Throughout the deserted ruins of what once was the colourful and lively Heartland City, now shadow of what it had once been drowning in its own silence, resonated panicked footsteps and a seeking voice. A lone girl only armed with a disk attached to her arm was in search of someone, strolling through the debris, walking over shattered glass, her pink eyes focused on not getting caught by anyone, not to get spotted by malevolent eyes.

What was left of the once peaceful streets was devoid of anyone, resident or invader, good or bad (albeit the concept was somewhat outdated, she had found out). The quietness was eerie to her, but she pressed on, hearing only her breathing, the sound of her brave but cautious footsteps, and her surroundings for any possible enemy. There was no sense of security to be had, only a sense of danger trying to sneak up on her.

Ruri had lived through the Invasion long enough to know what she needed to be careful about, what she wouldn't be forgiven for would she commit it. Obelisk Force soldiers could be everywhere, at any time, to enjoy carding her by ganging up on her and summoning a terrible beast to remind herself of the trauma of the war her people hadn't asked for. Trusting people was essential but shouldn't have been abused: survival required to work together, but to also think for oneself.

To be honest, Ruri hated having to be selfish about something as basic as being human; but that was what her brother had taught her so she could make it out of the Invasion alive, or at least survive long enough to see things getting better, acting through one duel at a time.

She regretted having gone to search on her own. At least, being with someone else like Sayaka or Allen would have given her a sense of security, even if that sentiment was fake or artificial. However, she had felt like they'd need to be as stealthy as possible, in a time where the enemy could be everywhere and attack at any time with a force a thousand times stronger than they could have ever hoped to get. But she was a tough girl, she could do that on her own without endangering anyone other than her; so she shook her head and tried to stop her shivers, to ignore the cold wind blowing through her hair and the cold sweats going down her back.

She had one objective, only one: finding her brother again. He had gone to recover resources for the camp a couple of hours before yet had been way too late coming back for it not to be suspicious. At best, he had gotten into troubles with the weight of the resources and was on his way to get backup. At worse, he'd be… He'd have left them without any hope to return. With the deepest desire not to see her beloved sibling carded and discarded on the floor next to some debris or to see him in any distorted shape, Ruri pressed on, fearful steps getting increasingly more determined, fasting the pace as long as nobody showed up in her fields of view or hearing.

The streets had become strangers to her before growing familiar again: it was how humans were getting used to misery, violence and hiding in a hole not to be imprisoned, tortured or meeting their end in cruel, blood-tainted hands. In this world where the strongest ruled, she couldn't have any high hope for her brother to be fine when she'd eventually find him, if she was going to find him at all. Yet, she found herself praying, perhaps uselessly, that he was going to be in one piece and okay by the time they'd reunite. She needed to bring him back to the base, if just for his own safety.

Truly, it was in those moments that Ruri would have appreciated that Shun was less of a natural loner, "I'm going to protect everyone by putting myself on the line" type of person. At least, they'd have convinced him not to look for stuff on his own.

Suspicious noises picked Ruri's attention, then interest. Her curiosity had never let her down, even since the Invasion had taken place. After spending a dozen or so of minutes hanging around the desolated ruins of Heartland in complete silence aside from her shoes crunching shattered glass and rummaging through stone, she was bound to be intrigued by suddenly hearing any human noise. Making sure to be stealthy, she glided along the walls, avoided all possible noise from stepping on potential sources of betrayal, and eventually arrived in the spot where the noise came from.

And then she almost screamed.

Squinting her eyes from behind the wall, the first thing that bestowed Ruri's eyes was the unforgettable image of an Obelisk Force soldier surrounded by what looked like two gallons of water and with a smashed Duel Disk attached to his wrist, locking her brother in his arms, the blade of a knife on the latter's throat, close enough from where she was for her to think he was about to be throttled on the spot. Distant yells reached her ears, "stop moving around, brat", "if you don't calm down, I won't hesitate". No offer to surrender. Her brother's feet desperately trying to get out of there until the knife was placed right under his chin.

