On request by Ashfia1.5Bleach- thank you. God, it's been so long since I've written anything for Yu-Gi-Oh!

Marik x OC

Dust

She had met him hitchhiking.

Thumb out into the road as she saw the movement of dust on the distance that indicated a vehicle. Roads in Egypt were always dusty, often lonely, and the majority of people did not stop for strangers, so she was not optimistic. She had been out here for three days now, on this long road, a miniature one man tent on her back and the same set of clothes sticking to her skin. There was no way to ever win in the desert, in the oppressive heat in the day and the inescapable cold in the night.

It was a bike, she realised as it got closer, rather than a car. She supposed it would do, if it actually bothered to stop, although the backpack would make it awkward.

It was a monstrosity of a thing, gleaming chrome shining through the film of dust. It seemed to take forever for it to get anywhere near her, and she stood back from the narrow road, knowing from experience that when- not if- the vehicle did not stop, it would bathe her with another, thicker, layer of dust and sand and grime. With three days of it already plastered to her skin, she was not eager to gain herself another.

But to her surprise, the bike slowed to a stop, the driver not bothering to put the kick stand down, just put his feet firmly on the ground and flicked the visor of his helmet up to look at her.

"Need a ride?"

She shouldered her bag a little more squarely, and called right back.

"I'd appreciate it."

He turned to feel for a spare helmet from the hold at the back of the bike, the twist of his torso emphasised by the cut-off shirt he was wearing underneath his leathers. She thought it looked odd, that expanse of ridged, tanned flesh against the black, solid jacket. She supposed though, if you were travelling by bike in the desert, you'd be stupid not to protect your skin from the sand and sun.

He threw the helmet over to her, and she caught it awkwardly with both hands.

"I'm not due to stop for a few hours."

She nodded as she hopped onto the bike, straining a little to get her leg high enough without unbalancing with the weight of the bag on her back. He had already put his visor back down, and she had not been able to see any detail of his face. His hair was blonde though, and long enough to stick out of the back of his helmet.

"Thanks."

He nodded, and gunned the engine again.

He drove fast, and he drove hard. The ride did not vary much on its straight course, but she was pretty sure that had there been any sharp corners, he wouldn't have slowed to take them easily. The bike vibrated between her legs, and she kept her back stiff, unwilling to loop her arms around this stranger to support herself. She knew her mother wouldn't approve, if she knew- would say that the guy was obviously a pervert, or a murderer, but she figured that if he wanted to cause her harm, he would do it regardless of whether he gave her a lift. There was not exactly many people around to stop him. At least this way she got a few miles taken off her journey.

There was not much scenery so to speak of, just the rolling dunes of the desert and the occasional clouds of dust thrown up into the air in the far distance, as if there were some mirror motorbike creating its own storm of turbulent movement.

She did not try to talk to him- she knew that there were some people who picked up hitchhikers for conversation, and those who did not, and those that did were the ones who started it. Besides that, the whine of the engine was loud enough to make conversation awkward. So it took until they pulled over, just shy of three o'clock in the afternoon, that she could talk to him at all.

"Shit, my legs hurt!"

She jumped off the bike, throwing her bag down, rubbing the inside of her thighs as she did so.

He pulled his helmet off, his own dismount far more graceful than her own, and she suddenly felt very stupid, bent over at almost ninety degrees at the waist. There was something a little bit intimidating about him- he was handsome in an unconventional way, with chiselled cheekbones and a jutting, strong jaw. His eyes were a washed out lavender, and his hair looked almost bleached, unreal against the tan of his skin.

He shrugged out of his leather jacket as she pulled off her ill-fitting helmet, ruffling her hair. It was shorter than his, and she still hadn't quite got used to it. In a fit of pique before she had gone away she had taken great handfuls of her hair- a plain brown, not very interesting but long and thick and soft- and had cut it off. Now it lay in a shaggy, uneven mess, long on her forehead, just below her ears and down to the base of her neck. A little ugly, but easy to deal with in the heat.

She grinned at him, and he half-smiled in return.

"Do you often pick up wayward travellers?"

He shrugged.

"Just doing a good deed."

She tilted her head to one side, smiling.

"Not many people care too much for doing those, you know."

He shrugged again, a strangely masculine hunch of the shoulders that softened the taut line of muscle in his neck as he relaxed.

"I guess I've got a lot of sins to make up for."

