Y/N: Wow, so Nikko wasn't very likable in previous chapters, and I was meant to give a bit of insight to his character here. I hope you're able to understand him a little bit better, but keep in mind his parents are the rash Taichi and the impulsive Rei. He's bound to get into trouble on a regular basis.
Title: Here Comes Santa Claus
By: YukiraKing
Disclaimer: We don't own Digimon or its characters.
Chapter 10: Not Built In A Day
Nikko Yagami:
"So this might have been the worst idea you've ever had," Makoto said dryly. We were sitting on a dusty floor in a clay building. The ceilings were low, and there was a single window that allowed the deceptively cold night air to come through and chill us all to the bone. I had Koromon tucked into my t-shirt so that he could stay warm, but it wasn't helping me all that much.
Who knew Egypt ever got cold? Certainly not me.
"You're the one that went along with it," I reminded him. Elliot laughed, and Osamu just curled around Minomon and sighed. I felt really bad about what happened. It didn't do it on purpose. How was I supposed to know that we'd get thrown into prison? Wasn't everyone used to people just popping up out of the woodwork? Travelling between worlds was a common occurrence back at home. It honestly didn't occur to me to think that it wasn't something that happened all that often a thousand years ago.
"I don't want to die in the past," Chapmon cried from Elliot's lap.
"We're not going to die," I said firmly. "We're going to get out of here. I know we are."
"Tell me when you come up with a plan so we can ignore it, okay?" Osamu said bitterly. It was the angriest I had ever heard him. He didn't sound that angry, not like Mom when Pal and Pul taught me to do the laundry and we ended up nearly drowning in soap suds. But he didn't seem overly happy either.
"It was a good plan!" I insisted.
"Hurry, go," I urged Makoto, while Elliot distracted Mimi, having drawn the short straw. Osamu was chatting with Chika, which was what I wanted to be doing, but I didn't draw the right straw. I was on guard duty, to make sure Koushiro didn't show up and blow the whole thing.
"On it," Makoto said, as he snuck up the stairs and down the hallway. He was going into his parents' bedroom, where he was going to go into his mother's jewelry box and steal the key of Time. Mimi had been keeping it with her for forever. I knew, because I complained to Dad when I tricked him into giving me a tour of the Council Hall earlier that day, hoping to swipe the key then.
That one was a bust.
We couldn't afford to fail a second time. Osamu's voice was getting closer, and I straightened my shirt, just in case Chika came over, but Osamu was able to distract her by asking her about Egypt, which she was happy to fill him in on. That joy in her voice as she told him about pickling the insides of pharaohs was the reason we were doing this in the first place.
"Got it," Makoto called as he raced down the stairs. "ELLIOT! We're leaving."
"It was so nice to talk to you, Mimi," Elliot said happily. "We'll have to do it again sometime. You tell the greatest stories of my dad when he was my age."
"I probably shouldn't have told you all of that," Mimi realized, hearing the mischievous tone in his voice. "Get back here Elliot. You can't leave until you promise not to tell Michael!"
"I can't really promise that, Mimi," Elliot said with a laugh, as he raced towards the front door. Osamu trailed behind him, with a sticker of a pyramid on his forehead. I snickered, and he sighed.
"Don't ask," he pleaded. We didn't have time to, anyway. We just grabbed our partners, and raced outside, and around the house, towards the backyard. No one would suspect us of being there, so it was the perfect place. Mimi thought we were going to be at my house, my parents thought we'd be at the Ichijouji's place, Osamu told his mom we were going to America to stay at Elliot's, and Elliot told his folks we'd be at Mimi's. We couldn't include Hiro, because he was grounded, which sucked, but we couldn't keep putting it off. With any luck, they wouldn't even be looking for us until tomorrow—if it even took that long.
We climbed up the ladder into Makoto's old tree house—something his dad and Kiyoko had thrown together, which meant it was way too cool to not be a club house—and sat in a circle. Our digimon partners were in our laps and we looked to Makoto. "Ready?" he asked. He waited until we nodded, before he stuck the key into the air where it magically opened a door. When the door was opened, we were all sucked inside.
"No, the plan sucked," Elliot groaned. "We told our parents we wouldn't be back until tomorrow. None of them are going to be looking for us. This is the worst day of my life."
"What, it beats out the other day in the auditorium when you embarrassed Shouta so much that Aika practically declared eternal hatred for you?" Makoto asked with mock surprise.
"I didn't mean to embarrass him," Elliot said, sounding surprisingly sincere. "I thought I was helping."
