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_**I heard an angel singing,

when the world was springing:

"Mercy, pity, and peace,

are the worlds release."**_

- William Blake

The blue, yellow, and green lights of the heavily populated city of Tokyo illuminated the surroundings of two humans, one reptilian Digimon clothed in black robes and a long, silky red cape, another completely uncovered black fox, currently injured and in the arms of one of the aforementioned humans, another clearly coming from human spiritualist influences, sporting multiple sets of feathered wings, and another Digimon with similar, thinly veiled influences wearing what was beyond any doubt a blue dalmatic.

There was another being nearby that the light did not illuminate, swathed both in darkness and underneath the protection of multiple methods of non-detection including trans-phasic flux, dimensional variability, and the staple of any such arsenal, the tired and true system of wave neutralization. The illusion-detecting abilities of the BlRemon were useless against so great and complex a system, and not even the magically attuned senses of the Magusmon were capable of detecting him at this power level.

The focus on the Magusmon in the mind of that being would have brought a smile to its face, if one was visible, or if it even had one at all. Its observations had seen the development of the 'Lex' subject ever since its birth, and although there had certainly been pitfalls he had encountered from time to time, each life-threatening situation brought him many times the normal amount of power that would normally be attained through such a means.

Beings such as they, it mused, deserved the attention of potent and powerful minds...

* * * * * *

Jamie felt the two points of blue light underneath the Digimon's hood piercing his body. The stare unsettled him and made him slightly nervous, even though he knew there wasn't anything about that should make him nervous. Obviously not letting of the recent events get to him, he joined Angie over by Jes' side. He knew he wasn't a very good tamer, but for his Digimon to just ignore him entirely and go off to fight by herself without him...that was new.

Since they had been joined by Lex, Angie, and Oliver, Jes seemed to b e even more detached from him. It was probably this crush thing she had going on with Oliver, even though this definitely wasn't the time to ask her about it, and probably not even the time to be thinking about it.

"I hope I didn't hurt you, Jes..." Lex said, putting his hand just underneath the wound on Jes' stomach, which Oliver had bound up with a piece of cloth from the red sweater he was wearing.

"Lex..."

"Hmm?"

"I'm going to fucking kill you." The giddy spellcaster giggled in response, grabbing Jes' head and giving her a quick kiss. Having known Lex for a day, that didn't surprise him, but Jes didn't seem terribly pleased with it. Even in her injured state, she had enough strength to hit him in the face and swipe her claws across it, drawing blood from underneath his eye. His response, of course, wasn't to do something violent in return, but to turn Angie and giggle again.

"Awie, did mean old Jes scratch you?" she asked, wiping away the small amount of blood that was there. Lex joined in the little simulation, pretending to be sad and hurt.

"Oh, will you two knock it off..." Jes growled slightly. Despite the hostility in her voice, which Jamie had long ago decided was constant and ever-present, she was in one of the most friendly positions that he had ever seen her in. Her face was now turned toward Oliver, and her arms were locked around his neck.

"S-she attacked you...I don't understand." The female voice from the flowing blue robes nearby said. Jamie felt kind of sorry for this Digimon...it was obviously a Vaccine that had spent its entire life destroying Virus Digimon, and it was just now coming to the realization that not all of them were ... well, like Jes.

"Jes would never really hurt me," Lex answered. "At least, I don't think so," he quickly added with a joking, high-pitched laugh.

"You are a virius, aren't you?"

"Yes...why?"

"Then why haven't you attacked BiRemon ... Jes ... or the Angewomon?"

"Jes is my friend," he answered simply, repeating what he had said earlier as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. "And the Angewmon," he grabbed Angie's hand and pulled her closer to him, "Angie is my mate. My beautiful, celestial and angelic mate."

"Aww, Lex..." Angie blushed and hugged him. The other Vaccine stared blankly. For whatever reason, it was obviously beyond her understanding how that relationship could possibly work. Jamie took a step closer to try to offer her their friendship.

"What's your name?" Jamie asked, surprising himself with his forwardness.

"Clerimon..."

"No, personally."

