roule
take it all or leave it... I Feel You
new semester, new me, new fic. i started writing this recently between assignments, and havent been able to stop. please help me.
hopefully with this i'll be back to regular writing in the fandom again lol
1.
Dead leaves in the breeze
Milou wakes up in a comforting warmth, with the front of her body pressing up against an unfamiliar form. At first, she stares blankly at it, notices how it moves up and down slightly through the thick red comforter covering it. Then, a bolt of coldness causes her to leap to her feet, stumbling back into the pale blue wall to her right with a soft thunk.
Her head spins around the room, hands grasping at the wall, chest tight and breaths coming out in fast puffs. The room is rather cozy, with a small stove towards the end of the room, with dark hardwood floors and a red Persian rug covering most of it, and a stark white space heater humming in the corner of the room.
It would all be comforting to the woman if this was really her room, where she had gone to bed the night before.
The night before, Milou had done an all-nighter, perched on her desk chair and plunking away at her animation homework, watching as the shapes she drew morphed and shifted on the canvas. Her room was puny, barely bigger than a prison cell, with half of the room taken up by her bed and the rest taken up by her desk and dresser. Pulggie had fallen asleep underneath her desk on the linoleum, the metal pokemon was curled up in a ball-like shape, blue eyes shut. Milou made sure to not accidentally hit him as her legs swung up and down as she worked, not just to let him sleep, but with the knowledge that his steel shell could break a toenail or worse if she swung her legs too fast.
After a few hours of work, her eyes began to ache, and she couldn’t bring herself to focus onto the screen anymore. After a short trip to the shower in the communal bathroom, she flopped onto the bed, locked the door to her room, flipped on her radio to classical music, and passed out.
And woke up… here. With a stranger sleeping beside her, in a bed that wasn’t hers, in a room that was unfamiliar to her with no memory of how she got there.
Pacing towards the window, dodging a nightstand that sat by the right side of the bed, Milou pulls back the cloth curtains. Instead of the brilliant blue sky-scrapers jutting up into the sky in her native city of Philadelphia, the buildings are brick, with elaborate neon signage on them. There are people walking down the street, some with pokemon walking beside them, too far away for her to recognize their species. She can’t think of anywhere that looks like that in her home city, and she quickly pushes the curtains back down. Her hands shake against her thighs, sweat trickling from them as she steps away from the window quickly.
Staring at the figure resting on the bed, Milou feels the cold leave her body, and a sort of itchy curiosity takes its place. She knows she shouldn’t act upon it, but the itch runs down her spine, and it's no use. Slowly, she approaches the bed, and tugs at the comforter. A young man's face, with a thin triangular jaw, full pink lips, and soft hair strewn across his pale face, a fading pink, slowly becoming a light blonde. His expression is almost angelic, eyes shut and mouth hanging slightly open. His face contorts at the sudden lack of blanket coverage, grumbling something the woman doesn't understand.
It takes her a few seconds to recognize the man, and relief washes over before confusion immediately follows it. Why is he here?
Milou grips the man’s bare shoulders firmly, and shakes him until she feels him begin to move underneath her palms. A long thin hand bats at her sluggishly, and grips her wrist as he turns away from the light, loosely but still enough to her cheeks to flush.
That’s all it takes to get it going, her mind sneers, huh? Just a slight tap of fingers...
“Please,” the man groans in a familiar low voice, turning away from her and burying his head into the blankets, “jus’ five more minutes, coach…”
“Yunseo,” Milou says, her voice sounding small and creaky in her ears, “wake up, it's me. Milou.”
That causes the man to pause, before turning to her with bleary, dark eyes. He blinks quickly, before rubbing at his eyes quickly.
“Milou…?” he murmurs, his thick eyebrows furrowing, “how…?”
“I don’t know,” she says, rubbing at her mouth, the urge to smile incredulously burning at her lips, “I just woke up, and I’m pressed up against your back.”
“But..”
“I know,” she huffs, before tugging on his wrist, “c’mon, do you think you know where we are?”
With a groan, Yunseo wobbles to his feet, the blanket sliding off his bare chest, and a hand rubbing at his eyes. Milou watches as he walks to the window, peering outside with half-open eyes. He stands still for a moment, and she observes his expression morph from irritation to confusion, then finally to horror.
He turns to her, his dark eyes wide and his mouth tight.
“I don’t know where this is,” he says softly, his voice shaking.
“Me either,” Milou sighs, rubbing the bridge of her nose, “what were you doing before you woke up?”
Yunseo turns and stares at Milou with blank eyes, mouth in a thin line.
“Sleeping.”
“Before that, asshole!”
“Uh,” he hums, tapping his chin with his index finger, “well… I was training Hankar for a bit, trying to teach her some new move combos. Nothing was sticking, so I decided to let her rest, and then I played Reign of Heroes until my eyes felt like they were going to melt out of my skull, and passed out shortly after.”
