In-Between-Time
Chapter Eight: On the Moon
a/n: Sorry sorry sorry! Oh boy. I'm going to finish it, I swear. Um…italics quotes are both Sora speaking first, and then Tai. The first one is from The Prisoner of the Pyramid, and I cannot figure out for the life of me what episode the second one is from (Under Pressure, maybe?) but if anyone could tell me, I'd really appreciate it. The Red Hot Chili Peppers own the lyrics I used below. Oh, also, there's a pretty blatant Card Captor Sakura homage in there, if there are any fans in the crowd. Other than that, if you're not too annoyed by the 2.5 month wait, I'd love to hear what you thought, so drop me a review, if you don't mind. And thanks so much to all of my reviewers so far. You're the reason I find the time for this, even if it's only an hour in the morning before I go to work. Thanks.
Alone inside my forest room
And it's storming
I never thought I'd be in bloom
But this is where I start
-Stadium Arcadium
"You have got to be kidding me."
"Oh, come on Joe, lighten up."
"No. No, Tai! I am not getting anywhere near that thing!"
The Digidestined were standing in a long sprawling line on the shore, staring out at the ocean, and there, beyond the breaking surf, some great leviathan burst out of the water, unfurled impossibly huge, webbed wings and beat them once, twice, gliding just above the surface of the water, effortlessly airborne. Salty rivers trailed from it in glittering ribbons, and the sun caught there, painting lavenders and blues, magentas and lighter roses. Kari gasped, and the Digimon folded its wings, streamlined, and dove. The splash was tremendous.
"Oh, he's so beautiful," Mimi sighed, and latched onto Joe's arm. "Isn't he beautiful, Joe?"
Joe winced. Mimi did an excited little dance.
Joe didn't think beautiful was quite the word he'd use to describe the giant fish Tai apparently expected him to ride on back of. All he knew for sure was this—Tai had gone insane. Too many years in the Digital World, man. There was no way he was going to be subjected to God only knew how many hours of terror and seasickness and—
The Digimon reappeared, closer now, like some strange and lovely flying whale, and they could see more clearly the intricate webbing of its seafoam and blue scales, its large liquid eyes, its strong muscled tail with a full and tangled length of leafy fins. This time it leapt in a clean arc, trailing a perfect half moon of seawater, and for a moment it hung there, an unexpected rainbow on a cloudless day.
Kari laughed, a sound that bubbled up out of her unbidden, and TK watched her with a strange look on his face, but Joe's eyes were fixed, perhaps a little wide and frantic, on the spot where the large Digimon had disappeared.
"No," he said.
Tai grinned. "Oh, yes."
If there was a perfect way to travel, Tai thought blissfully, this was it. Tucked in close to the wide shoulders of a powerful creature like Levimon, feeling the working muscles just beneath his scales, moving in time with the rhythmic beating of his wings, swimming through the air, flying across the sea—it was a new ecstasy and a homecoming for the Digidestined, recalling days not so long ago, bent low over Kabuterimon's back, held fast in Angemon's arms. It brought home the humbling knowledge that those powerful beings had held them in the palms of their hands and kept them safe—had carried them.
The large iridescent scales of Levimon's back were smooth and warm with the heat of mid-afternoon and several of his grateful passengers spread out and succumbed to sleep the way people often do on long car trips or plane rides, lulled by the rushing wind and the distant sounds of the ocean. It was one of those rare times of peace and unqualified restfulness that ordinary kids take for granted—days by the creek racing rose-hips in the eddying water, playing tornado and spinning, spinning until the world spins on its own as you sprawl in the grass and stare up at the ever-widening sky. For some kids, summer camp is just summer camp and belly laughs are a part of life, but these kids haven't been kids in a long time. They'll take all the lazy early-morning giggles, chocolate chip pancakes, and games of freeze-tag they can get.
Tai peeled off his shirt in one smooth, unselfconscious motion and stretched out on his back, closing his eyes so his long dark lashes cast shadows on his cheeks and the sun highlighted the rich golden undertones of his skin and Mimi and Sora stared at him unabashedly until they caught each other at it and had a good long laugh, holding their sides until they were reduced to hiccupping chuckles. The apples of Mimi's white cheeks were deeply pink and her sharp canines flashed when she grinned. She really was lovely, and Sora envied her easy grace, oblivious to her own golden beauty—her softly tapered fall of red-orange hair and the long athletic body that was made for this life, here in the Digital World.
