Hello, old friends (and new). The next chapter is finally here, and more are on their way soon. Hope everyone's having a great summer!

In Ruins

Chapter Seventeen

The bath-house, as big it was, could still hardly fit the entire town within its walls and tubs of water. Shigeru had often observed it was something of a mystery that the building wasn't perpetually, and intolerably, crowded. He had constructed some idle theories while he'd soaked in the bath waters. For one, he reasoned, the men and women (with children) were separated between the morning and the evening, so that meant only half or less of the city would enter any given morning. Second, there was no reason for the entire male populous to bathe all at once, so that reduced crowding further. And third, it was fair to assume that some people forewent bathing for days at a time. Alph was a world at the cusp of civilization, after all.

However, Shigeru had never really stopped to consider why the bath-house was always empty when he and Satoshi entered it in the thick of morning.

Now that the men's baths had switched to the evening, Shigeru discovered that the bath-house was in fact quite over-crowded by nature. The only reason that Shigeru and Satoshi had yet to experience this uncomfortable situation was because the townspeople had been, put simply, avoiding them.

From the staging room, Satoshi and Shigeru stood precariously wedged in the island of space spared by piles of chucked off, mismatched sandals. The cubbies on the wall were similarly not spared; stuffed with people's sleeves tumbling out of their compartments like sticks from nests. And as soon as he and Satoshi had passed underneath the hanging linen door, the sudden onset of sound from the bath house's inner room had caused both of them to share an uneasy look.

Satoshi was the first to find his voice. He suggested with a slow and awkward lightness,"We could come back tomorrow."

Shigeru didn't mind the idea, per se. He didn't feel physically up to a bath, and certainly not up to one in such a noisy, crowded room. He had become so emptied of energy and emotion after the course of - well, everything, that he felt as if the pipe water would catch the dirt and grime on his skin and carry him away with it. However,

"You smell disgusting," Shigeru replied, shaking his head. "I can't sleep in the same room with you."

"It's only been two days," Satoshi protested.

"Two sweaty days. And on top of that, you had to carry me through the Temple alone last night, didn't you?"

Satoshi had, so he inclined his head and started to disrobe, but not without adding, "Only if you're sure..."

"I don't care," Shigeru had nearly said before catching himself.

Shigeru let the smallest, laziest smirk mince his lips as he found a corner box to stash his wad of stinky clothes. It was a shame he didn't have another set, but judging from the grunge of the clothing in the surrounding cubbies, even his trousers were relatively clean. He threw his towel over his shoulder, and without a flicker of hesitation pushed aside the sliding door and stepped into dull roar of voices in the steam-thick bath.

The volume was deafening, and then, ephemeral. Shigeru hadn't even had a chance to breathe in before the room collectively took in all the air with a single breath, cutting off all conversations mid-sentence. Half the town of Alph was stashed inside the bathroom, and all one hundred of their pair eyes caught onto him and to his naked body.

In utter silence.

Shigeru, frozen on the spot, felt his old defenses clamping down on him like heavy machinery. The kindness he had come to expect from Haruka and Tano, though certainly not from Masato, was completely absent. The eyes of the room were openly assessing him. It made him wish he could be safe in his clothes.

But then Satoshi waltzed in, oblivious and if not outright happy, at least with some indication of peace.

Then he looked up, and realized that no one was watching them anymore.

Satoshi's complete disregard for the situation had caused the antagonists' discomfort to rebound onto themselves. They turned away, part by part, returning to their conversations. And though the volume didn't return to its previous level, the curtain was lifted. Shigeru no longer felt so excluded; merely, stunned.

Satoshi had meanwhile taken over one of the many rapidly abandoned stools, and had arranged himself on the seat beside a cleansing pool without a care in the world. In spite of his vibrance, there was something about the way that he reached toward the pipe, and cupped water in his hands that made him seem remarkably peaceful. A content and happy smile lifted the edges of his honey-brown eyes. They were, Shigeru realized with a plunging feeling in the pit of his stomach, really incredible eyes. They were the same eyes that had held him the night before as tightly as a Bind, or Wrap, telling him that everything would be all right; they were the eyes that had clung to him just hours ago after he had said, "I don't care."