“And what were you doing?” He asks, tilting his head to the side with a small smile on his lips.
“I worked on homework until my brain broke, then went straight to bed.”
The man makes a low “ah” noise, and Milou watches him as he scratches the nape of his neck with his long fingers. He glances over at the woman, and a tinge of red comes over his cheeks. Milou looks down at herself, only wearing a black bra with navy boxers, before she glances up at Yunseo, who is wearing nothing but a pair of white boxers, his pale bare chest and long legs burning itself into her mind.
“We should get dressed,” Milou says quickly, moving towards a dresser resting a few paces to the right, “if the two of us have to go out to find out where the **** we are, I’d rather not do it with my tits out.”
Yunseo laughs a little, a low, pleasing noise, and the two of them busy themselves with searching through the dresser. There’s nothing in here that seems to belong to Milou, no graphic t-shirts, no skinny jeans, just dress pants, heavy pull-over sweaters in a spectrum of different colors, and crisp white dress shirts.
Eventually, Milou decides on a dress shirt and red wool sweater combo, with long dark slacks and grey knee socks as well. The sweater feels heavy on her chest, but it looks nice, and it’s better than nothing. As Yunseo changes, she averts her eyes, picking at the fuzz on the arms of her sweater.
It’s… been a while since the two of them had seriously spoken to each other, or hung out and did **** together. It wasn’t because of a fight they had, or any tension between them, just their lives going in different directions and forcing them apart. Milou had art school, then her barista job at a local coffee joint, Yunseo had tourneys to compete at, sponsorships to fulfill, and media events to attend. They had never been able to find a time to play Reign of Heroes or some other video game together when they had those things going on, and could only muster up conversations through text some of the time.
Blinking, an itching feeling behind her eyes, she crosses her arms and sighs loudly. Why does she care now? Yunseo is here, and they could have whatever time they need to make up for the dry spell of conversation.
Instead of seeping further in painful memories, Milou decides to wander the room aimlessly, to investigate it a little further. In a small walk-in closet, she finds her set of three pokeballs on one of the shelves, with their red paint chipping off after years of use. On the adjacent shelf towards the left, she finds a set of six black pokeballs, with a orange-red ring circling around the top. Below the shelf are their phones, laptops and chargers, in a neat stack. Milou’s Fender Stratocaster lies off to the side, with her amp and pedals in front of it, holding it from falling forwards. Reaching out, she grabs one of her pokeballs, and lightly bounces it in her hand.
Nice of her kidnappers to think of her pokemon too, she wouldn’t know what to do with herself if they were back at her dorm. The thought makes her face crease in agitation, and she runs a hand through her dirty blonde hair.
Suddenly, there’s a press of hands on her shoulders, and she jumps a foot in the air. Glancing behind her, she can see Yunseo, wearing a dress shirt with dark dress pants, staring at her with wide eyes.
“What’s in there?” Yunseo asks, and Milou spins on her heels to properly face him, “oh, sorry for scaring you.”
“It’s fine, I’m just a little jumpy,” she sighs, rubbing at her chest, “it’s our belongings, my guitar, our phones, our pokemon, that sort of stuff.”
Yunseo’s eyes go wide, and quickly gathers all of his pokeballs. Once they’re in his arms, he seems to visibly relax, shoulders drooping. Looking down at her own pokeball, the artist realizes that if they’re going to investigate the mess they’re in, they’re going to need some protection. With a click, Milou taps the button on her pokeball, and in a stream of light, Pulggie appears. The lairon stares at Yunseo for a few seconds, before emitting a low grumble, walking towards his feet and rubbing against his pant leg.
“Pulggie!” he exclaims, reaching down to pat his armor, which garners a happy grumble from the metal pokemon, “you’ve grown so much, buddy!”
Milou laughs, fingers digging into her sleeve. A wave of unease sets in her body as she eyes the door, and Yunseo follows her gaze.
“Let’s get going,” Milou sighs, her hands feeling remarkably cold, “we can’t just stay in this room forever, you know?”
With a few steps, and a twist of the golden doorknob, she pushes out into the unknown world that lays beyond the door.
This ‘unknown’ turns out to be a long hallway, with tacky flowery wallpaper, full of several doors and leading to a small staircase made of what appears to be iron. Pulggie crawls past his owner, and sniffs around, looking over everything with his big blue eyes.
“It looks… quite quaint,” Yunseo says, head swiveling around, “do you think we’re in a boarding house of some kind?”
The artist shrugs, watching Pulggie out of the corner of her eye. The metal pokemon eyes the iron railing of the staircase, and makes a low squeaking noise and shuffling towards it as quickly as he can go. Milou steps forward, and is about to start walking up to her pokemon until the sudden noise of a door flinging open from behind shocks all of them.
Whipping around, Milou is met with a woman, about to the artist’s shoulder blades, wearing a similar outfit to Yunseo, but with a ribbon tied around the collar of her shirt. She stares up at Milou with wide dark eyes, with her dark glasses glinting in the light.
