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Tuli had just snuck a Pecha berry from her stores — surely no one would miss it, it was just one berry, and it had looked so tantalizing, almost like it had been begging her to eat it — when she turned around and nearly choked on it.
It wouldn’t have mattered so much if it had been Ginter. He was older, and she was young and dumb and supposed to be irresponsible, and so she would have gotten a little bit of a reprimand, insisted she’d never do it again, and then planned on how she was going to get away with it the next time a particularly juicy-looking Pecha berry called her name, even though Ginter took careful stock of all of their goods and would definitely notice another one going missing. (She planned to say it must have been bounced out of the wagon along the way, or something equally plausible.)
It did matter, this time, because she was staring at someone that she had seen many times, but had never quite trusted and certainly didn’t now, not now that she knew what had happened up on the mountain where the ruins of the Temple of Sinnoh stood. Not now that she knew the true aim of the person she, Ginter, and Mani had been traveling with had been all this time. Not now that she knew that the being with the long waves of dark hair and the eyes like dying stars was not a human being at all, but rather the shadow of God itself.
She swallowed the remains of the Pecha berry and said, her voice wavering, “Giratina.”
Tioga’s expression was carefully neutral. Their black-hole eyes were fixed on Tuli in the same manner she thought a wild Pokemon sizing her up for lunch might display. Suddenly she felt very, very human.
She regarded them, trying to figure out what she was going to do if Tioga decided that she was no longer necessary. Could she even hope to defend herself at all against a god? Her fingernails cut into her palms as she squeezed them into fists — not to get ready to attack them, but because she would be shaking if she didn’t. Her fight-or-flight was begging her to run for the hills… but she knew, if she tried, she would get all of about two meters before Tioga vaporized her.
They were a child of God, after all.
But they were distracted. Though their eyes were locked on her, she could see how they flickered with indecision. And the reason for that indecision had to be the person they were carrying. Tuli took in the sight of him — gone was the Ginkgo Guild uniform and the bun he always swept his golden hair back into. Now he was dressed in what must have at one time been his people’s ceremonial clothing, so very different from anything she had ever seen on anyone in this region or any surrounding ones. He was clinging to Tioga, who had him in a bridal carry; his fingers were grasping their new and beautiful white outfit as if by doing so he could somehow hide himself inside of it. That golden hair she was so used to seeing — so similar to her own, and yet so much different — was in disarray, half of it hanging like a curtain, the other half concealing his eyes from everyone except Tioga.
She swallowed and said, “Volo.”
Volo stiffened, just a bit, enough that she could tell he had heard her. He drew closer to Tioga.
They stopped about four meters from her and did not advance further. Those strange eyes studied her calmly.
“He’s hurt,” they said.
Tuli didn’t know what to say. There were no wounds visible on him, but Tioga wouldn’t be coming back to the Ginkgo Guild unless something was seriously wrong. “Okay,” she said, because what else was there to say, really?
Tioga’s eyes flicked to Jubilife Village, which was so close a person could hear conversation coming from inside. Though they were out of sight of the guards, it would only take a second to shout for them and have them come running.
They said, with obvious difficulty, “…we need somewhere to stay. For the night.” And, as if it needed to be said at all, “Jubilife Village won’t have us any longer.”
The Pecha berry sat like a rock in her stomach. “He tried to erase the—”
“He was going to create a new one,” Tioga cut in evenly. It sounded like they were trying everything in their power to hold back a concerning amount of rage and were only barely managing it. They brimmed with some new power that they hadn’t had before, when they’d been little more than a wanderer that Volo had taken up some strange fascination with. Tuli had been annoyed by the public displays of affection they were constantly showing, especially when the two of them stayed up late into the night cuddling in their bedroll and having whispered conversations, but now she found herself missing that unremarkable and amnesiac Tioga who must have known nothing of their true nature. “He was going to make sure that no one ever suffered the way he had suffered. But please, tell me more about how he deserved my father trying to kill him and how he should be left homeless and destitute for any wild Pokemon to make a meal out of.”
They pressed their lips into a thin line and fixed Tuli with that steely, space-cold gaze once again.
Little by little, the fear that Tioga would try to kill her was going away. It wasn’t her that Tioga was angry at; it was the injustices done to someone that they cared about deeply. When the legends had spoken of Giratina — if they did, which wasn’t often — they had always said that they were a vengeful god, banished to a dimension where they could no longer hurt anyone with their affinity for violence. Now, as she stood here, watching Tioga lower themselves to asking her for shelter to keep someone they loved safe, Tuli wondered how much of those legends were true. Those that painted Giratina as a being of chaos would never have believed that it would be standing before her, requesting something of her rather than taking it for themselves. They would have likely staked their reputations on Tioga slaughtering her and forcefully appropriating her supplies and shelter.
