A/N: Written for the Becoming the Tamer King Challenge: Training Peak Task, and for the What if Challenge, "What if Ken died instead of Osamu?" Both challenges are on the Digimon Fanfiction Challenges Forum (link's in my profile).
unchosen
2. the days that followed sunk into a deep aching pain
In the days that followed his little brother's funeral, Osamu learnt the meaning of a broken heart.
He had loved his brother more than anything in the world, but it had been a secret, forbidden love. Not the sort of forbidden love the world had given a grossly romantic or deeply stigmatised name. Not the love driven by physical desire and affection, like much of what the world called love in its ignorant tongue. No; to most people, it was an ordinary, unimpressive love: the love an elder brother gave the younger, from the moment they saw those sweetly innocent eyes blink up.
But for Osamu who had thrown his heart away for his studies, for that picture-perfect child the world seemed to crave, his brother had been the only one to stay close. He'd force Osamu away from hours of monotonous numbers and words to the real world, the outside world. He'd forced him to look away from the dull but understandable grey of existence to the mysterious colours beyond.
And Ken loved those colours; he'd appreciated them in a way that Osamu never had, and could never do. For Osamu, the hole he had dug for himself and been buried within was only six feet deep with crumbling, sloping walls. A slight touch caused the soil to run in a stream of grey with a fragile hiss, pre-empting the creak above. Of late, the creaks had been more audible, more ominous. Splinters had rained down…and he'd been selfish enough to leave Ken down there with him. Ken had brought some colour; spots of red that bled slowly into thin winding streams; ink trails left by the deforming red pen whose task it was to correct imperfection.
Osamu had been the one looking for perfection. Now he ached for it; that gaping hole where his heart had once been was his achievement thereof. Because Ken had been the one to always pull him back, the one to reply a frown with a smile and a blank paper with colourful crayon doodles. But no there was nothing but the black hole of his own making and a dull echo in his soul. Nothing but the grey-tinted visor through which he saw the entire world. No marring colour that could pull him into a world if blissful dreams, nor tears that could drown him in the ocean deep.
If only he could have cried…but he didn't deserve that reprieve. Only the guiltless deserved to wash away their sorrow with those tears. The empty echo of the house, its grey-washed walls, were of his own doing. He'd driven the only person he really loved away – and the force by which the elastic snapped back had killed him.
Ken, sweet innocent little Ken, had probably thought it was all his fault.