, 5'6", barely-adult with noticeably poor manners. "The millennium ring is buried, in any case."
"Yes, and he's here." Marik pointed. "Hence the-I mean, it's not a problem, it's just weird, right? It seems weird."
Bakura still had not removed his foot from the coffee table. "I woke up in the shrine a few days ago. I know nothing else."
"What shrine?" she asked.
"The one where the big rock used to be." They looked at him all blankly. "With all the slots for the items."
"...The millennium stone."
"God, of course that's what you call it. I should have guessed. It's the millennium everything with you people, right?"
"You woke up in the mortuary temple?"
"Yes, that's what I said." He was getting awful tired of repeating himself. "The stone is gone now, though. I've been sleeping there for days, the whole place has been reduced to a wreck. No idea what happened."
Marik snapped his head towards him. "You're sleeping out in the valley?"
Rishid, listening to all this for some time, finally spoke up. "May I ask a question?" A pause, as they all looked at him expectantly. "Why are we all speaking Japanese?"
Rishid looked at Ishizu, who looked at Marik, who looked at Bakura. "I don't speak Arabic or whatever it is everyone uses here. So unless you know ancient Egyptian, it's what we've got."
"We all spent the first decade or so of our lives studying ancient Egyptian, actually." Ishizu snapped her book shut, and opened her mouth and said what Ishizu Ishtar believed to be some rendition of "How do you do?" in reasonably accurate 18th-dynasty Coptic, which was not necessarily untrue. It was simply a "How do you do?" in a version of 18th-dynasty Coptic that had been learned exclusively from the study of dated, overly-formal religious texts, filtered through 3,000 years of constant deterioration and reconstitution of those texts, with an additional 30 centuries of tombkeeper isolation and pronunciation drift.
Bakura wheezed and bent over laughing.
"I said-what, exactly, is so funny?"
Bakura was too busy laughing to answer, losing it as the three of them looked on in irritated confusion. "Holy shit!" He looked around, gleeful. "Marik, say something!"
"Uh, the quick brown snake bites the lazy dog?"
"Oh my god, you all sound like that? That's fucking great." There were tears in his eyes. "That's incredible. That's the worst thing I've ever heard. Please continue."
Ishizu wrinkled her nose. She did not try again. "If you are indeed a resurrected spirit, and you came out of the mortuary temple as you claim, then I would ascribe this as an additional result of the duel rite. Unexpected, certainly, but relatively unmysterious."
"The duel what?"
"The ceremonial duel," Marik said, "when Atem came back."
"Who?"
"The pharaoh, when he got his new body." Ishizu clarified. "You probably have him to thank."
This was not an explanation Bakura liked at all, and it showed on his face, curling into something grim and hard. "I thank the pharaoh for nothing."
They all let that sit in the air for a few moments, no one quite understanding what he meant but the conversation exhausted, questions anticlimactically answered.
"Ishizu, Rishid," Marik said, "Can we talk for a second?" He had an odd look on his face. A look like was thinking about something, which on Marik Ishtar is not a look that often leads to anything good. Ishizu put her book down and Bakura watched all three of them move to huddle near the hallway.
"Hey," Bakura said, before they had the chance to exclude him. "Where's your kitchen?" Seeing the brief look of confusion on all their faces, he added, indignant, "I'm a guest."
Ishizu gestured vaguely towards the doorway. "Help yourself."
Bakura eagerly hopped over the back of the couch and set about noisily rifling through cupboards as the Ishtar siblings stood close together and spoke in unnecessarily hushed voices, considering they couldn't be understood anyway, and Marik made an unexpected suggestion.
"Is that really a good idea?" she asked, in a gentle tone.
"We have the room! I know it sounds bad but," Marik glanced over at him, visible from their kitchen doorway, eating what appeared to be raw garlic. "I don't think he has anywhere else to go."
"Marik, how well do you know this boy?"
"He helped me in Battle City."
"Helped you with what, exactly?"
Marik averted his eyes. "...He helped me with some of the saving-everyone stuff, too."
"So," she repeated, slowly, "you knew him for approximately two days, a year ago, during part of which he was trying to help you..." She did not have specifics but it could not really have been anything good.
"Come oooooooon. He's a friend and he's homeless. And he sort of almost died to help me." he said, with the big sad pleading eyes that usually got him whatever he wanted. "Rishid! Please?"
Rishid looked between them, at his little sister's concerned hesitance and his baby brother's sad face, and then looked at the mangy, half-dressed ruffian in the process of destroying their kitchen, and he thought. Rishid Ishtar was a person who spent a lot of time thinking. He was a man who never did anything without thinking, who acted slowly, who did not say a word until he'd planned out every syllable in advance, knew exactly how he would be heard. Then he opened his mouth and said something which he knew full well would permanently end all discussion.
"Mom would have let him stay."
Marik looked on blankly, this statement meaning almost nothing to him. Ishizu looked taken aback, and opened her mouth to say something, and then closed it, and glanced down and towards the kitchen, a little ashamed. "I suppose she would."
Marik took this as an affirmative, and his face lit up with a smile as he shouted back across the house "BAKURA! You wanna stay?"
"Stay where?"
"Stay here! Unless you want to keep sleeping in a tomb."
"Do I have to pay?"
"No, I got you covered. I owe you one."
"Yes," He bit into a chocolate bar Rishid had been saving for later, with an audible snap. "You do."
