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Pins and Needles	By : libek Category: Digimon > Yaoi - Male/Male Views: 5186 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Digimon: Digital Monsters, nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 1-Prelude
- 2-Daisuke
- 3-Yamato
- 4-Ken
- 5-Yamato
- 6-Miyako
- 7-Ken
- 8-Yamato
- 9-Takeru
- 10-Ken
- 11-Yamato
- 12-Ken
- 13-Yamato
- 14-Hikari
- 15-Ken
- 13
- 14
- 15
DISCLAIMER: See previous parts.

A/N: Hikari's POV. Stirring the soup, so to speak. I'm sorry, but it had to be done -- there's plot in them thar hills. Oh, and Shin is one of Jyou's older brothers. (You probably knew that.) Chizuru, on the other hand, is Miyako's first older sister -- Momoe being the eldest girl and Jun's best friend; Chizuru being Taichi, Yamato, and Sora's age. So, hopefully that clarifies that bit. Otherwise...this part contains more of my notion on Hikari's psychicness. I like that facet of her character, real or imagined. And don't worry, the next part is in Ken's POV. You won't have to wait too much longer.

Pins and Needles

Part Fourteen

by Libek

He was late, and his entrance broke a spell of sorts over the rest of them. Hikari lifted her head, stopped worrying the fabric of her thin cardigan, and forced a smile when their eyes met. He smiled back, or tried to, and for a moment she wondered if her own lips had been so thin and bloodless. Then his gaze slid away, she felt hers do the same, and he cleared his throat, turning to address everyone else.

They had been doing that a lot lately.

"Sorry I'm late," Takeru began, suddenly serious and intense. He started to say more, glanced down, saw that he was still wearing his street shoes, and hastily tugged them off. "I got here as soon as I could."

A soft, unhappy sigh from Jyou, who was eyeing his now-soiled bedroom carpet distastefully, but nothing more. He seemed to feel that now was not the time. Sora took it a little bit further, snorting in response. The older girl had been sitting on her upperclassman's bed with her knees drawn tight to her chest, but now she leaned forward eagerly, reddish-brown hair falling into her eyes.

"You scheduled the meeting," she pointed out. "What kept you?"

To Hikari, she had sounded more curious than accusatory, but Takeru flashed a guilty grin anyway. "I know, it was very rude of me. I really am sorry. I don't know why Mom had to pick yesterday of all days to trash her old magazines -- I barely caught the truck before they got shipped off with the rest of the burnables, and then it took me a while to find the right issue." He turned to Daisuke, and suddenly the good humor in him vanished. "Daisuke-kun, do you remember our conversation yesterday?"

The other boy frowned, very slightly, and shifted so that his chin no longer rested negligently on his folded arms. "What, you mean in class? Yeah, of course I remember." He reddened, just a little. "When we were talking about how to keep anyone from getting hurt. What about it?" This last bit almost sounded defensive, and Hikari studied him out of the corner of one eye. She couldn't help but wonder if that was really all they had talked about, but...

"Not that part," Takeru said, derailing her train of thought. And again Daisuke looked nervous, but her boyfriend didn't seem to notice. "The part about Ken-kun. About how you stopped by his place to check on him, but the police were already there. Do you remember that part?"

All of the awkwardness drained out of Daisuke in an instant, and to her horror, Hikari saw that he looked angry. "Yes! Of course I fucking remember, Takeru! If you had shown up at Iori's house and found a whole buncha sirens and his mom in tears and his grandpa looking like he was made of stone, it'd kinda stick in your memory a bit, don't you think?!"

Silence, of the ringing variety. From his own place on the floor, Iori stared up at Daisuke with his eyes so wide that you could see the whites all around them, and for his part Takeru had gone very pale. After a moment, the blond swallowed, and ducked his head.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean it like that."

That appeared to mollify Daisuke slightly, or at the very least take some of the wind from his sails. He, too, ducked his head. "Guess you wouldn't have," he admitted grudgingly. Then, quieter still, "How did you mean it, then?"

