Grusha tasted blood in his mouth, which was weird, because he hadn't had a serious injury in years, and the last one he'd had had been his leg, which was practically the farthest you could get from the mouth, and besides, all he'd been doing was picking up a few groceries, and also the blood wasn't his, which he somehow knew without even thinking about it — it belonged to a body sprawled ungracefully in the snow about a hundred feet away, leaking into it the same blood that Grusha tasted.
A lot of people got seriously injured on Glaseado Mountain, but rarely so close to the tiny town atop it. There wasn't much mountain left past whatever you'd call this smattering of only the most essential buildings. Making it this far and then getting yourself as hurt as this didn't make much sense.
But then, neither did finding that person's blood in your mouth.
He ventured over out of morbid curiosity. Halfway there, he decided he'd have to see it through — you couldn't approach a corpse and then walk away from it, pretending you hadn't seen it. Especially not when there was a Pokemon Center not even two hundred feet away, and especially not when the nurse that worked there was standing behind the counter, staring in his direction.
He stared back. Was she in shock? He remembered when he'd torn his meniscus that awful day, how he'd just sat there in the snow, staring at his knee, uncomprehending, certain that this was a dream, or not happening to him, not here, not now, not this injury, there had to be some mistake. He could see how even a medical professional could go blank upon seeing actual, unfiltered death play out in front of her eyes.
He knelt by the person's side. This close, the blood was all the more upsetting to look at — the amount of it, and the way it soaked black into the snow. It was easy to see where it had come from, with the light bouncing off the white of the ground, the way nothing ever truly got dark in the winter, in places that weren't Glaseado Mountain, but it would have been easy to see regardless. The boy's chest was split open, with his ribs broken and arcing towards the sky, each of them glistening with the same dark blood Grusha had to keep swallowing down.
"Jesus," he said, because what the fuck else did you say?
It was probably incorrect to call him a "boy", really. From what he could see of the mangled corpse he looked to be within three years on either side of Grusha's twenty-six. It was tough to tell, with his sweaty hair plastered across his face. Grusha moved to brush it away, and—
…what…?
His hair — green at the top, sliding its way down a gradient into white, matted red with blood — came away easily enough, but after that, Grusha wasn't sure what he was looking at.
There was a strip of — reality? — about two fingers wide stretching across the young man's face, positioned over his eyes. Within that strip, it was as if everything had been sectioned into tiny cubes and rearranged. Parts of his face were now hovering in the air to the side of his head, and his eyes had been scrambled like some sort of sliding puzzle. A long, thin black like that seemed to exist in only two dimensions shot off into the distance, much farther than where reality had stopped jumbling itself, and flickered in and out of being. Grusha had the upsetting feeling that if he tried to find the end of it, he would be walking forever. Not just until he found the end of it, or until he walked the entire planet and came back to where he'd started — forever.
He leaned over and threw up.
He couldn't help it. He did not understand what he was looking at. He couldn't reconcile what he was seeing with how reality was supposed to work. It wasn't even horror; if it had just been the corpse, it would have been awful, but tolerable. This was something entirely new, and he was feeling an emotion he didn't have a word for, and didn't think anyone had ever had a word for in all of history.
With shaking hands he wiped the back of his mouth and pulled his scarf most of the way back up. He remained there, kneeling in the snow, staring at a half-metre-square patch of it. He didn't want to look back at the young man's body.
A pair of shoes stepped into his vision.
He looked quickly upwards — the last thing he wanted was to have someone get the wrong idea about why he was here in the snow next to a corpse. But as his eyes traveled upwards his heart nearly stopped, because the person he was staring at, silhouetted against the bright silver disc of the moon, was the boy that was currently sprawled dead in the snow next to him.
He had to work to keep himself from being sick again.
He started to ask if the person standing in front of him was the twin of the person in the snow, because surely that was the only explanation. He had gotten as far as opening his mouth before the person was already continuing on, walking past him, not even stopping to glance at his own body, or his twin's body, or whatever relation he had to the dreadful thing beside him. His eyes were fixed on some point on the horizon, or where the horizon would be if he wasn't walking directly towards the swell of the mountain. Grusha watched as he walked directly into it, disappeared, and then reappeared walking perpendicular to the way he had been walking just before. He continued to stare straight ahead; Grusha did not even earn a glance from him.
