Grusha unlocked the door to his apartment. Leshy shot inside with so much momentum that he collapsed on the floor next to Grusha's couch, clutching his PokeBalls tightly to himself and laughing hysterically. It was so different from the agitated and anxious person he'd been in the hospital bed that Grusha found himself staring at him, fascinated by the fact that such an expression could live so naturally on his face. And — he admitted to himself, feeling his ears burn once again — kind of cute. No … really cute. This unabashed and exhilarated smile on his face was sending his heart into a little bit of a freefall. It was like nailing a 740 — the thrill of launching into the air, making the spin, and landing perfectly was the exact same feeling he was having now, watching Leshy dissolve into giggles.

He locked the door, then shouldered off his coat and started a pot of tea. Being caught in Frosmoth's Snowscape hadn't been a part of the plan he'd been thrilled about, and he couldn't wait to take the first sip of a mug of tea and feel it warm him from the inside out. He said, "Did everything go okay?"

Which was a stupid question, because he'd seen how things had gone, and it had been far from okay, but Leshy was safe and to his knowledge no one had been hurt, so technically it could have been worse.

Leshy had doubled himself over so that his face was buried in the several PokeBalls in his arms. He said, voice still tinged with laughter, "Yeah. Yes. Thank you. Thank you."

The heat rose to Grusha's cheeks. "Did you get the Minus Lock on?" Whatever that was.

"Yes. Sorry. About my face. God. And whatever else you saw." He barked out a relieved laugh again, and then said, "Okay, Rugelach, you can come out."

In a burst of light, a Pokemon's silhouette formed. For a moment, Grusha was terrified that whatever reality-breaking Pokemon Leshy had been trying to save had come out, but when he forced himself to look, he saw a Shedinja floating motionless in the air, a tiny throw blanket wrapped around it and tied at the neck, the same way Grusha had used to do when he was a child and walked leisurely and regally around the house on weekends pretending he was the tsar, with his long cape flowing out behind him. The blanket covered the hole in Shedinja's back that was often said to steal the soul of anyone who looked into it.

Surely, this couldn't be the reality-breaking Pokemon. It was only two feet tall, and had sidled up to Leshy, rubbing itself against him, apparently as happy to see him as he was to see it.

"I'm glad you're okay, too, Ru," Leshy told it, rubbing his own face against Rugelach's dead shell. "Sorry for worrying you. But look!" He retrieved one of the PokeBalls, which was unlike any PokeBall Grusha had ever seen — it was a muted, filtered purple on top, and a brownish-cream color on the bottom. Parts of it were repeated onto itself, and several flecks of the material floated just outside the PokeBall, the same as Leshy's eyes had been when Grusha had found him. Every few seconds a stripe of the PokeBall's material would flash into sight, stretching up through the air above itself, shooting off through the roof, the same as that thin black line Grusha had seen coming from Leshy's body when he'd found him. Held tightly around it was a silvery-black chain whose links looked less like traditional chain links and more like the claws of a dragon or the raised scales of a Sandslash. "We got Ketsu back, Ru! So everything's going to be alright now." As Grusha watched, Leshy's eyes got a little faraway, and the corners of his mouth twitched; he pressed the PokeBall to his lips and murmured into it, "Ketsu … I missed you."

This — the Pokemon Leshy called Ketsu — was the reality-breaking Pokemon, Grusha was sure of it. Even if it hadn't looked like a glitch in the matrix, he would have been able to tell from Leshy's reaction. To let a Pokemon like that out of your sight … it must have been terrifying. Not only for the people it affected, and for Leshy himself, but for whatever Pokemon was inside. Certainly such a Pokemon wasn't used to the logic of a world so different than the logic it seemed to operate by.

But still … if it had done that to Leshy…

Grusha said, turning back to the kettle, which was doing absolutely nothing of note other than boiling water that he obviously could not see, "Do you want to take those tubes out?"

Leshy straightened marginally. He seemed to have only just now noticed that though he'd removed the wires and tubing that had connected him to the hospital equipment — and Grusha didn't even want to think about how he'd done that, because some of those tubes did not look like they were the type to come out easy — a fair number of them were still present on his person; for instance, the IV tubing was gone, but the syringe was still taped tightly to the back of his hand, where it remained slid underneath his skin. "Right," he said, setting down his PokeBalls. "Wasn't really thinking about it until just now. I had less of a plan and more of a farkakte attempt at a prison break."

