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Emmet is not someone who considers himself beholden to things like reality and the truth. The truth, to Emmet, is what one makes. The thrill of a battle, winning or losing. A well-run train comprised of delicate parts, all crafted for one express purpose. Joy, and home, and belonging.
These facts are true because Emmet makes them true. Because time and careful work forge an ideal that cannot be so easily misplaced once cemented.
Ingo goes missing.
Emmet’s heart goes missing too.
That is a truth that Emmet can accept. When Ingo goes missing, so too does his heart and his home. It is easy enough to understand, like the formula of an equation or the mechanics by which trains stay magnetized to their tracks. Simple and factual.
But the concept of death – or rather, of an eternal separation, that is not the truth.
He can understand why people think it. They assume the worst and think that is the only other option there is, when they are tired of hoping and don’t wish to suffer any more than they have to. People are weak like that.
But where one’s truth is that of his brother’s eternal departure, his ideal is something else. That Ingo, in some way, shape, or form, exists, alive or dead, and that all he needs to do is find him. Through time, space, or something else. All he needs to do is just figure it out.
So he sees what is in front of him, hears what he is told, listens to them cry and acknowledges it with a nod of understanding. He sees, and hears, and rejects it with a smile.
Emmet rejects it and embraces something else entirely.
He tries a lot of things, some a little worse than others. There are the investigation leads, of course, his own work thrown into the fray, but it isn’t long before he understands that his home is not physical anymore.
So, he tries something else. Dabbling in the occult has certainly not been one of his usual interests, but there is always a time to start, and Chandelure, his brother’s faithful ghost, cannot lead him wrong. And if his brother is not physical, then maybe he is spiritual.
The verbal thrashing he gets from Elesa, full of electricity and ear-ringing pain and tears as he stands beyond the yellow line, makes him put a temporary stop on those plans. Admittedly, he had been hasty.
But it isn’t entirely worthless. His studies have procured a list of sources from all manner of academia, and it doesn’t take him long to find the first solid lead he has had since his home went missing.
His brother is, in fact, in this world, but not the way he should be. Not properly. Alive but displaced, lost in time and space, buried in the archives of Sinnohan libraries and museum artifacts. He sees his brother as if it were his own face, faded sepia photographs glaring at him from the light of his laptop, and he knows.
The work of the gods has taken him. The work of the gods must undo it.
And so Emmet gets to work.
To find Arceus, steps must be taken. To meet God is no easy feat, and yet Emmet, who sees nothing but what he considers his ideal, manages it. By fate or by chance, he cares little, only that he has the means.
An azure flute, procured from a museum. A little song, played at the summit of Mount Coronet, simple and airy and filled with all of the emotions that he cannot convey by any other means.
And Arceus, who hears him, who brings him to the heavens outside of time and space, and tells him Their truth.
The time to which his brother has been taken is one which he cannot return from. He has already, in his own way, altered the fabric of reality and history, too significant to displace once he has been set down. The man his brother knew is no longer the man that he is.
Emmet does not care. Through time, space, change, Ingo is his brother. If he must fight Arceus to return him, then he will. If he must summon the Dragon of Ideals to achieve his goals, then he will.
And if his brother is lost to time, dead and gone within a bygone era and waiting for him, then he will simply die, as he should have before, and he will be home again.
He sees Their truth, acknowledges it. Acknowledges it, and rejects it in favor of his own Ideal.
There is something to be said about the strange tenacity of humans who have a goal to strive for, a willpower which defies logic and understanding and emotion. It is something that humans cannot understand, let alone gods who live outside of them.
Arceus sees it now in the will of a man who will do anything to see his ideal come to fruition. Whether it means destroying the world, or destroying himself.
To garner the interest of a God is no simple feat.
Arceus, then, offers him a choice. To remain, and live his life as it had been meant to be. Present, with his loved ones, and to make peace with the loss he has suffered.
Or leave, and go back in time to the one he calls brother. Leave everything behind, with no hope to make his peace with this world and no opportunity to say goodbye. Never to see his loved ones again, human or Pokémon, and never able to return home.
Ingo is his home, Emmet says, factual, without pain or grief. If sacrifice is what it will take to see him, then he will do it. Emmet does not hesitate.
The decision is made. The deal is struck.
And Emmet.
Disappears.
Ingo is gone.
And then, one day. So is his brother.
It is the railway staff which note his peculiar absence, so alike a certain absence months before that prompt managers to ring Elesa until she picks up in the middle of a photoshoot.
It is Elesa who assumes the worst when she comes to his apartment and hears the cries of familiar Pokémon who plead for a master that is not there. Elesa who assumes the worst when sees the notes scattered haphazardly among open books laid out on a well-used desk. Elesa, who assumes the worst because at one point it almost had been, and her heart screams, her throat clogged up in bile, her lungs on the verge of stretching until they pop as she screams and looks and reads frantically what has been left.
Fear turns to trepidation, turns to confusion, turns to something that makes her sick with a kind of foreboding. The notes speak of gods and Pokémon and ideal. And the books, open to pages filled with sepia-tone photographs, show them. Both of them. Familiar faces that she recognizes and yet should not.
A Warden of ancient Hisui and his brother, side by side, familiar expressions and uncanny clothes. Both together. Never far from one another. Pioneers of Pokémon conservation and the inventors and founders of what would become a terrifyingly efficient railway system spanning Sinnoh in its entirety and onward.
They lived there, and they died there, and they did it all side by side. Ingo and Emmet, she reads, and she doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
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“Emmet…?”
“Ingo!!”
Emmet is home.