Chapter Text
I'm Dex and you're probably wondering how I got myself into this situation. Honestly? Same.
Last thing I remember with any kind of clarity, I was three beers deep at some dive bar on the east side, watching my buddy Marcus argue with a jukebox about whether or not it had eaten his dollar. Then there was a fourth beer. A fifth. A shot of something the color of antifreeze. And then five of us, jammed into a sedan built for four, with the dumbest of us behind the wheel because he insisted he was "the soberest." All because he had the least to drink. That phrase, I'm pretty sure, is the last coherent string of words my brain processed before everything went sideways. There was a screech. A weightless half-second where the world tilted ninety degrees and the cup holder spat my phone into my lap. Glass. A noise I don't have the vocabulary for. A big rush of heat. And then nothing.
And by nothing, I mean I woke up here. Wherever here is. Which, at this exact moment, is the inside of a small but enthusiastically violent avalanche.
I was tumbling. That's the polite word for it. The honest word is that the mountainside had decided I was a snowball and it was committed to the bit. My shoulder slammed against something hard under the powder, my hip rotated in a direction my hip had not previously agreed to, and a chunk of ice the size of a dinner plate clipped me right above the ear. The world flipped. Sky, snow, sky, snow, sky, a black smear of something that might have been a tree trunk, snow, snow, snow, snow.
My mouth was open. I don't know when that happened but somewhere in the chaos one of my boots departed for greener pastures. I tried to swim. That's a real instinct, apparently. When you're getting eaten by a moving hill, your arms remember the breaststroke. It didn't work, though. I kept rolling. My back hit a rock that the snow had been generous enough to mostly cover, and the impact knocked whatever air I had left out of my lungs in a wet, undignified gasp.
Then the hill stopped moving. Which would've been great, except it stopped moving with me underneath it.
It was dark, cold, and I felt like I was being squeezed in from all directions. It was a sort of pressure that makes you understand, on a very direct cellular level, why people are scared of being buried alive. My right arm was pinned across my chest. My left was somewhere above my head, which I only knew because I could wiggle the fingers and feel them brush against more snow. I couldn't open my eyes. My eyelashes were frozen shut. Or packed shut. Or both. My nose was full of ice. My mouth was full of ice. My ears were full of a high, thin whine that I think was my own panic doing its impression of a kettle.
I clawed, with the one hand that was free, I clawed up through the pack, and at some point, the resistance gave way and my hand was in open cold instead of compressed cold, and I dragged my face up after it.
My head broke the surface and I sucked in a breath so hard I nearly hacked up a lung. The cold hit the back of my throat and turned into a small private knife. I coughed. I coughed again. I spat snow and my gloved fingers strained against the ice. I dragged my chest free inch by miserable inch.
"I really," I wheezed, between coughs, "really hate this life."
I had been in it for one hour. Possibly less. Possibly more. Time, in this place, did not feel like a measurable thing.
It took me another five minutes of grunting and shoving and one very embarrassing whimper to get the rest of me out of the snowpack. My missing boot was gone for good; I could see the imprint where my foot had popped out of it about twenty yards uphill, and there was no version of me that was climbing back up there to retrieve it. I had a sock. The sock was wet. The sock was, in roughly thirty seconds, going to be a slab of frozen cotton glued to a foot that was going to fall off and become a souvenir.
Fantastic.
I limped the best I could. The slope had spat me out into a flat stretch, and the flat stretch was a forest, and the forest was the kind of place that didn't want me in it. The trees were tall. Stupidly tall. Thin, bony things with bark the color of old bone, and they went up and up and up until their needled tops disappeared into the snow that was still falling in slow, fat flakes from a sky the color of wet slate. The wind moved between the trunks in long sighs, picking up loose powder and throwing it sideways at my face. I could smell sap, slightly, and something colder underneath it that I think was just the smell of frozen dirt. My breath came out in long white plumes and froze on the inside of my collar.
I do, for the record, like snow. I like the cold. Back home, I was the guy who left his jacket unzipped in December and loved it. This was not that.
