Work Text:
Here’s the thing about forgetting: You don’t know what you’ve lost until you’re expected to have it.
A small cog in a machine, taken apart and reassembled, but with key components missing here and there because that cog was to turn another which was to turn yet another. A line with a clear terminal and stations, but the actual tracks joining them somewhere in the grave, and so each station becomes a lonely stranded island. A circuit with a break somewhere, maybe in a wire, maybe in the switch, but wherever it is, the damned bulb isn’t lighting up.
Which is an accurate summary of Ingo’s past week. Unova is a system of its own, one running smoothly in a cycle every day, each person, each Pokémon, each little part playing the same role day after day after day. Every day, the same faces, the same actions. Actions he can’t remember all the steps for, and that’s where the system starts to glitch. From blazing-fast efficiency, it grinds to a standstill; the emergency brakes are pulled, and delays are caused. Passenger satisfaction obviously takes a hit, but the conductor at the front is under great duress as well. At the end of the day, no one wins. Not the passengers, not the conductor, not even time.
(Hisui wasn’t so unforgiving to those who stumbled, was it?
…Never mind, it probably was. Stumbling meant certain death in particularly dire situations. He’s seen too many incidents, ones that plague his dreams even here in modern Unova. Contrary to what people tell you, it never becomes a mere statistic.)
***
He queues up for Sawsbucks (because he was the one buying coffee for both himself and his twin at work before) and realises he has no idea what to order when he reaches the counter. Before, as Emmet informs him, he would usually have an extremely specific, long order that gave anyone else trying to memorise it utter madness. Emmet, himself, just goes for a simple iced coffee and adds whatever ungodly flavouring he likes by himself later. He’s sorely tempted to do the same at this point, all the various toppings and names making his head spin. How did he even remember any of these the first time around, and why is that considered normal?
(Elesa had been the one to order for him first, because he lost a bet. She’d just added everything she heard while queueing up to a cappuccino. He ended up loving the bizarre concoction. That’s what he’s told later, when he grumbles to Emmet about it.)
Coffee has never tasted so painful, he thinks, as he takes a sip of the cappuccino he’d finally settled on. The taste is familiar, but wrong. He’ll have to figure out what he likes all over again. Or, he could just never visit Sawsbucks and save himself the agony. Then again, somehow, the drink has managed to alleviate the pounding headache he hadn’t even realised he’d had since he first woke up in the Alabaster Icelands, so he’ll most likely be coming back to this station. Many more times, in fact.
(He vaguely remembers reading an article on the symptoms of caffeine withdrawal. He also vaguely remembers Emmet nagging him for relying too much on coffee as a substitute for sleep. Oh well.)
***
He goes to Shelmart, tired of sitting around the apartment doing nothing while Emmet’s at work, and ends up wandering the aisles aimlessly. He’d planned on cooking some soup, just like he had back in the Highlands, perhaps putting that oddly underutilised electric stove in the house to good use for once. (Isn’t it wondrous, how people no longer have to start fires themselves to cook? How the simple flick of a switch can achieve the same thing as hours of gathering and choosing firewood?) And then, he’d walked around the supermarket many, many times. He never found any of the ingredients he was looking for. Not the Aspear berries or the Springy Mushrooms, or even the Plump Beans. He’s finally told he’ll have better luck finding them in Driftveil City, in the markets and niche stores that cater to Ranseian palates, because there’s no shot at finding anything un-Unovan at a Unovan supermarket chain. Truly a melting pot of cultures.
(Only the living ones, really. Hisui is dying, on its last legs, heaving its last breath, as Sinnoh takes its place; its people forced away, drifting through space to the four winds, their stories, the blood they shed, all forgotten. He sees Kamado’s face on screen, a reminder through generations of how Hisui was killed, and he turns the TV off instantly.
Professor Rowan has no idea why the returning Subway Boss treats him with animosity at best, even when they’re working together to reintroduce the Hisuian species the latter had brought back into the wild.)
He ends up settling for close substitutes, after he remembers after three hours that Delphox (the search engine) exists and looks up each ingredient slowly and carefully. Wepear for Aspear, Big Mushrooms for Springy, Shuca berries for the beans. By the time he leaves the store, he has 10 missed calls and 30 unread messages from Emmet and Elesa (in his defence, he’d set his Xtrans to silent mode before his departure and keeps forgetting to switch it) and comes back to find both of them waiting on the couch, worried and annoyed.
“You could’ve left a note or something at least!” Elesa chastises him, sweeping him up in a hug. “We thought you’d disappeared again!”
It is then he finds out exactly why the stove remains unused. “I accidentally short-circuited it once while playing with a few Joltiks,” Emmet informs him, an apologetic look in his eyes. “It never worked again. You were furious back then. That’s why Joltiks are banned from the kitchen.”
(They never cooked anyway. Both of them were lethal chefs at best. It’s one of the characteristics they share as twins.
…Not anymore.)
***
“What if,” he asks Emmet, tearing his eyes away from the TV screen, which is currently playing an old Roland the Rail Engine episode, “What if I never remember everything I used to be?”
“You will.” Emmet replies, turning to him. “You’re already starting to remember many other things. It’s verrrry good progress.”
“But what if I lose some cargo forever?”
“It probably wasn’t important anyway.”
“And what if it was?” Because even if all the things he’s forgotten are small, they are all a part of him. Or at least, who he once was. And he has to be that person, or he won’t fit back into the gaping hole he left behind. And all those little things add up to a rather significant difference, one that prevents the system from functioning perfectly as the well-oiled machine it should.
“We’ll rediscover it together. Because you’re still you. You’re still my brother.”
Rediscover. As if he’ll be able to pick up all the pieces and fit them back together the same way it had once been. It’s never that simple. Even had he all his old memories - wishful thinking at this point - he’s changed, immutably, because he now has new memories loaded onto the train, taking up the space and crowding with the rest. Horrors he doesn’t want his family to ever have to see, filling in the space of his nightmares. Friends that are long gone, resting in quiet, abandoned graves.
Emmet’s confidence, he thinks, is very much misplaced. But he’s grateful for it all the same (and it hurts).
***
He slips into Hisuian a few times purely on instinct. Sometimes, he’s struggling for the perfect Galarian word, the fog in his brain annoyingly surrounding that one word on the tip of his tongue, and ends up just using Hisuian instead to convey the rest of his sentence. Sometimes, the word is close enough to Ranseigo that some of his friends with a bit more international exposure can vaguely understand what he’s saying. Other times, he finishes speaking just to see bemused looks on the others’ faces.
It makes getting things done far harder than it needs to be, at least, just like essentially everything else about him since his return. He doesn’t understand people, and they don’t understand him. (And isn’t that painfully familiar?) The language barrier is just the most obvious part of this entire problem of being whisked away by the deities above to somewhere far away and getting his thoughts scrambled.
Unova needs a Subway Boss. Hisui needed a Warden. In his current state, he is neither, nothing but a confused mix of memories and cultures that both seem foreign and familiar at once, a chasm of time stretching out on both sides, one he can’t bridge.
The system is malfunctioning around him, because of him, so where does he really belong?