No response. Takeru just stood there, looking faintly sick. Finally, he sighed a curiously long sigh, and knelt down on the floor to go through the contents of his bookbag. He tugged a magazine out, set it in the middle of the floor where everyone could see it, and flipped the pages to a small article with a bold black headline and a photograph of Ken that looked like something from a yearbook. The boy in the picture was smiling, very hesitantly, in a way that didn't quite touch his eyes.

Puzzled, Hikari slid out of Jyou's computer chair, and crawled over to get a better look. Peripherally, she was aware of the others all doing the same thing. There was a tension in the air, as though they were in some sort of race to get to the end of the article, but she fought the mood and tried to focus, to keep her eyes from simply slipping over the words uncomprehendingly until they stopped. She wanted to understand it, not just read it. If her boyfriend thought this was important enough to call a meeting for...

Except that there didn't seem to be anything in the magazine that they didn't already know. It stated that the once-famous boy genius, Ichijouji Ken, had disappeared one afternoon while his parents were at work, and that they had no real leads in the ongoing search for him. However, from what information they had gathered so far, the police were confident that it was -- unrelated to the string of recent child abductions.

Her head jerked involuntarily, hair spilling into her eyes, and Hikari stared at the words. She read the sentence again, three times over, to make sure she hadn't somehow misunderstood. She hadn't, but -- how could the police be so sure? What information? None of the other investigations had turned up anything...

Hikari stopped reading and met her boyfriend's eyes. His expression told her everything she needed to know. He had noticed the very same thing. But he merely nodded at the others impatiently, and waited. He didn't speak until they had all finished reading.

"I don't get it..." Daisuke mumbled, his forehead creased. "What's the big deal? I've seen this before..."

"It's just interesting, isn't it?" Koushirou's eyes were unreadable, and for an instant Hikari wondered how he of all people could have missed it, but then the redhead continued, and she realized that he hadn't missed anything at all. "This entire time, our foe has been so careful and calculated. Why would he blunder so severely now as to make the detectives investigating this case decide that it was not even perpetrated by the same madman?"

When Takeru nodded, the redhead exchanged a deeply significant glance with Jyou, and Sora looked thoughtful. A scowl settled onto Iori's features. Even Daisuke's interest seemed piqued. Hikari opened her mouth to ask whether there had been any follow-up articles, then frowned and closed it again.

There was something missing.

She looked around at each of her friends in turn, slow and searching -- trying to place her sudden feeling of unease -- and then her gaze landed on Miyako. Miyako, who hadn't crowded around the magazine article with everyone else. Miyako, who hadn't spoken since her arrival, and who in fact hadn't really said anything all day. The lavender-haired girl was staring intently at the far wall, her face blank.

"How do we know for certain that it really was not a different assailant?" Iori offered, but so softly that he almost seemed to be talking to himself. "People do occasionally get kidnapped by other people, after all. Ken-san's disappearance could be completely unrelated."

"Or," Takeru countered, before Hikari could even think to agree, "it could be entirely related."

For a second, Koushirou studied him. He frowned, very faintly. "You know something that you are not telling us," he said. "Something that is not in the article itself."

Takeru met the frown with a sad, slightly bitter smile. "Yes, I do. There's one other thing I did before coming here -- I called Ken-kun's parents."

On the other side of the room, Hikari watched as one of her dearest friends went rigid, something small and almost imperceptible changing in his expression. In herself, she felt a delayed prickling that caught her breath in her throat. It was one of those strange moments where she could almost hear the words before they were spoken, and knew suddenly, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that they were absolutely true.

That sort of thing happened to her, from time to time -- had, ever since the Digital World's light had touched her as a child. But later on, she would remember that Daisuke had sensed it first for once. Odd, coming from such a normally imperceptive person. Perhaps he had felt it through the Jogress, a bond which none of them -- not even Koushirou -- fully understood...

