Pokemon (Detective Pikachu)

A Legendary Search

A/N: Just a warning that this chapter does contain a description of a very gory injury. I don't think that the description is too bad, but I did include some detail and figured that perhaps I'd best let you guys know.

26. Waiting

Absol stepped away from the window, fuming. How could Mewtwo do that? Being powerful and legendary didn't give you permission to manipulate people, any people. His own manipulation was bad enough, being driven crazy by any and every event that could possibly be called a disaster. From natural ones, to cruel human gangs to highway pile-ups, Absol had spent a large portion of his life sensing them all and being compelled to stop them somehow, which had led to intense pain when he could not and many sleepless nights kept up by his own racing mind as well as that pain.

Then there was how he treated that boy, Tim. He hadn't known the boy long, but Absol could certainly imagine the torment he'd gone through- all because Mewtwo wanted to "test" him and didn't have the decency to tell him where his missing father was. How low could a Pokemon get?

Now, though, Absol was free. He could still sense disasters; knew an earthquake was going to hit several thousand miles from here that would thankfully cause only minor damage, knew that in about six minutes a passenger plane in a different country was going to have an engine malfunction and make an emergency landing- that would end more like a crash- in a corn field. They worried him still, as they would worry anyone with decency, he was sure, but he didn't feel an insatiable need to try to prevent them somehow, and wouldn't be driven crazy by the fact that there was no possible way to get there in time. He could ignore them.

But he could still sense them. How could he simply just go home and forget about them? Ones that he couldn't help, he knew, he would have to learn how to ignore, for if there was nothing he could do then there was nothing he could do. He'd known that from the beginning, even with the compulsion driving him insane.

But the ones that he could do something about? How could he just ignore that? To know something bad was going to happen, to be able to stop it, and instead do nothing… that was nearly as bad as causing the incident itself.

Wasn't it?

And what about the boy? Absol might be free; Tim wasn't. Mewtwo had flat out told the boy that he was to do these things to change the world. Even if it was what Tim would have been doing anyway, it still wasn't fair to inform someone that they had to do it. It should have been left up to Tim.

Absol sighed. What did he do now? What did he want to do now? It seemed wrong to leave. Was there something more he should do here?

A voice caught his attention. The words it said were lost to him, as he wasn't paying attention, but the voice he recognized. Looking down, Absol realized this rooftop overlooked the parking lot at the front, and people he recognized were approaching- the same people that Tim had been with before.

That gave Absol an idea. They didn't know exactly where Tim was; he did. He jumped down to approach them.

"Well… now that's odd. This is a hospital, but…" Meiko muttered.

"Tim needed to get to a hospital, but I somehow don't think that's what he had in mind when he came here in the rush he was in." Inspector Holiday sighed. "So we should probably find him and make sure he's not getting up to anything dangerous in his state. I don't know what Mewtwo was doing with his arm, but with the blood on his sweatshirt the injury must have been bad."

"But where did he go, and why?" Emilia interrupted. Her heart pounded in her chest; how badly was Tim hurt? Why wouldn't he just wait until he got treatment for this? Why did he have to be so reckless?

"I'll bet he knows, if you can ask him somehow." Brad drawled, pointing. They all turned to see the massive Absol that had brought Tim here heading towards them, not running but setting a quick pace.

Stopping in front of them, Absol's eyes flicked to each of them before he suddenly flowed over behind Emilia, turned, and gave her a firm shove with his head.

Emilia looked behind her at him, confused for just a moment. Her glance showed her smears of blood on Absol's back and neck. Absol gave her another push, and she understood.

"Wait… you will take us to him?"

Absol looked at her, nodded once, and pushed her a third time before bounding a few steps ahead, then turning to stop and look at them.

Emilia looked at Brad. "You're right." She told him, then looked at the others near her. "Absol knows where to go- come on!"

She took off at a run. As soon as she started, Absol turned back towards the hospital and raced towards it, the humans following.

Tim stared at his father as he opened his eyes. His father gave a small groan and put a hand up to his face, using his thumb and smallest fingers to rub both eyes at once. Then he stopped, looked at Tim, and slowly sat up.

"Well…" he said.

Tim could only stare.

He had no idea how long the silence stretched for. It seemed like time had simply just… frozen.

