A/N: Hihi! Remi and Aiko here with more wild theories! This here is part of our Entropy verse, which is a mess of digimon, magic and radiation science in the Savers/Story universe. Which of course means we can use Kurata! So here is Kurata's little fill-in-the-gap tale while we work on what the main fics will be. (And we rolled a dice and landed on this series for what to update next, so...)

Yup, enjoy!

Written for the

Diversity Writing Challenge, h9 - a multichap with exactly five chapters
Digimon Dawn Remake Challenge, 1b.1 - write about a character running late
New Year's Mini-Advent 2016, day 10 - write about a desperate decision having unexpected consequences. (Halloween 2015)

down for the scraps
Chapter 1

When you were floating in an endless expanse of blackness, you had a lot of time to think. Kurata having a lot of time to think was usually a bad thing all things considered. It was how he had thought of the Gizmon, when he hadn't had the finances or societal guts for therapy. Also that thinly veiled implication that he couldn't tell anyone about his experiences anyway. But, well, what could he say? He was a coward. The Daimon men had that truth, if nothing else.

Bastards, the pair of them. If only the rest of the world knew. Daimon Suguru wasn't a slave driver, true, but he was a pile of self-serving sleaze. After all, he had been willing to let his assistant die rather than admit a gun in self-defense was perfectly sensible for the situation. Honestly, if they had been that concerned he shouldn't have been given one in the first place.

Even thinking of that and its indignity grew wearisome after a while, so Kurata reflected on other things. Heck, now he could admit without them there, his response to Digimon had not been the best, all things considered. Though how was he supposed to respond to a giant firecat, really? Someone could have helped. He certainly could not have helped. None of them had wanted him to.

… Maybe the Gizmon had been a bit far. But DATS was willy-nilly going around and killing the Digimon anyway! They had no proof the eggs were actually fine after being resent through the Dive program. He had told Satsuma that, but the man hadn't listened… none of them had.

He was just a coward… after all. His opinion was worthless without his mentor's approval. And so was he.

Kurata was relatively certain that, even after dying, that would rankle him.

And when the blackness opened up like an eye, Kurata was pretty sure that death was about to happen anyhow.

He was very grateful that unconsciousness claimed him soon after that. Falling that far was going to be nasty, and he'd rather be out for the trip if it was going to end in a reenactment of Humpty Dumpty. And who'd his army even be? No-one had been on his side at the end of the day. DATS had fought against him from the get-go. Touma had betrayed him and lost him the Norstein family's backing too… As if morals shouldn't take a backseat when nobody could think of anything else to give that girl some semblance of a life back!

Maybe he'd find a way like he promised. Or maybe his reluctance to toe that line would come back and bite.

Like his creations had come back to bite him. Those space oscillators - well, he'd been pretty much throwing a tantrum when Belphemon swallowed them whole but he'd been out of options. If even a Demon Lord couldn't cut those pesky idealists down to size, what could he use? He hadn't meant to rip apart the space-time fabric, though. That was only going to make the situation worse.

Ten years ago, humans vanished into the Digital World. What would happen now, with the sky torn asunder? Him falling through is one thing - a touch of poetic justice, some might say - but there were six-billion other humans who were also fair game.

The mass hysteria would teach them. It would also make a mess of their worlds - and the resulting chaos wasn't, he thought, somewhere he could peacefully live in.

Probably a good thing humans weren't durable enough to survive a fall from one world into another.

Except they somehow were, because pain was starting to creep in. Well, at least he wasn't dead.

Eventually, it hurt to keep his eyes closed, so he opened them. On the upside, he was down. On the downside, he was in great pain and that was terrible. He also had no idea where he was. That was fair, he supposed. It hurt too much to consider thinking about anyway.

When he could concentrate however, he saw the face of a young man, blond hair on Japanese features. He was tired. He looked to be about fourteen at best, but his eyes were much older. It was terrible to look at. It was almost worth pity. None of those DATS children had looked like that. They were all full of hope and that tripe.

Kurata coughed, having forgotten the taste of water. The young man jumped and limped away at the sound of it, almost too quickly. Good. He drove away strangers too.

At least this one returned, with an old man who reminded him very heavily of Yushima, albeit in a suit akin to haz-mat. That was just delightful.

"A survivor," the man said thoughtfully. "Well, well. Who do we have here? A relative of yours, eh Kain?"

"I guess." The boy sounded somewhere between sullen and tired. "I was a little thing, Prof. Don't got much memory."

"Most don't, boy. By the way, your suit?"

The boy let out a grunt. "Doc said it wasn't worth fretting over for me."

"We-ell." The man laughed. "If you sprout wings, that's on you."

Kurata could only dimly follow this. He couldn't even spring his voice to confirm it. He knew that name. He knew that voice. His nephew. His nephew was alive.

