Smoke Snake

Chapter 3

Tk doesn’t come to class today.

Neither does Kari, for that matter. Davis isn’t quite sure which empty seat makes him feel worse.

He should call them. He should go check on them. He should go ask Izzy, or Yolei, or anyone if they’re okay. That’s what a good friend would do.

But…

a light so bright it hurts the eye, pulsing in anger and hunger and fury

sticky red and glassy eyes and more red, and a small fragile body hanging on three sharp claws

He can’t.

In his chest, he feels the snake of heat press against his ribs, begging to be free.

He’s never been happier to get out of school.

“Tk is okay.” Tai tells him, having caught up with Davis on the way home. “He’s really tired, and it’ll leave some… scars, but he’s alive. Knowing him, I don’t think he’ll mind the marks too much, honestly.” he tries to joke. “Kari’s doing good too. She doesn’t want to leave his side, but she’s not hurt or anything.”

Davis hates it. He hates that he’s had to be chased down to be told this. He hates that he didn’t gather the guts to go find out himself. Courage? Friendship? What a joke. He’s the worst of the worst.

“How are you holding up?” Tai asks, and Davis stops dead in his tracks.

Davis doesn’t want to lie. Davis doesn’t lie. Davis is simple and straightforward, because frankly everything would be easier if everyone was.

But that’s the core of the problem, isn’t it? The world isn’t simple and straightforward. The guy he hated looks like a monster and sacrificed his life for him, the girl he loved turned out to be a storm who lit a fire in his belly.

He startles when a hand lands on his shoulder. 

“It’s okay to not be okay. You know that, right?” his palm is impossibly warm through Davis’s shirt- warm like the Sun in summer, like a blanket over his skin, like a house becoming home. There’s something a lot like understanding in his eyes, and the pressure in Davis’s chest is too high and the smoke is choking.

"There’s… there’s something in me, Tai.” It’s hard. It’s hard, to find the words to define it and the strength to speak them. But once he starts, he finds that he cannot stop, hot coal tumbling off his tongue. “Back then, when… when Tk… when it happened. Something got in me. There was smoke and fire. It was trying to- to choke me, to burn me up, to tear me apart. And- and it didn’t go away. It’s still here, Tai. I can feel it. The bundle of heat in my chest. It’s here and it’s growing.”

He doesn’t notice he’s shaking until he feels Tai’s fingers on his wrist.

“Davis,” he pauses, seemingly unsure. He and Davis have this in common that they’ve always been more creatures of showing rather than talking. Slowly, he lifts Davis’s hand, and presses it against his own chest. “Nothing got ‘in you’, Davis. It’s all you. It’s always been you. Just a different side of you.”

Davis blinks. Gears turn, piercing together an understanding, one he isn’t sure he likes. “So… What? I’m turning into a monster? How is that any better?”

“It’s just another kind of puberty. A digipuberty.” Tai grins. “It’s only as bad as you allow it to be.”

Davis closes his eyes. He thinks of Tk and his teeth. Izzy and his eyes. Sora and her jaw.

“Besides,” Tai muses, “there are worse things to get than fire.”

He thinks of Tai on the soccer field, coughing on the sides between times out, Tai in the digital world wiping away from his mouth something bright and oily too fast for a distracted Davis to really register.

“…What do you mean?”

“Well, in the end, fire will never fails you.” Tai taps his chin mindlessly as he speaks. “Bodies break. Resolves shatter. But fire? Fire burns. It burns until it chokes. When your bones are broken and doubt messes with your head, you can always count on fire to keep you upright and kicking. It’s just a matter of picking how much of you want to let it consume.”

That… makes sense, in a way. “That is. A rather poetic way to put it.”

“Blame Matt. He tried to get me to help him write songs, apparently soccer isn’t a proper source of inspiration.”

Davis laughs at that. An honest, bottom of his heart laugh like he hasn’t laughed in days.

Breathing feels easier.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow, he’ll go to the Takaishi household.