Kindred Pairs
by milesprower06
"Kyubimon!"
The sky was a sickly blood red, and only reflected off of the marble ground as well, giving a hellish aura to the entire surrounding landscape.
Rika's heart climbed in her chest as she saw the champion kitsune leap up and put her entire weight into the mega biker Beelzemon, colliding into him and knocking him off of his motorcycle. It was anything but graceful, with Beelzemon, the Behemoth motorcycle, and Kyubimon splitting off and crashing to the ground in separate directions.
"You have to get up!" Rika yelled.
"I'm trying!" Kyubimon grunted, getting to her paws, leaping up again when she saw Beelzemon, already on his feet, begin to raise his pair of double-barreled shotguns.
"Dragon Wheel!"
Kyubimon curled and flipped end over end in midair, self-immolating into a blazing blue dragon of fire, wrapping around the mega's wrists as he brought his firearms to bear. He yelled in pain, dropping his guns as Kyubimon could no longer maintain her attack, veering off and materializing again, only to collapse to the ground once more.
"Kyubimon!"
Beelzemon shook his smoldering hands.
"Nice try there, fox face!" He taunted, menacingly walking up to the prone kitsune.
Rika looked around in a panic, finding herself completely isolated as far as the horizon.
"Alright there, chatty. Any last words?" Beelzemon asked, standing over the winded champion.
"Impmon, please..." Kyubimon groaned weakly.
"Be quiet!" He screamed in response, raising his right hand up, his fingers straight and rigid. The tips of his claws glowed a bright purple, and Rika knew he intended to use them as a very potent stabbing weapon.
She gripped her digivice in her left hand with such an ironclad grip that she was amazed it didn't crack.
"Oh no! Kyubimon, please get up, you have to get away! These stupid cards are useless, I can't do anything!"
She flipped through them again, trying to find something, anything, that would help. In doing so, she lost her hold on the five fanned cards in her right hand, and they fluttered to the ground at her feet. She dropped to her knees, and attempted to hurriedly pick them back up, her heart pounding against her chest. Where were her friends?
'Not like this, not like this...'
"Enough!" She heard Beelzemon scream.
Rika desperately tried to stave off the panic setting in as she picked up the third card, and then noticed something she hadn't seen a moment ago.
A broken branch just inches from her knees on the ground in front of her, the edge positively jagged. She dropped the cards she had gathered up and quickly grabbed the branch, broken end out, and got to her feet, sprinting towards Beelzemon as fast as they would carry her.
"Don't be... So blind..." Kyubimon begged.
"I said quiet!"
Rika's knuckles were white as she brought the branch back, ready to thrust it forward as hard as she could, just as soon as she was close enough. She gave out a blood-curdling battle cry as she closed in, watching Beelzemon's raised right hand begin to descend towards her partner.
The mega saw her approach, and in an instant, shifted his weight to his left leg and delivered a swift back kick in her direction with his right. Rika felt a blinding pain in her chest and heard a sickening crack as the sole of his boot slammed into her rib cage. All of her forward momentum was halted and partially reversed as her feet left the ground. Her grip on the branch and her digivice became nonexistent as she careened backwards. She collided with the ground flat on her back, and her vision began to fade, as having the wind knocked out of her twice in less than a second rendered her barely able to draw in a breath. She heard her digivice clatter to the ground, and she tasted copper in the back of her throat.
She aimlessly felt around with her fingers across the marble surface as she struggled to make her lungs work again, hearing the thuds of Beelzemon's boots approaching. She forced herself to swallow the blood in her throat, and took in a raspy breath as she strained her abdominal muscles, pushing herself to sit up...
...Only to be forced back down as the mega's boot once again found her chest, pinning her to the stone as she looked up at the towering leather-clad figure. Glowing blue bits of data swirled around him as they slowly melded into his body.
"If you won't say it, I will..." He said, slowly leveling one of his shotguns down at her head, as he smirked down at her.
"...Goodbye."
Rika squeezed her eyes shut as she heard the click of the trigger, followed by a deafening bang and a blinding white light that instantly penetrated her eyelids.
Rika bolted up into a sitting position with a sharp gasp, eyes wide. It took her a moment to realize she was breathing normally again, and she looked around to take in her surroundings, remembering where she was.