"It's fine. The bathroom is right down the hall, if you need it."

"Thanks." There was a spot of silence, and the sound of a very light kiss, and then Leshy was saying, "Ru, stay here and look after Ketsu and the others, nu? I'll be back when I don't look so much a shonde. Ikh hab dir lib, kishkeleh."

And then he was gone from sight — but Grusha had a heightened awareness of his presence. His existence made not a sound, but something like it; he was unable to relax, knowing that there was someone else here in the house with him. It was the same way he'd felt at school back home, when he saw a pretty boy, hyperaware that the boy in question was existent and in his vicinity. He remembered how he'd retreated into his scarf or his coat whenever he caught sight of Andrey, even if Andrey was doing nothing but standing in line for lunch or asking the teacher a question. That was how he felt now, with Leshy, and he was surprised such a schoolboy sort of crush would creep up on him when he was nearing thirty. He wondered absently if the men he'd been attracted to in the past few years were just dull enough in comparison to make Leshy stand out, or if he was in a class of his own that had Grusha's heart feeling like it was trying to escape through his throat every time he saw him.

Leshy swore from the bathroom in his native language. In spite of himself, Grusha couldn't help but crack a smile. He spared a glance over his shoulder; Rugelach the Shedinja was watching him with a soulless, dead-eyed stare. Well, at least he didn't feel judged, even if he did feel a chill creep up his spine.

A few moments later, Leshy made his way out of the bathroom and into the kitchen, where Grusha was sitting with a mug of steaming tea in front of him and one across the table. He'd shrugged out of his coat and scarf and untied his hair and was now sitting there nursing the tea with all the familiarity of someone who had grown up somewhere so cold that having a warm drink at the ready after spending any amount of time outside was a necessity.

"Are you…" Grusha struggled to find the right word to describe Leshy's situation, and then just settled for, "…okay?"

Leshy raised an eyebrow, like he couldn't imagine why he wouldn't be okay. It had Grusha wondering if maybe this sort of thing was par for the course for him, and if so, how on earth he'd managed to stay alive all this time, because certainly there wasn't always someone like Grusha there to bring him to the hospital. Just as quickly he realized "stay alive" was a misnomer; Leshy's "Was I dead?" echoed in the space between them. This had happened to him before. He wondered if there were bloodstains all over Paldea. He wondered how many people like him were walking around forever changed by what they'd seen Leshy's "Ketsu" do.

He lifted the tea. His fingers around the porcelain handle were lighter than Grusha would have expected. He said, "I'm fine. As long as Ketsu's fine, and Rugelach, and the others—" At this, his Shedinja floated silently over to him, hovering just behind his shoulder; without even looking, Leshy reached up and gently stroked Rugelach's carapace. "—as long as they're okay, then so am I."

Grusha narrowed his eyes. He said, "You were dead. Didn't … Ketsu … do that to you?"

He realized as he said it that he wasn't entirely sure that was the case. Surely the eyes glitched outside of his face were "Ketsu"'s fault, if its PokeBall was anything to go by, but Leshy's chest being split open might have been something caused by an entirely different entity. Glaseado Mountain was often unkind to those who didn't know how to traverse her. The Pokemon were even less kind.

But Leshy looked a little hurt. He said, "It's not Ketsu's fault. It doesn't mean to hurt me. When things happen to me and— like— a brokh, I don't know how to say it in Spanish." He silently mouthed in what Grusha assumed was his native language what he was trying to say, and then apparently gave up. "When you saw me, like I was. I was dead, in a manner of speaking. Geshtorben. Nonexistence. In that state you experience nothing at all. You do not even experience not experiencing. I know—" he said, when he saw Grusha's eyes scrunch up, trying to comprehend this, "—it is impossible to understand because it is impossible to experience and remember experiencing. For me it is like—" He closed his eyes for an extended second and then reopened them. "—like I close my eyes, and then I open them. Like a very short sleep. Instantaneous, in fact. So I'm not in pain. I wake up and I'm in the hospital, or still lying on the ground, or something like that. To be honest, I'm not even really dead — I'm in a state that you can't comprehend so your mind tells you to see … whatever farkakte thing it tells you to see. I'm not in pain."

