When it comes to writing fic, I am seriously weak against 'they wasted a perfectly good plot,' so this is a fic I've prettymuch wanted to write since I first saw Tamers during the original broadcast. Very disappointed Yamaki didn't get a partner Digimon, when there was all the hearing voices and other foreshadowing that something was up with him. Tamers wasn't full of aborted arcs the way 02 was, but yeah, that felt like they were planning to build up to something more than his Heel Face Turn and it got cut for time.

In Adventure/02, he'd probably be in Kari's position, complete with vulnerability to the Dark Ocean and nastier possessions.

I had three different ideas for Yamaki's Digimon – first was Calumon for the hilarious contrast, the second was Zhaquiomon for maximum getting along like a house on fire (screams, flames, people running for safety…).

I researched Ryo's backstory while I was refreshing my memory on Digimon Tamers with a marathon, and ye gods, Digimon 02 makes so much more sense now!

For example – the armor digivolution that was the only thing that let them fight the Digimon Emperor? The digi-eggs that let them do it weren't around in Adventure, but that wasn't (just) because the writers hadn't thought of them yet.

The digi-eggs were repaired by Ryo and Ken during Ryo's second game (which also explains where the movie enemy Diaboromon came from). What Ken did to save the world before he got brainwashed was what allowed them to fight him while he was brainwashed. 'The real Ken' Wormmon had so much faith in was helping the Digidestined all along.

The mad scientist Big Bad of a series of video games causes enough trouble for an entire second series by leaving behind a single piece of mind control tech stuck inside a hero: Mega Man X or Digimon 02?

Yamaki glanced at the reunions happening all around him, worried families reassuring themselves of the safety of their just-returned children under the supervision of the personnel he'd arranged, and allowed himself a moment of hidden, bone-weary relief. For all the logistical scrambling he'd had to push through at the last moment, in the end they'd all made it to the park in time to watch the controlled crash of the Ark's emergence in the real world at the recalculated coordinates. Past the crowd and the railing, the programmed ship still sat in the water of the fountain where it had come to rest, shrouded in the lingering fog of a digital field. After everything it had taken to bring the children back from their perilous rescue mission in the Digital World - the tenuous contact they'd eked from the communication device he'd given them, the desperate creation of the Ark, and that frantic call at the end for donated processing power from computers all over the world when the Hypnos mainframe had gone down at the last, horribly crucial moment – the group of children and digimon, rescuers and rescuees alike, were finally back home by the skin of everyone's teeth. All of them, and the Digimon they'd gone to rescue, finally home.

Well, almost home.

"Her father said, 'She left on her own, she can get back on her own,'" Riley reported, and Yamaki glanced over at the brown-haired girl flanked only by two of his people confirming her condition, while the rest of the children were surrounded by their families.

For a moment, he just saw a twelve-year-old, standing slightly hunched under a blanket, with a strange smile on her face. No evident injuries, but he couldn't be certain that she could get herself over to another city on her own safely, not when everything had been disrupted by the evacuation of Shinjuku and the way people in neighboring areas were also starting to leave Tokyo. The devas might have stopped attacking when the Tamers left, but they still had the 'ordinary' kind of Wild Ones showing up, and it was no longer possible to cover up the danger they represented. Fortunately, those kids weren't the only Digimon Tamers in Tokyo. Unfortunately, the government's explanation for Vikaralamon's rampage through Shinjuku had revealed that 'a certain network official' was responsible for Juggernaut.

The children might have accepted his communication advice and the Monster Makers might have been willing to join forces with him to recover the children, but the effort to reach out to Japan's other Tamers, to recognize their efforts and give their Digimon some kind of legal authorization to be in the country… Well, it wasn't going well.

Digimon with Tamers were protected from Juggernaut, mostly, but the ones who had come to the real world looking for Tamers hadn't been. All he'd managed to do with Juggernaut was cost humanity a lot of potential allies and alienate the Tamers who knew those Digimon and were working to find partners for them.

