seed 01

Ichijouji Ken was stalking her again.

Noriko hated how she couldn't think of a better word for it. But what else could she call it, even when he was so <i>bad</i> at it? The past four months hadn't made him any better at matching his footfalls to hers, or at picking things to hide behind that actually hid the antennae sticking out from the companion he carried. While her life had improved, there still wasn't much Kawada Noriko could laugh about, so she had to give him that.

Said laughter felt rusty and self-conscious beneath her face mask. Lifting her head, she pitched her voice back. "You really are nothing like we thought you were, are you."

He came out from behind a bush, a leaf stuck in his bangs, and chuckled himself. "You caught me, huh..."

"If you're checking up on me, I'm fine." She turned to face him: he'd gotten even taller, but he didn't feel like he was towering over her the way he had when she'd seen him on TV, before. He was a kid like her. Just a kid like her. "Nobody can expect someone to completely turn their life around that quickly, can they?"

His brow furrowed, and she realized - too late - that she'd just given away the fact she was not, in fact, fine. So she looked away, embarrassed at the impulse to hide it, embarrassed that there was something to hide. "I want to figure it out myself."

"Understood." Ken nodded. "But...."

Was there always a "but" with him? Noriko bit her lips beneath her mask. She had been muting herself like this for as long as she could remember.

Ken took her silence as a willingness to hear him complete his statement. "Have you been to the Digital World, lately?"

At her side, Noriko's bag wriggled, and a horn popped out. "Not since the first time," said the horn's owner. "But I've gotten this much bigger anyway! Look!"

"That's impressive!" Ken's face lit up like he meant it, and he knelt to speak to Noriko's bag. Feeling stupid, she held it open for him.

"Tsunomon, you're making us look stupid," she muttered, looking around the street to be sure nobody was watching. The Digimon in her bag just smiled: "I wouldn't know!"

"I see. So your partner evolved into Tsunomon." Ken smiled at the Digimon. "Is life with Noriko-chan fun?"

"The best!" Tsunomon hopped in the bag, moving her pencil case about. "Watching Noriko work hard makes me want to work hard, too."

This was news to Noriko, who had mostly seen her partner lie on pillows, get pampered by her mother, and nap. But, then again, she hadn't asked if they wanted to do anything else.

"Work hard at what?" she asked, before she could stop herself, and Tsunomon contemplated this question. "....I wouldn't know," they finally repeated. "But someday there'll be something we can do together, right?"

"That's right." Ichijouji Ken had NEVER smiled like that on TV. If he had, the girls in Noriko's class would still be talking about him. "You're destined partners. There's sure to be something only you two can do."

"I want to find it soon!" said Tsunomon. "But only if Noriko does. Do you, Noriko?"

Noriko wanted to not be stalked by ex-boy-geniuses who somehow managed to make her feel even smaller when he was just a normal kid again than when he'd been some larger-than-life wunderkind. She doubted that was what Tsunomon had in mind.

"You didn't share it," she said instead of answering the question, looking at Ken. "Your dream. We all said ours and you didn't say yours."

Her mouth snapped shut immediately, and she almost felt her chest clench - oh, please, the last thing she needed was to start having attacks when <i>emotional</i>, not just whenever her stupid body felt like it - but Ken didn't seem to mind. He looked thoughtful, instead.

"....I think....I'm still looking for it," he concluded. "But I believe I'm capable of finding it. And that's enough."

"Oh."

Ken held out a piece of paper, which Tsunomon grabbed onto before realizing it wasn't food and spit it into the bag. "That's my email address. I-if you ever need anything -"

"I know."

"Eh?"

"Your email address." Noriko hefted her bag of schoolbooks and Digimon up onto a shoulder, almost immediately unbalanced herself and had to take some clumsy sidesteps - dumb, dumb, dumb, she could almost hear her sneakers saying as they stumbled across the pavement. "You published it in a magazine. Because you're a genius."

"....Noriko-chan...." He wasn't going to let it go, was he? Whoever asked him to be so concerned? Whoever asked him to be so <i>nice?</i> Why didn't nice people ever think about what happened when they were nice to others and that niceness didn't pay off? Why didn't they realize how hard it would be for the recipients?

Noriko wanted to scream. She walked instead. "I have to go."

