Title: Knifelight

Rating/Warnings: T/M (there's Initiation scene, which means child abuse and torture, some abused-becoming-the-abuser allusions, power/control issues, mental illness, basically the whole Malik enchilada)

Summary: Malik is Yami Malik is Malik.

No one on earth fears the dark as I do. Every night I sleep is pure terror.

- Malik Ishtar, YuGiOh! Duel Monsters manga, Volume 23, Chapter 142

I

t starts like this:

There's a candle on the table, dripping wax onto the floor.

He is ten years old and seven hours, seven hours of bleeding onto the stone floor of the tomb as its ever-present falling dust settles in and blackens his wounds. He is peripherally aware that he is trying to scream and failing, that he is dry heaving around the cloth gag shoved in his mouth, that a hand is rubbing a poultice into his latest cut that burns like fire and cobra venom, his skin is raising around it, the knife is cutting through it once again to raise it higher.

He is aware that he is dying, and that he's powerless to stop it.

This is foggy now, though, like a dream.

Mostly, there's a candle on the table, dripping wax onto the floor.

Pain has a strange way of focusing the mind, while at the same time taking it far away. At first there is nothing but his back and his weakness, nothing but the pain and the building pressure that backs up from his throat to his heart, as he tries and tries and tries and fails to scream around the gag. The small world of his own small body is all that exists, a visceral universe of pain and pressure and powerlessness, his lurching stomach, the sweat in his wounds, the frailty of his arms, his ribs creaking against the table, the sinews of his back.

And oddly, the candle on the table, dripping wax onto the floor.

The world is small enough to drift away.

The world is small, and he is small. He is the dust that's falling from the ceiling. He is the rivulet of sweat that meets the rivulet of blood. He is the gummy mess of god-knows-what that's drying on the floor, vomit and urine he doesn't remember because they left his tiny corporeal universe but that must have come from him. He is the candle on the table, the last candle still alight, he is the wax that's dripping to the ancient stone floor.

His ancestors bled here too, a thousand tiny bodies that bled and shit and puked for the greater glory of the Pharaoh. They sealed his memory in the scars and the wax of the hundred thousand dying candles that lit the way for the knife. They made a legacy of three thousand years of sweat and vomit and blood: an unchanging ritual of human excrement.

There's a candle on the table, dripping wax onto the floor.

Sweat and shit and sealing wax are all you'll ever be.

The candle has burned down to almost nothing, and he pretends this means it's almost over.

He is so small. The thin ropes at his wrists and ankles are stronger than he is; they hold him down. The knife on his back is smarter than he is; it will not let him think. The cuts on his back are bigger than he is; they will swallow him whole.

He is the candle on the table, dripping wax onto the floor. He is burnt down to almost nothing. He is tiny and weak and stupid and powerless and gone.

There's a candle on the table, dripping wax onto the floor.

The candle sputters out.

Breathe.

He is cracked open at the seams.

Breathe.

The tomb is in darkness. For just an instant, the knife stops.

Breathe, for I am half again as much.

He loves the darkness, because it was strong enough to stop the knife.

I am stronger than the knife, says the darkness.

He loves the darkness. He hates the knife.

The knife is in your father's hands.

The knife is the suffocating dust that's slowly burying the whole of the tomb alive. The knife is three thousand years of boys trembling like faltering candles in the darkness. The knife is his own shaking hands that chafe against the rope that binds them. The knife is his own weakness.

The knife is in your father'shands.

He loves his father.

I hate my father.

He hates his weakness.

We are stronger than the knife.

He breathes in the still darkness. He inhales, and dust and ritual and magic mingle with the bile in his throat. He breathes in the darkness itself.

Breathe, for we are half again as much.

A strike of flint. The dull thud of a new candle on the table. The clenching of his heart in his chest as he prepares for another round of pain.

Breathe, for you are half again as much.

The hiss of a new wick set alight. But the darkness is already in his lungs, and the tiny universe of his own body is half again as much.

Don't leave me.

I never will.

==o==

It goes on like this.

His wounds are wrapped in linen, and so is Rishid's face.

Mockery.

Rishid brings a candle to his chamber, and it flickers as the door shuts behind him. They stare at each other in silence, and the light is in Rishid's eyes. He keeps his back to the wall opposite Malik's bed.

He's good at that, your brother is, his back was to the wall when they dragged you away, when you screamed his name and he didn't even meet your eyes.

Rishid steps closer with the candle, and the light is still in his eyes. He unwraps his face. Fresh cuts ooze blood and sticky plasma, obliterating the writing there, and the candle in his shaking hand casts weird shadows against the rising scars.

Rishid balls the linen in his hand, and wipes the blood away. He doesn't even flinch.

Oh.

Malik recognizes the writing now. It's the first thing he ever learned to read. It's the first thing he sees when he wakes up in the morning and walks to the common chamber of the tomb. It's the loyalty oath to the Pharaoh, the oath etched inside the doorway to the tomb, the oath every tombkeeper – master, servant, slave – swears with their morning prayers.

But the Pharaoh's name is replaced with Malik's.

"Did you –?"

"Yes." Rishid's fingers are still clenched tight, as if clamped around an imaginary knife.

