Digimon Fan Fiction ❯ Pins and Needles ❯ Prelude ( Chapter 1 )

DISCLAIMER: Digimon Adventure 02 belongs to Toei Animation, TokyoPop, and, to a lesser extent, Saban. I own nothing but this story and the few original characters or elements I've created here and there. An example would be the Black Matter. You don't have to email me for permission if you want to use any of this shiznit, but I'd appreciate a nod of acknowledgment somewhere. >D

A/N: Neo!Kaizer. Something I'm writing for myself and no one else, though I hope there are enough people out there like me to enjoy the ride. ^_~ Because I like taito and kenato equally, I'm not entirely sure how this will end up...but I'd wager more on kenato because I've already written several taito fanfics. Besides, Ken's going to end up very depressed otherwise. >D But because of this, there will almost certainly be some taito elements -- so this isn't one of the fics that bashes it just because Yamato's with someone else at the moment. ^.^ That said, at this moment there is no yaoi content in this fic to speak of -- and I don't think that's going to change for several chapters. I want to do this reasonably, realistically, and that will take some time.

TIMELINE: The year is 2006, four years after the second series. This makes Jyou nineteen; Taichi, Yamato, and Sora eighteen; Koushirou and Mimi seventeen; Miyako sixteen; Daisuke, Takeru, Hikari, and Ken fifteen; and Iori fourteen. It incorporates the events of Episode 50, where every child in the world got a digimon of his or her very own.

It was cold.

Of all the thoughts that should have been in his head -- that needed to be there -- that was the only one Yamato could seem to hear anymore. He couldn't feel his feet. He remembered buying a pair of sleek black leather boots because he liked the look of them and thought they would go with everything he wore. Black was a neutral color. It never clashed, not with anything. Black shoes would save him time getting dressed in the morning.

He had never even considered wearing them in a blizzard. They were ankle boots, really, though Yamato didn't like the term; it made them sound feminine when they weren't. Not that that mattered right now. He wasn't quite sure what did matter, but then the creeping aching cold in his feet reminded him. Right -- the important thing about the boots was that they weren't waterproof and did a poor job of keeping the snow out of his socks. At least he wasn't wearing shorts. Yamato never really wore shorts if he could help it. They looked odd on him.

What was he doing outside? He wanted to be indoors somewhere, with a warm blanket and a hot cup of tea. A good book. An internet connection. Yamato didn't like the cold. He liked it even less when he wasn't dressed for it, and he wasn't dressed for it now. Surely he had a good reason for being knee-deep in snow wearing nothing warmer than his school uniform. If only he could remember what it was.

Intellectually, Yamato knew in some small corner of his mind that he was freezing to death. That was why he couldn't remember what he was doing out in the snow with a thin jacket and a pair of very stylish black boots that did nothing whatever to keep his feet warm. He needed to get somewhere warm, and fast. The only problem with that was that, looking around, he couldn't see anywhere warm. Partially this was due to the aforementioned blizzard, which was severely hampering visibility -- but mostly, Yamato thought, it had to do with being in the middle of a frozen wasteland.

Maybe he should slow down and try to sort things out. Had he come here with someone else? Should he wait, perhaps, for them to find him? Except that he was being chased, Yamato remembered. He had to keep running.

Who was chasing him?

He didn't know. Maybe no one. Maybe his dying brain was imagining things. Running expended so much energy, especially in the snow. He was so tired already. Should have come with Taichi. Taichi would've kept him safe. Taichi was good at keeping people safe.

Only...

There was something niggling at the back of his mind. Yamato ground his teeth, immeasurably frustrated. He couldn't make himself focus. It was hard enough to just keep running. But he thought something might have happened to Taichi. Something he couldn't remember right now. Why was he running? He hated exercise. Taichi was always teasing him about it, asking why he didn't leap at the chance to run around. The thought made him grin, just a little. How did you explain to someone energetic like Taichi that you didn't see the point?

Then again, he was also one of what Mimi called 'those annoyingly thin people' who didn't really have to do anything to stay in shape. It would probably fade when he hit forty or so, but forty was centuries off. Yamato figured he'd start exercising before then, preferably beating the clock by mere seconds.

Yet, despite this hatred for all things athletic, he was running. That simple fact startled Yamato, and he slowed down very slightly -- remembering, with the irony of an amnesiac, that it strained the heart less to ease off instead of quitting cold turkey -- and wondering at the same time why he was running. His lungs hurt, more than they should have even with the icy air rasping his throat. How long had he been running? It felt like ten minutes, nonstop. Maybe more. Ten minutes of sloughing through the snow and trying desperately to escape from something. But what?

