to fill these empty hearts
bakura/yugi, a what if au fic. takes place after the end of the series. characters belong to takahashi-sensei.
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Yugi moves in with Ryou. It's winter, and there are no flowers in the streets, no gold in the windows. Yugi hasn't touched a card deck since Egypt.
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(He doesn't know how to move on. How to react to things, how to smile and laugh and pretend that everything is fine, he's fine, without Yami there to steady him, Yami to need and want and make him feel as if he is worth protecting.
Ryou doesn't remember most of it, only bits and pieces, snatches of a feverdream, and a small selfish part of Yugi wishes he could forget.)
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Ryou shakes him awake at night. "Yugi—" digging nails into his shoulder, and he's dreaming of deserts and hot sun and magic in his hands, a whole world at his fingertips, and he can't help thinking: it wasn't so long ago that that name meant someone else altogether.
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He's already smashed every mirror in the house, anything with a reflective surface on it, and Ryou came home to find him picking glass pieces out of his hands, trying not to scream.
"Sorry," Yugi says, and "fuck," cutting himself again.
But Ryou only sort of laughs and bandages him up and remarks, "you'd never be able tell that I was the one with a psychotic thief in my head, between us."
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Yugi wonders about that.
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It's only a shadow at first, but one day, Yugi is looking at Ryou, watching the light dip and bend over Ryou's near-translucent skin, and suddenly, it's not Ryou at all.
"You—"
Yugi's reaction-time has always been a fraction too slow: too slow to avoid being hit, too slow to run, too slow to—
"hisashiburi," the ghost whispers, testing out his voice, and before Yugi can do the logical thing and hit him over the head so it's Ryou again, hit himself over the head because he has obviously become delusional—Bakura grabs his wrists and hisses something like, "don't even think about it" and he is exactly as Yugi remembers.
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"Impossible—" Yugi breathes. "You can't—be here."
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Bakura backs him into wall. Too-close, or not close enough, Yugi can't think around him, heat everywhere, he hasn't been this close to anyone since Yami left.
"I'm not—"
"I know." Bakura has never mistaken him for anyone else.
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"give Ryou back his body," or "what the fuck is going on" or "go back to whence you came, heathen!" cycle rapidly through Yugi's head, but he only manages a pitiful squeaking sound when Bakura decides to press his advantage and get even closer.
.
"I don't know how I'm here, or why, but I'm sure you have something to do with it, container," and Yugi can taste the strawberry milk Ryou was drinking in lieu of breakfast with each word.
Yugi sputters incoherently. "It's—I'm not—gone—"
"Hmm," Bakura murmurs, and kisses him and Yugi's eyes are wide, cheeks flushed, but Yugi isn't saying stop or don't or please, and Bakura finds that most interesting.
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Bakura steps back to strip his shirt off, half to ascertain that is no ring weighing heavy around his neck, half to gauge the reaction of the boy standing before him—Yugi who looks no more commanding than the last time Bakura fought him, with the fate of the world in his hands and betting everything on a last card.
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"You want me here," Bakura says, teasing and mocking and tantalizing, reaching for Yugi, and Yugi doesn't stop him—"because to bring him back would be selfish, but you can't let go, and you can't stop punishing yourself for wanting to—" whisperthoughts in Yugi's ear, nothing he hasn't wondered already himself.
There are bandages all over Yugi's too-small hands, and there's Bakura right in front of him, and Yugi for once in his short life—takes what he wants without asking.
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Ryou doesn't know. Ryou steps around Yugi to get dinner out of the fridge, and it's Bakura with a hand on his shoulder, a breath in his ear, touching him the way Yami used to, reassuring and comfortable.
Stop it, Yugi imagines himself saying, leave me alone, but he doesn't.
.
"He fucked you up bad," Bakura marvels, sliding a knuckle over Yugi's sharp cheeks, the hollow beneath his eyes. "Or maybe—he didn't change anything."
Yugi doesn't know which is worse.
.
It's weeks and weeks and weeks, and Yugi takes a deep breath and goes out into spring rain, and it feels—he doesn't know where he's been all this time, trapped somewhere in a dark room, pounding on doors that will never open again, aren't even there anymore, and the only time he's ever felt anything since Yami left him is Bakura—pressing him against sharp corners, rubbing his bones together, fucking him in the shower while Ryou's eyes went blurry around the edges, there and not there, like Yugi breaking a little more every day, and Bakura just laughing at him—but at least Yugi could taste that, the sandpaper texture of Bakura's contempt, sour when he swallowed.
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"Yugi, what are you doing?"
Ryou pulls him gently to his feet, up the stairs Yugi to their apartment, and before Yugi can protest, Ryou's peeled him out of his wet clothes and—
"It's nothing, don't—" but Yugi inadvertently flinches when Ryou tries to touch, and something flashes in Ryou's eyes.
"Did I—?" Ryou looks uncertain of himself, of his own hands, hesitant but needing to know, confidence that Yugi has never had, and (of course, of course, why would there be any surprise?) when he fits fingertips to the darkening bruises over Yugi's thin hips, they are an exact match.
.
"It's okay," Yugi says, "the only person he's hurting is me," and he doesn't see the look in Ryou's eyes then.