Tags: Mentions of drinking, trans male character, non human character, f-bomb, knowledge is power.
Chapter Four - Green - 1977-1978
On New Year's Eve of 1977, Izumi Koushiro interrupts Mimi's party.
He's there of course, almost everyone is there. But they're enjoying themselves, a few people are tipsy, food's getting eaten, and so on. So it seems like a good party, even though it's cheaper food she slow-cooked and ovened and everything, they love it all the more. And Daisuke-kun had helped. So it makes her feel better. He feels better too.
Though he'll always have that limp, she supposes.
But she's still not surprised (concerned, but not surprised) to find Koushiro curled up on her bed with his fingers pressing tight against his abdomen and a look of disgust twisting his features.
"Cramps?" she asks sympathetically. She's tipsy at worst, of everyone Takeru is their lightweight and they love him too much to repeat the drunken stupidity of 1976 on him, but she still has her brain in skull functioning well. He nods, chewing his lip and staring at the lamp.
"I always keep the painkillers in the side table here," Mimi continues and goes to get him some. He takes the pills gratefully, without water but still remains curled, staring off into space and even at the snowflakes. Normally, he'd be on his computer by now, distracting himself with theorems and strategies and things he would talk about with Taichi, but considering Taichi is out there sitting with Daisuke and miming throwing things at people standing in Times Square, it's safe to guess Taichi, unknowingly, is the problem.
"Thank you very much," he says to her after a few minutes, uncurling a little with some relief.
"You're welcome." Years ago, she'd have whined at his single minded focus and intensity, but it was just who he was. And if it keeps him grounded all the better.
So she sits and waits. She doesn't have the crest of patience, no one does, but Mimi knows now when to wait and when to blurt out her feelings. It's hard, because watching people dance around them is annoying and often not what's best but… boundaries are important too after all.
"I…"
And it does get rewarded eventually, if you wait.
"I want to confess to Taichi-san. I want to tell him the truth."
And that's why she sticks by this young man with a crush the size of a small country. She keeps his secrets because someone should. "You have told them the truth," she points out, sitting by his feet. "You're the boy Izumi Koushiro. That's all that will matter to them."
He makes a face at her and she doesn't laugh, but she wants to by gosh. "I know that, Mimi-san."
"But you don't know that, Koushiro-kun," she says. He nods. She shrugs. "Taichi-san is better than that, you know that too. I won't tell you to go out there, get so drunk that you forget your own name, and scream it out for all of New York to hear." He turns red up to his ears at the thought. "But you should talk to Taichi-san and Meiko-chan."
He freezes as he opens his mouth. "I didn't even get that far," he admits.
Mimi's smile widens. "That's why you keep me around," she declares, "I think further than you."
Koushiro cracks a laugh. Then he sits up slowly, gingerly. "I need some oolong tea," he says. "Not spiked."
"That's the spirit."
She returns with it and he guzzles it down with gusto. Then he says, "Hikari-san hasn't messaged me in over a year."
Mimi nods. They'd rather expected that. The digital world is hardly a safe place on a good day. Peaceful sure, but not safe.
"The last thing she sent me was 'Tell my brother to abandon that thought in his head'." He furrows his brow. "When I did I…" Koushiro sighs. "It all looked rather heavy, I suppose."
Mimi sits beside him. "Everything looks heavier when you love someone and can't help them." She thinks of those first few months of dating, of a crush spiking up her ears and the anger he had put into frantic, heartfelt drawings.
"Does it?" Koushiro asks, chasing down the last dregs of tea. "Or is he hurting and it's my fault?"
Mimi leans her friend against her side. "Both, except it's not your fault. You just did the right thing."
"And how do you know that?"
"Because I would have lied to him."
Koushiro smiles sadly. "Perhaps that would have been better."
"Not in the end," she tells him, watching the timer on the nearest billboard. "Not when it counts."
It's a month later that she ends up meeting Taichi at a cafe for lunch. He pays before she can scold him, and says it's so he won't have to worry Wallace. Mimi still scolds him, despite the sober look on his face.
