1: In Which Life Goes on (Until It Doesn’t)

The end to the fateful battle in Dark Crater was ultimately the most anticlimactic event of Twig’s life. 

A mortal couldn’t kill a Legend, but with Cresselia on their side, Team Venture had a fighting chance at defeating Darkrai and saving the world. Key word being chance — Twig wasn’t deluding herself into believing that she was likely to come out of the Crater alive. Judging by Kip’s solemnity as they came to the mystery dungeon outside Darkrai’s trap, he wasn’t fooling himself either. 

She rested her hand between his shoulders. He leaned heavily against her side. They entered the dungeon in Cresselia’s wake after that unspoken exchange, both silently reassuring their partner that they were glad to go into this waking nightmare together.

Twig remembered the subsequent dungeon crawl better than she did the vicious confrontation that followed. She remembered the stress of deflecting attacks that would have sent Cresselia sprawling and the terror that gripped her with every fiery blow that went her way. She remembered Kip leading their party so that he could take the brunt of the attacks they faced, better equipped to withstand the strikes they were met with, and her anxiety at seeing him trembling and teary as he mustered his courage with every chamber they entered. She didn’t remember Darkrai’s initial reaction to their arrival— though she vaguely recalled waking from a nightmare and striking him with a fist wrapped in flame— and she didn’t remember the fight that resulted in Darkrai’s oath to return and his attempt to flee. She remembered Palkia’s appearance and the way the dimensional hole warped and shattered upon his attempt to dispatch him. She remembered Cresselia saying that Darkrai was no longer a threat. 

She had gone into Dark Crater expecting to die or to survive with blood on her hands. She had survived, but with numerous injuries instead of a shiny brand of Assisted Murderer . 

Chimecho put her and Kip on strict bed rest orders after their return. Twig’s bed rest lasted longer than Kip’s after she fell ill and one of her wounds became infected, even succumbing to a coma at one point, but she came out the other side. 

She came out the other side, and the rest of her life was waiting for her.

It occurred to her that she couldn’t remember ever living without some sort of grand mystery or threat to her existence hanging over her head at all times. 

The idea of living a normal life, strangely enough, was utterly terrifying.

***

She was managing to keep it together. She had routines that kept her sane— she would wake in the morning, wash up, make breakfast while Kip was still asleep, eat stir-fried spelon berries and greens with her partner while they planned for the day, go on the jobs they picked out for their expedition, talk with the people who posted the job as they confirmed their completion, and go to sleep that evening and get ready for it all to repeat tomorrow. The routines kept her grounded. They kept her flurrying emotions and panicked thoughts stable, quiet— docile enough for her to bury them and for them to remain as such. 

Grovyle’s return threw that stability for a loop. 

She recognized Celebi opening the Passage of Time before it appeared— knew the shimmer in the air as the fabric of time was cut open in front of her and Kip while they were exiting their home. Embarrassingly, Twig’s first thought was that Dusknoir had somehow returned and was back to finish the job— she pushed Kip behind her and readied her claws. Grovyle barely dodged her blow when he stepped through the passage. 

“It’s good to see you too,” he said with a dry bite, though his eyes were watery and his stoic expression wavered more and more the longer they stared at each other. 

Silence.

Twig threw herself at him, arms wide, and he caught her in a hug that she was mortified by her gratitude for. 

Kip bewilderedly questioned Grovyle while Twig pulled away from the hug, flustered by the sudden urge to cry. He explained how Dialga restored the Dark Future as a corrected version of itself and stitched time back together in such a way that even Celebi struggled to understand. The long and short of it was everyone was alive, and that the future was healed. 

“But why are you here?” 

He paused, considering his answer. “The Future might look as though it was never a wasteland now,” he finally said, “but it still feels like one. It was maddening to walk the perfected version of lands where we fought for our lives, acting as if none of what came before had ever happened.” 

Twig said that line of thinking was crazy. “If the Future is healed, why don’t you make use of it? Wasn’t that the whole point of getting the time gears, storming Temporal Tower, getting erased with the rest of…?” She trailed off. She couldn’t wrap her head around the idea of leaving behind a squeaky-clean version of the world she knew. 

