"The ROOF?!" came the shout from the yard below.
Bakura ignored it, and continued overlooking the neighborhood from his perch.
"HOW?" called someone, in rising anger.
Bakura let him simmer for a few seconds before taking pity and yelling an answer at no one in particular. "The lattice in the back is very stable."
It was a decent enough perch. You could arguably see the river from here, or at least hints of it, slivers of distant water peeking between buildings and trees. A few hot-air balloons dotted the sky and apartment blocks towered over the world, each window suggesting a glimpse of a different room, each balcony with its own distinctive plants or furniture, every little touch providing a tiny portal into a life lived. A hundred cars and a hundred more little people raced back and forth in the distance like marching ants, car horns and exhaust fumes mixing with voices and the smell of street food. Locals, tourists, families with children, women in sparkly-patterned scarves off to lunch, a circle of old men laughing and smoking.
He had already memorized Marik's neighborhood out to three blocks. He did not know why he had done this, besides that the information seemed useful in some vague sense. He was mainly on the lookout in case of something dangerous, but he didn't see anything, unless the bent-over old woman watering her plants next door had some very dark secrets. He would keep an eye on her.
Someone grumbled a few words Bakura was fairly sure were profanity, and there was a bit of scrabbling. After a minute or two a presence appeared behind him, artfully ruffled, sun glinting off gold armbands.
Marik Ishtar was much like daylight angled directly into your eyeballs; relentless, annoying, somehow in every direction you look, and proof that beautiful things could be exceptionally painful. Climbing almost two stories somehow had not disturbed his breezy confidence, despite the twig in his hair. "So is this where you go, when you disappear all the time?"
"Do I disappear?"
"Yes. You leave without anyone noticing, and come back without anyone knowing how you got in. You were gone for two days." Marik sat down next to him on the edge of the roof, letting his legs dangle over the side, close enough to touch in a way that made Bakura, by reflex, subtly lean in the other direction.
Still, difficult not to be pleased by the notion that Marik was keeping track. "If you're all so dense that you can't notice who goes in and out of your own home, it's amazing that I am the first person to rob you and not the twentieth. I go lots of places. I don't see why this can't be one of them. Maybe I wanted to look at the birds."
Marik scanned the trees and rooftops in the immediate vicinity. "I don't see any birds." he concluded. "It is a nice view. Tired of hiding away with your books, finally?"
"No. Yet it appears several of my favorites have gone missing. I wonder why that is."
"A pity."
"Trying to punish my impertinence for refusing to play along with your games, or forcing my hand by eliminating other options? Not an impressive show of force. I know you can do better. And I have already found them." he said. "I don't understand. You can't like me that much."
"I don't know what you mean."
"Of course not." he said. "Your sister implied I should vacate the premises for the day," Bakura said, gesturing towards the skyline, "And I figured this fulfilled the obligation well enough."
Marik picked a leaf out of his hair and smiled at the view below, enchanted, because Marik was always hungry for and always already in love with anything he'd never seen before, even if it was the street he lived on from a different angle. He was wearing pastels again, and heart-shaped earrings. "You don't have to leave. Rishid has some friends over to watch the championship. He only needs the TV."
"You are always playing games on that TV. I do not see why this one is so important."
"They're important because they are very good at kicking things across the field, and if our teams kicks better than Tunisia's team, we get a trophy."
"Who gets a trophy? You?"
"No, Egypt."
"Who is 'Egypt?' Surely someone gets the trophy, and not all of us at once."
"I know you know how sports work," he said, narrowing his eyes, "and I'm not letting you trick me into whatever diatribe this is a prelude to."
"What possible diatribe could I get out of that?"
"I don't know." He scrunched up his face. "Something about the elites tricking people into identifying with the polity? Modern blood sport?"
"'Polity' is a good word. I might say something like that. Not the blood sport bit, though, that's all you." He paused suspiciously. "You are not watching with him?"
"I am not a sports person. Not unless it has wheels. As charming as I am, it is possible to have fun without me."
Marik scootched backwards a few feet and stretched, and then laid back on the flat roof, arms crossed behind his head as a pillow, and closed his eyes and seemed to be doing nothing in particular besides enjoying the sunlight.
