nameless

Laddershipping written for the final part of the Yu-gi-oh! Fanfiction Contest Round 9 ¾.

Thanks to friendship (aka the-healer-of-all-wounds) I managed to finish. Thank you, I would've been down for the count if not for you.

Ohhhh this was a toughie, particularly because of a ridiculous amount of tests for school last week and an injury that I sustained this week. Had to go to the emergency room 'cause my foot was bleeding all over the place... I'll spare y'all the details.

Take warning: Some AUish elements, gore, vore, evisceration, asexual (in both the lack of desire and lack of reproductive organs) Yami Bakura, and character death.

Upon His arrival, the heavens blackened. One beat of His wings rent the flesh off of any living creature foolish enough to come close. His fire melted men's bones, and one breath from His lungs turned their innards to ash. He immediately crushed anything that challenged Him, along with anything that did not. Living souls—squirming, howling, screaming—slid down His gullet, and only served to increase His godly power and already gargantuan size.

Or, at least, that's how He used to be.

The Dark One lay imprisoned in the very domain that He ruled. The Gods always liked irony, after all.

His bonds were the only source of light in the depths of the Shadows aside from the weak glow cast by the human spirits who were damned there. They always extinguished their light soon after arrival; particularly if they had the great misfortune of arriving directly next to the Dark One. A rare occurrence, but the event always brought Him pleasure as He could hear the cries that echoed through His Realm so close.

At this very moment in time, He didn't have any mortal souls to consume, but instead, a mouthful of His own shoulder. Determination glinted in the depths of His eyes, the dullest spark of emotion on His face, and He pulled again and again at the hunk of flesh.

The action had been compulsory and immediate upon realizing with no small measure of anticipation that His bonds were weakening. A rift began to make its way through the dimensional layers that made up the Shadow Realm.

The mortals were dabbling in the higher powers again. Fools. Useful fools, but fools nonetheless.

He had no way of knowing how long he stayed locked up like a dangerous animal, but He didn't concern himself with such things. He only cared about escape.

Even if only a small piece of Him would be able to.

Tearing deeply into His hide was undeniably difficult, even when He underwent the task Himself. No amount of clawing at His arm with His mostly-bound hand did more than leave a few scratches. They consisted of wounds that would have rendered a human being in two, but felt like little more than a collection of paper cuts to Him.

His frustration grew more and more incensed, an occurrence that happened all too often during the imprisonment of the dark god. Eventually the immense dissatisfaction with His progress boiled over. The Dark One snarled, and then bit into His shoulder again. Teeth sank into the thick meat with a nauseating gush of oozing black fluid. He slurped at the blood and turned His head to one side. The combination of anger and pain created a delicious mixture that lanced through His body when He tugged, and muscles rippled beneath the dark skin of His neck.

At last, the bit of meat came free and He spat it out into the same hand that He had used before. He didn't remove as much flesh as He wanted, but it would have to do. His tongue slithered out to clean the remaining juices off of His teeth, greedy for even the smallest amount of nourishment as He watched the bloody meat wriggle as if infested with worms.

There wasn't a differentiation of gender amongst the Dark One's subjects and victims. Even with such a distinction the result of attempting to mate would invariably end with His girth ripping His partner in half. If somehow a creature existed large enough to accommodate Him, He would probably scorch them from the inside out, anyway. As such, His children were born by different means.

Gradually, as He knew it would, the bloody meat stopped moving so sporadically and instead began a slow, steady pulsing. Quite suddenly, a spindly limb tore its way out of the flesh, a four-fingered hand clawing at the air like an undead corpse's would upon breaking out of its coffin. He watched intently as the rest of the body formed; it was as humanoid as something created from His flesh could be.

As with any infant, creature of darkness or not, the first few seconds of its existence consisted of learning how to breathe. The air in the Shadow Realm tasted bitter and foul on the fiend's tongue, but it swallowed lungful after lungful anyway. The body dripped with murky fluid reminiscent from the blood He had spilled when He tore the flesh He used to make it. Within the puddle of quickly congealing fluid the creature lay curled up in the palm of one of His great hands, the only sign of movement being its ragged struggle for air. After an immeasurable amount of time passed, it began to tremble in the cold that assaulted its soaked body; the weak, formless, pathetic excuse for a body.

