Title: A Persistent Shadow (Chapter 11)
Pairing: Ryou Bakura x Yami Bakura, possible others
Rating
: M
Summary
: The Pharaoh uses a spell to force Yami Bakura out of Ryou's body, but unfortunately for Ryou it doesn't work quite as well as intended.


Ryou had an entire night full of pleasant, fuzzy dreams. Most of them were about the spirit hugging him, but he also had a few about having fun with his friends both in and out of school. He didn't remember any of them afterwards, but he woke up feeling really happy. He sighed, squeezing the spirit more tightly.

The spirit, in turn, disappeared right from under him, letting him fall several inches down onto his bed with a plop.

Ryou groaned softly. He rolled over and rubbed his arm, which he'd fallen on top of at an odd angle. "You could have told me to move, you know."

The spirit now sat atop Ryou's dresser. He was scowling, but he looked oddly frazzled by the night's experience. "You were already done sleeping."

Ryou only shook his head, getting ready for school without bothering to reply.


The school day crawled by slowly. Ryou had met Marik at the entrance and they'd agreed that it shouldn't be discussed at school, so they'd asked Yugi if he'd come to the museum with them that afternoon. Ryou had spent the rest of the day wondering how the Pharaoh would react to what they'd discovered.

After classes were over they'd brought Yugi to the office at the museum. "So what did you guys find out?" he asked curiously.

Ryou stood off to the side as Marik handed Yugi a copy of the diagram from the book. He was happy to let someone else do the actual confronting.

Marik had cut the surrounding text off of the page, so that only the picture of the uniform remained. "We found the uniform worn by the soldiers in the vision."

Yugi looked at it, then glanced off to the side as though listening to someone. "The Pharaoh says that's definitely the uniform he saw. Who wore it?"

Marik took out another copy of the page, this one complete with text. "Could you send the Pharaoh out for a sec?"

"I guess so," Yugi replied. The puzzle glowed, switching Yugi's presence with the Pharaoh's.

"Who were the soldiers?" the Pharaoh asked without preamble.

Marik handed him the full copy of the page.

The Pharaoh read the words on the page. He was silent for a long moment before giving the page back to Marik. "Perhaps they were enemy soldiers disguised as the Royal Guard. It may have been some sort of ruse to fool the villagers into trusting them, or to discredit the highest leadership of the kingdom."

"If they were trying to discredit anyone, they failed miserably," Marik replied doubtfully. "We couldn't find anything matching what happened in that village anywhere, done by the Royal Guard or anyone else. Wouldn't they have left a few survivors to spread the word?"

Who would listen to a pitiful, insignificant villager over the honorable members of the Royal Guard? The spirit's tone had only a hint of the anger boiling beneath the surface; his face was completely blank.

Ryou found himself uneasily siding with the spirit – the Pharaoh didn't even seem to be seriously considering the possibility, and he'd seen the men in the vision for himself. How would people who hadn't been there or seen anything react to the story? "It looked like a surprise attack. They didn't give the villagers enough time to trust them," he said quietly. "I... I think they were real members of the Royal Guard."

Another silence.

"We have no way of knowing that what we saw happened in reality," the Pharaoh finally said. "The being may have simply given us a false, yet realistic vision to create confusion. Do we have any evidence that the events we saw in the vision actually took place?"

"Not yet," Ryou replied.

"There may not be any evidence, even if it did happen," Marik said. "If it was covered up way back then, there might not be anything left to tell us what happened."

"If there is no evidence, we have no reliable way of determining what the vision means," the Pharaoh pointed out.

"That's true, but we shouldn't give up now," Marik replied.

The Pharaoh nodded. "You continue your search for the truth, and I will continue mine. Do you intend to do more research today?"

"I'm definitely going to," Ryou replied. He knew the mystery wasn't going to stop bothering him until he solved it.

"Me too," Marik added. "It feels like we're finally getting somewhere."

"Let me know if you find anything. I must be going." And with that, the Pharaoh left through the door without waiting for another word.

Ryou frowned. "He didn't seem to take what we told him very seriously."

"I don't know about that," Marik replied. "He left without even remembering to let Yugi say goodbye. I think it might have affected him more than he's letting on."

"I hope so." Ryou still wasn't so sure.

"You seem pretty convinced that what we saw was real."

"Yeah," Ryou realized. "I think I am. I know we really don't have any evidence, but... I believe it really happened." Of course, he had more convincing evidence than Marik did at the moment, in the form of the spirit's reactions. "What do you think?"