Bakura let him. His eyes went back to the skyline, and fell back on the distant water.
"...Explain something to me." he said, staring out at small pinpricks of the Nile. "They have all of these houses and buildings right up against the river."
"And?"
"So, isn't that going to be a problem when it floods?" he asked. "I thought, well, they have cars and trains and such now, maybe there's some contraption that takes care of it. But when I went to check they all appeared very solidly on the ground to me, though I didn't look very long because people here get prickly when you poke around their yards. So it seems to me that the builders of your city must be very stupid and ill-advised, because it's already autumn and everything's due to be waterlogged any day now."
"Nile doesn't flood anymore." Marik said, without moving.
Bakura froze. "What?"
"They dammed it in the 60s or something? Ishizu would know exactly. It always looks like that."
"But it's—" he started, head slipping over the right words. "The River." he finished, in Egyptian, a word which did not mean "river," as in any river, nor mean "Nile," as in this specific river. A term wherein such distinction was merged or could not exist, because the specific fully encompassed the general or the general only ever described the specific; not the river or a river but The River, as if it were the only one.
Bakura's hands pressed into the edge of the roof, agitated. As if you woke up one day and someone told you that the sky was red. And one supposes it doesn't make a lot of difference to your everyday life what color the sky is, so there's no practical reason to be attached to the sky being blue. But now all of your metaphors are broken and all of your childhood drawings are obsolete, in one fell swoop. Someone has changed the background without telling you, when you didn't even realize the background could change.
"...How do they decide when to have festivals?" he asked.
"Different festivals. Less river-dependent."
Bakura frowned, and watched the street for a little while longer. A man in a small corner shop was selling cassette tapes. Marik had told him that the music everyone liked was rarely allowed on the radio because officials thought it was vulgar, but that you could get tapes anywhere and everyone passed them around. Bakura strongly approved of this open subversion. A woman walked down the street with the smallest, ugliest little dog he'd ever seen, which saw them on the roof and began to bark furiously. Bakura made a face at it as she struggled to corral it away, and decided he did not want to look at this any longer.
He flicked his eyes back towards Marik, the longest quiet Bakura had ever gotten from him, the peak of laziness. Bakura watched him for a few seconds, and then in imitation laid down a few inches away. He kept his eyes open, because he preferred to be aware of his surroundings. The surface was warm beneath him but the texture uncomfortably rough. He searched the sky for something to stare at but it was perfectly clear, except for the oppressive afternoon sun.
Bakura hated the sun. The way it lorded over everything, mocking you. They way it beat against the back of your neck and made your hair feel too long. How it stole your breath and rendered everyone tired and sluggish by mid-afternoon. The way it laid everything bare and tore up hiding places, a violation everyone smiled about and insisted was a virtue, because they were the type whose life didn't depend on remaining unseen. Bakura hated the sun so much he wanted to crack it beneath his teeth, smash a hole in Ra's boat so that he drowned to death in the underworld or better yet got chewed to bits screaming. Then the sun would never come back and everyone would panic, and that ugly winged dragon wouldn't zap anyone ever again, and it would stay dark and safe forever until eventually all the plants died and everyone on earth starved to death as the planet froze over in a long, slow spiral towards the killing of all things as they deserved.
The sun, which was 93 million miles away and several billion times his size, was unaffected by his rage, and boundlessly continued to shine.
Someone was talking downstairs, too muffled and far away for the words to be discernable beneath the sound of birds and bustle. A tension in his shoulders eased that he hadn't realized was there. This was perhaps the only benefit of having to share a living space with other people, that he could avoid the quiet; of hiding behind a doorway and hearing again the sound of distant, half-understood voices in another room. He was still thinking about this, and the sun, when he was jolted into alertness the way that happens when you're halfway to falling asleep and your whole brain panics.
He needed to get out of here as soon as possible. Like an itch, like a hunger, out and away to anywhere else.
"Marik."
"Yes?"
"I am disappearing again." he announced, sitting up. "Would you like to come with me?"
"Hmm. You already made me climb one roof today, and I haven't even been up here long enough to enjoy it." he said, pretending to have to think about it, because now that Bakura was the one asking he couldn't just agree without losing the game.
