Sorry for the long interval. I finished the chapter… and then I rewrote it completely. Anyway, Japan drama continues. Love for you all continues, too.

In Ruins

Chapter 25

There was nothing left of Satoshi to cling to any more.

Shigeru still felt the remnants of the kiss fading as his consciousness was encroached by a compelling darkness, pouring out thickly as paint from a bottomless bucket, drowning out even the memory of a world filled with light, and Satoshi. In spite of everything, it seemed, the earthquake had consumed them. He felt that, now, there was nothing left to do before being erased forever but to reconcile himself with happiness; for having had that single moment of knowing that Satoshi loved him, too.

For a while, this was everything.

But then the void faltered, and there wasn't even a hint of endless peace but incompleteness. This was not everything! The magnitude of his own existence compounded upon him, and he was not as good at self-deception as he had been in the past. Whatever else was true, he didn't want to die. He hadn't had his fill of life; his fill of kissing Satoshi. And for that matter it wasn't even fair that he hadn't had the chance to kiss Satoshi right, from the fear that if he were the one to reach out instead of Satoshi, it would've ruined everything, and the legend would have been left unfinished.

There was so much still left unfinished.

Shigeru imagined himself moving through the blackness that now felt more like silt and dust than water or paint or snow. It was heavy, but soft and warm. Suffocatingly so, like futons packed in around him. It hurt. And he wanted to breathe. Was that normal when one was dead? Was it normal to feel time and space mash together like dirt clods against fingers; like grits of earth, wedged into the space between the nail and the skin? He could feel it clinging to the inner walls of his nostrils and on his eyelashes and in the waistband of his boxers. It felt like it was everywhere.

It was everywhere, Shigeru realized with sudden clarity. And it wasn't some abstract thing, nebulous and without form.

It was dirt.

And he was buried in it.

Which explained the darkness, the weight, and the feeling like he was dead when he wasn't. He was trapped somewhere else, inside the realms of life and death like an ancient pot forgotten in the ground. And he wanted to live.

He panicked. All he could think was suddenly the word air! air! air! And he had to find it. He tried to move his arms. It was like pushing through water. The dirt was loose and ever-moving, but ever constant. His arms dragged. And soon they ached as he clawed with his fingers, scraping through the soil, searching; as he leaned into the areas with give, kicked his legs, reached out with everything in him, even with his soul -

- then at last it happened. He felt the last barrier crumbling, and the strangest sensation of lightness swallowed up the back of his upper arm and elbow as if he had been pushed back into negative space. As if he was going back into the void.

But he wasn't. It was just the stillness of air against him (air! air!) and he had been buried upside down in the upheaval. Chest tight enough to burn, he twisted himself around and reached out again in the place with the give, and grappled through, grabbing and pushing until his hands were free from the dirt. And then at last he lunged forward, and then his head was free and he opened his eyes and mouth to the air and the sky and to life. He opened his mouth and consumed it greedily. There was too much; he began to choke, coughing and hacking as he sputtered out the pieces of sand that had somehow slipped in-between his lips into his mouth. But the feeling of grit didn't matter, not with the air filling up his lungs, not with his lungs working because he was alive, when he had been dead, and now everything was made new around him.

And yet everything was familiar.

He breathed.

There was no hibiscus-scented wind carrying memories of his childhood; no gently lapping tide at his feet. No Satoshi, either. Not even the city of Alph. It was his world, exactly as he'd left it: a ruined field site with trenches that had been caved in by an earthquake.

It was also night.

Shigeru pulled himself the rest of the way from the ground, climbed atop of the loose dirt and let go of his bones and muscles, sprawling onto his back to stare at the stars. He could see his fast puffs of air taking form as they left his mouth in rapid fire. His lungs rose and fell quickly, and he coughed out more dirt. With the velvet black canopy stretched so far above him, it seemed indescribably real. Alph was a memory from not even a few minutes ago but it was already starting to feel like a suspended sort of space, a perilous, impossible dimension. Both far too open and far too closed. He imagined that if he were still in that place, laying with his back on the snow and staring at the cold form of his breath, he would have been able to see it float up from his mouth to the furthest reaches of the sky and rub against its edge like a helium balloon on a ceiling.

