kintsugi
the warmth of summer in the songs you write
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Rei did it all right: he and Pikachu stopped Gengar, defeated the legendary pokemon that stood in their way, and saved the world from the falling star. So why is he waking up in the woods again?
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written for the "right character, wrong genre" oneshot contest.
cw: rated teen for minor suicidal ideation
(spoilers for PMD Red/Blue Rescue i guess?)
Rei swallows heavily, flexing his paws against the gravel floor. The mudkip in him is wishing it was more damp; a distant, buried part of him yearns to be splayed out somewhere in the mud. He gently tucks that part aside—right answers or wrong ones, in the next fifteen minutes, the mudkip in him won’t exist anymore.
“I’m ready.”
The first questions are easy enough. He’s done this enough times that he’s got a good shot at all the right answers, and besides, it’s pretty clear when he answers incorrectly. Why did Gengar run? What made him regret that Gardevoir came to bear the curse in his stead? How does he seek to amend this wrong?
“And why,” the voice says silkily, “did Gengar choose to pull the tail of a ninetales in the first place?”
For a moment it almost feels like Rei is on the mountain instead of Gengar, jacket zipped up to the bottom of his chin as the freezing wind blisters the exposed skin of his face, ripping tears from his eyes. It could almost be Rei there, squinting against shards of ice, exhaling frosty clouds—and ahead, at the portion of the peak that’s suddenly serene, a ninetales. One hand reaches out, shaking—is it the cold? or because he knows what’s to come?—
Rei’s pondered this question as he plumbed deeper and deeper into Murky Cave, whispered the words in time with the drops of water that fell from the stalactites into the abyss below. What he wants to do is scream—how would I know?!—but that’ll get him nowhere. Not that he’s tried, yet. Maybe on the tenth try, for just for kicks.
Gengar, locked in place by the mysterious power, strains and tries to look at the mudkip that’s about to decide their shared fate. But Rei doesn’t look, can’t look.
Pikachu told him a story, once, during one of their trips through Frosty Cavern. When the first dungeon appeared, legends say it sprouted in the middle of a forest, unfurling like a seedling. It plunged roots into the ground and devoured everything it could see, its shadow engulfing homes one by. A herd of bulbasaur was caught up near the epicenter, and they quickly abandoned the sunny grove that had once been their home. “Don’t look back!” an elderly venusaur shouted, but one young bulbasaur, heartbroken to leave behind everything she ever knew, turned—
Rei always felt pitied the bulbasaur in the story, even though that wasn’t the point. For her crime, she was swallowed by the dungeon, and what emerged was a blank-eyed farce of the child she used to be. It was a cautionary tale, Pikachu had explained. You couldn’t hesitate in dungeons. You couldn’t look back. It would destroy you.
Running and not looking back is what got them all into this mess, when a human boy woke a ninetales from their slumber. And now a different human has to pick up the pieces. So Rei steels his jaw, looks straight ahead, and says, “He wanted something, very badly, and he thought Ninetales could help him get it.”
“Oh?” A cold chuckle emanates from the darkness, and Rei shivers. This wasn’t the response he’d expected. “And did Gengar get what he wanted?”
His heart thuds. He’s never gotten as far as this question before. In his ears he can hear the echoes of Gengar’s laugh, the way it accompanied each smirk and insult. This life had to be fun for him, had to be what he wanted, since he’d always chosen the cruel option, every time, and—“Yes.”
Something twists in Gengar’s eyes, and that’s when Rei makes his second mistake: he turns back.
It’s like the cave floor has turned to mud, and then sand, and then nothing at all: it opens into slow, yawning blackness, and Rei falls.
Faster. He has to get faster. He has to get better. The mudkip brain was too slow. Fine. Treecko is more agile. He was kind of liking the stability of the quadruped stance, and the ability to take more hits, but he’ll make this one work. He’ll get hit less. He’ll dodge better.
How many times has it even been? Six? Seven? This is the second time the reset’s happened without him dying, though. What changed? What was special about the cave?
“Hey! You over there! Are you okay?”
It’s hard, pretending to be surprised, over and over again. But Rei lets Pikachu scamper up, her heart-shaped tail flicking with alarm, and he feigns interest when she looks him over and asks if he’s hurt. What’s his name? Rei, that’s a cool name! Where is he from? Amnesia’s an easier answer than telling the truth.
He zones out while she babbles through an endless list of information that he already knows. A treecko? In this part of the woods? How strange. Must be the dungeons. Exploring. The guild. She wants to rescue people. They can do it together! Blah blah blah.
As they trot back to her place to settle in for the night, Rei can’t help but wonder if maybe he should just tell her again. Last time he’d tried saying something weird. It wouldn’t be hard to prove that he already knows the steps to her journey by heart, after all—he just nonchalantly told her on the first night what would happen the next morning: tomorrow Butterfree will arrive, looking for Caterpie, and then Gengar will show up and be a jerk, and one day they’ll save the world together.
She’d blinked vacantly back at him, smiled, and said, “Time to get some rest! Goodnight, Rei!” And she’d never mentioned it again.
How could she possibly believe him? He can hardly believe himself.
The second run was the hardest. Missing his human body, missing his cubone body, but even worse: missing his best friend even though she was there, right there, asking him what was wrong, how could she help?
And there was the burning question: what even happened? Why did he lose the ending he’d worked so hard for?
In the second run, he didn’t replicate everything perfectly. Sometimes he answered her questions differently; sometimes, he’d forgotten what had prompted different conversations by the fire each evening and they’d discussed different things. For a laugh he told her that he could fly her to the moon, and she hadn’t believed him. This time he picked a yellow scarf instead of a blue one. But it didn’t matter. Pikachu was still Pikachu, after all, and she still did everything the same. She was at his side through thick and thin, until the end. They got exiled, they discovered that Gengar had been the one to betray Gardevoir, and they put all the pieces back together. Pikachu was still Pikachu.
He’d stumbled back to Murky Cave, almost out of curiosity, almost because it had felt like a dream the first time—would it happen again?
(It did, of course.)
The third run, he went in as a chikorita. Why not, right? May as well try something new.
Wasn’t a great plan. Groudon burned him to a cinder and took Pikachu out with a mighty earthquake while he could only watch.
He woke up in a familiar forest and a totodile body. To resist the fire, and to cover Pikachu’s ground weakness. He couldn’t lose her again.
What a foolish notion. Of course he couldn’t lose Pikachu. No matter what he did, Pikachu was still Pikachu. That was the problem, he finally realized. He could tell the villagers whatever he wanted, he could trade tiny secrets with Pikachu as many times as he liked, he could fight in whatever body he thought would help—but they would never change, not in a way that mattered. Absol would join them with the winter winds. Pikachu would call to Rayquaza to halt the falling star. Alakazam would recognize them as heroes. It was the same. Everyone was the same.
The totodile succumbed to the elements halfway through Wish Cave, trying to figure out if perhaps a wishing star would save him from this. Rei woke up. Cyndaquil. Mudkip. Now, a treecko. I’ll have to work.
Pikachu’s a righteous type, the kind who would never stray away from someone who needs a hand. Which is why, Rei thinks, she’s so eager to welcome him into her home, give him her bed while she sleeps outside in the wind and the cold. It’s the right thing to do. That’s simply what good people do, so Pikachu does it.
A good person wouldn’t let her do that, of course. But Rei isn’t a good person. He lets her prattle on but tunes her out. By the end of the fourth run he’d stopped trying to get to know her. What was the point? He already knew everything about her.
The treecko body froze in a blizzard on the way up to Articuno. This time he chooses charmander. Faster than mudkip, had a better matchup with the enemies he’d be facing, and by the time their shared weakness to ground became an issue, well—they’d have Absol for that, or something.