There wasn't really a direction to walk in.
The forest kept giving me the same view in every direction; skinny trunks, deep drifts, the occasional black hole where a pothole had opened up under a thin crust of snow waiting for an ankle to volunteer. I tried to follow what looked like a clearer line between the trees, and after a while I gave up on trying to follow anything and just kept my one booted foot moving in front of the other.
Twenty minutes in, my sock-foot stopped feeling cold and started feeling like a block of wood somebody had nailed to my leg.
Forty minutes in, I tripped on a root. Or a rock. Whatever it was, it caught the toe of my boot and the world tilted and I went face-first into a drift that had been kind enough to be soft. I lay there for a second longer than I needed to. The snow was actually warmer than the wind. There was a real, genuine moment where I considered just staying. Just lying there. Going to sleep in the powder and letting whatever came next come next.
Then I thought about how stupid that was, and I pushed myself up on my elbows, and I kept going.
An hour in, I tripped again, this time over a buried branch that snapped under my weight with a crack so loud it made me flinch. I caught myself with my hands. The shock of the impact ran up both wrists. I knelt there in the snow on all fours, panting, my breath fogging the surface of the drift in front of me, and I watched a bead of saliva fall from my open mouth and freeze before it hit the ground.
I was tired. I was beyond tired. My legs had become two long aching arguments. My shoulders had locked up. There was a headache rising behind my eyes that felt like a second heartbeat. I was thirsty, which was hilarious given that I was surrounded by approximately twelve metric tons of frozen water. I tried eating some. It worked, kind of. It also made my teeth hurt. I got up and kept moving.
Frankly, I had no idea where I even got the will from.
By the time the trees thinned out a little and the ground started to rise into a slope of dark rock streaked with snow, my left foot had stopped sending me any information at all and my right knee had begun to give out completely. I limped, I lurched and at one point, I tripped a third time and didn't bother getting up for almost a full minute. Just rolled onto my back and stared up at the sky and watched the snow fall directly into my eyes. The flakes hit my eyelashes and stayed there.
What got me up was a very simple thought. If I lay there, I died. Again. Twice in one week. Well, twice in one day, if you want to be technical about it. Twice an hour, even. Whatever pride I had left could not survive that. That, and well, I didn't really want to die. Especially here, in this manner.
I crawled up to my feet and kept on limping.
The slope of rock kept going up to my left, a long wall of dark stone with snow caught in every crease and ledge, and I started leaning against it as I walked, partly to stay upright and partly because the rock at least blocked the wind on one side.
My gloved hand dragged along the stone. I could feel the cold of it even through the leather. There was lichen in some places, crusted patches of pale green and rust-orange that flaked when my glove brushed them, and in other places the rock was just rock, scored with thin vertical seams where water had once frozen and split it open. I kept my hand on the wall and kept walking. My breath rasped in my throat. The snow had started to fall heavier, in clumps now instead of flakes, and the wind threw it sideways into my face so consistently that I had stopped bothering to blink it off.
I leaned harder on the stone, and abruptly, the stone wasn't even there anymore.
My hand went through, as did my shoulder, and the rest of me followed because my legs had already committed to the lean. I stumbled into open dark and caught myself on my one good knee, panting, blinking at a sudden absence of wind that felt almost violent in how abruptly it had stopped.
I looked back. The opening behind me was a narrow vertical slit in the rock, maybe four feet wide and twice my height, and from the outside, at the angle I'd been walking, it had read as a shallow seam in a continuous wall. The snow blew sideways past the gap in long horizontal streaks.
Mercifully, none of it came inside.
Another plume haggardly drifted out in front of me.
Distantly, I realized, exhaustedly, that this was the first time I'd felt safe since I woke up.
The first thing I noticed after that, was the sound. Or the lack of it. The wind had been a constant in my ears for so long that its sudden muting felt like cotton stuffed into both sides of my skull. I could hear my own breathing. I could hear a slow drip somewhere deeper in. I could hear the creak of leather as I shifted my weight.