It was spoken in a tone of voice that offered no ambiguities, that gave rise to no further questions. She stretched and fell silent, watching him open the hatch on the back of his bike to root inside. He pulled out a bottle of water, and threw it to her. She caught this a little more gracefully, and dropped to the ground, sitting cross-legged on the sand. It itched, but there was already far too much against her skin. She was sure that whenever she got a chance to change, her skin would be rubbed red raw.

He sat too, with his own bottle, and nodded at the one in her hands.

"Drink it. I don't want you fainting on me."

It was warm but clean, and tasted startlingly refreshing. All of her own water had started to take on a stale taste, not undrinkable but definitely unpalatable.

"I've got my own, you know."

He grinned again, properly this time, at the fact that she didn't stop drinking his anyway.

"You'll be running low by now. How long have you been out here?"

"Three days."

He whistled.

"That's a long time to be stuck out here."

He stared out across the horizon, his eyes strangely blank.

"The desert… it has a way of distorting things, you know?"

She nodded, but she didn't really understand. He stared out for a moment longer, before coming to, as if he had been in a trance. The blank look left his eyes, and he smiled again that strange half-grin, one half of his mouth quirking upwards and the other half pursed together.

"D'you not think it's dangerous, hitchhiking your way around the desert like this?"

"Maybe, I guess. I've done it before though, and what's the worst that could happen? No worse than anything that could happen in a busy city. Hell, you read all the time about people getting killed on the Underground, right?"

He blinked.

"The… Underground?"

"Yeah, like a subway?"

His eyes remained blank.

"What?"

"It's an underground train. You've seriously never heard of one?"

He shrugged, again, a gesture that she was already beginning to associate with him.

"I spent a lot of time… isolated from the modern world."

She was unsure of how to reply to this, having spent most of her life in the modern splendour of a northern English city, where everything was accessible and everything was taken for granted. And, not to mention, unbelievably boring.

"Ah… fair enough then."

He was staring out again, and the look in her eye worried her a little. She'd met a lot worse though, seen a fair few people over the last few months who had looked a lot stranger, and the majority of them had turned out to be as safe as her own parents. The most dangerous people, she had come to notice, were the most normal looking.

He stood, and stretched upwards, and there was an audible pop of bone as his elbows clicked into place.

"How'd you get out here, anyway?"

"I'm on a gap year, but I got separated from my friends in Cairo. We were meant to rendezvous in Alexandria if anything went wrong, and I'm running low on cash, and had a while to get there, so I thought I'd hike."

"That was a stupid decision."

She glanced over at him, surprised but not offended.

"Hey!"

He shrugged, smiling slightly, and fell back to sitting on the floor.

"It's true."

There was a pause, and he rolled his shoulders.

"Well, I'm not going to Alexandria, not even close. And I'm not even stopping at a town. But I suppose we can put you up for the night."

"We?"

"My brother and sister and I. We don't live here anymore but we… we used to. We still come back here, sometimes, to check up on things. I'm meeting them there this evening."

She frowned, unsure, and he noticed.

"Look, we're not going to chop you up, or anything like that, but we've got a lot of space and you look like you could do with a decent bath and sleep. It's safer in there with us than it is off the side of the road in a tent, either way."

She shrugged, she nodded.

"Well, I guess…"

"Good. Now come on, I want to get there before it gets dark."

He stood with the fluid grace of a cat, and threw his leg over the bike, knocking back the kick stand and balancing it underneath him. He pulled his helmet back on, and revved the engine. They drove again, for hours, and the rumbling of her stomach reminded her that she had not eaten since early than morning, very early, as the sun was rising and she had packed up her miniscule tent. The sky, when she woke, had been a pale, misty blue, but during the day had developed into the startlingly deep, vibrant blue that only a truly clear, cloudless day can provide.

Now, though, it had faded into lilac, with a blaze of pale gold and orange on the horizon that hinted at the sunset whose detail was obscured by wind-blown sand. She had been watching those sunsets for the last few nights, watching them rear from the horizon into fearsomely intense colours. Beautiful, but it meant that the night was coming, and the night was cold.

She leant over his shoulder as far as she could, and yelled over the wind.

"Hey, are we anywhere close?"

He nodded, his silence as impenetrable as before. It would have been more dramatic had he skidded to the side of the road just as he spoke, but it took another half an hour of driving, the wind beginning to creep cold tendrils across her skin and the sky darkening rapidly.

