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sincerely-sofie · 4 months

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Dadnoir Musings: The Fanfic

Lord help me I’m back on my nonsense. Finally making this monstrosity public.

Word count: 6,930-ish

Summary: Fragments of Dusknoir’s interactions with and thoughts on Kip and Twig (especially Twig) throughout the events of the game, leading up into the start of The Present is a Gift.

It was meant to be simple. He would travel back through a passage of time alone, the sableye making the journey separately to spread rumors of a renowned explorer before he'd quietly enter the areas that were handfed awe-inspiring stories of his exploits. He'd do a number of good deeds along the way to validate the rumors, and in doing so he would gain the loyalty and aid of an entire population in tracking down the grovyle and human that had gotten dangerously close to securing another time gear before vanishing entirely after their retreat.

He had heard reports of the grovyle being sighted in this time period. It was good news, certainly, to have reliable sources verify one another— but he couldn't shake the uneasy feeling he had at the reports. They always identified the grovyle, but never the human. Easily the most stand-out member of the trio of rebels— even moreso than the Legend in their ranks— and suddenly the only one unaccounted for. He didn't know much about humans and how hardy they were, but the grovyle’s habit of whirling her out of reach of whatever strikes were sent her way implied a distinct fragility— perhaps she'd been disposed of in the window of time that they'd lost track of the rebels.

He hoped that was the case. Everything would be so much simpler if it was. Still, he instructed the scouts to search more diligently for the human. He wasn't foolish enough to hope for much of anything anymore, and the fact that he found himself clinging to the idea of not having to execute the human himself left him wary.

Something wasn't right.

He entered the lively settlement of Treasure Town with a sense of dread weighing heavy on his shoulders.

***

His cover story gave him a particular level of sway over the local exploration guild. Not only did they eat up every word he said with an unmatched trustingness, they provided access to their outlaw reports and records of suspicious activity. There he was— the troublesome grovyle was reported enough times to give an area he was likely frequenting, but not an indication of his next move or where he'd hide away after brushes with danger. Dusknoir needed to wait and gather more information. The grovyle was rash— it wouldn't be long before he showed his hand.

In the meantime, Dusknoir would continue building Treasure Town’s trust in him.

That didn't prove very difficult. The townsfolk were exceptionally welcoming. They bore no doubt in his cover story. The Guild’s recruits were almost sycophantic in their hero worship, as were their elite, save for a team of two— and even then, the team that seemed wary of him appeared more cautious out of nerves than actual suspicion.

They were a young pair of recruits— much younger than the rest of their peers. Where the other recruits seemed at least well on their way to entering adulthood, these two were evidently the youngest apprentices in guild history. Team Venture was composed of a timid but eager mudkip and an odd charmander who seemed completely flabbergasted by basic social customs.

Kip was endearing in his overzealous enthusiasm— his excitement whenever Dusknoir interacted with him and his partner was palpable, and he introduced himself by name almost immediately upon meeting him. Another indicator of the two’s youth, then— he was so young he didn't quite grasp the finer details of when and where you should give your name. One might find the misstep offensive, but Dusknoir was flattered by the boy considering him such a close friend.

The charmander didn't give him a name. In truth, she didn't give him much of anything— she hung back when Kip and Dusknoir spoke, never really saying anything, just watching him with a confused look like she was trying to remember something long lost to time. She was a studious character— Kip didn't attend many of the workshops the Guild put on, but Charmander arrived early to and left late from every last one.

“She wasn't the one to ask to form a team together— honestly, she kind of rejected the idea at first,” Kip admitted to him while waiting for his partner to return from one such event, “but I think that now she likes exploring even more than I do!”

“Funny how things play out like that,” he replied.

“She's amazing. I'm so lucky to have met her. She's my best friend.”

He watched as the mudkip fidgeted happily with his scarf, a slight blush on his face. Ah. Definitely a bit of lilipuppy love on his end. He couldn't help his chuckle. “And how did you two meet?”

“Oh— um. She was passed out on the beach one day, but I thought she was dead when I found her and I— uh— I screamed so loud she woke up,” he stammered. “It wasn't a very cool way to meet, but I'm glad I got to meet her at all.”

“I'm sure any would react as you did were they to stumble upon a possible corpse.” His brow furrowed. “Why was she passed out on the beach in the first place?”

“She doesn't know. She's got amnesia, if you haven't heard— she doesn't remember anything about herself before waking up on the beach. Well, anything but her name and how she used to be a human.”

“What?”

Kip startled at the sharpness of his tone. “She… she doesn't remember anything but her name, and how she used to be a human? Is everything okay, Dusknoir, sir?”

It couldn't be. This was a coincidence. He hoped desperately that it was a coincidence. If there was a human in the time he had traveled from, then there surely had to be humans in the time preceding it. This was another human, unrelated to the one that had evaded detection for the last year or so. It was a simple coincidence.

Kip watched him nervously.

“Apologies, I… I was simply caught off guard. Humans turning into pokemon is a concept that I thought was only the stuff of fairy tales. That combined with humans having been long extinct makes your story seem a bit peculiar.”

“Oh! Yeah, it does seem strange, doesn't it? I don't know if she's misremembering or not, but she's pretty intent on how she wasn't a charmander before waking up on the beach. She took a while to learn how to walk, though, and she doesn't know how to control fire like a normal charmander— so it makes me feel like she's telling the truth.”

Dusknoir hummed, lost in thought. Kip ran off to greet his partner when she exited the meeting hall for whatever seminar was put on that week, and she caught him in a hug and showed him a stack of notes she'd taken during the seminar. Kip stifled a laugh as he looked over the pages— Charmander demanded he tell her what was so funny, and he meekly explained that her spelling was even worse than her handwriting.

“Dude! Not cool! I didn't even know how to read any of this stuff last year. I'd like to see you write a paper in English after barely getting any time to learn it!”

They wandered off, chattering all the way, leaving Dusknoir to recall the mannerisms of the human who had all but dropped off the face of the planet and recognize their echoes in the child resting her hand over her friend’s shoulders as they walked to the guild dorms.

It was a coincidence. Simply that.

(The thought that the human he'd been trying to… dispatch for so many years was only as old as Charmander sat like a block of ice in his belly.)

***

He tried to get more information on this mysterious recruit, and his efforts to find any background beyond when she first arrived at the Guild yielded nothing. It was as if Charmander never existed before appearing on that beach— no records of her prior residence, birth, or heritage were to be found— no one had ever even known she existed before Kip brought her into town. He wondered if it was a conspiracy between them— that the girl was playing dumb and the boy was lying to cover up what he knew— but couldn't place any stock in the theory. Kip was as guileless as they come, and he had seen Charmander attempt to hide surprises from her partner— she was an atrocious liar. They were genuine in their cluelessness.

He learned more that personified the child than he would have liked while posing faux-idle questions to the townsfolk.

(“That lil’ charmander girl is the sweetest thing. She's got the etiquette sense of an overturned stump, make no mistake, but she means no harm by it, y’hear? Keeps coming by to my storehouse to hide presents for her friends— asked for a second lockbox and everything so her partner wouldn't know she was collecting up his favorite things to give him later on.” The woman laughed. “She loves playing with my little one, too— it's the funniest thing, seeing her try to play with her. It's like she thinks she's made of glass. I keep telling Charmander she can be a bit rougher, but she still treats the girl so gingerly!”)

(“Ah! Charmander, you say? Yes, yes, she's quite the character. Loves wordplay, that one. Sharp mind, if a little dense at times. Always asking about the finer points of merchantry. If she weren't already apprenticed at the Guild, we'd consider taking her on ourselves!” A pause as his brother interjected with his own comment. “Ah! I'd forgotten about that. She's made such a habit of paying for those two’s groceries. She's always so mischievous about it— almost treats it like a prank. Keep in mind she's never told those boys or their mother who keeps paying for their things, and she's sworn us to secrecy about it— you'll not tell a soul either, yes?”)

(“Charmander is… well, she's one of our most promising recruits, alongside her partner. I've had my misgivings— those two have shown their immaturity at the worst of times, to the point of near disaster, mind you! If it weren't for Team Skull, I shudder to think of what would have happened… But they've got good hearts. Charmander started out one of the worst-performing recruits in the Guild’s history, but she's made leaps and bounds of progress. It's easier to look past her age when you see the stacks of pages of notes and research she produces— though it's significantly harder when you see the severity of her spelling! She gave me a paper where she'd listed several questions about expedition protocol, once, and I was appalled by the sight!” A nervous flutter of wings. “Everything she writes is phonetic! Horrifically so! Her handwriting is no better. It's to the point I've debated calling on a tutor to stay at the Guild for a time to provide lessons. I shudder to think of a recruit ever rising to the point she and her partner have with such deplorable writing skills. Should I ever meet her parents, I have strong words to give on the importance of education!”)

It was a coincidence. It had to be. She was a former human who had arrived in town at the same time that the fugitive human had disappeared, but that wasn't enough to be incriminating. He didn't want to think about the alternative. In his questioning the townsfolk, all he learned was how utterly normal this child was— how she had the same quirks and charms as any youth would, despite her constant efforts to seem mature and keep up with her older peers.

She and her partner asked him if he, in all his travels, knew about the cause of her dizzy spells and visions. There it was— the Dimensional Scream, and another nail in Charmander’s coffin.

It had to be a coincidence. If it wasn't, then this child's blood would need to stain his hands if he wanted to continue on himself, and he was starting to doubt how much he wanted to live a life with that fact haunting him.

It would have been easier if it was just death he was facing. He could handle the thought of dying, grim as it was. But he faced no simple looming threat of death, but one of complete and utter erasure from existence— if the grovyle succeeded, it would be as if he never lived in the first place. The same fate would be dealt to Charmander. If the existential terror wasn't enough, Dialga’s visceral descriptions of what erasure felt like were unsettlingly vivid. Dusknoir would simply have to remind himself that an execution would be swifter, less painful— even, in a twisted way, more merciful than what Grovyle was so resolutely seeking.

She wouldn't suffer, and he wouldn't be stricken from all of time and space. It would be a twofold victory, grim as it was— if it ever came to that. He didn't even know if this was the exact same human who could discern Dimensional Screams. All signs pointed to her, but if he refrained from learning anything more, he could claim ignorance. He could leave her in this time and simply dispose of the grovyle, and she would remain as she was, blissfully unaware of her origins.

He just had to stop asking questions. That's all he had to do.

Charmander came up to him one day with a newfound hesitancy in her posture. “Hey, so— I really appreciate you telling me about the Scream a while back. And how you came to help me and Kip when the Manectric Tribe came along, and you scaring off Team Skull, and all that, too.”

“Think nothing of it.”

“I don't really get Pokemon stuff, but I know names are pretty important, like, as a trust thing.”

“That they are.” Don't. I don't want to hear—

“So I figured I could give you mine? As a symbol of, like, gratitude or whatever.”

“There’s no need.” Stop it. Stop it, stop it, stop it, don't tell me anything, I don't want to know—

“Nah, I don't mind.” She smiled widely, puffed out her chest, set her fists on her hips. “It's Twig! Nice to meet you, or whatever you're supposed to say when you… um…” Her prideful posture fell, giving way to concern. “What's with the face? Sorry if I messed that up, I don't really know how things are supposed to— I just thought…”

Of course. Of course he was wrong to hope. When was he ever right to cling to such things? It was her, and he'd known it all along, but he stubbornly refused to accept it.

“I'm sorry, man. You don't have to look so upset.”

“Whatever would give you that idea?”

“You're crossing your arms to hide the fact you're frowning.” She furrowed her brow. “I'm not stupid, Dusknoir.”

You are, though. You're so, so foolish, and you don't even realize it. I could have moved on from here without ever confirming who you were, and you ruined it.

“Apologies,” he murmured tersely. “I'm just a tad overcome. I need a moment.”

“Oh. Yeah, no worries.” She awkwardly reached out and patted the back of his hand as she passed. “I’m gonna go and… I dunno, do some sentry duty. Sorry again if I messed stuff up.”

You should be. You did. Legends and Life, you'll regret this even more than I do when the time comes.

***

It was rather jarring to see the same human that Grovyle had been so determined to keep out of harm’s way laid so low by his own hand. Dusknoir’s appearance at Crystal Cave sent the fugitive packing, and he was left to tend to an injured Team Venture.

Twig shoved his hands away as he assessed the damage. “Don't! Don't, I'm fine— Help Kip! He's— I don't know if he's going to…” Her voice broke, and his heart followed suit at the pitiful sound. “Please. You've got to help him.”

It took a moment to locate the mudkip in question— Twig had evidently been making efforts to lead the fight away from where he had collapsed behind a large stalagmite, unconscious.

He had seen injuries, he had seen gore— but he had never seen so much of them on such a small body.

Twig wasn't overreacting in her fear of whether or not her friend would survive their encounter with Grovyle.

He knew enough first-aid to ensure Kip didn't bleed out in the moment, but lacked the supplies necessary to do much else. Twig was bundling Kip up in her arms before he admitted as much to himself, starting the trek out of the mystery dungeon on shaking legs— and only managed several strides before falling to her knees with a pained groan. She didn't protest when he lifted her into his own arms and resumed the journey with more haste than she could muster in her state— only curled tightly around her partner, to the point that her tail brushed her jaw, promising over and over again that he would be okay.

