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The outsider woke up in a cold sweat. “Shit,” she said, as Volo stirred beside her.
“What is it?” he asked, sitting up slightly on their shared bedroll.
The outsider groaned and put her head in her hands. “Another dream.”
“Ah.” He automatically put an arm around her. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“I don’t think I should,” she said. It was the normal response. For someone so typically forthcoming about her emotions, she’d been extremely evasive about her night terrors of late.
“Are you sure?” Volo asked, gently guiding her head onto his shoulder. She allowed it.
There was a long pause. So long, in fact, that Volo started to fear the worst. Had she somehow learned about his true plans? His intention to turn her against Arceus and Jubilife Village? His tenuous renegotiation with Giratina?
“I don’t think I like men,” the outsider said, and then she tucked her face into Volo’s shirtsleeve.
He… was confused. They’d been together for more than a month now, ever since she’d admitted her feelings to him at the top of Mt. Coronet. Specifically romantic feelings, despite the fact that she’d only ever liked women in the past. And they’d kissed and cuddled since then, and grown incredibly close throughout their time together… sure, he was almost always the initiator of romantic intimacy and they had not yet discussed the necessary precautions if they were to have sex, but he’d assumed that those things would all come in time. She’d told him they would all come in time, and that she was just slow to feel them.
“Was it something I did?” Volo heard himself ask, baffled by the way she still clung.
“No,” was her muffled response. “I want it to be different. I tried—”
This startled him. “You tried?” For all of the ways he’d struggled with their unlikely bond, he’d never tried to feel attracted to her. He just was.
She pulled her head away, forcing herself to meet his eyes. “I wanted it to make sense,” she told him. “The way I was feeling. You are beautiful, there’s no question about that. And I do find you attractive, even if I don’t feel that way about other men.”
“Then what’s the problem?” Volo asked, raising an eyebrow.
She looked away. “It just doesn’t feel right,” she said quietly. “And I haven’t seen… all of you. And I don’t think I really want to.”
Oh.
“You’re not interested in sexual intimacy with a body like mine,” Volo said. She’d taken some interest in him before, but even then he’d been able to tell that she’d been pushing herself. She’d called it anxiety, but…
The outsider was mournful. “I wish it could be different. I think I came here, to Hisui, wanting it to be different. And you were the perfect opportunity.”
Volo had lost her meaning completely. “You said you didn’t remember your life before.”
She met his eyes and he was startled by the sadness he saw. “What do you think I’ve been dreaming about?” The outsider looked away again. “If I could be attracted to any man, I think it would be you. I think… some part of me knew that, and just wanted so badly for it to be true. Here. In this world.”
Volo felt his heart sink. “Is that all you saw in me? Do you not—”
Her eyes widened. “No! Volo, you’re my best friend. You’re the only person in Hisui that feels real to me. I love spending time with you, I love it when you hug me and when the world sees us a pair.” She laughed almost ruefully. “I love you. I’ve never said it before, but I do.”
Volo’s expression softened. “I’m sure you know that I—”
“But it doesn’t matter,” said the outsider, pulling her knees up to her chest. “Because I don’t think I can love you in the way you deserve, and I,”—her voice cracked—”I want it to be easy. I don’t want to feel like this, with the person I’ve chosen as my romantic partner.”
“Love isn’t easy,” Volo offered. The outsider shook her head.
“I know that,” she said. “And there are different kinds of it. But I think I just really wanted to prove to myself that I could feel romantic love for a man. It would just be more convenient, for me, if I could get myself to feel the way most women do.”
Volo narrowed his eyes. “You thought that loving me would be convenient?”
At that, the outsider released a defeated laugh. “Yeah, I guess I did.” She looked at him earnestly. “Comparatively, at least. It turns out in my old life, I did not have much luck with women.”
“I can relate,” Volo replied.
He knew it had been the wrong response the second he’d said it. Tears welled up in the outsider’s eyes.
“I am so sorry,” she told him. “I swear I didn’t mean to lead you on—”
“No,” Volo interrupted. “You have nothing to apologize for. I’m just trying to understand too.” He wanted to wipe the tears from her eyes, but now more than ever felt unsure whether she wished to be touched.
