Chapter Twenty-Two

He was right. Neither of them liked that.

They tried to argue, once the shock had worn off, against the sleeping arrangements but Ishida was steadfast in his decision, stating that until the threat of the Dark Ocean was dealt with Daisuke couldn't be more than fifty metres away from her at any point, day or night, meaning that for the foreseeable future they'd be sharing a room.

Hikari followed Daisuke into it and dumped her bag onto one of the beds present, taking in the space that was to be her latest home. It was modest enough, though compared to the hotel room it came up lacking, with two beds on either side of the room with footlockers at the end of them. In one corner was an en suite that contained a plain toilet and cheap shower, and in the other was a charging port for Daisuke's suit.

He made no effort to step out of it even as he slung his rucksack onto the bed, staring at the scene before him with his back to Hikari.

'Aren't you going to take the suit off?' she said.

'I'd rather not,' Daisuke said.

'Why?' Hikari said. 'I'm not planning on leaving the room for a long while, so you might as well take it off whilst we're here.'

'No thanks,' Daisuke said.

'You're not going to sleep in it,' Hikari said when Daisuke still made no move to do anything but stare at his bed. 'Are you?'

'Wouldn't be the first time,' he said quietly.

Hikari looked at him for a second then sighed and turned her back on him, grabbing her bag and undoing the flaps to get at the clothes inside. If Daisuke wanted to act like a child and hide inside his armour, she wasn't going to stop him, but that didn't mean she couldn't be irritated by his actions. After all, she wanted to have some kind of conversation with him about things and it would be hard to do that if he, literally, put up a barrier between them.

She began to pull the clothes out, starting with the oversized T-shirt Captain Ishida had provided for her the first night she had spent on base. He had added it to her suitcase as a joke, presumably, and Hikari held it for a moment as she remembered Takeru saying it looked better on the floor than it did on her. Less than a week later, they had broken up and he was accusing her of sleeping with Daisuke.

The teen in question was still standing immobile behind her, encased in armour, apparently content to do nothing to make this room into his home.

'Are we going to have any issues?' she asked, tossing the T-shirt off to one side.

'Like what?' Daisuke said.

'Like that night,' Hikari said. 'The one where we both tripped and hit our heads.'

'I don't remember that night,' Daisuke said curtly.

'Captain Ishida told me as much,' Hikari said. 'But that's not what I'm asking. I wanted to know if we'd have a similar issue, now we're sharing a room.'

She glanced over her shoulder to look at Daisuke and saw his head had turned slightly, perhaps enough to see her from the corner of his eye, and he said, 'No. We won't have any issues like that.'

'Okay,' Hikari said. She pulled out another T-shirt, a more normal and properly fitting one, but she kept hold of it as she asked, 'Can we talk about Saori and the others, at least?'

'No,' Daisuke said. 'I don't want to.'

'I do,' Hikari said. 'Stuff like that's not exactly something you can just ignore, Daisuke. You have to understand that, at least.'

He seemed to give a noncommittal shrug as Gatomon asked Hikari who this Saori was but she didn't answer, ignoring the Digimon for the moment, whilst Daisuke said in a soft voice, 'You don't always get what you want, Hikari. Just look at me.'

'Can I at least know when you first realised it?' she asked.

'Does it matter?' Daisuke said.

'Yes,' Hikari said. 'It does.'

He gave another of those noncommittal shrugs and said, 'MaloMyotismon.'

That was a shock, to say the least. Hikari had figured that he fell for her in the months prior to his disappearance or perhaps the weeks after being rescued, not four years ago, and she turned to face him as she thought back over all the time they had spent together since defeating that monster. At no point did she suspect his true feelings towards her, and neither had anyone else around her for that matter.

'That long?' she whispered, floored by the revelation.

'Yes,' Daisuke said softly.

'Is that why you asked me out?' she asked as she turned to face him.

'Yes,' Daisuke said again, his tone unchanged.

He finally moved and turned her way, but like their initial reunion that felt like years ago in the Yagami apartment his gaze was fixed on a point adjacent to her, as though he was unable or unwilling to look at her directly. Gatomon was another matter, his attention fixing onto the cat Digimon when she stood up on the bed and asked, loudly, 'What are you guys talking about? What does or doesn't matter? What did you realise?'

