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No...

It wasn't fair...

There was a sharp kick to my side as I lay silently crying in the snow. "Get up runt!!" I was alive. Bakura had managed to break through the barriers I'd hastily put up. He'd chased off my Amane-chan.

Even in death, he couldn't give me peace.

"Hey! Don't treat Ryou like that!"

Now Yami Yuugi was out as well.

Shimatta.

I groaned and burried my head farther in my arms. Now it would really start. I didn't want to be around for the fights between my yamis, one natural and one not, but of course I had no choice.

I couldn't help but notice as Yami and Bakura chased each other back and forth across my field of vision, that neither left footprints in the snow. If they were as light and insubstantial as that, why did it hurt so much when Bakura kicked me? Was it because his sheer will power made up for the lack of physicality? Or some other factor I didn't know about?

Or was it that they didn't leave footprints because they were Egyptian, and therefore didn't know what snow was, so just floated over it somehow?

Why in seven hells was I contemplating this while Yami and Bakura were trying their best to kill each other when they were both already dead?

The good thing, I suppose, was that they were fighting in the real world, and not my mindscape. In my mind and soulroom, they could toss energy blasts at each other DBZ-style, send up shi shi hokodans faster then Ryoga Hibiki himself, and glide through air a la Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. Not that that didn't make a good show, but when one is being pummeled by miscellanious ki blasts one does not have time to admire the pretty colours. When in the real world, my two yamis couldn't do such... spiritial things, and were forced to adopt a combat style halfway between Ranma Saotome's Anything Goes and Makoto Kino's Go Anything.

But I digress. I'm straying from the subject again.

Laying in the snow, my white hair blendng with the ground, they didn't see me. Yami stepped back onto my hand, and I yelped and pulled back. It threw him off-balance, just long enough for Bakura to get a good kick in to his gut. Yami doubled over in pain (can they feel pain if they're spirits?) and then, to my surprise and dismay and Bakura's delight... Yami turned on me.

Before he could stop himself, his anger at my distracting him got the better of him. It was just for a moment, and then he was the composed Pharoah again, apologising for his "mistake", but a moment was long enough for him to deliver a sound smack to my cheek.

I froze, colder then the snow I was kneeling on. Yami had hit me. The one that I'd always hoped would someday, someway be my salvation, my redemption, had hit me. And behind him, Bakura was laughing...

Something deep, deep inside me, the part of me that, I suppose, really was Bakura's reincarnation, snapped.

I screamed in rage, grief, frustration, and anger. I jumped to my feet, yanking at the cord that held the Ring around my neck, almost like an animal tearing at its leash. I pulled it off and threw it in the snow, and I pulled at the Puzzle as well. When it finally came over my head, I threw it down on top of the Ring, wishing for both of them to just disappear forever.

But I had forgotten that wishing was the Puzzle's power.

To this day, I still don't know if I'd have acted the same if I remembered in time that the Puzzle granted wishes. I trully don't know. Maybe I would have. Maybe I wouldn't've. Maybe I'd have made an entirely different wish.

But as it was, the point of the Puzzle struck the Eye of Horus in the center of the Ring. I was thrown backward by an explosion of coloured, mostly white, light. The last thing I remember seeing before darkness claimed me was the look of hurt on Bakura's face. That look haunts me to this day...

When I next awoke, I was laying half-propped up agianst a gravestone, where I'd fallen. What a cruel twist of Fate that it was my dear Amane's grave. I stood up, rubbing my head, for the moment not remembering the last few moments before unconciousness. I actually looked around for the Ring and Puzzle.

All I found was a pile of golden shards, half melted. I still have one of them, the one that means the most, even though the magic, the spirits are gone.

The Ring's Eye of Horus, crying tears of gold.

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WSJ: ^^v Okay, so i lied. There's going to be at least one, maybe two more chapters after this. But I ain't writing them tonight. :p Reviews please!

God bless minna-san!