Chapter Three – Positive Numbers

N hoped that Reshiram might be able to use Hilda's blood-soaked trainer card to his advantage, but although it could confirm that the blood was Hilda's, the dried blood was too old to carry a scent strong enough to track anymore. So, Rosa and N hopped on the dragon's back and returned to Aspertia where Cheren and Bianca waited without so much as a hint as where to start the search.

It was a little past noon when the two arrived in Aspertia, but Cheren's brooding expression didn't faze N in the least. The older of the two, with Rosa by his side, smiled at the once-bespectacled boy. Cheren's expression lightened only slightly when he noticed Rosa, and he raised a hand in a half-hearted wave.

"Rosa, are you sure about this?" Cheren asked, skipping a greeting entirely, and Rosa exchanged a pointed glance with N. "This could be dangerous. I'm just trying to—"

"Keep me safe, I know." Rosa smiled, her eyes almost as light as Hilda's had been. "Luckily for you, I don't need to be kept safe. I'm perfectly capable of taking care of myself, as I know you know, and as I know you know you're just having a momentary lapse in judgment." When Cheren opened his mouth to counter, Rosa held up a hand. "Please. I'm stronger than you."

"Maybe not…" Cheren's brooding look was back. "I have no interest in being Champion, so I would never find out."

Bianca snorted, reminding everyone that she was there, and she covered her mouth with her hand. "Sorry. I just thought that was really funny, Cheren. You used to be obsessed with being the best and the strongest and all that. You forgot about it?"

"I'd like to forget, but someone keeps reminding me," he retorted.

Rosa laughed, but when the sound ceased, suddenly the reason for their meeting rose to the forefront. Any hint of a smile vanished, and when Bianca shuffled her feet on the ground and kicked a rock, all four pairs of eyes followed the pebble down the sidewalk. It was a final reminder that they, now adults in this world, could no longer act as children.

But it remained silent for a moment beyond that one, their serious faces pointed in different directions. An observer might call this encounter awkward, but the four of them soaked it in. They could be together for awhile, after all, and such togetherness required mental preparation. Cheren, for one, wasn't sure he could handle N for a prolonged period of time.

They didn't realize, however, that the four were not all in the same place.

"I'm not going," Bianca finally announced, and the three other heads pointed towards her. Cheren appeared the most shocked; his jaw went slightly slack, and he made a motion to push up the glasses he no longer wore as if he had once had a habit of doing so.

"Why not?" Rosa, the first one to pull it together, asked.

It was fair to note that Bianca was Hilda's best girlfriend. In the past, the two of them spent hours braiding each other's hair and talking about the cute boys down the road (which sometimes included Cheren, not that they would ever admit that). Bianca was gentler than Cheren, so she was the one to whom Hilda would go when she was upset. Needless to say, many a secret had been shared between them.

Their reactions, then, were not completely unfounded.

"I'm sorry. I want to come." Bianca's eyes began to water, and she curled her fingers around the cuffs of her sleeves. "Professor Juniper has work for me to do, and I can't just leave. Besides, I'm good at the work I do here. If I were to come with you, I'd be useless. The three of you will be fine the way you are."

"You wouldn't be useless," Cheren protested, but even N could tell his argument was not in full confidence. "Hilda would want you to come."

"Oh, I know. I do know." Bianca nodded, a smile forced on her lips. "She was always great about including me in everything. But I might as well keep my job since I'm actually good at it."

Cheren began to protest again, but it was Rosa who stopped him this time. "It'd be selfish of us to insist you come, Bianca. We can't take you away from your work. But please keep us in your thoughts. We can let you know if there's any way you can help out from here, okay?" She smiled, and Bianca nodded.

N found the interactions of humans curious. Having been raised partially by Pokémon—for the first few years of his life, anyway—and then raised poorly by humans, he didn't fully grasp the nuances of social cues and rules. It was normal, exceedingly so, to act selfishly in this culture, while it might differ greatly in another.

He didn't think that Bianca was being selfish, per se, but it was possible that her best friend was in mortal danger…

And then there was Rosa, the one who acted in place of the three of them to make the final judgment. This, too, happened often as far as N could tell. It was for the "greater good"—the good of the group as a whole, save for maybe Cheren.

"Fine." Cheren relaxed and managed a smile for Bianca. "Thanks for coming to see us off, then. We'll see you soon."

"Be careful."

Cheren turned on N, eyeing the dragon behind him carefully. "Can you take us to where you found Hilda's trainer card?"

"Of course."

N led the way on Reshiram's back, and Cheren and Rosa followed behind on their own Pokémon. For Rosa and N, there was no guilt riding with them at leaving Bianca behind, but Cheren couldn't shake the feeling that something more needed to be said. Still, it wasn't as if he had a choice anymore, and he wasn't going to leave this to just N and Rosa.

They landed just outside of Unova's boundaries where the mountains rose in the west, and a light rain had started to fall on them. N hopped down off of Reshiram's back, and the dragon sat down in a comfortable patch of grass not too far from the humans while Cheren and Rosa's Pokémon returned to their Poké Balls. N elected not to comment on the injustice of it, knowing that he, too, had Pokémon with him in Balls, but three years ago he wouldn't have been such a pushover. But even he knew that he had to get along with those two.

"Just there," N said, pointing to the relative location of Hilda's trainer card. Cheren stared at the spot with a hand on his chin, as if some sign might pop out of the ground that read, "Hilda was here."

The sign wouldn't be necessary. The card was proof enough that Hilda had once been there, however long ago that was. Whether it was dropped or intentionally left behind was a bigger question—what had been happening at the exact moment Hilda passed this spot? Was she being pulled by her hair, bloodied and unable to fight back, to who-knew-where and dropped the card in hopes of being found? Or was this all one big mistake?

