Chapter Text
Bakura sat on his tiny balcony, legs laced through the gaps in the railing to dangle over the street below. He peeled an orange in parts, tossing the rhind carelessly up and over the railing. His apartment was shit in a lot of ways, but it was at the top of the steep hills that bordered the city, and it made for a great view.
The sun sent a soft orange hue over the city of Granada, stretched out and rambling below. It was sunrise, which meant that Bakura was coming to the end of his day. He’d spent most of the night hustling cards– Duel Monsters, mostly, which had become disgustingly popular in the last couple of years. He rarely got to play with any of the fancy holographic interfaces you saw on TV, but plenty of people were still willing to bet on analogue games.
Bakura always insisted loser give up a rare card in addition to cash. That was the key to winning, really. He was good, but he didn’t get really good until he had the right cards to pick from. Now he could almost pay his rent from a weekend drifting between gaming bars.
Once he was done with the orange, Bakura leaned back and stretched, popping his shoulders and neck. He wiped juice from his hand onto his shirt and then reached back to where he’d tossed his phone out of the way.
Malik had called him twice more since Bakura had shoved his phone away, and then sent a series of texts demanding to meet up.
Bakura stood and stretched again. There were left-overs in the fridge. He was going to heat them up in his barely functional microwave, eat them, and then pass out on the mattress on the floor that was his bed.
Malik called again. Bakura continued ignoring it.
Bakura’s apartment was literally carved out of the hillside. Everything was outdated, the layout was weird, and it was far away from everything, but it was spacious enough and Bakura didn’t have to share it with anyone.
Bakura pulled off his shirt, flopped onto his bed, and fell asleep almost immediately. He left his phone in the kitchen to charge. Malik could call him as many times as he wanted.
The problem with Malik, Bakura realized some hours later, was that they’d known each other since they were teenagers, and he’d made the mistake of giving Malik a spare key in a moment of weakness when he’d moved in.
“Dude,” Malik yelled, kicking his mattress, “what part of emergency don’t you get?”
Bakura cracked an eye and grunted at him. He was pretty sure none of the texts had mentioned an emergency. He’d hadn’t actually read them particularly carefully, but surely he would have noticed if Malik had an actual problem and wasn’t just being an attention-seeking jerk.
Bakura folded his blanket down just enough to flip Malik off, and Malik muttered something and left. A few minutes later, Bakura heard the stolen TV he had in the living room.
Bakura couldn’t get back to sleep with the noise, so he eventually rolled off the mattress and dug up some clean clothes. Malik was sprawled across his second-hand couch, wearing one of his stupid designer shirts and watching a dumb game show.
“This is your emergency?” Bakura asked.
Malik shrugged. “I suppose you could say it was less of an emergency and more of a… urgent need to share some news.”
Bakura raised his eyebrows. Malik grinned cheekily at him and switched off the TV.
“What would you say,” Malik said, looking like the very definition of ‘shit-eating grin,’ “if I told you you’d never need to shoplift another handbag again?”
Bakura snorted. “All of your bad pitches sound the same.”
He turned and head down the stairs to his bathroom. A metal spiral staircase ran through his apartment, groaning ominously under his weight.
“Hey!” Malik spluttered, nearly falling off the couch in his rush to follow.
Part of the bizarre layout was that the bathroom was on the ground floor, behind the cement-floored entryway his landlord used to store several rusty bikes and a giant TV that no longer worked. The bathroom was really obviously part of a cave– it had low, uneven ceilings, and the walls were a bumpy, spackled white.
Bakura took his time, washing his face and brushing his teeth, and he could hear Malik complaining through the door.
“This is legit this time,” Malik was promising. “We got the holo-recognition barcode working; you would have seen if you’d just come down to the workshop–”
Bakura rolled his eyes. Malik’s “workshop” was a bunch of machines in an abandoned office building he and some other dudes were squatting in. It was on the other side of the town, and if Malik thought Bakura was going to take three different night buses to get there at five in the morning, then frankly, Malik could go choke and die.
