AN: If you haven't noticed yet, this is going to be Marik/Thief King (citron). No warnings for the moment, but eventually some violence.


The free meal ticket wasn't supposed to involve this much talking.

Marik's room was covered almost wall-to-wall in posters. Band members in heavy makeup and ripped clothes glared down at you next to expensive-looking motorcycles, the occasional blockbuster movie, and what in a few cases appeared to be literal advertisements ripped out of magazines just because they looked cool enough. There was a laptop covered in shiny stickers, a purple nightlight, a Duel Disk half-disassembled, and a potent mix of sparkly bright colors and gloomy darks. It was very…Marik. An ode to violence written in glitter gel pen, black, jagged edges on a proud smile.

Most noticeable was his enthusiasm for collecting cheap plastic garbage. Sparkly keychains, stuffed animals, slap bracelets, digital pets, heart-shaped sunglasses, a tiny alien floating in a jar of slime, patterned scrunchies and capsule machine toys, of every type and on every surface. Harsh restriction for too long almost always eventually leads to a burst of impulsive excess, and evidently the thing Marik felt he was missing all his life was a mountain of fun, shiny, childish, novelty, end-of-the-checkout-counter trash.

After a night spent on an air mattress in a spare room that was half miscellaneous storage and half Ishizu's neglected home office, Bakura found himself sitting on Marik's floor and fiddling with something called a tamagotchi, while Marik sat backwards in his desk chair and talked, spinning occasionally. Marik liked to talk even when there wasn't anything especially important to say, probably because Marik believed all of his thoughts were important. The jaded frustration of yesterday's bickering had already given way to Marik's default state, a bright-eyed effervescence that chattered about anything and everything, white noise that filled out every silence.

"Living in the valley, of all places. How did you eat?"

"Whatever I could get." he said, bored, clicking the feed button on some odd little animal inside the plastic shell.

"You were scavenging for almost a week?"

"I do not scavenge." He said the word the way you held something gross far away from you and with only your fingertips. "Don't insult me. I am a thief. I steal."

"I didn't realize how important the terminology was." Marik's apologies always sounded playfully sarcastic. "What did you call yourself yesterday? The king?"

"King of Thieves."

"How did you earn that title?"

"Killed the old one." he said. This was not true, at all, whatsoever. It wasn't even a real title. But the little way Marik's eyes widened was great.

"Congratulations." he spun, in front of the open window. The windows in the Ishtar house, he'd noticed, were all open, no matter the temperature. "We won't ask you to pay rent or anything, since it looks like you're…" He glanced at Bakura, bruised, disheveled, covered in mismatched jewelry, and still not wearing a shirt. "In a rough place. Just clean up after yourself, and don't touch Rishid's plants, and try not to get on Ishizu's nerves, alright?"

"Where are they, anyway?" Everyone but Marik was already gone when he woke up.

"Working like real adults, Sunday through Thursday. She does preservation and cultural diplomacy work, travels a lot, mostly between here and Cairo. Rishid works downtown."

"And you?" as in, when are you leaving me alone.

He smirked. "Passports. Higher demand than fake trading cards, usually. I make my own hours." For the first time Bakura noticed the stack of supplies under the desk, cardstock and covers and ink.

The keychain beeped. Bakura scowled.

"It died." he complained, holding it up for Marik to see.

"You monster." Marik propped his head up with his hand, amused. "You must have starved it."

"It's not my fault the stupid creature is so fragile and needy. They're worse than—" and he was about to say 'humans,' and stopped, because that was a phrase that didn't make sense, because he was human, and he didn't know why the word was coming out of his mouth like that.

"Worse than what?"

His brain stumbled for a second, because he didn't have a proper end to that sentence, and not having the right words burned the inside of his mouth. "It's pathetic." he finished, and swung the trinket by the chain and threw it against the wall in frustration, where part of the plastic broke on impact.

Marik watched the tamagotchi fly through the air and smack the drywall with a detached frown, and raised his eyebrows. "It would have reset in a few minutes."

Bakura glowered and averted his eyes. "It was worthless. Learn to fend for yourself."

"It's a game, fool." That blithe little smile, like there was a game but only Marik knew the rules and he was happy to be winning. "Do you have any plans for the day, besides ruthless virtual murder?"

He leaned back on his hands. "I'm supposed to be dead, Marik, I hadn't made plans to do anything."

"Excellent." He got out of his chair and swept his keys off the desk. "Let's get out of here."

"And do what?"

