Title: Loaded Bones
Rating: SFW (abuse, the weird consent issues you get with body hijacking)
Wordcount: 8,618
Summary: After Battle City, Bakura reclaims the Millennium Ring and finds himself unexpectedly in control of the evil spirit inside it. What follows is a long, strange week of Monster World, mind games, memory gaps, and terrible mistakes.

Note: This is (mostly) dub-based because Ridiculous English Stereotype Bakura amuses me, but I've incorporated so much from the manga that the canon here has gone a bit syncretic. This fic also overwrites both the manga's Ring-reclamation-on-the-blimp scene and the anime's wacky repossession-in-the-church scene.

I'm following (very loosely, don't break out a calendar) the timeline that puts Battle City in 1997, so older tech ahoy! And I have set out to reuse every dumb power the anime assigned the Ring during Duelist Kingdom.

Thief

[Saturday]

Bakura had surely done worse things in his life, even if he hadn't been conscious for them. And it wasn't stealing, really, if the item in question belonged to him and was bound to come back on its own sooner or later. Besides, he had already tried asking, and both Yugis had been very unreasonable.

So it was with a relatively unruffled conscience that he tiptoed into Yugi's bedroom and conducted a brisk search of the dresser. Although Yugi and Joey were absorbed in a duel downstairs, there remained the risk that Téa or Tristan might notice Bakura's extended absence and come looking to make sure that he hadn't managed to injure himself in the loo.

The dresser proved fruitless. Frowning, he dropped to his knees and peered under the bed, where he discovered a stack of magazines that were probably Joey's fault. He blushed as he pushed them back into their hiding place, then turned his attention to Yugi's closet.

He groped blindly in a forest of leather until his fingers brushed what felt like a shoebox. Bakura withdrew it with care, his pulse racing at the metallic clinks that accompanied each motion, and found that the box was wrapped in a confusion of rubber bands that required some time to remove. He held his breath as he finally took off the lid.

There it lay, gleaming beneath the Rod and the Necklace: his Millennium Ring.

Almost reverently, he disentangled it from its fellow Items. The metal cooled his feverish nerves, and he caught himself humming as he slipped the Ring around his neck and under his shirt. The marrow-deep itch that had bothered him since he awoke after Battle City began to fade.

"Bakura?" Téa's voice carried up the stairwell and through the door. "Are you okay in there?"

He nearly tore down a pair of Yugi's trousers in his haste to return the shoebox. "Quite all right!" he called back, hoping she didn't notice that his voice came from not quite the direction of the toilet. "I'll be down in just a moment!

As he turned to leave, his gaze fell on the pile of rubber bands. Several snapped in his hands and left angry red marks; he hoped that Yugi hadn't made a game out of their number and placement. When the box looked more or less as he had found it, Bakura shoved it back amongst the shoes and stuffed the broken elastic scraps into his pockets.

He paused in the doorway to straighten his shirt, remembered just in time to pull his hair free of the Ring's plaited cord, and rejoined the others downstairs.

"Dark Magic Attack!" greeted him, followed by Joey's "Aw, man, not again!"

Nothing stirred within the Ring. As Bakura settled in cross-legged on the floor, Yugi and Joey congratulated each other on a game well-played. Téa deposited the communal pretzel bowl in his lap.

"You're just lucky Yugi isn't using his God Cards," Tristan said, prompting an indignant noise from Joey. "He'd kick your butt in a heartbeat with Ra on the field."

Joey leaned over to punch him in the arm. "What, are ya forgettin' who almost beat Ra?"

Téa rolled her eyes and reached for a pretzel. "Almost not passing out isn't the same as almost winning, Joey."

Further squabbling was forestalled when Yugi said, "Guys, there's no way I could play with the God Cards just for fun. They're way too important!"

"Yeah, definitely." Téa shifted, stretching her legs out in front of her. "Have you had any luck figuring out what to do with them?"

As Yugi's fringe leapt up, indicating that he had ceded the conversation to Yami, Bakura pretended to be engrossed in scraping the salt from a pretzel. Fairly or not, he hadn't felt entirely comfortable in the pharaoh's presence ever since he had pieced together enough second-hand scraps of Battle City to spell out, "Yami might have killed me to win." From his delirium he remembered nothing but the dragon, twin-jawed and yellow-eyed, gnashing its fangs as he pleaded for help until the spirit took his place.

The Ring warmed worrisomely against his chest.

Dropping Yugi's voice a brooding octave, Yami said, "Their role in unlocking my memories remains a mystery. For now, I can do nothing more than wait for the God Cards to reveal their secrets."

A familiar feeling passed over Bakura, a sense that his next blink might be drawn out for days. But instead of what normally followed―a breath out of sync, a sudden change of scenery, and a new stain on his shirt―he felt a curious mental thud, as if his mind were a window that had beguiled a speeding bird.

He blinked again, cautiously, and found that he was still sitting on the floor of the game shop with a half-scraped pretzel in his hand. The contents of the bowl appeared undiminished.

"Perhaps that tablet at the museum is the key," Yami mused. Whilst the pharaoh did tend to repeat himself, Bakura supposed it was unlikely that the group had been carrying on the same conversation all afternoon.

He glanced at the clock, realized he had no basis of comparison, glanced again regardless, and felt an uncertain smile stretch across his face.

