It had taken a while, but he finally found it. He had stumbled upon a veritable goldmine of information entirely by accident. Quite literally, he had stumbled over the Compaendium after setting it on the floor, and he found the book kicked open to a section about beasties, monsters, and spooks.

He took a brief break from spell-prep to read, and he soon found himself intrigued by all sorts of monsters and creatures that couldn't possibly be real and yet seemed to exist. At least, it was implied that they exist. Whether or not any of these demons, liches, and werewolves were real or not remained to be seen.

But that wasn't the victory won. No, as he worked his way through the lovingly (and often horrifyingly gruesome) illustrated pages, he found a rough ink sketch of something vague, indistinct. Something with the look of a humanoid doll, but like a sketch with too many lines drawn, until the entire image was obscured.

There were a few minor differences, but it was undeniable: he had found Hikari in the book at long last.

As Hikari spun thrilled circles around Bakura's head, he began to read aloud the section on manifest souls.

Souls were not things that could be seen, usually. They inhabited bodies and provided them with the life force necessary to be alive. A soul was the voice inside a person's head. It was what gave a body thought and feelings. Needless to say, it was very important. And because of its importance, bad things could occur should a soul be ripped from its shell.

Few things are powerful enough to be capable of ripping a soul out of a body: a brutal and violent death would be sufficient, or it could be done while the body still lives by a small assortment of beings and/or rituals. Either way, the end result would be the separation of body and soul, and the manifestation of that soul into a slightly more corporeal state.

These lost souls roam the surface of the earth, trapped in this plane, unable to find reprieve. The gates of heaven barred, the road to hell closed off, and even purgatory sealed away from them. They are forced to dwell in our plane of existence until such time as they are eaten by rogue demons, banished, or coerced into a ritual to place them inside of another (already empty, and this was important) shell. They could be bound to objects to empower them, used to fuel spells, and could even be trapped through various means.

It went on to say that some creatures, demons in particular, would eat the soul and leave the body alive but nonfunctioning. Others, such as shadowtouched, swappers, and necromancers, might remove the soul so that it could be used for some purpose or another, and it went on and on, not going particularly in-depth into any one facet.

"But yes!" Bakura said, "the important part is that the book says that souls can be bound and trapped. And I just had an idea. See, a necromancer is someone who plays around with the dead, and it says that souls are technically considered 'dead' even though they can be revived, so here's my thought. If all of this is true, and I like our odds lately after the magic spell debacle, then the Necronomicon might have a few nuggets of truth inside of it as well. And since it's the Necronomicon, it's probably going to have information that's relevant to what we need."

"Well..." Hikari mumbled.

"Come on, you should be excited. We're this close to figuring it out!" Bakura said, holding his fingers an inch apart. He tossed the Compaendium aside and reached for the lock picks.

Hikari shuffled slowly through the air. "I- I know, and I appreciate it, I really do, but..."

Hikari stopped shuffling and froze a bit higher than eye level, tendrils drooping sadly towards the ground.

"It's just, it's such a thin line we're walking right now, and I don't know how much longer we can go without something going terribly wrong. You're already sliding down a slippery slope with all of these spells you've been playing with lately. How big of a jump would it be to go from using the Necronomicon to help me to using it for evil?"

Bakura snorted derisively, and his fingers twisted mindlessly over the metal picks. "Ye of little faith," he scoffed. "I have tons of self control. I just want to figure this out, and the sooner the better." He looked down at the lock picks and then at the closed Compaendium, bookmarked with the spell sheet. He grinned.

The lock picks were left on the desk as Bakura scrabbled up into the attic, choosing instead to bring the spell sheet and a dry erase marker he'd swiped from school that morning. There was an unlocking charm he was dying to try out.

He sketched the advised sigil onto the front corner of the padlock, struggling with the blunted tip of the marker, and was eventually satisfied with the result. He visualized the lock springing open, snapped his fingers, and to his immense surprise, it opened, right away and without a second's delay.

Awesome.

He dragged the unwieldy Necronomicon from the chest and locked it back up again, already riffling through the pages as he returned to his room. Hikari hovered worriedly over his shoulder.

"It should go faster now," Bakura started. "I've got a basic idea of what I'm dealing with now, so I'm not just taking shots into the dark." He grinned. "You'll be out of here and playing lookout for me before you know it."

"I'm not helping you do anything illegal," Hikari warned. "I won't do it!"

