Ok, so this was inspired by the 'Generation Dead' series by Daniel Waters. By which I mean I have completely ripped off the 'Generation Dead' series by Daniel Waters. But the idea was just too tempting.

Disclaimer: I do not own Yu-Gi-Oh or Generation Dead.

Oh, and this one's for Lady Blackwell: die-hard thiefshipper and now my awesome beta (:

Newlydeads

Chapter 1

'Have you heard the news that you're dead?' – 'Dead!', My Chemical Romance

It was getting dark.

Bakura lay on his bed with his arms folded behind his head, staring blankly at the little patch of grey sky he could see through the nearby window. With every passing moment, the grey became steelier and more saturated with night-time blue as the last of the sunlight was swallowed up. Fat, heavy drops of rain plopped against the glass, driven by a wind that had picked up in the late afternoon and was only going to get stronger through the night...

And so on. Bakura hardly noticed. He didn't care. The ticking of the clock on his bedside table informed him that time was indeed going by as normal, but he didn't feel it. Couldn't. He was frozen. Stuck on pause. Trapped in that moment that played over and over again in his head, like a horrible song stuck on repeat-

(Ryou waves. Amane pulls a face. Yeah bye brat see you later.

They drive off Ryou still waving smiling waving yeah yeah miss you already I'll see you at school tomorrow idiot...

Man his mom's a shit driver-

BEEEEEEEEEP

-what the fuck is that-?

Tyres screech someone screams brake brake brake-!

Too late (oh God oh God)

metal hits metal. metal hits glass. glass and metal hit skin flesh bone

Again. Smash crash crunch- Stop. Nothing more. Glass on the road. No movement, no sign of...life-?

Ryou. Ryou? Ryou-!)

Bakura shut his eyes, feeling sick. He didn't think he'd ever sleep again without seeing that scene. Seeing it, feeling it, living it. (Ryou dying it.)

His chest hurt. The rest of him was numb. And dead. No, not dead. Ryou was dead. Oh God, Ryou was dead.

The skin around Bakura's eyes wrinkled as he scrunched his eyelids together too tightly. He realised this was the first time he'd allowed those three words to penetrate his consciousness. Ryou was dead. The phrase had a harsh, irrefutable quality to it that hit him like a punch to the gut.

It shouldn't shock him so much. He knew, of course he did. He'd known from the moment he'd torn up that street like a hellhound to reach the car, the moment he'd seen the silent family inside the wreckage – the mother crushed by the other car that had slammed into her side, Amane lying strewn awkwardly across the back seat as if she'd been bounced there (she had), and Ryou, oh God Ryou, sitting there seat-belted in, eyes half-open but not seeing, perfect and un-maimed but not there anymore, gone gone gone-

Blackout.

He still couldn't escape those few fatal moments. How long ago was it now? A week? More...?

The funeral was tomorrow. One big service. Three coffins. Goodbye.

Bakura wondered if he'd be able to cry. He hadn't managed it thus far. It had all just been so sudden, a crazy whirlwind set in motion by a few cars going too fast and stopping too suddenly and too late. There had been too many people hugging him and saying how sorry they were and sobbing on his shoulder – there had been no time for him to be sad. Just stunned. As if he'd taken an unexpected slap to the face and the pain just hadn't registered yet.

...Damn, that rain sure was loud.

His forehead creased into a slight frown. Behind the rush of the falling raindrops, he could hear something else – something slower, more purposeful and gradually getting louder.

Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap-tap-

His eyes shot open.

There were hands at his window.

Small white hands tapping at the glass. Weakly, unsteadily, but incessantly.

Hands.

Bakura didn't scream. (Not because he was so damn brave – just because he couldn't.) In an instant he was on his feet, surprised that his leaden body could move so fast. It didn't even occur to him to call for his parents. Shock and panic made him stupid.

"What the hell...?" he growled, trying to find courage in irritation, hauling the window open and leaning out. He looked down and found those hands attached to skinny black-clad arms and a skinny black-clad body and a face, dark eyes staring from a white face-

Bleeeep transmission lost white noise white noise world gone world spinning no no- black. why black? why bury him in black-?

"Ryou?" Bakura choked out.

He stared and blinked a few times, hoping with every blink that the illusion would dissipate. It didn't. It looked so real, Ryou crouched on the grass outside his room, Ryou in a black suit, looking ready for a funeral...yeah, his funeral! His funeral-!

The white shirt was soaked and stained, as if he'd fallen. His hair clung wetly to his head and face. His face. It was white

no, grey-white

no, blue-white

no, no, dead-white, and streaked with water. Rain or tears...?

Bakura couldn't breathe. Ryou not Ryou made a strange whimpering sound. His arms were still outstretched towards the window, no longer to knock but as if pleading for something – help, mercy, an embrace-

"Ba...kura..." he started in a terrible, strangled voice. Moving his mouth looked like a painful, concerted effort, as did forcing out any kind of sound.

"No," Bakura blurted out, recoiling. Those hands still reached out to him, trembling with effort.

"Ple...Kura..." Ryou (not Ryou, not Ryou!) croaked. A few unsuccessful spasms of his mouth suggested there was a lot more he wanted to say.

"You're dead!" Bakura shouted, backing away from the window, "This is crazy, you're dead...!"

Ryou's face (not his face) was completely expressionless, his eyes glassy – for a moment Bakura thought he saw fear and misery in their depths, but then they were empty again and he wondered if it had been a reflection of his own horrified face.

"Dead," he repeated steadfastly, trying to force the tremor from his voice.

Ryou gave a small, jerky nod.

Vomit burned at the back of Bakura's throat.

He slammed the window shut.

Bakura woke with his mouth open, as if about to scream. He immediately clamped his lips together, hoping he hadn't cried out in his sleep. Even if that old dream merited a shriek or two.

He rolled over with a groan, blinking against the muted sunlight permeating the curtains. When his eyes focused, the first thing he saw was a sheet of newspaper tacked to the edge of his bedside table. The article about the accident. Illustration and all.