"Hey," he said, and then louder, when he didn't respond, "Hey!"
He had been hesitant to say anything before. Though the snow ate up sound, and there was barely anyone living here anyway, he'd been worried he'd draw attention to himself and the dead body he was kneeling beside and invite suspicion. (Being a Gym Leader didn't mean that one could do no wrong. In fact, it was usually the people in power who ended up doing the most heinous things.) But he was looking at the same person whose chest was split open not even a foot from him.
Just like before, the person didn't look away from whatever point in the distance he was fixated on.
Grusha got to his knees. He pushed himself up unsteadily — half-moved, half-lurched toward the boy, hoping to intercept his path — stood directly in front of him—
—and was passed straight through.
He whirled around to see the other boy, who was walking on ahead as if he hadn't been there at all. He had definitely passed through Grusha, but the only evidence he had was a rolling, nauseating feeling that had him shoving his scarf against his mouth, trying to keep his insides in. He was sure he looked like he'd seen a ghost. He wasn't entirely sure he hadn't.
He glanced back at the corpse.
It was no longer a corpse.
The young man was still sprawled on the ground, the same as he had been this entire time, but his chest was no longer a yawning cavity. Instead, he looked merely as if he had collapsed in the snow, ungraceful, but mercifully alive. The blood remained.
His head hurt. A lot.
Afraid to take his eyes from the body on the ground again, he headed back over to it, even though he was intensely curious as to where the specter (?) of the boy was going, or had come from, or basically literally anything about him at all. Unlike before, his chest was moving in and out as if he was taking big, gulping breaths, though his lips remained parted only a little bit. The scrambled mosaic of his face had mostly resolved itself into something approaching normalcy, though not entirely — parts of his skin still hovered in midair on either side of his face.
Okay, he said to himself, one thing at a time.
It was the only way he was ever going to be able to make sense of this situation. He pulled out his Rotom phone, asked it to call emergency services. As the hospital was less than half a mile away, it would almost have been better to find a way to bring him there himself … except that this was sort of a crime scene, possibly, and the last thing he wanted to do was to get himself involved. And of course he hadn't been able to lift anything heavier than a few bags of groceries for several years now, ever since the accident. A human body would certainly be too much for him. He'd be no use to either of them if he ended up collapsed in the snow.
In only a few minutes, he was surrounded by flashing lights and sirens. All of it seemed a dream, like any moment now he'd wake up and find that the flashing lights were actually the sun beaming in through the windows. People were moving around him — someone was saying his name, asking him what had happened. Par for the course, he guessed. He answered their questions in a detached way, mostly watching as the boy's body was loaded up into the back of the ambulance, wondering why on earth no one was saying anything about the way some of his face wasn't, you know, on his face. He wondered if the injury from what seemed like so long ago now was only today having a mental effect on him, and why it would have waited so long. He made a mental note to go down to Montenerva at some point and see if he could get an appointment with one of the doctors there. He'd passed on therapy, even though it'd been recommended to him in the early days following his accident. Now, it might be necessary. And even if he didn't go through with it, he'd at least like to make sure everything was okay, physically.
Someone was saying something to him. He had to consciously drag himself out of the fog he had been in for the past few minutes. "Sorry?"
From beside him, one of the EMTs rested a hand on his shoulder and said, "I was asking if you wanted to come with us to the hospital. I don't … er, I don't know if you. Uhm. Know him."
He didn't have much else to do. Gym challenges were few and far between until the new school year started and the students began their treasure hunt. Not many people took the effort to come all the way up here if they didn't need to. He'd been considering taking tomorrow to resurface the battlefield floor, but that could honestly be done any time, in the off-season.
So he shrugged and said, "Alright."
oOoOoOoOoOo
It was strange, how in a hospital you couldn't tell what time it was. When he'd first walked into the waiting room, it had been bright and white and sterile. He'd watched them shuttle the young man off into the back on a stretcher, and that had been that. He'd settled himself down into one of the chairs, rested his head against the wall, and let his eyes flutter closed.
When he'd opened them next, the only indication any time had passed at all was the clock on the wall opposite telling him that it had been nearly three hours.
