He looked to his right and saw Latias, cradling her head in her hands, shoulders shaking. Like she was crying.

"Are you crying?" Mac asked. It looked like she was laughing, in some ways.

The voice replied in his head, in English.

"No. I can't. No tears in this form." It sounded like she was sulking.

"Oh. But...why do you want to? Is everything alright?". Mac supposed that she could be upset because she was on the other side of the planet to her family. But it was a bit of a delayed reaction if that was the case.

Latias appreciated Mac's concern, but on the other hand, she just wanted him to shut up and find out the whole 'missing parents' thing when they got to Alto Mare.

"It's...it's okay...listen...I'll tell you later."

"Only if you promise not to be upset until then." Mac responded. To everyone else, it probably looked like he was talking to himself. But there wasn't really anyone close enough to hear him properly anyway.

"Okay." the sulky voice said, and a second later she brightened up and - because she couldn't cry - her face looked radiant again. Mac - being hopeless - was convinced.

Mac checked his watch. He'd been asleep for nearly an hour!

"Yeah, your brain wasn't quick enough to do things in real time, like mine can. So it took longer to picture the scene than it would normally, so we were asleep for 3 times longer than what it felt like because your brain is 3 times slower than it needed to be." Latias telepathed, picking up the thought and explaining it without prompt.

"Oh..." Mac sighed. He always considered himself as above average intellect, so he was disappointed when Latias told him that he was slow.

But the downer didn't last long, because not five minutes later, the attendant who'd let them on the plane walked up the isle to him.

"You're awake now then?" She asked in a friendly tone, like she'd known him her entire life. Mac thought.

"Yep, very comfy seats if I must say." He replied, smiling.

"The two of you looked so cute together, I take it this is your girlfriend?" She asked.

Mac didn't know why she was so interested, perhaps she was just getting friendly before trying to sell them some overpriced food. But he answered all the same.

"No, she's my business partner. Assistant. We're going to China to do some maintenance work on an airplane and she does all the paperwork while I fix it."

Latias nodded in agreement on the outside, but on the inside she telepathed Mac. "What happened to boyfriend and girlfriend?"

Not for the first time, Mac ignored, her as the hostess carried on.

"Well she's a quiet one. Anyway, while you were asleep the pilot said you could come up to the cockpit since you helped build the engines. If you'd like to follow me?" She waved with a hand and Mac gladly obliged, standing up and pulling Latias with him.

As they walked to the front of the plane, Latias continued to rile him.

"Eyes up Mac. I may not be male or human, but I know what they like..."

Mac sent a thourght back.

"Hey! I wasn't staring! And anyway, what's it to you if I did?"

There wasn't any response, so whether Latias had given up or not got his message, Mac didn't know.

The attendant walked up to a door at the front of the plane, before typing in a code and holding a pass up to the keypad. "Hiya Kev, got two guests for you. Engineers." she spoke, and Latias was considerably confused by her seemingly talking to a door. Mac new better.

In the war against terrorism, the airline industry was doing all it could to prevent passengers from getting to pilots. The latest system was this three pass security. Essentially, anyone wishing to get access to the cockpit while the engines were started would need the pass and a key code. If the two were fine, it opened a comms link to the pilots, who could then listen to the reason for the person to enter. If they didn't recognise it or they didn't want anyone getting in, they would ignore it and not press the button to open the door.

As well as that, the pilots also had hidden buttons that allowed them to fill the cockpit with tear gas. Anyone not wearing one of the two pilots oxygen masks when that went off would be incapacitated almost immediately.

But in this case, the pilots were happy to have guests in the cockpit. Especially when they helped build the plane. If it wasn't for these guys, they wouldn't have a job.

And so the door popped open, allowing the assistant, Mac and Latias into the flight deck of the aircraft.

"So who do we have here?" The pilot - Sev - looked around in his seat.