He closed his eyes again tiredly, allowing the depressingly familiar wave of grief and disappointment to wash over him. Some mornings, when he woke from that nightmare, he would briefly wonder if the whole thing had just been one big bad dream – maybe he could go over to Ryou's house and he'd be sitting on the porch waiting, maybe he'd get up and run over to him and smile and whine about him being late as always-?

Anyway. The old newspaper refuted that little fantasy. Ryou was dead. A lot had changed in the past year, but that much remained a cold, unyielding constant.

Other mornings he'd open his eyes and wonder if the world had gone back to normal – sometimes he could almost convince himself that the latter part of his dream (the part where it descended into some kind of deleted scene from Dawn of the Dead) really had been just a dream. He could build it all up in his head. He'd see himself getting up and making a dash for the Domino Cemetery, and there would be a white marble gravestone with Ryou's name on it, and he could mourn and move on like he had a right to-

But then an irritating, smooth-sounding voice in his mind would tell him that was bullshit too. Wake up and get with the fucking program, Bakura, it would sigh contemptuously, Ok, Ryou's dead, you got that part. But, as your subconscious so kindly reminds you every night, he came back. And if you don't believe me, you'll be seeing him soon enough-

His alarm beeped. A sound smack shut it up, and he reluctantly dragged himself from bed and went about getting ready.

Ryou hadn't been the first teenager who refused to stay dead – far from it. He and Bakura had discussed the so-called 'zombie phenomenon' with morbid fascination when he'd been alive, which seemed the height of irony now. As supernatural phenomena went, the reanimation of the teenaged dead was pretty hard to ignore, and it sure beat the face of Christ materialising on some poor sap's morning toast. To the two of them, who had secretly swapped Disney for George A. Romero movies when they were about ten, it had seemed like the greatest and most impossibly exciting thing that could ever happen in their world. They had talked about it for hours, and played an incredible amount of Resident Evil as 'practice'.

Back then, there had been something deliciously Gothic about the stories of recently deceased kids getting up from mortuary slabs or waking up half-way through their own post-mortems, and all the surrounding media controversy (is this a miracle? Is it a sign of the apocalypse?) had only made it seem more attractive. After all, it had just been stories. Just the latest thing everyone tuned into the news for. (And God, the media never stopped lapping it up, there was always plenty of new material to ogle at. Almost every night – solemn-faced reporters delivering the latest statistics, scientists optimistically spouting the newest fad theory behind how it was happening, and over-excited people who'd found religion and figured they knew everything about it screaming that it was an abomination that had to be purged.) He and Ryou had known it was real, of course they had, but it had seemed distant. Like a war being fought in another country. Easy to forget about when you had something else to do. Normal kids like them had lives to lead – they didn't die. And they most certainly didn't come back.

Bakura sighed to himself as he pulled on a pair of dark jeans, a black t-shirt and a pair of scuffed grey high-tops. Other people seemed to have a habit of sprucing themselves up for the first day of a new school year, but Bakura was a believer in starting as he meant to continue.

He remembered when the first dead kid had shown up at their school. (The first of what had now become many, with more seeming to pop up all the time.) Junior high, seventh grade. Some girl in the year above them who'd accidentally eaten a cereal bar containing peanuts, to which she'd been deadly allergic. The school had held a cutesy memorial service for her, then the next day she'd turned up for classes. Cue lots of screaming.

Ryou's attitude had changed that day. All of a sudden it hadn't been funny or exciting anymore.

Bakura hauled his backpack out from the back of his wardrobe where it had lain unused all summer, and his face was set in a definite glower as he packed it with the things he needed. The day hadn't even started yet and he was already in a hideously bad mood, without really being able to pinpoint exactly why. Maybe it had been the dream (the memory, his traitorous mind corrected), which hadn't hounded him as much over the summer. Or maybe it was just the prospect of school, which hadn't been massively appealing to him even before he'd had to start sharing classroom space with the walking dead.

After shovelling a few spoonfuls of cereal down his throat, he shouldered his backpack and left the house without a word or a backward glance. Not that either would have been necessary – both his parents would have left for work almost an hour ago now. Such dedication. Not to mention the fact that they were totally at a loss as to how to communicate with or relate to their teenage son, who just hadn't been quite the same ever since that friend of his died.

Bakura cast a wistful glance at his father's old and generally unused car sitting in the driveway as he passed. He quickly shook his head and moved on to wait at the nearby bus stop. He'd just started learning to drive when Ryou died. Needless to say, he didn't drive much these days.

The bus pulled up after a few minutes, full of chattering kids who looked a lot more optimistic about the new term than he did. Bakura boarded with a heavy feeling in his chest, because he knew the sight that would greet him. He hadn't needed to deal with this for the whole damn blissful summer, but now it would be his daily knee to the groin again. He felt sick. He tried to keep his eyes trained on the floor but he knew he would look up, he always looked up – was it hope or guilt or...?

His eyes flicked up, briefly, awkwardly, like they always did. It really was a bad habit. It only made things harder.

Ryou sat with the other dead students, on one of the front-most seats right behind the driver. As usual, he didn't return Bakura's momentary look – Bakura was never sure if the other boy was ignoring him, unaware of his eyes on him or simply unable to move his head quickly enough to catch his eye. The blank, expressionless gaze of the undead made it impossible to tell what they were feeling.

The cursory glance told Bakura all he needed to know and more. Ryou's appearance hadn't changed at all over the summer months. His skin, always porcelain-pale in life, was still its now-customary ghoulish white, completely unblemished and more than a little unnerving. Ryou had never tanned well, but had usually gone rather red after any time in the sun. Bakura supposed zombie-skin was impervious to UV-rays. Or Ryou simply hadn't been outside all summer. His white hair hung limply around his peaked face, and his large brown eyes (those eyes that used to sparkle, Bakura remembered) were listless and vacant, seeming hardly aware of their surroundings. He wasn't smiling. He never smiled any more. Bakura was starting to forget what his smile looked like. He had photos, but looking at them was like drinking poison, and it wasn't enough anyway – Ryou's smile had always been animated and bright and alive-

Alive. Dead now.