Another thump registered in his psyche, followed by a horribly familiar voice that went straight to his brain without bothering with his ears: "You traitorous worm of a host, what the hell are you doing?"

Bakura twitched and crushed the pretzel he was holding. "Er, did anyone else hear that?"

The answering facial expressions suggested not.

"Are you sure you're okay?" Téa asked. "You look kind of flushed."

He hesitated only a moment before seizing the opportunity. "Come to think of it, I am feeling rather unwell. I should―" another thump, accompanied by swearing― "probably go home."

"Yeah, there's something going around at school," Tristan said. "You shoulda seen what Joey puked up last week."

Téa pulled a face. "That was his own fault. Three burgers and a milkshake on a bad stomach?"

"Don't forget the onion rings. Man, those sure tasted better goin' down."

Yami's lightening-shaped streaks of hair flopped back into his fringe as Yugi slid back into control, adopting a painfully earnest expression. "Do you want one of us to walk you home, Bakura?"

"Trust me, ya do," Joey added. "You don't wanna be alone in the middle of the street when your guts start doin' the tango."

The thumping had given way to an ominous silence. "I'll be all right on my own," Bakura said quickly, passing the pretzel bowl to Téa and trying to will the tremors out of his hands. "It's not far. I'd feel quite silly with an escort."

"Well, okay, if you're sure." Yugi gave him an uncertain frown. "You'll call us if you need anything, right?"

"Of course. Thank you." As Bakura got to his feet, he tried to remember whether he had told them about his living arrangements. Probably not―Yugi, at least, wouldn't have let him return ill to an empty flat, and the spirit in the Ring had no reason to have shared the information, not after it missed the chance to set its original plans in motion. At the door, he paused just long to wave a cheerful good-bye before hurrying off, racing his footsteps against his heartbeats.

The Ring remained silent, aside from the quiet slapping of its pointers against his skin. Bakura hoped it didn't decide to embed itself in him again.

When he reached his building, he ran past the elevator and up the stairs to the sixth floor, ignoring both the stares of his fellow tenants and the stitch in his side. At the end of the hall, he fumbled to get his key in the lock. His palms were sweating as if he truly were feverish. At last the knob turned, and he slammed the door behind himself loudly enough to hurt his ears.

A moment later, the sound was echoed by a series of muted psychic thuds, which felt more like impatient knocks than full-on assaults. "Whatever you're doing," said the voice in his head, "you will stop it immediately."

He realized that his fists were clenched and slowly pried his fingernails out of his palms. The spirit in the Ring hadn't spoken to him since it lost to Yugi at Duelist Kingdom; Bakura knew that it had begun possessing him again only because he kept losing time and waking up in strange places. His brain lacked the resources to sort out how he felt about the resumption of communication.

The tapping continued. "Now, host."

"Er, ah..." Bakura filled his lungs and set his shoulders. "No."

What should have been a mental bomb burst with all the destructive force of a soap bubble. As the voice in his head raged, he raised one hand in front of his face and wiggled each finger in turn. A small giddy noise escaped him.

"No," he said again, and the word left a sharp, sweet taste on his tongue. As he toed off his trainers, he learned two new compound swear words from the spirit.

Ignoring his mind's suggestions of how things might go pear-shaped, Bakura made his way to the sofa, folded his hands in his lap, and let his eyes rest on the blue numbers glowing on the video. His pulse slowed.

The spirit cursed him, his ancestors, and any descendants he might happen to have, down unto the tenth generation, before ending with "So enjoy this while you can. The moment I regain control of this vessel, I shall evict your worthless soul and feed it to the shadows."

"I don't think you can do that, actually." He was pleased by the mildness of his tone. "Otherwise, I expect you already would have."

The spirit didn't respond, and he was left alone to tally the seconds in his head. After two hundred he was content to let the clock count for him.

He breathed easily.

At a quarter past four, Bakura realized that the parts of his body in contact with the cushions were going numb. He shifted and stretched, eyes still fixed rapturously on the clock, and said, "Isn't this delightful? An entire afternoon has gone by, and I can account for every minute of it! I think I'll try an evening next." When the voice in his head remained silent, he stretched again, careful not to strain his bad arm, and got to his feet. "I'm also of a mind to try baking something."

The kitchen offered up flour, eggs, sugar, chocolate, salt, and vanilla—all the makings of simple chocolate brownies. The cocoa powder was a bit old, a veteran of several moves, but it smelled fine. The baking pan had only a thin film of dust that quickly succumbed to a tea towel. Humming, Bakura pre-heated the oven and fairly tingled from the thrill of being able to plan ahead.

He had missed baking.

A little over a year ago, before the voice began whispering in his brain, Bakura had blacked out while preparing a soufflé and awakened near the bus station in a town he had never heard of and which turned out to be a prohibitively expensive ticket away from home. He had just resigned himself to hitchhiking when he found himself inside the station, his jeans scuffed and his fingernails dirty, with enough cash to cover both his fare and the purchase of a few meals. In retrospect, he supposed this was thoughtful, considering he had arrived back at his flat to discover an eviction notice on his door and extensive fire damage in his kitchen.

Subsequently he had restricted himself to ready meals and spent a week agonizing over whether to tell his father that he suffered from what a growing number of library books suggested were dissociative fugues.

