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"Turning tail and running? From this puny human?!"
His voice followed it as it fled the scene. It tried as hard as it could to block him out... but he was the one person it had grown accustomed to never blocking out, and so his voice carried towards it, anyway, each word brute-force slamming into it with all the force of a sledgehammer.
Especially the last one:
"Pathetic."
It held everything in for as long as it could, even though the world in front of it, this beautiful world, with all its colors and its shapes and the sun shining down on it, because this was the world that had been blessed by Arceus, not the one it had been imprisoned in, never to have the sun warm its back again, was smeared colors and shadows and light that made no sense, what with the tears filling up its eyes. This was his world, and surely the sun must have taken its power from him, because there wasn't a single point brighter in this universe than its Volo, who cast everything in beams of light so brilliant that it hurt, but it welcomed the pain because it was his, because nothing Volo could produce could truly hurt, not in the permanent way, or the way that it could be angry at him for.
When it got to the edge of the mountain, however, it let itself seek out the shadows. It felt them welcome it into their embrace, wrap its soft darkness around them and pull it into them. To anyone else, it must simply have seemed to disappear into nothing, but it felt itself sink into those shadows the same way one might sink into a lake as they took a step off of the shallow end into what was nothing but an abyss below.
It had, of course, been planning to retreat into the Shattered World, to lick its wounds and try to put Volo's parting, hateful words out of its mind — but it seemed that fate was not going to be so kind. The darkness opened back up, and it saw the sun shining above it, and just the same as always, it hurt, but there was something else to be said about it, too. It had never felt such a sensation before, where the burning culminated in healing instead. Two sets of hands that belonged to one person took hold of it, and though it tried to claw away, to return to the void that even now beckoned for it to return, it was brought back up into the world that hated it thoroughly, the world in which only one person in existence had known its heart and had linked himself with it in order to achieve the goal they both wanted so desperately.
It looked up as it was hauled back into this cruel and uncaring world, and the first thing it saw was a kind and caring face, so kind and caring it thought it might never have known the meaning of the words until now.
It said, hardly daring to believe it: "...Volo?"
He was different. His hair had grown out so long — so long, to an unthinkable length, spilling over his shoulders, hanging down his back like a golden sheet. It still swooped across that one eye, but the silver it was used to seeing in his right iris had been splashed across with gold. At the back of his head was the symbol it was familiar with only because it was the circular plate around its father's torso. On him, the symbol was stripped of its power and given new meaning. It glinted beautifully in the light as the two of them knelt there on the marble floor of what had used to be the Temple of Sinnoh. It noticed he had wrapped part of his lovely ivory robes around it, blocking the chill from reaching it and filling it with a liquid, saffron warmth. Unconsciously, it leaned into it. He didn't seem to mind. In fact, he wrapped it up even tighter, and the feeling of his arms around it had it feeling tears prick the corner of its eyes once again.
Wait. It was not used to this vantage point, nor was it familiar with the feeling of a human being able to wrap arms around it. It looked down at itself and was so surprised it didn't know what to say.
Because it was in a human shape. It had two arms and legs, the same as any human, all a warm and healthy shade of brown, with hands and feet at the ends of them and everything. Its hands flew to its face and traveled across it — two eyes, like normal, but smaller, and free of the dark spokes that usually radiated outwards from them. It didn't have a beak anymore; instead, its fingertips flew across two soft lips, and a nose right in the middle, which was sort of like a beak, but much longer and narrower, with a pleasant bump in the middle. As its hands traveled around the sides of its head, it found that its horns had disappeared, as well as its headpiece, but thick, dark hair had taken its place, with two tufts sticking out farther than the rest on the sides to simulate the horns that were now absent.
It said, softly, "I didn't know I could do this."
If it had, it would have done it far earlier. Humans were much more susceptible to ideas presented by a being that looked even marginally like them, instead of the creature that it had been born as. Much as it loved that shape, humans were not very open to accepting things that looked different than them.
