I'm still exploring the relationship between Bakura and Malik, so here's a two-part one-shot. The first part is from Bakura's first person P.O.V and the second is from Malik's.

I think this is probably the closest I'll ever get to writing Bakura falling in love in a canon-based fic… Anyway, without further ado…

Stealing someone's heart would be a far less convoluted affair were it not just a figure of speech. Saw through their sternum, open up their ribcage, search through all the muck and cut out their sticky, bloody heart, yours for the taking.

Unfortunately, it's far less simple in the idiomatic sense. I am not a romantic person. I never have been and I never wish to be. I have no interest in, have no time, no patience for romance. I'm not some poor, sad sap pining over an unattainable beauty, and I'm certainly not wallowing in self pity because I'm lost as to how to win the love of the object of my affections. I'm looking neither for love nor commitment, not looking to give my own heart. I don't really have a heart to give, neither figuratively nor literally. My literal heart belongs to someone else; my host and I share a body which I need to borrow from time to time. Thus by extension we also share a heart, and so it is not mine to give away. My figurative heart doesn't exist, period, and if it does, it's so black and twisted and unrecognisable it'd be laughable to call it one. To put it simply, I'm the very definition of heartless.

You may, then, be wondering why I'm talking about stealing someone else's heart in the first place if I'm not interested in loving or being loved. Well, that's easy enough to answer. I'm a thief, a collector. There's something so deliciously indulgent, so shamelessly hedonistic, about being able to step back and look at everything you've amassed, and so if something catches my eye, I take it. No treasure is too difficult for me to steal; if I want it, then I'll have it, simple as that.

Except it's not as simple as that. Not in this case.

Originally Malik only peaked my interest because he was the carrier of a millennium item. Plan A had been to track him down and relieve him of it, fairly amiably, only a few barely veiled threats here and there since I was feeling generous. If he hadn't been receptive to that, plan B had been to make good on those threats, kill him and relieve his corpse of it.

And then I laid eyes on him. It was the first time I can recall seeing something and feeling the all consuming need to have it. I was quite familiar with want, because I'd wanted for plenty, but such an aching need to have something was entirely foreign to me. And then he turned up, smug and bratty and self assured, and I just had to have him. I needed to own him, body and soul, but how to go about it eluded me.

At first, I wasn't picky about the idea of his body and soul being separate when I procured them - seal away his conscience in an object and keep his body for my own; quite simple - but the more I stared at his cocky, defiant face with his amethyst eyes and his pale spun-gold hair and his golden-coppery skin, the clearer it became that half the beauty of Malik Ishtar was the combination of his body and soul together. This pretty treasure needed to be intact when I stole it, or it lost all value.

Kidnap held no appeal for me either. Stolen objects don't try to escape, but people are uncooperative like that. And besides, I had little experience in stealing a person, and I didn't wish to do a sloppy job, nor did I want to expend the time it would take to learn to do it properly. As much as I needed to have Malik for my own, I had a more important task to pursue - my raison d'être, if you will - and so this needed to be quick, or at the very least a side project.

And so that left me with the option of "stealing his heart", which really, all things considered, involved no stealing at all. In fact, the idea was that when I was done with him, he'd want to belong to me; to give himself to me.

If he was clever, and I saw intelligence lurking behind that pretty face and that cocky smirk, he'd realise from the start that any kind of relationship with me was a one-sided deal. He would be required to give all of himself and I would give none and that's just the way it would be. This presented a few problems, as most people don't like giving something for nothing, and Malik is certainly one of the most entitled people I've ever met. He thinks the entire world should fall at his feet and lick his shoes clean for him. I knew there was no way he'd ever willingly give himself away to me without expecting at least the same in return.

But that was okay. I was used to playing with puppets. It was just a matter of, shall we say, learning how to manipulate their strings.