Disclaimer: I own nothing involved in this story unless I invented it myself. This is written for fun, not for profit. All forms of feedback eagerly accepted. Concrit is loved the most, but everything is welcome
Fandom: Yu-Gi-Oh GX & Digimon Frontier
Title: Children of the Shadows: Chapter 1: Primal
Characters: Kimura Kouichi & Yuuki Juudai
Word Count: chapter: 2,280||story: 2,280
Genre: Drama, Adventure||Rated: PG-13
Notes: This takes place some years after the end of both series.
Challenge: Advent Calendar Day #6 (Yu-Gi-Oh GX), Advent Calendar Day #9 (Digimon), Diversity Writing Section H, #8: a multichap with exactly four chapters; Crossover Challenge.
Summary: [1/4 chapters; Kouichi, Juudai; 2014 Advent Calendar, Diversity Writing, & Crossover Challenge] Cast adrift, Kouichi finds himself in the home of the primal Darkness. The primal Darkness has brown hair, brown eyes (when they're not gold) and offers him miso soup.
He walked in the darkness and he was the darkness and the darkness was him and he didn't know what else to think about it. One and the same, ever and always, from the beginning to the end, and he didn't know who he was and why he was there and where he was, just endless night from horizon to horizon and were those even horizons? He didn't know. He couldn't guess. He wasn't sure of what to think about any of it. He just knew the darkness. And the darkness knew him.
The darkness was aware of him. Was it looking at him? Could it see him? Did the darkness have eyes at all? He wanted to know who he was, and it wasn't talking to him and he didn't know if he wanted it to or what he would do if it did.
The more he became aware, the more that he knew he didn't know anything. His own name eluded him, slipping and sliding away as if it were a living thing, a small lizard that didn't want to be caught, that flittered under rocks and peeked out only enough to make certain it could get away if he got too near it again.
He didn't know if that made sense. But he didn't know anything, so there wasn't much different about that.
And still the darkness stretched around him and enfolded him and was him and wasn't all at the same time and he didn't know and he wanted to know and it cried out within him and something sounded around him and was that him?
Or was it the darkness?
Or one and the same?
A vague whisper of a thought – or perhaps a voice – brushed by him, all curious and questioning, but he couldn't grip onto it enough to know what it wanted or even what it was. He couldn't understand it. He thought that he should but he couldn't, and shimmers of frustration danced underneath his skin.
When did he get skin? He didn't know. The more he became aware that he didn't know, the more he wanted to know, and the more it infuriated him that he didn't know.
Again it came by, a little stronger this time, but he still couldn't figure out what the words were saying, or if those were words at all and not merely the passing regard of the darkness. He stressed and strained, drawing in a breath, and not at all certain of when he'd been endowed with lungs. But there they were, and there he was, and he wanted nothing more than to fill them with air.
The darkness wasn't as dark anymore. Or perhaps he could see through it. Again, something he didn't know and couldn't understand. It was just there. But the shadows still clung thickly to him and welcomed him as one of their own.
Along with skin and lungs, he found that he had a mouth, and there was a tongue somewhere along with it, and a few other body parts that he hadn't guessed he owned or needed. But all of that together meant one thing: he could talk. Or had the parts to talk.
He struggled. He wanted to say something. He didn't know still who he wanted to talk to or who was there to talk to or if he could say anything that made sense at all. His thoughts roamed loose and unconstrained, nothing making a shred of sense as they wandered from one vague observation to another, and he still hadn't found the part of himself that would make him care.
Somewhere in all of that chaos, he found himself looking up into what he somehow recognized as a night sky. Not the night sky that he recognized, but there were many reasons for that, among them the fact he didn't remember any night sky in particular at all. But he knew anyway that this wasn't the one he'd seen before. Before what? Still didn't know that.
A hand rested on his own, and it wasn't -wasn't one that he knew, but he knew it anyway, and it thrummed with the shadows, swirling and soft and hard and welcoming and curious.
"Are you together yet?" The voice wasn't one that he recognized and for all the same reasons that he didn't recognize the night sky. But for all of that, he knew it anyway. It was the same as his voice. The same as the shadows that filled him.
"I don't know." The words fell from lips he'd only just begun to be aware that he had, thick and confused and struggling to be heard. He blinked, and the world didn't come into focus, did nothing at all but spin and dance and whirl and he closed his eyes, preferring the darkness. At least there he felt safe and less like his stomach was about to upend itself. He didn't know what he'd last eaten but he didn't want to find out by seeing it coming back up.
Time passed. He could not have said how much. The other one, the other darkness, came and went, but he found he wasn't alone. He didn't know what the others in this place were, or where this place was, other than a realm where darkness alone walked, but they were there all the same. He thought maybe he was sick. He would have to be, to see some of what he saw there. No one who wasn't sick would see something like a humanoid dolphin or a two-legged scarab or – or -
Well, he had to be sick, that was all there was to it.
"You were sick," the other said, peering down at him. Now he could see the other more clearly, and he understood what he saw even better. "You kind of still are, but you're not seeing things."
He blinked a few times more, trying to get his thoughts to work together in some fashion that made sense. It wasn't easy at all, but he tried. He had nothing else to do with his time. He tried to move an arm and found he could do so, if only a short distance.
"Who-" He tasted the word strangely. He wasn't sure how long it had been since he'd said anything coherent. He wasn't sure if he had yet.
"Yuuki Juudai." The other sat cross-legged in the sand and looked at him curiously, dark head tilted to the side. "Do you remember your name yet? You've been out of it for a while."