"Anything to prevent you from breaking more of my stuff." He glanced out the window. "I like it better outside."


"Marik." He caught the helmet in both hands. "I am not riding in your idiotic little sidecar."

"Why not? Rishid does it all the time." Marik was already revving the engine, in his leather vest and fancy bracelets. "You can't ride behind me. Your robe's too long, it could get caught on something."

Bakura noted that wearing a leather vest to ride a motorcycle was inane, because if the reason bikers wore leather was that it would protect them if they fell off then it was pointless when there weren't any sleeves, and furthermore why would you wear black leather in Egypt, do you simply enjoy heat stroke.

"I am not riding behind you." he said. The idea of sharing the seat was even worse.

"Then get in! It's fun."

Bakura frowned, because while he would rather die than admit it to Marik the objective fact of the matter was that motorcycles were loud and fast and cool as hell. But the sidecar was the least cool place on it and inevitably made anyone who sat in it the inferior, less cool party.

Marik was still waiting. "Do you have another way of getting into town? What's the problem?"

"It looks stupid."

"Don't insult her." Marik narrowed his eyes.

"I wasn't insulting," he was not under any circumstances calling it a 'her,' "your motorcycle, but the sidecar specifically is—"

Marik revved the engine again.

"All I am saying is—" Rev.

"I just don't—" Rev.

"Oh, you think you're very funny don't yo—" Rev.

"Piss off, Marik, I'm not—" Rev, extra long this time.

"I am going to snap your fucking neck." he said, but Marik was too busy laughing at his own joke to heed the threat.

"Just get in! We'll call it even for you slaughtering that poor innocent egg creature."

"Tch. Those things die if you breathe on them." he said, but he put the helmet on.


"The Winter Palace is over there," he said, pointing to a massive, gold-ringed hotel, built of white gates and grand archways.

"It looks like Scrooge McDuck vomited." Bakura said, scowling.

Marik laughed. "How do you even know who that is?"

They were walking leisurely down a half-busy Luxor street, Marik cheerfully pointing things out and Bakura invariably finding something wrong with them. A light breeze ran through the palm trees and across brown brick buildings. Somewhere in the distance a loudspeaker went off, and Bakura tilted his head, trying to decipher it. Marik ignored it, eating gummy worms and scanning storefronts.

"That place," he pointed, "makes really good falafel."

"The one with all the trash in front of it?"

"Yes, that one." He pressed his mouth together. "I guess there's no point in showing you the valley, right? You were there when half those monuments were built."

"There's nothing impressive about kings building statues of themselves." Bakura scoffed. "They didn't earn it, they just paid for it. The only thing those tombs are a monument towards is arrogance."

"Does everything make you miserable?"

"Yes. Do you have to be excited about everything?"

"Yes!" A rapid answer, as if it should be obvious. "I spent half my life being bored, I have a whole world to catch up on. There's music, and the internet, and TV dramas, and games," Marik was lost in his own little world, alight. "And the zoo! Have you ever been to a zoo?"

"No."

"You should! They have flamingos. There's so much I've never seen before!" Marik was bouncing his way through his sentences. "You aren't excited? To see the city, after 3,000 years?"

"You want to know what I think about this city?"

Marik nodded.

"Everyone is poor." He scanned the street in panorama, curled his face in disgust, watched the mish-mash of people walking by. "The tourists all walk around laden with cash and expensive cameras and then go back to fancy hotels," he spat, glaring back at the palace, "but everyone who lives here is poor. It's the same exact city I left 3,000 years ago. Why would I want to see it again?"

Marik looked a little wounded, but in the reluctant, pouting way when you knew someone was sort of right. "I guess it is the same city." He glanced upwards, trying to remember something, reciting old texts. "City of Amun, city of the scepter, something about Ahmose…"

"Don't do that." Bakura growled.

Marik smiled a little. "Speak Egyptian?"

"Yes. You can't even pronounce it right, and it's all old and weird and terrible. Dost-thou-whatever. It sounds like you're quoting scripture at me." He stared grimly ahead. "It's bad enough if your sister is a priest, I couldn't put up with all three of you."

"Ishizu's not a priest. She's a government official."

"That's worse."

"It's totally worse." He snickered. "Okay, expert, since yours is so much better," He pointed to an ad for a museum splashed across the side of a building, which contained several rows of decorative hieroglyphs. "What does that say?"

Bakura glanced at it for only a second. "No idea."

"You don't know?"

"No," he said, dismissively. "I'm not some fancy scribe who sits around palaces reading old tablets."

