A/N: From Divine's POV the entire time. I've been messing around with stream of consciousness and present tense as well as darkness/horror. Basically a summary of the headcanon I have for Divine plus extra things. Also possibly the darkest piece I've written yet.
He's on his knees, as his life points drop to zero with an anticlimactic electronic blip, and he feels the world mocking him as his power fades, his cards lie scattered on the ground. His opponent strides up to him, places a dark hand in front of his upturned face, and he sees a flash of light so bright he's afraid he might have gone blind. His heart burns with indignation, his will powerless against this force. His sight returns, and all he sees are a pair of feet walking confidently in the other direction as he kneels in his own castle like a fallen king.
Faces. Faces swim before his eyes as he recognizes these corridors. It becomes clogged with twisting, writhing people with no features on their faces except gleaming white smiles; they form a mass which made them indistinct from one another, until a boy emerges and he recognizes it's his old friend.
"Takeshi," he murmurs, getting up from the ground, now a standard-issue carpet as he looks at his friend's face.
"They've started to call you Divine," says the boy in front of him. He reaches for the only distinct face in the mass of students and his hand goes through, and Takeshi is now a liquid human glaring at him with those same blue eyes that used to greet him happily. "Maybe I should start calling you Divine too." He lays Hinotama on his duel disk and strikes the semblance of his friend, over and over, holes gaping and closing just as fast in the watery fiend's body. It creeps closer, and he refuses to retreat.
"I'll show you power." He plays his Magical Android and the beast is felled. He sees his friend on the ground, trembling, coughing, a trail of glistening dark blood emerging from those delicate lips, those eyes without shimmer, dead, completely dead. A smile curves up on his face as he realizes his limitless potential. The body goes up in flames and the delicious smell of burning flesh delights his senses. "Thank you… Takeshi."
The figure on the ground again liquefies, and as he looks up, he sees his old room, cluttered with educational books and booster pack wrappers and clothing, and his father is sitting on the bed, reading his diary without a care in the entire world. Rage is in his heart, yes, but now that he had infinite power, there is also a sort of pleasure he feels in killing that figure in front of him, and he drags the corpse into the closet before snuggling into the bed among the musty smell of textbooks and the iron splotches of blood on the comforter.
"I'm not useless." He wakes up next to the beautiful girl, her precious pearly face scrunched up with the nightmares she is having, and he watches her, astounded and positively delighted at the effects he has on her. "You're the useful one. You'll be one of my favorites." He pulls up the covers to reveal her shapely body, the white skin mucked and scratched, the ivory thighs turned black and blue and he almost wants to take a picture of his handiwork, how lovely and pained it is. Her red hair is frizzed and unwound from her hair ornament, and he plays with it between his fingers before yanking it violently to jerk her awake, and she screams and gasps until she sees his face and her eyes alight with love and hope and other things that were useful to him. She opens her mouth and maddeningly whispers, "Yusei", which gets him in such a rage that he considers killing her as well before his newfound practicality stops him.
"My name is Divine. Do you know what that means?" Her face turns green and her hair reaches up and wraps itself around his throat, and he is gasping, reaching for his deck and his duel disk, fully intending to completely drive a stake through that beautiful, devoted, naked body of hers that was his property and his property only, but the strength of her vines causes him to lose more and more oxygen until he loses consciousness. The world is pitch-black until he sees the face of a young boy, an older man, two girls, person after face after limb and their presences choke him, force themselves down his throat and into his eyes and up his nostrils and he can't see, hear, smell, taste, only feel the smothering darkness clogging his airways.
He struggles and struggles and fights his way to a sliver of light in the darkness, oddly rimmed by two rows of sharp teeth, but he forces himself out of that hole and reaches a shining pavilion, headed by a set of intimidating gates and a figure as tall as them, and that figure is a man holding a scale. The blockage in his throat is released as a clot of built up blood gushes forth from his lips, and he is on his knees again, holding his chest, a hole where his heart should have been. He looks up and sees the beating, bloody organ on the scale, a feather on the other side, and the heart is obviously heavier as the feather is sent reeling through the air and the bloody mass falls off the scale and straight through the floor. He sets a card on his duel disk but again hears his life points drop to zero and again sees the figure walk up to him, make a bright flash, then walk off.
This time, however, he sinks through the floor made of clouds as easily as his stony heart had a few moments ago and once again he can smell burning flesh and realizes it's his own. The agony is the best feeling in the world, and he smiles widely as he is engulfed in the eternal flames and his spirit dies a painfully slow and terrible death, the sins leaking off of it like the fat of the body, and his face melts and loses all features, his elegant outfit and his cards are ashes.
He wakes with a start, his body intact and a hand extended toward him. His new memories of the dream resound in his troubled mind. His pride deserts him. He takes the hand, and the tears don't stop.