Warnings: Underage drinking. They are suitably punished. With humiliation. Also flirting and innuendo.
Chapter Three - Red - 1976
Sora spends a lot of her time in the sewing room with Meiko for the first couple of years when not at home. It's better than being in that empty apartment, as she's supposed to be, or with Yamato and Takeru as she prefers to be.
Within that year, most of them had started gravitating to stay in each other's homes. Cheaper, less distance, less quiet. Meiko-chan, Miyako-chan and Mimi-chan, Takeru-kun and Iori-kun, Taichi and Daisuke-kun (though that was dangerous for a lot of reasons), Jyou-senpai and Koushiro-kun, eventually Ichijouji-kun would stop dragging his heels and come out wouldn't last forever, and they all know it, but the lack of Hikari-chan and the digimon… something had to fill the gap somehow.
"I heard Jyou-senpai got a girlfriend," she says as her hands move the cloth. "He says it's the same girl from before but I don't believe him."
"Mimi-san says she's actually seen them together this time so at least now we're sure she's real." Meiko doesn't fidget so much anymore. Her stutter is less present surrounded by the sheer amount of unshakeable trust and faith that comes from high doses of chosen child and therefore lots of language practice, but then in response her accent comes out full force.
But then Taichi has also called it cute and turned red for a solid minute so that might be the other reason they're hearing it more. Sora can't judge.
"Has she judged them thoroughly yet?" Sora picks up the patch and looks at it with disbelief. She could have sworn… ah well.
"Miyako-chan did," Meiko replies, gently scratching at her latest, carefully made design. She lifts the sketchbook for Sora's examination. Sora squints, looks at where the lines of fabric meet creases and where stretching would be. Then she gives a thumbs up.
Meiko nods seriously and reaches for her colored pencils, catching one as it rolls on the desk. She sets to work again with intense vigor. Even though they're at most a year apart, Sora can't help but smile at her junior's enthusiasm. Or well, interest at minimum.
Sora pretends that the little orange cats she draws in the corners of her work everyday have always been there, and that seems to make her friend happy, so there.
"I'm thinking of going into teaching."
Sora stops and turns off the sewing machine. The windows outside fill with voices yelling and people screaming about goals and hits and Sora thinks of the tennis equipment at her bed. "Teaching all together?" she asks, carefully folding her hands over the still itchy skirt.
Meiko swallows, almost an audible noise. Then she nods and takes off her glasses. Sora lets her, watches her fiddle with them as an excuse to fake clean them and not look. "Language," she says softly, slowly. "Accents, disabilities, differences, braille, that kind of thing…" She swallows. "It's… when I moved here, it was horrible. Uncomfortable. I was, am always having to control myself to look like everyone else."
Sora lifts up her hand and touches Meiko's shoulder. She gets a smile soft as silk, and just as easy to slice open.
Meiko finds it in her to continue. "And I was lucky enough I could fake it but… I'm tired of faking it and if I'm tired what about everyone else who has to pretend they can pretend at all?"
Sora thinks of Koushiro-kun, who creeps around them more nowadays than he had in 2005, or Mimi-chan, who'd flown back to America after a phone call from someone who said her parents' home was going to get sold off if she wasn't fast enough, or even Iori-kun, who'd been caught holding hands with a girl under a tree and laughing shyly when she nervously cheered him on in kendo.
Or even Daisuke-kun, who understands doing more than saying and that's why Miyako-chan's punted him off to Taichi's couch twice this month.
Sora reaches over, takes both of Meiko's hands in hers. "I think you'll be wonderful," she says, and means every bit of it.
Meiko smiles, dips her head and thanks her.
Soon, they get back to work, and the scene looks and feels ordinary once more.
"I wish I could have saved them," Meiko says after a while. "They were hurting, just like we're hurting, and I couldn't just… help them."
"None of us could," Sora says, not questioning the who, because it's just too vast to word. "Not then. But now." She stops and tests the words, tests her breathing. "We may have a chance. And I think whatever it is you want to do, you'll manage to do it. Even if you make mistakes, you're the best of us at showing that it is perfectly all right, even if it doesn't seem like it at the time."