"Remind me to not ask you for help," Makoto decided.
"Yeah, well, Aika still wants to be my friend, I know it," Elliot said. "It would be better if she could be my girlfriend too, but I know I can't have everything. Well, theoretically I know that anyway."
"You won't have any girlfriends if we die in this prison," Osamu said still curled up around Minomon. He looked genuinely scared, and now I didn't speak the language of the people that had thrown us in this cell, but I figured he actually had a reason to be scared.
"We're not going to die," Makoto said firmly. "I haven't convinced Aika to direct my play yet."
"I haven't gotten Aika on a date," Elliot added wistfully.
"Can we not talk about Aika?" I asked, wincing.
"You know, we should talk about Aika," Makoto said. "Because she's our friend, and we are really bad friends to her. We've ignored her for too long."
"She tried to decapitate me with a phone," I reminded them.
"Because you hurt her feelings," Osamu said, peeking up around his partner. "I'm not saying she didn't overreact, because I really think she did. But she had feelings and you hurt them."
"How was I supposed to know that?" I demanded. "We joke around all the time. We understand each other. We never hurt each other's feelings no matter how mean we get. Why was she any different?"
"Because she was your girlfriend," Elliot suggested.
"Barely," I said weakly. It was a bad defense, but we were just kids, and I was at a time in my life when I assumed having a girl as a friend meant you needed to be her boyfriend. I didn't actually have any real feelings for her. Not in that way anyway. And by the time I realized that, I was kind of head over heels for another girl. I broke it off with Aika for her, and suddenly I'm the bad guy. That didn't make any sense to me.
It didn't help that I was legitimately afraid of her.
"If you're not going to be friends with her then whatever," Makoto decided suddenly, "but don't get mad at me when I try to offer up that olive branch. Okay? I'm sick of avoiding her. I miss having her around."
"You're not getting feelings for my girl, are you?" Elliot asked, narrowing his eyes at Makoto.
"Please, I'm too dedicated to the theatre to have any time for girls," Makoto said crinkling his nose in distaste. He was completely fooling himself. Or maybe he just wasn't interested. I wasn't sure. We never really talked about that. Mostly, because I was kinda half in love with his sister, and if we talked about feelings we'd have to talk about that, and he mostly just looked like he either wanted to punch me, or wanted to throw up any time I mentioned it.
But I couldn't help it. I really liked her. She was so fun and wild and random. She always had me on my toes. I could never keep up with her, but it as a challenge that I liked to try to figure it out—to figure her out. She was like sunshine. I just liked to be around her. I didn't often get the chance though, since she was best friends with Aika, and that practically screamed danger, and Makoto would rather skewer me alive than leave me alone with her.
I wasn't that untrustworthy.
"I don't know if Chika was worth all this, man," Elliot said with a sigh, leaning back against the wall while Chapmon tried to suck all of the warmth he might've collected.
"Shut up," Makoto said defensively. "Chika is totally worth dying for."
"But a present isn't," Tanemon protested.
"No," Makoto agreed after a moment. "Dying for a present is stupid. We should've have come."
"It's totally the best present ever, or you know, it would be, if I'd found something," I said defensively. "We can find something in the morning."
"No, we can just go home now," Elliot protested. "Going home sounds like a ton of fun to me right now. I don't even care if I get grounded. I just don't want to die."
"I don't want it to be a wasted trip," I whined. Yep. I whined. "Chika really likes ancient Egypt. It can't be too much trouble to find something. When the sun comes up, we'll just get out of here, and grab the first Egyptian looking artifact and get the heck out of this time period."
"You're assuming they're not going to kill us upon first light," Osamu said, rather depressingly. I think I liked it better when he wasn't voicing his opinions, because he as being a real downer. I needed someone that could think positively. I mean, I was the bearer of hope, but it was no fun doing that all by myself. I wanted someone to help me. Uncle Takeru always had Aunt Hikari at his side to help him keep finding reasons to keep hoping.
My friends weren't really helping me with that.
"I'll get you outta here," Koromon promised, from within my shirt. He was talking against my stomach and it tickled like crazy. But at least his breath was warm.
"That's the spirit," I said brightly. "You guys can all go to sleep. I'll wake you when I see the sun, and then we'll be able to stage a break out. Think of how cool this story is going to be. I'm sure it'll impress anybody."
"Not Kaoru," Makoto grumbled, flopping over on his back and groaning when the dust flew up around him. "Nothing impresses her. She'd just laugh at us getting arrested."
"We weren't arrested though," Chapmon pointed out.
