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randomwriteronline · 9 months

Text

(A Day)

The sun was pouring in through the window, calmly, stretching like a drowsy Liepard. They had forgotten to get the blinds down, yesterday - but in their defense they had been too horrendously tired by the end of their snickering dinner to remember to do that, or to move back to their respective rooms for that matter. It still felt incredible that Elesa had managed to remain lucid and awake enough to go home on her own.

Emmet was asleep still, his cheek resting on his brother's sternum and arms wrapped in a loose hug around his neck. Ingo patted his back softly, intermittently, trying to follow along to vague memories of songs.

He wasn’t used to being awake before anybody else - usually he would continue snoozing only to be quickly yanked out of his torpor by a sudden sound caused by the activity of somebody already up and about, whether that be Tangrowth stumbling out to get some sun, a clansman checking on him, a Pokémon prowling around in an attempt to strike him unprepared.

It had taken just a moment to assess that his twin, even trembling so fiercely and twitching uncomfortably with his brow furrowed deep, muttering something like ‘viva’ in a pleading tone, was very much not conscious.

His nightmare had been dissipated quickly, thankfully, when his nape was scooped into a scarred hand and his hair kissed by a dry mouth that began to soothe him by muttering a litany from the Icelands, with a soft beat like patta-pat, pat, pat - patta-pat, pat, pat - patta-pat, pat, pat, patta-pat.

It was a sort of nursery rhyme, if memory served him well, to scare away Ghosts and bad dreams; and now Ingo struggled to recall the words to it.

There was one about Bergmites, but it had their ice armor melted in the sun, and this one was more of a playful march. He was half sure it featured an increase in number of some sorts - or maybe he was confusing it with the Aipoms swinging across the side of a river? Very likely; though he still had a feeling math played some part in all of it. What Pokémon do scare off Ghosts... Well, that’s easy, Dark or Ghost types, but it certainly wasn't about Glalies or wandering spirits. Might have been about... Riolus? Or Glameows. No, no, Riolus was more likely. Walking in rows after a Lucario acting as their teacher, or training together by attacking and blocking. Ah, but that didn’t have anything to do with shielding from apparitions - they couldn’t even touch them, Fighting types that they were! Though Steel is very effective against Ice... But what did Ice have to do with anything? Now he was thinking of Irida and Gaeric.

He rushed back to focusing entirely on the beat against his brother’s ribs before his mind wandered into territory that turned his own chest into a suffocating iron cage collapsing under the deep sea pressure.

Patta-pat, pat, pat - patta-pat, pat, pat - patta-pat, pat, pat, patta-pat.

Not remembering the lyrics was making this quite a challenge.

Did he at least know the melody?

Ingo tried humming a note or two, just to hear how that would sound like. He remembered to draw them out a little, like chant, or a lament. When he had heard Lian sing it to one of of Kleavor’s smallest Scythers while swaddling it in a blanket, his young voice had sounded a bit akin to the whine of a Swinub; Ingo traced over the fuzzy memory of his singing with his own buzzing throat, as if the still incomplete tune were a drawing and he himself an unskilled child learning to draw by following someone else’s lines on a paper held against the sun.

Had he ever listened to it properly? No, probably not. What a shame.

A part of him thought it was a relief. That meant it would have been easier to go back to everything being normal, being right; he would leave all of Hisui behind himself in some lost nook of his brain like he had left it behind in time and space alike, and he would return to being whoever he had forgotten he was, and it would have been good.

Not a trace of change.

(The warden that was bound to fade away from his self eventually was fiddling with the stark white kimono Irida had given him, lamenting without words how he wished he could still see in its place the pale pink of his former tunic, and mumbled that he didn’t like the idea of forgetting. It was just something that nobody could stop, Ingo tried to reason with him, sheepish and defensive: it wasn’t out of malice, but simply how things are. The warden looked at him very sadly, with that pale unhappy face of his.)

(I think it was about stars, the warden said: I’m not certain, but I believe the words sounded a little like this.)

The head on his chest lowered for a moment, nuzzling his ribs, and its shoulders moved as if trying to properly push down or take off a shirt too tight.

“Oh,” Ingo said, interrupting the string of vowels he had begun singing and stilling his hands over the bony back. “I apologize. Did I wake you up?”

Emmet shook his head with a sleepy groan; his arms stretched and tensed to make his joints crack imperceptibly, imitated by his legs; his eyes were still closed, and his mouth felt full of clay-like paste that stuck his tongue to his palate and his teeth to his lips.

“Already awake,” he lied.

“I didn’t mean to bother you.”

“Don’ worry.”

He tucked his knees against his chest and curled up a little more to be more comfortable, slightly tightening the hug he had his brother ensnared in. He couldn’t remember sleeping like this, like a rock placed on top of an ironing board, in what felt like ages. It felt warm, and nice, and familiar.

His twin’s hands rested back on his spine, as light as feathers, no longer patting it. Emmet hoped he wasn’t embarrassed by it, nor that he thought himself silly for it. It was calming, really.

He could have stayed like this for another hour.

Huh. Weird for him to want to keep sleeping. He was the early riser. Could have been the sleeping pill again. No, no way. He must have had digested it by now.

But his brother definitely would not wake up before the alarm.

“What time is it?” Emmet asked, groggy voice a little gurgling despite the fact that his mouth seemed drier than the Route 4 desert.

“I don’t know,” Ingo replied, “But considering the sun, it’s morning.”

Considering the what?

The sun doesn’t rise anywhere near 5:30 in the morning in early spring.

Emmet furrowed his brows and slithered, with some difficulty, one of his arms away from under his twin’s neck. Forcing his eyes to open (shutting them for another moment with a groan as the light bothered his not yet constricted pupils) he squinted at the numbers on the Xtransceiver. It took him a hot second for his brain to once again comprehend any written sign.

It was currently 9:03.

“Shit,” he croaked out with a wheeze.

With all the gracefulness of a nightstand falling down a spiral staircase and launching itself through the wide enough hole in its railing to bounce with a horrid crunch directly into a den of hungry Bidoofs, he began climbing down from his brother’s hold face-first, possibly emulating Eelektross when the dastardly Mold Breaker emanating from Haxorus would reduce him to pitifully crawling on the floor like a wet tube in disdainful protest.

His attempt at not worsening his disastrous delay was however quickly vanquished by a pair of arms slipping right back under his armpits and around his neck, which pulled him back up, and by the body attached to them, which turned and squashed him against the back of the couch.

“Fucker,” he spat out.

“You’re still tired,” Ingo commented casually like he wasn’t constricting his younger twin in a grapple: “From what I understand, you spent the entirety of yesterday extraordinarily drowsy. It can be dangerous to go about not well-rested, you do know that, right?”

“Let go. I am verrry late.”

“By how much?”

“Three and a half hours.”

“Ah! That’s quite a shame. At this point it might be better for you to take another nap and head out later, if not at all entirely.”

Punches began pelting his back.

As a response, he leaned a little heavier; his younger brother made a sound that reminded him of a Magby whose paw got stepped on, and started hitting him even harder.

“You’re a little weak,” Ingo noted, genuinely slightly concerned: “Have you been eating enough?”

“Fuck you.”

“I am very serious.”

“So am I! Fuck you!” and seeing as brute force was having no effect, Emmet was now trying to wiggle his legs back up to his chest in the hopes that he would manage to punt his feet directly in the older twin’s stomach. “I am already late on schedule! Don’t make that worse!”

Hm. A reasonable complaint. Very well then.

With a final squishing that got him another fist banging on his shoulder in an attempt to stab him with air (as there were no knives or other silverware available) Ingo sat up, stood on his creaking legs, and began making his way to the kitchen so his poor mess of a baby brother could sit down and get something in himself stat, before he decided he did not need to ingest anything before spending a whole day doing Sinnoh knew what with nothing to keep him standing upright on those bony ankles of his.

He spaced out for a moment once in the room, right before the fridge which still buzzed as loudly as the day before, wondering why his arms seemed to be occupied when he could have sworn he wasn’t holding anything in them.

Once he actually opened his eyes - must have been tired himself, trying to sleep even as he walked - he noticed he was indeed holding something.

That something happened to be Emmet, whose hands were holding extremely tightly on the fabric of his older brother’s shirt and whose legs were wrapped around his sides in a similar iron grip as to not fall onto the ground despite the fact that firstly, the arms keeping him airborne were very much not going to let go of him, and secondly, he could have easily stood on his own feet if he just put them back on the floor since they were the same height.

Emmet might have forgotten that in the throes of being picked up like a packet of potato chips, because he seemed slightly terrified by the current situation.

Ingo gently put him back down.

“Sorry.”

“I don’t like that you can do that,” his brother stated plainly. “You could use that for evil.”

"I most certainly would not," Ingo scoffed. "And you are just thin. Please sit down and get something to eat."

His twin fake-slapped him to shut him up. The slaps turned more frantic as he unceremoniously picked Emmet from under the armpits and hoisted him back up in the air, completely deaf to his string of no-no-no and sorries and ingos and put-me-down-put-me-down-Dragons-above-put-me-down until he planted his ass on a chair.

“You are going to eat,” he declared.

Excadrill, who had just scuttled into the room, agreed loudly with the sentiment.

In true younger brother fashion, Emmet pouted: “See,” he argued as he slumped in his seat: “I was right. You used it for evil.“

“I wouldn’t call making sure you don’t starve an ‘evil’ motive.”

“It is! Because I’m late.”

“By three and a half hours.”

“Exactly.”

“Which is so late, at this point the schedule must have been already rearranged to accommodate for your absence,” Ingo rationalized, trying to search through the fridge: “So might as well take your time and eat properly first.”

He then spent a few moments looking mesmerized as Emmet struggled on his chair against apparently nothing with such violence that, after rocking it over and over in all directions, he finally slammed so hard on its back that he should have by all means launched himself right onto the pavement tiles. Instead, he stopped just short of that, winning against gravity in a way that made no sense; the chair settled very gently back on all fours, and the younger twin whipped his head around to stare directly into Chandelure as she deflated in the relief of having caught him in time.

He then turned back to his brother older by eleven minutes exactly. His mouth was flat and his eyes told of unspeakable rage.

Ingo turned to the haunted light fixture: she gracefully showed him her back.

He could hear the younger twin wheeze and whistle in fury like a kettle left too long on a burning stove as he retreated back in the metal parallelepiped in search of something that could have constituted a good first meal. He sighed, re-emerging from the cold.

“Please let him go,” he demanded politely.

His brother gave a victory groan and slammed his face on the table to make sure the Psychic bindings on him were completely gone.

Archeops took the opportunity to sit on his nape.

“No!!” his trainer’s shout was muffled by the weight pinning him down as he reached up and harshly scratched the scaly body covered in feathers with hands hardened into claws. The overgrown snake-headed chicken gargled delighted by the annoyance of his mischief accompanied by Excadrill’s snickering chitters while Ingo reached out to get something in the pantry he was pretty sure he had seen yesterday.

Resuscitated fossil manhandled off of himself with the help of a couple belly rubs, Emmet jumped to his feet and shot him a glare.

“I am Emmet,” he announced irritated, “I am tired of being bullied.”

His brother hummed: “When are you set to return home?” he asked, completely ignoring the other’s demand.

“Eleven thirty at night.”

“I see,” Ingo commented.

The strange conciseness of the sentence set off alarm bells.

The second he tried to move forward to grapple him again, the younger dropped into a defensive stance and grasped the table to keep it as a barrier between the two of them.

“Nooo,” he growled.

“I will not pick you up again,” Ingo promised, only half-lying.

Emmet pointed at his face: “No!”

If the older took a step to the left, he moved to the right, and vice versa. They did that old comedy routine for maybe less than a minute before juvenile impatience overwhelmed the younger brother, and his brain suddenly shot to a completely different topic: had their Pokémon eaten? He glanced around to find their bowls, planning to pull off a fulminous move in some way or another and disappear first into the livingroom to somewhat set up breakfast for their teems and then into his own room to change shirt at record time and teleport out the door before he could be wrestled into a chair again.

The bowls were missing though, and the cabinet holding the various Type-specific foods had been left open to reveal its insides empty if not for a variety of edible pellets that must have fallen out as they were moved out.

Right. They were smart. And Gurdurr had sort of human-like hands. They probably got tired of waiting but didn’t want to wake their humans up. Especially not with one of Crustle’s spoiled baby tantrums. Dragons, how come that crab of a Bug was still behaving like an unsocialized only-child Dwebble? They had trained him like everybody else. Maybe it was because of that time they made him a fancy shell. Now he exploited the fact that they loved him to death and back. Verrry unfair.

The crackle of a clear plastic packet being opened got him focused on avoiding his brother again.

“Emmet,” Ingo sounded a little exasperated.

“I am Emmet. I am verrry late.”

“If you do not eat anything, you risk fainting in the middle of the day and putting yourself in danger.”

“False! I didn’t eat anything for a whole day once. Twice. I am alive. I survived. Cease and desist.“

Hm.

Considering the wide-eyed, pale-cheeked, brow-furrowed, very noticeably worried look he was getting, maybe that had not been the best thing to reveal to his renownedly protective twin at this time.

“Forget that,” he ordered in the bossy tone of baby brothers.

“I think I will singe it into my brain instead,” his brother replied in a horrified tone. “Emmet, what the hell do you-”

“I survived!” Emmet repeated.

Ingo ignored that and approached him directly: “Two days, you forgot to eat?”

“Not consecutively!”

“That doesn’t change anything!”

“It does. And I’m still alive!”

“That alone is surprising,” the older brother replied, nonchalantly handing him something no larger than his palm, “And your survival is not an indication that you are safe to repeat that experience whenever you want.”

The younger stuck out his tongue as he took what was being offered to him without even looking and opened it, almost as a reflex: “I can handle it.”

“Not if you faint in the middle of the street.”

“I am Emmet. I have never fainted ever in my life.”

“Maybe so, but I’m afraid that I truly cannot remember an occasion in which you have not fainted before.”

“I have not! You-”

He interrupted himself, biscuit halfway bitten through. His face fell into such an annoyed frown so fast that Ingo couldn’t help snorting a bit.

“First you lift me. Then you Psychic me. Now you use your amnesia to bully me.”

“Chandelure was the one to Psychic you, I unfortunately lack the power to make you sit down consistently with my mind.”

“You’re the worst.”

The lifeless delivery stung a little, hit a bit too seriously. But the comically disgruntled grimace that accompanied it, similar in every way to how a Pachirisu tries to fold its face into itself after biting into a horribly sour Rawst Berry, both eased any possible tensions and felt so familiar that he couldn’t help cracking a misshapen dastardly smirk at it.

“I am only looking out for my baby brother,” he defended himself.

Emmet groaned at being called that, shoving another biscuit in his mouth.

“I am not hungry anyways,” he still argued back as he chewed, pointing an accusatory finger at him. “I don’t need breakfast. I’m fine as I am.”

Ingo only looked down at his hand and replied: “Alright.”

His twin followed his gaze to the clear plastic.

He squeezed it with a crackle, the last few biscuits inside it swimming in crumbs.

“Fuck you.” he spat through the fifth bite he was taking.

Ingo snorted horrendously loudly.

Boldore peeked in to somewhat chirp at them, with its strong tripod legs clicking very gently against the floor and Eelektross in tow, who wrapped around his trainer in a loud gurgling hug. He rested his huge mouth on his head careful not to scratch him but all the same insistently reminding him, in his own very loving and very deadly enormous electric tube of a lamprey kind of way, that they were supposed to go, possibly as soon as they could, and he was notably being very slow this morning.

As Emmet grabbed his long head and swayed it back and forth, sputtering something like a whiny ‘I knooow’ through his mouthful of biscuits, Klingklang tried to persuade their impatient flatmates by whirring that he likely deserved a lie-in, or at the very least that they should have let Ingo have a bite to eat first.

Before Durant could agree or Galvantula could sneak off to try and get some jam for herself (because she was one bastard of a lady) Archeops began screaming wildly, jumping up and down all antsy and obnoxious in the hopes of speeding up the process until Crustle got bored of the other crybaby and threw a pebble at his coarse bald head to shut him up.

That worked for approximately ten seconds. Then the overly scaly chicken turned all teary eyed and wobbly lipped and broke out into wailing sobs, waddling away to Haxorus to get some comfort from his fellow reptilian.

“Harsh but fair,” the twins sentenced in favor of the hermit Bug.

The fossil bawled harder.

Excadrill interrupted the heart-breaking scene to ask her trainer if he was going to sit down and eat something himself or if her, Gurdurr and Chandelure would have to make sure he did that in his stead with a stern chitter.

In response, he showed her three ravaged clear packets, without even crumbs inside: “Ah, don’t worry! I’ve already met my stomach’s needs for the morning.”

His brother eyed the spoils with mild bafflement: “What- when?”

“Earlier, while you were making a fuss about not eating.”

“How do you eat so fast?”

For a moment, a rush of paranoia made him inclined to just lie. His common sense managed to shove through it, however, reasoning that he just had to not say one single stupid word, and how hard would that have been? So he looked straight into his twin’s eyes, praying his voice wouldn’t shake in a way that made it clear something was up, and told him, dead serious: “Sneasles are horrible little thieves.”

After a long second of confusion, the reply he got made him almost deflate in relief: “Oh right. You were on the mountain.”

“Yes.”

“Lots of little burglars.”

“Exactly. Heaps and nests of them, to be quite frank.”

“Man.”

A loud wail distracted them.

“YES!” the younger twin almost yelled, launching the clear plastic into the sink - or at least trying to, as it was so light that it got caught in the air and fell to the ground with a miserable pirouette of sorts to be picked up by Garbodor’s slinky arm for her to snack upon it. “I AM AWARE! We are going. Hold on.”

He marched out of the kitchen to a variety of jubilant shrieks of Joltiks waiting for nothing other than to be left alone to wreak havoc (accompanied also by the distraught beeps of the ones who didn’t want him to leave) and fetched his Pokéballs in a somewhat swift movement, trying to recall all six members of his team to varying degrees of success.

As he watched him fumble, Ingo suddenly remembered something he’d been aching to ask since yesterday.