"Illegal is just a point of view," Bakura shot back, waving his hand dismissively through the air.

The words swam faintly before his eyes as he flipped through. The first few chapters weren't what he needed. He kept flipping.

A twinge built in the back of his head. The next few chapters weren't right either. The pain in his head worsened slightly.

He groaned and grabbed his temples as he kept working through the massive book, reading titles of chapters to find something in the vein of dealing with souls. Hikari looked worried.

"Are you alright?" he asked, hovering slightly closer.

Bakura didn't look up, but his fingers buried themselves a little deeper into his temples. "Fine. I'm getting closer, I think..." He was wincing.

Hikari hovered in front of the book, causing Bakura to jump in surprise, wincing at the light. "If you need to stop-"

"I'm almost there," Bakura said. His eyes felt trapped by the book, dizzied by it, but it made the dark feeling in his chest swell wonderfully. It was like a drug high. He found the chapter. Now he just needed the passage.

"Bakura!" Hikari yelped. Bakura was reading through him, not even paying attention to Hikari's cries. The wisp drifted through the book, but Bakura just kept moving it away. He swayed unsteadily.

Finally, he found it. Four hours had slipped by somehow, and he blinked blankly at the wall as he puzzled over how it could have gotten so late so fast. It had felt like ten minutes.

He groaned faintly and rubbed at his eyes. His head felt like it was going to explode. He swayed again, and he pushed the books under his bed with his foot, hiding them behind a jacket that he kicked under after them.

He stood, wavering on his feet. "I need-" he mumbled. His tongue felt like it had swollen several times larger than it should have been, and it made it hard to talk. The headache made it just as hard to think. "... Water."

He reached for the door handle. Then he collapsed to the floor in a dead faint.

He came to much later, in the witching hours of morning. He gasped in pain. His chest felt like it was on fire.

"Hot, too hot!" he yelled, ripping at his shirt. He yanked it over his head, clawing at his bare chest. The mark on his skin was glowing faintly. It felt like the source of the heat. He gagged on cool oxygen. The carpet was too rough against his skin, but he squirmed over it like a worm, wriggling desperately towards the nearby bathroom.

He gasped as he pulled open the door. He fumbled once, twice, three times with the faucet. Too long. The water flowed like beautiful ice over his fingers. He splashed himself like a dying man.

Then, as quickly as it had come over him, it cooled.

"It was too much," Hikari whispered. "I should have known."

Bakura narrowed his eyes. His fingers clenched over the mark. "What do you mean?"

"I had forgotten. But I shouldn't have. The Necronomicon is not like other books. Its knowledge is not meant for mortal eyes. It is a book of death magic whose songs are sung by demons and plague beasts and worse. It is a collection of their knowledge composed into mortal language. And reading it... It changes people."

"Clearly," Bakura grumbled, rubbing at his head. Hikari's light was luminescent and harsh. Phantom pains still swirled behind his eyes, but compared to what it had been once, the pain was tolerable.

Hikari shook quickly back and forth. "No, you don't get it. I- just... Look in the mirror."

Bakura grumbled quietly to himself, but he still pushed himself unsteadily to his feet and looked toward the mirror. "Shit."

His eyes were glowing in the dark, the pupils slitted. He'd always fancied his eyes as red, but that was vanity; the color was always a reddish sort of brown, like long dried blood. But now the crimson was bright as the fresh stuff, red as grave roses and poison apples.

He grinned. "I look terrifying."

"Why are you smiling?" Hikari asked. "You do look terrifying! That's not a good thing! Everyone will see!"

Bakura shook his head and waved his fingers indistinctly over his eyes. The bright red melted away and became the old muted red brown color, and the pupils dimmed and rounded once again.

"You forget, Hikari. I can do this now, thanks to the Compaendium." His smile tightened, his mind already tracking back to the Necronomicon hidden away under his bed. "I wonder what else that book can do..."

Hikari was still worried when the sun came up. That wasn't surprising, and it was easy to ignore. What was worse than Hikari's concern were the looks from his relatives as he went down to breakfast.

His uncle tended to leave for work as Bakura was coming downstairs, so they rarely got more than a passing glance at each other. But when his uncle saw him, he stopped in the doorway. "Bakura? What happened?"

His aunt left the kitchen and she let out a little whimper when she saw him. "Oh, Bakura, are you feeling okay? You look sick! You're so pale. Come here, let me see if you have a fever-" Her hands fluttered near his face.

