In gratitude for donations and commissions, here is one of many pieces of content I’m offering as emotional sacrifice to my benefactors.
Malik Ishtar drifting a bit post-canon and trying to figure out Ryou Bakura.
Most common descriptors from others who have seen it in the rabbit holes I dig myself on Discord to share it with 2.5 people are ‘sweet, sad, strange, soft’. Primarily talking, no warnings or such.
This is very much raw snippets with pieces held back as I’m actively working on this currently and want to post the whole thing properly. It’s, uh, 17K in the document right now? So this is a preview I offer on the altar of angstshipping and not getting kicked out of my apartment. Between snips is filled in with […].
It’s not the full thing, @sturionic, and you’ve seen what’s here, I’m sure, but you did tell me to tag you once!
I hope it’s enough to enjoy and get a feel for what’s happening!
Malik makes his way as casually as possible out to the edge of the friend group where Bakura - the real one, the only one who was supposed to be there - is watching with a small, but real, smile.
“Can I talk to you?” Malik touches his arm slightly, just to try to indicate this conversation should be even further from the others.
“Me?” Bakura blinks, confused.
“Yeah. The real you.”
“Ah, yes.” The smile becomes a bit awkward and he rubs his arm where Malik had just brushed it. A sick feeling flashes through him as he realizes the spot is also where Bakura had been slashed in the midst of Malik’s deals with the Bakura from the Millennium Ring. He tries not to wince too much and presses on.
“I don’t want to bother you. Just a few minutes.”
Bakura shakes his head, awkward seemingly gone. “It’s okay. I don’t mind.”
Malik suggests a seat along the wall. No way for someone to sneak up to interrupt, still visible, hopefully feels safe.
Even with just this little, Bakura is already different. He moves differently, smiles differently. His voice is technically the same, just like his features, his hands, and the color of his hair, yet it’s all completely someone else.
“I’ve done a lot I can’t undo,” Malik says when they’re comfortably seated out of easy earshot. “But I at least want to apologize to people who give me the chance to. Especially to you. About everything, not just your arm.”
“It wasn’t you that did that, was it?”
“No, it wasn’t even my idea, but - I was with him, I gave him the motivation, I guess. I thought I could use him for what I thought I wanted. I went along with it.”
“Mmm.” He nods. “I see.”
“Didn’t you know?”
“Oh, I could guess,” Bakura says. “I even assumed. It’s happened before, see?” He holds out his left hand, unprompted, and shows off a healed but still present scar in his palm and one between two bones on the other side. “But I didn’t know. He kept me in the dark a lot. And when he didn’t, I think my subconscious did. There are a lot of blank spaces in my memory, so there are things I’m just used to not being sure of.” He smiles. It’s kind, and polite, and pretty, and feels just as completely wrong as it does appropriate.
“I’m sorry,” Malik says. “About that, about you getting hurt, about using the Rod to manipulate you, your friends… all of it.”
“I understand.” Not an 'okay’ or anything about forgiveness or forgetting, but understanding.
“I hope we can be okay?”
Bakura shrugs and retains his sweet polite smile. “Sure.”
The response is so casual it throws Malik a little off balance. Bakura looks and sounds like Malik cut him off in traffic at worst.
Admittedly, many of his apologies to Yuugi’s friends have been similar. Yuugi himself had needed nothing beyond their last meeting when Malik completed his family’s purpose. Malik had said he hoped they could be friends while trying to hold onto some sense of dignity and that had evidently been enough for Yuugi.
Yuugi’s group hadn’t brought the blonde woman, Mai, with them. Malik is still considering sending Yuugi back with an apology for her that includes a message that he is having nightmares about her, too. There are many people he hurt who want him to suffer as payment. Mai might be one of them.
Bakura, though, seemingly isn’t.
“How has it been for you since… everything?” This might be invasive or taking more time and consideration than he’s owed, but if the quiet Bakura wearing scars he didn’t earn was willing to talk, Malik wanted to hear what he said.
“Don’t worry,” Bakura says. “I’m not going to hurt anyone.”
“That’s not - I didn’t mean that. I just wanted to know how you felt.”
Bakura pauses and the smile shifts. Maybe it’s more genuine, or maybe it’s a specially constructed layer for just this question.
“No one’s really asked me that.”
“Really?”
