The Voice
PG, AU, one-shot
Sometimes the voice was happy.
Sometimes the voice was angry, and that was bad, because he got into a lot of accidents when that happened.
But still, Bakura Ryou reasoned, it was only a voice, and it could hardly hurt him.
He wasn't even really worried about it until he found himself addressing the voice as a separate person.
Then he flirted briefly with the thought of telling someone he was insane.
He didn't.
The voice developed a personality. It wasn't really bad, just angry. It could even be nice, like when he was angry or sad…
He didn't want to lose his voice, even if it meant he was insane.
But then, the dreams started.
They were okay at first. He was in them, and someone like him but wasn't, and his friend Yugi. Yugi always left him and other-him alone after a few minutes. Then other-him would talk, for hours and hours. But Ryou could never remember what he said, no matter how hard he tried.
Sometimes, on the nights he dreamed, he would wake so tired it was like he hadn't slept, but he had. Sometimes too he would wake sweaty, like he had been out. And sometimes… rarely… he would wake in a different pair of pajamas then he had gone to sleep in.
Once he woke bleeding.
It was just a small mark on his arm, but it scared Ryou. Feeling idiotic, he tired asking the voice about it, but that day the voice was silent.
It wasn't usually silent. Usually it could be heard talking about many things, crazy things that didn't make any sense, like Egypt and gold and things in the past… that changed everyone's destiny. Usually it talked so much that Ryou had to ignore his friends to listen.
It sounded so sure. So right. Righter then anything he had heard before. So he listened.
After he woke bleeding, he stopped hanging out with his friend's altogether.
Whether he was sleep walking… or actually really insane… he didn't want to hurt them.
His friends tried to talk to him, inviting him to one activity after another. But Ryou, now so caught up in the voice, found them easy to ignore.
The dreams started changing.
They were more violent, bloodier. Sometimes other-him was dressed strangely. Sometimes other people were there… not just Yugi, but Tristan and Jou and Anzu. Sometimes a darkly tanned blonde everyone referred to as Malik. Yugi and Malik had gold things like the voice had described.
Then something bad would happen…
Something bad…
The day he graduated school, he went to say a final farewell to his old friends. He was going to stay with his father in America.
The car he drove to the airport collided, in a freak accident, with an oil truck.
And the last thing Ryou heard before black overtook the pain…
Yadonushi…