Chapter Text
Ryou Bakura's first psychotic break came not long after Diva's departure. She had dealt with, certainly, the festering symptoms of psychosis. Paranoia. Delusions. Sickness left inside her like dried cum on a bathroom stall. Piss in an elevator. She's tried to scrape it out, sponge it up, but it's beneath her skin. Is her skin. Left there by the dirty hands of her dark passenger and the decade of violations he visited upon her body. Years and years and years of it. Like mold in the family home. More rot than person.
She knew things were getting worse. Recovery, a word so sour in her mouth. Anglo-French insult, a return to health. A return . She can't remember the last time she was healthy. Cutting her wrists over chalk circles even as a child. A chance to meet her mother one last time. Quiet in class, quick to concede, a pleasure to have. She was never healthy. She was just polite. Acceptably ill and quietly dying. Looking back, she wants to scream. She wants to take a pillow and smother the child she was to save herself from what’s to come
Following the departure of Yuugi's other self, and her intruder, Ryou Bakura's life fell apart, and she and Yuugi fell in love. An understanding between the two of them the same as plants and parasites. No one else could understand them. No one else, but each other. The two of them graduated high school (well, Yuugi did…) and she moved in with him. Their days were spent in relative happiness. Yuugi was busy with furthering his education. Pursuit of game design, spreading the sunshine in his soul. Ryou was busy with—with trying not to kill her self. Equal parts acceptance of identity and resisting a death drive nurtured from a young age.
Most days in bed. Always feeling watched. Followed. Pursued. Under scrutiny. A lifetime of confirmed suspicions, habitual eyes over her shoulder. She can barely leave her room, let alone the apartment they share. Her hair would mat, if not for Yuugi. She'd give into delusion, if not for Yuugi. She'd have fallen off the face of the earth, if not for Yuugi.
A million other "if not for Yuugi"s. She's grateful. She's so grateful. Glimpses of happiness gifted in his holy hands. Patience and love, and and and more than she could ever ask for. It's so much. It's too much. It's too much for one person to bear. Too much, for either of them.
It was just one day. Less that, one evening. Ryou Bakura's first psychotic break came not long after Diva's departure. And it came suddenly, at once, like an angel reached down from heaven and tucked in a needle behind her eyes. Her mind fragile already under the weight of forced remembering at the hands of the self-titled indigo child. Diva. Disaster. She doesn't remember what happened. She doesn't remember what happened. She repeats this when asked, she doesn't remember what happened. What she knows is this:
exenteration
[ek-sen″ter-a´shun]
- surgical removal of the inner organs; evisceration.
- in ophthalmology, removal of the entire contents of the orbit.
She doesn't see so good out of her right eye anymore. She tried (and failed) to do it to herself. It's a very descriptive word, pretty even. Left et exemplis, beautiful down her cheek, a scar in tandem with the one through her left hand. The one through her left arm. The ones through the meat and skin of her chest, five points like a hand forever holding her in place. Reasoning simple in retrospect. There was a needle in her head. It hurt. She needed to get it out.
She knows that. She doesn't think so good anymore. A little slower. A little stranger. Thoughts pass along and through her, just a capacitor somewhere between solar nerves.
She remembers one thing: how humiliating it was to regain sapience during her forced inpatient stay. Taken away before her loved ones could find her, after her ego snapped in two. She remembers plastic chairs with metal feet. Mismatched tile floors and drop ceiling. Nurses some nice, some…not. She remembers:
Raw.
Scared.
Alone.
And no one would give her the time of day.
Take these pills.
Eat when you’re told.
Not too fast, not too slow, or you'll get a write up for an eating disorder.
Go here. Strip.
Show us your scars, stay quiet, we will touch you.
Idiot, infantile, inexpressive, invalid.
Ineffective therapy, little more than picking at sore-heart scabs.
Ineffective medication that made her sick to her stomach, dizzy, drool on her pillow.
They kept her for what felt like months. Her release delayed because her father was too busy to come pick her up. Too busy to sign some paperwork. She cried to herself at night—chided to keep quiet by the staff—for fear she'd be there forever. She just wanted to go home. She just wanted to go home . She just wanted to have somewhere to call home.
One day suddenly discharged. Just like that. Just like that, standing in the parking lot like a dropped doll. Too numb to cry, too numb to talk. Yuugi and Mr. Sugoroku were waiting with a rental car. Yuugi brought her a blanket. Her favourite stuffed animal. She was guided like a lost cat into the backseat. Yuugi sitting next to her, talking assurances through her ears. Meanwhile she was nowhere on earth. Wondering why her father never came. Wondering if he even knows he almost outlived both his children.