Could you tell I was on a "Bakura" fixation train when I wrote this? I'm really liking this new version of his personality and writing in his narrative voice ended up so much fun that basically this whole episode is from his POV. Not that I'm complaining.

Bakura being a seventh wheel and teasing everyone about their respective crushes in the group is going to be a trend/running joke, and it's giving me the acest vibes. (I already lowkey head canon his reincarnation Ryou as ace so it wasn't a stretch :))

Episode Five Part One: Thieves' Code

"Maybe you've heard of a terrible place where the scoundrels of Paris collect in a lair!"

Bakura sat in one of the chairs at the library, busily at work multitasking.

He was keeping an eye on Atem as he'd been asked. He was also carefully transcribing the thieves' code from the tomb builder's old passage. In addition to those two things, he was pointedly ignoring the distant sound of Aknadin shouting for him, probably to scold him for some prank he'd forgotten about setting.

It was a lot to do.

Atem was sitting on the other side of the library from him, writing in one of his scrolls. He had another scroll out on the table next to him, and every so often, he'd look at it sadly, before rolling it up and stuffing it back into that satchel full of blank scrolls he carried with him.

Then he'd go back to writing.

Bakura looked back at his own work.

Okay… this looks like the symbol for a cache, but… it's got some other symbol on top of it. A cache of what?

Bakura huffed. This thieves' code, no matter what he tried, didn't seem to conform to the Kemetian alphabet. He wondered if he should talk to Siamun. The old man seemed to know every foreign language out there.

Speaking of the code… there was this symbol Atem was interested in…

Bakura frowned. "Hey, Atem?"

Looking up at the sound of his name, Atem stowed away his scroll hurriedly.

"What's wrong, Bakura?"

"That symbol you asked if I drew. What did it look like?"

Atem furrowed his brow. "Why do you ask?"

"I was wondering why you thought I drew it."

"Only because it looked newer than the others. But, here, it looked like this."

Atem sketched out the symbol. It looked like a flat-topped building and a similar building surrounded by spiked brushstrokes on two sides.

"That's way too complicated to be a thieves' code symbol. The point of thieves' code symbols is they're quick shorthand, usually written while running for your life."

"Then… who wrote it? If it wasn't a thieves' code symbol, what was it?"

Bakura looked at it again. "I don't know. Take it to Siamun, I think. He's got a knack for languages."

Atem nodded. "Are you trying to figure out the code in the old passage?"

"It's no good to lie and say I'm not, but my request still stands. This feels personal. Like I have to do it."

"I understand," Atem replied. "I won't help you unless you ask for it."

Bakura grinned. "Thanks. Mind if I pry into what you were looking at all sappy earlier?"

Atem's face paled, then turned red. "Um, no, it's… it's nothing you need to see."

"Does it have anything to do with the twins?" Bakura asked. "Lady Mana, perhaps?"

Atem's beet red face, buried in his hands, was proof enough.

"Bakura, stop it. How I feel on the matter is… irrelevant. She doesn't feel the same way, and shouldn't her friendship be more important? I scarcely met her."

"You're that confident she's not into you?" Bakura asked flatly, pushing harder even as Atem squeezed his hand into a fist, shaking and tightly shutting his eyes. "Even though, in your own words, 'you've scarcely met her'? It's not like she could do better than you, you are the heir to the throne-"

"She could do much better than me-"

"Agh, not this again. Look, Atem. Nobody in this palace thinks you're a bad king. Well, Aknadin might, but who needs him? What on earth makes you think Mana isn't into you? She kept shooting you little looks the entire time she was introducing herself, I saw!"

"She cannot possibly love me, Bakura, she doesn't know me-!"

"Are you that confident you have no chance with her?! Really!?"

"I am!" Atem shouted in Bakura's face. Bakura stepped back, nervous, his gaze instinctively flicking around for escape routes and weapons. It was something that the easy royal life was never able to train out of him, but he forced himself to stop when he saw Atem.

