Shadow: A…weird little one-shot that's been lurking around my head and home for a while. I might as well put it up this month and be rid of it; I'm planning to work on my longer fics over the summer. Anyway, enjoy.

Notes: Y'know, I think this is the first thing I've entirely uploaded that's in first-person POV. Ryou Bakura's thoughts on his yami, and insomnia.

Warnings: Dark themes. Horror references that may be off-putting.

Insomnia

It's hard to sleep when there's a voice in your head.

It keeps talking, even after the sun sets and the moon comes up – and aren't the stars so very pretty tonight, yami? I know you can see them yet you won't look – are you afraid of the stars, yami? I wouldn't be; Heaven has long since forsaken you, and you forsook it in return. I doubt you even care enough to hate it.

You hate a lot of things, yami. You dislike sleep – it's a waste of time. Night is the time when you wish to be up and out – and I won't let you do that. Oh, you scream and you shout, and then you forcibly shove me out of the way, locking me up in a tiny corner of my mind so you can do what you will. But not tonight. You're quiet tonight, yami; all that keeps me awake is your voice in my head.

I guess it's a good thing I don't like to sleep either.

Sleep is for the innocent, yami. For the pure. Sleep is for those who are not afraid to close their eyes at night, who are secure in the knowledge that while they dream nightmares of their life will not steal behind closed lashes and torment them for the nightly hours. I think it's worse for us, though.

There are two of us. Two minds to see, to recall, to remember. Two minds to file away the horrors of the day, and resurrect them at night to play and replay themselves in the corridor of our shared minds, sole dreams sliding under our soul room doors so we drowse in a shared Hell. Our combined fears lurk in the shadows of our minds, creeping out as darkness falls and rendering us dumb with grief, with rage, with fear.

It hurts.

I tried coffee first, to keep awake. I couldn't stand the drink – and you hated it more. But still, I drank it. It…didn't really help much - I fell asleep anyway, later than I'd intended but still asleep. I woke up the following morning shivering, dark monsters slinking back into the murk of our minds as consciousness cleared them away.

The bitterness in my mouth as I rose to clean my teeth came from more than the drink I'd had the night before.

I tried other methods to stay awake, but none of them worked. Eventually, I yielded to despair – and then you took up the slack, yami.

You…you took to talking at night, yami, to keep yourself awake. You simply begin as evening turns to night, your incomprehensible mutterings filling my head and my heart. I mourn that this is what we've come to, and the few times I've been close enough, when you never noticed I was there, your babble distressed me. You made no sense, yami, your fears a string of gibberish that flowed off your ever-fluent tongue to bounce off of your cold heart, the thick walls of your soul.

I think I'm at least partially insane. Perhaps, if I am, you're fully insane, and then we both compliment each other nicely. How else would your nightly nonsense not drive me to madness? I have known stronger men than I – and there are many – to crack under less pressure than that of a voice that simply can not and will not stop – but then, do I want your voice to stop? When it stops-

The sound of silence yawns forever and ever and ever amen and dear sweet Lord it goes on and on and on. An eternity of solitude, a gaping chasm, and yami don't you know what it is when you stop? You mustn't – not ever -, for then I can hear the silence between your words, between you anger, and see-

You don't want me to see that, do you? I can taste the darkness you hide, so much deeper and blacker than the face you show me, and it leaks through your soul across our hallway into mine. And it burns, yami, and the fire sears across my memories as it does yours, burning flesh and hair. Ashes of lives choking me, smothering us. Did you know roasting flesh smells of pork, yami?

We cannot breathe.

The past holds my chest and I gasp for breath and the dead gasp with us, clawing reaching, cold hands that slide through my ribs and touch my heart that shutters, beats, feeble and chilled. Your heart is stronger, yami, though yours stopped beating thousands of years ago.

I cannot sleep; I can't. If I sleep they will reach for me, for you, for us and they will take back what was once took from them. They will steal our breath, yami, and even your heart falters at that.

Keep talking.

I have shadows under my eyes now, and they show clearly on my pale skin. You brush your hand over them now as a spirit, yami, and in your eyes I see you lament. You've driven hosts to insanity before, yami; why feel guilt now? I would not have you guilty – I then would become another fear added to your ever-growing collection, so that your next host would meet the same fate as I, only quicker.

Tumbling down, down, down. You're still speaking, yami, and I long to cry, but my eyes have quite dried up. Your voice used to soothe me once; before it scared me; but now it is cracked and broken from overuse.

Now…now I am without sleep, and you are too. I dream of the day when your words will end at night – my waking nightmare – and ponder: is that what truly killed your other hosts, the ones that came before me? Not your 'evil', not your 'crimes' – no, not even one of the Pharaoh's hosts, or his Priests reincarnate. Your nightmares. Your words to chase away the fears.

Your silence.

You must surely reach a point when you have no more words left to say. And – and I fear what that will do to me, almost, and yet…I long for it. Blessed silence where I may wallow in my grief, where I may sleep and dream only that I may never wake up. For, locked in Hell, one knows one has no hope of redemption, and cannot be deluded. Reality only serves to offer false hopes, false comforts, pretty illusions that will all too quickly be snatched away. The dead will come for me and maybe then they will let you be, your village appeased by the snow-white doll you give to them, soft as ash. And then maybe it would be end to it.

But…there will be no end. I know this, deeply, in my heart of hearts. The sadness lingers, that at least some small part of me longs for such an end, and that that very same end will be denied to me by the one who offered it. And that would be you, yami. You torment me so.

Is it right for you to taunt me, yami, to drive me to the brink of sanity and then back off, to leave me a teetering mass on the edge? It cannot be. You should push me finally, yami, break me completely so I can be done – or pull me back, and hold me so I can weep. But you won't. You have ambitions for this life, for Yami no Yugi and the desire for your end. You have plans. You will allow nothing to get in the way of them, will you? Not even yourself. And so you talk.

Who can sleep, with such a voice in their heads? Muttering, nonsensical, Heaven-damned and constant. You don't care, yami, what your words do anymore. I may share your nightmares, your memories, but that is all you will allow. You cannot stop them, after all. You are driven, and still you continue to ignore my pleas to look at the stars. They are so very pretty tonight, and they choke me. I cannot touch them no matter how far I reach into the sky - yami, why are the stars so cold?

I – you can hear my suffering, can't you, yami? Your eyes narrow, but I am too tired anymore. Insomnia kills what is left of my defence to you – let it be done your way. It will be anyway, as it always has been, but – I might as well give you the last shred of what is left of me. My defiance? I have none. My dreams? Already commingled with yours. My hopes? Already long since extinguished. I cannot sleep, I cannot breathe and you will keep talking to yourself in your strange words and cracked voice, and it will never, never stop till one of us breaks. Whichever one of us it is, I know now it will be your hand that does it. You…you will destroy yourself, yami, with your own ambitions, or else you will destroy both of us. No accident will have you kill solely me, and I am too precious to your goals for you to suddenly rid of me one day. You will keep me alive, yami, even at a cost to yourself. But…you will drive me insane, if I am not there already.

Please, yami, let it end soon. Have my body, use it, just finish whatever twisted game you have in motion so I can finally be gone from you, so I can be rid of your talking and close my eyes and sleep. I may fear it, but at least then I know my nightmares would solely be my own. It would be done.

Yami…

Death would be preferable to this.