Hi, Sami, Ryou's Hikari here! This is my first fic, so please review, you have no idea how excited I am to be writing on this site! This is basically a one-shot of Ryou and his hard life

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The boy walked gracefully through the path of Sakura trees, his body seeming to be one with the wind, his steps so quiet they were unheard. He smelled the air, rich with scents of cherry blossoms, jasmine, and from some unknown place, cinnamon. Here he could forget his tortured life, his scarred soul, and pretend he was someone else.

His albino hair flew in the wind, longer than most boys, it nearly reached his waist. His chocolate eyes sparkled with life as he took in his surroundings, life that was as foreign to him as Arabic would be to an Australian child.

He felt danger nearing him, and looked around. He spotted no one, however, and a thick silence hung over the path seldom taken by the busy town people, only by some students at his school, in his year eleven class and the elderly who walked down the path and remembered being young, days that seemed millennia ago.

Lost in his thoughts, the boy never sensed the older teen approach him until it was too late. The older boy, Ushio, had pinned his hands behind his back.

"What are you doing here so late, Ryou? Shouldn't you be home, cowering in your room like a scared puppy?" The older boy's tone was menacing. It was late, Ryou realized, as it was nearly sunset. 'Oh no,' Ryou thought. 'I have to get home!'

He tried to pull away from Ushio's grip. "Where are you going, Ryou? I thought you could stick around and we could have some fun!" Ryou knew what Ushio's idea of fun was. It was beating him to near death and laughing at his attempts to get up. Ryou turned to leave but was interrupted by a fist coming towards his jaw at the speed of an arrow. He fell to the ground, clutching his face.

"Are you going to get up, brat?" Ushio had a sick look in his eyes, a look only given to him by the pain of others… "You always were a weakling!"

It was true; Ryou was weak, for he never stood up to the other boys. He hadn't even uttered one word to Ushio yet! 'I will always be weak…worthless…' Ryou's thoughts trailed off, and he remembered last night…

"You weak, useless, pathetic excuse of a human being! You don't deserve to live, you jinx! It was your fault your mother died, you hear me? YOUR FAULT!" Ryou's father was drunk yet again, and he was doing what he always did when he was drunk…hurting Ryou. Ryou tried to dodge his fathers blows, but he got hit in the stomach trying to evade a punch to the head and was winded.

Sinking to the floor, Ryou whimpered, looking up to his father. "Tell me it's your fault, and why! NOW!"

Ryou began to cry, his tears flowing down his pale cheeks, and he whispered the words in the same way he had almost every night since his father had lost everything, his job, his wife, his daughter…Ryou's sister… the night Ryou lost anyone who cared about him…

"It's my fault because I made Mother sick, I made her get hypothermia, and it is my fault! My fault!"

For it indeed had been Ryou's fault. He'd wanted to take his Mother out with him to play in the snow, and they'd played for a while, the then six year old Ryou running off to hide behind the big Sakura tree in the park. He'd waited for thirty minutes for his Mother to find him, and then he got cold and ran out.

"Mummy, where are you? I want to go home, it's cold!" Ryou's words seemed lost in the snow all around him. "Mummy..." he whispered.

He looked around the endless world of white, searching for his mother. He finally saw two legs coming from behind a mound of snow. "Mummy!" Ryou ran to his Mothers side, hoping to surprise her, but she wouldn't wake. "Mummy, please wake up," Ryou cried. He ran back to the house and got his Father to come to wake his Mother up. His Father rang the ambulance.

The doctors said she had gotten Hypothermia from being in the cold snow for that long. Thirty minutes, was all it took for her to catch the disease that ended her life, not two hours after she went to the hospital.

They said it wasn't his fault, and that she'd been knocked unconscious by a falling branch, and that made her Immune defense weaker against disease, so she caught Hypothermia, but Ryou knew better. It was his fault. And nothing would ever change that.

"Good boy," his father said, with a maniacal glint in his eye.

Ryou's sister had died some two years after wards, in a terrible car crash going to a friend's party. One stupid mistake by a distracted driver and his big sister was gone, his big sister he loved more than anything. Amane…sister…

His fathers job came after, leaving Ryou to get an after school job, to support the family, and at times he worked two jobs a night, leaving him constantly exhausted.

Ryou doubled over, having received another kick in the gut from his Father. He groaned in pain, and the coppery taste of blood welled up in his mouth. He spat the crimson liquid all over the kitchen floor.

