Bakura slammed the book down onto the desk with a growl.
"Something wrong?" Hikari asked. He bobbed closer, hovering just over Bakura's left shoulder.
Bakura glared. "I can't find anything. These books are useless. I figured they were fakes, but I thought they'd at least point us in the right direction."
Words rested, heavy and unspoken, on Hikari's lips for a long moment. Finally, the silvery wisp sighed. "Well, they're big books. Maybe we just aren't looking hard enough. I don't know why, but… I'm sure that the Compaendium has something inside. Please, don't give up just yet."
"Bah, give up. I don't know the meaning of the words. Just pisses me off," Bakura shot back. He narrowed his eyes and fixed a dirty look on the red cover. The shiny black mark on the front gleamed malevolently. Almost as an afterthought, he pulled down the collar of his t-shirt and studied the nearly identical mark on his chest.
It was funny. It had been three days since the mark had first appeared, but instead of fading any, it seemed to be getting bolder. Brighter. And it itched like a bitch.
He frowned and scratched at his chest absently.
"Come on, just keep reading," Hikari said.
Bakura grimaced at the book and then at Hikari. "Funny. Just a couple of days ago, you were telling me the books were eeevviiiillll. Now it's 'keep reading, Bakura!' every time I look away from the page."
Bakura imagined Hikari would have shot him a withering glare, had it been possible to see anything resembling a face. As it was, the vague grey tinge darkened substantially and there seemed to be a slightly sinister cast to the lashing silver tendrils.
"Well, just- you're only reading it. I don't think reading it will do... Much... I think..." Hikari muttered. "I just don't want you to keep getting distracted and spending longer looking than you need to."
"Ha! Admit it, you want to get out of here more than you are scared of these silly nonsense books," Bakura said.
Hikari froze sharply in the air, and then gave a quick shudder, conceding the point a little quicker than Bakura expected him too. "... Maybe."
Bakura sighed and returned to reading. And here he'd hoped to bait Hikari into being defensive. Failure. It just wasn't as fun without people pissed at him.
Whispers spread like wildfire in class the next day, and the rumor mill was already grinding away at a furious pace when he showed up for school. And here's the thing, Bakura wouldn't have believed the drivel for an instant, except for the fact that Ryou Yamata's desk was empty for the first time in, according to the stories, years.
Some claimed that he'd been kidnapped last night. Grabbed in a van as he walked home, or taken in the night from his bed while he slept. Still others claimed that they'd seen him walking alone in the moonlight, stumbling the way people do when drunk or sleepwalking.
Others said he'd been murdered, and that they'd seen his corpse with their own eyes, splayed out in some park or bridge or another.
Of all the rumors, he was even less inclined to believe this than the rest. Not because it was so ridiculous that a student would perish so young. It was that the other students, with their weak stomachs and naïveté, could speak so easily about seeing a stiff beyond funerals and last rites.
Right. Harder souls than them had gone pale at the sight of blood, when they knew that a quiet breath had been someone's last. Tougher men, Bakura had found crying themselves to sleep, alternately damning every god they knew. The first time was the hardest. No one knew so well as he did.
He scoffed under his breath as the murmurs dragged on long beyond the start of class. And though there were many things Bakura would have rather done than learn the basics of implicit differentiation, he found himself relieved when that damned Naraki-sensei silenced class and pointedly started the lesson.
At lunch, he felt a pointy finger jab his shoulder. After ignoring the first few pokes, he finally whirled around and glared at Yugi. "What the devil do you want?" he snapped.
"What do you make of this?" Yugi asked. His purple eyes were bright and piercing. Disconcerting.
"I think people are making a bigger deal of this than they should be," Bakura said. "The bloke's probably sick today. And, as I might have said once or twice before, I like it when others mind their own business."
"Pfft, fine then." Yugi said. "You probably don't even remember Ryou Yamata, do you? I'm the only person you talk to."
"Because you don't leave me the hell alone," Bakura growled. "I know which one Yamata was. He was the only person in this class who wasn't a wishy-washy son of a bitch."
"You mean he was a bully," Yugi said.
"I mean he was an asshole. But asshole or not, at least he wasn't a prissy little pain in the neck like you," Bakura said, turning back around.
"Of course," Yugi muttered under his breath, sounding rather sour. Bakura chuckled softly to himself. The day already seemed like a win for Bakura.
An hour and a half later, Yugi tried to ask Bakura more about that damned missing student, but Yugi misjudged. He tried to have this discussion during class. Bakura couldn't wipe the smirk off his face as Naraki-sensei gave Yugi detention for the distraction. And when Yugi sputtered at the injustice, it went from one day of detention to two, pushing at a third.
