Chapter Fourteen: Glassy Sky

He couldn't seem to feel his feet as he followed his brother, shoes crunching along the sandy path and eyes focused on the back of the other boy's heather hair.

His heart curled at that. Avis looked far too unnatural like that, with a figure that was automatically poised and tense and a hand gripping at his old sword while he walked. He knew his brother to be someone much more relaxed than that.

Aiden wanted to reach out and talk to him. Tell him that he didn't need to keep up the act and that everything would be OK—but he couldn't and he didn't even know if everything was going to be fine. He couldn't comfort someone with that.

Instead, he settled for following his twin back to Kalos' headquarters. One glance up at the swaying leaves in the night sky told him that it was windy out, but he wouldn't know about that.

After all, he wasn't able to feel anything much now. His senses had melted into a dull puddle of blurred feelings, and such a simple caress like the wind's touch couldn't be felt against his freezing skin.

Would he want this? The boy flitted into a slight state of panic as he reflected on the question. I mean, he never seemed to want me around. If I was alive, I would have been bothering him or something.

He then remembered that the whole issue was happening because he was dead, and that things would have stayed alright—sort of—if he'd just stayed alive.

That made his eyes sting, but he didn't cry. Being in the army made sure that he never cried easily—when someone like him saw something like death so often, it got stuck in his head. Someone who had death in his eyes wouldn't be able to cry like that.

And he was a ghost. Someone who's own emotions should have been wiped into grey along with his life.

The fact that he was dead didn't change anything about them. He was still far too naive and emotional for his own good, and he wondered if he was lucky to still have them inside a cold heart that couldn't beat any more.

Aiden jerked as he realised that his mind was drifting off, and he looked up to see that they were approaching the makeshift building where Avis had wanted to go. It wasn't fancy by any means; no one had bothered to put time into a temporary base, but he was glad for it. He wasn't sure if he could stomach seeing the place where he used to work.

A familiar man was standing at the headquarters' entrance. It took him a few moments to recognise the captain he used to work under, and that alone made him want to turn tail and run because holy shit he couldn't take everything in at once.

Just as Avis opened his mouth to speak to the older soldier, he stopped himself with a sharp intake of breath and turned around. He couldn't do it.

He forced an apology to the both of them as he took a step in the opposite direction.

§

He was almost back at Yan's shop when he noticed it.

The tip of his fingers glowed a little too much to be right. They rippled in places whenever he passed through a surface, more so than what was healthy for a ghost, and the only thing he could conclude from the dim light causing his skin to seem a bit too see-through was that—

—Lacia's spell was starting to take effect.

It didn't hurt, just as she had promised. He didn't know if it made him feel any better, but he supposed that he was relieved. This was how they'd planned everything to work out in the end—it was all up to fate in the end.

Pushing that thought outside, he sped up his pace, passing through the door to his friend's herb shop and halting when he saw the crumpled figure leaning against the counter.

For the next few seconds, Yan's hurried breaths were the only thing he could hear, and the girl didn't seem to notice him; instead, she curled into herself with a grim, shaken expression on her face, one hand making a futile attempt to steady herself and the other pressed over a bleeding eye.

"Yan?" he muttered, widening his eyes as he took in the situation before him. "What happened? Are you OK?"

There was no answer, and he supposed that his question was nothing but rhetorical. The girl wasn't fine in any way, and the terrified expression that glanced up at him from a single left eye was enough of a response for him.

"Let me see your injury," he tried to say, flinching when the teenager startled at his voice. "It's fine, Yan. I'm not going to do anything. Just let me take a look at it."

He tried to reach out and nudge her hand away from the injured spot, but his fingers brushed past her skin uselessly and fell to the ground. He'd forgotten about that inconvenience, and he'd been fine with it until now—but this was one of the rare times that it worked against him.

It took a long moment for his friend to comply, shifting her bloodied palm away so that he got a clearer look at her face.

Aiden's stomach lurched at the grotesque sight. The sclera that had once been white was now stained with a crimson that was too dark for him to make out more details, but he was certain that he'd seen a large cut that sent a shiver up his spine.

"What happened?" he whispered, hoping his tone was soft enough as he did so—and he decided that it wasn't the best question to ask. "You have to go to a doctor and get it treated, you know. This is way too serious to ignore."

Yan tried to stutter an answer, but her voice came out as a mixture of incomprehensible syllabuses that ended up breaking down altogether into a choked sob.

