"There isn't anything here for you anymore."
An eastern wind swept across Ecruteak city, rustling through the thick orange-leafed fingers of the trees that clawing crazily at the sky from their trunks. Morty's eyes narrowed, gaze unfaltering against the breeze pushing itself through the open window, causing his golden locks to flutter gently above his headband. Its scent was tantalizingly fresh and crisp, like the sea. He continued.
"And when your little pet, your mascot-to-be, is all done and gone with this place then the others are just as well finished too. They've left a long time ago, and despite everything you've ever said about it I don't think that's what you should have ever wanted. And you know, ever since then, things have changed. They've changed without you, Eusine. And I just think that if nothing else, you should at least know that."
His fingers felt the smooth fabric of which the innards of his pockets consisted. Their color matched the ceiling of the sky, mixed with the layers of drifting fog that floated a mile above the city. Eusine's white cape brushed lightly against his waist. A smirk that often played simperingly upon his face was, for once, absent.
For a little while, they stood in silence.
"Oh..." Eusine began quietly, brushing away the intrusive specks or dirt from his gloved hand distractedly. "Come on now, Morty. Cut the dramatics. You know that you and I don't need this."
"I'm still not sure if you're completely aware of what I'm implying."
"Implying?" The purple-suited man adjusted his bow tie, fingers flashing. "I really don't think I can be blamed for anything I've done. I was doing my job, Mort, following just the one. I know the well-being of nature is important to you, but I'm a researcher and a damned good one, if I may say so myself. Not a collector."
Morty turned away, sneakered feet scraping against the wooden floor of his room. Smoky incense twisted lazily upward toward the ceiling, leaving dreamy impressions of creatures and things stained within the thickness of the air. The juxtaposition of styles that made themselves apparent in Morty's personality reflected the insides of his living quarters: a surfboard was leaned heavily against a bookcase of occult and ancient texts; a collection of meditation prayer wheels were sprawled across the wooden walls like movie posters. Glancing at these, Morty stood absolutely still, his brown eyes speckled in black.
"Ho-Oh is gone."
A youthful body housing a generation's old soul.
Ecruteak's lone, remaining tower sprouted brazenly from the gated earth beyond them, its many floors layered upon each other as in a perfectly stacked edifice of tin. Its ornate presence shot dramatically against the shrunken autumn foliage, spread across and beyond the clean skirts of the city for miles. Eusine's brown cowlick swayed, the expression on his face becoming grim as the simple meaning of his companion's word sank.
A repeat. "Gone."
"...From...?"
Morty nodded. Their gazes moved to the tower outside, eyes resting upon the topmost floor whose roof curled outwards scraping against the moving sky; an abandoned roost. Eusine's widened lids relaxed slightly as he recovered from his momentary state of shock.
"I understand why you'd be upset."
"You knew about the consequences of your brash actions, Eusine, and don't try and tell me that you didn't. As I said, the disturbance of one is the flight of another. The rest of them. The very last one. It was applicable knowledge and a real threat. I foresaw this from the beginning and am disappointed in myself for seeing it to the end." He crossed his arms. "And I can see now that you'll push any sort of blame that you can onto another."
"It was that girl who provoked them," Eusine said softly.
"So it was a team effort, then."
The breeze continued to infiltrate their presence through the window; the tension between the two rotated above their heads like a fan.
"I had told you this," Morty went on. "You knew that the bird was going to leave its nest upon its forced solitude."
"And you're sure it isn't merely giving itself a chance to stretch its wings? Perhaps to get out and see the world for a little while?"
Morty stood completely still, bristling. His brow was furrowed, his expression grim.
"Ho-Oh isn't coming back."
Eusine exhaled deeply. "If you foresaw this all, then it's just as much your fault as any of ours. And besides, I don't see what's wrong about Ho-Oh deciding to take off; it's a wild Pokemon, and it's giving itself its freedom. There's no reason for it to have to stay here in Ecruteak."
"I can't say I'm entirely convinced of that argument, coming from you." Morty's pockets became filled with his hands once more as he swiveled his feet to face the window.
"Why do you care so much?" Eusine pressed further as he ceased to fidget.