"I'm fine," he said, backing away. She looked put out, but didn't push the matter. Typical.

He'd been mostly invisible for the last few weeks. His aunt liked to play concerned mother, especially since she'd never had kids of her own. But when it came right down to it, she didn't care that much. It was an appearances thing. She liked looking like the perfect doting mother (aunt) when in reality she only cared so long as Bakura didn't wander in the night where people could see him.

She probably loved it when he stayed put in his room all hours of the night, reading those books. She could tell the neighbors about how dedicated and hardworking her 'precious nephew' was, and it kept her off of Bakura's back.

It was mutually beneficial, and Bakura knew better than to mess with a good thing. Stirring up the status quo would only make things worse. And as nice as it would have been to put on an act and skip school to spend more time reading, the thought of looking at those books for one more minute made him physically nauseous, especially so soon after waking up on the floor from the last time. A break would be good.

After it all had been said and done, he ended up running just late enough to miss his train, and he was late to class. He considered making a run for it to minimize how late he'd be, but bugger that. He didn't care enough to bother. He slowed and set himself a leisurely pace to class, wandering in 20 or 30 minutes late. He was already going to get detention anyway.

But, to his surprise, when he came into the classroom, Naraki-sensei looked him up and down and sent him to his desk with little more than a 'don't do it again'. Bakura harrumphed. He must have looked worse than he thought.

Yugi recoiled visibly as Bakura approached his desk, but then relaxed so quickly that Bakura wondered if he imagined it.

"Wow, Kurokawa-kun. If I showed up this late, I'd be in detention for a month. How'd you luck out?" Yugi asked, leaning a bit closer to Bakura's ear to keep the sound down. Bakura slowly leaned forward as well to maintain distance.

"Motou, no talking in my class. You've got another night of detention with Aizawa-sensei."

"Really, Naraki-sensei?" Yugi asked, batting his eyes as though that might somehow manage to sway their teacher.

"Do you want another night?" Naraki asked, crossing his arms at the front of the classroom. Bakura smirked. Naraki-sensei's warning tone was a lot scarier than any of other teachers. Most students looked ready to piss themselves when he used it.

Yugi just sighed. "No, sir."

Yugi huffed and sat back in his seat, waiting until their teacher had resumed the lesson to lean forward once again. Bakura was getting pretty sick of this shit.

"By the way, anything new happening lately?"

"No," Bakura replied.

Yugi leaned even closer. "Sure?"

"Of course."

"The teacher seems to like you. Why is that?"

"Probably because I'm not a suck up like you, and I'm more than willing to tell people when they can just piss off. Like now. Piss off. Seriously," Bakura muttered under his breath. He glared backward for a brief second to get the point across.

It wasn't his imagination. Yugi's eyes were purple today, just as they'd been before their brief stint of red. And Yugi was still staring suspiciously close to where Bakura's mark was.

He turned back around quickly, scratching it through the uniform jacket. It'd been hurting a bit all day for some strange reason, but now that he could feel Yugi's eyes on it, it was making his skin crawl in addition to the vague twinge.

He scowled down at his history notes. It was his own eyes. They had to be the cause. He'd been keeping up the image of normalcy for hours, and though he knew he could hold it up for the rest of the day, he could definitely feel the faint drain of it sapping away at him. He let out a brief sigh.

Maybe the eyes weren't all they were cracked up to be. His vision was a bit sharper, and he'd noticed that he could see in the dark a little better, but now he had to actually use this... shadow stuff... near constantly just to keep from attracting attention.

Could it be undone? Did he even want it undone? No, the eyes could stay. Hell, he could probably ditch the shadows recoloring them and pass the new look off as colored contacts. He doubted anyone would be surprised if he of all people did that. Was that the smartest decision? He'd have to think on it.

But for now... Best to maintain the illusion.

Back at home, he tried the Necronomicon once again. He had to steel his resolve, silence the tiny, nagging feeling deep in his gut that told him not to, and ignore Hikari's reminders of what had happened last time, but he still did it. It was a book. A goddamned book. It wasn't going to get the better of him, and there was no way in hell he was going to be frightened of it.

He opened the book to the bookmarked passage, but paused before he actually started. No. He wasn't scared. Not at all. Not one... little... bit... His lips tightened.

"Nervous?" Hikari asked.

