Pairing(s): Taichi/Daisuke, implied Taichi/Yamato. (Also brief Takeru/Hikari if you want it to be, mentions of Shuu/Jun, and one-sided OC/Sora).
Rating: M
Contents: m/m, language, underage sex (seventeen year old Taichi, fourteen year old Daisuke)
Summary: It only takes one summer to teach Daisuke to be careful what you wish for. No happy ending.
Disclaimer: I don't own Digimon; Toei Animation, Bandai, Saban and Disney do. If I did, it wouldn't be suitable for children.
Purist's warning: You're going to see both original and dub names appearing. I'm basically happy with the dub, but it's so inescapable that Digimon takes place in contemporary Japan that I don't see any way to get away with saying that the English names are their real ones. Therefore original names are used, but some of the dub names - the ones that could be logical diminutives - appear as nicknames.

It should have been easy for him to score. The boy on the other team was fast, but he was also three or four inches taller than Daisuke and outweighed him by a good fifteen pounds, and neither factor was contributing to his maneuverability as Daisuke ducked away, swerved away, and dribbled, running flat out. A couple of players came in to give him some problems, but he shot the ball past them to Kiyoshi on the wing, who some part of Daisuke's brain had been conscious was matching him pace for pace, and barely slowed as he collected the ball and continued the run. It was like that sometimes; you were aware of what was going on on three or four different levels at once, and nobody had an idea first or was the leader because you didn't think about it, it just happened and was.

It had been climbing steadily into the eighties since summer vacation had begun, and today there was glorious, unbroken sunshine in the place of the recent rains; Odaiba baking under an endless blue sky without a wisp of cloud. Daisuke had been recording the temperature every day until the end of term for a science project, but he had no need to look at a thermometer this afternoon to know that it was scorching, and he was dog-tired. Sweat was starting to plaster strands of hair to his face, and his shirt stuck to him like saran wrap, but he didn't slacken his speed as he approached the penalty box.

He gulped air as he twisted his head to his left and right. Almost all of the defenders were out of position. Kiyoshi was struggling to find a gap through which he could pass to Haru in front of the goal, and between Kiyoshi and Daisuke was a clear cross, and, for one beautiful moment in time, between Daisuke and the goal was - nothing.

Daisuke yelled, loud enough to burst a lung.

Kiyoshi's head shot round, a wide smile leaping onto his equally sweat-drenched face as he abruptly switched direction and kicked the ball straight through the legs of one of the boys tackling him with full strength. He was the best winger on the team, and the pass didn't fall short. A few encouraging shouts started to go up from the handful of people hanging around on the sidelines as Daisuke received it, turned in the same step, and shot for the corner of the net.

He saw the ball bounce off the goalpost as if in slow motion, but he hadn't thought that he was close enough for it to hit him. At least not that hard.

"Nice eye you're gonna have there tomorrow," quipped Taichi from the spot where he was lounging, as Daisuke walked off the field after the game. He rolled away, grinning, as the younger digidestined aimed a kick at his shins. "Hey! I'm bored off my ass. Hang out with me for a couple of hours!"

Daisuke gave up his attack, and flopped down on his belly with a groan. His entire socket and cheekbone were throbbing, and he gingerly reached up to touch the raging yellowish-purple bruise that he was sure he could already feel welling up under the skin. He wanted to bang his head against something else very hard, preferably a brick wall. If someone had handed him a pen and paper, he could have written down the names of a few million people he would rather have embarrassed himself in front of than Taichi, his friend, his role model, his... what? Everything that he wanted to be, and nothing that he was. He yanked up a handful of unsuspecting grass. "I should have scored," he said. "How could I not have scored?"

Taichi regarded him for a minute. "Did I ever tell you about the time I fouled the referee?"

"You did what?"

"Fouled him. I'd had an argument with him, and then he got in the way of one of my tackles." Taichi went on, mimicking the voice of the injured official. "He said it was 'a vicious and deliberate attack' and red-carded me. I had to sit out a quarter final."

Daisuke gave a reflexive snort of laughter.

"Lost a game once as well because I kicked an own goal in the last five minutes."

"You moron!" Daisuke laughed out loud this time, despite his mood.

