A/N: I hope this update is sooner than the last few. I tried to work on it as much as possible. All my chapters still feel too darn short! It bugs the heck out of me. Oh, well, I'm still pretty happy with this one. Enjoy!

The Love of an Angel

Chapter 5

He was falling. He had been falling for a long time, for how long he didn't know, from where he didn't know. He just knew that he was falling, and that when the end of the fall came, it would be the complete and total end.

The bright sky above him began to fade into desolate gray clouds, and the sun's warmth withered away to be replaced with bitter cold. He opened his mouth to cry out, but his voice was suddenly frozen in his throat as his blood became frozen in its veins.

It was coming; he could feel it in his very soul. The end was breathing down his neck and curling cold, bony fingers around him. Everything went from black to blacker as the clouds suddenly disappeared from his sight, and the fall was over. All was silence, the suffocating, unbearable silence. So very suffocating; he couldn't breathe, he couldn't see. Deep under a still, silent lake of loneliness, his breath escaped him and the light evaded his reach.

In one last futile attempt to reach for the sky, he extended his hand out towards the surface of the black lake to see if anyone would reach back for him.

Something was wrong. Bakura's eyes snapped open to stare into the quiet night around him. Something wasn't right. Sitting up from where he had fallen into a light sleep, Bakura's garnet eyes carefully surveyed the unmoving woods around him. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary; he could detect no movement or presence of any kind other than his own.

Pointed ears twitched. There was still something that wasn't right, but he just couldn't put his finger on it. The slightest change in the smell of the air was enough to wake Bakura, and this change was much more significant than something that small. But, there wasn't any evidence of other demons in the area, or even any forest creatures. What was it?

Curious, and becoming rather annoyed, Bakura dared to take a look back into the cave where Ryou was. The angel was still lying on the cave floor with his uninjured wing wrapped around himself, as he had been when Bakura had woken up earlier. His pale, angelic face seemed to glow softly in the dim light, and in sleep he was almost as still as death.

Wait a minute…

Bakura's eyes widened, realization dawning upon him. That was it, that was the change. The angel was no longer breathing! The simple absence of that rhythmic sound was what had woken Bakura up, and now all the holes and cracks that he had thought were mended suddenly reformed tenfold within him.

/He means nothing, remember? Just a prize, just a jewel. Just a piece of merchandise, nothing more./

"But…" Bakura found himself talking out loud, suddenly feeling very unsteady. "But, I still need to ask him that question… about the tears…"

Tears! That was it! That's what they were called, he had remembered! Bakura began shaking the angel frantically, his heart suddenly racing in his chest as panic began to dominate his mind. Bakura's thoughts began screaming through his head what his tongue was somehow unable to say.

/I remembered, I remembered, I remembered! I know what they are now! But there's still more, there's so much more that I don't know, there has to be! You know what this is, angel, you know what these things are! You need to tell me, you need to show me! I need to know, I need to know what's missing! You have to wake up, angel, please!/

The demon could almost swear that there was suddenly the sound of glass shattering on stone; like a dam overflowing, the walls crumbled and fell. There were no defenses now. He was completely vulnerable, his entire soul resting on the hope that this angel could tell him what he couldn't find for himself.

The frantic shaking stopped. Bakura held to the unconscious angel's shoulders, staring down at him with eyes that flashed with so many emotions that he felt as if his heart might burst in his chest. A broken voice that Bakura hadn't heard in years began to speak from his lips.

"Angel, please…"he started, then shut his eyes tightly and clenched his teeth, hating this voice that he had thought was long dead. But, overcome with a need he couldn't explain, he continued. "I know I'm missing something, something important." Bakura grasped the angel's arm tightly, trying to find something to hold on to when everything was falling apart. "You know what it is; you've always known. You never lost it."

By then, the demon's voice had dropped to a hoarse, heartbroken whisper. "Please… you can show me. I'm sorry for what I said, it's not true. You can show me if you'll just wake up, please, angel…"

There was still no response; the angel lay still, his life fading away before Bakura's eyes. The demon lay down next to the angel, suddenly feeling a weakness in his limbs. He lay his head down near the angel's, burying his face in the soft white locks.

"Please wake up…" he whispered. Bakura was broken now. Everything had shattered, all the artificial outer skins had been stripped away, and all that was left was what had always been there. The pain, the terror, the helplessness, and the heartbroken child that had defended himself from the world in the only way that he could: by turning his back on it. This was no longer the cold, calculating demon, or the sly, clever thief; there was only a child.

