Disclaimer: I own nothing involved in this story unless I invented it myself. This is written for fun, not for profit. All forms of feedback eagerly accepted. Concrit is loved the most, but everything is welcome.
Fandom: Yu-Gi-Oh Arc-V
Title: Training A Falcon
Characters: Shun, Yuuri (Yuuto of a sort)
Friendship: Shun & Yuuto
Word Count: chapter: 1,620||story: 1,620
Genre: Angst, Drama||Rated: PG-13
Challenge: Written for the Diversity Writing Challenge, section G6, three-shot; Written for the 2015 Advent Challenge, day #14, write about anything; Written for the Dice Gods Challenge, random friendship, Shun & Yuuto
Note: I don't know if I'll write the backstory to how Shun got into this or not. It basically just hit my brain when the prompt was offered.
Summary: Splintered, bending, not broken, not yet. Spending days being trained and taught to obey, but not a slave, not a pet, not theirs in any way. He will fight in his own way but he will not fight his best friend, in any form.

He couldn't see anything. This was not surprising. His jailers only allowed him sight on certain occasions. During training was the most frequent of those, or dueling. But dueling was training and training involved dueling, to many extents. Not always, but enough so that he tensed for his deck whenever a training session drew near.

One would come soon. He could feel it in his bones. They weren't regular; nothing in his life was regular except pain when he didn't do well enough. He would suffer that gladly, though, because he hated those who held him and hated the thought of doing anything that pleased them on any level.

But sometimes he did anyway. He couldn't help himself. And whenever he did, he was not only praised, but rewarded, usually with a ceasing of pain and sometimes even with the addition of pleasure, such as the soft warmth of sunlight, or a few minutes to walk without being chained.

He hated that his standards for pleasure had fallen that low. But what choice did he have? A single mistake, caught at the wrong time, and a decision made by those who took him not to make a card of him. Why, he didn't know. He only could guess that they felt making him their attack beast was a far worse fate.

They weren't wrong. He kept on fighting, nevertheless, until he had no strength to fight anymore, and then he kept on anyway. There would be freedom one day. As he'd fought to regain those who had fallen before him, those who he'd left behind would fight to find him. He couldn't doubt it. He wouldn't doubt it. He didn't doubt it.

And yet how long had it been? How long since he'd seen a face that he knew and liked, or at least didn't hate? How long since he'd heard a voice that wasn't delivering an order of some kind? He didn't know anymore. Long. Very long. Weeks? Months? Something like that.

Surely not years. If he'd resisted them for years, they would've given it up as a bad job already, thrown him into a card, and let it be done. So, weeks or months.

That was the only assurance that he had. It wasn't much, but he took what he could get.

Pinpricks of pain ran all through his legs. The eternal warning; someone was coming. He struggled to his feet. They always wanted him ready to go as soon as his trainer arrived. He was always warned with time enough to get up, if he put effort into it.

Something else that he hated, but he ended up doing anyway: being ready when they wanted him. He'd tried to ignore them before. The pain wasn't worth the effort. They knew just how to hurt him the most.

The door slid open. He kept his eyes closed; the light that spilled in from it was always far too bright. They did that on purpose, he thought. That way if he somehow manage to get out of here - hadn't he once? He thought he had - then he couldn't escape anyway because he could hardly see in the light.

"Come on out, Kurosaki." His name. Part of his name. He had to struggle to remember the rest of it: Shun, that was it. Shun. He was Kurosaki Shun. He hadn't heard it in so long that remembering it took an act of will.

Even as he fought to recall his name he moved at the voice's command. He knew who it was, the one that he hated most of them all. Hated him the most because of who he looked like, who he should never have looked like, because there was only one Yuuto and how dare this Yuuri have his face, even if he didn't have his voice or his hair or act anything like him?

Keeping his eyes as closed as he could to avoid the light-blindness, he came to the door. He didn't need to see Yuuri to know the expression on his face: the same one he always wore, mild contempt and smugness.