When Bakura opened the bathroom door, Malik was sitting on the busted TV, scrolling through his phone.
“The handbags are lucrative,” Bakura said.
Malik glanced up at him. “You fucking hate the handbags.”
Bakura snorted. This was undeniably true. Malik had made a small empire selling knock-off handbags, and one of the linchpins in his kingdom was that his copies were nearly indistinguishable from the originals. Bakura had provided the actual, designer handbags– several of every design, to be dissected and analyzed– which he lifted from high-end stores.
It had made them both a lot of money, a lot more than Malik’s crappy fake Duel Monsters cards were making them.
On the other hand, Bakura had learned to hate stealing handbags.
“Bar La Fonte?” Malik asked.
Bakura shrugged and slipped into his shoes, left carelessly by the door.
“What about shoes?” Bakura asked as they walked. Bakura’s neighborhood was all narrow, steep streets that winded back and forth up and down the mountain side. “Those red-backed ones sell for a lot.”
Malik shook his head. “We’d need different equipment. I told you, I got the holo-recognition working.”
Malik had been making fake gaming cards for years. Duel Monsters had always had a dedicated following, even back when it was called Magic and Wizards. Recently, though, Pegasus LLC and Kaiba Corp had teamed up to introduce working holographs to the game, and it exploded in popularity overnight.
The holograph readers worked by reading a digital barcode embedded in the card, which was nigh-impossible for most forgeries to copy. The knock-off card industry had crumpled; Bakura was still seeing articles every once in a while about people being upset that the cards they’d gotten through an unlicensed seller didn’t work in their brand new Duel Disk.
If Malik really had gotten the barcodes working, though… well, people would pay a lot for that certain card to complete their deck.
Bar La Fonte was a sticky hole-in-the wall that got blistering hot in the summer, but it was close by and they had cheap sandwiches and drinks. There were three old men in the back corner, men like Bakura’s landlord who’d been born in this neighborhood and had been coming to this bar since they were young, and they were splitting a handle of vodka over their coffees. They paid no mind to Bakura and Malik, who were too young and too foreign with too long hair (and in Malik’s case, with too much over-the-top jewelry).
“Anyway,” Malik said through a mouth full of bread and cheese and tomato, “Whether you believe me or not, it shouldn’t be too hard for you to get us some more cards, right?”
“If you’re paying me either way,” Bakura agreed. “What types of cards?”
“Monster cards are easiest,” Malik said. “Get ‘em new. Used ones… don’t work as well.”
It still seemed a bit like a lost cause to Bakura, but at least it was better than handbags.
--
Malik went off to negotiate with someone– probably over the god forsaken handbags– and Bakura headed for the city center.
The streets in the city were so narrow that sometimes when a car passed, Bakura had to stand in a doorway to make room. Walking anywhere from his mountainside neighborhood sucked because, predictably, the walk was steep. Still, Bakura liked it– he liked the twisting labyrinth of streets, the darkness of the narrow pedestrian staircases connecting them, the way he could just slip into the shadows and disappear.
In contrast, the city center was bright and tree-lined. Tourists and locals and hipsters and buskers and beggars all flocked to the restaurants, the shops, the bars. It was loud and the sun shone bright and hot, warming the cobblestones to a sizzling heat.
Cafes spilled out onto the sidewalks, with cheap plastic tables and wide umbrellas and rickety chairs the owners would chain up after hours. Bakura wove through them, noting the purse he could steal here, the man who’s left his wallet on the table there, the teenager whose mobile phone was dangerously close to falling out of her back pocket. It was all too easy and, frankly, Bakura was sick of pickpocketing.
He was especially sick of snatching handbags.
The hip places to buy Duel Monsters cards were now electronics stores. They had expensive hologram-projecting duel disks on the wall behind the registers, and fancy cards under glass alongside mobile phones. Bakura slowed down as he passed by, and then decided against it. He liked traditional game stores better.
