Hello, everyone. Okay, first of all, to those who are reading The Unnamed God Card, I'm very, very, very, very sorry. I'm just really stuck at the moment and I'm spinning tires. Hopefully, this might provide as a temporary distraction for you until I'm get into the next part of what I'm going to do. This is a really morbid one-shot, though. Just warning you. It's not a tragedy for nothing.
And now for a note for viewers in general. I've been noticing this a lot lately on other fanfics, and I don't really feel like dealing with it here, so I'll just say this. If you don't like the story, then don't read it. Why continue to read it if you don't like it? Just saying.
'Kay. Now that that's over, I'm almost ready to let you read this. Almost. Like I mentioned before, this is a really depressing kind of story that does not have a happy ending. (Hence, a tragedy.) The last thing that I should tell you is that they're OOC.
Jaden looked down at his bloodstained hands. Silent tears streaked down his face, but he didn't take notice of them. He didn't notice anything. He couldn't. His mind was blank.
It took him several long minutes to even realize that his cut knees were bleeding heavily onto the jagged black rocks beneath him. That's when he began to notice that he was cold, so cold. The air was heavy and chilled around him, not even comforting breeze was relieving Jaden's frayed nerves. It was cold and dead, like a damp blanket that was threatening to choke him. Jaden almost wanted it to.
His glazed golden eyes lifted from the ground to the sky in a sort of lifeless trance. Not even the stars wanted to forgive him for his sins. They were hiding in the inky black of the night, refusing to give him even the slightest ray of hope, not that he had any left anyway.
His friends were all dead. The land he once ruled was destroyed and ruined, with barely any people left to survive in fear. And it was all his fault. Jaden should've known that Yubel was going to turn on him. He should have known better than to fuse his soul with hers. He only did it to help her. As a matter of fact, it did, but in a far different way than Jaden had ever imagined.
Now his kingdom was in ruins and it was all his fault. He was too weak to stop Yubel, and he was too weak to save his friends and subjects as Yubel slaughtered them all, using his body and mind to do so.
Memories rushed over his mind, completely overtaking him. Alexis, her throat in ribbons. Hassleberry, his limbs splayed out in angles that shouldn't have been possible. Syrus' face as he drifted in the marshy waters of a swamp. Chazz, impaled on a pit of vicious spikes. So many faces ran through Jaden's mind and he just wanted it to stop. It hurt, it hurt so much.
More scenes flashed by, faster and faster, more and more. Jaden couldn't handle the strain. He couldn't. It hurt, it hurt so much...
Bloodstained fists snatched at his dual-toned dirty hair as a painful scream erupted from his lips. Still, they wouldn't stop. They wouldn't leave him alone. Perhaps this was their way of punishing him. After all, it was all his fault that they died. So he didn't have the right to even scream. He didn't have the right to fight, but still he did.
The images came so fast that they blurred, and just when the searing pain came to its peak and Jaden thought he was going to die-finally, maybe the torture was over-the flashbacks came to an abrupt stop and Jaden collapsed completely to the ground before the world faded to black.
Jesse gripped Ezra's hand, hoping that a miracle would happen and his best friend wouldn't die. But he knew differently. Ezra's condition had been steadily getting worse, and there was nothing left that Blair-the young healer-could do.
So all Jesse could do was wait and watch as his friend died. As everyone who was still living cowered in fear of the fallen king. Jesse just felt so powerless and useless.
As he thought this, Ezra groaned in his sleep. Jesse's heart soared. Maybe Ezra would be fine. He had always been tough. Surely one massive wound wasn't going to kill him, right? It'd take several to kill off Ezra.
Jesse was just kidding himself, and he knew it. Ezra groaned again, more pitifully than the last, and his pale hand gripped Jesse's tighter for a brief second before it went limp.
At first Jesse didn't want to believe it. He wanted to scream, he wanted to call for Blair to try to save Ezra, but he knew that it was too late. Ezra was gone, and he was never going to come back. Not this time.
Frustration bubbled up inside Jesse, making the teal-haired teen to leap to his feet and pace around the room in anger. But instead of making him feel better, the pacing made him worse. The more he walked, the more he thought that Ezra wasn't there to walk with him. The more he thought, the more he remembered his precious village getting destroyed by the man who was once the benevolent Supreme King.
The Supreme King! This was all his fault; he killed Ezra. Jesse remembered everything. That harsh apathetic glare that was looking down on Ezra as he fell. Those horrible orange-and-blue eyes that were somehow laughing through the otherwise expressionless mask of the fallen ruler.
An unstoppable rage flowed through Jesse. Never before in his short life had Jesse truly hated anyone as much as he did at this moment.
His fists clenched at his sides as he stalked out of the eathern tunnel that was now Ezra's tomb. Jesse was going to get his revenge. He was sick of seeing people die. He was determined to end it here.