"They just grabbed us and threw us in here," Minnowmon agreed.
"They don't even have just cause," Tanemon sighed.
"Well, I mean, we did kind of just pop out of thin air," I said sheepishly. "They're probably not used to that. And really, we did kind of make a commotion."
"Okay, well this is hotter than anticipated," I said, when we'd passed through the Tunnel of Time and landed in ancient Egypt. The sun was beating heavily down on us, and only Elliot had thought to bring sunglasses. He fixed them on little Chapmon's face, and squinted as he looked around us.
"Aren't the pyramids meant to be like...huge?" he asked.
"Yeah," Makoto agreed. "Where are they? It's not like we could just misplace them."
"I think we're on one," Tanemon called, as he wandered over the rocks we were standing on. There were men dressed in rags that were dragging a large rock up onto the others. They spotted us, and stopped what they were doing. They pointed and shouted.
"No autographs, please," Makoto joked.
"I don't think that's what they're after," I said worriedly. "We should probably not be here."
"Anywhere else sounds good, yes," Koromon agreed. I bent down to pick him up, and the others grabbed their partners too. "How do we get down?"
"We might need to jump," Elliot declared.
"You're joking, right?" Chapmon demanded.
"It's the only way," Elliot said, sounding confident.
"It's thirty feet!" Osamu gasped.
"It's imp-possible," Minnowmon said anxiously.
"It's too late," Makoto grumbled, as the men ran forward and grabbed us roughly. They dragged us down off of the structure, and I could see that it wasn't even close to being a completed pyramid. That stupid key had brought us back too far!
They'd dragged us over to this crappy little hut that was probably the worst building I'd ever been in. Yeah, they had the excuse of being a part of an ancient civilization that knew nothing about our modern architecture, but really, who used dirt to make a house? My house back home had been made on a computer program by Kiyoko. All he had to do was press the enter key on his laptop and presto, Dad had a house. It was amazing.
I was also probably oversimplifying the process, but I'd never actually sat down to give it a go, so I wasn't exactly sure.
Everyone was lying on the dirt. Osamu and Minnowmon were curled in a tight ball, rocking back and forth as they tried to find some sort of comfort in this dire situation. Elliot and Makoto had unconsciously drifted towards each other, and were feeding off of each other's warmth, while Chapmon and Tanemon tried to burrow into Makoto's sweater. I sighed, remembering how we'd made fun of him for wearing his orange sweater even to the dessert under the hot summer sun.
He'd really shown us.
I could hear Koromon snoring in my shirt, and at some point or another, I guess I was lulled to sleep by it, because I couldn't remember the sun coming up, and when I opened my eyes all three of my human friends, and all four of the digimon were glaring at me like I'd done something wrong.
"You were supposed to wake us up with the sun," Makoto hissed.
"Those mean guys came back and we screamed until they left," Elliot said. "We weren't sure what they wanted to do, but Koromon scared them away with a Bubble Blow."
"Thanks buddy," I said, rubbing his head—which was really his whole body. It was weird to think that way, but my head was still in that weird stage where it was halfway asleep, and I wasn't sure anything was making any sense.
"You said you had a plan," Osamu prompted me.
"Right," I said. "Are there any guards at the door?"
"Yeah, two little guys, why?" Makoto said, peeking out of the door. I didn't answer. Instead, I just walked out of the door. The two guys jumped to their feet and reached for what I could only suppose were weapons, but instead of just letting them—because that would be ridiculously stupid—I ran at the closest one and tackled him to the ground. Koromon was the brave friend that actually followed me out of the hut and he cast a Bubble Blow on the other guy, freaking him out. It would've been hilarious, if, you know, the guy hadn't actually grabbed his weapon, and Koromon wasn't in actual danger.
So my plans weren't great.
"C'mon guys," I called hastily. I made sure the guy I'd tackled was still down, and the others just sort of toppled out of the hut, and we all started running. Makoto was pulling the key out of his pocket, but I ran faster, so that he couldn't accidentally take me with him. I wasn't going back home until I found something that I could use as a present for Chika. I raced through a small collection of huts, where people were making little artifacts to put inside the pyramid whenever they got around to finishing it.
I got an idea, and I headed to one of the least trafficked huts, and looked over their collection. There were a few talismans which were kind of cool, I guessed, but Chika already had a necklace made out of corks that she wore all the time, and I didn't want her to think I didn't like it.
"What are you doing?" Elliot asked sharply by the time they caught up to me. Koromon hopped around at his feet, huffing and puffing because of how fast he'd had to move in order to keep up. I felt bad instantly, and held my hands out for him to jump up. He did so gratefully, and I looked to Elliot. It was obvious what I was doing.