"You really cut your hair," she says once he's reduced to a miserable wobbling heap of guilt in his chair.
"Drunk man says what a sober man feels," he says, pulling his good cheer back out of his coffee. "It'll be hard to be taken seriously at the UN with hair the size of their egos."
She snorts and takes an elegant bite of pastry. "Thank you for that, Taichi-san. I'll say that to Wallace when he gets home. He needs a laugh."
"How can he when you're around to make it possible?"
Mimi laughs again. "Don't flirt. You may have everyone else wrapped around your fingers but not me. I invented charm."
"Only one of us is a princess here," Taichi replies with sparkling eyes and good humor. "And I can't rock a tutu."
"I think only your sister can rock a tutu now, Taichi-san," Mimi teases and watches his face- oh yes there it is, that little twitch. She was getting good at this. Before she'd have ignored those little face changes because that was subtlety and why be subtle when you can be yourself? Simple. Some people were just subtle. It was in their blood.
His lips twitched and he downed the rest of his coffee. "Ready to get to the point I guess."
"I usually am." Her shoulders shake a little but she squares them. "Running away didn't exactly work back then. Pretending there wasn't a point didn't either. If it's you, I know you've got a good point in there somewhere. And you're not trying to be an ass about it."
And honestly, she was glad he'd come to her and not the other way around, like Sora and Yamato had been implying should be done. Because they are suspicious, of course. After Daigo had died they'd always been… suspicious. It would be cute about anyone else. With Taichi it was… unhelpful. They trust him, right?
"Two things," he says, and his voice is mercifully low and they're in a private booth but there's no such thing as great soundproofing. So she sets a little radio out of her behemoth of a purse and slaps a cd on before leaning forward. He grins. "Two things. The first you'll like. The second you probably won't."
"Go on," Mimi says, licking her lips at the smell of gossip.
"The first." He stops, takes a deep breath and says, "I'd like you to help me talk to Koushiro about the three of us - me, Meiko, and him- living together."
Holy shit.
"Really? Now?" She tries not to sound scandalized and Mimi mostly succeeds in sounding heartened. Koushiro will be absolutely over the moon when he gets over the inevitable coming out that would have to happen with everyone eventually. Or he'll be concerned that Taichi was going to be one of those weirdos and his chances would be shattered. "Meimei's fine with it?"
"Meiko suggested it," Taichi corrects, cheeks lighting up pink. "She needs that kind of clout here and while I might be cool with whatever, I need her to be comfortable."
"That's adorable, I'm gonna puke," she tells him with a wide smile. "Oh I can definitely help you with that. It'll be easy."
"Second thing," he said as if she hadn't spoken at all. Mimi meets Taichi's eyes, ire creeping up her spine and then pauses.
"Your eyes are supposed to be brown," she said, struck a bit dumb by the sheer… newness of it. The bright red doesn't fit his face, stark and catlike and… just not right.
"I like them brown," Taichi replies. And they change back, smooth, shrinking a little to fit his face better, softer than ever. "Hikari doesn't bother because she's always liked red."
"So uh…" Mimi gives up on subtlety and spits out. "Are you an alien or something?"
Taichi grins and shakes his head. "No, we're Digimon."
She stares at him for a moment. "You're serious."
"As a kuwagamon to the head." He looks down at his drink. "Hikari and I never really had all the details. Our parents escaped to the human world at separate times, had us, raised us like humans as much as they could. The Digital World caught us anyway. We don't know what they were escaping from, but looking back, considering the time dilation, it could have been anything."
"You don't think Daigo-san and the others fought whatever it was."
Taichi shrugs a bit. "We might never know. But even so, we're back in time, pre-our past, pre being born. Our parents might be here."
Mimi opens her mouth to refute him, thinks, thinks of Hikari-chan's message, and then she feels her heart drop. "Oh."
She wants to be angry, wants to shake Taichi in his chair for hiding this, this hope, this possibility. But she wants to cry again too.
