6: In Which Darkrai Gets a Hobby

Twig was going to have a mental, emotional, and physical breakdown of never-before-seen proportions if she didn’t get ten minutes away from Darkrai. 

How could this guy be so clingy? Yes, she was too nervous to tell him to back off and give her room to breathe when she went on errands with him hovering over her shoulder, or to demand that she get some time alone when they were at her house, but she couldn’t imagine being so brazen with inserting herself into someone’s daily life. It felt like he was effectively glued to her side at this point, give or take a yard or two. 

As a last ditch effort to get him to cool it with the whole “I refuse to be even a room away from you” thing, Twig dug out some old curtains that a local Vemomoth had given away after her kids chewed them to oblivion, along with a pocket sewing kit. Darkrai gave her a curious look when she shoved them into his arms while almost certainly looking every bit at the end of her rope as she felt. 

“Mind mending these for me?” She asked, voice dripping with frustrated exhaustion.

He blinked, glancing from her to the bundle of fabric in his arms. “No, not at all. Is there a way you’d like them mended? A certain stitch, or—”

“Nope, anything’s fine, I don’t care, I’m going to take a nap. Bye.” 

If Darkrai knew something was off by the way she slammed the guest room door, he didn’t comment on it, and Twig didn’t have the reserves to care whatsoever herself. She was tired and frazzled and angry. Forget keeping up appearances for the amnesiac minor deity in her front room, she needed a breather. She collapsed in the center of the floor and tried to sleep— and while sleep never did grace her, wired as she was, she had the chance to breathe without the reminder of her situation breathing down her neck. 

She didn’t know how long she spent curled up on the floor there. It was long enough that the light filtering through the shuttered window had dimmed significantly, and her stomach was gnawing at itself in hunger. She cracked several joints as she rose— shows her right for spending an hour straight curled up in a ball on the floor— and reentered the main room.

Darkrai had mended the curtains she’d given him, yes, but a host of other items were repaired as well. Blankets and pillows, tea towels and napkins— all of them folded neatly and mended with beautiful stitches that swirled and wove in on each other to make little works of art where there had once been just worn-through holes. He looked up from a throw pillow that had been practically worn in half that he was in the process of stitching back together as she passed the hallway threshold.

“Ah.” He looked over his handiwork. “In hindsight, I should have asked permission to mend so much more than you had asked. I hope I did not disrupt anything by—”

“Where did you learn to do this stuff?” Twig asked, gingerly taking one tea towel that had been embroidered in addition to being mended— though embroidery seemed almost too simple a word for what had been done to it. It was more like painting with thread. The towel was mended with patchwork squares of fibers that sported all sorts of different textures— the thread was all one color, just a uniform navy that she had bought because it was the cheapest one for sale at the time, but the way it had been sewn into the towel showed clear scenes of forests and fields with clouds overhead thanks to the textures they had been stitched with. 

He blinked, taken aback. “I… I don’t recall,” he said. “Though I certainly seem to have picked up the talent at some point in my history.”

She frowned. She understood that sort of thing all too well. Not knowing where you learned something, or why you were better at one skill than another. Puzzling over the bits and pieces of a past that you could only see in a sort of portrait shaped by negative space— you could see the silhouette of something there, something that was made distinct by the outline of quirks you still possessed, but not the centermost piece itself. 

She picked up a set of colored thread and an embroidery hoop the next time she stopped by the market. Darkrai received them with a baffled expression— the first real emotion she had seen on his face since she’d found him in Mount Travail. 

“You probably want something to do other than stare out the window all day, right?” She gestured to the supplies she’d handed to him. “Seems like you’re good with a needle, so I figured you’d probably like… Um. I should have asked first, shouldn’t I? Shoot. Uh— if you don’t want them, I can—”

“No, no.” He shook his head. “I appreciate the gesture and the gifts. I was only surprised by the suddenness of them. Thank you.” His eyes creased in a smile. “I’m touched, truly.”

Twig blinked. “Uh. Cool beans. I’m gonna get started on dinner.”

