Dollshipping (Yami Bakura x Dark Necrofear) for Round 5 of The Yu-Gi-Oh Fanfiction Contest. WARNINGS: YB/Necrofear and YB/Zorc); bipolarity, the fanon Shadow Realm view where Duel Monsters hang out, general creepiness, and hot Necrofear/YB makeout scenes. (Not really. Well, sort of.) Don't like, don't read.

Disclaimer: I don't own YGO.

A note before reading - this takes place during canon.

Indirect Proof

Bakura glared at the purple-black cloud-earth beneath his feet, at the curling arms of dark mist enveloping the scene on all sides, but mostly at the unconscious boy at his feet, his white hair and features mirror images of Bakura's own. His arms were sore and trembling uncontrollably, his teeth gritted against the burning ache of his skin, but Bakura's pride would not allow him to take a seat on the ground—besides, that would probably only serve to cause him more pain.

He fought a wince as his scowl widened, frowning at the charred, cracked look his arms had taken on after a few hours of him standing in silence—split in places to reveal raw red flesh underneath, the skin was blackened and paper-thin, reminding him unpleasantly of the hide of a roasted pig. He considered attempting to peel it away to see if the nerves had been fried to nothing, but decided against it; it would not be wise to promote infection.

His eyes closed, lids dusted with soot and sweat and pieces of ash that had once been hair, as he saw in his mind's eye the face of what had once been his unwilling helper in Battle City, transformed into a true demon with the power of the Sennen Rod. Bakura was the spirit of a Sennen Item, but unlike the creature that now called itself Ishtar Malik, he could at least claim he was sane.

The power that Yami no Malik had unleashed upon his body had been more than enough to send the three resident souls well within the Shadow Realm, Malik spiraling off to some other location while Bakura and his host had ended up somewhere else. Perhaps it had been foolish for him to believe that the tomb-keeper boy knew the secrets of Ra, but Bakura had always been the one to seek out power, no matter the cost.

It was odd that the damage had been enacted physically rather than psychologically—but then, the Shadow Realm had been created for physical contact with what would otherwise have been nothing but wraiths in the air. Bakura supposed that he should not have been surprised.

Ryou stirred, his hair and face ridiculously immaculate in comparison with the spirit's blackened appearance, and Bakura was sure to keep his expression stony as the boy gaped at him. "S-Spirit, where—"

"The Shadow Realm," he answered flatly, clenching his fist and feeling the muscles of his hand twitch at the searing pain that followed. The skin of his palm crumbled beneath his fingers until his nails were scraping at bare flesh, and he watched as bits of black fluttered and disappeared into the darkness of the ground, willing himself not to make a single sound to indicate that he was suffering. "Thanks to that idiot Malik's plan—which, needless to say, failed."

"What happened to you?" Ryou whispered, and Bakura felt something inside him coil up in disgust at the childish, horrified wonder in his tone.

"This is a physical place," he said, raising his left arm and harshly brushing against the back of his right hand; the area he had rid of skin turned red, beads of blood welling up and quivering there. He held it up to show the boy in front of him, the drops sliding down and dripping off the side of his hand. "And any damage enacted by a Shadow Game is replicated in full on the loser's body."

"My body," Ryou said, his voice caught somewhere between a statement and a question, and the pity Bakura saw in those brown eyes made him want to slap him.

"Your body," he agreed, swiping his fingers down his right arm and carving tracks of red in the dark, charred skin. His voice turned vicious, his words as sharp as the tip of the blade that had created the wound in Ryou's upper arm. "I took the punishment that would have been released upon you. We are equal now, dearest yadonushi—wouldn't you say so?"

"I'm sorry," Ryou murmured, his words almost inaudible.

"Don't be," Bakura snapped back, his hand fisting in his pocket around the smooth cardboard-backed paper there—the card that had almost won him the duel against Yami no Yugi: Dark Necrofear.

The voice spoke to him when he was alone—when he sat on the abandoned roof of Ryou's apartment building at night and stared down at the ignorant people going about their business below, when he stood over the bodies of the schoolchildren whose souls had been trapped in RPG figures and reveled in the rush of power, when he entered the Shadow Realm at whim, as easily as stepping sideways.

