Author's notes: A short piece for Valentine's day, because these precious children are just the cutest. :)
The Digimon fandom has obviously been exploding recently because of Tri (not that I can talk, I'd been waiting for it for fifteen years and am as excited as anybody) but Tamers will always hold a special place in my heart and I thought there needed to be more fic for it, especially once I visited the Jurato tag on Tumblr and found that it was basically dead.
This fic can be interpreted as shippy or friendshippy, so draw your own conclusions. I personally OTP it, but that's just me...
Takato had known from the start that it would take a great deal of serious perseverance to rebuild Jeri Katou after her ordeal with the D-Reaper had shattered her.
"You know," she had quietly confessed to him one day after school, when they made their daily pilgrimage to Guilmon's old, inevitably derelict hut. By this point, it was a given that there would be no dinosaur-puppy there to welcome them, but that didn't stop Takato from hoping. "When the D-Reaper possessed me, I wanted to die."
Jeri sat down in the dirt, her knees drawn up to her chest and her arms wrapped protectively around her legs, and she looked so small and fragile it almost broke Takato's heart.
For months, now, it felt to Takato as though he had been picking up the pieces of her, one-by-one, and gluing the shards back together as carefully as he could. Every so often, he got it right, and his efforts would be rewarded with a slightly larger fragment of glass.
"I'm glad you didn't die. We would have missed you."
"I just can't convince myself that that's the case. I'm sorry, Takato."
... And sometimes, the sharp edges sliced his overeager fingers open. Well, that was what he got for not even bothering to put gloves on before making an attempt at the Jeri-jigsaw. He sat down beside her in the corner that had been Guilmon's favourite, without a word.
Ignoring the trail of blood running down his finger, Takato cautiously scrutinised the fractured piece in his hand. Jeri had always been warm colours, bright yellows and greens, but the patterns of colour decorating her glass had turned darker since her ordeal. Disregarding the tiny specks of his own blood marring a few of the edges, Jeri's bright yellow had become swirls of scarlet and amber, with a spider's web of bright white veins connecting the pieces and the occasional fleck of frosty blue to break up the autumnal hues.
No, that wasn't frost on fallen leaves. That was fire.
Jeri had always been a warm person, but the fact that her partner had been a lion, the presence of Rika in her life as a mentor, and the fact that she had managed to emerge from the D-Reaper's clutches in the first place hinted at a core of steel, Takato realised. A core of steel which, now that he thought about it, had to have been forged in a furnace in the first place; it made perfect sense that the colours of a piece of glass would darken when charred in a raging inferno.
He had an incredible amount of respect for her.
"Listen, Jeri," he said, his voice gentle as the light breeze bringing the scent of petrichor through the bars of the hut. "I care about you a lot, and I want you to know that it's okay that you feel this way. You've been through a lot, and you're entitled to be upset about it, but please don't think that nobody cares because I do and I'll always be here for you." She looked up from the floor, briefly made eye-contact, and gave the faintest shadow of a smile.
Chink. Another piece of glass fitted into place.
"Come on." Takato rose to his feet, before offering her his hand. "Let's go home."
She considered this for a second, before hesitantly accepting it and allowing him to pull her to her feet. When she was up, he began to turn to lead her from the hut, but found himself unable to move as she wound her delicate arms around him in an hug. He was surprised for a second, but gladly accepted the hug and only let her go a few seconds later after she had started to pull away.
Chink chink chink.
It was rare for Jeri to pick up her own fragments-he supposed she just didn't have the energy to do so- but when she did, she had a way of instantly knowing exactly where they went and attaching them so perfectly you could barely see the joins. Takato almost felt bad for his clumsy glue-job, but he understood that if he didn't help, it would take a lot longer to re-form her, and that when the vase was finally complete the criss-crossing cracks of his less-than-perfect attempt would be indistinguishable from the fiery pattern. In a way, they would become the pattern itself, enhancing the dramatic licks of flame with the occasional bolt of lightning, or a seam of gold in a solidified magma flow.
"Thank you," she whispered.
Takato smiled back, gently, as in his mind's-eye he picked a rose for her half-finished vase, wincing in anticipation as he fully expected the prickles to dig into his flesh, but he was pleasantly surprised when the sharp sting didn't come. A white rose, for the girl's unshakeable innocence, which he dropped into her half-finished vase with the jagged lip and the climbing crimson pattern which looked life-like enough to burn it to ashes, but that never could.