The second thing I noticed was the smell. Cold stone, mostly, wet mineral. Underneath that, something organic and old, the way a basement smells when no one has opened the door in a season. There was a thread of something charred too, something that had been a fire a long time ago and had since gone back to being ash.
I limped on inside deeper.
The cave opened up after the first few steps, widening into a chamber I couldn't see the full extent of because there was no light to speak of, only the gray bleed coming in through the slit behind me. I kept my hand on the wall and shuffled along it, my dead foot dragging a small trough through grit on the floor, until the wall curved and the air got a fraction warmer. It still wasn't warm, just less actively trying to murder me and that was when I saw the shape of it.
A tent. Or what was left of one.
It was set up against the far wall of the chamber, a sagging canvas thing in a color that might once have been deep green and was now the color of riverbed mud. Two of its support poles still held. A third had snapped at some point and been splinted with what looked like a tree branch and a wrap of frayed cord. The flap hung half-open.
There was a fire pit a few feet from it, a ring of blackened stones with a heap of cold ash in the middle and a few half-burnt sticks sticking out at angles. A small dented pot sat next to the ring. A folded square of oilcloth lay beside the pot. The whole arrangement was big enough to have housed two people comfortably, but everything in it spoke of one.
One cup, one pot, a single pair of indentations in the floor where someone had sat down a thousand times in the same spot.
I limped over. My one boot crunched on grit and weakly pushed the tent flap aside with the back of my glove.
Inside, a cot. Just a cot. A low frame of wood with a thin mattress on top, and on the mattress, a wool blanket the color of dried blood, and folded on top of the blanket, a thinner sheet of something that crinkled when my fingers brushed it. A thermal, foil-baked sheet. I'd seen them in camping aisles. I'd never appreciated one before like I did now.
There was nothing else. No bag, no clothes, food or any sign of an owner beyond the worn dent in the middle of the cot where a body had slept enough nights to leave its outline. I didn't care. I didn't care at all. I grabbed the thermal sheet and the wool blanket and I sat down on the cot and I started unwrapping both at once with hands that didn't want to bend.
"Sorry," I muttered, to no one, to the empty cave, to whoever had left this here. "I'll write you an IOU."
I got the thermal sheet around my shoulders first, the foil side in, and the crinkle of it was the most beautiful sound I'd heard in this entire stupid afterlife. I dragged the wool blanket over the top. I pulled my dead sock-foot up onto the cot and tucked it under the layers, laid down on my side and curled myself into a ball. I pulled my knees up so high they bumped my chin. I tucked my hands into my armpits inside the foil and closed my eyes.
The shivering started about ten seconds later, and it was the violent kind. It made my jaw clatter and my muscles ache. Somewhere in the back of my head, I remembered that shivering was actually good. Shivering meant my body was still trying, and I just tried to ignore the quavering. I let my eyes stay closed and the cave got further away and the slow drip somewhere deeper in got further away and the wind on the other side of the rock got further away and I was gone.
I don't know how long I slept.
What woke me was small and wrong. A point of pressure on the third knuckle of my left hand, then a pinch and a sting that, dull at the edges and pointed in the middle, and my brain, which had been three layers under, started climbing back up through the layers because something was eating me.
I snapped up and jerked my hand back so hard I clipped my own jaw with my knuckles. The foil sheet crinkled loud enough to echo, and I twisted around and looked down at the cot and there it was.
A rat. A purple rat. About the length of my forearm, with two oversized front teeth that were visibly red at the tips, sitting on the foot of the cot where my hand had been hanging off the edge. It had whiskers. It had small round ears with notched edges. Its eyes were red and they were locked on mine, and the tip of its tail flicked once, twice, against the wool blanket.
A Rattata. The word surfaced from somewhere in the back of my head with certainty that didn't come from this life. From the other one. From my childhood that I spent grinding hours and hours killing Rattata to grind up my Charmander before Brock.
I slapped it, and well, it wasn't a good slap. My hand was half-asleep and the leather of my glove muted the impact, but I caught it across the side of the head with the back of my fingers and it tumbled off the cot in a small purple somersault., It landed on the cave floor with an offended squeak. I expected it to run. Every rat I had ever interacted with had run.