"Still…"

But there was nothing to say, really. If Leshy didn't mind, he didn't mind.

On the other hand, Grusha minded a lot. And the fact that he minded anything a lot was hard to come to terms with.

To distract himself from the uncomfortable feelings rising up in him, he said, "Do you live around here?"

"Neyn."

This was said with the flippant air of someone who didn't live anywhere. So Grusha's next question was naturally, "Do you … have a place to stay?"

Leshy shook his head. "I guess I should have stayed in the hospital. At least they have heat, and food."

Leshy was very obviously the kind of person who despised pity, so Grusha tried to keep any semblance of it out of his voice. "I have a guest room. If you'd like to spend a few nights here, I'd appreciate the company."

If Leshy had known him, he might have seen such a proposal as strange. Grusha, the stoic, ice-cold Gym leader, asking a pretty boy to stay over at his apartment because he was lonely? It would have shattered everyone's conception of him. But of course he only kept people at a distance so that his heart wouldn't be broken again. He had already lost one love. He didn't have the heart to lose another.

Thankfully, Leshy didn't know him.

He played with his fingers for a while. Several times it looked like he was about to answer, and then he would close his mouth again and have an internal debate. Finally, he said, "It's very hard for me, you understand. To stay in one place. Not because of Ketsu — it's an intergenerational thing. Many years of being forced from places we tried to settle down in. So…"

Oh. Grusha knew Leshy's people. He felt a rush of shame, even though he hadn't been complicit in or involved with it. His ears burned a little.

"I understand," he said. "If you don't want to, it's f—"

"I never said I didn't want to."

Grusha perked up before he could stop himself. There was really no way to pass it off as anything else. His ears burned again, even more intensely.

Leshy drained his tea, and then he got up and walked over to Grusha, whose eyes followed him the entire time. He traced his fingers along the underside of Grusha's chin, angling his head up — their eyes met each other, and something, some emotion, or some concept, something that did not have a name, passed between them. A silent conversation in the span of a moment. Then Leshy closed his eyes and pressed a kiss against Grusha's forehead; an inch from his skin, he murmured, "Du bist a sheyn, elnt eyngl."

And then he walked away. Grusha watched him as he gathered up his PokeBalls, motioned Rugelach along, and disappeared into the guest room, which was easily identifiable as such by the fact that there were few personal effects inside it.

A few days, he thought. Right. That's the worst lie you've told yourself yet.

Grusha didn't sleep soundly all night. Some part of his subconscious was listening for the quiet, tell-tale footsteps of Leshy leaving the room and taking his Pokemon with him out into the snow. Grusha didn't honestly know what he would do if that happened. Would he get up and run after him? Insist that he couldn't go out on his own, not when he had just gotten released from the hospital, not when what happened to him could happen again? Or would he lie there in bed, staring at the ceiling, listening to the crunch Leshy made in the snow walking away, knowing he would probably never see him again?

So when he woke up the next morning, he was immensely relieved to walk by the guest room and see the boy curled up underneath the covers, green-and-white hair tossed all across his face, snoring softly, Rugelach held tightly to his chest although Grusha was pretty sure the cicada shell didn't sleep. The sunlight beamed in through the window, but hadn't reached Leshy's face yet — like this, he looked like a forest spirit, though his personality spoke to quite the contrary.

He set about his morning routine as quietly as he could. About half an hour later, there was a knock at the door.

He heard Leshy padding out into the kitchen just as he was accepting the armful of groceries from the delivery person outside. He set them on the table and tipped the person, closing the door before they could see Leshy just in case there was some sort of missing patient bulletin out for him. (He wasn't sure where on earth they would show that, though.)

"You made breakfast and you ordered breakfast?" Leshy asked, bewildered. He was looking between the plate on the table and the two bags of groceries just a foot away from them.

"Not breakfast," said Grusha. "Groceries. I left mine behind when I went to the hospital with you."

"Oh." Leshy did not sound altogether too pleased about having been an inconvenience to Grusha, even though he couldn't have done anything, as he'd been unconscious the whole time. "Nu, alright. Hey—" he said, sliding into the chair, "these are blintzes?"