Matt handed around eight strange fruits that he had picked on File Island and then bit into his own, finding the inside vividly red and not at all unpleasant. He was going for a second bite when Joe let out a forlorn sigh and said, "I don't think I can eat this."
Matt paused and lowered the fruit. "No?"
"Well…" Joe hesitated. "What is it?"
"I dunno," Matt said. "Some kind of fruit."
"Yeah, but what's it called?"
"I don't know, Joe, I just picked-"
"It's a Goraberry," Izzy said.
Matt and Joe both turned to look at Izzy, who didn't bother glancing up from his computer screen.
"Huh?" said Matt.
"A Goraberry," he repeated, still typing. "Tentomon loves the things."
"Really?" said Joe.
"Really."
"Goraberry," Joe said, and took a bite. He chewed slowly and thoughtfully, oblivious to Matt's incredulous stare, and apparently he could find no test that the Goraberry didn't pass and went to work on the rest of it, all suspicion forgotten.
Matt peered round at Izzy, and Izzy ignored him as long as he could (not long at all, really) and then sighed and said, "What, Matt?"
"Goraberry?" Matt said, and smirked.
"Well, he's eating it, isn't he?" Izzy said, flustered. "Now leave me alone. Hey, Joe! How'd you get through that barrier, anyway?"
"Well, after I walked across the—"
"Whoa!" TK said, and shot to his feet.
"I'll just tell you later," Joe muttered.
TK hurried to stand between Levimon's ears. "Guys!"
"Oh God, here we go," Mimi said dispassionately, getting up and going to join TK in the onrushing wind. "What the hell's the matter now? Flesh eating seagulls? Swirling vortex of—oh."
"Killer storm," TK said.
"Yeah," said Mimi.
TK stood almost a foot taller than Mimi, long and slim with his light blonde hair uncovered for once. His hat was shoved into his back pocket to save it from being lost to the ocean, and his big blue eyes looked wide and naive without the white brim pushed down over them.
"Tai, do you still have that—" he started, but Tai was already beside him, peering through the lens of his pocket telescope.
"Right," TK muttered. Mimi laughed.
"Oh boy," Tai said.
"How bad?"
Tai tossed the telescope to TK, who caught it deftly. "See for yourself," he said.
TK stared silently off into the distance for a long while, and then lowered the telescope and handed it back to Tai.
"Well?" Mimi said, practically humming with impatience.
"We're in trouble," TK said.
And they were.
"It knew!" Mimi bellowed miserably over the roar of the storm. "I don't know how, but it knew!"
"What knew what?" Izzy yelled back.
"The storm! It came after us!" Her voice was high and hysterical now, and she swiped her hand across her face, trying to stop the water running into her eyes, but the rain was coming in sheets, and she let out a frustrated sob. "It's not normal, the way these things follow us!"
No one bothered to argue with her; she was right. The storm had started as a dark kernel on the horizon, but it grew impossibly fast, boiling and expanding until it rushed at them, rolling over itself, hurling itself forward as they watched with building horror. The wind hit them with almost solid force, and they huddled close together in the smooth dip of Levimon's back as the sky grew dark in the middle of the day, the clouds ripped open, and the rain poured down. Lightning leapt through the air, illuminating their wet faces, and they stared around at each other with wide, scared eyes until Levimon hit a pocket of air and the sudden drop startled screams out of no small number of them.
"Where are you going?" Sora yelled suddenly, and the others whipped around to see Tai getting carefully to his feet.
"It's fine, I'll be right back," he yelled back.
"Sit down Tai, you're going to get yourself killed!"
"It's fine!" he repeated, and when Sora made to go after him he leapt forward, arms outstretched. "No don't!"
Their eyes locked and they stared at each other, hair streaming with water and plastered to their faces, chests heaving. A galloping roll of thunder erupted and Sora ducked her head, breaking the contact. Tai spun and ran sure-footedly up to the flat plane of Levimon's head, the flashing lightning revealing his progress like a stop-motion film, and then, after a long, tense stretch of darkness, they saw his silhouette kneeling close to Levimon's ear, saying something that was lost to the storm.
The deep rumble in Levimon's chest transferred through his skin as he spoke, and they caught an occasional word.
"…make it…too late to go…File…"
The wind buffeted them and caught in Levimon's finlike wings and there was another jolt that nearly tossed them all over the side. A sheet of water rushed across his back and the Digidestined came up sputtering.
Tai's voice came to them on the wind now and they strained to hear him.
"…more of this we can take! You…"
A low, building roar of thunder.
