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She is a statue frozen in place as he speaks her name, afraid to turn and see the voice's owner.[break][break]

What he must think of her. What Vivienne must think of her.[break][break]

Isolde's lips press together tightly, before she forces them to crease into a smile. She lifts her head to view him at last, blue eyes meeting amber.[break][break]

How long has it been since she's seen Vi's brother? She remembers so little of those final days.[break][break]

Hands cease in their wringing, becoming pleasant and still. Her voice seeks to match that serenity.[break][break]

"Shay? I didn't know you were in Hoenn."[break][break]

She is practised at this, putting others at ease: pushing down the fluttering of her own uncertainty in order to make others comfortable.[break][break]

His probing question echoes uncomfortably, and her smile strains beneath its weight.[break][break]

"Oh. I'm... well, I'm visiting Vi."[break][break]

Is that okay? her eyes plead with him. Already she begins to raise herself from her seat, anticipating being asked to leave.

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It's awkward, returning to her place beside Vivienne. That he welcomes her presence here, despite this nagging feeling that he shouldn't.[break][break]

"I should have come sooner," she sighs out, and her head lowers along with her tenor. "But with the Barrier, and everything back home, I..."[break][break]

The thought trails off, and Vivienne's voice sneers back at her: God Issy, grow a backbone. Is that all you know how to do? Make bullshit excuses for yourself?[break][break]

What worthwhile excuse can she give? Fear, ultimately, has held her back.[break][break]

"I don't know why I didn't expect you to be here," Isolde admits at last, and this time, she's the one who feels like her words come out foolish. Her hair falls over her eyes in a curtain of white, and she doesn't brush it away. Facing him is hard enough as it is. "You always seemed so busy, I suppose? I never know what you're doing anymore."[break][break]

His compliment takes her aback. Does she look well? She doesn't feel it. She wonders if he's trying to sound kind. He's always been kind to her, at least. And to Vi.[break][break]

She steals a glance in the mirror across the room, and the woman who looks back at her is pale and wan, as if she has hidden from all sunlight for days. In a sense, she supposes she has.[break][break]

"I think they told you, didn't they? They diagnosed me with retrograde amnesia. Everything before and just after the incident is still... blank, really."[break][break]

The details blur into one another, smearing like paint. There are no shapes forming, but the emotions the colours invoke remain: guilt, shame, and a sense of ownership over the calamity that came after.[break][break]

That puzzle dizzies and disorients her the more she tries to make sense of it.[break][break]

"I've transferred to Slateport University, actually. The art program there is really nice."

It's a valiant attempt to salvage the conversation into something better. Something happier.

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Why is he apologizing? Her sky blue eyes stare up at him, her confusion suddenly exposed by the brush of a large and tattooed hand. For a moment, skin unexpectedly meets skin, and she half-expects the figure lying on that bed to waken.[break][break]

To rise up and face her, with a glare cold with betrayal.[break][break]

Don't you miss me at all, Issy? Or is this the result you wanted?[break][break]

"It's not so bad," she tries to say instead, and again her facial features manage to find the smile buried in all her turmoil. "My parents aren't very happy I'm here, but, I don't think they're usually happy with what I do, anyway?" It isn't a question, but she affects the lilt of one anyway, subconsciously seeking his approval in their absence.[break][break]

I don't want us to be strangers, he says, and she almost asks him why.[break][break]

"I don't want us to be strangers, either."[break][break]

He's so close to her now. She could touch him, if she wanted to, and for a moment that traitorous thought flashes through her mind: her hand gently alighting on his, squeezing it with comfort she's certain he needs right now as much as she does.[break][break]

Selfish, that voice hisses back at her with unspoken reprimand, and Isolde refrains.[break][break]

"We were fighting, before it happened."[break][break]

It's a blurted out confession, needless and unasked for. Guilt tumbles and churns within her -- for speaking aloud this shameful truth, for feeling it in the first place -- and she awaits his judgment.[break][break]

For not being enough. For not being someone Vivienne might want to wake up to.

