There is a deathly sort of awkwardness that can only result from a person being inside your house with nothing in particular to do there, especially someone who had recently obnoxiously broken several important rules of polite conversation and who you are still reluctant to throw out. All the air is tainted and nobody wants to look at each other, as they are forced to continue an interaction they would rather not have even if the alternative was several hours of bloodletting.

Bakura was, as a general matter, immune to awkwardness. The heavy object dropped from on high does not feel gauche or self-conscious upon falling on someone's head; rather, the anvil or comically large piano is ruefully assured that it was exactly where it belonged, and that its vacuous victim should have been paying more attention to vertical pathways. Bakura, who would characterize himself if not as an act of god then at very least a force of nature for insurance purposes, watched the Ishtar household move around him with its teeth clenched like he was radioactive, and was nothing but pleased.

He had ruined everything and everyone hated him, which was delightful. You have to savor it, when someone hates you. It means you have conquered someone's thoughts. That they are looking at you, even if they don't want to be, or trying so hard not to look at you they might as well be staring. It is winning, to be hated.

Rishid handed him a glass of black tea that was sour and a little too strong, which Bakura took two suspicious sips of and then promptly abandoned to the side to stagnate, and in a tiny act of spite not even on a coaster. Bakura did not like tea, he decided. His old host mainly drank ever-increasing amounts of coffee, aluminum cans collecting in the bins, and Bakura had never liked the taste but he remembered getting the vessel and inheriting the pleasant buzz of balled-up, nervous energy. He felt like he could use it. That was the problem with having a body, it got tired. He could no longer extricate himself, hand that hunger or fledgling migraine off to be somebody else's problem, return comfortably to numb formlessness. Having flesh and blood meant you were stuck with it even when it stopped being fun.

Ishizu, eventually, retired to her room with only a sidelong and suspicious glance at Bakura, as Rishid went off to start dinner. Marik returned, finally, noticeably more dour, and only because he'd left his phone on the table. He did not immediately acknowledge Bakura, though, too busy typing away at something, his bubbly excitement from earlier that day evaporated.

Bakura watched him for a bit, out of the corner of his eye.

"If you are upset with me, you should know you have no reason to be." he said. "You said I was interesting, before. This should just make me more interesting."

Marik hardly twitched. Whatever text message he was reading must have been fascinating.

Sour standoffishness did not suit Marik, Bakura decided. Being ignored by Marik was somehow a greater insult than being annoyed by him.

"Is this because of what I said about stabbing all of you?" Bakura smiled and leaned over the armrest, could never resist the urge to poke the crocodile. "Because it was just a hypothetical. You're being very dramatic."

Marik finally flicked his eyes upward. "Don't."

"Don't what?" he asked, innocently.

Marik paused, and closed his eyes and inhaled in the manner of someone deliberately performing his anger management exercises. "Fine." he said, letting his eyes settle on Bakura. "Why?"

"Why what?"

"The entire world?"

"Please, like you're an angel."

Marik waited.

Bakura tried not to squirm and shrugged, nonchalant. "It was always going to happen when I opened the doors, so I might as well enjoy it. Really, they deserved it."

"The entire world deserved it?"

"Yes."

Marik put his phone down on the table with a thunk and looked straight at him, an act of deliberate and sudden charged attentiveness, almost uncomfortably so, the way a surgeon picks up a scalpel. "Do you deserve it?"

"Certainly, by most accounts." He wiggled a hand in front of him, living flesh and blood. "Though it would seem the gods disagree."

"Do I deserve it?"

"Do you really want me to answer that question?"

Marik wasn't done. "Kids? Old women? Kittens?"

"Especially kittens." he proclaimed with a grin, but this was a joke and it showed. "You can list off as many innocent categories as you like. It was necessary."

"Necessary?" Marik had a piercing little voice like an icepick and Bakura was becoming confident that the main reason people did what he said was to make him shut up. "Are you insane?"

"You killed plenty of people, so I don't see how you can take so much umbrage. I told you I wanted the millennium items. If you wanted to know why you should have asked."

Marik twitched. The cute little gears turning beneath his little head, that he'd been so willing to hand over the rod to a madman. That he hadn't even thought to ask. "I did," he started, through gritted teeth, "kill several people. And I have to carry it for the rest of my life. But I was trying to—" He stopped before launching into a defense, either because defending himself was against his new set of principles or because he felt it off-topic. "There's no possible reason to kill everyone on earth. That's pointless! It's idiotic nonsense. It's just stupidly evil."

