A/N: Warning for death, murder, implied cannibalism, blind character, dystopia, etc.
i.
She's born small, raised it, called to be the frightened bunny who knows the tricks.
She's born when the bombs are going down, when the city, her city, is collapsing, when the time war is lost and the leftovers are hungry. All Sayo knows is war.
Light and darkness have always been at war, apparently.
gaia gave them up long dead and this is what happens when the strong turn their backs on the weak, they wage war after war and nobody bothers to think of the consequences until there's a book to write.
Sayo quickly learns how to steal, to slit throats by not moving. She learns her innocence has never had meaning to anyone, except the parents who mourn it. But she loves them still. Is that innocence too?
She keeps her hair short. After the first hand grabbed pretty purple strands and almost caught her she won't risk it again.
The light is oppressive. They take her eyes and take the things the men call important but other than the pain she doesn't care one whit. She gets it back in halves but not wholes.
She's small and young and even when she's old she'll look that way but for her eyes. Even half-blind, she makes them pay.
her digisoul corrodes like the remnants of radiation.
ii.
She's a toddler, still a little chubby because her body hasn't caught up with the times.
The sky is always gray and she's usually pale and skin-chilled. She'll have so many tiny illnesses that leave their marks before she's ten, and more scars than the average cutting board but since she can barely see, she doesn't care. Feeling is enough.
Feeling tells her when it's her mother's hand adjusting the knife or her father stripping the data of another digimon's core to power their home in the basement. Feeling is the warmth of a resewn blanket.
there are no farms for poor children or extravagant computers, just the leftover pieces from dead tamers in a flimsy laptop.
She's tapping at it behind a wall because that's where the news comes from, her flimsy touch screen and smudged hands when she feels his shadow, the chill from his data. The knife flies and it's caught because he's expected it.
-do you want to leave?-
Leave and go where?
Leave and leave her parent skeletons to die because she is their reason for staying. Leave for a rich town her body cannot handle.
-you belong on earth, you belong home-
No I don't.
Earth is not home, Earth abandoned her.
-you're wrong.-
She is still young and not good at being wrong, so she leaves.
vi.
Dorothy grips hard constantly. Her nails are sharper than her doe eyes and people see the latter first, them and the way her body contours in the dim light because they're stupid.
They're stupid but Sayo isn't, not after years of memorizing how much steps weigh and how to tell when someone has a gun in their jacket and the timing for when a Digimon husk realizes. So she takes Dorothy's hand and kisses it before arcing her fingers up and sashaying into view.
as a child, she'd hated boys and their wiles because those got Newton killed for his lack of glasses and Gutts was left on the floor, sobbing red, with Ponch and Barone kissing him goodnight. now she knows better and loves everyone and hates everything.
The male's skin smokes when it touches her and Sayo jabs her knee into his stomach, twists when she feels him buckle.
-another one- Dorothy says, shaking her head. -Ponch will be mad.-
-There's plenty for him,- Sayo says before she snatches the man's wallet. There's probably nothing good in there, but she won't know until she checks.
The Chrono Data are dying, the city is living. Somehow.
The skin of its teeth is thinner than ever.
ix.
There's another explosion. Koh grips her wrist gently. He's trying not to run in, to save his Chief, his father, his everything.
She understands, at least a little. Her parents are long gone, she cut their throats herself when the mania started.
-you should have gone.-
The others had. What was left of the Light Fang and the Night Claw had left with the last ship to Earth. City was doomed, the Union had said. Let it die with the Chrono Core.
Sayo simply can't.
-and leave you to angst.-
He snorts and it's almost a sob near her ear. It says everything. The ground shakes, trembling with the force of a fallen angel and a broken knight. If there is anything left of Ofanimon, it's being burned away with her own lance, Another crack of armor, the sound of bones cracking a jaw and cracking themselves. Sayo can't cover her ears. She can't even watch to know who is winning.
Glare is screaming. It's a warped sound, like the sirens of old, and Julia's snarls are just as ferocious, clear over the howling winds.
Koh pulls her down. The air burns and burns. ChaosDukemon is gone. In its place is a hollow eyed dragon.
It is starving.
Ofanimon laughs. The Chrono Core laughs.
iii.
The Chrono Virus spread fast in the years since the fall of the YMIR project. The researchers had had to stop, abruptly, and erase it all, erase it before anyone could know.
What no one told them is the Cloud got rid of nothing. What people forget is that everything new goes into the cloud now.
And sometimes extra can 'rain' down.
That happens in the years before Sayo's generation, before they are born.
If it had just happened a little later, they would have been Tamers, bred to crush it.
Sayo wonders, while stitching up a wound with thread and no light to pretend to see with, if that would have been a happier time.
As it is, she doesn't think on it too much.
She has a gang to take her in, to let her listen to the beat of the water droplets. That's enough. It will be. It must be.
The egg hidden beneath a pile of dirty rags says otherwise.
v.
Julia was once supposed to be an incredible Tamer, head of her directive. Now, she's just a gang leader, a mother bear.
She's the one who finds Sayo with the matches in hand, the unfallen tears and the ruin of her apartment building collapsing while she stands there.
-come,- she had said, and Sayo had.
She had met people – not children, they lost the title of children plenty fast here- all in a warehouse. She knows the sounds of fighting, recognizes the smell of data. In the torn pieces of her sweater, the little Digimon squirms out to see.
Then someone places their hand over hers. Dorothy, her hunter of the Wizard of Oz, is standing there with warm fingers and not cold.
-finally,- she says. -was beginning to think we'd have to drag you home.-
Sayo laughs. The gesture hurts, but she laughs until she cries.
nulla.
