Chapter Text
A tall, sharp-dressed man with a distinctive wing-like hairstyle walks through Centra City’s main street, flipping a coin idly as he goes. The other half of his Sync Pair, a sleek Liepard, follows in suit, her whiskers twitching and tail flicking.
Grimsley finds himself frequenting the crowded nexus of the artificial island less and less these days, choosing to instead spend his days strolling through Pasio’s numerous dark caves, unwinding at the island’s far less crowded beaches and, more often than not since the League ended, back at the trainer-allocated apartments with Will and Karen: two talented Elite Four members from a far-off region he happened to be… involved with. Centra City’s cheery atmosphere, gaudy decorations and seemingly omnipresent fluttering confetti just never sat right with Grimsley.
City-wise, he’s always felt more at home in capitals of sin, the sprawling concrete jungles famous (or, more likely, infamous) for their bustling and debaucherous nightlife. Tall, pitch-black skyscrapers that seem to reach the sky like massive obsidian monoliths, neon signs and cheap liqueur, gilded pool halls drenched in heady cigar smoke and static midnight. Antique opulence and tasteless decadence, locked in a curiously concupiscent tango. In other words, the diametric opposite of this wholesome little star-shaped sticker of a city. Although, Grimsley notes, it’s strange that there’s no one else around, especially considering the time of day. Not that he minds, of course. Misery loves company, he figures, but fortune thrives in solitude.
He rubs his thumb over the surface of the well-polished coin, gearing up for another flip. Grimsley doesn’t care whether it lands on heads or tails: to be fair, he’s not particularly fond of knowing the outcome every single time in the first place. In life, he figures, there are just some things that are better left inconclusive. Shedding light on a situation provides clarity, but too much light can blind you. Maybe that’s why Grimsley found himself drawn to the Dark type: the quintessential obfuscator, capable of both absorbing light and blocking Psychic abilities.
Just as he’s about to give his trusty coin another toss, Grimsley hears footsteps. Out of the corner of his eye, he spots a white-clothed figure walking across from him. He makes a spur-of-the-moment decision: if the coin lands on heads, he’ll challenge the stranger to a battle. Tails, he will walk past without as much as a word to the fellow. He nods at his Liepard, who gives an approving mmrp and a battle-ready whip of her slender tail in response.
He flips the coin. He makes eye contact with the stranger.
The coin doesn’t land heads or tails. In fact, it doesn’t land at all. Once it begins its upward movement, it shows no signs of coming down. As if there were a massive magnet just beyond the clouds, the coin continues spinning towards the heavens, higher and higher until it’s little more than a vaguely golden dot in the atmosphere. And then, it’s gone.
Grimsley doesn’t notice this, though, because he’s found himself face-to-face with his doppelgänger.
It’s like looking in a mirror, albeit with a sadder and more disheveled reflection. The man is clad in a humble white kimono accessorized with a black scarf, resembling more a wandering mendicant than a professional gambler-turned-Elite Four member. His face is a little bonier, his eyes startlingly more sunken; he resembles a hastily reanimated corpse. Perhaps, however, the most striking difference is his hair color: dual-toned black and white, and quite striking in comparison to Grimsley’s deep blue wings. Grimsley doesn’t dye his hair, so if this is really another version of him, he has no idea how his hair got that way.
There’s something deeply unsettling about the way this… other Grimsley carries himself. He’s too cautious, too fatigued. It’s like someone drained his confidence. If someone did, it definitely wouldn’t be the only thing that was drained from this guy. He’s little more than a pallid simulacrum of his healthier-looking counterpart, a washed-up husk of the man he stands opposite to.
He’s never seen this man in his life. He’s seen this man a thousand times before.
A gun is drawn. A cigarette is lit. A pair of golden eyes glow in the night, twin searchlights cutting through the darkness like scissors.
The two Grimsleys make eye contact for an uncomfortably long period of time, staring each other down like a pair of wild Mightyena about to fight over the last scrap of prey. Grimsley scans his cadaverous double from the tips of his hairdo to his familiar black boots. It’s like looking into a mirror, he thinks. No, his mind backtracks, more like scrying into the future. He can feel the rhythmic thump of his heart in his chest, and wonders if the other Grimsley can feel it too, if he has a heartbeat in the first place. Between his gaunt features, the vacant look in his eyes and how his kimono is starting to resemble a burial shroud, it’s hard to tell if he’s even alive . A chill runs up the healthier Grimsley’s spine. Beads of sweat form on his forehead.