Bakura scowled. "Never," he shot back, and he started to read.

He managed to make it all the way through the section before he felt as though he'd collapse. His breath was labored, his head ached worse than even yesterday, the smell of sulfur refused to leave his nostrils, and yet, for some reason, he didn't feel quite so horrible this time. It was a feeling not entirely unlike the sensation one gets from a roller coaster: traces of fear and apprehension, but also an overwhelming feeling of flight, of freedom, of being inches away from being flung into the sky and loving every second of it.

He stumbled into the bathroom and hurled.

"It's too much," Hikari said above his head. "We should lock that book back up, stop reading it, it's ev-"

"If you say evil one more time, I'm going to throw you out the window," Bakura panted. He looked up from the porcelain throne he'd been worshipping and glared.

Hikari whimpered. "Well..." Empty threat or not, it got the point across. Hikari fell reticent and backed up to the wall.

Bakura braced himself against the tile floor and wobbled onto his feet, using the toilet as a crutch to get him up. His head swam, and his vision washed over with black for several seconds. He groaned. "God I'm hungry."

He made it downstairs, realizing only seconds too late the entirely real possibility of seeing his aunt in there. But fortune smiled down at him. The kitchen was empty. He started to eat whatever he could get his hands on, stuffing his mouth the way a man might if he thought he'd never see food again.

Finally he got a hold on himself.

"Right," he mumbled through the mouthful of food. He looked up at Hikari, who drew closer. "Let's talk about the good stuff."

"Are you okay-"

"Look," Bakura snapped. "Assume I'm always fine. I'll tell you if I'm not."

"No you won't," Hikari muttered. Bakura ignored it.

He smiled, but it was cold and slightly detached. "Now, don't you want to know what I found?"

Hikari drifted closer still. Bakura bit off another mouthful and spoke while he chewed.

"Right. So. The book had a lot to say on the matter. Most of it wasn't related to what you need to leave the house, but I did find a section about traps for souls. It had a lot to say about the power of marks and sigils, which I'm starting to think are some sort of combination of level one magic and what you use when everything else is impossible or overly difficult."

Hikari nodded. "Yes, that sounds right to me."

"Anyway, the deal is this: certain marks can empower or contain charms for longer periods of time, and also alter the effect of whatever you're trying to accomplish."

"Like the padlock," Hikari said with a nod. "It had one on the back already, protecting it, but the mark you made allows you to open it with shadow threads."

Bakura grinned. "Hadn't even thought about that." He'd just been following the Compaendium's instructions when he'd done that. Good to know there was some sort of rhyme or reason to what was required of him. And with that in mind, he would have to memorize how to replicate the sigil for future reference...

"So, did it have a trapping charm empowered by marks?" Hikari asked. He tilted slightly to the side.

"Yes. I'll bring some supplies home tomorrow. The marks looked a little tricky, but I think I can get them right with a little work. My biggest concern is being able to look at the book long enough to copy them. I'm not sure if it's easier or harder to use the book today, but..."

"If it's too difficult for you-"

"Oh well now you're just making it a challenge, aren't you?" Bakura grinned.

He implied multiple times that he would be buying these supplies. But that would require money, and he'd replaced his usual nighttime thieving jaunts with burying his nose in a magical book that sucked the life out of him. Trade offs.

So he didn't exactly have the money to purchase them from the store. Good thing Bakura didn't need to do that. Bakura watched everything. Where people went, when, why. He watched people's patterns, and he was figuring the school out quickly enough.

The art room was left unlocked all day, but there were students in the room any time except from 1 to 2. The only person inside then would be the art teacher. She would leave the room for bathroom runs sometime during that time. He had a five minute window. The only problem was that it was during a class of his own...

He had the morning to come up with a plausible excuse. Something that would get him out of the classroom for an indeterminate amount of time. Asking to use the bathroom himself wouldn't work, if he needed to wait outside the room for up to an hour. He could ask to go to the nurse... But then he'd probably have to go there for real. The school was a stickler about having students exactly where they should be, no wandering the halls. So what he really needed wasn't an excuse to leave the room, but one to wander around the school.

What would work for that, he wondered?

As one o'clock drew closer, he was not getting worried. True, this was his only guaranteed chance, and if he couldn't do it now, he'd have to hope that he could pick the lock before someone walked past and saw him. And if he didn't get the supplies, then all of this effort was basically a lost cause. But this was so minor it was a non issue.

