Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Chapter Text

When the alarm peals at exactly three in the morning, Emmet has been awake for thirteen minutes already. The ceiling fan turns four more times before he rises from bed, forgoing lights in favor of Chandelure's soft glow as she trails him through their empty apartment. Excadrill, Galvantula, and Archeops sleep in a pile on the living room carpet, rarely in their pokeballs these days, and rouse with varying degrees of enthusiasm as Emmet trudges in to nudge them with his one socked foot. 

Dim streetlight haze leaks yellow into the kitchen on account of, he assumes, Haxorus’s abuse of her opposable thumb privileges to sabotage Emmet’s resolve to leave the blinds low and closed. Dishes amass in the sink and the fridge is empty, but Garbodor has dealt with the trash and this he considers a victory. 

From the doorway, Klinklang's gears catch with a metallic drone when Emmet decides that the remaining cold brew coffee and a handful of almonds counts as breakfast. Emmet smiles and pokes the blue core on his leftmost gears, saying, "Don't worry! There's food at the station." 

On cue, Durant skitters up to his feet carrying Emmet’s bathroom kit in his mandibles, Crustle behind with his pressed shirt, tie, and trousers atop her back. In the past, the dingy station mirrors would suffice, but these days he wakes up with plenty of time to avoid his reflection in the comfort of his own bathroom. Here, he flips on light switch out of necessity alone, shoos his hovering Pokemon behind a closed door, and wills himself to see his own face in the mirror today. 

Fuck. 

Blurring his peripherals and fixating on his chin, he swipes his razor across his jawline and neck in quick motions practiced enough, despite the haste, to not knick the thin skin there. Hair comes next, haphazardly arranged with just enough attention to gelling the sideburns and the hope that the cap will cover the rest. 

Recently, Elesa had teased him about his eyebags and suggested he should invest in concealer if he wasn't going to get enough sleep. Or had that been directed at Ingo? 

It didn't matter. Perhaps he'd take her up on it and join her on her next shopping trip down to Castelia. If it had been meant for Ingo, well, maybe Emmet's just being thoughtful. 

For now, he splashes cold water on his face and allows himself a count of ten before he dries off and forces himself to open his eyes.  

He manages a count of six. The bathroom door closing heavy behind him, he does up his shirt with trembling fingers and knots his tie just too tight to be comfortable. Gathering his teams into their pokeballs, he sets Crustle, Garbodor, and Klinklang on his belt and the others in separate compartments in his pack. He'd rather they all stay out to accompany him, but ten Pokemon would be, at the least, a safety hazard. 

Not to mention the attention it could draw. Emmet doesn't need unnecessary scrutiny, not these days. Left to routine, Nimbasa City forges ahead regardless of any hitches and bumps in the tracks. The key is to prevent a diversion unless necessary, to anticipate rather than circumvent problems so that one can ensure a steady line ahead to the station so that one’s passengers will be none the wiser and safer for it. What good is the alternative, to panic or become resigned to the fact of fate? 

Emmet pulls a hat low over his brow and stares blankly into the coat closet. The apartment beyond the foyer stands quiet behind him, and he neither wants to leave nor stay. With a tight inhale, he pulls one jacket from its hanger, folds it over his arm, and nestles it between the two cases of pokeballs in his kit. On the exhale, he slides the other greatcoat, black and brown, over his shoulders and walks out into Nimbasa City. 

The early morning drags, Gear Station empty save for his staff on duty, third shift workers commuting on the lines, and the intermittent straggler of unidentified purpose. With the battle circuits unoperational until working hours, Emmet performs his daily review with the lead dispatcher, visits the Control Center, and completes daily audits across the Depot's flags and light signals. The reduced-service morning trains arrive and depart precise to schedule, and Emmet yearns for the portion of his day on the lines. He could only wait. Whenever needed for an early shift, Ingo had enjoyed quiet daybreaks on the platforms before his morning obligations on the trains. 

And Emmet has his part to play. 

Two hours later, he swallows down a grin as the Dark Green Line train rolls beneath his feet. His first challenger, an unfamiliar girl about the same age as the recent Champion, shies away from his initial greeting but redoubles her enthusiasm as Emmet runs his script. 

"Thank you for riding the Battle Subway today. I am the Subway Boss Ingo. I will choose the next destination based on your talent." 

Like all things, it was easier with practice. Once, his voice shook with the effort to get it right, to copy exactly the recordings that he watched in the bathroom mirror that first night after. He had lied and lied about colds in the summertime for those initial weeks until he could find the volume and tone that didn’t give him away. 

The girl fumbles with her pokeballs for a moment, then returns her attention his way with a tight, earnest nod. Emmet firms his jaw and selects Crustle's pokeball from his belt, keeping his tone level and voice loud as he continues, "Do you understand your Pokemon well? Can you hold on to your principle? Will you go on to victory or defeat? All aboard!" 

The car curves around a tunnel as they release their first Pokemon, and Emmet knows to center his weight and tilt into the turn as he casts out his right arm, the arc of his throw perfect this time despite relying on his nondominant hand. 

The challenger's Mienshao outpaces Crustle, and circumvents his rocky helmet by focusing on quick volley drain punches that both recover any damage and keep Crustle's pincers at a distance. Thrown back by whip-like force, Crustle peers to Emmet for guidance as she scrambles up again, and Emmet misses his cue by a beat. 

It's no harm done, a command given on a breathless exhale and the earthquake to follow, but it's unnecessary. A speed disadvantage requires his utmost attention and Ingo's Pokemon always wait for instructions. And it shows that Crustle is unnerved as earthquake stutters a start-stop rhythm that forces her to scramble forward to reach Mienshao before a dodge wastes their effort. 

Mienshao endures the earthquake and Crustle falls to the next punch. Taking a cue from Elesa, Emmet bypasses Klinklang's type disadvantage via a rapid volt switch to Garbodor, who absorbs the next drain punch handily. Psychic drops Mienshao, and in a phase of red light Reuniclus floats across the car with a chirp. 

Emmet resists the comment that bubbles up with the joy he feels at this trainer's obvious research preceding her climb to face him. Ingo would save that for the end. In a perfect reversal, the windows reflect purple and blue, and Garbodor bows under a psychic attack repaid in turn. Emmet can’t smile, but he would. 

Thankfully for Klinklang, the trainer's last Pokemon isn't a ground type. They take out Reuniclus with the combination of Klinklang’s speed and giga impact, but the Amoonguss that follows is a tank with giga drain. Klinklang falls surrounded by incandescent green, and his challenger leaps into the air with the joy of a clean win. 

With a crisp nod, Emmet recalls Klinklang and follows along to the voice in his head as he says, "Bravo! Your talent has brought you to the destination called Victory! However, your journey has just started. When you choose your next destination, go full speed ahead!" 

The girl blinks at him and says, "Thank you, Mr. Ingo! I thought you looked kind of scary at first, but," she pauses, tucking a stray section of hair behind her ear before smiling wide and unabashed. "You're a really kind person, aren't you?" 

When she leaves, Emmet sits with perfect posture on the benches facing the doors out to the station and hopes that his gloves mask how his hands shake. The train pulls away from the platform, tunnels a stream of light-dark-light around him as he takes far longer than necessary before proceeding to the car. Playing in two, the tracks are his daily respite and his operator can wait, just this once. 

Nate faces him on the Light Green Line and, as usual, does not win. His experimental combination today--Cryogonal, Bouffalant, and Cofagrigus--battles well, but some time has passed since their last challenger on the Super Singles circuit and Chandelure, Haxorus and Excadrill make short, eager work of them. 

Per routine, as well, Nate plops down on the seats after his last Pokemon falls, giving Emmet-as-Ingo a look of faux dismay when he begins to insist his schedule will not allow time for chat. Emmet takes a seat across the car, fixes his face into his most encouraging frown, and listens to Nate's most recent escapades, battles, and stories from the League. 

Early in this charade, Emmet came up with every reason he could manage to excuse himself from these conversations. His expression hadn't sat right, his voice and words too clipped, and the weight of the split second decision to lie and carry on was quickly becoming too real to carry. Any of those would unravel him, and he wouldn't--couldn't do that in front of a passenger. 

Now, if Emmet could thank Nate for his persistence without giving himself away, he would. A regular challenger was safer practice than Elesa and less miserable than the mirror, and Nate’s enthusiasm required little from him beyond a battle and a willingness to listen. 

Distantly, he wonders if his version of Ingo is more familiar now to Nate. As a person, that is, beyond the character on battle recordings and Xtransceiver screens. When Ingo came home, would Nate notice the change? 

Emmet thought about it often, what Ingo would think of him now. When he could bear it, he would play out the argument in his head. His brother would insist on honesty, on truth, and Emmet would eventually concede and then they could fix it together. Emmet, finally just Emmet, could play apologetic well. He would be sorry, desperately so, but--

Nate had asked him a question. He tilts his head, repeats Ingo’s name, and Emmet drags himself back to his actual reality. "I'm sorry," He says, checking his tone and posture with a careful, full inhale. "I was lost in thought, could I ask you to repeat that?" 

The train slows as it approaches Gear Station and Nate laughs, saying, "No problem! Just giving you the heads up that Rosa is in town today. You should let Emmet know, I'll bet he'd be excited to battle her this afternoon. No doubt she'll be rushing for the Super Doubles as soon as it's open."

Rocking to a stop, the train pulls Nate's attention to the doors behind him. Emmet allows himself a faint, quick grin of anticipation. As they step into the station, he's Ingo again in an instant, assuring Nate that he'll be certain to let his brother know and ignoring the pang in his chest that accompanies. A firm, purposeful handshake with absolutely no swinging, and they both depart, Emmet beelining for the office shared between the Station Operations and Engineering teams.

There's fresh coffee in the pot and the Depot agents and engineering staff on duty greet him with an array of salutes and good mornings that Emmet returns with ever-polite precision. Paperwork dominates the remainder of his morning, interspersed by a couple battles requiring a sprint to the Singles Circuit. No additional challengers cleared even thirty wins on the Super Singles, leaving Chandelure, Haxorus and Excadrill agitated from their pokeballs on the tray on his desk. 

A glance confirming that his staff are all focused enough on their own work allows Emmet to gently flick Haxorus's pokeball and whisper, "Complaining won't make challengers stronger." She rolls her pokeball over so that the latch faces away from him. Emmet is kind enough not to turn it back around, switching instead to his brother's computer screen and the slew of emails about track improvements on the Yellow Line that need scheduling. 

Half past noon arrives shortly after his third coffee, omitting the cold brew at breakfast, and Emmet rises from his chair without fanfare. Another round of salutes, have-a-good-afternoons, and Ingo's shift ends. This leaves Emmet just under an hour to change clothes and personalities before circling back to the station. 

Nimbasa City makes it easy to disappear. When there's not enough time to return home, Emmet has his pick between gym lockers, fast food toilets, and clothing store changing rooms to switch his trousers and shoes, as long as he ensures he removes his coat and hat as he departs the station. Only once, with just twenty minutes between shifts, had Emmet considered coming clean to Elesa so that he'd have full access to her studios. Still, the coffee shop around the corner asks fewer questions. 

Today it's a chain restaurant, where he had ordered a platter of lukewarm fries to stave off the objections of his Pokemon and his stomach. The convenient excuse of a ketchup stain accompanied plenty of reassurances to the waitress that happened to recognize him as Ingo. She comments in her Floccesy accent while handing him the check that it was sure sweet that his spare uniform was in his brother's colors. What was left of Emmet's appetite dwindled. 

The one benefit of doing two jobs at the same station is that Emmet can front-load his work in anticipation of his next shift. He arrives, white coat donned and smiling, responding to last week’s buried emails about the Yellow Line track works on his Xtransceiver. A well-meaning Depot agent comments that Ingo must have warned him on his way out, which isn't technically incorrect. 

The portion of his day doing office work is, by design, brief. This doesn't stop the project engineer for the Orange Line from cornering him en route to his fifth coffee. 

"Hey, boss, have a sec?" 

No. "I do. What is it?"

Emmet's plaster smile grows taut as he watches eyebrows pull sympathetic and hears the delicate note in her voice. "I wanted to make sure you're still okay. That you haven't changed your mind." 

His heartbeat pounds against the lump in his throat. "I am fine," he manages, stuffing his fidgeting hands into his trouser pockets. "I haven't changed my mind. He'll come back or I'll find him." He knows that the way that he's looking at her is too raw, too desperate, and his staff will notice, but it's easier to get away with in his own costume. Emmet’s the emotional one, after all. He could write it off as anxiety and his engineer, his one accidental conspirator, would back him up. 

Despite their inches of difference in height, she puts a hand on his shoulder, squeezing once then pulling back when he flinches away. "He wouldn't hold it against you, Emmet," she says, looking past him into the station and allowing a moment to pass in observation. Then she snaps back to formality, saying with a parting salute, "But I'll follow your lead. Boss." 

Emmet drops his coffee, full, into the bin and heads straight for the Pink Line. 

Later, when she wins, Rosa takes his offered handshake in both hands and swings Emmet around in wide circles in perfect time as the train dives along a curve. At the point she releases him, he stumbles dizzily onto the bench, and she says, "There! That's a smile. You looked like you were having a bad day."

Once recovering the use of language, he says, "That's an unsafe way of helping." 

His smile does come more easily, though. Emmet will give her that. 

"Iris and Elesa miss you, by the way! Both of you, except they apparently saw Ingo recently.” She considers, looping her arm around a pole. “Are you guys okay? If you lie to me, I’ll tell Elesa later." 

There it goes. Using the pretense of dizziness to buy himself time, Emmet stares at the roof of the car and tries to unpack each component. "I've been very busy. Ingo and I are fine. It's better for the Subway if we work separate shifts. This ensures even coverage." Half-truths aren't lies. 

Rosa pouts, but perks up when the intercom announces the station approach. Distracted by the scrolling sign overhead, she says, "That sucks. You must miss working with him."

Emmet closes his eyes and feels as if he's aged a decade. "It does," he says. "I do." Truths are easier still. 

The train rolls to a stop and Emmet departs with a proper handshake this time, no less for Unova's Champion. Iris would have his head if didn’t treat her successor accordingly. On the thought, he sends Iris a quick text, and the rest of his shift happens between blinks.

He shouldn't have trashed that coffee. 

Weaving through the last rush of evening commuters navigating the hive of Gear Station, Emmet makes his final rounds. The overnight crew filters in, and he jokes with them about the late hour as if he's not on his sixteenth straight. He doesn't falter, though, not until he crosses the threshold of his apartment, not until he hangs up his uniform and his brother's, not until he releases each of their Pokemon and ensures that they're fed and ready to rest. 

Then, only then, Emmet lets himself collapse. Some days he has the energy, after, to pour over notes and research, to follow up on the endless list of aliased enquiries to researchers, and to do something useful instead of only keeping everything from falling apart. 

Not tonight. 

Tonight the couch waits, sufficient enough for the little sleep he plans on. Tonight he falls asleep the moment he drops the tension of the facade. Tonight he does not dream. 

Two weeks later, it goes like this:

It's midway through his morning shift and Emmet-as-Ingo is ignoring his personal calls. If the Depot staff, any passengers, or his handful of challengers are acting strange, he doesn't notice. Today, and all of this week so far, he is barely coasting by. His work routines feel more akin to hauntings than his living, breathing life. 

On Monday, a researcher followed up. Their reply was almost incoherent, references to spacetime and wormholes buried in academic language far outside Emmet's areas of expertise. Regardless, he needed a direction, not a treatise. 

Instead, the email had phrases like 'International Police', 'Whereabouts Unknown', and 'Parallel Worlds' and once Emmet was finished dry heaving into the kitchen bin, he shoved the message into a folder on his desktop and tried to move on. 

It was only a theory. Barely a lead. 

By Thursday it's all he can think about. He's losing too often, and his agents are catching routine checks that he shouldn’t be missing. He's minutes from flushing his Xtransceiver down the toilet if Elesa can't wait until he clocks out. At least as himself, he'd be able to fend off whatever is on her mind without having to pretend at his brother's patience and infinite fucking restraint. 

When he alights from the Light Green Line after an abysmal series of battles at quarter to noon, Elesa waits on the platform. Her bulky casual wear strikes Emmet as strange, as does the way she has hidden the length of her hair in tight coils pulled back behind her neck. There's no time to question, though, as she quickly approaches and guides him by the elbow through Gear Station to a vacant breakroom. The moment Elesa latches the door and flicks on the lights, she circles on him and says, "What the fuck is going on, Ingo?" 

Oh. 

This isn't how he thought it would go. 

Dread sets in like a weight on his chest. He clenches and unclenches his fists at his sides, over and over again, and can’t come up with a single useful thing to say. Whether as himself or as Ingo, there’s not an answer that will stop this from derailing. 

Silence doesn't help. Elesa jabs a finger into his chest, and continues, "Why haven't you been answering my calls?" She drags up his right hand to hold his Xtransceiver between them. "Or do me one better. Why do yours and Emmet's numbers both route to the same Xtrans? I do run an electric gym, and you didn't exactly cover your tracks."

Dropping his wrist, she crosses her arms over her billowy sweatshirt and leans back against the door with a bitter smile. Emmet lets his hand fall limp against the lip of the table behind him, and tries to think through the static fog that coils around his brain. 

"It's--This morning hasn't allowed for unscheduled stops," Emmet starts slowly, finding it far harder to lie with Ingo's diction. "Emmet's Xtransceiver is in for repairs, so we decided to route his incoming calls to mine." 

Elesa's annoyance is a quick flash across blue eyes that she smothers with restraint as soon as it appears. "That's a left-handed Xtrans, Ingo, you're just wearing it on the wrong wrist. Don't bullshit me." 

"I--" 

"Wait, just, stop," she interrupts, pressing forward off her heels and flipping open the dual screen of her own Xtransceiver. Tapping at the screen, shoves a social media page underneath his line of sight, landing the scroll on a video that blows up to cover both screens. 

Emmet watches in slow motion as he fucks it all up. 

It's yesterday afternoon and the break between shifts is negligible. He's slipping, after Monday, and he still has the overnight shift as himself before the dawn cover as Ingo. A challenger on the Super Singles Circuit, who hadn't put up much of a fight despite the effort it took to reach him, hassled him for a conversation after their battle. Emmet had nothing to offer. His responses had been short and, in retrospect, probably cruel. 

Evidently, he gave himself away. 

Emmet watches his back, wrong in Ingo's coat, maneuver the crowds at rush hour through the shaded lens of someone's camera. Always only a few paces behind, the recording follows him around the block past the station, where Ingo’s coat comes off and his hat follows. It's the comment about his unkempt hair that gives away the identity of the recorder, Emmet’s embarrassment at his break of character still fresh. 

He can feel Elesa's hard stare as the camera follows him into a coffee shop. Fifteen seconds in the restroom and the recording clicks off on the peak of a hushed gasp as Emmet emerges into the dining area dressed in white. As himself.  

"See, normally," Elesa starts as she draws out of his space, leaning with her elbows on the far counter with feigned nonchalance. "I'd want to warn you about people like that. And, really, watch out for yourself. Please. But I also need you to tell me what's going on." 

The options divert like a series of switching points at a junction and Emmet doesn't know which way leads to the right station. 

Well. 

That's not exactly true, is it? 

He does know. He knows with certainty, with the voice that rings loud and clear and so sad in his head, that the answer is truth. 

Except to what end? 

Truth was a matter of binaries, with distinct beginnings and ends that cannot articulate the nuance of situations in motion. Were he to admit it, now, and own the deception, would the option remain to insist that he could still fix this? Or would he be forever fixed in the reality of his one fundamental failure, regardless of what actions he took thereafter? Those actions would be their own separate truths and he would still have made the mistake in the first place. 

He would be the one who lost Ingo. 

Emmet was still the one that let go. 

In these moments, his twin's expressions come easily. Emmet wore his smile as a wall, anyway, or maybe as a promise. A counterpoint, perhaps. So mirroring Ingo now felt like letting go. Until, that is, he had to speak. 

Elesa waits. 

Emmet diverts his eyes--a stupid, obvious tell, albeit fairly accurate to Ingo--and lies. "Emmet is unwell and I have taken over his shifts. He was… embarrassed at the idea of appearing weak to his challengers."

"No. Try again." 

When he doesn't, Elesa throws up her hands, then shoves them in the pockets of her sweatshirt and stalks the length of the breakroom. "Why are you being so frustrating? I haven't seen Emmet in weeks, and you've been barely yourself when I do get to see you. Now there's this all of the sudden and you have nothing to say for yourself, as if that's going to fly when someone with a microphone who isn't nearly as nice as me comes calling." At her natural pause, she startles and spins back towards him, eyes narrowed but brighter with the hunch. "Wait. Was it the Multi Battle Circuit being canceled? Is that what's up?" 

Emmet's stomach clenches. He needs to leave. 

Elesa, however, continues, "Is Emmet in Opelucid with Drayden or something? But the cancellation was months ago, right? You haven't been keeping this up for months. What changed?" 

Everything. 

"What?" 

Emmet goes to clap his hand over his mouth as if he can catch the slip and shove it back down his throat, but Elesa's hand rushes out to catch his wrist. They stand in the aftermath of the only truthful thing Emmet has said, both aware he hadn’t meant to say anything at all. Wide blue eyes blink rapidly at him and he forces himself not to break and give himself away. 

The hand she holds hovering an inch from his face fidgets and curls as Emmet tries not to bite the ridges of his nails into the pads of his fingers. 

Elesa asks, "What are you saying? Did something happen between you two?" 

The options divert like a series of switching points at a junction, and this time Emmet knows where they each lead. 

"Ingo, where’s Emmet?" 

I am Emmet. I let Ingo disappear. I failed. Now it's all falling apart. 

Or.

"He's gone." 

Elesa lets go of his wrist. “Gone?” 

Emmet looks away so that he doesn’t have to watch her process. If he had meant home, or away to Opelucid, Elesa had provided the opening and he did not take it. Frankly, she had given every opportunity to explain and given that this was what he had to offer, he could only imagine what she was left thinking. When she speaks again, her voice is impossibly soft. 

“I…I don’t understand.” 

Folding in on himself, caught between wanting to console her and knowing that in every way he is the one at fault, Emmet digs in his heels and says, “I’ve been maintaining routine operations in his absence, while conducting an investigation into what happened and where he could be now.” 

Elesa buckles. Emmet rushes forward to steady her, but she grips the counter behind her with one white-knuckled hand and stays him with the other. “Please. I’m sorry, but I need space right now.” Eviscerated, emptied like garbage onto the ground and deserving it, Emmet takes a measured step back. Then another. Elesa continues, “Gone can mean dead, Ingo.”

And he knows. He wants to shout, he wants to throw his hands up, he wants to weep, because he knows this intimately. 

Instead Emmet waits quietly as she stares blankly at an empty point on the linoleum floor. In equal parts he wants to anticipate her next question to better prepare and wants to dissociate right alongside her in some kind of mutually assured destruction of his own making. 

He never allowed himself to linger on the version of events where he had to reveal the truth without having Ingo by his side again. Does he explain how long? How it happened? The threads he’d unraveled to no avail? The threads he couldn’t consider? Does he just make it up as he goes, and continue his own search regardless?

“Hey,” Elesa says, her voice thick but firm. “Once I forgive you, you're going to let me help fix this. I’m not taking no for an answer.”

“But you intend to forgive me?”

She laughs, short and broken. “Don’t push your luck.” 

After that, it doesn't take long for Elesa's warning of worse scrutiny to materialize. As she pushes again for details, starting at when and where, a ticketing agent intrudes to inform them that there were a handful of interested parties looking for a statement waiting in the atrium. Her questions would have to wait.

Elesa collects her fractured composure, thanks the agent, and asks Emmet whether he'd like to take to lead or let her. 

Emmet would rather do any number of things. 

But he considers the depth of the grave that he's dug for himself and informs Elesa that he will handle it, that it should stay a subway matter for the time being. 

When she leaves without offering a hug or otherwise engaging in any of their infinite little rituals born out of years of friendship, Emmet tries to swallow down the emptiness that this leaves within him with grace. 

Success is relative. Not breaking down is a good start. 

He would need to cross the station atrium to travel from this particular breakroom to reach Ingo’s desk, so Emmet prepares his holding statement on the back of a crumpled receipt with a pencil that is more bite-mark than wood. The statements he's used to usually reference line delays, track or station damages, or system outages. The cameras outside would be looking for either news regarding the battle circuits for trainers, tourists, and local businesses, or for gossip. He doesn’t know where to start. 

Setting Ingo's hat on the table, he tangles his fingers in his hair and wonders whether disappearing himself is an option, until the thought tastes like ash and closes his throat around his windpipe. 

Emmet is still here. Meaning it's on him to deal with the aftermath. 

In order to write a holding statement for the media and to tell a good lie, one first needs to establish the facts. 

The first: Subway Master Ingo is gone. 

The second: Six months and eight days ago, an incident involving an unknown power occurred during a routine inspection on the Orange Line tracks in advance of the new Multi Battle Circuit's grand opening. 

The third: At this time, the surviving remaining witness of the incident, Subway Master Emmet, is leading investigations into the cause, origin, and result of this power. Further information is forthcoming. 

Emmet stares at the table until the polymer coating swims in whites and gray. When the roiling in the pit of his gut does not cease, he assumes it’s permanent given the route that he's set for himself. 

With the truth laid bare, he pieces together the lies. 

Later, in the atrium of Gear Station, Emmet-as-Ingo holds a microphone far enough so that when he gathers his voice it doesn't screech with feedback, and says, "In light of recent allegations, I would like to confirm that Subway Master Emmet stepped down from his position approximately three months ago following recent internal developments. We here at the Nimbasa City Subway System, and most notably myself, Subway Master Ingo, offer our sincerest apologies for withholding this information from the public. As the situation is currently ongoing and we are assessing what this means for our Battle Circuits, I can offer no further comment at this time."

Passing the microphone to his Chief of Staff, Emmet spins on his heel and strides back towards the innards of the station. Distantly aware of the clamor, he’s unable to make out anything over the bloodrush thrum in his ears and his own hyperventilating as he draws himself out of sight as fast as his legs will take him. 

Knowing he cannot face the city, its towering horizon less a refuge now than a panoptic threat of being seen, clearly, for what he is, Emmet relies on the tunnels to guide him home. 

Chapter Text

Iris isn't at home when she hears the news. It's rare, these days, that she stays in Opelucid City when there's Unova and the wider world to explore, free of the obligations of Gym Leader or Champion. Those roles can wait, with their meetings, their schedules, and their propensity for ending with someone telling her what to do, however deferential they may be.

A nearby herd of Deerling startle, scattering in every direction, as Iris releases Salamence into the thicket beneath the thin walkway she is teetering from. Route 7 is no place for dragons, but she won't be long. Shifting her weight off her left side, she lets herself drop onto her fastest flier and whispers, "Heya, girl. Think you can get us home quick?" 

There's less space than Iris imagines Salamence prefers, but they take to the sky without delay. With the evening sun behind her, she can't help but admire how the light dips and lifts over the distant desert dunes. It takes every bit of her resolve not to shift Salamence towards Nimbasa. 

It would be easy. The city is on the way. She could drop down in front of the station and if she can't find him there, there's no added harm in making a show of having Aggron break down his apartment door.

But Dad needed her more than Ingo needed a piece of her mind. Even if--

Well, no, Ingo desperately needed a piece of her mind, but the right thing to do was to head directly home. And suddenly the idea of doing the right thing felt more significant. 

Besides, what did urgency matter at this point? They had missed their chance at that. Three months ago, apparently. 

The air above the cloudline is crisp when Iris tries to steady herself with a deep breath. Here above Twist Mountain, it's fresh, almost delicate, and she is briefly, selfishly glad she has this time to compose herself before she’s home. Before having to actually deal with any of it. 

Because there isn’t an explanation, here, that doesn’t hurt. Why would Emmet leave without a word before or since? What would compel Ingo to pretend at being his brother, to lie point blank every time she reached out? To lie to all of them, his friends and family and passengers. 

What would keep Emmet away for so long?

Approaching Tubeline Bridge, Iris sniffles and flips open her Xtransceiver. Despite the chill and everything else, her hands are steady as she types. 

'Hi Emmet. Don't know if this will reach you.'

'Don't know anything actually.'

'I hope you're okay.'

'I hope there's a reason this is happening and a reason that Ingo didn't say anything.'

'And I hope we're all together again soon.' 

She doesn't wait to see if the messages bounce back. Better to close the app entirely, and leave the outcome a problem for some later, braver version of herself. 

Salamence croons beneath her, either announcing Opelucid in sight or offering acknowledgement and comfort. Iris folds herself low against her Pokemon's neck and hugs tight, arms not quite reaching all the way around. The sun dips behind the horizon and the wind picks up, billowing at her dress, as they start the decline. Iris steels herself, knowing her part. 

The house expects her, its door unlocked and a small mat laid out on the marble floors of the ever austere foyer for her to leave her shoes and pack without scuffing pristine surfaces. As she drags off her sneakers by the heel, she listens for any sign of the change in the silence. But Iris knows better than to expect a clear tell, not if he’s waiting for her. 

So Iris announces herself once she starts up the stairs--"Dad!"--her shout echoing off the stairwell walls and the high ceilings. It's not until she steps onto the second floor landing that her father responds with a simple "In here" from around the corner and down the hall. His voice is deep, not loud, carrying like he taught her when demonstrating how to project like a Gym Leader, a Champion, should. 

Ingo had explained better, later, that it's a measure of the might in your chest, not the volume that you can force from your throat. Emmet, who only raised his voice as a last resort and only at the station, prodded at the dip where her collarbones met and told her that if it was a matter of might, then her voice would someday carry clear across Unova. 

Iris sniffles again, stopping short in the hallway to gather her hands into fists that do nothing to relieve the tension that tightens her shoulders and closes around her throat and heart. 

She hates this. It's been an hour, maybe more, and she can't stand the way her thoughts dip sour when they turn to her cousins, caught between confusion, anger, and fear of what's on the other side of knowing. 

She hates this so much. 

But there's nothing she can do about it alone. 

Iris pats at her face and puts on a small smile before nudging open the office door. The room is lit yellow by the tall standing lamp in the far corner, casting the dark wood furnishings in soft light while the blue-white glow of his monitor accentuates the lines that scour her father's face and hands. Hunched forward on his elbows leaning his forehead on folded hands, he looks his age. 

Iris rounds the desk as quickly as her legs will take her and throws her arms around his shoulders. The monitor flashes and it's the video again, muted, but she doesn't want to watch Ingo tell the public information that he owed them first, this time in high-definition. Instead, she buries her head into her father's neck and squeezes tight as he unwinds his hands to hook his forearms over hers. 

They hold there for a moment before he says, "Ingo is lying." 

Of course he is. Iris says as much, pulling her arms free and then vaulting up to sit on the surface of the desk. "Emmet wouldn't just leave the subway," she says, looking at the thumbnail of Ingo's haggard face. "Unless he left Unova, he'd have to get noticed some time in three months, right? It's Emmet. "

"I've contacted Skyla on a favor to see if her peers in commercial air could confirm whether he's passed through. It's a long shot, given the timeframe, but it's like you said. Emmet is memorable." He draws a hand up his face and through his hair, a rare lapse of composure. "I shouldn't have to rely on my colleagues to determine the whereabouts of my nephew. Elesa informed me that all Ingo has to say is that Emmet is gone and that he's been investigating the matter on his own for months."

Gone?

Iris stops swinging her legs, letting her heels fall against the wood with dull, stuttering thuds. Her reflection in the dark window stares back at her, vacant and grasping for a logical conclusion. She sidesteps it entirely and says, "Investigating? Emmet left without telling Ingo where he was going?" 

"If Ingo is actively searching for him to try and reconcile the situation, I can’t imagine what would keep them apart. Especially at the cost of avoiding Nimbasa and the subway. There's been no reports of any particularly skilled trainers terrorizing the transit systems in other regions, so--"

"So something happened. Something happened to Emmet and we're just now finding out." 

With a weary sigh, her father switches off the computer and declares, pitched low and taut, "So it seems." The monitor with Ingo's face flickers to black, and Iris wonders whether he had been watching that recording on repeat until she arrived. It ends, she knows, as abruptly as it began. Ingo shoves the microphone at the nearest Depot Agent and stalks away past the turnstiles while the camera follows until he's out of sight. A reverse of the first video, Iris realizes, where he tries and fails to disappear into the city crowds looking like the weight of the world bore down on his shoulders the moment his jacket came off. 

"Why didn't he come to us for help?" She asks, watching her reflection turn murky in only lamplight. "Elesa didn't know either, did she?" 

With only a sound of acknowledgement, her father rises from his chair and offers Iris a hand down, which she doesn't take. There's too much nervous energy just beneath her skin to do anything but leap, stumbling forward onto the flats of her feet, from the desktop. It earns the signs of a smile, which she endeavors to return tenfold, convincing or not. 

He pats her head, then the turn of his brow changes and he reconsiders, pulling her into a hug. "Any answers are going to be in Nimbasa," he says into the air above her, voice pulling distant. Then, quieter in her direction, he adds, "You'll join?" 

And she recognizes the warring instincts, the drive to keep his kids in sight against the desire for them to flourish when given autonomy. It was the same instincts that encouraged her every impulse to travel, and then asked her to call home, when she could. So she pulls back to look him right in the eyes and tries to muster every shred of her determination into that stare. 

You'd have to fight me to make me stay, she tries to convey, and at the same time, I'm right here, I won't disappear . 

Instead of those words, though, she asks, "Tonight?"

"Immediately." Then, with a note to it that Iris thinks only she would recognize as flustered, "In thirty minutes." 

While she waits, a troubled impulse sends her tip-toeing to the twins' old room. It's unchanged, untouched, from when they lived here at her age, with two small beds and walls lined with train and Unova League memorabilia. Beneath a retro advertisement for Johto's Magnet Train, there's a map of the Kalosian metropolitan rail annotated in two sets of uniquely messy handwriting, one all slants and the other smudged and round. She can only really make out the two summary remarks near the top. 

Could use improvement, in long, sharp lines. 

Bad, in all lowercase curves. 

But it's the giant stuffed Eelektross, worn and faded to one off-blue tone, that gets her. Because, try as she might, Iris can't imagine them as kids. Not until now. They arrived into her life, or she into theirs, fully grown. Too tall and full of obscure technical language that she couldn’t follow, they were so enthusiastic and bright that she forgot how to be afraid of them almost instantly. It strikes her not because of the room, or the stuffed Eelektross, or the way that home makes you feel a little timeless after you've left for the first time. It's because what Ingo's done--what he's doing--is so stupidly childish. Why would he be alone, if he didn't have to be, unless he was scared and acting on instinct? 

Didn't he--they--get the same lecture she did? If you're ever lost, if you're ever in trouble , in a voice that's so sincere underneath the gruff, stern edge, I'll drop everything. Just call me. I'd rather be there when you need me than anywhere else. 

That was the point, right? 

Because she would have been there. He only had to ask. 

The tumult of anger, fear, and confusion meets its match in heartbreak, and when finally Iris cries she does it with everything left in her.  She cries for Emmet, gone, and Ingo left behind and withdrawn from the family still here to help him. She cries for the months of not knowing, of not being able to see, of not making time and missing the signs that she didn't know to look for. She cries for her dad, because he won't. 

