A/N: Written for the:

Interseason Big Bang
Diversity Writing Challenge, h6 – ficlet collection with ficlets 501-1000 words
Becoming the Tamer King, Training Peak task
Digimon Dawn/Dusk Remake Challenge, dusk registration task – write about a female character

The Lion Saver
1: the first Leomon

The first Leomon dies before Juri is even a Chosen Child and before she even knows digimon are real.

She watches it on television, when they air Digimon Adventure and there's no stepmother or stepbrother, but there's no mother either: there's only her and her father. She watches it on television when he's busy setting up the bar and she's taking a break from her homework to follow the series that's the hype of their class (and probably a good deal many other children as well).

She watches Leomon when it first appears on the screen, in that episode where it fights against evil on his own but is overpowered – and then saved by the light of companionship, consumed when he's left alone again and they cycle between the two of them until the evil's finally defeated and she can breathe a sigh of relief, because she's come to really like the lion digimon when he's not under that evil spell and it's really sad to see him when he is.

It's a little silly, she knows, because digimon are only products of a line of games and anime or so she thinks. But if she were to have a digimon of her own, she'd choose a Leomon, she decides. Even if the anime doesn't show them having any choice at all and the games don't give a Leomon as a starter. But that's okay. She can find Leomon eventually if she plays hard enough and it's the same with the cards. She'll find a Leomon card and then she'll build her deck around it and she buys packs and packs and packs and winds up with some treasures the boys in her class would probably drool over, but she's not that great at the game and doesn't realise it.

Though she doesn't get a Leomon for a long time, and it's not even that rare a card.

But she does get it eventually – and, as a pleasant surprise, Leomon reappears in the anime series the same week… though, granted, it's the preview for the next episode that clues her in.

As quite an awful surprise though, he dies the next episode. And it's the first time she's ever cried over a character from a television series but she really liked that Leomon.

At least there's Primary Village, the way for digimon to be reborn in a way that humans can't – and that's one of the things she likes the most about the digimon – and about that scene when Leomon shatters into sparkling bites like powder snow… And she doesn't like the scene otherwise because Leomon's dead and she cries and scenes like that aren't nice, they're not nice at all.

Leomon's not the first digimon to die on screen and she's seen death in real life so she wonders why this one affects her so much. But she cries for him anyway. She allows herself to cry for him anyway.

And then she builds her deck around the Leomon card she's finally gotten her hands on and watches the rest of Digimon Adventure, and then ZeroTwo rooting and hoping for his rebirth and return, because that's all she can do, but the latter never comes. She sees a glimpse of a Leomon in the final episode, but it's not the same one. The Leomon from File Island never comes back.

Like a human being, it dies and doesn't come back at all.