A/N: Well, it's been a while since I made one of these. This oneshot started as a stand-alone, but after it finished, I found it fit this piece nearly perfectly. So here it is. Part seven of the DarkeSword's ReMixes Project.
This story honestly started out as an attempt at something like crack, but it eventually morphed more into this. Of course, the central theme – the whole idea of what the hero does – is quintessentially crack-ish. But I wound up presenting it in a bit of a dramatically anticlimactic way, if that makes sense.
Anyway, I utilize the background of the hero of my Team Soul Trilogy, where the hero, whose Pokemon form is a Charmander/Charizard, is hero of both PMD1 and PMD2. There's a complex backstory to how that works and everything. If you're not going to read the trilogy, don't worry about that too much. If you are, then it's in there. The important stuff is that the Totodile/Feraligatr Algator is his partner in both games. And Darkrai was behind the falling star in PMD1.
Another note. In the lore of the Team Soul Trilogy, Star – the main character has various epithets and alternate names that legendary Pokemon call him. The two main ones – the ones here – are Starbane and the Destroyer of Stars. You'll see them both. That's Star.
That's about all you need to know. I hope you enjoy the story.
Remember to try listening to the song as you read. It really does help the atmosphere.
DarkeSword's ReMixes Project
Piece Seven: Blue Skies over Guardia
Star studied the floating rocks. Grovyle was explaining the history of the collapse of Temporal Tower. Star only half listened, the rest of his mind was focused on the problem at hand.
Time had stopped, he saw. Grovyle had explained this. It was a rather odd feeling, really – not feeling the passing of time, too feel the molecules of air frozen around him, only moving as he displaced them.
There were some things, however, that didn't make sense in this frozen earth. "Grovyle?" he asked quietly.
Grovyle subsided in his commentary. "What? What is it?" he asked.
"Why do Pokemon grow?" the human asked quietly.
Grovyle blinked. "Uh…" he frowned. "I have absolutely no idea. Why have we never thought of this? Plants don't grow! Why do we?"
Star considered the problem. "Do you have a plan to start time up again?"
"Yes," said Grovyle slowly. "Celebi can send a dispatch team back in time to before Temporal Tower's collapse through the Passage of Time and they can prevent the fall."
"That'll kill us all off, right?" Star asked.
"Yes," Grovyle admitted. "But it's worth it. For the world."
Star thought for a moment. "I think I have a better idea," he said quietly. "Yes… I have an idea that just might work."
Darkrai sat on his throne – he'd had it built in the depths of his old holding in Dark Crater just after the collapse of the Tower of Time. He watched through the portal of sight Palkia had long ago been forced to create for him to observe the world's goings-on as his old enemy, now fallen from power, and the Grovyle spoke.
The Nightmare Pokemon chuckled to himself, exalting in his power. You must wish there was something you could do, Star, old boy, he thought merrily. I imagine you're railing within against the injustice. But there's nothing you can do. Nothing, at any rate, that I can't prevent as easily as blinking.
Darkrai started to laugh to himself, loud and long, his deep voice echoing through the fiery caverns. The sound disturbed the other Pokemon in the room, who looked up, her eyes dulled with her failures.
"What is it now, Darkrai?" Cresselia asked quietly.
He grinned viciously at her. "Master Darkrai to you, Cresselia. And it's nothing of great importance. Just that your favorite little hero has finally shown his face."
Cresselia blinked, and hope bloomed quite transparently in her face. "Starbane…?" she whispered.
"Oh, come here," he said, beckoning lazily. She did, and looked into the rift with him.
"It's him," she murmured, eyes illuminated from within with a light of hope like nothing Darkrai had seen in them in what would have been years if time passed any longer. It beautified her face into a light that would have blinded the Dark-Type if Light – in the metaphysical sense – shone in this world anymore.
"Oh, yes," chuckled the Nightmare Lord. "And he intends to travel through the Passage of Time and prevent Temporal Tower's collapse."
She blinked. "That'd work, actually…"
"Except that I know about it!" Darkrai laughed, but somehow was unable to feel his glory fully. Somehow, crushing this lovely hope in his Psychic-Type former adversary didn't have as much pleasure for him as it once had. "I already have two separate countermeasures ready. The Cresselian Convention will come under attack in mere hours, and even if Celebi escapes capture and a team remains to make the attempt, I can attack the Passage of time and interfere with their transit."
Cresselia drew back from the image of the Hero as though burned, the light dying instantly in her face, and Darkrai laughed again, more for the cruelty of the thing than out of actual pleasure.
And then he stopped short, because he heard Star's familiar and hated voice saying something – something that made no sense.
"I have an idea that just might work," the former Charizard said.