There’s a moment of silence between all three of them, a tight, blanketing quiet that makes Milou’s nerves itch, before the woman speaks up.
“Is that you, Milou?” she asks, and Milou immediately breaks into a face-splitting grin on hearing her voice.
“Sure ****in’ is. You wake up in here too, Diana?”
Diana nods, crossing her arms, and brushing a strand of her light brown hair behind her ear. There’s a moment where Milou opens her mouth to ask her something before another door opens, and a mop of messy dark hair peeks out. The person in the doorway stares at them with dark eyes, their mouth hanging slightly open.
“H-How are you guys here?” the person asks, and they slowly walk out into the hallway.
“Do I look like I know, Michael?” Diana snarks, turning towards the man, who now stands in the middle of the hallway wearing a blazer, dress shirt and tie, a teal frog pokemon standing by his side.
“Well, I kind of hoping you or someone would have,” Micheal says, scratching at the nape of his neck with long fingers, before looking up at Yunseo, “do you have any idea, Yunseo?
“Absolutely not. Milou woke me up fifteen minutes ago.”
“She woke you up?” Diana asks in disbelief, her eyes wide.
“We were sleeping in the same room,” Milou says, rubbing her lips with her index finger, “you guys don’t have roommates?”
Both of them shake their heads, and Milou watches with some amusement as Michael’s marshstomp imitates his owner, shaking its head violently. Pulggie slowly approaches the other pokemon, letting out a low humming noise which causes the marshstomp to jolt backward. It wraps its large flippers around it’s owners legs, which causes the lairon to pause and stare at it, cocking his head to the side. The artist smiles softly, and pats Pulggie’s back, which garners a loud snort.
“Hm,” she says, rubbing her chin in slow circles, “I wonder why that is, then.”
“Maybe they ran out of room?” Yunseo says, walking towards one of the other doors.
He knocks on it, a quick rap-rap-rap, and pauses for a response. There’s a long silence before Yunseo twists the doorknob and pulls the door open with a loud creak. Peeking in, Milou sees a messy bed, its comforter nearly sliding off of it, pillows resting on the floor in odd positions. The closet doors are flung open as well, with various objects strewn across the floor, mainly some sort of brown canvas messenger bag. If Milou looks carefully, she can see the glinting of something circular and metallic underneath the cover, peeking out slightly.
“Someone already high-tailed it out of this shithole, huh?” she mumbles to herself, drumming her fingers on the doorframe.
“****. I was really hoping that someone would be in there,” Yunseo sighs, frowning to himself and rubbing his thumb against his pants pocket, “someone who could tell us what the **** is going on.”
Milou frowns, before feeling something nudge against her leg. Pulggie stares up at her with a soft gaze, emitting a low squeaking noise. The artist kneels down and lets the metal pokemon rest his head on her lap, running her hand down his iron armor.
“I know, I know,” she coos to him, barely noticing Michaels expression of amazement out of the corner of her eye, “you must be just as scared as we are at this brand new place, aren’t you Pulggie? Poor baby…”
Suddenly, Milou hears loud, quick footsteps coming from the end of the hall. Whipping her head up, she’s met with a man, must be in his mid-twenties at this point, only about five or so years older than her she guesses, his boxy face tight and hands to his sides. Her throat catches, and the artist freezes in place as icy terror runs through her, just staring ahead and hoping somehow that he doesn’t notice her. Through the haze of fear, Milou can feel a shaky hand rest on her shoulder, and looks up at Yunseo whose face seems tight with some mixture of agitation and fear.
At least they’ll be together in death, Milou laments to herself, and closes her eyes in anticipation of the incoming blow that’ll end this all.
There’s no such blow, and instead…
“What the **** are you all still doing here?” The man yells in a thick British accent, and Milou grits her teeth at both his volume and his tone, “they’re all going to be here in thirty-****ing-minutes, and you’re still up here, sitting on your asses and doing nothing!”
Milou opens her dark eyes wide, and whips her head over to Yunseo, who is gawking at the man from his kneeling position.
“Excuse me?” Michael exclaims, stepping forwards quickly, “What the **** are you talking about?”
The man looks at Michael, his face contorting and nostrils flaring.
“You heard me,” he snarls, stomping towards the boy until he’s nearly chest-to-chest to hin, “I tolerated you four oversleeping, but you’ve wasted two ****in’ hours at this point, two hours you could’ve spent earning your pay! Do you understand?”
“B-but,” Milou stammers, before a visibly shaking and furious Diana interrupts her, jutting a finger towards the man.
“What the **** are you talking about?! None of us agreed to this ****! Why did you-”
“-kidnap us?” the man groans, his expression softening into irritation, “I’ve heard that one before.”
Diana’s face drops, and the color leaves her face. hand falling limply to her sides, and she gapes at him.
