The Great Butler
Hush, keep it down
Before I get started, I want to extend a great deal of thanks to my good friend Ren for providing assistance in constructing this chapter and with some of its content. I couldn’t have gotten it all together in this form without her assistance. Please check her writing out at AO3, under the name magumarashi.
I also need to warn, this chapter contains an explicit but not overly graphic scene of self-harm. If you wish to avoid seeing this scene, stop when you read the line “his relief would not last long” and skip to the line “You don’t have to do those kinds of things to yourself.”
-:-
CHAPTER 29.5: Don’t Say a Prayer for Me Now
-:-
Mercury’s defeat at Renzo’s hands brought a sudden but welcome end to the day’s grueling events. With her obstruction gone, Matt, Amanda, Olivia, Anabel and Nekou followed Renzo the rest of the way down the rocky trail to Blackthorn City, a gentle snowfall finally starting up right as they arrived in the mountainous city’s limits.
That was the point where Renzo parted ways. He split from the group with words just as strange and off-putting as those he’d arrived in the Ice Path clearing with, informing them that he was heading back to Blackthorn Gym to prepare for the battle he and Anabel were going to have the next day. A battle, he made sure to tell them, would ‘change everything.’ That was how he put it, anyway, but any thoughts they had about it left their minds almost as quickly as he departed himself.
The hunt for Genesect and battle with it near the Lake of Rage. Matt and his group joining forces with Team Rocket to break into the Guanosine Base. The fight with Polaris to free Nekou. And then, everything that happened during their trek through the Ice Path itself. It had been a brutal, draining day, and the trials the five endured were catching up and taking their toll.
As a result of their exhaustion, they sought respite at the hotel that had opened in the city a year or so earlier. It wasn’t the most luxurious accommodation any of them had stayed at, but it was more than comfortable enough. There was even a Pokémon Center inside it, allowing them to skip the delay of making an extra stop and start unwinding immediately after healing their Pokémon.
For Olivia, that meant splitting from the others as they went to their respective rooms. As tired as she was, she had too much anger still weighing on her mind to even think about resting. Her discontent saw her heading to the restaurant on the hotel’s first floor, going through the motions of buying a glass of pink Aprijuice and occupying a booth to consume it.
Numerous televisions filled the dining room, all set to a FlareNet newscast presented by Malva. Olivia paid the program almost as little attention as she did the other patrons milling about the area. She did glance back and forth between the cloyingly sweet drink she was nursing and the rotating, flame-like orange ‘F’ in the corner of the screen, but the information being imparted by the pink-haired, bespectacled anchor passed through Olivia’s head without note. A word or two did connect once in a while, enough to give her an idea that Malva was delivering an update on the Altru Northstar’s destruction, but Olivia didn’t care enough to concentrate on it.
“And now, we move on to the subject of Polaris…”
The moment that name entered her ears, Olivia dropped her straw back into the cup of juice and snapped her head toward the television. It was the one thing that stopped in her head before passing through, and the one thing that could break her out of her daze.
“Some call it a radical movement and a threat,” Malva continued, speaking directly to her viewers with unflinching poise, “others say it is a new way of thinking that offers a path to a better future. But what is really behind this increasingly popular group? Tonight, we will take a look at the identity of Polaris from within, from words passed on directly from their representatives.”
Malva paused, turning slightly to face a camera positioned just off to her left. As the perspective changed, a video of Zinzolin’s speech to the crowd in Goldenrod City appeared over her right shoulder.
“Many learned of Polaris for the first time via their high-profile public events, such as this one in Goldenrod City…” The video changed in accordance with Malva’s words, switching to footage of Ghetsis’s speech prior to the Ecruteak riot. “...or this one in Ecruteak City. There were also many television broadcasts leading up to these events, but following the attack on Ecruteak City, it was discovered that Ghetsis Harmonia, then-spokesman of Polaris, was exploiting the organization to gain power for himself. Polaris’s leader, who referred to himself only by the name ‘Father,’ announced via a speech to the world that Ghetsis had been exiled and that Polaris’s purpose was to end corruption in the Pokémon League and restore the planet to its natural state.”
“Yeah, a speech he hijacked your network to give,” Olivia grumbled to herself.
“Since then, Polaris has worked extensively to spread their message through all available outlets, but their growing popularity has left many concerned. FlareNet reached out to Polaris’s current spokespersons for comment on these issues, and we were provided with a statement from the organization detailing its stated beliefs and goals.”
Malva paused once more, this time to adjust her glasses and pick up a thin stack of papers from her desk, and Olivia clenched her teeth as the broadcaster started to read from them.
“A diseased culture leads to a diseased planet. This is a core tenet of our beliefs. The corrupt nature of the Pokémon League system has created an imbalance in society that threatens to doom everything humanity has built. Those who live comfortably on the backs of the less advantaged push society ever forward, but only in the name of enriching themselves further. Their insatiable hunger is destroying this world. Poisoning the environment. Depleting our resources. Earth is on the clock, and even though they know that grim truth, their concern lies not with doing something to avert it but with consuming as much for themselves as they can before time runs out. Only through radical change can the dark day where all of existence passes the point of no return be prevented. Yet, the voices of those crying out for change are ignored by the entitled, the corrupt, those like Governor Tobias whose only interest is hoarding their riches until the day of reckoning comes. That is why we, Polaris, exist. We are here to give those a voice to the dreams of those who yearn for a better, fairer and more just world, the sort of world that is the only one that can survive and avert our oncoming disaster. Humanity has lost its way thanks to the bottomless greed of those who take only for themselves. Those privileged people who treat our planet as poorly as they treat those below them, as an exploitable resource and nothing else. We call upon those who would answer the cries of the disadvantaged, the same cries as those of our very world, to step forward and join us. Our path is the only way to save our planet, and with all the corruption and destruction the Pokémon League system has wrought, we will use the next tournament held on the Indigo Plateau to rewrite the course of fate. That will be the day history changes.”
Even though she listened until Malva was done, Olivia hadn’t been able to keep watching. The maelstrom of emotions stirring within her made sure of that. It was hard enough merely to listen, but even the image of Malva reading from the papers was too much for her to handle.
“It’s not fair…” she fumed into her drink, her voice half a whisper and half a snarl. “All this work I’ve done to try and get your attention, and this is how I get it?! You have to be seeing everything I’ve gone through, Dad! A lot of it at the hands of the idiots following you! And yet people keep falling for Polaris’s… for Polaris’s… for all of your bullshit!” Her anger peaking, Olivia slammed her fist down on the table. “Now I have to find you just to smack some sense into you! It’s not fair!”
“Olivia?”
The sound of Anabel’s voice pulled Olivia back into reality. She turned away from the television to face her mother, who was slowly drawing ever closer to her table. Anabel had both literally and figuratively let her hair down, leaving her jacket, scarf, sunglasses and ribbon in her room while her tie hung loose around her neck. A knowing observer might very well have noted how much Olivia’s newly-cropped hairstyle made her resemble a younger version of her mother, and likewise how Anabel’s undone ponytail brought her appearance closer to Olivia’s previous one.
“Smile,” Olivia thought to herself. “Smile so she doesn’t know…”
As much as she wanted to put on a brave face, though, the signals from Olivia’s brain never connected and translated into action. Was it that a part of her wanted to cry out for help, even against the wishes of her conscious mind? She had no idea.
Anabel didn’t miss her daughter’s pained, pleading expressions. Seeing the way Olivia wordlessly begged her for help made her nervously rub her right thumb and first two fingers together. “I guess you heard all of that?” Anabel asked, her tone gentle and caring.
“I should ask you the same thing,” Olivia responded, throwing up as much of her tough veneer as she could. “How long have you been standing there?”
“I was just about to call out to you when that report started, so I heard everything,” Anabel revealed as she slid into the booth opposite Olivia. There could be no more putting off the inevitable, she resolved. Their problems had to be confronted head-on. “Can we talk?”
Olivia turned away, pouted and huffed, “About what?”
About what? A question that Anabel only then realized she should have asked herself sooner. There could have been one answer or a million. Where would she even start?
Much to her relief, an opportunity for temporary reprieve presented itself when she spied a waiter who happened to be looking in their direction. She beckoned him to the booth with a wave of her hand, internally thanking the fates for the extra time.
“Yes, Miss? How may I help you?”
“A Roserade Tea, please,” Anabel said with a pleasant smile.
“Right away.”
The waiter scurried away as quickly as he had come, and with him went Anabel’s ability to avoid the uncomfortable situation she was in. “I shouldn’t be trying to get out of this,” she thought, her lip turning ever slightly downward. “That’s what caused all of this in the first place!” Gathering her courage, she took a deep breath and uttered the only words she could think of. “Olivia, I’m sorry f-”
Much to Anabel’s surprise, Olivia cut her off. “Mom, I know you’re sorry, and I know you mean it,” she said, peering at her mother but not turning to face her again. Once she started talking, the trickle of her speech became a flood, her emotions coming out unchecked. “But… I just can’t get myself to believe it, you know? I really want to believe all of it! I really do! But after what I heard you say to Rosalie… the way you kept Amelia and Ophelia’s names from me… everything going back to when Dad died and you kept it quiet and sent me to stay in Rustboro, how do I know for sure you’re sorry now? How do I really know?!”
Anabel bit her lip. She’d seen the tired, despairing eyes she was staring into before. Oh, she’d seen them plenty of times over the years. What was different that time in the hotel, and what made looking into them agonizingly painful, was that in the past those broken eyes had been her own, haunting her every time she saw her own reflection. Now they were Olivia’s, and they conveyed what she was feeling to Anabel more clearly than anything else possibly could.
“Olivia…” As much as it hurt Anabel to say what she was thinking, the elder Mistbloom knew there wouldn’t and couldn’t be any turning back. If there was to be any conquering of their differences, she'd have to shed her fears of tackling them. “I’m not going to expect you to forgive me, and I’m not going to ask you to understand either. Just… hear me out.”
“I’m listening.” Olivia begrudgingly acknowledged.