"Come on." Bakura tried to ignore the sound of his own pride gurgling as he reluctantly slit its metaphorical throat. "We'll find an even better roof. Before this place gets crowded."
"Alright, maybe." he said, up on his elbows, satisfied by the sacrificial offering. "Where to?"
"Anywhere. Up to you." Bakura jumped up on the edge, and then, with the utmost casualness, took a step backwards off of the roof.
Marik yelled and scrambled frantically to the edge to look downwards, but Bakura was already halfway through swinging himself inside Marik's open window.
The arcade was a relatively new installation, nestled in the corner of a mid-size mall. The front windows displayed a light-up sign reading "OPEN," in addition to posters about games, hours, prices, a bold advertisement for "FREE WI-FI," and a charm in the shape of a hand with an eye in the center, hung facing the street. Inside it contained all the staples one would expect—game cabinets in rows, skee-ball, a dance pad, the works. Against one wall was an enclosed, transparent glass box with a table and space for two people to sit across from each other; a miniature holographic arena, installed before Duel Disks came out, for what was increasingly the only game in the world anyone seemed to care about.
"We play for free," Marik explained, on the way up, "because Nasim used to be a tombkeeper."
"Don't tell me there are more of you."
"Lots." he said. "We aren't that far from the tombs, so a lot of people ended up settling in town. Supposedly we're the smaller sect, but no one knows what happened to the Shin branch." He pushed the door open. "We looked, but they disappeared off the face of the earth a few years ago."
"The what branch?" Bakura asked, faintly realizing that he might be responsible for something.
The weary-looking man at the counter, absorbed in a magazine, indeed had lavender eyes and a nose bridge that might imply some distant cousinhood. When he noticed Marik he frowned and reached beneath the counter to retrieve a sack of change, which he dropped with a muffled metallic thunk and promptly went back to his periodical without a word. As if pointedly ignoring them.
"He does not seem to like you very much." Bakura confided.
"He doesn't!" Marik said, with unbroken cheer, sweeping the bag off the counter and counting out change. He was already eyeballing his vast array of options the way a hyena chooses prey. "Bet I could destroy you at racing."
"He's your clan and he doesn't even like you? Why's he giving you discounts?" he asked, leaving the unpleasant man behind as they went further inside.
"They all think of Ishizu as being in charge." he explained, unconcerned. "And Ishizu likes me. Most of the time." he added, a tiny joke to himself.
"But they don't like you." he said. "Do they just think you're annoying, or was it the father-killing?"
Marik's smile did not drop, but for a moment it ceased to reach his eyes, and his height became present in the conversation in a way it hadn't been a few seconds ago. "You should find something to play." he said, like a real mafia boss, a polite and gracious suggestion delivered firm enough to be a warning.
Marik spotted something more entertaining and disappeared, and Bakura was left in the dark with 4 LE in change and row after row of blinking machines.
Arcades have a particular set of qualities, such as the fact that they are dark, and besides the front entry designed to entice you they have no windows. They do this in order to cut you off from the sun, so that you will lose track of time and spend more money, and to make all the sparkly neon lights of the machinery look even more interesting. The floor, likewise, was black with brightly-colored spots, and the games lined up in perfect mirrored rows, to create the sense of a world that was endless and yet claustrophobic. This sense was helped by the fact that the place was mostly empty, except for a few handfuls of teens and kids. Speakers pumped in faint pop music, where a man and a woman took turns talk-singing over a bouncy electronic beat, but it was difficult to make out over all the beeps and trills.
Fake darkness. Artificial. A darkness that contradicted itself, crafted by man to take something from you. It had the same pervasive wrongness as a Nile that never floods. Of course Marik liked this place.
Just like him, to bring you somewhere and then ignore you the moment you said something he didn't like. Well. Who needs him.
Bakura picked a cabinet at random, his own silhouette reflecting faintly in the screen. He had never played a videogame before. He had watched other people play videogames, for hours even. He had used computer programs for limited purposes, and had enough dim memories of watching his vessel post on forums and play with software to consider himself competent in the care and usage of most electronic devices. Yet the box in front of him with a joystick and a handful of buttons was somewhat foreign.