As Taichi smirked down at him, he looked into the other boy's eyes, and he was suddenly conscious that he wasn't being told the truth, at least not completely, and, furthermore, that Taichi knew that he knew that. Daisuke wasn't sure whether he felt frustrated or grateful. It made him feel younger, and dumber, that his friend would lie to him just to make him feel better, and not even try to make a better job of hiding it - or maybe do it while knowing that he wasn't a very good liar. Yet, at the same time, he thought that he probably ought to be happy that Taichi would want him to feel better in the first place.

He realized that his smile had faded slightly, and that Taichi was waving a hand in front of his face. "What?"

"Earth to Daisuke! I said, Matt's dumped me for a rehearsal, and Sora and Izzy are cramming." Taichi still tended, more often than not, to refer to Koushirou by the nickname he had allotted to him years ago in summer camp, much to Koushirou's mixture of irritation and resigned amusement. "Wanna go to a movie and throw popcorn at the front row?"

"I don't think the ticket guy at the theater likes me," Daisuke muttered. He was unsure if the fact that he'd tried and failed to get into an R-18 movie the month before was the kind of thing that Taichi might relate to and laugh with him about, or if it just sounded somewhat pathetic, so he decided not to tell the story, at least not today.

Food was a better subject. He couldn't imagine food not sounding like a good idea to anyone. He squinted up into the sunlight. "Can we get ramen?"

"You want to eat again?"

"I'm growing! I burn calories fast!"

Outside the shop, the concrete exhaled the heat again like a huge storage radiator. They didn't walk many blocks through the crowded areas along the main street, turning off instead along the path that ran under the monorail track, the pedestrian-only route to Taichi's building. The dry stalks of yellowing weeds protruded from cracks in the asphalt, and every now and then, a bird could be heard singing between the intermittent sounds of the trains. Taichi broke his stride to snap off the flower head from a solitary dandelion, and, swinging around in front of Daisuke, stuck it somewhat crookedly behind his ear. Daisuke tried to pull his head away from Taichi's hand, and then shook it violently in an attempt to dislodge the flower, grappling with his armful of soccer ball and food bags.

"Hey! What the -"

Taichi grinned. "Yeah, you're right. You don't need decoration. You're cute enough already."

Daisuke felt a sudden rush of warmth that had nothing to do with the weather; a blush that started out at his neck and rose up into his ears. He gawked, and then mentally slapped himself for proving Jun's past comments right as he realized that he must have, indeed, looked like a goldfish. "I'm... cute?" he said. The question was as much a rhetorical one as not.

Taichi ducked his head in a deliberate way so that he could meet his eyes. "Hey. I was just kidding around - I didn't mean to embarrass you. I say stupid shit all the time; ask Matt."

"I wasn't embarrassed!" Daisuke insisted. He didn't want to be thought of as someone easy to embarrass, as someone that Taichi had to take care around and mind what he said in front of; as a child. He'd never had any difficulties deciding what he did want. It was easy; you saw what you needed, and then gave it everything you had to get it. But for some reason, where Taichi was concerned, he wasn't sure. He looked at the other boy over the top of a paper bag. Hesitantly, he said, "So I'm not really cute?"

A curious look appeared on Taichi's face. "Do you want me to think you're cute?"

Daisuke looked down at his noodles. It wasn't quite the same as the ramen shop asking whether he wanted nori or egg. "I don't know. I mean... that's normal, isn't it? To want to be cute?" he finished, unsure of his words. Should he only want girls, when they giggled about whatever girls did when they got together, to think he was cute, and Taichi to think he was hot, or something? Or did that sound worse?

Taichi regarded him for a moment, and then reached out and grabbed the back of Daisuke's shirt, bringing him to an abrupt halt on the sidewalk. With the same indefinable expression on his face, he began to circle him, looking him over as he might do a science room specimen. He raised his hand to casually thumb Daisuke's cheekbone, examining his face, and then again to tug lightly on a bit of spiky hair protruding from beneath his goggles - Taichi's goggles - before moving behind him. Daisuke waited, confused, inhaling soy-chicken smell and feeling both the burn of the sun through the humid air and Taichi's nearness spring new droplets of sweat on the back of his neck. He didn't think that he'd ever been so aware of someone else's presence.

Taichi reappeared, his grin back in place. "Thought so."

Daisuke stared at him, a sudden irrational panic taking hold as he wondered what awful physical attribute of his Taichi had discovered. "You thought what?" he blurted.

