Atem lives. The ceremonial duel goes on and instead of taking him away forever as expected, the doors opened again and glowed and spat him back out, in flesh and blood and linen like the day he died. Anzu yells out his name in glee, and Yugi holds him close all warm and solid and discovers that when Atem is real he smells like fruit and incense and crumples into hugs like a man starving, and Jonouchi let loose ugly tears he'd been holding in all day, and Atem stepped out into the sunlight and blinked in wonder and everyone took him by the hand and took him home. It is a lovely story, about love and hope and the tie that binds and the second chances we never expect to get, and how beautiful, and how wonderful, and how nice.

This is not that story. This is not a story about him.

This story begins hours later, in the shrine where the millennium stone had already collapsed for good and buried all the items deep, in the dead of night after Atem and Yugi and all of his friends had long gone. The doors to the Duat opened again, and glowed once more. Then they dimmed. Then they glowed again. Flickering back and forth, an indecisiveness, a bickering between the powers that be. Eventually, though, a solution was reached, and for the second time in 24 hours a teenage boy was spat back out into the world, lying in the dirt and dizzily staring at the ceiling. He wore no crown. There was no one there to greet him, no one to shout his name. There was only the dark of the cavern, the old, dusty air, and the smell of smoke from fading torches.

The first thing he did, with his immediate jolt of awareness, was dig his nails into the cracks on the floor and hate them. It was not clear, exactly, who was meant by "them," but whoever they were they made his blood boil and his chest burst with the want to tear them to shreds. Everyone, maybe. The pharaoh and his annoying little friends, and Yugi Muto, and all six priests, but really it was everyone and everything. Every rock and every tree, he wanted it broken, and every man, woman, and child, let their blood fall drop by drop into the river until the whole Nile runs red, and every ray of light from the sun, let it turn cold and fall into night. The kind of hate that made the walls melt, that filled you until you couldn't see straight or even move, that sharpened and twisted the whole world until everything else looked hateful too, smashable, seething. It should have happened by now. It should all be gone.

Still, though, in his daze he could not focus exclusively on hating every speck of dirt in the universe with an overwrought fury. After a moment or two he got to wondering what exactly was going on. The last thing he remembered was losing to the pharaoh when they finally got a hold of that stupid name. He remembered that, distinctly, remembered losing, and it made him very angry; but he could recall nothing afterward, and besides was reasonably sure that should've ended everything for good. He sat up to feel around. It was pitch dark, but his eyes were good with dark. You couldn't be a thief of any skill if you couldn't work in the dark. He reached up to brush his hair out of his eyes, and felt his scar, and froze.

He reached up and touched it again. Yes, that was his scar, the one that ran down his eye, a nasty piece of work he'd received at age 11. He checked for more, ran his hands over himself, because he was a boy in possession of a great deal of scars, and discovered all of them were exactly where they should be. This was his body, then. The original, proper one. Not Ryou Bakura's body and not anyone else's either. He checked for the ring and found nothing around his neck, just his bare chest beneath his robe, a steady heartbeat.

Bakura stood up and squinted around the chamber until he found some pinprick of light in the distance, and picked through the ruins to follow it, hands running clumsily and then carefully along the walls to find his way. Because that was his name, Bakura, he remembered now. This whole time he'd thought he was stealing it from his host, but it turned out to have been his all along too. He remembered a lot of things he didn't before, his whole first life, properly in his head where it should be. He found the exit swiftly, and felt the wind hit his face just as the first tiny pinpricks of dawn were easing their way over the horizon. He could see now, sort of, his own hands, which were the right color, warm and brown. He was in his own clothes, his own shoes. Yes, this was definitely his body. He was standing outside the ruins of a familiar valley, and there was not a sound, no other people in sight.

He closed his eyes and tried to summon Diabound, tried to feel the spirit nearby, a familiar hiss and smooth scales, but there was nothing. All gone. All alone.

So that morning, still angry but mostly just confused, the King of Thieves sat in the sand as himself for the first time in three thousand and three years, and watched the sunrise.