Bakura hesitated with his hand on the bag of flour, bracing for the spirit's mockery; it seemed in too talkative a mood to let his brooding pass unremarked. To his surprise, the spirit didn't so much as sneer. He turned his attention to measuring and said, "You can't spy on everything I'm thinking now, can you?"

Scoffing registered in his brain. "Don't flatter yourself. You've never had an idea worth exploring."

This was a blatant lie; the spirit had browsed his memories like a delinquent in a comic book shop, reading full issues without paying and occasionally, with an unpleasant neurological tingle, dog-earing pages it wanted to come back to later. Whilst he expected its interest in all things Yugi Moto, Bakura wasn't certain why the spirit liked birthday parties and spotty recollections of Mr Benn.

As an experiment, he let his thoughts flutter through old fears and embarrassments, none of which elicited a response. He cracked an egg victoriously. "Well, then. From now on, if you want to know my opinions, you'll have to ask me."

"Don't hold your breath."

Bakura paused with the second egg pinched between his thumb and forefinger. That the spirit had passed so quickly from threats and tantrums to something almost like bantering disquieted him. He hurried the rest of the ingredients into the bowl in order to take out his confusion on the mixing process.

The spirit's grin, long and wry with spite, tugged at his mind. "Bit on edge, are we, host?"

An awkward motion lobbed batter over the worktop. Scowling, Bakura pressed his hand to the dull burn in his arm and said, "No, I am not on edge. I can'tbe on edge, because you can't control me anymore, and I'm baking again and you can't make me stop, and you can't just steal my body and do whatever you please without so much as a by-your-leave, and I―" he needed to breathe― "I have grievances!"

His knuckles had gone white around the spoon. Making a conscious effort to relax, he deemed the batter mixed and poured it into the pan.

In the back of his mind, the spirit chuckled in a way that made his nape tense. "Well," it said in the tones of one resigned to salvaging entertainment as obnoxiously as possible, "at least this is more interesting than 'Oh, dear. It no longer appears to be Tuesday.'"

The falsetto was uncalled for. Bakura made a miffed noise and fed the pan into the oven.

"Grievances," the spirit mimicked, then let its voice fall back to its usual pitch. "Heh. Do you keep a list?"

With a little more force than necessary, he twisted the knob on his kitchen timer to give himself thirty minutes. "I would scarcely know where to begin," he replied. "Let's see what I remember about Battle City." He ticked his points off on his left hand: "First, I remember my arm hurting so badly I couldn't even think. Then a dragon almost killed me, and then I had terrible nightmares. Then I woke up half-starved on top of a blimp." He rapped his still-folded joint. "Look, I didn't even need all my fingers."

When the spirit didn't reply, Bakura added, "And for weeks before that, I can't remember actually finishing a single homework assignment, though I suppose that doesn't matter much when the class seemed to have moved on to a new topic every time I attended school. I hope you were bothering to feed me."

Still no response. "And I'm failing algebra."

A low, lunatic laugh bubbled up in his brain. "When the world is covered by darkness, algebra will be irrelevant."

"How is that supposed to make me feel better?" He sighed and leaned against the wall, realizing after a moment that he had instinctively cupped his hand over his injured arm. He tightened his grip and set his jaw. "And you won't be covering anything in darkness, or trying to kill my friends, or―or anything of that sort. I won't let you."

The spirit laughed louder, whereupon Bakura realized that, short of discarding the Ring, he had no idea how to shut it up. He wandered into the living room and lay face-down on the sofa, burying his face in the cushions in the vain hope that the padding would somehow muffle the noise inside his skull.

"You amuse me, host," the spirit said, almost amicably. "Surrender now and your suffering will be minimal."

Scowling, he reached behind his neck and pinched the knot in the Ring's cord, drawing it out of his shirt. Perhaps he could accustom himself to the itching in the same way that an amputee could adapt to the tingling of a phantom limb. Of course, amputees tended to be given very good drugs.

The telephone rang. In order of descending frequency, the list of people from whom Bakura received calls comprised his school administrators, his landlord, local law enforcement, the specialty shop from which he imported too many touches of home, telemarketers, his father, and people who had been attempting to reach someone else. That he had gone two weeks without the Ring eliminated the fear of the first three.

When he crossed the room and picked up the receiver, his father's voice greeted him over a buzz of chatter that, to Bakura's untrained ear, sounded like Spanish. Background shouting obscured his father's question, but Bakura knew the answer by rote: "Everything's fine."

"Good, good. Now, I hate to tell you this, but we're in something of a critical situation. No need to worry, mind you―it's all museum politics―but I'm afraid I simply can't fly in for your birthday."

Bakura was surprised that he still had any capacity for disappointment. He twisted the phone's coiled lead tight around his finger. "I understand."

"I wish it were otherwise, but a priceless Incan collection is at stake. My work here is too important to postpone." And other things, by implication, were not. "I'll make it up to you at Christmas."

He had missed the last Christmas, which was just as well. On the morning of the twenty-fifth, Bakura had woken up knackered and found on his dresser a makeshift nativity scene populated with Monster World miniatures.

"I'll be there this time," said his father, and Bakura realized that he hadn't yet responded. "I promise."

Bakura swallowed. "Then I'll look forward to seeing you."