“I just couldn’t…” Anabel paused, folding her hands over themselves on the table as she rethought what she was going to say. “Back then, after your father died… that wasn’t long after what happened to your sisters. I couldn’t… I couldn’t deal with the pain. It was easier to just run away from all of it.”
Just then, the waiter returned, placing a white porcelain teacup on the table in front of Anabel.
“Miss, your Roserade Tea,” he said.
“Thank you.” Anabel flashed another smile at him, but as soon as he departed, the expression disappeared from her face. The aromatic liquid left a slight burning sensation as she swallowed her first sip of it, but the feeling didn’t entirely register in her mind. “It was easier to just run away from all of it, so I did. I pushed it all onto you and turned away from my responsibilities, and now I see how wrong I was. I’m sorry, Olivia. I’m so, so sorry.”
Although she said nothing, Olivia clearly was listening to what Anabel was saying. Her pout had faded, and she was intently watching her mother’s every move. It wasn’t until that moment that she realized she could feel a tear rolling down her cheek, and for the briefest time, she found herself wishing she had brought her sunglasses so she could cover her eyes.
“I was afraid I’d lose you too, Olivia,” she continued, albeit unsteadily. “After Amelia, Ophelia and your father… I just couldn’t bear to lose anyone else. I thought you would be safest if you stayed in one place with Matt, Amanda and Sheena watching over you… I should have had more faith in you.”
“You shouldn’t have done that, that’s for sure…” Olivia muttered, her stare flicking down to the surface of the table. “I wish you would have trusted me enough to tell me everything about Amelia and Ophelia. I really wanted to be a big sister, and I think I could have been a great one!”
“I…” Anabel was taken aback by Olivia’s declaration, but swiftly recovered. “I know you would have been. You’re like me, Olivia. More than you know.”
Olivia cocked her head, and the remaining anger in her features giving way to an inquisitive frown. “How so?”
“I always wanted a big family, too. Even when I was just a girl, growing up in Wintown in the Fiore region… I lived with my relatives there since my father was always busy with his work elsewhere.” Merely thinking of her adoptive hometown brought a wave of wistful nostalgia over her, filling her mind with memories of the clear, cold air and dense forests surrounding the community at the base of the Sekra Range. In spite of the tension in the booth, Anabel couldn’t help but smile, a warm, genuine one instead of the forced ones she’d shown the waiter. “I had all the friends I wanted, but I always felt like something was missing, so I preferred to find comfort in books instead. Around the time I was your age I developed a passion for battling and left my home, so I had my Pokémon with me along with my books. After that, my job at the Battle Tower helped fill my life further, but there was always that one thing I felt I was missing… a big family surrounding me, sharing the things in my life I loved with me. Once I finally had that chance, to have a family of my own, I wanted to make sure you would never feel that same nagging sense of loneliness I did, Olivia.”
The sensation of another tear rolling down her cheek snapped Anabel out of the daze she’d wandered into while talking. Her speaking had been reflexive and unchecked by much of any thinking, but as soon as she was able to give what coming out of her mouth more consideration, the weight of it all crashed down on her shoulders at once.
“That’s why…” she struggled to say, “that’s why, when I lost Amelia and Ophelia… and after Rich died… I know none of it was my fault, but… but… I couldn’t deal with the feelings of loss and failure I was experiencing. It was all just so overwhelming… so I just turned my back on all of it and retreated from reality. I couldn’t be what you needed me to be at the worst point in our lives because of my own cowardice… I was so afraid to lose you too that I told Matt to keep an eye on you and make sure you were safe. I pushed you away, and then…” The flood of consciousness that had been driving Anabel’s confessions abruptly dried up and stopped, making her freeze as a feeling of emptiness seized her body and mind. “That’s why I was even willing to entertain the idea of stopping your search for your father now. I haven’t stopped failing you for all these years, Olivia. You deserved better… I can’t even begin to give you the apology you deserve…”
“Mom…” Convinced she was about to receive a well-deserved round of condemnation for her errors, Anabel shut her eyes, only to snap them right back open when she felt Olivia reach across and grasp her hand. “You… You screwed up, Mom, there’s no denying that, but I get it. Or I think I get it, anyway. To tell you the truth, I don’t think I would’ve done anything different if it was me.”
“You shouldn’t even have had to think about being in that position, though.”
“Maybe you’re right about that, too, but… I don’t know!” Olivia pulled her hand back and balled both into fists on her lap. “Mom, there’s two things I get now. I think I get why you did the things you did, and even if I don’t like them I can at least try to understand, but the second thing I get is that we’re here now and there’s nothing either of us can do about it! You saw that crazy announcement on the TV. People are listening to that insanity, and Dad’s the one behind it! We might be the only ones who can stop this! Who can stop him! That’s why I can’t stop until I find him, no matter what! Even if he’s just being blackmailed to do this by someone else, we have to find him to prove it!”
“I’ll be honest with you, Olivia, I’m afraid,” Anabel admitted, again turning away from her daughter. “We’ll look for him, and I know by combining our efforts and getting help from Matt and the others, we’ll definitely find him. But what do we do if he really is the mastermind behind Polaris? What if there is no blackmail?”
“Mom…” Much to Anabel’s surprise, this time it was Olivia who flashed a smile at her. It was small and mild, but it was still a smile. Raising her glass of Aprijuice off the table, Olivia said, “He brought us here, that’s gotta mean something. Now we have to have faith in him. We both know he wouldn’t do something that awful.”
Olivia had a point, Anabel had to concede. “I’ll drink to that,” she replied, raising her teacup and tapping it against Olivia’s glass.
-:-
Across the Johto-Kanto border, the snow clouds had not yet reached Celadon City, affording Giovanni a clear look at the sky from his office near the top floor of the defunct Rocket Game Corner and Resort. At one time, it had been not only one of Celadon’s glitziest buildings, but one of the crown jewels of Team Rocket’s empire, commissioned by Giovanni’s mother and brought to prominence under his leadership. Those days were long past, however. Much like the city surrounding it, the resort had been left behind by time, its prestige eroding until it was just another building in the now-blighted urban sprawl. And just like how Celadon itself had become little more than Saffron City’s lesser counterpart, the Team Rocket boss’s own personal downfall was not far from his mind. As he glared down at the city from his seat behind his office’s desk, Giovanni was keenly aware of his own powerlessness, ruling like a fallen king over a ruined castle and not an acre of the lands beyond. The patch covering his damaged left eye bore witness to how his foes had torn him down. At least Persian was still there, happily sleeping nearby after being reunited with his beloved trainer.
Scowling in disgust at his own failures and the way the city reminded him of them, he turned his chair away from the window and refocused his attention to the two objects sitting on his desk. One, a drinking glass filled with an expensive alcohol imported from the Galar region, with a pair of ice cubes dropped in for good measure. Stacia had brought it to him upon his request, but despite her desire to stay with him, she deferred to his own wish for solitude for the time being. The other item was a photograph in a frame, and it was that which he moved to pick up first. His and Ariana’s younger selves were depicted in the image within it; taken shortly after they overthrew his mother to take control of Team Rocket for themselves, it captured a snapshot of a moment in time where their faces still bore the foolish naivete of youth. The world had been laid out at their feet back then. Bitterly looking back in the present, Giovanni had to ask himself, where had all of that potential gone? What had it led to?
“We had everything,” he uttered, half to himself and half to the photograph. “Did we fly too close to the sun when we went to Unova? Was that when our ambition became too great?”
In truth, Giovanni already knew the answers to those questions. Team Rocket’s actions in Unova, pivotal as they were in helping to check and ultimately defeat Ghetsis and Team Plasma, happened immediately before the International Police led a renewed crackdown on their group. The two events were too close together for it to be a coincidence. As the International Police picked Team Rocket apart, wearing its ranks down more and more until only the barebones membership of the present day still remained, Giovanni had grown increasingly aware that the police had merely been tolerating their more manageable activities in prior years. Once they made the quantum leap from being common criminals profiting from day-to-day illegal activity to a paramilitary organization seeking direct subjugation of entire regions, their status in the eyes of the law changed along with it. Even if it had been a necessary opening move against Polaris as a whole, there was no denying the winds of fortune had first begun blowing against Team Rocket after that.
“If we don’t defeat Polaris, your death will have meant nothing, Ariana…” One of the ice cubes in Giovanni’s glass had melted slightly, its shifting causing a clinking sound to ring through the otherwise quiet office. He paid it little mind, too caught up in his pondering. “But we also always had each other to rely on… and I wasn’t there when you died. Polaris was controlling my mind, and I couldn’t be there for you… and that’s the second time my own actions were turned against my followers. Is there really a place out there for Team Rocket in a world that’s rid of Polaris, or should we become something else? Are all these mistakes, these losses, a message?”
Lost in thought, Giovanni picked up the glass and turned his chair back toward the window. He was the boss of Team Rocket, the one burdened with the purpose of leading. That burden had been one he specifically sought by overthrowing his mother, the previous boss, so there was no avoiding the responsibility now upon him. In the past, he would have sought Ariana’s opinions on the matter before coming to any conclusions. With her, his faithful partner and underboss, no longer present, he found himself truly on his own for the first time since he was a young man. Whether to act in response to the losses that had so shaken him and repurpose his organization or not was a decision nobody else could make.
-:-
Several floors above the restaurant, Matt was making his way down one of the hotel’s corridors. He, too, was lost in thought. What Mercury had said and done on the Ice Path still echoed in his head.
“I had hoped you’d be more understanding.”
“I truly hoped we could make amends, that I could show you I only did what I did because it was all for you.”
“If that’s the best you can do, there’s no way you can stand in the way of what’s coming.”
“And after I helped motivate you to escape from Charon, no less.”
“Haven’t you ever asked yourself who leaked Project Cortex’s existence to you, though?”
Matt grunted and snapped his fist into a ball, his mind roiling with conflicting feelings of anger, despair and confusion. “If you manipulated me into escaping from Team Galactic to protect Amanda, what else wasn’t actually my choice?!” he thought to himself. “Has everything I’ve done since you left been in accord with your wishes?”
