Spoilers for Onix's Legacy-verse abound.
In many other lives, in almost every other life, Mikagura Mirei stops at the sound of a crying girl. She will stop, sword in hand, and wonder who it is. She will go and see. She will meet a friend who will change her entire life. Whether it is for the better or not is debatable.
This time, perhaps due to a twang of pain in her head, she keeps walking. There are always dying children, sobbing people, in a war. So she lets it go, like her father had often warned her to do. It will save her miniscule pieces of heartbreak
For once, she listens. Even the sound of a person's name doesn't make her turn. It takes great effort to keep walking forward, after her target.
She doesn't know later if she regrets not going to aid that person. She doesn't have time to think. That time is spent sharpening her sword and smiling at her parents, at the people she's sure will love her absolutely, even though she is incomplete and incompatible with most of the world.
She goes into war and fights. Maybe one day, she will earn her father's hug, his love made clear for all to see. She doesn't know.
Mirei, in this timeline, isn't quite sure that she cares about any of that. She is in a timeline where she doesn't want to think or feel. So she doesn't. But they need her to look like she does.
She pretends. She's always been good at pretending.
Someone's voice shuns and scorns her in the back of her mind. She, predictably, ignores it.
Years pass, months to a human, years to the world in which she had been dropped into by death and a monster with great blue eyes and tears of its own. She doesn't hate that monster. She knows who it could be, now. Saving it would be nice. It would give her parents a child who could love. Who would love without shame or fear.
Or maybe she can and she just doesn't want to admit it. Well, it doesn't matter.
The years pass and the centuries go by. In the forest she had left behind back then, chaos reigns. A great golden monster, an impossibility by all legends and fairy tales, holds court there, and her voice can shatter hearts when she is melancholy.
Instinct pulls Mirei up from her free time. Her parents are worried about such a dangerous thing running loose. It shouldn't require more Chosen Ones to kill it, certainly. If they wait too long it might, however. They need to settle it themselves.
Mirei, tugged from her doze, goes to kill it without being told to.
Her heart knows. It weeps. She tells it to shut up, and heads into the burnt trees.
Indeed, there is a golden dragon in the heart of the trees. It is curled up on itself, whining pain, whining a name. She regards it, not feeling pity nor disdain nor hate.
She may feel regret. It seems like work to figure it out.
"Rii," she says, like it should mean something to either of them.
Its great golden head, so small compared to its forebears yet so large compared to the rest of the monsters in this land, lifts to look at her, its many red eyes filmy in dying. "Who are you?" it croaks."Only my parents have ever called me that. They don't come here."
"They wouldn't," Mirei says. Her voice tinges with something green. It may be sympathy. "They are ashamed." Of her, of themselves, nobody knows.
The scoff sends leaves from trees. "That doesn't tell me who you are."
"A demon." It's easier to say than a soldier. It's easier to say than a puppet. Those clog up her throat like mucus. "I have to kill you," Mirei continues and her voice hitches and she can't say why. "Mama and Papa will do it wrong. They will make it really hurt, you see."
"And you will provide me mercy." Rhythm laughs. The sound even reeks of death. "It's taking everything I have not to jump you and rip you apart, not to eat you like any other idiot human who thinks they can make me theirs. I have my own. I won't let go of him."
"I can't have you." The words have no bite, but the dragon looks stricken anyway. Another pang from her chest. "Mine will never come and until they do, I have no one." She doesn't want pity, but the eyes soften enough to make her think that's what's there. Mirei shrugs it off. There are more pitiable people than her. She taps her sword against her knee and it slithers around her like water, the weapon warping into two blades that fit more easily around her hands. "Regardless, this land needs to heal. You still have to die."
"It won't change what happens." The dragon laughs like crackling torches. "I'll hatch again and I'll be corrupted again. I'll kill again. And then die. It's a cycle. You know what that is by now, don't you?"
In another timeline, this behavior would have hurt. Mirei now, however, knows she deserves it, and lets it go. The demon doesn't know how to apologize for its deep-set indifference. She steps forward and the dragon's bones creak as it uncurls from its defensive shield.
Battles are seldom as long as they look. In moments, Mirei is covered in blood and dragon flesh, the remnants of the data floating into the air, swirling into an egg painted in flame. She catches it, cradles it before she can stop herself. Her weapon returns to normal. The dragon was weakened by the program, and horrified by something Mirei herself cannot remember. A flash of purple light had overcome her vision for mere moments.
She leaves the blood-coated clearing, limping towards home. The hole in her chest heals mysteriously quickly. Mirei files that away as a helpful ability and pushes it no farther than that. Why question why things work the way they do.
The egg doesn't hatch. Mirei doesn't rub it, and it doesn't seem inclined to come out when anyone touches it. She studies, ignoring the concerned looks her parents give her. She learns how to open portals. She learns of the worlds beyond the veil. The limp doesn't entirely fade, but she doesn't notice. It's only a hindrance when she jumps too hard (which is always) or fails to fly (which is more and more these days).
She pretends her parents' watching her outside of her room is them full of approval, and buries herself in what she knows.
