"Stargazing"
Fandom: Digimon Adventure
Genre: General/Friendship
Summary: Even if the stars in the sky don't make an ounce of sense, they still have meaning. At least, as far as Joe and Gomamon are concerned. Friendship, oneshot.
Rating: G
Warnings: Dub names!
Author's note: Joe and Gomamon are probably my favorite human-digimon pair in the series. Their banter is such an adorable mix of honesty and sarcasm, and they always seem to play really well off of each other. This conversation between them popped into my head recently, and for the most part wrote itself. It takes place after the events with the Bakemon (episode 11) but before Joe and Sora rejoin the other DigiDestined in Primary Village (episode 13). I imagine they landed on another small broken-off section of File Island in order to rest up for the remainder of their journey back to Infinity Mountain.
"Joe! Jooooe! Hey, are you all right?"
Joe turned abruptly, waving at his digimon with one hand and gesturing for him to keep quiet with the other. "Gomamon, I'm fine, but keep it down, will ya? You don't want to wake the others." His eyes darted past the seal-like creature that was now crawling up the hill to where he was sitting and found the forms of their other two travelling companions. Sora and Biyomon were curled up together at the foot of the hill next to the remains of a small fire. Joe watched carefully for a sign that either of them had been disturbed by the sudden outburst, but they remained as they were, sleeping peacefully under the open sky. He breathed a small sigh of relief.
Meanwhile, Gomamon had finished his climb, coming to rest on the soft, mossy grass at Joe's side. "Whoops! Sorry. But we were on watch, and I think I dozed off, and then the next thing I knew you were nowhere in sight. I was..."
"You were what?" Joe asked, smiling. "Worried about me?"
"Huh? No way. I just wanted to know where you were, that's all." The digimon did his best to sound nonchalant, but Joe couldn't help notice relief spreading across his partner's face, the crease disappearing from between his eyebrows.
"So anyway," Gomamon continued after a few moments' silence. "What'cha doing up here? Admiring the view?"
Joe looked out from their perch on the hill, a pensive look on his face. From here, it did feel as if he could see the entirety of this strange new world: the sea, the sky, the dozens of the fragments of land that had once been File Island. "Hmm? Oh, nothing, much. I guess I'm just trying to figure out exactly how I ended up here."
"Well, that's easy. If you're anything like me, you walked."
Joe rolled his eyes at the digimon's joke. "Oh, har, har. No, I mean here, as in the Digital World. Why the seven of us were chosen to come here, who chose us, what exactly we need to accomplish. It's just so hard to see a reason for it all."
"Does everything have to have a reason?" Gomamon asked with a good-natured shrug. "I mean, if you hadn't come to the Digital World, we wouldn't even have met."
Joe looked down at his partner. "I know. And that is a good enough reason. Although," he added with a smile, "ask me again when you're in one of your stubborn moods and I might change my mind. But it's just... you see the stars?"
Gomamon raised his head to look up at the indigo sky. "What about them?"
"Well, in our world, the stars make patterns in the sky. We call them constellations."
"Con-stellations?" Gomamon raised a skeptical eyebrow. "What do they look like?"
"Lots of different things. They're usually named after animals or heroes, and most of them have stories about how they got up there. For example, there's Orion the Hunter. You can tell where he is by the three bright stars across his middle- that's his belt. He fought a fierce and monstrous scorpion-"
"Scorpiomon?" Gomamon asked excitedly.
Joe blinked, momentarily taken aback. Now there was a digimon he hoped he never had the misfortune to meet. "Er, yeah, something like that. Anyway, both the hunter and the scorpion died in battle, so the gods made them into stars and placed them on opposite ends of the sky, where they chase each other to this day."
Gomamon's eyes widened. "Really?"
"Well, that's how the legend goes, anyway. And it doesn't stop there. If you look up at the sky at home, you can see all sorts of things- a lion, a couple of bears, a dragon- each with their own unique story."
"And those stories- they all really happened?" Gomamon asked.
Joe laughed. "No, I don't think so. The stars have been in the sky a lot longer than humans have been around to study them. I think ancient astronomers gave the stars shapes and names in order to identify them, and then the stories were made up later to explain how they got there. But constellations still give meaning to the sky- not only because of the stories, but also because they can be used as a map to help you find your way."
