Chapter 14
Tai snapped his head up.
"Did you guys hear something?" he asked.
It seemed it was true, what he had read about in science class, as much as he hated to admit it...when the class had read the chapters in human psychology--not that he understood most of what the professor had been talking about...one thing did stick out in his mind--one chapter had dealt solely with the senses and how, when one was lost, the other four had a tendency to compensate for it. He hadn't really believed it them, how the deaf often had an acutely keen sense of smell, or the blind being able to hear better than those blessed with sight. But he believed it now, oh how he did.
And he despised it.
He frowned, trying to perhaps find the source of the noise...turning his head in an effort to pinpoint the location of the sudden sound. The others watched, their faces clouded by worry and anxiety. They all were seated against the wall now, their backs up against the cool stone. Agumon sat silent beside Tai, staring down at his claws and feeling useless. What good was a digimon, he wondered, who couldn't even help his human regain his sight? Even though Agumon knew that the blindness wasn't his fault, he still felt rather responsible for it, as if he should have been able to protect Tai from Kurarimon's nightmares. Gatomon, in the mean time, had been pacing incessantly, worried sick by Kari's disappearance. She was furious. Furious at herself, anyway...why hadn't she run after Kari? Oh, sure, the passageways were dark and winding, forbiddingly dangerous and all that... Gatomon sighed. So she should have followed Kari, to protect her, to make certain she was okay, to ensure that whatever might be lurking in those shadowy corridors didn't harm her. Why, oh why had she hesitated? She would never be able to forgive herself if something were to happen to Kari...
Sora looked at Tai, and cocked her head to the side.
"I didn't hear anything, Tai," she said slowly.
"Me, either," Agumon added.
Tai scowled.
"I was sure I--"
"Wait, hush!" Gatomon hissed, rotating her large ears. "I think...I think I...hear a..."
Tai leapt to his feet, not even waiting for Gatomon to finish her sentence.
"Kari!?" he cried.
Yamato quickly stood, and then hurried to the spot where the light met the shadows, trying to peer past the darkness, in search of the lost Digidestined child. The others waited in tense silence to see who...or what...it was.
They all gasped sharply when Yamato let out a shocked cry.
"Who is it?" Gabumon asked, ready to attack if it came to that.
"Is it Kari?" Tai demanded, anxious, clenching his hands.
Yamato's expression turned from that of shock to an angry glare as he stared into the darkness of the shadows. He stepped back cautiously, and curled his lip up in fury and disgust.
"You..." he growled into the blackness. "You've got a lot of nerve showing your face here, Pipermon." He bared his teeth as she stepped slowly into the light.
A cry of surprise arose from the children at the very idea that Pipermon would have the gall to return to them now, after what she had done. Gatomon's claws flexed, and she flattened her ears against her head.
"What are you doing here, Pipermon?" she spat. "Come back to bask in the rays of your treacherous victory?"
Pipermon did not flinch at the feline's words, rather she just sadly shook her head.
"Iie," she said slowly, but her voice did not waver. "No, children, I didn't come here to gloat, or to brag...nor did I come here to ask the forgiveness I know you can never grant me..." She hesitated.
"Then what do you want?" Tai asked. His tone was neutral, there was no coldness to it. Somehow, Pipermon wished there HAD been...at least then she would have known what he was thinking.
"I simply came here to return to you a certain something I believe you may have recently been parted with..." she said, and stepped aside, "a one Miss Hikari-san..."
"Kari!"
Tai dropped to one knee and flung his arms out as a huge grin spread across Kari's face and she darted forward. When he felt her arms around his neck, he quickly wrapped her in a tight embrace, squeezing her until he was afraid he might break her in half.
"Kari--God, don't you EVER do that again, do you hear me??" he shouted, his eyes glazed with worried tears he had refused to cry. He buried his face in the hollow of his sister's shoulder. "Don't you ever run off like that again, Hikari Kamiya!" He lifted his head and slowly got to his feet, placing his hands on her shoulders as she took a step back. "Do you have any idea what I would do if anything ever happened to you, Kari?" he cried. "Do you know what it would do to me if I ever lost you? Cuz I certainly don't...I don't even want to think about it!" He paused. "And I sure as hell don't want to find out!"
