"Ohhh…"

As Ash's eyes opened, his dulled senses were met with the muffled sound of footsteps rushing towards him, thumping and coming steadily over the ground. At first he thought they were Pikachu's, but as his senses cleared and his buzzing head returned to reality he realized what they really were—Lillie's. This made Ash tense—it was an involuntary reaction, something that even surprised him as he became more tense than he had ever been before around Lillie. There wasn't much he could do, with even the littlest movement shooting pain through every muscle in his body, and opening his dazed eyes felt like he was getting blinded. He could hear how quickly she was running, she was on him in mere seconds—faster than any normal person Ash had ever heard run. Ash was putting his arms beneath him, pushing himself up, his weak and trembling hands clawing a dirt as he pushed himself up with the little remaining strength he had—despite the pain, he knew he had to get up. He tried kicking his legs up and tried to put some momentum into pulling himself up, his body tipping sideways in ways he had never experienced with less control than he had ever felt when his legs barely left the ground at all.

"Ash…"

Ash tried opening his eyes again, barely able to get them to squint, much less look at the voice that had been above him. The world around him was blurry, but he could see he was further down and closer to the banks of the river than the shady place under the tree. He felt cold, wet mud staining the backside of his shirt, tall fronds of wild grass tickling his arms as he got up.

All of his vision immediately sharpened as he felt footsteps crunching right beside him, almost landing beside him like they had come from the sky. Ash covered himself as he felt movement just outside him, but it was no use—Lillie was grabbing his arm, turning him sharply. Before he knew it he was on the ground, pushed down by force. He dropped onto his back, the pain muffled through his backside, his head thudding to the ground as he fell against wild grass and thick clods of dirt. A weight dropped onto his hips and his stomach, a sensation that only felt like pinning when he suddenly had two hands grabbing his wrists and forcing them to the ground above his head.

Then, Ash opened his eyes, looking up towards Lillie's face when she looked down on him.

"Oh goodness, goodness goodness… Ash, you don't look too good…"

Lillie's voice was distant. Ash hadn't quite recovered all of his senses, the world seeming hazy all around him. As he looked up to see Lillie's face, he realized he couldn't really see it. It was obscured by a haze, impossible to see no matter how hard Ash squinted. The sun backed her head, making her nothing but a dark mass, making as clear to him as she would be a mile away even if she really was only a few feet away from him.

Through the weakness of Ash's own vision, he could begin to see details, and he wasn't quite sure what he was seeing. Her face was shrouded in darkness, but there were dark parts to Lillie's face that were more than just a trick of light or a blemish. The skin looked like it was broken and missing pieces—dark lines tracing through Ash's dim view of what he could see. He had seen it before, and the first thing that came to mind when he saw it was Lillie's broken knee, where the skin had separated and he had seen the silvery components inside. Squinting harder made him think he was seeing something glint through the darkness, realizing he was looking at parts where the skin had separated and exposed the inner-workings of Lillie's mechanical face. He thought he could hear clicking sounds, hearing parts moving underneath. The warped vision he had only showed dark objects where Lillie's eyes were, seeing the flit about in quick, mechanical movements wherever they could.

Though he could only see so much, he didn't want to see much more. Ash's instinct to shrink back found his head pressing against the base of the tree supporting his back. He reached around to find anything he could hold onto like he was going to move himself away, but his arms felt heavy and barely moved when tested against Lillie's grip.

"You look scared… Are you feeling okay?" asked Lillie. Her voice was seeming less distant and more tinny, like a recording.

The weight against Ash's hips shifted, coming closer onto him. Ash felt the presence of something in his immediate vision, his skin prickling when it came closer. He was turning, keeping his head away, desperate not to see what had become of Lillie's face.

"Ash please…" She was sounding more and more desperate.

He could feel her breath against his face—musky and foul, like a beast. There was no escaping it. Ash turned, looking up at Lillie.

It wasn't what he had expected at all. Her face had been replaced by a boxy frame, made of thin and glossy-green metal plates. Her eyes were round, plastic, and red, translucent and looking like old tail-lights. Her nose was nothing more than a raised plate, part of a 'T' shaped panel that had been bolted on in place of both a nose and eyebrows. Her ears had been replaced by large, wiry antennas with blinking lights at the end of them, sticking oddly through her long blonde hair. Down beneath, a metal grill had replaced her mouth, the amber transparency that filled her 'teeth' beneath lighting up with each word she spoke.

"Do… Do you think I'm pretty, Ash…?"

Then, Ash blinked. It was all a dream.

Ash woke up. When his eyes opened for real, looking past the blinding light of reality around him—and realizing he was exactly where he had been, flung on the ground—the dim sunlight above that overshadowed the world as it passed into evening, he saw Lillie. She was looking down at him, looking as real and human as ever.

"Ash… Oh Ash, I'm… I'm so sorry…! I… I don't know what came over me!"

Every real detail about Lillie's face came into sudden, perfect detail for him as he stared up at her, almost unable to look at anything else with her distraught look filling up to the corners of his vision. His eyes remained frozen open, staring up in disbelief—he wasn't even quite sure this wasn't a dream, but the sounds of Lillie beginning to sob coupled with the incredible pain in his head, assured him this was all very real.