The fuzz from the fleece rug comes out in tufts between her fingers when she's done gripping at it like a lifeline. There's a bathroom across the hall, and she needs to clean her face, but once her vision stops swimming she allows herself one last look across the room. There's the urge to take something, some token to hold onto, but everything is in perfect pairs and it feels wrong, somehow, to not leave the space as she found it. She runs her hand over the Eelektross stuff, the only object here that doesn't have a twin, and tries not to project some unnecessary anthropomorphic loneliness onto it. 

But she can't help herself. 

She's certain her dad is waiting by now, but Iris dashes back to her room and gathers every plushie in sight. Nestled in the curve of Eelektross’s long body, she leaves behind a stuffed Axew, Altaria, and Drilbur. The silly, childish anguish that seized her unwinds, just enough for her to move forward. 

Later, when Nimbasa rises in neon on the horizon, Iris tries to reconcile Emmet, gone with that room, with the version of her cousin she imagines that she knows well. Was there something beyond her, in their private world, that would explain why Ingo lied and hid this from them? Because her Ingo isn't selfish. He wouldn't lie if he knew it would hurt people he loved, and he wouldn't hide if it would compromise Emmet's wellbeing. 

Right? 

Would she understand if she saw the signs? She hadn't noticed anything amiss, even when, weeks ago, she had called Emmet but not Emmet and he acted as if nothing had changed. 

This time, as Salamence folds herself tighter to start the descent, she is silent like the city is not. Streams of motion resolve into clusters and then individuals, all captured in their own routines heedless of the ground that's shifted from beneath her own. A number catch sight of them flying in, two Salamence not exactly a normal part of the Nimbasa skyline, and Iris imagines that speculation will follow once they land. 

She can't bring herself to care. It's just gossip, the same thing that's followed her since her debut match as Opelucid City's alternate Gym Leader. Let them talk. 

The dark-green of Gear Station’s roof contrasts from the color and light of Nimbasa's other major facilities. They pitch towards the surrounding gardens, angling for a soft landing, and Iris leans her forehead against Salamence's neck. "It's going to be okay," she says, at once an incantation and a prayer. 

Maybe once she sees Ingo she'll start to believe it. 

The staff meeting could have gone better. Emmet could laugh, the first day free of a double shift and he ends up running an all-staff call from his apartment floor. As Ingo. 

They have desks for the rare occasions that require working from home, but Emmet's room is in disarray and he can't manage to breach the line he's drawn between the rest of their apartment and Ingo's space. 

Meaning that Emmet sat on the hardwood floor with his laptop balanced on their used copies of Civil Engineering for Underground Rail Transport and Nimbasa Subways: An Illustrated History of Nimbasa City's Transit Cars . The meeting lasts the full hour he scheduled, and each moment is excruciating, but he owes the Depot staff what leadership he can muster, if he won’t give them honesty. 

There's cowardice in it, too, by facing their questions from behind a screen so that work in the morning would be kinder. Here where the strain in his voice and the breaks in his facade could be ascribed to feedback and camera grains, rather than the increasingly obvious signs of his fracturing resolve. 

His Xtransceiver vibrates against his wrist, incessant, while their Chief of Staff puts forward the motion to close the battle circuits until the initial commotion blows over. At this, Emmet feels the brakes on his self-control almost fail to catch, but he grits his teeth and does not object. His Xtransceiver vibrates again once the agenda pivots to questions, and Emmet has to feign composure as he unhooks the band and smothers it beneath a stray cushion under the coffee table. 

Without lead time to vet the questions, Emmet has to brace himself for the worst outcome. It doesn't matter that he's unprepared, that he doesn't have a script of his own, much less one in Ingo's voice. 

"Will you be assigning a person to act in the Boss’s capacity role going forward?" 

No, says his head, bitter and caustic. 

"I will discuss diverting some of his responsibilities to the Chiefs, but in the absence of the battle circuits, I'd like my regular responsibilities and his to stay coupled," says his disciplined voice, somewhere between tired and sure. 

"Is there a way of referring to the incident and the change that you would prefer the Depot takes going forward? A unified front of some sort?" 

Emmet doesn't deserve them. "I'd prefer to keep to the tracks of my earlier statements. If asked, I’d ask you to cite internal matters and not participate in the speculation, but I defer to PR and Marketing for their expertise." 

"Was it internal? Not to point fingers, sir, but if there was an issue I think I speak for everyone when I say we'd want to know."

If he changes his story now, however much he trusts the Depot, it would find him again to catch him unawares. He allows himself a slow breath, fully in character, to cobble together a response. "It was-- We had a personal dispute related to work matters. No fault of the team."

He watches a murmur pass through the feed displaying the staff gathered at the station, and a number of icons signify new questions. Emmet tries not to sink beneath the coffee table. There's an exchange he can't catch between their Chief of Staff and the present personnel, and a note in the chat sends the question count back to a manageable number. 

"Are we expecting him to return? What then?" 

It's the project engineer for the Orange Line. She's a smudge in the crowd, but Emmet knows her voice perfectly and can feel the earnest intent roll off her tone. He manages not to shrink away from his camera. 

I hope so, he doesn't say. "We'd follow his lead."

The discussion turns technical from there, team assignments and approval processes, and he can feel the undercurrent beneath every question, why, why, why . Nobody asks. The earliest questions were the closest, his braver staff testing the waters only to find them cold and unyielding. 

Once it's over, Emmet's skin crawls with the filth that the deceit leaves behind. They trust him. Or, they trust Ingo. They trust Ingo and they worry about him, and, fuck, if only they knew. 

Instead of trying to parse the empty feeling eating at the core of him, Emmet turns out his pack and collects his pokeballs as they tumble onto the floor. One at a time, delaying another inevitable, he releases his team and then Ingo's into the center of the room. 

And, they know already, of course, but he still musters up his sternest frown and says, "I'm Ingo now." 

Immediately, the Pokemon start to argue. Not Chandelure, whose flame goes cold and small before she phases through the door to Ingo's abandoned room. The rest of them, though, vary between chattering amongst themselves and aiming what Emmet assumes to be some choice words in his direction. 

He can't speak to Pokemon, but they're no less expressive than people are. Heightened emotions are easy to read. Eelektross wraps around Emmet's shoulders and back, hissing when the others near blows. Haxorus and Archeops are the most animated, and he's surprised to read signs of Haxorus defending him. Though, he supposes it makes sense that his own Pokemon wouldn't want him to be someone else, especially not a poor imitation of someone they love.  

Durant nips at Haxorus's heels and Klinklang whirs imperiously behind Garbodor, who has pulled herself up to look far larger than she has any right to be. Crustle, otherwise perpetually docile, leers at Galvantula as she vibrates with upset and static electricity. Evidently tiring of whatever Garbodor has to say, Excadrill ambles over to Emmet's side and nudges into his lap. 

Somehow still too loud beneath its pillow tomb, his Xtransceiver vibrates at regular intervals. The air in here is suddenly too stale, his Pokemon less of a comfort than a crowd, and the walls inch inward. His lungs collapse fully with the effort of each exhale, but his inhales don't seem to pull any breathable oxygen. Mouth dry, he needs water, he needs the entire kitchen sink, but he can't feel his legs anymore to move. Or the rest of his body, really, beyond his heaving, desperate lungs. Eelektross hisses beside his ear and his Xtransceiver is still buzzing and the walls are closing in. 

Oh, some distant part of Emmet's brain lights up with realization. I'm having a panic attack. 

Then, Does Ingo still have those? 

The answer is there without reaching for it. No, because Ingo takes medication for his anxiety and Emmet doesn't, because everything he tried made his brain itch or left him hollow. But Ingo doesn't have his medication now, wherever he is. So the answer is probably also yes, Ingo might still have panic attacks. And that's terrible to imagine, and even then not true to the version of Ingo he needs to be. 

Even though the thought is little gentler than a slap to the face he's still spiraling. He's sitting on the floor of his apartment and his brain is sandpaper. His name is Emmet, but now he is Ingo, because Emmet lost his brother and he didn't want anyone to know. 

The world folds in on itself. Or maybe it's just Emmet, pitching forward and sending Excadrill scurrying from his lap. Whether it's easier to breathe this way is hard to tell, but in the dark he isn't Emmet, or Ingo, or anyone. He is a machine, a motor, and each ragged, desperate inhale a jolt of electric current from the third rail sending him hurling forward on the track towards the destination he’s set for himself. For better or worse.  

The apartment is quiet. Emmet counts the seconds until he wills himself to look up. Purple-blue curls of flame reveal Chandelure inches from his face. A few words come up, namely I'm okay, don't worry, and I'm sorry . But he just leans his forehead against tepid glass and is desperately glad she doesn't hate him enough to abandon him here at rock bottom. 

Eelektross curls low around his hips with a whine, and when Emmet pulls back he can see the rest of their Pokemon hovering anxiously in wait, allies again. After a cautious pause, Emmet nods and they flock to him at once. Galvantula is first to him and, as he buries his hands into her bristly hair, he apologizes. Once for each of them, even though he's not able to meet their eyes yet. A ten-car train of apologies and then he says, "I won't let it be for long. We'll find him. I promise."

A moment of respite passes, then routine follows. Emmet collects his Xtransceiver from beneath the coffee table and ignores the twelve missed calls from his uncle. The texts from Iris ache. When Archeops starts to pile various bags of chips and granola bars into the floor beside him, Emmet tries and fails to convince Garbodor to eat all the dishes in the sink so that he can find the willpower to cook something real. 

He gets forty-three minutes to recover before there's knocking at the front door. Three discrete knocks, to be exact, firm without being overly loud. 

Emmet briefly considers climbing out the window. 

Instead, he downs a glass of water and tries to look convincing.

Iris and Uncle Drayden wait at his door looking a little windswept. There are two key moments, Emmet thinks, that will make or break him. The first is when they look at him. The second is when he opens his mouth and speaks. 

"Good evening, Uncle Drayden. Iris." He swings his arm behind him with the other hand on the door and gestures a welcome. 

Uncle Drayden says, "Ingo," and steps in past him, Iris on his heels. 

Some small part of Emmet feels a little righteous, nauseous and vindicated at once that his identical face and his desperate performance was enough that the juncture passes without the need to course correct. 

Uncle Drayden scans the apartment, Emmet latching the door and watching him factor in new pieces of data in real time. Iris greets their Pokemon, and her voice is small when she asks, "Emmet isn't with his team?"

Emmet shakes his head, appreciating the solemnity of Eelektross's whimper as he flops onto the couch beside Iris. Neither she nor his uncle are particularly distracted, both staring at him with the expectation that he elaborates. 

There are three stories now. The truth, the public-facing message, and the version of events between the two that reconciles the loss with the deception. For them he uncovers the third, prepared this time to tell it. 

"I discovered his Pokemon abandoned in his kit in the tunnels." False.

One dangling hand draws up adrenaline strength to heave his kit over Emmet's neck and onto his shoulders. The weight of its landing, strap digging between aching shoulder blades staggered Emmet, and his grip slips from forearm to wrist. 

Uncle Drayden clears his throat, hands clenched tight at his side as he blocks the way between Emmet and the rest of his apartment. "What happened?" 

Emmet wants to pace, to expel the thought on the end of a footfall and keep in constant, avoidant motion. Instead, he calls Archeops to his shoulders and focuses on the repetitive movement of stroking her neck. His uncle watches, waiting for an explanation that Emmet knows will condemn him.   "We were completing routine inspections on the Orange Line tracks," he answers, a truth this time. "We separated after the Skyarrow Bridge platform. I diverted to the maintenance facilities to secure markers to flag an unanticipated defect on the rails. He was gone when I returned."

There hadn't been time to reach the cabinets before the concrete walkway beneath him turns to sludge and gives way. Three paces away, Ingo shouts his name and then something collides with his ribcage. Hands, nails scrape at his torso, his leg, tearing and falling away as he slams onto solid ground. 

Emmet can’t bear to look at his uncle or Iris, but the thick emotion in his uncle’s voice is enough for his chest to seize. "Why didn't we know?" 

Nobody knew. False. One project engineer knew.

Shouts echoing down the tunnel, she finds him after the sensors picked up a blockage on the tracks. She hauls him, deadweight and sobbing, off the rails before an incoming train, the third rail, or another hungry void could take him as well. 

Instead, each word a shard of glass in the back of his throat, he says, "I believed that I would find him. I was single-mindedly focused on my destination, alongside maintaining normal operations at the station." 

"Ingo," Iris rasps, close enough to a yell to send Durant and Crustle scuttling from her feet, "You pretended to be him. For what? For the station? Emmet disappeared and your priority wasn’t telling us, his family, right away?”  She breaks on a choked sob, and Emmet bows in on himself, vision tunneling. Archeops warbles, concerned, and rubs her beak against the line of his cheekbones. Iris continues, “We shouldn't have found out like this. You lied to our faces for three months." 

No. No, it's been six months. 4,380 hours plus six and not during one of them had Emmet prepared for this conversation, even under false pretenses. He needs to tell them, he needs to differentiate between the mostly-truth and the message from the station, but he feels suddenly disembodied from his voice and body. He’s an spectator to the expanding circle of his selfish, private grief as it threatens to make him face where this leads. And, worse still, where it ends. It’s a trainwreck in still moments and it’s desperately tempting to withdraw, to distance himself from the inevitable aftermath. 

"Ingo," his uncle says, and Emmet blinks back into the moment. "You owe us an explanation." 

Can't dissociate his way out of this one, evidently.

"And if," he starts slowly, tasting defensive dispassion like a good whiskey, a cold and bitter burn. "If I don't have one? I can say with certainty that I do not have the answer that you're looking for. Still, I suspect more lies won’t help us any, which means--" 

When Uncle Drayden interjects, he doesn't raise his voice. He doesn't roar, despite the way that Excadrill and Klinklang flee to the kitchen and Archeops’s claws dig into Emmet’s shoulders. His voice is cold and quiet, but heat rises red to his face. "This isn't a test. Your brother is missing, and we could have been helping to find him for months now and instead you've been alone and out of your depth. Unless you have anything to show for it, I think that it's safe to say that you should have come to us. Immediately."

With the awful insight of having lived the moment that took Ingo, Emmet has three theories. There's the certainty of Pokemon involved, something viscerally powerful, outside of the elemental and physical types. The specific Pokemon matters for the first theory: a wild Pokemon causes a freak accident. Sub-theory to this is an act of something Legendary. This, though, has no concrete figure to blame, to hate and demand his brother back from. 

Enter the second theory: a bad actor of some yet unknown intent. Someone, or some group, strong enough to wield the ability to rip a tear in the world and then knit it back together, less one Ingo. But with the second round of nightmares with Team Plasma over and dealt with, and CCTV feeds across Nimbasa and Unova's transit links scoured, there's no clear lead. No motive, no demands. 

Leaving the third, courtesy of a researcher emailing far too early on a Monday morning, that something in the very fabric of reality tore at the seams and stole Ingo to somewhere Emmet could not find him. 

None of those were answers. Six months and nothing to show for it. Uncle Drayden watches him with equal measures of fury and grief beneath the thin veneer of patience, and all Emmet can do is swallow hard and shake his head. 

"We're here now. We know now," Iris says, now their unfortunate mediator, her declarations tinged with the hope that it's not already too late. 

Uncle Drayden isn't done yet, though. "As the eldest, it was your responsibility to keep Emmet safe. You betrayed that the moment you thought you could help him on your own." 

Emmet lets acrid rage overtake the hurt of it. Twins. They were twins. The minutes of difference between them matters only when Emmet wants something, or when Ingo wants Emmet to do something. It's not for their uncle to wave in his face, to project his own history and notions of brotherhood onto them like Emmet's responsibility to Ingo wasn't the very same. 

Then again, Emmet wasn't doing a very good job of it. 

And Ingo wouldn't push back. Emmet feels the anger slip away, acid heat replaced with cold clarity, then emptiness follows. Ingo was always the better brother, eager to accept the role of obligate eldest whenever Emmet needed him. 

The ground beneath him slackened and fell, then something collided with his ribcage, knocking him onto solid concrete. There's grabbing at his coat and pant legs but no purchase, and Emmet reeled on his battered hip and lunged forward to catch an arm. One desperate hand, then two, clung a sweat slick hold but gravity and something worse demanded a fall. 

Emmet doesn't remember sitting on the couch, but somewhere in between Archeops leapt from his shoulders to the table and Eelektross coiled to make room, his head still resting on Iris’s lap.  Pressed into the empty corner, Emmet’s right hand grips at the arm and his left buries fingers into the cushions. Something here has to give. 

Iris and his uncle are talking still, their words filtering in like snatches of songs coming through PokeMart speakers. Galvantula approaches around the coffee table and prods at his left hand until he relaxes it. By now, even the braver Pokemon have fled the living room. Not all blessed with Chandelure's ability to shift intangible, they hover at the doorways and in the kitchen, with exception of Eelektross, between him and Iris. And now Galvantula, who chitters while she nudges at his hands, drawing attention back towards him. 

Iris says, "Is there anything else you can tell us?" 

"I can forward you my research in the morning," he mutters. To Elesa, too, on her insistence she would help provided she found it in her not to hate him. Or, well, Emmet's version of Ingo.

A flicker of hope in him suggests that Uncle Drayden would have the knowledge around legends, and Elesa and Iris the drive and clear eyes to chase leads that he's overlooked. It's not that he ever thought that he was any better suited to seek out answers alone. It wasn't that he didn't want help. 

He just wants to be alone. 

Emmet can see it already, in Iris's hurt-hopeful tone and the way that his uncle looks at him as if he can cobble together the broken pieces of him and make sense of what's left. Underneath it all is the belief that there's a person here, past the lies and the loss, that they want to understand. There's not. There won't be. Not on his own. 

And the second lie has made sure of that. There's no Emmet without Ingo. If nothing comes out of this, if Ingo doesn't come home, then that's it. This version of his life is over. 

Fuck. 

He's so selfish. He'd have to come clean, before, to air out his shame and repair Ingo's memory. But at the point he's had to live with the truth, well... Disappearing would be the logical next step. Who would want him to stay after they knew? 

"We're doing this the right way from here out," Uncle Drayden is saying, and Emmet has to repeat the words in his head to cohere where the conversation is turning. While his uncle continues, Emmet's stomach turns once he's caught on. "First thing tomorrow morning we report him missing to the police. It's up to you, Ingo, whether you accompany us or I send the officers to speak to you at the station." 

The strain to keep his face neutral wears him thin, his back teeth scraping up against each other in a stifled grimace. He needs to end this conversation. They need to leave. How is he supposed to maintain this miserable farce when every other word out of his uncle's mouth makes his stomach flip in on itself?

"I understand. I'll be at the precinct at 0900."

The engineer waved down an officer at the edge of Castelia City, where they had climbed from the nearest emergency exit. No more than a security guard, probably, the man hadn't been able to make sense of Emmet's scriptless, incoherent blubbering and surmised, once Emmet lost words entirely, that the best thing for him was a night's rest. By the next morning, his decision made, Emmet was so certain that he'd be able to fix this that he put on his brother's uniform and dodged the engineer for the next three hours. Cornered in an unused office, she played the footage of Ingo and him on tunnel cameras until the feed abruptly dropped to black. 

They announced the cancellation of the Multi Battle Circuit project on the Orange and Yellow lines that morning, the narrative aided by her initiative shutting down the Orange Line the night before. 

Then, like the scum that he's become, Emmet pulled rank on her. Lies prepared in advance, practiced, he cited an ongoing investigation as reason enough to play along with the charade of there still being two Subway Masters. 

There, of course, was no investigation in any official capacity. Emmet couldn't face it. Missing person cases had ended on his tracks, on his watch, before. Unidentified persons resolve into someone loved, someone missed, someone that deserved to live in slow motion on a cold gray-scale video feed. Why involve a third party, someone who will one day close the folder on his brother and file him away as a statistic? 

But he has nothing left in him to argue with now. It would be the right thing, the responsible thing. Ingo wouldn't refuse that. 

Besides, Emmet knows the difference between when his uncle is making an empty threat and when he means it. Gear Station doesn't need a cop showing up with questions after the debacle today. 

A glance passes, inscrutable, between Iris and Uncle Drayden. The tension between them and Emmet pulls taut, then finally gives way when his uncle's shoulders drop. He nods, and Emmet's next breath comes in fuller. Letting himself curl inwards on himself, ever so slightly, he tries to will his stomach to unknot.

There's not much left to discuss, after. Uncle Drayden rounds the apartment again, huffing judgements at the state of his sink and stock of his fridge. The huddle of Pokemon at Emmet's door effectively dissuades any venturing into his room, though his heart doesn't stop hammering at the wall of his chest until his uncle gracelessly suggests they depart. 

When they leave, Iris looks at him as if she has something more to say, and for one terrible moment Emmet is certain he's caught. But she only grabs the hand limp at his side, squeezes once, and then runs after her father as he rounds the corner at the end of the hall. 

That night, Emmet hauls out his clothes, locks both their bedroom doors, and decides that the couch would have to do from then on. It's easier to sleep with their Pokemon in a heap on the floor, the dim light left on in the kitchen a fantasy of not being alone. In between stretches of shallow sleep, the fluorescent shimmer lets him imagine he's only napping, that Ingo's just in the kitchen making coffee and everything is okay. 

Ingo meets them at the stairway to the Nimbasa City Police Department central office. Drayden and Iris are just two minutes late, but Ingo is frowning at his Xtransceiver as they approach. Had they not flown in from Opelucid first thing in the morning, perhaps they would have been more timely. But Drayden hadn't felt it necessary to remain in Nimbasa, particularly not when his library waited at home with any number of potential leads on finding Emmet. 

Ingo is still lying to him. He carries dishonesty in the set of his jaw and the faraway look in his eyes when he's not making some planned retort. Beneath Drayden's furious disappointment, he is frightened for his nephew. For them both. It shouldn't surprise him that Ingo would deteriorate without his brother. But he knows it could haunt him someday, if Drayden didn't figure out soon what to do to prevent Ingo from falling apart entirely. 

Iris noticed too, summarizing his sunken cheeks and the way his button-down hung off his frame in simple terms: "Ingo looks like shit." 

This morning, any measure by which his uniform coat hid the change was undermined by the dark purple hollows below his eyes. When he sees them, he pulls himself ramrod straight, nods at Iris, and then meets Drayden's eyes without a word. It's as if he thinks that Drayden cannot read him by now. That, or he doesn't care that they both know any courage he wears does nothing to conceal the man drowning underneath. 

A series of appropriately paternal gestures flash through his mind but none of it felt right, given the circumstances. It's like they're--he is--fifteen again, withdrawn and unknowable. Each piece easiest to make sense of in the presence of the other. 

He made a list, after taking them in, to capture the minutia of their differences. Ingo prefers his personal space respected, Emmet is tactile, all clasping hands and arms thrown around shoulders. Ingo needs time to stew and process, Emmet can't stand unresolved conflict and drives towards immediate solutions. Ingo finds his confidence when he slips into the background, unnoticed. Emmet is most confident when he's drawing attention, because that means he's in control. 

Drayden recognizes that boy in the shadow he's become, but he doesn't know who he is meant to be anymore. What would help him, as he now? What would help them both? 

Forward, then. 

So he marches his daughter and nephew into the precinct and states his request to the front desk. By some combination of his demeanor and Ingo's familiarity, they're led directly to an empty office and asked to wait, just a couple minutes, please, for an officer to come with the paperwork for a missing persons report. 

Ingo taps his foot beneath the table, perfect image of impatience, but freezes when Drayden levels him with a look. He's about to lecture, again, to insist on what schedule could possibly be more important than this, except last night made clear that conversation leads nowhere. 

And if I don't have one, Ingo had asked. The idea of it. Of course there's a reason. Nobody maintains two lives, with double shifts and tangled lies, on a whim. Not at the cost of their health and sanity, or of the trust of their family. 

Until the very last, Drayden had hoped that there was a kinder explanation. Some trick, some scheme of Emmet's, something that would make sense of it without the cost. 

But, then, Drayden had pushed. Too far, perhaps, but what else could he have done when Ingo was being so intransigent? To see the color drain from his face as he dropped to the couch like a puppet with cut strings, though, was enough to know for certain. 

Emmet was gone. Ingo was withholding information still. 

Drayden felt helpless and he couldn't stand it. 

An officer slides past the door and shuts it behind him, greeting them with a smile and a glance that bounces from each of them in turn, shrewd. He rounds them to sit at the desk, shuffles in the drawers for a pen, and says, "You're here to report a person missing?" 

Drayden watches sidelong for Ingo to take the cue, and with it the lead, but he barely nods, staring at the clipboard and pen in the officer's proffered hand. His throat bobs, shoulders drawn tight, and Drayden tries not to sigh as he grabs the clipboard before the officer can question why a municipal employee appears unfamiliar with paperwork. 

Drayden files the hesitation away with the rest, alarm bells blaring, and says, "We are. Subway Master Emmet has been missing for the past three months. Ingo, the exact date you last saw him was?" 

His voice warped with strain, Ingo says, "June 13." 

The officer hisses through his teeth. It doesn't cohere, at first, but then Drayden's blood runs cold. Iris gasps softly beside him, trying to stifle it behind a sniffle.

Six months. 

Ingo’s stare is fixed to the table as Drayden feels the world shift beneath him. Six months, not three, and he's certain that Ingo had the chance to correct them and chose not to. How could he?  How dare he?

But the officer is scribbling something in his notebook and Drayden steels his resolve. Their private drama is irrelevant here, and would only serve to distract from the case. Officers of the law are not immune to assumptions when public personalities are involved. He clears his throat and turns to the paperwork, narrating his input for the officer's benefit as he fills out the fields. 

Ingo provides details in clear, simple answers whenever asked. No nicknames, full street address of Gear Station, same haircut, same eyes, same height. Drayden extrapolates ten pounds difference from Ingo's current estimated weight. 

"Can you tell me about Emmet's plans the day he went missing? Things like what he was meant to do that evening, how he planned to get there. That kind of thing," The officer asks, flipping to his third page in his pocket notebook. Drayden pauses on the section about habits and personality, sets his pen down, and defers to his nephew. 

The officer starts to backpedal, saying, "Since it's been so long, it's alright if there's only so much you know, but--" until Ingo interjects. "The inspection on the Orange Line tracks was our final stop that shift. Assuming we found no major faults, we would have caught the service from Striaton City back to Gear Station. He would have closed out any remaining station actions before handing off to the overnight shift. We'd return home, feed our Pokemon and make dinner. The battle circuits, both Singles and Doubles at the time, would open at 0900, and there was always work to be done at the depot prior to battling, so we would have retired early."

It's the most he's said in their presence. The officer hums, still writing, and says, "It sounds like you did a lot together. Is there any way that he needed some distance? Some space?" 

"No," Ingo and Drayden say at once. A laden tension follows, the officer raising a single brow as he looks between the two of them. Admittedly, Drayden is glad to see them unified on this one front, but still he draws himself in and tries to elaborate. "To be clear, Emmet disappeared during the aforementioned inspection, and he left his Pokemon behind. Not only do I have no reason to believe he'd leave his brother for months , sir, but I know he wouldn't abandon the Pokemon he's raised since childhood."

Iris presses his arm. That likely could have been more civil. Drayden could level the same complaint in return, or suggest a concept called tact. But Ingo is hard to read, and the officer lacks the context. 

"Could you please clarify, actually, when you last saw him? How he disappeared? I know it's on the form, but I might as well take your statement if you were there." The officer pushes back in their chair and searches the lower drawers again, before pulling back up with another clipboard and a fresh form. 

Hands shaking in his lap, Ingo eyes the document and asks, "Could I make a statement verbally?" 

It's agreed on the condition it's recorded on video, a verification measure. Drayden wonders what came first: the shaking hands or the reluctance to write. Twice is a pattern. 

With an aged webcam propped up on wiry metal legs pointed in his direction, Ingo readies himself with his eyes closed and then begins where he had last night. 

"I knew he was gone when I found his kit, with his Pokemon inside, abandoned in the Orange Line tunnel about halfway between Castelia and Nacrene. It was 1900, I think, on June 13th this year. We were completing routine inspections on the track, signing off on our staff's work in light of the upcoming opening of a new battle circuit on the line. I departed maybe eight to ten minutes before finding his kit, as we needed rail defect markers and the nearest maintenance cabinet was at the Skyarrow Bridge Station platform. I heard rumbling down the tunnel, and knew that the nearest train on schedule was still, at best, leaving Nuvema. Whatever it was, I wasn't fast enough running back. He was gone. The cameras in the tunnels are motion sensor activated, largely used to track Pokemon disruptions. The fact that the cameras were still recording, but captured only--" he pauses here, blinking out of his absent stare for a brief moment, then shakes his head. "Static isn't the right word for it, but it's what I can think to call it. I can send the footage. That is why I suspect a powerful Pokemon is involved."

As Drayden had gleaned from his review of Ingo's research, sent as promised at six in the morning, that was the unifying assumption. He had seen the footage as well. The last thing it captured is Emmet crouching down, seemingly catching sight of something on the tracks, before it fades to pulsating swirls of grainy, distorted grayscale that, candidly, Drayden had not been prepared for first thing on waking up. 

The officer flips the camera switch off and sighs. "If that's the case, there's only so much the NCPD can do, but we can connect you to the right people." After a beat, he glances at Drayden and adds, "Though I suspect you already know a lot of the right people."

Much of the remaining details required on the original form are irrelevant, given the situation at hand. Drayden, with Ingo's terse-again input, fills it out to the best of his ability. Overall health and condition when last seen marked "healthy", with Iris pushing him to add "minor caffeine addiction" to the appropriate section.

The full list of people that Emmet would try to contact feels too short for a person so vibrant. Starting with Ingo, then Elesa, the list otherwise contains a handful of League members, Iris and Drayden included, some local trainers, and then simply 'Gear Station Personnel'. 

Still sour from the earlier question, Drayden underscores Ingo's name with three dark lines. Furious as he may be with Ingo at the moment, he knows how the twins are. Emmet wouldn't go to anyone else. 

When Drayden lifts the clipboard back towards the officer, he tries to steer the conversation. "What's next? I presume that you'll conduct an investigation, but is there anything further you need from us? How should we expect to hear from you in the future?" 

The officer leans back in his chair and chews on the end of his pen. "Well, see," he starts squinting at Ingo and seemingly collecting his thoughts. "Normally we'd recommend that you put up flyers, notify the individual's workplace and community of the situation, and make arrangements to ensure that their rent and bills stay paid and such. Seems a smidge irrelevant here. For, uh, multiple reasons." 

Drayden wants to interrupt, to insist that the man get to the point, but the officer suddenly leans forward into his elbows and hands to close in on Ingo. "Being honest, since this is all being handled at your level with regards to investigations at the station, sir, you'll know as soon as we do whether there's any breaks. I wouldn't expect much. You know how it is, the first 72 hours of any disappearance are critical. Six months without word? With the character profile you've given me? Emmet might be--"

"That's enough," Drayden cuts in at the same moment that Ingo stands, wavers, and then strides out the door. Iris rushes after him. That was the agreement, when she had insisted that she accompany them to the station and they assumed that Ingo might try to bolt like this. 

Now, in practice, it takes everything in Drayden not to follow. Instead, he combines his need to steady himself with a play of confidence, laying his palms flat on the desk and flicking his gaze up to meet the officer's. "Look. I think we are all well aware of the odds, but I appreciate you weighing in. I, for one, believe in my nephew and believe that he will find his way home. I ask that you do provide me with those contacts who may be better equipped to deal with the nature of this case at your earliest, thank you. You have my Xtransceiver number on file."

Pushing himself off the desk, he stands to signal the end of their conversation. At the door, he delays to add, "In the meantime, let me confirm your assumption that all matters at Gear Station will go through Subway Master Ingo. If there's anything at the Nimbasa City level, I would add that Gym Leader Elesa would be more than happy to lend her support. Good day."

An ugly impulse, but it felt a necessity. Or maybe Drayden feels he has the right to hold Ingo accountable, but never a stranger. 

He finds Iris lingering at the door to the men's restroom balancing unease and rage at the betrayals of gender norms. Drayden is impressed she didn't simply follow him inside. 

Wordlessly patting her on the back to signify taking over responsibility, Drayden enters to find Ingo in the overlit bathroom with his grip white-knuckle fast on the edges of a sink basin with the water running. His only acknowledgement of Drayden is to roll his knuckles lower around the ridge and to bend his head lower, breaking his stare at the mirror. Water drips from his face to the basin. 

There wasn't a single logical explanation for why Ingo had lied. Lied for months, six and not three, and kept them from being able to do anything to help Emmet or to even process that he was gone. Looking at Ingo now, Drayden understands the impulse better. Illogical still, but he recognizes the impulse to suffer indefinitely, and suffer alone, until Emmet was safe and home again. 

And Drayden could hate him for it. Could being the operative word, the broken hinge by which his resolve hung loose at the sight of the man that was still so much the boy he had helped raise standing on the verge of shattering. 

It takes one look at Ingo like this for every fatherly instinct Drayden has to kick in. The need to intervene, to reassure, to console, is near enough to the need to breathe and he knows it's unwanted. Ingo carries warning signs in the sharp jut of his shoulders and the taut lines on his throat, all clear signals to keep back and stay away. Little more than a cornered Fraxure with a broken tusk, he raises his hackles in a misguided attempt to stave off a threat he can no longer contend with. Less convincing than concerning, Ingo’s careful guard has fallen away completely, leaving something broken, like a tusk that will never grow back, in its place. 

Of all the stupid, selfish things. 

What aches the most is how it combines their worst impulses: Ingo's tendency to self-isolate alongside Emmet's to lash out and then shut-down under pressure. Initially, over the course of last night's conversation, Drayden had thought that he barely recognized who Ingo was, anymore. That wasn't exactly it. Rather, in the gaps that loss and grief left, Ingo has repaired himself with the shadow of his brother. No doubt helped along by months of imitation. 

Six months, to be exact. 

It seems every time he nears reconciliation, the cruel truth of it rears again. All the better, perhaps, to be the distant, exacting uncle that Ingo wants to self-mutilate with. Whether it would be better not to play the part, to respond to his unacceptable choices with unconditional forgiveness, is yet to be seen. 

"Ingo--" 

"He's not dead." His voice is so quiet, particularly for Ingo, that Drayden falls silent. "I would know." 

Over the early morning hours in his office in Opelucid, Drayden had allowed himself to imagine that whatever had taken Emmet had either killed him or left him to die. He didn't have the certainty of being a twin, with it the hope that your body or soul would know when that tie was severed. He had a missing nephew, vanished in the subway tunnels, months without a word. When the empty hollow in his chest recedes again, room enough beside the specter of grief to think again, there's only the one question. How would they recover? 

Would the thought that Emmet could have been found, been saved, had they known sooner ever fade? Did Drayden's forgiveness matter if Ingo could not forgive himself? Is it possible to lose Emmet without also losing Ingo? He would try. He would always try, but would the fractured edges of their relationship be enough to keep Ingo anchored? 

