"Garde?"
Gardevoir came up behind Akiyama and looked at the Gengar with something close to pity.
Akiyama sighed, stepped forward, and crouched to gather the Ghost-type into his arms.
Gengar didn't fight him. He just kept crying, all the fight drained out of him.
Crack. Crack. Crack.
Glass shattering, somewhere close.
The sobbing cut off. Gengar's face went tight with panic.
Too late.
The illusion came apart all at once. The figures he couldn't quite see wavered, thinned, and dissolved into drifting blue particles.
Nanami was standing in front of Akiyama again.
Gengar looked at her, launched himself out of Akiyama's arms, and had a Shadow Ball half-formed before he glanced back—at the old Poké Ball in Akiyama's hand.
The energy went out of him.
He floated back to Akiyama's leg, dropped onto his backside, and wailed.
I'll never see them again. Never.
He'd known the whole time. The dead don't come back. He'd stood guard over that house and rebuilt that lie night after night just to keep them with him a little longer.
"Was this your doing?" Nanami's brow furrowed as she looked from Akiyama to the battered old Poké Ball.
"It's complicated. Why don't you start with what you did." Akiyama moved past her and picked up his backpack and Kadabra's Poké Ball, both of which had turned up nearby for reasons he didn't understand. Then he bent down and scooped Gengar up again.
When he heard how she'd gotten there—straight through the front and every room after it—he wiped his forehead.
"Yeah, that's the Nanami family for you."
Plenty of people in this world charged in without thinking. Nanami had somehow refined it into a technique. Given the option, she'd have opened conversations with Hyper Beam.
"Worked, didn't it? Made him cry and everything." Nanami folded her arms.
"That's not—" Akiyama started.
The Gengar in his arms cried louder.
Inteleon shot the two of them a look of genuine sympathy. Kindred spirits.
So Akiyama walked, patting the back of one very committed crybaby, and told Nanami what he'd seen inside the illusion.
....
Greenlight City.
"That aura signature is gone."
A boy stood on a rooftop, the voice of the Pokémon beside him arriving somewhere behind his ribs. It was a Greninja, the red scarf at its throat hanging like a second tongue.
"I felt it too. Want to go take a look?"
Greninja was quiet for a moment.
"Let him be taken away."
"That's what I was thinking."
"Pika-pika?"
A Pikachu hauled itself up over the lip of the roof, cap on its head, and cocked its ears at them. Then it followed their gaze out past the city, into the wild.
The sun was going down at exactly the right angle. Their shadows stretched long and overlapped.
....
"Quiet. I'm grilling." Nanami still hadn't caught up.
"So let me get this straight. You get pulled into some world Gengar built, you meet his old Trainer, and the guy just hands him off to you."
Akiyama nodded.
"Do I look stupid to you?"
Akiyama nodded again.
"Inteleon. Hyper Beam."
Me?
Again?
Inteleon sat down in the dirt, tilted his head, and pointedly tapped one foot.
Angry. Let the Trainer figure out why.
"How come you got him? Seriously, why don't I take him? I could take care of him just fine." Nanami stared at the old Poké Ball like a kid outside a candy store.
The moment she said it, Gengar—done crying now—scrambled around to hide behind Akiyama's shoulder and refused to look at her.
My life would be over.
Akiyama, meanwhile, was struck by how genuinely bizarre this species was. Gengar had no weight at all. Holding him was like holding a shadow.
He caught the look Nanami was still giving the ball and quietly clipped it to his belt.
Gengar wasn't a Psychic-type. But who was going to turn down a crybaby like this?
Besides, he'd already promised the boy's old Trainer.
He was going to show him the world outside.
The rain had stopped along with the light. A small rainbow sat on the horizon, and when Gengar looked out through the broken window, he seemed to find two familiar faces somewhere in all that color.
They weren't going any farther tonight. They'd make camp on the floor and call it good enough.
Night came.
With a new Pokémon on the team, Kadabra started experimenting with a new Energy Cube formula. After last night he had a rough feel for the process.
Before long a black cube set in the mold, and Gengar's eyes locked onto it.
Kadabra lifted it free with Confusion, gave it a once-over, and floated it toward him.
Gengar looked at the cube hovering in front of him, then looked at Akiyama.
Akiyama nodded. Gengar swallowed it whole.
The expression that spread across his face was pure contentment. His tongue lolled out without his permission.
One cube and he was full.
Kadabra noted the reaction, then filed the formula away: Ghost-type. Satiation-focused.
"That's incredible, Kadabra," Akiyama said. "It took me forever to get these right and I had the recipes in front of me. You hear it once and you've got it. You don't even need the recipe."
I don't know either. I just… pick it up. Kadabra scratched his head.
Some of the credit probably belonged to Confusion being absurdly convenient.
Something warm settled in him, unbidden.
Is this a bond?
He watched Gengar being adorable about a food cube and saw, faintly, himself—back when he'd first joined this small household.
Across the room, Nanami looked at Inteleon.
Inteleon looked back.
"You go learn that too."
Inteleon experienced the sensation of being turned to stone and then hit with a hammer until nothing was left.
He lay down flat on the floor.
I'm tired. Let it all end.
He didn't move again until Kadabra brought a blue cube to his mouth, and then he only opened it wide enough to swallow.
After dinner, Akiyama went through the backpack and frowned at the Psychic-type cubes.
Maybe three days' worth.
If they didn't reach Greenlight City inside three days, Gardevoir and Kadabra would be eating nothing. And there was no guarantee the city even stocked this grade. Kadabra couldn't produce anything at that level yet.
I can go without, Kadabra said in his head.
"Absolutely not." Akiyama didn't even think about it.
"Garde!"
Gardevoir refused just as flatly. Technically all of it was hers by rights, but she liked sharing. Eating alone while somebody watched wasn't something she could stomach.
"Garde, garde!"
So we go a few days without. It's fine.
She wasn't budging. Not on this.
Kadabra nodded, unable to name what he was feeling.
Gengar had been watching all of it from the sidelines until Akiyama reached over and hauled him in.
"That thing taste all right?"
Gengar nodded.
"When we get to Greenlight City, if they've got something better, I'll get you the better stuff."
Gengar's little hands shot out, waving frantically. No, no, don't.
"Relax." Akiyama laughed and patted his head. "We're family now."
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