"Blini," Grusha corrected, then felt a little bad about doing so. Probably in Leshy's culture they were called blintzes. He curled his fingers around his mobility aid and winced as he tested his knee. It had held up yesterday, but he was paying for it today. Dismally, he looked up at the cabinets and wondered if it was even worth putting the groceries away right now or if he should wait until he could think about doing it without wanting to scream. But he had no idea how long that would take. Not for the first time he wondered why he kept putting off buying one of those stretchy grippers. He should write that down, he thought, and then didn't write it down.

"You want help?" Leshy asked.

It was just about the worst question he could have asked. Grusha didn't even look back at him.

"No," he said, "I'll figure it out. You don't need to get up."

Leshy snorted. "I wasn't offering myself. Are you kidding? Vos ret ir epes? I'm recovering. From my horrible injuries." He punctuated half of these words with a fork jab in Grusha's direction, having already begun inhaling the blini. "I was volunteering Rugelach. It has wings. You know, it gets up much farther than you or I. And don't worry — that throw blanket is secure. No soul-stealing today, meyn sheyne."

Rugelach hovered up next to Grusha, its tiny arms out and supposedly waiting to be filled with grocery items to be put away. Grusha, intrigued, placed a coffee tin into its grip; as the cabinets were already open, it simply passed silently from one to the other until it found a slot in which the coffee tin would fit properly and match the items around it, then returned to Grusha for another grocery item. Wonderingly, Grusha passed it a package of sushki, which it studied with its dead eyes and then stored next to a package of bagels on one of the bottom shelves. Close enough, he supposed.

"That's my Rugelach," said Leshy, and it was impossible not to hear the warmth of his pride in his voice. "Ikh bin azoy shtoltz, meyn libe."

Grusha glanced back — Leshy had his hands over his chest and had adopted the same sort of expression a parent might upon seeing their child in the star role of the school play. He would not have been surprised if the other boy had burst into tears, so genuine was his affection for this dead cicada shell he carted around with him. Though, Grusha couldn't quite blame him. He himself felt rather like a scientist observing a new and exciting phenomenon. He'd never seen a Shedinja in motion before; in fact, he was fairly certain he'd never seen a Shedinja.

It went this way until all of the groceries were put away. Grusha was sure he was supposed to show it some form of gratitude, but he was at a loss, so he simply held out his crooked finger as if he was offering it to a Glameow or a Skitty. Rugelach reacted much the same way as either would have, bumping up against his finger and rubbing itself against it before floating back over to Leshy who rubbed cheeks with it, looking as pleased as it was possible for a person to look.

Grusha felt an immense relief as he maneuvered himself into the seat opposite Leshy, after spooning himself some breakfast. He stretched his leg out under the table, making sure not to bump up against Leshy, but he needn't have worried — Leshy was the sort to hook his feet underneath the chair. His toes were curled; Grusha took pride in the fact that his cooking was apparently enough to cause such a reaction. He hadn't been sure about the smoked salmon. But now that he thought about it, that was a staple of Leshy's people's diet; he'd seen it advertised on every storefront of the few Jewish delis he'd passed by in his lifetime. And judging by the gusto with which Leshy was devouring his breakfast, Leshy was not immune to this cultural love of smoked salmon.

"So," Grusha said, his eyes fixed on his breakfast, although he was acutely aware of the presence opposite him. He hadn't had a visitor since the last time Iono had dropped by to try and convince him to appear on stream and talk about his trauma. (She'd offered him a sizeable check to do so, so it wasn't without reward, but the amount wasn't yet worth the pain of talking about the dream he had lost in front of more than just his mirror.)

"So," Leshy agreed, apparently taking delight in the fact that his situation was something for which no one had any precedent.

"I was going to resurface the gym floor today," said Grusha. "If you'd like to come along, you're more than welcome."

Leshy and Rugelach looked at each other conspiratorially. Though Rugelach's expression never changed, on account of it being a dead inanimate object, Grusha swore he could see a glint in the hollow spaces that passed for its eyes. After what he could only assume was a silent conversation that passed between the two of them, Leshy looked back at Grusha, his own eyes glinting, and the side of his mouth curving up into a snarky, knowing smile.

"Rugelach says it is very likely you are asking me on a date," said Leshy. "It also says that you are not very good at coming up with good spots to go on dates. But, sue me, I am enamored anyway. Yes, I will stand around and look beautiful while you, er, do whatever you said was going to be done to the gym. Put more ice on it, or what it is you said."

