Title: Boundaries.

Summary: Yami Bakura is sick of his host fighting back. And so he comes up with a little plan to teach him obedience. But even he doesn't know the depths of Ryou's secrets. Bakura's POV.

Characters: Yami Bakura and Ryou Bakura with little mentions of others.

Rating: T+ for angst, abuse, gore references and general darkness.

Pairings: None.

Total Words: 2 839

Warnings: Gore, violence, mild swearing, abuse, VERY BAD OCC OCCURRENCES, a horrid conglomerate of dub, original and manga thrown together with my own bad plotting. This one is seriously rather terrible, plot-wise.

Extra Notes: Last one that I wrote for the Light/Dark challenge. In reality, it was the one I wrote first. It, too, kept its original length. Despite its complete and utter crappiness I like this one best. My inner Ryou fangirl is to blame.

Disclaimer: Don't own. If I did, Ryou would so be a main character.

It's actually rather laughable, the way he still tries to fight. He's supposedly a smart boy; never gets below a B in school. Then why is he dense enough to think he could ever, in a million years, defeat me? In the beginning I thought he was just desperate and uneducated about how I really was. But now, after scraping through torment after torment, he still refuses to completely submit. I do not know whether to laugh or scream at him for his obscene stubbornness.

Surely he must be tired of all the pain? Surely he wants to make it easier for himself? I know he wants it to end; he's begged, cried and wished that enough times. And yet even though he screams and cries and begs through every torture, he still refuses to yield to me. He still fights when I try to take over, still tries to meddle in my plans, still struggles to release himself when I lock him in his soul room. It is almost as though he has a split personality: during torment the pleading, screaming, bleeding victim, after and before torment taunting me and inviting the next bout of affliction. As much as I hate to admit it, his behaviour puzzles me. And being confused pisses me off.

So that's why I decided to give him a double dose that night. It wasn't really a special night; things had gone as they usually did. I had ordered, he had refused, I had punished him for his disobedience, he had gone to bed with wounds down his arms and face, eyes red from tears, throat raw from screaming. And I had watched him go with a smirk as I usually do, relishing in every wince that crossed his face. It was then that it hit me: the same thing happened every time. No matter how I punished him, mentally or physically, he always defied me the next time. That made me very, very angry.

And so I decided to go beyond what I had done before in the hopes that I finally extinguished whatever pure fighting spirit he had in him. I waited until I knew for sure he was deep asleep, and then I materialised into my spirit form and stationed myself next to his bed. Chuckling at the prospect of what I would do to him I shut my eyes and reached out towards his mind. He was, obviously, blocking me out. I destroyed the wall easily; he was sleeping and thus not putting too much effort into the block. He only shifted slightly as I gained access to his mind, and so I delved in at once. I skipped past all the thoughts and memories and dreams he was not hiding from me; those would not do any damage. After a few moments I encountered another wall and, smelling victory, began to break it down. I shattered the restraint and made whatever it was play through my hikari's head, seeing it myself as it ran through his mind.

It was an old nightmare, one he'd had when he was younger. Some garbage about a city of shining, white-clothed people that turned into horrible demons and ripped people apart. How mediocre. There was hardly and blood or guts at all. No wonder the wall had been easy to break; this was pitiable. Even so, I felt his discomfort at the nightmare, the way he tried to shield himself from it and failed. It hurt him, no matter how insignificantly, and that was all I was really after. I let the nightmare play itself out into some other dream and started searching through his mind again. The next mental barrier I came across was much stronger than the first, and it took a lot more concentration to break it down. I patiently struggled with it, though, as I knew the more he tried to keep me out of something, the more that thing could hurt him.

This nightmare was half memory half fiction. Now he was the one mercilessly killing people without being able to stop, no matter how much he pleaded with his hands to discontinue the murdering. This one was a little more satisfactory; the people bled well and he could actually see the fear in their eyes as they begged for mercy. I'm pretty sure he got the lucid parts of the dream from a memory of mine I accidentally let slip into his head. This time he shuddered, trying to curl into a tighter ball on his bed. So losing control of his body really did scare him… That was something I would keep in mind for the future. I'll admit I drew out the half-memory, letting it almost pause on all the good and gory parts, making him twitch and whimper beside me. I couldn't hold back a laugh then; this was brilliant. Not even past the starters, and he was already writhing.

