This story was co-developed by Titan127 and beta read by ShonnaRose and JhinoftheOpera.
[12-2] Choice
He never flipped it over.
Through waking and through sleep, his Trainer Card remained firmly imprisoned within his fingers, as he didn't have enough control in that arm to relax, nor did he particularly intend to.
He was watched by medical equipment, forced to rest sitting up due to his arm. Localized anesthetic cut off everything below his shoulder, and his arm was cooking in a wrap of gauzes and creams while the antibiotics tried to keep his muscles on his bones. The doctor said, had he arrived a few hours later, he wouldn't have had to worry about the infection anymore. For Laina's sake, he didn't let her know that.
Ciel almost wished the pain wasn't blocked from reaching his brain. He was unfortunately conscious enough, with too few distractions in this sterile graveyard to keep his thoughts suppressed.
The flowers.
The red.
The woman.
The body.
The red.
The woman.
The flowers. The body. The woman. The flowers. The body. The flowers.
The red. The woman. The red. The flowers. The body. The Red. The Red. The red. The red the red the red the red the red the red the red the red the red the red the red the red the red the red.
His cheeks were salty, and his eyelids stung. Was he still breathing? Only barely.
The room's lamps were dark and the curtains pulled tight, leaving the swallowing bed his only certainty. A dull glow floated somewhere in the nothing, as he had requested the nurse flipped the digital alarm clock on its face before to keep its light contained. The light was red.
There was a person in front of him. He has a tacky shirt and blond hair, and he stood with an arm and leg forward while the other pair fell behind—confident in front but shivering like a lost child in the back. In a cave he stood, the rocks around him glistening with water that condensed from the thick air. The only reason he could see was a radiant glow to his side.
It changed. The blond-haired kid was on a raised platform, and between him and Ciel was a shimmering wall of energy. Small ripples appeared where drops from the torrent of rain made contact, blurring the view between himself and the kid. That scene didn't last more than a few seconds before he was whisked away again.
No matter how many new places appeared, he couldn't force them to stop. Abort. End. Cancel. Some were as simple as a collapsed shelf in a small, traditional-style home in Mahogany, or as monumental as a titanic roof of the Berlitz Mine hovering a few precious seconds off the ground.
The kid turned around, and around him bloomed a sea of petals. He was older now, a little taller, horribly like a mirror. Ciel screamed at him to make the decision before someone else made it for him, but everything collapsed to red.
A new scene appeared that tightened his fingers so hard around his Trainer Card that it nearly snapped in half. The sky, the ground, it was all still sickeningly crimson, where a metal building with a heavy iron door stood alone. Against all his pleads and cries, the boy pushed open the door, and it thundered closed behind him.
His eyes shot open.
A gentle beam filtered in from the hall, and chilly fingers on his wrist dragged him forward.
A blinding flash made him squeeze his eyes shut to keep it out. Junk was thrown this way and that past his eyelids, like the entire room was a scrambling puzzle He jerked in surprise when something cold found his right hand and it forced him to face the light and investigate.
Mint chocolate chip. It was his favorite ice cream, as much as someone lactose intolerant could have one. The lid was nowhere to be found and a plastic spoon was wedged so hard into dessert that it would shatter if he tried to dig it out.
His gaze soared from the ice cream to a blank monitor in front of him, his eyes barely adjusting to the torturous glare as four figures coalesced.
Silver, red-haired and still in that oversized hoodie.
Crystal, sun hat held in front of her pocketed overall dress.
Zuki, a braid down her shoulder above a black cardigan.
Brent, one strap down on his green overalls.
Together, and with all the joy in the world, they shouted, "Nice to see you again!"
Silver's was a bit of grumble, and Brent's slight accent stitched his words together, but nonetheless he felt the wave of welcome rip through his muscles and tear up his spine.
Was this even real, or was he still wrapped in the netting of his dreams? Last he checked, Silver, Crystal, and Gold were headed towards the Indigo Plateau, and Brent and Zuki had moved back to Cherrygrove to finish the former's undergrad. Why would they even get together to call him when they had so many better things to do?
