For Round 3 of The Yu-Gi-Oh Fanfiction Contest. The pairing is Protectshipping (Ryou Bakura x Hiroto Honda).WARNING: Jou x Malik, Honda x Ryou, and implied (Bakura x Ryou); yaoi/shounen-ai and parenthetical overdose.

This is a sequel to Afterthought (although reading it beforehand isn't necessary to understand this), second in my Postscript universe.

Disclaimer: I don't own Yu-Gi-Oh.

Notes: khered—Ancient Egyptian for 'child.' Enjoy!

Broken Column

"Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo."

Translation: "I was not, I was, I am not, I don't care."

—Anonymous

Honda had known liars and deceit from the moment he saw Jounouchi Katsuya for the first time, scarred and bruised but still with that painful tolerant smile on his face. He had lived among gang members and drug dealers, among bullies and the kids they beat up, been both and liked neither. He knew when someone was lying about not doing their homework or sleeping with another boy's girlfriend or sneaking out of their parents' house to go to bars in the middle of the night; he could see it in the false earnestness of their eyes and the bluffing quaver of their voice.

But there was something about Bakura Ryou that he couldn't figure out—something about the way his brown eyes were depthless and emotionless, something about the way he could sit still for hours on end despite the nudging arms of friends and the sharp reprimands of teachers, something about the sheer fragility of his empty porcelain face.

(Honda had never been one for chivalry, but Ryou was an exception. Ryou was always an exception.)

Because Honda had learned to rely on his instincts during those terrible years when Jounouchi turned up to school beaten and bloody, when they ran from dozens of gang members with no protection but their fists and their words, when the spirit of an ancient Pharaoh tugged them into war after war and somehow managed to pull them out. And his instincts had told him that Yugi was not okay when the boy locked away the God Cards and stayed silent for weeks on end; his instincts had told him that there was something odd going on between Jounouchi and Malik when the former brought the Egyptian back from a student exchange program bright and laughing; and now his instincts were telling him that Ryou, who was failing every subject but English and shutting himself off from the world, was the most messed-up of them all.

Sure, he had always been a weird kid. Too silent, too foreign, too polite, flying through his exams with straight hundreds and studying occult books in English at home—

(—building RPG fields that killed for an insane spirit who controlled his body—)

—a member of their group who remained forever on the sidelines, forgotten, alone, and ignored.

Why had they ever dismissed Ryou as just another member of the adoring crowd, with no purpose but to cheer them on and bring in a new foe for the Pharaoh to duel? Why had they ever followed Yami no Yugi around and worshipped him in action and soul for his talent for games instead of seeing the debris he left in his wake, broken into millions of pieces, nothing but flotsam on the tide of his veneration? Why had nobody but Jounouchi noticed that Malik was falling and dying and could not be okay after having his back cut open with fire and his soul rendered into shreds by the Shadows? Why had nobody at all noticed that Ryou had already fallen and died, so subtly and unassumingly that they could not be bothered to care?

Why, why, why was everything Yugi, Yugi, Yugi; why was his name the only two syllables that ever fell from their lips—

—is Yugi alright today is Yugi going to be okay Yugi doesn't look so good should we ask Yugi to come over to the arcade hey let's sleep over at Yugi's house today to see if he still cries and screams and dreams during the night—

Maybe if they had been looking less at Yugi and more at the others who had never known a kind word in their lives, who had suffered in terrible silence and the knowledge that none of Yugi-tachi could be bothered to notice—maybe then, Ryou could have been saved.

But he had fallen instead, fallen into a chasm where none wished to venture, and Honda had done nothing but watch and mourn.

The wind whipped at his hair, catching alabaster-white strands and tangling them into twisted ropes that blew around his face, obscuring his vision and making him see nothing but white, white, white.

(white is the Egyptian color of death, vessel dearest, or didn't you know?)

