H-4-T: Well, back for another chapter, eh? Mustn't have had enough of my terrible writing skills. That's a shame.
Well I don't own the prequel to this story, nor do I own Digimon or it's related characters. I would, however, like to take some credit for the storyline, as I did think it up and I have revised the meaning of comas and such to fit it in truthfully with the storyline.
Fic Time!
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Darkness. All she could see was darkness. There was a nothingness that surrounded her. A cold, dark nothingness that she could not get rid of. She hated the dark, it had always taunted her as a child and now it seemed as though it had permanently consumed her. All around, closing in, she couldn't breathe, the air was too thick and he lungs to weak. A faint beeping noise in the back of her mind, speeding up, getting faster and faster. Her heart was pounding in her chest, an ache drilling in her mind and all the while all she could do was lie there in the darkness of her mind.
"How is she?"
Voices. Voices in her head, always there, always talking, always asking if she was ok.
"I'm here!" she yelled, her voice echoing around her. "Help me! Please!"
"Her brain activity is very high."
"Help me! Please help me!"
"We should keep her going then."
"Please, I'm here, help me!" She was begging now, pleading with the voices to somehow help her. But, as usual, they stopped and went away, leaving her alone in the darkness. She curled up into a little ball and rested her chin on her knees, tears rolling down her face.
---
"Un…deux…trois…quatre…cinq…six…sept…huit…neuf…dix…" she counted, vaguely pulling at memories in her mind. Foreign languages had never been her strong point, and now she trying to remember them. She had been counting to ten for a long time now, all in different languages. Spanish, English, her native Japanese, German, Russian and now French. It wasn't much fun – it wasn't any fun – but it kept her occupied in the darkness.
She shivered and wrapped her arms around her for warmth, but it didn't help. Her fingers were going numb and turning slightly blue and her breath billowed out before her in pale clouds. The temperature in the darkness was never constant and could go from boiling hot to freezing cold in a matter of seconds. She had become quite used to it recently, as it had been happening more often, but she was not immune to the anomalies in temperature. She brought her knees up close to her chest and started counting again, refusing to close her eyes and sleep as she might well die from cold.
"Her temperature's dropped again." The voices were back again. Always they came back, talking about her, but not to her, always about her. Always teasing her, making sure she could hear them but they could never hear her.
They could never hear her.
They would never hear her cries for help, or those of pain. They would never know of the tears she shed in the darkness out of fear or loneliness, nor would they hear the heart-wrenching sobs that accompanied them.
She was truly alone.
---
She didn't know how long she had been in the darkness now. She couldn't tell if it was Monday or Wednesday; time didn't seem to exist in her little world where she was alone.
So alone.
She couldn't tell if it had really been hours, weeks, or just seconds. She had tried counting but had soon gotten bored. She had then resorted to singing. Starting at one thousand bottles of beer she soon found that – all too soon – she had gone through them all. Now not only was she bored, but her mind was also telling her that she was at least slightly drunk. She had a headache and her body was going numb. She wasn't able to get up and walk around in the darkness, all she could do for movement was sit or lie down. Occasionally she would curl up into a tight ball too, as though wishing to keep the darkness out and replace it with the hopeful light she felt inside. Memories of a faint power within tugged at her mind, but she couldn't place them and it was slowly driving her to insanity.
She tried to stand; tried to move her arms and legs enough to stop…what was the term…muscle wastage, but nothing worked. Her will power was weakening by the day.
---
She wasn't in darkness any more. There was a faint light surrounding her as she looked around. It was a strange feeling that was taking over her body; a feeling of weightlessness but it felt somewhat familiar.
Streets and buildings were flying underneath her. Or was she flying? Either way she passed them with extraordinary speed, although she didn't feel any air on her face.
Japan, she recognised.
She flew over a block of flats then a large mall. Cars zoomed on the roads, all unaware of her, and she flew over them with little regard to them. Finally she felt as though she had reached her destination. She was at a hospital, the red cross shining brightly above the doors. She landed on the ground and walked inside, not even noticing when she passed right through the door. She walked through familiar corridors, not really paying much attention as to where she was going but letting her feet guide her instead, until she came to a room.
The first person she had seen since she had first started the experience lay on a bed, his eyes closed and his blonde, shaggy hair falling around him. She knew him, yet she didn't know him. It was confusing even to her, but she walked through the doors (literally) and walked over to the bed. Reaching out a finger to his temple the world around her suddenly exploded.