He'd spent a little time on his phone, asking it to compile a list of therapists in Montenerva that specialized in stress due to traumatic injury and were accepting new patients. Once or twice one of the medical team stopped by to ask if he was here because his knee was acting up again, and he merely smiled and told them it wasn't him this time, to which they'd said thank God for that, and moved on, their obligatory check-in finished and over with. After another hour passed, he allowed Weavile out, so he'd at least have some company, but he'd curled up on Grusha's lap and immediately gone to sleep.
He fell asleep somewhere along the way, and when he woke up the shift had changed. A different team of doctors and nurses were flitting in and out of the waiting room, talking to each other in hushed (and sometimes not-so-hushed) voices. Weavile was still asleep on his lap, damn cat. He smoothed his hand over Weavile's back and smiled when he arched up into his touch.
A few minutes later, he was approached by one of the nurses. She must have been new, or at least new to the town — she was worrying at the hem of her scrubs, apparently nervous to be speaking to a Gym leader. Maybe just out of medical school? He tried to make himself look nonthreatening, but it mostly involved retreating further into his scarf.
"He's … he's, uhm, stable. If you want to see him," she managed.
"Okay." Grusha patted Weavile, who stretched, yawned, and then hopped off his lap to toddle along beside him. "Lead the way."
He followed her into the back and through the hallways. He purposefully didn't look into the other rooms. He didn't want to see himself in one of those hospital beds, dead-eyed and dreamless.
He could tell when they were coming up to the room of the boy he had saved, because the nurse glanced back over her shoulder at him and worried at her lip, as if if he was in any other state than what Grusha expected, she would be the one to suffer the fallout. Did he really seem like that much of a cold person? He wondered if tugging his scarf down to give her a friendly smile would do anything or if it would remind her more of a predator baring its teeth to show its intent to kill.
When they were just three metres away from the room, the world violently shifted.
Grusha had dealt with things like this before. When he had first heard the news about his injury, and how he would never be able to snowboard again, that this was a permanent injury that would change his way of life forever, not irreparably, but irreversibly, at least, the world had seemed to tilt on its side. For weeks and months after that, he would have near-constant bouts of absolute panic — his chest would get tight, his breathing would hitch, and he would have periodic bouts of extreme confusion. Even when he'd been given medication to get him through these panic attacks, he would more often than not find his fingers and toes and sometimes the sides of his face becoming numb, and he would, every few seconds, be afflicted by microseizures that had him tripping over his own words or causing a finger or sometimes his whole arm to lock up. Terrified he was having a stroke, he had gone to the doctor immediately only to be told that these were what medical professionals called "pseudoseizures", which were different from actual seizures in that they originated from stress and panic attacks, not from any electrical misfirings in the brain. Grusha didn't have them much anymore, not now that he had a new life and a new career.
But he was pretty sure he was having one now, because suddenly it felt like he had slid through reality about a metre to the right. Instead of heading towards the doorway he was now on course for the windows that framed each hospital door.
It lasted for only a second, and then he was back to his expected reality.
He dug his fingers into his palms. Was he really back to having pseudoseizures? He was otherwise completely relaxed, if a little bit apprehensive, and the seizures had never happened so quickly. Often it took hours of going through a panic attack for them to begin to show.
He took a shaky breath and stepped into the room.
The stranger was laid out on his hospital bed hooked up to approximately fifteen different machines. There were the normal, common ones one might expect to see in any hospital room; the rhythmic beeping of the Holter monitor was a sound Grusha had committed to memory after his stay. He was hooked up to an IV, as one could reasonably predict he would be. A nasogastric tube ran from his nose up towards a nutrient bag against the wall. Aside from that, Grusha couldn't guess at the purposes of the other machines. The numbers on them were not in a format that he could derive meaning from.
The boy himself was resting the same as any other hospital patient would be. Aside from the medical equipment snaking out from every part of him he seemed entirely at peace. His hair had been scrubbed down so that it now rested softly against his forehead and tumbled down his shoulders, and whatever hallucination Grusha had been having regarding his face was gone now, leaving only a normal set of closed eyes, albeit quite pale and translucent, with crystalline eyelashes that were resting like butterflies against his face. His lips were slightly parted and pale like his eyelids. He almost appeared to sink into the bed and blanket and pillows he'd been provided. Maybe it was just the presence of all the larger machines in the room that made him look smaller in comparison, but Grusha was fairly certain he'd look that way even if all he'd suffered was a scraped knee. There was something insubstantial about him; it was like he could disappear from this plane of existence if he gave any real amount of effort, or, conversely, let whatever other worlds there were take him away. Like he was fighting to keep a grip on existence in the first place.
