A.N.: Once again, thanks are in order to Digidestined Ninja of Sunshine and SeventhTatar for their kind reviews. And thank you to everyone else who has followed, favourited or enjoyed this story so far. There's a longer A.N. at the bottom, so I won't dally around up here. Enjoy!
"Takeru, are you okay?" Hikari asks. Or at least, the thing which looks like Hikari - but could well just be a part of the strangest, most awful dream he's ever had.
But if this Hikari and Ken aren't real, how can he believe them when they tell him he's in a coma? Do people in comas know what's going on? And if he's not in a coma, there's a chance they could be real after all, right? His head feels like a mess of thoughts, caught in a loop that circles round and round and round.
"Takeru," Patamon says firmly.
He stares at his partner. Is Patamon even real?
"I…I… Why is this happening?"
"Takeru, listen to me," Hikari says, her voice just as firm as Patamon's.
She's walked over to crouch beside him, hands wrapped around her own waist. He stares at her, wondering why his imagination made her eight years old again - why it made Ken eight years old. Apparently his head is even more messed up than he'd ever known, but even so-
"I'm real, okay? I know what you must be thinking right now, but I promise this is real." Hikari looks serious - as solemn as she's ever looked before. "What Gennai did… You'll have to ask him or Koushiro about it all later, but when he gave you the anti-virus it wasn't as simple as just getting it out of you. So he made this place. It's sort of… our bodies stay behind in the digital world, but we are here."
Takeru isn't sure he can believe her, even if she does look far more real than he thinks his imagination could make her. She's wearing the same clothes, but there are little details he's sure he would have forgotten. Like her being taller than him - or the whistle around her neck, which seems a pretty odd thing for an eight year old girl to have, really. If she ever did explain that one to him, it's one of those memories he's still lost.
"Are you listening to me, Takeru?" she asks, and he realises he isn't. Not properly. His head is still trying to wrap itself around the coma/not a coma problem.
He blinks at her.
"Why am I here?" he asks blankly. After all, real or not, it's still nice to have someone to talk to.
Hikari sighs. "It was the only way to save you," she says, her voice soft. "When Gennai purged the virus, it…all your memories were tangled up in it. Everything that makes you you. If he'd just completely flushed it out, all that would have been lost too. The only way was to send you here. To split off that part of your data and keep it safe, and let the anti-virus clear it piece by piece. Except, even after Gennai did that, you didn't seem to remember anything. So then it was safer to let you stay here until you did remember something."
Real or not, he doesn't see any point in arguing. If it's true, and this is Hikari, she wouldn't lie to him. If it isn't…well, what difference will it make? Even imaginary friends are better than no friends at all.
"So why are you here now?" he asks her.
She turns around and looks at Ken, who is watching them both with an odd expression on his face. He seems worried about something.
"Leafmon told us Ken was taken prisoner by… well, the real cause behind all of this.. He's missing. And Gennai said you'd mentioned a boy being here with you. It was the only lead we had, so I came to help, seeing as you didn't really trust Gennai. We… we really need you back, Takeru." She gets to her feet. "You too, Ken. We can't fight them without you both."
Ken stares at her, and takes a step back. "But… I can't. Leafmon is too small, and…and…" He looks down at the ground. "They don't trust me. Why should they? It's all my fault, and now he's using the seed to do the same thing again-"
"What do you mean?" Hikari asks. "And who are you talking about? Leafmon told us that Archnemon kidnapped you."
Ken nodded. "She's working for someone else."
"So, if you were kidnapped, how did you end up here?" Takeru asks. He's still completely lost, but at least now he doesn't seem to be the only one. There's a comfort of sorts in the fact that he and Hikari don't understand something.
Ken looks down. "They…they copied the seed and they're putting it in more children," he says morosely. "And they're keeping me in the digital world so I can't escape. Without my D3…"
Hikari nods. "We found it in your bedroom. Where are you? We can get you out, but we need to know where to look."
Takeru feels a little like this must be a dream, because suddenly everything seems to be happening at once, and he's just stood at the sidelines watching it all unfold around him. That's how dreams work, isn't it? They don't really make sense, and yet everyone else understands things perfectly.
Three months, he thinks, suddenly. It's a long time to have been here - long enough that of course things will have moved on without him. It doesn't have to be a dream for him to have missed out on the information which would help him make sense of it all. He's been stuck here, and all the while the others have been fighting some new evil.
Is there even a place for him among his friends any more? Hikari says they need him, but how can that be true? He betrayed them, hurt them - attacked them. Part of him just wants to run away again, because he can hear Hikari talking about going back right now and he's not sure he can face what that means. He's not sure he can stand there in front of everyone after what he's done and look them in the eye. What if they hate him? Why shouldn't they hate him?
