Ryou Bakura never had a problem with loneliness.

Mainly, that was due to the fact that he was never alone. Even after the death of his mother and sister, when his father started to be home less and less and he became more and more self-sufficient, he wasn't ever alone.

Ever since he received the ring there had been a voice, a voice no one else could hear, a voice inside his head.

The voice would accompany him through his day, talking away the silence that was around him. It would tell him stories, stories of blood and thievery and a kingdom long gone.

Other times, the voice would be quiet, and tell Ryou to tell stories instead, there was a feeling of ancient grief in his mind, and Ryou would talk, of what his mother and sister had been like, what his father did in Egypt, what games he liked to play and how tired he was of constantly moving around and thus not being able to keep any friends.

His stories were by no means as exciting as the voice's, but it didn't seem to mind, sometimes it sounded rather interested.

Ryou knew it was looking for someone, "Someone like me or rather, like you," and Ryou wondered if there were more people like him, people who heard the voice of a spirit that inhabited an ancient artifact.

The spirit had plans to be followed, once he found the one he was looking for, but Ryou never exactly knew what those plans entailed. He felt however, that the spirit was full of anger and longing for vengeance. Something terrible had happened to it, that much was obvious, but it never talked about it, and Ryou never asked.

Ryou never told anybody about the voice. He didn't even mention the ring, because the spirit forbade it. It had said, if Ryou would ever betray it, it would leave him and never come back.

And he believed it. The spirit wasn't one for empty threats. Once, Ryou got beaten up in school. That was the first time the spirit took him to his soulroom. At actually seeing the spirit, not just hearing it, Ryou even stopped crying. He was amazed at how much the spirit looked like him.

"It's because I am you. And you are me. We are one. And no one who harms us will go unpunished."

From then on, people who threatened Ryou, which he was afraid of or even people he simply didn't like, tended to vanish. He started losing time (awakening in places he didn't fall asleep in, or even in the middle of the day walking down a busy street) but only a little, nothing big, one or two hours once or twice a week.

They were still moving around a lot, and the incidents mostly went unnoticed. He knew it was the spirits doing, and that the punishment was hardly appropriate, but all in all it wasn't worth arguing about. It was a peaceful life and later Ryou would look back on those days as the happy times.

It was only when they moved to Domino that things changed.

The spirit took everything over: his mind, his name, his heart. And it never gave any of those things back. Well, what did you expect, Ryou mused, it is a thief after all.

It also kept his promise. Ryou betrayed it and ultimately, it left.

And it never came back again.

And that was when Ryou Bakura started to have a problem with loneliness.