"What is evil? What is good?" He crossed his arms, unperturbed. "What someone else told you it is? What your new friend the pharaoh has decreed it to be? You cannot trust other people's definitions."

"You have got to be joking."

"I am not joking. I ask important questions!" He was, of course, playing, but playing is not the same as joking. He was quite serious. Whether he meant what he said, though, was secondary to seeing what sort of entertainment he could squeeze out of Marik's scowl. "If I am evil, are you not also? Do you really think the two of us don't deserve to die?"

"There's no such thing as deserving!" Marik burst out, voice raised. "No one deserves to live and no one deserves to die. You live because you're alive. It doesn't matter what someone has done, or will do." Marik crossed his arms decisively, and his next words sounded recited. "You have to go on living, even if your path leads into darkness. This is the fate of every human being."

"Chintzy! Something from a greeting card, or your little coffin texts?"

"No." he said. "Rishid said it. There's no light in death. There's only light in life."

"Did Rishid say that, too?" he mocked.

Marik snarled. "Yes." Marik, out of his element, clearly having a position but unable to strongly articulate it, clung to other people's words like a life raft. Debate club was simply not his style. Marik Ishtar was not a boy people often argued with, and if you spend enough time in a world where no one ever dares to disagree with you then you are unpracticed in verbal defense. How disappointing. "You don't actually believe this. You would have to be brain-dead."

"It's not my fault that you are too stupid to understand."

"Then explain it." he said, glaring. Marik had a pernicious way of looking at you with a withering focus, like he was trying to see straight through you, a lab rat he was trying to understand, and getting frustrated either because he couldn't get through or because he could and didn't like what he saw.

"Fine." He sat up. "You think I am a monster, yes? I do not demand not to be seen as a monster. I only ask who it is doing the deciding. Not me, of course. I do not decide what is good and evil. There is no such thing." he began. "Good and evil are what happens when someone holding a big enough knife declares them and guts everyone who disagrees. It is about power! Power calls itself good, and creates evil from whatever opposes it."

He let the little golden Hathor fall out of his sleeve, rolled it between his fingers. "So if the pharaoh is in power, then every innocent he has slaughtered was for the greater good, was necessary, even, for the maintenance of order and harmony. How do we know what is good or evil? Because the pharaoh tells us. Surely the pharaoh knows what order is," and he does not say order, in Japanese, but Ma'at, "everyone agrees he must, because after all he is the king and has the backing of the gods. To question him would be to question the will of the divine! How monstrous. But what makes him the pharaoh, of all men, and why do the gods back him? Of course he is the pharaoh, they say, because his father was the king before him, and this is order. Who decides what order is? Him, because he is the king and has the backing of the gods!" He laughed, harsh and breathless, the funniest thing in all the world. "You see! It is circular! Senseless! Brainlessness! No wonder the world is so wretched! No wonder they can sit atop piles of gold and drench themselves in blood and it never matters. The snake is eating its own tail! The whole structure is built on sand!" He stood up in a fury and the figurine fell with a plop into his tea, splashing it across the table.

"So! If the king is order," he snarled, "then I will tear out his throat until he can create no more harmonies, and if he has the backing of the gods then I will kill the gods and replace them with my own, and if he is the very sun itself, as they so often tell me, then I will rip it from the sky and have eternal night."

Marik did not look impressed by this. He was staring at Bakura in some kind of bile fascination, someone grimly compelled to figure out exactly what kind of substance was smeared on the bottom of his shoe. "So what happens to you?" he asked, finally.

"What?"

"You." he said. "After you kill everyone on earth. Where do you go?"

Bakura blinked. "I rule it."

"Rule what? There won't be anything left."

"Were you not listening?"

Marik ignored the question. "You're going to rule what, a pile of corpses? A dead rock? Are you a complete idiot, or just insane?"

Bakura's brain stumbled for a second, grasped for something. "That doesn't matter." That wasn't the point, death was the point, the death of the pharaoh and everyone who worships him, that he dies and Bakura gets to watch him die. The practicalities of what happened after were irrelevant. There was no "after." He could not care less about any "after."