“I think they might be a little afraid to mention it.” He looks almost like he’s on the verge of laughing about it. “It’s okay. I don’t blame them. It’s nice to still have friends.”
“… and how you feel? What about that?”
He looks away from the others and properly at Malik for the first time since sitting down with him. “I don’t know. I think I have feelings that aren’t supposed to exist at the same time.”
Bakura does understand.
“I think I have the same thing.”
“I thought you might.”
“Is it always like this? You away from everyone?” Malik wouldn’t have to worry about this himself if he simply went home, stayed close to his siblings, replaced everyone he’d ever known with someone new and just avoided a few countries all together. But the connection right here, with the only other people who’d had something like his own experience? It scared him to lose it while it was still acceptable to touch.
“Not always.”
“Are you lonely?”
Bakura laughs, though it is quiet and soft. “Not always.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You understand it too, don’t you?” He looked at Malik wearing a tired resigned smile. “You wonder about the space between being told you’re someone’s friend and whether they actually trust you. It’s why you’re talking to me, isn’t it?“
The longer he sits with the real Bakura, the more what he thought he’d find before meeting him gets hazy, but whatever that was, Malik is pretty sure this wasn’t it.
“It’s not - I just wanted to apologize,” Malik says, though he doesn’t even sound convincing to himself.
“We’re the ones sitting out here, though.” Bakura tilts his head toward the rest of the group, engrossed in their game.
“They’ve all known each other a long time. They’re close.” It’s an excuse. On several levels.
Bakura looks off at the group, almost through them. “I read somewhere once that you can’t get closer to someone than you do by killing them.”
More Malik wasn’t ready for.
“…I think I once employed a guy who said the same thing.”
“It’s okay. I told you; I don’t want to hurt anyone.”
“I don’t think I thought you wanted to. I was just surprised.”
“I just meant maybe being close and being friends is different sometimes. Or maybe being close comes in strange shapes. Something like that.”
Malik has spent less than an hour talking to Bakura, but already a link he hadn’t totally expected tugs at things inside him he hadn’t planned on being reachable.
“Strange shapes sounds right.”
[…]
“What do you do now?” Bakura asks. “Now that you can just have a life if you want it?”
‘If you want it’ rings strangely in Malik’s head.
“Mostly, we talk to a lot of researchers. Rishid and Isis too. After everything, I thought – well, I wasn’t eager to tell people or get weighed down with officials and government, but it looked like the way to do the most good with…” He tries to motion over his shoulder to indicate his back as a stand in for everything.
“What are they researching?”
“What aren’t they? Us existing just detonated a giant bomb in the entire Egyptology field. I guess people out here have been trying to figure out how to pronounce the language we all learned as babies for a few hundred years, so we’ve been seeing a lot of linguists. But archaeologists want to talk to us, psychologists, general historians, people yelling things about aliens… I don’t understand some of it, to be honest.”
He wouldn’t normally have admitted that last part, but Bakura feels like someone he can trust with it.
“I haven’t heard about any of this.” It’s not a challenge, more an expression of wonder.
“They aren’t releasing most of the information to public channels, yet. It’s too big, too drastic. They want to make sure we’re real first.”
“Did they find you after the tournament?”
Malik twitches at just the thought of the experience. “Yeah. Several people did. I probably owe being able to live normally to being scientifically significant. Otherwise, I don’t know, I’d be …” He shakes his head. “Locked up? Being hunted for sport somewhere? I don’t know. In the end, it’s probably because of my sister or Kaiba that I’m not constantly in danger of being arrested.”
“Are people afraid?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” He pauses, considers everything that happened as it plays out in flashes in his head. “Probably.”
“Hmm.”
Bakura stays quiet but for the small thoughtful sound.
“Are you afraid of me?” Malik asks.
Bakura laughs. It’s cute and soft and almost insulting. “No. But don’t you think my answer would be the same either way?”
“I was kind of hoping we were being honest, given the circumstances.”
“I am.” He smiles serenely, like he’s meditating or enjoying a breeze. “You’ll just have to trust me when I say that.”
“I can do that.”
“Good.” Bakura looks at him as though they’ve finalized a contract. “I’m not afraid of you. And I’m glad you’re just a scientific curiosity, and not in prison.”
He had to laugh, even at his own weird traumatic situation. Bakura laughed with him, proving either a true lack of fear or a surprisingly iron resolve. Either one made him fascinating.
