Interlude — Blurry
Date: 02/28/13 Time: 21:54
Wrangling the triplets to bed was somehow, harder than it should have been this time around. They wanted to replay Yuuri and Viktor’s skate the whole night long, commenting on where they could have stepped and the one missed turn that they would help Viktor to painfully correct, Viktor’s performance had been flawless in their own words.
Yuuko was starting to wish she had gotten their kids into music instead. At least they could sleep to that and not have to watch the screen a majority of the time. But then, they were the ones at fault for it. If they hadn’t been in love with skating for so long, their children wouldn’t be themselves.
But today they just hadn’t had the patience for it. It had taken Takeshi promises of longer time in the rink to get them at least to lay down. They had given up on the tablet being shared between the three of them. It was a losing battle.
They had, however, managed to hide the egg in some old clothes and put it in a closet that no one was using and get Axel to stop asking so many questions about it. Because all they were doing were making Takeshi remember his back against a wall of trees and the screeching of his partner as he ran forward and the red drenched bone of Yuuko’s leg and—
Takeshi took a step forward, stumbling out of the vivid image in the dark and into their kitchen. Yuuko sat there, at her computer. A small calculator was next to it as always, followed by the budget.
“How is it looking?” He didn’t sit down beside her at first,
“It’d be better than great if the kids didn’t eat electricity,” she said with a small sigh. “We need to set a time limit on those things.”
“They’d just duct tape the tablets to their hands,” Takeshi pointed out in what he thought was a perfectly reasonable voice as he doled out the soup. “Like to see them pass class like that.”
Yuuko laughed, but it was a little more shrill than it should have been. For a few minutes the two of them gulped down soup in silence, barring the tiny clicks from the old calculator keys on their last legs.
Eventually, Yuuko had to speak. “What do we do about the egg?”
Takeshi bit his lip, thought about it. “It’ll be a while if it hatches so long as nobody touches it.” But this was their house and they had conniving devilspawn for children. They would be all over it in a matter of hours.
“And we’d still have to deal with it.” Yuuko ground her teeth together for an instant. “Are they… are they going to be like us do you think?”
Running through forests and fields and deserts, making food from things on the floor, fishing by diving into the water, sometimes barely sleeping because large teeth gleaming in the dark thanks to the roaring fire, real or imagined.
“Like hell.” Takeshi said, with fervor. “Over my head body.”
Yuuko would have rolled her eyes at the bold declaration but honestly she didn’t have the time or the energy. “If it was though, wouldn’t the digimon be hatched or… wouldn’t they have been just dragged through? That’s what happened to us…”
“That God lady could be operating differently from before. Building up trust then…”
Yuuko bit her lip. “Hime-chan called earlier. She would know best what that program’s modus operandi is… and she said this wasn’t it.”
Takeshi twitched and shook his head. “Then what is this?”
Yuuko didn’t have an answer. Instead, she went back to the frantic, never ending money count.
Then, when their food was long cold and they had given up, a video message icon clicked into view.
Yuuko featured for Takeshi, panic filling her throat. Maybe it was just spam. Or… or…
Before he could say no, she clicked on it. On screen, a young man appeared, brown eyes weary, suit neatly pressed, hair carefully brushed back. If it wasn’t for the crooked little smile on his face, Yuuko would have thought he was at the very least on his way to thirty-five.
The man on screen hesitated a moment, looking to the right. Then he turned back. “Sorry, sorry, this is my uh, first call like this. My name is Yagami Taichi. I am, well, I, I guess you could call me the leader of the current, active Chosen Children. People like you used to be. My boss asked me to talk to you, because unlike her I don’t have a kid, and I’ll need to get used to this. We wanted someone to debrief you.”
“On?” Takeshi prodded like their blood wasn’t ice, their hearts beating too slowly because holy fuck there had been people after them, hadn’t there? Up in the sky, shining like stars? Up in the sky, ready to fight and with nowhere else to look because even finish you could skate in the dark, you couldn’t write much, couldn’t work and with a broken hand you could do nothing.
And back then the envy and pain had risen up, made gouges of guilt in his chest because he could do something if his partner hadn’t left him.
Like what, he always reminded himself at the time, as he had in 1999 when the fear had made him a ball in the corner of the locker room, in 2005 when when he’d actually run outside and smacked a goblin to it’s knees. Like nothing.
Now, years later with a good few kids on his knees, he had a very good idea of what he would do and how.
And the rest of him was just plain old sad, sad that his friends and himself fighting for their lives had not been enough. All the force in the world might never be enough.
“On why your kids have partners.” The young man scratched his head. “Now, uh, just so you know, we have not figured out why your partners aren’t back yet. We think it’s because they went back to their places taking care of the universe and everything, so they’ll be a bit longer, but we dunno. Sorry about that.”
“I don’t think we’d be able to feed them anyway.”
Yuuko’s quip was met with a slightly wider grin. “Unless you guys out eat my agumon, you can do it if you stretch that budget.” He winked and continued on, once even Takeshi had laughed. ‘Anyway.’ His voice sobered. “Unless you’re talking with your other Chosen or anything, what I say here can’t leave this room. I can’t tell you unless that’s all right.”
For a moment, the two of them looked at each other, the conversation they were having with their eyes all too familiar to Taichi, who was at his desk, scratching behind Agumon’s eyeholes, too old to be completely blindsided or unprepared or any of those things really. He had seen his parents make this same look. They both looked at him and nodded together.
“Okay, simply put, the world is evolving.” At Yuuko’s snort, Taichi snorted wearily. “I know.” He shook his head. “But up until 2005, we could get away with lying and deleting information about Digimon, relying on people mostly forgetting all of these things. But then Himekawa Maki-san, my boss, was pulled into a plan to reboot both worlds, and that made things way too big to be hidden.”
Yuuko visibly shivered. Not just because that was their friend, and that meant she had hurt the creatures they had been brought in to save, but because that was still clear in their heads, no matter how much Yuuri had been clearly trying not to think about it.
God. How was Yuuri handling it? Sure, they’d know tomorrow night, but that didn’t mean anything in the grand scheme of things? His voice had sounded calm, but that could easily be a lie because he didn’t want to worry them. Even with Viktor, that idiot was probably on twelve.
“Anyway…” Taichi continued even with Takeshi not listening. “Because of that, we can’t just… look away from this. So the department I’m in is working to make sure the transition is smooth. We can’t control who gets a digimon and who doesn’t. All of that said, over time, we’re getting more and more sure that Homeostasis, who chose us, is not trying to make new soldiers. I don’t even think they’re trying to do anything other than leave us alone.”
“How do you know?” Yuuko’s voice was not trembling, even though Takeshi could feel the table shaking. “How are you sure?”
Yagami Taichi’s eyes narrowed. “Because it possessed Maki and told me, to my face, when I asked.”
“She.” yuuko corrected before she could quite control herself. “They… She always told us, it was a girl…”
Taichi’s expression seemed to soften, briefly, before that vaguely professional air crossed his face once again. “What else can I tell you?”
Takeshi leaned forward. “There’s a lot you can tell us, and we’ve got all night.”
They didn’t but this looked like a graduate student. What was the harm of one more all nighter for him?