Marik blinked slowly. "You...can't read?"

"I can read." he insisted, defensive. "Just not hieroglyphs."

"Hieratic?"

"Who reads hieratic? It's for prayers and taxes."

"You," Marik was trying very hard to fight off a smile, "can only read Japanese."

"Do you think that's funny?"

"It's a little funny, that that's how it worked out."

"I don't control how the necromancy works." he said, indignant, feeling red creep up his neck and hiding it by getting madder. "If the ring had ended up with a different host I'd know fucking Mandarin. What's your point?"

"Forget it." he said, shaking his head, a laugh in his voice. He tossed Bakura a candy.

They walked like that for a little while, in the fading afternoon heat, Marik's fancy boots next to Bakura's battered ancient shoes. A woman walked by and glanced at Bakura, bizarrely dressed and with half his chest out, and couldn't help but make a face as she walked on.

"We should get you some real clothes." Marik said. "Market isn't far. My treat."

Bakura stopped on the sidewalk, let Marik keep walking. "Why are you doing this?"

"Hm?"

"You let me sleep in your house and eat out of your fridge, and then you drag me around town, and now you want to buy me clothes." He narrowed his eyes. "Why are you being so nice?"

Marik stopped to watch him, innocently ripped the head off another gummy worm. "Because I'm nice. I owe you one, remember? For getting you stabbed?"

"The stabbing was my idea."

He smiled. "Glad that's on record."

"You are not nice." Bakura said, reaching forward and snatching the bag out of Marik's hand, seething. "You are a vengeful, power-mad, manipulative egoist who treats other people like tools to be used and discarded. So what are you doing?"

"Wow!" Marik was delighted by this accusation. "You really will just say anything, to anyone's face."

"It's true." Bakura said, getting annoyed. He didn't like how Marik acted like everything he said was funny, even when he wasn't trying to be.

"Formerly! Formerly I was," he mimicked Bakura's cadence carefully, "a vengeful, power-mad, manipulative egoist. Recently I've been trying something new. Where instead of being that, I'm nice." He gave him his most earnest, bright, wide-eyed and innocent smile. "So what I'm doing is helping out an old friend."

Bakura was unmoved. "That's stupid. I don't believe you."

Marik put a hand on his hip. "Fine, don't." He rudely took his candy back. "Would you believe that I was bored, and you are interesting?"

"Barely."

"That getting you clothes isn't a kindness, it's an excuse for me to go shopping?"

"That I believe."

"Then let's go." he said, "But I really am nice." He turned around and started walking again.

"Marik." He spoke through gritted teeth, still not moving, a few feet behind him. "I am not one of your toys."

Marik heaved a dramatic sigh. "Bakuuuuura. You need to learn how to have fun." That small, snide, insufferable smile again. "All that stress is bad for your complexion. You'll get wrinkles."


In a neat but cluttered office, beneath a row of award certificates and next to a framed vacation photo of three siblings making silly faces, Ishizu Ishtar was hanging up the phone. With the utmost care, she finished her call, placed it gently back in the cradle, steepled her fingers, and stared at it, pensive.

"Um, Secretary General?" A young man poked his head in, an intern.

"I told you, Ishizu is fine."

"Right, sorry, Dr. Ishtar. Um, we were looking into that issue with the temple of Ptah, and we talked to the tourism ministry and…" He paused. "Is everything okay?"

"Yes." She adjusted her expression. "I have simply learned some very unfortunate news about a houseguest."

"Are they…okay?"

"Oh, he's fine." Ishizu Ishtar had the most interesting sort of smile when she wanted to. Small, tepid, conspiratorial, reassuring but somehow not at all warm. "I fear it is the rest of us who may be in danger." She stood up, businesslike. "Ptah, then?"


"Here." Bakura tossed Marik a small black box.

Marik was sitting on concrete, a little ways outside the street market, after Marik had dragged Bakura directly past the noisy tourist market and into the real one. He sat among brightly colored bags, admittedly only a few of which contained anything for Bakura, going through things, while Bakura leaned icily along the wall nearby.

"What is this?"

"Consider it rent. You were looking at them."

Marik flicked it open. A pair of earrings, that he had in fact been looking at a few stores back and had decided not to get for the expense. "I said you didn't have to pay rent."

"I don't like owing people." He shrugged. "We're being nice, now, aren't we? That's what you said. If you don't want rent, say it's helping an old friend, or whatever it was."

The box was still open. They glittered in the sun. "How did you buy this?"

