As some of you may know, I have been living in Japan for the past four years. In the wake of recent tragedies, the people of Northern Japan, and a number of people very closer to me in Sendai have been going through indescribable events - earthquakes and tsunamis have left hundreds of thousands living in shelters with and without food and heat. Their spirits have at times been crushed in the wake of an 'impenetrably dark night.' In Tokyo, we have been faced with food shortages, aftershocks, unpredictable blackouts and a recent panic induced by nuclear reactors melting down nearby. I know you're probably just a poor student like I am, but even so I ask you to please consider donating money for the relief effort to Japan. Even five dollars can be the difference in helping a family get adequately fed that day. The Red Cross, Salvation Army, and Samaritan's Purse are just three of several hundred aid and relief operations that are in Japan right now, actively saving and changing lives in the wake of this unspeakable tragedy. You can donate online, without even having to get up from your computer. I urge you to do so if you can.
That being said, I'm not even going to try and explain now why the climax of this novel is so… so ironic. And why it was hard to write. But it's been in the works for years, I promise.
In Ruins
Chapter 24
Shigeru moved to chase Satoshi before he was lost from his sight.
"Satoshi!" he shouted. "Come back! Satoshi!"
He took three strides out into the snow; however, this was as far as he got before he was struck by the jolting chill of snow shoved into the fabric of his socks. The pin-needle pain of ice seeping through and clamping onto the sole of his foot made him stumble backward into the straw weave of the curtain and the heavy weight of Haruka, who grabbed him by the arm.
"You come back!" she shouted into his ear. "Put on your shoes before you go out there!"
"Let go of me!" Shigeru replied, breaking free from her grip and turning back to the street. He cupped his mouth in his hands and yelled. "Satoshi, what are you doing! Satoshi!"
When it was clear that Satoshi either didn't hear or didn't care, Shigeru whipped around to face Haruka. "Why did you stop me?" he demanded.
"You're not thinking!" she told him harshly. "Do you want to lose your toes?"
Shigeru looked over his shoulder again, but the street was empty. He felt angry enough to burst.
"It wouldn't have mattered if I'd only been running for a few minutes! Satoshi's gone now!" he fumed. "How am I supposed to know where he went?"
"It's not that hard to guess." Haruka pointed to deep indents in the snow that led from the front of the house. "Those are his tracks," she said in an exasperated voice. "You can follow him, you know."
Shigeru, admittedly, hadn't thought of that.
"Just give me my shoes," he said, voice clipped to hide his embarrassment. Haruka turned away from him to pull their two pairs of snowshoes from the hook by the door and Shigeru shook his head violently, as if that alone could pull him together. "We've got to find him," Shigeru said to himself as much as his companion. Haruka extended the footwear to him, and Shigeru snatched it from her. He could feel his pulse pounding in his throat as he worked the laces through the loops of his shoes at a faster speed than he'd ever moved in before. "Satoshi has got to be cold. He's been outside for at least an hour by now. Besides, I don't know what could've made him just run off for no reason-"
"I would've thought that you'd guessed already," said Haruka, in the midst of pulling her left sandal onto her foot. Shigeru spared her a brief inquisitive glance as she said, "He saw me inside the house with you."
"So?" he asked.
"Think about it," Haruka repeated. And Shigeru did, furrowing his brow for a moment, just long enough to consider her words - and to dismiss them. He finished securing his first shoe, and hastily moved to the second one.
"Obviously," he said, "he didn't run off just because you were there. He's been complaining every single day about you not being around. He should've been happy to see you again."
"Maybe not in that context," Haruka suggested.
"In what context?" Shigeru asked with a scowl.
Haruka pulled at the rope binding of her snowshoe with a deeply set scowl that seemed suited to match his own. "Are you doing this intentionally?" she wondered. "Or are you actually ignoring the obvious?"
"I'm not ignoring -" Shigeru paused mid-bristle, registering her tone. He looked at Haruka intently. "What are you talking about, Haruka? Do you know something that I don't know, but that I should?" he asked, his voice wet with accusation. "Is there something I should've seen, but didn't? Or something that I couldn't have seen, that he did? Like an illusion, maybe?"
Haruka's eyebrows lifted at the word 'illusion' but otherwise she seemed to ignore him and his suggestions. "I doubt it," she replied, tying the last knot fastening her snowshoe firmly to her sandal. "When Satoshi came inside, you were holding my hand, Shigeru. That must have been reason enough."
"What, just that? No," Shigeru shook his head, and stood up straight. "That's not what it was. Come on, let's go find Satoshi."
Haruka followed him silently onto the snow, and Shigeru began to trace the singular path leading down the street with disease.
"I'm serious," he continued, his eyes fixed onto the snow at his feet, "Satoshi couldn't possibly think that you and I were... in anything less than a platonic situation. He knows that I'm not attracted to women."
Shigeru might have sworn he heard her sighing, but didn't know for sure. Besides, even if she had been sighing, he had no idea what that noise would've meant.
"What do you think it meant, then?" he asked defensively. "Do you think he was jealous? That he loves you?"
"More that he loves you," Haruka corrected.
Shigeru nearly tripped before managing, "He doesn't."
"But if he did." She paused, then gesticulated to a tiny side street. "I think he went left."
Sure enough, the holes in the ground from Satoshi's footfalls made a clear turn to the left. The tracks were less far apart now, evidence that his stride had shortened. For some reason, he had started walking instead of running. He must've grown tired, Shigeru reasoned, as he began to step exactly in the step-holes that Satoshi had treaded down. "This street goes toward the sea, doesn't it?" he said aloud.
"I think so," said Haruka.
Shigeru continued down the path, taking one of the long staircases and the next two streets in silence. The city was so still that he could hear the air moving past his ears as he walked, and the slide of his trousers brushing together, and the strangely crunching noise of his shoe pressing down on Satoshi's footprints.
