[OMWK] Chapter 01/4: Epic Fail (Part 2/2)

[terresdebrume]

✗ TECHNICAL DETAILS

FANDOM: Digimon Adventure 01/02/Tri
RATING: Mature.
WORDCOUNT: 10 032
PAIRING(S): Endgame Taito, though the fic is primarily Taichi-centric. Side pairings include Takeru/Hikari and discussion of past Sorato.
CHARACTER(S): Taichi Kamiya, Yamato Ishida, Hikari Kamiya, Takeru Takashi, Daisuke Motomiya, Agumon, Veemon, Gabumon, Sora Takenoushi, and mention of the rest of the gang.
GENRE: Misapplied matchmaking. Also future!fic.
TRIGGER WARNING(S): Depression and discussion thereof, including one briefly mentioned suicide attempt in chapter two.
SUMMARY: In which Taichi has questionable ways to handle his issues, everyone tries to be nice, and Yamato yells at him a lot. Same old, same old, except for the part where they end up kissing.

OMWK ON DREAMWIDTH: [Chapter I - Part 1]
OMWK ON LJ: [Chapter I - Part 1]
OMWK ON TUMBLR: [Chapter I]
OMWK ON AO3: [Read Here]
 

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“I will never understand,” Yamato sighs into the phone in the middle of a Saturday night in early-December, “how you can be such a brilliant politician and fail so completely at understanding people at the same time.”

“I’m going to pretend I only heard the nice part of this,” Taichi says, stretching his legs under his parents’ kotatsu, “but only because I feel magnanimous.”

 

His parents treated him to the best home-made meal ever for lunch—or at least the endless chain of instant ramen and leftover junk food he survives on when Daisuke doesn’t bring noodles back from work made it feel that way—there’s a heater roasting at his feet, and so far he’s spent his afternoon doing exactly nothing but watch Agumon snore the time away between two micro-naps of his own. Throw in his mother’s solicitude—her constant concern over his well being just short of overbearing—and the satisfaction of being positively toasty when it’s only six or seven degrees out, and you’d be hard pressed to find more mollifying conditions.

 

“I’ll repeat myself then,” Yamato replies, something sizzling on his end of the line.

 

Taichi glances at the kitchen clock, and raises an eyebrow when he realizes it must be around eight AM in France...by Yamato’s standard, it’s a positively indecent time to be having breakfast.

 

“You suck at figuring out what the rest of us want.”

“I don’t!” Taichi protests, patience shrinking faster than snow on a Meramon as he straightens up, “I told you, Ken just keeps talking about Daisuke—”

“Do you even let him talk about anything else?” Yamato interrupts with far too much sarcasm, “Maybe he’d be happy to talk about your job, too.”

“My job is boring,” Taichi replies with a shrug, nodding at his mom when she comes to sit beside him with her crosswords, “why would he want to ask about it?”

“He’s polite,” Yamato replies without missing a beat—the sizzling stops, replaced by the sound of a pan scrapping against something hard, and a persistent buzzing coming to an abrupt halt before Yamato continues: “he genuinely cares about you—oh and also you’re one of the people who has the most influence on whether or not Digimon will be allowed in the police force.”

“I’m not that influent, Yamato.”

“Fine,” Yamato deadpans, “maybe he’s just doing this because Hikari and I asked him to check in on you since he’s the one that lives closest to you with the most free time.”

“Right,” Taichi snorts, opening and closing his free hand into a fist near his head for his mother’s benefit, “like I’m going to believe that.”

“Then we’re back to the ‘your work is not boring’ part of that conversation,” Yamato concludes, so matter of fact Taichi can almost see him shrug.

“Please,” Taichi protests with a grunt loud enough to make his mother turn away from her crosswords and back at him, “last week I had to talk a bunch of Numemons not to attack the prime—”

“There was an attack?”

 

Taichi turns to look at his mother—the worried lines around her mouth and under her eyes, the frown crinkling at her eyebrows as her knuckles whiten around her pencil—and almost wants to slap himself in the face for being so careless. He’s usually better at controlling his vocabulary—but then it’s harder to remember when he’s talking to one of the others.

Now his mother looks pale and tense, bracing herself for the worse before Taichi can even blink, and he can’t blame her for it—he knows he can’t, not with everything he already put her through—but that doesn’t prevent the spark of irritation blooming in his chest, tightening the finge rs of his free hand around his thigh as he reassures her:

 

“With stink bombs, mom. It’s gross, but it’s not dangerous.”