He turned and came to a stop at the door he had been seeking, the one which led to Nekou’s room. After the group split up upon their arrival at the hotel, she was the only one he hadn’t been able to account for in the interim. Amanda had gone with him to his own room before leaving for hers, while Anabel told him of her intent to meet up with Olivia at the restaurant. Nekou’s state remained an enigma, but after the brutal, grueling trials she’d faced that day and the misunderstandings from Olivine, he refused to leave her alone.
“Mom’s not controlling me now, that much I know for certain. What I’m doing now, reaching out, this is my choice. It’s what I want to do.” Matt breathed in and exhaled to calm himself, then said, “Nekou, can I come in? I want to talk.”
A faint whimper from the other side of the door hit his ears, but whether or not it actually was meant to be a response to his inquiry he couldn’t tell. He did find the door to be unlocked when he put his hand on the knob, however. Taking this as a sign to continue, he shut his eyes in an attempt to gather his courage, hoping that he wasn’t about to make a terrible mistake and walk in on something. “I’m coming in.”
For a brief second, Matt hesitated. Some part of him, a tiny yet persistent voice like that of a Dedenne yelling in the back of his head, was warning him that he wouldn’t like what awaited on the other side of that door.
But if he never had the courage to take that step, how would he ever know for sure? If she was in need of help, how could he ever do the right thing and help her if he backed away? “I might have done that before,” he mentally resolved, “but not now. I’m going to stop hiding and do something for once. That’s my decision.”
Steeling his nerves, he took the plunge and pushed the door open.
The sight that initially greeted him made him breathe a sigh of relief. It looked… normal. Granted, the room was dark and Nekou was sitting on the bed with her back to him, but he didn’t see any of the scenarios he’d imagined and feared, so he breathed a sigh of relief and crossed the boundary into the room.
His relief would not last long.
“Nekou?” he again asked, hearing her soft sobs even as she didn’t face him. It wasn’t until he turned the lights on with a press of the wall switch that she turned to face him, and when she did, he felt his heart stop.
It wasn’t the tears rolling down her face that caught him so by surprise. Those he had expected. What he hadn’t ever thought he’d see were the cuts on her left arm, plainly her own work made possible by the ruined beer can in her right hand, which she’d torn in half to produce a sharp edge.
All sense of reality froze for him once he saw what Nekou had done to herself. Everything he’d been thinking about saying, all the concerns he wanted to try helping her through, disappeared under the urgency of the immediate situation. Without thinking, he nearly sprinted across the room, lunging for the sheared can before she could slash herself again. She made no effort to stop him from pulling it out of her shaking hand and flinging it at the wall, where it clattered to the floor like the trash it was.
“Why would you do something like that?!” he blurted out in horror. Had he had the chance to more carefully consider his words, he wouldn’t have been as confrontational as he accidentally ended up being, but his own sheer panic put him in autopilot.
“Just watch,” Nekou mumbled lifelessly in response.
“Just watch? What does th-”
Matt’s questions died in his throat, for what she meant soon became very clear. The wounds began closing up right before his eyes, healing so thoroughly that within mere seconds, they were gone. No scars were left behind, no evidence they ever had existed at all. Someone who hadn’t seen them wouldn’t have believed they had been there. Matt knew about her ability to regenerate, but now, there was absolutely no doubt of what she was truly capable of - whether she wanted to be or not.
“That’s why,” she said, quietly at first but soon growing increasingly agitated. “You saw what I became back in the Guanosine Base. You saw what my back looks like. Why don’t the scars on my back heal, if every fucking thing else does? If the fact I can’t even injure myself doesn’t prove I’m a monster, on top of everything else, what does?!”
Left at a loss for words, Matt simply stared at her. In that moment, he did not see the Nekou he first came to know, the loud, foul-mouthed enigma who had joined his group to pay off a trivial debt. He now knew that was merely a veneer, a portion of who she truly was. No, what was sitting right in front of him was the other part that completed her at times baffling persona - a vulnerable young woman, tormented by lies and half-truths, scared by things her intelligence couldn't decipher and lashing out at everything around her as a result.
It felt like looking at himself in a mirror.
Acting instinctively, he moved to sit next to her and wrapped his arms around her shuddering form. Her sobs stopped when she felt him embrace her, coming to a halt in a single, high-pitched squeal of surprise.
“You don’t have to do those kinds of things to yourself,” he gently told her. “If it means anything, I don’t think there’s anything you have to prove. You’re you, that’s what matters.”
“But why?” she softly whimpered, subconsciously nestling her head against him. What he was telling her conflicted so violently with the painful notions filling her head that he might as well have been speaking in a language she had no comprehension of. “It’s that I’m me that’s the problem! How can you not see that, after what happened between us in Olivine?! I used you for my own satisfaction again right after trying to stop! You should know, you should know more than anyone… you’ve seen what I am, what I really am.” Even without Alter-Nekou speaking to her, the things the incorporeal demon told her rang out in her thoughts like the deep, resonant chiming of a giant bell. “I’m a disgusting monster… I’m not like you.”
Releasing Nekou from his arms, Matt intertwined her fingers with his own and exhaled. “What happened between us is exactly what I came here to talk about,” he said, staring out at the snowfall beyond the hotel room’s windows. “I refuse to believe it’s as simple as you being a monster and pushing people away. There has to be more to it than that! We have to talk about this and figure it out!”
“But why do you keep trying to understand how I feel?” she pleaded, again losing control of her tone to the overwhelming torrent of emotions she was experiencing. “How can you possibly care so much that you keep putting up with me?”
There it was. He’d long suspected it, but now he had it directly from Nekou’s mouth. She yearned for someone to care about her, but hated herself so much that it laid immense guilt on her shoulders. “Because… I’m a part of this, too. What happened between us wasn’t one-sided, and I’m not just going to abandon you. How could I, now that I think I understand… you don’t need some white knight on a Rapidash always riding to your rescue and protecting you. You’re tougher than that. All you want is the knowledge that someone will always have your back and be there to catch you if you ever do fall. You want the security of knowing someone’s there for you. I get that now, and I… I want to be that person. You’d do the same for me.”
“I don’t…” Just like when they were playing cards, Matt had completely figured her out. Nekou was simultaneously frustrated and relieved by his understanding, but that contradiction only drove her into a further state of conflict. Whether to keep her guard up or lower it and let him in, she was torn. “Why would you want to waste the effort helping me after everything you’ve gone through? Now that I’ve seen how hard escaping from your past and making it on your own really was…” As the meaning of her words caught up with her, Nekou paused. She already knew what he’d say, that the past he’d escaped from was exactly why he wanted to help her. Staring down at the floor in front of her, she bitterly said, “How you and Amanda grew up was seriously fucked. You know how important Maman was to me… you two deserved to have the same. Seriously, it’s fucked up beyond belief. Watching her try and turn you two against each other just turned my stomach. How disgusting… I want you and Amanda to have what I did, but it's too late and it’s not fair.”
“You know, you’ve been through a lot, and yet you still say that. I appreciate it.” Whether she meant to or not, she was giving him yet another look into just how similar they were. There was no way he could miss how she had tried to change the subject, and if he could do nothing else to show gratitude for her concern, he could answer the question she’d asked. “I guess the reason I want to help you goes all the way back to when Amanda and I were living together in Rustboro and attending school there. I wasn’t…” Matt hesitated, his nerve buckling under the weight of his memories. But when he looked to Nekou and saw her boring holes through him with her eyes from how intensely she was paying attention, those worries faded. He couldn’t bear to let her down. “I wasn’t doing so well back then. I don’t know if what was wrong with me had a name, but every so often, I’d get so anxious and afraid that I couldn’t function, and that was when the voices would start creeping into my head… I couldn’t bear to make Amanda’s life more difficult, especially if anyone else found out, so I made a Secret Base for myself behind the waterfall on Route 119 to be my refuge when I felt myself falling into that pit again. It wasn’t until I figured out that the blackouts and memory loss I was suffering were another persona emerging that I realized when it all began. It was brewing before we ran away from Snowpoint, of that much I’m sure, but without a doubt the day it all crystallized into something was the day our father’s experiment destroyed Amanda’s eyes. I was so furious with him for what he did to her, and for his complete lack of concern, that I couldn’t think straight. That was the first time I lost myself to that other persona, just to deal with what was happening.”
Before continuing, Matt lifted his hand up off the bed, and thanks to Nekou’s cement-like grip on it, hers went with it. He returned her attentive gaze, but couldn’t quite discern what was going through her mind at that point.
“There’s a reason I’m telling you all of this, Nekou. Everything that happened today, seeing Alter-Nekou take control of you, running into Mercury, it all made me see things clearly. We’re in this together. You have my back and I’ve got yours, because I’ve been there. I know how what you’re going through feels. You’re not a monster at all, you’re a good person who’s tired from fighting alone for so long, and you’re crying out for help in the only ways you know how. I get it. And you know why this-” he pointed back and forth between himself and Nekou with his free hand, “doesn’t bother me? It’s because in all the time I’ve been around you, you’ve shown me what it’s like to live freely by your own decisions, and after today, I’m making my own. I’m choosing to stick with you and hopefully get closer to you. What we had, what we have, is something that belongs to you and me and nobody else can ever take that away.”
Right as he finished speaking, Matt had a gasp of surprise forced from his lips when Nekou grabbed his shoulders. Bizarrely, though, grabbing his shoulders was the only thing she did. She froze completely still, clamping her hands on him and keeping her arms rigidly in place, preventing him from moving. An awkward silence settled in between the two, the room becoming so quiet that the sound of a pin dropping could have been heard.
“Th-there’s no way… he actually… he actually gets it…” Nekou felt like she was standing outside of her body, watching what was unfolding as an observer instead of actually being a participant. “I’m not alone… I really am not alone, he gets it, he knows what it’s like and I’m just sitting there like a-”
All of a sudden, Nekou found herself back in her body, facing squarely into Matt’s questioning, concerned stare. It was like a switch had been thrown inside her mind. Every emotion she’d been detached from just seconds earlier hit her at once with the force of a Machamp’s punches, and with no ability to do anything else, she collapsed into him and started bawling.