"…need to dive! Leave us somewhere and…"
And that was when Kari, by far the smallest of them all, was caught up in the tide of water along Levimon's scales and, reaching out one hand desperately, disappeared over the edge of their airborne island and plummeted towards the ocean below.
Sora let out a high, desperate scream, and Tai whirled to see them all staring with stricken faces at the spot where Kari had disappeared. He experienced a new kind of anguish, understanding for the first time what it must feel like to be a parent, and then took off, scrambling toward the place where they all had huddled together, oblivious to the rain and the cold.
They could still save her, they just had to hurry, they could still save her if—
"Joe!" he bellowed, skidding to his knees next to TK and clapping a steadying hand onto the younger boy's shoulder.
"I'm on it," Joe said, and he scooped the willing Gomamon against his chest and took a running leap off of Levimon's back. The high whine of Digivolution joined the cacophony of the storm and a flash of light that had nothing to do with lightning lit up the ocean like daylight.
"He's crazy!" Mimi said, hurtling to the edge and peering down into the darkness as the rain rushed past her.
There was a sort of pulse in the air and a hot shockwave rode up from the ocean on the heels of the shining black shape of Joe's crest.
"Look!" Sora said, and Mimi turned away from the place where the bright cross had been and followed Sora's point. There, in the last fading light of the crest, she spotted a dark crescent moon on the water. For a moment, she didn't understand what she was looking at, and then it came clear. Crescent Island. And there, streaking towards it, something that might have been a large turtle or…
"Zudomon!"
Tai turned and scrambled back to Levimon's head. "Do you see it?"
"I see it," Levimon said, and Mimi felt her teeth rattle, but soon everything was erased from her mind except for the absolute knowledge that she was going to die as Levimon tucked his wings in close, pointed himself at the new moon on the water, and went into what was little better than a guided freefall.
Mimi closed her eyes against the painful sting of the rain, against the island's alarmingly rapid growth below them, against the unsettling feeling that she was slipping—she closed her eyes, held on so tight she thought her fingers would snap, and stubbornly refused to scream. Her stomach was floating somewhere between her ears now, and this first drop on the roller coaster from hell was never going to end, oh she was going to throw up—and then a lurch and a sudden stop like a parachute had opened and they were floating. Mimi opened her eyes.
Levimon's impressive wings were unfurled and spread in the wind, all intricate webs and blue and teal patterns, and he guided them gently on those wings, down to the beach, to land and collapse in a blinding flash of light. There was a heart stopping moment when Mimi realized she was falling, and then she hit the sand with a jarring thud, the others landing all around her like a few more raindrops in the storm. Tai was crawling over to pick up what looked like a small blue fish-bird from the sand and hold it at arms length. "Doing okay, pal?"
"We made it?"
"Free and clear," Tai said, and got carefully to his feet.
The Digimon took in Tai's fixed line of sight and the grim set of his mouth. "What about the two we lost?"
"Any minute now," Tai said.
"I'm Fishmon, by the way," the fish-bird said.
"Of course you are," Tai said, and smiled.
TK stepped up beside Tai and stood quietly with the waves licking at his knees. Further up the beach, the others were picking themselves up with a quiet chorus of groans and disgusted sighs as they looked themselves over, wet and cold and unable to do a thing about it as the rain was still coming down hard and the wind was buffeting them from all sides, bending the trees behind them one way and then the other. They came one by one to join Tai and TK, arms crossed over their chests or hugging themselves feebly, trying for some degree of warmth. And then a dim shape appeared on the stormy water and resolved itself into Zudomon's wise, friendly face. He came to them through the rain with two waving figures perched on his back, remarkably small against the ocean backdrop. Tai wondered, not for the first time, what made them so important in a world like this—a world of giants—where they could be plucked up from the sand and set down on the moon.
"It makes us seem so small and insignificant. Like nothing we do really matters."
"Of course it matters. We can't take the chance that it doesn't."
"Thanks man," Tai said, reaching out to clasp Joe's hand briefly before turning a grateful look on Gomamon and starting to speak, but the small Digimon silenced him with a solemn gesture.
"This really isn't a good time for autographs, Tai," and then, in a stage whisper, "We'll talk later."
Tai snorted and turned to look for Kari, who was just being released from a fierce hug from Mimi. She shot him a meek little smile and shrugged her petite shoulders.
"Whoops," she said.
Tai's mouth dropped open of its own accord and Sora hid a smile behind her hand as he cast about for an appropriate response, completely at a loss. For a moment Sora was sure he was going to start yelling, but bluster went out of him and he let out a stressed, humorless laugh.