His father left Ryou lying there…to think about his misery and pain.

Ryou snapped back to reality as Ushio gave a swift kick to his shins. He fell to his knees for the second time in two days. He closed his eyes, waiting for the final blow Ushio was about to deal to his head, when he heard Ushio bellow in pain. He opened his eyes to find him unconscious in a tangled heap near the next tree.

"Are you okay, Ryou?" He looked up to find Bakura, a boy from his class, standing over him, worry written all over her features. Bakura looked remarkably similar to Ryou; they both had the same albino hair, same chocolate eyes. "I'm okay," Ryou forced out. Bakura pulled him to his feet, and they began walking down the path together. "How did you do that to Ushio?" Ryou asked. "I take karate lessons, I've been training ever since I was eight years old," Bakura replied. He then stopped and grabbed Ryou's arm.

"Ryou, tell me what's wrong, I've been worried about you. So many times you've come to school and had bruises on your face, and I've seen the scratches on your arms! Tell me what's wrong!" Bakura had begun to shake with rage now, rage towards who ever had done it to Ryou, because, in truth, he deeply cared for the younger teen.

Ryou stared into Bakura's chocolate orbs and sighed. "I'll tell you, but we need to go somewhere private."

"We'll go to my place," Bakura said. "It's only two minutes away, and I'm an orphan, so no one will be there."

Fast forward to Bakura's house

Ryou sat on the edge of Bakura's bed, and took off his shirt. "God, Ryou…" Bakura was lost for words, entranced and horrified by all the scars and bruises marring his pale skin, many old scars and some new, a few having been split open by Ushio's assault. Bakura had rage in his eyes, and was stunned to say the least. "Who did this?" he asked, his voice full of sadness and awe.

"My Father," was Ryou's reply. He then proceeded to tell Bakura everything, about his mother, his sister, and the constant beatings. At the end of it, Ryou was almost crying, and Bakura was so horrified at the damage done to this angel. "Hey, it'll be okay," he soothed, hating to see Ryou cry. Ryou flung himself into Bakura's arms, who was thinking how beautiful the boy was, and how unfair it was to have his flesh be scarred like it had been, what a waste of innocence.

Ryou pulled closer to him, and brushed his lips against the older teens. It seemed to last forever, that kiss, but it ended all too soon for the both of them. Bakura was exploring the depths of Ryou's mouth with his tongue, when Ryou pulled away suddenly. "I have to go home," Ryou whispered his words full of regret.

"No Ryou! No! Please don't go back there, he'll kill you someday! Please, stay here with me, we can get him arrested, and he can pay for all the horrific things he'd done to you!" Bakura pleaded with Ryou as hard as he could, but he could do nothing but watch as Ryou gave him one last kiss, and departed through the door. He stood by the window watching Ryou walk down the road, past the Sakura trees.

"Where have you been, you weak little nancy! You should have been home hours ago!" Ryou was terrified by his Fathers tone. "I was..." Ryou was cut off as his Father kicked him in the side of the leg, sweeping his feet out from under him, sending him sprawling to the hard kitchen floor. Blood sprayed out of his mouth as he was kicked in the stomach, an ache spreading through his whole body, and he could think of nothing but the pain. He backed against the wall, but there was no where else to go after that.

He was suddenly aware of a pain one hundred times worse than the rest jolting through his arm.

He looked to his arm to see a long cut there, seeping torrents of blood, and the cause of the white-hot pain.

He had never known a pain to be white before. To him, pain was red, but this pain went far beyond that. Ryou felt his life ebbing away, and smiled. He would be free of the pain and suffering, free of the ache of loneliness and knowing the world would never care. He was still smiling as he blacked out, and his soul was swallowed by a sea of pain, and then there was nothing, nothing but white.

The day after

"Class, I am sorry to say that last night, Ryou Bakura was murdered by his father. His father is now in the custody of the police." Miss Nagoya regretted the loss very deeply, Ryou was her best student, and she had never known he'd had problems at home. "I also regret to tell you that two hours after Ryou was murdered, Bakura Ryou committed suicide. We will miss them both very much."

Somewhere, in the endless confines of eternity, two figures, hand in hand, their silver hair flowing in the unseen breeze, walked silently down a deserted path of Sakura trees…

THE END.

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So? What did you think? Please review!