A/N: Last of the stuff I had posted on DA before my long long hiatus. Next post will be all new content! Again, if you're still reading, then thank you and I love you. Thank you for wanting to see this through to the end with me.
"Oh, Blayre. Will you look at what you've done to your suit," his mother sighed. "Do you know how long it took Mommy to sew that for you? What in the world were you doing down in that filthy old cellar with your sister anyway?"
"Mama, I had to go in there!" he shouted, his tiny hands clenched into fists. Tears were welling up in his eyes and already he could feel them threatening to pour over the rims of his eyelids. "Cecilia locked her away and I had to-"
"Blayre," she said, placing one her long, thin fingers gently on his lips. "It's alright. Noah's okay now."
"But she was real sick, Mama," he said, unable to hold back his tears any longer. "She was hurt. I wanted to make her better, but she didn't stop."
"I know, Sweetheart. Mama was really scared for her too," his mother whispered, holding him in her arms. "I love both of you so much that the thought of losing even one of you breaks my heart. That's the only reason I said all those bad words and got real mad-I was scared I had lost your sister forever."
"Like grandpa?" he sniffled, nuzzling himself deeper into his mother's hair as she stroked his back.
"Yes," she said, her voice strained in a way Blayre had never heard before. "But your sister's a stubborn little girl, so we get to keep her here with us."
"Mama," he said, pulling himself back from her safe embrace, "why did she do that to herself?"
His mother sighed and closed her eyes tightly. As a child, he had never realized why she had done this, but adult Blayre realized that she had been fighting back tears. She had just endured one of the most painful shocking things a parent can ever face-the possibility of one of her children dying. She took a deep breath and gently held his tear streaked face between her hands. "Your sister," she said as she let her eyes slide open, "is a special girl, Blayre. She's different for me and you and everyone else. You feel it too, don't you?"
He poked at the ground hesitantly with his scuffed and mud caked shoe, unwilling to look at his mother's face. "Sometimes," he said quietly, "Noah scares me. She says weird stuff."
"I know," she said softly. "She frightens me sometimes too. But then I remember that she doesn't mean to be scary, that she's not bad. She's my little girl and she's your sister and she loves both of us so, so, SO much. The only thing different about her and the rest of us is...she's special. And do you know what that means?"
"What?" he asked, glancing shyly up under his eyelashes.
"It means we have to make sure that Noah is safe."
"But, Mother," he groaned, his thick, black hair stuck to his sweaty forehead as he thrashed in his sleep. "I can't keep doing this for her. She is eating me alive. Just look at what she's done to your baby! I have to keep him away from her. Far, far away…"
"Audi no, Audi," Viola cooed gently, wiping the sweat away from her patient's brow. "Audino audi no?" she asked as she gently nudged Blayre. When she saw his bright eyes slip open and recognize his surroundings with relief, she cautiously held a glass of water with a Pikachu crazy straw out for him to sip from.
Blayre sighed as the water filled his mouth. He tried his best to stay in the moment, to savor the crisp, clear flavor of the minerals and absorb the soothing coolness into his very being, but whatever Trey had given him made that an impossibility. Clumsily he reached out for Viola, afraid of enduring the next dream alone. "Don't," he murmured as he heard her backing away. "Please don't leave me. I'm afraid of what I will find inside."
"Audinooo…" she cooed softly, nuzzling her head against his as she climbed into his bed. As lightly as she could, she let one of her long, sensory feelers wrap around his neck and listened to his heartbeat. She patted him gently on the head as she heard the frightened speed at which it raced along in his chest. From inside her nurse smock, she pulled a packet of her favorite stickers-scratch and sniff fruits with various wacky eyes and facial expressions- and peeled off a cluster of wide-eyed giggling grapes and carefully placed it on Blayre's right hand.
"What's this for?" he asked her, shifting slightly onto his back so that he could better see the sticker. "Have I really been eating so little that I look like I want sticker foods?"
"Audi," she scolded, giving him a very gentle play slap on the cheek. "Audino," she said authoritatively, grabbing his hand and then scratching the sticker. She playfully shoved his hand back under his nose and he took a long, deep breath.
"Oh, hey. They smell like grapes too. That's a really nice present, Viola."
"Audino," she said shyly, tucking her sticker sheet back into its pocket.
"No, really," he said sleepily, his eyes drifting shut again as the room began to swim and warp shape. "I'm glad Sister let Trey keep you. I was so afraid she was going to make him release you when we moved. You were so small when we found you, you probably don't even remember it…"
Viola gently unwrapped her feeler from his neck, his heart calm and steady once again as he was carried off to what she hoped were more peaceful dreams. She leaned back against one of the many pillows on her patient's oversized bed, kicking her legs idly while she thought of how long ago it had been since she met her human family. She had been very small as Blayre said, and most of it was now a large blur, but she remembered Atreyu.
