Don't Starve
Yuri has known hunger since he was a child.
Not hunger of the stomach but hunger of the heart. His body has known much food in his time. Three meals, three times a day, every day, all week, all year: it doesn't leave much room for starvation and that's not even to mention the snacks he sometimes sneaks in at his whim. No, he's quite gorged when it comes to the hunger of the body. It is the hunger of the heart where he's starving. Ravenous and craving for his next meal even though he knows that it will never come.
It has never come. Not once.
This hunger of his heart is visceral and foreboding. It leaves him hollow and deranged. It doesn't manifest in growls and whines but as something else. As a touch that leaves him craving more. As a jealousy that never fully reveals itself. Just a feeling. An afterthought of something else. Something far more horrible he may never fully realise.
Yuri can get a quick fix through a Duel but it's not enough. It's never enough. Though they say beggars can't be choosers but he's always been a king. He deserves more. Yuri knows he deserves more and better. He takes what he can get. That's the way he has always known it. The only way he'll ever understand it.
He won't realise there's more to it than that for a long time. Not until he sees what the fools have that kings don't. That is when jealousy, green-eyed and evil, will raise its head and whisper dark nothings into his ear and he'll rage for he's been knavishly dim.
One day, it will all be so obvious but in his sweet web of ignorance, Yuri will never realise it is until lain bare. So, he'll use the limited knowledge he does have and he will rend his tools as he sees fit. He will take and he will take until he's grasping at nothing. It won't take long. It never takes long before his finger tips are bleeding onto rugged ground as he fails to understand this hunger of the heart.
Game. Set. And match. Defeat for them. Victory – sweet, pulsating, ephemeral – for him. It sates his hunger like a morsel or crumb but then it returns… deeper than before. It repeats. And it repeats. And it repeats.
Duels fill that ravenous void but not for long. He analyses every Duel for the component its lacking. The answer is right there. Yuri always misses it. He fixates on the win instead of the loss. He fixates on his ideal of victory even though it is always fading and becomes scarcer than before.
He can see that this hunger is sated in the others. In his countless, moronic peers' eyes, he can see that they aren't slave to this primal hunger. What do they have that he doesn't?
The hunger turns to something else. Something far more feral. It becomes an unsatisfied and unmoving part of Yuri.
His body aches for the fulfilment of its needs. It has for a very long time for Yuri has known hunger since he was a child. The only problem is, he barely remembers when he was a child. Academia is the luxuriant wasteland he has only ever known. The others come in swathes of naivety from ships. He has no memory of anything outside this secluded island in which Academia stands tall.
So now, Yuri must ask the hunger that he has always had inside of him: was he ever a child?