Day 26 (August 1st). In the Z-ONE: Z-ONE is the man behind the madness. What kind of man do you think he is? Today's prompt is all about Z-ONE, or the timeline he lived in.
Focus: In which Yusei is unable to confront the Meklords in a reality far away—and his anger turns him into Something Else. Written by EibonVirgo.
Characters: Z-ONE.
They'd still been celebrating their win when the sky had burst open.
The air was full of white shapes and the sounds of metal clanging together. The power in the stadium had gone out. The streets outside were in chaos, full of silent cars and screaming people. Yusei lost track of everyone almost immediately.
Jack drove off shouting, still wounded from the duel. He was sure he could help. Crow went after him. Aki put the twins on the back of her bike and waited, helmets on heads, trying to make sense of the scene. When one of the big mechanical beasts put its arm through the stadium, Aki tensed—and shot away, twins in tow.
Yusei had never seen anything like it. He was mesmerized for a moment, eyes frozen to the blue infinity symbol glowing in its face. He was dragged back to reality when chunks of concrete and metal chairs came flying at him.
He hopped on his D-Wheel and ran.
Yusei barely ran from danger anymore. The Crimson Dragon had made him strong, he thought; albeit terrified of the future, of the pain and the red glow and of things beyond his imagination. These monsters were among them. They were metal Immortals. They were the exception.
And he was—had always been—a tiny, insignificant, white knight human.
He wasn't even sure he was breathing anymore, hands clenched around the Yuusei Go's handlebars, wrist cranking the accelerator back as far as it could go. Where had everyone else gone?
Pain crept up in his chest, so suddenly and crushingly that he knew he wasn't breathing—or even that he could. It felt like the world was curling his duel runner in around him. Suddenly movement was a prison, this bike, this body was a prison. Where would he go?
Yusei rode until he could not stand to ride anymore… which wasn't very long, by his standards. He found himself at Martha's old house, abandoned in the copse of trees at the edge of Satellite's sparsely rebuilt downtown area. Someone had been living here again, he realized, as he threw open shelves and a shiny new fridge.
Food and water. Food and water. Give yourself an hour. Go round up everyone else. Regroup here. Hide out. You gotta give yourself a moment to remember how to breathe.
Yusei stuffed himself, some rations for himself and the others, and his bike into the house's dark, dank cellar. He locked the door. Tried not to think about dying. He huddled into a corner and held his arms in tight, as if he could squeeze himself into a ball so small that his chest would forget that it was contracting in, in, in around his lungs.
He gave himself a moment.
The panic, the pain, would not leave him. It filled his bones with lead. He could not bring himself to swing back onto his D-Wheel, to open up the door.
He had run from the danger. Everyone had. Looking at it, at a threat he had never seen and had no idea how to deal with… made everything feel so impossible. He'd been trying to get a handle on this feeling, on this helplessness, ever since the Dark Signers had turned his reality on its head. Ever since nightmares had begun to plague him wherein the only one left standing—the only one with the fate of the world thrust upon his shoulders—was him.
And in those dreams, people always, always died. All because of him.
And the moments turned into hours. Into days. Into weeks. He scratched tally marks into the walls with a screwdriver. Guilt gnawed at his stomach. It was much too late to go back now. When he was out of food… he opened the door.
The city had burned. Perhaps yesterday. Perhaps a week ago. But the buildings in the distance were charred beyond familiarity. The skyline was a haze of yellow. Yusei dragged his duel runner out of the cellar, his leaden bones full of dread, and drove on.
The panic had snapped him of all of his strength. Of all of his sadness. He drove through the wreckage of Neo Domino, now a stinking pile of garbage and failure.
Satellite, part two. Yusei's father had named him after his legacy. And his father's legacy, he had become.
He didn't have the energy to cry, strangely. Or feel… anything. His body ached from the time spent curled up in the cellar, dying and dying and dying again and again.
Those monsters had moved on… it seemed. Yusei couldn't see any as he checked street after street, neighborhood after neighborhood. Sun up to sun down. Not a living person to be found.
Grief found him at last when he hit the Tops. A crumpled duel runner he knew inside and out sat, keeled over, cracked in two, on someone's driveway. The Wheel of Fortune. No rider to be seen.
It broke him. He hadn't cried since Kiryu had died, he thought, but he sat there and wept because if Jack's duel runner was here and destroyed, Jack had to be gone, too. And that meant that the others, that Crow and Aki and Rua and Ruka… well, they had to be gone, too.
He hadn't felt them die. But… when he moved aside his sleeve, his mark was nowhere to be found. He—He hadn't even noticed it had left him.
Decided that his moment of weakness had made him no longer worthy.
Gone. All of it.
The reality of the broken city, of his friends, of his failure was finally starting to hit him in full. And when he was done being sad, he became angry.
Angry at this. At the Crimson Dragon. At his friends, for leaving.
At himself. Most of all, at himself. For leaving just the same.
And as Yusei shut his eyes and counted to three, a small part of him hoping that it was all a dream, it occurred to him that his city was dead. His friends, likely gone. The world he had lived in had been killed off. It meant that he had to die, too.
His cowardice. His fear. His weakness. He'd have to snuff it out. If he was the only one left, it was not allowed to be a choice made in vain.
Today, he would have to kill Yusei Fudo. Tomorrow, he would have to be someone new. Someone who would run in and fight and not fear the consequences.
And he would have to spend the rest of his miserable existence trying to figure out how to wipe those godsdamned monsters off the face of the planet.
A/N:
Tune in tomorrow for Day 27, Pain vs Puff Pieces. :)