Hi! As promised, here is the Bakura POV chapter.
Enjoy!
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Bakura's POV
It's getting worse.
Ryou's always, as long as I've been with him, been pale and sickly, prone to illnesses. But never like this, never near so bad, and now twice in one day.
He went to his doctor recently. Just a regular check-up he said, just to make sure he's still healthy. Even then he was beginning to feel it, the bone tiredness, the icy chill, the fainting spells, that so afflict him now.
He tries to hide it from the world, from me, although the latter only halfheartedly. He thinks of me as omnipotent, omniscient, seeing everything he thinks, feels or wants to say. A sentiment I know is not true, and have done nothing to discourage. Even if, after all these years almost silent within him, I do sometimes have trouble telling where I end and he begins. The line betwixt us is not near so thick and separate as he wishes to think, anyway.
He had a fainting spell right in the doctor's office, albeit a short one. At that point, I had no idea what was going on, so I let him be. When he awoke, the doctor told him that although he was sickly and weak in his immune system since birth, he had gotten much worse lately. Much, much worse. He was weakened in body, his pulse rate lowered, his reflexes slowed. He told Ryou that he could be coming down with something, and if he had to put a date on when he might have caught it, when it had started, it would be when Ryou began his most recent school, Domino High. Nothing was going around school at that time, and nothing had happened around then. I know that for sure.
Nothing except when I became truly awake and first spoke to him. When I became active and closer to alive than I have been since...
I'm killing him. The one good thing that's happened to me in millennia, and I'm killing him. Just like my anger, my rage, my hatred is killing me, just not so literally and physically. For him to live, I would have to leave somehow. The only thing is that while he can't live with me here, I don't think I can live without him here. But either way, he's going to be gone. Whether dead gone, or rid of me gone it amounts to the same thing. Gone. Nothing. Even if there were some way to separate our two souls, and get me out of his body, he'd never stick around anywhere nearby anyway. He'd want to move on, to forget, to go find some new 'friends', people who wouldn't hurt him or restrict him or use him. But people who wouldn't know him either, and never really would. People who wouldn't know what he wanted and needed, almost better than he did himself. People who wouldn't be able to grant his wishes. Why, if he doesn't like the way I pay rent, doesn't he just tell me what he wishes for? I don't accept charity, not even unwilling or unknowing charity. Almost anything I'd do, aside from two things. I can't, or won't, I'm never sure anymore, go away and can't or won't leave the puzzle toting brat and co. alone. Not after this perfect chance, after all these millennia, all the sacrifice, all the...
I just can't help it that my little master foolishly chose to befriend them. Anyway, this will just be saving him from a whole bunch of inevitable pain, from the inevitable betrayal.
He wants to tell his 'friends' about me. He thinks they can help. He thinks that they want to help. He doesn't realize that they'd just lock him up and throw away the key, leave him to rot and languish and regret forever. It doesn't matter that he knows that he didn't commit any of my 'crimes', even if they were committed when I was in his body. It doesn't even matter if they know him to be innocent. All they want is someone to blame, someone to lock up and put away and make their world a better place. Save the world, get the bad guy, doesn't matter if a few innocents get stepped on, get sacrificed to ensure victory. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Or the one. That's all nice and pretty, until you're the one, until it's your turn to be sacrificed for the greater good. Then, all of a sudden, it's wrong. It's evil, unacceptable. And to want justice? Justice for horrible, unspeakable acts committed in the best interests of the greater good? That's the worst crime of all.
If landlord only knew all the things he knew about me that I didn't want him to know. All the things he sees without seeing that he sees them. But the rest of the world is blind, and I keep him in the dark, so I maintain my relative safety. Walking a fine line between teaching and hiding. Little master, so naive and trusting, yet to have that trust shattered, as must inexorably happen.
I tried to tell him once, about how I was affecting his body. How he was affecting me. I didn't get very close. It was during a lesson, one on poisons. He was tired, and I was finishing early, as not to tax him too much in his state of illness. Imparting one last tidbit of information before leaving. About the most deadly kinds of poisons. Not the quickest, or the most potent, just the most deadly. I told him that the most deadly poisons were the ones that, even though you know that it's killing you, and that you need only stop to save yourself, you don't want to. I was telling him, telling my one true poison, not about simple craving or addiction, but about the nature of needing. Even though he was the one dieing and I was the one needing. And I don't think he got it. But then again, I don't really think I got it either. After finishing with an analogy to salt or chemically speaking Na-Cl, two deadly poisons combined into something that everyone is so eager to shove into their bodies, I am sure he was thoroughly confused. But I didn't really want him to understand, I figured that out. If he does, he's surely gone, and once he's gone so also is my fragile grip on semi-sanity and any chance of revenge, of justice, of retribution, of amends.
And after that? After revenge, justice, victory?
There's nothing. Nothing for me, no going back, no fixing, no amends, no truth, no life, no death.
Just nothing, a welcome, unwanted nothing.
And maybe, hopefully, unlikely, someone to share that nothing with.
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Ok, not exactly what I planned it to be. Oh well, I don't thing it turned out too terribly awful. I think. But it's not my opinion that matters, its yours. So tell me what you think. Please. I can't improve if I don't know what I'm doing right or wrong.
Thanks!
Bye-bye!