Bakura moved on quickly, hands clenched into tight fists. He couldn't believe that after almost a year, it still hurt so much just to see him.

They hadn't spoken since that night before the funeral (which had gone ahead with two coffins instead of three and Ryou's father refusing to explain where his dead son was). Bakura just didn't know what to say. He'd seen his friend die, and even after he'd got to grips with the fact that Ryou had come back, he still had the uneasy feeling that he hadn't come back the same.

And as for Ryou...it seemed that he just didn't speak. Period.

At the back of the bus, Bakura found Jounouchi, Honda and Ushio and slumped down beside them without a word of greeting. They in turn acknowledged his arrival with nothing more than a grunt or two in his general direction. Although most people grouped the four of them together as 'friends', Bakura found that he had very little to say to them. They didn't seem to have a whole lot to say to him either, but he suspected that had more to do with their general lack of conversational ability than any sort of hostility. He was the one with the hostility. He didn't give one single ounce of stale shit about what they'd done during the summer – if Jou had finally passed his driving test or how many ten year-olds' jaws Ushio had broken or if Honda had actually managed to get laid. There was absolutely nothing that they could say to him that would capture his interest. They were thugs and they bored him. Harsh but true.

"Woah. You look ready for a funeral or something, Bakura," Jounouchi remarked suddenly, raising his head and eyeing his dark-coloured clothing.

"Every day's a funeral around here," Bakura replied dully, turning away to look out the nearest window before this escalated into any sort of conversation.

Things used to be different. Better. Back when Ryou was alive, of course. Middle school and even the start of high school had been just peachy for their little gang, which no longer existed, regrettably. Jou had been one of them – but he'd been different, too. He'd been, at most, a wannabe tough-guy – kind of loud and tawdry, but fun to be around, soft-hearted and fiercely loyal to his friends. Honda had been more of a hanger-on back then, absent often enough for Bakura to tolerate his occasional presence without complaint. Then there had been Yuugi. Such a sweet kid. A little wimpy maybe, but Bakura had never disliked the diminutive teen, though the two of them hadn't been the closest out of the group. Glancing around now, his eyes found Yuugi sitting about half-way down the bus, next to Anzu Mazaki and surrounded by her gaggle of gushing female friends.

Aw, Yuugi. Look what we've been reduced to, Bakura thought, lips twitching into a wry smirk as he wondered which one of them had ended up with the worst deal.

And there had been Ryou, of course. Bakura hadn't been aware of it at all at the time, but it seemed glaringly obvious now that Ryou (always smiling, always forgiving, always there) had been the central pillar holding their little group together. Everything had changed with surprising speed after his death. Yuugi had simply vanished from Bakura's social circle – he supposed the smaller boy had had more in common with Ryou than with the rest of them, and so hadn't felt like one of the gang after he'd gone. And then while Bakura had been drifting dazedly through the first few weeks following the accident, Honda had latched onto the shell-shocked Jounouchi, dragged him down to his insipid level, and now the two of them were pretty much insufferable. Then there was Ushio. Bakura cast a brief look over at the great hulking brute sitting hunched up in the corner. He wasn't entirely sure when Ushio had popped up, or why he'd been allowed to ingratiate himself into their already-dysfunctional circle. After all, he was an asshole. Always had been.

Quite simply, they stayed together now out of basic need. To be alone at high school was to be a walking target, something none of them greatly desired. And so they kept up a united front. They were 'friends'. They just didn't really like each other very much.

The bus stuttered to an unsteady halt outside the gates of Domino High. The chatter of the students intensified, intermingled with loudly-voiced complaints about being there already. Unlike Bakura, some of them actually wanted more time on the bus to just talk with their friends and not have to worry about the reality of a new school year. Everyone reluctantly got to their feet in roughly the same moment and started to filter into the aisle. The bus doors whooshed open and they all pushed forward in anticipation of escaping the inevitable crush – but there was no movement. Bakura, finding himself squashed uncomfortably between the people in front and behind him, craned his neck to try and determine the cause of the hold-up. Though he really should have guessed.

"Damn dead-heads," Jounouchi muttered from somewhere to his left, "Holding up the whole frigging world..."

Bakura didn't comment. He lowered his gaze and let the impatient crowd swallow him up again, because he didn't want to watch the dead teenagers from the front of the bus making their slow, faltering way out of their seats and down the few steps to the outside world. It was too pitiful a sight. Especially if you'd known one of them when he was alive, when he could walk and run and laugh and do lopsided hand-stands-

He wondered how Jou could be so callous about them. He'd known Ryou too. But then, Jou had always had a strange, almost zealous repulsion for the zombies, even when it had been nothing but stories to them.

"Goddamn...will you worm-burgers hurry the hell up?" Honda called irritably. Bakura didn't have the energy or will to reprimand him for being a total jackass. However, someone else did.

"Leave them alone," ordered a small but fierce voice. Peering further down the aisle, Bakura found the voice had come from an equally small (but currently fierce-looking) person – Yuugi. Luckily for him, Honda didn't hear him – otherwise the short teen would probably have been the first of the new term to visit the nurse's office. Bakura heard, though. A feeling of sickening inadequacy burned in his stomach.

His eyes wandered past Yuugi just in time to see Ryou being helped off the bus by another (and presumably more mobile) zombie. Bakura couldn't remember his name. He hadn't attended Domino High when he'd been alive. Therefore, Bakura had never spoken to him. All he knew was that he bore an unusual resemblance to Yuugi – except paler. And more dead.

