Disclaimer: I don't own Digimon.

Chapter Four: Withdrawal
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Some days, Kari forgot. It was only for a moment – that precious moment between sleeping and waking – but she both loved and hated that moment. She could lie in bed with the pillow over her face and almost convince herself that when she finally got up, Tai would be in the kitchen eating breakfast or sprawled across the couch watching TV. Eventually, though, Kari had to get up. She would go downstairs, and Tai would not be in the kitchen or on the couch. He would not be in the shower or outside playing soccer or on the phone with Sora. He would be in the same place he had been for years – nowhere. It was amazing to her that even after all this time, she could still feel so surprised by this.

Some weekends, when she went home to Odaiba, she would hear her mother crying at night. Kari felt compelled to comfort her, but at the same time, she had never been able to gather up enough nerve to talk about it. Sometimes, she was outraged that not everyone in the world mourned her brother; other times, she forgot that even her parents were experiencing turmoil comparable to her own.

Sighing, she heaved herself out of bed and gingerly put weight on her ankle. The doctor had said there was no break, not even a sprain, but Kari still was not convinced. She carefully maneuvered around her small dorm room, through the infinite piles of dirty laundry, and made her way to the washroom to start the day. It was Wednesday, and Kari didn't have classes until two in the afternoon. Her only plan for the morning was an early lunch with T.K., who had a break in his schedule at ten-thirty. Glancing at her watch and noticing that she was running late, she grabbed her purse and rushed across campus.

She was not blessed with a natural grace, and with the added factor of her tender ankle, it was not surprising that she tripped over herself on her way down the stairs. She tumbled roughly down the remaining half of the flight and came to rest at the bottom.

"Whoa!" a voice cried from behind her. She could hear the footsteps of someone quickly descending the stairs, but could not tell from the voice if the person was an acquaintance or merely a kind stranger. "Are you okay?"

She stared up at the ceiling and swallowed hard, wondering if there was a proper, honest way to answer such a loaded question. "No," she finally admitted, her eyes closing against the truth. "I'm really not."

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"The ocean was beautiful," Mimi said to the stone. "I've never seen water so clear and blue. It reminded me of the colour of that dress you gave me for my eighth birthday. Remember that one?"

Sora never answered, and Mimi never expected her to. She knew what Sora would say, anyway. And besides, words weren't everything.

She twisted Sora's ring around her finger and shifted on her feet, feeling her heels sink into the muddy earth. It had rained that morning, and she was reluctant to take her usual seat in front of Sora's tombstone for fear of ruining her favourite skirt. Mimi always wore her nicest clothes when she visited her friend, though she wasn't sure why. Sora had always been the one girl whose presence never required makeup or even combed hair.

The idea of family represented a great deal to Mimi; it was a word loaded with meaning and feeling, with memories both positive and negative. It could be interpreted any number of ways, though she did not feel most of them were very adequate. She knew only three forms. Her mother and father were her family, because they had created her and given her life. Matt was her family, because he was her husband and would one day be the father of her children. And Sora was her family, because with every beat of her heart and every breath of air in her lungs, her soul screamed out for the girl. To Mimi, family was not necessarily a group of people with matching DNA. Family was a feeling; a warmth that spread outwards until her fingertips itched so fiercely that she had to reach out and touch them. It was a dependency, a vulnerability. And ultimately it was the knowledge that they would not fault her for possessing either of these things.

And so Mimi did not mind that others thought her actions foolish, that even Matt stared at her strangely when she returned home from the cemetery with dirt under her fingernails and grass stains on her best dress. Sora would not judge her – in fact, Sora would probably act in the same way, were their roles reversed – and that was all that she could care about.

"The service was really lovely. And Matt looked very handsome," added Mimi, almost as an afterthought. She glanced at the neighbouring grave and told Tai, "I wish you could've seen Kari. She looked so beautiful."

