if this looks familiar it's because i've posted (the first chapter of) it here before; this has been edited slightly and will now be continued
background: ryou, bakura, and malik are women in this, everyone else is the same gender as they are in canon. ryou and malik are trans women and while i wrote bakura as cis i've kept it kind of vague (atleast with what i've written in advance so far) so if you want to view her as trans as well feel free
the main focus is going to be on ryou and bakuras relationship. torn/gravityshipping is endgame and puzzle/blindshipping is a main background ship. rating may end up bumped in the future.
Ryou wakes with the afterimages of red and gold imprinted on the back of her eyelids and the dull ringing of screams in her ears. The dreams slip away as her consciousness worms its way back to alertness and by the time she's fully awake only a vague sense of unease remains. She rises, pulls on her uniform, methodically brushes the tangles out of her hair and by the time she is out the door and on the way to school the feeling is already forgotten.
…
In her soul room Ryou looks like herself. Not - not the image she sees in the mirror in the morning or when she changes clothes, but her. It was an ecstatic feeling, the first time she noticed, before she got shoved in the dark and couldn't see anything and all senses went to more pressing matters. Like stumbling through the dark for some kind of exit and asking where am I?'s and who are you?'s that were only ever met with silence.
Things are stacked messily around the room - paint sets, carving tools, clay, boards and dice and books thrown wherever they may fall and making a minefield of the floor. The bed is large and piled high with pillows and covers and invites her to rest her head, but she ignores it.
There's a metal door, cold and gray and closed tight, but she bypasses it as well to dump her Monster World dice on the table. Her fingers seek out the die easily and she tosses it. She frowns when it lands but retreats back to the door anyway. It's heavy and refuses to budge, no matter how hard she pushes, and pulling proves as useless as always. She sighs, moving back to sweep up the dice.
Despite all her time here Ryou still hasn't figure out the exact rules for this place – but she's sure there has to be some way out, some puzzle or pattern to solve, if only she could find it.
…
The Spirit is messy, messier than Ryou, and unlike Ryou makes no attempt to not be. It is the first thing that Ryou notices when she wakes up from another blackout the day after the Voice stopped being the Voice and became the Spirit, and the longer the bodily takeovers last the more obvious it becomes. Her hair becomes a tangled, greasy nest and her clothes stick unpleasantly to her body like the Spirit was too busy for a bath or even a quick brush. Her stomach convulsed with hunger pains and her mouth tasted the foul way one does after not brushing for a week and the faint aftertaste of undercooked meats.
She cleans the dirt and dried blood - both, or just one, depending on the day - from under her nails and clips them down from sharp to bluntness and tries to avoid thinking about what her hands did when she was not awake to know. If she focuses hard enough for her vision to blur, she can pretend the stains are paint instead.
...
This needs to stop.
The thought is directed nowhere, and she feels no stir from the ring.
…
She does not call her father for help and he does not call her to check in when she begins missing too many days of school. Maybe the school could not reach him, buried out somewhere in the deserts of Egypt with his tools of escapism. But she doubts. Things were strained enough, after they died, but when Ryou turned thirteen and said, "I'm a girl," their connection nearly snapped.
Ryou looked enough like her mother without the clothes she stole from the back of her father's closet. She has her own, now, and prefers her jeans and long skirts and spare makeup to her mother's bright sundresses and heels, but it's enough. He doesn't say it, but she can tell by the way he never looks at her long when he's home from the trips that had been growing longer and longer each year.
He still sends money, the occasional gift, but phone calls are rarer and video calls stopped when she turned fifteen. She likes being by herself, and his work is important, so she tries not to hold it against him even when a voice whispers that she should.
…
The Spirit's fingers card through her hair roughly. Ryou wants to wince, but keeps her face carefully blank. Though she showed no interest in her own unruly mane, after finally appearing before her the Spirit seemed fixated on Ryou's - hers in the soul realm, not the physical, because they shared that; Ryou has to remind herself often now that they are separate beings, and she wonders, half with resignation, when she stopped viewing her body strictly as belonging to herself with an unfortunate parasite, and when the parasite became more symbiotic.
She knows it's a distraction - can feel the throbbing in her arm when she probes too close to check on her consciousness - and perhaps, an apology, but it's the lull of calloused fingers tugging with not-quite-gentleness and finesse through her locks to braid them that loosens her tongue.
Thoughts are fleeting, sluggish, hard to grasp, and her soul room shifts around her disorientedly, but she eventually manages to focus.
"Spirit?" She whispers, afraid to break the atmosphere. The Spirit lets out a low hum in reply.
"Did you have a family? It's just," She plunges forward despite the tightening of fingers at the base of the back of her neck. "You don't seem like the type to take care of your own hair this way, but maybe you had a-"
She expects the Spirit to lash out - slam her head to the ground and growl or yank her up by her hair - but instead she just vanishes. Ryou is left to sit herself up in the haze of mist overlooking space shuttles and stars, alone.
…
"You might as well give in and refer to me as Bakura, landlord," The Spirit says, mockingly, "All your friends do." Master and mistress and landlord might have seemed sincere at first, like all of the Spirit's intentions, but they never were, at least not fully.
"I can not stop you from stealing my body," Ryou traces the scar on the back of her hand idly, meeting the Spirit's transparent eyes as she stretches like a lazy monarch across Ryou's couch, "But I will not let you have my name, too." Her name is one of the few things she refuses to back down on when it comes to her Spirit. It hurts, hearing her friends refer to their enemy with Ryou's own name, but she knows they do so for lack of anything else to call her, and tries not to let it get to her.
...
The Spirit is either very kind or very cruel in the way she withholds things so efficiently, giving just the smallest touches to keep Ryou from crumbling in on herself or growing complacent.
Ryou wants to learn more about the Millennium Items, about the spirits, and when the Spirit asks her to build the diorama for her final game, Ryou agrees readily in return for the glimpses of the past the Spirit shows her to make things as accurate as possible. (Though, she thinks some things must be off, this is as close as she will get to the truth, so Ryou takes it.)
She loves her friends, distant though she's forced to be with them, and she has no misgivings about the spirits intentions for them, but she also trusted Yugi and his spirit to win against her own.
The doll for her Spirit is the last one she makes, and the one she spends the longest time on. Thousands of years trapped within a ring wastes ones memory, and though they were returning with the help of the Pharaoh's presence, the Spirit still struggled to remember her own name and face. She doesn't admit to it, but Ryou can't see any other excuse being true.
The skin is painted a warm brown that contrasts starkly against the mop of white - though much shorter than her own - that makes up the thief's hair. The scar is carved in and painted over carefully, the Spirit watching intently so close behind her Ryou could almost convince herself she could feel warm breath and that if she moved any closer, her chest would press in to Ryou's shoulders instead of passing through.
Her hand almost wavers at the thought (she could turn her head just slightly right now and maybe-) but through some deep buried will she manages to keep steady and finish the doll.
In the end, she doesn't get to see her Spirit disappear, and though she celebrates she feels almost cheated. Yugi got closure and strength from his spirit, but she was left with blank spaces in her memory and a million questions to never be answered.