Penumbra Darkening

Cautions: Angst. Lots. Some blood and such in this chapter.

Inescapable disclaimer: I own nothing.

Chapter 2

Running usually required a destination. Running away was another matter entirely. Bakura's desperate, slush-hindered sprint through the back alleys of the city was unquestionably the latter, for where was there to go? The ring to which he was inextricably bound still laid, as far as he knew, about Ryou's neck – and like a leash it would not allow this false body to stray too far. There was no goal to this dash anyway, save for that of distancing himself from the delicate young creature who, it seemed, had already floated miles beyond his reach.

"You aren't even alive any more!" he had screamed, and he had meant it. The boy he had been shaking, the mess of pale and silent, had possessed all the spirit and vitality of a ragdoll, and somehow that rattled him to his core. It was his doing, of course, and he knew this well. It had even been his intent. He had bruised and wounded him into submission, believing firmly that once Ryou's spirit was too invalid to fight back, he would be infinitely easier to deal with. There would be no power struggles, no brief insurgencies to take back control, and Bakura would have everything he wanted.

And now this had become true, hadn't it? Where once there had been a spark that sometimes turned rebellious, there was now a lackluster compliance with everything the spirit threw at him. Where there had lingered a gentle sort of innocence that served only to annoy one whose own had been lost centuries ago, there was now this blankly uncaring thing that he had become. He had, slowly and methodically, killed his host's spirit. The terrible part was how this now settled in his thoughts as he wandered, bewildered, through the white-blanketed town. There was no satisfaction where he had expected it, no sense of pride or relief at having attained this long goal. He could not even bring himself to say he was pleased with his own work, and this was a rarity in itself for the proud thief. Instead he was angry, mind lashing out again and again at the numb being in his thoughts, and he had no idea why. Somehow, inexplicably, he had wanted Ryou to fight back then. Or to cry out. Something, anything – anything but what he had done, which was quite simply nothing. He had wanted that spark of reality that set the two of them apart, that named Ryou as true and living and human, and yet he had been the one to extinguish it. It was not in his own nature to fall prey to such thoughts and insecurities, but now they haunted him, and when he could run no more he sank against the bricks of an alley wall, breathless and red-faced from the cold that stung at his eyes and cheeks. His legs, for reasons entirely unrelated to the shortcomings of this form, wobbled threateningly till he finally slid to sit amidst the snow and scattered litter, head bowed against the flakes that still dropped around him. Attempting to clear his thoughts seemed a futile gesture, but he tried anyways, eyes squeezed shut in a victimless glare of concentration.

A few moments passed this way before abruptly, and inescapably, something was very wrong. It began as a sharp sting just past the edge of his left sleeve, then spread to a mirrored one on the right, and with each passing second it worsened. Bewildered, the spirit lifted his arms and jerked the shirt aside, staring at the points from which the pain was now beginning to radiate. There was nothing there to explain its sudden onset – no wounds, no suggestion of injury, nothing but a faint reddish tint that owed its presence to the bite of the wintry air. But the pain seemed unwilling to wait for an explanation to be found, and heedlessly intensified, Bakura gritting his teeth against it and instinctively tucking the sore regions against himself to try to block the ache out. This proved to be another fruitless endeavor…and then it was deepening further still, a swirling dizziness clawing at the corners of his mind. With a growl he clutched at his head, hands curling to fists in his hair, but it only grew more staggering and he was vaguely aware that had he not already been seated, this would have likely knocked him off his feet.

Whatever the cause of this unseen assault, it grew only more agonizing with each passing moment, and the longer he sat there the more it seemed some invisible wound was bleeding him dry, stealing away all the strength he possessed. Finally, mind scrabbling for a solution, he determined that whatever it was might stop if he abandoned this body and returned to the sanctity of his Ring. To do so, he'd need to be nearer it than he was now, and so he struggled to his feet – Ra, where had his energy gone? – and began the hurried, unsteady trek home, stumbling and wobbling and very nearly losing his balance a few times. Things were growing darker somehow, and the world about him blurring, spurring him only to get home faster.

He couldn't have been more than a block or two away from his destination when the latest and most crippling wave of the assault hit. It was pain, but it was a new sort all together. The only word he could conjure up for this was sorrow, heart-gripping sorrow, but it seemed a terribly inadequate name for the sensation that had just now sent him reeling. It was grief, it was anguish, it was despair…

…and it was not his own. There were emotions of which he was capable and emotions of which he was not, and these were far beyond his own realm of feeling. This staggering torment did not have its foundry in his own heart; such a powerful and profound pain could only be born of a more sensitive soul than his own, and immediately there was no doubt as to whose soul was in question here.

Something was very, very wrong with Ryou.

And whatever the something was, it was becoming insistently worse, to the point that the spirit to whom he was bound could scarcely make three or four steps at a time before his legs would wobble and come dangerously near to giving out, the white of the world about him turning a sickly gray as his sight grew clouded. His arms had nearly numbed from the pain – so much could not be said for his chest, which ached with an unfamiliar constriction that came and ebbed in the same tidelike waves that brought with them the weight of his host's suffering. A small flock of schoolgirls, chatting as they strolled along the snowy sidewalk, was knocked roughly apart by the stumbling form; such casualties would have numbered higher, but mercifully the weather had kept most indoors today.

With each step as crippled and hindered as though by the sinking sands of his childhood memories, it seemed an impossibly long time before he'd made it at last to the little unshoveled walk that snaked up to the front door, and to that door itself, shoving it open and all but falling in. The pain had grown only sharper as he'd neared; now, no more than a moment's distance from his aching host, even breathing was a fierce challenge. The desperate agony that had drawn him here continued to pull now, stronger than ever; its wrenching pull led him up the stairs, where the dim stretch of hallway was pierced by a strip of light that marked the bottom edge of the closed bathroom door. In there? He wondered groggily, and the pull of his Ring answered in the affirmative.