At length everyone did make it off the bus and into the school building (at which point everyone started to wonder why they'd been so eager to get off the bus in the first place). Bakura couldn't help but notice that, even though the dead kids had been the first ones on the pavement, they were still the last to reach the school itself. He knew they were slower than the living (faster than they should be though – they were supposed to be as still as...as death?) but he wondered (occasionally) if they hung back a little further on purpose, to avoid close contact with the beating hearts they knew feared and hated them.

Sighing irritably to himself, he used the surging, disorganised crowd as an excuse to lose his three 'friends' and headed as quickly as he could to home-room. Once that little formality was over, he glanced over his new timetable with a somewhat displeased frown. Chemistry first thing on a Monday morning. Brilliant. He was sure the teacher was as thrilled as he was – they were going to have a regular class full of half-sleeping teenagers who would want to devote the small amount of brain power they had at such a time to catching up with the friends they hadn't seen over the weekend.

The noise that greeted him when he entered the science lab seemed to prove his hypothesis. The glaring majority of his new classmates were grouped together in clusters of varying sizes, chatting animatedly and no doubt trying to out-awesome each other in summer vacation stories. There was one bench at which two people were sitting quietly. Seto Kaiba, reading a book and ignoring the world as per usual. And a boy Bakura didn't recognise, who appeared to still be half-asleep, if the way he was staring blankly at the table-top was any indication. Bakura flopped wordlessly onto the stool at the end of the bench, kicking his bag safely underneath. Neither Kaiba nor the stranger batted as much as an eyelid at his arrival.

Shortly afterwards the teacher arrived (looking harassed as Bakura had predicted) and barked at everyone to sit down. The order was obeyed, and the chatter died down to a certain extent. The teacher wasted no time getting started and began firing out workbooks and scrawling complicated-looking things on the white-board. Bakura found that, after months of near-complete mental inactivity, it was almost impossible to pay any attention to what the man was saying, never mind take any of it in. He let his eyes wander from the front of the room, seeking something they could latch onto and observe without really having to think too hard. He eventually settled on his neighbour: the boy he didn't know and, up until right about now, had had absolutely no interest in. The more Bakura looked at him, however, the more he was convinced that he was a transfer student. He wasn't terribly familiar with many of his classmates, but when he looked at them – almost any of them – he would at least have an awareness that he did indeed see them in passing almost every day, or maybe sat next to them in some class he didn't care about. He couldn't place this boy, however. There was something oddly familiar about him, but not in a classroom-context. He was new. Had to be. Someone that distinctive-looking would have stuck in his memory at least a little.

The boy had burnished-bronze skin (and plenty of it on show, thanks to a sleeveless, midriff-skimming hoodie) which spoke of either exotic heritage or a recent long vacation in the baking sun. His hair (not ridiculously long, but long enough to hang in his eyes and shroud round his face) was surprisingly blonde for one with such a dark complexion, and on his neck and arms a gold choker and a set of matching cuffs glittered harshly. Such eye-catching accessories suggested a vivacious and outgoing individual, but the boy sat in a silence that somehow seemed more noticeable and intense than anyone else's – his hands were clasped limply in his lap and he was still gazing unseeingly at the bench in front of him, unmoving, unblinking-

A stopper seemed to lodge itself in Bakura's windpipe for a moment.

Unblinking. Completely unblinking.

He was never one to jump to conclusions, but all of a sudden he knew, he just knew.

This boy was dead.

Shit great another dead-head I mean zombie I mean living impaired- oh to hell with it, they're zombies...

Bakura nearly fell off his stool when the object of his scrutiny turned his head towards him (making him momentarily doubt his theory, since the movement was performed with a lot more fluidity and speed than he was used to seeing from the undead) and seemed to catch him staring. His eyes were lavender in colour, but cool and crystalline. Like amethysts. Or something. He stared at Bakura for what seemed like a long time, with a mildly expectant look to him.

"...You weren't listening, were you?" he said at length. Bakura knew then that he was right, this kid was a zombie; his voice was too measured, too monotonous for any living teenager, and his expression was just too...expressionless.

"Wha?" Bakura said intelligently, trying to conceal his inner disquiet. He was sitting next to a dead kid. There was a dead kid talking to him. Was that even allowed? The living and the dead never seemed to mingle. Ever. Bakura preferred it that way.

"The teacher said to work with...the others at your bench to solve the equation," the dead boy informed him, raising one hand (apparently as effortlessly as anyone living) to point towards the white-board, on which a hideously complicated string of numbers and chemical symbols had been scribbled.

"...Oh," Bakura replied lamely.

"Unless you'd rather work alone," the other suggested coolly (or maybe that was just the undead's inability to inject warmth into their speech?), his amethyst eyes seeming to hold a challenge, "Though I did this at my last school. I can help, if you...like."

Bakura wasn't sure if the late hitch in his speech was due to his lifeless condition (though he certainly spoke a hell of a lot more fluently than any dead-head he'd ever heard) or if it indicated some kind of scorn. At least he had confirmed Bakura's original idea; he had indeed transferred here. Another undead transfer student. They seemed to be crawling out of the woodwork in Domino.

"If you've done this already, then by all means take the lead..." Kaiba spoke up suddenly, rubbing at his eyes tiredly, "God knows I can't be bothered."

The boy's mouth twitched into a small, almost-smile. He glanced slowly between Kaiba and Bakura, making the latter highly uneasy.

"I might do that," he said almost lazily, "But first maybe you could tell me your names. I am new here, after all."

"My condolences," Kaiba said moodily. He looked as though he really needed a coffee, "Seto Kaiba. Don't worry about remembering it. It's all over this city."

He referred, of course, to his step-father's multi-million dollar company, Kaiba Corp. You couldn't walk down the street in Domino without seeing something with the iconic KC logo emblazoned on it.

"Charmed..." the dead boy said blandly before turning to Bakura, one eyebrow raised in an impressively life-like impersonation of expectation.

"...Bakura," he offered reluctantly at length. He didn't really want to ask the accompanying question but felt it would be ridiculous not to, "And you?"

