This was probably the most difficult thing I've ever written, but I hope you enjoy it. thanks to greenflower, my beta reader and dear friend.

In Ruins
Chapter Fifteen

Satoshi had been eleven years old when he first came across the excavation of a giant Aerodactyl fossil, with its wings splayed against the side of a wall. He'd never seen Alph before that day, much less heard of it. But he was familiar with the that the scientists had run around the rock with ready hands and eager mouths, quick to discuss and discover their findings. Even back in those days, it had made Satoshi think of Shigeru at the back of his mind - because Shigeru had acted the same as them, sometimes. They would be watching television in Daisy's room while she was taking her night classes, and Shigeru would see a commercial that he knew someting about and he'd start talking. Just like that. It could be something as simple as the taste of Moo-Moo milk - and he would lose himself to rambles about the way it tasted and how it was manufactured, like he even knew something about it. Since they'd come to Alph together, Shigeru had started doing it again. They'd be walking along quietly and suddenly Shigeru would whirl like a pinwheel, overwhelming with all sorts of observations, like how to read the marble sundial that had been erected in the middle of Alph's market plaza. Satoshi didn't understand half of what Shigeru was saying most of the time, but he liked it when Shigeru got that way. Because this is what made Shigeru himself. It made him seem happy, and relaxed. It made Satoshi feel like he was a kid again, like the world had nothing bad in it.

Why didn't he have that feeling now?

Without the sun or a watch to guide him, Satoshi could only guess that they had been wandering through rooms and corridors for thirty minutes, but it could have been two hours, or even a day, but it was long enough to give Satoshi reason to ask Shigeru what was wrong.

"Nothing," Shigeru answered simply. He stood from his crouch near a wall, and sighed. "It's not important."

If it were nothing, why was he sighing? Why did his voice sound so different from what he was saying?

"Well, you don't seem like you're enjoying yourself," pointed out Satoshi. "I thought you were going to have a lot of fun here, you know?"

"You don't seem to be having fun," rebutted Shigeru. "I thought you liked adventure."

"All we've seen are empty rooms," he replied. "No clues about the legend, much less anything interesting."

Shigeru folded his arms. "Exactly."

"Exactly?" Satoshi echoed in surprise. They walked into the corridor. Shigeru rubbed the back of his neck, and looked at Satoshi apologetically.

"Okay, so I know this hasn't been really interesting for you. I thought there was going to be more, too. So if there's nothing in the next room," suggested Shigeru, "Then we'll just leave and wait for Haruka and Hikari outside of here. How's that?"

"Yeah, sure," replied Satoshi, following after him. "So what's this next room?"

"The Main Room. Like its name would suggest, it's bigger, more complicated, and more central than any other room inside the Temple complex. We've been working our way toward it this whole time, room by room. There's also a big puzzle on one of it walls."

"I've heard about those. I think I watched a special on TV about them once."

Shigeru didn't reply. The long shadows spreading out from his torch pulled and smeared at the normal lines of his face, skewing the normal shape of his features, making him look almost unfamiliar. At last his steps slowed, and for good reason, as the hallway abruptly ended. There was a double-door, surprisingly; all of the rooms up to that point hadn't been affixed with doors, similar to the rest of Alph. The doors to the room were beautiful, too; crafted out of cedar wood and carved up with similar designs to the one Tano-san had shown them, which he and Shigeru had used for decorating cups and vases and plates. When Shigeru pushed against it, it creaked open on its hinges without resistance.

Musty air poured out into the humid hallway, and the room - at first - seemed like nothing more than a gigantic void, absent of light, form, anything.

Satoshi cringed, but Shigeru strode in through the door. He turned deftly beside the doorframe, his muscles remembering what his eyes could not see; he found an unlit torch against the wall, and passed his own flame over its' head. More torches were found, and two spots of light quickly became four. As the flames expanded, so did their halos, steadily reaching out to the cornerstones of the far walls.

"Wow," said Satoshi, his voice impressed. "How big is this room, anyway?"

"200 square meters, roughly." Shigeru set the torch against the wall, freeing his hands to explore. He stepped forward and brushed past Satoshi, his eyes rapidly scanning the corners and crevices of the room. "...Our team speculated that this place was used for the performance of the main rituals."