“Frankly, I have no clue what you lot are trying to get with this. I met with all of you yesterday to discuss your contracts and your duties, and I have witnesses and the documents you signed as proof, so drop that lie quick.”
Milou feels her stomach flip, and a cold sensation comes over her. A silence falls over the group, and the artist’s mind rushes to come up with some sort of joke or solution to end it.
“I’m sorry for our lateness, sir. I’ve just been looking for the food I bought for Pulggie here,” Milou quickly lies with a wide smile before anyone can speak up, and rubs her lairon for extra effect, “his species has a very specific diet, and I accidentally left the iron I bought for him with Diana when I moved in!”
The man stares at her, then looks down at Pulggie with a disdainful stare.
“Can’t he wait?” he asks, scratching at the side of his face.
“Well, if I don’t feed him soon, he’ll start foraging for food around the building, and you wouldn’t want that, sir.”
“You think so?”
“Oh yes, sir,” the artist nods quickly, her smile faltering somewhat, “I mean, looking at the wonderful metalwork in my room and in the hallway, I would imagine it was quite expensive to have installed.”
The man’s eyebrows raise, and he steps back somewhat, eyeing Pulggie with some caution.
“All right,” he says, and Milou feels her body relax, “but another thirty minutes late, and you’re all fired.”
Milou nods quickly, a big toothy grin on her face. She watches as the man turns around, and walks back to the stairway, hand in his pants pocket. There are several minutes of silence as he heads down the stairs, and after waiting a few moments just to be sure he’s out of earshot, Milou turns to face her friends with a serious expression. Diana’s face is pallid, her eyes bugging out, Yunseo is visibly quivering, his eyes staring blankly at the stairway far ahead, and Michael is leaning against the wall, head in his hands.
She had no idea how she didn’t choke on any of her lies. It had felt seconds away, like a hand rising up from her belly, up her esophagus, to rip the words from her vocal cords before they even formed. That was luck, pure luck.
The base of her fingers itch suddenly, an annoying, not quite painful feeling. Almost like something pushing up underneath her skin. Milou scratches at it, looking down at her hands as she does it. The skin is peeling off there on both her hands, but other than that, they look fine. No rash or any sort of discoloration, as far as she can tell.
“How…?” Diana whispers, barely audible.
“I don’t know,” Yunseo says, his voice shaky and tight, “this doesn’t make any ****ing sense.”
“Let’s cross that bridge when we have the free time to get to it,” Michael sighs, walking over to the artist, “Milou, do you actually have to feed Pulggie?”
“Yeah,” she nods, and gets to her feet.
Rushing over to her room, Milou rummages through the closet, grabbing her two remaining pokeballs, praying deseprately to find some sort of scrap metal for Pulggie to eat. After a few moments of searching, she grabs a paper trash bag full of cans and what looks to be cut-up car parts. Poking through it gingerly, it looks like it’s all safe for her lairon, no paint to remove, nothing. So she lifts it, and cradles the awfully heavy bundle in her arms, walking out into hallway slowly. Her lairon instantly perks up, and scuttles over to his owner, making a happy grumbling noise.
“Please move out of the way, and cover your ears,” Milou warns, before unceremoniously dumping the trash bag onto the floor, her friends skittering away.
The artist throws the empty bag to the floor, slamming her palms over her ears and shutting her eyes tight as she watches Pulggie approach the pile of metal. Milou’s pretty good at blocking out most of the sound by now, but the loud scraping, screeching, and the crunching of metal as Pulggie chews through it and tears at it with his sharp teeth still makes her stomach churn and ears ache.
After several painful minutes, the noise stops, and Milou opens her eyes. Her lairon is looking up at her triumphantly, raising his head up in anticipation of a pat. There’s absolutely no sign of any remaining metal on the floor, and Milou grins from ear to ear.
“Good boy Pulggie!” she cheers, patting his head softly as he squeaks loudly, “you must’ve been really hungry, huh boy? C’mon, let’s go downstairs now!”
“Jesus,” Diana says, grimacing in pain, “how do you live with that?”
“You get used to it,” Milou shrugs, and Michael stares at her like she’s losing her mind.
Milou lets her mind roam as they walk over to the staircase. What is the cause of all this, exactly? Why are they here all of a sudden, in the middle of wherever apparently under contract to do something downstairs? And she doesn’t even want to delve too deep into the fact that they were seen signing these contracts. Just the thought of that makes her skin crawl, and she desperately racks her memory for any fragment of a moment relating to that.
As they pass by the last door, Milou’s eyes catch on something white hanging from the wall. She pauses to the protests of Yunseo, who she feels tug at her sleeve, and steps closer to it, examining it with squinting eyes.
It’s a calendar, one her mother would buy for her house, a picture of a flowery field somewhere. There’s flashes of reds and yellow, begonias Milou thinks, against a green field, all with a brilliant blue sky framing it all. However, Milou finds herself staring intently at the date, underneath the photo, in a large, simple font.