There was a store he liked off the main road, which covered two floors of a narrow building with creaking floors under thin carpet. The aisles were cramped, the store shoving as much gaming memorabilia as it could into rows and rows of shelves.
Bakura lazed through the aisles, eyeing his fellow customers. He paused over a display of Monster World figurines, and then picked out a few dice from a poorly labeled cardboard box.
Upstairs was a little less cramped, and Bakura pulled a book on Duel Monsters (so old that the cover read MAGIC AND WIZARDS) and flipped through it. It featured a forward from Pegasus J. Crawford himself, telling the story of how he’d discovered the game on a trip to Egypt.
Bakura snorted and snapped the book shut. Sure, he’d ‘discovered’ a game that a whole other country already had. Whatever.
He lazed around the store a bit, then waited in line behind a bunch of teenagers to buy his fifty cent dice. He loitered outside the store, pretending to count his change while the teens opened all their Duel Monsters booster packs and loudly compared their hauls.
They moved on, and Bakura counted to ten slowly in his head before trailing after them. It hadn’t sounded like they’d gotten much good, but Malik could sell anything, provided he could get the cards to work.
He trailed them for twenty minutes before he made his move. He didn’t want them to associate losing all their precious cards with that nice game shop, after all.
They never even noticed him.
--
Malik was busy with whatever bullshit he did during the day, so Bakura lazed around a tea shop for a while before heading to a more trendy neighborhood. This one scrambled up a different hillside, all steep cobblestone streets and uneven sidewalks, and it was filled with hipsters selling crafts and con-artists selling knock-offs and hipster-con-artists selling knock-off crafts.
There were a lot of bars with a good gaming scene, which is what Bakura came here for. The first two bars he tried were overcrowded, and in the third one he tried to get in on a game of Monster World, but it was full. He finally settled on slaughtering a group of hipster tourists in drop-crotch pants in Duel Monsters, one after another.
The hipsters were from the Netherlands, dressed up for the neighborhood. They bought Bakura a beer for every win, so he let them talk at him.
“Do you know Atem?” one of the hipsters asked when he said where he was from, and Bakura’s mood immediately turned bitter.
“We don’t all know each other,” he snapped back.
“I just thought…” the hipster spluttered. “You’re really good, is all…”
Atem was the reigning Duel Monsters champion. Bakura had never met him, on account of Egypt being a whole country just shy of a hundred million people and Bakura not having even visited since he’d moved to Spain as a teenager. But Bakura was the only Egyptian a lot of people had ever met, and he got the question an infuriating number of times. He’d like to meet Atem himself one day, just to punch him in the face.
He left the bar tipsy and in a foul mood, intent on trudging back to his apartment to cook whatever food he had. The people in on the streets, conversing outside bars or kneeling over tarps filled with wares to sell or stumbling drunk down the pavement, annoyed him more and more with each passing step.
He stumbled over one of the tarps, snagging the fabric on his foot and sending the fake “mystic artifacts” spilling across the street. He wasn’t even sure if he’d done it out of spite or it was a drunk accident or, somehow, a mix of both.
The seller swore at him in Arabic, which was at least refreshing.
Bakura very half-heartedly picked up a couple of the random items the man was selling, tossing them back onto the cloth. A couple of drunk women pitched into help as well, giggling and snorting and generally being a nuisance.
He tossed a few of the khamsa hands the man was selling into a pile, and then discretely pocketed one for himself. He grunted a non-apology and continued on his way.
When he was back in is own neighborhood, in the abandoned dark alleys that made up the endless trek up the mountainside, Bakura pulled out his new treasure to look at it.
He’d thought it was an extremely stylized khamsa hand when he’d picked up, as that was half of what the man was selling. Khamsa hands, shaped like a hand with an eye in the center, were a sort of protective ward or good luck amulet, left contextless in a city that had replaced its Moorish rulers with the Catholic Inquisition, and they were popular in tourist shops. Bakura had sort of looked at the thing and gone “eye, five dangly bits” and then shoved it into his pocket.