He was a plump man in his thirties, and looked - for all intents and purposes - fresh out of the shower. Mac panicked when he realised that Sev or the copilot would have just come on shift and so could have seen him on the news. But even if he did recognise him, it wasn't like he was going to turn the plane around now they were an hour into the flight. He had plausible deniability of his existence on the plane after all.

Even so, Mac was horrified when the pilot interrupted before he could answer.

"You look familiar... err..."

Mac acted quickly, and suggested alternative places where the pilot could have seen him.

"You too...did you go to the first display of this bird?" By bird, he meant plane. Pilot lingo.

"Yes I did...OH THAT'S IT! I saw you there! You were..."

"Showcasing the engines". That part was true.

"Yeah, that's it. Well fancy that, small world eh? So I guess you made the powerhouses for this then?"

As the two men chatted, Latias stood just behind Mac, next to the flight attendant. The room they were in was small, and there were buttons everywhere. On the walls, on the door - which had closed after them - even the ceiling. What surface wasn't a button was a light, and various lights were flashing with no foreseeable reason or order. At the front of the room were windows looking outwards, though nothing was to be seen out of them but blackness.

The flight attendant turned around and, seeing Latias' confused face, tried starting up a conversation, clearly not thrilled by the men's technology-based talks.

"This stuff confuses me too, eh?"

Latias turned to look at her and nodded. The attendant continued to look at her like she was expecting more, until she remembered.

"Oh yeah, sorry, you're a mute..." Between the girls, there was an awkward silence. The men continued to ramble.

"So, you enjoy working with him?" The attendant asked to clear the silence. It was a very deliberately put yes/no question.

Latias nodded again, more enthusiastically. She did enjoy being with Mac. Even if he was distracted by everything. Then again, she wasn't exactly queen of the focused either.

Feeling a need to participate in the conversation, Latias pointed to the pilot and tilted her head, letting the attendant invent her own question for this action. Along the lines of 'Do you enjoy working with him?'

"Those? Those are circuit breakers. They stop things on the plane from breaking if something goes wrong. Why?"

The attendant was looking at a row of buttons behind the pilots chair, not the pilot himself.

Latias shrugged her shoulders.

"No reason? Ah right..."

The silence in-between the girls resumed.

Meanwhile, both pilots and Mac were becoming positively chummy.

"...so what would you do if I flicked this switch?" The copilot asked, hovering his finger over a switch with a red cover over the top.

Mac responded in a brisk manner, like he was Sherlock Holmes explaining the puzzle to his nemesis. Complete with pointing out switches and buttons on the panel mounted on the ceiling of the cockpit.

"Well, I'd press this one to activate the inverter from the other three engines, then deactivate the inverter on the one you just shutdown...no, actually. Since the turbines will still be spinning round, I don't need to do that. I can just introduce a fuel flow to the combustor with this button and this lever and then ignite with...this one."

The pilots both looked impressed, much to Mac's hidden delight.

"He certainly knows this stuff. Tell us then, how fast is engine three going?"

Mac just laughed.

"Which bit of engine 3?"

"Err...there's more than one bit?" The pilot asked, confused. They weren't taught, or required to learn, that the engine actually had three sets of fan (or compressor) blades.

"Yep. LP, IP, HP. Take your pick." Mac said, pulling out his phone from his pocket. The pilots didn't seem to care about the phone.

"Oh right...I'm gonna say...IP..."

Latias rolled her eyes. She was sure Latios would enjoy this kind of thing, but she was finding it positively boring. Sure there were loads of colourful lights, which were slightly interesting. But she was hungry, and just wanted to get home to Latios.

She wondered what he was doing right now.

Alto Mare, Hoenn, North Korea, Earth
Local Time and Date Unknown.

Bianca approached Latios, with a great degree of caution. By the looks of it, he'd been eating raw meat non-stop for the past two weeks, she didn't have to guts to go out and feed him. She didn't want to be on the menu.

Latios was laid on his side, resting the majority of his bulk on his right wing, with the other wing lazily folded infront of him, with the tip just resting on the ground. His head was sideways and still looking down his snout at the fish that he hadn't let out of his sight. Despite it being outside in plain sight, it hadn't rotted or been eaten. Bianca suspected that was something to do with Latios actively protecting it. With force. As a possible lure for other pokemon, or in his mind, food.

