I can't recall if we ever get any kind of idea what kind of person Ryo's mom was, but it's always been one of my favorite parts of fandom work to take situations like that and just make shit up. It's half the fun of it for me, honestly.


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"What kind of woman was your mother?" Noa wondered.

After spending the majority of the afternoon studying her headstone, he found himself wondering about the sort of human being she had been. It was impossible not to think about such things, he guessed; after all, graveyards were places where nostalgia danced, quite gracefully, with grief. Poetic musings were par for the course. Noa supposed, in a way, that he grieved his father; but he always found himself grieving more for the man Gozaburo Kaiba could have been, the man Noa thought he'd been, more than the actual person.

Seeing honest grief on the faces of Ryo and Roma Bakura, seeing that longing on their faces that was so palpable that Noa felt it, despite not even knowing what Aya Bakura looked like; that wasn't something he could ignore.

Ryo, for his part, offered a soft little smile. "She was . . . clever." He laughed. "She would go with Papa to his digs and help him identify the things he found. She'd help him sell them." He gestured. "Mama was an anthropology professor."

"Professor," Noa repeated. "I guess that must explain why you're so . . . studious about the occult. I mean, given her example. I know I learned plenty from Hahaue's example, even when she didn't teach me things directly. I can't help but imagine that it must have been the same for you."

Ryo started nodding halfway through Noa's statement. "Yes, yes. Absolutely. Mama always said if you love something, if you're interested in something, it doesn't matter what it is. You owe it to the craft, and you owe it to yourself, to learn as much as possible about it. I don't even think I was in middle school yet, when I first realized how much I loved magic and ghost stories and . . . everything in between. It all started because of a collection of H.P. Lovecraft stories I found in Mama's collection once. I read it all over, cover to cover, multiple times. Then I demanded to know more."

"Is Lovecraft appropriate for grade-schoolers?" Noa asked.

"Absolutely not," said Roma, chuckling; his first words in an hour.

Ryo's smile widened. "Mama didn't scold me," he said. "I think she was just happy that her children were interested in learning. Amane didn't like to read. At least, not the kinds of books I would read. But she liked to hear me tell the stories." He sighed wistfully. "Anyway. Mama decided, if I was going to read that kind of fiction, weird fiction she called it—not a judgment, by the way, she said that's literally what people used to call the genre—then I needed to know the proper context. Which . . . that meant a lot of different things, in the case of a man like Lovecraft. I don't think I need to explain what I'm talking about, do I? You know what I'm talking about, don't you?"

"I know." Noa waved a hand. "I've heard plenty about that man. Real piece of work."

"That's being kind about it," Ryo said. He stared off at nothing for a time. "It didn't take long before I was looking into occultism. It seemed like an upgrade. A way to bridge my favorite stories and the world I actually lived in. I don't know if I ever really intended to learn magic, but I wanted to know about it."

"Is that why you were so attached to the Millennium Ring," Noa asked, "even though it was deeply haunted?"

"Partly," Ryo admitted.

He averted his gaze.