Takes place in Pokémon X, technically, since Xerneas is the life-giving legendary.
…but that was
infinities
ago
"Serena, Sycamore's pupils… Let us live forever… That's right! I shall grant you eternal life! I'll give you the pain of endlessly waiting for a beautiful world to finally be built!"
Behind her, the terrible pressure of the chamber bears down on her the knowledge that she has defeated a legend, ended a dream. Her Poké Balls are sweating in her fists. And she can't tear her eyes from the Mega Ring that pulses in Lysandre's gauntlet, as residual heat from her own bracelet sighs through her body.
Calem shouts at them to get out of there, leading the way, and she instinctually bolts in his direction. She can feel the weapon charging without having to look at it, feel the collecting of an ancient power that held Kalos captive thousands of years ago. Before she can reach the sterile white of those walls outside, Lysandre grabs her arm.
"Not you, my little savior," he spits. "You're staying here with me to watch this place come to ruin!"
Shauna and Calem jerk back, but it's too late: they're beyond the threshold of the chamber door, which slams shut at a gesture from Lysandre. Serena cries out, wrenching herself instinctively away from that impression of devouring flame. She fumbles for a Poké Ball, but there's no time—
—and the Ultimate Weapon looses its energy behind them, a flower in full bloom whose melody envelopes them in unbridled white.
When she next wakes up, in a bed in Geosenge surrounded by her friends, red and white afterimages still dance across her vision. She learns she's only been out for a few hours after they pulled her out of the rubble miraculously uninjured, but it's hard to focus on what they're saying, especially with Shauna bouncing next to her bed in excited relief.
"We were worried!" Tierno heaves a massive sigh. "But everyone's all right now. We healed your Pokemon too."
"Thanks, everyone." She does her best to smile, because they're all looking at her with such concern. "What happened to Lysandre?"
"We didn't find him with you." Trevor looks nervously at Tierno. "Actually, the police are still looking, trying to rescue members of Team Flare that got trapped underground, but they didn't find him yet."
Everyone falls quiet for a little bit, and she looks outside the window. Ages of stone laid bare on the upturned earth. Pillaged graves set right again.
"You got clipped by that blast of energy, didn't you?" Calem asks, his words sliding into the gap of conversation. "The one Lysandre said would make us immortal."
"I guess I did." No guessing about it; the memory is raw, an imprint of fire, an iron grip, the scent of hatred. "But I don't feel any different."
Shauna laughs nervously. "Immortality doesn't actually exist, anyways." Calem keeps his eyes on her a little longer, studying her quietly, the same way he looks at her after she wins a battle.
Later when they leave, she examines herself in the mirror just to be sure. Nothing feels new in her genes, and no strange new power haunts her movements. So she sets out for Anistar and then Couriway, and there is no right way to make peace with the ruins at the heart of the town. It's odd; after her friends split up at the crater, they really do mean move on, with barely a mention of the incident in following conversations. Even Professor Sycamore leaves the subject largely untouched. No one mentions her encounter with Xerneas, or the mysterious wandering king. In time, the red suits and mechanical flowers stop appearing in her dreams.
Whenever she pauses for a moment in Anistar, the feeling of drifting encompasses her, languid yet potent like the atmosphere inside Olympia's gym. The gym leader herself passed onto her the habit of lingering by the Anistar Sundial, which now Serena indulges in the light of a lazy dawn.
It's early, and the sun has not yet begun to pour through the chiseled cutout of the prism. She stands on the raised platform in front of the crystal, that hand rising from darkness to capture and twist the light, and looks out at the shadowy sea.
Then, sunrise. The rays pierce through the prism, and she's falling in the dream of sunlight, everything become white, all memory washed clean in the diamond sweep of warmth. She closes her eyes, allowing herself a rare moment of stillness, far from all thought of the coming day. How long she can stand here, she wonders, just here, in the focused rays drawn towards gold? It's terribly nice to have it all to herself.
But when she steps out of the light moments later, she is no longer alone.
Standing in front of the sundial is a familiar red-haired man, a memory nearly buried flaring to life again. She sees him before he her, but she's the more surprised; when he turns towards her, a shape stepping out of the light, his eyebrows merely furrow.
They stare at each other, she poised on the bottom step so that they meet eye-to-eye, memories of upturned stone and flashing red held in that unspeakable distance. Her mind flashes through the no-it-can't-be-possible and the what's-he-doing-here in a matter of seconds, leaving the familiar gravity of his presence. Unlike her friends, who drift through her journey like smoke on the wind, Lysandre is a heavy pull towards something she can't name, something that feels outside the frame of herself and her journey.