It's callous, almost, to wonder at the aftermath when faced with the potential of a loss so great he could barely stand it. But how could he ruminate on the why, the how, when everything had already deteriorated so quickly without him knowing? 

Then, perhaps these questions are cover for fear. At least with their parents, his brother, there was closure. Immediate and cruel, there was no uncertainty. They were lost. Here Drayden could only wonder whether Emmet could be found, and what finding him might entail. 

Would he watch Ingo grow older, imagining somewhere beyond their reach Emmet is doing the same? Or would his nephew, his kid, only ever be the moment they last spoke, some meaningless conversation that Emmet had rushed through, too eager and enamored with his work to manage more than minutes for Drayden. At the time, that was all he could ever want: the twins happy and fulfilled. 

But grief is demanding. The memories that play in his head would never be enough, now. 

Ingo turns off the sink. Still without looking at Drayden, he scrubs at his face and says, "I have to get to work. Let me know if you come up with anything. With the research. I'll do the same."

Quiet again. Something shifts, then, in Drayden. A piece falls into place. Ingo is striding out the door, faster than he could stop him, but Drayden does not move.  

The strain in his voice. The constant stare at the floor, the impatience, the refusal to say Emmet's name once. 

The refusal to write, lest he give himself away with the wrong hand. 

Every motion, every fragment of an expression, that made Drayden insistent that there was some underlying deception would suddenly make sense. It wouldn't be better, wouldn't be worse, but it could explain what Drayden’s aimless, incomprehensible suspicion was grasping at. 

He feels sick. He feels vindicated, livid, and wrecked all at once. If he was right, if this wasn't just wishful thinking, then his nephew’s behavior may cohere into something Drayden could understand. Not the lies, not the decision to hide, but the person that he had become would make sense again. With all the heartache that came with it. 

It took all of his restraint not to follow, to not to try and call after him, to yell for Emmet and see whether and how Ingo responds. 

There would be time for that later. The inevitable confrontation, the aftermath of another terrible lie. If, only if, Drayden wasn’t lost in some hopeful bend that was clouding his judgment. To what end, though, he has to wonder. There was no victory in this, trading one lost nephew for another and finding the one that remains worse off than he could ever imagine. 

And how would they forgive him for it? While Drayden could grasp onto the desperate logic in the choice his nephew made, it was no excuse. 

Certainty, then. Then, when Drayden was truly sure, he would lay the choice before his nephew. If he was Emmet, if he had claimed his lost brother’s identity in a misguided attempt to hide, then it was up to Emmet to confess. Drayden would offer once. If Emmet cowered then, that would be the end of Drayden’s patience. 

First, he needs proof. Truth would follow. 

After that first day, during which Emmet needed to excuse himself to the desolate restroom stalls in the storage corridors beneath the station to dry heave until the panic subsided, Gear Station was easiest. It wasn't that the Depot staff wouldn't catch on if he fumbled. Rather, the persona of Ingo as a Subway Boss was clearly delineated, the stuff of training and manuals, and something of a performance in itself.  

Having only eight hours, nominally, of work to do was an adjustment. Especially when none of those hours involved battling. Work follows routines. Secluded to the offices, hidden away from the platforms and far too tired to safely operate the trains, Emmet fills the silence that claws at his lungs and throat with all-hours emails, ad hoc rail and car inspections, and, when he can bear it, research and investigations through the tunnels. 

His uncle calls him on the weekends, ostensibly to report on his findings and otherwise to scratch tenaciously at the surface of Emmet's facade. Admittedly, Emmet is paranoid, but Uncle Drayden watches any time he pulls aside to write something down--always just out of camera--and Emmet can see his jaw scrape whenever their patience with each other wears thin and Emmet veers off script. 

By the second week of this routine, he wonders whether his uncle will confront him first, or share his suspicions with Iris. As of yet, if her periodic texts to Emmet's Xtransceiver are an indication, Iris doesn’t suspect. Neither she or her father visit again after the first, which is relief that stings, still, underneath. 

Emmet reminds himself that this is for the best. They'll either forgive him when Ingo comes home, or what's left of their relationship won't matter anyways. In the end, they only need to know it was him, not Ingo, that lied. 

It takes three weeks for Elesa to contact him. 

He meets her for coffee over lunch. Emmet has to bite his tongue, sitting down with his overly sweet monstrosity, because he has always been the worst at being Ingo with Elesa. There are too many little habits and inside jokes, Elesa being one of the few people that related to each twin as a complete individual. 

The cafe she chooses is the same chain as the one he was caught in, which he has to imagine is intentional, but Elesa has selected a table in a nook in the far back corner, far enough from the windows and other patrons. She greets him cooly when he sets the mug onto the table, itself a sign of good faith. No running away with a to-go cup today. 

"How have you been you doing?" he asks, knowing it's an inane question, meaning it's exactly what Ingo would care enough to still ask. 

She presses her lips together, closes her eyes, and sighs deeply before answering. "I don't know. I've been better, I think. Would it be naive to ask how you are?" 

Emmet thinks so, Ingo wouldn't. "I have also been better."

"You'd think dropping down to only one person's job would help," she says, eyeing him. "But you look awful. Do you sleep? Eat?" 

Not a good sign, that the coat isn't helping disguise that. Elesa has a keen eye, though. He just hadn't expected worrying about his health to be a priority anymore. Gesturing at the mug of sugar, he says, "I try. It's hard to have an appetite, considering everything." 

She laughs, short and breathy. "Starving yourself won't help you find him any faster than lying to us did." When he flinches, she adds, "Sorry, too harsh?" Apologetic isn't how he would describe the fire in her eyes. 

Hiding behind a sip of coffee, he lets that simmer and searches for a useful response. When he finds one, he is sure to draw the clear, certain volume that would be convincing, regardless of how he actually feels. "I'm not going to scold you for being upset at me, Elesa, when you have every right."

"That would make it easier to stay mad at you, though." 

Aiming for that wobbly smile Ingo reserves for just him, Elesa and Iris, he says, "I can reconsider my position, if that would be helpful."

Something shifts then, and Elesa runs her palm over the edge of her cheekbones, wiping at her eyes without mussing her makeup. When she looks at him again, it's kinder, and somehow he feels more cornered by this abrupt change. Though he had imagined that she had only called him here because she no longer entirely hated him, he wasn't prepared for compassion. 

"I'll keep the offer in mind and get back to you." Then, softer still, "I didn't exactly have it together last time we spoke to actually ask. Look, I know an object in motion stays in motion and all that, but how are you even still going to work? You're not giving yourself any time to process. Emmet's gone and you haven't let yourself stop moving."

Emmet does not want to talk about this. Not remotely, not even a little bit. It was irrelevant. "I--" he starts, too quiet and choked. Again. Again, but better. "I don't think time off would help. I feel better at the station, and can't imagine what I'd do with myself without the routine." 

"Sleep, to start with."

The lack of sleep isn't for want of trying. He attempts to convey as much in a look, and she moves on. "Just consider it, okay? But if you want me to move on, how about you tell me why you're still wearing and also have Emmet's Xtrans?" 

The weight of the pack thrown onto his shoulder sent him staggering and his sweat-slick grip slipped from forearm to wrist, catching on fiberglass that has no purchase. He buried his fingers underneath the band, desperate nails scraping at the catch of the band for something to loop around but it gave. It snapped, and Ingo fell. 

"The wireless signal disrupts the sensors on the tracks, so we take them off when running rail inspections. It was in his kit, with his Pokemon. I wear it now as a reminder." 

The dig of emotional manipulation sours his stomach in a way that's familiar by now. In truth, Ingo's Xtransceiver is in his desk drawer behind his locked bedroom door, because Emmet can't face the memory of letting it snap. 

She doesn't press, though with the roller-coaster tracks in her gym she might have reason enough to. The carts are low to the tracks, and challengers don't take off their Xtransceivers to ride. Most of the minor lies settle like this, close enough to the truth while toeing the line of reasonable doubt. All it will take is for someone to pull the thread on a haphazard half-truth for everything to unravel. 

After that, there isn't much time left on their break. Elesa thanks him for sending his research, and explains that she and his uncle had been in contact. There's a whiplash to it, the appeals for him to take care of himself offset by the reminder of his betrayal, marked by Emmet’s newfound position as an outsider to their circle of grief. Iris had pulled away from him entirely, while Drayden and Elesa only divulged flickers of emotion beyond their resentment at his lies. 

Emmet wonders how they would mourn Ingo once they knew. He hates himself for depriving Ingo of the outpouring of love and longing that he rightly deserves, and then hates himself and them for accepting mourning as an option. This was exactly what he had feared. The inertia of their grief would drag him towards giving in when Ingo wasn't dead .

They depart with an attempt at a hug, Elesa leaning into the habit before Emmet tenses, somewhere between longing and disbelief. She pats his forearm, barely there, and promises to text. It aches.  

She keeps her word. While it lacks the joy and humor of how they used to chat, she sends him pictures of her Pokemon and asks him whether he's eating and sleeping. Occasionally she'll weigh in on Drayden's thinking, off the cuff, and Emmet will feel oddly adrift again until he remembers he'd rather be left alone. 

So time passes. Eight hours straight without the reprieve of battle is suffocating, so he takes to breaking up his shifts into two to three hour brackets, allowing for long stretches of time to patrol the tunnels or divert onto Route 16 with his team. Though he felt the closest thing to himself weaving between apartment blocks and towering horizons, retracing old tracks on the riverside, it takes only one intrepid stranger with too many questions to send him searching for more isolated stations. 

I cannot comment on recent matters. No, I cannot speak to the timeline of the battle circuits reopening. No, I have nothing to say regarding the future status of the Doubles Circuit. No, I will not say anything further about my brother. 

No comment. No comment. No comment. 

The public-facing staff all deserve a raise, in light of this. Everyone at Gear Station does. 

In the absence of the battle circuits, their Pokemon have grown restless. Particularly Emmet's own Pokemon, a number of which he had to claim were recently-caught replacements to maintain the illusion after the PR team noted the discrepancy between 'Emmet's' supposed departure and 'Ingo's' full team of ten. Luckily, it was up for debate which Pokemon actually belonged to whom between the two, given their tendency to treat their respective teams as an interchangeable unit. They had raised them together, after all. 

However tempting Nimbasa's Stadiums or Battle Institute may be, Emmet wasn't dumb enough to gallivant, his previous actions notwithstanding. Instead he wanders. In the tunnels he follows Chandelure's light and on the surface he meanders until a wild Pokemon breaks his reverie and gives a lucky teammate a chance to stretch their legs, or equally relevant appendage. After the first month of this the Pokemon in the area recognize him coming. All the better for it, where he's not terrorizing the local population but rather challenging the few that want the fight as much as he does. 

It doesn't take long, then, to switch tracks into Lostlorn Forest. Directly outside Nimbasa City, the sedgy thicket north of Route 16 is often busy with trainers and backpackers. Following the trail away from curious eyes leads him to a wooden bridge over a burbling stream, and from there into an unfamiliar copse comparatively devoid of people. 

The first time he follows the worn tracks of other wanderers, crossing the stretch of wild grass and sending Haxorus out to stave off any wild Pokemon. The grove gives way into an expansive clearing where patches of winter hellebores sway delicate in the wind. Combee hover benignly around him, curious, as he collapses onto his back in the grass to watch the clouds roll overhead. 

It's idyllic. Emmet should feel better. There should be some accompanying relief, or some moment where he's able to be grateful to simply be . To be present, to be here, to be alive. To have been saved to see that Nimbasa is still worth staying for, even on his own. 

In the hollow of his chest where he's meant to feel something, anything, Emmet is little more than an empty car without passengers. There’s recognition that he would once enjoy this, but he bypasses the platform where the actual emotion waits and waits. White, gossamer clouds amble across the most pristine blue sky, a gentle breeze ruffles his hair and sends wafts of crisp air all around him, and he feels like something left to rot. Except the earth wouldn't take him as it was meant to. He had twenty-five minutes before he was meant to carry this husk of the person he’s meant to be back to the station to feign personhood again. 

Whether out of some self-destructive instinct or simply because their Pokemon deserve to roam, Emmet returns to the woods regularly thereafter. The clearing was wide enough, empty enough, that Emmet could release five or six to let them enjoy the open air. Always in coupled pairs, Emmet's and Ingo's, so that they could engage in mock battles with their lifelong rivals. Better competition than the local fauna, in any case. 

Chandelure never joined. After that first night, she spent any moment out of her pokeball glued to his side. At first, Emmet assumed it was her contribution to the charade, but it didn't take long to realize it was her loyalty to Ingo manifest as a need to try and keep Emmet safe. In her way, she proved a better imitation of Ingo than Emmet could manage, fulfilling his uncle’s notion of Ingo’s role as caretaker and protector. So he allowed her to lead him through every excursion down the subway tunnels, especially on the Orange Line, and dutifully ate meal bars and drank water bottles on her command. 

Just once, he joked that if he was resurrected as a ghost Pokemon they could look for Ingo together, unburdened. The apartment glowed in blue and purple with the wash of her fury, and Emmet still has tinnitus from the way that she screeched at him. 

The change sneaks up on him. Once the panic of those first days settled, and the line of distrust between him and his family was drawn, Emmet’s plans to leave Nimbasa once he confessed started to take the form of private, morbid jokes about the nature of that leaving. Then the jokes became statements, his dark answer to any moment of longing, any intense spike of misery, and then to any minor inconvenience. He stopped thinking about where he would go first, after Unova. The filter of being Ingo was a blessing, or else he'd have let a comment slip and risk intervention from the Depot staff or, worse, his uncle and Elesa. 

Emmet didn't want to disappear. Not really. 

He wanted his brother. 

And maybe, underneath that, he wanted to stop pretending. 

Five weeks in, Uncle Drayden flies into Nimbasa to present his findings to him and Elesa as if it were some academic conference. Iris joins him, marking the first time Emmet has seen or heard from her since the precinct, excluding her periodic messages to the cousin she thought was missing. 

'Dad misses you. He stays up all night sometimes trying to figure out where you've gone.' 

'I spoke to Elesa today. Ingo isn't doing great without you, but I guess that makes sense. You both were always best together. I wish I could help him, but I don't know what to say.' 

'I had a dream last night that we were battling. You kept trying to talk to me but I couldn't understand what you were saying. Are you out there somewhere, trying to reach us, but we don't know what to look for?'

'I miss you. I love you. Come home.'

Emmet should have let her know. He shouldn’t have continued to spectate on her coping mechanism. He didn't even have to lie, completely, given that Ingo's texts were being routed to his Xtransceiver. But instead he adds it to the pile of wrongs, and saves each as a screenshot that he planned to send to Ingo someday, her words better than his at expressing exactly how much he was missed. 

They assemble at a city library on an unspoken agreement to meet at neutral ground. There, his uncle reiterates his certainty that there's not a clear contender among Unova's native wild Pokemon as a cause. The location narrows the parameters further, given that the particular stretch of tunnel alongside Skyarrow Bridge does not bend, leaving nowhere for a trainer with foreign Pokemon to hide. 

They had agreed, during their strained calls, to collapse the theory of a bad actor with a powerful, perhaps Legendary, Pokemon with the actions of an independent Pokemon. In the absence of any clear motivation to steal away a Subway Master, whichever one, the distinction was negligible until they had the barest hint of a lead. 

So, while Uncle Drayden lists off foreign Pokemon with the power to vanish a person with no trace in a matter of minutes, Emmet considers the concept of a wormhole. 

Wormholes were a theory, in the way gravity is a theory, up until recent years where events in the Alola Region brought the concept into the sharp lines of reality with a series of disappearances suddenly cohering around events that are, per his contact, classified. 

Ultra wormholes consume people, and then they fall and fall until they're spit out somewhere unknown. The energy from these ruptures can sap the identity from the person who fell, leaving them with no sense of who they are and how to come home. 

A wormhole appears like a rip in the fabric of reality and steals whatever it can reach. So why not him? The earth and concrete unspooled beneath him, first, but the well of its terrible gravity stopped at the ends of his yearning fingertips, after Ingo fell. Weren't wormholes meant to pull anything that dared at its perimeters? Surely, it should have pulled him in after? 

It's tricky to differentiate between a reasonable line of inquiry and the dull edge of self-loathing worrying at the edges of his every thought. Is this an actual question, Emmet, or do you just wish it had been you? 

"Ingo. I asked you a question." 

Shit. He looks from Elesa to Iris, neither of which appear willing to bail him out, then back to Uncle Drayden. Voice too loud for the library, he says, "I'm sorry, could I ask you to repeat it?" 

His uncle pulls back from his precipitous lean across the table and into Emmet's space. Emmet realizes, at the twitch at the corner of his uncle's brow, that he should have retreated before speaking. Ingo pulls himself back and tall at a challenge, while Emmet gets in its face. He chews at the inside of his cheek and wonders, for the thirtieth time in as many days, whether this would be the moment it derails, but Uncle Drayden leaves it at narrow-eyed scrutiny again. Emmet's stomach churns. 

"I asked whether there were any markings or scrapes on the walkway or tracks immediately after. I understand you returned to the Orange Line tunnel regularly in the beginning. I found nothing during my own investigations, but I suspect you would know better what to look for."

Emmet didn't recall giving his uncle permission to wander the tunnels. It feels both unlikely that pointing this out would do him any favors, and unlike Ingo to press. Instead, he says, "There were no signs of anything changed on the rail, no. Even the defect on the tracks that we had stopped to flag had stopped sparking, though we did send a maintenance crew down to investigate anyhow."

A beat. Uncle Drayden says, too slowly, "What did the defect look like?" 

Emmet's heartbeat picks up, thrumming against the wall of his chest, as he tries to think about a detail from the seconds before everything fell apart. "A spark off the third rail, I thought. It would not have been safe to approach, given that there was no clear short-circuit or friction to cause it. It was bright enough that you should be able to see it on the security footage."

His uncle fumbles with a projector and his Xtransceiver for a moment too long, sending Elesa up and striding from her chair to take the latter from his hands. In a matter of seconds, she's dragging a screen over to their table and the video flickers to life. They come into view at the edge of the field of view, Ingo's wide gesture first. Ingo had been arguing in defense of his choices on the Singles that morning, Emmet teasing him for being the sore loser for once. 

Blown up on the projector, vice his Xtransceiver or laptop, the hint of Ingo’s odd smile is there in the shadows of his profile. He hadn't noticed before. Not in the moment, either, because he's facing ahead, imitating some aspect of the battle, while Ingo looks at him and smiles. And, meanwhile, his uncle, Elesa, and Iris are focused on the recording of his own stupid, insignificant grin and laughter like that's what they've lost. 

Emmet clutches the seat of his chair in a vain effort to force himself to stay put. The feed flips to the next stretch of tunnel and there's the spark on the rail, white-hot and flaring. They approach, Emmet-from-before squats down to look at it, and points back the way they came. 

In the millisecond before the footage bleeds to dark static mire, Emmet swears that the spark amplifies a fraction. It flickers, reaching, then nothing. 

His grip slackens. There was something he missed. He has watched this footage countless times, slogging through the regret of it, and there was something he missed. 

Iris says, "It could be nothing. But it was fixed the next day?" 

Emmet can only nod. 

"Do these things normally just fix themselves?" 

Emmet shakes his head. Remembering words, he adds, "It's not abnormal for the lines to spark when a train accelerates, but the nearest was still out in Nuvema Town. If Unova used a four rail system, like in Galar, arcing on empty rails would be more common between the two power rails. On three rails, arcs between the third rail and the pickup are a result of standing water, dirt, or corrugations. Meaning we flag it for later safety checks. "

He’s shifting offtrack. The specifics are irrelevant, when he was meant to answer a simple question. Stay focused. 

Uncle Drayden is watching, so Emmet checks his frown and says, "My apologies. I didn't mean to derail there. I mean to say that, some sparking is normal but it was not something that would resolve on its own." 

"Then that's something to look into," Elesa says, looping around back to her seat at the table without a glance Emmet's way. "I didn't realize how creepy that static was, either, when I watched it at home. Any leads on that?" 

Uncle Drayden's scrutiny breaks, then, and he turns back to his theories on various dark and psychic type Pokemon with a scratch at his beard. The answer underneath, Emmet knows, is that he has nothing sure, which isn't far off from nothing at all. 

Emmet excuses himself shortly thereafter, citing work, when the conversation tilts towards next steps that his uncle and Elesa were going to take, pointedly without his involvement. When Emmet rises from his chair, his uncle asks him to wait, raising that there’s a conversation they’ve needed to have. 

Emmet, heart in his throat, flees instead. He promises to provide updates as they come, and answer any questions they have, and diverts back to his apartment to shout himself hoarse into the couch cushions. 

Iris texts him, meaning Ingo, that evening with an apology he hadn't earned. 

'It's not that I'm not still upset, but that I feel like I can be angry at you and still think you don't deserve to be alone.'

Emmet doesn't know how Ingo would respond to that. Emmet doesn't know how to respond to that. After that, the texts to Emmet's number stop, and Iris resumes sending him memes and battle recordings that she thinks will make him smile. If she catches him alone, she's almost always right. 

Uncle Drayden stops contacting him. A single text reads ' Call me' and, when Emmet ignores it, they reach a stalemate. 

In the weeks that follow, Emmet schedules his shifts for the early mornings and overnights. The reduced services allow him ample opportunity to scope out every inch of line for another one of those sparks. In a fit of courage, he sends a screencap from the feed to the wormhole researcher. They respond inconclusive and more images, footage maybe, would help. Emmet does not reply. 

Elesa asks him to lunch again. It's a ploy. She suggests they meet at her gym and choose a restaurant together, and there he is flocked by Nate and Rosa. Whether it's because Elesa coached them or by their own good judgment, neither comment on his previous lies. 

Elesa has an informant, and knows that his next shift doesn't start until evening. The gym is cleared of her regular suite of trainers. Emmet knows where this is going. 

She suggests they whet their appetites with a multi-battle. "I heard a little rumor that there's a chance the battle circuits might reopen. We wouldn't want you to be out of practice, right?" 

The kids look at him with stars in their eyes, and Elesa with the faintest shred of hope. It's a peace offering, he knows. The texts, by comparison, have been little more than the balance between habit and doing the right thing. Elesa was simply too good a person to abandon him entirely, even when she needed space. 

Surrounded by the pulsing neon glow of winding roller-coaster tracks, Emmet leads with Haxorus. With Elesa and Zebstrika at his side, it's fun. There's the rush of battle that his spars out on Route 16 don't deliver, there's Nate’s infectious enthusiasm and the inherent challenge Rosa brings, and Haxorus goes down but Garbodor does not. 

Emmet lets himself lean into the joy of it, and, when the battle is over and done with, Elesa beams at him for a breath before she remembers not to. 

Later, at a salad place that she chose without his input, Elesa says, "So, you actually can still battle."

He swallows a forkful of bitter greens without chewing. "I wasn't aware that was up for debate?" 

He was. Emmet knows that his autumn record was shit. 

"Back when…Earlier, I kept looking for ways I should have known. Once I got past your texts and our time together as him, the obvious stuff, I kept thinking about how much Emmet hated losing." The past tense, noted, stings. "But then I thought that you do, too. You're just nicer about it."

It's not exactly true. Ingo doesn't lose unless he means to, for the most part. Not in the sense that he throws fights, but in the sense he can recognize when someone is his match in an instant. He loves those battles, because that’s when losing is worthwhile. Emmet, for all his ability to read people, rarely anticipates a loss.  

But Ingo wouldn't correct her. So he stabs at some lettuce, trying and failing to get every topping onto the fork, and waits for her to continue. Instead, she watches him. He manages three seconds before setting down his fork to say, "Is there something wrong?" 

She rolls her eyes, which doesn't offset his confusion. "Almost always, these days."

Emmet isn't sure if she means with him, or generally. 

"Look," she continues, with a note of finality that sets his teeth on edge. "I just don't know how we're supposed to do this. Some days thinking about what you did makes me hate you. The rest of the time, though? It all just makes me so sad."

Elesa swirls her straw in her smoothie, head leaning on the other hand so that she looks away from their table, out the far window. Emmet waits. 

"I can barely look at you without wanting to cry. And then, I think, I can't even imagine what it's like for you. Which is just the core of it all, right?" She waves a forkful of salad at his face, still looking away. "Don't think that lets you off the hook. I just want to get beyond all the hurt and see whether I've got any compassion left after, you know?" 

"I--I'm afraid I'm not on the same track."

With a sigh, she turns towards him with eyes colder than her trajectory towards reconciliation would suggest. "Ingo, what's your plan if we don't find Emmet? Or if we do, but--" 

"Stop," he interrupts, and there's a shuffle as the handful of patrons around them turn to look. Quieter, he fumbles, "Please stop. I don't have a plan. I haven't considered an after." He's losing character. He doesn't want to have this conversation. "I haven't allowed myself to imagine what routes there are other than finding him. I haven't wanted to. I'm certain he's alive to be found." 

"Oh, Ingo," she says, and Emmet has to suppress a flinch because they're too close to the heart of him now for her to still think he's his brother. "If that was meant to be reassuring, you've missed the mark."

A part of him tears away, and Emmet can feel the bitter, feral smile play at his lips. There's something hideous in the realization of, after months, how much he misses getting to be a little mean. He bits down, hard, on the insides of his cheek until he can't stand it, and then says, "I'm entirely serious. I won't consider it."

"You might not get closure. There might not be an answer. He vanished , Ingo. You were minutes away and he was just gone. Are you going to spend the rest of your life searching for him, well after the point of reason?" 

"Yes." Emmet can't muster the volume. He whispers, hoarse and thick, "Yes. Of course, yes. What else would I do?" 

"You grieve. You live your life, instead of just being the one left behind. You shouldn’t have to survive only in the shadow of losing him."

Didn't she know that it was too late for that? Couldn't she hear it is the wrongness of his voice, the way his words didn't come out right? Wasn't it obvious? 

I am Emmet. There is no after. There's only the moment Ingo comes home, or the moment I can't continue on this route any longer.  

Elesa starts to visit his apartment again, after. Always unannounced, she has an uncanny insight into his work schedule and unfailingly catches him off guard. She brings takeout and movies, and they try and fail to avoid the subject of lies and loss. The Pokemon appreciate her presence, and it gives him a reason to clean up the depression nest that his living room has become since he shut himself out of the bedrooms. 

It helps. Until it doesn't. 

He sends the footage to the researcher, on word of confidentiality. He copies his uncle, their mutual silence still otherwise held.

The researcher explains that, while there were some of the hallmark signs of a tear in reality suggestive of an ultra wormhole, there were differences enough that they had two theories. Either this was an instance and presentation yet unseen, or this was something else. In either case, Emmet collided with the dead end without grace. 

He shouldn’t have been checking his personal email during his shift, and it leaves him floundering for purchase during an otherwise banal meeting. For the first time in weeks, he's at the station for regular hours in order to discuss spring plans, namely the potential to reopen the battle circuits. Or, circuit. 

Maybe the proximity to his life before made him more vulnerable. In any case, excusing himself with barely more than a word was less than an inspiring display of leadership. 

Shoving his entire head under the tap, too, does not bode well for his ability to cope. The running water drowns out the bloodrush thrum, and the cold biting against his jawline is the closest thing to clarity he can reach. 

Unsurprisingly, he regathers his composure to find the engineer waiting for him a respectable ten feet away outside the bathroom hall. 

"Boss?"

Emmet grimaces. His collar is wet. "I, uh, I apologize for the delay. We'll return to--" 

She holds up a hand to signal him to stop, and he lets his voice sputter out. "You can drop it. I haven't told yet, you know." 

There's a different way that this particular guilt strikes him, shame burning hotter than his usual self-loathing. "I know," he starts, trying to find his own voice, not Ingo’s, higher in his throat. "Thank you. I just-- I can't."

Looking away from him, down and to the floor, she straightens the edges of her uniform shirt and says, "This isn't working. I know I said I would follow your lead, I know you said there's an investigation. But, surely this isn't sustainable. Half the team is threatening to go find 'Emmet' and bring home, as if that's an option, because of how obvious it is that you're falling apart."

Ah. 

Emmet had really thought, absent of the odd hours and the restlessness, he had been managing fine at work. How naive of him. How stupid. 

He grits his teeth, lucky that she's looking away and doesn't mistake the set of his jaw for anger at her. He should have known better, of course, but like so much else this isn't something he can fix. The rail is crumbling beneath him as he hurtles ahead, and he knows this conversation can lead nowhere but wreckage. 

"I don't think there's a version of this," He says, back to Ingo's voice, "where I reveal the truth of it and come out better for it. I'd sooner assign a successor and depart quietly, I think."

"What? No." When she meets his eyes again, it's with a glare. Emmet shrinks. "Boss, really? You'd up and leave, just like that? All you're saying is that you'd quit before you gave us a chance to understand. That's not like you." She pauses, then steps towards him and pitches her voice low, "And I don't mean Ingo. You. That's not like you ."

Emmet doesn't recognize the person she thinks he is, and doesn't believe he could be that person again. Could he study old battle videos of himself, as he had with Ingo, until he learned his easy smile and easier confidence again? Except, he doesn't want to perform after this. He doesn't want to try and be anyone's idea of him. 

Would Ingo even know him as he is now? 

Emmet's vision blurs at the edges, fixed on a single brass button on the engineer's sleeve. He doesn't remember how to breathe. 

Would Ingo even want this warped, broken excuse of a brother? The liar? The one that took Ingo's own identity and twisted it into this sad excuse of a man, the walking husk of his memory? 

And Emmet had considered Ingo's inevitable disappointment. But in the haze of the last two months, in the constant fight against everyone else's if when the only bolt keeping him together is the promise of a when Ingo returns, he hadn't imagined the other side. 

Could Emmet even blame Ingo if he rejects him entirely? Before the first truth came out, there was the justification of the necessary cost to find him, to save him, but at this rate what good had it done? 

Ingo could come home to a brother he regrets saving. 

The engineer is waving in his face. He is spiraling. Here, in the hallway to the east wing restroom, Emmet is on the verge of breaking down and the engineer is trying to get his attention. 

He blinks. The fog clears, just enough. 

"Boss? Hey, you back?" 

Emmet straightens his back and tries to ignore the vertigo that follows. "Sorry. I'm sorry. I had a late shift last night." 

"You should go home. I'll cover for you." She watches him with a furrowed brow and her lips press into a thin line when he shakes his head. But she doesn't argue. She doesn't stop him from marching back to the meeting room. Loyal to a fault. 

Afterwards, Emmet's feet carry him to Route 16. Chandelure breaks from her pokeball on her own volition, trilling with concern and then alarm. Thick gray clouds blot out the afternoon sky and fog gathers over the westward skyline, obscuring the city behind him. 

"You don't want to be out when it snows, Chandelure." 

She stays. 

The stream that marks the boundary between Route 16 and Lostlorn Forest runs high, the bridge lurching in the water as he strides across. Wind carries leaf litter in whirls, but the flowers that had been blooming in the grass are nowhere in sight. The field lies still under the encroaching cover of hemlock tree canopy where the wind does not reach. The clearing is smaller than he remembers. 

Emmet is a lot of things. A liar. A coward. 

But he is not a fool. 

Emmet had lived in Nimbasa City for nearly a decade. He had heard the stories, the threat of something lurking in the winding woods. And, sure enough, whenever he found a moment alone in Lostlorn Forest, the treeline had twisted and bent inward, always different from the last. Emmet, though, was no stranger to the threat of forces beyond him. 

This time, there was nowhere to go. Emmet reaches the center of the meager clearing and sits on the damp grass to wait. The forest waits in return, quiet. Chandelure sinks to the ground beside him. 

"I know you're there," he says, and his voice does not shake. 

Out from the shade of the trees steps Ingo. Chandelure trills weakly, a burst of purple flame a show of strength she does not have in this match. But Emmet doesn't intend to fight. 

Ingo is exactly as he left, standing across the grass with his uniform crisp and posture tall. He looks nothing like the version of Ingo that lives in bathroom mirrors and the reflection in subway windows. Emmet lets himself smile, and then he breaks. 

"Hi, Ingo. I've missed you."

He presses his palms against his eyes one at a time to stem the tears, because he can't bear to look away. 

Ingo says, "Is this what you want?" 

His Xtransceiver vibrates against his wrist. Emmet closes his eyes and says, honestly, "I don't know. Can we just talk?" 

"We may. I don't have the answers you're looking for, however." His voice is wrong like Emmet's impression is, subtle enough that he can choose to ignore it. He does. 

"He wouldn't, either." 

It starts to snow. The illusion may obscure the wind, but it still picks up as the occasional flake as it turns into slow, steady snowfall. The air smells like cold and dirt, clear in a way that makes Emmet feel out of place. Ingo's eyes flicker towards the skyline, then back to meet Emmet's. He waits. 

"I meant to ask for help. You had the chance to run me out of your woods. You haven't. So I came here to see…" Emmet trails off, and Ingo tilts his head. Emmet's Xtransceiver vibrates on his wrist. "I don't want to do this anymore." 

Chandelure's anxious trill warbles, and she lifts into the air to position herself in front of Emmet. Ingo's shoulders raise and his posture bows inward, a threat. 

"She would prefer I leave. She thinks I'm tricking you. Manipulating you."

Emmet pats her glass. "Come on, Chandelure. I know what I'm doing. You not liking it is different. Pick a fight against the one causing the problem." Then, to Ingo, "Have you ever considered living in the city?" 

Ingo laughs, and it pulls his expression in too many directions and the creases around his eyes are all wrong. Emmet's head swims. But the Zoroark wouldn't know better, wouldn't know that Ingo laughs with his chest and not his eyes. 

"I have no interest in being caught."

The hemlock trees loom, with shadows that should be disrupted by the overcast skies yearning towards Emmet like grasping claws. Emmet raises up one hand, a surrender, and the other yanks Chandelure by the arm to his side again before she gets hurt. "No, no, not that," He starts, a little too fast to be convincing. "Really. I have ten Pokemon already. No more, thank you. I was thinking of a mutual agreement."

Ingo tilts his head again, this time in the other direction. Wordless assent to continue. Emmet struggles to believe that he's having the conversation. 

His Xtransceiver vibrates on his wrist. He knows, by now, that his uncle is calling. After the email, he texted ‘ I’m done waiting for you to call .’ 

"I need someone to play my part. Ingo's part. I just--I'm at the fucking brink. Maybe I was convincing at the start. But not now, and it hasn't even been a year. I need more time." 

"Time?" 

How emotionally honest does one allow themselves to get with a Zoroark? 

"Every day it feels like I'm destroying a little part of what's left of his memory, and for what? So I can feel better? Instead I wonder whether I know who Ingo is anymore, and whether he would know me. Or want to know me. Or want anything to do with me."

Ingo stares at him. Emmet is not done. "He's not dead. Which means that I have to find him. This," he gestures, flippant, at his coat and hat and face, "isn't helping me find him."

Ingo hums low, considering, but it sounds like a growl underneath. Emmet concludes his damned plea. "I think you'd be a better Ingo than I've ever managed." 

A moment passes. The snow gathers and melts, dripping from his coat into his collar, only barely dry from the bathroom sink soak, so he yanks at his tie until it's loose enough that the fabric doesn't sop to his skin. Ingo looks down at him, grinning. Emmet’s skin crawls. 