"Oh. Well, that room has to be somewhere else, doesn't it? After all, Haruka and Hikari are performing the rituals right now, aren't they?" Satoshi pointed out.

Shigeru didn't appear to have heard. He continued to look around, his eyes wild and darting; his footwork circular and short-stepped. Satoshi looked around himself, too, though his observations weren't as exacting as he imagined that Shigeru's were. He was playing the part of the adventurer, not the archaeologist: sure, the ceilings in this room were slightly more vaulted and the floor stretched out a lot wider in each direction, but what else? He moved towards the walls, stamped with a bizarre writing that Shigeru had called hieroglyphics. It had fascinated him in the first room, but he is admittedly less impressed now that he'd seen it in so many rooms, all of it indistinguishable.

There were significantly more of them on the walls here compared to the other rooms, and some of them seemed - he squinted, wishing he had a flashlight to shine more light on them - some of them looked like pokemon. This, at last, piqued his interest. He spent several minutes making stories from the pictures before Shigeru broke the silence of the room.

"There was another theory, of course," Shigeru said abruptly, "Some of my colleagues guessed that this room was used as a storage facility."

Satoshi turned from the writing on the wall. "But... it's neither of those things. It's empty."

"I know," said Shigeru, frustration evident in his voice. "I know. It seems exactly the same now as it was when we excavated it." Shigeru stopped moving for a moment, and fixed his eyes on Satoshi sharply before he continued pacing. Again, Satoshi thought to himself, this wasn't like Shigeru. Usually he got excited talking about his research, or archaeology, or anything, even goofy.

Instead, he just kind of looked sick.

"I had hoped that we'd find flower offerings, or fur pelts draped across the floor," Shigeru continued. "Perhaps jewels or riches lost to time. Maybe scrolls of sacred writings. But just look around. The room's exactly the same as when the first team of archaeologists discovered the Ruins-- about five years before you came to Alph, Satoshi. There'd been no looting, and that's probably just because there'd been nothing for looters to take."

"There's still something on the ground over there," interrupted Satoshi. He pointed to the far wall, where a chest hewn of stone sat stately firm.

Shigeru waved it off. "That still exists in the Temple in our time, too. It's a box filled with poke-dolls; there's nothing interesting in there." Suddenly, his voice sharpened, and he curled a hand into a fist. "This was a waste of time."

"Well, we wouldn't have known that if we hadn't come," Satoshi countered. He had bent down to open the chest, but stopped when he realized that Shigeru had stopped pacing, and now stood stiffly near the center of the room.

"It's kind of clammy in here," said Shigeru, his voice tight and at the edge of a whine. He sounded several years younger than he was. "Do you feel that draft?"

"No," answered Satoshi. He stood and approached Shigeru. They were almost at the same height, he realized; his eyes flickered across Shigeru's face, bent over and indiscernible. Torchlight cast a glow on half his features, the peak of his nose and the crest of his forehead, his cheekbones, and the shadows covered the rest. His feathered auburn bangs were moving slightly across his face even as he stood still - perhaps there was a draft after all.

"Stop staring at me," said Shigeru. he flattened the back of his hair twice, fidgeted with his collar, and finally dropped his hand to his side.

"What's wrong?" Satoshi asked baldly.

"Nothing's wrong. Why would you think anything was wrong?" Like it had all evening, Shigeru's voice betrayed him. But this time it was too high, and it sounded like he wasn't able to breathe.

"Shigeru," he worried. "You seem sick."

"I'm not. But we... We should go."

Satoshi furrowed his brow. "What? Go where?"

Shigeru answered him impatiently, tapping his foot. "Out of the Temple. There's nothing left to see here. We should go."

Satoshi looked at Shigeru, trying to understand. But there was little he could absorb but movement. Shigeru was absently rubbing down goosebumps on his forearms, wringing his hands, shoving them into his pockets, staring into space.

"Okay," Satoshi said. "Let's go."

But Shigeru didn't seem to have heard. He was muttering to himself.

"We should leave," he was saying. His voice was barely audible, but with the room quiet and empty, it resonated clearly enough. "We really should be leaving..."

"Shigeru," Satoshi interrupted forcibly, "Are you sure you're not sick?"