The Dark One's previous creations had worn ghastly purple-black skin, but this time around—possibly because of how restrained He was, possibly because the rift in the Shadow Realm let in light—the child had little skin pigmentation, further emphasizing how human the puny the thing looked. Not to mention that it was shuddering and whimpering and about to cry just like a filthy mortal whelp.

A disappointment from the very start.

When the gummed up eyelids finally separated and the newborn experienced the sense of sight, the very first thing it saw was His face. A human would have surely screamed their lungs out, had their first sight been the enormous countenance of its sire looming over them.

It, on the other hand, did not. Though it did feel rather sickened when His foul breath washed over it, filling the newly-cleared nostrils with the stench of death and decay. He radiated disapproval as He stared down at it with eyes at least three dozen times the size of its entire body.

Instinctively the creature shrank back, murmuring the first word all of His children uttered upon their birth:

"Master..?"

The sound of its crackly, undeveloped voice annoyed Him and His features contorted into a harsher expression.

"You are even more wretched than the others, fragment," He growled from deep in His chest, nearly causing it to flinch from the sheer loudness of His voice, "But you will have to do."

The "others", it would learn later, were its brethren. Thousands of years ago He had crushed into a pulp within His fist and devoured shortly after their creations because He was not satisfied with them. He grew desperate enough to accept it where he did not accept them. There hadn't been more than a taste of a possible escape with the others.

It cringed as He began to clean the blood off of its body with His slavering tongue, leaving the heady scent of rot on it in thick amounts. Eventually it relaxed, and even began to lean into the wet, cushy warmth. A few laps later He seemed satisfied with its cleanliness and left it cold once again.

Throughout the entire time in the Shadow Realm its creator lectured it on the ways of the universe; teaching it the disparaging ways of the light dwellers.

The hate that He exuded when He spoke of such things was truly astounding. At first His voice would be quiet, brooding ("quiet" here used loosely). All too quickly His tone would increase in volume until even His closest servants would slink away into the deep violet haze, to give Him time alone. But it always stayed with Him, for whatever reason.

Eventually the Gods would always make their way into His seemingly never-ending monologue, and then the real anger would start. Teeth bared, spittle flying, claws butchering the nearest living thing—which was usually the fragment.

Since it was so small the fragment only took one or two strikes with the talons before it was completely incapacitated, and seeing something so utterly crushed so very easily—even if that something was only the fragment—pleased Him. He wasn't happy, of course, nothing less than seeing the Gods and the Earth in the same state would even come close to making him truly happy, but…

By the time His rages ended, it would be lying like an abused pet in a puddle of its own blood, reminiscent of the way the fragment was first created—though that had been His blood and not its, and the body was fresh, as a newborn's should be. But after He finished, His child was gored and stank wretchedly.

Fear and respect, just as He wanted, resulted from this treatment. The fragment always held Him in awe, no matter what He did to it. Had the poor thing known any differently, perhaps it would have seen the abuse in a different way.

Sometime later—maybe a hundred years, maybe a thousand—the rift widened into a gaping chasm. By that point the creature was well-learned.

The tear was large enough that even He managed to get partially through with His servant, but only for a brief moment. The fragment didn't have much time to register neither the screaming humans nor the roaring Dark One before it was forced bodily into one of the golden items the mortals created, with the cost of allowing the barrier between the worlds to be torn apart.

While it had some of the Dark One's power accompanying it within the Ring, a sense of emptiness overcame the fragment after only a short time served there.

"Pathetic," the being always cursed itself as it tore into the flesh of its arms and legs with long teeth, eliciting a bout of pain, if only to feel something.

The mindscape the item contained was cavernous and cold, not unlike the Shadow Realm. Here the only glimpse of other life was seen through the eyes of the first possessor of the Ring. If the human souls being ripped apart and the shadow creatures devouring them back in its birthplace counted as "life".

Someone that the pale creature immediately decided it didn't like at all.

So resistant. So unwilling to accept the power that the item the fragment resided in offered. That the Dark One was practically giving away.

