[attr="class","dorado2"]1. A MIRROR, DARKLY

tw: blood, gore, violence

Her confidence lasts all of two seconds as she’s spat into a dirty alley. Catching herself on a nearby wall, Skyler slowly takes in the filth-covered cobblestones that lead to a sun-drenched street, the shadows within the alley made starker by comparison.

Cautiously approaching the mouth of the alley, she finds her eyes narrowing against the bright sunlight. Wind bites coldly at her exposed skin, bringing with it the tang of copper and festering rot beneath the salty brine.

Uneasiness creeps up her spine, her initial bravado forgotten at the sight of winding streets and colorful shops, sloped roofs, and high-rise buildings in the distance - converging into an awfully familiar landscape. Lilycove. Her home.

Except that it isn’t.

Cities are beasts unto their own, organic assemblies of thousands of lives happening in unison to weave a beautifully complex, irreplaceable pattern. But as Skyler peeks past the corner, this city is eerily quiet. Unmoving. Lifeless.

Dead.

Filthy papers are strewn about the street, piling up in heaps of trash along the sidewalks and catching on broken glass windows. Dirt has gathered in corners and on top of cars, a wordless testament to their abandonment. And, above all, a mantle of static silence. Unease pools in her gut, along with the crawling sensation that something is deeply, irrevocably wrong.

At first she thinks it’s the echo of her heartbeat in her ears. Then raised voices crack further down the street, coming closer.

Skyler quickly draws back, plastering herself against the brick wall. She forces herself to breathe past the sudden vice-like grip around her throat. Wide eyes flit about the alley, catching details in sharp relief. Broken crates. Rotten fruit. Water-stained newspapers. Because everything is starting to make awful, horrifying sense.

What did I ask for? She thinks frantically, digging blunt nails into the stonework until they draw blood. She knew, she knew where Ultra Beasts came from. She knew, and yet-

Shattering glass breaks her out of her thoughts. “We got it!”

The sound of a scuffle reaches her, followed by a pained groan. Peering past the corner, she catches sight of a man being brought down to his knees. His captors, blue-skinned, spit in his face. She has time to see a flash of belligerence within green eyes, to cheer for the defiant turn of his mouth - before a knife carves a line across his throat.

The captain draws back and slides down the brick wall, staying quiet throughout the gurgling and the choking amid a backdrop of amused laughter, mouth firmly closed against a scream that’s clawing its way up her throat.

This couldn’t be happening. It couldn’t. It couldn’t.

She closes her eyes at the rivulets of crimson that pool in the cracks between cobblestones. Not looking somehow makes it worse when meat is sloughed off, hitting the ground with a wet slap. Again. And again.

She waits for the Megalopolans to drag what remains of the man off before rising to her feet, watching - numbly, as if from a distance - as she makes her way to the waterfront. Megalopolan patrols stalk through the streets, but she knows her city well, even as an empty husk, and it makes avoidance easier.

There’s no one on the streets. There’s no one anywhere.

It’s like a eulogy for the living.

Here, the market stalls she visits weekly with Angelo. Stained red and in disrepair. Here, the museum where her parents work. Boarded up. Here, where she shares drinks with fellow sailors after a hard day’s work. Door open wide and swinging forlornly in the wind.

Only the crashing of the waves remains unchanged, and even that proves insufficient to fight the nausea that burns up her esophagus. Least of all when the beach (where she learned how to love the ocean, playing in the shallows and building castles out of clamperl shells) is littered with ivory spikes, like the teeth of some ancient beast that’s come to find death on the surface.

Wailord carcasses washed ashore - tens, dozens, more - bones bleached white by the sun. Food for beasts and scavengers.

The horizon is dark with ravaging ocean storms. But they don’t approach. Closer, above the shallow ocean surface, bloated Nihilego hunt. Their transparent bodies showcase a horrible amalgam of half-digested meals - pokemon and human alike.

