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The pain was so vast, so immense, it couldn’t be called pain anymore. With every breath he took, he thought he was still on fire. Nothing else could explain the excruciating lick of heat across his back each time his lungs tried to expand. He may as well have still been in the inferno, for all that the very air itself seemed to be incinerating his skin.
“You need to go to the hospital.” Asuka was talking. It took conscious effort to hear it past the pain, the somehow deafening screaming of his every cell. He was shaking, down the bone, like his very flesh was trying to escape the agony of his being. “I’ll call an ambulance—shit, my Sapotama…” Gone. Just like HeliosBoamon. “Where’s yours?”
Cougarmon’s limp form. They hadn’t moved. Kyo had to go to them. They had to be alright. There weren’t any red particles, right? He hadn’t killed his partner, had he? Useless, useless, useless—he couldn’t protect a damn thing in this world.
“Shit, shit, shit, okay, can you walk? It’s not that far to a road, we can find someone for help. I’ll carry Tomoro, so…” Asuka sounded far away as he trailed off, but Kyo could only try to look to the crater where his partner lay still. Turning his head was pure, liquid agony, like his skin was being sloughed off, but he had to try. The way Asuka hesitated barely registered through the white overtaking his vision, the shrill ring in his ears. “I’m sorry, but I can’t carry them. We have to leave them here.”
“No.” The word was out of his mouth before everything else caught up to him. He fought to remember the details of their situation through the screaming agony—he couldn’t let the pain consume him. Kyo focused on the feeling of concrete under his knees, biting into his skin, then the distant waves. The white of Asuka’s shirt, and the guilty but resigned look on his face.
The pain was all-consuming, and it felt like if he didn’t cut himself off from everything, it would kill him. But he had to focus. For Cougarmon.
“I’ll come straight back for them—” Asuka cut off, wincing.
They both knew he wouldn’t. Asuka had to make sure his brother was safe, and that meant either taking him to the hospital or back to their home. Leaving Tomoro wasn’t an option, so Cougarmon would be left instead.
Not in a million years was his partner going to be abandoned like that.
Kyo had failed them enough already.
“No.” He forced the word out again. The movement of his throat was its own kind of hell, but he had to. “I’m not leaving Cougarmon.”
Asuka’s face pinched. There was a look in his eyes, a fear. He was scared of the choice he was about to make. “Kyo, you need help. I’ll figure something out, just trust me.”
“No.”
Asuka was a kind person, but he’d had only had a partner for a day and had lost them. And maybe that wasn’t his fault, maybe that wasn’t fair, but it was the truth. Asuka had a responsibility to someone that would always have to come first. HeliosBoamon had made her own choice for that reason, after all.
But Cougarmon deserved better than to be left at the bottom of a crater of Kyo’s mistakes. And if he left them now, anything could happen—like Karina, Minoru, Luxmon, the babies. Kyo could take his eyes off his partner now and never get to see them ever again.
He couldn’t. He couldn’t lose Cougarmon. They were all he had—for ten years, they’d been his only companion, only comfort, only joy. His heart, his soul, his tether to the world. He’d rather die.
“Kyo!” Asuka was somewhere between scolding and begging. The reality of the situation hadn’t occurred to him yet—he would be the last to know what final choice he would make tonight. But to Kyo, it was all too obvious.
Each breath just made him want to stop breathing. Through the pain, Kyo had no wherewithal for this playact where Asuka pretended this was going to end any other way. So he spelled it all out, even when all he wanted to do was collapse against the concrete and die. “Go take care of your brother. Make sure he’s alright. Then go home, and never speak of anything that happened today ever again.”
Yes, that was the way of things. Heliosboamon had understood that too. Tomorrow, morning would come, and Asuka would go back to his normal, civilian life with his brother, with no Digimon to complicate things, just like he’d wanted to. And Kyo would find a way to live through this new pain, this new night, for Cougarmon. He and Cougarmon would take care of each other, as they always had. He didn’t need doctors or hospitals or any of the other trappings of this bitter human society—he just needed Cougarmon.
He forced his feet under him. Rising from ground may as well have been rising from pit of lava, for the sensory hell it was. He wanted to scream, to cry, to curl on the ground and burn into ash. The agony was endless, but he did not buckle.
Asuka just watched, before looking away, pale and green. Kaito hadn’t been able to look for long either, had he? The burn must truly be something monstrous to look at. Kyo knew better than to check—morbidly, he wondered if his neck would rupture if he twisted it to try. It felt like it would, or maybe like it already had.
Swallowing what was likely nausea, Asuka still tried. “I’ll—I’ll take Tomoro and I’ll call you an ambulance, okay? Someone will come get you.”
Part of Kyo wanted to scream—or maybe all of him was already screaming—because somehow, even after watching his soul made flesh vanish into light, Asuka still didn’t understand how the world worked.
“Don’t.” Kyo croaked, and there was a new wetness to his voice. Kyo didn’t know if it was tears or blood. His vision was blackening at the edges. He knew what that meant. “They’ll separate us. They’ll call someone to take Cougarmon away.”
“That’s—” There was frustration in Asuka’s voice, then. “Kyo, I can’t do this right now. I have to—Tomoro needs—please, just—you need a doctor. You could die like this.”
If only. But not an option. Kyo had to remember that. It was bad enough he’d lost sight of it during the brief battle, admitting the ugly truth to Kaito like that, but even if his life was miserable, empty thing, Cougarmon needed him. Digimon needed their partners. Without them, their only choices were to either be exterminated or starve to death.
So Kyo would live.
The first step was torture like he didn’t know was possible, and when he nearly crumpled, Asuka yelled. “Cougarmon will understand!” Just as fast, his voice fell and stumbled, like Kyo’s faltering gait as he made his slow, agonized way to the edge of the crater. “Like—like Heliosboamon did.”
If Kyo hadn’t felt so much like crying, dying, if he was capable of anything at all, he might have scoffed. Asuka was a kind person, but sometimes kindness wasn’t enough. Heliosboamon had indeed understood. They’d understood all too well that they had been born to a partner that could not choose them, that had more important things, in a world that had no place for Digimon. That the reality of their existence was that to their partner, they were a burden that could not be carried.
Cougarmon was not. Kyo had chosen them ten years ago, and that was maybe the one choice in his life he’d never regretted.
“Go, Asuka. Your brother needs you.”
There were no more words after that. He didn’t see Asuka leave, if he left at all. It took all his focus to navigate his way down the crater on his hands and knees. He could barely see, the world fading in and out, and couldn’t hear beyond the ringing in his ears, but he knew his destination at the first touch. He would know the feel of his partner’s fur even if he was blind, deaf, and dumb.
He collapsed against Cougarmon’s side, whispering apologies as best he could through his ruined throat, and focused his everything on living through the long night. Morning would come.