Shigeru's his hands faltered briefly, as they moved steadily up and down his arms. He scowled, but at least he looked up at Satoshi. "I told you that I'm not."

"But you're acting really weird," Satoshi insisted.

"I am not!" Shigeru snapped.

"You do. And you look freaked out."

"Well maybe I am," he retorted. "Did you ever think about that?"

"But why--"

Then, Shigeru shocked him completely; he curled his fists and shouted, "Why? Why? Fuck you, Satoshi! I don't have to tell you anything!"

The echoes of the words clattered against the walls. After the last echo splintered into silence, Satoshi remembered how to breathe. He stared at Shigeru, his mouth gaping, feeling the whip crack in his stomach.

Reality swirled in on him -- not the reality of the present, of Alph, but of the world that still felt like his own -- and for a shuttered moment, he vividly remembered everything that had come before. He'd forgotten that Shigeru had denied his friendship twice after they becoming friends. He should've known that Shigeru wasn't capable of being sincere. That Shigeru really still hated him, that their friendship had only been surface-level, after all; that, under the thin skin that had grown over their scabs, there had been this burrowing, purple maggot of distrust and anger.

But he didn't want to believe it.

"What the hell," Satoshi spoke, and his voice rose with every word, "What - the - hell! I thought we were friends."

"Look, I..." Shigeru's face warred with itself. A grimace won out. "We're friends."

"Then act like it!" Satoshi demanded. He felt his voice drop, the hurt weighing it down, as he added, "I'm just trying to help you."

Shigeru couldn't speak for a few moments, too busy breathing raggedly. When he spoke at last, his voice had hurt in it too.

"You can't help me. Not here," he said, like it pained him. Satoshi couldn't figure out where the pain would've come from; why he was angry, sick, and sad, as well - it didn't make sense.

"Is there something going on?" asked Satoshi, slowly. "Is there something I should know about? Did Haruka say something to you earlier while I was sleeping?"

"This isn't about Haruka."

"Then what--"

But Satoshi cut himself off. He was distracted by a sound from the hallway, a sound that could only be described as footfalls.

Footfalls?

Satoshi shivered: he felt the clammy hand of the draft of air that Shigeru had been talking about. Some sort of fear had hooked onto his vocal chords, had muffled them. He was still several feet away from Shigeru, but could not bring himself to speak in his full voice.

"Did you hear that?" he asked Shigeru, in a stage whisper. "Do you think that was the girls?"

"Why would you ask it if you doubted it?" Shigeru replied sharply.

"Because Haruka and Hikari... they would've been more obvious, right? Trying to get our attention or something."

Shigeru didn't say anything.

"I thought we were supposed to be the only three people here."

"Well, I guess we're not."

"Then who was it?" wondered Satoshi. "Why don't I feel like it was them?"

Shigeru still wouldn't meet Satoshi's eyes. He appeared to be trembling.

Satoshi reached out a hand towards Shigeru's arm, but his fingers never made it to the sleeve. The other boy stepped back from him, with halting steps. Then without warning, he bolted from the room.

* * * *

"Shigeru!" Satoshi shouted after him. He stilled, then abruptly swung around, ready to fight an unnamed and inexplicable assailant. But when he turned, there was nothing behind him; the room was the same as it had been but a minute earlier when Shigeru had run out. It was still empty.

Things were weird. He had never seen someone act as strangely as Shigeru had, and now he was gone. Satoshi felt his heartbeat accelerate as he realized that he was worried. He had no idea what Shigeru was going to do, where he was going.

He ran out of the room, leaving the torch behind.

"Hey! Shigeru!" he shouted, turning into the dark hallway. "Where are you!? Stop and talk to me! Hey! Shigeru!!"

The shouts didn't miraculously pull Shigeru out of the dark. Cursing, Satoshi took a moment's pause to choose left or right, and opted with the direction from which they'd come. If Shigeru was running, it would make sense that he'd run down a familiar path.

The intermittent lights were yellow specks, guiding him from the ground that sometimes he could not see. It felt like he was running through space, through time, through some corridor that may not even truly have matter. He tried not to focus on how hard it was to run in sandals, or how the air was so thick and clingy with wetness that it felt as if he were swimming, rather than running, through its hold. He thought instead of finding Shigeru, and how he would do that if Shigeru didn't answer his shouts. Would Shigeru be running after, or away from the footsteps? And why, in the first place, were there footsteps? Whose were they? And what was going on?

