Bakura vaulted himself to the top of the chain-link fence in one swift motion, perched on top like a strange bird in shiny new sneakers. Bakura had been very particular about getting sneakers; he had picked out expensive red ones with a great deal of care and consideration, and was highly self-satisfied with his selection. Possibly he was used to them, since Ryou Bakura had worn a set every day, or maybe he had picked up that among a subsection of young men they were an important status symbol. Marik strongly suspected he just liked the name.
"I knew you were going to get us caught," he said, with both hands between both feet on the top bar of the fence. "I said I'd have to listen to you getting yelled at. Predicted it."
"And I knew you wouldn't be able to exist anywhere for more than fifteen minutes without taking someone else's property," Marik grabbed a fistful of fence to haul himself up, the metal warm from the sun and dirty in a way he could feel. "But I was nice enough not to say it aloud. You might do something crazy, like prove me wrong."
"We were there for at least twice that."
Every barb was accompanied by a smile. This did not imply they weren't meant with earnest bite, but rather, that they were both having a pleasant time with their teeth.
"And no one is yelling at us." Marik added. At that exact moment cousin Nasim's voice echoed behind them, yelling, presumably something along the lines of "get back here, you insolent whelps."
Marik looked down at the plush cat in his other hand and frowned.
"Toss it over first, idiot."
Marik shoved it under one arm. "Move over."
"Don't give me orders." Bakura, in an act of further mockery, cartwheeled himself up into a handstand, his hair and clothes flopping towards the ground. He looked at Marik upside-down and nose-to-nose. "Control freak."
"Circus freak." Marik was starting to notice that spending time with Bakura seemed to involve a lot of climbing.
"Do you think he's called the police yet?"
"Are you worried?" Marik asked, swinging his legs over the top, as if very unworried himself but amused by the thought of Bakura's distress.
"No. I'm just curious about what'll happen to you, when I leave you in the dust for them."
"Are you sure?" Marik asked. "They didn't even have cops, when you're from. You could be scared of them."
"Cops are not new." Bakura scoffed, "A guardsman is a cop, and a priest is a cop who can read." Bakura paused, still holding himself what some forgotten corner of Marik's brain informed him was called a 'cast' handstand, a fact he only knew because he'd absorbed it while controlling Anzu, which made knowing it feel immoral somehow. "Where's the bike parked?" Bakura asked.
"Three blocks in the other direction."
The angry shouting got closer. The fence rattled as they both jumped off at the same time.
Marik and Bakura crossed the city in a whirlwind, through honking cars and beneath balcony clotheslines, cutting through yards and a coffeehouse terrace (to the vocal displeasure of its occupants), before stumbling, breathless and giddy, onto a random side-street lined with glass windows.
"I am never going to be allowed back in there." Marik said, still clutching his stuffed cat, sounding somehow victorious about it.
"Good riddance." Bakura said. They found the raised concrete edge of a flowerbed and both walked 15 centimeters off the ground with the affected air of children on a balance beam, on a whim, or perhaps to see who fell off first so he could be relentlessly mocked by the other. "That man was waiting for an excuse to get rid of you. Do you want to do something nasty to his car?"
"Yes." Marik cracked a smile. "But that would be a bad idea."
"Do you want to do something nasty to someone else's car?"
Marik laughed, not his typical practiced mocking one but a real, undignified snort, and it rang in Bakura's ears and went straight to his head like he'd won a prize. "We really shouldn't."
"Why not? You're in trouble as it is, right? Someone's probably dialing your sister as we speak. You might as well go all in."
Marik rolled his eyes. "It was an accident. We'll have to pay it back and write a heartfelt apology letter. I'm not going to get in 'trouble,'" he said, "for breaking a bunch of garbage machines that don't even work."
"God, you are an abhorrent loser, aren't you." Bakura said, with a cackle. "Can't possibly have been that you were simply bad at—HEY!" He didn't get the chance to finish as Marik shoved him off the ledge.