Whatever the case, the words came. And Daisuke leapt up in defense of his friend, before any of the others had even registered what those words meant.

"He wasn't kidnapped at all," Takeru said.

"Of course he wasn't kidnapped!" Daisuke wasn't yelling, but he had definitely raised his voice. "Ken knew what was going on, he's smart enough that he probably even knew which digimon was responsible, so he snuck out of his apartment and into the Digital World to launch the frontal assault..." Here, the Bearer of Friendship trailed away and looked round at the others as if for support. Finding none, he glared at them instead. "Oh, come on! What do you think happened? He just magically picked that exact night to run away from home?!"

A brief pause.

"Well," Jyou murmured unhelpfully, "entrance exams are awfully stressful..."

He shouldn't have said anything, Hikari knew instantly. He really, really shouldn't have said anything. Daisuke spun in place, digging his fingers into the blankets and very nearly shredding them. "That's not funny! Don't you get what he's suggesting? Not saying it straight out or nothin', he probably wouldn't have the guts --"

"You want it straight?" Takeru interrupted, and she couldn't help wincing at his icy tone of voice. Just at that moment, he sounded exactly like his older brother. "Fine." The same flat, unfeeling routine that Taichi had always insisted was just a facade, a way of protecting himself when he felt particularly frightened or vulnerable. Hikari didn't want to speculate on what her boyfriend might have been feeling that would make him sound so distant.

Then he spoke, and she understood completely. "I think Ken-kun is the one who's been kidnapping people."

No one said anything. Hikari found that she had plenty of time to look from one frozen face to another -- Daisuke, all the blood drained out of him, hands halfway to his ears as if he'd wanted to protect himself from Takeru's words; Koushirou, calm on the surface but eyes darting everywhere; Sora, her expression a perfect, unmoving mask of shock; Iori, the last vestiges of disbelief already leaving his mouth a small hard line; Jyou with his glasses half off and not even seeming aware that they had started to slip...

And then, there was Miyako. Her Jogress partner, who still hadn't said a word or looked away from the wall this whole time.

From her place on the floor, Hikari studied them all with a fierce intensity. It was, she found, much easier than trying to sort through her own tangled knot of emotions.

She remembered the day when Daisuke had come to her, asking what she thought of letting the former Digimon Kaizer join their group. His blind resolve that anyone who had a digimon belonged with the Chosen Children. The inexplicable way her stomach had twisted at the thought. And despite Daisuke's stubborn insistence, she didn't think she'd really accepted Ken as one of them until much later -- not until that day when he had approached her cautiously with an invitation to his Christmas party. The moment when she had finally realized, simply realized, that she wasn't mad at him anymore.

That almost without her noticing, she had come to forgive him for what he'd done.

On that day, the indigo-haired boy had seemed so tremulous, so certain that they were going to reject him, and that his crime had been too heinous to ever forgive. For a moment, looking at him, she had wondered if he would ever forgive himself.

Why would he have done this?

"He wouldn't have!" Daisuke protested, and it took her a moment to realize that she had said the words out loud. "Come on, Hikari-chan! You know he would never have done it! Tell them!"

Hikari stared at him, at his frantic expression, and felt a wave of pity -- but it was a wave crashing on a faraway shore, and it couldn't touch her now. Because she knew that what her boyfriend had said was true, and when she looked into Daisuke's eyes, she saw that he knew it, too. "Daisuke-kun --" she began, reluctantly.

"No," he snapped, cutting her off. "Don't you dare." He turned away from her, his eyes boring into nothing, and slowly shook his head.

It was more rude than he had ever been to her before, and Hikari winced. She knew, of course, that he had stopped having those feelings for her some time ago, but she couldn't help being hurt by his tone of voice now. Was that the only reason he had ever been nice to her -- just because he wanted a date? A stupid thing to worry about right now. She tried to marshal her thoughts into some kind of order.

"Makes sense."