He's dressed in a dark suit instead of black leather, but looks no less intimidating. Finally, he gives a short bark of a laugh and turns away. "Don't look at me like that, I don't want to battle you."
Without meaning to, she's brought a hand to the Poké Balls at her waist. She remains defensively quiet.
He looks aside at the prism, its facets dancing with the new day. This is how she remembers him, shoulders down and head up, relaxed but poised to strike. "Even if I wished to, it wouldn't be wise on my part. I heard you became the Kalos Champion. Congratulations."
"Do the others know you're alive?" she asks, finally, in a low voice.
"That would be impolitic of me, to let them know."
"And are you still…?"
The sea behind them rolls for a long time before he answers.
"How could I, after your actions?" His voice, never loud but deep, fills the space between them. "Because of you, the world I sought recedes from me every day. Though I always had the feeling that you did not reject my ideals, or at least were willing enough to attempt to understand. Not like your fellow pupils, with their talk of sharing amongst many what can barely be claimed by one."
Her cheeks heat. "They're my friends."
"We will see how long your belief in them remains unwavering. You, too, will come to know what it means to wait and watch the world sink into entropy around you."
Dread rushes her, sour and acrid as if a Ghastly has breathed down her neck.
"No."
The mocking little smile at his lips echoes back her doubts. How else did you survive tons of rubble and limitless energy crashing down on you? How did I?
Dazed, unable to really accept this, she can only look at him in bewilderment. The dim seas that roil in his eyes put the placid ocean behind Anistar to shame. Royalty is bred on his face, and she can feel the weight of countless other secrets lying within that line she's unwittingly gotten mixed up in.
"I cursed myself with you. Perhaps together we will face the eons that await immortals." He gazes at the prism, whose thousand surfaces throw off dazzling light, thousands of gems cast at their feet. "But it is too soon to speak of that. I can't stand looking at you now; go."
Wordlessly, she steps down from the platform and turns towards Anistar proper.
Lysandre, despite his words, turns towards her as she passes him. "I will meet you again, someday, perhaps in years. Or maybe you will seek me out."
She wants to say no, cry out her revulsion, but she grits her teeth against unwise words and exits the park. Behind, the rings of the sundial turn over and over, churning out their ruthless minutes and yielding them to the world.
Lumiose City never changes. Always a new avenue to explore, a new restaurant opening up, a new selection of clothes at the boutique. She can spend hours in the cafés, watching the baristas welcome men and women from all walks of life with the same courteous smile. Sometimes she sits in one of the plazas and lets her Pokémon out to roll in the grass and frolic up to strangers, who will start conversations with her merely because she is pretty and young and seems like the embodiment of the city to them. Bonnie, the gym leader, once started talking to her, and it was all she could do to hope that the woman did not remember a time once when she claimed her badge from her brother and was hailed in the parade as a hero.
But anyways, Lumiose is a place to get lost in the piquant smell of galettes, the heavy clomp of Gogoat hooves, the dazzling arch of the Prism Tower. It's where she goes when she wants to be distracted from the rest of Kalos.
Perhaps that is why she never visits the museum, with its visions of the wide world contained in canvas. But today she enters, declining the greeter's offer to purchase an audio guide, and heads for the stairs.
There's a café on the second floor, newly built, with ceiling-to-floor glass walls. Seated at one of the tables, Lysandre looks the same as ever. She catches a glimpse of herself in a nearby window, and wonders how different she must look to him. She's given up high-waisted dresses and stockings for blouses and dark jeans, but she's still long, lean, honey-tressed. In full bloom and more radiant than she has the right to be. He, in a different suit than she last saw him, still looks like he could crush her in the palm of his hand.
She sits and orders a coffee. They both regard each other in silence, sizing up the measure of the years. His eyes still look like they have been cut from sapphires, shaking off their excess light but also reflecting into themselves, to some unknowable interior. He wears the Mega Ring on a band on his right hand, but there is only one Poké Ball at his waist.
She breaks the quiet first. All their words are swallowed by the murmuring of fellow visitors around them. "I'm no longer the Champion. That was one of the things I had to leave behind, if I didn't want people to start asking questions." He nods, and she finds herself continuing. "I can't meet with the professor or Calem and the rest anymore either. Even my mother… They keep leaving me messages on the Holo Caster."
"You should have changed your number." Lysandre takes a sip of his coffee. Always before there had been a righteous glint in his eyes, the look of a man brewing revenge, but now it's not quite so pronounced. "Do they think you're still alive? Just gone missing, perhaps? "
"No. My friends stopped looking for me years ago. Only Professor Sycamore thinks I might still be out there, wandering. He left me another message today."