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She tries, as she always does, to make sense of the fragments that led up to the accident. They are stained-glass shards of memory, rearranged and pieced together with slow care, only to result in a window that refracts uncomfortable, unfamiliar imagery back at her.[break][break]

Had she shouted back then, even? Isolde never shouts, never fights back, but she could swear that she had.[break][break]

"Mm. It's all still hazy. I think--"[break][break]

The shift in Seamus at the nurse's arrival is all too familiar. It is the same way he stiffened up when Vivienne was waiting for him in the principal's office, when Vivienne was detained in the mall department store as a girl for shoplifting, when Vivienne mouthed off one of Seamus's ex-girlfriends only for them to bite back at his sister, expecting support from him that they would not receive.[break][break]

Isolde knows all this, because she had been there, too. She'd been dragged into the chaos with Vi, who always gleefully pulled her into the whirlpool of her havoc, luring her with dreams of drowning in excess. Isolde's parents were wealthy and well-connected enough to blunt this negative influence on their daughter's life, but it spared Vivienne true ramifications just the same.[break][break]

Seamus had always loved Isolde for that, hadn't he? For protecting his sister. For understanding, in a way no one else had, how special Vi was.[break][break]

Is, comes the quick self-correction. She's still here. She's still alive.[break][break]

This time, Isolde does reach for him, placating him with a feather-light touch. Let me handle this, her eyes beg him.[break][break]

"Of course, we understand. Thank you for letting us know." She does not have Seamus's difficulty in being kind, in smoothing the hardness from her edges into something soft and easy to hold. "We can come back after, can't we? Visiting hours should still be a bit longer yet."[break][break]

Her Chatot mimics her with a bright note: "A bit longer yet, a bit longer yet."[break][break]

The nurse's stern look sweeps over them both, the man beside the white-haired woman seeming moments away from baring his fangs. Only fragile fingertips on his wrist hold him back.

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Where he is all heaviness, she is air itself -- gliding as if floating a half-step above the ground. She knows how to make herself silent, how to make herself small and unnoticed.[break][break]

He looms over her in the hallway, and Isolde feels herself swallowed in the vastness of his displeasure.[break][break]

Her Chatot dares to disturb him, perching on Seamus's shoulder with a crooning meant to soothe his agitation. Isolde would fear for its safety, were it anyone's Pokémon but her own.[break][break]

He won't hurt her, just as he won't hurt Vi. He never does. He never will.[break][break]

She knows this, a belief held deep in her bones.[break][break]

The things they say about those Hunter kids, her parents would sigh. You can do better than them. They're no-good for you.[break][break]

As if some people didn't deserve friendship, or love.[break][break]

This time, the smile she shows him peeks through a lopsided grin. "You still haven't changed," she teases.[break][break]

It is a small act of bravery, a boldness she feels she's earned with him.[break][break]

Maybe she's wrong to think so.

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Something aches in her at the sight of the delicate avian Pokémon perched in his hands: the way a rough man can be so sweetly, disarmingly gentle.[break][break]

This is what the others don't understand about Shay. All the fight in him begins and ends with what he believes is worth protecting.[break][break]

"Lucy, please," Isolde chides with a soft laugh, extending a hand for the Chatot to return to her. How magnificent creatures of flight are, she thinks to herself as the parrot alights on her knuckle, so grand and yet as light as the feathers they possess.[break][break]

Her favorite dreams are when she's flying alongside them. How freeing she imagines it must feel.[break][break]

The world seems to expand the longer they remain outside of the hospital room. When Vivienne is out of sight, her ghost cannot linger over Isolde like a penumbral shroud.[break][break]

She is allowed to daydream again. She is allowed to know laughter.[break][break]

Yet when Shay asks her to join him after the visitation, alone, there is a brief second where this rare privilege is taken from her. The guilt returns like the slam of a gavel, and once more her sky blue eyes avert themselves to stare at anything at all except the man next to her.[break][break]

You have all the privilege in the goddamn world, Issy, and yet you do nothing with it, whispers back a sly, treacherous memory. Vivienne's voice is casual in its bored, blunt nonchalance; she has never hid her thoughts from Isolde, nor has she ever tried. If I were you? Born in the life you live? I'd be the most fucking selfish person alive.[break][break]

Her Chatot sings in the silence of her indecision, giving her an excuse to hesitate. To wonder. To doubt herself, and her own intentions.[break][break]

"That would be nice," she says finally, and there is a shyness to the smile she gives him now, endearing in its awkwardness.[break][break]

"Would be nice, would be nice," Lucy the Chatot echoes.[break][break]

She smothers the part of her that knows this is betrayal, that hates herself for not fighting this harder.[break][break]

Isolde comforts herself instead with this absolution: everyone has to eat.

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