"Resurface it," corrected Grusha, and leveraged a not-entirely-serious glare at Rugelach, who was dead and therefore more or less completely unaffected. That was fine, because the only reason Grusha was glaring at the Shedinja in the first place was to do something that wasn't putting his hands over his face to disguise the way he was turning entirely pink at hearing Leshy refer to their outing as a date.

Like, it was, but still.

"You'll want a coat," he told Leshy. He had found the boy in a outfit that was very ill-fitting: both because it was a loose T-shirt that basically guaranteed frostbite if you wore it out of the house for more than three minutes, and also because Leshy was so skinny that it was likely any shirt he wore, ever, would fit him less like a shirt and more like a set of living-room curtains he had fashioned into an approximation of a shirt. "I have a few. In my closet." He didn't say if you want; that was inviting the possibility of saying no, and he was nervous that Leshy, who prided himself on self-sufficiency, would think, somehow, that he was intruding by accepting Grusha's offer.

In fact…

Leshy watched him return from where he'd disappeared into his room. He had one of his coats he'd brought from home draped over his arm, lined entirely with fur on the inside. He'd kept it around, expecting Glaseado to be as cold as his homeland, but when it hadn't proved itself to be, he'd stashed it in the back of his closet and taken to wearing the one he was known for instead, with the wing-like protrusions on the shoulders, and the Pokeball scarf. He offered it to Leshy. "Here. It's really warm."

"Nu, todah, meyn sheygetz. I imagine if all the money from your country suddenly disappeared, you could probably trade in winter jackets instead." He held it to his face and breathed in deep, which was so forward Grusha felt the blood pooling warm in his cheeks again. If he kept this up, he wouldn't need a coat at all.

He hated to admit it, but the resurfacing itself was kind of boring. He had done it a thousand times, so it was more mechanical than anything by this point. He wished he could have offered Leshy something to do, but it was the sort of job you didn't give to just anyone off the street. Still, Leshy didn't seem to be having a terrible time. He was standing off to the side of the gym floor, with his hands in the pockets of the coat he was wearing, gazing off at the approximate place where his body had been found. The nurse from the Pokemon Center had been taken somewhere else — Grusha didn't know the specifics, but he had seen in the local news when he'd woken up that morning and checked his phone that she had been unresponsive when her coworker came in to relieve her.

It was also mentioned, in a throwaway line near the bottom, that she had been muttering under her breath about the arithmetic of the universe.

He was trying not to think about that as he moved the shovel across the ice. He had, after all, had the ability to call someone regarding the nurse, but his head had been filled with nothing but Leshy for the past day.

He sighed as he shoved another mound of snow and ice into the quickly growing pile at the end of the field. He had used to be able to do this resurfacing much more quickly, but with his injury he could no longer get quite the momentum behind it. Macca, his Cetitan, had helped him get going, and was now carefully watching from the sidelines as Grusha continued on his own, ready to step in when his trainer looked like he needed a break. (As it had only been about seven minutes since Macca had reluctantly allowed him to take over, Grusha was trying very hard not to look like he needed a break.)

He rested his hands on the top of the plow. Leshy was facing away from him. He wondered if the other boy was upset at what had happened to him, or if it was by now just a fact of life. If it had happened so many times that death (or whatever you called what Leshy experienced, or didn't experience, as the case may be) had lost its sting. He wondered why, if such horrible things happened when he was in Ketsu's vicinity, Leshy didn't just find somewhere to dump it and return to a normal life.

He wondered if that was even a possibility.

"Are you from Paldea?" he asked, before he could stop himself.

Glaseado was a place of few people and even fewer conversations, so Leshy should have responded immediately. Grusha felt immensely embarrassed when he didn't, and nearly pretended he hadn't said anything at all when Leshy turned slightly to look over his shoulder at the Ice-type Gym leader.

"No," he said, "but I thought that was obvious. Are you in need of some conversation, meyn malekh? I had not taken you for such a person. You are very quiet. Like Ru."

The aforementioned Ru was laying on Leshy's head, its tiny arms grasping what they could of his hair, and its expression, as usual, impossible to read. It might have been having fun, or it might have been wishing for Grusha's death. There was no way of knowing.

"If you don't want to talk," grumbled Grusha, taking hold of the shovel once again and digging it into the accumulated snow, "then we don't have to talk. I was just asking."