***

Chimecho received the two recruits and administered the care that Dusknoir was unable to provide, ushering him out of the room so she would have room to work in the cramped Guild infirmary. Left in the silence of the main floor alongside the unsettled guild members who had gathered together when they learned of Team Venture’s state, he found himself standing before the infirmary door, numb. Slowly, the guild members dispersed, the quiet tension in the air left unbroken as they awaited news of their friends’ fates. Chatot remained, noisy in his silence as he alternated between pacing and leafing through paperwork that he never gave more than a few moments of attention at a time. Dusknoir eventually had the sense to seat himself a ways away from the infirmary door and began sifting through the events of the last few hours.

He hadn't pursued Grovyle. He had the opportunity to corner the fugitive— there were a number of dead ends in Crystal Cave, any of which he could have driven him into and had the upper hand in a confrontation where he might capture him— and he didn't take it. He squandered the perfect chance to finally do away with the greatest thorn in his side in favor of assisting another of the trio he'd been tasked with dispatching. He could only hope that Dialga didn't learn of his misstep— there would be hell to pay if he did.

He was pulled from his thoughts by Chatot’s startled squawk as he shot over to the infirmary door when Twig stepped onto the threshold, though not fully through, heavily bandaged and with a pronounced limp. “What are you doing up and about?! You need to remain in the infirmary until you've been given a clean bill of health! I won't have you running about jeopardizing yourself— think of— think of what horrors that would do for the Guild’s image! Get back in there immediately!”

Twig gave him a weary glare. “I'm not going to sit around and watch while Chimecho stitches Kip back into one piece. Move over, man.”

Chatot opened his beak to protest once more, but froze upon glancing over Twig's shoulder— catching an eyeful of Kip’s injuries, judging by the way his feathers flattened against his body in fear. “A-Alright, just this once, then. But sit down! You look faint. I don't want to have you falling and giving yourself a concussion on top of all this!”

“Pretty sure I already have a concussion, Chatot. I also can't sit down unless you let me through the doorway.”

Chatot complied, fretting over her until she laid down on the floor and set her legs up against the wall to combat her supposed faintness that Chatot was so worried about. “Dusknoir, I'm dreadfully sorry, but please keep watch over this recruit for a moment. Chimecho will no doubt need more material for sutures shortly— I must seek supplies in town.” He didn't wait for a response, simply shot up the ladder leading out of the guild in a flurry of wings and panic, leaving Dusknoir and Twig in an vacant chamber.

She closed her eyes, falling so still that she seemed to be asleep. Recalling her mentioning a concussion, he reached over to rouse her— but her sudden words made him freeze with his hand outstretched.

“Chimecho doesn't know if he's gonna make it.”

He couldn't muster a response to that.

“You’ve— you've been around, you know lots of stuff. You've probably seen injuries way worse than those. Kip’s— he's gonna be okay, right?” He watched as she opened her eyes, fixing him with a teary stare as she waited for an answer. “... Right?”

He couldn't look at her. “His injuries are severe,” he finally murmured.

She turned to stare at the ceiling. He did his best to ignore the way her breaths stuttered and hitched, turning into quiet hiccups and whines as she rolled over and shifted to press her back against the wall and cry into her knees. Distantly, he wondered how she managed to cry so quietly, even when every whisper of a sob shook her entire frame with its intensity. He intently avoided pondering what had motivated her to develop such a skill.

It wasn't easy to ignore an injured, distraught child weeping only an arms-length away from him. He found himself unwillingly reminded of the sableye when he first took them in— Twig's situation was different, but the end result was almost the same— a child left adrift and frightened in the face of tragedy. Where the sableye had each other, though, Twig was left to weep without five siblings to answer the slightest whimper with unflinching support. Her partner— her only true friend amongst the Guild, from the sound of things— was on death's door, unable to come to her aid and offer the same words of comfort she had repeated to him as Dusknoir brought the two back to the Guild.

Despite himself, he reached out and set his hand over her back. She stiffened under his palm, and he nearly pulled away, but she caught hold of his thumb on her shoulder and held his hand in place. Her tears continued. He didn't say anything when she curled up tighter and her sobs picked up in volume, too startled by the memory of one of the recruits describing something to him.

(“Twig really doesn't like being touched. Not most times, at least! One time I patted her on the back because she beat my best sentry duty record, and she whirled around and almost took off one of my petals! Like, oh my gosh, I totally freaked! Kip said that she barely lets anyone touch her— you've got to be a real close buddy for her to be okay with it, or else it really freaks her out— but I didn't think it was that bad! Eek!”)

He kept his gaze fixed on the opposite wall and tried not to think about how she felt bonier under his hand than one so young had any right to be.

***

Kip survived, adorned with a number of scars that would remain for all his remaining days as a mudkip. Twig was glued to his side during the days in which he was allowed to exit the infirmary and rest in the dorms, and she became his crutch whenever he struggled to walk about the Guild to build his strength back up after so long being bedridden. The other recruits flocked around the two and made their concern known, offering to help with anything they needed as they recovered.

Kip asked for help checking a particular book out of the Guild library and sending word to Chimecho that the numbing agent was working a bit too well, and that he couldn't feel the fin on his head whatsoever. Twig didn't ask for anything— suddenly every bit as stoney, stern, and stoic as Grovyle had appeared in confrontations once they were separated— and said little over the following days. When one recruit waddled up to her after a workshop with carefully written notes and an apology for how he couldn't write as many pages as she always did on account of how fast the lecturer spoke and how slow his paws were, though, she pulled him into a hug that he meekly returned.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you—”

“Aw, shucks, it's really nothing! Don't mind it at all. I know how much you love those workshops. Me, though, I was lost as soon as the lecturer flipped the first page on her big ol’ chart thingy! You mind explaining how traps form in a mystery dungeon? She kept saying that it was important to know for this workshop, but I didn't go during the one where it was taught.”

She launched into a lecture of her own, more animated than he had seen her since her encounter with Grovyle, and Dusknoir was tempted to applaud the young man for so cleverly distracting her from her wounds.

***

With a trap laid for Grovyle, Dusknoir watched for the right moment to spring it. It didn't take long— the fugitive was gullible and impatient, a dangerous combination of traits that ensured Dusknoir wasn't left waiting for long.

Grovyle was secured— albeit perhaps roughed up a tad more than was totally necessary to capture him— and that meant he had to resolve the other loose end before he departed for his home era.

He called Team Venture forward, out from the back of the crowd where they always lingered. He only had to bring Twig closer, but to summon her alone would raise suspicions at this most critical of moments. She was slow to come up to the front of the crowd and made her way there leaning heavily on her partner when she finally appeared. Evidently, her refusal to rest and recover from her injuries had backfired, leaving her in a worse state than Kip was despite her having the lesser wounds at the beginning.

He only needed her. He could leave Kip behind and have a single child’s death weighing on him for eternity instead of two, if only they would stop clinging to each other for one measly second. He gave a speech describing his gratitude, waiting for the moment when she would shift her weight off of his side and onto her own two feet so he could grab her and be off— and there it was. He seized her in a hand and shot back into the passage of time, realizing too late that Kip was dragged along by her fistful of his scarf.

Great. Of course.

He caught hold of the boy when Twig’s own grip came loose and cursed whatever Legends were watching and no doubt laughing at his luck.

***

He really should have expected Grovyle would have another trick lying in wait before the execution. He'd hoped that Kip and Twig at least would remain unconscious for the act, but Grovyle's hissing and spitting curses his way roused them, and they were pulled along with his escape plan as a result. Dusknoir was going to kill him personally if things continued to sour thanks to him. When they had the three cornered— along with Celebi, even— he found himself possessed by the urge to twist the knife.

It was cruel to reveal Twig’s identity to Grovyle in order to stamp out any bit of resistance in him, but Dusknoir would be lying if he said it didn't give him some awful sense of catharsis to see the horrified guilt in his face— he finally realized just what he'd done by beating a child unconscious and nearly doing the same to a second one in Crystal Cave, and Dusknoir took a certain glee in his regret. Twig’s look of disgust at the reveal only drove the knife deeper. Good. He deserves it. He put out a hand and sent a shadow snaking along the ground, ready to take the wretch out—

— and Twig tackled Grovyle out of the way of the attack, putting herself in the range of the strike. He fumbled, dampening the worst of the blow before it hit her, but she still let out a sharp cry in response. Legends and Life, he would rather put the two youths out of their misery with something quick, but that was made difficult by their insistence to throw themselves in harm's way as living shields for the one target he wanted to suffer.

Fine, then. He reached out to snatch Kip up and snap his neck, but Twig surged into Dusknoir with such force she managed to throw him against a tree and lit a barrier of flame between them and her allies.

She kicked off of him, further dizzying him thanks to her using his eye as her chosen springboard, and landed ready to dash back to her group— but stopped short when she saw the long wall of fire between them.

(He'd never seen her use any sort of attack before that incorporated the flames she could manifest as a charmander— only ever using her fists, teeth, and even fallen branches to strike— and he suddenly recalled how he could count the hours at the Guild by how many times she'd let out a startled yelp when she'd see her own tail. Back then, he thought she'd simply never grown accustomed to an extra limb. It was with a bitter, weary laugh now that he realized she was afraid of fire.)

He reached out, hand outstretched to take her by the throat.

Kip sprang up from the ground that he had tunneled into and headbutted him hard, whirling around to douse the flames and shove his partner forward. “Come on, come on, we've got to get out of—!”

Grovyle snatched the girl up as he sprang for the passage of time, not even sparing her partner a second glance as he leveled Dusknoir with a deadly glare when he passed. Kip was only pulled along by Twig grabbing his scarf and pulling him into her arms as they darted into the passage of time, Celebi swiftly shuttering it and vanishing in a shimmer of air.

Lovely.

***

Grovyle hadn't told Twig what would happen to her if their efforts to restore Temporal Tower succeeded. Of all the things he'd done, this one failure to act was his most repulsive misdeed by far.

She was baffled by Dusknoir's question of whether she truly didn't fear erasure, looking to Grovyle for answers. He stuttered and stammered, resisting her request for the truth at first, and Dusknoir, for all his willingness to see his instructions to kill these two as just business a few seconds ago, concluded that it would be a lovely vacation to throttle Grovyle in particular.

One last attempt to dispatch Twig as kindly as he could was once again foiled— Grovyle passed on the burden of his mission to a child who just learned she was giving up her entire existence to change a future that was uncertain— and he forced Dusknoir into the passage of time.

***

Erasure was less painful than he expected. It was less like being ripped apart by every second he had lived and more like his very soul was slowly being brushed away, like he was falling asleep. Twig had gone through with her part, then. He hoped the event of her disappearance wasn't too frightening for her or Kip.

Dusknoir could feel himself slipping. He could barely summon the words as he asked, “Grovyle… My life… did it shine?”

Grovyle must have been just as exhausted as Dusknoir, but he smiled despite it. His hand shook as he reached out to grip his arm. His voice trembled with effort as he fought to speak. “Extraordinarily.”

It was a pitiful scrap of comfort— meaningless, really. But that simple response, combined with the sun rising behind the collapsed forms of his unlikely allies moved him to tears.

Okay. If this was how he was struck from all of time and space, it was okay. He would be able to accept it.

As dawn broke for the first time in decades gone uncounted, Dusknoir stopped clinging to the world about him, and let himself drift away completely.

***

To return to existence was unexpected. To be given a second chance at life by Dialga himself was even more unexpected. But perhaps most unexpected of all was how much he hated this bright future’s refusal to admit all of the terrors that had taken place on its soil.

Grovyle and Celebi felt similarly. The decision to immigrate to the Present was unanimous, heightened by Grovyle's late realization that if they'd been restored, Twig likely was as well— Celebi couldn't open a passage of time fast enough for his liking once the idea hit him, and he bolted through it the moment it was vaguely safe to traverse.

“… He's certainly eager to move in.”

“Dusknoir, dear, you know full well he's not leaping at the opportunity to pick out wallpaper.” She turned to the passage, face pensive. “It's been so long since I've seen them in this timeline… I'm almost afraid. How do I look? Are my antennae straight? Are my wings as dazzling as ever?”

He gave her a flat stare.

“You have no appreciation for beauty! Hmph!” She feigned anger for only a moment before glancing back at him, worried. “If you'd like a moment, Dusknoir, you can wait here and prepare yourself. I know you didn't part on the best of terms with our two little explorers.”

“I doubt they're very little anymore.”

“You're right! Oh my goodness, they must be full-grown by now… I'm going through, dear, but you come on out only when you're ready.”

He waited for a feeling of readiness to overtake him.

It never did.

All he could do was take a breath and enter the passage.

He was greeted by sunlight, dappled shadows, treetop canopies rustling overhead, and Twig's startled command for Kip to get behind her.

She was barely any taller, covered in scars he didn't remember her wearing when they last parted ways, and she had her fists balled up in front of her and ready to lash out the second he approached. Grovyle stepped forward and tried to explain, and her look of frightened fury gave way to confusion, then frustration.