Meiko's hands still. Then she says in a bit of a choke. "Thank you, Sora-san. I-I'm going to try."
Sora doesn't quite know what to say to that. But then, as she hands her friend a tissue, she really doesn't have to.
Graduation dawns quietly. There's no madcap rush to decide their careers or panicked noises about college. Everything had been decided when the Digimon left. And there's no one to meet them but each other.
Jyou waves between scribbles and paperwork. Mimi flops on Sora, grumbling about how she still has another year.
"Speak for yourself," Miyako says with a huff. "I have two."
"Iori-kun has like, five, don't torture him," Takeru shoots back as he sticks a price tag to Yamato's clothes.
Iori shrugs, as if it doesn't mean anything. "I can use the vacation."
Daisuke cackles.
Sora smiles at them all, and gently shoves Mimi to her side instead of her spine. The complaint she gets is in such garbled English she can ignore it.
"Did you finish securing that building Koushiro?" Taichi asks between sips of a soda he'd promised himself as a gift.
"Almost." Koushiro's indispensable laptop is still replaced with a notebook and pens which he despises but is definitely understandable. They don't want the thing stolen. "That transfer student is quite smart. He's going into automation soon, or something like it. He says he wants to study robotics and replication of the human body. Like stem cell research."
"I'm surprised no one laughed him out of the room," Yamato says wearily from his head on the table. Studying was never fun, but an ants in your pants Taichi really takes the fun out of it. These past few months were an exercise in not dying of exhaustion or murdering your best friend, according to Yamato. Not in that phrasing of course, but Sora reads between the lines. And the two of them wouldn't be as close if they didn't want to consider that.
"They certainly tried their hardest," Koushiro says wearily. "The problem is that he is literally years ahead of his time. I looked at his theories… they're quite accurate from what I remember."
They stop for a moment. Then Taichi slurps his soup and says, "Have we ever been sure that we were the only ones to come back?"
They all look at each other. Miyako-chan's head thuds dramatically onto the table. "Can we talk about this later? We're supposed to be happy today."
"No," Iori-kun deadpans. "It's what you deserve, Miyako-san."
Ken snickers and pretends to hide it in his napkin. Daisuke doesn't hide it and falls backwards in his chair laughing so hard.
No one continues the conversation. Sora glances at Yamato, then Taichi, and then wishes they had.
Yamato's hiding something from her.
She is too busy studying and getting used to computers (old computers at that, Koushiro-kun - Koushiro just Koushiro now they are adults- has to be chafing at the poor technology) to really guess at what it is. If she is wondering, it's mostly in how even Taichi isn't telling her. And getting away with hiding it.
"He'll get it to you when he's ready," is the closest she gets to a hint from him. "Don't worry about it."
She wants to shake him. "How can you blurt out you forgot your own birthday but not this?"
Taichi grins. "Some things mean more than arbitrary dates of birth on a calendar." He pauses in his writing. "I can't wait for when in thirty plus years when I never have to use English cursive again."
"You're the one entering international business and wanting a head start, not the rest of us," she reminds him, fixing a patch in her skirt.
"Says the small business owner in Japan."
"Bite me," she says with the strongest amount of affection she can muster. She had considered at first, opening the flower arrangement school her mother had tugged and goaded and demanded of her in childhood that she resented, and maybe someday that would come, but right now, Sora simply can't see it. "Trade schools are still valuable. And I'm not giving you a discount until your hair is normal sized."
And the building needs to go to use. She'll have plenty to keep her occupied in it.
Taichi scoffs at the concept of normal hair, literally. "But who else will I commission suits to contour to the exact specifications and curves of my ass?"
"Meiko-chan, probably," Sora says without missing a beat.
He snorts. "Oh no, oh no, she's more interested in-"
"You corrupt my ears any further, Yagami Taichi, and this pencil is going into your nose."
"Your hairclip is still up there I'll have you know."
Horrified at the potential of that, Sora throws a seat cushion at him.
Yamato comes home, half a Takeru under one arm and the other half dragging on the pavement and sees them using the twin sofas as boundary lines, tangled up in a familiar wrestling match of childhood past.