“It’s just not worth it! Nothing is!” she wailed, her tears flowing free as she hit her fist against his arm. He responded simply by embracing her again, letting her get everything she needed to out. “Don’t you fucking get it?! Nothing in this world fucking lasts! You want to learn some lesson from how I live? Learn to not give a fuck about anything and live every day like it’s your last! Otherwise you’ll just get hurt!”
“But you don’t really live like that, either,” Matt gently pointed out. “You care about Olivia, I know that. You care about all your friends, you care about Marie and the rest of them… and the fact you were so upset over thinking you took advantage of me says you care about me, too.”
“I do, everything you said is right…” she admitted, her cries tapering off into a softer sobbing. “That’s why I have to stop, because I don’t think I can lose anything or anyone more after Maman… I’ve always had only one wish, to be able to go and live somewhere to live in peace with all the things that make me feel good… but I don’t even deserve that. Not after… not after I killed that fucking punk Grunt who was picking on me. I sent him to that place where there’s an eternal nothing, that place I have nightmares about… that’s where I deserve to be.”
“No, it’s not. I promise you, you deserve to find that place where you can happy. It wasn’t you who killed that guy, it was Alter-Nekou. I’m sure of it. That thing, whatever it is… that’s the monster. Not you.”
“Is he fucking serious?” Nekou internally asked herself. “How does he keep saying things like that? Unless…”
An answer soon presented itself to her, but if she had the chance to think about it, she wouldn’t have understood it. Nothing about what was happening really made any sense, but as she settled in more comfortably against him, she found herself wondering if it really mattered at all.
“You really are un fou, you know that?” she quietly breathed into his light, button-up shirt. “It’s so much like you to latch yourself on to this fucked up crazy train I call a life.”
“Well, when the train of your own life was so messed up you almost got buried in a snowstorm only to be rescued by an omnicidal lunatic with a god complex, I guess you’re used to crazy?” Matt offered.
“Tu n'as aucune idée,” Nekou muttered, pressing her fists against him. “I don’t even know where I end and that… that… ce monstre effrayant, where she begins. When Colress had me locked up, and she was taking over my mind… I saw things. I think they might have been memories. Memories of a childhood I’ve never remembered before…”
Childhood memories? The mere suggestion of such a thing piqued Matt’s interest. She’d said before that she couldn’t remember her life past a certain point, so had something changed? “What were they?” he asked.
“I saw… I saw…” Initially unable to get the words out, she found some sense of relief when he tightened his arms around her. “I think it was the room I grew up in… there was nothing there but the flattest fucking mattress you can imagine, and a desk piled with textbooks way too advanced for a kid as old as I think I was then. That was one memory, anyway. Then there were the injections… there were these scientists, injecting me with all kinds of chemicals that made me feel like they were burning me from the inside out. Think that’s why I can regenerate, because they were talking about regeneration and then had a Binacle slash my fucking back up… that explains the scars, I guess, but not why they stay while everything else heals.” Nekou whimpered in frustration, deeply upset from her recollections but feeling a strange sense of security in the moment. “I don’t fucking know. I just wish I knew who to blame so I could make them regret it.”
“The question of who did those things to you must be one that has an answer,” Matt softly suggested to her, making her shift in his arms. “I’ll help you find that answer. I promise.”
He couldn’t see her lips turn upward into a tiny, relieved smile. “But why? Why always put yourself second and go out of your way for someone like me, who’s done nothing but take from you?” She knew he would have some satisfying reply, she just needed to hear it from him.
Releasing her from his embrace, he turned back toward the window. Snow was starting to collect on the glass, the pane growing ever so slightly foggy from the cold.
“I guess it’s because I had to be the responsible one, since Mercury and Charon blew Amanda and I off,” he pensively reflected. “Things haven’t really changed since then. If you think about it, none of us really have the most stable families. Olivia and Anabel have each other, that’s true, but they’ve been through way more than they deserve. We all have… we’ve got each other, so we have to watch out for each other like we were a family, you know? You’re a part of that.”
A family. Those two words, those two short, simple words, shook Nekou to her core like nothing ever had before. A family. In all the life she knew, only Ariana really came close to giving her that. Judging from the fragmented memories she’d seen, she certainly hadn’t had it in her childhood. And yet, there was Matt, the tattered explorer offering her the comforts she thought she’d lost when Ariana was taken from her.
And, as little sense as it seemingly made, she believed him.
“Merci du fond du coeur…” Nekou pulled back, allowing Matt to see her smile as it grew broader. “But… I’m going to make a promise, too. Let me help you with the burden of protecting our family… don’t feel like you have to do this alone. If you’re watching out for me, I’m going to watch out for you. If I’m going to be your bodyguard, you be mine. I can’t watch you take all of that on yourself anymore, I want you to share it with me. Because…” Both her words and her emotions suddenly caught in her throat, but by that point, her thoughts were racing and she couldn’t stop them. “B-because… I, I want you to learn how to enjoy your life, too. Y-you keep telling me you get that from me, and if that’s making you happy, then I want you to feel that way, and… and, uh…” Growing flustered, she shut her eyes and admitted, “It’s just… it’s just, when I think about, I… I-I’m…. I’m p-prettty sure, I’m pretty sure I’m fucking in l-”
She stopped speaking altogether when he embraced her again. “Sssh, it’s fine. You don’t have to say it if it’s hard. It’s been a long day.”
Feeling as if a great weight had been lifted off of her, Nekou pressed herself against Matt’s side and leaned her head on him. “It sure has, hasn’t it… I don’t know what we are, but it sure is nice to have someone there’s no bullshit with.”
“You can say that again.”
“It sure is nice to have someone there’s no bullshit with,” she repeated wryly, getting him to laugh. “Say, would you read to me?”
Before he realized it, she had thrust his copy of The Prince and the Soul-Heart toward him. How had she gotten ahold of it then and there? Had she been holding on to it the entire time since discovering it? Where had she been keeping it? All the questions Matt could have asked, and yet, he didn’t feel like he needed to. With his close friend snuggled against him, her warmth radiating into him and the sweet floral smell of her shampoo flooding his nose, those questions just weren’t necessary. Was she more than a friend now? Maybe. But in that moment, he wasn’t sure if it mattered. Whatever she was, whatever they were, he was too content to care.
“Gladly,” he answered, taking the book into his hands and opening to its first page. He inhaled deeply, then began reading, “Once, there was a great kingdom that ruled over a land of snow. Beyond the boundary lay an endless, winding forest that many magical creatures called home…”
-:-
In Father’s office within Polaris’s temple, the leader of the cult and his closest advisor were again conferencing in seclusion, away from their followers. He and Finansielle stood in front of his desk looking up at a hologram being projected from the double helix statues, depicting a three-dimensional model of Renzo from the shoulders up. The virtual display cast a shining glow over them both, and reflected in a continually shifting fashion in the gentle current of the huge water tank behind them.
“The Oracle’s told me some rather tantalizing new information,” Finansielle told Father, her manner teasing and eccentric as it so often was. “It’s time for you to bring Renzo into our fold.”
“I’ve known this day would come for a long time,” Father replied, sounding rather detached, “since the day you first told me of him. I am almost surprised that it has come this soon… will this really work?”
“He has an important part to play. You know that, silly.” Moving away from Father’s side, Finansielle slid in front of him and playfully crossed her hands behind her back. “We just have to convince him that you’ve been watching over him all along. All you’ve got to do is tell him things nobody should be able to know, but we know… his history… his name…”
“You’re right,” he admitted, resigning himself to the truth of his words. “You will go and establish contact with him. I will speak to him from here.”
“There you go…” Finansielle cooed, her lips twisting into a wicked grin. “That’s exactly how she’s told me it will go…”
-:-
Nekou had no idea how or when she had left Blackthorn City, but when she came to, she certainly wasn’t there anymore. Wherever she was, there was nothing to be seen for what seemed like miles. A vast, endless sky filled with stars spread out infinitely in every direction, but the dread creeping through her made her initially think she was alone in the void.
Alone in the void? Was that really true? Or was there something else there with her?
Stiffening in terror, Nekou whipped her head upward, discovering that the space above her consumed by an immense, churning black cloud. Periodic flashes of lightning inside the storm erased any doubt of whether or not she really was alone, casting fleeting glimpses of something gigantic hiding among the clouds. Even the brief looks she could get at it impressed upon her just how incomprehensible the monster’s nature was. It gave off a nightmarish image, as if it was the living embodiment of death itself, a beast that climbed out of her worst fears to torment her in reality.
“So you are finally here with me, where you belong, instead of your pitiable planet…” the atrocity lurking in the storm said to her. Its voice was everywhere and nowhere, radiating through the very atoms comprising the space Nekou shared with it. “Our time together will be fleeting for now. But you know we will soon be one, you will fulfill your fate to be my avatar…”
No matter how horrifying the monster was, for it to so boldly claim her very existence was something she couldn’t abide. She furiously tried to direct the most profane language she could muster at it, to dare it to even try making her into something she wasn’t. But the words she wanted wouldn’t come out. None would. Was it the creature’s doing? How was it suppressing her voice?
“I am this space, and this space is me,” it told her, as if it were reading her mind. “Just like I am you and you are me. Embrace me and you will have control over everything that is and ever will be here. From the beginning, this has been the fate written in the stars…”
“...Ah!”
Just like that, Nekou was back in her Blackthorn hotel room. It took her a minute to fully realize she’d never left. She had fallen asleep with her head on Matt’s shoulder while he was reading to her, and he’d also nodded off not long after. Accordingly, when she snapped awake from her nightmare, she stirred him from his slumber as well.
“Nekou?” he asked, noticing how rapid and shallow her breaths were. “What’s wrong?”
“I… I had a fucking nightmare…” Nekou put her hand against her chest as she tried to stabilize herself. “I was somewhere… somewhere. I don’t fuckin’ know, alright? I just know there was this demonic looking thing there that told me I belonged there with it, that I don’t belong here and I’m going to be its avatar or something… I can feel it down in my bones, calling to me…”
“Whatever that thing was, it was wrong.” Matt wrapped his arms around her in another attempt to comfort her. “Sometimes our brains lie to us about stuff and we just have to remember what’s real, and what’s real is that you do belong here.”
