"You will be your own demise…"
The darkness was suffocating. Like a living, breathing blanket that engulfed everything around him, impeding the air from reaching his lungs. It covered everything. It was endless, like the sky or the sand at the edges of the sea.
"You fight against nature itself… Your own…"
It did not allow him to move. Every effort to fight it resulted in a doubled force keeping him in place, crushing his body, snapping his bones. It drenched of fear and death, its pestilence deeply ingrained in his brain.
"… And in your arrogance, it will devour you…"
He couldn't hold for much longer. He needed to breathe, he needed to move. But as much as he struggled, it was useless, like a fly caught in the web of a spider. But it would never kill him; He knew that very well. It would just keep him where he wouldn't be heard screaming…
"You brought this upon yourself"
He woke up, frozen in place, clutching the sheets by his sides like if the room had suddenly flipped around. His emerald eyes rolled around in their orbits, trying to locate the source of an annoying buzzing that he soon found out was his own breathing, combined with his rapid-paced heart beat hammering his whole body. His skin was covered in a cold sweat.
Still half-asleep, he refused to move in his confusion for a few minutes more. It was only after the sun had raised enough to hit his face through the window that he lifted a hand to block it, and once he was sure no consequence would arise from that action, he uncovered himself and sat on the edge of the bed. His head rested heavily between his hands.
"It was a dream… a nightmare… it will never come back…" He whispered to himself. He repeated it several times, to make sure he believed it, and he had been repeating it to himself every morning of every day for the last 12 months.
"We killed him… it… It will never return…" But at what cost? That was the doubt that burned in his mind every time. After it was all over, there was so much he had to leave behind, and so many people that had to pay the price of his victory. The fallout on both worlds made it impossible to call any of them home.
The sound of the alarm clock startled him: 6:30 a.m. already. Angry at the device, he left his palm slam against the button to turn it off, and then walked out of the small, messy room and into the shower.
A few minutes later, when he was out getting dressed, he proceeded into the next part of his unusual routine: He caught a glance of his digivice, always a reminder of what had happened, of the things he'd experienced that only few could relate to, and the decisions he made that had no turning back.
When he first traveled into the Digital World, he was a troublesome kid in the body of an 18 year-old; aggressive, arrogant, and feeling entitled to whatever the strength of his fists could get him. He had no idea how or why of all people was he chosen when the disruptions started, but he could name at least four people that could've done a better job. They needed a human to stop it. Why to choose a mere street thug?
After it was done, he left the Digital World a hero, but he would never accept such a title after what he had to do. He still believed there must have been a better solution, even if he could not see it after all this time.
He sighed, pressing his hands against his eyes and letting them slide through his brown hair. He then took a good look at the small room: His clothes were everywhere, dropped on the floor or hanging off the scarce furniture. The floor was covered in a fine layer of dust, and one could not quite see through the window. The rest of the house was in a slightly less ordained state, and the desk with his laptop, digivice and alarm clock was the only place in perfect order. He made mental note to clean up everything that deep down he knew would be disregarded later.
He got dressed, and then walked to the living room next door: There was nothing he had to do this early in the morning, but sleeping provided him with no rest anymore, so for the last year he had been sleeping late and waking up early. It was tough, but compared to the nightmares, the adjustment became steadily easier.
"Speaking of things one does not get used to…" The boy took a look at the lonely sofa resting on the center of the living room, right in front of the entrance door: A large, black creature resembling an alligator of some kind snored peacefully in it. It had long, sharp claws, and with every exhalation, faint puffs of black smoke shot out of his nose. A normal person would be terrorized from the sight…
"I already put an extra bed, and you continue to sleep there like a stray dog" He groaned. The creature moved its strangely shaped ears, and then lifted its head up to glare at the human with its intense ruby eyes. The boy was not scared one bit, instead glancing at the open window to the right that led to a three stories high view of the city below "At what time did you arrive?"
"Piss off, Jinn" The creature growled, resting its head on the arm of the safe and closing its eyes "Nobody spotted me, so stop being such a hassle"
"You have such a wonderful mood in the mornings" Jinn commented, going to the small fridge plugged mindlessly by the dining table and extracting some leftovers from yesterday's dinner from it. He sat down and stared at the tuna salad, poking it around with a plastic fork. His appetite was also pretty affected by it all; most of the time he ate by inertia, the simple custom of doing so every day, and small portions at that. He looked through the open window in front of him, towards the city that he fled to; the city that he could never call home.
"Darkguilmon…" With a gloom look on his eyes bathed by the sun, Jinn called at his annoyed partner "Do you think we did the right thing?"
"Like I've said a good hundred times before: We did what we had to do. End of the story" The creature growled, not that interested in his partner's worries "The Dark Core would've done much more damage had we not traveled through the worlds. And you'd be bitching about that instead"
Jinn growled in resignation "I guess you're right… but… all that people…"
"We spared them a much worse destiny. They would be thankful" Darkguilmon replied, bored of Jinn's constant regret. Jinn sighed; Darkguilmon was a tough creature to have around. Unlike many digimon, that adopted a live-and-let-live approach to most of their business, he had grown to be a warrior and a hunter, and his sense of mercy was almost non-existent. His general attitude would annoy Jinn much more, but considering how he was first, this was an improvement.
Jinn took a while to eat what was in his plate, then went to brush his teeth and go to college later on. It was when he was stuffing forcefully the books into his bag pack. He had remembered just now that he had forgotten a report due today, when a noise alerted him. It was a strange beeping, that repeated a faint but oddly familiar melody.
Like if lightning had struck him all of sudden, Jinn turned around, looking frenetically at the desk behind him. The digivice, barely the size of a cellphone, emitted a red glow to accompany that sound. The digivice had not done something like that in one year…
It only did it when there was danger nearby.