Only, it hissed as it rose up on its back legs. The red of its eyes deepened. The two front teeth that had been chewing on my fingers a minute ago were suddenly very visible in a wide-open mouth, and it crouched and it sprang.
I let out a panicked shout and threw both arms up in front of my face. I closed my eyes, made another noise I was most certainly not proud of, somewhere between a yelp and a word my mother wouldn't have liked, and I waited for teeth.
Only, the teeth didn't come.
What came was a sound. A clean, metallic shink, and a small wet impact, followed by thud against the cave floor that was heavier than a rat should have been.
I timidly lowered my arms.
The Rattata was on the floor in front of the. It was on the floor in front of the cot with a sword through it. The blade had entered just behind its ribs and come out the other side, and the body was twitching, and the eyes had gone glassy already, and the blade itself was a thing I could not at first make sense of.
It wasn't held by anyone. It was floating. Two swords, actually, paired and hovering side by side in the dim, with red, no, cerise sashes tied around their hilts and small eyes, actual eyes, set into the pommels. One of the blades was the one currently skewered through the rat. The other was raised slightly above it, angled outward, in what I understood with a slow cold lurch was a guard position.
A… A Doublade.
The name came up the same way Rattata had. Out of the back of my head. Out of the other life. It was a steel and ghost type. Two swords that thought together. It was, without a doubt, my favorite gen six pokemon—and that was high praise, since I actually liked a fair few of the gen six pokemon.
I frightfully watched it pull its blade free. It spun, splattering the ichor off it and damn, it looked every bit as cool and menacing as he imagined it would if he were to see on in purpose. The Rattata flopped on over. The Doublade rotated in the air, both blades turning in unison, and I had the distinct and unpleasant feeling of being looked at by something that did not have a face but absolutely had a gaze.
The pommel eyes blinked and pink sashes shifted in a draft I couldn't feel.
I didn't move. I wasn't sure I was breathing.
The Doublade lowered. Slowly. Both blades dipped, and the lower one extended, and the tip of it pointed past me, at the cot. The whole construct tilted, the upper edges of the swords angling down, a small bow of a motion that I read with the part of my brain that wasn't locked up as a gesture.
It was telling me to sleep.
"I," I said. My voice came out cracked. I cleared my throat. I tried again. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I didn't—this isn't mine, I know it's not mine, I'll—"
The blades dipped again. Once, firmly toward the cot.
I thought nothing more and just nodded slowly. Kinda like how you'd nod at a man with a gun. I pulled my legs back up onto the cot, and I dragged the thermal sheet and the wool blanket back up over my shoulders, and I lay down on my side facing the Doublade because there was no version of this where I turned my back on it. I tucked my hands under my chin and watched it and it watched me back.
Or its pommels did. The two small eyes set into the hilts caught what little gray light bled in from the cave mouth, and they did not blink for a long time.
I didn't close my eyes.
Not at first.
I lay there and I watched the swords hover, and I watched them drift, slow and resolutely, over to the Rattata on the floor, and I watched the lower blade nudge the body with the flat of its edge. It was probably prodding it to confirm the deed was done. The body didn't move. The Doublade rotated, the sashes shifting, and then it floated, in no particular hurry, over to a spot near the cold fire pit and settled there, both blades crossing low over each other in a resting posture.
It stayed there and didn't move at all.
I lay there for what felt like a very long time with my eyes open. My fingers ached where the Rattata had chewed them. I could feel the small punctures pulsing under the leather of my glove. The cave was quiet again. The drip continued, wherever deeper in. The wind on the other side of the rock continued, muffled and far. My shivering had stopped. I was warm in a way that wasn't quite warm but wasn't hypothermia anymore.
I watched the Doublade. The Doublade watched me, or rested… I had no bleeding idea.
Sleep came in the way sleep comes when you are too tired to negotiate with it. It came in stages. My eyes closed. My eyes weakly opened. The Doublade was still there. My eyes closed. My eyes opened. The Doublade was still there. My eyes closed.
