A/N: Yugioh fandom, I have returned! Is there anyone left…? :O
Rated for death and violence, although I don't think it's too graphic…No worse than the manga, certainly. P:
ooo
The body was cold when Ryou Bakura touched its shoulder. He had read about plenty of murders—a morbid hobby of his—yet this one puzzled him, and he stared at the corpse with sick fascination. The teen appeared to have died in the middle of the classroom, barely a mark on him, losing all his body heat in just under a few minutes.
Initially, the boy had been slouched over with his head hanging down, pointed locks of hair drooping, shrouding his features. Observing this with mild concern, Ryou had then asked if he'd felt ill, lightly tapping his arm and jumping back when the teen collapsed—
And now Yugi Mouto lay dead at Ryou's feet, ice cold, for no immediately visible reason.
Just five minutes ago, the teacher had called on Yugi for an answer, and the boy had been scolded for not doing his homework, the class snickering at his inattention. Yugi had flushed in embarrassment, very much alive, so unlike the current, washed-out pallor of his skin. Only five minutes ago.
Now, lifeless eyes stared blankly at the ceiling, but a different eye caught Ryou's gaze: a golden one, winking up at him from beneath Yugi's school jacket, an unorthodox necklace. Upon closer inspection, the item appeared to have strangled the boy. His neck had a thin line encircling it which matched the rope attached to the object. Instead of the expected mottling of black and blue, however, a barely visible, pink thread of skin trailed across his throat. The line vanished even while Ryou watched.
Leaning over, Ryou snapped off the necklace as if in a trance, fingers brushing over the golden ring and the pointed cones swinging from the bottom. He swiftly hid the necklace beneath his own jacket as a girl behind him screamed, shattering the eerie, short-lived calm in which the class had yet to notice the body. Startled out of his daze, Ryou shivered at a sudden burst of cold, drawing his jacket closer. A boy was dead, and Ryou was stealing golden artifacts and studying the victim's throat. Something was wrong with him.
Still, he couldn't help but watch as the last traces of Yugi's murder vanished from around the boy's neck, deathly pale skin replacing the faded bruises.
ooo
Ryou wasn't so stupid as to put on the necklace, of course. Not after he'd seen Yugi's mysterious death, and the disappearing evidence. The medics and the police had puzzled over the case, but Ryou remained silent, because really, no one would believe him. He could say that an odd golden necklace had strangled the boy. He could scoff, because of course there were no marks to affirm his claim; the bruises had vanished. He could suggest that the corpse had super-healing powers.
Yes, he could say exactly that, and the police would scowl and tell him that it was hardly the time for jokes.
At the same time, Ryou couldn't bring himself to throw away the necklace. Instead, he kept it in his room, the cord still broken, the eye in its center glaring malevolently at him when he came home from school.
Meanwhile, the news of Yugi's death travelled like wildfire, but much to Ryou's distress, no one appeared concerned for the boy himself. Rumors circled of a possible suicide; it was no secret that Jounouchi Katsuya and Hiroto Honda bullied him relentlessly, but nobody knew how Yugi had managed it, and so that was all anybody questioned. The only person who seemed genuinely concerned with Yugi himself—rather than the mystique surrounding his death—was Anzu Mizaki, but Ryou couldn't bring himself to speak to her. After all, he hadn't known Yugi, either: any comfort he offered would prove hypocritical, when Ryou himself couldn't stop wondering how, exactly, Yugi Mouto had died.
With all the stories travelling around, the rumor which most people dismissed captured Ryou's attention the most: whispers travelled that a ghost haunted the school. But as no new evidence appeared, the students began to lose interest in the outlandish musings.
Right around that time, Ryou started hearing voices when no one was there.
It started out in dreams.
There was a phantom, whispering from the darkness, indistinguishable at first. As the nights passed, the dream progressed further and further: each night, he saw a little more, torchlight dimly illuminating his path as he trailed down stone stairs, dampness muffling the echoes of his footsteps in the cavern. Ryou simultaneously dreaded sleep and longed for it; he desperately wanted to know what the shadows concealed, but the darkness chilled him, until droplets trickled down on him in a warm rain.
The night he realized that the droplets were the blood of his family, Ryou woke up screaming.
He still sobbed, even when he realized that he'd had a nightmare. It had felt so real; he could feel the desert heat, the blood that splashed under his feet. He could see his mother thrash in the arms of a soldier, as they stabbed her, again and again, dragging her to a cauldron and leaving new smears and puddles of red. Ryou moaned.
"Pardon the interruption, but you aren't going to snivel all night, are you?" a voice asked scathingly, colored with mock courtesy.