They are born with a cacophony of shrieks. In the bowels of the directory, the children cry and shift as they become accustomed to this new world. They search for their host. They search, and they search.
But Chronomon, the true king, will not wake without a heart.
They ought to have searched for the person who could give him one.
But hearts are finite. Their lives are meant to be infinite.
They are many, they are one.
Yet some slip away. One of them is named Sayo. Another is named Koh.
iv.
Sayo doesn't know how she finds the eggs.
They're the brightest light in her broken vision. They are never in plain sight, usually rolled under dumpsters, in the river, beneath floorboards for broken buildings.
The most special is under her bed.
It's so tiny, warm like the pocket warmers of rice her mother had made her during her first winter of hunting for cores, warm like the rare cooked meals she has these days. She can't help but hold it to her chest.
She thinks it chirps, like the baby birds in audio dramas. The city doesn't have much for real animals.
The imports will soon stop too.
She doesn't know what will happen after that.
vii.
-slow.-
Sayo seriously wants to deck Koh hard enough to kill him.
Unfortunately, Julia says he needs to live. He's the only light child with enough life to survive the final battle if he sees it, whatever that final battle actually is. The rest have been crippled, killed, or worse.
The Chrono Virus has eaten them, soul first.
His friends no longer have natural smiles and easy steps. Instead they're stiff with cold eyes and derision in their mouths. They are always hungry.
There aren't enough Real Beings left alive for them. So they eat each other.
Sayo has never seen it, but Dorothy tells her it's quite disgusting.
She takes her word for it.
Hence, Koh is a very grumpy gills, who is never satisfied with her efforts until she's knocked him unconscious and kicked him into the wall with the sharp pointy objects. The most she gets from him is an approving grunt.
Elitist.
Yet she's the one he takes with him when Julia forces a buddy system. She's the one who can hear the heavy grunts of dying monsters for him to scan and welcome to his forces, who can smell the change of data to know when the ticking clock has reached zero. She's the one who stays when he wants to go.
Somehow, she has become his friend.
She doesn't know why he's that stupid, or why she is either.
viii.
She's certain about one thing with Julia's plan: it's terrible.
Julia is tough. No one here can say that she isn't. At least one of every person's overnights in the healing pod (she didn't even know those existed until she was sixteen!) comes from her.
But taking on Glare, the king of the Chrono Data, by herself, is nigh on suicidal.
Of course, after all of this mess, she likely is suicidal. If they weren't here, Sayo thinks she would have hung herself just high enough for the Chrono to never reach her.
Regardless, they all say yes.
City is doomed. All the survivors, children, adults, born here, brought here, all know that. They need to get off, to let the beauty fall.
Sayo knows that's why Julia's plan is terrible. Win or lose, she's not getting off this land.
Win or lose, city is going to be destroyed and the Chrono Data with it.
She keeps her lucky egg in her pocket. It throbs. It had stopped chirping so long ago.
They have a week to say goodbye.
Almost everyone does.
They stay.
Whether they know it or not, they are a part of this.
x.
-don't let go!-
Koh is screaming at her, howling her name. She wishes she could see so she could know where to slap him so he would stop. There is blood in her mouth, dripping from her forehead. Is it debris? Is it the Chrono Core?
No, it's a lance. The side of Ofanimon's lance has cut her open. Blood drips with the smell of data and she wonders for the first time if there's a reason she's survived longer than her parents did.
Then it hurts. It just hurts. She reaches blindly for the blade and tugs on it, trying to hold it like a baby with a rattle.
Her Digimon are in capsules, ready to release, ready to fight, but she can't. She can't even try. She is dying. She feels it.
The egg in her pocket slips out, and it is so warm again, warm like the blood on her cheek, warm like the sun and fires.
Ofanimon draws back, howling pain. There are words in her pain, words and betrayal and something lost.
-chronomon- The words become a single one and Sayo can feel betrayal and love in those few syllables.
The light is almost burning now. As it burns, Sayo wonders if she's dying. The egg glows bright, so bright.
That's when the first missile hits.
Koh howls.
terminus.
for a moment, they both are dead as a doornail. dead and with no hearts and somehow in pain. something is leaving them forever. there is no ground, no air, just an eternal sense of mid-air and maybe falling someday. then they are free and touching real grass for the first time in their short lives.
Sayo hears the swing of a tiny sword, her Hyokomon dancing around Koh, dancing past the wind of his strikes.
They are alive.
Julia coaxes a broken Glare to drink, makes him turn away from the egg that refuses to hatch.
Sayo thinks she could hatch it, but Julia never lets her close. She doesn't let either of them close.
Sayo can't understand why. She doesn't think on it too hard.
The feel of grass is cool, a good kind of cool, on her finger, rough like sandpaper and fragile and she doesn't really know what to do with it. It clears the air and tickles her skin.
The Digital World is not Earth. She doesn't know how to get to Earth. If it's anything like her city, she doesn't want to go there now.
When they fell, they died. She had felt it deep, deep in. And they were all here now, together.
If that is not wonderful, she doesn't know what is.
A/N: Well, that was a trip. Lemme see if I can explain it, if it wasn't clear. The Chrono Core acted earlier than it does in the canon, and quickly. it infected Glare directly when he was younger as well as many of the Light Fang and Night Claw and citizens of CITY. It was subtle. By the time people became aware of it, the Chrono Data had already spread like a virus. Hope that helps makes sense of a few things.
Challenges: AU Devils of Doom. 208. facing an apocalypse!AU, AU Diversity Boot Camp prompt "psychotic", jigsaw puzzle prompt 'week', diversity writing challenge E28, what if challenge, and Valentine's/White Day Advent day 28. write from a female character's perspective.
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