1/12/2011: Sorry everyone! A reader tipped me off to the fact that I'd uploaded the wrong version of this chapter to f f . net. Sorry for the mistake. Please enjoy this new chapter with a very important extra scene at the end!

In other news - at last, we've reached the hundred-thousand word mark! I can't believe it. Thanks for everything, you guys. Let's enjoy some fan-works! Greenflower made a cute picture of Satoshi and Shigeru holding hands (post-fic, we can guess) - check out her account on deviantart. And oh my goodness, please read Azalea's fanfiction for this fanfiction, "Cut." It's so beautiful, I hereby declare it fan-canon! The links are in my profile for all you interested.

Now, without further ado...

In Ruins

Chapter 21

The snow continued to fall periodically for the next two days. With each fresh layer of snow, Alph transformed itself, until all signs of the summer sun were erased. The cobblestone of the streets was no longer visible except in patches across the plaza of the city center, where the treading of feet had worn down the snow into a new, and treacherous street, easily giving to ice. The flood of villagers into the market had trickled to nothing. When Satoshi discovered the vendors' earlier closing times, he had briefly worried that he and Shigeru would be forever doomed to less than three complete meals a day - a problem caused, of course, by Haruka's continued absence. He was fortunately mistaken, as Tano had taken over the task of feeding Satoshi and Shigeru in the priestess's stead. Satoshi kind of missed seeing her. As much as he liked Shigeru and Tano, it was a bit boring only being around them all the time...

Especially when they were ignoring him.

"How's this?" Shigeru was asking Tano as he checked the kiln, bending over to peer into one of the grates between wood and stone. From within, pile upon pile of charcoal glowed red with radiant heat. Shigeru was radiant, too, with sweat breaking out on his forehead and over his face, his hands and wrists, whose movements were strong and certain, powered by a certain strength that belied the muscles in his arms that had been developing over the course of the past month. Half of his body faced the kiln, and was framed with light that glowed from within. It was a good thing, thought Satoshi, that the sun was hidden behind wintry white clouds, or else the brightness of the kiln and the sun would have made Shigeru nearly too bright to see. As it was, the compulsion to look away was still as strong as the desire to continue watching him.

"The coals aren't well distributed in the back corner," Tano answered Shigeru after some time. "As you can see, the heat is fine for the moment, but by noon, it will overheat."

He stood with a few more logs in the crook of his arm, his head cocked to the side and one eye clinched shut as he peered inside of the kiln. Satoshi tried to focus on Tano's response, but found he couldn't. It wasn't that interesting when he couldn't see what Shigeru was doing. Besides, his stomach was throbbing in the pit of his gut, and it was just as distracting as the cold behind him. He stepped closer to the rocky oven and leaned toward its warmth.

As he did so, Shigeru bumped him lightly with his elbow. "Hey," he said. "Watch out. This oven's really hot."

"I know, that's why I'm getting closer to it," Satoshi answered him.

"Yeah, but get any closer and you'll start sweating."

"That sounds great." Satoshi tried to angle himself around Shigeru again, but he stood in front, blocking the kiln.

"Well, it shouldn't. The only reason your body sweats is to bring down your body temperature. You'd be better off changing your socks if you just wanted to get warm," Shigeru finished.

"I don't have another pair of socks. Wy don't you just let me take a turn?" asked Satoshi petulantly. He turned to Tano, who was leaning all of his weight on his knotty cane. "Tano, I've been standing around watching you, and then Shigeru, do everything all morning-"

"That's because you spent all of breakfast complaining about how tired you were from collecting wood all yesterday-"

"- so it's only fair to let me spend some time playing with the fire, too," finished Satoshi, stubbornly.

Tano edged forward. "As a matter of fact, I was just going to ask you if you wanted to take a break, Shigeru," he said. Satoshi could use some practice stoking the coals and adjusting the temperature. He will, after all, be essential help in completing the final steps, won't he?"

Shigeru reluctantly stepped aside, and leaned the poker against the side of the kiln. "Well, in that case, you can go ahead and put more coal in if you want."

"Great," said Satoshi, and eagerly brushed past Shigeru - whom was damp with sweat, the moisture clinging straight through his clothes in places - and grasped the long shovel, already resting in a pile of cold and snow-flake covered coals. He lifted a pile of the coals upward, and held the shovel casually for a few moments before staggering backward.

A hand steadied him from behind. "Careful," said Shigeru, leaning into Satoshi just slightly.

Satoshi felt himself flushing. The heat intensified around him, and he shrugged away. "I'm fine," he defended. "It was just really hard to lift that; way harder than the other shovels that we usually use."