A few mornings after he meets Pikachu, Gengar steals their mail, as he always does. Rei stands politely by the mailbox and waits for Gengar to saunter out of the woods. Oh no, what a shocker. Luckily Pikachu’s always overreacting; it’ll cover up for the fact that he doesn’t even bother to act any more.
“Kekekeke!” Gengar cackles, a handful of letters clutched tightly to him while Pikachu sparks in indignation. “We’ll be taking these!”
Pink clouds streak across the sky, tinted by the sunrise.
But this time he doesn’t run off right away. He turns to look at Rei, that annoying grin plastered across his face.
“Haven’t you ever wondered,” Gengar asks quietly as Rei stares at the purple underbelly of a passing cloud, “how Pelipper opens her mail?”
“What?” His head jerks over in surprise. Gengar had never said that before.
“Her mail, kekeke,” Gengar repeats in a mocking voice. “She delivers some to us. Surely she gets some of her own. But what does she do with it? How does she open it? Does she respond?” The charmander’s body has a natural resistance to fire, but it still feels like Gengar’s gaze is burning holes into his chest. Gengar straightens his back a little to stare off into the horizon, as if the sun-streaked sky will hold the answers he needs. “Does someone else do that all for her? And why is that? Why did we make letters that she can’t use?”
“Gengar,” Rei says flatly. But his clawed fingers twitch reflexively; the orange scales around his knuckles almost seem to be aching to wrap around a pen. “Did … did you sleep well last night?”
Something in the ghost almost seems to wilt, but then he just blows a raspberry at the two of them. “Bye, losers!” he shouts—that’s normally all he’s supposed to say, Rei notes distantly—and heads off with a final kekekek, the rest of his posse sweeping in his wake.
Rei stares after him, his tailflame spluttering, and it’s only when they’ve disappeared into the woods that he realizes he’s shaking.
“Oh, look!” Pikachu says enthusiastically. “There’s Pelipper now! That must be our mail! It looks like they didn’t steal anything useful after all!”
But while Pikachu’s sorting through the newsletter’s tabloid-esque reporting—Slowpoke claims to have discovered cure to forgetfulness! Duskull banks hate him: ten tricks to making your money last!—he can’t help but turn an envelope over and over again in his claws.
Many, many days later, after they save the world, he goes to Murky Cave by himself. On purpose, this time. It’s the only way he can get Gengar alone.
“What you said, about the letters,” Rei finally manages to say on the fifth floor, sweeping around a corner with his tailflame to see if there are any traps ahead. “What did you mean?”
“Keh?” Gengar asks.
“The letters,” Rei says, and he finds that he can’t keep his voice steady. “The day we first met. You asked about Pelipper’s mail. Why?”
“Dunno.” Gengar makes a motion that might be a shrug. It’s hard to tell in the semidarkness; his body blends and blurs around the edges. “It bothered me. Doesn’t it bother you?”
“No,” Rei lies confidently, lancing down a wild zubat with a quick flamethrower. “So they have mail in this world. Why do you care?”
“Well, I was thinking more about the rest of my confidants. Ekans certainly can’t open mail, and I’ve always done it for her. But if I don’t wake up early, what’s she to do? Why wouldn’t we just develop a system of communication that doesn’t require hands? Those orbs you carry around are awfully neat. There’s probably one that has a non-written record that’s usable for all kinds of pokémon, not just the ones who can write.”
That’s … probably the longest thing Gengar’s said without insulting anyone.
“I mean,” Rei manages, “that’s very nice and all, but why did you ask that then? Why did you ask me?”
“Dunno.” Another maybe-shrug. He smiles at Rei and says in a sickly-sweet voice, “What’s it to ya? Does it bother you, Rei?”
Rei swallows and puffs out his chest. Of course it doesn’t bother him.
They enter the final chamber.
Did Gengar get what he wanted?
No.
So what did he want instead?
…
…
…
The darkness swallows him.
It’s becoming robotic. But maybe it doesn’t have to be.
Meowth this time. Limber. Lithe, fast. He had a friend once who trained a purrloin, and that furry bastard could steal your glasses off your nose and convince you it wasn’t her. Now Rei can be tricky, a sweet talker. And a good liar, like Gengar. With a cat’s silver tongue, Rei’s sure to get through everything this time.
Beat down the first few dungeons. Recruit whichever ferals want to come along. If they don’t want to be his friends, send them back. He runs through with single-minded determination. In the mornings Pikachu greets him cheerily. He nods vacantly back; she never wilts, never wavers.
Pikachu is Pikachu, after all. There are only two people in this world who have deviated from the script. Himself and the voice in Murky Cave.
And now, Gengar.
There’s a third. Something about the formula’s changed, and that stirs him back to life. He watches Gengar with laser precision when he comes to steal their mail, but this time the ghost catches his eye and kekeke’s off with the letters clutched tightly to him instead of saying something.
Rei stares after him; Pikachu cheers with delight as Pelipper comes by with more mail. It’s more of the same. So Rei blitzes through the rest as well. Gengar deviated once. Maybe he’ll do it again.
It’s a mantra Rei has to repeat over and over again on this run, when nothing changes. Gengar taunts Pikachu, bullies Caterpie, turns the entire village against Rei. By this point it isn’t worth protesting—the villagers follow their scripts, just like Pikachu. It isn’t their fault, just like it isn’t Gengar’s. Rei tells this to himself over and over again as he and Pikachu creep off into the their exile, pearly dawn hanging around the rooftops.
It doesn’t help. Gengar’s eyes glow red in Rei’s dreams, and they’re brighter and more sinister when the ghost whispers his lies, threads them through everyone’s hearts and minds until they’re all staring at him with empty heads and eyes full of hate.
The meteor falls. Rayquaza obliterates it. The resulting shockwave sends Rei tumbling from the Sky Tower.
Gengar saves him, again. Rei almost wishes he didn’t—at this point, Rei needs a sign that his theory was right, that Gengar’s different in any way that matters. But Gengar follows the script, pulls Rei through the void between worlds and back into the light, muttering all the while about how he’s totally planning on dragging them into the dark, if only he hadn’t just gotten lost, then he could do his evil plan of accidentally saving Rei’s life. Rei feels bad while he feigns unconsciousness. Is this really how Gengar feels? So afraid of redemption, so ashamed to do anything remotely good, that he has to pretend it isn’t even on purpose?
“Who are you talking to?” Rei rasps from cracked lips. The exhaustion’s not entirely feigned—Rayquaza did a number on them, and the fall did the rest.
Gengar jumps in surprise, and Rei’s legs fall out of his grasp. “No one,” he says immediately, and stares at the meowth body in front of him. “Say, who do you think I am? Can you recognize me?”
“Gengar,” Rei replies groggily, “is that supposed to be a trick question?”
The ghost hisses in annoyance and vanishes with a puff.
Oh. Hmmm. That was the unscripted response he’d been looking for.
Rei sags back, every muscle in his body aching. In the rift between worlds, in his current state, there’s certainly no coming back from this one. The phrase be careful what you wish for lingers in his ears, but he ignores it. This is what he wanted.
The void swallows him slowly, almost gently, but this time it’s practically a relief.
Gengar changed. Gengar changed.
Machop this time. Why not. It’s sort of just a curiosity at this point, and there’s something vaguely comforting about being a humanoid.
How long has it been? The other memories are starting to fade. Rei was a trainer once. He might’ve even had a different name—the voice in Murky Cave just kept saying you, Rei enough times that he’d assumed maybe the voice knew better than he did. He’d collected gym badges. What a strange concept now, after everything he’s seen. Gyms and tournaments. Roasting bits of fruit and crackers over a campfire and sharing with his pokémon. Writing letters, he thinks wryly. He didn’t hate that world, but he didn’t love it either. He’s staring at his grey, five-fingered hands when he realizes this is probably the first time he’s wondered what’s going on at home.
