Yu-Gi-Oh! Fan Fiction ❯ Solaris ❯ Chapter 3 ( Chapter 3 )

[ T - Teen: Not suitable for readers under 13 ]

A/N: The truth? I had totally forgotten I have an account here on Mediaminer too. But here's the rest of this ficcy…

Chapter 3

The dinner was a quiet one.

Kaiba ate his food bit by bit, in small morsels, slowly and systematically cleaning up his plate from the admittedly quite delicious meal someone had whipped up from canned foods. Surprisingly delicious. He suspected that Malik was behind it. He just couldn't imagine that Bakura, who was just attacking his stewing as if he'd still have to kill it before eating it, would have been able to conjure up something like this.

Malik was the one who also tried to keep up conversation, but his attempts were repelled by Kaiba's snorts and Bakura's smirks. After a while he too gave up, and they finished eating in silence.

Malik wiped his mouth with a napkin - while Bakura quite pointedly wiped his mouth on his sleeve - and sighed. “Well… how about a glass of something? Some liquor or brandy? Let's move to the library for that. It's a good place to talk.”

“Best idea for ages,” Bakura muttered and got up. “The drink part, that is.”

In the library Bakura poured whisky for Malik and Kaiba, and sat then down with the bottle. “So.” He took a drink from the bottle and sunk in his chair. “What did you want to talk about? The weather?”

“Shut up,” Malik muttered. “You of all should know this is serious.” He turned to look at Kaiba. “I know what you're thinking - well, you haven't made your thoughts any secret anyway, but…” He sipped his drink. “We do not have anything to do with this. If you don't believe our theory of where these … people come from, feel free to present your own. But we do not have anything to do with it.”

Kaiba leaned back in his chair and thought.

“You should be familiar with the resources we have here,” Malik continued. “Do you really think we would be able to do something like this? To… clone people here, on a space station run by two people, when the best laboratories in the world can't do it?”

“The fact they don't do it doesn't quite mean they couldn't if they wanted to,” Kaiba stated and laid his glass on the table. “But… I get your point. Unless you have some equipment here I am not familiar with…”

“You are quite welcome to check our equipment, if that would convince you,” Malik muttered. He stared at his drink for a moment. “You could, of course, try to talk with that look-alike of your brother. He might know something, or at least, as time goes by, with right questions, he might come to know, if you get what I mean.”

Kaiba frowned. “Not quit…” he started to say, but Bakura cut him off.

“That's what Mutou did. And then went and emptied a bottle of pills. Just so you know what the risks are in talking too much with people who shouldn't exist.” He took another big gulp from the bottle.

Malik sighed and shook his head. “Bakura told me he gave you his notes.” He got up. “I guess I might as well give you mine. Just a moment, I'll go to get them.” He emptied his glass and walked out of the room, leaving Kaiba staring at his drink that he hadn't even tasted yet. He raised the glass to his lips, grimaced at its smell, and did not drink. He did not enjoy whisky.

Bakura lay sprawled in his chair, head leaning back, staring at the ceiling. Every now and then he raised the bottle and took a small sip of it. He said nothing, which was fine for Kaiba. He did not like this weird man - in fact, he enjoyed his company even less than whisky.

Time passed. An old clock ticked quietly on the wall, a weird thing to have on a space station, Kaiba thought. He watched the clock face and its ornate numbers, and thought that it most likely belonged to Yami. Or… had belonged. A strange, uneasy feeling entered his stomach. It was still hard for him to think of Yami in past tense - in fact, he had not thought much about Yami in any way since watching the video tape. Now he wondered why… in the end it seemed to him that if he could figure out just what had happened to Yami, why he had done what he did and exactly what he was babbling about on that video, maybe then he would understand what was going on in this space station. He frowned at the clock and at himself, annoyed as he realized he had unconsciously been avoiding thinking about this.

The minute hand stirred. Bakura sighed loudly in his chair. Kaiba dropped his gaze back to his drink, shook it gently in his hand as minutes stretched by.

“What the hell.” Bakura stood up suddenly. “I'll go to see what's taking him so long.”

Kaiba placed his untouched drink on the table and got quickly on his feet too. “I'll come with you.”

They walked briskly, footsteps echoing in the empty corridors. The station was small, and it had not been hard for Kaiba to memorize the floor plan. He was glad of that - he did not like the idea of walking in strange places in even stranger company and not knowing exactly where they were going.

He heard Bakura curse softly when Malik's door came into view. The white haired man started suddenly to run. It took Kaiba a moment to realize the cause of his agitation - then he saw that the door was open. He hurried after Bakura who already had disappeared into the room.

The room was, slightly put, a mess. It was clear that Malik was not an orderly person - clothes and papers were lying here and there all across the floor and furniture. But that was not all; two chairs had fallen, someone had clearly knocked down a pile of books from the table, and… Malik himself was lying sprawled on the floor. Bakura crouched down beside him and with a quick touch to his throat said, “He's alive.”

“Well, that's a consolation,” Kaiba muttered as he took the scene in. “What the hell has happened here?”

Bakura shook his head. “I'm not entirely sure. But I've got a feeling we've got something dangerous lose here.”

“Really now.” Kaiba bent down to examine Malik, who didn't yet show any signs of waking up. “Yes, I'd imagine that's the case, unless he somehow managed to hit himself on the head. Are you really telling me you've no idea what - or who - could have done this?”

Bakura scooped his unconscious colleague into his arms and carried him to the bedroom. “He never told me,” he grunted as he placed Malik on the bed. “I did know something was going on - it started about one week before you arrived. One morning he came late to the lab, and had a cut lip and seemed quite disorientated. He kept his room locked after that… I asked him once if he was going nuts like Mutou, and he just shook his head and muttered something about having been there and done that years ago.”