"Ach, neyn, that was not what I was meaning." Leshy turned around fully, then, and stood at the edge of the gym floor, uncomfortable, or at least looking like it, with the concept of stepping out onto the floor proper. "I was happy, that you were talking to me. I'm sorry. I tease. Will you keep talking to me, pretty Grusha?"

He'd been called pretty before, but it was mostly by groups of tittering, high-voiced tenth graders who visited his gym while on their treasure hunt from the school in Mesagoza. Unlucky for them, then, that he was only interested in other adults, and more specifically, only interested in other men. Now one of those men he was interested in was calling him pretty, just like he had wished all those times before, and he didn't know what to do except to stare at Leshy in what was certainly not the sort of reaction the other boy had been expecting, except that he couldn't figure out how to make his face do anything else.

Leshy just blinked hopefully at him, as if he would have waited for the answer forever.

Finally, he said, "Yeah. If you answer the question."

Clearly, he was a Casanova.

"I am not from Paldea," Leshy said, which Grusha could have guessed. "My land lies in the middle of a very vast desert, except that we've cultivated a great many trees around it. Still, it is an unforgiving place to get to, and so most people simply don't try. Which is, of course, all the better for us. It means we're left alone." He tapped a finger against his bottom lip, considering. "But, of course, you must know that there have been times in the past where we didn't live there. Your accent has me believing that you probably come from the place that allowed us some temporary refuge."

He didn't mention the other things that Grusha's homeland had done to his people. Mercifully.

Grusha said, "I do." Then, because it felt right, and because he didn't know how someone would not say it, once they were confronted with the truth of it: "I'm sorry."

"A leben ahf dein kop," said Leshy proudly. Grusha guessed this must have been some sort of great praise. "It's rare to see a person who is not wrapped up in semantics — you know, 'my father did this, not me', this sort of thing. I don't care if it was your father that did it. Saying it was your father instead of you doesn't bring back my grandfather, my great-aunt, others of my family. Nu — you know where I'm from. Not such a good match for you, eh?"

He inclined his chin towards Grusha's scarf. At the thought of being trapped in the desert with his current attire, Grusha broke out in a little bit of a sweat as if he was actually there. What a nightmare. Give him the cold any day.

"But I think that's not the question you're asking. You want to know where it is that I found Ketsuban."

Grusha was alarmed. He hadn't known he was being so obvious. As he revisited the conversation in his head, he realized there was no way Leshy could have known where he was going with it. He had either been an incredibly good guesser, or there was some sort of psychic power involved. And though Grusha knew not every esper looked the same, he was fairly certain, from his experience with Leshy so far, that the other boy was not one of them. "…yes," he admitted, because there was really no graceful way to argue that that hadn't been his end goal.

"It's alright," said Leshy. He slipped his hand into the jacket pocket and withdrew the screwed-up Pokeball Ketsuban resided inside. Even the sight of it had Grusha flinch; though the glitching was minimal, and localized to the Pokeball, he couldn't help but be concerned for Leshy every time that thin purple bar stretched up into the sky so far that it might have reached to the end of the universe. Though the concept of it turned Grusha's stomach, he could see that Leshy was filled with love for the creature within — he was gazing at it with shining, affectionate eyes. "Ketsuban," he explained, "was found on, ah, I think the name was Cinnabar Island. You know this place?" When Grusha shook his head, Leshy clarified: "Kanto. It was very hard there, to speak to people. They use symbols in their alphabet, like Yiddish, but it takes many years of study to get them right. And no one knows any Yiddish, so there is no one to translate. There are people who speak English—" Not surprising, Grusha thought, since English seemed to be everywhere nowadays. He much preferred the steely, bendable sound of Russian and the lilting song of Spanish. "—but I don't speak English. Sue me. I think it is an ugly language. Anyway, there was no one else on the beach that night. I … had just come from something very emotionally taxing. And I was walking up and down the beach, trying to get it out of my head. Up and down, up and down, up and down — then Ketsuban appeared before me. I thought I might have been hallucinating. I thought my mind might have broken from what happened to me before I came to the beach. But neither of these things were correct. It was just Ketsuban."

"Why did it appear?" Grusha asked him.

