Dead Byte
It was perfect narcissism. It was a sick, sick fantasy. It was everything Yusaku wanted and more. No, not wanted – needed. It was everything Yusaku needed and more.
It began with a simple notion. It started like how a droplet of water can become a flood. It did not begin as a singularity but that ignores external circumstances which everything, every aspect of Yusaku's life, can lead back to. Perhaps he is beginning the story of love and lust to soon but the first thought, the first time he began to conceptualise this perfect narcissism, this sick, sick fantasy, was when he was hanging out with Naoki.
Not willingly, anyway. Not that Yusaku did many things willingly.
Yusaku had been walking to school. Naoki had joined them. Under the guise of routine friendship, they talked. Nothing deep or anything serious like that but it was just an offhand remark. Though, to call such an impassioned speech an 'offhand remark' is misleading. Yusaku couldn't have cared less. Naoki could care on behalf of the world.
He was talking about how he idolised Playmaker.
Yusaku was Playmaker. Ergo, Naoki idolised Yusaku as Yusaku was Playmaker. What's interesting about that is whilst retaining a somewhat realist idea of Yusaku, Naoki was convinced of all sorts of fictionalisations regarding Playmakers. It was somewhat intriguing, even to Yusaku who simply didn't have the capacity to care for such trite. The concept of alter-egos and personas bisecting like this hadn't intrigued Yusaku up until this point when larger factors were at play and were beginning to rear their nasty effects on Yusaku.
"Playmaker is so hot!" Naoki exclaimed in the midst of banter and ranting.
Yusaku nearly missed such an exclamation. Honestly, Yusaku didn't really 'get' sexuality. He thought hot to be a temperature. Other people, people like Naoki, saw it not only as a temperature but as a way of gauging someone's attractiveness; specifically, their sexual attractiveness. He thought it was useless. People were people. How good could they be?
But that was the loneliness talking. That was the repression rearing its toxicity and contorting all of Yusaku's thoughts. That was the true starting point. The starting point for how he would come to understand himself… his selves.
He was lonely and sick, and he was dying, and he didn't care. No one cared. His body was a vessel for revenge. He was not ill in the bodily sense, but in a more emotional or mental sense. He was slowly succumbing to a rotting of the mind and soul. He didn't care. No one cared.
Perhaps there were people who cared. Perhaps Yusaku simply overlooked it. He didn't care. Why should Ai or Aoi or Naoki or Shoichi – why should any of them care?
He had one goal. One initiative. He was satisfied to perish upon the culmination of all his hatred exerted unto the world and to have his vengeance satiated. That's all he wanted. That's all he needed. It was not an antidote, but it was a damn good poison.
But then, in his lowest points, after he had woken in the night with faint tingles of electricity in his veins and with nightmares fresh before his eyes, he found himself in need of an outlet. He was cold. He was so fucking cold.
He was lonely. He was sick. He was dying. He only had himself, or so it felt. Or so Yusaku deluded himself into believing. After all. He was the only one who knew he was lonely; who knew he was sick; who knew he was dying in all but physical sense.
So, he tried to blot out the nightmares even though they tinged the very phosphenes – bright and colourful – on the back of his eyelids. He held onto his head and he pressed hard. He wracked his brains for anything; anything!
And he did happen upon it.
Perhaps the sole singularity was his hatred and his vengeance. Perhaps that was the true start but alas, so many traumas exuding from one period in his life seemed to blur everything. He needed a coping mechanism and he needed it badly. And he found one.
"Playmaker is so hot!"
Hot. Warmth. Anything but cold. And Yusaku was so, so cold. He was freezing. The exclamation rang in his ears. He licked his lips. In the darkness of his room, the frigid darkness, he found the kindle he could burn to stave off the evil that lurked in every cloying shadow in the corners of both his room and his mind.
He turned to the one person who knew all his problems and more. He turned to himself. No. Not his self. His other self. Someone whom he could conceptualise as himself in all but name and appearance.
Yusaku turned to Playmaker.
Not in the physical sense. Not in the way where energy shoots through his body as his mind is fooled into being taken into the digital realm. In a more… spiritual sense. Thus, he began to conceptualise Playmaker as someone who was not only him in all but name and appearance, but in other ways. More subtle ways of personality.