It was cold, too cold, and his thin cotton shirt and ragtag jeans could offer no protection against it. He had worn the same clothing for too long, now, long enough that the elbows of his sweater had been tattered to nothing and the cuffs of his pants were as threadbare as the few coherent thoughts left in his mind. (It didn't matter, though. Nothing mattered.)

He wasn't sure how he had arrived here, clinging to the rain-wet stone of a cliff face somewhere on the shores of Japan, with the ocean crashing against the bottom beneath him and the sharp rocks of the beach beckoning, inviting, whispering at him to let go and fall. "Come here, grieving boy, and we will take away all your hurt, all your pain, all the memories. Fall, child, Fall."

Or maybe those were just the spirit's words, running through his mind like the loop of an endless song. He could never tell the difference.

He wondered if the merciless waves had eaten away at the cliff face for centuries on end, if the salt and the sheer deadly force of nature's scavengers had carved out a cave there at the very foot, with only the rest of the mountains left to support his weight. He wondered if, even now, the rock was weakening and trembling—if, no matter whether he dropped willingly or not, the world would be tired enough of him to collapse beneath his feet and send him plummeting into the void.

He had Fallen once already, Fallen so utterly and completely that another one should not be frightening, but oh—he was scared. Malik may have thought him happy; everyone else may have thought him happy and content and alive, but he was not.

(you have never been happy since she died and left you alone, little fool.)

He was never happy.

(fall, khered, Fall.)

(do it for me.)

Crack.

Ryou sat at his dilapidated excuse for a coffee table, a translucent plastic bag and a pile of newspapers before him. The walnut had shattered in his hands, spraying bits of shell and meat all over his room and his clothing, crumbling to bits beneath the pressure of the glittering silver object that functioned as a nutcracker.

He didn't care.

He remained silent, ignoring the new cut on the back of his thumb that seeped blood, its ragged edges dusted with the strange grease-like substance that all of the nuts were coated with. He imagined that if he licked his fingers, he would taste the seasoning that the people of the manufacturing company had graciously provided for their customers, that the neatly printed words on the back insisted was just a small addition to add to the natural flavor.

His father had said similarly, back in the days when Amane and Mother were still there and they could at least pretend to have some semblance of unity, some semblance of family. Ryou had not believed him then, and he did not believe him now.

His father had introduced him to the concept of baby walnuts when he was a child, bringing some back from his trip to China and insisting on showing Ryou and Amane how to crack them properly. It was a job that required patience, Bakura-san had said. Do you have patience?

Amane, frustrated by the way her seven-year-old fingers had slipped off the little cracks on the surface like ice skaters skidding and twirling and gliding in the winter, had given up quickly and gone off to more interesting things. Ryou, determined to prove to his father that he could do something too, had persevered for hours on end, eyebrows furrowed and nut after nut smashed to bits, taking the ones his father had managed to extract perfectly and efficiently and claiming them as his own.

He had not succeeded.

And he could not succeed now, trying to pry the shells apart to uncover the precious little bits of food they hid inside them, no better than what he had been as a boy not yet six years old, because his life itself was a failure.

(mother and sister dying when you were ten, building the structure of your so-called friends' deaths with your bare hands, left alone to rot and fade away by ones who could not care less—you are destined to die, vessel dearest, and anyone would tell you the same.)

Ah, but there was no reason to struggle and fight and lose and cry if he knew that in the end, there was nobody to save. His father was far away in Egypt and trying to forget; his friends were clustered in a sympathetic group around Yugi in the Kame Game Shop; he himself was lost among the Shadows, doomed to sit and wait as the darkness wore away at his mind and feet until he fell to whatever awaited beneath.

He cracked walnuts until his fingernails were chipped and bleeding, until his hands were sticky and dirty and disgusting, until his floor was littered with the sad remnants of his unfruitful efforts and the voice was laughing and mocking and telling him that look—see that destruction is all you will ever manage; destruction is your birthright and your end.

He wanted to live to live to live and breathe and love and—

(fall, khered, fall.)

