Chapter 1- The White Room

Dear Aunt Helpful

I am 14 and gay. My dad hates me already. What do I do?

-M

Scoffing quietly, Marik reminded himself of all the good that letter did him. He'd sent it in to the magazine in the hopes of a supportive response, when he was just 14 years old. Six years later and he found himself in a mental institution. His dad told him he was crazy. Hallucinating, talking-to-himself, fed-up-with-life crazy.

"I am just so sick of living here!" Marik had told them all, to his own demise. "It's nothing to do with what's in my head."

"Son," And his father had choked on the word like he regretted it, "You're bored of women. That's why you think you like men."

"I don't think I like men, I…"

"You're dumb, so you think you can't past tests." His father interrupted him.

"I'm not…"

"Which is why you're too lazy to study for them. Which is why you should be studying harder!"

"Dad!" Marik had insisted, adamant. "I'm not trying to do any of this…"

"Oh of course." His dad had told him, suddenly planting his head face down into his hands as though shamed. "It's the voices in your head, right son? My only son..."

"One voice. Singular." Marik attempted saying, as though that made it any better for him. "It's like this other Marik, an, an evil Marik…"

"Stop it!" His sister Ishizu burst out spontaneously, as though intent to save them from some great evil Marik had become. "You'll break mother's heart!" But through all the theatrics, their mother had already run from the room sobbing ages ago.

Marik raised his eyebrows in surprise, not certain it was anything to get upset over. "Why? How is this any different from how I've acted all my life?"

"It's gotten worse," His father told him, in a tone that laid a red carpet down for his own confession. "And…Marik. We've come up with a solution."

"Oh so I'm a problem now, am I? Good, that's real sweet of you all. So hey, how're we gonna fix me?" His sarcastic remarks fell on deaf ears. He could never have foreseen what was to come.

He could never have imagined himself, a vast stretch of miles from home, with his own back pack stuffed to capacity with the little bits of home he could bring along tethered to his back. It dug into his shoulders, scratching his bronze skin a little, making him wonder where his mother was to complain to. Or his cell phone to call her and complain to with, or Ishizu to complain to in the meanwhile.

God he missed home.

It must have showed on his disappointed face as he slipped into the Psychiatric Ward's main office, because the receptionist took pity on him. She bustled over with wide, sympathetic eyes. "Oh dear, can I help you?"

Then he just realized she was checking out his mid rib from closer range. He felt a little exposed when he realized everyone was looking at him, fascinated by his Egyptianess. This place was clearly a little further from home than he would have liked to imagine.

"I'm good. Just…checking in to room 505."

"You came alone?" she asked disbelievingly, with even more sympathy swimming her eyes. "Oh dear…"

"Yeah." Marik admitted, a little confused. "Anyway, if you could just, point it out to me…"

"Oh sure. But you need to be scanned first."

"Scanned what now?"

"Ya know. Tested for drugs and narcotics and the what have you. Also, gotten your health inspection."

"I need a…health inspection?" Marik asked uncertainly, berating his parents for setting him up here.

"Yep. Everywhere. You'll have to be naked. Come to think of it, I'll come with you!" She announced doltishly.

Marik shivered at the thought, on the verge of plunging out the doors again. There was still time, he could still make it. They didn't even have his name to cross reference with the psycho that'd escaped their ward. Although one check up call from his dad with the description of tanned, scantily dressed and Egyptian and, they'd probably have his name soon enough.

"It will only take a minute." The over eager receptionist assured him, nudging him onwards in a combination of care and a strange personal mission.

Marik was about to protest when he was overwhelmed by another's person's thought patterns. Yami Marik had arrived in voice alone up in his thoughts again.

'Hey Marik!'

"The reason I'm here…" Marik returned the greeting at a hiss, under his breath as the receptionist cocked her head doubtfully, as though hesitant to believe he was talking to himself.

'Yeah well now it's just you and me here, right Marik? Just us. Just you and me in the silence…'

That thought was unbearable. Marik was about to scream at his dark side, when he realized with pained acknowledging, that everybody in the room was still staring at him. And they couldn't hear his dark side's end of the discussion.

"This way now…" The receptionist picked up where they'd left off, not deterred in the slightest.

Marik felt pushed and receded instantly. He wanted to run from here. The thought of home spun in his mind. His own back pack weighed him down like a guilty conscience. Maybe he shouldn't have pled crazy. Maybe he should have just appeased his parents and dated a girl and cheated on tests and pretended the voice up in his head was the illusion they told him it was.

He shuddered involuntarily at the most significant of those notions. Dated a girl. He'd had about enough of girls; boys were a different matter. There was something refreshingly honest about a boy; as though he didn't want to deceive you with hidden meanings and saying one thing while he did another. In all truthfulness, he could understand a boy better. He was one. How much easier it had to be seeing eye to eye. They had to be easier to confront with that in mind.