With barely any fanfare or build up he ensnared his brother’s wrist in an iron grip; he hadn’t meant to spook him into stillness, but before he could apologize different words were already leaving his mouth as fast possible, as if afraid they wouldn’t have gotten through otherwise: “May I come with you?”

Emmet blinked for a moment.

“Where?” he asked - a little stupidly, he had to admit.

“To the Station.”

“... Why?”

“I’d like to see it. The inside of it, I mean. I’ve never... I’ve yet to see one. Since I’ve gotten my amnesia.”

Ah. Yes. Good point. Reasonable request.

Problem: nobody was aware of the fact that previously-missing-for-years Local Minor Celebrity Guy was back in the region, except for people who definitely were not going to disclose such a detail to the public before the man in question was allowed some time to at least re-acquaint himself with everything in a geographical sense and also with his own family instead of letting the doors of the media circus swing wide open to drown him in unwanted attention.

Second problem: previously-missing-for-years Local Minor Celebrity Guy was perhaps one of the most recognizable people in the region after a maximum amount of three glances in his direction.

In conclusion: fuck.

Emmet stared into his twin’s eyes for a span of time that would have made anybody nervous and uncomfortable, and to be completely fair, Ingo himself wasn’t necessarily enjoying the situation either.

Finally he clamped his older twin’s shoulders between his hands, tightening his grip around them for a moment: “Dress up,” he only ordered.

“Pardon?”

“Yes. You can come. But. Dress up,” he repeated, trying to formulate a proper sentence in the chaos of having to change and trying not to worsen his delay and making sure hordes of journalists wouldn’t materialize as soon as his brother stepped out of home: “Change clothes. Get normal ones. Random ones. Not much attention. Unrecognizable. Otherwise. You know. Newspapers.”

The last word clued Ingo in on the bigger problem, as his eyes widened and he nodded with an air of great gravitas: “The Sewaddles of life...”

“The Sewaddles...” his brother repeated with a horrified expression, agreeing.

Now the older twin clamped his hands over his shoulders, tone growing almost comically determined as he reassured him: “I shall endeavor to give myself as generic an appearance as possible!”

His brother gave him a thumbs up and launched himself in his own room.

It dawned on him, suddenly, that he’d been wearing the same clothes for something like 48 uninterrupted hours.

An invincible itching took over his limbs.

If he didn’t change immediately he was going to physically explode.

Ingo had only gotten a glimpse of the station when Elesa had kindly taken him to the fairgrounds the day before: despite his eyes feeling almost magnetized in its direction he’d barely seen it as they had passed it in a rush, an imposing cement shadow colored in a light muted yellow intervalled by steel blue veins.

Its entrance was framed by white stairs and pillars, he could notice now that he was walking directly towards it, and each of them was topped by what resembled an opaque petrol green gem, the same color as the roof.

Its windows seemed rather dark from the outside. From the upper floor a sort of balcony stuck out; he recognized red and yellow banners hanging beside it.

The style reminded him vaguely of the Galaxy Team’s headquarters, though notably smaller in size and completely different in coloration, and otherwise void of elaborate rooftop decorations or visible chimneys. It’s rather modern, professor Laventon had commented when he’s seen him look at it intently once, to tentatively try and strike up a conversation before he found out the warden’s love for his study subjects: I suppose it wouldn’t look quite as out of place if it were in Galar instead of here among much simpler architecture, don’t you think?

He stumbled on his own feet for a moment as he attempted to take the whole thing in as it came closer and closer, becoming larger and larger. Emmet was still pulling him by the wrist, and kept him from falling.

There must have been some kind of carpet before the door even though he hadn’t noticed it, because the clack of his soles was muted for a few steps.

In a moment he was hurtling down a flight of stairs, barely getting the time to acclimate to a strange sort of artificial light that gave them an orange hue (no, it didn’t give them anything, they were simply colored like that, he realized as he looked better) - and then the sound beneath his feet turned completely different again, shoes hitting unfamiliar terrain, yellow tiles looking like bricks that had been worn and smoothed and dimmed and lightened by constant passage, almost vibrating from the way they were illuminated until somebody walked in front of him and cut him off, and he stumbled back, head rising from where it had been stuck staring mesmerized at the floor to catch brownish veins slithering through it before fixing his eyes on the face of a large clock, the glass encasing its hands gleaming in a way that burned his retinas against the dark grey behind it; he shut his eyes only to be shoved off by a passing shoulder that was already gone when he turned to apologize, and a different golden shine made his pupils hurt enough for him shove the brim of his cap down on them - but now that he couldn’t see came the noise, an incessant downpour of noise, voices talking, someone screaming, music playing, metallic words being spoken garbled and aloud from all around him at once, something rushing hurriedly making the air tremble, discussions about food school work outings did you see what they and then she said are you coming to the damnit i told you it’s not I’ll see what I can that lying piece of next train for delayed by ten arriving in platform 3 unavailable mother what is the it not clang twang you to stop here! where what minutes hour drift theater route 14 8 20 12 1 9 sand of to which go by from juice next close crack rrrrrrrrrrr up at in nacremistrusveilton bank multi single ville train track grrck see now then soon when down here him? in in an the that this it’s those go! ahead behind he’s she you how we’re sorry for ‘scuse me get off open on buzz go! inconvenience it not got rot thought hold on--

Suddenly he felt cotton on his skin, and a force yanking him away, and then he gasped for breath and saw his own face looking back at him in a dim light.

A hand was exerting pressure intermittently on his palm. He was holding that hand’s wrist.

He gasped again. Then took a deep breath.

“I-”

“It’s a lot,” Emmet preceded him. He kept pressing intermittently. “It’s a lot.”

Ingo nodded, staring at their hands.

It was a welcome respite from the overload of that unfamiliar environment.

(But it should have been familiar, shouldn’t it? He had worked here. He should have known its every nook and cranny. It shouldn’t have been so disorienting and frightening, to find himself inside it again.)

“It’s alright,” his brother reassured him. “It’s always a lot. Weird light. Weird sounds. Too much light. Too many sounds. Too many people. Many bump into you. Verrry bright. Verrry loud. Verrry intimidating. The first impression is always like that. Always a lot. I cried the first time. It was too much. Verrry much too much. The first impression is always a lot.”

The older twin swallowed, feeling his mouth dry: “But it gets better?”

“Yup. You get used to it quickly. Stops being so scary. And the hat helps.”

The conductor hat did have a rather large brim, he noted absentmindedly. Must come in handy against the golden sheen of everything.

Speaking of that, wherever they were at the moment was notably azure in hue.

Ingo blinked at the four walls around them.

“Where are we right now?”

“Elevator. We’re going down to the control room.”

“Ah. ... Wouldn’t an elevator go up, considering its name?”

“That’s the good part. Goes both ways.”

“Fascinating...”

Emmet snickered a little at his very honest delivery. His thumb began squeezing slower, slower, slower on the scar of a cut on his brother’s palm, until he stopped pressing completely.

They waited a moment more in silence.

“Better?” he asked.

Ingo nodded; he watched the gloved fingers leave to press a button, and held onto Emmet’s wrist a little tighter for the surprise when the elevator moved.

“The control room is better,” his twin reassured him: “A lot less lights. Dimmer ones. And less sounds. And less people. A lot of beeping but it’s not bad. The Depot Agents will be there.”

An extremely vague idea of what the title meant struggled to resurface, so he felt safer asking: “Is that bad?”

“What’s bad?”

“The Depot Agents being there.”

“Nope! They work here. They know you.”

“Ah,” Ingo noted in a weird tone.

The thought of a room of people who knew him made him uncomfortable. Pokémon were one thing, to have re-introduced to himself in bulk, but humans - so far they’d shown up one at a time divided by fairly long intervals, giving both him and them some time to assess and handle the whole thing. Would they have asked a lot of questions? Did they even know he likely didn’t remember them? Would he freeze up on them? He feared this would have ended badly.

His brother waved beside his hand with a wide motion, snapping him out of his worried musings: “They know about the amnesia. They won’t be mad.” he smiled. “I bet they’ll be verrry happy to see you.”

The older deflated a little: “That’s a relief.”

For now, he would blindly believe in his little brother and hope for the best.

His hand was squeezed intermittently again, slowly, softly. It hushed away his worried thoughts, allowing his eyes to wander.

The elevator whirred very quietly as it descended.

“There’s something misspelled on your coat,” he noted.

The other blinked: “Something what?”

Ingo pointed at what seemed to be a paper square of sorts hanging for dear life on the white fabric through a piece of tape: “It’s misspelled,” he repeated, “I would guess it’s meant to be ‘substitute’, with an additional ‘s’.”

Emmet plucked the makeshift tag to examine it; then he gave a short wheeze; and pocketed it without a single explanation.

A soft ding: the elevator’s sliding doors opened upon a dark colored corridor, much more pleasantly lit than the upper level had been. It wasn’t particularly long, opening into what, even from the relatively limited angle they had as they stepped out of the machine, appeared to be a fairly large room out of which was running a young person in dressed in green from the bottom of their trousers to the top of their hat - very similar to Emmet’s in shape.

“Cameron,” the conductor greeted.

The man blinked twice and stopped in his tracks with a little difficulty, skidding across the pavement for a moment, genuinely surprised.

“Boss!” he exclaimed; he sounded rather young. “We thought you weren’t--”

His boss interrupted him: “I am verrry late. Didn’t hear the alarm. Awfully sorry.”

“Oh, I mean, we got everything under control, sir, that’s no problem, it’s just that we’ve already, uh, we’ve... We’ve... Uh... We’ve...”

His words had begun trailing as soon as he’d spent just a moment too long on the man who was standing a little hunched and awkward next to Emmet, just long enough to recognize the shape and color and brightness of the eyes stuck between the face-mask and the brim of the hat.

Under the intense gaze of those vaguely disbelieving ever-widening eyes Ingo realized there was little to no reason to keep his frown hidden in a so deeply underground place, where media outlets very likely had no chances of hounding him. Should he have taken the mask off in the elevator? Should he take it off now? Should he leave it on? His time in Hisui hadn’t exactly left him looking, as the kids and various medical professionals who had been one breath away from declaring him legally dead say, good. Was this a good time to be self-conscious?

Emmet picked up the conversation again: “You have?”

“Oh, uh, yes, we’ve - we’ve adjusted shifts and everything to cover for, to cover for everything, so, so, yeah, you know? Yeah,” Cameron stammered, struggling to take his eyes off of Ingo.

He fiddled with his hands a moment, looking about to ask a question but holding himself back. At that point the amnesiac decided to try his luck: mask hastily taken off with a little titubancy, he watched the Depot Agent’s face turn bright with recognition and, more concerningly or heart-warmingly, genuine excitement.

“Good morning,” Ingo cawed out on instinct.

The young man flashed him a huge smile: “Good morning, boss!” he replied, almost a little out of breath: “It’s been a while!”

That was oddly sweet.

“He asked to come,” Emmet butted in.

Cameron turned to him with his fingers shaking: "Is... Does, the press--?"

"Absolutely not."

“So we’re the first to--?”

“Yup.”

That seemed to throw the agent for a loop. A very awed, clearly happy loop, but a loop nonetheless - one that was keeping him planted where he stood, entire body jittery with a joyous energy that couldn’t find any release.

“Cameron,” his boss called him.

His shoulders jumped a little as he turned to fully face the white clad subway master: “Y-yes! Boss!”

“You were going somewhere.”

The enormous grin on the young face faltered in an instant to be replaced by pure terror: “RIGHT!” the poor boy shouted; his head sunk into his shoulders immediately in utter mortification at the realization that he had yelled in their faces, and he repeated with a squeak as his legs began anxiously attempting little steps to bypass them (offering apologetic glances as they helpfully moved away to let him get to the elevator): “Right, sorry, sorry, right, I should- sorry, I’ll-! I’ll be, I’m going now, sorry, sorry - right on schedule, right, sorry— ah, boss!”

Both twins raised their chins in his direction and widened their eyes ever so slightly, to assure him they were all ears.

Cameron smiled again, all wobbly and earnest: “Have a good day!”

“You too!” they replied in unison.

His excitedly waving hand vanished behind the sliding metal doors, and they were once more by themselves in the short tunnel.

It had gone… well.

It had gone well. All things considered.

Ingo repeated the sentiment to himself a few more times as he was turned around until the moving machine was no longer in his line of sight. It had gone well, with a single person and his brother by his side. Maybe it would have gone well for a whole room of people with his brother by his side, too.

A gentle pressure on his palm asked him if he felt ready to go into the control room.

He nodded without a word; they began walking again, a little slower.

It was definitely darker than the main hall, which was a pleasant surprise: the deep petrol green of the roof coated the walls, light bouncing off of them with a slight metallic sheen, coating the entire chamber in a nice penumbra. A few doors broke their compact appearance, leading deeper into the entrails of the earth, away from civilization, from the noise, from everything. Perhaps they opened upon spaces specifically designed for quiet and repose, or dedicated to specific functions or people. He imagined Emmet must have had his own private quarters of sorts.

Illumination was provided by thin insertions between the panels glowing a bright neon green, as well as coming from the wide curved screens that took up half of the room itself, all blue gradient backgrounds and dark magenta squares popping up on them every so often, azurish words blinking or typing themselves into existence. The floor too was of a deep blue that made it almost seem, if one were caught up in their own thoughts enough, like a large shallow puddle of semi stagnant waters, like those of underground springs or basins. Ingo had moved his first steps on it very carefully, holding onto his twin’s arm, convinced he would have heard a muted splash each time he shifted his feet.

Emerging from the pavement was an imposing hexagonal table emitting a dull glow from whatever the screen upon it was displaying. He noticed several chairs, and long desks full of dark buttons and small lights and smaller screens like those of old televisions, and a few strange stiff metal stalks with what looked like porous round petal-less flowers on the end protruding forward.

Those are microphones, you dollar-store poet, a little voice smacked him from inside his head. Hopefully his embarrassment wasn’t obvious.

A small concert of beeps, trills and cues filled the air just enough to be noticed without resulting as totally overwhelming as the cacophony a few hundred meters above his head. Even the chatter, although very much present, was also notably more subdued.

It felt comfortable, all in all.

He’d likely spent hours upon hours every day in here.

It really was no wonder that he’d taken to caves as naturally as a Zubat might have. Him being constantly magnetized towards them made so much sense now.

Also it thankfully meant that it did not have anything to do with the electromagnetic field around the mountain, or the enormous space-time distortion directly above his head, which certainly gave him some manner of confused relief from a vague concern he was still unable to articulate.

The rubber soles of his shoes were awfully quiet as he advanced into the room, in stark contrast to the click-clack of his twin’s.

That did not stop a fairly older man from noticing him near instantly and making his way over to them at a fairly quick pace, his face ever so slightly contorted into a gentle reprimand as his hand already stretched out to stop him.

“Sir - sir, I’m sorry, passengers are not allowed in this area of the station, I must ask you to return to the upper level,” he explained in an amiable tone; his gaze shifted onto Emmet for a moment, with almost a hint of exasperation in his eyes as he noted how he was holding onto the dark sleeve trying to slip away in mortification at the scolding: “Boss, what about following the rules?”

“I am following them.”

“Bringing some other person here like that is following the rules? You more than anybody else know only personnel have access to the control room, it’s a…”

His pupils had shifted back onto Ingo as he’d spoken, and while the vowel dwindled in the man’s mouth he could tell the cogs of recognition apart as they grinded as fast as they could to process every bit of visual information available to them. Finally the agent smiled in a vacant manner, like someone who struggles to believe what they’re seeing, and adjusted his cap.

“It’s high time I got myself a pair of glasses, it is,” he corrected himself with a short laugh. His hand, square and wide, stopped halfway over to the younger man: “The name’s Ramses, by the by. Sorry for the scare, you’re not in trouble.”

He quickly shook it, surprise overtaking his momentary fear of having messed up.

The strangest part was that the agent had immediately recognized his anxiety. Had he suddenly grown more expressive?

Then he realized he had moved to be almost completely behind the back of his (by barely above ten minutes) younger brother, actively trying to make himself smaller, and in order not to crumble into twelve thousand little bits from the embarrassment he hid his face all the way behind Emmet’s shoulder blade.

In part also because he noticed, not without a slight apprehension, that more and more people were turning towards them to stop everything they were doing and stare, very pointedly, very specifically, at him.

Ramses cackled without any malice to turn over to his boss again: “While you are rather late, aren’t you.”

“I am Emmet.” his interlocutor replied, unamused: “I am aware.”

“May I ask just what happened to cause such a strange lapse?”

“Didn’t hear the alarm.”

“Only that?”

“I was. Verrry tired. Also a victim of a conspiracy.”

“A conspiracy!”

“Yes.”

“And what would that have been all about?”

“Nobody wanted me to get out of the house.”

“A tragedy, truly.”

“Ah ha. Ah ha. Ah ha.”

“By all means, I admire your dedication, boss, but I really don’t think it would’ve been that bad for you to–”

Somebody gave a loud, gross cough with the specific intention of focusing the general attention onto their person.

That happened to be a gaunt young man who seemed to have been clenching his jaw from the second he had begun having enough teeth to grind them together, who had still had the courtesy of spitting up that racket into the crook of his elbow instead of the open air.

A less intentional cough wracked him as eyes settled on him.

Must have been the nervousness.

Finally, he found a way to articulate the words he was trying to get out of himself: "Emmet, sir, sorry - but are- are we allowed to perceive-" and he made a nervously stiff wide motion with his arm to indicate the man in dark clothing, though there was still something respectful about the way he flailed his hand about, "-This? And, and acknowledge, the situation currently happening? Or is there an unspoken rule to not... Do that?"

Emmet did not answer right away.

"Hm!" he eventually replied, not necessarily responding. He turned to his brother, who had remained all but frozen in place where he had been pinpointed, and looked right into his eyes: "Since you're the one this will be impacting the most: do you wish to agree to subjecting yourself to the mortifying ordeal of being known?"

Ingo blinked.

"That was very verbose," he noted flatly.

“Please answer.”

Ah. Yes, right.

He turned to the agent who was trying to singe holes into his head by staring at him with the intensity of a billion suns concentrated through a magnifying lens that he couldn’t decide if it was enormous or minuscule - whichever made the light burn hotter.

