Merry Christmas to everyone! Shigeru took a few turns on me during this chapter. I know you all are starting to hate him, but don't give up on him just yet! Some of this chapter will hint to a major plot point about why he's become such a jerk. I'm very, very interested in seeing what you think.

chapter five

"Seriously, is that all you have to say? You're just... sorry?"

Satoshi's eyes had come up from the floor, hesitantly scouring Shigeru's expression before stealing away to the corner of the room. The fire and the shadow cast his shadow long and with double-edges.

"Yeah... You were right about some stuff. I probably need to be more careful," Satoshi spoke just barely above a mumble. "And I was being sort of stupid, I guess..."

He waited for Satoshi to go on with his excuses and with apologies, but instead, Shigeru watched him move forward and take his seat on the cushion that sat opposite him around the fire pit. Having done so, Satoshi ventured his eyes up from beneath the brim of his hat and his shaggy bangs, and looked at Shigeru in earnest. Being Satoshi, it was the most incredibly open expression of penitence that Shigeru had ever seen. It made him even feel sorry for making Satoshi want to be sorry. It was - it was bizarre. It was disturbing, it was so much so that Shigeru, for a split second, thought of giving in. Then he leaned away from the wall and in towards Satoshi, in a practiced way that he knew looked just as aloof as it did intimidating.

"Well, it's good to know that we both agree that you're stupid" Shigeru pointed a finger at Satoshi with a denigrating smirk. "But since you - unfortunately - didn't manage to kill yourself off yet, it looks like you're in for a lot of fun tomorrow."

"Huh? Why, what's going on?"

Satoshi's expression changed completely as he uttered his response. Any tension that had existed from his apology was wiped away as easily as if it were dust. Shigeru tried not to let himself look amazed at how anyone could simultaneously be both so sincere and so forgetful.

'Just because I'm talking to you doesn't mean I like you, now. Idiot.'

"After you ran off like a little girl, Haruka and Masato came in to ask us how we felt about meeting with the village leaders tomorrow morning. It seems that everyone in Alph is dying to know who we are and what we're doing here."

Satoshi sharply twisted around to glance at the door ('The instinct of a world-famous, paparrazzi'd pokemon champion?' Shigeru mused). In the center of the doorframe, however, an unrolled woven blanket hung as if it could care less for its' change of occupants. Quite suitably, there were no leering faces of villagers peeking through the cracks of light left open.

"But, Shigeru-"

"In case you're wondering," Shigeru waved off Satoshi's simultaneous incredulity and anxiety. "You shouldn't see the entire town peeking in on us right outside the door."

"But," Satoshi repeated, stubborn, "but wouldn't that make sense? Us being here is really unusual, right? Why wouldn't people want to see us?"

"It's because the village leaders are keeping them away for now," Shigeru explained, surprising himself with the patience in his own voice. "After you appeared outside with Haruka this afternoon, and went with Masato and Haruka to the Perch, it was obvious to the Elders that the town had received at least one visitor from 'Outside'."

"From 'Outside'?" asked Satoshi. "What does that mean?"

"Someone who's not from the Village is called an 'Outsider' here. They don't seem to get new blood into Alph very often. I bet they haven't even seen people who aren't from this community for over a hundred years, from the way they're talking about us. But I had always assumed... We had all assumed... that they weren't so self-contained..." Shigeru paused, and his irises moved to the corner of his eye, as he looked at something out of sight. "For example... Why don't 'outside' people come to Alph? Wouldn't it be easier to travel over sea than over a desert? And if there's no cultural exchange, especially trade, how does Alph get all of its' food? We'd always assumed that the food came from trade, since the village sits on essentially a giant rock..."

Shigeru began to gesticulate as if he were catching the thoughts flashed through his mind, one after another. It was a rope tightly reweaving itself as he spoke, all the colors disordered -

"...since that's just proven not to be the case, how do they repopulate without each generation losing genetic material and inbreeding? Is this why they eventually abandoned..."

And Shigeru continued, even though the more he spoke, the more he felt the chill spread over him. He was so close to understanding what was happening - there was something right there at the edge of his knowledge, but what was it?

