If I owned Digimon Adventure, Takeru of the Cute Accent would have been delivering monologues every episode. As he didn’t and you weren’t painfully bored as a result, it’s obvious I don’t. ::smiles:: I also don’t own Serial Experiments Lain, which is the property of Chiaki Konaka. He also wrote episode 13 of Digimon Adventure 02 and there are loads of parallels between the two shows – not the least of which is that Lein\Lain looks a lot like Hikari.

Can I plug something shamelessly here? I’m working on an original novel, which is up in that section. It’s called A Story For Alice Grey. It’s in the same horror\fantasy genre as this piece, so, if you’re enjoying this, you might want to check it out . . .?

A STORM OVER BLOSSOMS

CHAPTER 15

CONNECTIONS

Closing the door quietly behind him, Taichi slumped against the wall and let out a deep breath. His mother was safely in bed for the night, having taken her little, white pill crushed in a glass of water. She had not seemed to taste the bitterness, obediently drinking it down before handing the empty glass back to him. It seemed like he lived his life by the medicine cabinet these days. A tranquiliser in the morning to keep her calm while he was at school. Another one when he returned home in the afternoon. A sleeping pill in the evening to get her through the night. And none of them helped even a thousandth as much as Hikari walking through the front door would.

Not for the first time that evening, he wondered if Takeru really had seen his sister the night she had vanished. With all the strange things that had happened to them since they had met Koromon, Hikari’s appearance in the Takaishi’s apartment was not impossible. It was certainly no weirder than her glowing and rising in the air, and that had happened more than once.

Besides, there had always been a bond between the two, younger children - a bond that went beyond friendship or love or even their crests. From what Yamato had told him about the first time his sister had gone to the Dark Ocean, Takeru had been the only one who had known what was happening. He had seen her vanishing in class, wavering like light on water. He had heard her calling him from the Dark Ocean, and had somehow been able to cross over to her. What if . . . .

He clenched his fists at his side. No, he could not afford to allow himself to hope again. Hope was dangerous. Hope led his mother to seek peace at the bottom of a bottle of pills; hope led his father to order one more drink every night; hope led Takeru to become like Yamato at his most remote. The facts of the matter were plain, and they did not allow for hope. Takeru had been running a fever. They had searched the Dark Ocean without success, and there was no way she could be beneath the sea. Hikari was gone and she was never coming home. He had to put his life back together without her in it, no matter how difficult it might be.

Pushing himself off from the wall, Taichi walked down the hallway to the kitchen to make himself some supper. He grimaced when he opened the refrigerator and saw how empty it was. He really had to go shopping the next day, or they would have to start fighting Miko for her food. He took out a pot of instant natto and an apple, before adding a carton of milk to his haul. It was more breakfast food, but it was that or the suspicious-looking, left-over pizza at the back.

He had just put his meal on the table, when he heard a knock on the door. He made a face - it was probably his father coming home too drunk to unlock it for himself. A few months ago, he had sworn to Hiruko that he wouldn’t drink anymore, but that promise had been forgotten on the evening Hikari had vanished. His father had come home stinking of sake, tears streaming down his cheeks. He had spent the night weeping on the sofa with her picture in his hands.

“I’ll be there in a sec,” Taichi slid the bolt and unlatched the chain, before opening the door. He smiled in surprise when he saw Sora standing there with a covered dish in her hands. She was dressed casually in a pair of blue jeans and an orange vest, while her hair was pulled back off her face in a ponytail. However, he was ashamed to admit that it was the dish that held his attention after a week of convenience foods. The fragrant smell of lasagna rose from it, and his insides growled in response.

Rubbing the back of his neck sheepishly, “My stomach and I say ‘hi’.”

Sora laughed and stepped forward to kiss him softly on the lips, “Hi, Taichi. It looks like I came just in time. . . .”

*

Standing in the middle of the flickering light, the girl stared without expression at the man who wanted to kill her. He held his gun with unsteady hands, and the red light of a laser-targeter flickered across the bridge of her nose. Her eyes were large and brown; her hair was cut in a chunky bob apart from a single strand that was marked with an X of elastic; her mouth did not even tremble. After what felt like hours, she spoke: “No matter where you go, people are connected.”

His eyes widened and tears began to trickle from his them, sliding down his cheeks. They were the eyes of a fanatic, wide and staring. The laser-light arced into the air, piercing the darkness and coming to shine inside his mouth. There was a flash of red, and blood splattered across her face. She stepped forward and looked down at him, like a pitiless god or an angel without mercy, and the screen faded to black.