Before she knew it, Ruri had sidestepped to see more, to guess if she should run away and risk getting spotted to get some help or if she could deal with it on her own and free Shun from the lock on his neck. There was no time to go get aid from Kaito or Yuto, if they were back from their mission that was: her brother was about to have his throat slashed if someone didn't do anything.

When Ruri finally looked back at the scene, the soldier was looking right into her eyes, having obviously spotted her. Gulping, she approached, careful of the hand holding the knife, making sure to look strong or even menacing as she did so. She was going to save her brother from the imminent danger, after all she had to be strong, in these dire times, and she wouldn't hesitate to duel the man who had dared lie a hand on her brother.

Oh, wait. His disk had been smashed, presumably by Shun himself. She'd have to settle that in other ways, something not uncommon to her.

"Stop in your tracks!"

The yell of the soldier made her do just as he ordered, if not just by surprise. Despite her absolute want to save her sibling, Ruri had to admit she was at a disadvantage: no real weapon aside from a Duel Disk that'd take too long to use compared to the time required to slash someone's body with a blade of any sort and no way to pressure the man into surrendering his hostage.

"Ruri!" Shun's screaming, yet audibly strained, voice made itself heard against the cold of the blade. "Ruri, get out of here, go away, right now!"

"But, brother! I can't give up on you like that!"

Her response didn't seem to please him in the slightest, as he was about to respond to her with an enforced frown on his face, but the knife got even closer to his throat.

"If you don't fuckin' shut it, I'm killing you on the spot."

Her brother grudgingly accepted to stay quiet, as she could see from the frown still present yet his voice disappearing entirely from the air. This was messed up and, if she wasn't trying to save one of the people dearest to her, she'd have perhaps shed a tear; but this was, as Shun would have said himself, a battlefield where crying didn't matter and didn't improve things, where it was to kill or be killed. A reality she clearly hated, a reality that she had to face every day, a reality that was threatening them both yet again.

The fire inside of her, however, didn't stop burning. She felt a rush of adrenaline coursing through her body, making her limbs tense up and her mind get sharper, like the predator about to jump on its victim, yet she wasn't the predator there: she was more like the prey waiting for its hunter to go away. If she had to defy odds to get her brother back, she would: Resistance members stuck together and, like two birds of the same feathers, siblings helped each other out. It was her time to help Shun out of a dangerous situation.

"Ruri, huh…" The soldier mused to himself for a moment, before a smile creeped on his face. "So you two know each other, right?"

She didn't respond. That was an obvious trap and she wouldn't step in it.

"Oh well. What about we make a little deal, you and I?"

That was already more interesting and less one-sided, but she had to remain focused and suspicious. You could never trust the Obelisk Force, Shun and Yuto had reminded them all numerous times before, and she had seen that from her own two eyes. There was no backing down, but there was also no suspension of disbelief.

"You give out the location of your precious, fellow members, and he shall be free. What about that?"

Shun angered right in front of her, pupils retracting and fists balling up. His arms were oddly free, but a slash of a knife could be quicker than any punch or kick.

"Don't listen to that offer, it's a scam! Protec-"

He was interrupted by a cut on his right cheek, his frown deepening with a little grunt, to which she had to keep in a yelp of horror.

"I told you to shut the fuck up, didn't I?! Next time you open it up, it's your throat I'm gonna cut!"

Her brother went back to being silent, red trickling down his face and to his neck in thin flows. Ruri was left wondering what to do: giving their position was obviously a no-go, she would have never betrayed her companions for anything, but what else could she do that wouldn't risk her life or his? If she approached even further, Shun could die a moment later. She had no other bargaining chip than what she couldn't give up for anything. Even her moral horizon, her last resort, was doomed to fail: activating the carding function on her disk would also card Shun in the process, making the entire ordeal utterly pointless, if not counterproductive, and she'd lose someone close to her yet again. There was no way out of this…

"Wait, miss."

