Time has never seemed so slow to Manon before this day. She really has no idea how far that Centre is, much less how long it's going to take for help to get there. She trusts Charizard, she really does (she has no other choice anyway), yet her impatience is once again getting the best of her. She's never been the calm or patient type, sure thing, but in such a situation, nobody could blame her for being so upset and wanting everything to go faster, right? The situation was urgent!

That sense of urgency, she mostly feels it whenever she surprises herself glancing at Alan, hoping he'd start waking up or at least show he's still alive by doing something else than painful, weak grunts. On second thought, the fact she's able to qualify anything Alan does of being weak, even frail or fragile, is a rift in space and time: Alan doesn't really go well with either of these adjectives, much less with the idea itself of weakness or vulnerability. Her impatience must steam from this contrast between the last time she saw him, healthy and being cold to her again (she knows it was more of a ruse anyway, maybe a dare to see if she was truly able to keep up with him no matter what), and… whatever this is. A daytime nightmare, perhaps?

With how little she's actually equipped for adventure, Manon has no way to check anything. Her only thermometer is the clammy palms of her hands, something way past imprecise. What if her hands are too hot to actually evaluate his fever? If that's the case, she can't be able to tell if his fever is getting worse! And, if it does, then what? She doesn't know what Pokemons Alan on him right now, much less if they'd actually obey her like Charizard did. Would the sense of urgency currently raging in her heart spread to them? So many questions, so little possibility to answer them and be sure she's not getting totally mistaken.

Despite how cruel the vision under her eyes is, Manon cannot look away from him. She'd have never imagined she'd ever see Alan, the strong and strong-willed Alan who had risked his life in the battle between two Hoenn legendary giants to save his Charizard, the stubborn Alan who never gives up on anything he decides he's going to accomplish, the Alan who put the world into jeopardy only to help fix it later as an attempt to atone, be this fragile on her lap, at nature's mercy, so vulnerable it feels like she could shatter his entire body with merely a misplaced embrace.

Manon wants to cry. Not for her, because she's doing perfectly fine, but because the situation calls for it. The more she thinks of what could have been, the more she sees her dearest friend (aside from Chespie), the heavier her heart gets. What if Pokemons in the forest had attacked him? What if Charizard had never found her? Wouldn't he be… No. She's here to protect him, and so is Chespie. They've gotten stronger since he last saw them, she's going to show the world if said world forces her into doing so. She won't let anyone, or anything for that matter, endanger him anymore.

Suddenly, breaking through the artificial serenity of the overly-calm forest, resonates a different grunt. With the earring of a Fennekin, Manon turns her head towards the one currently lying with his head on her lap, her heart skipping a beat when she notices his eyes trying to open. Manon shakes her head: he must be stirring in his sleep. Then she shakes it again: he's waking up! Finally, he's waking up, he's alive and he'll be able to explain to her what happened to him! Everything is going to be okay, thank Arceus, thank Xerneas!

She didn't know what she really expected from his current condition, but her heart still hurts badly when she notices his eyes. Like everything else, they're not like themselves and yet so his: his usually sharp and piercing icy blue eyes are foggy, reddened around the ages, unclear like a mirror covered in mist. She should have seen it coming, she knows that, but it doesn't prevent her from biting her lip thinking it shouldn't be this way.

A few, heavy moments fly by. There is still no sign Charizard is coming back. The forest is oddly quiet, but it's been since the very moment she's arrived there with Chespie. Her companion is also dead quiet, barely reminding the world he's still there. She wonders if he's able to talk, if he can hear her if she speaks to him, if he's waking up for real or if he's just going to fall asleep right afterwards, if he can tell her how he got himself in this dangerous mess. She wants to scold him, to hug him, to bombard him with questions, to tell him she may have saved him from bigger dangers; but she can't do that, not for the moment. She painfully needs to wait, and then wait again. Maybe she's going to wither away before she can do anything about the situation. Goddammit.

