Warning for negative bias, child loss, indication of poverty, etc. also severely AU.

Crash landing onto Earth soil has never felt so sweet.

Of course, it's rather short lived, because immediately Satsuma is reaming into him like he did something wrong. He can barely hear it all through the ringing because the space-time bomb did not work as intended, and he's starting to think he's going to go deaf in at least one ear.

What's he complaining about anyway? They're alive aren't they? Because of him! He saved everyone's lives… well, except Ikuto. Except him. Damn it that had kind of been the point. Not entirely his point but…

"Do you trust me?"

He's starting to think that's out of his reach for the moment.

Oh. His teacher isn't here.

Akihiro looks back. Doesn't really want to, but he should be here. He needs to go home or something. Damn family man.

He's not there. He's nowhere to be found. Wait, he'd stayed behind hadn't he? Damn idiot, the portal was still open. Someone needed to drag him back here, and it sure wasn't going to be him. No. That had been what had gotten him into this mess to begin with.

The portal vanishes anyway, not that it matters. Satsuma's still shouting and it hurts. Be a little quieter.

He'll admit to passing out later.

"That's the coward's way."

It's comments like that that make him hate his mentor on bad days. Coward?! What, was there something wrong with fear? Fear of a monster? She hadn't been a bad monster, usually, not an awful one. She stretched the truth a bit, and was dangerous, but she had listened to him. She had cared. Probably spoiled him on that a little bit, if he's going to be honest. Still. Better than Daimon.

Better than the professor who graded on merit rather than research, on gut intuition rather than put into practiced method. The man wasn't stupid, Akihiro wouldn't have worked for him if he was, but he definitely wasn't smart.

And standing here, in the older man's office, Akihiro has to wonder if it was more cowardly to not face a lion or not come home to your family on purpose, to your life. Because it had to be on purpose, if he could punch lions he could certainly have gotten through that gate.

He picks up his things, examines them. Behind him are the Noguchi's. The woman's inconsolable and he can't blame her. He does feel a niggling of guilt. They may have found their son if it wasn't for him firing that haphazardly. That part is his fault. It wasn't exactly wrong though. He hadn't meant to wake up the god damn lion.

She sniffles quietly and then smiles at him and god it's like her and it hurts. Going to make him go grayer than he is. He hates smiles like that that say they know everything. No one knows everything. A scientist's job is to learn everything and teach it to all the wriggling masses below.

He thinks about what a disgusting image that is and decides to wipe it from his vocabulary.

Her husband only nods, leading her out the door and to the findings conference which he has to present all of 'these god damn things are murderbeasts and could eat us all and my boss decided to stay there anyway' and nothing positive. They hadn't found the kid, all of their findings were incredibly inconclusive, and their best researcher was probably dead.

And it was his fault because he had some sense.

Yeah, today was going to be great.

"Don't apologize."

Akihiro shuts his mouth. It's a reflex, born of being raised by a single mother who got support checks once a month and promptly spent them on him and bills and food. Saying sorry was something you got out of rather quickly. "Right..."

He just never expected barely seasoned mother Daimon Sayuri to have it down to a science of its own.

Probably would help if little Masaru wasn't looking at him with utter disappointment too. Yes he isn't the guy's dad, and it isn't his fault his dad was a reckless fool.

(He's starting to think he has a thing about fathers. It might be a complex.)

She sits him down like he always comes over rather than on occasion when the man forgets to do his paperwork or doesn't give him the right set of calculations (and now that's all fallen to him anyway, joy) and sets food in front of him. The lack of real meals for nearly six months gets to him and Akihiro devours it in minutes.

The embarrassment is worth it for the way the woman smiles.

"He stayed behind," she says after a while, after sending a slightly less disappointed Masaru out to go catch frogs or whatever his daily routine was. He hopes it isn't face punching, he does not need two of his teacher in the rest of his life if and when the man came back (because he would, he had to, otherwise how would they proceed?). He nods and she sighs. It's one of those long drawn out sighs that speaks of fondness, like they've been married more than ten years rather than less than six. "My husband's a bit foolish, isn't he?"

More than a bit, he wants to say. More than a bit and a half. He doesn't say that, catches his wandering tongue. "My teacher's enthusiastic."

"It gets the better of him."

Ouch.

Akihiro almost feels sympathy for the mirage man. Almost.

She smiles again. "I suppose that means it's back to work for me."

He can see the feasibility of that going down the drain in her face. His mother had barely gotten a job at her age. With two children, and one still in diapers, that was impossible. Though, Yushima, thankfully, was not an idiot.

He pulls out the file from his bag. "The higher ups are signing for this instead. He..." He swallows because the whole thing is a lie of its own and while lying is sometimes good, it's usually imperfect. "He'll be considered dead, rather than MIA. You'll be compensated for it until your children both graduate high school, possibly university if the cards are played correctly."

Akihiro can hear his mother's voice every day he came home with top scores, even in things he hated doing, because that was the only way to get free was to get good, get better than anyone else. Apartments weren't cheap. Houses were beyond expensive.