While the magician held all of these negative qualities, he was also the fragment's only way of interacting with the outside world.

They were only brief glances, really, and subtle interactions. Sometimes those interactions were as harmless as moving a tool a few inches out of place, leaving its host confused when he reached out to write another line of scripture, but found the tool eerily misplaced. Or a quiet stutter mid-spell in a voice that most certainly wasn't his own.

When the second event happened, oftentimes the surrounding mortals would look up in slight alarm at hearing his tone mesh with something near-demonic. The magician would either look at them blankly, unaware of what had occurred, or his expression briefly twisted into a wide grin with canines appearing slightly more elongated than usual. The dumbfounded mortal blinked and the visage of the fragment was gone.

Testing the waters, really. Just how much control could it take..?

The magician performed all sorts of rituals on the Ring which never ceased to make the fragment cackle uproariously at the pathetic attempts to exorcise it. It especially liked that the costs of such rituals were so high—self-harm, sacrifices, everything. The parasite inwardly chuckled as the magician's expression darkened when he made incisions, whether it be on himself or the exposed throat of some supposed criminal.

What did frustrate it; however, consisted of the constant pull and tug of power between human and darkness. The fragment was wrestling for what it determined to be a god-given right to have influence over the Ring's possessor. Had the Ring spirit been more successful in manipulating its first host's mind, the Pharaoh's death undoubtedly would have been much, much sooner.

Control wasn't a problem with the next one. He welcomed the power with open arms.

The fragment didn't diminish itself by going to search for the soul room of the newest owner of the Ring, instead waiting for him to come and confront the darkness himself. It was not disappointed. Within the chambers of the Ring the mortal came stalking with footsteps that, had they been in the mortal world, would likely have been silent, but in this mindscape they echoed as if he was stomping.

"You…" His voice was faintly inflected. "You're Zorc Necrophades?"

At that it did turn its head slightly to glance at him.

"Yes," it said curtly.

The fragment licked its lips, tasting the intermingling flavors of spices and gold and carcasses. The human's eyes were a few shades off of the color of the haze of the Shadows.

The self-proclaimed "Thief King" stared back with a rather flat expression. "The way the stories portrayed you I expected you would be larger."

The fragment's lips twisted. Had he been addressing the Dark One He would not have hesitated to peel the flesh from his bones for addressing Him so casually.

"If I were in My true form you would liquefy the moment I spoke, mortal."

It found no shame in allowing Bakura to believe that it was its Master. Doubtlessly, the Dark One wouldn't be pleased with this decision, but… it secretly preened at the thought of being mistaken for the god.

"And just how do you plan on assisting me while you're like this?" The final word was accompanied by a gesture that indicated the fragment's body.

It now felt personally affronted, but showed no sign other than to flex its claws slightly and turn away. "You must obtain the Millennium Items and release Me completely. Only then will you have My full power." And you will have given me assistance.

A commendably short time later the tomb robber's very blood ran black. The fragment had wasted no time in rotting him to the core, filling his easily manipulated mind to the brim with potent darkness. It got to a point that the cries of the wandering ghosts that had so motivated him before were smothered with his thoughts of unleashing the Dark One.

As he slaughtered enemies and innocents alike, the fragment lay within the chambers of the Ring, smile growing a little wider at the squelching sounds of carnage. It played games with itself and attempted to guess what had caused the more spectacular-sounding deaths. Had it been something as mundane as one of the thief's knives? Or the mortal's ka that grew steadily larger with the darkness fueling it?

The fragment could hear the distinct sounds of gurgling and caught sight of a man choking on his own blood through its host's eyes.

"How dull," it murmured before forcing a surge of power to be emitted from the Ring.

Three, two...

Delightful splattering noises signified that the remaining men had been blown apart. The fragment threw its head back and laughed uproariously. It could hear the thief's own slightly less deranged laughing, as well.

For the first time since leaving Him the fragment felt a twinge of something akin to happiness. It had a willing participant in the resurrection of the Dark One, even if that participant was an abject human. The thought of seeing Him out of the Shadows and unbound made it smile.
After all… He deserved no less than the world at His feet.

