A/N: Thank you for your reviews! As far as canon goes... I try to keep characters in character, but I'm no expert handler of the Digidestined, and I may take liberties where I see fit. And here is where the cop-out AU setting comes in handy. XD

Right. I'm not going to reveal anything concerning, uh... pairings at this point because that'll spoil the fun. BUT... I will preface this chapter with a note about T.K.'s character. I play him as highly boyish, almost carefree. If you don't like that, too bad. That's my version of Takeru for you. Nothing much happens here, just lots of background—and Kari!

Happy reading!

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Chapter Two: Reality Check

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Kari Kamiya stood before her chalkboard, felt eraser limply in hand. What she examined were the creative culminations of her kindergartners. They had been tasked with a last-minute, drawing free-for-all to burn up leftover energy, and their masterpieces were etched in an uneven line onto the grey-black slate, none of them veering too far away from the low chalk rest.

She smiled praisefully at the results. It was like a decorative border, a train of endearing squiggles, imperfect but beloved, like flowers out of season she would happily hang outside her apartment windows.

"That one looks like the troll in The Three Billy Goats Gruff... or your brother."

Kari giggled. To her credit, she remembered her manners by the time her chortles tapered out and covered her teeth with a hand, turning her gaze over her shoulder in the process.

T.K. smiled knowingly at her, his brow lifting in amusement. He leaned against her doorjamb, arms crossed, the straps of his backpack hugging his shoulders. The pose was abandoned once they met eyes, and he approached her, drumming his hands against the thighs of his jeans in an erratic, unmetered beat.

"You do know he was thinking about accompanying me home this afternoon?" she said in greeting, sliding an arm around his middle the instant he slipped one around her waist. She shifted her arm a bit, trying to make space in between the back of T.K.'s winter jacket and his heavy bookbag.

"And you told him 'No.' Because you're a big girl and you have me."

He leaned forward and traced the doodle resembling to Tai—or at least the hair he proudly carried during high school. Kari watched him, her eyes narrowing on his profile. A corner of her lip pulled upwards.

T.K. continued.

"But I'm thinking it's more the former." His blue eyes shifted, one of them winking at her. "Am I right?"

Kari's fingers pinched some of the fabric of his coat and tugged playfully, her message delivered in silent agreement. Though it had been an endeavor years in the making, she was one of few women with whom Tai allowed himself the humility of deference. The others—their mother, Sora, and Mimi—had also earned their titles of authority by way of extended association, some of them unavoidable, like in the case of their mother, though for obvious reasons.

Kari had had a harder time. It wasn't easy knocking sense into Tai when he assumed the leadership role, and she, frankly, was of a meeker personality and build. T.K., though a younger sibling himself, was graced with a near opposite experience growing up. His parents were divorced, so when he and his older brother, Matt, spent time together, it was to bond, to be present for the other, not to protect or coddle or shield, though T.K. wasn't entirely exempt from those, either. Still, with his help, she gradually learned to stick up for herself, asserting her capability to function in a world independent of her older brother, and Tai, like a jagged rock smoothed out by the pounding of waves, eventually relented.

Of course, that didn't stop him from asking the usual questions whenever he was in town.

'Everything all right with the teaching? Any parents giving you hell? Is Takaishi treating you well? Are you eating? Please don't tell me you're pregnant. Take your birth control pills every morning.'

Honestly, he was often times just as bad—if not worse—than their mother. At least she didn't ask if Kari kept to her birth control regimen.

"He'll be joining us for our dinner with Sora, Matt, and my parents," she said, slipping away from T.K. to grab her things.

Her back was turned toward him but she could still feel his face wincing, as if the expression were being drawn onto her spine.

"Don't be like that, T.K.," she chided, shutting her planner and shouldering her tote bag. She reached for him and took his hand. "You two get along fine. You like him. He likes you. No problems here, right?"

