A/N: Written for the what-if Challenge on the Digimon Fanfiction Challenges Forum with the what-if: What if Ren's music player broke? A cute little post-Hunters scene.
A Broken Music Player
Ren wore his headphones even after his music player broke. Mostly it was because of force of habit, though he'd rather hear some upbeat metal beat pounding his ears instead of the silence. He didn't like conversation – not much anyway, because most of the world's population talked about useless stuff and that didn't have much meaning for him…or they were so monotone, he couldn't listen to them without a strong background. Now, there were some people
who could carry on an intelligent and interesting conversation, but they were few and far between and no-one would know if he'd snuck a hand into his pocket and put his player on pause.
When the music player broke though, everybody knew. Strangers who happened to be walking around when he stopped in the middle of a busy shopping district and cursed. Friends who'd heard his complaints so often they were sick of it. Conversers who found a bit of a scowl on his face and a vacant look in his eyes – because he just couldn't focus without the damn thing.
If only he hadn't already spent his allowance on that baseball collector's item. It was a lucky gem at the time, but collectables came after necessities after all and his music player was a necessity.
Even Ryouma and Taiki were sick of him, and neither of them ever got sick of anybody…for the most part anyway. Not that he knew Taiki too well, but Ryouma looked up to the guy and Tagiru was good friends with him and Ryouma was good friends with Tagiru and somehow Ren got dragged along as well. But that wound up working to his favour, because they were so fed up with him, they pooled their money and (along with Yuu and Airu apparently, though neither of them admitted to it) brought him a new music player.
It was a cheaper brand than his older one, but that one had lasted so long it had become severely outdated. The new one could play mp3 disks as well, and could record stuff, and had a place you could fit a power cable in so you didn't have to rely solely on batteries, and it was a little smaller.
And blue, which was a perfectly reasonable colour. And he happily plugged his old headphones and a rock CD in and thanked them all profusely. Ryouma just rolled his eyes. Taiki gave a small smile and a shrug. Tagiru said something Ren didn't quite catch since the volume wasn't adjusted yet and too high to hear anything over. Airu just made a face, because the type of music he enjoyed clashed with her tastebuds.