“There's— No way. There's no way he did any of that. He's just trying to get our guards down again.” She cast a vicious glare his way. “What, was Primal Dialga a cover? Were you really working with Darkrai all along? Too bad, we beat your real boss months ago! Get out of here before I—”

Kip stepped forward, brushing aside his partner's threats with a smile. His words were sincere and simple. “I knew you were too nice to be faking it. All the times in Treasure Town, Amp Plains, Crystal Cave— I told you, Twig. C’mon, you owe me five-hundred poké!”

She sputtered for a moment as he simply held out a paw expectantly. She reached into her bag and begrudgingly slid a large coin into his waiting palm. He gave her a smug smile as Dusknoir looked between them.

“Do you two often bet on the intentions of those you meet?” He asked, unsettled by the well-practiced exchange.

“It’s a joke. Mostly. And we don't do it too much,” Kip answered.

He was scared to hear the answer he was certain he already knew. “And what started this routine between you?”

To his surprise, they didn't respond by pointing to him. Twig crossed her arms and murmured, surprisingly hesitant, “We got… um. Don't know if there's a specific word for it in Pokéspeak, but we thought we were talking to Cresselia, and it turned out it was very much not Cresselia that we were talking to. We started up the joke to deal with that.”

“A Cresselia that wasn't Cresselia— who would impersonate a Legend?”

Twig gave him a once-over, her suspiciousness giving way to exhaustion. “You know that Darkrai dude I mentioned a bit ago?”

The explanation that followed wasn't as horrifying as the manner in which it was told. Kip admitted his fears as he explained their subsequent clash with a Legend who masterminded Dialga's decay, but Twig dismissed hers. The blatant attempt to put on a brave face and minimize her own anxieties— anxieties which still clearly affected her, judging by the way she avoided eye contact and her tail’s flame fizzled and hissed while burning an anxious magenta— brought to mind a memory he'd almost forgotten.

(A bloody child shakily shoving helping hands aside, sobbing for him to ignore her wounds and tend to her partner. A refusal of aid in favor of assisting another.)

His hands curled into fists, and he looked away. Twig tensed and took a half-step closer to Kip, and the sight killed him.

***

Kip offered their motley trio a place in his and Twig's home as they searched for more permanent lodgings. They accepted, much to Twig's poorly hidden chagrin.

Everyone else had retired for the night— curled up in makeshift beds pulled haphazardly together out of blankets and pitiful amounts of straw insufficient for any real mattress. Grovyle snored loudly, sleeping deeply for perhaps the first time Dusknoir had ever been around to see, and Celebi had tucked herself tidily into her bed, breaths whistling lightly as she rested. Kip was doing the same a short distance away. Twig, meanwhile, sat at a table across the room, pretending to look over papers she must have read ten times each by now, glaring up at him every time she leafed through the stack anew.

The implication that she didn't trust him around her unconscious friends and had taken up watch to protect them wasn't lost on him.

She did this for multiple nights. She'd reached the point that she was nodding off in the daytime, exhausted by her nightly vigils, but she still kept them up. He had attempted to fake sleeping earlier in the night so she'd allow herself rest, but she remained awake even then— and so he swiftly gave up the ruse in favor of his typical pattern of sleep. Each evening, she'd take up her post at the table and start skimming papers with feigned interest, keeping an eye on his every move and tensing whenever he so much as twitched.

He deserved each terrified glower she gave him. His knowledge of his guilt didn't make it any easier to see one so young carrying the world on her shoulders.

She was grown now— likely nearing an evolution, if the reddish scales now dotting her skin meant anything— but she still had the eyes of a haunted child when the nights were long and her watch over her friends wore on her.

She finally slipped up one evening, her head settled on folded arms over the table’s surface, eyelids drifting closed until her breathing finally evened out and she fell asleep. He sighed with relief, but the reassurance that she'd finally get some rest was short-lived.

She flinched in her sleep, murmuring fearfully, fingers twitching against the tabletop she'd slumped over.

Uncertain of what to do, but called to help all the same, he rose and pulled a blanket from the meager sheets comprising her empty bed. She relaxed when he draped it over her, her hands no longer balling into fists and her tail’s flame glowing a warm, peaceful white instead of flickering between aggressive violets and panicked magentas.

She looked smaller as she slept— as if in her slumber she forgot to puff herself up and pretend she was self-assured and confident. She looked like a recruit too young to keep up with her older peers and too naive to understand the danger she threw herself readily into.

She looked like a child.

She looked like a child, but she'd never had the chance to truly be one. Between running for her life in the Dark Future, to taking on a schooling far too intensive for those her age, to waging battles with Legends and shouldering whatever trauma she'd garnered from all of it— she'd never been allowed such an opportunity.

(He was part of that. He was part of the reasons she'd never been able to grow up as a child should. He'd been part of the wretched selection of foes who robbed her of her youth.)

Dusknoir tugged the blanket higher around the girl's shoulders. She sighed a cozy, content sound, and he left for a late night walk.

He didn't mention the blanket come morning. She left it unspoken as well.

(She took a glance at her post the next evening and turned away, electing to sprawl out in her bed and snore almost loud enough to put Grovyle to shame.)

(It was a simple thing. Meaningless, really, and no great signifier of any faith that had been rebuilt. But it moved him near to tears regardless as she dropped off to sleep before any of the rest of them. She trusted them all to keep her safe and be safe in turn— and he was encircled in that trust.)

(It wasn't the unwavering faith of a child, but it was something, and it was something that meant the world.)

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choshifics · 6 months

Text

(Another) First Kiss: Chapter One

Everyone wants a second chance, Max more than most. For one fleeting moment, she thinks it's finally here, only to realize that it's all wrong, so terribly wrong. Now, she has to find out if a higher hope can lead to a better end, or just more time until she hits the ground. (A Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon Adaptation)

“But we decided long ago We’d build a time machine and go”

—“(Another) First Kiss” from Severe Tire Damage by They Might Be Giants

Dreams of falling are very common. Because of this, they have an almost de facto interpretation for anyone researching them (almost always after having just woken up from one). The common consensus is they represent the psyche coping with a perceived “lack of control” since, generally, it’s pretty hard to control your descent when falling.

This makes enough sense for any bleary eyed sufferer to nod along and go right back to sleep. Unfortunately, it’s not quite so simple. It’s all in the context.

After all, a pidgey might be used to the sensation. Falling is an integral part to flying. It might enjoy the little experience for most of the dream’s duration without even realizing they can’t stop their descent until, well.

Their descent suddenly stops.

In this particular context, Max didn’t much mind. She’d spent the previous painfully sleepless night agonizing over every mistake she’d ever made. Loss was familiar to her, but that didn’t make it sting any less. Each one ripped a new part of her soul out. The only thought that brought her enough solace to finally fall asleep was the desperate, painful, hopeless wish that she could just go back to the beginning.

As she’d fallen asleep, she was so eager for some respite before the sun set that she failed to notice something akin to tendrils creeping out of her paws. They brought a warm embrace that she was too tired to question until it was too late. She’d fallen asleep and an oddly pleasant dream greeted her.

Wind rushed through her fur fast enough to batter her ears and tail into a hopeless loop of quivering shakes. They were at the mercy of aerodynamics, and so was she. It was fun, in an odd way. She spent most of her life barely over a foot above the ground, so the new vantage point was novel. Spreading her arms like wings, she felt the rush of sudden friction slow her descent.

Commonly known fact about dreams: they can’t cause pain. An easy way to tell if you’re dreaming is to pinch your arm. If you feel pain, it’s not a dream.

Of course, there are other ways to induce pain in someone. One sure fire way to cause pain is, well, fire. Thanks to the drag she’d just added, a bit of atmosphere started to accumulate and ignite right under her. What started as a pleasant warmth quickly burst into an all consuming inferno.

The singes felt familiar in the way any experience that drew on lost memories did. She recognized the familiarity without any idea where it came from. It was an odd thing for a mouse to experience twice, atmospheric reentry.

That slight difference in experience gave her an edge up over the pidgey. She’d known she had no control over this descent from the beginning, allowing her the opportunity to scream in terror for about a second before her descent met its sudden end, and, presumably, she met hers.

Her immediate, terrified leap into the air was a bit odd. She babbled in pika-speak incoherent even to her. After she landed from her jump, she froze. That was a mighty fall. She needed to check for injuries. The good news was she was still standing. Her legs and back were fine. Good. She managed a slight breath of relief thanks to that, but she didn’t stop there.

First, she counted her arms, relieved to find two, and with ten nubbins to boot. She brought both pristine paws up to feel for her ears and, again, found two. Neither hurt, but she pulled them down to check for sure. Both looked as pristine as her paws, not so much as a nick.

Her left ear was fine. It ended in the same point as it had when she’d… dropped in to this world. A pit in her stomach started to form as she finally started to remember how falling from the sky felt so familiar. She glanced around her to see a painfully familiar field around her calling at her from the void of lost memory, all the way down to the lake in front of her.

She couldn’t bring herself to look into the lake’s reflection for the same reason she couldn’t bring herself to look behind her. She knew what she would see—what she didn’t want to see. She clenched her eyes closed and smacked her head with her paws.

“Wake up, wake up, wake… up,” she started to chant, though her voice sounded off. The difference was subtle, and she couldn’t quite put her paw on what it was. The first thought was it sounded younger, which made sense. Of course she’d sound younger if she was suddenly transported back in time (how that was the most logical conclusion at any point made her head hurt if she thought about it).

She wasn’t waking up. When she hit her head, it hurt (despite the meteoric landing not doing much). She wasn’t dreaming. She was stuck like this. Taking a deep breath in, she prepared herself. It was time to face the music.

With a practiced flick of her tail, she brought it in front with her eyes closed. It’d be easier to feel the end than see it, so she hesitantly grabbed it with her left while her right ran down the two lumps on its opposite end. Eyes closed, her brow furrowed in sudden consternation. That wasn’t either of the two possibilities she’d considered. If anything, it felt like the tail of any other girl. Pikachu.

Her eyes shot open and confirmed that, not only did her tail end in a heart, but it even had a familiar little patch of black fur to highlight the shape.

It was a girl’s tail. Her tail was a girl’s tail. She had a girl’s tail.

“No way,” she breathlessly whispered. Even after checking so many times, she still felt the suspicion it was a dream. Her paws shot to her face to feel what else was different, but that was basically fruitless. Instead, she bolted over to the lake to look at her reflection. She rushed over so fast that she almost didn’t stop before leaping right in.

Luckily, the added friction of the grass allowed her to stop right as the nubbins on her forepaws tapped the edge of the water. It barely distorted the image of her reflection, luckily. She looked down at almost the exact face she’d always had. Her same eyes, the brown spot under the left side of her lips. But it was just a bit softer, just a bit brighter, and with the widest smile she’d ever seen in her reflection.

It was still her.

The jubilee had one minor hiccup. Her stomach turned a bit when she realized she had one more thing to check. In the same way she couldn’t bring herself to look at her tail a minute ago, she couldn’t bring herself to look down. She felt a phantom ache at the loss she already knew she’d see.

But, she couldn’t put it off forever. She stood up and, with the quickest of glances, confirmed exactly what she’d feared. “I-I-I,” she stammered, but it wouldn’t come out. It was already obvious, but how? She knew exactly where she was, exactly when she was—and she definitely hadn’t crash landed like this the first time around. With breathless confusion and surprise, she finally managed to shout, “I-I’m a girl?!”

One second of thought might’ve had her reconsider the wording (she’d been a girl before, after all), but that second didn’t come. Instead, a familiar voice asked, “Were you… not one before?”

Under any other circumstances, hearing that voice would make her jump for joy. She did end up jumping, but thanks to what she’d been inspecting moments ago, it was from sheer, nude horror. “Ithos!” she squeaked, trying in vain to cover herself with her paws. “Haven’t you ever heard of privacy?!” Ithos flinched back, putting his arms up in defense, and it finally clicked for Max.

“ITHOS!” she screeched, dashing over and launching herself onto him. She latched on before he could resist, squeezing the familiar scales with tears already in her eyes. “Y-you—you’re here, I’m-” She cut herself off, finally catching her slips. He had no idea what she was saying, latched onto him like this.

More came with that realization. This was her first day there. This was the day that they met. This was the first time they saw each other. Ithos had no idea who she was. She was just some pikachu that fell from the sky, screamed in surprise about being a girl, then leapt onto him.

“Jesus Christ, I’m so sorry!” Max sputtered, hopping off of him and backing away. “I just—I’m so sorry! You have no idea who I am, and I just-”

“Hold on,” Ithos said. Max shook her head, sparks of embarrassment bouncing off her cheeks. What a ridiculous first impression, how could she—what would Ithos think of her now?! She kept backing away in humiliation and terror. “Hey, wait!” Ithos shouted, but Max shook her head. Worse, his yelling started tickling into her instincts, demanding she continue her retreat, even if she knew he was only trying to say it was okay.

At least, that’s what she thought, but then, right as her hindpaw met air on one fateful step, he screamed, “LAKE!”

Right. The lake. It was right behind her, well.

Right below her, now.

The water engulfed Max before she had a chance to scream. She clutched her paws around her mouth in desperate horror, trying in vain to hold one last little pocket of air, but only getting water. Her limbs froze. She couldn’t even flail. The only other person who knew she was in here was Ithos. A charmander. Even realizing she was about to die, she couldn’t help an internal chuckle.

