Faking Redemption
Chapter 2

Tagiru and Airu and Yuu showed up, about three days after the incident. And a part of me hoped and expected that because Airu was one of two hunters who knew where I lived and Tagiru was tenacious enough to find my address through some means or other. Honestly, he was likely to not take the obvious route and just ask someone who might know first off… But Amano Yuu was more pragmatic. He'd probably realised Airu and Ren were the most likely to know where I lived.

When I peeked out of the window, wondering who in the world was ringing the doorbell at eleven in the morning, I saw the three of them lined up on the doorstep with Tagiru in between the other two.

That was almost kind of cute. Would have been, a few days before, because one of the things we could happily tease Airu about was her near obsession over Amano Yuu. But now I wondered why she'd led them to my doorstep. Why Ren wasn't with her. Why she'd even bothered to come. Why Amano Yuu had bothered to come when we barely had a relationship at all. And why Tagiru had come.

The afternoon wasn't the same as the morning, after all. It had become very, very, different. The entire board had changed. My perspective of the board had been thrown off and then it was all over before I could do a damn thing about it.

Tagiru got tired waiting for me to answer the doorbell and yelled my name loud enough for the entire street to hear…or thereabouts. One of the neighbours stuck their head out of the window, even. I sighed and went downstairs because, really, I had no reason not to let them in. If they came to berate me, it was no less than I deserved. And if, on the other hand, they came bearing sympathies or forgiveness, I could just pretend to accept them and send them back on their way or else twist those sentiments so I received something more deserving in the end instead.

My head spun on the stairs. No doubt because I hadn't been down recently. Didn't really need to. There was a bathroom upstairs – two, really, if you counted the one in the master bedroom. And 'kaa-san left me a tray in the mornings and assumed I'd eaten lunch and dinner before they got back home. But the breakfast was plenty. It had always been plenty and I suppose that was what got me into the habit of skipping lunch more often than not. It was for reading, back then. Lunch hours spent in the library dreaming about what it would be like to have magic powers and be a hero – and then the sky opened up and revealed the Digital World and a real hero the likes of which I could aspire to become.

Instead, I was the villain tucked into the tale to throw the true heroes off their victory path, and I'd done a stellar job of that as well: revealed in the end there only because I so overtly sabotaged the scene – because using the Brave Snatcher was always meant to be the turning-point of the tides, but not like that.

'Ryouma! Are you in there?' Tagiru. Yelling again and now knocking on the door too, as though the doorbell wasn't working. It was. It was working perfectly. Maybe one day we'd get an intercom system but yelling worked just as well until then. Would've worked better of the original plan had worked out. We only had this big of a house because 'kaa-san and 'tou-san had been planning a big family – but it never happened. Was just me, and now the house is too empty and too big. But they're still trying. They don't want to give up quite yet.

As for Tagiru… like I was going to answer if I wasn't, but I was and I couldn't just pretend I wasn't. Not when I'd geared myself for the encounter. So I unlocked the door and let it swing back. Yuu looked somewhat surprised. Airu just cocked her head and grinned at me in her usual way and Tagiru's frown of frustration morphed into a smile as well. 'I was worried you weren't going to answer,' he said – or something along those lines.

I shrugged and let them in. The less I looked at those expressed, I thought at the time, the better. I bustled around in the kitchen instead. 'Tea? Coffee? Hot chocolate? Lemonade? Orange juice?'

'Coffee,' sung Airu, but I wasn't surprised. She always wanted coffee, and we gave it to her, and then ran after her when something caught her attention. But a sleep-deprived Airu was scary so we took the lesser of the two evils in that matter. The only thing I was surprised about was how…normal, it all was.

