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
7. in a big bright world, there is a dark pocket with an answer there
He opened the other email. It was more direct: simply instructions to take the image down because it was dangerous and a phone number to call.
Osamu wasn't feeling particularly social, but he called the number anyhow.
The one who'd sent the email picked up: one Izumi Koushiro.
The conversation was both revealing and unrevealing at the same time. He told about the Digital World once Osamu revealed he knew a bit – what his brother had told him. But he didn't know the way in. And he didn't have any other proof, apart from the words of eight children.
And they didn't know a thing about Ken except what had been on the news.
In the end, he slammed the phone down in frustration. Nothing. That had given him nothing. They weren't friends of Ken. They didn't even know Ken – or that important place he'd found that was worth fighting his brother when he'd never fought his brother for anything before.
They didn't know what happened to a digivice without an owner either.
He went back to the first email because, in the end, that was the more telling one. The one that didn't just give him dry hard facts he'd have soaked up before because Ken was always there to add some colour…
And he soaked up the pretty lines of that email. Almost poetic, now that he read them more closely. Poetic, philosophical…with truths buried beneath that he only had to read…
The oddity of its author, its words, escaped him for a moment. He hadn't realised it the first time, but more than just plain despair, there was a possibility written in those words.
There was also a duty.
"Because your brother has passed, you must bear the fate of both worlds in his place. You must live on…for him, and for yourself."
He whispered the last words out load. 'You must fulfil your brother's destiny. Unlock the gate inside despair.' He repeated it. That possibility. Those binding words. 'The gate inside despair.'
There was a gate that he could open. A gate that hadn't banged shut and sealed with sealant like all the others that had closed with his brother's death. A gate that had opened because of it.
Tears began to stream down his cheeks but he was smiling. Here was a possibility. The first glimpse of light he'd seen since he'd lost it: that bright light that was his younger brother in his life.
Following that glimpse, he could find the Ken he hadn't taken the chance to know. The Ken in the Digital World.