This was better. This was better, because he was alive, with nothing looming over him.

As a smile stretched across Shigeru's face, a tingling sensation spread out across his body. It wasn't just from the return of oxygen to the furthest reaches of his fingers and toes, but the thrilling relief of success. After everything, he thought with wonder, they'd made it. They'd solved the legend after all, and since he'd made it back home, Satoshi couldn't be that far away. He nearly laughed with joy, but was too tired, and settled with a smile that he could feel dimly in his cheeks.

Shigeru's hand, almost by its own volition, reached down to the side of his tool-belt. He wasn't surprised to feel that his shovel and his scraper had been lost among the debris, only hanging from plastic hooks as they had been. But his pokegear was still nestled deeply in its pocket, and this was the only thing he needed anyway. Ignoring the continued shortness of his breath, he desperately mashed his fingers into the buttons on its side, and the screen flashed on, illuminating the space around him.

Shigeru raised the phone to his ear with a shaking hand.

When Tano arrived a few minutes later, Shigeru had almost expected him to look as fuzzy as he had sounded on the receiver. Like something had been lost in him when translated between the living Alph to the crumbled ruins.

Tano was, however, more crisp than Shigeru ever remembered when his form appeared silhouetted over the ridge separating the field site and the camp. He held a flashlight before him in one hand, and its beam cast an echoing glow on his face and clothes. The untucked ends of his mustard-colored shirt flapped as he jogged down the slope. Sand and dust billowed up at his feet as he descended the uncertain terrain. Shigeru must have done something to alert Tano of where he was, but when Tano replied, calling out to him, his mouth was suddenly dry, his tongue slow to move. He was overwhelmed with the feeling of Tano's being real, and familiar, right down to the knit of his eyebrows and the gleam in his eyes as he approached Shigeru and took him up in a hug.

Shigeru was nearly bowled over by the relief of knowing, not just feeling but knowing that he was home, and that he was safe.

He fought not to cry.

Tano finally stepped back, releasing him, and Shigeru took the chance to take a deep look at his older colleague. He seemed as if he had been woken up by Shigeru's call, and taken no consideration to anything else on the way to responding; his hair was in disarray, the skin under his eyes wrinkled and tired. It was even further heart-warming.

"I'm so glad to see you," said Shigeru honestly.

"Not as much as I am glad to see you," Tano answered with difficulty. "I didn't think I would see you again."

"It's been a week, hasn't it?"

"Yes. I assume you knew that because of your pokegear display?" Shigeru nodded. "Good, good. I'm rather amazed you still have any battery life after so long."

"It hasn't been that long."

"Seven days is a long time for a pokegear to stay alive… And even longer for a person who had been buried in the ground." Tano gestured to Shigeru's body, still damp and dark with dirt. Shigeru instinctively folded his arms over his chest, guarding the appraisal.

"Don't act like it's some miracle that I'm alive, because it's not," he said. "It's more complicated than that."

"I'm not a fool," Tano answered immediately. "I know that. You may be a genius, Shigeru, but you're far from super-human. You had no breathing pocket and no access to water, as far as I can tell. So how did you survive - if you really were buried for a week? Why did it take so long for you to come back?"

Tano's voice was calm, but insistent like the lapping of warm water on a beach, the salt an irritant to the raw parts of sunburned skin. Let it go, he thought desperately. "I said it was complicated. And I'm really tired-"

"Tired or not," Tano broke in, "I need to know if you're truly okay. Don't look at me like that, you know why I can't let this go after you made me promise to tell no one that I was coming here tonight, not even your own grandfather..."

"Why are you bringing him into this?"

"Because he's here, on the other side of the hill, worrying about you right now. Both him and your sister came to the site two days ago to close up loose ends, if it came to that."