He drummed his pencil against his thigh. There had to be some sort of excuse that could get him out. Some way of convincing Naraki to let him out of the classroom for an indeterminate period of time.

Magic and shadows and shit got him into this mess. Maybe it could get him out. He closed his eyes. There was a way to make yourself seem more convincing. A way of subtly influencing a listener to sway them to your desires. If he could just remember what it was, it wouldn't matter how good the excuse was. He would be let out.

It had something to do with a name... What was Naraki-sensei's full name? Bakura traced the letters in English onto the corner of the page. That was the start of it. He'd only glossed over the spell once so he wasn't for sure. There was something else.

He sketched a light circle around the words to try and jog his memory. Something inscribed inside. Simple, uncomplicated. A star, but with an odd number of points. The pencil tapped more.

Not five. Not six. Hopefully not four, he wasn't sure if he could draw that one. He marked the top of the circle. Seven sounded right... He added six more dots equidistant from each other and connected the dots to make a star over the top of the name. His hand curled around the paper to hide it from sight.

Something else, wasn't there? He closed his eyes and imagined it working, trying to quash the feeling that this was all stupid. He knew it would work, but the process for beginners was... Ugh. Naraki twitched slightly in his desk and stared out at the class. Excellent. Bakura folded the corner over and kept his eyes trained on his notes as he started to doodle a long curving blade.

Finally, the time had arrived. He braced himself, stood, and approached Naraki, trying to fake his best 'concern' face. The lie would be the easy part. Making it convincing, though, would rely more on subtle body language than the words.

The lie itself was a pretty simple one. What was the one kind of object important enough to merit needing immediate attention? Medication. Bakura chose an epipen, if only because his other idea, a diabetes meter, would draw attention to the fact that he'd never needed one before. But allergy meds? Perfect.

Naraki gave him a long look, trying to decide if he should allow Bakura to search the school or not, and Bakura gave him the most innocent look he could muster, all the while willing that silly little paper charm to just freaking work.

Naraki sighed after a moment that stretched seemingly on for hours. "Fine, you may, but be fast," he said, shooing Bakura towards the door with a slight gesture. A few students looked on in awe.

Bakura only grinned and swept easily out the door. He was free. Actually obtaining the supplies was simple, since it was only ten or twenty minutes until the art teacher left. Bakura stashed the supplies in his locker and walked back to class with his smile victorious. It wasn't even a problem. Magic made this too easy.

"School project."

"Oh," his aunt said, smiling her empty smile at the supplies he had in hand. "Such a good kid. Keep up the good work, Bakura."

Bakura nodded. "Yeah... Sure." He shuffled upstairs quickly. Questions were tiresome. He was not in the mood for more than that.

Hikari was positively glowing when Bakura entered the room, bouncing faintly. "Yes! You bought the supplies!" he said, drifting left and right without a care in the world.

Bakura scoffed. "Like I'd forget them." He grinned. "Interesting. I guess you're more excited about this than how my day went?" he asked, waving the large posterboard through the air.

Hikari slowed a bit. "Well, I mean-" he sputtered. Bakura laughed.

"Ha, no I get it. But my day was boring, so I really don't have anything interesting to tell you. So we can just get started."

Hikari sagged a bit in the air. "Ok."

Bakura darted up to the attic and retrieved the Necronomicon. Best to keep it safe and away from prying eyes, he figured, though he doubted anyone would go through his room. Better safe than sorry.

With the scrap paper, he practiced a few parts of the sigils for the better part of two hours, working them again and again until they didn't just look right, they felt right too.

Each one done fully and correctly felt different from the others, as though imbued with the shadowy dark tendrils that had attacked him that first night so long ago. He could feel the drain of them sapping at him as he finished each one correctly. And, as the book advised, he drew a slash through each finished one to destroy it and sever the flow.

Finally, he'd copied all of the marks out of the book to a workable degree, where he could put the Necronomicon back where it had been and still finish his work. It was late by this time, and a glance at the mirror revealed a drawn look to his face and dark shadows under his eyes.

He'd let the shadowy disguise over his eyes slip away the second he walked into his room, and they looked hungry and evil in the gloomy half light of the room. Very demonlike. He approved very much.

He cracked his fingers noisily and Hikari cringed at the sound. "Alright," Bakura finally announced. "Let's try this."