“I just wish believing that was as easy as saying it,” she replied, leaning into the embrace and accepting his compassion.
END of CHAPTER 29.5
I also need to warn, this chapter contains an explicit but not overly graphic scene of self-harm. If you wish to avoid seeing this scene, stop when you read the line “his relief would not last long” and skip to the line “You don’t have to do those kinds of things to yourself.”
-:-
CHAPTER 29.5: Don’t Say a Prayer for Me Now
-:-
Mercury’s defeat at Renzo’s hands brought a sudden but welcome end to the day’s grueling events. With her obstruction gone, Matt, Amanda, Olivia, Anabel and Nekou followed Renzo the rest of the way down the rocky trail to Blackthorn City, a gentle snowfall finally starting up right as they arrived in the mountainous city’s limits.
That was the point where Renzo parted ways. He split from the group with words just as strange and off-putting as those he’d arrived in the Ice Path clearing with, informing them that he was heading back to Blackthorn Gym to prepare for the battle he and Anabel were going to have the next day. A battle, he made sure to tell them, would ‘change everything.’ That was how he put it, anyway, but any thoughts they had about it left their minds almost as quickly as he departed himself.
The hunt for Genesect and battle with it near the Lake of Rage. Matt and his group joining forces with Team Rocket to break into the Guanosine Base. The fight with Polaris to free Nekou. And then, everything that happened during their trek through the Ice Path itself. It had been a brutal, draining day, and the trials the five endured were catching up and taking their toll.
As a result of their exhaustion, they sought respite at the hotel that had opened in the city a year or so earlier. It wasn’t the most luxurious accommodation any of them had stayed at, but it was more than comfortable enough. There was even a Pokémon Center inside it, allowing them to skip the delay of making an extra stop and start unwinding immediately after healing their Pokémon.
For Olivia, that meant splitting from the others as they went to their respective rooms. As tired as she was, she had too much anger still weighing on her mind to even think about resting. Her discontent saw her heading to the restaurant on the hotel’s first floor, going through the motions of buying a glass of pink Aprijuice and occupying a booth to consume it.
Numerous televisions filled the dining room, all set to a FlareNet newscast presented by Malva. Olivia paid the program almost as little attention as she did the other patrons milling about the area. She did glance back and forth between the cloyingly sweet drink she was nursing and the rotating, flame-like orange ‘F’ in the corner of the screen, but the information being imparted by the pink-haired, bespectacled anchor passed through Olivia’s head without note. A word or two did connect once in a while, enough to give her an idea that Malva was delivering an update on the Altru Northstar’s destruction, but Olivia didn’t care enough to concentrate on it.
“And now, we move on to the subject of Polaris…”
The moment that name entered her ears, Olivia dropped her straw back into the cup of juice and snapped her head toward the television. It was the one thing that stopped in her head before passing through, and the one thing that could break her out of her daze.
“Some call it a radical movement and a threat,” Malva continued, speaking directly to her viewers with unflinching poise, “others say it is a new way of thinking that offers a path to a better future. But what is really behind this increasingly popular group? Tonight, we will take a look at the identity of Polaris from within, from words passed on directly from their representatives.”
Malva paused, turning slightly to face a camera positioned just off to her left. As the perspective changed, a video of Zinzolin’s speech to the crowd in Goldenrod City appeared over her right shoulder.
“Many learned of Polaris for the first time via their high-profile public events, such as this one in Goldenrod City…” The video changed in accordance with Malva’s words, switching to footage of Ghetsis’s speech prior to the Ecruteak riot. “...or this one in Ecruteak City. There were also many television broadcasts leading up to these events, but following the attack on Ecruteak City, it was discovered that Ghetsis Harmonia, then-spokesman of Polaris, was exploiting the organization to gain power for himself. Polaris’s leader, who referred to himself only by the name ‘Father,’ announced via a speech to the world that Ghetsis had been exiled and that Polaris’s purpose was to end corruption in the Pokémon League and restore the planet to its natural state.”
“Yeah, a speech he hijacked your network to give,” Olivia grumbled to herself.
“Since then, Polaris has worked extensively to spread their message through all available outlets, but their growing popularity has left many concerned. FlareNet reached out to Polaris’s current spokespersons for comment on these issues, and we were provided with a statement from the organization detailing its stated beliefs and goals.”
Malva paused once more, this time to adjust her glasses and pick up a thin stack of papers from her desk, and Olivia clenched her teeth as the broadcaster started to read from them.
“A diseased culture leads to a diseased planet. This is a core tenet of our beliefs. The corrupt nature of the Pokémon League system has created an imbalance in society that threatens to doom everything humanity has built. Those who live comfortably on the backs of the less advantaged push society ever forward, but only in the name of enriching themselves further. Their insatiable hunger is destroying this world. Poisoning the environment. Depleting our resources. Earth is on the clock, and even though they know that grim truth, their concern lies not with doing something to avert it but with consuming as much for themselves as they can before time runs out. Only through radical change can the dark day where all of existence passes the point of no return be prevented. Yet, the voices of those crying out for change are ignored by the entitled, the corrupt, those like Governor Tobias whose only interest is hoarding their riches until the day of reckoning comes. That is why we, Polaris, exist. We are here to give those a voice to the dreams of those who yearn for a better, fairer and more just world, the sort of world that is the only one that can survive and avert our oncoming disaster. Humanity has lost its way thanks to the bottomless greed of those who take only for themselves. Those privileged people who treat our planet as poorly as they treat those below them, as an exploitable resource and nothing else. We call upon those who would answer the cries of the disadvantaged, the same cries as those of our very world, to step forward and join us. Our path is the only way to save our planet, and with all the corruption and destruction the Pokémon League system has wrought, we will use the next tournament held on the Indigo Plateau to rewrite the course of fate. That will be the day history changes.”
Even though she listened until Malva was done, Olivia hadn’t been able to keep watching. The maelstrom of emotions stirring within her made sure of that. It was hard enough merely to listen, but even the image of Malva reading from the papers was too much for her to handle.
“It’s not fair…” she fumed into her drink, her voice half a whisper and half a snarl. “All this work I’ve done to try and get your attention, and this is how I get it?! You have to be seeing everything I’ve gone through, Dad! A lot of it at the hands of the idiots following you! And yet people keep falling for Polaris’s… for Polaris’s… for all of your bullshit!” Her anger peaking, Olivia slammed her fist down on the table. “Now I have to find you just to smack some sense into you! It’s not fair!”
“Olivia?”
The sound of Anabel’s voice pulled Olivia back into reality. She turned away from the television to face her mother, who was slowly drawing ever closer to her table. Anabel had both literally and figuratively let her hair down, leaving her jacket, scarf, sunglasses and ribbon in her room while her tie hung loose around her neck. A knowing observer might very well have noted how much Olivia’s newly-cropped hairstyle made her resemble a younger version of her mother, and likewise how Anabel’s undone ponytail brought her appearance closer to Olivia’s previous one.
“Smile,” Olivia thought to herself. “Smile so she doesn’t know…”
As much as she wanted to put on a brave face, though, the signals from Olivia’s brain never connected and translated into action. Was it that a part of her wanted to cry out for help, even against the wishes of her conscious mind? She had no idea.
Anabel didn’t miss her daughter’s pained, pleading expressions. Seeing the way Olivia wordlessly begged her for help made her nervously rub her right thumb and first two fingers together. “I guess you heard all of that?” Anabel asked, her tone gentle and caring.
“I should ask you the same thing,” Olivia responded, throwing up as much of her tough veneer as she could. “How long have you been standing there?”
“I was just about to call out to you when that report started, so I heard everything,” Anabel revealed as she slid into the booth opposite Olivia. There could be no more putting off the inevitable, she resolved. Their problems had to be confronted head-on. “Can we talk?”
Olivia turned away, pouted and huffed, “About what?”
About what? A question that Anabel only then realized she should have asked herself sooner. There could have been one answer or a million. Where would she even start?
Much to her relief, an opportunity for temporary reprieve presented itself when she spied a waiter who happened to be looking in their direction. She beckoned him to the booth with a wave of her hand, internally thanking the fates for the extra time.
“Yes, Miss? How may I help you?”
“A Roserade Tea, please,” Anabel said with a pleasant smile.
“Right away.”
The waiter scurried away as quickly as he had come, and with him went Anabel’s ability to avoid the uncomfortable situation she was in. “I shouldn’t be trying to get out of this,” she thought, her lip turning ever slightly downward. “That’s what caused all of this in the first place!” Gathering her courage, she took a deep breath and uttered the only words she could think of. “Olivia, I’m sorry f-”
Much to Anabel’s surprise, Olivia cut her off. “Mom, I know you’re sorry, and I know you mean it,” she said, peering at her mother but not turning to face her again. Once she started talking, the trickle of her speech became a flood, her emotions coming out unchecked. “But… I just can’t get myself to believe it, you know? I really want to believe all of it! I really do! But after what I heard you say to Rosalie… the way you kept Amelia and Ophelia’s names from me… everything going back to when Dad died and you kept it quiet and sent me to stay in Rustboro, how do I know for sure you’re sorry now? How do I really know?!”
Anabel bit her lip. She’d seen the tired, despairing eyes she was staring into before. Oh, she’d seen them plenty of times over the years. What was different that time in the hotel, and what made looking into them agonizingly painful, was that in the past those broken eyes had been her own, haunting her every time she saw her own reflection. Now they were Olivia’s, and they conveyed what she was feeling to Anabel more clearly than anything else possibly could.
“Olivia…” As much as it hurt Anabel to say what she was thinking, the elder Mistbloom knew there wouldn’t and couldn’t be any turning back. If there was to be any conquering of their differences, she'd have to shed her fears of tackling them. “I’m not going to expect you to forgive me, and I’m not going to ask you to understand either. Just… hear me out.”
“I’m listening.” Olivia begrudgingly acknowledged.
“I just couldn’t…” Anabel paused, folding her hands over themselves on the table as she rethought what she was going to say. “Back then, after your father died… that wasn’t long after what happened to your sisters. I couldn’t… I couldn’t deal with the pain. It was easier to just run away from all of it.”