The boy's lips stretched into a wider smile, revealing a few pearly-white teeth. His eyes were still cold but that counted for very little.

"Malik," he told him (and it did seem to be for him and him alone – it was clear that Kaiba didn't care if he had a name or not), "Nice to meet you. Bakura."

Malik. It was a nice enough name. But Bakura knew that every time he thought of it or said it aloud, all he'd be able to see in his mind's eye would be those five letters carved into a tombstone that wouldn't be needed as soon as originally expected.

Bakura spent the rest of the class trying very hard not to do either of two very tempting things: one, to openly stare at the dead boy (Malik, he reminded himself. Even dead kids have names) just to see if he ever breathed or blinked. (He didn't. Of course not.) And two, to shuffle as far away from him as he could get without falling off the edge of the bench.

He wasn't afraid. But the corpsicles made him...uncomfortable. And he'd never been forced to sit in such close proximity to one before.

As a result, even though Malik explained every stage of the equation in his cool, level voice, Bakura simply wrote down the final solution with absolutely no clue how he had got there.

"You look like you really learned something," the blonde zombie commented dryly (but was that just his deadness?) as the class came to an end.

"Yeah, well..." Bakura muttered.

"That was surprisingly painless," Kaiba said as they started to pack their things away, "I'm glad someone else in this class at least knows how to think things through."

"I'm just a little further ahead...than the others," Malik reminded him with a ghostly smile on his face, "I'm sure that once you all catch up, I'll be as stupid...as the rest."

Kaiba snorted and chose not to reply. (Perhaps wisely – what kind of reply was there to give to that?) Bakura realised with some disbelief that Kaiba hadn't noticed that Malik was dead. He couldn't possibly have – surely even the future CEO of Kaiba Corp. would be at least slightly fazed by the presence of one of the undead...?

The bell rang.

To Bakura's unending disbelief, Malik was out of his seat along with the more conscientious living students, and out the door before the more lazy ones had even bothered moving. He was fast. For a dead guy. He moved almost...almost...

Normally?

He wondered if that was harsh. But, then, being dead and yet very much alive wasn't exactly the general definition of 'normal'.

As he left the classroom, he caught sight of Malik talking to someone near the door. Glancing at them furtively, he saw to his great surprise that he actually recognised the second person, though he couldn't quite place him. Against his better judgement, he paused to half-watch the ongoing conversation, which was starting to look more like a confrontation.

"I'm not a child, Marik," Malik was saying with as much angry heat as a dead-head could summon.

"No, you're just dead," the other (Marik, Bakura supposed, and the name too was familiar) replied bluntly, rolling his eyes. Bakura almost winced. It was considered politically incorrect to remind a zombie that they were indeed dead.

"Doesn't make me helpless. You don't need to wait for me outside every class," Malik snapped, "It's embarrassing."

"Every class? It's the first class of our first day," Marik pointed out irritably, "And I only came to meet you because we have the next class together. Give me a break, Malik."

Malik shut his lips together tightly, appearing conflicted – probably due to feeling a combination of annoyance at being coddled, grudging gratitude that someone wanted to coddle him and slight remorse for being unkind about it. (Maybe experiencing more than one emotion at the same time was a bit too much for the undead brain.) In the end he didn't say anything further, instead choosing to turn away and stomp off towards his next class – without the person who'd come to meet him.

That person (Marik, right?) sighed heavily and shook his head, sending his mass of platinum blonde spikes into a frenzy. When he too turned to head down the corridor, he caught sight of Bakura and paused before grinning and pointing directly at him.

"Hey, I know you," the blonde said, all traces of irritation gone, "Lemme think...Touzoku, right? Bakura...?"

"Right," Bakura said, blinking, "Uh...where...?"

"Aw, don't tell me you forgot," Marik said with mock-hurt, "Three summers ago. Soccer camp. Marik Ishtar."

"Shit, yeah!" Bakura exclaimed with a short laugh as it all came flooding back to him, "God, how could I forget...?"

"I know. Jeez," Marik said with another grin, "Come on, I'm sure a few of the camp leaders must still be in therapy after all the shit we pulled..."

Bakura remembered it all so clearly now that his memory had been jogged. It had been a dry, hot and seemingly endless summer, and he had found a kindred spirit in a certain Marik Ishtar when his parents (mistakenly assuming that, because he played soccer in school, he had an undying desire to spend his whole summer in cleats) had carted him off to the nearest sports camp. The two of them had raised merry hell for a month or so and had become fairly inseparable, but lived nowhere near each other and, being equally scatterbrained as well as equally mischievous, had managed to fall out of contact by the end of the year.

This felt like some kind of weird dream – and not the horrific kind that usually haunted Bakura's sleeping hours. How many times since Ryou's death had he wished Marik (with whom he had simply clicked and who he knew would understand him infinitely better than Jou and the rest of the fail-crew) was here?

"I almost didn't recognise you," Bakura said with a small smirk, looking the other up and down. He was a lot taller than he remembered, and definitely less scrawny.

"It has been three years."

"So how come you suddenly transferred to this dump?" Bakura questioned, folding his arms.

"Oh, that. It was mostly because of..."

Marik trailed off and his expression became more serious all of a sudden. Bakura found his momentary good humour fading. He sensed he was about to learn something he might not like.

"You just come out of Chem?" Marik asked, jerking his head in the direction of the nearby door.

"Yeah..." Bakura confirmed, getting an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach.

"You met Malik, then?" the other questioned. Bakura found himself oddly unsurprised at hearing the name, "Or maybe not, I know he's not the most approachable or communicative..."

"No, we met," Bakura told him, "You know him?"

"Hah, well I'd hope so. He's my brother," Marik said with a laugh, "Twin, to be more precise. Which I guess is why our parents thought it would be ok to give us ridiculously similar names..."

