There But For You Go I
Fandom: Digimon Adventure/02/tri
Genre: Drama
Summary: A character study of Maki Himekawa at various points in her life, inspired by and belatedly written for Makinishi Week 2018 on Tumblr.
Rating: K+
Warnings: None.
Chapter One (Prompt: When They First Met)
August 23, 1991.
It's bad enough that Maki is on this field trip. Tokyo Tower, big whoop. It's not as if she hasn't been here before. She wishes her school would take them someplace new and exciting, somewhere... different. Not here; hot and uninteresting and absolutely teeming with people. She weaves past chattering student groups and gawping tourists toward a less-trafficked corner of the observation deck and looks through the scuffed and dirty window. The city boils around her in an endless, shimmering cloud. A mirage. She looks down through the glass floor, the distance between her feet and the ground stretching beneath her like the gullet of some huge, ravenous animal. I wonder what would happen if it decided to swallow...
"Hey!"
"Sorry about that. Wasn't looking where I was going." The boy who ran into her is sprawled gracelessly on the floor, knocked off balance by his own momentum. His fingers card apologetically through a mop of unruly hair. His expression deferential but barely fazed, as if to say this sort of thing happens to him all the time. Maki regards him in frosty silence. How stupid do you have to be to run into someone who's standing still?
She continues to watch him as he stands, goggles (who wears goggles?) flashing in the late-morning sun. She thinks she recognizes him. He's from her school—same grade, different class—which causes her to bite back the harshness she wishes she could voice aloud, instead forcing herself to respond to his apology. "Don't worry about it," she says. Boring. Maki leaves the window and makes her way to the elevator. She remembers there's a convenience store near the base of the tower, maybe she'll get a drink in order to pass the time...
"Name's Daigo, what's yours?" The boy has followed her into the elevator, along with a handful of other kids she doesn't know. The doors slide closed behind them and suddenly she's left without an exit. He's smiling at her. His face is open and friendly, and once again she finds herself standing on the precipice between want and should. More than anything, she wants to take the plunge and tell him it's none of his business.
She opens her mouth.
It's bad enough that Maki is stuck here. Stuck in this elevator, in this city, in this world, in this life. It's bad enough she always feels like something's missing, like some grand adventure is waiting for her, just out of reach. And then—
And then, the elevator gives a sickening lurch. Everything goes dark, right before the buttons on the console start to flash and five pillars of light crash down on their heads like a wave. Maki feels her feet leave the floor and looks up just in time to see the gigantic hole that seems to have ripped the sky and ceiling apart, pulling her into its center alongside this boy and three complete strangers. And even though she's terrified, somehow there's still a small part of her brain that's able to think, as the world upends itself and pitches them headfirst into the unknown.
Finally!
