I am a staunch Thief King Bakura Apologist.

I feel the need to point this out, as we enter into Seto's contest with TKB. This is the core of the story, in all honesty, because I always felt like canon never really gave Kul Elna the weight it deserved. TKB is treated like a maniacal extremist who needs to be put down like a rabid dog, but I've never been anywhere but firmly on his side.

What happened to Kul Elna was an atrocity, and it's one of the main reasons why I don't believe any of the Millennium Items are "good." Even when they're held by people we like, they aren't noble. They're a constant reminder of a heinous crime.

I hope that the way this story concludes is sufficient to … compound on that idea, to explore it, but for right now the main thing I feel the need to point out is that I don't actually consider TKB a villain. If I said anything to the contrary in earlier chapters of this story, over the 10 years or so that I was struggling with … everything, I figured out the truth.

TKB did nothing wrong, and I want nothing more than to give him a hug. Well, okay, he probably wouldn't like that. Maybe a quilt and a bowl of soup. And a knife. I bet he'd like a nice knife. Ahem. Anyway. Just so we're clear on where I stand here, I consider the way he handled the reveal of Kul Elna to be one of Atem's most grievous failings.

You might think it's wild that I would use Seto Kaiba as a vehicle to right that wrong.

But … well, what can I say? It's what I do.

Verse One.

Bakari strode outside of Turtle Game, out to the parking lot behind the shop. "It is best, I believe, for this work to be done in the open. Beneath the judgment of the sun." He said this more to himself than to Seto; it struck the eldest Kaiba that Bakari was using him as a stage on which to perform. He didn't view Seto as a challenger, so much as an obstacle. Seto supposed he couldn't blame the man; he, himself, had spent much of his life doing that precise thing to plenty of others, all through his career. Even with a perfect memory, there were any number of people Seto had conquered over the years whose names he didn't know, because he'd never bothered to learn them in the first place.

Mokuba, Noa, and Kisara all followed Seto outside.

Seto was only slightly surprised when, a minute or so later, Ryo Bakura came out behind the others. He looked exhausted, bedraggled, but resolute. Whatever it was he was doing right now, it was important enough to do in direct spite of his body's cries for rest. Perhaps, Seto thought, he wanted to observe the swan song of the spirit who'd spent so long using his body for this work. Perhaps he needed to make sure that it was really going to end today. One way or another, it would end today.

Ryo clutched an old, weathered Bible to his chest.

"I have already extolled the nature of my existence, and my work, to your brother," said Bakari; he was all business now. There was none of his dark humor, nor his anger, nor his need for pain. There was something ceremonial about the way he was acting now, and Seto was quite sure this was significant.

Someone was watching them now. Someone important.

Noa leaned in close and told his brother—in clipped, short phrases—about Kul Elna, and the people there who'd been sacrificed in the name of creating the artifacts which Seto now collected like battle scars. Seto listened carefully, feeling several things slot into place, while he watched Bakari pace around the parking lot, seeking something that none of the people watching him could see.

"Yours," Seto said eventually, "is the challenge that he failed."

Bakari turned, eyed Seto carefully, then he nodded. "Correct," he said. "I highly doubt that he would understand it, or face it if pressed. I, after all, desecrated the corpse of his lord father. I brought rebellion to his court. It was I who nearly ripped his beloved country apart. What king, what man of reason and wisdom, would listen to me?" Something like his old rictus grin came back. "We do not, after all, negotiate with terrorists."

"You symbolize the reason I'm doing this in the first place," Seto said. "You're why the Millennium Items failed to rest when the King set them in their Cradle. You're why he's back, why you're back, why Seti is back. You're why none of them are resting now."

Bakari crossed his arms over his chest. "I suppose I am, at that," he said.

"In order to win the Millennium Ring from you, I have to face your people. Do I have that right?"

Verse Two.

"You will face more than my people," Bakari said. "You will face their truth. You will know what your precious Atem refused to see. You will face the brunt of their fury, and that will not be negotiated. No dragon will be taking that burden from you. I trust that you understand. I trust that you know what this means: if you wish to remove my Ring from me, then you will know their pain, and you will endure their retribution."

Seto's eyebrows raised. "As a living descendent of the king responsible for your peoples' genocide, you would have me shed blood for them."

Bakari didn't answer; he bared his teeth.

Seto sighed, then shrugged. "I suppose I can't fault you for that." He gesticulated randomly. "I can only guess how I would act in your place. I certainly won't pretend I misunderstand your anger. You call him my 'precious Atem,' but I trust you understand something: my relationship with him, such as it is, has ever been fraught. You are not about to hear me shout his virtues in direct opposition to the face of his sins. There are responsibilities hoisted upon anyone placed in a position of leadership. As a king, he would be called upon to answer for the crimes of his country."

