This is one of those stories begun from an assumption. Some people say Yami Bakura ends up trapped in the Shadow Realm. Even if that does happen in the anime, that doesn't mean he'll stay there. Due to my lack of information, this is a "what if" story. In the long run, it doesn't even have much to do with the show. With this story, it isn't necessary to be correct about what happens in the show.

Disclaimer: I do not own the show Yu-Gi-Oh! or any of the cartoon's characters.

NIGHT

Part One:: Invisible

Every time, five minutes before dawn…

I wake up, realizing I'm caught in short sobs…

My chest is shaking, restricting painfully against the bed…

Wet, hot tears stain the sheets and fall on to my hands.

I'm not just full of emotion. I'm the Anguish and Loss I can't explain…

I can not remember what is gone…

I just know that I failed greatly.

It's my fault.

It's my fault!

Perhaps once a year I dream this way. The dreams I wake up crying.

The trailing pale braid that goes around her head and then falls forever.

The blood that splatters everything in a volcanic surge.

The scream…

Then I wake up, every time, five minutes before dawn.

It happened again this morning. My strange weeping woke me up. I heard the scream ringing in my ears, and experienced a bile-rising horror at failing an unknown task. I don't know what I failed at, I just know that I did lose, for the first time in my life. Turned on my stomach, my eyes opened and I was breathing in harsh but quiet gasps. Immediately like always I flipped over, to see the clock switch from 6:55 to 6:56. The sunrise was at 7:00 today. As usual, nothing has changed about the scenario. I had hoped that even a second of it would be different-that might mean I was finally free from this exact, terrifying, life-long repetition of nightmares.

So I laid in bed until dawn. At 7:01, groaning with the muddled, clouded feeling of my brain and limbs, I got up and stumbled down a dark hall way to the bathroom. In the usual routine after one of the dreams, I ran the shower and was doused by water. The liquid was warmed by a furnace illegally dysfunctional before noon. The cold water numbed me, but washed away the cloudy wall around my senses. The feeling of being covered in blood was also gone, to my great relief. After the shower, I stepped out and went to get dressed for school, feeling a great deal better. Only the feeling about the failure I couldn't remember remained. No one would guess about the dream. Hey, I could even fool myself on a day like this. I looked at myself in the mirror, met by the confident, strong-lined eighteen-year-old face and odd tawny eyes of Honda Hiroto.

Have a great day Honda, I thought to the image in the mirror. He agreed and wished me the same with a beaming smile. Then it was downstairs, to the smell of scattered but cooking breakfast. My father, a soy sauce bearded man with yellow-green eyes and a love of giant trucks, was up before me even now. As I came downstairs, my long coat trailing behind my legs, he just had to turn and stare at me with surprise and concern. That made me feel so much better. I sat down at the table and grabbed today's newspaper to read the movie, sports, and cuisine sections, trying to ignore him. He left the bacon sizzling to crisps just to keep his eyes locked on me.

"What, do you want me to go see a psycho-therapist about this?" I tried to joke as if my nightmares weren't a big deal. To almost everyone I knew, except my parents, Honda was the last person to be bothered-no, haunted-by repetitive dreams. I was the tall fighter of the streets, a great friend and a terrible strategist. I was no Duel Monsters player like my friends, the champions Yuugi Mouto and Katsuya Jounouchi. Heck, I was even worse than Anzu. Though loud-mouthed and rougher natured than my friends, I admit I owned a soft spot for girls.

My father's eyes just narrowed in some emotion I couldn't name…Suspicion? Regret? Then he turned around and went back to our poor bacon, and didn't say anything about the fact he knew I had had another nightmare. Beyond the fact my mother and father had been really concerned when I was little, they now accepted them as a daily fact about their son Honda. I couldn't understand the emotions I saw behind my parents' eyes when the nightmares came up, but I didn't care. For me they barely existed, a small dark part inside me. Any other person would have been disturbed by my parents' reactions, but I felt the dreams were my failure. I could ask my parents and friends for help on any issue but this one. They were my fault, and my responsibility.

Mine alone.

It was autumn, and for me, my last year of school. I was one of those big guys on campus, a senior of Domino High School. It was still pretty early in the year, but there was a strong sense of foreboding around me. Time to leave the nest little birdie. If you don't leave, we'll kick you in the butt. I didn't mind this in the least. I was excited about the last of year of school, and especially for college. I was perfectly fine with being kicked out the parental nest by the butt. There were harder things in life, some of them I had all ready met with, that were harder than learning how to fly.