It was really obviously not a hand, though. It was gold with a stylized eye, embedded in an triangle and then suspended in a ring. Five pointed rods dangled from it.
Maybe he’d give it to Malik. That bastard loved his gold jewelry.
Bakura tossed the not-khamsa ring-thing on to his couch and forgot about.
--
Malik’s fake cards could be read by the holo-readers after all, and Malik smirked at Bakura from behind the giant projection of Baby Dragon in the workshop.
“Where’d you get the duel disk from?” Bakura asked instead of being impressed. “This isn’t a knock-off too, is it?”
“If you must know,” Malik sneered, “it fell off a truck.”
“Oh, I see,” Bakura drawled.
It was actually a shame Malik only had the one on-hand. Even if they were gimmicky, they were fun, and Malik was a pretty good player himself.
“Prove your cards work, then,” Bakura said, playing at nonchalance even though he knew Malik could read him a mile away. “Duel me in one of the public arenas.”
Malik snorted. “Winner buys dinner.”
“Deal.”
Individuals could buy woefully expensive Duel Disks, but plenty of places had huge arenas with holo-readers. Parks and malls, mostly, but the cinema nearby had sacrificed a theatre to set one up. It was a little more expensive than the mall ones, but it was closer.
A poster of Atem loomed over them as they waited in the cinema’s line.
“God, I hate that guy,” Malik said. “Got a sharpie?”
Bakura didn’t, but he padded down his pocket for an alternative. A pen, maybe, or a pocket knife. Instead he came up with the ring-thing.
“What the hell is that?” Malik asked.
Bakura didn’t know what to tell him, so he just shrugged. He’d forgotten he’d even stolen the stupid thing, and he must have left it in his pocket. When he’d been a kid, Bakura had been a horrible little gremlin of a pickpocket. He stole things he needed and things he wanted and things he didn’t want or need. He stole from strangers and he stole from people he didn’t like, and he stole from strangers he didn’t like on account of things like snooty posture or fashion choices.
It therefore wasn’t weird for Bakura to just have random things of unknown origin, but he’d certainly grown out of a lot of the petty theft once Malik had figured out how to make real money off a different kind of theft.
Malik was unbothered and used the pointy dangly bits of the ring to carve a mustache and devil horns into the plastic covering Atem’s poster. It was completely juvenile. Bakura was still snickering about it when it was their turn to use the duel arena.
Malik immediately whipped out all his fake cards, just to show off that they worked. Bakura had included using the fake cards as part of his challenge– and he’d know Malik would use them excessively because he was a huge show-off, just look at how he dressed– but because Bakura lost, he griped about the cheating all way to the shitty fast food place Malik picked.
“Here’s your weird ring back,” Malik said, dropping it onto Bakura’s plastic tray.
Bakura thought about tossing it along with the paper his burger came in. It was dumb and he’d grabbed it on a whim. But there was something about it that he liked– the fact that he’d never seen anything like it, maybe.
On his bus ride back home– the bus swaying worryingly as it cut tight turns on the winding road up the mountain– Bakura googled a couple of phrases on his phone to see if he could figure out what the ring was. He thought maybe it was some sort of bastardized Native American dream catcher (which seemed in line with the types of things white hipsters would want to buy), but google insisted the symbol in the middle was a rare Eye of Horus, only ever found in one tomb of an unknown pharaoh.
“Are you kidding me,” Bakura muttered.
It was so obscure he wasn’t sure how it had made its way onto what he’d thought was a mass-produced souvenir. None of the obnoxious pagan sites explaining to white people how Bakura’s ancestors worshipped brought it up, so it didn’t look like it was in public recognition at all. Maybe it wasn’t a mass-produced piece of fake junk after all.
He guessed he was keeping it.
--
Bakura woke up one day and walked into his kitchen to find all his Monster World figurines lined up neatly on his rickety two-person table.
