It had started with migraines.
He'd thought at first that they were because of the lack of food and water - he'd had them before, when especially tired, and hungry, and thirsty, and he had been ignoring whatever they'd bothered to put through the door ever since they'd taken his deck away.
So he tended to ignore them, even if ignoring them meant huddling up into a ball of pain when the knives behind his eyes felt like searing hot pokers and wouldn't stop for anything, making him feel ill enough to throw up, if there had been anything to throw up.
But then... what little he could see - the light shining in through that one high up window being enough, whether it was sunlight or moonlight - started to blur.
At first, that too was no cause for panic.
He was tired. The headaches weren't helping. He was faint all the time.
It was nothing, he'd tell himself. Nothing.
But it grew worse, and so did the migraines, leaving him weeping when he'd thought that there were no more tears within him to be shed, leaving him shaking when he thought that there was no more energy within him to move.
The blurring became bad enough that he couldn't see the detail of the wall from the other side of his cell.
He'd never had problems with his sight before, and for the first time, he was scared of what was going to happen to him.
He was going to die anyway. He knew that. But this... this was an insult to add to that.
They'd tossed him into the van, and two men stayed in the back with him, obviously friends of the man he'd brought down by the looks of sheer anger that they would send his way, and the fact that they turned on him the moment they were moving.
The driver, if he heard anything, didn't care, or couldn't be bothered to stop.
Kiryu fought back - no way would he go down without a fight - but there were two of them, and it was such a small space, and they'd taken his duel disk away, so he couldn't use that for a weapon, and they had theirs, and after what he'd done, they weren't hesitating.
They kicked. They threw punches. Hit him until he couldn't fight back any more, and he was lying there, bleeding on the floor of the van, glaring up at them with bloodshot eyes.
He'd been hit on the head several times. Once or twice, near his eyes, his nose - it was a wonder they hadn't broken it - and he felt light-headed, but kept his focus, couldn't lose his focus.
He blacked out before they reached the prison, and was awakened forcefully once they got there, certain that they'd said something to the effect of 'He was like this when we found him', or 'He put up a fight', which he had, but he hadn't been the one to start it.
And now in his cell all he could see were the fuzzy colours of the door and the wall and the almost blinding light that was coming from the window in the daytime, and the pale blueness that came through at night.
He shivered, holding himself close, barely able to see his hand in front of his face, and was afraid.
No one had come in. No one had done anything. They'd noticed when he'd been writhing in pain some time ago - he'd lost track of the days and weeks long before - but no doctor had ever been sent for.
He thought, somehow, that there should have been a doctor. Even in Satellite there were doctors. Some charged extortionate prices, but even then, you could pay them back somehow, and they'd treat you.
But none had come. None had been thought of, he felt. The idea made him want to cry, just as the migraines had, and still did, and made him want to bring the entire place down, want to scream at how unfair it all was.
But he couldn't.
Soon, the darkness would come. It would blot out the walls, and the door, and it would take away the sunlight and the moonlight both. Nothing would be left other than the unsatisfying darkness, in which he was more alone than ever before.
His own personal Hell.
And when it came, when the migraines lessened to a steady throb behind his eyes, constantly there and reminding him that it could always be worse, he would try to stand, only to wobble, try to walk only to fall down.
What had happened to the great Kiryu Kyousuke? Leader of Team Satisfaction? Was this what he was reduced to?
This was the hell that Yuusei had assigned to him. That they'd all left him to.
He hated them. He hated them, so much, so very, very much he HATED THEM-
And more than that, some part of him wished even one of them were here, right now, to let him know that it wasn't just him in this world of darkness, to let him hear a voice, anyone's other than the security guard that occasionally passed by outside his door, to know that someone cared.
No one ever came, though. And that just made him hate them more.
A voice.
A voice in the dark.
His head raised - uselessly. Looking around in futility to try and figure out where from.
It wasn't anyone he recognised. Then who...?
"I am an envoy of the underworld."
Hell. But he was already in Hell.
"If there were a desire thou wouldst have granted, it would be within my power to do so, so long as you were to become reborn as a Dark Signer."
A desire. Whatever he wanted.
He licked his lips, dry from having been unused for so long, breathed and swallowed, blinking sightlessly.
"I..." his voice cracked. "I want to see..." He coughed. "To have my... vengeance..."
He trailed off, and finally closed his eyes as he realised that he was, after all this time, actually dying.
Maybe that was what was happening. Hell, coming to take one of their own.
"And... one last time..."
One last duel. Team Satisfaction's last duel. To say... 'goodbye'. No matter how impossible it seemed any more, with no deck, and no sight to see his cards with.
A fanciful after-thought, but there it was.
And then... darkness.
But of another kind entirely.
...
AN: SO. I play this character, this Kiryu, in a roleplay dressing room, and just today decided to pick him up again to post with, and ended up looking at this picture again, which is actually what inspired the whole thing. ( member _illust .php?mode =medium&illust _id= 6683482).
I'd originally wanted to have him injured badly enough (by accident) while on his way to the Security facility, but never treated. I've looked it up, and what he ends up iwth more or less matches 'Cortical Blindness', except that the way I play him doesn't match up with this perfectly. But then again, later events in the AU help make this make sense, I think.