"You're officially cute."

ooo ooo ooo

Being able to relax with food was something of a luxury for Daisuke. His parents usually stuck to just asking him to please not put his elbows on the table, but Jun, when she was home from college, was still more than capable of making up for them with a running commentary on how revolting he sounded when he ate, how he'd taken the last bread roll without asking, and a seemingly endless list of other mealtime sins. In school time, he generally preferred bumping trays in the crowded cafeteria, eating around the accidental puddles of soda left on the tables, and listening to someone else slurping their soup or cracking their gum into his ear.

Taichi's balcony was a lot better than any cafeteria. Daisuke shifted, stretching one leg, catlike, over the side of his chair, and just managing to reach far enough while still remaining balanced to wriggle his bare toes in a stripe of sun. His socks had been discarded along with his shoes at the door, and the air felt nice. He stared out over the railings, frowning a little. Taichi's building was almost parallel to his, and it was strange, in a way, to think about how they sat in different places sometimes looking out over the exact same stretch of water. He was always pleased when he discovered something new that connected Taichi and himself, however small, and he added this one carefully to the jigsaw puzzle in his mind, alongside shared appreciations like Orange Range and fried potato pancake sandwiches. He used to be happy with how big his puzzle had grown, but it had begun to frustrate him, as if it was always missing one essential piece. Sometimes he thought that Taichi's smile - his warm, more infrequent smile, rather than his shit-eating grin - might fit the space, and, once, he had found himself watching the way that Taichi's shoulders rolled as the other boy pulled off his shirt after an exhausting game and splashed a nearby bottle of water over his head, and they had looked like perfect candidates at the time.

And Taichi thought he was cute.

Did that fit?

He was still frowning when a hand brandishing a bottle of lemonade appeared in front of him. Taichi had returned from his mission to the refrigerator and was standing beside him.

"I figured I shouldn't give you beer, and Kari half-killed me the last time I drank her chocolate milk, so it was either this or regular soda." Taichi dropped the bottle onto Daisuke's lap, and returned to his own oversized floor cushion at the foot of the chair. He settled on it, one leg tucked loosely beneath him, lazy in the warmth, and took a swig of his own drink, watching Daisuke with dark, curious eyes. "You know, I kinda didn't want to interrupt you there. You looked like you were miles away. What's taking up so much of the Motomiya brain power today?"

"You," Daisuke answered, and immediately cringed, even before he saw the lift of Taichi's eyebrow. He struggled to reassure himself. Everybody always had to be thinking about something, so there wasn't any reason why it shouldn't be whoever they happened to be with. It wasn't like he was telling Taichi that he thought about him all the time, was it?

Even if that wouldn't have been all that far from the truth.

Daisuke felt the flush rising in his face again, and shifted in his chair, now both embarrassed and angry with himself. You were supposed to start thinking and caring about different kinds of stuff as you got older, but things weren't supposed to change, not in the ways that mattered. He'd never wanted them to change. He hadn't known that hitting his teens was supposed to mean having these feelings about one of his older friends that made him blush and feel aware of him over every inch of his skin whenever he was close to him like this, like it had never done during the crush he had once thought his gratitude for Hikari's friendship was. This was as if Taichi had an electrical field around him that Daisuke kept stumbling into. He hadn't known that it would mean making this empty space exist somewhere inside him that he didn't know how to fill. He tripped over his words in his attempt to get new ones out and smother the one still hanging in the air between them.

"I mean, not just about you, about you and me, and... it's nice here, and I don't get to do this that often, just hang out with you and talk. I know I don't get top grades, so I'm probably not the best person to help you study, but I know about more than just soccer. We can talk about anything you like," he finished, hopefully, chewing on his lower lip. Did he sound too desperate? He'd wanted to offer, not ask.

"You want to be smart? Smart like Izzy?" Taichi exhaled through his nose, a small, amused snort. "I'll just grab you a drink, show you where the power outlet is, and go watch TV for two hours. You won't notice I was ever gone."

This felt more natural. "Well, no... more cool, I guess... more like Yamato."

An odd look crossed Taichi's face, just a brief shadow of something indecipherable. "I don't just talk to Matt because he's cool," he said. Then the shadow passed as quickly as it had appeared, leaving Daisuke unsure whether or not he had just imagined it, and Taichi smiled, warm-smile. "I don't just talk to you because you're cool either."