Come to me, Bakura, it would say, deep as the darkness itself, low and enticing. Come back, and you will remember everything. Eternity will be at your beck and call, and you will reign over the creatures that Yami no Yugi calls to fight with him in battle; you will best him at last.

The earth before him would open, splitting into a gaping chasm whose bottom he could not see, and the phantom wind at his back would push him forward until he fought against it, its force so strong that he could lean backwards and remain upright.

Not yet? The voice would laugh at him, its mirth shaking the ground beneath his feet. I shall wait, then, until the time that you are ready to join me once more.

"What's going on?" Ryou screamed at him, his usually passive attitude disrupted by the very imminent threat of death. His hands clutched the edge of the cliff, grasping uncertainly for hold on the dark blue-violet wisps of magic and somehow finding solid ground to latch on to.

Bakura was balancing with one foot on an outcrop of cloud-earth while holding on to another above him with his left arm, because as much as he would have liked to think otherwise, his right had been burned and abused too much to use. "We're falling," he said matter-of-factly, his voice cold.

"Where?" Ryou demanded, his eyes wide and panicked as he slipped further down. His fingers, splayed awkwardly on the ground above him, were slowly inching toward the edge of the chasm; Bakura gave him about a minute before he was forced to let go.

Bakura glanced down to be met with a wide expanse of blackness, so complete that he could not see a thing. "Deeper down," he said instead, because he would not be caught admitting to ignorance.

"Deeper down to what?" Another fraction of an inch. Ryou's legs were flailing desperately for hold on the side of the cliff, only functioning to accentuate the rate at which he was losing his grip.

Bakura opened his mouth to give some sort of answer, but—

Let go.

He paused; Ryou paused; the entire world seemed to go still.

Hello, Bakura; we meet once more.

Bakura was frozen, the voice tugging at something in his mind, some sort of forgotten memory resurfacing, darting out of his mental grasp so that he could not get a strong hold on it—

Don't you remember me? Laughter. Ryou whimpered as the ground shook, struggling to keep his hold on the outcrop. Bakura was transfixed, his face for once showing something besides smugness or contempt, his eyes staring into the darkness over the boy's shoulder.

I taught you everything you know now, boy, and you don't have the gratitude to acknowledge my presence? The voice was amused now, the question rhetorical. Surely the Pharaoh's memory loss does not apply to you too?

"Trust me." It was a woman's voice that said those words, assured and promising.

Bakura's hand reached almost automatically to his pocket, tracing the contours of the card there. Dark Necrofear.

He stepped off the ledge he was standing on, yanking Ryou down with him despite the boy's startled cry, and together they plummeted down, down, down.

The laughter rang through the air again. Welcome home.

The memories smashed into him like the full-force roar of a cannon, and Bakura smiled. Home.

"Where are we now?" Ryou said, looking rather terrified of the complete darkness surrounding him on all sides.

Bakura smirked, his teeth gleaming white despite the presence of no light whatsoever—how they could see each other had always been a curious concept for him, but then, the Shadow Realm was an odd place. The lighting was uneven and dim, and even though he knew this place like no other, Bakura was still somewhat bothered by it. "In the deepest recesses of the Shadow Realm, yadonushi dearest, a place where not many have dared to venture. It is here that the Duel Monsters roam—in the lands beyond this place, where they linger in woods and marshes and empty towers, waiting for their prey to arrive."

"What are we doing here?" Ryou asked, his eyes sliding left and right as if he was expecting something to jump out on one side and attack him—quite wise, Bakura thought.

"Welcome," someone said before he could respond, and they both turned to see a woman with dark blue skin, pointed elfin ears, and glowing green-slit eyes standing before an entrance of tangled vines that had appeared behind her. She smiled with lips that melded evenly with the rest of her face, cradling a cracked baby doll in her clawed arms, her left encased in an armor-like purple sheath. "Feel free to enter when you wish to."

"Necrofear?" Ryou murmured, staring in horror at the mutilated doll in the woman's arms.