Once he'd fought every time he saw Yuuri. That face infuriated him as he'd never thought anything could. Yuuri not only was a better fighter than he was in general, but Yuuri fought dirty. Shun ended every single fight on the ground, in pain from one or more extremities. Now he kept his anger confined to dirty looks whenever he could manage them and told himself it was enough.

It really wasn't. But until he could do better, it was what he did.

Yuuri said nothing else, but turned and walked away. Shun followed without needing to be told. He wondered if today's training would be dueling or something else. He was learning how to fight better here. He would make them regret teaching him. Yuuri was, as always, first on his mental list of who he would beat when the time came. He would just have to take him by surprise.

"We have a special training session for you today," Yuuri said as they came to the large double doors that marked where Shun spent most of his time when out of his cell. "I think you're going to enjoy it." He didn't know how to smile very well, but he tried. Shun wished that he wouldn't.

"Why?" He hated their rule that he only speak when spoken to, beaten into him over the last weeks. He was not a slave. He was not their slave. But the silence was hard to break when there was so seldom anyone to talk to anyway.

Yuuri gestured toward the door. "Go find out."

Shun mentally shrugged. He had nothing else that he could do. The doors slid open as he moved over to them, revealing the darkness beyond. His training room was always dark when he first entered. The light would grow gradually as he spent time there, letting his eyes adjust.

This room was even more his than the cell was. The cell had only bare stone walls and bare stone floor and bare stone ceiling and a door with no window in it. There were small slits in the very top, far out of his reach, that let air go in and out, but nothing beyond that.

Here in the training room, he could fight and not be punished, not unless he failed. Here he dueled, and so long as he did his best, all was well. Here he fought and learned and savaged and waited for the day when he would be able to turn all of this on those who kept him captive.

He was not their killer hawk. He would never be. But he would kill them and their last regrets would be giving him claws to strike with.

The doors slid shut behind him. Complete darkness wrapped around and he enjoyed it . He moved forward, sure of his footing, until one outstretched hand touched upon a table. Duel disk? Or other weapons?

Other weapons today, dull-edged swords. This wasn't the first time he'd wielded these in here and he picked them up easily. He'd been told that when he was out in the field for real, the blades would have edges. That had given Shun many a sweet fantasy to dream of.

A whoosh of light, and Shun moved at once, slamming the sword into the training dummy outlined by a spotlight a short reach away from him. Another one appeared, more hidden in the shadows, but Shun hit that one easily enough as well.

The lights danced around, giving his 'opponents' cover but not him. Shun still struck true, dodging when he could. Other lights struck through the darkness and he fought to avoid them. He knew the rules; if those hit him, it counted as an injury. He would feel it too; they were the same kind of holograms that were used in dueling. Not enough to cause damage, but enough so that he would know he'd been hit.

Some of them did hit, but never in a place where he couldn't shrug it off. He dodged under one that would've officially 'beheaded' him, and found his blood racing. Each of the beams set against him was connected to one of the dummies. He found the one for that one and struck it down.

A few moments of silence and shadows. Shun took the chance to rest while he could. They were changing something; this had happened before. What this time?

another light. Another strike. Now he could see what it was, and he faltered, just for a moment.

No longer a blank training dummy, but the image of one of his fellow resistance members, one that he knew had fallen a week or so before his own capture. Was this no longer a dummy? Had they somehow revived him?

Shun dared not take the chance. He knew the punishment for failing during training. His blade connected with the dummy just as it had with all the others. Still just a false thing of stuff.

He shrugged off the anger that slid through his veins that they dare do this. He could have expected nothing less. They would want him to fight his comrades, but these were only false copies. They meant nothing at all to him.

He kept on fighting. He made a point to remember each of his comrades when he saw their copied version and longed for the day when they'd all stand together again, triumphant against everything.

Another one behind him. He whirled, saw who it was, and froze on the spot. No. It could not be.

Yuuto?

To Be Continued

Note: Thank you for reading and I hope that you enjoyed the chapter. Please let me know what you thought of it if at all possible.