Warnings: Character death, grief, emotional neglect

Prologue – The Fourth Death

In 1995, Meiko was related to everyone in the world.

Not really, but she knew people. She knew them everywhere. Sometimes it felt like everywhere she looked, they knew her. So she knew everyone who came to her door by name and face, and at the age of six, as far as she was concerned, she knew them all.

So she knew her auntie more closely than others, by her slightly heavier steps, by the way her knuckles were sometimes swelled up like bee stings after school, how she was barely an auntie and more of an estranged (she likes that word, estranged) big sister except Hime-chan would never be that way. Meiko's father liked her after all.

That was a thought for when things were cloudier and clearer by hindsight in turns. But it was mostly because Hime-chan was smart and strong and funny. Seeing her cry was strange. It was usually from things like pulling n her hair too hard or chopping onions.

So seeing her in a huddled ball on the wooden floor, staring outside like a doll, was like seeing the end of the world.

"Hime-chan?" She had dropped her ball, she remembered, eager to play with her because Hime kicked the ball at just the right strength. She hadn't responded, hadn't spoken a single word or even lifted her head. "Hime-chan?" Her voice faltered a little. This made a lump rise in her throat. "What's wrong?"

No vocal answer. But the longer arm looped to wrap around her shoulder and pull her close, still trembling.

Okay this she understood. She understood this kind of sadness, bone deep and too tough on your skin and bones that made describing it impossible, impenetrable. So Meiko hunkered down and hung on for a while, listening to her auntie's body shudder and quake with sobs. It seemed to last forever.

Then a larger, steady hand shook Meiko a little. She opened her eyes. It was strangely cold this morning… afternoon? What time is it? She sat up straight.

"It's all dark!" It was practically nighttime.

"You took a nap with Auntie, kiddo," teased a voice to her right. She looked to the side, saw grey hair and a sling with a tuft of blue poking out from one side. "It's cold out here."

"Ryuji!-nii!"

Maki did not stir. She was quiet now, and her grip on Meiko's waist a little easier. That said, her eyes were open a little. She managed a smile.

"Auntie." Meiko said the word as loud as dared. "Are you okay now?"

She let out a wet snort, sad and tired and not young at all. "No, but I'll be all right. Don't worry, Meiko."

Don't worry, Meiko. They always said that, as if they can stop her from worrying, as if it makes a difference if she doesn't. It wasn't like she could help.

Still she didn't say anything against it. Her legs were starting to hurt and she was still feeling kind of tired, she realized. Her eyes were starting to droop again anyway.

Then she let out a squeak, very much awake as her aunt swung her up to carry her. "Come on, up with you." She was smiling now, a little, a little more as they walked. "Before you catch a cold."

"You'll catch one first! You don't have any sleeves!"

Maki said nothing, but she felt better, felt closer, more alive. "Idiots can't catch colds, Meimei."

"You're not an idiot either!"

Maki tweaked her nose and did not counter this. Meiko beamed, victory in her blood.

Meiko sank into her bed gleefully the second she was on it. She scrambled to get under the blankets. It was way too cold for September! Maki watched her, the faintest, most exhausted smile on her face. Once certain that Meiko was comfortable in her bed, Maki turned to leave. As she did so, her eyes saw something sitting innocuously on the small writing desk.

"Did your dad find book at another sale?" Maki lifted the book so Meiko could see the cover, all spindling lines and symbols that Meiko had never seen before.

Meiko could also barely see them with her glasses off and her head on the pillow anyway. Still, she would never leave a book on her desk. That was for messy people. "I dunno! Never seen that before."

She watched Hime-chan's hair move. "Mind if I hold onto it then for a bit? I can always read it to you later."

"Keep it," Meiko said, voice slurring as she started to really sink under her covers.

She fell asleep to gentle fingers carding through her hair and a sad little humming sound that occasionally hitched with sobs. Meiko thought about it, but not very long.

In 1999, Meiko was haunted for the very first time.

It was like typical hauntings, of course. Rattling doors, glasses falling, ominous wind. Scary stuff.

It was more of a problem for her mother than her. All Meiko had to do to escape was go outside. For some reason the ghost refused to go outside. Or interrupt her sleep. Once in a while the fridge would be found left open and yet there would be no crumbs.

It was almost like they were being haunted by something with manners. Weird.

She had thought the ghost had manners anyway.

Meiko was normally a rather heavy sleeper. Case in point, her relatives were puttering about even though it was super dark and late and she had remained fast asleep until there had been a scream so loud it couldn't possibly have been slept through.

And it was of course, coming from her other cousin.

It wasn't a pain scream; it was a terror scream. But then again, Ryuji tended to think they were the same considering he took being "big brother" to an all new level of overbearing. Even Meiko's dad thought it was a bit much and it had been a tooth and nail fight with her mom to let her go running in the trees. Without thinking, Meiko rolled over and squeezed her eyes shut again. She had school tomorrow, she needed to sleep.

