With the conclusion of my first fic, I wanted to change tact a little bit. This will be a shorter, much more light-hearted story that has Koumi as the focus, but with Taiora on the side (can't help myself). I did promise a reader about a year ago I would do something like this when I finished my first fic, so this is it basically. I'm really just trying to have a bit of fun with this one, kinda in preparation for my next big story. Other than that, hope you enjoy.

Izzy Izumi raced up the steps of the apartment block, the lift being, predictably, out of order. The young computer genius was short of breath, having jogged the whole way from his own home in another apartment block, part way across Odaiba. He would normally have walked, not least because of his real lack of athleticism, but with what was bearing on his mind, his current predicament was anything but normal, at least for him.

Izzy was a young man who liked facts and logic, and what he was experiencing was perhaps the furthest thing from his comfort zone that he could think of. He was both elated and terrified by the mere thought of it, and his mind was spinning with more than just a thought. He was experiencing a fixation, and he was going to one of the few people he hoped would be able to help him.

Panting as he finally came upon the apartment door he wanted, Izzy knocked three times, his fist creating a gentle, echoing rap against the wood. He waited for a few moments, doing his best not to dance on the spot with all of his pent up anxiety, despite his fatigue from having jogged so far. Mercifully, the door opened to reveal the exact person he was looking for.

"Hey Izzy, good to see you. What're you doing here?" came Tai Kamiya's surprised, but still jovial welcome, his immensely bushy hair reaching from one edge of the doorway to the other.

"Hey Tai." Izzy returned his fellow Digidestined's greeting hastily, forgetting to be surprised that Tai was so alert at nine in the morning, "Can I, uh… can I ask your opinion about something… privately."

Tai turned his head to one side, looking at Izzy on an angle.

"Um, OK, sure." Tai replied, a little taken aback. Izzy could understand as he barely ever asked anyone for advice and even more rarely from Tai.

Tai ushered Izzy inside the apartment. The Kamiya family residence was modest, having a small living area, an attached kitchen and three bedrooms, but Izzy liked its homely atmosphere, having visited it many times over the last several years. It reminded him a lot of his own apartment where he lived with his parents, only more crowed what with the extra child. As he looked around the family room, he saw Tai's younger sister sitting at the dining table with the phone pressed to her ear as she chatted animatedly into it.

"Hi Kari." Izzy called over to her, giving a small wave.

Kari smiled sweetly and waved back, but continued to hold the phone to her ear. Evidently there was someone on the other end of the line that was too important to put on hold, even for a few seconds.

"T.K.?" Izzy asked Tai bluntly.

"T.K." came the confirmation.

Tai led Izzy to the room he once shared with Kari. Six months prior, the older boy had entered his senior year of high school with fellow Digidestined Sora Takenouchi, who was also his girlfriend of a year, and Matt Ishida. At that time, his parents had seen fit for him to have a room to himself, leaving Kari to inhabit the guest room as the younger sibling. From all reports the arrangement worked out well as both were happy to have a bit more privacy from one another. But Izzy was concerned more with his own problem at that moment than he was with Kamiya family politics.

"So, what d'ya want to talk about." Tai asked, swivelling around and taking a seat on his bed while motioning for Izzy to sit down on his desk chair.

Picking up the small pile of school books and papers that lay messily on the chair and depositing them on the even untidier desk, Izzy parked himself on the seat, the cushion on it about as thin as a tea towel. Shifting uncomfortably, he stayed silent for a few moments, building up the courage to admit what he had come to say. Tai was visibly on tenterhooks as he leaned forward, eagerly awaiting what was to come.

"Well I…" Izzy began nervously, "I came to you because you have, er… you have some experience with this."

Tai just blinked, clueless as to what Izzy was talking about. Fidgeting uncomfortably again, the young genius pressed on.

"You went through a lot when you were working out how you could get together with Sora… and well-" Izzy explained slowly, but Tai caught on and interrupted him.

"Wait a minute Izzy. You have a crush on someone, don't you?" Tai said, grinning his head off at the potential gossip he had just gotten his hands on.

"Y-yeah." Izzy admitted, his cheeks reddening slightly.

Tai shot to his feet as fast as Izzy could blink and started air punching with his eyes squeezed tight and a grin reaching from ear to ear plastered on his face. Izzy just sat there looking utterly perplexed for the ten seconds it took for Tai to do his little dance and calm down again. When he finally slumped back down onto the bed, he said the one thing that Izzy dreaded to reveal, but that was the whole purpose of his visit.

"So who is it?" he asked, still grinning madly.

Izzy's answer was a mumble, lower than even he could hear.

"Come again?" Tai said, leaning further forward than he already was.

"M-Mimi." Izzy managed to say and this caused Tai's eyes to shoot open as wide as they could go and for the older boy to nearly fall forward onto his face.

