In-Between-Time
Chapter Eleven: A Time to Gladiate
a/n: Go take a look at my C2 community! It's undergone a pretty substantial overhaul, and there's nothing on there that isn't worth your time. Excellent fics. Especially anything by Pied Piper, dreamcruiser, Flash-Indie, Silver1, and orchid falls. They're all effin' brilliant.
Also, on another note, quotes from this extremely belated chapter are from The Dark Network of Etemon.Oh! And I'm a registered beta now. Send me your betables. Cheers!
This chapter is for ryuu-takahashi, who is a good sport, even when I'm not. :)
In the new light, in the reflection of Kari's unduplicated soul, the coliseum began to change. As the seal of darkness peeled back and let in the pale yellow light of day, ashy heaps dissolved and sank into the sand. Seeing this, the panicked Rookies lost their cool. Gazimon, Floramon, and a stray Datamon who may have been an enemy reborn clawed and shoved at each other, single minded in their desperation. Surimon who hadn't reached the shelter of a stone doorway burst into data under Kari's gaze and blew away on the breeze. Others crouched beneath the stadium seats, blinking owlishly, eyes strange and glassy. The sound was deafening. The crystalline fracturing of virus-born Rookies, the wordless din of voices, the scraping and scrabbling of fangs and claws against rock, against each other. And a strange growling…a low rumbling…an approaching storm? No matter. They had them on the run. Tai turned, feeling bold, to the task at hand.
"Hey ugly! That's right you sack of mud, come get me! Come on, you mutant, are you scared?"
Tai bent, picked up a fist-sized rock, and lobbed it at Dokugumon with his customarily effortless accuracy, hitting her squarely in the eye with an unsettling squelching sound. The effect was immediate. All activity stopped and the horde turned as one to watch the exchange between the van-sized Champion and the reckless human youth. There was a long tense moment as Dokugumon flailed, almost comically, for balance, eyes burning red and fixed in hatred on Tai's deeply tanned face, but gravity wasn't on her side, and she toppled backward off of the overturned soccer net, hitting the ground with a dull thud and kicking up a small whirlwind of sand.
Tai crowed.
In the wide and dark coliseum, the sound echoed loudly and faded away to a silence that stretched and snapped like an overstressed guitar string. There was a rumbling then, and scores of Champions poured onto the battleground through evenly spaced stone archways, crouching low, flexing and snarling, surrounding Plesiomon and Magnadramon. The Rookies resumed their retreat, flowing like schools of strange fish, making little tracks in the sand. They rushed past the Champions and cowered, but they never drew the attention of the advancing monsters whose faces were so familiar to the Digidestined. They were former enemies, former friends, but some were twisted and mapped with black veins, their eyes lost and empty. They were black-and-white projections of the warriors they had been, leaping forward in space and time, jittering and obscured by a haze of static. They were the children of the virus, and Tai could feel them inside of him as he stood, waiting for his moment.
The two Megas watched the ring of their attackers tighten and exchanged a careless glance. Plesiomon let out a booming laugh, and Kari ripped open the remainder of the dark canopy blocking the sky, letting the sun shine down and reflect a million points of soft pink light off of her partner's scales like rose petals. Magnadramon, lovely and lethal, reached for her nearest opponent, and drew him to her.
Tai felt the earth through the soles of his shoes, he felt each controlled breath, in, out. He tensed. He smiled at Dokugumon, raising a challenging eyebrow--a face that could take Matt from zero to pissed off in 2.5 seconds.
"Well?" he said, his voice lazy, his heart racing.
Dokugumon roared, trails of saliva connecting the tips of her sharp teeth, and snapped her head to the side, her eyes searching a nearby doorway.
"Kill the Patamon," she hissed into the dark, and then hurled herself at Tai, scurrying on eight black legs, her bulbous abdomen dragging on the ground. And Tai sensed more than saw a hunched form in that doorway, gliding out of the shadows, before he turned to run, Dokugumon fast on his heels.
