Digimon Fan Fiction ❯ You've Got a Friend ❯ Prologue

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You've Got a Friend

A Digimon 02 (second season) fanfic

by Alicia Ashby

Author's Notes: People wanted a sequel to One of Us. Well, here
it sort-of is. This is another 'between episodes' style fanfic,
set after "If I Had a Tail Hammer" and "Spirit Needle". Very
mild spoilers for those episodes and previous ones included.
Enjoy! ^_^

***

Ken Ichijouji lay quietly in his bed, staring up at what one
could suppose was the ceiling. However, closer examination would
reveal that he was staring up at the screen of a tiny handheld
device that he held just a few inches in front of his face. It
was a black Digivice, a D3. He supposed he should hate it. Even
after the Crest of Kindness had glowed, it was still black and
twisted, just as it had been when he'd been the ruthlessly evil
Digimon Emperor.

But he couldn't hate it. Not right now. Because, for all the
evil the device had once done, it was also tirelessly displaying
the most wonderful, perplexing words he had ever read in his
life:

"Ken,

Thank you so much for your help. I look forward to the day when
you can join us.

Yolie"

That was all the little e-mail said. She'd probably taken less
than a minute to type it out, perhaps finishing it even as he
began turning away from the Digidestined. Maybe she was just
trying to be polite. Maybe she was afraid he'd turn against them
if she didn't go out of her way to make him happy. Maybe Davis
had ordered his team to be nice to him, even though they all must
surely fear and hate him.

Or maybe he was wrong, and Yolie had simply wanted to be his
friend.

He sighed and lowered his arm, letting his Digivice rest on the
bed next to the slumbering Minomon. Not because he was tired of
looking at it, but simply because he had looked at it for so
long that his arm was beginning to hurt. Was he really doing the
right thing now? Davis had walked across town to speak with him,
and he had coldly blown him off. And it wasn't that he didn't
like Davis, or that he didn't want to be his friend, but it was
still so hard to relax in the presence of the Digidestined and
think of them as potential friends rather than enemies. He
wasn't ready to deal with them yet, and he had no choice but to
push them away until he was.

This was all that cursed woman's fault. He'd been ready to try to
make friends with the Digidestined. He'd been concocting plans
that would help him contact them as he'd begun wearily picking up
the pieces of the everyday life he'd abandoned for so long. He
really had wanted to keep his promise to Leafmon and make new
friends. He knew he was lonely. But after that terrible woman
had shown up in his room that night, and once he had realized
that she had appeared there in order to wrest the locations of
the control spires from his computer, he had realized that all
the wounds he had given the Digital World had not yet healed.
His redemption was not complete, could not be complete, until
absolutely no evil that preyed upon innocent Digimon could be
traced back to his hands. He had to make himself clean somehow,
make himself ready to accept his role as a Digidestined.

It was this that the others could not understand, not even Davis.
But why should they be able to understand it? They were heroes.
They didn't know what it was like to be truly dirty, to look at
themselves in the mirror and see the hollow eyes of a monster
staring back at them. They shouldn't have to know. He couldn't
bring his taint to their group. He might find some way to
make them dirty, too. Would Davis reach out to make new friends
so easily if he became dirty, would he ever forgive anyone for
anything again? Would Yolie ever write another simple, beautiful
little note like this? Of course not.

He had been so irresponsible, for so long. This time, he had to
think more clearly, and about more than just what he wanted. It
would be so easy to let the Digidestined solve his problems for
him, but he could not let himself be that weak. Only after he
had healed himself could be even hope to be worthy to stand
alongside Davis and Yolie and the others whose faces he could not
even match a name to. They all must see through him so easily,
just as the terrible blonde boy had in their altercation on his
base, and yet he knew so little about them that he couldn't make
himself trust even the simplest overture of friendship from them.

It hurt, not to be able to trust. He wanted what they offered so
badly, so badly that it seemed somehow wrong that Davis and Yolie
should offer it to him so easily. It could not be so easy to
be like them. There had to be something to be done first,
something to prove, someone to fight.

Like that terrible woman. When she was beaten, maybe then...
they could be made to understand that much, couldn't they? That
he simply wasn't worthy of the gift they wanted to give him yet?

Ken lifted the Digivice up once more and pondered it, the soft
sound of Minomon's breathing and the rustling of the cloth the
only noise in his little room. His free hand seemed to move of
its own volition, typing. It took less than a minute to write
the little note. It took ten minutes of internal debate with
himself to make himself tap the sending command. He then shut
off his Digivice and laid it underneath his pillow before rolling
over and getting ready to go to sleep. He didn't know if any
reply would be sent to his note, but if it was, he knew that he
would not be ready to read it for a very long time.

