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).
This was originally two separate chapters (I accidentally wrote two chapter 5s, lol), but a little chopping and changing reorganised it into a chapter 5 and a chapter 6. :D So all good again.
unchosen
5. within the grey plastic cover lay secrets that silence still kept
He took the digivice out from the drawer and stared at the little plastic gadget in his hands. It didn't look remarkable in the least…but something about it had stirred Ken up. Something about it had called out to him.
Osamu raised it to ear level and shook it again. Like the last time, it made no noise at all. Silent, like his room, framing only the echoes of raised voices and a slap resounding through lost time. It told him nothing he didn't already know. Just that he'd been blind and a fool, taking Ken for granted one too many times.
And now that would be his haunt. This little device, this inconsequential thing looking at him with its mocking stare, telling nothing of its secrets. Or maybe it had no secret at all, and Osamu was simply searching for one, looking for meaning inside something where no meaning existed.
Maybe he was just trying to, so to speak, place the blame somewhere, make a little lighter the heavy load that existed on himself because of it.
But it was telling him nothing, and time would not freeze for him. Eventually he had to do something else: the mountain of schoolwork that awaited him or a video game because Ken was no longer there with him to play with and he'd never taken the time to learn anything else.
Still, he obsessed over the digivice, once obsessing over his studies failed him without Ken there to strike the perfect balance, as he'd always had. Time was sluggish and slow without him. Screeching to halts too many times. Scratching and biting at skin he hadn't even realised was so tender. Letting him bleed little dry flecks of blood all over the carpeted floor.
The computer. The digivice. The bits of Ken he hadn't known. Had ignored. Those bits dragged him in. He had to know about them – all about them.
But the digivice was just a plastic toy in his hands, telling him nothing.
Funny how he didn't believe that now. He'd believed it easily enough when it had been Ken saying there was something deeper. Something almost magical. Now that Ken and Ken's voice were gone, Osamu had no proof at all – and yet, he was searching for it, as if Ken was right and only now that Ken's voice was fading into far away memories could Osamu accept it as the truth.
Or maybe it was guilt making him want it to be true.
But it was to no avail, whatever the reason was. The digivice did nothing for him. Opened no doors. He tried though. He took a picture and posted it online in the hopes that someone else would recognise it. He took it to professors and other genius students, hoping they'd have an idea. He stared and stared and stared, as if something would click in his mind. But there was nothing. Nothing.
Until, one day, there was something. Two somethings.