Then made her jump as he hit the horn attached to his handlebars, and slowed to a stop.

"Marik!"

A woman had appeared from somewhere, but she stopped short when she saw the girl on the back of his bike. Her- she presumed this to be the sister- sudden appearance had shaken her. It looked almost like she had risen from the earth, and there was certainly no house anywhere in sight. What was going on?

She got off the bike as he did, taking her bag off her back but not putting his down, hugging it to her chest.

Marik, she realised, must be her benevolent saviour- and it was only then that it occurred to her that she had not known his name.

He hugged his sister to him, and turned back to her.

"Hey, this is…"

He blinked, the same thought obviously going through his head.

"I'm Anna."

She smiled, and the sister took her offered hand, obviously unsure as to who this girl with the tenuous connection with her brother was.

"I picked her up on the road. She's hitchhiking, and I thought she could do with a place to sleep for the night."

The woman nodded, and turned warm blue eyes to the newcomer. Anna felt a little uncomfortable- she was definitely intruding on something. She saw another man appearing, but this time she caught sight of him as he emerged, literally, from her ground. Her eyes widened, and the woman laughed, still holding onto her hand, now with both of hers.

"I'm Ishizu Ishtar, and you've already met my younger brother, Marik. That over there is our eldest brother, Odion. We're more than willing to welcome you into our home, but you may find it a little… unconventional."

Marik had pushed his bike off the road, and down into the place where the two eldest family members had appeared from.

She took Anna's arm in the crook of her own, and led after them.

"I'm afraid you've become privy to my brother's guilty conscience- he spends a lot of his time these days trying to help people, although a lot of the time he doesn't come across quite as nice as he is trying to be. Now come, come. There is a lot of space."

She was listening to this, but she was paying more attention to her surroundings. She was being taken down steep, stone steps that stretched downwards into the dark, and as they got down far enough, Ishizu turned to slide a covering over the gap, so they would not be uncovered.

"I suppose it is hard to believe, but we lived down here, as children, with our family. This is one of several passages that lead to the main body of rooms- they were built a long time ago, and they used to lead to oasis', or camel-trails. This particular trail was made into a road a few years ago, much to our gratification. It makes things much easier, really."

They passed the bike, taking up most of the narrow corridor, but the other two had already disappeared.

The corridor was dark, but intermittently lit with electric lights, fastened to the walls and linked together with tacked up wires. It should have been eerie, scary, but the light was warm, and it looked strangely cosy, if that word could be applied to bare stone walls and the echo of quiet footfalls.

"We don't live here, anymore- we all work in Cairo, but we come back here every few months, to… remember, I suppose. There are things we are still responsible for, down here."

The air was warm, and softly musty. She could see bright light at the end of the corridor, and the smell was changing, almost floral. The corridor opened into a huge room, and she let a gasp slip from her mouth. A cavernous, pillared room, with corridors and rooms leading off it, all in the sandstone that everything here was made of. Carvings in the walls, floor to roof, the strange and unreadable- to her- characters of the hieroglyphics. Four huge urns of rose-coloured stone, filled almost to bursting with lilies. The whole room was lit with perhaps hundreds of lights, all roughly wired to places where it would not obscure the ancient writings, making the room brilliantly bright.

"It was always dark, when we were young."

She turned to smile at Ishizu, who squeezed her arm, and led her to a large table.

Marik was already sat there with his brother, rubbing at his face with his hands but smiling the genuine smile she had seen when he laughed, the one that she liked. She tried not to start at the sight of Odion's face, with its strange markings that blighted that which would otherwise be remarkably handsome.

Ishizu reached a hand to touch Odion's cheek, as if reading Anna's mind. For just a moment, he pressed his face against her palm, before turning to look at the visitor. The tenderness between them was startling, and she smiled awkwardly. He nodded at her, just once, but there was acceptance and welcome in his unsmiling face- it was not unkind.

"Perhaps our visitor would like a bath, Ishizu? She looked like she has a lifetime's worth of sand on her."

"You're right, of course."

Ishizu turned to her, smiling, and look the bag from her unresisting hands.

"Please, Anna, come with me. I'll show you to a room."

Anna nodded once more at the strange, silent family, and followed the sister to another room. Everything was clean, swept free of the sand that got everywhere, and brightly lit.