"What!? Seriously!?" Tai exclaimed, his grin having been replaced by a jaw that was as close to the floor as it could go.

"Shhhhhhh!"

Izzy was embarrassed enough without having Tai shout all the newly revealed information to everyone in the apartment block, which would include T.K. Takaishi who was presumably still on the phone with Kari. From there it would spread to Matt, seeing as he and T.K. were brothers and then it would snowball on. Izzy shook his head furiously, trying to purge his mind of all the worst case scenarios. He wanted to keep this private until he knew what to do.

"I'd like to keep this between you and me for the time being, Tai, so please don't announce it to the whole neighbourhood." Izzy told him dryly, to which Tai chuckled in response.

"Sorry," he said, "I just really didn't see that coming. So… you and Mimi. When did this happen?"

Izzy stared silently in Tai's direction, but he was looking straight through his older friend and into a void in his own consciousness. He had never actually put it all in sequence before, never been able to fully understand it. But then that was why he was getting advice from Tai; he had tried to reason it all out before, but it had never worked.

"Izzy?" Tai prompted lightly.

"I- I don't really know where I should… how I can explain it." Izzy admitted, refocusing his eyes.

"Well from the beginning would be pretty obvious, I think." Tai said while he let out a small laugh, which only caused Izzy to grimace.

"Well… it was about a year ago…" Izzy recalled.

"Wait, this is when she first arrived back in Japan." Tai interjected, remembering the girl's return from the United States just over twelve months ago.

"Yeah…" Izzy confirmed, his recollections of that day becoming clearer by the second.

"So what was it that made everything click?" Tai asked, confusing Izzy a little.

"Um, what?"

"I mean what about her made you kinda… y'know, look at her that way?" Tai managed to explain, gesticulating randomly as he went.

Izzy had to stop and think at that. He remembered going home that day, after the reunion dinner that had been held upon her return, feeling incredibly distracted, which was unusual for him. His stomach felt like it was levitating inside his body, his heart was beating faster than normal and that night he had the most trouble sleeping since he had been in the Digital World. Most of all, though, he distinctly remembered the image of her bursting into his mind every five seconds, and no matter how much he tried to concentrate he could never seem to keep her out of his head. It scared him deeply at the time, as such an unwilling fixation was truly rare for him, and it had never concerned a person before.

Trying his hardest, Izzy wracked his brain, trying to remember exactly what had triggered such a reaction from him. After a minute or two he had recalled all he was able to. He looked up to see Tai waiting patiently for his response, which was strange to say the least.

"Ah, well the first thing I remember noticing… well she was so… so happy, I guess." Izzy recounted.

Mimi had been away, living in the United States for around four years. When she had returned, although she still insisted that she had loved America, it was like someone had breathed new life into her. They had all seen Mimi in the Digital World and on the odd occasion when she would return to Odaiba to visit, but when she had finally come back for good it was the difference between a hill and Mount Everest. She had been so bright and bubbly it was like she was a kid at Christmas on a constant sugar high. It was the first thing that had struck Izzy, as soon as he had laid eyes on her again at the airport that day.

"I don't really know how to explain it to you Tai, it was… infectious. It just hit me as soon as she walked into the arrivals area."

As Izzy looked back to Tai, he saw a thoroughly sceptical look on his face.

"So this all started because she was happy… right." he said, giving Izzy a strange look.

"What?" Izzy replied, thoroughly perplexed.

"Dude, there was more than that." Tai told him with a lopsided grin.

"More? I-"

"Izzy, when I knew I liked Sora it was more than just one thing that told me that." Tai explained, his expression whimsical and joyous as he seemed to be remembering something truly fantastic from his past.

"What d'you mean?" Izzy asked, both intrigued and surprised by Tai's reaction to his own recollections.

"Well it was practically everything about her," Tai said, but seeing Izzy's raised eyebrow he went into specifics, "I mean I loved how she was so playful, how she was so kind and caring. She was really sporty, her hair just fell so perfectly around her face, and he skin was so-"

"OK, I think I get the picture Tai." Izzy cut him off as he looked as though he was ready to rant for hours. After the couple had gone through their public 'lovey-dovey' stage for the first couple of months of their relationship, Izzy thought he had had just about as much as he could take of all that and he was in no mood to hear more of it.

"Ha, sorry." Tai said, grinning sheepishly and rubbing the back of his head, "Guess I got carried away. But what was it about Mimi? There must have been more."

Izzy returned to the depths of his memory, trying his hardest to extract what Tai wanted to hear. After a short while he came back with more.

"Well, she was really nice to me when she got back." Izzy remembered. Tai raised an eyebrow at that, so Izzy qualified his statement, "Not that she wasn't nice to me before, but you know how she kinda, um… how she never used to be… enthusiastic about talking to me since I'd always talk about computers and other technical things."