Yugi fell silent. Bakura nearly burst into cruel laughter. All was right with the world.
Bakura settled back in with the Compaendium again after he finished his homework, at Hikari's less than subtle urging. His old skimming process, involving sloping a few dozen pages at a time, wasn't bringing him the results he wanted, so he had to refine his process a bit.
He now took in a couple words per page, just trying to get a feel for what it was trying to explain. The hope was that he'd find something relevant enough to merit a more in-depth readthrough.
But as he worked his way through the droning hours of turning pages, his eyes began to glaze and wander and slow. He skipped less and less at a time. Eventually he found himself completely absorbed in the Compaendium, the way he'd been so utterly enraptured by the introduction.
It was an essay on innate magical potential. Boring stuff, really, or so it sounded like. But it was a bit more interesting than that.
It seemed that all of nature was in a state of perpetual magical potential, the way an object perched on a ledge might have kinetic potential. Basic physics explained that removing the ledge would cause the object to begin to fall, all because of this potential energy inside of it. The kinetic potential becomes kinetic motion downward.
However, until the ledge is removed, it shows no outward signs of this. As long as the ledge supports the object, the object will continue to sit motionless, awaiting the chance to spiral down to the ground under the divine force of gravity.
Similarly, everything in existence had a latent magical potential inside of it. It was a sort of energy that flowed and moved and could be felt and manipulated by those who dealt intimately with the stuff. Because of this, there was the possibility for shadowtouched to capitalize on this innate potential.
Shadowtouched, it read, had the unique ability to see the ledge supporting the object for what it was: something removable, which could be adjusted to suit the shadowtouched's whims.
To the average human, the metaphorical ledge wasn't just immovable; it was a fact of life, not even acknowledged to exist due to the simple fact that it had always been there, seemed to play no role in the object's existence, and changed nothing that they could perceive.
To one of the shadowtouched, there was more than just a ledge. Suddenly there was a ledge and the flow of energy just begging to be manipulated. For a price, of course.
Removing the ledge to send an object falling to the ground would take resources, and so too did manipulating the fabric of reality through the influence of the shadows. The price varied, of course, but would always be paid in full, regardless of the result.
It even listed three starter spells.
Bakura burst into laughter as he reached the short list. Hikari, who had taken to watching anime on Bakura's cell phone, drifted away from the screen.
"Is everything alright?" he asked with no small amount of concern.
Bakura got himself under control quickly, but he was still smirking and wiping away tears for several lingering seconds. "It's just this book. It's ridiculous. Talking about magical spells like this, it's just-" He chuckled again. "Heh. Had me up till then, but it's just so… hmm… Reminds me of Bloody Mary. Spooky if you believe it, sure, but everyone else sees that it's bullshit. Interesting bullshit, of course, but nothing of interest or consequence."
Hikari was quiet. "... What is Bloody Mary?" he asked, and the head-like part of the wisp cocked to the side.
"You don't know?" Bakura asked. "She's just a little mirror ghost from a story kids tell to scare themselves. An urban legend. You go in the bathroom with a candle or flashlight, usually, but any dark room with a mirror works, and you say 'Bloody Mary' three times. Legend has it, she'll appear in the mirror, dripping with blood, and will do one of several things to you. Either she'll claw your eyes out, curse you, steal your soul, or outright kill you. Childish. Been around for maybe… eh… forty years."
"Childish?!" Hikari cried. "What kind of childish game ends with your soul stolen or your eyes clawed out? That sounds like a mischievous demon, not a mirror ghost!"
Bakura rolled his eyes. "Don't tell me you're scared of an urban legend. And anyway, we aren't talking about Bloody Mary, we're talking about stupid spells." He stared at the book for a long moment before glancing back at Hikari. "I'm gonna try one."
"I thought you said they were stupid."
Bakura glared. "I did. But I still want to do it. That, or I'm showing you Bloody Mary just to see if ghosts like you can piss yourselves from fear."
Hikari twisted 180 degrees. Pouting, probably. "You're so mean," he said in a sulky tone, and Bakura stifled a small smirk. Definitely pouting.
"Right. So. Stupid spell," Bakura said. He turned out the light and sat back down at the desk, trying to read in the faint glow cast from Hikari's backside.
Supposedly, the spell would 'summon light'. Never mind that it broke physics to just summon light. He twisted his fingers into the recommended gesture, stumbling as he tried to pronounce the strange, foreign words. As an afterthought, he jabbed his fingers into a little twist that was advised by the book. He tried to imagine light filling the room.
Unsurprisingly, nothing happened.
He tried again, the wording coming a little easier this time, but still nothing happened. He started to laugh. "It's so stupid!"
"Stop laughing. Do it again."