Kip, who had nodded in understanding at Grovyle’s explanation, gave her a weary look. “Remember when we started hiding out in Sharpedo Bluff, and I said I hadn’t set foot inside in years even though it was technically my house? It was too normal after my parents disappeared. It made everything ten times worse by being completely fine when nothing else was.”

She guessed she could understand the dissonance of such things, though it still seemed an overzealous reaction to turn up your nose at a perfectly good home or an entire divinely repaired era. She still kept her mouth shut— it didn’t make sense to hold up the reunion with her difficulty understanding the motivation behind it.

The appearance of two more familiar faces made her heart soar and then drop.

Celebi came through the Passage first, doing a little loop in the air as she appeared. “Oh, good! I was worried I got the place wrong. Time is so easy, but places… Hello, darlings! It’s just a joy to see you!” She zipped around their heads, giggling at their surprise. “Look at your faces! Tee-hee! Is it really such a shock that we’d all make our way back to you eventually?”

“Don’t you just mean ‘we’? It’s only you and Grovyle. Right?” Twig’s tail twitched as she realized what that meant. “You guys brought someone else! Who is it?”

Grovyle opened his mouth to answer, but the person in question appeared before he could answer—  and the Passage closed behind the new arrival with a terrifying finality as he loomed over the group. 

Judging by Grovyle and Celebi’s complete lack of worry at their foe’s presence, Dusknoir wasn’t about to kill them all— unless this was a trap, and somehow Grovyle and Celebi turned against them… but they would never— but how would they be okay with…

When Twig took on a defensive stance and put herself between the ghost-type and Kip, Grovyle raised his hands in a placating gesture. “It’s okay, he’s only here to… I swear, it will all make sense once I explain.”

Apparently explaining meant giving the world’s most lukewarm argument for why Twig and Kip could believe the guy who earned their trust and then shattered it beyond repair was actually a good person. Twig had looked up to Grovyle after she learned the truth behind Dusknoir. It was hard not to— he was always so cunning and experienced, while she was just some nerdy kid who didn’t understand half of what was going on around her at any given moment— but in that moment as he shared the story of how Dusknoir supposedly only sided with Primal Dialga to survive, he seemed like the most gullible idiot in the world. Celebi’s nodding sagely during his explanation and occasional interjections to clarify how they survived the Future’s erasure did little to inspire any confidence in Dusknoir for her either. Twig knew that he had to have tricked them somehow. They were misled and he’d enact his revenge at any moment. She glared up at him, ready to spit that she didn’t believe a word and that she’d take him out here and now— but Kip stepping out from where she shielded him with her body gave her pause. 

Her partner elbowed her with a sunny grin. “I told you he was a good guy.” He then turned to Dusknoir. “I knew you were too nice to want to hurt anyone. Twig owes me three hundred Poké.” At her noise of offense, he continued, “No, wait— she owes me six hundred, because she was so sure she was right that she doubled down on her first bet.”

Dusknoir, who had been silent until now, gave him a dubious look. “Have you always made it a habit to bet on the trustworthiness of those you meet?”

“It’s just a joke— besides, it only started when we figured out the Cresselia we were talking to was actually… Well…”

Celebi perked up. “You two know Cressi? Oh my goodness, it’s been ages since we last spoke! How is she? She was always so focused on getting to and fro whenever she needed me to open the Passage of Time that I’ve hardly gotten to speak to her in the last… ah, I don’t even know how long!”

Grovyle glanced at Dusknoir, confused by Celebi’s sudden excitement, and received a miniscule shrug in response. “What are you talking about? Cresselia…” His eyes widened. “You mean the Cresselia? She’s alive?”

“… Are you saying that she wasn’t alive in the Dark Future?” Twig’s stomach twisted at how much sense that made. She doubted Darkrai’s vision for a world shrouded in darkness would have allowed for any loose ends that could come back to bite him. “Um. Yeah. We met Cresselia a while after graduating from the Guild, but not the real one— not at first, at least, but… ugh . Do you guys know about a Legend called Darkrai?”

She wasn’t expecting Dusknoir of all people to be the one to react to that, but his eye widened in fear at Darkrai’s name where Celebi and Grovyle’s expressions remained as they were. He murmured something under his breath. “So he truly exists, then. Who is he? I’ve only heard of him through Dialga speaking in his sleep.”