The smile widened, Necrofear's hands tightening around the doll's chipped body. She passed a finger across the gaping hole in its head, deliberately breaking off a portion of its eye. "Yes."

"We'll stay here," Bakura said, reveling in the newly-healed skin of his palms as they stood in the main room of the tiny house that they had been assigned.

"For how long?" Ryou snapped, his temper unusually short—most likely a result of the events of the past few hours, in which they had been repeatedly attacked by groups of Scapegoats while traveling through a forest.

"For as long as it takes me to heal," he retorted, scowling at the charred-black ends of his hair. Zorc had promised him that the power of the Shadows would speed up the recovery process, which was good—after all, Bakura didn't know how long it would take for the Pharaoh to destroy Yami no Malik and restore souls to their correct bodies, and it would not do for him to return to the physical world in a weakened state.

"And how long will that be?" Ryou asked wearily, slumping back into a couch of sorts before jerking upright once more and frantically brushing scattered bones off his clothes. Bakura noticed with some satisfaction the tiredness in his eyes—the Shadow Realm sapped one's energy quickly, ridding it unfortunate victims of the will to sustain any strong emotions.

Bakura shrugged. "As long as necessary."

"What about Necrofear and her new doll?" The question was unexpected, not fitting in with the rest of the conversation.

"New?" Bakura said. "Hasn't it always been there?"

Ryou frowned at him. "Not when I first bought her card."

The darkness has no emotion, for it is not human. It yearns to feel, yet it cannot. And so the rule of entropy applies to it a hundred times over, as it tests each emotion time after time in an attempt to figure out what is natural—for no feeling can be natural to it.

He met Dark Necrofear on the outskirts of the forest the next day, staring out at the dark, narrow stream that ran as a barrier between the trees and the vast plain to the east, racing over the rocks on the riverbed to create rapids that threw up dark-foamed spray.

"Hello," she said without turning around, tenderness in the way she held the broken doll in her arms. Her voice was light and lilting—much different from the smirking foreboding present when she had greeted him and Ryou the day before.

He paused as she knelt down, dragging the lone arm of the doll through the water so it came up stained dark gray, dripping onto the grass. "What are you doing?"

She giggled, actually giggled, turning around so that droplets of the odd liquid flew through the air and landed on the trunks of trees. "Letting the child taste the water, of course!" she said, her expression bright, and there was something oddly attractive in the carefree glow of her once-strange eyes and the half-hollow purple armor encasing her legs and arm. She beckoned to him with a blue-clawed finger, effortlessly leaping the five feet to the other side of the stream and bending to splash him with the doll's hand.

On a whim, he splashed her back, grinning when it landed on her arm and splattered over the top half of the doll's head. She laughed and tossed it over the rushing river to him, distracting him so that she could hit him directly in the chest with another spray of water and duck his retort.

As the broken porcelain doll flew through the air between them like the playing ball of a children's game, he could hear something like the faint echoes of laughter in the air, as high and bubbling as that of a baby.

"You broke it." Necrofear's words were low and dangerous.

Bakura frowned at her, glancing from her angry expression to the blank smile of the doll in her arms, as dilapidated as ever. "What do you mean?"

She gestured toward the gaping hole in its head, its jagged edges looking likely to draw blood from her armor-clad fingers. Inside, its skull was hollow and white, surprisingly smooth despite the flecks of black dirt that marred its perfection, and the porcelain that it was made of was barely thicker than a peanut shell. "You broke it and killed it, and now it will never live again!" Her voice was sharp and harsh, a whiplash to his ears, and it made no sense in comparison to the easy happiness she had shown the day before.

"But it wasn't exactly alive to begin with," Bakura pointed out.

"Not alive?" she said, holding up the doll before him and tracing the other side of its head lovingly. "It was more alive than you are now, living on a demon's charity in a demon's land, too weak to even heal yourself! You were the Dark One's greatest protégée, the first human to survive this part of the Shadow Realm, and look at what you have become—a parasite, living in the body of a boy who happened to pick up the Sennen Ring and be born into the same generation as the Pharaoh's host. Have you thought of a way to beat him yet, even with the restoration of your memories and a portion of the Dark One's soul locked inside the Sennen Puzzle? Have you?"