"Odion wired this whole place up, with Marik's help, when our father died and we settled the… events that followed. It's almost calming, now, to be down here."

She swung a door open, and took Anna inside. The room was Spartan but lovely, with swept floors of the same slabs of stone, worn smooth with what must have been hundreds, maybe thousands, of years worth of feet. The walls were whitewashed, and the bed was made of dark wood, with a thin mattress.

"There is a bathroom, the next door along. I will find you some sheets, whilst you are busy."

Anna stripped in the privacy of the bright light and cool flags of the bathroom. The bath was huge and made of some kind of polished rock, smooth and black. The plug opened onto a grate on the floor, spilling out into the ground, but the tap was free-standing, and ostentatiously new against the rest of the room.

She poured hot water into the bath and scooped water over herself, until most of the sand was off her. She put the plug in when she was clean enough, letting it fill with hot water around her. This whole place was strange, but for whatever reason, she could not feel on edge about it. Perhaps it was the unassuming kindness of them, their gentleness for each other, the welcome she had received. She scrubbed the sand out of her hair and leant back in the hot water, and allowed herself to think about them all.

Odion, whose face was made of hard lines and scar tissue but whose eyes were gentle, who leant into the touch of his sister's hand like it was a lifeline. Ishizu, whose voice was so warm but held a trace of sadness to it, when she spoke of his place, as if she could not escape certain memories. Her eyes were so wonderfully blue, too- the burning blue of the sky. You did not get skies like that back in England, where everything was grey, and dull.

And then Marik, the one who had dragged her into all of this.

With his cut-off shirt and his strange smiles and his penchant for helping people, to make up for some sin he had apparently committed- although she struggled, she really did, to think of any sin that could fit this perfectly dysfunctional group of people. With his lovely skin and his motorbike, and the way he offered to help her, out of nowhere, for no reason.

She liked that, that unconditional help.

It was out of place and unconventional, in this modern world.

The water was chilling rapidly, the stone not made to conserve heat, and there was a layer of grit at the bottom now. She washed her hair, scrubbed herself, and felt the film of the desert leave her at last. She reached for her own bag of toiletries, taking out her razor and rubbing up a lather on her legs. In books and in films, the heroine never had to think about performing such banal tasks, but real life continued to disappoint her. Even when on romantic, solitary journeys of discovery, stubble still grew, her hair still got greasy, and she still missed the taste of the cigarettes that she had given up before she left.

Adventures were fun, but you could never really leave real life behind.

The towels were coarse and large, and she wrapped one around herself self-consciously as she darted into the hall, her clothes and bag clutched against her chest. Her bed had been made contentiously, with cream linen sheets and a thick wool blanket for the night cold, and clothes had been lain out for her. She blinked at them, but slid them over her skin anyway- the majority of her clothes were unclean, or covered in the sand that had got into her bag.

She rubbed her hair with the towel, glad for the first time that she had decided to hack it off.

She padded back into the main room in the knee-length linen dress left for her and the slip-on soft shoes, feeling a little self-conscious. Ishizu had been in a neat business suit, as had Odion, but when she returned the three were sat around the table, and Ishizu was in similar garb, with Odion still in his suit trousers but barefoot, with his tie gone and his shirt unbuttoned.

She smiled in the doorway, awkward, and Ishizu stood to her feet with the same sort of grace that his brother had demonstrated earlier.

"Oh, you look quite like one of us. I hope you did not mind me leaving some of my clothes out for you- I was presumptuous. Travelling in the desert does nuisance to your belongings, I know. Leave your clothes out tonight, and I will wash them all with ours."

"Oh… yeah, yes. Thank you, if you're sure it is no effort."

She was pulled over to the table, where she sat between the two men, opposite Ishizu. Marik offered her his closed half-smile, and she returned it, suddenly shy.

"So, Anna. Marik tells us you are heading to Alexandria."

She nodded, her hands folded in her lap.

"Well, Odion and I are going there ourselves, but not until the end of the week. I can understand your need to press on, but we would be more than happy to have you to stay for the next two nights, and then you can drive down with us, if that is what you wish."

She blinked, she mumbled. The corners of Odion's mouth turned up, just a little bit. His voice was gravely, warm.

"We understand your hesitation, but it is better than walking."

Anna sighed.

"You're all so hospitable, so very kind. Why?"

Marik tapped the table with his fingertips.

"We never had many visitors, as children. It's nice to… to see some new faces here."