Shigeru felt guilt, but also the familiar twinge of a headache murmuring against the heavy bone of his skull. "That doesn't change things. I can't tell them I'm okay just yet."

"Why not? Your family thinks that you-"

"I understood you. Everyone thought I had died, right? Well, the truth is that I nearly did, and now I need some time to think things over. When I go back, they're going to make me talk about it, and I'm not ready."

"You need to talk about it eventually," reasoned Tano.

Shigeru couldn't help sighing with exasperation. He couldn't blame Tano for being logical, but it would've been easier if he had just left things alone, so Shigeru wouldn't have to keep lying to him, and making it seem as if, in the wake of a crisis, his emotions had gotten the better of his brain. The truth couldn't be further off. He had no problem talking about what had happened; in fact, he really couldn't wait to start working through the implications of his trip to the illusory Alph.

But he wasn't ready. Physically, he was about to collapse. He still felt cold, even though his clothing and hair wasn't caked with snow anymore. Digging out of the ground had been tiring, too. He had to get some sleep - and then, he needed to talk to Satoshi. They would need to stand together if their story was to have any credibility.

More important than even that, he had to make sure Satoshi understood why, at the very end, he had done what he had done - and why he hadn't done other things. Why he hadn't kissed him. And, he had to make sure that the connection they had forged in an illusion weren't a part of the dream as well.

There was just no way to say this to Tano without sounding insane.

"Please, can't you just give me a little while?"

"I can give you a choice," Tano decided, voice firm. "You can deal with all of the media and the reports by yourself when you arrive, or you can tell me what happened to you and I'll take care of things until you're ready to tell the world the gritty, riveting details of your miraculous survival."

Shigeru was tempted to complain That's not fair, but some latent part of his brain activated at the last moment and shut off the link between his thoughts and his tongue. He thought, rather to his displeasure, that fairness had very little to do with anything. He had been the one to contact Tano on impulse, and to make demands on the basis of their friendship - perhaps more than on logic.

He spoke these last thoughts aloud.

Tano nodded, and the beam of his flashlight wavered with the movement of his head. Shigeru tensed as he was struck with the unreasonable notion that the synchronicity was only incidental. That the truth was that Tano was standing on uneven ground; that an earthquake was making Tano's head and hand swing around. He waited, his pulse thrumming inside him, but the ground seemed mostly still. The shivering was probably coming from somewhere inside of him, this time.

The moment passed, and Shigeru had to forcibly tune himself in to focus on Tano's voice again.

"In that case," he was saying. "I'll give you tit for tat. I know your body wasn't in the ground, Shigeru. We enlisted every ground pokemon from miles around, and they searched for three solid days. So where were you?"

Shigeru wanted to tell him that he had been laying in the snow, and in the grass. He wanted to tell Tano about being born, and dying, and the infinite void of time and space, but he couldn't.

Tano was silent for long enough that Shigeru could tell he had things he was keeping to himself, too, but Shigeru had no idea what those things could be.

"Since," the old man said at last, "You don't seem ready to make any decisions right now, I'm going to make one of them for you. I'm going to go tell your grandfather that you're safe, and that you seem largely unharmed."

"Is there really no way you could just let me stay with you until I'm ready? Because if my grandfather finds out, he'll tell his assistant, and then he'll tell everyone about it, I'm not ready to see… to see people. I mean…" Shigeru felt like an imbecile, but he couldn't think of a way to piece together his words in a way that wouldn't be misconstrued.

"Is this about Satoshi?"

Shigeru snapped his head to look at Tano so sharply that it hurt his neck. "How did you know I was talking about him?"

Tano turned around to ascend the hill, but Shigeru caught a glimpse of his face just before he was out of the flashlight's range. It was contorted with wrinkles and shadows. It looked a thousand years old.

"It was just a matter of time," he said.

Satoshi had been shaking for so long that it had grown hard to think now that the world was still.