The nurse had left him and closed the door behind them. Grusha supposed the only thing to do was to cross the room and take the chair by his bed, so that was what he did.
Outside, Glaseado and the far-off towns all the way down at the base of the mountain, shining with reflected sunlight, were inverted. Grusha was staring up at the bottom of the mountain; the sky yawned open and pale-blue beneath them.
His heart hammered.
He blinked.
It was back to normal. Everything was where it was meant to be.
He clutched a hand to his chest, where his heart was stamping a tattoo against the inside of it. Jesus Christ. After all this time? Really? Now he was having rampant hallucinations?
He sighed and lowered himself to the plastic chair. Along the side, he could see the boy's information, or at least what they had been able to collect from whatever personal effects they had collected from him. After the name field was written C., LESHY.
Leshy. Grusha had heard that term before, back in the motherland, mostly out west. He wondered idly if he'd be able to speak to Leshy in his native language or if the name was sentimental only. He himself was only able to speak it because his parents had made an effort when he was young; he didn't know how common that was among other children of foreigners.
He reached over and took Leshy's hand, careful to avoid the tubes extending from it. It was so light that it didn't feel like a human hand at all, and very cold, besides. Just like his eyelids and his lips, the back of his hand was near-translucent, his veins dark and clearly visible through the skin. Not raised — just as if his skin was missing a layer underneath it, like a thin bedsheet rather than a duvet.
Weavile, who he had honestly forgotten was there, made an inquisitive sound; when Grusha didn't react except to glance over at him, he curled up on one of the other chairs and was immediately asleep. Unsurprising for a cat, Grusha thought. Or a weasel. Or whatever Weavile was. He wished he could be so lucky.
He folded his other arm and rested his chin on it, surrounded by silence save for the Holter monitor, watching the minute movements Leshy made unconsciously.
And then, without realizing it, he, too, was asleep.
oOoOoOoOoOo
"Ir zent a sheyn eyngl."
The voice came from above him — ridiculously, at first, Grusha thought it might be his father. But the language was different, and the voice was too soft, and the words too rounded; his father had always wielded words like sharp pieces of glass, even if they didn't actually wound anyone. He blinked the sleep out of his eyes, raised his head, and was met instead with the soft and round green eyes of the boy in the hospital bed, who was now watching him with no small amount of surprise in his eyes.
"Ir geven vakh?" he asked, to which Grusha obviously had no reply. He shook his head a little, winced at the motion, and then continued, "You're cute — so why are you here?"
Grusha flushed as he realized he was still holding the boy's hand, who hadn't made any effort to move it. He debated for a moment whether to take it back. He decided, in the end, to leave it there — to take it back now would seem like he was embarrassed about it. He surreptitiously adjusted his hair with his other hand so that it fell overtop of his ears, which were burning hotly. "I'm the one who called the ambulance."
"Right…" Those green eyes were locked on his ice-blue ones like a vise. He was waiting for Grusha to continue.
"That's all," said Grusha.
"Nu, really?" He lifted an eyebrow. "No job? Or are you off today? Don't tell me you're rich and don't need to work. The last thing I need is some rich boy's charity."
Listening to him was like watching a conversation happen between two Starly at the same time. Grusha thought he ought to be looking back and forth between them except, of course, there was only the one person involved. A little astonished, he said, "I'm not rich. I mean — I'm not poor, either. I'm a Gym leader." This was information that he was surprised to have to volunteer.
"A Gym leader, huh? No kidding?" When Grusha nodded in the affirmative, he drummed the fingers of his other hand on what as probably his thigh underneath the covers and hummed something to himself.
Grusha said, "You didn't know?"
"Eh? How would I know? I'm not part of that school that does the treasure hunts every year, and I'm not someone who's interested in gathering all the badges and facing the Elite Four, either."
"You had PokeBalls, though," Grusha pointed out.