He'd reverted back to a wild state - instinctive hunting, not much bathing, and sleeping whilst also staying alert to the outside world. Bianca knew his current diet wasn't good, even at a wild-animal level. Without Latias to collect berries for him, he'd be lacking in so much vitamins and other rather essential things. As for Latias, well. She could catch her own meat, but she only ever did it with Latios nearby, from what Bianca could understand. If Latias wasn't getting the meat she needed, she'd grow really weak, really quickly. Especially while as she was in season.

It was killing her, seeing him like this, thinking about him like this. Three weeks ago, she'd have bounded up to him and happily tugged on his tail fins.

Now she was approaching as slowly and as calmly as possible to avoid him eating her.

Latios saw the girl, but it took him a second to remember. Ever since Latias had gone, he'd focused only on her. What she smelt like. Sounded like. Felt like...he'd forgotten everything else. Then he saw the girl. Bianca. Kind, loving, funny...was that her?

Latias used to change into Bianca. And you'd only be able to tell by sight by who was wearing the beret. So they'd swap the beret around. Of course, she'd never fooled him. She smelt of dragon regardless of what she looked like.

Bianca saw his eyes dart towards her and flinched, but it was clear Latios had no intention of getting up. Aside from moving his eyes, he didn't make any attempt to interact with her. She tried to change that.

"Latios? It's me?"

Latios did nothing, which did have Bianca worried. He normally pricked his ears up when he heard his name at very least. It was almost instinct. But he didn't do anything this time.

She made the clicking noise with her tongue that always got their attention.

"It's nearly winter, Latios. You don't like that, do you? Snow? You hate snow. Latias wouldn't want you to freeze either. Please come inside? You can go straight to your room?"

Latios remained motionless.

This was worrying Bianca. Had he gone deaf?

"Latios, I know you're upset. But could you at least let me know that you're okay? Not OKAY, obviously. But at least that your not injured? Please?"

Latios, after a pause, finally responded. It wasn't much, but Bianca noted him make a huffing noise; breathing in deeply and then exhaling noisily. It was the noise he normally made when he was frustrated. That was before Latias went missing.

"I can hear you." The voice appearing in Bianca's head made her want to squeal with delight, she hadn't heard it in that long. Except even his psychic voice sounded defeated.

"Oh good! Are you hurt?"

Latios considered this. Yes, he was hurt. While he was looking for Latias he'd incurred many injuries, chiefly the rather large cut on the side he was now laying on. He couldn't remember what had caused it, but he'd tried licking it clean so many times and it hadn't done anything. What good would Bianca do?

Instead of psychicing, Latios just gave out a negative-sounding coo. That was all she needed to know, really.

"Oh, okay..." She didn't believe him. Just from where she was sitting she could see raw patches on his down and several feathers missing. They'd grow back, but not for a while.

A silence lapsed between the two. Bianca wasn't sure what else to say, but at the same time, she wanted to say something. Anything to keep him from staying silent. She'd got him to talk, she didn't want him to stop now just for lack of a conversation topic.

"Latios? We could watch TV? I've got a film? You'd like it. It's called 'How to train your dragon'?" The title had seemed apt when she'd got the disk, but when it came to actually watching it, she couldn't face it without having company. Lorenzo was at work and Latias was, well...not here.

And now she'd tried to ask Latios - the apparently morbidly depressed dragon - if he wanted to watch it with her, it just sounded stupidly childish and happy, even if nothing could be further from the truth.

The silence extended further.

"Bianca? Do you miss Jay?" The question was so sudden and unexpected, Bianca would have missed it if it wasn't beamed directly to her brain.

She wondered why he'd asked her. There was no harm in being honest though.

"Well...I don't know. He wasn't a bad person himself. It was just his family that w- "

"He was a bad person." Latios interrupted.

