Lost, Ryuu wandered the streets without knowing what or whom he passed, walked an endless road of faded colors and blurred shapes with a feeling of such bereavement that at times he didn't even know who he was, didn't even know if he was alive. How was it possible for a living person to feel this way, as if all life—all purpose—had been drained from the world?
At times he could hear the shadowed figures around him laughing as he passed, a sound that was so out of place, so foreign that he barely recognized it. Upon hearing it, a feeling he'd only just started to have would creep forward in his breast, like a great dark snake that coiled around his heart and squeezed. The sound had to be stopped, snuffed out forever. No creature deserved to make such a noise.
It was unfair, a crime for people to be feeling anything but sadness and misery, anything but darkness. Often he would forget why, forget why he felt this way, forget why he drifted aimlessly through places that had probably once been familiar to him. Why he had hurt that woman that had come to him to help.
Help. "I can help you," the voice would say again, a nightmare.
But no. "I don't need help," he said aloud to the air, repeating what he'd said at the time, lost in his mind, his memories.
"Then I have no choice."
And then he would remember.
Lifeless, terrified eyes once filled with love and trust and joy. Dead. Rusger was dead. His soul-link, his friend—and with him, Ryuu's heart.
I'm going crazy, he thought mildly, grinning and not knowing why. Had there ever been a pug? Had it all been a dream, a distant dream of happiness that he could never really feel? Try as he might, he couldn't bring up the happy feelings, even the sad feelings, that he had been able to feel in those dreams.
Nothing was real. Nothing mattered.
And so he wandered. The only real thing in this place of wraiths and forbidden laughter.