As he crouched, just yards away from the soccer net, TK felt a sort of coldness that was almost in the air, but more than that, it settled at the base of his spine; on the nape of his neck. And there was almost a sound. A dry skin sound, or a scraping of birch bark, and he turned to look along the wall to the next doorway to the right. A grinning, empty-eyed skull was inching its sightless face around the edge of the doorjamb to stare at TK and to laugh, though its mouth never moved.
"I'm going to kill you," it said, "and your little pig friend."
It turned its head slowly, cocking it to the side like an inquisitive puppy. The grin seemed to widen, and three white, wrinkled fingers groped around the edge of the doorway, stroking the stone wall.
"Are you scared, little boy?"
Somewhere far away, Tai was running, and Dokugumon was taking the bait. He had to act now, before she caught up, before it was too late.
TK slowly reached his hand into his pocket and closed his fingers around the solid handle of Izzy's knife. The balls of his feet found purchase in the sand and he tensed, blinking through a haze of adrenaline.
"I'm not a little boy," TK said. "And he is not a pig."
Tai was in the zone. He settled into a sprint, his breathing even, his feet barely touching the fine sand. He could hear Dokugumon behind him, rasping, her teeth clicking, but it was all falling away. All he had to do was reach the shelter between Plesiomon's firmly planted fins, and he would be safe.
He loved this rush, this fear. This shouldering of Agumon's burden. Being a part of the fight, being in the thick of it. The responsibility of leading his friends into danger…that was a horror he gladly spared the others from, but it didn't give him the release, the satisfaction, of jumping in with both eyes open. He pushed harder, his strides lengthened. Just a moment longer.
Shit," Matt hissed, leaping to his feet as Sora did the same beside him. "There's someone down there with TK. Do you see…"
But Sora's eyes were focused elsewhere. Matt turned to look at her and found her, one hand planted on the seat in front of her, thin frame straining forward as she looked off across the coliseum, past Tai and Dokugumon, past the raging battle between the Megas and the Champions, at the farthest wall. Matt opened his mouth to question her, but thought better of it and turned to look as well. And that was when they heard it.
That deep strangled roar shook hundred year old dust from the walls, and this time Tai understood. His feet stopped working, and he nearly pitched forward into the sand, but he caught himself somehow and stood, breathing painfully around a thick lump in his throat, as the past rushed forward and left him paralyzed on the battlefield.
"Skullgreymon?" Tai said numbly, and didn't hear Dokugumon's scream of triumph.
And as if in answer to Tai's quiet voice, the wall burst and crumbled around a stone door, and there he was, hatred rolling off of him in cold waves, a true monster, a monster Tai had the power to call forward. Tai closed his eyes against the bleached white bones. It can't be him it can't be him…
He opened his eyes.
"Agumon?" Tai whispered, and his knees went weak.
Matt watched all of the fight go out of Tai, watched Dokugumon bear down on him, watched as TK drew the knife from his pocket and held it out in front of him so it glinted in the sun, and realized, not for the first time, how casually they threw their lives around. His best friend, his little brother, the young woman he'd come to love…what were they doing here? He turned to Sora and hated the desperation in his voice when he said her name.
But he was ready.
"I've got TK," she said, her fingers closed tight around the walking stick. That hardness was back in her eyes. "Go."
Matt was barreling down the row of seats long before he had time to register any sort of fear. He took a flying leap and hit the sand hard enough to send little jolts of pain screaming up from the tips of his toes, but he didn't slow down. God, it was just like Tai to take everything on his own shoulders; to face the worst of the messes that came their way without anyone beside him.
It was just like him to forget that he wasn't alone anymore.
"Tai, you moron, get down!" Matt yelled, but Tai was frozen, staring into a pair of empty black sockets, looking for any spark of recognition.
And oh yes, Skullgreymon stared back.
"Tai, move!"
