#illadvice

 Joey doesn’t think of the past often ( the willing kind of thought that isn’t in a rush to remove itself like a familiar, nauseous blur ), but when he does, he remembers the sun. The bare, hot sun across the deserts of Egypt where the sky is blue and nothing else. His friends on the brink of freedom towards the rest of their lives where shadow games cease to exist, and are replaced by something normal.

He is still trying to find ‘normal,’ but he’s starting to think it doesn’t exist. The world after Atem’s departure is something else; not quite a reality so easily grabbed, always something slightly off. Something replaced. Something foreign. 

He can’t go back to what once was, but he can try for the feeling. The drugs should kick in in another thirty minutes or so, and until then, Joey finds this park bench particularly comfortable to stretch on as he closes his eyes, face towards the sun like it had been all those years ago.

Just as his muscles begin to relax in this position, he thinks he might have a fighting chance in deceiving his mind... until something blocks his light, and he shifts in annoyance, a hand trying to shield his eyes as he cracks one open at the silhouette person above. 

*calls the police*

                    Perhaps showing up on his former partner in crime’s doorstep, utterly unannounced, without his knowing he was even alive let alone in Egypt was what some might call ill conceived. Those some, however, did not include one Ryou Bakura who had in fact enabled it and given him the Egyptian’s address. But shock and minimal fighting aside, it wasn’t even anywhere close to the long list of bad ideas Bakura’s had in his many years.

                    He leaned against Malik’s bike a small backpack resting at his feet as he waited for the Ishtar to get his things together before they ventured into the desert.

                    Bakura was in Egypt for something more important than to bother Malik Ishtar, after all. He didn’t need to leave Japan to do that. But he did need to see it with his own two eyes that Kul Elna was silent. Ryou could promise all he liked that the 99 souls of his people had passed with the damned pharaoh, but he needed to see it. Needed to walk into those ruins and find them cold and silent and not haunted with the screaming ghosts of his family.