They found a body.
Trudging back to Seafolk village, they were quiet. Sugar's paw steps pitter-pattered behind them, but backwards glances met the snap and white glint of teeth.
(What do you do when a Pokemon's trainer dies?)
Sugar could wait. Thinking hurt.
They kept their heads down. One foot after the other. Blackened debris peppered the grass as they went, more and more until there was enough that it became concerning. The grass dropped with it.
There was a crater, shallow and fresh. Fist-sized clumps of dirt and unearthed rock dotted the edges.
000 staggered to a stop half a second after his foot hit the edge, skittering pebbles down, down, down.
Something sprawled across the bottom - ten or twenty somethings. A jagged shape glinted orange-gold in the setting sun, half buried, as if the earth were caught mid-swallow, struggling its meal down, tentacles radiating outwards from its depths, tangled and eel-slick. They were like black ropes, striated so deeply that the spaces between them disappeared into themselves.
The air tasted metallic. Coppery.
"What is that?" 000 asked, surprising himself in the face of a growing sense of deja vu.
He watched. Waited. Listened to his heart pound in his ears.
Sparks crackled off the ropes. He cleared his throat, and in his best I have everything under control, I'm your superior, listen to me voice, he said, "Call in backup."
Looker stared at him, and he blinked so slowly he may as well have been a Kecleon. He shifted a little, picking at the hem of his sleeves.
"Did you hear me?"
He kept picking at his sleeves.
Silence thickened between them. It ballooned outwards until even the Pelliper lost their voices, no caws rasping through the stagnant air. The ocean waves sounded like nothing more than pin drops in the distance. It was deafening.
"How many people do you want to die today!" Anger pressed against his lungs. Its weight made his breathing shallow and fast.
Looker shrugged, more rag doll than person.
"Give me your fucking pager. Just - Arceus fuck."
He did. He reached down and unclipped it from his belt, a black rectangle with a single blinking light.
000 paged backup. The light stopped blinking.
They sat down and waited.
Back up came shortly. They milled in dense pockets of movement and sound, something like ants, all dry cleaned suits and pressed ties.
One man stood out from the rest. A little too tall, a little too confident. His suit shone in the Alola sunlight, satiny and deep blue, tie pinned in place. He was no more well-dressed than the other agents, but he had a different air, confident authority as thick as Axe approached 000 and Looker, one hand outstretched. The other rested comfortably in his pocket, fingers bunched beneath pinstripe fabric.
No one shook his hand. He pulled back and finger combed his hair, chuckling instead. Smooth and fluid. As if he'd meant to do that all along.
"000 and 100KR, I assume?"
000 didn't say, "Obviously." He thought about it, long and hard. Or well, not very long or very hard at all because his brain kinda felt like a fried egg.
He fumbled for his badge.
"My name is Agent Orange." The man said, tone clipped.
"She's dead." Said Looker.
000's stomach lurched.
Agent Orange looked at them. His eyes were cold and hard, narrowed somewhere between skeptical and analytical, scanning them from top to bottom. Looker's shoes gave him pause: the polished leather had once been brown, now dark, black blood glistening in chunks. He sucked in a deep breath. His jaw clenched tighter.
"My team will be handling things from here."
His agents had broken up into groups. Some lingered by the boat they'd arrived on. Antennas and flags and intricate metal shapes with questionable uses lined the main cabin. Its ramp was down. Two people wheeled out a cart from the ship's insides. It was gurney shaped but bare, no sheet or railings. Or maybe it was more like a slanted table. A monitor was attached to the side. It glared in the sun. Wires pooled underneath, loose coils that jostled and slid along hard plastic as the table's wheels hit sand.
000 watched them lock the table in place. They fiddled with the monitor. Static flooded the screen.
He couldn't hear it, but he felt it thrumming in his bones. It was cold and soft and sharp all at once. He turned away.
There were agents everywhere he looked. Twenty or thirty bodies all moved with purpose. He and Looker did not. They stood rigidly, backs stiff and eyes searching. Hands empty. Agent Orange's gaze did not waver.
000 swallowed hard. He thought about the pokeballs on his belt, Twitch and Pierce exhausted and hurt. He thought about the cigarettes in his pocket, lighter left on the motel nightstand. His fingertips itched with need. His legs longed to turn and walk away. To never look back.