This is a terrible prank, he texted to Malik along with a photo. He then shoved all the figurines back into the shoe box he’d kept them in and tossed them back into the bottom of his closet. He had tried to get into Monster World several times, but usually it just turned out he didn’t like people enough for social games. Oh well.
He went about his day– which was sitting around watching a bad sitcom and eating generic brand cereal for several hours– until Malik texted him back.
Have you seen the news??
Bakura flipped to the local news. They were talking about increased traffic in the suburbs. He switched to a national channel, and there was some footage of a bus crash. None of these things seemed like something Malik would be interested in, unless Malik had suddenly become obsessed with distribution routes for his handbags.
You’ll have to be more specific, Bakura replied.
Malik sent a link. Pegasus LLC had just announced a rare card exposition to tour Europe, and it would be open two days in Madrid. In addition to rare and out-of-print cards, it boasted dueling workshops and meet-and-greets with famous players. The flyer at the bottom of the article was dominated by Exodia, but in the corner were little photos of Pegasus J. Crawford, Seto Kaiba, and the king of games of himself, all photoshopped to look like they’d taken the photo together.
What? Bakura texted back. You want to actually punch the king in the face?
Ha! Was Malik’s reply. Several minutes later, he followed up: What prank?
You broke in and lined up my game pieces like a weirdo, Bakura typed back.
Why would I do that? Malik asked. That seems more like something you’d do while blackout drunk.
Bakura frowned at his phone. It wasn’t unheard for Bakura to drink that much, but he didn’t actually like losing track of his nights, and he’d definitely spent all of yesterday sober.
We need to have a business meeting, Malik said, and Bakura rolled his eyes and left the message on read. He was getting so sick of ‘business’ and ‘meetings’ and this town. Maybe Ishizu was right and he should have done a technical program.
Except, no, that sounded equally mindlessly boring. He switched the TV back to the sitcom. How nice it must be, he thought, to live such a stupid and mindless life as these one-dimensional, poorly-conceived characters.
He must have fallen asleep on the couch, because suddenly it was dark and he was feeling groggy. He pushed himself up and stumbled for the light switch. He’d eat, maybe, and then go see if he could beat some new cards out of people. That seemed like a good idea.
While his frozen lasagna microwaved, Bakura went into his room to find an extra shirt for the chilly night air. The ring was laying on his bed, splayed out across the rumpled blanket.
Bakura had no memory of putting it there, but he shrugged it off. He grabbed a button-up and his shoebox of Duel Monsters card, and took them upstairs to the tiny second floor room that served as his kitchen. He sat on the balcony and sorted through his cards over dinner.
--
Malik texted him more about business meetings, and while Bakura understood why they couldn’t just text about what card Malik wanted swiped from a shop, or what handbag Malik wanted next, or a negotiation of Bakura’s pay, it was still really annoying.
Bakura texted Ishizu instead. He sent her a link to a page about the weird Eye of Horus and asked her opinion. She was studying this shit, so surely she’d have a good opinion on it, unlike Malik who just wanted to talk about acquiring rare cards.
What am I, your personal encyclopedia? Ishizu answered, hours later. Not even pretending to care how I’m doing first?
Bakura frowned at the message thread. Apparently the last time he’d texted her, it was four months ago and also about random trivia. He was pretty sure he’d seen her between that last text and now– she and Rishid visited Malik every once in a while– and Malik hadn’t gone on any emergency trips to Madrid recently, so obviously she was fine.
How are you doing? He texted.
How ingenuous, Ishizu replied instead of a real answer, and then she sent him a paragraph about how the tomb had been uncovered by accident by locals in January 2000, giving it the nickname “Millennium Site.” In addition to normal pottery and carvings, several mysterious gold artefacts had been uncovered, all emblazoned with the stylized Eye of Horus, nicknamed the “Millennium Items.”
Some people think it might be some sort of elaborate hoax, she concluded. It was uncovered in a site that had already been pretty thoroughly excavated in the 80s, and a lot of the artefacts don’t really fit with what we know about the times. Some genetic work was done on the mummy entombed there, too, and some fishy stuff came up.