Magnadramon and Plesiomon surged forward to meet Skullgreymon as if on some silent command, and the chalky shriek of claws hitting bone raised the hair on the back of Matt's neck. He pushed his body harder, but he already knew he'd never make it in time. Dokugumon coiled and sprang, Skullgreymon loosed some kind of cannon fire, and the resulting explosion blinded Matt for several long seconds. When he had finally staggered upright and blinked the sand out of his eyes, Dokugumon was bent over something…someone…oh God…
TK dodged the lurching, grinning digimon, fighting a sudden and strange wave of nausea, and hit the sand, a wiry blonde blur, the knife a comforting weight against his palm. He skidded to his knees in front of the sticky cocoon of the soccer net and grabbed a fistful in his left hand, tearing and slashing with the knife until his hands were thick with the stuff. He held the gash he'd made wide open and realized he was yelling Patamon's name, but he fell silent at the sight of a pair of big, kind eyes, delicate orange paws, fluttering bat wings, and a very goofy smile.
"I thought I lost you again."
"I'm like a boomerang, I just keep coming back."
"Oh, Patamon," TK whispered hoarsely.
But the grin fell away from Patamon's face, and he surged forward. "TK, look out!"
TK spun just in time to see a white, hooked claw slashing down at-
Some hysterical part of Matt suddenly wished that he had time for a long-suffering sigh, or at the very least, a sarcastic remark. A why me, or a I told him I wasn't going to attack any more giant spiders with my bare hands would have sufficed, but he barely had time to realize what he intended to do before he leapt directly onto Dokugumon's creepily dry, smooth back and ripped out a handful of coarse hairs at the roots.
Dokugumon screamed and Matt stared down at the bouquet of hairs in his fist, horrified, before finding himself airborne for a long time, hitting the ground--his ankle made an awful, popping sound--and rolling a good ways to a painful stop.
"Christ," he muttered, disoriented, forcing his cramping fist to open. The black hairs fluttered to the ground and Matt turned, looking for Tai, and saw Dokugumon slash down brutally with a dripping fang. Tai yelled. Matt levered himself unsteadily to his feet, trying to keep weight off of his ankle (yes, ow, definitely a sprain) and went back for round two.
Sora let out a war cry that left TK startled and admiring, and swung the walking stuck into the grinning skull of his attacker without the slightest hesitation. The digimon's head rang like a gong, and he crumpled to one side, his white fingers clutching at sand.
We have to stop meeting like this," TK said flippantly, though his eyes were a little wide, and his breath was coming fast and panicked.
"It's really not my fault you need so much rescuing…" Sora said, and Patamon stepped into the light.
"Can you digivolve?" TK asked.
Patamon grinned.
Matt wasn't sure what he'd been planning on doing once he caught hold of Dokugumon's eyelid, but he figured hold on was a good enough plan, so that's what he did. He was vaguely aware that Tai had gone awfully quiet. Odd…he'd have expected the reckless hothead to draw attention back to himself. This was…uncharacteristic. Matt was also thinking that being swung around by an enraged spider was not the worst thing that had ever happened to him, though he didn't necessarily want to make a habit of it. It was kind-of like a…Tilt-O-Whirl. He was getting light-headed now, and something was telling him to let go. Perhaps his better judgment was having its say or…no…that was Sora. She was screaming at him to--
"Matt, let go!"
He did.
"Hand of Fate!"
Matt tucked, rolled, and then lay gasping on the sand. The world went grey, and then came back into almost-focus, but it was hard to make anything out through all of the black spots dancing in front of his eyes. If he wasn't so sure he had a head injury, he would have sworn he saw Angemon in the sky, hovering there like his own personal guardian angel.
And good thing too, because apparently, in a fight between two Digidestined and one very angry Dokugumon…the spider wins.
Dokugumon hissed and staggered on a few damaged legs, trying to make a run for it, but no matter where she turned, the dark shadow of Angemon was waiting for her. She forgot Tai and left him unguarded, making a pained, groaning sound with each uneven step, crossing the sand at a crawl.