"Aaaaahhh!"

Ash nearly screamed, his voice breaking in the middle of the violent, terrified shout. He scrambled to get away, just the mere thought of Lillie being as close as she had been in the dream made his heart stop and the whole cavity of his chest throb with fear.

Lillie didn't know what to think. Her eyes shrunk back at Ash's reaction to her. It made her sit up on her knees, trying to contain her own fear—something she was visibly struggling with. Though she had brought herself down to Ash's side, kneeling awkwardly on both a good knee and a bad knee, her hands hovered awkwardly between different tasks she had momentarily stopped from. She had gone to place a hand down on his leg, reassuringly, to both test his dazed senses and provide some comfort—and also balance herself off of her exposed mechanical knee. She had also gone to reach up to Ash, to grasp for him and hold him—grasping for his head or his shoulders, she didn't know, there was no plan at this point.

"Ash—Oh, oh goodness… I'm… A-Ash…!" Lillie struggled, incoherently. Ash was still trying to get away, and yet she didn't want to jump in and send into an even worse panic, but there was little she could do. She looked around for some kind of solution, looking down where by Ash's squirming leg where Pikachu had finally just arrived, standing himself up. "Just stay calm, okay? I'm so sorry! I… I didn't mean to…!"

The realization had taken awhile for it to come to Lillie, but when it came it was like a shock to the heart—it was her. Ash was terrified of her. She knew exactly what she had done—even if she hadn't meant it. The tense, terrified look on her face fell, dropping off slowly and sagging down into a sadness. Her mouth hung open with nothing to say, her tensed arms that had been held out and hovering at the first chance she saw to help Ash had now sagged to hang at her sides. She sat herself back on her haunches where she was kneeling, her hands folding to rest in her lap. When she looked to the ground she took a breath, shuddering quietly, failing to keep anything to herself as is. Her eyes looked like she had run out of tears, she looked like she was miles away from Ash, and she didn't look like she was coming back to the conversation any time soon.

She pushed herself off of the ground gently, slowly raising onto two legs. The exposed knee made mechanical sounds with nothing to keep it inside, a hydraulic pump slowly extending out as she found level footing on the ground. She folded her arms like she was cold, walking away from where Ash had been laid to rest, walking towards the grove on the opposite side and leaving the last vestiges of Ash's vision.

Though Ash had been watching from where he was laid up, his neck suddenly gave out and his head dropped from the strain of looking up towards Lillie. His head fell back, and he used the last of the strength in his neck to stop his head from dropping against the rocks again, painfully lowering it back to rest flat. His shoulders loosened and his arms rested down by his side to feel some relief in his sore muscles. Though his mind teetered on the edge of falling back into the pseudo, half-sleep it had been when he had the vision, the fear in him kept him from slipping into it again. He looked uncomfortable as he laid there, visibly straining to keep himself from passing out.

"It's too late…" Lillie whispered quietly.

The sound of Lillie's voice gave Ash something to focus on. He knew he would snap out of it, he could feel little bursts of clearheadedness reaching him, but it would take time. He needed to latch onto something, and staring up at the underside of a leafy jungle tree wasn't going to do it. As much as he didn't want to, he had to strain to listen.

"I should've known from the start… It was too late from the moment I fell…"

Ash couldn't see where Lillie was, but the vision of herself tearing open her knee once again came to mind quickly. Though each little micro-movement out of him made his head throb, making him feel an awful lot like his brain was sloshing around in his own head, he had to bring himself to Lillie. The part of him that feared for her turned his stomach worse than the real pain shooting lightning bolts through his head. He turned himself, hoisting himself up only to roll onto his side. His legs slipped, bringing himself lower and away from the tree as his hands weakly found the ground in front of him, fighting to find some solid place from which to hoist himself up.

"D-Don't bother…" said Lillie. Even if he couldn't see, he could hear Lillie facing him. "P-Please don't get up… Don't try this time…"

At the banks of the river, Ash knelt down and leaned into the rushing currents of the river. His knees planted in the muddy silt—just beside where he had left his hat—and his hands planted down in the cool water, his fingers sinking into the sifting grains of dirt and rock underneath until he felt the tough stone giving some resistance against his palms and his grip felt sturdy. He leaned in like he was doing a push-up, dunking himself down head first into the water until he felt every inch of his head sink down into the cold river. He felt the coldness of it all brush against his cheeks and his forehead moments before he felt like he was part of it all. Water seeped into the little crevices of his ears, seeping down the length of every hair until it met his scalp.

And then Ash pulled up. All of his hair fell into his face immediately and hung down, shrinking against his skin like he was wearing a mask of some kind. He brushed it to the side, finally opening up his eyes, staring out across the river. The evening air was harsh on his skin, and it made him shiver—it was the first time that Ash had felt the night coming close, now that it was no longer sunset, now that it was dusk and the light from the sky was slowly pulling away. It would be incredibly dark in the forest soon.