The next time the thief found his way into the Ring, the fragment was far less accommodating, given the circumstances. It sensed immediately that he was significantly weakened, as the usual aura of strength that surrounded his ka was completely extinguished. The power that the fragment had been supplying also cut of, though it could still detect traces of darkness.

"Zorc! Where are you? This wasn't a part of the deal!"

"Stop your incessant whining," the fragment hissed from where it sat hunched over with the side of its body flush against the wall.

In spite of the vague awareness that this particular phrase had been one that the Dark One often used when lecturing His creation, it couldn't bring itself to mind. The thief remained, after all, an inferior mortal, sealed into the Ring or not.

"In what part of our agreement did you say that I would be sealed into the Millennium Ring?"he spat, rage to match the fragment's own expression on his face.

"In what part of our 'agreement' did I say that you could fail?"

The Gods sealed the Dark One away, again, with bonds even tighter than before. If anything the human only made things worse. White hot anger pulsed beneath the fragment's equally white skin as it seethed. The only solution, obviously, was to find the Items. Again.

Finally the creature let out an aggravated snarl and tore at its arms with its claws. Pain. Pain was always a good way to cope, whether inflicted upon itself or someone else. The mortal stared. It could feel his discomfort at the sudden display of self-mutilation.

Why had the Dark One put the thief's soul in its abode? Let Ammut devour his heart in the afterlife. The fragment didn't like the idea of sharing the Ring's power with anyone, let alone an argumentative mortal, unless the action directly benefited it Master.

Unless…

It turned its sights back to the thief and noticed again how weak he was. Took note of his rasping breath, slumped posture, dead violet eyes. The fragment's expression contorted into one of sick glee as it thought back to the world-weary souls in the Shadow Realm… the ones that its Master had occasionally allowed it to play with.

The mortal apparently took notice, as his own expression turned cagey. "Why are you looking at me like that?"

Unlike Egyptian culture dictated, Ammut did not eat the Thief King's sin-heavy heart.

The fragment, on the other hand, took the liberty of ripping the organ out.

The thief fought, of course, as any mortal with even a scrap of self-preservation would have (and he had a lot more than that).

They wrestled within the hollows of the Ring, punching, clawing, biting. The human of the two was larger and more experienced, but in light of the exhaustion that he faced, it had an advantage. The fragment let him get the occasional upper hand if only to have enjoy snatching his hopes of beating it away a few moments afterwards. Eventually it grew tired of playing and slammed the thief's head particularly hard against the floor.

He lay stunned just long enough for it to straddle him and sink its claws into the left side of his chest.

"Scream... that always makes it more fun..." it hissed.

Killing random mortals through its host's body—when the thief still had a living body, anyway—served as great entertainment, but it was nothing in comparison to tearing them apart with its own hands. Particularly not when the soul was something of a gift from the Dark One.
The Thief King clung to life for a long time, at first still having the strength to try to push the fragment off of him. He writhed feebly as it tore through layers of warm, wet muscle and fat with its icy, bony fingers. There was a particularly agonized howl when it broke some of his ribs from their respective places with its teeth and lapped at the sweet marrow that oozed out to compliment the blood.

The fragment paused for a moment when it reached the cavity that held what it was looking for, inhaling and allowing its senses to drown in the metallic scent. By that point the thief had gone completely limp. It couldn't be bothered to see if there was any light left in his eyes.
It prepared to sink its claws into the organ when it caught sight of something against the broken, blood soaked ribs.

The fragment paused and inspected the odd, misshapen blob, sniffing slightly. The thing resembled darkness, but writhed with liveliness that it had never seen in the shadows.
It reached down to grasp the squirming object and lift it up to eye level, letting the thief's limp body fall from its other hand.

Though not as potent as what the Dark One had supplied it with, the power was palpable.

"Apparently your anger was not as petty as I thought..." it mused.

So this was what had driven the thief and powered his ka before he obtained the Millennium Ring. The fragment was aware that the hatred ran deep, but... for a mortal soul to be so dark as to grow such power on its own?

As it inspected the foreign darkness the fragment realized that it had seen something akin to this on a soul in the Shadow Realm... the Dark One ranted a bit on the subject as he gored a particularly dark human soul.