"Oh...Jean..." staring blankly forward into the nearest street, which was devoid of all life, it was obvious that she wasn't really participating in the conversation.

"You don't know how lucky you are, Jean." Jamie said, trying to start up a conversation, even if it was on a rather uncomfortable subject. "Those two wiped out three WarGreymon yesterday with one attack each."

"I know, it was in my briefing ..."

"Your what?"

"My briefing. For my mission here," she said simply, still looking away and not really engaged in the conversation.

"Your mission?"

When she didn't respond to that, Jamie's eyes began to wander, undetected by the object of his stare. Judging by its voice, the Digimon was presumably female, and Jamie couldn't help himself by wondering at what she looked like underneath her robes--at least her face. He couldn't even see her face, the way that her gold-trimmed blue hood covered everything except the eyes that glowed a soft blue underneath.

"My mission was to kill him," Jean gestured back where Lex had been standing here a few seconds ago, and Jamie quickly averted his eyes to avoid being detected. For a moment, he had been studying where the Digimon's chest was, trying to see if he could find an indication of breasts or some other, more tangible indicator of feminity. "But I can't bring myself to do it now. Look at him," she pointed out to Jamie with her staff what Lex and Angie were doing: they were slowly but obviously feeling and exploring each other, but they were doing it in a very loving and affectionate way, with giggles and soft cooing noises. The fact that what they were doing was so blatantly sexual didn't seem to affect her in the least, but it made Jamie quite nervous, especially being next to a woman--at least, he thought it was a woman.

"I don't know what to do anymore," she continued, looking down at the ground.

"You can come with us!" Lex offered enthusiastically, suddenly next to Jean, hugging her tightly. Jamie bit his lip, finally able to make out some of her physique now that Lex was hugging her and pulling the bulk of her robes in his direction, away from Jamie. He could make out the presence of breasts and the presence of a curve running from her chest to her waist. Jamie immediately blushed and looked away, telling himself that he probably shouldn't be thinking about her in the way.

"I'm a Clerimon, I've spent my whole life destroying Digimon like you; that doesn't bother you?" she protested, quickly pulling herself away from the physical contact with Lex.

"But you don't anymore, do you?" Lex's head, exposed unlike that of the Clerimon's, cocked, giggling and waiting for an answer.

"No, I suppose not." The Clerimon answered after a few moments of blank, complete silence. "But I ..." her unfinished sentence hung in the air that was starting to get cold with the night.

Jamie's eyes, believing that they were once again safe from detection, resumed staring at the Clerimon. Her voice sounded nice, but it seemed like there was so much confusion and regret in it. He would have liked to push her hood down, give her a hug and comfort her, telling her that it would be alright. Another, more logical and realistic part of him told him that doing that would probably end with pain on his part, much as it usually did with Jes when he did that.

"Then you can come with us," Lex said, obviously happy to be adding another Digimon to his list of friends.

As they all walked back to the hotel rooms, Jean kept her distance from everybody, despite the attempts of Jamie, Angie, and Lex alike to try to get her to be a little more social. It didn't work, however, and instead, she simply watched from afar as Angie crawled into Lex's robes, invisible until her head popped out of the head hole in the robe next to Lex's, and watched as Oliver struggled in his attempts to carry Jes. Once, when they were almost to the hotel and it looked like Oliver was about to collapse from the weight of carrying Jes, she flinched at the sight, and Jamie almost thought that she was going to offer to her help, but she didn't.

As if the embarrassment he was feeling for himself for continuously staring at her wasn't enough, for whatever reason, she was getting closer and closer to him in their little formation. Where Jamie was opposite everyone else, it was probably just an effort on her part to stay away from everyone, although Jamie liked to entertain the little fantasy that she was doing it to be closer to him. He was too busy staring at her to notice that she was almost touching.

Suddenly, she turned around to face him and twitched. At the time, his eyes had been pointing directly at her chest, where the outline of two small, round breasts were just barely visible. He didn't need to be able to see her face to tell that she wasn't thrilled; her body language was more than enough for that.

