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Four months after Lucas disappeared, Barry nearly ended the world.
In Barry’s defence, he’d not meant to do that, but this did not seem to make Champion Cynthia, Dawn or the man from the International Police any happier. Also in Barry’s defence was the fact that at some point in the last three years, he might have…sorta forgotten that the legendry Pokémon he’d befriended could create rifts in space that were somewhat bigger than they were…safe.
Dawn had been deeply unforgiving about this mistake and had yelled. Whether Dawn was mad because ‘Lucas is dead, get over it like I did’ or because ‘Lucas is fine, stop nearly destroying the fabric of reality or he’ll be mad at you when he gets back’ seemed to switch on a dime.
Palkia was refusing to interact with Barry now, and without his friend, Barry couldn’t try anything like that again.
Not with a teenager’s budget.
Only the rich could afford to do that sort of thing thoughtlessly, and even if he really wanted to save Lucas from wherever he’d got lost, Barry didn’t want to hurt anyone either.
Barry had thought that this would fix everything, but it… hadn’t.
It might have even made it worse.
A cold night in a cell in the holding room of the police station before Barry had been bailed the next morning had given him way too much time to think.
Barry already could see, with the benefit of a different view and listening to so many people yell at him, that he’d been…wrong.
Before he’d even had time to settle in the cell, he got visited by his boss at the newspaper and was ‘let go’ from his job as a junior reporter. Barry, chest achingly empty and aware that he’d not been doing a very good job of being a reporter recently, even before yesterday, hadn’t argued with her for the first time ever.
The disappointment in his editor’s eyes had hurt. There had been a point where he’d wanted her to be proud of his work so badly—
Now he didn’t even say anything as she walked back out.
Everything had gone wrong, and now—now he had to figure out what to do next.
Barry never did anything slowly—do it fast or never, that had always been his motto. So it felt right that one night of quiet was all he needed to stare at himself and decide that he did not like the person he was now.
He’d decided that with utter conviction and vowed to change that by the time the sun spilled icy light across the concrete floor. Soon after dawn the door was unlocked, and he was led out to the interrogation room. Foot jiggling with too much energy, he was left in that room to stare into space aimlessly, waiting for his wallet, phone, and Pokémon to be given back to him.
The door opened with a click at last, and one of the international police offices stepped in.
She was a quiet woman with purple hair, and a had who’d stood in the background as the other officer had put the cuffs onto Barry. He’d barely even noticed her, and even now, staring right at her with no one else to distract from her, she was somewhat…forgettable.
“Now that you’ve had a night to consider, I would like to hear your reasoning for those…actions of yesterday.” She said, seemly not caring to take more time to introduce herself.
“Does it matter?” Barry said, sinking low in his chair.
Even if he’d turned over a new leaf in the last twelve hours, Barry didn’t want to help someone like her that didn’t understand anything about him.
“I want to know the circumstances so that I understand why you tried to harness Palkia’s power so recklessly.” She repeated, tone even and a little melodic.
Barry folded his arms and glowered.
He knew that he’d not been doing the right thing. He’d done enough thinking last night, wondering if this was how a villain would feel, locked up and disgraced. That’s what he was probably being called in the papers and internet. Those that wouldn’t call him an ‘unstable child’ anyway.
But he still didn’t want to talk about it.
So, he glared.
There was a light sigh, and she pulled a phone free of her suit jacket and inspected the notes on it.
“A friend of yours, a professor’s assistant named Lucas, disappeared four months and five days ago from his home where he lived with his mother. There has been no sign of him since, and he left all his clothes, his Pokémon team and his belongings like wallet, money and other such essentials behind. A body has yet to be found. He was declared dead two weeks ago.”
Barry’s chest ached, and his skin itched as he listened to the exact words that he’d heard over and over again, on the TV, from family and friends and strangers alike.
The same empty words that always meant the same bloody thing.
No one knew what had happened to Lucas but that they’d still decided he was dead. Barry had wanted to know what the truth was, even if it cost a lot to be sure. He wanted to know if he should just give up and cry and accept he’d never see Lucas again.
Until Barry was sure, he couldn’t seem to just…let go.
Barry really hadn’t realised how much he’d miss Lucas until he wasn’t there. Lucas had been his ‘other’ friend. Dawn had been there since before he could walk, but the Professor’s assistant had just turned up during that first day of their adventure.
And after that, he’d just…kept turning up.
Lucas had gone on adventures with him sometimes. He’d been funny and a little too calm and soft-spoken, even when everything had been going to hell. No matter what happened, Lucas reacted with moderate surprise and would immediately commit to helping solve the problem, even if it was just a key that had gotten lost or a villain threatening the world.
Lucas who was always just…there. And now he was gone, and Barry might have just completely messed up any chance he had to change that.
The woman was considering him, eyes a little dim in a way that he couldn’t read and her mouth a little pursed as if in thought.
“Your plan was never going to work.” She said.
Barry’s fingernails bit into his palms, and he flinched but still stayed quiet as he tried to project as much of his rage at her while still keeping it stuck in his head so that he wouldn’t start yelling.
There was a soft sigh, and she seemed to decide something.
“I…understand your…anger.”
“Yeah? How you reckon that.” Barry spat.