"I don't know where we're going," he admitted, eventually, and turned around in search of guidance from his traveling companion. She was only a few meters behind him, but the distance felt as deep as one that could be separated by a fissure. "Haruka?" he asked.
"He's going to the Perch," she said, shortly. "It's for certain."
"Certain?" Shigeru raised an eyebrow. "He could be going nowhere in particular."
"No," said Haruka, disagreeing firmly. She looked at some point past Shigeru that he couldn't see. Her eyes were practically glazed over. "Not after he came in. He's jealous. And he's hurting. He wants to reach out. He's ready."
"It's not possible for you to know any of that just from seeing him in the doorframe for two seconds," Shigeru replied, upset. "If you were right, your perception would actually be paranormal. "
"I've seen a lot more than just today," Haruka retorted, but didn't, Shigeru noticed, seem willing to disclose exactly what it was that she'd seen. "He loves you."
Shigeru flinched involuntarily. "Stop saying that."
"Why?"
"Because it's not true," Shigeru answered her bluntly.
Haruka's lips turned into a tiny pout. "But it has to be true. The legend-"
"-isn't words. It's imprecise. It could be anything."
"But who else fell from the sky?" Haruka queried, her voice traveling up from behind him like an insistent breeze. "It wasn't me. It wasn't Hikari. We've always been here. Don't you remember the last part of the ritual?"
Shigeru didn't have a chance to answer her before Haruka continued.
"After the pair from the sky drop their torches and explode into light, they vanish. And then they started to dance. And then everyone does, in Alph, all of us together. They were freed, and - and so were we. That's what the legend says will happen, Shigeru, when you break the curse." Haruka tucked back a lock of hair that had slid into her face as she was talking, the delicate turn of her wrist drawing attention to her eyes nearly wet with tears. "You'll set us free from the Protector's bubble around our island. We'll be able to travel, to trade, to go out and see more than we've seen. To meet new people and new pokemon and to experience new things. To live. Don't you see?"
Shigeru was good at lying, and he wished that he could tell her that he didn't understand. But the sincerity of her plea broke though him.
"I'd help you if I could," said Shigeru sincerely. "And I want Satoshi, I told you that. I wish things could be this way, and I could break your curse… But I'm sorry. This isn't the answer. Satoshi doesn't love me."
"Does he love anyone else? " Haruka's voice cut into him, "Does he even care about anyone else on this island as much as he cares about you? Does he follow anyone else around? Does he seek approval from anyone else? Why not?"
Shigeru had no answer for her.
"The legend is about coming together, Shigeru. If you have love in your heart, then that is what must come from him, as well. You need to ask him what is in his heart."
"Haruka, I-"
He turned around, only to find Haruka was further behind him than she had been before. How had her voice seemed so close, then? he wondered momentarily, but the thought was abandoned when she began to back away from him in long steps. "I have to go now," she said. "And so do you. You need to get to Satoshi, and hurry."
"Hurry? Wait - what?" Shigeru took a step toward her, his hand out. "Is the Perch unsafe?"
"It's not that, exactly," said Haruka. "It's what he is doing at the Perch that is dangerous."
Shigeru whirled around and looked intently at the end of the path, which curved down a slight slope. "What's he doing?" he demanded.
"I don't know exactly. But he's visiting Staraptor. And according to the legend, he is trying to connect, remember?" Shigeru had to admit that this would have made sense, if Haruka was right about the legend. Which she wasn't. Haruka continued, "When Satoshi saw me with you, he must have felt upset, like he couldn't reach out to you. So he's going to go looking for something else to reach out to, like his Staraptor."
"What's wrong with him spending time with his pokemon?"
"It's not his pokemon. Staraptor isn't his."
Shigeru could tell that Haruka found this fact significant, but to him, it was completely illogical. "Of course Staraptor is his pokemon. Satoshi flies on it all the time."
"It doesn't matter what you think," said Haruka, folding her arms.
An impulse striking him, Shigeru approached the curve in the road. He was not too surprised to see that the road turned into a path zig-zagging down the edge of a snow-crested cliff. At the end of the path the white-capped bird pokemon hutch sat boldly, the final bastion of a city blanketed in snow.
Shigeru was so relieved to see it.
"I'll go talk to him," he decided aloud.
"Good. I'm going to the Chief now," Haruka told him listlessly, and turned around in a brisk but somehow graceful motion.
"All right," said Shigeru to her back. "Will you be bringing us dinner when you're done talking with him?"
Haruka stopped and gave him a long, almost wistful look over her shoulder. A bit of bang caught the edge of her mouth, which was quivering. And then she walked away.
Shigeru stared after her, a rock stifling all the sound in his throat, until she was lost beyond buildings.
He felt himself trembling as well.
When Satoshi stumbled into the Perch, his eyesight blurred by tears, he could only see where he was because of the smell. The hay and musk that filled his nostrils was a sharp departure from the world outside, too cold and too muted to sense with his body.
After running through white streets for what felt like an hour, the rush of scent was less welcome than it should have been. If anything, he wished he could sense less before he was bowled over by his feelings completely. It was nearly impossible to stand in the weight of them, now that the veil over his heart had lifted with stunning clarity, just like the door curtain he'd had in his hand when he'd come home to Haruka's.
He had felt hurt enough to die. Like nothing could ever make him happy again, and he wanted to be happy. He wanted. That was the problem; that was the thing he had been avoiding ever since he had achieved the dream on which he'd staked his entire life - and won the Championship at Indigo Plateau.
He'd forgotten what it was like to want anything.
The realization burnt inside of him strongly enough to wrench out tears. He staggered into the center of the room, searching blindly. He could hear the rustle of wings, of pokemon nearby, and finally he found Staraptor in its corner. It battled its wings in startled greeting.
