title: your bones i let go and the dream did subside
pairings: past thiefshipping, angstshipping
other: was written for arostine's birthday, beta'd by jess. title from "Gigantomachy" by Cake Bake Betty. i don't own yugioh

Bakura fucks him the same way he approaches everything; raw and unbridled with just that much of a calculating edge in his every move, with carefully performed laughter that rides on the edge of a particular madness far too familiar to him. It makes him interested, enough that he wants to stay.

That's not how things work. That's not how its meant to work. Villains don't fall in love, and they certainly don't get a happy ever after. (But what is a villain?)

Afterwards, they lay there in bed, not quite touching, but not quite ready to leave, lazing in the hazy satedness of postcoital activity.

"This changes nothing," Malik says. "You won't get the Millennium Rod until after the Pharaoh is defeated."

Bakura laughs.

"Darling," he purrs, words of mockery. "I love it when you talk dirty to me."

Malik kicks him out of bed, disturbed at the near domesticity of the encounter.

Even when everything is 'done and dusted', when Battle City is over and Yuugi says "It's okay, it's done," Malik follows after Bakura. There are few things that will ever be fully okay, that will ever be 'done', as if placing a lid on the traumas of a life were as simple as that. This is but one more event in a life of quotidian moments, but this, Bakura, bears watching. Perhaps it would be better to leave be. Never tickle a sleeping dragon, let Pandora's box stay closed. But he's a moth drawn to the flame, drunk on the performance and the violence, or the performative violence, and why not add another one of those disgustingly apt clichés that seem to increasingly apply to his life.

Malik never showers with him.

When Bakura asks why, Malik gives him a silent look and turns away.

Let Bakura believe what he will, let him keep his misconceptions about Malik's imaginary misgivings with intimacy.

'Do you love him?' Ryou asks, years later after the fact when Malik's sitting on the edge of the bed, listening to the sound of the neighbour a flat down practising music on the piano as it blurs and merges into the crackling of the fake wood fire. Likely, Ryou thinks its safe enough to cross a line that they've always tiptoed around. As if it were ever safe around Malik and his maybe broken psyche (because the thing is, his Other is not simply Other, but something that is part of his own fragmented consciousness, a name which he keeps even now, to deny his own culpability, even if he has long since recognised it - culpability - in other ways).

Malik snorts. As if whatever he had had with him, Bakura, could be reduced to mere trivialities of 'love'.

Besides. Love is for the living. Neither he nor Bakura count, Bakura, now truly dead, and him, a living ghost that haunts the edges of reality, whose body feels near translucent under the glare of day, where the ordinary people go about their ordinary lives. He stays only to infringe on the lives of others, leeching their happiness for the bitter hole where his own should have lived.

Ryou looks at him expectantly, jagged edges under a carefully cotton soft smile, and he wonders how much of that is Ryou, and how much of it is Bakura. How much have they both been affected by the vestiges of bitterness that lingered after even three thousand years? How much has Ryou internalised, after having lived there. He can see it now, whispers of hate seeping into an already love neglected consciousness, sinking into the very marrow of his bones.

Most days, he thinks they're not so different. Bakura would have set the world afire to watch it burn. Malik's not sure if he prefers to make sparks, set fires. Perhaps that is Bakura's last gift to him, a twisted delight in the cynicism that has wormed it's way into not his heart, not the organ in his chest, beating to keep his body's blood circulating, oxygen used in cellular respiration, energy for the cells, but into his brain, into the very core of his being, into his soul.

He hasn't quite gotten to putting out flames, but perhaps he will learn.

because-

There's a gentle cold touch on his face, and Ryou is shaking his head.

"Of course you loved him," he says, quiet and amused and there's the bitterness too, the way Bakura's name is a negative space around Ryou, unmentionable but known, a mythicality attached to an identifier that was his, was stolen from him, shared with him. But there's a patient soul there, someone who'll light up the world if he choses to, and Malik could learn from that. Could learn from him.

"Come to bed," Ryou says, patting the space beside him. They lie in bed, and let the hours pass, the sound of the piano and the cackle of the fire, and maybe this isn't happy ever after, but its something.