"Those are for dirt, not for kilns. Of course they're different. And the coals are heavy, too... Anyway, here - let me help," Shigeru offered. Satoshi didn't have a chance to respond, much less argue that he was fine, before Shigeru had moved forward and put his hands on top of his.

He has long fingers, Satoshi thought almost dizzily as he and Shigeru guided the shovel to the grate. And they're really neat, even under the fingertips. That's - that's weird.

As soon as the coal-laden blade was ensconced within the walls, Satoshi let go and dropped the shaft of the metal instrument onto the kiln's shelf. The burden lifted so abruptly that Satoshi staggered for a second time, nearly bumping himself into the side of the oven in his effort to reclaim his footing. Shigeru immediately let go of Satoshi's hand, and Satoshi, only then, let out a breath he didn't know that he'd been holding onto.

"You can do the rest, Shigeru," he said, weakly. "I'll, uh, just keep watching you like before. It's no big deal."

Tano shook his head. "Come, Satoshi. Try again. You just need to be strong."

Satoshi followed the potter's gaze and looked into the grate, where the coals were hot enough to make the air wave like it were water. Resolute, he put his hands back on the shovel and pushed it all the way into the kiln. He twisted the handle and deposited the coal into the bed of flames. His duty done, he withdrew the shovel and turned to his audience. He was pretty sure that the only thing keeping him upright was his pride, but at least he'd done his job.

"How-" a heavy breath, "-was that?" he asked.

"Do you really think I'm going to be impressed by your one minute display of muscular glory?"

"That pile of coal had to way at least fifty kilograms! I'd like to see you do better!" Satoshi groused.

"Oh, no," Shigeru smirked wryly, "It's your turn."

Tano bent down beside the grate. "That was good," he said to Satoshi, evidently ignoring his and Shigeru's conversation entirely. "Now finish heating this kiln for firing, and describe each step as you accomplish it."

Satoshi let out a small sigh and picked up the shovel again. Oddly, now that he'd performed the task once, it seemed much easier, and he lifted it more quickly than before, in spite of lacking Shigeru's help. He surprised himself further by not only shoveling in three more loads of coal successfully, but also by managing to reserve just enough latent strength and awareness to adjust the piles inside the kiln and measure the quantity of heat afterward.

By the end, His face and his arms were drenched from sweating and he felt far colder than when he had begun - as Shigeru had rationally predicted. Satoshi was gratified that Tano had only interrupted him once to adjust the angle of his arm. He hadn't done that terribly in spite of everything.

"You've learned very well," Tano told him as they were leaving for the day. "Only after a little more and you'll have learned everything I can teach you."

"What, seriously?" asked Satoshi, rather dumbfounded.

"The rest comes from practice," said Tano, with a wrinkled smile. "Much like life."

Satoshi thought about it for a moment, and realized that his Pokemon journey had started in almost exactly the same way.

Satoshi rubbed the linen of his blanket against his head vigorously. It was helping his hair dry, but not nearly quick enough: he was covered in more goosebumps than clothes, and exposure to the cold night air was threatening to make his ears fall off. Either them, or his toes - he couldn't figure out which one would shrivel up with frostbite and fall off first, because both were equally numb. On the way back from the bath, he'd gotten his socks wet again, so they were drying by the fire. Shigeru's socks were by the fire pit, too, except they were warm and dry and still on Shigeru's feet because he had avoided stepping in the puddles outside the Bath House.

"You really can't blame me just because I didn't tell you they were there." Shigeru pointed out. "Besides, I did tell you it was snowing again."

"But I could see that for myself!" Satoshi grumbled.

"Yeah, but you obviously weren't aware of what it meant. When people hear that it's snowing, they usually try to apply that knowledge, and instead of staring up at the sky, more careful about where they're walking in icy conditions."

"Whatever," Satoshi gave up, embarrassed, and not for the first time that day. He dropped his blanket from his head and rested it around his neck so that the corners of one side fell across his knees.

"Mom used to say I'd catch a cold if I went into the cold with wet hair," he reminisced. "So did Haruka... And Hikari, come to think of it. I guess girls were always telling me that I was going to catch a cold or something."

"Girls were always pointing out that you were acting stupidly, you mean," said Shigeru. "Don't compare me to a girl."

Satoshi held back from pointing out that Shigeru was really, really clean like a girl. And that he had clean fingers. And pretty eyelashes. Actually, he wasn't sure how that last one was related, but -

"Hey, so about dinner." Shigeru picked up a bun with a leaf of lettuce and a fish tail sticking out from it. "I just realized that Tano left us an extra sandwich. Do you wanna split it?"