August 7th, 1963
“Jesus ****in’ christ,” she whispers.
hopefully with this i'll be back to regular writing in the fandom again lol
1.
Dead leaves in the breeze
Milou wakes up in a comforting warmth, with the front of her body pressing up against an unfamiliar form. At first, she stares blankly at it, notices how it moves up and down slightly through the thick red comforter covering it. Then, a bolt of coldness causes her to leap to her feet, stumbling back into the pale blue wall to her right with a soft thunk.
Her head spins around the room, hands grasping at the wall, chest tight and breaths coming out in fast puffs. The room is rather cozy, with a small stove towards the end of the room, with dark hardwood floors and a red Persian rug covering most of it, and a stark white space heater humming in the corner of the room.
It would all be comforting to the woman if this was really her room, where she had gone to bed the night before.
The night before, Milou had done an all-nighter, perched on her desk chair and plunking away at her animation homework, watching as the shapes she drew morphed and shifted on the canvas. Her room was puny, barely bigger than a prison cell, with half of the room taken up by her bed and the rest taken up by her desk and dresser. Pulggie had fallen asleep underneath her desk on the linoleum, the metal pokemon was curled up in a ball-like shape, blue eyes shut. Milou made sure to not accidentally hit him as her legs swung up and down as she worked, not just to let him sleep, but with the knowledge that his steel shell could break a toenail or worse if she swung her legs too fast.
After a few hours of work, her eyes began to ache, and she couldn’t bring herself to focus onto the screen anymore. After a short trip to the shower in the communal bathroom, she flopped onto the bed, locked the door to her room, flipped on her radio to classical music, and passed out.
And woke up… here. With a stranger sleeping beside her, in a bed that wasn’t hers, in a room that was unfamiliar to her with no memory of how she got there.
Pacing towards the window, dodging a nightstand that sat by the right side of the bed, Milou pulls back the cloth curtains. Instead of the brilliant blue sky-scrapers jutting up into the sky in her native city of Philadelphia, the buildings are brick, with elaborate neon signage on them. There are people walking down the street, some with pokemon walking beside them, too far away for her to recognize their species. She can’t think of anywhere that looks like that in her home city, and she quickly pushes the curtains back down. Her hands shake against her thighs, sweat trickling from them as she steps away from the window quickly.
Staring at the figure resting on the bed, Milou feels the cold leave her body, and a sort of itchy curiosity takes its place. She knows she shouldn’t act upon it, but the itch runs down her spine, and it's no use. Slowly, she approaches the bed, and tugs at the comforter. A young man's face, with a thin triangular jaw, full pink lips, and soft hair strewn across his pale face, a fading pink, slowly becoming a light blonde. His expression is almost angelic, eyes shut and mouth hanging slightly open. His face contorts at the sudden lack of blanket coverage, grumbling something the woman doesn't understand.
It takes her a few seconds to recognize the man, and relief washes over before confusion immediately follows it. Why is he here?
Milou grips the man’s bare shoulders firmly, and shakes him until she feels him begin to move underneath her palms. A long thin hand bats at her sluggishly, and grips her wrist as he turns away from the light, loosely but still enough to her cheeks to flush.
That’s all it takes to get it going, her mind sneers, huh? Just a slight tap of fingers...
“Please,” the man groans in a familiar low voice, turning away from her and burying his head into the blankets, “jus’ five more minutes, coach…”
“Yunseo,” Milou says, her voice sounding small and creaky in her ears, “wake up, it's me. Milou.”
That causes the man to pause, before turning to her with bleary, dark eyes. He blinks quickly, before rubbing at his eyes quickly.
“Milou…?” he murmurs, his thick eyebrows furrowing, “how…?”
“I don’t know,” she says, rubbing at her mouth, the urge to smile incredulously burning at her lips, “I just woke up, and I’m pressed up against your back.”
“But..”
“I know,” she huffs, before tugging on his wrist, “c’mon, do you think you know where we are?”
With a groan, Yunseo wobbles to his feet, the blanket sliding off his bare chest, and a hand rubbing at his eyes. Milou watches as he walks to the window, peering outside with half-open eyes. He stands still for a moment, and she observes his expression morph from irritation to confusion, then finally to horror.
He turns to her, his dark eyes wide and his mouth tight.
“I don’t know where this is,” he says softly, his voice shaking.
“Me either,” Milou sighs, rubbing the bridge of her nose, “what were you doing before you woke up?”
Yunseo turns and stares at Milou with blank eyes, mouth in a thin line.
“Sleeping.”
“Before that, asshole!”
“Uh,” he hums, tapping his chin with his index finger, “well… I was training Hankar for a bit, trying to teach her some new move combos. Nothing was sticking, so I decided to let her rest, and then I played Reign of Heroes until my eyes felt like they were going to melt out of my skull, and passed out shortly after.”
“And what were you doing?” He asks, tilting his head to the side with a small smile on his lips.
