Don't own nothing! Bakura and Ryou are not mine, obviously :)

A gift for my sis, Hana-Liatris!

The Ring

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The hot wind beat incessantly on his face as he trod with difficulty on the soft ground. Ryou felt filthy, from the dirt that got everywhere, the headache and the thick beads of perspiration that ran down his brow and soaked the collar of his tan-colored garment. He despised that path completely, but knew it like the back of his hand for years on years of walking it. He'd tied his horse to a semi-reliable old tree at the entrance of the valley, and, like always, he prayed the beast would not run away from the sun and the scorpions. But so far, such a thing had never happened.

He didn't dare not go alone into that place. Although they had never shown themselves to him, he knew they were there… the lost souls, he meant. He had always believed in ghosts, he'd always had this knack for feeling and seeing things ordinary people did not. Right, he would never go telling that to anyone, and maybe he had won a fair deal of weird stares back in the times he played Duel Monsters. "That's weird, man!", he sometimes remembered someone had told him that once. Well, he'd thought, we all have a private side to us. The point is, he felt them, everywhere in that forsaken nook of the desert… they made stones tremble and the wind howl like possessed, and everything, even the unending sand, gave off that vibration… He could not properly explain it, not that he would ever need to. It was enough for him to go alone in there. He smelled their anger and their violence, and for the life of him, he would never expose anyone, not even his horse, to such strong auras.

It remained a mystery to him how he could walk unharmed, how, although his feet felt swollen and painful, his eyes burned with sand and dirt and drought and he was soaked in sweat inside and caking hot in the outside, how, nothing ever even grazed him. Each and every year, for many years now, he'd lost count, he would come. He'd never reached the end of the valley as he left, that the devious wind already swiped his footsteps into a sandy forgetfulness; and he had been told he was foolish to come punctually every single year to Egypt only to remain for a couple of days (no one knew what he did, anyway).

It was not as if he could help it, it was as if his heartstrings pulled him to that place out of a sour, sore emotion he couldn't name. A terrible, hollowing what if.

Marveling at the saddening state of decay of that place, he trod on, past earthen foundations of houses and traces of what could have been streets. It was alien to imagine that once, millennia ago, that place had known water, vegetation, laughter. The desert had swallowed it all into that despairing barrenness.

He knew the entrance to the underground chamber, he'd always known it, although he never knew how. He'd easily found it the first time he'd come, and kept finding it whenever he returned… once, only once, he had a thought to spare to that bitter young man he'd met back when there were still Millennium Items, Malik was his name. Ryou had wondered whether it was him and his family that kept that chamber from collapsing, but then again, the place emanated such strong, dry energy, that perhaps it survived through the centuries on its own accord, nurturing from the stone tablet that lay in its debris-littered center (still active, still magical, still evil).

He didn't know, he figured he wasn't too enthusiastic to know either. The tingling behind his eyelids of the presences of the lost souls drove away the loneliness and the stiff, suffocating sensation of being underground. But didn't put his heart at any ease.

Dim afternoon light trickled into the chamber from its half-obstructed entrance and a couple of cracks on the roof, making it eerie and unwelcoming.

And solemn.

Ryou crouched next to the tablet, and let his thoughts carry him anywhere. He'd lost count, but what he did know was that that day was an anniversary of sorts. That very same day, many years in the past, he'd woken up free of the Ring, and alone. He'd, very reluctantly, followed in his father's footsteps, and knew so much of the world and ancient magics that he did wish he didn't sometimes.

He'd never found the Ring.

He'd never really understood if he'd been seeking it all those years.

Wherever he was, he always returned to have a word or two with the stone tablet that held it… Or sometimes he just stayed there, looking at it, drowning in dirt and darkness and half-shaped recollections.

"Would you stop doing that?"

The voice stilled even the lost souls at the edge of the darkness, and reverberated through the chamber as if it had been made of lightning and thunder, even if it had been a couple of muttered words.

Ryou's blood ran like ice in his veins, and he went blank, and, for the first time in what felt like ages, he became scared.

"Hurting, regretting, I don't know," the muttering continued, "…don't care, but quit it."

Silence. Ryou was not answering any time soon.

"Ten years you've been droning on about it, you may be happy now," there was no reproach in the way those words were said, but rather, sullen weariness, "dragging me out of the afterlife to please tell you to shut up."

Shut up… it echoed. Ryou knew the voice then, he recalled a face and- "What?". It was the best he could come up with, and his very own, quiet voice, caused no echo at all in that horrible earthen vault.

A torch flickered into life, and Ryou discovered with horror a figure sitting on the stone tablet, on the end that was furthest from him. At once he knew the outline, and he feebly stood up and took a couple of steps towards him. He was huskily warned to stay away, but he paid no heed. Scarce feet away from the spirit, Ryou knew instantly, it was a spirit, a ghost.

He frowned softly, feeling at a loss for everything. "I knew it was you, I knew your voice."

The spirit did not do him the favor of looking him in the eyes.

"I didn't want to disturb your afterlife," the young man said softly, "I don't even know why I kept coming here."

The spirit shrugged, and it was somehow a familiar thing.

"It always felt weird after you left"

They'd called him Yami Bakura years ago, but now, he was just a nameless ghost hovering over the remains of a village he'd lived in once.

"What is the afterlife like?" Ryou did not want to make small talk. He really did not- but he was terrified of the silence, and of the strong presence before him. Familiar and unfamiliar, less maleficent but always as bitter, restless.

"Hell," the spirit answered, "It's always hell for thieves, murderers and necromancers. And I was all three of those."

Ryou knew he was asking childish questions. But the setting and the feeling were surreal, and he meant every word when he asked, "Can you come back?"

A smirk flashed on a transparent face, tan three thousand years in the past, "Ten years, and still as alone as always?" the spirit mocked.

"Yes," the young man admitted. "Wasn't it always so for you too?"

The spirit scowled, quietly.

"Would you come back if I found the Ring?" Childish, Ryou thought, childish. But it was probably the way the spirit remembered him, if he did remember him. Childish.

"I'm not of this world anymore, landlord," and it sounded like it should make sense to Ryou, but it did not, only that it somehow meant that he was truly a ghost now, and not a spirit.

"Everything should have been different," the young man said bitterly, and sat down on the tablet, next to the spirit. He could not help it. It would always be a spirit for him, bending the bonds between this world and the next one. Or was he not talking to him right then…?

Deeply, both Ryou and the spirit that had probably been a past life of his were afraid to decipher what the young man had meant by different.

Ryou sighed. "With no pharaoh, no Ring,"

"It doesn't matter how many lives we live," the spirit said after a while, "We will always be bound to the Ring."

A spark of discontent bittered Ryou. "What, are we cursed in every dimension?" he asked, looking fully at the spirit for the first time.

"It's not a curse, landlord," he said, locking eyes with him, sounding so weary that Ryou's heart flinched for the heart of the man in front of him, that had never done so, "It's a duty"

Ryou's questioning look was met with hollow eyes filled with contempt, "If not us, then who?"

The young man stood up after a while of contemplating their dialogue in the perfect silence. He asked the spirit if he would return to the afterlife when he left the village again.

"Probably not to that one," the spirit said, flashing a creepy smirk and becoming one with the darkness again.

The torchlight flickered out.

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A/N: So? What do you think? Perhaps this could be an introduction rather than a one-shot...

(wink at Hana-Liatris ;) )

26-year-old Ryou... mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm sexxyyyy *_*

{BTW, I uploaded chapter 13 of my you x Yami Malik story! Check it out ;) It taked place in the Shadow Realm }