"Your brother?" Bakura repeated, trying not to gape. He suddenly realised that the two of them did look very alike. But it was easy to forget that dead people didn't just pop up from nowhere, that they had families too, "Oh yeah, uh...you two are pretty similar."

"I know, right? We used to be totally identical, back before..." Marik started before trailing off and looking to the side briefly. His eyes flicked back to Bakura's face, and he immediately got the uncomfortable sensation of being scrutinised, carefully considered and judged. It was as if the blonde was searching for something in his eyes, his expression, something he needed to see was there before he could continue.

"Malik's dead, y'know," Marik said finally. His eyes (violet, like Malik's, but a lot less intense, a lot more alive) remained fixed on Bakura's face, clearly gauging his reaction.

"...Yeah, I know," Bakura admitted quietly. He looked away. He couldn't help it.

"Shit, you could tell?" Marik asked with a grim chuckle, "He's not gonna like that."

"I think it was the eyes, mostly...he doesn't blink," Bakura said awkwardly, not mentioning that he also thought those eyes looked like they were carved from crystal and that he felt they could see right through every façade he put up to fool them, "But he's not like any others I've seen. Not at all."

Marik gave a small sigh. Through the milling mass of students up ahead, they could still see Malik's retreating back as he fought through the crowd – most of whom would probably never notice that he didn't blink or breathe. At a glance, he could easily pass for a beating heart.

"Yeah, he looks good, doesn't he?" Marik said with a wistful smile.

"Uh...I guess," Bakura said without conviction. Then he thought of Ryou, and of how death had sapped him of all vitality and almost all mobility, all recognisability, and he suddenly found himself able to say with renewed certainty, "Yeah. He does."

"Anyway, he's kind of why the family moved here," Marik said conclusively, "Domino High's getting a pretty good reputation for the way it handles living impaired students."

Bakura supposed that was why so many dead-heads had been popping up over the past year or so. Though if Domino was supposedly one of the better schools for the undead, he sure wouldn't like to see one of the more inhospitable establishments.

"Does it bother you?" Marik asked abruptly, almost suspiciously, "Him being dead."

"Well...yeah. Kind of," Bakura admitted with a shrug, "I don't go around burning zom- uh, living impaired people at the weekends or anything. But I won't lie, it creeps me out a little."

"Heh. At least you're honest," Marik said with a wan smile, "Tell the truth, it used to creep me out a lot. Before Malik died. Actually, it still creeped me out for a while after he died. It took a bit of getting used to. But I guess no one can really be comfortable with it unless they know someone who's 'living impaired'. So I won't hold it against you as long as you go easy on him, k?"

Bakura nodded despite not really knowing what he was agreeing to. He knew it hadn't been intentional, but Marik's words had knocked some of the wind out of him. No one can really be comfortable with it unless they know someone...So was he being excused on the grounds of ignorance? But he did know someone 'living impaired', his best friend was walking around dead and he still couldn't find it in him to overcome his inexplicable repulsion-

"You in cookery class now?" Marik asked, snapping him out of his sickening thoughts.

"What? Oh. Yeah," he replied after checking his still-unfamiliar timetable.

"Me too. And Malik," the blonde said with a grin that was almost wicked, "I hope he doesn't feel too bad, chopping up some other dead meat..."

Bakura stared at him, eyes bulging somewhat. Marik laughed loudly as they started to walk down the corridor (which was now empty apart from other tardy students).

"Sorry, did that sound bad?" the blonde said, still laughing, "Me and Malik joke about it quite a lot. It makes it easier, I guess."

"I see..." Bakura said uncertainly, shaken by the crass-sounding comment.

For the rest of the way to the cookery room, the subject of the walking dead abruptly vanished from their conversation. Marik launched into the usual catch-up questions – how've you been, still playing soccer, any other sports, know what you wanna do when you get out of this dump? (Fine, no, not really, no.) Then they entered the classroom, and Bakura's heart almost stopped (which was pretty much the most inappropriate metaphor ever, he later mused). He didn't even hear the lecture from the teacher about wandering in late this early in the term, because he was alternating between staring fixedly at the floor and staring reluctantly at the back of the room. Where Ryou was. Ryou was in this class.

Bakura swallowed hard. This wasn't going to be fun.

"Alright everyone, pair up," the teacher ordered, looking almost as harassed as the chemistry teacher had. It seemed to be a universal look for all staff members on the first day, "I don't care that you're hardly back, you're cooking today. Vegetable soup. Recipes and ingredients are at the workstations, and I really hope none of you are so hopeless that you could mess this one up..."

"Vegetable soup," Marik whispered as he and Bakura claimed a workstation with a mutual assumption that they'd be working together if only to continue catching up, "It's ok, no dead meat..."

They'd just located all the equipment they would require and were about to start preparing the vegetables when the teacher spoke up again.

"Ahem. I don't think this partnership is a very good idea," she said primly, folding her arms and tapping her foot. Bakura looked up, wondering if she was referring to him and Marik, but quickly realised it was nothing to do with two latecomers working together. Malik and Ryou were standing next to each other, the former staring the teacher down with a look of sheer disdain and the latter gazing mutely at the floor. Bakura should have known they would end up together. No one ever wanted to partner with the dead kids. And even if the others in the class hadn't noticed that Malik was among the ranks of the living impaired, he was new, unknown, and therefore nobody's first choice.

"Is there a problem?" Malik enquired politely enough, but so coldly and with such ice in his eyes that Bakura almost felt like flinching even though he wasn't the target.

"Oh yes, there's a problem," the teacher snapped, "Any 'living impaired' student in the class is bad enough, but two of you working together? I do not think so. We'd be here until next week."

If possible, the freezing look in Malik's eyes intensified to the extent that it seemed impossible that the teacher wouldn't be struck down where she stood. Bakura could understand his apparent rage. The teacher had just kind of 'outed' him as a zombie. And it seemed as if most of the kids in the class really hadn't noticed before, if the way they were now ogling him was any fair indication.