"May I see it?"
She hesitates, but brings up the clip on her Holo Caster. They watch Sycamore's image strobe across the air and hear his voice, tinny as it is on the projection. He never could quell his habit of gesturing towards the person he was speaking to, even on camera. When the message ends, Serena returns the device to her pocket.
"He's aging well." Something like a sigh escapes Lysandre. "I was… fond of him, as his student. I will be grieved to see him go."
"You can't say that," she says, and he frowns at the sudden swell in her voice. "Professor Sycamore is the whole reason I was able to go on my journey and become the person I am. You can't just say that, like we're just waiting to… outlive him."
Lysandre has the good grace to remain silent, stirring another splash of cream into his coffee.
"Have you seen Geosenge?" she asks, voice trembling. "It's been years and they still haven't recovered from what you did. There's a gaping hole in the middle of their village, their whole economy is ruined because they can't depend on tourism anymore, and they've had to make room for human gravestones alongside the Pokémon ones on Menhir Trail."
"Had my plan succeeded, the damage would have been more than redressed in the new world. It's worse to leave things half-completed, as they are now."
"Don't you dare say the way things are there is because of me stopping you."
Serena's teaspoon falls to her dish with enough of a sharp clatter to elicit looks. Lysandre, before whom there could never be any weakness hidden, razes her with his stare. It's not fear or awe that he provokes in her like he did when she was a teen, but it still halts her with the reminder of all the royalty he gathers up into his being without so much as thinking about it.
"What I do say," he pronounces at last, "is that I should have never sought out the weapon, if there had ever been any chance of failure. But… it doesn't matter. In the long run, everything will be forgiven, forgotten, except you and me."
"Me! Even though I did nothing…!" she protests, bitter at long last. "I did nothing against the world, and you made me this way."
She looks down at her coffee to keep from tearing up. Why did you agree to meet with him? flashes through her mind more than once.
When the moment passes, she finds Lysandre looking past her, at the entrance to the galleries.
"Shall we look at the paintings?" he says, and there's ice in his tone, as if he doesn't deign to address her accusations. She nods, although inside she's still shaking with frustration. What power does she have to face him now, when Pokémon battles mean so little compared to the immensity of time that waits for them, a guillotine never to fall? He pays for their coffee and leads her out of the café.
"What have you been doing?" he asks as they stroll past the paintings.
"Traveling. There's a lot of Kalos off the official map they give you specific to Pokémon questing. I'm still battling, but less often. And I'm thinking of going abroad," she says, the words sounding hollow even to her. "I've heard Unova is a pretty fast-paced place."
Without being conscious of it, their steps have slowed in the gallery depicting Kalos's own history. I've been there, she thinks blankly at the paintings depicting Laverre's gym, or the Parfum Palace. And there. And there.
"How many years will you be able to stand this?" Lysandre murmurs as they wind a circuit through the galleries. Never having been able or perhaps unwilling to shed the importance from his demeanor or the intensity from his voice, he attracts many a curious glance. She wonders how she looks next to him, and has to remind herself that she's no longer a cringing child but a woman; and yet before him, it's all too easy to want to kneel. "Or perhaps you are the stuff of legends, with determination like the king's, ready to walk the world three thousand years in the hope of a glance of the treasure you pursue."
Abruptly, he turns on his heel. "Would you like to make a bet on who will endure longest? I, with my ideals, and you with your convictions about bonds, and friendship."
The breath catches in the hollow of her throat.
The next moment, though, he turns away.
"Forgive me. It was a foolish idea." And they continue on through the museum, walking through the quiet time capsule buffered against the rest of the world with its elegant placards and classical music. The knights and castles that peer at them, frozen in time, seem the two-dimensional representations of what they are now.
"Kalos in its glory days, and all of the bloodshed that colored them. I don't think even you would contest that things were simpler then."
They sit on a bench in front of one of the paintings depicting the great war. Pokémon and people rush forth in a blaze of sand and soil. The painter has exerted himself to labor over every last tuft of Zoroark's fur and flicker of Charizard's fire blast, resulting in a helpless tangle of details. In this way the painting is prevented from being impressionistic and glorifying war, instead shouting out its injustice in each minute rendering of a bent limb or broken sword.
Lysandre studies the painting, frowning deep enough to scare off any visitors who linger too long by the work, and she knows why, why she came to meet him and will never stop coming. Soon there will be nobody else.
Since she came back to Kalos, they've crossed each other's paths a few times, she crossing a bridge to find him sitting by the lake on the other side or some such coincidence. Mostly in Lumiose, which is how it happens now too.