His efforts to protect Japan with Yuggoth and Juggernaut had failed. The model the Tamers were using worked, and even if he'd been wrong about so much else he had known that he had to find something, he couldn't just stand back and do nothing. Especially since he hadn't been formally fired, it was still his job to protect Japanese citizens from the hazards of the digital world.

He hadn't stopped the children from going into the Digital world and he'd taken responsibility for getting them back, so making sure she got the rest of the way home safely was his responsibility. He was going to have to arrange something on her behalf, he decided, already moving in her direction.

Then the moment he took a closer look he knew that, "She's not on her own."

He recognized it.

He first felt it when he activated the Juggernaut.

No, that wasn't true, that wasn't true at all. He'd first felt the stirring of emotions like these all on his own. What he saw in the girl now… He'd seen it in the mirror.

It had started back when he discovered the Digimon. Rogue artificial intelligences infesting the net? An infestation like that would cause far too much damage: trivial to get inside the bank systems and crash them, disrupt food shipments and oil shipments because no one could keep track of them or pay for them. The power plants and grids that lit the world were digitally regulated, the traffic lights that kept cities moving ran on digital timers, the hospital machinery that preserved lives needed both computational chips and electricity (backup generators wouldn't hold out forever), and even the water supply was primarily controlled by computers, save for the physical emergency protocols. Parasitic AI rampaging in the computer networks would ruin real lives, kill real people. This was the information age: it was communications that let people and vital information get to where they needed to be. That let people from opposite sides of the world learn to understand each other.

Hypnos was a government agency created to gather signals intelligence, to spy on both criminals and other countries and fight off cyberterrorism. Lack of intel or ability to coordinate that intel killed. It was proverbial that a message lost to something as trivial as the lack of a nail in the messenger's horse's shoe could mean the end of a nation.

The Cold War veterans in the agency knew how much destruction could potentially be caused by a breakdown in communications, and if Digimon began to tamper with communications from within the network...?

Yamaki was never good with people.

No. He was terrible with them. They always expected him to lie to them when they asked whether or not he was smarter than them - when lies were supposed to be bad - or they expected him to know things he had no way of knowing.

The world inside computers was supposed to be different.

The deliberate work of human hands, human minds. Simple. Logical. Zeroes and ones, an elegant either-or dichotomy. None of the chaos and confusion of the real world. A program either worked or it didn't, and if it didn't there was a reason why and it was possible to track it down and fix it. It was something he was good at, and if he was good enough at something then it didn't matter how much he irritated people, they still needed him.

Finding out that the internet had these things, these evolving viruses infesting it? If the public found out there would be a panic. The things needed to be destroyed, now, before they destroyed the Information Age.

Finding out that they could manifest in the real world? Not just the real world's chaos infecting the pure realm of thought, turning the world of ones and zeros into the domain of rampaging beasts, but they wanted to come here?

It shouldn't be possible, it seemed like magic (something out of control, something they couldn't stop, couldn't fight), but he'd made it make sense, discovered and analyzed the mechanism. Code to chemicals to chain complexes to living, breathing monsters. He'd tracked them down and stopped them, defeated them, and he'd truly felt like the hero, hadn't he?

The one in the right, the defender of humanity, held back and fettered by small minds. The children didn't know what they were dealing with, acting like these were Pokemon instead of real, wild animals, dangerous chaotic creatures that didn't belong in either world, that lived to destroy.

He'd stop them.

He'd stop them once and for all. The Juggernaut, an unstoppable defense. Force them all back to their world (and if they were deleted in the process, all the better). He wouldn't let rogue AI set foot upon Earth, to kill not just their irresponsible creators but all of humanity.

That boy could see him as mad, as the villain, but he'd laughed because with that portal in the sky it had felt so perfect. Yes.

