Okay listen: My life is a goddamn fucking farce. I no longer care if you see things happening with Thomas as old or new or fictional or true. All of these things are gonna blend together and I don't care.

(CW for depression and self harm)

Volkner wasn't there.

I guess I knew it could happen. I'd heard about the erratic nature of his gym presence, and I knew on Tuesdays the gym was only open from 10 to 12 in the morning, but I'd hoped. I felt like I needed it enough that he had to be there, you know?

But I stood on the pavement outside the gym for three hours straight, from half an hour before it opened until half an hour after noon, and no one showed.

That's all right, I told myself, walking away with my head high. I'll go train and be back tomorrow.

I looked up the gym's website to check if Volkner was on vacation – there was no mention of it, though the gym hours on the website were a little different than the ones posted in front of the gym itself. On Wednesday, I showed up for those hours. Still no gym leader.

I had too much time in those first few days to think, and after a month of trying to evade thoughts of one specific person, my mind kept returning to him. The realization that a boy distancing himself from me wasn't a new thing had my brain spinning in circles. What did I do wrong? Was it something specific, or something inherent about me? Was I just that repulsive? What about me was so bad that the people I loved wanted nothing to do with me?

I kept thinking the words "There's no reason for you to stick around" and wanting to throw up.

I wasn't sure I had feelings for him anymore. I wasn't even sure I'd had feelings for him to begin with – the honeyed stab of seeing Lucas again was never something I'd felt towards him. I'd been happy around him, and there was something sweet in there, but… I don't know. It didn't feel the same.

But even a month later, I still felt like I was missing something. There was an emptiness in the air, a rift in space, as if Palkia had decided he hated me too. It reared its head around woopers and absols and ampharii, formal menswear shops, the Jenga set in the back of the Pokemon Center closet. I'd associated it with love lost – it had filled the void Lucas left behind, so it had to be that, right?

I didn't dare pass the time by training or leaving the gym's front doorstep, for fear of Volkner showing up in that time. I just stood there, my pokemon resting in their pokeballs at full health. We trained from evenings deep into the night, alongside the trainers who were night owls, and within a few hours I'd be yawning at the Sunyshore Gym's front door while my pokemon napped in their pokeballs.

Emily Wu, who was one of the night owls, asked about my schedule change, and I told her about waiting for Volkner. Thursday afternoon, she showed up with milk tea and waited with me for two hours. As much as I'd committed to waiting on my own, I appreciated her company.

On Friday, when the gym should've been open either 9-11 am or 5-6 pm, I waited outside the glass front doors of the building for twelve hours, just in case he showed up in between or before or after. At three different points in time, Sean Obi, Omar Knight, and Ashley de Leon each showed up just to hang out.

"Word got around," Sean told me. "We're here to support."

And it really helped. Having friends who weren't on my pokemon team meant that talking to them was more relaxed than focused, and it eased my nerves. It also was a relief to see that people did, in fact, want to spend time with me.

But. Maybe if they knew me better, that'd change.

When they weren't around, the rift in space flitted in and out of my attention, reminding me of who else could have kept me company, if they'd wanted to.

A fidgety buzz occupied my nerves increasingly over the course of the day, evolving into an insatiable need for constant motion. I jumped around, I tried juggling empty pokeballs, I did full workouts on the pavement in front of the gym. I felt my hands itching for something, and by the end of Friday I knew they wanted that brick wall by the Pokemon Center.

Volkner didn't show up on Friday. On returning to the Center, I glanced at the brick alleyway.

I just need to defeat Volkner, I thought. I just need to fight him and win. I just need this eighth badge.

And I walked past the wall without collision.

I returned home for the weekend, since the gym was by all accounts closed on weekends, and I hung out with Megan and Tricia to take my mind off things. I didn't tell them much other than "Volkner hasn't shown up."

We watched a movie at Megan's house on Sunday night, and after Tricia went home I wasn't ready to return to Sunyshore. Returning to my own home didn't feel like a better option, after the fight my mom and I'd had that morning.

"It's the kind thing to do," she insisted.

"I'm not going to flee the city because the boy I used to like is there," I said angrily.

"You just said you still felt something for him. The fact that you're keeping yourself in between them makes me worry."

I bristled. "I'm not trying to break them up!"

"It's stress on their relationship that they don't need–"

"Mom, I'm not a shitty person!" I finally exclaimed. "I don't know who you think you raised, but she's not a monster!"

At that, my mom had fallen silent in a way that felt so vulnerable, like she was the victim in this scenario, that I stormed out just so she couldn't make me feel like the bad guy.

"Have you seen Brycen's new movie?" Megan asked.

I hadn't. We sat back down on her sofa and started watching it.

I could feel the weight of her presence next to me, like the gravitational field between us was drawing me towards her. Or, okay, I know technically it was, it's just the gravitational force between two people is gonna be negligible compared with that of the earth itse–

Her head fell onto my shoulder. A warm softness bloomed in the center of my chest. I froze, partly out of shock and partly for fear of jostling her and breaking the spell. I was full of hope and terrified of the implications of everything. I wanted her to stay there, soft hair pressed against my arm.