Looking back is what doomed the bulbasaur in Pikachu’s story, after all. Sometimes it’s better not to question how you got somewhere, and instead figure out where you’re going.
He corners Gengar at the bottom of Sinister Woods. It was hard to design the battle so that Pikachu fainted first and Gengar fainted last, but by this point Rei’s had plenty of practice. It’s merely a matter of ducking out of the way of a few attacks, throwing a punch at Gengar’s gaseous body that’s sure to pass straight through him, and then—
“Nicely done, Rei,” Gengar chuckles, while the machop body stands over him. “Looks like you’ve won this time, kekeke.”
“Shut up.” He’s panting, harder than he’d like, but no matter. He’s won.
“What, you aren’t happy with your victory?” With an exaggerated motion, Gengar flops to look over at Pikachu. “Aww, your friend looks hurt. You should probably check on that.”
“Shut up,” Rei growls, his hands curled into fists. At this point it’s almost easier to believe that Gengar doesn’t even want to be saved. Why couldn’t he just have an easy fight and then decide he was going to join them, like Rayquaza?
“The funniest thing about humans,” Gengar drawls from the floor, “is you always forget that you can change too. Pokemon evolve all at once; we humans have to do it gradually, and it shows, doesn’t it? I could spot you from a mile away, Rei. The second you stepped into town last week, I could tell—just a dumb human, too wrapped up in his own misery to see the things that really matter.”
He’s not scary any more. He really wasn’t the first time, either—who names their evil squad Team Meanies? But he pronounces Rei’s name like it’s a hex, and somehow it rips straight to the heart.
It isn’t worth talking to him, but: “What would you know?” Rei snaps back.
“Me?” Gengar asks mockingly. “What would I know about what?”
He’s like this. He’s always like this. Rei’s in no mood to take jokes, though. “About things that matter.”
The gengar’s smile slides off of his face. “Quite a bit more than you, I’m afraid.”
Pffft. There he goes again, trying to make himself out to be the smartest, the wisest. What would he know? He hasn’t had to live this over and over again. He hasn’t even tried to save himself.
That’s fine. That’s what Rei is for. Everyone in this world needs saving. The ferals in the dungeons need to be saved from the madness that has overtaken them. The inhabitants of the town need to be saved from the falling star. And Gengar needs to be saved from himself. If Rei could only find the right body that would let him do all of that. That has to be why he keeps resetting, right?
“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Gengar,” Rei says, struggling to keep his voice calm even though his hands are shaking. This isn’t on script. None of this is on script. He could pummel the smile off of Gengar’s face, smash a new one in its place. His arms itch to do it. “You ran, after all. You abandoned Gardevoir. Wasn’t she important?”
Of its own accord, Gengar’s toothy grin slides from the gaseous confines of his cheeks. Perhaps in his shock he’s too confused to lie or deflect; what comes out is completely innocent, completely genuine: “She was. She was very important. She deserved better.”
Rei hopes he means it, hopes he’s right. Because it’s starting to look like Gengar understanding is the only thing that’ll get them out of this mess.
“Since you already know—and we’ll keep this little secret between the two of us, won’t we?” Gengar chuckles softly before Rei knocks him out. “If Ninetales cursed me out of my world into this one, why is she here as well?”
The battles and conversations and dungeons stopped feeling important a long time ago, but now they’re practically forgettable. Nothing else matters except saving him. But Gengar’s such a tricky bastard to pin down; he never hangs out around town. Rei spends a full week trekking through various dungeons, trying to see where he spends his time, but it’s no use. Gengar comes and goes as he pleases, and he really only pleases to show up to make Rei’s life miserable. That, and Murky Cave.
So they end up there again, trekking through the depths.
The ghost is bad for company. Maybe it’s because they’re both such good liars. Rei stubbornly pushes through the dungeon on his own, batting back the shadows with vine whips until the misdreavus and duskull stop peering out of the woodworks.
“Have you ever met a sableye?” Gengar asks suddenly.
Rei racks his brains, and then unleashes a cloud of paralysis spores from the bulb on his back. The seviper behind him falls to the ground, twitching. Sableye. On this run? He’s not sure. Does it matter? He’s not sure about that, either. “Once or twice,” he manages.
Gengar shrugs. “You’ve seen them before, one of these times, I’m sure. Spiky ones, with all the gems. Still ghosts, though.” He blinks; for a moment, the chamber is warm. “Would it surprise you to know they’re born as smooth like me?”
Rei inhales heavily and then body slams a crobat out of the way. Oof. The bulbasaur body can take a lot of beating, at least, and it’s not like the inhabitants of Murky Cave were ever the hard part of the dungeon. That’s still further ahead.
“Their primary diet is gemstones, you see,” Gengar adds quietly, eyes burning orange with flame. “The minerals sustain them, although in times of scarcity they’ll feed supplementally. But sometimes when they do, there’s usually something that doesn’t quite sit right with them. It festers inside of them, gnaws away at them. But they’re quite resilient, being ghosts and all. So what they’ll do is sequester the impurity deep inside, and surround it with a thick coat so that it can’t infect anyone else. The coat grows and grows, adds facets upon facets to itself, and then it slowly moves to the surface of the skin.”
He has to answer. He has to say something. But what comes out is an abrupt, surprised: “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because,” Gengar says calmly, “when the impurity surfaces, it isn’t festering any more. It’s a gemstone.”
The ghost has always been cynical and cryptic, dancing around the disasters he claims to adore, but this is something new, even for him. “Why are you telling me this?” Rei repeats, harsher than he’d intended.
The silhouette of the stairs slowly solidifies through the inky blackness of the dungeon. Jagged steps cut through the haze, leading further down into the abyss. Last stop.
“All these mysterious dungeons are always harboring something too, some strange, legendary anomaly at the very center. It’s locked safely away from the rest of the world. But which is it, a gemstone or a fester?” Gengar turns and casually spears Rei with his stare, one foot on the stairs. “What a silly question. It’s both.”
Rei tilts his head up, brushes past him, and descends. They enter the final chamber together.
The first questions are the same. And then, finally, the voice asks: “If the correct answer once more eludes you, Rei. What will you do next time?”
“Does it matter?” Rei asks bleakly. Once he succeeds, then what? Does he go back to living with all these people? Settle down as if he hadn’t reset and pruned and predicted around all of them? He knows them, and understands them now, in ways that they’ll never comprehend. Lombre once confided that his dream was to run a cooking stall. Makuhita confessed that she only got into the dojo business because that’s what everyone expected of her. Manectric wants to study a way to cage lightning in a little glass orb, some sort of way to replace their torches—but it doesn’t matter, because none of them ever do it. They never break script.
“I don’t think it does.” The voice breaks him out of his reverie. “Do you?”
What a strange question. Of course it matters. If he can just figure out the right person who can clear all these obstacles, to right this wrong world, then he can finally be free.
“This friend of yours, this Gengar. You’ve met him many times. If he wore the face of another, would he still be him?”
The voice had tried to explain this to him once, a few runs ago: bodies are physical constructs to hold the soul, to hide the brightness from seeping through and searing the world with its sheer power and intensity. Some souls are brighter than others, and could light the world like a sun. Such a soul would be recognizable no matter what form it took. And some souls were fractured, scattered, cut up in a such a way that their light only shone through on the edges. But were those souls any less?
And the voice had echoed firmly through the darkness, repeating the question: Were those souls any less to you, Rei?
He’d answered wrong first, but now—
“Of course it would. By now I could recognize him anywhere.”
The voice presses, gently, like dabbing lace over a fire. “Do you think he’d still have to struggle? If he were born instead as a Rayquaza, would he immediately have his problems solved?”