He went entirely slack. It was as if he had been the result of some online character-maker before and had been reset to the default settings, his expression carefully neutral. He said, slowly, "…where did they put my Pokemon?"
Grusha told him he had no answer for this.
He swore in whatever language he had been speaking before. It was impossible to mistake the unfamiliar word as anything but a swear. Grusha hadn't meant to get any more involved in any of this than to tell this boy he was happy to see him doing well and ask if there was someone he could call, but he was beginning to feel like he had stepped off the edge of a cliff he couldn't claw his way back up.
"It's alright," said Grusha, trying to reassure him. "They'll take good care of your Pokemon. They probably just didn't want them to come out in the middle of a hospital room…"
"No one on Earth would want my Pokemon to come out in the middle of a hospital room," he said, "or at least not the one. The rest, not a big deal. But, uhm—"
"Grusha," Grusha supplied.
"—Grusha. I have to get those PokeBalls back. Do you know where they'd put them?"
He was sitting completely upright, and looked like any moment he would try to rip the IVs out of himself and attempt an escape. Grusha found himself tightening his grip on the boy's hand.
"Leshy," he said, "relax. It's alright. No one's going to mess with your Pokemon."
The other boy stared at him warily. "How do you know my name?"
In answer, Grusha pointed to the side of the bed, where the patient information had been written, the same information that was likely on the medical bracelet looped around his other wrist. Leshy's eyes stopped on their journey down towards where Grusha was gesturing, taking in Grusha's hand holding his a little bit tightly, as if to keep him leashed and therefore unable to leave the room. He didn't look disappointed, but Grusha was shouldering himself farther down into his scarf anyway. He could hear Weavile across the room snickering. But Leshy didn't attempt to take his hand back, so, small miracles.
"Well, anyway," said Leshy, "it's not me or my Pokemon I'm worried about. It's just that, like, since I was unconscious I didn't have a chance to put the Minus Lock back on, which means— it's just— god!" Here he did let go of Grusha's hand, but only to shove his own through his hair, which would likely remain stringy and limp until he managed to get a shower and wash the remainders of the blood out of it. "Okay. Okay. Make plans and God laughs. Should've known. Should've known. Still recovering, so performance is down. Perception is not what I'd call at an all-time high. Not to mention this town is approximately the square footage of a postage stamp which means the staff will be on high alert for anything out of the ordinary. If I…" And here he began muttering plans to himself so quickly that Grusha couldn't follow them at all, only catching maybe every sixth word, none of those words reassuring in the least. At some point he slipped back into that other language Grusha had never heard, which he spoke nearly three times as fast and looked much more comfortable in.
Grusha waited until what seemed like a break in this obsessive self-monologue and said, "If you want, I can go ask the nurse if I can get your Pokemon back for you."
"No, that will never work. Not if she already saw— damn it! Vey iz mir. Did you see my PokeBalls? No, not now," he said when Grusha started to shake his head, "when you found me, outside. Were they doing anything … unusual?"
Grusha's face had to give him away. He felt how his eyes went wide. He hadn't seen the PokeBalls, of course, but he'd seen Leshy, and he'd seen the way Leshy's face had scrambled itself like a mosaic that didn't exist in this dimension. Although, Leshy hadn't asked if his PokeBalls were spread across space in ways that didn't make any sense. He'd only asked if they'd been doing something unusual, which could have meant anything. It was entirely possible he didn't mean anything at all by it except asking if the stickers he'd put on them had come off.
Grusha opted for the safe answer, which was: "I didn't really pay attention to your PokeBalls. I was just focused on getting you some help."
Leshy watched him for a very long time; it was so long that Grusha, who normally had no problem meeting someone's gaze head-on, averted his after some time.
"When you found me," said Leshy, very quietly, like he was sharing a secret, "what did I look like?"
If he answered, Grusha thought, it was all over. If he answered, Leshy would know he was hallucinating, and then inevitably it would get out to someone else, and then it would spread, and it wouldn't stop spreading, and word would make its way to La Primera, and she'd disqualify him from being a Gym leader because of it, and another dream would fly away from him just like that, and he couldn't handle that, he couldn't, he was already stress-hallucinating from the last accident, and even though they'd be nice about it all he would see would be their judgmental stares behind the fakeness of their eyes and their tight smiles, and everyone would talk about him, how sad it was that he'd had such a promising career and lost it and found a new dream and lost that, and if he—
"Grusha."