Hikari flitted back and forth, standing between Bakura and the door. "Are- are you sure you don't want to wait until tomorrow? You look a little… rough. Maybe you should wait until you're well rested. You're exhausted and you only had one charm up at a time. There are six."

"I'll be fine. I want to see if this works," Bakura said.

Hikari sighed.

But Hikari just didn't understand. Bakura needed to do this. He wasn't some pathetic little magician doing parlor tricks. He was Bakura, he was shadowtouched, and he could pull off something amazing with a little practice. This was just the start. If he couldn't do this much, how could he expect to become something greater and more powerful?

"Right, so," Bakura announced, laying the poster board flat on the ground. He grinned. "Let's get started."

He sketched the circle first, then the six circles around it. Inside of each of the circles, he put down the starts of each symbol, holding off the final marks of each for when all had been drawn.

The first was a minor annoyance. The second a stronger tug. Three and four sapped at him. Five was becoming laborious. He was panting visibly as he sketched the last few marks of the sixth. Lifting his marker, his body convulsed briefly.

Hikari cried out, and Bakura shook faintly as he rose back onto his knees. He coughed, and when he pulled his fingers from his lips, they were streaked faintly with red.

"Bakura-"

"Get in the circle," Bakura said, lifting the salt. He started to pour it along the inner circle line and Hikari reluctantly slunk inside the boundary before it closed off. Bakura rose to his feet, the action laborious and slow.

Had the posterboard always been this heavy? He couldn't recall. His hands were trembling as he eased his way down darkened stairs. Hikari played the role of flashlight well enough to see by, so he didn't need to turn on any lights.

The front door was silent as he nudged it open with his foot.

"Are you sure you want to do this?" Hikari asked. His voice was trembling. "It's going to be even harder on you when you cross the line."

"Hard? Ha!" Bakura said. He tried to make his voice sound strong, but it quivered faintly in spite of it. The strain was audible. He approached the line and paused. Hikari held his breath.

They stepped across.

Bakura gasped. It was as though the floor was swept out from underneath him, the breath sucked from his lungs. He wavered on his feet, but then straightened out quickly enough. After the initial rush, it settled into something that, while not easy, was at the very least manageable.

"It- it works," Hikari breathed. "It works!" He whirled around to face Bakura, glowing brighter than before, before suddenly dimming. "Oh, Bakura…"

Bakura pressed his lips tightly together and stepped backwards until he could sit on the porch. The strain receded sharply after a certain point, but he still felt the drain of it even seated well behind the line. He let Hikari out of the salt line.

Then he destroyed the board.

Hikari watched as he angrily attempted to shred the marks into tiny pieces with his hands, and, failing to do that particularly effectively, dragged his knife from his pocket and flicked it open, hacking the symbols apart. Each one peeled back the layers of effort one by one until all were gone.

He was still panting when everything was said and done, but finally his breath was starting to level off slightly.

"That was… a bit rough," Bakura said. He wavered unsteadily.

"A bit?" Hikari said. "You look like you're about to collapse. Please, just get inside before you drop unconscious on your porch."

Bakura scoffed and staggered back into the house. His footsteps sounded deafening compared to what they usually sounded like. He couldn't remember the last time he'd heard his footfalls on wood flooring, let alone on carpet as he could now.

He coughed again, and there was more blood on his fingertips. His skin was stark white, almost bloodless. He was sickly-looking in the mirror. The mark on his chest hurt like hell. He clawed at the collar of his shirt, dragging it low enough to see the hint of red.

It was almost luminescent in the pale light. The mark was stark against his skin. In fact, it seemed to be almost shifting just underneath the skin, cloudy hints of darkness moving languidly with his pulse.

He dropped heavily into the bed.

"Refining the charms will make it more effective and less draining on you," Hikari mentioned in a small voice.

Bakura rolled over to look at the wisp hovering a few feet above the ground. "Really? How d'you know that?"

"Not sure," Hikari said, seemingly shrugging. "I just do. It sounds right, anyway."

"Good," Bakura groaned, clutching at his head. It hurt worse than ever before, and the world started to spin before his eyes. "Because that freaking sucked."

Hikari moved up to eye level, dimming to a soft, barely-lit glow. "I'm sorry, Bakura."

Bakura harrumphed and lost consciousness.

I'm considering adding tendershipping and puzzleshipping, with the possibility of Bakushipping later on. Thoughts? Objections? Reaffirmations? Feel free to leave a review, and thanks for reading.