"You're a pain in the ass, Kari," he said good-naturedly.
"Must be a family trait," she said, and this time Sora laughed outright, feeling the last of the fear in her wash away in the pouring rain.
There was a round of fond goodbyes and sincere thank-yous as Tai released the tired but satisfied Fishmon into the rough water. He dove almost immediately, and after a moment, appeared in a neat leap some distance out, waving once, and then was gone. They all watched the dark water for a moment, and then Tai said, "Come on, let's get out of this storm," and they went, turning to address the tall tangled rainforest at the top of the beach.
Mimi twisted her wet hair into a tight knot at the nape of her neck as they walked and it looked like a small pink rose, dark with water and secured with a green band. As soon as they had ducked under the dark canopy of the forest and out of the rain she stripped off her drenched sweatshirt and rung it out so that water dappled the relatively dry and lush forest floor. Matt sneezed.
"Okay," said Tai. "Ah…we made it. So that's good."
Joe, who had been digging forlornly through his bag of mostly ruined supplies, sent him a reproachful look and then set about ignoring him.
Tai sighed. "Fine, it was a disaster, but we're here now. And so is Palmon. So what we have to decide is this: how much longer are we planning on making her wait?"
There was an uncomfortable silence, and several of them stopped messing with their hair and clothes and stood up a little straighter. Mimi knotted her sweatshirt low around her hips and crossed her bare arms over her chest.
"Anyone need a break?" Tai said.
No one said anything.
"Okay, let's go.""After all we've been through, he can't possibly be thinking of going."
"Okay, let's go."
It was warmer in the densely packed jungle, and dark in a quiet, comforting way that calmed frayed nerves and racing hearts. Steam rose lazily from their damp clothes and for a long time the only sounds were those of their feet on dry leaves. The storm seemed very far away now as they parted hanging vines like waterfalls and passed by enormous mauve flowers that blossomed in beds of tree roots. Light filtered down to them in some places, and it was while they were passing through one of these thick, lazy rays that Mimi fell into step beside Tai and thanked him quietly, resting a hand on his elbow for a moment and then letting it fall away.
"Hey, hold up, guys," TK said from somewhere at the back of the group.
Kari had stopped abruptly, her head cocked to the side like she was listening to a conversation in the next room. She stood that way for a moment and then turned a few degrees to her left. This seemed to work a lot better for her, because she immediately took off in this new direction on her own, getting a good ways into the densely packed undergrowth before stopping and, almost as an afterthought, calling, "This way," over her shoulder before continuing on her way.
"Bossy," said TK.
"I know, right?" said Mimi, but she followed Kari into the darkness. They all did.
The forest was changing. At first it was just a feeling—the sort of uneasiness that makes people look back over shoulders and walk a little faster. The sleepy, dreamlike feel of the woods was falling away like dried mud on heavy work boots, and they all felt it now as they walked into the dying heart of Crescent Island. The flowers were shriveled on their stalks, and the darkness neared absolute—no falls of light here, only nighttime. Tangled vines snatched and grabbed at them as they tried to pass, and TK pushed them away from Kari, whose mind was elsewhere, focused somewhere up ahead.
"Kari, man," TK was saying. "I don't know how you do it. We're having a perfectly enjoyable stroll through the woods, and you manage to find the creepiest spot on the entire island. You're like a basset hound for the weird and disturbing."
Kari gave no sign of having heard him—just led them to the edge of a large clearing and stopped as the others filed up behind her.
"Yikes," said Matt.
There was a massive tree centered in the clearing, and nothing grew within thirty feet of it, but its sickly black branches reached out to connect with the rest of the canopy like polluted veins. Gray leaves clung wet and crumpled to the branches, and littered the ground like moth wings and mummy skin.
And there, suspended from the very tip of one sagging branch was what looked like an enormous drop of murky water, or possibly some kind of egg sac quivering like it wanted to either hatch or maybe fall and splatter on the bed of leaves, leaving the brittle arm of the tree jittering up and down, but it was so huge—impossible that it could be a drop of water, why it was almost large enough to hold…large enough to…
A low, anguished sound came from Mimi and she pushed past Matt and Sora to run beneath the branch and stand, her face upturned, arms reaching upward, straining to receive the dark lengthening teardrop that was so long so far out of her reach.
"Palmon," she whispered, and behind her, TK and Kari's eyes met in a moment of perfect clarity.
"Clap on, Kari," TK said softly, and clapped twice for good measure, the clear sound ringing out in the silence.
"TK, don't be an ass," Kari said, and lit up like a Christmas tree.