(no subject)

[spoke]

Pairings: n/a
Rating: R (death, some cussing) After the sacrifice at Kul Elna and before he storms into the palace looking for revenge, what’s happening with Bakura?
Yu-Gi-Oh is of course not mine, because if it were Yugi would never in a million years have won! (Or if I caved and he did, he would have won with the help of all his friends, not just the ones willing to play by his rules - which system leaves out Seto and Bakura Ryou. jerk.) (This is more of a mini-rant than a disclaimer ;p )

Acknowledgments: Many many thanks to the lovely shusu, without whose beta-ing this wouldn’t be getting posted. ^^ All remaining mistakes are of course mine.

Spoilers: So if anyone isn’t current with the latest Millennium World manga? Because there are serious differences bleaching into vanilla! between the manga and the anime? No reading! *shoos away from the spoilers*

Incisions
“Yes, I pride my games on my attention to detail.” - Bakura, pretending to be Ryou during the Monster World game.

The day outside was a nest of heat. It was a relief at first to walk out of that burning air and into the cool of the shrine. Now he'd been leaning against the old jackal statue so long it had absorbed his body heat. Every time he shifted for a bit of relief, the heat reflected back at him. At least it didn’t stop his hands from moving. He was starting to see a definite resemblance to Anubis in the little block of wood they’d started out with.

His eyes were getting tired from focusing in the weak light. He could have gotten closer to the tablet and its cursed lights, but he didn't want to do that today. He hadn't seen those lights go out since the Pharaoh's priest lit them. They just burned and burned, throwing out poison that shifted across the hollow tablet and the ruin around it; and down the steps onto the broken pottery and scattered relics, all defiled and discarded when the bastards had come in. But it didn't reach him, sheltered behind Anubis's likeness. Even in the fury of their deliberate wreckage, the priest's men hadn't been able to move the jackals flanking the steps. He remembered their frustration at that. More, he remembered the priest's hesitation before he told them to leave the statues be. Even the soldiers had noticed something strange in the priest’s eyes as he turned his back on them.

He thought the priest knew he would be judged even then. He smirked to himself, pausing a moment to lean his face against the statue and rest his eyes. He wanted to think about the past now. Not the future, no matter how often it came into his thoughts.

He spent enough time thinking about it anyway. Letting the symbols on the cursed tablet sink into his mind. Listening while the voices of the dead hissed in the air around him, giving voice to emotions he didn't know how to express yet. His eyes peeled open to look at the ceiling, watching them weave disturbingly aimless patterns into the air. He frowned as he pulled his eyes back to the carving in his hands, and wondered briefly what he looked like. He would have to cut his hair soon. It was getting to be a bother pushing it out of his face.

But he'd have to find a different knife first. It wouldn't be right to use this one for anything but carving.

His mind was drifting again, not paying attention; but then he knew now that it didn't really matter whether he paid attention or not. When he'd first found the knife, he hadn't known anything. Sifting through the rubble of yet another house, trying to find something that was still edible, he had put his hand on the blade and drawn it back with a hiss. Such a shock went through him that he hardly noticed the thin trail of blood welling on his hand, and he stumbled back to the door. The blade fell from his hand, traces of blood mingling with the dirt as he fled in panic.

The buildings had blurred as he ran, his only concern to put distance between himself and that thing. It had made him feel something he couldn't even identify at first. It wasn’t anything that belonged in the village. It had almost felt nice. All he could think at first was that it was some kind of trap.

It wasn't until he finally collapsed against a wall that his panic gave way to confusion. If it was a trap, why hadn't the ghosts reacted? He had looked to them, he remembered, glaring but not sure how to put the question. By the time he'd got his breath back, he had decided not to even ask. There couldn't be any trap. Any kind of threat to him and the ghosts would have reacted. Hells, if there had been a living soul besides himself in the village, the ghosts would have warned him. The dead cared more for him than the living villagers ever had.

Before he'd quite realized that his mood had shifted, he found himself stalking back towards the house. The ghosts still weren't reacting, either. They just writhed through their former homes as he passed, formless streaks of pain that barely retained any kind of human form. They were constantly in the corners of his eyes. In the air around him. But they didn’t seem to notice that anything was wrong with him, and he was getting more angry with every step.

By the time he reached the house with the damned knife in it, he saw that he was wrong. They had been reacting to him, and he'd gathered an escort without even noticing it had happened. So they did feel something, after all. He wasn't even sure what he was going to do, really.

But it wasn't right that even one of the villagers should have escaped their fate. It hadn't been that long since he had watched as all the pain and the torture they had been put through etch away all traces of individuality in the ghosts. They had knotted into this horrible screaming mass and he had tried to help them. He had tried to -help- them, and couldn't because he didn't even know what he was doing. All he had been able to do was reach out blindly, without words to shape his efforts because he didn't have the knowledge that would tell him what words.

By the time he managed to speak to them so they paid attention instead of swirling mindlessly around him, it had been too late.