But Tioga looked like a denial from Tuli would break them.
She bit her lip so hard she thought the skin might break. Was she really doing this?
Before she could change her mind, she waved them over to the wagon.
The way they moved, now that they had combined with the part of them that had been banished to the Shattered World for billions of years, was disconcerting to say the least. It was like a trick of the mind; if you let your thoughts slide over it, they would appear to be walking the same way as anyone else. It was only when you really forced yourself to pay attention that you could see how they seemed to slip in and out of shadows without straying from the path that they were walking, how darkness clung to them like condensation, how you could not say that this being was moving entirely in this dimension.
She moved aside some crates as they strode over. Once they had climbed into the wagon, she could see how extraordinarily uncomfortable it was going to be — she had forgotten just how tall Volo was, and Tioga was even taller than that. But somehow, they made it work, and though the way Tioga was posted up against the crates couldn’t have been comfortable, Volo was curled up against their torso, looking like he could fall asleep right then and there. Tuli was alarmed to see the pained tears pricking at the corners of his eyes, but she could tell it was from whatever injury he had sustained at the Temple of Sinnoh and not due to the awkwardness of their position in the wagon.
“I’ll need to cover you with a blanket. So Ginter doesn’t see,” she explained. She dreaded to think what would happen if the old man found out that Volo had not only come back but had been escorted by a creature often regarded as the death of God, the insidious shadow of the Lord’s grace. He had not had kind words to say about his former employee when Akari had come back the other day and told everyone everything that had transpired, especially when she’d gotten to the part about Tioga showing up in all of their divine glory and threatening her life if she didn’t immediately leave.
As she hunted through the various supplies on the other end of the wagon, she heard Tioga humming softly. When she glanced back, she could see that this creature she had been so sure was nothing but a hostile demon was running their fingers through Volo’s hair. It was him they were humming to, and when she stilled for a second she could hear them say, “I know it hurts, darling.”
And then, Volo’s voice, barely there, so weak it legitimately scared her: “Tioga, am I going to die?”
Tioga’s voice, now, so soft and kind Tuli felt her chest clench in sympathy: “No, my darling. You won’t die. I love you too much to let you go and do something like that.” Then, “We’re staying with Tuli tonight, so you can get some rest. But you have to stay quiet, alright?”
Heartbroken: “They know what I tried to do. If Ginter finds out, he’ll make us leave. Tioga, I don’t think I can handle getting up and going somewhere else. Not even if you carry me.”
“I know, my sweet boy. I’ll keep us safe. I promise.” And, hesitantly: “If worse comes to worst, I can bring us somewhere that no one will bother us. But it’s frightening, and I’d rather not scare you anymore than you already are. So please get some rest, okay, my Volo?”
In a fading voice, already half-asleep, Volo said, “I just wanted to make it so no one else suffered…”
“I know. And you are so kind for it that I don’t deserve to have you as my disciple. Just sleep for now, and we’ll figure everything out in the morning, alright?”
“Alright.” A pause, and then, “Tioga?”
“Mhm?”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too, my thoughtful, compassionate human.”
A long few seconds passed, and then all of a sudden Tuli realized she had been frozen in one place the entire time with her hand on one of the blankets. She was lucky that Tioga was facing the opposite direction. She didn’t want them to see the way her eyes had become misty with tears.
But she didn’t bother to swipe them away when she delivered the blanket to Tioga, who covered Volo with it up to his shoulders and then did something that caused them to fade into the shadows of the corner of the wagon. It was hard to see them like this — you really had to work to make out the shape of a person, even though you knew they were right there. Their orange eyes blinked back at her from the cover of darkness, so devoid of emotion she might as well have been speaking to a rock. Volo, while more visible than Tioga, was still draped in shadows, and looked like he wanted to disappear into them entirely.
Tuli said, “I’m glad he has you.”
Tioga just blinked at her.
She said to Volo, “I always liked you. I still want to like you.”
And then she released the rope holding the wagon’s canopy back, and the fabric swung into place, separating her from Volo and Giratina.
She was still alive in the morning, which was a nice surprise.
Ginter was already awake and had strolled into Jubilife yet again to catch up with the residents. Tuli had learned during their travels that meaningless conversation while sitting on a step somewhere was a chronic condition for old men. He and another man were standing by the fence, probably talking about the weather or the kids these days or whatever it was that men over fifty found interesting. (Was Ginter over fifty? She’d never asked, but surely people under fifty didn’t have that much gray hair, right?)
She yawned, stretched, and packed up her bedroll; she had gotten all the way to making breakfast before she remembered that she had two extra pieces of cargo in the wagon. Good Lord. She was lucky Ginter wasn’t around. If he’d investigated stock or something, and Tioga wasn’t able to hide the two of them in time… well, she didn’t want to think about what would have happened. Tioga had shown how uncharacteristically gentle they could be, but there was nothing saying that they were like that with anyone but Volo.