Leshy shrugged. "To this day I do not know. I sent out Sylphie — my Sigilyph — just because I was taken aback, you know. But Sylphie stayed frozen in the air, not even moving her wings, and there was this long music note. I do not know where it came from. I just know that Ketsuban produced it. I couldn't move, though I am not sure if that was because of what had happened to Sylphie or if I was just too afraid. Anyway, things started again after that. Sylphie looked back at me and her eye was wide with terror. Of course I let her back into her Pokeball." He had slipped Ketsuban's Pokeball back into the pocket of the jacket of Grusha's he was wearing, and now his hands were clenching a little into fists inside those pockets. Clenching, then unclenching — as if he couldn't decide whether to be anxious or not. He said, "Something happened after that. But there are no human words for it. It is like how you thought your mind was broken back when you found me in the snow, I'm sure. The best I can explain is that Ketsu and I talked to each other. That time, it hurt very much."

Grusha said, "That's what I don't get, though. How come you keep it with you if it hurts you?"

In his room was a framed photo of him winning his first cross at the SnowZone outside the Plaza Mayor. Draped around that photo was the medal he had won from it. He was thirteen and his elated grin had been so bright that on bad days he lay there in bed staring at it for hours on end before finally succumbing to the sanctuary of sleep.

Leshy said, simply: "Who else has tried to love it?"

When Grusha was done, or at least as close to done as he could get by himself, he turned around to ask Leshy if he wanted to go to lunch with him. There was a place over in Montenevera with good ouzo, which seemed a fitting halfway mark between their two cultures, and, food-wise, leaned a little closer to Leshy's neck of the woods than Grusha's. It was going to be a real date, he told himself, and he'd let Leshy know. He'd tell him that he was welcome to stay at Grusha's for as long as he wanted, not out of any pity for him, but because Leshy had seen something in Grusha that most people didn't. At one point during the resurfacing he had asked his Rotom phone — quietly, so as not to alert Leshy — the meaning of what Leshy had said to him just before he'd gone to bed last night.

Du bist a sheyn, elnt eyngl.

You are a beautiful, lonely boy.

He found himself staring at an empty field of snow, with not a person in sight.

He was no longer such an impulsive person, so for the first few hours he stayed at home and made some calls and tried to sound like a normal person on the phone. Voice-only, he told La Primera, because he was feeling a bit under the weather and had stayed in bed most of the day, so he wasn't really looking up to snuff, to which he could hear the hand-wave from her end saying she couldn't care less what he looked like, because the important part was whether he was still up to battling or not. He assured her he was, that it was just a cold — and she'd given him that unsettling laugh that he wasn't entirely sure was actually a laugh, because it was more like what would happen if a person very slowly opened their mouth and sound issued forth from it in an approximation of a laugh. He had never been able to tell if that was her being sarcastic or not.

But, in the end, she took his word for it, that if any challengers arrived he would be up to battling them with his full force, or at least close enough to it that no one could tell the difference.

From there, he dropped his phone onto the blanket beside him, which had Rotom sputtering a little angrily. He couldn't bring himself to apologize. He couldn't bring himself to do much of anything, really. Not when he was trying to ignore the fact that his ears were straining for any sign of the front door, which he'd left unlocked, opening, and Leshy's presence filling the room. He'd even moved himself from his bedroom onto the couch in the living room, and though the television was on, he'd kept it on silent for the same reason.

The long stripes of the sun setting fell across him hours later. Slowly, and then all at once, the room got dark around him — and Grusha's heart felt tight in his chest.

Glaseado was not a forgiving place.

With every limb feeling like a cinder block had been tied to it, he dragged himself up from his place on the couch and pulled on his shoes. He cast a glance to the mobility aid by the door. Looked away. With one final check of his PokeBalls by his side, he locked the door behind him.

"Of course you wouldn't fucking make it easy for me."

He had to get angry, because he could feel the despair tugging at him and trying to drown him inside itself. The loneliness. God, Leshy had seen it so clearly. No one else did. He knew it for a fact. He had seen articles and message boards and comments on YouTube videos and TikToks and Twitch streams far less popular than Iono's but still with no small amount of viewers, because he was pretty, and teenage girls were, bafflingly, into unconventionally attractive gay adult men. The unending chase, he guessed, or something like it. Anyway, he'd seen how his crushing loneliness, that overwhelming sadness, was instead interpreted as standoffishness, as him embracing the personality that an Ice-type gym leader should have, cool and calm and collected.