Leaning over the cliffside, Skyler loses her breakfast.

She doesn’t dare look in the direction of her parents’ house, or to look for the Sotally Tober.

She knows not to face those particular horrors.

She really should’ve known better.

[attr="class","dorado3"]

[attr="class","bycrane"]made by crane

[attr="class","dorado2"]2. IN THE JAWS OF BEASTS

tw: blood, gore, violence

Nightfall descends over Lilycove faster than Skyler would’ve expected it to, dark lamps signaling either a failing power grid or a redirection of power towards other endeavors. It makes navigating through the streets a tricky business - and realizing that she’s being followed an even trickier one.

She first notices it when she’s waiting, breath held halfway down her throat, as another Megalopolan patrol walks past. Abandoned vehicles make for a good hiding spot from those who aren’t really looking.

Except that these do.

She turns in time to see strands of silver disappearing further down the street, followed by a cacophony of shouts. The Megalopolans had seen it too -but they’d find her first.

Motherfucker.

Skyler scrambles to her feet, abandoning her hiding spot - and all attempts at stealth - to run further down the narrow side street. Alarmed shouts rise in volume behind her, and she knows she’s been spotted. Fuck.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

Turning left, Skyler skids and slams into the wall, barely acknowledging it before diving into a narrow space between two apartment buildings. The sound of booted feet on tarmac inches ever so closer, hounding her steps.

(She would’ve fought back. She has fought back, a year before. But she’d caught a few newspaper clippings while sneaking into side alleys earlier. ‘Hoenn at the mercy of Megalopolan forces’, ‘Sootopolis has fallen’, and ‘The End of the Hoenn region as foreign dignitaries attempt to start peace talks’ had painted a grim picture. And she has no desire to die here. She’s fought this war already. She's paid in blood and nightmares, she's not doing this again, not again, it's too much, it's too m-)

A bright flash nearly blinds her, and the world abruptly tilts on its axis as a roaring explosion knocks her back. She’s violently thrown against the wall, vision going black with pain. Smoke, acrid and chemical, burns up her nostrils and into her lungs.

When she comes to, a few seconds later, her ears are ringing, deaf to anything but a high-pitched screech. The street wobbles in front of her, distorted and bathed amber by the glow of nearby flames.

A single Unown floats into her vision, nearly peaceful among the chaos. Behind it comes a shadow, humanoid. Silver-haired.

Skyler bares her teeth in aggressive defiance, an empty gesture against the assassin’s lifeless, purposeful gaze. Her fingers twitch in the direction of a pokeball, but they’re not working quite right, refusing to heed her orders.

“Fuck off.” Though it’s more rasp than voice, it’s still heard over the crackling flames.

While her powers answer when she calls on them, a wild tide swelling beneath the surface of her skin, the Unown still floats by her head.

And the captain isn’t sure she’s fast enough to avoid execution. But, she thinks, at least she’ll make sure to take him down with her.

Distant voices shatter the impasse, and between one blink and the next the assassin has melted back into the shadows and out of sight.

He needn’t kill her, she realizes with a sinking feeling that evaporates any lingering sense of relief. He need only expose her – and the Megalopolans would take care of the rest in the most gruesome way.

Skyler struggles to her feet, leaning against the wall on shaking legs. She swallows a groan as her arm falls limp by her side. She doesn’t look at the shriveled skin, twisted by heat into a charred mess – but she can feel it, a shock of agony crawling up her arm to her shoulder and over part of her face.

Don’t think about it now. Not yet.

Looking around, the captain stubbornly stomps on a rising sense of hopelessness. There’s nowhere to run, her escape cut off by roaring flames while bloodthirsty voices approach from the opposite side.

She finally reaches the pokeball.

“There it is!”

A colossal shadow falls over her, giving her some respite from the approaching inferno. Her mouth opens, but the command dies before it has an opportunity to leave her mouth, replaced by heavy coughing. Her vision swims, shapes and colors melting together before unconsciousness finds her.