***

"Alright, Davis. I'm going to go over this with you ONE more
time, and if you can't get it through your thick skull then it's
just your fault!"

"Geez, Yolie," Davis' voice crackled softly over the phone,
probably the result of a sudden exhale. "If you don't want to
help me with my math, then just say the word and I'll go figure
it out by myself! I probably could, y'know."

"And then you'll get another 35 on the next test, which means
you'll get grounded, which means we'll be out a Digidestined at
the worst possible time!" Yolie said back, careful to keep her
voice crisp and businesslike. It wouldn't do to let the poor
dumb idiot know that she was really just worried that he'd get so
wrapped up in playing hero in the Digital World that he'd manage
to get himself held back a year. Davis had always had a hard
time in school anyway; he got bored and fidgety during lectures,
and didn't see any reason why homework was a more beneficent
pastime than video games and soccer. His new responsibilities
just became something else he could prioritize over school, only
this time he had the deadly addition of a justification for his
slacking.

"Alright, alright... geez, you make it sound like I'm trying to
fail," Davis muttered. "Okay... problem thirty-five. The one
with Farmer Miyazawa's stupid rice bushels."

"That's a good one! Alright, the problem says that Farmer
Miyazawa has 2500 bushels of rice. Thirteen percent of the rice
gets eaten by rats, and then 500 bushels of rice are stolen. So
what percentage of Farmer Miyazawa's original amount of rice
remains?"

"... a whole lot?"

Yolie scowled and tapped her pencil eraser irritably on her
notebook. "No, I mean, how do you do the problem?"

Davis stumbled through the problem, his speech slow and careful.
"Okay... uh... I wanna find out how much rice got lost, so... do
the multiplication thingy to figure out how much thirteen percent
of 2500 is?"

"Right!"

"... and then I subtract 500 from that, right?"

"No, Davis," Yolie lectured. "Think for a minute, what's the
problem actually asking you to do?"

"Find out how much... oh! Subtract the answer of the thirteen
percent thingy from 2500, and then subtract 500 from that?"

"Right! Then you just figure out what percentage of 2500 that
amount is. And you know how to do that, right?"

There was a long, unnerving pause. "... you divide something by
something else, right?" Davis asked.

"You're on the right track..."

"It's... uh..." Davis paused for a minute. Yolie could dimly
hear pencil scribblings from Davis' end of the phone. "... divide
the little number by the big number..."

"Yes..." Yolie couldn't help the enormous grin that was beginning
to spread across her face.

"And then... you multiply that by a hundred... and that's it,
right?" Davis voiced became hopeful, as he waited for some
confirmation from Yolie.

She could have told him anything in that moment and he would have
believed her, completely and absolutely. Fortunately, the only
thing she wanted to tell him was the truth. "That's it exactly!
See, Davis? I told you that you weren't stupid, you were just
being lazy."

"Hey! I wasn't being lazy, this stuff is hard. And it's not fun
or anything, and not important like being a Digidestined and it's
definitely not half as cool..."

Yolie sighed, the smile on her face taking on a tired, kind look.
"... whatever, Davis. Think you can get the rest of it done
yourself before you go to bed?"

"Oh, definitely! The rest of it kinda looks easy now... um,
thanks a lot for the help. I couldn't have figured this out
without you..." Davis' voice became quiet, and took on the
slightly bashful sound it usually did when he was trying to show
gratitude. Most people thought that Davis was a jerk, and she
couldn't blame them. You had to know him for a long time to
realize that he just wasn't good at communicating anything but
the facade he'd begun affecting in a vain attempt to disguise his
flaws. And that facade, unfortunately, demanded that Davis
convince himself that he was in fact invincible and
indestructible.

"No problem," Yolie said, trying to make it sound like she hadn't
done anything of the slightest importance for him. It'd make him
feel better. "Maybe now that you can do your homework, I
can actually get some slee--"

Yolie stopped in mid-speech. She could clearly hear her digivice
beeping. "... Yolie, what's up with your Digivice?" Davis could
hear it, too.

"Hold on, let me check....." She walked over to her desk, and
picked up her red and white D3. "... it's an e-mail from
somebody."

"Who is it?"

"... Ken. It's from Ken!" Yolie all but squealed in delight.

