"Weakling. Why do you try to protect them?" Bakura's voice rang throughout Ryou's soul room. "They don't care for you. And they don't trust you, either."Bakura smirked at his hikari as the boy's knees grated into the stone.

Ryou gazed hatefully up at his blacker half through snow-white bangs. The light was shaking with exertion. Sweat was pouring down Ryou's face as he struggled to steady his breathing.

"It would be so much easier if you just let me control you, mortal." Bakura smiled dangerously at his host.

"Never." His hikari spat through labored breathing. Ryou's eyes narrowed with odium as Bakura assailed his mind again, trying to gain control.

Ryou moaned and his body writhed in pain. His hikari was weakening. Bakura was almost through.

Suddenly, pain beyond excruciating assailed Bakura's entire body. He could hear his own scream reverberating as though it was someone else's. Another scream joined his, singing a throbbing duet that no one heard. Light flashed before Bakura's eyes and all he saw was white, before the burning cries faded and everything plunged into black.

Yugi Motou bolted up in his bed. Pain raced through his mind and he felt as if his body was being wrenched in two. Someone was screaming inside his head: Yami. He screamed out loud, a sound harsh enough to wake the dead, as his body distorted in pain. The spiky-haired seventeen-year-old heard footsteps approaching his room rapidly as a flash of white light faded to black. The teen slumped back in his bed as darkness claimed him.

Raine started in her sleep as she let out a small cry. A drunken reprimand with a complimentary empty whiskey bottle were aimed in her direction, as Sef reacted to her nighttime shriek.

"Might as well wake up now." The teen grumbled. It was three-thirty and she had to wake up at five. Raine never slept much anyway and trying to get an extra hour-and-a-half would be a waste of time. Besides, the dream she'd been having hadn't been the most pleasant.

She sat up in her bed and swung her legs onto the floor. Raine was wearing what she had worn that day: camouflage wide pants paired with a long-sleeved black top with a dark green t-shirt overtop. Despite the fact that she resided in Egypt, the night was cool, and Raine's body temperature had the annoying habit of remaining below average no matter what she did, resulting in her being freezing whilst others were nice and toasty warm. Not that this was the sole reason for her wearing out-of-season (and climate) clothing, but long sleeves were good for hiding things that she didn't necessarily want broadcasted to everyone she knew. Sure, suspicions that her stepbrother abused her rode the waves of gossip, but people would want solid proof. Once they had this, Raine would be classified into the category of 'abused kid'. That was a reputation she could live without.

Raine had been adopted when she was twelve years old. Her family had lived in the Middle East, Raine's father doing some international work for the Canadian government. She had lived with her six-year-old brother, her mother and her father. She'd been eleven.

Her world hadn't been perfect. The knife of terrorism had carved out a number of her friends and people she cared about, but she had a good family; a good life.

That had all come crashing down one busy Monday morning, which seemed like any other Monday morning Raine had ever encountered. She remembered the day vividly. One minute her mother had been calling her down for breakfast, the next, all hell broke loose…

Raine peered out the front window of her house as she skipped down the stairs. A few cars were passing in the street below and one pulled to a stop right in front of her house. The eleven-year-old shrugged. Her father had people come to see him often. She dashed down the stairs to the kitchen in the back.

"Mom, there's a car out front. I think they want to see Daddy." Raine walked into the kitchen and pulled her little brother into a good-morning embrace.

She ruffled his hair as she smiled. "Have a good sleep kiddo?"

"Yup!" His hazel eyes looked through his dark brown bangs as he beamed at her. "I'm gonna go ask Mommy if I can go to Tisa's house today, 'kay?" Raine giggled at this question; Tisa was a girl that Rafael had had a crush on from the time they had moved from Canada. When Raine nodded, the young boy bounded off to the front of the house.

All of a sudden, there was a huge boom; followed by another and yet another. The walls of the house cascaded to the floors. Raine screamed as she fell to the floor, raising her arms to shield herself from the falling barriers. She could hear huge crashing noises all around her. Pain shot through her arm as a piece of concrete hit her; she screamed louder. Something cut her face and she could feel the blood pouring out of the wound. She called out to her parents; crying; screaming. Raine pushed herself closer to the wall, willing it all to stop, as she started sobbing cries that weren't heard as tortured weeping, the combined screams of anguish and pain of her neighbors and friends, and the smell of blood filled the air.

Dust rose into the air as Raine pushed a piece of plywood off of her. It had blood on it. She ran to where her mother had been standing, waiting for the visitor. When she caught a glimpse of her mother, she immediately turned away; she fell to her knees and threw up. She looked wildly around. "Daddy! DADDY!" Tears started to waterfall down her face as she cried endlessly for her dad. Raine wandered around the debris when she tripped over something. The eleven-year-old looked back and froze at the sight before her. An arm stuck out of the wreckage; an arm with her dad's watch fastened to it. Raine breathed deeply over and over again, trying to find some stability within her own head as she slowly crawled backwards, away from her father.

She bumped into someone. It was Mr. Amir, one of her father's good friends on her street. He was holding what was left of his arm, stumbling over his words asking for help. Bloody was pouring from his face, his arm, from everywhere, it seemed. Raine screamed again, over and over, as her neighbor collapsed, vomiting blood.

Raine started to run. She ran like she had never run before. She had to find her brother. She had to stop whatever was bleeding, fix whatever was broken. Rain sprinted back to where her mother lay, bracing herself as she moved the debris around her mother's corpse, looking for her little brother. "Rafe!" Her voice was strangely high-pitched and sounded like it didn't belong to her. "RAFAEL!" She screamed her brother's name over and over again as she ran through what was left of her street, her home. Her cries joined those of others as she stumbled into more shuffling casualties, as she passed by her friends who were horribly mangled. Raine spun around helplessly. She couldn't find Rafe. He couldn't find her. Her arm throbbed painfully as she sunk to the ground sobbing…

Raine looked into the dirty mirror in her small, basically furnished bedroom. Bright hazel eyes peered out of tanned skin, as short, white-blonde hair stuck out at bed-head angles. A thin white scar was traced beneath her right eye, her only physical souvenir from that morning of terror.

Raine slipped out of the house via the back door and started to walk down the dark streets. She wrapped her arms around herself as she melted into the shadows. This was her favorite thing to do. She could dissolve into the darkness so that no one could see her, while she could see everything. It was a gift. Raine could become invisible anytime she wanted.

Raine walked a little further past dark houses when she finally came to her destination. The house was old, abandoned and crumbling, but the flat roof was still sturdy. Raine grabbed a hold of a piece of wood that was sticking out from the building and swung her body up to land soundlessly on the rooftop. She walked to the edge of the roof and sat down, facing the desert, which stretched long and shone silver in the night.

Raine absentmindedly fingered her scar as she thought about her dream. She'd dreamt of Egypt, but a different Egypt than the one she knew now. She'd dreamt of a massacre.

There had been people running; blood in the air. Screams had filled her ears. It had been a haunting reminder of the own massacre of her neighborhood. Though this time, the killing was done with swords instead of bombs. The pictures had changed suddenly to a white-haired boy sobbing as he looked at the same village. The village had been deathly still and corpses had littered the streets. The picture had changed again to the pale boy, dressed in modern-day clothing writhing the pain. Then the light had blared as screams filled her head, uncannily sounding like the screams of her history and of her dream.

Raine sat on the edge of the roof as she mulled her dream over in her head. All dreams showed you something, whether the dream was unbelievably stupid, or a nightmare. The girl silenced her thoughts as she watched the sun rise over Egypt.