She lingered there for quite some time, shivering under her umbrella when the rain started up again. She talked until her throat was dry and her voice hoarse, and even then she continued on. The wind kept causing her umbrella to flip up awkwardly, until finally Mimi grew tired of struggling with it and put it away. The rain soaked her clothes and skin, ruining her hair and washing off the makeup she'd spent nearly thirty minutes working on.

She felt something brush lightly against the inside of her wrist, and for a fleeting moment she thought it was Sora's touch. She turned, startled, and saw Matt standing behind her in a dress shirt and pants, holding an umbrella large enough for the both of them to share. He slipped out of his jacket and placed it around her shivering shoulders.

"Pretty wet out here," he said conversationally, as if they did this everyday. She nodded softly, aware that he was trying, but unsure of his motive. It made her sad to realize she didn't trust his grief or value it as much as she did her own, but she could not fix this now. She turned back to face Sora and Tai, but allowed him to grasp her hand firmly in his own. He squeezed it and she squeezed back, Sora's ring digging into her finger sharply, a permanent reminder of her own pain. She took notice of his tie – a yellow and black one that was his nicest and favourite, one he saved for the most important occasions – and she almost felt guilty for wishing she could be somewhere else, in different company.

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T.K. glanced at his watch and gave Kari ten more minutes to make an appearance. Then, he resolved, he was leaving.

She arrived twenty-two minutes later with another guy, whom T.K. didn't recognize. Did she even realize she was late? Or had she forgotten all about their plans and shown up here on mere coincidence? Deciding it didn't matter either way, he grabbed his bag off the other chair – one he'd been saving for her – and took a route to the door that guaranteed she would spot him.

"T.K.! Hey, wait!"

He didn't wait, and when he felt her hand wrap around his bicep a moment later, he was actually surprised that she'd come after him. He was overcome with the reality of his own hopelessness: he'd spent his break waiting around for a girl he hadn't even expected to show up. It struck him harder than it ever had before, and unlike the numerous other times he'd been let down by her, this time he could not shrug it off quite as easily.

"I did wait," he told her. "I spent the last half hour waiting for you to show up, and you just casually strolled in and called after me as if I hadn't."

"I know," she said.

"But?" he said, because he knew it was coming. Kari could never admit to being wrong without giving an excuse, no matter how poor it was.

"But," she said, "I don't think my alarm clock went off this morning. Or maybe it did, and I just slept through it. But if I did sleep through it, it was only because I was up until four in the morning editing your paper for you last night."

"Yeah, and I was up just as late as you were, and yet I've made it to two classes already today," he said. "Plus, I didn't ask you to edit my paper, you offered to do it. And if you knew you were going to sleep in today because of it, you should have cancelled our plans."

"Come on," she said lightly. "You aren't seriously this mad because I'm a teeny bit late?"

"Yeah, actually, I am," he said.

She pulled up her sleeve and put her elbow in his face. "Look at this!" she whined. "I was rushing over here and I was so concerned about being late that I wiped out on the stairs and skinned my elbow. That's got to get me some points, right?"

"Does it hurt?" he asked.

"It stings like a bitch!"

"Good," he said, and before another lying word could pass through her stunned lips, he left her.

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Good. The word echoed in her head over and over, hurting her far worse than her fall down the stairs had. What had gotten into him? He was usually so caring, so attentive. Was he angry with her for being late? Or was it something else?

Could he have been angry because she showed up with another man? T.K. had never been the jealous type when they were together, but he had become increasingly protective, almost possessive, of her since their break up. She considered this for a moment and decided it wasn't the case. After all, he hadn't even asked her about Blake. It was possible he hadn't even noticed him.

"Are you in there somewhere?" Blake asked her in an accent she couldn't pinpoint. The more he spoke, the less certain she became.

"Sorry," she said. "I guess I zoned out for a second."

"I just asked how your head was feeling," he repeated. "It looked like you smacked it pretty hard when you fell earlier."

"It's fine," she told him. "Thanks."