If this thing suggests that he tries being himself, Emmet is going to scream. He hopes the situation as presented is just ruinous enough that a Pokemon as mischievous as a Zoroark would be tempted to take the bait. 

But Ingo bares his teeth, staring down at him with pity and scorn that Emmet can't bear to look at. His breath catches and his hands rush to cover his mouth, stifling a sob. He shouldn't look away, but there isn't enough of him left to stand Ingo looking at him like that. 

There's a rush of air, the flutter of a coat flapping out on a turn, and when Emmet lifts his head, he's alone. 

Well, except for Chandelure, who presses into his shoulder and sings fragile bits of bellsong in some attempt at comfort. The clearing expands around them, and there are hellebore flowers where his hands land to dig nails into dirt. 

Emmet collapses backward to lie on the grass, the snowfall biting at his face. His Xtransceiver vibrates on his wrist. Uncle Drayden is calling. 

Waiting until his best guess at the last ring, Emmet taps at his screen and hoists up his left arm at an angle so that the camera can catch his face.

"It's unbelievable that you would ignore my calls, in light of everything," his uncle immediately says, and then, "Are you alright? Where are you?" 

"Lunch break," Emmet replies, using his free hand to scrub melting snowflakes from his forehead. His hat has toppled into the grass behind him. "Uncle Drayden? Can I ask you something?" 

There's a lag in the video, and Emmet watches his expression soften and his muted agreement before the sound stutters in. "Of course. What is this about?" 

"You know. Don't you?"

His uncle flinches, then takes a deep breath. A second later, the speakers sound, "I have suspected. Are you done, then? Is it time to finally put a stop to this?" 

And Emmet laughs. It's an ugly, choked thing, but wholly his. "No. Of course not," he says, letting his laughter fall into a weak grin. "I just don't want to pretend if you already know. And Iris?" 

"I have not said anything, though I imagine she's noticed something is amiss. I'm not going to continue maintaining your lie for you, if that's what you're asking." 

"Why not? You have so far." 

Uncle Drayden's image rattles as he wanders from one room to another, a brief plunge into darkness ceded by the wash of lamplight. He says, "That was different. I was concerned that, had I pushed, it would only make things worse. When I suggested we talk, you ran away and then refused to contact me for weeks. Until the email . I will not lie for you, Emmet." 

Snowmelt rolls around the bevels of the screen and along the length of his outstretched arm, catching on the bunched up sleeves of his shirt and dissolving there into the damp. Chandelure, still refusing her pokeball, shoves her way underneath his arm and flares in his defense. Emmet sighs. Time for a new route.

"Okay," he starts, and he drops his voice low again, louder if not confident. "Give me one month. Let me reopen the battle circuits, assign some successors to each of the lines. I want to fix things, as close to how it was. I owe Gear Station that much. I owe Ingo that much. Then I'll tell the truth myself." 

Emmet can tell it's excruciating, but Uncle Drayden agrees after a thoughtful, drawn out pause. His nod precedes his voice from the speakers. "Fine. One month." 

There's nothing else to say. Not yet, not until Emmet holds up his end. Whether he'll follow through in the way his uncle expects, well, that's for Emmet to decide later. For now, he hangs up the call. 

He has work to do. 

Ingo is late. Elesa paces on the pavement in front of his apartment building, periodically glancing at her Xtransceiver for a text, a call, any indication of where he is. Because Ingo doesn't do late. Ingo is perfectly punctual, exactly on schedule, never more than seconds behind a promised time at worst. But, somehow, they agreed to meet at 4:30 and it was inching closer to 5:00 which each turn of her heel. 

Sure, today was busy. The Singles Circuit reopening would be a big deal on its own, but Ingo had gone and surprised everyone by announcing that the Doubles Circuit would start again on the same day. The compromise? New trainers to face for the strong few that breach twenty-one consecutive wins, hand selected by Ingo as the strongest on the team. The Super Circuits would open later the month, hosting a rotating challenge for the 49th battle drawn from the League's host of gym trainers. Elesa, herself, volunteered for one Tuesday a month. For now, Ingo would be the regular challenge, but he explained that the goal would be to eventually phase out and focus more on the operations and development side of the subway. 

Honestly? It made Elesa uneasy. 

Emmet was still gone. There were no new leads. That was the intention of this evening, in fact. With Ingo's newfound vigor making her nervous, Elesa wanted to discuss a new avenue. One that would involve expanding their circle to include another, and someone that Ingo doesn't know. 

Elesa is not Drayden. She's not Ingo. The circling around the potentialities, around Legendary Pokemon and wormholes, wasn't her style. Elesa thought the best way forward would be with concrete evidence, not theories. And in the absence of any sign on the tracks themselves, the next best option was the footage. The others dismissed it as beyond repair, but that hadn't stopped her. 

But, she hit a dead end. She needed a Pokemon's help to fix another Pokemon's mess. But, it wasn't a Pokemon she could up and catch out in the wild. 

Rotom are rare, and they're not native to Unova. But a friend in Sinnoh has one, and Elesa thinks he has the know-how to guide it. The problem is asking Ingo whether she could send the video to Volkner at all, given his insistence that Emmet's disappearance stays private. 

Elesa was certain, though, that she could make him understand that it was better to risk one more person knowing if it meant they would be closer to finding Emmet. Closer, too, to knowing what happened, and with it what to expect. 

The clock strikes the hour. Elesa tires of waiting.

Time to go. 

She starts down the road towards Gear Station, stalwart and grandiose on the western horizon. Joining up with the stream of commuters heading for their trains home, Elesa pointedly does not imagine scenarios in her head that explain Ingo's delay. If she just doesn't acknowledge the hollow pit in her stomach, the flutter in her heart, then she would arrive at the station to find Ingo  too absorbed in preparations, having lost track of time. 

Besides, what was normal Ingo behavior anymore? Add missing appointments to the list, right between moderating his volume and lying. 

Elesa picks up pace. 

Once past the threshold and into the evening-lit atrium, the crowd breaks off into streams towards the various platforms. Elesa keeps straight, striding up to the information desk and her favorite Depot agent. They don't notice her approach, shoulder pressing the station phone to their ear as they flip through some sort of manual. As she waits at the line, she scans the crowd for a familiar black hat, maybe the flutter of a greatcoat, and when she turns back to the desk the agent is staring at her, wide-eyed. 

Swallowing hard, she holds her head high and steps up to the counter as the image of composure. Before she can find her voice, though, the agent says, "I don't know if Boss is available right now. He, uh… he's been locked in a meeting room with a cop for the last hour, maybe? I don't know what's going on, but my buddy in the back said an officer walked right up to his desk after the announcement and then they went into another room and shut us out."

Oh. Oh no. 

Did the police investigation turn up something? After months of nothing, did they find him? Did they find Emmet and just walk up to Ingo to tell him? 

Ignoring the agent calling after her, Elesa swings around and dashes toward the offices. There are people staring, commuters and confused station staff alike, but her vision tunnels on Ingo's desk, empty. The nearest employee balks, and points towards a closed door, blinds drawn. Her heart is in her throat and her lungs heave, and not from running. With no respect for Ingo’s authority, she knocks, loud, thrice and shoves open the door. 

Ingo sits across from an officer, pressed to the back of his chair with his jaw clenched. The officer has a notepad and pen, and leans forward with his elbows on the table in a manner that's likely meant to read as non-threatening but that Ingo would read as impolite. 

"I'm sorry, but," Elesa says as the pieces fall into place, her heart settling but her stomach beginning to churn. "Is something going on? Are you questioning Ingo?" 

"Just following up on some outstanding questions on the missing person case, ma'am," the officer says, gaze flashing to her and then back to his notes. "If Mr. Ingo is late for something, well, it's up to him how much longer we'll be." 

Elesa doesn't like his tone. As Ingo makes no indication that he plans to explain, Elesa drags a chair from the corner of the room to Ingo's side, bumping its legs against the side of his chair until he budges up. To the officer's raised eyebrow she says, "I've been helping look into what happened to Emmet. Maybe I can clear some things up?" 

"Ma'am, I think that would be not exactly procedure, and--" 

"As far as I can tell, this is an informal conversation, right? What's the procedure, exactly?" 

Immovable object meet unstoppable force. Elesa folds her hands beneath her chin in a prim imitation of the officer's affectation. Ingo gapes at her out of the corner of her eye, and she has to wonder whether he thinks she would abandon him to this. 

What a mess they are, now. 

The officer straightens, mirroring Ingo now, and says, "Well, can't argue with that. I'm looking to corroborate some timing pieces between Mr. Ingo's statement and our investigations. You're aware of the details regarding his location during the moment of Mr. Emmet's disappearance?"

Turning to Ingo, she watches his face as she explains her understanding. "Yes. They were together on the Orange Line walkway, some ways from Castelia City. Ingo stepped away to find something to mark a fault on the tracks, heard something and ran back to find Emmet's kit abandoned."

His expression holds terse, no more stressed than before she spoke, but his hands clench in his lap. "Right, Ingo?" 

"You see," the officer says on the end of a hum. "That's pretty much it. There are a couple of maintenance cabinets between the Skyarrow Bridge Station platform and the point on the tracks it all happened. We figured subway folks know best what's in each. Didn't think much of the, what, eight to ten minutes it took Mr. Ingo to run back?"

Elesa felt the hairs on her arms stand. Ingo doesn't look at her. 

"It's been a fairly dry investigation so we wanted to follow up on every possible detail. The times don't match up. A helpful agent here at the station forwarded us some reports from that evening on the Orange Line. We've got seismic activity in the tunnel at 7:03, then the sensors pick up a sizable disturbance on the tracks at 7:05. The agent on call at Skyarrow that day explained that the report grade is indicative of a person or Pokemon-sized obstacle.. When I was following up the other day, said agent happened to recall it was Mr. Ingo. There had been some kind of accident, and she had to halt services out at Nuvema to investigate."

Elesa files away Ingo being on the live tracks for later. One trauma at a time. 

If there wasn't that ten minute delay, there's every reason to believe that Ingo had been there, that he had seen what happened to Emmet. Which means he had still been lying to them, for months more, and again it had been information that could have helped them find Emmet. 

It's almost enough to have her believing that this whole time Ingo had known, known that there was no finding Emmet, known that gone meant dead, and denied them the closure because he couldn't bear it. But, of all of them, Ingo was the one most convinced that Emmet could be found. So much so that Elesa was terrified that the worst outcome would destroy him. 

If she doesn't kill him first. For lying. For hiding away with his grief and then daring to look hurt when Elesa relied on Drayden to navigate the heartache of it. For keeping her from being allowed to explain to her friends why she had been so sad, so lost, because why wouldn't her oldest, dearest friend still keep in contact with her even if he had cut contact with his brother. 

For everything. If she didn't throttle him for every intolerable moment of this, she feared with the certainty of premonition that this story would end with Ingo and Emmet both lost. 

And she hated him for that, too. How dare he leave her to restrain her rage that was so hard-earned? There wasn’t comfort in the anger, she didn’t feel righteous. Warranted didn't mean wanted. 

She just wants Emmet home safe. 

She just wants them both--them all--to be okay. 

Ingo hasn't spoken. Practically non-verbal, he offers no explanation, no justification, no genuine truth. And doesn't that sting? 

Elesa could leave him here, she knows. It can stop being her business the moment she chooses. What would he do but wallow in this cruel mess he's made? 

But she won't. Won’t and not can't. Elesa will not give up on him. It's not some misguided loyalty to Emmet, either. She loves him still, her stupid trainwreck of a best friend, even when she hates him. And she wants to understand. 

More than anything, now, she wants to understand what did this to Ingo. Or, rather, why he did this to himself. 

So, she grits her teeth and says, "I see your point, officer. Could I ask what happens now?" 

"I'd like Mr. Ingo to come in and revise his statement. And, by 'I'd like', I mean I'm asking nicely now and will be asking with a warrant if necessary." 

Elesa startles, swinging her attention back to the officer. "Excuse me?" 

He clears his throat, looking a little uncomfortable under her glare. "You understand missing time, even a few minutes, doesn't look good for him, right?" 

She could laugh at the idea of it, but knows better. Instead, she levels her tone and says, "You can't be suggesting that Ingo is responsible? Losing Emmet is destroying him and you think he…" she trails off, balking at the officer's noncommittal shrug and feeling unable to meet that with putting the idea of it to voice. Instead, she ends the conversation.

"Fine. If something official is required, I think you should leave, though. Procedures, right?" A beat. No one moves. "Now." 

The officer's gaze slides to Ingo, who nods, and so he flips closed his notebook and pushes up from his seat. Elesa doesn't watch him leave, holding herself upright and still until the moment the latch catches behind her. 

Then she folds in on herself, burying her head in her hands, unable to decide whether she needs to scream or sob. 

"Elesa--" 

"Stop. Don't," she says into her palms. She counts the next three breaths, collecting her thoughts before she says something she'll regret. "I won't be able to take it if you lie to me again."

Ingo stays silent beside her. Between her fingers, she watches his foot tap on the floor, and it's so unlike Ingo to be impatient that she struggles to reconcile the man she thought she knew with what he's become. She makes him wait. 

After a minute, maybe two, she lifts her head. "I was going to give you the choice, before," she says, tilting to the side to force Ingo to meet her eyes. "But not anymore. I think a Rotom can clear the distortion from the footage from that night. I'm going to send it to Volkner, in Sinnoh, so his Rotom can give it a try." 

His pupils dilate then shrink to pinpricks. Elesa bites her lip, swallows the ugly doubt that rises from her chest, and adds, "If it works, we show it to the cops and cut this nonsense. Okay?" 

When he doesn't immediately agree, even though she didn't expect it, her heartbeat slamming against her chest is all she can hear. Then he says, voice impossibly small, "Okay." 

Elesa doesn't wait. She calls Volkner there in the office, time zones not her concern, and walks him through the situation while he makes himself a coffee that looks more like a punishment than a pick-me-up. Ingo avoids the camera, up and pacing at the far side of the meeting room until Volkner agrees that the fix might work, at which point Ingo stills and listens. 

For the rest of the evening, Elesa doesn't let Ingo out of her sight. She drags him to the northeast side of town to grab an overnight bag at home, and then marches him to his apartment to wait. He doesn't speak, only humming soft acknowledgements and engrossed in feeding thePokemon while she feels herself grow more and more impatient by the minute. 

As is the norm, apparently, all ten of his and Emmet's Pokemon fill the apartment whenever he's home. She thought, at first, it was an effort to make the place seem less lonely in Emmet's absence. But now she realizes they are what keep him together in the open stretches of time between work and what limited social obligations he, at this point, has. When Elesa normally comes around it was less obvious, focus on their conversation and whatever distraction she carried with her. But in the absence of talk, she watches as Garbodor, Crustle, and Durant tidy the kitchen, while Haxorus and Galvantula drag the scattered array of cushions into a pile on the floor. 

Chandelure hovers at his shoulder, and he mumbles to her in undertones she cannot pick up while she visits with Excadrill and Klinklang. 

It strikes her that, while Ingo has fallen apart, their Pokemon are in perfect health. They, in their way, do what they can in return. 

A little after 11:30, Volkner sends back a file, email containing no text or acknowledgement of what he had seen. Infuriating, but not an issue for the moment. 

That it took only a matter of hours to resolve doesn’t pass unnoticed. Of course it had been that easy. The knowing wasn't the hard part, it was asking the right questions at the right time. 

What's going on? What's changed? Where's Emmet? 

Why? How could you? What's your plan, after? 

And now back to where they started: What happened? 

With the laptop on the coffee table, Elesa and Ingo sit on the couch surrounded by Pokemon and Elesa lets instinct override hurt just this once and grabs Ingo's hand before she leans forward to start the video. His hand is stuck open, trembling, but once she presses once he gives in and closes his fingers around hers. 

The recording starts as she remembers. Emmet and Ingo on the Orange Line walkway, Emmet spotting the spark and crouching down to get a closer look. She almost expects it to cut to static, for this all to be a terrible fit of misplaced optimism, but then Emmet presses his hands to his knees and pushes up to his feet. 

Elesa knows it’s the past, knows it’s only a recording, but seeing Emmet do anything beyond what that footage loop had to offer up until now has tears in her eyes. He points down the direction they came, explaining something and Ingo nods, pointing back to the fault on the track. Emmet spins on his heel, starts back westward.

Elesa is about to point out the difference, Emmet leaving and not Ingo, when the footage begins to rattle. Between them, the point of light on the tracks rends open, radial with bolts of electric ripping towards the edges of the rail. Darkness, inky black and coiling, yearns out from around it, coating the walkway in an instant. 

Emmet stumbles back, losing his footing to the dark. As he twists around, Ingo behind him is running, shouting, and then leaping, slamming shoulders and arms into Emmet's side. 

Emmet careens back, Ingo grasping at his waist but slipping to cling onto his coat. Emmet lands hard on the edge of tracks beneath the walkway where the swirling darkness hasn't reached. Jostled by the collision, Ingo loses his grip, hands and arms dropping flat to the rapidly receding solid ground. 

Elesa feels nauseous. 

Emmet twists and lunges, catching Ingo's outstretched arm with one, then two hands. Ingo dangles, Emmet trying and failing to draw him back on hand and knees. 

Ingo yells something. Emmet shakes his head. Ingo yells again, and his suspended hand drives up to his shoulders, grabbing the strap of his kit, his Pokemon, and then flinging it over Emmet's back. Emmet staggers, his hands slip up to Ingo's wrist. He pulls, Ingo yells again. 

Something gives. Ingo's Xtransceiver a black smudge in Emmet's hand. Emmet reels with the displaced weight, toppling backwards onto the tracks. 

Ingo falls. 

The darkness recedes. The footage continues, but Elesa's vision has fallen away to tears. 

She had wanted to understand. 

She takes the trembling hand she holds and brings it up to her chest. The anger, the betrayal, will soon follow, she knows. He had lied from the beginning, from the first moment she asked for a shred of truth. 

For now, she closes her free hand around the other and presses her forehead low against her knuckles. She holds his hand like he could disappear at any moment and says, barely more than a whisper, "Emmet?”

Chapter Text

Chapter Text

Drayden still wonders at what point he should have intervened. 

The door is unlocked when they arrive. It is well past the hour of reason and beyond the point of no return. The apartment sits dark but for the wash of white-blue laptop light pooling over Emmet and Elesa on the old couch. The Pokemon gather around and below the low coffee table, alternating between reacting with a nervous clamor to the opening door and flanking Emmet, who folds over elbows on knees with his head in his hands while Elesa cries mutely at the other end of the couch. She, and not Emmet, moves on their arrival, drawing up to her feet and crossing the mess of cushions on the floor to draw both Drayden and Iris into a desperate, clinging hug. 

Elesa is less inclined, shortly thereafter, to treat Drayden with compassion when she learns that he had suspected, then knew, and said nothing. Her scorn is short-lived and, at the time, the least of his concerns. 

He and Iris watch the recovered footage while Emmet excuses himself to the kitchen to stare blankly out the slanted-open blinds at the city below. Street lamps cast bars of yellow light across his face and torso that ripple as he shivers. Drayden does not go to him. With sleep-tired eyes, they witness what Emmet has always known: Ingo--truly Ingo--shoves Emmet away from unravelling void of dark, and Emmet cannot save him in return. Ingo accepts this, throwing his kit onto Emmet's shoulders and demanding that Emmet, Drayden assumes, lets him go. 

With all the rationale of retrospect, Drayden knows there were countless better ways to respond to the whole truth uncovered.

Reeling from the revelation that Emmet had seen it happen, with his daughter bawling beside him, Drayden shoves past Haxorus and Klinklang guarding the kitchen entry and hauls his nephew around by the shoulder to face him. Desperate to give reason to his rekindled anguish, he demands answers: "Is there anything else you withheld?" and "What possessed you to hide information on what, exactly, happened?" and “How could you?” 

He knew the answers then as he knows them now. Perhaps he could have guessed before the footage revealed Emmet had known all along, had he cared to interrogate the cause behind Emmet's charade. 

"It was supposed to be me. It should have been me. I thought--" 

"No. You didn't think. Or else you would have conceived that me, the police, anyone other than you could have helped find him if they knew how he disappeared. Again, at every turn you impeded our chances. It’s as if you don't want him found." 

Some days the footage plays behind his eyelids first thing in the morning, always the moment that Emmet's foot dropped into the dark just for Ingo to throw himself over the edge to save him only to fall short of saving himself. He can hear the snap of Ingo's Xtransceiver band in his imagination, now, after toying with his own to understand what measure of force it takes to rip through reinforced nylon.  

Once, and only once, had he let the footage play to the end of the feed. Minutes pass after Ingo falls, Emmet collapsing back on the tracks and howling until his lungs and spirit give out, heedless of the live third rail. Drayden loves and hates the Depot agent who pulled him out, his nephew's savior and enabler. Until, that is, Drayden acknowledges that he enabled Emmet himself. 

Dragging his shoulder out from under Drayden's hand, Emmet backs up against the window, blinds crinkling in protest. The white kitchen cabinets flicker purple as Chandelure materializes, the room running cold to raise the hairs on the back of Drayden's neck and arms. She silently phases through him, stealing the breath momentarily from his lungs, to position herself in front of Emmet. Awash from underneath with her candlelight glow, Emmet's eyes are livid and bright with flame for an instant before dropping to the floor between them. 

Drayden watches as the fight bleeds out of Emmet like an arterial wound. In spurts, then all at once. Hands clench fitfully at his sides and lips pull tight through teeth until he forfeits the internal battle and lays his forehead against Chandelure's glass. To the space between them he says, "I know. I know. I'm sorry." 

One apology of many, Drayden had thought then. Hadn't that been what he wanted? First a confession, followed by a shred of accountability. Wasn't that what they deserved for the lies and for the damage done? For Ingo foremost, he told himself then, firm in the belief that his own personal outrage was always secondary. 

All of it could have been avoided. 

From the living room, Iris says, “But he saved you. Emmet, he saved you. I don’t understand.” 

Emmet flinches, shutting his eyes as Elesa’s voice, with the unaffected monotone of someone who has given up, follows. “He doesn’t have an explanation. There’s no reason. We mourned you, Emmet. For what?”

Drayden leaves him there, stalking out from the kitchen to console his daughter and gather the wherewithal to admit that he had known some of the truth and agreed with Emmet to withhold it from them. 

The consequences felt righteous and so Drayden had let the pieces fall into place dispassionately. To watch Emmet hold himself accountable at long last seemed like a victory hard won. Actions met their consequences, with the eventual outcome resembling resolution, at the time.  

It's easy to imagine that by then it was already too late. Comforting, moreso, to believe that maybe it always had been, that Emmet as they knew him had been undone from the moment Ingo saved his life. There's poetry in the thought. It could absolve him, it could absolve Emmet, to believe they had no choice. There’s a comfort in making mythology out of their mistakes. 

Emmet certainly believed so back then.  But fate is a construct meant to provide an explanation after the fact. 

Drayden could have intervened. He chose not to. 

By morning, Elesa and Iris sleep drawn close on the couch as Emmet emerges from the bathroom, fastening the last button of a pressed black shirt. Drayden leans against the far wall, near the front door, unsure of whether he’ll stop him or let him leave. The look they share is laden with everything left to say. Emmet breaks first, looking away to busy himself with returning the Pokemon piled on floor cushions to their pokeballs for a proper rest. 

They, like their trainer, had not made any effort to sleep. Drayden's insistence that they be put away had been summarily put down in a cacophony of growls, hisses, and whirs. The Pokemon's protectiveness fascinates him, given that they are the only ones who have been privy to Emmet's complete truth. He envies their insight, and with it their ability to forgive Emmet for all he's done. 

Emmet brushes past him to the entryway closet, and Drayden turns to watch him select a white uniform coat and hat. Low as to avoid waking the girls, Drayden asks, "Are you going to work? Now?" 

With a wary sidelong glance, Emmet waves the back of his left hand, something small jammed between his pointer and middle finger. A thumb drive. When Drayden doesn't immediately comprehend, Emmet grumbles, "No. The precinct. Work is later." 

He shoves his--his and not Ingo's--cap over greasy hair and folds the coat long over his forearm. As he hunches over to pull on his shoes, Drayden says, "Should I accompany you? I can send for counsel. The Mayoral Office has lawyers on retainer. Unless you've already secured representation from Gear Station?" 

Emmet shrugs as he lifts back up to his full height. "Nope. There's no need. I'm going to tell the truth. I don't want lawyers involved." 

"That's… incredibly naive, Emmet. I'm coming--" 

"You're not," Emmet interjects, voice flat and final as he draws the brim of his hat lower over sunken eyes. "I am fixing this." 

How easily he had been swayed by that final performance. Now Drayden suspects it had been entirely for his benefit, from the moment Emmet admitted the lie and Drayden accepted his terms. He asked for one month to settle his affairs at Gear Station. Elesa called them to Nimbasa during the third week. 

Had he been willfully blind to Emmet's resolute intentions? Not exactly. He thought he had time. Entitled to his fury after months caught in their hopeless avoidant stalemate, Drayden believed he could let his emotions run their course before taking action. 

So he left the consequences to Emmet and Emmet alone, certain that this was the toll owed. 

The hearing is brief and private, resolved at arraignment in forty-eight hours on a joint agreement that Drayden is not privy to. Emmet stands tall in a black suit purchased for the occasion, careful to avoid associating Gear Station in his mess by wearing his uniform. In simple statements, a prepared script, Emmet agrees to a civil compromise on charges of false impersonation and making a false statement. Iris holds Drayden's hand as the judge makes blithe, careless remarks on the nature of grief. 

The fine is a small fortune. Drayden winces, wondering whether an investigation of this quality really accumulated such costs. There's an irony that the money ostensibly collected on behalf of damages to the victim is taken directly from the funds meant to feed the victim's Pokemon and pay his mortgage in his absence. 

Later, in the lobby, Emmet refuses his offer to help. "I can afford it. No cost to Ingo. Don't worry."

His footsteps echo along the tile hallway as he strides towards the tall double-doors. Drayden and Iris watch him go.

There are cameras waiting when they eventually follow out to the plaza outside, milling about aimlessly in the aftermath of Emmet's assumed disinterest in their questions. A ripple passes through the gathering when the cameras swing their way. Drayden lays a firm hand on Iris's shoulder as calls of "Gym Leader Drayden," and "Former Champion Iris," ring out. He steers his daughter down the stairs, a swarm of questions competing for their reaction. 

"Why the charges months after the incident? What's changed?" 

"How does the police statement and investigation link to Subway Master Emmet's sudden and unusual departure?" 

"Why did he lie?" 

"What did he lie about?" 

"What did Subway Master Ingo mean when he said that we'll know soon?" 

Emmet had been one step ahead. He had his careful destruction meticulously planned. 

Drayden could have guessed that Emmet wouldn't wander into damnation without managing its potential outcomes. He wonders if he had asked what Emmet saw at the end of this, would he have lied again? 

Equal parts hope and resignation divide the answer that rises in twin parts. Emmet would've told the truth and it wouldn't have changed a thing. 

Drayden stoops over an old treatise on Pokemon interference on human societies when his Xtransceiver vibrates twice on his wrist. Foreboding creeps in when the shorthand notification reads '... statement at Gear Station'. 

He doesn't know if he can do this again. 

On his tap, the notification expands to a full-screen video of the Gear Station concourse, a handful of agents in station greens giving wide berth to a microphone staged in the middle of their semi-circle. A red dot draws his eye to the bottom-left corner, red text reading 'LIVE'. 

As Drayden sinks back in his chair, a knot pulling tight in his stomach, Emmet walks onto the screen wearing his white cap, his matching greatcoat folded neatly over his right arm. The recording cuts to closer footage, and Emmet's face and frame cut sharp angles in shadows under the atrium lighting. He looks frail. 

A murmur passes through the gathered crowd as he straightens the white hat over his eyes and adjusts the microphone to his height. The twins’ names pull clear from the susurration, first both and then Emmet’s alone. It strikes Drayden that all it takes is the color of their uniform, and reels from the shame that once, if only briefly, he had been as easily swayed. 

"Good afternoon," he says, and his voice is deep and solid like Ingo's. He clears his throat and presses his lips together as they pull into a frown. His once easy smile has made no appearance in the past week. 

Voice softer, more like his own, he starts again. "Hi. I am Emmet. Subway Master Ingo is missing. For the past ten months, I pretended to be him. Neither he nor the Gear Station team has had any involvement in this deception. I have handed in my resignation to the Unova Transit Authority. I leave the Nimbasa City Subway System and the Battle Subway in better hands. I only ask that you don't hold my brother accountable for my mistakes when he returns. Thank you."

An agent with watery eyes slides up to the microphone and announces that they will now take questions, provided they're pertinent to the subway and not ' Mr. Emmet's ' personal matters. 

This does little to stop the onslaught that follows. 

It has been two and a half years since Drayden last saw Emmet.

The twin bed creaks with age and disuse as he sits on its end, one hand digging blunt fingernails into the sheets. The other holds a postcard, Sunyshore City beaches glossy and smooth beneath his thumb. On the back reads a short message in an achingly familiar looping script.

Still alive. Nothing's changed. The Pokemon are healthy. Thanks for the messages. I do read them. Hope home is as quiet as it seems from here. Hope you are well. 

E.

Drayden traces the indents left by the pen with his forefinger, wondering how long ago he made them. Did he send them immediately, trusting the lagging pace of interregional mail to allow him time to make his escape? Or did he wait until he landed at the next region to send a postcard from the last? Drayden could imagine him in the airport, scrawling his bare minimum correspondences on plastic seat arms while waiting at the gate. Emmet as he imagines him is little more than a memory: haggard and thin and pulling apart at the seams, a runaway boy chasing a long lost hope. 

Is it selfish that Drayden cannot imagine him happy, in the aftermath they made? 

Emmet stays as Drayden last saw him, barely more than a ghost holding a box at the front door with the first and only request he asked of them after the whole truth unraveled. The boxes, six total, sit stacked against the wall in this same room, each neatly, exhaustively labeled with all of the ephemera of Ingo's life. Beneath childhood posters, subway maps and an aged print of Alder, beside the other of a pair of twin beds piled high with stuffed Pokemon askew in disarray, the boxes linger unopened, undisturbed, where they will stay indefinitely. 

Somewhere in Drayden's office is a folder with the details of Ingo's finances, the bill of sale on their apartment, and a handwritten outline of every logistical detail of the twins’ shared lives altered since Ingo's disappearance. Underneath it were two postcards, one each from Alola and Galar, and an envelope carrying a creased note with words that once held Drayden by the throat.

I'm going to find Ingo. 

Four months between it and the first postcard. He thought the placid Alolan sunset was an advertisement for a travel agency, at first, until the handwriting on the back, smudged and too messy, gave him pause.

Still alive. Nothing's changed. Met with the researcher and came up with nothing. Assume this is confirmation Ultra Wormholes aren’t the cause. The Pokemon are healthy. I hope it’s been easier for you. I hope you are well. 

Take care.  

E.

Still alive. Because he must have understood how they would interpret what he left them with.

He took the next flight to Alola and, sure enough, Emmet had been there. A foreigner, overdressed and high-octane, had passed through like a storm. The Pokemon Centers had known him best, one trainer with ten Pokemon striking enough without Emmet's bearing and Chandelure's constant shadow to contend with. The trail ended at an austere, spotless facility across a desk from the Aether researcher, who had confirmed for Emmet that whatever took Ingo was something well out of their depth. He took the next flight home, at a loss. 

Now, Drayden is resolved to accept that this was it. Ingo is a case waning closed, and the distant need to decide whether to hold a funeral. He is one minute and fifty-two seconds of grayscale footage. He is gone. Emmet is the indentations left by a pen held too firm and the faint smell of ink. He is an intentional absence, a succession plan, and the cruel belief that his loss would go unfelt. Drayden is left to wonder what could have been.

Setting the newest postcard beside him on the bed, Drayden buries his head in his hands. There were days he could forget, losing himself in routine and believing that his nephews were both safe and happy an hour away. It could stay that way for hours until a passing thought, a flash of black and white, a familiar Pokemon dragged him bodily from his momentary reprieve. In the years to come, would their absence become ordinary? Would having his family together and whole recede to memory? 

How convenient that he never considered himself their father until he had already lost them both.

Today is not a day to forget. Perhaps another manic bout of research will follow. Desperate dives into dire texts leading all to the same answer: if what took Ingo has not returned him by now, it likely never will. Or would he indulge in the hope that someday Emmet would return and from there they could rebuild? As if he can't see the underlying message in the few words he sends, carrying the threat that either something will change or--

Enough. Enough. 

Drayden rushes to his feet as if his haste can drive the thought away. It doesn't, he has no power over this particular fear, but he's learned by now how to banish it to the recesses of his mind where it could not taunt him. 

Still alive. Still alive and perhaps out of reach but not beyond hope. 

Glancing across the twins' old room, he slides the postcard into his shirt pocket and heaves a sigh. He'll have to call Iris soon, and Elesa after. Likely they'll have postcards of their own, with their own regrets weighing heavy on their undeserving shoulders. 

There are things he cannot change. There are forces beyond his control, between a darkness that stole lives in subway tunnels and a grief that ravaged Emmet from the inside out. But he can call the girls. He can write to Emmet, even if that leaves the next hours abandoned to waiting and watching to see the message received. 

Drayden can try to move forward, and can try to be the person that is ready to forgive when the time comes, so that hopefully Emmet can forgive himself.

Ingo is fairly--albeit not entirely--certain that his origin station was not in the desert. This is unfortunate, given a desert is where Arceus saw fit to terminate his journey. Shin deep in sun-warmed sand, he brushes stray grains from his hair and trudges ahead to retrieve his hat where it lies some distance away. After an inch of progress, Gliscor breaks from his pokeball with a screech akin to laughter and hauls Ingo up by the tunic out of the dune. While Ingo sputters his thanks, Gliscor swoops for the hat and drops it neatly atop Ingo's head.

His surroundings are unfamiliar, wild, and the similarity here to his arrival in Hisui sends a numb prickle up his extremities. Dizziness sets in.

A breath. Then another.

Gliscor hovers at his side, grinning and snuffling at the dry air. Five other pokeballs wait at his hip, each of his Pokemon having chosen against all odds to accompany him into the unknown. This time he is not alone.

This time he is not here by accident.

A gust of scorched air carries a plume of sand over where they wait, and Ingo fans a hand over his eyes until the dust settles still over the amber expanse. Sweat pools at the band underneath the brim of his hat, rolling down his face and dripping along his jaw. Twice now, he has traveled time and space to find himself inadequately dressed for the conditions at hand. Better heat than the cold, he supposes, and better that he hold faith in Arceus's word. 

As he pulls his coat sleeves over and off his arms, Ingo gazes across the wide horizon. To the west stands a veritable mountain range of gray structures, tall and straight, drawing a pocked line along the far perimeter. At each end of this barrier rises enclaves of tightly packed glass spires, glinting in the morning sun. Cities, he understands implicitly. Each spire a building, as are the gray monoliths to the west, housing countless aspects of human activity. Homes, businesses, public spaces, all expanding into a network of community and culture that binds thousands of lives to this place and to each other.