The trip down memory lane, straight to hell.

Then, something else crashed into the water. Her eyes were closed, but she couldn’t believe the burning scales she felt wrap around her chest. She almost let her breath hitch, but the paws around her mouth stopped her just in time.

When Ithos tried to swim up, though, he wasn’t exactly fast. In fact, he wasn’t moving up at all. He was sinking. They both were, but not for lack of his trying. His hindpaws hopelessly flailed in the water in useless motions that did absolutely nothing but intermittently kick Max.

An almost audible shift clicked in Max’s mind. Facing her death was upsetting, sure. It was terrifying to her, but not unthinkable. She knew life wasn’t permanent.

Ithos was a different story.

In an instant, Max twirled around out of Ithos’ grip to smack him across the face. It stopped his flailing while also spewing a few bubbles out of his mouth. Importantly, though, it seemed to calm him down (which might’ve been the sudden loss of air talking).

Max latched onto Ithos tighter than she had on land and starting violently kicking as fast as she could. It barely, slowly started changing their course, but it got them higher than Ithos had. With a grunt and more kicks, she even managed to get them to start ascending. Her lungs started to burn, but she kept on kicking with all her might, more oxygen than she had. She didn’t have any other choice but to keep going.

Her swimming lessons with Cori payed off; water flung off their heads as she shoved both of their heads up and out. As much as it terrified her to try, she couldn’t stop herself sucking in a gasp. Alive—she was alive. She was—she was swimming.

They weren’t out of the fire yet, though. She had to pika-paddle over to the nearest edge, grabbed hold of it with one paw while the other flung Ithos out. Her adrenaline started to wane, so she scrambled to yank herself out of the water before it ran out. She flopped down in the grass about a yard from Ithos—okay, still strong, that’s good.

A breeze froze the air on her fur; the fear caught up with her. She tried to reach for the scarf that wasn’t there and let out a squeak of terror. Her hindpaws started to numb. Those breathless gasps couldn’t bring air in, and she knew why.

Stone lungs can’t breathe.

She froze in place, every inch of her growing colder. She didn’t have her scarf. She couldn’t stop it. She couldn’t bear to try and move, couldn’t bear to fail, to feel stone’s non-response. The dripping of water down her fur froze her further. It was getting cold, so cold. Every bit of warmth fled her flesh as it turned to stone when suddenly, a very heavy, very hard bit of warmth smashed into her chest.

“D-don’t—hold on!” Ithos screamed before smashing his paws into her chest again. If she had been stone, she no doubt would have shattered. He actually managed to yank her out of the panic attack, yet didn’t stop slamming into her chest for even an instant.

The chest compressions were hopelessly erratic. If she’d actually needed CPR, he would’ve had better luck hitting her over the head with a baseball bat, but he kept smashing the air she would’ve used to tell him as much out of her chest.

Finally, he stopped for just an instant. Max started taking in a breath of relief when, all of a sudden, she felt something stopping her.

Warm scales. On her lips. Blowing air.

Again, she slapped her paw across his cheek, tossing him off her. While he rolled of her, she rolled over to heave whatever those compressions did to her out of her lungs. Oh God, her ribs—no, if they’d still been injured, Ithos absolutely would have killed her. Max rolled back to sit down just in time that she collapsed into a sitting position.

“S-sorry!” Ithos stammered. “I-I really—that wasn’t what I was trying to do! I swear!”

Max looked up to see the saddest, most terrified look of humiliation she’d ever seen on someone else. Even while Ithos rubbed his reddening cheek, the entirety of his attention went to her and the other paw waving his surrender. He was so terrified of what she thought that he hadn’t even noticed the lack of a flame at the end of his tail.

Max brought a paw to her mouth, eyes wide in disbelief. The absolute worst first impression she’d had to date—and that was saying something. She tried to use her paw to cover it, even calling in her other for backup, but that didn’t work for long.

A mix of a giggle and a snort chuckled its way out of her while the laughter started creeping into the rest of her face, and she couldn’t help it. She still couldn’t believe who she was looking at. Who she was talking to. Who she’d just slapped—twice. Luckily, the water absolutely soaking her managed to hide the burgeoning wave of tears.

“Wh-what?” Ithos whimpered, which only made Max laugh harder.

“Y-you can’t be serious!” Max cackled. “What—why would you dive into the water if you don’t know how to swim?!” She lost herself to another fit of giggles while Ithos sat a few feet away, simmering.

That simmering quickly turned to whimpers, though. The instant the sound tickled her ears, Max choked down the rest of her laughter, praying she hadn’t hurt him. When she looked at him again, his wide eyes were trained on his tail. “I-I… it. My.”

Max almost thought this was a joke, but his expression was far too sincere for it to be one. He was serious. He actually thought he was in danger.

Max took a few breaths for herself to calm and said, “Look, you’re okay.” She scampered over to rest a paw on his shoulder—hot, he was hot—and she ripped it away before it caught fire, swearing, “Kachu!”

“Sorry!” Ithos yelped, yanking his tail into his arms. Max could see the water boiling off him, yet the charmander didn’t seem to notice.

Max shook her head in disbelief. “Incredible,” she said, barely holding back another chuckle. “Y-”

“Sorry,” Ithos whimpered.

“Hey, hey! It’s fine, don’t worry!” Max said. She almost went in to hold him when she caught another glimpse of boiling water. “Here, let me see it.” She held out her paw, gesturing to his tail.

At first, Ithos pulled it back. Then, his eyes met hers and registered her shift to soft warmth. One paw at a time, Ithos let go of his tail and let it wiggle over to her. In all honesty, Max didn’t know what she was going to do to help, but she knew she could. She proceeded to follow her gut, motioning him to set it down on the ground.

“You’re not gonna die,” she reiterated. “It’s just a myth. Tail flames go out all the time, all right?” She glanced up to his eyes, but he wasn’t buying it. It was… honestly impressive that he’d fall for something like this. “If it happens, don’t worry.”

Max looked down at the tail, the tiniest hint of an ember of a memory starting to spark—right! “All you need,” she whispered with a bit of glee while she leaned down right next to it, “is a spark!” She let loose a flashy little shock from her cheeks and watched as a billowing flame burst out from the end of his tail. Perhaps getting closer wasn’t the best idea.

She leapt up, feral spewing out of her mouth while her paws rushed to her face to stamp out the flames. They didn’t find much, though, only a few patches of slightly singed fur. When she realized she wasn’t on fire, the laughs were quick to come. “Yeah, I shoulda thought that through better,” she chuckled.

“P-pikachu?” Ithos asked. “Did, why do you keep doing that?”

“Ka?” Max asked, slapping her paw over her mouth when she heard herself. Right, of course that would stay. Entirely new body, entirely new everything, but no, she still has this bullshit stuck in her head. “Sorry,” she said, careful with every syllable. She glanced around, eyes lingering on Ithos. Even after all this time, she was abysmal at hiding that she was hiding something. “Can you… keep a secret for me?”

Ithos looked her over again, starting to pull a bit of confidence back into himself before he said, “Sure.” In fact, Max thought she could spot the beginnings of a smirk. “My name’s Ithos, by the way.”

Max didn’t even notice her cheeks sparking, letting out a chuckle. “Right,” she mumbled. She looked away, already fully aware how this was gonna go. Pretty much everyone who had a reaction to her name had the same one. “Mine’s Max.”

“Max?” Ithos asked with a smirk, like his suspicions had all been confirmed. Max couldn’t help mouthing along when he said, “Odd name for a pika… chu.” Shit. He’d noticed. Max almost panicked, but he seemed to shake it off quick. “Was that the secret you wanted to tell me?”

“Oh, right, well, no,” Max muttered. “Or, yes? But, w-well, it’s, there’s another.”

“What is that?” Ithos asked. “You keep talking like that. Why?” He narrowed his eyes to raise a brow at her. He didn’t seem any bit concerned, just confused.

“Kachu,” Max grumbled. Did she need to explain this? No, that was ridiculous. Ithos knew about Dungeon Sickness—everyone did. “It’s just what it sounds like.” She couldn’t help a bit of sheepishness as she looked away, scratching at the back of her head. “Dungeon Sickness.” Even if it was embarrassing, though, she knew she could trust Ithos.

He didn’t immediately seem to respond, though, oddly enough. It must have been a lot to take in. He’d just seen her fall from the sky, and they’d both nearly died. That would make anyone need a minute.

Max took a deep breath and reset her head to neutral. It was more comfortable while also letting her see Ithos out of the corner of her eye. He might not know her very well, but she still wanted to make sure he was doing all right. Even with shoddy memory, she could still read him with ease. With just her peripheral vision, she saw him staring… maybe she wasn’t as good at reading him as she thought.

She almost thought he was staring at her, but that was ridiculous. Ithos had never expressed any interest in her before. More feelings than she expected came out in a knot when she reaffirmed to herself that he was probably straight.

She froze. If she didn’t move, she rationalized that the thoughts couldn’t see her, or maybe that Ithos couldn’t see her. He—she was a… more traditional girl, now. Even then, she shook the thought out of her head. Absolutely not. She’d never seen Ithos express interest in anyone, had she? Yet, when she inevitably took a glance to see his expression, she absolutely recognized it.

And he was absolutely looking at her.

It took a second for Ithos to notice she was looking at him. His eyes weren’t exactly on her face. A few sparks bounced off Max’s cheeks until Ithos finally met her eyes, and the scales on his cheeks turned redder than a charmeleon’s.

“M-mom-Mother Mew, I’m so sorry!” Ithos squealed. “I-it, I was just zoned out, I swear!” He threw both paws to his head, staring down exclusively at the grass.

Max suddenly didn’t feel any bit of embarrassment. In fact, with a quick once over of the charmander, she understood why it had kind of hurt to remember he was straight. It was almost embarrassingly cliché, when she thought about it. The Hero and The Partner, but she instead chuckled as she realized that between Ithos, Mandy, and Eleos, she absolutely had a type.

Maybe Cori would be an exception if she had feelings for them, but she of course didn’t and they weren’t.

Nevertheless… she certainly didn’t want to rush things. Seeing Ithos absolutely beside himself in embarrassment, a devilish grin started spreading her lips. She decided for absolute certain that it’d be better to take their time. For his sake, and nothing to do with vengeance, she resolved to simply not notice the little hint Ithos just dropped.

Hell, Ithos had missed all of hers.

“Hey, I’m sorry,” Max said, wrapping an arm around Ithos’ back. He yelped at her touch, so to calm him down, she dragged her paw down his back, making sure not to go against the grain, and let muscle memory guide her. Her claws poked at the scales right under his shoulder blade, right above his tail, and watched the anxiety melt off his face. He was a lot more timid than she remembered, but maybe he had some growing left to do.

“Look, I don’t really know this place too well,” she said, patting his back. “I know we just met, but could I ask a favor?”

“What?” Ithos asked, starting to look more like himself. “Yeah, of course!” He looked at her with a befuddled smile, shaking his head. With all the cheer she expected, he looked at her like asking for help was hilariously redundant. The sight had joy bubbling up in her chest. It was just like she remembered him.

“I’m not sure I can find you a place to stay, but I’ll try my best!” he said. An ache started to form in the back of Max’s throat while she watched him practically trip over himself to declare his helpfulness. An idea flashed in his eyes like a fire, but he had to physically pull himself back. “O-or, well, there is one thing.” He turned away to scratch his neck; Max held him tighter without his notice.

“It’s just, well…,” Ithos stumbled to mumbles. Even still, Max could see that eager glint in his eyes. She couldn’t have said no to that face if she wanted to. “Do you know about Rescue Teams?” It helped that she didn’t want to.

“Yes!” Max squeaked, tears cracking her voice to bits. She couldn’t help yanking him into a hug while tears started streaming down her cheeks. “Yes! Let’s do it!” Gleeful giggles ripped out of her without any chance at resistance. Her mind raced, every single dream coming true right before her eyes. “A team! Let’s form a team!” It finally hit her. She was getting a second chance. She could finally do this right.

“R-really?!” Ithos cheered. He threw his own arms around her after the initial surprise. With her legs wrapped around his belly, she fit right in his lap, barely tall enough to rest her head on his shoulder. “Thank you!”

He tried to hop with her in his arms, but barely made it up off the ground and toppled back down. “Wh-whoah,” he grunted. “You’re kinda heavy for a pikachu.” Max couldn’t hold back a laugh. It really, really was just like before. “O-oh! But, so, we’ll need a na-”

“Plasma!” Max squeaked, unable to hold herself back. “Team Plasma!”

Ithos churred out a roiling excitement. “That’s perfect!” he cheered. He even let out a chuckle, shaking his head before mumbling, “I was about to say that, too.” He didn’t linger on that, though, before yanking her back into a tighter embrace. He shook with excitement while Max melted in the embrace she’d missed. He leaned down to declare, “We’re gonna be the best Rescue Team the world’s ever seen!”

Max’s ear twitched. The first time, she’d been too excited to care. It was one word, one synonym that was functionally the same thing. She figured it was just a slip of the tongue, or maybe she’d just misheard him. Even still, she wasn’t convinced she heard right.

