Lynchshipping (Thief King Bakura x Yami no Marik x Marik)
"You look terrible."
"Shut up."
"Only stating the obvious."
"Then you don't have to open your stupid mouth for that, do you?"
Marik spoke into his pillow, but the recipient of his irritation could hear him quite clearly. The projection of the tan skinned, white haired man was grinning, Marik knew without looking at him. He was grinning so widely that it was twisting the scar that ran across his cheek into a gruesome spectacle.
He was grinning because he legitimately enjoyed watching Marik look so desperately and helpless, struggling from his dreams with strangled cries as the sheets tangled around him like the shadows that threatened to swallow him, the cold sweat coating his bare skin and making the old scars on his back ache with ghost pains. He was a sadistic, horrible bastard, and he liked to watch Marik suffer.
Marik lifted his head from the pillow, finally looking at the spirit that sat on the foot of his bed.
"Get out," he muttered.
"And go where? No, I'm pretty comfortable being attached to your brain for now."
It had been an accident. Marik had once attached a piece of himself to Bakura through way Anzu, severing his link with Anzu forever. But after being nearly destroyed by his other half, he had simply assumed that his connection to Bakura had died with it.
He had been wrong.
After Bakura was defeated in the Shadow RPG, the part of him that wasn't Zorc, that wasn't banished to the Shadow Realm forever, managed to escape by grabbing hold of that last link. Marik.
And now Marik was stuck with the evil bastard.
"I am not your side show," Marik hissed.
The thief king laughed.
"Of course you're not. You're the main ring of the circus. So much guilt and desperation..."
"Shut. Up."
"I just wish you'd let me watch your dreams while you're having them. It's starting to get boring watching you from the outside and trying to guess what kind of horrors are passing through your mind."
Marik shot straight up. If the man had not been insubstantial, Marik would have grabbed him by the throat and thrown him against a wall.
"Get out of my frigging head," he said through his teeth.
Bakura met his eyes levelly, face completely serious for a moment. Then his customary smirk tugged at his lips.
"So guilty, Marik. Why are you so guilty?"
It was because of him. That dark specter that laughed at him in his dreams, that pulled him down into the darkness, that grinned at him in the night, whose echoing voice had just the same amount of horrible glee and malice at this new bastard that shared his head.
"I killed him," Marik said. "I killed him."
Bakura's smile didn't even falter. But his eyes flashed with curiosity.
"He was a damn, evil, sadistic bastard that I created," Marik said, uncertain where the words were coming from. "He was a killer. A murder who laughed as he pushed the blade through someone's ribs. Who grinned at the sight of someone being tortured, in pain. I made him. I frigging made him."
He could barely breathe. His chest wouldn't let the air through to his lungs; it was feeling so tight.
"He was me and I was him but I hated him, I hated him for existing, I hated him for being there, I hated him because I hated myself for making him – and I killed him. I put my hand on the deck and I felt him die. I felt it. I felt him disappearing and dying, but he was me. I. Killed. Me."
He gasped for breath. The hold of his darker self never seemed to leave. It was that terror – that terror that reminded him that he was responsible for that creature's birth, and that it was entirely possible for Marik to bring that darker part of himself back. It was entirely possible that at any moment that bastard could be reborn in the caverns of his mind – because they were one and the same and as long as one survived the other could certainly return if the chance came about.
He almost thought he could hear the other one's cackle at the back of his mind. He had to remind himself that it was just his imagination. The other one wouldn't come back, because Marik wouldn't let him. Never again. Never again.
Bakura wasn't smiling anymore. He was simply...considering Marik. His dark eyes, further shadowed by his thick white bangs, peered out at him, studying him, curious, wondering.
And then his smile returned.
"Ah," he said. "You see, this is why I like you."
A/N: Dark. Sorry. (not really) Next is Loyaltyshipping (Yami no Yugi x Mahad).