Satoshi smiled weakly at it, came up to it, and petted the giant pokemon on its slick, orange beak. Once, twice. It did not take long before his tears began to fall, and snot. He was sobbing, and his face was dripping and blotchy because his heart was doing terrible things to him.
"You won't - won't believe, Staraptor," he said, his voice catching in the back of his mouth like it did in a Politoad's, "just how stu - how stupid, I - that I've been -"
He rubbed his face with his sleeve and cringed at the harsh feeling of coarse fabric against the raw skin around his eyes and nose. Staraptor scratched at the ground with its claw, its massive body shifting weight and all the feathers seeming to ripple as they caught the dull light in the room. Satoshi felt himself clenching up further, even with Staraptor docile at his touch. For all that he had run to pokemon in the past to soothe him, it suddenly just seemed so unfamiliar.
He couldn't believe it had really been that long since he'd sought company from a pokemon, and not just a basic service, or the companionship of… of a pet.
He hadn't had a single pokemon battle for over a year. After Indigo Plateau, there hadn't been much point; nothing else had seemed worth reaching for after he'd won. What was the point of finding something new to reach for, when he'd gotten the ultimate and it wasn't enough? Why not just lay in bed for a year and eat and suck off of others?
And then he'd come to Alph, and slowly, without even noticing it, he'd come to want again.
It was just little things at first. Like the want to have an adventure. Then, it had been to do well, to compete, as he and Shigeru had sat side by side. And then somewhere along the way, not even knowing it, not even thinking of it even once, he'd come to want that closeness as an end in itself.
He could've denied it once, but what was the good in that? He'd tried to believe it was all a hallucination, but he couldn't, not after having to stare directly at Shigeru and Haruka's hands clasped together as they were sitting closely by the fire, the words inevitable or meant to be or something like that echoing in the air.
The want he'd felt for Shigeru outside Takeshi and Kasumi's house wasn't gone. It wasn't going to go away. It was real. And that caused so many more problems that stretched beyond himself. It meant that the other things he'd felt and thought about since that morning weren't theproducts of his imagination. And that meant his fears about the world being unreal were just as present as they had been before.
The thought doubled back at him. If it had really been like Shigeru said, that the whole time it was them (him) at the center of the illusion, how was he supposed to know?
Or was it really more a question of how couldn't he?
"I'm an idiot, aren't I," he said to Staraptor, his voice thick with self-loathing. He looked at the pokemon in the eye, waiting for it to give him some sort of response. But the bird pokemon looked at him, expression blase as always, as Satoshi stood there and sniffled. "What?" he asked it eventually. "Do you really have nothing to say?"
Staraptor did nothing more than pick at the ground with its feet.
Satoshi swallowed back his disappointment. "Fine. Don't try to help," he said, curtly. "It's not like you could have anything to say, anyway. You barely know me."
The pokemon cried out, and flapped its wings as if to say, It's not my fault. You barely come to visit me.
But it was also possible that he was saying, Who would want to know a pathetic loser like you?
Satoshi couldn't really tell. He had to admit that he wasn't Staraptor's trainer, after all; he was just someone who had rode the pokemon a couple of times when he'd needed to. He had never connected with it, not empathically, as he had with his other pokemon, and Pikachu in particular.
If Pikachu had been there, Satoshi would have understood exactly what it was trying to say. He was sure of it. And Pikachu would comfort him, too, because Pikachu was his best friend and was always there for him when he needed it. If only Pikachu were there.
The surge of emotion that jolted Satoshi at this thought was intense enough that he nearly staggered backwards.
Of course he missed Pikachu. The yellow pokemon was his best friend. It had been by his side every day for the past six years, sharing everything with him! How could he have forgotten? And his other pokemon, what about them?
As the emotion rocked him, the gulf in Satoshi's heart started to show itself to him, gaping so widely that he could see nothing outside of it. He could barely hold back a cry as the want mixed with his shame for denying it. There were so many other things that he had been overlooking, and Shigeru had just been the start of it. He wanted to go home and see his pokemon. And maybe lay on his soft mattress in his warm bed, or maybe not. Maybe he could sleep outdoors again in a tent, or in a sleeping bag, surrounded by his friends and the trees. He wanted to live his life. He was tired of running from it.
The admission that he cared, that he wanted - even if it was just in his mind - made everything around him just that much clearer, and heavier. He stared at his empty hands miserably as he felt the emptiness left by the emergence of a final want that he hadn't been denying, but he simply hadn't had: it was the desire to go home.
It seemed too impossible.
He turned from Staraptor, and cried until he couldn't.
It felt like it had been days by the time the tears began to dry, and it left him thirsty and more tired than he'd even been before. He wiped his face, wondering what he was going to do next, wondering how he could survive a 'next,' when he heard a voice calling into the Perch from outside.
He looked up, and could see through the doorway Shigeru's figure half-sliding, half-walking towards him in quick paces down the tumbling snowy hill. He was shouting, predictably, Satoshi's name.
For a moment, Satoshi stood in conflict between the warring desires to run away from Shigeru, and to stay with him. The point was moot, anyway, because there was nowhere he could go to get away. Resolutely, he set his shoulders and swallowed hard enough that he could feel his adam's apple bobbing inside his throat.
He went outside, and felt the wind nipping against the tips of his ears.
Shigeru shouted out his name again, though this time with something like relief. Satoshi didn't know how to feel about that, except for wary.
"Shigeru," he called back as his friend came close. "What are you doing here?"
He briefly hoped that it wasn't too obvious to Shigeru that he'd been crying, but he seemed to be too busy flicking the sweat off his forehead, beneath his auburn bangs. He slowed as he approached Satoshi, and his cheeks and nose were red.
