Chapter Text
His subconscious thinks before he does, some part of him seeking closure and fury and penance. Calem’s feet have led him to somewhere he never thought he’d visit again.
The entrance to Lysandre Café is boarded up, blinds long shut. The external surfaces are all grimy, trash piled in heaps beneath the windows. Calem isn’t sure if it’s fitting, necessarily, but it certainly is ironic that the base of a man so obsessed with beauty would end up like this.
Conveniently—maybe too conveniently—the doorway itself is accessible. Calem doesn’t need to force it open, even if the hinges groan in protest and the doorknob has rusted more than a little bit.
The inside of the café is dark, with light only streaming in from the open doorway. With aid from a small pocket flashlight, it’s clear that the place is dusty, both suspended in the air and thickly coated on every surface.
And yet, it’s not quite enough for a place meant to be untouched for over half a decade. Calem can spot a cleaning effort and somewhat recently-used mugs. Plus, of course, the wide-open secret entrance to Lysandre Labs. He recalls something about Paxton visiting, and of course Grisham and Griselle probably frequent it, so it’s not as surprising as it could have been.
Right before he heads down into the labs, it strikes Calem that he should probably call out his pokémon, or at least a couple of them. The thought is a little embarassing—he’s sure they heard his minor breakdown earlier—but it’s not like they haven’t seen worse.
Midnight’s teal eyes glow in the dark and Falx’s white fur somehow still slips into the shadows. The meowstic hops onto his left shoulder, a tiny paw patting his head, and Falx slinks over to accompany him on the right. Even if it’s only a third of his team, Calem is comforted by their presence.
Together, side-by-side, they descend into the basement floors of Lysandre Labs.
If he’s being honest, Calem isn’t entirely sure why he’s here, or what he’s even looking for. Something in his soul called him here, so he’ll just have to listen until that call has been answered and satisfied.
A teleporter to the right glows a sickly jaundiced yellow, but he first tries the elevator. It quickly becomes clear that the stupid thing requires a key. It lines up with what he remembers about Serena’s story, but that doesn’t make it any less irritating. He supposes he’ll just have to go looking for one.
Calem first turns right, glancing at Falx. She seems relatively at ease for now, so he continues without fear. He navigates the partially-collapsed maze of computers and other machines, cracked and tarnished. Some still feebly glow with blinking orange-yellow lights, never staying on for more than a second at a time, a final elegy to their old purpose. His footsteps echo like thunder by contrast.
Just as they turn around the bend, Falx growls and lunges forward, performing a quick attack on a lone houndoom that has taken up residency. Calem narrows his eyes.
“Midnight, stay with me. Falx, play defense. Spume, come on out and use water shuriken,” he quietly instructs, every sound already booming in this deserted underground.
Spume neatly emerges from his pokéball while the houndoom snarls back at Falx, teeth glinting in the low light as it clamps its jaws around one of her legs. Spume’s water shuriken dislodges it, knocking it away soaking wet. The crunch wasn’t very effective, but a few strands of soft white fur now dance in the air.
“Quick attack, brick break,” Calem orders, the doubled-up attacks on the prone houndoom knocking it out quickly. He doesn’t feel bad about ganging up on a wild pokémon like this, but he doesn’t feel any malice, either. He won’t make this take longer than it needs to.
He murmurs a “thanks” to Spume as he returns the greninja to his pokéball, whipping out a super potion to quickly spray on Falx’s leg. It heals quickly, the damage minimal.
From there, they continue on. Calem takes the teleporter hiding behind another wall of dilapidated machinery, not savoring the brief feeling of nausea and partial nonexistence. Midnight and Falx seem completely unbothered by the experience, as expected for a psychic- and dark-type respectively.
There isn’t much immediately, only a couple books of various colors strewn about the table. Calem flips through them quickly, flashlight revealing maddened sentences about Lysandre’s vision and Team Flare’s virtues. The words would taste like bile on his tongue, sour and bitter and burning. The sensation transfers over to his thoughts seamlessly.
Calem leaves the books shut tightly, taking the teleporter back and heading down a different path. He comes across a gaping pit in the floorboards, the metal warped and bent inwards like it once bore a great weight before finally collapsing. He calls out Cirrus to help him across, Midnight accompanying him, while Falx simply leaps over with great agility.
On the other side, he spots a manectric and electrike in the middle of the way forward. He swaps out Cirrus for Verdure, the space too cramped to accommodate more than three pokémon at a time.
“Falx, Midnight, throat chop and psychic on the electrike. Verdure, sleep powder on the manectric,” Calem gestures towards the electric-types.
Midnight’s ears lift as a wave of psychic power targets the electrike, Falx swiftly knocking it out with a follow-up attack. The small pokémon hardly stood a chance.
Distracted by the quick takedown of its younger counterpart, the manectric falls victim to Verdure’s sleep powder, stumbling before collapsing to the ground. From there, it’s three powerful pokémon all directing attacks on the sleeping manectric; naturally, it doesn’t take long for the sleep to fade into unconsciousness.