Kari frowned.
"I'm sorry, Tai," she replied softly, "I just... There was something I...had to take care of." She tilted her head to the side and looked at the others as Gatomon leapt into her arms with delight. "I didn't mean to worry anybody," she added, smiling sweetly at her digimon.
The rest of the children gathered quickly around the Kamiya siblings, glad to be all reunited again. Gatomon purred loudly in Kari's arms, overjoyed to see that her human was okay. Yamato let out a relieved sigh. He would have felt terribly guilty had anything happened to Kari, considering she had been sore at him when she had run off. Had she been hurt, he would have felt responsible, even if his harsh words hadn't been the reason for her disappearance. He smiled, happy she was all right. Though he never would have admitted it to anybody, Yamato saw Kari as a younger sibling himself...as he supposed most of the kids did. TK and Kari were sort of the communal little brother and sister...all of the Digidestined looked out for them and made sure they were all right. Oh, sure, the older kids looked after one another, that was a given...but it was a little different with Takeru and Hikari. Being as young as they were, the junior Ishida and Kamiya children had been taken under the older kids' wings...whether they had approved of the idea or not.
Yamato's smile suddenly faded as he turned back over his shoulder.
"Pipermon, wait a second," he said, extending one arm as she turned to leave. "Wait...wait a second," he repeated, and she stopped, though she did not turn over her shoulder to look back at him. He squared his shoulders. "Pipermon, I...I don't understand."
She glanced at him oddly, one eyebrow lifted.
"I don't get you, Pipermon," he said slowly, walking toward her, "if you're working for Kurarimon, why did you return Kari to us? We're less of a threat when we're divided."
"Like I told you all before, Yamato-san," she responded quietly, as though she did not have the strength to raise her voice above a whisper, "I have no desire to harm you children. I don't want to hurt any of you. Kurarimon has advantage enough over you as it is...I figured I would even the odds a little and at least keep you all together."
Yamato frowned.
"But why?' he asked tenaciously. "Are you on her side...or are you on ours?"
She clenched and unclenched her fists.
"I...I dunno..."
"Whaddya mean you don't know?" Tai asked. There was no anger or resentment in his voice, only confusion, and maybe a little bit of dejection.
"I mean I don't know," she repeated slowly. She shook her head. "I just...don't know..."
"It isn't a hard question, Pipermon," Yamato growled, still smarting from the earlier events of the day. He was determined to get a straight answer from her. "It's not that difficult a question. Who's it gonna be...her or us?"
Pipermon refused to look at him.
"Please, don't, Yamato-san," she implored, "don't ask me that."
Yamato scowled.
"What's that supposed to mean?" he demanded coldly. "You have to make a choice."
She turned away.
"I don't HAVE to do anything, Yamato-san," she growled, "but you seemed unwilling to accept that from the start..."
"Don't hide your eyes from us, Pipermon," Jyou said softly after a moment of awkward silence. He looked over the rims of his glasses. "Please don't turn your back on us."
"We only want to know the truth," Sora added.
"And the truth lies in your eyes," concluded Mimi.
Pipermon cringed.
Kari knit her brow.
"That reminds me," she said, and approached Pipermon, "when we were in the corridor, you mentioned Kurarimon having a scar...a scar across her left eye...?"
"Oh, so that explains the weird eighties hairdo..." Mimi muttered.
Pipermon glanced up.
"The scar...?" she whispered, and looked at Kari.
"What's it from?" the younger child wanted to know. Pipermon cast her eyes to the rest of the children, who all looked quite intrigued by this new tidbit of information. She sighed.
"The scar...the scar was...an accident," she said to them. "Kurarimon was toying with her powers...testing what she was capable of. She tried to copy Piedmon's attacks to see if she could use them, for, as we all know, Piedmon had some nasty attacks up his sleeves..." She frowned. "Kurarimon found she had no trouble mastering the Clown Trick attack...but she ran into a few roadblocks when she attempted to master Trump Swords..."