“I worked on homework until my brain broke, then went straight to bed.”
The man makes a low “ah” noise, and Milou watches him as he scratches the nape of his neck with his long fingers. He glances over at the woman, and a tinge of red comes over his cheeks. Milou looks down at herself, only wearing a black bra with navy boxers, before she glances up at Yunseo, who is wearing nothing but a pair of white boxers, his pale bare chest and long legs burning itself into her mind.
“We should get dressed,” Milou says quickly, moving towards a dresser resting a few paces to the right, “if the two of us have to go out to find out where the **** we are, I’d rather not do it with my tits out.”
Yunseo laughs a little, a low, pleasing noise, and the two of them busy themselves with searching through the dresser. There’s nothing in here that seems to belong to Milou, no graphic t-shirts, no skinny jeans, just dress pants, heavy pull-over sweaters in a spectrum of different colors, and crisp white dress shirts.
Eventually, Milou decides on a dress shirt and red wool sweater combo, with long dark slacks and grey knee socks as well. The sweater feels heavy on her chest, but it looks nice, and it’s better than nothing. As Yunseo changes, she averts her eyes, picking at the fuzz on the arms of her sweater.
It’s… been a while since the two of them had seriously spoken to each other, or hung out and did **** together. It wasn’t because of a fight they had, or any tension between them, just their lives going in different directions and forcing them apart. Milou had art school, then her barista job at a local coffee joint, Yunseo had tourneys to compete at, sponsorships to fulfill, and media events to attend. They had never been able to find a time to play Reign of Heroes or some other video game together when they had those things going on, and could only muster up conversations through text some of the time.
Blinking, an itching feeling behind her eyes, she crosses her arms and sighs loudly. Why does she care now? Yunseo is here, and they could have whatever time they need to make up for the dry spell of conversation.
Instead of seeping further in painful memories, Milou decides to wander the room aimlessly, to investigate it a little further. In a small walk-in closet, she finds her set of three pokeballs on one of the shelves, with their red paint chipping off after years of use. On the adjacent shelf towards the left, she finds a set of six black pokeballs, with a orange-red ring circling around the top. Below the shelf are their phones, laptops and chargers, in a neat stack. Milou’s Fender Stratocaster lies off to the side, with her amp and pedals in front of it, holding it from falling forwards. Reaching out, she grabs one of her pokeballs, and lightly bounces it in her hand.
Nice of her kidnappers to think of her pokemon too, she wouldn’t know what to do with herself if they were back at her dorm. The thought makes her face crease in agitation, and she runs a hand through her dirty blonde hair.
Suddenly, there’s a press of hands on her shoulders, and she jumps a foot in the air. Glancing behind her, she can see Yunseo, wearing a dress shirt with dark dress pants, staring at her with wide eyes.
“What’s in there?” Yunseo asks, and Milou spins on her heels to properly face him, “oh, sorry for scaring you.”
“It’s fine, I’m just a little jumpy,” she sighs, rubbing at her chest, “it’s our belongings, my guitar, our phones, our pokemon, that sort of stuff.”
Yunseo’s eyes go wide, and quickly gathers all of his pokeballs. Once they’re in his arms, he seems to visibly relax, shoulders drooping. Looking down at her own pokeball, the artist realizes that if they’re going to investigate the mess they’re in, they’re going to need some protection. With a click, Milou taps the button on her pokeball, and in a stream of light, Pulggie appears. The lairon stares at Yunseo for a few seconds, before emitting a low grumble, walking towards his feet and rubbing against his pant leg.
“Pulggie!” he exclaims, reaching down to pat his armor, which garners a happy grumble from the metal pokemon, “you’ve grown so much, buddy!”
Milou laughs, fingers digging into her sleeve. A wave of unease sets in her body as she eyes the door, and Yunseo follows her gaze.
“Let’s get going,” Milou sighs, her hands feeling remarkably cold, “we can’t just stay in this room forever, you know?”
With a few steps, and a twist of the golden doorknob, she pushes out into the unknown world that lays beyond the door.
This ‘unknown’ turns out to be a long hallway, with tacky flowery wallpaper, full of several doors and leading to a small staircase made of what appears to be iron. Pulggie crawls past his owner, and sniffs around, looking over everything with his big blue eyes.
“It looks… quite quaint,” Yunseo says, head swiveling around, “do you think we’re in a boarding house of some kind?”
The artist shrugs, watching Pulggie out of the corner of her eye. The metal pokemon eyes the iron railing of the staircase, and makes a low squeaking noise and shuffling towards it as quickly as he can go. Milou steps forward, and is about to start walking up to her pokemon until the sudden noise of a door flinging open from behind shocks all of them.
Whipping around, Milou is met with a woman, about to the artist’s shoulder blades, wearing a similar outfit to Yunseo, but with a ribbon tied around the collar of her shirt. She stares up at Milou with wide dark eyes, with her dark glasses glinting in the light.
