A/N: Darkfic, semi-colon abuse, mindfuck (real or imagined).
The first week after the ceremonial duel, his sleep is dreamless for the first time in years. There are no whispers, no dungeon-like soul rooms with walls painted in blood, no ancient nightmare-visions of the destruction and agony of thousands drawn from someone else's memory.
He remembers the certainty in Isis' eyes as she explained it to Marik. For Yugi to win, she had said, he must have been the Pharaoh's equal in every way, and that is why fate brought them together - they each had what the other needed.
So what does that mean for him and the thief-spirit? he wonders, grasping at the empty place on his chest absently. The Ring is gone. Bakura Ryou is no longer the host to an evil that threatens the world - his life, he realizes, will be empty of the blackouts, the strange impulses, the borrowed memories that used to leak into his mind. His life will be empty, and he will fade into the background of Yugi's group of friends.
He tries not to feel wistful about it.
-
The first month after the Egyptian spirits have supposedly left the world for good, he begins to feel like his old self again. That is to say, his days begin, at times, to fray at the edges as they used to - the light of them takes on that hazy, medicated gleam the old Ryou was so accustomed to. While the Pharaoh's sharing with Yugi had seemed to bring him into focus before the world, the thief's presence stamped Ryou out, made him slow and weak and stupid.
Perhaps he is going crazy. Perhaps it is just that the thief left him that way.
He has his suspicions, but he keeps them to himself as he does everything else. Yugi's group may trust him now, but honestly, he prefers to keep the thief's memory as his demon and his demon alone.
-
It takes a year for the thief to draw enough of himself up to appear to Ryou, and even then it is only in sleep. When Ryou stumbles upon him, he is stunned. Not at the thief's presence, because some part of him always knew that the thief would never truly leave him, but at what the shadows have finally managed to do to him.
The thief is strewn about Ryou's soul room like the bloodied fragments of a jewel. There is the form most familiar to him leaning against the doorway - the lanky, pale-skinned one with that familiar smirk on his face. There is the muscled and scarred form with madness in his eyes; that one, too, is familiar to him if only in dreams.
But there are others. Ryou wonders if there is enough left of the thief to even give him a name.
The starved-looking tanned boy with wild hair, no scar; the one that is sinuous like a cat, some sort of dancer or whore, he realizes; and finally, the small boy: almost cherubic, except for the blood-red eyes.
"You see, yadonushi," breathes the spirit into his ear, "I told you I would never leave you."
-
Ryou begins to fade away afterwards. The one who is most concerned is Anzu, who turns to him one day and asks him if he's eating well, if his apartment is too lonely, if he'd like to go to the arcade with them after school.
He shakes his head and smiles serenely. She doesn't know; he can never be lonely.
(He figures it's because, truly, the thief had been such a large part of him that when he left there was not enough Ryou left to occupy a body alone. He is eroding too; maybe it is proof that he never existed at all, or perhaps it's just because the only real person he has ever known lacks a true body himself.)
-
One day long after his body is asleep, Ryou asks the thief a question. The child with bloody eyes is absently braiding his hair; the whore lays in his lap and giggles lecherously at something Ryou cannot see. The one named Akefia leans against the wall, arms folded across his chest. He does not know where the others are; they come and go. He calls out for the one that could be his twin.
When the thief appears, Ryou's voice is suddenly hoarse. "Why?" he whispers through cracked lips.
A grin, at once breathtaking and malicious, blossoms on the other's face. With a gaunt hand he makes a sweeping gesture across the soul room. "Don't you know - there was not enough heart left for Ammut to devour?" His peals of laughter echo off the cold stone floors. "So here I am. Together forever, Ryou," he says, laughing all the while, and draws what is left of the boy into an embrace.
-
He does not bother to keep track of the days anymore. His groceries are rotting in the fridge and he thinks he should probably go out and get some and as he is about to get the keys and go, something heavy and skeletal like a hand on his shoulder stops him.
Ryou can barely remember his friends' names anymore, though he knew them a month ago. He has given everything over to the thief, it seems; his body, his home, his mind, his friends, even his memory. He would be amused if it weren't so terrible - the thief will leave this world an honest man, if he ever really leaves it.
The haze clears suddenly, and Ryou gasps as he looks around at his desecrated apartment. He gathers up what is left of himself, then, and makes a decision.
-
His hand does not tremble as, one by one, the pills slip down his throat. It is not a suicide, it is simply the fastest way to get to the thief.
When he open his eyes it is like breaking the surface of water after floating like a dead thing for too long. He falls into the thief's arms. "I'll go with you," he says to him - to them - and afterwards it is easy. Because in giving away the last part of the collective named "Ryou", he is becoming more, he is becoming part of something more real, and perhaps (he hopes fiercely) together it will be enough of a heart to weigh and damn, enough of a person to give it a permanent name and finally, finally sink down into the shadows and rest.
And if not, at least he will not be alone, and the shattered soul before him will be the last thing to know his name. Ryou was always an optimist.
-
When it is done, the apartment is empty, empty, empty for a week before Yugi's group stumbles into it, but of course by then it is so late that the most that ever manifests of the boy afterwards is the memory of his name, and then even that is gone more quickly than a shadow in the desert.