"I’ve talked to a lot of people like you before.”
“What do you mean—What’s people like ‘me’ mean?”
“People that are trying to cope with someone…vanishing for no reason. I know what it’s like because I was lost, as your friend is. And now I work to help others. Like you and like me. I’ve seen this from both sides. So, I understand, even if you don’t believe that I can.” She said, and her soft voice was almost…casual.
Something dropped out of Barry’s chest and left it yawningly empty. That should have felt like fear or dread, but that gap was the place that terror and anger had been festering alone and to be suddenly rising over that it left only a deep and burning sort of expectation.
“You know what happened to Lucas?” Barry asked and felt like his whole world was depending on her answer.
“I…suspect I know.” She said, with just enough hesitation to make the blood in Barry’s ears feel like it was punching through the veins.
“What do you mean—explain it already!”
Her pause was shorter this time, more thoughtful as she shifted to rest her weight on her other leg. “Have you heard of Fallers?”
“No—what’s a bloody Faller?”
“Someone that fell through space and time. A hole opens, and…people just…disappear. Sometimes just for now. Rarely forever, but usually for a while. Sometimes a long while before they find a way back.”
“How long for you?”
“Ten years passed before I reappeared in this reality.”
Barry stared at her and felt his gut drop. “Ten years?”
“Yes. I suspect that’s why I remember so little of my life before I was found again in Alola by the international Police.”
“Ten years…?” Barry repeated, burying his hands into his hair. “I don’t—I don’t want to lose Lucas for a decade! I don’t want him to forget me! Maybe you were just a not very good trainer, and that’s why you took so long to get back?”
“I was a Tower Tycoon in Hoenn as a teenager. You should know the weight of that title, child of Palmer.”
The sudden reminder of his father cut a bit deeper than Barry liked, and he immediately shied away from giving her reason to rub salt into that wound. His father—that was something Barry didn’t want to think about.
He didn’t want to know if this had finally managed to make himself a disappointment.
“Oh…oh, never mind, you’re a better fighter than Lucas then—Maybe not me, but I’ve got Palkia even if he’s not talking to me right now,” Barry said, trying to get some sort of ground here.
She raised an eyebrow. “I have the honour of being able to call the great Pokémon Entei my battle partner.”
“…Seriously?”
“Yes.”
Barry decided that he wouldn’t give that much weight because he might despair a little if he did. “Entei only a manifestation of volcanos. Not space, which is much cooler.”
“I am lightly tempted to take you outside and ask you to prove your ability in a fight. That’s odd. These days I find that my passion for battling is a great deal less than I’m told it used to be. Maybe you are just an annoying child, but I still find myself interested by the impulse to challenge you.” The agent mused.
Barry stared at her, not sure what to make of a comment that should have been confrontational but somehow ended up sounding almost…curious. A bit like Lucas and how he’d always face down even the weirdest and most powerful Pokémon with nothing but mild fascination.
That thought left a lump in his throat, and Barry swallowed that back down and asked, “—What’s your name?”
“I am known as Anabel.”
Barry smiled, knowing it wasn’t his best work, but deciding that he owed something to this person for telling him this much. “Glad to meet you—I’m Barry.”
“I know. It was on your arrest warrant.”
The arrest warrant reminded Barry of the other consequences and the fact he now didn’t have a job that he needed to go back to. He’d got so used to getting up and immediately thinking about how and where he’d go hunting for stories today that it felt like another near unmanageable loss.
But he was beginning to get used to those.
“…I think I got fired because of…that,” Barry said, as he set his shoulders back a little further.
“Fired from what?” She asked with mild curiosity, though if it was at the words or his reason for telling her this, Barry couldn’t tell.
“My job.” He said, not really wanting to get into it even though he’d been the one to bring it up.
“Hm. You are young, and people are more forgiving of youth. You’ll find another.”
“Are you trying to investigate the portals? You got lost in them. You have to care about this, right? And now you’re helping me—are people in the International Police investigating the wormholes things that are taking people like Lucas?” Barry demanded
Anabel’s gaze was weighing him now, eyeing him up and down as she pursed her lips, and he could see that Anabel was keeping up with his train of thought. That was a good sign; not a lot of people could keep up well with Barry’s rapidly shifting thoughts
“I am unsure if joining the International Police is…your best option.”
“Look, if you’re doing something. I…I reckon no one about here would let me…help. Even if you’re not doing a lot, I think—” Barry set his shoulders back. That night in the cell had given him a lot of time to think. “—I think that maybe I shouldn’t just keep doing things randomly. I’m going to change my path now.”
“Hm. A little wisdom was gained, then, but a little too easily for me to trust.”
Barry laughed, feeling bitter but also getting it. “Yeah. I’m meant to ‘grow’ slowly and agonise over the changes, right? I saw that Leader Cyrus do that. Took years for him to realise he was wrong. But not me. I know I did wrong. I know that I need a new plan. And I think I need help. I’m going to…I want to save Lucas. Or know if he’s—”
Barry’s voice cracked and failed him. He’d never quite managed to say it aloud. The fact that he really wanted to know was if he could mourn or if his friend was still out there.
And he needed to know which.
