What Fools These Mortals Be

An LLS Production

Three thousand years of bad blood between us does not a good drinking time make. Did I ever mention how difficult it is to sit down with your sworn enemy-but-not-really-enemy for a drink? Yeah, it's that awkward.

Luckily, the modern world makes better drinks than the shite cheap beer every peasant drank back in the Black Land. Some of the stuff back then was so weak it was piss rather than the real deal. And with the vine, as His Highness might say, the dark in us comes forth.

Bring it on, then.

Anyway, I was halfway through the slightly more improved but still shite beer when the Pharaoh said something that made me waste it all over the counter-top.

"What?" I yelled, ignoring the looks from the bartender.

"I said," he pronounced with the air of a taxidermied amphibian, "How are you and Ryou?"

"Not a thing in the world," I replied. "There is nothing I am more practised at accomplishing, in fact, than nothing."

"It's bad tonight, isn't it?" he asked me, getting straight to the meat of the matter. "Whatever have you done?"

Beside us, the lunatic Tomb-Keeper's other gives a drunken hiccough. "What else? The great Bakura got kicked out for the night, that's what!"

The mighty living Horus looks to the darkened ceiling, as if praying for some relief, and looked at me again. One of his arched little brows had raised. "Are you truly planning to spend your very long after-after life pining for someone who resides not twenty yards away from your bedroom door?"

I raised a brow at him. "Unless you have a better idea, celibacy is looking to be the only choice of the matter."

"But, surely the situation is impossible," he argued.

"The situation may be impossible, but it's also deserved." I shot back. "You have no notion the sort of tortures I put that fellow through as it is."

"Some notion, perhaps, of the tortures." he admits, knowing full well what I refer to. "Of others, not so much."

"It's uncanny," I mused, drawing my nails through a newly freed lock.

My hair is as white as the light of Khonsu, the same as the omote, for the inexplicable reason of my trauma and heritage and what I shall always curse the idiot Pharaoh's brother Akunadin for. Couldn't the man try something easier, like poison?

"I have never loved anyone like this, and what do I do? I torment him at every available opportunity. I am out at all hours, when I know he worries for my safety, for some reason beyond comprehension. I am abrupt with him at times– and that is not even who I am."

"You've always barked orders at the men you admire," the former King observed. "I remember one we captured in the Medjai. Do you remember him? With the devastating moustache and beard and the soulful brown eyes? You demanded he mark your entrance more clearly, so he says. I've never seen anything like it– he was very nearly dead of apoplexy into your first heist."

"But he managed it, and I made it up after," I shot back, recalling well enough. Alcohol, good. Thank Tenenet and Shezmu, I doubt I could recall everything if my life depended on it.

The former living god looks at me, before he takes a long draft of the tumbler and slam it back down empty on the counter-top, wiping the froth from his lip with a quick flick of the tongue.

"So," he sighed when he was through, "You are an utter cad to him, out of habit if not inclination. How does he respond?"

I frowned, not only at the question but at a tangle I had discovered in my long hair.

"He possesses various defences now." I admit as I pick the knot. "He ignores me. He laughs at me. He returns my fire, although in such a fashion that it always turns out he has never said anything out of turn. And finally, he fixes me with a look as if to say, 'I know you do not like to hurt me, so I am at a loss to know why you should insist upon it so frequently.'"

"That's amazing," he murmured.

"Yes, I know he is."

"Not that," the Pharaoh motion to the bartender. "The bartender's skill at the dry Martini. Ra knows that shaker's defective."

"What of you?" I asked, not really desiring a new topic but aware that one was required as I let go of the errant lock.

One cannot wax on about holding an eternal torch for a man who resides a door away from one's own bedroom for longer than ten minutes without feeling entirely ridiculous. Especially where one's own enemy-friend-sort-of is concerned, even if I do not feel like listening to those two's lovely, perfectly perfect, makes puppies want to projectile vomit paradise.

"Fine," the Pharaoh tartly replies. "I am considering graduating him to the more... exciting parts to be enjoyed. Spontaneity is good, enough to keep the little one on his toes. We have gone through every separate romantic mood available to the pedestrian lover, enough that he can remain on his feet without scattering at the next mention of the act."