“Hey, Ithos?” Max asked. She didn’t let go of him, but she extended her arms to lean back enough to look up at him. “Did you mean to say ‘Rescue Team’?”

“The plot thins, she’s waiting”

It had been one single afternoon. Max stood at the end of a short path that lead to a ratty hovel of a dome. It was the same shape as the house she’d borrowed in Pokémon Square. The main difference was the many, many exposed boards, and even a few holes in the walls. Definitely not the dorms Goon had shown her.

“Sorry, I know it’s… bad,” Ithos said. He looked to the ground a second before shaking himself out of it, throwing a fist up in determination. “But I know we can fix it up!”

“Right, yeah,” Max mumbled. “Sorry, I think it’s great!” She looked up to him with as much of a smile as she could manage. Even this wasn’t really her main concern. It was a bit… bad, but she’d been too shell shocked from signing up as the wrong kind of team to care.

“Besides, I’m sure G-,” she slammed her jaw shut before taking a breath. “Great friends of yours won’t mind helping!” She started to have a bit more of a genuine smile. She had a chance to try again with Goon, even. He might even end up not hating her. Max turned to see Ithos… suddenly downcast. “Ithos?” He was avoiding her gaze.

“Well, so…,” Ithos muttered, barely able to get a word out. Again, he had this… cloud over him that Max couldn’t remember. She knew he was a boundless bundle of hope. Half the time she looked at him, though, he had a shadow of despair on his face. “I don’t really… have any.”

“What?” Max asked. “Wh-yes you do.” This didn’t make sense. Ithos had to be the most amicable mon she’d ever met. Yet, she watched him wince in pain at her words. “O-or, I mean, look.” She rushed over to grab hold of his arm. “Sorry, it’s just.” She trailed off, struggling to find a way to speak that wouldn’t give her away. Ithos kept his eyes on the ground, practically dripping with self-doubt.

It broke her heart.

She threw her arms around him, making him yelp. “Look, I’m sorry,” she said, squeezing him tighter before he could wriggle out of her grasp. “I guess, you just seem so sweet, helpful, fun, and great that I can’t imagine people wouldn’t fall over themselves to be your friend!”

Ithos stopped trying to squirm out of her hug as she spoke. She glanced out of the corner of her eye to see a shadow of that gleam in his eye. He struggled to look at her, but couldn’t help a smile. “Y-you really…,” he mumbled before trailing off. Shaking his head, he finally wrapped his arms around her. She could feel him quaking in her grasp. “N-no one’s ever been so… nice to me. Thank you.”

Ithos squeezed her tighter; Max felt her heart shatter. This was wrong—so, so so wrong. Ithos was so full of joy. She’d only ever seen him doubt himself once! This was

“Champagne to celebrate?” someone asked.

“Do you mind?” Max hissed, not even bothering to look at whoever that was. She had much more important worries to—and he’d just walked on over to the other side.

“Champagne for the lovely team?” he said again.

Max grit her teeth, looking over to bark, “Not now!” She got a good look at a grovyle holding exactly what he’d offered. A bottle of champagne. He quickly ducked away, exactly as she asked, and she sighed in relief. What a weirdo.

She took a deep breath to steady herself and leaned back. She looked carefully, deeply at Ithos’ face. It was exactly who she expected to see. Exactly the face she remembered, and yet, there was something missing. That confidence, that glee, that unshakable hope, that—motherfucking grovyle was slowly lowering the champagne into her line of sight.

“We’re like, ten!” Max shouted, breaking out of Ithos’ hold to glare up at Grovyle.

“Wh-Max?” Ithos stuttered. He crumpled in on himself a bit as he whimpered, “I’m thirteen.”

“So sorry, I’ll need but a minute,” Grovyle explained. He tossed the champagne at Ithos, giving him no choice but to catch it, and flicked a shiny, blue-diamond rescue badge at the both of them. “I’m with the Rescue Team Society!” He shoved the badge back in his bag before Max got a good look at it. “That’s congratulations on the new team!”

He clapped twice with a ridiculous smile before switching his gaze down to Max. Looking into his eyes, she saw the slightest hint of something darker behind them. “If you’ll allow me one minute with this lovely lady, I’ll be out of your scales,” he said. His paw shot down to the ruff of her neck and grabbed hold before she had a chance to resist. “I wish you the best, ah,” he glanced back at Ithos to double check, “Charmander!”

Max hissed out screeches and squeaks of fury while fruitlessly trying to wriggle out of his grasp. She had no idea what she was saying, too angry to form a sentence. She was just waiting for Ithos to burn him to a crisp.

Instead, he managed to plop her in a cage, whipping a vine out of his paw to snap it closed before her paws hit the bottom. He reclined, crossed his legs, and shook his head, rubbing his eyes before staring down at her. He’d completely relaxed, as if he’d completely neutralized her, but she’d show him.

“Piiiii,” she growled, pulling charge into her cheeks before launching it towards him with a roaring, “KA!”

Her mighty bolt hit the metal of the cage and dissipated into the ground.

“Fantastic, get it out of your system,” Grovyle grumbled. “Then, you can tell me what the hell you’re doing here.” While Max kept trying, he sat back and tugged his bag forward for rummaging. She thought she had a chance with an iron tail, but that only made the entire cage ping with a ring so earsplitting she had to cover her ears, eyes screwed shut into a wince.

When she managed to peak one eye open, Grovyle was bent over with a pair of classic style 3-D glasses, red and blue lenses. “Nope, native,” he said, flicking off the glasses and tossing them back in his bag.

“Of course I’m—kachu,” Max half-screamed, half-grumbled. Grovyle patiently watched while she took a second to calm down before trying again. “Of course I’m native!” she spat. “I’m a pikachu, born and raised!” Whatever this guy thought he knew, she wasn’t going to let him know she used to be human—certainly not while caged.

“Born? A pikachu?” Grovyle hummed, tapping his chin with a claw. Pokémon hatch. Max could practically see the glee in his eyes as he watched her realize her mistake. She didn’t let that get her down.

“It’s a figure of speech,” Max said, rolling her eyes. “But yes, hatched, if I’m speaking to a pedant.”

“Pedant?” Grovyle scoffed, throwing a paw to his faux-broken heart. “Such lovely praise, thank you!” He flashed a malicious smile before narrowing his eyes. “Now, tell me what you did with her.”

“With who?!” Max shouted.

“The pikachu,” Grovyle said. “And don’t try to play games with me. I know you don’t belong here, impostor.”

“What are you talking about?!” Max hissed. The more she tried to figure out what was going on, the less she understood. “Who do you think I am?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t care,” Grovyle said. “But I’m not going to let whoever you are muck up the time I’ve spent so much time fixing.” Max held tight to her glare to keep the bit of recognition shining through. “All I know is there’s a pikachu named Max that’s supposed to be here, and you’re not her.”

Max almost told him to shove it up his ass before his words finally started to register. Half of what he said made sense, but the other half didn’t. It was almost the same amount of sense as talking to Ithos. Grovyle was right, this wasn’t her time, but he also thought the pikachu was a girl. She was, but she wasn’t the first time she crashed down.

“Sorry, she?” Max clarified. She quickly shook her head. That didn’t matter. “Okay, wait, please.” Her paws came up to rub at her temples. “Look, I’m Max, I swear.” She looked up, half pleading with the half that wasn’t enraged to be looking through the bars of a cage.

Grovyle eyed her with the same scrutiny. The way he looked her over made her feel like livestock. His eyes scanned her, top to bottom, then finally landed on her tail. An idea seemed to shine in his eyes, though his anger seemed to be waning. Whether that meant he believed her or not, Max wasn’t sure. “The end of your tail,” he said. “Is that natural?”

Max instantly felt even less comfortable with him examining her top to bottom. “And what is that supposed to mean?!” she hissed. Grovyle was a bit taken aback by her reaction, but she didn’t care enough to stop. “What the hell gives you the right to ask if I’m ‘natural’?” That stare, had he been trying to figure out if she was—“However the hell my tail used to look doesn’t matter! It’s a girl’s tail because it’s mine!”

Grovyle’s eyes flashed in sudden, horrified realization for a split second before shifting instantly into even deeper confusion. “The—Pikachu, you know the end is natural, right?” he asked. Despite promising herself nothing he could say would calm her down, he did shock her out of herself.

She’d forgotten about that little change. “R-right,” she mumbled. “Well, yeah, of course.”

“I was talking about your fur,” Grovyle said. Max shrank away, sparks bouncing off her cheeks. “Is it dyed, or natural?”

Max took a deep breath, but it didn’t really help. Her ears were burning hotter than when she’d lit Ithos’ tail right in her own face. “Oh, that?” she squeaked. Glancing back, she felt a little leap in her heart. She hadn’t even had a chance to see her old tail out from under the bandages. This one looked pristine, cute, and it was hers. “Dyed?”

“Natural,” Grovyle corrected. “It should be dye, but it’s not. It’s a recessive gene that won’t exist for another eight hundred years, yet here you are.”

“What?” Max balked. Even if her tail wasn’t like that, Libré didn’t start existing eight hundred years after she met Ithos. “Eight hundred? Years? Are you joking?”

Grovyle looked over her expression to try and find the deception. When he couldn’t, his eyes got distant before he shook himself out of it and started mumbling to himself. “This doesn’t make any sense. Why is she here?” He hopped up to pace back and forth, continuing to mumble too fast and indistinct for her to make out.

“Yo,” Max said, getting sick of hearing him talk to himself. He didn’t seem to hear her and went right on mumbling. “Hey,” she called, a little bit louder, but evidently not enough. “HEY!”

Grovyle jumped, looking down at her with a mouth twisted into horror and disgust. “Excuse me?” he asked. “Not polite to yell, young lady.”

Max grit her teeth, eyes narrow as she could make them without closing them. “Polite?” she asked, placing her paws on the cage he’d trapped her in for emphasis. Grovyle’s expression didn’t change in the slightest. This seemed perfectly natural to him. “Says the guy who hasn’t even told me his name.”

“Grovyle,” Grovyle said.

“Your. Name,” Max snarled.

“No name, just Grovyle,” Grovyle answered with a dismissive wave. “Makes things simpler, doesn’t leave a trace. Hard to leave an impression that way, so.” He shrugged, looking down at her with a smirk. “Just Grovyle.”

“Just Grovyle?” Max asked, keeping her eyes narrow. She was doing her best to look at Grovyle the way Goon usually looked at her. It didn’t have the same effect on Grovyle, though. If anything, he seemed to relish in the glare. She took in a frustrated breath to prepare for an even more frustrated exhale. “Might as well call you Doctor.”

“Hatched and raised a pikachu, did you?” Grovyle asked, eye quirked in pseudo-confusion. Max flinched, cursing herself while he grinned. “Don’t worry, I already knew you were a human.”

“What, because I like their shows?” Max countered. This was way past the point she could recover, but she might as well try.

“’Their shows’ won’t be unearthed for another six hundred years,” Grovyle explained.

“That—no, you’re wrong,” Max said. She couldn’t even begin to figure out what he was trying to say. Cori had told her about the human artifacts they’d already discovered. Even if it had been that very year, that was three at most.

“Ready to admit you’re not from this time, yet?” Grovyle offered.

“I will when you will,” Max grumbled. “It’s the Rescue Society, not Rescue Team Society.” She looked up at him with a proud smirk of her own.

“Fantastic, she’s clever,” Grovyle said with a smirk of his own. “I’ll bet you noticed the badge, too, then, right?” He bent down to tug it back out of his bag, then showed it to her. “This rank doesn’t exist yet, either.” Max bit her cheek, failing to hide her frustration. He’d pretty much gotten her at this point.

“I’ll give it to you, though,” Grovyle hummed as he tucked it back into his bag. “You merely were unaware that rank had been a recent addition.” Crossing his arms, he reclined back with an almost genuine smile, at least the closest he’d shown her this far. “I guessed wrong.” Taking his arms back, he stretched them up to extend his back and sat forward. Despite saying he’d ‘give it to her’, he still looked like he’d won something.

“You will when I will, correct?” he said.

“Okay, fine!” Max said, rolling her eyes. “Yes, all right? I’m in the wrong time, but only by a few years! Not a few hundred.” Grovyle raised his brow, but gave her space to go on. “Look, I don’t know what happened. I was sleeping, I wake up, and I’m a meteor again. It’s the same day I met Ithos, but he’s… different, and I’m a girl.” Grovyle gave her a glance.

Max shrunk away again, cheeks sparking. “N-not, well, that’s obviously… how it was, though,” she muttered. It was a pitiful attempt, but she looked up anyway, hoping he’d pretend to believe it for her sake. He very clearly didn’t. Max shrank further, worried what he’d say about that next.

“Ah, so you are Ithos’ partner,” Grovyle said. “His second one.” Max blinked, suddenly worried she’d been sloppy seconds all this time. She’d known she was sloppy, but seconds? “Good seeing you again.” Before Max could even glance at him for that, he went on. “Still doesn’t explain why you’re….” He shook his head, waving the thought away. “Tell me, haven’t you noticed anything odd?”

“Well, yeah?” Max said. He was, evidently, a time traveler. She was more just frustrated he just implied they’d meet again. “Ithos is a lot more, well.” She searched for the least insulting word, before settling. “Pathetic.” At least he didn’t hear her.

