[attr="class","thadmain"]The first thing Kepler did when he got back to their flat was download all of his METENO data. There was a loooooot of footage from the six cameras on his person, though the last few minutes of everything was rimed in frost and most of the stuff from his palm-cams was just… meteor.

But it was better to have more data than to have less data so once everything was on his PC and backed up to three different flashdrives and a DVD he headed for the bathroom to defrost with a hot shower.

Their space felt too large and empty without Ash, even with the multitudinous pieces of computer technology and science shit crammed into the second bedroom to make his office. He’d just turned the hot water on when his phone pinged. He grabbed it off the bathroom counter and--

--immediately started to cry.

Oh, he felt awful. Here he was focusing on work and himself while Ash was in the fucking hospital. Add to that the layers of exhaustion, latent guilt at getting Ruby Garcia ’s Houndour perma-frozen, and generally failing to do anything productive during his entire time on the meteor, and it made for a very messy break.

He abandoned his shower and barely remembered to turn the water off before cramming himself in warm clothes (Kyruem’s bullshit was still affecting the region) and hopping on Ahamkara for a speedy Gyarados trip to the hospital… though he had to ditch her at the city’s edge and take a Teleport or else she would literally have tried to destroy everything.

He had to use Divinity’s hypnosis to put the nurse orderly to sleep and snoop around in her computer to find what room Ash was in (he wasn’t family). He left her slumbering peaceably and continued on to Ash’s sickbay, coming through the door into the night-darkened room.

Seeing what condition his boyfriend was in caused him to break down crying again as he all-but-threw himself on the bed, trying to avoid the places that looked the most hurt.

“I’m s-so happy you’re alive, I’m sorry it t-took me so long to get here, I b-brought chocolate.”

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[attr="class","thadmain"]“Y--yeah,” he says, half a slur and half a sniff, realizing belatedly that Ash is hurt and maybe he shouldn’t be climbing all over him, “wh-what the fuck is up with that?” It wasn’t a question that Ashley could answer-- neither could Kepler, frankly, which was a startling thing in and of itself.

“What the fuck are our lives?”

It was the same thing he’d asked Ruby Garcia on the meteor.

“S-Sorry, I-- I don’t want to hurt you.” He gently disintangled himself from Ash, pushing up on the mattress to right himself back on his own two feet, but then Ash swooped in with a hug of his own, pulling him down again, and he just went, boots and coat and sweaters and snow-strewn jeans and all, damp and cold and serpentining into Ash’s bodyheat like the little missile that he was.

“You c-could have died,” Kepler says-- as though Ashley needs reminding-- and he’s crying again. “You c-could have died and I f-fucking went to space to do f-fuck all.” How immaterial it seemed-- the impossibility of space travel and METENO Deoxys and Kyurem and Hoopa-- in the light of this newfound feeling. “I l-love you too but you could have died.”

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[attr="class","thadmain"]Kepler doesn’t say anything, just buries his face and tries to get himself under control. He’s not sobbing anymore but there are definitely still tears pouring down his face, wetting Ash’s shirt when he nods.

He peeks up, and Ash is smiling. Despite everything, Ash is smiling. And it makes Kepler feel a little bit better about… about all of it.

“Do you… do you want to talk about it or… not yet?” he asked, reaching up to push black strands of hair out of Ash’s face. He wasn’t a psychologist but he knew that traumatic things like this sometimes took time to worm themselves to the service-- to fester, to abscess.

“I’m crazy about you, too. Oh!” He rolled over into the tiny bit of space between Ash’s body and the bed railing-- he fit because he was like, six inches wide-- and took the box of chocolates that Divinity had been holding aloft for this entire time. The little Ralts’ arms sagged. “I got you these. Um. Do you want anything else? Food? Real food?”

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[attr="class","thadmain"]“Hey,” Kepler coos, face falling; he drops the chocolates on Ash’s chest and reaches for his face, one hand cupping around his cheek. He pushes up with one elbow until he’s more full-on laying over Ash’s chest, concerned.

Divinity pulls himself up on the bed with a quiet hup, sitting close to Ash’s knee.

Kepler quiets and listens as Ash recounts what had happened at Mt. Pyre. One hand goes to gently brush Ash’s arm, an unbidden, unchoreographed motion, as though to prove to them both that it’s still present and attached.

“...Penelope Livy?” Kepler asks, stuttering a bit? “Like… Councilwoman PENELOPE LIVY ?” Oh, fuck. That had… implications. Hopefully no one had recognized Ash or else…

Kepler pushes himself up more, one hand braced on the opposite side of Ash’s chest.

“What… what the fuck are you talking about?” he asks, finding his volume and his incredulous, skeptical passion. He looks at his boyfriend in frank disbelief. “‘You got off too easy’? Ashley, you were lucky to get out of there with your life.” No, no, absolutely not. He was not going to stand for any of this self-patronizing bullshit. There was no logic in that, no equation that added up to Ash got off too easy.

All of the extra stuff-- Palkia, Father Winter, all that other bullcrap-- fell aside. He reached up with his free hand and scooped it behind his boyfriend’s head, cupping the back of his skull and lifting, pulling it forward. Gone is the weepy little boy caught in the fleeting notion of life, though his cheeks are still tear-stained and his eyes are still red.

“You don’t get to sit here and claim you got off easy or you didn’t do enough because-- you fucking didn’t, and you did. Now you focus on getting better. Got it?”

He is pointedly ignoring the bit where Ashley said your actions on the meteor saved Hoenn or whatever because Kepler hadn’t done jack all fuck shit on that cursed space-rock, but that wasn’t the focus of the moment.

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[attr="class","thadmain"]Kepler leans into the touch, sealing their foreheads together, absorbing in the warmth and the smell and the feel of Ash.

“You made a mistake,” he says, letting the hand cradling Ash’s neck relax to card through his hair, drawing swirls on the back of his skull with his fingertips, “you were in a stressful situation and you made a mistake. You can’t undo it. All you can do is move forward.”

Higher mathematics didn’t deal with negatives except in the form of indicating decimal places. In the sciences, absolute 0 was still just zero. There was no going below zero.

He cleared his throat.

“When you hit your lowest point you are open to the greatest change,” he said, liking how it sounded rolling off his tongue, so much so that he smiled a little. You almost couldn't tell he stole that from Avatar.

“Good. I wouldn’t let you leave, anyway. I’d break the laws of physics to drag you back kicking and screaming if I had to.”

He kissed the bridge of his nose, turning back onto his side.

“I love you. Now you gotta focus on getting better and getting out of here.”

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