He could still feel the way Satoshi's eyes had made him feel warm; like being held in an embrace.

A shiver swept Shigeru, and he jerked his head away before Satoshi caught him in his stare. Only once he was facing the pools did he remember that he was in the presence of company, and he felt his stomach turn from low to high, the bile threatening to surface from the sharp anxiety of having been caught looking.

But if any of the villagers had seen, they weren't showing it. Half of them had already found excuses to leave; the other half were facing away from him and Satoshi, toward the far and non-descript wall with high and open-shuttered windows, murmuring in low voices to each other.

He found a pipe and leaned in, moulding his face into the press of the quasi-cataract. The gentle water splashed onto the crest of his brow, where he was smudged with mud from his collapse in the Temple. His hands came up to rub at the skin of his cheeks, his eyes; the pipe-water caught onto grits of dirt, lifting them from where they'd stuck onto the planes of his face. And still more came down, in that same, steady stream, lifting from him all the sweat that came and dried while he had dreamt; the salt from where he'd refused to wipe his tears. Down, down, all of them; and up - up he went, the weight going with the water and his heart going buoyant with the air.

Just as he'd feared.

He had never felt so clean in all his life.

It had only been two hours. Maybe three. There weren't sun dials here; just day and night, and there'd only been a pocket of time in between the two, and that was all that had passed since Shigeru had broken apart from the hurt; the pain. And then at last, from adoration.

He and Satoshi had already gone to bed, their stomachs filled from the small bounty that Haruka had offered. He had some pride that in that the time between their conversation and their good nights, he'd said nothing of the words that had been pummeling his mind; hadn't told Satoshi that he'd spoken the most perfect words that Shigeru had heard in his entire life.

Shigeru tried to fight back the event from his mind but he could not do so with any more success than he'd had at the onset. Part of him was still floating up there in the steam, the part that had written himself off forever. He had hope, suddenly; too much hope for a person who couldn't possibly have anything left to hope for. He had peace. And in some paradoxical way it strung him with a thrumming, living tension. Blankets wrapped him in warmth from both under and below, but sleep was as far and elusive from him as the waves reaching for the sands of Alph.

Shigeru watched Satoshi sleeping through the slits of his eyes as they laid on the could see the outlines of face and arm through dimmed moonlight, close and near, revealing that Satoshi had moved their pallets closer together at some point in the course of the previous night. Most likely he'd done it to keep an eye out in case Shigeru were to have taken a turn for the worse. But he'd forgotten, evidently, to move his own bedding back to its original place, and now there wasn't space for a man to lay on his side between their beds.

With the room in shadows and his eyes squinting, Shigeru could imagine without trouble that he and Satoshi were sharing a single bed. And with his mind darkening, ever so eventually, he could imagine that he and Satoshi were just as close.

He reached out a lazy hand and felt for Satoshi's. It was there between them on the ground, open, as if waiting for him. Like some nights before, Shigeru stole it and took it into his own. But not only for the heart-tug of a moment, but this time he bent down, curving his body like a bow. Gently, he lifted the hand to his face and brought his lips to the center of Satoshi's palm.

In the dark, it tasted like dry things. Like wood and salt. It smelled like old hay, from their beds. It was distinctive, earthy - it both grounded him and went straight to his head. Shigeru let the hand go, arranging it back on the ground with agonizing care; he bent over further, huddling in towards his pallet and the earth it rested on, and he shook from his shoulders to his bones. The taste of salt grew stronger.

He was crying again, but no one had to know.

The next morning was a smooth return to normal routine, even if Satoshi had accidentally started walking toward the Bathhouse before remembering that they'd already visited it the night before. Shigeru laughed at him, leaving Satoshi with the distinct impression that Shigeru had known his mistake the entire time but was just waiting for Satoshi to catch on. Satoshi stuck out his tongue, and Shigeru responded the same. And then they carried on, taking their rambling walk through the brightening limestone corridors and along the Trough, until at last they arrived at the head of the dead-end street where Tano lived and worked.