"Of course," said T.K.. He dropped the mock frown. "Tai's like my other older brother. I just hope he doesn't... uh... hold anything against me for being Best Man. I mean, juggling my last year of grad school and my brother's wedding isn't easy, and all the ideas I have for Matt's bachelor party end up related to literature."

Kari laughed.

"I'm sure Tai holds as much resentment toward you for being Best Man as Mimi holds for me being Maid of Honor—meaning none."

Her grip on his hand tightened as they walked out into the cold February air, blustery and infused with city smog. Kari herself had doubts about her fit for the honor, and she wished Mimi still lived in Tokyo. But with the chef, fashionista, and overall entrepreneur living the high-life in New York City, the title and all its responsibilities had fallen to her: Kari Kamiya, kindergarten teacher.

In an effort to keep the doubts from trickling into her brain, she picked up the thread about Matt's bachelor party.

"Name one of your ideas," she prompted, letting go of him as they reached his car.

"Moby Dick."

"No."

"Fine," he said, chuckling and ducking inside to throw his backpack into the rear seat. He sat, long legs stretching out under the steering wheel. "Amended, then. The Odyssey."

She looked at him, impressed, her face expressing the word she didn't say but which she knew was understood between them: highbrow.

"See? Good, right?" said T.K.. He twisted his body around, throwing his arm over the headrest of Kari's seat as he backed out of the lot, talking throughout. She could feel his breath on the side of her face, warm and smelling lightly of coffee. She giggled faintly behind a hand. "I could get strippers to dress up like sirens," he went on excitedly. "And they'll serenade him this time, instead of the other way around. I'll ask Tai for some ideas." He snickered to himself. "Take that, big brother."

On the car ride to her apartment, they tossed around other party ideas. Kari was less confident about her approach to Sora's pre-marriage blowout and did her best to keep up T.K.'s momentum about mermaid strippers. She jotted a mental note to phone Mimi. Otherwise, Sora's bachelorette party was in danger of being as exciting as her grandmother's knitting club.

"Le Petit Palais at seven, you said?" T.K. called out of his car window. They had reached her neighborhood, and T.K. was reaffirming the rest of their plans for the evening.

Kari stood out in the lot, facing the driver's door. She nodded and added a reminder for him to dress appropriately—to which he replied with a shake of his head.

"Why your parents love that place is beyond me," he murmured, directing his gaze out the windshield. "And this coming from the guy who's a quarter French."

With a sigh, Kari leaned into the open window. She knew precisely why her parents preferred the upscale French restaurant, and she was not a fan of their reasons, either.

"I'll try to make it as painless as possible. Now, get going. I don't want you to be late for class."

"Yes, Miss Kamiya."

She reached in, giving his laughing chin a pinch before kissing him goodbye. A minute was taken to watch him drive away before she walked into her apartment complex.

After taking the elevator up eight floors, she reached her cozy, one-bedroom home, unlocking the door and giving it a wide swing as she walked in. She had just slipped off her right shoe when she caught movement on her living room couch. With a shriek, she stumbled to the side, crashing against the door panel while her knees gave way beneath her, lowering her to the ground until she was practically hunched to the floor, curled in the fetal position.

Her trespasser raised himself off her couch and stared at her.

"What... What are you doing here?" she managed to ask between gasps. She set a hand over her racing heart, debating whether or not she'd need to fish out her inhaler from her purse. All things considered, she shouldn't have been so surprised to see her brother in her house unannounced. He had done it before.

"You gave me a key to your apartment, remember?" he answered.

"Yes, for emergencies," Kari said, attempting to get back up on her feet. Tai walked over to help her up. Stubbornly, she refused his assistance and swatted at the air separating them. Once on her feet, she calmly returned to taking off her other shoe.

"Hey," Tai said, "you have the spare key to my apartment, too. You could have thrown parties in there while I've been gone. In fact, please do. I won't have to vacuum inches of dust when I get back from trips because I can count on you to clean up after yourself."

Kari was hardly entertained by the idea. Becoming housekeeper to her brother was an absurd prospect. She had no use for Tai's hollow home, but she would pass the information along to Davis, who, at twenty-six, still had plans to unleash twenty or so stray cats into Tai's apartment.