Bakura did not know one thing about genetics, but apparently whatever they’d done indicated that the body wasn’t from that part of the country, and also they’d found traces of modern European DNA on the wrappings. Of course, that could be from any of the various researchers handling it.
Finally, Ishizu asked, Where did you find it?
Not even going to ask how I’m doing? Bakura answered.
Oh, I forgot you’re funny.
A guy was selling a thing with it on it, he said.
Where? Ishizu asked immediately. Did he say where he got it? Can you go back?
Bakura didn’t see why Ishizu would care. It wasn’t like something a guy was hawking on the street could be anything approaching a legitimate Millennium Item.
Sorry, he lied.
He tucked his phone into his pocket and went to pull the ring out of the kitchen drawer he kept random things in. It was kind of cool, he decided, to have something that was part of a weird mystery. Maybe Ishizu was onto something with her archaeology degree.
Malik wanted him to get a Dark Magician, because apparently Malik was now taking commissions from desperate duelists and Dark Magician was super popular. It was, after all, Atem’s trademark card. Bakura might as well go find a Dark Magician Girl too, since anyone with half a brain would want that next. Then again, people who just wanted to copy a celebrity’s deck might not have half a brain.
On his way into town, he bought a cheap faux leather cord and hung the ring around his neck from it. It was cool, after all.
--
Bakura woke up in the creepy storage room he wasn’t technically allowed in, sprawled over all the random crap his landlord kept in there.
The storage room was between the ground floor and the first floor, dug into the earth and then spackled white like the bathroom below it. The ceiling was so low he couldn’t stand fully in it, and the entrance was covered with a unevenly cut piece of black fabric.
The landlord kept things in there, and part of Bakura’s rental contract was that he wasn’t allowed in. The landlord promised that he’d call at least 24 hours in advance if he needed anything from the room, and it had seemed like a weird but bearable agreement to Bakura, especially given the landlord never asked about where Bakura’s money came from or asked to see payslips.
Bakura had, of course, gone through the room even before he’d finished unpacking from his move-in. It was overwhelmingly useless junk: old lamps and broken furniture, vinyl bags of old clothes, plastic toys from the landlord’s now adult son, a typewriter with missing keys. He’d been living here nearly two years and his landlord had not once come to get anything.
For a brief, terrifying moment, Bakura had had no idea where he was. His back was in knots, and when he flailed to get up, he banged his knee painfully on a chest of drawers.
He had no memory of going in there, and he had no idea why he would be tempted to. He liked the idea of a secret, forbidden room full of possessions, but they were all worthless objects he didn’t care about.
There was no light in the room, and Bakura stumbled and tripped and swore as he struggled for the exit. He crawled out onto the spiral staircase and went up to his living room to discover it was afternoon.
He remembered going down to the corner store at around 5pm the day before to grab some groceries, and then nothing else.
It was disturbing. Bakura had heard all sorts of horrible stories about people being drugged on the streets, or about people having breakdowns and losing track of themselves, but none of those things seemed like things that could happen to him.
He decided not to let it bother him. It was a fluke. He was going to be late to meet Malik. He took a long, cold shower that would make him even later to their meeting, and then walked down to the bus stop with his duffel bag.
“You said I wouldn’t have to do this anymore,” Bakura drawled as he dumped the contents of the duffel bag onto the collapsable table Malik referred to as his “work desk.”
Malik grabbed one of the handbags and zipped it open, examining the soft pink lining.
“They changed the shade of pink again,” Malik whined. Then he added, “We need to build up a good reputation with the cards before we can start making the real money–”
Malik went on a whole speech about how once people realized they could get unlicensed cards that played just as well as real ones, then they could get more customers and blah blah blah. Bakura had heard the speech before. He got out his phone and opened Candy Crush.
“And that’s why we’re entering the tournament,” Malik concluded, and Bakura looked up.
