may 2024 - ryoken/yusaku

[trainerlyra]

title: untitled
date written: may 2024
word count: 3,250
notes: UNFINISHED, but unsure if i will end up finishing this one so wanted to throw it up on here. i have a lot of thoughts about the way yusaku dealt with grief in the ten years between the lost incident and canon, if that wasn't obvious

The first year after Yusaku had been rescued, along with almost all the other children — almost, he always reminded the adults at the orphanage, almost — everyone was oddly chipper. The adults in the sessions where he was supposed to talk about things kept trying to make him play games, and it was almost as if it had never happened to him at all.

Almost, because it had. Thin white scars still crept all over his arms and stomach, sitting comfortably as a second skin. The nightmares had never stopped, wouldn’t ever stop, and looking at a duel disk still made him want to vomit. The idea that he could be snatched off the street made him never even want to look out the windows, and he still could never stop eating if food was put in front of him until one of the adults took him away.

That day, they even had a cake. The cake had a few candles on it, and he was the one they asked to blow them out. He belatedly realized they were probably trying to keep him from thinking about The Incident, as they called it through closed doors and hushed whispers. 

Silly of them to try, Yusaku thought. He was always thinking about The Incident. It was what drove his every waking moment. The idea that he could be snatched back and forced to duel over and over again sat in his skin deeper than the scars. 

Importantly, though, Yusaku could never forget about it. There was someone still there, someone still trapped, who needed rescue. The voice that had saved him, that promised him safety and return home, who had always encouraged him even when he was out of tears and out of breath and so hungry he was dry heaving with bile pouring out of his mouth, that voice was not among the children that had shared his hospital room. 

So, the voice who had saved him was still trapped. Yusaku could absolutely never forget about him. If the adults weren’t going to go back and save him, Yusaku knew he would just have to do it himself eventually. 

So later, in his private room, because he screamed too much to share with the other kids, Yusaku had snuck a candle and a match stick in his coat pocket that afternoon and lit it up in a mockery of his own celebration. 

“Thank you for saving me,” Yusaku whispered to the white candle, not flinching when hot wax dripped onto his fingers. It didn’t hurt as much as losing duels did, anyway. “I promise I won’t ever forget about you. I’ll keep thinking of three things to survive, just like you taught me.”

He did not blow the candle out. Instead, he sat on the floor, watching it burn until there was nothing but fire in between his thumb and forefinger, licking his skin. It still didn’t hurt.

..

“It’s been two years,” the woman who usually brought him breakfast mused that morning, “since you came to live with us, Yusaku-chan!” 

The save, he realized, was fairly pathetic. That was not what she was talking about and they both knew it. 

Voicing that would only get him reprimanded, though. It was all that seemed to happen those days — he’d say what was on his mind, the exact way that everyone told him to, and then they’d scold him for it. It was a stupid game, and he hated that he didn’t know the rules. So it was better not to play at all.

So he nodded, because that was easier. 

She continued on, pretending that she hadn’t just said what they both knew she had meant. “You’re eight years old now,” she said, sighing. “But you act like an old man sometimes. You should smile more, Yusaku-chan.”

Even when he didn’t say anything, he was getting reprimanded. Go figure.

Yusaku scowled. “Not really,” he said, a tad petulant. He crossed his arms over his chest, trying to hide himself away. Talking to people, even people he was well acquainted with, was hard. 

He just didn’t understand them. And how could he, really, when they were so confusing? Nobody understood where he was at, what had happened to him. During the daily treatment sessions, where they asked him many questions and wanted him to talk about it, they kept trying to tell him it was all over and he was safe.

But it wasn’t over. How could it be over? How could it be over when he didn’t know what had happened to him or why, what had happened to the boy who saved him, if he was really safe going outside at all? It couldn’t. It couldn’t be over when he couldn’t eat right, couldn’t sleep right, couldn’t breathe right. Yusaku didn’t understand what was so hard to understand about that.

The woman laughed, and carried on about her morning. Yusaku spent the day as he normally did, but after lights out — still in his own private room, of course, because he still screamed too much and too loud for the other children — he sat down on the floor, against the door, and closed his eyes.

“I hope you’re okay,” he said quietly to an empty room. “Thank you for saving me. I wish I could talk to you again.”

The voice who had saved him only gave him a few memories. He hadn’t recognized it, but now Yusaku would know it anywhere. If he ever heard him speak again, that was. They’d spent many hours consoling him, letting him know he was doing a good job and it would all be over soon. That he wouldn’t have to suffer anymore.

He’d reminded Yusaku how to think. How to keep himself alive, and how to keep himself sane. The adults at the orphanage, he knew, might disagree with that sentiment, but Yusaku heard the whispers about one of the other children, who had stayed in the hospital long after he’d been brought here. 