"It's okay." Daisuke lifted his shoulders in a not-quite shrug. "You don't have to say stuff like that. I'm just me."

"Yeah. You're cool because you're you."

Daisuke felt that he should at least say 'thankyou' in some way, but before he could get the words to form themselves into some kind of order, his mind went completely blank and numb. Taichi had put his drink down on the floor beside the empty food cartons, and, reaching for Daisuke's nearest foot, swung it onto his lap. Idly, he began working it over with his strong, blunt fingers, kneading the sole and instep in a vaguely circular motion. Daisuke opened his mouth, closed it again, goldfish, and finally managed to produce a small throaty sound that he'd intended to be Taichi's name.

Taichi glanced up from his task, his mouth quirking up, apparently misinterpreting the look on Daisuke's face. "You ticklish, Dai?"

"No! Kind of... I don't know!" Daisuke wondered how it was possible for Taichi's touch in one inoffensive place to be sending little shivers all the way out to his fingertips. He must be strange. Maybe he was congenitally defective, and had hypersensitive skin and nerves connected up to each other that shouldn't be and all kinds of other wrong things. He swallowed, his throat feeling dry, wishing he could take a mouthful of his lemonade, but unable to turn himself to doing anything but watching the steady movements of Taichi's hands, the rhythmic flex of the tendons.

"Feels good if you've been on your feet for a long time for a game." The corner of Taichi's mouth rose higher. "And yours were in my face asking for it." He grabbed Daisuke's ankle and hauled him back as the other boy guiltily tried to pull his leg away. "Do not move, Motomiya! I haven't finished the patented Magic Massage yet."

His hands weren't expert, but they were thorough. Each of Daisuke's toes was rolled in turn between Taichi's thumb and forefinger, long strokes made to the top of his foot, and gentle pressure applied to the ball. Daisuke felt himself sliding lower in his seat, instinctively stretching towards more of the sensation. It gave him such a warm, shivery-good feeling having Taichi sit at his feet and do this for him that he began to grow almost lightheaded. He felt strangely emboldened by it.

"Tai?"

"Yeah?" A thumb circled Daisuke's heel.

"We should do this again... more often."

Taichi looked up at him, and for a moment Daisuke felt not so much like a specimen as naked. Then his head moved in a slow, decisive nod, and he smiled. "Yeah. We should."

ooo ooo ooo

Jun emerged from the kitchen as Daisuke shut the apartment door behind him, toeing off his shoes. She was holding a jar of mayonnaise in one hand and a stick of celery that had obviously just been dipped in it in the other, and she took a bite of the latter, crunching as she observed him.

"People usually only have that kind of look on their faces if they've either been punched, or been kissed." She grinned, looking at her watch. "You have exactly fifty-six minutes to tell me every dirty detail before Shuu arrives."

"Yeah, well, maybe there's one Motomiya who people actually want to kiss!" Daisuke retorted, but without the energy behind it that he would have liked. It was bad enough that he'd blushed in front of Taichi, but there was no way that he was going to let Jun tease him enough for him to do it in front of her, just because he resented giving her the satisfaction. Especially when it wasn't as if he had been kissed by Taichi, he added silently, and instantly had a vague sense of being hurt by the thought. He went over it piece by piece, looking for the culprit. After a moment, he realized that it wasn't discomfort that that Taichi could have kissed him, but disappointment that he hadn't.

Jun pointed at him with her celery. "Hey! As a next-year-to-be-married woman, I both resent and refute that remark!"

"You put drugs in Shuu's tea. Or you tied him up in your room and tortured him with hot irons and Mom's vegetables and more painful stuff until he asked you."

"Daisuke..!" came their mother's voice from the kitchen, a note of warning in it.

Jun rolled her eyes. "It's okay, Mom, he's insulting me! The honor of your cooking's still intact!"

"Daisuke, apologize to your sister!"

"But no guy would propose to her unless she'd threatened to do something really bad to him!" Daisuke paused as a thought crossed his mind that he immediately knew he never wanted to have again. "Or he'd done something really bad to her..."

"Jun!!"

"I'm not, Mom!" Jun shouted. She reached behind her and pulled the kitchen door shut, then, turning back to Daisuke, licked the tip of her finger and made two imaginary marks in the air, either side of an invisible line. "Okay," she said, pulling a face at him. "One all. But you do know I'm still going to bleed you for all the juicy information, don't you?"