“And you did not deem it important enough to investigate?”

“I thought he'd tell me if he thought I should know,” Bakura replied with shrug. “I guessed that he too had a visitor, but… those things are kind of personal. I don't like people nosing into my affairs - so I keep my nose out of other's affairs too. Unless they happen to interest me.

“I guess I should have been interested about this,” he added after a while.

“Apparently.” Kaiba was quiet for a while. “So, how is he?” he asked then.

Bakura glared at him. “Do I look like a doctor to you?”

Kaiba ignored him and eyed the bump in Malik's head with a frown. “That looks like a nasty hit… I wouldn't be surprised if he's got a concussion, at the least.” He looked over his shoulder as he got no reply and noted with annoyance that Bakura had left the room. After a while he heard water running in the toilet, then Bakura returned with a plastic cup in his hand.

He walked wordlessly to the bed, then threw the water from the cup on Malik's face. Nothing happened. Kaiba looked at him with arched eyebrows.

He shrugged. “Worth trying. You got any other ideas?”

“Yes.” Kaiba stood up. “We'd better catch this disturbance we've got here before it does further damage.” He looked around in the room. “Any clues here for what we're facing?”

They examined the two rooms that made up Malik's apartment but found nothing. Kaiba picked up some papers from the floor, looked at them with a frown and threw them then away.

“So…” he said, turning to Bakura. “Mokuba came for me, some weird kid to Yami, a maniac to Ishtar… don't you have a `visitor', as you called them?”

Bakura stiffened visibly. “None of you business.”

“I take that as a yes,” Kaiba muttered. “So, who is it in your case?”

Bakura glared at him. “What part of `these things are kind of personal' you did not get?” he asked slowly, and as Kaiba saw the look on his face, he decided to drop the subject. For now.

“Nnnh…”

A quiet groan came from the bedroom. As they returned there, they saw Malik trying to sit up on the bed, and failing quite miserably.

“Are you okay?” Bakura asked him, coming to stand by the bed. Malik tried to shot a glare at him, but failed in that too.

After a few attempts he managed to whisper, “Have been better.”

“Who is it?” Bakura asked. Malik looked at them with a troubled expression and said nothing. Bakura gave an impatient sigh. “We need to know. How dangerous is he? Or she?”

“He,” Malik muttered after a while. “And he's dangerous. Very.”

“Who is he?” Kaiba repeated Bakura's question.

Malik started to shook his head, but the little movement made him to wince in pain and he closed his eyes for a moment.

“Who's he?” he then muttered. “Not someone I'd have wanted you to meet… He's… well, simply put, he's me.”

“What?” That came out of Bakura and Kaiba simultaneously.

“It's… all about one… problem I had once, years ago… I… thought it was past now, but…” He breathed heavily and fell silent. “You know, I really don't want to talk `bout that. Not now, anyway.”

His voice sounded weak, and Kaiba nodded. “So, we've got a problem. How do you propose we solve it? You're saying there's no way to get rid of these people?”

“Yeah. I've tried. I managed once to lure him enter one of our small space shuttles and sent it off, adrift into space, but… but…” Malik swallowed. “Could I have some water?”

Bakura picked up the plastic cup and headed off to the toilet without saying a word. Once he had returned with a cup of water, Malik drank half of it and continued.

“He came back. Or it wasn't really `he', not the same one I'd lured away - I don't know if that one exists still, or if the shuttle is empty by now. But there came a new one, that night, and… I had luck then. Managed to lock him into the closet. I've no clue how he got out. When you came,” his eyes shifted toward Kaiba, “I'd just been talking with him. Trying to reason. But… he's mad. Stark mad. You can't reason with him…”

He sipped the water again. For a moment no one said anything.

“Fine.” Kaiba stood up from the edge of the bed where he'd been sitting. “We need to catch him and lock him somewhere. There's one thing though… do locks keep them out? Or rather, keep them in, in this case?”

Bakura nodded. “It's only when they first appear - then locks matter nothing and they come right to you. But they can't walk through walls or anything. So yes, I think that is what we must do for now, before we come up with a way to get rid of them. Permanently.”

There was something strange in Bakura's voice that made Kaiba to glance toward him, but the white haired man's expression was as unreadable as his tone. He turned back to Malik.

“Do you have any idea where we might find him?”

Malik shook his head weakly. “Not really. He… might have gone to the labs, maybe, but… I'm not sure.”

“We'd better go to search for him then.” Kaiba gave Malik an estimating look. “I guess you're not coming.”

Malik shook his head again. After a brief conference Kaiba and Bakura set off, locking the door behind them. They headed first to Kaiba's room to get his pistol - even if it would not kill the intruder, it would slow him down. Bakura had smashed one of the chairs lying on the floor, and was carrying a thick chair leg on his shoulder. “Just in case,” he had said at Kaiba's questioning look. Personally, Kaiba thought that he appeared a little bit too cheerful about it, but he didn't say anything.

As they came to Kaiba's room he headed toward his bed to get the gun, but before he reached it he stopped suddenly on his heels.

“What?” Bakura asked from the door.

He shook his head, staring at the nightstand in silence. He checked its drawer, ruffled a little his bed, and turned then to look at Bakura with a severe expression.

“It's gone.”

“What?”

“My gun. I left it on the night table, and it's not there anymore.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.” The word came out an angry snap.

Bakura was quiet for a moment. “Well. This might pose a problem,” he said then.