This got Ruri's attention back to the soldier, rather than her own thoughts and a plan of action she couldn't find.

"What about I give you another proposition?"

"What is it, this time? I won't ever give up on my comrades."

She tensed up without fully realizing it, anxiety getting to her to the point of making her nauseous and dizzy, even though she had no time to breathe when such a climax had been reached.

"You come with me, and I let him go."

Ruri couldn't know what the soldier had in mind when proposing that deal to her. Did she hold any special value, more than Shun did? Was this a trap all over again? It could have very well been such. She had to exert the utmost caution as she went through with the deal, thinking it over and over. Was she ready to bet for her brother to bail her out of there once he'd be freed? Was she ready to trust a pure stranger, a dangerous one of that, with such a thing?

As the answer kept getting more and more uncertain in her mind, she noticed Shun talk to her through lip movements, something they had learnt together to communicate more easily between themselves. "Don't you dare do that," he told her with cold irises and blood still trickling from the fresh cut. He didn't wince, didn't let the sting show, just continued speaking to her in a silent voice, "don't you dare, Ruri".

"You're sure you'll really let him go?"

"What more do you need as a proof?"

She made a step forward, judging his reaction, hoping she was jeopardizing the already-tense situation. The soldier, much to her surprise, actually took the blade further from Shun's neck, but that wasn't without the latter reacting with far less appreciation, continuing with the silent scolds, "don't do that, Ruri, don't do that". She couldn't let her lips move, otherwise she'd betray her cover and ruin her attempts. This was her, no, their only chance. She couldn't mess it up.

"So, you've decided? You against him?"

She didn't respond, attempting not to show the slightest indication as to the contents of her hand, yet still got close enough to him to be in range to do something. Responding would betray either her true intentions or her brother; she simply couldn't take that risk. She was already bluffing as is, having to bear her heart threatening to pulverise her ribcage from the inside and the slight wave of nausea covering the insides of her throat. There was no need to put everything at risk for what could be nothing.

But she had forgotten Shun had a mind on his own, a mind that was definitely bent on protecting others and acting on his own.

Events and twists unfolded at a speed so intense that she was barely able to keep up. Her brother grabbed the soldier's armed wrist with his own hand, trying to make him discard it on the floor by violently shaking it, somewhat arriving to accomplish that until, before both sibling could realize that was happening, someone had been stabbed, blood pouring from an abdominal wound. Due to the similar size of the two men in front of her, she was unable to guess whose blood it was, who had been injured; but things were happening much too quickly for her to guess that with exactitude. Instead, the soldier kicked her brother in the stomach, making him drop to his knees, the knife falling onto the ground with a droplet of red jumping as it did so, splatters on the dirty ground, and a flash of light blinded her.

When her eyes opened again, the only things left for her to see were the discarded knife and her brother, exhaling a shuddering breath, on his knees but almost falling from that poor balance, a hand on the ground, and a card right next to him.

Feeling a terror rising that she didn't quite understand, Ruri rushed to her brother's side, kneeling right next to him. The card was what she had thought it to be: Shun had carded someone, presumably in self-defence. Considering how strong he was in hand-to-hand combat, her fear grew wider, until she noticed a hand on his left side, clutching his coat, crimson dripping between his fingers. Pearls of sweats were appearing on his face, his breath seeming even more fragile as heard from up-close.

"B-brother, you're bleeding…!" she exhaled, half in a cry and half in a whisper. "Let me check it…"

"I'll… I'll be fine, Ruri. Let's head back to the base…"

"You got stabbed, didn't you?! You're not fine, Shun, let me check your injury at least!"

He put his hand away from the wound, revealing a dark red, almost maroon, stain quickly expanding.

"Oh my, it's terrible… We need to bring you back as soon as possible to the camp…"

He rose to his feet before she did, but he quickly started swaying on his, prompting her to prop his arm on her shoulders. She had seen him do it many times for Yuto and the opposite way around, she could completely manage this. Her brother had always been a featherweight, a glass cannon of sorts: she tried to make sure he didn't get in too rough of a shape, but it was getting exponentially harder with time going and especially as the Invasion was taking place. Yet, she'd do her possible, all that she could, and that started with bringing him back to their base.