“What?” he said.
Malik twitched, scowling at him and putting his hands on his hips, exactly the way Ishizu did right before she was going to tell him he was a moron. “In Sevilla,” he clarified.
“In Sevilla,” Bakura repeated.
“For the Euro League prelims,” Malik stressed, now tapping his foot. “Just for the Sevilla tournament, you win 200 euros and Red Eyes Black Dragon. The grand prize for the whole League is the Winged Dragon of Ra and even more cash–”
Bakura snorted. “What, you think you can win? We’d have a better shot going in as audience members and then mugging the winner after.”
Or maybe not mugging– maybe Bakura would convince them to go to drinks, or follow them back to their hotel room and take all their cards, or maybe he’d corner them in an alley and make them duel him and show off just how much better he was. Yes, those all seemed like appealing options to him.
“If we pass prelims in Sevilla, the next round is in Paris,” Malik continued, “where the grand prize is–”
Bakura didn’t really care about prizes, though, and he rolled his eyes and went back to Candy Crush. Sure, he liked winning, and he liked getting stuff, but he’d rather do it his way than enter some stupid tournament.
“If you win, I’ll get another guy to get the handbags until Paris,” Malik finished.
Bakura glanced back up from his phone. “You’re covering travel expenses,” he said.
“Deal,” Malik agreed.
--
As far as Bakura could tell, the entire Ishtar family was prone to micromanaging. When they were younger, Ishizu would get it into her mind that they should take the university track at high school, or that Rishid should get a certain type of job, and then she’d insist that’s what was going to happen until it did. Malik did the same thing with his handbag crime syndicate– he’d just decide something and then he’d bully everyone around him until they all bent to his whims.
If Bakura were to do some psychoanalyzing, he’d blame their control issues on their batshit abusive father, now dead in some backwater village in Egypt. But just because it was understandable, it didn’t mean it wasn’t also incredibly annoying. Bakura agreed to this dumb tournament scheme, but that he didn’t need Malik to check his deck.
“Here,” Malik said, slapping four cards down on the table and then spreading them out with a swipe of his hand, like he thought he was some sort of casino dealer or something. “These would fit perfectly with your deck.”
“I don’t need your fake cards,” Bakura snarled.
“I’m sponsoring you,” Malik said, “so you could at least–”
“I’m going to play my way or not at all,” Bakura snapped, and Malik rolled his eyes as if Bakura were the unreasonable one.
“Whatever,” Malik said.
Malik did bully him into attending strategic meetings, which were mostly bullshit discussions about what cards they could reasonably make. Going after ultra rare cards was pointless– even if they could somehow clone a Blue Eyes White Dragon, everyone would know it was a fake since there were famously only four in the world.
“What about Exodia?” one of Malik’s lackeys asked, staring hungrily at the DM EXPO MADRID poster Malik had printed out and stuck to his corkboard bulletin board.
Exodia the Forbidden One had only ever been played once in an official tournament, and by the King of Games himself. The tricky thing with Exodia not a scarcity of cards, but rather the difficulty to summon. Plenty of people boasted having full sets, and Bakura himself had two pieces he’d gotten just from booster packs. It seemed like fair game.
“So that’s an option,” Malik concluded after Bakura shared his thoughts. “I like that. How much do full sets sell for?”
Bakura looked it up on his phone. It was a lot. The lackey who brought it up looked like he was on the verge of drooling.
Bakura zoned out for the rest of the meeting. He wasn’t one for efforts organized by other people, and he wasn’t much of a team player in general. Malik had never expected as much before– Bakura was a great go-to guy for procurement, less so for production and distribution– but unlike with the handbags, Malik must have thought Bakura was part the demographic interested in buying knock-off cards.
It was annoying. Bakura was going to have to communicate to him that this new arrangement wasn’t going to work out.
After Malik finished his final dramatic speech, Bakura remained in his chair, playing Candy Crush again. One of the lackeys– not the Exodia one, but the one bald who looked like he worked a haunted house in his spare time– paused next to his chair, leaning over and staring at Bakura with bulbous eyes.