"I had to follow you," he said to Satoshi. "You just ran off like crazy…"
Shigeru trailed off as if expecting an explanation that Satoshi wasn't ready to give. With his new insight to himself, seeing Shigeru actually hurt, and Satoshi bit the inside of his cheek to keep himself under control. And while he knew it wasn't subtle, he didn't care. He didn't know what else to do.
"What were you doing anyway," he managed to ask.
Shigeru screwed up his brow. "When?" he asked. "Are you talking about when I was at Haruka's just now?" Satoshi stayed silent, and Shigeru correctly picked that up as confirmation. Obviously frustrated, he avoided answering by means of accusation: "Don't play stupid, you saw everything when you walked in while Haruka and I were talking and-"
"Yeah, talking. I saw that." Satoshi interrupted before he could help himself, and Shigeru looked at him with incredulity.
"Satoshi..?"
"What?" Satoshi returned. Although his tone of voice, even in his own opinion sounded nowhere near innocent, he was at least more successful at keeping out the bitter taint than he had been the time before.
Shigeru stepped closer to him.
"You didn't actually hear anything we said, did you?"
"Oh, I heard you mention something about the legend, but it was kind of overwhelmed by the fact that you were…" Satoshi caught himself, and looked away. "You know what, never mind. It's none of my business."
"Our conversation had to do with the legend. Of course it's your business," Shigeru retorted.
"What, you actually want me to interrupt the next time you and Haruka are having a moment alone?" he asked before he had thought it through, and immediately regretted it. He didn't want to hear about Shigeru and Haruka together. Thinking about it felt as awful as throwing up. It hurt like hitting things; like hating life.
Shigeru suddenly looked almost pale against the snow.
"I wasn't-" he started.
"I don't care-" Satoshi interjected.
"Well, I don't care that you don't care," Shigeru argued. Satoshi, feeling like there was no recourse, bit out any angry 'fine,' and tried to step around Shigeru, but Shigeru moved in front of him, his arms spread out wide to stop him. "I'm still going to say what I want to say," he spoke quickly, "Listen, there's nothing going on between me and Haruka. She's not my type. Not even close."
"Oh yeah?" Satoshi spat out, and tried to push through Shigeru. "She said it was inevitable. Leave me alone."
Shigeru's hand grabbed onto his bicep. "Satoshi," he said. Satoshi felt his heart racing, and he could barely breathe at the assault of want that made him start leaning into Shigeru's hand before he even knew what he was doing.
"What?"
"That's not what's going on," Shigeru told me. He was looking at Satoshi oddly, but that wasn't too unusual. "I told you I was gay. I told you. And Haruka, as I am sure we can both agree, isn't a man. Okay?"
Relief flooded through Satoshi at the words, but it still wasn't enough. He struggled in Shigeru's grip. "I heard Haruka," he complained. "And she said something about destiny and-"
"We were talking about the legend," Shigeru told him. "Not me and Haruka's relationship."
"Well, you should have waited for me to get back," Satoshi shot at him.
"Yeah. I know. I'm sorry. I'll tell you everything once we get back inside somewhere warm, okay? You look like you're freezing. Anyway, let's go back to Haruka's place and wait for her to come back from her meeting with the Chief."
Shigeru paused, and then his eyes momentarily lost focus. A hand came up to partially cover his mouth as he thought aloud. "We should go quickly," he said. "She didn't say why, exactly, but she was saying that we were out of time-"
"Time for what?" Satoshi asked. He was still looking at Shigeru's mouth, unable to look away now that Shigeru had drawn attention to them with his hand. His lips were a good color, if slightly chapped, and the top one was just barely thicker than the bottom one. Satoshi had never noticed. And it was making him tremble at the knees. He quickly looked off into the snow, trying to un-notice Shigeru's lips so he could focus instead on the words coming out of them. He was, after all, still kind of upset.
"I don't know what we don't have time for, just that we don't have it," Shigeru was saying. And then, "Hey… do you feel that?"
"Feel what?" Satoshi looked immediately at the place where Shigeru's hand rested on his arm - where he knew his heart beat was pulsing wildly. "Also, no," he tacked on.
"Come on, you've got to feel it. The ground is moving beneath us. Again." Shigeru released Satoshi. Stepping back, it was immediately apparent that the trembling Satoshi had felt in his knees hadn't been a reaction to Shigeru's proximity, but an echo of a transmission from the ground.
"We might be experiencing an after-shock from the earthquake this morning," said Shigeru, practical even as it was laced with the tiniest hint of fear. "Even though it's kind of late... We should probably take cover."
"Good idea," said Satoshi. He looked around himself in a circle, eyes scanning all directions. He could see the Perch, the side of a cliff, a long road, and the ocean. None of the places seemed to be immediately viable sanctuaries, and he nearly said as much to Shigeru, but his friend was looking past him.
"What about up?" he suggested. "If we're off the ground, that's got to be the safest place to be."
Satoshi had already turned around, joining in the direction of Shigeru's gaze. "Staraptor!" he called out and walked two steps into the doorway of the Perch. "Come on, get us out of here, there's a-"
He stopped mid-sentence. Eyes wide with shock, he looked through the door to the Perch and at the two visibly ruffled bird pokemon sitting at attention along the walls. Staraptor was no longer among them. He was gone.
"No way," Satoshi said breathlessly. He stumbled out of the Perch in the midst of the trembler, with the hair risen on the back of his neck and the thoughts from earlier that spoke of illusions and impossibilities resounding in his mind. "No way! Staraptor was just here! What the hell is going on!"
A huge chunk of snow tumbled from the Perch's roof only a few meters right of where they were standing.
"I don't know," said Shigeru, unevenly, "But I don't like this. Let's continue this conversation somewhere safer."
