Fic Summary: A world based half on madness, half on a wild desire for truth and love - it's the world Yamato lives in, and it feels more real to Taichi than anything else. Reality is mutable, psychological, terrifying and beautiful. Yamachi

Rating: M because people eventually get naked.

A/N: This is the first fic I've written since I was thirteen, so please be nice with it. The first chapter's more like a preamble, fooling around in the characters' heads. It will quickly turn into Yamachi (starting somewhere in the next chapter), so if that's not your piece of cake, allez, va t'en, go.

It's largely psychological, just because I'm largely psychological. It inadvertently contains a shameless mini-pseudo-treatise. I just realized that quite a bit of it can be summed up by "In the Waiting Line" by Zero 7 (an awesome song in and of itself.) I should stick that in somewhere, might help coherence (if anything could). Anyway.

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Elation

Chapter 1: Killing Time

Ishida Yamato

I have always had the fierce sense that there is no truth in the superficial. This feeling is persistent and very disconcerting. It, in short, fucks with my sense of reality. Everything I say, from the beginning to the end of this story, ultimately reflects this sense of being totally disconnected from a truth that I feel to be existent (somewhere), but which I cannot find anywhere. It is maddening.

Here it is.

September 12th.

I have been waking up feeling... different.

The summer dragged on, and I spent more and more time just drifting off into these long walks that would take me all over Odiba, or losing my mind in guitar with the band, or whatever. I still saw the rest of the 'destined', though our destiny was really over. I never did talk much, and I guess I've always been a bit 'off'. Just now, I feel like nothing's keeping me in the real world.

I have this strong inclination to just... give in to something, but I don't know what.

Just a week ago, school started up again. Autumn always gives me this sense of absolute change. I shouldn't be swayed by pathetic fallacy, but the leaves falling just hits me like... everything old is being stripped away little by little. And school started. My life had that eight-to-four sur-imposed on it, and I thought that I could just wash away into that routine. Mistakenly.

Instead, I've been waking up feeling different each morning. It's not fear, it's more like a diluted amalgamation of joy and sorrow. It's like a vague prophecy that I can't quite make out. It's also like I'm feeling it with the volume turned way down on it - it's just this low background noise to everything, and it keeps me from concentrating because I'm straining all the time to hard to hear it.

My friends are these people who seem to know me, but I'm not certain anymore. I was a kid when I faced death with them, but I feel now as if I saw something there that they didn't see. Maybe it was something in myself. Like when I broke from the group, and when I fought with Taichi (we fought so much), there was a madness there that they were happy to forget about. But I knew - and I know - it was very, very real.

And as autumn drains the colour from everything, my breath feels like it's caught in my throat. It's as if I'm waiting for a significant change to happen just so that I can breathe, or speak.

This is what is in my mind as I wake up.

Although I walk through the present, I am thinking in the past, and I am waiting for the future. Three time zones. You know who I'm thinking about? Never mind.

I took a scalding hot shower this morning, but I didn't feel clean afterwards. I ate my cereal, but it didn't have any taste. And I went to school, but my friends' faces didn't hold any familiarity.

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Yagami Taichi

If you were going to ask me about myself, I wouldn't begin with myself. I know I act egocentric, but... I'd start with Hikari.

Or I'd start with this Zero 7 song, 'In the Waiting Line'. More specifically, the lines:

/Everyone's saying different things to me, different things to me,

Do you believe in what you see/

That kind of sums it up. But right after that, Hikari.

Hikari's nothing like I was when I was eleven. She's so together - I was all over the place. She remembers everybody's name and face - I just smiled as if I knew everybody, but I had no clue. She's got all the clues. I thought I'd be looking out for her all my life, but now it's like she sees all this stuff I don't.

Who knows. But it's like she knows things. And she's so quiet, you just want to tell her things. I can't imagine not having this girl around, but at the same time, it drives me crazy. I'm her older brother and I look out for her, but it's her who watches me whenever I'm around.

Not that I tell her things. Some of the sick shit that goes though my mind, are you kidding me? I'd never tell my kid sister stuff like that.

But I talk to her about other stuff, like our friends, and people in general. I ask her how she remembers everybody's name and face, and she tells me that they just stick in her head easily, like words stick with a two-year-old learning how to speak. Then she chides me by telling me my head's in the clouds, and that's why I don't remember.

I ask her if she thinks our friends know each other well, and she tells me she doesn't know. What did she say...

"I feel like I trust everyone, but I've never really tested that trust. I've put my life in their hands, but never my secrets."

I think it's that way with all of us. That's why I start with her, because she can pick up on stuff like that, without realizing how much it really means.

I don't tell her a lot of my secrets. She might not trust me if she knew the weird things that occupy my mind half the time. I tell myself everything, though; I could run through the whole inventory of strange and even frightening deviations that I'm guilty of, if you asked me to.