"I don't know." Marik absently traced a figure eight on the table with his finger. "My instincts are telling me that it's true, but... I think I've learned my lesson about jumping to conclusions without knowing the full story."

"We'll just have to find out the whole story, then," Ryou said, feeling determined. "Do we have any books about the Royal Guard?"

"Maybe..." Marik turned to the nearest bookshelf and started looking through it. "We have plenty of books about the army, but none about the Royal Guard itself. It's somewhere to start, anyway." Marik handed him one of the books about the army and took one for himself.

Ryou sat down at the table and turned to the section about the Royal Guard. He'd glanced through this particular book before when they'd been trying to figure out who the soldiers were, but he'd been focused on information about what soldiers wore and nothing else. The vague descriptions without pictures hadn't been much of a help. He hoped it would be more helpful now that he was looking for something else.

The spirit appeared on the table in front of him. You're never going to find anything, you know. Who would let the destruction of a tiny, worthless village blemish the record of the adored ruler of the kingdom?

Ryou skimmed over the introduction. There still has to be a clue somewhere. A group of soldiers can't just obliterate an entire village without leaving behind some trace of what happened.

They can if it's a village no one cares about, the spirit said bitterly.

Ryou paused in his reading. There still has to be something. Those people can't just be... forgotten, he replied, his thoughts and feelings blurring together for a moment.

The spirit stared at Ryou for a short moment before disappearing from the room.

Ryou returned to the book. He didn't entirely know what he was looking for – he knew the spirit was right about the event itself not being recorded. He continued diligently through the chapter until something finally stuck out at him:

...and these rigorous standards for entry into the Royal Guard were maintained through its entire existence. The only known exception to this occurred during a short period where nearly a hundred soldiers were recruited into the Guard at once, the regulations apparently having been relaxed to meet the required number.

The reason for the sudden recruitment of so many soldiers for the Royal Guard at that particular time has been debated. Some have suggested that it was a move to increase the protection of the ruling family from assassination, as fears of both invasion and interference from outside powers were running especially high at this time. Skeptics of this idea have pointed out that there was no action taken to expand the living quarters of the Royal Guard to accommodate a larger number of soldiers, indicating that the total number of soldiers did not increase beyond normal capacity. There is also no indication that any extra money was expended to pay for more than the usual number of Royal Guard members, even though the soldiers employed in the Guard were paid far more than their counterparts in the army.

Conversely, there is no indication that the Royal Guard had been under the standard number of soldiers before that point, either. Some believe that the new soldiers were brought as replacements, but there is no known record of a corresponding number of soldiers leaving, dying, or being released from their duties, despite records of these occurrences existing in other, much smaller instances.

Ryou read the passage over again. It wasn't necessarily evidence of anything, but...

He turned to Marik. "I might have found something. I'm not sure." He handed the book over to Marik and pointed to the passage. "From here."

Marik skimmed the passage. "That is strange. First we have members of the Royal Guard murdering villagers, and now we know a large number of them just disappeared at some point. You're right. It could be related."

Ryou took the book back. "How, though? The villagers were the ones being murdered, not the soldiers."

"Maybe the soldiers were killed off afterward, so they couldn't tell anyone what they'd been ordered to do," Marik speculated. "Does it say when it happened?"

Ryou skimmed down a little more. "Nothing exact, but it was sometime during the Pharaoh's father's reign." The history of the Pharaoh's brief reign might have been a little sketchy, but that had only made it easier to figure out where he fell in the timeline. There weren't many Pharaohs whose very names were missing from any known records, and there was only one spot in the record with a totally unexplained, near-catastrophic event in the heart of the kingdom.

"Okay. If this is the same event, we at least know when it happened," Marik said. "Which is good, because we'd been kind of assuming it happened during the Pharaoh's reign, and it looks like that isn't true."

"Do you think we should tell the Pharaoh?" Ryou asked.

"I'm not sure he'd consider this real evidence. Not on its own," Marik replied. "We'll just have to find more." He went to the bookshelf and picked up another book. "I'm going to read about the Pharaoh's father."

"Good idea. I'll keep going with this book." Ryou went to make a copy of the page from the book, then sat back down to look for more clues.

The spirit reappeared in front of him, looking at him with the barest hint of approval. You've figured out more than I expected, Landlord.