He blinked a few more times, not certain of how to answer it. Then the little lizard that was his name fell into his hands and out of his mouth. "Kimura...Kouichi."
And with those two words, everything blocked in his mind unfolded and he breathed in a sharp, harsh, stuttering breath, quivering all over. "Kouji!" Kouji, Takuya, Izumi, Junpei, Tomoki...where were they all? Where was he?
Hands rested on his shoulders and he found himself looking into a pair of warm brown eyes. "Calm down. You're not ready to go back just yet."
Kouichi stared, heart racing, thoughts as chaotic as before, but now filled with memories of his brother and friends. "What do you mean?"
"What I know about you is this. You came flying out of the sky and landed face-first right over there." Juudai gestured over to a place not that far away. "The Neo-Spacians called me, and I came to see what was going on. You've been out of it for hours."
Hours? All of that had only been hours? Kouichi's hands clutched at the sand beneath him. Most of what Juudai said didn't make any sense, but he listened anyway. It was all he could do.
"It looks to me like you fell through some kind of gateway between worlds. Those are kind of rare, but they've been known to happen." Juudai stared intently at Kouichi, a frown forming between his eyes. "And you've got some kind of a connection to Darkness. Not like I do, but...that's why you came to Neo-Space. I think. I'm not good with this."
Kouichi wondered if having landed on his head was why this didn't make much sense. He felt like it should. It just didn't.
"You should probably try to get some real rest. That might help," Juudai said. Kouichi didn't even consider arguing. All he did was lay down and close his eyes and once again the darkness held him close.
Bit by bit the memories sorted themselves out, each falling neatly into place. Some were dustier than others but soon enough he knew what had happened.
"We saved the world," he said to Juudai, staring down into a cup of hot miso soup the other had given him. "We did it when we were just kids. Not even twelve yet for me." He found a small strange smile on his lips and liked the way it felt there. "Some people didn't take it all that well, though. The world we saved, the Digital World...the Digimon, the people there, one of them wanted to take over and rule it all. And I guess he figured that he wanted to get us out of the way first, in case we wanted to try stopping him."
His fingers tightened on the cup. "And we would have, too." He wasn't certain if Juudai would understand. Could he? Did he?
Juudai's fingers pressed against his hand and he looked up into a smile as strange as his own. "Of course you would have."
He did. Those eyes that looked into Kouichi spoke of a warrior, one who had fought his own battles. Perhaps not the ones that Kouichi had fought or in the same way that he had, but he knew what it was like to defend those he cared about.
Kouichi drew another breath and continued. "I never did get his name. I just know that we were hanging out at Izumi's place when all of the televisions and telephones started to go berserk. There were Digimon appearing on all of them, all evil ones. Then they started to actually show up." He shook his head, remembering how his hands had clutched for his phone, his instincts telling him to call on the darkness, to become Lowemon once again. Only he couldn't and he didn't, and then there had been hands on him, gripping him, and he'd seen more of them clutching at the others, and they'd had Kouji and then there'd only been darkness...
He didn't know how long he sat there or even if he said anything else. He sipped at the soup, wondering who had made it. He could compliment them on the recipe, whoever it was.
"Sounds like you need to get back there fast," Juudai said after some time. Kouichi nodded. His friends needed him. His brother needed him. If anything had happened to them while he was gone...
He looked around, trying not to let himself get too furious. It reminded him too much of other times to get too angry. "Where is this place anyway?"
"Neo-Space. You could call it the home of Darkness. Good darkness, anyway," Juudai said. "I don't come here that often, but you needed the help. We Good darknesses have to stick together, right?"
Kouichi looked at him again. "You're... darkness too?" He didn't look like anything that Kouichi would've associated with darkness at all. Cheerful as a sparrow, brown as a nut, with a smile that was too large for his face, and …
And eyes that were suddenly a brilliant gold that made part of Kouichi wish to drop to one knee before a darkness far deeper, vaster, and older than his. The primal darkness, from which all shadows sprang, stood before him.
"Yes." Juudai's voice hadn't changed, but it was different all the same, old beyond words, calling to mind the ancient darkness behind the stars. Kouichi swallowed, at a loss for words like he'd never been in his life.
Then, between one moment and the next, Juudai's eyes glimmered brown once more and he reached over to scoop the cup of soup up from where it had fallen unnoticed from Kouichi's hand.
"Hey, you might want to keep breathing there. I hear it's a good thing."
Kouichi swallowed again, then squared his shoulders. "Can you help me get home?" He needed that more than anything else. Always Kouji lurked in the back of his thoughts, and if that Digimon had brought him to any harm...
Kouichi did not like remembering being Duskmon. That didn't mean he couldn't do it. Or that he hadn't picked up a few tricks from that time that could be useful when the occasion demanded it.
"I'll do what I can. If I can't, I've got a friend who I'm pretty sure can," Juudai promised. Kouichi had to believe him.
Time in Neo-Space wasn't easy to judge, but Kouichi thought he hadn't been there more than a couple of days before Juudai declared they were going to try to get him home.
"I'm getting pretty good at finding what world I want to go to. So if you just think about your world, and if I'm holding onto you, I should be able to take you there," he explained. Kouichi still didn't know if that made any sense, but he didn't have many other options than to trust him.
Darkness sprang up around them. Darkness was always there, but now it was more there. Kouichi rested his hand on Juudai's shoulder and together, the two of them walked into the shadows where they belonged.
To Be Continued