"Ah."

Ishizu stood, and moved to a far off corner, where a primitive and free-standing gas stove had been set up. There was food, Anna realised- hot, wholesome food, when she had been living on cereal bars and lukewarm water for days. That cinched the deal- hot water, hot food.

"I'd love to stay, if you are sure that it will put you to no inconvenience."

Marik turned to her, and flashed her that particular smile.

"It would be our pleasure."

To her surprise, she felt butterflies dance in her stomach.

She had slept well and long. The lights had slammed off automatically at twelve, but she had been drifting off already, full and warm underneath the blanket. The conversation had been quiet, slightly strained at times but not terribly like the many times she had had to meet people she had never seen before.

She woke the next morning to silence, as was, it seemed, the traditional sound in these caverns. The strangeness of it had not really struck her before just now, but why, she had to wonder, did these three beautiful people all spend so long under the sand? How did they grow up in this darkness? She shivered, and pulled the blanket up around her neck, noticing the new folded towel on the chair by the door, and the dress on top of it. A second bath, fresh linen, and she found herself able to make her way to the main room again. She began to doubt, a little, her decision to stay, until she saw Odion, leaning against a pillar, staring into space.

He turned to her with a nod.

"Come. Marik and Ishizu wish to show you the rest of these labyrinthine walls. I will help you find them."

She followed him silently, for he made no motion to converse, and the place was daunting. Corridors spewed off in various directions, but Odion walked with an assured step, knowing exactly where he was going. Soon they were walking over a crust of sand, where there were much fewer lights.

They emerged in a hall not dissimilar to the well lit main one, but with a slatted roof, that let in some light. Sand had built up in the corners, and Marik and Ishizu were in the middle, sweeping it up. Odion handed her a brush, one of the two propped up against the wall, and silently she helped them.

That was how she spent her first day there- sweeping up sand.

Hours passed, and they moved from room to room, sweeping it into piles. Every few hours, Odion would scoop up their piles into buckets, and would disappear, presumably to deposit them outside. Soon the sun slanting through dimmed, and the room darkened, and Ishizu put down her brush with a decisive click.

"Enough. Odion, will you come with me? I need your help to prepare for this evening."

He nodded, and lay down his brush with hers. She smiled over at the two of them.

"Marik, Anna? Can you put away the last of the sand?"

She nodded at their retreating back, and reached for the bucket. They filled four of them, and they took two in each hand. She assumed that they would be going outside- and even after less than a day underground, she missed the open air, but he led her down more corridors, which, if anything, led deeper.

There was a new door, at the end of a corridor of no particular consequence, and it stood out against the stone flags and worn wood of the place. He pushed it open, and all that lay behind it were more rooms, identical to all the others but for their complete darkness, and the fact that there was a cluttering of furniture.

And it was filled with sand, laboriously so. Every piled bucket of sand had been thrown in here, she realised, and she had no idea how many rooms they had swept clean, how much there was left to add to it.

"We're trying to bury it, you know."

Marik was frowning, his forehead knitted.

"We're trying to forget these rooms... we used to live in them. We cannot go any further."

She nodded, feeling as if her breath had been taken away from her.

He took her hand and pulled her away from those rooms.

The way back was darker than the living rooms, more sparsely lit and she could see, for the first time, just why it was that these three kept such a strange solitude about them, why they were so hauntingly sad when their eyes rested on the shadows and so joyously happy when they didn't. This place was beautiful, and this place was strange, and this place was a little terrifying, as well.

He dropped her hand in the hallway, and she did not strive to take it back.

Their dinner was loud. Ishizu was uproarious and animated, and even Odion and Marik laughed aloud. They asked her for minute detail about her life, where she had come from, and she answered as best she could, although it was dull to tell. Wine was poured, a thick sweet wine that she had never tasted before, and soon after they had eaten Odion pulled out a strange stringed instrument and began to play. The melody was soft and sweet, and Ishizu sang along, in a language that Anna did not know or understand.

The beauty of the music was not lost on her, though, despite the obvious language barrier. Ishizu pulled her up and spun her around, dancing, until they were both laughing so hard that she could no longer sing, and she had to pull the both of them down onto chairs.

"Oh, dear," she wept, "it has been a great many years since I have laughed like that."