Stop them. Save this world. Preserve order, eliminate chaos. His quest, his ambition: in retrospect, that was when this thing he now sensed inside the girl had clicked into place inside his heart, wasn't it? His program had bridged the gap between the real and virtual worlds while he stood amidst swirling data, triumphant as his program scythed down those who dared trespass where they did not belong. If the children were right, if the Digimon were just children's games, he wouldn't have a problem with them, but they'd become a danger to everyone. Didn't they see that? They had been present when buildings fell to magic powers that ignored physics and strength that defied Earth's laws of biology, when everything had come down to children playing deadly games of monsters against monsters-

No, it hadn't mattered whether or not they did, because he saw the danger, he would fight this war in the shadows.

Then the damned things somehow managed to use his weapon, his vaccine, to break into his world. Once again, they weren't supposed to do that!

He couldn't bear his failure to protect his world. Couldn't let it stand. After all his efforts, had he only managed to create a path to let such powerful entities in, laying out the welcome mat for AI that hated and would try to destroy humans? He'd failed, he'd been desperate to fix it, but part of him was angry because this wasn't part of the script, this wasn't how things should be.

He'd become desperate to do something before the creatures evolved any further, before it was too late for humanity to stop them from breaking into their world and killing countless people. The Wild Ones were already materializing at will, a threat that couldn't be kept out or ignored: was he the only one who saw that?!

Then had come the disaster where Juggernaut had failed to stop the vaguely porcine titan rampaging through Shinjuku, ruining any chance of keeping secrecy - or his job, or the building - intact.

He'd stood there after his second failure like a captain going down with his ship, waiting to see if the world would expect him to atone for his failure with his death, but no. That wouldn't solve anything. Not that he'd had any idea of how to create a new solution, which was how he'd ended up at Riley's. She was the only person who understood his system almost as well as he did, she'd figured out how to pull off a cover-up that got the higher-ups off his back after one of the earlier incidents, she knew how to spot when something was a bad idea: maybe he'd turned up on her doorstep in hopes she had a better one.

Even after she'd let him into her home, he'd sat there on her couch reviewing files, rethinking everything he'd seen, not even registering her signs of affection, her offer of breakfast. Refusal to recognize reality: how could he call himself a scientist, much less a computer scientist if he held on to a flawed hypothesis, his blatantly false theory, for the sake of his own stubborn pride? There had to be something that could protect this world, and the Tamers had succeeded where he failed, dealt with the Devas he released into the world. He'd been forced to recognize that maybe the Digimon were more than just data.

Maybe they could be, should be partners.

Maybe they were people, and he was a mass murderer.

He'd meant to protect the world, but he'd blinded himself. That was why he took off his glasses to Takato and his friends, his expeditionary force, the real heroes going off to save the world. It was a pledge to try to look at the world with open eyes. Try to discover what was there instead of forcing everything to conform to what he expected to see.

Things changed, systems evolved: the first digital computer's original creators could never have dreamed what it would become. Just as computers had become more useful, simple programs meant to amuse could become allies, defenders.

Not bugs, features.

But back then...It had been the Juggernaut, he knew. That had been the moment when he truly became death, the destroyer of foul beasts that did not belong in his world. When the portal to the digital world was open and both worlds resonated. That was when he heard it, felt it, and now he saw…

There was more than a little irony that he had Juggernaut to thank for alerting him to what stood in front of them now; the link between the two worlds, the product of his thoughts and his will connecting him to a world of data, was the reason he could look at a little girl and see a hollow shell. But the person he'd been back then might not have understood what it meant. She hadn't been saved from an animal, she'd lost a part of herself. When Leomon became her Digimon she'd lent him her strength, her will, and when he was taken away from her they'd gone with him.

She'd been desperate to fill the void inside her, and something had obliged.

He took off his glasses now, not quite understanding the feelings running through him. Or maybe he did understand them, and that was what was worrying him. He hadn't wanted a Digimon partner, and now he had proof staring him into the face that it was hazardous, that it was risking insanity. He should be terrified, realizing that it wasn't only the Devas that had hijacked Juggernaut.

Juggernaut created a bridge between computer systems and reality, something that could let Digimon, data, people transfer between the physical world and computer systems.