As she made breakfast, she tried not to be obvious about the fact that she kept looking at Ginter to see if he was headed back to the wagon yet. So far, so good — she managed to plate a helping of breakfast without him looking over even once. With one last look back at him, she stole away out of his sight to the back of the wagon, where she knocked on the wooden siding and said, “Volo?”
Several flat black ribbons with deadly-looking crimson spikes on the end caught hold of the fabric covering the wagon and pulled it aside. Tuli found herself looking into the face of Tioga, who had not moved all night, it looked like. The ribbons were coming out of their back; they must have been parts of their Giratina physiology.
They glanced down at the human boy they held tenderly in their arms. He had been fast asleep, but at the sound of his name and the feeling of movement beside him, he had started to wake up. He blinked the sleep out of his eyes, yawned, and, seeing Tuli in front of them, pulled himself up into a sitting position. Tuli watched as Tioga guided him so that he wouldn’t fall; she could see how Tioga’s claws maneuvered him like he was porcelain, like they’d break him if they touched him the wrong way. To be so treasured by Giratina… Tuli wondered, absently, how it felt. What it was like to be such a precious thing to such a powerful god.
“Breakfast,” Tioga explained.
That was all they had to say. Volo, apparently feeling at least better than he had been when he’d gone to sleep, had all but snatched the plate from her and was shoveling eggs and sausage into his mouth like he hadn’t eaten in years. She thought she heard him say thank you somewhere in between bites, but honestly, she couldn’t be sure.
She only had to wait about forty-five seconds until he was finished and handing the plate back to her.
“Jeeze,” she said, because, like, what else did you say? “Sure hope you don’t get sick, or that’ll have been a huge waste.”
“Sorry,” said Volo. “I’ve barely eaten anything for the past two days. Tioga and I were—”
Horror dawned on his face.
He turned around in Tioga’s arms. He was completely crestfallen. “Tioga,” he said, a little brokenly, “I didn’t save anything for you. I…”
They nuzzled into his neck, though Tuli could hear the quiet growling of their stomach if she focused. “It’s alright, my love. You needed it far more than I do.”
“But I— you saved my life, Tioga! And here I am, so ignorant of your needs… I… I…”
He looked helplessly at Tuli.
“I can’t,” Tuli said, and she really did feel terrible about it. “I’m skipping breakfast for you. You know Ginter keeps stock, like, meticulously. You always complained about it ‘cause that’s how he found out you were barely selling anything until Akari came along.”
Volo looked like he might be about to cry. He held his hands in front of Tioga’s face. “It’s all I have. I can’t believe how selfish I am, Tioga. Look at me. Less than one week as your disciple and I’m already thinking only of myself.”
“Shh, shh. None of that, now,” said Tioga, and then they took his wrist in one of their claws and began to lick long stripes up his hand, gathering any amount of food they could, even though they couldn’t have been getting anything solid.
Feeling very intrusive, Tuli excused herself and waited outside of the wagon for them to be finished. But her curiosity ended up getting the better of her; she called, from outside the wagon, but not loud enough to be heard by Ginter: “Can’t you go stay with Cogita? Isn’t she your grandmother or something?”
“Ha! My grandmother,” said Volo derisively. “No. She’s from my tribe, but we’re not related. And besides — she can’t stand me. And she’s a disciple of Arceus, so she really can’t stand Tioga.”
Oh, right. Volo had brought Tioga along on his excursions to Cogita’s home, but Tuli remembered how they had always looked like they were being forced to go to the dentist. They must only have gone because they wanted to keep an eye on him. Though Cogita wasn’t Volo’s family, Tuli wondered how it must feel to have someone so important to you have to be so uncomfortable around the only other person you knew from your tribe. It was like a mother-in-law situation from hell.
“We should go,” she heard Tioga say under their breath. She could almost see the way they must have been gently squeezing Volo’s arms, nosing at his neck, pleading with him in their very animal way. She’d seen them around enough before all of this had happened to be able to pretty accurately predict what they were doing at any given point in time, mostly because the answer was almost always “being physically affectionate with Volo”.
“Of course,” Volo answered them. “I’m yours. Where you go, I’ll go. When you want to leave, we’ll leave. No matter what.”
“Are you feeling up to it? You were in so much pain before…”
“I’m alright. It’s just a dull headache now. And even that’s going away now that I’ve eaten something.”
“Still having panic attacks?”
“Yes. But I think if we start walking… if we get away from all of this… they’ll clear up. Jubilife Village being right there is terrifying, you know?”