Calem recalls Verdure, the venusaur far too large to comfortably navigate the labs, regrouping with Midnight and Falx as he strides forward, returning to their previous arrangement.
The group comes across numerous other pokémon as they venture through Lysandre Labs, the place absolutely infested. At least they found a home in this wreckage; Calem is sure that the pokémon are using the space better than Team Flare ever did. He does find himself a little concerned that they’ll get into something dangerous, though, something left behind or still able to be activated. Hopefully that concern is unwarranted.
His two partners easily deal with the ekans and honedge that pop up here and there with super-effective attacks, not taking more time than necessary. Eventually, Falx points towards an elevator key stuck behind an electronic lock. He’d just wreck it, but he’s not sure if that would trigger any alarms or security measures that are somehow still active.
Calem hums, sending out Ion, pointing towards the electronic lock. “Try a thunder wave.”
Ion yips and directs a thin stream of electricity towards the lock. It buzzes and beeps, overloaded with electricity, the storage door creaking open. Calem scruffs Ion’s fur a little and returns him before the jolteon gets up to his usual shenanigans.
With an elevator key in hand, he starts heading in the direction he thinks will lead to the looping teleporter, deeper into the lab. Calem tries not to get bogged down in the details—he already knows how horrible this all is—but when he flicks his flashlight over a couple whiteboards, he can’t resist the urge to look closer.
He sees what look like energy diagrams for Infinity Energy, potential wells hypothesizing about Mega Evolution. A drawing of energy being siphoned from a helioptile, redirected towards empowering and overloading other pokémon, sometimes even forcing an evolution. Calem feels a hint of seething anger curl his fingers into fists, but he forces himself to move on, though not before erasing the whiteboards’ contents, as inconvenient as it is after so long.
The final teleporter is in sight, but Calem quickly diverts to one last dead-end room. It’s a large rock with precise operating machinery hovering above it. He’s not quite sure what it is or why it’s important until he reaches out to touch it. The moment his skin makes contact with the rough mineral surface, Calem feels something like an electric shock, jolting his system and causing him to recoil, fingers twitching.
But it’s not electricity, not quite. It’s Infinity Energy. This is part of a standing stone from Route 10. It’s a piece of a gravestone for a pokémon killed by the Ultimate Weapon three thousand years ago.
Surely they had to know. Or, at the very least, their inspections would have led them to figure it out. And yet, this stone is still here. And yet, they still went through with their schemes.
Desecrating the dead to recreate the method of their murder. It’s despicable.
Calem makes a mental note to call for an extraction and repatriation of the stone, roughly shoving the machinery away from the stone before taking the teleporter back to the entrance. He recalls Midnight and Falx, the elevator too small to comfortably fit all of them. Thankfully, the elevator key works, allowing Calem to descend to the second basement floor.
This floor is mostly a single long hallway, or at least what remains intact and accessible. At the end of the corridor is a jail cell, a massive one capable of containing a giant, with steel bars fitted to its frame.
He stares at it until the dark lines blur in his vision, seeming as though they stretch up to the heavens and lingering when he blinks.
With a click of a button, a greninja appears beside him. Calem’s voice is cold.
“Use brick break.”
The metal bars fracture into pieces, hitting the floor with enough noise to make his ears ring. The ends still stay fixed to the floor and ceiling, now made jagged with the break, but between them is a large gap, easily maneuverable between.
There. Now nobody can ever be trapped in there again. It’s the least he could do for AZ after everything, a final parting gift.
Calem takes the elevator down to the lowest floor alone and in silence, only the squeaks of the lift interrupting it. The doors open to the third basement floor, the true depths of Lysandre Labs.
He’s never been down here, either, only heard stories from Serena, but even then, the place was fully lit up and functional. Now, only the low-level emergency lighting is on, scarlet hues bleeding from the base of the walls. They cannot fight against the shadows that creep from the darkness of the ceilings and corners, only bathing the corridors in faint ebbing vermillion.
It’s colder down here, too. There are no pokémon to warm the place and make it home, only the brutalistic architecture built for function over form. The distance from the sunlit surface is made clearer than ever.
All in all, it feels like Calem has just stepped into the abyss.
He walks alone with only his shadow for company, long and fading from the dim lighting, far taller than he. Calem meets a dead end and turns the corner.
It’s the room he’s heard so much about. The floor glows beneath him, amber lights encased in glass. The Team Flare logo is still proudly displayed on the six computers, half on each side to create an open walkway in the middle, still shining an ominous red.
At the end are two buttons, orange and blue with one on either side, placed too high for a child to comfortably reach. They were the buttons that could trigger the Ultimate Weapon. The buttons that never mattered in the first place.
The twin buttons flank the centerpiece, the gleaming schematics of the Ultimate Weapon, displaying just as brightly as it surely was five years ago, as if it’s the only thing that has been left untouched by time. It’s beautiful beyond compare. It’s disgusting beyond belief.
Calem bows his head. He couldn’t say if it was out of respect or shame. Emotions roil in his gut, a churning vortex of conflicted feelings.
Have they done enough? Has he done enough?