A lone cartridge nestled in a revolver, not unlike an egg in a nest, readies for a round of Russian Roulette. Click, click, there’s the barrel of a six-shooter between your ice-blue eyes.
Then, the unfamiliar Grimsley speaks.
“What’re you looking at?”
His voice is notably raspier, like he’s had a year or two of some serious chain-smoking under his belt. Like his younger-looking double, he carries a coin that he occasionally flips, albeit one that’s worse for wear. Grimsley’s Liepard bares her teeth at the look-alike.
The egg lies shattered on the pavement, bleeding out translucent thoughts and nicotine-flecked gold. Birth, unbirth, rebirth, death. What’ll it be? You always fancied a good game of chance, didn’t you, Lady Luck’s double-crossed erstwhile paramour? Is her wine-red lipstick stain still present on your neck? It’s an exit wound that refuses to heal. Eternity is drowning in the shallow end of a jacuzzi.
Grimsley asks a question that, although it hurts to admit it, he already knows the answer to.
“Who the hell are you?”
The man who looks an awful lot like Grimsley chuckles wearily, giving a tired, toothy grin in response. He sports the same sharp, elongated canines as the lookalike standing across from him. His pupils, a pair of deep black voids swimming in pools of bloodshot ivory, begin to slowly leak a sort of runny dark fluid. An inky tear rolls down his clammy cheek. Something in the air starts to smell like decay. Grimsley’s damn near sweating bullets now.
A wheel spins. A dart is thrown. An electric blue beverage is poured from a cocktail shaker into two identical glasses. A couple of dice clatter on a table.
“I’m nothing more than the guy who lost.”
Dead silence smothers the atmosphere. Now the air is thick with a bizarre cocktail of miasmas: tar and gin and gasoline, rotten meat and burning plastic. The stranger with Grimsley’s face cracks a second miserable smile, another rivulet of oily ichor seeping out of his eyes and staining his kimono.
“Nothing more, nothing less.”
Grimsley’s head is swimming, it’s suffocating, his vision blurs around the edges as he swears this must all be a bad dream. A friend and coworker of his, Caitlin, said once that all dreams have meaning. If this is a dream at all, Grimsley has no clue what the hell this is all supposed to mean. Something about…confronting a part of yourself that you’ve ignored? In all honesty, Grimsley doesn’t give a shit, and even if he did, he’s frankly too woozy right now to seriously interpret any possible meaning. He blinks, a desperate grasp at something, anything to confirm the presence of consciousness.
When Grimsley opens his eyes, the other him is gone without a trace.
The remaining Grimsley blinks again, then shakes his head. For a split second, a glowing outline of his mysterious double flickers where he once stood, pulsing incandescent white. It was as if the universe was winking coyly at him.
Snake eyes.
Grimsley slams the doors of the Pokémon Center open, unusually feverish. This was his destination, after all, he planned to meet up with a fellow member of the Unova League to discuss public relations and something she called “image improvement”. He just got a little backtracked, that’s all. That’s all he’ll tell her.
Unlike the streets outside, still saturated with vacancy and silence, the Center is bustling with people and Pokémon alike. Soft music plays over the speakers, loud enough to hear but quiet enough to serve as a backdrop for the chatter of the Center’s patrons. Some Trainers peruse the wares of the small shop on the left-hand side, others simply stand in the lobby and engage in pleasant conversation with their fellow Sync Pairs. Grimsley ignores all of this and makes a beeline for the café. A nice, hot cup of something with a hit of caffeine should steady his jangled nerves.
“What’ll it be, hon?” The café’s green-haired receptionist – Trinnia, was it? There’s three of them, they’re hard to tell apart – smiles pleasantly at her customer, blissfully unaware of the events that transpired just outside the building.
“Coffee,” Grimsley only half-groans, making a last-ditch attempt to come off as his usual suave self. “Black coffee, please.”
“Coming right up,” Trinnia chirps amicably, pouring a hot cup of ready-made java from the nearby coffee machine into a paper cup. “Would you like cream or sugar in your coffee?”
Grimsley lowers his head into his hand and sighs. He requested his coffee black not even a minute ago . While in other circumstances he’d probably make some kind of roguish quip, his disquiet right on the heels of encountering his despondent double still clouds his mind, so he can’t be bothered to say anything witty.
