I don't usually write things on impulse. I'm the kind of person who has an obsession with plotting out things very clearly for weeks before writing them. But I was thinking last night and this idea just wouldn't leave me alone. So I wrote it in two hours and now I'm posting it because I thought it turned out rather well.
It's mainly an exploration of Ryou's and Yami Bakura's characters, and also some practice for me when it comes to writing in present-tense. Tendershipping is sort of implied a little bit if you squint, but I wouldn't say that it's romantic in the slightest. Hope you enjoy!
Ryou Bakura has dreams, sometimes. Most of the time they're vague and abstract, confusing enough to make him forget about them as soon as he wakes up. Sometimes they're clearer, more vivid, some less pleasant than the others, but they don't wake him up in the middle of the night.
There is one dream that does, however. One that always manages to startle Ryou awake even at the latest hours and keeps him awake for a long time afterwards, the shock it causes far too heavy to ignore and go back to sleep after.
The dream, or more exactly the nightmare, about that one day.
He has played the sequence over and over again in his head even while awake; he knows it by heart by now. But still, the dream makes its return over and over again.
The details somehow manage to stay the same, each and every time he dreams it. Yet, even though he knows it by heart, he still can't seem to recognise the dream while he's dreaming it. And when he does, it's too late.
The dream always begins on a morning. He's eight years old and is playing his new Monster World board game with his older twin sister Amane. She's giving him a sulky look, one that tells him that he has to be careful with him next words.
"I want to be Game Master!" she declares confidently with a demanding tone in her voice. Amane doesn't bother asking. She knows that her sweet brother will always let her have the last word. Ryou doesn't protest because he doesn't want to argue with his sister. He still feels bitter, though; why does she always get to do all the fun things?
"Of course", Ryou says, and Amane's lips lit up in a smile. Ryou loves seeing that smile. Amane has always been like that; the more open and daring one. Maybe it's because she's the oldest, but she's always had a bit of a bossy streak. But she's also Ryou's best and only friend, and so, Ryou always lets her lead. The game will be a lot of fun anyway, and maybe she'll let him be the Game Master next time.
Then, Mum comes in. She's smiling widely at the sight of her children playing together. She's a peaceful woman, her light blue hair and green eyes so alike her daughter's.
"Amane, we need to go shopping", she says. Amane lets out a groan at her words.
"But Mu-um! Can't you see me and Ryou are playing a game?" The stubborn look in her eyes makes Ryou happy; Amane always wants to spend time with him, unlike all the mean kids at school who tease him for his long hair and call him a girl.
"We need to buy you a new dress, Amane", Mum says. "Ryou can come with us too, and then you can keep playing when we get home."
"Okay", Amane begrudgingly accepts. "But only if you buy me Duel Monsters cards!" While Ryou has always preferred the board game Monster World, the card game Duel Monsters is Amane's true passion. She wants to be a professional Duel Monsters player when she gets older and never hesitates to point it out. For some reason, Ryou's brain can't ever resist to point it out, either.
At that point, the dream usually changes. The three of them are in the car, with Mum driving and Ryou and Amane in the back seat. They're on their way home, and Amane is wearing a brand new red dress. Her light blue hair is also tied up in pigtails with two pink ribbons that Mum also bought for her. She's tearing open a Duel Monsters booster pack, an excited look gleaming in her green eyes.
"Oh! Look, Ryou!" she yells. "I got Change of Heart, and Dark Necrofear! These cards are really good!" Ryou glances over at the cards; he's not truly interested but his sister is excited so he wants to see anyway. It's usually at that moment he gets a sense of Deja-vu, followed by a few seconds of complete and utter terror. There's not enough time to change the course of the dream. There never is.
And then everything is screeching car tires and the screams of his mother and sister, and the horrible sound of metal crashing into metal. Ryou looks into his sister's eyes, sees the complete utter terror in them before everything goes black.
He wakes up drenched in cold sweat every time, gasping for air. It takes him several minutes to stop breathing heavily and get back to his senses. Ryou has to tell himself the same things over and over again. It was just a dream. That was eight years ago. Mum and Amane are long gone. Reliving the scene in dreams is still never going to be worse than the real thing. The first few years he could cry for hours after waking up. He doesn't cry now, not anymore. But even without tears, the pain is still there. It will probably always be.
