A/N: Written for the Digimon Flash Bingo, #079 - genre: supernatural
Friends with a Ghost
For the others, the battle against the D-reaper was the one and only time seeing Alice McCoy…if they'd had that honour. Jeri hadn't. But she met Alice many times thereafter, and she couldn't understand why no-one else did.
It was a slippery topic, somehow. Went something like this:
'Have you seen Alice recently?'
'Alice? Who's that?'
'Alice McCoy. She wears black. Has blonde hair and who'd had a Dobermon partner.'
'Dobermon… Isn't that the girl who brought us the power to biomerge in the human world? I thought Dobermon died – sorry Jeri.'
And Jeri would shrug and repeat her question.
'No, I haven't seen her since. Was her name Alice? I thought she was a DigiGnome or an agent from the Harmonious Ones or something like that.'
Jeri didn't think that, because she knew Alice McCoy was real.
And then one day, when Rob McCoy, her grandfather, was visiting the Wong family, she asked him. Because surely he'd know what his granddaughter got up to. Because when she asked Alice anything…not personal but orienting – things like where she went to school – Alice would just change the subject and Jeri would forget she hadn't gotten an answer until they'd parted ways.
Rob McCoy said Alice had died years ago, before Ryo had vanished even – which, to their knowledge, was the first time the two worlds had been connected beyond creating the digimon.
Alice confirmed that sadly when Jeri asked, but Jeri didn't mind being friends with a ghost and Alice was relieved when nothing changed. It was even…comforting, somehow. Especially since Alice knew what happened in the Digital World and could tell her about the others and what they got up to. Not Dobermon though. Dobermon was gone forever. And not Leomon either.
And maybe that was another thing that made that friendship with her so comforting. Both of them had lost their partners in a way the others hadn't.