Rayquaza was lonely. That was her secret, holed up in a crystal spire at the apex of the world, with only the clouds for company. She pretended she liked it. She pretended it was easier to push the fools away. But she was a sadder person for it. “I don’t think so.”
“The world will always try to shape you into someone you don’t want to be. Everyone has different ideas of who the right person is, and the right person for them now may be completely different from the right person for them in ten years. You’ll never please them all.” Here, in the darkness, all he can feel is someone else’s soul, and it flares brighter than a thousand suns, but it doesn’t burn. “But maybe you can try being good enough for yourself this time, Rei.”
The void swallows them whole.
He can’t help but take the voice’s advice to heart this time when he goes in as an eevee. It was his favorite pokémon back when he was a human, he thinks. He’s not sure. Those memories are so long ago, so hidden, that it’s hard to even look back at them. Better to keep forging ahead. There’s nothing to be found in the past.
Gengar has a strange new question for him—what would we do if there was another Gengar? Would we also call them Gengar?—but Rei pushes him aside. He was close. He was so close. He just has to make it back to Murky Cave, and then answer that one question.
It’s an easy answer, when he thinks about it. What did Gengar want when he pulled the tail of a ninetales? The answer’s obvious in hindsight. He wanted the same thing Rei did.
“So then answer me this,” the voice says. In the darkness are two eyes made of amber shards, and Rei can see himself trapped in the pupils. “Why did that human come to choose to pull the tale of a ninetales in the first place?”
“He wanted something very badly,” Rei says softly. “And he thought that Ninetales would help him get it.”
“What did the human want?”
This time it really is Rei at the peak of the mountain, his hand outstretched, the silky tail in his grasp. Tears rim his eyes, but they aren’t from the cold or the wind.
“He wanted to be cursed.”
“And why,” the voice asks, “would he want that?”
Why indeed? Why would anyone want that?
Rei flinches, waiting for the familiar pull in his feet, as if the universe wants to swallow him home, but nothing happens. The answer comes slowly, but with it, an aching sense of finality: “He thought he deserved it.”
“He thought he deserved it.” The voice laughs, almost dismissively. “My power is to punish those with a corruption of their heart’s desire. I was met by a fool who wanted riches, so I gave him the power to change all he touched to gold. In doing so he learned that what mattered to him most was transient. In entombing her in gold, he doomed himself forever.” Sparks emanate from the darkness, golden pinpricks of light skittering across the ground. “So you see my dilemma then, don’t you, Rei?”
They wait for Rei to answer, but the words don’t come to his throat. He wasn’t expecting another question, after all, and—how would he even answer this one? “I … no?”
“For those who invoke my curse, I corrupt your greatest wish. But what if your wish is to be cursed and die? What would I give you?”
Haven’t you wondered, a silky voice drawls, how Pelipper opens her mail?
This world felt like a thin veneer of the human world disguised as fantasy because it was. It felt like a pale imitation of the place he’d known, an elementary reimagining of the human world, because that’s precisely how it had come to be.
Rei’s heart leaps up into his throat, almost like it’s trying to choke him, but the thoughts don’t stop coming. The voice—Ninetales—doesn’t lay curses at random. If someone wanted to die, how would you punish them? What would you make them do instead?”
“You would curse them to live.”
“I would curse them to live.” The voice pauses to ponder, but the void does not devour him. “I would disagree, but only on a semantic level. I have cursed you with life, but that is only a symptom, not the root. If you truly wanted to die once you leave this place, you could. You will walk the mortal coil just like anyone else. You thought you deserved what was coming for you, so I cursed you to see yourself for who you truly are. And what did you see looking back at you, Rei?”
Pikachu’s righteous battle cry. Gardevoir’s whispers on the edges of his consciousness. Rayquaza, raging at the heavens; Groudon, gouging great trenches into the earth. Even the ferals in the dungeons. All of them felt familiar, like the words were his even if the voices sounded like another, and—
Gengar, staring at the visage of a gardevoir in his dreams, and then running off with tears in his eyes. How had he phrased it?
Too wrapped up in his own misery to see the things that really matter.
“I saw someone who needed to be rescued,” Rei responds, the words like lead in his mouth.
“Rescue. A strange word. In your language’s ancient tongue it meant to cast out.” The voice hums for a moment, and then something in their cadence softens. Shards of amber round off into droplets of honey. “You humans are such strange creatures, always meting out your hate and love to the ones who least deserve it.”
“So you cursed me.” It was a kind curse, at first. The very first run had almost been enjoyable. Saving people. It felt good until he realized it didn’t matter.
“So I cursed you, Rei. I cursed you to be reborn over and over again until you could see that you were a right person for this world, if you could only live with yourself and learn from your mistakes. You did a bad thing, but it did not mean you couldn’t do good things again. You cannot always change others. But you can help them, and sometimes you must risk yourself if you want to rescue them.”
“You wanted me to be better than Gengar,” Rei tries. It’s a wild guess, but it feels true. That’s what Ninetales would want him to learn, right? That he can’t save others until he can fix himself?
“I wanted you to understand him. There is darkness in all of us, Rei. We are all prone to moments of weakness. But it is what we do after that defines us. Do you flee? Do you deny it? Or do you rise above?”
No. Ninetales wants him to understand something entirely different. Were he still a human, his cheeks would burn with shame. Still, the eevee’s body shakes as if from exertion. “I fled.”
“The human boy who pulled my tail,” the voice says quietly, “was quite a fool. He had done a terrible thing, one that drove him up my mountain in his madness and desperation and self-loathing, but doing that terrible thing did not mean he deserved a cursed existence. I saw that as soon as I looked at him. And he fled in fear, while his pokémon took the brunt of my wrath, but I would never curse someone undeserving. I undid Gardevoir’s curse and came for you, Rei.”
This time, Rei can’t bring himself to look anywhere but at his paws. Trapped in a world where the only real people were him and his shadow. This is how you punish someone who wants to die. “You cursed me to live with myself.”
“I cursed you to rescue yourself,” the voice says simply.
Rei stares down, bewildered. “Rescue myself?”
It was true; he’d been undeniably drawn to Gengar since the beginning. What a strange pokémon, with so much anger and guilt bubbling just beneath the surface. Surely there had to be something deeper—that’s why Rei had gone after him, right? Because they’d been so different, right? Not because they’d been so similar.
No, that wasn’t true. He’d been drawn to Gengar because they felt the same. And it hadn’t seemed fair that Rei got to be the hero when they were hardly any different.
“And you were quite slow about it, too,” the voice says with a scoff. “When you saw your vindictiveness and hate in someone else, you were so quick to condemn it, and then even faster to forgive it. This world took a lot more cues from you than me. A fictional world where you beat your friends until you can save them. What a tiresomely human thought process, but it got the point across. When you return to your world you may find room in your heart to be kind to your friends instead of forcing them away, Rei. And you may even find the courage to extend that courtesy to yourself.”
He can’t help but focus on one word out of so many: “When I return?”
“When.” The shadows shift once more. “I am vengeful, but I am not vindictive. If your heart changes, my curses fade. But the lessons will stay with you, Rei, and they will stay for a good while. That is the true nature of my curse.”
“But if I return …” That wasn’t an answer. What was he supposed to—“What do I do now?”
The void leaks in on the corners of his vision, but where it used to be dark, it’s light. A cold wind blows around him, lashing him with snow; the shadow of a golden fox and an enormous mountain looms overhead.
“Now?” the voice chuckles, a low, rasping sound like the popping of the last coals in a fire. “Now, you live.”
---
written for the "right character, wrong genre" oneshot contest.
cw: rated teen for minor suicidal ideation
(spoilers for PMD Red/Blue Rescue i guess?)