Hikari had turned around some time during all of this, but he wasn't bobbing in the air. He was frozen, his voice blunt and serious. Bakura blinked. Something about Hikari seemed wrong. His light had dimmed. The color had paled. Something about him seemed more severe.
Bakura made a face. "What's gotten into you?"
Hikari jerked, and the color returned with a sudden flush. "I'm sorry, what was that?" he asked, moving slowly left and right once more. A portion of the wisp suddenly tilted to the left, like a cocked head. "I didn't quite hear."
Bakura narrowed his eyes and furrowed his brows, but chose to say nothing. Whatever had come over Hikari seemed to be gone now. Either way, it wasn't like this was doing anything.
He jabbed his fingers in the gesture one more time and said the words once more, willing light into existence.
A flash split the dark. Blindingly bright and white as fresh snow, it swelled to fill the room and then fell back, settling into an orb hovering at eye level where his fingers pointed.
Bakura's jaw fell open.
"Holy shit," he breathed. He moved his hands slightly to the left, and then back to the right, and the orb followed the gesture exactly. Even when he moved his hands in more complicated movements, it mimicked the gestures. "Holy shit!" He fell backward out of his chair.
"I told you!" Hikari cried, swirling around the orb.
"Holy shit!" Bakura said louder. He pushed himself to his feet, moving the orb around the room and watching the play of reflections and shadows skate over the room. He flicked his fingers towards the corner, and the orb stuck against the wall. "This isn't real."
"I told you!" Hikari repeated. He swirled back over to Bakura, glowing as bright as the orb did. "It's real and it's magic, and I told you to take it seriously!"
Bakura waved his hand in front of it, and it dimmed and flickered out of existence. He summoned another, and then two and three, and sent them spinning through the room in curious swirls and loop-de-loops before banishing all but one.
A sudden wave of exhaustion washed over him, but he pushed it out of his mind.
"This changes everything," Bakura whispered, staring in awe at the last lit orb. He extinguished it, too, and turned to look at Hikari.
Maybe the books weren't actually horseshit. Hikari alone had been enough to cast a bit of reasonable doubt, but now…
His eyes flickered over to the book resting on the desk, still open to the page on innate magical potential.
Where had he read the words shadowtouched before?
The next day of class brought with it more rumors and more unconfirmed, unsolicited stories. All of them were, of course, regarding Ryou Yamata, who had supposedly been kidnapped, killed, or worse over 24 hours ago.
Curiously enough, all of today's rumors seemed to agree on many facts, which Bakura would later discover were almost entirely true thanks to a late night news broadcast that aired that evening.
The boy had been found late last evening by a businesswoman on her way home after a long day of work. As she crossed a bridge, a pair of muddy shoes sticking out of a bush caught the corner of her eye. Attached to those muddy shoes were a pair of mud-stained trousers from the uniform of a local private school.
Curious, the woman had picked her way through brush to get a closer look, and had found the still body of the raven-haired, corpse-pale Ryou Yamata. An emergency services call and a rush to the hospital later, and the verdict was in.
Ryou Yamata was alive, uninjured, and deep in an unexplained coma from which he would not awaken.
This was not the strangest thing to the students, however. No, the strangest part was that this wasn't the first time that this had happened.
Six other people had been discovered around Domino in the last two years or so, all of them still deep in a coma from which none of them had awakened from.
Bakura braced himself for another game of twenty questions from that damned Motou, but to his surprise, Yugi was not in class the first half of the day, and when he showed up in time for the second half, he was deathly pale and wore a look of vague horror.
He did not approach or even acknowledge Bakura, though he did look remarkably shocked to see Bakura sitting in the same seat he'd sat in all of term. But beyond that, Yugi didn't really acknowledge or speak to anyone all day, not even as he departed to carry out his detention with some teacher on the other side of the school.
Whoever died and threw that kid under a freaking train, Bakura couldn't care less. At least Motou had stopped bothering him at last.
Meanwhile at home, his vigor in the Compaendium was renewed. The lure of possible magic was just too attractive to ignore. Well, he called it magic.
The book prefered to call it the manipulation of shadow threads, which dictated the control of that magical potential stuff that had been explained in the overlong, dissertation-level essay. Which was all well and good, but as far as Bakura was concerned, the name didn't matter half as much as the result.
And the results were highly compelling so far. The three spells in the essay had all proved to be as simple to master as the book had posited they would be, and Bakura was determined to find more. He remembered long lists of spells and rituals and effects detailed in earlier passages of the book, and it only took an hour or two to find the pages again.
Initially, he'd discounted all of them as some sort of occult fantasy of the kind you could find in any generic web search for magic spells. The variety of approaches and the simplicity of some of them seemed to give them a highly discreditable factor.
