Marik & Bakura Go To C**town

By LittleKuriboh

Chapter One

Desert winds threatened to ruin Bakura's perfect blend of wild, immaculate hair, as the crooning melody of Horse With No Name surrounded them and gave poetry to their escape. Behind them, the remains of the old hideout clattered and burned in the endless sun. Smoke still itched at his nostrils, acrid and irritating, while beside him Marik leaned forward in the driver's seat and cackled - also irritating - like they hadn't almost been blown sky-high. The idea of being blown alongside Marik wasn't distasteful to him, although given the context - that of an explosive device secreted within a faux Christmas present delivered to them by a long-dead Egyptian Pharaoh - he couldn't say he'd enjoyed it nearly as much as he would the other.

They'd made it to the Marikmobile - which, unlike the Mokubamobile, actually existed and was a sleek pink 1963 Cadillac with no top and an engine that had seen far better days - and careened through the hidden exit marked with the words 'Secret Area'. At least, it was meant to say that, but Marik had ran out of space while painting the steel doors. Instead it merely read 'Secret Are', and when questioned, Marik would explain that it was a thought provoking statement. "Secret are…?" He would ask them, his voice pitching up awkwardly as if expecting them to finish the grammatically obtuse sentence. Toward the end of their all too brief tenure, somebody had crudely drawn an S between the R and the E, causing it to take on a whole new meaning.

"Secret arse?" Marik had blurted at the following meeting. "Okay, which of you arses secretly put their secret arse on my rear entrance?"

Bakura grinned, though it was a sterile thing. The way you'd smile remembering someone who used to bully you getting expelled. It was gratifying, but it was a gift that came attached with so many painful ribbons that it made your mouth eventually recede into a thin glum line the more you dwelled on it. Of course Zombie Boy was blamed. He took the fall for all of Bakura's tricks. But Zombie Boy was long gone, and with him, it seemed, their hideout.

The car wasn't making much progress, although the way Marik was behaving you'd think they were re-enacting the pod race sequence from Star Wars. Had Marik been even remotely cultured, Bakura would have compared it to the chariot scene from Ben Hur - but no. No, Marik was definitely Anakin, and this was definitely Tatooine, and Bakura was the reluctant Liam Neeson wishing he'd never even been cast in this dreck.

Something fell from the sky and exploded in the road ahead. Nothing significant - just a puff of smoke and noise, but of course Bakura found himself being hit in the face with the charred remains of whatever it was. He reached up and wiped the sooty mess from his eyes, holding up the last few pages of what was once a poorly fashioned scrapbook named The Tome Of Villainous Achievements. He remembered this. Their first evil council session, when it had just been the two of them. Before they'd sent out all the invitations. Or rather, before Marik sent out the invitations. Bakura was content to just relax on the couch and watch him work, pretending to listen to the words coming from his mouth and instead simply enjoying the way his tongue moved across the stamps as he placed them on their respective lavender envelopes. Simpler times. Of course, when Marik was involved, simplicity came naturally.

"Lah-lah-LAH-lah-la-la-lah!" Marik parroted as the song began to fade into static. Bakura grimaced. Somehow the static had more of a tune to it. "I like road trips! We should be filming this, Bakura. It would make for a great movie. Think of the high-jinx!"

More like low-jinx. Bakura remembered all too vividly what happened last time they'd attempted to shoot a film together. "I'm trying not to." He leafed through the half-pages from what barely constituted a scrapbook, and found a picture of the two of them with their arms around each other, Bakura noticeably less pale in his cheeks, and Marik, well… Had anybody seen the picture they would have insisted Marik looked drunk. He would have told them that that was just Marik. No alcohol necessary. This was the moment when they had decided to put their differences aside and work as a team. For all the hate and cruelty Bakura was capable of, when Marik had asked him to be his 'BFF', he just couldn't say no. Never could. Of course, he had assumed one of the letters in 'BFF' stood for something far more lewd - and it wasn't the letter B.

The car lurched as it ran over something that looked like half a couch cushion, all chewed up and riddled with everyday shrapnel, and Bakura snuck the photo into his pants pocket. They had gradually crawled all the way up to fifty miles per hour, and Marik was hollering something about selling DVDs of their exciting trip, as though this whole thing had been planned in advance. Like he was enjoying their almost obliteration and felt it could be marketed.

"And on the cover, it will just be me surrounded by European girls who are all like, wow!" Marik described, moving his left hand across the filthy windshield in a short arc, as if to behold some miracle of nature, like a field of naturally occurring candy canes. Marik would have liked that image. "That guy certainly is sexually attractive to me! And maybe one of them will have, like, really big boobs! Not even sexy, it's just amusing, because they're enormous! Have you ever seen Maury Povich?"

"No, I ha-"

"Neither have I," Marik cut him off, "But I hear some of the girls on that show, man! Some of those girls have… they have problems!"