"If you'd found your parents," she begins slowly. "We could have found ours. Or… no." She thinks it over a little longer. "They needed to remember they were your parents. Because they'd remember going through time, and we'd be able to go home but… but they don't. Do they?"
"Based on what Hikari's message was, no, I don't think so." He sighs. "Sometimes she'll message me on the side. If it's private or she doesn't want Takeru or Daisuke to see it and get the wrong idea. But she sent that to Koushiro, which means I have to tell all of you guys and get the crap kicked out of me. And now we can start pushing the worlds together a lot sooner."
Mimi chews her lip. "What am I supposed to do?" Her role has always been one she's made herself. But this time, he's seeking her out, specifically asking her for help. What does she have aside from a general inability to not have a good time whenever?
Taichi regards her thoughtfully and for a moment, she thinks she can see that impossible mass of hair again. "It's not obvious?"
That stings, a little, but he's smiling, because he knows, and therefore if she thinks about it a while, it's obvious. But mostly she's just annoyed.
"Spill whatever you know," she orders. "Or I'm telling Sora-san first."
Cowed by the threat of his best friend, he does.
And from that Mimi remembers what she's always been good at.
It's not a good time, it's a good hand.
Tachikawa Mimi has always been good at opening people's hearts.
Sitting with Taichi over cake and coffee and devolving to arguments over who has the worst gen-ed experience, Mimi can always forget. But she glances at him in the window, and his eyes are a bright, soft red, there's a jagged edge to his smile and…
She has no idea how she could have missed it.
"What do you think is going to happen?" she asks once he's done and chugging water. "Will the Dark Masters come back? And we'll have to fight them all over again?"
As a child it hadn't felt possible by herself. Even together, it had taken so much.
Taichi blinks and butters a croissant so fast she swears she doesn't see him pick up the knife.
"You know the answer to that."
Mimi sits there and stews on how patronizing that sounds. Like she's still a child. Like she's…
"Fuck you," she says, not loudly, but firmly, but coldly. "Fuck you Taichi-san. That's not fair. That's not fair at all."
Taichi nods, sober-eyed, almost a little teary. "It's not," he agrees. "My parents tried to stop it, but… but Homeostasis was all alone." He shrugs mirthlessly. "We couldn't just leave her."
"But what about us?" she insists, slamming her hands on the table. "What about them? You can't be okay with it being our kids."
"Of course I'm not!"
She stops. His shoulders are shaking. People are looking around like they saw a ghost. The booth is just that private. "Of course I'm not okay with it." His voice is a whisper. "What can I do though? Not have a family? Leave Hikari alone to deal with that? I'm her brother."
"She chose this," she snips back, just for the sake of argument.
"So did we," he says with just as much acid. "Didn't we? We chose to go! She just chose to stay! I can't just put that burden on her and her hopefully hypothetical kids or family or the digimon! Or our digimon by themselves! What kind of partner would I be?"
For a moment, Mimi imagines Palmon standing alone over the great screaming monster towering over Tokyo, against VenomVamdemon with nothing but her vines and some water. Mimi chokes, and coughs into a napkin, eyes wet.
"That's not fair," she tells him when she can breathe again.
Taichi meets her eyes. "It's not, is it?"
Mimi wants to tell Taichi she hates him but it's not true, so she doesn't. She doesn't hate him. She doesn't even hate the god that put them here anymore. She hates destiny.
She hates being an adult.
"We'll make the worlds connect," she says, almost without thinking. "We'll train them. We'll… we'll raise them healthy and strong. Whatever we have to do. But if we can stop it, if we can stop them, make it not them, we…"
Taichi nods. "We'll do what we can do."
Mimi swallows the bitter taste in her throat.
"I'm not defending you in there," she tells him.
"I would be worried if you did, Mimi." Taichi grins and all the window shows is mischief. "So, Koushiro?"
Mimi's eyes sparkle a little, faint and tired. "Oh you have to earn that one from him."
He doesn't pout, but it's close.