He was just a young boy himself, nothing like the grown up he was now. Though human age was sometimes difficult for her to tell, she didn't ever really have any problems understanding Atreyu's age. He was so carefree and full of energy then, she remembered. And so brave, running right out into the tall grass in the forest without even a second thought. When he found her curled up, alone, and badly hurt, he didn't hesitate at all to scoop her up in his arms and care for her. He covered her in band-aids and even gave her one to play with while the bigger human took her into the Pokemon Center to be healed. She smiled as she pulled the very same tattered, dirty band-aid from her sticker pocket, admiring it a moment before putting it back in its safe spot.
"Hey, man. She can go where she wants, when she wants, with WHO she wants. You aren't the king of everything, you scrawny…" Blayre mumbled to himself, his arms tensing up as he shifted in his sleep.
"Audino," she sighed, shaking her head. Some people really were lost causes.
"Jeez, kid," his father sighed, dusting off his scraped up little boy. "Think you'd just give up after a while. You really are your mother's son, stubborn as the day is long," he chuckled.
"Dad?" Blayre asked, his mouth feeling clumsy and heavy, as though words were still foreign to him. "Where'd Touko go?"
"Who?" his father replied, looking about their serene surroundings quizzically. "Oh, you mean that tasty young thing that hangs around with the weird kid? I should have known you had your eye on her. You always did have a thing for brunettes. Good to see you didn't go changing on me."
"I don't understand," Blayre said sluggishly, falling back on to the sherbert colored grass he suddenly seemed to find beneath his feet."Why did you have to go, Dad?"
"I didn't have a say in the matter. You know that, kid," he sighed, running his hands through his thick black hair, a habit his son had picked up from him when he was a young boy. It was the only thing he really remembered about him now. The rest of him was smoothed out, a flat, featureless being that was vaguely male. "Most of us don't."
"You didn't even try to fight it," Blayre said quietly, his eyes slipping closed as the cotton candy clouded sky shifted from light blue to a bright pink. "You knew me and Trey would have to go back there and you still did nothing. You didn't give two shits about us. You never did."
"That's not true, Blayre. You remember the visits to the hospital and the surgeries. You're just looking for someone to blame for the way things have turned out. Even after all the years that have passed, you're still only a child."
"I'm not!" Blayre shouted, the ground beneath his back feeling as though it had suddenly turned to gently flowing water. "I haven't been a child for a very long time. Noah saw to that, the hateful bitch."
"Don't talk about your sister that way," his father scolded, nudging him in the side to test if he was listening. "She didn't ask for any of this either. You should know better than anyone what it's like to have to deal with what she does."
"Again with this bullshit," Blayre spat. "All I've heard since we were kids is how 'special' she is, how hard she 'suffers.' Well guess what, Dad? I've been dealing with the exact same thing for just as long and nobody-not you, not Mom, not Noah-ever felt the least bit of sorrow for me."
"Wrong again, kid," his father sighed. "Your mother and I couldn't even count the hours we spent of our short lives crying for the pair of you, not just her. Between you and your sister, you were always the stronger, more functional one. Noah was so much harder to raise than you. She needed so much validation, so much praise. She needed to be the special one, to have people worry and attend to her like she was different.
"You were so much easier, so much simpler. You didn't want to be any different than the other kids. You wanted to run and play and get scratched up. There wasn't anything fragile about you. You tried so hard to be just a regular little boy and for the most part you were; but you always kept people an arms length away, like you were afraid of hurting them. It's how you continue to get by. Nobody ever gets to see inside the depths of you, but that's not really fair, is it?
"The point is, kid, you are both extraordinary people and you both suffer for it terribly in your own ways. Your mother and I so wished we could have helped you more than we did. It would kill her to see you so broken down."
"I know," Blayre said, tears seeping out his closed eyes. "I'm trying, Dad, I really am. I just can't fight it off anymore. All the noise, all the people-ALL the time. I can't turn it off anymore. That last time she took control, she did something to me and I can't undo it. Trey thinks he can help me, that he can make the connection like it used to be, but I know she'll never let me go."
"I know, Blayre," his father said, his voice now no louder than a whisper. "Noah is something else, so persistent and strong. But I know something else: you are, and always will be, stronger than her. Don't give up now that you are so close to the end of all this. You can open the gate, you can put a stop to all this."
"How?"
"Still a child," his father chuckled, "thinking your dad has all the answers."
Atreyu squirmed nervously as he sipped at his tea. He had always hated to wait for things, especially important things. Today was worse than ever. His stomach felt as though it were full of Butterfrees and he checked his watch so often he felt as though he were developing some sort of nervous tick. Time, it seemed, had slowed to a maddening trickle. Barely twenty minutes had passed since he'd left Blayre and Viola.
"Ummm, hello? Is everything alright, kid? You look kinda sick."
"Oh, sorry," he sputtered, the weary looking waitress snapping him back into reality. "I have a big exam tomorrow. My mind is a little preoccupied."
"Right, well," she sighed, "do you plan on ordering anything else?"
"No, I'm fine. I'd just like to sit here a moment longer, if that's alright."
"Sure, as long as you'd like," she said dully, gazing longingly out the window. "Jeez, it sure got ugly out there. Look at all the haze! That's so strange. It was beautiful out just a few minutes ago."