The blue-haired boy looked out to the horizon, the thoughtful look still in his eyes. "When you can navigate by the stars, you're never really lost. But I can't really do that here. There's no Big Dipper, no Southern Cross... I don't know where we are, and thinking about that just reminds me of how little any of us know about this place." The jagged silhouette of Infinity Mountain loomed ominously in the distance, growing slowly but steadily larger as their tiny island cut a path through the water. Joe sighed. "I don't know why Devimon wanted all of us separated. I don't know what will happen if the four of us can't find the others. And I have no idea how or even if we can get back home. Everything's just so... uncertain. I wish we had a map that pointed us in the direction of some answers."
Gomamon cast his eyes down to the grass. "I wish I knew where we could go," he said, for once both serious and earnest. "I wish I could tell you the why, or the what, or the how, but I can't, because I don't know, either. But," he said in a cheerier tone, "I do know that the stars in the Digital World have meaning, too. Maybe you're just not looking hard enough."
"Oh yeah?"
"Yeah! Like, do you see that big band of stars that goes all the way across the sky?"
Joe nodded. "Sure do. We have something like that at home. We call it the Milky Way."
Gomamon giggled. "That's a funny name. Here, we call it the Trail to Infinity. Legend has it that if you walk directly underneath it and manage to reach the end before the sun rises, a mystical city full of ancient and mysterious digimon will appear."
"Hmm," Joe said, adjusting his glasses. "Ancient and mysterious digimon, eh? Sounds like a place I'll be wanting to avoid for the foreseeable future."
Gomamon nodded sagely. "That's probably for the best. I hear it doesn't really live up to all the hype anyway. And you see those really bright ones over there?" He pointed a clawed flipper to a cluster of stars just above the horizon. "That's the Great MarineAngemon, who watches over all us water digimon. When those stars appear over a body of water, it's a sign of good luck, because it's then that MarineAngemon is closest to his element. And how about that one at the top of the sky there?"
Joe looked directly overhead and saw a large star glowing with a faintly blue light.
"That's the Star of Digivolution," Gomamon explained. "It contains the knowledge of all digimon forms, past, present, and future, and it's said that each digimon borrows power from that star when it comes time for them to digivolve."
"Wow," said Joe.
"You said it!" Gomamon chirped. "So you see, there's meaning up there if you know where to look. So maybe you being in the Digital World isn't so meaningless after all!"
"Yeah, I guess you're right," Joe admitted with a smile.
They sat in silence for a while.
"Joe?"
"Yeah?"
"What would you say if I told you I didn't really know anything about the stars, and that I just made all those stories up?"
"Honestly?" Joe leaned back to stare upward, a light breeze running playfully through his hair. "It would probably be something along the lines of, 'that's what I thought.'"
"Really?" Gomamon asked, trying to sound like he hadn't been caught off guard. "And what makes you so sure you'd say that?"
"Oh, I don't think I would actually say such a thing," Joe insisted, adopting his partner's act of cool indifference. "But if I were to say it, it would only be after I confessed that I've been watching the sky since we first got here, and I just happened to notice the stars are different every night. And not just in little ways, either- I mean completely, one-hundred-percent, totally different, almost as if they were random!"
"Oh, you uh, noticed that, did you?"
Joe nodded. "Yup. Izzy thinks the sky must reconfigure itself every night at sundown. He has a theory that some star patterns may repeat themselves by sheer coincidence, but there are so many possible variations that we're pretty much guaranteed to never see the same sky twice, no matter how long we stay here. Besides," he added with a wink, "you're my partner. After a week with you, I've learned that sometimes you, er... well, let's just say you tend to stretch the truth every once in a while, if you think it'll make me feel better."
Gomamon smiled begrudgingly. "Can't pull one over on you, huh? Still, you can't blame a 'mon for trying."
"Well, just remember you are talking to one of the most with it and together guys in the entire Digital World. I mean, just look at how I handled that leadership gig." At this, Joe laughed, unable to keep up the facade any longer. Gomamon couldn't help but join in, and the boy and digimon shared this private joke before lapsing into a comfortable silence once again.
"Joe?"
"Yeah?"
"Will you tell me more stories about the stars in your world?"
Joe smiled. "Sure, buddy. Anytime."
And the two of them continued to sit in the grass, talking quietly together while staring up at the stars that twinkled down on them from the expansive, enigmatic- but not entirely meaningless- digital sky.
~Fin.