A/N: Challenges:

Diversity Writing Challenge, h4 – write a twoshot
The Becoming the Tamer King Challenge, A Surprise and a Fight with BlackTyrananmon (event) – two or threeshot where a character is confronted about their character
Haloween Trick or Treat Bag (2015), day 12: witches – write about a desperate decision having unexpected consequences

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Pacifist
Part 1

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It was good he didn't have any siblings – or maybe a kindness for all of them. He was trouble enough for his parents: always sick, always needing to be watched a little extra closely… It was why his mother had to leave her job, so she could be home full time and could watch him. She'd plan to go back, originally. She'd spent five years at university becoming a pharmacist and threw it all away because of him.

Of course, all parents had to think about the situation of their lives when they decided to have a child. But it was a little different with ones that didn't come out normal. He actually wasn't too bad, compared to some other kids. He met a lot of unfortunate souls in the children's hospital, because the small problems most kids had never got that far. Kids who were hacking up their lungs most hours of the day, whose nails squashed their nail beds, who had to be admitted for infections other kids could cough and sweat out in a matter of days. Kids with little balloons called aneurysms in their brain that could blow at any moment and kill them. Kids with cancers that could be cured but after lots of pain, and kids with cancers that couldn't be cured at all. Kids whose entire bodies, inside and out, were deformed – and there he was lucky, because it was only his heart that suffered.

But the heart and the brain were two vital parts of human life. One could only live for three minutes without them.

And, for him, his heart had a hole. An odd hole, that they couldn't fix immediately like most holes and they'd had to put a band aid on it instead. The term was actually called "banding", but he'd misheard it when he was younger and it had stuck in his head. And it was an appropriate analogy, in any case. The banding was a temporary operation that simply held the two sides of the hole together until he was old and fit enough for a proper surgery. And, in the interim, he had to take care not to overload his heart, and his parents had to make sure the hole didn't start to leak, or blood didn't start to go the other way through the heart (he'd seen a girl who'd had that problem. She'd been completely blue), or he doesn't get an infection that'll cause the muscle more stress.

So his mother never went back to work after her maternity leave. She had her hands busy with him. The pharmacy got a new pharmacist. His father continued to work as a police officer, and they started putting as much money as they could spare (and perhaps a little more; he still wasn't sure) away, so they could pay for his operation.

They had enough, now. In between regular trips to the paediatric cardiologist and the children's hospital, and their regular day to day expenses.

He knew he was fortunate. He knew his parents had sacrificed a life of comfort and possible future siblings, and her mother her job, for him and his health. He didn't have the right to fear the thing that would set them free from all of that – but he did. He was afraid. Afraid and weak.

Courage and strength, for him at least, went hand in hand.

It didn't have to, of course. It simply did. All the heroes in fairy tales were strong, after all, and he liked fairy tales because he knew better than most children how the real world looked. How every child didn't have rosy cheeks. How some of them had sunken so deep, one had to wonder where the muscles that caused the mouth to open and close and chew could go. And yet they did breathe, and talk, and chew. Just how he walked around with what was, functionally, a hole in his heart. People even called it that, though it wasn't a physical hole. Just the two ends of a rounded shape not quite joining. It was actually called a septal defect, and the types depended on what two chambers were linked by the malunion. So the one he had was a ventricular septal defect, even if it didn't look like the textbook example of one. A textbook example would have been fixed years ago. And maybe he wouldn't have had the time to reject the idea of a permanent fix.

It wasn't that he couldn't imagine not running without being short of breath, or doing the other things normal kids his age do. It was everything else: the chance that it would go wrong, the chance that things would change drastically with the family, at home…and the chance that he'd fallen too far behind to ever be normal, even when there was nothing physically holding him back anymore.

It was easier to stay sick, that way. More cowardly to, but a quiet life was at least a peaceful one. But, of course, his parents couldn't accept that. His suffering brought them pain. He drained their resources, their time… It would all be finished with that operation and how could he tell his parents he didn't want to have it?

He couldn't, regardless of whether they'd be able to convince him otherwise or not. He couldn't because he owed them for all the extra things he'd taken away, all the extra things they'd sacrificed for him.

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The digital world had, at first, just been another quiet activity for him. Something he could do without having to get out of a chair and move too much, which meant it was something he could take the time to enjoy before his own apparent lack of breath choked him. He knew he wasn't actually lacking breath, not like those poor kids who were coughing up yellow or green phlegm every day. But it felt like that, when the blood ran in circles back through the functional hole.

Through the Battle Terminal, it was his avatar that ran around with Gaomon, and not his body. It was a place he could have adventures without really having them. Where he could play with friends the way he'd always dreamed of playing, except without his body being the chain to tie him down. Outside the terminal, he sometimes thought of how he'd be able to do all those things once he had his operation as well – but the real world was different to the digital one. His friends had known him for years. And classmates and even people he barely knew in return. They'd always think him fragile. They'll always remember all the opportunities he'd missed. He'll always be the useless, weak little boy and the operation wouldn't change that.

But he was a different Inui Yu in the digital world. The him there never had the inability to run and play, or even fight as they sometimes did with other digimon. Those were sparring matches, of course. It was against the rules to go for a kill and that was good, because it was the sort of game that encouraged friendship and bonds and blood would just sully all of that.

Or that's how it all was, until he vanished into the Battle Terminal and entered the digital world for real.