Around her she was again in darkness. Alone again in the darkness. She glanced around and sighed. Yup, she was definitely alone.
Had it all been a dream or was something else going on?
It was so confusing.
---
"One thousand two hundred and seventy six bottles of beer on the wall, one thousand two hundred and seventy bottles of beer…"
She had started from five thousand this time, and it was keeping her occupied enough to take her mind away from the black void around her. It wasn't very exciting nor was it very stimulating, but it kept her occupied.
She had been 'flying' twice more – three times in total – but it always disappeared as soon as she touched the young man on the hospital bed. Every time she tried to will the pattern to change. She told her mind to stop her reaching out her hand, but the useless lump never listened.
She closed her eyes and raised her hands behind her head, deciding to catch some sleep.
As soon as she felt herself drifting off, the voices returned.
"Are you ok?"
She sat up and looked around wildly. The first thing her mind registered was that she was no longer in the darkness any more. Luscious green grass and perfect trees surrounded her while birds sang and the sun shone above.
"Excuse me?"
She then realised that the voice she heard wasn't one of her voices, as she had named them. She jumped to her feet and span around to see the boy from her hospital vision looking back at her, a look of shock on his face.
"Hikari?"
Was that her name? Was she Hikari? Was that a first name, a last name or was it some form of nickname? She remembered it well and it struck a strong chord in her heart, but she couldn't place it.
"Am I?" she asked unsurely. "I can't remember."
"You are," he replied. "I can promise you, you are Hikari."
"Who are you?" she questioned.
"I'm Yamato," he answered. "You used to always call me Matt."
"Matt?"
"Do you remember?" She shook her head. "That's ok, we can work on that." She nodded.
"So…are we dead?" He let out a little chuckle.
"No, we're not," he replied. "I mean, I may look like God but…"
"So full of yourself…" she muttered, almost habitually. She then clamped a hand over her mouth and a look appeared on her face as if she had said something shameful. "I'm so sorry, it just came out!"
"No…that's good," he replied. "You're saying things you used to say, and that's good. I'm not offended, so don't be sorry." She looked up into his blue eyes and smiled at him slightly. A slight breeze blew past them and her brown hair blew out beside her and she nodded; a determined look in her eyes.
---
She had been back to visit him many times since that first meeting, and he had helped her regain a lot of her missing memories. She hated not remembering things; it made her feel weak. She hated feeling weak.
Neither of them knew how long they were there for a time or how long they had been in their 'places' in total. She, however, was always the one to visit him. He could never visit her. She didn't want him to. He had a vast paradise with luscious foliage and other such luxurious things, while all she had was the darkness.
Looming, black and endless.
Darkness.
It surrounded her.
Trapping her.
And she had no way out.
---
"One thousand bottles of beer on the wall, one thousand bottles of beer…"
She couldn't stand in her hell, yet she could in his heaven. Was she condemned to waste away here? Was he trying to save her? She had never been a religious person, that much she knew, but was it too late to change?
Too many questions in her head. Too many thoughts buzzing around like flies. She wanted to squash them all. Bring out the fly spray and doom them all. They were doomed for death anyway, why wait? The only thing stopping her from dying was the fact that she couldn't move to get anything to end it all with (not that she could see anything in her black surroundings anyway).
She had tried to visit Matt, but she had been unable to slip into his little slice of heaven. In fact she had barely made contact with him at all. Maybe the redemption had finally set in and she had lost her angel. Perhaps she had now been left to rot and decay in this dark world.
"She's still stable, but is there hope?"
"Her brain activity is completely normal. I would say she was just asleep."
The voices again, the same ones that had been with her since the beginning of her time in this world. She didn't bother trying to call for them, she knew they wouldn't hear or answer her. They never had.
And they never would.
The voices started to fade away; she only caught snatches of the conversation.
"Two years..."
"…And I'm afraid that we might have to…" They faded away completely and she was alone again. What was so significant about two years? Could that be how much longer she had to wait until she would receive the answer of hell or heaven? That was going to be a long wait.
Or was that the time she had already spent here? Maybe she had everything wrong. Maybe there was something wrong with her and she was in some sort of cell or something, strapped down to a bed for her own good so she didn't harm herself by accident (or could it be purposeful? Was she insane?). She was no longer sure of anything. She wasn't even sure of who she was.
Hikari.
Yes, that's what Matt had told her.
She was Hikari. Yagami Hikari. She had a brother called Taichi and a best friend named Sora Tak…Tak…Takenouchi. She had been stranded in the desert with Matt and Sora for nine years at one time. Was it nine years? Was that how long he said? Did he even tell her time period?
