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His heart clicked against her spine as he held her in the dark, the moon hanging from crooked wires in the sky, pale light obscured around the edges of the window by a tangle of branches that grew from the oak tree in the front yard. The room — no matter where Grace and her moved over the years Serena had said that she’d kept her bedroom the same shade of dull, almost faded, purple — held the stench of dust, of disuse.
“I can feel your spine, Ser.” Calem whispered, hesitatingly pressing a kiss to the nape of her neck, before nuzzling his face into the crook between her neck and shoulder. “You should eat more.” His words were muffled by the satin collet of her pajama top. She smelled like lavender and cloves, smelled like her soap and Grace’s cigarettes.
Serena made some noncommittal noise, nearly weightless as she laid in his arms, still as the dead. (He couldn’t forget the weight of them as he pulled them from the rubble, from the wreckage — five children had left Vaniville Town on a journey, only two had come back — he couldn’t forget. He wasn’t sure if he ever could.) Serena’s Delphox was curled at their feet, radiating heat and undoubtedly cradling its stick to its chest like a stuffed doll as it had ever since it evolved the first time.
Except for his Noivern (who was naturally nocturnal and was therefore eating its first meal of the “day”) and Greninja (who was hidden away somewhere in the rafters above, standing guard over its loved ones until it would determine if Grace and her Rhyhorn and her Fletching were safe), their Pokémon were spread out across the room sleeping intertwined in piles or in the Pokébeds they’d bought them at the local Pokémart, Glaceon has turned its stuffed bed into a mass of glittering ice crystals, whereas Talonflame had to singe its bed and tear it up with its claws before it could get comfortable, but they all were comfortable, were happy, were content.
Calem couldn’t remember what those things felt like.
(Calem couldn’t remember feeling.)
“I don’t want to eat.” Serena’s voice whistled from her lungs and throat like the wind through a reed on the bank of a river: haunting and haunted, completely familiar and utterly foreign.
“If you don’t you’ll die.”
“We’re already dead.”
“Not dead enough.” Five children had left Vaniville Town on a journey, none of them had come back, not really.
“No.” She agreed, pulling herself out of his grasp and sitting up.
He moved with her, after her, like an echo.
“Cook me something and I’ll eat it. But it can only be you. It has to be you.”
Her hair unbound around her face, her eyes bled in their sockets, color leeched by an act of war, an act of power stolen from a God.
“Deal.”