“Really?” His mother insists, and Taichi clamps down hard on the wave of annoyance roiling against his stomach.

“Yes,” he promises, hating the way it’s not enough to placate his mother’s worrying.

“Would you tell me if it was?” She insists, and Taichi sort of wants to answer ‘no’.

 

He never has, after all—not when he was a kid and it could have meant getting out of things entirely, not when he was a preteen he wasn’t even directly involved, not when he was a teenager and he and his sister cried into her shoulder for almost an hour. What else was he supposed to do, anyway? It’s not like she could have done anything but sit and wait, none of the people actually involved having time to stop and explain the situation to her—Taichi has done a lot of that when he was a kid, watching doctors and nurses busy themselves with his little sister without realizing there was another child there. He wasn’t about to put her through that as w ell.

He started counting the weeks until he could move out of the family flat when he peed his bed a few days after Yamato left for his semester in Moscow, and hasn’t even dreamed of coming back ever since.

 

“You know what,” he tells his mother, face aching with a stiff smile, “I think I’m going to take this call outside.”

“Sweetie,” his mother tries, easily sensing the distance, “you don’t have to—”

“No, it’s okay,” Taichi tells her, getting to his feet before she can touch him, “I’m feeling stuffy anyway. I can use the fresh air.”

 

He gives his mother one last would-be reassuring grimace, and tries not to look too obvious in his flight as he steps out on the balcony with nothing but slippers and a thick pullover to protect him from the cold. He sighs as soon as the glass door slides shut behind him, and purposefully keeps his gaze fixed on the skyline so he doesn’t have to watch his mother instead.

 

“Outsider freak out?” Yamato asks after a while, voice softer than before.

“It’s my fault,” Taichi says with a shrug—his voice is a little thick, but he’s pretty sure he’s going to catch a cold out there, so he doesn’t let it bother him too much—“I slipped.”

 

Yamato hums in response, and Taichi almost asks if Yamato thinks he should have known better, too, but his stomach constricts at the thought, and the question leaves a bitter taste of bile in his mouth when he swallows it down. Instead, what he asks is:

 

“Does it ever happen to you?”

“Like I talk to my parents enough for them to freak out.”

“Takeru could,” Taichi says, but Yamato scoffs.

“To my mother, maybe. Not the old man, though.”

 

Taichi nods at that, and then Yamato tells him to wait before he starts saying something in French—Taichi has no idea what. He’s not surprised by Yamato’s dismissal—has spent enough nights at the Ishida residence before Yamato left the country to take an educated guess as to why his friend is so close-lipped around his family—but that doesn’t prevent his heart from sinking as he listens to Yamato exchanges what must be goodbyes with his grandfather.

It’s hard to understand that kind of situation when you haven’t lived it, after all, and Taichi doesn’t need someone who doesn’t get it right now.

 

“Pappy flipped out once,” Yamato says after silence has stretched between them for several seconds with no ending in sight, “it was definitely my fault. We...talk more. Since then.”

“Do you tell him about the nightmares?”

 

Yamato makes a garbled noise around his breakfast that could mean anything from ‘I don’t have nightmares’--Taichi has countless middle-of-the-night texts and conversations that say otherwise—to ‘we sit at the kitchen table and swap war stories: I talk about Digimons and he talks about killing Nazis’ —or whatever Yamato’s grandfather did back in the French Resistance. Something in Taichi’s stomach twists at the sound, somewhere between envy and sadness, and since he can’t quite figure out which is which he decides to go back to safer grounds:

 

“Well, we can’t prevent them from worrying,” he says, trying to sound more cheerful than he really is, “but at least we can rejoice in the future success of operation Kensuke—and shut up, it’s a great portmanteau.”

“I didn’t say anything,” Yamato deadpans, and it’s easy to reply:

“You were about to.”

“You never know,” Yamato says with a rattle of cutlery jostling around in a plate, “if reason doesn’t work maybe aesthetics will.”

 

Taichi blows a raspberry into the phone out of principles more than anything else and, unsurprisingly enough, the only thing they exchange from then on is childish bickering, until Yamato has to beg out of the conversation so he can go attend his latest bootcamp. Taichi pretends to think Yamato is just admitting defeat, but the truth is he can’t feel his toes anymore and it’s a relief to come inside. He rubs some warmth back into his arms, wincing as returning blood prickles along his veins, and then startles when he realizes his mother is still there, looking at him like he just did something adorable.

