The Heel Pokémon caught me in a huge hug and spun me around, myself laughing and shrieking all the while. I almost dropped the exchange program paper, I was so happy to see him alright. When he set me down, we looked at each other lovingly for the longest time, but if I stared hard enough, I thought I could see redness in his loving eyes, and tears building where there usually was such determination and fire.

"Is...everything okay, Incineroar?" I asked.

He opened his mouth to answer, but before his could get a word out, my parents appeared from behind him with sad smiles. "Greetings, Primarina," my father boomed. "I'm glad you were able to make it back safely. How was the eclipse?"

"Oh, it was fine," I lied, not wanting to get into the depths of the Ultra Wormhole with my parents when I had things to talk about with my boyfriend. "But I'm exhausted. D'you mind if I just grab some sleep really fast?"

"Of course not," my mother quickly obliged. "I figured you had a long last few days. Please come in."

I smiled and nodded, and Incineroar and I entered the house together. It had used to be a Pokémon Lab, complete with an aquarium and an entire basement dedicated to humans' research of Pokémon. It also made for a great living area, though, with couches and a loft with a bed, couch, desk and window that served as my bedroom, and roomy wooden walls and flooring. I motioned for Incineroar to join me as I crossed the large living room and climbed up the ladder to my loft so we could have some privacy.

I was already on my bed by the time Incineroar jumped on the ladder, and I was already bombarding him with questions by the time his head peeked into the loft. "What are you doing here? Is everything okay? Are my parents okay with this? Why didn't you come to Hokulani with me? What's wrong?"

He looked at me for a few seconds with a dumbfounded expression, then blinked, sighed, and scrambled the rest of the way up the ladder and fell onto my couch, to the right of the bed and to the left of the window. "Well," he started with an unusually wavering voice. "I just want to begin by saying that your parents have been very...hospitable to me during the time I've been staying here, and—"

"Okay, now I know something is up," I interrupted. "My parents would never be hospitable to you." He looked pained, so I quickly added, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Keep going. I won't interrupt anymore."

Incineroar smiled sadly and continued. "Well, believe it or not, they've actually been really kind, and, uh, I really appreciate it. But, Primarina...oh, sun and moon, I have no idea how to tell you this. It's real complicated..."

"It's okay. Take your time, and I'll listen." I tried to stay calm, but the tone in his voice and the sadness in his eyes made my heart begin to race with fear. Nonetheless, I reached across my bed and put my flipper on his paw, pressed it against the worn fabric of the couch, and squeezed it reassuringly. He looked up at me, and I returned his gaze with serious eyes.

"I-I got busted, Primarina," he stammered out, voice cracking. "I let my guard down, I let the Gumshoos find me and I let them find my pack. My family. My father. They tried to wring answers out of me, and I did my best to dodge their questions, but...I just made a fool of myself. And then," His gaze moved from me to space, and he stared off into nothingness with a mix of guilt, anger and simple sadness. "then they made me watch. They made me watch as they sprayed their poison, forcefully evicted the Pokémon I loved...and severed the head of my father with their reddened fangs." I gasped as Incineroar shut his eyes, undoubtedly seeing whatever massacre that had taken place in his mind, as if it were happening right then.

"I...I'm sorry, Incineroar." What little anger or disappointment I had toward my boyfriend for not coming to Ula'ula Island with me immediately dissolved, and I ran my flipper that wasn't still firmly glued to his paw over the creases of the worn exchange paper in thought. I didn't know what to say, or what to do. So, I just sat there in silence, my eyes still on his, afraid to move. We stayed like that for a while, until the dawn gave way to a bright Melemele morning, and our faces were illuminated by the light of the sun.

Incineroar opened his eyes and looked out the window at the increasingly blue sky with a sigh, as if he was looking into the great beyond in the clouds, where the mythical Sinnohan Arceus waited, and perhaps his father, too. "I'm sorry I couldn't make it to Ula'ula Island to see the eclipse with you, Primarina," he whispered finally. "Thing is, I...I completely just forgot about it. And if I had been there with you, they wouldn't've caught me. Then none of this'd be happening, and—"

"Hey," I cut him off, squeezing his paw tighter. "None of this is your fault. I want to do everything I can to help you, but just know that it's all going to be okay. Don't beat yourself up over it. Alright?"

"Heh. If I tried to beat myself up over this, I'd be dead by the first punch." It was then that I noticed his new scars: claw marks up and down his body, slight dents where fangs had dug in, irritation on his wrists, likely from a highly-pressured Water-type attack, and countless others. I looked at him in fear, but he dismissed it. "I'll be fine, so long as I can find myself a Potion or two later." He sighed. "What do you have there?" He pointed to the paper and looked at it rather bluntly.

I jumped, remembering my plan to tell him of the document's proposal, and hastily brought the paper to my eyes. "I found this at the airport with my friends, and I thought you should know about it..." I began to read the print slowly and clearly in an attempt to calm my still-racing heart, and Incineroar got a look of suspicion that only grew with each word. His tail swung back and forth and his fur bristled, signs I knew all too well that meant he didn't like something. When I finished, he stood abruptly and paced the room with a hunter's air.