The last thing I thought, before I went under for real, was that I had been in this world for just a few hours at this point, and I had already died once before I'd arrived here and I'd nearly died a half dozen times already and now, I was saved by a literal sword.
Before the absurdity could truly catch up with me, I was out light like a light and this time, I did not prematurely stir.
Much later, I came back into the world sluggish and a little resentful about the journey. My eyelids unstuck themselves in stages. There was wool against my chin and foil-baked sheet crinkling at my shoulder every time my chest rose, and the inside of my mouth tasted like a sock that had been left out in the rain and then gnawed on by a goat.
Warm wasn't the word. Warm was a generous overstatement. But compared to the avalanche, compared to the thirty-seven varieties of cold I'd cycled through on the way to this cave, the small humid pocket I'd built under the blankets felt like the kind of luxury people wrote songs about. I lay there for a moment in that thick, animal stupor, listening to the slow drip deeper in the rock and the muffled hush of wind on the other side of the slit.
And then the memories rolled in all at once, like a truck taking a corner too fast.
The car. The screech. The cup holder. Marcus arguing with the jukebox. The avalanche and the swimming-instinct of arms that didn't know how to swim through snow. The trees and the dead foot and the third trip and the not-getting-up. The rat with the red-tipped teeth. The two swords with eyes in their pommels and pink sashes catching the gray light.
I snapped upright and sucked a breath that scraped my throat raw. The thermal sheet crackled like a small fire. My head swam. The cave wheeled around me in a slow lazy circle and then settled, dim and gray and quiet, and I was alone.
That was the part that punched me.
Alone.
I twisted on the cot and looked at the spot by the cold fire pit where the Doublade had crossed its blades and gone still. Nothing. Just stone, grit, and the dented pot and the folded square of oilcloth and the small dark stain on the floor that was the only proof a rat had ever been there. The body was gone too. I didn't want to think about where.
"Okay," I croaked. My voice came out wrecked. I cleared my throat and tried again. "Okay, so, that was a dream."
It hadn't felt like one. But then again, this entire situation didn't feel like one, and the entire situation was, technically, my new life, so the bar for what counted as real had been lowered to roughly ankle height.
I started to push the blanket off, and that was when my hand brushed something hard and cool near my hip, just outside the bedding, sitting there like it had been left for me on a side table.
A pokeball.
I knew what it was the second my fingers closed on it. The size, the weight, the seam down the middle, the small dimple of the button on the front. My hand recognized it before my brain did.
I pulled it up to my face, held it in both palms. Three other balls sat in a small leather loop on the belt of the trousers I was wearing, which I had not, until now, registered as being trousers I did not own. Standard reds and whites. Untouched. Whoever this body had been, whoever had been sleeping in this skin before me, had been kitted out for catching but had only ever filled one.
"No," I said, to the ball, to no one. "No, no, no, don't—"
My thumb accidentally slipped over the button and cramped. In the spasm, it pressed into it—
The ball split open in my hands with a soft pop and a beam of white light spilled out of it. The beam fell to the cave floor in a pillar that bloomed outward, narrowed, sharpened, and resolved itself into two slender shapes hanging in the air about four feet off the ground.
Two swords floated about and the pommel eyes blinked open one at a time, the lower one first, then the upper, with the slightly groggy air of something that had also just been woken.
I yelped and scrambled backward on the cot so fast that my heel caught in the wool blanket and I went over the far edge of the frame in a tangle of foil and elbows. I hit the stone floor on my shoulder. The breath went out of me. I scuttled backward on my palms until my spine hit the cave wall and then I held my hands up in front of my face, palms out.
"I'm sorry," I said, fast, "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to—I didn't know it was you, I just—I touched it and the button went and—"
The Doublade hovered. Both blades angled slightly toward me, not in a guard position, not quite, but almost attentively. The pommel eyes fixed on mine.