As fast as was humanly possible--still not fast enough--Jamie's face flicked upward to meet the concealed face of the Digimon he had been trying to picture all this time. Frozen as if in terror for a few moments, she quickly made her way back over to Angie, whose head was sticking out of Lex's hood, and one of her wings was protruding from an open fold in the front of his robe.

Damn...now she thinks I'm some kind of pervert or something, Jamie thought, mad at himself for not being able to control his eyes. Despite all of this, he couldn't help himself but continue to watch her, trying to remain as discreet as possible. Maybe it was the mystery of not knowing what was underneath those cobalt-blue robes. Maybe it was seeing Lex and Angie so happy together, and seeing Oliver and Jes growing loser and closer despite their incredible differences. Jamie blushed slightly at the memory of his last experience with women. Maybe he was just a member of an old-fashioned, dying breed, but he still thought it was the man who was supposed to make all of the moves. Rather than matching up with that belief, however, his modern England seemed to sharply contrast that view and turn it around into the opposite...

"We're back," Jamie heard Oliver say softly, affectionately, and very quietly to Jes, as if he was speaking to an almost-sleeping child. Jamie, being the only one who wasn't preoccupied with either carrying someone, exploring the clothes on another person's body from the inside, or actively trying to stay away from anybody, took it upon himself to pull open the door for everyone else, holding it open as first Oliver and Jes, then Lex and Angie went through, each pair busy with themselves one way or another. Without really knowing why, he kept holding the door open. When he was about to close it, he looked behind him and realized why that was. There was Jean, standing timidly a few feet away from him, obviously waiting for him to go through before she did.

"After you," he offered, opening the door further. "Ladies first."

"...what?"

"Nothing," Jamie sighed slightly. This was almost worse than Lex. At least he had something of an idea on what was going on around him...and Jamie didn't find Lex to be attractive. Jean was a different story. He opened the door as widely as he could, then walked through the hotel lobby, going down the only hallway in the small hotel, heading in the direction of his room.

On his way by Oliver's room, he heard the sounds of someone rolling around, followed closely by a loud crash and a series of male and female giggling. Jamie sighed, knowing without having to think about what had caused the noise what it was, and probably didn't want to know what they were in the middle of doing.

As Jamie opened his door, it suddenly occurred to him that if Oliver and Jes were sleeping together and Lex and Angie were sleeping together, then there wasn't going to be any room in there for Jean. And she couldn't stay in his room, since it was only outfitted with one bed. The thought of having a girl in bed next to him appealed to Jamie for all of the obvious reasons, but the emotional side of him didn't want to put her through anything more than she already had.

"There's no room in here; you'll have to stay with Jamie," Jes informed her just before being put down on the bed closest to the door. He wanted to hear the rest of the conversation, considering that he was a subject, so he pretended to have problems unlocking and opening the door, craning his head slightly in the direction of the other room to better hear what they were saying.

"But where am I going to sleep...?"

"You'll have to sleep in Jamie's room." Seeing the Clerimon's body straighten out upon hearing that she would have to be sleeping in the same room as him, he felt both pity for her, and anger and regret with himself for not having more control over himself.

"Don't worry about him," Jes' voice continued tiredly. "He's too much of a wimp to try anything with you ... besides, you could always kill him if he did." Silently thanking Jes for caring so much about him, he rolled his eyes slightly. When they returned onto the Clerimon, her head was turned in his direction, and again he didn't need to see the expression on her face to know that there was something akin to fear in her mind. She made her way around to him, and those small blue points of light looked back up at him in some kind of askance.

"Can I stay in here with you? I have nowhere else to go," the pleading tone of her voice would have been more than enough to convince him if he wasn't already more than willing to let her stay in his room. The innocence with which she was handling the situation even made him guilt-ridden enough to not immediately consider that he might be getting the opportunity of seeing more of this mysterious Digimon.

"Of course you can!" Jamie answered happily, trying to be as accommodating and kind as he could to the creature, whose head came roughly up to his neck. "I don't mind."

"Thank you." As he was opening the door, she gave him a formal bow, making Jamie giggle slightly. "After you..." he said, repeating what he had done earlier. This time, she took the offer, but not without glancing behind her a number of times.

