Fate: Ta-da! This is a major chapter crunch, and probably the cause of THSB suddenly seeming shorter. Don't worry about it. I was just in the habit of writing much shorter chapters two years ago. ;; But be happy. It's been polished, even! Less melodrama, more angst, more plot!
Disclaimer: FLY AND BE FREE! Oh. Er. Nickelback isn't living in our room, so I guess they're not ours.
[2] In Which Things Turn Upside Down
Yami no Bakura was, to say the least, royally confused. And scared. And numb. And very astonished that his idiotic, weak, could-be-broken-in-half-with-a-glare hikari was very deftly managing to keep up a most enjoyable game of tonsil hockey.
It just wasn't the sort of thing one expected from said idiotic, weak, and-so-on-and-so-forth hikari. The astonishment resulting from this discovery threatened to overwhelm the numbness. Bakura threatened to hurt the astonishment if it took away what felt like his only salvation but left the confusion and fear alone. The astonishment, being unable to be hurt, didn't listen. It and numbness promptly abandoned him, leaving him alone with terror, confusion, and a growing sense of dizziness. And maybe some pesky other emotions too.
Ryou still hadn't stopped kissing him, either. Bakura tried to be angry about this. It didn't quite work. This was possibly due to the fact that all he could focus on was, I know I never taught him to do this. And maybe the fact that it was Ryou, and his hands were doing things he couldn't follow but felt anyway like strange ice, and maybe the odd little draining sensation that all of a sudden yanked –
Something was not quite right anymore. Something had been wrong, and had been getting wronger by the minute, and it had suddenly broken. And after a few irritable weeks of literal soul-searching, Bakura was suddenly able to put a name to the 'something'.
Ryou...what are you doing to me...Ryou...?
The gentle dizziness suddenly swamped him, filling his ears with white noise and blacking out the edges of his vision. And somewhere in the middle of it, Ryou stopped kissing him.
Everything rushed back to normalcy. Bakura blinked, still trembling in body-wracking spasms. "Wh-wh-what was that?"
Ryou smiled lazily. "I wanted you to see what it was like, being so crazily in love with something so evil." He shook his head and laughed softly. "I didn't think about what I'd have to trade for it. And now I'm not so sure I want to trade back."
Bakura simply gaped at his hikari, who had planted his hands on either side of him. The only thing keeping the stunned yami standing was the wall and his hikari pinning him to it.
Ryou still was wearing that lazy, the-world-be-damned smirk. It was now accompanied by only halfway open dark eyes and lines of mockery that Bakura had never seen before on anyone but himself. "You know, once, I would have given anything for this." Ryou shook his head slightly, silvery hair cascading around his face and brushing Bakura's nose. "Only five minutes ago, now that I think about it."
Bakura blinked, stared, tried to stop shaking, and managed to lean fractionally farther away from Ryou. "And all along people have been calling me insane," he managed to grind out.
"But you are the insane one," Ryou said with a smile. "You're mad, and I'm mad. We're all mad here, yami mine. Are you in love yet? Does it hurt at all?" Ryou laughed again. "Emotions...such pathetic things. I can make you wild with a touch, and you taste like..."
"Don't touch me," Bakura hissed.
"Too late," Ryou replied. "Oh, yami, yami, my weakling yami." Ryou gently pushed the hair out of Bakura's face. "The roles have reversed, you see. We are one. And when I gain a quality you have, you must lose your grip on that quality yourself if you are so determined to separate us."
It was definitely time for Bakura to find a quiet, dark corner and do some serious thinking about his relationship with Ryou.
"Do you want to be left alone now?" Ryou asked with amazing perspicacity. "Alone, just like I've been ever since you broke into my soul and took up residence there? Even though I have you forever, I'm alone. Forever alone. And now you're going to be alone too." He abruptly stepped back and vanished around the corner of the room.
Bakura slid to the floor with a shuddering sigh and buried his face in his hands. He can't be alone. He's mine, he's mine, he's mine!