Not to mention its nighttime exploits in which it explored the host's soul room. The reminiscences that the fragment discovered there were most interesting, powdery and bitter, like soot. Though some made it feel sick with the saccharine, oozing sensations of useless things that mortals so treasured. More often, of course, the fragment came across the more grotesque aspects of its second host's life.

As it subconsciously allowed the darkness to join with the creature's own power, a few little scraps of memory resurfaced.

…murmuring mother's favorite lullaby in spite of his rough voice being unable to carry it well…

…accidentally opening a jar within a tomb that contained a partially preserved brain within…

…apologizing to Diabound as he devoured a snake for lack of anything better to eat…

…waking up screaming as he dreamt for the thousandth time of his father being dragged away for the sacrifice…

The fragment never did like that last one. Too often it associated the memory with its Master, for some reason...

After a moment of deliberation the fiend curled its lip and turned attention back to the heart that it was contemplating before. Upon finally extracting the organ with a none-too-gentle hand from the chest cavity after much pulling and splicing to the flesh in the thief's mutilated chest, the fragment held the prize in its fist. Darkness oozed more thickly than blood upon squeezing the object, causing the fiend to blink.

It had attributed the vast amount of dark power the thief possessed to itself and the Ring. But instead… this organ… this human organ generated the darkness. Made the thief capable of such hate. A smile curled ash-white lips. The fragment decided that something so tainted with the shadows' poison could prove useful.

In the way that the host whose soul lay dead and disfigured at the creature's feet had stolen expensive trinkets and worthless human lives, it took the heart for itself. Along with the memories. For amusement purposes, it told itself.

The process of transferring the organ into the fiend's own chest was messy, but not impossible. It had few organs to speak of in its faux-human form.

Time wore on. It found more hosts. It stole more souls. It grew stronger off of the nourishment those souls offered. It did not find the other Items.

Frustration swelled in its human heart, fueled its determination. The fragment thought only of the golden objects that so evaded it. And secretly, mournfully, of its Master. For a reason that the fiend couldn't discern, the heart began to hurt during those times.

Someday… maybe in a hundred years, maybe a thousand…

Its final host, the one that it didn't immediately kill the moment they obtained the Ring, was a disgustingly innocent one.

Ryou Bakura.

The fragment remembered the other host by that name and smiled bitterly. All of the boy's friends—those that it learned of by making presents of their souls—called its host by that last name. They called the monster possessing his body that name, too. Screamed that when it locked them away and kissed the tops of the miniature versions' heads.

And… the fragment liked being referred to as such. Yes, it rather enjoyed the sound. The name held more nostalgia than those of its other hosts, and it was always addressed as such while in Ryou Bakura's body, intentional or not.

Bakura.

The name tasted good, like the metallic juice that dripped in red streams off of its many host's teeth as they breathed their last.

"Dark Bakura."

It whispered the namesake to itself within the dank corridor that was its soul room, wrapping its slender arms around its torso in a self-hug.

An identity. Not just the darkness—not just a fragment of Him—but something more, as well. No, something less. It immediately backtracked as it thought of the Dark One. Its Master wouldn't approve. If He ever decided to grace it with a name, it would accept it, but... naming itself...

Finally the creature decided to settle for "evil spirit of the Ring" or just "evil spirit" if the mortals were too lazy for the first of the two.

Not as suitable as the pet name "fragment" that the Dark One had given it upon its birth, but it doubted anyone cared.

-The first paragraph at the beginning is an interpretation of how Zorc describes his power to the High Priest in the manga.

-In Season Zero when the Dark Master's piece was attacked and parts of his flesh were torn off, they would turn into monsters that would serve him.

-The fragment was asexual because, well... it's darkness. It doesn't need to make babies. Technically by that logic Zorc wouldn't have a gender, either, but he is referred to as a "he" in canon, so…

-Zorc has four fingers, hence the reason I decided to give the fragment four fingers. If there had been a good place to mention it I probably would have said that it didn't have a belly button, either.

-In the manga, and possibly the anime (I haven't seen the Japanese version of Season Five), Thief King Bakura used the Ring to BLOW PEOPLE TO PIECES. Like, nothing left of them but bloody puddles and miscellaneous body parts.