He passed under a torch, and just as he hit it evenly, and his shadow shot out directly beside him, he heard a shout.

It was Shigeru, it had to be. Satoshi barreled down the passageway leading left. Eventually, the firelight faded into darkness behind him. He hoped he could gauge the distance right, that he wouldn't run directly into a wall; and he worried that Shigeru was hurt, and his heart pummeled him from inside of his chest.

"Shigeru!" he shouted into the darkness. There was no reply. He tried again. "Shigeru! Where are you?!"

He ran directly into a wall.

The blow took him so off-guard that he fell backward onto the ground. He collapsed onto the rock, and the second bite of pain hit him harder than the first. He heard the skin on his elbows peel back as they are skinned, but the feeling of being smashed overwhelmed him.

Satoshi let out a groan as he inhaled unsteadily. The movement has made him dizzy, but there was no light to see whether the world had begun to spin around him or not; he felt himself losing focus and black was black and his arms had hit the wall first, hadn't they? He got to his feet shakily recounting the collision; he could feel the full throb of his shoulder and guessed that he must have rolled his arm forward, catching it with the side of his body rather than taking the hit directly with his head or chest. The ache was stretching out from there like a bubble of gum, reaching across his ribs and swelling outward. But he had to keep going - had to turn around and find Shigeru. Satoshi grit his teeth and put one hand to his temple, avoiding the part which was tender, and stretched out his other hand to support himself against the wall.

He got to his feet, eyes squeezing shut to clear his mind. When he opened them, he blinked back the darkness, and saw at the end of the hall a dimly glowing blue light.

Satoshi's breath choked back in his throat.

He'd been worried about Shigeru. He hadn't thought to be afraid for himself. And maybe he should've been thinking of fear ever since they'd arrived. Satoshi thought back on Shigeru's jumpy, strange behavior in the Main Room, and tried to cast it in that light. What if Shigeru had been telling the truth, that he wasn'tsick; that he'd just been scared?

But when Shigeru had been acting that way, they hadn't even heard the footsteps yet.

"Shigeru!" he called out again, as he approached the room. The blue light glowed out from its entrance like the signal atop a light house. There was no way of knowing if Shigeru would be inside of it, but the light was so out of place that it compelled Satoshi forward.

He stepped through the doorway and into the light.

He stood for a moment, transfixed and confused. He blinked to let his eyes adjust, but before his eyes could even re-focus fully, the blue had vanished. In his vision, shapes clarified themselves from not blue, but white. A glare was formed by three industrial-sized spotlights. They stood on tripods, with long cords snaking to some distant wall. Then he saw a huge ladder, on its side, along with various illuminated rubble - boxes overturned, their contents spilled onto the floor. And then, a tall, broad-shouldered man in a white lab coat facing all of it, his profile in shadow.

The dizziness from hitting the wall had no competition to the confusion and shock that churned inside Satoshi now, as he stood in what seemed like the future. Rather, it seemed like the past.

"Hey!" Satoshi managed after a moment. "You--"

The man turned around and raised his eyebrows.

"Satoshi," he said in greeting. Satoshi saw the shadows slide back from his face, and the memories returned.

He knew this scientist: tall, with short, spiky black hair, that same orange turtleneck, and a crooked smile. They'd met in a lab several years earlier, when he, Takeshi, and Kasumi had first come to visit the Ruins of Alph. Together, they'd saved a herd of Omanyte and Omastar that was living in one of the reservoirs. Satoshi had heard Kasumi sighing over how cute he was once or twice, but after the visit, his name had never been brought up again-- until, he remembered belatedly -- until a month ago, when Shigeru had spoken the word in the middle of a nightmare.

He should've realized that Shigeru and Foster must have worked together; the Ruins weren't that big, after all. He felt like an idiot.

"Hello Foster," said Satoshi, warily. "What are you doing here?"

"Just working. You know how it is," he said, stepping over a shadowed pile of the rubble. All the shapes stuck out at angles, crumbly, hard, and soft. The soft line caught Satoshi's eye - it wasn't rock, he realized belatedly, and his heart stopped in his chest: it was an arm. It was Shigeru's, and Satoshi's heart stopped inside his chest.