"No way! That completely rules! What did he say?" Davis sounded
more enthusiastic only because he knew that he could make as much
noise as he wanted and never wake up June.

"And just what makes you think that's any of your business, Davis
Motomiya? For all you know, this e-mail could be extremely
personal...." Yolie batted her eyelashes and struck a lovesick
pose, much to Poromon's consternation.

Davis' reply was nothing but a snort. "Pffft. Yeah, you wish.
Come on, be serious."

Yolie scowled at the phone briefly before actually glancing down
to read off the e-mail's contents. "Fine, but I'm stopping if any
of it's something an unromantic jerk like you has no business
hearing. It says... 'Yolie, I appreciate your sentiments. I
regret not being able to work with your team at the present
juncture. Please send my regards to Davis. Respectfully yours,
Ken.'"

There was a long pause as Yolie just blinked at the strange
little e-mail. Did someone her age really write like that?

"... whoa. Ken uses really big words," Davis marveled.

"They're not that big," Yolie replied offhandedly to him. "But
they're not all that friendly, either. What's this supposed to
mean? It reads like a thank you letter I'd send my grandma!"

She could hear Davis' sigh crackle over the phone line. "I think
that's the only way he knows how to be friendly."

"Huh?"

"Well, think about it. When he was the Emperor, he basically
hated everybody, right?"

Yolie nodded. "Yeah..."

"Well, if you think you're better than everybody else, then how
are you gonna be able to make friends with anybody? Ken's
probably never had a real friend in his entire life. How's he
supposed to know that you don't talk to your friends the same way
you talk to your teachers or your parents or whatever?" Davis
sounded like he was actually depressing himself with his words.
Yolie couldn't blame him; it was a horrible thing to contemplate.
Never, ever, in your entire life allowing yourself to have even a
single friend?

"No wonder he thinks he has to do everything himself," Yolie
sighed back. "He knows how to be polite, but he really doesn't
understand how to be anyone's friend."

"That's why somebody's gotta teach him!"

A smile suddenly crossed Yolie's face. "And that's why you've
been trying so hard to make him one of us, isn't it, Davis?"

"Well... yeah. I mean, if the guy who got the Digimental of
Friendship can't get through to him... I dunno. It's just gotta
be really lonely not having any friends. Nobody deserves to live
like that, y'know? I mean, I know it looks like I've just been
really reckless and everything but... this feels right. I dunno
how else to explain it." Davis fell silent, not even his
breathing carrying over the phone line.

"Davis, this always happens. I'm always ready to think you're
the biggest, stupidest jerk in the whole wide world, and then you
go and do something... something so absolutely nice for
somebody that it makes me remember why I'll actually admit to
being friends with you," Yolie giggled.

She could hear Davis' usual easy smile returning in his voice.
"Yeah, right! You know you just wanna try and convince everyone
that you're a member of the entourage of the world-class soccer
star, Davis Motomiya!"

"... then you say something like that and I remember why I spend
most of my time making fun of you," she snorted back at him.

"You're just jealous 'cause I've already got my girl picked out,
and that means you can never, ever have me for your own."

Yolie rolled her eyes. "Whatever, Davis. Look, I'm worn out.
I'm gonna go to bed. And you'd better do that, too, after you
get done doing your homework. It won't matter how much help I
give you if you stay up all night playing video games again!"

"Alright, mom, I'll go right to bed," Davis mock-sneered back at
her. "Night, Yolie. Thanks for the help!"

"Night, Davis," she yawned, then clicked the 'off' button on her
portable phone. "Obnoxious, arrogant dork," she smiled down at it
and spoke softly to herself. She laid it on her desk, and
after a moment of pondering Ken's sadly formal e-mail, shut off
her D3 and laid it beside the phone, along with her glasses. She
then stumbled over to her bed, turned down her covers, and
snuggled down underneath them. She was asleep almost as soon as
her head hit the pillow.

Poromon hop-fluttered over to her and landed at her side on the
bed. Yolie automatically folded him gently in her arms,
snuggling him as if he was some sort of living plushie. The
little In-Training Digimon nevertheless sighed as he shut his
eyes and got ready to go to sleep. Ken wanted to help the
Digidestined, but wouldn't make friends because he didn't know
how. Yolie and Davis wanted to make friends with him anyway, but
Ken wouldn't let them. Did all humans act this silly, or just
the Digidestined?

Heaven help them if the normal ones were actually worse!

***