"One of you switch into another pair," the teacher said curtly, "I don't care which."

She bustled off to do God knows what. Probably just to avoid Malik's scathing glare, which must have been unnerving her.

There was a long and absolutely deathly silence. Malik scowled around the room, chin stuck out in an unspoken challenge. What the fuck are you all looking at?

"Sorry, Bakura. I can't just leave him there," Marik said with an apologetic smile, crossing the room (completely ignoring the stares of the other students) and exchanging a few words with his much deader twin. Malik looked thoroughly pissed off at his brother having to come to his rescue, but seemed aware that it was a necessity. No one else was going to crack and offer to work with either of the undead students.

It was with mixed feelings that Bakura watched Malik eventually turn and walk briskly towards him. A part of him was shamefully nervous about working alongside a zombie again – and in a practical class. But a much larger portion of him was simply relieved that it was Malik and not Ryou that Marik had sent over.

"Hello again," Malik said tonelessly as he reached the bench, "Ba-ku-ra."

Bakura got the strange feeling that the dead boy was somehow making fun of him.

"I promise my maggots won't contaminate the food," Malik said with a sting in his voice that clearly wasn't aimed directly at Bakura but still managed to cut into him a little. It was intended for all living people, after all. Sorry you're being forced to work with me. Sorry it bothers you so damn much.

"I...before, in Chem...I didn't realise you were Marik's brother," Bakura blurted out clumsily, suddenly wanting to try and treat this kid as normally as he could. It was hard enough being a new student without being immediately ostracised for something that wasn't really your fault and was (as far as medical science was aware) pretty much unchangeable, "Me and him met at soccer camp a few years back."

Malik blinked (which looked stranger than it should have, since Bakura knew it was a conscious response instead of a reflexive one) and then gave one of his ethereal smiles.

"Oh. So you're that Bakura..." he mused aloud, going over to the nearby sink.

Bakura supposed Marik must have told him about all the crazy pranks and rule-breaking the two of them had got up to after the constant, unvaried soccer had started to bore them. He felt somewhat embarrassed that Malik's first impression of him would be based on some stupid things he'd done when he was fourteen.

"You weren't there, were you?" he asked uncertainly when silence started to descend.

"No," Malik replied simply, running the slightly earthy vegetables under the cold tap, "Soccer was...never my thing. Basketball was my sport, before..."

The sentence didn't really require completion. He frowned and looked more intently at the vegetables in the sink.

"Soccer was never really my thing either," Bakura admitted, peeling the flaky skin off of an onion and starting to hack at it with the nearest knife, "My parents just thought it was."

"Yeah?" Malik said, dumping the dripping vegetables onto the worktop. He didn't sound very interested but Bakura wasn't sure if that was, again, just the deadness.

"...I always sucked at basketball, though," he said with a laugh that sounded nervous even to his own ears.

"I used to be pretty good..." Malik said blandly. His expression was impossible to read, "Do you want me to do that?"

"Huh?" Bakura blinked. The blonde boy pointed to the slightly butchered onion.

"It won't hurt my eyes," he said with a furtive smile, "...Also, you're using a bread-knife."

"Really?" Bakura said, blinking again as he looked down at the blade, "Well, shit."

Malik reached over to take the onion from him. As he did so, their fingers nearly touched. Bakura jerked his hand back on an instinct he didn't even know he possessed. Shame burned through him immediately but Malik didn't comment on it, instead merely starting to slice the onion with a small sharp knife.

"...Does it really not make your eyes hurt?" Bakura asked at length, desperate to re-instil some kind of normality after that little slip. His own eyes had already started to water during his brief time with the pungent bulb.

"Onions can't hurt me now," Malik said plainly. Without warning, he made as if to plunge the blade of his knife into the back of his own hand. Bakura only just managed to stifle a yell, "That...wouldn't hurt me either. But it would never heal...so let's not."

"Shit, don't do that!" Bakura yelped, feeling his heart pounding furiously in his chest, "Why...seriously, that was...!"

Malik sniggered softly.

"You're kind of cute," he commented, finishing his neat job of slicing and dicing the onion and moving on to a potato.

Bakura felt his face burn as he reached for a carrot and started peeling it, just for something to look at. He found himself wishing that Malik was just a little slower, a little more zombie-like. A normal zombie (if normal was really the right word) would never have been able to give him a scare like that. A normal zombie wouldn't have been able to move fast enough.

"The boy...I was with before," Malik said, snapping him out of his thoughts, "Do you know his name? He didn't have time to tell me."

Malik must have been standing with Ryou for a good ten minutes, but Bakura still had no trouble believing that the white-haired boy couldn't even stutter out his name in that time. He hoped his unease at this question didn't show on his face. He tried to appear neutral, unmoved – as if he too were one of the dead.

"It's Ryou," he said as flatly as he could. He thought it came out sounding a bit pathetic.

"Oh," Malik replied with the ghost of a smile, "That's...impressive. Most of the breathers here probably...don't even know that."

Bakura struggled to keep his expression uncaring, completely unaffected, but something must have broken through – and Malik must have seen it. Truly an astute zombie.

"Oh," he said again, quieter this time, "I see."

Bakura didn't know exactly what the blonde zombie could 'see', and he didn't really want to find out so he didn't ask. He couldn't help stealing a glance over his shoulder, though. As he might have expected, Marik appeared to be doing most of the work. Ryou was holding a knife (a mildly scary sight in itself) but seemed to lack the motor skills and coordination to put it to any good use. His expression was, as always, completely impassive, but the Ryou that Bakura remembered would have been feeling an overwhelming amount of frustration at being so useless.

Then, to the shock of everyone who noticed, Marik laid down his own knife and went to stand behind Ryou. He reached around and took the dead boy's hands in his own, carefully guiding them so that the knife cut a halved onion into neat, even slices.