Rather than him out here in the dead of night on top of a frozen mountain with only the flashlight on his phone lighting up his surroundings, looking for some desert boy that had probably hiked it either to Asado or all the way back home to his desert oasis.

Stupid. So, so fucking stupid.

He had crossed his arms inside his jacket, and now his fingernails bit into the soft skin of his upper arms.

His knee was throbbing.

The mobility aid wouldn't have helped much here, in the snow, and probably would have made it even tougher, because he would have had to dig its wheels out of the snow half the time. But at least there would be a place to sit down.

He abruptly crashed to the ground.

It was half-tripping, and half-not caring enough to stop himself from falling. It was a slope, so at least he wasn't lying there in the snow, which would have been a really pathetic sight, but this one wasn't much better — he was sitting there, arms crossed, shivering, and leaning upwards against the slope, which was the only reason he was able to sit up at all. The cinder blocks around each of his limbs had become overpowering, and it was impossible now for him to deny their pull. In fact, he hoped he would sink beneath the snow entirely and into the inky blackness of the dirt underneath.

He hated himself. He had for a long time now.

His Rotom phone kept flitting around him, anxious, pulling up the number for emergency services. Grusha kept waving it away, explaining with as few words as he could that he'd be getting up in the next few minutes, anyway; he just needed a little time to himself, and he was speaking coherently, so he didn't have hypothermia or whatever the hell you got when you were too cold, which he had never really bothered learning the name of because the cold had always been a cocoon for him, until tonight, where it ripped through his veins and stabbed at the insides of his skin in time with his self-hatred. That's what he told Rotom, anyway. Just the first part, of course. Even though Rotom kept shaking itself in front of him and blinking the time at him, which was several hours since he'd left his house, and the temperature, which was in the single digits Celsius, and on its way to having a minus sign in front of it.

He rested his head on his knees.

When he looked up seconds-minutes-hours later, he was staring into the eyes of a thunder of Baxcalibur.

His phone had at some point tucked itself inside his scarf, and was shaking uncontrollably. Or, no — it was shaking, a little bit, but the person doing the uncontrollable shaking was him.

Baxcalibur normally didn't approach, but there was something wrong with this particular thunder. A shortage of their natural food source. Grusha, who had seen enough healthy and fed Baxcalibur to know the difference, would have been horrified at the state of their emaciated bodies if the cinder blocks hadn't become so heavy that he could barely blink his eyes without feeling the weight of the sky pressing down on him from above. Their eyes were feral, and the one in front was studying him with the exactness of a butcher trying to decide on the best cut of meat to slice away first.

Grusha's frozen fingers tried to reach for one of his PokeBalls, and then fell short. There were maybe twenty or thirty in the thunder before him. Even if he'd had the strength, he wouldn't have sent his friends out into a losing battle that would end in all of their deaths. His best hope was that the thunder would ignore his PokeBalls, and that when someone found him, they would set his Pokemon free.

He would face this alone. Just like everything else.

He tensed for impact.

Warm, bloody hands covered his eyes. In his ear, a voice whispered, "Kuk nisht aoyf mir. Don't look."

And then Leshy was launching himself into battle, and Ketsuban's PokeBall was open, and his body was changing, forming into something else, and the world in every direction around Leshy was turning itself into tiles that repeated over and over onto themselves, and lines stretched in every direction, and that one single note he had talked about was playing, blocking out every other sound possible, even his frantic heartbeat, and he was choking, and his mind was filling up with numbers, numbers, so many fucking numbers, and the sky above him was exploding into brilliant light, and from above all of it was white, and there were pixelated numbers crashing down onto him, and houses cut in half and flitting across his vision and cubes of the ocean placed where no ocean should ever be, and this horrible 8-bit music playing under and over and through the single lone note, and Leshy did not exist anymore, and had always existed, and was overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and grusha please answer me and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and this is what hurts, it's other people and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and i'm so sorry overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and overwriting and—

Tⳅ⺴+ ⳧➍⨈⁈+⳧ↀ? ⓣ⁈⺴+ⳅ⒱⁈+ⓣ? +⳧ d+➍ↀ⨈⺴ ⼴+⒱d⁈+?ⳅ⳧ ⺴+➍ↀ⨈⺴ + ⺴➍⺴+d⳧?+ⳅↀp⒱d