Ah, fuck.

[attr="class","dorado3"]

[attr="class","bycrane"]made by crane

[attr="class","dorado2"]3. CALLING ON ANGELS

tw: blood, gore, violence

She comes to some time later, to the feel of scratchy fabric against her skin and darkness. Groggy, she takes stock of herself. Arms, legs, fingers. They better, she thinks in the aftermath of her disorientation, not have taken her toes. 

Getting up proves to be more of a task than she’d expected, but her own bullheadedness walks her through it. More than that, she’s missing a couple of very important items. Her pokeballs. And her Blue Orb.

Fumbling in the dark, the captain finds a pokeball (not hers, she'd later realize) and the reassuring weight of what seems to be a blade. Pocketing the first and holding onto the second, she moves to the door. After a moment of silence, she quietly pries it open.

The barest hint of sunlight reveals a short corridor and stairs leading down to a lower level. The door inches open just enough for Skyler to sneak past it, weapon at the ready.

She doesn’t expect the amused breath that’s expelled somewhere behind her.

Instinct has her whirling around, using momentum to launch herself at the figure. She slams them against the wall, ignoring the agony in her arm as she presses the blade to the person’s neck.

“You know. For someone who’s butt just got saved, you’re acting pretty rude.” Skyler starts, feeling the edge of something sharp poking into her side. Looking down reveals a knife, poised at the edge of breaking her skin.

“Fuck’s sake…”

Breathing harshly past the sudden spike of adrenaline, she stands down. While her fingers tighten around the knife, Skyler herself cautiously steps away. Perhaps because whoever this might be, she rationalizes, doesn't seem too keen on murdering and eating her. For now.

“Where’s my stuff.” It is less a question than it is a demand, silver eyes narrowing in an attempt to discern any features in the low light. “I need it.”

“Could’ve just said thank you. No need to go out of your way to murder me.” Wry sarcasm drips from the words, and something about it has Skyler furrowing her brows. Any hostility leaks away as the figure steps away and motions to another chamber. “Shall we?”

They step into what seems to be a living room slash kitchen slash apocalypse bunker – which, given the reality out there, isn’t such a stretch.

“Maybe next time try not to Phantom Force into a guy’s secret hideout, I thought-“

But what he thought is drowned out by static and the feeling that the rug has just been pulled out from under her feet. Maybe finding her silence odd, the man’s voice sputters out. It’s only when he turns to her that slivers of sunlight find a face shadowed by starvation, skin pressed tight against bones and far paler than it ought to have been. She follows the curve of beloved features up to ocean blue e-

Milky. Milky white. Blind. A cruel mirror.

“Angelo?” She doesn’t recognize the tremble in her voice, or how it leaves her mouth reluctantly. As if by speaking she’d make it true.

Silence blooms in the wake of her question. She sees him tense, shoulders arced inward as if to protect himself from an unfelt wind. Whatever he’d been doing is halted halfway through.

And though he can’t see her, his eyes still seem to find her somehow. Face devoid of expression.

“…Who are you?”

Because, of course, before the war started, they’d barely known each other. He’d been the delivery boy with an uncanny gift for being able to find her, and she’d been that one crazy ship captain.

“I’m - Skyler Dross. Ship captain. Crazy sailor?” Perhaps he doesn’t remember. Perhaps in this version of the timeline they hadn’t gotten to meet.

“Skyler Dross is dead,” he rasps out, knuckles bleeding white around the blade’s handle. “Who are you?”

It shouldn’t surprise her, but it does. She’d all but gone on a rampage after Anders’ death, recklessly throwing herself into conflicts with no thought for self-preservation. But still.