Then, it said to Volo, the world smearing around it again as tears once more filled its eyes, "I was hoping you would c-come back. I'm so sorry, Volo. Akari was not gentle. But even so... I should have stayed. To protect you. She could have hurt y-you..."
"She wouldn't have hurt me," said Volo softly. "You know she wouldn't have."
It had never heard him speak this gently, except maybe to Togepi as he was sending it off to sleep. It remembered lying down near him, watching him worry after Togepi. It remembered a heaviness settling in its heart, because it was the loneliest creature in the world, and Volo knew it, and yet he had never, not even once, opened his heart — his heart filled with so much love that it could scarcely believe such was possible to live inside someone — to it. Every night, it had gone to sleep a minimum of ten feet away from him, and sometimes more, at least on the nights where he wasn't welcomed into the Ginkgo Guild camp, where it was forced to watch from the shadows as he was accepted with open arms. I am trying so hard to be enough for you, it said silently, heart in the deepest darkest depths, trying to understand why it wasn't, but of course, it knew why it wasn't enough. It had never been enough, for anyone. It was consistently giving everything it had to the people it cared about and being rejected as if it wasn't even trying.
This — how Volo was speaking now — was how it had would have given anything in the world to have heard him speak to it when they had been traveling together.
It wept. It couldn't help it. It buried its face in his chest and it sobbed, shook with the force of it.
Volo's fingers trailed across its back. He murmured into its hair, his voice breaking as well, and wasn't that a surprise, because it had been heartbroken before and wholly ignored by him, "I am so sorry for what I — he — I — did to you. I have been so cruel to you, Giratina. I have been nothing but an oblivious, selfish monster."
Another voice came from its other side — this one husky, like the edges had been hacked off with a paring knife and not sanded down into smoothness. "Darling... I don't think it knows."
"What d-don't I know," said Giratina, and was so comforted by the feeling of being in his arms, and the acknowledgement of his ignorance of how upset it had been all this time, that it couldn't bring itself to make the sentence a question. It thought it might fall asleep like this. It thought that when it finally died, it would want to remember this moment. It would want Volo to send it off just like this.
Volo said, "I'm not your Volo. Not the one you've been traveling with so far, anyway."
It swallowed back its tears and blinked up at him. There was a sadness to him, that he couldn't be what it was so desperate for. It saw it in his eyes, like he might start crying, too. It was honestly surprised he hadn't started yet, because he dripped with empathy for it. You couldn't fake that kind of compassion. It was bathed in it, it was under Volo's hyper-local, personal sun of compassion, and it never wanted to move from it.
It said in a very small voice, "You're not my Volo?"
Then, immediately after, destitute and broken-hearted: "No, you're right. Of course you're not. He would never be concerned about me."
Volo's face set in an expression Giratina couldn't parse. It was an anger, but it was not the type of angry expression Giratina was used to seeing on his face. There was something righteous about it, something holy, something painful. Giratina felt itself being handed off to the other presence, very lightly, with the utmost care, as if it was something precious, and it watched Volo get to his feet. Like this, he seemed a god himself — the setting sun was positioned just behind his head, and though the hair ornament he wore was symbolic of Arceus, he could not have reminded it any less of the creature it knew as its father. He was a vision. He was what this world should have been gifted with all along. This was a Volo who had known love, and had accepted it, and reciprocated it, and had created a new world saturated with it.
"Wh-Where are you going?" it asked, a little afraid to have this new Volo leave its presence. It felt it might crumble into dust, having known this affection and then having it so suddenly vanish.
"Stay here," he said. "I'll find him."
And he took off across the marble floor.
Behind it, the person it had been handed off to had looped their arms around it, and they were gently and carefully braiding its hair over one shoulder. They said, sounding as if they had been living in heaven for the past few centuries and could no longer quite grasp the extent to which grief could reach, "My darling is going to make everything better, my sweet Giratina. He always does. Just you wait."