"It doesn't matter what happens to you?"

"No!" Marik kept missing the point because he was stupid, because he wasn't listening even after Bakura had so carefully explained, wasn't seeing how the world around him worked.

"So what, you just die? Sit around ruling a pile of nothing?"

"That's—" he started, because Bakura had always been confident, apropos of nothing, that he could not die. It was not something he would allow. Marik had been right, if not about everyone else then about Bakura, who had-to-go-on-living-even-if-his-path-leads-into-darkness, who should have died with his village at the start or by the pharaoh's hand at 16 or a month ago at 3,016. He simply hadn't. Always should-have-died, always just barely scraping past the finish line, always clawing, persistent, spiteful, each time ever more exhausted, each time ending up with a few more scars, through to the next tomorrow. Bakura could not die. Dying would be letting them win, and finishing his plan would mean that Bakura wins and everyone else dies. "That's not the point!" he insisted, perhaps a little weaker, defensive, because Marik was an idiot who clearly didn't understand anything. "The world's too broken to be redeemed. There is no choice but to destroy it."

Marik was still staring at him strangely, intently, but it had softened. It looked like pity. It stung. Bakura ground his teeth.

Bakura decided he was sick of this and swiftly turned to leave, coat trailing behind him. "I'm going to bed."

Marik called something after him but Bakura did not hear him, because if he spent one more second listening to Marik's insipid garbage or seeing him look down at him then he was going to do something he'd regret. Instead, he went back to the Ishtars' spare room, and went to bed angry. He did not know why, exactly, or who he was angry at, but that has never mattered. He could always find something to be angry about, something to hate. There was always just angry, and angry was always enough. Hatred crawled its way up the back of his spine, simmered and made his hands shake, and he was awake with it until late.

The dreams where he is Necrophades were not nightmares. They were violent, grisly, and full of ugly monsters, but there was never any fear. The whole time he is smiling, and in the dream he feels nothing at all.

Bakura woke up early, too early, when the sun was only just peeking between the blinds, bleary and feeling dismal. Half-conscious, a well-trained prickle at the back of his neck told him he was being watched, and he snapped awake.

A cat, inches from his face. Small, more like a kitten, with shiny black fur and giant yellow eyes, staring straight at him.

"The hell do you want?" he asked.

It arched its spine and hissed at him, teeth perilously close to his nose, and sprinted away.

Bakura dragged himself up from the floor and rubbed his eyes, the miserable, foggy half-awake that felt like the bad taste in your mouth. He squinted around the dim room. Not a guest room, not really, but a back room of various neglected miscellanea that didn't fit anywhere else in the house, including a wobbly desk with a bulky desktop computer and a strange, dust-covered contraption Bakura did not realize was an exercise machine. Instead he concluded it must be some sort of torture device, which sounded like something these people would own.

This charade had gone on long enough.

Bakura's footsteps were light and near-silent, past the cracked-open door where Marik was snoring and the two closed ones that must belong to Rishid and Ishizu. The walls were dotted with cutesy family photographs, all recent, the same cheesy grins at ski resorts, sunny beaches, and various tourist traps. He resisted the urge to smash the glass in on all their faces.

He made his way to the front door and was about to click it open as quietly as possible when someone spoke behind him. "If you are going to sneak out," they said, "you might want to use the back door instead. It won't require you to walk past the kitchen."

Bakura stopped and turned slowly. Rishid was leaning in the doorway, wearing pajamas and holding a mug decorated with ugly cartoon fish, with blocky English text across the rim reading "THEY DIDN'T HAVE MY NAME."

"The hinges in the back squeak a little," Rishid added, "so if you do go that way, open it slow."

Bakura paused, processing that he had just been given advice.

Rishid Ishtar had a bearing that was difficult for Bakura to get any read on. He was quiet, speaking not even half as much as his siblings, and apparently unflappable. Calm, but nothing like Ishizu's iron calm, of carefully bottled tension and austere, scientific patience. He was not disinterested in whatever happened in front of him but merely unsurprised by it. Steady not like a rock or anything that stands still but the way a boat stays upright no matter how much it is tossed by the waves. There was something of Marik there, the way that so much of what he said was halfway to being a little joke, but worse, and always delivered so seriously, so that you could never really quite tell where he stood on anything.