He retreated a little more. The man must have realized how impressively intimidating he was being and moved his gaze a few inches away, to allow him room to breathe.

Masking a cough that was meant to give him courage, Ingo forcibly dragged himself out of his brother’s shadow and extended his forearm in his direction, lying only a bit as he said: “But I can assure you that I have no problem about my existence being acknowledged by the people in this room, mister...”

"Isadore, sir!" his interlocutor replied. He rushed to shake his hand - his arm nearly dislocating for the speed at which he had moved.

His stalwart grip wasn't particularly strong, and unlike the nervous warmth of Cameron's gentle if slightly trembling hold it or Ramses’ jovial light pressure it seemed to almost carry a sort of chill, an attempt at maintaining the correct distances at all costs in the name of professionalism; despite his best efforts, however, his dark eyes shook a little as he tried to set them somewhere on Ingo's face, failing.

He opened his mouth - a small mouth all in all, more akin to an isosceles trapezoid than a circle or a line - to suck in a breath: "I'm honestly glad to see you again," he said, tenser than a well-pulled rope, serious. A little emotional.

Ingo nodded and hoped not to come off as too stilted: “Likewise.”

He thought he heard something crack weakly, in a way that did not inspire alarm - like a thin layer of half-melted ice breaking between the soles of a boot and steady ground.

Then his brother nudged him a little, and the comfortable murmuring arose again.

Suddenly, he felt fine.

The people in the room no longer appeared as oppressively terrifying as they had been just a few moments ago, not even when they reached out to him to introduce themselves all over again.

He took note of each name being offered to him, each differently built face smiling at him, to store them in pairs somewhere in the back of his mind. It felt familiar.

(It was the same as the first few days in the Icelands, the warden reminded him in an absentminded tone: he was more disoriented than nervous, and more trying not to freeze where he stood than to keep himself from hiding somewhere he could find enough air to breathe, but his modus operandi had been the same - associating sounds to as many somatic traits as possible to minimize the embarrassing chances of mixing people together.)

(He didn’t have the heart to slap his mouth shut, feeling as though that would have been uselessly cruel.)

(It was completely different now, he reasoned with him gently. And as he had noted earlier, they needed to stop thinking about Hisui. It wouldn’t be good for them.)

(The warden looked at him sadly as he slowly greeted more people.)

(It’s not that different, he murmured.)

(Then he fell back into silence.)

The green and yellow of their uniforms also felt familiar, comfortable, easy on the eyes, and the worn cotton of their gloves gave him the strangest sensation, like an incorrect deja-vù: he recognized the texture, yet found the lack of stitches running along the sides of his fingers awfully weird.

He must have worn plenty of these for days on end across the years before everything had happened if that specific feeling was so ingrained in his brain.

And he had forgotten he hadn’t been wearing gloves for about three years, after all, hadn’t he?

Not forgotten, actually - just, assumed he was wearing a pair.

Hm. Yes.

He had definitely spent a lifetime in gloves like that.

An entire lifetime.

…

They must have reeked.

Heavy steps bounced off of the floor with a notable stomping rhythm; he turned his head around for a moment to find the source of the noise together with a few others until he ended up facing towards the corridor that led in from the elevator.

Something was there which had certainly not been there beforehand.

It appeared to be a smaller replica of Emmet, head turned to the side.

One that had not seen the gentle hand of a cleaner in quite some time, if the spent dullness of its form and the heavy grey patina covering every inch of the subway master uniform was of any indication.

An even smaller humanoid form trotted next to it, dragging around a black ponytail larger than their entire body without any apparent struggle.

It took him a moment to realize that those were not long black gloves, nor black shoes, nor wide, pleated, bright yellow pants - though in his defense he had been misled by both their shape and the presence of a red vest, which instead was, indeed, an additional garment.

And of course nothing could have prepared him to see the supposed hair snap open to reveal a sparse set of sharp teeth and what looked like the inside of a mouth.

His shoulders had jolted at that, he was certain.

He turned his head left and right, to check if anybody else had seen it: not a single person in the room seemed to have any interest in whatever was happening at the room’s entrance, glancing over in silence and returning to work.

Was this a common occurrence?

Was he having some kind of hallucination?

When he turned his gaze back to it, the head of the replica was definitely in a different position.

Which distinctly did not help.

His fingers grasped his brother’s white sleeve, pulling gently if with a very obvious urgency to direct his eyes to the very uncanny sight of a smaller, dirtier, technically (hopefully) unmoving version of him standing not that far away.

Thankfully, he followed his gaze without question.

Puzzlingly, he smiled a little wider, and waved.

The eyes of the statue twitched, the head shifted slightly to look at them.

And then the mouth opened with a squeaky, delighted sound.

“Oh!”

The dusty miniature living copy of Emmet was not, in fact, as he could now tell while it approached very quickly with a gait that was nothing like his brother’s save for the intensity, a copy of Emmet.

For starters, it was not nearly as pure white or extreme in pallor, skin taking on a faint maybe yellower undertone, hair being a grayish brown whilst also lacking their distinctive sideburns, replaced by braids. The nose also bumped forward around the eyebrows’ height and hooked to fall straight down instead of pointing outwards - possibly having been broken once, too. The mouth was much too thin as well, while the shape of the eyes was almost exactly an inversion of the twins’ hooded ones: a flat line underneath, turning rounder towards the eyebrows.

And obviously neither had irises of such a dusty, rotten green.

A small hand in a white glove was extended out to him before he could fully process just how quickly the distance between them had been traversed: an incredibly angular turn of the lips’ corners forced the previously emotionless neutral expression into the amiable squint of a smile.

“Pleased to meet you!” a voice that sounded the way overly saccharine artificial strawberry tastes squeaked at him: “Briosa Crociera, Substitute Subway Master! I’m a recent development.”

He greeted her just as enthusiastically, noticing vaguely the lack of even the slightest budge at his volume or handshake: “My name is Ingo!”

He liked that description - recent development.

Something about it put him at ease. Perhaps it was the somewhat elegant way it managed to completely remove his amnesia from the conversation’s equation. Of course he wouldn’t be aware of any recent developments even under normal circumstances, like taking a three year long vacation or moving to a new region or getting himself another job, or something similarly plausible.

“She’s deaf,” Emmet filled him in, as though the fairly crucial detail was little more than an afterthought.

Almost as if to corroborate or prove the statement Briosa continued cheerfully without taking her eyes off of the man she was replacing, oblivious to the fact that she was repeating the same exact information: “I cannot hear a single thing!”

That explained her total stillness when he’d yelled his name in her face.

Hearing people tended to shirk away afterwards.

“If at any point you need to communicate with me, please refer directly to my hearing aide, Mawile, so she can translate you!”

His gaze shifted even lower to encounter a pair of crimson eyes on a short yellow snout looking back up at him. The Pokémon greeted him with a nod that had the black flaps (hair? Ears?) framing her face sway a little, small arms folded behind her back.

He could read now, on her vest, a proudly displayed SUPPORT POKÉMON written in big bold letters.

She seemed surprised, or perhaps amused, when he somewhat awkwardly sat on his heels and extended his hand to her as well, to shake her paw as he had done to every other human in the room with him at that moment.

“It is a pleasure to meet you!” he told her, as genuine as they come.

She chirped her own greeting and shook on it.

Her black paw felt less fuzzy than he would have expected, as well as cold but receptive, like Klingklang’s core, Excadrill’s claws or the surface of Magnezone’s body: she must have been a Steel type then, despite not looking like one at all. The unusual appearance and more lively texture must have come from a secondary Typing. Psychic, perhaps, considering her role?

“Pardon my curiosity,” he added following that train of thought; she craned her neck and listened intently. “I hope it’s not a bothersome question, but, ah - may I ask how exactly does a translation work? I’m not quite sure I can imagine it…”

The little creature nodded. He would have assumed she might have simply redirected his words into her trainer’s brain or something of the such through a telepathic power; instead, much to his surprise, she let go of his hand, unfolded her other arm, turned to her aidee, and began making a slew of quick signs with outstanding precision despite how small and stubby her fingers were.

Briosa waited for her to finish before looking at Ingo and gesturing to the proud beastie: “Like that,” she answered in her stead.

“Ah!” he noted loudly, impressed, eyes very wide. “I see!”

Mawile huffed a cackle through her nose. What a whimsical human. He’d known him again for less than five minutes and yet his at times sort of awkward propriety and excited politeness were already bewitching her body and soul, as she liked to exaggerate. Which was an impressive feat considering only Briosa herself had won the throne of her affections in more or less the same minuscule amount of time.

(Unseen, Emmet shot her a glance and signed: “Be nice.”)

(“I am nice,” she replied in equal silence: “He is fun and silly. I like him.”)

(“You never told me you like me. In two years.”)

(“I did not.”)

(“You wound me.”)

(The Fairy snickered and discreetly signed a little ‘love you’ at him. His small triumphant smirk made her cackle in silence again.)

The substitute snapped her face with a sudden stilted movement: “By the way, good morning! Did you sleep well?” she asked the twin in white, using a particular inflection on certain words that made them almost sound like rubber being bent and released to produce a goofy kind of wobble.

Emmet placed his nails against the underside of his chin and lazily thrusted his fingers forward, producing a soft ‘twhip!’ noise as his skin was pulled along.

Briosa turned to Ingo: “Did he sleep well?”

Being addressed made his shoulders jump for a moment, and he forgot she could not hear him: “Oh, uh, I - yes, yes, I believe he has, at least, for the most part.”

Thankfully he’d nodded vigorously as he’d spoken, so the other had still managed to get the gist of it: “Yes, I could tell,” she reassured him, “His eyebags are looking a lot less sapient today.”

Emmet repeated the gesture with an added stiff emphasis.

He regretted it as his brother asked: “Does that mean something?”

“Nope.”

“That means fuck you,” Briosa helpfully corrected, helped by Mawile’s snitching.

“Does not.”

“He’s telling me to go fuck myself.”

“Am not.”

“He’s denying it, isn’t he?”

Ingo nodded.

“Ingo,” his brother said in his most betrayed monotone.

“Hold on,” his substitute stopped Emmet before he could go on and turned around, once again repeating the gesture: “Anybody know what this means?”

Several hands left their duties to spell and an equal amount of voices arose to reply, in a slightly confused tone since she should have known that well: “Fuck you?”

She triumphantly faced Ingo again: “See, that’s a fuck you.”

To which he craned his neck towards his younger brother and exclaimed quietly, flabbergasted: “Emmet!”

“She’s being mean!” was the explanation he got.

“Well, you cannot just walk around telling people to go fuck themselves whenever they are mean to you!”

His brother groaned loudly.

Then, a mischievous glint overtook his eyes.

“You’re right,” he conceded.

His hands then carefully signed a sentence that caused Briosa’s amused expression to morph into a puzzled one, furrowing her brow and reducing her mouth to a thin austere line as some of her fingers joined together to attain a peculiar shape that seemed to ask ‘what do you mean?’.

The thin strip of paper that read ‘susbstitute’ was handed over to her.

She held it for a moment, staring at it quizzically.

“It’s not misspelled,” she objected.

A helpful finger pointed her to the superfluous S.

It took another few seconds before she spurred into action, but when she did she slammed her hands closed, trapping the heinous label between her palms before hastily shoving it in one of her pockets.

The look with which she gazed up at Emmet was mostly barred from Ingo’s view, as he was still sitting on his heels, but he did catch the glimpse of an absolutely furious smile wobbling with an attempt not to laugh; her hands flew with the quickness of intense, snickering anger at his brother’s face, probably promising who knows what sort of retaliation, and he wheezed out a cackle of his own.

Ah! So they were friends.

The realization felt like a strange weight off his chest.

The agents were, of course, laser focused on their job.

A subway station, especially the region’s central subway station, needed constant care and supervision, after all. There was always something lurking out there ready to create a Situation of some kind which would then require to be remedied somewhere between ‘as soon as possible’ and ‘if we could do it instantly it would be great but alas we are mere humans incapable of even the simplest Skullbash without caving our heads in so we will be handling This as best as we can, Please Hold On, We Are Very Tired’, and the more brain and muscle power available, the better.

However.

In their defense.

It was really hard not to want to look at what Ingo was doing.

Partially because, of course, he had disappeared from the face of the world three years ago and then re-emerged out of the entrails of a snowy mountain in a foreign region with said region’s most powerful teenager in tow, which to be honest felt a little bit unreal, so it was nice to see that yes, it had indeed happened, and yes, he was physically present in the room.

But in larger part it was because Ingo reacquainting himself with the machinery he used to operate daily was a joy to watch.

He looked around the control room like a kid in a candy shop.

Granted, neither twin had been too enthusiastic about duty calling Emmet onto the Battle Lines, and everybody could see how their boss had very clearly wished he could tear himself in half to keep one eye on his brother and do his job at the same time; but in the end he had been forced to compromise with the promise that Ingo would remain with at least an agent at all times, even in the case he would leave for the upper levels.

Luckily for him the chaos and brightness and noise that had first welcomed him had not made leaving the underground chamber particularly appealing to the just repatriated man, who had gladly preferred watching the subway’s hidden machinations behind the trains for entire hours now.

At first he’d stuck to looking at screens and wandering very carefully, with an exceptional silence to his step, in order not to bother anybody.

The pose and attitude reminded Furze of an old man watching a construction site - the kind that stands there a little hunched, with their hands held behind their backs, just above the hip bones, that always waves back at polite Gurdurrs and Conkeldurrs and tries to yell instructions at them sometimes because ‘he knows how it should be done’.

Ingo had not the faintest idea what he was looking at nor how it worked, so he refrained from offering suggestions or tips.

Instead, at some point, after gathering enough courage and being as certain as possible that he wasn’t being bothersome, he very shyly approached Eloise and bashfully asked if she could explain what an ATO was.

Once he knew all about Automatic Train Operation, he asked about everything else.

It was pretty fun actually, to split the various topics between them to sort of teach him the ropes as though he’d been a newbie - he was an attentive listener after all, making pertinent questions, interrupting explanations only when necessary, and by the way he looked at both the agents explaining and the object or program being explained he was very much one notebook and pencil away from compiling an entire work guide where he stood.

It also helped that the various explanations took up a discrete amount of time, meaning that it was almost midday and the entire control room had successfully contained the still sort of flighty ex-conductor.

Not that they didn’t trust him to be out and about, of course!

It was just… Well, they’d been worried about him.

As everybody had been.

And now he was back, and there was still a sort of fear that any wrong move would have had him bolting away and disappearing into the fog again.

So knowing he was there with them, asking questions, being interested… Showing how, despite the time passed, despite the amnesia, he was still indeed very much enamored with their job…

To call it a relief would have been putting it mildly.

But when the bulk of the questions were over and Ingo’s presence had melted back into familiar commonality again, their attention to where he was at all times might have sort of faltered slightly.

It did not lead to losing track of him, thankfully - but it did lead to them all freezing in horrified realization as an announcement about the train to Undella experiencing a five minute delay rang out across the correct platform by a voice that was notably not coming from any of their mouths.

Furze met his boss’s eyes just in time for the older man to widen them in a sudden shared awareness.

“I should not have done that,” Ingo peeped, guilty as charged, hand still near the mic.

The agent did not reply yet.

He turned around quickly, checking a couple of things. One: Isadore was notably absent. Good. Two: were the others thinking what he was also thinking?

Jackie definitely was, because he and Jackie had a lovingly defined “telepathic connection” since they were kids that came with people who grow up together and are obsessed with trains to the point of either exploding or phasing through the floor about it, so he knew they were absolutely down for what he was thinking; Josh had a notably vacant gaze that would not express anything beyond a very intense dial-up tone, so jury was still out on him; Hank, one of the older agents, seemed very intent on waiting for him to proceed with the plan - he definitely knew exactly what it was about, and as a fairly important figure to the youngsters in the room he wanted to make it very known through his expression that he thought it would have been funny as hell; Eloise on the other hand was gripping her desk in an attempt to repress or at least hold herself back from beating him to the punch with a delighted scream that might have scared the hell out of the poor man.

Everybody else in the room approached his inquisitive gaze with either trepidation (like Vip) or a shy attempt at stopping him that didn’t quite work (like Billie).

Oh come on. They’d done way worse bits when prey to boredom before.

Strengthened by the general agreement, Furze raised both hands and took a big breath through his open mouth, making Ingo worry. Then he curled his lips inside his mouth, held still by his teeth as he appeared to be trying to eat his own chin, and cocked his head to the side.

“Technically, that’s… Not good,” he admitted. He clicked his tongue very loudly before continuing: “Because, you know. You’re, uh… Not here yet. In the region. Technically.”

“I apologize,” the poor amnesiac cut him off. “I don’t-”

“HOWEVER!” the agent cut him off now, both index fingers outstretched to point upwards - causing a few to actually look up.

Pause.

“However. I don’t think. That anybody, here, would be too sad about having some… Help, with announcements. You know. Since we’re all busy with other stuff…”

Ingo’s face lit up at the prospect of being helpful.

Oh hell yes.

This was going to be so funny.

Would anybody even notice that the missing Subway Master was now warning about staying behind the yellow line? Probably not, since even when newly maintained the intercom still garbled voices just enough to make them hard to recognize.

Even if a few of them did, they would probably just be really confused - which only added more fun to the bit itself.

The problem with this assumption is that Furze’s brain was so overwhelmed with the love for anything related to railwork that he had completely forgotten a couple of fundamental things: firstly, that humans are extremely nosy creatures that really, really like to make friends or strangers aware of any weird business they come across; secondly, that the Subway Masters were still immensely popular figures in the region with their fair share of fans and an indescribable amount of clips of their voices readily available on the internet, so it wasn’t that hard to recognize them.

Also, thirdly, this was Nimbasa City.

A not insignificant percentage of the urban populace probably met the twins more times than they could count properly.

So imagining that the Nimbasians wouldn’t have near immediately recognized the voice of a minor local celebrity who was technically still missing through the vague garble of the speakers was like imagining that a shiver of Sharpedos wouldn’t have found a wounded swimming tourist bleeding profusely in the Hoenn seas.

Which is to say it would have been incredibly stupid.

But Furze (and Jackie, and Hank, and Vip in a way) lived in a world that did not account for such silly things, and so the control room had a bit of a blast for the better part of an hour listening to their boss bellowing out warnings like nothing had changed..

