Chapter Text
When had Yugi stopped telling his grandpa things?
It used to be that Sugoroku knew every minute detail of his grandson’s life: what he’d had for lunch, which bullies were giving him a hard time, what new games were popular with the elementary school kids. But these days—ever since Yugi had solved the Millennium Puzzle, really—he knew that the kid was leaving a lot out whenever he shared how his day had gone.
He supposed it was just part of being a teenager. Part of growing up, even. And he supposed he should be glad that his grandson was finally gaining the confidence and independence to take care of his own problems without needing his grandpa’s help, strange as some of those problems might be.
That said, it sure would have been nice to know that Bakura had a Millennium Item before he found himself face to face with the damn thing in a hospital room.
Now, Sugoroku wasn’t terribly familiar with Bakura. He was the newest addition to Yugi’s group of friends and quieter than the others to boot. The only thing Sugoroku really knew about the kid was that he tended to gravitate towards the dice and modeling supplies in the game shop whenever he was waiting to meet his friends there.
Even so, he was absolutely sure that the thing glaring down at him with Bakura’s eyes was not the polite young man who paused to admire every little unpainted figure in the store from time to time. Seeing the—well it had to be the Ring, didn’t it, given the shape—seeing the Millennium Ring appear around his neck out of thin air just confirmed it.
“Who are you?” he whispered numbly, suddenly aware of just how much taller than him Bakura was.
The Ring was starting to glow, which couldn’t possibly be a good sign. Sugoroku backed up a few steps and held up his hands defensively.
“O-Okay, I see you have places to be. You don’t want to stay in the hospital—and really, who does?” Sugoroku felt his back hit the wall. The glow from the Ring threw the shadows in the room into stark relief; they shifted as the thing-which-wasn’t-Bakura moved, crawling hungrily around Sugoroku’s feet. Think fast, think fast. “But I have a proposal for you, if you’re willing to hear me out.”
The thing raised an eyebrow and smirked. “And what do you think you could possibly offer me?” it said in not-quite-Bakura’s-voice.
“A ride,” Sugoroku blurted out. “We’re only a couple blocks from the game shop, and we could go get the car. You got a Duel Disk from god knows where while you were away from the group—I’m guessing that means you want to go make up for lost time in the tournament now?”
The thing blinked at him, expression unreadable. At least the eerie glow seemed to have died down.
“Listen,” Sugoroku continued. “You’re nearly done being treated here, but you’ve lost a lot of blood. Just...Just stay until that IV is done so you won’t be dehydrated. Please. It’ll set you back maybe half an hour, and then I’ll drive you wherever you want to go. No questions asked. I guarantee you’ll save more than half an hour if you don’t have to cover the whole city on foot, plus you won’t have to worry about walking for hours in the condition you’re in. Deal?”
They stood in tense silence while the demon, or whatever it was, considered this, all the while glaring at Sugoroku with a sharpness and intensity that just looked wrong on Bakura’s face. Sugoroku gulped, wondering what his options would be if this thing rejected the offer. Could he grab the Ring and get it off of Bakura fast enough to catch it by surprise? Would that even work if he could manage it? He wasn’t feeling optimistic about it.
Finally, the creature scoffed and rolled its eyes. “Fine,” it hissed. “I guess I could do a little deckbuilding while we wait.”
“Great idea!” Sugoroku squeaked, a little too enthusiastically, as he remembered how to breathe. “I actually have some of my cards on me, if there are any you want to borrow!” It looked deeply unimpressed by this, but did end up thumbing through the stack of cards lazily, pocketing a Diabound Kernel after staring at it for a good twenty seconds.
They fell into a strange sort of silence while the demon took out a deck of cards and started sorting them into little piles for consideration. Sugoroku chanced a curious glance over its shoulder before being shut down instantly by a withering glare. Even from the little bit he could gather, the deck had a pretty obvious spirits/undead theme. A little bit on the nose, honestly.
Satisfied that the poor kid at least wasn’t about to be dragged out of the hospital and all across town, Sugoroku sat back down and tried to distract himself with a newspaper he’d picked up in the waiting room. He couldn’t help casting occasional nervous glances toward the bed, though. The thing occupying Bakura’s body was surprisingly absorbed in its cards; it looked almost human, if you could ignore the slightly unnatural edge to its movements. After a few minutes, it was almost comfortable to be in the room with the thing, and Sugoroku was content to leave it to its deckbuilding and try to focus on reading about the museum’s new Egypt exhibit.
That is, until he actually caught a few words of what it was murmuring to itself, which commanded his full attention again.
Sugoroku weighed his options. On the one hand, whatever was sitting in that hospital bed could probably kill him with a thought, and he got the feeling that it might actually do so if he tested its obviously limited patience any more. On the other hand, he was about ninety percent sure it had just muttered “...sahf, hamon, pasit, met...” under its breath as it counted out the cards in a pile.
