Disclaimer: If I owned Yu-Gi-Oh! or any of its characters, I'd be able to spend my moolah getting original fiction published instead.
Bakura stifled a sigh as they sat in the living room. He glanced across at Ryou - how could the pathetic little albino be entertained by this drivel?
Ryou's eyes carried the blunt gaze of someone catatonic. The only thing they reflected was the flashes of light from the screen.
The room, too, was dark. The sun had set a few hours ago. Damned if he was going to get up and close balcony door, which a cold wind was coming in from. Damned if he was going to shut the curtains. Let Ryou do it if it mattered that much. But apparently, it didn't matter that Ryou's skin was bumpy and icy, or if the freaks from the opposite apartment building could stare to their voyeuristic hearts' content.
Fuck the cold. And it was irrational that he should be so annoyed about Ryou not bothering to get up and close the blinds, anyway. Firstly the only light came from the television, so if your night vision was good enough to see from across the street and in that, well... You deserved to peep. Secondly there was nothing to see but hours and hours of Ryou being entertained by sitcoms, forensic dramas, and reality tv shows that weren't the least bit inventive.
Bakura could show them inventive. He absent-mindedly drew a blade out of the sheath he wore on his left arm. He had to wear tank tops to keep it free to draw, but it was worth it. Anyway, he looked good, didn't he? Today the top was the same pale blue, robin's egg blue, as his eyes. Not that anyone had noticed. Said eyes narrowed slightly as he began to play with the dagger.
Its hilt was a hard gold-compound, slightly raised swirls that caught the light - when there was light - and glittered slightly. The blade was steel, edged near the hilt with silver. It was polished and flat. The weight of its six inches in his hand was oddly reassuring. He pushed the tip into the plush arm of his chair and slid his fingers down the hilt, down the blade. He turned it the other way up. End over end.
Fucking mortals. Make someone eat a scorpion and they were entertained. Fucking Ryou. Should put a scorpion in the bed, see how funny they are in real life. Of course, then Ree might actually get stung, and wouldn't be around for Bakura to torment any more. And how much fun would that be? A real test of endurance... A test of nerve. See how long you can take a ritual scarring from a knife. See how long your puny mortal body can go if it's being used as a pincushion.
See how many fingers you can hack off before...
Ryou sighed.
Bakura stopped playing with his knife. The point was pushing slightly into the leather of his black pants, making a small indentation, perilously close to drawing blood. How did it get there?
"What? Something actually got through to that tv-drenched brain of yours?" he said, his voice rasping.
Ryou glanced at him, then looked back at the screen, still silent.
"Well fuck you too, babe," Bakura said calmly, and stood. His limbs protested slightly. He waited for them to creak audibly, like joints of a door that has been closed for far too long. He refused to stretch and dispel the ache, instead standing motionless, almost stubbornly savouring it. "I'm going out."
He stalked out of the room - past the kitchenette - out the front door in several long strides. Ryou sat on the couch across from the now empty chair, staring at the door for a moment. Heh. He used the Kaiba-walk. That was almost amusing.
The bike stopped at a red light. Traffic streamed from the other direction. Bakura considered letting his tires squeal as he shoved his way straight through the centre, but he was too tired. Too tired? his brain said. The great Tomb Robber, too tired for causing mayhem? Well what was the bloody point anyway?
"Hey honey, aren't you cold?" a sultry voice called out from the curb. "I could warm that pale skin of yours."
He glanced over at the woman under the streetlight. Her physical characteristics failed to register with him. He was left with a vague impression of black and red as he stared at her eyes. Her smile loomed, inviting, but her eyes were dull. She had the demeanor of someone whose soul had been slowly and carefully cut down. He grinned in approval and revved the engine.
Green light. He floored it, and could almost taste her disappointment as the traffic swept him further and further from her. He increased his speed, until he was speeding further and further from everything. The motorcyle fled through the streets like liquid, mercury racing hotter and hotter, slipping past everything and everyone. The whine of the bike was close to becoming a clear, hard note, high-pitched. It shuddered under his legs.
He felt like mercury injected into the veins of Domino. How could he end up in this city? With those dueling assholes that couldn't remember their pasts, and their whiney fanclubs? The fucking forgotten pharaoh, his permanently-in-denial priest, and - well, okay, the Tomb Guardian was alright some of the time. Still.
He ought to rip this town apart. He ought to... He ought to... What? He ought to be what he was born to be, thousands of years ago. He ought to be genius and stealthy and irresistible and so bad-fucking-ass that he didn't need to do anything anymore because everyone just thought about the things he had done.
