Disclaimer: No property of Digimon Adventure 02 belongs to me. All characters and related titles are copyrighted to TOEI ANIMATION Co., Ltd.


Author's note: I haven't done Digimon fanfiction in... positively a long time (years), if ever, thus, I present you this piece I've been thinking of since drawing Hikari fanart.

There also will be spoilers for those who haven't followed the series to where I am at now, so read at your own risk!


Monochrome Ocean
Prologue


Since I was a child back in the 5th grade, the Ocean of Darkness has been one of my struggles up until this day. Some call it schizophrenia, some treat it as an epidemic, but either way, it's been haunting me for quite some time now. It's never been able to go away completely. It strikes me when I least expect it, and the ghostly pleads for help still linger in eternal echoes in my psyche.

The ocean is real, and most certainly not part of my imagination. I've actually been to this actual location as many times as I have seen it in my vision. I've received a plethora of headaches from being forced to shift into its dimension. Whenever I fully recover before disappearing into the ocean completely, my clothes were either wet or dusted with sand. All the scars I've received from battle in the beach have stayed. A select couple of allies have been there with me, witnessing the reality of this tragic terror: Tailmon has fought two gruesome battles in the area. Takeru-kun has flown in agile streaks through its air. Ichijouji-kun has touched its poisonous waters. Miyako-san has fallen into its sands.

No one knows about this besides my friends, mainly the allies I've already mentioned. Onii-chan and my other friends appear to be aware of it and often ask me if I'm fine, which I answered yes to. After what I've been through, I was convinced that it was over. I had hoped that the ocean would no longer remain in my nightmares. I thought it would leave me alone since I declined the Dagomon's request to help reproduce an army, since Miyako-san convinced me that my light can guide my way out, since Ichijouji-kun sent Demon back into the dimension of horror. It's over, I whispered over and over to myself.

It's still there.

I see it in my dreams every night, from the moment my eyelids dim my view to my waking moments. According to Koushirou-san, scientifically, my dreams occur when I fall past the five stages of sleep and approach REM sleep (rapid eye movement sleep). REM sleep is the process of revisiting the same five stages and is said to be much more hard to wake up from. It is associated with tense muscles and vivid dreams.

However, I know it's anything but a dream. It's all too real, and the connections bridging from light to darkness remains strong. When I feel myself falling into REM sleep (supposedly, that is), I feel myself waking up, collapsed in the icy sand of a distant shore, slow rhythms of waves beating back and forth in an erratic pattern. Strange, I would first think. Whenever I go to the beach for a trip or so, it's never been this cold. Then, when I open my eyes, I would discover that I was — there, in that place considerably equal to hell. In front of my vision lay the monochrome ocean, a bitter, lonely place for those who punish and those who would be punished.

The skies were cold and saturated. There was no sunlight when it was seemingly daytime, between soft dawn and departing dusk. Fog breathed in wisps across the strip of dark, opaque water (described as the transfer of vapor pressure, as some scientists would put it). It was hard to see anything but the white vapor swirling around and around, and you couldn't even see where you were going. You were a lost puppy in a place like this, with no place to go and no idea where to start. The lighthouse in the distance couldn't guide you and meerly stood over the cliff, mocking you with misleading light.

If worse comes to worse, the monsters would strike. They're not even Digimon (considering this was a dimension separate from the Digital World), but figments of darkness warped into the shapes of friendly, everyday Digimon. If I may recall, there appears to be a war, a rebellion, an issue about fighting this "Lord", which was why I was summoned by the Dagomon in the beginning of 5th grade. The pain and suffering hasn't ended yet for those monsters. Kind and justly as they may look, you can never be sure if you can trust them or not. They might force you to acquiesce to a greater command that you haven't agreed to when you've only agreed to one condition (referred as the foot-in-the-door phenomenon, as I had came upon in a book one day). They may turn their backs on you and leave you for the dead.

The worst part is you cannot escape from this nightmare. Once you're tainted by it, once the Dagomon choose you, you're haunted. You're definitely haunted forever. There was no way in nor any way out of this monochrome ocean.