TK frowned.
"How come?" he asked.
"I would suppose it was because it was a very powerful attack...and one she was never meant to be able to use," Pipermon explained. "But, whatever the reason, she was unable to control it, and the attack backfired on her."
"Backfired?" Tai echoed.
Pipermon nodded.
"One of the daggers basically boomeranged," she told them, "and it cut her face. It blinded her left eye."
Tai's face contorted. He winced at the very idea. He understood how it must have felt for Kurarimon to lose her sight... Even in one eye, vision is a terrible thing to be without...but to lose it like that...to be blinded by your own mistake...by one of your own powers... How horrific, he thought, cringing, to forever lose your sight, be it in one eye or both, because of a miscalculation you made yourself...!
"I can understand how the blindness would not have healed," he said slowly, rolling ideas around on his brain, "but why didn't the scar ever knit?"
"Yeah," Palmon agreed, "digimon usually heal real fast."
The rest of the digimon quickly attested to this.
"And I would think," Tentomon added afterwards, "that the fact that you, Kurarimon, and the twins were all a special advanced type of digimon, that you would be able to heal even faster."
Pipermon shook her head.
"You would think so, wouldn't you?" she asked ruefully. She placed the middle and ring finger of her right hand on her left forearm, and pressed down hard, wincing. She hissed in pain, then drew back her hand, holding up her fingers. The children gasped.
"Blood?" Mimi asked, crinkling up her nose. "Again?"
"That hasn't healed yet?" Jyou asked, remembering how she had injured herself in her struggle to save Yamato from plummeting into the gaping mouth of the Shin’en.
Pipermon's eyes flashed.
"The fabric of my sleeve was easy enough to mend," she said, "but not so the wound." She paused dramatically. "It takes me just as long to heal a flesh wound as any of you..."
There was a collective gasp.
"Inconceivable!" Izzy cried. "Why so long?"
"You're a digimon," Gomamon said, "how come you don't heal like one?"
"Wouldn't the fact that you're a combination of all types of digimon make you, like, invincible or something?" Mimi wanted to know.
Pipermon shook her head.
"No," she said slowly, "actually, that's why it takes us--Kurarimon, the twins, and myself--so long to heal." She looked at Izzy. "It would seem that, rather than increasing our ability to heal," she said slowly, "it actually IMPEDES it..."
"That's odd," Jyou said with a frown.
"Not really," Pipermon said, "not if you think about it from a computer analyst's point of view. Being that we are a combination of data, virus, AND vaccine, all together, it's rather like what happens when an internet browser is trying to load too many thumbnails at once. If those images do not load in a certain time span, the operation times out, and they just stop loading."
"So you're saying that it simply took too long for Kurarimon's scar to heal," Yamato stated, "and it just...just stopped?"
She nodded.
"Basically," she said.
"Whoa," Izzy murmured, "time to hit the 'reload' button..."
"So...I still don't quite understand her motives," Tai grumbled. "Is she threatening this world only to draw us here?"
"And had we not come," Sora chimed in, "would she have truly destroyed it?"
"What good would that have done her?" Mimi added.
"That’s not the issue here," Pipermon responded. "She knew all she had to do was threaten the livelihood of the Digital World in order to lure the Digidestined here."
Yamato was still suspicious of Pipermon. Even after what she had done, in returning Kari to the group, he had still been burned deeply by the sudden realization that she had been working for Kurarimon all along, and was reluctant to trust her again, for fear of history repeating itself.
"So tell us the truth, Pipermon," he challenged, "is it REALLY beyond your power to give Tai back his vision?"
She frowned sadly.
"Unfortunately, yes, it is," she affirmed. She looked at Tai. "Kurarimon is the only one who can return it to you at this point..."
"Psh, like that's gonna happen..." he scoffed.