Atem took a shaky breath, looking at Bakura, wide-eyed. His expression was a mixture of ashamed and horrified, as if he'd just killed someone rather than raise his voice with his stepbrother. Atem looked at the ground, biting his lip.

"I'm sorry, Bakura. I shouldn't have shouted at you like that. I… I don't know what came over me."

"Hey, listen," Bakura began, feeling awkward. He was never good at comforting people, and while Atem had had mood swings in the past, he'd never had to personally deal with them. That was more Isis's thing, as the older woman had essentially mother-henned all of them to adulthood, including Atem. That meant he wasn't equipped to safely diffuse the situation when confronted with Atem screaming at him in rage and almost in the same minute looking like he would cry from shame. "I shouldn't have prodded you like that."

"That's no excuse," Atem replied, his voice trembling. "I…" He backed up, fearfully, before turning and running for the library door. "I'll be in my room!"

"Hey, wait-!"

But Atem had already disappeared around the corner, his cape the last thing to vanish.

Well, great.

Bakura huffed, going back into the library to gather his own scroll of thieves' code notes and resolving to go head off Aknadin and see what on earth the old geezer wanted. He didn't want Aknadin anywhere near Atem now, especially since Atem was already so upset.

"Oi, what do you want?" he asked the Eye-bearer, who had the Millennium Tome under his arm (he never seemed to part with that thing these days), and was, true to form, looking furious. Bakura then dipped his head, spitefully amending, "Lord Aknadin."

"I want to speak with the Prince, not you, Priest Bakura."

"Atem has sequestered himself in his room, Lord Aknadin, he's in an extremely out-of-sorts mood right now, and I'm not about to let him get bombarded with the next thing you think he did wrong as king this week on top of it!"

"Boy, I doubt you know much about court affairs given you are only here through the prince's dubiously sane word, but I am simply trying to help him! His way of doing things is hardly an efficient way to run a court, and it is my sworn duty to ensure he makes the best decision for the country! That head injury he sustained has made him volatile and unpredictable, and that is no state for a proper ruler to be in!"

"Constantly stressed because you can't keep your Ra-forsaken mouth shut about it when you think he's made a mistake is no state to be king in either!" Bakura blurted out.

Aknadin scowled, his face purpling with fury. "How dare you insult me after the only reason you weren't hanged was because of my brother's kindness! You have no right to command or rebuke me, thief, son of a thief!" Aknadin snarled, only to step back as Bakura got in his face. Bakura had grown up tall and strong in the past nine years. He was told that he was intimidating, and he was far from the scared child who had stared up at the Eye-bearer who seemed so massive and terrifying when he could read his every thought and had his life in his hands. Now, he knew how Aknadin worked. He worked by subtlety and needed the upper hand to be more intimidating than a starving, whining bird, screeching at everything but flying away when called out for their nonsense. Like any of the cowardly drunks he had run into as a child, if you weren't afraid of them, their bravado deserted them.

"I'm not going to repeat myself - leave. Atem. Alone. If you really have information he needs to know right this minute, rather than some oh-so-clever double-edged insult for him, tell me, and I'll tell him."

Aknadin scowled, but, as Bakura expected, he simply hmphed and walked away. However, desperate to have the last word, the old snake just had to say:

"You know, one of these days my late brother and my nephew's honor won't be enough to save you, Priest Bakura. You merely live on borrowed scraps of kindness, like a dish-licking dog. A borrowed title you were never meant to have in the first place. And one day, that kindness will run out. Then justice will at last find you."

Bakura gritted his teeth. "Is that supposed to scare me!?" he shouted as Aknadin slunk off down the hall.

But Aknadin didn't answer.

"Well, I messed up," he announced as he walked out into the garden where Isis, Seth, Kisara, Mana, and Maahad were waiting.

"Messed up how?" Seth asked.

