A/N: Posted this as the start of a new story, but am shoving it back into this one because I can't be bothered to make it go in two different directions. This is more like chapter 1.5, and it's a bit short. I just stuck it in because it felt fitting. The next chapter's almost done, anyway. I tried to dumb Taichi down a bit at the end, but eh.

Am leaving tomorrow for three months with limited internet access  So I'll try to wrap this up nicely in the next chapter or two, but knowing me, I'll probably pick it up again as soon as I can.

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Chapter 2: Temporal Gold from a Temporal Mine

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They stood on the mountainside, screaming at each other into the wind. Taichi's skin was frozen and he could think of almost nothing but the intense biting pain that was constricting every blood vessel in his body. Yamato seemed, even in the midst of the torturous cold, to be somewhere else entirely. In his mind, he was already scaling the mountainside in search of his brother.

The air was black.

"Yamato, come back here!"

"No, Tai, I'm going. Don't follow me." His voice was drowned out by the howl of the wind.

"Yamato!"

Taichi's eleven-year-old chest constricted with sudden panic. He had sensed with horror, since he had first seen Yamato, that the boy's existence was precariously held in balance between his alien stubbornness and his terrific madness. He hysterically refused the idea of Yamato's death, but had dreaded it from the first moment he'd seen him. His pale face and long, spirit-like limbs made a ghostly image of him. And now the pale blonde boy had his icy gaze set over the snowy edge of a frozen mountain, and Taichi couldn't let his spectre disappear over that terrifyingly close horizon.

He leapt after his friend, the ice burning his bare skin.

"Taichi, you don't understand, just let me go!"

What didn't he understand? Yamato was headed for death, and with such certainty, as if there was nothing he could do but throw his life away. The gusts of wind blew snowdrifts between the two boys, obscuring them from each other's view. Taichi cried out in panic (and pain), and was glad that the wind muffled it.

He ran with renewed energy after the fading silhouette of Yamato, who trudged onward. Yamato was not impervious to the weather, and his body appeared weak, but full of tireless resolve, as if he would allow inertia to carry him forward after his muscles failed.

Taichi pounced on him.

"You have to come back, you're acting like an idiot!"

"It's not your brother out there, Taichi!"

Yamato hit him. Taichi had never been hit with such purpose before, only ever in play. He struck back angrily, twice, before halting. At this point, Yamato surged upwards with new warmth in his arms and legs, and knocked the other boy down. They tangled together, striking each other with determined fists, mindlessly hurting each other and rolling thoughtlessly over the hill -

Neither had ever been in a real fight before, where they were overcome with the desire to debilitate the other person, where there was such a vital need to pass them, where the anger overpowered them and the speed and intensity of everything overtook their rational minds. Taichi fought with his reflexes, but Yamato seemed to fight with calculation that scared the other boy. They tore at each other.

Several things overtook them, besides the adrenal rage.

First, they both experienced the illusion of being much warmer than they were before. They were both getting frostbitten, but their muscles were warm and moved with little stiffness from the cold. Even as they plunged over and over into the snow, it touched them only as a sudden shock that was soon forgotten. The warmth was not only from the sudden use of every muscle to stay the blows of the other, but was also from their bodies crashing together, and from the fact that fighting off an attacker is a great distraction from the cold.

Secondly, both of them experienced a perplexing rush of sorrow and elation at the same time. Yamato and Taichi were both vitally aware, with every blow that they received, of the idea of the death of their younger siblings. The despair that filled them poured out of them in a rain of blows. Strangely, Taichi at one instant (when thrown against an ice-covered rock and struck in the collarbone) prayed that Yamato would kill him. Yamato did not wish this once.

And yet they were elated, because in the moment of violence, all other tragedies, including their own young bodies being slowly frozen, were effaced.

Perhaps strangest of all is the fact that both of them had the intense feeling of communicating something profoundly urgent to the other - a cry against their own mortality?

Eventually, they clung together, half-dead in the snow, and made peace. As the haze of sickness and the insane rush left them, their basic instincts of self-preservation returned, and they agreed to go back to the cave. It is important to note that Taichi felt no victory in this, but rather felt as if the deaths of both younger siblings were now deep, permanant bruises on his heart, and that his blood ran thick and dark blue because of it. They both reached the cave, and sat in silent despair.

"I am sorry," Taichi said. He was deeply sorry.

