Scar

Puzzles (2)

(based on no episode in particular. Happened in Zexal II, before Arclight brother's reappearance, still partly inspired from im-aggressive's drabble. Any situation you recognize might not come directly from me :p)

Disclaimer: Of course I don't own YGO Zexal—oh, for the love of RA, I'm sure y'all knew the brief already! I'm sick of punching the ctrl+c and ctrl+v buttons, so I'm hitting this random (supposedly) disclaimer words instead.

***

IV hadn't realize that they—he and Rio—had the almost similar shade of eyes until he looked at them up close. Actually, she was the one looking down, her body crouched a little above him, eyebrows furrowed.

"Are you alright?" she asked, her white hood hanging down from her head, blocking the sunlight behind.

Uh, not really? Was what he had wanted to say, but his lips instead formed a "What?" with hoarse voice, as if he hadn't had drinks for quite some times.

The blue haired girl crouched even lower, extending a hand to touch his right shoulder. "It seems like you're injured. Who are you?"

His lips moved again, and he couldn't hear his own voice as the darkness slowly swallowed his consciousness. When he opened his eyes again, he was back in his room in the submarine.

That was quick, he thought, blinking several times to make sure he was really awake. It had been awhile since the last time he had nightmares, and although he wasn't complaining, he was definitely confused with the sudden rhythm change. Ever since his day out to the ruins, his nightmares were now replaced by a series of strange dream filled with familiar faces that seemed to be connected to each other in scattered, incoherent pieces—like an unsolved puzzles of some sort.

The first time he had that dream had been about him dying—crushed by a knocked down building. The second time he had found himself lying limp on a shore, his right side throbbing with pain, but then he started crawling half-consciously until he reached the nearest grove of trees. Somehow, he managed to stand up and walked sluggishly along the thicket, using the trunk of trees to prop him. He kept walking, aiming for God-knew-what, before his legs gave way and collapsed to the ground—which happened to be too close to a river, making half of his body drowned in the shallow water.

That was one of the uneventful and bearable ones and it was usually short and he woke up just fine after that; no jolt, no sweat, no nothing. The eventful ones were even worse than his usual nightmare as it usually involved dark, dismal places, and the problem was that everything inside those dreams felt too real to his liking, even the pain. He could still feel the lingering sensation a few hours after he woke up, just like the aftereffect of Augmented Reality duels.

There was this one particular dream—one of his least favorites—where he was chained inside a cave, his back was whipped relentlessly until he lost consciousness. Much to his horror, he was really stubborn in that dream, refusing to drift off even after hundreds of lashing, so it lasted longer than he would have preferred. He was pretty shaken up after the dream that he spent the whole morning being jumpy every time his back made contact with something.

They had been there for three weeks now, and he still hadn't figured out what was the connection between the ruins and his dream. Why was he the only one enduring it? What about his brothers? They seemed perfectly fine to him so he presumed they didn't have one of those dreams, even though he did spot them in some of his dreams; inside the caves, barely talked to each other and had to work like slaves, digging and digging until their hand calloused. They had been called with the same code-names they were using now, and it certainly was creepy.