[fanfic] Digimon Adventure 02: My Purpose

[higuchimon]

Title: My Purpose
Characters: Jun & Daisuke
Word Count: 2,605||Status: One-shot
Genre: Family||Rated: G
Challenge: Diversity Challenge: section D, #98, fic that starts & ends with the same letter; Thoughts of Siblings Competition
Summary: Jun's always known what her role in life as a big sister was. Until Daisuke went behind her back and did something she never imagined: saved the world.

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Ever since Daisuke was born, I knew what my purpose as his older sister was. Our parents told me that I would have to look out for him until he was grown up. I think they thought I would be responsible and all of that.

How they got that idea after watching me grow up for six years has always been beyond me. The only thing I wanted to be responsible for when they brought Daisuke home was getting rid of the little bawling annoyance that took all of their attention away from me. I’d been the only center of their world for my whole life. What did they need another kid for? Wasn’t I good enough?

He was a boy, too. I guess they thought they should complete the set, one boy and one girl, but what could he do that I couldn’t? Sure, he was a champion drooler from day one, but that was one contest I didn’t want to win.

I didn’t really try to get rid of him. I wanted to, I really did! I wanted to wake up one morning, and not have it be because he was demanding his breakfast or his diaper changed or attention or whatever else it was that he wanted, and to find out that I was an only child again. I had the happiest dreams about that. None of them ever came true.

Momoe kept telling me that I’d get over it, that she’d felt the same way when her little sisters were born, but I didn’t want to get over it. I wanted to get rid of my brother. Besides, she hadn’t been an only child before anyway. I had been, and I wanted to be again.

No matter what, he didn’t vanish into thin air, and I had to put up with him. At least I didn’t have to be there all the time. I was in school by the time he came along, and that gave me so much time away from him.

Sooner or later, he got around to growing up, which I definitely appreciated. Daisuke got a lot more interesting once he could crawl around and do things instead of lay in his cradle and whine all the time.

Being Daisuke, our parents blamed him for some of the things that he did. They probably should’ve blamed me for a few of them.

Maybe one or two of them. Like showing him where the cookie jar was and teaching him how to stack things to get to it. That took him a while to learn, but once he figured it out, you couldn’t keep cookies away from him.

It took our parents only one experience to figure out that Daisuke and sugar is a really, really bad combination.

I kind of wish now I’d been able to record it. It would be amazing to pull out the tape and show it whenever his friends come over. He’d squeal so much, but he knows that I have certain rights as his big sister, which include embarrassing him every chance that I get. He should consider himself lucky that baby pictures are Mom and Dad’s domain.

At any rate, he got older. I really shouldn’t say that he grew up, because Daisuke? Growing up? Like that’s ever going to happen. He got bigger, he started being able to hold conversations. I won’t really say ‘intelligent’ conversations because he wanted to talk about soccer and how great this guy he’d seen playing was and the silly things he drew with his crayons. If he’d wanted to talk about something like music and rock stars and anything else that was really interesting, then I’d say that he wanted to have an intelligent conversation.

Then came a day that changed a lot more than I ever imagined it would. The first thing I thought was that it was some kind of monster movie being filmed. One with really good special effects. I’d heard some of the newer companies could make it look like monsters really were roaming the streets.

Unfortunately, none of them had yet reached the point where they could make it look like buildings were being blown up when they really weren’t, so when our building shook like it was in the middle of an earthquake, we all knew something was going on somewhere.

Well, I knew. Daisuke was too busy staring at the monsters and squealing like the eight year old he was to think anything else about them. Me, being a much more mature and intelligent thirteen year old, I grabbed him by the wrist and started to drag him out of the apartment with Mom just ahead of us.

“Monsters! They’re really cool, Jun, aren’t they?” Daisuke just kept waving his hands at them, probably wanting to grab his crayons and draw them. He hadn’t drawn a whole lot recently, not since he really started to get into soccer, but every now and then I’d find something of his floating around the apartment.

I’d never forgive him for the time he drew that one picture of me and Momoe. I don’t even know where he gets ideas like that. Probably better not to ask. He might actually tell me, and then I’d have to hurt him. A lot.

“Yeah, they’re wonderful. Shut up and keep running!” He could draw them some other day when we weren’t running for our lives.

He wriggled around more, but I was almost grateful when one of those things sent some kind of energy beam slashing near us and a piece of the building exploded. One of the pieces slammed into my arm; it didn’t break it, but I could feel blood dripping down in just a few seconds.

The best part of that was that Daisuke stopped wanting to draw the monsters and figured out running away was the best option. I want to say it had something to do with what I said when I got hit, but I don’t think it was anything that coherent. And from the look Mom was giving me, I probably shouldn’t have said it around him anyway.

I said a few more of them five minutes later when these weird ghost creatures rounded us up with a lot of other people who’d run out of the building and dragged us off to Big Sight. But Mom was saying a few of them herself then, and trying her best to get them to leave Daisuke and me alone, so I don’t think she noticed.

I didn’t know what they wanted. I don’t think any of us did. At least no one who might have said anything to us about it. We were just shoved in there and ignored for the most part. That was fine with me; the less they paid any attention to us, the better I liked it.

As much as I wanted it to be otherwise, though, they didn’t keep on ignoring us. Not all of us. They didn’t pay any attention at all to Mom and one of them gave me a really hard look a few times. I wanted to ask if he were thinking about asking me out or something, but then he grabbed Daisuke and dragged him off.

In all my life, I don’t think I’ve ever panicked as much as I did right then. What did they want with my brother? Why him?