Utterly unconcerned, the blond just shuts the door. "Well shit if you'd told me we were sharing Taichi tonight I'd have called Mochizuki and booted this idiot back to Miyako's house."
"She just wasn't patient enough to include you for me," Taichi replies from underneath her armpit. She's still not sure how his head got there. "What's wrong with emo junior over there."
"Shut up…" Takeru mutters. "I know I'm in trouble…"
"Kiddo you're seventeen, the only trouble you're in is the trouble you make for yourself," Yamato replies, flopping his brother's limp, misery exuding body onto the free couch. Taichi and Sora untangle themselves in the wake of teenage angst. Having experienced it through all walks of life, they are pretty sure they're mostly experts in the field.
"That's such a change," Taichi comments, slinging an arm over Yamato's neck. "You've grown up, bud."
He gets a punch in the shoulder that's definitely deserved.
"I drank beer," Takeru hiccups over their familiar bickering, looking truly sorry for himself at this point.
Yamato makes a noise that was supposed to be a laugh and ends up a cough.
"Screw off," Takeru whines. "I'm all weepy. In front of my girlfriend. I'm never getting that back."
"If she loves you she'll accept seeing you at your worst," Sora assures him. "She might even like it."
"As long as it's not your violent worst," Taichi says with a fond little smile. "And even then you might be good."
Takeru moans with pity, truly sniffling and feeling sorry for himself. "I'm screwed."
"You are not," Sora insists, while Taichi and Yamato look at each other in disbelief. "You're struggling, that's all. That's fine. That's-" She stops, searches for the closest thing she can get to remembering this kind of misery, the kind that you know you'll get out of eventually but right now it just really freaking sucks. She smiles at him. "I miss my mother," she finally says.
And of course because she picks this to say in front of three boys who didn't quite get a whole lot of "how to handle girl tears" except Taichi, who waits like always for her to actually cry. "I know that's normal and it's okay and it's good because that means I still love her and she loved me and that my parents loved me but that doesn't change the fact that they're gone because we weren't ready to do the hard parts and the easy parts of life at the same time." She swallows and is she actually going to cry while she's trying to be the adult, gosh that's gross.
Taichi scoots closer to her and kneels to rest his nose right in front of Takeru's face, which is also gross. "What she's saying is you're gonna get through this and it's going to suck and it's not going to feel like it, but you can do it."
"And what if I can't?" he asks and for a moment, all Sora can think of is the scared eight-year-old who promised her that he'd take care of Hikari-chan and that he was brave now and thinking of that hurts in a way it never did before. "I couldn't take care of Hikari-chan, what makes you think I can do this?"
Yamato flicks him gently on the forehead. "I have your hopes, Takeru."
Takeru sniffles a moment, and then says. "Cheesy."
Taichi grins at him. "We're the chosen children. Let the cheese pour."
"Speaking of."
Sora turns to Yamato, who has finally taken off his jacket and his bags and is pulling something from his pockets.
Oh. Oh shit. How did she not figure it out, how the hell didn't she think of this, oh no oh gosh oh-
"Takenouchi Sora," he says with a cracking voice because his cheeks are burning and his eyes are water and they're all a complete mess. "I'd like to marry you. Will you let me?"
She wants to cry, scream, laugh, hug him. She takes the box from his shaking hands and forgets all decorum to throw her arms around him and kiss him hard.
For a moment, they have the apartment to themselves. Then Takeru croaks. "Is she the mother-in-law now?"
Taichi laughs himself out of their apartment. Takeru isn't nearly that lucky.
Mimi, over expensive phone calls and D-Terminal, is already screaming an hour later.
Even Hikari-chan, dimensions and miles and time zones away, sends them her love. And pictures of their digimon puffed up with pride.
They're too young, surely, in college, even worse, working on their careers anyway, even worse. But in reality, marriage doesn't mean everyone matters any less. It doesn't mean they don't love anyone else or everyone else. Because they do, and having futures with all of them would be worth experiencing. But they choose each other because that's the happy future they envision.
And ultimately, for Sora, that makes missing her mom a little bit easier.
She thinks her mother would be fine with it anyway.
She hopes her father can forgive her for not letting her be there.