An engine rumbled in the background. Someone called his father's name. "Sorry, my shuttle's here. I've posted your present. Take care."

"Take care," Bakura echoed, and the line went dead.

He held the receiver against his ear until it began to beep at him. As he replaced the phone in its cradle, the voice in his head sneered, "How pitiful."

"Don't." The wall was nearer than any furniture, so Bakura leaned against it as he stared at his feet. His folded arms pressed the Ring into his torso.

To his surprise, the spirit didn't persist in mocking him. An automatic "thank you" nearly escaped his mouth before he caught it. Willing his arms to relax, he glanced up from the floor and saw himself sprawled supine on the sofa.

Not quite on, he realized―his doppelgänger was translucent and poked through the cushions in the places where it didn't bother emulating the laws of physics. A copy of the Ring rested on its chest, the brilliant gold dimmed by the pattern of the sofa showing through.

The specter grinned, and Bakura saw that it was not a perfect double, unless the afternoon's baking had somehow twisted his facial features and done unexpectedly exciting things to his hair. A tuft shaped like a bat wing stabbed insubstantially through the armrest.

He contrived to sound unruffled: "You've got my hair wrong." There being no direction in which he wished the conversation to continue, he retreated to the kitchen and the soothing promise of tea. The beeping of the kitchen timer intercepted him.

"That's not food."

The voice came from behind Bakura rather than from inside his head, startling him into fumbling the pan. By luck it landed on the hob instead of his feet.

"I rather think it is," he replied stiffly. He used his oven mitt to nudge his baked goods into a more secure position.

When he didn't turn to face the spirit, it darted in front of him, intersecting the oven with its torso, and hitched up its copy of his shirt. "This body is already soft and weak," it snapped, jabbing a finger at its exposed ribs. "Don't make it fat as well."

Bakura gaped at it, sputtered, and finally threw the oven mitt through its face before storming off to fill the kettle. When he returned, he made a point of igniting the ring in the middle of the spirit's stomach. A translucent stripe in its shirt sliced the little blue flames in half.

"I preferred it when you ignored me." He reconsidered almost as soon as the sentence was out of his mouth. "Prefer" was too strong a word to apply to the sensation of being shrugged on and off like a winter coat.

Before he could amend his statement, the spirit vanished. He blinked at the space where it had been.

"Very good, then," he said, and took his tea and brownie in peace. He pointedly had seconds.

In the back of his mind, Bakura could still sense the spirit, spread like a thick balm over the places that had ached ever since he woke up without the Ring. The painkillers that left him fuzzy-headed and scarcely aware of his own skin had done nothing to diminish that discomfort; on his first night back in his flat, he had slathered an entire tube of analgesic cream over his arm before realizing that his pain was too inscrutably diffuse to blame entirely on the injury. He felt a bit like a drug addict.

He refused to wonder what he'd be feeling if the spirit had been able to regain control. Instead he made himself a sandwich, ate a third brownie, and decided to leave the kitchen before he made himself ill. The voice in his head remained silent, even when he stopped in the doorway and stared at his living room, curling his fingers around the Ring.

The evening stretched out before him like a sunlit sea, all silver surfaces and black depths. Not long ago Bakura had made a mental list of the things he wanted to do if-when-if his body was his own again, but the rawness that followed him home from Battle City had seized priority. Now that he couldn't very well run back to Yugi's and announce he was feeling much better for reasons he didn't want to disclose, he supposed he might as well get a start on dealing with the guilt.

Guilt lived in his flat's spare room, in foam-lined cases.

He had meant to do something about it sooner, he reminded himself as he weaved between his work table and his elaborate game board. Bakura always meant to do things; it wasn't his fault the Ring liked to break his promises.

Setting his jaw, he picked up one of the larger boxes and staggered with it over to his work table. It was best to prepare everything now, he told himself, so that he couldn't back down later. He held his breath as he parted the cardboard flaps and confirmed that he'd got the right box.

"What's all this about?" asked the voice in his head.

He felt a curious flush of triumph, mingled with relief; the spirit had broken first and after scarcely an hour. After what he hoped came across as a meaningful pause, he replied, "I'm putting them back."

The spirit snorted. "Don't be daft, host. You don't know the first thing about moving souls."

"If I can't figure it out, I'll—I'll ask Yugi. Either way, they're all going back."

A patch of pale, shifting color interfered with his peripheral vision. When Bakura opened the topmost metal case in the box, revealing two rows of figurines set in foam lining, the spirit's hand splayed over them. "So ungrateful," the spirit murmured. "I gave you what you wanted."

"I wanted friends." He didn't add that he felt sick whenever he couldn't remember all of their names, nor that he had a recurring nightmare in which the Ring arrived a few years earlier and somehow intercepted the souls of his mother and sister. The worst part of the latter was waking up in a haze of nearly equal parts horror and longing.

As he set the case carefully on the table, the spirit tutted at him. "If Pegasus hadn't had such miserable timing, we'd have both got what we wanted months ago."

Bakura dug his nails into his palms. The spirit's original scheme, conveyed with cruel glee, had involved treating certain of his new classmates as it had just professed to treating the old. Denying him his flesh but not his consciousness, it had made him a captive audience for its improvisational planning process when Duelist Kingdom threw a spanner in its works. By the time the ship docked, he had given up protesting; all it ever got him were blackouts. He couldn't credit courage for telling Yugi to attack him on the battlefield.

