Light split the darkness of a white room.

Quietly, under the whispers of evil words and malevolent promises to the dark, blood spilled. This was a glorious rebirth in the night, heart throbbing, gasping with the breath of life restored anew.

The shadowmage slipped out into the night as his victim let out a scream.

The train slowed and the crowd surged like an incoming tide, jostling Bakura Kurokawa bodily in the small bit of space he'd claimed as his own. He snarled at a person whose hand roamed somewhere it shouldn't have been. A different hand on his shoulder steadied him and steered him through the sliding double doors before they could close behind him.

"Come on. Your aunt's waiting for us."

The voice was crisp and sharp, like the suit his uncle was wearing. But, also like the suit, it was worn out and a bit haggard. The man's face was drawn with age lines and his black hair seemed to grey even as Bakura watched.

Bakura narrowed his eyes, but didn't raise a fuss. The sea of people pressed tightly around him. A thousand expressionless faces going a thousand different directions, with no more regard for him than he for them.

He didn't bother to struggle against them; instead, he elected to let himself be pulled along, tracking the back of his uncle's head, maintaining a set distance as they emerged into the abnormally abysmal, grey August morning.

His aunt was already at the house when they arrived.

"It's finally time," she said with that damned overeager smile, turning a key over in her hands.

Bakura leaned against a street lamp, scowling at the dismal sky. Brewing clouds threatened rain in soft, rumbling tones above their heads. It wasn't the that rain bothered him all too much. He'd grown up just outside London. Rain was second nature.

It was this 'family bonding' thing that was new.

He'd only been in Domino, Japan for three weeks, and he was already sick of it. He'd been doing just fine on his own. The only reason he was here at all was because of a small mistake, an oversight. The plan had been perfect otherwise.

But it was too late to dwell on should-haves and could-haves now. Things could have been worse than getting shipped halfway across the world to live with an aunt and uncle he'd only met twice before. Much worse, given the circumstances.

His only comfort was the knowledge that this situation was only until he turned 18. The age of adulthood in Japan was 20, but at 18, he could return to England and do whatever the hell he wanted. If he kept up his grades, his aunt and uncle would even pay to send him back. One more year.

And at least they were finally moving into something larger. How they'd gotten this, though…

In this area, these weren't just cheap apartments. The houses over here were lovely. The one they stood before now was, perhaps, a bit older and less-maintained than the rest, but it was still leaps and bounds better than the old one-bedroom unit that his aunt and uncle were living in before.

Bakura closed his eyes, waiting. Waiting for his aunt to finish her moment, waiting for the first few raindrops to spill from overbearing clouds and spatter onto his face, waiting for his 18th birthday so he could leave this country forever.

When the "Come on, Bakura," finally came, that was when he finally opened his eyes again, following his relatives at a distance into the new residence, their shoes exchanged for slippers near the door.

He tuned out the self-congratulatory cheers of 'to our new home'. The western-style rooms felt normal to Bakura, but to his aunt and uncle, they were a refreshing change of pace from the traditional style apartment from before.

He cast his critical eye over the interior, the furnishings that came with the house, the woodwork and the paint on the walls, trying and failing to find some real fault with it. Something about this house seemed too good to be true.

His relatives listed amenities that came with the house, the positives of the location, probably the same tired spiel that the realtor gave them: proximity to the station, a quality high school not far away, walking distance from anything they might need. Bakura tuned her out.

They'd been swindled. They had to have been. His aunt and uncle weren't poor, but they weren't particularly wealthy, either. There was no way they could afford this without there being something terribly wrong with it.

He made his way through the house, looking through the kitchen first, then making his way through each of the other rooms. He tugged at doors, testing the hinges. Tapped on walls. Pressed his ear to various surfaces to check the propagation of sound. He jumped on the stairs, which only creaked a little in the middles at odd intervals. The edges were solid and silent. The railing was firm. The construction on the house was solid.

Nothing flimsy or cheaply thrown together. He leaned against the window in one of the rooms, peering out at the street. Something had to be wrong with this place. Things that seemed too good to be true usually were. That was how life had always been, and how it always would be. He left the room to track down his aunt and uncle.

"So, what's wrong with this place?" he asked them, leaning over the sturdy railing.

"What was that Bakura…?" Aunt Aiko asked.

"This place. How is it this cheap? Everything about it is perfect. There's gotta be something wrong with it," Bakura said.

"There is nothing wrong with this house," she insisted.

Bakura nodded. "Right, right. Yes. Then why is it empty? Why hasn't it been snapped up by someone else before us? Did someone die here?" His eyes lit up. "Was there a murder?"

"Bakura!" his aunt snapped, looking properly horrified. "Nothing like that! The previous owners had to leave in a hurry on urgent business in America, and needed to get this house sold as quickly as possible. If we didn't sign right away, it would have been sold to someone else."

