Bakura doesn't know how much time has passed.
He's been counting the days. He knows that more than five have sluggishly trickled by, but his grasp on the time is loose. The first day lasted for fifty-seven hours, and the third for merely thirteen. They weren't marked by the setting of the sun that hung pale in the sky for what Bakura can only assume was the day.
It doesn't glow yellow. It's white-washed, pale, looking like a ghostly moon with too much light. The sky is too bright, too blue, contrasting heavily with the dead sun that doesn't bring heat.
Bakura stops telling the days by the sun soon enough.
If he had to describe what he thought Hell was like before, he'd give the standard answer. Fire, heat, pain. If you asked him now what Hell's traits were like, he'd bring up the complete opposites of his previous answers.
There is no fire. Bakura wandered the streets for those first disorienting days with every intention of finding a sign of life, or a sign of what took it. Everything was devoid, but nothing in disarray. No sign that the citizens of Domino City were suddenly faced with an apocalypse and dropped their things haphazardly before getting well out of dodge. Everything is far too neat. It reminds him of an atomic test site, with houses made of plywood and puppets poorly impersonating human activities inside.
He almost wishes it were. Then maybe there would be charred remains or disorder or something to show that he wasn't alone, that he hadn't been.
The fire isn't the only thing that's absent. It took him a few days (one hundred fifteen hours, precisely – he's learnt to only trust the hours) to notice that despite the weak effort of the sun that should have been enough to stop the cold seeping into his skin simply didn't. The city is both cold and abandoned, but that's not the right word for it. Abandoned implies that someone but him had been there and then left. Bakura doesn't dare trust that thought, and gives the city a new adjective to describe it by: empty.
He caught on quicker to the lack of pain than the other things. Somewhere halfway through day three he had broken the window to a furniture store, setting off the alarm. It blared and blared and nobody came to see what the noise was or to arrest him. If his flesh hadn't been embedded with glass shards and bleeding, he'd never have noticed a thing.
And that – that's what scares him. The complete lack of everything. The void that turned the previously small town into a looming, ominous entity.
He doesn't speak until the one hundred and thirty-sixth hour. It's brought on by how bleakly blue the sky is before it shifts into purple, and he knows, he knows. That's why he screams.
The colour isn't natural. Abomination comes to mind, and Bakura swallows back the bile, the desperation, and there still isn't pain to be found anywhere. Not in his arm that had healed overnight (so to speak) and not in that hollow pit in his gut that aches with an absence he doesn't want to think of.
Eyes, then. Blinking down from the sky as if he were back in that Shadow Game, but he had been in control there. In this place, he can scarcely control his own body. So his knees nearly give out, but he snarls. Defiant as ever, glaring up at those two vacant things in the perversion of a sky. They don't glare back.
He runs. He runs like the life he isn't sure he's living is depending on it, but the city is like something out of a cartoon; when he gets to the alleys that are supposed to lead to the highway, he's back at the field he woke up in.
The eyes are still there, more brilliantly wide than ever. The colour of the sky drains inwards, as if sucked through a straw and somehow deposited in the grotesque eyeballs that don't belong in the sky. That don't belong anywhere.
He thinks time loop, of course, but he knows he's wrong before he even finishes the thought. The day is the same, but those eyes never appeared before, and he prays they'll never appear again. They're far too sinister, staring down like a misguided God punishing the wicked. But no sin could be worthy of such a cruel punishment.
"Nothing is real," Bakura says, haughty. He stares up into the sky, into those eyes, and they roll slowly down and fixate on him. "This world isn't the real one," he gets out, jaw set. "And you can't break me, Malik. I will never let you."
The last roll of those eyes before they shut seem to say oh, really? but Bakura focuses only on the grass beneath his feet. They're naked, he realizes. It wasn't like that before.
Things do change, he finds out. Nothing noticeable, most of the time. His hair will feel longer or his fingernails dirtier, but it confirms something. If he can touch it, change it or have it change him, it's real. And that's a thought that he can't stand.
He ignores all the changes. Repeats it like a mantra: not the real world, not the real world. If it was, Kaiba would be hosting another ridiculous tournament, and the words offer comfort that is only temporary. Bakura has found hostility in his new environment; some places he frequents morph into sharper versions with colder walls and try to drive him away with sudden drop-offs and stairs that spiral into the ground. He took a look, once, and recoiled as the blackness he stared into squirmed.
