Chapter Twenty – Placing the Blame

-Four days since return-

"All right, you're looking good, May. Move your right foot forward just a little bit more."

I took a deep breath and held onto the two bars on either side of me with a firm grip. It hurt, but the physical therapist knew that. That was why she pushed me to do this for the entire half-hour, the first of the two sessions I had each day: to walk again.

This was the second day of it, and each step became a little easier as my feet healed. But my legs still shook, and I couldn't explain why I hesitated so much. Did I hate what the ship made of me? Perhaps. But I also wanted to walk again. It had been a bit of a shock for everyone the other day when I made my first attempt to get out of bed and ended up collapsed on the floor—mostly for me.

But, honestly, the hospital treated my physical limitations as the least of my problems. Those would go away with time and practice.

My mental state?

Well, whatever it was Doctor Chalado and Jameson saw in those letters disturbed them.

I wanted to point out that neither Steven nor Nate seemed that bothered by the letters, except I knew I'd be lying if I said that. Obviously Steven would do whatever he could to make it look like he was calm, cool, and collected. But even I could see how dull the gleam in his eyes was. He was hurt, and I was the one who hurt him.

"Two more steps," the physical therapist, Nicola, ordered, and I swallowed. It was still like walking on pins and needles. "Come on, May, don't quit now."

It didn't help that the skin graft on my arm was still in the process of healing, which made me nervous to put too much pressure on that arm. But my PT told me that it was for the best—it made me less likely to rely on my arms as my strength rather than my legs. But, honestly, I'd rather just float out of here than anything.

The game broke me. That was the reality of the situation. And I was pretty sure everyone else knew that, too.

"Nice. Good job." Nicola patted my shoulder once I took the final steps, and I nodded with a grimace that I meant to be a smile. "So your infection is definitely healing. It's just a matter of you overcoming whatever fear you have of walking."

She rolled the wheelchair over to me, and I turned around on the bars to sit into it. "I'm not scared."

"Then I guess it's confidence that you're lacking."

Confidence… yeah, I was confident that this whole thing was a mistake. But that didn't meant that I didn't believe I'd be able to walk again. This infection in my legs and feet just had to be worse than the doctors originally thought or something.

Yeah, right.

But what was I supposed to do about it?

-Five days since return-

I expected Wally to return sooner than he did. So when days passed without a word from him, I knew I messed up by asking for Steven when he came to see me. By now, I'd given up on ever seeing him, until a knock on my door and a flash of unkempt hair peeked through the crack in the doorway.

"Wally?" I wondered, and he walked into the room silently. "I'm glad to see you."

I expected him to react bitterly and ask, "Oh, now you're happy to see me? Not going to ask for Steven?"

But instead, his lip quivered, and he hurried towards me and hugged me in the exact same way he had the other night. It didn't hurt as much this time, but I still groaned under his weight. He'd gotten a lot taller and a lot less scrawny.

"I had to go home for a couple of days," he explained when he got off of me and sat in the stool, even though I didn't ask for any excuses. "But I worried about you every day. How are you feeling? You certainly look better than the other day."

"You're not mad at me?" I asked, ignoring his question completely and going straight to the point.

But his eyebrows furrowed, and paired with his frown, he looked like a little boy trying to understand something that made no sense to him. "Mad?" he repeated, and he frantically shook his head. "I'm not mad at you! I'm… really, really worried about you. And scared, too. But I'm not mad at you."

He was too good… much too good for a world that only did wrong. And much too good for a girl like me who only broke hearts.

I didn't want to break his, too. But I knew I already did.

"Wally," I whispered, and I looked away from him because I couldn't take it anymore. "You're my best friend."

He grabbed my hand, but I still couldn't bring myself to look back at him. I stared at the window and bit my lip to fight the tears, but the pain only made my eyes water even more. By the time he spoke, I was stifling sniffles because I had already begun crying.

And it hurt even more when he said, "You're my best friend, too, May."

-One week since return-

I always had the television on in my hospital room even though I didn't ever watch it. There was something awfully familiar about being trapped in a room with nothing to do. It was Doctor Chalado's suggestion that I keep myself occupied by having the television on and taking up a hobby like knitting.