Then a little crackle coming out of nowhere made them all jolt, and a well known voice calling out for an answer had them all getting a little heart attack.

Josh fumbled a little with his radio and finally replied: “Yes, boss?”

“Why is Ingo’s voice doing the announcements?”

“OH you know!” Josh quickly replied as he began sweating buckets. His voice failed him for a few more instants before he wheezed out: “Briosa. And her... Impressions.”

The other end remained quiet for a moment.

“Sure, I’ll take that,” Emmet said cheerfully.

Then the radio went silent and the depot agent gave out a wheeze.

Billie would not, however, let him take a break: “BRIOSA?” she nearly shouted, “The ONLY deaf person here?”

“I panicked!” the poor man shrieked back.

“And you chose HER?”

“What was I chosen for,” the Substitute asked roughly at that moment, her small size and light weight allowing her to make her way over to barely two centimeters away from Vip unnoticed until it was too late for the agent, who proceeded to jump and smack her in the face with her elbow by mistake as they retreated for the spook.

The hit did not make her budge in the slightest; the girl, on the other hand, immediately clutched said joint in pain.

Her Mawile's large mouth snapped sharply when the small gloved hand pointed at her: "Apparently I got chosen," Briosa stated plainly. "Chosen for what?"

She had not seemed that threatening when Ingo had first looked at her earlier.

The agents, frozen in place, with eyes wider than tea saucers and cold sweat coating their brows, clearly had a different opinion.

Hank at last waved a hand with a sort of airy, light-hearted motion, smiling as amiably as he could despite the anxiety making the stubble on his abundant chin wobble: "Oh, you know, we were just comparing out impressions of Mr. Ingo here - and in the end, see, we concluded yours might've been the best!"

He swallowed a knot in his throat as the small three-fingered hands signed.

The Substitute read them intently, laser focused; then her mouth produced a squeaky sound, as if her tongue had been made of whistle grass, that couldn't have come out of Ingo's lips after a thousand years of practice.

"Sure, I'll take that!" she replied cheerfully.

Immeasurable relief swept through the depot agents in a fairly noisy cacophony of wheezes and sighs and held back breaths being released.

Completely oblivious to it, Briosa turned her attention solely on Ingo, gazing at his face with a small smile, flat lips barely curved upwards: “Have you been to any of the train platforms yet?”

He shook his head.

It dawned on him, in the time that it takes for the thunder to crack a small distance away from where the lighting has struck, that he hadn’t seen a single train so far outside of the ones in the books they had at home.

“Would you like to?”

His eyes widened slightly with interest.

Could she read his mind?

Ah, no - the subject was different. Still, the outcome was the same.

He nodded.

Or at least, he was fairly along in the motion when Jackie slithered between him and the small conductor and hurriedly began signing: “Maybe it- maybe it would be better not to, actually! Right?” they turned to Ingo for all of two seconds before deciding he agreed with the sentiment: “Right! Right.”

Briosa stared directly at them and blinked, slowly, leaving a long beat of silence: “Why?”

Even with their reputation as the most off-putting of the Depot Agents, Jackie couldn’t help but shrink a little at the weird inflection and pause. Their fingers felt as though they could only move in a small area, mimicking their voice as it came out in a whisper: “It could be dangerous. For, for, you know. News.”

The only answer he got was a second, slower blink.

Ingo felt the weirdest kind of deja-vù, like he was looking at a Purugly intimidating a Beautifly into submission, with the main difference being that the Purugly was excessively small and the Beautifly was not flying at all.

Point being, it was so utterly alien that he could not tell what was happening other than that it was comically strange.

Eventually Jackie began slinking over behind him, gently pushing him forward to take their place (to shield themselves or not to hinder him?) as they conceded with nervous signs: “But he’ll probably be fine, it’ll–”

“He’ll be fine,” Briosa finished for them.

“Yeah, yeah, it’ll be fine, you’ll be fine boss, don’t worry, you’re in good hands, right?”

A chorus of ‘Right!’ replied from the rest of the room.

Rotten olive eyes shifted back onto Ingo: dusty eyebrows raised beneath the cap to silently repeat a question, and he nodded again.

The sudden grip on his wrist did not hurt, but it did make his heart jump in his throat from the scare; not even the time to yell out a prayer into his head that he was already being dragged away with the same ease as a fairly large leek.

In the tunnel preceding the elevator the substitute casually remarked: “Sorry for throwing you back into the pits of hell that’s the upper level but I’m imagining that whatever you did that got pinned on me is not something you could do outside of the control room, right?” and turned to him briefly, staring him down with an unblinking gaze inside the azure walls.

With a foreboding feeling crawling along his spine, Ingo nodded. An apology, stuck in his throat, decided to get swallowed back down just in case it attracted her ire.

“Nice!” was the calm reply; at the hit of a button the elevator doors closed, and the machine began rumbling upwards. “Remember to pull your face mask back on once we arrive. Do you have any Pokémon with you?”

He shook his head.

Maybe it had been a bad idea, in hindsight, to leave without any of his Pokémon in tow; but Emmet had reasoned that being back in the subway after all that time would have filled his team with the urge to launch themselves into battle thus causing a rather destructive commotion, an hypothesis which had instantly proved itself to be correct when they’d all perked up at the mention of any sort of scuffling, each quivering excitedly with sportsmanlike bloodlust.

Ingo also still hadn’t properly reacquainted himself with their movesets, their personalities, their dynamics and the ways they each took on the battlefield, so he would have likely been left at the mercy of their enthusiasm, unable to handle them nor lead them into a satisfying match. It would be better to practice on their own somewhere quieter.

Briosa clicked her tongue in a rather curious manner at his answer, the hint of a sympathetic smile on her face. Her small hand reached wordlessly to her belt to pull out a Pokéball, opening it without even looking.

The beastie emerging from the metal sphere was relatively stout and not too big, easily standing without too much trouble on her arm. Its paws were relatively small, white much like the fur on its belly, while the flaps of skin between them were of a bright yellow replicated on the round cheeks, or at least on one of them. The other had an enormous gash of naked skin ripping through it, joined by a few more which forced one of the black eyes into a perpetual squint and one of the nostrils to reach almost up to a lacrimal duct. One of the black ears also seemed to have been halfway through a rudimental shredder.

“This is Emolga!” Briosa cheerfully introduced the defaced rodent: “He will make sure you’re not getting bothered.”

“Ah,” the man only commented. “It seems he’s gone through quite a lot.”

“He has! A Mandibuzz tried to have him for lunch but he disemboweled it and ate it instead!”

“Oh my!” Ingo noted, now genuinely impressed.

She grinned, handing her partner over to him: “He’s not going to bite off your face, don’t worry,” she reassured him as she made a motion for him to cover his mouth and nose while holding the door closed for a moment more. “These days he’s more into fruit and Type-specific food, you know, like a normal apex predator.”

He waited until Emolga had crawled onto his shoulder before pulling up his facemask and following her out: “Perhaps he’s related to Gligars.”

“Hm! Never saw one,” she replied, easily bulldozing her way through the crowd via a one-armed iteration of Emmet’s patented terminator walk as she held Mawile aloft on her other hand to keep on listening to her ward.

“They are fairly common on Mount Coronet,” Ingo helpfully explained: “Their main means of sustenance is sucking the blood from prey.”

“Hm! Intriguing! You ever got bit?”

“No - luckily, my quick reflexes have left me unscathed from Gligars and Gliscors, their evolution, alike.”

“Ah, good for you!” she spoke louder now, to be heard above the chatter of the station: “I can’t stand getting blood taken to be honest! Even when it’s just for a blood check I have to look away and clench my fists really tight, so I guess if something tried to suck it out of me I’d freak out and knock it clean off. No clue why it bothers me so much!”

“It’s always more comforting knowing one’s blood is not out and about,” Ingo noted thoughtfully.

She nodded, solemn in her motion: “So it is, so it is.”

Emolga squeaked gently on his shoulder as if to join the conversation while getting comfortable; kind scritches behind the round ears had the mangled rodent chittering in delight.

They must have kept talking about blood or Gligars or similar small death machines, if anything because while he struggled to retain information he could still feel the way the facemask molded and stretched around his mouth as it kept opening and closing. He was rather glad of her determination in keeping this somewhat gruesome small talk going, as he was so concentrated on replying to her that the mass of bodies and sounds and colors and lights couldn’t pierce through his senses as it had when he had first entered the station: it still hung all around him, waiting to strike him at the worst possible moment, but so long as he had the muted grey coat to follow and answer to he found himself powering through the sensory overload with relative ease.

It somewhat helped that the rest of the crowd wading through the station seemed to magically part at the first glimpse of her, likely repelled by her potent aura of menace.

Her voice was squeaky as it raised in volume, her words getting lost along the way between the chatter and the fuzziness of his senses but still managing to lead him along through the dark and dull gold with a candy rose trail. He wasn’t perfectly aware of where they were going, though he did thankfully take notice of the stairs; otherwise he would have likely catastrophically crashed along them knocking out anybody who accidentally happened to be in his way like a Golem down Bolderoll Ravine.

The rush of wind from the tunnel distracted him as he was answering something. While not daring to step over the yellow line he still leaned a little towards the darkness snaking away into the earth, just in time to see the blinding light of a pair of beady Bug-like eyes rise out of it as it kept approaching.

It was almost more reminiscent of an Onix than of a Steelix, if he had to be honest; and if he really had to ponder over the matter a moment more maybe he would have even preferred comparing it to a Gyarados, between the roaring and the fairly evenly sized sections of its long body. Of course none of them blasted light from their eye sockets, nor did they travel on long threads of metal or carry dozens upon dozens of people inside them, opening their enormous bodies to let them in and out.

Emolga’s paws kneaded into his shoulder, and he realized he was heaving inside his facemask. A hand went to place itself on the black and white fur so he could ground himself while its twin reached out beneath him to be sharply stopped by a firm palm around its wrist.

“Are you ok?” he heard being asked to him.

Ingo swallowed and looked down, meeting Briosa’s unmoving eyes. Something in her and Mawile’s faces read like slight worry.

He nodded as he absentmindedly caressed the electrical rodent’s ear.

“It’s... Awfully loud,” he explained, like it was an apology.

The substitute tilted her head sympathetically once it was signed to her: “So I’ve been told,” she replied, and without him noticing she pulled him away from the crowd pouring in and out of the steel shell, towards the end of the platform. “Can’t know from experience, I’ve never been on a train before I was twelve - but it sure does look like it’s real loud.”

“You were not deaf at twelve?” he asked, to unconsciously distract himself.

“I was, actually! But not before that.”

“May I ask what happened?”

“No.”

“Understandable. My apologies for prying.”

“Don’t worry.”

The train huffed and puffed and groaned, and at last it pulled itself forward, gaining momentum faster and faster until the lights of its tail disappeared behind a curve of the dark tunnel.

Emolga squeaked and bumped his soft head against Ingo’s. A tepid comfort washed over him at the contact.

Furred Pokémon were such blessed creatures to have around. Ah, why did he have to favor the ones with harsh skin, jagged scales, impenetrable carapaces and cold metal bodies? No, that was not the right question - why did the universe have to be so cruel not to grant his most beloved beasts with at the very least some kind of plush texture, just to let them be hugged more often? Why did it have to make his body so delicate to the point where he could not hug them without bruising himself?

Not that their rough exteriors deterred him all that much, but it would have been nice to lay his head on a comfortable tummy that wasn’t Excadrill’s yet again. The others deserved to have their own chance as living pillows, too.

Doors sliding shut spooked him out of his musings. What was it with making doors slide? Who was making them slide? Wouldn’t they slide open due to centrifugal force?

This was going to drive him insane.

Much like the noise.

The noise might have done him in first.

Luckily, the rumbling beast was off somewhere else already, dragging a wide number of people and its infernal chatter along with it. Those whom it had deployed onto the platform slithered away like generous swarms of frightened Zubats into the tunnels leading upwards, towards the main hall, and the void they left was quickly filled again by other commuters arriving from the opposite direction.

He scratched behind Emolga’s ears again; the sight of Briosa still leaning against the fencing by his side quieted down his worries.

She locked eyes with him for a moment and gave him a tiny smile.

“Better?” she asked.

“I’m… Not sure, actually,” he admitted: “I fear I’m not used to so many people and lights and noises all at once anymore. But I’m certain exposure will help me.”

“You were on a mountain, right?”

He nodded.

“Without anything around you?”

“Aside from the occasional Pokémon cries or small avalanche, there was not much clamor, no.”

“Yeah, a large city’s subway station will do that to you then. Must have been real quiet.”

“It was.”

“Do you miss that?”

(No. Not at all. Not in the slightest. The quiet had been horrifying at first, maddening, and then it had curled around him and prevented him from resting. It felt impossible that ever since he left he’d been able to sleep so easily when it had become such an arduous feat.)

(Not even the warden could deny that.)

“I prefer the noise, in truth. Even though it’s not always pleasant.”

Briosa hummed: “I feel you.”

(Ah. Of course.)

(She more than anyone must have understood the restless terror of the quiet.)

A second loud cacophony quickly approaching had Ingo startle out of his skin and try to back away into a trashcan, stopped only by the conductor’s titanium grip and Mawile’s jaw very quickly wrapping around his leg to put it back on the ground with a surprising amount of gentleness for an appendage made specifically to maul and chew.

He looked on with dismay and disbelief as the train returned, causing everything that had happened barely a few minutes before to repeat in a nearly identical manner.

Did it…? How the - no, there was no way. It had just-

“That’s not the same one, is it?” he asked just to get confirmation on his doubts, because otherwise that would have been absolutely batshit.

“Same what, train?” she replied. When he nodded, she clicked her tongue: “Aaah… No, it’s a different one, that’d be way too fast even for our standards. These ones pass every three to five minutes. It’s a busy commute, so there’s usually a very small waiting time between them.”

Oh, thank goodness. He wasn’t fully sure of how long the whole journey might have been, but certainly the train wasn’t just running in circles in three minutes.

Speaking of the second train, the beast had already departed with no more additional fanfare than a derogatory flash of the headlights on its tail, dragging its body into the tunnels with as much clanging and roaring as it could, and the new passengers were already congregating on the cement floor, all careful to stand by behind the yellow line.

It was frankly a little amazing how the chatter and general noise never subsided at any point. It was less like waves washing upon the shore before being pulled back and more like a school of extremely young Magikarps jumping constantly in shallow water.

Despite that, however, he couldn’t help but sense a sort of disturbance among the disharmony - some kind of even less pleasant sound intermingling in it.

Almost on the other end of the platform a woman let out as high a shriek as possible.

She then proceeded to yell at length at the top of her lungs.

A second similar voice replied in the exact outrageous volume.

Ah.

So that was the additional worse noise.

Oh joy.

On his shoulder, Emolga growled.

Everybody else either shut or lowered their voices, turning to the extremely loud argument before facing away, not interested in joining the two screamers who very much looked ready to tear each other apart from what he could see among the sea of passengers dutifully waiting. Glancing at Briosa to figure out what the right procedure in this case would have been, he found her blissfully continuing to lean onto the railing of the platform’s end with not an ounce of concern in her eyes; Mawile on the other hand, sitting next to her on the same railing, had a paw to her face pinching the bridge of her snout, approximately five seconds away from taking a long inhale before sighing just as deeply, ruefully and tiredly as a Fairy could.

Hm. Perhaps he should help.

His hand was blocked by gloved fingers before it could gently nudge the substitute’s shoulder to get her attention, eliciting the same desired effect of having her turn to face him in an inquisitive manner.

The problem of communication returned to his mind at that moment, though in the span of a second he had already opted for the simplest of solutions: without a word, he pointed his index finger straight at the two commuters violently yelling and making threatening gestures at each other without a single concern for the space nor the people around them.

She turned towards the source of the commotion. Clearly being too short to properly visualize the matter, she then effortlessly pulled her body to stand completely vertically upon the metal bar through the strength of her arms before settling her feet down on it and getting a better look.

The groan she let out was more like the sound of a revving motorcycle with chainsaws for wheels.

“These types again,” she lamented, flat lips parted in an annoyed grimace. As Mawile climbed up her coat to get on her shoulder she extended her hand over to Ingo: “Can I have Emolga back for a moment?”

He complied, allowing the electrical rodent to climb into her palm.

The little scarred beast laid on it on his belly, pointed directly towards the disrupters; his trainer then reeled her arm back, snapped: “Get’em, GGGuts!” and launched him into the air, apparently attempting to splat him against the opposite wall - which thank Palkia did not happen, as he opened up the flaps beneath his arms to stall in the atmosphere a moment and angle himself so that he would land right on the head of one of the screaming idiots on the platform.

Said screaming idiot shrieked even louder for the surprise.

Hm!

Interesting technique!

Briosa patted his arm as she jumped back on the floor: “Gonna be back in a hot minute, do NOT move,” she simply instructed, and before he could even just nod off she was, cutting through the crowd like a Mamoswine through a snowstorm.

Ingo might have kept on looking (and if had indeed been solely focused on her he might have eventually gotten to take in the rare sight of Substitute Subway Master Briosa Crociera, roughly as tall as two lemonade cans and as heavy as a Leppa Berry and a half, lifting two entire women three times her weight and height into the air to hurl them up the stairs to the platform like a pair of feathers after harvesting at least a couple molars from each of their mouths) if the next train hadn’t rushed into the station at that moment, distracting him.

Rivers of people poured out once again, blocking his visual. Hundreds of feet tried to cover the enraged yelling with the sound of their stomping - thank goodness he’d been shoved a little away or he would have been right in the middle of the flood - passing over the gap between metal and cement in either direction.

Among the indistinct clamor rang out the name of a flower.

He turned immediately, as though he’d been called.

His eyes searched immediately, feverishly, looking for something or someone like he knew exactly what he was searching. A bloom? Sprouting from the cement, from the paint on the walls? From the lamps? The faces rushing past him?

(The flower had roared before talking, and roared straight at him, with the viciousness of a little prune moving little hands like little claws, but he couldn’t remember that.)