Giratina turned its head slightly to take a look at them. It was shocked to discover that they were practically a carbon copy of it, with the same-tone skin, the same black hair that tumbled down their back and over their shoulders, the same dying-star eyes, even though it couldn't see its own eyes, the same sharp incisors that filled its mouth. Unlike Giratina, however, this being had yellow horns poking out from the side of their head, traveling down both sides of their face just like its headpiece, and gold ornaments clasped around their arms and legs like the ones it boasted in its Pokemon form. The ends of their fingers were a gradient into deep obsidian, and it was tough to entirely call them fingers as they instead more resembled claws, except that you couldn't make your mind subscribe to one reality or the other.
"You're Giratina, too," it said in wonder.
"I am." They nuzzled at the side of its face, the way they might if the two of them had been in their dragon form, though such an action would have had Giratina's face flushing, because you didn't often nuzzle someone you didn't know quite well, and only when the other person was related to you — which it guessed they technically were, if they were the same, but still — or if you cared about them enough to want to make yourself their family. "I'm so sorry your Volo hasn't seen all the things you've done for him yet. I'm so sorry you cried yourself to sleep every night."
God, and acknowledgement was all it took, wasn't it, because the tears spilled over the rims of its eyes again and shot down its face. Maybe it was the human body it had been gifted... but it had the feeling it would have reacted like this even if it had been in its normal body. It grasped the other Giratina's hands, stopping them from braiding its hair, and it could feel how tightly it was holding them, how if they had been a normal human, it would have broken every bone in their hands, but this was Giratina, too, and it held tightly to them as it cried, and it cried even more when the other Giratina nuzzled them again and hid their face in its neck, pressing soft, understanding kisses to the underside of its jaw.
"I know it hurts," they said. "I know. It was lonely, being all by yourself for so long, wasn't it? And then you met him, and he was supposed to make everything stop hurting. He was supposed to be the answer to everything, because he was the only one who understood your heart." They were quiet a second, and the only sound was Giratina trying to get its weeping back under control. Then: "I love you, Giratina. No matter what happens next, you're never going to be alone again."
It took a while, for it to subside into hiccups. The other Giratina held it close the whole time, whispering loving words of affirmation to it, a thin simulacrum of its draconic tail traveling up and down its left arm, soothing it the way its mother might if it had ever had a mother. After another half an hour of this, it had finally calmed down — at least, until it saw the new Volo marching up the path that led to the Temple of Sinnoh, and then up the stairs themselves, his slender fingers dragging along its Volo, its precious, curious boy, by his elbow as he struggled to keep up with his taller counterpart ("Ouch, what are you doing, are you really me?! What the hell?!") whose strides were so confident and long that Volo was literally tripping over himself so as not to fall flat on his face. The new Volo's expression was nearly the same as when he had left, except that there was an irritation it now, an anger that flickered back and forth across his face. Giratina was used to this expression — but it was used to itself being the target of Volo's — and other's — derision. This new Volo stopped in the middle of the broken temple floor and fixed that incandescent look at Volo. Giratina's Volo.
It was stymied.
Volo opened his mouth to say something, and the new Volo shoved him to the ground.
It wasn't a hard shove. Even from here, even lightheaded with the aftereffects of crying, Giratina could tell that he had only been using the barest fraction of his power. It had been more of a purposeful push than anything. But Volo sprawled onto the temple floor anyway. His hair, which had come loose from how he'd styled it in their final battle against Akari — how long had it been since then? it hadn't been keeping track when it had disappeared into the shadows — fell into both eyes, long and fae-like and beautiful, as he glared hatefully up at this alternate version of him, who was glaring back down at him with a look that would have sent Giratina running back to the Shattered World with its tail between its legs so as not to suffer such judgment.
Volo said, explosively, like he said everything else now that he'd abandoned his facade: "What the actual fuck?!"