Still…

“I am Skyler. Just not… Not from around here.” It sounds impossible when she speaks it out loud, and she doesn’t blame him if he chooses to not believe her. He’s listening regardless, so she continues, “I’m from another timeline. Where I’m from, the Megalopolans didn’t…”

“Didn’t fuck everything up?” Angelo doesn’t look too convinced by her story, but the blade is sheathed once more. She can’t read his expression, a blanket of calmness over what she’d learned to be a maelstrom of emotions deeper within.

And for the first time she notices how withered and sick this version of her husband is. She could probably snap him in half with no effort on her part. Despite the wry grin on his face, he looks like he’s barely capable of standing.

“Tell me, then-“ His eyebrows have risen so high it looks like they’re reaching for his hairline. “-about your timeline.”

And so, she does.

She tells him about how they repelled the Megalopolans back. Tells him about the Lilycove warfront and her role in it. Tells him about their week-long treasure hunt in a lush, tropical island. Tells him of the days, weeks, months that followed. Of their attraction to each other that had quickly spiraled into nights spent by each other's side. Of how he’d taken to the skies with star-speckled eyes and a hunger for distant horizons. Of how they’d escaped to Alola on a whim and returned married. Of how a Soul Dew had found its way to him, of how she’d found herself anchored to the depths. Of lazy afternoons spent exploring, and of dodging the ire of a spoiled pirate feline.

There are too many memories, far too many to condense into her storytelling. But by the time she’s run out of words, nothing remains of Angelo’s forced and surface-deep casualness. An awful blankness peeks out from between moments of wistfulness.

He approaches her on silent steps, and Skyler remains stills when he touches her face, feather-light. It is less a romantic gesture than it is the reflection of a bottomless, terrible hunger for a dream that would never be his. She feels the desperation in the coarse fingertips that linger, learning the shapes of what could’ve been.

“... Husband, huh? Am I also handsome there?”

A wet, trembling laugh escapes her.

“You’re the most annoying pain in the butt I’ve ever had the displeasure of meeting.”

His teeth flash in an insolent and all-too satisfied smirk, a glimpse of her Angelo beneath the gauntness and sickness. Suddenly it becomes hard to breathe past the knot in her throat, hard to ignore the burning in her eyes.

“That checks out. Tell that other me that he’s a lucky fucking bastard.”

‘No,’ She thinks, her smile wobbling in place, tinted by tragedy. She looks at the carefully wrapped gauze around her arm. ‘No, I am.’

Angelo takes this time to weave his way around the chamber, returning shortly with her things. Her pokeballs, her Blue Orb, her necklace, her bracelet. She hadn’t even realized it’d been missing, but touching it brings a wave of relief.

“Enforcers – megalopolan patrols - will be searching the area,” he tells her on hushed tones. “After the ruckus of your escape. There’s only so many places they can go before they knock at my door. Well... knock isn’t exactly the word.”

He seems awfully casual about it, especially given that Skyler has no doubts about his fate should he be discovered.

Neither does he, it seems.

The blade is heavy as he curls her fingers around it - a silent plea.

A million thoughts race around her mind, congealing into a mass of panic and refusal. But despite her powers, Skyler can’t cure blindness or sickness or the broken world they’re in. She can’t cure the hopelessness that shadows his smile. He knows. She knows.

With slow movements, she removes her wedding bracelet from around her wrist to place it gently in the palm of his hand.

And so Angelo holds on tightly to a piece of his dream, even as death comes to take him away.

[attr="class","dorado3"]

[attr="class","bycrane"]made by crane

[attr="class","dorado2"]4. I SHALL CALL IT SQUISHY

tw: blood, gore, violence

There's smears of arterial blood across her face when she steps out of Dhelmise’s portal.

The phantom feeling of a blade sinking into flesh remains etched into her muscle memory, playing out repeatedly like some sort of macabre film. Fingers spasm around the handle of a blade Skyler suddenly realizes she’s still clenching tightly.

With a startle, she drops it onto the ground, staining the grass a deep red.

(His blood.)

