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Elesa finds him in a history book. An extinct pokemon leans over his shoulder, bumping his hat off just in time for the photographer to snap the picture. There is no light in his eyes, no straight-backed confidence. She runs her thumb over the exhausted face staring back at her. She wonders where he went, what he endured, why he had to be taken from them so suddenly so sharply without a goodbye--
Emmet finds her curled around the book hours later with still-wet tear tracks down her cheeks.
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Emmet sees him in the corners of his eyes, in window reflections, and against the rushing steel of the subway trains. The announcements still make him startle and spin around to find the owner of the familiar, dearly missed booming voice. He has two lockers now, one recently emptied of black coats and dog-eared books. He does not use it.
The detectives rule his brother’s case a suicide and he fights them every step of the way. His brother had not been depressed, had not been suicidal, had not wanted to disappear into the wind without a word. But after one sharp, irritated comment from the detectives, Emmet steps back and wonders. Had he not noticed? Had his brother been drowning and ignored? Unappreciated? Unloved? Unwanted?
Elesa’s discovery of Ingo’s picture brings sharp relief - Ingo was alive, Ingo was okay - until he realizes that Ingo is too far out of reach.
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Ingo listens to the children in the village poke fun at each other. They laugh and scream and duck beneath outstretched hands covered in mud as they weave between the clan’s adults and tents alike. There is a pair of twins - two young boys, so alike it sometimes hurts. They tend to finish each other’s sentences. One usually gets distracted in the middle of a thought and the other always seems to snap back to focus in order to finish it.
It reminds Ingo of someone.
There is a girl who loves to sew and quilt and decorate the camp. She had pestered him about his coat and hat for days before she had convinced him to let her try and fix the larger gaps. She follows around the twins, dedicated to her role of eldest sibling. Her laughter is loud and carefree. She is currently yelling at the others to avoid getting mud on the tents she recently helped patch up. When she is ignored, she lurches to her feet and chases after her giggling younger brothers.
This, too, reminds Ingo of someone.
It makes his head hurt to think about it too much. But still, the familiarity lingers just out of reach and it beckons him - Ingo just isn’t sure if he wants to catch it. Whatever life he had lived, it is gone. He cannot go home - wherever and whenever that might be. Whoever might be waiting for him would be better moving on.
Even if thinking about it makes his heart ache and brings up snippets of memory - snatches of don’t give up and together, right? He wonders if being stuck here, building a life here, is a betrayal to those he’s left behind.