Bring Them Home.

Bring Them Home
Song- Bring Him Home from Les Miserables.

This is my first song fic in ages- the first was a companion to my first fic, a terrible mary sue fic oh gosh I'd delete it if it didn't have 60+ reviews.
Neither here nor there.

This was the most emotionally exhausting piece I've written, competing with the Dark Ocean chapters of A Fading Hope and the short story I wrote about being bullied in middle school.
I actually had to stop half way through and go into the living room and watch some mindless destruction AKA Independence Day with my roommates.

So.
First things first, of all the characters in the Digimon franchise, there are dozens who get like a minute of screen time and have names.
Mrs. Ichijouji did not have a first name. She's not on the character list on fanfiction.net. ( maybe we should fix that somehow?)
So I named her Aina, which means Love and Affection and also Vegetables. I thought it fit nicely.
I named her husband Yori, which means Trust.

When I first came up with this idea, I planned it for Izzy's mum and T.K.'s mum, and that was it. But as I started planning it- a month ago? I started thinking I could adapt it, that Ken belonged in there because I love his mother, and then- Sora too, because her mom is the only other one in the group that Knows and Understands and lives with that knowledge that her child is fighting something. Might not come home.

Let's talk about these moms.
I love the moms, I love Moms on a whole- my mom is my best friend, and when I'm away at school I miss her more than anything.

So I enjoy writing about moms.
Ken's mom is the least 'in the know' about her son's activity, but she knows something is wrong, and wishes she could help him. She does what she can, giving him all the love that she, well, didn't show very well as Ken was growing. I don't think it was her fault, exactly. I think that when Sam died, something in her broke, and is only now starting to heal.

Sora's mom is an interesting character, she had a huge, huge, huge impact on Sora's life, and her crest. She is not a soft hug mother, but a lioness, fierce, protective, and... not the best at explaining things? But she loves her daughter so much, and wants to protect her from all the danger. I feel like, of the knowing mothers, she's the least comfortable with it. Part of her wants to take Sora away from it all, but she knows she can't do that. She has to trust her daughter.

T.K's mom is similar to Sora's- she knows that this is something her sons have to do, but that doesn't mean she likes it. She's not very close to Matt, but as of A Fading Hope, I think they are getting closer. He comes over for dinner some nights, she goes to his concerts, but it's a new relationship. She knows the danger of the digiworld best of all, heard T.K. crying out from nightmares in those last few years, saw T.K in the hospital because of it. She's terrified of losing her family.

Izzy's mom has got to be one of my favorite characters. There's a line, a throw away line, never brought up again, that has haunted my thoughts since I was a kid- "we had lost a little boy of our own, you see"  I wanted to know that story. Izzy's mom loves Izzy so much- it hurt when he buried himself in his texts. She's so grateful that the Digiworld, in a way, brought her son, the son of her heart, back to her. At the same time she fears it will take him away forever.


I'd already established that Matt's family was religious. I'm not sure where that came from, probably another fanfiction, but I liked it, so I kept it. Nancy is a religious woman, God has been there for her in her darkest moments so she begs Him to bring her sons back to her.

Aina's sections were as much about her own failure as a mother and trying to make up for it as her missing Ken. She's the odd duck out at this point- she doesn't know what Ken is up against physically. She's thinking about his spirit, his heart- the sorrow inside him, not the demon things without.

Sora's mom, as I said, mostly focuses on wishing she could shield her daughter, take her place. Her daughter, she knows for a fact, is missing and is physically injured, and Toshiko wishes desperately she could protect her daughter- she's always protected Sora, and now she can't.

But it's Yoshie's section that is, if you will, the center piece of the story. I never got an explanation for what happened to that little boy.
Her story was inspired by the story of a friend of mine's sister. Her little boy died at birth, because of the same condition. It was reading her blog and her story that whispered to me- this is the story of the little boy. This is what happened to him.
I named him Eiji- meaning eternity.
It was so hard to write.
Another reason was that I was almost that lost child. I was born 6 weeks early ( a far cry from five months, I know) I was 3 pounds, 1 ounce, and only about a foot long. The doctors said I would die, there was no hope for me. Unlike Eiji and Tiny Baby, I got my miracle.
It was close though, and I will never be normal.

Yoshie clung to Izzy, he was a bright spot, and he was her son, and she loved him, and she's lost so much and as much as she knows he had to go... she was so afraid of losing him. And now, maybe she has.

Then there's the repetition- Come home, come home, come home, come home; Bring him home.
I thought it fit nicely.

I'll TRY to write the next chapter of Unseen Kindness for next week, but I've got two papers due Thursday and Saturday, so that might not happen.