It wasn't the first time Ryou had heard a lingering whisper after his dream faded, but he hadn't grown so accustomed to it that he no longer reacted. He shot up with a gasp, clutching at tangled sheets, panicked at how the voice sounded clearer than ever before. Even worse, at the foot of his bed, a specter stood and studied him lazily, leaning back against the wall. Ryou tightened his grip on his sheets, wild-eyed.
"Not much of a greeting," the phantom said idly. "And after wailing so loudly, too. You disturbed my rest."
Ryou didn't respond. When he opened his mouth, only an unhealthy choke came out, and it reminded him of his sister, who had gagged on her own blood. The phantom sneered, and Ryou shivered, an unnatural rush of cold air filling the room. He gaped, cross-eyed, as his breath created a white cloud of vapor, the temperature much too cold for summer. He was certain that he hadn't even turned on the air-conditioning that night.
"What, no apology?" the spirit asked at last, watching him predatorily. "Tell me this, then. What do you know of ghosts, mortal?"
"Hn," the ghost said in distaste, when once again, Ryou didn't answer. He heard what the specter said, but making sense of it was another matter. "And here I'd thought that you might prove more entertaining than the average present-day human. But since I'm in a generous mood, I suppose I won't kill you just this second."
"You're a ghost," Ryou said, a delayed reaction, high-pitched and disbelieving. Either that, or he had truly gone insane, imagining the undead for company because he'd gone so long without friends amongst the living.
The phantom looked at him incredulously. "Very good," it drawled, giving a slow, mocking clap. "I'm impressed. The mortal speaks, even if it doesn't have a modicum of originality."
"You're connected to the ring," Ryou blurted, his voice slightly steadier. "Did you...did you kill Yugi?"
"You're not completely incompetent, then?" the spirit asked disdainfully. "Of course I did, you fool."
Ryou considered the words as well as he could, adrenaline surging through his veins; he was speaking with a ghost, in the middle of the night, questioning him about an impossible murder and suspicious artifacts. His fingers shook as he brushed away a tangled chunk of hair, catching on a knot as he lowered his arm, but ignoring the pain as he accidentally yanked out a few strands of white.
"Are you going to kill me?" he asked, and the spirit laughed.
"Perhaps," the phantom mused, and Ryou jerked away, heart pounding at the gleam in its eyes. "But it's curious. Mortals often see that nightmare when they take my ring, but you're the first who's suffered a...modified version of my memory."
"A memory?" Ryou asked, even as he considered the implications. The ghost claimed that Ryou had seen reality, but his mother and Amane hadn't died in such a fashion. Besides, he couldn't believe that he'd looked into another person's mind, living or not. Impossible.
"A memory of when the Pharaoh's men slaughtered my village like pigs," the spirit spat. "Don't ask questions you already know the answers to, mortal. You saw the memory as clearly as I."
"You were human? Did you die with them?" Ryou asked quietly, deciding to ask about the Pharaoh later, if he survived. Ryou still couldn't understand how the nightmare could have been reality. It hadn't been the blood of strangers that covered his hands.
"In the nightmare, it was your family that died instead of mine," the spirit said, considering him thoughtfully. "We're not so different, you and I. Did you watch yours die, as well? Left alone to remember, over and over and over."
Ryou drew back as though slapped, and he let out a shaky breath. Memories of his own, pervaded with different screams and blood, overwhelmed him. Shattered glass and his sister's shattered skull filled his mind. Men and women shouted in panic and dragged him from a burning car.
"You didn't die with your family?" Ryou asked again meekly, only this time he knew the answer. The ghost had lived on, whoever he was, a shadow of his former self, but something had kept him going.
"No. I was left to remember the death of my dear, screaming mother," the ghost's expression contorted hideously, and its entire being flickered, sending Ryou's room into complete darkness for a fraction of a second. "Over and over. But this time, when I relived it, she was replaced with your own mother."
Ryou shuddered, remembering the sensation of red oozing down his fingertips; in the nightmare he'd watched as she died, but he couldn't actually remember how the blood had covered his hands. It hadn't made sense, perhaps his own memories overlapping the nightmare, but either way he'd somehow known the blood was hers, or maybe Amane's, yet in the end it didn't matter, because it was drowning him, he couldn't breathe, couldn't breathe-
"Wake up," the ghost hissed, and Ryou jolted out of his hallucination, his hands pale and clean once again. They shook violently, so hard that the muscles hurt. "Your nightmares are only valuable if you use them. You suffer, but you do nothing in the face of your pain. In the face of their pain. You're a fool."