To his left and right, he felt warm bodies. Raven was curled into a ball on the bed, and Arden leaned politely over with his forepaws on Ciel's arm. The sparkling Lilligant also stood with Mantis away from the bed, shaking and twirling to an invisible beat. Only Brisa was missing from the dream, and he had no spare brainpower to imagine her into existence.
Ahead of him, the apparitions devolved into a meaningless bombardment of chatter.
"Ciel! Man! You keep doing more hero stuff! People are talking about you all over Johto now!" exclaimed Brent.
"It's wonderful to talk to you in person! He keeps telling me so much about you when he sees you on the news, sometimes I think he's seeing someone on the side." Zuki leveled a playful tone, which was perhaps tangled—only slightly—with true suspicion.
"Dang, how's your arm?" said Crystal, holding her fingers to her cheek, "I heard the infection was pretty deep. Did they wrap it okay? I learned some advanced first aid from Diane over the summer, so maybe—"
Silver cut her off with an incredulous stare, leaving the dreamscape in pause. It made the noise and the pain fade for only a moment, enough for Ciel to take a breath. "Ease off. He's in a hospital, they've already dealt with it by now."
"I'm just trying to give some advice," she shot back.
"No, seriously!" Brent cut in and physically shoved his girlfriend away so he could lean into their camera. The latter's put-upon "hey!" seemed to miss him entirely. "Tell me all about it! You haven't called me back since the plane thing, and now I've got a stack of articles about you growing on the dining table!"
Each shouted syllable was reflected by a pound in his head, punching the walls of its cage to escape, making the veins in Ciel's brain swell to bursting. A burning sensation had started to seep from his slung arm to his head. It hurt. It hurt so much.
A cold spoon touching his tongue as the ice cream wormed its way into his mouth, and he finally saw who brought him here. Laina literally spooned it for him, as he couldn't pick up the utensil without dropping his Trainer Card. He wished the icy sensation would moderate the temperature in his head, but instead it twirled with the freezer burn into a double-faced hellfire. And she kept going, forcing it down without a second thought.
They kept talking, and talking, and talking, whether or not he was listening, and blood flowed free in his head. His fingers clenched the Trainer Card. This dream felt so real and he felt so real and it hurt. Wake up. Wake up. Wake up!
"Ciel, you gotten a Pokémon with the new Types? I remember you mentioned talking about that Kukui guy and that book you were excited about." Brent's voice again, whether spewed from a body or chiming from nowhere. The twang, erratic but gentle, became a quake of vibrations in his cracked skull.
"Perhaps I could perform one of my dances?" asked Zuki. "I'm in the middle of choreographing one for our new show, but I could give you a sample."
More shakes fired from Crystal, and even Silver too. They all said nothings with the force of a rocket blast. There was no epicenter—no direction to escape.
All his agony came ripping from his lungs through his dusty esophagus, in the loudest scream he could utter.
"STOP!"
All was still.
His jaw felt like rusted clockwork that hadn't been run in years. When was the last time he spoke? He clenched his teeth as the echoes of his outburst lingered, finding the grinding of his bones almost as unbearable as the gradually vanishing pressure in his head. Everything had become eerily quiet, and it almost made the pounding worse, as he could sense nothing else.
"C-Ciel?" someone asked, in a mindful whisper.
He didn't know who, but his eyes drifted up to the screen and to his sister. All of them sat in stasis, waiting for an absent cue to resume with shock tattooed over the features. Even his Pokémon were stalled, Lilligant frozen amidst a performance. They were unable to respond, as his scream had gotten through.
Aside from some waylaid coughing, the first person to speak was Laina. She gently placed the ice cream off to the side and then swayed on her feet, locking and separating her fingers in alternation. "Okay, so, uhh, maybe we could just save this for later. Just not a great time for—"
"No!" he exclaimed, another involuntary burst. It wasn't fair to them. He didn't know when or how she organized it, but she'd manage to loop them all together regardless of time differences, and for what? So he could scream and tell them they were failures for trying? "It's fine. Fine. It's good."