Well, I didn't really have the hand-eye coordination back for knitting yet, I discovered, and what good would it do me, anyway? Who wanted a crappy half-assed scarf? I certainly didn't.

So I read. Steven brought me a couple of books from his house a few days ago, so I was practically a certified expert on rock classification now. And even though I wasn't particularly interested in this, it passed the time when I didn't have visitors or rehab. What else was I supposed to do with all of this time?

Except think. And I thought a lot. About what I did, about all of the questions I still needed to ask. About how the moment I got out of this hospital, I'd have a target on my back again.

I hated this. It felt like I was being set up for slaughter.

With a sigh, I shook my head and returned my focus to the book on my lap: Advantages of Geotechnical Engineering and Thermo-Mechanics. It was a real page-turner.

A sudden knock on my door made me jump, but I stuck the book on my side table and called for the person to come in. I would take any excuse to stop reading that piece of crap—but I'd never let Steven know that.

"Hey," Nate greeted.

I waited for a moment, expecting Steven to enter behind Nate like he usually did, but no one else came in. Something sunk in my chest—my heart if I still had one, but I doubted that—and I tried not to let it show. But based on Nate's small smile, I had a feeling it didn't work.

"Steven's planning on stopping by in an hour or so," Nate explained, and he took a seat in the stool beside my bed. "I figured this would be a good time to come and talk to you alone. There are just… I don't know, some things that I can't bring myself to say in front of Stevie. Not that he wouldn't understand, but I think this is just one of those things that should be kept between the two of us."

My eyebrows furrowed, and I sat up and swung my legs out from under the covers so I was facing him. "What do you mean by that?"

Nate chuckled and waved his hand innocuously at me, though I seriously doubted there was much innocent about this guy. He had the look down, but behind those big bright eyes of his was a person who knew far more than he let on. "Nothing bad, I promise. It's just that I understand where you're coming from, and I think I have to explain myself a little since you really don't know me… you know, like, at all."

I didn't really think he needed to explain anything. Not without Steven, anyway. If he planned on telling me about the game, which was apparently against the doctor's orders, then surely it wasn't something that needed to be shared alone. I wanted to know. I really did. But the two Adventurers were a pair, so whatever Nate had to say, Steven had every right to hear it, too.

Right?

Unless it wasn't the game Nate wanted to discuss.

"You know how I told your doctor that you were right about everything? Made an idiot of myself and all? I have a tendency to do that, just ask Stevie," he added as an aside, but it seemed befitting of his personality to weave these things together. Even though, like he said, I knew next to nothing about him. "Well, I do believe that. You were able to figure out so much, and I admire that. But I also think you were wrong about people. About humanity."

I wished I could stand up without a nurse in the room, because I didn't like feeling so small compared to this kid.

"What are you talking about?" I demanded.

"The hell if I know," he responded with a shrug, and then he smiled at me again. I had the feeling I was missing something here. "I can't really explain it. I'm not as good with words as you are. It's like… you made the game under the assumption that humanity wasn't willing to change, but the Adventurer had the ability to change it for themselves. That someone had to be the catalyst before things could get better—and even then, it was surface level. You took a two-dimensional view of a very three-dimensional world."

I wouldn't deny that, or maybe I didn't have the energy to do so. But I knew from firsthand experience that people weren't willing to help each other if they could find a way around it. People were blind to the struggles of others and judgmental as a fundamental flaw of mankind. It was easier to feel nothing and do nothing than get involved. No one reached a hand out to me. No one offered to take the weight of the world off my shoulders—no one even tried.

"You were wrong about that," Nate asserted, and his voice got louder and stronger and so much more powerful. I felt my jaw slacken a little. "Steven wanted to help me. He did without even knowing it himself."

"But he had no idea about me," I countered. I loved Steven. I still did even after all of this. But he missed so much of me. Him loving me, and me loving him, didn't solve anything. "No one had any idea."

"You're wrong again. Maybe he didn't know what you were suffering with, but for a while there, he didn't know about me, either. He didn't even like me for the first few days!" He laughed at the thought of it, and then his gaze went soft—somewhere a little beyond me. "And even though he didn't, he still helped me. And he took the responsibilities of Champion from you, didn't he? He didn't let you bear that like I did."