Bakura scowled at her, folding his arms and shoving the doll away. "That will take time—"

"You don't have time," she snapped, her eyes two snake-thin slits of green. "Who knows when the Pharaoh will take the God Cards and use them to find his true name? You cannot be unprepared then as you are unprepared now, and if you are, the Dark One will be displeased."

Before he could respond, she turned on her heel and left.

"Do you know what they used to do here?" Necrofear said, pointing at a lone stone tablet lying flat on the ground.

Bakura shrugged and remained silent, frowning at her back and still fuming from what she had said to him before.

"They used to kill children," she said calmly when he didn't answer, tracing the edge of the rock and cradling the ever-present doll in her other arm. "In the nomadic times, a large population made it more difficult to continue moving from place to place. So when women had children when the tribe could not support them, they came to rocks, placed the children there, and broke their necks." She climbed up, standing on it so that she towered a foot above him.

Shocked out of his brooding, Bakura glanced up to see her take the doll into both hands and raise it above her head. "What are you doing?"

She gave him a slow smile, blue lips pulling back to reveal pointed white teeth. "Killing it."

The doll twisted through the air, its eyes wide and unaware as it smashed into the rock and shattered into a thousand jagged pieces, the porcelain flying through the air in glittering, iridescent arcs. Necrofear stared down at the few shards that still remained at her feet and laughed once, quietly—an eerie, unsettling sound. "Fatality."

"How did you get your doll back?" Bakura demanded the next day.

Necrofear simply smiled at him, an odd blank smile that seemed to fit the RPG figures that Ryou used to make more than her. "Where did it go?"

"You broke it," he said, knowing how little sense his words made because of the fact that he could see it clearly in her arms, exactly the same as it had been before. There were no marks on it that indicated that it had been repaired, and its head was chipped off in the exact same place—over its eyes, creating an uneven line that streaked three quarters of the way across its forehead.

The smile was still there. "No, I didn't."

"But I saw—"

"Maybe you saw wrong." Her voice was sweet, her eyes holding no deeper meaning—and for a moment, staring into them to make sure that it wasn't a trick of some sort, Bakura felt a sickening sweep of nausea envelop him, making the forest and dark gray sky swim before his eyes.

It was too artificially happy, cloyingly so, like the thick smell of incense that had once hung around the bodies of the dead as embalmers were at work, like the taste of modern medicine that dissolved into bitterness shortly after entering the mouth.

He left in silence, and Necrofear did not question him—she simply remained where she was standing, the smile lingering on her lips as one blue finger stroked the face of her doll.

Necrofear's eyes were desperate for once, wide and panicked and somehow more human than they had appeared before, as she clutched his arm and attempted to speak. Her doll was gone. "T-The D-Dark One—he took—"

Bakura frowned at her. "What?"

She choked on her words, her mouth moving as no sound came out. "I can't—"

Exasperated, Bakura shook her off and walked away.

Ryou didn't even glance up as Bakura returned home, engrossed in flipping through a large stack of tarot cards—there were six or seven additional piles on the desk in front of him, and more spread out face-up for him to see better.

"What do you know about Necrofear?" Bakura asked.

Ryou shrugged, going through the cards quicker than before, each making no sound as he dropped them heedlessly onto the ground beside him. "She's your monster."

"Then if she's being confusing, who do I go to for clarification?" he said, not quite believing what he had sunk to—asking his host of all people for advice.

"There should be a relationship counselor somewhere in the Shadow Realm," Ryou suggested flatly, his tone perhaps more acidic than before as the cards formed a pile at his feet.

"There isn't."

The last card fluttered through the air and Ryou froze for a moment, tracking its progress with his eyes. "I'm not helping you," he said carefully, standing up as if the floor itself would crack beneath him at any moment. "Bye."

Unprepared for his words, Bakura was too shocked to do anything but watch as his form flickered and disappeared.

