Hmmm… Things are kind of awkward in this chapter… Ah well. =) This is information which leads up to the next chapter, enjoy.
Chapter 12: Boat
Bakura was trying to read the rest of "a Vampire Story," but he just couldn't focus. His mind kept going back to last night, when Marik murmured his name in his sleep. It kept replaying in his head, over and over and over again, like a scratched record. 'Kura… 'Kura… 'Kura… Only, he never got annoyed of hearing it. In fact, he found himself smiling like an idiot sometimes, but he quickly straightened out his face and tried to go back to reading. But his mind just kept going back to Marik. Why would he murmur my name in his sleep? Does he remember I kissed him? What doe he remember this time… He also remembered that Marik thought holding his hand was nice…
He growled himself a warning.
He went back to trying to read, but then the guy that has been occupying his thought for practically the whole night entered the room. Bakura pretended to continue reading as Marik walked in with his hand on his head.
"Ugh…," he said, "I have a horrible headache… ah, ah Ah-CHOO!" he sniffed.
"Well, you can't blame me this time," Bakura said.
"I know…"
He sat down next to Bakura, not noticing how Bakura tensed up. Marik groaned again and laid his head against Bakura's shoulder, which made everyone's favorite white-haired thief blush slightly.
"Do you really think my sister won't find me?" Marik said, his thoughts in a different world than Bakura's
"H-how could she?" Bakura only stammered once, he wasn't used to Marik being this close, but hey, he wasn't complaining.
Marik sighed, "It's just that, she worked at that dress shop, and if she's here, then my dad…" Marik's thoughts trailed off and he lifted his head back up in time to sneeze in the opposite direction of Bakura. He rubbed his nose with his sleeve.
Bakura closed his book and said, "You really hate your dad, don't you?"
"Let's just say, he's the most horrible person in the world," Marik said as his eyes started to droop. He shook himself awake and then smiled at Bakura. "Guess what?"
"What?" Bakura asked.
"I remember some things from last night."
Bakura froze. "Is that so?"
"Yeah," he put his arm around Bakura's shoulders, "Come here old buddy old pal! I didn't know we were friends."
Bakura almost let out a breath of relief, "I just said that because you wouldn't have gone home otherwise."
"Hmmm…" Marik said still smiling, "Really? I seem to remember you coming back to save me from those weird guys too."
Bakura looked at Marik, slightly worried now, "How much do you remember?"
Marik thought about it, "Everything at the bar, the walk home was kind of blurry."
"Ok," Bakura said, now smirking, "Buy the way, you didn't seem to mind those guys flirting with you Marik."
Marik's face turned pink and he took his arm from around Bakura's shoulders and said, "I was drunk!"
"Ah, but you weren't as drunk as the last time now were you?"
Marik ground his teeth, but then he closed his eyes and rubbed his temples. "Do you have any Tylenol or something?"
"No, sorry. If you eat something it should help."
"Eh, I'm not hungry, I'll just drink some milk." He got up and poured himself a glass of milk.
"Don't set the house on fire this time."
Marik's eye started to twitch, "Isn't that how you kill vampires though?"
"You wouldn't hurt me."
"Really? Why not? You certainly give me good reason to."
Bakura smiled, "I seem to remember a certain Egyptian telling me holding my hand felt nice."
Marik's face turned crimson, "I-I said that?"
"Yup."
"… I was -"
"I know, I know. You were drunk, tell it to the judge."
"Trust me. I would never say that sober." Marik sat down at the kitchen table, and then he thought about the one dream he had last night. He had dreamt one thing, and that one thing had been Bakura kissing him. But that wasn't the weird part, okay, maybe that was slightly weird, but the weirder part was that Marik actually enjoyed it, in his dream of course. And when Bakura had took his lips away, Marik remembered his dream self murmuring " 'Kura…" Marik groaned out loud and hit his head on the table. Marik was glad Bakura couldn't read his mind like that sparkly vampire in Twilight. He wished he could get it out of his mind, but it kept replaying in his mind, like someone kept pressing the rewind button an a DVD player. And the worst part was that now Marik wanted to see how Bakura's lips felt against his in real life, if they were as soft as they were in his dream…
Of course, if Marik had been thinking he would have realized that in dreams you can't feel anything but emotions, but he wasn't thinking that much into detail.