At the sound of her voice, Hikari jumped, just a little. When she tried to catch the older girl's gaze, however, she found that Miyako still had her back to the room. "Miyako-san?" she ventured.

"Well, it does make sense," Miyako repeated, so quietly that a person had to strain his ears to hear her. "Think about it. Who else would have had access to the Chosen Cadet database? We never posted the full list anywhere. Even the police didn't know. And to capture them all without knowing their names or addresses, that would take ages. This so-called digimon would have to be following them home, one at a time, or else somehow take out whole squads before they managed to send a message of warning. Not impossible, but...there's no way it could have been done this fast." She turned tired, henna-colored eyes on them all, and lingered on Daisuke in particular. "But Ichijouji-san could have done it all without much difficulty, don't you think?"

The Bearer of Courage opened and closed his mouth, but nothing came out. He was obviously having trouble thinking up a response. Again, he looked around the room for help, and again received only silence. He seemed on the verge of giving up when Iori began to speak.

"I do not know quite what to think," the younger boy whispered. "But I cannot help wondering if we are judging Ken-san unfairly. Other than the fact that he does not appear to have been kidnapped, what evidence do we really have that he is our malefactor? Takeru-san, I am sorry for your loss, but I think you are being overly hasty."

A strange scene, to be sure -- Daisuke had leapt across the room and pulled the younger boy into a tight and apparently airless hug. From the panicked, strangled expression on his face, Hikari rather suspected that Iori was regretting his decision to speak out in Ken's defense. She hadn't yet figured out what she thought of his points, though, when Takeru smiled weakly. No, she realized at once, there was still more. He hadn't leapt to any conclusions. For an instant, she hadn't been sure -- after all, Iori had made a good observation. Yamato's disappearance might have very well had a negative impact on his judgment.

It...was why he hadn't really talked to her for days now.

After that first meeting, where she had announced that Taichi, at least, wasn't dead, Takeru had walked her home. The two of them had been side-by-side for five minutes without so much as looking at one another when he abruptly turned to her and blurted out:

"You're so lucky."

She had been confused, at first. "Lucky? Lucky how?"

As she watched, he had made his hands into trembling fists. "What do you mean, how? Hikari-chan, I'd give anything to know right now whether my brother is alive or dead."

No longer confused, she had reached out to wrap her own hands around one of his tightly-clenched fists. She had ignored the sudden stabbing pain in her heart, because she knew that he'd had no idea what he was saying. If he had, he never would have said...never would have dreamed of saying... "I don't really think you would, Takeru-kun. You don't understand. It's not the same as knowing he's safe, and besides..."

Besides, Hikari hadn't added, would you really want to know that someday you're going to stop on the street and know that your big brother needed you, but not in time to save him? To know that he probably cried out for you, but you weren't there, and you won't ever be able to make it up to him?

Perhaps she should have said it anyway. When she had met Takeru's eyes again, they were angry. "It's something," he had insisted. "More than I have. Maybe you don't know he's okay, but you know he isn't dead, and that means...that you have some hope of still saving him..."

The expression on his face had melted then, revealing the naked despair underneath, and Hikari had wanted to take him in her arms and reassure him that Yamato was alive, too. She had wanted, more than anything, to hold him close and comfort him and really mean every word that came out of her mouth. Looking at him, she could tell that he wanted that, too. He had wanted to hear her say that it would be all right, because if she'd said it, then he could have believed it, no matter how bad things got.

Honestly, Hikari had wanted to do that for him. If only she had been able to feel Yamato's life, his heart beat, the way she could feel her brother's. They had the Jogress, and that linked them together -- considering that, and everything else, shouldn't she have been able to sense him through Taichi, if nothing else? Shouldn't she...? But she couldn't, had never been able to, and had no idea whether she would have known if he were dead. If Takeru hadn't known her so well, she might have been able to lie, but --

No sooner had the thought occurred to her than her boyfriend had turned his back and walked away. They were almost at her apartment, and it wasn't as if she really needed the escorting, but Hikari felt another, sharper pain in her heart. He had never just left her alone like that before. At the corner, he'd paused, and for a fleeting moment, she had thought he was going to come back to her, but he had only said over his shoulder:

"Thank you for caring enough to try."