Jamie sighed, feeling even more guilty than he already did.

* * * * * * * * *

As if there wasn't enough for her to worry about from her decision to not have killed the target that she had been given, now she had this human and his inappropriate advances to worry about, as well.

"There's only one bed," he said, pointing to an unmade and rather messy bed pushed up against the wall. She immediately cringed at the thought of sleeping anywhere near a male that didn't follow the rules of her Chapter regarding such relations.

"You can have it," the human. "I'll just pull up a chair." That kindness surprised her, she hadn't been expecting it...for a few moments, she thought she was going to be sleeping either in one of those chairs or on the floor at the foot of the bed.

She sat down on the edge of that bed and stared down at the wall. She could se her own reflection in the mirror, which she looked away from in shame. Everything that she had ever known...could it be wrong? The Chapter and it's leaders had never been wrong before, but what if this was an exception? Maybe that's what this was, an exception...but if that was true, were there any more, or just this one? If she went back, how would she be able to tell? The Inquisitors were very strict about any interactions with Viruses at all, even just prior to fighting. If she wasn't careful, she could end up killed by the Inquisition...or worse. Much worse. The fate of those who were no longer able to serve their respective chapters were...shaking away those thoughts, she told herself that she didn't need to think about it.

Or did she? She had already failed them once, and that was usually enough to have an Interdictor removed from their duties. When...if...she returned to the Citadel, she would be a shamed Inquisitor, a fallen member of the highest and most duty-bound order of society. How would she be able to serve then? She had no other skills that she knew of that would be of use inside the Citadel itself; she had never been trained to become a member of the Administratum...perhaps she could serve as a member of the Guard and sit around, waiting for some army of hostile Digimon to attack.

Jean didn't want any of that, though. She was an Interdictor, it was what she had done her entire life. She couldn't fathom the possibility of doing anything else. Whatever happened now, she wouldn't be able to return to the life she had known forever, if she was allowed to live at all.

"What have I done?" she asked herself, looking at the reflection of her completely concealed self.

"What you thought was right, obviously." She hadn't meant for the question to be answered by the human, but he answered it anyway.

"I don't know what I think," she said, sighing again. Maybe she would be able to stay with this group of humans and Digimon. If she couldn't serve her Chapter as a warrior and a hunter, maybe she could serve a human tamer in whatever way a Digimon was supposed to serve their tamer; that wasn't a relationship she was very familiar with. While she was in the Digital World, she had killed a Virus who was travelling with their tamer, but her instructions had been to leave the tamer alone, the justification being that although the taint of the Virus on the Digimon itself was irreparable and the world could only be saved by its destruction, the tamer had only been corrupted temporarily, and could eventually realize the errors of their ways in taking such a Digimon as their partner.

A few moments of awkward silence followed as she thought about both her past and her future. Her entire life had been followed according to a rigid structure which she had followed ever since she was a small child. That structure, that way of life, that carpet of protection against the cold, hard floor of reality had just been violently ripped out from under her. What's more, the guilty hand was her own.

"Mind if I sit down?" he broke the silence, inching slightly closer to where she was sitting. He already made her uncomfortable, but evidently that was something she was going to have to get used to if she was going to be spending more and more time with these Digimon and their humans.

"If you wish." Apparently, he did. The place that he chose to sit down in was uncomfortably, unnervingly closer to her, and she flinched quite violently before she eventually brought herself to her senses and told herself again that the presence of humans very close to her was something she was going to have to get used to if she was going to stay in their company. He was basically one of the only things she had now, and she definitely didn't want to lose that.

They sat in another eternity of silence encapsulated within a few moments. Jean wasn't a very social creature to begin with, but her brooding mood made her lack of things to contribute to the conversation even worse.

"Why don't you take that off your head? It's not cold..." she felt a hand move a little bit closer to her head, making her turn away and shuffle as far away from him as she could.

