Chapter Text
It all started because of Ryou’s Gran.
She was a strange old woman with wild white hair, the same his father would age into quickly later on and the same he came by naturally. When Ryou was very small, she would dazzle him with dark fairytales: stories of witches and dark curses, fantastic monsters, grim fates. His father would stand by shaking his head as Ryou listened to her whisper excitedly, gnarled hands flaring out in bright gesticulation as Ryou stared on with eyes full of stars.
“Ugh,” his father would groan, dragging a hand down his face. “Mum, come on. You’re going to scar him if you keep on telling stories like that.” He’d never stop her, though. He was the sort of pacifist that tried to avoid conflict before it ever started, and so he never made demands.
But his mother would just laugh, his baby sister still teething a chilled ring on her hip. “Oh, come on, Charles. Let her tell it.” She would smile, and his father would just sigh, because he could never deny her anything. “Look how happy it makes him!”
Ha.
When his Gran passed away, he was too young yet to understand what all the tears were for. When it finally clicked months later that he would never see her toothy smile again, never revel in another mad story as she painted pictures of empty forests, ramshackle houses, and empty tombs, he finally cried.
His parents were horrified when they found him trying to perform a séance, a circle drawn in black chalk in his carpet and all the house’s scented candles sticking up his room.
It was his first experience with death.
He would have given anything for it to have been his last, but it was far, far from it.
Gran might as well have written those stories in Ryou’s DNA.
Ryou entered primary school with a book on famous ghosts in his backpack, and he would read it under the table, in between lessons, out on the playground. He had developed a fascination with death, and he fantasized about meeting a real ghost one day. He wondered about how they lived and how they died. He wanted to ask them. Perhaps it was a lingering remnant of the time he spent with his Gran, that speaking to them was like speaking to her, but...he didn’t really think about it that hard.
He still spoke to her, sometimes. When he was alone in the house, or in the hallway with no one around, be would talk to her. He liked to imagine that she was somewhere nearby. Most tangibly, he wrote her letters, detailing his days and all the stories that they might have talked about until his hands cramped. His parents worried about this, but their therapist told them it was a healthy, albeit unusual, coping mechanism, and so the let it go.
But he was now being subjected to a class of his peers, and they thought his albino pale was spooky so they kept their distance.
“I’m having some concerns about Ryou,” his year one teacher politely folded her hands over her knees, his parents sitting with furrowed expressions across from her.
“Well, what’s wrong?” His mother asked, leaning forward slightly.
He pretended not to hear them, playing with blocks that were far too young for him anyway, even in primary. He stacked them up along the floor as he listened to the conversation, the block’s corners catching along the playmat.
“He’s usually so well-behaved.”
His instructor raised her delicate hands. “No, no! Ryou’s an angel in class. It’s just...he doesn’t get along so well with the other students.”
He had been thinking about making a castle, and he stacked up the blocks to make the first wall. It was going to have a tower and a dungeon. He was already thinking about what kinds of ghosts might live in the dungeon, trying to come up with names for them.
“He tends to isolate himself pretty frequently. He’s much less social than the other children. There isn’t anything going on at home, is there?”
His mother and father looked at one another. “No,” said his mother, sounding alarmed. “He’s always been a shy boy. You don’t think there’s something wrong, do you?”
“That’s ridiculous. Umiko and I would have noticed something,” his father butted in.
The teacher shifted in her seat. “W-well, I wouldn’t necessarily say that anything is wrong, per se...”
As he listened, Ryou noticed a shadow move over him as the color of his blocks darkened. Glancing up, he found three of the other boys standing over him. He just looked at them, wondering what they wanted.
The first one, Jeffrey, crossed his pudgy arms. “Why’d you look like a girl?”
Ryou blinked, caught off guard. “I don’t look like a girl,” he frowned.
“Yeah, y’ do,” said another, Roger, narrowing his eyes and tilting his head. “Your hair’s all long n’ stupid.”
Stupid? Ryou brought his hands up to his hair, placing his hands over it defensively. He looked over to his parents and the teacher, but, just as before, they were facing the other way. “It’s not stupid,” he muttered defensively. His mother said it made him look like a handsome gentleman.
“Yeah it is,” Jeffrey nodded, and his silent third nodded with him. “It’s stupid and creepy, like your face.”
The other two giggled in agreement.
Ryou set his blocks down. Why were they saying these things? He didn’t know them. He never talked to them. “I’m not creepy,” he said firmly.