Now that Grovyle wasn’t at her throat about it, she started actually thinking this through. “I know we’re supposed to be an Expedition Team, not a Rescue Team,” she mumbled. “The house is supposed to be a dorm.” A subtle horror started building in her chest. If Grovyle was here to stop her messing up the timeline, he might already be too late.

“O-oh God,” Max mumbled. “How fucked are things already?”

“Fret not, my foul-mouthed female,” Grovyle sang with spite. Despite the negging, Max was trying too hard not to grin about being called a female to be mad. “Luckily, there haven’t been any tremors yet.” Leaning back, he rested his head on his arms while looking down with a hint of pride in his eyes. “Because I got here soon enough to stop you.”

He preened at his accomplishment with a wide grin. “I’ll just get the right Max from…,” he trailed off. The pride and victory shattered before his eyes. “Wh-where’d you say you put her?”

“I didn’t!” Max said. “I didn’t do anything!”

“You did—you had to!” Grovyle shouted. He hopped up, holding a paw to his head. “It doesn’t make any sense. I fixed this, I had to! There hasn’t been a single tremor!” He shook his head as he began to pace again. “The problem is totally solved! Everything’s supposed to be fine after I leave!” He started pacing more and more frantically until suddenly shooting his gaze to her. “Well? Any ideas?” he asked.

Max just stared in amazement. Had he really expected her to chime in?

“Great,” Grovyle grumbled. “Great! I make one mistake, I don’t even know what it is, and now I’m stuck with another idiot human.”

“Oh, like you’re so clever,” Max spat.

“I am,” Grovyle said. He dropped down right in front of her. “Do you have any idea how serious this is?” He stared at her with rage she could feel. “This isn’t when you meet Ithos! This is a thousand years before you meet him!”

“A thou—he’s a charmander!” Max shouted.

Grovyle paused for a second, expression frozen. Max could see the gears turning against each other in his head. “Right, of course he is,” he said. He stared at her for a bit longer before finally shaking his head. “I have to fix this, and I have to fix this fast.” He dragged his paws down his face before looking down at her.

“You’re still his partner, at least,” he grumbled. He grit his teeth, mind racing for any other option and eyes growing more and more resigned while he couldn’t find one. Shaking his head, he growled something under his breath before facing her again.

“All right, you get to stay,” he jabbed a claw towards her, “for now!” Despite getting yelled at, Max nearly bounced in excitement. Time be damned, she wasn’t ready to say goodbye to Ithos. “But don’t you dare touch anything. Don’t you dare change even the slightest little event of the slightest little mission.”

“How am I supposed to know what happens?” Max asked, but he was already yanking his bag back on.

“Well, there were no tremors when I took it, so thanks for not drinking the champagne,” Grovyle said. “I’ll pick it up in the morning.” With a shrug, he looked down at her one last time. “See ya!” Without so much as a wave, he started running off, leaving Max trapped in the cage.

“Hey—Grovyle!” Max shouted, shaking at the bars of her cage. “Want my help? Then let me out of here!”

Without missing a beat, Grovyle spun around and started running backwards. “Never locked the top, dear!” he shouted back at her. “Besides, you’re waiting until I let you out to shock me!” He waved, turned back around, and disappeared from sight.

Max wanted to gnaw on the bars. She was really looking forward to shocking him. She went to push the top off and met no resistance. Every swear she knew came out in its pika-speak equivalent while she crawled out of that stupid cage. That entire time, she could’ve just hopped out and beat that smug look off his face.

“Whatever, whatever,” Max grumbled to herself. Hopefully he hadn’t taken her too far away. She only knew he’d taken her South thanks to her charge. With a grunt, she started down the road while her mind raced.

This situation was already absurd. She didn’t believe a single second since waking up entering the atmosphere, and now Grovyle was telling her a bunch of nonsense she believed even less. It left her head spinning when all she wanted to do was be with her friend again. She hadn’t seen him for years, and this Ithos didn’t even have a reason to hate her.

“Not yet, at least,” Max whimpered. Every possibility remained that she’d make the same mistakes or worse. She couldn’t even remember half of them. Hopefully more would come back as she spent time with him. Unless Grovyle was to be believed, this should be about the same experience as last time.

“A thousand years,” Max scoffed. That little part was too ridiculous to even shake her head at.

Ithos screaming in agony yanked her out of her thoughts.

“Ithos!” Max screamed. She hopped down on all fours to sprint as fast as she could. “Hold on! I’m coming!” Ithos didn’t sound too far away, but that might just be how loud he could scream. Among the things she could remember, the volumes of his screams hadn’t returned to her memories yet.

Heart racing, she desperately scanned her surroundings for the house while she barreled down the road. Right in front of her, some water type was having a peaceful stroll. She hopped around them with inches to spare, shouting, “Sorry!” Whoever it was yelled at her, but she couldn’t make out what they had to say above the winds.

Finally, she caught sight of the house out of the right corner of her eye. She banked right and shot right into the house. “Ithos! Where are you?!” she shouted at the dark—dark! The only light in the place was his tail. She saw him clutching his paw, sitting against the right wall and ran over to him. She had to weave around a few boards with crooked nails in on the way.

“Hey, hey!” Max said, laying a paw on his shoulder. Ithos flinched away at the touch before looking up at her with the biggest, saddest eyes she’d ever seen him give. “It’s all right. What happened?”

“Uh, so, well,” Ithos mumbled. He glanced at his paw before desperately looking away. “I-I thought, well, while you were talking with him, might as well get started on construction, right?” Looking up, he tried his best to force a smile before his eyes shot away from her gaze. Based on the un-nailed board behind him, Max had a pretty good idea what happened. She couldn’t see the hammer or the nail, though.

“I didn’t have a hammer, though, so I couldn’t nail them into the wall yet,” he continued. Max tilted her head. That explained why she didn’t see a hammer, but now she had no idea what he even could’ve been doing. “I just started pre-nailing the boards.”

“Pre-nailing?” Max asked. That definitely wasn’t a thing, but it explained the several discarded boards in there. Her stomach started to turn as she started forming a hypothesis.

He was holding his paw.

“Ithos, what were you using to pre-nail?” Max asked. She knew the answer was going to horrify her, but she was ready for it.

“Mega Punch,” Ithos said.

Max stared forward. While she’d been talking with Grovyle, Ithos had been punching nails into boards. Ithos had always had dangerous amounts of tenacity, but he at least wasn’t stupid. Max wasn’t sure even she had ever done this something so stupid. At least he meant well, but God how pathetic. It was beyond what she could’ve even thought of as a joke.

It made her desperate to propose.

“Hey, you’re all right,” Max said. She pulled him into a hug, running her paws down his arm. Hopefully it would help while she tried to figure out how to at least dull the pain. They didn’t have any bandages, ice, not even painkillers. It was just an empty house. All they had was that stupid bottle of—perfect.

“Here, I know what’ll help,” Max cooed. She squeezed him one last time before getting up to find the bottle. It sat nestled against the would be door frame, but it was hard to make out with the light streaming in from the entrance. She slowly pawed over to it, carefully nudging every ‘pre-nailed’ board closer to the wall. As she got closer, she noticed two mismatched cups nestled in with the bottle.

Ithos must’ve gotten those somewhere for them to use. “Aw, that’s perfect,” Max cooed. Nestling the bottle in the crook of her arm, she put one of the cups on top of it and carried the other one in her paw. Out of curiosity, she tried to probe at her surroundings with her awareness on her way back. Barely even trying, she felt the entire room.

She quickly tried to reign it in when she made it back to Ithos. “Nice cups,” she said, grin trying to burst off her cheeks. Pathetic or not, it was Ithos. “Here, this will help with the pain.” She needed to look at the bottle to figure out how to open it.

She couldn’t take her eyes off Ithos. It was him. It was really, really him. Just the sight of his face made her so happy she thought she might explode. The face she never thought she’d see again. Whether she got to stay for a few hours or a few years, she was happier than she’d ever imagined was possible just looking at his f—

“M-Max?” Ithos asked, ripping Max out of her thoughts.

“Sorry!” Max shouted. She nearly collapsed in on herself for having stared at him silently for she didn’t even know how long. “God, I’m so sorry.” Her cheeks sparked enough to rival his tail as a light source. “I probably look insane to you.”

“H-hey, it’s all right!” Ithos said. He threw his good paw up to wave surrender. “I, um.” He brought his paw to scratch at the back of his neck. “I didn’t mind.” Thanks to testing her awareness, Max could tell his cheeks had flushed despite the dark. “Whatever you were thinking about, you looked really happy.”

“Yeah,” Max chuckled. Either he was oblivious, or that unsure of himself. Based on her gut, she was pretty sure it was the former.

Putting the cups down, she started ripping the foil off the bottle to get at the cork. “We can clean this up after we go get some tools, how’s that sound?” she said with a smirk. Several slivers of foil floated down around them until she’d finally excavated the cork. She’d only seen this opened in movies, though, so with trepidation, she shook it a few times before smacking at the cork with her paw.

After the second hit, it shot open with a playful pop, and foam shot out right behind it. She tried to cover it with a paw, but only succeeded in redirecting the stream directly to her face. By the time she had a good seal on it, it had already stopped.

Max looked at Ithos. Ithos looked at Max. She’d completely soaked both of them. Again. Not quite as bad as the last time, at least. Ithos had his mouth cinched shut as tight as he could possibly manage while his cheeks puffed up in repressed laughter. His eyes begged her for permission. Little did he know, she was holding back some chuckles of her own.

They let their laughs out in unison, soaked and sticky, in the dark, run down house. Ithos kept laughing long after Max did, but she didn’t mind. She listened to the symphony with a growing smile while she poured some of what remained into the cups. It seemed like most of the champagne was still there.

She waited for him to finish laughing, too happy about hearing it again to interrupt. When it finally tapered off, Max nudged a cup into his good paw, raising her own when he took it. “A toast,” she chuckled. “To friends.”

Ithos’ mouth shot open into a grin while stars formed in each of his eyes. “To friends!” he cheered, clinking his glass against hers. He took a conservative sip before cringing and wiping his mouth. Max took her own sip and didn’t blame him, though she never loved champagne, either.

Ithos stared down at his cup, grinning as wide as his lips would let him. His eyes shone with the light of the world and enough joy to fill Max’s heart while she watched him. He shook his head in disbelief with another chuckle. With impossible glee and restraint, he whispered almost too quietly for Max to hear, just to himself, as if unable to believe the words, “To friends.”

“The morning alarm rings

I’m asleep but she’s talking to me She’s walking ‘round wearing all of my clothes”

Max couldn’t run fast enough. No matter what she did, she could feel it gaining on her. Whatever it was, she knew she didn’t have a chance in hell of living if it caught her, and her paws were starting to ache. She couldn’t see it, couldn’t see her surroundings, couldn’t see anything, working entirely off the building dread as it grew closer.

Everything from her surroundings to her own moving had grown so distant, so hard to make out already. She could feel her instincts clawing for control, and she was too busy running to fight them off. The monster chasing her started to close in on her as her instincts closed in on her mind. She would die, and her instincts would kill her before the beast did.

It had her by the shoulders, thrashing her. Before it dealt the final blow, it roared, “Max! Max! Wake up!”

Max shoved it off her and let out the strongest shock she could manage. The world was still pitch black around her aside from the light coming from the monster she’d thrown off. She almost made out slivers of light behind her and tried to run for them.

She slammed into a wall and started desperately clawing at it to get away. Her claws stung the more she tried, but she had to get away, barely even had control of them. The desperate need to flee overrode any thoughts she tried to form as she hopelessly tried to break through to the slivers of freedom she could barely make out. She couldn’t get anywhere, the glimpses of moonlight only twisting the knife.

“Max! What’s wrong? It’s just me!” Ithos yelled. Max spun around to cower against the wall. She pressed against it, made herself as small as possible in the hopes of escape while staring up in horror at him. He’d brought his tail forward, lighting every sharp fang in his maw that she could imagine tearing her apart.

“Piika pi ka,” Max whimpered, curling up as tight as she could. Escape was impossible. It was hopeless. She couldn’t bring her paws to run no matter how hard she tried. Already, she could hear the monster stepping up to claim its meal. Its warmth grew and grew around her as it stepped agonizingly closer, agonizingly slowly. With its fire, she only hoped it would kill her before cooking her.

It’s claws came for her back first and started gently combing down her fur. “It’s all right, it’s all right,” Ithos cooed as quietly as he could. He started rubbing her back in a few spots as his paw went down her back. “I’ve got you, don’t worry.”

He kept petting her, kept whispering comforts at her as her whimpers died down. The soul-rending terror took a while to abate, but he patiently continued tending to her. “It’s just me, Ithos,” he whispered, bringing his other paw to her belly. He lightly scritched the bit she wasn’t covering while still tending to her back. The fear started slowly giving way to a building peace and comfort.

The warmth that terrified her minutes ago now soothed her. She’d felt so cold, so alone, but now, she was neither. Her instincts were too preoccupied with the petting to keep her from wresting some bit of control back from herself. She blearily looked up at Ithos for some explanation.