"My god - Shigeru!" he cried. He ran forward and bent to his knees beside Shigeru, touching the boy's arm. It was real; a real person and not some mistake. He could tell as much by the roughness of Shigeru's elbow and the softness inside the crease of his arm.

"Shigeru," Satoshi repeated, his hand curling around Shigeru's arm. "Shigeru, wake up!"

The man's voice came from behind Satoshi. He'd moved closer as well.

"So you know the Ookido kid, huh?" asked the man, and he sounded almost friendly; but a note was strained, and his voice raised the hair on the back of Satoshi's neck.

Satoshi helplessly ran his hands over Shigeru's forehead, as if checking the temperature. His voice shook as he answered Foster. "Don't you see he's unconscious? You've got to help me get him out of here! This is bad--"

"What? Help you get him out... What, are you his friend or something?"

Satoshi gaped, and turned to the scowling man.

"We're old friends," he said. Then he switched his tone into one more accusing: "What about you? Are you blind?"

"No, I can see him lying there."

Satoshi felt a shiver go down his neck as he looked at Foster. He didn't seem concerned about Shigeru. He seemed almost smug. But why would someone be that way? Satoshi racked his brain, and came up with the only conclusion that could possibly answer the situation.

"You did this to him," Satoshi said unevenly.

"Is that what you think? Even though I've been your friend in the past, helping you...?"

Foster raised his voice, as if he were goading Satoshi. "Shigeru and I are old friends, too, you know," he said. "But I didn't do anything to him. That is, I did... nothing."

Satoshi stared at the man, confusion with his fear, but amplifying his anger more than anything.

"You bastard," he growled. "You did do something. Why else would you say it like that?"

Foster chuckled and stepped over to where Shigeru was laying. He looked down at the boy with disdain, and Satoshi thought that he might actually kick Shigeru, and braced himself. "Don't get so worked up," said Foster. "It's nothing permanent, Satoshi-kun. Your friend will be himself again by morning."

"Don't tell me that! How do you know?" Satoshi found himself back on his feet before he'd realized that he'd unbent his legs. "Shigeru's lying underneath a ladder that shouldn't even be in the past in the first place! You're not supposed to be here either!"

"Yeah, so what? You going to do anything about it?"

Satoshi had no idea what he was going to do, but he had to do something. Instinctively he reached for a pokeball -- but he'd forgotten that they were gone now, and his hand only met air around his belt. Foster kept on laughing.

"Why are you even here?" Satoshi demanded, frustrated. "What do you even want?"

Foster smiled, and looked past Satoshi, to the place where Shigeru laid in the rubble. "Funny you should use that word," he said.

The anger stormed Satoshi from all sides; he clenched his jaw and with no other option, he launched himself at Foster with a strangled yell -- "Get away from him!" he shouted --

-- and met nothing but the hard rock floor.

For the second time that night, Satoshi's lungs crushed and flattened, knocking the breath sharply out of him. He turned over with a groan, and saw Foster standing exactly in the place where Satoshi had just fallen through the air. His skin, however, had begun to gleam. The spotlights, the ladder, the boxes -- they all began to glow, at first dimly, but then brighter an brighter, and Satoshi was forced to shade his eyes with the back of his hand. He looked up at Foster, a final time - wanting to get out a question, but unable to find any words. Satoshi watched as a gel-like blue substance dropped over the man's transient body like a curtain, and his movements slowed and stopped.

Then, like a zap of electricity, he flickered and vanished into nothing.

The spotlights, the ladder, the boxes disappeared along with him. Even the pinning rocks and the wet pool of blood was missing from the floor by Shigeru's thigh -- but Shigeru himself had yet to wake up. He was breathing as if through shredded paper, and when Satoshi pressed his hand against Shigeru's artery he felt a pounding heartbeat. He didn't know if that was good or bad, and without the spotlights - without the blue light, whatever it had been - all he could see was a cloying darkness. Satoshi blinked to adjust his eyes, hoping that the torchlight from the hall would restrain the black tide that surrounded them. Nothing changed, so he wrapped his arms around Shigeru and pulled him to an upright slump.

"Hold on," Satoshi murmured, with a panicked edge sliding over his voice. "I'll get us out of here. Just... hold on."