Eventually, his father sighed. "Well…"

"I, uh…" Tim muttered. Scrambling for something, anything, to say, his mind settled on the situation at hand and he said, "I guess… when we're talking to others, we'll have to be really careful since… you're not supposed to know anything that happened after your accident… I guess…"

Tim felt like an idiot. He'd finally found his father, and all he could think to say was how they were going to keep up the illusion that Mewtwo had set them both up in?

His father chuckled. "I suppose that's true." He looked at Tim in silence again for a moment before shaking his head. "Well… what do you say to the son that's spent weeks and weeks looking for you, only to find that you've been next to him all along with no one the wiser?"

Tim scoffed, looking at him, not really annoyed but entirely unsure how to react.

His father shook his head again and chuckled more. "What a pair we make now, huh?"

Tim scoffed again, this time with a note of hysteria in his voice. He stumbled forward and sat on the bed.

His father stopped chuckling and looked at him. "Actually… I think I do have something to say to you."

Tim looked up from where he'd been staring at his knees in shock.

His father smiled at him. The expression, the gentle smile, the warmth in his eyes… Tim hadn't seen it in months. Not really. It hadn't been the same at all.

"You did good, Tim."

Tim's breath left him in a rush, tears pricking at his eyes. He lurched up and towards his father, reaching out his good arm. His father, in turn, reached out both of his.

Wrapping his arm around his father and feeling his arms wrap around his, laughter bubbled up in Tim's throat, and he couldn't seem to stop it. He didn't care, though; his father was laughing too, and it just didn't seem to matter.

It was him at last. His father was here. Maybe he'd been Pikachu all along, but he hadn't been Tim's father. But now, Tim had found him again. His voice, his presence, even his smell, were here, surrounding him. He had his father back at last.

"That's my boy." His father said, tightening his arms around his son.

The group scrambled out of the elevator, a couple of them with sighs of relief; with that many of them in there, it had not been a comfortable ride up. Absol immediately took off, trotting down the hallway; Emilia wasted no time in following, and heard the others right behind her.

She didn't look back, though, instead just following Absol down the hallways.

When Absol stopped dead, so did she.

Looking up, her breath caught. For the second time that day, she saw Mewtwo ahead of her.

It floated just off the ground in front of a door. It looked up, noticing them, and smirked.

"What did you-" Emilia began, then stopped. Mewtwo had vanished, teleporting, before she could finish asking it what it had done to Tim to make him act this way.

"What would Mewtwo be doing here?" she heard Mr. Graham ask over a low growl from Absol.

That was when they heard it- laughter, both familiar and unfamiliar to Emilia, coming from the door ahead of them, the one Mewtwo had been in front of.

"Tim?" Meiko said. At the same time, Holiday said, "Hold on just a minute…"

Emilia ignored them both, closing the distance between herself and the door, and opening it. Going inside without hesitation, she only stopped once she was in there.

One of the two people in the room was definitely Tim. The other was an older man, one who looked a whole lot like him. Both of them were laughing, and holding each other as though they thought the other would disappear.

Her worry vanished. She was pretty sure she knew, now, why Tim had been acting the way he had. She had never met the man, but she was sure she knew who he was. There was no mistaking it.

Behind her were exclamations from the others, but the only one she heard was from Inspector Holiday, who pushed his was past her as he said them.

"Great Arceus…"

Reaching up, he took his hat off of his head and stared in shock. "Harry Goodman…"

The final two words were said in a whisper, but they had the effect of a shout. Everyone fell silent, and the man looked up at them, though he did not let go of Tim.

"Frank Holiday." He greeted. He looked around, for a moment not seeming at all surprised, then his eyes suddenly widened and he cleared his throat.

"What's, ah, what's going on? Frank, who are all of these people? What's happened?"

Holiday shook his head in disbelief. "This… I can't believe this. Have you been here all this time?"

The man cleared his throat again. "I, uh, wouldn't know. Last thing I remember is… my car went over the cliff. Then I woke up here, with my son. Ah, wait! The man who sent me off the cliff, we need to find him. He's been distributing a dangerous chemical-"

"Yes, the chemical known as R that makes Pokemon berserk. We already know about that. If you've been unconscious since the crash, Harry, then… well, let's just say that you've been missing for a long time."