“—I’m strong. I’m capable, and this way, maybe I can keep searching. But I’m not going to be stupid twice.”
“Having a strong Pokémon team means nothing if you cannot use it—”
The door to the interrogation room opened again and that other officer, Looker, entered with a clipboard in hand.
“Sir, I have the papers you asked for on the kid—”
“Hey! Dude!” Barry planted his feet and lifted his chin. “You think I’d be a great addition to the international cops or whatever you guys are, right?”
Officer Looker stared at Barry. “…No? You tried to put a hole in time and space?”
“Yeah, but that was yesterday, and I’ve grown as a person now.” Barry pointed out settling in better now that he knew what he wanted. “And even then, I still let you arrest me. None of you could have beaten me in a fair fight if I’d wanted to fight you.”
Looker raised an eyebrow. “I doubt that.”
“Then I will prove it.” Barry had never let a chance pass by if he could grab hold of it first. Stopping to think was for people that had time to waste. “Let’s go outside and—”
“You will not,” Anabel said, holding up a hand, even if there wasn’t any obvious irritation.
“Come on! This way, you get to keep a close eye on me, and get a powerful and clever agent that can help with your mission and get someone very dedicated to finding out more about Fallers! You only win from recruiting me!”
Looker looked to Anabel. “…He’s got about half a point.”
Anabel sighed ever so slightly, and Barry sensed an edge of weakness to exploit.
“Come on! I’ll be the most loyal grunt you could hope for! I’ll write great reports because I’ve had practice, I can interview people already! I’ve also got social skills and a keen mind! Also, I’m probably the best battler you could ask for and have learned my lesson the hard way and have a track record for taking down villainous organisations. You couldn’t ask for a better deal!”
“Was he a villain or a salesman?” Looker mused.
“He is a…nuisance,” Anabel said, but it was with a degree of acceptance. “…We are going to do this officially. Submit the paperwork. Go home. Wait, and then you’ll be called for an interview. I’ll see to it that you get one. And then prove yourself. If you do, then I’ll see to it that you get put under my command, but the rest is up to you.”
Barry grinned, knowing that he looked a little too feral but also knowing that there was only a slight chance he was bluffing. “I’ll be the best candidate they could ask for!”
“This may be a bigger change than you expect, and there may never be an answer even if you work for years. Are you prepared for that?” Anabel said and held out her hand.
Barry took it and knew that his grip was painfully tight, then grinned as she squeezed her hand enough for him to feel his knucklebones grinding together.
“I’ll accept whatever answers I find, but I will never stop looking until I find them.”
“I look forward to potentially working with you,” Anabel said.
“Likewise! I can’t wait.” Barry replied.
****
A week later, Barry was accepted as a member of the International Police.
A lot of people were rather unhappy about it, but Barry was not a Champion class trainer for nothing. He’d beat Champion Cynthia in an official match, and even if he never beat Dawn in a fair fight, anyone else was fair game.
The interview was slightly…hampered by Barry’s very recent actions, but the fact was that he had managed to reroute his whole life in an unreasonably short time. He wasn’t hired as an agent due to that, but he was pulled in as ‘Probationary Constable’, which was good enough for Barry.
It also meant that he got to leave Sinnoh, which honestly…was likely for the best.
It turned out that this Anabel person was very highly ranked, but in an odd way where she basically had her own department. Said department was mostly made up with her and only sometimes Looker. Most of the time, Anabel worked with people involved in her current ‘case’ and worked alone the rest of the time.
Still, she was true to her word and accepted Barry as her ‘grunt’ as he persisted in calling himself since ‘Probationary Constable’ was WAY too much of a mouthful.
Slowly over the next few weeks, Barry learned a little more about Anabel and Looker.
It turns out that the reason Looker sometimes worked with her was that he’d also gone through a period of being ‘lost’. He’d only appeared months later on Hoenn’s shores, missing his memories. But Looker had managed to regain enough so that he still knew ‘himself’ as Anabel put it. That time had left enough of a mark on him so that he’d easily and willingly drop work to come and aid Anabel when she needed it.
Anabel seemed to remember almost nothing of her past life beyond the barest details and, after a decade or two, had more or less…accepted that.
She’d built something new and did not…dwell in the past.
But despite her determined movement forward, Anabel was deeply dedicated to trying to ease the horrible jarring separation that other people felt from the disappearance of Fallers. Her life all but revolved around her work.
Even after weeks, Barry hadn’t seen a set of clothes that was a suit or with something in her hand that wasn’t related to a new investigation. Barry hadn’t known what to expect about the work Anabel did, but there were many more people who’d been lost than expected. And as his understanding of the Fallers grew, so did Barry’s faith that Lucas was still alive.
Somewhere or somewhen, anyway.
Most of what Barry did in the times between was fetching coffee, listening, collecting and summarising papers and research and working.
Anabel didn’t seem to know how to do anything but work. Barry wasn’t really sure if he should comment on that. He tried to get her to watch movies with him and found very quickly that she just didn’t know any. Or books. Or chores. Or many basic things about life that people learned as children and that she’d lost along with the rest of her memories.
The only things she knew were what she’d learned working for the international Police. Barry wasn’t sure she knew how to do anything but work.