Sometimes, Ryou thinks about calling Dad. Wherever he is, it would probably be daytime when it's midnight in Japan. But he always changes his mind. It would only upset him more anyway. So Ryou sits alone in his empty apartment and stares at the wall, thinking of the one day that tore his family apart.
One night when he wakes up, the Spirit of the Millennium Ring is sitting on his bedside, looking at him. Ryou expects him to make a mocking comment; make fun of him for being so weak and pathetic, dreaming of his dead family even eight years after their deaths. But the Spirit doesn't. He just sits there in his transparent form and watches Ryou silently.
Seconds pass. Nothing happens. It's like they've shared some sort of understanding. Ryou wishes the Spirit would understand the pain. That the Spirit would offer Ryou comfort. But why would he? He's an immortal ancient being, after all. Human mortality probably doesn't make any sense to him. Not to mention that he also hates Ryou's guts.
The Spirit offers no comfort, so instead, they sit together without saying a word, staring at each other as the clock ticks slowly towards morning. Ryou thinks he can see tears in the corners of the Spirit's eyes, but dismisses it as a trick of the light. There are no mocking words, no snarky comment, just silence. And in those moments, Ryou wonders if things could have been different between the two of them.
He wishes Mum and Amane were still here. He wishes that one day never happened. He wonders if that would make his current life better. The Spirit is the only one he has right now, and somehow that just makes him feel even lonelier.
The Spirit of the Millennium Ring had hoped to rid himself of the dream when he was sealed within the Ring and became what he is today. He's technically dead, after all; he shouldn't be able to dream anymore. But apparently, as long as one has a soul, even if it is as dark and corrupted as his, one can still dream.
Every night he dreams. No exceptions. And there is only one dream, no variations; every night it's the same one. He can't escape it, no matter how hard he tries.
The dream, or more exactly the nightmare, about that one day.
The memory plagues him even when he's awake, but over the 3.000 years he has existed he has learnt how to keep it under control and at bay. However, when he sleeps within the Millennium Ring, his subconscious turns against him every single night.
It begins very similarly every time. He is transported back in time with this dream; for a few moments, he's no longer a bitter 3.000-year-old spirit, but instead he is a young child living in the village of Kul Elna. He's arguing with his mother.
"No, Bakura, you're not allowed to leave the village!" his mother shouts. She and he were always very similar, both in looks and behaviour; tall, long white hair, the same shade of dark skin, and of course the same temper.
"Why not?!" the child he once was retorts angrily. "I'm old enough to take care of myself! All the other kids get to go outside the village!" That's a lie, and they both know it. However, his mother is clearly so irritated by now that she doesn't care anymore.
"Fine!" she yells back. "Get out then! And don't come whining to me when you get bitten by a snake or stung by a scorpion!" As the little brat he is, he grins and runs away from his angered mother, out to explore.
The dream always switches scenarios at that point. He's heading back to his village after a long day of exploring; he's in a great mood but he is starving. He hopes his mother isn't angry anymore and has made something for him to eat. It's getting dark already, and when he approaches the village he sees that there's an unnatural red light glowing from it. Fire, he realises, and begins to run. His good mood is replaced with worry for his mother, and it's usually at this point that he realises that he's dreaming.
When he comes into the village, the shock hits him every time. The Pharaoh's soldiers are there, and they're dragging everyone with them; every single person from his village. He tries to spot his mother among them, but can't find her. Peeking out from his hiding place in a dark alley, the smoke from the fire paired with the sheer terror of the sight before him makes it hard for him to breathe. It feels so real. A dream shouldn't feel this real.
At this point, the Spirit thinks every time that he's going to change the course of the dream this time. It's a foolish thought; he should know by now that he can't, but he can't help hoping.
He runs past the soldiers; they pay him no mind since he's not supposed to be here. He hears the sound of children crying and their parents screaming their names. By now, he's crying too, as the weak little child he is in this dream. He runs down those familiar stairs, determined to at least save his mother this time around, but every time he reaches the foot of the stairs, he remembers the sheer terror.