"Missing?"

"Your car crash happened over three months ago… almost four now, actually." Meiko chimed in.

"And no one knew where you were after that until, well, right now." Holiday nodded.

"So… wait, who are you?" Harry asked. "All of you, really… and what's happened? It was really three months ago?"

Tim listened to the others talk as they came in and smiled, though no one saw since his back was to them. The thought drifted into his head that his father was doing a great job pretending he'd just woken from a coma, and he was perfectly content to let him keep up the charade by himself.

He suddenly felt an odd sensation near his stomach and around his right arm, which he was still holding there. Then, the pain returned, just as bad as it had been before Mewtwo had intervened. He felt his body spasm, and his father stopped talking.

"Tim?" he heard him ask, but it was almost as if Tim was hearing it from far away. Agony radiated from his right arm, the pain so fierce he couldn't breathe.

His father's face was suddenly in front of him, but Tim couldn't really see it well, his vision going hazy.

He couldn't really follow anything at that point; the pain shut out all else, and when darkness took over his vision, he eagerly welcomed the painlessness that accompanied it.

Harry felt his son twitch and then stiffen in his arms, and abruptly stopped talking to Frank, a small part of his mind grateful to have a distraction from trying to figure out what questions he should be asking to keep the others thinking that he'd just woken from a coma. A much larger part of him, though, was concerned about Tim, who didn't respond when he called his name.

Harry leaned Tim back until he could see his son's face, which was twisted in pain. Moments later, Tim's eyes rolled upward and then closed as he lost consciousness.

"Tim?" He changed his grip to hold Tim up with one had so he could lightly shake his shoulder. At the other end of the room, he heard Emilia ask, "Tim? What's wrong with him?", but ignored her in favour of finding out.

Then, he felt something damp and looked down. Red was spreading from around Tim's stomach.

Frantically, Harry laid his son all the way back on the bed to see where the injury was, and when Tim's arm fell away from his stomach to land on the bed and reveal that the injury was around his wrist and not on his torso, he belatedly remembered that Mewtwo had been doing something to the injury around Tim's arm that Harry hadn't seen.

He could see it now, and wished he could not. Tim's wrist was not just injured, it was torn, torn badly enough that it was amazing his hand was still attached at all. The bones in his wrist were clearly visible, jutting out jaggedly in every direction, clearly broken. Wet strips of flesh hung from both sides of the tear, varying in length. And the red that was now staining the hospital bed was spreading rapidly.

"Oh, my gosh!"

He looked up at this voice, now right next to them; Emilia's hands went up, one stopping at her collarbone and the other going right up to her mouth. She looked sick.

"Get someone in here- now!" Frank cried upon seeing Tim's hand. "This is a hospital- find a doctor! At that rate, he'll bleed to death in minutes!"

Mr. Graham and Brad both left the room at a run. Frank Holiday raced forward and grabbed the blankets of the hospital bed, tossing a corner of them over Tim's arm and leaning on them to put pressure on his wrist. Then he looked over at the two girls.

"Get both of you out of here, for now." He told Meiko. "I'm not saying you have to go far, but once they get in here, the doctors are going to need room to figure out what's happened and how to help. We'll let you know what's going on as soon as we can."

He waited a moment, then added, "Go!" when Meiko seemed to be to stunned to move.

At that, she shook her head, lowered her camera- had she come in here with that thing recording? How had she not lost it in the chaos?- and grabbed one of Emilia's arms just below her shoulder.

"Come on."

"But-"

"I know, but you can't do anything for him now. We have to wait outside the room until someone tells us what's going on."

With gentle but firm pressure, she pulled Emilia from the room. Absol, whom Harry just noticed, walked over to a corner and sat down in it, still in the room, but out of the way.

And they waited anxiously for help to come.

Tim had managed to scare Emilia several times. When he fell from Noivern with Keith. When he stood in front of Noivern's ultrasonic waves. When he'd gone to confront Feraligatr. When Keith had told them Tim was dead.

But none of those times came anywhere close to what she felt now. Eventually, she and Meiko had been ushered into another room to wait for word of him. Pikachu had been hastily given to them as well, the little Mouse Pokemon just waking up and seeming dazed. Plusle and Minun danced around it, chattering, but he seemed confused.