Then her cousin screamed again, and this time it was a lot closer to her door. Therefore, Meiko could hear exactly what the girl said. "Monster!"

Monster? Meiko opened her eyes, grabbed her glasses and rolled out of bed. What monster?

With the appropriate lack of caution for a young girl, Meiko burst from her room, chasing the adventure full force. She entered the living room to find Ryuji looking all around the room as something black swirled under the floor, over the floorboards at the same time. His sister was perched on the couch, practically a statue.

"Don't get any closer!" Ryuji barked. Meiko only looked at him in bafflement. IT wasn't a bug or anything, it didn't look like it was doing anything.

Then the shadow let out a hiss. It rose up slowly from the ground and slowly turned in mid-air, white eyes -were those really eyes?- staring into her own.

Book? It said.

"Book?" Meiko repeated. "I have a lot of books."

The Book.

"What book? I can go get it!"

"Stop trying to reason with it!"

The shadowy… thing? Maybe it really was a ghost! Hissed again and began to wobble and shift. It reared up and shot towards her like an arrow.

"Look out!"

Meiko yelped and slid to the floor, dodging the ghost that vanished into the wall.

The room was silent for a moment. Then a loud bang resounded through the house. Meiko bolted to her room. It was empty, but everything was tossed around, including a book that Meiko could not remember ever getting. It seemed innocent on the floor, spine cracked, flopped uselessly on the pages. But as Meiko moved over and tried to pick it up, her fingers started to burn. She yelped and dropped it, right as Ryuji reached her. But there was no more movement. No more fear. No more screaming. Just a strange book and her aching hand.

And a messy room, but that was still pretty normal. But ever since then, it felt like she was being watched.

There was a car crash in fall of 2000. There was a very bad incident with a truck and a group of cars. It should have meant nothing to Meiko. It was far from home in a place she had never really been. It should have just been something on the news to make her cry.

And yet there she was in this strange city area she didn't want to be in.

She was standing at a funeral for four people, standing next to a little boy with purple hair and a baby face that was too short to be right and next to Ryuji. There was no spoiled Erika. Erika was swathed in white and crying because everything was loud and painful and wrong and something was her fault and her big cousin just looked sad and angry and old beside her. And though it was wrong, though it was very very wrong and inappropriate, she reached over and took his burly hand in her own.

Ryuji looked down at her and smiled wetly. And it twisted his face a little less hard and so she clutched tighter as they walked.

And Hime-chan met them at the end of it, holding a little ceramic vase and incense.

"He loves the honeysuckle kind," she said to Ryuji, dressed in her high school uniform and slumping at the weight of the jacket. His fingers trembled when he took it, but he nodded, bracing, strong, cold.

It was only now that Meiko could remember, could see the faint lines of black thread at the elbows, the extra wornness of her bag.

"Don't be proud, Ryuji-kun," Hime-chan said gently. And then she was gone, back to a boy her age with messy black hair in a suit a size too big and eyes softer than dog fur.

Ryuji's frown only seemed to sink further, too big and serious and even a little scary. Meiko reached out and took his hand again.

She watched his expression fall apart and not even Erika's old sobbing could bring it up again.

It was 2002 when she met her ghost again.

By now Meiko was a little too big to climb trees with help, too big to chase after her father's car when it left or to be babysat by anyone. She was too old to walk to school without friends and since nothing was happening, no matter how honestly she smiled or how interested she was in other things, no one slid along.

The move to Odaiba was almost a dream, even though, much to her disappointment, there was no backyard the size of the town to get lost in. There were no adventures that took people up the mountains and buried them in dirt. It was all contained.

She could not escape her father here.

Not that she had to try very hard. He was around even less than he had been before. Were fathers not supposed to smile, she wondered? Were they supposed to look at you strangely, like you were the enigma and not them? Her mother hadn't changed at all, really. She always smiled, cooked plenty of food. She invited people over and pestered Ryuji and Erika to spend less time at that café of theirs because computers weren't as important as people.

But father had only backed off even more. Disappeared into work all the harder.

"It's just more expensive to be here so he needs more hours," her mother would say.

But even she had no explanation for the profiles left on the table early in the morning, the muttering about children she saw in passing at school and nowhere else. There was no explanation for how long he was working, nor the meals left on the table for him every morning and night. Or the way he would look at her sometimes when he was home.

Expectant.

Meiko took to ignoring it. She had class and the computers were often acting up. She had enough to focus on. Her classmates were only a little bit of help.