But the light spell had actually worked. The spell to bring the rain had taken three hours to show results, but the unseasonably strong thunderstorm had been more than a little convincing. And maybe it was a touch of vanity, but he liked to think that his eyes really had flickered between their usual reddish color and equally-startling hues of lilac, acid green, and the blue of a depthless ocean.
Either he was experiencing hallucinations that were extremely vivid and realistic and suffered from a bad case of happenstance and poor lighting, or there was something to this shadowtouched thing.
He didn't give it much thought. Instead, he diverted his attentions to the massive list of spells and started picking through the ones that were supposedly the simplest. He planned on trying them out as soon as he could. For... Scientific reasons.
To his left, Hikari let out a deep sigh. Bakura was tempted to ignore it the way he'd ignored all of the dozen other pointed sighs which Hikari had been prone to over the last few hours. If he asked, he'd have to stop his work, and then he'd be making no progress on this matter. Then again, if he continued to ignore Hikari, the sighs would continue, and god were they distracting.
He glanced up for a moment. "What?"
"Oh, nothing," Hikari said, seemingly surprised to even be noticed. "Just… do you see anything about salt? Or maybe other things that can get me out of here?"
"In a minute, I'm almost finished," Bakura said.
There was another deep sigh from Hikari, but Bakura's attentions were already reclaimed by the book. There were a few basic level bindings and simple enchantments that seemed like they'd be pretty easy to get the hang of, and he only included on his list the ones that he had the ingredients to pull off already laying around his house.
"You really shouldn't be doing this," Hikari worried.
Bakura jolted from the book and glanced up. Another hour had passed since he'd last looked away. Where had the time gone?
"You're dabbling with things that you shouldn't be messing with. It's evil stuff. Summoning one ball of light to know it's real is one thing, but all of this will corrupt your heart and soul."
Bakura sneered. "I'm already corrupted inside and out, don't you realize?"
Hikari twisted slightly in what Bakura was starting to realize was a pout, but then again, Hikari probably thought Bakura was kidding. He wasn't.
If Bakura was right, it was that exact corruption that allowed him to do any of this in the first place. Because the first thing he'd done when he got home (even before Hikari looked up from his marathon session of anime) was go back to the introduction where he'd first seen mention of the shadowtouched.
He had a pretty good idea of what it meant to be one, now. And if Hikari was in the dark about it for now, so be it. He'd find out eventually.
Morning dawned bright and early, and Bakura was dead tired. He could barely hold his eyes open, though the red color was alert and bright in the mirror. His bones felt like they weighed a ton or more.
He was starting to regret staying up all night playing with magic. Schooling was not conducive to nocturnal behavior, no matter how much Bakura liked the night. Only a few more months, he repeated to himself as he dressed. A few more months, and he'd be free to do as he pleased without anyone breathing down his neck. Play the game for a little longer.
Hikari grumbled a bit, mostly soft 'I told you so's' that he didn't think Bakura could hear. Little pain in the neck was getting as bad as Yugi sometimes. But at least it kept things interesting at home.
The usual yell from Hikari, "Don't forget to tell me everything when you get home!" was the last thing he heard as he left.
Unsurprisingly, Yugi was back at it that day at school. Whatever had happened the previous day, he'd recovered in full. The finger jabbed his shoulder earlier than usual today, and he had to grit his teeth to keep from saying anything truly horrible.
"You look tired today, Kurokawa-kun. Everything alright?" Yugi whispered.
"Fine."
"Are you sure? You don't look fine. Have you been up to anything lately?"
Bakura glared back. "Why the hell do you want to know? Mind your own goddamned business."
Yugi shrugged and sat back in his chair, but he was still staring at Bakura with those damned red eyes. Bakura blinked. Wait. Hadn't Yugi's eyes always been some obnoxious shade of purple? Bakura didn't even care about the color of people's eyes 99 times out of a hundred, but he knew that he wasn't just imagining the change.
He glared, puzzling over the change. Yugi stared unblinkingly back, his smile dissolving somewhat. Only, rather than looking him in the eye like a man, Yugi was looking down, eyes somewhere over Bakura's chest. Right over his heart, to be specific. Right at the mark hidden under his shirt.
"What are you staring at?" Bakura groused.
Yugi startled. "Oh? Hmmm... Nothing. Sorry to bother you, Kurokawa-kun."
"You aren't sorry," Bakura muttered, settling back into his seat for the remainder of the lesson. He narrowed his eyes at the board. Yugi was fishing for something. What it was, Bakura wasn't sure. But it was getting old very quickly. He'd have to do something about this problem if it didn't stop soon.