Which was what Giratina was thinking, and had been thinking pretty much since it had been dragged back into the sunlight by new-Volo and other-Giratina, but it took a backseat in its mind as terror rose up in it, choking it, stealing its breath. It wrenched free of other-Giratina's arms and lurched towards Volo, crying, "Don't hurt him! Don't hurt my Volo!"
Volo stiffened. He looked from new-Volo to Giratina, his hair rearranging itself, sliding off of his other eye until it was covering just the one, just like it'd always known him. He stared at Giratina, and then at the other-Giratina behind it, and it could practically see the gears turning in his mind as he said, "...G-Giratina?"
He was looking between the two of them, so Giratina couldn't be sure which one he was referring to. They looked nearly identical, but the other Giratina was the one that had horns and shackles on, so it assumed he must be referring to them.
Thankfully, other-Giratina was quick to correct him. "I'm Tioga," they said. "I'm my Volo's. Your Giratina is this one right here."
Volo studied its face with an emotion they couldn't parse. Only for a second, though. Then he looked off to the side, into the distance, at nothing in particular, and he said, "Whatever."
"Oh, no, you don't," said new-Volo — a god, certainly, so he must have been Volo Roi, Volo who sees me, Volo Shekinah, Volo who lives beside me, Volo Rapha, Volo who heals, Volo somech noflim, Volo pokeach ivrim — and pulled Volo halfway up by his elbow again, earning a pained, surprised cry from him that felt like someone had grabbed the heart inside of Giratina so hard it could feel the nails biting into it. It nearly made for him again, but Tioga placed a gentle hand on its shoulder, and when it looked back, they just gave it an understanding, but firm, shake of their head.
Volo Roi was livid. His hand was a clamp on Volo's arm, so tight that his knees were forced slightly off of the ground as he was drawn close to look into Volo Roi's eyes.
Volo Roi said, "Apologize to Giratina."
It was not a request. It was an order.
"For what?!" Volo demanded. He was spitting mad. "It should be the one apologizing to me!"
"What did you say?"
It was a terrifying thing, to hear Volo Roi speak this way. Any person with even a shred of common sense would have shut their mouth right then and there, realized that they were messing with a being that was not even in the realm of fucking around, that there would be serious consequences if they were continued to be disobeyed. But Volo must have seen this other version of him as non-threatening, somehow, because he went on to say:
"Giratina should be apologizing to me. It lost — against a child." He sneered at Giratina, whose chest felt like it had caved in and was sucking everything else in along with it to be obliterated forever, because of course he was right, of course it had lost against a child, and that was unforgivable, really. "Some god you are."
Volo Roi was seething. Or frigid. Giratina couldn't tell which. Some sort of hatred was coming off of him in waves, and it was either so hot it was cold or so cold it was hot. Either way, it was acidic. "You also lost against a child, if I recall. Yet Giratina still came when you asked, without even a moment's hesitation."
He stepped forward, and yanked Volo along with him. A few steps, and he had crossed the distance between the two Giratinas. He dropped Volo in front of them.
He said, "Look at it. Look what your stupid, childish arrogance has wrought. Look at what it took for you."
Giratina hadn't been cognizant of the marks on itself, because it had been sort of preoccupied with the whole 'having a human body' thing. Now, as it looked down, it could see the bruises that mottled its beautiful brown skin, the way gashes opened it up in various places, the cuts and scrapes along its fingers, the palms of its hands, its pretty knees and legs and ankles. It was sure there were more in places it couldn't see. It had not battled anyone in a very long time, so it had assumed the pain was simply part of its abyss-deep depression. Now, it was beginning to remember what it was like to suffer physical harm.
"Look at it," Volo Roi ordered him, and this time it left no room for compromise, even from someone like Volo.
So he did.
It could see the way its wounds affected him, even if he tried to pretend otherwise. It could see the guilt that swam in his eyes, the self-loathing, oh, its beautiful human, always so self-loathing, and now it was seeing it up close, how it warred with the defensiveness he wanted to react with, but couldn't, now that he was around three other people who knew his heart. He lingered a moment on the tear tracks on its face, and then he looked back up at Volo Roi and said, "Alright. I've looked at it."