*
risk you
*
“So once more it comes down to you, Rei,” the ethereal voice says solemnly. The words echo in Murky Cave, and the darkness flickers with movement. For a moment the shadows have fangs and tails and piercing golden eyes, and Rei can almost see the forest fire raging between each strand of fur. But the voice itself can be contained by no form, and it speaks with the weight of one who has seen a thousand years. “You will speak for Gengar. Answer wisely, or else I fear he will succumb to the curse forever.”risk you
*
Rei swallows heavily, flexing his paws against the gravel floor. The mudkip in him is wishing it was more damp; a distant, buried part of him yearns to be splayed out somewhere in the mud. He gently tucks that part aside—right answers or wrong ones, in the next fifteen minutes, the mudkip in him won’t exist anymore.
“I’m ready.”
The first questions are easy enough. He’s done this enough times that he’s got a good shot at all the right answers, and besides, it’s pretty clear when he answers incorrectly. Why did Gengar run? What made him regret that Gardevoir came to bear the curse in his stead? How does he seek to amend this wrong?
“And why,” the voice says silkily, “did Gengar choose to pull the tail of a ninetales in the first place?”
For a moment it almost feels like Rei is on the mountain instead of Gengar, jacket zipped up to the bottom of his chin as the freezing wind blisters the exposed skin of his face, ripping tears from his eyes. It could almost be Rei there, squinting against shards of ice, exhaling frosty clouds—and ahead, at the portion of the peak that’s suddenly serene, a ninetales. One hand reaches out, shaking—is it the cold? or because he knows what’s to come?—
Rei’s pondered this question as he plumbed deeper and deeper into Murky Cave, whispered the words in time with the drops of water that fell from the stalactites into the abyss below. What he wants to do is scream—how would I know?!—but that’ll get him nowhere. Not that he’s tried, yet. Maybe on the tenth try, for just for kicks.
Gengar, locked in place by the mysterious power, strains and tries to look at the mudkip that’s about to decide their shared fate. But Rei doesn’t look, can’t look.
Pikachu told him a story, once, during one of their trips through Frosty Cavern. When the first dungeon appeared, legends say it sprouted in the middle of a forest, unfurling like a seedling. It plunged roots into the ground and devoured everything it could see, its shadow engulfing homes one by. A herd of bulbasaur was caught up near the epicenter, and they quickly abandoned the sunny grove that had once been their home. “Don’t look back!” an elderly venusaur shouted, but one young bulbasaur, heartbroken to leave behind everything she ever knew, turned—
Rei always felt pitied the bulbasaur in the story, even though that wasn’t the point. For her crime, she was swallowed by the dungeon, and what emerged was a blank-eyed farce of the child she used to be. It was a cautionary tale, Pikachu had explained. You couldn’t hesitate in dungeons. You couldn’t look back. It would destroy you.
Running and not looking back is what got them all into this mess, when a human boy woke a ninetales from their slumber. And now a different human has to pick up the pieces. So Rei steels his jaw, looks straight ahead, and says, “He wanted something, very badly, and he thought Ninetales could help him get it.”
“Oh?” A cold chuckle emanates from the darkness, and Rei shivers. This wasn’t the response he’d expected. “And did Gengar get what he wanted?”
His heart thuds. He’s never gotten as far as this question before. In his ears he can hear the echoes of Gengar’s laugh, the way it accompanied each smirk and insult. This life had to be fun for him, had to be what he wanted, since he’d always chosen the cruel option, every time, and—“Yes.”
Something twists in Gengar’s eyes, and that’s when Rei makes his second mistake: he turns back.
It’s like the cave floor has turned to mud, and then sand, and then nothing at all: it opens into slow, yawning blackness, and Rei falls.
*
Faster. He has to get faster. He has to get better. The mudkip brain was too slow. Fine. Treecko is more agile. He was kind of liking the stability of the quadruped stance, and the ability to take more hits, but he’ll make this one work. He’ll get hit less. He’ll dodge better.
How many times has it even been? Six? Seven? This is the second time the reset’s happened without him dying, though. What changed? What was special about the cave?
“Hey! You over there! Are you okay?”
It’s hard, pretending to be surprised, over and over again. But Rei lets Pikachu scamper up, her heart-shaped tail flicking with alarm, and he feigns interest when she looks him over and asks if he’s hurt. What’s his name? Rei, that’s a cool name! Where is he from? Amnesia’s an easier answer than telling the truth.
He zones out while she babbles through an endless list of information that he already knows. A treecko? In this part of the woods? How strange. Must be the dungeons. Exploring. The guild. She wants to rescue people. They can do it together! Blah blah blah.
As they trot back to her place to settle in for the night, Rei can’t help but wonder if maybe he should just tell her again. Last time he’d tried saying something weird. It wouldn’t be hard to prove that he already knows the steps to her journey by heart, after all—he just nonchalantly told her on the first night what would happen the next morning: tomorrow Butterfree will arrive, looking for Caterpie, and then Gengar will show up and be a jerk, and one day they’ll save the world together.
She’d blinked vacantly back at him, smiled, and said, “Time to get some rest! Goodnight, Rei!” And she’d never mentioned it again.
How could she possibly believe him? He can hardly believe himself.
The second run was the hardest. Missing his human body, missing his cubone body, but even worse: missing his best friend even though she was there, right there, asking him what was wrong, how could she help?
And there was the burning question: what even happened? Why did he lose the ending he’d worked so hard for?
In the second run, he didn’t replicate everything perfectly. Sometimes he answered her questions differently; sometimes, he’d forgotten what had prompted different conversations by the fire each evening and they’d discussed different things. For a laugh he told her that he could fly her to the moon, and she hadn’t believed him. This time he picked a yellow scarf instead of a blue one. But it didn’t matter. Pikachu was still Pikachu, after all, and she still did everything the same. She was at his side through thick and thin, until the end. They got exiled, they discovered that Gengar had been the one to betray Gardevoir, and they put all the pieces back together. Pikachu was still Pikachu.
He’d stumbled back to Murky Cave, almost out of curiosity, almost because it had felt like a dream the first time—would it happen again?
(It did, of course.)
The third run, he went in as a chikorita. Why not, right? May as well try something new.
Wasn’t a great plan. Groudon burned him to a cinder and took Pikachu out with a mighty earthquake while he could only watch.
He woke up in a familiar forest and a totodile body. To resist the fire, and to cover Pikachu’s ground weakness. He couldn’t lose her again.
What a foolish notion. Of course he couldn’t lose Pikachu. No matter what he did, Pikachu was still Pikachu. That was the problem, he finally realized. He could tell the villagers whatever he wanted, he could trade tiny secrets with Pikachu as many times as he liked, he could fight in whatever body he thought would help—but they would never change, not in a way that mattered. Absol would join them with the winter winds. Pikachu would call to Rayquaza to halt the falling star. Alakazam would recognize them as heroes. It was the same. Everyone was the same.
The totodile succumbed to the elements halfway through Wish Cave, trying to figure out if perhaps a wishing star would save him from this. Rei woke up. Cyndaquil. Mudkip. Now, a treecko. I’ll have to work.
Pikachu’s a righteous type, the kind who would never stray away from someone who needs a hand. Which is why, Rei thinks, she’s so eager to welcome him into her home, give him her bed while she sleeps outside in the wind and the cold. It’s the right thing to do. That’s simply what good people do, so Pikachu does it.
A good person wouldn’t let her do that, of course. But Rei isn’t a good person. He lets her prattle on but tunes her out. By the end of the fourth run he’d stopped trying to get to know her. What was the point? He already knew everything about her.
*
The treecko body froze in a blizzard on the way up to Articuno. This time he chooses charmander. Faster than mudkip, had a better matchup with the enemies he’d be facing, and by the time their shared weakness to ground became an issue, well—they’d have Absol for that, or something.
