It was all over, huh.
The feeling that everything was over didn't sit well within him. No matter how many times he'd see Kusanagi celebrate with his brother, Aoi Zaizen smiling honestly or Takeru rejoicing with his childhood friend, he just couldn't get over the fact it was all over. It was such a brutal change, thinking he didn't have any revenge to pursue or "bad guys" to fight anymore. This felt… odd and disturbing, as if his peace of mind was gone.
Contemplating the situation, Yusaku could only realize one thing: it meant he would go back to an "ordinary life", the one his classmates and the entire city shared. There would be no more life-or-death duels. There would be no more fire burning inside of him dictating him to fight this or that person for whatever it felt like dictating him to do.
The fire had been quenched, now. There was no longer a need to play a card game on boards, extracting cards for storms and searching for the source of a voice. None of that was relevant anymore. Nobody would have their consciousnesses infected, stolen or deleted. There was no Tower of Hanoi, no hidden and protected zone. None of that.
In a way, it was as if his entire life had changed in the course of an, admittedly, not-so-long span of time.
He had expected to feel complete again when he started his crusade for revenge. He had gotten what he wanted from it, in this case: he felt more human, with things to look forward to, friends and wants to satisfy. It finally felt like he would be able to live normally again, like when he was still a child…
Aside from one void inside this new completeness.
There was a part of him who was nowhere near used to this, a part who was addicted to the thrill of being unable to expect what was to come. That part would never be put to rest now that his life was "normal": he would have to get rid of it. He had learnt the lesson that everything took time: deleting this "addiction" would be a long way, but it had to be done…
Glancing at the Duel Disk lying on his table, a new realization hit him: he didn't need to bust these cards every so often nowadays. He could let his cards remain in a drawer forever from now on, never touch the game again, be free from the last link to the darkest parts of his past.
It was all over, but there was one thing left inside this disk he couldn't bring himself to figure out what to do with. Give him to Kusanagi to analyze it? Release it onto the Web and let it do whatever it wanted to do? Maybe he could just tell it to go home… It had told him about it before, after all.
He knew for a fact other people associated with Ignites had decided to either keep them around, release them so they could go back to the Cyberse, or they had somehow made a compromise so it could be both at the same time. He didn't really know what he had decided to remember this piece of information, but he did anyway.
What he was sure of, however, was that he didn't know what do of Ai.
When they had first met, he had sworn he'd just throw that AI away once he was done using it as a bargaining chip, a hostage, whatever the enemy needed it for. In the end, he owed Ai his life for the few times he saved him from a sure death. He'd have died before he would have defeated Revolver if Ai hadn't been here to risk his existence just to save him.
Ever since that day, Yusaku just couldn't wrap his head around getting rid of Ai as if he was merely an ordinary AI or program. He was different from all the other dueling AIs: he had, in a way, his own soul. An artificial soul made out of his own suffering, but a soul nonetheless, right? It was a gray area nobody had bothered clearing out yet.
He glanced at the oddly-silent Duel Disk, until a familiar face showed up.
"Playmaker?"
The small humanoid shape of the Ignis he had been assigned to showed up from the disk, as usual, displaying something akin to worry. Huh, odd.
"Oh, it's you."
They stared at each other for a little while, without a real reason to do so, just because there had to be something one of them wanted to say. He knew he had to tell something to the AI just because it wouldn't exit his mind.
"You're not gone yet?" he bluntly asked, as usual.
"Gone?" Ai seemed shocked at the question despite the number of times he got asked about that exact matter. "Where? Why?"
"I don't know, the Cyberse maybe? All your friends seem to have gotten back there."
"You're not wrong…"
Ai took an overdone pensive stance.
"Hmm… I don't know yet. I wanna go back to my friends, but I also have friends here, and I don't want to let them down!"
"What friends?" Yusaku's eyebrows twitched. "Roboppy?"
"She's part of them, but aren't we also friends?"
Yusaku felt like scoffing at this question of a reply. It was ridiculously funny, and he didn't know what it was that amusing.
"Yeah, I guess," he answered with a little, maybe mischievous smirk.
"C'mon!" Ai reacted with a delightfully offended yell. "We've lived through so much together! We're more than friends now! We're partners!"
"I suppose so, but you're still just an AI."
"It's not because I'm an AI that I don't have a heart! You're killing me Playmaker!"
The fact Ai was still calling him "Playmaker" bothered him, for some reason.
"Can you call me anything else than 'Playmaker'? I don't plan on being a 'hero' on Link VRAINS again."
"Oh, okay."
The AI took his pensive pose back, until he showed some confusion.
"I don't know what to call you then…"
The pick was painfully obvious, but if he didn't lay it flat for him, he'd be stuck with it for a while.
"Just call me Yusaku, if we're friends. Friends call themselves by their first name, I guess."
"That's gonna be weird…" Ai muttered under his 'breath', before looking back at the human in front of him. "That's a great idea! I'll call you Yusaku from now on!"
Sadness then showed through his eyes.
"Well, if I don't leave for good, at least…"
The AI really looked like he had a cornelian dilemma on his hands.
"My friends decided to mostly live in Cyberse, and I thought I'd do that too, but I'm not so sure anymore…"
"You know you're free, right? You didn't have to stick around anymore."
"I know that! I just don't feel like leaving, that's all."
"You should. You're free now."
He wasn't so sure about pushing the AI to leave his disk, especially considering he planned to stick it in a drawer he would never open ever again once that was done.
"You really want me to go home, huh?"
That question shouldn't have been so puzzling, yet he was almost silent in front of it. He had learnt to be more honest, right? He should be able to say what he thought, instead of beating around the bush.
"It's on you there. I don't mind having you around. You're the one saying we're… friends, right?"
What a weird notion, but it felt so true. It felt truer than most of what he had gone through, the lies and the hidden depths.
Ai's eyes glimmered.
"I guess I'll just visit my friends from time to time then!"
Yusaku wasn't so sure about putting away his Duel Disk anymore.