33. In Which Twig Attempts Small Talk

Twig went out for a walk early the next morning. She needed to escape Kip’s worried looks and tentative, careful questions, and she didn’t want to be around when Grovyle or Dusknoir woke up to interrogate her. Unfortunately, Grovyle must have sensed her escape plan before she put it into motion, because he was up even earlier than usual and caught her by the arm before she could leave. 

“Twig—” he began. 

“Back off,” she hissed, careful to keep her voice low. “I don’t want to talk right now.”

“I’m sorry about last night. Please, just tell me how I can help. I’m worried.”

“You don’t need to be. Everything is fine. Ask Celebi if you need to, but the Future is still saved, and we don’t have to do anything about it.”

She tried to pull away, but he held her fast. “I’m not worried about the Future. I’m worried about you. What’s wrong?” 

“Nothing.”

“There is no chance that nothing‘s wrong. Please, Twig, I want to help.”

“If you want to help, let me take my walk. I need to clear my head.” 

With a tight frown, he released her, and Twig stormed up the stairs outside. 

The cool morning air always helped clear her head. She found herself following an old trail down the forest that ringed around Treasure Town that she had always loved back when she and Kip lived together. It was a meandering trail that barely had any incline or decline to it— mostly level, with hardly any other pokemon that walked it, and also a gentle serpentine curve that swung around giant oak trees every so often. It was beautiful, especially when spring green leaves had filled out the branches overhead again after winter. It felt like the trail was healing after it had been scarred by the cold. Twig wished she could do the same. 

Wouldn’t that be nice— grow a couple leaves on a few branches, and everyone would assume that everything was just perfect about her? Twig could see signs of oak wilt in a number of the oldest trees— a lesson she recalled from her schooling as a human. They had gone down to the air purification chambers in the bunker and learned how to care for the plants within. She wished she remembered how to heal these trees. She didn’t know how, and that stung. 

Maybe that’s how Grovyle felt about her. 

She pulled the cloak she grabbed before leaving tighter around herself. He said that he knew she was suffering and wanted to help, but didn’t know how to fix it. Twig had always assumed it was out of pity that he nagged— a sort of forceful, frustrating means of correcting her more burdensome traits. Maybe it wasn’t out of pity, though. Maybe he really wanted to help because he cared about her specifically. Maybe it was because seeing her hurting hurt him as well.  

… Yeah, right. Who would be stupid enough to think Twig of all people was worth empathizing with? Grovyle was smarter than that. Twig, for all her stupidity, was clever enough to know she wasn’t worth the time of day. What a dumb thing to even consider—

A hand closed around her wrist before she stepped into open air, her foot dipping over into a sharp drop in the path. Right, this part had a sharp drop-off of about the length of her tail. She hadn’t noticed because she was too busy wiping away her tears. 

Startled, she scrambled for purchase and launched herself back, glancing over her shoulder at whoever it was that saved her. She caught a brief glimpse of a dark, clawed hand before it melted away into the dappled shadows of the early light. 

She stared into the empty forest, mouth agape as she tried to process what just happened. 

“Dude,” she finally said. “It’s not that far of a drop.”

Silence, save for the hushed whispering of the leaves. 

“The worst that could have happened is I maybe would have rolled my ankle.” 

Nothing. She saw the shadows to her left shift uncomfortably. 

“Thanks, I guess? Um. How have you been since you disappeared? I’ve been doing good. It’s, uh, nice to see you again? I… I dunno what to say. This is kind of awkward—”

“Do you often come to the forest to cry?” Ark’s voice meekly asked. 

She sputtered in surprise. “What kind of question is that?”

Silence. 

She frowned. “Why do you even want to know?”

“You frequently left for the trees at the edge of your property whenever upset toward the end of my… I was curious. That’s all.” 

It took a moment for her to consider whether or not to ask her own question— why he hadn’t tried anything yet to put his former plans in motion— but she decided against it. “It’s out of the way,” she finally said, as if that was a real answer. 

Silence. 

The trees rustled overhead. Ferns stirred in the wind to her side. The shadows on her left shifted again, and she could just make out a subtle dark shape in the dappled shade of a particular silhouette. 

“You aren’t well,” Ark said. 

She scoffed a harsh sound. “Gee, you don’t say.” 