She took that work, even the weird and boring bits like checking up on people who’d lost someone, very seriously.
Even years later, she checked up on some individuals.
Barry had found that the first time they were in Alola and had visited the Aether Foundation in its shining glory. The president had not been welcoming, but she’d not thrown them out either. There had been a sigh over the intercom before she ordered the grunts to let them in.
Anabel murmured to Barry, on the lift going up, that they were here to check on the progress studying the ultra-worm holes, which was suspected to be linked to the Fallers.
Before Barry had even had time to demand why they weren’t helping this person, Anabel moved on and into the meeting room with the president.
By the end of the meeting, Barry hadn’t needed to wonder why they weren’t helping her. President Lusamine was…not entirely insane, but she was certainly not rational.
Seeing her was a little like looking into a mirror for a few months before when Barry had been trying to explain to Dawn how he was going to save Lucas and make everything fine again. How desperate he’d been to make all those ugly and unescapable feelings of grief go away but had only managed to make everything worse.
Barry had stayed silent as they’d left, ushered back down the lift by Assistant Branch Chief Wicke.
In the scorching Alola sun, Anabel sighed a little and tipped her head back. “Good people can end up…stretching their own minds when confronted by grief. And President Lusamine was never very good at telling the difference between what was the right thing and what she just wanted to do.”
“Now you’re using her as an object lesson for me?” Barry asked, “I told you. I know better.”
“No, I just wanted you to see, from the outside, how people can become their worst. But that we also need to understand why they do that. You need to understand, if you’re to work with me. Not to judge them. We need to be able to see from their point of view.”
“Is that why you’re letting me be your grunt? Cus I already went bonkers with a mad idea, and you think it will make me…what?” Barry retorted, “What are you getting at? Stop being vague at me and speak directly!”
Anabel didn’t react to his voice pitching up or the snarl and folded her arms loosely behind her back before she said, “I accepted this job at the international Police to see if I could understand and stop people from ending up like me. But I’ve found that the longer I do this, the more I’m doing it for people like you and her.”
“The pathetic idiots that might do something stupid?”
“The ones left behind and that have to remember—they’re the ones that need to have someone at their back. That need help. I wish I hadn’t become a Faller, but I’ve accepted it. I’ve grown into this new person I am and moved on. My family never did, and a lot of others are just like them.”
“…You have family?” Barry said, knowing it was a stupid question, but she didn’t call it like that as she seemed to understand his real question.
Like why she never had anyone her how to be a normal person again and if there were still people around who cared about her, why had she been left adrift?
“My parents still live, as do my siblings, I’m told,” she said.
Barry squinted, half-blinded by the sun and vaguely wishing he had a hat. “And they decided to…what? Hold it against you not remembering stuff when it wasn’t your fault in the first place? That’s—that’s just not fair!”
“Would you be angry if your friend Lucas didn’t remember you? If he looked at you and asked, ‘please tell me what’s your name’?”
A wave of something like fear hit Barry, and he pushed it, and that thought away. “NO—we’re going to get Lucas back before that!”
Anabel looked away at the ocean. “…The only things I remember from my whole ‘before’ life is the joy I felt battling a strong trainer in the frontier tower and one single moment of staring up at the stars and declaring to someone that I loved that I’d be back after I became the strongest fighter in the world. I still don’t know who I made that promise to, and I likely never will, even if they’re still alive with the other half of the memory. No one wants a stranger back, after all.”
Barry stared at her, already half sure where she was going with this and fighting to think of a way to derail it before she finished.
“I don’t remember my parents or friends’ faces. I don’t know how many siblings I have. Or where the house that I grew up in is. I know there were people I loved, but I can’t remember who.” Anabel breathed out softly. “And they don’t want a walking stranger that makes them see a dead girl that vanished.”
Barry swallowed hard. “Lucas will remember me.”
Anabel shook her head and turned on her heel, walking away and leaving a black shadow behind her under that blazing sunshine.
“…Come. We’ve still got work to do. We’ll do that now.”
Barry clenched his hands into fists, glaring at her back and taking just a second to furiously rub at his face before he stumbled back into step beside her.
They did have work to do, after all.
****
Barry hadn’t thought that there would be many people that could possibly have vanished like Lucas, and there weren’t that many. Not in the scheme of the world. But there were enough so that he and Anabel were always busy.
Most of their work wasn’t trying to change the world but just keep track of families or friends and not down details to keep a running record of those lost. Sometimes they found someone who reappeared, which could be even harder to deal with. People with no memories and no idea who they were or where they were.
It was up to Anabel and Barry, with some extra help from Looker, to figure out those answers.
Sometimes those people would get home, and the memories would bloom again like Looker. Sometimes they never remembered anything at all, like Anabel. And sometimes, they had to deal with someone that had decided to take getting a friend or family member back into their own hands.
Barry never told Anabel, but he preferred it when the person was angry and fighting than when they were…grieving.
Barry suspected Anabel knew because when they had to fight, she always got him to do it. So he would, and when he was finished, and the person’s plans, which were always this horrible mix of utterly self-sacrificing and yearningly selfish, were wrecked by Barry and his team—then Anabel would calmly step in and decide how to help the person.