As she put on her house slippers, she looked her brother over swiftly. He was dressed in a sleeved, blue compression shirt, fitted to every muscle of his upper body, and some athletic shorts of a similar color. A quick glance at her shoe mat and there were a pair of size eleven running shoes—expensive judging by the brand, good condition, and matching streaks of blue. The items also explained the stench of sweat radiating off him. She sniffed.

"You're off, I'm guessing," she said.

"Customary jet-lag recuperation period," he replied, stretching his arms over his head. "Good thing, too. I'm fucking tired of wearing suits."

He plopped himself back on her couch, picking up his phone in the process and flicking his index finger repeatedly over the touchscreen. Kari took a moment to look over her apartment, curious over whether Tai had rummaged through her things while she had been away—snoop that he was.

"Did you meet with Mom and Dad yet?" she asked, spotting some books out of place on a shelf. She went to put them back in their proper order.

"Yeah..." he said, speaking to his phone instead of to her. Kari noted the rudeness but bestowed the frown to her books instead of him. "I, uh... I met up with them... for lunch."

"And how'd that go?"

"Oh, you know... The usual," Tai replied. "They ask me how my work was in Vienna. I tell them. Dad nods and says, 'Hmm, interesting, Taichi. Very interesting.' Mom shakes her head and doesn't. I explain. She still doesn't get it, so we change topics. I ask how things are around here. They say it's fine. Neither of them have broken a hip... yet. Then Dad can't hold it in any longer and asks if I brought a girl home. I say no. Mom gives me a look, says I'm not getting any younger and neither are they, and she wants her grandchildren. I tell her she and dad look good for their age and have at least four more decades left in them so I have plenty of time to do that. Then, hallelujah, the check comes and we say an amen."

Kari's chuckles cut off when she picked up the next item to re-shelve. It was a book on child-rearing she had bought recently but had yet to open. The cover had been flexed out of its fresh stiffness, and the flyleaf had a message written on it that wasn't there before:

HIKARI, it read, WHAT THE HELL IS THIS DOING HERE?!

She sighed and put it back in its place anyway.

"Who's to say you haven't already sired a few illegitimate grandbabies on your escapades around the globe?" she quipped, wasting no time exacting her vengeance.

"Oh, ha, ha, Kari," Tai deadpanned. His eyes were still glued to his phone. "Who the hell says 'sire' these days? You spend way too much time with T.K."

She sniffed, loud enough for herself to hear it, but inaudible to Tai's general deafness to other people's disapproval.

"And I practice safe sex," he boasted, finally putting his phone down and looking at her glaring at him. "Unlike some people I know." He squinted, and Kari's face stiffened, repressing the blush threatening to flood her cheeks.

She sat down in an armchair beside the couch, maintaining her composure.

"What's that?" she said. "You're probably diseased. Chlamydia Kamiya."

"Uh, no." Tai sat up and fastened his eyes on her, eyebrows bent at a sharp angle. She knew what he was thinking. Did my baby sister just throw a fastball insult at me? Yes. Yes, she did. "I'm clean," he insisted. "Last check up with resident physician Joe Kido said so. And I wasn't the one with the pregnancy scare, ahem." He turned his attentions back to his phone, but he glanced once at her. "Why else do you think I tell you to remember to take your birth control pills every morning?"

Kari was tempted to rub the back of her head. A small pain started throbbing in the bounds of her cranium, but she kept her hands where they were, on her lap.

"For the last time, Tai, it was not a pregnancy scare. My period was late. That's all."

"Uh huh."

He reclined back on the couch, stretching himself out. She wanted to slap him.

"It was my first year out of university," she defended. "My first month on the job teaching and the same month I moved out and was living on my own. It was also around the time T.K. and I had just gotten back together. It was a tough month and a tough year. There was a lot of stress."

"You were also fucking twenty-two with a joke of a starting salary," Tai murmured. "You know, the ideal starting point for motherhood."