She faltered as she recounted their struggle against Darkrai. It was simple enough to recite the facts of it all to the stray Treasure Town citizen who asked during her recovery from the fight, but it was different to explain what they’d gone through as Grovyle watched her with a look of unbridled horror on his face. The world blurred around where he stood in the corner of her vision, and she found herself unable to pay attention to anything but him— despite how she avoided letting her gaze wander from its place fixed on the ground between her and the trio before her. She found herself unable to continue her recitation past when she entered Dark Crater alongside Kip and the true Cresselia. Kip picked up where she unwillingly left off, concluding with Darkrai’s ultimate fate.

“He ended up escaping, but Cresselia said that we didn’t need to worry about him, and he’s never shown up after our fight. So we’re pretty sure everything is okay now. Sort of.” He paused. “Hey, do you guys need somewhere to stay the night?”

Twig was tempted to loudly voice her distaste at his offer, but held her tongue. It was his family home that he was offering. She didn’t get to have any say in who he allowed to visit. Admittedly, Dusknoir’s mutual distaste at the mention of Darkrai— even when he wasn’t fully aware of who he was or what he’d done— was giving him a significantly better standing in her eyes. She could tolerate him staying over. She would just keep watch all night long for fear of him killing every last one of them in their sleep. She could handle that. No biggie.

***

The trio stayed the night and left soon after to find more permanent lodgings. Twig had a feeling Dusknoir didn’t care for her staring him down all evening. She voiced her worries to Grovyle before they left, and he brushed her off without a care. “It’s fine. Dusknoir isn’t someone to worry about. He’s changed.” Twig still disagreed, but he hadn’t massacred them all when she nodded off in the night during her watch over her friends and left him the only one awake, so it didn’t seem as pressing of an issue as she’d initially thought. 

She didn’t mention the blanket she found strewn across her when she snapped awake that morning, a nightmare of something she’d left unsaid clinging to her like burrs on wool. He didn’t bring up the gesture either. That was how most things went for the two of them, now.

The peace remained as the following months stretched into the coming year, long after the three refugees settled into a comfortable home in Fair Fields, a cheery place that got enough sun to make up for the deficit Grovyle and Celebi had suffered from so keenly in the Dark Future. Kip and Twig settled into a new routine of going on expeditions and visiting their friends every so often (and it still felt odd to refer to Dusknoir as a friend, even if only as part of a group of them) . Kip led the expeditions that emphasized scouting and exploration, while Twig spearheaded the ones that focused more on rescue and retrieval. It worked out nicely for them, their twofold talents complementing each other well enough for Team Venture to become a distinguished exploration team, known several towns over in any direction for their skill and willingness to take any job, no matter how small. The silly little slogan Twig had proposed for them to market themselves with back in their apprenticeship even found a use. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained” was a catchy way to get their name out even farther. It reached the point where they received more jobs than they could take— but Chatot was happy to delegate the surplus tasks to the proper recruits.

This proved to be an excellent way to keep in touch with their old friends along with the rising generation of recruits. Twig had gone up to the guild to drop off another batch of paperwork entailing the newest selection of jobs Team Venture couldn’t take, contact information and job descriptions all neatly written out in Kip’s fancy cursive footprint runes that Twig couldn’t hope to read, and she nearly dropped the tall stack of papers when Marill came bounding up to greet her as she entered the main floor. He excitedly told her how he and Azurill had applied for apprenticeships, hoping to follow in her and Kip’s footsteps, and that Azurill was very put out about having to wait another year to join even though he was practically as old as Team venture were when they joined. Twig actually did drop the papers when he told her about Wigglytuff training a new guildmaster called Bidoof.

Chatot gave a lighthearted chastisement at the disorderly stack of rescued pages she handed him afterward, unable to hide how he beamed when she asked after Bidoof. “Yes, yes, he’s been studying under the Guildmaster. He has much learning to do— a great deal of learning, mind you— to fill the Guildmaster’s monumental role in managing the goings-on of the Guild. But he’s performing well. We’re all very impressed.” He paused, then murmured an addition under his breath, “I almost feared he would begin demanding perfect apples as well, for his eagerness to imitate the Guildmaster. Heavens. What an awful turn that would have been.”