Yamato didn't feel sorry, though. And so, he didn't know what to say. He just looked up at Taichi with intense concentration, and studied his young, ruddy face. It was only slightly battered, and there was no swelling because the air was like ice.

"Do you... understand why I was trying to leave?" he asked helplessly.

Taichi nodded. "I can't even imagine where my sister could be right now."

"I'm the only person Takeru has, though. I have to protect him and I feel completely powerless."

"All we can do is wait, Yama." The cavern flickered in the light of the small fire they'd built, and the digimon had curled up to sleep in the corner. They had the sense of total isolation, and once again, their eyes rose to each other's faces.

Waiting creates another world. It creates this silent space between the urgency of the initial crisis, and the inevitable consequence. If there is nothing you can do, you are ripped out of that state of urgency and placed in a vacuum outside of reality - here, there is nothing but time to kill before whatever happens, happens. Taichi, who always wrestled with his compulsion towards duty, felt ripped in half by this sudden displacement. He wanted nothing more than to flip forward in time, but instead he was held captive in this cave with Yamato, and so he performed this phantom vigil.

"We should go to sleep," someone said. It had the sound of a soothsayer's warning, as if consciousness would ultimately unravel whatever concrete reality remained.

But though they lay down together, they could not sleep - they rested, Yamato twining his arms around Taichi's stomach in an odd gesture of companionship and reconciliation, considering their confrontation. Taichi closed his eyes and allowed his breathing to deepen, but after an hour had passed, and their bodies had been forgotten, their minds began to wander once again.

"The reason that I was leaving," Yamato began, shattering the silence of the cave with nothing but a murmur in Taichi's ear, "was not only because I love Takeru with all my heart. It was not only because I believe that I'm worth nothing if I can't protect him."

Taichi stirred. He wanted to turn and face Yamato to listen to him, but they had just earlier begun to feel warm, and he resigned himself to the faceless narrative coming from behind him and being fed into his ear.

"Then why?"

"It was because," Yama continued, "of a few things. First is that I believe in miracles. I believe that sheer luck can draw two people away from certain death. Not inevitably, because we all die -" hearing this was strange and shocking to Taichi, because they were both still very young - "but sometimes. And sometimes, I would rather trust myself to an act of heroism that rested on sheer luck than to live with nothing but hypothetical situations in my head. When I believe I can do something, I just go - it more often than not fails. I just can't think of what would have happened if I hadn't tried.'

'Second is that I don't really think I could have stood the hours of uncertainty in between then and... tomorrow, or whenever we... find out..."

Taichi cut him off. "But you did, you're holding up, aren't you?"

"Yeah. Thank you for stopping me."

"Really?"

"Yeah. If... if I am so determined to protect Takeru, then I should trust when someone's that determined to protect me. It's just fair, isn't it."

Taichi got the strange feeling of Yamato as a brother, both older and younger than him at once. He leaned back, pressing his body to his friend's.

They were just children, and so the gesture didn't carry much of the erotic significance that it would three years later, when Taichi would sit on Yamato's couch and lean back into his body, allowing the fair-haired boy to lace his arms around his fourteen-year-old waist much like they had just done in the cave. In the cave, it was just a plea for more body heat in the cold cave, a survivalist press towards warmth. But also, it was a gesture of understanding. And that dimension would remain tied to the movement until the next time Taichi would commit it, three years later.

Yagami Taichi

When I remember it, the memory freezes on this one moment. I forget everything else that Yamato said that night, but I clearly remember the way his breath felt on the back of my neck. I was just a kid, so all I could gather was that the closeness there was somehow different from anything else I'd ever felt - that was all. But looking back, it's like Yamato was... fourteen-year-old Yamato, in the guise of a child. Or someone else completely.

He was mad. Then, he was mad about protecting his little brother, or about remaining alive - I don't know. Now, his madness has become this sublime undercurrent to everything he says and does. It's just a tinge to his words. And it's not the madness of anger, it's the madness of an eleven-year-old boy who wraps his arms around the waist of the boy he just kicked the shit out of, because it makes sense.

It's beginning to make sense to me, as well. That's the thing.

I'm sitting on Yamato's couch. I've dropped the math book to the floor, and he's just talking. He's talking about a song he's thinking about writing, that he apparently can't put into words, it's nothing-talk.

I want to stretch out and lean against his torso, but we're fourteen now and that would be really, really gay.

I just want the feeling from the cave back, though. I don't know why I want that, I just do.

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