Sleepshipping (Marik x Possessed Jonouchi x Rishid)

Rishid glanced across at the blond boy dubiously. He had the trademark hollow eyes of the Millennium Rod's work, but there was something else there that worried him. He couldn't quite put his finger on it.

Marik seemed to notice the glance.

"He was difficult," he said, as though that answered some unspoken question. "His mind was fairly strong."

Rishid nodded, but he still did not understand what exactly was different about Jonouchi. But it was not his place to ask, or even to speak. Marik's violet eyes hovered on the silent Rishid for a moment, then they returned to staring at the Millennium Rod. The gold item glinted in the sunlight of the harbor. That eye seemed to stare right through Marik, into his soul and the hatred that seethed there.

A sharp pain shot through the back of his head and Marik winced. Rishid shifted, and Marik cursed himself for allowing that weakness to show through. Controlling so many minds at once was starting to wear on him. Of course, his own Ghouls were a fairly simple bunch. Only a few of them were currently being controlled, and that was simply for the sake of being able to see anywhere whenever he needed too. So many it wasn't the number of minds.

Maybe it was just Jonouchi.

The boy stared blankly at nothing. Marik could still remember the fervent struggle to gain control of his mind. He felt sore, as though he had physically been fighting the blond boy. Rishid's dark eyes glanced over Marik, and Marik bristled. He could tell Rishid was worried about him – but he didn't have the right to be worried.

"Shouldn't you be doing something else, Rishid?" Marik snapped.

Rishid did not answer. He never did. Marik supposed that was why he still kept Rishid around. He didn't ask stupid questions, and he never asked if he was all right. That was good, because Rishid of all people should know: Marik was never all right.

Jonouchi shuddered slightly, and the pain grew in Marik's head again.

"Go back to sleep," he muttered, tightening his hold.

Jonouchi shuddered again. Then the part of him that struggled did just that: it went back to sleep. Marik used the lull to renter the Millennium Rod's power. It was a strange thing, how it worked. He would get a vision of a person's thoughts, manifested in the shape of boxes. Close the right boxes, and the person was Marik's to command.

His eyes wandered to Rishid. Well, some of them. He had seen the mind of Rishid, but his boxes were, for the most part, closed up tight. Marik could neither access nor block them. The only thing that happened when Marik used the Rod against Rishid was that his voice could be projected into the small boxes that must remain open, the ones that were necessary for consciousness. The rest were locked away from him. Rishid had locked them himself.

Perhaps that was the real reason why he never spoke.

Jonouchi's mind was different. Almost everything was open – he had no idea about how to shield his own mind. Things tumbled from the boxes in a jumbled mess of everything. And he had been adamant about keeping them open. Marik had been unable to close a single one – until he found a tiny, closed box shunted to a corner of Jonouchi's mind.

When he had opened that box, every dark, angry, and selfish thought or action Jonouchi had ever done tumbled out. The other boxes snapped shut, like a defense mechanism to keep the darkness from tainting anything else. With a little bit of Marik's encouragement, he had forced the box to grow. Jonouchi was not so much under Marik's control as he was under the control of his selfish and hateful self.

"Marik," Rishid said, just a soft pair of syllables that meant nothing to Marik. And yet, their soft, gentle pronunciation by Rishid caused him to pause and look up at the tall man that he had once called his elder brother. His dark eyes were not judgmental. They were only questioning. While Rishid would never say the words out loud, he would think them, and Marik would understand that he was thinking them.

What is wrong?

Marik hesitated. He didn't really know, but he did feel that something was wrong.

There had been so much happiness spilling out of Jonouchi. So many both sad and happy things, all jumbled together, making him what he was. There was nothing he would change about himself, except to lock away the darkness.

What would his own boxes look like, Marik wondered. How many of his boxes had he closed to hide things away? Had he hidden the right things?

Jonouchi shuddered once more, and this time, Marik did not increase his control.

Maybe what was really wrong with him was what Jonouchi already understood. Maybe, of all three of them that stood there, only Jonouchi had closed the right boxes.

A/N: Abstract, but threesomes are difficult. And I wanted to explore Marik's mind control thing in a very Yu-Gi-Oh way; after all, Shadi sees a manifestation of a person's soul like a room when he takes over minds. Shouldn't Marik's powers work in a similar way? Next is Slaveshipping (Pegasus x Mokuba). ...geez, and I thought Rebecca and Pegasus was bad...