Taichi hasn’t seen that kind of smile on her—or on his father, for that matter—since he was a child trying to act older than he was for his sister’s sake. The Digiworld and its host of complications erased that smile right off Taichi’s parents’ face when it turned out he really had to make decisions that should have been far beyond his years, and seeing it back because of something as simple as a conversation with his best friend makes Taichi pause.

 

“What?”

“I was just thinking how much you’ve grown,” his mother says, a touch of nostalgia gracing the edges of her smile, “not so long ago a disagreement with Yamato would have ended in a shouting match.”

 

Taichi’s face floods with heat, and he looks to the ground as he remembers a week of near complete silence in the aftermath of what should have been a fairly innocent argument. ‘I’m twenty five, ‘ma,’ he mutters instead of telling her about that.

 

She’s still smiling when he leaves, and that’s worth more than the exact truth.

 

{ooo}

 

He manages to phone Sora a few days before 2013 turns into 2014, and catching up with her somehow manages to shave something like ten years off his shoulders. It’s early in life, maybe, to think like that, but that doesn’t prevent Taichi from feeling the difference when the weight vanishes.

He’s not sure how they get around to discussing Daisuke and his growing crush on Ken, but he does know how flabbergasted he feels when she says:

 

“I just hope it’s not going to go too far.”

 

Taichi blinks at her through the video chat window, face owlish enough that Biyomon giggles at him from behind Sora’s shoulder. He’s a little too caught off guard to care though, because what on Earth?

 

“What do you mean, ‘too far?’”

“Well Ken is clearly not interested,” Sora explains with a wide shrugs—she pauses to answer a presumably important text before she finishes: “if Daisuke falls in love with him it’s going to make things really awkward. And painful.”

“Or not,” Taichi manages after chasing his own voice for a few seconds, “might be you’re wrong and they’re going to be perfectly happy together.”

 

Sora’s shoulders mo ve like she’s putting their hands together—picking at the skin around her nails, maybe—and then she mumbles:

 

“Maybe.”

 

She sounds skeptical, at best, and changes the topic fast after that, grilling Taichi on his work and home life. He lies a l ittle—ma kes up a couple of solitary outings just to spare himself the shame of admitting his social life has pretty much vanished, and does his best to sound like Digital World diplomacy is as fascinating a topic as it was when he started out—but mostly sticks to things that would be true if he wasn’t so busy and tired.

He brushes her off—gently—when she tries to warn him again, though. She may have the crest of love but she’s too far to have real clarity on the situation, and Taichi isn’t that brainless thank you very much.

 

{ooo}

 

It takes some effort not to gloat when Ken’s visits increase after their group’s New Year reunion—Taichi didn’t miss the effort Ken put in preparing the whole event and while simple kindness was definitely involved in the process, it certainly doesn’t explain the kid’s enthusiasm about it, or how much discussion of Daisuke’s qualities, life and project he can endure. Even Taichi is getting a little tired of the topic, and he’s the one who usually starts with it!

He’s had to slow down a bit in the past few days, because Wormon asked if Taichi was interested in Daisuke which wouldn’t be a problem if not for the fact that it isn’t what Taichi is going for at all. Besides, knowing Ken’s tendency to close up when he’s upset—second only to Yamato in that regard—if Taichi doesn’t set him straight, pun completely unintended, he might end up giving up on what might turn out to be the best thing of his life.

That would honestly be unacceptable.

So, Taichi makes it clear he’s not interested in Daisuke that way, keeps encouraging both Ken and Daisuke’s attention to the other, and celebrates with a much deserved sake shot one night—or maybe more like two or three.

 

(Agumon and Daisuke freak out when they find the bottle—not even half empty—so Taichi decides not to have a long-distance toast with Yamato about it, but that doesn’t prevent him from cheering a little every time he spots even the smallest sign of progress in his project.)

 

{ooo}

 

Taichi spends most of the weekend after New Year’s sitting on his TV with leftover cereals, watching reruns of Takeshi’s Castle while the others are either out or, in Agumon’s case, visiting a Tokomon village on File Continent. It’s not a bad program: it keeps complicated thoughts at bay and lets him idle the day away without guilt, which is all he’s asking for these days.

He spends an unusually bright Sunday morning like that, ignoring the world around him until someone runs up to his door—the footsteps echo through the corridor for a long moment before there’s banging on the door, and Ken’s voice calls out Taichi’s name through the wood. Taichi blinks and sighs at the sounds, peeling himself from the couch with the ache of too little movement in his joints before he makes his way to the door.