Classic marketing trick to prey on the gullible. It seemed like an obvious ploy to him, but maybe it was so plainly obvious that his aunt and uncle had somehow fallen for it. Too late now. Bakura would find out what happened eventually.

"So… I get a room this time, right?" he asked. His uncle smiled at him and stood up, taking the stairs one at a time with the snail's pace of someone with an arthritic knee. His aunt trailed behind.

They walked into the last room Bakura had visited. "How's this for a room?" his uncle asked, smiling. "Better than a futon in the living room, right?"

That it was. A real, honest to god bed, the likes of which Bakura hadn't slept on in years. Even the last few weeks had been spent on a pull out sofa purchased on the cheap from a second-hand shop so that Bakura would have somewhere to sleep.

This room was… well… not entirely unlike the room he'd had when he was young. A bed, although the coverlet was plain white. A desk. A chair. A dresser. Basic things.

It felt obscenely wealthy.

He let both of his backpacks slip gently onto the floor and trailed his fingers over the desk. All of this space was his. Silly, when one thought about it. All of this storage for someone whose entire life fit inside of two backpacks.

Above him, something caught his eye. When he looked up, he noticed a small handle set into the ceiling. He blinked. "What is that?"

"Looks like an attic," his uncle said, frowning at the handle. "Strange. The floorplan didn't mention one…"

"Really? I want to see," Bakura said.

His aunt crossed her arms and shook her head. "We can check it out later. How about we go get some dinner? We can get some noodles from that shop you liked the night you arrived."

Bakura considered the offer for a moment and nodded. "Fine." The redirection was obvious, but the noodle restaurant she referred to was one of the few things Bakura could stomach when he first arrived in Domino.

He cast one last look up at the ceiling before following his aunt and uncle out of the house. And though he made plans to explore it as soon as he returned home, the thought of it slipped from his mind by the time they returned, much later that night.

They'd celebrated the new house with dinner, followed by dessert, followed by a trip to a store where they splurged even further, going so far as to buy a few things for Bakura's new room to personalize it a bit.

It was far from Bakura's mind as he replaced the plain coverlet with one that was deep grey, nearly black, and spread a poster on his wall for a show which he'd started watching since he'd arrived in the country and had decided he rather liked. It wasn't much, but the act was foreign and surprisingly welcoming.

Well. This was still the wrong country. He was still forced to live with his relatives instead of on his own, which he would have preferred. And yes, all of his schooling would be done in Japanese instead of English. But… he did have a bed. So that was new.

He turned his lights off late that night, settling into the covers. The mattress was almost too soft, but he managed to fall into something almost resembling sleep after some time. Hours twisted in nauseating lurches and lulls. The uneasy passage of time had him tossing and turning restlessly, on the brink of wakefulness.

About three AM, a touch of ice over his forehead jolted him fully awake. He stayed perfectly still for a long time, eyes tracking slowly over the room.

For four years, he'd lived by these finely honed senses. They were all that stood between safety and losing every last little thing he'd managed to accrue over his lifetime. He had trusted his life to these senses.

But there was nothing there.

He narrowed his eyes in the gloom of light coming through his window. When he pulled back the covers, he felt a slight chill, more than there should have been. But he still saw nothing but the foreign room.

"It's just nerves. Strange room, strange house, strange country," Bakura muttered. "Something's just wrong somewhere." He stood, searching the empty drawers of the dresser, the desk, even looking under the bed for things unknown that could be causing the nerves.

At one point, he thought he heard a scratching noise, but even that seemed like his imagination. And even it it wasn't, rats and mice were the obvious, simple culprits.

He peered out the curtains, looking out over the desolate street. The moon looked like it might have been full, but wasn't really. Spatterings of stars above cast down their faint glow. He pursed his lips. Just as he suspected. There was nothing.

He slipped out of the room, easing himself silently down the stairs and dodging the creaky spots he'd made note of earlier in the day. The rest of the house was equally empty, save for the snores emanating from the other occupied room. He drank a glass of water, voided his bladder, and returned to his room, grumbling quietly.

He was being ridiculous.

He shut the door behind him, scowling at the floor and stalking over to his bed. Then he froze.

His head very slowly turned.

But there was nothing there. "Fuck," he growled. Something about this was all wrong. Feeling things that weren't there, seeing faces in the shadows where there was nothing.

He shook himself and went back to bed, grumbling and grousing silently to himself as he pulled the covers over himself. But he didn't get back to sleep that entire night. He tossed and turned, but there was no reprieve.

He rose with heavy eyes and a feeling like death that lingered in the back of his mind all day. More hours than Bakura cared to mention were spent shopping for school supplies, all of them for classes that would resume the following day, when the summer break concluded.

The stores were overcrowded, the trains busy as ever, and the long hours of the adventure exhausted him. He wanted to crawl back into bed. He wanted to go back to England.