What was it? What was he missing? His eyes scanned the memory of data sheets and dirt and a hieroglyph and-

"... unrealistic. However, the teams haven't found fossils of giant bird pokemon in that vicinity, so perhaps-"

"Shigeru," something interrupted, "What are you talking about?"

He came crashing back to himself with a start. The rope fell all around him, and he desperately tried to memorize the coils before they unraveled once more. But they had already mostly faded to the back of his mind. Shigeru took a long blink, then snapped his eyes towards Satoshi, sitting in the middle of the room with a curious expression, wondering with some indifference whether or not Satoshi had said anything.

And then he realized where he was, and the next thought that came was What the hell! I was talking to myself again! And what did he ask me anyway?

Shigeru opened his mouth to offer a defense, anything, some sort of excuse -

- and Satoshi began to laugh.

"Don't laugh at me!" shouted Shigeru, as a flush began to rise on his cheeks and up his neck. "I was thinking aloud!"

"Want to tell me what you were thinking of, again?" baited Satoshi, leaning into Shigeru.

A flush rose on Shigeru's cheeks and up his neck. Satoshi was teasing him!

"No, I was thinking aloud!"

Satoshi moved forward and leaned forward on the palms of his hands

"Really," Satoshi sparkled. "I guess you weren't saying anything important."

Shigeru blustered as he leaned himself backwards, throwing out his hands for escape. "Of course it was important! But I'm not going to waste my time trying to explain it to you if you couldn't get it the first time I said it!"

"Geez, sorry," Satoshi was mollified and became quiet for a moment. The flirtatious glint left his eyes, and Shigeru's body uncoiled itself from the anxiety that it had caused.

It was just a long enough stretch of time for Shigeru to remember what he'd been trying to say in the first place.

"Anyway, Satoshi, because we're outsiders - we're strange. And I was told that the village leaders think that we might be evil."

Satoshi's cheeks inflated as he tried to keep his laughter under control (Shigeru enjoyed the expression on his companion's face, as he may or may not have had a similar reaction when he had first heard the news from Masato). He also enjoyed that now, at least, he was not the only one who had been at a loss for words.

"On the chance that we're evil, of course, we had to be isolated from the other villagers so we couldn't curse them."

"If we were evil, wouldn't we have just cursed Masato and Haruka immediately? Or Masato at least," asked Satoshi innocently, his laughter now largely contained.

Shigeru snorted. So Satoshi agreed on his judgment of this world's Masato? "There are different types of evil, though. Sure, it's evil to curse the first person you see, but it's much, much more effective if we didn't act evil immediately, but waited for our big chance to curse the village leaders."

"Then why would the village leaders want to meet us tomorrow?" Satoshi's shoulders dropped as he let out a sigh of obvious distress.

"They want to know who we are and what we're doing here."

"But if we're evil-"

"If we're evil, that wouldn't be a good idea, right?" Shigeru stuck out his finger and pointed it right into Satoshi's face (more for old time's sake than anything else, and it was actually just as satisfying as it had been during 'old times', too). He continued, sourly," That's where the 'fun' begins. Tomorrow morning, we'll be meeting the village leaders, but only after undergoing a series of curse-preventing and evil-searching tests."

"You mean like, walking on hot coals barefoot? Or running on a spinning log over a raging waterfall? Or eating the most pokefood in an hour without throwing up?" asked Satoshi. His eyes shone brightly and were imploring as they looked up to Shigeru. Of all the expressions that could've come over any human's face, Satoshi was just bizarre. Really, who else would actually look excited at hearing something like that? And of all the responses for a human seeing such a face, even Shigeru couldn't quite understand why, but he quirked a smirk.

"Where do you get these ideas?"

"I saw it on T.V. once," Satoshi mumbled, suitably chastened.

"You realize that there is no way that eating ten pounds of pokefood would prove your integrity."

"I don't know," said Satoshi, dubious, "I don't think I'd feel like doing much of any cursing after eating that much pokefood."

"Sounds like you're admitting to having wanted to be evil."