Odion smiled right at Anna then, and she cast her eyes in the direction of Marik. He too was smiling, but it was much more reserved, at it was cast into the corners, brightly lit. As their laughter died out, so did the conversation, and Odion placed his instrument away, and stood, offering a hand to his sister.

"Come, Ishizu. Let us let the young ones finish the wine."

She took his hand, smiling up at him, and did not let go as they left the room. Anna's eyes followed them, wide.

"He's not actually our brother, you know."

She started.

"I mean, I think of him as my brother, but our mother found him, and adopted him."

Anna nodded, not sure what to think.

"Come on."

She trailed behind him as he took her down one of the many corridors, quickly losing herself. He stretched his arms upwards, folding them behind his head, and she was unable to miss the movement of muscle on his back.

"What happened to Odion's face?"

He stilled completely, so suddenly that she almost walked into the back of him. Without turning, he lifted his shirt up to his shoulders, without taking it off completely. Her eyes widened at the elaborate carving.

"He did it as an honour to me, when I took on this burden."

She reached out hesitantly, unsure of whether or not to touch it. She rested her fingertips against the ankh in the middle of his back, that crossed the line of his spine, and felt the delicate ridge of scar tissue. He started forward, dropping the fabric of his shirt down over his markings once more.

"Come. I want to show you something."

She dared not say another word, in case she mentioned some other kind of personal matter, and followed him. The people who had designed this place, she realised, did not go in much for bright colours and decorations. The walls were bare now, and this part looked a lot older than the rest. They came to another room, wide and un-carved, just raw stone. It could have been from any time, in any place. It had the same slatted roof as the other place, but the piles of sand had not been cleared away.

He took her hand in the darkness, and pulled her through the moonbeams that turned the disused room silvery. Dancing to a discordant music in his mind- perhaps the one that his sister sang- he spun her around three times, before falling down onto a pile of sand.

She was left there standing, unsure of what to do. She felt suddenly sleepy, from the wine and the sweeping and the strangeness of the day she had had, and she yawned loudly, slapping her hand over her mouth as she did so. He smiled up at her.

"I'll take you back."

All she could do was nod as he surged to his feet, pressed an arm around her shoulders, and pulled her down a different corridor. She had no idea how he found the way back to her rooms, but soon later, she was left at the doorway with a nonchalant wave, as he disappeared into the darkness again.

There was a vase of lilies in her room. She didn't know when Ishizu had put them there, but she knew they were meant as a thank you. It was the same floral smell that had greeted her yesterday, although that was beginning to feel like a thousand years ago, now.

Time has a strange way of distorting, like that.

Hours later she woke to noises outside her door. The smell of the flowers was no longer pleasant but suffocating, almost funeral, choking her. There was what sounded like the scraping of nails on wood, the shuffle of feet, and the faintest sound of growling.

She sat up, wrapping the sheet around her naked chest as the door clicked open.

It looked a lot like Marik, but he was taller, and his hair was wilder, and there was a glint in his eye like he wanted to do something unspeakable and untoward. He looked right at her, at the line of her bare shoulder blades and the soft clumps of her hair that matted over her forehead. He was shirtless, and he was smiling manically at her.

"Hello, girl."

She swallowed, looking at him nervously as his wide smile disappeared. He stumbled, righted himself, and then rubbed his forehead with his knuckles. Who was he? Another sibling, one that they had just failed to mention to her?

"Son of a bitch. Get back inside my head."

She swallowed. What the hell was wrong with him? He stumbled again, his leg hitting the bed.

The door slammed open, reverberating against the wall.

"Marik!"

The tall man, who looked a lot like Marik, spun around, and Anhfa gasped as she caught sight of the carvings etched into his back. It was Marik… but how?

Odion stood in the doorway, and that growling hiss came out again.

"Bastard."

He clutched his head in his hands, and fell to his knees. Ishizu was standing behind Odion, her eyes wide and staring not at her brother but at Anna.

Marik screamed, and Anna slipped from the bed, her sheet still around her. She pressed her forehead to the back of his neck, and he shuddered as if she had hit him. His hands fisted in his hair, and she felt him physically shrink, back down to the proportions that she knew him as. He was shaking, but his hair fell back against his head in the mess that she knew it was.

She did all that she could, wrapping her arms around his waist and pressed her lips to the top of his spine, where she could see the smooth round circle of the top of his vertebrae.

"Marik?"

That was Ishizu, and she pressed a hand to his forehead. His voice was rough, as if he were ill.