Pupils fixed onto the heads slowly disappearing left and right, all unfocused as they passed faster and faster despite his attempts at… At what? He had no clue, no clue at all. He sifted through them over and over, left and right, left and right, only managing to catch glimpses of each of them, not finding anything, anything, not even the slightest thing.

Somebody called out once more to a flower.

Bodies passed, eyes and noses and hair and mouths and ears, and he just kept on searching, and searching, and searching, without even knowing what to look for, so focused that he didn’t even notice every head he looked like was turned to show the profile except one.

Hold on.

He just lost that one, actually.

A sudden panic struck him and closed his entire digestive tract in a painful knot.

The impact on his stomach had him double over, but at least it completely obliterated that terrible feeling.

His face’s disastrous descent towards his own knees was stopped only thanks to his chest hitting something soft and voluminous that was doing its absolute best to lodge itself into his body just below his sternum; arms were wrapping his waist in as tight a grip as it was humanly possible, holding onto him like a lifeline, trying to sway and strangle him all at once.

He choked something out as a reflex, though the words were completely unintelligible even to himself. His hands found small, sturdy shoulders, with the kind of still wiry muscle that kids who haven’t yet finished growing have - he pushed them away from himself as the embrace around him loosened enough for him to actually manage that.

While he struggled to inhale after getting the breath knocked out of him so suddenly, the girl came into his focus very slowly - first her hair, of a dark and deep violet color, held fast by some yellow bands of sorts, then the brown of her eyes, the shape of her nose and mouth, the little faded scar next to her ear from when (she’d run into the edge of a table faster than a Blitzle as a tiny itty bitty prune and started to cry as loud as she could and he had cried even louder with her in solidarity so that she would stop to try to console him while her dad fixed her up, but he couldn’t remember that), the hunch of her back that made her seem so small, the strength in her hands as she still held onto his middle, onto his clothes.

She seemed about to apologize, but between her huffs and humid eyes she could barely make a sound.

A boy shouted for the flower again.

A half-asleep conversation came back to mind.

His grip on her shoulders tightened slightly.

“Forgive me for the strange question,” Ingo asked with a sudden hurry: “Would you happen to be my cousin?”

She inhaled in a noisy, watery way a few more times, a trembling smile creeping up on her face as it lit up.

She nodded.

A moment later arms were lifting her into the air from under her armpits in a bone-shattering hug, so tight she could feel her chest being compressed and yet filling her with such an incomparable wordless joy that she couldn’t help shrieking out a laugh as she wrapped her legs around the man’s middle, holding onto him like a Komala to its log. He swayed the both of them left and right, faces buried in each other’s hair, gripping so hard they were probably bruising - then suddenly pulled away to face her again, eyes wide and shining like he was about to cry.

“I’m sorry!” he apologized, “I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you, I wasn’t aware that you were such a beautiful young lady!”

Iris laughed even louder and found it impossible to stop herself from tearing up a little, and gently slapped his cheeks over and over, forgetting her soon-to-be nineteen years of age in favor of returning the five-year-old who didn’t like to be called like that because she was a Dragon Tamer, not some noblewoman.

She buried her face in his shoulder again, heart beating frantically. Ah, why did words have to be so hard now of all times!

A sob wrecked through her, unable to be contained.

Before she could chastise herself for it, an absent minded hand had already started patting a song on her spine.

She hugged him even tighter.

She knew it.

She knew he still remembered her.

She knew they couldn’t have been that unlucky.

A male voice called for her: she unwound herself from her cousin to turn around, his white arm still gripped tight in her palm, wide and tearstained grin illuminating her still somewhat child-like face.

“Marshal!” she cried out, waving at the man whose approach was slowing down more and more the closer he came to the formerly missing Subway Master as though frightened by the possibility of doing something too brash, too wrong, to come off too strong, “Marshal, come here, quick! He knows me! He knows me!”

(That would have been an exaggeration, but this wasn’t the time to make it known.)

He looked at the empty expression on the ghost of a man before him as bright white eyes stared into him.

He’d been stuck in situations that sparked and screamed with tension before, competitions and brawls and battles alike, close calls and last hits the anticipation of which had made time stretch endlessly as though it were a long, infinite rubber band struggling to return to shape after being released in an ocean of air denser than drying cement, but this - this had his heart and throat in an iron grip, squeezing them so hard that he could feel every single vein pulse with how desperately quick his heart was beating against his chest.

Speaking didn’t come hard to him usually. He’d honed that skill like many others, balancing himself as he always had been taught to do. And yet now his tongue felt dry and tangled, and his mind was blanking hard.

Should he have even said anything at all? Should he have just waved? He could have always turned around and left. He would have been ashamed of it for the rest of his life, like any fighter with some self-respect, but it was still an option. He could have just gone.

But could he, really?

How much had he missed him? That idiot who’d gotten poisoned by toxic trash enough times to become immune? To whom he’d tried to teach capoeira with no success at the tender age of seven, only managing to flail him around despite their difference in height? Was he seriously going to leave him like that, staring, not even offering a simple greeting, an introduction of even the barest kind?

His cousin was looking at him.

Not vacantly.

With purpose.

He raised a hand to give a little wave, offering a small bashful smile with it, but didn’t get to accompany either with any sound: the taller body slammed into him after carefully setting his sister back on the platform so quickly he barely saw the motion, and squeezed him in the spindly arms.

It took him a second for him to fully feel the hug.

A few moments after he heard a loud bony pop coming from a spine that wasn’t his own and reverberating against his arms, he realized he was hugging back.

Oh boy.

That must have hurt a bit.

“I did need that,” Ingo thankfully wheezed in his hold.

Marshal coughed out a laugh. These guys - they had such a way of being goofy…

His embrace grew a little softer as he nestled his face into his cousin’s shoulder, and he allowed himself to chuckle again: “Good to see some things don’t change, eh?”

The grip around him seemed to grow fonder.

Ingo was not there.

Locating him in the control room should have been easy. For starters, he would have stood out by being the only person not wearing any uniform; then, even if he could have melted into the penumbra with his dark clothes, the area of his head was so white between eyes and hair and pale skin that it would have been impossible to miss.

So, vice versa, the fact that he was not immediately recognizable among the small crowd and dim lights made it all the more obvious that he wasn’t there.

And if he wasn’t there, either he was somewhere else, or he had never been there to begin with.

Both of which were equally terrifying possibilities.

Cloud jumped a little when a hand grabbed their shoulder with a grip strong enough to just yank it off of their body in one go like a dangling baby tooth waiting to be pulled out of a child’s mouth.

“Where is Ingo?” Emmet asked with a face that could have effortlessly killed a man.

Luckily for the Depot Agent, their gender crisis which had decreed them to be no such thing decades ago spared them long enough for the moment of blinding terror to subside and let them answer in a peep: “With Briosa, boss.”

“Where is Briosa?”

“She should be on one of the platforms - she wanted to show him the trains, I think-”

“Which platform?”

“I - I don’t know, boss, it’s-”

“When did they leave?”

“I, ah - uh,” they scrubbed their brain to recall what the other had said and checked the clock: “About, uh… Maybe an hour ago, an hour and a half at most, by now.”

Perhaps they should have lied - whatever little color was in Emmet’s face was draining rapidly leaving him almost transparent, and based on how his grip was trembling, how his chest was squeezing quicker and quicker, how his eyes were shaking to find something to focus on, he was very close to breaking down.

They needed to fix the mess they made now, before it turned into a catastrophe - but how, how, how…

By chance their eyes fell on a printed copy of the staff schedule.

The subway master jumped when a palm laid on his wrist: kindly furrowed brown eyes forced him to look into them to ground him.

“Boss,” Cloud spoke more securely, “Briosa’s on the Single Train right now, right? Her shift started a while ago and she didn’t come back to the control room, so she likely went straight to the train. Ingo seemed interested in seeing one, so maybe she decided to let him tag along and let him watch some matches!”

It sounded right; it sounded plausible. Emmet gave a few small nods: “Yes,” he conceded, “Probably. Maybe. Possibly."

“You can check in on her on the radio,” they continued, “Just to make sure.”

Radio! Right! Right. He had the radio. He could contact her. He could ask her.

He should have done that.

He should have thought of that.

He would go do that.

He would go.

His hands unclenched: “I’ll call her,” he managed to force out of himself.

Cloud offered him a smile and gently patted his forearm: “Sounds like a good idea, boss. Your office is probably better for these sorts of things - we’ve got everything under control here.”

“Yes. Thank you.” he breathed. “Verrry much.”

“Anytime, boss.”

Bless whoever had ever decreed the existence of the Depot Agent profession.

Who knows where he’d be without them by now.

Emmet counted the long swinging steps that covered the distance spanning across the control room, the short corridor opening from its wall, and the office it lead into; then he counted them again as he marched laps around the furniture, trying to find a spot where he could lean onto (sitting would have worsened his panic, he just knew it, he had had a taste of that on his own skin enough times before that he was certain he had to keep moving) while searching around in the pockets of his coat.

At last having found the small radio, it sizzled to life as he tuned the correct frequency and spoke into it: “I am Emmet. Calling Briosa.”

He could feel a panic attack climbing up his leg.

It hurt like hell when he slammed his shin against the side of his desk, but at least it staved off the spiraling thoughts for a moment as he hissed.

He waited for the snap of Mawile’s maw to come through the receiver and urgently asked: “Is Ingo with you?”

The answer came a moment later, extremely calm: “He’s outside.”

“Where?”

“The city.”

“Alone?!” he almost shouted, stopping in his tracks..

“Nope,” Briosa popped her lips: “Two people came over to pick him up I think, one girl looking younger than I do, one guy not older than me, both from the Opelucid train. Ingo said they were his cousins and they were all sort of crying in the middle of the platform, so I figured I could let him go with them.”

Opelu - oh!

The tension in Emmet’s shoulders completely dissipated as they uncorked with a snap when he laid against a wall, like the cap of a heavily carbonated drink flying away, and he let out a relieved sigh.

Oh, alright. This changed everything. Thank goodness.

“Champion Iris and Elite Four Marshal?” he asked just to be sure - though that was most definitely them. They must have heard about that mess with the announcements somehow, and the girl had probably dragged her half-brother to see Ingo as soon as possible. They had both missed him dearly, after all, he was certain of it.

The other end remained quiet for a bit longer than usual.

“If that’s a code I don’t know what it means.”

“No - question. Were the people Champion Iris and Elite Four Marshal.”

“I don’t know.”

Confusion settled on Emmet’s brows, making them furrow.

“What do you mean?”

“That I don’t know.” Briosa repeated.

“Don’t know what?”

“I don’t know if they were who you said.”

“The Champion and Fighting member of the Elite Four?”

“Yes.” now she started to sound annoyed. “Should I know them, anyways?”

Out of all the new things to learn about his co-worker today, this was not one he had remotely considered.

Also!

It was possibly the worst thing to short-circuit him at this precise moment, while he had no clear whereabouts of his brother and was beginning to doubt if his company was indeed who he thought they were and not somebody else.

His Xtransceiver decided that was the right moment to start ringing: an unknown number blinked on the display.

“Please hold until further notice,” he ordered automatically, too torn between panic and bewilderment to think, and just as he shut down the radio before getting an answer he opened the call.

His own eyes, magnified, replied.

A distinctly much louder and more expressive voice then made the speakers shriek: “HELLO! EMMET! CAN YOU HEAR ME!”

“No,” the conductor replied thoughtlessly with a wheeze that almost collapsed him.

“OH NO!”

“No no no, he can - he can hear you just fine, don’t worry, maybe just- just lower your voice a little, actually, I don’t think the speakers can survive that,” a definitely darker hand said as it came into view to gently pull Ingo away from the screen so that he wasn’t trying to shove his head through it.

The video feed trembled as it was yanked a little lower, revealing bright maroon eyes and an enthusiastic smile: “Hi Emmet!!”

“I am Emmet,” he replied fondly, out of breath: “Hello Iris. Hello Marshal.”

After another adjustment, the Fighting Elite Four member also properly came into view, waving back at him.

“You’re looking nice,” was the first thing he said.

His not-quite-cousin’s eyes narrowed, smile turning playfully angry: “Ah ha. Thanks.”

“No, seriously, you seem well-rested! That’s a relief!”

“It’s likely due to the fact that he slept in today,” Ingo snitched.

Iris gasped: “Slept in? Did a shooting star pass by? Did someone pray for a miracle?”

Oh no. Not this again. “I have been bullied enough about this already.”

“Oh yeah?” Marshal egged him on, “By who?”

“Ingo. My team. His team. The Agents. Briosa. Elesa, if she finds out.”

“That last one doesn’t count.”

“Yes it does.”

“She doesn’t even know it!”

“She will. And she will bully me.”

“Can I call her on this as well?” his twin instantly asked their cousins at that, feigning innocence: “She will surely be glad to hear he’s gotten enough sleep.”

“No.” Emmet prohibited.

Iris ignored him candidly: “Oh, you can call her right now if you want-”

“Nooo,” came from beyond the screen, and she giggled. “Stop that.”

“You only need to get the number pad open down here and then you type in–” Marshal began to coach him.

“Stop that!”

Ingo snorted loudly at his furious pout: “Don’t worry, don’t worry - I will delay the inevitable as of now. I shall save her contact and call her later in the day to let her know of your prolonged nap, which I’m certain she’ll approve of.”

“Do not.”

“I cannot make promises.”

“Yes you can. Promise you will not.”

“I would have to make a promising gesture in order to do so, but unfortunately both my hands are occupied.”

“No they’re not.”

His supposedly free hand came into view, very much held by Marshal’s own in an invincible grip. The young man’s smug grin followed suit.

Emmet almost forgot he was behind a screen and tried to physically wipe it off.

Remembering he was behind a screen, however, brought him to a slightly delayed realization - together with the much needed question, as embarrassing as it might have been, of whether or not he was still suffering from the excessive sleepiness of the day prior in order for him not to be noticing horrendously obvious things.

If anything, he concluded, getting more rest was proving to be much more detrimental to his attention than getting less, so he probably shouldn’t have slept at all instead.

Everybody he knew would have likely strangled him for coming to such a conclusion, but even they couldn't have argued against the stone cold facts his lackluster performance was serving up.

Anyways.

“You have an Xtransceiver,” he noted with no shortage of relief.

“Took you long enough!”

A gentle elbow playfully pushed the girl’s head away: “Give him some slack, Iris, he was busy letting us make fun of him.”

“Ha ha. I was also verrry worried. I didn’t know where Ingo was. I got verrry scared.”

Ingo’s mouth was already halfway open to offer an apology, but Iris beat him to the punch, throwing her arms in the air triumphantly: “Well you won’t have to worry about that anymore! Now you can just call him whenever you want!” she added, moving her hands in a very goofy way as if to showcase an invisible product: “On his brand new welcome back gift we got for him so he never loses track of anybody of us again! And we don’t lose track of him!”

“Which I’m assuming was the main point,” her constantly frowning cousin pointed out.

“Good job making him feel like we’re putting him on a leash,” Marshal mumbled at her sort of jokingly, getting a slap on his arm for it.

“Oh no, by all means, it’s perfectly sensible! It will certainly be much easier for you to keep track of me than the opposite - I’m still not sure how to use most features on this blasted thing, I’d likely mess up any simple function spectacularly…”

“Trust me, we’ve seen worse.”

“Yeah, nothing can beat Grandpa Alder on that.”

“He took out the batteries by accident once, I don’t even know how, just pulled them out manually somehow. We brought it over to the manufacturer and even they couldn’t figure out what he’d done. You’ll be fine.”

“You’ll figure it out super quick.”

“You still should have told somebody. Have them send a message to me. I was worried.” Emmet brought the three of them back on track sternly. He still allowed a smile to creep up on his lips, relaxing his shoulders a little: “But I admit, it’s a verrry good idea for a gift. Yup!”

“Of course it was,” the girl gloated, “I had it.”

“She did not,” her brother shot her down.

“Yes I did!”

“For the sake of truth I must confess,” Ingo interrupted their argument: “It was Marshal who first proposed it.”

Iris gasped at him in furious outrage: “You’re supposed to side with me! I’m the baby!”

“I thought you disliked that definition?”

“It’s situational,” Emmet predicted.

“It’s situational!” she replied a moment later. Her piqued finger took up the entirety of the screen: “You shut up.”

The conductor wheezed in her face.

Overwhelmed with righteous fury, the current Unovan Champion loudly stomped her foot: “Whatever! I had a better one right now!” she declared, “And it’s to go get lunch because it’s midday and I’m kind of starving.”

Then she gasped again, and smiled wider: “You could come too!”

“No.”

Fuck. Shit. Fuck. Too abrupt. Damn panic.

“I’m working,” Emmet added hastily before she thought he was denying out of anger or annoyance. “I can’t. Sorry. I should not leave the station. Sorry. Sorry.”

“It’d be quick!” she pleaded back to him, and the saddened look on her face made him want to crumple into a dead leaf and turn to dust. “It could take what, maybe fifteen minutes? While you’re on your way we can get a sandwich or something, we hide Ingo in the bushes so he’s safe–”

“Excuse you-”

“-Shush, and then we can eat out here! And maybe once we’re done the three of us can go around to see the city and you can go back to work, just–”

“My,” he started, and then stopped. He had a hard time swallowing the lump in his throat, but there was no need. It was the truth. “My lunch break. It’s not now. Later. I’m working. Sorry.”

“We can wait then!”

“No. You’re hungry. You get cranky when you’re hungry.”

“No I don’t!”

“It would be disastrous. Can’t put Marshal and Ingo in that kinda danger. Better appease you verrry quickly.”

Iris furrowed her brows at him and pouted.

It would have been funnier if looking at her didn’t feel like getting stabbed in the gut.

“Not sure if it’s a good idea though,” he decided to change the subject, “Walking around with Ingo.”

“Why not?” Marshal asked.

“You know. Paparazzi. And other Sewaddles of life.”

“We can deal with those.”

He doubtfully scrunched up his face in response.

His cousin took that personally: “What, you don’t trust the Champion and her loyal fist-fighting knight to be able to handle a couple flashing cameras?”

That had Ingo turn to the still somewhat distraught Iris with eyes as wide as the moon itself, shining brilliantly with absolute surprise and a pride that was undoubtedly going to explode into a sonic boom in roughly eight seconds: “You’re the Champion?”