It was weird, sometimes, thinking of just a voice. Most of Yusaku’s memories came in different ways — he remembered the emptiness of his stomach, the burning in his throat, the pain of the shocks when he made a mistake. He remembered the smell almost like smoke after. He remembered the blinding white walls, the eternal emptiness that reflected nothing back at him and gave him nothing in return. The taste of the bland food on his tongue once in a blue moon, still the most flavor he’d had in who knew how long every time he was lucky enough to get a meal. The salt of his tears when he was hydrated enough to cry sitting on his lips when he licked them. 

The voice, however, only came in sound. There was no one in the room with him, smiling at him. No one hugging him or offering him something physical at all. Just a disembodied voice, coming in through the walls of the room, promising him he would survive this if he could just keep thinking of three things. 

Yusaku knew what loss was. He remembered his parents, before everything. He remembered his mother looking frail, and his father finally dropping him at the orphanage looking halfway to the grave himself. He hadn’t understood then, of course, but now he had the words for it. Loss was something everyone experienced. 

Two weeks ago, the hamster that was kept in the playroom died. The other kids at the orphanage cried over it, some not understanding why it wouldn’t get up and move again. Some did understand why, but weren’t ready to accept it. They loved it, so not having it hurt.

Yusaku did not cry. He stared at it blankly, wondering when he would get to join it if this was going to be the rest of his life. But then the voice who saved him would be left alone, and he wouldn’t do that, so he’d turned on his heel and went back to his room.

Living was harder than death, he thought.

..

How do you grieve for someone who you did not know anything about? Yusaku asked himself that often, but particularly around the time he’d been rescued from The Incident. 

It had been seven years since he was plucked out of the room and taken back to the orphanage. Seven years, and things had changed so much. 

He was alone, as he always had been, but now he was truly alone. The orphanage couldn’t protect him. It wouldn’t even understand his concerns, telling him he was overly paranoid and nobody would take him back there ever again.

They could, he’d said. Of course they could — once he’d been plucked right off the street, coerced into going to a young boy’s house who looked horribly guilty the whole walk there, and thrown into the lion’s den with no tools to help him survive. Why wouldn’t it happen again? Why wouldn’t they come find him if they wanted to?

Nobody understood, so Yusaku had to deal with it himself. This was not a surprise. He always had to. Teaching himself how to code and program was surprisingly easy, but in the way that it was extremely accessible to him but not simple to learn. He’d spent all his free time — a lot of it, thanks to the fact that the orphanage had started giving up on him at nine — on his laptop, pouring over lines and lines of nonsense that eventually started to make sense to his brain. 

Everything was digital, he knew. Everything including things like his personal information, which was somewhere on the net. Somewhere that the people who took him could find. Something that anyone could use against him. 

Better to learn to hide, Yusaku had thought. And once he was confident in his abilities to wipe any trace of himself away, he made plans to leave the orphanage. He was only thirteen, but he’d been saving money he’d been making from coding work in secret. It had been enough to rent an apartment on the underdeveloped side of Den City, under the fake ID he had created for himself. 

Nobody even bothered to look for him. No fliers were put out, no news reports, Yusaku hadn’t even been on the back of the milk he bought once a week from the convenience store down the street.

Had he been once, he wondered? Nobody seemed to ever recognize him, but that didn’t mean much. His hair had changed a bit, his eyes colder. Yusaku was also aware of how shady everything had become with regards to The Incident, and wouldn’t put it past someone to have tried to cover it up. Nobody outside of the few select adults that were first informed knew what had happened to him. Most people just assumed he’d been abused before getting dumped at the orphanage, which he supposed wasn’t a far cry from what actually happened, but still. 

It was lonely, sometimes. Having gone through something like that and having not a single soul he could talk to about it. But that was just another reason he needed to find the boy who had saved him back then. Because of him, he was able to do all this — to get to a place of moderate independence and stability even as young as he was. 

Three reasons to keep going, Yusaku reminded himself, sitting alone on the floor as he always did on that particular night. The lights were off around him, and the only noise was the gentle whirring of his computer fans from the desk nearby. Outside was silent. His neighbors were all asleep or at work, and his apartment was far enough back from the Den City center that there weren’t cars going by and people still watching VRAINS duels late into the night outside nearby.

Grieving for someone you could not name was something Yusaku felt odd about, sometimes. All he really had was a voice — a voice, with the words that had saved him. It had been a person who had come again and again, even when Yusaku didn’t want to talk, even when Yusaku was too exhausted to respond or too angry at the world to want to try and be cheered up. The voice had always persisted, and it hadn’t lied to him. 

It had saved him. Saved all of them, from those rooms. He hadn’t even known there had been more until they were finally rescued; body frail and hair greasy and sticking to skin. Whoever the boy had been, he was kind. He was someone that Yusaku loved, despite not knowing a thing about him. 

