A/N: I got tired waiting for Kiriha, so... Kiriha. It also gave me an excuse to nudge the timeline along, because it will need to slow down soon enough anyway.

Prompt for this chapter is #6 - pack.

Dripping Water
Chapter 7 - google searches (Kiriha)

It had been over a week, and Kiriha was surprised to discover that he couldn't find Xros Heart at all. He'd expected them to leave a trail of breadcrumbs like they had in the digital world, but instead they'd either slotted seamlessly back into their old lives or they were playing the caution card and lying low.

And Taiki might be clever, but not overly cautious. Oh, he cared about the lives about his army to the point of foolishness, but he wasn't the type to hide and strike from the shadows. The agenda he chased – his purpose for leading the army and fighting for the Code Crown – would not allow such a covert operation.

So what? He was putting the digital world on hold and chasing after other frivolous things? That didn't sound like him either. Not that Kiriha could claim to know Taiki very well. They only ever met on the battlefield. But, on the battlefield, one developed an understanding of their opponent like they couldn't elsewhere.

So if Taiki was doing something instead of finding the fastest way back to the digital world, he either knew something Kiriha didn't or he was doing something he felt was more important. Or both.

And Kiriha wondered if that something else had anything to do with his two tagalongs: the humans who weren't Generals but still tried to make themselves useful because they were just as tangled up in the fate of another world as the rest of them.

If it had been Kiriha, he'd have built his own army with or without a digivice. He wouldn't have hung around standing under somebody else's umbrella. And no-one would do that for him, either. He had older brothers that could have, that should have – but they didn't. He was on his own. And that suited him just fine nowadays.

But when Taiki had the other half of what had gotten them to the human world in the first place… He had no choice but to look for him, since Taiki didn't seem to be trying it the other way. Though that might have been an easier task with Nene and her Monitormon. Or a Datamon, but he'd never picked one of those up. His army was built for power, all in all, and now was one of those times where he needed something else.

He sighed. Though it wasn't like power-houses were completely useless when it came to the more covert operations. MailBirdramon could fly, at least, and he had a few other fliers. They could hide in the clouds and scan the waves of faces that looked so similar to them, to find the three familiar ones.

Greymon was too conspicuous without the ability to fly and hide in the clouds, so he stayed in the Xros Loader.

Kiriha, meanwhile, combed the internet. Frustratingly, most of the results gave a singer in Da-ICE with the same name. And he didn't know enough about the Kudou Taiki that was Xros Heart's General to be able to limit that search.

And so he searched through pages and pages of results before he found other Kudou Taikis – and he was surprised at how common the name was. Not ridiculously common, but enough so that he hadn't stumbled across the right Taiki at all until he found the results of a district-wide track meet. That one had a picture that was mistakenly a younger Taiki… but all it really served to do was narrow down the district. Taiki wasn't in elementary school anymore, and that was assuming he hadn't moved to another area.

Still, Kiriha kept combing – and his digimon that were capable of flight continued combing the city from the skies.

If he could just find the name of the middle school, he could find Taiki… assuming he was going back to school. He probably was. Exams were next week and Kiriha was well aware of that. He should have been preparing for his own, but there were other things to do. More important things. Things that would decide his future in a way getting good grades at school wouldn't. But there were so many more results to filter through…

He tried new keywords. Track. Sports. That helped, and the right Taiki popped up more often. Taiki in track. Taiki in kendo. Taiki in basketball. Taiki in, essentially, every sport under the sun. And, with the more recent ones, he managed to find Taiki's middle school.

He found a few other things, as well. And it was curiosity that made him read those articles more thoroughly – or so he'd argue with himself. Just curiosity: a need to further understand his rival and his opponent on the battlefield.

He looked up Amano Nene for the same reason. Two Generals he was fighting against, that he needed to be victorious against. And both of them had skeletons in the proverbial closet. Both of them had things dragged onto the internet: a place where there was little privacy if someone looked deeply enough.

Though the digital world was too far removed for even that, apparently. Amano Nene and her little sister had disappeared some years ago, and there hadn't been a drop of information since.

Kiriha stared at that. He'd been gone for two months, himself, and it was his school that had raised the fuss. But missing children posters didn't stay in someone's attention for very long. No-one had reported him yet. No-one had noticed he wasn't missing anymore, and they probably wouldn't unless he went back to school or someone noticed his should-be empty apartment was inhabited again. He avoided his usual shopping outlets as well, because he knew he'd be going back to the digital world soon enough and it was far simpler to not deal with his "disappearance".

Still, two months was nothing when compared to years. And Amano Nene had been alone in the digital world, so where was her little sister? Orphaned as well – and Kiriha might have wondered if Taiki was an orphan too to round off the set, except a few of the newspaper articles mentioned his father being a well-known sports trainer that travelled all through Tokyo.

And then there was Kudou Taiki, sports boy extraordinaire who dabbled in different things but didn't seem to stick to any one in particular after dropping track in elementary school. And Kiriha had stumbled on the potential reason before he'd found the middle school name.

A classmate and club mate, confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life after an incident on the track revealed a hidden monster. Unfortunate for the kid who'd dreamed of competing in the Olympics one day. Unfortunate for the rest of the track members who'd been shooting for similar goals – or hadn't – to be faced with the cruel dream-enders they thought only adults saw.

Well, Kiriha couldn't pity really pity him. Dreams were intangible things and who knew what Taiki's dream had been, anyway. And friends weren't the same as family, wasn't the same as losing family, or being abandoned by them, or being kept at arm's length and so removed that barely anyone knew their invisible guardians were blood related. He could sympathise with the Amano siblings that way, but Kudou Taiki… He couldn't sympathise with Taiki. That little tidbit of his past may not even have anything to do with the person he was now.

He thought it did, though. Maybe it was instinct. Maybe it was because that was the only sordid detail of his past he'd found, amidst a slew of achievements. Maybe it was because the Kudou Taiki he'd gotten to know on the battlefield always seemed to take the limits of people and digimon into account. They all had their roles, and sometimes they pushed beyond their comfort zones (he remembered Zenjirou's pale face clinging to a stalk) but it was never anything they couldn't do and, as far as he could tell, Taiki had never lost a member of Xros Heart.

Both Kiriha and Nene had sacrificed members of their army for the greater good. He knew that for a fact. Was Taiki's reluctance simply kindness or was there something more to it? Because he could easily imagine Taiki hoarding every friend he found, every person (and digimon) he got to know, trying to make all their dreams come true because he'd seem somebody else's fall through…

MailBirdramon's shadow fell over him. 'I've found them,' he rumbled, when Kiriha logged out of the computer and climbed onto the roof.

'Finally,' Kiriha replied, and climbed further, over the rails and onto MailBirdramon's back. 'I got tired reading about that idiot, you know.'

'If you say so, Kiriha.' But MailBirdramon sounded amused.

At least he respected him enough to not call him out on the obvious lie. Because Kudou Taiki was far from an idiot, even if he was naïve. And he was far from boring, either.

Kiriha would have already figured him out if he were. He, and Amano Nene as well.