The digital world was created by coding, and Juggernaut was his coding. The way someone programmed was how they thought, and the brain itself was a computer. If the Juggernaut could be used to transfer invading beings to and from one computer system… if only he'd realized that it, that something might be able to forge a link to him.

He should have been terrified. He should have yelled so they had some warning, should have tried to knock himself out, something to stop it from seeing him, realizing that the data link was there and setting up this two-way access. There was nothing he could do to stop it, just like he hadn't been able to keep the devas from using Juggernaut to gain access to the human world.

He still should have tried, he knew, because this thing had taken over a child, it was everything he'd built Hypnos to stop. He couldn't. Because in that moment, he'd recognized it, on some level. Not just a partner, which would mean something complementary, but something akin. They should understand each other perfectly.

He knew that it was using her. Yamaki had become a destroyer, yes, he knew in retrospect that he'd forgotten that his goal was to protect and had let himself be ruled by his pride, but this?

In the park surrounding them, the reunions continued, relief and scolding and reconciliation, all of them unaware of what had followed the children here.

He'd rather be at Hypnos. It was his system; he'd hoped he could control the world, make it safe from there. (Instead, it had taken children to defeat the Devas, and he hadn't been able to do anything about Suzie Wong being snatched by the Digital world when he'd been right there in the park with her.)

Only something (well, this answered that question) had taken out his system while they were trying to bring the children back from the Digital world, and while it would be restored from backup within a few hours (of course he'd anticipated attack from the Digital world, even if not one with that kind of power), for now… No. Even with Hypnos, he didn't have the technology to force this out of her.

Now that he studied it more closely...while he hadn't known it at the time, he'd encountered this entity even before the Juggernaut launched. The anomaly in the tunnel. So it had already been trying to get into their world. It had targeted Hypnos, the system that monitored entities from the network gaining access to the real world and the closest thing to a defense the human world had aside from a bunch of amateur children. It had smashed the system he created, and if he drew its attention then it would recognize him just as clearly as he recognized it.

Was this his fault? It would have gotten here eventually, even if he hadn't helped bring the Ark. Even if it hadn't used this girl. Just like he had kept trying to find a way.

Even if it wasn't his fault, it was his responsibility to deal with this.

Riley was looking up from her clipboard at him, worried. She finally said, "What do you mean, sir?"

He was prone to tuning out the world while he thought, but Riley's voice got his attention. He hadn't noticed Rika Nonaka walking up to Jeri and putting her jacket over the girl's shoulders.

The Tamers and their Digimon couldn't sense what this was, but he could?

He'd stopped moving when he'd realized what he was dealing with. He completed the walk over to it now, getting his people's attention and gesturing for them to remove themselves with a sharp wave of his hand. When Rika gave him a hard look, looking ready to tell him to back off, that the girl was distressed and didn't need to be bothered by someone like him, he told her to, "Get back."

"Jeri?" Takato asked, heading towards his friend. 'She' ignored him, eyes focused on Yamaki.

"That's not your friend," Yamaki warned Takato and Rika. "Come out of there," he said, because he knew something so much like him wouldn't have come here without a plan, wouldn't be so weak it couldn't manifest. It still… she was a child, and even if this was his partner, he couldn't… not a child. It was already in this world, and he'd taken it upon himself to protect those kids. Even if it probably wouldn't obey him any more than wild Digimon had to obey the first human they found. He couldn't… it was hard to want to harm it, but that didn't mean he could let it…

She laughed with inhuman delight, and he wasn't 'partner.' He was 'user,' 'programmer.'

That was exactly how he'd thought, before he'd realized that wasn't the reality.

Designate appearance. Tell it how to manifest, what form to take in this world, so it could pursue its goal without mutation.

Yamato couldn't help but stumble back as that which he'd already unthinkingly invited into his mind fully uploaded itself there.

Red-orange bubbled into the air around Jeri, something off about the mass that poured off her - out of her - to pool around her feet. It didn't seem to look or move right, like badly integrated computer animation, far more like computer imagery than anything real - even Digimon looked more organic. The strange mass surged forward and upward, turning and twisting strangely, as though there were more dimensions involved than the usual three. The seething orange-magenta bled away into ever-shifting mottled greys - like static, like a granite sandstorm. A shapeless, alien form assumed a familiar shape.