“Yeah?” she just replied.

Emmet quickly pulled the Xtransceiver down and stuck it close to his back. His fulminous reflexes saved him from the shrieks of the speakers as the latest contender for the title of world’s loudest BRAVO rippled through them in an attempt to make them explode.

He could envision the ear-ringing state of deafened daze Iris and Marshal were in at the moment extremely clearly, which likely said something about either himself, his brother, his cousins, or all of the above.

“YOU DID NOT MENTION THAT!” his brother was continuing in the same volume of voice, too caught up into the prideful euphoria to lower it: “CONGRATULATIONS!”

Faintly he made out Iris shakily replying her thanks.

“THAT’S INCREDIBLE! WHEN DID YOU MANAGE SUCH A FEAT?”

She responded it had happened around four years ago.

Whatever Ingo shouted next was completely unintelligible, so perhaps he should have intervened before the Xtransceivers completely gave up and burst into flames on their wrists, which would have been notably distressing.

“Fine! Fine. I am Emmet and I’m convinced. He’ll be fine. Go for it. I trust you with him. Show him the city. Catch up with him. Hide him in the bushes.”

“Emmet.”

“I am Emmet.”

“Please do not advocate in favor of shoving me in any nearby shrubbery.”

“Would be a good hiding place.”

“Emmet.”

“It’d be much more effective than having you pretend you’re a lamppost.”

“Marshal.”

“It’s true!”

“Are you sure you don’t want to come?” Iris insisted. “We can wait just fine, seriously…”

“I am Emmet. I am sure. My lunch break is at… “ fuck. When was it? “Two. Do not worry for me. I will eat. Have a good meal. Go see the rest of the team home. They’ll be verrry happy, I bet. And Elesa. But don’t tell her I slept in.”

At least she smiled mischievously: “Immediately tell her you slept in, got it.”

“Nooo - avoid.”

“Instantly.”

“No!”

“Right now.”

“Iris Wittle Wyvern Lophiris. Stop that.”

“Don’t call me that!”

“Call you what.”

“You know what you did!”

“I do not. Anyway!” he decided to cut it all short, before the credibility of his excuse began to dwindle: “Enjoy yourselves. And avoid paparazzi like the plague. I love you.”

They must have answered. He wasn’t sure he heard that.

By the time the call was closed and he wasn’t under their eyes anymore he was fairly sure the only thing keeping him still upright was the wall against his shoulder and the grip of his soles on the dark pavement.

Maybe he should have fainted for a while. Just slumped right down on the cold floor and lost consciousness for about half an hour. Maybe he could have gotten himself a nice little cardiac arrest for all of two seconds to ragdoll his way out of the wildly spinning tornado of thoughts passing by his neurons so fast they were essentially incomprehensible, some shifting amalgamation of panic and shame and a general desire to slam his head very hard somewhere and cause a dent either on the unfortunate surface of the day or in his skull.

What was even the matter? He hadn’t even talked to them. He hadn’t shut his door in their face. He had just not answered after the first two calls.

He hadn’t even been rude.

(I love you.)

(What a stupid fucking thing to say after as prolonged and obstinate an avoidance as his own. He was going to–)

Hold on. Hold on. Hold on.

How did that… The stupid one… How did that song go? About the, uh… The stupid… Ugh. He scratched at his forehead. The one… With… The fish. Captain.

Ca-pitan Findus, controilran-cido As-do-mar…

He couldn’t scrape the rest from his brain, but at least it cleared it enough.

Should have used this instead of medicine. Then again, he’d been half asleep and easily conditioned by his brother’s own less than stellar feelings, so he was excused.

Normal things now.

Things to do.

… Save the number. That would have been verrry useful.

He opened his eyes as little as possible to check on the display, so that he wouldn’t fuck it up by trying to do that blindly.

A warning; he selected ‘yes’ without even reading.

That was something he’d have to figure out later. Or tomorrow. No matter. Just… Not now, please.

Breathe.

Things to do.

The ringtone made him first jump, then cuss.

Dragons help him. These five minutes were feeling even more never ending with every millisecond that passed.

Breathe.

Marshal nodded at him in greeting from the screen as he walked leisurely.

“Heya.”

“You just called.” Emmet noted dryly. He bit his tongue at how annoyed he sounded to himself; luckily for him, it came out just as monotone as always.

“I wanted to talk with you for a moment more. Without the whole…” he moved his arm in a fairly eloquent way towards a couple of louder voices off-screen. “You know. And it was Ingo who called you first, to be precise.”

“Tamayto, Tamato. Same thing.”

“Ugh, whatever,” the younger man stuck out his tongue at him.

“Unsportsmanlike. Penalty.”

“Hey!”

“You taught me that.”

“Can I talk to you for a second or are you going to keep doing this?”

“Hm. Perhaps.”

“Cuz…”

He was smiling. He was smiling - he wasn’t angry. A little annoyed, but in the way one is annoyed at a friend being a little too goofy. He was even chuckling a bit - his chest shook slightly from it.

The relief the sight of such a simple expression gave him left a disgusting aftertaste all over his mouth, not sparing even a singular cell. It was similar to that of gastric acid.

“I’ll be quick, I know you’re busy and all,” Marshal got to the point, now that the interruptions seemed to have finally stopped. “I just wanted to say it’s good to see you again, too. Even if you’re only on a screen.”

Emmet’s throat dried up.

Marshal didn't notice: “Maybe another time we can all meet up, with Mom and Dad too, and Grandpa. I bet I could rope Grimsley in if you wanted,” he laughed a little.

“Maybe.” his cousin conceded faintly. “Another time.”

“You’d be up for that?”

No. “Yup. Sure. Another time, maybe.”

“Of course! Of course.”

It was still weird to see white teeth when he grinned. He was so used to him wearing that teal guard over them in recent times (recent years, a few years ago, which meant they weren’t so recent anymore, and it made him want to look away and leave and curl up in a ball and apologize and never talk again) that he’d almost forgotten that wasn’t their natural color.

“I’ll see you then,” his cousin waved.

The conductor waved back a little: “Bye.”

“Have a good day!”

“You too. Love you.” (what a stupid thing to–)

“Love you too!”

The image sizzled away; Emmet breathed in again sharply through his nose, swallowed, and slid down the wall until he was sitting in midair.

He waited in a limbo devoid of thoughts for a few seconds that felt more like a couple hundred minutes, eyes closed, trying to quell any tremor that attempted to make his muscles quiver with nervous antsyness.

They’d looked honestly happy to see him.

Honestly it was going to make him cry.

Or have a breakdown.

Calm down, calm down - other things to do, there’s other things to do first.

Work to do first.

Briosa to call first.

To tell her.

And also for the other thing.

He turned the radio back on and spoke into it without registering the action, clawing his way back into his body as the words left it. Mawile’s snap arrived right on schedule to assure him his messages were being received.

“It was our cousins,” he confirmed.

“Oh, nice.”

“But.”

Silence.

“But what.”

“You don’t know what the champion looks like?”

“No.”

Emmet willed himself to calm down. Maybe she hadn’t kept up since Alder had gone off in grief; champions change often. That made sense.

That could not be applied to Marshal.

So he changed his question: “You don’t know what the Elite Four look like?”

“No? Should I?”

He could not answer that in a way that kept him sane. So he remained silent, absolutely stunned.

“Am I supposed to know them?” Briosa insisted.

Was she - “They’re the League!” he replied.

The response came in the same unbothered shrug of a tone as before: “I don’t know the League.”

She what.

“How.”

“I’m not into competitive battling.”

…

Huh??

“This is. This is the Battle Subway. You work at the Battle Subway.”

“Yes! And here we just run over trainers. By the way you should get over to the Multi Line as soon as possible, would be better somewhere around uhhhh this precise instant, there’s an obnoxious pair that’s been very slowly making their way through the twentieth car with some kind of stalling strategy and should be done in about fifteen minutes. If they come in and you aren’t here I will not guarantee for the safety of their tendons.”

Alright. Yes, he should have returned to the train. Ingo was safe with family, so he had nothing to worry about.

And he could have continued this hell of conversation much more easily, too.

Emmet was notified of Ingo’s return to the control room somewhere around six in the afternoon, while he was still rushing through the tunnels of the Double Line. Moments before the arrival of the next challenger, he was then notified that his brother was currently snoring away on one of the breakroom’s couches.

When he peeked his head in a little less than two hours later, he was still asleep.

Iris did have a tendency to drag people around as though they had as boundless an energy as hers, and while Marshal had trained for years and had enough stamina to actually keep up with her, her not-quite-cousins definitely did not; so his poor twin was probably exhausted from being flung around the city like a gymnastic ribbon on a go-kart passing through a wind tunnel, or a wacky inflatable tube man being pulled into one of Tornadus’s storms.

A weight settled on his bones.

Ah, damnit. He should have eaten his lunch after all. Not his fault he forgot about it.

His glove scratched his eyelid a little as he rubbed it.

Hm, yes, had to be sugar withdrawal. Nothing else. Nothing at all. Not sleep, definitely. He was Emmet. He wasn’t tired. And certainly it wasn’t having stayed here instead of going to see his cousins. Nope. No way.

He’d been busy. Verrry busy. He was working. He couldn’t just go around. Sorry. He could not. Nope. Sorry. Sorry. Verrry busy.

He repeated the words to himself ad nauseam as he mindlessly chewed through his previously abandoned sandwiches with all the glee of a thoughtless automaton spending its days stamping bottle caps. He could have sat for a moment, just to stretch a bit and get this torpor out of him - yes, he nodded with a yawn, he’d do that, timing himself with Ingo’s snores.

A hand shook his shoulder: “Boss, you’re needed upstairs.”

Emmet opened his eyes to find himself hunched on his knees.

When did that happen?

“How long?” he asked vaguely, feeling his tongue stuck to his palate.

Thankfully, Hank had a degree in barely awake communications and was currently getting a coffee not too far away: “About ten minutes, maybe,” he replied.

“Yeah, that sounds right,” Ramses nodded.

Their boss hummed; like a Purrloin, he snapped his back into a sitting position, listening to his spine as it popped while stretching his arms upwards.

Well, that didn’t do him good.

He was going to need a chiropractor. Or maybe Marshal could have just realigned his backbone with some kind of grapple.

If he ever managed to crawl back to his cousin in shame.

“I am Emmet,” he groaned to ignore his own thoughts: “I’ll be there in a second.”

Ingo was still sleeping. His brother gave him a gentle pat on the arm and left him to continue resting.

By the time he opened his eyes again he felt like a few geological eras had passed.

He checked the nearest clock, squinting to figure out what he was looking at: the hands told him it was 10:23. Most likely in the P.M.

He was suddenly very hungry.

They probably would have eaten once they were back home though, right? In the meantime he should have probably had some water. He felt like a dried up Petilil slowly shriveling under the midday summer sun.

On second thought, where was he, exactly?

Because this did not look like home, or the control room, or his hut. Perhaps he had been abducted, which however sounded unlikely as he did remember finding the elevator with Cameron (Cameron? That was his name, right? Not Cloud. Cloud had longer hair. Hm, yes, that was Cameron.) and descending away from the piercing golden glow all around himself.

“Oh! Finally. We were thinking you had a heart attack.”

His eyes shifted groggily onto some gaunt young man almost glaring at him..

“Is… Adore?” he tried, unsure whether it was that or Isaiah but feeling a preference for the former.

The agent nodded and reached for some weird large thing standing against the wall to stick a sort of key in it before poking at it repeatedly with one finger: “You’ve been asleep for four hours and forty-seven minutes,” he let him know with surprising precision. “Did you sleep at all before coming here today?”

“Yes,” Ingo replied dryly. “The whole night.”

The weird thing spat out something similar to a very small paper cup.

Isadore looked at him in bewilderment as something trickled into the tiny container; he shook his head after a moment, as if remembering something: “No, that makes sense.” he nodded again.

A hiss escaped his heavily clenched jaw as he grabbed the little cup in his palm for all of one second before retreating his hand.

By the time Ingo had finally managed to sit back up without almost falling asleep in the process the liquid must have finally cooled down a little bit, because the young man was finally able to pick it up and bring it over to the couch. He took note of how carefully he maneuvered the little thing, gripping it with the precise grip of a machine, moving in perfectly strides so that the contents of the cup could not have so much as moved in the slightest.

He stood for a short while, narrow eyes fixed on the beverage.

“Do you like lemon tea?” the agent asked finally.

Oh, that sounded nice: “I believe so, yes.”

“I hate it.” Isadore replied, and with the same precise robotic motions he lowered the cup down so he could take it from him. “But I messed up my order and ended up with this, so if you’d rather drink it than let me waste it I’d be fine with that.”

“Ah! Thank you.”

“It was a mistake.”

“Still, thank you.”

Like he couldn’t tell that he’d done that deliberately, just to be nice - especially from how he insisted it hadn’t been intentional and how he’d left in an embarrassed hurry. He might’ve not had that good a relationship with Ingo before.

And the tea tasted just fine. He didn’t know what he was missing.

The Battle Lines were officially closed.

As much as he loved them, Emmet sighed in relief. They could really drain one’s energy worse than a whole candelabra of Litwick.

Now all that was left to do was ensure that all passengers left the station for their final destinations, return the trains to their rightful resting platforms, close down for the night, and go back home.

And make sure his brother still existed.

Because there always was the possibility of him not existing.

Which was the worst possibility, right next to him being found dead.

(Him being found dead was so close to the former in the scale of worst things to be real because by ‘not existing’ he meant specifically ‘not existing here and now back home’, not ‘not existing since the beginning’, and that left the window very terrifyingly open for the latter to happen.)

Briosa cracked her phalanxes with her thumb one at a time.

Once she was done, she moved onto those of her left hand.

She did not say anything. He focused on the quiet snaps muffled by the cotton gloves and tried to relax his shoulders.

The tension suffocating him in the elevator thankfully disappeared as soon as he stepped into the control room and an incredibly pale head all but literally lit up at the sight of him.

Ingo waved at him as though they were twelve kilometers away from each other, remaining perfectly still right where he was. Emmet waved back in the exact same manner, smiling as wide as he could.

Mawile found them impossibly silly and held back a cackle.

Billie decided to interrupt their silent waving by gently launching the older twin towards the younger with a hand on his back, promising under their breath that Vip was going to help with the last few things to check, and the man took the momentum in stride and slammed directly into his brother so quickly that neither even had the time to outstretch their arms for a hug, headbutting the shit out of each other and ending up stumbling a little for the recoil before they grabbed each other’s forearms to keep themselves from falling on the pavement.

“I apologize for falling asleep for nearly five hours!” he told him once they had established some distance again: “Iris and Marshal have the same terrible grip and powerful legs. I was no match for such behemoths.”

“Marshal was pulling too?”

“Yes!”

Memories of getting thrown around by an eight-year-old who could wrestle a Fraxure made the other at once smile and wince: “Oof. Did you try any opposition?”

“Absolutely not. They would have run me over like a herd of Piloswine.”

“Good call.”

He took a long breath through his nose and groaned.

“I am Emmet. I will admit. I am verrry tired.”

“Preach!” Vip (short for Venipede - her mothers were from outside the region and really, really liked Unovan bugs) hollered back at him unprompted before slinking her head down onto the desk in defeat. Josh, ever the sweetheart, patted her back in solidarity; Billie preferred shoving her a little out of the way.

Emmet was very tempted to imitate her, but pulled all of his remaining willpower to resist, only hunching his back forward in a slump and giving a long sigh: “Exactly. Let’s go home.”

“Oh! Is the Station shutting down for the night?”

“Yep.”

“I see! It is very late after all…”

Noticing the saddened tone, the younger tilted his head: “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, nothing, just a silly thing. It could be handled tomorrow, or another day - it’s not a big deal anyways.”

“What is it?”

“... I would have liked to see the inside of a train,” Ingo admitted bashfully, like he was confessing something embarrassing or ridiculous: “I know the vague layout of an old locomotive from the books I’ve read a little from at home, but I have no idea how current trains look…”

“Ah! That’s fine. We can do it an-”

“The last train to Anville Town departs in a few minutes,” Briosa helpfully interrupted him out of nowhere.

Mawile must have filled her in while they weren’t looking.

Josh checked on one of the monitors and nodded: she was right, the last run for the day would have left in a moment or two.

“I can accompany him,” she continued simply.

Emmet tensed: “It’ll be verrry late for you,” he tried to dissuade her.

“I’ve gone home later. Plus I’ve got business on it.”

“I know. But it’s late.”

“I know. And I need to go anyway.” she turned her head towards Ingo: “Do you wanna come along?”

“Briosa.” Emmet signed before his brother could reply, not smiling. “Look at me.”

She did.

“It’s late. We can do this another time. It’s fine.”

She gave a short hum. Her fingers moved quick in the total silence: It’s forty-five minutes of ride at most. We’ll leave around 10:50 and we’ll be back by closing time. Rapid and painless.

It’s late, Emmet insisted equally quiet: It’s verrry late. We can do it tomorrow.

Do you want to come along?, the substitute asked then.

He hesitated; then he shook his head imperceptibly.

Being on unmoving ground was making the prospect of getting back on a train worse than anything, almost to the point of nausea. It happened, sometimes. It had happened several times, in the past years. Once the seasickness had even had the horrid idea of manifesting physically, and it had been mortifying to clean that cab.

At the same time, he didn’t want to leave Ingo alone on a train launched towards an unknown destination. Anything could have happened, literally anything, and instead of arriving at Anville Town he could have ended up across the world again, or somewhere he could have never returned from, or the train could have derailed with him on it, or he could have fallen out, or, or, or…

He couldn’t know how much Briosa could have known about what was going on in his brain since she couldn’t read his mind, but she didn’t smile.

Her stout fingers just moved, with as much understanding as they could have: I’ll be with him. I’ll make sure he’s fine and return him home right on time. Nothing else will happen. I’ll protect him. You know I’m good at these sorts of things.

Yes, she was. And yes, he did.

He took a long breath.

“Is everything alright?” Ingo asked softly.

Emmet waved a hand to reassure him: “Technicalities,” he replied, hands signing as he spoke: “You can go. If you want. Briosa said she can come with you. I’ll stay here. I’m feeling a bit lightheaded. Is that ok?”