"Oh," The receptionist broke his spiraling thoughts, throwing her head up cheerfully to see across his shoulder. "There he is. That's the Cadet Psychiatrist of your ward, over there."

Marik nodded bleakly, revolving to see where she'd pointed at.

"That's him over there, his name's Bakura dear."

It was something about his hair. No, his eyes. No, definitely his hair. As he came sweeping up out of nowhere, a young boy in white that made the clinical trench coat appear angelic, his blue eyes met up with Marik's helpless stare. They arrested him there, without any will to escape him. It didn't even seem possible that anything so striking could have a place amid the plain, surgery green walls of the clinic halls.

The boy smiled enchantingly at the dumb founded stare he'd received. "Marik Ishtar?" He presumed.

Marik bobbed his head once quickly at that, swallowing back his torrent of questions.

Bakura had a clip board in one hand, and he approached with it extended. "Are you signing yourself in?"

Marik couldn't locate English words in time, so he snatched up the clip board feeling impolite at his own silence.

A voice he hadn't expected woke inside of him just as his hand brushed past his Cadet psychiatrist's on grabbing the board. The voice he ironically should have been the most prepared for by now.

'Hey, uh, you do realize your heart beat is like a thousand times…'

"Shut up." Marik muttered to his dark side while he dashed his signature down on the page.

"Excuse me?" Bakura asked sweetly, glancing up from his quick discussion with the receptionist to listen.

"Oh, uh, it's…" Marik started, pressured crazily.

'This is like when you start a test you haven't studied for. Maybe worse…'

"Ah-hm. Nothing." Marik tried throat clearing, mostly to drown the thoughts in his head that weren't his own out.

As though full of understanding, Bakura nodded politely. "Alright then. Would you like to follow me to the nurse's office?"
"Yeah I would actually." Marik stated recklessly, despite his earlier reservations.

Bakura obliged with a brief smile and took the lead down the quiet green halls.

'Boy if this guy isn't a stiff.'

Marik ignored himself.

It didn't take them long to reach the check up room, where Bakura pulled up and prompted Marik inside. "Go right in. The nurse will be with you."

"Will you?" Marik asked, almost childishly.

Bakura laughed softly at that, which made him even harder to pull away from. He shook his head gently, as one in custody of psychos might become accustomed to. "No, not inside Marik. But I'll be with you after to take you to your ward."

Oh great, like the lollipop at the end of the injection. Marik nodded at the brief respite in that as he forced himself through the nurse's doors alone.

Another fangirl met him on the other side. "Oh! I mean…Oh, hi! You must be…"

"Marik Ishtar." He provided her with, scared of her though he couldn't isolate why.

"Room 505. Oh, well it's just wonderful to have you here!" Her getting over-excited was psyching his nerves up. Marik swallowed back the urge to call Bakura in.

"Well if you'd just sit down here," The nurse ordered him, setting him down at her table. "I'll ask you a few personal questions…"

"Um…"

"About your health."

"Oh," Marik relaxed slightly.

"Right. So, um, let's start at the top…" She ran him through a cascading list of questions that took them past the ups and downs of his general state of life and living. When she was done, she patted the operating table with one hand to imply he sit on it.

He was surprised at the motion. "But, aren't we..?"

"Body inspection." She affirmed for him kindly, as her smiling eyes carried down to his shirt. "Gonna have to take 'em off, sweetheart."

"Hmm." Marik contemplated that, recalling words like these from no further reliable source other than that previous fangirl. "Hang on a sec. Bakura!"

"Marik?" Came a pleasant voice that had detected his startling outcry.

"I'm not sure if I need to go through with this. She wants me to strip."

"That's part of the process. Keep going, you're doing great."

"I'm…not sure I'm comfortable with that." Marik called back out to him, surprising himself at how easy it was to find words when the conversation was being held behind the shield of a door. "How badly do I have to?"

"Dear, it's only policy." The nurse confirmed for him, petting his disheveled hair in fondness of his innocence. "Don't you worry about a thing. It's completely professional."

"Why can't he do it?" Marik spat out worriedly at her touch, immediately regretting it. Instantly hoping against the odds that Bakura wasn't still listening in on them.

The nurse pulled back ever so slightly, amused and perplexed all at once. Then she brushed her hair behind her ear, laughingly telling him, "Bakura? Bakura is not qualified, dear. He would just lose his job if he tried that sort of thing."

"Why does everyone here call me dear?" Marik asked in self pity, still somewhat relieved Bakura hadn't heard his last whimpering session.

"Because you are a dear," she tried to cover for herself with, before confessing, "And it's very Psychiatric Facility for us to do so."

"Really?" He asked her tiredly, not sure how long he could keep the conversation going to prolong the final event.

"For sure. Now take your shirt off."

"Why do they call us that again?"

"It's a happy word. We need to use happy words. Shirt, please."