Just then, the waiter returned, placing a white porcelain teacup on the table in front of Anabel.
“Miss, your Roserade Tea,” he said.
“Thank you.” Anabel flashed another smile at him, but as soon as he departed, the expression disappeared from her face. The aromatic liquid left a slight burning sensation as she swallowed her first sip of it, but the feeling didn’t entirely register in her mind. “It was easier to just run away from all of it, so I did. I pushed it all onto you and turned away from my responsibilities, and now I see how wrong I was. I’m sorry, Olivia. I’m so, so sorry.”
Although she said nothing, Olivia clearly was listening to what Anabel was saying. Her pout had faded, and she was intently watching her mother’s every move. It wasn’t until that moment that she realized she could feel a tear rolling down her cheek, and for the briefest time, she found herself wishing she had brought her sunglasses so she could cover her eyes.
“I was afraid I’d lose you too, Olivia,” she continued, albeit unsteadily. “After Amelia, Ophelia and your father… I just couldn’t bear to lose anyone else. I thought you would be safest if you stayed in one place with Matt, Amanda and Sheena watching over you… I should have had more faith in you.”
“You shouldn’t have done that, that’s for sure…” Olivia muttered, her stare flicking down to the surface of the table. “I wish you would have trusted me enough to tell me everything about Amelia and Ophelia. I really wanted to be a big sister, and I think I could have been a great one!”
“I…” Anabel was taken aback by Olivia’s declaration, but swiftly recovered. “I know you would have been. You’re like me, Olivia. More than you know.”
Olivia cocked her head, and the remaining anger in her features giving way to an inquisitive frown. “How so?”
“I always wanted a big family, too. Even when I was just a girl, growing up in Wintown in the Fiore region… I lived with my relatives there since my father was always busy with his work elsewhere.” Merely thinking of her adoptive hometown brought a wave of wistful nostalgia over her, filling her mind with memories of the clear, cold air and dense forests surrounding the community at the base of the Sekra Range. In spite of the tension in the booth, Anabel couldn’t help but smile, a warm, genuine one instead of the forced ones she’d shown the waiter. “I had all the friends I wanted, but I always felt like something was missing, so I preferred to find comfort in books instead. Around the time I was your age I developed a passion for battling and left my home, so I had my Pokémon with me along with my books. After that, my job at the Battle Tower helped fill my life further, but there was always that one thing I felt I was missing… a big family surrounding me, sharing the things in my life I loved with me. Once I finally had that chance, to have a family of my own, I wanted to make sure you would never feel that same nagging sense of loneliness I did, Olivia.”
The sensation of another tear rolling down her cheek snapped Anabel out of the daze she’d wandered into while talking. Her speaking had been reflexive and unchecked by much of any thinking, but as soon as she was able to give what coming out of her mouth more consideration, the weight of it all crashed down on her shoulders at once.
“That’s why…” she struggled to say, “that’s why, when I lost Amelia and Ophelia… and after Rich died… I know none of it was my fault, but… but… I couldn’t deal with the feelings of loss and failure I was experiencing. It was all just so overwhelming… so I just turned my back on all of it and retreated from reality. I couldn’t be what you needed me to be at the worst point in our lives because of my own cowardice… I was so afraid to lose you too that I told Matt to keep an eye on you and make sure you were safe. I pushed you away, and then…” The flood of consciousness that had been driving Anabel’s confessions abruptly dried up and stopped, making her freeze as a feeling of emptiness seized her body and mind. “That’s why I was even willing to entertain the idea of stopping your search for your father now. I haven’t stopped failing you for all these years, Olivia. You deserved better… I can’t even begin to give you the apology you deserve…”
“Mom…” Convinced she was about to receive a well-deserved round of condemnation for her errors, Anabel shut her eyes, only to snap them right back open when she felt Olivia reach across and grasp her hand. “You… You screwed up, Mom, there’s no denying that, but I get it. Or I think I get it, anyway. To tell you the truth, I don’t think I would’ve done anything different if it was me.”
“You shouldn’t even have had to think about being in that position, though.”
“Maybe you’re right about that, too, but… I don’t know!” Olivia pulled her hand back and balled both into fists on her lap. “Mom, there’s two things I get now. I think I get why you did the things you did, and even if I don’t like them I can at least try to understand, but the second thing I get is that we’re here now and there’s nothing either of us can do about it! You saw that crazy announcement on the TV. People are listening to that insanity, and Dad’s the one behind it! We might be the only ones who can stop this! Who can stop him! That’s why I can’t stop until I find him, no matter what! Even if he’s just being blackmailed to do this by someone else, we have to find him to prove it!”
“I’ll be honest with you, Olivia, I’m afraid,” Anabel admitted, again turning away from her daughter. “We’ll look for him, and I know by combining our efforts and getting help from Matt and the others, we’ll definitely find him. But what do we do if he really is the mastermind behind Polaris? What if there is no blackmail?”
“Mom…” Much to Anabel’s surprise, this time it was Olivia who flashed a smile at her. It was small and mild, but it was still a smile. Raising her glass of Aprijuice off the table, Olivia said, “He brought us here, that’s gotta mean something. Now we have to have faith in him. We both know he wouldn’t do something that awful.”
Olivia had a point, Anabel had to concede. “I’ll drink to that,” she replied, raising her teacup and tapping it against Olivia’s glass.
-:-
Across the Johto-Kanto border, the snow clouds had not yet reached Celadon City, affording Giovanni a clear look at the sky from his office near the top floor of the defunct Rocket Game Corner and Resort. At one time, it had been not only one of Celadon’s glitziest buildings, but one of the crown jewels of Team Rocket’s empire, commissioned by Giovanni’s mother and brought to prominence under his leadership. Those days were long past, however. Much like the city surrounding it, the resort had been left behind by time, its prestige eroding until it was just another building in the now-blighted urban sprawl. And just like how Celadon itself had become little more than Saffron City’s lesser counterpart, the Team Rocket boss’s own personal downfall was not far from his mind. As he glared down at the city from his seat behind his office’s desk, Giovanni was keenly aware of his own powerlessness, ruling like a fallen king over a ruined castle and not an acre of the lands beyond. The patch covering his damaged left eye bore witness to how his foes had torn him down. At least Persian was still there, happily sleeping nearby after being reunited with his beloved trainer.
Scowling in disgust at his own failures and the way the city reminded him of them, he turned his chair away from the window and refocused his attention to the two objects sitting on his desk. One, a drinking glass filled with an expensive alcohol imported from the Galar region, with a pair of ice cubes dropped in for good measure. Stacia had brought it to him upon his request, but despite her desire to stay with him, she deferred to his own wish for solitude for the time being. The other item was a photograph in a frame, and it was that which he moved to pick up first. His and Ariana’s younger selves were depicted in the image within it; taken shortly after they overthrew his mother to take control of Team Rocket for themselves, it captured a snapshot of a moment in time where their faces still bore the foolish naivete of youth. The world had been laid out at their feet back then. Bitterly looking back in the present, Giovanni had to ask himself, where had all of that potential gone? What had it led to?
“We had everything,” he uttered, half to himself and half to the photograph. “Did we fly too close to the sun when we went to Unova? Was that when our ambition became too great?”
In truth, Giovanni already knew the answers to those questions. Team Rocket’s actions in Unova, pivotal as they were in helping to check and ultimately defeat Ghetsis and Team Plasma, happened immediately before the International Police led a renewed crackdown on their group. The two events were too close together for it to be a coincidence. As the International Police picked Team Rocket apart, wearing its ranks down more and more until only the barebones membership of the present day still remained, Giovanni had grown increasingly aware that the police had merely been tolerating their more manageable activities in prior years. Once they made the quantum leap from being common criminals profiting from day-to-day illegal activity to a paramilitary organization seeking direct subjugation of entire regions, their status in the eyes of the law changed along with it. Even if it had been a necessary opening move against Polaris as a whole, there was no denying the winds of fortune had first begun blowing against Team Rocket after that.
“If we don’t defeat Polaris, your death will have meant nothing, Ariana…” One of the ice cubes in Giovanni’s glass had melted slightly, its shifting causing a clinking sound to ring through the otherwise quiet office. He paid it little mind, too caught up in his pondering. “But we also always had each other to rely on… and I wasn’t there when you died. Polaris was controlling my mind, and I couldn’t be there for you… and that’s the second time my own actions were turned against my followers. Is there really a place out there for Team Rocket in a world that’s rid of Polaris, or should we become something else? Are all these mistakes, these losses, a message?”
Lost in thought, Giovanni picked up the glass and turned his chair back toward the window. He was the boss of Team Rocket, the one burdened with the purpose of leading. That burden had been one he specifically sought by overthrowing his mother, the previous boss, so there was no avoiding the responsibility now upon him. In the past, he would have sought Ariana’s opinions on the matter before coming to any conclusions. With her, his faithful partner and underboss, no longer present, he found himself truly on his own for the first time since he was a young man. Whether to act in response to the losses that had so shaken him and repurpose his organization or not was a decision nobody else could make.
-:-
Several floors above the restaurant, Matt was making his way down one of the hotel’s corridors. He, too, was lost in thought. What Mercury had said and done on the Ice Path still echoed in his head.
“I had hoped you’d be more understanding.”
“I truly hoped we could make amends, that I could show you I only did what I did because it was all for you.”
“If that’s the best you can do, there’s no way you can stand in the way of what’s coming.”
“And after I helped motivate you to escape from Charon, no less.”
“Haven’t you ever asked yourself who leaked Project Cortex’s existence to you, though?”
Matt grunted and snapped his fist into a ball, his mind roiling with conflicting feelings of anger, despair and confusion. “If you manipulated me into escaping from Team Galactic to protect Amanda, what else wasn’t actually my choice?!” he thought to himself. “Has everything I’ve done since you left been in accord with your wishes?”
He turned and came to a stop at the door he had been seeking, the one which led to Nekou’s room. After the group split up upon their arrival at the hotel, she was the only one he hadn’t been able to account for in the interim. Amanda had gone with him to his own room before leaving for hers, while Anabel told him of her intent to meet up with Olivia at the restaurant. Nekou’s state remained an enigma, but after the brutal, grueling trials she’d faced that day and the misunderstandings from Olivine, he refused to leave her alone.
