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Jabberwocky
"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"
"Jabberwocky" - Lewis Carrol
Silence reigned in the small apartment as Bakura and the spirit locked gazes. The younger was the first to break the taut atmosphere.
"So . . . why are you here?"
The spirit noted the defiance still present, the firm lines to the boy's posture that had never been there before.
"I am here for you."
Bakura's eyes widened slightly. "For . . . for me?"
"Yes." The ghostly form seated itself casually on the arm of the sofa, gesturing for Bakura to do the same. The unnatural civility and calmness only increased his unease. He complied, sitting at the far edge on the opposite side, ready to spring up at a moment's notice.
The spirit restrained the urge to roll his eyes. Trust was the key here. He turned, examining Bakura again. Yes, a definite change.
"You are in danger," he said, abruptly.
The boy stared back, blinking slowly. "Danger?"
The spirit nodded gravely. "You know, host, that I will risk no harm to you."
Bakura involuntarily glanced at the rumpled sofa over which he had just somersaulted. The spirit sneered. "I mean more harm than a few bruises, you dolt."
The insult seemed to sting something in him. He sat up straighter. "What kind of danger?"
"An ancient one."
Bakura groaned inwardly. Experience had taught him that anything with that description was the worst of its kind. The spirit shot him a half-amused glance from under the long, snowy lashes.
"Am I really that bad?" he cooed in mock falsetto.
Cursing, Bakura remembered the mind link. He cleared his throat nervously. "Um . . . I think you could answer that better than I could, actually."
"Very good, host. You learn some civility. Perhaps this is not a total loss after all." The thief stood and began to pace slowly before the wary boy.
"Have you been having any odd dreams lately?"
"Odd . . . well, yes, but no more than usual . . ."
"Describe them." The order was sharply put, the cold eyes narrowing. Bakura shifted uncomfortably.
"Why do you want to know?" he demanded in turn, suspicion turning his voice sharp.
The spirit considered him, a small smile playing around the corners of his mouth. A sheen of sweat broke out on Bakura's forehead. He recognized that smile; the anger beneath it.
"How long do you think you'll last?" The question was deadly soft, "How long do you think you have, boy? You didn't do very well the last time you were in the shadows . . . this time it will be far worse than anything I would willingly do to you . . ."
Despite himself, Bakura felt the old sense of fear creeping in. He knew that the spirit would not risk any lasting damage to him; he was the 'vessel' after all. Thieving, double-crossing, deception, that had always been the spirit's way. What made this time any different? Was there really a threat, or was this yet another ploy to gain possession of his free will? Schooling his face into an indifference that surprised even the thief, he looked up.
"What do these dreams have to do with . . . this danger?"
"Everything."
"You'll have to be more specific," he said, far more boldly than he felt. He knew that somehow, he would pay for this later. Dearly.
The spirit smiled beautifically, and, for an instant, Bakura was looking at a mirror image of himself. "Tut, tut, details all come in good time. The shadow I sense is one with which I was . . . acquainted. A long time ago." The smile twisted. "And he has no mercy for the weak. What was it you dreamt, landlord?"
There was no mistaking the command in his tone now. Bakura watched him carefully as he spoke.
"There's no harm in telling you, I suppose. They're mostly the same, short, repetitive. I'm standing on a tall cliff, overlooking a city. It's night, everything is dark." He paused reflectively and the spirit resisted the urge to tear into his mind and see for himself. "There are people around me, a shadowy group, they're all on horseback. We are watching the city, waiting for something to happen. Then someone speaks and the dream ends." He looked up at the spirit.
"That's all you remember?"
"Yes . . ."
"What did the person say?"
"I don't know! It didn't sound like any language I recognize . . ."
"So its a man?"
The boy nodded, growing more and more curious by the second. The spirit was deep in thought, shaking his head as if dissatisfied. "Too vague . . ." He looked up at Bakura, the cunning light re-entering his slanted gaze. "I cannot be sure unless you confirm it."
"Confirm what?" The uneasiness was creeping back into his mind.
"That what you saw in this . . . dream was what I think it was."
"What are you planning?" He was off the sofa faster than before, backing towards the door.
His mirror image laughed mockingly back at him. "And where do you think you're going?"
"Away from you! You think I trust you?" he shouted.
"Oh, but you should. Without my help you will not survive long. And I simply couldn't have that . . ."
The rest of the sentence was lost in Bakura's desperate barrage on the door. "HELP! HELP! SOMEBODY LET ME OUT!"
Thus, he missed the spirit's slightly bored expression as he came up behind him and lightly placed a translucent hand on either side of his head. The brown eyes rolled back as he collapsed on the rug and the spirit smirked as he vanished into the Ring once more.