Videogames struck Bakura as staid, compared to tabletop. Ungenerative. Dead. The little pixel man on Bakura's screen couldn't do anything that hadn't already been programmed into him, and could only ever wander forward towards one inexorable fate. The match is set, and the ending predetermined; you pilot a mere ghost to his inevitable end. Not like a real game, where there was a real person across the table, a give and take, where everyone is putting a little piece of their own soul into the game and no one really knew how it would end. No, he did not like the idea of videogames at all. Mocking you, where all the choices are illusory, with no one on the other side to argue with, no possibility that any option can exist beyond the chafing constraints of what the game has already thought of. Yet the little man exhorts the player to go forward, and dances with uncontained glee with every level cleared. Of course he does; he cannot conceive of any options outside his parameters, which are to win or die, and even death is only a short reprieve before being awoken by the next coin to serve another master. A mangled, braindead extension of whoever is pressing the buttons, the shadow of the ghost of whoever programmed the machine. No one across the table at all, only lights blinking on and off.
This is not a game. It is disgusting.
Bakura's fist went straight through the screen and hit the back of it hard, impact reverberating up his forearm, glass and wire jabbing painfully into it along the way. As he drew his hand back the edge of a shard jabbed directly into his palm, right where the stupid poly-resin castle went in a few years ago, except it hadn't because the castle didn't go through this hand, but if that's true why is the scar there. It felt exactly the same. He winced and tried to shake it out, and then realized shaking was a very bad idea because he was bleeding, long red rivulets running down his arm, and wondered why the hell he'd done that. He was in pain, he noticed, and tried to hold tightly to the sensation. Pain was so refreshing, after millennia of the bland non-feeling of incorporeality. An exhilarating sharpness, a clarity, a bite.
Something tugged on the edge of his sweatshirt, and after a few seconds of delay he managed to focus his eyes in that direction. A little girl in an obnoxiously bright orange dress and Hello Kitty shoes wrung her hands shyly and then said something in Arabic that he barely understood, but from one or two words and the context he believed was a request for someone else to have a turn.
Bakura snarled in response, something like "Go away" though he could not have recalled exactly what, and she made a face of fear and ran off. What's she even asking for a turn for, since he'd just broken the damned machine? He hadn't, though, because when he turned back the screen looked exactly as it always had.
The little pixel man on the screen had stopped moving. That was strange. The word "START" had been blinking two different colors before, and now it had stopped. Bakura moved the joystick and pressed a few buttons, and nothing happened. Frozen. He smacked it. Nothing. Bakura leaned in and squinted, trying to see exactly what was wrong with the cabinet, but as soon as he got close the whole screen distorted itself into glitched rectangular patterns, eviscerating the little man and his world of sisyphean torment.
Cheap piece of shit.
Across the room, a high-pitched whine and the violent thunk of someone kicking machinery with designer boots meant that Marik was losing at something.
"That's not going to knock anything loose." Bakura said, appearing behind him and making Marik jump just a little, which was satisfying. "You're supposed to use the claw." He pointed, helpfully, to the three-pronged metal hand behind the glass, hovering over a pile of toys.
"The piece of garbage is rigged." he snapped, through gritted teeth.
Bakura tilted his head. He had become intently focused on the claw machine. He ran his eyes over it, taking in every bolt, plate, and seam. "You're trying to get the big one?"
"...Yes." he said, remembering for a second that he was supposed to be mad at Bakura, though at this point he understood that if he got angry every time Bakura said something inflammatory then it was going to be difficult to hold a conversation. "Not that you could win anything either. Last I checked you still hadn't figured out where the money goes in." He watched Bakura start poking at the controls. "Are you listening? I said it's rigged."
Bakura nodded. "Of course it is. That's not how you win." He left the control panel and stood on his tiptoes to get a good look at the top of the machine, and then dropped to examine the bottom. "You can't play by their rules. That's what they want. No, what I was thinking," Bakura went backwards to where the machine met the wall in a movement that could only be described as 'slinking,' and stared into the crevice. "'S that they have to get the prizes inside somehow, don't they?"
"They do." Marik confirmed, starting to smile, and watched Bakura wiggle his shoe in the space between the machine and the wall to make just enough space to get a look at the situation. "It's going to be locked."
"Ways of dealing with that."