"Please, angel," the broken one whispered to the savior. "Please…"

Much to his surprise and joy, a hand plunged down into the dark water and took his. He was suddenly pulled out of the dark abyss, away from the loneliness, away from the despair, and was greeted by a welcome rush of sweet, pure, light-suffused air and half-hopeful garnet eyes.

Ryou's emerald eyes snapped open, and he gasped for breath like he had just broken the surface of a sea. He sat up instinctively, coughing and trying to get air into his lungs.

Once the angel had gotten a bit of his breath back, his head slowly turned to look deeply into Bakura's eyes. What he saw nearly made him lose his breath all over again. Every shard of dark, frigid hate was gone from Bakura's garnet orbs. All the defenses were decimated, and all the walls had tumbled down into a ruined, broken heap. The entire façade had disappeared into the past, and the Bakura looking up at him was just as alone and lonely as Ryou was.

The garnet eyes gazed at Ryou forlornly. All the questions that Bakura had wanted to ask were like small flames captured in red amber, and Ryou found himself wanting to answer all those questions and show Bakura all the things that he had never been able to enjoy.

"What…" Ryou tried, then stopped to take a deep breath. "What… did you want me to show you?"

A figure cloaked in black moved swiftly through the forest, his black wings folded behind his back. He was following a nearly undetectable trail that only he could see, and did not use his wings because of the large abundance of trees and brush deep in the forest that could easily catch and damage a wing. Many of the palace guards, who were supposed to be the elite force of the Demon Lord, hurried to keep up. They weren't used to moving so quickly on foot; in fact, most of them were not used to moving quickly at all. They were utterly spoiled, and the bounty hunter thought them to be a troop of pampered, useless fools. The bounty hunter hadn't particularly wanted them to come, but his majesty had insisted that they help bring back the angel.

The Demon Lord's distrust of the bounty hunter was obvious, but that wasn't what the tracker was concentrating on at the moment. He estimated the trail of disturbed brush and snapped twigs he was following to be about three days old. The unusual depth of the very few footprints he managed to find suggested that the thief had been carrying the angel, which meant that the angel was injured. That would certainly slow the thief's getaway, which would only make the bounty hunter's job easier.

He was quite certain that the thief hadn't left the forest around the capital city yet. A patrol had been set up to cover every inch of the border around the forest, and the bounty hunter had to grudgingly admit that it was rather effective. No one had been allowed in or out of the forest ever since the night of the incident, and it would be difficult to sneak past such a thorough watch, especially with an injured angel as baggage. So, he had a hunch that this thief was planning on biding his time and waiting until most of the alarm had died down to make his escape out of the forest and into another city.

Suddenly, the trail that had been right in front of his eyes just a moment before stopped completely. He frowned, rather confused, and knowing that the demon wouldn't have risked flying with all the patrolling guards in the sky. Then, the bounty hunter noticed a thicket of trees right near the end of the trail. Eyes narrowing in suspicion, he stepped closer.

"Master Malik?" one of the few guards that had managed to catch up spoke.

"What?" Malik said viciously through clenched teeth, turning his vivid but hard lavender eyes on the guard that had dared to address him. The guard stuttered out a few unintelligible syllables, then said in a nervous voice, "We've already, ah, searched this area, Master Malik, sir. We didn't find anything."

"That is because you are an incompetent gaggle of blundering loons," Malik said matter-of-factly. The guard looked as if he was about to say something else, but Malik silenced him with a glare that seemed like it could burn right through flesh. Turning away from the annoying guard and peering through the trees, he could see a well-concealed cave entrance, with the trail leading directly into it. Another trail led out of the cave in another direction, towards the south. It seemed that the thief was trying to slowly work his way towards another city.

/Ah, but will you be able to outsmart me, my little angel thief/ Malik thought to himself. Grinning smugly, Malik took off running once again with the guards huffing and puffing along behind him.

A/N: Ooh, ominous! That's the desired effect, anyways. BTW, about the dream sequence, both my sister and I have had dreams in which we were drowning, and I think we might have actually stopped breathing while we were asleep. It was very weird; so, I decided that if one were to take that to an extreme, then one could actually die in their sleep if they were having such a dream. That's that idea, anyways. And for anyone who guessed that Malik was the bounty hunter, ya'll were right. The idea of a bounty hunter actually came from my sister when I was really stuck on what to do with this story, and Malik seemed like the perfect fit for the role. Anyways, I hope ya'll enjoyed the chapter, please review!