However, most people like that were…not very good fighters. Barry could take most down quickly without a lot of effort and with time left over to tell them how stupid they were during it.
Subway Boss Emmet was…not an easy fight.
To the man’s credit, Subway Boss Emmet hadn’t done what most people in his position did, which was lurch into a half thought out and desperately unthought out scheme. No, Subway Boss Emmet definitely had a plan.
Theoretically anyway.
In practice, it was a little…iffy.
Barry was a little unsure of his exact intentions – and whatever Subway Boss Emmet thought he was doing was hampered by the constant undermining of his own plan while trying to avoid getting anyone hurt.
Barry knew that he didn’t want anyone to be hurt because he’d been forced to sit through quite a long presentation for what Subway Boss Emmet thought he was doing before the man had realised why Barry had walked onto his train and asked, ‘who are you and what are you doing’.
The man didn’t look like he’d slept in a while, but it had still been a bit bemusing.
The man seemed to be not very good at the whole ‘villainous plan’ thing. There had been a powerpoint presentation with three separate slides on how Subway boss Emmet intended to make sure that no one was injured.
Barry noticed that there seemed to be no provisions to stop the Subway Boss from being hurt.
Still, Subway Boss Emmet had ground half of Unova to a dead standstill by the end of the day he’d put his plan into action. This plan, which mysteriously involved trains and something about a quest to meet the creator of the universe and putting in railway stations throughout the universe until he found his partner?
Or maybe Subway Boss Emmet just wanted to fight a god and get his partner back and had no idea what he was doing even with all the planning he claimed to have done.
It might not have been a very charitable summary of his plan, but Barry wasn’t feeling very charitable.
The man had a team of eleven Pokémon.
Barry wasn’t sure that was even legal, and they couldn’t possibly just be his. It was not practical to spend the time and resources looking after such an extensive group of Pokémon. But then again, most Pokémon, even ones that liked you, tended not to obey a trainer other than ‘their’s’ unless it was very special circumstances.
That all the Pokémon had worked with this guy without hesitation was…a bit surprising.
Still, Subway Boss Emmet fought like a man who’d been doing double battle’s so long he’d forgotten how to fight alone, and that ended up being the one reason Barry hung on till the end. Every time he nearly lost outright, the man would slip again as strategy slid through his fingers and left him trying to brute force with tactical moves and using brute force to inflict status moves in equal measure.
But in the end, Subway Boss Emmet finally ran out of Pokémon.
“—Is that the last one?” Barry demanded, hanging onto his victory with nothing but his teeth at this point for every new Pokémon he’d thrown out past the eighth one. “I’ve never fought anyone with more than six! What is wrong with you—I mean beyond trying to use a train to punch a hole in reality, but I think the eleven Pokémon is the greater crime here!”
“You…defeated me,” Subway Boss Emmet was still smiling down at the last Pokéball in his hand, the one that had his Eelektross and the last Pokémon to go down. The Eelektross who’d hung on almost past the end for her trainer but in the end had gone down, nevertheless. “—My first loss since…You defeated them all.”
“I’m not bloody surprised I’m the first to defeat you since you have eleven Pokémon!” Barry snapped, still rattled by being pushed further onto the back foot than expected.
“I lost. Failed. The perfect plan derailed.”
“Perfect plan?” Barry replied. “You nearly got a lot of people hurt!”
That got the attention back to Barry and nearly knocked the stupid smile off that man’s face. “Safety checks were made! I did not fail to account for the dangerous—”
“If you’d managed to overload those bloody engines, it might have just exploded! People might have died!”
That might be a slight overestimation of the danger. The one thing that Barry had learned during that powerpoint presentation had been that Subway Boss Emmet probably hadn’t passed high school math and while he knew a lot about trains, string theory and physics was a little beyond him.
The most like outcome, if no one had managed to blast through the man’s full team, would have only been damage to the train.
And the man himself.
But it was better to beat the point home with a brick and pick up the pieces of the man’s ego later.
“—You are an absolute moron!” Barry continued. “You were going to achieve nothing. You were going to do nothing but waste people’s time, get people hurt or killed, and probably lose your job! Not going to lie! Don’t think anyone is going to want you anywhere near a train any time soon! Maybe ever!”
“They can’t—I have to keep them running on time—I have to—I must, I—what else could I—”
Subway Boss Emmet was still staring at him at the point where he lightly crumpled to sit inelegantly on the floor of the train carriage, hand still gripping the Pokéball in a white-knuckled grip, and now there were tears dripping off his chin. If Barry had known how close the man was to a complete emotional breakdown, he might not have yelled so much.
Or at least he’d have done it where Anabel could deal with the crying.
Barry wasn’t very good with crying and definitely not in men who seemed to have walked off the deep end and then found a shovel to keep digging even after hitting rock bottom.
Hands gripping the sides of his head, last Pokéball still in hand, Emmet seem to almost forget that Barry was there at all. “…If I fail—I must keep them running. I must find my brother’s station. I must. I must. I—there is no other route to take. So I must.”
Barry had read the report that it was Subway Boss Emmet’s partner that had disappeared over two years ago, but he’d not realised they were brothers.