"No different than the way you sound every day" Satoshi challenged boldly.

"Actually..." Satoshi trailed off, a smile on his lips. Shigeru placed his elbow on his thigh and rested his chin in his palm as he waited for the story. It took a moment before he realized that his lips, too, were twitching upwards.

He sat up immediately, fighting off the warm feeling that had been building in his chest without his notice.

"I'm hungry," he lied.

If Satoshi noticed the abrupt change, he didn't comment on it. In fact, Shigeru watched him move his hand onto his stomach sympathetically.

"Oh yeah," Satoshi groaned. His face paled as if he were ready to swoon. "How are we going to eat?"

It was a far more reasonable question than Shigeru wanted to give him credit for; in fact, Shigeru could've kicked himself, as he realized, Of course, I spent all of my time today trying to figure out what we're doing here that I didn't even think about what I should do here.

"I'm sure Haruka and Masato plan on feeding us," he said instead, his voice purposefully ambiguous.

"Can they feed us now?"

"Want to go find them and ask? Why do I have to be your personal message boy?" Shigeru whined.

"Well, I thought you knew where they were."

"And I thought that you told me that this was their house, but I don't see them anywhere, do you?"

Satoshi crossed his arms. "I'll just wait, then."

He waited until the fire burned down to charcoal and emitted light no longer.

Shigeru had for a while now laid on his pallet, facing away from him. Satoshi frowned as he slipped under his covers and tried to find some comfort in the darkness. Without his friends, without his pokemon, it was nearly too quiet, and he clung onto the steady rhythms of Shigeru's breath with every fiber of his being. It ha been a tiring day...

Inhale, exhale. Awake, asleep.

He wasn't sleeping.

The deception in itself wasn't unusual. Shigeru spent more time laying on his back staring into space than he did in an actual state of rest; it wasn't deliberate, or anything, but there was something in him that fluttered inside him at night. Sometimes, he could pinpoint what was bothering him. At Alph, for example, it was the heat and the sand. When he camped, it was the musty dew on his sleeping bag. Back home in Pallet, it was the too-crisp bed sheets.

Tonight, it was the sound of Satoshi's steady breathing as they laid beside each other.

Or maybe it was the fact that he didn't know where he was and didn't know where he was going and the inky black night had never been quite so thick before.

But Satoshi was just as disorienting.

He wasn't doing anything. He was just laying there. He'd fallen asleep as soon as he'd closed his eyes. He wasn't breathing heavily, or snoring, or moving in his sleep. It was too dark for Shigeru to tell if he was scowling or if the muscles of his face were relaxed.

There wasn't anything to it... And yet, Shigeru couldn't ignore him.

Not that he ever could.

But why had Satoshi been so... meek? Why had he apologized? Did he think that it would change the fact that they were trapped in some bizarre world with no explanation (and yes, Shigeru really did believe that Satoshi was involved in this for some reason or another)? What did Satoshi think he would do, offer forgiveness for getting them stuck here? And what about - what about everything else? Did he honestly think that there was a way he could be forgiven?

Satoshi's guileless apology flashed before him; Shigeru's eyelids drooped; his eyes rolled into the back of his head, and still sleep didn't come.

He remembered having said,"Seriously, is that it? You're just... sorry?"

And then.

A wind-chime shook in a light breeze outside and masked the trembling sigh that he released, and the memory became a vision as Shigeru slipped into himself.

They were in the field of hibiscus flowers.

The sun was scorching, and he could smell the sea nearby. More than that, the pungent aroma of dying blossoms and rotting petals wafted towards him. Satoshi didn't seem to mind the overpowering scent, however; he was skipping among them like a pleased child. He was- that is, a child again, and of ten years precisely.

Satoshi waved at him.

"Shigeru," he cried out. "Come here. See this."

"Ah," said Shigeru, nodding. He moved several steps forward, and the flowers on the ground parted to bring them together; yet beneath his feet, vines coiled and uncoiled like living snakes.