Malik reaches out towards his own name, and if there are tears in his eyes, it's because he's in pain. Because Rishid loves him. Because Rishid could have saved him. Because Rishid replaced the Pharaoh's name with Malik's, and isn't it rightfully so.

It means nothing. Look how shallow the cuts are, how steady his hand. Do you think he experienced anything like what we did? Do you think he pissed himself and puked and sobbed like you? The knife was in his own hand. It is a mockery and nothing more.

Rishid could be beaten for mocking their traditions.

The knife was in his own hand.

Rishid is so strong.

Rishid is the strongest man in the tomb. Rishid is stronger than your father. Rishid could have saved you.

I saved you instead.

Because he could not save himself.

Because your father had you tortured as your brother stood idly by.

Because they all swear loyalty to a Pharaoh who has them hog-tied and tortured from 3000 years beyond the grave.

The knife was in your father's hand.

And that is the question, isn't it. Because the knife was passed down from Pharaoh to father who cut him, from Pharaoh to brother who could have saved him, and surely this means that the Pharaoh holds the knives in the end?

When will the knife be in your hand, Malik Ishtar?

"Who should I hate?"

Hate the man who holds the knife.

==o==

It's pitch black the day they run.

That's all he remembers – that it's pitch black. He'd spent too long in the World Outside, too long in the sun. His eyes had soaked up the light like water on parched earth, and saturated; there was nothing he could see Below.

The flickering candles of the tomb are nothing now, and the darkness is everywhere.

The darkness is everywhere.

A whip cracks.

Rishid falls.

You see better than you think you can, Malik Ishtar.

(Perhaps he sees the candle light glint off the Millennium Items in the corner of the room.)

No. He sees nothing of the World Below. His eyes are in the sun now. He doesn't remember.

(And there's a knife across the room. There's a knife in the Rod.)

When will the knife be in your hand, Malik Ishtar?

He is in darkness. He doesn't remember.

(And if he runs from the tomb with the Rod and its knife, it is only because he found it there. And if there is blood on his hands, it is only because he grabbed his father's dying body as an act of love.)

He is in darkness. He doesn't remember.

He doesn't remember.

He doesn't.

==o==

The thing is, though; the thing is: he lives in half-light.

The city at night lights up like a second sun, and it's in the city lights he stays: a phosphorescent glow that never goes out, that shadows neon pink on neon green on brick wall graffiti at twilight. But the city light is false and he is false – he is a thousand times a liar, but he remembers the desert starlight. So he lives in half-light, swaths himself in the warm blankets of the streetlights and their sodium-glow pretending the alley isn't dark, and he knows it's all a lie.

But he walks the streets like he owns them, and he gleams like blade of a knife.

And if you lean against the alley wall, it's only because you can't breathe out. If your knuckles go white, it's not with the effort of keeping me in. I'm always here, and you're suffocating with lungs full of air.

If his knuckles are white, it is the Rod that is precious and meant to be held. And if he can't breathe out, he's dying.

Liar.

Yes.

Because that's how it goes, the valiant struggle of self-betrayal, the knuckle breaking grasp to the cliff-side as you slide down to the crevasse of who you really are. He's not seen cliffs since they left Morocco, he's mixing his metaphors; the sides of the metal-chrome buildings of Shanghai are steeper, and maybe that's why.

Or maybe we're just getting stronger every time you use the knife.

He shoves it down like vomit, bile and shame. He shoves it down like minds against him, because he's stronger every time. He shoves it down, because that'spower, and power is the white-knuckled grip and not needing to breathe, power is the Rod and the Knife and the Mission and yes.

So big and strong with your knife and Rod and gun.

Indeed, he says, I am.

You say power, I say pain; it's just blue bleeding into purple, and purple bleeding into black.

He knows. The difference between ambition and power is a few pretty words, between victory and destruction a clearer look in the eye. And he has thought about himself far too long not to know the difference.

Two sides of the same coin.

Sides implies a separation. You're just a step further up on a steep, steep cliff.

He knows. The darkness bleeds into him now, as he bled into it on the night of its creation. He knows he'll fall, his knuckles crack under the weight of the knife, but for the grace of all the gods he is a magnificent liar, and the city is so, so bright.

Hold on tight, Malik Ishtar. Hold on, and see if you can grip the knife without losing hold of the light.

And so he curls his toes in bed at sea and loses half himself at midnight. So he grabs hold to the wisps of identity as they sail past, grabs hold with teeth and claw and soul, until that alone is power, until he's bleeding into the darkness once again, until he is the knife made flesh and that flesh is wracked and torn as it had been on that first night and would be on every night to follow.

There's a crack in the ceiling and the dark shines through.

Bite your tongue, for I am half again as much. As much a part of you as the blood that throbs in your temples and the fingernails digging into your palm.

He knows. But power is worth this, he knows just as well, knows he will never be cut open as long as the knife is in his own hand.

The knife is in your hand, Malik Ishtar. And with it, what you call power and I call pain, what you call control and I call abasement, what you call victory and I call chaos. The knife is in your hand.

And he'll never be the little boy screaming in the darkness, because he is the darkness, and he knows now that he always has been.

The knife is in your hand, and your hand is in mine.

The difference between them is the blood in his cheek, the half-moons on the edge of his palm.