A minute later, she sat back up. Neither of us said anything; we just kept watching the movie. And by the time I went home, we had not spoken of it at all, as if everything was normal, as if I wasn't filled with fearful hope.

Volkner wasn't there on Monday either.

"I'm gonna lose my mind," I told Coeur after ten hours outside the gym.

"Do you wanna talk about it?"

"No."

Tuesday morning, I was significantly more sore than I should have been. I hadn't even been standing the whole time on Monday. But the soreness was everywhere – my back, my arms and legs, my head. And I was so tired.

"Fuck it," I said to my pokemon after the gym "closed" at noon. "Let's go find this bitch."

I spent the rest of the day searching. I let my pokemon out to split up and ask the pokemon of the city for directions (which I wouldn't have considered doing a month ago, but at this point we hadn't heard from Galactic in well over a month, so my sense of vigilance had declined).

I asked just about everyone in sight. Most people had no clue. Someone told me the location of Volkner's favorite bar – I couldn't enter, but I asked the man at the door whether Volkner was around. He was not. I came back to ask again a couple times later that day.

"Listen, kid," the guy at the front said when I showed up for the fourth time. "No one can predict the movements of the man. I'm not even sure he's in town. He hasn't been here in a while."

My pokemon received a variety of dead-end leads as well. I'd considered calling Looker to see if he could contact Volkner, but that felt like asking my dad to handle my problems for me. Ashley de Leon, who was from Sunyshore, had no leads either.

"He was still showing up to the gym semi-regularly when I challenged him last," she said while waiting with me outside the gym.

I actually did end up asking Looker to contact Volkner, because I was starting to worry something had happened to him. Looker called me back within a few minutes.

"He's doing fine," Looker said.

"Where is he?"

"In and out of Sunyshore, but he wouldn't specify where. He claims to be busy."

On Wednesday and Thursday, I struggled to get out of bed. My whole body ached, and moving around hardly seemed worthwhile. Why bother getting up? Volkner was impossible to find. I'd just waste another day tiring myself out and achieving nothing.

But I dragged myself out there anyways, because the pursuit of the gym leader was the one thing holding me together.

By Friday, I was still sore, but I'd managed to perfect the methodology of my pursuit of Volkner. I spent the whole day camped outside the gym, positioning myself directly opposite the doors so that there was no doubt what I was there to do. Sean, Renée, and Tejal and AJ joined me at different points in the day. I let out one pokemon at a time to search for Volkner in the city, swapping them out in 30-minute shifts. They made a game of it, sort of a relay race where the baton was the information already accumulated. And for all our efforts, how were we rewarded? We weren't, of course. Because perfection was not enough to reach our goals.

The fidgety energy I'd discovered last week kept accumulating over the course of the day. I kept having to make an active effort to ignore the brick wall on my way back to the Pokemon Center. Especially on Friday.

"Evelyn, you okay?" Coeur asked after I stood staring at the brick alleyway for several minutes.

Oh, Arceus. If I punch a wall, my pokemon will see me. Idiot.

I turned and walked into the Pokemon Center. "Yeah," I lied.

I stayed in bed for a long time on Saturday.

"Evelyn, it's one," Coeur said.

One of the benefits of aura communication is that it's much easier to form words when my mouth doesn't physically want to move.

"You guys should go get lunch," I said.

"You gotta eat too."

"I'm not hungry. You guys go ahead."

"We're not going without you," Coeur said defiantly.

I felt my spine lose strength like a plucked flower stem. I didn't respond or move.

Prom took Faith and Hope down to the cafeteria an hour later (unsupervised pokemon are discouraged but not prohibited). Coeur and Trust and Def caved a few hours after that.

I took a long shower and did go downstairs in the evening. I was hungrier than I'd realized, so I ate in the cafeteria rather than taking food back upstairs. It was a relief to be alone for once, rather than existing in the pseudo-aloneness of your pokemon always being nearby. Like, don't get me wrong: usually it's nice to have friends by my side constantly, and of course safer. But right now it was exhausting.

I stared at the chair across from me for a while, thinking of who ought to have been there. The rift in space stared back. It was a familiar absence, by now, but I was finally coming to realize that it wasn't lost love so much as the absence of a friend.

I miss you, I thought at it.

It stared at me, unresponsive, colorless as grief.

Sunday was a little better. I managed to get out of bed by noon.

Monday morning, when I was feeling more alert but still quite down, we returned to the gym. Someone was waiting for us there. It wasn't Volkner, unfortunately, but it was perhaps the second best person it could have been.

"Heard someone's been looking for the gym leader," Flint of the Elite Four said, a big grin on his face.

My breath caught. "I have," I said carefully. Arceus almighty, finally.

Flint grinned even wider and started walking away from the gym. "Come on," he said, beckoning for me to follow.

Fun fact: "What about me was so bad that the people I loved wanted nothing to do with me?" was written, I shit you not, 30 seconds before I received a text from one of my best friends saying he didn't want to be friends anymore.

Ha ha, the universe has comedic timing.