PART 2

"What are we going to do about Daisuke?" Takeru asked Hikari, as he handed her another basketball to pack away in the storage closet. She took it from him with a sigh and put it on a shelf beside the other sporting equipment. This had become a Tuesday afternoon ritual for them, ever since he had been made captain of the team. His new position had come with certain responsibilities, which included tidying up the court after every practice and ensuring that the all the equipment was safely stowed away. Somehow, despite all her protestations and complaints, he had roped her into helping him.

Secretly, however, she did not mind. Being with her best friend made it fun. Takeru made it fun. They would sometimes play a game of one-on-one, where he would run circles around her even when she insisted he could only play with one hand. Or they would bring their Digimon and try to help Tailmon catch a flying, swooping Patamon, who inevitably ended up laughing at them from the top of one of the hoops. Or they would simply sit on the bleachers and talk until the school grew quiet around them and the janitor came to chase them home. Which Takeru obviously wanted to do now about Daisuke.

Irritation rose up in Hikari at the memory of Mr Hamasaki’s despondent ‘Thank you, Mr Motomiya’. She had known that he would volunteer for the team once she did, but she had not thought her teacher would actually accept him. Daisuke had a lot of good qualities - most of which she was too annoyed to remember at the moment - but one of them was not intelligence. He was the last person she would have chosen for the quiz team, and she included her brother and Mimi in that calculation! Still, she thought with some trace of her natural optimism returning, there had to be a way to help him become less stupid, if not more clever.

"You don’t suppose Kohshiroh* could invent a device or a potion to make him smarter, do you?" she said wryly, turning back to face her friend.

Grinning, "Mom always said that eating fish made you smarter - she even wrote an article on it - but that’s just an old wives’ tale."

Her eyes met his, and she knew that he was thinking the same thing that she was.

"I’m just desperate enough that I’m prepared to try anything," she stated bluntly, then paused as she remembered something, "But . . . Takeru, how are we going to get him to eat fish? Daisuke told me he hates it."

There was nobody who could do innocence quite like her best friend, and he was giving a command performance at the moment. His eyes were very wide and very blue, his mouth was curved in an ingenuous smile, his hands were spread in front of him. When they had been younger, that same look had gotten them out of more scrapes than she cared to count. Adults had taken one glance at Takeru and had instantly gone searching for somebody else to blame for the spilled paint or the broken glass. He could have sweetlooked his way out of any trouble, and would have done so if he were not so honest. Not that his honesty was particularly apparent at the moment. When Takeru looked this guileless, she knew she had every reason to be suspicious. . . .

"I’m sure you will come up something, Hikari."

Her dark eyes narrowed at the slight inflection on the pronoun. He could not be serious about . . . He had to be joking about . . . She must have misheard him suggesting that . . . He was not intimating that . . . She had thought he himself . . .Well, he had been the last person from whom she had expected this.

"I hope you aren’t implying what I think you’re implying, Takaishi Takeru."

He nodded in silent confirmation, but kept his gaze firmly fixed on his shoes. She guessed he was too ashamed of what he had suggested to meet her eyes. He should have been, she thought grimly. He should have never even thought of it. Even if it were not real, even if it were for the good of the team, she would never consider it. There was only one answer she could give him.

"No."

"Yes."

"NO!"

"YES!"

"No! I am not going to go out with him, just to get him to eat seafood!" she folded her arms across her chest and glared at him. Her friend held up his hands in front of him, as if in surrender or to ward off a blow. She had been right about the innocent look being a front. It had vanished completely now, to be replaced by an odd expression that she had never seen him wear before; that caused her anger to dissolve into bubbles that rose up in her chest like champagne. All of a sudden, it felt as if her chest was too tight, as if the bubbles were pressing against it and it was going to burst. She was happy, but it was a painful happiness. She could not understand it or describe it. All she knew was that her relationship with Takeru had subtlely changed somehow, and that she did not quite like it.

"I can’t think of any other way," he said quietly, "I can’t. So, you’re going to have to take one for the team, kid."

His words snapped her back to reality, champagne sensation completely forgotten. The look in his eyes had vanished and Takeru was just her best friend again. That was, he was her best friend, who seemed prepared to feed her to the lions to win the quiz. She scowled.

"Can’t we just get XV-mon to pin him down and forcefeed him?"she groaned, her shoulders slumping, "Forget it. I know the answer to that already. So, I guess I have a date with Daisuke tonight."

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In part 3, Hikari takes one for the team as she prepares to go on a date with Daisuke.

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QUESTIONS:

Heh heh heh, my readers have to work in my ‘fics! First, lyrics. Now, infoquest. In the dub, there’s an ongoing joke about Davis being unable to get T.K.’s name right. He tends to change the last initial, hence T.B and T.P. What is the equivalent in the original?

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FOOTNOTES:

* I read somewhere that this is actually the Japanese spelling of his name. I only know hiragana and all of twenty symbols of katakana at the moment, so am not sure one way or the other myself. Ah, the joys of beginning Japanese . . .