"Unless we manage to get the physical manifestation of your vision back from her, Kamiya-san," she explained, " your sight can never be returned to you...and the only way to get it...is to destroy Kurarimon..."
Yamato narrowed his eyes.
"So tell us how to do that," he said.
Pipermon balked.
"I...I can't..." she replied softly, after a moment of silence.
"You CAN'T?" he echoed menacingly. He clenched his fists. "You can't...or you WON'T?"
Pipermon shook her head quickly.
"You don't understand--"
"If you're not our ally, Pipermon," Yamato growled, "then you are our enemy..."
TK grabbed his brother's arm.
"Stop it, Yama-chan," the younger boy said. "Leave her alone."
"TK?"
Yamato couldn't believe what he was hearing. Was his own little brother standing up for the enemy?
"TK, have you gone bonkers?" he asked incredulously.
"Don't you get it, Yama-chan?" TK asked. "She doesn't want to hurt US anymore...so just leave her alone. Why can't you see it?"
Yamato blinked.
"See what, TK?" he demanded. "She's the enemy! If she won't tell us how to destroy Kurarimon, she must still be working for her!"
"It's called loyalty, Yamato," Kari cut in. Yamato spun to look at her.
"Loyalty?" he repeated. "To that monster?" He wrung his hands. "After everything Kurarimon has done to her? After everything she's put her through? After all the threats and demands...why would she still defend her?"
Sora frowned.
"In the same way an abused child still yearns for the love of their parents, or a maltreated animal still responds to the call of the master who beats it," she said, "Pipermon feels a certain loyalty to Kurarimon, it would seem. Perhaps she doesn't agree with what Kurarimon is doing, but she can't help us fight her."
"Kurarimon plucked her from the gutters of the Digital World, turned her around, and gave her a purpose again," Kari explained. "Oh, sure, it was an EVIL purpose, but it was still a purpose."
Pipermon was a trifle taken aback. They were defending her? She couldn’t believe it! She was both touched and puzzled by their words.
Yama still looked skeptical, but didn't reply. Rather, he folded his slender arms over his chest and grumbled indecipherably.
"Maybe it's just that she doesn't want to be the one to tell us how to administer the deathblow, Yamato," Jyou suggested. "She doesn't want to directly tell us how to flip the kill switch."
"She has no more desire to hurt us," Tai added, "we've seen that..." He paused. "Perhaps she just doesn't want to be the one to tell us how to hurt Kurarimon..."
How was it that they knew? Pipermon found herself wondering. How could it be that they understood? She looked at Tai, then at Kari, then at her hands.
Izzy straightened his back.
"Pipermon," he said after a moment, closing over the monitor of his laptop, "perhaps if you consider it from this point of view...?" He looked at her. "In our world, two forces that would not normally work together will sometimes ally with one another if they have a common enemy..."
She smiled sadly.
"That's just it, Izumi-san," she responded quietly, "we don't." She shook her head slowly. "I don't want to be your enemy, Digidestined..." she added, "but I cannot be hers." She looked at them. "Please try to understand..." She looked at the floor.
Kari took a tentative step forward.
"Pipermon..." she said after a second, and the digimon looked up. Kari smiled weakly. "I hope that, even if we cannot be allies in times of war...perhaps one day we can be friends in times of peace."
Pipermon inhaled sharply, and started to stammer a reply, then stopped suddenly, and Kari tensed. That same electric feeling was in the air again. Kurarimon was nearby. Pipermon glanced behind her.
"She's coming," she said quickly, lifting into the air and wrapping her arms about herself. "I must go. Be warned, Digidestined, it will take more than simply strength to defeat Kurarimon..."
Tai stepped forward.
"What, then?" he cried, extending one arm. "If strength alone won't defeat her, then what will?"
"Look within yourselves, children," Pipermon said cryptically, "and you'll find what you need. Stop searching for the answers in darkened corners...for you won't find them there."
"Then where do we look?" he demanded desperately.
She winked at Kari.
"Try looking in the light..."
With that, she vanished into the shadows with a soft jingle of the bells around her wrists and ankles.