In fact, was he even real?
The thought sent chills down her spine and she tried to push it away – desperately trying to hold on to the idea of an angel – but it came back, unbidden. It would not go away and it remained in her mind, at the forefront of her thoughts, making sure she thought about nothing but the fact that her angel may have just been a fantasy that she had created to ease her troubled mind.
But, if her angel wasn't real, did that mean that she wasn't Hikari?
There was a pain in her chest and her breathing became short and ragged. She clutched the front of her shirt in her fist and leant over her legs, her face contorted in pain as the unforgiving seizures continued.
A noise was coming slower and beeping was increasing. The pain was becoming unbearable. Oh how she wished it would end.
"She's going into cardiac arrest!" a voice, so distant now, yelled. What was cardiac arrest? Was it some foreign term? She had heard it before, but it's definition eluded her and the pain in her chest continued.
Then everything was gone.
Just like that.
Gone…
Lost…
"Clear!"
With a sharp jolt she was thrown back to consciousness and was dimply aware that the pain had subsided a little. She was no longer in the darkness. Worried faces looked above her, gazing down upon her with fearful eyes. White behind them, all white, a sheer difference to the darkness she had experienced for only God knew how long. Was it two years like the voices had said? Were these faces above hers the owners of the voices?
A hospital.
Was she still alive? Was there hope for her yet? There was the beeping again near her head – a heart monitor, she realised. She tried to look at it but her muscles would not respond. She could only gaze at the faces above her before she slipped back into the colourless world of nothingness.
---
Hikari.
Yagami Hikari.
That's who I am: Yagami Hikari.
She had been telling herself the same thing for a long time now. Just lying there in the darkness, telling herself over and over again who she was.
Hikari.
Yagami Hikari.
That's who I am: Yagami Hikari.
She had long since quelled the thought about her angel being a figment of her imagination and she now had soothed her questions about who she really was. Even f she wasn't Hikari, she had told herself, she could still believe that she was until she found her true identity. Couldn't she?
Until then she could – no, would – just lie there. There was nothing else to do. How she wished that she could just talk to Matt again; talk to anybody.
How old was she? She didn't know. Was she paralysed? The thought, so random at the time, hadn't even crossed her mind until now. Did she have a boyfriend? Again an unanswered question. Was anyone worrying about her? She definitely hoped so.
Or did she? She didn't know how long she had been away from her home (if she had one). Did she really hope that someone was being put through the torture of hoping that she was alive? Was she even alive? Was there any hope left?
Hope.
Why did that word trigger memories?
A blonde boy. A boy with lots of courage.
Courage.
A boy with wild, bushy hair and a wide toothy grin. Friendship radiated off him.
Friendship.
Her angel, Matt, appeared in her mind, looking happier than she had ever seen him.
All those words, did they mean something special to her? Were they something exceptional? So extraordinary that they were possibly taken out of a dictionary and put onto pedestals?
No, people didn't do that to words. People did that to gods, not words.
Definitely not words.
Hikari.
Yagami Hikari.
That's who I am: Yagami Hikari.
---
Hope, courage, friendship.
Hope, courage, friendship.
Hope, courage, friendship.
Why were those words special?
She had pondered the question for ages now; it felt like at least a year. Imagine that: a year of sitting and pondering about three words. It was like an old saying she had heard: There must be more to life than sitting wondering if there is more to life. It was quite a clever little saying that she remembered, if she thought about it. Every philosopher always had a theory on whether there was more to life. She couldn't remember any off the top of her head, but she was sure that she would remember them in time. And, from the looks of things, she had a lot of that ahead of her.
She was tired; oh so tired. She just wanted to sleep, but something stopped her. Some nagging force in the back of her mind that told her that sleeping was a bad idea, and that a bad result would come out of it. Was that nagging force true? Or was it working with some force – the voices, perhaps – and trying to tire her out until she was too exhausted to put up a fight. What then? Would it be death, or something worse? Or could it be a fate worse than a fate worse than death?
And so she sang.
Again.
"I've got a little baby bumblebee…"
---
The bumblebee song had made her felt quite sick (some of the lyrics were not for those of weak stomachs) and she felt the need to hurl, but she couldn't. She felt sick to her stomach, and yet her body – her own body – was unwilling to help her out. Had she done something truly terrible to deserve this terrible treatment? Who could she ask?
The voices. Maybe the voices would hear her for once.