There was a brief struggle between his nerdy curiosity and his self-preservation instincts, and damn it all, the curiosity won. He did wait for the thing to finish counting before saying anything, though. It wouldn’t do to get his soul ripped out before he could get an answer to his question, after all.
“...If you don’t mind my asking,” he began, and froze when its eyes snapped up to meet his. The seconds crawled by and nothing catastrophic happened, so he swallowed hard and continued: “...were you speaking Egyptian just now?”
That gave it pause. It frowned, gazing off into space, down at the cards it had just counted, and back up at him. It shrugged. “I...guess?”
“Is- Are you- Is it-” Sugoroku had to pause to collect his thoughts a little. “Were you...around in Ancient Egypt? Is that your native language? You can still speak it after all this time?”
Another noncommittal shrug from the demon. Ghost. Whatever. “What does it matter to you?”
“I’m...I used to be a bit of an amateur Egyptologist, myself. That’s- that’s how Yugi got the Puzzle, actually, I brought it back from a tomb a long time ago. And one of the big questions in Egyptology-”
“You brought what back from where?” the thing cut in, bewildered. Sugoroku blinked at the sudden interest. It was leaning back now, looking him up and down like it was seeing him for the first time.
Sugoroku grinned sheepishly and scratched the back of his head. “Well, I may not look it now, but I did get up to all sorts of wild things back in my youth. Of course, those days are long behind me. Even if I wanted to go off on an adventure now, my knees sure wouldn’t appreciate it, hoho!”
The thing’s expression had lost some of its venom by now; Sugoroku was met by a bemused smile.
“Heh. You know, that’s basically how this kid got this,” it said, holding up the Ring. “Archaeologist dad.” It smirked at him, leaning in closer. “I always kinda wanted to ask what it felt like, knowing you’ve handed your own kid over to something like me. You sleep okay at night?” Sugoroku didn’t respond; the thing just cackled.
“A-Anyway,” Sugoroku continued as the laugher died down, “What I was trying to say was, I’ve had an interest in Egypt for a long time. Even have a few good archaeologist friends who research it! And, well, I’m fairly sure they’d kill me if I spent half an hour with a native speaker of Ancient Egyptian and didn’t ask a few questions about the language.”
“Didn’t they already figure it all out, though?” the spirit asked, frowning. “I thought they could read the writing. It was a whole...thing.” It gestured vaguely. “There was like, a rock that translated it for them or something.”
“But that doesn’t tell them what it actually sounded like!” Sugoroku protested. “We know what the writing means, but trying to read it out loud is all guesswork. Especially since you didn’t write down any vowels.”
“What the hell is a vowel?”
“It’s like...it’s a kind of sound where...” What the hell was a vowel, actually? “Like, if you were going to write the name Bakura in hieroglyphs, you’d just write it bkr. And people today would have no idea whether that’s supposed to be Bakura or Bukori or Abkra or, or anything else. It’s all educated guesses.”
“Uh...huh?” The spirit’s eyes were boring into Sugoroku.
“A-And there’s this other letter...let’s see...” There was a pad of paper on the table by the bed; Sugoroku took it and shakily sketched out what he hoped would be a legible bird. “This one. How do you pronounce this? None of the other languages around seemed to have whatever sound this was.”
“Lemme see.” The demon squinted thoughtfully at the drawing. “Oh yeah,” it deadpanned, “That one is pronounced ‘do I look like a fucking scribe to you?’”
They looked at each other for a long awkward moment while phrases like 1-5% literacy rate flashed across Sugoroku’s mind. The spirit broke out laughing.
“Not much help for your academic buddies, am I?” it spat out, grinning almost bitterly. “And your king doesn’t remember, does he? Sorry you’re stuck with the one who can’t read and talks like a gutter rat.”
The ghost started to turn back to its piles of cards.
Sugoroku was practically dumbstruck. “That’s...actually more interesting for a historian, you know,” he murmured, almost inaudibly.
“What?”
“I mean...think about it. Everything we know about Ancient Egypt today is based on writing. You can’t just go chat with someone, it’s all royal proclamations and letters between nobles and recordkeeping, stuff like that. And it tells us a lot! But there’s so much more that was never written down,” he said, looking the demon right in the eyes. “No one’s ever heard just...a normal guy talking normally.”
The thing in the hospital bed blinked, then looked Sugoroku up and down critically for a moment. Finally it chuckled a bit, shaking its head.
“You know what? Sure. We’ve got some time to kill,” it said, leaning towards Sugoroku with a terrifying sort of glee buried deep behind its eyes. “Wanna hear a scary story?”
Sugoroku eyed the Ring warily. “As long as you aren’t planning to make it interactive, I’m all ears.”