"Why do I care?" Morty let out an incredulous laugh. "When an ancient and sacred being is driven out of his home by mortals, you ask why I care?" He stood silently for a moment, burning. "Don't try to tell me that by driving it out of Ecruteak we were all doing some good. Don't try to tell me that the Tin Tower wasn't its spot. It lived there, Eusine, that was its home, as the burned tower was to the trinity of hounds. This town, this city, was blessed with Ho-Oh as its guardian. Ecruteak was built generations ago as the chosen subject under its protection; the people were mystics, psychics, who understood this powerful Pokemon, and I know you're about to try and oppose this move of thinking under the argument that it is a wild being, but these were my grandfathers, Eusine, and--"
"If you can foresee everything I'm thinking, Morty, then I'm unsure as to why we're talking," Eusine cut in dryly; an advocate for the devil.
An anticipated pause of sorts passed over them. Their feet were placed perpendicularly versus one another; Morty's jaw trembled slightly under the pressure from his own tremendous thought. Unexpectedly, his eyes narrowed in a mode of misplaced shame.
"This way I can at least hear the sound of your voice," he said quietly.
The wind that caressed their cheeks so gently had, for the moment, stopped. A lone Murkrow's cry shot across the distance, becoming lost in a shroud of fog that had begun to unwind over the trees beyond. The two beings that filled the smoky void of the room became statuesque, as though they had always been there. The blood pounded inside their heads as their brains turned. A look of bewilderment had passed briefly over Eusine's sharp features; suddenly, his smirk returned as his naturally playful gaze shifted briefly toward the window.
"All of that..."
Eusine's heeled feet tapped against the hard floor; it creaked as he approached his companion, looking at him.
"...isn't really what this is about, Morty. Is it."
A rare, smiling guilt invaded Morty's stoic features as his hard gaze melted from his face. A hand left his pocket and scratched his chest, distractedly. Eusine's dress pants were tight against his legs; he stopped in his tracks and peered further into Morty, curiously, a white hand fingering his chin.
"So that's it, then," he finished.
"Was there confusion as to why I was so...jumpy?" Morty asked.
Eusine ran his fingers through his own hair thoughtfully, his lip still curled upward. "Jumpy, huh? Well, I can't say that I'm not feeling rather a bit...petty, about the real issue now at hand--"
Morty froze. The fan continued to spin.
"Petty?" he snarled, suddenly defensive. He moved a step closer, his chest filling with air. "How could you say that the situation, how everything that has changed, doesn't matter to you at all? Is that right? How you've been tearing down forests and burning villages to find and kidnap a legendary beast?"
Eusine raised an eyebrow. His arms were crossed in passive defiance.
"Things were at peace when you weren't around, Eusine. Ecruteak lay here hidden in its valley of maples and untampered meditation; Ho-Oh chose to nest in the sacred tower we had built for it, and its reborn children wandered the ruins in hopes of mending its home. For the first time in hundreds of years they were here, they were at peace. And in the wake of their absence due to your brazen and perturbing obsession with them all, I don't understand how you can just flounce in here as though nothing had happened, expecting me to help you, no less."
Their ears perked in the following pause; as the two glared unflinchingly at one another, they listened to themselves breathe.
"Perhaps," Eusine began slowly, his toes grinding against the insides of his shiny white shoes, "the only thing left to do is help them in what ways we can. They're lost, wandering the wilderness. The northern wind versus the east, and the west. They're clashing."
"So you're going to capture the North. You're going to kidnap Suicune." Morty's fist clenched at his side.
"What else can we do?"
The brilliant leaves were swept loudly in the wind outside, drizzling from their branches slowly toward the pure, darkening earth. By now the clouds had enveloped the small city, draping Tin Tower in a shroud of visual mysticism. The incense was nearly gone, its steady flow of wispy designs passing through the air suspended between their locked eyes.
"Your tactics are hardly honorable, Eusine. Clambering over your own feet to try and catch a glimpse of a god...you're no better than any of the other bumbling trainers out in the world after all. Pokemon aren't research subjects to you; they're merely prizes. To believe I supported you in the beginning."
"You were the only one who could," Eusine admitted. He turned slightly to the side, fabric rustling in the silence. "Your opinion's rather harsh," he added, switching his tone to match a sudden reminiscent mood that fell over them. "When you said things have changed here, in Ecruteak..." He fidgeted with the buttons on his fitted purple coat. "...I guess that meant more than a few things, didn't it?"