Pomegranates are not the only things that can tie people to places where they do not wish to stay. There will always be personal connections too, for those are hundreds of times stronger than any other—they involve the heart and the soul, and those transcend the physical body.

"This," Necrofear said, holding up an immaculate, shining blade, "is a knife."

"I know."

She held it in one hand, placing the tip against her arm and pressing down so hard that Bakura fully expected it to sink through more than an inch and draw blood. He didn't protest, though—he had learned to leave Necrofear alone when she was acting as strangely as she was then, although her so-called 'mood swings' had become too constant to be labeled as passing whims.

Nothing happened—her skin remained as unmarked as Bakura's was then, completely healed from the burns he had suffered after Ra's attack. "See?" she said, tossing the knife away and paying it no attention when it landed with a thud on the ground. "No blood. I am not human, Bakura."

His name sounded strange when coming from her lips—Bakura wasn't sure if she had ever said it before. "I realized that."

Her laugh was harsh. "Then why do you imagine this?"

She grabbed him by the collar of his shirt and smashed their mouths together, pressing her lips to his and her body to his, the cold porcelain form of the doll trapped between them. Almost automatically—a knee-jerk response implanted in him from those dry sweltering days in Egypt many, many years ago—he kissed her back, arms coming up to grasp her by the head and shoulders and mouth parting to accommodate hers, shivering at the cold, cold feel of her skin against his. He felt her fingers tangled in his hair, nails dragging down the side of his face, and he closed his eyes.

The kiss dragged on for an indefinite period of time, and Bakura felt inexorably as if he was falling further and further into her, sinking through whatever barriers she had put up in her mind and reaching out to see what lay at her very core—

He felt darkness, nothing but darkness, horrifying and absolute and utterly, utterly repulsive. Even he, a person who fed on the power that the Shadows provided, had not sunk this low; even Yami no Malik, created of the darkness, could not rid himself of what remnants of light he still possessed; even Duel Monsters, once the ka creatures of everyday people in Egypt, had past lives to tie them firmly to reality. This, what he was kissing, was not one of them.

He shoved her back, not caring when the doll fell to the ground and lay there helplessly, its glassy eyes almost pleading with him. That darkness he had known only once before. "…Zorc."

Necrofear straightened, not bothering to pick the doll up. "What do you mean?" It was that eerie smile on her face again, the blank, ignorant smile that challenged the world to tell it the truth.

"You're Zorc." He could not hide the horror from his voice.

"And yet you love me." The smile was amused now, mocking and laughing, but Bakura did not have the willpower to respond.

"Why?"

She tilted her head. "Why not? Human emotions, though you are not human, are curious things. And you, my dearest protégée, have failed me once before, and will fail me again."

"It was you, all that time?" he managed.

"Not in the very beginning," she allowed, bending down to hold the doll limply by the shoulder. "Was this there all that time?"

"What about Necrofear and her new doll?"

"New? Hasn't it always been there?"

"Not when I first bought her card."

"The doll is her," he/she said, raising it high above her head, her snake eyes accompanied by a snake's smile. She dropped it carelessly, letting it smash against the ground, and this time it exploded into a burst of white light, fully illuminating the room and letting Bakura see it properly for the first time since he had entered the Shadow Realm. "And now it's not."

Bakura swore that as the broken porcelain figure disappeared before his eyes, he heard a sound echoing through the distant forests to the north, a sound like the sobbing of a child.

"What have you done with Bakura?" the Pharaoh demanded from across the RPG table, his eyes desperate and yet angry with fear for his friends.

Zorc smiled, fingering the card in the pocket of Bakura's trench coat. "No matter what you do, he won't be coming back."

The End

You see how cleverly I covered up Necrofear's lack of canon personality? xD

Endnotes: There are lots of implied events here; you decide what they mean. The thing about hunter-gatherers practicing infanticide is true. The part about breaking their childrens' necks on rocks is probably not.

There may be a sequel to this (a.k.a. Chapter 2) that goes up during the summer, describing what happens between the two final scenes.

Reviews are awesome; concrit is especially loved. So review, please! :]