He started to slow the bike. He looked around him. He'd ended up in the high end of town. He'd probably gone right past the fucking Kaiba mansion at some point, roaring around like a lunatic. Was that all he was good for these days? Behaving like a crazy spirit? Behaving like some whingy asshole whose bike is louder than his bite? He was wasting his bloody time. He had several thousand years of knowledge and lacked totally (almost, something said) in scruples. If he actually bothered to do anything, he'd be rivalling KaibaCorp by now. Hell, if he bothered to use his brain, he could steal it right out from under Kaiba's technology-obsessed nose.
Not that he would want his used tissue of a company.
Living in a two-bit apartment with his fucking hikari. Well, the two-bit part of that had to go, anyway.
Bakura walked in the door and straight over to the television. Ryou stared silently from the couch. Bakura picked it up effortlessly and carried it to the open balcony door. Without saying a world himself, he hurled it off the edge, and turned back to the room. A few seconds later a scream was heard down below, concurrent with a smash.
Ryou's mouth parted slightly. Bakura crossed the room in less than the blink of an eye, and yanked him up off the sofa.
"You fucking... You," Bakura said, and shook him slightly.
Still no words.
"What, you're never going to talk to me again, is that is, sweetheart?" Bakura's eyes darkened a shade, some untouchable quality about him deepening, almost as if an aura were shifting around him. The hair of Ryou's arms stood up on end. "You're just going to live in your tv now? It's not like the ring you know. You can't hide in there for millenia."
Ryou's breathing deepened. His chest exhaled and inhaled, less than an arm's length away from Bakura. Bakura stared at it momentarily and wondered if the heart inside was beating calmly, if it hadn't even bothered to register the shift between Survivor season fucking 17 and Bakura's arms. Or if it was fluttering like a trapped bird.
"Say something. Say something."
They stood in the room. Bakura waited. Eventually, so softly he wasn't sure he was actually hearing it, Ryou said, "What?"
"Something."
"...I have nothing left, 'Kura. No words. No anything. What more could I possibly give you?"
Bakura thought about his knives and the scars under the black shirt Ryou wore just now and the nights when all Ryou could do was cry and the times he was told to stop and the way Ree never hit back and that time, just once, when he made blueberry pancakes, waiting on the table for Bakura when he walked out of the bedroom and Bakura - mad from a nightmare so dark you can't imagine that he never told Ree about - hurled the plate onto the floor and walked out, leaving Ree to clean up the broken plate and ruined food.
He shook Ryou again and this time stared into robin's egg eyes as blue as his own. "Something, fuck it all to hell! Something."
He crushed Ree to himself, breathing in that once-familiar scent of the apricot shampoo the hikari insisted on using. He crushed Ree's lips, holding him - who almost struggled - pressed so close that they might share the same body if not for the clothes. He kissed him like he was drinking after wandering in the sands, like he would drink Ryou from the mouth downwards, like Ree was water and Bakura never wanted to be dry again. He kissed him until Ryou felt something.
And Ryou thought of something down inside, sunlight hitting the tender, vulnerable first - last - stem of a seedling above ground.
When Bakura pulled away Ryou's face was wet with tears. In that soft murmur, dazed, staring into Bakura's eyes he said simply, "Sunlight."
Bakura returned the stare for a long moment and then threw back his head, laughing with his rasp, sounding filled with joy and yet like a flock of crows. "Don't be foolish. You're the hikari here."
Ryou looked at him, eyes filled with emotion that Bakura hadn't seen in... Possibly more than he had ever seen. Ree stared, waiting to be hurt again, waiting to be scorched, waiting to blacken and die again.
Bakura, softly now, one hand on Ryou's back, raised the other to the back of his neck. Carefully, he leaned forward and slowly, hand sliding into Bakura's soft white spikes, he licked a line of salty drops off Ryou's cheek. Ryou blinked.
"How did you do it?" Bakura demanded, his face dangerously close to Ryou's. "How did I manage to fuck you up and fall in love with you at the same time?"
Ryou suddenly dropped his weight onto Bakura, arms reaching around him, holding him tight, face buried in his neck.
"I did it all wrong, babe," he continued. "And you're the only fucking one. But now... Now you're gonna see what I can fucking do when I do all the wrong things in the right way."
"And what wrong things are you going to do to me in right ways?" said a muffled voice from his shoulder, sounding suspiciously - incredibly - teasing, suspiciously inviting.
Bakura crowed again. "I was thinking more along the lines of owning the city, the state, the whole damn world... But we can do that, too." He shoved Ryou back onto the couch, grinning.