"I'm okay, Ishizu. He's gone."

She nodded, and kissed his forehead like you might kiss a small child. She fell into Odion's arms at the doorway, and turned desolate eyes to Anna.

"I'm so sorry you had to see this, Anna. Please, forgive us."

She said nothing, and they left the two of them alone. Soon afterwards, Marik stood, leaving her kneeling on the floor, and left, without speaking a word.

She did not sleep well, that night.

The next morning was as subdued as she had ever known it, and although she had only known these people a matter of days, she grieved with them, because although she could not tell what it was that they had lost, she knew that it was something that had been important to them. Ishizu and Odion were already getting ready to leave, even if they were a day early, and she quietly packed the rest of her things away.

She pressed the worn linen to her face as she slipped back into her own clothes, the clothes which Ishizu had washed for her, and sighed at the smell of the underground caves.

She did not know if it was possible to miss something that she had barely known, but it seemed to her that she would miss this, dreadfully so. There was an intimacy in this place, a closeness that she had never felt in her button-down, middle-class suburban world. And was that not why she had come out here in the first place, why she had delayed real life and left her grey world to find somewhere vibrant, breathtaking. She had wanted an adventure, and here it was. It had been strange, but it had been, for the most part, wonderful. This place... she would never forget it. It was mesmerising.

But it was not hers to have.

She threw her bag into the boot of Odion's car, and prepared to leave this strange, short chapter of her life behind her.

The car set off, and Ishizu sighed, but it was Odion who spoke.

"Anna… we should not have dragged you into our family."

"We are sorry, Anna. But there is a part of Marik that cannot be stopped with ease."

She stared out of the window, at the rolling sands. This strange, 'otherness'... it only added to the attraction. That other had meant her harm, she was sure, but although she had been a little scared the hairs on her nape had been stood on end from anticipation and excitement, not fear. And Marik himself- there had never been any true threat from him, she was sure. Just look how he had fought to break the spell that had been cast upon him. His kindness, too. The kindness of all of them. She had fallen half in love with this place, in these few days- the skies that blurred reality, reflected in his sister's eyes, the pain of the shadows, on his brother's face.

And Marik himself, so discordantly beautiful, so little like anything that she knew.

His eyes, burning in her dreams as the sand rubbed her red raw.

"Stop the car."

"What?"

"Stop the car!"

Odion skidded to a halt at the side of the road, looking incredulously back at her.

"Where are you going?"

She smiled at Ishizu, wide and alive.

"To have an adventure."

She threw herself out of the door, onto the sand and then onto the road, and began to run, back in the direction they had come. Had she had time to look back, she would have seen Odion pressing his forehead against Ishizu's, hoping for redemption. She did not know what they hoped from her, or even what Marik would say to see her there again, but she found that she hardly cared- she just wanted to see his smile, half-there, again.

She ran, even though it burned her legs and she could feel a stitch in her side. There was a film of sweat on her lip, but within moments she could see a figure in the distance, for the car had not had time to go far before thoughts had stopped them all.

Marik was stood in the middle of the road, next to his bike, staring, but in the opposite direction to where she was coming from.

"Marik!"

He swung one leg over the bike.

"Marik!"

She watched him pull his helmet over his head, and forced herself to run faster.

"Marik!"

He started, and turned, pulling off his helmet and turning to look at her. She came to a stop a few feet from his bike, bent over double and trying to catch her breath. He stared at her, incredulous, and pushed the stand back into place with his foot. She stood straight, looking right into his eyes, and moved towards him. His eyes were wide - and oh, how they made her skin prickle - and she smiled right back at his confusion.

She took the spare helmet from the back of his bike, and swung a leg over the gleaming chrome. This was illogical, possibly idiotic, and her mother would definitely not approve, but there was something about him that made her want to ride off into the figurative sunset. Something that made her feel wild.

"Go."

He was turned right around, his torso twisted.

"Where?"

He kicked back the stand, and gunned the engine as she pressed another kiss to the back of his neck. He turned to her again, and she pressed another to his throat, before pulling back, and pulled her helmet visor down.

"I don't care. Just go."

He looked at her, and smiled.

And I know that I'm damned if I never get out,
And maybe I'm damned if I do
But with every other beat I got left in my heart…
You know I'd rather be damned with you
Well, if I gotta be damned, you know I wanna be damned
Dancing through the night with you
Meatloaf