“Mom’s not controlling me now, that much I know for certain. What I’m doing now, reaching out, this is my choice. It’s what I want to do.” Matt breathed in and exhaled to calm himself, then said, “Nekou, can I come in? I want to talk.”
A faint whimper from the other side of the door hit his ears, but whether or not it actually was meant to be a response to his inquiry he couldn’t tell. He did find the door to be unlocked when he put his hand on the knob, however. Taking this as a sign to continue, he shut his eyes in an attempt to gather his courage, hoping that he wasn’t about to make a terrible mistake and walk in on something. “I’m coming in.”
For a brief second, Matt hesitated. Some part of him, a tiny yet persistent voice like that of a Dedenne yelling in the back of his head, was warning him that he wouldn’t like what awaited on the other side of that door.
But if he never had the courage to take that step, how would he ever know for sure? If she was in need of help, how could he ever do the right thing and help her if he backed away? “I might have done that before,” he mentally resolved, “but not now. I’m going to stop hiding and do something for once. That’s my decision.”
Steeling his nerves, he took the plunge and pushed the door open.
The sight that initially greeted him made him breathe a sigh of relief. It looked… normal. Granted, the room was dark and Nekou was sitting on the bed with her back to him, but he didn’t see any of the scenarios he’d imagined and feared, so he breathed a sigh of relief and crossed the boundary into the room.
His relief would not last long.
“Nekou?” he again asked, hearing her soft sobs even as she didn’t face him. It wasn’t until he turned the lights on with a press of the wall switch that she turned to face him, and when she did, he felt his heart stop.
It wasn’t the tears rolling down her face that caught him so by surprise. Those he had expected. What he hadn’t ever thought he’d see were the cuts on her left arm, plainly her own work made possible by the ruined beer can in her right hand, which she’d torn in half to produce a sharp edge.
All sense of reality froze for him once he saw what Nekou had done to herself. Everything he’d been thinking about saying, all the concerns he wanted to try helping her through, disappeared under the urgency of the immediate situation. Without thinking, he nearly sprinted across the room, lunging for the sheared can before she could slash herself again. She made no effort to stop him from pulling it out of her shaking hand and flinging it at the wall, where it clattered to the floor like the trash it was.
“Why would you do something like that?!” he blurted out in horror. Had he had the chance to more carefully consider his words, he wouldn’t have been as confrontational as he accidentally ended up being, but his own sheer panic put him in autopilot.
“Just watch,” Nekou mumbled lifelessly in response.
“Just watch? What does th-”
Matt’s questions died in his throat, for what she meant soon became very clear. The wounds began closing up right before his eyes, healing so thoroughly that within mere seconds, they were gone. No scars were left behind, no evidence they ever had existed at all. Someone who hadn’t seen them wouldn’t have believed they had been there. Matt knew about her ability to regenerate, but now, there was absolutely no doubt of what she was truly capable of - whether she wanted to be or not.
“That’s why,” she said, quietly at first but soon growing increasingly agitated. “You saw what I became back in the Guanosine Base. You saw what my back looks like. Why don’t the scars on my back heal, if every fucking thing else does? If the fact I can’t even injure myself doesn’t prove I’m a monster, on top of everything else, what does?!”
Left at a loss for words, Matt simply stared at her. In that moment, he did not see the Nekou he first came to know, the loud, foul-mouthed enigma who had joined his group to pay off a trivial debt. He now knew that was merely a veneer, a portion of who she truly was. No, what was sitting right in front of him was the other part that completed her at times baffling persona - a vulnerable young woman, tormented by lies and half-truths, scared by things her intelligence couldn't decipher and lashing out at everything around her as a result.
It felt like looking at himself in a mirror.
Acting instinctively, he moved to sit next to her and wrapped his arms around her shuddering form. Her sobs stopped when she felt him embrace her, coming to a halt in a single, high-pitched squeal of surprise.
“You don’t have to do those kinds of things to yourself,” he gently told her. “If it means anything, I don’t think there’s anything you have to prove. You’re you, that’s what matters.”
“But why?” she softly whimpered, subconsciously nestling her head against him. What he was telling her conflicted so violently with the painful notions filling her head that he might as well have been speaking in a language she had no comprehension of. “It’s that I’m me that’s the problem! How can you not see that, after what happened between us in Olivine?! I used you for my own satisfaction again right after trying to stop! You should know, you should know more than anyone… you’ve seen what I am, what I really am.” Even without Alter-Nekou speaking to her, the things the incorporeal demon told her rang out in her thoughts like the deep, resonant chiming of a giant bell. “I’m a disgusting monster… I’m not like you.”
Releasing Nekou from his arms, Matt intertwined her fingers with his own and exhaled. “What happened between us is exactly what I came here to talk about,” he said, staring out at the snowfall beyond the hotel room’s windows. “I refuse to believe it’s as simple as you being a monster and pushing people away. There has to be more to it than that! We have to talk about this and figure it out!”
“But why do you keep trying to understand how I feel?” she pleaded, again losing control of her tone to the overwhelming torrent of emotions she was experiencing. “How can you possibly care so much that you keep putting up with me?”
There it was. He’d long suspected it, but now he had it directly from Nekou’s mouth. She yearned for someone to care about her, but hated herself so much that it laid immense guilt on her shoulders. “Because… I’m a part of this, too. What happened between us wasn’t one-sided, and I’m not just going to abandon you. How could I, now that I think I understand… you don’t need some white knight on a Rapidash always riding to your rescue and protecting you. You’re tougher than that. All you want is the knowledge that someone will always have your back and be there to catch you if you ever do fall. You want the security of knowing someone’s there for you. I get that now, and I… I want to be that person. You’d do the same for me.”
“I don’t…” Just like when they were playing cards, Matt had completely figured her out. Nekou was simultaneously frustrated and relieved by his understanding, but that contradiction only drove her into a further state of conflict. Whether to keep her guard up or lower it and let him in, she was torn. “Why would you want to waste the effort helping me after everything you’ve gone through? Now that I’ve seen how hard escaping from your past and making it on your own really was…” As the meaning of her words caught up with her, Nekou paused. She already knew what he’d say, that the past he’d escaped from was exactly why he wanted to help her. Staring down at the floor in front of her, she bitterly said, “How you and Amanda grew up was seriously fucked. You know how important Maman was to me… you two deserved to have the same. Seriously, it’s fucked up beyond belief. Watching her try and turn you two against each other just turned my stomach. How disgusting… I want you and Amanda to have what I did, but it's too late and it’s not fair.”
“You know, you’ve been through a lot, and yet you still say that. I appreciate it.” Whether she meant to or not, she was giving him yet another look into just how similar they were. There was no way he could miss how she had tried to change the subject, and if he could do nothing else to show gratitude for her concern, he could answer the question she’d asked. “I guess the reason I want to help you goes all the way back to when Amanda and I were living together in Rustboro and attending school there. I wasn’t…” Matt hesitated, his nerve buckling under the weight of his memories. But when he looked to Nekou and saw her boring holes through him with her eyes from how intensely she was paying attention, those worries faded. He couldn’t bear to let her down. “I wasn’t doing so well back then. I don’t know if what was wrong with me had a name, but every so often, I’d get so anxious and afraid that I couldn’t function, and that was when the voices would start creeping into my head… I couldn’t bear to make Amanda’s life more difficult, especially if anyone else found out, so I made a Secret Base for myself behind the waterfall on Route 119 to be my refuge when I felt myself falling into that pit again. It wasn’t until I figured out that the blackouts and memory loss I was suffering were another persona emerging that I realized when it all began. It was brewing before we ran away from Snowpoint, of that much I’m sure, but without a doubt the day it all crystallized into something was the day our father’s experiment destroyed Amanda’s eyes. I was so furious with him for what he did to her, and for his complete lack of concern, that I couldn’t think straight. That was the first time I lost myself to that other persona, just to deal with what was happening.”
Before continuing, Matt lifted his hand up off the bed, and thanks to Nekou’s cement-like grip on it, hers went with it. He returned her attentive gaze, but couldn’t quite discern what was going through her mind at that point.
“There’s a reason I’m telling you all of this, Nekou. Everything that happened today, seeing Alter-Nekou take control of you, running into Mercury, it all made me see things clearly. We’re in this together. You have my back and I’ve got yours, because I’ve been there. I know how what you’re going through feels. You’re not a monster at all, you’re a good person who’s tired from fighting alone for so long, and you’re crying out for help in the only ways you know how. I get it. And you know why this-” he pointed back and forth between himself and Nekou with his free hand, “doesn’t bother me? It’s because in all the time I’ve been around you, you’ve shown me what it’s like to live freely by your own decisions, and after today, I’m making my own. I’m choosing to stick with you and hopefully get closer to you. What we had, what we have, is something that belongs to you and me and nobody else can ever take that away.”
Right as he finished speaking, Matt had a gasp of surprise forced from his lips when Nekou grabbed his shoulders. Bizarrely, though, grabbing his shoulders was the only thing she did. She froze completely still, clamping her hands on him and keeping her arms rigidly in place, preventing him from moving. An awkward silence settled in between the two, the room becoming so quiet that the sound of a pin dropping could have been heard.
“Th-there’s no way… he actually… he actually gets it…” Nekou felt like she was standing outside of her body, watching what was unfolding as an observer instead of actually being a participant. “I’m not alone… I really am not alone, he gets it, he knows what it’s like and I’m just sitting there like a-”
All of a sudden, Nekou found herself back in her body, facing squarely into Matt’s questioning, concerned stare. It was like a switch had been thrown inside her mind. Every emotion she’d been detached from just seconds earlier hit her at once with the force of a Machamp’s punches, and with no ability to do anything else, she collapsed into him and started bawling.
“It’s just not worth it! Nothing is!” she wailed, her tears flowing free as she hit her fist against his arm. He responded simply by embracing her again, letting her get everything she needed to out. “Don’t you fucking get it?! Nothing in this world fucking lasts! You want to learn some lesson from how I live? Learn to not give a fuck about anything and live every day like it’s your last! Otherwise you’ll just get hurt!”