But, she thought, they haven't been here in such a long time. Had they forgotten her? Had she been left to die on her own? Was she being punished for being to stubborn?
Or was it the opposite? Had she been unconscious all this time? Maybe they had lost interest in her.
No, she decided. No one could b unconscious for this long, she was sure of it. And she was almost certain that coma victims would have been left for death in her position.
There was a loud sound – like an explosion. How did she know what an explosion sounded like? She had no clue. She felt like she was shaking all over; as if the very ground beneath her was moving and jerking her, shaking her around to see what came out.
But there was no ground under her. In the black nothingness there was nothing to lie on. She felt the surface against her back, but she somehow knew that it didn't belong in the world she was in. That she was definitely sure of.
Another explosion and another rumble of movement.
There was a sharp pain in her leg and she screamed out in agony. Her leg fell numb and useless (not that she could have used it before anyway), all senses gone.
The explosions continued for a long time before stopping, and during that time she heard screaming and panic.
What was happening? Was there some form of war going on or was she imagining this? No, she couldn't have been imagining it, it was too real. What was real anymore? Were the explosions real? Was her angel real? Was she real?
"Hello?"
A voice. Not one she recognised, but a new voice. There was movement, something being lifted and the little senses left in her leg told her that a pressure point had been removed.
"Rika! Rika over here! I've got another one!"
It was a little girl's voice, she could be no older than about ten Hikari guessed.
There was more movement.
"Is she even alive?"
"She's unconscious."
Was she really unconscious?
"You know we can't take her, Alice," the second voice (Rika, was it?) replied. "We don't have the medical attention to help her."
"But lookie!" Alice exclaimed. There were small scuffling sounds and Hikari was very confused. All she could see was darkness. "A D-3."
"But then that means…Let's get her out of here." She felt herself being moved, as though she were being carried in a strange way. She couldn't figure it out. Still the black void around her remained as intense as ever.
A butterfly.
It was a cheerful, random thought that suddenly popped into her head, but it made her smile a little. Inside her head she saw a golden butterfly on a green leaf. She could see the image perfectly, including the little dew drops and the green veins. The butterfly twitched it's wings, but didn't fly away.
A pretty butterfly, Hikari thought. So content, so carefree, so small.
Could she ever be like that?
---
There had been various shifts where different people watched her. She counted the shifts and she was up to two hundred and five. She now knew the voices of Alice, Rika, Jeri and Henri. She could imagine them to be sweet little children who cared for her, but she had also heard snippets of what they were saying.
There was a war, she knew that much. She could never catch the name of the enemy or who was winning; she had to just put up with the fact that there was a war going on.
She wanted to be a part of it, but she couldn't. Not in the state she was in (whatever that was). She was getting so stressed about not being able to help that it was driving her to insanity.
Was she already insane?
There was movement around her. A change of watch, she decided.
"See you in the morning, Jeri," a young girl with a thick accent stated simply. Jeri thanked the girl and walked away.
There was more movement and Hikari was vaguely aware of something tickling her forehead.
"You won't know me," the voice stated, "but I'm Catherine. I'm from France. I'll bet you want to know what's going on right now, don't you? What am I saying? You probably can't even hear me."
"I can hear you!" Hikari yelled, but she knew it was futile.
"I'm sorry if you think I'm blabbering, but I need someone who I can just talk to and not have them judge me. I can't talk to myself because that's just mental, and everyone else is just too busy. I hope you don't mind, but I just need to explain myself."
Hikari was at a loss. Was there some sort of base going on here? Was this a war base? She knew a war was going on, but she didn't know which side she was on. Best to just listen and piece together the information. It wasn't like she could do much else, could she?
"This war's been on for four years now," Catherine started, and Hikari found that she could understand the other's French accent clearly. "It's been so confusing; many of us can't even remember what started it. We know it started in Japan and spread out, but no one knows the real start.
'Almost everyone I know has been killed. My grandfather, my parents and even my little brother. I just feel so…alone. Rika was kind enough to take me in and I do my part here and there, but I still feel so left out. It's stupid, I know, but I'm always feeling that I could do more for the base, y'know?" There was a pause. "I thought so. You probably can't even hear what I'm saying. I might as well be talking to myself." With that she stopped talking. There were no more words telling her what was going on, no more glimmer of hope of some sort of explanation. She was consumed in the darkness again, left to ponder the thoughts of Catherine.