In an effort to work the twist out of his stomach, he opened the next case, from which the face of his former gym teacher stared up grimly at him. Though the spirit no longer deigned to manifest, he could feel its smirk tugging at the sides of his mind: "You can't tell me you didn't want that one."

Refusing to take the bait, he picked up the next case of indwelt figurines and wished that their warmth were a figment of his imagination. Bad enough, he thought, that their eyes were detailed far more finely than he could ever hope to manage with a brush and a magnifying lens.

He had never wanted any of it; perhaps all he had to do was convince the Ring of as much. Once he had arranged and opened all the cases, he waved the Ring over them, thinking ungrateful thoughts, then tried flicking the pointers at the figurines. He suspected his time would have been more productively spent asking the tide not to come in.

When he turned, sighing, to make sure he hadn't missed anything in the box, the spirit appeared in the corner of his vision. Bakura frowned as it postured in front of the little prisons it had created, its head cocked and its copy of the Ring glittering around its neck. It ran an intangible finger through one of the cases.

"If you really don't like your presents, host," it drawled, "you need only say so. I could easily return them."

He stubbed his finger on a chunk of terrain. After a calming breath, he replied, "No." Politeness tacked on a perfunctory "thank you." Removing his hand from the box, he added, "I'd rather ask Yugi."

"No, you wouldn't."

He wanted to protest, but just as every blackout had made it harder to imagine sharing his fears with his father, every vivid-eyed miniature represented another question that Bakura didn't want to answer. The worst part would be explaining the lack of dust on even the older figurines.

"And you do realize that it isn't Yugi you'd be asking."

He stilled.

"It wouldn't take but a moment," the spirit continued nonchalantly, "but it perhaps you'd rather drag the pharaoh into our affairs."

The other option was to dig a hole and bury the lot of them, but Bakura hurried that thought away before he could be accused of entertaining it. The unused shame attached itself to his fear of a spirit that was, in point of fact, at his mercy.

"You'd better not try anything funny," he said, and failed to sound authoritative. The spirit's eyes gleamed as its projection winked out.

An awkward moment later, he realized that he had no idea how to cede control. The spirit cut off his halting questions: "Your soul room, host."

"Oh," he said, unenlightened. He closed his eyes and fidgeted.

Every other time he had visited his soul room, the spirit had put him there. He could remember his first exploration of it, how he puzzled over his mind's disjointed symbolism as the Ring's disembodied voice prattled around him. He recalled the second-hand sensations of the outside world, the sharpness of immediate reality when the spirit granted him a moment of control, and a pale door, left slightly ajar, which he was forbidden to touch on pain of unconsciousness...

Bakura focused on the image of the door. Something inside him trembled and detached, as if he were nodding off, and suddenly plush carpet filled the space beneath his palms. "There," he said, sliding his eyes open, "now, you promised―"

The door slammed shut. A demand for unconsciousness hit the back of his head like a brick, but to his surprise he remained awake.

The blank wall of his soul room rippled and shimmered. A moment later it melted into a window, as it had done when the spirit used to leave him conscious during its takeovers. Through it he watched his stolen fingers curl around the Ring and heard his darkened voice split the air with laughter.

"How dare you!" he shouted. The walls swallowed the echoes. "You promised!"

Shoving aside the question of what else he should have expected, he closed his eyes and focused again on the idea of his soul room door. When that didn't work, he envisioned the spirit hurled bodily through it. The image was cathartic but otherwise unhelpful.

Gritting his teeth, he threw himself at the door, expecting to batter it ineffectually with his fists, and yelped in shock when it swung open. Arms whirling, he managed to catch hold of the jamb as his legs tried to spill him out into a black void beyond.

This was new.

As his vision adjusted, Bakura saw that what lay beyond his door was not a void but a dark hallway. A little light fell on the floor immediately outside, just enough to discern the junction of the walls and to determine that the passage was narrow and curved. If he concentrated, he could make out the impression of a gap in the wall on the right.

He probed with his foot and found the floor solid. The hand he sent to investigate the wall reported cold stone. Without giving himself time to second-guess, he pushed off into the hall and ran for the gap.

A flash of light later, he felt the Ring in his hands, breathed in the scent of the boxes, and trembled from a dizzying fusion of relief and rage.

Inside his head, the spirit made an irritated noise. "Paranoid, aren't we? How do you expect me to release those souls if I'm not in control?"

Bakura bristled. "You tried to knock me out! I felt it!"

"Only to keep you quiet. I can't bloody concentrate with your blathering."

"You're lying." To his chagrin, he sounded all of four years old. "I can't believe I trusted you."

The spirit faded into visibility in front of him, its shirt askew and its hair wild, as if it had been subjected to a vigorous psychic shaking. Its eyes glittered as its tongue flicked over its lips. "Well, if that's how you feel," it asked with a hiss, "what are you going to do about it?"

Bakura strode across the room and opened the window.

The spirit's manifestation tensed, not with terror or rage but with a palpable curiosity, as if this were the most interesting thing he had done all day.