“It’s not just about sex, either,” the outsider said, and this seemed to be her first time truly considering the notion. “It’s like, I can try as hard as I want to imagine a story where this is right for me—but when I really picture it beyond the initial novelty, my mind just blanks out. Like there’s nothing beyond that. Like I’m not really the me in the story. But in these stupid dreams, I keep remembering the way I actually felt about women in my old life. Even when I didn’t even find them all that attractive or unique, attraction was still effortless. There was no physical discomfort. It just felt right.”
Volo tried to imagine how it would feel to not experience physical attraction towards an intimate partner. He certainly felt attracted to her, and that attraction was made even stronger because he liked her as a person. Perhaps more appropriately, he considered the few strangers he’d engaged sexually during an earlier period of experimentation. He had not felt repulsed by any of them, regardless of gender, although he hadn’t been particularly attracted to them either. He hadn’t given those interactions much of himself at all.
He regarded the outsider, remembering that she put herself into everything she did.
Was this what happened when her mind desired something that her heart and body did not? A reprieve from rejection, if that was her experience of engaging women romantically. It was statistically unlikely for any given person to feel attracted to people of the same sex—even if her world had been more progressive than Hisui, that biological reality was likely the same. And while there were people, like Volo, with more fluid senses of attraction… he’d never instilled that fluidity in himself. It just was how he felt. He wanted, therefore he was.
On the top of Mt. Coronet, the outsider had used that logic to justify her feelings for Volo. She’d seemed so relieved, so free, at the time… but he’d also noticed the discomfort. The anxiety. What was the difference between resisting something for its unfamiliarity, and resisting it for its incontrovertible wrongness?
“I think I might have been asking the wrong questions that day,” the outsider said. “I asked if you were real, and I used that to determine my own reality. I said I found you attractive, and that feeling was real. But I was only seeing the parts of you that I wanted to see, in a reality removed from my own. When I lacked my memories, that separation had been easier. But now… I don’t know.”
She sighed and ran a hand through her hair. “I think the version of me who loves you romantically is just as real as the version of me without my memories. But that’s not who I am. That isn’t real. I’m not myself if I’m lobotomized. I don’t know why I lost my memories when I came here, but it’s not like they were entirely gone. They were still driving me.”
Volo nodded his understanding. While he hadn’t lost his memories, he had still been playing an altered version of himself for years. It was really only with her that he’d been vulnerable. And hadn’t she said the same thing to him, many times?
“I think I know who I am now,” said the outsider, “and I know what I feel. I might hate it, but—”
She cut herself off. Tears ran down her cheeks.
“Hey,” Volo said, still unsure whether he should embrace her. “It’s okay.”
“I don’t want to be in pain because of feelings that are supposed to be good.”
“I’m sorry that you ever were.”
The outsider wiped the tears from her eyes. “It’s not that kind of pain,” she said. “Nobody set out to make me feel bad. Sometimes things just aren’t under my control.”
That old reliable voice in Volo’s head offered, But they could be. He told it to shut up.
“You don’t want to control the world,” Volo told the outsider, because maybe they were not lovers, but they were still kindred spirits. “You just want to the world to love you as much as you love the world.”
She paused, and then nodded.
“And it hurts worse than anything,” Volo continued, “when it simply doesn’t.”
“It would be better,” said the outsider, “if I could control myself at least. Make myself fit the world as it is.”
Volo understood this too. He remember his years as a merchant, denying himself precious proximity to his actual interests. Distancing himself from a world he supposedly still wished to destroy.
He glanced towards his Survey Corps satchel, issued two weeks ago by Professor Laventon himself. An unlikely friend—a mentor, really—who was convinced that Volo could find success as a professor himself one day.
The oddest part was that Volo had started to actually believe him.
“When a person blazes their own path,” Volo mused, “do you think that they do it alone?”
He laid back on the bedroll, staring up at the stars. Wordlessly, the outsider settled beside him.
“They must,” she eventually said. “It’s their path and no one else’s.”
“But paths can cross,” Volo argued. “They can be parallel. And how do we even decide where to start, without some guidance from those who have blazed paths before us? We value history because we can learn from it, after all.”
The outsider shook her head. “But we still end up alone. I always end up alone. Do you know how much it hurts to think that someone is on the same path that you’re traveling, only to realize that they never intended to stay? That they’re just following in your footsteps? That they dislike the direction and wish to leave?”
Volo smiled softly. “That, I believe, is where most people would consider a change in their own direction.”
The outsider scoffed. “Easier fucking said than done.”