I guess it begins with this: I've played over the death of everybody - every one of my friends, and myself - in my head. I started doing it in the digital world, to help reconcile the fact that it might just happen one day. I started with Yamato - I was always so terrified he would just... die. His sullen expression and his messed up blonde head were just fixtures of life, but mentally, it was like he was in another world half the time. I don't know. I could see him jumping off a cliff or doing some other crazy thing just to save us, and it scared the shit out of me. His death felt... inconceivable, but inevitable. It was terrifying.

And so I lay down one night in the digital world, and I imagined him doing that: jumping off a cliff. There he'd be, on the rocks at the bottom, just this lifeless shell. I'd be filled with horror, and the horror lasted days, initially, but the more I thought about it, the more days I spent with the image in my head, the less horrific it was. In the end, it was just... there. And I did it with Hikari. It was just as hard; she stuck in my mind for weeks. But the horror left eventually. Then I did it with Takeru, and it took a few days. Then Sora, Koushirou, Jyou, Mimi, all the digimon. My mother and my father; even though they weren't here in the digital world being attacked, I pictured them as well. I don't know why. I kept doing it after I came back.

Well, not with everybody. When I got back, I really only imagined the deaths of myself, Hikari, and Yamato. Sometimes I would feel the need to think about the others, but it was mainly those three.

You... get to know a person in a crazy, intense way when you try to conceive of their death. It's like all the secret love you have for them comes rushing to the surface, like white blood cells to a bleeding chest wound. Your love pours out like crazy, and it hurts so much, it erases everything else there is.

I did it because I needed to feel close to certain people. I needed to understand who they were, and to remind myself of how much I loved them. I know it's a bit of an extreme way to do it, but I always needed things to be extreme before I really got them.

I needed to know who I was, and so I thought of my body, stunned, being smashed through a car windshield. You know, I felt so alive after that. Like I could do anything.

I needed to know who my sister was, and so I imagined burying her in the ground after some disease had ravaged her body. After that, every time I looked at her, it was like I could see the entirety of her person, beautiful and brimming with life. It worked.

After a while, it was just Yama I thought about.

Yamato - no matter how many times I imagined his body crashing against those rocks, I could never really believe that he was dead. Funny, because looking at him across the classroom, today, I couldn't really believe that he was alive. That, maybe, was the most horrifying thing.

You want to know what the story is, here. It's Yamato - no one's really daring to say it, but a few people are beginning to think that he's slipping into something.

I sit next to Yama all day in class, and I look over at him, and his expression doesn't tell me anything. I walk home with him every day, because he likes to walk instead of taking the train and I go with him - it's like an hour's walk - and he barely says anything. When I ask him how he's doing, he says he doesn't know. And it's not a provocation, it's not like he's giving me the silent treatment. It's like he really doesn't have a better answer. And so we get to his house, and he asks me if I want to come upstairs, and he looks at me with that clear, icy stare like he really doesn't want to let me leave him alone. I don't want to leave him alone, either. The long walks are the most intense part of my day.

I tell people that I walk home with him every day because I'm concerned about him. To my credit, there's probably some truth somewhere in that.

His apartment is completely spotless and bright, and there's almost no furniture in half the rooms, but there's always a bit of clutter (books, clothes) lying around. His clothes are always clean. The long twists of his body just look like they're in sharper definition than anything else in that place. His face sticks out like it's the only thing in focus in a blurry photograph.

The whole first week of school, now, I've sat in his apartment and done homework in the living room. I usually never do homework, but my hands just occupy themselves with the problems while I'm sitting there. I'm really listening to his silence. His dad doesn't come home until much later. It's always quiet.

Well, no, I mean, we do talk. We joke around, and we laugh at nonsense. His voice is softer than mine, and I always feel a bit loud with him. (It's always been like that, but now more than ever.) So we talk, but it's like we're not saying anything to each other. Neither of us can come up with any words, but it's like we know we're in the same boat, so... Yamato, he looks comfortable when we're there.

He throws open all the windows of the apartment, and we sit around just doing math or composition or talking about nothing, aware that each of us has something heavy on our mind, something familiar. Maybe it's like we know that it's going to come out sooner or later, whatever it is, and we're killing time.

I don't know. It's different than when I'm with other people. He's a strange person to be best friends with, and I am.

I always try to imagine what it would be like if he were gone, just to be able to throw him into perspective - to figure out what it's like with him here. It doesn't work, I can't. Just as he's half-absent in life, I get the feeling that he'd be half-present in death, and nothing would change at all. That's a strange kind of immortality, isn't it. I can't wrap my head around it.

When people know you really well, you can die and they'll remain with this static picture of you in their minds. There's no static picture of Yama, though. I wonder if he wakes up as a different person every morning. I feel like that a lot of the time, but I give the picture that has come to be myself: I play soccer, laugh with everybody, behave exactly the same month after month. During the day, I fall into the rhythm of it, and I even forget myself.

Then I remember, and I feel like I could already be dead.

Like, I wouldn't tell this stuff to Hikari. She'd worry too much. I can tell myself, though, and I do, more and more often, because I can't keep it out of my head. It's not that I ever concentrated in school, or overthought things with people - life was always easy. This feels easy, too, this sudden wanting to abandon everything familiar that I've become.

It feels like I could just let go.

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