Kari crossed her arms. Like he of all people was an expert in family planning.

"I don't understand what point you're making, Tai. Women in Africa get married and have children far younger than that. You should know. You've been there."

"Well, yeah, but the culture is different," he said, capitalizing on an uncharacteristic moment of snobbery. He gesticulated to the ceiling, still speaking to the damn screen of his phone. She wanted to rip it out of his hands, but, again, she stayed put. Tai tended to wax international officer whenever a continent was introduced in conversation, and she was betting on that to take her off the hot seat.

"The success of a woman there—particularly in the indigenous tribes—" he continued, "is based off of her ability to bear sons and raise families that will help maintain farmland and villages. Unlike here, where her job is to find a job and independently survive the call and demand of metropolis before she marries and surrenders herself to the home life."

"Thanks for the anthropology lesson, Professor," she mocked.

Tai laughed—cackled, more like.

"Nice try, Kari, but don't change the subject." Finally, he sat upright and set his phone aside, facing her square on. "You had a pregnancy scare. And you were seriously scared, Kari. I remember. Didn't help that T.K. knew jack shit what he was going to do with his life and could offer little to help you financially."

Kari's lips thinned, curled in under self-inflicted pressure. She knew her brother wasn't deliberately trying to talk badly about T.K.. His insensitive remark was residual of his fraternal concern. He wanted what was best for T.K., but forgot, like many parents and guardians, that "best" was a relative term.

She sighed and scratched a fingernail over the crease of her khaki pants.

"I'm sorry my boyfriend decided to keep a scrap of his integrity and pursue a degree he loves and enjoys," she said, speaking to her lap. Her defense sounded pathetically romantic, an observation better suited for daydreaming highschoolers—not a twenty-six-year-old working woman. Still, she would utter a million banalities if it meant supporting her beau in all his doings—mistakes and errors of judgment aside. "And he did have a job at the time," she added. "He was working in a bookstore. At least he doesn't complain about what he's doing now."

"Of course he's not," scoffed Tai. "He still doesn't have a real job. He's in grad school getting his... I don't know... a Masters in English. The fuck is he going to do with a Masters in English?"

"There are a lot of things he can do with that degree. Why limit himself? And you're one to talk, Tai. You have a well-paying, lucrative job, and you complain about it like a baby."

"Says you. You whine about kids and parents and other teachers to me all the time."

She saw him blindly reaching for his phone, his crutch in times of disintegrating interest.

"But the teaching I don't carp about," she parried, staying him from reaching the piece of technology. "I do what I love," she stated, "and T.K. will too, and we'll be happy."

Tai looked at her, his face softening in seriousness. He leaned back on the couch and exhaled loudly, folding his arms behind his head.

"Kari..." he sighed. "You're being impractical."

The retort left her lips before she could check it.

"And you are practical?"

He shrugged.

"Yeah. Why do you think I worked my ass of in school for eight fucking years to get a fucking Masters in International Affairs?" He leaned forward, getting worked up—as usual—over his academic success, which was quite the opposite with the general populace. She never understood why.

"Tai," she said, bending forward herself. "You whine when you're sent to a location you don't like. You groan when you are tasked with an assignment you don't want to do, you have almost nothing nice to say about your colleagues and superiors, and when you leave for work, you do this." She pursed her mouth and flicked her index finger over the protruding lips, blowing a raspberry.

He wrinkled his nose at her, setting his large hand on her face and nudging her back. She slapped his hand off, the both of them chuckling.

"It's called earning a living for a reason," he commented. He cleared his throat, and their laughter rapidly dissolved into silence. "Sucks, but it pays."

It was a universal, crudely put truth, and Kari smiled defeatedly in its echo.

"One day, dear brother," she said, putting a hand on his shoulder, "you are going to meet someone who lives for their passion, not the pay out. And then you will eat your own words."

"You mean aside from you and T.K.?" He chuffed. "Right, Kari. If I find one, I'll tell them they're being a fucking idiot."