Normally people had a funeral to attend when they lost someone. Had a gravestone to go to and sit by and leave flowers at, or a cremation site or some ashes in an urn to pray to. Tradition in Japan usually meant keeping a picture near the door, to greet and say partings to every time you left the house. 

Yusaku had none of that, of course. All he had was words.

..

Sometimes, as Yusaku — Playmaker, he reminded himself, he was Playmaker in Link VRAINS — wandered the VRAINS, he wondered if he would find the boy there. He was older, now, just as Yusaku was. It had been almost a decade since that time, which meant the boy had grown just as Yusaku had.

What did he look like? Yusaku had never been sure, but he wanted to believe he would have kind eyes. Someone who was willing to do what he did, who saved him, must. When he walked in the shadows, looking for any clue he could and using anger as his driving force, he would stop sometimes and stare at the different avatars.

He wouldn’t recognize him in any of those faces, Yusaku knew, but that didn’t stop him from wanting to. Even though it had been nine years, he knew that if he ever heard him speak, he would recognize him immediately. That voice was burned into his very being. There was no way he wouldn’t.

But the face didn’t exist in Yusaku’s memories. His face, the way he might smile or look like when he cried, the way his skin might feel, how tight his arms might wrap around Yusaku in a hug — none of that existed for him. 

The things people often spoke about, like missing the way someone’s eyes lit up when talking about the things they loved or the way they’d hold themselves in a room, weren’t things Yusaku had to go on. His image was nothing but smoke and mirrors; bits and pieces of different people he saw throughout the day that his mind desperately wanted to place to the boy who had saved him. 

How did someone grieve for a person they could not name? A person they did not know, a person who only existed in fractured moments in time? Yusaku sighed, closing his eyes and leaning his head against the wall. 

The same way everyone grieved, he thought. With a heavy heart and a hand reaching out for something that was never there in the first place.

..

In his dreams, around the time that Yusaku had been in that facility, he would dream about it. That wasn’t unusual in and of itself — he dreamt about it far too often. The nightmares no longer gripped him the way they had when he was younger, but they were not pleasant. He did not enjoy sleep.

It was honestly the only time he did enjoy sleeping; when he was dreaming about his savior. In his dreams, even though he still did not have a name or a face and all he had was a voice, his mind conjured something up. He could never remember it, when he woke up, but he knew in his dreams it was clear.

Once he woke up, it was like something getting lost in the water. It became blurry, moving, until the image itself was entirely gone. 

Nobody could understand, Yusaku knew. Not the professionals that had been required to help him when he was a child, and certainly not anyone he knew now. Kusanagi may understand the horrors of the Lost Incident because of what happened to his brother, but he was not there. And more so, he remembered what Jin had been like before he was taken.

He remembered his smile, his laugh, the way his eyes looked when he was thinking. Kusanagi had all of his memories, so many photos, and he could still visit him. Yusaku, of course, had none of it.

He had the voice, of course. He’d always have that, no matter what. But even that had started to fade to an extent with age. It had been almost ten years to the day that he had been taken. The fact that it was normal for the memory of the voice to slowly dissipate didn’t make him feel better.

It was all he had. Taking that too, when everything else was never given to him in the first place, was the worst fate Yusaku could imagine. 

How do you grieve for someone who you never knew? How do you think about them when you have no images to place to a voice? 

Sometimes, Yusaku wondered if he was ever real at all. 

..

Unlike Kusanagi, he could not say “I miss him”. There was nobody to miss.

..

He missed him, anyway. Yusaku always missed him. He missed the only thing that he’d clung on to life for. That boy had told him to survive — had made sure he had the tools to do so. Nobody in his life had ever taken care of him like that. Not before the Lost Incident, and not afterwards. Nobody had ever understood him.

But that voice — when he was in the dark recesses of his mind with only his fear for company — he could understand him. He had seen his pain, he had watched him through it all. And he’d saved Yusaku. He’d saved all of them, but none of the kids who he had been able to talk to in the hospital had any idea what he was talking about.

The voice was Yusaku’s, and Yusaku’s alone. That should make him feel good, he thought. It should make him happy that he was able to have such a thing to get him through.

But if he was the only one with memories, who could remember him properly? Who else would want to fight for him, fight for his safety the way he’d fought for Yusaku’s? 

..

Unlike Kusanagi, Yusaku could not describe what he wanted once he saved that person. He could not say that he’d want to go to the amusement park that they never got the chance to visit, or cook favorite foods that he had loved as a child. 

Instead, Yusaku could only grapple with it within himself. What would he do, once he’d saved that person? Once he was sure they were safe, and knew how much they had done for him over the last decade?

He would thank them, but then he would leave. That person was Yusaku’s driving force, but he was not the voice’s only reason for surviving. Of course, he could hope he would have remembered him. That he would be happy he was safe, and that Yusaku was there. 

Hoping does not equal reality. Yusaku had learned that a long time ago. 

..