Her ulterior motive of getting him something to do so he would stop hovering over her shoulder at all times worked wonderfully, and she was able to steal away to the kitchen alone while he stitched happily in the main room. It was nice to get the time to herself, even if it was only in a side room without a door. She pulled out the journal she had written her pros and cons list in weeks ago and reviewed it. That one awful pro still outweighed all the cons of housing Darkrai. But if she could have little moments away from him like this, maybe she could manage to keep another apocalypse from occurring without having a breakdown of monumental proportions.

***

That one spot above Twig’s wrist was hurting again. It wasn’t uncommon for the area to flare up with pain, especially during changes in weather, but it didn’t make it any easier to deal with the throbbing, dull ache that kept her up at night more than her newfound roommate’s nightmarish aura did. She massaged the complaining spot absentmindedly most days now, barely noticing her efforts to soothe the pain. 

Darkrai, of course, did not fail to take note. 

“Forgive me my prying,” he asked early one morning while Twig looked over her list again, “but the scar on your arm is clearly quite bothersome to you. Is there anything I could fetch to soothe it?”

She snapped the journal closed, startled by his voice after he had so silently approached her. He almost certainly couldn’t read English, but she didn’t want to risk the chance that he might be able to. “Um. No, not really. I’ve tried pretty much everything, but medicines and painkillers don’t do much for it.”

“Peculiar.” His brow furrowed just barely— the slightest change to his expression. “How did you earn the scar? I’ve not heard of an old injury refusing even numbing agents before.”

Twig opened her mouth to say she didn’t remember, but a flurry of colliding memories stopped her.

(Her aunt seized her arm just above her wrist and dragged her out from under her bed. She couldn’t remember what was screamed during the events that followed, but she wasn’t sure she even wanted to remember it when just the memory of the fevered pitch and furious tone made her stomach turn. Her arm burned at the thought of it. And then the memory turned hazy, almost warped and shifted, and suddenly she was in Dark Crater. 

(Darkrai launched forward to where Kip had collapsed, ready to deliver the final blow, and Twig had thrown herself between them and taken the hit. He seized her arm and threw her against the cavern wall. What ensued was a burning, icy pain that stabbed through her veins and gripped her innards, but she forced herself back onto her feet. Cresselia swept over to tend to Kip, and Twig let loose a vicious counterstrike on a terrified looking Darkrai. The next thing she knew, she was waking up weeks later, having apparently been laid so low by her injuries that she’d nearly died.)

Twig looked down at her arm, shoulders drawing up. She flexed her claws. Her hands were shaking.

“Dunno,” she finally answered. Her voice was tangled up, a knotted lump in her throat that she had to force out. “I’m not sure how I got it. Just that it hurts.”

“Are you certain? It seems an odd injury to not recall gaining—”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she spat, and immediately regretted it. 

Silence.

She didn’t dare look up at him.

It was a long moment before Darkrai spoke. His voice was collected as ever— calm, cool, and calculated. “My apologies. I seem to have touched a nerve. I won’t make the same mistake again.”

He left the kitchen. She could hear him moving about in the main room.

Why did she feel so nauseous all of a sudden?

***

She curled up in her bed as he plucked away at his needlework across the room. Sleep came quickly with how exhausted she was. Nightmares came even quicker with Darkrai’s presence. She was used to it, and she was prepared for the usual fare of being chased, or falling, or getting lost. She could almost count the days of the week by the rotating selection that was employed, and she had the fortitude to jerk awake, yawn, and roll back over when she woke from one. 

This wasn’t one of those nightmares. 

(She was hiding in her aunt’s unit again. She was extra mad at her now because she hadn’t done well with her schoolwork, and that apparently meant that her aunt wasn’t a good enough person to be in charge of her. She was shouting about how she was making her look bad, so hiding seemed like the best thing to do at the time.

(She had a lot of bruises when her aunt found her. Her arm hurt the worst— she had squeezed it until it felt like it snapped between her fingers. She ran away at that part, convinced that she would kill her, and her aunt got in big trouble when people found her crying and clutching at her arm. She wasn’t supposed to go out when she was crying, but she did. And now her aunt was going away because she had done something wrong, and she still didn’t know what it was that was so bad she had to never see her again.