This was the one with the trap deck, he remembered. Be careful of him.

Bakura watched him, hand still on the doorknob. "Are you going to stop me?"

"Are you going to do something I should stop?" he asked, making no expression besides the smallest raising of an eyebrow and the scar tissue that went with it. The scars along one half of his face were not as deep as the one on Bakura's but noticeably elaborate, whole tiny hieroglyphs on such a difficult canvas. Bakura vaguely recalled that getting stabbed in the face just once had been a messy, bloody, screaming affair; whoever had done up Rishid so carefully must have had a lot of patience. And hated him an awful lot.

"No." Bakura said, because it sounded like the correct answer, and he didn't actually know what he was going to do anyway.

Rishid shrugged, and did not move.

"Aren't you supposed to be keeping an eye on me? Making sure I'm not wreaking havoc on the innocent populace or something?"

"Of course." he said. His Japanese was careful and polite, but noticeably more accented than Marik or Ishizu's. "However, you just told me you weren't going to do anything bad."

Bakura took his hand off the doorknob, affronted by this level of stupidity. "So? I could be lying."

Rishid pretended to think about this. "Are you lying?"

Bakura stared at him, trying to figure out what sort of game this was. "No." he said, enunciating the word like he was speaking to someone half-deaf.

"Okay, then." Rishid said. He seemed to regard Bakura's frustration the same way one might read the morning paper. Only mildly interesting and not something you could change, and therefore not anything to be especially bothered about. "Stay safe. Let me know if you need anything."

"If I need anything while I'm sneaking out?"

"Yes." Rishid nodded, and did not move an inch.

"Fine." Bakura reached for the door again. "I'm leaving."

"Goodbye."

"And I'm very dangerous," he insisted, "and you have no idea where I'm going or what I'm going to do."

"See you later."

"How do you know I'm going to come back?"

Again, he feigned reconsideration. "Are you going to come back?"

"Do you even care?" Bakura was starting to find this remarkably irritating. "No, I'm not. Ever."

"Alright, then." Rishid took a cavalier drink from his ugly fish mug. "Try to stay out of trouble." he said.

"I do not take orders from you." Bakura spat.

"My apologies." He smiled softly, and corrected himself. "I hope you try to stay out of trouble."

Bakura slammed the door behind him and walked outside without another word.

Weirdo.

Bakura picked his way back across the city as somewhere in the distance a man on a minaret sang in the dawn. He kept his eye on the river, Egypt's nexus, visible in the distance, trying to make his way via signs he could not read and through streets where traffic rules were nonexistent or ignored. Mainly he was trying to avoid people. Bakura did not like people on a good day, and today was not a good day, so he hated them especially. Truthfully without Diabound to call on he felt a little naked. How do people ever walk the streets, one must wonder, without having a snake god on hand to kill anyone or anything that might threaten them. If he were a lesser man he might find it nerve-wracking.

Still, some were unavoidable. The tiny smile and knowing look from the bus driver, who noticed that his bus pass was government issued and clearly had a woman's name on it, but who let it slide and said nothing, rudely depriving Bakura of the opportunity to argue with him. He would have loved to argue with him. An old woman on the sidewalk yanked him backwards onto the curb two seconds before a car passed by, and then patted him gently on the shoulder and said something he did not understand. He resented the intervention but opted not to touch her purse, as that sort of common snatching was beneath a thief of his caliber.

That was modern Egypt, so far. No traffic lanes and people that never stopped talking. Even the towers talked, several times a day, but at least that was pretty.

So Bakura dragged himself, in awkward, confusing, labyrinthine fits and starts, across the city and back towards the Nile he knew and then across that, farther and farther away from the life that sprung up around the river towards the valley where only dead things lie, and finally back to the only place he ever really fit.

There was nothing left of Kul Elna.

In the old days, there had still been the ruins of the village, burned out foundations. You could trace the outlines of the neighborhood in the shadows of the cliffs, the faint impressions. He used to dig through and find things in the wreckage. The long-abandoned ovens where people made bread, crumbling stairs that used to lead to tiny rooftop kitchen gardens, old ceramic and pictures painted on the walls. There were always so many pictures. They'd been artisans, builders of temples and tombs, before they were thieves, and they'd never stopped painting. Bakura knew the pictures better than he remembered any of their faces. The mural in third house on the left, of the nice-looking woman who might have been a goddess or someone's wife, or the tiles with the pomegranates, which must have been aspirational because no one here could have afforded to eat those, or the little tomb in the cemetery filled with scenes of someone he thought might be related to him, because one of the people they kept drawing over and over had white hair. Or maybe the paint had just faded oddly. He could never get good answers, out of the ghosts. When they were coherent at all they never answered any questions but their own.