Anyway, Marik drank some milk, and started thinking about his sister again. Why is she here? Is the whole family here, or just her? How did she know I was here? Does she know my plans? Does dad know my plans? Thinking about it made his head hurt again. He drank more milk.
Maybe Bakura's right, she hasn't found me yet, besides, they probably are just looking for vampires. Then Marik thought of something that he probably should have thought of a while ago. Wait, if there looking for vampires, then isn't Bakura in danger? His eyes went wide, he really didn't want Bakura dead. He didn't know why, but the very thought of Bakura being gone made his heart feel heavy. He drank a lot more milk.
He thought about where the Millennium Items could be. He knew that they could be anywhere, and he only had ideas of where they were. Ugh… if only I knew where they were located… Then all we would have to do was get there. Then Marik started thinking of how he would get to the different places. He couldn't take a plane, it's not that he didn't have a passport, because he did, it was because he was afraid of heights. He just didn't like feeling so high up, knowing that at any moment the plane could crash and he could plummet to his doom… In fact, whenever his parents made him take a plane ride, his mother usually gave him some pills so that he would sleep through the whole thing.
He smiled at the memory of his mother, then he remembered his father's way of dealing with his acrophobia. Shoving his face against the plane window and telling him to "get over it!"
Marik scowled, and then drank more milk.
Only he was out of milk.
He put his glass away and walked back to the bathroom to take a shower.
Meanwhile, Bakura had given up on trying to read "A Vampire Story," seeing as how he wasn't paying attention to it, and went onto his computer. He went onto Google and typed in, "Millennium Items." Most of what he got were ads for items that were Millennium and that they were on sale for 18 easy payments of 19.95!(1) But he soon found a cite stating Egyptian Legend entitled, "Millennium Items, Do They Exist?
It basically repeated what Marik had told him earlier, that if you collected all of these Items then you would get one rule-free wish yadda yadda yadda. Then it said that each Millennium Item gave you a certain power and listed what they were. It started with the Millennium Puzzle. Bakura didn't really know what that thing did, so he read part of the article.
'The Millennium Puzzle
The Millennium Puzzle is a very strange piece, because you first have to put it together to get any special powers, and you don't even know what the thing is supposed to look like. Many people have claimed to have tried to solve it, but then gave up, saying it was an impossible task. However, it is said that if you do in fact solve it, then you get the 'powers of the dark,' or the power of yami no games(2). No one really knows what this entitles, many archaeologists have tried to find out more about this piece, but this is the only information they found of it.
An anonymous eye-witness claims to have seen the Millennium Puzzle, in it's solved form, or so they believe, around the neck of a young Japanese boy. The eye-witness says that the Puzzle is in the shape of a "upside-down pyramid." However, since we don't actually know what the piece looks like, we cannot confirm this. Most likely, it was just a piece of jewelry with the Millennium eye symbol on it.'
Bakura smirked at the last part. They don't know that we actually have it. Then Bakura thought about the yami no games. You've got that right, the Pharaoh was all about yami no games. He used them for everything. Bakura continued to read the article.
The Millennium Rod and Millennium Ring were listed next, so he skipped over those since they already had them and knew what they did. The next item listed was the Millennium Eye.
Millennium Eye… That sounds interesting. He read through the article, and saw that this gave you the power to do a "mind scan" and basically read your mind. The only problem with it was that to get it to work, you had to place it into your eye socket.
Bakura smiled evilly, That would be a fun way of torturing someone. He thought of the last time he had heard someone scream in terror… 2 weeks ago. He sighed, that was such a long time! His eyes glanced back to the article and focused on one spot.