Finally, after these excruciating minutes, Alan visibly stirs and his eyes fully open. Well, "fully" may be overselling it… It's more that she can tell he's trying to open them fully, but it ends up looking half-closed anyway. Her fight against her own impatience and sense of urgency is turning into a curb-stomp battle with her as the loser of it all: as such, she prefers to focus on him, in hopes it'll make time go by faster and bring help to them. Charizard must have found the Centre by now… right?

"Ah, you're awake, finally!" she yells, almost more to herself than to him, a smile making its way onto her worried face. He's not fine, but at least he's alive, there's that.

Of course, she receives no answer immediately. Instead, Alan moves his head around, sighs and finally looks at her. If she didn't know him better, she would have almost thought this look on his face wasn't of surprise, but rather his next stage of waking up.

"Ma…" His voice is dry, hoarse, and barely a whisper. "Manon…?"

"Yep, that's right, it's me!"

She's a bit too excited about watching someone wake up.

Alan tries to sit up, elbows against the grass and the fallen leaves, a hand flying to his head.

"H-hey, don't overdo it!" she tells him, in a moment of panic, trying to see if that'll get him not to be too stubborn about it. She doesn't want it to become the next time where he'd break his shoulder for her.

"Where… are we…?"

Oh, good question. She's got zero idea where they are, considering she's just followed a Charizard until she was presented with the fainted figure of her friend and desired travelling companion. (Still in her dreams, she guesses).

"I… don't know, actually. But Charizard's gone to get help, so it should be fine, just rest!"

She giggles nervously, as if to convince either Alan or herself that truly everything is one-hundred-percent fine when it's not, while he looks around. Does this dude even stay still for a second? He's always moving, even when she's asked him not to and that he's sick! How's she supposed to make him behave?

"What help?" Alan asks as he gets up, only for him to stumble and her to quickly sit him down to the ground. He's terrible, terrible she says!

"The one for you because you were unconscious on the ground with a fever, dummy!"

Manon doesn't really know why she's scolding Alan, the thick-sculled and utterly confused Alan who'd never listen to her before. It's not like she expects any rational answer or reaction from him either, so as long as she speaks, she may be able to keep him grounded until help arrives and he's obligated to surrender to medicine (and people who actually know what they're doing, because she sure doesn't know that).

In lieu of a reply, Alan coughs in his fists, loudly, hoarsely, to match with his voice and everything. All of her grudge against him melts into a tiny puddle of stupid feelings as she hears and watches this, prompting her to rub his back as if that's gonna make anything easier on him. She got too caught up in her own mind to remember he was still unwell and needing medical attention before he got tremendously ill, so she shuts up for a few moments and waits for the fit to be over.

"Hey… You're alright? That sounded painful…" she then asks him, trying to get his eyes to look into hers, hands on his shoulders, tone softer than anything she's ever said to anyone who wasn't Chespie. Speaking of him, he's back on her own shoulder, silent, solemn. Probably doesn't have anything to add, anything to make the situation better. Just like she does, in fact.

"Ah…" He pants first, then clears his throat, coughs again, and finally finds the voice in him to respond. "I'm… fine enough, I guess…"

"That can't be right! You felt hot and your cough's super nasty, you can't be 'fine enough'!" She wants to scold him like a kid, she really does! He's such a Tauros-headed idiot sometimes, just like her, if not even worse! Just a pain, a big bad pain for her, but especially for himself!

Alan doesn't reply again, too busy looking at her confused and being too dizzy to really get up. She sits down next to him, just in case he needs a place where to put his head which, suddenly, seems way too heavy for his poor neck and body.

