Disclaimer: I don't own Digimon, and make no money from writing this.
Notes: No beta reader for this piece, because it's pretty short and I didn't want to trouble her. Any spelling and grammar mistakes are entirely my fault. If you spot any, please point them out - I'm always looking out to improve.
I'm really sorry about not writing much over this past month - it's been pretty busy! But I've started a fanfic prompt challenge, so with any luck you'll be seeing more from me soon.
It was a whistle. A small grey whistle, dangling from a thin pink string which itself hung from a little rusty hook high up on the wall.
What was a whistle doing in a toy shop? It wasn't as if it would make a good toy. There wasn't much you could do with it. Well, you could obviously blow it, and maybe it would make a decent collar for Miko if she wasn't in one of her scratching moods when they got home. But the string, if he could pull the whistle off it somehow - that could be used for all sorts of things, despite the unfortunate colour. A lasso, a dog lead, even a superhero cape if he was just allowed to get his hands on that old curtain which nobody really liked anyway...
And now he was stretching up on his tiptoes, trying to make a grab for it as silently as possible. There was something about it that had caught his eye, although he wasn't entirely sure what. And it was shiny, too. Covered in dust, and probably not even real metal, but it was still shiny.
At the counter, the conversation was continuing.
"So, Yuuko, what brings you here today?"
"Ah, well, it's Taichi's birthday next week, I just thought we'd drop by so he could choose something. We asked, of course, but he'd never give us a straight answer."
"They're a nightmare at that age, aren't they?"
"Well, he's not really a bad kid. Do you know, the other morning I woke up and he was standing there with a frying pan - trying to cook for himself, can you believe it? He hadn't even taken the egg out of its shell, and -"
"By himself? And how old is he, six?"
"Five. He's six on Thursday."
"Ha, I can remember him coming in here when he could barely walk! Doesn't time fly?"
"Oh, yes..."
Adult talk. It was rarely worth listening to, so he never did. Reaching as high as he could, his fingers barely managed to brush the edge of the mouthpiece. After several seconds of grasping at thin air, he gave up for the time being, and looked around the shop. There were a few brightly-coloured plastic stools in one corner, buried underneath a whole mountain of plush animals. What if he moved a few of them out of the way, dragged one of them over to this wall, and... nah. They'd notice. That was something he was trying to avoid.
"How's your other kid doing? Hiroko, was it?"
"Hikari, actually."
"Bit of an odd name, isn't it? I mean, no offence."
"Mmm... well, anyway, she's fine. Just at home right now. Asleep. I would have taken her along, but having to watch out for two of them..."
"No, I see where you're coming from. Susumu taking care of her, then?"
"Huh? Oh, no. No. He's at work, she's by herself."
"Is that safe? What if -"
"She's a bright little girl. Never much trouble. I'm sure she knows enough not to leave the house or do anything dangerous if she wakes up. I left a note, just in case. Sometimes I wish her brother was more like her..."
He remembered the pair of goggles hanging round his neck. They were handy things, goggles, although he mainly found himself throwing them at people. Oh, there was an idea - he could try to throw them up there, snag the string with them, and pull them down. But if he tried that, he'd still have to pull the goggles by himself. That was a stupid concept. What if, instead, he jumped up, and got his hair to catch the string, and - no, no, that was even worse. And possibly painful. He was starting to massage his scalp with one hand even thinking about it.
As a last resort, he could always ask for it as a birthday present. But the string was pink, and that made it, ugh, girly. Would he risk it, buying something like that, when for all he knew one of his friends might burst into the shop at any moment? He could just picture Sora's face... No, that was out, too. Unless -
"Taichi? What are you looking at? Ah... excuse me a moment, I think he might have found something he likes..."
They'd noticed. Never mind, then.
He turned round as his mother approached. She didn't look particularly angry at him, which made a change. And he hadn't really been doing anything wrong; it was his birthday soon, after all. Still, it didn't seem like a good idea to admit he was attempting to steal something. Instead, he stood to attention and did his best to convey, in one innocent expression, that he had done nothing suspicious in the past five minutes and certainly nothing involving a whistle that may or may not have been hanging on the wall behind him.
"You were looking at something just now, weren't you?"
"Wasn't looking at nothing," he said. A second later, he thought a word which would probably have earned him a slap if he'd said it out loud. Voices weren't as easy to disguise as faces.
His mother sighed. She straightened up, reached out above his head and unhooked the whistle. It gleamed in her hand.
"I know you were trying to get at this. Do you want me to buy it? Because if not, we're going home and you can forget about any new toys this year."
He couldn't tell from the tone of her voice whether she was completely serious or not.
"I... want..." he began to say slowly.
"Yes or no, Taichi?"
It was a gut-wrenching decision for a five-year-old to make, but he was nearly six. "Want a new football," he said.
But as they were about to leave and head on to a more suitable shop, he furtively glanced round to check nobody was watching. Then he slipped the whistle off the lower shelf, and pocketed it. There were some things you couldn't just leave behind.