Jesse was glad that Blair was out trying to get herbs. If she had been around, she might've been able to calm him, but Jesse didn't want to calm down. He wanted the Supreme King's head, and he didn't want to have to scare Blair into letting him go.
He didn't even pause as he stormed out of that damp cave. The nighttime darkness shrouded the land around him, so Jesse didn't even see what tripped him when his foot suddenly hit something, causing him to pitch forward and fall hard on his arms.
Cursing, Jesse pushed himself up from the ground to see what he had tripped on. His green eyes widened in horror at what he saw.
Blair, pale and as lifeless as Ezra.
Jesse backed away, shaking his head slowly. This was all a nightmare. It had to be. Blair wasn't dead. Neither was Ezra. This was just all some horrible, twisted nightmare that would be over in the morning. Then Ezra and Blair and he could all run through the village's roads like they did before when they were kids. Before the Supreme King started killing off his own people.
No. This wasn't a nightmare, and the Supreme King had to pay.
But how was Jesse going to find the bastard and kill him? He hadn't thought about that.
As if on cue, a duel monster materalized a few feet away from Jesse, just out of reach for his knife. Its eyes were orange and blue, and it seemed to be a monstrous mix of human and dragon. Yubel. That was the card that the Supreme King adored above all else.
If he got rid of it, maybe the bastard would get a taste of how it felt to lose someone close to him just before he died. Jesse chased after the heinous duel spirit, but it merely turned away and chuckled as it walked away. And no matter how fast Jesse ran, he couldn't catch up.
He wasn't even paying attention to how far they were going up the mountain before the duel monster just suddenly disappeared, leaving Jesse completely on his own and completely lost.
Jesse wanted to yell, wanted to kill something just to let out all of the anger that was threatening to overrun him at that moment. That's when he noticed someone laying on the ground not far from him.
His anger evaporated as worry replaced it. The person didn't look injured, but there wasn't a way to tell from this distance.
Jesse crept closer slowly. Now that he looked closer, the person was a boy around his age, with dual-toned brown hair. When that appearance made a connection with the one of the evil king in Jesse's mind, he froze. Was it really the same person that destroyed his village in cold blood?
He shook the thought away. There was no time to take pity on the Supreme King now. Jesse reached down and roughly shook the boy awake. He felt so frail, it was hard to believe that he stole the lives of anyone.
The king's head wobbled on his shoulders before he woke up. Jesse almost wished he'd just let the boy sleep. Gold eyes that were filled with anguish looked up at him, shaking Jesse's resolve. Besides, they weren't the vicious eyes that Jesse remembered. The eyes that Jesse remembered were...orange and blue, just like Yubel's.
Nevertheless, Jesse knew that the Supreme King was responsible for the deaths of everyone he once knew, so he had to pay. Jesse drew his knife and rammed it into the brown-haired boy's throat, not quite enough to draw blood, but it was enough to usually cause a reaction. Not for the former king. The boy didn't flinch. At. All.
He just continued to stare at Jesse with the same agonized look. If Jesse didn't know better, he would've thought that the boy was inviting him to finish the job.
Just then, a flicker was visible behind the golden-eyed teen. Yubel. Then she was gone, and the Supreme King's eyes changed to that horribly familiar orange and blue. He no longer sat and patiently waited for Jesse to kill him. He knocked away Jesse's knife and smashed the unsuspecting teal-haired teen to the hard ground.
His grip on Jesse's throat tightened, and air wasn't getting to Jesse's lungs. My throat is going to get crushed! Jesse panicked, struggling uselessly against the strong grip. And just when it seemed like Jesse was going to die, the pressure was suddenly gone. Air rushed back into Jesse and he slowly sat up, coughing.
The Supreme King was stumbling away from Jesse, holding his head and mumbling. "No, I won't kill anymore. I'm in control. Yubel can't make me kill him..."
Jesse didn't know what was going on, but he did know that the king was dangerous and needed to be taken down before it was too late. His hand frantically searched the ground, shaking badly.
By some miracle, Jesse's hand found the hilt of the knife and he slowly pulled it closer, not wanting to call attention to himself. But there was some little noise that alerted the king to his plan, because gold snapped to orange and blue and the fallen king charged again, but there were tears lingering on the edge of those eyes.
Jesse froze. He couldn't bring himself to kill this boy.
Jaden, however, had no such quelms. By one last burst of willpower, Jaden forced himself to trip over the rough terrain, leaving him in the perfect position to fall on the knife that Jesse was holding.
And as the tortured king ended his suffering, the sun began to rise over the land that would once again prosper in the years far beyond the end of the cruel king's reign.
I would like to hear your thoughts on this. Even though I've written a lot of morbid stories, I've never written a tragedy, so I want to know if I did good or not. Pretty much anything will be accepted as long as it's a relatively nice comment saying whether you approve or disapprove.