Funny. The answer didn't seem to matter that much anymore. Yamato had asked himself these questions before, and each time he cared a little less when he realized he wasn't quite sure. Tired. He was so very, very tired. And cold, though the cold was fading. Everything fading. Maybe he would just lie down for a little while...

Yamato fell to his knees. He hadn't meant to do that, and he felt a surge of panic, but it was very distant panic. Not enough to make him stand up again when all he wanted to do was close his eyes and sleep. Sleeping was dangerous when you were freezing to death, but he only needed a few minutes of rest. Then he could force himself to his weary feet and trudge on.

Or maybe he would make a snow angel first. It hadn't gotten cold enough the last few years for proper snow, and Yamato missed playing in it. He couldn't remember the last time he had actually played in the snow instead of just hovering over Takeru's shoulder worriedly. But then, he was having trouble remembering much of anything right now.

His eyes slipped shut.

The Digimon Kaizer smirked faintly. For a few seconds, he had actually allowed himself to briefly entertain the possibility of failure -- or rather, of a less than perfect victory, which was tantamount to the same thing. Six of one, half a dozen of the other. They had caught him unawares, his old friends. It was an embarrassing oversight, to have expected their arrival but not this soon. He had all of his security measures in order, he had selected the perfect digimon to pit against their combined might...but all of his careful planning was for naught, because he had underestimated Daisuke.

Not a mistake he would be making twice.

Fortunately, it hadn't spoilt things as badly as it might have. He had located and captured the Gokumon only the night before, and when the perimeter alarms started going off, there wasn't time to test his allegiance. Ken didn't like running his operation that way, especially with creatures as powerful and potentially unpredictable as this one, but if there were holes in his control, the Gokumon must have liked its marching orders, because it had fulfilled them to the very letter. When they awoke, Agumon and Gabumon would doubtless be in a great deal of pain. It had been years since they had devolved to their Child states.

The only thing left now was the cleanup. With a complicated-seeming hand gesture, Ken brought up a visi-screen displaying the injured Yagami-kun. He hadn't come quietly, it seemed. How very like the dark-haired young man to fight his capture barehanded. Even against a simple Adult-level like Stingmon, such conduct was very ill-advised. Yagami-kun looked angry. He was pacing his cell like a lion in a cage. Discussions would be pointless until he calmed down some. The Digimon Kaizer decided to leave him be for the moment.

There had been the small matter of Ishida-kun still to deal with, but now that he had collapsed, Ken felt that things were finally back on track. Ishida-kun's escape attempt had been almost as unexpected as his and Yagami-kun's appearance in the first place -- although not so much in the timing this time as in the perpetrator. Surely, Ken had thought, between the two of them, the former Keeper of Courage would be the more difficult to subdue. Even Daisuke had spotted ages ago that Courage was simply a stronger energy than Friendship. But he was not Daisuke, and he should have known better; Ishida-kun's mind was the one fraught with paranoia, and as a result his eyes had been the sharper, his body the more poised for flight.

On the other hand, one could also argue that Yagami-kun had not wanted to run. Eighteen years old, and he still preferred to solve most of his problems head-on -- physically, if such a thing could be arranged. With or without his partner digimon, he wouldn't have liked the idea of running away. He might even have thought it cowardly.

Did he now consider Ishida-kun such a coward?

Possibly -- and if he didn't, he might could be made to. It was worth thinking about, Ken decided. Anything to drive his old friends apart, especially the oh-so-powerful Jogress pairs. Divide and conquer.

That was why he had spent the last few months gathering his power in seclusion, instead of gallivanting around with a whip in one hand and a fistful of bloody digimon in the other. Word would have traveled from one herd to another, all the way to Gennai's ears, and then he would have arranged a taskforce and informed his pet soldiers of their enemy. The Digimon Kaizer couldn't have that, not so soon. The final phase of his plan relied heavily on the element of surprise -- and throughout, the chance that his old friends might hesitate in battle considerably upped the odds of overall success.

And Ken did so want to succeed this time. The school counselor had told him that setting reasonable goals and achieving them would do wonders for his self-esteem. Admittedly, complete dominion over the Digital World was setting his sights a little low, but you had to start somewhere -- and fulfilling a childhood dream had been another of Dr. Saionji's terribly enlightening suggestions. Perhaps the next time he had a mental breakdown, his parents would find someone eminently more qualified to help him deal with his 'stress'.

