Disconnect

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Like every fight the team gets into, Minerva feels it's her personal responsibility to start this one. She turns in my arms, the acid scars on her face so deep that her red flesh is showing. The sickly-sweet scent of Hyper Potion hangs in the air over both of us. I bring the hand not on her neck to my face and trace my own scar. We're a matched set. Her burned out eye fixes on me and her golden bond pulls me in, like she's grappling with the ruff of my shirt. I can almost feel myself choke with the weight of her pain and remorse as the now-sightless silver sphere wheels about in the darkness, like a moon lost in the dead of space with its sun burned out and its planet suddenly disappeared into the cosmic void. It reflects no light and knows nothing, sees nothing.

"Ashley." Minerva rasps, and I am all too happy just to hear her speak. "Damnit, Ashley, you did this to us."

"I was letting him grieve!" I protest, but twelve-year-old Ashley's out again and she's sobbing. Fear and panic and some desperate need to prove myself all gush forth over her body and her snout tenses into a snarl as my tears hit the raw part of her body and sizzle to thin lines of smoke.

"You gave him an opening." Minerva is choking on the words through the pain. I didn't know she had limits yet here they are and she's pushing out against them, trying to bat them away so that she can retain consciousness for seconds longer. "He is an opening."

"You can't blame Ethan. He didn't know." I say.

"You did! You knew!" she spits out, and with an nonreassuring gasp goes limp again in my arms.

"Damnit." I whisper, because I did. Ethan comes back into my mind, whispering in pictures about dark hair and the scent of river and pancakes. "Damnit, damnit, damnit!" I hold out the trembling right hand that clutches her Pokeball and stow her away in my bag.

Behind me my Pokemon pick up whispering with the wind. Some of it is conscious mumbling and some of it is in my head but we can't tell the difference when we're this far into it. Hycanith joins the conversation in mumbled feelings and sharp-edged concern, the background line to the hellish soundtrack that is tonight.

"Quiet down!" I yell. Sixteen year old Ashley is back out, clenching hands that are a half-inch smaller than they should be and hating the two inches she's missing from a good two years of time travel as she stands up. I don't know why I insist on remembering my age like this- I didn't count the days. Who knows when my new birthday is. As far as I'm concerned, this is where I stand- and like any good teenager, the first thing I do is whip out my phone.

Er, Pokegear.

Mom.

Ethan.

Morty.

Lance.

Cecily.

For my own sanity I work my way through the list, fingers trembling, because I don't know how long I'll have or if I have any kind of time at all. Everything is up in the air. There are no rules.

Mom. I'm about to go dark. If you need anything talk to Morty, but please, stay inconspicuous as possible. I promise when all of this is over I'll explain whatever I can. Stay away from Mount SIlver, encourage whoever you can to stick to their normal lives. (I almost put programming but manage to stop myself.) Love you.

There's nothing I need to say to Cecily. Social interaction can wait until after the end of the world.

To Lance: I'm sorry for everything. If you're getting this message, you probably already know Red has what he wants. We have two months. Please watch Morty, make sure you two stick together. Things about to get really dangerous. Don't go after Red.

He's mine.

I take a deep breath. Here comes the hard one.

Morty. Morty it's all over.

To my surprise, he answers at once: What's going on?

Red. I reply. Red's opened the breach through worlds. We don't know what he'll do when he gets it working but I think this might be our endgame. We have two months, Red's in full control of the game code, we don't know what he can do now. I won't be able to progress unless I play the thing the way it's meant to be played, so I think I'm the only person who can do this. I'm going for my fourteenth through sixteenth badge now. Wait where you are until Bella and Lance show up, if we Goldeneyes stick together we'll be okay.

That's a lot to take in. he replies.

I'm sorry.

Look. His typing indicator shows up, disappears, and then appears again. I hold my breath for what seems like an hour. I'm not your Morty. This isn't your Ethan you're defending. You're not from this world... but still, if anyone, anyone at all was going to save us, it would be you. I'm not handing over our lives to you- they've been in your hands since the beginning.