"Really."

"With their breasts. Sometimes." Marik was losing control of his train of thought. The way he stammered it was like watching someone try to lasso a charging rhinoceros. Obviously panicked and yet he seemed to think he knew what he was doing. "It's like some kind of freak show. It's totally offensive. We should watch it, Bakura."

"So am I on-"

"We should get Maury Povich to be in our road trip movie!" Marik declared.

Bakura ignored him and continued. "So am I on the DVD cover, or am I not as important as some European girl's chest?"

"Um," was Marik's nonplussed reaction. Something told Bakura that Marik hadn't expected him to take the idea so seriously. There obviously wasn't going to be a DVD, or large breasted women - European or otherwise - but Marik's brainwaves tended to take on a life of their own. This was the first time Bakura had seemed remotely invested. At least by the notion of promotional art. "Maybe you could be Maury's sidekick."

"Couldn't he be my sidekick?" Bakura asked, reaching down and thumbing at the radio's ancient switches, hoping to get some sound out of it that didn't make him apprehensive about the possibility of creatures from straight out of a Silent Hill game showing up. "I mean, at least let me be a main character in our own movie."

"It's a road trip movie, Bakura!" Marik chided, not even watching the road anymore. There was literally nothing or nobody around for miles. That's why they chose the location for the secret hideout in the first place. Desolation. That and Marik wanted to someday build the world's first life-size sandcastle. He'd managed to build part of the moat, which really only involved a lot of digging and cursing, before he gave up and decided to just build lots of very little ones. Through the rear-view mirror, Bakura could see them receding into the horizon. At least not everything was destroyed. They still had Sandcastle City. "It's not about the characters! It's about the journey!"

"That's rather profound," Bakura remarked. "For you, I mean."

"And the vehicles!" Marik added, deflating Bakura's prior response. "It's all about what car we're driving! And how much rubber we can burn!"

"I think we've burned more than enough rubber for one day," said Bakura, slapping his arm across the metal frame of the door beside him and turning to look back at the decimated hole where there once was a hideaway. As he watched, the whole thing collapsed in a plume of oddly purple smoke. There was a flash, and a crack, and something big and metal whizzed past them at a ludicrous velocity. Bakura turned to watch it slam violently into the side of a rock shaped like someone's hand giving the hook 'em horns sign, his expression never shifting from that of indifference, and recognised at once their old microwave. The source of many a hasty meal. It was either that or order from the local kebab shop, situated approximately two hundred miles away. The bill was always enormous, but fortunately all their delivery boys were called Steve. One of the few times Marik's powers proved useful. "Amongst other things."

Bakura wondered to himself how the Pharaoh had been able to deliver a bomb to their secret base of operations. After all, they didn't technically have an address. The invitations had simply read 'Take a right at the bush that looks like Stan Bush and follow the sound of 80s music until you find it'. Marik had insisted that everyone would know what he was talking about. Then they'd spent the next week or two playing The Touch on a non-stop blaring loop through the loudspeakers installed within the tomb's outer façade, just waiting. After all was said and done, Bakura decided to just call a few people behind Marik's back and give them more specific directions, allowing Marik to believe that his cryptic series of clues had been what actually caused his council to converge. All Bakura needed to tell them was "Head to the kebab shop and follow the delivery boy who has a sort of glazed over look in his eyes", and within the next twelve hours they were all plotting to overthrow Yugi Moto, in between mouthfuls of Indian food.

Yet the Pharaoh didn't have any problem delivering a package to Somewhere In Egypt, as the subtitles so very often described. Perhaps that was the problem; as a main character, that pasty deep-voiced twat was able to bend the rules to his advantage whenever it suited. The ability to read subtitles could easily have been amongst his fourth-wall breaking repertoire, and while the words Somewhere In Egypt could have feasibly pointed to any given location, odds were that the Pharaoh's will would be done. He had played one too many a card game with the bloke to think otherwise. It was pointless to even challenge the guy.

So why did he?

Why even team up with a whole host of villains to try and overthrow someone who was just so damn… unoverthrowable? He knew it was a fruitless exercise, a waste of everyone's time. Nobody in their right mind would think otherwise.

"Hey Bakura!" Marik interrupted his inner dialogue. Bakura turned to see the boy wearing a round pair of sunglasses that sufficiently hid the vacant, childlike manner in his violet eyes to the point that he actually looked somewhat mature and - Bakura swallowed - handsome. "We're on a mission from God!"

Bakura slumped down in his seat, folding his arms awkwardly about his lap and looking off to the horizon where the sun too was trying to hide its slowly reddening face. He closed his eyes and tried to think of things that didn't involve Marik's bare shoulders or midriff, or feeling his own lips upon them. Yet another fruitless exercise, yet another waste of time.

Nobody in their right mind indeed.