Somewhere within, Ingo belongs.  

Watching the skyline, he waits for a spark of recognition to guide him.  

Another gust scatters an orange storm of grit into a thin fog. Nothing comes to him. No familiarity filters in. Unfortunate, but not unexpected.

Hot sand bites at the exposed skin of his arms as he pulls his tunic over his head and throws it over his shoulder. With care, he ties the tattered sleeves of his jacket around his waist. He feels vulnerable, suddenly small, in only his undershirt. Still, he’d sooner be uncomfortable than dead of heatstroke. One learns to pick their battles in the wilderness.

For safekeeping, he draws a folded piece of paper, ripped straight from the binding of Akari's Pokedex, from his dangling coat pocket and passes it to Gliscor to hold in one claw. It contains every detail of her past life that she could recall, from the occasional name, to the Pokemon she fought with, to careful descriptions of places and faces that would emerge, hazy, at the edges of her memory. 

Ingo's counterpart, with Akari wherever she is now, is far less detailed. He wrote his name twice, once in Hisui's alphabet and again in the alphabet he’s always known. Beneath that he listed the man in white with my face and Pokemon with mastery of flames; purple . Beside both he left two rudimentary drawings, one of himself wearing a wide smile and one of four motes of light orbiting a candle flame. Akari contributed with a small line of text emitting from his not-quite self-portrait that read, 'I like winning more than anything else' . Unwilling to leave her with only these vague leads, they picnicked with Rei and Lian beneath the Grandtree from noon until dusk, Akari needling Ingo to talk while Rei recorded every foreign word and concept onto the page.

This leaves Ingo with two destinations. Foremost to find home, to reunite with his partner and to meet his man in white. Then to find Akari, to ensure she is safe and not alone in an unfamiliar world for a second time.

Perhaps a third, as well, if escaping the heat counts.

Scratching Gliscor behind the ear, he takes a steadying breath and then points outward to the western wall of buildings. "We will alight there to determine our route. All aboard!"

Gliscor mimics him with a shriek and a twirl. With his concurrence, Ingo sets forth.

The sun climbs steadily to its crest, bearing down on them and washing the landscape in a golden, hazy glow. Pokemon that Ingo does not recognize emerge from the sand to investigate the disturbance. One in particular, a tiny insectoid carrying a stone on its back in a manner similar to a Parasect's fungus, catches his attention for a long moment before it shrinks back and burrows away into the sand.

Ingo sighs, trudging on, hoping against hope that once he rights his course he will find that his memories follow. Arceus had assured them both they would remember in time, but that restoring them then, all at once, incurred risks. That his brain could manage on its own what a God could not still seems implausible, but he has no room to complain.

Arceus restored him to his rightful time and place out of benevolence alone. Unlike Akari, Ingo had not arrived to Hisui with a purpose. Had Akari not insisted he join her, there's every chance he would have lived out the remainder of his life in Hisui.

Perhaps it would have been easier. In Hisui, he had his responsibilities as a warden and at Jubilife's training grounds. He had the Pearl Clan, his fellow wardens, and the Galaxy Team. He had Professor Laventon and Rei, Zisu and Cyllene, Palina and Lian, Sabi and Iscan. Irida. Lady Sneasler. 

Returning was a calculated risk. It is the belief that the home he yearned for with every breath and beat of his heart would measure up to the full force of his hope. With it, he carries the faith that he could become whole again, regardless of what these years have wrought.

So as the heat pools thick on the back of his neck and scorches his face where his hat doesn't shadow, Ingo does not resent Arceus. All that matters is moving forward with the surety that he will find what he has been missing.

The buildings draw close enough that their silhouettes resolve into distinct shapes. Pockets of greenery flourish between high walls, a sure sign of water that reminds Ingo of the pervasive dry that clings at his throat. Gliscor chitters beside him, likely thinking the same, and pulls slightly ahead.

The wall separates into layers, buildings grouped in two and three lined by neat avenues. Apartment complexes, his mind supplies, without any meaningful context. The boundary between city and sand is marked by a lip of concrete that gives way to a thin footpath between two complexes, which Ingo follows inward away from the desert.

Suddenly and without warning, Ingo encounters more people than he has ever seen in one place.

Gliscor pulls closer to him, hovering just behind his back and hissing nervously. There are other Pokemon about, at trainers’ sides or perched on shoulders, but none of Gliscor's size and ferocity. With a whispered apology, Ingo flips the catch on his pokeball and watches as his partner shrinks away, leaving him to continue alone.

One cautious foot in front of the other, Ingo follows the side road towards the main thoroughfare. Here, Ingo can no longer keep a careful distance from the crowds. Like a stream around a caught twig, people divert around his slow pace unimpeded, paying him no mind and sparing him no second glances. It's strangely comforting to be overlooked.

Except that, like in Hisui, he's all but helpless on his own. His only hope alone is to come across anything that sparks a shred of recognition and thus far he has nothing to show for it. Allowing himself to be guided by the crowd may lead him astray. Yet, nothing in his surroundings is familiar enough to justify diverting. What better option did he have but to hope the trajectories of others lead him somewhere familiar?

A flash of blue and white catches his eye. Iron fencing rounds a downward set of stairs where individuals break off from the main road and follow it down into a lit passageway beneath the ground. A post extends from the far end of the fence, holding a circular sign of pale blue and white. Ingo pulls to the side and removes his hat. Worn at the edges and faded to shades of gray, the emblem on the front is the same.

His heart thuds against the wall of his chest. Running the fabric of his hat between his fingers, he allows himself a moment of vindication. His instinct to hold on to these bare vestiges of his past life was worthwhile. They can lead him home.

At the entry to the tunnel, another sign reads 'Subway', punctuated by a pink dot. Familiarity stirs, like the answer on the tip of his tongue. 

Without another thought, Ingo races down the stairs. The tunnel leads him to an underground space lined with tiles that clatter under a crowd of quick footfalls coursing towards a line of metal gates. Above the right and left ends hang two signs, respectively reading "Entry Castelia City" and "Entry Nimbasa City; Super Doubles Circuit", both marked with the same pink dot.

Nimbasa.

Ingo sounds out to word silently, tongue to teeth, lips press and release. Nim-ba-sa. Nimbasa.

Recognition cuts through the haze of forgetting like a hot knife searing through honeycomb. The word shines bright and neon, thrums with a Yanma wing hum, and settles in his chest like lying in a warm bedroll after a long day's trek.

Nimbasa is his destination. He knows this in the same way he knows his name.

A hand touches his elbow. Ingo startles, suddenly aware that he's become an obstruction, and begins to turn as a voice says, "Excuse me, can I help--"

A young person wearing a crisp green uniform stalls mid-sentence as Ingo faces them, their mouth falling agape. Ingo flushes, suddenly aware of his sunburnt face and sand-swept hair. Incongruity finds him the odd one out again. 

As he starts to gather an apology, ducking his head and bowing his shoulders, the person shakes their head as if to unstick a thought. A furrowed brow gives way to a wide smile, and, with some mixture of incredulity and delight, they ask, "Boss?"

A pause. Then, "Wait, sorry, not boss, I know. I just--I'm sorry---but, Mr. Emmet? You're back?"

The world tilts. His vision swims and the air drains from his lungs, words failing him. That name-- Emmet --reverberates in his sternum with edges like shrapnel, leaving with each beat of his heart a sharper sting than the last.

Hands grip his elbows, holding firm, and a voice repeats the name again. Mr. Emmet. To an ambient backdrop of chatter growing quiet, the name echoes across tile walls until something certain takes up residence in Ingo's chest.

He blinks, taking in the stranger’s concerned expression as they hold Ingo's near-deadweight from slipping to the floor. With a weak inhale, he locks his knees and clenches his fists to steady himself, grasping at how to communicate the feeling that holds his heart hostage.

"My apologies," he starts, slow to correct his accent and pronunciation in his original tongue after so very long. "But I am not Emmet. However, I need--I have to--it is of the utmost importance that I find this person. Please."

A series of emotions flit across the face before him. First, perhaps naturally, confusion. Ingo expects this. He isn't who they were expecting. But when eyes narrow, searching, Ingo draws back from what he can only describe as suspicion. As Ingo prepares some explanation, something decisive turns their scrutiny to alarm, and their grip tightens.

"Oh, fuck ," they breathe, "Mr. Ingo? Boss? Are you really him?"

Ingo realizes they could talk past each other indefinitely if he doesn't reroute. Uneasy but decisive, he withdraws his arm and says, "I am uncertain that I'm a boss of anything, but I am Ingo. I apologize if we've met before, as I have lost my memories since my departure from this station. You knew me?"

Again, they say, "Oh fuck." Red rises to their cheeks as they catch a hand over their mouth and sputter, "Ah, shit--oh, wait, sorry, sorry, language, I know. Can you just--your memories? That's…Okay. Okay!"

With a deep breath, they step back and snap straight into a salute. "Sir! Please come with me to the office. We here at the Nimbasa City Subway System are going to help get you on the right track."

Elesa taps her foot on rubber subway flooring out of time with the music that spills from her headphones. Her guard is down, lower lip caught between her teeth and nails digging into her biceps, arms crossed tight. People always stare, of course. But the attention now sears her skin as it closes in around her. She feels vulnerable and she's certain it shows.

She's going to throttle Emmet.

What right does he have showing up after years expecting them to relive the same cruel lies? Amnesia? Get real.

They are not doing this again. If he is going to be home, he’s going to have to face himself whether or not he can stand to. And this time she isn't going to let him out of her sight. No lying. No pretending. No running away. Not again.

Elesa is going to save Emmet from himself even if he hates her for it.

Fuck. Her eyes start to water. Too hard, too frantic, she prods at her Xtransceiver and drags the volume to the maximum. A notification blinks onto the screen. Skyla, always her first line of support, responds first with a series of shocked gifs and then a genuine reply: 'What if it's actually Ingo?'

It isn't. The Depot agents are falling for Emmet’s routine. She can't hold it against them. After all, hadn't she? For months even, and twice over. She hadn't wanted to see him for what he was, during that terrible mess, because she had barely wanted to see him at all. One lie had been enough. The second? Unimaginable.

In truth, though? She had been relieved.

It wasn't something Elesa could explain. She had tried once, wine-drunk and weepy in Skyla's apartment. The initial emotions of realizing it was Emmet beside her, that it had always been Emmet, quickly passed. Past the shock, the malignant doubt inside of her finally broke away. Ingo wouldn't have lied the first time, not if Emmet disappeared like they thought he had. 

It’s not that it made more sense for Emmet to lie. It’s that he must have known, after being there to see him fall, that Ingo was lost. By lying, he imposed his denial onto them. 

Elesa hated herself for it. Ingo dead and Emmet ruined by it, and Elesa dared to feel relief because she could finally understand why.

Not that knowing mattered. Emmet still left. And after nearly three years of postcards and the rare, stilted text, he’s back and lying again.

The automated announcer rings twice and announces Route 4 Station inbound. Elesa exhales upwards, billowing her neat bangs and sending them askew. She'd have to pull herself together, later, for Emmet's sake. Whether or not he deserved it. There would be talk, and her presence would draw attention right to him. Why fuel the fire with her own disarray?

The train slows and dim light spills in from the windows as the platform pulls up beside them. Elesa lifts to her feet with one hand curled around the nearest metal bar. Gazes follow her to the doors as they hiss open, sending a prickle down the back of her neck. Heedless and head held high, she steps down onto solid ground, ignoring how her stomach lurches with anticipation, or dread, or both.

An agent meets her outside the turnstiles, waiting with her hands folded nervously in front of her. She hurries to Elesa's side and directs her out and away from the flow of commuters before Elesa has time to remember her name. It feels like a lifetime since she maintained a network at the station. She's lucky the agent that found Emmet had her contact from working the Battle Circuits.

Her guide stops short of the door to the staff room and, in a stage whisper, says, "You need to know that he's really disoriented. Apparently he came in from the desert and it seems like his amnesia extends to pretty much everything. Just don't be surprised if he doesn't recognize you, okay?"

Ignoring the unease that crawls up her spine, she smiles. "I appreciate the heads up, but I'm sure he'll recognize me."

The agent doesn't insist. The door opens into a small back office, cluttered with papers and walls lined with aged security monitors flashing through black-and-white footage. It takes a moment to find Emmet where he sits wedged in the far corner, partially obscured by a second agent perched atop the adjacent desk. Both Emmet and the agent pause mid-conversation, the latter leaning back to allow Elesa a clear line of sight.

When Elesa last saw Emmet, he was wasting away. His clothes had hung off his frame and dark circles hollowed out a home beneath his eyes. This memory of him haunts her, always the image to mind when she thinks of him now.

Here, hunched over in an office chair pressing a water bottle against his neck, he’s changed again. The sunken fatigue at some point gave way to worn worry lines etched into his face. He looks aged, down to the scruffy beard that sprouts from his chin, wearing the weight of three years like a decade.

He's wearing Ingo's hat. It's worn like he is, scuffed with a torn seam pulling stuffing from the top. Tied around his waist appears to be the matching greatcoat, but long tears run up the flap as it spills out around him along the edge of the seat. Seeing Ingo's uniform in disrepair is a fresh loss, unexpected and gutting. 

He's looking at her without a hint of recognition, response, anything. He waits, silent, for her to speak as if he wasn't the one who left. As if he doesn't owe her an explanation.

"Emmet, please, don't do this. We can't do this again."

He startles, flinching and pulling up straight so he's pressed back against the chair. Retreating. The Depot agent beside him winces and their hands fly up in a staying motion, saying, "Miss Elesa, we really do think this is Mr. Ingo. I thought the same as you, at first, really."

Uncertainty crawls up her skin like frost on a windowpane, cold and slow. The defensiveness melting away, Emmet-as-Ingo studies her as if he doesn't know her, gaze flitting across her features like this is the first time they've met and he's committing a name to a face. Like Ingo does--did--with his challengers.

"Miss Elesa," he says with enough care to make her heart ache. His voice is low and resonant without the forced, raw edge that she ascribed to grief, once, before they knew it was an act. One impulse reels with the idea that he's practiced, better perfecting his cruel performance. Another impulse, quieter, catches hard against hope and holds fast, wondering.

"I'm afraid that I do not know what cause you have to believe that I'm not who I say I am. I assure you, I am Ingo. That's all I know for certain here in this place. Please, believe me. I have no reason to mislead you. I’m only trying to find my way back to my station."

Three and a half years ago, Ingo and Emmet departed in uniform from Gear Station to investigate the tunnels between Castelia City and the eastern peninsula. Underneath Skyarrow Bridge, an unknown force tore a hole in reality from a single, small spark and took Ingo, leaving no trace beyond the kit he threw onto Emmet's shoulders and the Xtransceiver that snapped with the force of Emmet's desperation.

Elesa decided that whatever took Ingo that evening must have killed him. Otherwise, the Ingo she knew would have stopped at nothing to find his way home. He would never abandon them.

Elesa shouldn't hope, she shouldn't dare, but she can’t help herself. Was it any more absurd than Emmet returning to Nimbasa only to lie again? After all that the first had cost? After they had all spent years, now, without them both? 

 Emmet wouldn't be so cruel. Right?

She loves them both too much, still, not to hope. 

Her heart flutters in her chest like a caged Pidove as she stumbles forward, steps suddenly uncertain. "Your station?" She starts, her voice faint. "You said all you know for certain is your name, but you've managed to make it here. If you don't remember, how did you know where or what to look for?"

He removes the hat and holds it by the brim over his lap, considering it. His intensity falls away with his steady eye contact. "When I arrived at my previous station, all I had on my person was this cap and my coat. For much of my time there, these were my only remnants of where I departed from. It was only recently that I found myself with recollections of any kind. I had a partner once, a fire type, I think, who was very dear to me. And the man who looks like me… That is Emmet, correct? That's why you all think I am him?"

He sighs, setting the hat in his lap and pulling his gaze painstakingly back up to hers with eyes haunted. "I assumed that if I could find them, I would be where I belonged. Regardless of the condition of my memory. But my journey will not be so easy, will it?"

Something in Elesa shifts and tears spring to her eyes. The doubt in her burns out. Perhaps she’s being naive, made a fool yet again, but if she’s not?

If this is Ingo? If this isn’t a trick, and he truly forgot them?

Then he’s alone. He’s been alone all this time, and now he’s here, needing someone to help him find the people who love him. And here she is. 

Conviction strips her of the blunted grief that she wore for armor all this time. Longing that bites like desperation claws free from the parts of her heart that she hidden away. She wants Ingo to be alive. She wants to hope against hope. Elesa doesn’t want to miss him anymore. 

Elesa approaches him like they're both made of jagged, sharp edges, heels clicking on the tile floor in hesitant, punctuated footsteps. A pace away from him, she extends a hand, pretending to not notice how it shakes, and says, "Okay. I believe you. I believe it’s really you, Ingo. I believe you made it home.” A pause, the words settling between them. “Can I--could we hug? I could really use a hug from my best friend right now."

He smiles, small and a little sad. This is enough for her to break, tears falling finally as Ingo smiles and somehow she can see years of loneliness in its soft lines.

He takes her hand, firm and rough to the touch, and Elesa hauls him up and into her arms. His hat flutters to the floor between them as he lurches forward with the force of all her strength, his hands stuck outstretched around her in surprise. She knows he doesn't know her; she knows he mustn't understand, but she gathers his shirt in her hands and holds him close and hard, hoping desperately that it communicates a fraction of how much he's been missed. After a long, aching moment, the strain in his shoulders drops and he wraps his arms gently around her back.

It doesn't matter that she'd been crying already. Elesa sobs, then, fingernails running into fabric as she struggles to catch her breath.

"Elesa," he murmurs, so uncharacteristically quiet. "I've known you for a long time, haven't I?"

"Since we were kids," she replies, fighting every instinct to bury her head into his shoulder and stay there indefinitely. How much of this is his own misguided kindness, holding her and reassuring her because she asked him to? Because she needs to prove that he's real? Painstakingly, she unclasps her hold and Ingo immediately follows her lead, dropping his hands to his side in a whisper against the fabric of his coat.

Stepping back, Elesa busies herself by drawing her braids neatly back over her shoulder as she waits for Ingo's lead, just in case her assumptions are incorrect. His gaze diverts again to the floor.

A small, determined part of her burns bright at the chance to guide him home, as if she can make up for not being able to keep Emmet here. So she says, "If you'll let me, I can help you figure things out. I'll want to call your uncle. He can help, too. And he'll want to see you. We've--" Her voice breaks. With a steading breath, she tries again. "We've all missed you so much."

He nods and looks towards the Depot agent, who gives him a thumbs up and says, "We'll hold tight here on any announcements that you're back until you give the go ahead, Boss. I do wonder, though, if anyone on the team can get the word out to Mr. Emmet."

Another nod, only after his expression twists at the mention of Emmet's name. "So he's truly not here?" When Elesa sighs, looking past him and searching for a way to gently convey how everything went wrong, he continues. "I understand. I was gone. With the years since, I cannot blame him for moving on, even if that means changing terminals. In my absence, you all still had your lives to live."

"No," Elesa and the agent say at once, hasty and forceful. Elesa elaborates. "He's looking for you. You're right, things did change. We all grieved, but had to keep moving forward. Even Emmet, I think, believed he was moving on by leaving. But he's never stopped trying to find you."

“I…I don’t understand. Who were we to each other?”

Of course. Ingo referred to Emmet only as the man who looks like him. If he doesn't know, how could he understand?

Elesa crouches down to retrieve Ingo's hat from the floor. As she dusts off the lining, she says, "He's your brother. Your twin brother. You both--A lot happened, I have a lot still to explain, but the two of you would have gone to the ends of the world for each other. Emmet couldn't give up on you."

Running her hand once over the top, Elesa sets the hat back atop Ingo's head, adjusting it once so it lays straight. She senses his unease at this one-sided intimacy, even though his infinite politeness prevents him from interrupting the gesture, and she pulls back and out of his space.

Their strained distance ached when she couldn't stand to touch Emmet-as-Ingo, then Emmet, in light of his lies. This, she realizes, will be excruciating.

Elesa knows she has to forge a way forward or else she'll drown.

Before anything else, even Drayden, Ingo needs to see a doctor. The amnesia alone is reason enough, but his skin is wan and thin up close, and, standing, his shoulders roll forward and his hands have a tremor. It could be the shock, but she would never forgive herself if she overlooked anything now that he's home.

Pilfering a spare fare card from the station lost-and-found, Elesa leads him down towards the northbound platform. He smiles that unfamiliar smile again when the train approaches, but it falls away when stares fall upon them once they settle in the car. Her glare silences any prying, but she can feel the rumors start in the dense, cycling air.

Elesa texts Emmet the moment the car pulls away from the platform. Short and simple, 'Ingo is home. You need to come back.’  

It’s the most recent in a string of her messages that go unreceived and unanswered. A month now, since his last reply. It’s not the longest he’s ghosted her. She tries and fails not to hold it against him.

The short wait at the clinic is spent navigating first that Ingo doesn't have any identification and second, once his records are found, that he's a missing person. That the clinic will notify the precinct solves a problem, but it also draws reality ever closer. How is she supposed to explain to Ingo what happened?

Elesa sends Emolga’s pokeball with him for her own ease of mind. She'd leave her entire team with him had that not been so plainly overboard. A nurse leads him away and she reminds herself, on the edge of frantic, that he will be fine. He won't disappear again just because she's not with him.

After the door swings shut behind him, Elesa marches outside. Her Xtransceiver rings once before Drayden answers. He sits at a desk with reading glasses perched on his nose, obviously working. "Elesa. I'll need to call you back, I--"

"Ingo's home."

She watches the deferment die half-spoken as his mouth snaps closed. The exact moment the notion that it's Emmet lying again shows on his face, she says, "It's not Emmet. Prove me wrong later, if you want. I really believe we found Ingo. Or, he found us."

Even over the phone, Elesa can hear Drayden's throat close up, his voice thick with hope and doubt. "Where? Where is he?"

Shifting his window to the second screen, Elesa types out the address of the clinic and says, "He has amnesia. He won't remember you, besides that I told him you're his uncle. I don't think he remembers what happened. He didn't know who Emmet was, but he held onto the idea of a person who looks like him. I'm not sure if it makes things better or worse."

Drayden stays silent for a moment and then swears, barely audible, under his breath. Elesa waits. After setting his glasses aside on the desk and drawing a hand down his face, he says, 

"I'll be there in an hour. Do we know where he’s been?"

"No. I didn't want to push. I was a little overwhelmed when I got to him, and after it didn’t feel right to pressure him for an explanation." She pauses, considering. "He looks like he’s aged a decade, Drayden. The Depot staff that found him said he came in from the desert. Where do we start, with that?"

With a tight nod, Drayden leaves it there. Back inside, there’s no sign of Ingo, leaving her with nothing to do but drop into a wobbly metal chair and wait for whoever shows up first. In the interim, she emails her gym trainers and cancels her modeling gigs for the next week, citing a family emergency. Which isn’t a lie, really. To Skyla, she explains everything, up to and including the fears and heartbreak Ingo didn’t deserve to worry about.

The text to Emmet remains unseen.

Time passes, maybe an hour, until the city clamor filters in as the doors behind her swing open. Drayden pauses when he sees her, then strides up to the desk with his usual air of bureaucratic importance. Iris, with him, heads straight for Elesa. There's glitter in her hair, catching in the over-bright fluorescent like shards of glass, and Elesa wonders whether she came directly from the League. Without preamble, she lowers into the chair and says, "Dad doesn't believe you."

Elesa laughs, soft and a little put on. "Yeah, I bet. It's Ingo, though. I'm certain."

Iris hums, leaning back in her chair propped on sandaled heels. "You thought he died, though. Before any of us were even ready to consider it, especially Emmet."

Hands tightening on the arm of her chair, Elesa feels her nails pit aged vinyl as she considers whether the shame that burns her face is justified. Maybe she's right. Maybe Elesa is hopping from one comforting delusion to the next, ever eager to move on and forward.  

"It wasn't Ingo that convinced me. Well, not entirely." As she tries to form a feeling into coherent words, Elesa watches Drayden interrogate the poor receptionist, reveling in his intense air and the way it reminds her of them. She can feel Iris staring.

Elesa sighs, dropping her gaze to the floor. "I think I believe him because some stupid, naïve part of me has faith enough in Emmet, even still. The amnesia, the idea that Ingo forgot but is still looking for his brother, that he's held onto his old uniform so long it's falling apart at the seams. It's almost theatrical, if it’s a lie. I can't believe Emmet would do that to us."

As she bites down the quiet, desperate 'right?' that tries to snag the end of her explanation, Drayden’s shoes pull into view. So she expects the dismissive huff and draws herself up to meet his eyes.

He says, "We can't afford to be wrong. What if it is Emmet, and he knows something that we don't?"

Elesa hesitates, but Iris does not. "Then he wouldn't have come home." She rubs a thumb beneath her eye, shrugging apologetically when her father winces. "I'm gonna believe him. I want to believe him. And if Elesa's right, I don't want to hurt Ingo by treating him like some kind of puzzle now that he's finally home. Especially if he doesn't remember us."

Drayden's responding hum is non-committal at best, but it's a start.

It's another hour before Ingo reappears, announced by Drayden's chair scraping against the linoleum to draw their attention towards the far corner.

Ingo stands in the doorway with a mess of papers in his hands, hunched shoulders pulling back as he searches for Elesa and finds her beside Iris and Drayden, both on their feet. The three of them stand frozen, staring at each other across the waiting room floor, presumably waiting for the other to make the first move.

There's a moment where Elesa hopes Ingo will recognize them. It would sting, sure, but Drayden and Iris were family. Could he see himself in Drayden's features, and hazard a guess?

The moment passes. Elesa draws up and towards Ingo, saying when she reaches him, "I called your uncle. Your cousin, Iris, came with him. I've explained what’s going on. Did everything turn out okay with the doctors?"

He nods, breaking his watch on the others behind her. Somehow, he looks even more exhausted as he says, "Yes. I have been directed to a nearby destination to request the appropriate medicines. I'll need to return to this station in a week to confirm that my systems are improving."

Drayden and Iris wait behind her, and his attention slides back over her shoulder. She asks, "Ready to go?"

With another soft smile, no easier on her heart this time than the last, he says, "Ready for departure."

Drayden and Iris meet them in the middle. Elesa watches as Drayden scrutinizes Ingo, from his battered hat to his scruff and down the long, uneven lines of his tattered coat. Iris ignores her father’s wariness, electing instead to hold out her hand and smile brightly.

"I'm Iris," she says as Ingo shakes her hand. Jerking her head to Drayden, she adds, "This is your Uncle Drayden, my dad. Which means I'm your cousin! You helped teach me how to battle and raise Pokemon when I was younger. When you're feeling better, I'd love to meet your new Pokemon."

"It would be my pleasure, Miss Iris. A good battle has been known to stir a memory or two in the past. Perhaps you can show me what you've learned?"

Her smile broadens then, performance falling away for an excitement that suits her. The tension in her shoulders drops, just a fraction, as she agrees readily on the condition that he does not call her 'Miss'.

Ingo turns to Drayden and inclines his head. "Sir. I… Miss Elesa explained that you raised us, my brother and me. I wish I could-- I wish I hadn’t forgotten. I am so sorry." His hands close to fists at his side. "But I know in my heart that I missed you. Not a day has gone by that I have not longed to be home. I assure you, if it is at all possible, I will remember."

Drayden's hands fall firm on Ingo's shoulders, all gruff, paternal surety. But his voice gives him away. "Ingo," he starts, hoarse with a quaver underneath. He waits for Ingo to meet his eyes. "You're here. That's all that matters. You couldn't remember and, even so, you found your way back to us. We couldn't ask for anything more."

Ingo hugs him first. Fierce and yearning, he closes the gap between them and, with the slightest give, Drayden folds his arms tight around his back, hard enough that his shoulders shake.

Elesa realizes, with sudden clarity, that a heart can heal and break at the same time. Digging her nails into her palm, she steadies herself and holds back her tears with a rough, deep breath.

Ingo is here. Emmet is gone. How fitting it is to find themselves once again back to this.

Ingo wakes up comfortable, the mattress soft beneath his back with cushions enough to soothe the ache that tends to gather at the base of his neck and the small of his back.

That this is unusual occurs only as a secondary thought. When it settles, Ingo lunges upward, blinking away sleep to take in his unfamiliar surroundings.

The space emerges in white and cream cast in thin morning light, with high ceilings and tall, spare furnishings like nothing he had seen in the Pearl Settlement or his Jubilife quarters.

Which is because, follows the third thought, he is no longer in Hisui.

The catch on a pokeball clicks beside him, and Alakazam breaks free to float at the end of the bed. His eyes take on a violet glow as he casts Ingo awash in a delicate psychic energy. Familiar enough by now not to mistake his thoughts for his own, Ingo closes his eyes beneath the tide of calm/safe/home until his heart-rate settles and reason returns.

"Thank you, old friend," he murmurs as recollection fills in the gaps that panic leaves behind. "I am certain it will get easier with time."

Alakazam hums, stern brow softening slightly, and his energy pulls away like low tide waves. His pokeball clatters against the others collected in a small tray on his bedside table as he returns to his rest.

Ingo meanders to the vast windows that line the east wall, drawing the curtains aside to reveal the long horizon. From the desert, only the tallest spires marked Nimbasa's skyline. Here in its midst, he realizes that each building is its own Galaxy Hall and more in scale and grandeur. In their brief walks between subway stations yesterday, he marveled that he could have come from a place where humankind dwarfed itself beneath its skyward aspirations.

But he preferred the subway, all the same. 

From the first spots of headlights around the bend, setting the tunnel aglow, to the snap of sliding doors meeting closed and the car pulling forward underfoot, Ingo felt alive with memory. All of it familiar: the weight of the car as it rattles along the tracks, the colors of signs and signal lights as they rush past in the dark tunnels between stations, the timbre of the automated announcer as it leaps from one recording to the next. All of it known.

How can he explain to Elesa that he cannot remember her, even as she held him and cried, but his memories of the subway arise effortlessly? The doctor had explained that there is no treatment for amnesia besides time and hope. That he could recall his twin and his partner--Chandelure--is a positive sign. But there's no guarantee that he will recover everything.

He managed then to hide his disappointment, even if he had never expected a cure. It should be more than enough that the medics here had the means to treat his pain and had training to restore function to muscles warped taut by old injuries.

But he had been mourned. 

Met with the full force of that unexpected truth, how could he bear to wait and hope that his memories would return? How could he stand to be little more than a ghost of who he once was?

How could he be someone worthy of a family if he couldn't be the person they missed?

Enough. Ingo would derail if he continues down these tracks any farther. Ruminating certainly won’t do him any good. Elesa had promised they would discuss what happened in his absence after a night's sleep, and Ingo swore he would try and explain where he had gone.

He must focus on what can still be done, rather than regret and longing, if he is to be prepared for that conversation. He wants to understand what happened. And perhaps he cannot be the version of himself they lost, but his family deserves answers. What little he could offer, he would gladly give.

Later that morning, over chipped mugs of tea beside a wide-open window overlooking the city below, Elesa tells him about Emmet. The curtains drift gently in the warm breeze, scattering the bars of yellow-white light pooling on the table. Elesa leans her chin on one hand, staring out at a flock of Pidove gathering in the shade of a window-ledge. She says, voice low, "You two were inseparable. Two halves of a whole, you know? It showed in everything you set your minds to. There wasn't anything the two of you couldn't do as long as you were together."

Complementary is the word that comes to mind, as Elesa describes them. The photographs on her device show the man in white, bright eyes and an easy smile, fluid even in still shots and always with an arm around Ingo’s shoulder or linked with his. Always together, a perfect answer to Ingo's dark colors and rigid lines. When Ingo tries to trace a finger over an image, the screen flips to a picture of the three of them. Elesa is wearing Emmet's white hat, grinning, with her arms thrown behind their necks to pull them, flabbergasted and flushed, into the frame. Ingo can imagine a voice, soft and tenor to his own loud baritone, full of flustered complaints and smothered laughter.

"Do you remember how you disappeared?"

Ingo swallows, throat suddenly dry. He remembers the cold. He remembers the splint around his arm and the bruise green and yellow around his wrist. He remembers Calaba, much later, explaining that he had been left out to die, and would have if not for the Clan's generosity.

He says, mindful of her actual question, "No. My memories begin upon waking up in the medical tent at the Pearl Settlement."

Her brow arcs, curious, as she tilts her head towards him. Ingo shrinks under her stare, dropping his gaze to his tea. Steam billows, visible in the noon light, as he wraps his hands around the warm ceramic.

"Emmet was there," Elesa says, and Ingo stops, hands and mug caught mid-air. "You were together and something ripped a hole in the world. Emmet almost fell, but you threw yourself into him and fell instead. He tried--he tried so hard to save you, even after you… He couldn't. He couldn't save you and it destroyed him."

The warmth against his palms feels suddenly distant, like the chatter and horns from the streets below. His fingertips are clumsy as he sets the mug back onto the table, sending tea sloshing onto his hands. He watches, numb, the steam rise along his knuckles. "What do you mean?"

Eyeing the tea seeping from his fingers into the tablecloth, Elesa springs to her feet. She grabs his wrist and drags him to a faucet, shoving his hand under a stream of cold water. Without dropping his arm, she says, "For six months after, he pretended to be both of you, just to keep up the illusion that nothing had happened. After he was found out, I confronted him and he lied. He pretended to be you for months more. Once it all unraveled, I… he… Before I-- He left. He left a note saying he was going to find you and I haven't seen him since. Just messages, sometimes, telling us he’s still out there.”

The water pours over his hand. Wasteful. Water is scarce this time of year. Not here, evidently, where it spills endless from the tap, pooling in the silvery basin as it rushes towards the drain. Ingo watches it swirl there, Elesa's grip tight around his wrist so that he can feel his heartbeat thrum against her fingers.

The contact itches. The urge arises to pull his hand away, out from under the cold wash and the warmth of her touch. He wonders if he had always balked at physical proximity or if it's another scar of Hisui. In all the photographs, Emmet pulls him close. 

Elesa drops his hand. The tap stops, the last drips falling from his hovering fingers to echo hollow against metal. Ingo asks, "Why would he lie?"

"To hide. Not that he told me. It's just how I made sense of it. We didn't know, at first, that he was there when it happened. He was hiding then, and he's been hiding since."

"He should know better than anyone that a fault cannot be repaired by concealing the damage." From where the certainty arises, Ingo is unsure.

Elesa sighs, stepping away and leaning on her forearms over the countertop. "I don't think he believes he can repair anything without you. And now you're here, and he's not answering my texts or Drayden's calls."

Ingo drags his hand, still wet, through his hair, asking regardless of the futility of it, "So we wait?"

"I think that’s all we can do."

Determined to not wait idle, at the least, Ingo spends the afternoon exploring Nimbasa with Elesa as his guide. He fears that every unfamiliar destination will be a reminder that he is not himself, not as she remembers. But all of the city lights are no match for how she glows leading him along, pausing to point out old haunts and reminisce.