"No, you can have it if you want. I'll be fine with two."

Shigeru stared. "Are you seriously refusing food?"

"These fish sandwiches aren't nearly as good as Haruka's," Satoshi defended.

Shigeru's surprise gave way to dismissal. "You don't have to sound so nostalgic." Then, he added: "It was only a few days ago."

"Still! I miss Haruka's cooking. Tano makes the same thing every day and I'm sick of eating fish sandwiches. Haruka used to come here and feed us twice every day. I just don't understand why she won't do it anymore."

Shigeru stayed silent. Satoshi watched the shadows of the flames playing on his face, hoping that eventually Shigeru would share whatever was on his mind, but the moment grew too long for him to ask, and Shigeru seemed unwilling to share. Satoshi crossed the room, dumping the blanket on his bed as he crossed the room, and settled by the fire right next to Shigeru. He put out his hands and wiggled his fingers in the waving, smoky heat that spilled off of the flames.

"Shigeru, do you think that Haruka got hurt somehow?" he found himself asking.

"I don't think so," said Shigeru, his voice vague. "She seems like she can take care of herself."

"So won't she just come back?"

"Don't worry about it. Hey, do you want that sandwich?"

Satoshi felt the food being thrust into his hands before he knew what was happening. He ate it, not because the taste was tolerable but because he could fell the cold seeping into him more with every minute and was anxious to get into bed, and to sleep and not worry about all the weird things that seemed to be piling up just like the banks of snow outside their house.

Not his and Shigeru's house, really, but Haruka's house, he reminded himself, And Masato's house.

He edged closer to the fireplace.

"Do you fink," he said, mid-chew, "Do you think it's colder than yeshterday? I'm not shure."

Shigeru sat back and pulled a face. "I don't know. I thought that the snow was insulating the heat, a little bit. But... it's still way too cold in here."

"Then maybe we should sleep by the fire tonight," Satoshi suggested at length.

"Are you sure you won't roll into it by accident?"

"I don't roll around in my sleep!" Satoshi defended.

"Yes, you do. But it's probably better if you accidentally burnt yourself in your sleep than if you got hypothermia. Without Haruka around, I don't know any of the locals who can help take care of you if you get sick."

Kasumi and Takeshi's faces floated up in Satoshi's memory, but he quickly set them aside. "I told you, I'm not feeling sick at all."

"Better safe than sorry, though," Shigeru replied. He got up and moved their pallets close to the outside ring of the fire pit. Satoshi watched him bend down to take the covers in his hands, and drag them methodically across the room until they were lined up neatly some inches from the fire, the foot of the bedding closest to the flames. Satoshi couldn't help but notice that the linens were still arranged side-by-side as they had been before.

"Are you sure it's not better to place them in a ring around the fire?" he asked curiously. "That's how we always did it when we went camping."

"Well - body heat will last longer than the fire will, you know," said Shigeru.

The fire was doing all sorts of things to make his face glow red; to make his eyes look deep and shadowed. Satoshi felt his stomach turn and get light and get low all at once.

"I'm done with dinner," he announced, and turned away.

Shigeru had been right about one thing, and completely wrong about the other.

He'd been right that the cold wasn't intensifying, but he'd been wrong that their fire would be sufficient to keep it out. He had neglected to think of other weather phenomena, like blizzards, that could crack open on a city and consume it like the yoke of an egg. In the middle of the night, the blizzard that erupted had bursts of wind strong enough to blow aside the hanging flap of a door. The draft of freezing air that swept into the room swallowed its fire in a visceral 'whoof' that stole the heat from the room so abruptly that it startled Shigeru into consciousness.

He wasn't aware, however, what it was that had woken him - especially not when his first conscious thought was of pain. As he realized that one of his limbs was throbbing, fear broke through the level of pain, and he tried to take in his surroundings to understand what was wrong. He could hear the dim howl of wind blowing through the streets outside, and he could hear it whistling as it made its way into the room in the interims of his thoughts. It wasn't, he told himself fiercely, anything that he hadn't felt before; it was just the regular pain he had to deal with because of the accident and-

- but it wasn't his leg. It was his arm. And it was in pain, but it was warm.

The panic subsided quickly as his consciousness took over. His leg hadn't been hurting him ever since he'd arrived in Alph, anyway, even if he had seen Foster and been through the accident again. In place of his leg, a different organ tugged at him and flared up in pain outside of his control.

He peeked an eye open and discovered Satoshi clutching onto him, resting with his head resting against the inside of his arm. In that moment, with Satoshi locked against him like the piece of a jig-saw puzzle, the pain in his heart was more acute than the pain in his leg had ever been.