"Where?" Satoshi grumbled. "The earthquake should be over any second now!"
As if in protest, the ground made a sudden jerk and rumbled with a new surge that seemed almost like waves trapped in a swimming pool, resounding on each other, strong enough to force Satoshi into locking his knees and swinging his arms forward to keep his balance. Shigeru, too, looked unbalanced when Satoshi turned his gaze on him, but it had nothing to do with the way Shigeru was standing in the center of a beaten-down path of snow with the icy face of a cliff looming over him.
"Like I said, we should go somewhere safe," he insisted, his breath making the words short. "If we can."
In that moment, something clicked inside of Satoshi's head.
He couldn't place its source. It was something about Staraptor's inexplicable disappearance, the sudden frequency of earthquakes and the bump that he knew he could still feel on the back of his skull that, in combination, finally stopped him in his tracks and made him stare at Shigeru with all the clarity he had lacked when they had been sitting in the steam-filled tub of the Bathhouse together.
"Why bother running and finding somewhere safe?" he heard himself saying. "We're just in an illusion, anyway!"
Shigeru turned his head to stare back at Satoshi, startled. "What?"
"You were right," Satoshi said, approaching Shigeru with uneven steps, his arms out for balance. "Everything in Alph, including these earthquakes, are just illusions. They can't actually hurt us!"
"But you just got a concussion from an earthquake this morning!" Shigeru retorted in equal parts anger and disbelief.
"And that's how I figured it out," Satoshi claimed. "You were right about everything; that this place is being controlled by the Unown, that the Unown are listening to us, that they're listening to me..."
"Now is not the time for this," Shigeru barked at him, and began to stagger off through the snow. Satoshi saw no other option but to follow after him. They stumbled forward, half-sliding and half-running on the snow even as the tremors seemed to grow.
"Where are even going?" Satoshi asked, his voice raised to reach over the sound of distant buildings moving on their foundations, of pebbles tumbling down the sides of the cliff face. Shigeru didn't answer him, and Satoshi looked around just in time to see a part of the Perch's roof crumbled in exactly on the spot where they'd been standing. Even though it was just a bunch of hay and snow that had slipped between beams, it was too close to be coincidental, Satoshi thought to himself. He didn't know whether to be amused or terrified.
Shigeru seemed to have chosen the latter after misstepping and nearly falling over in the wake of that particularly strong swing of the ground.
"I hope all the shaking doesn't cause an avalanche off these cliff faces," he said, his voice tight, "There's something strange about these tremors."
"That's because," Satoshi told him, gritting his teeth, "It's not an earthquake!"
"Except that it obviously is," said Shigeru, and paused as much for breath as to concentrate on guiding his foot. "The thing is, I can't tell what kind of wave this is - or what sort of direction the plates must be moving in. It feels like all of - all of the waves are going everywhere at once, directly - under my feet and not just thousands of miles underground-"
"That's because it's not an earthquake!" Satoshi repeated, and Shigeru turned on him fiercely. Satoshi just answered him with an obstinate glare. The waves were getting stronger, he could feel it in the shaking of his bones inside the muscles of his thighs. Pretty soon he wouldn't be able to walk.
"Fine! Explain!" Shigeru finally gave in. "Just do it quickly."
Satoshi gathered his breath, sparing only the briefest thought on how it was strange that suddenly the thing he had been willing to go to any length to avoid talking about earlier that afternoon seemed so easy thing to confront, if only because everything else was so much more difficult by comparison. Even walking, even breathing.
He locked his knees and spoke.
"This morning," he said. "I wanted the earthquake to stop and it stopped as soon as I told it to, it did. And - I think I'd made it start, too."
"Why did it stop?" Shigeru asked immediately. "No, how?"
"I don't know," said Satoshi, "I wasn't trying to do it, it just happened."
"Then you have no way of knowing you caused it," Shigeru said, dismissing him with the wave of a hand, and began to walk forward. "Come on, let's keep going until we find somewhere safe-"
Satoshi could barely think now, much less focus on each footstep that struggled to find a secure hold in the snow.
"The earthquakes also started the same way," he tried. "Both when the earthquake brought us to Alph, and this morning, too! I was doing the same thing."
"What, playing with pottery?" Shigeru scoffed.
"No, you idiot," Satoshi snapped. "I was thinking about you!"
Shigeru went rigid, and Satoshi barreled forward, seizing the chance to speak while Shigeru was rendered without a response.
"I'm not as smart as you, but I can see the pattern for this. Each time I start feeling really strongly about something, it's you. And whenever that starts to happen, enough to make me cry, or something, there has been an earthquake, and I know that the Unown must be behind it. You said before that the Unown were probably controlling illusions. I didn't want to believe it, but... You were right."
The words were hardly out of his mouth before, barely three meters away, a huge chunk of earth detached from the side of the cliff and crashed onto their path, blocking the entrance back to Alph. The previously flat stretch of snow on the road before them suddenly lurched, a portion seeming to sink into the ground. Shigeru pointedly looked away from it, and back to Satoshi. It was obvious as much from his expression as anything else that they were trapped. Even if the earthquake were to suddenly subside, the road was lost.
"We're trapped in," Satoshi stated dumbly.
Shigeru turned to him, nearly falling over in the process, and thus losing half the power of his pointed barb: "If you're so sure that this is an illusion, that this is your illusion, then why don't you just make it end already?"
"I don't know what to say," said Satoshi.
"Well what did you say last time?"
"Stop!" Satoshi shouted.
And it worked.
The earthquake abruptly came to a halt. And that wasn't all. With it, even the chunks of snow that had been breaking apart went static. Powder snow that had been shooting off from tiny crash sites were suspended in the air as if held in place by invisible strings. The ground was still. The sky was still.