They are sitting in a red café.
"Did you enjoy Kanto?" he asks, perfectly uninterested. Weather-talk as they wait for their coffees.
"It was a nice diversion. I got all the gym badges, but I didn't want to become Champion and then just leave, so I came back after that."
He nods, and gets up to bring their coffees back from the bar. One sip and he grimaces. "Even the coffee has gone to the gutter. I never hired baristas who couldn't brew a cup I personally approved of."
"I never came by while you ran it." She corrects herself. "To sit down and have a drink, that is."
The new owners kept nothing but the décor, not even the name. As to what became of the labs, she can only guess they've been converted to apartments, or perhaps private offices. The couples and artists that fill the café with excited chatter are a far cry from the red-suited grunts that used to haunt the place.
"I met the king while I was wandering," Lysandre says, and still after all these years, her stomach drops at the memory. "He was going off to die with his Floette. It was finally their time. Before he left, he told me something interesting. There are two legendary Pokémon in Kalos."
She stays quiet, sipping her espresso and studying him with eyes dulled neutral.
"You already know Xerneas." That's an understatement, she thinks, but the years have robbed her of the bitterness. "The second is Yveltal, the Destruction Pokémon. Every thousand years, it comes to the end of its life and absorbs the life energy from everything around it to keep on living. We are coming upon the end of a millennium now."
"Absorbs the life energy… You mean it might be possible…"
"If we find it before its life ends and if we communicate to it our circumstances… Perhaps we'll be able to sate its hunger, or, better yet, prove to fill it beyond its share."
She lets herself tremble at his words, because it's been so long since she's allowed herself to think of any end. Around them, the relic of this place so central to all that happened suffuses the air with overbearing memory. Framed by deep red, Lysandre is… no, she can't tell if she remembers what he looked like back then right, but the years have not softened his gaze. Still, it's perhaps the first time that she looks at this man with the wild red hair and thought of anything resembling hope.
It comes one day unexpected: a beeping light on her Holo Caster, the first message she's received in years upon years. Better technology has surfaced, but she's kept the device charged all those years just for this. She's in a café with a Rising Star, listening to his dreamy talk of gym leaders and championships and feeling nothing in all the places she should. Standing, she places a hand fondly on his head (was that too old of me?) and steps outside to play the clip.
Lysandre's face flickers in the air before her. "I found Yveltal. Come at once."
When the boy steps onto the terrace a few minutes later, the faraway jingle of a bicycle bell is he can find of her.
She's practically used to the modus operandi of legendaries by now—shrouded somewhere secluded, warranting a tiring climb and a battle before they would listen to you. Serena meets Lysandre at the city outside the forest, where they collect their supplies and enjoy a last cup of coffee. Somehow they've both come to depend on the stuff. It doesn't surprise her, these points of intersection. Over the years they've discovered a few of them: black coffee, mille-feuille pastries, summer afternoons spent by Rivière Walk.
It doesn't matter though, because there's been less and less to say, and they take more and more time getting to it. Now, as they stare at the dregs of their cups, sensing the absence of anything to do but go, she reaches for a question she hasn't asked in all their time. "You had eternity to come up with a new way to beautify the world, and you'd really cast it all aside here and now?"
He accepts the wheedling irony in her tone without offense. "As you were chosen to have the potential to change the future, I was chosen to lead the world to a more beautiful state. Having failed, decisively at that, I sense it would be not my place to attempt anything further."
That closes the issue. Lysandre pays for their coffee and bids her good night. In the morning, they head for the forest.
Despite the wild Pokémon that rush to fight or befriend them in the outer stretches of the woods, they pay little attention to the creatures. All these years and he's never demanded a rematch, and she's never asked. The only Pokémon that he has with him is a Gyarados. "Not the same one," he says, as if it needs explaining. She nods. The Braixen she has now is from an egg whose line goes back to her original starter.
It's never too uncomfortable an excursion; Lysandre is royalty, after all, and won't settle for the cheap tents and sleeping bags she would have been content to bring along. In the evenings he tells her about his own journey through Kalos when he was young. The stories he tell culminate in moments of astonishing cruelty—the day he lent a young man a Pokémon only for him to run off with it, an incident where he offered the street urchins in Lumiose a place to stay and their subsequent attempt to rob him—and end in bitter remarks about the region's ugliness that he curtails before falling silent.
