11. In Which Ark is Kept in the Dark

Darkrai was not often one to pry, but it was painfully obvious that Twig was hiding something from him. He intended to learn just what that something was, but he also wasn’t eager to rush into it and cause her to clam up even further than she had when he tried to nudge her into giving him the truth of why her friends distrusted him so deeply. Only Celebi seemed to truly see him as a non-threat— and he suspected that she knew more than she was letting on to him as well as to her peers. Was it because of her dominion as a being of Time? Was it because of some facet of her divinity he was not aware of? Whatever it was, Celebi trusted him more than all of her peers put together did. 

(She was a pleasant conversation partner. He was glad to discover his ability to converse with other Legends no matter the distance extended to her as well as his counterpart, and that the unsettling discomfort that accompanied any half-realized attempt to speak to his counterpart was not echoed when he spoke to her using their shared telepathic abilities.) 

Twig’s tenseness was no longer something he could overlook. He had thought of her as being a jumpy sort of person by nature, but witnessing her relax in the company of her peers— disregarding whatever argument had taken place the night before their departure that soured the atmosphere there— showed him that this was not so. Twig was still an anxious character, but she was one who was bold amidst her nerves— she masked her restlessness with a boisterous bravado and a blatantly false confidence that he couldn’t tell whether she thought was convincing. If she did, she was either dense or delusional— and Darkrai personally suspected a mix of the two was at play.

Twig insisted that she was not afraid of him— that she trusted him, that he was a good person in the past and had changed many lives for the better— so why did she behave as though at any moment he would strike her off the face of the planet?

“… What are you thinking about?” Came the voice of the charmeleon in question, jolting him out of his musings as he watched out the window, embroidery forgotten in his lap. Her tone was cautious. She suspected he was considering something in particular. What, and why?

He picked the tambour back up as he spoke. Perhaps a more direct approach would benefit his search for the truth— a sort of startle tactic to unsettle her into speaking honestly. “I was pondering why your associates, as well as you yourself, regard me with a peculiar hesitancy. Your insistence that none see my presence as particularly forbidding seems to be misguided.”

To his surprise, she answered not by deflecting his questions with  nonexistent grace, but a half-formed, quiet chuckle.

“What is it?” He asked. 

“I— uh— Sorry, I just…” She cleared her throat, the small smile that had found its way onto her face vanishing. “Sometimes when you talk, you sound like some kind of stuffy regency era guy.” 

He blinked, taken aback. “Oh.” After a moment that he took to consider this observation, he said, “… I suppose the Serperior royal line’s rule has concluded by now, hasn’t it? The era of a presiding regent would have come to an end quite some time ago.”

She furrowed her brow. “Um, yeah. I think so. Is something wrong?”

“It is nothing of note,” he said, feeling thoroughly disoriented by the realization of the time that had passed since his impression of when it should have been. 

The rest of the evening was spent in silence— Twig finishing penning a letter and Darkrai once again illustrating some unknown landscape that gripped his mind with its visage until he put thread to fabric. He managed to ground himself enough to notice that the drifts outside were finally melting. Spring was on its way. He wondered what the change in weather would bring. He hoped dearly that the coming months would yield answers for his questions.

Who was he before he lost his memories?

Why did Twig take him in when she seemed so scared of him?

Who exactly was this charmeleon hosting him, and what exactly was it that she hoped to achieve by lying about who he once was and how she knew him?