Out of the corner of one eye, Ken saw a flicker of movement from the visi-screen showing Ishida-kun's crumpled body. He gestured it closer, and was relieved to find that the movement had been from Stingmon and not his quarry. His partner digimon had finally reached the blond boy. It was about time; apart from any impatience, a few more minutes and not even Stingmon's infrared vision would have been able to locate Ishida-kun's body for all the snow.

>Target acquired.<

The Digimon Kaizer pressed his index finger to a small flat button in the lower-right hand corner of the visi-screen and laughed. "I can see that, Stingmon. Congratulations. You'll live to see another day. Bring him back here and place him in a holding cell." Ken hesitated. He didn't want Ishida-kun and Yagami-kun anywhere near one another, not just now. Where had Stingmon taken Yagami-kun?

>Any cell in particular?<

"I'm thinking," Ken snapped. Somehow, despite a thick collar of Black Matter, this particular Insect-type had retained his droll inflection. Comforting at times, but now was not one of them. "Third tier. If Yagami-kun is anywhere beneath the fifth, move him to the second. I'll be needing to speak with them both at least once a day for a while, and it would be nice if they were close at hand."

After a beat, he realized that he had given reasons for his orders without thinking about it. As though Stingmon deserved an explanation, or would even still understand one. He gave himself a small mental shake. Superiority, power, control -- they were all about mindset as much as anything else. Now was not the time to start forgetting himself in front of one of his minions. Especially not a minion that had once been a friend.

"And once you've done that," he added, "report to the Quiet Room. Forbidding you to speak without permission would be inefficient at best, but I cannot tolerate insubordination."

>Understood.<

Frowning, Ken leaned back in his chair. He would consider removing Stingmon's collar before the discipline commenced. Torture was simply no fun at all without screams or the occasional plead for mercy. A mind controlled by Black Matter was a mind held tightly in his closed fist, and their owners rarely so much as relieved themselves without permission. You could tell the weaker ones not to breathe, and they would die right there.

Of course, some digimon did have a natural immunity of sorts to the material -- mostly higher-level Holy-types -- but they were quickly identified and dealt with. It was the reason for his rigorous tests of any digimon he had never captured before. Tests where one member of the sub-species was slowly killed with a series of increasingly difficult commands to prove that it was not simply pretending in order to play spy. He hadn't found one yet, but the possibility existed, and a leak would be deadly.

After all, the resonating Black Matter was key to his system of communication -- one of the new toys he'd rigged up in the last few months. It was considerably more private and effect than a simple intercom, and he could transmit orders to minions on the other side of the Digital World as easily as those in the next room. Unfortunately, he hadn't yet devised a method of keeping the more local commands private; Black Matter sung loud and clear, so that even if he aimed a transmission at one collar, any others within range would pick it up second-hand. All it took was one digimon with a will of its own to carry every single one of his secrets back to his enemies.

It was for this reason that the Digimon Kaizer was so horribly thorough with those rare digimon on whom Black Matter had little to no effect. Simply killing them wasn't good enough, for history indicated that digimon retained a sometimes foggy memory of their past iterations -- even the ones dating back thousands of years. No, digimon with an immunity to Black Matter had to be completely and utterly eradicated. They had to be erased from the Digital World's core program, so that they would never be reborn in the Village of Beginning. He still had a great deal to learn about that core program, but he had already found a useful little trick that pulled the data of a specified digimon out of the reformat loop.

He supposed he should have felt some sort of guilt for the lost digimon, but a thing that could not be controlled simply had no value to him. No amount of sentimentality would change that fact. Besides, these creatures had cheated death for long enough. When the war began, and he could finally reveal his name and his modus operandi to the Digital World at large, perhaps they would even begin to lead fuller, richer lives as a result of learning that life is short, precious, and not to be thrown away without reason.

Ken might very well have meant that charitably. In the proper tone of voice and with an appropriately simpering smile on his face, he might have fooled even Stingmon into thinking so. If he closed his eyes and merely listened to himself speak, Ken might have even fooled himself. But the Digimon Kaizer was under no illusions about himself. Not any longer. He knew full well that the only reason he wanted those digimon to place more value on their fragile beating hearts was that it might possibly make them more reluctant to help the so-called Chosen Children.

And it was that knowledge that kept his eyes hard and cold no matter how sweetly he smiled.

End of Part One.