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There's a kid at the bottom of his pit, and for about half a second Bakura considers eating him.
Instead he says, hands on his hips and staring down at the scrawny little bastard sat there in the dirt: “You’re not a goose.”
The kid splutters at that, mouth agape and floundering for a reply. Bakura doesn’t blame him. He hadn’t been expecting to have a conversation with whatever fell into his trap, on account of it likely being one of the stupid geese he’s seen wandering around this shitty ruin on the way into town. The town bleeds into the bigger city a-ways down the river and the city streets all lead to the palace, and that’s where Bakura’s gonna wind up someday soon, but—
But today he was really, really expecting a goose.
“Why would I be a goose?” The kid’s found his voice and what sounds like a temper along with it, scrambling to his feet in a hooded cloak that looks far too big for him and clutching some ratty scrap in his fist.
“‘S a goose pit.” Bakura tells him.
“Who makes a goose pit in the middle of a—” he glances around, scowling at what little of the room he can see from six feet below it, “in an empty house?” He doesn’t wait for Bakura to answer before he demands, “Who digs a pit for a goose?”
“How’d you get in the pit?” Bakura snaps. He hasn’t spoken to anyone in at least a week, let alone had to defend his grand trapping strategies to some brat who didn’t watch where he was going. It’s his own fault if he hasn’t learned the rules of living out here by now. Bakura should just leave him here and it’d serve the little shit right, stomping in and asking questions like he’s the godsdamn pharaoh himself.
“Why do you even have a pit?”
“I need it!”
“Need it for what?” Gods above, does this kid not shut up? He’s standing like any city guard Bakura’s ever seen, chest all stuck out and chin tilted up even though it tips his eyes farther under his hood. If Bakura’d run across him in the city-proper and not out in bumfuck nowhere, he’d fit right in with the nobles' kids: full of smug bravado and thinking they’re entitled to answers from everybody under the sun.
“For stuff.” Bakura scratches at the back of his neck and squats down, sitting at the edge of the pit and letting his feet hang over. “You ask a lot of questions, don’t you know anything?”
The kid frowns and twists the scrap of fabric between his fingers. It’s a nervous habit that undercuts how tough he’s trying to look. “That was a question.”
He’s got Bakura there. “Huh, shit. You’re right.” The kid’s jaw drops like he’s never heard somebody curse before. Bakura rests his elbows on his knees, feet kicking at the wall of the pit and sending down a spray of dirt.
The kid scowls up at him, pushing his hood back from where it slips over his eyes. “Are you going to help me out?”
“I’unno.” Bakura scrubs a hand across his face. It comes away gritty. “Haven’t decided yet.”
“I won’t ask you any more questions if I’m not in your pit,” the kid points out. Then as an afterthought, he asks, "What's your name?"
"It's—" He nearly tells the truth, just to hear it again even once, telling it to a stranger who has no idea it’s been years since anybody’s said it out loud. But then again what's it matter anymore, the real one? "Bakura. It's Bakura."
The kid wrinkles his nose. "Bakura? You're a foreigner?"
"Sure thing." The story comes easier to him now, now that he's committed to telling the tall tale. And with a captivated (captive) audience to boot. "I'm Bakura from the South," he says, and it tastes like the truth already. "Came up with that caravan that rolled into the city last week."
"Ah."
"You?"
The kid's face flickers through a thought process that looks eerily like the one Bakura just had, but he's not about to start asking questions. Bakura'd like to say this kid looks a little young for keeping big secrets but then again, he had been too when he'd started.
A rock bounces off his ankle, jerking his attention back down. "Asennu," says probably-not-Asennu, brows furrowed like he had to think real hard to come up with it.
Makes him look a bit like a wet cat, Bakura decides, but keeps the thought to himself. “You’re not from around here, Asennu.” He doesn’t make it sound like a question because it’s not one. A few years ago Bakura hadn’t looked like he belonged out here either, but he’d never quite looked this lost. He’d always had enough smarts to watch his feet, anyway. “You live in the city.”
Asennu’s face is stone-cold sincere and Bakura’s impressed at how he doesn’t even flinch at being caught out. “My father works in the palace,” he admits, like it’s no big deal and Bakura was right—this is some scribe’s brat who's got in way over his head. Asennu crosses his skinny arms across his chest. “I wanted to go explore but he wanted me to stay for lessons so I went anyway.”