Honda was surprised that Ryou had accepted Yugi-tachi's offer of going camping to celebrate the nearing end of their eleventh grade year. The white-haired boy had been more distant and closed-off and silent than ever after beaming Malik had returned from New York City with Jounouchi in tow, inexplicably a few thousand yen richer than they had been when they left—it was a good story, they would claim, that they could not tell. Malik had visited Ryou sometime between that homecoming and the camping trip, Jounouchi said, but would not tell anyone else what had happened, and Honda understood.

Malik, after all, was the only one of them who had fallen deep, deep, deep into insanity and then pulled himself out at the very last minute. Honda could only hope against hope that he could help Ryou somehow, though he knew in his heart that Ryou was far beyond aid.

They could not pack six tents and expect to be able to carry them on the bus that would take them to the forest by the shore. So they split into groups of two, and Honda was the only one who was willing to share with Ryou.

It was because he had become a stranger to them all, because Honda knew well that Jounouchi and Malik and Anzu and Yugi would much rather had Ryou declined their request, because awkwardness among the cured and the dying could never quite be resolved until there was only one left standing for the others to applaud. (And Honda had never quite been one for understanding, but Ryou was the exception. Ryou was always the exception.)

So, Honda thought it fair for him to consider it odd that Ryou had left in the middle of the night with his sleeping bag untouched and nothing but a pen and a math textbook remaining on his side of the tent. Ryou could have been doing his homework or studying or engaging in other scholarly activities, but Honda was skeptical, because he knew that Ryou was too far gone to care. He took tests because he had to and did homework only sporadically, and he would have been the very model of an uncooperative student save for the utter flatness of his words and the lack of challenge in anything he said or did.

He stepped outside and shivered in the chilling night air. It was in Honda's nature to protect and to fight after all those years of watching Jounouchi stumble into his house at one in the morning with chips of glass in his bleeding hair, after seeing every single one of his friends fall and die and lose their souls to laughing psychopaths sporting golden Items. Ryou had never quite counted to him; Ryou had always been somehow lumped in with Yami no Bakura in Honda's mind, because he was too busy trying to save everyone to realize that right in front of his face was a supposed 'villain' with an 'accomplice' who had nobody else to pull him out of the trench he had dug.

The moonlight cast its pale monochromatic glow upon the forest and the sea, making shadows where there would otherwise be none and ghosts that haunted the night with their noiseless steps. Honda had never liked the time after the sun set and colors were bleached away to slip into the water that drank them in eagerly; he had run too many times then, run and feared and yelled, stopped knives and bullets with arms and walls. He associated the night with the time that the ones who hated could turn upon those they despised and kill them easily, cruelly, with a simple stab in the back.

Nightfall was the time of deceit, and Honda had never been fond of lies.

He found Ryou swiftly, sitting on a rock in a space among the trees with a stack of paper as pale as his hair in his hands. His face was shadowed by what sharp light that managed to sift through the branches surrounding him, hitting the paper squarely and revealing perfect kanji printed there in his neat, clear handwriting.

"What's that?" Honda asked abruptly, and Ryou did not even jump or look around, but remained stiffly in his position, staring at the words in his lap.

"Something you have no right to read," his voice whispered softly, sounding as if he would not even bother to fight back were Honda to snatch the objects out of his grip and toss them to the angry waves that cried for blood below. "Something that was me, a long time ago, and now is not." His back straightened slightly, his posture still rigid and formal. "And it will never be again, if I have anything to say in the matter."

Honda was the one who jerked back at the sudden menacing edge to Ryou's tone, because there was something so very wrong about it, something that screamed of the days of the past when the spirit of a golden ring haunted and twisted through the lives of Yugi-tachi, laughing and killing and so very determined that he would win.