Then she remembered something important.

"Wait, Shun."

"What is it?"

He attempted to have a sharp tone, but it only came off as snappy.

"It'd be better if we stopped the bleeding… Could you sit down for a minute? I'm going to apply pressure on the wound."

He gave her a weird look, skewed even, before giving in and sitting down on a patch of debris. Ruri had taken some basic first-response lessons back before the city had been destroyed, and only improved on them afterwards, making her hands move almost on their own: she opened her brother's coat, removed a piece of fabric she had around her waist, and applied pressure on it with all the force she could gather in her arms. Would she not have had an iron determination to save him, she'd have let herself tremble. However, in times where she was needed, she couldn't falter, so she pressed on.

Unfortunately, Ruri had to admit something else: the wound was deep and, as such, bleeding profusely. She couldn't stop what she now knew to be a haemorrhage, even if with her best efforts she had slowed down the flow, getting herself drenched in red.

"Can you please hold it on there for me, brother…? I wish I could do more, but that'll have to do for now. Let's go, okay?"

Without a vocal reply, he did as she had told him to: he put his hand over the piece of fabric, itself on the wound, and they got up, his arm still on her shoulders, walking slowly but surely towards the base.

Because she was aware of how dimmed down Shun's reflexes had to have been by this point, trying not to count by herself the volume of blood he had already lost, Ruri had to be sharper than ever. Her ears were focused on the potential unusual sounds that could have greeted them, her eyes were focused on her brother's vitals, her touch felt feverish under the weight of having to care for the two of them. The streets were deserted, but that was far from meaning they were safe for anyone: an Obelisk Force soldier could have found his colleague carded and have been on the hunt for them. She had to make sure they weren't attacked and, if they were, that they could defend themselves and get out of there.

To be fair, she didn't exactly remember the time she had spent walking from their base to the spot where she had found Shun taken hostage. She'd have estimated it to be around a dozen of minutes, perhaps less, perhaps more. There hardly was a way to know what time it was when exploring the wastelands, she hadn't even thought of checking if she could check what time it was at any point.

That, sadly, didn't prevent her from having this atrocious feeling of being slow. Their walking speed was usual fast because they were used to the ruins, but with his condition at that moment, she could have only expected to slogging through the streets. Yet, the slower they got, the harder it was for him to push himself on his two feet despite not having both her arms as support, the more anxious she got: would they make it to somewhere safe in time? They were both struggling, silent as tombs, because nobody spoke in the wastelands.

The moment her eyes spotted a familiar camp, Ruri felt like she could have jumped out of joy. They had made it there and, judging by the fact Shun could still support himself and walk, they'd make it in time. He'd, most likely, still be alive tomorrow: but things weren't set in stone yet. As such, she tried picking up the pace, but she kept hearing pained grunts and pants from him, sweat blistering on his face, his cut having finally stop bleeding, breathing heavily. She had no time to lose: she needed to make it to their camp as soon as possible.

Relief washed over her again when other members of the Resistance noticed them arriving and took things into their hands, but not before she almost fell, brought down by the collapse of her barely conscious brother. Relief and concern fought for dominance over her mind: on one hand, help was arriving with men and their gurney approaching them quickly, but on the other, Shun seemed miserable and on the brink of death. It could have gone either way, at that point, so she just helped them get him on the gurney and watched them run to the medic's tent, slowly trailing behind them.

Ruri believed herself to be someone with patience, usually and most of the time. She was hard to truly anger, albeit she was prone to being upset for someone else. The Invasion had made her a bit more apathic than before, but she remained more optimistic than most of the camp: they could see the end of the dark times if they stuck together.