“Don’t act like this is my fault,” he snapped, suddenly sounding more like the Darkrai that Twig had come to fear all those years ago. But even so, it sounded more like it was a bark with no bite behind it. She found herself pitying the way he schooled his naturally mellow tone into something venomous and cruel. It would be like if she scooped up a snowball and decided to call herself an ice-type. He continued, “I didn’t ask to be your little project you could prune and shape into something you weren’t afraid of. I didn’t ask to be struck dumb and empty-minded so that you could fill my head with lies. I didn’t ask—”

“Maybe not, but neither did I. We don’t get to choose how things shake out. I didn’t ask to remember my past, and you didn’t ask to be the Legend of nightmares, either.” 

He snapped into visibility, hackles raised in an aggressive posture and a noticeable fear in his eyes amidst his livid expression at Twig’s mention of the privileged knowledge she’d been given. Darkrai didn’t want his domain, Cresselia had told her what felt a lifetime ago. Pressing a lunar feather into Twig’s hands, she had revealed how her counterpart considered the universe a cruel thing that sought to scorn him personally from his creation. He’d lamented as much to her at a point when Cresselia hated him for only existing, and she had told him she hoped the universe truly did loathe him as he thought it did. 

Twig watched him loom over her with a painful sense of empathy. They both felt like no one cared, didn’t they? But where Twig had convinced herself that no one should bother with her, Darkrai had turned his anger outward rather than inward. They weren’t the same— and they never would be— but if there was any sense of fate in how the universe worked, she could see herself being a reflection of the Legend before her. 

He was a loathsome, angry, pitiful thing that hated himself. And Twig knew exactly how that felt. 

“How much did that wench tell you?” He spat. 

“Enough.” Twig didn’t meet his eyes as she found herself echoing his own words, once uttered in a dark room after a nightmare. “She told me enough.”

Darkrai’s furious posture faltered. He backed down just barely, then a hair more, and then melted back into the shadows. Twig couldn’t pick him out from the dappled shade cast by sunlight filtering through the leaves anymore, but she could feel his presence somewhere in the forest with her. 

“I didn’t want Cresselia to tell me all your business, you know,” Twig murmured. “But she’s… well, she’s intense. She doesn’t really take no for an answer, and you don’t want to argue against a Legend too much when you’re mortal. At least, that’s what I’ve heard. Celebi is pretty similar actually, but you don’t have to worry about ending up smote to dust or whatever when you tell her you don’t want to eat her cooking.” 

Silence. 

“Okay, you got to ask me if I like going to the woods to cry, so I get to ask a weirdly personal question too.” She crossed her arms, faking disappointment in the Legend hidden somewhere around her. “Do you do that thing where you hide in the dark with everyone when you don’t want to talk about something, or is it just something you do with me?” 

The forest was still. Almost unnaturally still. It froze and went taut, almost as if drawn up tightly with marionette strings, and Twig wondered if she’d pushed too hard and now she was going to die. 

She sighed. “That was supposed to be a joke, by the—”

“Considering you are the first to ask such uncomfortable things of me, or even to speak to me much at all, I can’t say I know how to answer that.”

Oh. This wasn’t a ‘the universe is being summoned to swallow you up in a giant stony pit’ sort of tension, it was a ‘the Legend you’re talking to is nervous’ sort of tension. Darkrai spoke so hesitantly that Twig couldn’t even say it sounded more like Ark as he uttered the quiet answer. There was a bit of teeth in how he said it— almost like he wanted it to be more of an accusation than a confession— but it had no bite. He just sounded helplessly, hopelessly tired. 

She understood that. 

“Look, man, I’m sorry about Cresselia. Her being a real… Ugh. I know a lot of things that could describe how she was, but they only make sense in English, so I’ll go with what you said earlier and say wench. She was awful. You didn’t deserve that— not at the start, at least.” She rubbed the sides of her arms nervously. “And I’m sorry about her telling me everything about your past. That was a jerk move on her end. Heck, even you didn’t blab to Kip or anybody else about me pretty much barbecuing my entire bunker.”

 A pause. “You weren’t responsible for that tragedy, nor what happened with—”

“Anyways!” She cut him off, eager to avoid whatever garbage he was going to spew to try and get her to see things the way Dusknoir desperately wanted her to. She wasn’t going to handle another lecture that ended with her completely and utterly gutted very well. “Sorry about that, thanks for not killing all my loved ones, keep up the good work, I’m going to finish my walk now. Bye.” 

She turned on her heel and hastened back to Sharpedo Bluff, pointedly ignoring the eyes she felt on her as she went. 

That got dangerous. And not in the way she expected. She needed to change up her walking routes, and fast.