—because Yami no Bakura had had Ryou in his grasp and Ryou's mind in his hands to break and manipulate as he wished, and yet his plan was flawed, terribly flawed, because nobody cared for Ryou enough to sacrifice the world in his place. Perhaps the spirit had too much faith in human nature, Honda thought, because otherwise he would not have concocted an idea so certainly doomed to fail. But Yami no Yugi was an actor, a faultless perfect actor; he had convinced caring Yugi and Anzu and the rest of the universe that he had tried, tried with every fiber of his being, to save the helpless and help the saved and damn the damned further into the depths of wherever they had fallen—

And yet, Honda knew that Yami no Bakura was gone, banished, far away in the Shadow Realm where none but the passing faces of his nightmares and dreams could contact him any longer.

(ah, but he has fallen, you idiot, and I shall pull him down with me until he stands where I stand and we may share our fates as we did before.)

(go, khered, go. Try to hide, but the darkness will find you again.)

He trembled where he stood, trapped with no place to hide, unable to move up or down or left or right. He was stuck on the tiny ledge where the hungry hands of the sky ripped at his clothing and the wind shrieked at him to choose, where there was nothing around but the uncaring apathetic moon and the sea that laughed below.

(you cannot escape. You know that well enough.)

Yugi-tachi was far away, sleeping in peace where no wraiths had left them on a cliff face to fall and die forgotten, where they did not have to worry about not waking up the next day or rising to an empty room with the shelves coated in dust and neglect, where Yugi could grieve for the life he had lost with the ears of friends turned to his words.

He had nothing, and it seemed that everyone else did.

(listen to your own thoughts, khered. Jump.)

He had given in to the spirit, loved the spirit and followed the spirit, handed over his soul on bent knees and silently begged for some sort of reciprocated affection. He had leapt into the void with arms extended in hopes of being caught; he had doomed himself by choosing the wrong side and Falling oh-so-quickly, his wings torn off by his own hands, his body limp and unresisting. Because, fool that he was, taught and trained Catholic that he was, he believed that he would receive pity and be able to stand on two feet at the bottom of the chasm, lost but whole.

But he had been wrong.

(mercy is for the weak, for those who need it, and you have not the backbone to ask. This is your punishment for waiting in vain, and it is also mine for acting too quickly and not biding my time, for not having patience—but then, you have no patience either, not even patience enough to pry a nut out of its shell with fingers that were born to do things gently. We are two halves of the same soul, you see, unable to hate and forced to love, and should we not live out our opposite punishments together?)

He did not want to die, but then—

Had he not died already?

(in soul yes, in body no, so the world will be much obliged if you do both. Fall, khered, Fall.)

(do it for me.)

Honda stood outside the closed door of Ryou's apartment, his hand resting on the cold plaster of the wall. He had been in that position for the past fifteen minutes, not quite sure why he was there but nevertheless determined to talk one-on-one with the other teen. He just didn't know when to do so, and so the dusk had found him there, still debating in his head whether or not he should leave.

Ryou answered the question for him by inching the door open barely a crack, one eye peering through. "You've been here for over ten minutes." It was a statement, nothing beyond what was necessary to say, and Honda could not tell if he was happy or surprised. Ryou had faded into shades of gray after the Pharaoh and the Ring had disappeared into the earth after the Ceremonial Duel, and it seemed that he could not find the energy to speak anymore, could not be bothered to do anything but exist.

"May I come in?" Honda asked, and wondered if he would regret that.

Ryou didn't even blink, but edged the door open a foot or so and silently stepped back.

The inside of his apartment was not what Honda had expected. There were no shelves and tables full of games, no writing desk with homework and a computer, no bright lively atmosphere. The shades had been drawn over the west-facing windows so that the orange light of the setting sun illuminated clean-cut rectangles on their backs and cast an odd, dim glow over the room. There was a coffee table in the center with a worn old couch behind it, covered in papers and writing utensils and a few scattered tarot cards. There was no neatness about it, none of the Ryou-like qualities that Honda could tell had once been present, and the lightbulb above his head had been shattered into pieces with bits of opaque white glass in a haphazard pile on a chair.

