Rewind | Pokémon Fanfiction

Interlude One | A Phobia of You

Insert Song | Phobia | Stray Kids

Some words only amplify the gloom. They are better when unuttered. It is times like this that silence proves itself the better bawd of mercy.

"I just want you to know that we should move on."

Yet those words, on leaving proud lips, can never be recollected. They'd vaporise and glower in the mind's eye. Lofty ideals as truth and victory are no different.

At least, that's how it should've been all along. Those ideals serve no better purpose here, for the forsaken who forsakes others.

That is the role Adolf accepts the day he met Yan. How long ago was that? There is no conception as time or age. Not in the castle in the sky, that freeze-frame of a film, dissociated, a plot hole in the world's woven story. A side quest that could be easily dismissed.

A nothing.

Had he truly given up on her? Even his steel heart isn't sure now. Who would draw a line and erase it later? When a line is created, it shall lie on a plane. A plane that has too many other lines, too many other routes.

Detaching from the past seems to be one of them, yet no matter how much he erases that line, it will always regenerate. It will always be there.

Now the line swells and distorts into a body. Yan's body, motionless.

So all that he could do is to ask, "Am I a hypocrite, too?"

Because it is such a moment that forces him to see himself, like a Luxray coerced to see its mane, its sharp gaze, in a Mega Alakazam's many spoons. All the psychic energy would convert into another excuse as "That couldn't have been me." After all, Adolf relishes self-doubt like aged wine. He'd swirl it in a glass and breathe and sip that saccharine fluid, a smile crawling on his lips to conceal the woes behind his eyelids. His frown makes itself a misfit on such optimistic expression. His laughter is tinged with green envy as he walks to her body and runs his thin fingers down her hair. Oh, her taffeta hair!

Adolf shifts back and glances at the window, the clouds shimmering and swimming about outside. She couldn't have died, could she? No pulse awakened, no static, no "I am sorry"- Nothing.

What is he to do now? All he has developed is an uncanny fear that has grown roots to stab the lumpy soil that is his being. He has rejected it once; then he could do it again.

Should he? And would he? His blameworthy hands grapple the air for someplace to point, something to accuse. To be free of fault, he must first find something seemingly faultless to play scapegoat with. He wishes there is someone, just someone, but he can have none. He snaps his fingers and feels all the heat rush through his veins, his hair. Are these malleable strings attached to a pathetic excuse of a human, or a true marionette ready to burn?

His mouth dares not open, his nostrils expanding and contracting to scoop tight knots of breath. What is this scent, this stray perfume? It speaks to him in every way, of how to caress and be caressed, of how to forget and be forgotten, of how to hope and to be hoped for, of how to be. Elusive as the Elysium it would present itself to be, it laughs shrilly and punches his armpits.

What dirt holds between the hands and the shoulders? Is it... gossip? Is it betrayal? Is it dread?

Adolf shudders and hugs his knees, desiring some obsolete warmth, and he knows, should he let go, this heavy fragrance will morph into a noose to break his head. He's just made of wires, not veins, not hair, his skin but pure oak. Yet he is every fibre a human, unexpectedly still alive for the three years he has been swept away from home. Three years and counting, he has to remind himself time and again. Three years and counting. Because he still believes in time.

The air snakes around him and snuffs the sun outside, and the sky darkens gradually into a pool of black blood. There is the sun and the moon and their endless, exasperating cycle, but nothing of time. Still, he believes in time.

This perfume coddles up to him and licks his lips. With a soft gaze, it asks: Is it death?

Adolf shakes his head. Once. Twice. Thrice. He's enraptured by fear's hallucinatory scent once more.

The fear of what the world will be, should Yan not wake up. Or something else entirely consumes him bit by bit by bit by bit till he is weary and broken, more fragile than glass and porcelain, less dead than a zombie.

Adolf looks at Yan and laughs: it is, at first, a series of staccato breaths, and as his mouth widens, and his chest flares, and his lungs explode, it gradually morphs into a haunting, Mightyena-like echo. He hasn't laughed for a long time it felt so unearthly to him. It didn't sound like him at all.

In his peripheral vision, though arguably a figment of his imagination, the woman's lips curl by an inch.

The gesture, however conceived it may be, startles Adolf into another silence.

Eyes dart across the space to find some gauze, some potted plant, something that would bring him closer to a form of healing. Barrenness sleeps here instead.

He touches himself. The scars are always there, littering his flesh, his forearm and backhand, and down his spine. He looks at them quizzically from time to time when fear bores him and when staring at Yan's body bores him and when seeing the world at a standstill bores him. When he bears into them some intricate holes, with whatever hopefully intense stare he can now manage, he glances across the arid desert of a clothed woman as well.

Everything he gleans tells him the same story over and over again, as if there's some obsession with it, as if he ought to accept it somehow. He blinks and blinks silent tears he never knew had been a thing. Rather, it was as if he invented tears and solitude.

Fear can't claim him, but he can't claim fear either. What he claims is that one sensation, of how he remembers to forget what it's like to be in captivity. It keeps him in suspense, that one day salvation will arrive and he will be shoved into the oblivion ocean to drown his sorrows truly. Till then, he shall fight fear with tears and solitude as his only allies.

He shall hope to see Yan's smile, that she would wake up and joke about life or herself.

He glances at the wall he resents and steps away from it. His hands reach hers and feels a marble instead.

Those words glare at him and tease him like they were nothing, like they should mean nothing.

All he can do is to face the wall or face Yan, so he faces the cursive script, the beautiful arrogance hidden in the elegance.

Until you have awoken, you shall not return.

A smile tugs at his lips, and blood adorns his face. Blood that he can't rub off for years. Blood he knows will always be there, a part of his living hell. Blood known as guilt and regret.

Adolf knows now, how truth and victory are a couple.

But he can't reconcile.