"I really don't think you're getting it right," she'll say, and tell him of the generosity of a woman who was always happy to tell her of her Pokémon's memories, or of the gratitude of an old man she lent a baby Pokémon to in his last days. But those too are faraway memories, no longer fresh flowers picked from meadows at will but withered relics she keeps pressed between the pages of her reminiscences. Time itself has estranged them from their passions; she sees that now. They don't argue as they might have.
So the days pass in walking, the sweat and darkness of the forest enveloping them. The clearing where Yveltal makes its nest is devoid of other Pokémon for a ten-kilometer radius, as if all other living things have sensed the nearing of its appetite. At last they come to it, a sheltered glade dancing with light, and in its midst the legendary bird.
Its folded wings seem like they could encompass the world if outspread. Both of them hesitate. Yveltal has sensed it coming for at least a half hour now, and its bright blue eyes, darting and intelligent, survey them under a brilliance of red-black scales.
"It knows we're immortal," she breathes. She can read its eyes like water. "And what we want… But it still wants to battle us."
It gives a soft purring cry in agreement. But when they release their Pokémon in a double battle against it, the shriek it releases and the battering wind it raises when taking flight send both of them gritting their teeth in desperate acknowledgement of their awe.
She's forced to coordinate with Lysandre to best the mythological bird, but having been Kalos Champion and leader of Team Flare in the past, they recall the old language of Pokémon battle easily to them. Not to say it's an effortless victory; Lysandre has to Mega Evolve his Gyarados, and she's forced to use potion after potion to keep her Braixen in the fight.
But they defeat it at last, the myth giving one last tremendous cry as it crashes to the earth. Elated, she feels the shock of triumph rumble through her, and knows from Lysandre's stance that he's experiencing the same in his own proud way. Even after all these years and years and years, this is a moment to remember. Impressive enough to be the last.
The bird recovers, curling its wings protectively around itself, and appraises them with its skittering blue gaze. Its next words make them shudder.
Not him.
Yveltal's voice, queerly genderless but deep enough to shake the heavens, strobes through them in undulations of stardust and faint nausea.
"Not me?" Lysandre's eyes, those winter oceans, falter in their steady tides.
Yveltal looks at her. Its words ring with the battle cry of a distant Kalos ravaged by war, and the knowledge of a sacred being to whom all that means nothing. Yes, I will end you, girl. But not him. He has sinned and brought this upon both of you.
Lysandre stares. Disbelief unhinges him; his shoulders slacken, and he looks between her and the bird as if they share in some conspiracy. Refusal hadn't been anything they'd even anticipated.
In that moment, she recalls the power she had of old, when she was young and beginning her quest and the world was in her tender white hands. The gym leaders would bow their heads before their proffered badges, legends would fall before her fingertips, and through it all her Pokémon would smile at her side.
But wait—isn't that moment now, aren't these the same tender white hands that cupped the badges of Kalos and the Poké Balls of legendaries alike? In a startling moment, she realizes that it's been too long since she was that girl on her journey, competing with her friends and collecting Pokémon for Professor Sycamore. It's been infinities. Nothing quite feels real anymore except him:
Lysandre, who time and fortune have perhaps shown a different Kalos, one not nearly as beautiful as the one she's seen. Not even having known the kindness she's had a surfeit of on her journey.
So she says it. "Take both of us, or neither."
Her words confound both of them. Yveltal tilts its head and emits a soft squawk. Lysandre turns to her, his brow drawn down in confusion.
She continues, "Take both of our immortal lives, and it'll be enough so that you won't have to absorb the life force of anything else around you." To Lysandre… "I think," she says, "you've waited long enough for the world, haven't you?"
The sights and sounds of the forest hush to make way for Lysandre when he looks at her, for that quiet thing opening between them, after years and years (and years, and years) of it, of life with no understanding like the one that passes through them now. Here at the last moment, she senses some sort of possibility, hopelessly late and all the more wondrous for it.
Perhaps Yveltal senses it too. Perhaps it takes pity on them, or perhaps it gives into its hunger after all. But when they return their gazes to the legendary Pokémon, it acknowledges Serena's mandate with a bow of the head, and then begins to rise.
As its body starts to glow black, as the energy gathers around them, Lysandre turns to her. Just a glimpse of him is all she has time for—him, a vision of red hair and hard eyes, descended from royalty and carrying all of its terrible pride and sense of responsibility.
"Thank you… Professor Sycamore chose his pupils rightly. Perhaps if I had met more people like you on my journey, I could have truly changed something."
She has just enough time to coax a smile onto her trembling lips. Not enough, but it never will be now. Now, now, there is only this, the end of the beginning that should not have been—
(but maybe, for one second, that beginning justifies the long wait)
—and together they turn, and embrace Yveltal's Oblivion Wing.