Bakura clicks his tongue. “Sounds awful.” Asennu looks mollified that Bakura agrees, which means he hasn’t realized he’s being made fun of. “What lessons?”
“Star-charting,” Asennu grouses.
“Like tracking the constellations to see where you’re going?” Bakura grins when Asennu nods. “Think paying attention might’a kept you from walking into a trap made for a bird?”
Whatever retort Asennu’s gearing up to make—like the fact that the sun hasn’t even set yet—dies on his tongue as his stomach growls. This is, Bakura’s aware, the exact opposite of how he’d expected this afternoon to go, but it’s been nice. Asennu will probably be gone in the morning, back to his father in the palace if he was telling the truth or off somewhere else if he wasn’t, but for tonight Bakura decides he can spare some supplies in exchange for the company.
“Right,” Bakura sighs, chest heaving dramatically even as he grins, “come on.”
He hears it when he rolls onto his stomach, ear close to the ground as he reaches to help Asennu out of the pit. A rattling coming closer, like bricks and tile on the back of a builder’s cart or—or bronze plating on soldiers’ armor. On palace soldiers’ armor.
And then, as Asennu reaches up for his hand Bakura gets his first good look at what he’d thought was a dirty scrap of cloth. Covered in mud and dust but it’s fur, leopard’s fur, there’s only a handful of people in all of Egypt with the gods-given right to wear it and one of them is in this pit—
It’s the same rush of understanding he gets when a knot comes loose under his fingers or a bolt slides free only this time, this time his reward is a punch of cold dread as he scrambles backwards, jerking his arm back from the boy. Somebody outside yells a name and it sounds like the lid of a casket sliding home, like the hiss of melting gold—if Bakura’d had even a flicker of doubt, he doesn’t anymore. “Are you there?! Atem!”
Bakura skids out of the house just as people move past the doorway to the room he’d been in. He presses himself flat to the wall, fingers catching on a gap in the bricks. Dropping to his knees he looks through it; the guards haven’t found Atem yet, they must’ve stormed right past the main room to head down the hall.
Now’s his chance to make a break for it but to the beat of his pulse he can hear them, the ghosts he’ll never truly put to rest, shrieking for him to turn around, to finish this, to run back and kill the prince and damn the consequences—and Atem is strangely silent, not calling out for help until someone shouts his name again as they storm into the main room at last.
The fury of the voices then is terrible, whipping into a frenzy so loud it brings tears to his eyes, until Bakura can’t hear anything but ringing in his ears as he clutches his head and kneels trembling in the dirt.
“I haven’t seen anyone,” Atem is telling one of his rescuers when Bakura pulls himself back together, talking to an older boy who looks furious even as he runs his hands down Atem’s arms to reassure himself the prince is alright. “Mahad, really—I’m fine!”
Somehow, Atem’s insistence makes Mahad look even less convinced. “And you’re sure you were alone?”
“I’m sure.” Atem turns then, gaze skating over the crack in the wall Bakura’s pressed to. “There was no one here.” He glances at the wall again and this time, he meets Bakura’s eye. “Just a couple of geese.”
“I know your name,” Bakura says, a long, long while later.
“How?” The pharaoh is resplendent, there’s no other word for it, in his court with his tinkerers and his toys and Bakura’s here too—just like he knew he would be. There are no windows facing south in this part of the palace but Bakura likes to think if there were, he could watch the city bleed back into the town and the town’s edge trail all the way to a shitty little patch of ruins where he could have finished all this before it ever started.
Bakura shrugs, the weight of stolen treasure on his back a comfort he’d half-forgotten. “You told me.” He rests a foot on the old pharaoh’s corpse and croons, “Do you want to know what it is?”
“Tell me!”
Which isn’t an answer, really, but Bakura decides to let it slide. “Your name is Asennu,” he says, wind picking up around him as the shrieking roar of voices rises in his ears, Diabound shifting under his skin. “Your father worked in the palace, and you hated your astronomy lessons."
The pharaoh jerks back like Bakura hit him—he’s livid, yes, but there’s something else, a flicker of doubt like the ripple of leopard’s spots. If Bakura were feeling particular maudlin here, at the end of everything, he’d say perhaps the pharaoh was starting to remember. “That’s a lie!”
“Fine.” Bakura drags a hand across his face—it comes away gritty. “Forget I asked.”