“Kaa pika?” Max asked, shaking her head. She got a little bit of progress rubbing some sleep out of her eyes, though she still felt exhausted.

Ithos gave her a solid pat and pulled his paws away. “You all right?” he asked. While she rubbed her eyes some more, he bent down a bit to get a better look at her. So he didn’t startle her, he brought a paw to her back to soothe her just in case.

It was all barely a blur to Max. She struggled to piece together the rushed bits she remembered, but her nose was a great reminder of her little escape attempt. “Chuuuu,” she grumbled, cupping her nose with her paws.

“Max?” Ithos asked. When Max glanced up, he was looking at her eyes. She froze, shrinking away a bit as she realized what he was looking for.

“S-Sorry!” Max whimpered, hopping up to cradle her tail to her chest. Sparks spouted from her cheeks while her ears caught fire. She buried her face in her tail to hide her eyes, certain he’d only see the inky black of a feral.

Ithos put his paw on her head, slowly running down her back. His touch steadied her quaking while his voice, “Hey, don’t worry! I’m not gonna hurt you,” slowed her racing heart. He kept on petting her, siphoning her nerves away, until she built up the courage to peek one eye over her tail. This time, he was just smiling at her. His eyes met hers only to make contact.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, patting her back. His paw rested there, ready to soothe her again at a moments notice.

“Chuuuu,” Max groaned. She let her tail fall to her chest, but kept hugging it. Now that her instincts were calmer, she could manage to talk again after a bit of concentration. “Sorry,” she said, shaking her head. She couldn’t bring herself to look Ithos in the eyes. At best, she glanced up to see him smiling down at her. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah, I’m fine!” Ithos said. He pat her back a few times before she’d even noticed she was tensing up again. “What happened? Was that all because of a nightmare?”

“Sort of,” Max mumbled, trying not to lose her self in his touch. His warm paw against her fur warmed a part deeper than she could remember. “I’ve been like this for a while.” Her eyes scanned along the floor while she tried to build up the courage. “D-Dungeon Sickness.”

“Dungeon Sickness?” Ithos asked. “What’s that?” His hint of confusion met a tidal wave of her own.

Max looked up to see if he was serious, but he was. “Oh,” she mumbled in disbelief. She’d never had to explain this to someone before. Most of the time, she spent most of her energy making sure no one knew she dealt with it. “So, you know feral pokémon?” He nodded, so she went on. “Well, I’ve got instincts like one. If I get upset or stressed, they come out, and it’s really hard to put them back.”

“Really?” Ithos asked, sorrowful empathy in his eyes. “How?”

Max narrowed her eyes at him before her brain caught up. He’d just seen her enter the world through the atmosphere that day. She jerked her head away to avoid his eyes. His partner wasn’t supposed to have Dungeon Sickness. A light burn of panic came in her chest while she wondered how much she’d just messed up time.

“R-right, ha,” Max mumbled. “Well, y’know. It’s hard to explain.” She tried to smile up at him which lodged a shard of glass into her heart. “It’s all pretty new to me, too! Being, uh.” He was the first to know, she was pretty sure. Still, a hint of doubt held her back. “What I am.”

Luckily, Ithos proved she guessed right. He nodded with a bit of a self-satisfied smirk. “Right,” he said. Max let out a breath of relief. “An alien.”

“What?!” Max balked. She almost laughed at the joke, but his face looked entirely sincere. She kept staring at him, waiting for the facade to crack, but no. He was entirely serious. She couldn’t help shouting, “Human!”

“Hu—what?!” Ithos yelped. His eyes went wide before he leapt back, clutching his head in his paws. “H-human? But—nonono, but that—last time a human was here—oh sweet Mother Mew!” He stared at the floor in horror that only seemed to grow with time. “A-and I’m you’re partner.” He shook his head in a desperate attempt to calm down, but it only seemed to terrify him more.

“No, I can’t,” he said, shaking his head more. His paws came up in an attempt to wave the whole concept away. “Look, I’m not sure what you think I am, or how your people choose, but l-look, I can’t save the world!”

Max stared in open mouthed confusion. She couldn’t even be shocked at this point. Ithos had constantly told her they could do anything, constantly affirmed that, if anyone had to save the world, they could. He took on that burden better than even she had. He’d almost seemed excited about it, yet here he was begging her to save it with someone else.

A realization came gradually, crawling underneath her skin to skitter into her fur. Looking into his disbelieving, uncertain eyes, she started to see someone else. She started to see herself. Without Ithos, she never would have had the courage to do what they did. She needed him, then.

He needed her, now.

Ithos had stopped trying to argue his fate, now sitting with his head in his paws. Every half-breath in came with a trembling exhale, lungs rushing to get as little air in as possible. His heart almost audibly beat out of his chest.

“It’s all right,” Max whispered. Ithos didn’t seem to hear her at all, eyes stuck to the floor while his head slowly shook. One slow, soft step at a time, Max crept over to rest a paw on his shoulder, praying that the right words would come to her. Until then, she let her paw follow a familiar trail down his back with stops for extra scritches all along the way.

“I’m scared, too,” she said. A paw went to the scarf that wasn’t there for security, and she shivered. It still wasn’t there. She clutched Ithos a bit tighter to compensate. He’d been the one to pull her out of every stupid mistake she made. If Grovyle didn’t find the right Max soon, she wasn’t sure how much she could really do. When she looked up at Ithos’ eyes, her answer called from beyond the veil.

“When I think about it, I’m terrified,” she said, not sure if the words came from the heart or her memory. Wherever they originated, though, she knew they were true. “I don’t know what it’ll take, what I need to do, or what I’m even supposed to be stopping.”

A sneer snuck onto her face as she looked away. “They didn’t exactly give detailed instructions,” she grumbled. “But,” she looked into his eyes and found him looking into hers, “When I look at you….” She trailed off as a smile started to creep across her lips. “I know I can do it.” His eyes pulled her in, and she started to lean in for a hug. Once she had him in her arms, she whispered, “I know we can do it.”

Ithos carefully wrapped his arms around her as well. They’d hugged earlier, yet he seemed suddenly unsure where to put his paws. His paws twitched around her back for a bit until settling exactly where Max remembered.

As she held him in her arms, and he held her, the tremors started to slow. She squeezed him a few times, and he did the same after the third. His face wasn’t in her line of sight, so she watched his tail’s flame. The shaky ember started to grow and crackle with life. She squeezed him a bit tighter as it grew from a fire to a blaze and felt him do the same.

Tapping each other’s backs, they pulled back, chuckling in accidental unison, “Someone’s excited.”

“What?” Max asked. She turned around to see her tail bobbing eagerly from side to side. Ithos looked at his own and flushed, but Max couldn’t take her eyes away. All her life as a pikachu, she’d shoved her tail behind her, pretended it wasn’t there.

She pulled it forward to run her paws along the fur, down the bobs that formed the heart. The shift from yellow to brown was subtle, but the brown felt that little bit softer. She couldn’t wag her tail holding it in her paws, so she started wiggling side to side. An involuntary flick of her ear brought her eye up to see Ithos watching her with amusement. “S-sorry,” Max said, tucking her tail behind her.

“No, don’t!” Ithos chuckled. He kept watching her as he lost the fight against laughter until finally getting a grip on himself. After watching her for a few seconds longer, he said, “I kinda get what you mean.” Max managed a glance up, if only to see his smile. “Something about you, I don’t know.”

As he spoke, Max could almost hear two of him. Tears threatened her eyes in the dim light as, in the present and the past, she heard Ithos say, “I just look at you, and I think I could do anything.”

She couldn’t stop herself from tackling him into a hug, too emotional to even try speaking. Whether she’d slip into pika-speak or not, she didn’t have words. Holding him as tight as she could said more than she ever could. They fell asleep in each other’s arms, and she finally had a night without nightmares.

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the-present-is-a-gift-au · 3 months

Text

Chapter 9: In Which the Future Trio are Paid a Visit

Twig knocked on the front door of the Future Trio’s home with the world weighing on her shoulders. Celebi was the one to answer. “Twig, dear, it’s been too long! I couldn’t believe—”

She cut off abruptly when she caught sight of the shadowy figure looming over Twig’s shoulder. Curiously, her expression wasn’t one of terror or fury like Dusknoir and Grovyle wore when they peered through the doorway as well. She regarded Darkrai with a look of… disorientation, almost. Like she was suddenly seeing double and trying to discern what exactly she was staring at. It stirred up some old memory from meeting Celebi in the Dark Future after Team Venture’s brush with death, but she didn’t have time to dwell on the memory when Grovyle was readying an attack and Dusknoir was following shortly behind him.

She gestured to her plus-one. “This is Darkrai. Or Ark. Whichever name you want to use. I met him at Mount Travail. He lost his memories just like I did, so I've been helping him out since we met. Be nice to him. He's sensitive.”

Darkrai regarded her with a look of quiet curiosity, but said nothing. Grovyle and Dusknoir warily dismissed their forming attacks, and Celebi continued to squint at Twig and Darkrai.

"Darkrai, these are the guys I was telling you about— Celebi, and Grovyle, and Dusknoir." She indicated each one as she named them, then put on a strained smile. "Is dinner ready? I'm starved."

The food was great, as it always was, but the meal itself was the most awkward thing Twig had ever gone through, and Grovyle staring at her worriedly the whole time didn't make it any easier. Darkrai made regular attempts at polite conversation, but Dusknoir and Grovyle only ever responded in the most minimalistic ways one could imagine. Celebi meanwhile, despite her insistence before now that if she ever saw Darkrai again she would kill him on sight, was enthusiastically chatting with the same person who had sent her entire timeline into ruin, and she was doing so with a cordialness Twig hadn’t foreseen.

When the moon was high overhead, Grovyle indicated a room for Darkrai to sleep in and a separate one for Twig. When it was Kip and her visiting, it was always one room that they stayed in together. She guessed Grovyle saw her exhaustion and decided to remedy it however he could. Bless him. Even with her distance from Darkrai, though, Twig’s nightmares persisted. She woke up countless times clutching her arm and whimpering in pain. She was a mess come morning.

Grovyle was up, being the fellow early riser that he was, and watching the sunrise in the grasses on the edge of the Future Trio’s property. Twig sat down heavily beside him and flopped onto her back in the grass.

"What happened, Twig?" Asked Grovyle.

"It's what I said. Found him while I was delving at Mount Travail. He was shocked that I knew who he was because he had amnesia, and I brought him home. He's been my roommate since then."

"You need to kick him out. At minimum."

"Why?"

"Do I need to say it? Look at you. You're worse off than I've ever seen you since we reunited, maybe even worse than when we first met. You're putting yourself in danger to be kind to this moralless, untrustworthy—"

"I'm not doing this to be kind to him. I'm doing this to make sure he stays in line. I can't risk taking my eyes off the guy and having him remember how much he enjoyed world domination, Grovyle. It's— It’s bread and circuses for the Legend who almost took over the world. Keep him distracted and complacent. That sort of thing, you know?"

Grovyle didn't look like he believed her.

"Besides, who knows. Maybe some wacky shenanigans will happen and he and I will become best friends. It happened with you and Dusknoir, didn’t it?”

He bristled. “That isn’t the same, Twig,” he said lowly. “Dusknoir changed of his own volition. It wasn’t like this, where Darkrai is a disaster waiting to happen. Besides that— you’re not well.”

“I’m doing great,” she bit out.

“Have you looked in the mirror lately?”

Twig didn’t grace that with a response.

“Twig, I’m worried. Just tell me the truth. Are you okay?”

She tossed an arm over her eyes and grumbled an indistinct answer, and didn’t react further to his nagging.

***

Hours after the rest of the household had started their days, Celebi finally rose from bed, with Darkrai following shortly. They chatted quietly in the kitchen, discussing interdimensional auras, temporal entropy, and other topics that made no sense to a non-Legend. Twig watched them for a moment before turning to Dusknoir as he read, seated on the floor of the main room, and steeled herself.

He looked up when she approached, impassive expression flickering with worry.

"I need to ask you something," she said. Then after a few nervous heartbeats quietly added, "Privately."

He set his book aside and followed her out into the forest along the property's edge. Grovyle stood up from where he was knelt in the garden as they walked out. She waved off his look of concern with a dismissive motion. I'm fine. Don't worry about it. He was, yet again, visibly unconvinced, but didn't follow after them.

Dusknoir folded his arms behind his back when Twig came to a stop, finally satisfied that no one would be in view or earshot of the conversation she was dreading having, and calmly asked her, "What is your question?"

She opened and closed her mouth several times, put up a hand or started a gesture in order to begin only to falter halfway through the motion, and finally just sagged, shoulders drooping and head bowed, with a groan. "I guess it's less of a ‘question’ sort of thing and more of a ‘me running my mouth off and you telling me if I'm crazy’ sort of thing."

"Alright." He settled onto the forest floor, and the effort to get closer to her eye level was appreciated, especially when he motioned to a branch on a nearby tree that was closer to his own. "Run your mouth off, then, so I can assess your craziness. Keep in mind that you're not going to be told you're totally sane, though. I know you enough to say a description like that would be madness in itself."

The joke fell utterly flat in the face of her anxiety. But it was nice of him to try and ease the tension, at least. She clambered up and sat down on the branch, putting her face level with his brow, and wrung her hands. She had recited everything she wanted to say so many times in her head on the way here, and now all of it seemed inadequate and pointless.

