36. In Which Twig Is Put Back Together

I told them everything. And I did it crying harder than I thought was mortally possible, Twig scratched onto the pages of a hardcover journal. I blabbed everything and I did it while dribbling all over them both. I think they were more grossed out by the dribbling part than the ‘me indirectly killing an entire bunker of people’ part. I tried the same garbage as always to argue my point that it was my fault, and Celebi looked ready to slap me. I think she honestly might have if Dusknoir didn’t grab her midair and walk her away in his hand. It’s a good thing he did, because I started crying even harder when Grovyle said something like he’s glad I survived the fire and Kip gave me the saddest look ever. He started crying too. I don’t think anyone should see two people bawling their eyes out and clinging to each other like we were. It was kind of gross. If Dusknoir and Celebi stayed to watch, I might have died of shame. Grovyle being there was hard enough. 

The Future Trio stayed over for a while longer at Kip’s place. There was a lot of talking that happened, and I honestly don’t remember a lot of it. I should have written it down as it happened. Basically it was just people talking circles about how they couldn’t believe I thought they hated me and how I meant a lot to them. I think I fell asleep mid-sentence at one point because I was so worn out from the crying. I’m never crying again. The one time during the hug was okay— it was fitting. But Celebi gave me an English dictionary before they all packed up and left, and I didn’t even realize I was crying until she was grabbing for tissues. That felt pretty ridiculous. It’s just a book. But it almost felt like she’d given me a drink of water the night I left my bunker behind. Dunno how to say it in a normal way, but it helped me feel better. 

It’s a real one. She found a real Oxford Language Dictionary. It’s missing pages and dogeared to heck and back, but Arceus, this thing is like my baby. I keep taking it off the shelf just to hold it in my hands. I’m sure she had to have pulled some strings with Dialga to bring something like this back from the past or future or whatever, but she kept saying it wasn’t any problem to get. Judging by the look Grovyle gave her, it was a big problem to get, but I’m glad she went through it to give it to me. There’s even etymology included for a lot of the words in it. Pronunciations and everything. It’s gold. 

What else to say… When Dusknoir said to try keeping a journal, I didn’t think it would be so hard to decide what to write! As always, his ideas are annoying and weirdly effective. It does feel like I’m not as frazzled now that I’m writing regularly. What else to include, though… 

Kip asked me if I wanted to move back in with him. I tried to, but I actually got homesick for Verdant Village after a while. We decided to just keep a room open for each other at each of our places so that we can crash at either house whenever we want to. He loves the library in Verdant Village whenever he comes over. I’m pretty sure the Swadloon that runs it has a crush on him, but I don’t think he knows. I’m eager to see how long it takes for him to realize it. 

I finally took up Gardevoir on her offers to have me over for dinner. Lyra never fails to show off some new toy or trinket to me whenever I come visit. At first I thought that she just wanted to talk to someone new about her things, but it clicked for me the other day that she wanted to talk to me in particular about them. That… um. It was weird. Nice, but really weird. She’s a good kid. 

I wonder if Manaphy is old enough to visit Treasure Town by now… I need to figure out how to contact Walrein. It’s hard to send letters underwater, I think, but I’ll figure something out. 

She set the journal aside and stretched her arms and back, rolling her shoulders as she stood up from the writing desk Kip had begged her to buy. It was more than worth the investment. She was never writing using the floor as a table again. Her entry for the day written, she stepped out into the warm sunlight trickling between the leaves overhead and started her usual routines. She chopped firewood, she brought water in from the spigot at the edge of her property to wash the dishes from last night, she went to the market and got some peppers that seemed like something fun to try cooking with. It was her day off between running her shop and going dungeon delving, so she decided to go for a walk like usual to kill time before she’d need to meet up with Gallade for Lyra’s exploration lessons. 

The hiking trails were well-kept in Verdant Village, sometimes to the point of being better maintained than the main roads that people traveled through town with. Twig had discovered a number of real hidden gems since she’d moved back in, and she made use of them as often as possible. 

Oddly enough, apparently Darkrai frequented the trail she was on right then as well. 

She hadn’t seen him since the day she bore her soul to everyone she’d been keeping secrets from. He’d vanished somewhere between their argument and the hug that sent her spiraling head first into all the heartbreak she’d been refusing to acknowledge, and he hadn’t shown his face in the months after. Celebi kept in touch with him via telepathy and responded to Twig’s occasional request for an update on where the heck is this guy and what the heck is he doing by saying that he was doing some traveling and thinking. Twig could believe the thinking bit— Darkrai was calculating and cautious, and Ark was analytical and prone to deliberation— but really? Traveling? It seemed strange to imagine the Legend as being a globetrotter all of a sudden. But then again, he had taken in all the sights on the way to Cresselia’s mountain with such awe and enthusiasm that it was easier to imagine him enjoying that sort of thing than she thought it should be. 