"Ciel, no," said Crystal, stalwart. "We're here to help, but if we aren't helping, then we shouldn't be here. I guess we could've been a bit more coordinated."
"I could've told you that," mumbled Silver, who received a—noticeably strong, according to his recoil—punch on the forearm in response.
Brent nodded feverishly inside his panel. "Yeah, don't you worry! I can get us together next time, and—"
"Where's Gold?" asked Ciel.
His question came out of nowhere, but it was the only part of this that he could really focus on. Absentminded, boneheaded, erratic, and haphazard as he was, he was a really reliable friend, and one of the first persons, aside from Chuck Hartwig and his wife, that supported Ciel in person after Olivine.
"Gold is…" She trailed off. "I don't know. News reports say he's been taking the Kanto Gym Challenge and that he's beating some time record, but he's not slowing down to answer any questions. We're trying to find him at the moment."
"How can you not know where he is?" asked Brent. "I thought he was like your—"
"My what?" An eyebrow raised alongside the tone of her question.
"You know, your, uhh... Zuki, help me out here."
"I believe I've only talked to him briefly when we attended that tournament the first time. A nice man, for sure." Zuki's knowing stare never faltered, and even in mischief was as sculpted as a statue.
Brent seemingly hoped the answer would sweat right out of him if he stalled long enough. A false emotion tugged ever so slightly at Ciel's cheeks. His friend said, "Your boyfriend, okay? I never saw you without him, and you talked and hugged a lot, and it just seemed like you had that kind of thing going on."
"You'd better hope that's wrong," said Silver. Brent and Zuki stared from inside their widget, and he pulled up his right arm to reveal Crystal's fingers firmly grasped within his own. It was a gentle, but still wholly unbreakable, gesture.
Oh. When did that happen? Ciel searched his memory banks, but his query returned empty, whether it was lack of data or processing power.
Brent formed an "O" with his mouth, and then faced away in his shame.
"Dumbass," Silver said, squeezing her fingers a little harder. She didn't break under his frustration.
"Hey, that's what we want to see."
Crystal pointed her finger right at his face and forced him to look at himself in the unsteady mirror of the screen's glare. It vanished as soon as he noticed it, but for a split second, the curve of his pursed lips could have been called a smile.
"We're not here to make you speedrun the five stages of grief or anything," she said. "We want to work at your pace, and if we can do the littlest thing, you need to let us know. I don't want someone else running off without telling me what's wrong."
"Do you… know?" he asked. It was no secret, due in part of the legion of local reporters had tried to interrogate him as they fled Ren and Eva's.
"Not really. We'll leave it to you to tell us."
He couldn't. No, no! His hand went to his head again, and the pain threatened to return in full force. He couldn't put anyone else in harm's way, not after she made clear what his failure to keep secrets cost him.
That woman, the Ruins of Alph, whatever was going on behind the scenes with Lance's clan in Blackthorn, he couldn't tell anyone. She held a sick promise over his head like a guillotine.
If breaking it was the reason why the Champions—
And Hector—
Just as his head threatened to explode, Crystal said, "Sorry I couldn't help much, Laina. We'll see you soon."
The others said their goodbyes; Crystal and Silver's camera went dead, while Zuki stepped out of view. Only Brent remained, even as his girlfriend called him away from offscreen. Ciel had never seen such a fire behind his eyes.
"I'll be there for you," he declared. "In Sinnoh if I have to. I'll be your hero."
Without any room for argument or clarification, the call died. It had felt like an eternity in agony, but the black screen that remained was all too eager to tell him how long it actually lasted. Seven minutes. Even.
He fell into the bed, held hostage and awaiting whatever Laina wanted to say, focusing on the only thing that he cared about: the card in his left hand. He couldn't even pivot his head to look at Raven and Arden, both in tense silence with their own misgivings. The Lilligant studied them from afar, not yet resumed her dance.