That almost made these ten years of hell worth it. Though he doubted his late sister and her husband would have agreed.

What the Noguchis had been thinking when they chose to help the world that had taken their son away was beyond him.

In any case, he'd been lost in his head too long. Silent too long. His two companions - both somewhat familiar, if only because one shared the same sort of nature as another man and the other had grown almost beyond recognition - frowned at him.

"Kain,' he voiced, finally. "Kain Nakane?"

Kain folded his arms. "Aren't you supposed to have all your nice neat memories?"

Not-Yushima patted him in the shoulder. "Well, you've grown up quite a bit, you know. Not a little tyke chewing on my wires anymore."

"Yeah, we probably got copper-poisoned while we were at it," the boy groaned. "Think I can get some demerits off by arguing that?"

Not-Yushima's expression suddenly turned severe. 'You're lucky you weren't expelled from the Union. You'll be assisting with the rehabilitation and learning some good life lessons while you're at it.'

"Yeah, yeah," Kain sighed. "Never said I wouldn't. 'Sides, where'd I go?"

They'd almost forgotten about him. Kurata sighed internally. That was the kind of existence he had.

Not-Yushima's eyes had snapped to him again at the very thought. "Apologies. So you know our little miscreant?"

The way the man said the words was putting a gross understatement on the situation, he could already tell. This was a blood thing, Kurata was relatively certain: an overzealous response to problems. "I do," he said, refusing to rise to the bait of and why haven't you stopped him?

Because he was causing the same amount of trouble, obviously. He didn't say so, as that would likely get him into worse graces.

Not-Yushima stood back on his cane, no pun intended. "Fascinating. Any ideas how he got down to us?"

"Probably the same reason he's here now." Kurata looked his nephew right in the eye. "Touching something he knew better than to touch."

The young man glared at him. Kurata only raised an eyebrow. Honestly, he had seen more terrifying. Like a Gizamon lunging for his throat.

"And how did you wind up here?" Not-Yushima asked.

Perhaps in more innocent circumstances, he might have sprouted a sheepish look and said something about Kurata family traits - because, really, their hair and dramatic solutions to actually-quite-important problems were both classics. Though the snippets of what he'd caught suggested they'd both gone to epic proportions this time.

He gave the summarised version. The unbiased summarised version, because no doubt the world he'd left behind would be more than happy to paint him the villain and throw him under the proverbial bus.

Granted, he'd thrown Noguchi Ikuto under that bus, but reason dictated a single child's life was more than worth the rest of the human race. But would you have done that to Kain? his consciousness asked.

Maybe? Kain had been missing for ten years, and he'd been a tiny little brat before he'd vanished. Kain, who'd been his sister's entire life. Kain who DATS were more than happy to forget about, after Noguchi Ikuto vanished soon after, and then Daimon Suguru. Kain, who he hadn't had a chance to be much of an uncle to before he'd vanished, who barely even looked like his dead-from-grief sister (except the hair, which had apparently won out over the tamer Nakane genes), who still somehow managed to recognise him (was it the hair?), and who wasn't dressed in a haz-mat like suit like the other guy because some doctor thought it was unnecessary.

Particles of dust brushed from the hands of the world, huh.

"We-ell," said not-Yushima. "Guess we should strip you and suit you up too. This here's a hazard zone after the Chrono Reactor exploded, and there's a hell of a lot of work to be done." Almost as an afterthought, he added: "We also need to do something about the exposure we've all already had, but need to make sure everybody survives the here and now now first."

'Yeah, and that worked just great last time,' Kain muttered.

Kurata was tempted to scold him, but honestly, what good would he do? He'd be a hypocrite if he tried. As if he wasn't enough bad things by the sounds of things. "Would you like to explain this… Chrono Reactor?" He tasted the words in his mouth. "As a fellow scientist, it sounds fascinating to learn about, especially if it's poisonous."

"It is only poisonous because of how it was initially activated," Not-Yushima replied in a breezy voice. "But it's too late now, it's changed half the subtleties of the nearest ecosystems… not to mention what it's done to the eggs."

"I beg your pardon?"

Not-Yushima almost smiled. "Normally humans can gather data and form eggs themselves. However with this radiation, that's a mite more difficult. I believe it mixed with the data of something else,leaving natural eggs simply not forming. We've had quite a few injuries in these past few days." He pretended to look gently saddened, and it was such a Yushima-like gesture. "The death toll is starting to creep."

Kurata couldn't explain the lump in his throat, but he was suddenly very aware of it.

"I see." Because that was about as truthful as he could be at the moment. In a way, this all just proved him right. The digimon were trouble - but maybe humans weren't that much better. 'Right. What's the plan?"