[…]
“Would it be okay if we kept talking after this?” Malik takes his phone (admittedly still one he didn’t obtain through the cleanest of channels) out of his pocket.
“Oh, yes! Here!” Bakura enthusiastically takes the phone and immediately begins entering information. “I’ll give you my number.” He smiles so much he nearly sparkles as he saves the number and hits the call button, which sets off a soft tone near his hip. “Now I have yours, too.”
It is just the number to a definitely, totally, in no way illegally obtained cell phone, but the eagerness Bakura shows to have it is more comforting than any words Malik has heard from anyone else in a long time.
[…]
“Well? What did you think?”
“Um, I had my eyes closed the whole time,” Bakura admits.
“Oh, come on.”
“Sorry! Maybe I’ll do better next time.”
“‘Next time’?” He sounds hopeful and he’s not sure he meant to. When would there realistically be a next time? The next time Bakura casually takes a quick vacation halfway across the world to say goodbye to a supernatural member of his friend group?
“Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean to assume anything!”
“No, no, it’s okay! You can come with me anytime!”
“Wow, thank you! I’d love to!”
This feels unreal and kind of like being adrift. Are they both just pretending they live across the plaza from each other and can visit whenever they want?
“What are you all doing tomorrow?”
“Oh, the museum! Aren’t you coming with us?”
“No, I wasn’t invited. I don’t want -”
“Then I’m inviting you!”
“I - Okay?”
“I’ll find out when we’re leaving and let you know.” His cheerfulness waned somewhat. “Sorry. Unless you don’t want to go; I’m sure you’ve seen it all more than enough.”
“No, no, I really want to! I might have a different perspective on them now.” He might. Bakura may be providing that perspective. Malik may mostly be interested in spending more time talking, whether it takes place in a cesspool of tourists on a backdrop of his childhood or not.
“Then I’m looking forward to having you with us again. Sorry I kept you so late.”
“You really didn’t. It was me too.” He grabs his helmet to try to force himself to not stay even later. “Do you know you apologize a lot?”
“I do, don’t I?” Bakura smiles, his eyes almost squeezing shut. This is either sincerely a little self mockery or a dodge of some kind, but Bakura’s arsenal of smiles is so large that one night has not been enough for Malik to learn them all.
The only right response seems to be laughing, an impulse Bakura seems to share.
Malik gets on his bike with a lingering feeling that he’s been snagged on something.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, then?”
“Yes!”
Bakura smiles. It looks sweet, happy, and genuine. Or maybe Malik just hopes it does.
[… …]
“You didn’t have to come with us.”
“What?” Malik startles when he hears Bakura’s voice so close.
“You just look uncomfortable,” Bakura says.
Malik shakes his head and refocuses on reality. “I’m okay.”
“Good. I’m glad you came.” This isn’t the same smile Bakura used on Jonouchi. “Do you want to go to the next room with me?”
Truthfully, he doesn’t particularly want to go into any of the rooms, he just wants to figure out more of Bakura, but the answer is still the same.
“Sure.”
The next room rounds a bit of a corner and a colossal broken head of a pharaoh sits against a center column to welcome them to the next display. Bakura looks as closely as he can at the polished stone, as though he’s being pulled in.
“How do you feel?”
At first, Malik thinks he’s asking the stone, but then there’s a pause and Bakura turns to him, head tilted. “Oh,” Malik says, “you mean me.”
“Of course you.”
“I don’t know, you felt kind of like the type to talk to statues.”
“Were you just going to stand there and let me?”
“What would I have said? We’ve both seen weirder things, right?”
Bakura smiles brightly and nearly laughs. “True.”
The smile is different even from just in the other room. He’s still joking and still cute, just like he was with Jounouchi, but joking about being a guy who talks to rocks seems to make Bakura’s smile more sincere than the manufacture of mummies.
“So?” Bakura prompts.
“Oh, yeah. How I feel.”
“Unless you want to wait for him to answer.” Bakura points at the giant stone face.
“I feel… “
Veneration of a world he was raised to serve covers every surface around him. There’s not a single room that isn’t about it. If he thinks about how much there is and how it’s wrapped around him in every direction, whatever emotion the thoughts conjure tries to compress his lungs. He might as well be buried in it.
He lets out a long breath to make sure he’s still able to.
“I feel a little overwhelmed, I think.”