And Volo knew it better than most. “For nearly a decade,” he said, “it’s been my dream to use Arceus’s powers to recreate the world to my liking. This, of course, would necessitate the destruction of the world as it is.”
The outsider sat up abruptly. “What?”
Volo smiled up at her lazily. “Did you not think there was a point to subjugating the creator?”
“But there are pokémon living here! And trees! And people!”
As always, he felt a fondness for her priorities. “In the new world,” he said, “there could be as many pokémon and trees as you’d like.” At her horrified expression he added, “And we could find you someone to love, who would love you the way you desire.”
She looked horrified. “That’s—no. If it’s not her choice, then—”
“I know,” Volo interrupted, closing his eyes serenely. “It’s why I’ve given up my plan. For all of this world’s tragedies, I’ve recently discovered numerous unexpected joys. And there is something beautiful in knowing I did not devise them myself.”
You taught me that, he did not tell her. Because it really should have been obvious.
She laid back down beside him. She did not speak for several minutes. In the meantime, Volo watched the stars.
“I think this world is a video game, Volo,” the outsider said. “When you just told me about your plan, I remembered—I play it sometimes in my dreams.”
“Slang?” asked Volo, to whom the phrase ‘video game’ meant nothing.
“It’s like… an interactive story,” the outsider replied. “One where I’m the main character, but also kind of telling it?”
“I can conceive of such a narrative,” said Volo, who had spent a not-insignificant amount of time throughout the past decade imagining a version of his life in which he had absolute control.
“In the game,” the outsider said, “you have the same plan. And you take me to Mt. Coronet.”
“Is it actually you?” Volo asked. “Or someone more… generic?”
“The player character is pretty generic. I actually think they’re canonically meant to be fifteen. But I’m not fifteen, so she isn’t either.”
“Fascinating,” said Volo, instantly judging this alternate version of himself for losing Arceus’ favor to fucking teenager.
“And when I played the game,” the outsider continued, “I already knew about your plan. I actually only played the game because I knew. I thought you were attractive, the words you said and the image on my screen. I related to you, too.”
Volo was not sure how to feel about that, so he settled on flattered.
“In my real life, I’d recently experienced something,” recalled the outsider. “A heartbreak. I met a woman who loved legends as much as I did, and there was almost this… magnetic pull between us. And even though we came from very different places and believed contradictory things, I couldn’t pull myself away. I knew she would probably never allow herself to act on any feelings we shared, but I liked being around her too much to spare myself the pain. And I cared about her. I wanted her to be free, like I was. I was hurting, but I was free. And I thought… even if the world is painful for people like us, we could withstand it together.”
The outsider sniffled. “But she didn’t want that, and I couldn’t handle it. So I left. And I probably broke her heart too.”
She turned her head to look at Volo, surprisingly deadpan in her subsequent delivery. “In other words, the idea of an beautiful, androgynous fictional man determined to dethrone the god he supposedly worshiped out of spite, who had a complicated affection-resentment-projection complex about the protagonist, was a very relevant to my life at that time. Especially because I could use my crush on said character as evidence that I could love a man and avoid repeating whatever the fuck happened a few months before, and a few years before that, and a few years before that, all the way back to being a closeted teenager with a repressed crush on my straight best friend.”
Volo blinked. “That sounds like a very complex way to experience desire. Was that all in the video game too?”
The outsider smirked. “No. I wrote about it myself. This other version of me, and I guess you too. I found a point in the story where things could have changed direction, and I—” Her eyes widened. “Holy shit, it was the gligar.”
“What?”
“I added the gligar,” said the outsider, “to knock me out. And that gave me the excuse to tell you that I liked you. And that changed the direction of your plans.”
It took Volo’s mind a few seconds to catch up. “Are you saying that you—or, this other version of you—could basically be considered omnipotent?”
“Huh,” said the outsider, “I guess so.”
Volo looked up at the stars again. “I suppose it’s a consolation to learn that some god out there is invested in me.”
“What about Giratina?” the outsider asked. “You guys are still scheming together, right?”
Volo cringed. Either she’d known the whole time, or she’d figured it out through her dreams. “We identified each other out of necessity,” he said.
The outsider sighed. “Are you and I really any different?”
Volo didn’t like that implication. “I don’t know,” he said. “Do you want us to be?”
“We weren’t written to be friends, Volo. If I can’t love you the way I wanted, there’s no point to my existing. The story can’t continue as it was outlined.”