A few thousand years had worn away the mud bricks, though, and now there was only a blank, empty stretch of sand, closed in by cliffs on all sides, with a few crumbling pillars surrounding the dark hole in the ground that led to the temple. You wouldn't even be able to find it, if you didn't know where to look. Just another random patch of dirt in the Sahara, indistinguishable from everything that surrounded it, meaning nothing to no one.

A gaggle of birds flew off in a panicked flurry the moment he approached, except for a handful of white vultures. The only living things that could be seen, they perched on the rocks above and examined him with still apathy. Graverobbers recognize their compatriots. Or maybe they were seeing future dinner.

Bakura descended with the utmost care, testing every step before putting his full weight on it. Stairs this old were an accident waiting to happen, especially in the dark. You'd think the entrance would have filled with sand by now. A wonder nothing was nesting in it.

"Hey." he said, reflexively to the dark, and then paused at the bottom of the steps realized he'd just greeted people who weren't there, and felt very silly.

He wondered when they'd gone, exactly. Probably after he died the first time, when the pharaoh sealed everything. Another thing he took from you.

Or maybe it was more recent, only after whatever the pharaoh had done to end all this nonsense, the same thing that led to both of them getting new bodies. Maybe they'd been down here all alone for all three thousand years, waiting for him to come back. He gripped the edge of his sleeve nervously. He didn't like that thought. It was a very bad thought to have. The weight of it crushes your throat.

"Sorry I'm late." was all he could say, again, to no one. It was just a habit. They always got so antsy, when he was gone for too long. They'd start shrieking loud enough that the neighboring towns would hear and spread rumors, or kill animals that wandered too close to the village. They couldn't go anywhere or do much else. They were just frustrated, and in pain.

Bakura let his eyes adjust to the darkness, so good with darkness that he was, and stood in silence, and realized he had absolutely no idea what he was supposed to do. Except survive, of course. Always survive. But besides that. He certainly wasn't going back to Marik's. He was hungry, and his feet hurt. The millennium items were gone. Even if he had them, it would require making another...pact. Out of the question.

Were they really gone, though? He looked suspiciously at the rubble. The word Ishizu had used was "buried."

Bakura, tentatively, pressed his palm to a wall and closed his eyes, and tried to feel for heka. Bakura had never studied magic, not properly, knew nothing of whatever incantations the priests recited from their fancy scrolls, and wouldn't have been able to read them besides. But he had grown up seeing magicians in the town square, and Bakura could steal anything he could see. So he stole their talk of Ka and made Diabound, made it better, bigger and brighter and more venomous than anything their puny powers could manage, and then used Diabound to steal more still. He could cast no spells, not one, but he had a clumsy, untrained, intuitive sense for power. Always reaching for more of it, always seeing how and through whom it moved, trying to think of ways to take it for himself. Power kept you alive and made your enemies dead. Power, used correctly, got you more power, which you then used to keep yourself even more comfortably alive and make your enemies even more painfully dead.

There was power here, beneath the floor, and not even that far down. The items and the tablets of the gods, the thrum of all their glittering force, that melted human minds and bent shadows to your will, beckoning, familiar, to welcome him home. Was there something else, though? Something small, a weak, malignant spark, broken into tiny fragments, hiding in a pile of discarded gold.

The lord of the shadows had been killed. Good had triumphed over evil once and for all, and light had banished the darkness forever. This was a lie, obviously. You cannot kill the god of evil, and anyone who said they had was an arrogant fool drunk on his own victory.

Bakura had no evidence for this. He knew it somewhere beyond reason, something you could scrape off the bottom of his lungs or find written behind his eyelids, the same kind of limbic, irrational certainty that makes people scream about the apocalypse on street corners or set themselves on fire to see the world beyond. You cannot kill the god of darkness. He lived in human hearts. He was in the sinew in every self-serving act of cruelty, in the spittle behind every piercing insult, and he drew new breath with every wail of anguish, thrived in the fears and doubts that kept people apart. You cannot kill him. He lives again each time a thoughtless child stomps on an anthill. He was weakened, maybe, hurt, so weak that he would never be able to act again on his own, but he was not dead. Bakura knew better than anyone. He could never be dead.

