A while ago I said that I no longer cared what anyone reads as past or present or truth or fiction in this part of Chance. For this chapter, though, I want to come back and say the way Thomas and Evelyn feel about the situation is actively not at all what I feel about things that happened in 2022. Just in case that matters to anyone.

Anyway that's all, here's the chapter lol

Thomas Zamora settled into a chair by the window. He was quiet. I was quiet. I didn't have a plan.

"How are you?" I eventually asked.

He shrugged. "Doing okay. You?"

"Uhhhh…" I glanced down at my broken body. "I've been better."

His face flushed. "Oh. Yeah. That's… yeah."

There was silence again. He wouldn't meet my eyes.

"So… I hear you're going back to Johto," I said.

Thomas shook his head. "I don't know anymore."

"Oh?"

"It just…" He was still shaking his head absently. "It just doesn't feel right."

"Ah. Did you get the Snowpoint badge?"

"I did."

"Ah, good." Then, "Not that I would yell at you if you hadn't challenged her yet. But. I'd have definitely yelled at you."

He couldn't hide his smile at that. Then he sighed. "Evelyn, I'm so sorry."

I blinked. "What for?"

He gestured in a wild way that I understood, even now, to mean everything. "Cutting you off without explanation. I don't think it was fair, I just… and this isn't me making an excuse, it's just what my thought process was, but I didn't feel ready to pursue anything romantically yet, I thought I was over April but I don't think I'm as over her as I told myself I was, and I figured us splitting up would be the best option."

"Couldn't… couldn't we have talked about it?" I breathed.

"Well, I also remembered how you… With Lucas, you'd talk about it and reason through it and you'd still love him, even when he treated you like shit, and you said it wasn't a reasoning thing so much as a willpower problem, so I realized that if I stuck around you might not ever get over me, and… and I figured there was only one way for you to move on."

I was slowly understanding. "I didn't, though," I told him. "I've had to try so hard not to think about you constantly. I didn't move on from you; I just got sad, and then mad, and then sad again."

"What was I supposed to do?" Thomas said. "Pretend nothing happened? Let you have feelings for me that I couldn't reciprocate? Let you tear yourself apart the way you did for Lucas?"

"Yeah, but… I feel like we still should have talked about it? Friendships go two ways? I could've… I don't know, you just sort of… took the decision into your own hands and didn't give me a chance to do anything."

The deep sadness I'd seen in his eyes a week ago had returned. "I think I convinced myself that it didn't need to be a two-person thing, because if friendships have to go two ways, then either one of us could affect it separately… But I don't think this was right for that. I think I overreacted."

Still, I saw his reasoning. And still there was another detail I hadn't yet said.

"I don't even know if I was ever in love with you," I said.

"You… you weren't falling for me?"

"I don't know. Maylene and Candice convinced me I should ask you out, but… The way I feel around you is not the same as the way I felt for Lucas, or…" (or the way I felt around Megan) "…or anyone else previously. I was still trying to figure things out, too."

"You meant it when you said maybe," Thomas realized. "I thought you were evading the question. But you really didn't know."

"Yeah. I mean, I was kind of pushing the answer toward yes, because… I don't know, it seemed like the thing to do? Moving on from Lucas? Doing what a happy couple encouraged? But I really don't know, and I don't even… I don't even know if I'm straight, much less in love with a specific person right now."

And that's how I finally told someone I didn't know my sexuality. After a month and a half of not speaking to him. Because all this time later, my instinct was still one of trust.

"Man, I really reacted too strong, too soon," Thomas groaned. "And it's cost us."

"Well," I said after some time. "We're here. Now what?"

Thomas thought about it. "I'd hope to be friends again, if possible. What about you?"

I inhaled, shifting myself a little in the hospital bed, and exhaled before saying, "I don't know. We've been good friends before, and we've been… not the best of friends before. I think in my head, I don't want you to just… be allowed to push me away and pull me back again whenever you want? But I think the rest of me is willing to give it a shot, see where things go, figure out whatever we are now. You were such a good friend to me before."

Thomas shook his head. "You overestimate how good a friend I was."

"If anything, the last few months were rough because of how kind you've been in the past."

We both were silent for a moment. I saw the fear, and guilt, and sadness that Looker said had led him back to me.

I've missed you so much, I thought.

All this time, he'd made eye contact with me maybe once. I could feel the tension like a heavy curtain in the air, obscuring us from one another.

I broke the silence. "So… how was Snowpoint?"

Thomas's expression shifted into a wry smile — he knew what I was trying to do. But he went along with it, filling me in on his weeks in Snowpoint, and he asked me about Sunyshore, and despite the tension we started to find tiny moments of laughter again.

We weren't the friends we'd been. But we had room to grow.

The hospital let me go about a week later. Despite a couple of nasty scars (some of them pretty badass!), the open wounds and burns were basically healed, and the rest weren't a big risk. My arm and several fingers would be in a cast for a while longer, but Def's healing had helped speed up the process.

We'd discovered, as they decreased the dose of pain meds, that there was definitely nerve damage. Every now and then pain would shoot up my arms at random, usually going away in a few minutes. The hospital chansey taught Def a daily process for healing it, but that was going to be a long-term project.

According to Dawn, the Sunyshore Gym's open hours were packed with trainers. "Volkner only gets through one or two trainers a day, and the majority lose," she said. "Ashley de Leon won, but that's about it. Volkner's also applying to challenge the Elite Four."