“You’re always reading ghost books,” said Roger. “That’s creepy. Oh, maybe you are a ghost!” He said the words like he’d made some kind of grand discovery, puffing his chest out, Jeffrey following Oh yeah! “That’s why you’re so pale all the time. I’m a genie.”
Behind him, he heard his teacher say, “I just think that his lack of socialization might be bad for his growth. He has to learn it sometime, and it’s easiest when they’re young.”
“...isn’t it geni-us?” said Jeffrey.
Roger scratched his cheek. It was almost like they’d forgotten they were talking to him. “You knew wot I meant though.”
“Yeah, yeah; that’s fair.”
“I heard his gran died.”
All three of their heads snapped to attention as the third boy spoke. He was smaller than the others, and Ryou didn’t know his name, but he spoke from behind Jeffrey’s shoulder.
The words put a lump in his chest. Ryou didn’t like thinking about her not being there anymore. It made him feel helpless; he remembered his failed séance. Why bring up my Gran?
Jeffrey took a step back, giving the other boy room. “Yeah?” His brow was furrowed, like he didn’t know what the third boy was going to say.
“Ryou’s developing fine,” he heard his father’s voice from the conference table. “He’s a very bright boy.”
His mother added, “And he has a great imagination.”
His teacher hesitated. “...yes, but—”
The third boy’s big eyes were focused on Ryou, and, in that moment, Ryou couldn’t help but find him a little ‘creepy.’ “I bet she became a creepy ghost,” he said. “She became a gross, creepy ghost, and she’s haunting him and that’s why he’s creepy.”
“Oh,” said Roger.
His father sighed. “Look. I understand your concerns. But Ryou’s doing perfectly fine. Sure, he gets a little sucked into his hobbies, but don’t all young boys?” He gestured over to where Ryou was standing. “See? Look—he’s talking with three other boys, right now.”
Slowly, his mother stood up, calling over to him cautiously. “...Ryou?”
As it happened, they turned their attention back over just in time to see him punch the third boy in the face.
His mother cried.
They’d had to sit down with the principal, who didn’t seem to understand how terrible it was that they’d said something bad about his Gran. The man just seemed stern, and seeing his mother’s distraught face, he uncomfortably let Ryou off with a warning.
Ryou couldn’t help but feel bitter that the Third boy wasn’t sitting outside on the bench, awaiting his own turn. He was the one that said mean things.
Instead, when they emerged into the hall, his mother let out a little panicked noise, and Ryou looked up to her in alarm. She kneeled beside him, and out of the corner of his eye, he could see the other kids looking at the scene from down the hall.
“Ryou,” she cried. “I don’t want you to ever start a fight again, okay? Be kind. Even if they deserve it. That’s going to...to ruin your life! You have to be better than them. Violence is never the answer, no matter what, okay?” She gritted her teeth. It threw him how panicked she looked, and his heart raced.
Kneeling beside him, his father sighed. “Do this for your mother, Ryou,” he said wearily. “I know they were trying to start something, but...” He lowered his voice, muttering to him. “You know how she is about fighting.”
Ryou’s grandfather had been a brawler. He’d gone pretty far in the boxing circuit, but when he got too old to officially compete, he’d continued taking bets for underground fights. When he’d accidentally killed another fighter, he’d gone to jail. He had a heart attack before he ever had the chance to be released.
Ryou’s mother said the fighting caused the whole of it, start to finish.
Ryou’s chest hurt. He didn’t like to see his mother so upset, didn’t like that he was the one that had made her that way. He still thought that the other boy deserved a punch, but he couldn’t help but feel that he had done something wrong if he made his mother cry. It was the worst he’d ever felt. “O-Okay,” he said finally. The longer she made that disappointed face at him, the worse it got.
His mother’s hands grasped his shoulders, giving him a firm shake. “Promise me,” she said.
His pale eyes were wide at her adamancy. “I promise.”
His father pushed himself up. “You see, Umiko? He’s not going to get himself in trouble. It was those brats that were bothering him. He won’t start anything.” His father took his hand, and for once Ryou was relieved to be out of the scrutiny of his mother. “She was just worried,” his father murmured down to him. He straightened as Ryou’s mother blotted her face against her wrist. “Now. Let’s go get your sister, and we can...go to the park, or something.”
Ryou considered it. There was a small cemetery branching off from the park.
Ryou was happy to go along and be away from this moment. Play with his baby sister, try to make his mother smile again while he imagined the people the tombstones must have belonged to, kings and witches and bad boys who upset their mothers.
But he never forgot it, and every time he thought about standing up for himself, he thought about his mother’s teary face and was shamed into balling his fist on his knee.
