AFTERMATH: HACK
Part 1 – The Spoils of Battle
Chapter 20 – Unconditional Love
Yuusaku
.
Takeru makes a convincing argument. Or rather, Yuusaku simply hasn't generated a counter-argument. But he doesn't really want to stay in his apartment. It's too full of shadows. And he doesn't really want to stay in Den City either, for the same. Kusanagi will be preoccupied with Jin for the foreseeable future. Takeru will be returning home. Even if they weren't, they had other focuses, other obligations, and the thing that had been uniting them all was gone.
The thing keeping him in Den City was gone. Maybe his parents had been right to move away, to insist he come with them. Maybe they'd also been right to allow him to stay when he'd refused, when he'd said he needed the chance to close the door on his past.
He's closed that door now, hasn't he. Except Ai blew a big hole in the wall. Still, staying in Den City isn't going to fix it and Takeru's visit has left him with a homesickless the likes of which he hasn't felt before.
Does that make him a bad son, he wonders? He hasn't missed home in five years. Five years when his parents finally gave up on their house and moved away, when they offered him a little apartment when he hadn't followed them.
Takeru is right. He's relied on his parents and not thanked them for it, not kept them up to date, not given them the courtesy of regular phone calls, of visits, of simple thanks and love. He hasn't given himself the courtesy, either, of thinking about the future.
Or that's a lie. He had; it was just impossible now. He'd planned on shaping a world where AI and humans could live together in harmony. Now he had lost that foundation, and trying to create something like the Ignis again would be the height of foolishness, given he knew firsthand how they were born.
He also knows it was wrong: inhumane, depriving of basic rights and hardly a simulation of humanity at all. A basic RPG game would have been better.
A basic RPG game might be better.
He blinks at his wall. Link VRAINS transfers their consciousness into data, into avatars of their own choosing, their own design. It was a study of humans in an environment where their physical bodies were less of a limitation, but there were still limitations and they were still humans. People died in the earlier incarnations of virtual transfers. People fell into comas in more recent ones.
He doesn't know comas but he knows how that feels: to feel trapped, to wonder if there's light at the end of the tunnel or no way out of the loop.
Except now he's got options. Stay in Den City or go visit his parents? Or is it even called visiting when it might up a permanent move? And return to Link VRAINS, to duelling, or distance himself from the network. Detract himself entirely, or find some halfway point where he can still programme and hack and research AI without stooping to Dr Kogami's levels.
He laughs; laughter peels from his lips and bounces off the empty walls of his apartment. Yesterday, he had no options. Now, he has too many.
He looks up train times anyway. He knows he has to do that. And he sends Kusanagi and Takeru a quick text letting them know his intentions, because he knows he has to do that as well.
He hovers at the unknown number, then leaves it alone. He doesn't need to watch his back so closely anymore, even if it's an odd feeling to not have to. So what if Playmaker is discovered? Playmaker's work is done and he'd never wanted to be a saviour to begin with. He just got in too deep and couldn't back out. Didn't have someone – a Kusanagi Jin – on the other side to pull him out.
He leaves the house with his keys and his duel disk still strapped on his arm, and his school bag. He hasn't packed for a trip. He hasn't packed at all. Just left like he would leave for school every day, and he's even walked partway there even though it's too early and he has no intention of going to school anyway. It's only ever been a necessary nuisance anyway. But he checks the envelope with his parents' address, and where he's scribbled a few train times, and changes direction. He's in time regardless; waits a good fifteen minutes for the train, and then waits another half hour on it.
The countryside zips past. They've been so close, yet so far.
And the city is entirely foreign to him. The train station overlooks a beach and at least that rules out one direction. He still crosses to the other side, to the road parallel to the railway line, and where it curves into an intersection, and other streets.
He almost laughs at himself again, but the stoic mask has slipped so tightly on his face, he can't. His facial muscles barely twitch. He simply stands, looking at the roads – but he doesn't know them, doesn't know which way to go. He has the address, and the train station, but he didn't look up how to connect the two. He has his duel disk –
Which connects to the internet, of course. How, he wonders, is he forgetting such basics? Still, he searches for the address, searches the streets around him to work out which direction he's in, and then sets off.
It's a long walk, but it seems to pass by in no time at all because before he's ready, he's standing in front of the address and he doesn't know what to do next.
Put a deck of cards in his hand and he's on autopilot, but he's lost the skill of socialisation and he never quite got it back.
Luckily – or perhaps unluckily, the decision is taken out of his hands. He stands for too long, probably, or else the timing simply works out that way. But the door opens while he stars at it. Someone backs out, talking to someone else. Says farewell. Locks the door. Then turns around and sees him standing at the gate.
He stops short.
Yuusaku isn't doing anything of note to stop short as well, but he would have if he were.
His father looks older, he notes. He's got grey hairs and age lines and he didn't have either of those before. He also has a beard and it changes his face somewhat.
It almost makes his father look like a stranger, but not totally unrecognisable.
And he probably looks different too. It's been five years, after all. Five long, rapid and messy years that have ended in a tangle of bandages and half-healed scars.
"Yuusaku," his father says.
And then the door is opening of its own accord and his father is tripping down the front steps to hug him. Yuusaku doesn't react in time – doesn't need to react in time – before he's enveloped in that warm hug. And it's different to Kusanagi's: he doesn't know why, at first, but then he gets it. It's like Takeru told him. His parents aren't bad people. They never were, and they didn't deserve the five year absence he ungraciously gave them.
And, five years of absence later, they love him anyway.
He grows even warmer when his mother wraps her arms around him as well. Warmer still with her warm breath in his ear.
"Welcome home, Yuu-chan."
And not even Ai has ever been that familiar with him, so he accepts it: accepts that warmth… at least for now until he needs to deal with the baggage that he's brought along for the ride.