I type in I love you, not sure if I'm doing it for my Morty or this Morty or if I can even hold a relationship after all this. I send the message and the sending circle appears on the screen, holding there in a perpetual swirl of motion as it goes nowhere.

"What's wrong with the-" I ask, as a message has never taken this long to send, and the screen turns blue. I recognize something akin to the interface, and then the tell-tale signs of a dead computer. The screen goes black, not off-black but just a pure blankness, and a bright white smile in eight-bit appears.

I drop the device like a hot coal, but the smile remains, peering up from the upturned, dirt covered pane of glass.

"It's not going to explode, is it?" asks Reginae.

I shake my head. "Just Red keeping us in our place. We... we need to sleep."

Ethan lowers his head. "I didn't know. I didn't know." It's strange to hear it coming out of his own throat, rather than through my mind, but even though he looks less like my old friend than ever I think I hear a trace of Ethan's inflections in his new voice. He sounds much too young to be the King of the Seas but too powerful to be anything human.

I withdraw him. The Pokedex, which provides a helpful back-up map (so I haven't lost everything), also now registers Ethan as a Lugia now. Red was true to his word after all.

Bastard.

We go to the Pokemon Center and a confused Nurse Joy takes all my Pokemon, paying special attention to an injured Minerva. Her Chansey rolls the gauze round and around my Ninetales's head, but Minerva stays still not out of a lack of energy but out of shocked apathy. Affording to care is to let the floodgates back down.

They're all too quiet.

I don't know how long I sit in the lobby before Nurse Joy hands me my Pokeballs back and puts an arm on my shoulder. "I may not be a human doctor," she tells me, "but you need some sleep, sweetie."

I agree with the diagnosis. I let the hotel-friendly team members out when we get back to our room and fall back, giving myself up to the rapids of sleep.

It's been years since I was tired enough to collapse onto the bed with my shoes still on.

***

I dream of the bright white smile and eyes of the Pokegear screen staring up at me and think I'm going to suffocate. When I wake up it's still there, still smiling, and with a furious cry I throw it across the room. It breaks on impact, but I stomp on it anyways, crushing shards of glass and that awful smile into the ground again and again.

I look up, the deed done, and dislodge a glass shard from my lower leg.

The room is dark save for the outlines of my Pokemon, just visible. I see Reginae's eyes flicker, think I can feel Ethan flinch from inside his Poke Ball even though he shouldn't be conscious, and I know that Minerva's snarling on the side of her face hidden from my sight, the side not swaddled in gauze and rust-colored bandages filled with soaked through blood. Fang stays silent in his sleep, curled up with Hycanith, whose skull rustles with the sound of her breath.

Ten is the only one who acknowledges my outburst.

"Can't sleep?" he turns his head all the way around before waddling around so that we're face to face.

"What do you think?" I ask.

"Oh, I was thinking. End of the world, might as well... anyhow, this was how we started out. Just the two of us in the dark, working things out in the aftermath of this or that trauma, this or that challenge." he clucks.

"Which time?" I ask.

"Oh, more than a few. I tried to get on board early." he asks, "How did you get the Pokegear?"

"It was a gift from my mother," I say, but saying gift hurts my mouth, the word is so bitter. It was a going away gift from a single parent to her only daughter, whom with she had spent the last twelve years of her life. I shattered it as if shattering her heart wasn't enough. I was such a stupid kid.

Ten eases my concerns, "There's a tech shop in our next stop, over in Pewter. We can get it fixed."

"Bet Red erased all my data, though."

"That he almost certainly did."

"You know what this means," I say grimly. "I'll never find out what happens in the newest episode of How To Train Your Dragonite.

"I thought you stopped watching those shows years ago." Ten tilts his head.

"You caught me," I let out a soft laugh to myself in the dark, standing over the pieces of the broken Pokegear. "Yeah. I did."

(A/N: Short chapter, but the alternative was to smash two scenes together into an incredibly long, disconnected one. Approximately twenty chapters left... including the reunion. I have a lot of scenes I'm really excited for and a hell of a lot of reveals to get through- including tomorrow's chapter.)

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