It had to be the cold. That was what must have driven Satoshi close to him at last. Shigeru didn't dare look the gift horse in the mouth: he slid his body forward, framing Satoshi's with his own, and freeing his arm. Their chests touched, and the hand that had wrapped around his arm so fiercely had nowhere to go but to fall around his back. It wasn't a gentle, natural motion - there was the cool touch of fabric in the way, jarring the otherwise smooth motion of the arms down to where they rested at last in an embrace. But it was perfect, somehow; deeply satisfying and warm.

Shigeru couldn't remember the last time he had had his arms around Satoshi. They must've been kids. Hugs, just in general, were nearly just as rare. He couldn't remember the last time he'd felt arms around him, even for a moment- it must have been from his sister, last Christmas, when he had given her a pair of Buneary hair pins.

It had been too long.

The doorway was flapping, and between its bursts of motion he could see that the snowdrifts had gathered to two feet in height outside their door. Shigeru saw it, turned his face to Satoshi, and closed his eyes against everything else.

He held on.

The sky the next morning was a faceless gray. There were no bulges or bumps in the spread of cloud hanging above the city, and now that the snow seemed stopped for good, Alph itself seemed to mirror it below: Cold. Static. Lifeless. As Satoshi and Shigeru trampled down the snow in route to Tano's house, they didn't hear the sound of distant running water in the Trough, or the rabble of the villagers going about their morning work. It was just each other's breaths, and the crinkling sound of powdered snow as it broke apart at their feet.

The approach to Tano's house itself was a further picture of seclusion. The firmly-rooted tree in the courtyard had bowed over from the weight of the recent snowfall, like a servant resigned to serve. It was hard to imagine that only days before they had sat beneath the tree with their sleeves rolled up to their arms, laughing together. Now it took Satoshi effort to speak, much less to laugh, under the cold hand of the weather.

Satoshi hadn't noticed the cold at all while he'd been sleeping, though, and had even woken up in nothing short of a sweat, resulting from exposure to the fire pit that Shigeru had stoked into a blaze.

They both had barely been out of the Bath House for a walk of fifteen minutes, but he couldn't wait to get into their mentor's house and be enfolded in welcoming warmth again.

Unsurprisingly, then, Satoshi made it to Tano's door first, and immediately set to work on unbraiding the hemp rope of his snowshoe.

"Tano," he called out as he released his first sandal from its trappings, "We're here! And we're ready for breakfast!"

"I think Tano's aware that you're always ready for breakfast," Shigeru commented from his side.

Satoshi flashed him a grin. "Yeah, probably. But reminding him might help him to get it to us faster."

Shigeru stood, his sandals in his hands, and looked at him for a moment with an unreadable expression. Then he turned back the door flap and stepped into the room, out of Satoshi's sight.

"Tano?" he called.

Satoshi rubbed his thumbs against his fingers in circles to work the warmth back into them. He blew on them, too, just for good measure, while staring out at the courtyard in front of him. A stray wind picked up, and the top layer of snow lifted and began to dance like a wave of cold fire across the ground.

"Tano?" Shigeru's voice rang out again. "Tano?"

Satoshi got to his feet, dropped his sandals in the door frame and walked inside. It was just as cold inside as outside, and unusually dark. None of the window coverings had been lifted aside to let light in from the back wall. And the fire must have been out, too. He looked over at Shigeru, who was facing away from him at the table, standing still.

Satoshi didn't see Tano anywhere.

"Shigeru, what's going on? Is Tano not here or something?" he asked.

Shigeru didn't respond, so Satoshi walked across the room and peeked into the adjacent room where Tano usually kept his food and slept. It was empty and immaculate; everything in there and in the main room looked as they'd left it the day before. Satoshi looked back at Shigeru, still absorbed in thought - and, apparently, with something that he held in his hands.

There was a piece of paper in his hand that Shigeru appeared to be reading. Satoshi crept up to get a closer look, but it was of no use: the writing on the paper wasn't in Japanese at all. Instead, the paper was covered with weird hieroglyphs like the ones he'd seen on the walls in the Temple, lit up by torchlight.

"What's that?" he asked Shigeru.

Shigeru's fingers crumpled around the paper, and Satoshi could see that his hand was shaking slightly.

When he finally spoke, his words were tight and hollow.

"It's a note," he bit out. "From Tano. He's... left."

"He's left?" Satoshi tried to feel out the words in his mouth, but his tongue failed him. "What are you talking about?"

"Tano wrote us a note. He said... The note said that he's feeling ill, and he's going off to 'seek warmer grounds.' Or something."