He stands up, and finds himself taking small steps backward, away from the conversation by the wall. It's not that he wants to run away again - he wants his life back, he wants to see his family again - but this is all happening too fast. It's too much to take in when he's still trying to make sense of the past that's only just reappeared in his head. Knowing that he has friends, and family, and a life that's more than just the cottage is different to having to go back and live it. Patamon stays quiet, but he can feel his partner's eyes on him, waiting to see what Takeru will do next.
It would be easy - too easy - to pretend he can't remember anything again, and let them leave. Let them work it out without him, and stay here where things are safe. The cottage never changes, and he's got Patamon to talk to now. He doesn't have to face everyone if he doesn't want to. He could stay here forever, couldn't he?
But if he stays, what would happen to Ken? He's never heard of this Archnemon person, but she certainly sounds like bad news. If everything they've said is true, if it really is Hikari stood over there - and he badly wants it to be, not least because it would mean he really is holding his partner in his arms - then it sounds like Ken needs all the help he can get.
What kind of friend would he be if he backed out now? And besides. He promised Hikari they would find him. They found him here, certainly. He practically tripped over him. But the promise weighs on his mind. It doesn't properly count until they've found him everywhere.
Promises are important. He's always known that, even when he couldn't remember everything else. You have to keep them. And if he can't keep his promise by staying here, he doesn't really have a choice. He has to go - the decision has been made for him once more.
The conversation has ended. He's missed the important part, probably, but it's okay. He can't really remember where everything in the digital world is anyway. He's not even sure who they'll be fighting, frankly, but that's okay too. His newly restored memories are full of moments like that. Indecision, fear, uncertainty: it's nothing new. The odds against them were always impossible, and they always won anyway.
And maybe - just maybe - if he does the right thing then it will offset some of the crushing guilt that's weighing him down, too. He takes a deep breath.
"So what do we do now?"
Hikari and Ken stare at him. He can feel his legs shaking a little: there's no way he's ready for this. Not to face everyone; not to leave whatever this place is; not to see if he can still fight and be part of a team. But his friend is in danger and he made a promise to find him.
"Now we wake up, I guess," Hikari says. "Gennai's been keeping us under this whole time, so we just have to let him know we're ready to go back."
Takeru frowns. "But what about Ken? How does he wake up?"
Ken looks away. "I'm not sure I can," he says. "It wouldn't do much good, anyway. There's a guard, and I…"
The last traces of his indecision fizzle away. Ken needs them. And he recognises the expression on his friend's face, too. It's the look of someone who doesn't really believe things will work out. Someone who's given up.
"Well, it's only one guard, right?" Takeru says. "So it's nothing we can't handle. We'll get you out."
Hikari nods. "We can bring you back to Gennai. Even if you can't…he'll know what to do. He's always come through before."
"It won't stop him," Ken says. "They don't really need me any more - that's why there's only one guard."
"Then once we find you, we find him, and put a stop to it once and for all," Hikari says firmly.
Takeru nods in agreement, although doesn't really have any clue what's going on. Right now that's not important. He's about to leave Ken here alone, and he knows what that feels like.
"We're coming back, Ken," he says. "I promise."
Hikari smiles. "Now that's the Takeru I remember."
A.N.: Okay. So, this is kinda the point at which I admit that when I had the plot bunny for this fic, the idea was to stop around about here. It was, primarily, an AU in which Ken infects someone with a dark seed instead of creating Chimairamon/Kimeramon, and the thought was that once Takeru overcomes that, it sorta ties back into the events of the timeline, and a quick summary would outline how that works. Job done, end of fic, hurrah.
Except, the longer I stewed on it, the less sense that ultimately made. Changing that one thing would set off a huge chain reaction of other differences - several of which I had already acknowledged in my initial plan. Ultimately, I knew that to end the story here would be both ambiguous and deeply, deeply unsatisfying. Finishing with a quick summary of the rest of everything? Laaaame.
The long and short of it is that, no. Fic does not end here. However, this does make a good place for me to pause a little bit and collect my thoughts on how to actually write the next part. I'm also starting a companion fic to this story, inspired by the Digimon Adventure Bang (check them out on Twitter and Tumblr). It means rewinding back to before the start of Metanoia, and having those events nailed down will make writing the next part of this story a lot easier.
I'm not calling it a hiatus exactly, because I've always written multiple stories in parallel and I have every expectation I'll be updating again before long. But there is a deadline to the Bang, and that means I really need to knuckle down and thrash out that story for a bit. Updates over here might take a bit longer for a little while as a result.
I won't be writing another "drop you in the middle and make everything super confusing" fic. One mind screw is enough to be working on at a time, so the companion will be a lot more straightforward, and by its nature will explain plenty of things which are still a mystery in Metanoia (for a few more chapters, at least). If you don't want to be "spoiled", feel free to completely ignore Renascent when I post the first chapter. (This might not be for a day or two because it's my son's birthday soon and life is Super Hectic.)