“Neither, thank you.” Anticipating the drink and subsequent exchange, Grimsley rifles through his jacket pocket for spare change. Among the sea of coins, lint, bemusingly present poker chips and a half-empty package of Scrafty Slims cigarettes, his hand runs across…something. Something cold and metal and disc-shaped. It feels like a coin, although its size and notable lack of a ridged edge deem it not the kind used as Pasio’s currency. There’s something about it, though, that feels just too familiar. Might as well take a gamble and shed some light on the mystery coin, Grimsley figures, taking the coin out of his pocket.
It’s his coin. The one he’s always flipping. What was that doing there? This wouldn’t be such a shock if he could remember putting it in his pocket in the first place. He can’t even remember catching it the last time he gave it a toss. When was that, anyway? How did it get in his pocket? How did he even get here?
Grimsley’s train of thought is interrupted by a cheery voice and the smell of fresh coffee tickling the inside of his nose. “Your coffee isn’t gonna drink itself, hon. Enjoy!” Trinnia gives a lighthearted wag of her finger as she slides the cup of joe over to her customer. With all the weird shit that’s been going on, Grimsley needs something to take his mind off it all.
The bitter drink reaches Grimsley’s lips and promptly almost burns them off. Way too hot. What are they heating up this coffee with, Grimsley thinks, a fucking Magcargo? He pushes the drink across the coffee bar’s counter, figuring it’ll cool in due time, and his elbows follow in suit as he rests them on the countertop. Grimsley holds his coin up to his face, turning it in his fingers to watch the fluorescent light shift and bounce off the coin’s shiny golden surface, all the while nonchalantly anticipating the arrival of his acquaintance. She should be here any minute.
As if on cue, the Center’s doors open again. A stunning black-haired woman with long legs and a puffy yellow coat makes her entrance, tossing a Poké Ball playfully in her left hand. Even on her dullest days, it’s hard to not notice Elesa. Her galvanizing presence could turn heads in a room full of mannequins if she wanted. She sashays down to the café and takes a seat right next to Grimsley.
“There you are, Grimsley! To be honest, I didn't think you were going to show up, let alone earlier than me!”
“Hello, Elesa.” Grimsley swallows dryly. “You’re a bit late.”
“Fashionably late, I hope! Now, I hear you’re looking for a way to add an edge to your presence here on Pasio?”
“What’ll it be, hon?” Trinnia chimes in to take Elesa’s order, using the same sentence she said to Grimsley right down to the cadence.
“I’ll have a Razz Berry Lemonade, please and thank you.”
“Coming right up.” Trinnia flashes a certified retail-grade smile and gets to work without a second’s hesitation, unfazed by the magnetism of the model-slash-Gym Leader who just ordered a drink from her.
Usually, Elesa tends to have this sort of dazzling effect on people, making them feel like they’ve stepped into a spotlight or swallowed a shooting star with little more than a single glance or sentence on her part. There hasn't been a day since Elesa arrived in Pasio that a starry-eyed admirer hasn’t approached her in the street to ask for her autograph, or a selfie with her, or something along those lines. She doesn’t always mean for people to fall under her scintillating spell, but she figures it’s just part and parcel of her celebrity status. Trinnia, however, manages to be completely immune to the Gym Leader’s glamor, going about her business and pouring a cup of cold lemonade without so much as a ‘hey, you’re Elesa the shining beauty, you’re exactly as pretty as you are in the magazines and I bet you’re just as strong as they say you are’.
Elesa is, surprisingly, more than okay with this. It's refreshing to not have people flatter her wherever she goes, and as much as her fans’ support means a lot to her, it can be demanding, even tiring at times. With all that spotlight shining in her eyes, she’s bound to go blind sooner or later. That being said, it’s strange that Trinnia doesn’t even acknowledge her, especially considering how prominent her figure is both in and out of the modeling circuit. Even so, Pasio is chock-full of famous Trainers. Compared to how bright some of those stars shine, from the glorious to the notorious, Elesa feels like she’s on the brighter side of dimness in the island’s personal cosmos.
As Trinnia hands her a frosty plastic cup of reddish lemonade, Elesa figures that she’s probably extremely used to catering to a revolving door of legends and luminaries from every region imaginable. There’s no reason that she’d recognize her specifically.
