I hope everyone had a great holiday and 2012 has been a good one so far! =) This is a chapter that I wasn't quite sure where to fit in, but I think this will work well! Thank you to all of you who left comments, I just want to say a quick hello to Helen ess and say welcome to her sister who just started reading! Thank you guys for your amazing comments! :D Also, a thank you to sarah177k who sent me an amazing message =) To the rest of you, your amazing commentsjust completely make my day! Thank you so much for reading up to this point and I hope this, and the rest of the chapters to come don't disappoint =)

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

It was him, surely.

But the way the other boy only glanced casually to his side at the younger brunette, was strange. There should have been a reaction, an exchange more than the haphazard grin he offered.

But how was this even possible? Iori knew it wasn't, something was wrong with the boy beside him, and before the thought had completely formed in his mind he knew exactly what it was. The boy, sitting beside him and appearing to look not much older than his own thirteen years was supposed to be dead.

Yukio Oikawa was dead, this was a fact.

There was only a handful of people who knew this as well as Iori, who had witnessed it as he had. Given, none of them had been impacted as much as he had, but still. It was something Iori knew, one-hundred percent: Oikawa was gone.

Then how was he sitting beside Iori at that moment, very much alive?

Iori looked around the room, where was he? The panelling on the walls was not from his own home, but vaguely reminiscent of blurry photographs he doted upon of his deceased father.

He was in his grandfather's house, where his father grew up. The house Iori's grandfather couldn't bear to live in after the premature death of his son.

"Come on, Hiroki!" Oikawa suddenly exclaimed with a soft nudge as he pointed towards the small dated screen in front of them with the controller clutched it his hands. Iori's heart lurched. The realization that had been obvious from near the start of the sequence was now clear. But he didn't want to say it out loud, to fully allow the word to form in his mind in fear that the whole illusion would disappear.

It was all a dream. And the dreamt up version of Oikawa thought Iori to be his best friend, Iori's father. The sick joke twisted at Iori's nerves as he turned to find a mirror. But, as everyone knows, finding what you want in a dream is like finding one's own singular breath once exhaling it.

As he stood, Iori inherently knew he was no longer his father, and Oikawa was no longer in the room with him. Iori kicked himself as he silently urged the reverie to return. He hadn't dreamed of Oikawa, or even his father for that matter, in years. He'd never truly knew the man, his father's best friend, and it was only through these dreams that he could converse with him, even if it was only his subconscious responding and not the man himself.

Iori could live with that.

The wood panelling faded, each spiralling into one another and fading as if someone pulled the plug on a bath and the water was draining. The colour was gone, and Iori stood alone in a vast black, nothingness. He feared moving. Even though it was only a dream, there was no ground, no walls, nothing of substance. If he moved from the spot he was in he could fall to his death. Yes, it was only a dream, his mind yearned to rationalize, but he recalled Miyako once telling him that if you die, really die, in a dream, you die in real life. At the time Iori had rolled his eyes and had told Miyako to stop reading such unreliable things on the internet, but the fear had forced his rationale into surrender. It was time to wake up. This dream was no longer something he wanted to experience.

Iori tried to jolt himself out of sleep, a method he had made up when he had started getting horrible nightmares and believed himself too old to crawl in bed beside his mother. He tried again, but still the darkness surrounded him. Something was holding him in. Something was preventing him from waking up.

Iori's usually steady heartbeat quickened. Was he trapped here?

There was a noise. The silence was split, not quickly but slowly, as if loosely woven fabric was being torn slowly, each seam letting out one last cry as it let go.

A dial tone?

Instinctually, Iori reached for his back pocket where he usually kept his cell phone. The cheap flip phone he had gotten for his stay in Germany often pocket dialled if he put pressure on the wrong place. It wasn't there, but of course not. He was wearing pajamas and his phone was on his bedside table.

The dial tone made way for a voice, his own, hard and irritated.