"I waited until they weren't looking, and then took it, and they did not notice because I am very fast and very quiet."

"You? Quiet?"

"When I want to be." he smirked.

Marik snapped the box shut and dropped it in one of the bags. "Can you teach me?"

He raised an eyebrow. "You want to learn how to steal things?"

"I intend to learn everything in the entire world." Marik announced, standing up. "Surely the so-called king can manage a lesson, your majesty?" The facetiousness of the compliment was irritating, yet its very existence was successfully aggrandizing.

"I guess I could." He glanced back in the direction of the market. "You'd get caught, though, and I don't feel like standing around watching you getting yelled at."

"Then," he decided, "I won't get caught." As if by confidently saying it he could somehow will reality into the proper shape through arrogance alone, which knowing Marik he very possibly could.

"Yes, you will. Everyone has to get caught. You're not a thief until after you get caught."

Marik half-smiled, unsure where he was going with this. "Isn't the point of stealing not to get caught?"

"Yes." Bakura removed himself from the wall to stand up straight and started proclaiming and enunciating his words in careful performance, because now he was showing off. It was quickly becoming apparent that Bakura had exactly two settings, and they were 'sitting in the corner like a miserable grouch' and 'showing off.' "But right now you only think you know not to get caught. It's in your head but it's not anywhere else. You have to get caught once, to really learn your lesson, and then you'll never get caught again."

"Fine." Marik crossed his arms, because to him this all seemed very silly. "What was your lesson?"

This was the question he'd been waiting for. Bakura grinned viciously. "Do you really want to know?" he asked, leaning in too close, on his toes to reach Marik's height.

"Yes." Too, too close. Marik ignored the natural instinct to move, did not step back.

"Got this." He tapped the scar that stretched itself across one half of his face, deep and jagged.

Marik keeps his composure, in the midst of intimidation. He is steady, unimpressed, and doesn't move his eyes. "That must have hurt."

"It was wretched." he said, with a smile, and took a step backwards, putting distance between them again with a lazy sort of grace. "You learn your lesson once," and out of his sleeve with a flourish fell Marik's wallet, "and then you know never to get caught again."

Marik blanched and instinctively reached for his pockets. "Did you do that just now?"

"You're too easily distracted." He gently tossed it in the air, caught it, with a smirk. "You should have noticed where my hands were going."

"Very funny." Marik reached to take it back, and Bakura casually threw it backwards out of reach into his other hand, and grinned, and ran down the street.

"BAKURA!"


On the second floor of Kame Game Shop, at 9:00 PM Japan time, Yugi Muto flipped his cell phone shut. "Well, that's…"

"Problematic." Atem finished.

Yugi sat down on the bed next to him, shoulders brushing. Yugi and Atem separated, their connection so recently shredded it still felt like an open wound, had apparently few boundaries. They sat too close together, so used to the other one being a phantom that they crashed into each other, or maybe just finding any excuse to savor solidity, warmth.

Atem frowned. "Should we go? He could be up to something."

"We just got back from Egypt. She didn't say he'd done anything, just that he was there."

Atem stared ahead, considering. "Usually the villainous plan comes to us. I am unsure of the path forward."

"Yeah, the protocol is a little weird when it's just…someone bad is alive on the other side of the world, who might be doing something, somehow, but we don't really know what."

"Indeed."

They fell into comfortable silence. Yugi and Atem had a lot of comfortable silences these days. Sometimes it felt like they communicated half in facial expression alone.

Yugi thought something at him, received no response, and remembered he has to open his mouth now. "What if he's different this time? Everyone deserves a second chance. Maybe a new life will encourage him to do better."

"I am, as always, envious of your optimism."

"I'm going to call Bakura." he said, flipping his phone open again.

"He just came back, partner, I doubt he has a number."

"No, Ryou Bakura. He deserves to know, right?" Yugi looked down at the name in his contacts, in sympathy and dismay. "He was doing so well."


In the shade beneath a tree along the bank of the Nile, Marik and Bakura sat in a patch of grass and watched the boats go by. Cool air rose off the sloshing water the same way it had in every century since the river started flowing, long before any human was around to breathe it in. Some things predate even the ancients.

"Marik." Bakura sat with his legs crossed, propping his head up with his palm, ever tetchy. "What are we doing?"

"Looking at boats? It's cooler by the water." He shrugged. "We could find somewhere to go inside, if you really want, but I don't like walls."

"No, this." He gestured angrily towards the river. "What we are doing here. Why you're dragging me around."