No one was telling him what was going on, anyway, so it didn't really matter what he thought about anything. When Tano and a team of colleagues and medical workers had arrived to 'rescue' him mere minutes after he'd pressed the distress button on his pokegear, he had tried to lift himself up and meet them on his feet but hadn't been able to stand. It was as if his muscles had atrophied, or as if they no longer knew how to obey him. He'd tried to talk to the Nurse Joy, and to the others, and to explain to them everything the Unown had done, but the words had come off of his tongue in a jumbled mess of Shigeru Shigeru Shigeru, and he had been too tired to correct the assumption that he had been lost in the desert for days.

But mostly, he just wanted time to think it through himself before he was expected to explain everything.

The events between his rescue and his trip to the hospital were a blur. He tried to adjust to where he was and what he was doing, but the surroundings kept changing, and he felt like he couldn't catch up. His brain was still swarming with remembering and collecting those memories from the past month and a half into piles and patterns that made sense. The newest ones were the hardest to understand. There had been an earthquake. No, earthquakes. There had been the feeling of snow so cold that he thought it was going to freeze his hands in place at Shigeru's side, and break them off of his arms like dead wood. And then, there was the shaking.

Just thinking about it was making him exhausted. He couldn't even tell when he succumbed to sleep.

He didn't let himself be woken for a long time.

But it was over now, he reminded himself. He wasn't dead. He was home, and the world was no longer turning in on itself, jerking him around it ruthlessly. And his feet felt warmer than they had been for days, and perhaps because he was lying on a bed, in air cooler, lighter, and crisper than he had known for weeks. Dimly, he could hear a whir; a familiar sound of air being sucked in and sent out by a climate machine against the wall.

He let out a lazy yawn that had halfway made itself into a contented sigh.

"Pika…?"

Awareness rushed into him. "Pikachu?" he asked, his voice breaking on the final syllable. His hand reached out, and he had only just lifted his palm before his pokemon was burying its face into it with joy, crying out it's name - crying out his name. He could feel the tickle of short, smooth fur and whiskers against his fingers. The pokemon bound up his chest and grabbed his face in his paws. "Pika pika piiiii," it continued.
Satoshi was just about to reach for it with his free hand when he was interrupted by a voice that he knew like his very life.

"Satoshi!" cried his mother. "You're awake!"

"Mom…?"

Satoshi strained to see her face, and had barely made out the essentials of her expression when she let out a little cry and dived to embrace him. For a second, it was difficult to breathe. And then he was overwhelmed by the feeling of her grabbing hold of him with her soft, and surprisingly little hands, and gripping onto him fiercely.

"Satoshi, I'm so happy!" she said. "You worried me so much! But I'm so happy that you're all right!"

"Pika pika pika!"

He turned his head and looked at Pikachu, whom had moved to make way for his mother but was still a warm weight at his side, its head and arms laying upon his chest. It was staring at him with a pair of eyes as full of joy and worry as his mother's had been, and he felt his throat tighten with sudden emotion. Hardly aware of what he was doing, he found himself crushing the creature against himself and his mother in an awkward, one-armed embrace.

He felt so emotional. His mother, his Pikachu were emotional, too. But for a moment, he had no idea why. He just let himself drown in the feeling. It was somehow cathartic, like being freed.

At last his mother released him. When she stepped back, it gave Satoshi the opportunity to set his eyes on his mother's face. Little by little her features were becoming clear through his sleepy veil. She was as neat and well kept as ever, though there were dark bags under her eyes and wrinkles in her clothes. They had the suspicious crease that came from uncomfortable sleep - a case he knew too well. He turned his glance away from her, uncomfortable to see her looking so unlike herself when he was the cause. Absently, he let his eyes scour the various apparatuses of the hospital room and the stiff, white linen of his bed-sheets. There wasn't a speck of sand in sight.

A nurse came into the room, and approached him with a chart, scribbling furiously. He wished she would tell him what was going on at least, rather than writing it down somewhere he couldn't see, and staying totally silent.