There had even been footage of the disappearance making this one of the rare cases where they knew or could at least put together a good set of evidence for the man becoming a Faller. Subway Boss Ingo had just walked through a train carriage and disappeared before he stepped into the next one.
With nothing but five seconds of dead bursting static to mark the transition.
Barry rubbed his eyes and tried to remember what Anabel would do when dealing with someone who was having very big emotions and wondering why the man was still bloody smiling.
“When’s the last time you slept?” Barry asked because he was getting used to Anabel nagging him to sleep and was happy to pass that along.
“…Unknown. I’ve been setting my alarm to go off every half hour. I do not wish to oversleep and miss the stop.”
Barry groaned. That wasn’t very healthy, he was pretty sure.
“How about eating? You been doing that?”
“Schedule has been overfull.”
Barry squinted at him. “Please tell me that was a joke.”
Subway Boss Emmet’s smile didn’t move. “I do not joke.”
“You are a mess of a human—you can’t have stored all of your self-preservation with your brother, could you? Aren’t you a grown man?”
That got a reaction even if it was a wonky one, as an arm lashed out, halted and withdrew slowly as he glared a wide smile at Barry. “I will continue to work as previously scheduled—I take enough to sustain the engines! This is enough.”
They were still in the station where Barry had accidentally cornered the man.
It had been luck that Barry had been the one to find him, what with the dozens of people from this city and region in general that were all trying to find the Subway Boss. Shame that none of those people were here, really.
“You still want to keep going with the plan and hurt people, or will you come with me now and try and find a better option?” Barry asked.
“...I…You derailed me. I failed Ingo. I’ve hit the end of the line.”
Barry clapped his hands together with a grin. “Okay then, can work with that—I saw a cool looking café while running here, and I haven’t eaten since breakfast, and I want to try your Unovian ice cream. It’s meant to be the best in the world, and I want to review—try it. We’re going to get lunch and you’ll eat a sandwich, and we’ll wait for Anabel or, like, one of those other people that’s looking for you, and they can find us there. Okay?”
That had, at last, managed to confuse Subway Boss Emmet so that he’d stopped looking quite so broken, and the bewilderment meant that he was almost frowning at Barry now.
Marching over, Barry grabbed the man’s arm. “Come on. I hope that they might even have cookies and cream. Dawn—a friend told me about that once. It sounded tasty.”
“—This is not a time for ice cream—” Subway Boss Emmet tried to say, but the manic energy seemed to have burned out of him again.
Barry ignored Emmet and found that for all his heigh, the man was light. It took almost no effort to drag him to his feet, and this close, it was easy to see how dark the shadows under his eyes were and how his eyes—
Well. Eyes that like were a lot more common than Barry had expected.
“I beat you at a battle, so you now have to do what I say. And I say we’re getting lunch.” Barry ordered and started walking, dragging the Subway Boss along.
There was cookies and cream ice cream at that Café, and Barry bought a whole bowl full, not bothering to get any other food even as he insisted on getting Subway Boss Emmet a soda and sandwich.
This at least confused the Subway Boss enough to calm down enough to go silent, and after a bit of guilt-tripping, he did eat some of it, which was a much harder battle than those eleven Pokémon had been. There were a few…weird looks from the people who’d definitely noticed that the subway system had had an…error of operation and been shut down for the day.
But no one was directly talking to them, and that’s all Barry wanted.
“—They’ll probably arrest you when they find you. Food in jail is bad so eat now while you still can.” Barry noted over his own ice cream and with the wisdom of someone who’d already put his own arrest a long way behind him.
Subway Boss Emmet didn’t say anything to that. He was still smiling too and had kept doing that even though the whole thing. That was a bit weird, but honestly, Barry kinda got it. Sometimes all you could do was laugh or cry, and if it got too much, you might just do both to bleed off all those gnawing feelings in your chest.
“They’re probably not going to want you taking care of the trains for a bit,” Barry added. “Since you, ya know, tried to use them to punch through space-time or whatever. That could be a mark against you, I’m just saying.”
That got a flash of raw panic even if the smile never shifted, just for a moment. “They cannot—I must keep the trains running! It is verrrry important that when he gets home—I must keep them running on schedule.”
Barry leaned on his elbow. “I think you did most of the damage to them yourself.”
“It would not have—” Subway Boss Emmet’s face flinched, muscles about his mouth shifting to look pained, but still smiling despite that.
“No matter what, I think they might ask you to take a break. Sit back and think about the dumb things you did that got you here so that you’ve ended up a villain, dude.” Barry said flatly.
And at last, that stupid smile fell off his face. “I am not—I am doing the thing no one else can do. The events that allowed this to happen is an abomination. I will make this break in the schedules run to time…I just want Ingo back. I cannot—half my soul is missing, and I cannot continue like this, but I—this is the only route left. I want to get off, but I cannot. ”
Emmet dug fingers into the sides of his head again, elbows on the edge of the table as he stared down at the untouched half of the sandwich.
…There was always room to keep digging down until you stopped recognising yourself.
Barry’s chest felt tight. He didn’t usually feel other people’s emotions, but right now, that was…hard. Even if he wasn’t really feeling the same thing, it was still a little too close to home.
“What were you even trying to do?” Barry demanded, falling back onto an attack to make that ache go away.