"Breathe. Then start at the beginning," Dusknoir lightly instructed, jolting her from her thoughts. "Rip the bandage off quick."

Alright. Inhale slowly, exhale slowly. Stop agonizing and start talking. “My aunt would hurt me when I was a human. Like, hit me and stuff. A lot.” She wasn't looking at his face when she said it, but she could see him go stiff and still in the corner of her vision. “It was something that she'd do because I back-talked or acted up, and if it was really bad, she'd get out a lighter and— uh— b-but I forgot about anything happening when I became a charmander. It came back a while after you— uh—” She swerved hard around what she was about to say, pivoting her choice of words. “— after Kip and I came to the Dark Future, in little bits and pieces over time. I didn't tell anybody for ages, because it's dumb and embarrassing, and I wasn't going to, but… Well, Darkrai can visit people's nightmares, right? So he figured it out. He didn't say anything, and it was…" She paused. "Okay, he did say some things, but only in ways I understood. Nobody else picked up on it. But it freaked me out, and— well— yeah.

“That was before he lost his memories. But he figured it out again after that, and it's been messing with my head, even though he hasn't talked about it since he found out. Like, he hasn't mentioned anything. Not a peep. He's not exactly who he was before the whole amnesia thing, so he might not ever say anything, but I can't stop thinking about how he might. It's not a zero percent chance. It's just so stupid, because even if his memories did come back he probably wouldn't talk, but I'm stuck thinking about what if he does, and I… yeah."

Silence.

"So. Um. How crazy am I on a scale of one to ten?" She joked, turning to the man next to her and immediately regretting her attempt at humor.

Dusknoir had his eye behind a hand, arm crossed over his stomach, effectively hiding his face as he hunched in on himself.

"… Sorry for unloading on you," she murmured. "It's dumb. I shouldn't have said anything."

"Your… When you…" He tersely muttered a prayer and lowered his hand, looking up at her. "I— Thank you for telling me. I'm honored you trusted me enough to tell me. You did the right thing in telling me—"

"You can drop the script Magnezone gave you, man. I'm not a kid."

"—And you didn't deserve any of the mistreatment you received."

Something in her bristled at that. "I did, actually. But it's in the past. Or Future, or whatever," she hissed under her breath. She crossed her arms, looking down and away. "Forget I said anything, it was messed up for me to bother you with this junk."

"What did you say?"

"To forget about—"

"Before that."

"I said I deserved it and that it's done with, so whatever." She narrowed her eyes, glancing at him from the corners of her vision. He looked disgusted. "Yeah, look, I know it'd take some messed up stuff to deserve that sort of thing, but I was messed up. It's not on her. You don't have to worry about it."

“How on earth could a child deserve to be treated so repulsively?”

“I did a lot of awful things on top of being a legendary brat most days. Don't worry about it.”

“Twig. Answer me. What could you have done to deserve… You mentioned a lighter, those devices humans used to start fires? Arceus, how could you deserve such a thing being used on you?”

Her response came out small, timid. “I hurt a lot of people.”

“We all do. That doesn't mean any of us deserve to be abused by our kin.”

“No, like— I physically hurt them. Humans lived in bunkers when I grew up, and I'm the only one left from mine. And that's because of me. It's because of me an entire bunker is dead. It's my fault that hundreds of people are dead and gone, because I was a crybaby who couldn't handle getting batted around a bit here and there.” She cast him a weary, angry glance. “I'm pretty sure killing an entire community of men, women, and children counts as something that would make me deserve that kind of thing.”

His brow furrowed. “How could you manage to—?”

“By leaving my bunker. There was a fire, and the doors locked themselves behind me. No one else could get out, and they all burned or suffocated to death. Not a pretty way to go, you can guess, so I definitely had some preemptive karma going on with my aunt.”

There was a pause. “Preemptive,” Dusknoir echoed. “Am I right when I say, then, that you suffered for years before the supposed justification for your pain took place?”

Twig didn't respond.

“How did this fire start?”

“It just did,” she said too fast for it to be the truth. Dusknoir saw through it and asked again. “Look, I don't want to talk about— ugh. My aunt started it. I blabbed about her hurting me worse than normal to one of my teachers, and she was going to be arrested because it was real bad apparently—” Dusknoir made a choked sound beside her, but she pointedly ignored it— “So she started a fire to try and use it as cover for her to get out of trouble with. Probably. I dunno. Never got to ask her. I ran when I heard she was being detained because she always said that if something like that happened… Well, I didn't want to see if she was bluffing with what she told me. I ran, I left my bunker, and because of that these big bolts that lock the exit doors activated and trapped everyone inside behind me. It's my fault they all died in there.”

Dusknoir was silent for a long time. “How old were you upon coming to the surface?" He asked with a heavily fettered anger to his words.

"That doesn't matter. What happened is what happened, and it's done."

"Humor me."

She gritted her teeth. "I was six."

He took in a sharp breath and let it out in a low hiss. "You were a child young enough to not have even lived through ten winters. You fled because you were intimidated and abused by a wretch of a woman, and the mechanisms of your home failed. You can't be expected to hold the blame for a tragedy in which so many passed in an unfortunate way—"

"You can just say I cooked them, man. It's fine. And believe me, I'm not some poor little survivor or whatever you're thinking of me as. I was the worst kid anyone ever met. People hated me.”

“And who told you that?”

Twig gritted her teeth, silent.

"Even if you were an unpleasant child— which I honestly doubt— the blame for any escalation would not have been on your shoulders whatsoever. You were a child."

That stung somewhere deep in the back of her mind. "Thanks for trying to reassure me, but you're wrong. I was awful and I deserved every lick of pain I got.”

Dusknoir glared at her. "Whether or not you deserved anything doesn't matter. No one should lay a hand on you, regardless of whatever they might think you've earned. Would you say Azurill or Marill would deserve the treatment you received, were they in your place?” Her stomach seized at just the thought, and he continued. “No. You wouldn't. Because you know, even if you deny it, that what was done to you was wrong. What you deserved was safety and care, not to be made the victim of such cruel, unfair retribution.”

"Nice speech, still wrong. Bye." She hopped down from the branch and got three steps toward the house before Dusknoir caught her by the scruff and brought her level with his narrow glare. "Dude, what gives?!" She spat, clawing at his fingers.

"What gives is you're refusing to accept your complete innocence and acknowledge the perpetrator's sole responsibility for what was done. You were an innocent bystander; a child."

"I don't count!"

"You do."

"No, I don't!"

"Why do you believe that?"

"I told you— I killed my entire bunker!"

"And did that matter?"

“Put me down, you lousy piece of—"

"Did that matter?"

She paused, claws stilling in their furious assault on the hand holding her aloft, brows furrowing as she held his unyielding, though not unkind, gaze— the question sinking in. "… What?"

"Did you really kill them?" Arceus, he sounded so tired. “Did you kill them, or did you survive them?”

Silence.

“Anyone else could have been the first to flee. Anyone else could have gone through the exit before you. And then it would be them in your place, cursing themself for having lived where others died. You didn't will the mechanisms to fail, nor did you sabotage them. All you did was have the misfortune of surviving alone.”

She slowly lowered her claws from his fingers, curling her hands in to her chest. When she finally looked away from him without any rebuttal to spit, it felt like she'd been skinned alive— like her outer layers were all peeled away until there was nothing left but a dripping, bloody wound where she once stood.

Silence.

"… Put me down," she repeated.

He did so, and settled onto the ground beside her.

There was quiet for a long moment as they sat. Twig drew her knees up to her chest, hugged them close, and hunched her shoulders in as she stared at the ground by her feet.

Dusknoir spoke in a steady tone— firm but understanding as he brought their conversation back to Twig's initial concern. "Don't blame yourself for what was done to you by your kin. Don't blame yourself for fearing the ability to tell someone yourself being removed from you. But most of all, do not blame yourself for surviving. You were spared. Others were not. You surely feel disoriented and disgusted by that fact. But there is nothing to be done about the past but to continue living."

Those last words echoed in her skull. It hit her that he was speaking from experience, and a number of things clicked into place.

(He had mentioned there being other servants of Primal Dialga. Yet by the time they had entered the Dark Future, only he and the sableye enjoyed such a rank. She'd seen scars on him that didn't fade, a hallmark of a wound dealt by a Legend.

(It wasn't the same as her upbringing. Nothing would be. But if she thought about it, “As you wish, my lord” sounded dangerously close to “I'll go get the lighter, Auntie.”)

“You were a child,” he repeated, and his words felt like antiseptic on an open wound.

A few strangled tears slipped from her, and she managed to hold back most of her pitiful, weepy noises. But when she continued to sniffle and shake, Dusknoir set a kind hand over her shoulder— or over her entire upper arm, rather, with his size— and Twig, deciding that he could be a part of the Don't lose a hand when you touch Twig club, let all the years of swallowing back the need to scream and sob finally excise themselves.

***

To say she got worried looks upon returning to the house was an understatement. She knew it must have been clear in her face that she was crying, and Dusknoir’s clawed-up hand certainly didn’t help ease any concerns. Darkrai’s subtle worry was the most unnerving, though she knew Grovyle’s blatant fretting meant she was in for a discussion she didn’t want to have. Dusknoir set a hand on his shoulder as he made to approach when she started for the guest room— murmured something about allowing her time to collect herself— and Twig didn’t linger long enough to react to Grovyle’s heart-wrenching expression of concern. She locked the door and let herself collapse onto the bed, boneless and hollowed-out from her tears.

It was as if something had been ripped out of her as she wept at Dusknoir’s side. She felt like she’d had a tangled, knotted mass extracted from deep within her ribs. It wasn’t a bad sort of feeling, but it was definitely different than the constant lump in her throat she was used to. It was strange. Certainly not unpleasant, but not exactly good either.

She didn’t sleep that night, only stared at the wall in a numb daze. It wasn’t a bad night. But it wasn’t exactly a good one, either.

Grovyle was up when she rose the next morning. She murmured a greeting and poured herself a cup of whatever was heating in a kettle on the stovetop. It was a lukewarm magost berry tea, and the lack of steeping made it distinctly unpalatable. She drank it regardless.

He watched her drink for a moment. She avoided eye contact.

“Twig,” he finally said, “you’re being reckless.”

She did not need another ‘Let’s unearth all of Twig’s shortcomings and bring them up for review’ session so soon. She took another swig of the tea and looked away from Grovyle entirely.

“What if Darkrai’s memories return? What do you do then? You’re living with him. Who’s to say that he won’t recall his past and decide to kill you in your sleep?”

“That won’t happen,” she muttered.

“How can you say that so confidently? It’s a possibility! You don’t know for certain that it won’t happen—”

“The Darkrai I knew isn’t ever coming back, Grovyle! He’s gone. So I'd better get used to it already. I don’t need you driving in the fears that things will change when they never will! Darkrai is gone, he’s dead. So I should start acting like it, and you should too!” With those last words, she rounded on him, teeth bared and the flame at the end of her tail bright in the dim room.

She had never seen Grovyle look so defeated.

“I…” She swallowed hard. Why was he staring at her like that? Why was he—

Oh.

Darkrai wasn’t the only person who had lost their memories. He wasn’t the only one who had changed beyond recognition. He wasn’t the only one who people had to relearn how to act around when they used to know him well.

“I’m sorry,” she forced out. “I didn’t mean it like— I didn’t—” She gritted her teeth for a moment longer, then stormed out with another stammered apology.

Arceus, she felt awful. And she knew Grovyle felt even worse.

Good job, idiot.

***

Twig didn’t say goodbye when she left the next morning. She’d already done enough damage— it’s not like she needed to rub into Grovyle’s face that she was too stupid to know how to fix the damage she’d done to him and what friendship had been recovered between them. Darkrai was up and about in the main room already when she got up to leave, long enough before sunrise that even Grovyle hadn't risen for the day. She didn’t tell him they were leaving. Darkrai understood without her saying so— just rose up silently and followed behind her as she locked the front door after them with the spare key she’d been gifted.

At some point on the homeward trek, Darkrai spoke. “I don’t mean to seem as though I doubt you, but I still find it necessary to clarify how exactly we knew each other before my memories were lost.”

Twig found herself picking up the pace out of an instinctual need to flee— she had to purposefully slow her strides. “I already said you were a do-gooder type, man. You traveled all around, and my exploration team partner and I traveled too. We were bound to bump into each other at some point, and we got to know you a bit whenever we did.”

A pause. “This doesn’t explain why you and your companions are all so wary of me.”

“What?”

“Surely you noticed how Grovyle and Dusknoir reacted upon witnessing my arrival? They were ready to strike me down— or at the very least give their greatest effort in doing so.”

She chewed at the inside of her cheek. “That’s just them— they’re weird and nervous about new people. I’m not scared of you, Darkrai. Trust me.”

He didn’t respond further. She could only hope that he didn’t notice the waver in her voice at her final words as they traveled through snowdrifts and frost to Verdant Village.

#the present is a gift au #pmd eos #pmd fanfic #pmd explorers #pmd fanfiction #pmd fic #pmd2 #pokemon mystery dungeon #pmd sky

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