They bought more than Bakura thought he'd need, doubling the amount of material things in his possession, and didn't get back until much later that day. He lagged behind, lugging the large bags by himself, scowling fiercely at the ground.

"You just moved in, didn't you?"

He glanced to his left. There was an old woman getting into a car, grey hair pulled into a messy bun, face carved deeply with wrinkles. She paused at the car door, frowning.

"Yeah. What about it?" he managed, trying not to drop the bags.

"You shouldn't have done that. That house is cursed."

Bakura eased the bags onto the ground. "Define 'cursed'," he said, crossing his arms. This all had the surreal feel of something out of a B-list horror movie. Luckily, those were the best kind.

"Darkness. Cold. There is death in that house."

"Death…" Bakura mused, smiling. "So someone really did die here."

"Don't smile like that, boy. You can't even begin to understand the gravity of what you've done by moving into that house. What dark forces will begin to act on you and your family. You'd be wise to move out now, before something happens."

"So that was why it was so cheap," Bakura said. Superstitious idiots.

"Tell your family. You must leave this place."

Bakura hummed and continued to smile as he gathered his bags. "I'll let them know, but, well, we only just moved in. I think they'll want to take their chances."

"You're making a mistake if you do," the old woman said, shaking her cane melodramatically at him. Bakura fought the urge to cackle at her. This really was a B-movie!

He walked through the door his aunt had left open. "What took you so long, Bakura?" his aunt asked him.

Bakura grinned at her. "Just chatting with our neighbors is all."

She smiled. "Lovely. I'm glad you're adjusting so well."

Bakura lugged the bags up the stairs and dropped them tiredly into his room. He stared at his bed for a long minute, mulling over the idea of a nap to ease the exhaustion, the lethargy.

But, as soon as he laid down in the bed, he felt the icy touch against his skin once more, sending shivers rocketing down his spine. Something white wavered above him. He blinked, rubbing at his eyes, but the glimmer was gone as quickly as it had come.

He laughed at himself. One mention of a curse and he was imagining ghosties in his room.

He rolled over and settled into a fitful sleep.

In his dreams, he smelled fire. Smoke, yes, but also the scent of wood and steel and flesh burning. Tongues of flame tasted the night sky. He felt blood splashing against his skin. A handle twisted in his fingers.

He snapped awake in cold sweat, breath heaving, clutching at his chest in a panic.

It had been a year since he'd last had a nightmare like that one. He thought they were gone.

"Stupid house," he growled, kicking the covers off and stalking off to the bathroom. Fucking strange house and fucking ghost story stirring up his overactive imagination and dredging up things best left forgotten.

He took a long shower, washing away the memory of the dream, and came back to the room, toweling off his hair.

That was when he heard the scratching again. The rats, or whatever they were.

It was faint. Not noticeable unless you were listening for it, but Bakura's senses were honed sharp as knives. He pulled on a pair of boxers and let the towel hang on his shoulders as he settled into a slight crouch, eyes scanning the room.

"Now what?" he muttered.

He listened closely, trying to pinpoint the exact spot the sound came from. It was almost as though it came from above him. But as soon as the thought crossed his mind, it cut off.

An infestation in the attic? That would explain a lot.

He kept his body low, moving quietly to the middle of the room. The scratching began again for a few seconds before stopping once more. He reached up, struggling to grab the handle that led to the attic and eventually deciding it was too high. He pushed the nightstand towards the middle of the room and climbed atop it, using it as a stair step to reach the handle.

It came open with a dull creak, pulling down steep stairs, nearly like a ladder, attached to the square opening in the ceiling. Listening close for the scratching, he climbed up, finding himself in total darkness. He used his new cell phone's camera as a flashlight to illuminate the area, but the darkness hungrily consumed much of the beam.

Little was left to show where he stood. He managed to find a pull cord hanging from the ceiling, and a quick tug brought a single bare light bulb to life. He let the phone go dark, looking around.

It was almost empty up here. Freezing cold, too, for some reason, a fact that wasn't helped by his state of undress. Slanted ceilings were fitted with exposed rafters and a bit of uncovered insulation. A few boxes gathered dust in the corner. In the still, stale air, cobwebs and dust motes glittered in the dim light.

An unconscious shiver ran down his spine.

There was something horrible up here.

He wasn't sure how he knew. It wasn't a conclusion drawn through logic and reasoning. It was something that he knew instinctively, deep down in the reactionary, animal part of his subconscious. Something he couldn't put his finger on.

The hair on the back of his neck rose. A cold chill ran over the fingertips of his left hand, as though they'd brushed against ice. He clenched his hand into a fist, whirling to look, but there was nothing there. Still, he felt as though he was being watched…

His eyes traced slowly over the room, searching for whatever might have been hidden in the darkness, making that scratching noise. Rats, right? Or some other sort of vermin? He heard the scratching for a short burst, but it was gone before he could do more than pinpoint a general direction.