He felt eyes on him. Agent Orange only smiled.
He turned. A group of agents had drifted closer, combing the grass around the crater. The grass a yard away from his feet. One woman pulled up a wormy chunk of something, nose wrinkled, and she stole a long look at him. 000 shook his head.
The woman stood, and the chunk went inside a plastic canister. Her face went blank. Steady hands and blue gloves.
There were more agents at the bottom of the crater. Several of them crouched, waving equipment and talking fast. There were significantly less canisters.
"What are we supposed to be doing?" 000 asked.
"Leaving," said Agent Orange, smile fixed. Frozen. He had no laugh lines or wrinkles. "The floating village is a short walk from here."
"She's dead." Looker said again. He didn't sound like he was talking to anyone, words quiet and rushed. "I tried to…I couldn't…."
"Do you two need an escort?"
"It killed her. Why did…I watched it…."
000 blanched. "That won't be necessary, sir."
"Do you even care?"
The distance between Looker and Agent Orange shrank in a flash. Looker grabbed him by the lapels. The fabric squeaked and twisted.
Agent Orange frowned mildly.
"You don't care, do you?"
"She did her job." Agent Orange took Looker by the wrist. He pushed him away like some overeager dog or a child interrupting an important phone call.
Looker fell silent.
000 grabbed him by the shoulders, pulling him back. Looker didn't fight. His body was limp, and he'd sweated through his trenchcoat, heat radiating up into 000's palms. 000 tried to make his expression apologetic. Nothing responded the way it should have. A live wire of anger coiled tight in the back of his throat.
He just felt tired.
"Don't worry so much about Fallers, okay?" Said Agent Orange.
000 didn't say: "What?" It barely crossed his mind.
"Get out of here and write your report. Tapus know we've all got our work cut out for us."
Agent Orange walked away. His suit shimmered less than it had before. A rustle, and he disappeared, indistinguishable from his agents.
000 looked down. A folded, white square sat on the ground. He glanced back, but the crowd had moved on. The grass was only grass again, as if the rubbery worms had never been there at all.
He pocketed the square.
The walk back to the village was long and silent.
Someone was whistling. He stood below the porch, leaning back so that his shoulders touched the mid-railing. It sounded like he was trying to whistle something in the neighborhood of Camptown Races only a street or two over. He had a receding hairline but couldn't have been much older or younger than Looker, who had celebrated his twenty-first birthday sometime in the past five years.
He took a deep breath, and the next doo-da came out short and sharp and died airly. He'd caught sight of 000 and Looker, who were approaching the stairs in the slow, staggering way criminals approached the gallows (before the gallows were outlawed, obviously). The Sylveon trotted after them doggedly. Her fur was rumpled, stained faintly blue.
"You guys look rough," he said.
000 grimaced and pulled at the collar of his button up. The blood didn't stick out too much - not the human blood at least. His shirt and tie were more or less the same shade of red as a slasher film's floor. The beast's blood stuck to the fabric in black, chunky blobs, and smelled like rotten eggs. Except his tie was somewhere back on the beach, probably shoved into an evidence bag or trying to get lost at sea.
Looker watched the ground beneath his feet, every step measured and stiff. His gaze wasn't particularly focused.
If the man noticed the stench of sulfur, he didn't say anything about it. Probably because he smelled like a ripe Skuntank and had the air of someone who'd smoked a roll fifteen minutes ago.
"Is that blood?" The whistling man pointed.
"Nope," 000 said.
"Are you sure? That really looks like -"
"It's fake blood." He gestured at Looker then himself. "We're making an alien movie."
"Like an indie film or something?"
000 and Looker shouldered past him. 000 made a point of slamming the door shut. The hinges rattled.
All the lights were off and the curtains drawn. It made the room gloomy. The mini fridge sat in a menacing way, all square and quietly jittering, and the little twin bed loomed from the corner. Its rumpled sheets cast shadows even in the dark, twisted lumps that sank into the tweed carpet. The shadows looked a lot like black holes.
000 shucked his shirt off and tossed it at one. It went thump. His shoes followed one after the other, heavier and louder. Looker's trenchcoat came next, several still moments in which Looker stared blankly, debating on whether or not to follow suit, but discomfort eventually won out with a full body shudder. Both their faces scrunched when it landed stickily.
