Music in media: Wake Me When It's Over by The Cranberries

17 January, Monday, 4:30 p.m. | Winter

Let the world burn. Engulf it in pleasure.

Such unearned warmth in winter was the most desirable thing Rae could conjure in her mind. Blistering bitterness roused in her soul, forcing a hiss out of her.

It was a miracle she survived that mighty long fall. She didn't think her hair would catch the ledge of the window and extend till she touched ground, though the searing sandstorm blasted her sideways toward the Pokémon World Tournament building.

Now, she was in a thatched house, weighed down by a thick blanket as a tall lady with long pink hair blocking her ears sashayed toward her with a porcelain cup of jasmine tea. Rae took it with shivering fingers that wound round the hook, then cramped up. She could not hold onto the cup. She could hardly hold onto anything without the paralysing resistance coursing through her being.

"Z-Zorozoro..." She winced as she spoke the Hisuian Zorua's nickname. Having fused with the Pokémon while knocked out by the lullaby, she was glad she could feel little to no pain during the process, though it was all coming to her now in bursts and waves. She could detect his presence within her, yipping and yapping to be set free.

"Don't stress yourself," said the lady as she set the cup onto a saucer and placed it on a mahogany coffee table. "Close your eyes."

Beaming, she slid her hand over Rae's eyes, a morbid gesture reminiscent of a pastor or the like closing a corpse's eyes, but the girl could not resist the tinge of lethargy clouding her senses. Rae obeyed and fell into a lonesome void.

She fell without knowing fear. She did not scream or flail. It was an endless fall through a tornado of yellow eyes blinking and flickering like faulty torchlights in the dark, freezing light crisscrossing untamedly all about her. Rae knew those eyes.

They were Zorozoro's.

They were pleading.

"My body! My body!" he shrieked as he manifested before her in smoke.

Perhaps it was because they were both straddling at the threshold of consciousness, Rae didn't think much about her sudden ability to understand him.

"Our bodies are stuck together," she reasoned.

"No! I don't want to be a scrawny waif! It's your fault that this happened! If you never met me, then I wouldn't have to suffer! It's because of you that I'm suffering like this!"

Rae cringed at his shrill words. Zorozoro was treating it too personally and effectively shifting the blame on her. It wasn't right or fair to say the least, but she was his trainer after all. Someone had to take responsibility and if Zorozoro didn't want any part to do with this, then the only party left was herself.

"Do you want to talk about it?"

"No!" Zorozoro cried and swatted her aside. Rae ducked and glared at him. "What? Don't look at me like you pity me! I pity you! What kind of creature has such a weird physique?"

"I understand. We had to crawl when we were born."

"No! You don't understand! You think I didn't crawl when I was born? What? Are humans so special?"

"That's..."

Rae bit her tongue. What else could she say? What else could her ideals afford her in the face of such bitter malice?

But that was it, wasn't it? How she'd keep labelling him and repeating to herself how the Hisuian Zorua was full of malice and set up a self-fulfilling prophecy like this. What was it that Zoroark had said?

"Your personalities are antithetical like Yin and Yang, and you both come from a foreign land. ... But of course, we only ever live with our interpretations of things."

Do we not live with things and people then? No, of course we do! How else were all these fusion hijinks happening? Yet Rae couldn't deny how much of it was pure judgment. There's no such thing as neutrality nowadays. Everyone must take a side. Neutrality is naught but sublation and annihilation, and no one wants to be destroyed.

Then misinterpretations must have the same effect. Zorozoro was callously misinterpreting everything. That's how he's been living. What about herself?

Even if they were antithetical, this fusion was hardly a fair synthesis.

Still, when was she this philosophical? Wasn't it Icosa who kept shoving it in how sensitive and emotional she was and will be? She never pegged herself as a brooding, ruminating girl either.

"Zorzoro?"

"Shut up! It's not like talking can solve this... this!" Zorozoro scrutinised his paws and frowned. He had not claws but human hands.

Rae flinched. The Hisuian Zorua leapt about the boundless darkness, the thousand eyes opening and closing, shifting clockwise in their concentric circles.

"Is this how you've been seeing yourself? Deep down?"

Zorozoro paused in midair and darted diagonally across her face. "I'm sorry I don't possess half the wondrous imagination of a human."

Rae squirmed. "You don't have to be sorry?"

"Could you not tell I was being sarcastic? I thought you were just meek, but you're dense."

"Is there an end or am I supposed to keep falling?"

Zorozoro scowled and grabbed her shoulders. She felt his body weigh on her, her own body forced to straighten as if on a flat surface, the darkness lightly rippling beneath her skin, warm and cool at the same time.

"So long as you think you're falling, you're falling," said the Pokémon crisply.

Rae gasped and sat up. Gravity's pull no longer had any hold on her. Glancing at Zorozoro, she clutched her chest. It felt... hollow, like a Rattata was nibbling holes in her while an Ominous Wind penetrated her being. Any residue of warmth made way for the quiet cold.

"You knew this all along."

Zorozoro licked his bony fingers. "It was amusing watching you whine like a newborn cub, mroof!"

Rae bit her lip in protest but her slight gesture only provided the Pokémon another means of slighting her. The blistering dark stared back at her as the thousand eyes shut, the sound of camera flashes echoing like a tornado.

She waited.

They never opened again.

Rae barely had time to probe the stillness when a hissing smoke enveloped Zorozoro. Then it was just her and the smoke, a kind of grey will-o'-the-wisp flickering and growling as the air gradually grew humid.

"Zorozoro?"

Only radio silence.

She called out to him once more.

Still nothing.

With no sense of time or space or light  or any morsel of reality, Rae let boredom grip her. Her eyes shrunk, she collapsed into herself, folded fetus.

In the distance, or at least it sounded so, waves of smoke and haze layered each other, the sound of quiet billowing, quiet enough to hear footsteps on what must be sand falling, raining, like in an hourglass.

That was what Zorozoro's darkness sounded like. An hourglass whose sand dripped through the funnel to no end, not that it was too heavy to flip it over, but that patience was a dear and bitter companion that outstayed its welcome. And there he was, in her mind's eye, cowering at the top, waiting to slip through that funnel, to pass the time, to pass alongside time, even if it meant being drenched in pelting time.

But Rae couldn't be sure. She might just be seeing things the way any other person would see or hear things when they were half-awake, mistaking fleeting thoughts of an arbitrary nature for a glimpse of reality.

The hourglass had no walls of glass but the dark sand remained its form, sustained its flow. Rae was convinced they would materialise before her when she opened her eyes.

No, just the hush of the grey smoke, looking lonelier than it had been.

And in that instance, she understood why empathy was a sticky web, that even if one connected with another, one would have a trying time moving towards them without first caring about the struggle one had landed themselves in. So no, Rae wasn't walking on eggshells here. She was stuck in a web trying to convince another creature there was a way out before the Ariados returned, if there was an Ariados in the first place, or perhaps it was only visible to Zorozoro.

For all her efforts, for all her energy, she could only muster an "I'm sorry" before she felt she was falling again.