Primal Dialga rested atop Temporal Tower, looking down at the lands below. There was really not much to behold now of the fragmented Hidden Land, in all honesty. Even his own Temporal Tower had a quite a serious horizontal element to it nowadays.
To his crazed, demonized eyes, there were few sights more beautiful.
The shadowed dragon mercilessly crushed the feeble resistance his old, saner mind threw forth at these thoughts. It barely took any effort.
He looked over to the east, where, north of his military compound where the Sableye forces were barracked, the Cresselian conventions were even now meeting.
There, he knew, Starbane was even now orienting himself into this new, darkened world, preparing himself to save it. But in mere hours, Dusknoir would reach the Sableye compound and the dragon's orders would reach his forces.
In mere hours, the Cresselian Convention would be crushed, and every member – including the fallen Hero – would be dead.
But suddenly the Dragon of Time felt an odd sensation in the world around him. It was as though every force in existence was suddenly waiting with baited breath to see the results of something, and he felt the old Dialga surge forth within him with a renewed vigor, as though in anticipation.
He fought it, wondering (and perhaps, somewhat fearing) what could have given rise to such a reaction all over the world. What was happening?
"I have an idea that might just work," Star murmured.
"What?" Grovyle asked, looking at him wonderingly.
Star thought for a moment. "I warn you, this is going to be painfully anticlimactic if it works. If you're hoping for a final confrontation with good and evil, we're not getting it this way."
"Do you think I care?" Grovyle said, exasperated. "If you have a way to save us, then do it!"
Star nodded. And then, slowly and deliberately, and as loudly as his human voice could, he began to count seconds.
"One… Two… Three… Four…"
And the world began to count with him.
Palkia blinked in the depths of the Spatial Rift. Something had altered in the world. He felt a slow change coming over his heart. A lightening, as it were, of his spirit.
What new machination is this? he wondered. What can Darkrai possibly accomplish by giving us… what is this? Hope?
He flew up out of the rift to see. And what he beheld took his breath away.
For he felt a wind on his face. A cool, brisk wind, as might occur just before dawn on a night in the autumn. And it had been autumn, hadn't it, before everything they had built with Lord Arceus finally crashed down around them?
He hovered for a minute or two, just relishing the feeling, at long last, of air blowing by his face, kissing the scales lightly with its cool touch. And then the dark grey on the horizon pinked, and he turned and watched the eastern sky.
And after a timeless age of darkness, the sun rose on a shattered world.
And after an eon of sorrow, Palkia smiled.
Primal Dialga roared. A crushing pain blossomed through its body, spreading from the Diamond of Time on his chestplate, which was gradually shifting from red to blue. But the most horrible quality of this pain was that, unlike any hurt the mad Pokemon had ever sustained before, this pain was his, and his alone. He didn't share it with his elder, saner form.
That old, sad, and oppressed Dialga at last rose in full strength, and finally, after a numberless length of time without time, finally broke his enemy and broke his chains.
The Dragon of Time stood and stretched, exalting in the freedom that came to him after an age of broken servitude. He looked around at the devastation of his tower. Far away he felt the Hero, counting second after second, giving them what they had lost.
But he could not count forever, and so the Tower of Time must be repaired.
And so, extending his power for the first time in an age of the world, Dialga roared, and time and force spewed forth from his jaws.
And all around him, the shattered Tower began to reclaim its shape.
"One… Two… Three… Four…"
Darkrai stared, dumbstruck, at the Hero's ingenious technique. Even as he watched, the stones hovering around the Charizard began to shudder and fall.
He shook suddenly, as though cold, feeling the great power that came from tapping into the energies of a world in darkness slowly draining away. Beside and behind him, Cresselia, too, seemed to vibrate slightly as a power she had not felt in ages returned to her.
His shoulder slumped as he studied the human-turned-Charizard-turned-human-again before him. He was defeated by nothing more than an imaginative idea. Crushed.
He heard, from far away, Dialga roaring and knew that even now, Temporal Tower was being repaired. He knew the wind, on the surface, was starting to blow and that soon enough, the sun would be rising.
There was a silence in the cavern for a minute, and then Cresselia spoke. "Darkrai…?"
"What do you want from me?" Darkrai murmured brokenly. "Capitulation? Fine. You win. I lose. I always lose. Starbane is my end. I can't defeat him. I can't even hold my own. Or do you want vassalage? Vengeance for your own enslavement? You have it, Mistress Cresselia."
There was another moment of silence, and then Darkrai felt the strangest sensation of his long life. Cresselia nuzzled into his arm from behind. "The Light doesn't seek vengeance, Darkrai. It's the core of our code. Our creed."