He watches her face as she turns it over and over, as she reads each line word by word with the utmost care. He shouldn't be surprised she's that thorough, but he is. He should know better by now.

After a while, Sayuri holds her hand out. It takes him a second to realize it's for a pen, which he thankfully, as a scientist, keeps on hand fairly often. He doesn't flush this time. He thinks about it, but he doesn't.

Akihiro proceeds to exit with as much dignity as he had entered with, which admittedly wasn't much. She thanks him on his way out and it hurts a little, being thanked for something he didn't do.

Just something he must have inherited from his teacher, he figured.

Still, it feels good, it feels too good. He can't stand how much the praise makes him swell up.

Pulling the gun was stupid, his ideas had been stupid. It aches to be wrong. The trouble is he doesn't know how wrong he is. He's met so few digimon. One that had wanted to snap his neck the way you did chicken joints and one that loved him so damn hard she had left him. He doesn't know if maybe Digimon have babies or they're the same from one day to the next. They eat all kinds of food, he knows that, he knows because Nat was very fond of his mother's udon. He knows that they can blend in with humans sometimes/ He knows that they can have feelings but that's all he knows. That is not enough to make these decisions though it is enough to be very, very afraid.

But he's more than afraid, isn't he? He's confused and angry and bothered and tired. All he had wanted was to talk to her and that had failed. But now he has to try again. Is it that he has to? Or more that feels obligated to try?

People are still disappearing. There are monster sightings everywhere in Japan, and they're popping up outside too. He tracks it. One of them might be her. He looks very hard for gold.

Yushima is invaluable, he realizes. Satsuma is as well, but Akihiro recognizes when a person is used to being given orders rather than giving them. That's fine. The man's not a scientist.

There are appearances, Digimon appearances. But no disappearances at times.

He meets one, a blank eyed blond aristocrat boy who tells him it happened in the garden. He feels the father watching him. It goes ignored.

The black thing is not as stoic as its human but it tries. It's a different reaction. It's… he doesn't want to say it's a human reaction, because it's not but it is.

It's confusing, aligns with one other but not much. It bears investigating.

So, he does.

He doesn't go back to the Digital World. He doesn't think he can.

Akihiro visits the Daimon family some more, mostly because she calls his phone while he's grading papers and somehow this means he gets a free meal and to have to investigate little Chika's growth spurts at the child's insistence and grudging curiosity from the son about what he's doing from the son because it 'was dad's work once'.

"Could be again," he offers and the bitterness is not in his mouth this time.

The little boy's scoff, so perfectly disbelieving at nine years old, is almost uncanny to himself. He would find it funny if it wasn't a little heartwrenching. He had thought two Suguru was a problem.

But still, the children ask, and Sayuri doesn't say no, so he tells them he's looking for their father (because he is) but he's proving difficult to find. He doesn't talk about the monsters. That would involve swallowing his own tongue.

But when the children have gone up to bed, he tells Sayuri. He tells her everything and she listens with white knuckles and angry hazel-green eyes and for a moment, the woman he had always thought of as a wee bit dreamy is not even close.

Then she relaxes, nice and slow.

"He's not coming back, is he?"

Akihiro gives her an unprofessional shrug. He has no idea.

"He has better chance than the baby did," he offers, as if it's a condolence. Did. Does. Probably did. He's not sure. That was tactless.

Sayuri nods, probably pretends like it wasn't. "I see."

They've got real government funding now, almost six years after they nearly died to get recognition. The Noguchi don't ask for updates anymore, but Akihiro wouldn't have given them any. The woman was nearly catatonic the last time he had seen her. Best to just leave them alone to the ordinary life, since that was never going to be him, from the sight of things.

Akihiro notes a pattern as more humans and Digimon… coexist. It's nothing like how he thought.

(But it's children, he realizes. Actual children. It… it fits somehow.)

There's a pattern. He can follow it. He can find it.

He can change things.

Without hitting them. Without shooting them. Without being the coward or the bully.

He will do this differently. He will do this right.

He still has nightmares.

Nightmares about the gunshot, about the fangs, about his throat being so parched that he's surprised he has saliva anymore. Nightmares where they're all dying slowly one after another and he makes it all the way into that arctic zone alone and gets punched into a wall and there's her voice and-

He keeps waking up and thinking she's there but she's not.

Akihiro wakes up hearing his mentor calling him coward and seethes. Then he looks in the mirror and smiles a little bit.

So what if he is? And maybe he's not. He's the kind of brave that isn't about strong hands and a big heart. He's the kind of brave that keeps people alive.

And he sure as hell isn't whatever Daimon Suguru is.

A/N: Okay so I have a lot of feelings on the canonical writing of Daimon Suguru and Kurata Akihiro, and admittedly most of them are kind of weird. I refuse to justify Kurata's actions in canon, but I don't really think Suguru deserves a pass. This came out of that. Anyway, please review! I appreciate them! And if you haven't read Imperfection, please read it!

Challenges: Ultimate Sleuth 2.2, Diversity Writing (AM) E56.