Matt shook his head forcefully and came back to his senses enough to scramble to Tai's side, and found him pale and unconscious, bleeding alarmingly from a gash in one arm. Typical. Trouble magnet.
"Wake up, Tai."
He put a hand on Tai's uninjured arm and shook him lightly. "Hey, wake up."
"M'fine," Tai mumbled. "Knock it off."
"Great, asshole," Matt said, closing his eyes against the painful wave of relief, and rocking back to sit down heavily in the sand. "Next time, when I tell you get down, hit the dirt, got it?"
Tai smiled. "You're the boss."
A muted thunderclap echoed off the coliseum walls, and a wave of warm air ruffled their hair. Matt and Tai both looked at the sky, searching for the source of the sound, and the bright gold outline of the crest of hope warmed them like the sun, flooding every corner of the battlefield with light.
"Nice!" Matt called, and Tai turned gingerly to follow his gaze. Sora and TK were running up to join them.
"I do what I can," TK said, jogging to a stop, and nodding at the newly digiolved MagnaAngemon in greeting. The angel gave him a long, solemn glance, and then spun, spreading his massive wings, and carved a circle in the air with his sword. "Gate of Destiny!"
And that was how Dokugumon checked out.
By the time MagnaAngemon had strolled up casually to stand over TK, who suddenly looked very small, Matt had gotten an arm around Tai and eased him carefully into a sitting position. Tai looked positively green, and his eyes were shut tight with the effort of holding on to consciousness.
"I'm fine, really," he muttered, and Sora rolled her eyes at Matt as she tied a scrap of fabric tightly around the gash. It bled through immediately, but until they met up with Joe, there wasn't much she could do. He had all of their supplies. She smoothed Tai's hair back from his forehead and frowned at the heat radiating from his skin.
"Tai, I'm going to hand you over to MagnaAngemon," Matt said, glancing up at the angel, who nodded once. "He's going to get you out of here. We'll meet up with you as soon as-"
But Tai shot suddenly to his feet, and Matt barely managed to catch him before he toppled over again.
"Skullgreymon!" Tai gasped.
Kari and Joe's partners had made short work of the Champion army. The virus-born digimon were strong, but not strong enough for two Megas. Whatever Champions hadn't already made a frantic retreat were hovering at the edges of the arena, looking torn between running for their lives and staying to watch. Magnadramon and Plesiomon clearly had the upper hand. Skullgreymon didn't have a chance, but he was a berserker, and self-preservation didn't factor in. They had him backed into a corner, and Magnadramon looked up at Kari, hesitating. Skullgreymon roared.
"Wait, no!" Tai called, but Kari nodded her permission and Magnadramon lunged.
Sora grabbed Tai by the shoulders, forcing him to look her in the eyes.
"It's not him, Tai," she said quietly as Skullgreymon shattered behind her. Tai took a deep, shuddering breath at the sound.
"I promise you, Tai. That wasn't Agumon."
The dust settled, and the last few Champions faded silently into the shadows in a final retreat. Gatomon and Gomamon reappeared and Joe came running across the sand to Tai, who sat down hard before Matt could catch him. Gatomon leapt into MagnaAngemon's arms, and he held her while she purred. Kari was the last to rejoin the group, and by the time she had ghosted her way to TK's side, Joe had finished with Tai and moved on to Matt's ankle.
Tai and Kari looked at each other quietly, and for the first time, Tai felt like there was an unfathomable distance between them. He looked for some kind of apology in her eyes, but all he saw was quiet confidence.
"Kari…Kari what if that was him?" he said quietly, but everyone heard.
"It wasn't," she said.
"You can't know that," Tai said, his voice rough with emotion. "I know all of this power must make you feel like you're infallible, Kari, but you're not. You can't just jump in like that, make decisions like that! You're not the only one who…who…"
Kari looked away, and Sora reached for Tai, but that was when they heard Mimi scream, and Izzy's panicked yell for help, and after that, a lot of things changed.