[It's harder than Shun expected it to be to recall some of these details, and he's still mulling on Yuto for a few more moments after he finishes. While he can't reasonably blame himself for Yuto being here when he knows his soul was present in Yuya last he knew, he also can't help but think that if he'd gone to help Yuto in the first place, he might've been able to avoid whatever it was that did bring him here.
The feeling of contact snaps him out of the brief reverie, and his fingers twitch back instinctively at it, the typical slight flinch from contact when it had mostly meant a potential attack for so long. He's not sure enough whether Ren's trying to comfort him or comfort himself to refuse it, though, because after subjecting him to a talk like this it'd be a bit more callous than he prefers to act towards his friends to throw off an attempt to ground himself, even if it is an unfamiliar one.
He doesn't exactly return the gesture, but his hand at least relaxes to rest in the same kind of position, Shun's jaw set as he nods at where Ren's own experience trails off.]
I was furious at the start, but once it wore off, having both Yuto and Ruri gone was like losing everything all over again.
[The admission is quiet, and as restrained as he can make it, because he certainly hadn't felt like being restrained about it then.
After a moment, he lets out a breath and goes on to answer Ren's question.]
He wanted to find allies before we went to Fusion. I don't know if he planned it or not, but we were all split up when we got there. Some of the others apparently turned up in groups, but I was completely alone, so I went underground. I didn't know if the others had been lost between dimensions or what, but I looked for information and played in gambling duels to try and find strong duelists. Everyone I met there was weak, but that was when I first dueled the Lancer who turned out to be the mole placed in Xyz. He claimed to be an LDS exchange student, but he didn't play anything like them. He had the steel, the edge they'd always lacked.
But Synchro itself was disgusting. Imagine a city where everything on the ground is slum, and the single percentage of the rich live literally above everyone else in their ivory towers while corrupt officials maintain that and crush any attempts to rise up. The underground duels were raided - all the Tops residents everyone knew came to watch were gone by then, of course - and all of us there were arrested. I started a fight in the prison and got sent to solitary confinement for it, but by the time I escaped almost all the rest of the Lancers had been brought to the jail too and were breaking out. I saved us from one recapture, but then we ran into the head of security himself, Jean-Michel Roger, smug bastard that he was. The governing council of that city in Synchro wouldn't take a side in the war when they learnt about it, but Akaba came in, after he'd left us all to rot in prison for a few days doing whatever the hell he was doing, to broker a deal. We ended up being forced into the Friendship Cup, one of Synchro's traditions, and if we could prove ourselves against the city's best, they'd join the war effort.
It was basically a gilded cage, being allowed that. We were locked up in fancy rooms, completely isolated from each other, only let out to duel. And my first opponent was that traitor and spy who'd crawled into the Lancers. [His fingers tense and curl again at that, though it's residual anger rather than pain this time.]
no subject
The feeling of contact snaps him out of the brief reverie, and his fingers twitch back instinctively at it, the typical slight flinch from contact when it had mostly meant a potential attack for so long. He's not sure enough whether Ren's trying to comfort him or comfort himself to refuse it, though, because after subjecting him to a talk like this it'd be a bit more callous than he prefers to act towards his friends to throw off an attempt to ground himself, even if it is an unfamiliar one.
He doesn't exactly return the gesture, but his hand at least relaxes to rest in the same kind of position, Shun's jaw set as he nods at where Ren's own experience trails off.]
I was furious at the start, but once it wore off, having both Yuto and Ruri gone was like losing everything all over again.
[The admission is quiet, and as restrained as he can make it, because he certainly hadn't felt like being restrained about it then.
After a moment, he lets out a breath and goes on to answer Ren's question.]
He wanted to find allies before we went to Fusion. I don't know if he planned it or not, but we were all split up when we got there. Some of the others apparently turned up in groups, but I was completely alone, so I went underground. I didn't know if the others had been lost between dimensions or what, but I looked for information and played in gambling duels to try and find strong duelists. Everyone I met there was weak, but that was when I first dueled the Lancer who turned out to be the mole placed in Xyz. He claimed to be an LDS exchange student, but he didn't play anything like them. He had the steel, the edge they'd always lacked.
But Synchro itself was disgusting. Imagine a city where everything on the ground is slum, and the single percentage of the rich live literally above everyone else in their ivory towers while corrupt officials maintain that and crush any attempts to rise up. The underground duels were raided - all the Tops residents everyone knew came to watch were gone by then, of course - and all of us there were arrested. I started a fight in the prison and got sent to solitary confinement for it, but by the time I escaped almost all the rest of the Lancers had been brought to the jail too and were breaking out. I saved us from one recapture, but then we ran into the head of security himself, Jean-Michel Roger, smug bastard that he was. The governing council of that city in Synchro wouldn't take a side in the war when they learnt about it, but Akaba came in, after he'd left us all to rot in prison for a few days doing whatever the hell he was doing, to broker a deal. We ended up being forced into the Friendship Cup, one of Synchro's traditions, and if we could prove ourselves against the city's best, they'd join the war effort.
It was basically a gilded cage, being allowed that. We were locked up in fancy rooms, completely isolated from each other, only let out to duel. And my first opponent was that traitor and spy who'd crawled into the Lancers. [His fingers tense and curl again at that, though it's residual anger rather than pain this time.]