“Trains are the way to reach any destination. Anywhere that Ingo is will have a train, even if he has to build it himself. I…wanted to find that station.”
Barry flopped back in his chair and blew a breath between his teeth. This guy…might be worse than him, or maybe he was just more…obvious about it. Then again, Barry had tried to break things to get Lucas back and had ended up with a criminal record in less than four months.
This guy had at least lasted years before his breakdown.
Anabel had helped Barry, even if they weren’t a lot alike. Sometimes someone that understood a bit was enough.
Maybe he could…help? A little?
“I lost my friend. He just…disappeared. Woke up one day, and he was…not there. They declared him dead a few months ago.” Barry muttered. “I don’t even know if they’re right. I probably shouldn’t be mean to you, considering that I tried to…I wanted to make a doorway to him. to get home.”
There was an odd flicker to Emmet’s face, something that almost looked expectant. “Did it function?”
“No. And if my other friend hadn’t stopped me, I might have…ripped an unmendable hole into the fabric of reality.”
“…That sounds…veerrrrry foolish.”
Barry shoved a finger under Emmet’s nose, “You tried to use a train to punch a hole in reality—and I KNOW it wasn’t smart now! I might have…got a lot of people hurt! I didn’t mean to. But I still nearly did it! Dawn might have stopped me, but she doesn’t talk to me a lot right now. Says I should give up. But I don’t want to. I want to fight something until I get him back! I am going to fight Arceus themselves with my BARE hands if it got me Lucas back!”
There was a short silence as Subway Boss Emmet stared at him, face fixed in stone and eyes way too intent like he was using eye contact as a status attack. But it wasn’t a violent attack. More…like he was trying to calculate Barry’s words into a formulate he could see.
Like he was trying to see Barry as a person rather than a speaker that was presently demanding his attention.
The tap-tap of footsteps finally cut through that silence, and Barry looked up to see Anabel in the doorway of the café, eyeing it like she was searching for someone. Barry waved to catch her eye, happy that she was here to take the rest of this mess of a human away and talk sense into him better.
Anabel did not seem to think that Barry had done a good thing and was eyeing Subway Boss Emmet and the half-eaten sandwich with a near-dead stare. “Barry, what are you—half the gym leaders of this region are still searching for this man.”
“How’d you find me first then?”
“I tracked your phone. Now explain what you think you’re doing having lunch with the man I asked you to apprehend.”
“Well, I did do that, and then I decided he was a bit pathetic and maybe hadn’t eaten in a while and bought him lunch. That’s what you always do when we visit someone, and you think they need help. You said I needed to follow your example more.”
“…I…misestimate the damage. I lost. As long as it does not get in the way of my route, I will accept the cost.” Subway Boss Emmet said, back straight and expression back to that unmoveable smile that looked like a death mask.
“Look. Anabel. He’d not eaten in days—and he’s not slept in longer! I basically had to look after him. We should look after him—we should hire him! As an independent contract probationary, whatever! Come on, Anabel, you know this is a good idea!” Barry said, not really sure why he was going to bat for this guy, even if a few months ago he’d been doing the same thing as him.
…Maybe that was why he was doing this? Barry didn’t get yelling or screaming or crying, but he did get that burning urge to try and take the universe by the throat and force it to give him what he wanted. He was also pretty sure that once he’d been given a chance, this guy wouldn’t do it again. Or at least not the same thing.
Probably.
Besides, he liked Emmet. The man had wanted to fight a god, and Barry related to that.
Anabel stared at Barry. “Barry. Why.”
“Because for all that, conductor seems to be kind of a lost puppy, he’s a pretty good fighter, honestly? He cheats and has too many Pokémon, but he’s not that stupid, and he might even be an…assist?” Barry said, leaning back in his chair.
That got Subway Boss Emmet to smile viciously, “I refuse. I will not be named—”
“Barry.” Anabel interrupted. “Do you know who this man is?”
“He’s a train conductor or something. Management of some sort, maybe? Why?”
“…Subway Boss Emmet is of an equivalent rank to a Tower Tycoon. Why did you think half the Gym Leaders and the Champion were all scrambling so much that they asked us to aid the search?”
Barry looked at Subway Boss Emmet, suddenly a bit more alarmed than he’d been before. That…might explain why the man had been so hard to fight.
“But he was on a train? Why’s he not in a tower?”
“Trains are infinitely more practical! They serve a purpose. Towers are pointless and a waste of public funding!” Subway Boss Emmet said, and there was a sudden sharp burst of life to his eyes that made Barry somewhat aware of how dead they’d been before.
“This is Unova, Barry,” Anabel pointed out like it explained everything, and in a way, it did.
Barry held a hand to the side of his head, staring at Subway Boss Emmet. “…So, is he like smart too, or just powerful?”
“Excuse me?!” Subway Boss Emmet snapped.
Anabel ignored him as she appeared to consider Barry’s question. “He is reasonably intelligent, when not…run dry.”
“…Hey, dude?” Barry said. “Since the city will probably want you to like…not be about for a while, would you like to have like a…secondary job? With us?”
Subway Boss Emmet’s smile had an oddly intense amount of killer intent and deep confusion, so Barry ignored him and turned to Anabel instead.