Confused was how the hospital staff had been, as well, when they first were dragged into the room by Mr. Graham, who'd found them first. They had certainly not been expecting that the occupant of the room was suddenly awake, nor were they expecting that it seemed his son would have to take his hospital bed right after he'd finally vacated it.

Sometime after they were pushed into the room to wait, Absol slinked in as well and settled down against one wall, watching the door in silence. Even when the Cheering Pokemon tried to engage him, he stayed silent and unmoving. Waiting.

By the time they had been in the room for an hour, the door opened and Mr. Graham had joined them. Emilia's throat felt like something was lodged in it, but Meiko managed to ask,

"Have you heard anything?"

Their boss sat in one of the chairs with a heavy sigh. "I know a little. They're operating on him now. They came out to speak with Tim's father, Harry… they wanted permission to amputate what was left of his hand."

Emilia gasped. Mieko stood.

"They want… they want to-!"

Ethan Graham held up his hands. "There was a discussion. Harry asked them if there was any other option. They told him they could give repairing it a try, but the chance of a complete recovery was less than 10 percent… there's not much left holding his hand onto his arm now. The injury is even worse because it was torn rather than cut, which makes the repair far more difficult and the chance that everything will heal properly much smaller. But then Harry asked what the chances were that trying to repair the hand went so badly that even worse consequences developed, and they said it was even less than the chances of a full recovery. Eventually they told him that it was mostly likely that if they tried to repair Tim's arm, it would probably heal some but never fully, and might give him pain for the rest of his life. Harry told them that if they had to amputate to save Tim's life, then do it, but only then. He believed that they were underestimating Tim and said he would heal. Told them he never gave up on anything else, so he deserved the chance to keep fighting for his hand."

Meiko sighed in relief and sat back down. "Oh, thank goodness…"

"They said they would have their best surgeons work on the repair." Mr. Graham finished. "Also, that Lieutenant Brad fellow, he went back to oversee things in Rhyme City, while Inspector Holiday is speaking to Tim's father. I think he's filling him in on everything that happened while he was missing."

"Do you…" Emilia's voice came out in a soft, cracked voice, and she swallowed hard and tried again. "Do you know how long it will take?"

"For them to finish the surgery, no. I'd guess several hours, though, so we should get ready for a long wait." Graham sighed.

And that was exactly what they had to do. Another hour and a half passed before Inspector Holiday came to join them; he had no new news on Tim, but informed them that he'd told Tim's father as much of the events of the last few months as he could and that doctors were running scans and tests on him before they allowed him to do anything else. They wanted to be sure that his waking from the coma had no complications, and overrode Harry Goodman's protests; Tim's father, it seemed, thought his coma might have something to do with Mewtwo. According to Holiday, he'd said that he saw Mewtwo just before the car accident, and saw him again when he woke up after Tim entered the room.

Given everything that had been going on, Emilia suspected that Mewtwo did indeed have something to do with Tim's father arriving here- from what she'd heard, doctors just arriving for their shift had found the man unconscious in the parking lot- and with why he didn't wake until Tim had found him. It had been hovering outside the hospital room when they had arrived, for Arceus' sake!

She had no idea why, but right now, that was not something she really cared about.

Time stretched forever. Meiko dozed off in one of the chairs; Mr. Graham and Inspector Holiday started speaking to each other about inconsequential things. Once or twice, they tried to get Emilia to join in, but gave up; she had no interest in it, even though she knew that the time would pass faster if she was distracted. But she couldn't get her mind on anything else; whenever they asked her something, they had to repeat the question three of four times, before she realized what they were saying.

Absol, too, was as silent as she was. She happened to notice that once, Plusle and Minun approached the Disaster Pokemon and were running around him, jumping onto him, chattering to him. But he lay there as if they weren't in the room, neither moving nor responding to their efforts and just staring at the door. Eventually, the two rejoined Meiko and curled up with her.

Eventually, Tim's father came through the door. He didn't have much to say- only that they were still doing the surgery, and that Tim was in critical condition, but they had things under control "for now."

Emilia wanted to scream. She wanted to know if Tim would be okay… she wanted to see him!

