A/N: Written for:
The Prompts in Steps Challenge, 3.11 - ficlet, trickle
The Yugioh all seasons/verses bingo: the non-flash version, #030 - vague
Diversity Writing Challenge, b16 - write a third person POV fic
A Trickle of Changes
The changes are subtle at first. He doesn't realise himself that he's changing. That he's growing quieter, and yet more observant. That he's taking in more of the world than he'd ever taken in before, but that he's slowly detaching from it in the process.
When people do comment, they assume it's natural. After all, he's Bakura Ryou: quiet transfer student with a thick accent because he's half British and only half Japanese as well. He's Bakura Ryou, who lives on his own in a three bedroom apartment that's too big and too nice for a juniour high school student to be living in on his own (though he claims his father does come home every night, when in all honesty he comes home once every few months at best). He's Bakura Ryou whose mother is dead (and little sister too, but he never talks about her to other people, so they don't know that one, and they only know his mother's dead because they ask).
But it's not new, his mother's death, and his sister's, and his father being absent almost all the time like he is. It's been like that for a few years, and it'll be like that for a few more.
But it is changing, again. And he's not aware of it. His classmates aren't aware either, because they think it's all part of the grieving process and maybe it is, or maybe he's one of those shy people who only gets more distant from their peers, except he's not. He doesn't want to be lonely, and he's not sure why he's getting lonelier. He's not sure at all.
But he does know he has to try harder, so he goes back to the basics. Bakes cookies for his class once a fortnight, bring cards to school to play (even though they're technically not allowed, they make the lunch times more fun and the others are more than happy to not own the cards and therefore skip out on the majority of the detentions if they wind up caught, which they haven't yet). And he invites them over to play more complex games as well, because he's got no parents at home in the afternoons to make him do homework first thing and he can make cake and more cookies to snack on, and because there's the games room that has taken up the spare bedroom.
So they play all afternoon in that room after the kids had told their parents the night before they'd be working on a fictional group assignment (because even though it was friday, they still had homework that needed doing and going to play with friends was a sunday and if you've finished homework thing). And then things changed drastically, because within a week, they are all in hospital.
He doesn't realise it's connected to playing games with him until a few attempts later, when the others bring it up as part of the pool of rumours surrounding him. And the new consensus is that Bakura Ryou is cursed, and that's why his mother is dead, why his father's home (and maybe he's dead as well, and just hasn't reported it yet because then he won't be able to live in his fancy apartment on his own and will be chucked in an orphanage instead). And it's not a clear-cut everybody believes it rumour at first, because they don't exactly faint in his game room. It can just as easily be a coincidence, or food poisoning (and nobody eats his cookies anymore and he stops making them after having to eat them all one lunchtime and winding up with a painful stomach ache).
But it's not a coincidence, because when school becomes so unbearable he has to change, the first person to lose in his game room collapses on the spot. And the rumours pick up where they left off.
And Ryou doesn't understand at all, because he's not doing anything. He's the same as he's always been, but something around him is changing…
But that's not true either. And it takes him a few years to realise there are gaping blanks in his memories, for all how easily he can reconstruct a scene of reality at will.
And it takes meeting Yugi and his Millennium Puzzle to learn the full truth of it all.