To be kind of honest, I was a little jealous. This was Daisuke. My little brother. He wasn’t anything special at all. He still liked food fights and he ate anything that sat still long enough to be eaten, sometimes before the fight and sometimes after, and he thought kicking a ball around was the height of being awesome, and he was just Daisuke.

So why did they want him? What made him special?

All right, maybe I was a lot jealous.

I’m sort of fuzzy about what happened after Daisuke came back. Nothing he said made a lot of sense at the time. Something about getting in line to see a cat. I would’ve asked if he hit his head, but Daisuke’s said things like that before.

Things worked themselves out, and I didn’t find out everything about what did happen for the longest time. What I cared about then was finding Momoe and her family and making certain that they were all right. I never did find them; but she told me later they were out of the city for the day, so they weren’t in any trouble at all, except for not being able to get back in once that fog blew in.

Daisuke got even weirder after that, and for him, that’s saying something. There was this girl in his class, Yagami Hikari, and while he didn’t talk about what happened, I got the feeling he thought she knew something about it.

I didn’t want to talk about what happened either, nor did anyone else. It was weird, now that I think about that time. It was like everyone decided about three days in August just didn’t happen. Or if they did happen, no one should talk about them at all.

But if you want to talk about weirder? Daisuke hit the jackpot for weird when he got into fifth grade. Because that was when he started talking to himself in his room a little while after school started. He thought I didn’t hear him, but I did. It’s not like he was whispering.

And it just got weirder after that. I caught him sneaking food into his room a half a dozen times. He insisted that he wanted to eat it, but I knew for a fact that at least twice of those times, he didn’t like what he was bringing in there.

But it vanished anyway.

Then came that whole business with Ichijouji Ken. I wanted to see their soccer game against each other; I had a dozen clippings or more of Ken and all of his awesomeness – no, I don’t like soccer, I just wanted to get his autograph on my shirt. For someone my brother’s age, he really is cute – and to see him in action would’ve been great. I missed it, though.

From the way Daisuke acted after that, I should’ve guessed something was wrong somewhere. Especially when Ken vanished. I just didn’t have all the pieces to put it all together at the time.

That whole year just was strange, because Daisuke actually had friends. Sure, he’d had people he hung out with, but he never really seemed to connect with them like he did these guys. I didn’t know what they had in common, but it was something. Something special.

Finding out what it was completely blew my mind. Because Daisuke? My brother? Supposed to help save the world? I think it took me about ten minutes to stop laughing, and I kept staring at him, wanting him to start, to tell me how much of a joke it was.

I could believe someone like Ken doing something like that. Maybe even Yamato…all right, especially Yamato, even after what happened on Christmas. But Daisuke? Why in the world would anyone want him to save the world?

And I kept right on thinking that, up until he actually helped to do it.

It still took me a while to find out everything that happened, but since all of those kids sat down with all of their family members –which happened to include me – I finally got to know everything.

Frankly, I still don’t see how Daisuke deserves someone as cute as V-mon as his partner. But that does explain who he was talking to all those times.

Well, even if I wouldn’t have picked him for it, he still managed to pull it off pretty nicely. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised about that. After all, he is my brother. If he’s going to do something right, at least it’s something really big, and really good.

There are a lot of other people who are getting Digimon partners these days, and some of them might have to help save the world one day themselves. I don’t have one, not yet. I don’t know if I will get one.

I think I’d like one, though. Daisuke seems so happy with V-mon, like he’s found a friend unlike any other in the world. Now that I see them all with their own partners, they’re all like that sometimes. I really wonder how they kept it from us for all those months.

Besides, how hard can it really be to save the world? I know what they told us, but it just doesn’t seem like that big of a deal. Maybe if I had to do it, I’d feel differently about it. But I think I’d like to try, because whatever Daisuke can do, I know I can do too. And probably do it better.

I’ve done a lot of things better than Daisuke. I’d like to think this could be one of them.

Though the more I hear about what he did since that first day of school, the more I wonder just a little. Because fighting the guy who is now his best friend and being tough enough to look a vampire demon thing in the eyes and tell it that his life is grand just the way it is? That’s pretty hardcore.

I think what I really don’t like the most about all of this is that I wasn’t there for him like I could’ve been. Sure, I didn’t know what was going on, and they went out of their way to make certain no one knew who didn’t already know. But I didn’t make any effort to find out what was going on even after some of it nearly slapped me in the face.

I’m never, ever going to live down what happened on that trip with Yamato and his friends. That’s something I’d really like to pretend never happened now anyway.

Maybe one day I’ll get all of this sorted out and know what to think about it all. I still keep tripping, just a little, over Daisuke and what he did in all of this. I mean, he practically told a three headed giant monster to eat him so that his friends wouldn’t get hurt. If I hadn’t heard it from V-mon and Ken and Wormmon and the others, I wouldn’t have believed it.

He’s a lot more than I ever thought he would be, the day our parents brought him home from the hospital, and I wanted them to put him right back where he came from.

Not like that. You know what I mean. I hope you do, anyway.

But if my purpose in being his big sister was to help him to grow up, to watch over him, and embarrass him every chance I got, then I think I did all right. Because he ended up finding a better purpose than just being my brother.

He became a hero. A really great hero.

Maybe if I watch him a while, I can be a hero too. I’d like that. There’s a whole lot I want out of the world and I can’t get it by sitting down. That’s never been how I do things anyway.

There’s just one thing I need to find: a purpose. One that’s not just bothering my brother or finding cute boys to sign my shirt. But I’ll find it. I taught Daisuke a lot, and this was the first lesson: anything is possible.

The End