Still, Ash was feeling normal again. That ringing feeling his head had disappeared, and he wasn't feeling as disoriented as he had been. Everything was a little bit clearer, he was feeling like his senses were fully back under his control.

A splashing in the water caught Ash's attention, and he looked beside him to a spot in the river just a few feet down. Pikachu had waded into the water, his body hunched over as he walked on all fours just a little closer to the shore than Ash had gone dunking his head. Though the water was shallow it came a third of the way up the side of Pikachu's belly, his whole body churning the water as he walked out into the river.

"Hey buddy…" Ash said, quietly. He hadn't heard how weak his voice was until then, and when he did he could feel the stiffness of a dry throat in the back of his mouth.

The river current was slow in the area that Ash and Pikachu had squatted at, being not much more than a gentle suggestion that brushed against arms or legs that had been submerged inside. Little eddys branched off from where Pikachu had planted all four of his stumpy little legs, and where Ash's arms were still planted he could feel the cold of the water slowly inching up his forearm with each little wake and rise of the current that came sloshing up. It reminded Ash that his arms were still planted deep in the cool river and the dirt clumps beneath. He raised his hands, making a dirt cloud come swirling out of the crater in the ground where his hands had been.

Brushing his hands together at the top of the current cleaned his hands better than he ever had at home, and though there was something extra satisfying about it he still felt uneasy. There had been a pit in his stomach that had been growing since he had first come down to the bottom of the ravine—since he had found Lillie.

Nightmares aside, there was something that had been plaguing Ash's thoughts. It appeared on his face as he looked back up from the shore and towards where the first trees appeared at the edge of land, where Lillie had placed herself again. It was deja vu for Ash, seeing her sitting back down by the tree again exactly as she had before with her back to the tree. Her leg had sprawled out too—even though it had been reattached and realigned to her knee, the part where she had clawed her fingers into the skin hadn't gone away and was still showing the mechanical parts underneath. She was far away, dozens of feet away, and the streaks of light that came through the treetops in the forest behind painted her in a sunset shadow, looking like a doll that had been poised in a strange portrait. He wasn't ready to go back, he wasn't ready to continue the same cycle the two of them had been going through just yet.

Looking back, him and Pikachu shared a look. Later wasn't going to come, prolonging it wouldn't give them more time.

Ash stood himself up. He grabbed for his hat and then for the blue-striped shirt he had been wearing before, picking it up from where he had set it on a rock nearby and letting it unfold from a single flick of the wrist. He wiped his face against it and dried himself as he walked back up from the shore, just before he slipped it over and popped his head and arms through the holes, fitting it to him. A large, face-sized stain of water appeared in the center and made the collar sink in, making him look more tired than he already was. Putting his head through the shirt had blocked his vision for a second, but when he re-emerged and could see again he had stopped short of Lillie and the tree she was parked under.

Though he had seen all sorts of different kinds of sadness from Lillie, this was a new one—this was melancholy. She was staring ahead, tears dried around her eyes like she had run out of tears to give. Her hands, accustomed to being folded in the center of her lap like a proper lady, sat uncomfortably at the ends of her dress, holding down the ends of it to cover her knees.

"Leave me alone..."

"I… really don't think that's a good idea."

"Yeah? Well… That's because it isn't! Don't!" Lillie's voice broke as she shouted. She had kept her head facing down into her lap, seconds before she lifted up and looked on Ash with all the fury she could muster. Her face had turned red beneath her shiny, soaked eyes. "If you… If you really think I'm weird… then just leave me alone…" Lillie shivered as she got the words out of her system. Her hands held her legs close, cradling beneath where the skin had ripped open again—Ash could see her fingertips brushing against the cut edge of the artificial skin, and though he tried to look away he felt a fear that only showed when he wasn't looking, when he wasn't sure she wasn't about to tear her own leg wide open.

All of Ash's worst fears had been confirmed—seemingly because Lillie's had come to the surface. Even if Pikachu was sitting down on the ground beside Ash, Ash could feel he was alone. His doubts showed as he looked away, searching the ground, only to come back more determined a second later.

"I'll leave you alone if you want, Lillie," said Ash. "I just want to let you know that we can stay the night here if you want. I was just going to get some stuff from the jungle if that's alright."

This made Lillie quiet. She was looking past the tops of her knees, down to the ground beyond her feet, looking intensely worried. She swallowed, sniffling, and for the first time in awhile trying to wipe the tears from her eyes.

"That's… that's fine…" Lillie whispered, just where Ash could hear.

With nothing else to say, Ash backed up towards the trees, looking down for only a second to make sure Pikachu was heading to follow him too. Though Pikachu was looking back already, Ash took a moment to look back too, then headed towards the thicker parts of the jungle. He walked ahead only a few steps before he heard a voice.

"Ash… Thank you…!"

Lillie had tried to speak up again, sounding brighter and more optimistic. Ash hadn't disappeared that far into the woods to avoid looking back and obscure her from his vision. She was still sitting there, and despite her tearful expression she was looking up with a smile.

Ash didn't say anything, he only smiled as he stepped back to head into the jungle further.