"I'm serious," Aiden protested, lips pressed together in worry as he glanced at her pale face. "You don't have to do anything right else now. Just please go to the doctor and have your eye looked at. It must hurt like hell."

A sigh of relief escaped his mouth as the girl stood up after a minute.

§

Aiden couldn't help but glance over his shoulder on their way back.

Yan wasn't trembling quite as much now; instead, she remained behind him with an eerily calm expression on her face, and her eyes were pointed at the greys of the tiled ground as she followed him with a listlessness that saddened him.

The bandage over her eye hid a woebegone expression, and the look in her left eye was diminished and too dull for a sixteen-year-old girl.

He hadn't even reached the herb shop, however, when she reached forward to overtake him and stare at him with an even, glassy-eyed glance. "It wasn't an accident."

His throat went dry at that. "It's fine if you don't want to talk to me about it, you know. I'm not trying to force you or anything."

"No, it's fine." Yan shook her head, slipping a hand into her pocket into retrieve her keys and jabbing the piece of metal into the doorknob with more force than necessary. "Fabio was the one who did this to me. There. I said it."

Aiden went stock-still at that, gaping at her with an open mouth until she'd closed the door behind her and he was forced to walk through the frame to see her again. "What? But isn't he missing—according to Lillian, at least?"

"I don't know," she snapped with forgivable terseness. "Why would I know? I never cared about him in the first place. The guy's always had a few screws loose, but he's always been tactical. I don't know anything."

He didn't have the heart to tell her that she looked a little insane herself. The poor girl deserved a break.

"Don't you know that I'm selfish?" She glanced up at him with a look akin to that of a small child whose favourite toy had been broken, and he jolted at the sudden change of topic. "All I care is not letting myself get hurt."

"My mother's dead. My father thinks I'm a freak. Even my best friend refuses to acknowledge that I'm normal." Her grey eyes were downcast as she continued rambling, nails digging into her skin hard enough to draw blood. "After a while, you stop caring about anyone but yourself."

His eyes darted to the side. "That's not true. I'm sure they care."

"They don't!" Yan retorted back, her tone rising to something far too similar to an anguished shout, and one look in her tear-rimmed eye was enough to let him know that her sanity was unravelling.

None of them had been stable enough to ever label themselves with that term, Yan less than others, and he cursed at himself for not realising that she'd been losing her grasp on the world ever since she'd been dragged into his mess.

"I'm sure Avis does, but that still wasn't enough for me. I'm greedy," she breathed out. "And after I found someone that accepts me for who I am, apparently that's not enough, because Arceus damned you to have that same tragic fate. I can't let anyone else go anymore."

He regarded her with a sympathetic glance, trying to think of something to say. "Don't blame yourself for that. I mean—after all you've been through—"

She shook her head to cut him off. "I'm not," she muttered, with a firmness that almost shook him. "I've long accepted that everything I did was for myself. And all I have left is you."

"Avis cares about you too," he tried to say. "Don't you know that?"

"He's too busy trying to be you," she shot back, her voice cracking in the middle of the sentence. "Don't you get it? I'm lonely. I hate being alone."

The both of them stood in silence for the next minute, wide eyes staring at each other and refusing to give in until Yan dropped contact, dashing back out of the shop without a word and slamming the door shut behind her.

"Where are you going?" he called in worry, slipping through the wooden frame one again to chase after her. It wasn't that he didn't trust the younger girl; she would have been capable of taking care of herself, but he couldn't leave her alone after what had happened.

Besides, the sinking feeling in his gut told him to keep running.

Yan was faster than he'd imagined, turning all sorts of corners in an attempt to keep him away, and he knew that part of the reason why he couldn't match her speed was because of his dulled senses, but it didn't make him feel any less frustrated.

Still, he pressed on.

§

Aiden reeled at the stench of the alleyway that he'd been pushed into.

He'd dealt with plenty of those shady places in his life. He hadn't, however, expected the pink-haired girl to know such a place, and he didn't want to even question why she had chosen to gone there.

"I can't stop you from following me," she sighed. "I don't mind. I've already admitted to you that I'm a freak and a monster, and you're still here, so...thank you."

Then, her voice hardened from its initial tremble. "I don't want either of us to get hurt any more. You weren't so close to him, right? It's fine to do this?"

His breath seemed to catch on something, and he would have gripped onto her wrist if he could, but he was a ghost that wasn't even supposed to be wandering around Earth and he could touch nothing. "Yan, what are you talking about?"