"Is there anything you want to say? I know there is, Volo. I'm you, no matter how much you want to argue otherwise. I've been where you stood. Everyone here knows you intimately. So speak."
All of this was said with much less vitriol than the rest, but Volo Roi's eyes still sparked with something Giratina had never seen in Volo's eyes before. At least, not in this form.
"You were crying," Volo said to it, which was not the thing it had been hoping to hear, but things rarely turned out to be what Giratina was hoping for. It was very used to not achieving anywhere near the best-case scenario.
It said, "Of course I was crying. You hurt me, Volo."
"I didn't do that." Volo was immediately defensive. "If I was such a terrible wielder of your power, then you shouldn't have listened to me. You should have done whatever was necessary to stop Akari."
"I wasn't crying because Akari hurt me. I was crying because you hurt me." At Volo's confounded expression, it said, in disbelief that he could be so obtuse, "You called me pathetic! You were so mean, and all I was trying to do was make you proud, Volo! I traveled with you... I stayed outside the village when you went in, just like you asked, even though I was so, so scared that someone would find out what you were planning and be terrible to you about it... I didn't show myself to all of your friends, even though I wanted to meet your friends so, so badly, because if they knew you, then they had to be good people... I was always hungry, 'cause whenever you bought food it was always just for your favorites and never for me—"
"You eat?" Volo said blankly.
Which just sent Giratina crying all over again. "Of course I eat! I'm a Pokemon, too, aren't I? But whatever, it was fine, 'cause I found some berries growing in the forest, so I didn't starve, but it really sucked to see you feeding everyone else and you didn't even care about me. You never cared about me, Volo. You never cared about me the whole time even though I did everything you asked. And then I still came to help you, and when I couldn't do it, even though I tried really hard, you said those awful things to me, and all I ever fucking wanted was to be your friend. I cried myself to sleep every single night, Volo, 'cause I saw you with all your Pokemon, and you loved them all so much, and they all loved you so much, because of course they did, you're you, and I kept hoping that at any moment you would turn around and see me looking at you hopefully, and you would say, 'What are you doing all the way over there, Giratina?' And it would be the best—" Giratina was barely managing to speak through its crying, now, and it was so very apparent that it had fantasized about this exact moment happening so many times. "—it would be so wonderful, I could practically hear your voice saying it, it made me smile so big... and then every single time, I came back to reality and you weren't even looking at me. Your back was to me and you didn't care about me at all. And every night you tucked all your Pokemon that were outside their Pokeballs in, and you kissed Togepi on the forehead, and I would watch you and beg you, in my head, to come do that to me. It was all I wanted, Volo, it was all I wanted, and you never did it even once. You never even thought about doing it, so maybe I was stupid to even want it in the first place, but I can't help it, really, I couldn't help what I felt and what I'm feeling, and you broke my heart, Volo. Did you know that? Did you know you broke my heart?"
It was easy to see that Volo's head was spinning, having absorbed Giratina's melancholy monologue. He said, "You were... jealous of Togepi?"
He must have been expecting Giratina to take it back, embarrassed, but it was so destitute and heartbroken that it nodded, fresh tears spilling down its face, and squeaked out, "Yes."
Volo said, faintly, "Oh."
"It didn't even have to be a kiss," Giratina went on. "It could have been anything. I would have taken a pat on the head. I just wanted you to be proud of me, Volo, 'cause no one's ever been proud of me before, and I thought if I did everything you asked maybe you might be."
Volo said something, but it was far too quiet for anyone to make it out.
"What?" Giratina asked.