They sat on the sofa as Honda tried not to stare at the gray pallor in Ryou's face, as the silence stretched on and the room in its fading unused glory began to feel suffocating and confined. The windows had been slammed shut, and the door was thick enough and the building empty enough that no noises of life from the streets outside could be heard, so that he and Ryou were more alone than Honda had first imagined when he had set out to do—what, exactly? He was not sure—

(And normally Honda would have sighed, "Forget it," and left, but Ryou was not normal. Ryou was far from normal, and Ryou was always the exception.)

"Are you okay?" he asked at last.

"No," Ryou said simply, as if he could not be bothered to lie, as if it was too much effort to elaborate and explain and ask for help when he was doomed with or without it.

"Can I help?"

"No," Ryou repeated, and his face was utterly blank—not giving, not taking, already too far lost to bother with life.

And as the dead hopelessness in his eyes stared calmly into Honda's, something in his mind snapped. It screamed that Ryou was there and fading and dying before his eyes, that soon whatever chasm he had given up his sanity to would eat him alive. Ryou needed an epitaph or a realization that would pull him back from the brink and show him that before him was a friend who cared whether he was gone or not—and Honda cared. Perhaps he had not realized until then, but he cared.

(you fool; nothing can stop the pull of gravity unless gravity wills it so, and the vessel will not hover inches above the rocks of his end any longer.)

But for no coherent reason, Honda leaned forward and kissed him, lips pressed to the other's for a long timeless moment as Ryou stiffened underneath the hand that Honda had placed on his shoulder sometime in the midst of all this. He did not return the kiss or push him away, but simply sat there with the apathy that had become the everything of his existence, because he would make no effort to do more.

(ah, you have waited long for this moment—have you not, khered?)

And in his mind, Ryou was silent, because it was no use to reply.

(but you know fully well why I cannot allow this.) Cold, malicious, saccharine-sweet.

Don't kill him. Please.

(a response, khered? What lengths this mortal has driven you to!) The voice was biting, sarcastic, stronger than Ryou's, overriding Ryou's silent protests with its authority.

(you are mine, to do with as I wish, not his to steal. There is punishment for those who would take from the greatest of thieves, and you are nothing but the goods being fought over.)

Ryou shoved Honda away with more strength than he had known he possessed. His eyes were wild and desperate and finally, finally holding some semblance of life in them, finally burning with the fire of someone who grips the sword stabbed into his heart and gives it a twist to make sure he dies. "Go away," he said fervently, his voice barely audible, his words rushed as if he had a time limit on what he was allowed to say. "Go away, please leave, just leave—" He grabbed a pile of papers on the coffee table and crumpled them into Honda's hands, standing up and backing away quickly.

Honda glanced down at them, still too shocked by the turn of events to properly react. "Dear Amane," he read from the top of the first one, and he met Ryou's eyes with something like horror in his own. "What the hell—"

"Go," Ryou whispered, his expression more crumpled than ever with the sudden overflow of emotion onto his face, pushing Honda out of the door. "Just go. Please."

(are those tears on your face, khered?)

"You did what?" Malik spluttered, choking on a mouthful of hamburger while Jounouchi thumped his back and laughed something that sounded like 'karma' in his ear.

"I went to Ryou's house," Honda repeated, more impatiently than he usually would have, because there was something wrong about Ryou's behavior, and Malik no doubt knew what it was. Outside the restaurant, the rain poured down in waterfall waves and rushing rivers, turning the sky dark gray with foreboding as lightning forked blinding white through the air.

"Why would you do that?" Malik gasped after a few more seconds of coughing, eyeing Honda as if he were insane. Perhaps he was, to jump to the aid of someone so far beyond helping—but then, Malik was not one to reprimand him for insanity.

Honda opened his mouth to answer and found that he had none to give.

Malik groaned, leaning across the table with Jounouchi mimicking his motion so that the other customers of Burger World would not hear their conversation. "Look, Honda, I don't know how to explain this properly... but Ryou's messed-up. Really messed-up." He held up a tanned hand, forestalling any protests. "Before Jou-kun locked him away, my darker side haunted my dreams each night. He gave me nightmares about everyone I cared about dying and other similarly unpleasant things"—Malik shuddered, and Honda had the feeling that he was editing his story mentally—"until I was so afraid of sleeping I once stayed awake for days on end. It's like constant torture that you can never escape, and the darkness is a veteran of driving people insane.