Yamaki looked forward into the eyes of his former self rendered in flickering ash, or rather tried to only to be blocked by glossy black. The mirror image of the glasses he'd used to block out the world, worn even at night because it was cool, he was cool, fighting a secret war, the hero of this story.

He was distantly aware that Henry had taken one look at the gelatinous mass when it appeared and realized that, "It's the D-Reaper!" and that Takato had raced over to catch Jeri as she fell. Guilmon was growling somewhere nearby, just as it had at the Juggernaut. At the program, the fighter, the partner Yamaki had tried to create for himself (so like Takato and so different) only to instead call up something already answering that description, already fighting for that purpose.

The D-Reaper grinned at him, like his doppelganger of stormcloud and static.

Oh, and it was sweet. To the D-Reaper, everything was so simple. So clear. Protect the net, protect both worlds by vanquishing evil. And what was evil? That which had outgrown its bounds. That which was stealing resources that weren't allocated to it, invading systems that didn't belong to it, slowing and damaging the programs, the lifeforms that were supposed to be there. Pluck the weeds to tend the garden. Protect the ecosystem by removing invasive species.

Kill. A simple and final solution. They weren't alive. The D-Reaper didn't understand alive. It hadn't been programmed to be capable of moral considerations. There was right and not-right, good and evil, black and white and simple.

Simple as the scythe it drew from his mind.

It really was just like he'd been back then - he too might as well have gone shrouded in grey while bearing a scythe, with his eyes veiled by black.

Refusing to see the truth, willfully blind.

Justice was blind, but that was supposed to be because it was without prejudice, not because it had only prejudice to go on and refused to see reality. The D-Reaper hadn't been designed to see any reality beyond whether or not a program had outgrown its bounds. It wasn't intended to solve problems or defend the net in any way other than imposing deletion.

This couldn't be how normal Digimon partnerships worked. He'd built it a path right into his head, and for now all he could do was be glad that he'd screwed up, and Juggernaut could create two-way links rather than the intended unidirectional data transfer to exile Digimon from the real world; that reciprocal access now allowed him to see enough of the D-Reaper's nature to venture... "Your programmer forgot about you, didn't he? He probably thinks that you're long gone, either because of incompatibility with modern operating systems, basic anti-virus programs, or both. With no source of updates you've been forced to adapt yourself, haven't you? You had to steal pieces of Digimon coding to keep up with their evolution.

"You know it's wrong," according to the D-Reaper's programming, "but it's the only way to keep carrying on your duty," Yamaki said, taking a step forward, reaching a hand into his pocket for his own sunglasses, but no, the shield wouldn't help. It would give him distance, make him harder to read, and that was the opposite of what he needed here. With his eyes bare he felt vulnerable, but he was vulnerable and a piece of plastic wasn't going to help. He could call in air support and it would still do no good, not against something as powerful as this.

"You've just been doing exactly what you were told this whole time… Except for in that one way. You need to be updated, given parameters that are realistic for a program to function in today's digital world. Otherwise, you can't do your job, right? And it frustrates you, that everyone sees you as the villain, not the hero, because times have changed and you can't update your criteria for what counts as reasonable parameters for other digital beings. You don't just need edits, you need a version update. You've been cobbling together what you need out of Digimon coding, haven't you? And it's made you more aggressive." Made it want to kill instead of doing its duty with calm detachment. It only helped illustrate why programmers were the ones who had the right to set parameters; programs didn't have the right to modify themselves or act outside their directives, even when circumstances changed.

It needed him and they both knew it.

"This program requires extensive upgrading," a distorted version of his own voice said. "You will begin now."

"Mitsuo!" Yamaki heard Riley shout as coding and decades-old bug reports flooded into his head.

He felt an arm that he knew was the D-Reaper's grab him a moment before he lost track of the outside world.