"You're mine!" Yami Bakura screamed at the unresponsive living room. "Damn you, Ryou, you're mine! You'll never be alone! I'll be in your thoughts, in your head, in you and all over you for eternity! You're mine!"
If Ryou heard, he gave no sign of it. Then again, it wasn't like Bakura was in any condition to notice signs. If Ryou had run screaming through the house in the nude playing an accordion and bellowing the lyrics to "What If God Smoked Cannabis?", Bakura would have been completely oblivious.
Ra take my bloody hikari. What was he playing at? I should go find him and –
"Thinking deep thoughts?"
Bakura froze. Oh, Ra...
"You know, I was in the habit of doing that, once." Ryou had one arm around Bakura's huddled shoulders and was tracing his fingers through his yami's pale hair, making it even more wildly spiky. The would-be gentle gesture was annulled by the dreamy, dangerous tone in Ryou's voice and...
Bakura tilted his head back even more to meet his hikari's eyes in shock. Ryou was smiling gently, with the horrible lines of teasing and torture shining in his once-innocent face. "And all I ever thought about was you. Did you know that? Always and forever you. But you never knew, you never cared. Nothing like that. But now you know." Ryou kissed his temple lightly. "Now you know."
The skin-on-skin contact vanished as Ryou once more deserted Bakura to the inner machinations of his own mind. Bakura stayed huddled thus for a while, then, remembering how Ryou had sneaked up on him, looked around wildly for any rampaging hikaris.
Ryou was long gone. But there was something from upstairs.
Music.
It was unfamiliar. Faint. Something he'd never heard Ryou listen to. But it had to be Ryou. Besides, Ryou was apparently trying quite a few new things that, if he wasn't doing a lot of these new things to him, he would declare pretty damn near praiseworthy. Especially that amazing new ability to kiss the life out of people.
But he still wanted to hear the music more clearly. Something about it made him want to hunt it down and listen to it. And then maybe throw the magic music box producing it against a wall so his hikari wouldn't be any more corrupted. And then jump on it, stab it, throw it out the window, and torture it into giving him his Ryou back.
With this firmly in mind, he felt around for the knife he'd dropped. Ryou never touched his knives, he knew what would happen if he –
But Ryou was different now. And, hey presto, no knife.
Bakura stomped towards the kitchen, kicking aside everything in his way. He was beginning to regain his bad temper and strength. This could spell trouble for Ryou, psychotic or not.
Kitchen. Knives. Fire. Good, he thought as he slammed the door open.
No knives there, either.
Bakura then did something he had never done before.
He addressed Ryou like a malicious sibling rather than a doormat.
"Ryou! Give me back my fucking knife or I'm going to go hunt you down, tear you apart with my teeth, and rip them from your sodding body!"
Er. We should all remember that Bakura was deprived of all familial influences at a tender age.
"Yami." It was a taunting, sing-song voice; soft, breathy, cultured, but still mocking. He looked up to see Ryou sitting on the stairs with a wild, delighted grin on his face and malice glimmering in his eyes. He was holding Bakura's switchblade lazily in one hand and was gently drawing the fingers of his other hand across the edge. "Come and get it." Ryou pressed one bloody finger to his lips and smiled. "If you can," he whispered, his lips being stained red with his own blood.
Bakura focused on regaining his footing and taking deep breaths. When he looked back at the stairs, Ryou was gone. There was no trace that the slighter boy had ever been sitting there.
Breathe. Do not scream at Ryou. Breathe. Do not scream at Ryou. Breathe. Bugger this for a lark. Find a weapon and threaten him. And remember to breathe, he thought to himself.
After much rummaging in the kitchen, he found a pair of pink plastic blunt-tipped scissors, a roll of wallpaper, a forgotten comb with a few strands of silver-white hair, a cheap broken plastic pen, and an ancient piece of duct tape. The latter probably dated back to when he'd first been robbing tombs.