"You did it," said Shigeru with no lack of awe. Satoshi could barely even breathe from relief, quickly followed by disbelief. His hunch had been right. Alph wasn't real. The Unown had created it out of illusions, maybe even out of images that had come from his own mind. And most importantly of all: he was in control.
For a moment, Satoshi could see all the opportunities, all the possibilities that the power brought to him. He could control people, he could live however he wanted and do whatever he wanted, for as long as he was still in Alph. And maybe if he had made that discovery just a day before, those possibilities would've been pleasing enough to make him want to stay forever. But there was only one thing left he could possibly want from the Unown, and it was something an illusion couldn't fulfill.
There was a lurch in the ground beneath them, and somewhere not too far away, he heard the sound of wood snapping and the massive heave of a building giving its final breath before collapsing into the ground. When he looked around himself, he couldn't see anything but white snow, and mottled white sky. And then the ocean. With nothing in-between it.
"The Perch is gone!" Satoshi shouted.
"That was not supposed to happen," Shigeru just finished saying, and then both he and Satoshi were thrown to their sides by a giant seismic wave. Satoshi crashed into the ground, the side of his head scraping against the icy top layer of the several days old snow. The knot on his head from that morning flared up in pain, and he grabbed his head, dizzy and disoriented for just a moment as Shigeru began to shout angrily through the earthquake, battering the ground just as intensely as it had before.
"What's happening?" he yelled. "I thought you told it to 'stop'!"
"And it did stop," Satoshi protested as he righted himself shakily. "Maybe this is an aftershock?"
"If you'd actually stopped the earthquake in the first place, there shouldn't be aftershocks," Shigeru returned, "Unless you're asking the Unown for the world to shake apart!"
"I don't think I am!"
"Why don't you know?"
Satoshi floundered as all rationality quickly evacuated his brain. "How could I?" he cried. "I haven't understood anything since I got here! And I'm not just talking about Alph, but me. I mean, I thought I knew what I wanted, but I didn't! I only just figured out that I wanted to see Pikachu, that I wanted to go home, that…"
Trailing off, Satoshi gestured helplessly in the empty space in front of him, as if the air could explain himself better than he could do alone. It, at least, wasn't churning uncontrollably from forces he couldn't see.
"That doesn't make sense," Shigeru said. "Why would you want the earthquake to continue unless you wanted to die? No. You don't want to die on any level, even on the levels that you don't understand, right? Now, maybe the Unown were listening to you before, but I think… I think they've stopped listening and now they're doing what they want to do. They're getting out of control, and that's why the earthquakes are happening."
"How do you get them back under your control, then?" Satoshi wondered aloud. He briefly flashed back to the time when he was eleven, and had first seen the Unown swirling around the ceiling of the Hale mansion. The Unown had been going crazy then from overextending their power, or at least that's what Entei had said. How had he, and Molly, and his friends managed to break through…?
"Molly had to believe in Entei," he said.
Shigeru spent a long moment staring at him, moving and yet not moving: it felt to Satoshi like he and Shigeru were being tugged in four directions by some contest of will, when it was really just the earth fighting them, point by point and punch for punch.
"That's right," said Shigeru finally. "Molly Hale made the illusion real, didn't she? At least on a practical level."
Satoshi felt like this information was nearly as far from being helpful as it could be. "Yeah, but… Shigeru, I don't think I can make Alph real on my own like Molly did."
"That's not the point. You don't need Entei because you have the legend. It's the legend you have to make real."
"I don't even know what the legend is," said Satoshi, tiring of the back and forth rocking of the earth and wishing it would just stop so he could sit down and hold his brains inside his head. "I don't care about it, or anything. I just want to go home! That's all I want!"
Satoshi could hardly think straight, and didn't care because Shigeru was close enough that he could feel his warmth radiating straight into to his bones.
"Is it?" Shigeru asked, a strange gleam in his eye. "Is that really all you want?"
"Yes it is!" he lied immediately, and regretted it just as quickly. Shigeru knew him, and he was a bad liar in the first place. Shigeru stared at him with enough intensity to make him cringe. He felt like he was being searched; as if he were a criminal trapped inside his own body. Unable to stop himself, his feet started to back away, but his snowshoes only gave him so much advantage over the shaking ground before they began to slide in different directions. He lost his balance and Shigeru caught him, but instead of letting go he held down, clutching at Satoshi tightly by the shoulders.
"Satoshi," asked Shigeru, nearly choking up in the final syllable. He swallowed. And then asked in a rush, "Are you in love with me?"
The question came so fast that initially Satoshi couldn't even process it.
But Shigeru was staring at him, as the words rang inside of his head until at last the noise took on meanings and stunned Satoshi into speech. He opened his mouth, not even knowing what he was saying except that he was suddenly repeating Shigeru's words desperately.
"Now is not the time-" he managed, but Shigeru cut him off, practically shouting in his face,
"ARE YOU IN LOVE WITH ME?"
Satoshi couldn't answer. He just shook.
Not because he didn't know the answer, or even that he had trouble saying it - but simply because he'd never even thoughtof it. He had been avoiding even the most ancillary descriptors for his relationship with Shigeru, or with anyone, for so long that he'd forgotten that the word 'love' had ever been there, that there had ever been a time when he'd been ten years old and wondered, just wondered what it would be like to be with Shigeru forever. And now, with anxiety bursting out in patches across his body, like perspiration would have struggled from his skin if there had only been more heat, he realized that maybe it was finally time think about it. And of course it was there. And although there were other feelings mixed up inside of him, too, like fear, especially fear, love wasn't a feeling anyway. It was the force that had driven him to this moment in the snow with Shigeru, and there was no use for pretending any differently now.
"Satoshi, did you even hear me?" Shigeru exclaimed, trying to force his attention. It wasn't necessary.
