Strangers Like Me

I don't own Digimon, or any other franchise that may be mentioned here. Enjoy!

"Kouji?"

I stiffened at the sound of my stepmother's voice. What did she want now?

"Could you go up to the attic and get the folding table for me?" Satomi was, as always, completely oblivious to my discomfort around her. "I'd get it myself, but there's so much dust up there. It set off my allergies. Your father really needs to dust up there more often."

I was tempted to tell her to get it herself, or just completely ignore her like I usually did, but my father had been on my back lately about listening to her. Instead I sighed and left the kitchen where I had been trying to find something to eat. I didn't go to the attic often; there wasn't anything I found interesting there. Mostly old furniture and some of Satomi's stuff from before she married Dad. Nowadays Dad was the only one who regularly went there to dust before it got too much for Satomi's allergies.

I walked up the stairs and flipped on the light switch. Satomi's small folding table, something she only used when she had too many papers on her workroom desk, was wedged between two boxes of clothes. The table was stuck between the boxes, forcing me to pull hard enough that when the table came free with an unexpected jerk, I staggered back into a nearby bookshelf. Several books tumbled past me as the bookshelf shook. Then something bigger came down from the top shelf and bounced off my shoulder on the way to the ground, causing me to yelp. I looked down to see a medium-sized cardboard box. The fall had knocked off the box's lid off, causing the contents to spill out on the ground.

Sighing in annoyance, I put the table down to pick up the mess. There was a pile of what looked like old letters underneath them a lot of old pictures...

I froze.

Why did my father have two babies in that picture?

My eyes fell to another picture which had also landed face-up. My mother...My real mother, not Satomi. She had died in a car accident when I was two. She was seated on the ground, with a dark-haired blue-eyed little boy in each arm. I didn't have to look in the mirror to know that one of the boys was me, but the other...

This wasn't possible. This had to be some kind of sick joke...

Why was my name "Kouji," then? Why did my name translate to "second light?" The only time I had asked my father about it, he had told me I was named for a grandfather on my mother's side. But, if I had a brother...A twin brother...

My hands shook as I reached for another picture, then another. Every one had the same two children. With Mom and Dad at a zoo as toddlers. As younger babies in a playpen. Now toddlers again and playing on a playground. There was no way...Why hadn't Dad told me I had a brother? Had he been lost in the same accident that had killed Mom? At least my father hadn't tried to replace my...My brother in the same way he'd tried replacing Mom with Satomi. Or had he? Was that why he had gotten me my German shepard, Raiko?

I put the pictures back into the box, then moved on to the letters. Some of them were still in the envelope unopened for some strange reason. I wondered about that for a moment, then turned to the ones which were already out. The first letter on the pile was dated about three years ago. I recognized the handwriting as one of my father's older friends. What was it doing in that box then? Most likely Kyo had mentioned my brother. I skimmed through the first few paragraphs where Kyo was talking about his family, then...

"...I ran into Tomoko and Kouichi last week..."

Tomoko was my mother's name. I guessed Kouichi was the name of my brother. But, this was only from three years ago. Shouldn't she be dead by that point? What was going on?

"They're both doing fine. Tomoko has a new job and Kouichi is almost finished with second grade..."

Second grade?

But my mother had died when I was only two. There was no way...

No, that was wrong. I found myself gripping the letter harder than I had intended to as the truth became clear. There was one way for that to be possible. If my mother hadn't died at all, and my father had lied to me. He had been lying to me for all these years...

"Kouji?" Satomi's voice came from downstairs. "Are you all right up there?"

Satomi. I felt sheer rage blinding me. Of course she had to be in on all this, she was the one who was replacing my mother wasn't she? If Dad wanted to keep secrets so badly, I'd keep them. Neither he nor Satomi would know about what I had just found. But if Mom was still alive, then maybe one of those letters held her address. Or at least a clue to it.

"I'm fine." I tried to keep the turbulent emotions swirling around my head out of my voice. "I just found some old letters. I'll be down in a minute."