(She was scared. She didn’t want to have to go live with someone else. Her aunt said that everyone else was mean and they’d be really angry if she went to live with them.

(She was scared before, but she was terrified when the fire happened.

(Apparently when her aunt was being taken away, she had started a fire in ther unit. Sometimes she would do that when it was extra cold in the bunker and she didn’t want to have to ask for extra blankets from the neighbors. But it was a different kind of fire, because it spread really fast. The entire bunker filled up with smoke. People were screaming. She found a room that led away from the rest of the bunker corridors and hid in there, but when the fire started to get inside that room she pulled and pulled on a door at the back of it until it finally opened. The metal of the handles bent under her fingers and burned her hands as she pulled it open, but she ran up the stairs that it led to until she could breathe without smoke filling up her lungs and the scrape of locking machinery drowning out any other sound. 

(When she left the bunker, she looked up at the sky, and all she could think of was how the stars were a lot darker than she thought they’d be.

(She came back to the bunker the next day. She wanted to apologize to her aunt. She wanted to go to her teachers and say she was fine and that they didn’t need to tell the bunker officials that she needed help.)

(She found nothing but ash and charcoal, warped metal and bones, carnage and rot.)

(Twig’s surroundings seemed to stutter— jerking back and forth between slow and erratic before beginning to melt. She forced herself to look up from the bodies at her feet. She found ice-blue eyes staring back at her from across the visceral scene. And then everything was gone, sloughed off like a second skin, leaving nothing but dripping shadows behind.)

Suddenly, she was lying on her stomach, with her guts clenching in fear and a hand on her shoulder. She sucked in ragged gasps as panic gripped her, and when she finally came to enough to recognize Darkrai looming at her bedside, she waved him away perhaps a bit more violently than was needed— though it was hard to care when she desperately needed to focus on getting control of her breathing. 

When her lungs finally decided to listen to reason, she spat a quick flame and lit the lamp she kept next to her bed. Darkrai swiftly retreated into the shadows, settling in the opposite end of the room and out of reach of the lamp’s illumination, though not that of the dimmest reaches of her tail’s flame. His eyes never left her. 

She didn’t ask for an explanation. He still broke the silence with one. “You looked unwell. Pained.”

Oh. She let out a short, dry laugh at that. Guess he freaked out the same way she had when Grovyle took a nap around her for the first time. She’d woken him in a panic because she thought he was dying, what with how he cringed and contorted himself in his sleep. 

“You wouldn’t wake when addressed, nor when shaken,” he continued. 

Another dry sound, though this one walked the line between a laugh and a sob. The irony was not lost on her— Darkrai, lord of nightmares, unsettled by someone being affected by his powers. It was kind of sweet, in a pitifully twisted way. 

Despite her reluctance to ask it, she still found a question falling from her mouth half-formed. “How much did you…?” 

Silence. 

When he finally spoke, it was with a noticeable discomfort in his unflappable tone, and for a heartbeat, he turned away. “Enough,” he murmured. “I saw enough.” 

Great. That meant he saw everything.

Quiet swallowed the room again, the flicker of lamplight the only motion in the awful stillness. The pokemon across from her was unmoving, unflinching. He didn’t look away again, and the way his gaze dissected her every twitch was nauseating. 

This was, to put it in the most joyous of terms possible, agony. Real, true agony beyond anything she’d experienced. Agony because she hadn’t told anyone about this memory since it returned. Agony because it was the only memory that had returned. Agony because it was Darkrai that found out. Agony because Darkrai had already found out, before his botched escape into the Passage of Time, and he hadn’t said anything— and not out of some sense of compassion or pity. It was because she knew what the icy gaze that flashed in her nightmares back then meant, and because he knew she had witnessed him prying. It was because she had a dirty little secret she hadn’t admitted to anyone—that she had barely even admitted it to herself— and he had made it into a carrot on a stick, into something to get her to pay attention and follow along with everything he said and did. If her focus slipped up for a second as he spoke to the terrified people of Treasure Town, he would hint, and people would worry, and she couldn’t handle the people who deserved so much more than her fretting over someone who didn’t even deserve to exist. 