"I'm showering first. You need to barf again?"
Looker practically glowed in the dark from being sheet-pale, as if he'd forgotten the common decency of having some pink or an undertone or something to his skin. Of course, he'd gone that pale an hour ago. Regaining a semblance of health didn't seem to be in his agenda.
"Last chance."
"…I'll go outside," he said weakly.
000 was certain that if anything ever happened that made him blanch like a sheet of paper, he'd be dead. Yet, there Looker stood. Europeans were funny like that.
"Whatever. Suit yourself."
He stepped into the bathroom, socks squeaking on the speckled tiles. Cold seeped into the soles of his feet as he flipped on the light. Locked the door. Everything looked dingy and yellowish. The mirror was smudged and splotched from past toothpaste stains and years of chlorine-heavy water splashing out of the sink.
Washcloths and towels hung on a rack over the toilet. They were all white and stiff.
The sink water didn't help much. It heated up faster than even the most aggressive tea kettle, steam rising in waves, but the washcloth still felt like sandpaper. Soggy sandpaper, to be exact, but it was enough to scour the top layer off the cheap bar of soap.
The water kept running as he scrubbed his skin. Steam fogged the mirror. It was better that way; if he couldn't see his face staring back at him, he couldn't see the dried blood, and he could ignore the iron and salt and the uncomfortable feeling and the body on the beach and the snap and the scream. So he scrubbed and rinsed and let his eyes trace patterns in the countertop instead of watching the water run pinkly down the drain.
He scrubbed his shoulder extra hard. No ink came off. His arm ached dully, all the way down to muscle. He watched water drip onto the floor tiles.
The ceiling was tiled, too. They were the foam kind of tiles, a little saggy and speckled. A water stain stared a yellowish stare from the corner. It didn't have eyes. The shape suggested nothing resembling eyes. It resembled a sad parsnip, if anything. There was a feeling of being watched, or maybe just a general, roiling nausea, and he cringed. He left his pants wadded up under the sink and counted the tiles while he showered.
When he was done, towel wrapped around his waist, Looker was gone. So was his trenchcoat. A pile sat in its place. A pile of what, well, there wasn't any good word to lump the objects together. They were all roughly lump shaped, at least. They were also all dumped out of Looker's trenchcoat. The lint said so.
The closet door looked wrenched open, folded in an aggressively careless way that left it stuck partially out into the room. The plastic dome light inside glowed dimly. There might've been a pair of shoes missing. Not 000's shoes. He only ever packed one pair, unless you counted sandals, but sandals weren't exactly real shoes.
The closet light touched the pile's edge, haloing it in angular, unflattering shapes. 000 took stock of the objects:
A handheld mirror of the cheap, plastic variety; a half-eaten, (currently) melting chocolate bar; a fork; a Gameboy Advance - purple; a loose copy of Castlevania; a rusty nail; Looker's trainer ID, boasting a photo of one very skinny, lanky, teenage Looker; and lastly, a bottle of melatonin.
000, being a detective by all but his refusal to go through more training, noted that Matilda's pokéball wasn't there, or Looker's wallet (where his ID typically resided), or his gun. He nudged the pile with his foot. The fork tumbled over the Gameboy and onto the carpet. He made the conscious decision not to be concerned.
A moment passed as he stood there in the half-dark, silent except for the mini fridge's incessant buzz and a faintly whistled song that might've been by the OrBeatles. He put on clean boxers. Concern tried to ask him a question, meekly raising a hand. He made an even more conscious decision to stop caring so much, period.
All his fucks had been given in rapid succession, and he smothered any new fucks with a thick blanket that muffled their cries for help. He grabbed the melatonin. Squishy, sugar coated gummies had congealed into a sleep-shaped brick at the bottom of the bottle. He shook it. The brick made a horrible, solid thumping. He unscrewed the lid and swallowed a handful without chewing.
He passed out somewhere between three and twenty whatever Mareep later. The twenty whatevereth Mareep had black wool and terrible, terrible teeth.