As he turned back around, something on the floor caught Bakura's eye. He crouched low, fingers trailing along the old wood. It seemed anacronic compared to the rest of the house, at odds with the modernism that seeped into every pore of the downstairs rooms. Older.

Scorch marks burned strange lines along the old wood, faint, occult symbols. His eyes narrowed. He'd seen symbols like this before somewhere, burned in the back of his mind so deeply that he wasn't sure if it was a dream or reality. Seeing them now evoked a hollow feeling within him, deeper than the penetrating cold of the room could reach.

"What is this…?" he muttered, standing back up. He turned in a slow circle, drawing up short at a faint silvery wisp that hovered near the source of the scratching sound. He took a step closer, slowly, silently, focusing all of his attention on the wisp. This thing… he swore this was the thing he saw in that waking instant.

Was this…? Could this be what the neighbor was referring to when she mentioned death?

As he leaned closer to look at it, it suddenly straightened up, revealing a form vaguely reminiscent of a humanoid, only doll-like, scaled down to a foot or so tall. Nothing could really be discerned that could be concretely defined as a feature of the wisp, but something about it seemed human in nature.

As Bakura's eyes followed it in puzzlement, it suddenly darted backwards and then forwards.

"You can see me?" it said in a breathy voice. The words didn't seem to reach the air. They resonated deep in the core of his being, evoking images of bubbles drifting aimlessly through space, windchimes stirring in a void. But there was no question. The words came from the silver wisp.

"What are you?" Bakura demanded. "Tell me!"

The wisp jerked and backed nearly all the way to the wall where it quivered in the darkness, shining with its own immaterial light. "Don't hurt me!" it cried. "Please, don't!"

Bakura recoiled in surprise. "What?"

"Please, I won't do anything to you! I don't mean any harm! Don't send me away!" it pleaded.

"Hey, don't freak out," Bakura said. "It's okay… I think…" He took a cautious step closer, peering down at the frightened thing. He'd never seen anything like it before. At least it seemed more afraid of him than he was of it.

Whatever it was, it was faintly translucent, corporeal enough to see. But not touch, Bakura amended, from the way it passed, unhindered, through a nearby crate. After a moment, it moved to hover a bit lower than eye level a few feet away from him, edging nearer with something that could only be described as hesitance.

Its lack of any discernible facial features made it difficult to be absolutely sure, but Bakura had seen skittish animals before. Not that this was any animal Bakura had ever seen before.

But the question remained: what was it?

"Hey, look, I- You're obviously sentient. Do you have a name?" he asked.

It seemed to look up at him, parting a denser bit of silver the way some people part long hair hanging in their face. "You aren't going to hurt me?" it asked.

He shrugged and shook his head, watching the silvery apparition drift up and down with undisguised fascination. "Not until you give me a reason, I suppose… So... a name. Do you have one?" he asked.

It considered the question for a moment and eventually responded with something that seemed to resemble a head shaking no. "I don't think so. At least, if I have one, I don't know it." It hovered a bit closer to him, coming slowly and then a bit faster. "But… you could give me one."

This threw Bakura for a loop. "What, me?"

It nodded. "You're the first person who's seen me in forever! Please, I want a name!"

"I can't say I'm qualified to-" Bakura began, only to be interrupted by repeated pleas of 'please' and 'just a first name is okay!'. "I don't think I-"

"Please please please," it begged, coming closer suddenly. Bakura stumbled backwards in surprise. "Please please!"

"I- well-" he glanced wildly around the room for inspiration, not entirely certain why he was humoring this mysterious apparition at all. "Uhh, no, not that… No, not that either," he muttered aloud, eyes landing on decomposing cardboard boxes, wooden crates, and the lightbulb above his head.

He paused at the lightbulb, then looked back at the glowing silver wisp.

"Uh… glow? Wisp? Light? No, wait, I know! How does Hikari sound?"

The wisp paused for a second and then circled rapidly around him, cheering gleefully. "Hikari, Hikari, Hikari!" it babbled, brushing up against him every now and again. When it did, he was struck by an icy sensation that came from the contact.

"But, uh, Hikari, if you don't mind me asking, what are you?" Bakura managed.

The wisp slowed and settled somewhere at eye level. "Me?" it said slowly, reluctantly. "Ahaha… well… I'm…"

"Yes?"

"I'm dead. I think."

Bakura grinned. "I fucking called it."

Bakura Kurokawa seems like an average high school student. But the discovery of dark magic in his attic will lead him down a path as black as the shadows, and awaken the gruesome past he's kept a secret for years.

Completely AU, of course, but it'll have plenty of nods to the source material. Bakura will likely continue to be this level of OOC teen!Bakura for another few chapters until he becomes the monster we all know and love.