Persona Shutter Layer 1
Author's Note: An extended, in-depth take on a scene from episode 140. Enjoy the story and R&R.
Disclaimer: I do not own anything related to or of the Yu-Gi-Oh! Arc-V series.
Summary:
Akaba Layra exorcises Zarc's evil influence from Sakaki Yuya's body, and in that moment, their souls commingle.
The universe trembled in anticipation of the demon's next move. More violence! More bloodshed! More carnage! Always more!
No more…
Zarc beat back the impertinent conscience of his double, Sakaki Yuya, but for the first time since his quickening, his flesh forsook him.
Yuya was fighting his control. And it was all that accursed little girl, Akaba Layra's, fault.
No sense of fixed identity. A critical, past-turned eye. Ideal hiding place for the miserable wench who defeated him.
"Ray!" Her name is vile, scalding his stolen tongue.
He'd created Pendulum Monsters, maneuvered his pieces into position, and pitted his reborn aspects against one another. Waiting thirstily to reunify his fractured whole. Yet Ray revived and chased him into the new world.
Man's brutality given form. A dark wurm. The devil-spawn of Astrograph magic, Integration Summoned between the gates of zero and infinity.
This twisted fairy tale. It had to end.
Layra reached her bracelets to the Four Heavens, and the reincarnating natural energies of the flowers, winds, birds, and moon gathered around her, a spiral of unspoiled life force.
Vitality bathed the Supreme King Dragon and his servant-kin. His depowered attack salamander evaporated, and soon, Zarc also fractured. Odd-Eyes, Dark Rebellion, Clear Wing, and Starve Venom split off, flickering, frozen in the temporal gulf.
Fusion failing.
Tuning unharmonized.
Overlay, no encore.
Immortality surrendered.
Valiant Layra took a magic sword to Yuya's soul, and cut out his shadow self, purging the divide.
"I must choose a subject," she mumbled.
The rope was severed. The crystal fell from the arc of light drawn in the sky, lodging firmly in the array of Yuya's heart.
When she prayed, Zarc's orphaned essence, a fanged ghost, vengefully drifted free.
For a few transient breaths, Yuya felt Yuzu's presence. A ten-second montage of their rapport played across his thoughts as Ray's spirit departed Layra's body, and the child adopted Zarc's rage-filled animus instead.
Layra, who leeched the light of others, would bear the pillory of darkness.
A fragment of the Lancer's being had broken off, and now resided within her. Yuya tried to recover her and recover Yuzu, but the mental and physical damage left by Zarc's occupation bit like Layra's Sonic Halberd.
Beautiful lilac hair flowed shapelessly through his fingertips.
Resigned to her pain, she thanked him, "Goodbye, Yuya."
Then, she vanished. And with her, the evicted evil.
In the blinding, white expanse of the Fifth Dimension, Yuya screamed Layra's name.
She entrusted him her last gift: a potion of bottled smiles.
He uncorked and drank the flask of distilled memories straightaway, consequences be damned.
Yuya heard a baby's cry, before his mind went blank.
Make me smile again.