'…An eye-witness claims to have seen the Millennium Eye in the eye-socket on Pegasus J. Crawford. They claim that wears his hair so that it covers the eye, but if you look in on him from a side-view, you can see a glimpse of it…'
Bakura kept reading, but it didn't say any information on the actual guy Pegasus. He clicked the 'back' button, and typed, "Pegasus J. Crawford" into the search engine.
What came up was mostly websites supporting some children's card game or something, but he soon found a website that had information on the man himself.
It also included a picture. Bakura couldn't believe how this guy looked. His hair was long and white, it did cover one side of his face, it looked like he usually wore red with a necktie, and moreover, he just looked gay, He just had that look about him, especially in his smile. Bakura almost cracked up laughing, but instead he just laughed a little bit. He was still laughing when Marik came out of the shower wearing only pants and with his hair still damp. He walked into the living room and looked at the picture of Pegasus and immediately started laughing. "W-who is that?" he asked while laughing.
"This extremely gay man is Pegasus J. Crawford and the supposed owner of the Millennium Eye." Marik stopped laughing and took a closer look, allowing Bakura to see him without his shirt on. He found himself snapping his eyes back to the computer screen.
"That would explain why one side of his face is covered, where does he live?"
Bakura scrolled down, all the while focusing his eyes so that they wouldn't move, and he soon found where he lived.
"It says he lives in a small island off the West coast of America. Apparently it used to belong to Hawaii before he bought it."
Marik's eyes went wide, "How rich is this guy?"
"Very, he made that card game that Yugi's always blabbing about, Duelmonsters or something like that."
"Oh yeah, I remember now," he stood up straight, "Well, looks like we're going to America."
Bakura turned to look at him and raised his eyebrow, "And how exactly do you suppose we get there?" He had to struggle to keep looking at Marik's face.
Marik thought about it, "We could get a… a…. ah-CHOO!" he sniffed again.
"For goodness sakes Marik, put a shirt on before you sneeze on my keyboard!" Bakura said wiping off his keyboard.
Marik sniffed again, "How is me putting a shirt on going to prevent me from sneezing?"
"If you're cold you are more prone to sneezing, now put a shirt on!"
Marik rolled his eyes, "You sound like my sister," but walked to get a shirt anyway.
Bakura sighed, glad he could relax now. What the hell just happened? he thought.
He looked back at the computer screen. How are we going to get there? A plane maybe? Marik came back in, and Bakura said, "We might be able to take a plane over there."
Marik's blood ran cold. "A p-plane?"
"Yeah, it would certainly be the fastest way there."
"Um… I don't think we should take a plane…"
Bakura looked at him, suspicious of Marik's behavior. "Why not?" he asked.
"Because…because…because he probably doesn't allow planes to land on his island!" Marik said.
Bakura narrowed his eyes.
"Besides, the plane rides would all be during the daytime." Bakura lifted his brow, and then slowly started to smile until his mouth was in an evil grin. "Marik Ishtar, you're afraid of heights, aren't you?"
"What? No! Wh-what makes you say that?" Marik said as his face slowly went red.
Bakura started to laugh, "I can't believe it, you're afraid of heights? How can you be afraid of heights?"
"I already said that I wasn't!"
"Really?" Bakura said smirking, "So you would be perfectly fine with us taking a plane to the island."
"Yes, but we can't, you'd burn up, remember?"
"I could wear my trench coat remember?"
Marik and Bakura stared at each other, and then Marik hung his head, "Don't take a plane…"
"Why not?" Bakura said, clearly enjoying himself.
"…because I'm afraid of heights."
Bakura started to laugh again, and Marik clenched his hands into fists and bit his tongue, but eventually he couldn't take it anymore.
"You'd be afraid of heights too if your dad hung you by your foot on top of a pyramid when you were five-years-old!" Marik yelled.
Bakura immediately stopped laughing. "…What?"
Marik turned his head to the side, he could feel tears building up at the ends of his eyes, "Never mind, just forget it."
"Marik -"
"I said forget it!" Marik screamed and then walked into the bedroom and slammed the door.
