A/N: Written for the Digimon bingo, the non-flash version, #020 - glory.
Glory Bells
He dreams of being a hero when he grows up. A prince in a fairy-tale-tale. A knight in shining armour. Maybe he'll get to save his big sister from some nasty dragon. Preferrably, he'll meet his gorgeous future wife and sweep her off his feet and they'll ride off into the sunset on his ultra-cool noble steed.
Things kind of go in the wrong order. He meets his princess when he's still a kid who's got a lot of growing up to do and he fails too many times to count to woo her. Not that it's from lack of trying. And not that he stops trying either. But princess and prince are pretty far from on their way to having a romantic relationship by the time the royal steed comes around, and all that's still before the dragon finally rears its ugly head.
Not to mention the princess's apparent prince seems to show up before the steed as well, and that guy's steed is a flying horse and much more romantic than a little luck dragon who turns into a fire lizard. Not that he didn't love V-mon...but one had to admit that Pegasusmon had more of the steed traits than Fladramon.
And then there was Angemon. How could he compete against an angel? How could V-mon compete against an angel - and compete against a veteran angel to boot? The events of his fairy-tale-tale were coming out in the wrong sequence, and he'd never had control of it.
Still, the hero part of the fairy-tale-tale was open to him, and he hasn't been doing too bad a job of it. He's got Taichi-sempai's goggles as his crown and he's taken down his share of bad guys, but the evil ruler keeps on ducking away and he's got a feeling they haven't seen the worst of those enemies yet.
Because Taichi-sempai and Hikari-chan and even Takeru have spoken about evil digimon - digimon not controlled by something like the black gears or the towers and he knows there are worse enemies out there, and like the hero in all the fairy-tale tales, he'll have to fight and defeat them.
And then the real enemy shows his face and it's ugly like the wicked witch of the west and he stands and fights. And he wins, and better, they all win because he doesn't give up: what Miyako calls his bold-headedness and the enemy himself calls his tenacity. So he fulfils the hero contract in the end after all. And rescues the princess, though the one he winds up fetching in person winds up being one of the others. But all that doesn't wind up mattering in the end. They beat the bad guy and save the world, shed a few tears along the way, and then their lives go on.
And somewhere along the line, the hero finds a different soulmate and the princess finds a prince, and his fairy-tale-tale is complete. Just not in the way he'd thought all those years ago.