"I said it's me who's pathetic!" Everything he said was a fuse set to blow or a sparking transformer or the static electricity before a lightning strike. His eyes quickly moved away from Giratina's and desperately focused anywhere else. "When I was saying those things to you... deep down, I knew it wasn't about you. One god abandoned me. Why should I expect any other to act differently? It was me I was angry at. That I wasn't strong enough, even with all the training I'd done... that I had to rely on the power of a god to save me, when my people have tried that for centuries, to their detriment... I couldn't see straight, I was beyond angry, I was furious. If there had been some way for us to fuse and for me to gain your power I would have done it right then and there, to rip Akari apart. And I don't even hate her that much..." He shook his head. His eyes were starry. "It's me that's pathetic, Giratina. I'm nothing. I'm worthless."
Giratina was aghast. It crawled across the floor of the temple and drew him into its arms, running its fingers through his hair; at first, he tensed up completely, so stiff he might have been paralyzed... but then, as the seconds went on, he relaxed into it, and his hands came up to travel up its back and rest on its shoulder blades.
"Don't ever say that about yourself," Giratina was murmuring to him. "Don't you ever say you're worthless, Volo, don't you ever say you're nothing. I mean it. You're worth so much that I cried myself to sleep every single night that I didn't get your acknowledgment. All I ever wanted was to have the privilege of being your friend, Volo. When you talked to me the first time, I was happy because I wanted to make my father answer for what it did to us. But the longer I spent time around you, the more I didn't care about that anymore. 'cause who cares about my father when I get to wake up every day to a world where you're right next to me? Who even cares about my father then, Volo? The only thing it could do to hurt me now is to take you away from me, and I won't ever, ever let that happen, no matter what. If you want, you can tell me to go away forever, and it'll hurt more than anything in the world, but I'll do it, 'cause I just want you to be happy. But even if you do that, whenever you're in trouble, you can just call my name, and I'll hear you and come protect you. 'cause you know why, Volo? You know why I'd do anything for you?"
Volo mumbled a question into Giratina's shoulder.
"'cause I know I'm not yours — but you're my very favorite, Volo."
Volo said, a little trembly, "I don't want you to go away forever, Giratina. I just thought... I mean, now that it's all over..."
"You thought I'd leave you behind? You thought I was only in it because I wanted to punish my father?"
Volo nodded miserably.
Giratina made a despairing sound. It kissed the top of Volo's head as the sunset lit up the sky in brilliant pinks and oranges, the last vestiges of light casting themselves out into the aether.
Tioga was exuberant, watching as Volo asked Giratina to change back into its normal form. They watched as it did so — and god, what a small Giratina it was, compared to them. It lowered its head, as Volo requested, and he pressed a long, sincere kiss to the spot just beside its right eye, his own eyes closed and everything, and he smoothed his hand over its cheek, and he said, "You've been a very good dragon, Giratina. I hope you can forgive me for how I've treated you. I hope you can find it within you to allow me the distinct honor of being your friend."
Giratina's eyes squinched up, and it fought back big dragon tears, but ultimately lost the fight once more. It was okay, though. Volo was crying, too — happy tears — and without paying any mind to the other two beings in the vicinity, Giratina answered in the affirmative, and it curled up into a crescent moon shape, and Volo tucked himself against its face, both of their eyes fluttering closed as they drifted off to sleep, exhausted from their big evening.
Tioga turned to Volo — their Volo — to see what he thought, but he had disappeared.
Of course it was not difficult for Tioga to find him. Even if he had gone halfway across the world, they would have been able to track him down. You could not hide this Volo any more efficiently than you could hide a sun that had gone supernova.
But he wasn't halfway across the world. He was sitting on the edge of the cliff that the Temple of Sinnoh was situated on. His hair ornament caught the starlight, and his golden hair was so vibrant it seemed to give off its own luminance, however subtle. He was looking out over the as-of-yet unexplored lands of Hisui, his knees drawn up to his chest, his arms looped around them, his shoulders slumped.
Tioga dipped through the shadows cast by the broken pillars until they arrived in his own, manifesting themselves beside him. They touched a hand to his shoulder.
"We did a good thing," they said quietly.
He looked at them for a long second with those golden eyes.