"It did," Morty said, jaws tight. His weight rested heavily upon both of his feet. Something had happened in the past minute; a subtle acknowledgment of a place privately known and shared by the two of them, usually permissible to mention in whispers that warmed each other's ears in the past. Their own thoughts swirled speedily inside their heads, making them dizzy with quick flashes of a mutual past blended dreamily with the subject of their heated discussion.
"Well," Eusine started, glancing down to his side. His usual bounce in his words and in his step were replaced by an uncharacteristic sadness. "I still can't see how I'm entirely to blame."
"You left me, Eusine!" Morty cried, voice ascending to an unusual volume as his sneakers unrooted themselves from the wooden floor and pounded closer and closer to the culprit. "You left me here again without a word! Do you know how long you were gone for? Have you any idea?" His eyes were wide with an unfamiliar emotion that lay often dormant beneath his dazed lids, heavy in recent recovery from sleep.
Eusine's eyes narrowed; he took note of all. "This is a bit unlike you."
Morty chuckled again suddenly, in disbelief. "That's all you still have to say, then."
"I just don't understand what you want from me!" The inflection within Eusine's throat rose to a higher frequency as well. "It's impossible for me to know anything right now, when I have no idea where you're even going with all this!"
Morty stared at him, his cool stony gaze pushing through the costumed man like a fog. Eusine felt it pierce, and did not squirm. "Do you even know?" he simply added, accusingly.
A strange feeling passed over him then. There was a calm following the storm. He watched Morty's strong convictions, his unbreakable barriers, suddenly crumble and collapse before his very eyes. Their eyes remained locked, and Morty did not turn away; he did not dare glance at himself. It was like a deflation. Eusine watched his comrade's heart breaking inside his chest; the expression written across his face, a gradual and utter sadness that had lingered within his vision for months, breaking the surface as he leaned forward and kissed his companion in the room.
It was quiet. Their clothing rubbed, but briefly. Morty's cool-colored track pants were loose; Eusine held the fabric in his gloved hand as he grasped blindly.
"Dig you," Morty muttered, barely breathing, as he rested his chin upon Eusine's shoulder in a foreign and comforting embrace. His cheek rubbed slightly against smooth, flayed brown hair; neat bedhead. Eusine remained in a state of surprise, holding the back of the blonde's hair swept underneath that damned headband of his. And in that way, the two remained suspended in the room, all hung up on one another and swaying against each other's clothing and skin to a silent waltz. And after a while, after their insides were all thawed out and their emotions warm and fluttered, their absent attention was redirected subtly toward the window, as a fated entryway for a new breeze sliding in from the north.
Eusine felt it. He tensed. His other felt it, too. With a slight drop in his shoulders, Morty's realization pushed Eusine away and carried the purpled man to the slim doorway, compacted cape sweeping. He turned; they faced each other from across the room once more, noiseless, their bodies speaking a different language than they had before. The air was thick again with the words telepathically sent between their electric gaze.
They understood. Together they could have foreseen into any future. They didn't need to.
"I'm sorry," Eusine said. He left.
A wind compass. The dogs were made to roam the world.
The fog outside slowly blew itself away like a candle, leaving the rich trunks of the trees dense with moisture and scented like the sea. Morty's hands fell back into his pockets. He moved carefully toward the window, feet placing themselves carefully across the faded wooden paneling onto the spots that remained soundless, the spots that had yet to eject the nails from its big, embracing planks.
The birds were born to fly. He looked.
The Tin Tower ever remained, bracing itself against the natural currents of the sky; a meditative fortress. Morty's posture began to sink into his body, subconsciously, as he felt the wind brush against his face and move past it, toward that slim door that stood ajar behind him. His eyes were dark. He hadn't slept. His mouth was closed. He didn't speak. He clenched. He couldn't; he knew already. His eyes were deep and they reflected all he'd seen. His abilities were his curse.
And in the worry and in the sadness that had eaten away his insides in the past months, a smile crept onto the corner of his roughened face. Suddenly -- oddly --the idea struck him that maybe things were meant to be this way.
The charming man was meant to wander, and the quiet man was meant to stay.
The curling incense simmered away its final burning flick, and went out.