Stride, stride, walking away from the problem, knowing she was walking away from the problem but not knowing how to solve it. Step by step by step, skirt swishing against her legs, pace picking up, rounding the corner, frustration building -

And then she was running, hurtling herself down the hill towards her house, tripping, leaning against a telephone pole, feeling her lungs catch for real this time and coughing, coughing, gasping, tugging down her mask and rooting in her bag, finding the inhaler as Tsunomon passed it to her, one puff, two, breathe, <i>breathe</i>, support herself on the telephone pole and pretend she was anybody but somebody who still had to pretend she was somebody else.

<i>I can do it</i>, she told herself, the same way she'd been trying to tell herself every day for months. <i>Look what I've already done! I can do it!</i>

But look at what you can't do, said the voice she kept inside so it wouldn't poison anybody but herself. You can't even make it down a hill.

"Shut up," Noriko gasped: how long has it been since you went to the Digital World, Noriko-chan? What's the thing only you and Tsunomon can do, Noriko-chan?

Run. The only thing she and Tsunomon could do was run, and with her lungs like this she couldn't even do <i>that</i>.

Or was it?

Noriko pushed herself off the telephone pole, walked towards the house with her head held high. "Tsunomon."

"Yeah?"

Ugh, she hated how her voice always sounded after an attack. It was raspy enough already. "What do you think the Digital World's like now?"

Tsunomon turned in a circle to think; she could feel them do it, had seen this happen many a time. It made taking them out in the bag awkward. The answer, however, was what the answer always was: "I wouldn't know!"

"You always sound so happy about that." Noriko tugged the door open, didn't bother lining her shoes up neatly after kicking them off. She'd be putting them back on soon enough anyway. "What's so great about it?"

"Hmm-"

"Don't say you wouldn't know." The voice she tried to stifle she tended to let loose, on Tsunomon. Was that mean of her? But...it felt kinda relaxing, all the same. To have somebody she could be her ugliest self around that still thought she was worthwhile.

"I wouldn't do that to you." Up the stairs they went, Tsunomon still chewing on the question. "I think....it's because that means I'm going to discover something new. If I'm empty, that means there's room for lots of things."

"You shouldn't call yourself empty." Hypocrite, said the poison voice. Noriko tossed the bag on her bed and took Tsunomon out of it, tucked them under her arm, turned back around.

Tsunomon looked up: "I'm getting to go out like this? What about your homework?"

"It can wait." It wasn't like her grades had gone up, anyway. Whatever she'd been trying, whatever Tsunomon had been watching her do and being impressed by, it wasn't working, it wasn't working, stupid, <i>stupid</i> Ichijouji Ken. "Believe in yourself and your dream", yeah, in the moment, you could do that, but when real life came calling, it was a little harder, wasn't it?

But the thing Kawada Noriko was sickest of was the Kawada Noriko who thought like that. She lifted the phone in the hall, dialed a number. Blanked on the name of the kid she was calling, since they'd only really talked once, in the back of a dark truck, in hushed whispers. The short kid had started it. Lucky, she'd thought, and she could tell from the looks on everyone else's faces they were thinking it too. What was <i>he</i> doing there? He could start a <i>conversation</i>.

His mother picked up. God, her voice was harsh. Worse than Noriko's. Noriko cleared her throat. "Your son. I need to - speak to him. Please."

"Well, of all the--" But she heard that voice calling down the hallway. "Hiroshi-kun! What did I tell you about the company you keep? There's some rude girl on the phone for you--"

A second receiver picked up. "Hello?"

Yeah, this was him, this was the right kid. They hadn't exchanged phone numbers for nothing. They were all going to change the world, they'd conspired, in the back of that truck - and then promptly ignored each other after the fact, immediately shifting to seeing the others as competition, lesser, undeserving of the gift they'd been bestowed. "Kawada Noriko," she said, aware his mother was still on the extension, past caring. "You have a computer, right?"

She'd-find-out-his-last-name-when-she-got-to-his-place Hiroshi-kun made a nervous noise. "I....do."

"I'm coming over." And she hung up on Hiroshi-kun and his screechy mom. Instantly her ears burned, and she stared down at the telephone. But she'd done it, hadn't she, she thought, heady with the realization. She'd messed up every single step of the way, but it had gotten <i>done</i>. She had committed.

The piece of paper with Hiroshi's number had a few others on it; she hadn't been able to collect that many before the lady in the truck had caught them and made fun of them for it, but Noriko had pocketed the paper anyway. Two was enough. Two more numbers meant four of them. Four was a bad-luck number. Of course it was.

Perfect for them.

"I need to talk to your kid," she said to the other two parents who picked up, because she couldn't remember <i>their</i> names either, because if there was one thing Kawada Noriko knew how to do, it was screw up. "We've got someplace to go."