Okay, here I am with another Ryou and Bakura fics. It's non-yaoi, and is basically about Ryou remebering Bakura. No flames please! This is for journey maker, thanks for reviewing all of my stories, it really boosts my confidence!

Don't own. Never will.

Once upon a fairytale…

Once upon a time….. that's how all good fairytales start, isn't it? You're immediately transported to a magical place, and you know that the story promises to be filled with romance and adventure.

The characters in those stories are always straightforward; the good guys are always perfect, good-looking and kind, and the bad guys are always ugly and completely evil.

There is no in-between. You can't have an evil character that's also good deep down.

It's just not done.

They believe that. Yugi and his friends, I mean. They can't seem to accept that… he…. was a good person. He was a trustworthy friend. But they all live in their own little fairytales, so they don't know that.

Some people seem to think that my life is a fairytale as well. I get excellent grades at school, the girls all love me, I'm friends with Yugi Motou; the King of Games.

Those people don't have a clue.

My life is a living hell. My mother and sister are dead, my father doesn't care. He's always off on some archaeological dig. He sends me presents, as guilty excuses. But I know the truth, his love for his family died with my mother.

I don't have any real friends- Yugi, Joey and the rest of them say that they'll always be here for me, but that's not true. They never were. They didn't see when I was suffering. So much for the whole 'best friends forever' speech that Téa's so fond of.

Not much of a fairytale, huh?

And then it all changed. He came.

I didn't always know that he was there, but I suspected that something was wrong with me. I could hear voices in my head. I was scared. I didn't want to be seen as a lunatic. So I kept quiet about it. But the voices kept getting louder and louder, until they merged into one, a spirit, a person, a yami. And I realized that all my friends falling into comas weren't just coincidences. It was me.

I was locked in my own mind for days at a time, and then he would give me control again, just for a little bit. But I didn't know what I had done- the terrible things that he had done under my name. I was a puppet, a vessel.

But gradually I learned that he wasn't as bad as he first appeared. He had feelings. We talked, and I learnt about the horrific events of his past. Slowly, slowly we became friends.

It wasn't exactly a lovey-dovey relationship, it was more that he cared for me like a big brother would, but he never showed it. I just knew, from the way he protected me. He wasn't an affectionate person, but that didn't matter. For the first time in my shattered life, I had a real friend, a brother even. My life was rebuilding itself. I was entering my own little fairytale at last.

But in real life that doesn't happen. At least, not in my life.

They took him away from me. Yami, his hikari and their friends. They couldn't even be bothered to tell me what had happened to him afterwards. They just assumed that I would be pleased that my violent yami was gone.

I managed to get the whole story out of Yugi eventually, but he told me a biased view. Bakura was evil, end of story. It was the end of my story, anyway.

Fairytales always end with the good characters alive, happy and successful, and the bad ones dead. But there isn't room for me in there.

And they all lived happily ever after….. apart from the gaunt, lonely figure in the background that no-one notices, and that no-one cares about.

The forgotten one.

That's me.

My fairytale life. The strange fairytale, that the little children didn't like, and their fathers put the book at the back of the bookshelf. Because my fairytale didn't end up 'happily ever after'. I was doomed to be abandoned from Chapter 1.

There you go. Please review! Also could any kind reviewer please tell me which one is the good one out of Marik and Malik? I'm watching a subbed series that uses the dubbed version's names, so if someone would clear this up for me, I'd be really grateful!