He was supposed to be traveling. He was supposed to be on some sort of quest of soul-searching and pondering. But here he was, several yards off the path, hidden in the foliage and tucked within the shadows. 

“Dude,” Twig eloquently began, “I can see you.”

There was a moment of hesitation before he rose from the shadows, plainly bewildered by her ability to pick him out amongst the dappled shade of the trail. 

She sighed. “You’re still you–shaped when you do that. You mess up the rest of the shadows around you. And you’re… I dunno how to put it, your shadow is noisy, I guess. If that even makes sense.” 

He hummed a low note. 

“I don’t think I ever thanked you for what you did. Um. I appreciate it. Or at least I do now.”

He narrowed his eyes. “What do you have to thank me for?”

“Ark, I’m not stupid. It was pretty obvious looking back on things that you waited until I was in earshot of the gang to start really getting under my skin with what you asked me. If you hadn’t, and if they hadn’t overheard me chewing you out for it, I probably wouldn’t have said anything to anyone about…” She waved a hand. “It’s because you did that that I’ve been doing better, even if it’s indirectly.”

“I see.”

“So, uh… How you been?” 

“Well enough,” he answered, and did not elaborate. 

She frowned. “Cool. Have you seen anything neat on your travels?”

“Many things.” 

“Many, huh? Stuff like…?”

“Nothing leaps to mind.”

He’s way less chatty now. Weird. “When…” She leaned against a tree opposite to him and fidgeted with her hands, trying to summon the courage to ask him a question that had been eating away at her for months. “When did your memories come back?”

He gave her a wary look. “Why this interest?”

“I’ve had some other stuff come back for me while you were gone. I wanted to ask so I could get an idea of what’s triggering their returns. It seems random at times.” 

Darkrai looked away for a moment, hackles raising. “It was… on the expedition we embarked on. You took a hit intended for myself. I recalled a young human doing the same for a grovyle, and somehow understood that it was you in the memory, though that was only the first to return.”

“The first—? You really only remembered that one snippet?”

“It was in bits and pieces that the entirety of my memory returned; a gradual process. Your rejection of my request to join Team Venture was when everything fell into place and I understood what the scattered recollections meant.”

That gave her pause. “You knew then? And you didn’t say anything until I totally healed up from my leg getting broken?”

“It was… difficult to reconcile the perceptions I had of you. On the one hand, you were an adversarial nuisance who foiled my every effort to achieve anything. On the other, you had showed me a care I had not received in living memory and given me a new perspective.”

Huh. Celebi wasn’t kidding about me changing his mind. Wonder how I managed that. “I can get that. It took me a bit to get used to the idea of you being so different when Cresselia first met you.”

He gave her a vicious glare, cold and poisonous. 

“Calm down. I’m not going to let anything slip about your past, especially when you haven’t blabbed about mine. Thanks for that, by the way. Dunno if I could’ve handled Dark Crater if you had said anything back then.”

His glare twitched, venomousness flickering as it gave out into something softer, though schooled by an uneasy sternness. “My failure to blab did not come from a place of kindness at that point. It was leverage I didn’t intend to give up. Surely you can grasp that.”

“I can. Doesn’t change the fact you didn’t say anything before I did.”

Silence. Leaves brushed together in quiet whispers as the wind passed through the treetops. The air was heavy around them. Twig could smell rain on its way. 

“I’m sorry,” he finally said, and Twig realized she hadn’t been able to pick out the mournful crease of his brow or the barely noticeable desperation in his posture when she first met him in Mount Travail all that time ago. Before, he was practically unreadable to her. Now she was able to see the nervous twitch in his fingers, the hesitancy in his volume. He’d always seemed so closed-off in her mind’s eye, but he had swiftly become an open book, given time. 

She blinked, taken aback by his words. The shame in them, the disgust with himself— it was obvious he wasn’t apologizing only for holding her past as leverage, and it was an apology he didn’t expect to be accepted. 

“Hey.” She punched him in the arm, earning a startled grunt. “You got somewhere to stay?”

He squinted at her. “No.”

“I’ve got a bunch of spare rooms if you’re down.” 

“If I’m—?” His eyes widened, then narrowed. “You’re making fun of me.”

“Not in the slightest.”

“I…” He tilted his head slightly, looking like he was trying to pick out a seed of sarcasm he was convinced lay in her words. “If you’re certain it is well with you.”