“But you don’t really live like that, either,” Matt gently pointed out. “You care about Olivia, I know that. You care about all your friends, you care about Marie and the rest of them… and the fact you were so upset over thinking you took advantage of me says you care about me, too.”
“I do, everything you said is right…” she admitted, her cries tapering off into a softer sobbing. “That’s why I have to stop, because I don’t think I can lose anything or anyone more after Maman… I’ve always had only one wish, to be able to go and live somewhere to live in peace with all the things that make me feel good… but I don’t even deserve that. Not after… not after I killed that fucking punk Grunt who was picking on me. I sent him to that place where there’s an eternal nothing, that place I have nightmares about… that’s where I deserve to be.”
“No, it’s not. I promise you, you deserve to find that place where you can happy. It wasn’t you who killed that guy, it was Alter-Nekou. I’m sure of it. That thing, whatever it is… that’s the monster. Not you.”
“Is he fucking serious?” Nekou internally asked herself. “How does he keep saying things like that? Unless…”
An answer soon presented itself to her, but if she had the chance to think about it, she wouldn’t have understood it. Nothing about what was happening really made any sense, but as she settled in more comfortably against him, she found herself wondering if it really mattered at all.
“You really are un fou, you know that?” she quietly breathed into his light, button-up shirt. “It’s so much like you to latch yourself on to this fucked up crazy train I call a life.”
“Well, when the train of your own life was so messed up you almost got buried in a snowstorm only to be rescued by an omnicidal lunatic with a god complex, I guess you’re used to crazy?” Matt offered.
“Tu n'as aucune idée,” Nekou muttered, pressing her fists against him. “I don’t even know where I end and that… that… ce monstre effrayant, where she begins. When Colress had me locked up, and she was taking over my mind… I saw things. I think they might have been memories. Memories of a childhood I’ve never remembered before…”
Childhood memories? The mere suggestion of such a thing piqued Matt’s interest. She’d said before that she couldn’t remember her life past a certain point, so had something changed? “What were they?” he asked.
“I saw… I saw…” Initially unable to get the words out, she found some sense of relief when he tightened his arms around her. “I think it was the room I grew up in… there was nothing there but the flattest fucking mattress you can imagine, and a desk piled with textbooks way too advanced for a kid as old as I think I was then. That was one memory, anyway. Then there were the injections… there were these scientists, injecting me with all kinds of chemicals that made me feel like they were burning me from the inside out. Think that’s why I can regenerate, because they were talking about regeneration and then had a Binacle slash my fucking back up… that explains the scars, I guess, but not why they stay while everything else heals.” Nekou whimpered in frustration, deeply upset from her recollections but feeling a strange sense of security in the moment. “I don’t fucking know. I just wish I knew who to blame so I could make them regret it.”
“The question of who did those things to you must be one that has an answer,” Matt softly suggested to her, making her shift in his arms. “I’ll help you find that answer. I promise.”
He couldn’t see her lips turn upward into a tiny, relieved smile. “But why? Why always put yourself second and go out of your way for someone like me, who’s done nothing but take from you?” She knew he would have some satisfying reply, she just needed to hear it from him.
Releasing her from his embrace, he turned back toward the window. Snow was starting to collect on the glass, the pane growing ever so slightly foggy from the cold.
“I guess it’s because I had to be the responsible one, since Mercury and Charon blew Amanda and I off,” he pensively reflected. “Things haven’t really changed since then. If you think about it, none of us really have the most stable families. Olivia and Anabel have each other, that’s true, but they’ve been through way more than they deserve. We all have… we’ve got each other, so we have to watch out for each other like we were a family, you know? You’re a part of that.”
A family. Those two words, those two short, simple words, shook Nekou to her core like nothing ever had before. A family. In all the life she knew, only Ariana really came close to giving her that. Judging from the fragmented memories she’d seen, she certainly hadn’t had it in her childhood. And yet, there was Matt, the tattered explorer offering her the comforts she thought she’d lost when Ariana was taken from her.
And, as little sense as it seemingly made, she believed him.
“Merci du fond du coeur…” Nekou pulled back, allowing Matt to see her smile as it grew broader. “But… I’m going to make a promise, too. Let me help you with the burden of protecting our family… don’t feel like you have to do this alone. If you’re watching out for me, I’m going to watch out for you. If I’m going to be your bodyguard, you be mine. I can’t watch you take all of that on yourself anymore, I want you to share it with me. Because…” Both her words and her emotions suddenly caught in her throat, but by that point, her thoughts were racing and she couldn’t stop them. “B-because… I, I want you to learn how to enjoy your life, too. Y-you keep telling me you get that from me, and if that’s making you happy, then I want you to feel that way, and… and, uh…” Growing flustered, she shut her eyes and admitted, “It’s just… it’s just, when I think about, I… I-I’m…. I’m p-prettty sure, I’m pretty sure I’m fucking in l-”
She stopped speaking altogether when he embraced her again. “Sssh, it’s fine. You don’t have to say it if it’s hard. It’s been a long day.”
Feeling as if a great weight had been lifted off of her, Nekou pressed herself against Matt’s side and leaned her head on him. “It sure has, hasn’t it… I don’t know what we are, but it sure is nice to have someone there’s no bullshit with.”
“You can say that again.”
“It sure is nice to have someone there’s no bullshit with,” she repeated wryly, getting him to laugh. “Say, would you read to me?”
Before he realized it, she had thrust his copy of The Prince and the Soul-Heart toward him. How had she gotten ahold of it then and there? Had she been holding on to it the entire time since discovering it? Where had she been keeping it? All the questions Matt could have asked, and yet, he didn’t feel like he needed to. With his close friend snuggled against him, her warmth radiating into him and the sweet floral smell of her shampoo flooding his nose, those questions just weren’t necessary. Was she more than a friend now? Maybe. But in that moment, he wasn’t sure if it mattered. Whatever she was, whatever they were, he was too content to care.
“Gladly,” he answered, taking the book into his hands and opening to its first page. He inhaled deeply, then began reading, “Once, there was a great kingdom that ruled over a land of snow. Beyond the boundary lay an endless, winding forest that many magical creatures called home…”
-:-
In Father’s office within Polaris’s temple, the leader of the cult and his closest advisor were again conferencing in seclusion, away from their followers. He and Finansielle stood in front of his desk looking up at a hologram being projected from the double helix statues, depicting a three-dimensional model of Renzo from the shoulders up. The virtual display cast a shining glow over them both, and reflected in a continually shifting fashion in the gentle current of the huge water tank behind them.
“The Oracle’s told me some rather tantalizing new information,” Finansielle told Father, her manner teasing and eccentric as it so often was. “It’s time for you to bring Renzo into our fold.”
“I’ve known this day would come for a long time,” Father replied, sounding rather detached, “since the day you first told me of him. I am almost surprised that it has come this soon… will this really work?”
“He has an important part to play. You know that, silly.” Moving away from Father’s side, Finansielle slid in front of him and playfully crossed her hands behind her back. “We just have to convince him that you’ve been watching over him all along. All you’ve got to do is tell him things nobody should be able to know, but we know… his history… his name…”
“You’re right,” he admitted, resigning himself to the truth of his words. “You will go and establish contact with him. I will speak to him from here.”
“There you go…” Finansielle cooed, her lips twisting into a wicked grin. “That’s exactly how she’s told me it will go…”
-:-
Nekou had no idea how or when she had left Blackthorn City, but when she came to, she certainly wasn’t there anymore. Wherever she was, there was nothing to be seen for what seemed like miles. A vast, endless sky filled with stars spread out infinitely in every direction, but the dread creeping through her made her initially think she was alone in the void.
Alone in the void? Was that really true? Or was there something else there with her?
Stiffening in terror, Nekou whipped her head upward, discovering that the space above her consumed by an immense, churning black cloud. Periodic flashes of lightning inside the storm erased any doubt of whether or not she really was alone, casting fleeting glimpses of something gigantic hiding among the clouds. Even the brief looks she could get at it impressed upon her just how incomprehensible the monster’s nature was. It gave off a nightmarish image, as if it was the living embodiment of death itself, a beast that climbed out of her worst fears to torment her in reality.
“So you are finally here with me, where you belong, instead of your pitiable planet…” the atrocity lurking in the storm said to her. Its voice was everywhere and nowhere, radiating through the very atoms comprising the space Nekou shared with it. “Our time together will be fleeting for now. But you know we will soon be one, you will fulfill your fate to be my avatar…”
No matter how horrifying the monster was, for it to so boldly claim her very existence was something she couldn’t abide. She furiously tried to direct the most profane language she could muster at it, to dare it to even try making her into something she wasn’t. But the words she wanted wouldn’t come out. None would. Was it the creature’s doing? How was it suppressing her voice?
“I am this space, and this space is me,” it told her, as if it were reading her mind. “Just like I am you and you are me. Embrace me and you will have control over everything that is and ever will be here. From the beginning, this has been the fate written in the stars…”
“...Ah!”
Just like that, Nekou was back in her Blackthorn hotel room. It took her a minute to fully realize she’d never left. She had fallen asleep with her head on Matt’s shoulder while he was reading to her, and he’d also nodded off not long after. Accordingly, when she snapped awake from her nightmare, she stirred him from his slumber as well.
“Nekou?” he asked, noticing how rapid and shallow her breaths were. “What’s wrong?”
“I… I had a fucking nightmare…” Nekou put her hand against her chest as she tried to stabilize herself. “I was somewhere… somewhere. I don’t fuckin’ know, alright? I just know there was this demonic looking thing there that told me I belonged there with it, that I don’t belong here and I’m going to be its avatar or something… I can feel it down in my bones, calling to me…”
“Whatever that thing was, it was wrong.” Matt wrapped his arms around her in another attempt to comfort her. “Sometimes our brains lie to us about stuff and we just have to remember what’s real, and what’s real is that you do belong here.”
“I just wish believing that was as easy as saying it,” she replied, leaning into the embrace and accepting his compassion.
END of CHAPTER 29.5