"Are we even sure this is real?" Mokuba demanded. "How do we know he's telling the truth? What reason do we have to listen to him?"

"I know enough," Seto said, holding a hand out in his brother's direction. "I'm hardly calling this man a bastion of truth, but he is not lying now. He wouldn't dare. He knows who watches us now, the same as I do. Not just the gods. I imagine you have just as much fondness for divine authority as I do." Bakari scoffed, and it sounded almost friendly. "No, what concerns you is that your people are watching us right now." Seto's eyes narrowed. "Isn't that right? The dead of Kul Elna are with us right now, are they not? Watching, waiting. Haven't you invoked them directly, woken them from their restless nightmares, to assist you in this game?"

Bakari grunted. "You're smarter than you look," he said.

Seto flashed a grin. "I'm pleased to have outpaced your expectations."

"Are you prepared, then, Seto Kaiba?" Bakari asked. "Will you face the depths of depravity responsible for the artifacts you now claim as your own?"

"I do not claim the Millennium Items as my own," Seto said. "They have claimed me. You know there is a difference, and you know it's an important one. All the same, I am prepared. I have spent my entire life facing the sins of my fathers and myself. This will be no different."

"Oh," said Bakari. "It will be different. That much, I promise you in earnest."

Seto held out both arms now. "Step back," he said to his court. "Remember: if the choice comes between helping me and saving yourselves, that isn't a choice. Get the hell out."

Mokuba rolled his eyes. "You know I'm not gonna do that, Niisama."

Seto sighed. "I know," he said, long-suffering, "but I have to say it."

Verse Three.

Kul Elna is a dusty little place, with rough-hewn shelters set against the foot of a mountain. It looks carved right out of the stone. Seto sees shovels, picks, buckets, and any number of other tools strewn about; he remembers Seti speaking of his kingdom's greatest sin, the thing to which he deigned not to refer during their game. He felt wholly unqualified to do so. Seto wonders if this little village is that thing; he's quite sure, as soon as he thinks of it, that he's right.

He steps through the village, taking on the stairs which act as its main thoroughfare, like the spine of a great beast. He veers off to enter a dwelling every so often; he sees Bakari's fellows—his neighbors, his siblings, his parents, his children—huddled inside beneath threadbare blankets, using stones for pillows. This is the most impoverished place Seto has ever seen in all his life, and he can't help but remember the images of prosperity, of light and love and brightness, that Seti wove for him.

Seti's Kemet and this Kemet are entirely different countries.

The contrast is striking.

There are . . . not many children here.

What few there are, are tiny; thin, shivering, hungry.

Seto knows that Bakari is watching him, waiting for him to speak, but he doesn't.

There aren't any words he feels a pressing need to speak.

It takes Seto well over an hour to seek out every denizen of Kul Elna, and Seto is quite sure that their number—ninety-nine—is no coincidence. It feels too deliberate, especially since none of them bear any real resemblance to Bakari himself.

Looking for someone?

The voice is deep, deep within the earth itself, rising up to meet him.

Seto doesn't answer.

If, perhaps, you wonder: no, I am not here. Such was my blessing, and my shame. As it happens, the spell to invoke the magic which now sits so pretty on your skin . . . requires a paltry ninety-nine souls. The blood of ninety-nine was mixed with the molten gold; I, whose fortune was so glamorous on the evening of this great unmaking, this dress rehearsal for Sodom and Gomorrah—yes, I was off hunting for food. Do you think I had the decency to become a pillar of salt when I looked upon this blasphemy? I think you know: I didn't.

There's something authentic in Bakari's voice; something real.

Something about his anger rings true now, so true that it rattles Seto's bones.

Bakari wishes that he'd died with his people. He feels that he should have, and the fact that he didn't is shameful. Survivor's guilt, no doubt, made all the more comical now that he's also been dead for millennia. However, dead though he is, the last son of Kul Elna is not a part of them.

Bakari is removed from his legacy, inexorably cut from his history.

These thoughts, and many more, swirl through Seto's mind as he strolls down the heavy, trodden, dust-whirling steps. He sees someone off in the distance, cresting a hill, and he wonders if this is the moment he's been sent here to witness.

Is it Atem? Is it Atem's father?

Is it anyone?

Verse Four.

Anger is, ultimately, the most honest of all emotions. It's the rawest, and it lays its invoker bare for all to see. At least, that's what Seto Kaiba tends to think, when he's of a mind to be philosophical. In this way, he connects with Bakari in a way that he never had any intention of doing, had no way of guessing would ever happen, while he watches the massacre at Kul Elna unfold in front of him.

There's no laughter, no jibes, no snarky little quips, from the ghost who speaks for the Millennium Ring. Not anymore. They've reached an understanding, he and Seto, that doesn't need words. Though he has no way of knowing, this is Bakari's true test, the truest mark of whether the Millennium Ring would make its indelible mark on Seto's skin at the end of the day.