And then resumed walking.

Watching him form the words that would pass judgment on one of their own, Hikari felt that same initial burst of hopefulness and that very same stab of pain, but they didn't seem to be her feelings any longer. She found her gaze wandering again to Miyako, who was once more studying the far wall.

"There's no mistake," Takeru began, still with that small, sickly smile. "I'm sure of it. Firstly, his parents told me that this wasn't the first time so far this year that they've thought he might have run away -- just the first time he wasn't back by morning. It's been going on for about six months, just every once in a while."

He closed his eyes, and Hikari tried to imagine how hard it must have been for him to listen to Mr. and Mrs. Ichijouji's grief while they answered his questions.

"They didn't want to say anything to any of us about it right off, in case we were the ones introducing him to -- drugs? Gang warfare? -- whatever had been keeping him out all night. Then they started to notice that, each time he left, he took a small amount of food and supplies with him. The night he finally disappeared for good, he took the usual few cans of food plus all of his warmest clothing."

Here, her boyfriend paused and sighed.

"I know this isn't easy," and she couldn't help noticing that Daisuke suddenly looked murderous, "but I think that Ken-kun has been using powerful digimon to abduct the Cadets one by one, as they were heading for their respective homes. He's had all of this planned for a while now, and has clearly been gathering provisions for his base of operations. And, considering we haven't been able to contact Gennai-san...I wonder if Ken-kun got to him, too."

"To Gennai-san?" Sora repeated, obviously skeptical. "How? I don't know, Takeru-kun...this isn't the first time we haven't been able to reach him only to have him turn up at the last minute..."

Before Takeru could even start to reply, though, Koushirou was shaking his head, lips pursed. "No," he said flatly. "This is different. Possibly, he has merely holed himself up somewhere in order to escape detection, but I cannot believe that it is just a coincidence. Gennai-san has never left us in quite such desperate circumstances as these. If he could, he would have gotten in touch with us by now."

"Are you guys even listening to yourselves?"

It was Daisuke again, but all the heat had gone out of him. When Hikari turned to him, concerned at the despondence in his tone, the redhead was curled in on himself and very quiet. If she hadn't known better, she might have thought he was on the verge of tears.

"He wouldn't have done this," Daisuke whispered. "He just wouldn't. I've Jogressed with him. I've felt his heart, and he's not evil! He's not..." He blinked rapidly and scrubbed a fist through his eyelashes. "Why would he want to hurt Taichi-senpai...? Never did nothin' to no one. And Yamato-san -- he liked Yamato-san, they were friends! I just...it doesn't make any sense," he finished, sounding so broken that Hikari wanted to hug him.

There was a tense silence. Takeru had started chewing on his lower lip, and Hikari thought he looked torn between sympathy and exasperation. "Daisuke-kun..."

"Don't say it," the other boy growled. "Don't tell me I should've known better. Don't tell me I'm being stupid. Maybe you never cared one way or another about him, maybe you just put up with him 'cause you felt sorry for the guy, but Ken was my best friend, okay?"

He didn't flinch or look away awkwardly after he finished. He didn't even seem to realize what he had just said. That Ken had been his friend, not still was. To Hikari, and apparently to Takeru as well, that one little word spoke volumes. Even if Daisuke didn't want to believe it, some part of him, at least, already did.

Internally, she braced herself for one of the others to notice and comment and start another, louder fight, but no one did, and when she chanced a quick headcount, all she saw were sympathetic faces. All except for Miyako, whose expression she couldn't even see, let alone read. She would have to have a talk with the older girl later on, once the meeting was over. Hikari didn't like not knowing what she was feeling, and the only thing she got from Miyako's rigid back was a stone wall.