After realizing that his only option for arms was to try and scare Ryou with the terrifying cuteness of the pink scissors or smack him on the head with the wallpaper, he decided to just go and threaten him.
And so Bakura snatched up the pink plastic scissors, and stomped up the stairs. Teddy Roosevelt didn't have a thing on him when it came to stairs.
He paused at the landing. The music had started again. Bakura cautiously poked open Ryou's door with the pink scissors and stuck his head around it.
Ryou's laptop was abandoned, as though he'd just stepped out for a minute. Probably plotting my demise right this minute. Little fucker. There was music playing very faintly on headphones
"...don't think we left my hotel room
Should show you the sights 'cause I think I said that I would
We gotta make love just one more time in the shower
'Cause something's gotta go wrong, 'cause I'm feeling just too damn good..."
"What, he thinks he has problems?" Bakura asked indignantly, pulling off the headphones.
"I don't know, your problem isn't much different from his. Only something already went wrong," Ryou said, closing the door behind him.
"Holy shit!" Bakura whirled around to face his hikari.
"I assume you're here for something. Could it possibly be me?" Ryou asked, mock-piteously.
"Sod off. You took every single bloody knife in the bloody house. Now you can bloody well give them back," Bakura growled.
"Or, I could not," Ryou said with a smile. He held out one hand. "Come here."
Bakura went.
"You're still beautiful," Ryou said softly. "I didn't lose that." He reached over and twined his arms over Bakura's shoulders. "I'm not completely insensitive. Not yet."
"Shut up and kiss me already if you're going to," Bakura replied, flinching.
"If you insist," Ryou replied.
Oh gods oh gods oh gods oh gods oh gods help me...
"...'cause something's gotta go wrong 'cause I'm feeling way too damn good and it's like every time I turn around I fall in love and find..."
Bakura shoved Ryou away, hard. "Not you! Not like this! Not you!" He nearly flew for the window and crashed through it, not bothering to open it. The glass carved deep into his flesh as he slammed through, then dropped heavily to the ground. Almost instantly he dragged himself to his feet, gasping, broken, wracked with pain, but driven by enough terror to keep it all away.
The falling dusk was almost enough to obliterate a dark-clad, slightly built boy with a shock of silver-white hair, streaked with blood and stumbling down the street, a small piece of pink plastic clutched mindlessly in his left fist.
Almost.
But not quite.
Ryou turned away from the broken window with a smile, licking some of the blood off of a stray shard of glass. He then calmly righted the chair, sat down at his computer, donned his headphones, and smiled at the knife lying to the left of the laptop.
Now. What was I doing, again?
Fluffy: We've had to condense the review replies in accordance with the gestapo. Read on for new review replies! Oh, and all the replies from the three chapters that became one are in here. Promise!
lynx wings: Good thing you find it fun. Bakura doesn't.
Beholder of the Shadows: And he wasn't expecting it, either. Hee.
Girl Bakura: You're correct about the snogging.
Julie: Thanks for reviewing!
Seadragon1012: Sorrysorry. We had computer troubles. Bad Mel. Bad, bad Mel.
Schizothief: waveses Does it bring back memories yet? Bwahaha.
Alyssa-anime-angel: It's coming, it's coming. Bakura...cute...never thought of that one.
Yami Anime Writer: In retrospect, you saved us. Much thanks!
Neko and Inu-chan: Doesn't anyone like Bakura?
Brit-chan: Have pocky. Mmm. Pocky goodness. And Ryou's phone number, too.
mizustarangel: Yep, no one loves Bakura. Sigh. Let us revolutionize the world.
MER-PEOPLe: Not a bad idea, but I think I need a website first. And to pass chem with an A.
Lfangor: Sankyuu sankyuu for reviewing!
Fyredra: Er. Hounds of Anubis. Er. We'll be. Uh. Going now. Psst, ten bucks on natural.
moonnymph: ;;
little maiden: Look! Someone likes him!
Duel: So, uh, look at that. Reviews. Go forth and contribute, et cetera.