 

“Oh my—are you alright?” Ken manages, out of breath, when Taichi opens the door and nearly brains him in the process, “You weren’t answering your phone!”

“...I was sleeping?” Taichi replies, shaping the words with more care than entirely necessary, “what’s the matter?”

“Yamato tried to call you six time,” Ken replies, breathing slowly getting back to a normal rhythm, “you didn’t answer!”

“No,” Taichi repeats, more slowly, “because I was sleeping.”

 

It’s far too early for Yamato to be calling though—it must be around three AM in Paris right now, which is closer to late yesterday than it is to early this morning, and Taichi frowns when he realizes there’s only one possible explanation for the disruption.

 

“What happened?” He asks Ken even as he rushes back to his bedroom to retrieve his laptop, “Is Mr. Takashi going to be alright?”

“What?”

“Mr. Takashi!” Taichi repeats, opening his laptop in the same breath, “If it were a Digimon thing you’d have led with that so Yamato called for something else, and unless something happened to him or Gabumon, then it’s got to be his grandfather, so how is he?”

“I don’t know,” Ken replies, crossing his arms over his shoulders, “Yamato didn’t mention.”

 

Taichi pauses, confused.

 

“Then why on earth is he calling that early?”

“Taichi, it’s not early,” Ken says with the same careful enunciation Taichi used earlier, “it’s almost five PM.”

 

Taichi stares at Ken over the edge of his laptop, the orange glow of his screen almost painfully bright between them while he scrambles to gather his thoughts, and yet only manages a feeble:

 

“What?”

“It’s almost five PM,” Ken repeats like Taichi might break if the news is delivered too abruptly, “Yamato asked me to check in on you because you missed your phone call.”

“I—ju—what?” Taichi stutters, still unable to make full use of his braincells, “what do you mean he asked you to check in on me?”

“Well,” Ken answers with a heavy blush, “we’ve all been sort of worried about you lately, and you didn’t seem ready to listen, so I agreed to keep an eye on you...then when you didn’t answer on Skype or on your phone, Yamato asked me to pop by and I just...trusted his instincts, I guess.”

“...what?”

 

Ken’s face goes from flushed to beet red in record time, and Taichi almost feels his own eyes turn into panicked spirals as one realization follows another and he all but yells:

 

“What do you mean, you were keeping an eye on me?”

“Like said,” Ken says, shoving his hands behind his back, “we were all worried...I’m the one who lives closest, and your place is on my way from the academy, that’s all. Why did you think I spent so much time here?”

“To see Daisuke?” Taichi replies, hoping the high-pitch of his voice doesn’t erase the ‘duh’ from it.

“I see him every day while he works,” Ken points out, puzzlement pushing at the edge of his obvious discomfort, “I can talk to him there. Besides, if I were visiting him, I’d at least talk to him.”

“Okay,” Taichi answers, bringing his hands up to rub at the slowly-forming migraine between his temples, “so you’re...not interested in him?”

 

Ken blinks and looks down at his crossed arms as if expecting Wormon to be there—as if looking for comfort in the shared confusion—before he shakes his head with a helpless little shrug and says:

 

“You know I’m straight, don’t you? I mean. I’m actually demiromantic, but I’m still not interested in men.”

 

Taichi’s eyes widen, heart hammering louder and louder in his ears and against his ribcage as he absorbs the enormity of his mistake.

Months—he’s spent months encouraging Daisuke’s crush, shedding as much of a positive light on the prospective match as he could manage, plotting and congratulating himself on a project well-managed, and all t hat for what, exactly?

He shies away from the answer like stepping back from the edge of a cliff you were about to fall off of, clenches his fingers into fists, and tries to breathe deeply through his nose. What does his reasons matter? The result is exactly the same: he was warned against this. Extensively so, even, but it wasn’t enough to stop him, and now Daisuke’s the one who’s going to pay the price.

 

“Oh my god,” he mutters, “what have I—”

“It’s okay,” Ken interrupts, clearly misreading his intent, “what matters is you’re safe.”

 

Taichi looks back at Ken’s face then—stares at the concern in his dark eyes—and tries to listen to his friend’s word while his brain slowly turns into some bland cotton-candy thing.

 

“It’s just—you’ve lost a lot of weight in the past few months,” Ken says like he’s reciting a list, “you haven’t been playing soccer—Hikari said you didn’t even eat much even when your mom was cooking. And then Yamato told us you sounded bored about your work and you’d started texting him at odd hours—it wasn’t that hard to put two and two together.”