I laughed out of spite. This was starting to sound like one of my counseling sessions.

"That was one thing, and quite frankly the least of my problems. According to everyone here, anyway," I muttered, and Nate's eyes refocused on mine. "Everyone has found some way to talk around it… saying I lost my mind without wording like that—saying I'm a lunatic without using that word. That's exactly what you're doing right now."

Nate shook his head. "I'm not—"

"The thing you don't understand," I snapped, and Nate's eyes went wide, "is that I've had to do this all alone. I've had to live with myself, with all of this pain, for years. And no one, not even Steven, knew anything about it. I've had to try to help myself by myself. So you coming in and telling me that people aren't that bad is a load of bullshit."

"You think I haven't had to help myself? You think your pain is that much greater than everyone else's? Than mine or Steven's? You can't compare suffering because that's denying the pain other people have felt even existed," Nate countered, and then he sighed and ran a hand through his mop of hair. "I've had to live with myself for awhile, too, you know. But… I didn't even know you and you inspired me. You're much stronger than I am."

"This is strength?" I shouted, and behind me my heart monitor began to beep in quick succession. I pushed myself up from the bed, standing on my wobbling, weak, pathetically useless legs. Nate stood up, too—completely stable, completely stationary—but he couldn't catch me before my legs gave out and I fell back onto my bed.

And then he stared at me with his mouth slightly ajar, as if he wanted to say something but couldn't formulate the words.

"You don't know anything," I hissed, every syllable laced with all of the resentment I'd been hiding since returning. "Everyone keeps telling me that it will get better, that I'll be able to regain complete functionality in another week or so—but no one will ever remind me that I did this to myself. It's always me who stands and realizes with every single step I struggle to take that I brought this upon myself."

"May…"

"And nothing's changed!" I continued, and the incessant beeping was close to driving me over the edge. "Nothing has changed except that I'm in the fucking hospital. I'm going to get out of here and find that everything is exactly the same. That I failed!"

Nate didn't say anything right away. He searched my face, his eyes moving back and forth as if trying to find the answers I wanted in plain sight. But he wouldn't be able to do it. Some kid like him would never be able to give me what I wanted.

Then he spoke again. "You didn't fail. You changed Steven's world. You changed my world. And you've changed the lives of the countless others who found themselves wrapped up in this game. All for the better."

With every word, more tears built up along the lower lid of my eyes. I could hardly see anymore—it was as though I had been dipped underwater and expected to continue life normally… As though I was expected to breathe like always. So I turned my head away from Nate so he wouldn't see that he really did find the answer.

"You're naïve," I whispered.

"I know," he agreed, and I knew that if I looked back at him I'd find him smiling again. "But sometimes naïveté isn't a bad thing. I just hope you'll forgive yourself soon, May."

I blinked, and the tears I couldn't stop slipped down my cheeks. I couldn't even stifle the sobs that escaped, the bursts and gasps of air that overcame me. And Nate, this perfect stranger who got wrapped up in my plans, leaned down to me and held me in his arms for a moment. I tried my hardest to hold my breath, to fight the tears.

But I couldn't. "What did I do?" I cried out against Nate's shoulder. "What did I do?"

He didn't say anything. I doubted there was really anything to say. Instead, he reached away from me and grabbed something from beside my bed, but I didn't see what. And the moment after he grabbed it, he wrapped that arm right back around me again.

"I can't do this anymore," I mumbled, lifting my head from him. "I should've died on that boat. You and Steven should never have saved me."

"But if you—"

Before Nate could finish his sentence, the door to my room opened and a nurse popped her head in. "You called?" she began, and then noticing the two of us half-embraced, her cheeks flushed. "Is everything all right?"

Oh. That was what Nate reached for. The call button.

"I'm fine," I said quickly, wiping my eyes with the back of my hand.

"You're not." Nate let go of me and sent me a hard look. But he rose to his feet before I could retort and turned his gaze on the nurse. "It's been a tough morning for her."