“Of course! Please take care of yourself.” then, after a moment of nervous pause: “Are you sure I can go? I can stay here if-”

“Woof, train leaves in seven minutes,” a little voice interrupted them again. “Better go now unless you want to wait a whole day. There’s other ones, actually, but this one actually gets out of the ground, which is much niftier.”

(“Woof?” Vip mouthed.)

(“Niftier?” Billie mouthed back.)

Briosa fixed her rotten green eyes directly in Ingo’s: “So! You wanna go?”

Ignoring the brief sensation that she was challenging him to a hand-to-hand combat match to the death, he looked to his twin.

Emmet gave him a thumbs up.

The older nodded; the minuscule Substitute smiled, stuck her entire arm down Mawile’s open enormous maw so the little thing could safely dangle from it instead of having to scuttle after her, grabbed his wrist with her free hand, and left without any additional words to anybody in the room.

Had the tightening deadline put wings at her feet, or was he so baffled by the fact that she had just consciously and willingly had one of her limbs swallowed by her hearing aide that he forgot to take time into account?

Either way, he could have sworn they had taken much longer to reach the platform earlier today.

He also could have sworn that they had returned to the same exact platform.

He blinked hastily several times, finding a definitely smaller amount of people than he had seen on his first visit waiting for the mechanical beast to come pick them up, and turned left and right before looking down to find his guide’s translator - still happily dangling from the arm she was chomping on..

“Are we going to-” he began, stopping himself for a moment out of uncertainty “-Opelucid City, I believe?”

“Anville Town,” Briosa corrected after raising Mawile to her eye level.

“Are you sure?”

“Perfectly certain.”

“I don’t want to doubt your expertise - you know much more than me, that’s without question - but are you absolutely positive this is the right platform? It looks a lot like-”

He couldn’t finish that thought as the conductor howled: “OOOH - oh ok, no, that’s fair, they’re all designed to look the same. They have signs before the entrance though, and Anville Town trains and stations and signs all have a brown line on them? Like that one over there.” and she pointed to a long bright brown line painted across the shorter wall of the platform. “It’s because it’s the oldest train line in the region and all stations were initially decorated with brown lines. Did you know that the slang for railway officials is brass collar?”

Actually, he did! From the moment she mentioned ‘slang’, but he did. Huh. He nodded, genuinely surprised by himself, and even added: “Or main pin.”

“Yeah!” Briosa grinned, squinting a lot: “Funny stuff to know.”

Funny indeed.

The train still made a horrid amount of noise, causing Ingo to regret not having asked for Emolga’s support again before Mawile very gently patted his leg to offer him some comfort. The sliding doors hissed open; the Substitute Subway Master positioned herself perpendicular to them and extended her arm towards the brightly lit interior of the rumbling millipede titan.

“All aboard!” she encouraged him - stretching the first word and rushing through the second, in a perfectly opposite intonation to his own and Emmet’s.

Ingo complied, stepping onto the train.

They were in the cab directly behind the locomotive (Briosa seemed to privilege this placement, as she had moved them towards the end of the Opelucid platform earlier as well) and if he turned his head to his left he could see a corridor made of long sections like the abdomen of a Bug stretching all the way into infinity, all identical as far as he could tell: same two lines of blue plastic seats built almost like sofas, same metal bars right above them, same handles dangling from them, same grey doors with wide windows, same openings into new cabs, same rows of glass separating the inside from the outside wind, over and over and over and over.

Gently buzzing above him, the neon white lights didn’t hurt as much as they could have.

(He remembered dreaming something like this once or twice.)

(Hadn’t he dreamed it in Sinnoh?)

(Not Hisui - Sinnoh. On the couch of Johanna and her child’s house… Yes, he recognized it now. He’d dreamed of sitting here, on a train, headed who knows were; he recognized now, the more he thought about that dream, the scratch of Marshal’s hair on his nape, the scent of Elesa’s Persim shampoo coming from his shoulder, Iris’s weight pressing on his lap, Emmet’s face leaning against his arm. He wondered who it had been, then, on whom he was sitting.)

A mechanical voice instructed him to stand away from the doors as they closed, and a rumble startled him so much that he almost jumped.

Briosa, at his side, made no motion nor betrayed any emotion.

The man looked around for a moment, thinking back to the plane and the car and finding a glaring problem.

He turned to Mawile with great urgency: "Where are the seatbelts?"

Both she and her aidee gave him a funny look.

"Trains don't have them," the substitute told him.

What?

The gigantic wretched beast moved with a jerk, and Ingo felt his entire body, completely stiff and as straight as a perfect line, get yanked back like a catapult towards the floor.

A thin arm pressed harshly against his back to stop him from actually making contact with the ground, keeping him upright despite the notable difference in height almost effortlessly, and as his freefall was stopped in time he became fully conscious of the fact that, oh! Yes! He had, indeed, been descending right into a concussion!

So he screamed.

The body under him seemed to shake incredibly hard for a moment; he was then grasped between two hands, manhandled for a hot second, and firmly planted on one of the smooth plastic seats.

Briosa looked directly into his eyes. Her vaguely square smile had an air of disbelief, and her hands trembled a bit.

"PLEASE MAKE SURE TO HOLD ONTO THE HANDRAILS OR TAKE A SEAT BEFORE THE TRAIN DEPARTS!" she said, not quite screaming but almost, sounding incredibly shrill. "ALSO DEAR DRAGONS YOU ARE LOUD!"

Ingo sunk in his mortified shoulders.

"I - I apologize, I did not-" he only managed to babble.

"I'M NOT MAD BY THE WAY, I'M REALLY IMPRESSED!" the Substitute interrupted him (not out of a lack of manners but because she could not have heard him if she wanted): "I DON’T THINK THE HUMAN BODY IS MEANT TO BE ABLE TO MAKE A SOUND AT THAT VOLUME! THE CLOSEST THING I CAN COMPARE IT TO IS WHEN I ACCIDENTALLY LAID AGAINST A VERY BIG SPEAKER AND A BASS LINE RIPPLED STRAIGHT THROUGH ME AND JUMBLED MY MARROW LIKE GELATINE!"

This must have been what roughly half of Hisui had felt when he spoke to them most of the time, Ingo managed to think for a moment before his brain focused on imagining how exactly something like a ‘bone marrow gelatine’ would have looked and tasted.

In a fraction of a second he concluded that it would have been abysmal, and not for the shape or ingredients; despite having apparently never eaten gelatine as far as his brain could remember he could feel it in his mouth, and the texture made him want to shrivel and implode.

He quietly snuck it on the shelf of his mind reserved for Things I Forgot I Found Abhorrent And Would Like To Forget Again.

Blissfully unaware of the plight her boss had unleashed upon himself through the power of recalling horrendous attacks at his senses, Briosa then made her tone and volume drop drastically to much quieter ones as her whole body relaxed: "But seriously, make sure to secure yourself next time you're on a subway car. You can get really hurt and injure other people along with yourself. If you screamed again you could also probably bust their hearing."

She smiled again, looking right into him as if pinning him like one does to the wings of a Beautifly, with that flat smile that stuck the corners of her lips up in a sort of strange parenthesis and her rot green eyes a little squinted.

"You can't hurt mine in a way that matters," she chirped, as if to reassure him.

That actually was a relief. He’d had enough complaints about his shouts risking avalanches and attracting dangerous Pokémon, without counting all the ringing ears he had caused; he was truly glad the only living beings in this car were himself (naturally immune to his own volume), a completely deaf person and --

His head retreated inside his shoulders as a horrified realization hit him and he turned, absolutely mortified, to the small beast sitting right beside him.

“I am - so sorry,” he started off as her big red eyes tilted curiously, “I did not mean to - I am honestly, earnestly sorry, this is - probably very bad, considering what you - did I, did I hurt you? Did I hurt your ears, was my voice...? Again, I am terribly sorry, I, I hope I did not cause you any harm...”

Mawile blinked twice before snapping her smaller mouth open with a chirp of sorts, not looking cross at all. She began twisting her tiny fingers at him, but before he could apologetically remind her he could not understand sign she realized so herself, and turned towards her aidee: Briosa read her paws and furrowed her brow, replying in the same silent language with a certain puzzlement to her motions.

There was a moment of stillness that followed - their equivalent of a beat of flabbergasted silence. Mawile then gestured something with a very amused shit-eating smirk on both lesser and greater mouths, and her owner quickly clamped her hand in front of her little face as though to force them both shut.

“Vai a ciapa’ i Patrat, bimba, vai - che sarò stanca pure io a quest’ora, eh?” she sneered softly, chuckling a little as her fingers repeated whatever completely incomprehensible thing had just come out of her mouth. The little Fairy insisted on something with a grin, getting a gentle swat from a gloved hand: “Stocazzo che glielo dico, me lo posso anche tenere per me che mi son scordata che tu ci senti per lavoro.”

She then turned her gaze on Ingo’s face, ignoring her snickering companion.

“Steel types are actually virtually immune to hearing loss!” she explained chipperly: “They’re often employed in dangerously loud jobs because their organs can only get deformed under extreme pressure from all sides, like at the bottom of the ocean! But in that case they’d already be dead before the compression could do the trick so it barely counts really. But yes. No matter how hard you scream you cannot deafen this little beast.”

Three-fingered paws waved to get her attention once more and added something else.

“She still appreciates your concern!”

The poor man wheezed out a sigh of relief. Oh thank goodness. No harm done. He would have climbed out of the train window out of mortification otherwise.

Mawile seemed to be amused by his reaction, considering the gentle chittering laugh that left her lesser beak-like mouth and the cackling snap of her larger one. Her little three-fingered paw went to pat his arm in a comforting manner, as though she understood his feelings perfectly: maybe this had already happened on a previous occasion? Or perhaps she was simply very empathetic, as Fairies tended to be?

She and Briosa appeared to be on the exact same wavelength, that was certain, since they understood each other perfectly despite the language barrier.

Wait, no, they had no language barrier.

The both signed.

Right.

Yes.

That made sense.

Wait.

He furrowed his brow suddenly: “You translated her right now, did you not?” he asked the substitute, realizing only at that moment what had happened.

She turned her attention to the beast next to her and answered him with a slight lag and a fairly satisfied smile once his words were made understandable to her: “I did! It’s a mutually beneficial kind of deal. Makes it a lot easier to understand other Pokémon as well.”

“Your communication with your team must be on another level!” Ingo replied.

“I doubt that!” she struck him down airily: “I don’t want Mawile to work overtime translating every single thing my lads say. They’ve learned to be real expressive for that. My communication with her is on another level, that’s true - I forget that five-fingered sign exists sometimes.”

“Five-what?”

“Five-fingered sign,” and she waved her fingers in a sort of cheeky goodbye. Then she held down her thumb and pinky, moving the other three as she spoke: “She only has three fingers, so she most usually tends to use three-fingered sign. She’s also fluent in five-fingered, but that takes her two hands so, you know, it’s much less convenient.”

Ingo nodded, eyes enraptured by the fluidity of her signing: “It’s as though you were trilingual,” he commented in awe. “Or quadrilingual, perhaps? I believe you were speaking something else, before...”

“Ah. That. Yes.”

The stilted way she said that had him shrivel in his own shoulders, convinced he’d overstepped another boundary.

Mawile laughed louder and mischievously gestured something at her aidee.

“Zitta.” she was shushed.

She laughed even harder.

“I apologize,” the much taller man peeped as quietly as he could, which admittedly wasn’t that much: “I didn’t mean to bring back any animosity.”

The beastie found his addition even more hilarious clearly, because she leaned her back down on the plastic seat and kicked up her feet as she wheezed and cackled uncontrollably to the point where she had to grab her stomach as it started cramping. Still coughing a little she wiped away tears of absolute mirth from her eyes as she pulled herself up once more before launching in a series of signs so fast and naturally that it would have likely caused him to short circuit in an attempt to follow had he been able to understand her.

He turned to Briosa with a frown that told of being completely at a loss.

She replied by keeping her mouth perfectly shut.

Mawile egged her on.

“Stocazzo, t’ho detto,” the substitute insisted.

Not at all deterred, the Steel Fairy snapped her maw as though accepting a challenge. As she turned back to Ingo she clearly threw sign to the wind and began, instead, to mime at him: whatever they had talked about, he pieced together from her performance, regarded Briosa asking her a question related to her hearing.

His comprehensive noises with which he began commenting on the show clearly sent the subway master into a short panic, launching herself forward to grasp her aide to shut up her theatrical endeavors before she could get to the point.

She did successfully delay the ending of the story; she also however got laughed straight at her face with each miss.

After not even thirty seconds she threw her patience out of the window with wild abandon: “Basta!!” she softly shouted as she trembled with an exaggerated cartoonish rage, “Guarda che ti mangio!”

Not frightened in the slightest, Mawile signed back a retort.

“Va bene!” the substitute caved in.

She rubbed at her eyes to try and mask her snickering as she attempted to recollect herself enough before she could properly turn to Ingo, who had been left a little concerned by their interaction.

“It’s stupid,” she reassured him immediately with a wave of her hand and an easy smile. “I just. When she told me you were worried about having destroyed her eardrums, I got confused. Because I forgot that she can hear. Even though that is literally her job.”

“Oh!” he sighed in relief. That was kind of humorous. “I see.”

“She’s not letting me live this down now because she’s mean,” she then specified, putting a special emphasis on the last word as she eyed the utterly remorseless Fairy, who seemed proud of her mischief. A gloved hand pressed onto her flat nose: “You’re lucky lip reading only gets me so far or you’d be still stuck back over there in Kalos.”

Mawile made a motion as if to hug herself before pointing back at her.

“Love you too.”

“If I can -” Ingo began, lifting a finger to catch Briosa’s attention, but he stopped and retracted it as he reminded himself she couldn’t hear him right when she actually looked at him.

His attempt at turning towards her Pokémon was however stopped by the substitute herself, who quickly motioned with her hand towards her face to incite him to speak directly to her. Had she forgotten he couldn’t sign? It seemed very much unlikely. Still, if she was encouraging him to engage with her instead of Mawile, she must have had her own reasoning, right?

“You mentioned lip reading,” he tried.

“I did,” she replied without missing a beat, staring at him. Her eyes seemed to be focused a little under his own.

“I... Assume it would be something akin to... Figuring out letters from how the mouth moves?”

“I’d correct you since I’m reading the individual words, but yes actually, it’s mostly telling letters apart.”

“Is that what you’re doing right now?”

“Yep.”

“Ah! It seems more convenient than the translation.”

“It’s not!”

He tilted his head in surprise: “How so?”

“It’s hard,” she explained matter-of-factly: “The mouth can only move in so many ways. A lot of letters end up looking exactly the same. Plus I can’t do it on phones or radios, I can’t read multiple people at once, if I’m in a group swapping between person to person is a whole struggle that gets annoying real fast, sometimes it’s just plain difficult, like when Emmet’s got his neutral face on--”

“His neutral face?”

“You know--” and she gave him a somewhat vacant smile, forcing her mouth into what she probably believed to be a V shape of sorts. “This face. The bane of my eyes. You know how he doesn’t speak much? Makes a lot of pauses? That’s actually perfect since it’s little bits of information. Easy to read and digest. But this face makes everything so much harder.”

“Ah,” he nodded without much conviction. He did remember that specific expression now that she mentioned it, but he still failed to see what she actually meant. “Why does that make lip reading difficult?”

“Because his face gets locked in place and he speaks real small and cramped keeping all his words to himself, like this,” she answered: following her finger as she pointed he noticed then that her lips moved quickly, although describing them as ‘moving’ almost sounded like an exaggeration (a more apt verb could have been ‘twitching’), barely parting as they did. “Every single sound looks the exact same. It’s a nightmare.”

“I can see that…”

She then began switching between expressions as she continued, her entire face shifting in ways that conveyed all sorts of emotions like a theater actor’s might have: “But when he’s actually reacting to things it’s so much easier, because he uses every single muscle he has to show what he means and his mouth gets dragged along, like this! See? He’s verrry expressive. Verrry readable.“

Ingo nodded again, transfixed: “You’re very expressive yourself!”

Briosa giggled at that: “Thanks! It’s the circus training!”

Thefuckingwhat.

He shook his head to clear it of the dozen barely comprehensible questions that clamored to be asked. Keep focus. No getting off-track. We’ll be here all night if you keep changing the subject.

“I imagine I’m giving you a lot of grief then,” he noted as he got back on his train of thought, “Since I’m... Not quite good at conveying emotion through my face.”

“No, actually. You’re really loud.”

Her knowing such a detail should not have come as a surprise, because she had already remarked on it previously when he had thanked her for saving him from a concussion after almost slamming his head against the metal floor with a blood-curdling scream directly in her ear.

However, she had mentioned she could tell because the vibration had vigorously coursed through her like an electric shock.

So in the end, he was again left completely baffled.

She seemed amused by how wide his eyes had turned when he finally got her back into the focus of his gaze, cheeks almost red with embarrassment, and asked: “Is it... Is it visible?”

Her smile curled a little more; she opened her mouth as large as she could and replied at a fairly high volume, to show him properly: “The louder someone speaks, the wider they tend to open their mouth! You do that all the time! It makes it much easier to tell the individual sounds apart since there’s a little lag between each of them and they’re enunciated fairly well!”

Huh! She was right!

At least, it helped her understand him better. He’d been worried about the opposite, so it was nice knowing that.

“You are extremely observant!” he noted.

She laughed with a rubbery sound: “And you’re trying real hard to make your lips as readable as a book!”

“It seems to make it much easier to converse!”

“It does! But watch out.”

“For what?”

“Long sentences. My brain fries a little if I’ve got too much on my plate.”

“Oh! That’ll be a problem. I’m fairly talkative, as far as I’m aware.”

”I figured.”

“I must admit this feels more natural than on-the-fly translations - I mean no offense for your line of work,” Ingo specified quickly (Mawile reassured him with a thumbs up) “But it is easier to speak directly to you instead of having to relay the information to a third party first. I suppose it’s a matter of awkwardness, or perhaps just a feeling of strangeness in the process of having to first speak to you, Mawile, who then has to translate it all to you, Briosa, in order for you to give your interlocutor an answer. To put it much more simply, it just... It feels a little weird. Is it not a little weird to you?