"I didn't catch you on purpose," I said. My voice sounded reedy in the quiet. "I wouldn't. That's a—that's a very weird thing to do to someone who saved your life. If you want out, I'll let you out. Right now. I'll throw the ball in the snow. I'll smash it on a rock! I just—I don't want to die, and you didn't kill me last night, so I figure that means we're, you know, on speaking terms."
I was babbling. I knew I was babbling. The Doublade tilted, both swords turning together in the air, and the lower blade extended and pointed, very deliberately, at the pokeball that was still lying open on the cot where I'd dropped it.
I stared at it. The blade held the gesture.
"You want… the ball."
The Doublade's tip dipped once. A nod, of a kind.
"You want me to—what, put you back in?"
The blade pointed at the ball again. More firmly this time. The upper sword angled in agreement, like a second opinion in the same conversation.
I rubbed at my face with one shaking hand. The leather of my glove dragged against the bristle on my jaw, which was another piece of news I'd have to deal with later, since the face this body wore apparently came with stubble it had not bothered to inform me about.
"You want to stay."
A pause. The pommel eyes held on me for a long second, and then the whole construct bent at the middle, hilts forward, blades back, in a slow deep bow. It was a nod, the entire body of it.
It wanted to stay.
"That's—" I started, and didn't know how to finish the sentence, and just sat there with my back against the cold rock and my hands still half-raised and stared at this floating two-bladed creature that had decided, for reasons completely beyond me, to throw in its lot with the man who had been chased into its home by a snowdrift.
"Why?"
The Doublade tilted again. Just a tilt. Both swords leaning in unison, the pink sashes shifting in some draft I still couldn't feel. No answer that I could read. I let my hands drop and released a long breath that fogged in front of my face.
"Right," I muttered. "Right, sure, never mind. Stupid question. Forget I asked."
I sat there a while longer. The Doublade drifted back to its spot by the fire pit and settled again, blades crossed low. It did not seem in any hurry to do anything else. After a minute I got my legs under me and limped, on one functional foot and one block of frozen meat, around the cot and back onto it.
The pokeball sat there open. I picked it up and turned it over and didn't press the button again. I clipped it to the loop on the belt with its three empty siblings and tried not to feel the weight of it as anything other than a weight.
After a while, I started looking around the cave properly.
There was more light than there had been last night, a thin pale wash of it coming through the slit, enough to see by. The chamber was bigger than I'd registered, deeper than I'd registered, with a low ceiling toward the back that sloped down until it met the floor in a kind of natural alcove. The fire pit, the tent, the cot. The dented pot. The folded oilcloth.
And, further in, tucked against the wall in the alcove where I hadn't bothered to look in the dark, a backpack.
I limped over to it. It was a big traveling sack, the kind of thing serious hikers wore, with an external frame of dark scratched metal and side pockets bulging with shapes. The canvas was a faded olive that had once been brighter, scuffed at the corners, patched in two places with mismatched squares of leather. A water bottle hung from a clip on the side. A coil of rope was strapped to the bottom. The whole thing looked like it had walked a long way and had been put down here a long time ago.
I dragged it out into the gray light and squatted next to it and started unbuckling.
The contents were what you'd expect.
A spare wool shirt rolled tight. Two pairs of thick socks, dry, which I almost wept over. A folded waxed-paper packet of energy bars, hard as wood but unspoiled. A small tin of matches. A short knife in a leather sheath. A pouch of dried jerky. A compass with a cracked glass face. A small leather book whose pages were so swollen with damp that they'd glued themselves into a brick. A coil of fine wire and a whetstone.
And, at the bottom, against the inner wall of the pack, a flat square of stiff card that I almost missed because it was wedged in between the leather and the lining.
I pulled it out.
It was a photograph. Slightly aged, the corners gone soft, a small white crease running through the upper third where it had been folded once and unfolded again. The colors had warmed toward orange with time, but the picture was clear enough.
There was a waterfall. It came down a tall murky cliff in a single white rope of water and threw up a haze at the base. In front of the haze, there were two figures. The first was a Honedge hanging at about shoulder height in the air.