Bakura ignored him for as long as he could, finishing the level. The guy just… stood there. Looming.
“Can I help you?” Bakura asked, arching a brow.
“I saw you,” the man said, and his eyes were wide and the circles under them so dark Bakura wondered if he’d sleep in the past week. “On the street.”
“That’s nice,” Bakura said, and attempted to nonchalantly go back to his game.
“It was night,” the man said, and Bakura was seriously considering just leaving immediately and never coming back. “You didn’t move.”
That was…. A really weird statement, and Bakura kind of wondered if that meant the man had seen him asleep. He really, really didn’t want to know, though, so he continued to ignore him.
The man shoved his own phone under his face. “Look,” he said, and Bakura had to lean back to be able to focus on what was on the screen.
At first he thought it was a photo. It was of a man standing in front of an ATM, at night in front of a closed bank. It was clearly Bakura– the combination of white hair and dark skin weren’t exactly common, and he could just barely make out the facial scars.
A couple, drunk and clinging to each other, passed by. Bakura remained immobile. It wasn’t a photo– he’d just been standing dead still.
“How long is this?” Bakura asked, grabbing the phone out of the man’s hand. “When did you take this?”
“I watched you for almost an hour,” the man said, his creepy eyes boring into Bakura.
The video was only three minutes long, but it was creepy enough. It was from the previous Sunday night– a night Bakura knew he’d been home on, because there was nothing to do on Sunday in this city.
“You didn’t even take any money out,” the man concluded. “You just turned and walked away, like a ghost.”
The man was giving Bakura a very expectant look. He could die waiting for an explanation, though, because Bakura had no idea what was going on.
“Don’t film me ever again, fucking creep,” Bakura snapped at him, and then stormed out of the office building.
It took two buses to get home, and while he was waiting for the transfer, Bakura ducked into a corner store and bought the first bottle of alcohol he saw. Examining it on the bus, it turned out to be stupid barely-alcoholic Don Simón sangria. At home he found half a bottle of whiskey, filled it the rest of the way with sangria, and then drank it until he passed out.
When he woke up he was still drunk, and still on his balcony floor, just now more horizontal. That was… good, maybe. He liked waking up in the same place, with the certainty his body hadn’t gone anywhere.
It was dark now, and he dragged himself back inside and nearly knocked over a lamp trying to turn it on. After some fumbling with his phone, he managed to log into his online banking. Nothing had changed since he’d paid rent by direct deposit on the first. Bakura had only ever been paid in cash and barely used his banking account; he kept the minimum in there, and then he’d periodically make deposits for rent or anything he anticipated needing to by on his debit card.
His doppleganger or nervous breakdown or whatever that had been hadn’t been successful with the ATM, then.
Oh a whim, he checked his history on his phone. No weird texts or calls to anyone, but his search history turned up several mysteries.
Two days ago were a series of searches on Granada and Spain in general. They were baffling in part because– well, they were in English. Bakura spoke English perfectly well, thank you very much, but it certainly wasn’t his go-to language from random searches, especially randoms searches about Spain.
The first search was Where is the Alhambra? And then his history showed that he’d gone from the Wikipedia page about the famous palace– which happened to be right down the road from his apartment– to the page on Granada, and then he’d searched “Granada to Narha,” which turned out to be a misspelling of the town of Nerja.
Why the hell had he misspelled Nerja? Spanish was a phonetic language. Bakura didn’t misspell things, even drunk.
Which– and he had to remind even himself of this– he hadn’t been drunk two days ago. In fact, passing out drunk last night seemed to have prevented him from doing… from doing whatever this was.
Malik had had a few psychotic episodes back in the day. Was that what this was? Should Bakura ask him about it?
No, he wasn’t going to do that. This wasn’t affecting anyone but him, so there was no point admitting it to anyone. He’d just deal with it, the way he’d just dealt with every other problem he had.