No, it was there, sleeping in bits and pieces, dreaming of rage. So small that it would be difficult for anyone to detect, but for Bakura it was easy, recognized, and it reached back out for him, hungry, showed him everything. A thrashing ocean deep enough to drown the cosmos in its maw, heaving against the walls that dammed it, with every crashing wave the fulminating pulse of two throats raw from screaming. It threatened to burst your ears and suffocated every other thought, gently laid strings around your neck, filled your mouth and blocked the airways with choking rage and acidic black bile and the burnt scent of decay, knowing that it was deathly wounded and restrained, only a puddle, but still deep enough to sink into, or at least deep enough for you, always for you, and you could wake it up again so easily you don't even need the items really he is eons older than any bauble no all you need is to kill a lot of people just the right number in just the right way the power is yours for the taking it would be so easy and all of the instructions are there—

Bakura recoiled for the wall like it burned. He swallowed terror, and then hated himself for being afraid. He let that turn into hating everything else instead. No. He kicked the wall as hard as he could and pretended the recoil didn't hurt. You do not use the King of Thieves and get away with it.

No. No more pacts.

Bakura, scowling, sat on the floor and pulled his knees up to his chest, a position he found comforting for reasons he did not understand, such as having never received a hug from almost anyone in his entire life and how we crave what we need even when we cannot imagine it. He simmered, teeth clenched, staring at walls like he could burn holes in them, sitting alone in a valley of corpses in a city that looked nothing like he remembered it and where he couldn't even ask for directions.

It is an odd feeling, to have spent your entire life under the resolute belief that you have no one and nothing, that you live for and depend on no one but yourself, only to suddenly realize you did, in fact, have something left to lose. That you can be even more alone than last survivor and have even less than nothing at all.

There was a lot that Bakura did not understand. He did not understand why he was here, and alive, because surely none of the gods he hated would decide he deserved it. He did not understand why the Ishtars' cute little family photos were somehow both compelling and revolting, the way people stopped to stare at car wrecks, the same way he felt remembering watching Ryou Bakura talk to his dad. He did not understand why his thoughts kept circling endlessly back to the other Bakura, like a storm drain, or why he wanted to talk to him very badly even though he did not know what he would say, or why the silence of the temple was worse than even the most annoying noise, eating away at him until he wanted to pull his hair out, and he didn't understand why this horrible awful world still existed and why he still hadn't smashed it into tiny pieces, melted it into a pile of ash and dripping molten rock, cracked it open and swallowed the sun and boiled the river and tore down the sky.

There it was again, rage that made his vision swim, hatred that killed everything else in his head, consumed the walls around him. Do not let them trick you. Do not believe their lies. There is no good to be salvaged in a world where justice is whatever one man pleases. If silence is what they call peace, then he will bring peace to every single one of them. If people wear the corpses of the damned like trinkets and call themselves heroes, then there are no heroes. Every story ever told is a lie, made up to convince you of something it serves the teller for you to believe.

He could not help but continue to eye the rubble. It was an unfamiliar addition to a familiar place.

The millennium items were beneath him. All of Kul Elna's blood in one place. What was underneath the wreckage, what had been soaked into the stone, and what lived in Bakura. Scattered across the world for thousands of years, everything finally back home where it belonged.

This was an oddly nice thought. He absently pressed his palm into the floor, felt the uneven stone press back. They were still here. It did not matter, if he could not hear them. They never said much that was helpful anyway, and it was usually the same thing. Some vaguely remembered conversation about letters to the dead, that the writing was the point, not the answers, which he'd only half-listened to and at the time insisted was bizarre and stupid.

Mainly he was thinking a little wistfully about how the Ishtars' had their own shower. No, though. He wasn't going back.

"I'll manage." he said, laying on the floor to count cracks in the ceiling. "I always manage."

It really was going to get freezing soon, like Marik said. He knew how to tolerate that. He'd gotten too spoiled, in Japan.