"I was crazy; Ryou is still crazy now. He gave up a long time ago, probably around the first few months after the Ceremonial Duel, because he just didn't have the resolve to fight it and lose, like I would have if Jou hadn't stepped in. The insanity is like... like a giant void, sort of, that you don't anything about except that you don't want to be there, and that it might be easier to just jump in instead of wasting the energy to dig in your heels every step of the way. And Ryou realized that already, because none of us"—he said that word with a hard voice, resentment in every inch of his tone, and Honda knew he was blaming Yugi-tachi for the neglecting of their friend—"were smart enough to help him. He's gone, and there's nothing you can do to pull him back."

"He—Yami no Bakura—" Honda could not speak the words. "He... haunted Ryou's mind? Every single night?"

"He did, and probably still does," Malik said matter-of-factly—because Malik had never been afraid of stating the blatant truth, because Malik had never quite cared enough for tact. "Maybe during the day, too, since my dark side was on the verge of doing that before Jou stepped in."

"Then how do I get rid of him?" Honda asked, because there had to be some way, because hadn't Yami no Yugi in all his magical glory pulled off a last-minute rescue every single time he had dueled?

Malik blinked at him with a half-annoyed, half-sympathetic you haven't been listening to me, have you look on his face. "Didn't you hear? Ryou already gave himself up to the Shadows; he thought he would at least go out in peace, so to speak, and he didn't want to fight..."

"Why not?" Honda asked, feeling hope slip away from his grasping fingers.

Malik shrugged, and his face was carefully blank when he answered. "Because he's in love with Yami no Bakura, that's why."

Because the truth was nothing but pain and regret and faith spiraling down to their deaths; because Honda had known all along that he stood no chance against the darkness.

It was cold, too cold, and the waves mocked him in all their deadly fury dozens of feet below, mocked his fear and his hopelessness and the fact that he couldn't possibly win.

Don't kill him, he pleaded in his mind, his tears frozen to his cheeks by the wind.

(ah, but I can only kill when I am in your body—ne, vessel dearest?)

He didn't want to die, but what other option was there?

(fall, khered, Fall.)

(do it for me.)

"Where is he?" Honda demanded, bursting into the apartment that Jounouchi and Malik shared after fumbling to unlock the door with his key.

Malik turned a bored head to him, curled up unashamedly against Jounouchi's side with a bowl of ice cream in his hands. In other days, Honda would have stopped and groaned and complained that there really was no need for such displays of affection. (But this was Ryou, and Ryou was always an exception) "Ever heard of knocking?"

"Where's Ryou?" Honda insisted, his motorcycle helmet still on his head and his jacket not even fully zipped up, his voice frantic, desperate, unrelenting.

That made Malik sit straight and snap careful violet eyes to him, made Jounouchi tense suddenly with the memory of what had happened that winter—

(—death and depression and darkness streaking toward him in one huge blur—)

—"I don't know."

Honda tore out of the room just as quickly, and the engine of his motorcycle could be heard revving outside as he left and grabbed the neatly folded stack of papers still stuck in his pocket and read the second sentence of the first page—the location, the destination, the X that marked the spot of the treasure, because then Honda knew where to go.

Dear Amane, I buried some of your old letters last week, when Yugi-tachi and I went camping at a forest a few dozen miles away...

He arrived there half an hour later, the hem of his jeans soaked through from when he had splashed through a leftover puddle from yesterday's thunderstorm, and he thanked whatever gods were out there that it had rained when he saw in the mud a set of footsteps leading off to the edge of the cliff on which the forest resided.

His heart plummeted somewhere down into the region of his stomach, and he let his bike fall to the wet earth as he ran without heed to the precipice. "Ryou!" he called into the terribly silent night, begging for him to still be alive, hoping that the other boy had not yet chosen to let go. "RYOU!"

