Ken stood alone amidst the sands of the digital desert, letting the
hot, dry wind toss his hair.
This is where Wormmon died. Right here, in my arms... Ken's hands curled into fists, his fingernails digging painfully into his palms. He didn't care. The sting was nothing compared to the pain in his heart. Nothing measured up to that pain. Nothing. Here... here he had caused so much pain. So much. And now he felt it had all been turned back on him. Just as well. He deserved it. When blood sees blood of its own
Closing his eyes against the sandy wind, images of the Kaizer sprang unbidden into his mind. The Kaizer with his loose, arrogant stance, his distinct, evil smirk, his regal clothing... His face. It sings to hear the voice it's known
Ken felt a shiver going through him, remembering his face, the Kaizer's face... Osamu's face. As the Kaizer, he had never really paid attention to that little similarity, but now that he was Ken, he could see it with sickening clarity... He had tried to become Osamu, without knowing, and, in some way, had succeeded... even to the point of looking almost exactly like him. One body split and passed along the line
Tall and thin and athletic, relaxed and loose in posture... If the Kaizer had worn a hooded green sweatshirt and normal glasses, you wouldn't have been able to tell the difference between him and Osamu. I know these bones as being mine
Even his smile... The Kaizer's smile had been not unlike Osamu's on certain occasions... But Osamu never, never would have done what the Kaizer had done. What Ken had done. Osamu had been a good brother... he just got tense at times from all the pressure on him. Ken understood that now. It was something that he hadn't understood when he was little. All he knew when he was little was that Osamu sometimes got really mad and started being mean to him for no real reason. He hadn't understood that the attention he so coveted was the source of Osamu's stress, which was the source of his occasional fits of violent anger. All Ken had known was that he wanted the attention Osamu was getting, and he wanted Osamu to stop being mean. So he made a wish... He made a wish that, once it had been granted, he wished he'd never made. And my question to you is:
Osamu wasn't around to be mean to him anymore... and he was getting the attention Osamu had been getting... At the worst possible price to pay. He'd gotten his wish... and look what it had done to his family. Look what it had done to him. In the aftermath of the wish, he had been bent, stretched, and broken... then reassembled into a monster. The Digimon Kaizer. Some are lean and some with grace and some without
Ken fell to his knees in the hot sand, curling his fists in the gritty stuff. Over and over, the events played in his head... The fight, the wishes, Osamu's death, the rise of the Kaizer, and then his defeat... Each time, someone's voice was telling him what had gone wrong, what he had become, what he had so wretchedly brought on himself... sometimes Osamu, sometimes his parents, sometimes the Chosen Children, sometimes Wormmon... Wormmon was the worst, with his sad voice and big sad eyes, filled with infinite love and devotion, despite all the pain he had suffered at his partner's hands. Ken's heart wrenched when he thought of what he had done to his partner... his one and only friend. Of a child who had been left alone at birth
Even knowing how his parents had always paid more attention to Osamu, how they had inadvertently fostered his resentment for his brother, Ken couldn't blame them. They hadn't made him wish for Osamu to go away. They hadn't sent him the Digivice that he and Osamu had fought over. They hadn't sent him to the digital world to become a monster. See his eyes and how they start with light
Ken had done all those things himself, allowing his own darkness to grow and consume him, until he became so much a creature of the shadows that his eyes wouldn't even reflect the light. Did he carry his bad luck upon his back
His fault. His fault. All his fault. He had given in to the shadows, and nearly destroyed a world in the process. And my question to you is:
So sudden... so fast. The darkness had been growing, swelling, festering in his heart until he was lured back to the digital world, lured to a place that pulled the darkness from its confines... and in that moment, the shadows had claimed him as theirs. It had taken Wormmon's blood to finally banish those shadows. And yet it felt as though it had taken his own. When blood sees blood of its own
Perhaps, in a way, it had... Digimon and Chosen Child were linked, heart and mind and soul, and the blood of one might as well be the blood of the other. Ken was bleeding to death. It sings to hear the voice it's known
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