(When Kip and Twig refused to fight Darkrai initially, he decided to give them a bit of motivation to confront him in his trap. Everyone in Treasure Town began having nightmares of their worst memories whenever they closed their eyes. She overheard the Guildmaster quietly discussing an old mentor he was forced to part from with Chatot. Marill came to the market alone one day, looking skittish and fearful, and said Azurill was torn up about the mess with Drowzee bugging him again. Kip cried on Twig’s shoulder about seeing his parents in his nightmares, only for them to disappear without a trace as evening fell and the happy memory curdled— a newly christened orphan, the old wound made fresh once more.

(Twig had nothing. No bad dreams whatsoever. No nightly reminders of why she’d left humanity behind. No midnight rehearsals of the reason she kept her distance from everyone but the select few who could touch her under specific circumstances. Nothing.  

(Darkrai knew. And this felt somewhere between an olive branch and a debt he intended to collect.

(Twig said she’d been dreaming of the execution posts in the Dark Future. Kip nodded sympathetically through his tears.) 

She took a deep breath, staring back at the cold, pinprick glows coming from the dark of her home. 

He had known before. And he knew now. Might as well take back some of the control here and explain what he no doubt was registering wasn’t just the figment of a stressed-out, weary brain.  

“I was human, once,” she said. 

The light of his eyes dipped and raised, barely, as he nodded in the darkness. He’d discerned that already. 

“We all lived underground. There was some big disaster that we were scared of happening, and so we were supposed to hide until it blew over. But the thing is, sickness spreads real fast when you’re living in an enclosed space with limited clean air, so… Well. My parents didn’t make it when a nasty bug hit our area. I started living with my aunt, who— I mean… You saw how that was.” Twig laughed weakly.

Darkrai didn’t even chuckle.

She cleared her throat. “Um. Yeah. Looking back, I think she was mad at my mom for having a picture-perfect life when she didn’t, and she’d take it out on me once my folks died. I don’t blame her. I was an obnoxious kid.” She rubbed her hands together, unable to meet Darkrai’s gaze anymore. “Didn’t expect her to try and smoke everyone out when people got all huffy about it, but… I guess I should have.”

The glow of his eyes in the dark didn’t waver.

She explained briefly about the Dark Future— how she’d come from it, how a number of her friends had as well, how she’d saved the Present with the help of her partner and a handful of other pokemon— Grovyle, Celebi, Lapras, and more. She gave the explanation, careful to leave out any hint of Darkrai’s involvement, to draw his attention away from her shameful origins and how she should have died in that fire as well— how she would have, if she wasn’t such a coward she ran away at the first whiff of smoke.

He didn’t even flinch at the story of her revival thanks to Dialga or all that came before it. He just sat there, silent, watching. 

“A-Anyways, none of that matters. I’m here now, and everything’s peachy. I don’t even have the same body that got all banged up back then! It’s fine. I’m fine.”

He didn’t speak. 

This silence was going to strangle her. Would he just react, already? She said all of this to take ownership of the secret’s reveal, but it still felt like he was the one holding all the cards here, even if he had a distinct air of unease about him despite his menacing presence in the darkness. 

“You knew,” she said. “You knew about the life I came from.” She intended it to be comforting— a way to smooth over the tension in the air. A lie of omission where one could assume he had been her trusted confidant in an ugly situation, instead of teasing at the truth in front of everyone she knew. 

Silence.

“Nobody else did, not even Kip, or Grovyle, or— anybody. But you knew,” she repeated herself, feeling her voice jitter with nerves. 

But he saw through the lie, because of course he did— because she couldn’t keep any secret away from ice-blue vivisection. Not then, and not now. 

“You didn’t want me to,” he murmured, and it wasn’t a question. He knew. He always did, and he always would. 

She put out the lamp and rolled over to face the wall, regretting having spoken at all.