'You haven't told her?' Daisuke said, keeping his attention on Gatomon.

'No,' Hikari said. 'I haven't told anyone yet. I wanted to talk to you about it, first.'

'So tell her,' Daisuke said. 'I won't stop you.'

Hikari spared him an annoyed glance as she grabbed Gatomon and put her in her lap, the Digimon looking up at her with those blue eyes, and said, 'Daisuke was in love with me.'

'That's what you were talking about?' Gatomon said, surprised, but not as much as Hikari expected.

'You don't seem that shocked,' she said.

'It's not like I didn't already know,' Gatomon said. 'He's been like it since you were little kids, remember? Why are you getting so worked up about it, though? It's just a crush.'

'No, it's not,' Hikari said. 'Daisuke has, or had I should probably say, actual feelings for me, Gatomon. He really was in love with me.'

'Oh,' Gatomon said. 'Oh.'

Now the surprise came, her eyes widening in response. She craned her neck around to look at him as he remained standing across from them, his expression inscrutable from behind that blackened visor of his suit, though to Hikari he seemed resigned, or defeated, like actually hearing her say it aloud to someone other than him meant he could no longer run from it or ignore it.

'That's why you were so hard on Hikari,' Gatomon said. 'More than the others.'

'Yes,' Daisuke whispered. 'It was bad enough being abandoned by people I thought were my friends, but to be left for dead by someone I actually loved?'

He shifted his attention from Gatomon to her directly and said, 'I loved you, Hikari.'

'Daisuke, I'm so sorry,' she said back, about the only thing she could think to say. 'Why didn't you say something to me before?'

'Because it wouldn't have mattered,' he said, his tone growing sharp. 'No matter what I tried, no matter what I said or did, I was always this buffoon to you and everyone else. If I had come out and confessed my feelings, I bet you would have laughed it off thinking it was some joke.

'Then, you go and date some blonde pretty boy who didn't put half as much effort into showing how he really felt about you compared to me. I just about wanted to die when you announced it to everyone.'

'You said you were okay with it,' Hikari said.

'Obviously I lied,' Daisuke said. 'Wouldn't have been the first time I did.'

'Not for something that huge,' Hikari said.

Daisuke scoffed and said, 'Oh, yeah? You sure believed me when I said MaloMyotismon's Phantom Illusion had no effect on me.'

That stunned Hikari into silence, as it did Gatomon. For all these years they had believed their victory over MaloMyotismon was due simply to Daisuke's immunity to his illusion spell, how his lack of insecurities and determination to destroy the evil Digimon was what had allowed him to shrug the attack off like he had, but it seemed today was a day for one shocking revelation after another.

'What did it show you?' Hikari asked, fearful of the answer.

'Us,' Daisuke said, gesturing between them both. 'We were older, in our twenties if I had to guess, living in our own apartment with rings on our fingers and a baby on the way. That was it. Nothing special or extravagant, just the two of us living life as a couple in love, a warm smile on your face that I could never grow tired of looking at.

'MaloMyotismon showed me that the one thing I wanted in life was for you to be happy, and to be the one that made it so.'

His voice had grown soft, the previously sharp tone becoming almost downright melancholy as Daisuke revealed this secret he had carried for four years without telling a single soul. He gave an almost inaudible sigh and went on to say, 'But soon enough I realised that it wasn't to be. You and Takeru were destined to be together, he was the one meant to bring about that smile, and I grew so angry with MaloMyotismon that destroying him became my greatest desire. The rest is history.'

'Except the part where you lied to us,' Hikari said.

'Yeah,' Daisuke said distantly.

He sighed as a click and a hiss sounded from his suit, the back half opening up to deposit him onto the bed where he sat with a forlorn, vacant expression on his face, staring at nothing and looking so lost to Hikari she couldn't help but feel an urge to walk over and give him a comforting hug, to tell him everything would be okay, but she doubted he'd appreciate that coming from her.

'Did you ever care for me?' he murmured.

'Of course,' Hikari said. 'You're my friend.'

'Then why didn't you come look for me?' Daisuke said. 'Or didn't you care enough to?'