And so forward he forced himself, staggering to the door and going to shove it open – only to find the lock firmly in place. Bewildered, he gave another firm push, but to no avail. To try again, he realized grimly, would cost him his last traces of stability. He would require his thief's intellect, a difficult thing to summon up in this state, and when he'd caught his breath he leaned to expertly detach the hinge pins that kept the door in place. Hn…The doors he remembered had not bothered with such things, but old habits died hard and he had inevitably become acquainted with the methods of trickery needed to take what he liked in this modern world as well. A bit of careful jimmying had it, and he knocked the door aside, shoving roughly in.

He was not prepared for what he saw.

The bath had been drawn, and drawn deep. Its waters brimmed over the edge, seeping to stain the once-immaculate tile and grout beneath.

Staining them pink.

Poisoning the bath's contents were dense clouds of red, clouds which clotted the surface and obscured the thin, bruised frame of its lonely inhabitant. He did not move, did not stir or shift when Bakura yelled his name; shaking his shoulders earned no response, nor any change in the tearstained pain frozen into his expression. Even a few desperate slaps proved to be in vain, and with each passing moment, the same unconsciousness that had descended upon him seemed closer to claiming the spirit crouched beside the tub as well. Frantically, and still yelling for the boy to wake up, Bakura fished through the tainted waters till his hands closed around one thin forearm, yanking it above the surface. For just a moment it was clean, rinsed by the sudden motions, and then just as suddenly it had stained itself once more, crimson pouring from the fearsome gashes that scored the boy's delicate wrists. All of it seemed hazy, dreamlike, impossible; even as he dropped that arm with a yelled curse in some long-dead dialect, the spirit could not really make himself believe that what he saw before him truly existed.

Reality, however, had no more regard for whether it was accepted than the night had for whether it brought sleep, and consciousness continued to slip heedlessly away from Bakura with each passing instant. A dizzied glance to the counter behind him illuminated the ring to which he was bound, limp and lackluster atop the yet-spotless porcelain around the sink, but he no longer sought to retreat into the sanctity of its chambers. To escape the pain would be a futile errand; he had seen lives taken with wounds like the ones Ryou now bore, and while he recovered within, his host would die. The drive at this moment to prevent that, at any costs, went unquestioned; it came to him as instinct. A difficult instinct to act upon, however, with his mind swimming and his legs barely complying when he willed them to straighten and replace him on his feet. He swore now to every god in his copious pantheon, cursing the way the blood continued to spill from Ryou like light pouring from a window. A beautiful, shattered window…

And one he did not know how to repair. Snatches of ideas, of solutions, flitted wantonly through his mind, but only one seemed willing to hold still long enough for him to grasp it. A memory, of a conversation…Ryou, demonstrating the mechanism of a bandaid, and going on in his topic-hopping way to comment on how much better medical services were in this era than they must have been when the thief was alive. How well organized and accessible they were, a fact that had thoroughly surprised the spirit at the time. To get in touch with these allegedly advanced services – well, undoubtedly one of his little companions would know that, since trying to ask Ryou himself anything right now would be painfully futile.

A few staggering steps, broken by intermittent collapses against the neat hallway walls, brought the half-conscious spirit to Ryou's room, and a shove of the door – this one proved to be unlocked – granted him access. The place was irritatingly neat, devoid of the worn clothes or aging magazines that might have marred the bedroom of a less fastidious type, and it was all too easy – even with the rapid dimming and swaying of his sight - to pick out the plastic silhouette of the phone upon his desk. Beside it, predictably in its place, was the small spiral-bound book in which he'd seen his vessel inscribing the little notes that were his attempt at hanging onto friendships – names, addresses, numbers for their phones, both the normal ones and the inscrutable little beeping ones they all seemed to carry around wherever they went. That was what he'd sought, and he called on what he'd picked up of this place's script to make an educated guess at which of those numbers he could dial into the phone to talk to the pharaoh's light. He was the most annoyingly dependable one of the bunch, and by Bakura's reasoning, the one most likely to know how to get in touch with this supposedly accesible modern medicine Ryou'd spoken of. Hands fumbling and shaking, he keyed the digits from the book into the phone's handset, holding it to his head as he'd seen others do and struggling to stay on his feet through the agonizingly long moments in which all that crackled through the receiver was the electronic buzz of ringing. One…another…a third, and now he could stand no more and crumbled to the ground, the phone's base tumbling along to crash at his side…

And then, mercifully, a voice.

"Hello?"

His voice…it wouldn't work right, and his eyelids were slipping, gaze reduced to hazy slits.

"Hello?"

A last, desperate struggle against the oncoming darkness. If he could not speak now, Ryou was gone.

"…Yugi…"

Silence, perhaps startled, and at last hesitant recognition.

"Bakura-kun? Is that you? I can hardly hear you…"

"Ryou."

"Eh?"

"He's in trouble…hospital, you've got to get…"

And finally the dark eyes closed, head falling forward and limp fingers surrendering the phone to gravity, even as Yugi's voice, confused and startled, buzzed from its speaker.

"What? What do you---is this---What happened? Hello? Bakura-kun!" Distantly the spirit could hear a thud – the phone being dropped? – and unclear words in a desperate tone, the pharaoh's voice now mingling with that of his bewildered lighter half, and then at last an all-encompassing silence banished him from it all.