A/N: May be a bit hard to read. It's written pretty...spaced out? Sort of a bunch of ideas brewing together
Yuri sometimes wondered who he was.
He knew who he was. He was Yuri Lowell from the Lower Quarter of Zaphias, best friends to the current Commandant, Flynn Scifo. He was a member of Brave Vesperia and he traveled the world in a ship with a flying whale who talked to a woman on said ship. He was oftentimes a criminal to the empire and could be an annoyance to his friends, but he could also be a joker and help out with whoever needed it. He helped put a stop to Alexei's reign and to the Adephagos, but sometimes he wondered who it was who saved the world, who helped people, who joked around with friends.
Because after thinking about all this he remembered a blade sinking into flesh of a magistrate's back, he remembers seeing a knight being buried alive in sand, he remembers seeing a leader being crushed beneath his own weapon and letting all those things happen. And when he thinks of all this he wonders if it's really the same person who stabs someone in the back as it is that laughs with his friends and helps the poor and elderly.
But then he thinks of the boy in the magistrate's basement, the parents in the desert, his friend's look of pure agony, and wonders if what he did was really all that bad. They deserved it, did they not? It was coming to them. He saw the wounded monster, the empty oasis, the city of Zaphias over grown in plants and taken over by monsters and his conscience didn't hurt him so bad.
And he continued to think. He thought of an accented voice speaking words with an ominous meaning, his friend's voice scolding him for what he did, the guild boss' utter uncertainty over how to interact with Yuri any longer and again he doubted himself.
He looked down at the unsheathed blade of his sword and turned it. At just the right angle, the sunset glinted off of it and he was certain he could see blood on it. Perhaps it was on his hands as well. He had washed his blade off before. Once in the river of the guild city, and he had briefly questioned if the water he bathed the blade in was the same water that enclosed over his first victim's body.
No, his second, he thinks to himself after pondering this. He remembers a cloud of books, blood dripping in his eye, explosions - and a man with a pair of glasses, and then a sword being pulled out of him.
Certainly this killer could not be the same one who experiences a life, a good one, with happiness and friends and close people and ale and a dog.
And with this on his mind, Yuri wonders who he is.