And so it went on, me breaking down his mental walls and him being dragged through nightmare after nightmare, unable to wake up. It got harder and harder to get to him as the memories or thoughts became more and more painful, but the struggle and strain proved to be worth it every time. He cried and begged and thrashed almost more than when I was cutting into him with an object. Whoever the old fart was who said mental affliction is worse than physical is probably right. But as the night wore on I began to get tired because of all the effort it took to break him down. And the effort was not so worth it any more; I needed something really spectacular, something that would once and for all make him submit to me because of its sheer power. Kind of like blackmail, except that it would hardly be something criminal he'd done that I could use against him; he is far too pure to ever have done anything remotely illicit before I came along. I was starting to think that I had reached the limit of my torture- a limit that wasn't exactly inept after all the agony the memories had caused him- when I suddenly, very faintly, caught a glimmer of another wall. As I explored I came to realize that this one was at the very center of his mind, so deep and well protected that I had not noticed it before. It was exactly what I was looking for.

I am almost ashamed to admit that it took a very, very long time to break that wall. Even in his slumber he added layers to whatever he was protecting, so that it happened that as soon as I had eventually manage to peel back one layer, he'd added another to compensate for it. I started to become very enraged at his resistance, and now curiosity also played a role at me trying to break into that very protected thought. Finally I yanked out another memory that had caused him considerable pain before and let it occupy his concentration, while I attacked the memory I really wanted. It took more effort than before as I was now concentrating on two things at once, but it meant that once a layer of protection was peeled back I was one layer closer to the hidden thoughts.

As I struggled with the last few layers I suddenly realized that it was not only me he was trying to keep out. He was walling away whatever it was from himself too; he did not want to see it. He had buried it deep within his mind and had walled it up so tightly just so that he would not catch even a fragment of it in his everyday thoughts. That was when the curiosity in me burned brighter. He had proved time and time again that he could handle anything I threw at him, even if it did take a while for him to work through some things. So in order for him to have locked something away instead of dealing with it meant whatever it was had to be bad. Very, very bad. And what on earth could my little light have done that was that unthinkable?

The last layer was the hardest, and took almost all the might I have to break through. As cracks began to form in the mental defence I saw that it was not one memory or thought he was holding back but many of them, a consecutive string of events that together was unbearable to him. Finally, finally, I managed to get through, and the memories all flowed out like water that has been tightly dammed up for too long.

At first I was disappointed and pissed again. The memories were not bad at all. In fact they were the total opposite. They were of him, ranging as far back as five years old, happy and running and skipping in little hikari joy. I nearly wanted to puke. But, just as I was about to pull out in disgust, I noticed something that I had not in my initial shock. He was not alone in any of the memories. He had somebody else with him, somebody half a head shorter than him with exactly the same eyes. Somebody with long, blue hair and dimples on her smiling cheeks. Somebody he called Amane in a voice that radiated love.

Amane Bakura. My hikari's little twin sister. I was genuinely staggered. Never had I ever imagined he had a sister, let alone a twin. I then paid rapt attention to the memories, watching how the two of them grew together, hearing their petty fights, their loving goodnights, their protective outbursts all through the years. It didn't take even a remotely smart person to figure out that the twins had been close. Very, very close. They told each other absolutely everything, and when the smallest of tragedies struck they held onto each other like the other person was their life raft. Amane was, I saw with interest, almost the opposite of my hikari. Where he was careful, thoughtful, sweet and pure she was brash, fiery, loud and opinionated. She acted before she thought, said things that got her into trouble more times than not and got herself into physical fights that he had to bail her out of. And yet, even though she got him beaten up and in trouble, even though she wrecked his things and exasperated him to no end, he loved her more than he did himself.

A painful edge started to enter the memories and I focused more. There was one of his father and a woman telling them, as gently as they could, that his father would be moving to Japan for business and, because Amane was not the best scholar it was the smart thing to do to let her finish her school year in England. The two put up a vigorous fight. Most of the temper-tantrums and the screaming and shouting came from her, but I was surprised to find my light also made his opinion known. I think that may have been the first time I had ever seen him shout at anybody. Then came the part that shocked me more than anything has in many hundreds of years. I came into the picture.