Yusaku wasn't sure what sort of traits he was injecting into this other him, this other him of the mind, but he knew the resulting creation was neither him nor Playmaker. But at the same time, was exactly him and exactly Playmaker. After all, if most the world could believe that Fujiki Yusaku and Playmaker were separate entities, then Yusaku and Playmaker could believe that as well.
It only escalated from there.
As with all addictions and all beautiful and ugly lies, it began small. It began as comforting words after a nightmare and it began as three things noted in all mundanity. The Playmaker in Yusaku's head – not his Duel Disc – began as a sort of comfort and domesticity.
Then, it became a source of other types of comfort. Yusaku can't recall what night it was but it was an awful night in the dead of winter, he thinks. He remembers a chill and he remembers needing something blindingly hot to distract him.
So, he turned unto a comfort he had never indulged in before. At first, he couldn't bring himself to do it. He doesn't think anyone can on the first turn. Not something so… seemingly sinful. So, instead, he probed himself with an awe that he had never had unto his body before. It was not quite clinical, but it was not quite admiring either. But, on the second night, on the second attempt, Yusaku was able to. He used Playmaker to coach himself through his gestures.
He came that night. For the first time. And the release was blissful, and he had Playmaker to thank. Right after it, after the splatter and mess, Yusaku didn't think that he would ever be able to bring himself to do such a thing again. He was not entirely incorrect on that notion. He was unable to bring himself to do it in any other name but Playmaker's – but his, truly.
Yusaku was careful not to overextend his newfound pleasures but even in the course of his modest use of this pleasure, the hit wore off quicker than he had hoped. As is the way with all addictions. What begins as high, soon turns to a low.
Furthermore, after that, he began acting… strangely.
Not in a way that Yusaku could document without bias. He saw something wrong with himself. The poisons he was taking upon were doing something to him. He'd never felt this good. Not in any way that he could remember and though he had no memory prior to incident, everything after – every painful moment – seemed forever etched unto his vessel so therefore, he could confirm. He had never felt so good in such a long time.
However, others could note where Yusaku failed to see beyond his limitations. Shoichi could see that Yusaku was eating less and Naoki could see he was withdrawn even more. Aoi was receiving signals which unsettled her and made her feel unsafe around Yusaku. Finally, AI felt like he was completely and utterly isolated from Yusaku's interior world. This was in spite being inseparable from the device Yusaku kept strapped to his wrist. It was concerning to say the least, but it was difficult to get involved.
After all, Yusaku was a notorious eccentric in his pains and he seemed to just be revelling in them deeper and deeper.
Until all these events and feelings and notions climaxed.
Yusaku had locked himself in the closet in the truck. He was banging on the wall. He kept banging and banging until his hands were raw and until his ears rang with the sound. He ignored Shoichi's pleas from the outside. His Duel Disc was broken. It had to be broken. There was no way in which it could be functional even though it was making all the right noises and lights. It couldn't be working because Yusaku wasn't being accepted by that which he longed to join.
It was in this night, this cold night, that the flame of warmth that Playmaker had provided Yusaku had been extinguished.
All Yusaku wanted was to be a collection of zeroes and ones. He wanted to be at peace in a world which did not know tranquillity. He wanted to be cured of all the poisons he had drank so deliciously. He just wanted to be with his love. His one true love outside the prison that was the world which was made of materials: distinct, sharp, hurtful, all that and more.
Why wasn't the Vrains accepting him? Accepting them? Fuck, why wasn't the people he thought he could trust most intimately, even when he had spurned them so deep into his illusions and fantasies, why weren't they accepting of him? Yusaku just wanted to be there. That's all Yusaku wants at the crux of all this madness: both self-inflicted and as the culmination of torture.
He just didn't know if he wanted to be there as two individuals coming together as one in a pure sense: the merging of two separate entities which had always, in truth, been one. The avatar and the controller. Or, if he wanted to be two individuals coming together as one in the carnal sense. Whether or not he wanted to be absolved of the sinful prison that his real-life vessel, that his flesh and bone, was and to become a carrier of something else.
He was in love. He was in love. He was in love with the zeroes and ones and with the avatar inside his head and with the avatar inside of his game. Let him and Playmaker be as Yusaku had foreseen in the depths of his loneliness: the loneliness which had morphed into a sweet and sublime narcissism and twisted fantasy. He was in love.