“I know,” said Tioga, in a voice that made it very obvious they had never been comfortable around other people, even though they had always acted like they were. Tuli recalled how Tioga’s excitement had always been dependent on Volo; it was always him they were lifting up in praise and saturating their conversations with. When the subject had come to their own origins, they had almost always gone quiet and remained that way for the rest of the interaction. They must have been deflecting some pretty intense panic attacks all this time, too.
A minute or two later, the two of them climbed out of the back of the wagon. Tuli gestured around the side, which would hide them from Ginter.
Tioga’s arms were draped over Volo’s shoulders. The two of them were so tall that she felt like little more than a Rattata standing before them. And they were such opposites — Tioga, a living shadow, the encroaching night given form, and Volo, standing there in his mostly-white ceremonial clothes and his long blond hair falling like curtains around his face and over Tioga’s forearms, looking very much like an angel sent from Heaven. How perfectly they fit together.
“Just stick to the tree line,” Tuli told them, motioning to a path through the bushes that would spit them out by the woods. “That way, if you run into anything dangerous, you can bank right and lose them in open field. You’ll do better there than in the trees, you know? Most Pokemon get tired pretty quickly, especially if you zig-zag and exhaust their stamina. I don’t think many of them are endurance predators. Not like humans.” She realized a second too late what she’d said, and gave Tioga an apologetic look. “Er…”
“Thanks, Tuli,” Volo said, saving her. Tioga was, as per usual, just blinking at her from the shadows they seemed to consistently be enveloped in, even when the sun was shining almost directly down on them like it was right now. She would have been concerned that she’d somehow offended Tioga, but this felt less like them giving her the silent treatment and more like Tioga having finally regained their memories and now feeling distant from humans as a whole — except for their Volo, of course. “You didn’t have to let us stay, but you did. Even after you heard what it was I was trying to do. That… I’ll always remember that.”
She could see, now, the compassion that Tioga had been talking about in his eyes. How he truly wanted nothing but the best for everyone. How he wished fervently no one would ever have to suffer as he had suffered. Looking at him like this, she thought it might not be such a bad thing to have this world erased and recreated with him as the god in charge of it.
But she had to stop going down that road. If she kept thinking about it, she’d end up asking to come with him, and she already knew that Tioga would never approve. Besides, it wasn’t her journey to take. She still had a job and a family and people who cared about her. Leaving it all to follow someone with the kindest eyes she’d ever seen would probably be a decision she’d regret somewhere along the way.
“It’s no problem,” she said, reaching out and lightly punching his arm in a friendly way. She summoned up a bittersweet smile and said, “Just… Just come back, yeah? At least once. Just to let me know how you’re doing. It doesn’t have to be soon. I just want to know you didn’t go and really get yourself killed by Arceus or something.”
Not like Tioga wouldn’t move heaven and earth to protect him, of course. She thought about mentioning that, but decided against it. Maybe one day she would be friends with Giratina. Maybe someday they’d be ready to accept a platonic relationship with a human.
But today was not that day.
She was gazing out at the open field when Ginter sauntered back over and began preparing his own breakfast.
“Ya see something interesting out there?” he called to her.
She shook her head, watching the two dots that were Volo and Tioga disappear over the horizon.
“Just remembering an old friend,” she said.
A trill of Staravia birdsong sounded from behind Tuli.
She straightened up from where she’d been organizing the fruits and vegetables for the day. God, she felt eighty years old. Who knew that her back would feel like it was giving out on her less than ten years after she’d given up the traveling-merchant game for good? She guessed she owed a lot of it to constantly bending over and inspecting stock; she hadn’t known how taxing it could be. She had a new appreciation for Ginter for always doing it for her. She’d have to thank him the next time he came to town, which could be quite soon, as he was close to retirement age and Solaceon was known for its quiet and relaxing atmosphere. He’d sure need some of that.
She turned around — the Staravia that had trilled at her was perched on the fence separating her property from Mizono’s. She waved at Mizono, who was sitting on her porch, a mug of tea cupped in her hands and rocking back and forth on a rocking chair, and then turned her attention back to the Staravia. Her heart jumped when she saw it was holding a rolled-up piece of paper; she retrieved it from the Staravia’s mouth, thanked it, and then gestured it over to the stands lining the side of her house, where it studied each bin carefully before finally selecting a large, juicy Rawst berry and flying away, though not far — she’d need it less than twenty-four hours later to send something back the way it had come.
Settling herself into a chair next to her makeshift little market, she unrolled the paper and began to read:
Hi, Tuli,
Hope you’ve been well! Right now, Tioga and I are in a place called Orre. Tuli, I can’t believe it — it’s like home. Like Canaan, where the Celestica are from. Canaan’s still a long way away, but I’ve never seen somewhere so close to my (admittedly few) memories of it. I’ll try to find a camera so I can send some photographs with my next letter.
So, here’s what we’ve been up to lately…