It was the first time since Floaroma that he'd paid close enough attention to his partner to see her fur was still restless. He prayed to whatever deities were out there that she was simply mourning, and not that another disaster had yet come to pass. He couldn't be ready. He didn't deserve to be.
His sister shuffled her hands in front of her, and then said in a low, almost imperceptible voice, "I screwed up."
How did she even organize this? She had taken his Poké GEAR and his Poké Balls from him—he hadn't found a valid reason to stop her, knowing the choices he made—so he surmised that she had contacted them earlier today, or yesterday, or whenever. He hadn't been paying much attention.
"I just wanted to make you happy. If you tell me what happened, I can help you. Mom and Dad can help you! Come on, Ciel." She struggled to utter her words, simple as they were.
I can't tell you. I can't hurt you.
"I did it for you," was all he could say.
"What do you even mean?" She got into his face, though keeping what she probably thought was a comfortable distance. He didn't tell her she was wrong.
He shook his head pitifully. "It doesn't matter."
"It does matter when you need to be better. You need to be the person you're supposed to be."
Who was he supposed to be? A famous Trainer? A brother? A failure? A killer?
He sealed his rusted jaw and held onto his Trainer Card with dear life. She seemed to notice how hard he gripped it and grabbed it herself, tearing it from his grasp. His "dear life" wasn't much, he supposed.
"You've been holding this for days. What's even the big— oh." Her eyes widened when she flipped it over. "Oh."
She could see it. The giant, blood-red X marked on the back face, which filled one of three spaces below the magnetic strip. They were labeled "Violations".
"Is this about," she swallowed something in her throat, "your Typhlosion?"
The reality had chained his arms and legs since Floaroma, forcing him to fight against the truth simply to trudge forward, and making him heavier for her to pull along. He finally opened his mouth to explain.
"My yearly audit is in March," he whispered. "They bring in vets and psychologists to judge the health of your Pokémon to determine if you're still fit to be a Trainer. Three marks and you're done, forever. I don't think I'll have any marks left next year."
"That's not fair! Arden forgave you for that, and you've tried to be good for all of them!"
"It doesn't matter. A Trainer makes choices for their Pokémon. If they don't make good choices, they aren't worthy of being a Trainer."
"But it wasn't your fault! You love your Pokémon. You wouldn't have done something if you knew it was going to hurt them!"
"So Hector chose to die?!" he shouted.
Her eyes went blank. Her lips quivered, and she backed away. "No! No, no, no! That's not what— I just meant that you, you had to—"
She must have seen the tears burning trenches into his cheeks, because she let her fearful backsteps lead her to the door of the hospital room. Without another word, she threw open the door and escaped, leaving the passage cracked behind her.
His Pokémon— no, he couldn't call them that. They stared at the exit, clearly unnerved by what just occurred. Ciel folded in on himself, wanting to be as far from them as possible.
"You should go with her." It was like he was no longer speaking. He didn't feel anything leave his lungs. "I don't deserve you."
With bated breath, he awaited their answer.
One by one, they left the room. First the Lilligant, which took hold of the waylaid ice cream on her way out. Then, Mantis grabbed the squawking mass behind the monitor and dragged her from the room.
After an eternal stillness, Arden stepped back from the bed as well. Ciel could feel the turn of his head, the lingering of his gaze, and the half-hearted reach of his paw that stopped before it could meet his skin. When Arden eventually limped away, it left Raven trembling alone on Ciel's lap.
"Go," he said.
She didn't.
Raven refused to move further away, which would concede that he had won, or closer, which would claim that he was wrong.
She refused to move entirely, which meant the most of all.
Some of what Crystal mentions in this chapter is more directly explained in Ten Thousand Meters, which focuses on Gold. He had some unresolved things at the end of his last appearance that I wanted to build on, and this establishes firmly that those two stories are running side-by-side. Maybe they'll converge at some point in the future.
Volume 12, Part 3: Memento is next. See you someday!