"WHAT!"

Then Daisuke's voice played, as if some omniscient sound system was replaying the conversation of the other night. The worst were distorted. "Tha-that b-bet-better.." came out like the words were crumpled and covered in static. The conversation cut off and the static filled Iori's ears, just like when the cable cut out and the volume was too loud. White noise filled the expanse of nothingness. Just it and Iori.

He tried again to awaken and failed. What was going on?

Then, silence. Brief, however, as it was interrupted:

"Iori."

The voice was thick and deep, just as he remembered. The hair on his arms pricked up, his neck tingled as if someone had spiked his spinal fluid. Suddenly nothing was dream like. It felt as real as he was.

Despite his former hesitation, Iori spun around, his thin thirteen-year-old frame quavering from nerves and disbelief as he saw the figure stand in front of him, same pallid skin and long dark hair, his back hunched slightly and his mouth in a lightly angled line.

"Oikawa?" It was obvious who it was, but Iori said it anyway, almost as if his brain needed confirmation. It was silly, the deceased could still enter dreams, why should he be so surprised to see the man standing before him? It wasn't the first time Iori had dreamed of him, although he had gone almost a year without doing so.

The man nodded once, his hair curling slightly at the ends as he did so. He didn't speak, somehow knowing Iori had more questions to ask before he explained anything.

"How are you here?" seemed to be the most pertinent thing on Iori's mind, and was spoken first. "This is just a dream… but I can't wake up. Something feels wrong."

Oikawa was stoic, even more so than he was in life. He moved only at the mouth as he spoke, and slight movements in his face. If one did not look above his neck, he made a believable statue.

"Correct, it's a dream. However, it is not the dream that is wrong, Iori. This is the only way I could contact you, otherwise I fear a great loss is approaching. A darkness, such as this one."

He lifted his arm stiffly, like a robot, as if to indicate the blackness still surrounding them. Only Oikawa was not dimmed by the lack of light, but this impossibility seemed the least important of the long list of them that was still growing.

"So, you're the reason I can't wake up? You're trying to contact me from…" Iori paused, gauging his words to not sound so superstitious, but he couldn't figure another way of putting it. "From beyond?"

"In a sense, yes. Your friend Daisuke tried to contact you recently, did he not?"

"Yes, but-"

"They are in great danger, Iori."

Iori paused, and gauged this. Why had he been so harsh on Daisuke? Well, it was Daisuke. He'd never expected him to be the one he'd receive a call from if something went wrong. Takeru, his DNA-Digivolving partner maybe, or Miyako. But never Daisuke. "But what can I do? I'm so far away from Japan!"

"Their problems aren't in Japan."

"The Digiworld?" Iori gasped. "I thought that was over, no more fights."

"Not entirely. I cannot explain fully in this capacity. You will have to contact Daisuke. He needs your help and I can't do a lot, or inform you of too much, but I can tell you that the forces of the Universe will take care of you. Get you where you need to be."

"What? What is that supposed to mean?"

Oikawa did not respond, and Iori watched as his father's best friend began to fade out slowly.

"WAKE UP!" Oikawa roared and as his voice soared around Iori, the man's figure dissolved itnto a mist, taking the darkness with him.

Iori was awake.

He could feel the breeze from the slightly cracked window rustle the blinds above his bed, and the only darkness he saw was the back of his eyelid.

Warily, Iori opened his eyes. It was almost time to get up, his alarm was going to go off in ten minutes. Noises from downstairs filtered up through the open vent, voices speaking in that foreign language telling him that the host family's parents were up, preparing breakfast as they had every morning of his stay thus far.

Without another thought, Iori rolled over to grab the phone sitting on the bedside table, looking through the recent calls to find Daisuke's number.

It was only for emergencies, and even if it seemed foolish, Iori had a feeling in the pit of his stomach that he couldn't ignore. This was an emergency.

It was now time to hear what Daisuke had to say.