Disclaimer: Yu-Gi-Oh

Disclaimer: Yu-Gi-Oh! does not belong to me, I make no profit by my arbitrary shows of fanservice.

A/N: A drabble about Ryou and his issues, of which there are doubtlessly many. This would be based after the end of the series, sometime after Bakura's "who the hell knows what really happened to him" defeat.

Absence

Ryou wonders if it's something in his blood, perhaps a disease of some sort. He fancies he can feel it, black and insidious, oozing through his life stream and tainting it further than it already has been. In these moments he experiences a swift and suffocating sort of anxiety, he begins to think he can see his skin crawling, feel it shifting into something else that isn't him. He panics in these moments, drags his nails over his wrists, his forearms, his neck and face and chest, until bloody lines gouge themselves into his pale skin, crisscrossing like sloppy patchwork, a raggedly stitched together doll of haphazard emotions and fears.

He is a mess of illogical human contradictions.

He hates so strongly that he makes himself sick with it and yet he loves unconditionally with a heart that seems to be constantly breaking.

He laughs and smiles one moment and yet he screams with pain, agony, misery in the same breath until unconsciousness overwhelms him.

He pretends he is happy and tells his friends, "I am alright, everything is fine, you don't need to worry" and with the same voice pitched just a little lower he says, "please stop, I can't keep dying this way, don't ever let me go."

He knows, to a degree, that this is killing him but it is not in a classical, clinical, modern, or remotely romantic sense. He is not thrusting the dagger in his own heart; he is not throwing himself to the savagery of starved lions. He is not letting his body tumble from a nameless cliff's edge and he not bringing that vial of bittersweet potion to his lips to carry him to an eternal slumber. No, this slow murder is somehow…more painful and it seems far more realistic than romantic notions of consummated suicides.

The poison in his blood burns cold and runs to the pit of his very soul, to the creature who lurks -- lurked? -- there, hateful and dangerously protective, his guardian angel of wrath and revenge and nauseating hate. It consumes him, whispering false hope and still seething with horrifying rage. He feels sick with it…

"Will you ever leave me?" he asks the mirror on nights that are quiet, when he fancies his blood is not quite so tainted, that he has not been left quite so ruined. "Will you ever set me free of this?"

And his reflection replies, "I already have, this is what loneliness feels like."

Ryou, in these moments, feels like dying because he knows too well that it is true and wonders, after evil has finally been vanquished, after the good has triumphed and he can say goodbye to possession and manipulation and fear, why everything in his life just seems a whole lot…worse.

Fin

Hate the ending but that seems to always be the way of it with me. Review please? It's always nice and helpful.