Only then did the nurse seem to notice my tear-stained face, and she hurried over to me and pulled several tissues from the shelf behind me. "Oh, dear." She dabbed at my cheeks, as though I couldn't do such a simple thing myself, and then glanced over her shoulder at Nate. "I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to ask you to leave for the time being."

Nate just shrugged. Not a care in the world. "No problem. See you later, May. Feel better."

As if. I couldn't remember what better was supposed to be. All I knew was that this wasn't it.

I always thought I'd have to lay down on some long couch or something during these sessions. But Doctor Chalado only had a couple of loveseats in his office, which made the room feel massive despite being slightly larger than my hospital room. This would be comforting to some people but not me.

"I heard you had a difficult morning?" Doctor Chalado asked, though it honestly sounded more like a statement than a question. "Did you take your medicine at breakfast?"

"Yes," I responded. A simple answer. Robotic.

Doctor Chalado typed something into his omnipresent laptop and then pushed the small stand off to the side. He folded his hands together, which he had the tendency to do whenever he was trying to piece my puzzle together. He had a lot of little quirks that I'd discovered over the past couple of days, but maybe that made him better at understanding other people.

Then again, maybe not. There were always two sides to a coin.

"You've had a very trialing week. I know that. Your nurses and other doctors know that. Your physical therapist knows that." Doctor Chalado smiled at me. "We're not expecting a miracle, May—you won't become better overnight. Really, I don't like the word 'better' at all. It's not that you'll get better, but you'll be able to cope with your environment and personal situation as well as everyone else."

"But, Doc, you know as well as I do that the second I get out of here, I won't be like everyone else anymore," I countered quietly and politely.

He didn't have an immediate response to this. He leaned back in his seat and crossed his legs, but his hands were still folded together in his lap. He was on the older side—balding on the back of his head with a ring of gray hair around the spot. Chubby, too, like he was the type of guy who went home and chugged a couple bottles of beer before passing out for the night.

After listening to all of my nonsense, who could blame him? And I wasn't his only patient for the day.

"You had this whole 'game' planned out for several years, correct?" Doctor Chalado asked, putting emphasis on the word game probably because he didn't like it. "What was your plan for after it ended? There were a couple of possible routes you mentioned the other day. First, you could have died on the ship. Second, the one that happened, the Adventurers would find you and bring you home. But you didn't expect to return like this."

"Admittedly not," I hissed, and Doctor Chalado nodded.

"What did you plan? If you were found, as you really were, what did you plan to do after?"

I pulled my feet up onto the couch and hugged my knees into my chest. The movement was just to delay my answer, which seemed obvious at this point. I had a feeling Doctor Chalado was only asking because he needed me to say it aloud.

"I had no plan. I was supposed to come back and everything was supposed to be better… fixed, changed." My eyes began to water, and I quickly wiped them dry. "And I called Nate naïve… I'm the naïve one…"

"Like I said, things don't become better overnight," Doctor Chalado repeated, and I stared at my hands to avoid looking at him. "I know you think the world has done you a lot of wrong. But you have to consider your blessings, too."

"They're curses," I corrected.

"Not those things—not the titles," Doctor Chalado said quickly. "You're intelligent. By the time you leave this hospital, you'll be physically healthy and strong again. You're young, which… well, I consider that a blessing at my age." He laughed, and I leaned down into my knees to keep him from seeing my small smile. "May, you're meant to live a long and happy life. Everyone deserves that, so don't take it away from yourself."

I didn't respond to this. He took the silence as an opportunity to type something new into his computer, while I kept staring at my hands. My nose tingled right at the bridge, a sure sign that tears would start again if I didn't stop them first.

"I need your parents to come in next week," Doctor Chalado added, and my gaze shot up from my hands to his face. "I've already called them and scheduled an appointment for Wednesday. I realize that you're having trouble speaking with them, and they've expressed concern, as well. This needs to be addressed, May."

"Why?"

"You'll be going back to live with them when you get out of the hospital, yes?" Doctor Chalado smiled at me. "They have to understand you if you're going to live with them, which means understanding your illness, as well. They have a lot of questions."

I scowled and dropped my feet back to the floor. "They won't understand no matter what you tell them."

"I think they'll surprise you."