Bakari doesn't know this, and so neither does Seto, but the silent dead know.

They remember Atem, and what he felt upon witnessing their fate. The shock, the horror, the denial. They remember how Atem was quick to cast them aside, to cast them from his thoughts. Is it fair to judge him for that, considering the circumstances of his learning? Considering how young he is? Perhaps not. But when have the angry dead ever had patience for the living? When have they ever shown grace and understanding?

The restless dead of Kul Elna remember what they were looking for—what they had been waiting for—and didn't get, from Atem.

They get it from Seto Kaiba in waves.

In a sweeping torrent.

Rage.

Seto watches the brother of the king, the first man to take on the name Akhenaten. Seto watches him weave his magic, watches him rip the blood from the people of Kul Elna. It comes flooding out of their mouths, their ears, their eyes, like serpents. They try to scream, and then they choke: the men, the women, the children; the young, the infirm, the elderly; the strong and hale, the weak and sickly; all of them crumple to their knees and shriek as they are melted from the inside out. Wrung out like wet sponges, made as dry and dead and forgotten as the sand on which they built their home; and they don't even know why. They don't know what's overtaken them. They don't know that one man is responsible for their agony. They don't know what sad, stupid purpose they are being sacrificed for.

Seto does.

Seto knows, and he feels a ravenous fury unlike anything he's ever felt.

The last remaining whispers of fear and hopelessness from the trials of Obelisk disappear, going up in smoke as a roaring fire lights behind Seto's eyes. He has no room in his mind or his heart for fear or horror, for grief or sorrow or confusion; none of these things find any purchase in him. They aren't here.

They don't exist.

Seto Kaiba reaches in, deep within himself, and he grips his heart in his right hand.

Bakari, watching from on high like a raven, perched on the branches of a dead tree, is stunned into speechlessness. He gawps, unable to remember, for the life or death of him, what he ever hated about this man.

Verse Five.

It was impossible not to notice the change in Seto's demeanor, even as he remained fully and thoroughly unconscious. His jaw flexed, his brow furrowed, and his fists clenched in his lap. Though he sat still with his back straight, looking like nothing so much as a monk in training, magic started to radiate from him like heat waves. The markings of the items he'd already won started to gleam through his clothing and, in the case of one, his left eyelid.

Noa scowled. "All right, you know what?" he said, so suddenly that Yugi and his friends—who'd all stopped working on the shop to watch, breathlessly, as the game for the Millennium Ring began—all flinched away from him, violently. "I've had just about enough of this. These gods have the idea that they can demand whatever they want, make whatever arbitrary calls they like, and we're just supposed to sit here and let them? I don't think so. This is over."

He strode over to his brother, made to pass him, to confront Bakari again.

He stopped when Seto reached out an arm and gripped his wrist.

It was too deliberate.

"I will finish this," Seto said, slowly, distantly, like he wasn't fully in the physical world.

He probably wasn't.

Noa grunted. "Aniki," he said, "this is ridiculous. You can't expect me to believe that getting you helpless and outside of this world, or whatever it is you've got going right now, isn't a trap. He has a grudge against the entire royal line. That includes you. That includes Mokuba. You can't be just . . . sitting right here in this trap."

"If he attempts to make use of my absence, such as it is," Seto said, "that's what you're here for. Wait. Watch. Intervene if you must, but only if you must. Too much is riding on this. I have things in control. Trust me."

Noa wanted to be angry, wanted to argue, but there was something about the way Seto spoke to him, something about the invocation of trust, that gave him pause. He straightened, his face losing much of his consternation. He looked, all at once, like a soldier at attention.

Yugi was studying his rival like he'd only just seen Seto Kaiba for the first time.

"This is like the first time I put together the Puzzle," he murmured, "versus the second."

"What do you mean?" Noa asked, more sharply than he intended to.

"The first time I did it," Yugi said, lifting up the Puzzle in both hands, "it took me . . . what, eight years? Almost a decade. The second time it took barely five, maybe ten minutes. It's hard to remember. I was in a burning building at the time."

"You . . . you were—okay, then." Noa shook his head. "Don't know why I'd be surprised to hear that."

"You're talking about how fast Niisama is gathering the Millennium Items," Mokuba injected, "compared to how long it took him. Right?"

"Yeah." Yugi nodded. "It took Atem so long to get them all gathered."

"Neither he, nor any of us, was focused on the task," Seto murmured softly. "It was simply a matter of course." He paused. The faintest glimpse of a smile rose on his lips. "Besides, I'm nothing if not a stubborn bastard."

Noa shrugged. "I mean."

"He makes a good point," Mokuba murmured.

"I guess so," Yugi admitted, eventually.

END.