"You're disturbing. I don't want to be related to you!" Daisuke dropped the soccer ball as he headed for his room, leaving it to roll to a corner. The sun's intense warmth was starting to fade from his bare skin, but he could still taste lemonade soda.

Chibimon was asleep in the bedroom on a pile of laundry. He was tangled up in a shirt, and the fabric of the sleeve covering the tip of his nose ballooned and deflated with the gentle puffs of breath. Daisuke found himself watching for a few moments, oddly hypnotized. For some reason, he'd never really noticed until several months after he'd first met his own digimon that they breathed. He'd found out quickly enough that they ate; Chibimon, no matter what form he was in, seemed to have an inbuilt radar that enabled him to instantly home in on any candy bar. But breathed? Digital creatures breathing. Even now, Daisuke still found that extremely cool. He always wanted to hold a mirror beneath Chibimon's nose when he was asleep, just to see if it fogged.

He was thinking about going to find one, when Chibimon suddenly sneezed, and opened his eyes. The blue digimon beamed at the sight of his partner and tried to jump to his feet, but the shirt was wrapped around one leg, and he ended up half rolling out of the clothes pile instead. "You're back!" he chirped, muffled in carpet.

Daisuke shook his head, snapping out of his trance. "Dude, you'll stink if you sleep on my clothes before they're washed."

Chibimon lifted his arm and sniffed at his own fur, then at the laundry. "They don't smell bad. They just smell like you." He hopped over and stood on his toes to sniff at the leg of Daisuke's shorts, nodding happily in confirmation. "You smell like Taichi today, too," he added.

Daisuke felt as if he ought to be ashamed at the images that sprang into his head at the innocuous comment, and was even more ashamed that he wasn't. He lay down on his bed, feeling slightly sick; just a strange heady, swimmy feeling inside. Chibimon, looking puzzled, followed him, and bounced on the spot, trying to grasp a corner of the sheet with his small paws so that he could climb up beside him.

"Hey, Taichi doesn't smell bad either!"

"He smells good," Daisuke mumbled into his pillow. He turned his head to the side, resting his cheek gratefully against the coolness.

Chibimon nodded, still bouncing, but now in a frustrated way. He was evidently aware that there was another level to Daisuke's response, but unable to grasp quite what it was. "He smelled like almonds last week when he was eating Pocky..."

"Better than almonds."

"Daisuke-smell is good to me." Chibimon stopped bouncing for the time being, and sat down on the floor. "It changes when Taichi's around, though."

"Huh?" Daisuke lifted his head. "It changes how?"

"I don't know." Chibimon shrugged, as if the issue wasn't particularly noteworthy to him. "It's just different. It was different when you came in, but it's gone now. And it was different when we all went to Miyako's apartment and you were sitting on the couch next to Taichi watching that movie. And Miyako's sister made cake." He brightened, back on more interesting ground. "Will she make cake for us again?"

Daisuke stared at his digimon in horror, realization creeping over him as he remembered how he had felt sitting next to Taichi that day. Miyako's couch wasn't especially roomy, and he had been almost squashed against him by Ken on his other side. He had been able to feel the breathing of both other boys - out of synch, Taichi inhaling as Ken exhaled - but he had been more aware of Taichi's. He had thought at the time that it must be because Ken's always seemed familiar, like an extension of himself; a subtle echo of their digimon's bond. Or just because Taichi was bigger.

"You can smell it when I'm horn-" He choked off the word, unwilling to say it, even now. That would have been defining a very specific shape for his missing puzzle piece, and he wasn't anywhere near sure enough of his feelings right now for that.

Chibimon blinked, oblivious. "What?"

"Forget it!" Daisuke buried his face in the pillow again.

Backing up across the room and taking a run at it, Chibimon made a flying leap, and managed to land on the very edge of the bed. He teetered for a moment, scrabbling with all four feet, and finally managed to haul himself onto the mattress. Plumping himself down next to his partner, he prodded him, curiously. "Daisuke? Can we play video games now like you promised?"

Daisuke sighed. He felt like heaving the biggest sigh of discontentment in the world. "Yeah," he said, after a pause. "Yeah, we can play."

He just wished that the things he wanted hadn't got so much more complicated than that.