Bakura stared at the place where Marik had been standing and rubbed his hand through his hair. "Great, now the drama queen is mad at me…"
Marik was walking angrily through the bedroom. He even ripped up a pillow and stared at all the feathers everywhere. He sat down on the bed and brought his legs up so he could rest his head on his knees. He wasn't going to cry, he was done with that, but he just couldn't believe that he had yelled at Bakura about something of his horrid past. He had told himself that he wouldn't tell Bakura anything of his past, and now he had told him why he was afraid of heights?
He groaned. The thought of his dad just made him so angry, he could feel his anger boiling up to his head, getting ready to explode, and Bakura laughing at him like that… it made him furious.
Bakura doesn't have the right to laugh at me, he's never met my father, he wouldn't understand
'Want to know what I think?' his inner self put in.
No.
'Well I'll tell you anyways. I think you should face your fears and ride the stupid plane.'
Marik paled at the thought. No thanks.
'If you want Bakura to stop laughing at you, you have to face your fears, do you think he has any fears?'
…no
'What was that?'
I said no!
'There we have it, so either face your fears, or act like a baby.'
I'm not acting like a baby!
'Wanna bet?'
Marik didn't respond. He sighed. Maybe we should take a plane, it would be faster, and besides, it's not like I'm traveling with my dad this time. And really, falling isn't that scary, once you get over the splatting on the ground thing… Marik groaned again. He stood up, but he immediately felt dizzy afterwards, he shook it off and decided to lie down on the bed. His eyes started to close, and he drifted off to dream-land.
Meanwhile Bakura was thinking heavily. He had never cared so much about anyone being mad at him before. Usually he just shrugged it off, "Oh look," he would say, "Another guy is mad at me, oh well, like that's never happened before." But it was different with Marik. No matter how much he hated to admit, Marik was different. In some way, some how, he became more than just an insignificant person like he thought of every one else. He became more than just another person you pass on the street, or some guy you talk to because you're bored, or that stranger you have to talk to and work with because you need their help. He was more than that. Somewhere along the line, Marik had turned into a friend.
Maybe even more than a friend.
Bakura rubbed his temples. He was not going to think that way anymore. He started thinking about what he knew about Marik's dad.
"When my dad found out about the candy, he threw it all away." "Let's just say, my dad's the most horrible person in the world." "You'd be afraid of heights too if your dad hung you by your foot on top of a pyramid when you were five-years-old!"
Based on this, Marik's dad seemed like a really bad person. I mean, who dangles a five-year-old off the side of a pyramid? Even Bakura wouldn't do that. At least not to a five-year-old.
If I ever find Marik's dad I think I'll kill him, Bakura thought. Then he searched more on Google.
About ten minutes later, Bakura was smiling in triumph. He stood up and walked into the bedroom. He saw Marik laying on the bed sleeping. Only he did not look good. His face was red like he had a fever.
"Marik?" Bakura said. Marik's eyes started to open. He looked up. "Oh, hey Bakura," then his head fell back on the pillow with his eyes still open slightly.
Bakura rushed forward and put his hand to Marik's forehead, although, this caused Marik's face to turn more red, and Bakura's eyes went wide. He took his hand away. "You're burning up!"
"It's no big deal, it'll go down."
Bakura raised his eyebrow, "Oh really? Stand up."
Marik stood up, but he looked like he was about to collapse. Bakura helped him back onto the bed, then he left to get the thermometer. He shoved it in Marik's mouth causing Marik to glare at him.
"I'm fine!" he insisted.
"Stop talking." Bakura tapped his foot, waiting for the electric thermometer to beep, because he was not a patient man, he never was.
When the thermometer beeped, Bakura looked at it. It was at 37.8 degrees Celsius(100 degrees Fahrenheit). Bakura scowled. "You are not fine, you're sick."
Marik turned onto his side, "It'll go away," he said carelessly.