"Keh. I still can't believe you know how to do locks. Did they even have locks in 1000 B.C.?" Marik was getting excited, and when Marik was excited he started chattering, presumably because of how much he loved the sound of his own voice. "I should learn to do locks. When we had to open vaults with the ghouls I would usually steal the keys, and even when we had to break in I had people for that, you know? I should've learned locks. I bet I would be great at locks."
"Stop talking." He crouched down to get a good look at a metal plate with a tiny keyhole on it. "And we did have locks. They made a giant magical key and you think we didn't have locks? With tumblers, even. Give me one of your earrings."
"Don't ruin it." Marik took a dangly heart out of his ear.
"I would never." he said, flattening the hooked end with his teeth. "Just keep watch."
Marik did keep watch, which mainly consisted of standing conspicuously in front of Bakura to keep him out of direct view. The little girl from before and a boy with close-cropped curls watched them from near the dance machine, but no one else noticed or cared.
After a few seconds there was a pop and the whole back panel swung open on hinges. Marik turned to look and was immediately greeted by an oversized plush black cat smacking him square in the face.
Marik caught it, realized what it was, and hugged it to his chest. For a brief second he looked like he was about to swallow his pride and say some kind of thanks, before his expression curdled and died as Bakura said "Do you want this back?" and offered what used to be an earring, now bent out like a deformed paperclip and covered in what might have been saliva.
"...You can keep it." he said, in dismay.
"Why would I want it?"
Marik ignored him, distracted by the warm inner lights of the claw machine, now wide open to anyone who could twist their elbow over the barrier that kept everything from falling out. "Which one are you taking?"
"I don't want a stuffed animal, Marik." he said, lying.
"Come ooooooon." He rummaged around the plush pile and then waggled a teddy bear in Bakura's face. Bakura slapped the bear aside where it bounced a few feet, and the little boy next to the dance machine gleefully snatched it up and ran back to his compatriot.
Marik frowned, and went back to the pile as if the negative reaction had not happened. "What's your favorite animal?"
"Snakes."
"Gross. Pick something else."
"They are not gross, they're noble creatures, and I'm not picking something else."
"They don't have any snakes."
Marik had his hands on the upper glass while they spoke, and Bakura leaned on part of the inner panel; being moved away from the wall had left it slightly off-balance, and it jostled ever so slightly while they bickered.
"Not my problem, and I don't want a toy."
"Then why did you break it open?"
"I did it for—" Bakura stopped himself from answering. "For the challenge. And I didn't break it," he said, rapidly changing the subject, "I opened it the normal way, through skillful and nonviolent means. Isn't that what you people prefer now?"
"Yes, but you 'broke in,' so it's—"
"Don't call it breaking when the object is unharmed. It has been finessed. When I want to break something, I promise, you'll—"
The machine wobbled, ever so slightly at first. Before anyone noticed and yet too long after anyone could stop it, it began to tip over.
A number of events were packed into the next three seconds, and they happened almost simultaneously but in this order: Bakura leapt backwards like a startled animal, on instincts honed by trap-ridden pyramids; the claw machine hit the floor with a catastrophic metal crash; Marik clapped his hands over his ears to avoid the roar and clatter of four panels of shattering glass; a little girl screamed in delight; a flood of stuffed animals cast themselves across the fun-patterned carpet in a river of soft plush and glass shards.
A few seconds later the pinball machine next to it, unsettled by momentum, fell sideways and hit the arcade cabinet next to it, which fell forward with its own metal crash, and hit the one next to it on the way down, and this went on for a few more dominos until everything had settled.
"Well. It was rigged." Bakura peeled himself away from the wall. He looked down at the mess, unperturbed, and turned to Marik and sounded almost proud of himself. "I'd say we've saved several dozen children from being scammed out of their hard-earned coinage. A public service, really."
Marik said nothing.
The sound of the crash had caused a rush of attention from every other person in the small arcade, several of whom had run over to see what the ruckus was. This included Nasim The Ex-Tombkeeper And Current Afternoon Shift Arcade Attendant, who stared at the wrecked machinery and then at them and met Bakura's grin with an expression best described as furious.
The machine sparked, making several people wince or step backwards, and a smoke wafted from the control panel.
Marik and Bakura exchanged a look, and bolted.