A/N: Written for the Becoming the Tamer King Challenge: Training Peak Task, and for the What if Challenge, "What if Ken died instead of Osamu?" Both challenges are on the Digimon Fanfiction Challenges Forum (link's in my profile).
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unchosen
1. the silence at his funeral screamed like nails on a chalkboard
The Sakura blossoms had dried out, leaving their stems scratched and bare. The refuse cacked like flakes of paper beneath their feet, almost inaudible in the howling winter wind – but he heard the paper as silent screams, and his steps were foolishly tentative because of it. Yet he stepped on, wandering aimlessly simply to hear the screams digging fine-point needles through his skin.
Paper could not scream; nor could dried Sakura blossoms. He knew this, and even if he wished to do so he could not delude himself to think it otherwise. Perhaps that was a fallacy of his. If he could not see or touch or taste or smell or hear, then it did not exist – or so he had believed, thought he had believed. Except his brother had been able to prove he hadn't, and their relationship had died for it.
Not Ken though; he'd died for Osamu: his life, shoving him away from the car as hard as a nine year old could shove; his lies, calling out his brother's falsehood even when he knew it to be the truth; his stress and frustration that had erupted into anger and fired at the comforter instead of the enemy lines… and his God damned pride that had held his tongue in check thereafter.
If he could have gotten away with it, he wouldn't have even come; he didn't have that right, or that strength. Not that strength had much of a place when innocence died. Most present only knew his brother's face, that cherubic face with baby fat still clinging to his cheeks and those doe blue eyes that seemed to eternally search out souls to touch with its never-ending vat of light. But they were still crying in the crowd while Osamu hid apart, thinking of how the dead Sakura blossoms wailed in near-silence under his feet and why he'd been deaf to his brother's more obvious screams.
But soon the refuse of the Sakura had been reduced into something finer than paper yet coarser than dust, and could no longer wail. And the newfound reprieve wrapped in the howls of the wind made his skin crawl; the silence itself screamed, worse than the dying wails of dried Sakura blossoms. It was fresh agony, fresh like the teeth-grinding sound of nails on a chalkboard, and when he felt unbidden tears he brushed them angrily aside and suffered the biting flakes and resultant stings from the bare Sakura tree instead.
No-one reprimanded him. No-one reached for him, except his father – a silent tall figure in the sun supporting his mother.
Osamu did not go, though the long-since tainted desire for that comfort crawled beneath the needle pricks before he could reject it.