It is quite the usual night for the Spirit of the millennium ring. He moves fluidly, walking through the deeply dark streets like an eel through water. His shoes wade through the black and yellow pools of shadow and streetlight in long, confident strides. He fears nothing the evening conjures for him. It only feeds his energy.
The thin, polished knife in his pocket is not for defense, nor is it for wild, random strikes. He is not a serial killer; Bakura knows better than to give in to impulses and induce sloppy fatalities to some poor soul travelling hurredly through the same cold night. He is not stupid enough to get caught, but even threatening depleates his energy, and he is always aware of conserving it. Besides, a victim worthy of his full sociopathic performance is few and far between. Bakura chooses wisely and carefully, and only when the time is right. Nevertheless, as it happens on all the nights where he slips quietly through the blackness on his own, his eyes flit back and forth across the street and into the windows of apartment buildings, searching. Every movement is noticed and categorised.
Bakura sees a figure sitting on a stoop, silently smoking a fizzling cigarette underneath a sputtering artificial streetlamp. There is nothing remotely intruiging about him. His shaggy, unkempt hair and hands that tense when he takes a drag of his cigarette suggests a cold, nihilistic attitude. The Spirit snorts, quietly appreciating the similar mindset. He very quickly becomes exasperated by negative and dramatic people as that attitude only inhibits results, but a bitter person who also yields product to the world is as good as anyone else to him.
As he passes the stoop, he feels a lazy urge to kick the cigarette out of the boy's hand. Tobacco makes him nauseous, as Ryou's body is so fragile. Although much too often, it's an escape for both reality and his delusions. He both despises and accepts this coping mechanism, as he does with many aspects of himself.
Their gazes meet as the bodies line up with each other in the milky white light. The boy has uninteresting eyes beneath thick lashes, and the pupils grow bigger as they take in Bakura's pale appearance. Bakura nods his head almost imperceptably, not one for juvial greetings, especially not at this hour.
The boy responds with a sharp inhale and a puff of billowing, stinking smoke into Bakura's face. The gesture does not faze the Spirit—not much really does, at this point—but it makes him wrinkle his nose and scowl slightly, if only for show. It seems that whenever he exudes some amount of cordiality, however stale and fake, it is refused by those around him. It makes him, if anything, still more tired and eager to isolate himself. The boy's mouth curls into a crinkled sneer and his tongue pokes out of his mouth in a singular childish snicker.
He continues travelling aimlessly through town, unsure of his destination. This is one of the nights he walks the host's body until exhaustion. But as he meanders sleeplessly into the books and crannies of endless buildings, his hand itches on the smooth handle of his knife. Surely no self-righteous, average-looking teenager would be searched for in the middle of the night, would they? He had not spiked Bakura's homicidal tendencies, merely stung his eyes with cigarette smoke. That was worth a meager threat, was it not? A quick altercation in the darkness of an alley before Bakura disappears into the safety of a town that knows only his the face of his host—it's just what Bakura needs at the moment. Or at least what he convinces himself he needs, and that is usually the basis of most of his decisions.
The figure is gone from the stoop when Bakura returns; there is a definite chill in the air, and no one apart from someone like the Spirit would enjoy the sharp sting of cold for too long. Bakura is not at all deterred by this; he has time to kill, almost always does, and, after all, this is not a high priority situation. He stands, still as a dead man, in the shadows in between two buildings across from the boy's apartment. He observes a light flicker in a room on the fifth floor, then returns his gaze to the front door to the stoop, breath swirling in condensed whorls through his thick mane.
The door opens about half an hour later and a trash bag is pushed out, followed by the shuffling body of Bakura's target. He slings the bag over his shoulder, huffing overdramatically, and stomps towards the trashcans behind the apartment. The Spirit gently touches the handle of his knife with a much colder hand, and he moves forward in the dark like a silent, icy stream. He is smart enough to be so slow that the trash is emptied into the cans before he reaches his prey; excess noise would ruin this moment. He prides himself on these small details he concocts during planning, if he can pride himself on nothing else.
It seems too easy, and Bakura is already starting to feel bored as he reaches out from behind the boy's bent figure, and the blade moves like a ribbon in the air in a way that takes Bakura's breath away every time he engages in these interactions. In one motion, one arm is trapping down the two flimsy arms and the other is holding the knife so close, intimately against the boy's skin, with just enough pressure that Bakura can feel the heartbeat shrieking like a trapped animal against the still, dead metal. The boy's face slaps noisily against the wall of the alley, a pathetic sound that makes Bakura's mouth twitch at the corners.
Though the Spirit has given up searching for the reward of joy or happiness that comes with living long ago, the electricity of fear in others is palpable and exhilarating to his apathetic brain. The knife shakes, partly with the blood of the other pumping furiously against his flesh, and partly because the tension in the air is flooding into his veins like a drug.
Bakura lives for this.
The night is silent for a moment as the boy struggles, physically with Bakura's strong grip and psychologically with the reality of his current state. The initial shock bleeds into terror, sharp, high pitched fear that digs into his lungs, his heart, his organs once so loose and wet now frozen like dry ice. His limbs freeze in one quick moment. There is barely any air in his throat and he thinks that even if he could use his lungs, all the air in that alley now belongs to the man with the knife to his throat.
The Spirit says "Pardon me, but" with such an effortless tone that his target is hit with a wildly surreal bolt of security. As if the man, holding the boy so close against his body that their internal temperatures seem to match, can change back and forth between opposite states of mind. It takes the other a moment to answer, a moment to slow down his blood to a point where he can speak without his lips shaking stupidly with the shock of such a rush of adrenaline.
"What," he softly says, every word a careful, quivering wisp in the night air, "do you want from me?"
He knows the protocol for this sort of situation, everyone who lives here does, but it still makes his heart jolt and twitch like a dying rodent to be faced with a tangible scenario. Every bone in his body seems stiffer, brittle as a fragile branch, easy and fun to break. Bakura's overwhelming body melts him down, makes him press further up against the wet wall of his apartment building. The bricks are freezing and clammy on his cheek.
Bakura's voice sweeps over the boy's neck and ear, snaking languidly across the skin. The Spirit scoffs, amused by the futile attempt to defuse the situation. "Nothing," he says, plaintively toying with the collar of the other's shirt with ice cold fingers. "Not from you. Don't flatter yourself." A shifting of weight beneath his hands, a quickening of the heartbeat trapped against the metal of Bakura's blade.
Verbal humiliation is something the Spirit enjoys immensely, as he always resort to whispering sweet, abusive nothings into the ears of his ever-present host when Bakura is too tired or bored to unleash physical torment.
Bakura could launch into his usual dramatic shpiel, could inform this poor soul who he's truly up against and how large the scope of Bakura's anger, apathy and violently nihilistic philosophies really are—but he chooses to exude some amount of watered-down pity for his victim. Tonight is not a night for long-winded monologues, however much he appreciates the moment in the spotlight. He is here only to blow off a bit of restless steam, for now.