It helped to have background noise. It had always helped, either to calm him or to let him sleep, as far back as his first century. Before he'd met Corrival. Before he'd known that other people could do the kinds of things he could do. The fact that it was a language he didn't understand helped too, kept his mind from attaching unnecessarily to any of the words. It was why Hopeless had read to him in Latin--the sounds were pretty enough without meaning anything.

Even thinking about Hopeless didn't hurt so bad right at the moment, though he could just as easily attribute that to the fatigue. He simply didn't have the energy to hurt any more than he already did.

...the hat. If nothing else he would have to make Anton give him the hat.

"Any luck on that radio?" he asked some time later, though he couldn't have said exactly how long. He'd worked through all of the string patterns he could remember that didn't require an extra set of hands, and for the moment the string was loose, held in one hand on the tabletop. The sounds of Bakura moving through the kitchen were almost as soothing as the speech and he was loathe to interrupt them, but Erskine had put this off long enough. He still didn't particularly want to make the call, but he'd managed to shove the panic down for the moment and waiting any longer risked it coming back.

As long as he got the hat back he would figure out how to deal with the rest of it, even if the worst should happen.