Ryou

What a miserable couple of days. Every time I regained my strength, Yami Bakura got the urge to try the eye again. Then my energy was gone once more. I still hadn’t gotten a chance to clean up the mess of blood in the den. I wasn’t even sure how much time had passed. When Yami Bakura took over, I lost all awareness. And although he didn’t admit it, I knew he wasn’t having much success with the millennium eye. How did I know? He stopped hitting me. He was too absorbed with the eye to concern himself with me. And he was worried. The millennium eye was his advantage against Yami Yugi. Well, the eye and me. During the last duel, Yami Yugi didn’t attack until he saw that my yami and I were separated. With me safe, he was free to attack. Yami Bakura said he wasn’t going to make that mistake again. I tried to explain to him that if Yugi was threatened, Yami Yugi wouldn’t hesitate to attack me. But as usual, I was ignored. If he hadn’t been distracted by the eye, he probably would have smacked me, too. So now I had being a hostage to look forward to.

I was thinking of these things while I was confined to my soul room and my yami was “experimenting.” Suddenly, I was tossed back to my body. Yami Bakura usually wasn’t this eager to allow me my body back, so I knew something was wrong.

<Get rid of him!> ordered my dark side.

I had no clue what he was talking about.

<Yugi, you idiot! He’s at the door.>

Oh, no! Now what do I do? If Yugi saw the eye, he would know that “I” had killed Pegasus! And he would know that my yami was back! If he found out, Yami Bakura would hurt me, bad…

<But I can’t let him see me like this!> I pleaded.

<Your hair is long enough. Cover it. Take a leaf out of Pegasus’s book.> Just the mention of Pegasus made me feel like my insides were tied in a knot. I felt so guilty.

<What about the bruises?> I asked, stalling.

<Make up an excuse. Now hurry, before he gets suspicious.> was the reply.

“Are you ok, Bakura?” I heard Yugi call. “I heard a crash.” What was he talking about? I looked about and found the explanation.

“You broke my lamp!” I accused before I could catch myself. I flinched. I would regret that later.

<DON’T YOU SCOLD ME!> he practically screamed mentally. <I can see I have been too lenient with you lately. I’ll have to fix that. Now answer that damned Yugi!>

“I’m coming, Yugi!” I called, less than enthusiastically. I had screwed up big time. Now Yami Bakura felt he had to put me in my place; teach me a lesson. I knew things had been too good to last. How pathetic is that? Times have been so bad that any amount of time that I wasn’t in pain or scared were the “good things.”

I quickly brushed my hair over my face and checked it in the bathroom mirror to make sure that the millennium eye was covered. I then ran to the den to open the front door. Upon seeing the mess, I realized that I couldn’t let Yugi in. Blood stains all over the floor never went unnoticed. I reached the door, unlocked it, and opened it just enough so that I could be seen.

“It took you long enough,” Yugi said good-naturedly. Then he saw me. I saw his expression change from his usual happy attitude to shock, then pity. “Bakura, what happened? You look like a train wreck…” Yugi said, bluntly.

“I…uh…” I searched my mind for some kind of excuse. “Err…an accident…on my bike. Ran into a tree. Had to go to the hospital for a little while. They thought I might have a head injury. But I’m better now. I should be able to go back to school soon.” There, that was believable. I managed a weak smile and tried to look as innocent as possible.

“Since when do you have a bike?” Yugi asked.

Oops! Oh, smooth move, Ryou. I hadn’t had a bike since I was six, when I fell off and broke an arm. I had to make something up. “My father bought it for me this last weekend. Heh… Wrecked the first time I got on the fool thing.”

“Can I see it?” I couldn’t tell if Yugi meant this honestly or if he was calling my bluff. Either way I had to think up another excuse. I was such a bad liar.

“Uh…no…” I stammered. “My father brought it to the shop. It looked worse than I did after the accident.”

“I doubt that,” Yugi muttered. I gave him a look. What did he doubt, exactly? Was he not believing my story?