She nodded as a sense of heaviness lifted from her. Somehow, a weight she’d been carrying was taken away by those words. “I’m gonna finish my hike. Let’s walk and talk; Celebi made it sound like you saw every corner of the globe and I want to hear the highlights.”

She started off down the path,  Darkrai falling into her wake as she passed. “Globes don’t have corners. Not having corners is the entire purpose of a globe.” He sighed. “I suppose I could enlighten you. There was a number of locations you’d likely have found interesting. One in particular had a population that prided themselves on preserving a number of human words and phrases in their daily language…”

Twig enjoyed going for walks alone. It turned out she like to go for walks with company even more. 

***

Life was surprisingly mundane despite Twig having a Legend for a roommate. Darkrai insisted that Twig fill her house up with a more typical amount of furnishings, and Twig asked him what exactly she should fill the empty rooms with. He was at a loss and didn’t answer. She had her suspicions that he hadn’t been in many homes before, but didn’t push him on the subject. She eventually figured out she’d been living almost exclusively out of her living room and that the numerous guest rooms in the back of the house were actually a study, a bedroom, and a pair of guest rooms, and that she should probably populate them with the proper furniture accordingly. Given time, Gardevoir no longer looked like she was going to have a conniption whenever she visited, and Twig was actually kind of proud of the decor she put together. 

It was during the evening as she looked over a bookcase she’d arranged a few books and keepsakes on, and she thought that she liked how she’d done it, that it occurred to her that this was the first time she could remember feeling proud of herself without any strings attached. She just liked how she’d angled a potted plant next to a stack of books. That was all. There was no baggage of doing it to make up for her being worthless or an awful, burdensome person— she’d simply done it for her own sake, and she liked what she’d done. That felt… weird. It felt weird, and scary in a number of ways. But she didn’t run from it. She doubled down on her newfound pleasure in filling her home with pretty things. 

It was dumb to take so much joy in something so stupid. She didn’t even have any system she used to decorate— she just stuck things where they looked nice with no rhyme or reason or even color palette to keep the baubles cohesive in their looks. It was dumb. But it was something that made her happy. It wasn’t her usual kind of happy, either. This wasn’t a flashbang of cheerfulness that faded fast and left her empty— it was quiet and warmed her bones even in the dead of night when she fought herself to get over her anxiety and insomnia and just sleep. 

It was easier to fight her insomnia hearing someone else moving about the house at night. Ark was quiet, but the muffled thud of a cabinet closing or a door creaking open as he went from room to room helped her feel like she could give up on her desperate need to be awake and aware at all times. She hadn’t thought that sharing a home with him would ever be reassuring, but here she was— she’d woken up from a nightmare of her mind’s own making, another memory that the lunar feather hanging on her wall couldn’t dissuade when it was busy canceling out Darkrai’s aura already— gasping for breath and finally catching it when she heard the Legend getting himself a drink from the next room over. 

Her memories hadn’t come back to her any more than they already had— it was still just those handfuls of images, of the days leading up to how she left her bunker to burn and now one nighttime vignette of Grovyle soothing her as a kid as well, that haunted her sleeping and waking hours. She wondered why her memories hadn’t returned to her completely by now, especially when Darkrai’s had despite him having amnesia for so much less time. Sometimes she wondered if maybe they’d never come back. But it was becoming more common these days for her to think that it wouldn’t be surprising if they were just dormant and waiting for a safe time to come back into the light. Given time, she was increasingly sure her past was bound to return to her in full, for better or for worse. 

She looked up from her journal. She wasn’t writing a real entry at the moment, just flipping through old ones and adding a date here or there where she’d forgotten to include them. Ark was sat at the dining table, one of the heavier books he’d added to her collection sitting untouched before him as he instead pored over a thin book of fairy tales. It had been strange to get used to Darkrai and Ark being truly the same, but she supposed he had to get used to her being herself as well, so they were fairly even on that front. And besides— he still held a tambour and needle in the same way. 

She guessed not much had changed at all, in the end. He was still himself, whatever that meant, and she was still whoever Twig was. She still struggled to wrap her head around people loving her, but she was starting to see that there were some things about her worth caring about. There was still healing to do. There was so much of it that Twig found herself intimidated by recovery most days. There was so much healing to do ahead, but in the end, things had changed, just a little. She had some hope now. The past was still an enigma, the future was uncertain, but between the two sources of so much grief and anxiety lay something she was finally seeing as precious and lovely. The present was an excellent gift to receive, after all.  

She intended to cherish it.