Ingo collects landmarks along their route, committing to memory the tracks to and from Elesa's home and Nimbasa's open spaces. When he tells her that he'd like to come out to the canals again, Elesa smiles and points out a nondescript brick building and explains that he once lived nearby enough to walk along them daily.

"You moved closer to the station, though, once you opened the Battle Circuits and took over as the Subway Masters. Emmet sold that apartment when he left. I don't know what his plan was, if he found you. But, I guess neither of you had incomes anymore to pay it off. Half dramatic gesture, half logical decision. Pretty on brand for Emmet."

That evening, Drayden and Iris join them in Elesa's apartment and Ingo tells them about Hisui. He starts with the last thing he learned, always suspected but only confirmed by Arceus: "I was sent to the past, centuries ago."

They maintain their composure until the last, through descriptions of the Pearl Clan and his role in the Highlands as Lady Sneasler's warden, past Akari’s arrival and the frenzies giving way to the Red Sky, up until Arceus. Ingo tries to be objective and to keep the details brief. It is easier than overturning his neat compartments, and facing that everyone he describes is forever out of reach.

When Ingo trails off, Drayden brings a hand to his face to pinch the bridge of his nose, clearing his throat. "It's unlikely that we would have found you, then, even if we had somehow proved the involvement of Sinnoh's Creation Trio. I'll be honest, I'm not certain whether that makes me feel better or worse."

Iris says, fingers tapping, fidgety, on the table, "Emmet's last postcard came from Sinnoh. Do you think he found anything?"

"It depends if we trust his word that nothing’s changed."

That night Ingo falls asleep in a familiar-unfamiliar guest room with a knot in his stomach and an anxiety that festers without the words to make sense of it.

How can he understand someone that he doesn't remember? If he doesn't remember, why does every thought of Emmet leave him adrift with emotions that he cannot place? His brother's name cuts a fresh wound with every bitter mention, but Ingo can't muster up the same betrayed disappointment that his family carries heavy on their shoulders.

He only feels sad.

The next days mimic the last, wandering new corridors of a Nimbasa he recognizes but does not remember. Elesa continues to accompany him, regardless of any business of her own to attend to. He begins to feel a burden, however much Elesa insists she wouldn't want to be anywhere else. The offer stands to travel to his uncle's home in Opelucid City, but Ingo can't yet let go of the hope that familiarity will lead to remembrance.

Desperately, he wants to look at any location that Elesa points out and say that he does know it, that the anecdote rings a bell and that her efforts are not in vain. But for every ghost of recognition in the scent of exhaust and fresh paint on the warm breeze, or in the way evening sunlight glows golden along skyscraper window-panes, he's at a loss to remember a single, real moment of his life before.

It's easier by the fourth day, when Elesa surprises him with a journey to Gear Station. En route, she explains that she battles on the Super Singles Circuit once a week.

"You used to face challengers on this and the normal Singles every day. After everything, Gear Station closed the circuits until Emmet built up a new system that runs on volunteers from the League. It's not the same, but it's a system that lets us Gym Leaders flex our chops in ways the League Challenge can't accommodate. I just don't think Emmet realized how popular you both were, though. Nobody battles like the two of you did. "

Ingo misses the weight of his hat and coat as he steps through the grand doors into Gear Station. Light from the tall windows pools on the marble floors of a wide atrium, and even through the crowds of passengers, Ingo can trace the clear routes to the offices and the staff passages down to the platforms and service corridors. His hand ghosts to his throat to straighten a tie that he’s not wearing, and falls away with the instinct to pull at lapels that he left on a coat rack in Elesa's apartment.

There's an absence to his left that has him turning over his shoulder to look for someone that is not there.

A woman in a gray uniform breaks from the departing crowd and jogs up to them, smiling wide at Elesa before pulling into a crisp salute. "Boss! Glad you could make it. Thanks for coming out, Miss Elesa. I've got him from here."

Elesa leaves for the Circuits with a quick hug and a "see you later" that feels as much a command as a promise.

The woman holds out her hand for Ingo to shake, saying when he takes it, "I'm your Chief of Operations. You knew me as a Program Engineer before everything happened. It's a relief to have you back and safe, sir."

Ingo shrinks under the authority cast onto him, dropping her hand to say, "There's no need for the formality. I'm no longer anyone's superior, short my memory and qualifications."

"That's funny, I don't remember accepting your resignation," she quips, then softens. "I know, I know. We're all just excited to see you. There's no obligation attached. Your subway is in good, capable hands, I promise. It's only that with the way things went, getting to see you and maybe pretend for a second it's like old times… It's easy to get caught up in. So you'll have to excuse me, sir."

It helps to tour the station. He finds muscle memory comfort in navigating the offices and the platforms, eased by the familiar drone of the automated announcer and the clamor wherever passengers congregate. The Chief's brief explanations of different Depot functions follow a logic that Ingo comprehends with an unexpected ease. She smiles at his questions, hustling him over to staff members most equipped to answer, and Ingo is grateful that they bypass any discussion of his whereabouts and memories. Even if every agent they encounter refers to him as Boss.

I'm sorry, he wants to say, I'm not who you think I am. I'm not the person you want me to be.

He wonders if Emmet ever felt the same, embroiled in his lies. Did each deferential salute remind him of the difference between what they thought and who he was? Did he peel away from the public's prying eyes with the fear that some stranger would see what the people who loved him could not?

Alone on the Green Line Platform, Ingo waits for Elesa and tries not to manufacture a version of his brother from the pieces of him left behind in Nimbasa. He doesn't know Emmet. And Emmet will eventually realize that the person he's searching for is already gone.

What did his brother think of him to cause him to choose to live as Ingo instead of himself? How could Ingo as he is now live up to that ideal of him? Would the Ingo Emmet pretended to be measure up better than the husk of him that's left?

Would Emmet ever come home to find out?

Eventually, Elesa steps out onto the platform. The rush of wind from the departing train behind her casts her long braids out wild around her as she searches for him in the crowd. Her smile, when she finds him, is all teeth, bringing out the soft lines around her eyes and wrinkling her nose. Ingo remembers, in a voice now familiar, the words, ' I think the real me is the one who battles with Pokemon as a Gym Leader .'

When she reaches him, she teases his smile. Evidently, his expressions are a recent development and not an unwelcome one. He is pleased to catch her off-guard for once, saying, "Your smile has changed, too. I’d like to see you battle next time, to see the real you shine, again. It’s been too long.”

Two wide blinks and she's throwing her arms around his neck, and this time he does not flinch.

As he leads her through the atrium mob towards the evening light, a voice pulls above the clamor, yelling his name. He swings around, smothering his centuries out-of-place defensive instincts, to find the Chief dashing towards them. When she reaches them, she doubles over, panting, leaving Ingo to catch her cap as it tumbles from her head. Holding it, he recalls that senior uniforms only came in white or black. He doesn't have to wonder what changed.

Once she's caught her breath, she pulls up ramrod straight and inclines her head. "Sir! Ingo. I realized I wouldn't forgive myself if I didn't say something and I didn't see you again. Forgive me for the dramatics." With a last, deep breath, she raises her gaze to meet his and says, "I'm the one who found Emmet right after you disappeared. I always knew it was him and I didn't intervene when I could have. And for that, I am so, so sorry."

Ingo's about to interrupt, insistent that she should feel no need to hold herself accountable for his brother's actions, but she bowls ahead. "What I should've said then, I'll try to say now. All of us are here because we have faith in the system you both believed in with everything you had. And every day we try to do best by your legacies. The subway wouldn't be half of what it is without the sweat and tears and soul you both poured into it. You're always welcome back here, in whatever form you want. Even if you just need a ride, you have a lifetime fare pass. Which I know you'll never take.

"What I'm trying to say is that you're family. There's no obligation to try to come back and make things how they were, but don't be a stranger. Not when you don't have to be."

Ingo stares, speechless. A chime on her wrist device, and she nods tightly at the display before taking her hat from Ingo's forgotten, proffered hand. "That's all. Take care, Boss. Thanks for bringing him around, Miss Elesa."

Back at her apartment, Elesa is elated enough with the day's successes to break out a bottle of wine. Crowded by their Pokemon, pressed tight even in Elesa’s spacious apartment, they trade happy stories that night. Sparing the hardships, Ingo tells her about meeting his partners, of Lady Sneasler and her kits, of his fellow Wardens and the accords finally achieved between the Clans by virtue, in large part, of Akari's hard-won victories.

Wine-warm and reminiscent, the tracks ahead finally seem less daunting.

Until morning comes.

Ingo wakes up comfortable and knows something is wrong. These are not his quarters in Jubilife. The walls are too high, the furnishings foreign. Even the air sits different, an artificial breeze heavy and too consistent as it's pumped from the vent overhead.

Tossing the comforter bodily to the floor, he stumbles off the mattress and feels around his person for his pokeballs to find his jacket gone. Scanning the unfamiliar room, there's no sign of anything he knows. Beyond the glass wall rises a gray monolith like nothing he's ever seen, and closer he finds himself at a dizzying height with no recollection of climbing.

Metal chimes behind him as Alakazam emerges from his pokeball and claps his spoons for Ingo’s attention. Probopass follows, following procedure and lumbering up to his side. Relieved, Ingo leans, heavy, onto Probopass as Alakazam washes him in a psychic tide.

Calm/safe/calm.

"Where am I?"

Home/safe.

Shaking off the fabricated calm, Ingo flings an arm in an arc around the room. "This isn't Jubilife, nor the Highlands. Whatever station we've arrived at, it is not mine."

Another pulse, repeating urges of belonging and safety. But he doesn't recognize this place, not the furnishings or the skyline beyond the window. The clothes he wears are unfamiliar, also, too thin and flimsy as he draws a thumb and forefinger along the hem.

He closes his eyes, reaching for recollection to find only silence.

Not again not again not--

Home?

Ingo remembers a staircase made of force as clear as the most perfect glass, where nebulae swirled beneath his determined footfalls. Akari's back led him onwards, on the promise of a chance to return to the world he came from. On a boundless platform encircled by stars, the God of Creation bowed low on its forelegs and apologized for the actions of its offspring, driven mad in its loneliness, that tore him from where he belonged. Ingo asked whether Arceus can repair him, remake him as he once was, and Arceus claimed the cost of rebecoming by divine will could be to lose what had come to pass in Hisui. One look at Akari and he knew that was not a price he could pay. He would never forget again.

Nimbasa. This is Elesa's guest room in Nimbasa City. It isn't familiar. Not like Gear Station, or the lap of gentle waves along mossy canal walls, or the morning sun cresting a concrete and glass horizon in countless mirror images of dawn’s light. It isn’t home.

"I need--" he chokes, reeling up off Probopass and towards the pokeballs collected on the bedside table. "I need to retrace my old tracks. It'll be better to clear my head before Elesa awakes, lest I worry her unnecessarily." Probopass returns to her pokeball with no further prompting, but Alakazam eyes him with his keen rigor for a moment more before bowing his head and accepting the pull as Ingo flicks open the catch.

Gathering the others in his arms, he stumbles out to the living room and grabs his worn coat from the rack, drawing it over his donated pajamas and pouring the pokeballs into its deep pockets. The sandals Elesa bought him are barely comfortable, and violate several safety precautions, but for once he feels no desire to pull on socks and his old shoes.

Even the mornings here are hot, especially when compared to the blast of artificial cool pouring into the lobby. Is it always this warm, or was it his luck to be returned here at the height of summer? His feet carry him towards the canals, intent for now to avoid troubling the personnel at Gear Station once more while hoping to find solace in old haunts.

Cutting a straight line through milling crowds, a fragile part of him is proud to carry himself with almost the confidence of a local. Were it not for the state of his dress, perhaps he could be mistaken for one. But the occasional double-takes and tracking glances are enough evidence that he's not convincing anyone.

Then, when has blending in ever been an option? Certainly not in Hisui. So what reason does he have to expect it here?

Cowed all the same by the scrutiny, Ingo calls out Tangrowth to follow in his shadow. The crowds part on their own for him then, and Ingo finds something strangely familiar in the bulk of her form and people's wide berth in her presence.

The breeze across the easternmost bridge cuts through the stifling heat that pools on his face and neck, and his next breath comes more easily. He's failed on his route to his old apartment building, but he recognizes the neons, dim in the sunlight, of the broad avenue cutting east-west through the entertainment district. Advertisements glow on colossal screens and compete with colorful signs for the attention of passerbyers, most of which stream past without a glance, onto their destinations.

With child's eyes he once stared up at the lights and images with wonder, another hand warm and fidgety in his. The wonder had, at some point, long-faded to exasperation at the waste, but he would always think fondly of how the district once captured his imagination so entirely.

There's an absence at his side again, sending a shiver up his back. He turns around to lean his arms over the fencing, looking out to the water, so that Tangrowth fills the void.

The breeze runs ripples across the otherwise still canal, and the city noise recedes again into ambience until a voice draws his attention again. "Hey, you shouldn't have a Pokemon that big out in town, buddy."

Ingo turns, an apology ready on his tongue and Tangrowth's pokeball in hand, when the man who addressed him squints as their eyes meet. Then he grins, leaving Ingo feeling suddenly cornered. Tangrowth ignores the recall.

"Well, shit! Looks like not everything you read on the internet is fake. You really are back in town."

Ingo holds up his hands, starting to say, "My apologies, sir, but--"

"Now, which one are you this time? The dead one or the liar?"

Ingo's mouth snaps closed, his blood running cold. Tangrowth shadow pulls higher behind him, stretching long towards where the man stands.

"Well, I guess I answered that question myself. Sorry, I'm sure you don't remember a random challenger like me. I never got past your brother, you know. Not until you were pretending to be him. Always had to wonder whether it was a fair fight. Though it doesn't matter much anymore, his record. Right?"

Letting the chill coursing through his veins seep into his tone, Ingo says, "I think you'd be better off not commenting on matters you don't understand, sir."

Eyes scan him up and down. The man laughs, and says, "You really don't have any weight to throw around here anymore, Former Subway Master." He sneers, throwing out his hand in Ingo's direction. "Look at you, still wearing his coat. What’s left of it, anyways. Guilt got you bad, huh?"

Against his better judgment, Ingo steps forward into the man's space, pulling back his shoulders so that he towers over him. "I am Ingo. I have returned, and whether you're inclined to believe me or not, I would suggest that you keep your mistaken assumptions about my brother to yourself."

How pathetic. A hollow man in his sleepwear and the tattered remnants of a long defunct authority wielding his disconcerting appearance as a threat. He stands in defense of a brother he does not know, whose choices he can barely begin to understand. The man slinks back anyway, spitting towards their feet and whirling around to stalk off in the direction he came.

Embarrassed, for himself and Emmet and the mess that's left of them, Ingo plucks the catch of Tangrowth's pokeball more forcefully than he intends, whispering an apology once she returns.

His mind buzzes like the flutter of a thousand Combee wings as he draws away from the iron railing and down the thoroughfare eastward, against the main flow of foot traffic. It's three blocks of incoherent static, blood rushing between his ears, before a sign points him Route 16 by way of an over-lit gateway clogged with so many people. Ingo lets the stares roll off his back, wishing for his hat and settling instead for his sternest frown.

The gate opens to a path lined with shorn grass, apartment buildings and offices giving way to fenced-in thicket. Determined to avoid another unwanted interaction, Ingo dives off the road the moment the fence breaks to a field of wild grass. Long stalks snap under his hasty steps, louder as the city noise drains away.

What is he running from?

Not the noise. The city sounds are a comfort that the quiet of the Coronet Highlands could never offer. It swallows his thoughts, drowning old anxieties and the gaping silence where his memories--his identity--belongs. Here in what's meant to be home, the clamor of other, vibrant, hopeful lives beyond his own is an island in the sea of his own emptiness.

The people? Perhaps. But, again, there's solace to be found in the proof in others that life goes on, even when his seems stalled out miles from the station.

Recognition? When did other's perceptions of him start to matter? It certainly hadn't derailed him in Hisui to be perceived on others' terms. Without his own identity, he had always defined himself in conversation with their ideas of him.

The easy answer is that he's running from his brother's mess. If he could just escape the unease, the grief, the disarray that every mention of Emmet brings to the surface, he could move forward. But that isn’t quite true. He doesn’t want to run away from what happened. He wants to understand. 

Passing over a log bridge above a parched stream, Ingo stumbles through a patch of bladed grass that knicks his wrists where his coat sleeves unravel and expose skin. The treeline guides him forward, branches interweaving into a barrier too close to divert through, opening into a small clearing blanketed with white wildflowers that dance in the breeze. The hemlocks pull together in all directions, leaving him nowhere to go.

Ingo collapses, knees scuffing dirt as he spills onto the ground. He gasps there, blood coursing hot and urging him onward and away to anywhere else.

It will follow wherever he goes, he knows. It lives under his skin, in the spaces between breaths, and he will never stop running if he doesn’t recognize there’s nowhere to go. 

Regret burrows in the marrow of his aching bones, lashing out with every motion. Ingo never wanted to leave. How can he apologize for something he did not control? For a decision he did not make? 

When he fell to save Emmet, did he expect to die?

Had he remembered, would things be different? Would he have found his way home sooner, before grief ate Emmet alive? Would that version of Ingo resent Emmet for his lies, like Ingo now is supposed to?

Ingo can’t hate his brother. Even now, without his memory and with everything changed. 

Does Emmet feel the same?

"You're back?"

Ingo startles, gaze tearing across the treeline for the source of the voice and finding no one.

"I thought you gave up."

A figure emerges from the northern shade, a silhouette in the familiar shape of a uniform hat and greatcoat. A realization follows. Fear like static runs up Ingo's skin and he's scrambling for a pokeball, knowing his team doesn't have a good counter for a Zoroark.

The illusion wears his face, though this time not mocking him in a white-and-red coat or an eerie, broken smile. No, his double walks out in his own black uniform in pristine condition, with his face unlined and unshaven. As Ingo presses up on his toes, the illusion blinks at him, tilting its head.

"Oh? You're not him, are you?" Its face splits into a long grin, all teeth. "You're the one he wanted."

Ingo freezes, arm mid-toss with Gliscor's pokeball in hand. His voice dies in his throat. It approaches, its face morphing into something hollowed out, with sunken cheeks and red-rimmed, gray eyes. With a voice soft enough to be a whisper, it says, "Why are you here, lost one?"

For a moment, Ingo cannot breathe. It's a voice he's never heard before and the only voice he has always known. It's his face and the face he's sought for years.

But, he's done this before. He will not fall for this again.

"Spare me your false pity, fox, I have you outnumbered." Gliscor breaks from his pokeball, swooping out in front of his shoulder with a hiss.

The wind picks up, gathering in the canopy leaves and twisting the wildflowers into knots around him. Red eyes flash in the dark beyond the treeline. Meanwhile, the illusion blinks at him, and breaks into a throaty laugh, "I understand why he asked for my aid, meeting you now. He was too meek, in the end, to wear his illusion of you."

What?

Ingo’s hesitation must show on his face, as the illusion tilts its head again, leaning closer so that they'd be eye to eye, if not for Gliscor shifting closer. "You did not know. Are you looking for him, this time? Stand down, human. And tell your pet to do the same. I knew your double and did not harm him."

He is not prey to be toyed with. Gliscor hisses again, and Ingo counters, "What reason do you have to hold back with your enemy in reach?"

But he doesn't command Gliscor to attack. Curiosity often outweighs fear, for Ingo. He has the scars to prove it.

It pulls back, drawing away. "Enemy? You may be in my woods, but you're no enemy of mine, lost one. If there's nothing to say--"

"Wait."

Ingo and the illusion share a pause at the desperation that claws its way from Ingo's lungs. He tries again, shoving out an arm in front of Gliscor. "Wait. What did he want from you? My double?"

"A way out," the illusion says, his smile falling and the light draining from his eyes. Ingo swallows the pang at the sight. It is not Emmet. "He called it a mutual agreement. I would be the you he was pretending to be, taking over his life and its urban comforts. He would go off to find you."

Ingo bites down on the inside of his cheek, swallowing the protestations that the Zoroark has no business hearing. Instead, he says, "He departed to search for me, still. You did not take my place. Why not?"

Licking its lips, the illusion looks past Ingo, considering. When it levels its gaze on him, again, its eyes narrow. "I wanted no part in his destruction. After watching him for months, his pitiful illusion of you was all that was left, in the end. What time he thought I could buy him only prolonged the inevitable. After all, you are here and he is not. He didn't find you."

The illusion looks down at him with Emmet's tired face, and Ingo decides enough is enough. "You're wrong," he says, drawing up a force of belief he didn’t know he had. It carries a lifetime in two simple words. Ingo wonders if this is what it is like to remember loving someone he has loved before knowing anything else. 

He wants to see Emmet again.

"Nothing is inevitable. Emmet is not a lost cause." Pulling himself on aching knees to his feet, Ingo matches the illusion's twin height, standing finally eye to eye. "Your assumptions may have helped him, in the end, so for that I thank you, Zoroark. But I won't be tricked into hopelessness. My brother and I will find each other."

Eyebrows raise, and the illusion's face splits into a feral grin, broken and inhuman like the Zoroarks in the Icelands. Gliscor tenses beside him, readying an attack, but the illusion only bows and shakes its head, laughing again.

The wind picks up again, buffeting Ingo's true coat, tattered and worn, around him. A raised hand to block the gust is enough cover for the illusion to fade away behind the sweep of his arm. The treeline pulls outward, the tight hemlocks melting away in the wind to reveal a wider clearing, bright and green in the summer light.

Ingo huffs, adjusting his lapels and giving Gliscor an appreciative pat. The sun pierces from directly overhead, warmth seeping into the black fabric of his coat. Nearly noon, then, and he lost track of time. Knowing Elesa would be worried sick, knowing he mustn't disappear on them again, he turns quick on his heel and coaxes Gliscor onward, towards home.

Ilex Forest stands still where Emmet walks, any local Pokemon deterred by Chandelure haunting his shadow. In the daylight that filters through the ancient tree canopy, the forest feels gentle, welcoming even. Emmet is an intruder, disturbing the peace with his determined forward march through the soft underbrush. 

That wouldn't do. Not if he is meant to find Celebi. 

Pausing at a fork cut by an oak tree behemoth, Emmet crosses his arms over his chest and turns to face Chandelure. Her yellow eye-spots narrow at him, the definition of unamused. With a sigh, mock beleaguered, he says, "You do not have to like this plan. But I gave you the choice. You don't have to come with me. I can send you home to Uncle Drayden."

Two bursts of flame in time with short, screechy chimes convey her opinion on that option. But she refuses to return to her pokeball. Again. 

Since leaving Unova, her pokeball sits empty more often than not as she hovers at his shoulder, never more than a pace behind. He suspects she fears he'll disappear, too, if she drops her constant vigil. He wonders what she would do, if not for her loyalty to Ingo. 

He hopes that his presence is some solace, as hers is to him. 

Though her reluctance is new. The plan, the reason he set their course to Johto, hasn't changed. At every opportunity, Emmet presents their Pokemon a chance to offboard, knowing he has no right to drag them along his damned tracks. Each of them readily, repeatedly chose to stay. So, why the change in Chandelure? 

"What would you have me do?" 

Chandelure trills, kinder this time, and lowers to bump a candle-arm against his right wrist. She phases through his bag, sending a chill along the hairs on his neck, and chimes again. 

Oh. This again. 

Most mornings he finds his old Xtransceiver set out beside his sleeping bag, flashing with notifications he will not check and messages he will not read. It is impossible to look now that he knows what he needs to do. 

Again he says, "I can't." But, here at their last stop, he elaborates. "I can't look back. I can't face them. What if I lose my resolve?" He would, he knows, if he tries to explain. And he can't lie, not another, not even by omission. Except, isn't avoiding them the same?

He doesn't want to hurt anyone anymore.

To himself more than Chandelure, he says, "It's different now. I know my route. I can bring him home. I can fix this."

Chandelure trills, insistent, with flames rising higher still. Emmet's chest tightens as he tries to raise his voice, before he clamps down teeth on his bottom lip, frustration bleeding away unspoken. 

A whisper instead. "I won't be able to live with myself if I don't try." 

Emmet found Ingo on a library bookshelf by a window overlooking the sea. The cloth-bound cover was rough on his hands and the spine crinkled when opened, suffusing the corner in the scent of dust and disuse. Six pages of glossy insets split the book in two halves, and on the third was a sepia photograph of Ingo, his uniform frayed, his features weathered, his back stooped, and a small smile on his face. Warden Ingo of the Pearl Clan, the footnote said, taken in Jubilife Village. Centuries ago. 

Smiling. Aged. Still Ingo. 

Emmet had blinked and found himself sitting at the harbor, legs pitched over the edge, well past nightfall. The smell of the sea still makes him nauseous months later. 

He delayed after the discovery, caught up in questions of the Creation Trio and distortions of time and space. It took him so long, too long, to realize he doesn't need to know why . He needs to take matters into his own hands and bring Ingo home. Even if his family or Chandelure would protest. Any risk is worth taking. 

Ingo hadn't hesitated, back then. So Emmet will not now. 

Chandelure makes a sound that's more akin to a keen than song, floating up against his chest. Her heatless flames lap at his jaw, tickling without catching at the messy line of his sideburns and the patchy stubble around his scruffy goatee. 

Ah. He's the worst, isn't he? 

And here he had thought he'd been doing better, all things considered. 

Trying to do better would entail facing his family and explaining what he found. Doing better would require telling them what he plans to do. 

"Chandelure," he murmurs, hating the tremor that bleeds into his voice. "It is unlikely that Celebi will arrive today. We may wait here for a very long time. When we make camp, I will start by looking at their messages. Perhaps tomorrow I'll be brave enough to call." 

It's enough that she pulls away and, as they press forward, drops the menacing air. Emmet follows the south-west route, trusting his instinct to guide him as the underbrush grows thicker overtop the rough-trod footpath. The forest is lonely, still, as they proceed. Like something hidden in wait, holding its breath until the air catches the leaf canopy in a gentle hiss. Emmet wonders if Celebi is already here, watching in judgment. 

He would understand, truly, if it never appeared to him. It would not be alone in deeming him unworthy. 

If a person recognizes the defect in themselves that renders them unworthy, does that reflect some inherent merit that ebbs the scales in their favor? The notion seems optimistic. To be self-aware isn't the same as being good, or deserving, especially when all one does with their self-awareness is to wear it like thorns to justify being alone instead of vulnerable. 

Emmet doesn't want to hurt anyone anymore, a desire which lends to avoidance, a harm that doesn’t require effort. Then, the recognition of that inherent harm rationalizes the conclusion that he's past repair and better left to scrap. Let him be useful in the pieces that live on past this version of himself, in the few fond memories that are left of him and the subway's success in his absence. Something like a legacy. But that's little different than giving up, and Emmet doesn't give up. Emmet likes to win more than anything else. 

Which lends to inviting ultimatums like the one that he's walking towards, ever undeterred by ridges of moss-slick stones and bowing branches. Bring me back to my brother or reject me entirely is little different than a gambler seeking that one lucky break, even at the risk of losing it all. By trying, Emmet is clinging to the belief there's something in him capable of fixing things, instead of destroying them. 

But it only counts if he fixes everything rather than what’s reasonably in his power to mend. He could return to Nimbasa, or Unova at least, and face the family he left behind. Except Unova will recognize him, whether with scorn or apathy, and he can't bear to look back at the life he abandoned, the life he loved, and see where he no longer fits. He is little more than a replaced part. Something better off forgotten. 

After all, isn't that why he left in the first place? There was no home without Ingo. He can survive being alone, but not there. Not again. 

So he calls the consequences of leaving his truth instead of recognizing that he made the choice. 

Well. Emmet has had plenty of time to think. Little help that it does. Endless arrays of justifications and rebuttals make no difference when coming up against the simple fact of his conviction. 

What else is supposed to do? Ingo is out there. 

Ten minutes pass, and he almost misses it. Younger oaks wreathed in ivy shade the passing to a small clearing, two steps off the path. A shrine stands haloed in dappled sunlight with dewy moss climbing up once-white walls. Emmet pauses mid-step and falls back on his heels, only proceeding once he's scanned the wildflower bed that flourishes under the break in the canopy. With careful steps despite his unwieldy, worn hiking boots, he approaches without treading on a single flower. Chandelure follows. 

The man in Azelea Town explained how to make an offering, and still Emmet feels awkward as he shrugs his pack off his shoulders and splays it open on the dirt to fumble for the dish and berries he bought. An assortment of nanab and tamato berries and a silken pouch of stardust set underneath the posts, he plucks the stray leaves from the sloped red roof and settles low to the ground, unsure of whether to pray. 

The breeze carries the soft scent of leaf litter decay as it lifts up through high branches and sways the shadows above. Chandelure hovers above him, watching him as he watches the grass brush and curl around the stakes bored into the earth.

Please. Please take me to him. Please help me bring him home. 

What is the difference between a wish and a prayer? Which would Celebi answer? 

Emmet doesn't know. He doesn't know what he's doing. But what can he do but try? 

The forest stands still in response.

When he remembers to breathe again, it feels like giving up. He reminds himself that this was planned. It would be naïve to expect Celebi straightaway. Glancing up at Chandelure, he says, "See? Not today. There--" 

From the unfurled innards of his pack on the ground, his Xtransceiver begins to vibrate. Chandelure burns brighter, bobbing in the air in her approximation of a nod as Emmet watches her anticipation glow in blue surges of flame. There's the instinct to protest bubbling up with his heartbeat at the base of his throat. This isn't what he promised. 

The contents of his pack, potions and ethers nestled between protein bars and a cheap camp stove, rattle with the next vibration that Emmet can still feel the ghost of on his wrist. Every impulse clamors to ignore the call, to be the person he is instead of who he'd rather be. 

Or he could be brave. 

The band clenched in his fist is cold when he snatches the Xtransceiver from between layers of neatly folded shirts and brings it up to his face. Atop a black overlay, ' Uncle Drayden ' in bold capital letters covers the screen. A glance back to Chandelure is the only despair he allows himself at the inevitability of his uncle being the one to call. 

He's been here before. A different forest, a different track, bowed under the weight of Ingo's uniform and the fear of what honesty would cost. He suspects that his uncle knew he was planning to leave back then. He doesn't know whether it was because he could tell staying would kill him, or because he had finally had enough of him. 

Maybe both. 

Emmet drags the icon and Uncle Drayden appears on the screen, blinking and drawing himself straight as he processes that Emmet answered. Automatically, despite the counterpart to justify the habit, Emmet says, "I am Emmet.” Then,  “Good… evening? It's evening in Unova, correct?" 

His uncle stares at him with his brow knit, paling visibly even on a video feed. Emmet waits, uneasy with the tension, for exactly twelve seconds before saying, "Did you call me without something to say? That's very inconsiderate." 

That works. Uncle Drayden bristles, red flushing the exposed skin above his beard and his shoulders jumping almost imperceptibly. Emmet does not grin, but he could. "You never pick up, Emmet," his uncle grouses. "You don't answer my texts. You left. Forgive my shock at the sudden change." 

"Okay." And Emmet waits again, ending up in a futile staring contest as Uncle Drayden almost certainly wants some explanation and Emmet refuses to give away the ground that his uncle is the one who called. Perhaps not a productive strategy, but it's the one he's got, nonetheless. 

Another moment passes, and Uncle Drayden gives in. "Where are you?" 

In Ilex Forest praying for Celebi to send me to Sinnoh two-something centuries ago. Perhaps too honest, up front. "Johto." 

"No." Head shaking, a hand scrubs up his face. No? Emmet flounders, not expecting that response. His uncle continues, "Why aren't you home? It's been days, Emmet. If all of this is for Ingo's sake, why aren't you here?" 

"You want to argue. I can skip to the point," Emmet says, blood boiling, before he comprehends what his uncle said. A pause for his atrophied tact to get it together, and he asks, "Sorry, reversing. Days? Since what?" 

Uncle Drayden stares at him again, squinting as if Emmet is missing something obvious. Chandelure chimes, lowering into the frame, as his uncle swears under his breath. 

Then he tears the ground out from underneath Emmet’s feet. 

"Ingo's home. He made it back to us." 

His uncle goes on, explaining how they had been trying to reach him, all of it lost on Emmet. Still crouching beside the shrine, he lowers himself to the ground, one hand seeping into the mossy dirt to press deep for stable ground. The other hand slackens around the Xtransceiver band, the video falling off-kilter and then turning up to the leaf-lined sky as it drops to his lap, the freed hand flying up to cover his mouth. Swallowing hard, his jugular pulls with the force of each breath pushed out from his suddenly weak lungs. His head swims, hearing dropping away, lightheadedness setting in.  

Ingo is back? Ingo is alive? Home and not lost, a fading name among hundreds carved on some forgotten Snowpoint memorial? 

Home as in Nimbasa, in the wreckage of what their lives once were? But there . Unova and not Sinnoh. Home. Home . 

"He’s there?" he asks, meaning you wouldn't lie to me like I did to you. He grabs his discarded Xtransceiver and brings it back up to his face, holding it high above him to watch for his uncle's nod. 

"In Nimbasa with Elesa. He found us, Emmet."

Distantly, cruelly, Emmet realizes that all he ever had to do was wait. Ingo hadn't needed him to search. The very opposite, in fact, because now Ingo was in Unova and Emmet had run away. Halfway across the world and for what? 

Ten minutes ago, maybe that would have hurt him. Maybe it still will, when the shock comes down. Now, in this moment, Emmet relief sparks the long-dead engine inside of him like kick-start jump cables. Without realizing that he's started, he finds himself laughing, smiling like he hasn't in years, caught between disbelief and giddiness. 

"I will be on the next flight."

"Emmet…" Uncle Drayden starts, his tone familiar from childhood words of warning. Emmet's laughter dies on his tongue, fear spiking with a sudden chill. Questions arise, panicked and untethered, as to whether Ingo is hurt, or sick, or worse. 

"What is it? What's wrong?" 

At the end of a sigh, his uncle only says, "He's leaving Nimbasa today to stay here. It's nothing. We told him what happened, of course."

Oh. 

It isn't as if Emmet hasn't conjured up the conversation in his head countless times now, always settling on the conclusion that he'd rather have a brother who was disappointed in him, who thought less of him, than no brother at all. 

To his uncle, Emmet says, "I understand. I left our lives derailed. You had to explain what changed." 

"And why you weren't here." Another sigh, and Uncle Drayden seems to deflate as he says, "Is this it then? It’s been years, Emmet. One phone call and now you're coming back? It's a lot to process." 

Emmet looks past him, beyond the Xtransceiver in his hand and back to the shrine before him. "I can't change the choices I made. Returning now doesn't fix things."

"No." It's the answer Emmet expects, because he's prepared for this conversation, too. He's certain his uncle is as well. So here they sit, worlds apart, playing the parts they believe they owe one another. 

He doesn't know exactly what Uncle Drayden will say next, but he's unfazed that he has more to say. Expectation is almost comforting. "There was no fixing anything, once you left. There was only moving on. I had to grieve you both, Emmet. We all did." 

There's the obvious retort, the one where he makes sure his uncle knows he could have had to truly grieve. When he left, Emmet fully planned to die without a second thought in the face of failure. Today, he could have vanished into the past with only the hope that the journey included a return ticket. 