"Or on his back," I chuckle, taking another draft of beer.

"I am past distinguishing separate erotic moods," I admitted once the draft was in my belly. "It has been over six months, after all. I would probably accept the advances of a poodle if it were groomed deceptively enough."

"Why ever has... six months?" he asked, blankly shocked.

"Because one doesn't go out in search of a new umbrella when what one requires is a roof over one's head. Or at least, the thinking man cannot manage to stomach it."

"Do you know what I think?" the maniac looks at me, slightly sad and... pitying? "I think he loves you."

I was silent. Silent for too long for the two of them not to smile at me.

"Why, don't you think he loves you?" Malik cackles quietly. "See the way he follows you, the sort of dangers you lead him into, and he questions none of them and he shelters you even when he has no need to."

"He may well act as if he harbours some affections for me, to be sure."

"I am right, then, and your problem is solved."

"Even if you were right, what in Duat does that solve?" I demanded acidly. "Suppose he does not love me, and I tell him the fix I'm in. He is shocked, he thinks it over, he recovers, and he slowly but surely leaves our home, feeling for my situation but finding it impossible to make an answer, and he departs, knowing that his other self will ever tend toward his... charms. Then, say that by Hathor, he does love me? Say he accepts my offer, knowing nothing of the sort of life I lead, or the consequences it could have for him, blindly following me out of a misplaced platonic attachment?"

"The sort of life you lead?" the Pharaoh laughs at me. "It's the same life as us. Yours and his. Twenty hours a day, if not more, between the fact of your cohabiting and the fact of your kleptomania and the magic we share. You are only talking about the addition of four hours."

"But those four hours," I could not help but sigh.

This provoked a long, throaty laugh from the lunatic. "Poor little darling."

The Pharaoh grinned at me. "I must admit to you, I supposed your current residence in the fields, not in the red land."

"It'll be Duat itself if I don't do something about it soon. Those four hours will be the death of me. My second death, that is."

"Those four hours could surely be improved if you weren't actively ignoring him," the maniac observes. What is this, pick apart Bakura's love life? And when did he learn common sense?

"I'll ruin him."

"Why should you ruin him, if you love him?" It was the Pharaoh who asks.

"Because of who and what I am, and who and what he is not," I replied, smiling ruefully into the tumbler. It was surely a bigger affair than three thousand years ago. "But I need not pretend to you, that my motives for remaining silent are entirely selfless. The other half is pure terror."

"But why should such a kindly one as Ryou frighten you?"

"For the same reason," I sighed. "Because of who and what I am, and who and what he is not."

Darkness. A thief of time. A walking death and terror and madness and everything crazy and insane.

The Pharaoh is frowning again. "I see the same gentility in him that you do, but I would term it strength and not weakness. His innocence is the pliable sort, I think, a kind of natural resilience against the dark. I know you to own a shadowed side, but you would never exploit him, knowing it is there."

"I already have done."

"How?"

"By allowing him to see that I need him more than anything in the world, by actually coming back to him from the eternal fields." I reply flatly. "That is a heavy chain, when presented, and unasked for. That's what I've done."

"I would wager that he does not see it as the great burden you do," he said in a peculiarly soft tone. "Your needing someone is... I don't know if you realize it, but for a man of your independence to need anyone is quite wonderful. I think so, at any rate."

The silence hung over us for seemingly millennia before I broke it. "Do you ever think of Hell?"

He looks at me once more. "Duat, you mean?"

"I mean damnation."

"Oh," he sighed. "Yes. Yes, I do see what you mean. And yes, I... often wish that. Well, they do say you can ask forgiveness and all will then be quite magically well again."

The Pharaoh is rattled. Great. Now we'll have a Game, and I'll spend the time thinking in the Realm again...

"You needn't worry about hell, Bakura," he whispered. "Hell is living in solitary confinement. And you are not alone."

"I've upset you," I said quickly. "We'll talk of–"

"No, let us continue to talk of you," he suggested with a laugh that was almost a groan. "I have no advice to beg of you in return, after all, for I know how to live my life. So let us talk of you for a while longer, and see if we make any progress. Remind me where we left off. Oh, yes, you were in love."