 

Taichi frowns at that, going over Ken’s speech in his head—abrupt weight loss, lack of appetite, loss of enthusiasm...and okay, he woke up at five today, but that’s just because work and university left him positively exhausted for heaven’s sake!

 

“You think I’m depressed?” He asks anyway, just to confirm—he manages to be disappointed at the way Ken’s face softens no matter what, and squashes the feeling as hard and fast as he can manage. “I’m not depressed,” he promises.

“Taichi,” Ken starts, but Taichi cuts him off:

“I’m really not. I’m just super tired—I see how it can look that way, but just because it looks like it doesn’t mean I am.”

“In my experience,” Ken starts, but Taichi cuts him off with a raised hand:

“Ken, I’m not depressed. Stop worrying, and tell the others too—I’m fine. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have something important to take care of.”

 

He all but pushes Ken out of the apartment after that, deploying considerable amounts of energy on convincing the guy not to worry—it doesn’t look like it works but, at last, Taichi is alone again, and he can finally catch a breath.

After all, if he’s going to have to break a friend’s heart—all through his own usual, pathological, bullheaded stupidity—he might as well take some time to figure out the least bad way of doing that.

 

If it even exists, that is.

 

{ooo}

 

Daisuke looks down at his hands while Taichi’s face catches fire, sweat boiling under his armpits while the burning heat of shame licks at his neck and ears.

It’s only been a couple of hours since Ken left the flat, and maybe Taichi could have given himself more time before he had to face this conversation, but what would have been the point? Delaying things protects no one but himself, and if anything he deserves the discomfort after what he did. He’s the bearer of Courage, dammit! He’s supposed to be a leader—to keep his team safe—and all he’s done lately is set one of them up for heartbreak while he made all the others worry!

Suffering for it won’t change anything to the situation, but at least it should ease his mind.

 

“I really am sorry,” he promises for what must be the third time in as many minutes, “I don’t—I shouldn’t have encouraged you without knowing...I shouldn’t even have gotten involved at all, actually. I never meant for you to get hurt—I’m so sorry.”

“Well,” Daisuke starts, almost—but not quite—managing to hide the shiver in his voice, “you were trying to help. That happens.”

 

Taichi opens his mouth to answer—tries to nod in assent and accept the forgiveness he’s so readily presented with—but the words stick at the back of his throat and he looks at the ground instead, fingers digging so hard in the flesh of his thighs even his knuckles ache. He stays silent, and lets the weight of his shame drag his shoulders down, down, down, until he’s almost kissing his own knees.

 

He barely resists the urge to bang his head against the bones when, after a long, painful silence, Daisuke leaves the living room and slams the door to his bedroom shut behind him.

 

{ooo}

 

“I can’t even believe anyone thought I’d make a good ambassador,” Taichi tells Yamato when he catches him on the phone several hours later, “I’m so—so—stupid and selfish!”

 

Yamato half-yawns, half-grunts into the phone, and Taichi listens to the rustle of fabric on his friend’s end of the line, followed with another soft grunt when—Taichi assumes—Yamato realizes what time it is.

It strikes him, now, that there is quite a lot of irony in waking someone late at night so he can complain about being too selfish, but then the damage is already done by now—and Yamato will just call back if Taichi hangs up anyway.

 

“Sorry,” he says nonetheless, glad, for once, that Agumon isn’t here to witness the interaction, “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize—”

“Calm down, it’s barely past nine here,” Yamato tells him in a whisper—Gabumon must be sleeping in the same room, meaning Taichi could end up indirectly waking the Digimon up as well.

 

Things just get better and better.

 

“The real question is why are you up at five AM?”

“You were right about Daisuke,” Taichi admits in lieu of an answer, ears still burning, “about Ken—about everything.”

 

There’s a pause on the other end of the line—Taichi imagines he can hear Yamato frown, impossible though he knows it to be.

 

“I assume,” Yamato says in a careful tone, “that you apologized already and he didn’t take it too well?”

“He took it very well, actually,” Taichi admits in a tight voice, “better than I had any right to hope for. He thought I was just trying to be nice.”

“So you set him straight.”

 

Taichi swallows around the thick lump in his throat—refuses to let the burn of his eyelids become anything more, even if it takes some loud, deep breathing Yamato is sure to identify. At least the living room is dark now, and neither Daisuke nor Veemon have given any indication they wanted to come out so far.

 

“I didn’t even have enough guts for that,” Taichi admits, shame rushing back to life with the words, “I just sat there and let him figure it out for himself.”