There’s a moment of silence between all three of them, a tight, blanketing quiet that makes Milou’s nerves itch, before the woman speaks up.
“Is that you, Milou?” she asks, and Milou immediately breaks into a face-splitting grin on hearing her voice.
“Sure ****in’ is. You wake up in here too, Diana?”
Diana nods, crossing her arms, and brushing a strand of her light brown hair behind her ear. There’s a moment where Milou opens her mouth to ask her something before another door opens, and a mop of messy dark hair peeks out. The person in the doorway stares at them with dark eyes, their mouth hanging slightly open.
“H-How are you guys here?” the person asks, and they slowly walk out into the hallway.
“Do I look like I know, Michael?” Diana snarks, turning towards the man, who now stands in the middle of the hallway wearing a blazer, dress shirt and tie, a teal frog pokemon standing by his side.
“Well, I kind of hoping you or someone would have,” Micheal says, scratching at the nape of his neck with long fingers, before looking up at Yunseo, “do you have any idea, Yunseo?
“Absolutely not. Milou woke me up fifteen minutes ago.”
“She woke you up?” Diana asks in disbelief, her eyes wide.
“We were sleeping in the same room,” Milou says, rubbing her lips with her index finger, “you guys don’t have roommates?”
Both of them shake their heads, and Milou watches with some amusement as Michael’s marshstomp imitates his owner, shaking its head violently. Pulggie slowly approaches the other pokemon, letting out a low humming noise which causes the marshstomp to jolt backward. It wraps its large flippers around it’s owners legs, which causes the lairon to pause and stare at it, cocking his head to the side. The artist smiles softly, and pats Pulggie’s back, which garners a loud snort.
“Hm,” she says, rubbing her chin in slow circles, “I wonder why that is, then.”
“Maybe they ran out of room?” Yunseo says, walking towards one of the other doors.
He knocks on it, a quick rap-rap-rap, and pauses for a response. There’s a long silence before Yunseo twists the doorknob and pulls the door open with a loud creak. Peeking in, Milou sees a messy bed, its comforter nearly sliding off of it, pillows resting on the floor in odd positions. The closet doors are flung open as well, with various objects strewn across the floor, mainly some sort of brown canvas messenger bag. If Milou looks carefully, she can see the glinting of something circular and metallic underneath the cover, peeking out slightly.
“Someone already high-tailed it out of this shithole, huh?” she mumbles to herself, drumming her fingers on the doorframe.
“****. I was really hoping that someone would be in there,” Yunseo sighs, frowning to himself and rubbing his thumb against his pants pocket, “someone who could tell us what the **** is going on.”
Milou frowns, before feeling something nudge against her leg. Pulggie stares up at her with a soft gaze, emitting a low squeaking noise. The artist kneels down and lets the metal pokemon rest his head on her lap, running her hand down his iron armor.
“I know, I know,” she coos to him, barely noticing Michaels expression of amazement out of the corner of her eye, “you must be just as scared as we are at this brand new place, aren’t you Pulggie? Poor baby…”
Suddenly, Milou hears loud, quick footsteps coming from the end of the hall. Whipping her head up, she’s met with a man, must be in his mid-twenties at this point, only about five or so years older than her she guesses, his boxy face tight and hands to his sides. Her throat catches, and the artist freezes in place as icy terror runs through her, just staring ahead and hoping somehow that he doesn’t notice her. Through the haze of fear, Milou can feel a shaky hand rest on her shoulder, and looks up at Yunseo whose face seems tight with some mixture of agitation and fear.
At least they’ll be together in death, Milou laments to herself, and closes her eyes in anticipation of the incoming blow that’ll end this all.
There’s no such blow, and instead…
“What the **** are you all still doing here?” The man yells in a thick British accent, and Milou grits her teeth at both his volume and his tone, “they’re all going to be here in thirty-****ing-minutes, and you’re still up here, sitting on your asses and doing nothing!”
Milou opens her dark eyes wide, and whips her head over to Yunseo, who is gawking at the man from his kneeling position.
“Excuse me?” Michael exclaims, stepping forwards quickly, “What the **** are you talking about?”
The man looks at Michael, his face contorting and nostrils flaring.
“You heard me,” he snarls, stomping towards the boy until he’s nearly chest-to-chest to hin, “I tolerated you four oversleeping, but you’ve wasted two ****in’ hours at this point, two hours you could’ve spent earning your pay! Do you understand?”
“B-but,” Milou stammers, before a visibly shaking and furious Diana interrupts her, jutting a finger towards the man.
“What the **** are you talking about?! None of us agreed to this ****! Why did you-”
“-kidnap us?” the man groans, his expression softening into irritation, “I’ve heard that one before.”
Diana’s face drops, and the color leaves her face. hand falling limply to her sides, and she gapes at him.
“Frankly, I have no clue what you lot are trying to get with this. I met with all of you yesterday to discuss your contracts and your duties, and I have witnesses and the documents you signed as proof, so drop that lie quick.”