Ryou felt warm at the not-quite-a-compliment. I knew there had to be something.

Don't get too satisfied with yourself. The most important information won't be found in any of these books.

Why don't you tell me, then? Ryou asked. Is it that you don't want to tell me, or that you don't want me to know at all?

The spirit said nothing. He looked like he didn't entirely know the answer to that question himself.

Don't you want someone to know who those people were, what happened to them? Ryou still hadn't figured out what the spirit had to do with the village, but by now it was clear to him that the people had to be important to the spirit somehow. He knew so much about what had happened there, even though as far as Ryou could tell he couldn't have actually been there at the event himself.

It had occurred to Ryou that the spirit might have been there and been killed there, and that was why he hated the Pharaoh so much, but it didn't really fit. For one thing, Ryou hadn't seen the spirit in the vision, and as far as he knew none of the others had either. Ryou knew the spirit couldn't have been as powerful in his real life as he was in his nightmares, but he still had to have been very strong. Ryou was certain he could have taken down most, if not all of the soldiers before getting killed himself.

The spirit scowled at him. There is only one person I need to know what happened there, and he will never believe it, let alone care about the people it happened to.

You mean the Pharaoh? Ryou asked. But if it happened during his father's reign, he had nothing to with it. Is it just that he won't acknowledge what happened? Ryou could understand that much. The Pharaoh's seeming unconcern was getting to him, too, and he didn't have anything to do with the people involved.

Even if it happened during his father's reign, he still benefited from it, and he allowed himself to continue benefiting from it even after he learned the truth.

Ryou had too many questions to ask at once. Benefit? Wait, he knew what happened at some point?

Yes. But as I expected, he didn't even think of giving up the power that it had granted him. He didn't do it then, and he won't do it now.

Power? Ryou didn't know how the destruction of an unknown village years before the Pharaoh ever came to the throne would give him any more power. He was already Pharaoh, after all. And he couldn't really be said to have that power now, whatever everyone called him.

Unless the spirit meant the other sort of power: shadow magic.

The Millennium Items.

Ryou strained to see the connection in his mind. What would the Millennium Items have to do with soldiers murdering villagers and stuffing their bodies into... a cauldron...

Melting them down...

Ryou's mind went blank in self-preservation for a moment, but then a memory of something the spirit had told him came crashing through the silence: "...there's a 'dark presence' in every Millennium Item. They're dark artifacts that were created in a dark ritual."

Ryou's head shot up, looking for the spirit for confirmation, but the spirit had disappeared again. He rubbed at his chest where the Millennium Ring used to be, as though he could rub away any contact he'd had with the thing. It had touched his skin, its spikes had dug into his body, and he'd worn it for years without realizing anything.

He stopped touching the area where the ring had been and forced himself to calm down. He would need more information, some actual proof, before he could do anything. He didn't even know what he should do if it were true. He turned to Marik. "Um."

Marik looked up from his book. "Did you find something again already?" He sounded impressed.

"Er. No. Not exactly." Ryou tried to figure out what he wanted to say. He couldn't just blurt out his idea with no good explanation of where it came from. "It's about the Millennium Items, actually. Do you have any idea how they were made?" Ryou already knew the answer, but it was a start.

Marik shook his head. "No, I've never seen any information about how they were made or who made them. All I know is that they were in use by the time the Pharaoh took the throne, but couldn't have been made very long before then." Marik looked at him curiously. "Why?"

"I've been thinking about the vision," Ryou said slowly. "I mean, the purple thing was trapped in the ring, and we had the vision when we used that spell on the ring, so... shouldn't that mean the items are connected to the village somehow?"

"How would the items...?" Marik trailed off. Ryou could tell he'd come to the same conclusion when his eyes widened and he started to look slightly ill. "You mean the cauldron."

Ryou nodded.

"That... that makes a disturbing amount of sense," Marik said. "I don't know how we can verify it, though."

"It's not really the sort of thing that would be written in a history book, even if it hadn't been covered up," Ryou agreed.

"I can look through some of my family's stuff. There might be something in there that will help us find the answer." Marik stood up and put the books away. "I'll tell you if I find anything tomorrow."

Ryou grabbed his things and turned to leave. "I'll see you at school."


The spirit was nowhere to be found during the walk home. Ryou was wondering whether or not he should bother with dinner when he saw the police cars parked outside of his apartment, stopping him in his tracks.

He sighed.

This can't be anything good, can it?