---
Memories, both good and bad, were returning to her as time passed. She could now clearly recall ten of her other friends, the Digidestined, and the evens involving Myotismon. She could remember every detail of being in the desert and every scent of her mom's cooking way back from when she was only eight. She could remember the hospital clearly, and knew she had been sick a lot of times in her younger years. Everything was crystal clear until it came to returning to the real world with her brother. From there on she could only guess from the blurry pictures.
What was the significance of her memories returning? Was she finally getting her answer of where she was going? Was this a sign to tell her that she was almost at the end of a long, dark tunnel?
Catherine had been in lots of times since their first 'talk', and Hikari was always ready with suggestions on how to help her and how she could help herself, but Catherine was like all the other voices (except for the fact that she talked to Hikari) and would never hear her. So she just listened, aware of how much Catherine was saying even if the other was not.
But that day had been different. She had been slightly less aware of what Catherine was saying and more aware of the state she was in. Memory fully regained she was familiar with her past but had no idea (besides what she had pieced together) of what was going on in the present.
She had a determined resolve to fix that.
When Catherine left to get some water to cool her down (she had a fever at the moment) she had felt a tingling sensation all over her body. The dark world around her faded away to a less-darker existence, and she had found that she was lying on a cold stone floor with her eyes closed. She tried to open them but soon snapped them shut again as the world around her was too bright to handle.
It took a while for her to be able to register what was around her, but she was in some sort of makeshift bunker, lying on a small cot, the sheets abandoned next to her. She tried to sit up, but her arms were too weak to support her. She was able to move them as though she would sit, but she could get no farther than a few inches away from the thin mattress before her arms shook with the strain and she collapsed again.
Was she still alive then? Had it all been some strange dream, or was something else going on?
There was a sound she recognised as footsteps coming toward her and she tried vaguely again to push herself off the bed. But, once again, her arms failed her and she collapsed just as a small girl with blonde ringlets entered, carrying a bowl of water and a flannel.
As soon as she caught sight of Hikari, the porcelain bowl dropped to the floor and smashed.
"Oh my…" she whispered, trailing off with a lack of words. Her accent was thick and French, and it was definitely Catherine's. She quickly turned from the room and ran down the corridor as a feeling of disappointment filled her. She had already scared off the opportunity of a new friend just by trying to sit up. She was such a failure.
However footsteps could be heard a couple of minutes later, along with various excited words in French that Hikari could not understand. It was then that the blonde (Catherine) and another teen around the same age with brownish-orange hair in a high ponytail appeared in the doorway.
Where Catherine had a soft appearance with a pair of three-quarter jeans in a pale pink and a pink tank-top, the other girl had a rougher appearance. Her white t-shirt had cyan material covering her shoulders and a matching broken heart in the middle of her chest. Her arms were bare except for two maroon sweatbands around her wrists. She had a thick maroon belt around her waist holding up her dark ¾-length jeans. Around her right leg she had two strange, maroon bands, both with silver buckles at the front. She wore dirtied, worn trainers on her feet and she carried herself as though she ah a large ship on her shoulder.
"She's finally awake," the girl muttered in fluent Japanese.
Was she still in Japan?
"We've got to report this to Taichi at once," the slightly taller girl stated.
"Wait!" Catherine exclaimed. "We're supposed to report all activity to him, but we didn't report that she was here. It's going to be a little strange to say 'this girl we found three years ago just came out of a coma' when he doesn't even know we found a girl three years ago."
"Three years?" Hikari croaked, her voice raw. The two young women turned to her, looking as if they had forgotten her existence until she had spoken.
Catherine was the one who came over and sat at the foot of her bed.
"Yes," she whispered, "we found you three years ago in a recently abandoned hospital in a coma."
"How long have I been like that?"
"We've only been with you three years," she stated, "before that…I don't know. What was the last year you can remember?"
"2005," Hikari answered. Catherine seemed to pale.
"You've been in a come five years," she stated. "It's 2010."
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H-4-T: Ok, not bad, but they're getting shorter! I don't want to return to the sad days of 1,000 words a chapter! Don't make me!
Hikari: You're the one writing the chapters, so technically you control what's going into them.
H-4-T: I know…I know…
Takeru: And what's up with you making this a Takari? Shouldn't you be moving on to another couple now?
H-4-T: It's not a Takari.
Takeru: It's not?
H-4-T: No, it's not. (Sorry Takari fans)
Takeru: Face paling Then…who am I with?
H-4-T: All will be revealed in time.
Hikari: And who am I with?
H-4-T: Me to know, you to read and find out.
All three: Read and review!