"I was teasing Atem about something stupid and I pushed too hard," Bakura said, sitting down next to Isis and plucking up a fig from the pile she had picked.

"Atem's always accepted your teasing in the past…" Kisara pointed out. "What was different about this time?"

"I touched a sore subject, I guess," Bakura sighed. "The point is, he just exploded. Y'know, yelled at me."

"Yelled at you?" Isis asked. Even when he was upset, the prince seemed to go out of his way to never raise his voice.

Bakura sighed. "Yeah. My instincts kicked in - fight or flight and all - and he noticed. Then he got… really upset. It was almost like he had killed a puppy rather than yelled at somebody. He said he had to leave, shut himself in his room, and he hasn't come out since."

Isis sighed. "Now I want to know more than ever what's bothering him."

"Lord Atem has always been eccentric, hasn't he?" Maahad asked.

"Yes, but lately he's been acting strangely, even by his standards," Seth replied.

"We all think he's scared of something, something that's coming quickly," Kisara explained. "Two days ago, Seth and I accidentally surprised him two nights ago, when saying goodnight to him."

"He almost fainted," Seth added.

"What could the prince be afraid of?" Maahad asked.

"He told Aknadin that recently he's been preparing for the possibility that the assassin who attacked him as a child could return. This morning I found him trying to find methods of covertly escaping the castle walls, in case… in case such information was ever needed," Bakura said.

"Oh. They never did find that man, did they?" Mana asked soberly.

"Gods bless, is he honestly preparing for an attack? A coup?" Maahad asked.

"I wonder… if it was something the gods told him," Kisara said.

"Hm?" Mana asked.

"When I first arrived, Atem told me that he had received advice from the gods."

"Directly?" Mana asked. Was that the secret the prince seemed to be hiding?

"Yes; he was very insistent that was how he came by this information too."

"From how young?" Maahad asked.

"He first confided in me about it when we met. I was six years old, he was five."

"What information was he given?" Mana asked at the same time as Maahad exclaimed, "He received personal messages from the gods from five years old!?"

"He called me by name before I even introduced myself, and he gave me a message from them not long after."

"About what?"

"...It's… a personal matter," Kisara said, her face pinkening. "Anyway, he seems to anticipate things before they happen and know things about a person without being told. He knew Seth's name before he even arrived, but he passed that off as something he overheard."

Seth blinked in surprise. Apparently that was news to him.

"He also seemed to guess Kisara's strategy in the middle of your first fencing match with her," Bakura said. "He insisted it came from just watching how you two fought, but he seemed to think Kisara wasn't looking to win."

Seth looked over at Kisara, confused. "Is that true?"

"I mean, I wanted to win. Don't think for a minute I wasn't fighting at my best. But I didn't need to win. I felt gaining your respect was the real victory."

Seth smiled at her. Then his expression sobered. "But did the gods tell him that?"

"I mean, I consider myself a master at reading people," Bakura cut in. "Any thief who isn't is liable to get into trouble."

"Weren't you being threatened with hanging when you first got here?" Isis asked flatly. "I suppose that's about as 'in trouble' as you can get."

"Clever, very clever, Isis," Bakura huffed. "Anyway, with Atem it's more than that. He just knows things that he has no business knowing. There was a period of my life where I was convinced the guy was clairvoyant."

"That doesn't settle what he's worried about. If the gods told him-" Kisara said. "Then it's likely to affect not just him, or not just him and us, but all of Kemet."

"But Atem has always been tight-lipped about why he knows what he knows. He always seems jumpy when we ask about it, too. I don't think that's going to change."

"Surely if it concerned the whole country…" Isis began, before trailing off.

"So, what's the consensus? Leave him be until he calms down?" Seth asked.

"That's what I vote for. I'm no good at the whole 'comforting the distressed' thing," Bakura replied. He thought for a minute about showing them the symbol Atem had shown him, that the prince seemed to recognize, but that would mean talking about his interest in the thieves' code of the old tomb builders and… no. That was his project.