Neither of them speaks, at least for a while. All the noise around them are breathes, some faraway falls crunching under the weight of small Pokemons and Alan's cough, which sometimes comes back, sometimes gets replaced or announced by some throat clearing. Manon can hear the birds soaring in the sky, the little things you only hear in a forest, the beating of her stressed heart and what she thinks is Alan's pulse, sounding almost quicker than her own. He's usually cold-blooded, she knows it, she knows that, but… But…

"I hope Charizard's found help and that they're on their way…"

She can feel her friend slumping on her, head on her shoulder, left side lodged against her right. A faint smile must be on her lips by now: he's alive, he's going to be fine once this is all over. He's strangely not moving much anymore, apparently content with pseudo-resting against her. At least, she's found him in times, she can now watch over him and, she hopes, she'll prevent him from hurting himself any further.

"You… mind if I babble about? I'm scared you're gonna faint again if you fall asleep…"

"I'm not falling asleep…"

Manon doesn't feel like directly rebutting him. Alan's feverish, she can sense it through their clothes (he's sticky too, she knows that from having put her hands on his shoulders), it'd be like hitting an injured Pokemon for the sake of proving she's right or something. Yes, he's stubborn and, yes, he still seems to think she's dumb: but he's sick, he can barely keep up with a conversation, he can't get up properly… She needs to be caring and patient, not as jumpy as she usually is. That sucks for her, but it especially sucks for him.

Frankly, seeing Chespie bedridden was way more than enough for her, she doesn't need to see her other dearest friend falling deadly ill on her watch.

A new silence follows, thicker than the previous one, covering them both in a thick layer of fabric, wrapped around their throats. Manon doesn't have a single clue as to what she should be saying next, if she should even be saying something too. Instead, she just stares at Alan with his eyes fluttering like broken roller blinds. He seems so out of himself, so unlike his usual tough guy persona, that she cannot help but worry more with each passing second. What if it's actually already too late? What if he's sicker than she thinks? How sick is he, anyway? He won't let her touch him to test out, she knows that, so she's left with speculating through observations

And, well, she sucks at analysing other humans. If she was any good at it, she'd have been able to tell Lysandre had terrible plans in mind. Perhaps she'd have been able to tell Alan her true feelings, to convince him he didn't need to cut all ties with her. Everything would be better; she'd be able to know what she can do to help him feel at least a bit better. No, no, instead, she's just sitting there, her sick friend against her, slowly but surely either falling asleep or losing consciousness again. Where is Charizard when you need it?

So Manon silently prays. The girl who's always noisy, always nosy, never getting quiet and always asking questions, making remarks and comments, snarking at people, sliding some jokes; is silent and prays. Praying who, she doesn't know, she didn't think about it. She just repeats over and over in her mind how she wants everything to be better, for her friend to feel good again, for the illness to go away and the fatigue to disappear. It's dumb, she knows that, praying Xerneas only work in fairy tales and nursery rhymes. At least, she thinks so? If it works, she'll get back what she said and be the happiest girl ever for her poor, poor friend.

The complete, too heavy to be serene silence breaks in the snap of a stick from behind her. She jumps, taken aback, balancing Chespie out of her shoulder and making Alan almost land on the ground, barely catching him back with her surprised arms. His eyes try to look at hers, or that's what it feels like, but they're too unfocused and glassy to properly do so, and as such it ends up failing. This is still so weird, so unnatural…

However, a smile is soon brought where right before it stood a frown. Charizard is back and, with it, what looks like a medical team. The rest of the rescue mission passes in a flash: the nurse and other people she doesn't know take her friend away on a stretcher, Charizard still out of its Pokeball offers Chespie and her to fly to where the staff comes from. The sudden change of pace is unexpected, and that surprises her.

As they fly away from the forest, Manon thinks, a lot, much more than usual. Today's weird, too weird. The changes of pace all over the place are awful, she wants them to stop, she wants today to go back to normal and boring. She wants to get her normal Alan back, the one who gives her snarky remarks, the one who's too stubborn to ever go back or accept things the way he doesn't see them, the one who's worked and fought again Lysandre, the one who almost brought the end of the world before helping fix it. She just wants her friend back, free of illnesses and exhaustion, to travel with him and not be Kalos's worst nurse ever.

And, well… Is that asking too much from the world?