A few people stared in undisguised horror. Marik didn't seem to care. Bakura didn't care, either – those stares weren't what mattered. What mattered was that Ryou had turned his head – slowly, slowly – to look at the tall blonde, and his pale dead face had stretched into a small, squint but very real smile.

Bakura felt an unexpected lump in his throat.

"I don't think anyone's done...one nice thing for him since he died," Malik remarked. Bakura jumped, unaware that his partner had been following his line of vision.

"How'd you figure that?" he asked with a frown.

"I just know," Malik said shortly.

By the end of class, everyone (even Marik and Ryou) had managed to produce two servings of something that could pass for vegetable soup.

Bakura tried to be as subtle as possible as he stared across the classroom. Marik was standing there, talking away to Ryou as if it were the most normal thing in the world. Maybe having a dead brother changed your perspective on these things. Ryou, whose vacant gaze never usually left the floor, was looking him raptly in the face, at least appearing to take in his every word. Bakura found himself biting down on his lower lip, waiting with bated breath to see if Ryou would open his mouth and form some kind of reply. It would be a damn miracle, but in the last hour Bakura had seen him smile for the first time since he died, so maybe it was possible, maybe...

"Uh-oh."

Bakura blinked and turned back to his own workstation. Malik had been ladling their soup into two Styrofoam cups, but was currently standing staring into the pot, ladle poised in mid-air.

"What is it?" Bakura asked after a long moment of silence.

"I think my eye just fell in here," Malik said flatly, leaning slightly closer to the pot's contents.

"Seriously?" Bakura gaped, feeling his stomach heave. He gripped the edge of the worktop tightly – because the sight of an eyeball floating in the soup just might make his knees forget their primary function.

"No," Malik said, turning his head to reveal that both his glassy eyes were still safely in their sockets. He was smiling. Or rather, smirking.

"You think you're really funny, don't you?" Bakura muttered, folding his arms and trying to fight down the blush he knew was spreading across the bridge of his nose. He supposed he'd been pretty stupid to fall for that. He'd never heard anything about zombies randomly and unexpectedly losing body parts.

"You're the one who's funny," Malik informed him, still grinning to himself. He finished serving out the soup and pushed both cupfuls towards Bakura, "You...might as well take both of those."

"What? But you did most of the work," he said unthinkingly. He felt the urge to smack himself in the face as he remembered an instant later.

"What am I supposed to do with it?" Malik asked dryly, fixing him with a half-lidded stare. Because, of course, zombies didn't eat.

"Yeah, ok, sorry," Bakura grumbled, pulling one of the cups towards him and inspecting the contents, "Uh. Think we might have overdone it with the blender. It looks like well-digested vomit."

Malik stared at him for a moment before practically sputtering with laughter. His laugh came out a little stilted at first, but quickly settled down and became a surprisingly natural sound. Bakura found himself fighting down a smile too.

"That's gross," Malik reprimanded him.

"And dropping an eyeball in it isn't...?"

The blonde zombie sniggered a little longer before looking serious again as he watched the wisps of steam rising from the cups.

"...Does it smell good?" he asked at length. He looked genuinely curious. Bakura blinked.

"You can't smell it?" he asked in surprise. For the first time, Malik looked embarrassed.

"Not really," he said with an awkward shrug, "I mean, sometimes I...kind of..."

He fell silent, looking off to the side.

Well, that was new. Bakura had never really thought about the dead-heads' sense of smell. He knew they could see and hear and, usually, speak. Touch he wasn't sure of. They didn't seem to feel pain (if onions and knives couldn't hurt them), but they must have some sensation in their bodies; otherwise they wouldn't be able to move, right? But smell...He supposed it was directly linked to taste, which they sure didn't need any more.

"...Yeah, it smells pretty good," he said finally. He raised one cup to his lips and took a mouthful of the dubious-looking substance. Malik looked honestly shocked – after all, dead hands had prepared most of those vegetables. Bakura suppressed a smirk (and possibly a grimace too). Looks like your maggots didn't contaminate it after all.

"Tastes ok too," he concluded after a moment, "But definitely has the consistency of...well-digested vomit."

"Nice," Malik commented.

"Also, I keep imagining an eyeball floating to the surface," Bakura said, setting the cup back on the worktop, "Thanks for that."

"It's my pleasure," Malik said, that ghostly smile hanging around his mouth again.

When the bell rang, Bakura left both cups of soup on the worktop. He didn't need to drink any more of it – he'd made his point.

"Looks like Marik made a friend," Malik said blandly as he shouldered his bag. Bakura turned to look and was dismayed (though not really surprised) to see that he meant Ryou.

"You coming or what, Bakura?" Marik called to him. Ryou's head revolved (slowly, jerkily) to face his direction, but he didn't raise his eyes to look at him.

"...No," Bakura said, already heading for the door, "I said I'd meet my friends...somewhere."

It sounded lame even to his own ears, but he didn't care. As long as he got away. Sure, he'd just spent two classes in a row with Malik, and the blonde boy was surprisingly tolerable and remarkably life-like for a zombie, but Ryou was different. He couldn't be near Ryou. Not now.

"What got into him?" he heard Marik wonder aloud as he hurried away.

"Maybe I scared him," Malik replied.

Happy Halloween, everyone!

I just killed two of my favourite characters D: Somehow I think zombie!Ryou and Malik would be weirdly cute, though. I tried to draw Ryou to demonstrate his creepy cuteness, but I have pretty much no idea what I'm doing when it comes to digital colouring so it's not exactly a masterpiece. But he's my new icon, anyway xD If amateurish art is your thing, take a peek at my deviantART account for the full picture. Username is fiver-chan.

Marik and Bakura are FAR TOO NICE in this story. But I can live with that.

Also, if anyone has any quirky death-related quotes or song lyrics, please send them my way. My plan is to have one at the start of every chapter but I have a seriously limited supply at the moment.

Thanks to Lady Blackwell for beta-ing – you improved this chapter by about 150% (:

Review?

Fiver x