Bakura landed on the sidewalk on one foot without stumbling, and threw in a dramatic little flourish.
Marik smiled despite himself, and struggled to look serious. He tucked the cat under his chin. "I told you, I'm being nice now. No bloody revenge, no horrible crimes, no defacing anyone's car. Nice, upstanding citizen behavior only. Remember?"
"Aren't you still forging cards for a living?" A vending machine projected a knock-off solidvision advertisement every few seconds, and Bakura took a step out of his way to jump straight through it. It produced a thin, minor resistance, like walking through a spiderweb, and a strange but not-quite-painful buzzing sensation as it passed over the skin. He smiled. Novel.
"That's different." Marik said, offended. "I'm doing it…" He gestured vaguely, searching for a word. "Nicely. It's paper. Hurting no one. It can't be wrong just to print something."
"What are people using that stuff for, after you print it?"
"I don't ask."
Bakura laughed. "Be serious. What happened to all that talk about Battle City?"
"The Marik you met in Battle City is dead." he declared, and jumped down to join him on the sidewalk, hitting the ground for emphasis. He began to slip into that rehearsed, sanctimonious tone again. "I now understand the stain I have placed on myself and our line, for the lives that I took and the laws of my forefathers which I broke," He placed a hand over his heart. "and I know I may never truly make amends. But if I am to deserve our new place in the light, it is my responsibility to—"
"God, don't you ever get tired of that?"
"No, Bakura, I do not get 'tired' of being a good per—"
"Of faking." he spat, and the expression that crossed Marik's face approached genuine hurt.
Bakura turned to leave him on the sidewalk. "Go home and be 'nice' if you really want. But I'm not listening to any more of that contrite nonsense."
His eye followed the movement of the passerby. Someone important-looking chattered on their cell phone; a horse-drawn carriage made its way down the street, the horse looking somewhat anemic; a woman separated two bickering children, patted one on the head and took them gently by the hand to lead them on past a cybercafe. Bakura's face darkened.
In every great city of the world, from Babylon to Beijing, at least one man has woken up each morning and looked out over the vast, writhing world from his palace balcony, and convinced himself he created it all. He has thought himself great, probably called it "his city" with pride, told himself his flesh and thought is the very machinery upon which human society runs. In truth, men in palaces and penthouses die often, do little, and are replaced quickly. Civilization, that horrid, indefatigable creature, truly depends on, if anyone, a sufficient number of day-laborers and weaver-women deciding to wake up and go to work that day; and if ever they did not, humanity would quickly be reduced to a handful of starving, naked animals surrounded by a few crumbling half-walls. It is the most important task of men in palaces to ensure that the day-laborers and weaver-women never realize this.
Bakura's unrelenting, undying, stomach-turning, tooth-grinding, hatred for great men in palaces and penthouses was a given, but it would be too easy to mistake him for a mere facile hero of the downtrodden. He reserved no pity for the choking masses. The ordinary and impoverished day-laborer sent his sons to become soldiers whose job it was to kill people like Bakura. The indigent weaver-women were content to serve the cruelest gods so long as they believed it would keep their villages from becoming like worse, poorer villages, like Bakura's village. When Bakura was blood-soaked and barefoot they had offered him nothing, content, instead, to let their eyes run past the horror of him, and to believe they were pharaohs of their own hovels.
So when Bakura looked out over cities, not from balconies but from rooftops and gutters, and saw children and grandmothers and people walking cute little dogs, it was his view that even if the fish rots from the head, the tail may well still owe you something.
(Bakura always hated dogs, anyway. They had been competition, back before he learned to steal well and had to live on scraps. Starving mongrels with two legs and four, fighting for garbage that would make them both sick, but Bakura had been smaller and had many fewer teeth. He tried not to think of it.)
"I think," Bakura turned back to Marik with an ever-widening grin, "that it is about time we ate."
"What?"