I'll just keep it in mind. Just in case it's important.

"I guess. Just… keep in mind what Bakura told us. About… Lord Aknadin threatening Lord Atem," Maahad insisted.

"I definitely will. In fact, I'm tempted to bring it up with Master Aknadin, just to see what he says. Likely he'll come up with some kind of excuse," Seth said.

"Please don't do anything rash, Seth," Isis replied.

"Yeah, I got into an argument with Aknadin after Atem left - and no, it wasn't just me being petty. Aknadin wanted to yell at Atem for some other imagined offense, and I didn't think Atem was up to hearing that in his current state. So I called him out about criticizing Atem's every move. I didn't bring up our suspicions that he's jealous and wants the throne - I'm not that stupid - but I told him point blank if he had to say anything useful to Atem to deliver the message to me and I'd take it to him, and if he didn't, to leave Atem alone."

"Oh, gods. How did he take it?"

"The usual way, blustering and squawking about how I had no right as a former thief - love how he consistently ignores the word former in that title by the way - to talk to him that way. But he backed off, as far as I'm aware. That's the thing about Aknadin, pierce through the intimidation factor he can read your mind and his title, and he's all talk."

"All talk though he may be," Maahad said gravely. "He is the head of the regency, and he has the clout to make life awful for all of us, even Lord Atem, if he catches on to what we're thinking about him. Tread carefully is all I'm saying."

"Thank you for telling us what you were told, you two," Isis said to the twins. "Maahad may be right that it's just servants gossipping, but gossip doesn't come from nowhere."

Bakura looked at Mana, who was biting her lip. "Why would anyone want to take the throne from Lord Atem? Why would Lord Atem be convinced he was the wrong person for the position? Was that something the gods told him too?"

Bakura thought about saying something to Mana about how Atem was obviously smitten with her, since the shadowfolk girl also seemed attracted to his brother. But just because he ignored the unspoken rules of tact didn't mean he never learned them. Atem was obviously not ready to admit his feelings for Mana yet, and forcing him to before he was ready would doom any relationship between them before it even began. So Bakura kept his mouth shut on that subject.

"Since he's likely not going to tell us, we just have to keep our eyes on the horizon," Bakura said.

"Speaking of Lord Atem, I noticed him writing in a scroll earlier, before he left for the library," Maahad said. "Is that also…"

"Oh, yeah. He uses them to record his thoughts so he can look back on them later with the advantage of hindsight. Said it was like writing letters to his future self."

"But why are they in a strange code?" Maahad asked.

"Wait, what!?" Bakura asked.

"I only caught a glimpse," Maahad said. "I was very ashamed, because I guessed it was a personal matter, so I looked away once I realized what I was looking at before he noticed I was prying. But not one letter of it was in Kemetian. It was in this strange foreign alphabet."

"Huh… He showed me a symbol earlier, convinced it was thieves' code, asking me if I knew what it meant. But I didn't recognize it. Could it have been from that weird writing system you saw him using?"

"What did it look like?" Maahad asked. "If I saw it anywhere on the page, I may be able to recognize it at a glance."

"Big brother's great at memorizing things," Mana said. More teasingly, she elbowed him and said, "It's the only thing saving him in magic study."

"Mana! I can perform magic!"

"Save the sibling banter," Bakura said. "Here, he drew it for me, let's see if I can remember…"

Maahad handed him a scroll and a pen, and Bakura inked out the symbol.

"I did see that symbol, but only once. And without context I can't say what it means."

"Huh," Bakura said.

"Still more questions we can't find answers to," Seth said. "Or, at least, questions only answerable by Atem."

"Again, just keep watch. Stay vigilant. Something's coming, and if Atem's worried about it, all of us should be."

As the young priests convened in the garden, Atem was still in his room, frowning. He was trying to focus on the issue that he'd been pondering when Bakura had started talking to him, but inevitably, Bakura's fearful look at his outburst would fill his head, making it impossible to think about anything else.