Except August 3rd rolled by and she couldn't concentrate on those things. No matter how interesting literature might have been. She ended up wandering out of the apartment (another awful change, she missed the great house with its endless green) and into the city, that strange old forgotten book she'd left a single bookmark in the pages of to mark where it had fallen open. She still had no idea what it meant but no one seemed to (except Hime-chan seemed afraid of it for some reason) so she wasn't going to do too much research into it by herself. So she carried it instead, wandering in the heat, stopping once to spend some money on an ice pop and a sandwich, before she found herself at Fuji TV station.

There was a group ahead of her. One of them held a bouquet of red flowers. Meiko watched and, from the marrow of her bones, curiosity burned. What were they doing there? What was going on?

Of course, three years ago, the sky had been full of islands and rivers, landmasses and seas and monsters. She had woken up on the floor of a cold, lit up building alone and seen-

Seen a rainbow full of children, waving and calling down to the world below.

She had wondered what had happened to them.

And now, squinting a little beneath the last of her ice pop, she knew. They were alive. They were here. They could be related to the book even. Maybe she could ask.

But she didn't ask. The greeting didn't even make it out of her mouth as they disappeared up into the elevator. The city had made her quiet and thoughtful and subtle where she had been outright. IT was nothing to be proud of really.

So, she watched them go up the stairs. And, after a good few minutes, she went after them.

None of them saw or heard her of course, and she wouldn't have done it any other time. But as they had been so sober and carrying mourning flowers, she hadn't been able to help but stay quiet and follow. Because the monsters had been scary at the time, searching for someone and only held back by that alone. She'd… cowered then. And, Meiko was realizing, she would cower now.

The elevator dinged open, but everyone was absorbed in whatever was happening by the window. Her book vibrated in her arms again, and Meiko dropped it. The book fell open without a sound, pages flipping as though the air conditioner was on. It stopped at one point, on blank pages. She stared at it, not frightened exactly, but there was a swooping sensation in the pit of her stomach that she couldn't identify. Her eyes went wide as writing began to scrawl down the page.

"Stay where you are."

Meiko made to shift, but the page turned.

"Don't move."

Now she was afraid. But she did as they wanted. She shook all over, feeling her food creeping up her throat.

Another page turn. "You have nothing to fear."

That was a laugh. There was everything to fear.

She didn't know how long she had stood there, face pale, world full of her thumping heart. Then a quiet voice spoke.

"It's been a while."

She wanted to jump, really, but she couldn't move even now.

"They're gone now," the voice continued. "You can move."

Her shoulders sagged and Meiko sank to the floor, breathing hard.

"I'm sorry about that, but… I merely wished to speak in private. I wanted to thank you. You took wonderful care of my book."

"Who ah-are you?" she stuttered out.

They made a sound of confusion and then laughed. "Oh, I'm sorry."

The speaker stepped through the desk she had been hidden behind, revealing a relatively short man with grey skin. At first glance, he reminded her of the stories of magicians her aunt had read between homework assignments, but at the same time, he also reminded her of a scarecrow.

He was a ghost scarecrow.

She had no idea how to take that.

"I am Wizarmon," he said, bowing a little. "As you can see, I'm in a rather… unpleasant situation here. I can't return to life, but I also cannot leave either. And that book you have may be able to help me."

"What happened to you?" Meiko asked, finding her proper voice.

The man seemed to smile with his stitched mouth. "I protected someone I treasured with my life, is all. I repaid a debt she had left me."

"I… I see…" Then she remembered. "You tried to get the book before!"

He smiled again. "I did, yes. It was then I realized I couldn't touch it, and left it with you. I can do a little more now, but I need your help to accomplish this."

"Accomplish what?"

The warm expression turned grave. "Either this forbidden book I stole brings me back to life, or I pass on to reincarnation. And either event needs to happen soon. Or… Saving my friend won't have had any meaning." He lifted his head to lock eyes with Meiko. "I can not allow that to be the case. She – Tailmon – warmed up so much in those few hours… I refuse to let that be taken from her. Will you help me?"

She didn't answer at first, so he added. "In return… I don't know what I can provide but, at the very least I… I will support you as a friend, as I-"

"I'll do it!"

He blinked. "I… you will?"

The girl smiled almost to herself. "I'd like a new friend. The city's too big for one person you see."

And as she spoke those words, something soft and blue clattered to the floor beside them, as if someone had been waiting for this moment.

(They had been.)

"I'm Mochizuki Meiko," she said with a small bow from her waist. "It's nice to meet you, Wizarmon."

"Likewise," he agreed. "Soon, perhaps, you'll be able to shake my hand."

The girl laughed and for the first time since he had died, the Digimon felt warmth in his chest.

A/N: This was supposed to be something way different but that original idea spiraled out of control so I scrapped it and went with this one instead. Thanks for waiting!

Challenges: Commission, Epic Masterclass interseason 5, three sided box, mega prompts word 11, interseason boot camp - nauseating