Milou feels her stomach flip, and a cold sensation comes over her. A silence falls over the group, and the artist’s mind rushes to come up with some sort of joke or solution to end it.
“I’m sorry for our lateness, sir. I’ve just been looking for the food I bought for Pulggie here,” Milou quickly lies with a wide smile before anyone can speak up, and rubs her lairon for extra effect, “his species has a very specific diet, and I accidentally left the iron I bought for him with Diana when I moved in!”
The man stares at her, then looks down at Pulggie with a disdainful stare.
“Can’t he wait?” he asks, scratching at the side of his face.
“Well, if I don’t feed him soon, he’ll start foraging for food around the building, and you wouldn’t want that, sir.”
“You think so?”
“Oh yes, sir,” the artist nods quickly, her smile faltering somewhat, “I mean, looking at the wonderful metalwork in my room and in the hallway, I would imagine it was quite expensive to have installed.”
The man’s eyebrows raise, and he steps back somewhat, eyeing Pulggie with some caution.
“All right,” he says, and Milou feels her body relax, “but another thirty minutes late, and you’re all fired.”
Milou nods quickly, a big toothy grin on her face. She watches as the man turns around, and walks back to the stairway, hand in his pants pocket. There are several minutes of silence as he heads down the stairs, and after waiting a few moments just to be sure he’s out of earshot, Milou turns to face her friends with a serious expression. Diana’s face is pallid, her eyes bugging out, Yunseo is visibly quivering, his eyes staring blankly at the stairway far ahead, and Michael is leaning against the wall, head in his hands.
She had no idea how she didn’t choke on any of her lies. It had felt seconds away, like a hand rising up from her belly, up her esophagus, to rip the words from her vocal cords before they even formed. That was luck, pure luck.
The base of her fingers itch suddenly, an annoying, not quite painful feeling. Almost like something pushing up underneath her skin. Milou scratches at it, looking down at her hands as she does it. The skin is peeling off there on both her hands, but other than that, they look fine. No rash or any sort of discoloration, as far as she can tell.
“How…?” Diana whispers, barely audible.
“I don’t know,” Yunseo says, his voice shaky and tight, “this doesn’t make any ****ing sense.”
“Let’s cross that bridge when we have the free time to get to it,” Michael sighs, walking over to the artist, “Milou, do you actually have to feed Pulggie?”
“Yeah,” she nods, and gets to her feet.
Rushing over to her room, Milou rummages through the closet, grabbing her two remaining pokeballs, praying deseprately to find some sort of scrap metal for Pulggie to eat. After a few moments of searching, she grabs a paper trash bag full of cans and what looks to be cut-up car parts. Poking through it gingerly, it looks like it’s all safe for her lairon, no paint to remove, nothing. So she lifts it, and cradles the awfully heavy bundle in her arms, walking out into hallway slowly. Her lairon instantly perks up, and scuttles over to his owner, making a happy grumbling noise.
“Please move out of the way, and cover your ears,” Milou warns, before unceremoniously dumping the trash bag onto the floor, her friends skittering away.
The artist throws the empty bag to the floor, slamming her palms over her ears and shutting her eyes tight as she watches Pulggie approach the pile of metal. Milou’s pretty good at blocking out most of the sound by now, but the loud scraping, screeching, and the crunching of metal as Pulggie chews through it and tears at it with his sharp teeth still makes her stomach churn and ears ache.
After several painful minutes, the noise stops, and Milou opens her eyes. Her lairon is looking up at her triumphantly, raising his head up in anticipation of a pat. There’s absolutely no sign of any remaining metal on the floor, and Milou grins from ear to ear.
“Good boy Pulggie!” she cheers, patting his head softly as he squeaks loudly, “you must’ve been really hungry, huh boy? C’mon, let’s go downstairs now!”
“Jesus,” Diana says, grimacing in pain, “how do you live with that?”
“You get used to it,” Milou shrugs, and Michael stares at her like she’s losing her mind.
Milou lets her mind roam as they walk over to the staircase. What is the cause of all this, exactly? Why are they here all of a sudden, in the middle of wherever apparently under contract to do something downstairs? And she doesn’t even want to delve too deep into the fact that they were seen signing these contracts. Just the thought of that makes her skin crawl, and she desperately racks her memory for any fragment of a moment relating to that.
As they pass by the last door, Milou’s eyes catch on something white hanging from the wall. She pauses to the protests of Yunseo, who she feels tug at her sleeve, and steps closer to it, examining it with squinting eyes.
It’s a calendar, one her mother would buy for her house, a picture of a flowery field somewhere. There’s flashes of reds and yellow, begonias Milou thinks, against a green field, all with a brilliant blue sky framing it all. However, Milou finds herself staring intently at the date, underneath the photo, in a large, simple font.
August 7th, 1963
“Jesus ****in’ christ,” she whispers.