"Look up, look up," Satoshi pleaded. Shigeru obeyed and saw the sun. And then he realized that it wasn't the sun; it was only Satoshi's face; a burning, blinding light. Shigeru threw his hands over his eyes and looked towards the winding, moving tangle at his feet. A shadow seemed to pass over at last, and everything grew cold. Shigeru rubbed his arms where goosebumps had gathered.

"Are you cold?" asked Satoshi abruptly.

"No," Shigeru lied. "I'm fine."

"You probably shouldn't stay here," the boy told him solemnly, as he reached for another flower. "In the past. It's isn't warm enough. It's really cold."

Shigeru stuck his hands in his pockets. "I don't see what that has to do with anything."

"Well, sometimes the present feels like the past. Doesn't it get cold on its own sometimes?"

Shigeru pinched the bridge of his nose. "No."

"Then why are you so cold, Shigeru? Why are you so cold?"

"I'm not going to answer that," he snapped. "And what's with all this talk about being cold - would you just stop speaking in riddles already? Can we... can we play, or something? Like we used to?"

A sharp wind whipped through the flowers and the vines and the two of them in the field. Shigeru knew how to recognize change, at least, and braced himself for an assault.

"I'd like to play. I want to be friends again. But you're too cold." Satoshi bent down to pick up another blossom, but Shigeru stopped him in time.

"Listen. It's not because I'm cold, it's because you're you; isn't that reason enough?"

"How can you say that? I haven't even seen you for years! You don't even know me anymore!" Satoshi's eyes were incredulous. He straightened. "It's not my fault that you're so screwed up! Why are you so angry? It wasn't me that made you this way!"

"You don't know what you're talking about."

"I don't? Then what am I supposed to know?" asked Satoshi. His voice was deceptively light as he brushed off Shigeru, broke off yet another stem and twirled it in his fingers. "What am I supposed to know, Shigeru?"

"That you're the sun! That you're the one who made me have to be cold, just to live! You destroyed my life!" Shigeru shouted, and suddenly he began to cry.

A tear dropped off of Shigeru's chin and the vine snakes hissed as it hit their flesh. This was too much for them: they rose up in convulsions, their leaves flashing like teeth and their swiveling no longer seductive but charged with danger, palpable and angry.

A cloak of grey settled over the vision and Satoshi's face blurred. He was no longer ten and he was no longer Satoshi, and there was a sun no longer drenching them with light but blistering him with cold terror. Seeing Satoshi as a child has reminded him of warmth, and happiness, and life. But this - this was guilt and hate and pain and death.

This was not something he could accept so easily.

"Satoshi," he hesitated only a moment before demanding, "Listen, come back! I want to go back! I can - I can explain!"

Only a menacing smile erupted from the darkened side of Satoshi's face, and then the vines, at last the vines attacked him - it was what he deserved after all - he knew this - and he crumpled to the ground.

On the ground now, the vines hissed as they churned over him, burning welts into his skin. Still, he could see the dark veil of shadow over the man where Satoshi had been.

'You... You...'

"You destroyed my life," Shigeru echoed himself, his voice weak. Blood leaked from his mouth like a hibiscus flower.

"No," said the disembodied voice, his voice deep and grating, "You deserved everything you got."

The panic flashed and Shigeru forced his eyes open. The air began to clear away the scent of blood and hibiscus, but the smell of sea water remained. The cold remained, too, and Shigeru remembered the coarse blanket over his legs. He pulled it closer to his chest and looked around himself. His breath echoed in the too empty, too cold room, and the darkness lifted; yet the second world of his slumber resonated at the edges of his vision.

The words resonated, too: "You deserved everything you got."

And the cold was still so thick around him.

"No... I didn't," Shigeru whispered. But he didn't know if he believed it.

He struggled to calm his breathing. Surely, the air began to clear and the darkness resettled, no longer plagued with sparks of madness and dreams dancing in the corners. The memory of sleep disappeared and surrendered him to a chilly, desert solitude.

Yet his breath stayed shallow, his muscles taut and his leg aching. Satoshi - who might as well have been half a world away, and not merely a meter - laid still on his sheets, breathing deeply, with muscles loose. It was a cruel juxtaposition that Shigeru could not suffer lightly.