"But you still talk about all that stuff." Tai said blankly.

"That's what I mean. She didn't seem to be bothered by that anymore, it was a complete change. I just couldn't understand it." Izzy insisted.

"All right." Tai replied, "What else?"

"Ummm… well I guess I was really impressed by how much she knew. I mean, I never thought she was unintelligent, but it's like when she was in America… it was like a quantum leap." Izzy did his best to articulate it, but he was still met with a very strange look from Tai that he was unable to place. Izzy decided to move on.

"She was so confident, but not… not arrogant. She was really talkative." he continued on, recapturing Tai's attention, "Oh, and… umm."

"'And umm' what?" Tai prodded.

"Y'know…" Izzy mumbled embarrassedly, "she looked…"

Tai's eyes widened and he smirked. "Oh yeah, she was wearing…" he said, giving some rather awkward hand gestures.

"Yeah…" Izzy confirmed, remembering Mimi's designer attire from that day. If there was one benefit she had had while living in New York, it had been access to some of the highest end fashion anyone could get their hands on, and she of all people had an eye for it, plus she knew full well how to get the best look possible out of it.

"Yeah, that'll about do it." Tai stated, nodding his head as he continued to smirk, "Looks like you're human after all, Izzy."

Izzy was bright red as he looked away from his friend. He had hated to admit it, but he would have been blind not to notice how attractive she had looked to him back then. Even now, despite the fact she was not dressing to impress every day of the week, he was still taken aback at how beautiful she appeared to him. Compounded with the myriad of other things he liked about her, it was now becoming so much clearer to him why he felt the way he did. He was surprised that it had taken a meeting with Tai for everything to start to make sense.

"OK, so what're you gonna do about it?" Tai jumped in, surprising Izzy.

"What am I… ah, that's why I came to see you." Izzy replied, dumbstruck.

"Well, I'm going to put this in really simple terms for ya, Izzy." Tai told him, leaning in with a big grin still on his face, "You tell her and ask her out. Easy, right?"

"W-what?" Izzy spluttered, not able to believe what his friend was telling him, "B-but, you took ages when you were deciding what to do with Sora, a-and if I tell Mimi, well… look at her and look at me, she wouldn't-"

"Look Izzy, if you want to be anything more than friends with her then you'll have to say something. I took way longer than I should have to decide I liked Sora and I wish I'd done something sooner. Anyway, you're the guy after all." Tai stated matter-of-factly, folding his arms and nodding to himself.

"Why should that make any difference? Sora was the one that asked you out in the first place." Izzy pointed out, eliciting an embarrassed look from Tai.

"Heh heh, well I just got lucky, I guess. Outside of that, the world is screwed up, but that's just the way it is for the most part." Tai said, not looking Izzy directly in the eye until he had finished speaking.

"But girls ask guys out all the time. Why is it my responsibility?" Izzy demanded, losing sight of his own problem, trying to make a point.

"Well, I'm sure they do, but as Matt will surely tell you if you ask him, don't bet on it happening to you." Tai said flatly, continuing before Izzy could ask any Matt related questions, "And besides, from everything you've said, Mimi doesn't look like she's gonna be the one to do it, and that's assuming she feels the same way you do. It's up to you to make the first move."

"So that's it?" Izzy asked, a little disappointed, "And what if she doesn't feel the same way?"

"Then at least you'll know you tried. I wish there was more I could tell you, but that's it. There's really not that much else to it." Tai told him apologetically, but checked himself quickly, saying, "Oh, make sure you tell her in person though."

"Hmm, that was the one part I knew already." Izzy groaned.

"Look, why don't you come back here if and when you ask her out, and if she says yes I'll help you plan the date." Tai offered.

"If…" Izzy said, a little despondent.

He had expected more from Tai who, along with Sora, were the only friends of his who had ever held down a successful relationship that had lasted more than a couple of months. If that was all he could get from the guy who had laboured for almost two years, working up the courage to tell the girl he had feelings for how he felt, then Izzy really was not liking his chances. Sure Sora had beaten Tai to the punch, but it was on the very same occasion that Tai himself had planned to tell her. He had been certain that Tai would be able to give him some sort of strategy or something that could help him out. Instead, all he got was 'suck it up and tell her'.

"Don't worry Izzy, you'll do fine." Tai assured him as they walked towards the Kamiya's front door, seemingly reading his mind, "Just be up front and try not to speak gibberish when you tell her how you feel about her."

Giving a last wave to Kari, who somehow was still on the phone, Izzy stepped out of the apartment onto the landing. Farewelling Tai, he started his journey home thinking all the while, 'Why was life so hard sometimes?'