She does not panic, as she once had, when her father is thrown to where she can't reach him. She does not scream from her hiding place as a tentacled monster devours her mother before she can even consider destroying it. Even when her very being cries out to save them, it's not enough. Mirei takes the egg and rubs it, carries it with her as she searches for answers.
Eater and Vitium. Two names. YMIR. A third name. All of them are connected. All of them make her memories swim.
When the small child hatches from the egg and latches onto her without knowing any better, Mirei cries for the first time since she was a toddler, and things still hurt her.
(To this day, she cannot recall the event that made her this way. There likely wasn't any one in particular.)
She tracks the child's signature. She goes into the files, the ones that said who was chosen, the ones that say who everyone in the world may meet one day.
She points at one for the small child to see. "Aki?"
The excitable cooing and tighter grip on her neck says yes, with fervor.
Mirei thinks she's smiling. She cannot be sure.
When she sees the location, her heart sinks. Her parents always warned her about Earth: that world was toxic for her. Her system rebels against being there. It is almost like it knows the end before she does.
Mirei swallows and sets to work.
There are no cats to distract her, to want her to do other things, to find adventures where they may really not have been any. There is no best friend greedily trying to take hold of everything she has. There is no family and friends to dissuade her, no one to tell her their fears about the mother and father they loved more than she did. Instead all Mirei has is herself and her weapons and this tiny Digimon-child who is too eager to be whole again that all of this apathy goes simply unnoticed.
Simply put, she finds the spell for the human world in under twenty years. Shorter than she had expected, all things considered.
Mirei still looks like a child. Unlike before, where it was her own conscious desire to stay a child, to stay safe in her parents' laps, this is simply due to a lack of consideration of the whole thing. The purpose, the goal, is the only relevant thing in her mind now, no matter how much her heart tries to do otherwise.
She picks up Rhythm and puts her on her back, like a big sister would, and casts the spell. It wraps around them, striking at the program that wants to break every byte of data into non-existence. They land in a sidestreet, in the middle of the night. Rhythm squirms. She smells him. Mirei feels a heavy hand clutching her lungs for the tiniest of instants, and then it is gone. She has the child point the way.
'Aki' is at a college apartment, slightly beat-up, but well-structured. She speaks politely to the landlady, who looks at her so strangely. Her reasoning is likely solid, but Mirei wouldn't know where to begin in deciphering it, let alone how to ask. On her back, Rhythm vibrates again. She sets the girl down and watches her bound up the stairs by jumping with both feet, watches with a sensation like her heart is trying to choke her. She doesn't know why, and simply follows the child.
Though she is short, she is able to reach the knocker. It nearly crumbles in her hand and she takes care with using it. There is nothing else she can do. It might cost him if it breaks.
The door opens after almost five minutes. The child in the photograph, lanky and with baggy clothes, is much the same as the person in front of her. He is taller, for certain, and his glasses have changed, but he is much the same. It is enough for Rhythm, who is already reaching out her arms, trying to form words.
"Kurata Akihiko-san?" Mirei i says the words, polite as she was told to do.
The cross expression at being woken does not fade. "Yes?"
Mirei does not register the tone, merely picks up Rhythm for him to see. "Did you lose her?"
At the last second, her tongue says 'her' instead of 'this' and the tension uncoils in her stomach. Rhythm squeals love.
"Aki!" she says, reaching out het small arms. "Aki!"
The expression, so ready for a biting remark, melts into something warm. "N-Nat-chan…?"
"Aki!" Rhythm doesn't recognize the name difference or doesn't care. Akihiko takes her from Mirei with trembling hands into a hug that seems like it will be drowned in tears. Mirei dips her head and turns to go back down the stairs.
She is at the landing before Rhythm screams. "Mii! Mii!"
She pauses to look up. "I can't stay," she says.
Her human clutches at her still and Mirei thinks she is imagining the tears on her own cheeks. "Why not?" he says, and she can see the Chosen Child in his face. "Why can't you?"
Because this world is killing me right now. That is the simplest answer. That is the most realistic answer. "This was all I wanted to do," she says instead, and walks away from the sound of sobbing again. She pretends that she isn't crying herself. The entire idea sounds ludicrous. She has never wanted anything. A demon desires until it is collared and she has always been collared. Still, she wants what they have.
She cannot have it.
"Eater. YMIR. Vitium."
She chants these words and goes home. The Vitium screams her name and she draws her blade. It warps. The world warps. Mirei realizes, with a delayed sort of embarrassment, that she cannot do this by herself, like she has everything else.
She calls to others and when two boys and a girl arrive in the Digital World, and a third boy chases after the trail she leaves him, they meet a tiny child with purple hair and no expression on her face.
"I need your help," she says to them, like that is enough. She walks away from their protests. She knows they will follow. Her memories say so.
She doesn't know if she wants them to follow.
A/N: Well. This was fun. Not sure how to clarify it but it's interesting to me. I love all of the gameverse too much. Cyber Sleuth comes out tomorrow so I wanted to get some more stuff out just before then. That said, enjoy!
Challenges: Diversity writing (Digimon) E3. A oneshot with no dividers, Advent Calendar 2016 day 8. write about less popular characters, and gameverse boot camp prompt 'omniscient'.