The trembling starts somewhere within, spreading to her limbs. Silver eyes open wide, glassy and unseeing. 

The thing about your weaknesses is that they make you fragile. And often fragile things, when broken, leave behind a lot of sharp edges.

Often more dangerous than the whole.

Skyler muffles a choked sob against the palm of her hand, uncaring for the smear of crimson left on her cheek. Uncaring for anything but the howling that grows within her ribcage, yearning to rip it open, looming threateningly at the edges of her awareness.

She needs to find a way out of this place. Back into her own. Soon. Now.

Fuck her wish.

She won’t live a moment longer in a world where Angelo’s blood stains her hands.

(Not that it would ever wash away, she’d later realize.)

An Unown-D is called forth. “Find others of your kind if they’re not with someone else.” The assassin is still out there, and she doesn’t want to bump into him. The Unown immediately speeds away and out of sight, hopefully heeding her words.

In hindsight, she was lucky then. Standing on the outskirts of Lilycove, it was only a matter of time before she’d be noticed. She’d seen the colossal, bloated things that hovered over warm waters close to shore.

When this one comes for her, it’s tiny by comparison.

The Nihilego’s approach is silent, its bulbous body an invisible ghost against the glare of the bright blue sky. Skyler notices it first as a burning sensation crawling up the length of her spine.

By then, it’s too late.

Tentacles slither around her arms in a vice-like grip, holding on as venom is pumped into her system.

“Fuck! Ge- Getoff!”

The amorphous shape envelops her in a parody of a loving embrace, holding her close until it consumes wholly - merging. Skyler grits her teeth past the panic, struggling with feral purpose to push past the neurotoxins that burrow into her flesh.

Muscles spasm violently, locking in place, and a whimper turned growl slips past her lips.

“I’m no- no-” Her tongue is a useless appendage flopping around in her mouth. Nerves twitch, surrendering to the inexorable advance of this invader.

There’s a horrifying screech, both outside and inside her mind. The captain winces and attempts to bite into spongy, translucent flesh - but her mouth is growing numb, and her jaw muscles are starting to relax into submission.

No.

Soon she wouldn’t be able to do anything other than feel herself being slowly digested.

No.

She shoves her whole weight into the Nihilego’s side and both stumble. A glint of metal catches her eye, and she zeroes in on it. Another shove has them on the ground, closer to the object she’d so carelessly thrown aside.

Skyler grunts, reaches into the tall grass to find a handful of dirt.

Numbness spreads up her legs, crawls over her torso. Her fingers twitch, barely able to form a fist.

“Ngh…” In the end she’s crawling, fighting against a body that’s shutting down bit by bit. Arms grope blindly over moist earth. And when fingers curl around a horribly familiar handle, the captain wastes no time.

An unyielding fury echoes within her head as she stabs into it. Its tentacles recoil, starting to move away. She stabs it a second time, and a third and a fourth.

She rips into it with savage abandon, carving long stretches of translucent flesh long after the alien shrieking within her own mind is but a dying whisper.

When the knife finally falls from her hands, the Ultra Beast lies silent around her.

Skyler bends down and retches. A slimy glob of purple splashes against the grass, leaving an acrid aftertaste in her throat. Big, wheezing, desperate gulps of air attempt to bring oxygen into her lungs as she painstakingly pulls herself away from the dead UB.

For the next hour she’d be wracked by crippling seizures, watching helplessly as a horde of Unown circles her and wondering when she'd be found. It’d be at least a couple more until she’d regain full control over her limbs. And only by the light of a setting sun over a doomed city, would she finally find a path back home – souvenir in hand.

Towards a Lilycove that breathes life. Towards ocean-touched eyes that spark vividly. Alive. Hers.

She’d reach the Sotally Tober only to find a cold pillow and silence, and maybe that was for the best. It proved enough to muffle her sobs long into the night.

[attr="class","dorado3"]

[attr="class","bycrane"]made by crane