"Yeah," he said, and looked Shigeru straight in the eye. "And I am."
Shigeru didn't even look that surprised.
He just stared back at Satoshi, his irises flickering in their beds. Like they were looking for something. Waiting for something.
Satoshi didn't know whether to feel humiliated or offended.
"What? Don't you have anything to say?" he asked, and pushed at Shigeru's chest violently, expecting him to respond or something, but the other boy barely gave, stiff as a stone. And the only reason he may have only moved as much as he had was because it had gotten so difficult to stand without knees clacking together or collapsing while the earth was still reeling from an attack beneath its crust.
"Nothing's happening," Shigeru said. Now, at least, concern seemed to be knitting between his eyebrows, but it barely even constituted as an attempt at empathy as far as Satoshi was concerned.
"What the hell do you expect to happen?" Satoshi asked angrily. "Did you think I was going to sing to you or something?"
"No, Satoshi, I was expecting something… something to change. For the earthquake to stop, and for us to go home. That was supposed to save us," Shigeru answered with finality. "But it didn't. I'm… I'm sorry."
"Save us? What are you saying? That it's too late?"
Satoshi got his answer when Shigeru yelled "Watch out!" and suddenly threw them both down into the snow in a flurry of limbs. Chunks of ice and rock rained from the side of the cliff in their direction, but at least it wasn't the brunt force of the landslide that Shigeru was taking with his back. The full swing of the earth had taken care of that much, aiding Shigeru in flinging them even further than they could have moved by their own power. Satoshi had no time to be grateful when he could see the rustling of large stones along the part of the cliff face closer to them now, where hair-thin cracks were already spreading through the rocks and morphing into bolder and bolder lines.
"I think it's going to fall on us in any second," Satoshi said, attempting to right himself. Shigeru was already moving his feet beneath him, as if to stand up from a squat. He held outt a hand, but Satoshi couldn't tell if it was him offering help, or mocking him, or just trying to find his own balance, Satoshi ignored him and pushed up from the ground with a grunt - his fingers were burning from the feeling of snow pressed down between his fingers - but then another jolt hit and he was sent back to the ground. Shigeru, too, tumbled forward to his knees and practically into Satoshi's lap with a loud cry.
Satoshi bent down to him immediately. "Are you okay?" he began to ask, but could barely get out the first two syllables before Shigeru shook his head, managing just a broken "No, I-" Then his hands, one of which had grasped the snow and the other, Satoshi's knee, reached out and wrapped around Satoshi's shoulders. Satoshi nearly doubled over by the sudden weight as Shigeru embraced him as if he were grounding himself to a lightning rod in the middle of a thunder storm, chest flat against chest, legs wedged between leg. The weight was heavy, and the earth was still undulating so violently that Satoshi found himself being overpowered, and eventually the forces all conspired to push him back into the snow, where the sharp chill of melting ice seeped through his clothes and tore out his breath from him. He looked up. Shigeru was breathing heavily, braced above him, and For a brief moment it felt like the fantasy Satoshi had had outside of Kasumi and Takeshi's house. for a moment, he was so dizzy with want that he could only see white.
By the time he had recovered, Shigeru had put his head on Shigeru's shoulder, their necks warm where the bare skin touched together. They were both shaking, but it was as if they were only one body now being rocked by the earthquake. Yet Satoshi had almost never felt further apart.
What made it worse was that for the first time that Satoshi had ever seen, Shigeru had admitted to being wrong about a theory. Of all the times to be wrong, it seemed from both his words and actions that Shigeru was implying that the stakes had been their lives.
And they were going to die like this.
Satoshi had already cried himself out at the Perch in front of Staraptor, and he had already told Shigeru how he felt. He had even run across the entire city in the snow. There was nothing left in him to send out to the world but his misery, it seemed. His eyes rolled back in his head. When he looked up, hoping to see a spot of sun through the clouds before the earth began to crack, he was shocked to see that he was no longer looking at a snowy landscape. Or at least, not that alone.
Orbiting above him and Shigeru were a horde of wavering black and white blurs. They seemed almost like they were dancing as they swayed in patterns and shapes that rose and fell in time with the earth. They were the Protectors. The Unown. Satoshi knew it instinctively, and this time - without Pikachu, Charizard, Entei, and all of his friends by his side - they seemed so much more threatening. Beyond them, stretching into the sky, a blue wall of light had been raised, holding back the crumbling cliff side, and trapping him and Shigeru in. He could see beyond his and Shigeru's feet that the snowy path on either side of the barrier had already begun slipping into the ocean.
"What is this?" he found himself whispering. "Shigeru, the Protectors, they're… all around us."
"It must be the legend," Shigeru bit out. "They weren't there before. They must have showed up when you said you loved me."
"The legend? Why would the Protectors care about me telling you that I loved you?" Satoshi asked in disbelief. The final ends of his words were punctuated by another terrible noise; it sounded like the crack of lightning or even the crack of an island breaking apart. He didn't want to look away from Shigeru to see, but looking at Shigeru was almost as painful. Shigeru looked almost angry as they shook in sync.
And then suddenly, Shigeru moved back. He picked himself up, taking the weight off of Satoshi and undergoing a devastating change. His eyes, otherwise dull with pain, began to shine with discovery - a look that seemed suddenly not unlike hope.
"You're absolutely right," he said, his voice filling with awe and strength. "You're right, that's it! It's not about words. It's action."
"What?" Satoshi stared at Shigeru, stilluncomprehending. "What are you talking about?"
"The legend!" Shigeru exclaimed.
The force of the next wave nearly made Satoshi sick, and it was strong enough to throw both him and Shigeru onto their sides. Satoshi briefly felt as though he were looking up into the sky and seeing it filled with frozen-over stars and swirling black monsters, but he couldn't tell if it was just a consequence of his eyes rolling into the back of his head.
