Note: To all of those who read Malik's Answering Machine, I am finally, after months and months, going to update chapter 13! However, I'm waiting to receive 20 reviews today before I do it. So get to it!

Alexa G.- Okay! I'll try to make the chapters a little longer. I have big plans for later on in the story, so expect longer chapters a bit later…

trueyamigirlfriend- S'okay. Glad you are enjoying the fic!

Akio the Dragon Master- Perhaps they are, Akio-chan, perhaps they are. But try explaining that to Marik.

DevilsPrincess- Ha ha, me, give tips? Eh… but your tips have helped me so much! Lol.

Disclaimer: I do not own Yu-Gi-Oh. I do, however, own the plot for this story, and the little rap-song thingy that I made up while listening to… well… rap. (shrugs) I needed something to go in there, after all…

"And I don't give a #! who've you've got on hold/I just traded in my car for pot and birth control

"Somebody said I can't #, I'm too old/I'm just trying to give my baby girl some gold…"

Bakura and Otagawa grimaced. Neither of them liked this song, but they couldn't change it; they wouldn't look badass-cool if they weren't listening to highly-inappropriate music on the public streets in town square.

It hadn't taken Bakura very long to tell Otagawa that a Shadow Game was just Duel Monsters with a few different house rules and such. Now, they were trying to look cool. Well, Otagawa was. Bakura was cool. He was wearing his Battle City outfit, and every girl that passed by him was drooling… and one guy, too! (Bakura tried not to look so… cute, after that.)

Otagawa asked a lot of questions about Marik.

"That guy didn't act like he was our age, though," Otagawa offered. Bakura rolled his eyes.

"He's a little slow," Bakura said. "He's… not the type of person you would like to hang out with, Otagawa." Bakura added a tacit -kun to the end of the name, mouthing it but not pronouncing it. Ryou always used polite honorifics like that, so it just seemed natural. Outwardly, though, Bakura was highly in the practice of using yobisute, which meant adding no honorifics on the end of the name at all. It could be okay, if used for very well-known friends or for family, but other than that, it was quite rude, and that was why Bakura used it so much.

Again, Bakura wondered what Ryou was up to.

"So how long have you known her?"

Otagawa's words stirred Bakura out of his reminiscent cerebration. "Uh… what?" he responded, quite doltishly I might add. His eyes were tiny dots. (Cute and funny mental image:D)

"I just asked you how long you've known Miho and them."

Bakura groused: "Why do you care so much about her?"

Otagawa shrugged. "I was just wondering!"

"Two years. Ever since my host… I mean, my itoko (cousin) moved here and I moved with him."

"From where?"

"From England."

"From London?"

"Naw, some crappy little place down by the seashore. Nice place to grow up, if you like hailstorms and typhoons."

"You can get typhoons in England?"

"Uhh… maybe," Bakura said. He had been bluffing.

"Oh. That would seem cool. Hailstorms?"

"Well," Bakura said, speaking expressly from Ryou's childhood memories now, "in the summers it was really hot, and in the winters it would… yes, it would hail a lot. Then you'd walk across the sand, which would be half-frozen, kind of like permafrost, and it the sand didn't freeze your skin right off, you'd step on a piece of hail and bruise your foot or trip over it and jut your chin open or something." (This had happened to Ryou three times.) "The autumns were okay… the leaves didn't really change color so much, except for this one really big tree in Ryou's front yard, which really seemed like the back yard because, I don't know, even thought it faced the street, it felt more like it really faced the ocean, you know? Anyway, there was this one big tree that changed colors… and leaves transmuted from a dull orange to a muddy brown… but when you're little, you think this is really fascinating, no matter how ugly the colors are. The springtime was really annoying though, because that was when some of the damn crabs would be born from their opalescent little eggs, and when you stepped into the foam that the waves heaved up onto the shore, you could step right next to them or on top of them and never even know it…"

"Were… are, there any dangerous animals in UK waters?"

"Um…" Bakura sought to remember: "There were these sea urchins… if you stepped on those, they'd splinter your toes, and owch did it ever hurt… um, once the area near us was visited by a Portugese Man O' War… Those are really rare, though. Sometimes we'd find a Velvet Swimming Crab, and those can really hurt you, but neither of us ever got hurt by one—"

"You live with him?"

"Live with who?"

"Bakura Ryou."

"Oh. Yeah." His voice sounded really blank. Did he always sound this stupid?

"But now he's back in England," Otagawa said, almost accusingly. Or maybe, Bakura thought with a slight gulp, it was just his mind telling him that Otagawa was accusing him.

"I guess."

"Why aren't you?"

"I didn't need to go."

"Why did he need to go?"

"Um… he wanted to visit his family again." Bakura shuffled his feet on the pavement. "My, uh, parents are dead, so I… live with Ryou and his family when I was growing up… but now I don't like to burden them so much. They're kind of airheads, you know?" Bakura offered Otagawa a weak grin. "And, yeah, um… yeah."

"So how long ago did he leave?"

"Uh… three weeks to a month, I guess. I don't remember the exact date."

"When's he coming back?" Otagawa continued to question.

Bakura tried to amplify his squeak of a voice: "I don't know…"

"Why don't you know?" Otagawa asked, raising both eyebrows and eating an ice cream cone, which dripped—Bakura could've sworn he'd done it on purpose—on the front of his white shirt, that went under his navy blue uniform jacket. It was vanilla, though, so one couldn't tell it was stained unless they were near him.

"…He's not sure yet…"

"Is he missing school?"

"I suppose so… No, I'm just ki—kidding, he's probably going to school there, but he hasn't told me much about it."

"And he has a girlfriend there? And that's why he doesn't want to leave?"

Had he told him that? "Uhm… yeah, I guess…"

When one said it like that, why wasn't Ryou coming home? Bakura's lower lip quivered with something… not quite, but not quite unlike, aggravated concern.

Maybe it was time he actually made a phone call…