"What we came here to do," I pointed out. "Do you think she'd want a cat statue?"
"Just get her this Canopic Jar and call it a day," Osamu said. "She was talking about them. She thinks they're fascinating."
"Great," I said with a cheery grin. "At least someone cares about my mission."
"Awesome," Makoto said unenthusiastically, bringing up the rear, having chosen to walk quickly, rather than run. "Those guys are coming now though, and we need to get out of here."
"Do you have any money?" I asked hastily.
"Yeah," Makoto said sarcastically. "I happen to carry ancient Egyptian currency on me. Oh wait, I must've left them in my other pants."
"Sorry," I said, looking around helplessly.
"Just take it and let's go," Elliot said impatiently. Osamu looked to the woman that was making the jars out of clay and pointed to a nice looking one, and then pointed at the rest of us. She nodded quickly, looking at us with wide, terrified eyes. I realized that they were scared of us. I supposed we must've looked rather strange to them. Not only were we from a region of the world they might not have known about yet—I didn't exactly pay attention in history class—but we were also from the future.
"Thank you," Osamu told the woman as he took the jar, which kind of looked more like a vase to me, but I figured he knew what he was talking about, since he'd had the honour of having Chika's company.
"Now can we get out of here?" Makoto asked, looking over his shoulder impatiently. He let out an involuntary yelp and stuck the key into the air, opening the gateway. We were sucked into it quickly, and he slammed the door behind us, just before those guys could catch up to us. They looked really mad that we escaped.
I was happy though. I had what I'd come for. It was a little plain, just being made of clay and all, but it was an authentic ancient Egyptian artifact, and it had this nice newness to it that most others of its kind didn't have. Chika could really appreciate the work they put into it, instead of just guessing how old it was.
"That was the scariest thing ever," Chapmon said solemnly.
"Let's never do it again," Tanemon agreed.
"How did Mom and Dad deal with stuff like that when they were ten? They were practically babies. That's crazy, is what it is. I'm so glad we got out of all of that," Makoto said, but I couldn't ignore the obvious glare he was sending my way.
"What we need to do is come up with a really cool story that makes us sound a lot braver than we actually were," I decided. "There's no point telling anyone if they're just going to make fun of us."
"Aren't we going to get grounded if we tell anyone though?" Koromon asked me.
"Probably," I decided. "But it'll be worth it."
"It's got to be worth something," Makoto said. "We nearly died."
"I think that's a little bit of an exaggeration," Elliot said, rolling his eyes.
"I don't think I want to brag about this," Minomon said softly.
"I want to forget it ever happened," Osamu said to himself. But I heard him. I probably wasn't supposed to though, since he looked embarrassed.
"At least we got what we came for," Tanemon said, looking up at the jar I held in my hands. I looked down at it too, and wrinkled my nose.
"What's this jar even for, anyway?" I asked Osamu.
"Chika said they used them to put body parts in," he said with a shrug.
"Gross!" was the general consensus.
"I'mma fill it with candy hearts," I decided, as we walked through the Tunnel of Time. When the world flashed around us this time, we found ourselves back in Makoto's tree house. The sun was high in the sky. We made it before bedtime. Excellent!
We climbed down the ladder carefully, passing the jar down as gently as possible, and Makoto led us through the backdoor of the house. "Hey Mom, I'm back!" he called loudly. Mimi came out of the kitchen and looked to us with a furrowed brow.
"But you just left ," she said, sounding confused.
"Right," he said, looking back to us. I shrugged my shoulders, trying to keep the jar hidden behind Osamu's back so that Mimi couldn't see it. I guess the Time key decided we needed to come back right away, instead of tomorrow. I didn't really understand time travel. I was pretty sure I really didn't want to anyway. "Well, we decided to cancel those plans, I guess."
"Oh, well, I better get more on for dinner then," she said simply. There was a glint in her eye though, and I could've sworn she saw the key that Makoto was trying to hide with his shirt sleeve. I didn't stick around to find out though. Makoto led me through the house, making sure that Chika wasn't around, and sent me back to the Temple using the computer in his room. I needed to get this jar home and to come up with an excuse as to why I wasn't staying over with the guys after all.
But it didn't matter, because I'd gotten the perfect gift. I couldn't wait to see her face when she got it!
Featured Evolution Line: Nikko: Botamon—Koromon—Shoutmon—Tyrannomon—Megadramon—Dorbickmon