As a sort of peace offering his mother gave Amane the mobile she had wanted and his father brought home the Millennium Ring for him, saying it was connected to the game he loved playing. Both were grateful for the gifts, but still reluctant to give in. Eventually, though, they knew they were beaten. A tearful goodbye was said, one that was so raw and painful even in the memory I wondered how in Ra's name I hadn't noticed it at the time. Had I really been that self-absorbed that I had not even felt the raw aching that was tearing my new host apart at saying goodbye to his twin? Apparently not, because that night was the first time I had even heard of Amane.

The pain slowly started to fade away as the weeks wore on, and I noticed that the memories were not as clear now, as though they were not important. Then, suddenly, they became crystal again, starting with the memory of a night he had been writing Amane a letter. It was all boring facts about how he had started at Domino High that day, but he did not get very far until I interrupted him. Again, I was truly stunned. I had taken over his body in the middle of him writing a Ra-damned letter to the girl and I still hadn't twigged that she existed? I was obviously not as observant as I gave myself credit for. That, or my hikari had more control over his memories than I had originally thought. Still not much control, though, as the free playing of the previously walled-up memories proved.

I was about to leave him to his happy little thoughts and go and see where Amane was now and why she hadn't contacted him in years when a sudden burst of pain shot through me from my hikari's mind. A new memory was playing, the clearest of them all, and even the start of it, which seemed to me very boring and unimportant, had him fighting to make it stop. And how he fought! Stronger than anything I had ever experienced before. It was like he was a drowning person fighting for air, the way he tried to suppress the memory and the way panic and pain clutched him as he could not because of me. I obviously kept it open; I was curious and still on a mission to torture him, after all. In the memory his phone started to ring, and he answered it. Through his excited conversation with his sister he fought, trying to shove the memory away. I held it there as his excitement turned to disappointment; the roads were too slippery and thus they would not be spending Christmas together. His mother came onto the phone and he began to beg and plead with her to come anyway. To forget the state of the roads and drive down; everything would be okay.

As the memory him begged, the present, sleeping him began to cry. The reaction shocked me; he was weeping over a phone call? Of course I had seen him cry many a time, but the tears were usually very justified. Speaking over a phone hardly warranted tears of such magnitude, or such deep, aching sorrow. I was distracted by his growing pain and sorrow so I only caught the gist of how the conversation ended; his mother and sister would come down that evening, despite the roads. In his memory he was glad, in the present he was breaking. As the phone started ringing again in his memory, hours later than the first phone call, he began to fight me harder. I had to use almost everything I had to keep the memory open, a few emotions playing through me then. One of them was frustration at his stubbornness, one was curiosity at what happened, one was pleasure at his obvious pain, one was triumph that I made him feel that hurt. I now had my weapon; the worst part of the memory hadn't come yet and he was already in as much pain and torment as he usually was when I was done with the punishment.

His father picked up the phone. His struggling stopped, as if he knew what was coming was inevitable. His crying turned to sobbing, jerking his sleeping body as he gripped the blankets in agony. His father's face paled and he dropped the phone, almost sinking down to the floor. At the look on his face I abruptly felt a jolt of realization through me. Suddenly I knew why he couldn't face this, why he was in such agony next to me, why his father was so distanced towards him, why Amane never called. The roads had been too treacherous. The two women had never made it to Japan.

As his memory father started yelling at him how it was all his fault, a fact that was already permanently clawing at his mind, I shut down the memory. Using all the strength and power I had I piled layers and layers of mental protection over the memories again, until they were as tightly sealed shut as I had found them. Then I closed the mind link and stood up, gazing down at my still sobbing hikari. Yes, I still wanted him to give in. Yes, I still wanted to cause him as much pain as possible for his defiance. Yes, his anguish still brought me pleasure.

But I would not do it that way. Not with that weapon. Even I, the tormentor, the King of Thieves, the extreme darkness to his light, know which boundaries not to cross.