"Instead of what, letting you sit around my house all day doing god knows what?"

"Oh! That's it, then." He sulked. "I'm being watched."

"Not what I meant." Marik had found a stick on the ground and twirled it idly. "It's called hanging out. Like friends do?"

"Wouldn't know."

"No friends?"

Bakura did not answer. He glared at another ferry going by.

Marik watched it too. "Me either."

The sunlight glinted off the water.

"We weren't friends." Bakura said. "In Battle City. It was a temporary professional alliance."

Marik snorted. "Like you weren't having fun."

"I was not. It was entirely goal-oriented and you were a huge pain."

"Yes, you were! We spent half a day running around cackling like conspiratorial fools." Marik grinned. "You thought I was fun." He said it with infuriating confidence, ever so smug, like the very idea that someone would disagree with him was laughable.

"I didn't. I was going to—" and the words he didn't say were kill you, I was going to kill you as soon as I had the rod, had already planned out what to do with your guts, it didn't matter if you were fun, he didn't care, he couldn't be friends with anything, but saying that to Marik seemed unwise and thinking about how he felt back then made him dizzy, so he shoved it away somewhere.

Marik didn't notice, light and easy as always. "Well, I thought you were fun. For a little while." He started using the twig to draw patterns in the dirt, arcing lines and swirls and wedjets.

"Until you completely lost it, you mean?"

"Yes." Marik winced, grimaced. "Until that happened." He kept drawing, pensive, a little deflated.

"What happened with all that, anyway? The other you? I was busy being mostly dead."

"Being the darkness, you mean?" He lightened a little, and Bakura couldn't tell if he was being mocked or not, but with Marik that seemed par for the course. "We won. Shadows turned him into dust." Marik frowned, closed his eyes and tilted his head, listening to something far away. "He's still in there, somewhere."

"You can't just get rid of him?"

"Not how it works."

"Stubborn bastard."

"I would have said…" Marik made a face. "Sadistic monster. Cruel, irrational, heinous leech. Yours isn't bad, though. He was persistent." A delicate, looping pattern, crisscrossing over itself. "He was trying to protect me, in his own weird way."

"That's funny, I seem to remember him trying to kill you."

"Sort of. He was trying to be me, forever." Marik finished a line on the ground and bent the stick in one hand, testing the flexibility. "That's why he exists. To be me when things are overwhelming. Because he doesn't care about anything, so nothing hurts him." He scowled, squeezed it, and there was a glint of something in his eye, rage, frigid and terrible, something buried, something familiar. "I don't need that anymore. I have to feel my own hatred." It snapped. He softened, and placed it gently in the grass. "I can't make it someone else's problem."

The waves lapped the riverbank as another ferry went by.

Bakura yawned performatively. "So whatever part of 'hanging out' you insist on dragging me to next," he announced, "Can it have food?"

Marik smiled again, relieved at the abrupt break in tension. "Do you have priorities besides eat and steal?"

Bakura looked at him in disdain, seemed to consider this a very stupid question. "Steal to eat. Eat to live."

Marik stood up and dusted grass off himself, stretched languidly, swung his keys on one finger. "Tell me all about it on the way." he said, and headed back off towards where the bike was parked.

Bakura watched him for a second and then glanced back at the river, and with a disgruntled noise reluctantly got up to leave. Really, he'd thought he could make it at least a week with these people, taking advantage of a bed and a fridge until he booked it with whatever looked the most expensive. He might have to cut it short, if Marik was going to keep prattling on like this.

No, the free meal ticket definitely wasn't supposed to involve this much talking.


In a small, silent apartment in Domino City, Ryou Bakura put down the phone, and felt sick. He sank to the floor and pulled his knees up to his chest. The quiet of the room, peaceful before, now felt menacing. It screamed of an ominous absence. He closed his eyes. His brain was quiet too.

Not that his head couldn't provide, conjure exactly what it would say. My dear host, with its awful laugh, like fangs sinking into your brain stem, Did you think you could be rid of me that easily?

He grabbed at the fabric of his shirt, squeezed it, right at the place on his chest where he knew a set of scars would be. A neat arc of little marks, where something had dug in. They went well with the scar on his left hand, and on his shoulder.

He shuddered and took a high, shallow breath, the kind you do when you are trying to convince yourself not to cry.

He hugged himself tight and wondered, in passing, how it was doing. If it missed him.

That night, for reasons he knew to be irrational, he locked every door and window in the house.