Someone Elesa recognizes, however, happens to be sitting right beside her, an atypically troubled look washed over his visage. Image improvement will have to wait, Elesa figures as she takes a sip of her pleasantly tart drink. There’s something bothering Grimsley that needs to be dealt with first.
“Hey, Grimsley, you don’t look like you’re shining your brightest today. What’s got you so down?”
“It’s…it’s really nothing. Trust me.”
“Come on now, sweetie, something is clearly wrong. It’s like you’ve lost your signature spark. Don’t you Lie-pard to me!” A slight giggle escapes Elesa’s lips. Ever since a fellow Gym Leader and close friend of hers – Skyla, Grimsley’s pretty sure her name is – suggested she breathe new life into both her modeling and Gym Leader careers with an image revamp, Elesa’s tried to cultivate a more ‘casual’ and ‘friendly’ persona. In other words: in the name of public image, she’s doubled down on the sappy nicknames and bad puns.
Grimsley stifles a groan and, for a moment, is relieved that they aren’t discussing public relations at the moment. If Elesa’s guide to a PR makeover includes corny jokes and calling people ‘sweetie’, he’d much rather stick with his current image: suave and sophisticated, with just a touch of vice.
Along with Pokémon battles, modeling and wordplay, Elesa has the art of detecting and cajoling the innermost sentiments out of even the most standoffish individual down to a science. Talking to Elesa about seeing a fucked-up replica of himself across the street was not going to be a walk in the park, but from Grimsley’s point of view, it sure beats the hell out of hearing her recite an string of increasingly absurd instances of paranomasia in the name of public relations enhancement.
“Something…really weird happened to me earlier. Uncanny.” He rubs his temples, almost trying to massage the event out of his brain like a stiff joint.
Elesa takes another sip of her lemonade and raises a quizzical eyebrow.
“I think I met myself today. He looked miserable.”
Now she’s staring at Grimsley like he’s grown another head. Fan-fucking-tastic, Grimsley’s internal monologue bemoans, she thinks I’m a goddamn lunatic.
“Look, I…I was walking down the street, and I just saw another version of me! He looked older, like he was from the future. He was an absolute wreck…” A heavy sigh punctuates Grimsley’s uncharacteristic rambling. “I know, it probably sounds ridiculous, you’re free to not believe me, but I swear! I swear it really happened!” He cups his head in his hands and starts muttering to himself. “Man, oh man…Just my luck that as soon as I start getting used to this place, some crazy shit starts happening to me…”
Like the flick of a light switch, Elesa’s expression goes from skeptical to serious. Her eyes soften as she places a hand on Grimsley’s shoulder.
“I believe you. As improbable as that all sounds, I truly do believe you.”
Grimsley looks up at Elesa and scans her face, looking for some sign that this is an empty gesture from her to make him feel better. Nothing in her expression suggests she’s lying, and years of experience with the truth and its absence have honed Grimsley’s mental lie detector to a sharp point.
Lightning strikes twice. A television screen flickers static.
He slides his coffee over from the other side of the table, just for another tentative sip. Ideally, it’d be at optimal drinking temperature now: hot enough to warm his insides, but just cooled down enough to keep his taste buds from jumping ship. He can’t be completely sure though, it might still be too hot to handle. Flip a coin, take a sip, it’s all another one of life’s small gambles.
Grimsley puts his lips to the cup’s paper rim, and promptly almost spits the coffee out. It’s colder than a Beartic’s breath, even though it’s barely been a minute since Grimsley got the coffee. A chill runs down his spine.
A hologram phases in and out of nonexistence. A mirror breaks, each glassy shard reflecting an equally glassy eye. Some say it’s an ill omen. Seven years haunted. Two years ago, your heart clicked and buzzed with all the mechanical trappings of an android. What are you looking at, synthetic superstar?
Elesa closes her eyes contemplatively.
Two mannequins in the window of a mall, faceless plastic simulacra, sport matching haute couture garments. They’re sisters separated at birth. Cheap eyeshadow glitters under a streetlight, for a moment it becomes a spotlight. A machine visualizes a heartbeat. A machine imitates a heartache. A machine peels its glossy silicon skin off, exhibiting genuine human heartbreak.
“I know it’s crazy, but you wouldn’t be the only one. I haven’t told this to anyone before, but…I’ve seen myself here too. She was who I used to be.”
Everyone thinks they’re the only one. Misery loves company, dread actively desires it.