His name cut through the frantic whirlwind of his thoughts. He surfaced with a gasp, and was surprised and humiliated to find his eyes were misty with tears.
Leshy's hands were on his shoulders. His fingers were digging in with a surprising amount of strength for someone who was hooked up to so many machines. His verdant eyes were at once kind and firm; Grusha felt he could see the spruce trees of his homeland inside of them.
It had been a long time since he'd visited home.
Leshy said to him, slowly, clearly, with an effort to keep his words free of the moderately heavy accent from wherever it was he came from, "I know you're having a panic attack. But you need to tell me if anything was … wrong … with my body. When you found me."
Grusha nearly choked. Could— Could he really— "Your body?" he breathed, hardly daring to believe it.
"Yes. I don't know how I would describe it. But … was anything going on with my body that was … not at all something you would expect to see." Leshy looked as hesitant as he had been to answer — maybe more. "Something … you wouldn't expect to see … on anyone. Ever."
Grusha said, "…like what?"
Leshy's eyes narrowed. "If you're asking that, then I already know the answer. You can tell me, you know. You think I'm going to make fun of you?"
"No, it's — it's not that. But…" He swore in Russian, to which Leshy raised an eyebrow, and shoved the heels of his hands against his eyes. Now that he couldn't see the other boy, things were a little bit easier to bear. "If … If I tell you what I think it is, and I'm wrong—" He couldn't even say if you tell someone, I'll be kicked out of the Pokemon League, because that in itself was incriminating. It was so frustrating he could scream. He hated feeling this vulnerable.
Leshy said, "Was I dead?"
Grusha nodded miserably.
"Damn. Okay." When he moved his hands away a little, he could see Leshy worrying at his left thumbnail. It was quite a feat to accomplish with an IV and its corresponding tube stuck into his hand. He was staring at the spot where the wallpaper met the flooring, and didn't lift his eyes as he continued, "Was there anything else happening to me? Whatever you're scared of, I promise you the fact that you just told me I was dead and I didn't react badly proves you'll be fine."
Grusha took a shaky breath and removed the heels of his hands from his face. He swept his hand in front of his eyes, indicating the area that had been scrambled when he'd happened across Leshy's corpse.
"My eyes, huh? They were…" Leshy made a motion with his hands like he was placing things in random order in front of him. "...like that? Like, fucked-up? Uh … outside of my face, and all?"
So relieved that he thought he might faint, Grusha folded his arms on the hospital bed, lowered his head into them, and nodded enthusiastically.
He felt Leshy pat the back of his head, which was so unexpected all he could do was sit there, frozen.
"There, there, meyn shegetz," he said, in the sort of soothing tones a mother might use to comfort her child. "You must have thought you were hallucinating." When Grusha nodded a second time, he said, "Well, as much as I wish I could say otherwise, you were not. That's part of the reason we have to go get my Pokemon back. One of them is … unruly."
Grusha would not have classified an entity that broke the laws of reality something as trivial as unruly — more like extremely disturbing or even apocalyptic — but it was Leshy's Pokemon, after all. Maybe — he dreaded it even as he thought it — it was capable of much worse. He lifted his head so that he was peeking overtop his folded arms; as silly as it made him feel to admit it to himself, he didn't want Leshy's hand to leave its reassuring position on his head. Thank God they were in a private hospital room. "When you … get near it … is it going to do that thing to your face again?" He had so many questions: Was he conscious during it? If he was, could he see properly? Didn't it hurt? He was assaulted with the need to ask these questions, but probably the first order of business should be to secure Leshy's reality-breaking Pokemon first.
Leshy worried at his bottom lip thoughtfully. "Maybe. But only because it doesn't have the Minus Lock on its PokeBall. It's not trying to do it." He paused, then added, "Probably."
Grusha had heard of Pokemon like that, that had horribly strong powers and chose to live in seclusion away from humans as a result. Lugia, for one. Maybe Leshy's Pokemon was like that. But Grusha had never heard of even the most powerful Pokemon doing something like what he had seen on Leshy. "Will you be okay?"
"If I can get close enough to the PokeBall to put the Minus Lock back on it," he said.