"Welcome back, drowsy."
Bakura groaned, the mocking tones of the spirit even more unwelcome than the splitting pain wracking the back of his head. It happened every time he was forcibly dragged into unconciousness; into his soul room. The area in question supposedly took on the form of the place in which one felt most at home, the true resting place of the soul. This had been explained during one of the more benevolent moods of the spirit of the ring. Bakura had found himself here numerous times before. The reading room of the house he used to live in. When he had a family. Sitting up, eyelids blinking open blearily, the panelled walls of the room came into focus, the fireplace in which a blaze always crackled, the closed glass cases under which the more prized artifacts from his father's explorations rested, the newspaper cuttings on the cork board, the rough sketches scattered haphazardly over the desktop, the small, neat bookcases, the window casement . . . Turning slowly, the man lounging casually against the glass pane came into view. The spirit waggled his fingers infuriatingly.
Bakura stood rapidly, fists bunched, blood thundering in his head. "I KNEW IT!" He advanced on the lithe figure who was now grinning back, arms crossed behind his head. The dismissal was enough for the boy. He launched himself mindlessly at his tormentor, grappling with him and tearing him from his seat. They crashed to the floor, the thief kneeing Bakura in the gut and flipping him painfully onto his back. Powerful fingers enclosed his throat, slamming his head back into the wooden floor.
"Let . . . me . . . go . . ." Face turning an alarming shade of red, he flailed futilely at the spectre above him, so elusive in reality, so solid and undefeatable here, invading the place only he should control.
"You really are an imbecile," the spirit said musingly, seeming to take no effort at all in holding him down. He went on in the neutral tone of a teacher delivering an algebra lesson. "In this place you are not restricted by physicality. It is the strength of your soul that you should be exploiting."
He released Bakura, stepping gracefully away from the boy's prone form. "Get up."
Sitting up, he did not comply immediately, but shot an enraged, accusing stare at his smirking adversary. "You tricked me! I should have known what this was the moment you appeared!"
"You really are good at jumping to conclusions. You should consider a political career, landlord."
Bakura humphed, folding his arms and staring at the wall ahead. "Well, don't you have things to steal? In my body?" he snapped.
"All in good time." The spirit deemed it time to approach. Bakura wondered how much longer the indulgence would last before the tide turned and left him very much on the receiving end. "I keep my promises, landlord. I would like you to remain alive long enough to serve my purposes."
The barb made the boy wince, much to the thief's satisfaction. "And now your education in 'all things that would harm you' commences. Let's begin with the foremost on that long list."
He waved his fingers, balancing elegantly on his heels, and a wall lined with bookcases vanished, quickly replaced with what appeared to Bakura to be a very large, insubstantial television screen. Scrambling to his feet, he moved closer, frowning at the shadowy shapes chasing across the murky surface.
"After you . . ."
Mistrustfully, he glanced at the thief who was now rocking back and forth, smiling congenially. The smile vanished immediately, replaced with a snarl.
"Very well, cockroach, after me it is."
Somehow, the insult was a lot more reassuring. Bakura stepped into the swirling shadows after the swiftly striding spirit.
The harsh, biting wind, sweeping sand past his face, whipping back hair from his forehead, was the first thing he felt. Shivering, he wrapped his arms around himself, realising that the effects of the night weather were actually much diluted due to this being a memory, a projection of a time long past. The spirit's memory. Looking around, Bakura saw no sign of him. Cursing, he trudged up the incline ahead, the howl of the wind the only distinguishable sound. Thus it was that he came upon them, a line of shadowy shapes outlined against the night sky. He tripped, stumbling backwards in panic, gathering his wits when he realised that they could not see him. A memory . . .
Approaching the motionless figures once more, he squatted a safe distance away, examining them as best the darkness allowed. Although covered in cloaks to keep out the chafing sand, heads swathed in linen wraps, Bakura could see that these were no ordinary men. There was an effortlessness with which they handled their horses, a deadly grace with which they bore the variety of terrible weapons, a gleam of restrained eagerness that reflected now and again from exposed eyes that told Bakura exactly who these men were. Who they belonged to. Body, mind and soul.