They found the potter seated lazily in the smoky morning shade of his singular tree with an assortment of tools strewn around his feet. Shigeru sauntered up ahead of Satoshi with a natural swing in his step, starting up a conversation with his mentor as pleasantly as if he hadn't spent the previous day in bed, essentially skipping work. His face was bright; he looked like he didn't have a care in the world. Sleep, Satoshi could see, had been good to him.

For a moment, Satoshi started to reflect on the events that had led up to Shigeru's happiness, which had somehow tied into his spontaneous breakdown after they talked about the events at Alph. But as soon as the memories started he skidded his brain to a stop. He'd process the revelations Shigeru had made later, when he had time alone. When he didn't have Shigeru distracting him in the edge of his field of vision.

After all, if Shigeru didn't think it was important enough to deal with at that moment, then why should he? Satoshi was content to accept that Shigeru had said all he'd needed to say the night before.

He meanwhile put down his water jug, and curiously inspected the bowls and utensils that Tano had left out, turning them over in his hands. Shigeru joined him soon after he started, though with a bit less scientific vigor than Satoshi had come to expect. In the middle of his conversation, he had picked up a braided cord and was twisting it between his fingers like it were an idle trick.

"So what's all this for?" Satoshi asked Tano, interrupting the interlude.

"We're obviously going to be decorating the pots," Shigeru interrupted baldly, though to his credit, he said it without spite.

"Obviously?" Satoshi echoed. Actually, as far he was concerned, it hadn't been that obvious, since there weren't exactly paints and stuff scattered around the grass and on the mats that Satoshi would have thought necessary for decorating. Before he could get the question out of his mouth, Tano was agreeing with Shigeru.

"That's precisely right, Shigeru," he said, and rubbed his chapped, wrinkled hands together with merriment. "You two are ready to progress to more advanced techniques."

Shigeru showed more than a trace of self-satisfied pride upon hearing this. Satoshi deflated.

"Umm..." He looked up at his mentor doubtfully. "Are you really sure that I'm ready?"

He couldn't help thinking about the beginning of the week, when he and Shigeru had been trying to make thick rims for the ornamental jugs and he had broken through the clay formed walls so many times that Tano-san eventually took away his clay made him sit and watch him and Shigeru doing the task correctly for the rest of the afternoon. That had been humiliating enough to bring his rank down from a Level 79 to a Level 66 in a single blow. It had felt almost as bad as losing a Gym Badge.

"What do you mean?" Tano answered, interrupting Satoshi's reverie. "Of course you are."

"I wouldn't know about that," Shigeru pitched in. "Satoshi's not exactly the artistic type."

"What, and you are?" Satoshi had retorted.

"Calm down, boys," said Tano. He stood between them, placating. "I haven't even explained what you're doing and you're already getting so agitated..."

"I'm not agitated yet," said Shigeru, folding his arms in mock agitation. "Just tell me what we're doing."

The three sat down in the grass, stretching out as Tano began to explain the tiny knives, sticks, stones, and pricked pieces of hide, one by one. He showed them how to hold the tools; the way to press with the tools. He dug into, scrubbed against, and clawed at the dirt in the middle of where they sat with each item in turn for his examples. Finally, he got to the cord. Tano rolled it exactly the way that Shigeru had been doing in his hands, except not between his fingers but with his palm face down over the dirt.

"Oh. Oh, absolutely not. This is the clay I've kept from your first attempts at grinding down the minerals," continued Tano placidly. "It's not much better than mud."

"Glad to know how much he respects our craftsmanship," said Satoshi sarcastically, and Shigeru laughed, his blue eyes twinkling. Satoshi grinned back. The mood was infectious. Even after - after some time (he had gone for so long without a clock that he wasn't sure how long it had really been), Satoshi had managed to wet and knead his first lump of clay into a bowl. The task done, he looked at the tree stretched above him, with the sunlight radiating through the leaves and branches. The sharp rays highlighting the harvest of full, ripe berries that hung down from the twigs like dark clumps of hair. He furrowed his eyebrows, concentrating on the play of light, color, and shadow, as if the act alone could summon inspiration.