A few mornings after he meets Pikachu, Gengar steals their mail, as he always does. Rei stands politely by the mailbox and waits for Gengar to saunter out of the woods. Oh no, what a shocker. Luckily Pikachu’s always overreacting; it’ll cover up for the fact that he doesn’t even bother to act any more.
“Kekekeke!” Gengar cackles, a handful of letters clutched tightly to him while Pikachu sparks in indignation. “We’ll be taking these!”
Pink clouds streak across the sky, tinted by the sunrise.
But this time he doesn’t run off right away. He turns to look at Rei, that annoying grin plastered across his face.
“Haven’t you ever wondered,” Gengar asks quietly as Rei stares at the purple underbelly of a passing cloud, “how Pelipper opens her mail?”
“What?” His head jerks over in surprise. Gengar had never said that before.
“Her mail, kekeke,” Gengar repeats in a mocking voice. “She delivers some to us. Surely she gets some of her own. But what does she do with it? How does she open it? Does she respond?” The charmander’s body has a natural resistance to fire, but it still feels like Gengar’s gaze is burning holes into his chest. Gengar straightens his back a little to stare off into the horizon, as if the sun-streaked sky will hold the answers he needs. “Does someone else do that all for her? And why is that? Why did we make letters that she can’t use?”
“Gengar,” Rei says flatly. But his clawed fingers twitch reflexively; the orange scales around his knuckles almost seem to be aching to wrap around a pen. “Did … did you sleep well last night?”
Something in the ghost almost seems to wilt, but then he just blows a raspberry at the two of them. “Bye, losers!” he shouts—that’s normally all he’s supposed to say, Rei notes distantly—and heads off with a final kekekek, the rest of his posse sweeping in his wake.
Rei stares after him, his tailflame spluttering, and it’s only when they’ve disappeared into the woods that he realizes he’s shaking.
“Oh, look!” Pikachu says enthusiastically. “There’s Pelipper now! That must be our mail! It looks like they didn’t steal anything useful after all!”
But while Pikachu’s sorting through the newsletter’s tabloid-esque reporting—Slowpoke claims to have discovered cure to forgetfulness! Duskull banks hate him: ten tricks to making your money last!—he can’t help but turn an envelope over and over again in his claws.
Many, many days later, after they save the world, he goes to Murky Cave by himself. On purpose, this time. It’s the only way he can get Gengar alone.
“What you said, about the letters,” Rei finally manages to say on the fifth floor, sweeping around a corner with his tailflame to see if there are any traps ahead. “What did you mean?”
“Keh?” Gengar asks.
“The letters,” Rei says, and he finds that he can’t keep his voice steady. “The day we first met. You asked about Pelipper’s mail. Why?”
“Dunno.” Gengar makes a motion that might be a shrug. It’s hard to tell in the semidarkness; his body blends and blurs around the edges. “It bothered me. Doesn’t it bother you?”
“No,” Rei lies confidently, lancing down a wild zubat with a quick flamethrower. “So they have mail in this world. Why do you care?”
“Well, I was thinking more about the rest of my confidants. Ekans certainly can’t open mail, and I’ve always done it for her. But if I don’t wake up early, what’s she to do? Why wouldn’t we just develop a system of communication that doesn’t require hands? Those orbs you carry around are awfully neat. There’s probably one that has a non-written record that’s usable for all kinds of pokémon, not just the ones who can write.”
That’s … probably the longest thing Gengar’s said without insulting anyone.
“I mean,” Rei manages, “that’s very nice and all, but why did you ask that then? Why did you ask me?”
“Dunno.” Another maybe-shrug. He smiles at Rei and says in a sickly-sweet voice, “What’s it to ya? Does it bother you, Rei?”
Rei swallows and puffs out his chest. Of course it doesn’t bother him.
They enter the final chamber.
Did Gengar get what he wanted?
No.
So what did he want instead?
…
…
…
The darkness swallows him.
*
It’s becoming robotic. But maybe it doesn’t have to be.
Meowth this time. Limber. Lithe, fast. He had a friend once who trained a purrloin, and that furry bastard could steal your glasses off your nose and convince you it wasn’t her. Now Rei can be tricky, a sweet talker. And a good liar, like Gengar. With a cat’s silver tongue, Rei’s sure to get through everything this time.
Beat down the first few dungeons. Recruit whichever ferals want to come along. If they don’t want to be his friends, send them back. He runs through with single-minded determination. In the mornings Pikachu greets him cheerily. He nods vacantly back; she never wilts, never wavers.
Pikachu is Pikachu, after all. There are only two people in this world who have deviated from the script. Himself and the voice in Murky Cave.
And now, Gengar.
There’s a third. Something about the formula’s changed, and that stirs him back to life. He watches Gengar with laser precision when he comes to steal their mail, but this time the ghost catches his eye and kekeke’s off with the letters clutched tightly to him instead of saying something.
Rei stares after him; Pikachu cheers with delight as Pelipper comes by with more mail. It’s more of the same. So Rei blitzes through the rest as well. Gengar deviated once. Maybe he’ll do it again.
It’s a mantra Rei has to repeat over and over again on this run, when nothing changes. Gengar taunts Pikachu, bullies Caterpie, turns the entire village against Rei. By this point it isn’t worth protesting—the villagers follow their scripts, just like Pikachu. It isn’t their fault, just like it isn’t Gengar’s. Rei tells this to himself over and over again as he and Pikachu creep off into the their exile, pearly dawn hanging around the rooftops.
It doesn’t help. Gengar’s eyes glow red in Rei’s dreams, and they’re brighter and more sinister when the ghost whispers his lies, threads them through everyone’s hearts and minds until they’re all staring at him with empty heads and eyes full of hate.
The meteor falls. Rayquaza obliterates it. The resulting shockwave sends Rei tumbling from the Sky Tower.
Gengar saves him, again. Rei almost wishes he didn’t—at this point, Rei needs a sign that his theory was right, that Gengar’s different in any way that matters. But Gengar follows the script, pulls Rei through the void between worlds and back into the light, muttering all the while about how he’s totally planning on dragging them into the dark, if only he hadn’t just gotten lost, then he could do his evil plan of accidentally saving Rei’s life. Rei feels bad while he feigns unconsciousness. Is this really how Gengar feels? So afraid of redemption, so ashamed to do anything remotely good, that he has to pretend it isn’t even on purpose?
“Who are you talking to?” Rei rasps from cracked lips. The exhaustion’s not entirely feigned—Rayquaza did a number on them, and the fall did the rest.
Gengar jumps in surprise, and Rei’s legs fall out of his grasp. “No one,” he says immediately, and stares at the meowth body in front of him. “Say, who do you think I am? Can you recognize me?”
“Gengar,” Rei replies groggily, “is that supposed to be a trick question?”
The ghost hisses in annoyance and vanishes with a puff.
Oh. Hmmm. That was the unscripted response he’d been looking for.
Rei sags back, every muscle in his body aching. In the rift between worlds, in his current state, there’s certainly no coming back from this one. The phrase be careful what you wish for lingers in his ears, but he ignores it. This is what he wanted.
The void swallows him slowly, almost gently, but this time it’s practically a relief.
Gengar changed. Gengar changed.
*
Machop this time. Why not. It’s sort of just a curiosity at this point, and there’s something vaguely comforting about being a humanoid.
How long has it been? The other memories are starting to fade. Rei was a trainer once. He might’ve even had a different name—the voice in Murky Cave just kept saying you, Rei enough times that he’d assumed maybe the voice knew better than he did. He’d collected gym badges. What a strange concept now, after everything he’s seen. Gyms and tournaments. Roasting bits of fruit and crackers over a campfire and sharing with his pokémon. Writing letters, he thinks wryly. He didn’t hate that world, but he didn’t love it either. He’s staring at his grey, five-fingered hands when he realizes this is probably the first time he’s wondered what’s going on at home.