'I can't explain it,' Hikari said quietly, averting her gaze off the near catatonic Daisuke as he swayed slightly. 'I just can't, Daisuke. Every fibre of my being tells me that I would have never abandoned you like that, not now and not ever, and I am struggling to think of a reason why I did just that.'

Tears began to spill over from her eyes and land in her lap, her hands clenching into fists. Why had she? Why had she not cared that four close friends of hers had simply vanished into thin air for several months like that?

'I'm so sorry, Daisuke,' she whispered. 'I am so, so sorry.'

'It's too late for sorry,' Daisuke said. 'If you had cared, you would have looked. If you had looked, I wouldn't be the pilot for the suit.'

'Are you saying it's my fault you're here?' she said, a newfound fear gripping her heart as she snapped her head back to Daisuke. 'Please, no. Don't say it. Please don't. Don't say it's my fault.'

'But it is,' Daisuke said. 'It's your fault I'm here. It's your fault any of this is happening. If you'd just come looking for me, I wouldn't have felt so betrayed to accept Captain Ishida's offer. If you'd just made some kind of effort when I went missing, there'd be somebody else in that suit other than me! This is all your fault, Hikari Yagami!'

He jumped to his feet and pointed an accusatory finger at her, his voice almost a scream, but all Hikari could feel was unbridled terror that one more detail from her nightmare had come true. First it had been the burnt skeletal remains, then the ruined buildings of Odaiba and Daisuke wearing the suit, and now this. He was telling her everything that had happened to him, all the hardships he had gone through, was the fault of her inaction. How soon would it be before he was killed, fighting against some gigantic tentacled creature?

She trembled and went pale as Daisuke continued to stand over her with a glare fixed onto his face, and she said, 'Don't go with them to the Dark Ocean, Daisuke. Please. Don't go. You'll die if you do.'

'Why?' he said. 'Because you saw it in your dreams?'

'Yes,' Hikari said. 'Too much of that has come true, especially now we're so close to entering the Dark Ocean. If you go through with the Marines you'll encounter some giant creature, maybe even a Digimon, and it'll be made up tentacles and one of them will pierce your chest and kill you.'

'It's a little late to start caring,' Daisuke said.

'I don't want to lose you.'

Hikari surprised herself and Daisuke by standing up and grabbing tight hold of his shoulders, staring right into his eyes as tears flowed fast and free from hers whilst she spoke. His mouth dropped open in surprise and whatever comment he had to fling her way died on his tongue, a short gasp being all that he made by way of noise.

'I've already lost too many people I care about because of this thing,' she whispered. 'I broke up with Takeru and I can barely stand to even look at Taichi now, and I'm drifting away from the others because they still believe they looked for you.

'So please, Daisuke. Don't let me lose you, too.'

Then she kissed him, another move that shocked her and one, she reasoned, was driven purely by her emotional state, plus maybe a little guilt and sympathy for Daisuke after all these years of misery he had gone through because of her. He seemed as shocked as her, if not more so, offering no resistance to her lips pressing up against his. If anything, though it could just as easily have been wishful thinking on Hikari's part, he leaned into the kiss slightly as his hands came up and gently grasped her shoulders.

She broke the kiss and waited with no small amount of apprehension, embarrassed that she had done such a thing to Daisuke out of the blue like that, for him to say or do something in response.

'I loved you once,' he eventually said, gently, his grip on her shoulders tightening slightly. 'And maybe part of me still does, if my choice in call girls is anything to go by, but what you did hurt more than you could ever know. I'm sorry, Hikari. You lost me a long time ago.'

He pushed her back slightly and Hikari felt his shirt slip from between her fingers, a cold feeling sweeping through her as Daisuke's expression fell and he turned away, towards his bed. He didn't so much lie down on it as he did collapse, facing away from her and towards the wall as her legs trembled then gave way, Hikari landing on the floor in an untidy sprawl as tears continued to flow down her cheeks.

Once Gatomon recovered from the stupor brought on by the scene she had just watched, she did her best to coax Hikari onto the bed proper rather than the hard floor, though nothing the Digimon could say or do would bring Hikari out of the trance she found herself in, staring sombrely at Daisuke's back as it shifted slightly with each breath he took, the only indicator he was still alive.

She didn't remember doing anything else for the rest of the day.