He looked over at her, startled, and saw that she was smiling at him. "Yes, we won," she said softly and simply. "You lost. But come up, Darkrai, and look at the sunrise with me. I know you. I think you'll see why maybe our victory isn't such a bad thing."
She grasped his arm with one of her own stubby ones, and still smiling with a quiet, inward glee, she led him out, and up.
He was quite tongue-tied all the way to the surface. The sky that had been just in the throes of the gray dawn for an age was already lightening to pink, he saw. The Full Moon Pokemon steered them both to face the east, and still smiling, leaned her head on his shoulder. He wondered what had pushed her to be so forgiving. He asked as much. "How can you not hate me?" he whispered to her.
"How can I hate you?" she whispered back. "The light is dawning, Starbane's come back, and everything is back to the way it was. How can I hate anyone at a time like this? How can I do anything but forgive?"
He didn't know how to reply to that, and his thoughts were interrupted by a sudden flash as the first rays of the sun touched his eyes.
The golden orb rose, and the syrup of its light spread over the rocky landscape before him, setting everything into glorious song. Every Pokemon, every plant, and every stone seemed to bask in the touch of the light.
Beside him, Cresselia sighed happily, a breathy, wonderful sound, and he turned to look at her, still leaning on his shoulder. And just as the world sand in the light of the sun, so his heart sang at the light of her beauty.
When had it begun, he wondered, as he curved his neck down to kiss her brow. Had it begun today, as everything seemed to have? Or had it been growing since he'd captured her and kept her as a servant to glorify in the fact of her degradation? Or had it, perhaps, been planted by Arceus in the Genesis itself?
But as Cresselia turned her eyes from the dawn and captured his lips with hers, he decided that it really made no difference.
Star smiled around his words at the feeling of the wind. Grovyle gasped beside him at its touch, and Star knew he'd never felt its gentle nip before.
"Five…" he continued to murmur. "Six… Seven… Eight…"
A babble of voices rose up behind them in the Cresselian Convention, and Pokemon poured out toward them. Star barely kept his count for the next ten or so seconds under the onslaught of praise and thanks, but he knew that if he stopped, time would revert again, for Temporal Tower was still broken.
And then Dialga roared in the distance, and he stopped his counting, knowing that the Dragon could take over his own kingdom from here. The human's grin widened.
His memory returned to him as the sunlight touched his face. He looked around for his oldest friend – his Rescue Team partner – in the crowd, but the Feraligatr was nowhere to be seen.
His shoulders slumped slightly. Algator would be here if he was still alive. His old partner wouldn't have missed the Cresselian Conventions for the world. The only logical conclusion was that he had fallen while Star slept entombed in crystal.
A tear fell from the Destroyer of Stars' eye for the friend – for all the friends – he had lost. He remembered the battle with Rayquaza at the height of his youth. He remembered the next fifty years, how he had had all of his friends assembled beside him, journeying to ever more distant and dangerous lands.
And he remembered the fall. He recalled the instant when, in their exodus from the Northlands, he and Algator had started to grow smaller, at last becoming their original forms once more – a Totodile and a human. He remembered that they had fallen unconscious.
And he remembered with pain awakening, seeing himself alone, forsaken by friends who no longer knew him, nor he them. Amnesiac once again.
He remembered being found by the Lucario who had, in one of his last acts before the final collapse of Temporal Tower, frozen him in golden crystal to be found when it was time for him to save his people again.
And the Cresselian Convention had found him and awakened him. And in return, he had saved them. All those he had known were now dead or absent.
But everyone and everything died eventually. They lived on in his heart. And as he looked around himself at the cheering crowds of Pokemon, exalting in the glory of the morning, he could not help but feel a sweet happiness. Perhaps it was tempered by sorrow and bitterness, and so perhaps it was bittersweet. But it was happiness nonetheless.
Star turned away from the sun, and began to walk. He would find a dungeon and he would explore it. For, in the end, there was little else he knew how to do.
A/N: It wound up a little bittersweet at the end, yes, but the plot of the Team Soul Trilogy wasn't created with this idea in mind. Algator did die when Temoral Tower collapsed – but he was alive again when Star went back in time. So that was happy. But it means he's dead here. Oh well; Star did, in theory, save all those future-Pokemon's lives, although, by the ending of PMD Sky's Special Episode 5, we know he didn't really. Still, everybody's happy like this. And we even get DarkraixCresselia for those who want it.
Anyway, I hope you liked the story, and DarkeSword's corresponding piece. For those who don't know how to find his music, it's on ocremix, with the dot org suffix to the url. Search for the artist DarkeSword.
As always, reviews are very good ways to ensure that I'll write more of this stuff that much sooner!