Tano had told him, after all, "To decorate something with beauty, you need to be surrounded by beauty."

It didn't seem to be very apt for Satoshi, because the firm and sticky clay bowl in his hands had completely failed to transition from a piece of dirt to 'art.' And the longer he stared at the tree, the more convinced he was that it was really nothing more exciting than... well, a tree. And the clay in his hands was, like Tano had said, just a bunch of ugly mud.

Especially with the stab mark he'd accidentally made into the clay while leaning back to look at the tree.

"You're using that bamboo-knife wrong," said Shigeru mock-helpfully from beside him.

"Go away," muttered Satoshi, sullen. But Shigeru continued without missing a beat, pointing at the scribble that Satoshi had scratched in the center of his bowl.

"Those are either poor attempts are hieroglyphs, or poorer attempts at English."

"It's a picture," he defended.

"Oh," said Shigeru, as if he hadn't known it all along.

"Yeah, a picture of your face. And before you say anything about how ugly it is, you should shut up or I'll draw a wart on your face," Satoshi threatened.

Shigeru scoffed and pointed at a lumpy clump of lines etched in the center of the 'face'. "Looks like I already have a wart. Or one hell of a beauty mark."

"That's a nose," Satoshi's cool facade withered in a whiny despair, and Shigeru laughed. He leaned his back against the base of the tree trunk and continued talking from behind Satoshi's shoulder.

"You're not just bad, you're terrible," he said. "You make a way better pokemon trainer than artist."

Satoshi looked over at Shigeru's jar. Predictably, the lines of the rope were symmetrical, complementary to the roughly hewn swirls and triangular patterns. Scraped into the jar at places were grooves; at others, braided weaves. Shigeru was predictably a natural!

"Can I see it?" he asked.

"Go for it," said Shigeru, passing the pot over. "Don't even think about messing it up. I know where you sleep."

"Like destroying it would accomplish anything," Satoshi muttered. "You'd just make another, better one."

Shigeru accepted the compliment with smug satisfaction and leaned back against the tree. Satoshi eyed Shigeru's piece in his hands, passing it back and forth between his palms critically. He couldn't believe it. Shigeru had obviously surpassed him completely. In Satoshi's mental tally, Shigeru's standing skipped straight from level 84 to 100. And Satoshi was still a meager 66.

He turned Shigeru's cool clay carefully in his hands, touching gently in the corners so as not to smear anything. The inside bottom of the pot had lines drawn down into it, apparently with some degree of purpose. Satoshi looked closer. After a moment of squinting, he could see that the lines were delicately etched Kanji, lined up in an off-balanced symmetry. He caught the characters for 'dragonfly' and 'lotus blossom' - which meant it was a poem about summer.

"Ah, you found that," commented Shigeru. His voice was still smug and nonchalant from the earlier praise.

"I can't believe you wrote a haiku inside your pot!" Satoshi exclaimed, his earlier jealousy forgotten. He looked up, grinning at Shigeru. "Remember when you wrote that one for me, in Sinnoh? About our friendship?"

Shigeru's expression altered quickly. Instead of being happy at the nostalgia, his face turned towards that of vague surprise and discomfort.

"...Yeah, now that you mention it," he said.

"Geez, you practically sound like you forgot about it!" Satoshi picked up his own jar and resumed drawing. "Your own poem."

"I hadn't thought that hard on it," said Shigeru mildly. "It wasn't a big deal."

"Huh. But you know, Hikari though it was really, really good. After you said it, she wrote it down somewhere - she thought it would be famous someday, but eventually lost interest and I found it. It's probably still in my backpack somewhere back home."