Biting his lip, he fumbled with the knot on the Ring's cord and tried not to think about why he didn't just pull the thing off over his head. He tried even harder not to think about how he'd felt until just a few hours ago, how the gnawing emptiness had lingered long after he gorged himself in the blimp's kitchen. A week after Battle City ended, he had stopped pretending that ridding himself of the spirit was anything like excising a tumor.

He wondered if cancer patients ever suffered from separation anxiety, if the terror of loss could be worse than that of metastasis. It occurred to him that he probably wasn't sane.

He released the cord, letting the Ring fall back against his chest, and closed the window. "Don't ever do that again."

The spirit laughed, long and loud and all along the chromatic scale, before falling silent. When it showed no signs of speaking again, Bakura wandered into the kitchen for another brownie and a cup of tea, which he took along with his herbal supplement. His ceiling squeaked as the tenants above him lumbered their way towards bed.

An hour later, having drunk as much tea as he usefully could, Bakura tried to do the same.

As he lay on his back, failing to sleep, his shifting drew muted chimes from the Ring beside him on the pillow. The spirit appeared at the edge of his vision, wearing his green tartan pajamas and looking somewhat more ghostly than usual in the faint light seeping through the curtains. It crouched at his bedside.

He gave it a wary look. "What do you want?"

"The rest of the Millennium Items, and the pharaoh screaming for mercy as I eviscerate him with my teeth."

"That's completely horrible. And those are my teeth."

Light pollution glowed through the spirit's grin. "Were you asking in general, or just at the moment?"

With a long sigh, Bakura pushed the Ring aside to the mattress and buried his head under his pillow. "I'm sorry I asked at all."

When he heard the spirit's voice again, it was so near his ear that he was disturbed not to feel breath. "You know," it crooned, "that I have never meant you harm." Perhaps it had forgotten threatening him earlier in the day. "Sleep tight, host. I'll prey on your nightmares."

Sleep came loose and fitful, and only after he was too knackered to entertain the dread that the spirit might attempt a lullaby.

[Sunday]

He floated into wakefulness as sunlight saturated his curtains. Yawning, Bakura debated having a lie-in, ruled that the negative side had no arguments worth considering, and brought his knuckles up to rub the crust from his eyes.

When his eyelids parted, he found the spirit perched on the foot of his bed, staring at him.

"Blimey!" He bolted upright, yanking his blankets through the spirit's legs and briefly choking himself as the Ring's cord caught on the edge of the pillow. The spirit didn't stir.

As his heart rate fluttered back to its baseline, Bakura tilted into a better sitting position and released his death-grip on the sheets. He tugged his right sleeve until his pajamas sat less askew on his shoulders.

He blinked at the spirit. It did not blink back. In his Sunday-morning stupor, he found that it put him in mind of a disaffected goldfish.

After waiting a moment to see if the spirit intended to explain itself, he swung his legs over the edge of the bed and set about his morning routine. To his relief, the spirit's manifestation appeared not to follow. It was one thing to have peripheral awareness of another consciousness in his head, and quite another to have that consciousness leer at him in the loo.

For his sanity's sake, he relieved himself with his eyes shut.

As he washed his hands, a vague sense of unease made him glance up at the mirror. A moment's study revealed that his reflection had a visual echo that moved slightly out of sync, and his features in the glass were sharp-shadowed and hard.

"Are you―" Bakura couldn't find a sane way to phrase it― "in the mirror?"

He raised a hand to investigate the glass and found that his fingers intersected those of his echo. With a little shudder, he jerked back and wiped the affected skin against his pajama bottoms.

"Right, then, I suppose you're just in front of the mirror. Why?"

There was no response. If he squinted, Bakura could just discern his reflection behind the spirit, which was still giving him the dischuffed goldfish look.

Abandoning any hope of a rational morning, he gave his hands another wash and headed for the kitchen. The spirit chose this time to manifest atop the worktop beside the oven, its legs dangling over the edge and the toaster gleaming through its midsection. He marched past it to the fridge and got out the eggs, milk, and butter.

As he rooted through the cabinet for a frying pan, the skin of his nape crawled. He whirled round and found the spirit so close behind him that his hair whipped through it.

This time he managed not to jump. As he backed away from the spirit's face, he hit upon an explanation.

"I say, are you bored?" The last word came out more incredulously than he'd intended; what surprised him wasn't that the spirit was bored per se, but that it was sulking. In Bakura's experience, its moods spanned a narrow range and never strayed far from "maniacal." Of course, in his experience, the spirit had always fended off ennui by going for joyrides in his body.

The spirit still wasn't answering him, but he thought it looked ever so slightly more expectant.

He sighed and set down the pan. Although he didn't feel particularly sympathetic―the slam of his soul room's door still rang in his ears―he didn't fancy being stared at all day. "Come on," he said, heading into the living room. He didn't bother to check whether the spirit followed. "I'll put a video on."

Years of frequent moves had pared down his collection. After a quick rummage through the cabinet, Bakura fed the tape labeled Pyramids of Mars into the video, turned on the television, and went back to the kitchen. He noted with approval that the spirit was, at least, no longer on the worktop.

As long as he was able to cook in peace, he intended to cook well. Out of habit and lingering worry he had bought few perishables during his last shopping trip, but he still had sliced ham, half an onion, and a package of processed cheese to work with. His finished omelette comprised more filling than egg.