The second was a young man in his late teens. He was tall and lean by the looks of it. He had bright red hair tied back at the nape of his neck, with shorter bits falling around his face. He was grinning at the camera and had one arm slung up around nothing, except the nothing was clearly where the Honedge floated, and his other hand was raised in a peace sign by his cheek.
I sat back on my heels and I looked at the photograph for a long time.
Then I looked over my shoulder at the Doublade.
It hadn't moved. Both blades crossed at the fire pit, pommel eyes half-lidded, sashes hanging still.
"Hey," I said quietly. "Hey, I'm—I'm sorry."
The eyes opened the rest of the way.
"I lost my mom not long ago," I said. The words came out before I thought about them, which was maybe the only honest way they were ever going to come out. "My dad, he… he was never really in the picture, so when she went, that was kind of it for me, family-wise. So, I know how it feels. To lose someone, I mean."
"He was your trainer," I said. I held the photograph up so the figure could see it. "Wasn't he?"
I lowered the photograph. I looked around the cave. The tent with its splinted pole. The cold fire pit with its long thick bed of ash that hadn't been added to in a season. The single cot with its single body-shaped dent. The backpack with no owner.
"You've been here a while," I murmured, mostly to myself. "Years, maybe. Guarding this. Why?"
The Doublade didn't answer that one either. I hadn't expected it to.
I sat in the quiet for a long minute and let myself think. The thing about being smart, is that it doesn't help you when the facts are sad. It just helps you arrive at sad conclusions faster.
"You wouldn't have let yourself be caught," I said slowly, "if he was still alive. Right? You wouldn't. A pokemon that's bonded to a trainer doesn't just, it doesn't just hop into the next ball that opens in front of it. You'd have fought me. You'd have killed me, even, probably, instead of the rat. So, either he gave you up, which doesn't match the part where you've been camped out in his cave like a guard dog for years, or…"
I stopped. I didn't want to say it. I said it anyway.
"Or he's dead."
The Doublade's pommel eyes blinked, once, slowly, at the same time.
"Yeah," I said. "Yeah, that's what I thought."
I set the photograph down on the canvas of the pack, face up, where the light could reach it. I looked at the grinning redhead with his peace sign and his stupid bright hair and I felt something heavy and unearned settle in my chest on his behalf.
"I don't know what makes me special," I said, to the Doublade, to the cave, to the photograph. "I really don't. I'm not anybody. I'm… I died in a car with four idiots and a half-drunk friend at the wheel, and I woke up here in someone else's body with someone else's clothes on, and I have no idea what I'm doing, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the guy you were hoping would walk into this cave."
The Doublade hovered.
"But I'm glad it's me," I murmured quietly. "Glad's the wrong word. I… I'm… I'm grateful. I'm grateful. And I promise you, I'll do right by you. As much as somebody like me can. I won't push you into fights you don't want. I won't trade you off. Whatever the bar is for a halfway decent trainer, I'll try to clear it."
The eyes held on me.
"And if I don't," I added, "if you ever look at me one day and decide I'm not worth your time, you tell me. However you tell me. Tilt, point, whatever. And I'll let you go. I'm not going to keep you against your will."
The Doublade considered me for a long moment, then it bowed again, the same slow deep bend at the middle, hilts forward, blades back. It held the bow for a second longer than last time. When it rose, both pommel eyes were on mine and they were, I thought, a little softer at the edges, though I might have been making that part up.
I let out a breath I hadn't known I was holding.
"Well," I muttered wryly. "Glad we had this chat."
The Doublade resettled by the fire pit.
I rooted in the pack until I found the waxed-paper packet of energy bars, and I picked one out, and I broke it in half across my knee with a crack that echoed off the stone. It was hard as a roof tile and smelled ever so slightly of honey and old oats, and when I bit into it, my jaw protested, and I chewed, and I closed my eyes, and for the first time in what felt like a very long lifetime I tasted something that wasn't snow.
"Oh," I said, around the stale, expired mouthful. After not eating for, what felt like days, this old, brittle and somehow stiff protein bar tasted like the best hershey's bar he's ever eaten. "Oh, you absolute beautiful brick of garbage."