The whispers tempted him, suggesting revenge, declaring vengeance as the righteous course of action, even though Ryou knew he shouldn't-
"And you're wasting away. You try so hard to be good, but the darkness fascinates you," the spirit spoke what Ryou thought so often, but just as often tried to pretend that he didn't. Because surely an interest in death didn't mean that he wanted to join the afterlife, and surely curiosity for the macabre didn't make him evil- "You only pretend to be kind, but you know what you really want? You want the one who killed your mother to suffer, you want him to burn-"
"Stop," Ryou interrupted hysterically, scrambling backward and crashing into his headboard, rattling his lamp. He fumbled for the switch. "Stop! I don't, I don't, I don't-"
"You do. You want to make their murderer beg for mercy, and then, only then, you want to die and join them-"
He finally found the switch and flipped it, tears streaming down his face and a sheen of sweat covering his body, and he gasped for breath.
His room was empty.
ooo
He threw away the ring. He buried it at the bottom of a trash bag and watched the garbage man take it away.
The following afternoon, he came home from school and found the golden eye glinting malevolently up at him from the nightstand of his room, and he pretended he'd never thrown it away in the first place, thinking he hadn't been sleeping well and maybe he remembered incorrectly.
For his next attempt, on the way to school one morning, he buried the ring in a garbage basin behind Burger World. And that following afternoon, the golden ring returned to his room, just as pristine as before.
After that, he decided that its reappearances unnerved him more than its presence itself, so he buried the item under several pillows and tried to pretend that it didn't exist.
ooo
Ryou slept with the light on for weeks, and for the most part he succeeded in keeping away the phantom. The nightmares—memories—persisted, but when he woke up they dissipated, and he entertained no unwanted visitors afterward. As the days passed, he managed to instill a semblance of calm, reminding himself that no matter how much he missed his mother and Amane, they would not want him obsessed with revenge. He enjoyed his simple and hateless life, even if it was a little bit lonely, and just because he didn't have friends now didn't mean that he never would.
When Ryou finally convinced himself that the phantom was wrong, however, he couldn't seem to find a reason not to speak to it again. He'd gone over their previous conversation many times, without the panic he'd felt at the moment, considering the little hints he'd been reluctantly given: a murderous Pharaoh, suggesting ancient Egypt, and a strong desire for vengeance. Not much to go on, admittedly, and soon his curiosity got the better of him and against his better judgment, three weeks after the first incident, he turned off his light. No matter how curious he was, though, he had no desire to sleep through another nightmare of blood and death, so he forced himself to stay awake.
"Are you there?" he spoke to the darkness.
He felt foolish speaking when he appeared alone, but he ignored the part of him that mocked his apparent insanity, and kept a finger on the light switch. His eyes slowly adjusted to the lack of light, revealing an empty room, and at first he thought that no one would answer. Then he blinked, and he stared at the foot of his bed in astonishment, where a spirit leaned back where the mattress met the wall, legs sprawled leisurely over the edge of the other end, as if the specter had been there all along.
"Well, well. The mortal decided he would face me, after all," it drawled, eyes flashing. The ghost studied its fingernails, the tendons long and spider-like, washed out to the point that they almost looked like bones without skin.
Ryou let out a shaky breath. "What's your name?" he asked quietly.
The ghost studied him. "I was called the King of Thieves," it said at last, as if it had only just then deemed the question worthy of a reply.
"That's not a name," Ryou couldn't help but point out. "That's a title."
"I am thousands of years old, and have seen the fall of Egypt and the rise of the New World," the ghost said dispassionately. "Why would I tell you, who has barely been alive a heartbeat, my name?"
"Do you choose what you look like?" Ryou asked instead of acknowledging the insult. He suspected that if he responded to every condescending comment the spirit made, they would never speak of anything else. "If I'm right, then you're from ancient Egypt, but you don't look Arabic."
"I can manipulate my form," it acknowledged, eying him suspiciously. Perhaps it wondered why Ryou wasn't incoherent with fear, like in their last encounter.
Ryou tightened his grip on the light switch, ensuring he had a strong hold despite his sweaty palms; he prided himself that they remained relatively steady, even as he wondered if a lamp would really protect him. This time he was prepared.
"Why did you choose a form that looks so much like me, then?" Ryou asked, gesturing with his empty hand. He hadn't paid much attention the first time around, too overwhelmed with the impossibility of a ghost in his room, but the spirit had the same shock of white hair and eerily similar features. If not for the red eyes, Ryou would have recognized himself immediately; the spirit created a three-dimensional, wild reflection of himself.
"It functions as well as any other," the phantom scoffed. "Even if you are rather scrawny and pathetic."