Incentive given, he starts to limit the locations he goes. Switches it up, even. But he knows that just like those eyes, there are ears too, being fed by mouths with greedy little sentences like children tattling to an elder. That's where he'll go, I saw it in his head. Do I get a treat for telling you beforehand?
Bakura grows weary within the first week. He had initially managed to stave off panic, but now it's high and climbing up the back of his throat. No fear, still, too raw to be allowed in a place of desolation. But there is anger, and it works well enough for him. His nails are clawed to sharp bleeding stubs by the time he stops ripping down posters that suddenly appeared around him on walls that hadn't been there before. He ripped the bottom half off, reading it's real real real all real and stared at the top one. I know you know it.
He wakes too early. He knows, because his nails are still ruined, still aching from abuse, but something is different. He takes in the strong, yellow glow of the sun, bright above his head. The sky is a cerulean blue, like it's supposed to be, and Bakura feels hope so uncharacteristic for him swell in the starved confines of his chest.
Just another trick, he warns himself. Hope isn't worth having when he knows it will be snatched away, and he rises cautiously. His feet are clad again, and it means he can go into the city instead of skittering the outskirts to avoid the hungry snatch of pebbles as sharp as broken glass.
It's all still empty. His footsteps still echo forlornly as they try to fill the space between the buildings. No childish laughter to be heard. No businessmen shouting. Not even the hum of engines.
Bakura knows he was foolish to hope, because those two eyes open in the sky and roll back, revealing milky white with red lightning criss-crossing on it.
Did you like my trick?
"No," Bakura answers out loud, shadow absent from behind him. He doesn't feel real and his voice bounces back at him, nonononono from a dozen angles and the feeling of being alone threatens to crush him.
Bakura thinks that he's getting thinner. His ribs aren't showing, and he still has enough muscle-mass to do heavy lifting when he wants to destroy something and smash it into oblivion – but still. He feels weaker, aware of a hunger he can't sate but that doesn't overwhelm him like everything else has. It's like suspended animation, except for that he doesn't know the exact definition and he might be wrong. He feels the suspended part, though. It hangs heavy above his head.
"Not today," he says. He felt the eyes open long before he glanced up, seeing the curious look in them. He thinks it resembles a child watching with flippant cruelty as its boot comes down to crush a bug. "Leave."
And the shock that runs through him when those eyes don't only close, but vanish is so pure that he drops what he's holding and stops breathing for a moment.
He had thought of this universe as sentient when he was dropped off into the cruel vacancy of it. The fact that the eyes of the creator had obeyed his will has a thrill tingling along his spine for three days (he's not sure when they end, but he's counted two hundred fourteen hours so far) and he's almost thrumming with his new-found power.
It's not much, but if he can change something, maybe he can get out. He tries it with a door. It opens into an empty room with a chair in the corner. The chair is red and the walls are blue, and Bakura scrutinizes the setting before closing the door. "Green," he says, chanting it. "Green."
The door opens and the wall is still carefully blue, and the chair still red.
A further five days pass, and he thinks that maybe emotion is the solution. He had been angry when he ordered the eyes to shut – to go away. He doesn't feel angry at the room with the red chair, and he can't feel anything else for it. He opens the door and pulls it back while shoving his head forward; the ensuing contact has him seeing white splotchy blobs that swim in his vision, and the lack of pain leaves room for the anger and slight embarrassment. "Green," he snarls, and the next time he opens the door the walls have turned turquoise.
He waits for him. Bakura sits down on the field he wakes up in every single day regardless of where he falls asleep. He crosses his legs and stares at the sky that has gone paler, and he has the time to think that he's winning when the eyes open. Fury shines in them, and they roll obscenely, pupils wide.
Bakura smirks. It's the first time such an expression has crossed over his face since his arrival in this world.
"I figured it out," he says. The victory is so clear in his voice, the way his back is straightened out. "You built an entire world just for me, and I found the weakness." His voice trembles, almost aches to just spill what he knows, but he won't. He'll let his captor fear him. It's what he wants. Bakura desires nothing more than for those loathsome eyes to widen in fear of him.
"You based the concept on the shadow realm, and that's where you went wrong. I'm the one that controls it, you pitiful fool. I am the one who escaped it. And you listen closely, you pathetic excuse of an entity."
Bakura's lips curl in such victory, and the laughter that leaves him fills up all the spaces where other sound should be.
"As I escaped the Realm, I will escape this. You lost."
Then there's only whiteness so furious Bakura knows he's won.
Fin.
Well, this was a fun thing to write. Hope it was enjoyable.