Twig relayed the news to Kip, and he dropped an archaeological encyclopedia he’d been reading on his foot, which made her feel significantly better about the papers. 

Life was good. Twig enjoyed the steady rhythm of it— the expeditions, the grocery runs to Kecleon Market in between— she even came to look forward to the spontaneous trips they took to visit the Future Trio (the collective nickname she’d given Grovyle, Celebi, and Dusknoir was dumb. She knew that. But it was easier to say than all their names in sequence, and it allowed her a bit of grace when it came to avoiding directly referring to Dusknoir as a member of her inner circle) , despite how the spontaneity often would send her scrabbling for emotional purchase. During the first few unscheduled visits, she’d nearly broken down and admitted when Grovyle asked that she was having a hard time coping with her workload of being Team Venture’s spokesperson on top of the expeditions they embarked on. She caught herself before the confession slipped, thankfully, and the next few visits weren’t even half as taxing on her composure. Now that everything had settled, she was adjusting to a life without looming threats to her continued existence or secrets about said threats.

Life was good. Until it wasn’t.

***

She was hiding in a closet again. 

A harsh voice snapped and shrieked outside where she’d tucked herself behind fancy dresses and blazers. She didn’t understand how the people living to the sides of their underground unit couldn’t hear a woman screaming her head off in rage such a small distance away, but maybe eighteen inches of solid stone and soil between their and the source of such a vicious sound served to muffle things more than a dumb kid like her could understand.

It never started with screaming. This time, though, it did. She came home from her lessons in the schoolroom of their bunker and barely had time enough to put away her bag when she heard her name being spat from the next room over. She didn’t know what her aunt was saying or why she was so angry, but she knew what happened after her anger turned into screaming— so she hid herself in the little closet built into the stone of her bedroom wall. If she managed to stay out of the way before it turned into screaming, she could usually avoid everything that came after. That meant that if she hid until the screaming stopped, she’d be fine— right? 

… Why did she have claws instead of fingers?

That wasn’t good. And neither was having a tail with a flame at its end. Nobody was allowed to handle fire except the really important people who wore those fancy badges— if a fire started, it could swallow up all the air in the bunker and suffocate everyone inside. She wasn’t supposed to have anything to do with fire— especially not after she was found carrying a lighter for her aunt and the woman got in heaps of trouble for it. 

Speaking of, she could hear her aunt’s shouting getting closer. 

“You haven’t got a clue the mess you’ve landed me in this time!” Footsteps stopped outside her bedroom. “People are talking, and it’s all because of you!” The door slammed against the wall as her aunt entered. “I never should have bothered with her mess… Golden child Rowan never taught you to keep your mouth shut, and now I’m stuck with a brat who likes to lie about me to her teachers.” The closet doors were thrown open. “I’m sick of you blabbing about things that aren’t anyone else’s business knowing. You need to learn about a thing called respect , Shea.”

That wasn’t her name. Her name wasn’t Shea. Was it? Why was she so startled by her own hands? Why was she scared of her own tail? She couldn’t remember her name. Why was she terrified of this woman and her grasping fingers outstretched to seize her by the arm?

“Come here. You’re going to learn a lesson you’ll never forget, you lousy little—”

The fingers closed just above her wrist, a pain like white-hot flames blazed beneath their touch, and Twig woke up drenched in sweat and shaking in the dead of night.

She gasped and hiccuped as quietly as she could manage, Kip still asleep in his bed close by. He might be a heavy sleeper, but you could only snore through so much, and your exploration team partner crying her eyes out a few feet away seemed to toe the line of plausibility on that front. Her stomach turned at the thought of Kip seeing her cry— or maybe the way her guts seized was thanks to the splitting headache sending nauseating spikes of pain through her skull— and so, quietly as she could manage, Twig crept up the steps leading outside their home. 

The cold of the midnight air shocked her into lucidity. The panicked remnants of the nightmare still clinging to her mind fell away as she shivered in the chill, and she was able to breathe at a normal pace and simply think.

