author's note: I'd wanted to hold off on posting until my other short story was finished, but this has been pinging around for ages and refusing to let go, so I've bit the bullet. Because even if you didn't include Wonderswan stuff, the idea of a boy stuck in the digital world with only a feral dragon for company is wild and should've been better utilized. Yes, I'll be forever bitter about that.
Don't really have any concrete plans, but it'll probably be short chapters and off beat narrative choices. I also have a vaguely sketched out arc to get Ryo close to how he acts in Tamers, so if you're worried this will be all sad and depressing all the time, things will get better. Eventually.
"One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be family." ― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated
"This isn't working."
Ryo's Hyper Colosseum regionals trophy had been smashed to pieces. Gold-painted metal shards ribboned out of the carpet like wicked blades of grass, the plaque with his name on it cracked in half. One half was jammed in smeared cake batter and frosting red as lamb's blood, stuck between the conjoined point where two walls met, while the other half rested beside the corpse of the dinner table.
Cotton fluff from the shredded sofa drifted toward the ground in lazy spirals, shielding then revealing the shocked faces of friends and family members alike in gentle, undulating waves. (He imagined their horror disappearing whenever it obscured them from view. There was a term for it: object permanence.) They resembled feathers. He had read somewhere, once, maybe—memories for him were like a looking glass darkly—that laughter kept birds airborne. No one was laughing now.
Nothing good ever happened during birthday parties. As far as Ryo was concerned, the tradition should be abolished entirely. It would save everyone a whole lot of trouble.
His father looked like he wanted to hit him. He often looked that way these days. Ryo wished he would just do it; cross the line fraught with uncertainty to the point of no return, break through the silent hostility with the bone edge of clenched knuckles. They could confirm at last where each other stood instead of remaining trapped forever in this liminal space. The simplicity of a fight, of clear-cut winners and losers, was appealing. Far more appealing than the alternative.
Until his father spoke; then Ryo knew what needed to be done.
Cyberdramon stood just outside the trashed apartment complex, waiting in a vacant lot. He always descended into eerie calm after flying into uncontrollable rages. His tattered wings were spread wide, as if straining against his body's landbound predicament, the snout of his visored countenance pointed heavenward.
Sometimes when Ryo watched Cyberdramon he would lose time. The space between blinks stretched from seconds to hours, the solemn expression of a dark-haired boy tattooed against the inside of his eyelids. Another version, another lie layered on lies, another ugly epiphany framed in the golden flecks of ocean eyes while love flowed the wrong way, backwards through the slipstream.
Not for the first time, Ryo wondered if this was karmic retribution. Had he been a tyrannical emperor in his past life? Occasionally it felt that way, or more accurately, as if a multiplicity of lives he might have lived were superimposed over each other, none of them real. Maybe it was a prophecy, the prophecy, not that prophecies existed—here: You will be alone always and then you will die.
"Let's go," Ryo said. "We can't stay."
Cyberdramon might have been carved from stone. A fabricated gargoyle hewn from zeroes and ones, ready to spring alive when the tip of the sun touched the basin of the horizon. The clink of a shishi-odoshi echoed in Ryo's mind and he tasted river water under his skin. At last, Cyberdramon swung around—moving at his own pace, as ever—utterly opaque, masked behind the metal helmet. Ryo could see only his own distorted reflection gazing back at him.
A clawed hand extended toward Ryo. Cyberdramon waited, expectant. After a pause, Ryo took it. His partner lifted him how a large cat might carry their cub in the private cavern of the mouth, guiding Ryo straight down into hell.