Ryou, he knew, had been deeply lucky for the mother he had. He never doubted that she loved him. She was kind and gentle, and she cherished their family.
So he didn’t blame her. It would have never occurred to her the repercussions of instilling such a fatal flaw, especially when she wasn’t around to see it.
As he got older, his fascination with ghosts evolved into a full-blown love of the occult. He was no longer the creepy ghost boy, but the scary kid who liked monsters and demons and witchcraft. He didn’t think much of the criticisms, though. He loved the quiet thrill the stories gave him in an otherwise mundane life. He held steady under a barrage of condemnations, per his mother’s wishes. The bullying was normal. The nervous looks were run of the mill.
At the end of the day, regardless, he got to go home to his loving mother, his little sister he adored (even if she thought he was a little weird, and he the same of her,) and occasionally, even his father.
His father had made some great strides as an archeologist in Cairo, and so he was often away for months at a time. This just meant that Ryou was especially glad when he was around, and that he was able to hog his mother’s and sister’s time for himself when he wasn’t. They spent countless hours baking in the kitchen, playing pretend in the back yard, never not together.
But he was getting older, and as young boys do, he longed for space. Even that love could get suffocating.
“I’m not going!” Ryou turned and marched back towards the house.
Amane crossed her pale arms and his mother sighed from the open car door. “Now Ryou, you’re better than this.”
“No, I’m not.” He was mad, and so it didn’t matter if it made sense. It seemed so big at the time. There was a haunted house coming into town that he had really wanted to go to, and his mother had said he could go. Only, when she looked more into it and it said it was intended for sixteen and up, she said it would be too scary for him and changed her mind.
And now Amane was getting to go to the festival that she wanted to downtown, nice as you please, on the same day! He was fuming. He didn’t think about how Amane would have felt, or that his mother might had good reasons for saying he couldn’t go—of course not. He was ten and this was the end of the world.
They would probably never come back to that city. No one liked the stuff that he liked; no one would show up! If he let them go without him, they’d be gone forever.
“You’re being a big jerk,” Amane huffed from the sidewalk.
He whipped around, tears in his pale green eyes, making them burn even more in even the dim London sun. “It’s not fair! Amane gets to do whatever she wants.” Not true, even if she was the baby. But Ryou of ten wanted them to understand how unfair it was, that somehow, this tantrum might make his mother change her mind.
His mother crossed her arms. “It’s not nice of you to fuss like this,” she scolded, then sighed. “If you really want to stay, that’s up to you. But your sister and I are going to go have a good time. Maybe you can stay here and think about this behavior.”
“Fine!” He yelled, little mouth scowling. “Go then!”
It was stupid. Such a minor argument. It should have been nothing.
The day passed into the evening, and the house was very quiet.
Eventually, Ryou got over his anger and just cried in his sheets that he wasn’t out having fun like his mother had said. He was still upset, but now he had just made it worse for himself, and he was stuck all alone.
He took out one of his books and read, waiting for them to get back. He’d read it too often; it wasn’t scary anymore. The longer it took them, the worse he felt, and eventually, he thought that he should apologize, if only so he would stop feeling so bad.
But time passed. Another hour. Another hour. He waited.
Then the house phone rang.
He sprung out of bed, it nearly 7:00 PM by then and he couldn’t imagine what was taking them so long to get back. Was it that fun? They usually would have had supper by then, at least. Maybe they were punishing him.
He padded through the kitchen, and picked up the landline. “Hello?”
“Hello?” The voice that came on was older, and sounded confused. It wasn’t his mother or father. Maybe a telemarketer. She said, “To whom am I speaking?”
All his parent’s manners training suddenly bounced back into his head like a pop-up book. “UH, oh. This is the Bakura residence. Ryou speaking.”
There was a long pause. “Oh,” said the woman softly. “Hello, Ryou. How old are you, perchance?
“I’m ten,” he said.
“Oh, dear,” the woman murmured.
Ryou scrunched his eyes. Who was this?
A moment later, she continued. “Ryou,” she said carefully. “Is your father around?”
“My father is in Egypt,” he said, more confused by the moment. Anyone who knew his father would know he was off.
Another tight pause. “Is there...anyone else there, Ryou?”
“No?” He thought he could hear some people talking in the background, and the noise made a nervousness knot up his stomach. “Who are you? Why are you calling my house?”
“Oh, no,” the woman mumbled. “Oh, poor dear. Listen, Ryou? Someone’s coming to get you. There’s been an accident, and...oh, I’m so sorry, dear.”
The first time, he didn’t understand.
But this time, he did.