A/N: Another installment of the Base series! Written for the Building Blocks Challenge, song prompts #1 - The Pretender (Foo Fighters), The Prompts in Steps Challenge, 3.3 - crimson, The Becoming the Tamer King Challenge, Steamy Jungle Task - write a side-story/spin-off to any of your series, and The Diversity Writing Challenge, c30 - write a fic that explores guilt.
And am I supposed to warn for underage drinking? Uhh... consider yourselves warned. XD
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Base Series
A Toast to Two Rivals
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The both of them are drenched in blood and, here and now, the remains of the world celebrate them.
Happy, ignorant fools. They don't even realise what they've done. What they celebrate. They don't realise the contradictions they explore, when they give praise to Chiefs old and new, gratifying the murdered and the murderers, the victims and the prepretrators, all in the same sentence.
They hold the bubbly laughter in, because they know this role is just another guise of the price they play. They've made the new world, and it's their job to rule it until the ground's nice and firm and they can pass the baton off to people that are, hopefully, not as glaringly red as them.
And, hopefully, by then, the rest of the world won't be so blind either.
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Fireworks go up in the sky. Taomon and Daomon are doing them with their magic and it's such a waste. But they can afford to be indulgent now. The trouble's past.
Like the trouble will ever be past, considering what they'd brewn together.
But they keep the truth secret, Sayo and Koh. Part of both of them want to tell, but the rest of them know how fragile minds are: both human and digimon. After all, it's what made their respective chiefs go insane. It's what made the warriors and lords meant to guard their world and the gates to beyond insane. It's what made two children into murderers - and not just one-time murderers but the sort who'd had to kill again and again and again, until they stopped feeling the blood.
At least they'd had to stop before they'd grown blind to it as well. If that was a relief, or not.
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They drink under the fireworks. No-one scolds them because they're the chiefs now, the king and the queen and there's no-one ranked higher.
'Maybe we should keep it like this,' Sayo laughs. It comes out a gargle and Phascomon growls and moves away from her, like he's uncomfortable with this side of his mistress.
Perhaps he was. He was minding the farm while his mistress transformed the world, after all. He only came out in the aftermath, and by then it was a new place, and a new girl.
He blamed Koh. Just like Koh's Gatomon blamed Sayo. But they were both there. Watching the other, perhaps. Keeping an eye on things. Or perhaps they simply didn't want to miss the next evolution. Either way, neither human paid too much attention to them.
They were too innocent. Not harderened survivors who'd lived through the blood, who'd lived through the transformation. Not Apollomon and Dianamon who were shadows just out of sight. Not Hounomon who flew high in the skies, hidden by the sun. Not Piedmon who performed tricks for the children while listening for the slightest hint of betrayal -
And that was the least frightening part, even if, in all likelihood, Piedmon will have taken someone's head off by the end of the night. And that person might be an innocent. It might turn the popular opinion against them instead.
Because, really, that's what they deserved anyway.
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The fireworks died and there's only the night sky lit with lanterns after that, and Koh opened two new bottles of sake and gave Sayo one.
She took it without thanks and swallowed a gulp. 'You should get MetalGreymon to add a few fireworks,' she laughed. 'Doesn't the sky look so dull as black?'
'It's a waste,' Koh replied, wondering if he meant the blank sky or the idea of using MetalGreymon's attacks to brightened it up. 'It should be red,' he said, a little after. Black didn't suit. It just hid things. The story would just begin again.
'It should be.' Sayo took another gulp, and Koh mimicked her. 'Maybe we ought to remind them what they escaped.' She sighed. 'We'll never do it, will we?'
'Unless we need to...probably not,' Koh agreed. 'At least we know the truth.'
'At least we know the truth,' Sayo echoed dully.
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They've emptied five bottles between them before the ceremonies wrap up and they're dragged to the stage to address the world. Sayo was half asleep. Koh could barely stand. Someone had structured the celebration really badly - or maybe they thought the alcohol would make everyone nice and fuzzy when they heard the lie from the horses' mouths.
Sayo had a grin on her face. 'Let's give them a good tale,' she said.
Koh just groaned. They'd worked out the lie. But with two heads filled with fuzz, saying them properly would be a whole other matter. 'Ophanimon, would you get over here?' he yelled.
Sayo winced. So did Gatomon. Phascomon snarled at him. But Ophanimon appeared as though she'd been there the entire time (and maybe she had, though he hadn't seen her; she was good at keeping out of sight when she needed to do so). Piedmon detatched himself from the children and came to stand beside her as well. A representative for each of them, and they sank gratefully into the official's chairs and left the tale in more capable mouths.
And he'd made the right call (or maybe they'd planned that bit as well and he'd just forgotten). Ophanimon knew the lie, and she told it well, and Piedmon had a way with children and embellishments he'd picked up since his time in the CITY before joining Sayo's team. There were lots of tears in the middle, and towards the end, where the Chiefs died hero deaths they'd been powerless to prevent, and how the royal knights had sacrificed themselves to faciliate the freeing of the gods and the defeat of the demon lords.
Never mind that the lords weren't initially demons and that they'd killed the Chiefs and the royal knights themselves. Of course, neither Ophanimon nor Piedmon mentioned that. And, up on stage where everyone would hear them if they let it slip, they didn't mention it either.
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'Let's share another bottle.' Sayo hadn't quite managed to doze off, though she hadn't picked herself up either. The crowds were starting to thin and the microphones were off. They could talk relatively freely again.
And Koh wasn't fuzzy enough either, now that the hardest part was coming up: to sleep. He poured half the bottle into an empty one and gave the other half to her.
'We should toast something,' he said, suddenly. 'Everyone who died.'
Sayo snorted. 'We should toast the moon and back, then,' she scoffed. 'Including the people we killed.'
'Then just our digimon.' Because some of those digimon were ones no-one had known about, no-one had met. And they were the ones they truly mourned. Perhaps the only ones they mourned without ever making peace with - because they simply had to make peace with the ones who they'd killed with their own hands.
'Our digimon,' Sayo repeated in, for once, a drunken somberness. She raised her bottle. 'For our digimon.'
The bottles clank so loudly they crack, but nothing leaks out.
They chug down its contents and drop them.
They break when they hit the grass on top of each other, and the Mekanorimon sweep the pieces up.
'Who's was on top?' Koh asked, as the few remaining crumbs gleamed in the light from the moon behind them.
Sayo shrugged. 'Guess it doesn't really matter.