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
3. the keyboards opened the doors to other, less fabric worlds
Time stretched on without an end in sight. Osamu continued on in his studies. His parents continued to give him lukewarm smiles of encouragement…but now they were missing something. That something that all of them had taken for granted, simply assumed would always be there, in the backdrop.
But it wasn't. Ken wasn't. And now the thing that had cut up tome had gone as well. It became a long string without knots or brakes, and the frays simply bit at his fingers and let them go.
He imagined thin lines being carved into those fingers, fingers that had been dulled from the constant tapping on computer keys and handling of thin biro point pens. He imagined them bleeding onto those pristine white keys his mother always made to polish clean, imagined the splashing stains of colour it would leave behind.
But perfection had no room for that, and all he could do was cast those loose thoughts aside and drive on like a mindless drone. There was no-one to make him do otherwise; no Ken to show his charming smile and complain it wasn't healthy to stare at a computer screen or a textbook all day, or complain that Osamu hadn't played with him and fulfilled his brotherly duties for the day.
He'd felt out of his element, playing with his little brother, and teaching him little things like how to read. Patience was a virtue he lacked, and playing and teaching both demanded it. He, Osamu, left more scrapes than Ken deserved, but Ken was always smiling as he asked for more…except for that one time, that last time…
He'd drifted off without realising it. He'd displaced the ENTER key on his keyboard, like Ken always used to when he got too enthusiastic over a computer game. Osamu had played them all once and that was it; the rest of the time it was Ken, trying to beat his brother's records.
But not all of them. Somehow, Osamu had opened one Ken had never, to his knowledge, touched. A game that crossed strategy and fighting, that gave pieces to play with and removed them. "Killed" was the term they used for the pieces lost…and Ken, naïve but sweet little innocent Ken, had stayed far away from it.
Except there were three scores recorded. Two were his, and one saved under his name: the high score that sat at the very top of the ladder. The other, the number two place, was what he'd just earned. The other was under the defaulted name: not his, nor Ken's. But no-one else used that computer but them.
It was dated a couple of weeks back: those few days the two brothers had barely spoken to each other, when Ken burned with a rare anger and Osamu had just left things be. And now it was too late; Osamu sat at his computer and imagined his little brother angrily pounding keys, watching the characters on the screen fight until one fell and another moved on, taking his frustrations out where only the inanimate avatars in the game would suffer for it. It was, in a way, shocking. Frightening. Ken wasn't supposed to be like that. Ken wasn't supposed to get angry.
Of course he is. He's human.
It was Osamu that wasn't.