"None of my deliberate doing, I assure you," I snapped.

"So be it." he whispers, and the blood of gods is apparent as he speaks. "You have to change it. Join him while you walk the earth, if only for interludes, and be happy with him. You think slowing down at all will drop you straight into hell, but it won't– and even if it does on occasion, he will be there with you. Do not wait; you might be like me, who have to claw and crawl back to the eastern bank for a second chance at what I gave up."

I knew what he meant. We have gone through the experience together.

There was nothing else as I buried my face in my hands, my cheeks hot from the beer. "I've never tried this."

"There is a first for everything."

"Forgive me anyway," I asked.

There was silence and the lunatic's cackles. And then the Pharaoh smiles.

"There is nothing whatever to forgive," he laughs, like his father, I have met the Pharaoh Aknamkanon. All the tales are true, I remember, however distantly; Aknamkanon was always one for second chances.

And then there was no good thing to be done for him, save only walking away.

I hastened my pace home once we disbanded to return to the hearths of our homes. No one would be idiotic enough to attack me; the monsters of the dark and shadows ensure that well enough, if not that it was me, Bakura, once named the King of Thieves. I am not someone to cross if one wants to live.

There was not much left to consider by that time, and I was nearly home. Time enough, however, to wonder whether the five minutes' journey remaining was sufficient to work out the way the universe worked, so that I could better guess whether I might be granted my heart's desire if I asked for it prettily enough.

Time enough for panic. And time enough also for an inkling of relief that it would all soon be over one way or the other, even if my life was finished.

The simplicity was appealing, you'd admit.

A light shone through the crack below the door as I stopped before it.

Forgiveness from a loved one, when a man has made an unforgivably stupid mistake, is always treasured.

I stayed like that, just breathing, for nearly two minutes, I think.

The door is a simple business despite the courage of the Dutch, and I find myself in the dimly lit living room, Ryou still curled up in the couch, reading. Waiting. For me.

"I am never going to Heaven," I told him as I march in.

Ryou sits up, alarmed as he places the book on the coffee table and walks up to me. "Bakura? Are you... drunk?"

I shook my head and took his hand off my shoulder. Once I had it, however, I did not give it back to him. I held it with both my own, running my fingers over his palm, trying to breathe. Our bodies were very nearly touching.

Those four hours. I would give anything on earth for them.

"I didn't even know you believed in God."

"I'm not going to Heaven," I insisted though my throat seemed to be malfunctioning. "I am a rogue and a liar and a thief and a coward and– oh, countless other things. But what I meant to ask you– I think, very probably, I could have my piece of Heaven here with you. Anywhere. With you."

I would give up eternity itself for those four hours.

He stopped breathing.

"Here, I could be pardoned, and yet retain the offence," I added.

He gazed back at me, perfectly still.

"I wouldn't deserve it," I continued blindly, looking down. "But, by Osiris, how I would try."

His other hand came up to still my caressing of his fingers. He waited, for an embarrassingly long period, until I finally managed to look him in the face once more.

Silver and emerald, and never has there been a more devastating combination.

"I know," he says. "I know you would."

That is the one paramount blessing upon which all the rest hinges, I know—Ryou Bakura is my religion, my avocation, my single hallowed addiction. And then I had always been kissing him.

I had always longed to feel his breath in my mouth and the aching pressure of his tongue caressing mine. I had always wanted to feel his lean body against me, for a sigh to escape his lips when I pressed eager hands against the small of his back. If it was sinful, then let it be said that I welcomed the fire, begged for it to take me, gladly hungering for more.

It was only later, after pleas and blasphemies and acts that have been criminal since the ancient world, staring a perfectly formed arm nearly as pale as the sheet beneath it, when I realized how much the feeling must have been compounded for him.

Had I lived oblivious day to day as anything near the object of worship he was to me now? I hoped against hope that it was not so. For if I had, time had not been kind to him.

He looked at me questioningly and I smoothed a hand over his face.

Why I hadn't done so a thousand times before, seemed as unbelievable as the glow that lit his eyes when I did.

I wonder what the gods think of us now, light and dark together.

Shall we their fond pageant see? Lord, what fools these mortals be!

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