There was no need for him to search, his eyes were drawn to the man who had brought him here as if by magnetism. In the weak moonlight filtering from between the ghostly clouds, the red cloak danced in the wind, the gold bands across the bare chest clinked softly, the huge black stallion beneath him snorting, breath clouding in the chilly night air. As if in a dream, Bakura approached, pausing when the light allowed him to examine the Thief King closely enough. The hair remained mostly unchanged, if a trifle more unruly, tufts standing out like a self-endowed crown around his proud, unclad head. The eyes, the ever-changing greyish-blue of the sea, as treacherous and as changeable, the corded neck, a tiger straining in his eagerness for blood, the broad-shouldered torso, easily outmatching any of the assembled men behind him, the muscular knees that gripped the horse's sides beneath the saddle. Bakura's gaze traveled to the hands that grasped the reigns, so different from the slender, pale, artful digits he was accustomed to. The powerful, dark-skinned appendages were heavily veined, the palms callused, knuckles scarred and knotted from the ferocity and violence they were accustomed to meting out, each hand large enough to cup (and crush) Bakura's skull like a leaf in a hurricane. There was nothing remotely fragile about the Thief King, nothing that seemed to connect him to his modern counterpart aside from the gleaming hair. For the first time since he had been aware of the spirit, Bakura felt something bordering on respect and awe.
Glancing around, his eyes widened. This was the scene from his dream . . . hazy, but he knew it well enough. And he had been . . . he shuddered slightly when he realised that he had been occupying a position beside the Thief King and hadn't even been aware of it. There was a shift, an ever so slight change in the mens' demeanour. The Thief King spoke, words in Arabic that Bakura could not understand and he looked up rapidly, in time to hear a distant sound much like a roll of thunder and a mushrooming cloud of smoke and flame erupting from the town ahead. The tension amongst the men broke. Harsh, grating, voices rough with ill-use, they cheered the destruction of some far-away enemy. Bakura winced, stumbling back again as the horses wheeled around with martial conformity. The man beside the Thief King, the one whose position he had occupied in his dream, pushed back his hood and Bakura beheld a dark beard, grizzled cheeks, a leonine mass of wiry hair and a craggy profile, much lined and scarred with battle and travel under the blazing Egyptian sun. But it was the eyes which arrested him. Unlike the Thief King, who carried himself with the pride and grace of a young leopard in his prime, dominance clearly reflected in his gaze, this man was almost hunched over in the saddle, the eyes so hooded and dark as to appear as unfathomable tunnels.
"You see, my Lord, I told you that my skill in covert arts was . . . commendable."
Bakura started slightly at his sudden ability to comprehend Arabic. The spirit had probably effected the change.
The Thief King spared his companion a glance. "You do yourself an injustice, Usi. That was quite something to witness." The distant shouts of panic and terror filtered back to them, carried on the wind. The white-haired man smirked, leaning back in his saddle and cocking his head to one side. "I never thought that screaming could sound so pleasurable from so far away."
"Unless its a woman . . . then its no fun at all!" one of his men called.
The thief grinned. "I'd grant honour to the woman who could speak at all after experiencing me," he replied, earning a roar of approving laughter from his men.
Bakura's attention, however, was not caught by the bawdy camaraderie, but rather by the strange watchfulness of the man called Usi. He alone was unaffected by the men's enthusiasm, the hooded eyes remaining on the Thief King, strange, vigilant.
A single cry resounded through the night, echoed by many others. "All hail Khemnebi! Glory to our King!"
If Bakura had been able to read the man better, he would almost have said that he detected a gleam of satisfaction, not a welcome one. And it seemed as if he were not the only one who noticed. As the band of thieves thundered away into the night, a wild, dark river of heedless grace and destruction, the Thief King had passed close by him, glancing briefly over his shoulder at Usi, the deep distrust momentarily visible on his sharp features. Then the blue-grey eyes flashed past and he was yet another shapeless shadow, the rushing of the wind catching the crimson edges of his cloak.
"All hail Khemnebi! Lord of all Thieves!"
The darkness around him began to recede, his vision clouding over, the flickering of the firelight and the comforting, musty odour of old books forming a sensory jigsaw that led him back to his soul room. He blinked, once, twice. From across the room, the spirit watched him. And for the first time, Bakura felt no shame in the word, no sense of futility, no cloying of his throat at the very mention of it.
"Yami?"
There was something he had learnt tonight, what he had witnessed was not the pure malice, venom, the biting coldness he was accustomed to. He had seen the untamed, the free, a soul with no boundaries or conformities. Was judgement really his own? Surprise echoed across the mindlink and he broke his train of thought hastily. That man was long gone, crushed from memory by his own hand. Shaking his head as if to clear it, he advanced.
"Who was that man? Usi . . ."
The spirit pushed off the wall against which he had been leaning. His eyes glinted, catching the amber sparks leaping from the fire.
"That, Bakura, is the right question."
A/N: And that was a very long chapter . . . excuse the length!