His mother must have sensed something was wrong, because she pulled aside her Clefairy-embroidered handkerchief from her eyes long enough to explain what she knew.

"They found you last night. You had slight malnutrition, mild dehydration, and a moderate case of hypothermia when you came in. It's not quite the normal record for a person who has been buried alive, dear…"

"I guess not," said Satoshi, his voice coming out thick with sleep. He wasn't really sure what he was saying.

"You were just sleeping. Dreaming," she told him. Satoshi had to admit, that seemed right - it felt as if he was waking up from a dream.

"That's how come I'm here," she continued, "and not in the waiting room. I had been reading, but you started crying out for someone in your sleep. Nurse Joy said she would take care of it, but I had to come! You nearly tore out the wires from your arms..."

Satoshi looked down and saw his arm linked to the I.V. "They put this in while I slept?" he asked, feeling uncertain about what that could mean. "How long was I out? I mean, was I…in a coma?"

"Of course not," his mother reassured him quickly. "You came in just last night, after all. Though they think you might have been in... ah, psychological shock."

Satoshi's head was swimming and he sought out Pikachu for comfort. "Shock?" he asked, patting his pokemon's head. "But I didn't…"

"You didn't talk to anyone at length at all, apparently. You just showed up last night, asked a few questions but otherwise were just really quiet. Didn't even recognize me. You just kept asking for… Well, Ookido-sensei said that after the accident, it's only natural. He says it happens to people a lot after a near-death situation."

"You were talking to him?" he asked, though sometimes he had to admit it was really a question of when was she not talking to him.

"We both arrived this morning. It was the soonest we could make it after we found out about the accident..."

"The accident," Satoshi repeated.

"Yes, that." His mother looked terribly silent for a moment. "I can't believe you were in the ground for so long without us knowing; we did a big sweep of the area, searching for survivors, and for you, for you both, and-"

"Mom, you've got it all wrong. I wasn't in the ground," Satoshi told her in confusion.

Her handkerchief dropped from her face. "What?" she asked, kneading it in her hands nervously.

"Stay awake," she told him as she moved to the door. "I'm going to get everyone. They've been so worried about you since the earthquake."

Satoshi didn't know why, exactly or even vaguely, that it was the mention of an earthquake to break through his daze at last.

"An earthquake," he said to himself. Yes, that was it! He was in a hospital because there had been an earthquake after he'd seen Shigeru and… And then, now he remembered, he'd died, or something like it; and he'd been transported to the past with Shigeru and lived in the ancient city of Alph and there was the legend and oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.

"Wait!" he cried at his mother as she turned away.

She was back at the bed instantly. The words tumbled from his lips. "The people waiting; they're Kenji and Professor Oak and Shigeru, too, right? Shigeru's there too, right?"

His mother's expression broke, and she wrung her hands. "Well, he - he -"

Any feeling of peace that had been gathering inside of Satoshi's chest was squashed out immediately. He tried to keep his voice calm, even though he could swear that the monitor beside him confirmed a spike in his heartbeat.

"Shigeru," he repeated. "How is he? Tell me, tell me that he's-"

"You're talking about Shigeru Ookido?" The nurse had been pressing buttons on a long keyboard, but paused at last to look up at her patient. Her candy-red lips twisted with sympathy. "I'm… I'm sorry they didn't tell you," she said.

Satoshi's eyes darted from her to his mother. "What does that mean?"

"Pika pika," said his pokemon cautiously. His mother just unfolded her Clefairy handkerchief. And refolded it.

"Satoshi, the reason that Ookido-sensei came here… is about Shigeru. He was lost in the earthquake, too."

"What?" asked Satoshi. He tried to clear his mind, to focus it; to catch his breath and think - but ended up just letting out a desperate moan of distress instead. "No, that can't be right," he said, his voice wavering, "He should have come back with me."

"Come back?" his mother queried, but he had already closed his eyes, trying to remember the details of what had happened after their lips had touched, but it didn't work. It was like he was trying to call back images from a dream.