She shook her head hopelessly at him and stood to go into the kitchen. Her headache was peaking, and she was in dire need of her go-to stress-reliever.

"I'm going to make some tea," she announced. "You want a cup?"

"Sure," said Tai, following her. "Just none of that blooming shit you gave me last time. I ate the flower."

"You're the only person I know to have made that mistake, Tai."

"Yeah, yeah," he grumbled. "My sister, the tea snob."

He went back to fiddling with his phone, leaning against her counter and using his thumb this time to make sweeping motions over the screen. One day, Kari told herself, she would wrench that device from his grasp and toss it out the window.

"Excited for dinner tonight at Le Petit Palais?" she asked, measuring tea leaves into an infuser.

"Mmm..." was all he allowed.

"I take that as a no?"

With difficulty, he pried his eyes away from his phone screen and looked at her, his stare hardening. She knew the warning well and allowed his rising temper a few moments to boil down, occupying herself with the present chore of pouring hot water into a pot.

Even so, Tai remained mute as she poured him his tea. It was Earl Grey, simple enough for his unpolished taste buds, and he accepted the saucer and cup with the slightest grimace, which Kari routinely ignored. She had subjected him to countless tea parties since they were children, but he had yet to be accepting of the ritual, finding it an affront to his masculinity. In contrast, a typical afternoon with T.K. consisted of them sitting down, sipping tea, and finishing up the morning crossword—an activity Tai branded as "weird."

"Kari," he said, making a face as he drank. He licked the backs of his teeth in either distaste or discomfort—likely because he had burned his tongue. "You know what I think of dining at Le Petit Palais."

She nodded subtly. Le Petit Palais was the favorite restaurant of Tai's former girlfriend, a girl their parents adored and one Kari had grown to resent the longer she continued coming up in her brother's speech. It was a rate congruous with the distress her name seemed to inflict on him. One syllable of her name could make him twitch. One complete utterance enough to have him hack out a subject-changing cough.

It wasn't that their relationship ended badly. It was precisely the opposite. He had met her in France when he had studied abroad. For a while, they tried the long distance relationship, and she even came to visit him in Japan one summer. But proximity proved more vital than either of them could foresee, and, mutually, they parted ways—only to rendezvous whenever they were within one hundred miles of each other.

Tai insisted there were no emotions involved, but Kari assumed otherwise. Convening at Le Petit Palais raised two certainties, one contingent on the other. Firstly, their parents would not be able to shut up about Tai's ex, and, subsequently, Tai would be forced to relive everything he had purportedly "given up" for the sake of his job. The last time they had eaten there was when she had finished her first year of teaching, and her brother had rubbed his forehead so many times that the skin was thoroughly polished by the end of the night.

"Did you... see her when you were in Vienna?" she asked, knowing full well what his answer would be. To smooth over her prodding, she slipped a cookie onto his plate.

He responded with another reluctant and throaty hum.

Kari bit her lip, attentively watching her brother wipe his jaw with a hand as if he had a toothache. Idly, she stirred milk into her teacup, letting the clink of spoon on china fill the silent void between them.

"How is she?" she said softly.

"How's who?"

Kari inhaled deeply. He always did like to prevaricate by pretending to be dumb.

"Tai," she said, sounding like their mother. "You know who I mean." He turned his gaze to her after stalling for a few seconds by looking out the window. Crossing his arms, he leaned back, mouth stubbornly shut. He would require some provoking, like a schoolboy who refused to apologize to a student he'd bitten. "Tai," she repeated, calmly. "How is she?" She paused and dropped another cookie onto his saucer, her eyes bravely on his own.

Her lips parted a second time.

"How's Catherine?"

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A/N: Ack. So sorry nothing much happens here. But as a fair warning, there will be another "informative" chapter before the plot picks up. Don't know if you expected Tai and Catherine to already have a past, but, there it is. And I really do like Kari. I hope I did her character some justice (but feel free to tell me otherwise!).

Anyway, thank you, as always, for reading! :D