Looking back is what doomed the bulbasaur in Pikachu’s story, after all. Sometimes it’s better not to question how you got somewhere, and instead figure out where you’re going.
He corners Gengar at the bottom of Sinister Woods. It was hard to design the battle so that Pikachu fainted first and Gengar fainted last, but by this point Rei’s had plenty of practice. It’s merely a matter of ducking out of the way of a few attacks, throwing a punch at Gengar’s gaseous body that’s sure to pass straight through him, and then—
“Nicely done, Rei,” Gengar chuckles, while the machop body stands over him. “Looks like you’ve won this time, kekeke.”
“Shut up.” He’s panting, harder than he’d like, but no matter. He’s won.
“What, you aren’t happy with your victory?” With an exaggerated motion, Gengar flops to look over at Pikachu. “Aww, your friend looks hurt. You should probably check on that.”
“Shut up,” Rei growls, his hands curled into fists. At this point it’s almost easier to believe that Gengar doesn’t even want to be saved. Why couldn’t he just have an easy fight and then decide he was going to join them, like Rayquaza?
“The funniest thing about humans,” Gengar drawls from the floor, “is you always forget that you can change too. Pokemon evolve all at once; we humans have to do it gradually, and it shows, doesn’t it? I could spot you from a mile away, Rei. The second you stepped into town last week, I could tell—just a dumb human, too wrapped up in his own misery to see the things that really matter.”
He’s not scary any more. He really wasn’t the first time, either—who names their evil squad Team Meanies? But he pronounces Rei’s name like it’s a hex, and somehow it rips straight to the heart.
It isn’t worth talking to him, but: “What would you know?” Rei snaps back.
“Me?” Gengar asks mockingly. “What would I know about what?”
He’s like this. He’s always like this. Rei’s in no mood to take jokes, though. “About things that matter.”
The gengar’s smile slides off of his face. “Quite a bit more than you, I’m afraid.”
Pffft. There he goes again, trying to make himself out to be the smartest, the wisest. What would he know? He hasn’t had to live this over and over again. He hasn’t even tried to save himself.
That’s fine. That’s what Rei is for. Everyone in this world needs saving. The ferals in the dungeons need to be saved from the madness that has overtaken them. The inhabitants of the town need to be saved from the falling star. And Gengar needs to be saved from himself. If Rei could only find the right body that would let him do all of that. That has to be why he keeps resetting, right?
“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Gengar,” Rei says, struggling to keep his voice calm even though his hands are shaking. This isn’t on script. None of this is on script. He could pummel the smile off of Gengar’s face, smash a new one in its place. His arms itch to do it. “You ran, after all. You abandoned Gardevoir. Wasn’t she important?”
Of its own accord, Gengar’s toothy grin slides from the gaseous confines of his cheeks. Perhaps in his shock he’s too confused to lie or deflect; what comes out is completely innocent, completely genuine: “She was. She was very important. She deserved better.”
Rei hopes he means it, hopes he’s right. Because it’s starting to look like Gengar understanding is the only thing that’ll get them out of this mess.
“Since you already know—and we’ll keep this little secret between the two of us, won’t we?” Gengar chuckles softly before Rei knocks him out. “If Ninetales cursed me out of my world into this one, why is she here as well?”
*
The battles and conversations and dungeons stopped feeling important a long time ago, but now they’re practically forgettable. Nothing else matters except saving him. But Gengar’s such a tricky bastard to pin down; he never hangs out around town. Rei spends a full week trekking through various dungeons, trying to see where he spends his time, but it’s no use. Gengar comes and goes as he pleases, and he really only pleases to show up to make Rei’s life miserable. That, and Murky Cave.
So they end up there again, trekking through the depths.
The ghost is bad for company. Maybe it’s because they’re both such good liars. Rei stubbornly pushes through the dungeon on his own, batting back the shadows with vine whips until the misdreavus and duskull stop peering out of the woodworks.
“Have you ever met a sableye?” Gengar asks suddenly.
Rei racks his brains, and then unleashes a cloud of paralysis spores from the bulb on his back. The seviper behind him falls to the ground, twitching. Sableye. On this run? He’s not sure. Does it matter? He’s not sure about that, either. “Once or twice,” he manages.
Gengar shrugs. “You’ve seen them before, one of these times, I’m sure. Spiky ones, with all the gems. Still ghosts, though.” He blinks; for a moment, the chamber is warm. “Would it surprise you to know they’re born as smooth like me?”
Rei inhales heavily and then body slams a crobat out of the way. Oof. The bulbasaur body can take a lot of beating, at least, and it’s not like the inhabitants of Murky Cave were ever the hard part of the dungeon. That’s still further ahead.
“Their primary diet is gemstones, you see,” Gengar adds quietly, eyes burning orange with flame. “The minerals sustain them, although in times of scarcity they’ll feed supplementally. But sometimes when they do, there’s usually something that doesn’t quite sit right with them. It festers inside of them, gnaws away at them. But they’re quite resilient, being ghosts and all. So what they’ll do is sequester the impurity deep inside, and surround it with a thick coat so that it can’t infect anyone else. The coat grows and grows, adds facets upon facets to itself, and then it slowly moves to the surface of the skin.”
He has to answer. He has to say something. But what comes out is an abrupt, surprised: “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because,” Gengar says calmly, “when the impurity surfaces, it isn’t festering any more. It’s a gemstone.”
The ghost has always been cynical and cryptic, dancing around the disasters he claims to adore, but this is something new, even for him. “Why are you telling me this?” Rei repeats, harsher than he’d intended.
The silhouette of the stairs slowly solidifies through the inky blackness of the dungeon. Jagged steps cut through the haze, leading further down into the abyss. Last stop.
“All these mysterious dungeons are always harboring something too, some strange, legendary anomaly at the very center. It’s locked safely away from the rest of the world. But which is it, a gemstone or a fester?” Gengar turns and casually spears Rei with his stare, one foot on the stairs. “What a silly question. It’s both.”
Rei tilts his head up, brushes past him, and descends. They enter the final chamber together.
The first questions are the same. And then, finally, the voice asks: “If the correct answer once more eludes you, Rei. What will you do next time?”
“Does it matter?” Rei asks bleakly. Once he succeeds, then what? Does he go back to living with all these people? Settle down as if he hadn’t reset and pruned and predicted around all of them? He knows them, and understands them now, in ways that they’ll never comprehend. Lombre once confided that his dream was to run a cooking stall. Makuhita confessed that she only got into the dojo business because that’s what everyone expected of her. Manectric wants to study a way to cage lightning in a little glass orb, some sort of way to replace their torches—but it doesn’t matter, because none of them ever do it. They never break script.
“I don’t think it does.” The voice breaks him out of his reverie. “Do you?”
What a strange question. Of course it matters. If he can just figure out the right person who can clear all these obstacles, to right this wrong world, then he can finally be free.
“This friend of yours, this Gengar. You’ve met him many times. If he wore the face of another, would he still be him?”
The voice had tried to explain this to him once, a few runs ago: bodies are physical constructs to hold the soul, to hide the brightness from seeping through and searing the world with its sheer power and intensity. Some souls are brighter than others, and could light the world like a sun. Such a soul would be recognizable no matter what form it took. And some souls were fractured, scattered, cut up in a such a way that their light only shone through on the edges. But were those souls any less?
And the voice had echoed firmly through the darkness, repeating the question: Were those souls any less to you, Rei?
He’d answered wrong first, but now—
“Of course it would. By now I could recognize him anywhere.”