"I'll come with you."
"No," Leshy said, sudden and so firm that even Grusha couldn't really argue with it. A little softer, he said, "No. No, you can't come with me. There's nothing saying it won't affect you as well, and the last thing I need is to be ready to leave and have you frozen there in the doorway muttering to yourself about the arithmetic of the universe and how everything is a fractal or some shit like that. If you really want to help, go outside and have a place for me to hide from the nurses or something, because they're definitely going to be chasing me."
Grand Leshy auto was not something Grusha wanted to be charged with tonight — but he supposed, if they were smart enough about it, they might be able to pull it off with no one the wiser. And Leshy was looking at him again with those eyes that reminded him of his homeland. It felt like if he didn't help him, it would be a betrayal, even though he wasn't at all beholden to this pretty boy in the hospital bed.
It was also something he could probably get away with if he played his cards right, as opposed to being stamped with the figurative scarlet A of actively hallucinating — even though now he knew, horrifyingly, that he hadn't been hallucinating at all.
"Okay," he said. "Okay. I'll be outside waiting for you. How long do you think it'll take?"
"Dunno. Hopefully less than five minutes, if you can point me in the direction of where they have my Pokemon." He patted Grusha's head again, giving his hair a little ruffle. "Shkoyach, meyn sheyne. It means a lot."
oOoOoOoOoOo
Which was how Grusha found himself standing outside of the hospital a few moments later. He was sure he looked every bit the confident Gym leader most people knew him as, calm and collected, hands in his pockets, leaning back against the wall, Weaviile next to him and Frosmoth resting on the awning above him. It wasn't unusual to see him around the hospital in the days and weeks following his accident, and anyone happening across him would just assume it was one of his check-ups. But the truth was that his heart was hammering inside his chest. He was on high alert for whenever Leshy burst through the door and the two of them made their escape. He glanced up at Frosmoth; she glanced down at him. Not that he doubted she was paying attention, but they'd have one chance to pull this off, and if he was even a second late he was putting himself in a very unsavory spot.
His Rotom phone floated in front of his eyes; on it was a list of search results for "reality-breaking Pokemon". Of course nothing helpful was coming up. Most of the results were TikToks about speedrunning your Pokemon journey using only Ninjasks. Not the kind of breaking of reality Grusha was looking for. He searched Minus lock; this also returned absolutely nothing of note except for a prompt asking him if he had meant to type Mechanical lock. (He had not.)
So the only answers he was going to get about Leshy and his Pokemon were from Leshy himself. He sighed and allowed his shivering Rotom phone to slide back into his pocket.
He let his gaze drift around the town aimlessly. He had to squint — the sun was bright, and it was reflecting even brighter off the white of the snow. Few people were out on a cold day like today. Grusha had his scarf up around his ears and over his nose, himself. It was one of the several reasons he had decided on a nonverbal signal for Frosmoth. He could see the Pokemon Center a distance away. He couldn't say for sure, but he was fairly certain the Pokemon Center nurse was still standing in the same position she'd been when he'd first happened upon Leshy's corpse. Maybe it hadn't been shock that had frozen her to the spot. Leshy had mentioned that if he came with him to retrieve his Pokemon, he might be stuck in the doorway talking to himself about fractals of the universe. Was that what had happened to her? He'd have to mention it once they were safe and could have a proper conversation.
Speaking of the devil — he heard a crash from inside the hospital, and then a shout from one of the nurses. He peeked inside. Sure enough, Leshy was — well, the only word he could think of for the desperate, out-of-control way he was throwing himself across the room was careening — towards the front door, trailing all manner of tubes and wires, with his backpack looped haphazardly around his shoulders and his PokeBalls gathered in his arms. His eyes were wide and scared like a wild animal's. He pitched forward through the door and shouted, "Now, now, now!"
Grusha lifted his hand and gestured forward with two fingers, like he was giving a salute. Frosmoth launched herself into the air and performed a Snowscape attack, which near-instantly sent their immediate surroundings into blizzard conditions. It was impossible to see anything through the thick snow — but Grusha moved in the direction he'd last seen Leshy, thrusting his hand out, grasping blindly, and— there.
Leshy took his hand, and Grusha pulled him through the snow and out the other side.