While Bianca was slightly annoyed about Latios saying her boyfriend was a bad person, she was delighted that he was at least voicing his own opinion again.

"Well...I suppose. It depends who you are. You're quite scary to most people, but I think you're really kind."

Latios absorbed this. He certainly didn't FEEL kind. He'd not let Latias have any of the fish at Lorenzo's party, he'd never let her do anything, always held her back, he'd never had the guts to ask her to be his mate, and he hadn't even given her the present the moment he caught it. And there was the small matter of all the pokemon he'd killed in the failed attempt to get her back, though he was at half a mind to ignore those since he ate most of them afterwards, which was what he did to survive on a day to day basis. And now he was isolating Bianca. That definitely wasn't kind.

"Well...do you miss him?" It was the only thing he could think to say.

Bianca was fed up, she just wanted to spend some family time with Latios. Not talk about the son of the people who kidnapped his sister.

"No. Shall I tell you who I do miss?"

Latios did his first facial movement of the fortnight and raised a non-existent eyebrow.

"Who?"

Bianca managed to choke out the end of the sentence.

"Your sister. And you. I've missed both of you so badly...still do..."

Latios saw her crying but it took a few seconds to connect with him, he'd gone without emotion for so long. Bianca missed him too? Even though he was right here...because he'd shunned her because...because?

They both missed Latias. Granted, Bianca not as much as Latios, but it was common ground. Like saying everyone hates thieves - everyone does, but some have more reason to than others.

"Bianca?" Latios coo'd outloud and psychicly. His actual voice sounded hoarse. She looked up from holding her head in her hands.

"Do you want a hug?" It was the best he could do.

"Muhhh huuu" Bianca bawled by way of response.

Latios raised his left wing, the one that he wasn't lying on.

Without questioning it, Bianca crawled next to him, under the wing and tightly hugging his neck.

The two of them laid there, doing nothing but crying and emitting the occasional desperate wail.

Alto Mare Broadcasting Station, Alto Mare, Hoenn, North Korea, Earth.
Same time.

"Lozzie?"

Lorenzo was sat in a darkened room, in front of a bank of monitors. He'd never seen himself getting a desk job, and while this wasn't exactly full-time desk based, a lot of it was. He enjoyed it though. About as much as working in the museum.

Right now, he'd just come off from filming the third episode of his series. It was his lunch break and he didn't need to be in the editing room, but he'd come here anyway to review some clips.

Specifically, the hospital clips, as they'd been codenamed. Locked up, encrypted, password-protected, scrambled and encrypted again, the clips contained every frame of footage that the camera crew had got of Latios while he was in the hospital. Only 8 frames - less than half a second - had him pictured while he was awake, and that was too blurry to identify, as it was taken as the camera man had dived for cover to escape him as Latios broke the sound barrier and crashed out of the hospital's skylight.

Lorenzo didn't realize it when he'd signed up, but not just the editors did the editing and stitching together of the programs. The presenters also edited them first, to get scenes in the right order and the like, before the editing people came in and did fancy titles and animations. Which was why Lorenzo was now so fluent at adding, splitting, jogging and removing video clips, despite rarely touching a computer before.

"Lozzie?". The voice asked again, as the stick-thin figure loomed at the doorway, casting a shadow that looked uncannily like a streetlight.

Lorenzo muted the video streams and all the screens cut to a set of colour bars, then slowly swivelled around on the incredibly comfy chair to address the beanpole woman.

"Yes, Charlotte?"

The woman walked into the room, but the other chair had been taken out, so she she half-sat on the desk. She looked worried.

"Is everything okay?" She sounded concerned too.

Everything was not okay for Lorenzo. With both of the twins gone, he'd lacked a structure that was otherwise built around them. When they'd gone, that structure had collapsed, leaving Lorenzo confused about what he actually did, more than once.

If Latias and Latios were with them, the first thing Lorenzo would do when he got home was feed them. While they were eating from their bowls, he'd share stories about the museum with them. Then they'd play with him and Bianca. Latios would do his check around Alto Mare, leaving Lorenzo to clean Latias' down...