"So if that thing's official, you're saying the API is just going to invite a bunch of Pokémon no one knows about into the academy with open arms?" he growled.

"Well, it might not be like that, but—"

"The API is my refuge, Primarina! It's all I got left; the deans, the wrestling ring, you. After summer ends, it'll be my home, until we can figure something else out. And now it's to be invaded by a school...what did it say, 'not previously known of'? What if they're some super-dangerous and detrimental Pokémon? What if they're not Pokémon at all? The only safe place for me left, and look what it went and did." Incineroar grunted in frustration, his naval-area fire belt burning hotter than normal.

I let him breathe for a moment, then said softly, "You have no idea that's what it'll be like. It's only eleven Pokémon, and you probably won't even notice any difference, just like any exchange program. Don't think they're going to be these killing machines just because they might be different or unheard of. And so what if we don't know what school it is? Solgaleo and Lunala likely have it under control, and they always know exactly what they're doing." I told myself to believe in my own words, but even I was apprehensive to blindly trust the deans at that point. I mean, given the Ultra Wormhole's appearance and everything, Solgaleo and Lunala seemed a little less like all-knowing philosophers then and a bit more like crazy experimentalists. I had to calm Incineroar all the same, though, so I just tried to look confident as I stared up at him.

The Heel Pokémon breathed deeply, in and out, the rise and fall of his heavy chest slowly growing longer and calmer. He closed his eyes, ran his paws over the top of his head once, then let out a long sigh. "You're right. But what are we supposed to do now, then?" he whispered. "We know about this when probably no one else does. But the question is, should we spread the word?"

"No," I replied quickly. "I mean, rumors could start, words could slip, and imagine if one of the deans found out we knew about the exchange program! I know about it, my friends know about it, and now you do, too. But that's it. We can't risk this information falling into the vicinity of someone irresponsible."

"Your friends know?" Incineroar questioned suddenly. "Even Raichu?"

"Yes, even Raichu. But I trust her," I scoffed. "So you rub each other the wrong way. Fine. But she's still got enough sense in her to not spill the Poké Beans about anything."

"Oh, I know," my boyfriend chuckled. "Just wanted to mess with you."

He looked down at me with one of the big smiles I loved to see, though this one was still tainted by the sadness of loss and death that I couldn't imagine going through myself. Yet he still tried to smile, despite the dire news both of us had shared. He still tried to smile, though he was undoubtedly in both mental and physical pain. He tried to smile because he loved me, I knew. So I smiled back, rose from my bed, took up his paws in my flippers, and rested against his chest, where I found comfort.

"It's summer," I whispered into his ear. "And we're together. We shouldn't use our time in vain, no matter what. Let's do the best we can to make something great come out of this. All of this. Okay?"

"Yeah," Incineroar replied with a sigh that shook most of his remaining sadness back into concealment. "Okay." With that, he gently broke away from me and crossed the loft to the window, staring out at the beach and the waves and the sky. He pointed to the gently rolling water, then looked at me, and asked a question in a tone that gave me the feeling he'd been waiting to ask it since before I'd returned to Melemele: "It's a nice day out. You wanna maybe sit by the beach like we used to?"

I smiled with the sudden remembrance of simpler, less dire times. "Of course I'd like to," I agreed softly. "Let's just find a Hyper Potion or two first."

Laughing, we half-climbed, half-fell down the ladder to the loft, and landed hard on the wood floor; Incineroar first, and me to follow. He rushed to the door and waited there as I made for our Potion reservoir downstairs; ever-shrinking, as Potions were no longer in production and hadn't been for decades, but my parents still made sure to stroll out to the Hau'oli Poké Mart every so often to see what they could buy and use to restock the shelves of our collection. As I went down the stairs and grabbed a Hyper Potion by its nozzle I thanked the Sinnohan deity Arceus yet again for his creation of Pokémon specializing in healing, in case the day would come when the very last manmade Potion would be used.

When I returned to the ground floor, Incineroar still waited for me, holding the door open and all. Just seeing him cleared my mind of any negative thoughts, and I made my way toward him as fast as I could, playfully sprayed him a bit with the bottle of Potion, then flew out the door laughing before he could catch me.

"Hey!" he called. He tore after me despite his scars, and chased me all the way down to the waves, though while I went without hesitation into the beginnings of Melemele Sea, he didn't dare touch them. "Get back here with that!" I looked back and saw him out of breath on the edge of the water, though still hugely grinning. I laughed and crawled out of the sea to meet him, and with a playful roll of my eyes, I sprayed each wound until it was barely a memory.

I couldn't help but think all that time that for the first time all year, summer actually felt like, well, summer. Despite everything that happened and was happening, we still had each other, and to me, that's what made summers great. Love. It was a season of passion as much as heat and freedom; as Incineroar and I played and ate and sat together on the beach until the ends of sunset that day, that became clear to me. And when I looked at it that way, no news seemed so dire after all.