She needed to tell someone about her nightmares. Scratch that, ‘ nightmares’ were too fuzzy and gentle of a term for them— she knew what they were. Memories . Memories of her time as a human in the Dark Future. Memories of her early youth that sent her hands shaking and stomach clenching with a terror that startled her with how fundamental it felt to her being. A number of things about her had begun making sense since the scattered few memories’ return— the way certain words made her seize up with a sudden anxiety she couldn’t place in the moment when she heard them, as well as her sudden panic whenever being touched by someone outside the ranks of people she knew and trusted enough to give up her life for in a heartbeat, to name a few— and they all painted a picture together that left Twig feeling sick. 

She needed to tell someone about the scattered recollections coming back. They had been an ugly secret for some time now— one she kept under lock and key and excuses of I’m fine and Don’t worry — but she could feel herself beginning to buckle under the weight of hiding it all from her friends. If she didn’t share the burden with someone soon, she could see herself falling to pieces.

She needed to tell someone. 

She glanced back at the entrance of the home she shared with her best friend, the person she trusted more than anyone in the world. If she was going to tell somebody, Kip was the one person she could see herself telling about her memories willingly. She steeled herself, trying to muster the courage to go back inside and wake him. She made it as far as to step down onto the main floor and take one step toward his bed when her summoned courage failed.

She left a note written in messy footprint runes— the scribbled message of “Out for a bit, be back soon” no doubt horribly misspelled despite her best efforts to make it legible— and slipped back into the cold of the night, setting off on a walk to calm her nerves.

***

When Twig returned to the Bluff later that morning, Kip was up and practically vibrating with excitement as he sat with numerous envelopes and letters spread across the floor table before him. He must have gone to get the mail while she was away. He held one opened letter and stared at it in awe.

“What’s up?” Twig asked. She had made up her mind to speak to Kip about her recovered memories when she came home, but his elation gave her pause.

“I got in!” Kip turned to her and threw his arms wide— which wasn’t very notable, given his meager reach as a mudkip, but the gesture’s enthusiasm was unmistakable. “I sent a paper to the Archeologist’s Guild a few weeks ago like you told me to, and they offered me an apprenticeship! I got in! They said they want me to go on a research expedition!”

A smile found its way on her face. “Dude, that’s amazing! I knew you’d do great!”

Kip had spent ages grappling with realizations about himself and how he felt about exploration expeditions. He loved going on jobs with her, he’d said, but he’d come to understand that wasn’t where his skills or interests truly laid— he loved the learning that came with their expeditions and not the exploration itself. That, combined with his passion for history, led Twig to lovingly bully him into looking into a career change. She’d seen him grow increasingly worn down as the months went on and his dissatisfaction grew. She also knew he was a sharp thinker and a quick learner, and that he would thrive in whatever field he was pulled to. 

A realization made all her insides twist. “… Are you going to accept the invite?”

“Oh.” Kip’s enthusiasm faltered, souring into a hesitation that tugged at her heartstrings. “I… I don’t know.”

She sat down next to him at the floor table, taking a quick glance at the letter he held. It wasn’t signed by just anyone— the archeology guild’s guildmaster had provided her own signature. Twig recognized the shape of the illegibly fancy runes from the front cover of that encyclopedia Kip was always reading. He spoke of the woman with such admiration that it put even his idolization of Dusknoir as a kid to shame, yet he was reluctant to head off on an apprenticeship that she had approved him for personally.

She watched him worriedly. “Why not?”

“It’s— it’d be weird to go on an expedition without you.” He set the letter down and fidgeted nervously with his paws, eyes fixed on the tabletop. “We’ve always done exploration jobs together, and I know that it wouldn’t be the same thing to go on an expedition for a new guild, but… I don’t know I could do the job right without you there.” A pause. “I could send a letter back. Maybe they’d accept you too if I put a good word in—”

“I’m not smart enough to get accepted into a guild like Sandslash’s, Kip.”

He let out a huffy noise. “You’re plenty smart. And besides, the dimensional scream could be really useful on a dig—”

“I haven’t had any since after Temporal Tower.” 

“Well, you could still—”

“Why don’t you just go yourself, Kip?”

He didn’t answer.

“Kip?”

“… I’m too much of a wimp,” he murmured. “I’d mess everything up because I’d end up freaked out by something and get cold feet.”