"He's not you," said Tioga softly.
Volo pressed his mouth into a thin line. He had seemed so confident up to this point; now, he seemed entirely dependent on Tioga's perception of him, the same way he had seemed when they had drawn him out of his necklace, as if one unkind word from Tioga could break him into pieces he would never be able to put back together. "He's not," he said, "but I was him, back then."
Tioga nosed at the groove of his neck, making a small, sad, affectionate sound.
"I would have been no different from him, if you hadn't split yourself into two and kept your human body here in this world as a link. I was no different than him, really. I was still cruel to you. I wanted you to be something you weren't, because it meant the god I had such complicated feelings towards would be under my power. I would have done anything to silence Akari, back then. It was only Arceus's intervention that stopped me, and it was only your intervention that stopped it." He lifted Tioga's chin so that they were forced to look at his misty eyes, and he said, voice wavering, "How did you ever find it within you to forgive me, Tioga? How do you still find it within you, even now?"
He looked so forlorn, so morose, that they had to kiss him before anything else. They pressed their lips to his, the way they had a million times before, a chaste, loving kiss — and they could feel him relax under them, could feel the tension dissolving. They were so grateful to be able to do this for him, though mostly they were used to it happening in their bedroll — before their ascension — or their bed in the inn of the night, or, when one wasn't available, curled up beside each other in the grass or in the sand, if they were near shore, or anywhere else they could find shelter, after their ascension. It was a special kind of blessing, when you saw the person you loved more than anything else in the world shaking and sweating and terrified, to be the one thing that he could hold onto, his anchor, the one person that would steady his breathing, slow his heart, and, eventually, send him off to sleep, which might have eluded him for several days in a row beforehand, if the horrors were particularly persistent.
His heart was calm, now. His limbs were slack. He had extended his legs out in front of him, so that they hooked over the edge of the cliff and dangled freely into the open air. He took their face in his hands and kissed them back, honey-warm and like home, and when they were finished, they opened their eyes but kept their faces just as close to each other. Volo's hands did not move from where they were cupping Tioga's jaw.
"Volo," they said, their voice a sheer, nearly-transparent thing, though there was no one around who could overhear them. "If I was angry, and I said something cruel to you — something really cruel, something that you knew wasn't true — what would you do?"
"You're my god," said Volo, which was wild to hear when he had just spent the last five hundred thousand years as one and retained that appearance even now. "I worship you. I would assume that you knew better than me. That you saw something in me I didn't see myself. I would agree with you, and I would ask if there was anything I could do to rectify my shortcomings."
Tioga gave him a withering look.
It really was what Volo would do... but he knew what they meant. They were asking him as an equal, not as a god and their devoted, self-loathing acolyte. He said, sighing: "I would tell myself that you were hurt. That you were angry, and that you didn't truly mean whatever it was that you said. I would wait for you to calm down so that we could talk about what was going on, and how I could help you to feel better, to feel like yourself again."
"And you wouldn't hate me, right?"
"Of course not! I could never hate you, Tioga..."
"What would you do if I asked you to forgive me?"
Volo mulled it over. He wanted to be as honest as possible in this thought experiment, where the two of them were equals. "I would forgive you. But I would also tell you that there was nothing to forgive, because I would understand that you said it at a very delicate moment, and that that wasn't your true heart, but of course you would insist that there was, so I would tell you that if that was so, then I would always forgive you, time and again, because there's not a single thing you could do to send me away from you forever."
"And why is that, my Volo?"
"Because I love you. Because I can't stand to be apart from you. Because you've done so much for me that there's not a single thing you could ever do or say — no matter how cruel, no matter how heartless — that would make me want to leave you. Because you're the one thing that makes everything better. Because even when we're fighting, as long as I can still see your face, I know that everything is going to be alright, because you're still here."
He thought back on what he had said — on the thought experiment as a whole — and said, simply, "...oh."
Tioga said, voice so uncharacteristically paper-thin: "Why do you think I feel any differently about you?"