Tim's father sat down next to her. After a moment of silence, he spoke, and somehow it was easier to listen to what he was saying than the other two men.

"So… I was told you helped my boy a lot in the last couple of months. I bet… you can tell me more about what was going on than Frank could."

"Oh, I…" she hesitated, suddenly feeling a little shy of this man whom she didn't actually know and yet was so important to someone who was so important to her. "I didn't really… help all that much. He helped me a lot more."

"Oh, I think you probably helped more than you think. Tim, he has a good heart, but a tendency to try to do everything himself because he doesn't want anyone else to be inconvenienced or in trouble, even if he's looking at something he really can't do by himself. Even if all you did was stay near him, that would be more of a help to my son then you might realize."

He sighed, then smiled. "You know, Tim has said before that I was the one who taught him not to give up, and most of the time, that thought makes me proud… but sometimes I wonder if I taught that a little too well. Sometimes, he needs someone to make him let others help…"

The man shook his head. "That's… not what I came to discuss. No, there's plenty of melancholy in the room already. Let's think of happier memories. How did you meet my son, and how did all of your adventures end up going?"

Talking about Tim was easier than staying away from the subject of him altogether- much easier. She told him everything, from the first meeting when they tried to stop the Aipom, right to the confrontation with Lugia and her fear and confusion over how he was acting before they got here and found out why.

When she was finished, Tim's father shared a couple of stories from Tim's childhood. Once again, Emilia found these much easier to listen to. She had lost track of how long they had been there; he was just finishing his fourth story when something happened at last.

"- and he absolutely refused. He knew there was one last Equinox egg* hidden in the yard somewhere, and even though it was past lunchtime, he would not leave until he'd found it. I ended up having Pikachu roll the egg into an easier place to find behind his back so that he would finally be able to put it in his basket and we could go in to eat."

Emilia giggled softly, but stopped when the door was opened. A nurse walked through it, holding a clipboard.

"Well," said the man, "How well his hand is going to heal now is anyone's guess, but he's out of surgery and stable."

Emilia rose from her chair, her heart lifting as well.

"When will we know?" Harry asked, also standing.

"It's hard to say; the healing process will take time, even with Pokemon powers speeding it up as much as possible. He will probably be able to take the cast off by the time school starts, though I don't think he will be able to use it too much at that time. Therapy after that might bring back some of the use in it; it might not. There's still a chance that healing will go badly enough that we'll have to put him under again and remove it, but we won't be discharging him until well after we know that won't be happening. I'll warn you now that the chance of it fully healing is slim to none. There are almost certainly going to be some lingering effects." The nurse warned. "If he regains 80% of his original use with it, we can consider things to have gone extremely well. I would most likely not expect that degree, though."

"Well, we'll see." Tim's father smiled.

"Can we see him?" Emilia asked.

"Well, he's in the recovery room at the moment, and he's sleeping- we're going to keep him there for a little longer. He's being monitored, and he's on enough morphine that even when he wakes up, he's not going to be able to think very clearly, but if you keep out of the way of those checking on him and stay quiet, going in to see him should be fine."

Mr. Graham and Inspector Holiday both stood immediately; Absol, somehow, was already at the door. Emilia started towards the door, then realized that Meiko was still asleep in the chair. She hurried back to shake her shoulder, waking her.

"Wha?"

"Come on- we're going to see Tim!"

A/N: Well, lots of panic going on. Lots of emotion running high; at least they tried to see if they could save Tim's hand. We'll have to see how successful they were...

The next few chapters that come up for this are going to be somewhat calmer, less excitement... and let's face it, right now, Tim's kind of overdue for some nice, calm normalcy.

*Equinox egg- when I was originally writing this, I wrote in Easter, like an idiot. But the Pokemon world wouldn't celebrate the same holidays we have in our world, because they don't have the same Gods. However, I think the spring and fall equinoxes and summer and winter solstices would be something they might arrange celebrations for, and for the Spring Equinox, I personally don't think it's a stretch to believe they would celebrate things regarding the new growth to come, including the fact that spring would likely be breeding season for a lot of Pokemon. Since all pokemon hatch from eggs no matter what kind of creature they appear to be, it's not hard to think they might have an egg hunt during their Spring Equinox just like some religions have them here for Easter.