From the living room carried the familiar strains of the Doctor Who theme. Bakura took his breakfast with him and found the spirit manifested in a translucent sprawl over the sofa, resentfully watching the television. He opted to sit on the floor rather than through its legs.

"You ought to like this," he said, slicing his omelette. "It's got a high body count."

The spirit glared at him with naked loathing, then turned the same expression on Tom Baker.

And it had been in such malicious good humor the night before. If Bakura was doomed to spend the rest of his life playing host to an evil spirit, he didn't see why it had to be an evil spirit with mood swings. "Please yourself," he said before tucking into his breakfast.

He paused mid-chew when the hairs rose on back of his neck. A sidelong glance confirmed that the spirit had returned its contemptuous stare to Bakura.

After swallowing, he pointed his fork at the screen and said, "See, the mummies are robots."

In icicle tones, the spirit asked, "How the hell are you doing this?"

"I've got a PAL converter."

The spirit growled and vanished. A moment later he felt it thump into his psyche again with all the efficacy of a pebble against plexiglass.

He sighed and leaned over to hit the pause button. "Give over, will you? You're going to give us both a headache."

In reply the spirit battered like rain against the window of his mind and demonstrated an almost poetic mastery of offensive words. When it showed no signs of giving up, he resumed the video and returned to his omelette. He made a mental note to buy tomatoes.

"Are you going to be much longer at this?" he asked. "I don't want to miss the mummy getting caught in the badger trap."

The thumping ended in a furious howl as the spirit reappeared wild-eyed and wilder-haired between Bakura and the television, overlaying the images with green tartan. He frowned and squinted through it. "Even in your sleep!" the spirit snarled, jabbing its finger at his forehead. "You idiot mortal container, you shouldn't be able to maintain a barrier when you're unconscious!"

The fork clattered against the plate on its way to the floor. Multiple sentences raced to get out of Bakura's mouth first: "So that's―you were waiting for me to fall asleep so―I told you not to try that again!" A stray thought drifted over the collision. "I say, did you just call me a container?"

It called him worse.

Until yesterday afternoon, Bakura would have found it impossible to imagine asserting authority over the spirit. Now he felt a bit embarrassed that he flinched as it continued to rage at him, twisting its borrowed features almost past the point of resemblance. He was reminded of a wasp that his sister had once caught in a jar, the primary difference being that the wasp had come to accept the futility of attacking the glass.

With a sigh, he left his plate on the coffee table and stood, holding the Ring by the place where the cord looped through it. The spirit cut itself off mid-sentence to demand, "Now what are you doing?"

"Shutting you up, I hope." He shook the Ring vigorously in the spirit's direction and accomplished nothing but hitting his own knuckles with the pointers. Experimentally, he swept the Ring through the space that the spirit did not quite occupy. It watched with narrow-eyed scorn.

When Bakura progressed to flicking the pointers one by one with his forefinger, the spirit made an exasperated noise and flopped down on a rough approximation of the coffee table. The yellow of the omelette seeped through its thigh. "You couldn't even if you knew how," it said sourly, propping its chin on its fist. "You great cosmic accident."

At least it seemed to be on its way back to sulking now, though the insults were not appreciated. Bakura huffed. "I most certainly could. I found my way out of a cave with this thing, I'll have you know."

"Did you," the spirit replied, eschewing the question mark.

"I did! I wanted to do something useful―" Bakura cut himself off when he realized how pathetic he sounded. "That is, I wanted to know the way out, so I held the Ring and thought about it. Well, more than 'thought,' really; I suppose it was a bit like wishing, but also a bit like expecting..." He trailed off, running his finger around the Ring's edge. "I've been missing a sock."

To his delight, one of the pointers stiffened and began to glow. A tingle ran up his arm, coaxing him towards the hallway.

With a murmured "Well, I'll be thrice-damned," the spirit vanished back into his mind, where he felt it settle in like a cinema patron. Bakura followed the tugging triumphantly into his bathroom. The moment he crossed the threshold, all five pointers rose like accusing fingers against the medicine cabinet.

"How do you suppose it got in here?" he mused as he opened the door. The Ring directed him behind the first-aid kit to the bottle of mouthwash that he consistently forgot to use. Withdrawing it from the shadows sent something round and heavy rolling along its bottom.

Bakura frowned and tipped the bottle until enough green liquid slid off the object to let it gleam gold, and even then it took him several seconds to cobble his thoughts together. He managed not to yelp. "Why is Pegasus's eye in my mouthwash?"

The spirit manifested on the opposite side of the bottle, the contents tinting and refracting its expression. "You'd stopped using the stuff."

"You know very well that isn't what I meant! Why is it here at all?"

"You might have noticed that it isn't in your face." The spirit affected a tone so long-suffering that Bakura, to his own chagrin, came within a syllable of apologizing. It flashed him a distorted green smirk before vanishing.

There had been blood on his sleeves after Duelist Kingdom, he remembered, but he had long ago fallen into the habit of blaming his own clumsiness for mysterious scrapes and stains. It was easier to focus on cleaning up and moving on.

For a guilty moment he pretended to consider alerting the police. It wasn't as if there was any good in returning the Eye to Pegasus, who, as far as Bakura could remember, wasn't much less evil than the spirit in the Ring. Perhaps he could rinse away the odor of antiseptic mint and make an anonymous donation to Yugi's collection, but then Yugi would go to put it away in the shoebox...