"And I have decided," he continued, with the gravitas of an important announcement, "that someone on this street will be paying for dinner. Whether they like it or not."
"...You don't need to steal from anyone to buy dinner." Marik said. "I have money."
"Do you? I've had your wallet for half an hour."
"You do not," Marik said, rapidly shoving hands in pockets until he produced a small purple pocketbook. "See, it's right—"
"You checked." Bakura said, delighted.
"You worm!"
"It's not about whether we can pay." Bakura continued. "It's the sport. I will even let you choose the victim! Anyone in the world," He gestured, grandly, the universe before them. "Just point."
Marik glanced aside at the rest of the street, with a suspicious frown. "You refused to teach me any pickpocketing, before."
"And I still am. You are choosing a pocket, and I am doing all the work. Foolproof. Or you-proof, anyway."
"...None of these people have done anything wrong."
"Everyone has done something." Bakura said. "These are the people who tromped around feasting in the sun while you lived six meters down in the dirt or whatever, aren't they? Surely you deserve recompense. They can buy us one meal."
Marik's smile was amused but distant, curious. Mildly entertained. He was not truly opposed; he wants to watch you convince him. Why did that make Bakura nervous? He hated being toyed with. But it was not permissible to quit now. He was having fun, and there weren't any other moves to make in the game.
"I would," Marik crossed his arms and sighed dramatically, and cast an eye towards the horizon, where the late afternoon sun was painting the sky in purple and gold, as if to match his outfit. "But it's going to be dark soon."
"And?"
"The darkness and I have been enemies for millennia. It is not a feud to be taken lightly."
"Is that why you sleep with all those lights on? I assumed it was because you were afraid. Are you also, by chance, an infant whose mother still braids his hair?" he asked. "Oh! Do you have a curfew, is that it? Does poor little baby brother have to be home by ten?"
"No!"
"Shame, it'd be more fun to break if you had one. But I suppose there's no one left to enforce that sort of thing on you. Certainly not your fa—"
Marik grabbed the hood of Bakura's sweatshirt and yanked him backwards so hard he stumbled, and the front of the zipper pressed hard against his neck. "Bakura." Marik said. It was a complete sentence.
"Did I say something wrong?" Bakura made no move to escape, but nor did he move any closer, keeping, instead, the fabric in Marik's grip perfectly taut. "I'm only talking. Hurting no one. Can't be wrong just to say something. You know, I think you're being a little ungrateful. A master thief has agreed to steal anything you want, and you're not even treating it like an honor! I'll rescind the offer, if you don't want it."
Marik paused for a long, slow, silent moment. "...Anything?"
"Anything you can see. I am the king." he said, ignoring the distinct, distant dread that he was about to regret something.
Marik abruptly let go. "Hm." He scanned the narrow street full of shops, again in silence, for several agonizing seconds, as if scrutinizing every centimeter. His eyes finally settled on a window display across the way. "I want," he said, pointing, imperious, "That."
Bakura tried to follow his hand to a small gallery, which appeared to promise mainly copied hieroglyphs and shabti figurines. "You want what, a papyrus print? That's worthless."
"No." Marik clamped an arm around his shoulder to adjust him more precisely, and Bakura went rigid. Marik's hands were cold and he smelled like imitation citrus candy flavor and somehow, inexplicably yet exactly, the color pink. "That." he said, with an ever-widening smile. Bakura had not noticed when Marik's expression had become a smile.
"That won't even fit in my jacket." Bakura said. It would not buy dinner, either.
"You can do it." Not a question, not a word of encouragement. A statement of a fact.
"I can." Bakura said, not at all defensove. "In broad daylight, even." he added, though deflated at the prospect.
"Is that a problem?"
"No." he said, his pride intact. "You distract the woman at the till."
Marik nodded. "I'll think of something."
"Don't just chatter at her about the weather. A big distraction."
"Return without a receipt?"
"Worse."
"I'll ask for her manager." he said, diabolical, and Bakura's chest did something strange.