The dream was still haunting me, but I shoved it into the tiniest corner of my mind. One of my best skills was to focus on other things besides what really troubled me. Perhaps the skill had come from having these nightmares at such a young age, when if I hadn't learned to deal with them, I would have been a psychotic four-year-old scared of everything behind the next corner. Within me there had always been the strength and determined focus to shove emotions away and lock them up from the rest of the world. Things had been getting stressful for me lately. The nightmares had been arriving a lot more recently since the beginning of summer. The dreams were like waters, and I was a riverbed. They were eroding me away more quickly than my banks were being built back by silt. With such force, the nightmares were beginning to break through.

I lived in a poorer part of our town. It had been quite rough growing up here, but my best friend and I had managed to bring a bit of order to this place. I hope we had managed to make it a bit safer for the people who were too young, too weak, or too scared to really survive here. Katsuya Jounouchi had always done well in being my partner of protection and justice, but his heart and soul did not have the same devotion to this cause that mine did. Jou had other things to worry about, such as his Duel Monsters career, his sister, and his father. I can assure you his father is no easy man to deal with…Sometimes, inside me, the only drive is to wipe the streets clean of all their grime and confetti. I want to place my hands against the walls of one the buildings that houses drug dealers, men who try to force innocent young women to work for them, or any other urban evil of this day and age, and blow it to pieces. I've had the feeling before that I could do exactly that, if I remembered how.

The sun was shinning into my eyes, glaring at me rather menacingly. I was staring up at the sky as Jounouchi and Yuugi Mouto came around the corner. Yuugi managed to startle me. He still reminded me of a small boy sometimes, as he was extremely short but not scrawny, with a startling clever brain under his jagged hair. Primarily his sparkling eyes reminded me of a child with unsoiled trust and innocence. I had spaced out, lost in my thoughts over the endless nightmare.

"Hey, Honda!" the world famous duelist yelled at me. My nose irregularly angling toward the sky, I jumped and turned to look at my friends with briefly frightened eyes. I felt a little flushed as my heart pounded from the shock, but in a second I managed to put on the large, almost carnivorous smile Honda-the-clown was famous for. I realized I looked sort of goofy in contrast with the dark thoughts going through my head.

Where was my head? I'm rarely caught by surprise like this, so I must have really been out of it. Maybe I should go see a shrink about this thing, at that thought my blood ran cold. This was my problem, and I wasn't getting help now. Anyway, how would a shrink take the idea of a nightmare that had occurred the exact same way for the past fourteen years?

Even my smile disappeared as we started again towards school. Jounouchi just had to notice the fact I was distracted. Unlike the usual day where I talked about school and work, or guzzling food from my family's top class refrigerator (this was one of my favorite hobbies), I couldn't help but be a quiet shadow. The pale braid I kept seeing in the dream, and the scream that followed it, obviously belonged to the same person. What exactly had happened to her? Was I supposed to have protected her? What had she meant to me? Who was she anyway-

"Honda!" I snapped out of the reverie, this time by Jounouchi's summon. The blond teenager looked at me in concern, "How did it go with Miyako? Did she accept when you asked her out? I'm assuming she said no. You're bummed."

I opened my mouth, and immediately let this go. At this point, I had to let Jou and Yuugi believe this was the reason. I hadn't even asked Miyako out yet, if I would at all. I still had my eye on Jounouchi's little sister Shizuka, who was sixteen now. True in my personal promise to protect her and be there for her when Jounouchi couldn't, I was waiting for the time when Jounouchi wouldn't explode every time I called her. I looked down, and pretended to act bummed in the "Honda-the-clown has been dumped once again" way. Actually I was bummed in the "Honda-the haunted has been suffering from nightmares again" way, but my friends had never seen that side of me. I put on a blubbery, hurt look, and nodded to Jounouchi.

"It will be all right Honda," Yuugi looked at me confidently, "There are plenty of other nice girls out there to ask out."

"Except for my sister!" Katsuya Jounouchi added defensively. I gave a small, invisible sigh, and looked up toward the sky again. Shizuka had such a great brother, she'd be off limits even to her husband. Often I wished I had a sibling. I was an only child like Yuugi, which was one of the major similarities between us. Seto Kaiba, Jounouchi, Anzu, and even Ryou all had brothers or sisters.

Actually, I took that back as I saw Ryou Bakura's younger sister walking towards Domino High on the opposite road. Rosa Bakura was now an only child, as her brother was imprisoned in the Shadow Realm. She was the same age as Shizuka, and now went Domino High as a junior. I didn't know her very well, but she was a pretty young woman with long pale hair, filtered with lilac, blue and gray highlights. She looked about as glum today as I felt, but there were always shadows in her eyes. Life had been very hard on the Bakura family. Looking down to the ground, Rosa's hair bounced around in a long pale braid, swinging as she stepped. A strange feeling went through me. I saw the long braid, and heard a repetion of the scream from my dream in my head. The girl from my dream suddenly had a face. That face was Rosa Bakura's.