Bakura returned the mouthwash to the medicine cabinet and firmly shut the door.

As the latch caught, a patch of white appeared in the corner of his eye. The spirit cast no reflection as it looped an intangible arm over his shoulder and splayed its hand over the Ring, which stirred slightly against his chest. "It seeks the other Items," said the spirit, having apparently abandoned frothing rage for creepy pedagogy. "It hungers for reunion. To set it on a different scent requires a level of finesse that you lack. Wouldn't you like to learn?"

Reflection or no, he knew that it was grinning. "I've got plenty of other socks," he decided, turning to leave. The spirit drifted backwards ahead of him, fixing him with a look of discomfiting interest that did not waver when he retrieved the cold remains of his omelette from the coffee table and exchanged them for a brownie.

"Aren't you curious?" the spirit asked, insinuating itself between Bakura and the rest of the kitchen. "You could wield powers that made the gods themselves tremble."

He walked through it into the living room, fighting the impulse to shiver at the total lack of sensation. Even ghosts were meant to impart a chill.

"Poor, pathetic host," it whispered into his ear as he claimed a seat on the sofa. "Always so terrified of getting what you want."

The brownie met a mangled end in his fist. "Listen, I'm not stupid! I know you're only trying to take over again so you can hurt my friends, and I won't let you!"

The spirit vanished with a snort and spoke inside Bakura's head: "Surely you don't think I've spent the past five thousand years plotting the demise of your most recent acquaintances."

"Friends," he said sharply. He tore off nearly half the brownie with his teeth and chewed with therapeutic fervor.

"Friends," the spirit mimicked, poisoning the phonemes. It laughed low in its throat. "Then why are you spending the weekend alone?"

He had spent the first weekend after Battle City huddled on the sofa, eating handfuls of cereal straight from the box and jumping at every sound that managed to penetrate the fog produced by his painkillers. Two days ago, when Yugi had caught up with him after school and invited him to drop by the game shop on Saturday, Bakura hadn't even cared whether he was an afterthought.

As a response, "Mrph-mmph" got the sentiment across well enough, but he swallowed in order to add detail. "I told them I was ill."

"And they've been ringing you every hour since to inquire after your health."

"Stop it! They're my friends! It's that they're busy now, and I'd hate to be a bother―" He shoved the rest of the brownie into his mouth before anything unfortunate could escape.

The spirit tutted. "They fear me, but for you they feel nothing but pity, which is even now turning to resentment. You've seen the relief in their eyes when you leave them."

Unable to enunciate around the brownie, Bakura thought at it with what he hoped was conversation-killing force, I'm not listening to you.

A smug laugh echoed inside his skull, but as the sound faded, so did the spirit's presence. It occurred to him that the quiet throbbing in his arm had also faded; he wasn't certain he'd felt it at all since waking. When he rolled up his sleeve, he found the wound a paler red than it had been the day before, and poking it produced only mild discomfort.

It also occurred to him that the video was still playing, now well past the scene with the badger trap. Annoyed, he rewound to the beginning, turned up the volume, and went off in search of his rucksack.

A few minutes later Bakura had settled in on the sofa, still in his pajamas, with his homework arrayed before him on the coffee table. The noise of the television drowned out the silence of the telephone and excused his inability to factor polynomials.

When a bit of white popped into his peripheral vision, he ignored it until it said, "'X' is fourteen."

Frowning, he checked the proposed solution in the margin. "Not unless sixty-eight is suddenly the same as negative three."

"You're rubbish at this," said the spirit.

"I wouldn't be if you let me go to school more often." Despite his inability to make any headway on his homework, he felt his mood rise like a soap bubble. "And I am going to school tomorrow. I'm going to attend all of my classes and take notes and revise as much as I please and earn top marks on all of my exams."

With an exasperated growl, the spirit returned to its skulking-place in the basement of his consciousness. Bakura returned cheerfully to his maths homework, which made no sense but did so with reassuring constancy. On the screen, the mummy extricated itself from the badger trap.

He had progressed to catching up on early American history when the spirit manifested on the other end of the sofa and glowered at the television. Colonies blurred together as he found himself more interested in Sutekh than Saratoga. Deciding that he deserved a break, he marked his place in the book before giving his full attention to the last part of the serial.

When the Doctor emerged triumphant, the spirit crossed its arms and narrowed its eyes. "Host, was this meant to be a cautionary tale?"

"I doubt it, unless you spent time possessing the writers." It stared at Bakura as if he were unfathomably stupid. "Oh, why I picked it, you mean. No, it's just always been one of my favorites. Robot mummies, pyramid traps, Sarah Jane with a rifle―really a classic." He got up to rewind the tape and pick another from the cabinet. "Here, then, let's try City of Death."

In short order the spirit began to regale him with its thoughts on Scaroth, which were more interesting than what the Yanks had got up to during the Napoleonic Wars. Bakura gave up trying to revise and made popcorn. When he returned from the kitchen, the spirit demanded to be given control so that it could participate in the snacking, but it took his denial in stride and returned to its villainous peer review. He introduced it to the Daleks next.

By evening the spirit had taken to calling him an anorak, so they moved on to horror films.