“I mean, logically, it makes sense. He wants his brother back, and we are the one group that is trying to work on that. He’s smartish, powerfulish—not as much as me, but not too bad—and this way, we make sure he doesn’t nearly destabilise reality again! And I get another guy on the team to keep me company, between Looker visiting! It’s a win-win-win!”
Anabel was giving Barry the same look he got when he’d microwaved a frozen pizza and nearly set fire to their motel room.
“If I could give my—” Subway Boss Emmet started.
“You may not,” Anabel said. “If we do this, Barry, I’ll expect that you keep an eye on him. And he’ll still need to go through the refractions of his actions within Unova’s justice system first.”
“If he avoids jail time, I’ll vow on my honour as a trainer to watch over him well!”
“…Fine. I’ll aid him in putting in the paperwork, but it's up to Subway Boss Emmet if he takes this offer or the two years in prison.”
“Cool! We’ll get another guy on the team!” Barry crowed.
Subway Boss Emmet twitched and, in a surprisingly lively gesture, wacked Barry over the head. “Excuse me! Talk to the passenger before deciding their destination!”
Barry rolled his eyes. “You want to go to prison?”
“No. Detrimental to end goal of retrieving Ingo. However, I—” Emmet started.
“Then I repeat! Welcome to the team!” Barry said.
“I want time to consider the trip first!”
“Too late!”
****
A few weeks later, Subway Boss Emmet joined the team.
Technically, anyway.
The official story was that he was on ‘leave’ due to an emotional breakdown and was taking time to recover. For an official story, it was funny because it was also basically what had happened—but for the fact that Emmet was being kept under ‘supervision’ by the International Police.
Turns out that his cousin (by adoption by his uncle, who was some sort of Gym Leader) was the Champion of Unova, and she was willing to put in a good word for him, and in the end, no one had been harmed, not even the trains.
Emmet had put a lot of effort into that because he really liked trains. Really, really liked them. Like it was the one thing that he talked about other than Pokémon battles. Emmet probably thought about his brother more, if those stilted half-sentences that cut off the moment Ingo’s name got out was any clue, but he talked about trains almost every other waking moment.
Barry wondered absently that if he ever ended up quitting as a member of the International Police, he could start a newspaper column about trains and just ring up Emmet every other day and listen to him talk for a bit to get new material.
He could write all day that way and still never run out of content, all without leaving the house.
Barry had low key assumed that Emmet wouldn’t have many friends, not if he’d managed to wander that far off the deep end, but the funny thing was that he did? Or at least there seemed to be a surprising amount of people who knew him. Emmet didn’t greet most of them very cheerfully, and even the ones he liked didn’t get a lot of his time, but there was still some connection there.
Then again, Barry and Anabel weren’t ones to judge, not when Barry ignored the handful of people that rung him, and most of Anabel’s family still pretended she was dead.
Emmet also wasn’t a very nice person, Barry had found, but he wasn’t a bad one either. He was direct. He was basically incapable of tact and tended to say the words in his head directly without any detour. Anabel only made the mistake once of letting Emmet be the one to comfort a newly grieving relative of someone lost once before she and Barry decided to never let that happen again.
Emmet was good at asking questions, though and good at investigating weird ‘details’. Anabel tended to drift in the conversation too much to be good at asking questions about such things. Her focus always ended up with the people left behind as she tried to help them or with the found who’d drift back out of portals.
Emmet was good at asking the sort of specific questions that managed to help them discover several of the missing people who’d not become Fallers.
It was very funny the first time that Emmet walked back into a house where Anabel was still comforting a grieving mother, with a kid under his arm to dump on the floor and announced loudly that the child had been hiding in the woods the whole time and now he’d found the brat they could leave and go find a case that wasn’t a waste of their time.
Despite being the only teenager present, Barry was the only one good at putting all those pieces together in writing and pulling and plucking at them until a narrative of events emerged.It was a bit like being a journalist, but no one but the bosses or his teammates ever read his stories.
Sometimes, when he was bored, and there was a gap with little else to do, Barry would try and write the reports like when he’d still loved writing and fitting together the stories for the paper.
Just…now and then.
To keep his eye in for if—when he found Lucas, and could…go home.
They weren’t a good team; in some ways they were barely a team, but it could have been a lot worse.
Eight months had now passed since Lucas had disappeared. Despite everything Barry had learned, gathered, and researched, he still didn’t know if Lucas was alive. To cope, Barry had started calling them the ‘Faller Anti-Villainy Support Club’.
He’d even made a sign and hung it up where the others would see it, just to see what the reaction would be.
Anabel had not been amused and had sighed heavily and said that she’d never been a villain. Emmet had gone absolutely still after he’d seen it, and after a long pause where Barry worried he’d pushed way too far, there had been a near explosion of laughter until Emmet had ended up sitting on the floor from the force of it.
It hadn’t sounded very rational laughter, but it was still something to do.
What else was there when the people they were looking for might never be seen again? It was laughing, crying, or going a little mad, and honestly, Barry was pretty sure that between them all, they were doing a fine job of all three.
They really weren’t a very good team, nor a very productive one when most of their cases were unsolvable, but it was better than being alone.
And there was always work to do, after all.