"Why would he do this?" Jyou asked abruptly, his voice soft.

"Because he's a psycho?" Daisuke suggested, more sarcasm than anything else. "That's what we're all saying, right?"

If Jyou had even noticed the redhead's hostility, he gave no sign of it. "No, I mean -- why now? Even the insane need something to trigger them. Serial murderers have a profile they target, child molesters go after specific children for specific reasons, and megalomaniacs want to take over the world for a reason. There's always something they want to change or someone they want to punish. If Ken-kun has been normal or even pretending to be normal for this long, then there must have been something in the last year or so that pushed him over the edge."

She could only see his face out of the corner of her eye, but for half a second Hikari would have sworn she had seen Daisuke flush. It was gone by the time she managed to snap her head around for a better look, though, and she frowned, wondering if she hadn't been imagining things.

"That's a good question," Sora was admitting in a reluctant sort of way. "Has he been under a lot of stress recently?"

"I don't think stress alone would be enough," Iori said. "It must have been something more. Perhaps...does anyone know the date of his brother's death? The anniversary, especially if it was a five or ten-year mark, might have made him especially sensitive, and then any little thing could have done the rest..."

Everyone agreed that this made sense, but not even Daisuke was sure of the exact date that Ken's older brother had passed away. That surprised Hikari a little bit, for some reason. Of all of them, she would have thought that Ken's self-proclaimed best friend would be the one to know a personal thing like that. But no, they had never really talked about it, because the indigo-haired boy had so obviously not wanted to and Daisuke had figured the subject was best left alone, at least for now.

"I'm such an idiot," the Bearer of Courage muttered. "I always thought, 'Oh, there'll be plenty of time for that later.' Some friend I am, huh?"

In his smile then, there was a certain tightness that reminded Hikari of the red flush she thought she had seen in his cheeks. She frowned at him. What wasn't he telling them? Hikari opened her mouth to ask, but never got the chance -- a sharp knock on the door interrupted her and distracted them all. It looked as if Jyou's mother had gotten back from the store, and that meant it was at least eight-thirty, possibly nine.

Their parents would all be worried, but especially hers. Her mother and father had inflicted a strict curfew the second they realized her big brother was missing. Technically, she wasn't even supposed to be out after dark. If they had so much as suspected that she was planning on going into the Digital World...

"We'll continue this tomorrow," Takeru said in an undertone, as soon as Jyou's mother had closed the door. When they all nodded, he snatched up the magazine and grabbed his shoes, only pausing briefly to smile a goodbye at her. She returned it, and then he was down the hall and halfway out of the apartment.

"I still can't believe it," Sora murmured in passing as she stood to follow. She blinked, and frowned a little. "I should warn Mimi-chan...I'll write her an email as soon as I get home."

A few of the others made small, noncommittal noises, and then everyone was moving at once, scrambling to get away from each other and the remains of the meeting. Maybe, Hikari reflected, they were all trying to escape the decision that had not quite been made.

Anger hit her in a hot rush, and for a second she wasn't even sure where it had come from. Her brother's life was on the line, couldn't they see that? Didn't they care? Of course it was Ken, of course he was the one responsible -- hadn't Takeru said he had taken warm clothes with him? If he wasn't behind the whole thing, how could he have known to try the far north? Daisuke had guessed and gotten lucky, but Ken was not exactly the guessing sort, or had never seemed to be -- and besides, why wouldn't he have told them where he was going? No, it was the only explanation that made any sense. There was no question about it.

So why hadn't the meeting ended with them going into the Digital World and attacking? Why hadn't a plan of attack been at least mentioned?

She was being unreasonable, though. Too close to the issue because it had been Taichi kidnapped and not Shin or Chizuru. And even as she wondered furiously why they weren't going on the offensive, she knew that they still needed time to plan -- that she wasn't being fair to her friends, who had good reason to feel divided on this issue and who were all coming around very quickly to the idea of one of their own working against them, considering.