There were stars outside the window. Red pinpricks of light. 000 went to sit up but found the ground already there, solid under his feet. Tight fabric pinched at his wrists. He raised an arm, satin sleeves shifting, a plastic button on each cuff. A tie circled his neck too tightly, just enough that he couldn't take a deep breath without the knot digging in beneath his Addam's apple. He distantly thought that this was wrong, that something was terribly, terribly wrong, but he couldn't remember what. It felt like a soap bubble. Effervescent and oily. Slipping away from the brush of his fingertips as he stood on tiptoe and reached.
The corners of the room were blurry. They probably weren't important. Probably. There was a heaviness in the room that felt very much like something that resided in corners, if not having seeped in through them in the first place. It had eyes and hot breath.
Leaving so soon? Do your promises truly mean so little? Said a voice like ancient oak roots tearing through dirt.
000's mouth didn't work. His tongue forgot every syllable it had ever learned how to form, going desert-dry and limp. The stars outside spun in dizzying shapes.
It's regrettable. The words sounded like the paths falling leaves traced in the air.
He had a distinct feeling that the voice wasn't talking about going back to Hoenn. Guilt settled in his stomach, ice-cold and slimy. Pressure welled up where his heart ought to have been.
Worry not, Kahuna.
The floor began to crack apart beneath his feet.
The choice was never yours to make.
Those were the last words he heard before the world caved in.
000 gasped as he bolted upright. The sheets stuck to the back of his neck, damp with sweat. Something crackled when he raised his hand, and leaf bits brushed against skin, stems lying on the sheet inconspicuously. The window was open. A bush rattled its branches quietly from a few feet away where the sun was still up, and the mulch was brick-red. He wanted nothing more than to scream.
The sunlight had a quality of evening-ness to it. It diluted itself before it ever came into the room, edges soft and pleasantly warm rather than sharp and scalding. He stood. He stretched, less because he needed to and more because it was what people normally did when they woke up. More leaf bits fell, not fluttering through the air so much as disintegrating on their way towards the carpet. There was a distinct lack of clutter down there. Even the Castlevania cartridge was gone. A new pair of loafers sat by the door. They were copper colored, darker at the toes than the heels, and polished just shy of metallic. The stitching along the edges looked strikingly deliberate.
It seemed like a very Looker thing to do: to go out and buy new shoes.
There were no other signs of Looker. 000 glanced around the room to be sure, but where Looker was and where Looker wasn't usually ended up being self-evident. He had all the legs and grace of a newly-hatched Ponyta that would greatly disappoint its trainer in the coming years. The bathroom light was on, the door wide open. There was an empty aluminum can on the floor. 000 sighed.
"Whaddya think you're doing?" He asked, rounding the door.
A tab popped. Looker stopped mid-drink, a can tilted back and his eyes wide. He spluttered, choked, and ultimately half fell/decided to sit on the edge of the bathtub to cough. There was a twelve pack of something on the sink counter. The box was ripped open and soggy.
"Guess." Said Looker.
"Is that how ya wanna be? Gonna make this your hill?"
"Can we just…." A deep breath. " We can figure this out later. Please."
"Well, we could've, but you taste in beer just had to be shit, huh? Heineken, really?" 000 shook his head. "You should've tried harder."
Looker finished the can. He sat it by his feet. It was practically gold compared to the bathroom tiles.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Whatever you want it to, kid."
"I can't do this right now, Nanu. I can't."
"You hesitated."
A laugh caught in his throat. It was sharp and broken, a wheezing kind of hysterical. He felt like he was choking. Like he was drowning. Were the walls squeezing in closer, or was it just him?
"What the fuck do you think - "
"He gave us those papers - we…we aren't supposed to know. It doesn't even matter! It never mattered what we did! Don't you see that?"
000's blood pressure skyrocketed, but Looker was already jumping to his feet. He pressed a wrinkled bundle of papers into 000's chest. He was smiling. It didn't reach his eyes. He clutched at the collar of his own shirt desperately.
In one fluid movement, he elbowed Looker hard in the ribs and stepped backwards out of the bathroom, blood pounding louder than Looker's sharp intake of breath. He smoothed the papers flat.
The words bled together.
Bait, unstable, disposable.
Cold dread dragged through his body. His last bit of faith in humanity died. He smoked out the window and drank until everything went fuzzy. He watched his hand shake against the windowsill, fingers twitching in place.
He lit another and drank some more.