From an inner pocket, he pulls out an emergency flashdrive, plugging it into the main computer and extracting the available data. It takes longer than he’d like, Calem suddenly finding himself terribly impatient.
After what feels like an eternity, the files are transferred, and he stashes the drive away for later. He breathes, but it does not feel as though oxygen fills his lungs, or at least not enough.
A pause. Calem releases all six of his pokémon, the group fanning out from the center. He catches various expressions of confusion and concern on their faces.
He steps forward, gaze fixed on the screen. He’s close enough that he can make out the slight warping of the material, fuzzy splotches from long-time use and disrepair, marks of imperfection that prove that it’s real.
Falx suddenly barks in alarm, dashing towards him.
Calem punches the screen.
Cracks spiderweb out from his fist, long fractures growing from the impact site, forming large splinters in the glass. The display flickers, blue-screening with columns of chromatic aberrations. The smooth lines and multicolored hues make it almost look like the petals of a flower, but elongated and uncanny.
Falx grabs his sleeve and yanks away his hand. Only a few small shards of glass drip from the main break, the chemically-toughened glass designed to not outright shatter. His hand is still bleeding, though; Calem can feel the blood sluggishly ooze from the wounds, a few chips of glass lacerating his skin. It hurts, but distantly, like there’s a vast canyon between him and the pain.
He stares at his hand for a moment before slowly lifting his head to look at his team.
“Help me,” Calem pleads, and it’s clear he doesn’t mean with his wound.
Arceus, he must really look desperate.
Ion is the first to act, shooting a thunderbolt at one of the computer towers. It sparks wildly, tendrils of smoke rising from some of the ports, the lights frenetically engaging before dimming for good. He yips triumphantly, the proud howl of a leader.
The sounds of cathartic destruction begin to surround Calem as his partners raze the place. Falx plucks Midnight up by the scruff and sets him down in front of Calem, barking an order. Midnight meows an affirmation, eyes glowing brighter as his psychic powers gently extract the few pieces of glass from Calem’s hand, then takes some bandages from his bag and wraps them around. For good measure, the meowstic uses safeguard. Falx flicks her tail approvingly.
Calem stands and Falx keeps close to his legs, alternating sides as he walks. His head is still fuzzy, a little light-headed, but he’s not going to sit still.
Spume practically drowns one of the other computers and Verdure knocks over another with sheer heft and strength, Cirrus and Midnight playing some damage control to keep everyone safe. Predictable, after what Calem pulled, and more in line with their personalities.
He approaches the orange button, leveraging his fingers around the edges and yanking it from its socket. Wires hang like vines from the gap, writhing and dead. He tosses the plastic onto the floor, kicking it away. A small drop of blood had fallen onto it at some point, a dull streak of red smearing onto the floor in the button’s wake.
Falx takes a cue and indulges in the destruction, trotting over to the blue button and swiping it off cleanly with a slash of her scythe-like horn, before sauntering back to Calem’s side. She looks pleased with herself
He continues, ripping out wires and felling machinery. His heart beats quickly, a sort of horrified euphoria rushing through him.
It feels like terror. It feels like freedom.
The screen he originally punched has long gone dark by now, cut off from power and program. The cracks have only grown, now reaching to the edges of the surface, branching signs of the impact slithering like fractals. In the dim and inconsistent lighting, the monitor has become more reflective, like an inky mirror.
Calem stares into it. He isn’t sure if he sees himself.
It shows a shadowy outline of his figure, vague and more than a little fuzzy around the edges. In the lack of light, though, his eyes are clear, piercing and glowing, remnant aftershocks of Infinity Energy. They do not look like the eyes of a human.
He freezes. What is he doing? What has he become? It scares him, something deep within him, to see himself so ill-defined in the reflection, like a creature of darkness and instinct, utterly lost to the void. His mirror image has become the shadow that clings to his heels and follows him wherever he goes, the shadow he can never escape, the shadow that takes the form of the mere idea of a man. Calem thought he had grasped the sun, used its light to banish the shadow to oblivion—but it was only waiting, lurking and unseen, because you can never escape from your own shadow.
His success was fundamentally false. He was blinded by the sun he thought he’d reached, letting it shift his gaze away from his own doubts and fears. A solar flare, just as bright and maddening, leaving dancing colors behind in his eyelids and etching into his retinas.
No. No more. No more will Calem let himself hold onto the sun that only burns and blinds. The light he makes might be paltry and dim, but it’s still his, shining at just the right hue.
“We’re done here,” he announces.
There is once again quiet in the room, seven individuals standing in the wreckage. It smells like ashes without a fire. Calem begins to walk out, and his team follows.
He recalls them as he enters the elevator, ascending back to the uppermost floor. Alone, but not truly.
Calem climbs the stairs out of Lysandre Labs and exits Lysandre Café. He squints against the fading sunlight, shielding his eyes with his bandaged and bloody hand. It’s sunset now, night encroaching on Lumiose City.
He steps forward, feeling feather-light and at peace as he leaves Lysandre behind, alive or not. Calem is no longer the scared child he was back then; he won’t let it control him anymore. He has people he wants to go back to, who he will go back to.
And so he returns.