No. There were no mistakes, and there were no coincidences. N considered himself an optimist, but probability was always positive, whether the outcome good or bad.

"All right." Rosa stood with her hands on her hips, her gaze firm on the mountains towering above them. "There are a couple of possibilities here—and please tell me if my ideas are ridiculous because I'm no detective. But obviously something happened out here. Hilda probably stopped at the Pokémon Center to heal her Pokémon—this is either before she began her search for N or during some unplanned return here."

"Before she left, most likely. Why would she return randomly? It would be towards the beginning of her search, so there'd be no need for her to come back to Unova," Cheren countered, and Rosa nodded.

"But if her stop at the Pokémon Center was exactly three years ago, she would have been recognizable as the Champion. The nurse should have known who she was," Rosa suggested, to which Cheren had no counterargument. "N, did the nurse ever explicitly state that Hilda dropped off her Pokémon three years ago? Or would you say it was an estimate?"

N shouldn't have let that slip past him. "Estimate. She wasn't sure it was Hilda, either, but she knew that the girl had dropped off an Emboar."

Rosa nodded, her expression passive, but Cheren's lips were pursed in annoyance. "So, my thought is that it was Hilda, but it wasn't three years ago. I think it was a little less—after Iris took over as Champion, so the excitement about Hilda died down. Maybe two to two-and-a-half years ago. The nurse wouldn't have recognized Hilda anymore, and it would be plenty of time for her to decide to quit and return to Unova. Aspertia would make sense as the first stop home, too, since it's the closest to the mountains."

The boys remained quiet. Rosa said she was no detective, but she certainly had more of a mind for it than either of them. What she said made sense—Hilda was on her way back from searching for N when she was ambushed, most likely specifically after Hilda was without her Pokémon. A nurse who had never seen her before wouldn't necessarily peg her as the ex-Champion…

And then Hilda was brought out to these mountains, dropped her trainer card, and was—where?

"It would be perfect timing for Team Plasma, too," Cheren offered. "Hilda showed back up while they were formulating their next plan. Ghetsis wanted her out of the way, so—"

"It wasn't Ghetsis," N reiterated again, for what felt like the twentieth time, and Cheren rolled his eyes. "He wouldn't."

"Yes, but we're talking two years ago—my encounter with Ghetsis only occurred a year ago," Rosa countered, though it was obvious by her nonchalant tone that she was only playing the devil's advocate. "Who is to say that he didn't remove Hilda from the equation ahead of time knowing that he was planning another go? She was the one who stopped him first, after all. He lost heart after I defeated him, not after Hilda did."

N didn't like it. He would admit that Ghetsis had done some terrible things—and he had been an even worse father to him. Even worse, he didn't want it to sound as if he was sticking up for Ghetsis, because he wasn't. But N believed he knew the man well enough to say that he wouldn't hurt Hilda—not when she willingly removed herself from the equation by going to search for N. There would be no point in that wasted energy.

"There's no point in thinking about who the culprit is when we don't even have any leads," Cheren said hastily, and Rosa nodded. "All we know is that Hilda went to the Pokémon Center—at some point within the last three years—and never returned. Even that isn't one hundred percent set in stone. She passed through here at some point and dropped her trainer card with her own blood on it. Now what?"

"Well," N began, looking from the direction they had come to the mountains. "Assuming the Pokémon Center as point A and this spot as point B, there is a linear path of travel. The shortest distance from one point to the next is always a straight path, which suggests that point C would fall along the same line. Which leads…"

N followed the invisible path with his finger, pointing it towards the mountains. Cheren and Rosa both held their breath. It wasn't that far from home…

"Let's look for more clues before we go climb up a mountain, though. There might be something else around here," Cheren suggested.

N doubted that there would be anything else—the trainer card was already a pertinent enough clue, and the chances of finding another item of substance in this area was low based on the geography and time range. But he humored Cheren anyway, deciding that it was better to be thorough and bet on that small chance.

The three of them spread out, looking along the grass and under rocks and in the dirt for any other sign that Hilda had been there—and hopefully a sign that she had been there of her own accord. None of them were sure what that might look like, but none of them expected that the reason Hilda never returned was because of foul play.

They searched longer than necessary, perhaps due to desperation to find anything else that would connect to her. The sun had begun to set, and the winds by the mountains chilled the air. Still, they looked… and looked… and looked.

"… Come."

Rosa raised her head and glanced around, holding her breath as she searched for a source of the sound. "Did you hear that?" she finally whispered to her male companions, not that they could hear her from where they were. "Did you hear that voice just then? It sounded… familiar." Rosa took a step forward towards the mountains, her feet crunching in the grass, and then another and another. Her eyes glazed over a little as she walked. "It said—"

A hand closed around her wrist, and she gasped, shaking herself back into full consciousness. When she turned back around, N let go.

"Where are you going?" Cheren asked, jogging over to the two of them. He glanced between them, and Rosa frowned.

"Didn't you hear that? That voice?"

Cheren made a face and shook his head. "No."

The three went silent, straining themselves to hear something—anything—but after a minute or so passed, Cheren shrugged. Even N couldn't hear anything, and he considered his hearing particularly strong. Still, Rosa pushed it—she couldn't have imagined it, she couldn't have just been hearing things, there was a voice…

But the boys still didn't believe her.

Until they turned around.

Author's Note: Sorry if these chapters are short. Because I've been writing drabbles for the past few weeks, I'm writing these chapters and they feel so long, haha. The next chapter is longer.

I actually don't think this fic will be that long overall, though. It's hard to tell because when I plan things, it all fits perfectly together, and by the time I write it, one planned chapter will span across three. So, we'll see what happens.

Hope you're still enjoying this!