It wasn't that Emmet's rough edges had dulled with the years, but he's learning to accommodate them. For himself and others. 

Instead of the obvious, he says, "I know." 

All of his apologies are full of defensive justifications that there's no need for. Without them he knows it sounds like he hasn't acknowledged the harm of it all. Three berries and a pouch of stardust beneath a shrine might prove that he hasn't. An apology now would be a lie, even if a kind one. "Thank you for calling me. For telling me Ingo is home. You didn't have to." 

A pause. Emmet glances back at the screen, finding his uncle with his eyes closed, lost in thought. When he returns, he scratches at his beard like they're discussing a particularly challenging crossword and not how they have and could have hurt each other. Emmet smiles, small and real. 

He's glad it's his uncle who called. How easy to feel like a child again, owning up to a mistake that will one day wash away with the rest of youth. A father can make just about anything seem surmountable.

"I have never given up on you. Even when you wanted me to. Even when you gave up on yourself. Whatever truth you believe about our family, Emmet, it is not mine." He stands up, the camera catching a brief flash of an Opelucid sunset in purples and reds. Emmet knows the window. He misses the view. 

"Come home, Emmet. Your brother's waiting."

"Okay," Emmet replies, like it’s nothing. As if everything hasn’t changed. "I'll see you soon."

Wrinkles appear at the corner of Uncle Drayden's eyes that give him away. Emmet's heart hurts at the sight. The screen goes dark as the call ends, and his Xtransceiver lights up with countless notifications. From Elesa, insistent and detailed. From Iris, admonishing but kind. More still from Gear Station staff who he expressly requested lose his number. All with the same message, in one way or another:

'Ingo's back. Come home.'

Legs unable to hold him just yet, he stays there in the dirt to read them. It’s on the third, from Elesa, that the world shifts again. 

‘You should know. Ingo lost his memories when he fell. He doesn't remember any of us. I don't know if he will, unless you come home. He needs you, Emmet.'

His memories. Ingo doesn't remember him. 

'It's nothing,' his uncle said, knowing that it is everything. Ingo won't know him. 

Ingo hasn't missed him. And all he knows about Emmet is that he's a liar, a failure, a mess of a brother that ruined everything because he couldn't stand to be alone. 

The crisp forest air clings like dry ash in his mouth as he tries and fails to fill his lungs. His field of vision collapses down to the patch of dirt right in front of his knees, black tunneling around the edges. Panic, his last standing friend, greets him with a hand tight around his heart.

Stop. Emmet buries dirt-stained fingers into knees, anchoring to the real sensation until the pain in his chest gives way by a fraction. 

Ingo was alone too. While Emmet had his memories of him, Ingo had nothing. Even then, he came home. He traveled time to a place he did not remember. On what? Faith? Longing? 

And Emmet knows who he had been, from their earliest memories to the things Ingo wouldn't share with anyone else. All the while, his concern is what Ingo may think of him? 

No. Not quite. He's left that fear behind. 

He's afraid that Ingo won't love him anymore. Without his memory of who Emmet was, what's left of him worth loving? Worth wanting back? 

Here he is afraid of the idea of an Ingo who would reject him, when the real Ingo is alive and home and waiting for him. 

The air is cold as he breathes again. Clarity follows the sharp sting of ice in his lungs. 

His pokeballs rattle on his hips. Chandelure hooks a candle arm around his bicep. To them, and to himself, he says, "I am alright." His heart stutters, weak with strain. "Correction. I will be alright." 

He repeats this, I am Emmet and I will be alright, as a prayer and promise as he gathers his pack and his courage. When ready to depart, he indulges in one last look at the shrine over his shoulder. 

The dish lays empty, the offerings gone. Emmet smiles. 

Iris hears first, which seems unfair to Ingo. In an ideal world, Ingo would be the first to know that Emmet is coming home. Well, no. An ideal world would have never separated them. At the very least, Emmet would have been here when Ingo returned. 

But that's not how it happened. So, instead, Iris watches her father's hands shake as he pours them both cups of coffee, evidently forgoing his once held opinion about caffeine at her age, as he says, "I spoke to Emmet. He's coming home."

Before Iris can figure out what emotion, exactly, bubbles up in response, he continues. "I didn't tell him about Ingo's amnesia."

“Dad . You're joking. Why not?" 

He lays a mug on the dining table in front of her, aromatic and steaming, and she glances from its surface back up to her father. After a slow, stalling sip, he says, "In the moment? I was afraid he would change his mind if he knew."

Iris takes the mug in her hands and lets the warmth pool in her palms. She's better at schooling her reactions these days, but she's no paragon of impulse control. "That's stupid. Extremely stupid, Dad. Ingo's not gonna remember him and you want that to be a surprise?" 

Her dad sighs and lowers into a chair at the other end of the long dining table. Having no patience for that, Iris draws herself up and drags her mug by the rim noisily across the table until she drops into the seat beside him. He watches, cringing as her steam-damp hand grabs onto the expensive, likely antique, chair and pulls. She is certain he's thinking some begrudging thought about teenagers, but it's her turn to scold today. 

"Emmet wouldn't have stayed away, even if you told him. You know that. I know you think that he just ran away, that 'finding Ingo' was just an excuse, but you can't believe he wouldn't come."

Pinching his forehead between thumb and forefinger, he shakes his head. Iris takes a swig of her coffee, bitter but tastier than what they stock at the League cafeteria, and waits. Eventually he looks back to her, eyes sad, and says, "He was happy. I hadn’t expected--I thought he had seen our messages, but chose to stay away. Perhaps out of some misguided bitterness for the years lost, or for not being able to be the hero in this. So when I was wrong, when his first response was simply joy…I didn't want to take that from him. Not yet."

"So now he's full of hope, which will just come crashing down alongside his trust in you." Iris heaves a sigh, wondering if Emmet would answer if she called. Would she be strong enough to say what her father couldn't, seeing Emmet for the first time? She doesn't know. "We're a mess, aren't we?" 

"Families--" her dad stops, catching himself mid-idiom, and concedes. "We are. I hope to mend things, but it seems my instincts are to sabotage my chances."

Iris searches for some adage of his to tease him with to ease the tension, something along the lines of trying being a matter of taking the first step, when her Xtransceiver starts to ring. It takes a full second to process Emmet's ridiculous photo, one taken years ago in Anville Town with him posing atop an old decommissioned train car. Barely a glance to her father and she's sliding her finger along the screen, swallowing disappointment when it goes to an audio-only line. 

"I am Emmet," he says, a little harried but altogether too casual for their first time speaking in years. Iris can't help but roll her eyes, lucky that he can't see. "I am assuming you heard that I am departing for your station. Because Ingo is home. I don't have the right to ask for anything. But, for Ingo's sake, could you do me a favor?" 

"Hi, Emmet," Iris replies, finding normalcy more comforting than stating the obvious. It'll be worse in person, she knows. Then again, that she even gets to see him in person is more than she would have expected a week ago. So she continues with, "I can try? What do you need?"

She can hear him tapping at his screen on the other end, always too firm and hurried. "I am sending Ingo's Pokemon via the box link. Well, except Chandelure. She will not go in her Pokeball. Anyways, use Uncle Drayden's access pin. I know you know it."

Her father clears his throat noisily, and Emmet laughs. There's performance to it, Iris recognizing the uneasy hope behind her dad's glare and hearing the catch in Emmet's throat in his laughter. She knows her part. "Whether or not your accusations are fair, sure. I can do that. When will you get here?" 

Emmet hums, hesitating a moment as dull echoes indicate his prodding at his screen. "Tomorrow morning. Elesa will be at the airport. Do not worry about me."

Iris and her father share a look as Emmet mentions Elesa, wondering, and Iris starts to say, "Emmet…"

"I know," he interrupts. "It's okay. I know. Elesa's texts-- I understand the situation. I am prepared."

Are you? 

"Do not worry about me," he repeats, voice clipped and tight. "I am fine. Thank you for your help. I'll see you tomorrow." 

The call ends before Iris can think of anything to say. She leans back in her chair, kicking the front legs up off the floor as she stares at the roof with its neat paneling and ostentatious chandelier. Her dad says, "I suppose I could have expected that Elesa would convey what I hadn't."

Iris doesn't respond, reminding herself to be thankful that Emmet is even coming home, that Ingo is alive and here, even if he can't remember anything. 

A broken family is better than not having one.

Shortly thereafter, five restless Pokemon gather in the foyer and come to terms with her not being Ingo, not yet. Soon, she soothes in low, loving murmurs as she greets the team--or half of it--that has known her since as long as she’s been family. Iris is unsurprised to find them in impeccable condition, Haxorus's tusks freshly shined, Crustle's pincers free of grit, Klinklang recently oiled. Excadrill waddles up to her for attention, and both are surprised to find that she only reaches Iris's mid-thigh now. Garbodor, too, stands less imposingly behind her, however well-fed in itinerant garbage Emmet keeps her. 

It's been nearly three years. Why is she surprised that she's changed?

Absent-mindedly petting Excadrill's wiry fur, Iris explains that Ingo came home with a new team, that he doesn't remember anything, and that he had somehow ended up in the distant past. It sounds no less absurd now as it had when Ingo described, with little detail, the years he spent in Sinnoh. Hisui. Maybe his new Pokemon could better explain to his old team in their own language. Or, perhaps, they would be as strange as Ingo seems to her now.

The Pokemon take the news without furor and need no reminders to be on their best behavior. Iris tries to imagine what this is like for them, so long in Emmet's care. Did they believe that Emmet would find him? Were they afraid, like her Dad was, like Elesa was, that one day Emmet would disappear like Ingo had but entirely of his own making? Or, like her, had they known that keeping moving, pursuing change under the guise of a goal, a destination, could be what it takes to survive? 

Hot air swims in front of her face as Haxorus leans into her space and snorts. Iris giggles, a little put on, and bats her snout away. Haxorus narrows her eyes. "I bet you have to deal with a lot of overthinking with Emmet on his own, huh? I'll try my best to stop."

Not particularly convinced, apparently, Haxorus huffs and draws back, sharing a look with Excadrill at Iris's feet before settling back on her haunches to wait. 

They hear them first, Ingo's voice carrying through the stone walls before the latch on the front door clicks. He's marveling at the architecture, of all things, as her father pushes forward the doors and ushers Ingo inside. Iris is on her feet at once, brandishing a smile and putting an extra spring into her step as she greets them, surprised again to see a soft smile cross Ingo's face when he sees her. 

"Miss--" 

"Just Iris." 

"Iris. It is a pleasure to see you again. Your father was just explaining Opelucid's history to me. I had no idea we hailed from such a storied location."

It's been long enough, now, that her recollections of Ingo's idiosyncrasies have collapsed into her recollection of Emmet's, and of Emmet's version of Ingo. She stops a pace short of hugging him, remembering that Emmet's Ingo was distant and non-tactile, but unsure how much of that had been grief and how much had been caricature. Awkward and uncertain, she opts to hold out her hands for him to take, feeling slightly guilty for pushing initiative onto the amnesiac who couldn't possibly remember how they used to be. 

When he takes her hands without pause, her smile pulls more genuine and she swings his arms to twist them both towards the far corner. "Look!" she says, hoping her father warned him. "Emmet sent them all the way from Johto so they didn't have to wait to see you!" 

Here, there's hesitation. Ingo's hands tighten around hers as he takes in the waiting, unfamiliar Pokemon as they pretend not to be desperate for his recognition. For a moment, she's afraid this was a terrible mistake, that she should have kept them in their pokeballs until he was ready. But then the weight of his hands in here falls away, and he's striding with purposeful steps towards them, gushing. 

"Bravo! Look at these fine blades, and these durable scales! I am proud to have called such a formidable creature my ally." 

And, "Ah! A tunneler, correct? What a boon you would have been in the Coronet Highlands, my old friend."

"What strength to carry such an impressive boulder. The striations of granite are impeccable," and, "So you must gather energy with the turn of your impressive gears, and store it for later use in your cores? An elegant mechanism, no doubt."

Then, "A poison type of such capability would explain much of my affinity for My Lady's kits, given their, well, clumsiness with their claws. And to see a Pokemon so perfectly built to mitigate the worst of human wastefulness. I'm certain the subway staff were always thankful for your presence."

He goes to his belt before pausing there, turning to her father. "May I?" 

He huffs, muttering something about the tiles, but there's no bite to it. After he nods, Ingo's full Hisuian team emerges from their strange pokeballs.

Crowded with eleven Pokemon, the foyer that always dwarfed her with its high ceilings and sparse furniture is suddenly itself reduced. Iris retreats to the stairwell, hoisting herself onto the edge of a stair that extends just past the banister, legs kicking in the air as she watches the clamor from above. 

It occurs to her that this is the most alive she’s seen the house.  

Had it been like that when the twins were younger, chaotic teenagers with ten Pokemon between them? Watching her father soften, the creases in his forehead and under his eyes diminishing, she thinks so. 

Iris is glad she has this little, broken family of hers, if it means there are moments like this. 

Emmet's stomach jumps as the plane touches ground with a stuttering lurch at Mistralton Interregional Airport. His Xtransceiver flashes to life on his wrist, timed to the minute to end airplane mode per the flight schedule, which he is pleased--if surprised--to find accurate. The watch's weight is heavy and unwieldy on his arm after years without, the hope that he'd put it on and feel like himself again just a delusion. 

He supposes he's lucky he kept it. The idea, at first, was to cut all contact. Time followed with postcards, and the few texts he could manage. Then, he grew used to the routine of texts sent with no expectation of a reply. After deciding to chase Celebi, though, he buried it away. He doesn’t know why he kept it charged. Instinct? Or maybe doubt?

As the plane rolls towards the gate, a text notification illuminates the screen a second time. Elesa. 

'Skyla says your plane landed. Enjoy passport control. Hope it’s easier without ten Pokemon on you for once.'

Followed by, 'I'm waiting by the Pokemart Express at arrivals. You owe me for being out this early.'

Anxiety flutters in Emmet's gut, enough to stop the impulsive response laden with a snark he lost all privilege to. Instead he sends a thumbs up emoji, twice, and promises a coffee on the way. There's a good coffee kiosk at the Driftveil Station concourse. A pain, perhaps, to sidetrack while changing to the Dark Green Line, but Elesa's more than deserving.

For good measure, he adds, 'Thank you for coming all this way. Especially early. You didn't have to.'

The plane rolls to a stop and Emmet watches three dots bounce on the screen while waiting for the boarding bridge to attach to the front of the cabin. Elesa usually texts quickly, leaving him wondering what she could be typing, considering, and deleting as he waits. 

The seat belt lights flicker off with a ding. Elesa responds, 'I didn't. I wanted to.'

Passengers from the seats behind him pass him by as he stares at the screen long after it times out, left with his dark reflection staring back. Emmet departs with the other stragglers, earning him, he's certain, a longer wait at immigration, but the impatient part of him is faraway. Uncertainty coils up him like a hungry Serperior, choking out the inertia that has carried him forward for all this time. 

He has a destination. No, a terminus. This terrifies him. 

Tall windows overlooking the taxiway have his reflection following his steps through the airport. Against his reflex to avoid mirrors, he watches it, wondering whether he can cobble together a version of himself familiar enough that Ingo would remember when he sees him. 

It's hard not to hold onto the hope that he himself would be enough to break Ingo's amnesia. It's idealistic, little different from the hope that he would be the one to bring Ingo home, but he can't let it go.

Washed out by the morning light, his reflection is something pitiful. Something honest. Would Ingo feel guilt, even without remembering him, when he sees the scant person left of him? Emmet can’t allow that. 

Maybe he can borrow that concealer from Elesa on the way and blot out the dark circles beneath his eyes, at the least. Emmet never remembered if it was him or Ingo she suggested it to. 

Picking up his team from Customs, Emmet delays at the threshold between the no-man's-land and Mistralton City. Above the one-way metal gate hangs a sign that includes directions to his subway, marked with a familiar blue-and-white symbol. 

He misses it. Even after all this time, all of his mistakes, he misses it. He never stopped wishing to go back, even if he knew he couldn’t face them. 

Elesa is waiting on the other side. Ingo is away. Emmet has to move forward. 

So he pulls together his smile and pushes through the gate, metal cold on his palms. He finds her waiting at the end of the fenced walkway leading into the concourse, with shorter hair and new headphones, lips pressed together in a frown he knows she's forcing. 

He stops an arm’s length in front of her. 

"Hi, Elesa." 

Everything about her today runs sharp. Direct, clean lines on the shoulders of her coat, around her eyes, the contours of her cheeks and jawline. Picture perfect and unapproachable, leaving Emmet waiting for reproach. He watches her wrestle with words, willing himself not to flinch when she finds the most damning ones.  

So it surprises him when her face crumples. Without warning,  her hand grabs a fistful of his shirt collar and she hauls him into her arms. "You idiot," she whispers, face burying into the crook of his shoulder and neck as he slowly lifts his arms, shaking, to hold her in return. "You asshole. You absolute trainwreck of a man. I missed you. I missed you so much I couldn't stand it." 

Was she the last person to hug him? A lifetime ago, in an apartment he gave up, after she uncovered the moment that ruined him and saw him for everything that he was? 

She was. Asking him why, how could he, she pulled him fierce and close with both anger and need, and it had felt like being burned alive.  

"I missed you, too," he says, quiet into her coat, meaning it in ways he doesn't have the words to convey. Hasn't he imagined this? What use was a script when being held, being wanted, steals his voice? He won't cry, not yet, even though his throat closes and eyes sting. He's not forgiven, just missed. "Thank you for being here."

She pulls back, and the departure of her weight and the warmth of her arms buckles him until she places her hands on his cheeks, holding his face close. "I wouldn't be anywhere else. I am personally hand-delivering you to your brother. I'm the greatest friend in the world, and neither of you deserve me." 

Emmet smiles wider, buoyant with relief and adoration, and leans his forehead against hers. "This is true. I am Emmet and I've never deserved you. I’m very lucky." His turn to pull back, and the novelty of proximity settles and anxiety rushes in to fill the gaps. His heart flutters in his chest with the desperate urge to flee, to curl in on himself, and her expression turns curious, if worried, as it shows on his face.

Anchoring himself with a deep breath, he says, "Don't pretend for my sake. You can be angry." 

She blinks at him, and he can see the shocks of red around blue irises from her own held tears. And then she laughs, soft like song, and drags him into another hug. "I can be," she says, threading a hand into his hair and ruffling it. "I am, sometimes. But I can choose to be happy, too. Happy that you're home. Happy that Ingo is alive, that he's back and safe and still himself, in all the ways that matter. I think, after everything, all the hurt and regret, we get to move on and get better. That's what I want for myself." 

"I ran away. It feels--" 

"I don't care." This time she steps back, holding out a hand for him to take. "I'm being selfish this time. I get to decide for myself how I move forward. And, if you ask me, you should think about what you really want. If holding yourself accountable is just a way to punish yourself with the anger you think we deserve, then where does that leave us? What if we want it to be different this time? What if we want it to be better?"

Emmet looks at her hand, delicate with nails perfectly painted. It's not forgiveness. It's compassion. It's a start. 

He takes it. 

With a single squeeze, she leads him through the concourse and down into the airport's bowels of moving walkways leading to parking garages and taxi stations, until the deepest part gives way to a familiar platform just beyond a turnstile gate. Elesa holds a pass out to him with a wink. 

The Brown Line thrums beneath his feet, like an electric current up from the soles of his boots through the core of him. Emmet can't manage to sit down, too alive with the sensation of being on a train again, even as anxious anticipation writhes under his skin. The lulling motion keeps him above water, a finite experience to focus on instead of the questions and fears that threaten to pull him under. He visualizes the southbound length of tunnel, the state of the tracks when he left and the repair schedule of the older cars that run along the Brown Line. He does not ask about Ingo. She does not ask about his travels. Companionable silence sprouts from the unspoken agreement to leave it for later. 

Or, so he thought, until Elesa nurses a to-go coffee on the second train and taps a button on her headphones, looking up to him and saying, "He remembered you. You and Chandelure. Only an impression, not even your names, but you were who he was searching for. You're who he meant to come home to." 

Caught off guard, Emmet's grip wraps tighter around the hanging handhold as something between a sob and a curse crawls up his throat. Chandelure's pokeball, unusually still since she returned to it a day ago, vibrates at his hip.

Meanwhile, Elesa continues. "I thought he was you, when the agent called. When I decided to believe him, I was deciding to believe in you as well. There was lying the first time. There was leaving. But you wouldn't put us through it all again. Was I right?" 

Automatic honestly takes over, leaving him lightheaded with the weightlessness of it. "In Alola I considered taking his name. I didn't want to be Emmet. It would have been easy. But I didn't. Nobody knew him there. Which meant nobody would notice that I was forgetting how to be like him. That would be worse than being me."

The train pulls to a stop at Iccirus City Station and Emmet waits for the jam of changing passengers to clear before catching Elesa's stare and finding the answer to her question. “I was killing him by pretending. The idea of him, at least. Coming back to Nimbasa without him would mean I gave up. That person would have died before giving up what was left of Ingo, too."

Elesa looks down at her coffee cup in her lap, fingers tracing the inset rim of the travel lid. Without turning back to him, she asks, "Would you have ever come back? What if you found out where he was?" 

Ah. 

The line between Iccirus and Opelucid is direct, laid almost perfectly straight. Under the best conditions, this train can traverse the distance between the stations in three minutes and twenty eight seconds. In the two minutes remaining, Emmet could delay and obfuscate until the train comes to a stop and they're distracted by the journey out of the station and through Opelucid. He could avoid the question. 

"I did." 

Elesa's hands slacken around her cup and Emmet has to swoop low to catch it before it clatters to the floor. The paper is lukewarm in his hand and the untouched coffee sloshes as the train starts to slow. He holds it out for her, and elaborates. "In Sinnoh. There's a record of him there. I was in Johto to find Celebi."

Instead of taking her cup, she wraps a hand around his wrist. He doesn't look away. Neither bravery or penance silences the instinctual compulsion to hide. But he's tired of hiding. 

As the train pulls up to the platform, Elesa says, "So you wouldn't have come home."

The doors slide open with a pneumatic hiss. Her stare does not break. There's a nuanced answer, where he admits that he half expected Celebi to reject him entirely, but there's no need. She's not looking for the complexities, the versions of this four contingencies deep where he just may have returned. She's looking for the truth. 

"Not without Ingo." 

Against the odds, she smiles, even as tears well in her eyes. Pulling herself to her feet with his arm as leverage, she shakes her head and says, "Same as ever. Both of you are, despite everything." He realizes this is what she meant by choosing to be happy. Pulling his wrist, her full coffee still abandoned in his hand, she strides towards the platform beyond the car. "Come on. Let's go get him."

Emmet wonders if she's right. The train pulls away as they make towards the stairs, a two-beat rhythm of wind rushing between the divisions of the cars at once so familiar and something he could have forgotten in time. Something that Ingo did forget. The station leads them along diversions, away from maintenance along aged walls and outdated machinery. Had he scheduled these repairs in a spreadsheet somewhere nestled within their ten-year plan? Or did it arise as needed, the facilities worn by unanticipated errors of time? 

Change renders Opelucid unfamiliar, too, but the route from the station to his uncle's house is the same. It's Opelucid and not. He is Emmet, the one in Elesa's memories, and not. His devotion to Ingo makes him who he was. The weight of grief and distance and want wore him into someone he hardly recognizes, like developers building over the bones of the Opelucid he remembers. 

With amnesia, there's no one for Ingo to compare him to and find him wanting. Except Ingo remembered him. The idea of him. And maybe that's worse, needing to measure up to a concept. To Ingo, Emmet is--was--a goal, a direction. A trajectory. Now they've finally found each other and Ingo has to live with who it is he was looking for. 

Could Ingo feel the same? 

Maybe that's being generous. Maybe it doesn't matter. 

It's always a surprise, years out from his adolescence, that the archway entry to Uncle Drayden's house isn't as towering as he remembers. Somehow the door remains equally as foreboding, height no match for the authority that pervades its wooden facade. Knowing it's unlocked, knowing that he's expected, Emmet opens the door. 

The moment he steps past the threshold, Chandelure bursts from her pokeball and into the foyer, her cry echoing up the high walls. Her flames burn brighter than he thinks they have since they lost Ingo, and the sight of her happiness brings a wide, heartfelt smile to his face. "Go on," he whispers as doors and footsteps creak upstairs. "I'll be right behind you."

She looks at him, eyespots narrowing, for a long moment before she trills, short and bossy. "I promise. No more diversions," he says, hands raised in surrender, and without further delay she floats up and through the ceiling. 

Elesa chuckles. "I hope he's expecting her. Ghost Pokemon versus his new survival instincts seems like a bad match." 

Footsteps that had been thudding along above them resolve into Iris, leaning around the curve of the stairwell so she's visible at the top. "I warned him! When Chandelure didn't come with the others, I expected she might be eager." Taking the steps two at a time, Iris, taller and lanky, bounds down the stairs and into the foyer, stopping just short of throwing herself at Emmet. She comes up to just above his shoulder, now.

As Iris motions to say something, stepping closer, a voice resonates from the floor above, low and loud, carrying in an effortless way that Emmet never quite got right. Emmet's muscles seize, his teeth grinding as his jaw locks, the greeting he owes Iris lost as his heart jumps against his chest. 

Ingo is really here. 

A desperate glance at Elesa has her abandoned coffee back in her waiting hands and his pack tumbling to the floor. Iris smiles softly as she steps backwards to give him a direct path to the stairway. "Welcome home, Emmet. He's in the guest room. The one with the balcony."

"I--" The route emerges in his mind's eye, up the stairs and back over the mezzanine to the set of rooms in the back, but he hesitates. "I should wait. It's been very long. I should greet Uncle Drayden. I shouldn't just--" 

"Go. It's okay. We'll be here." 

His feet carry him without another thought, guided on a track to the room where he'll find his brother. Upstairs, he can hear Chandelure's excited chimes between bouts of Ingo's voice, alternating as if in deep conversation. The urge to sob gathers thick in his chest, caught on the desperation that he holds himself together just a little longer, all the cobbled and chipped pieces of him that threaten to crumble at the sound of Ingo's voice. 

The door stands open, a couple paces away, and Chandelure interrupts Ingo's praise to trill inquisitively, presumably sensing his approach. A shuffling, the sound of an unfamiliar Pokemon sniffing and a chair scraping against hardwood floors, follows. Emmet relaxes, tendon by tendon, his clenched hands and clamped jaw. A pace away now, he knocks twice on the wall beside the door and allows himself one unsteady breath before finding his voice. 

"Ingo?"

The chair scrapes again as Emmet rounds the doorframe. Ingo is half-way standing, one hand clasping white-knuckled on the arm of the chair and the first thing Emmet notices is the scar that runs between his knuckles up to the edge of his bunching, oversized sleeves. Eye contact seems suddenly impossible. 

Look at him. Look at his face. He's here. He's real. Just look. 

"Emmet." 

His tone takes on a raw, hoarse edge, the name barely more than a breath. And still it’s as much a command as a plea, dragging up Emmet's chin until his eyes meet their perfect match. He doesn't know what he expects to see, already having forgone any hope of recognition. Perhaps the same haunted, dissociative emptiness from the photograph. Perhaps the determined desperation moments before he fell. 

Not a smile. 

And yet there it is, slight and fond beneath watery eyes and an upturned brow.

Emmet spent a lifetime learning to read his brother's subtle expressions. With so much clear on his face now, he's almost at a loss. 

He isn’t prepared for affection. 

"Emmet," Ingo says again, releasing his grip on his chair and stepping closer. Behind him, the sliding door to the balcony stands open, framing him with morning light as a gentle breeze stirs the sheer curtains. Chandelure floats beside him, and a Gliscor hovers nearby, head tilted as it looks between Emmet and Ingo. “I have missed you. Even when I didn’t know what and who I was missing. I knew...”  

He falters, voice breaking, then redirects. “I have only ever known home as finding you."

Emmet's throat closes, vice tight, and chokes out any possibility of responding, whether or not words would eventually come. 

Ingo looks away. "I wish I could be the person you spent so long searching for. For myself, and for you, I wish I knew more than this sense that I am meant to be where you are. That we are a two-car train. But I only remember the idea of it and what others have told me about us. About you. About me."

Emmet realizes what Ingo is trying to say. Every word of it pervaded with apologies Emmet has not earned and regret Ingo does not deserve. Changed or not, he can imagine his brother in this lonely room, running over the speech in his head so that he could get it right, as if Emmet wouldn't understand him implicitly. As if Emmet can't read the hopeful anxiety, the self-doubt, in his halted gestures and careful, gentle tone. 

This isn't how it is supposed to go. 

"You," Emmet starts, an awful choked sound that tears from his chest. "Ingo, you lost everything. You lost your home. Your memories. And you made it back anyway. But I left you nothing. Not our apartment. Not Gear Station, or the Battle Subway. Not our family unscathed. I wasn't here when you arrived. Don't apologize. Please. I can't--"

"Emmet." Firm and sure, Ingo can still play the older brother when it counts. "I didn't set my course home in order to arrive at a forgotten apartment, or a job I could no longer perform. I don’t know, yet, how to feel about all that happened. There is so much I still don’t understand. But I wanted my family, not my life as it once was. And they are here, changed like I am changed, but still here. What matters to me now is that you came home.”

The spell of tentative distance breaks and Emmet rushes forward, gripping hands on Ingo's wrists. "Of course I did. Where else would I be? I didn't want to leave. I didn't want to lie. I just wanted you back." 

"I am back," Ingo says, winding his arms around in Emmet's grip to clasp his forearms in return, the pressure of calloused fingers solid and real. "What do you want now?" 

Gray eyes exactly like his own bore into him, waiting with endless patience and no less exacting for it. Emmet falls silent, without a coherent answer for a question he'd never thought worthwhile. Perhaps at his worst, when wanting to find Ingo was secondary to wanting to end the lie, he knew. But, now, in this version of himself that's supposed to live in the aftermath? Where he no longer needs to wonder what Ingo would do because Ingo is here where he belongs? 

Emmet knows what he doesn't want. He doesn't want to hurt anyone. He doesn't want Ingo to hate him for what he did. He doesn't want to live haunted by the worst version of himself. 

He doesn't want to be alone anymore. 

"I…" he whispers as surety strikes, holding fast to the last truth he has. "I want us to be brothers again." 

It's as easy as breathing, from their clung lifelines on each other, for Ingo to pull Emmet forward and into his arms. Emmet sags there, feeling the knot in his chest finally snap as he chokes in a gasp that falls apart into a sob. Then another. And for the first time in years, since he found himself alone on the rails with a snapped Xtransceiver and an abandoned kit all that was left of his brother, he lets the tears fall. 

Voice breaking, Emmet buries his face in Ingo's shoulder and wails there, hoping to smother his inarticulate grief in the tangible warmth of his brother's presence. Ingo's arms hold strong even as his body shakes with sobs of his own, keeping them both on their feet until it becomes too much and he lowers them, gently, to the floor. 

Knees press bony on hardwood to remind Emmet that he's real, that he has a body and hasn't been swallowed entire by the agony that he buried beneath easier pains. The ache inside of him that screamed for years, it should have been me, it was meant to be me, finds itself eclipsed by the reality that it had not been and he had to live with that. 

No matter how much he begged, lied, pretended and fled, Ingo fell and he didn't. Ingo saved him. And it hurt. Fuck , it hurt. 

But it didn’t kill him. 

And Ingo found him again. 

"I'm sorry," Emmet croaks, hiccuping around an attempt for air. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I thought it would be better if I was gone. If I fell. I thought they'd rather have you. They didn't. It still hurt. So I gave it all up. Everything you saved. I don't know if the person you fell for survived, Ingo. I'm sorry."

Ingo folds tighter around him, pressing Emmet close with a gentle hand on the back of his head, fingers threading in unwieldy, overlong hair. Emmet anticipates some admonishment, for Ingo to disagree that Emmet is beyond repair, but Ingo only holds him close. Expecting denial, Emmet finds instead unconditional acceptance in whispered, wordless comforts and the refusal to let him go. 

And so he breaks again, another guttural sob and frantic whispered apologies. "I'm sorry," he repeats as sobs themselves, torn from the very core of him and spilling out like the hot tears that run damp into Ingo's shirt. 

"I'm sorry.”

Black fabric runs smooth between bruised fingertips as Emmet makes a terrible decision for the second time. The matching hat bears down on him like a steel plate fixing the line, and he can feel himself shrink beneath its weight as he steps in front of the bathroom mirror. Drawing each sleeve of the wrong coat painstakingly over his arms, he bites down on the inside corners of his mouth until he tastes iron, until the frown sits right. To his false reflection he clears his throat and pitches his voice low and loud to say, “I am the Subway Boss Ingo,” but his voice breaks before the title and he drops hands on the cold countertop to cough or retch or both. 

“I’m sorry.”

“Emmet?”  Elesa says and the two syllables of his name, his own name, are like shards of broken glass at the moment of shattering, ringing in his ears. Her hands are wrapped around his, and she holds him because he's already disappeared once. He hates her, then, for loving him. For missing him. It burns in his voiceless throat and crawls up his skin like rot. How can she look at him like he's been resurrected when he robbed her of her rightful grief? The footage plays on, his pathetic howls for the brother he failed countless times since mercifully mute, and eventually he gets what he wants. Elesa drops his hand and pulls away, disbelief shifting to horror as she says, “Emmet, what have you done?”

“I’m sorry.”

The keys to what was once their apartment are heavy in his hands as he drops them into the waiting palm of the building manager. There’s a taxi outside weighed down with six sealed boxes holding everything that Ingo left behind. Except his Pokemon. Except his brother. The manager smiles at him in a way that is impossible to read, and Emmet finds that he does not care what she thinks. In a month, maybe two, he’ll fade from her memory along with every trace of him left in Nimbasa City. Good. As a last goodbye, he stuffs three letters into the outgoing postbox and hopes it’ll be easier to be forgotten. 

“I’m so sorry.”

Wyndon is small from the hotel rooftop, shining gold and blue beneath the overcast dark. Cold raindrops kiss his upturned face, sporadic and then ceaseless, as he wonders if somewhere else Ingo is underneath the same sky. He wonders if Ingo is anywhere at all. Chandelure hovers beside him, glowing meekly, her presence a protest. “He’d never forgive me,” he says, his best and last excuse. “But I don’t know if I want him to.” When the rain soaks his clothing and the cold seeps into his bones, Emmet finally steps away from the edge. Tomorrow, the day after, and all the days to follow, he will decide whether the choice was cowardice or bravery. 

" I'm--" 

Ingo stays with him as words devolve again into sobs and then gasps, and when Emmet's tears have finally dried, Ingo says, "I forgive you.” 

A breath, hands drawing away and landing on his shoulders as Ingo pulls back to look at him, eyes red and crying still.  “We survived, Emmet, both of us. It hurts now, it may always hurt, but we will be okay again.”

Grief is a dark tunnel, the lighting defunct and the signals defective. When a light emerges, a sign of the end, it’s as easy to anticipate an oncoming train as it is a refuge. Standard Operating Procedures demand he carry a light of his own, but he had left it behind when he started down these tracks alone. Navigating the dark for so long, Emmet’s instincts pull him back towards shadow, knowing this grief better than he knows himself. He can believe that it will always be agony. He can assume that he will never recover. 