Hikari reminded herself of all these things, and slowly calmed down. One more day, and then they would all talk again. It had been a week already, so what was one more day, really?

But...

If only Takeru hadn't been so curt with her. If only Daisuke hadn't wasted so much time denying everything. If only Jyou hadn't laid it out so clinically. If only Sora hadn't sounded so casual about the whole thing when she left.

If only Hikari hadn't realized that she might wake up in the middle of the night and know without question that her loving big brother was dead.

Maybe then, she wouldn't have been so tempted when she turned around.

There was still one other Chosen Child in the room with her. Miyako, who had been so unnaturally quiet all day, was sitting at Jyou's desk and turning his computer on.

"Miyako-san...?" For the life of her, she wasn't sure why her voice had come out so small and weak.

The older girl did not so much as glance her way. "I think you should go now, Hikari-chan."

"Go? Why? What are you going to do?"

A stupid thing to say. It was obvious what her Jogress partner intended, and doubly so when Miyako withdrew her D3. Hikari felt strangely weightless at the sight of it. As though, somehow, nothing she said or did or even felt would make the slightest difference. Liberating, in a way.

She licked her lips. "What about the meeting tomorrow?"

To her vague surprise, Miyako snorted contemptuously. "Meeting? What meeting? What are they going to say that they haven't already said? Isn't it just another delaying tactic? As if Ichijouji-san is really going to go away if we all ignore him hard enough."

She had started to quake, very faintly, and Hikari gazed at her uncertainly. She was calling him Ichijouji-san, but even in that distance, she sounded almost...almost sort of...

Had Sora been right? That teasing bit of lunchtime gossip seemed to have taken place ages ago, in another world -- but had it been true? Certainly, Miyako had felt that way about Ken once, years ago, but did she still? Watching the older girl's shoulders tremble, Hikari thought...maybe so. She hesitated for a moment, a very long moment, because there was every chance that this might be disastrous, but --

-- in the end --

"I'm coming with you."

The shaking stopped all at once. "What?" Miyako whipped her head around, lavender-colored hair a textured whirlwind, and tried too late to affect innocence. "Coming with me where?"

"To the Digital World, of course," Hikari told her, feeling more sure of herself with every passing second. Let the boys dawdle and debate -- they were going to actually do something about this. "That's what you had in mind, right? Now, under cover of darkness, before we lose any more time. You want to see Ken-kun yourself."

Miyako did not immediately reply, and Hikari knew she'd succeeded in surprising her. "Well...yes...but...it has to be just me who faces him. Do you understand that? If I'm alone, he might listen. He might realize it's not too late, and then he'd see --"

"-- How much you care about him?" Hikari finished for her delicately, and watched the older girl turn an interesting shade of bright red. It was a valid enough tactic. Far be it for her to doubt the power of love. She had seen it do some very strange things -- things she would have thought were impossible. "I know. But you can't do this alone, Miyako-san. You need Silphymon's power, at the very least. Let's go and get our digimon. Please, let me help you..."

"Can I be the one who finally approaches him?"

She could feel the grin spreading across her face, the one that everyone had always said showed the family resemblance between her and her big brother. Now, if only she could share a tiny portion of his strength... "I promise. We can use Silphymon to get inside his base, wherever it is, and then go our separate ways."

Besides, she was more interested in rescuing his prisoners than confronting Ken face-to-face. She wasn't sure what she would have said to him, and...the Digimon Kaizer...had always scared her a little. Whatever had happened to him, the things he was doing now were so much worse than what he'd done before, and -- Miyako was welcome to that end of things, if she wanted it so badly.

Wait for me, Oniichan. I'm coming.

"All right," Miyako finally agreed, rising from Jyou's desk with a determined look on her face. "It's a deal."

They shook on it, only meaning to seal their bargain.

Later, Hikari would remember it as the moment that had also sealed their fate.

To be continued...
- 13
- 14
- 15
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Pins and Needles