"I wear what I must," she answered simply. The vestments of her order were something else that she had never questioned. They were ornate almost to the point of being inhibitive during combat, but they marked her as a Digimon in the service of a higher purpose, and someone that was not meant to be trifled with by any except the most brave and most powerful inhabitants of the Digital World. By never revealing their true race to anyone except their superiors, it also removed the aspect of race and species from the ranks of the Interdictors and gave them a sense of unity higher than they would be able to achieve just by calling themselves the same thing. "It's a symbol of my service and my purpose," she explained in case the human couldn't understand.

"Oh, ok." Not exactly the response that she had been expecting, but any discussion at all was better than no discussion at all. At least it let her know that she wasn't completely alone in a strange world.

"You're sitting next to a murderer," she announced, convincing herself that if there was one virus like Lex, there could be others. How long would it have been before she found out that not all of them were bent on total destruction at the exclusion of everything else in their lives? Would it have taken a year? Two years? How many other Digimon would she have killed in that period that may have been like that, only attacking her out of defense for themselves? A hundred? A thousand, perhaps?

"You did what you thought was right..." Finding herself growing less and less agitated with the human, despite his attempt at removing her vestments. There were only two things that she could call her own now. One of them was the garment designed to show unity and peace...apart from the pragmatic matter of that being the only clothing she had, it was the only thing she had that promoted peace. The other item was the bright white staff, decorated at its top with the ornate, winged symbol of her Chapter and infused with part of the data of every being she had bested in battle.

That brought back so many memories, memories that she had never reflected upon, at least not for anything other than strategy, tactics, and skills. She had never thought that everything she took was a life, or that her function was essentially the same as that of a virus...

"But...they're all dead now. Some of them...Some of them..." she couldn't bring herself to finish the sentence, fearing both having to face the words herself and letting her new friends know the full extent of some of the things that she had done. "I've done terrible things,"

"There's nothing you can do about that now," One of his hands touched her shoulder, making her flinch away from him even further, sliding along the other side of the bed. His constant need to be in physical contact with her was starting to tax her patience. She wasn't used to people touching her, especially without the intent to kill her. "It's all in the past."

"You don't understand, Jamie ... what if one of them would have been like Lex?"

"Would have been...?" The moment she said it, she realized it was too late to correct it. "You mean--"

"Yes! They were Viruses...I didn't know any better!" She shuddered at a particularly vivid memory that was now going to haunt her for the rest of her life. Jean had been sent to do away with a particularly violent group of lower-level Digimon that had been periodically attacking one of the numerous small communities of Vaccine and Data Digimon that her Chapter did its best to protect. After a number of days of looking for tracks and following her senses to the target, she discovered that it wasn't a small number of relatively powerful mid-level Digimon at all, as the reports she had received indicated, but rather one Digimon of the expected level and an extremely large number of Baby and Child-level Digimon: her children. After she had done her duty and dispatched with their mother, she pursued what remained of her brood until, in their youthful ignorance, they were outmaneuvered and ended up against a great cliff that fell through the next six layers of the Digital World. Falling down that would have meant instant death for all but the most powerful of Digimon, and she took advantage of that. After giving them an attack that wiped out the majority of them in a single blow, scattering their data through the cold air of that part of the Digital World, the rest were thrown off the edge six layers below, whey were landed with a sickening, nauseating noise that could only have meant their deaths.

"I'm horrible," she told herself, hanging her head down and sobbing quietly at the severity of some of her deeds. Earlier that day before she had left the Citadel, she had watched two mates clad in the bright red robes of the Administratrum caste holding hands as they walked down the stone street. As they moved away, she could see that their tails were wrapped around and intertwined with one another, and that their heads were

"No, no you aren't..." Jamie's voice got continuously closer and closer to her until she could finally feel the touch of his hand through the ornate robes prescribed to her by her chapter. Her first impulse was to shrug her shoulders away from the offending human, get up, and move into one of the chairs. A deep, hidden part of her didn't want to suppress the urge, but it was quickly beaten down by the more rational part of her mind, and she got up and sat down in one of the chairs next to the table on the far side of the room, taking care to make sure that she didn't reveal any of herself to the human. She got the distinct feeling that doing that wouldn't make him any less...feely.

"You regret what you've done. That means something," Jamie said, taking the place that she had been sitting in for himself. "And we--at least I--can forgive you."