"Oh. So what else is a happy word?"

"Dear…"

"Yeah I know that one," Marik strung her along enjoyably, "But…do you know any other happy words?"

"Well now dear, I'm not sure, but if you don't take your shirt off for me this instant…you're going to hear some very unhappy words."

Adhering to the threat, Marik whisked his shirt off indignantly. "Hmph."

"Alright, let's put an ear piece on here." She gave him the full 911. He was approved of shortly and bid his shirt again in only moments.

"Well, that was painless enough." She declared.

"For you maybe." And Marik recovered his dignity along with his shirt again.

"Pants next."

"I was afraid of that." Marik said with dread. Her incessancy won over his defiance long before the battle had even started.

"Thank you dear."

"Don't mention it."

Marik stumbled out of her doors defeated, having forgotten Bakura was even there waiting for him. His half open eyes met the blue eyed, white haired angel modestly. "So, are the people declared crazy after they're poked with sticks in there, or, even before that?"

Bakura giggled warmly at that, helping him take the next few steps down the halls dressed in his newly donned psychiatric ward-white robe. "But aren't you more comfortable now?"

"Emotionally, no." Marik admitted despite the comfort of his new robe. "And the outfit just makes me feel psychopathic."

"You're not psychopathic." Bakura assured him in all politeness, as they passed by a man drinking milk through his nose. Bakura hesitated in nervous watch of him as they came up closer, where the man instantly resigned to stopping the defiant gig and proceeded the act of drinking through the funnel that was his mouth. Bakura smiled approvingly at him and then lead on again.

"Sure I'm not." Marik cooed like a child.

The inside of his room was white and calming. Everything was devoid of color; drab and meaningless. The walls of the room were empty and white. The bed sheets of his room were just as colorless. The floors and the corner chair were lacking too.

Against the pale interior, Bakura's ashen skin and startling white roguish mess of hair were lost without contrast. It was enough to convince any man the world was clean and clear and simple.

"I want to go home." Marik told Bakura unguardedly. "I hate it here."

"Now Marik," And Bakura positioned himself as a barrier between the door and his patient's frantic eyes. "I understand you're still new to this place, and it may all come as surprising. But I'm with you through this, and I'm sure you'll settle in quite nicely."

"Yeah. And when that day comes, I'm sure as hell to be crazy."

Bakura's fallen expression pled with him to comply with the process. Marik just saw a world without color.

"Look, I've had enough." Marik told him outright, certain he could push the slimmer boy out of the door frame and his path need be. "Just get out of my way."

"Marik," Bakura said his name like he'd known him for a long time. "This isn't a prison house. This is somewhere you've chosen to be, because you know you're not crazy."

"What?"

"This isn't a way to admit to yourself you've lost it. This is just a way of proving that you're not crazy."

"Huh?"

"It's all confusing, I know." And Bakura touched his face lightly. "But in the end, you'll walk out of here with no one stopping you. You'll walk out knowing you were everything you thought you were when you first came in here and just couldn't reach the words to tell us."

"I…"

"And I'm here." Bakura promised him, the selling point. Marik didn't have to be crazy to know that this was all an obvious trap he was letting himself fall into. Bakura's eyes were so alluring that they threw all the color the room needed across the spotless walls. "I'm here with you Marik. And I would really like to get to know you before you take off again. Would you stay here to get to know me, Marik?"

Probably, a bad idea. No, definitely, a bad idea.

"Okay."

He was granted solitude a few seconds after complying, at which point he tossed his heavily weighted bag down onto the floorboards with nothing but the miles he'd travelled in mind. It was as though he'd been trapped in hell by an angel.

His thoughts warped by feelings he'd never felt before, Marik sat up in the silence with nothing other than the promise of Bakura's return resonating across his consciousness. He was less than pleased to realize he had just received his first dose of psychology.

'Will you stay with me, Marik?' Which in fact meant, 'Will you stay here, miles from home, for a stranger who thinks you're not much more than crazy?'

There was no denying how much he missed the most annoying aspects of his most annoying family now, right down to his dolt of a sister and his father's unfounded pet snake that had bitten him once when he'd least deserved it. It had struck out at him back when he was little, and uncomplicated, and unprepared for the harsh realities that were to come. Come to think of it, the same unpreparedness he experienced alone in the room that day.

The small, but endless, white room that had somehow become his.

He wasn't even sure what they could do to fix a patient who wasn't hallucinating or crazy. Whose demons were real.

'Marik? What're we still doing here? Let's break a window or something, come on.'

As tempting as his evil self was, Marik denied it that pleasure. Of telling him what to do.

After landing them both in an insanity ward, it was the least he could do out of vengeance to ignore the spirit further. It was a taxing punishment to uphold.

'Marik? Hey, Marik. Hey Marik. Marik, it's me, Marik.'

Correction.

The small, but endless, white room that had somehow become…theirs.