Her bedroom.
Breathing heavily, she put a hand on her chest in an effort to get her heart to calm down. Once her breathing calmed, she glanced over at the clock next to the lamp on the far corner table, seeing a time of 12:36 AM. She then looked down at her pillow, and delivered three successive punches to it before she grabbed a corner of it with a clenched fist, and flung it across the room with a frustrated grunt. It cleared the center table and harmlessly collided with the wall, falling to the floor in a heap.
She swallowed, realizing how dry her mouth and throat were. She stood up, going over to the center table where a glass of water sat next to her blue-ringed D-Arc. Grateful that her hasty pillow shot put hadn't knocked it over, she took the full glass and downed it in five gulps, returning the empty glass to the wooden surface as she continued to catch her breath.
She paced alongside her center table for a few moments, collecting her thoughts. Knowing she wasn't about to get back to sleep, she quickly stripped from her sweaty pajamas and changed into the gi Chou and Henry had lent her when she had started Tai-chi lessons with them. Taking another deep breath, she stepped up to her bedroom door and slid it open, stepping barefoot out onto the wooden patio, then down into well-trodden dirt of her home's central garden. She took a moment to look at the moon's reflection in the stone-ringed pool; pretty much the only light source in the night sky that broke through Shinjuku's light pollution.
After a few more deep breaths, she silently thrust forward with a right punch, then after waiting a moment, retracted it, and put her feet into a fighting stance, then repeated the motion with her left fist.
This was kata. As Sensei Chou and Henry had taught her, it was martial arts routines meant to be performed alone, either as practice or as a form of meditation. It was normally accompanied by vocalizing each move with a short shout, or kiai, but seeing how it was the middle of the night, she opted to remain silent in the garden, and she instead kept the kiai internalized in her head.
"Renamon... Ever since you left, I've felt like an empty shell."
Pieces of the message she had recorded for the packet began to echo in her mind, and all it was doing was beginning to distract her from her routine. She was barely a minute into her routine before she paused, unable to concentrate on it.
She had been angry at herself for months, ever since her sense of self-worth had been torn from her into that portal. When she heard about Hypnos sealing the tunnel under Guilmon's hut, she almost wanted to hit Takato for beating her to making the fuming phone call to Yamaki. If she had done so first, she was fairly certain it would have been fairly louder, with considerably more creative vocabulary. After he had offered to send their partners one-way messages, she had spent days adamantly refusing to record anything for the packets, unwilling to send any kind of message as if she wasn't going to see Renamon again.
When she finally convinced herself to do so, she was unable to keep herself composed, breaking down as she spoke into the microphone.
"Your voice... I want to hear it so badly. I wish I could hear it right now."
She was ashamed of herself when she discovered that she had been the last to submit her message for sending. Renamon didn't deserve that kind of hesitation, not after everything they had been through together.
Shortly after the packets were sent, Rika tried her best to get out of the funk she had found herself in, pushing herself and the others into getting back into, or staying in shape. Takato stayed relatively close to his family's bakery in West Shinjuku, working on his mile time at his school's track. When she realized she needed something new, she asked Henry if she could start taking lessons with him and his sensei, and he immediately welcomed her.
She brought pause to her kata, realizing that she wasn't going to do her routine any favors in this sleep-deprived, distracted, yet wired state. She returned to her bedroom, got out of her gi, and changed into her trademark heart t-shirt and jeans, quickly tying her hair up into her favored pineapple ponytail. After grabbing her D-Arc off of the table, she scribbled a quick note to her mom and grandma, and stuck it on her sliding bedroom door before closing it, just in case they came to check on her in the middle of the night. With that, she quietly jogged out to the front gates, pushed the left one slightly open with a creak, and slid out into the street.
Right now, it felt like the only thing that would help was a midnight stroll accompanied by the sounds of the city.
"I won't say goodbye. We'll see each other again, Renamon. I know it. I know it."
A/N: Well, I figured I could do one very long chapter over the course of a few days, or I could write out what I've got now, and keep it around 2k words.
Thanks for reading, and especially for the reviews so far, Nobility! It's absolutely nostalgic, reminiscent of my opening days of writing fanfiction, where just a paragraph or two of feedback was enough to motivate me to do more and more.
Stay tuned for more!
-milesprower06