Bakura rolled his eyes. Marik could tell Bakura didn't believe him, so he stood up and started walking, but he tripped after taking a few steps. Luckily, Bakura caught him by the waist just before he hit the floor and put him back on the bed. He couldn't help but notice how muscular Marik's chest was, and Marik's face turned just a little redder. "You should sleep some more," Bakura said, and then he left, closing the door softly behind him. Marik stared at the doorway, wondering why Bakura seemed to care about him.
But hey, he wasn't complaining.
Bakura came back in the room after a little while with some soup. Marik had just woken up so Bakura shoved the soup at him, "Eat it," he said.
"I'm not hungry."
Bakura scowled, "I already made the soup, you're eating it."
"I didn't ask you to make the soup."
"Too bad, eat it or die."
"But if I eat it I'll die anyway won't I?" Marik said with a smirk.
Bakura's eye started twitching again. "Eat. It."
Marik too the soup and the spoon, "What did you do to it?"
"I didn't do anything to it."
Marik shoved the spoon at him, "You eat it first then."
Bakura rolled his eyes and ate some of the soup. "There! Happy now princess? Is there anything else I can get you? Water from the Fountain of Youth maybe?"
Marik shook his head and ate some of the soup. His eyes went wide. "This is delicious!"
"It's Ryou's recipe, of course it's delicious."
"Was he a chef part-time or something?"
"No, he just liked cooking." Marik ate more soup. "So listen" Bakura said while looking at his fingernails, "About your fear of heights, I didn't know about your dad." He didn't say anything after that.
Marik slowly took the spoon out of his mouth, "…Are you apologizing?"
"No, I'm just saying I didn't know," Bakura said still looking at his fingernails with a bored expression on his face.
Marik's mouth slowly formed a smile, "Apology accepted Bakura," he ate some more soup.
"By the way, pack your things by next week."
Marik looked at him curiously. "Why?"
"Because we're going to Pegasus's island."
Marik began to pale, "How are we getting there?"
"Boat."
"Boat?"
"Yup, I bought a boat."
Marik was confused, "Why did you buy a -" his mouth slowly formed a goofy grin.
Bakura stopped looking at his fingernails and scowled at Marik. "Why are you smiling like that?"
"Did you buy a boat just so I wouldn't have to ride a plane?"
"Of course not, don't be so conceited. He probably wouldn't allow planes to land on his island anyway."
Marik smiled, "Thanks 'Kura."
Bakura rolled his eyes, "Just pack your things," he said and then he left. But as soon as he had closed the door, he smiled.
As soon as Marik had finished the soup, he got up and found all of his clothes. He put them in a pile and then put them in his duffel bag. All the while smiling. So Bakura actually can be kind.
(1): This equals $359.10... You call that easy?
(2): For those of you who don't know or forget, yami no game means game of darkness.
REPLYING TIME!
ThatsWhatCheeseSaid: I felt so happy after reading your review =) I'm glad I could make you squeal with joy =) And thanks, I really tried to make the Christmas special funny, I'm glad I succeeded! ^^ I also like Bakura's reaction to Bakura's cat-form, I had so much fun writing that XD
I'm glad you love drunk Marik, because I do too, I just don't want to do that too much because I'm thinking of Marik's health… AND that would be so great if you reviewed every chapter! =) Your reviews mean so much to me TT_TT They make me smile :D
And yes! May the power of thiefshipping give me a role! XD Thanks!
MimeGirl69: I'm glad you like the chapter! And you're right, that would be one kooky way to scare your neighbors O.o I could just imagine it… XD
BTW, recently, I found a cite where I can actually READ the Yu-Gi-Oh! manga (I'm so super special awesomely happy that I found it and it's really different from the book…) and there was this one part where Kaiba and Yami are dueling and Kaiba says, "Yugi, dueling with you (next panel, Kaiba wearing a creepy smile) makes my heart beat faster," and me, being the fan girl I am, stared at the screen like this: O.o I almost screamed in terror because that is one couple I do not support. (Sorry prideshipping fans, I just don't see it happening.)