Which meant he'd stuck to his promise. Good. I was gonna have to fight him if not, and my arm was still in plaster.

Mom had gone home and come back with things to replenish what I'd lost – Galactic had taken my poketch and bag. I was trying not to think about some of the things I'd never see again, because in theory they're all just things, and things are replaceable, but the shiny stone necklace from Megan that evolved Hope into a togekiss was gone, and so were my hearing aids and the expensive wireless earbuds from Thomas that had been sitting at the bottom of the bag for a month and a half, and all eight gym badges were gone as well. Looker had written to the Pokemon League for replacement badges, but it's not the same, you know?

(That makes me sound ungrateful. I actually didn't need the physical badges for anything; my record was digitally attached to my trainer ID, which Looker had gotten me a new copy of, so the replacements were ultimately just a really kind gesture.)

About the hearing aids – Looker had gone and gotten me new ones. He'd made sure I had music playing in the vicinity since realizing my old ones had gone missing. What really shocked me, though, is that I don't recall time skips while with Galactic? Maybe I just didn't notice them, or maybe Dialga saw what was going on and decided to give me a break, or maybe I just had too many more pressing issues at the time? I really don't know. But I was anchored now, and I did test whether I was still experiencing skips by turning the speaker off late one night and immediately finding myself four hours in the future. I kept the music playing after that.

But at any rate, Mom had brought me a new change of clothes – too many changes of clothes, to be honest, but what else would you expect? – as well as the poketch I'd hidden away in a drawer. It was the same poketch as before, technically; just the duplicate I'd left behind in favor of the one I'd already had for 6 months before time traveling. A cleaner one, in other words, without any scratches on the wristband or message that said "Good luck, Lyn, see you soon" or any of the music I'd downloaded, which massively sucked, I don't know why it was so difficult to find and download songs, and now I'd have to redo everything I'd already done before. Ugh.

Mom also brought an explanation, given over lunch in the cafeteria.

"When I was nineteen," she began. "I met someone. Not your father – someone else. A coworker of mine. It wasn't until I'd fallen head over heels for him that I discovered he was engaged."

I nearly dropped my fork. I'd never heard this from her.

"I was a lot more stubborn at the time – more like you – and I didn't really want to get over him, and I kept spending time with him and becoming better and closer friends as his fiancée became more and more suspicious of me. But I let him keep trusting me. Frankly, the fact that the idea of me sowed doubt in his fiancée's mind gave me hope."

Her eyes were darker than I'd ever seen them before. I didn't recognize this look on her, but I think it was one of shame.

"Eventually, we were out one night, and I got a little too drunk and confessed to him. Within days, everyone at work knew, and they looked down on me for it. It ended up being bad enough that I quit my job and started anew. Eventually I met your father and we fell in love, and the rest is history. But I still regret the things I did in the past – in part because of the repercussions on other people, but especially because of the damage it did to me."

I struggled for words. "We're not the same person, though," I said. "It wouldn't be the same necessarily."

"Not necessarily, no," she agreed. "But you're a lot like me, when I was your age."

I thought about it. "I guess I just… I don't know, I wasn't looking for advice, and I definitely wasn't looking for someone to yell at me about something I was already feeling bad about."

"That's fair. I was trying to prevent you from making the same mistakes I'd made, but I may have been a bit overbearing."

I shrugged. "I mean, it sounds like it was a big thing in your past. I wouldn't want to watch someone I cared about go through something that really sucked for me."

Mom nodded. "How are… things going now?"

"There's not much going on anymore. I don't think I have feelings for Lucas. I don't know if I have feelings for anyone else."

"Okay."

"Crisis averted, right?" I joked.

"Sure," she agreed. "But on your terms, not mine."

"I mean, I can barely call it my terms, exactly," I muttered, "but sure."

Mom smiled and patted my hand. "I love you."

"I love you too, Mom."

Looker had come by to talk logistics when he suddenly frowned. "You said Galactic finessed some information out of you."

"'Finesse' is a strong word for electrocuting me until I dissociated, but yeah."

"Finagled, then."

"I'll accept finagled."

"Did they ever ask about the Spear Key?"

I scanned my hazy memory. "Uhh… No."

"Strange. I'd assume that would have been a priority of theirs."

I thought about it. "Well… they did get the location of Spear Pillar from me."

"But without the Key, the chances of them being able to open it decrease significantly. Besides, the Key could have been used to scan for Spear Pillar. Two pidgeys, one stone."

"That's true…" I frowned too. Galactic now had the Lake Trio, the orbs, the Red Chain, the location of Spear Pillar, they'd already deployed the bomb… The Spear Key was the last thing they needed. Although even if they'd asked about it, I wouldn't have been able to point them to the exact person who had it.

There was still something else that remained unaccounted for – at Iron Island, Galactic was somehow able to scan Mount Coronet for Spear Pillar without the Key? So… surely they'd found it by now, and shouldn't have had to ask me…?

Wait.

"Who has the Key right now?"

Looker hesitated, but he did tell me.

And suddenly it all made sense. The keyless scans. The disinterest in the Spear Key. The Ironworks ghosts. The spy. The rebuilding of the Galactic bomb. The fact that Galactic knew who Looker was. The unusual secrecy surrounding one Galactic commander.

"Arceus," I breathed.

"What is it?"

"I know who Neptune is."