Bakura, historically, did not really have a consistent place to sleep. He drifted. There was Kul Elna, of course, which he returned to when he could. Otherwise, there were a few specific tombs he knew were safe and unlikely to be disturbed, whatever inn had not most recently thrown him out, and eventually a series of quaint apartments belonging to Ryou Bakura, few of which ever lasted more than six months because. Well.

"Yes, I know you want me to take care of myself. I'll figure it out."

He could go somewhere else. He could get the money. Things were different now, though. You can't just go into a hotel and dump gold on the table. They would get suspicious if you paid in cash, and he didn't speak the language, and they would want an ID or something. Marik could have made him a fake ID. Damn it.

"Besides, they'd throw me out eventually anyway. Probably when Marik finally annoys me to death and I snap him in half. Ruin it like I always do, you know how my temper is. I get it from you."

All they ever wanted was rest. Begged for it, constantly, even when he couldn't help them. Now he wanted them back? So they could writhe around in pain, just so you can hear their screeching again? Vile, wretched, ungrateful child. What did you ever do for them? You couldn't even kill one weakling prince.

No, he winced, fought back at his own head. They wouldn't say that. They couldn't be mad at him, not ever. He was all they had left.

"They're the pharaoh's lapdogs. Item users, even. You would slaughter them."

"Me? I mean, no, not at the moment. Yes, of course they deserve it. It's just not practical right now. Honestly, do you want me to kill them or use them? I really wish you'd all just agree with each other, sometimes."

They would be ashamed. Sitting around here, wasting his talents. He was meant to destroy the world, not sit around talking to empty rooms and thinking about whether or not to room with a loud, annoying simpleton who wouldn't even be honest about his viciousness, who masked it with thin, empty platitudes just so he would get to be friends with the pharaoh of all people, and his vapid little family.

Bakura felt a jolt go through him as facts he hadn't considered before fell into place.

...Marik was friends with the pharaoh.

Of course. How could you have gotten so distracted? Forget about the world. The world was only a price. One he had been happy to pay, but only a means to an end. The real prize was still out there, could still be won. The temple did not yet have all of the blood it needed.

"We aren't done." he said, sitting up and shaking dust out of his hair, but who he was talking to was anyone's guess. "I promise. I won't fail this time. You'll have him."

"I love you, too."

Marik got home, mid-afternoon, and closed the door behind him and ran a hand through his hair. He walked back towards his room while thinking about ordinary things. He should probably get some actual work done, and he wanted to message Yugi his new deck for a balance check, and Bakura was sitting on the kitchen counter, and the bike would need an oil change soon, and—

Marik stopped, just after passing the kitchen doorway, and took two steps backwards.

Bakura was sitting cross-legged up on the kitchen counter, eating garlic again. "Good, you're back." he said. "We have a problem."

"What problem?"

"There is no meat in this godforsaken kitchen." he announced. "What are you, vegetarians?"

Marik, who didn't know what he had been expecting but certainly not that, did not know how to answer this. "Uh, mostly?"

Bakura made an affronted back-of-the-throat noise of disapproval and disappointment. "Horrible. You'll need to fix that."

Marik tried to focus on something that actually mattered. "Why are you back here?"

"To eat your food and sleep beneath your roof? I thought that was obvious."

Marik frowned suspiciously. "What about destroying the world and stabbing all of us, or whatever?"

"I can't." he said, rolling his eyes. "The items are gone. I am, tragically, powerless. Why do I need to keep explaining this?" He tossed the rest of the bulb across the room, which Marik caught reflexively, and then realized his hand was on one of the parts Bakura's mouth had touched and gingerly put it down in disgust. "Don't tell me you're retracting your generous offer. I'll probably do something horrible, if no one is around to monitor me. I have been told I am a downright scoundrel."

Marik looked at Bakura sitting there ever so casually, with his shoes on even like some kind of barbarian, and made a face that could only be described as grim, beleaguered acceptance. "I get it."

"Get what?"

"It's not that we're letting you stay here." he said, reluctantly. "You have decided not to leave us alone."

"I have no idea what you're talking about. As far as I recall all of this was your own excellent idea."

Marik crossed his arms and, distractingly, his eyes drifted to the front door. "Wasn't the door locked?"

"Yes."

"How did you get back in?"

"'King of Thieves' is a very straightforward title, Marik. I don't know why you're having such trouble with it."