“At least you didn’t lie,” Yamato points out, tone more gentle than it has any right to be—it stiffens Taichi’s back, claws at his throat until he hisses:

“You sound like you don’t even mind!”

“Fine. You were stupid, pigheaded and selfish, and you got Daisuke hurt, just like I said you would,” Yamato says, each words sharp as a knife, “does it make you feel better?”

“No,” Taichi admits.

 

In Yamato’s defense, it’s not like anything has a chance of succeeding at that just now.

 

“Then saying it was pointless,” Yamato says, voice barely above a whisper, “you’re a decent human being. You feel bad enough about this without me adding to it.”

“For all the good it does to Daisuke,” Taichi mutters, and Yamato snorts.

“I don’t think you can do anything about that just now,” he says, “you’ve said your piece, now give him space so he can think things through. Then we’ll see how it goes.”

 

Taichi sighs and nods, even though he knows Yamato can’t possibly hear that, much less see it.

Yamato’s right, though: there isn’t much to be done about Daisuke’s predicament right now, and it’s not Taichi’s place to do it. Excruciating as it is, the only thing he can do is wait.

 

“What if he doesn’t want anything to do with me afterwards?”

 

The question left Taichi’s lips almost of its own accord, cold dread flooding his lungs at the though. What if Daisuke decides to leave for good—what if the others feel like they have to make a choice, what if Taichi’s stupidity just damaged their group beyond repair?

 

“I don’t think he’ll do that,” Yamato starts, but Taichi snorts before he can finish his sentence:

“How would you even know that?”

“Because I wouldn’t,” Yamato says, matter-of-fact tone blurring into a yawn. “We’re not close friends, but we share a crest, remember? He’ll need time, sure, but I don’t think he’ll leave entirely.”

 

Taichi nods again, the motion just as useless as it was before, and wipes at the edge of his eyes with his palms. Really, he’s being pathetic—Yamato’s right. There’s nothing he can do to help right now, and sitting in the dark like an idiot won’t change anything to his situation.

With a sigh, he gets to his feet—winces when his knees crack as he straightens up—and then he says:

 

“He’d have a right to leave though. I basically broke his heart because I was afraid he’d leave the flat.”

“I know,” Yamato replies, “you messed up, there’s no hiding that. I just don’t think it’s entirely your fault.”

“I’m not depressed,” Taichi replies automatically, before he amends: “well, obviously I am feeling depressed, but I’m not actually sick or anything.”

“Then you’re doing a good job of pretending,” Yamato says, and Taichi pauses at the edge of his bedroom, one hand on the threshold to hold himself steady:

“I’m not,” he insists. Then, tiredness stretching his voice into some sort of half-whine he barely recognizes: “can we just leave it at that? I’m not up for a debate about it. I’m fine. Overall.”

“Okay,” Yamato says in that way that means he still disagrees but doesn’t want to fight about it—in a way, it’s almost worst than having to argue the point. “You should go to sleep now, though. You’ll feel better tomorrow.”

“I don’t feel like sleeping.”

 

Taichi would say he’s not tired—if anything, it would salvage the sad remnants of his dignity, if only to his own eyes, even if not much of it is left to spare where Yamato is concerned—but the truth is he hasn’t been that exhausted since the weeks following the Reboot. It’s a bone-deep ache, something thick enough to coat his entire being and spirit, and right now he doesn’t have the energy to pretend otherwise.

It’s not like Yamato hasn’t already seen him at his worst, anyway. What’s one more instance in the grand scheme of things?

 

“At least go to bed,” Yamato insists, and Taichi honestly only agrees because putting up a fight is too much of an effort just now.

 

He makes his way to his bedroom on autopilot, free hand in front of him to avoid bumping nose-first into the wall as he feels his way to his bed. He collapses on it without bothering to take his clothes off—he only even put them on out of respect for Daisuke anyway—and keeps his phone against his ear when he pushes his head into the pillow.

It takes him a second to register the sounds of movement on Yamato’s end of the line, and then he’s yawning into the phone:

 

“What are you doing?”

“Getting my guitar out,” Yamato replies after a brief pause—he must have gotten earphones to free his hands, then.

“You think a lullaby’s going to put me to sleep?”

“I know I’ve put you to sleep that way before,” Yamato replies without missing a beat, “shut up and enjoy.”

 

Taichi chuckles, surprising himself with it, but he does manage to shimmy out of his dress pants and slip under the covers while Yamato tunes his instrument.

It barely takes half a measure of a tune from Spirited away before he falls asleep.