Bakura is the first person to admit that he is completely and utterly mad.
He's lived so long he's almost forgotten how long it's been. Three thousand, four thousand, five thousand years? Does it even matter anymore? He's been so many places, lived so many lives, been so many people, that he has almost forgotten who or what what they all were. Who or what he is now.
There is one thing he has never forgotten, even after his mind was corrupted and his soul was taken over and his body eroded into dust. Deep down, he has never forgotten. An event like that can never be erased easily, especially when it was carved into his heart when he was so young, so small and helpless compared to now. Now, he has power. Now, he can manipulate, control and destroy at will.
Back then, all those millenia ago, he was not mad. He was human, mortal. He had one body, one soul and one mind. He knew what he wanted, and how he could get it. Whether it was merely a small raid or a full-scale attack, all of it was done because he was trying to get revenge in whatever way possible. But it was never enough. No amount of thievery or murder could ever bring them back, and so he turned to deeper, darker measures.
If he had known exactly what summoning Zorc would have brought about, would he have still done it? It meant the destruction of the Pharoah, but it also meant the destruction of whatever was left of him. Zorc chipped away at his conscience until he could no longer tell where he left off and Zorc began. They became the same person: a boy spurred on by cruelty and torture and hate, and the Shadow Realm itself, a demon that could never truly die.
Sealed away for centuries inside his own soul, if it really was his own soul anymore, it's not really a wonder why he became so twisted. When the darkness is not only surrounding you, but inside you, a part of you, how can you ever possibly hope to catch a glimpse of the light again?
Living in the light isn't all that it's cracked up to be. The light burns. In the light, you can see the bad things as well as the good; all the hurt and suffering in the world. It piles down on top of you, smothering you with truth and feelings and memories so painful that you would do anything to get out of such a terrible, blistering light. To be blind. To live in the dark.
The darkness is comforting. The world desires its embrace. There is nothing in the darkness. No sadness, no cause for hurt. In the darkness, one cannot see one's mistakes, or the dreams that failed to be. The fatal flaws and the missing pieces. What could have been, what should never have happened.
Two souls, or three souls, or four souls, trapped together in one body. Ryou, Zorc, whatever is left of the Thief King, Bakura. Three live in the darkness, because they belong to it, and one lives in the light, because he is too young and naive to understand that the darkness is better. Easier.
Bakura know that he must be insane, because these things do not happen to sane, normal people. Normal people think that the light is good. Normal people live and die in the light, because it's all they've ever known. Only the mad seek out the darkness, because only the mad have a reason to do so.
And Bakura has three thousand (four thousand, five thousand) years of madness escalating inside him, trying to burst out into the light, but kept under the thick, warm blanket that is the darkness, because he knows that going into the light is not worth the pain it will bring.
Yes, Bakura is mad. But is it really that much better to be sane?
A/N: A little something I spent about an hour writing in order to try to understand Bakura a little bit better. Tell me if I got the character and the story right, because I actually haven't watched Season Five, which is what is this about really. So. Yeah. I'm quite happy with how this turned out. I'm not generally very good at writing stories.
Oh, and some (most) of the lines in the eighth paragraph (if you can call it that) are from Kingdom Hearts: recoded. Props to whoever knows which part!
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