A/N: Am running a little behind on Christmas presents, but real life likes to get in the way. This one's for Tomoe! Enjoy!
The Presents Under the Tree! DFC 2017 Christmas Event!
Diversity Writing Challenge, i14 - a multichap with a prologue and an epilogue
The Valentines to White's Day Advent 2015, day 29 - white rose
in the recycle bin
prologue
The digital world is constantly modified, like any other operating system. It is full of bugs, like any other network. Things vanish into the nameless black space, like any other hard-drive. Sometimes, those things can be dragged back into being, if they're still sitting in an unemptied recycle bin.
They check, of course: they check every step of the process. Different checkers, in different places and times… and so the Old Clock Man, as he's now called, finds an oddity in data soon to be struck out of existence forever.
He remembers Quartzmon, after all, and how the entire world including the humans within were quartised. That's not quite the same as turning them into digital world data, but it's similar. Similar enough to catch this. Different enough that he can't correct it remotely.
It's a pity, because he quite likes the human he works with now, and he doesn't want these four erased from the world. It's a pity, because he can't do a whole lot from here. He's an old man, after all, made from an old digimon. He's accumulated far too many demons to swim through discarded data like that.
Which leaves his hunters, but who can do the job? The digimon run the risk of crumbling themselves, in a world where all data is shredded into scraps and not even the king of the digital world has lived long enough to maintain form and presence without that. So the humans… but what human child will go into the reprocessing factory alone?
…of course, one who has no partner to lose, but one to gain. But, he wonders, will it be too cruel to ask? There is no guarantee, after all, and he has demons aplenty to entertain. But that might be good for him, too. He is young enough to overcome them. Or human enough.
He wonders which it is, but it doesn't matter because he himself is neither of them.