While she was a firm believer of that and the virtue of being patient, she also had a sense of urgency running through her Kurosaki blood, the one she shared with her brother. Because of it, she wanted to stampede through time and not have to wait for any verdict, for any piece of news concerning his condition, if it was bettering or worsening, if he was even going to see the light of the dark days again. She couldn't stand to lose him, after having lost most of the people she knew to Fusion's forces. He had to make it out of there alive, for himself, for Yuto, for the others, for her.

She started trying to find different ways to pass time. She entered and exited the tent, paced outside, observed the people around and tried to guess what they were doing with their days, went through her deck, shuffled it, looked through it again to see if she had missed details on the illustrations, then put it back into her disk before going back to pacing outside the tent. They were few enough for information to communicate quickly: most people walking past her gave her sympathetic looks, the kind you'd give to the grieving.

Exhausted by the fears nabbing at her mind, her clothes now tainted with patches of maroons and browns, she eventually resorted to sitting in the part of tent akin to the waiting room of a hospital. It wasn't comfortable to sit on the ground or a makeshift chair as long, slow minutes passed by, people going and out, yet no feedback on her brother ever came up. In her head started flashing horrific scenarios of how he had been dead on arrival and they just didn't know how to tell her so without having her break down in tears and drown in her own grief, listing all the reasons she could think of for his early demise. Blood loss, internal haemorrhage, shock, sceptic shock, organ failure, critical medical error, lack of supplies leading to the impossibility to treat the case.

Perhaps she had been too late. Perhaps she had been too slow and, because of her, he was dead. Maybe that, if she had given herself up to the soldier, he'd have been fine and alive… Maybe that'd have given him enough time and distraction to disarm the soldier and they'd have run far away from there, perhaps using one of Raidraptors to escape the vicinity. No, instead, she had been a dumb girl and had let him get stabbed because she hadn't been able to stop him from going through with a dangerous and desperate plan! She only had herself to blame, and yet she could never apologize to him, and it made all matters worse, and…

Ruri?

A gentle voice called out her name, making her snap back to reality. In her daze, she didn't really recognize who it was, but it was a woman in her twenties or thirties, dressed in white, splatters of red covering her. She had a soft smile on her face, soft eyes looking into hers, who must have been red from all the crying she had done while waiting.

"Y-yes?" She rose on her feet, feeling a vertigo settle for a great total of three seconds. "D-do you have anything on my brother's whereabouts?!"

"I won't lie to you, Ruri, he was in a rough shape when he arrived there. He had already lost a lot of blood and was slowly slipping into shock," (the knot in her throat kept strengthening: that was it, he was dead), "but I'm happy to tell you that Shun's pulled through it."

Tears formed in her eyes again, untamed, a whole other kind of tears that didn't make her eyes sting.

"It's going to take a while for him to fully recover, but he's going to be fine, eventually."

"C-can I see him now?"

Another smile.

"Of course. If you may follow me."

The medic's tent was one of the only large ones of the camp, mostly because it had been sewn together from other tents that had been rendered unusable by assaults and the weather. Yet, it still remained somewhat small, which made it so the walk to wherever her brother was now felt short and to-the-point. To be fair, she didn't care about what it looked like, as long as it felt as safe as possible and as long as she could see him alive and breathing… It'd be fine, all fine.

No bed nor IV to be seen in the makeshift recovery room, but calm breathing. The woman whose name she still couldn't remember (the knot in her throat and the emotion, perhaps) had told her to warn her in case something was wrong before leaving her alone in the little space now dedicated to her sibling.

Sitting beside the sleeping-bag-turned-impromptu-hospital-bed, Ruri was observing her brother with little fear and a foreign kind of comfort in her stomach, replacing the pit and the burning acid having churned inside for what had felt like hours. Compared to their previous endeavour, he looked peaceful, as if he had been merely asleep, even if the cloth bandage on his cheek said otherwise, although the unnatural paleness of his face still stung her to see. It couldn't be avoided until he'd have recovered, she supposed, so she simply held one of his hand and silently rejoiced: they'd see another day together and, one day, journey to the end of the night to see the light of day and healing.