He was afraid. Bakura, my own stepbrother, was afraid of me.

It seemed no matter what he did to improve his behavior, he seemed to slip seamlessly back into being the cruel, villainous Pharaoh he saw in Yugi's memories. As much as he tried to avoid his fate, he was always dragged back to the path of doom those memories promised.

And something had gone terribly wrong with the story's path in only a day, something that could jeopardize the happiness of at least one of his dearest friends…

He'll let me get away with anything. I'm Aknadin's favorite, remember? That bitter comment uttered by Seth earlier that day - it had been lifted almost word for word from a conversation in Kingdom In The Sand.

Specifically, Seth's first affection flag with Mana. Mana had just had a horrible first lesson with Lord Aknadin, with the Eye-bearer being his usual caustic self towards the young girl. Seth had come across her crying afterward and, in a way strangely soft in comparison to how insufferably arrogant he had acted in all previous interactions, Seth had asked her what it was she was crying about. Mana had denied Aknadin's involvement, not wanting to slander the man much older and higher-ranked than her, but Seth had guessed immediately Aknadin had played a part. Seth had called Aknadin bad-tempered and an old fool, and Mana had protested such insults, worried Seth would be overheard. Seth's response had been those words, bitter and harsh: He'll let me get away with anything. I'm his favorite, remember?

Seth had said the exact same thing today. But he'd been talking to Atem, not Mana.

Did I… Did I steal Seth's first romance flag from Mana?!

That was why he had run out of the room, he needed to think about the matter in private. Seth needed the joy Mana brought to his empty life in the game, and Mana… Atem wanted nothing more than for her to find her destined love, and if that was Seth, he never wanted to impede their relationship.

And yet, today, he had intercepted - stolen - the first seeds of Seth and Mana's relationship - without even meaning to!

Was he destined to stand in the way of their happiness no matter what he did? Was he always going to be the foul, vindictive rival?

He took a deep, shaky breath.

"It'll be alright. It must be. It was just… just one flag. That doesn't mean Mana and Seth won't get together… unless she chooses Bakura instead because of it…" Ugh! The game carefully put the other leads and their rivals out of the picture in the routes not their own, and since the real timeline clearly wasn't doing that, it would be a hard time ensuring every single one of them was left happy. If Seth chose Mana and Kisara Maahad, that still left Isis and Bakura as spares. That wouldn't be bad, necessarily, as Bakura was not the same man as he was in Isis's route, but neither of them seemed drawn to each other, meaning it wasn't likely they would end up happy together. Likewise, if Isis and Bakura were chosen by Maahad and Mana respectively, Kisara and Seth would be left in a loveless relationship, their bad end.

And that was if everything went perfectly - and he didn't think it could.

He'd already messed up one romance flag for Mana, and his attraction to her showed no signs of conveniently going away. No matter how much he told himself his friends were the ones she truly loved, part of him imagined Mana's joyful smile at her wedding in both good endings, and wished the groom she was beaming at as she leaned in for a first kiss as husband and wife could be him.

Well… Seth seems happy with Kisara.

That was true. Seth seemed much more tolerant of Kisara's presence than in the game. In both routes but especially Mana's, he jumped at every possible opportunity to leave his intended wife, guilt being the only thing that tethered him to Kisara at all. But here, the real life Seth and the real life Kisara were just about inseparable.

But that doesn't mean you have a chance! He scolded himself, wanting to hit himself for even nurturing such a thought.

If not Seth, then she has to end up with Bakura. Not me. Not me. Never me.

Keeping that in mind was the only way he would be able to survive his doom, if leaving her to someone else caused him such pain after he had only known her for a day.

Mana could not love him. He was the villain, as fate itself seemed fond of rubbing in his face. No matter what he did, it seemed that was all he could be.

His only hope was that he could keep his role from interfering with his friends' happiness.