Seeing that enormous cauldron again is as terrifying every time. Seeing his people, his friends, being dragged towards it by soldiers with emotionless faces… and then being dumped into the cauldron, their screams echoing in his ears as they slowly become one with the molten gold within it… It makes him give up. He collapses to his knees and curls up in a ball on the floor, squeezes his eyes shut in an attempt to keep the tears from flowing and presses his palms over his ears in an attempt to block it all out. Go away, screams. Go away, soldiers. Go away, horrible pain. But he knows it won't. It never will. He thinks of his mother. The last words she said to him were angry. They usually always made up after arguing. Now they never had the time.
He wakes up, then, back in his soul room within the Millennium Ring, crying out his mother's name. He's breathing heavily and he can feel the tearstains on his cheeks. Even then, for a moment he's no longer the Spirit of the Millennium Ring, bitter ancient being hell-bent on world destruction. He's no longer the Thief King Bakura who terrorized Ancient Egypt and held a vendetta against the Pharaoh. For that one moment every night, he's just Bakura from Kul Elna, a young child mourning the destruction of his village and his family.
After that, he can't sleep anymore. He doesn't dare to. He doesn't want to wake up in cold sweat yet another time, and he doesn't want to see those things again. For 3.000 years, the vision has plagued him every night. Even now, when he's no longer a human but a being of the darkness, that hasn't changed. He had hoped it would.
One night, he can't stand the solitude within the Millennium Ring anymore. He leaves it in spirit form and reappears in the bedroom that belongs to his host, the boy who shares his name; Ryou Bakura. The boy is fast asleep in his bed, and the Spirit sits down to watch him. He's jealous of the boy, who can sleep so peacefully when he's unable to. He's resting there, his long white hair spread around his head like a Gloria. The Spirit is tempted to wake him up with a fright, just out of spite, but decides against it and instead observes the boy's left hand, which he is clutching his blanket with. The pale skin is marred by a scar, and for a moment the Spirit wonders if his host would forgive him, if he asked. These are of course things he would never say to the boy, and he would never think them either, except at this late hour. He sits there for a while, thinking of the things he has done and the mistakes he has made.
The boy jolts awake suddenly, gasping for breath. The Spirit meets his gaze and suddenly realises that he never wiped away the now drying tears in his eyes. He becomes frightened, though he would never admit it. He can't show weakness in front of his host; it's one of the things that he will always view as off-limits, even now in the middle of the night when he's near his breaking point. But the boy doesn't seem to notice, or at least doesn't say anything. They stare at each other, in some sort of silent agreement.
They sit like that for a while. Right now, in this vulnerable moment, the Spirit wants so badly to reach out. He probably would have if the boy had already been awake a few minutes earlier, when he first showed up. But now, the reminder of the morning that will come eventually, and the simple fact of who he is, is stopping him. He wonders if anything would change if he did tell his host. But he quickly dismisses it; his host hates him anyway. And it's not like this innocent young thing would understand how it feels to lose his family forever.
He has thought about it so many times. If that one day had never happened, he wouldn't be here now. And somehow, he's not completely sure how that makes him feel.
I have a huge fascination with Ryou's and Yami Bakura's relationship in any form, be it canon or AU, romantic or platonic, etc...
I was thinking about them and came to the conclusion that despite their differences, they have had some experiences that are similar, namely the loss of someone dear to them. However, Ryou seems to handle the tragedy in his life better, but that's not too strange since it's nowhere near as bad as what the Thief King experienced as a child.
I always seem to end up writing Yami Bakura as the more vulnerable one in the relationship, because I regard Ryou as the stronger individual, mostly since he hasn't been through as many horrible things as Yami Bakura. And I view Yami Bakura as the kind of character who hides the trauma he has experienced, because he can't afford weakness when he's trying to bring about the destruction of the Pharaoh... The reason he regards Ryou as weak is because he can see Ryou's weakness clearly, while in truth he's actually the weaker one and he knows it. I don't know, maybe I'm just rambling nonsense by now. I'm a bit stressed, you see; I wasted my time for finishing my due homework by writing this thing. Also, this fic is supposed to be a one-shot, but it's rather open-ended, isn't it? I might continue it... or not. We'll see. Depends on what people think.
Also, I'm going to Stockholm, Sweden in two days. (Exciting! Yay!) Probably no White Heart of the Thief updates until I get home. Apologies for the inconvenience; I'm a busy person.