A/N: Written for the Digimon Flash Bingo - 705 - character: Takaishi Natsuko
Mother, Mother
She tried so hard to protect Takeru. But, somehow, she got upstaged by an orange bat with wings.
It wasn't like anyone meant for that to happen. Except whatever godly powers had been fiddling around with destiny. Why they had to drag her children in to it, she didn't know. But Takeru back then had been a tiny little boy who couldn't go anywhere without someone holding his hand –
And maybe that was her fault, for keeping him under wraps but she had to. She worked so long and she couldn't have him wandering about where no-one could keep an eye on him. He was less than four when it was the two of them together and only them. A tiny little boy who cried every night when his big brother wasn't there to play the harmonica for him.
She wondered if Yamato cried like that as well. Her husband – ex-husband – said he didn't. Said he was sullen and silent instead. But there wasn't much she could do, over a phone. She tried. Just like her ex-husband and other son tried to stop Takeru's tears. Didn't work too well. It was Natsuko and Takeru, and Hiroaki and Yamato now.
So she had to protect Takeru who cried when no-one played the harmonica for him and cried when he fell down.
But suddenly he wasn't crying at all that anymore. And he was arguing with her. Being brave, braver then her. And gliding away into the ocean on a white creature with a boy she'd never met before – a boy Takeru couldn't have known for more than a week because that's when he'd gone away to camp and come back a changed boy.
And there was an orange bat in his arms. An orange bat that, in the stories that came later, looked out for him and fought for him and protected him. Even fought down that vampire creature that had had almost the entire populace of Odaiba under its spell. She couldn't protect him like that – and there were so many other parents weeping about that same woe.
But her son had a guardian in that orange winged bat and it, he, protected him.
At least for that consequence, she couldn't mind being upstaged.