The Fairy nodded sagely in wholehearted agreement. It was very likely surreal for her, to have the vast majority of her daily conversations be in actuality a game of telephone between two other people.

Briosa instead looked at his face intently, mostly without any emotion.

It dawned on him a little too late that his musings had been in fact expressed in a tempestuous river of words which had likely stunted her comprehension.

She shook her head repeatedly for what felt like the span of a second, very quickly, in a very brisk movement: “Got the gist of it but lost half of that, hold on,” she apologized before turning to her hearing aide: “What’s weird?”

A few quick signs.

“Oh, yeah, absolutely,” she then immediately agreed as well, “I forget it is because I live like this but it’s weird as all get out for everybody all the time, everytime. Ramses still tries to talk directly to me even though he's known that his mustache covers his entire mouth and I cannot read a single syllable since I first told him five years ago.”

Five years?

But she’d said...

Wasn’t she a recent development?

Five years was not necessarily recent.

Five years...

"Then -” Ingo noted, confused: “We do know each other."

"No," Briosa's reply was quick, sharp, completely flat in tone.

The train hit a harsh curve; unbothered, she simply leaned in the opposite direction and remained upright on her feet, not changing her stance in the slightest, as though it were the easiest thing in the world.

"You were definitely aware of me, but we didn’t know each other,” she explained: “You hired me and I worked here. And anyways we probably wouldn't have made much progress because I'm not particularly sociable and as far as I'm concerned you didn't sign. I've gotten to know Emmet because it's been about two years, but I didn't know him either before the promotion."

"Before you became a substitute?"

"Yep."

But he had been in Hisui for at least three years. He mentally counted the seasons that had passed again: yes, the math made sense.

The tracks had returned straight; his interlocutor had returned upright.

"Why didn't you replace me as soon as I went missing?" he asked then, confused. It made no sense to wait a year or so - running such a network alone would have taken a toll after a few months, probably.

"Oh, I'm not replacing you," she corrected: "I'm a temporary solution. Speaking of -” and before he could ask her what exactly that meant she seemingly changed the topic of conversation entirely: “How much do you remember about how to drive trains or running a station in general?”

The man blinked.

He simply shook his head.

Briosa loudly clicked her tongue in a way that briefly reminded him of how Mawile’s larger mouth would sometimes snap when opening: “Huh. Then I guess it’ll be a while before I get demoted back to depot agent. If you want to be a subway master again, of course, which is likely. Not a fan of having to wait, because I hate being responsible for things, but oh well!”

“Why should you be demoted?” the man asked, furrowing his brow. She had seemed to be doing a fine job, hadn’t she?

“Because you’re back,” the substitute replied: “I told you. Temporary solution.”

“But you are already a subway master! There’s no need to for-”

“I am not!” she interrupted him before he could finish. Mawile hadn’t even gotten to the beginning of the second sentence.

Her thin, gloved finger pointed at her dusty face, at her broken nose and flat-lipped, straight-lined mouth: “I am a Substitute,” she repeated a little slower, spelling out each syllable carefully. “I am temporarily filling in for one of the two Subway Bosses. You are said Subway Boss. You were before and you have remained as such.”

“... For all three years I’ve been missing?”

Mawile did not translate that. She answered him herself, nodding. Her owner probably had already understood.

Ingo was still, on paper, a Subway Boss.

No, actually - he had never stopped being a Subway Boss.

For all that was worth it, the whole world might as well have hallucinated his disappearance: checking Gear Station documents one would have been certain to have found him in the tunnels, or maybe in the control room, in a locomotive or one of the stops, casually making his rounds, checking maintenance, battling, driving, working as if his own friends and family weren’t desperately looking for him in every nook and cranny. Like a ghost, or a cutout. Empty air in a shape that resembled his, doing what he ought to be doing, unseen, unfelt, unheard, mindlessly performing tasks it was convinced it could achieve while being completely mute and deaf and blind and incorporeal, incapable of feeling hungry or tired. Housing the station like some kind of specter.

He had remained a Subway Boss, in Hisui. He had held onto those rags of a uniform like his life depended upon them and worn them religiously every second he could - but that was different. That was him trying to preserve and maintain whatever scrap of his own identity he had left. That was not important to others, nor did it conflict with the reality of his situation.

It was just yet another symbol of his many statuses: he was a part of the Pearl Clan, as his tunic showed; he was Sneasler’s warden, as his bracelet showed; he was a strange foreigner, as his old clothes showed.

Why was he a Subway Boss?

Why was his replacement something that should have lasted what sounded like a couple of days, maybe a week, always ready to be replaced back?

What if he had never met that kid, Sinnoh bless them, and had never had the chance to come back home?

“Why?” he only managed to say.

His throat felt weirdly dry.

Mawile made a quick gesture. The train swerved again, and the overhead handles leaned to Ingo’s left; Briosa’s body shifted towards his right with the fluidity that comes from practiced ease while her feet remained unmoved on the ground, and he watched how the corners of her rectangular smile eased downwards until her mouth was a perfectly emotionless straight line.

She looked at him intently, with her rot green eyes; she blinked.

“I don’t think anybody could ever really understand just how stubborn your brother is.”

So it had been Emmet’s decision?

What was his plan? To go on his whole life like that? Pretending his brother was still there, somewhere, doing everything he always did, just always out of reach? Was he ever going to give up, eventually? Bury an empty casket? Or was he going to keep convincing himself that somebody was still just sleeping coated in dust in that empty room until the day he dropped?

Something abnormally cheery snapped him out of his spiral.

He looked up. Briosa was smiling again, in a strangely stiff way, and looking right into his eyes like she was trying to drill through his pupils.

Her words reached him with a slight delay, her voice squeaky and disgustingly dripping with sugar-coated honey.

“I collect teeth!”

Ingo was so taken by surprise that he completely stopped thinking.

Alright.

“This is a conversation stopper!” she continued, tone unchanged, the shade of her visor over her unblinking eyes making her suddenly appear mildly terrifying. “I would like for the conversation to stop!”

Frankly, that sounded like a marvelous idea.

He gave her a thumbs up.

She cheerfully nodded in thanks. One of her hands shot up from where she had held both behind her back, pointing somewhere behind her passenger.

Ingo followed it.

The world outside the glass rushed past him, an endless cave carved by fulminous winds and globes of light flying towards the end of the train; and then the walls ended, and it was bright.

Not bright as in daily - bright as in bright, deep blues, and bright, swaying greens or golds. Bright as in bright, far off stars, illuminating houses in dots or clusters with hundreds of different colors against the shadowed backdrop the night draped over hills or plains or mountains in large blue paint strokes.

Raising his head skyward he found only bright, small white sputters in that waveless celestial ocean - all their brethren fallen to inhabit a poor thing like the Earth, to shield it from the fear of a dreaded something hiding in the same shade humans could not see through: their sparks pierced apart the foliage of any trees they found to reach bright, murky waters flowing away, streams like long sleeves of light fabric left out to flutter in the wind.

The mountain coming closer colored itself a bright, luminous silver as the night peeled back from it momentarily only to return all at once when the train ran right into the tunnel dug through its entrails, fitting within it perfectly. The lights were back once more, rectangular in shape, and began zipping past the metal giant, eager to reach what to the passengers had been the entrance - he couldn’t help but wonder where they would have gone next, once out of this cave, if they would have flown away into the sky they’d been taken away from or if they planned to head towards the cities instead to escape the monotony of their previous home - as the clanging of the rails spurred them onwards between the empty patches of carved rock left in the wake of their travel.

Outside there was a long line of darkness, extending bright, golden beams into the night sky to lead the winged beasts trying to lower themselves to the ground with utmost care: the Mistralton City Airport. How weird, when looked at like this, from the outside in! Skyla’s bright red hair would have certainly glowed in the dark, even if such a big distance would have shrunk her to the size of a doll; if she’d been out he would have been able to spot her and wave at her. But how could she notice him back? He strained his eyes looking for her, but it was too bright and too dark at the same time.

Fields of crops distracted him, black soil ready for sowing interwoven with already matured stems. He found himself half entranced by the way the latter danced in the cool wind and how they rustled, piqued, like Staravias furiously preening their feathers back in place after a gust of wind left them in disarray, as the train passed them by. Under the nightly veil they looked like a cobalt sea; beneath the sun they must have seemed like forests of green algae misplaced, somehow, on land, moved by invisible currents...

So Unova was this, too? Beyond the paved cement roads and the sturdy buildings and the endless man-made light? He looked up again: more stars had come out, but nowhere near the galaxy the Pearl Clan so adored to gaze upon, the same he’d watched up there near the peak of Mount Coronet. They seemed lonely in the same strange way that makes melancholy feel lovely.

Those were Unovan stars. The Hisuian ones had gone, had left with their era. Somewhere out there they were traveling, maybe in a train.

Maybe they were resting on the ground, in the many lights of the many cities.

He liked both of those ideas.

(He needed to stop thinking of Hisui.)

Ingo turned back to Briosa after what had seemed like ages spent looking out the window like a little kid, bright white eyes wide with wonder.

She smiled, the corners of her mouth curling it into a square bracket.

“It’s a beautiful place,” he only managed to say.

She read his lips and conceded, sweetly: “It’s nice.”

Mawile chirped in agreement.

Anville Town introduced itself first with the sight of its bridge closing in, its station appearing only once the train was fully out of the thick forests around the small settlement. From above the bricks, once everything was quiet, the breeze carried what seemed like the sound of a flute.

Through the glass on the other side of the car he watched as the few passengers still on the train stumbled out and hurried back home as instructed by the conductor over the speakers.

They awaited a minute, maybe two, in near perfect silence.

The buzzing of electric lines above them was becoming comforting.

Mawile clacked her large maw and signed something; Briosa made an indescribable face ascribed to some sort of yet undiscovered emotion, though certainly leaning towards negative and vaguely malicious.

“Excuse me,” she began.

Ingo nodded, excusing her, as she turned towards the cab.

“JACKIE! FURZE!” she screamed so loud that he jumped in his seat: “I KNOW YOU’RE STILL IN THERE! YOU’RE NOT GONNA HAVE ANOTHER STATION SLEEPOVER! IF BY THE TIME I GET TO TEN I HAVEN’T SEEN YOU GET OUT OF THIS TRAIN I’M TEARING THE PHALANXES OUT OF YOUR FINGERS AND BOILING BROTH OUT OF THEM! ONE TWO THREE FOUR FIVE SIX-”

The door leading into the car slammed open: scrambling messily as though the pavement was covered in oil, the two Depot Agents forwent any friendship between them in favor of avoiding the very real threat, even at the cost of sacrificing the other.

They barely had the time to raise their hats as a goodbye with a pair of hasty ‘goodnight boss!’ before they quickly disappeared into the station.

Briosa watched them without changing expression. She took their place in the cab naturally, her composure utterly unbroken, and made quick work on the control panel to set the Grade of Automation to 4 so she wouldn’t need to drive it herself. Ingo looked as she activated the intercom for one last warning, her cavity-inducing saccharine voice reverberating through the empty Steelix carcass on wheels.

Then the sliding doors closed with a gentle, dull sound; the metal beast set itself in motion, inertia pulling the overhead handles to the side before they settled back into their unsteady stillness, shaking with every rumble on the tracks.

The Substitute walked out the cab and closed it behind herself.

“Sorry about that,” she said with such simplicity that it almost scared him. “They’re idiots.”

Ingo blinked heavily.

He turned away from her, looking instead Mawile in the eyes: “May I ask why such a harsh sentence was warranted?” he asked, watching as she translated.

“Remaining in Gear Station at night, let alone overnight, is strictly prohibited,” her aidee replied, “But those two have camped in there before and will try to again. Furze because he’s obsessed with trains and Jackie because they like making it seem like they’re a ghost infesting the station.”

Ah. “That is reckless behaviour,” he conceded, “But I’m not sure the bodily harm was necessary.”

She shrugged: “It works! And I like making colorful threats.”

As mean as that was, he could believe that. It was still an exercise in creative writing or improvisation after all - even if maybe not that pleasant for others to hear, especially if it was directed at them very specifically.

“Speaking of which, I would like to ask you a favor.”

Ingo studied her face: nothing about it said that she was going to request he lend her one of his bones willingly or otherwise, so he nodded.

“Emmet should not come to work tomorrow,” she began: “It’s a scheduled break day. Every Gear Station employee including him has one and it’s a regular occurrence specifically so nobody risks overworking themselves.”

That sounded like a very useful idea. Commanding the station seemed like stressful work for everybody involved, even despite the fact that by now they were probably used to it. Between conducting the trains and the myriad of things to keep in check in the control room, departures and arrivals and delays and scheduling maintenance and whatmore and whatnot - it really wasn’t any wonder such a decision had been taken. He doubted he would have managed such a routine.

(But he had, hadn’t he?)

(He had, once. It had been his routine, once. His life. Not even four years ago, it had been his life.)

Briosa tilted her head slightly, snapping him out of his musings with the slight movement of her braids: her right one draped itself along her cheek, while the left one - which started at the front of her temple and ended up tied at the back of her head - moved away enough to show the thin sideburn following the curve of her jaw, ends split into diverted scissor blades.

Oh!

So she did have them too.

Something about them suited her face.

“Please tell him that if he so much as tries to walk in tomorrow I will fold him like a shirt and hurl him straight home through a window, frisbee-style.”

Ingo replied with a blank stare.

On one hand, that sounded a little extreme.

On the other hand, this was about Emmet.

He gave her a solemn thumbs up.

She adjusted the brim of her cap to cast a dark shadow over her rotten green eyes and gave him a toothy, rectangular grin: “Thank you for your cooperation!” her sugary voice chirped: “We hope you enjoy the remainder of your ride home.”

Mawile gently pulled at his sleeve and helpfully pointed back to the glass, to the world breezing past the three of them, only living beings in the rumorous stomach of a wheeled Gyarados, as if to steer him into a more pleasant experience with her beak-like smile and the slight snap of her much larger maw.

Ingo thanked her with a deep nod, and let himself become absorbed once more by the beauty of nighttime Unova.

The train arrived at 11:31 p.m., with the slightest delay. Emmet notably deflated in relief when the doors to the last car opened, his brother’s silhouette stark against the neon white light as he rushed to greet him. Briosa only peeked through without getting on the platform, upper body bent at a forty-five degree angle and face inscrutable; Ingo, though he lit up as soon as his younger twin came into view, seemed a little worn by the rather busy day he’d just had.

“You’re back,” he said. He could have sounded a little more emotive, or at least not as overwhelmingly flat - even more than usual - but evidently he was also pretty exhausted.

“I am!” his older brother replied without missing a beat. “It was a very interesting journey! It was quite enjoyable, despite a minor accident.”

“Oh? What happened.”

“Nothing to be too worried about - I simply had not expected the train to ricochet me into the floor when setting into motion,” Ingo commented (getting a slight wheeze out of Emmet), before turning a little bashful: “Briosa was kind enough to catch me before I actually fell... And regrettably, I repaid her by almost deafening her.”

His white-clad sibling furrowed his brows almost imperceptibly. He turned towards the substitute, who looked back at him with the gaze of someone who has no idea what the hell is happening but does not want to interrupt.

“That’s an achievement,” he noted.

“I would not call ‘causing irreparable damage to the senses’ an achievement.”

Emmet signed as he spoke: “It’s hard to deafen the deaf.”

Ingo did not reply to that.

Briosa, on the other hand, threw her head back and cawed out a single rubbery laugh before gently slapping the very embarrassed freshly returned (if not going to be operative for a long while) subway master’s back a couple of times, in a sort of attempt at comforting him while also sharing in Emmet’s amusement.

She pushed him a little closer to his brother: “That’s a sign you need some sleep, boss,” she said airily: “I’ll handle things here.”

The younger twin signed something at her, probably a question to make sure she was certain about that, if she didn’t need any help at all; she waved back at him as if to shove away his worries and replied silently with a formal salute - two fingers leaving the brim of her cap and a squinty-eyed smile. Mawile chirped her own goodnight to them from her shoulder when Ingo waved, jaws snapping merrily as the two men departed.

Golden lights had dimmed to dirty silver in the rest of the station to match the eerie silence dripping from the walls. Gone was the noise and the chaos; exiting into the night lit up by the spherical lights of the street lamps somehow felt as though they were still underground, rushing through a now spacious tunnel.

“Was it good?” Emmet asked as they walked: “Coming along?”

“In spite of how tired I am, I’d say so, yes,” Ingo nodded. “It’s been an interesting day, despite the noise. And I got to see Iris and Marshal!”

“That was a nice surprise, yep.”

“I wish you’d been able to come along too. They were so excited at the prospect of seeing both of us.”

“Were they?”

“Yes, I’ve told you. But maybe for another time.”

“Hm. Another time.”

“Oh - I saw Unova, you know? While on the train?”

“Oh?”

“Yes! I saw the fields and the mountains, the city lights - the airport at Mistralton City, even. It’s a beautiful place.”

“The airport?”

“Everywhere. The whole region.”

His brother smiled, and nodded.

They both yawned.

Good thing they still had some leftovers from yesterday. They probably wouldn’t have managed to cook on their own if they had to.

“And Briosa?” Emmet asked suddenly.

“Hm?”

“Briosa. How is she. What do you think of her.”

“She’s...” several words he wasn’t sure he could have found in any dictionary come to his mind, but for the sake of being at least somewhat comprehensible he had to compromise: “A lot, to be completely honest with you. But I cannot say she wasn’t also quite kind and overall pleasant company to have.”

“She is, yup! Nice. And a handful. I’m glad.”

“Of what?”

“That she was nice. And that you enjoyed her.”

“Ah! I’m glad as well.”

The faintest buzz of electricity and metallic rattling within trash cans accompanied their silence for a while.

“That reminds me, she had a message for you.”

“A message?”

“She politely asked me to tell you that if you come to the Station tomorrow, which is your scheduled free day, she will - and I quote - fold you like a shirt and hurl you straight home through a window, frisbee-style.”

The younger wheezed.

Ingo stared at him awfully stone-faced.

“She meant it.”

“I know.”

“Do you also know I too will enforce your free day upon you?”

“I know.”

“I am serious.”

“I know.”