"I know, but...none of them can."

Turning her eyes back down to the ground after making sure he wasn't going to make any moves to get nearer to her, she started sobbing softly. There was no way that she could ever forgive herself if those that she had wronged hadn't, and there was no way that they could, obviously...they were all dead, and there was nothing that she could do about it.

"I'm sorry," she told them, even though they couldn't hear. "I should have known..."

"Oh, Jean, please don't cry. I hate it when people cry." He had somehow managed to escape her sense of sight, her sense of smell, her sense of sound, and her sense of sight all at the same time, gotten behind her and started rubbing her shoulders around some of the few leather-reinforced sections of her dalmatic. Again, a small part of her mind wanted him to keep going, but the overwhelming majority had a number of problems with it. Somehow, though, this time the smaller part won out temporarily and the rest of her was helpless to do anything but stand by as she started to like what he was doing more and more.

No one had ever touched her like that before...it felt kind of nice. His hands were rubbing over her shoulders again and again, squeezing out the tension of all of the muscles in her upper body, which was saying a great deal, given the amount of stress her mind and body went through over the past day.

A mental shaking of her head threw those thoughts away and returned her to her normal state of mind. Even though her services to the Chapter were beyond doubt a part of her past know, she wasn't ready to have that kind of relationship with anybody, especially a human.

"Please don't touch me," she said in a meek tone of voice.

"I'm sorry," he answered. "I should have asked."

Instead of affirming that statement, which she didn't want to do because she didn't want to offend one of the people who had probably saved her life and opened her eyes to the existence of viruses like Lex that didn't follow the template of what she had been taught, she held her tongue until the human said something else.

"I'm sure you're tired...you should get some sleep."

"I am kind of tired..." the thought of sleeping whenever she was tired and not when her mission outlines or training schedule dictated was a new concept to her, and at first, she could barely even drag herself up out of the chair and over to the bed.

* * * * * * * * *

The simple truth that there was only one bed had occurred to him before, but its implications hadn't quite reached his mind yet. While Jean crawled into the bed, hesitating every few seconds for reasons that only she could know, Jamie realized that there was no way he could bring himself to crawl into bed next to the Digimon. The strong, primitive urges that had originally made him attracted to her were nothing compared to the guilt and sympathy he was feeling for the situation that she was in.

Still, the thought of pulling back that concealing blue hood to see what her face looked like underneath it was growing more and more appealing to him, especially with the way that parts of her robes were succumbing to gravity to reveal beyond any doubt the curved, female form of the Digimon that was lying there.

"...Jean?" he asked quietly, wondering if he could somehow justify that at to himself by getting permission from her, but it was far too late for that. Finding himself absently wondering if the texture of her body would be like, he realized that he was slipping again and brought himself violently back to his senses by hitting himself squarely in the forehead with his palm. He was quite thankful that she didn't. Making a small, relieved noise, he pulled the few non-armed chairs in the room up against one another to create a makeshift bed of his own. Stealing the one pillow that Jean wasn't using, he pulled a spare blanket and took another long look at the Digimon that was where he would have been otherwise sleeping while trying to get to sleep himself.

What was going to happen to her? He had his hands full being Jes' tamer, although that particular assignment took less of a toll as she spent more and more 'quality time' with Oliver. Still, he wouldn't know what to do with another Digimon to keep track, take care of, and follow everywhere they went. He couldn't just leave her to her own devices, though ... she had obviously been brainwashed from a young age to follow the orders of whatever organization she had been a part of. Maybe she could end up being partnered with Tom...

That idea died away almost as quickly as it had appeared once his eyes, half-closed in that period of thought just before one falls asleep, recalled hazily that Jean was a female, and that Tom could never, ever be trusted with the protection and care of any Digimon at all, much less a female Digimon, and less than that a shy Digimon who couldn't even show her face to her friends.

He sighed again. Well, he would do everything he could to make sure she stayed safe, alright, and cared for as long as he could. She deserved someone's help and attention after everything that she had been through, and he was going to do everything in his power to make sure that happened.

With that firmly implanted within his mind, he went to sleep.