"Agh!" he cried out suddenly as a pain bit into his shoulder. He only caught the briefest glance of a few chunks of ice glancing off of Shigeru, too, but he was whirling in his epiphany and oblivious to pain. Satoshi wondered how big the next block of ice would be that rained down from the cliff, and if it, too, would miss its mark.
"What about the legend?" he pleaded with Shigeru.
"Haruka," he was already saying, "told me that the key to the legend was actions, not words. What were you doing when all this started, when the first earthquake came?"
"I was… crying," Satoshi admitted, "alone. Thinking about you, like I said before."
"Okay, so what if that's what got their attention?" Shigeru speculated desperately. "If you were so sad that they brought you and I here for all this time, what do you think would happen if you were doing something that made you really, really happy?"
"You think if I did - or, felt - something opposite of what I did when they brought us here, we could go home," Satoshi realized.
"Yes," declared Shigeru with satisfaction, and Satoshi felt the magnitude of his misery immediately. Something of it must have shown in his face, because Shigeru said to him,
"Don't you get it? This is our last shot!"
"Well it's hopeless!" Satoshi shot back, and then Shigeru grabbed him by the shoulders and began to shake him, as if the earthquake hadn't been doing that enough on its own. "Why are you giving up so easily?" he shouted. "That's not like you! How come you can't be happy?"
Satoshi tried to bat him away with his arms, barely able to muster up the energy that was being overwhelmed by his feelings.
"Didn't you hear anything I've said all afternoon?" he shouted back, "I know I'm an idiot, but did you even think about what I said before applying it to your over-stretched, stupid brain? Besides the fact that we're about to die in a world that's not even real and is probably my fault for existing in the first place, did it even occur to you that I might be upset because I love you and you don't love me back!"
Shigeru's eyes widened in shock. It only gave Satoshi momentary satisfaction, rather short-circuited by the creeping feeling of numbness that came from laying in the snow for too long. He tried to gather his breath - he had started panting, it felt like he hadn't stopped running ever since he had arrived at Haruka's. His heart was beating wildly in his chest. He could feel Shigeru's hands near his sides, curled into fists - and that was all.
The earth wasn't shaking anymore.
But Satoshi had no time to think about that before Shigeru had grabbed him by his voice.
"You're so wrong," Shigeru was saying with a low and quiet vehemence. "Who said you can't be happy? Who said you can't get what you want? You can't just assume things when you never even asked."
"What was I supposed to ask?"
When Shigeru didn't reply, Satoshi was forced to hazard a look into Shigeru's eyes.
It was like looking into a grate, into a fire that had been stoked inside a kiln for days, and then being caught up in the burning. Satoshi was taken aback as a flare answered from within himself, his body moving faster than his mind, responding to signals that had been sent in words Satoshi didn't know. He flicked his eyes up from Shigeru's lips to his eyes and back to his lips, lips that were softly parted and wet, almost as if they were waiting for him.
It wasn't possible.
Maybe he wanted it so badly that he was just imagining that Shigeru's chin had lowered, and that his face was closer than it had been less than a minute before, because how? How could Shigeru be suggesting with his body what he seemed to be suggesting after he had been so cold to Satoshi before?
Satoshi flicked his gaze to watch the Unown - they had formed a circle above his and Shigeru's bodies - and kept popping in and out of existence around them. The number seemed to be growing by the second into a humming, singing swarm, and it was frightening Satoshi more than the earthquake had, because they were holding the strings to his and Shigeru's lives and bursting outward in an endless storm.
He couldn't bear to look at them. It felt too much like staring death in the face.
But he could feel Shigeru's breath against his face, warm like a heater in a winter room, and the burning that this caused in his stomach was enough to remind him that he was still alive, and he and Shigeru were the only things that were real and if they were going to die, anyway, there was no use in being scared.
Shigeru's name escaped from his mouth unbidden, and when he tried to gather his thoughts desperately it came out in an inarticulate jumble of words.
"I… Do you…Is it okay, if I…"
"God, Satoshi," Shigeru answered breathily. "Just… do it already."
His eyelids fell shut.
Before he even knew what he was supposed to do, Satoshi was doing the only thing he could think of, angling his head at the softest incline. It was like Shigeru had just been waiting to match him plane to plane because all he had to do was press forward into the sparest space between skin and skin before the distance was breached between them.
And then it was so easy.
Their lips slid against each other's, fresh and yet familiar, like trying on a perfectly-fitting new set of clothes.
The outside world went silent; the singing, the shaking - everything dampened of sound that he could hear Shigeru's quiet hitch of breath against his mouth. There was a pause - it was like a shock of its own - and then Satoshi felt Shigeru returning the pressure of lips against lips. The inner world was violent with wonder.
Satoshi had never known or imagined that a touch could take away every bad feeling in the world - that it could be just as intent as words; that it could give consent and caress all at once, that it could shoot straight down to the pit of a stomach like the first bite of an exotic and delicious treat. That it answered a plea he hadn't known ran as deeply in him as blood, and as it filled him he was left with a feeling that floated on the words this is Shigeru doing this to you - he wants to do this with you - he didn't say no. Not once in his entire life, he was absolutely certain, had Satoshi ever felt so desperate and yet so impossibly happy, just like Shigeru had said he could be - it made up for everything, every sad day, every painful, lonely moment.
So in that next instant, when the world exploded, he didn't even flinch. He barely knew that blue light broke out around them, ripping the world apart like paper. He barely knew that the ground and Alph were falling away from the soles of his shoes. Perhaps there was black all around him; perhaps, this time, he wouldn't wake up after ceasing to exist. It didn't matter. He only knew one thing that mattered: the mouth and arms of his best friend, capturing him with his lips and folding him in his arms like a prize.