She took several steps forward, turning yet another corner and eyeing him as he did the same, and the end of the dilapidated alleyway seemed empty until he saw the blonde-haired boy lying against the bumpy surface of a brick wall.

"Fabio?" he muttered—but of course, the older boy couldn't see him at all. His gut tightened at the realisation. "Wait, Yan—"

The girl's blank frown deepened into an angry scowl, and she bent down, glaring at the taller boy's hazy-eyed gaze and shoving him harder against the wall. "What happened to you? The person I knew wouldn't have attacked me without reason."

Fabio tried to speak, trembling hands causing him to frown in confusion—the expression on his face was similar to that of a prisoner that he'd rescued once—but Yan's voice interrupted him. "I almost went blind because of you. I am almost blind because of you."

"I don't want Aiden to get hurt any more," she uttered. "I don't want to be hurt any more, but you don't seem to get that, do you?"

It was then that he noticed the knife in her hand.

"Truthfully, I don't even know what I'm doing any more," she admitted in a whisper, her grip tightening around the weapon. "All I know is that I know that this is wrong, but I don't care. This whole world is wrong in the first place."

Her breathing was laboured, and her eye was too soft and teary for the look of a murderer—it made him shiver. The years of loneliness and hurt had finally made the sweetest girl he knew crack.

Aiden had heard somewhere that the nicest people were the worst when angered. He hadn't paid much attention to that miscllaneous quote until now, but it seemed like that fact contained more truth than he would have liked.

He tried calling out to her, but his voice didn't seem to be working. Was he afraid of the simple knife in her hand or her expression?

"I'm sorry," she mumbled, taking a step closer to the shivering boy, and she closed her one visible eye as she prepared to slash her knife into Fabio's throat. "I know this isn't your fault, and it's no one's fault either, but I'm selfish. Please forgive me."

And just as she swung the knife, some instinct in him snapped.

He darted in front of the weapon before it could make contact, trying to throw his arms around her in some horrible form of an embrace, and the one thing on his mind was Arceus, please let this work.

It was the only thing he could think of, but he was a ghost and of course, he fell straight through the girl and hit the ground with a dull thud.

The wince on his face was more of a habit than anything else, and the first thought that came to him when he sat up was to glance at Yan's expression.

The teenager seemed to flinch at his action, her eyes travelling to the figure behind her, but her hand had slipped and the knife laced the boy's cheeked instead.

Her figure was tense, not moving a single inch as she stood frozen to the ground, and amidst the feelings in her eyes was a new type of confusion that shot him question after question on why he had done that.

"I know you're feeling conflicted right now," he told her, blue eyes serious and calm in comparison to her own panicked ones. "You were never really fine to begin with, and everything that happened just made it go downhill, right?"

Yan stared at him for a few long moments, her eye full of hardness and rightful bitterness.

"I could feel your warmth," she muttered in response, the weapon clattering to the ground as Fabio tried to stem the blood from his injury. "But you're a ghost. You can't touch me, so how is that possible?"

He paused, studying the shaken look in her grey eyes as he tried to form a reply. "I was just hoping to snap you out of it, so I don't really know...but it could be because you used to be a ghost. I'm not sure about that."

"It's...I haven't felt this kind of warmth in years," she acknowledged, her voice cracking on the last word. "Was it that that drove me crazy? Because I never asked for any of this. I never asked for this power."

She didn't continue; instead, her gaze was frightened and directed at the trembling boy she'd attacked, and he took it as a sign to speak again. 

"You're not crazy," he tried to say. "I don't like this world too. Arceus is unfair in his ways sometimes."

Yan dipped her head at that, taking in a deep breath to steady herself and not daring to look back. "Do you think that after all of this, everything will go back to normal? Do you think I can be the person I used to be?"

He forced a smile, but his words were as genuine as his intentions. "People change a lot," he admitted. "They change to suit the world's whims and fancies. But no matter how much you change, Yan, you're still a good person. I believe in that."

That alone made her turn around, her right eye staring at him from beyond the bandages for any trace of a lie, and the look of suspicion changed to one of disbelief when she could only find truth in his tone.

"Look, Fabio will be fine," he tried to reassure.  "It's late now, and a lot of things have happened in the past two weeks. Like you said, no one's at fault here, and both of you are going to be fine. Let's go back now, alright?"

When he didn't get a response, he let out a sigh and lowered his gaze to meet the ground beneath him.

"Yan, I don't find you a monster."

§

*finger cracks*

okay shitty ending i know i honestly didn't know how to write the last part ;;

people will probably hate yan now LOL