She frowned and elbowed him. “Dude. Is what Skuntank and the rest of those jokers said getting to you again?”

“Doesn’t matter. They were right. I couldn’t even get past the Guild’s front yard before you came along.”

“Yeah. But when I was erased with the Dark Future, you made it through the Hidden Land and past the front yard on your own. Face it, man, you’re the bravest guy I know, and you do it all while shaking in your boots.” When he gave her a confused look, a bolt of panic launched through her. “It’s a saying. Maybe a human one. I dunno. Anyways, you’re super brave, and I’m pretty sure that if you can face down a bunch of Legends when it’s required, you can go on an expedition without some doofy old charmander tagging along.”

He frowned. “That was a great pep talk, but you’re not some doofy old charmander. You’re my best friend. You’ve got to stop talking about yourself like that.”

Twig waved a hand dismissively. “Yeah, fair. But you better write back to the archaeologist’s guild and tell them you accept the offer for an apprenticeship and to go on that expedition, or I’m going to eat your encyclopedias.”

Kip’s stern expression twitched.

“All of them. Even the fancy ones. Maybe I’ll learn how to read better that way than you trying to teach me. The way to a gal’s brain is through her stomach and all that.”

He shook his head fondly, disapproval giving way to a warm smile as he picked up a pen and began to draft his response. Twig patted his back and walked up the stairs outside again to take a hasty walk into the forest outside Treasure Town, as she liked to do when overwhelmed.

So much for talking about her memories coming back. She’d just have to grin and bear it for however long Kip would be away on his expedition.

***

Kip was going to be away on his expedition for at least two years, and it looked more like three or four when you got down to the finer bits of math. This time, his resolve only wavered when he considered Twig being lonely in his absence— before the thought occurred to him, he seemed even more excited by the opportunity. Twig reminded him of the precarious uneaten status of his encyclopedias and told him she’d be fine, and that they could write each other letters so they wouldn’t get unbearably homesick for each other.

(Because that’s what missing Kip would be like: being far from home and without the person who made her feel like less of the dead weight of a begrudging burden and more like a burden that people actually enjoyed carrying around— like a lucky charm, like something useful. Without him around, she’d be back to that awful state of needing to justify her every move to herself. Without him, she’d have to learn how to be worthy of existence.)

Kip thought that becoming pen pals was brilliant. Twig was going to miss him liking her ideas in person. 

They went to Wigglytuff’s Guild to file the necessary paperwork so Kip could register as an apprentice in a new guild— which meant disbanding Team Venture. Chatot’s feathers bristled out when they came to him asking for team dissolution papers, and he shrieked a panicked Why?! that even Loudred would have envied the volume of.

“I don’t see why you need to go off to another guild,” he groused when they explained. “You’ve done wonderfully as an explorer— Why leave behind a stable, successful career to start from scratch elsewhere? It makes no sense. When the Guildmaster began laying out plans to establish the Guild, he stuck with it, no matter how grueling the work became!”

His efforts to persuade them to remain as Team Venture continued incessantly, even as they signed the papers to formalize the disbanding and he notarized them. Twig knew that he was being so negative out of concern for them and the rest of the Guild— Team Venture was a great help in supplying jobs for the rest of the apprentices by distributing surplus work to their teams, after all, and he did always have an overbearing mother hen sort of nervousness to him— but his fussing always irked her. Something about it made her itch with discomfort. Not that it mattered— they folded their copy of the paperwork and delivered it to the post office to be sent off to the Archaeologist’s Guild. 

Team Venture, as far as the continent-wide catalog of exploration teams were concerned, never existed. Twig felt like a bit of her heart had vanished with it.

“It’s weird,” Kip said on their walk back home. “I still feel the same, but… also not? Nothing’s really changed, but everything is about to be so different so soon. It’s nerve-wracking, honestly.”

“Your nerves are always wracked,” Twig joked in an effort to diffuse the overwhelming atmosphere. 

Kip frowned. “I’m excited to go, but I’ll miss you.”

She paused, and her voice lowered to a sorrowful tone. “Yeah. I’ll miss you too.”

She set her hand between his shoulders. He leaned against her side. The rest of the walk to the Bluff was spent in silence.

She would miss him. Even now, the loneliness was killing her.