At first, he was so frightened he couldn't move. He could easily die all alone. No-one to calm him down if he ran a little bit too much. No-one to help him with the medications whose names he couldn't all pronounce, let alone remember. If they stayed the same over the years, he might have managed it better, but they didn't. When new and better drugs came out, he was switched out. If he got bad side-effects, he switched out. When he was sick, he got extras added on to the normal regimen. And he had none of those with him at the moment. None of them in the digital world.

Normally, a person's first concern in such a situation would be water, then food. Medicines took first place for him – the medicines he'd pretty much lived off, and was so attached to. He felt even more vulnerable without them, and he was already vulnerable in a strange place on his own.

But he wasn't entirely on his own, and Gaomon seemed to know all the right things to say.

After a rampaging Tyrannamon had chased them a good distance first.

It was funny, actually. The Tyrannamon had roared so loudly they'd both shot off, and he only realised later he was panting but not dizzy and his chest didn't feel like it was going to burst. This is what it's supposed to feel like, he thought. It was much easier to breathe too, when he calmed down. This was how he'd feel after his operation…perhaps. He couldn't guarantee it, after all. And it would be far more terrifying than being chased by a Tyrannamon and he'd be all alone as well.

'I'm here,' said Gaomon.

Yes… Gaomon was there.

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Even with Gaomon, he was scared of the new world. He wished he had more friends: to be with him, to protect him, to comfort him. And then he ran into Tsurugi and Agumon. And more enemies – but he was starting to work out the enemy thing. They didn't differ too much from when he and Gaomon were on opposite sides of the Battle Terminal. The enemies were ones he'd seen before, and they had their weak points. He only had to point them out and they could attack.

And with GeoGreymon on their side, it became far easier.

Maybe he grew complacent. He missed his parents, yes, but the digital world had a freedom he hadn't realised before. The surgery would still be waiting for him when he got home. That weak heart of his would be waiting as well – or would catch up with him, and that would be even worse because how long before he could breathe normally again? How long before his chest stopped hurting? How long before the room stopped spinning? How long before he could get out of a bed again?

If he could be free of all that in this world, and have friends like Gaomon and Tsurugi…why did he need to go back and face what waited?

He could be a different Inui Yu in this world. A stronger one. The human who fought alongside his digimon, even if he was always giving the orders from a safe distance and watching the results. He couldn't even watch calmly because the distance wasn't as safe as he would like, but he had to be able to see the battlefield as well. And Tsurugi had no qualms about standing close. Neither had Ami, actually. And her Pichimon was still at the baby stage. If she got into trouble, they wouldn't be able to fight back and yet she stood almost neck to neck with Tsurugi, instead of a few paces behind like Yu.

Ami sort of sat between Tsurugi and Yu. She wasn't as reckless, nor as cautious. The one thing she didn't sit between them on though was her opinion on fighting. 'I came because I could raise a digimon without having to fight,' she retorted, after a slightly insensitive comment from Tsurugi. Suffice to say, she wasn't too pleased to be in a world that necessitated fighting every other day.

And she seemed suspicious of Yu's ease in it, as well. He wasn't sure if it was about the fighting or the ease, but they were both truths in a sense. He could fight because it was Gaomon who did the actual fighting – him and GeoGreymon and, rarely, he felt he wasn't strong enough to help out because he was helping, by pointing out the weak points, and by coming up with strategies. As for the ease… It was his dream world, without the enemies to fight – or maybe his dream world did include those enemies, because he'd always felt he was falling short of the hero mark, hadn't he?

And he was more of the side-kick than the hero in this tale, because he gave the commands almost from behind the scenes and let Tsurugi and GeoGreymon do the main fighting. They were the ones who'd get blasted first if things went wrong, or if Yu was too slow, or if they themselves were too slow when Yu could, in his own mind at least, blame them for being a little too slow to execute his plan in the opposite circumstance. Tsurugi was the defender and the convenient scapegoat and he knew it was a cruel way of thinking but, deep down, it was the truth. Of course, Tsurugi was a friend as well: the friend he always wanted, that forgot he even had a heart condition until Ami reminded him, but even she relaxed when he said the digital world came with the perk of rewriting that and mothered him in a far tamer way than his own mother. But she was still wary – the sort of wariness he expected his parents would always have with him, the sort the kinder friends would always have with him…because the crueller ones would just look with scorn at a weakness that would soon be only subjective.

And it was much easier when it was physically there…or not there at all.

If he could make her forget, he would. But he couldn't and she didn't mention it again so he supposed that was the best he would get. The digimon didn't understand. Tsurugi forgot and remembered and forgot again. And they didn't need to sacrifice anything to be with him. Ami didn't fight anyway. Tsurugi rushed to the front lines anyway. If anything, him being the strategist in the shadows was a help to both of them, and he loved that. Sure, the constant attacks frightened him still because what if Tsurugi and GeoGreymon did at some point lose? Gaogamon would only be able to do so much on his own, being in the support position for so long. Maybe he should try and break that mould – but why? They didn't have to get into a situation like that. They didn't have to lose.

He couldn't help the way he was born, with that functional hole in his heart, but this world took away those boundaries and he could do all the things he wanted to do but couldn't in a place like this. It didn't have to change. He didn't have to get greedy and do something that'll shake the balance. Things were fine the way they were. He might not seek out battles actively, but he could fight like this, in a way he couldn't in the real world. He could be strong. And he could be normal without needing that operation in their real human world.