He can choose to think that what good was in him died that day.

But Ingo holds him there, hands steady and real, asking him to trust that there’s more to him than his pain and his mistakes. 

Ingo says, “I promise.” 

Emmet believes him. 

Chapter Text

In time, life goes on. 

Morning comes, as it must, and Ingo folds his pillow over his head and screws his eyes shut as if he has any chance of survival. From her perch on the wall above him, Chandelure whines a warbling decrescendo and returns to her pokeball with a hiss and a click to rest undisturbed. Ingo has no such luxury.

Thirty seconds later, light from the hallway stains his eyelids in filtered fluorescence as three short knocks rap against the doorframe. 

"Making no progress, I see."

Ingo curls up smaller beneath the blankets. 

A chuckle. "I recall somebody saying we could afford no delays today. Right, Gliscor?" With a theatrical sigh, Emmet adds, "Well. I trust you will keep him on schedule. He'll thank us later. Probably." 

With a flutter of leathery wings, Gliscor--the traitor--yanks the comforter from Ingo's vise grip and drags him bodily into consciousness. The apartment beyond the bedroom walls rouses with groggy chitters and low whines, hushed by Emmet's voice in soft, chiding tones.

Gliscor churrs, prodding him on, and Ingo sets one foot and then the other on soft carpet, willing his sleepy systems to start up. 

How easy it has become to be comfortable again. 

After indulging in such luxuries as toothpaste, a hot shower, and clean pressed clothes, Ingo emerges into the living room resembling a human being once more. He sidesteps the still dozing Pokemon collected in, on, and underneath the couch to find in the kitchen a waiting plate of eggs and a chipped mug of coffee. The mug is one of the old ones, displaying a cross section of an old wood-and-steel locomotive, bought at tourist prices from a long out-of-business shop in Anville Town. Neither of them can remember the trip, but Ingo-before-Hisui had kept it and, therefore, so had Emmet. Ingo, it turns out, was always more sentimental about their ephemera. 

There are moments of a past life that Ingo may never fully recall surviving in the pieces of another him that Emmet kept in spite of the odds that they would waste away in sealed boxes, left to gather dust in Opelucid.

Nevertheless, Ingo does remember. His memory is not linear, nor complete, and yet his world is now more familiar than it is not. That is more than enough. 

So, Ingo takes the mug in both hands and joins Emmet on the fire escape. His brother leans out on the overlook, absentmindedly petting Archeops perched beside him on the railing as he watches Nimbasa ebb and flow along its daily routines beneath them. The morning sun bathes the city in light, the harsh heat off glass and iron allayed by the breeze that sweeps in from the nearby canal. 

Emmet hums a soft acknowledgement, feeding his last scraps of toast to Archeops. He steps up onto the railing as the Brown Line train emerges from underground to surge across the stretch of elevated rail that leads it out and over the bay towards Driftveil. Somewhere between begrudging and fond, Ingo grabs a fistful of his shirt as Emmet folds out over the ledge and lifts a hand to check the time on his Xtransceiver, muttering, "It's forty-six seconds behind schedule today." 

Ingo snorts and says, "You'll have ample opportunity to ensure Gear Station is aware when we arrive this afternoon." Then, pulling Emmet back onto the solid landing as the last rumbles of the passing train dissipate, he adds, "Are you certain you're ready?"

Dropping back on his heels and rocking there, Emmet shrugs. "Nope. But I am tired of waiting." He glances over his shoulder, and there's a familiar spark in his eyes that Ingo has missed dearly, once he remembered what to miss. "Are you?" 

"I suppose that depends whether you are asking if I am ready or if I am tired of waiting." The answers are the same. Anticipation burns beneath his skin like wildfire, setting his deep-rooted, gnarled insecurities and fears aflame. What will grow from the ashes is yet to be seen. 

Emmet grins. "Both. Neither. I can tell either way." Extending an arm out for Archeops to clamber up onto his shoulders, his heft unheeded, Emmet pivots to face Ingo head on. "You waited for me. Thank you."

"This is not something I wanted to do without you." 

Emmet's expression softens, almost imperceptibly, and Ingo wonders if it's too much pressure, too soon. There is a disparity between them here, as is too often the case these days. Any foray into the public eye would not go unseen or unnoted. Returning to the station at all, notwithstanding their plan to take on the Circuit, would be far from subtle. Between them both, Emmet has more to answer for when the public asks questions.  

But Emmet says, "I know. I'm glad." There's more to it than that, Ingo knows. He had learned and then remembered, and learned anew thereafter, how to understand implicitly all the things Emmet leaves unsaid. 

There is more to it than being glad , certainly, where unspoken is that Emmet had done it alone and couldn't survive it. But, what Emmet wants is no less evident, even in fewer words. 

And how easy it is to want the same thing. Even after all this time. 

"You told me we could do anything. Go anywhere. We have seen worlds outside Nimbasa, now," Emmet continues, nudging past him and bumping a loose fist light against his shoulder as he climbs back into the apartment. "I never needed worlds. Our subway is enough." 

A clatter follows, Ingo turning to watch Gliscor and Archeops compete for precedence at the food bowls as Emmet makes for the kitchen to feed them. The others that stayed out overnight would be soon to follow, awake finally with breakfast in reach, and their little apartment would come alive with their clamor. His own breakfast, now cold, waits. Ingo has a schedule to keep, with no room for delays, though the temptation to idle beneath the morning sun and marvel at what they rebuilt holds fast. He hesitates. 

"Besides," Emmet calls from inside. “It isn’t living to hide like this. It is easy to be afraid. But what if I wasn’t? What if I was brave?” He leans around the doorframe, grin all teeth and eyes brighter still, alight with resolve. “I’m done hiding. I want to live.”

Emmet weathers the eyes that follow them through Gear Station like a seasonal storm. All rain stops eventually, he knows. What threatens to flood as likely runs its course, given time. 

They are fewer now, anyways, after the news of Ingo's return faded from headlines to gossip and then to a curiosity at best. All what a shame what happened or all's well that ends well that Emmet doesn't bother to begrudge. The ever mercurial public will muse and whisper until something more interesting arises, and while he and Ingo may not fade into obscurity, they will at least be ordinary. A part of the Nimbasa City scenery once more. 

Or not. 

Emmet supposes that depends on today. 

Elesa thought taking on the Multi Circuit first was ostentatious. He doesn't disagree, but would think that she knows the value of a decisive debut. 

It's hard to do things by half-measure when he's a half made whole again. 

Which is to say that the consequences of scrutiny no longer outweigh the sheer mass of his longing. To take on the Super Multis before applying for the job serves as a twofold proof: that he has the ability and the stomach for it. After all, it's possible to want things that he can't survive. Better to know for sure before throwing his proverbial hat in the ring. 

Ingo walks ahead of him, through the turnstiles and down the long escalators to the platform bay with his shoulders back and head high. By now he's a familiar sight at Gear Station, an exception easily made early on allowing him to spectate Elesa's weekly bout on the Singles circuit. Emmet had even encouraged him to return formally, given that his battle aptitude was no less intact. 

It would have been easier if Ingo outright asked Emmet to join him. Instead, his awful, perfect, endlessly patient brother admitted that he had considered such tracks, and asked Emmet what route he saw himself following if Ingo returned to their original station. No expectation, not until Emmet admitted he couldn't imagine wanting anything else and Ingo sagged with relief. 

What they wanted hadn't changed, but they had. Ingo's caution stung in the moment, but Emmet realized early on that there’s more joy to be found in being able to remind Ingo that he doesn’t have to be alone, than there’s loss felt in the reassurance being necessary. 

How could he take it for granted when being together is all he ever wanted? 

At the threshold between the concourse and the Yellow Line platform, Nate meets them in Depot agent greens. He pulls into a sturdy salute that's undercut by the wide, toothy smile that breaks free before he can contain it. "Bosses Emmet and Ingo," he says, dropping his salute but not his smile. "What can we do for you today?" 

Emmet steps up to Ingo's side, adjusting his civilian cap and wrinkling his nose. "I am Emmet. I have never been your boss. Stop that."

Ingo chuckles. "I'm afraid it doesn't matter whether we supervised them or not. The title stays. I have long suspected it's a campaign to see us back onboard." 

"Is it working?" Nate asks, deadpan.  

Emmet feels laughter bubble up in his chest, quelling just enough of his unease at being seen in the station that he lets his guard drop with the tension in his spine. It wouldn't be so simple, he knows, were his presence here less a novelty. But Elesa had told him not to overthink others' trust, to stop treating kindness like a finite resource and to stop treating people like traps laid in wait. 

Gear Station hadn't given up on him yet. 

Ingo says, "Before we consider anything of the sort, best to run a general overhaul to ensure there will be no unanticipated disruption were we to return to service. Am I correct that you're manning the Super Multi Circuit today?" 

Once the matter of their eligibility for a Super Circuit is settled, less an exception and more a tacit acknowledgment that the two architects of this battle facility were more than qualified for its premier challenge, Nate directs them to the rear car with a spring in his step. News of their intentions wouldn't last past the first round of lunch reliefs, Emmet expects. 

No going back now.

The train kicks into gear as they take their positions at the end of the car, and Emmet watches recognition bloom in the faces of the first pair of trainers. Their prepared lines are too quiet for him to hear over the exhilaration that thrums in his ears as Ingo reaches for Chandelure's pokeball at his hip. Eelektross vibrates in his hand. 

Emmet makes eye contact with the camera in the far rooftop corner. He grins. 

Four electric whirs wash the interior in infrared and Emmet remembers how joy can taste like iron pluming in his lungs.

Overheat fogs up the windows and leaves gray soot stains on vinyl and hard rubber. They proceed to the next car. 

Discharge sends the information displays into haywire flashes of white and neon until the leftover static electricity dissipates in a wash of ozone. They proceed to the next car. 

Earth Power erupts underfoot and the aftershocks reverberate along the curved metal walls, flooding the cabin in dust and grit. They proceed to the next car. 

Close Combat hits in time with the two-beat rumble of the train jumping along the rail, one-two punch in tandem with the beat of his heart loud against the wall of his chest. They proceed to the next car. 

Ingo smiles, throwing out his arm to call out commands in perfect time with Emmet, as if nothing changed and they never stopped fighting at each other’s side. Emmet laughs without thinking, without trying, without wondering whether he has the right. 

They proceed to the next car, and the next and the one after, on and on in seven groups of seven as the Yellow Line carries them along the east coast of Unova and back again. 

When they reach the forty-ninth, Iris forgoes her lines entirely and asks, "Did you pick today on purpose?" Her wry tone isn’t enough to hide the eagerness in each step as she takes her place at their opposite, nor the fire in her eyes. 

Beside her, Rosa beams. "Technically, they had an informant." She thrusts out an arm, wielding a pokeball out in front of her, red fiberglass glinting off the yellow safety lights pulsing beyond the car windows. "What's more serious than two Champions? And if a battle is not serious, well…" 

Emmet feels his breath catch, incredulous and delighted at once, and his smile pulls genuine. He and Ingo say at once: "Then it is not fun."

Mind's eye a perfect replication of their practiced motions, Emmet's arm follows its familiar arc in unison with Ingo's as Machamp lands heavy on the hard rubber floor with Gliscor fluttering beside him. The subtle lift of Rosa's brow, a sign of honest surprise from a favorite challenger, is a victory of its own. This surprise does not last. 

Serperior moves the instant it materializes, coiled form erupting out towards Gliscor bearing a Leaf Storm barrage in its wake. Leaf litter blades gouge leathery wings, and Gliscor retreats up to the ceiling, still unused to the limits of a subway car arena. But, at Ingo's call, he makes a high arc and dives down into Aerial Ace, returning Serperior's damage dealt in turn to send it tumbling back towards Rosa as the train dives around a curve. 

Iris's Hydreigon surges ahead with her raspy roar, Surf waters gathering behind her as she passes Serperior, waves collecting high in the center of the car before crashing over Machamp and Gliscor. The water dissolves as it ebbs at the toe of Emmet's boot, and Gliscor droops, awash in red light before he can collide with the floor. 

Iris cheers, calling Hydreigon back to her side, but Machamp already has his command. Undeterred, he catches Hydreigon's retreat with one arm and hauls it in to pummel it with the remaining three. Close Combat leaves Machamp panting where Hydreigon falls, vulnerable and in Serperior's coiling reach. 

But, then, that's the idea. 

Chandelure's chimes echo along the curve of the car where the walls become roof, the last of the damp evaporating at their feet. Serperior redoubles on Machamp with another Leaf Storm, weaker than the first and not nearly enough. Machamp weathers the blow, ice crystals accumulating on his fists. 

Chandelure soars to his counter-corner, no command necessary, Overheat building white-hot behind her glass. 

"Don’t get cocky!" Iris shouts, clambering onto the far seats as her Haxorus emerges amid the fray. 

And Chandelure is too close, filled with the same confident exuberance as Emmet, eager to fight again at Ingo's side. Haxorus is faster. Her axe-blades thrash into Chandelure's arms with outrage’s force, enough to throw her back and disrupt her attack. But Ingo, or Emmet, or maybe both of them, call out to her, anticipating Iris’s first move. Chandelure phases away and reappears behind Serperior as her flames combust the dry air around them. 

Serperior recoils, its spent leaves catching alight as it flutters to the floor, but there's nowhere to go. Rosa swears, almost laughing with disbelief, as her ace falls. 

Later, Emmet will recall that she once swept the Super Doubles with Serperior alone.

Machamp, emboldened, reels on Haxorus with frozen knuckles that slam into her soft underjaw. Ice webs up her muzzle and down her neck as she careens into the seats, forcing Iris to catch a handhold and swing back to the ground. Ingo is a breath ahead of him, shouting, "Please stand behind the yellow line, Iris!" 

Given how close Ingo gets to the fray during their daily spars, he wonders how tempted he is to violate their own safety precautions. 

Rosa, still fixed to her station at the far end of the car, holds her last pokeball close to her chest. With a pitcher's windup, she puffs out one cheek and throws the ball to the precise center between Haxorus and Machamp, forcing the latter backwards as a Volcarona materializes into his space. 

Out of the corner of his eye, Emmet sees Ingo rear back. It's rare, these days, to come across a Pokemon he doesn't recognize. Emmet laughs, surprised himself, and without thinking he flashes in a quick gesture their hand-signal for bug and fire types. Old habit, unlikely something Ingo remembers, but Ingo surprises him with a tight nod, hesitation forgotten.

The scales that shake from Volcarona's wings shimmer a purple veil and Psychic drags Machamp, crumpling, to the floor. It's Emmet's turn to swear, earning a withering look from Ingo before his attention turns back to Chandelure, temporarily outnumbered. 

And Chandelure should be slower than Haxorus, but the ice creeping along her claws constricts her reach. The dark energy collecting at Chandelure’s core rushes towards Haxorus faster than she can break free. Shadow Ball bursts on impact, dark tendrils coiling around Haxorus's form before collapsing inward, downing her with it. 

Eelektross emerges into the center as Volcarona readies Psychic again. Iris falls back on her heels and huffs, folding her arms over her chest. Defeated. The smile that she has to purse her lips to stifle gives her away. 

Speed is Rosa’s specialty, and Volcarona outspeeds them still. Chandelure falls in a kaleidoscopic haze. Emmet licks his lips, feeling Ingo's eyes on him as they both calculate the odds. At this size, with Rosa's training, Eelektross on his own would need three clean hits to knock out Volcarona. And Eelektross himself would be down in two. Rosa knows it, too, almost patient as Emmet reckons with where this will end. 

Or. 

Fuck the odds. 

Teeth flashing, Emmet throws out his arm in a wordless command and the first thunderbolt crashes down, rattling the car and searing the edges of Volcarona's wings. Eelektross reels to the side, careful to avoid the seats, as Flamethrower singes his flank. Surging up from below, Eelektross coils around Volcarona's abdomen and drags it to the floor. It tries again for Flamethrower, but not before white light floods the car and Thunder shakes the windows in their frames, power enough to blind him. Emmet doesn’t blink. 

The commotion starts before his eyes adjust, only Ingo's booming "Bravo!" louder than Emmet’s echoing eardrums drowning in a bloodrush thrum. And that could mean anything , given Ingo's love of a lost battle well fought, until he's hoisted up into the air in a bone-crushing hug as Ingo says again, "Bravo, Emmet!" 

Oh. 

They won. We won. 

Relief is rarely, if ever, the first feeling to resolve itself in the face of victory. Emmet loves winning, and therefore he always means to win. There is no reason for this to be any different, not in light of the forty-eight individual victories that led them here. Not when Emmet fought, day after day, to be Ingo’s even match again when his brother battles with a ferocity that Emmet only barely understands. No win is a given, but he hadn’t realized how easily he had accepted, as if to lessen the inevitable blow, that they could lose here.

And then what? 

Ingo sets him down as his vision clears, pulling back with his hands firm on his shoulders. “We have arrived--” Ingo starts, voice thick with pride and Emmet isn’t able to wait for him to say anything more, already rushing forward to gather his brother into his arm. And Ingo laughs, hands easily folding around him again as Emmet catches his breath.

He realizes, his brother solid in his arms, that he waited for years to be able to fight with Ingo at his side. That had been the plan for the Multi Circuits, an elegant solution to their longing to battle together for a change. Despite everything, the plan continued, realized by the team he had left behind. Or, written off. And so Emmet assumed they had written him off in turn, regardless of what anyone had to say about it. 

How long had he wasted believing moving forward was an uphill battle? Why had he assumed that to want, to hope at all, was fighting a losing fight?

Hasn’t Emmet always known that the best victories are fought for? 

It’s enough to make him laugh, the way a single win has him reassessing the losses he’s long accepted as simple reality in the name of avoiding the idea of a defeat he couldn’t come back from. I want to win so easily became I’m afraid to lose that he forgot why he loved winning in the first place. 

It comes as no surprise, then, that it took winning beside Ingo to remember. “I missed this,” he says into Ingo’s shoulder, feeling the moment close in on them. The waiting reality of what comes next steadily encroaches, footsteps slamming along the car floor as Iris and Rosa approach. For now, he draws back and musters up a quick, genuine smile. "This is where I belong. Where we belong."

Ingo nods, sharp and sure. "Then we know our destination." 

The train rushes onward, carrying them home. 

There's no shortage of attention waiting for them once the doors slide open at Gear Station. Ingo leads them out onto the platform to a gathering of reporters vying for a soundbite behind the barrier of harried Depot agents attempting to control the situation. However expected it may be, Ingo loathes to admit they created this problem for themselves. 

It doesn't sit right with Ingo that the public finds them so worthy of such attention. While Emmet is quick to take the blame, assuming his actions are the root cause of such scrutiny, Ingo wonders whether any version of events would have stymied the public's morbid curiosity. 

To hear Uncle Drayden tell it, it stems from their once-held role as leaders, but Ingo struggles still with why and how of it all. Irida was a leader, as was Adaman and even Kamado, and yet they weren't subject to such furor. Even when they made terrible mistakes, as Kamado certainly had. Hisui's public world was too small, too intimate, for drama of Nimbasa's scale. 

Then, Ingo supposes, Akari was a leader, in her way. There had been ample clamoring over the details of her inner life, and for that she had paid the price when that curiosity turned so easily, so suddenly to fear. What allies she had hadn't stopped the cruel whispers as her friends marched her out of Jubilife. 

His heart seizes, a familiar ache that finds him whenever he thinks of her, still out of reach with not a lead to guide him besides Sinnoh itself. Not now , he knows. Not yet.  

He would find her again.

Emmet, stepping down beside him, says, "We could run." 

Ingo hums, surveying the surrounding platform as the train pulls away behind them. "The only clear route directs us down the maintenance corridor along the tunnel, past the passenger cleared zones. Violating, if I recall, four different safety measures in one seems unlikely to support our case."

Throwing his head back with a groan, Emmet sags against Ingo's shoulder in mock dismay. "Can't run then. Could I tell them to get lost?" 

"Perhaps we could manage something marginally more diplomatic?" 

Emmet frowns, pulling himself straight and adjusting his hat low over his brow before clearing his throat into his balled fist. "Something like," he says, pitching his voice lower. "Our sincerest apologies, but we can provide no comment on our planned trajectories at this time. Please direct your questions regarding the Multi Circuits to the appropriate Station personnel." 

Ingo shouldn't be surprised that Emmet's imitation is so uncanny, given everything, but he’s caught off-guard all the same. Stuck between the urge to sputter some defense of his demeanor and to scold his brother for making light of what happened, he only manages, "Surely that will only make things worse."

Emmet's brief facade cracks, an easy smile blooming across his features. "I know. I'm joking. Elesa says humor is a coping mechanism." On a pause, he turns serious. "Trust me. I know." And with a sigh, he gestures towards the clamor and adds, "But it makes this seem small." 

He squeezes Ingo's arm and begins towards the waiting crowd. "Don't worry. It's different this time, so I'll be okay. Let me take the lead."

The agents shoot them both apprehensive looks as Emmet relieves them. Long strides take Ingo to his side right as the first microphone shoves its way into Emmet's face, Ingo forcing himself not to flinch while his brother manages to look unaffected.

"I am Emmet. We have a schedule to keep. We will answer one question per person, thank you!" 

"Are you returning to your roles as Subway Masters?" 

"Not our decision. Whether we return is at Gear Station’s judgment." 

The next microphone is thrust past Emmet, the attached question this time directed to Ingo. "Do you and Mr. Emmet intend to work in different capacities after your brother's resignation?" 

Swallowing unease, Ingo says, "I consider my own departure tantamount to resignation given the extenuating, private circumstances and expect to be evaluated accordingly upon my application." 

"Some questioned your suitability to lead, Mr. Emmet, during the fiasco following Mr. Ingo's disappearance. The Battle Subway certainly suffered in your brother's absence, whether or not we knew he was absent. Are you certain you're equipped to return to Gear Station, whether on the circuits or in an managerial role?"

Tension builds in Ingo's spine and at the base of his throat at the reporter's tone. It's not the first pointed question they have fielded. After word spread of his return, Nimbasa closed in on them with endless curiosity, and after Ingo's reappearance ceased being interesting enough, the questions turned to his thoughts on Emmet's lie.

Ingo, it turns out, is a less patient man than the city remembers. 

So Ingo moves to advance on the reporter before his brain makes the decision to intervene, held at bay only by Emmet's hand seizing his wrist and pressing twice. 

"I am Emmet. I resigned because I was not suitable to lead. That was then. I am not asking for your trust. Nor your forgiveness. If Gear Station determines I am worthy of a second chance, I intend to earn it. Decide then for yourself whether I am equipped for the job I'm tasked with."

Emmet's grip tightens, and another microphone breaches his space despite it being well past enough. Ingo clears his throat and shoves the microphone out of Emmet's face with his free hand. "As my brother said, we have a schedule to keep. Our conversation has reached its terminus. Good day." 

The hand around his wrist drops. Ingo nods curtly and steps back for Emmet to lead them away. The Depot agents converge again on the media personnel as Ingo follows his brother towards the concourse, through the gates, and to the staff offices at the far end of the atrium hall. 

Managing three careful knocks on an office door, Emmet rushes inside the moment they're invited in and slumps into the nearest chair, dropping his head into his hands. 

An agent, in a uniform indicating a member of the leadership staff, says, "Make yourself at home, I guess?" 

Ingo stares at him for a long moment, searching for recognition, while Emmet breathes heavy through his fingers. "Just. A moment. Please. Thank you." 

Behind the initial agent sits a familiar woman at the desk, gray uniform an off-color match to their old coats. "Afternoon, gentlemen," she says, checking her Xtransceiver. "You're early, you know. Not that I expected you to run the entire Super Multis before showing up."

Inclining his head, Ingo says, "My apologies for the disruption. We encountered issues en route, however expected, and I elected to sidetrack rather than wait it out." 

She waves him off, sharing an amused glance with her colleague. Ingo recalls that he hired him, though he cannot remember his name. The irony of their positions now reversed is not lost on Ingo. 

"Not to worry. This will be quick, I think. After all, it's all well overdue." 

Emmet exhales sharply, something between a laugh and a sigh, and says, "I seem to recall making recommendations. Our positions remain vacant. Passenger and challenger numbers have only increased. Seems very unsustainable."

"You see, it's such a delicate balance, the skills needed to run the Battle Subway and the know-how necessary to fill the Stationmaster role." She smirks. "And you know how it's our policy to promote from within. Somehow nobody wanted the job. We’ve made do with subdividing the responsibilities among the division chiefs." 

Climbing to his feet, Emmet takes his place at Ingo's right. "Consider this our application."

Ingo huffs, adjusting his non-uniform cap and aching for the comfort of his old coat. "We know the process well enough, having designed it. If you'll have us, it's our intention to follow those tracks exactly. No exceptions, station greens and all." 

"You'll certainly need to recertify, Ingo, before we put you out on the platforms. And, Emmet, all probationary agents do a rotation in the desk-side offices. How does starting at the Communications and PR branch sound?" 

After a dramatic wince, shoulders pulling up to his ears, Emmet grins. "Deserved."

The other agent chuckles and says, "If I remember the stories, it took you boys three years to go from agent greens to the Boss's seat. And only after designing the Battle Subway from scratch to get you there. You sure you're up for this?" 

Emmet shrugs, sidelong glance meeting Ingo's. The light in his eyes returns once more, burning bright with confidence and pride, as if the question is answered just by Ingo's presence at his side. Ingo wonders, not for the first time and surely not the last, how he could have ever forgotten this. 

Beside Emmet, he feels alive again. 

So he knows his part. With his posture pulled straight and countenance sure, Ingo draws up the confidence of a Subway Master and a Warden of the Highlands at once and says, "We'll do it again in one." 

When the alarm peals at exactly five in the morning, Emmet wakes up well-rested. Chandelure chimes as she phases through the door, shedding warmth and soft light as Emmet sets one foot, and then the other, on the cold hardwood floor. Galvantula chitters at the end of the bed, stretching her pedipalps with her best insectoid approximation of a yawn. Emmet scratches her wiry fur, just where her carapace meets her abdomen, until her purrs ease her into wakefulness and she hops onto the floor beside him.

Gliscor meets him in his hall, swooping from his bookshelf perch onto Emmet's expectant shoulder while Chandelure phases ahead into the adjacent room. On the practiced count of three, he flicks on the hallway light and nudges open Ingo's door. Met with still silence, a moment holding its breath, Emmet grins and says, "Good morning, sunshine!" 

Sheets shuffle as Ingo pulls the blankets over his face. 

Emmet hums, glancing between Galvantula beside him and Gliscor on his shoulder. Chandelure expels a brighter burst of light with a gentle trill, showering the room in kaleidoscopic ember motes. Ingo groans and turns over to face the far wall. 

"Well," Emmet says with a sigh, "looks like I'll have to take over for the Single's today. What a shame."

Gliscor churrs in a manner very alike to laughter and leaps from Emmet's shoulder into the bedroom, landing at the foot of Ingo's bed to tug at the sheets.

Ingo concedes. 

Dawn shimmers off the canals through the fire escape window, where Emmet finds Archeops waiting. He taps his beak twice against the glass, and although Emmet grumbles about it, he lets in the crisp morning air as he always does. The others that slept outside of their pokeballs follow him into the kitchen, quiet and patient as he brews two cups of coffee and sets a pan on the heat before stooping to the lower cabinets to haul out their food. 

Ingo emerges, showered and fixing his tie, as Emmet feeds the fourth and last group, eyebrow raised as he tosses Garbodor the coffee grounds and allows Magnezone to hover at the floor outlets. "You spoil them, Emmet." 

Wordlessly handing Ingo his over-sugared coffee and a plate of hash browns, grinning again, Emmet downs his espresso in one swig and heads to the vacated bathroom. 

Razor lined up along his jaw, he hesitates. Ingo wears his beard as it was in Hisui, if better kept. After so long in cheap motels and on campsites, Emmet feels the most like himself clean-shaven. Yet he always hesitates, a fragile part of him afraid to look in the mirror and see only himself. 

Ingo's voice carries down the hallway, gentle affections to the Pokemon filtering through the door in low, resonant tones. Emmet closes his eyes, breathes deeply, and resumes his routine. 

Best to have some difference between them, Emmet accepts, once he dons his uniform at the entryway. Ingo slips the identical green coat over his shoulders and fits the hat tight over cropped hair, and Emmet is struck as he is every morning with the dissonance. Ingo with sunken eyes and a goatee in the same uniform they wore as barely more than teenagers. By now, though, the comparison feels like respite. 

There's a comfort in returning to where they began, a lifetime ago. Old uniforms suit them more than they would have believed. Change is relative when set in scale. 

At the station they part ways with tight salutes, Ingo to facilitate challengers on the Single's Circuit and Emmet to conduct on the Brown Line. Why Ingo would want an assignment so proximate to the battling he's not yet cleared for, Emmet doesn't know. Then, Emmet had forgotten how much he missed working all day on the trains. 

The Brown Line runs from Nimbasa to Anville via Mistralton, passing their apartment and cutting over the western bay to run beneath the old growth woodland north of Driftveil. From the cab, the tunnels coil in perfect curves aglow in electric yellow, each platform emerging exact to schedule from the dark in gray and white, busy with life. They arrive at each stop with perfect precision, Emmet verifying alignment with the platform with muscle memory accuracy, guiding the operator with the same point and call he wields in battles. 

The train carries over the tracks like his blood rushes through his veins, the thrum of both felt when he lays a gloved hand against the car wall. He is home. He is exactly where he belongs. 

How easily he took this all for granted, once. 

At half past noon, his train arrives for the fifth time at Gear Station, and Emmet alights for his lunch break. A glance at his Xtransceiver confirms that Ingo checked in on schedule, as he always does, and Emmet tries and fails to smother his relief. As Emmet taps out an update, an unfamiliar voice carries loud across the platform:

"Ingo!"

Emmet turns sharp on his heel, assessing the tone--surprised, excited, not panicked--and reviewing Ingo's schedule in his head, to find a girl, a stranger, rushing towards him. 

"Follow the rules! No running--" 

She slams into him, arms tight around his waist, and Emmet feels his heart rate spike and his posture go rigid. He is not Ingo . Who is she? 

The girl is no more than sixteen, from the brief glance he got of her, with long dark hair and an accent Emmet can't immediately place. Into his uniform jacket, she says, "I found you! Ingo, I kept contacting the station but they…" 

She stops short, pulling away and peering up at him with a furrowed brow and too-sad eyes. Her voice wavers as she asks, "Ingo? Don't… don't you recognize me? Don't you remember?"

Several realizations arise at once. 

The first: This is the girl Ingo met in Hisui, the one who brought him home. 

The second: She found him first. She came all the way here, from Sinnoh judging by her accent and Ingo's assumptions. All of Ingo's searching led to dead ends, and here she is at their station. 

The third: She is alone and afraid, and Emmet will not stand for that. 

"I am Emmet," he says first, and the girl--Akari, this must be Akari--rears back as if burned. He cuts off her apologies, holding up a staying hand and willing his strained smile to soften to something warmer. "Ingo is my brother. I am--" 

"You're the man in white! You were his twin? " 

Emmet nods, relief uncoiling the knot in his chest. "Am. I am his twin. He's here. He will want to see you. I can bring you to him."

"Please," she says, and he recognizes something desperate in her voice. He remembers the soft forest floor, his Xtransceiver cold and unfamiliar in his hand, and the realization that he was no longer alone. 

Without further hesitation, he holds out his hand. When she takes it, eyes wide, he leads her in a rush up to the concourse. "Don't uncouple from me," he calls over his shoulder. "It is very busy. Ingo will be very mad at me if you get lost."

Diving around milling passengers, around the bend and down the ramp to the Dark Green Line platform, they arrive at a queue of challengers approaching the Circuit facilitator. The Circuit facilitator who is decidedly not Ingo, despite Ingo being on shift. Panic rushes in with his heaving breaths, the need he suddenly feels to reunite this girl with Ingo foreign to him but no less real. 

"Emmet?" 

A small hand tightens around his. They both turn at once, finding Ingo standing at the edge of the battle kiosk with two coffees, one in each hand. Emmet watches his stare slide from Emmet to Akari, feeling giddy as realization blooms in the subtleties of Ingo's expression, in the slight upturn of his brow and how he blinks ever so slightly faster. When tears spring to his brother's eyes, he sets in motion. 

Dropping her hand, Emmet gestures for her to come with as he approaches, neatly relieving Ingo of the coffees at the moment just before Akari barrels into him with enough force that he stumbles backwards. Emmet knows firsthand that it takes quite the hug to stagger him.  

" Akari ," Ingo says, the name like something torn from his lungs. "You are here."

"It's Dawn. I remembered my name, I remembered who I am. I'm Dawn." 

Her familiarity resolves into a face on the motel television, a newscast of a missing Champion, just a girl, that Emmet couldn't stand to watch because back then all he could think about was how Ingo vanished too, a powerful trainer gone in an instant, and he couldn't stand himself for thinking about his own grief when a child was lost. 

Now, years later, Emmet can only laugh. At the coincidence, at the idea that he had known of his brother's savior before--or maybe well after, considering the time travel involved--she had saved him. At how he was right, she had disappeared like Ingo had, and he'd been too afraid of his grief for it to matter. 

It earns him a look from them both, and he's surprised that they even notice him over the full force of a long-awaited reunion. He manages half-bow with coffees in hand, and explains, "It turns out I have the Champion of Sinnoh to thank for bringing my brother back."

Ingo leans back from the hug to watch her nod, obviously flustered at the recognition, and he smiles that new smile of his and pulls her in close. "The twice Champion of Sinnoh, I would say. Dawn it is then." He brings up a hand to pet her hair. "Hello, Dawn. I've missed you." 

She sobs then, and her entire frame shakes as she holds onto him with what must be all of her strength. 

And Emmet understands. He knows the feeling, desperate and adoring, like he knows his own name. Like he knows his limits. 

It is the same as Elesa's smile, the one that scrunches her nose and crinkles her eyes, as they shared cheap takeaway on the fire escape of the apartment she found for them, watching the city they chose together a lifetime ago light up in neon, their hands one each in hers as another city night flickered to life. 

It is Iris's voice as it breaks, admitting that she's afraid they don't know each other anymore, that too much time had passed and she had been so young, before she insists that she wants to know them again, and them to know her as she is now. 

It is how Uncle Drayden reached for him as they set out again for Nimbasa, the veneer of two clean, firm handshakes forgone immediately and without reservation as he pulled them both into an unexpected embrace and held them there, a promise made unspoken and no less meant. 

And it is how Ingo's hands had trembled as he remembered falling, fingertips tentative as they reached for Emmet's face to find him real, alive and saved because of the courage of a man he only just remembered being.

Her relief, suffused with joy and hope and love, is the very same that catches Emmet by surprise every day, fierce with adoration and the knowledge that it easily could have ended differently. 

Dawn holds Ingo and weeps like Emmet had, and Ingo whispers hushed nothings into the crown of her head until the worst of it passes. It will pass, as all things must, where beyond the grief and fear and want is the simple truth of having survived it. 

And how lucky they all are, Emmet knows, to have made it here to the end to see that it is kind.