Author's Notes
Congrats to Asarikou-chan for guessing Izumi's price correctly. Hopefully, it was still entertaining.
Next up is Junpei, then lucky last is Kouichi. Okay…not so lucky to be honest. No-one's getting away from me. *Insert evil laugh*
Any takers for the last two? Kouichi's may be a little obscure for some. I've just got an obsession with darkness (if you couldn't tell from my fics), so it made perfect sense to me.
Enjoy.
The Price One Must Pay
Frontier-verse. They find that everything comes at a price. With interest attached.
Genre/s: Angst/Friendship
Rating: T
Part 4 of 6: Izumi
She had always been a rather free-spirited girl. Even at a young age, she would be running everywhere and climbing all sorts of furniture…under her parents' supervision of course, they didn't want her climbing off the balcony and crashing to the ground like she almost had at age two. Luckily, her father had been fixing the stairs under the said balcony, and after hearing the shriek, hurriedly caught the tumbling, exhilarated toddler.
When she grew older, she still ran around…when she could get away with it. She had a sharp mouth too, and quite the imagination, probably why she threw herself into every opportunity for drama that she could. She grew quite independent growing up, despite being an only child, contraire to the general consensus that kids like her become too dependent because they are spoilt parents who do not have to split their attention. They tried to restrict her, having to draw the line as parents somewhere; she was a young girl in modern society after all, but for the most part, they let her grow into her own woman. She did so too, blossoming in Italy, but when they moved to Japan, the loose, spirited girl had no place in the traditional Japanese society.
Within a few months, she was called to the digital world. Her free spirit found Fairymon and Shutumon, the warriors of wind, and the identity that had given her grief these past times and blurred in the process became stronger, fiercer and more solid than ever. She learnt a sort of mollification of sorts, but more importantly, she had the power to move freely on land and air (and sea, if the battles with Ranamon and Calmaramon were any indication), and to use that power to attain victory in whatever fight the Digital World threw her way. Even when she lost her spirits, her legs and invisible wings threw her into the fray, catching the egg that was the last salvation of the digital world before anyone else even thought to move.
That experience taught her more about herself. She realised that the free movement that allowed her to flitter through situations, biting, lashing and snapping at times, was as much a defence mechanism as a gift. It came then to knowing what to do in what situation, honing and trusting one's instincts and understanding oneself and the relationship with other people (being different to the people she had been used to), and still maintaining that integrity and strength and spirit that made her who she was.
After a few years since their return, she realised her life was slowing down. She loved new things; ideas, challenges. She loved travelling, even if it was by herself with a local ticket, wondering through streets and parks and shopping complexes, and the occasional else. But she found herself staying home more and more, occupying herself with less experimental and more mundane things. She in fact didn't notice at all, until her mother, the work outdoors type herself, noted the pleasant change of the boring household chores being done by the time she got home.
It wasn't a reason for concern till awhile later, when her school had another camp, which she refused to go. She waved off the concerns though, simply saying she didn't feel like it.
She quit the drama club a few weeks later, then dropped debating after finding her arguments weren't coming out with the same passions. Writing, she still done on occasion, but the stories, while words flowed true as they always did, seemed to lack that inner passion and free spirit that others had attributed as her trademark.
Her teachers were concerned of course; well, most of them were. Science and math for one, or two to be technically accurate, were thrilled she was finally sticking to the prescribed methods and in the case of the former, not blowing things up in the labs, but her language teachers, for Japanese and English that is, found the quality of her work was lacking. Humanities was falling too, but mostly because she was going for less and less of the many excursions and sometimes multiple day long trips that were arranged.
She eventually started cancelling appointments with friends as well, simply going where it was absolutely necessary. Her face would sometimes go white with the strain, as if she was forcing herself to keep walking forward. But the long summer holidays that year simply couldn't come fast enough. Never before had she felt so spent, so…paralysed. Never before had her soul ever resisted to carrying her on the winds of life.
She panicked. Quite suddenly. Her parents panicked too, but she only knew about that when she woke up hours later in the hospital. The doctors had no explanation; there was nothing wrong, medically speaking, save the run of the mill panic attack. They couldn't explain what caused, and as she refused to say, there was nothing else to be done.
Her legs shook badly as she walked from the hospital with her parents. They attributed it to the shock. She didn't. She couldn't tell whether it was her body or mind doing the deteriorating, but she realised at that point that she had hit the peak and tumbled down. Once the queen of the air, now she could barely walk on land. There was no-where she wanted to go, not even home sweet home, enough for her feet to carry her with no resistance. There was no free spirit; the Digital World had brought its full glory as well as its death.
One day, she stood up off her bed, staring at the door only a few paces away. Her legs attempted, reluctantly, forcefully, to take one shaky step forward, and wobbled dangerously. Her brain froze. Only a few steps, she tried to tell her mind, but unexplainably, the words would not form. Her balanced tottered dangerously. She sat heavily on her bed again to stop herself from falling. Her body locked. She stayed, frozen in place, like a statuette.