Opening his eyes again, it was obvious that nothing had changed in the room. Objectively. But the air-conditioning was suddenly chilling; the fluorescent lights above him, stagnating. Satoshi hated it all irrationally. He'd really liked waking up to the heat of the island, the touch of the sun. Not to this, but the scratch of tunics brushing against his skin, and Shigeru beside him. He wanted to put his hands in a pile of clay and build something until he lost himself in it. He wanted to lose himself with Shigeru.

But Shigeru wasn't lost. Satoshi just knew it. They'd fulfilled the legend, and then he'd come home, so it only made sense that Shigeru had as well.

"I just need to find him," Satoshi murmured, struggling to lift himself up off his bed. "Get off, Pikachu - Mom, you have to tell them to let me out - and take me to him-"

"Daisy! Help me stop him!" The nurse quickly answered his mother's summons. By the time that both women were holding down his arms, he knew there was little hope for escape. Even Pikachu was doing its part, too, little paws pushing furiously against his chest. Satoshi was unimpressed.

"Why aren't you guys going to help me?" he complained.

"Your body has been under a great deal of stress," the nurse told him sternly. "You shouldn't push yourself-"

"You guys don't get it. I'm fine!"

"You were buried alive for three days. How could you possibly be fine?" his mother demanded.

"I was buried alive for barely thirty seconds!" Satoshi argued back fervently. "There was just a foot or so of sand over me on the dune, that's all! I can't explain it now, but I wasn't there for the rest of the time! I was somewhere else, okay? And I'm totally fine. I just need to find Shigeru!"

That being said, he lashed out against the nurse, and successfully broke free of her soft grip, but then his mother caught him down again, her own hands surprisingly strong.

"No, you don't," she said, her voice tight. "I know you're his friend, but you need to put your health as a higher priority!"

The nurse put in, from his other side, "There is no question that you have undergone some sort of a trauma and are not yet fully recovered. You were too dazed to even walk when we first found you."

Satoshi had to admit that she had a point. Still, "What are you going to do about Shigeru?" he returned. "I know he's out there. And if he's in trouble, if he's like I was…"

"People are searching for him," said the nurse, her voice strangely affected, "but I'm not letting you off this bed rest until it's clear that you're not going to slip away from us again."

"Can't you just enjoy the fact that you're alive?" his mother asked him.

"Don't say it like you mean that I'm alive and Shigeru is dead because he isn't!" Satoshi shouted angrily.

Speaking the words had been like unplugging the stopper from a drain, and it funneled the strength out of him. He collapsed backward onto his bed and shut his eyes tightly, wishing he could bury himself under the sheets or do something more.

Eventually, the nurse batted his mother away, telling her that all her tests showed that Satoshi would be fine, but that he needed time to rest. Surprisingly, though, she said nothing about Pikachu, and let him stay at Satoshi's side.

He listened to the tap-tap of the nurse's rubber-soled shoes as she walked the room, checking the equipment one final time. And then she, too, left with a sympathetic parting glance, and let the door to his room slowly shut behind her. It had barely closed before Satoshi let out a big sigh of relief, allowing his defenses to drop. With the draft from the hallways absent, and with nothing to distract him but Pikachu, the air in the room simply felt strange. The hospital room had no windows; the shelves lacked even the bouquets of flowers like he always saw in soap operas. It was just another white-walled space filled with the static of machines.

Satoshi didn't mind as much as he thought he should have. In a way, he felt too tired to be anything but ambivalent, even if he was stuck in bed. Maybe his mom and the nurse were right; maybe he really was a little sick. Or maybe it was just impossible to feel good, not knowing where Shigeru was and if he was okay.

He shifted downward, burrowing himself into his sheets. The top cover was cool; the closer ones warm and starchy but at least clean. Pikachu curled up against him, its nose pressed tightly against the juncture of his neck and collarbone. It was a comfortable, familiar weight. Satoshi let his eyelids fall over his eyes, and in a little time, the world filled up with darkness again.