He noticed my look and quickly said, “Oh, nothing…sorry…oh…nothing…” Whatever he meant, he didn’t mean for me to hear it. That was obvious enough.

“Uh, where is your dad?” he asked to take the focus off of him. Happy to finally be able to answer something truthfully, I answered.

“He’s on a business trip for a few weeks. He left Saturday. A dig in Central America.” My father was an archeologist.

“So he bought you a bike, brought you to the hospital, AND brought the bike to the shop all in one day AND before leaving for Central America?”

Ohhh… The one truth I tell and that’s where he gets me. God, I was so stupid! Yami Bakura seemed to agree as he screamed at me from the back of my mind. <You fool! Why don’t you just announce that you’re lying?> Well at least I hadn’t mentioned that my father’s flight was at six a.m. Yugi seemed to sense my distress and honestly appeared to have regretted questioning me. He changed the subject.

“Can I come in?” he asked. “You missed a lot of work and may need me to explain a bit.”

“Err… I really would prefer you didn’t.” Yugi looked hurt. “Oh, no. I didn’t mean that…it’s just…the place is so messy and…uh…Couldn’t we just do it out here?”

Yugi nodded. “I guess so. You have your math book, right? And science?”

I told him I did and asked him to wait for a moment. I closed the door and ran to get my supplies. I also stopped to make sure the eye was still covered. Where was the hair spray when I needed it? Oh! But that would hurt on that eye, wouldn’t it. Yami Bakura yelled at me that I should not have accepted Yugi’s offer, but I told him that it would be more suspicious if I didn’t. I was actually looking forward to this. Yugi was the first human contact I had had in days, seeing as my yami wasn’t “technically” human.
 
 

Yugi

Bakura was a REALLY bad liar, but I felt sorry for him. I hadn’t really meant to catch him up in it like that, I was just trying to make sense of what he was saying. Judging from the look on his face, he was really struggling with himself. Maybe in more ways than one. Poor guy… He seemed so guilty and ashamed. I changed the subject and sent him to get his supplies. He closed the door and left me there. I could hear him running to the back of the house.

I believed that his injuries required him to stay home, but there was no way they were caused by running into a tree. It had to be Yami Bakura. It had to be.

<I agree.> came my yami’s voice from nowhere. <Why doesn’t he want you in the house?>

<He says it’s messy.> I replied.

<Check.>

<What?!!>

<Check. He might be hiding something. For Bakura’s sake, check.>

Who can argue with Yami’s logic? I certainly couldn’t. I opened the door a crack. The lights were off inside, so I opened it a little more. Now I could see. Now I could see…red stains all over the floor?

<Blood.> Yami Yugi said. <Bakura was hurt bad…>

Blood? Oh, my God! No wonder he hadn’t come to school. But I hadn’t seen any injury other than the bruises. What had happened here? I could hear Bakura shuffling around in the back. I quietly closed the door.

<At least we know for sure now.> Yami said. He was right. There was no longer any doubt. Now we had to plan the next step.

I spread my books out on the grass and sat down. Bakura soon returned and did the same. “So where do we start?” He asked.

“You have a lot to choose from,” I said. “Math, science, language… there’s a ton of all of it.”

“Figures…” he said. “I’m gone two days and the old bat pours the work on.”

“Three.” I corrected.

“What?”

“You’ve been gone three days,” I stated again. “It’s Wednesday.” It was worse than I thought. He didn’t even know how much time had passed. And there was something else. I didn’t like the way he kept nervously brushing his hair into his face. He must have been covering more bruises.

Bakura seemed to be searching for an excuse. I couldn’t stand to see him suffering like that, so I offered him one. “I guess when you sleep all day, it’s hard to keep track of the time, huh?”

He nodded. “Right.”

Yami and I were both satisfied with the information we had gathered. Not happy, just satisfied. I spent the rest of the afternoon helping Bakura with his work. For someone who obviously had other concerns, he seemed rather enthusiastic about it. Guess he was glad to get his mind off of other problems that had nothing to do with square roots and formulas.