Bakura knows... a small portion, of why Gene is the way he is. Certainly not the whole tale of it, but enough to know why Gene's misunderstanding that he'd done something to Bianca had been taken the way it was.

"No, he doesn't," he agreed. "And realizing that, was part of my decision."

He gave Pepper a ghost of the grin he'd given Gene when the younger one had asked what he wanted: hard, and not kind. "I was going to put him in his own mind for a while," he said. "You've seen the way the Shadow Realm tests people, now imagine it doing that with the intent to break someone."

Malik's darker half had tapped into that, to trap Jonouchi and Mai, and even Malik to an extent.