Ha. Like that was possible. Growing up, I had been the perfect daughter to them, hadn't I? Everything about me exceeded their expectations. Their only child, Champion? Their only child, the hero of Hoenn? They had done such a great job raising me. They had received so many compliments about me.

How could they understand now that all of that had been taken away from them? I was no perfect daughter.

"You can do this, May. You struggled through it for years all alone. Let other people help you now. You just need to open up to them," Doctor Chalado encouraged. "I know it's hard. But you have every right to be happy. Don't let anyone, including yourself, get in your way."

Another thing easier said than done. There was always something in the way. I just couldn't figure out what.

-Twelve days since return-

"You look great, you know."

I took a seat on the bench and stretched my legs out in front of me. Steven sat down beside me, gripping the edge of the bench and leaning a little forward to see my face.

"You're just saying that as an obligation," I told him, and he smiled.

Those smiles were rare. I knew he was trying, but even he had difficulty keeping up appearances after awhile. I had always been better at that. And he wasn't at all like Nate, who despite our awkward encounter those few days ago still came with Steven most days to see me with a smile on his face. When he wasn't with Steven, I'd gotten into the habit of asking where he was. I was pretty sure it annoyed the crap out of Steven.

"No, really." Steven leaned back but still held onto the edge of the bench. "Considering you couldn't even stand up when you were first admitted, you've made a lot of progress."

"Yeah, but I still have to take breaks every few minutes."

"That's still a great improvement."

And it was pretty nice. I hadn't been discharged from physical therapy yet, and I wasn't supposed to walk around unsupervised, except to go to the bathroom—even then, I was encouraged to call the nurse. But it was still far behind where I had been before this game. I felt like a child… even though I'd made good progress, the fact that I couldn't do something so simple was… frustrating. To say the least.

But not as frustrating as these interactions. I still hadn't been able to ask Steven and Nate about what they did as the Adventurers, and I had a feeling Jameson or Doctor Chalado told them explicitly that they were not allowed to do so. How could I get better, or whatever I was supposed to get, without knowing?

And to make things worse, my parents were coming tomorrow. How could I start that conversation?

"Hey!"

Nate appeared from one of the hospital doors into the courtyard and then sprinted towards us. He never did enter quietly. It seemed to peeve Steven, but whenever I looked in his eyes, all I saw was light. Steven really cared for Nate. And it seemed like it had been a long time since Steven cared for anyone.

Even when he looked at me, all I saw was pain, no matter how loving the gaze.

"Look what I brought," Nate announced with his hands behind his back when he made it in front of us. He swung his hands around and revealed my dirty old bag, one that I hadn't seen since I made it to the hospital.

And at the top of that bag…

"My team," I whispered, and I glanced between the balls at the top of the bag and Nate's smiling face. "Nate…"

"It was Stevie's idea," he quickly explained, and when I looked over at Steven, I noticed his cheeks had gone a slight shade of pink. "Jameson has been holding onto your bag for investigative purposes, but Stevie convinced him to hand it over this morning. Thought you might like to see your old friends again."

"Is that true?" I asked Steven, and his cheeks flushed even more darkly.

"Yeah, but Nate wasn't supposed to tell you that," he said, shooting Nate an accusatory look, but that only made the kid beam more. "Thanks a lot, buddy."

"Wow. Thank you," I breathed. I took the bag from Nate and scooped out all of the balls holding my Pokémon. And with several clicks, my whole team materialized in front of us. They glanced around in some confusion—until they saw me.

I was in tears before I even made it to the ground. I slid off the bench onto my knees, and my Pokémon swarmed me with their loudest cries ever. "I'm sorry," I told them. "I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry."

There weren't enough words in our language to say sorry. But I had to guess by the way my team prodded me with their heads that words weren't needed to express forgiveness.

Author's Note: One of the things that I wanted to portray over the course of this story was how difficult it is to talk to the people close to you about your situation. It was one of the reasons why May opened up a little more easily to Nate than she did anyone else (particularly her parents, who she has shunned upon returning). It also helps that Nate speaks his mind pretty easily… a little too easily.

For those of you in university/college right now, good luck on your finals as they approach. :)

See you soon.