Sometimes, Shigeru couldn't sleep because of the heat, or the sand, or the stiffness of his bed. Some of the time he couldn't go to sleep because he was thinking through his research in his head.

But most of the time, it was because of the nightmares.

Morning came and Shigeru threw aside his covers immediately, a scowl already on his face.

The sudden commotion startled Shigeru, who always slept in his room alone, and liked to use the Snooze function on his Poketch alarm application, thanks.

But it wasn't entirely terrible. He felt light and he didn't know why. It may have had to do with his night vision; in his memory, there was the vague image of blood and flowers, but it was gone now, and it was just the memory of Satoshi, standing in that field, smiling at him. And that was all he had to hold on to.

Shigeru turned his head to look at Satoshi, whose black hair lay tousled on the bamboo weave of his floor bed. His eyelashes fluttered intermittently but showed no reliable signs that he was in the process of waking. The only thing more messily arranged than his hair were the sheets that were wrapped halfway around his legs.

He wondered whether or not he should wake him, but finally decided on yes in the uncomfortable silence. He was, after all, still here and not home. But the stupid boy had always slept like a rock - in the middle of typhoons and riots, probably - and since Shigeru really would rather not have to touch him, he really only saw one viable solution: to prod Satoshi with a poker stick.

For Satoshi, it wasn't altogether unpleasant, at least not at first. He was simply minding his own business in the middle of a dream.

Of course, he didn't realize it was a dream, he was too entrenched in his own situation by far. thought that he wad dodging marills and pineco in a fierce game of dodgepokeball, when he (presumably) got hit in the shin by some antagonist. Repeatedly. "Someone's using psychic pokemon!" he'd shouted, at the same time as he caught a marill and clutched it to his chest instinctively, "That's cheating! CHEATING!" Eventually he climbed a tree and escaped, but more importantly, the poking stopped, and he was able to resume his imagined game (which now involved using the Pineco as hand grenades).

He finally woke up to the smell of cooking food.

He had next to no idea what it was, but the smell of spices and bread wafted to his nostrils and filled his lungs and that was all that he needed to break free from slumber and give him the strength to bolt upright.

"Good morning!" he said, his voice thick. "You brought food! You found food!"

He tumbled from his covers and crawled unsteadily to the end of his bed sheets, only several feet from the outside of the fire ring. He rubbed his eyes and leaned forward towards the fire, and his stomach made a growl so loud and disarming it probably would have had worth as an attack in a pokemon battle.

Shigeru stretched out an arm to hold Satoshi back, and just in time to stop Satoshi from barreling into the fire, too.

"Get back," he scolded. "It's not ready yet."

"What is it?" asked Satoshi, peeking around Shigeru's body-block.

"Breakfast," Shigeru deadpanned. When Satoshi continued to stare, Shigeru felt obliged to add, "I'm making eggs, rice, and something I don't think you'd like me to identify. Haruka brought it by this morning and said we'll need our energy."

Satoshi's stomach seemed to agree as it cried forlornly.

"Are you going to die?"

"Maybe," groaned Satoshi. "I'm so hungry..."

"Well, suck it up. I didn't eat before I went to bed, either."

Satoshi stared at the food and chewed at his lip.

"Hey, Shigeru, before I forget, there was a question I wanted to ask you."

Shigeru made a noncommittal grunt and turned his poker in the charcoal bed.

"Last night, you said something in your sleep. And I was just wondering, because the name sounded familiar..." Satoshi cocked his head to the side. "Who's 'Foster'? Is he a friend of yours?"

"Hmm. Foster?" asked Shigeru, his voice flat. He spent a moment prodding an ember before meeting Satoshi's eyes with cool indifference. "... Never heard of him."

Satoshi opened his mouth again, but Shigeru's hand slipped and the fire poker hit Satoshi's hand, and caused his breakfast to slip into the fire.

"No!" Satoshi shouted, devastation written on his face, "It can't be... gone!"

In the ensuing scramble to salvage his food, Satoshi didn't notice that there was more than just one fire burning in that room.

The second one smoldered in Shigeru's eyes.