And a damned knife lying in the rubble of someone's house held something he hadn't been able to do?!

He still couldn't control it. He didn't understand what he was doing well enough for that, but the ghosts had poured into the building anyway. The very walls seethed with them as he stalked into the place, kicking aside broken chairs until he could drive the knife into the table and demand that the spirit attached to it come out and talk to him. He had demanded and screamed until his throat was raw, and never gotten an answer. The ghosts twisted around him, driven into a storm by his words, but nothing ever replied.

It finally ended when he sank to the floor with his body curled around the knife. It was night, and dark out, and he was too tired to go back to the temple to sleep. Much too tired.

His mind was drawn out of the memories while he tilted his head to examine the little collar he'd put on the carving. It looked like... he brought it up much closer to his eyes to check. There were little glyphs on it, spelling out his name. He laughed softly as he let the knife begin moving again, with only a twinge of guilt for having stopped it. It had taken so long for him to figure out what was going on in the first place...

He hadn't realized until he had woken in the heat of the next day that he might have been wrong. The ghosts were crowded around him like a blanket. There still wasn't a trace of the one he had been yelling at. Except for the blade lying cool and light between his hands. Sighing, he pushed himself up and poked through the house again. He wanted a sheath, so he could carry it without cutting himself on it again.

It wasn't until days later that he remembered he was carrying the thing. He had finally been forced to leave the village to get food, and come back with his belly full for the first time in ages. He was comfortable, if not happy, and he had settled down in the shrine to talk to the ghosts again... and had to move the blade out of the way. Pulling it out of the sheath, he stared for awhile, his eyes gone dull. Why the hell had he kept the thing?

Because he still didn't know what that feeling was that had been sealed into it. He settled himself as comfortably as he could, legs crossed and facing the cursed tablet, and glared at the blade as if that could force it to give up its secret. The air had shifted in around him, the ghosts passing through and within the shrine, and he was probably half asleep when he realized he was seeing the ghosts reflected in the metal. The ghosts that he hadn't seen reflected anywhere else. That was just one of a dozen things he didn't understand. Like the way the ghosts always seemed to be hungry, which at first he had thought was a lack of funerary offerings - but they hadn't wanted anything he brought home with him.

He looked into the blade and watched the ghosts' reflections, and slowly began to understand. It seeped into his mind as if it were rising from the blade and through his eyes. Some time in those few desperate days when the ghosts were losing themselves, one of them had taken a different option. Maybe more than one, for all he knew. He'd been searching for food, not relics. But this knife had been somebody's, and now it was somebody, as much of that person as remained. That strange feeling he hadn't been able to place, he could feel it growing now that he was paying attention. It wanted something...

He turned it over in his hands, trying to figure it out. What did it want? It felt right that it was moving in his hands, but... his eyes narrowed in annoyance. He needed to look at it differently. What were knives for?

Killing things? Not the right answer.

But cutting, that was close. Cloth, no...

He didn't realize he had gotten to his feet until he crouched, in front of the pile of broken wood he had gathered for fire when he wanted it. He shook his head and reached into the pile - and stared when his hand moved without his willing it, picking out a piece and setting to work with the knife. Before he was quite aware of what he had done, he was holding the smallest replica of an ankh. Like one of the cursed things the priest had taken away with him. Within a few hours, he had a whole set of little Items, as if the ghost inside the knife were making him toys.

At which point his hands had stopped moving and he had collapsed into laughter that was more than a little hysterical. He used to want to learn to do this, to make things. But he would never have chosen to learn this way.

He wanted his father to teach him. He had kept at him. Begging and pleading and making himself as useful as he possibly could be until father had finally given in. He remembered mother teasing him that his father wasn't very good at this, so he shouldn't expect too much. But she had the happiest smile on her face when she watched them, so he didn't care if they were both awful at it. He knew she was pleased that father spent more time at home to teach him. So he was making his mother happy and his father proud, and he would make himself good at this if it took forever.

Of course, forever turned out to be something quite different than he'd imagined. But as time passed and he used the knife, he found he was getting better even when he used another. He thought eventually he wouldn't need the knife. But he was still going to use it. Not to would feel like turning his back on the ghost in the knife. He wasn't ever going to abandon the ghosts.

He turned his head to look up at Anubis's eyes to check them. After all, he wanted to make sure all the details were correct.

Personal context: So I asked myself, how did Akhenaden's mummy end up in Ryou's father's museum? Haa, I bet Bakura told him where to find it.

To which Ryou responded with an explosion to the effect that 'No, that's his daddy and Bakura is never ever to talk to him! Ever.' Insert hissing and seething and a general Mine! reaction like I'd only seen out of Bakura previously.

Bakura's feelings are hurt. Not that he will admit this. He turns into a complete bastard instead, and the yelling and the fighting only ends when they both aggree to try and understand each other a little better. Apparently it never occurred to Bakura that he might be considered a threat to Ryou's family. What there is of it.

This fic is Bakura's half of making-up. I haven't even started on Ryou's. Oi.