“That doesn’t sound like something you would say,” Volo told her. “What happened to blazing your own path?”
“People don’t tell stories about situations like this,” the outsider argued. “If the purpose were romantic or sexual self-indulgence, I’d just gender-swap you. But that loses a dimension of honesty, doesn’t it? And when I write things like this, I write them to be honest. With myself, if not anyone else.”
“Okay,” said Volo. “So would you not honestly maintain a close friendship with a man you originally hoped to claim as a lover, but ultimately failed to view in that light?”
“Of course I would,” the outsider said, “if he was stupid enough to accept that. And not abandon me. Like how I abandoned—”
“Oh, please,” Volo interrupted. “If you believe that you abandoned her for a lack of authenticity, you do not need to worry that I would use the same justification for abandoning you.”
“I know,” said the outsider. “It’s just… I’m not sure if this is the kind of story I need right now. The me who’s telling the story, I mean. It’s realistic, but it’s not indulgence.”
Volo shrugged. “Okay. Then she can stop telling this story. She can tell another story, one in which things are exactly to her liking, and can fulfill her every desire. In the meantime, we’ll keep existing in peace.”
The outsider seemed to consider it. “I… didn’t even think that was an option.”
Volo shrugged again. “There’s one way to find out. And you’re not the only person with supernatural abilities in Hisui. I’m pretty sure Mistress Cogita is immortal.”
“Really?” asked the outsider. “How?”
“Celestica lineage,” Volo said. “I may share that blessing, myself.”
The outsider’s eyes went wide. “Seriously? Why haven’t you mentioned that before?”
He gave her a devious smile. “Perhaps I just realized it. A slight change in the plot. The omnipotent version of you, granting one final blessing.”
“Now you just sound crazy,” said the outsider, putting her head in her hands. “How would we even test something like that, anyway?”
“We could just keep living. See if anyone tries to stop us.”
The outsider turned her head to her own satchel, lying beside Volo’s. “They’ll have to get through Crinkle Cut first.” She was referring, of course, to her level 100 alpha bibarel that could probably fight god itself.
Volo hummed. “Togekiss, too.”
They remained in silence for a few more moments.
“I’m really glad you’re a part of my life, Volo,” said the outsider.
“I love you too,” replied Volo, with the softest utterance of her name. “My dear friend.”
Lumiose City
Approximately 150 Years Later
He’d donated the green pants.
“Good riddance,” the outsider muttered under her breath, as the pair departed from Lumiose City Museum. After meeting with the curator a few months ago, they’d finally gotten around to visiting the complete Hisui exhibition.
Volo rolled his eyes. “It was ceremonial.”
“And was the hairstyle ceremonial too?”
Volo pursed his lips. He’d told the curator most of the truth, but…
“Oh my god, it wasn’t!” the outsider laughed, pulling him by the arm towards a café. “You did that on your own!”
Volo scowled, running a hand through his loose hair. He joined the outsider at the outdoor table, tilting his head when she freed a pokémon to dine with them. “They don’t have bibarel in Kalos, you know.”
The outsider took a galette out of her satchel and offered it to Crinkle Cut, who occupied an entire chair on his own. “They do now,” she said. “So how do you feel?”
“About what?” asked Volo, releasing Togekiss from her ball.
“Sending off the outfit. Your old dream.”
Volo considered. “I think it was time. I doubt that it will mean anything so personal to anyone but myself, but if anyone else could learn from it… I like the idea of that.”
“Another legend,” the outsider said with a knowing smile.
“Exactly.”
HONK!
Volo and the outsider turned to watch a dark-haired young woman running purposefully down the city street, followed by an alpha abomasnow. A taxi driver honked at her again, having narrowly avoided a collision.
“I like her jacket,” said the outsider, undoubtedly referring to the red plaid pattern. While she’d left her kimono of the same styling in the past, she still wore flannels regularly. “And that abomasnow looks just like Yeto.”
“We’re a long way from the Alabaster Icelands,” Volo said.
The outsider narrowed her eyes, staring as the woman as she picked something shiny off the ground. “You know, I think that might be me. Like, a different version of me.”
Volo met Crinkle Cut’s eyes. Crinkle Cut released a sympathetic chatter. It wasn’t the first time they’d had a sighting like this, and it almost certainly would not be the last.
The outsider shook her head with a smile, and then turned back to the table. “Anyway,” she said. “Galar next?”