For a long time, Shigeru didn't answer. And then Satoshi realized what he'd admitted. He ignored the embarrassed heat in his face, doggedly focusing on his own decorations for several minutes until Shigeru passed him a plate. The curiosity broke the blush, and Satoshi looked at the plate, and then Shigeru in confusion. After the third look at the plate, he could see that, like Shigeru's earlier pot there had been something scratched onto the bottom. Another haiku? Bemused, Satoshi read.

Even though he's male
Satoshi of Pallet Town
acts just like a girl.

Said Satoshi of Pallet Town flipped from bemusement to outrage. Who was Shigeru to talk! he wondered. He was the one who'd written him a poem in the first place, and a sentimental poem, no less! Also, he was the one who'd broken the pokeball a second time, for that matter! Satoshi began to squeeze the edges of the clay plate in his hands, indenting the edges with his fingers, and only once he heard Shigeru snickering, did he look up. And he realized that Shigeru had been - joking.

He read the message again, and blushed. He quickly flattened out the marks that he'd made accidentally with his fingers, and picked up the sharpened end of his hollow decorating reed. Within a minute he passed the clay pot back to Shigeru - now inscribed with a rebuttal.

For a scientist
Pallet Town's Shigeru is
too touchy-feely

Shigeru's face crinkled - he was obviously offended - and had an answering retort etched on the clay within a minute.

Pallet's Satoshi
is rather stupid for a
pokemon trainer

Satoshi crossed out the last few words. "Pokemon Master," he corrected, pleased that it even kept with the syllabic structure of the haiku. Shigeru crossed out the correction, and in its place wrote "sub-par human being."

Shigeru received the dish several more times - they were passing it back and forth now with matching grins - and it was amazing that Tano never became aware of, or squelched, their diversion from their task. But then, he'd said that the plate was only as good quality as the mud, so maybe he didn't care.

After perhaps the longest wait in their exchange, Shigeru passed back the goblet with a picture of a fat, but oddly cute Pikachu shooting lightning in every direction. Beneath the pokemon lay the caption, "At least I don't ride on the successes of others."

Satoshi all but growled when he caught onto the rather cutting insinuation. He came up with a suitably sharp retort of his own - "At least I don't dig up dead pokemon for a living" - but the plate had become rather full of messages, so he just slugged Shigeru on the arm. It felt just as satisfying, anyway.

The evening meal came in parts that evening. First, Masato appeared, a rare enough thing with how he tried to avoid his own house-guests; but not only that, he came on his own to announce that Haruka would be slightly late in bringing their dinner.

"I wouldn't have really noticed," Satoshi admitted. "She's really that scheduled?"

"I wonder..." Shigeru began, before shrugging it off. "Anyway, thanks, Masato."

"No problem," said Masato stiffly.

Satoshi had rather expected that Masato would run off, now that he no longer had to be around them. However, rather than leaving he hovered by the doorframe, aloof and self-absorbed until Haruka - and the meal - and Hikari - arrived some minutes later. He made no sign of recognizing it, but Satoshi and Shigeru couldn't miss their dramatic entry even if they'd been trying to. They - and probably the rest of the street - could hear the yammering of shrill and pitch-dumb voices several minutes before the pair even neared the house, heralding the arrival of dinner. As Satoshi was increasingly becoming certain, Haruka and Hikari in the presence of each other, never, ever signaled anything good.

The pair were completely incoherent in their argument, right to the point where they were outside the door, and the boys could see from the shadows cast under the door that they were tugging the basket back and forth with angry jerks. Satoshi could pick out a few

hissed words and spit-out phrases, like, "-my job-" "I want to-" "priestess" and even what might of been some mildly screeched curses.

"What are they doing?" wondered Shigeru with mild shock.

"I don't know," said Satoshi. "I just hope they don't drop our dinner."

He'd barely spoken the words when Hikari and Haruka crashed through the door with tight, unnatural smiles and a facade of happy cooperation belied in the harmony of their hands holding the basket between them. Masato rolled his eyes from his place at the wall.

"Hi Satoshi," said Hikari, nearly gushing. "Hi Shigeru."

"How are you this evening?" asked Haruka brightly.