Though she'd only known him for an hour, Kari liked Blake quite a bit. He was polite and soft-spoken, but very witty and articulate. He'd said he was twenty-one, but that didn't feel right to her; she couldn't decide if he seemed younger or older, though. He had a boyish smile, but the type of maturity she wasn't used to seeing in males her age. He wasn't exactly handsome, but he was far from unattractive. And he wasn't short, but he wasn't particularly tall, either.

He wasn't particularly anything, actually. He was completely unremarkable in every way; the kind of face one forgot about immediately after seeing. She might have walked by him every day and never taken notice until he'd helped her up from her fall this morning. What would it be like to be so unknown – to be able to walk through Odaiba without anyone staring at her, without anyone whispering about Tai? She was struck by this thought from the moment he'd started talking, and she found it such an admirable quality that she could almost forget about her disappointing encounter with T.K. earlier.

There was something very comforting in the idea of anonymity. She wanted to ask him if he'd ever done anything worth noticing in his whole life, but realized he might take it as the opposite of how she meant it. He had such a warm, easy way about him. They spoke for hours about anything and everything, and she felt so safe within their conversation that when he asked if she had any siblings, she told him the truth.

"I have a brother," she said, stumbling over the verb. She would never figure out which tense she was supposed to use. Saying she had a brother was probably more correct, but she didn't feel that Tai had stopped being her brother just because he'd died. After all, she certainly hadn't stopped being his sister. "But he died when I was seventeen."

"I'm sorry," Blake said, and she believed him. She had never told anyone that fact about herself before, but it didn't seem strange to tell him. "I can't imagine what that's like."

"Do you have any siblings?"

"A younger sister," he told her. "Elizabeth. She's fifteen."

"Are you close?"

He seemed to consider this for a moment, not because he wanted to be respectful but because he wanted to be accurate. "We've drifted since I moved here for school, I suppose," he said. "But we used to be very close, even when we were younger. She's terrific."

"She must miss you so much."

"Yeah," he agreed. "I miss her, too."

"Of course," Kari said. "But she misses you more."

His eyebrow went up in an interested, perhaps flirtatious, sort of way. "How do you mean?"

"I mean that the little sister always cares more," she explained. "You were there when she was born, and you've watched her grow, and you probably love her very much … but you know how to live without her. You had six years of life before she was there." She didn't know why she was saying this to Blake. Maybe it was true, or maybe it wasn't. There were some truths that one could only understand after a great misfortune in life, and perhaps this was one of them. "For her, there's nothing before you. There's nothing without you."

He stared her straight in the eye, and it was the first time someone really saw her in years. "That friend you were meeting," he said, "was that really just a friend? Or are you involved?"

"No," she said quickly. She was caught off guard – though not upset – by the abrupt change in topic. "God, no. We're just friends. We dated once but that was a whole other lifetime ago, and we both realized it was a mistake before it got too serious."

Had she really said that? And more importantly, had she meant it?

"Good," he said. "It's probably not my place to comment, but I saw the way he acted earlier and you didn't deserve that." She felt a sudden desire to defend T.K., to explain just how little she deserved after all the things she'd done to him, but she caught herself. "He just really doesn't seem right for you."

The words struck her in a way she had not expected; there was nobody more perfect for her than T.K., and surely anyone with a pulse would realize that. She felt a wave of desperation break over her and didn't understand where it was coming from. There was an overwhelming need for her to argue with Blake's statement, to prove him wrong. She imagined herself several years ago and could feel it all in an instant – the happiness, the hope, the security. To tell her that she shouldn't be with T.K. was ridiculous and so obviously incorrect. She had chosen to end things with him, yes, but not because she had wanted to. Sometimes, one had to do things out of necessity rather than desire. Losing Tai was an impossible grief, and losing T.K. would have pushed her so far over the edge that she would have never been able to get herself back. And so her actions, though not ideal, had been perfectly logical. If she were going to lose him (and her past had taught her to be certain that she would), then she wanted to at least lose him on her own terms.

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