Then again, wasn't I doing the same? Playing host like I hadn't taken all their hard work and dreams and stomped all over them. Though I suppose I didn't do that, exactly. More like they filled their cookie jars and never reached the top because I was siphoning coins off when no-one was looking. It's kind of like that thing with charity, where they say the left hand shouldn't know what the right hand gives. Though, in my case, it's what the right hand takes, isn't it? Takes and feeds to Quartzmon and the coins are digimon and yet we never realise, I never realise, that digimon should have been far easier to miss than loose change in a jar.

I missed Yuu's and Tagiru's requests in that and Airu has to sing them in my ear. Tea and orange juice respectively. And it turned out all three of them always had the same thing, and Taiki-san would normally have orange juice as well. Tagiru babbled on about that at some point or other. Can't remember if it was that particular visit or another one though, but I soaked up the information on Taiki-san anyway. At that point though, I wondered why I bothered. I was so far behind I'd never get there now and I couldn't even muster up the enthusiasm to try. After all, trying was what led to all this. Thinking I could become the best hunter, when I was never a hunter to begin with but a prize that had been hunted that day two years ago – or was that thought, too, just another way to attempt to alleviate my guilt, my responsibility?

'You'll blow your house away if you sigh so much,' Airu scolded, and one of the boys snorted. I thought it was Yuu and maybe that's why I remembered it. Yuu always looked too dignified to do such a thing. And Tagiru sounded so disbelieving in his next statement that I don't think it was him. Something about the house being so big. Something about the Amano house too…

And then Yuu explained that it was just him and his father, so it just felt bigger like that when there'd been five people once upon a time. And then the conversation went off on a tangent and I forgot the rest, or didn't listen. I listened to the clicks of cups touching the counter and spoons touching the cups and I figured I should probably make something for myself as well and pulled out another cup. But which one did I want? Something warm. I was suddenly missing warm things –

I took a glass of orange juice too, straight from the fridge. It froze my teeth and stabbed at my brain and there were already needles stabbing at the brain. But that was the whole point. Why should I pick something I enjoyed? I was going to be different from Taiki-san on this one, unless he didn't like orange juice for the sake of orange juice but drank it because he worked himself too hard otherwise.

I tuned into the conversation when Tagiru yelled my name again and I wondered how many times he'd called it in a more normal tone before that. I wasn't that far away, physically anyway. But he raised an eyebrow at me and asked exactly how far away I'd been and I guess he'd noticed I'd mentally drifted pretty far away.

And not one of them had mentioned Quartzmon, and they'd mentioned Taiki-san only in the context of the orange juice.

So I supposed that meant the role of opening the can of worms fell to me. 'Quartzmon,' I said truthfully and bluntly. And I turned around to face them so I'd see their expressions.

They were all taken aback by my bluntness and Yuu and Airu were staring at each other, before thunderstorms appeared on their faces and they turned away.

Belatedly, I wondered when Yuu would take a hint, because Airu was a trap master but never quite subtle. But I didn't care much, at the time. I was still waiting for the other shoe to drop and my visitors seemed determined to hold on to it. Even then, when I opened the can. Because Tagiru let off a spiel that sounded very much like he was trying to lighten the mood and it might have worked if things weren't so…personal.

That's how things went, wasn't it? Some pins were too deep to just laugh out and Tagiru stopped talking soon enough. He realised it too. Or else the silence of his audience clued him in. But no-one I knew was really good at reading those cues. No-one had realised it, after all. It had caught them all by surprise. I had caught them all by surprise. But the naivety of children was truly a wonderful thing, for them to march into the home of the enemy and let me close the door behind them and never think of what advantage they'd just handed me, never think I could betray them again…

Because it was very easy to say I couldn't, I wouldn't. Very easy to say Quartzmon was gone and it was all his fault but that was simply absolving me of my blame and the role I'd had to play in it. And that part of me who attacked Taiki-san? How could any of us be sure it wasn't gone?

Probably, the only one who noticed I was still holding the spoon in a fist with white knuckles was me myself. But you could stab a person's brain out with a spoon. It all just depended on where you aimed – or were allowed to.