Keeping This Tomb by Made-in-Wonder

Title: Keeping This Tomb
Author: made-in-wonder
Pairing: Malik Ishtar/Isis Ishtar
Disclaimer: I don’t own Yugioh. Incest here implied more than outright, but. Siblings. Yeah.

Their flat - sparse, modern, colorless - didn’t look like the home of an international criminal mastermind. That was the point. Yet it always reminded Rishid of the tombs in which they’d grown up, as if even after deserting they had never really left.

Malik rolled into the flat like a storm front with Rishid the wisps of cloud trailing behind. He stalked their living room like a man intent on his destination - but kept having to make a right-angle turn, walk in a square, go nowhere. Rishid slipped into the kitchen to put water on for tea. They were home.

Rishid was still out of sight when Malik spoke.

“She’s grown up, hasn’t she.”

“Yes, Master Malik,” Rishid agreed. He’d taken his own opinions away from the day’s encounter, but they would remain unspoken.

Malik spoke again. Rishid decided to remain in the kitchen. “I didn’t notice the first time,” Malik was admitting. Rishid blinked, started preparing dinner. “But she’s a woman now. The Secretary-General!” He chuckled in scorn. “Forever guarding tombs.”

“She opposes us,” Rishid stated. Malik prowled by the kitchen to snort in person. “Of course she does,” he remarked. “She’s the good one. Loyal to the Pharaoh over even the family!”

“Yes, Master Malik,” Rishid concurred. He’d dwelled on this divide plenty on the long ride home from the museum. If Malik supposed as much, he neither indicated as much nor seemed to care.

“She refused me,” Malik revealed, his voice hard and cold yet layered with petulance. “She won’t let herself understand! But she’ll see, in time.” The voice grew soft, fond: filled with an affection Rishid didn’t often hear. “I’ll save us, and then she’ll come back.”

He’d be expected to agree again, Rishid knew, but couldn’t speak. Their sister was a stranger now. They could no longer say what she would or wouldn’t do.

The silence lay between them. Rishid waited for disapproval. It didn’t come.

“Hey, Rishid.” What did come sounded thoughtful, pensive. Hesitant. Rishid almost left the kitchen, but Malik would wish to remain unseen. “Does she look like our mother?”

Rishid considered, once he could think again.

“Somewhat,” he finally admitted. Malik had never asked about his mother before. Rishid hadn’t brought the woman’s face to mind in years, either. It’d been replaced.

“I knew it.” A pause betrayed an inclination of Malik’s head; a rustle, that he’d sat down. The tea was ready. Rishid poured Malik a cup and brought it to him where he sat. Malik accepted the cup but didn’t bring it to his lips, slouching slightly in the chair. He shifted, crossed his legs. “So our mother was beautiful, too.”

After another pause, and a refusal to think about it, Rishid nodded.

Malik smiled, touched the brim of his cup to his lips and sipped. “I thought so,” he murmured, his expression faint and distant. “Good.”

“Yes, Master Malik.”

Rishid was halfway back to the kitchen to finish dinner when Malik spoke again.

“Her namesake married her brother,” Malik mused aloud. “She understood loyalty.” Rishid bowed his head. He didn’t want to remember the rest of the myth: the brother-husband torn apart, his self splintered, scattered, discarded in the Nile like so much rubbish. Destroyed by chaos, by darkness and the god of foreign lands. Of the unknown.

In the myth, the goddess Isis had tirelessly hunted the pieces, sewn them together, made her brother whole again. Rishid pondered this ending. He trusted. He prayed.

He slipped into the shadows of the modern-day tomb, returning to his duties. If the goddess alone could tie the thread, he at least could keep this tomb and stand guard over the pieces.