"Maybe there's a storm coming in or something," Atreyu laughed nervously.
"That'd be just my luck. I walked here today," she groaning as she listlessly meandered back behind the counter.
Atreyu cringed inwardly as he imagined her journey home tonight. "I hope she didn't have important plans or anything," he thought guiltily. Again he glanced at his watch. 6:33. Only three more minutes to wait now. His stomach groaned in agony as a fresh torrent of acid rained down inside it. "It'll only take a couple days to fix everything," he thought. "That's all I need to help Blayre. Soon he'll be up and strong enough to finish this. Then we can finally go back home."
Just three more minutes.
For the first time in a long while, N was feeling well in body and mind. He sighed happily as he opened his exhausted eyes, still in a daze. Beside him Touko slept lightly, her long hair falling messily around her. She shifted slightly, letting her head rest on his bare chest. Gently he wrapped his arms around her, the feel of her heat on his skin supremely relaxing.
He yawned as he glanced over at the alarm clock next to their bed. Bright green LED numbers read out 6:35 PM. He knew that in just an hour he and Touko would have to get up and fly off to somewhere else. While he welcomed the idea of leaving the city, the idea of leaving this bed was extremely, to use a term he learned from Touko, sucky.
"10 more minutes," he thought, his brain heavy with a mixture of sleep and satisfaction as his eyes slipped closed. "Then I'll wake her up and we can get ready to go."
6:36 PM
Atreyu inhaled sharply, his pulse quickening to a sickening pace. He closed his eyes, his tea clutched in his hands, as a wave of dread washed over him. He felt himself shiver and the pure black key tied about his wrist seemed to grow immensely heavy. It had started.
Less than a minute had passed before he heard the first scream. He opened his eyes slowly and glanced out the window to see that the unnaturally dark haze that filled the street had grown denser, just as scheduled. Sporadically, a few people would dash by, their faces unreadable as they passed by. Atreyu didn't need to see their faces to know they were terrified, that they were fleeing something horrible. As he sat in his booth, his hands jittering with nerves, he couldn't tell if the deafening, dull thud that reverberated in his ears was from his heart or from the world outside.
It was time to move. As casually as he could, Atreyu stood up and left his money on the table, leaving a guiltily large tip for the disinterested waitress, and slipped into the kitchen. He didn't really need to try to be discreet about his departure. The entire staff was pressed against the window, too transfixed by what was happening outside to bother with what was going on around them. After doing battle with a set of very startling and loud pots and pans, Atreyu eventually found his way to the service door.
Hesitantly, he pushed the it open, afraid that the small back alley would be too crammed full of people to safely navigate. A few misplaced people jogged passed him, not giving him a second look as they ran by. He sighed, wiping his forehead with the back of his sleeve, and carefully made his way to the side ladder that led to the roof of the little cafe. He gripped a rung as best as his sweaty, shaking hands would let him.
"Get it together," he muttered to himself as he climbed. "Everything is working so far."
The higher he moved up the ladder, the calmer the city became. Up above the noise, above the haze, and the panic, it seemed like any other day. He let out a small sigh of relief as he cleared the fog line, his stomach finally untying the knots that had been stuck so tightly there since he sat down. He wondered if every time would be this unpleasant or if he would learn to love it as Blayre loved to fly. Some how he very much doubted that.
The wind caught him off guard as he stepped on to the roof. Trainers must be using their flying type Pokemon to try to blow the sickening fog away. Trey groaned, running his fingers as best as he could manage through his moppish hair-a nervous habit he had picked up from his brother. He hated causing so many people such unnecessary worry. He knew what it was like to be afraid of the dark, to feel like it was closing in on you from all sides, to be crushed as you were unable to escape. But it had to be done. All this pain, all this nonsense, had to end. If there was anything he could do to help, he had to do it.
Slowly he unclipped a pokeball from his belt, an action that still felt foreign to him, and enlarged it in his hand. "You're the last one to the party, as usual," he whispered. "But you have the most important job tonight."
With a sudden pop and burst of light, a large, black, well-groomed dog-like creature materialized before Atreyu. He patted the great Pokemon on the head affectionately a few times, taking care not to bump its horns too much. The houndoom wagged its great pointed tail in nervous anticipation as he watched his master pace before him.
"You know the plan, Uvall?" Atreyu asked, his voice taking on a rare serious tone. The houndoom nodded solemnly as it stretched its long body out. He loped gracefully to Atreyu's side, nuzzling his hand with its long, orange snout. "Good," Atreyu said gently. "I know I can always count on you, Uvall. But promise me...that you'll be careful not to get injured." Uvall let out a low keen, gazing reassuringly up at his master. "I know, I know. I worry too much. Well, it's time," he said, gazing at his watch. "I'll see you later. Take care of the others until then."
"Hound," Uvall replied confidently as he jumped from the roof to the ground below. Atreyu couldn't help but chuckle slightly as he heard a fresh wave of screaming wash over his ears. Sometimes he really disliked how alike he and his sister were.