And for a long, long moment, there was no answer.

"... Honda-kun?"

Honda knelt on the ground next to the chasm, straining his eyes to see down into the darkness, the moon a tiny sliver of light low in the sky. "Ryou, are you alright?"

(what do you think, idiot?)

A pause. "No," Ryou whispered, his voice tiny and thin and only just managing to be heard past the violent crashing of waves on the shore. "Please, go away—"

"Where are you?"

Ryou's voice was growing more distressed, shot through with the emotion that for so long Honda had hoped for him to show—but then, how could he have known that this was how the situation would turn out? "Go! Just go, I don't want him to hurt you—"

(what lengths you go to for this boy's safety, khered! Quite a shame that you do everything in vain...)

Honda began to climb down, carefully feeling his way past the rain-slippery rocks and shadow-shrouded niches. "Hold on, I'm coming down, don't let go..." At the time—unlikely as it was—he still had expected to be able to somehow trump Yami no Bakura's hold, had still thought that he, with no power but his insistent desire to protect Bakura Ryou, could drive away the shadows.

He saw Ryou a few feet lower, his white hair easily visible in the weakened light, and he extended his arm to the other boy, beckoning for him to take it. "Come on, Ryou, you can get up this way—"

(take his hand.) Amused, sadistic, laughing. (go on, and see what happens to a mere mortal when all the force of the Shadows is channeled through his body. Do it, khered—do it for me.)

Ryou whimpered, his right hand twitching as it slowly made its way up into the air where Honda's waited. "N-No, p-p-please—"

(—how foolish Honda was to think that the powers of the heart and of love could trump over the darkness! How naïve and stupid and utterly foolish, because the darkness could crush hope with the ease of a person stepping on an ant, crush it and eradicate it and smother it from existence—)

"You can get rid of Yami no Bakura," Honda pleaded, seeing the desperation in the other teen's eyes. "Malik did it with Jou, and you can be free too, I swear; I swear it on my life! Please, Ryou, just trust me and let me pull you up, and we'll figure this out together—"

(touch him once; make one more move toward him so that his skin brushes ours, and his mind will be thrown far deeper than anywhere you will be able to Fall.) A smile, teeth bared. (kill him, khered—do it for me.)

Ryou's shoulders shook as he sobbed, and his arms dropped limply to his sides. Honda fell silent as well, and there was no noise but the sound of Ryou's gasping breaths and the faint crashing of the waves far, far below. He turned his head up, his eyes meeting Honda's, and his face was painted ghostly pale by the light of the moon. "I care about you too, Honda-kun. I care too much to let you suffer what you will if I come with you."

It was cold, so cold.

The wind whistled through the air, tugging at their clothes, singing a mournful melody for a mournful day—a song for death.

"I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry."

Ryou let go, and he fell.

(Ah, but he Fell so hard.)

Epilogue

For a long time, Honda could not look Jounouchi or Malik in eyes. Every time he saw their faces, laughing or serious or even solemn in sympathy for him, he was reminded too painfully of what he had lost and what he could have had.

And it was only months later, on the night of Ryou's birthday that he celebrated in silence with the only other two who truly understood what had happened, that he found the courage to open Ryou's letters to Amane and read them one by one:

Dear Amane, I miss you. Dear Amane, I have drifted far away from Yugi-tachi, who were once my very best friends. Dear Amane, The spirit says I have Fallen. I think he is right. Dear Amane, There is a boy named Honda Hiroto who wishes to help me, but I know he cannot, though I wish he could. Dear Amane, The spirit will kill him. Dear Amane, Goodbye—

He would have liked to think that he could have done nothing. But that was a lie, and Honda had never been fond of liars.

End

A/N: I tell you, that turned out much more depressing than I intended.

Endnotes: A broken column, when carved onto a gravestone, symbolizes early death.

Reviews are loved, concrit especially. So review, please! :)