He held them to him. He palmed the back of their head and pressed their face into his shoulder, wrapped them up in his ivory robes. This was the only iteration in which he had ever been taller than them, and he relished the feeling of being able to protect them for once, to be their guardian instead of the other way around, to make them feel small and safe and loved in his arms.
"You're my one thing that makes everything better," Tioga squeaked out. "I'll forgive you anything, Volo, as long as you never go away from me."
"I won't," Volo assured them, immediately. "Not ever."
"Okay. Good." They sniffed wetly, swallowed, and said, "'cause, like, I wanted to ask you if you'd marry me, but it was gonna be real awkward if you were, like, 'Well, Giratina, sometimes you hog all the covers in the middle of the night, and also I don't like the way you accidentally thwack me in the face with your tail sometimes, or chew on branches, so I'm going to go away for a while and hope that when I come back you act more like a responsible human being.'"
"The tail thing is an accident. I don't expect you to know where your tail is at all given times of the day, especially when I'm so small in comparison to you. And chewing on branches is nothing new. You've done that as long as I've known you. It was strange when I didn't know you weren't human, but now that I do, I know it's just to keep your fangs whittled d—"
His brain caught up with what they had said, and his heart stopped dead in his chest. He very nearly thought he might be in need of medical attention.
He said, because he couldn't manage anything else: "Marry you?"
"Yeah, don't worry, it was a dumb idea. I just thought I'd pitch it and see if you were into it. Even if it was just for the tax benefits or whatever."
Volo was gaping like a fish. He was sure he looked ridiculous to anyone on the outside. Thankfully, the only person who would have been witness to his idiot reaction had their face buried in the slope of his neck, though he was certain they could feel his pulse, which had restarted and was now racing along at what felt like four times the normal speed. Once he could speak again, he said, "No, no, it's not that — I'm just. I wasn't expecting it. Marry you! Of course I will, Tioga! That should have been obvious when we spent half a million years together in a world where my primary concern was making sure that you were safe and happy. Why on earth would you think that that wasn't where I wanted our relationship to go?"
Tioga lifted their head from his shoulder and blinked hopefully up at him. Like this, he could see how fragile they were. How fervently they'd been hoping he would say yes. They said, "'cause, I mean, I don't know. Because I'm a Pokemon, I guess?"
Volo had thought about this quite extensively. At first, when he'd seen Tioga in their Pokemon form, he'd been nervous that he would feel differently towards them. He had already had sex with them — though in human form — at that point, even though he hadn't known what they were, so he had kept waiting for the self-condemnation to begin. But the more he had seen them in their dragon form, the less he had believed that anything about their relationship could be wrong. Even as a Pokemon, they were entirely sapient, weren't they? They spoke to him. They had human intelligence. They spent most of their time in a human body, and even when they didn't, it was the same mind inside of them. For all intents and purposes, they were human, aside from their true body being a dragon, of course. If he was being honest, their nature as a god superseded humanity entirely. It would have made more sense for Tioga to feel that being with him was inappropriate, with the considerable gap between them in terms of ability.
He rubbed his nose against theirs in a nose kiss. They squealed with delight. "You know I couldn't care less about that."
"So we'll be together forever?" Tioga asked breathlessly.
As if there was any possible future where they would leave each other. He could not even imagine such a thing. He couldn't even force his mind to create a hypothetical for a situation like that. It wasn't that the thought of living life on his own again was too horrible to fathom; he couldn't fathom it to begin with. It was not a fact of reality that could happen. The two of them coming apart was not just far-fetched but entirely impossible. He understood even more now, what Tioga had been trying to say. Of course they forgave him for how he'd treated them. Of course they would continue to forgive any of his idiot transgressions. There simply was no future in which one or both of them did something so unforgivable that it caused a rift between them that could not be breached merely by the presence of the other person.
As long as they were still here. As long as he could still see them. As long as they hadn't gone away from him.
He said, "Much, much longer."