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Lucas?
I can’t…I can’t feel you anymore. It’s cold without you.
Why have you left me? What is this nightmare I find myself drowning in?
Please, don’t leave me like this.
The warmth of your arms around my body lingers like an afterthought. The fur on my chest still feels tousled where you buried your snout and wept for reasons I understood far too late. Your last words still echo over and over in my head, tumbling over each other like waves, overlapping until my mind splits in two, screaming and howling until the tumult itself collapses and only a hollow, stagnant emptiness remains.
These anomalies never correct themselves. The twisted mirror never fluctuates nor fades.
I’d known, once, that it couldn’t last forever. I’d prepared for it. Tried to warn you about it. If I’d just remembered that, if I hadn’t come to pretend—to want to pretend—that we had all the time in the world together…all this wouldn’t hurt so much, would it? If I hadn’t chosen you, despite every reason not to…I wouldn’t be so lost, would I? It was all I ever wanted, to stay with you. And I couldn’t have even that.
How could things have gone so wrong? Was my fate sealed the moment I opened the door for you on that horrible day, letting you and you alone see me at my worst? Should I have known better than to have curled up next to you night after night, to have savored your fluffy hugs and wonderful cooking? Should I have foreseen this before I took your outstretched paw and walked with you to a new expedition-filled life? Held your trembling form tight when your doubts and demons came creeping in?
Is…is all this my own fault?
It was supposed to be me. I was the interloper, orbiting on borrowed time, and it was supposed to be me expunged from the universe when I’d outlived my usefulness. Everything I did, I did for you, and this is how you repay me—by sending me to drift alone in a world to which I never belonged. To consign me to keep guiding the shivering and the lost to safety when I cannot see even the ground on which I tremble.
We swore we wouldn’t leave each other’s side even if the Sun itself turns to stone, and this is how you honor our promise.
No. It wasn’t your fault. You couldn’t have known.
I don’t know if I care about that fact anymore, and it hurts.
You are everywhere. Not even the absolute blackness of closing my eyes offers me respite from your gentle smile and starry crimson eyes, haunting me like specters. Hounding me like sunlight. One stray whiff of the crisp spring air, and I am torn apart, stitched back together at your favorite hill overlooking the village. The spot under the tree, where you’d wrapped your Harmony Scarf around my neck, grinning like mad. Where you’d lied in the grass at my side, nuzzling my cheek and squeezing my paw, and swore to stay at my side. Where you’d finally embraced me for the last time, giving up on your muddled, fantastical explanations and sobbed silently into my shoulder.
You were never good with frantic questions yelled at you one after another. But how could I believe you when you claimed that you were Mew, that this all happened thousands of years ago, that your time and purpose in this world came to an end with Dark Matter’s passing? That we’d chosen to erase our memories because we wouldn’t have been able to rescue the world if we’d known the cost?
How could you expect anyone to believe something like that?
I cannot remember the last time I stepped foot in a Mystery Dungeon. Letters pile up from your Pops, begging me to search the world to find you, then to carry on what we started together if nothing else, and I cannot bring myself to even get out of bed to read them. Ampharos claims that I can stay in the Expedition Society HQ for as long as I need, yet not a day goes by where he or Mawile does not pester me about finding a new partner and returning to expeditions.
They must be tired, so desperately tired of carrying dead weight. Today, they even spun a tale that a prophet who can see into the past and future might have a way to bring you back. And tomorrow I am to pay this seer a visit. How gullible do they think I am? What do they think will change if I humor them?
You are everywhere, everywhere, everywhere, and I don’t know why. In the newspapers, in smiling faces, in held hands and longing gazes and intertwined lives. I saw you in Rampardos and Cinccino’s horrified scowls, faces twisting where loving smiles had shone moments ago, as I gripped their cups of scalding coffee so tightly in my paws they shattered in my grasp. I saw you in Kangaskhan’s concerned, pitying eyes as she pried shards from and bandaged my singed paws and walked me back to the Expedition Society HQ, forcing me to take a paid leave from work at the café.
But…through it all, I couldn’t hear you. Which concerns me—you were there, weren’t you? Why couldn’t I hear your voice? Your stupid jokes and gentle sighs and infectious giggles?
I cannot make it through this without you. Speak up in the future, won’t you?
Enough. This is wrong. I am delusional, haunted, wrong. I have lost my grip on what is real and what is not. This is all because of you. This is all your fault, all of it.
You are nowhere. Not even the whims of Arceus themself can change that. Hallucinations are not born into fruition no matter how tantalizing or seemingly real. I watched you fade into golden light, felt you slip like sand from my grasping paws. You left me without even a corpse to bury. There is nothing beneath your spot on the hill, where they placed a stone for you, placed flowers and wept for you, waiting in vain for a second ghost to show himself.
There was nothing for me to say. Nothing for me to see. You would’ve understood.
Shut up. It wasn’t his fault. How selfish can one Vulpix be? I should’ve gone. I should’ve mourned for you. I know that. You wouldn’t have wept for the disintegration of our shared future if you’d wanted this to happen.
Come back. I’m sorry. Please hurry—can’t you see how much I’m hurting? When you come back, there may be nothing left of me to greet you.
Leave me alone. You disgust me. You won’t leave. You keep haunting me. Sleeping at my side like nothing’s changed, with the same warm, blissful smile, snuggled up next to me, a shining ghost pressed up against a lifeless husk. You keep teasing me, a tap on the shoulder, a tinkling laugh on the breeze, a pulse of warmth like a heartbeat from the scarf around my neck, and it’s always nothing, nothing, nothing. And I still turn every time, a broken, hollow puppet made to dance. You must delight in my misery.
I have nothing more to give you. You’ve taken everything. You, who left me behind. You, who couldn’t even make me understand why you had to leave. You, who must’ve known this would be the death of me, the damning of a misplaced soul, and-
And…
And…you, who saved me. You, who never cared that I was human or that I was meant to vanish someday. That my very form does not belong in this continent. You, whose eyes will never again light up as the Expedition Society digs in to your and Swirlix’s meals. Who will never get to rebuild your relationship with the Pops who became sober just for you. You, who cradled my fluttering heart in your paws and cherished it like no one else in the world, letting me do the same for you—you, who…who will never know just how much you meant to me.
All because I couldn’t protect the one Pokemon who I wanted to keep safe in the end.
I have no right to ask this of you. Not after I’ve broken your last wish over and over, more times than I can count. But grant me one last favor, Lucas—no, my dear partner, wherever you are—
Don’t ever forget that the cold, quiet world you and I rescued is praying for you to come home.