The voice presses, gently, like dabbing lace over a fire. “Do you think he’d still have to struggle? If he were born instead as a Rayquaza, would he immediately have his problems solved?”
Rayquaza was lonely. That was her secret, holed up in a crystal spire at the apex of the world, with only the clouds for company. She pretended she liked it. She pretended it was easier to push the fools away. But she was a sadder person for it. “I don’t think so.”
“The world will always try to shape you into someone you don’t want to be. Everyone has different ideas of who the right person is, and the right person for them now may be completely different from the right person for them in ten years. You’ll never please them all.” Here, in the darkness, all he can feel is someone else’s soul, and it flares brighter than a thousand suns, but it doesn’t burn. “But maybe you can try being good enough for yourself this time, Rei.”
The void swallows them whole.
*
He can’t help but take the voice’s advice to heart this time when he goes in as an eevee. It was his favorite pokémon back when he was a human, he thinks. He’s not sure. Those memories are so long ago, so hidden, that it’s hard to even look back at them. Better to keep forging ahead. There’s nothing to be found in the past.
Gengar has a strange new question for him—what would we do if there was another Gengar? Would we also call them Gengar?—but Rei pushes him aside. He was close. He was so close. He just has to make it back to Murky Cave, and then answer that one question.
It’s an easy answer, when he thinks about it. What did Gengar want when he pulled the tail of a ninetales? The answer’s obvious in hindsight. He wanted the same thing Rei did.
“So then answer me this,” the voice says. In the darkness are two eyes made of amber shards, and Rei can see himself trapped in the pupils. “Why did that human come to choose to pull the tale of a ninetales in the first place?”
“He wanted something very badly,” Rei says softly. “And he thought that Ninetales would help him get it.”
“What did the human want?”
This time it really is Rei at the peak of the mountain, his hand outstretched, the silky tail in his grasp. Tears rim his eyes, but they aren’t from the cold or the wind.
“He wanted to be cursed.”
“And why,” the voice asks, “would he want that?”
Why indeed? Why would anyone want that?
Rei flinches, waiting for the familiar pull in his feet, as if the universe wants to swallow him home, but nothing happens. The answer comes slowly, but with it, an aching sense of finality: “He thought he deserved it.”
“He thought he deserved it.” The voice laughs, almost dismissively. “My power is to punish those with a corruption of their heart’s desire. I was met by a fool who wanted riches, so I gave him the power to change all he touched to gold. In doing so he learned that what mattered to him most was transient. In entombing her in gold, he doomed himself forever.” Sparks emanate from the darkness, golden pinpricks of light skittering across the ground. “So you see my dilemma then, don’t you, Rei?”
They wait for Rei to answer, but the words don’t come to his throat. He wasn’t expecting another question, after all, and—how would he even answer this one? “I … no?”
“For those who invoke my curse, I corrupt your greatest wish. But what if your wish is to be cursed and die? What would I give you?”
Haven’t you wondered, a silky voice drawls, how Pelipper opens her mail?
This world felt like a thin veneer of the human world disguised as fantasy because it was. It felt like a pale imitation of the place he’d known, an elementary reimagining of the human world, because that’s precisely how it had come to be.
Rei’s heart leaps up into his throat, almost like it’s trying to choke him, but the thoughts don’t stop coming. The voice—Ninetales—doesn’t lay curses at random. If someone wanted to die, how would you punish them? What would you make them do instead?”
“You would curse them to live.”
“I would curse them to live.” The voice pauses to ponder, but the void does not devour him. “I would disagree, but only on a semantic level. I have cursed you with life, but that is only a symptom, not the root. If you truly wanted to die once you leave this place, you could. You will walk the mortal coil just like anyone else. You thought you deserved what was coming for you, so I cursed you to see yourself for who you truly are. And what did you see looking back at you, Rei?”
Pikachu’s righteous battle cry. Gardevoir’s whispers on the edges of his consciousness. Rayquaza, raging at the heavens; Groudon, gouging great trenches into the earth. Even the ferals in the dungeons. All of them felt familiar, like the words were his even if the voices sounded like another, and—
Gengar, staring at the visage of a gardevoir in his dreams, and then running off with tears in his eyes. How had he phrased it?
Too wrapped up in his own misery to see the things that really matter.
“I saw someone who needed to be rescued,” Rei responds, the words like lead in his mouth.
“Rescue. A strange word. In your language’s ancient tongue it meant to cast out.” The voice hums for a moment, and then something in their cadence softens. Shards of amber round off into droplets of honey. “You humans are such strange creatures, always meting out your hate and love to the ones who least deserve it.”
“So you cursed me.” It was a kind curse, at first. The very first run had almost been enjoyable. Saving people. It felt good until he realized it didn’t matter.
“So I cursed you, Rei. I cursed you to be reborn over and over again until you could see that you were a right person for this world, if you could only live with yourself and learn from your mistakes. You did a bad thing, but it did not mean you couldn’t do good things again. You cannot always change others. But you can help them, and sometimes you must risk yourself if you want to rescue them.”
“You wanted me to be better than Gengar,” Rei tries. It’s a wild guess, but it feels true. That’s what Ninetales would want him to learn, right? That he can’t save others until he can fix himself?
“I wanted you to understand him. There is darkness in all of us, Rei. We are all prone to moments of weakness. But it is what we do after that defines us. Do you flee? Do you deny it? Or do you rise above?”
No. Ninetales wants him to understand something entirely different. Were he still a human, his cheeks would burn with shame. Still, the eevee’s body shakes as if from exertion. “I fled.”
“The human boy who pulled my tail,” the voice says quietly, “was quite a fool. He had done a terrible thing, one that drove him up my mountain in his madness and desperation and self-loathing, but doing that terrible thing did not mean he deserved a cursed existence. I saw that as soon as I looked at him. And he fled in fear, while his pokémon took the brunt of my wrath, but I would never curse someone undeserving. I undid Gardevoir’s curse and came for you, Rei.”
This time, Rei can’t bring himself to look anywhere but at his paws. Trapped in a world where the only real people were him and his shadow. This is how you punish someone who wants to die. “You cursed me to live with myself.”
“I cursed you to rescue yourself,” the voice says simply.
Rei stares down, bewildered. “Rescue myself?”
It was true; he’d been undeniably drawn to Gengar since the beginning. What a strange pokémon, with so much anger and guilt bubbling just beneath the surface. Surely there had to be something deeper—that’s why Rei had gone after him, right? Because they’d been so different, right? Not because they’d been so similar.
No, that wasn’t true. He’d been drawn to Gengar because they felt the same. And it hadn’t seemed fair that Rei got to be the hero when they were hardly any different.
“And you were quite slow about it, too,” the voice says with a scoff. “When you saw your vindictiveness and hate in someone else, you were so quick to condemn it, and then even faster to forgive it. This world took a lot more cues from you than me. A fictional world where you beat your friends until you can save them. What a tiresomely human thought process, but it got the point across. When you return to your world you may find room in your heart to be kind to your friends instead of forcing them away, Rei. And you may even find the courage to extend that courtesy to yourself.”
He can’t help but focus on one word out of so many: “When I return?”
“When.” The shadows shift once more. “I am vengeful, but I am not vindictive. If your heart changes, my curses fade. But the lessons will stay with you, Rei, and they will stay for a good while. That is the true nature of my curse.”
“But if I return …” That wasn’t an answer. What was he supposed to—“What do I do now?”
The void leaks in on the corners of his vision, but where it used to be dark, it’s light. A cold wind blows around him, lashing him with snow; the shadow of a golden fox and an enormous mountain looms overhead.
“Now?” the voice chuckles, a low, rasping sound like the popping of the last coals in a fire. “Now, you live.”
*
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