Ryou leaned back against his headboard, looking to the ceiling as he thought, the wallboard gray in the darkness. He imagined existing for thousands of years, alone and without light, no one to call his name and no mirrors to look into. He imagined existing for so long that humans became pathetic mortals.
"Did you forget?" Ryou asked, and the phantom glared at him, uncomprehending. "Your name and appearance. Did you forget them?" he clarified.
The spirit rose to its feet in an instant, hissing angrily, almost feral, and Ryou found himself doubting for a moment that it had ever truly been human. It looked down on him, fingers forming claws, appearing more angular than ever as they curled.
"I remember enough," it said viciously "I remember how my family wailed as they burned and how I slipped in their blood as I ran. I remember how the Pharaoh declared me the savage one when I dragged his father's corpse before him and demanded penance."
"You didn't forget their pain," Ryou said, shuddering involuntarily as he remembered the dreams of the desert and red sand. "But did you forget yourself?" he asked uncertainly.
He wasn't prepared for the hands that shot out for his throat, nails digging into his flesh. He felt the now-familiar sensation of running blood, dribbling down his neck like sticky water. Without thinking about it, he grasped at the phantom hands, surprised that he could touch them, but nevertheless he couldn't gain an advantage. Thrashing against his headboard, his lamp rattled in protest, and the sound prompted him to scramble for the switch but he was too late, he couldn't find the strength or the clarity to flip the switch, he couldn't breathe, couldn't breathe-
With a click, light flooded the room at last. Ryou gasped for air, alone again, tears leaking from the corner of his eyes. He kicked off his sheets as warmth returned to the room, and jolted when the light bulb flickered ominously.
It took him a long time to fall asleep.
ooo
The finger marks on his neck didn't last long. Much like Yugi's, the marks disappeared by morning, and Ryou wondered vaguely if it had all been a dream. The golden eye on the necklace seemed to wink at him.
He could not avoid the phantom forever. Didn't particularly want to, even, despite the terror he'd experienced in their last confrontation. Turning on the light seemed effective enough for banishing the vengeful spirit, and Ryou had always enjoyed the occult: how could he resist the proof that it existed in reality?
The following night, the phantom once again appeared promptly after Ryou flicked off the light. The spirit mocked and jeered, but after Ryou redirected its attention towards the injustice it had mentioned before, it barely seemed to notice Ryou's presence.
Ryou listened raptly, horrified at the tale of a cruel Pharaoh, and the destruction of an entire village, the children and the elderly and everyone in between. Flickering in the darkness, the spirit seemed wary of his reactions, of the distress Ryou expressed on its behalf. He truly believed he would vomit when the ghost described how the bodies had been dissolved in vats, their melted corpses mixed with melted gold to form the Millennium Ring that now sat on Ryou's nightstand. He had witnessed the murders many times in his nightmares, but he hadn't known the end result: the Millennium Ring now seemed more sinister than ever.
It was early in the morning by the time the ghost had finished, and they sat for a long time in silence, Ryou's eyes closed, pale and shaken. He'd managed not to cry, but he looked sickly and disturbed, and the ghost studied him with interest.
"You believe me," it stated, a mild observation accompanied by a raised eyebrow.
"Shouldn't I?" Ryou asked, exhausted. He needed sleep, but he didn't think he could, nor did an attempt seem worth the effort, anyway. The sun would rise soon, and he had only a few hours before he had to prepare for school.
"In Egypt the Pharaoh's word was the word of the gods, and my accusations blasphemous," the ghost spoke flatly. "In my death, mortals declare me a monster, and are either too afraid to listen or too distrustful or too uncaring. I've even been called a demon, whispering the word of the devil to tempt mortals to Hell. Yet you believe me, when I have no evidence to the contrary and have threatened to kill you."
"Do you want me to mistrust you?" Ryou asked, honestly having been too tired to consider the possibility that the story was a fabrication. Still, even with the insinuation, he saw no reason for the spirit to lie, and found he believed the tale, regardless.
"No. I simply think you're a fool," the spirit said.
"You killed Yugi," Ryou murmured, eyes still closed in exhaustion. "I won't forgive you for that. But I won't forgive the Pharaoh, either...because I don't think you're lying."
Ryou didn't receive an answer, and after a minute, he cracked an eye open to see the phantom's reaction. But sunlight filtered through the window, and the spirit had vanished.
ooo
A/N: Well…that's that. Are ghost stories out of fashion? Eep I love them, and I hope you found this enjoyable, too. :)
I did intend to write more for this, but first I thought I'd see how this went over…It doesn't seem a terrible place to end, if people are satisfied. I'd love to hear what you think! Review? :D