Shigeru looked at Satoshi; his brows knitted, his face suspiciously un-telling. It gave him no guidance to work through his confusion. He didn't know what to think. He couldn't.

"Tano never said anything about being sick before. So that must mean he's coming back, maybe in two days or something. Right?" Satoshi asked hopefully.

Shigeru shook his head. "I don't think so."

"Why not?"

"Because he also said that we've learned all that we need to know," Shigeru clenched his fist, here, "And he wants us to finish firing all the pottery in the kiln."

"But," Satoshi protested, "we've barely started learning about firing or glazing."

"Tano obviously thinks we've learned enough."

"But I haven't. I can barely shovel coal!"

"And what makes you think I'm any better prepared than you?" Shigeru retorted, anger appearing more clearly on his features. "Didn't you see how much I was sweating yesterday?"

"Yeah, I saw. But you'll still remember everything that Tano said, and you'll do it perfectly. You always know what to do," Satoshi answered, and dropped his eyes to the ground. "So... what do we do now?"

Shigeru tossed the crumpled wad of paper onto the table, and turned his full attention to Satoshi at last.

"I don't know."

Satoshi was caught off guard. "What?"

"I said that I don't know." Shigeru stretched out the words with obvious pain, like they were an old piece of gum he'd been chewing in his mouth for hours. "I don't know what to do now any more than you do. I haven't had a clue about what's been happening around us ever since we arrived in Alph."

For half a second, Satoshi believed him, just from the sheer sincerity of Shigeru's tone. But then reason struck him, belatedly, and it added to the confusion that warred inside his skull. "That's not true," he stated.

"Yes, it is." Shigeru folded his arms for emphasis, but Satoshi was unimpressed.

"You've been explaining things to me since the very first day we arrived, and every single day since then-"

"Sure, I construct theories about what I do know, but that's it. Educated guesses that stem from the knowledge of science - the composition of soil layers, the method of discerning the age of a bone, things like that - doesn't mean that much when you're dealing with pottery, or with people, or with being thrown into a false reality."

Satoshi looked at Shigeru, and realized he had never thought about it science in that way. But he was certain that Shigeru still wasn't right. For all that Shigeru was saying, Satoshi knew that Shigeru was smart, and that whenever they talked about anything from food to favorite movies, Shigeru picked the subject apart with a rational mind. He made theories about almost everything. And when he did, he was almost always right.

Except maybe, Satoshi realized, when he made theories about himself.

"For a person who says he doesn't know anything, you seem to be doing a pretty good job to me," said Satoshi.

"Then why haven't I figured out how to get us home yet?" Shigeru replied, his voice caught between desperation and a whine. "Why haven't I figured out the legend after nearly two months?"

"Why are you making such a big deal out of this? Didn't you say that this place was an illusion built by the Protectors, designed to last as long as they wanted it to?"

Shigeru turned away from him and began to pace. "I know I said that we'd have all the time in the world, but what if I was wrong? What if it's only designed to last as long as tomorrow morning? Didn't you notice - in this past week especially - that everything has felt like it's been accelerating around us? That things are changing, faster and faster, and all sorts of events are just whirling together and splitting off into a million pieces?"

Satoshi did look around himself. Tano's work-room seemed clean and neat as it was on most mornings that they arrived. Snow was piled up outside the door, and while there was a definite abundance of crusty ice on the edge of the doorframe, as far as Satoshi could tell, Alph was hardly speeding up. If anything, the life of the city had slowed down to a perfect snow-globe stillness.

"No," he admitted. "I haven't noticed anything like that."

"Then it's probably nothing," said Shigeru immediately. "It's probably nothing."

"Really? But you just said-"

"Maybe we should just do what Tano suggested," Shigeru interrupted, his voice obviously strained. "You could check the fire in the kiln and start getting things ready. I'll try to find something for breakfast."

"Oh. Okay."

Satoshi paused, feeling as if he was missing something. It was obvious that Shigeru was upset, but he had no idea what to do. The back of Shigeru's head betrayed nothing of what he was thinking; the ends of his auburn hair, the shells of his ears, the strong lines of his shoulders beneath his shirt were all in a conspiracy to keep him as frustratingly illegible to Satoshi as the crumpled letter on the table. Giving up, Satoshi walked to the door and prepared to go start working in silence, but right as he passed the doorframe he was struck with a sudden impulse to say one last thing.

"Hey, Shigeru?" he raised his voice slightly to reach across the room. "I'm sorry about Tano."

For a moment, Shigeru didn't respond. And he still didn't turn around. But when he answered, Satoshi finally understood the reason why.

"Yeah," said Shigeru, swallowing. And then, more thickly: "Thanks."