"Hungry," answered Satoshi. "But good, I guess."

"I'm hungry, too," Hikari blurted out.

"Is there a reason you two were figh-"

Shigeru didn't have a chance to finish before Hikari had barreled forward and leeched onto Satoshi's arm. "You know what I think? I think," she announced, "You should come have dinner with me!"

"Umm, you just brought us dinner," said Satoshi. He tried to regain his arm, but with no success; when he tried to bring it back to his chest, he just moved Hikari closer to him with it.

"Haruka," Shigeru addressed the other priestess, "Were you both thinking of eating dinner with us tonight?"

Haruka answered slowly, "I admit, it had crossed my mind, but I wouldn't want to be an inconvenience."

Satoshi couldn't explain it, but the way Haruka had said the last word had seemed directed at Hikari.

To say that the tension of their earlier fight still hung between them in the air was pretty much inaccurate. Satoshi felt like he was choking on the anger between the two girls, and Satoshi could only wonder what it was about. He turned into Shigeru's conversation with Haruka, wondering if that would illuminate anything. He doubted it, since Hikari and Haruka - and even Masato, in his way - were all acting like nothing was going on.

"To be honest, I'm still recovering from the other night," he was saying. "I don't think I'd make good company."

Suddenly, Hikari appeared in the center of his field of vision, bending low and affording him a stunning view of her cleavage, off-set by long and trailing silver jewelry. "What about you, Satoshi?" she cooed. "Please, please, if you don't want to go out, won't you let us, or at least me, stay and eat with you? Like I was saying, you owe me."

Satoshi had no idea how to reply to that.

"You have a point," he said reluctantly.

"Actually, you don't. He doesn't owe you anything," interrupted Shigeru from his side.

"Yes, he does! He already told me we would get to spend time together, but we didn't." Hikari straightened and shot Shigeru a thin glare. Her bracelets clacked like the angry pincers of a crab. "Well if you need to rest anyway, Shigeru, then you should just let him go out and do whatever he wants."

"What if I get sick again and die here alone?"

"I could stay here with you," Haruka offered. "It would be my pleasure, really."

Shigeru's expressions oscillated wildly from surprise, to panic, in the space of half an instant. Satoshi knew that expression well enough but couldn't figure out what could've brought it on. Of course, it happened so fast that Satoshi wasn't sure if he'd imagined it - except that the resulting indifference on Shigeru's face was too defensive, even for Shigeru, who could switch on his walls as fast as a Pidgeot turning midair.

"You know what? I'm tired too," lied Satoshi quickly. He stretched out his arms and feigned a yawn. "Plus, we have to go to the baths after this. We could, uh, catch up later."

Hikari looked tremendously put out. "When?"

"Some time... later?"

"But we were really looking forward to spending time with you tonight," pouted Hikari. "Are you sure-"

"They're sure," intervened an exasperated Masato. "So will you two come home already and think about my dinner for once? I'm starving here."

"We don't want to keep you from sleeping," said Haruka carefully, to Shigeru and then to Satoshi, and then somehow back to Shigeru again. "It's too bad that you're tired, is all."

Hikari shuffled awkwardly to the door, picking up Haruka along the way.

"Sorry, Masato," Haruka apologize to her brother. "We'll go take care of you, now."

"You should've already," grumbled Masato, and exited without even saying 'goodbye.' Haruka and Hikari gave a last fleeting glance at the room - offering their good nights - and then left, too.

The door panel swung down, and settled into place. It was quiet again, but only once Satoshi could see the dust clouds dropping in the wake of their exit did he let out a sigh of relief. He could hear Shigeru taking their dinner out from the basket and Satoshi joined him eagerly.

"So that whole fighting... wanting to eat with us... 'girl thing' just now was kind of weird," said Satoshi.

Shigeru paused in spreading a bread crust with a creamy, sweet-selling tamarind sauce, and held up the knife as if contemplating it.

"Don't sound so surprised. They're women," he concluded.

Satoshi completely understood, and laughed.