Picking up the remote from beside him, Takeru clicked off the television and got to his feet. He had been watching it without seeing it for hours now. His eyes were sore and itchy from hours of crying. It was strange, but he felt even more helpless and hopeless than he had before remembering Hikari’s midnight visitation. He could recall every detail of it now - the stripe of light across the hallway; her white, wave-wet nightgown that sparkled with sand around its hem; her hands slipping through his; her scared, pale face as she faded from view - and was amazed that he had forgotten it. He might have been sick, but how could he have not remembered something so important?

However, remembering what had happened to her had not made him feel any better. All kinds of terrible scenarios had passed through his head when he had thought of Hikari living alone in a strange city. The best was that she had been found by a good samaritan and was living in some sort of children’s home. The worst . . . The worst had made him want to scream and punch something. He had read the papers and seen the news. He knew what homeless girls did for money, or what they had done to them by those who weren’t prepared to pay for their kicks. If someone had done anything like that to Hikari, he would find them and make them regret every time they had touched her. Yet, all of those had been in his overactive imagination. They were no more real than that strange time a Bakumon had trapped him and his brother inside one of his dreams. (1)

However, if Hikari was in the Dark Ocean and he knew she was, she was in very real danger. He did not know the reason why the Dark Ocean’s currents had pulled her into it again, but he knew it could not be a good one. Nothing about that place of shadow, mist and darkness could be good. What had happened three years ago had made that perfectly clear to him.

After the control spire had been destroyed, he had landed on the beach with Pegasusmon and looked across to where Hikari was surrounded by strange, pale creatures that seemed half-frog and half-human. One of them had said something to her - its voice had been blown away by the wind and Takeru had not been able to hear the words - and stepped forward to grab her arm. Hikari had struggled and twisted to break loose, but had not been able to free herself from its grip. His stomach twisting in him, he had yelled at them to let her go and had run to help her, but Angewomon had intervened before he had reached them. The arrow of light had sizzled against the creature’s arm. With a cry of pain, it had released Hikari, then, still staring at her, the creatures had receded down the shore and faded into the whispering ocean like mist at dawn. Hikari had refused to tell him much about what they had said to her, but there had been a hunted, fearful look in her eyes that had made him want to wrap his arms around her and let her know that she was safe. He had settled for the safer option of putting his hand on her shoulder, and had been rewarded by a little smile.

This time, however, he had been too weak to save her and there was no Angewomon to chase away the monsters with her brilliant arrows. Worse still, there was no Angemon to fight his battles for him, to help him bring Hikari home. After they had thwarted Vandemon’s latest attempt at plunging both worlds into darkness, the Digital Gate had shut and not opened again. It had been three years since he had last seen his partner, and he still missed him as much as he had on the day he had said goodbye to him. It seemed his life consisted of being ripped apart from the ones he loved. His father and brother, Patamon, Hikari. . . .

He could see why Yamato had decided long ago that caring was dangerous, why he had isolated himself from everyone around him. Loneliness might hurt, but at least it was a choice you made. It was under your control. It wasn’t a pain you woke up to one morning, after believing for years that everything was fine. It seemed impossible that just three months ago she had been chasing him through the park, laughing, trailing cherry-blossoms in her wake. It seemed impossible that his worst fear had been that she might not love him back, that her heart was fixed on somebody else.

Now, she was in the Dark Ocean and he had the impossible task of bringing her home all by himself. None of the others would believe him. Taichi hadn’t, and he had the most reason to want to believe him. Instead, he had put his hands on his shoulders, turned him to face him and spoken to him in the same tones as he had used when Takeru was eight and upset about something. But he wasn’t eight anymore and he knew Hikari was in terrible danger. If he had to fight all those creatures himself to save her, he would.

“No matter where you’ve gone, we’re connected,” he said in determination, “I’ll get you back, Hikari. I’ll get you back.”

*

“There is no more time for these games,” Dagomon said to Demon, as the other digimon entered his throne-room and prostrated himself on the floor in front of him. Still in the human form he had assumed to trick the girl, he was seated on his high throne of bone and coral. Bright blood marked the steps that led up to it, pooling around his feet. In his hand, he held a shimmering clamshell, and his grey eyes were troubled as he looked at it.

“My lord?” Demon questioned.

“See,” Dagomon held out the shell to him. Demon rose to take it, and battled to hide his shock when he did. A network of cracks fanned out along one side of the shell; fine, black lines against the smooth surface. If they grew any longer or broader, the shell would shatter and then . . . .

“She will remember everything.”

“Yes,” he replied, “Tonight, the Child of Light will be mine, whether she gives herself to me or not. And my kingdom will be reborn in our union.”

*