For the second time since she'd attempted to leave him here, he gave her an exit.

This option, in many ways, was less palatable than the first.

The insult of blind vanity had injured her pride. The keen observation of his single eye in this moment, however, pierced through something else entirely.

Discomforting as it was, she met Fernando's scrutiny evenly, holding his narrowed gaze with a quiet, resolute defiance. Another man's reflection stared back at her as she did so, conjured by the implication that had been breathed into existence with his single, accusatory sentence.

No. He doesn't get to know that part of you.

Her hand pressed down on the tableside, as if suffocating the ring beneath its weight; with that motion, the memory shattered and vanished before she could give it life.

This time, Elisabeth mirrored Fernando's words back to him in a voice that was cool and clipped in its intonation: "Do you want me to be honest?"

Elisabeth Fiorelli had deceived FERNANDO SILPH, but she had not lied to him. Lies required upkeep and maintenance, and the longer they spun, the quicker they unraveled.

"I don't know what I think about you, either. Not really. In many ways, I don't feel I know you at all."

Most often, Elisabeth deflected away from herself, allowing others to speak in the silence she gave them. She was viciously selective in what she discussed and what she withheld of herself: for all their phone conversations, precious little had circled on the topics that one might naturally assume two individuals would talk about at length.

So when she spoke, she relied on the truths that she knew. The truths that would have led to this moment, inevitably, one way or another.

"I think you prefer knowing less of me. I think it's something we have in common."

The flat fist rested on his tableside, the glossy sheen of the card underneath shimmering as she considered her next words.

"People are inevitably disappointing. I'm no different, in that regard. I suspect you aren't, either."

Her fingers unwrapped from the ring that she'd held in her grip, rolling it leisurely in her palm before she offered him a tight, wry smile.

"But it's nice to pretend otherwise, for a little while, isn't it?"

Social ✿ Outfit ✿ FERNANDO SILPH

"Does it matter?"

His pity tasted like ash in her mouth. Her hand retreated from the tableside like a spider skittering away from the light, wrapping around her body as she turned her gaze towards the door.

Close as it was, its mercy still proved too distant to take.

"We don't talk about those things. And we're better for it."

Her emerald eyes cut back to him, something fierce in their gleam. With the motion, it was as if some barrier had shimmered into existence around her, invisible save for the way her expression turned almost blank, its emotion plunging into something cold.

"Something happened to you. It's why we're here."

Something he deserved, a voice whispered in her mind, like the hiss of a serpent.

"Am I supposed to simply keep calling you at night talking about nothing, Fernando? Is that what you want, in this moment, having been on the verge of death?"

The abandoned ring gleamed atop his little black card, its contrast stark and glittering.

"I can't give you something real. So I am choosing to be the one who disappoints you first."

Social ✿ Outfit ✿ FERNANDO SILPH

And in this, he proved how little he knew her.

Whatever hold he had on her slackened with the self-pity and loss in his words, relief visibly flooding her as her arms fell to her sides.

Her opponent in the past had been expertly acquainted with her weaknesses, exploiting them with merciless precision. Silently, she had feared that this man, too, had learned enough of who she was to be able to cut into the carcass of her dignity all the same.

Instead, FERNANDO SILPH gave her a merciful reprieve from her own vulnerability: the escape she craved.

"We can be civil about this," Elisabeth said, a calm returning to her words. "It's a small region, and you are one of its more prominent members. We're bound to see one another again."

She couldn't see the attack for what it was, which is why she read it as a surrender. The steely exterior that had manifested itself about Elisabeth lowered and faded, reverting to a professional politeness that mirrored the way they had first met one another.

"Believe me when I say there are others in Hoenn better suited to giving comfort than I."

She turned her back to him and the impenetrable gaze of his single eye, and began to make her way to the door.

Social ✿ Outfit ✿ FERNANDO SILPH

Freedom exhilarated her.

Every step towards the door Elisabeth feared some words that might pull her back. Some remark that might snag her in place, hooking her back into that room where she could feel herself so close to saying or doing something foolishly revealing.

Somehow, this time, she had escaped when she wanted to.

As Elisabeth signed out of the hospital, retrieving her Pokémon and other sensitive items from security, her hand shook with a faint tremor. One she stilled as best as she could, unable to place exactly where the nerves had arisen from.

Relief? Panic? Or perhaps reassurance that the truth she'd held as self-evident in her mind was, in fact, true:




Anonymity had emboldened her to play this silly little game. Elisabeth was nothing and no one in a world full of Avatars, cunning politicians, fierce soldiers, and brilliant scientists: just one more pretty face in a region filled with pretty faces, like one rose flourishing in a thicket of countless other blossoms.

The idea that someone like FERNANDO SILPH wanted anything more than a passing distraction from such a person was absurd.

She had been willing to be a distraction. Something without strings or attachment. Something casual, light, entertaining even: one stranger speaking with another, and taking comfort in the safety of that strangeness.

Although.

Walking into the sunlight, Elisabeth wandered idly about Lilycove's streets, unfocused in the haze of her thoughts. The tremor returned, and with it, an uncomfortable truth that she suppressed to the best of her ability:

He angered her.

That he had let her believe, for a moment, that she was more than what she had been willing to let herself be to him. That he had confused her with the intensity of his attentions, that he had dedicated his gratitude to her, and that he had dared to guilt her now in that very hospital room.

More than that, more than anything, it infuriated Elisabeth to know the truth of him was what she always feared it would be.

She resented that she had chosen him to turn to in her quiet moments of loneliness, in the darkest hours of night.

She loathed that she had ignored those warnings in herself and selfishly continued onward. If she hadn't learned what she did of him, by the grace of selling her soul to Rocket as she had, that time in the hospital room might have been spent very differently.

How nauseating was the admission of that weakness.

For a moment Elisabeth allowed herself to stew in her own indignation and self-loathing, before the thoughts were quietly filed away and pushed aside, like so many other sins and follies she failed to forgive herself for.

The composure returned, and with it, a tidy compartmentalization. She would go home and she would tend to her garden. She would lose herself in her work, as she always did, and later go to the Rocket Headquarters and continue in her newfound duties as an admin.

This was what Elisabeth told herself as she departed, at least.

Instead, in the coming hours, she would spend the rest of the day and night ransacking her home for an object she could not find: yanking out drawers, turning over bedsheets, emptying her closet, and uprooting countless flowers in her garden in the hopes of finding something she knew, she already knew with sinking dread, was elsewhere.

She'd been so careful in so many ways, and so, so breathtakingly reckless in others.

---

In a hospital room in Lilycove, sitting on a little black card, sat a forgotten little gold ring.

A Kalosian family heirloom.

A poisoner's ring.

And, perhaps most damnably and innocuously of all, a peculiar master key to a poisoner's basement.

Social ✿ Outfit ✿ FERNANDO SILPH