I put the lid on the box, leaving the stack of letters out so that I could bring them to my room and read them there. Then I climbed up the bookshelf to place the box back at the top. I picked up Satomi's table in one arm and the letters in the other. I took a deep breath as I got ready to head down the stairs, schooling my face into an emotionless mask. Satomi wouldn't find out that I knew, it was just another trip to the attic.

Satomi was waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs.

"Thanks, Kouji."

She took her table from me, then headed off to her workroom. I watched her go until she turned the corner, then turned and headed to my room closing the door behind me. I threw the letters down onto my bed, then turned to look at my dresser. There was a picture frame, one of those types which swung on hinges to display one of two pictures. The side that faced me was the one with the three of us. I scowled down at Dad and Satomi's happy faces. How could they smile, knowing that they were lying to me? I flipped the frame over to look at the old picture of Mom that Dad had given me when I was younger.

What had happened to my mother, to make her leave? Most likely a divorce. If that happened, then having Kouichi go with her made sense. It also meant that she would probably have gone back to whatever her family name was before she met Dad, so I would have to find that out. I sat down on my bed and picked up the first letter on the pile.

A half-hour later I put the last letter down with a sigh. The letters had said some useful things, like confirming my guess that my mother had left because of a divorce. Unfortunately, every mention of my mother was vague at best, and didn't answer any of my questions. Why had my parents divorced? Where was Mom living now? What was her family name? Did Kouichi know anything about me?

Most of the relevant parts of the letters talked about Kouichi. From what I read he was quiet, shy, and spent a lot of time buried in one book or another. I pulled my bandanna off my head and sank back onto my bed. How could Dad tell me Mom was dead? I knew that divorces were supposed to be especially hard for families, but that wasn't an excuse.

My eyes fell on the last stack of unopened letters which I had brought down with the rest of the stack. It was extremely rude to open another person's letters, but so was telling me my mother was dead...Besides, going by how the ink on some of the envelopes had faded slightly Dad had kept them for years without opening them. The name on the return address was Aoi Kimura, not a familiar name. Then again, not all the names on the letters had been familiar to me. I guessed that they were people who knew Mom and Dad before the divorce.

The envelope on top of the pile didn't have any letter, just pictures of a young boy. I guessed his age to be around six or seven years old. Kouichi...

I flipped the picture over to see writing on the back marking the date it was taken. Sure enough, it was not long after I turned seven. The next picture had the same boy, this time with a slightly older version of my mother. I felt my heart skip a beat as I saw her. It was one thing to hear that she was alive, but to actually see it...Even if it was only in a picture...

The rest of the pictures in the stack were pretty much the same. Kouichi. Sometimes with Mom, sometimes with other kids. Less often with an older woman. I grabbed the next envelope on the stack. The envelopes must have gotten out of order, because those pictures had Kouichi as a four year old. Other than that, it was the same thing. The rest of the envelopes had the same, too. Now he was eight. Then nine, then three. The final ones, chronologically speaking (But the sixth in the stack) were taken about a year ago and showed Kouichi as a ten year old. I pressed my fingers against one of the pictures from that year that showed my mother as well. Her face was more careworn than it was in the older pictures, but her smile was as bright as Kouichi's as they both held up an award of some kind. Kouichi's smile was definitely shyer, like he didn't believe he deserved all this fuss.

I laid back down and contemplated my next move. None of the letters had mentioned a family name or address or even a phone number to contact them by. That left looking up the people who had sent the letters and getting the address out of them. The person who seemed to know them best was the person who had sent all the pictures, Aoi Kimura. I guessed she was a relative of some kind. An aunt, or perhaps my grandmother. I looked down at the envelopes that had held the pictures. The return address never seemed to change, so it was most likely that she still lived there...

I got up off the bed and went to my desk to find a pen.

Author's note: This fic hasn't been beta'd, so there will probably be a few grammatical errors. This was a requested fic that set off my muse.