But with Latias gone and Latios as good as gone, Lorenzo had frequently gone home and stood in the hallway until he thought of what to do instead. For periods of ten minutes or more.

"I'm fine, Charlotte, really."

"Hmm...you seemed a bit...out of it today. We might even have to edit your vocals on that last one to make it sound a bit... 'peppy'er". Lorenzo had learnt that in this industry, 'pep' could mean anything.

He hadn't been sleeping either. He hadn't told her, but he'd heard Bianca crying in her room at night. Each time he'd considered going and talking to her, only to chicken out because he didn't know what to say. Bianca wasn't twelve anymore, and his words weren't powerful enough to soothe or reassure her.

"I'm just tired. I've been thinking...about the Latios in the hospital..."

Lorenzo pressed a button on the console and the screens flipped back on, showing several different images of Latios lying on the hospital bed in the Alto Mare pokemon centre. This was before he woke up, an hour after he'd been admitted. As a result, he had the muzzle - which looked evil while it was attached to his snout - and a tonne of medical equipment attached, including two tubes down his neck and a needle in his right wing.

Lorenzo knew it was the real Latios, he'd taken him into the hospital after all. But for the sake of protecting the identity of both of them, Lorenzo frequently found himself making reasons as to why this Latios wasn't real.

He'd already visited the hospital again under the pretence of capturing some interviews with the nurses and filming some stock footage. But while he was there, he'd nabbed all the paperwork relating to Latios being in the hospital - everything from the initial admittance report, to an invoice for the broken windows - which was helpfully left in a box marked LATIOS. Not that any of the nurses knew it was missing, he'd taken it without asking. Then he'd taken it home to read, although even after a few hours he didn't understand it. What a 'heamorraged thyroid control nerve band of the nth degree', he had yet to discover. It was, for all intents and purposes, just another collection of words.

On the top right screen, the video was paused on one frame that captured Latios from a side-on angle.

"It can't be real. He can't be real. This one here, look..." Lorenzo pointed to Latios' wing.

"It's way too short to provide enough lift to make him fly. This IS a ditto, I'm sure."

"Lozzie, we can't have you working like this." - the voice was kind, not shouting or even sarcastic. "We've done filming now, you can go home now. Please?"

Lorenzo didn't want to go home. Home was empty. The dragons filled it, physically and mentally. Without them, the house was just so much brick and mortar.

"Sorry Charlotte, but I can't. I just want to finish this clip and then - "

"Lorenzo, we get this a lot with our new starters. They go at it for weeks at an end, barely sleeping and spending all day editing. And then one day they get so tired, they just crash." - she made a popping noise with her mouth and dramatically collapsed her hands to her sides, paused for a second, and then carried on.

"And it always starts with, 'I'll just finish this bit'. I don't want you to be one of them. Stop what your doing, save, go home and have a nap. We're weeks ahead of schedule already thanks to this drama at the hospital."

"Charlotte, please! We've got the only footage of Alto Mare's legendary, now could be the cha-"

"I didn't want to do this Lorenzo, but I'm going to have to..."

Charlotte reached down under the editing desk and rotated a switch. All the screens popped into blackness. Next, she took a padlock resting on another hook under the desk, and secured it around the switch, before removing the key and putting it in her blouse pocket.

"This key stays with me until one o'clock tomorrow afternoon. Please, just go home and rest? It's for the better, I promise."

Part of Lorenzo hated Charlotte. She always had a solution, and was always a good one, but it was never quite delivered in the best way. I. E. Turning off the machine without warning.

"But, isn't there filming to be - "

"NO. We've basically done filming for the next two weeks, and anyway, you'd need so much time in makeup to remove the bags under your eyes, no offence that it wouldn't be worth it. Go home."

Lorenzo pushed himself out of the chair and briskly walked over to the door, slamming it to make his point known.

With the screens off and the blackout door shut, Charlotte was left in complete darkness, unable to find her way to the light switch or the door.

"Shit..."