Chapter Six: A Wounded Puppet

They walked in silence for a long while.

In all honesty, they would have been back at the base—but Lillian had suggested taking the longer route back to the village, and he was too tired to argue with her. Perhaps he needed the time and space even more than she did.

He appreciated the scenery. It wasn't anything special—just overgrown trees and flowers that seemed to be dimmed through the early-morning light—but it had the right amount of detail to distract him from everything that had happened.

After all, he had always liked to observe things. The world was a tiring place, and learning to soak in every small bit of his surroundings helped him relieve his boredom from the shadows.

Learning how different people functioned was another part of it, but he preferred not to think about it.

Avis wondered if Lillian was doing it for him. It was unlike her to hide things from him like that normally; with all her sneaky ways, her candidness had been surprising to him. But this—everything—couldn't be considered normal anymore.

Hell, he was starting to ponder if everything had been "normal" in the first place.

He couldn't pinpoint what he was angry at. Was he angry at himself for not having broken out earlier? For having to rely on a technique that wasn't even his? Was he angry at Takeo for having been too obsessed with his brother? Was he mad a t Xerneas and Yveltal for everything they were doing?

It hurt to even think about it. He didn't have the strength to pay much thought to it, so he remained quiet and let his anger seep out in an undirected way.

All he knew was that he didn't want any of it anymore. Part of him almost yearned for six days to pass so that he could hurry up and die, but the other half of him was conflicted about it.

"Avis."

Lillian's voice broke the silence between them, and he pretended not to be startled. His nerves had been put on edge, after all; he was jumping at the most nonsensical things.

"Don't say anything," he muttered back, hoping that she would get the message. He didn't need any of her pity. "Just shut up."

He didn't want to admit that he wanted to tell her. He wanted to tell someone about the entire situation—how everything had been so screwed up from the beginning, how he was going to die soon enough, but he couldn't.

It was like suffocating. Avis wondered if the secrets she'd kept had felt that way to her too.

"Right." Lillian averted her glance, chewing on the inside of the lip as she continued walking. The I'm sorry about this went unsaid, but he could feel it at the tip of her throat.

The conversation dipped for all of three seconds before she spoke again, her golden eyes unreadable as she looked at him in a mixture of pity and concern.

"Don't go back to your house today," she mumbled. "Stay at an inn, or at Yan's herb shop, or—something; I don't know. I have a guest room in my house. Just...I don't think it would help anyone if you were to stay there tonight."

He could feel her voice waver for a moment, and he interrupted her before she could speak any more. "Stop saying you're sorry."

She blinked in surprise. "I'll try."

"It feels weird coming from you of all people," he huffed. "Your apologising won't help a shitty situation. Just give up already, won't you?"

"I'll stop," Lillian said carefully. "But if you're going to be angry, then be angry at the right person. You couldn't have prevented it from happening."

It was for a split-second that he let the control over his emotions slip. He turned to the younger girl and glared at her, watching as she returned the expression with a sharp look on her face and a stubborn look in her eyes.

"Cut it out with all your philosophical bullshit!" His voice dropped to a whisper. "You don't—You don't even understand what's going on, and—"

"Then why can't you tell me, you insufferable idiot?" Lillian gritted her teeth, balling one of her hands into a fist and using the other to grab on to his good shoulder. "If I don't know what happened to make you this way, how am I supposed to know what to do? If I don't know why you're being forced to act like Aiden in the first place, how am I supposed to understand? Tell me, goddamn it!"

That made him flinch. She didn't understand that he wasn't allowed to tell her, she really didn't, and he was surprised at how much it hurt.

What made him more surprised, though, was the fact that she looked close to tears.

Lillian wasn't the type of person to cry. She would express her dissatisfaction for whatever reason that would have put her in a foul mood before solving the problem with her own hands. He had started to suspect that tears were useless to her.

"I'm—" She stopped as she realised what she was going to say, and she took a deep breath to collect herself. "I'm just frustrated that you're not being honest," she muttered. "And I'm not used to not being able to fix something."

"No, I'm sorry," he muttered. "I can't tell you anything. I wish I could."

The both of them stayed silent for a while—Lillian had stopped walking, and he felt as if it was appropriate to do the same. He was, in a way, too scared to speak further; all he could do was fix his gaze on the greens of the plants beside him and wait for her to respond.

"...look at me," she decided. Her tone was quiet, but it was commanding, and it was almost exactly like how he would expect a Hoenn soldier to speak. "Just for a few seconds."

When he lifted his head to meet the girl's eyes, she let out a quiet huff, glaring at him through her bangs and folding her arms across her chest before opening her mouth to speak again.

"Do you still think that I made you join because of Aiden?" she asked, not giving away any emotion through her tone. "Do you think that you're pulling me down just because you can't fight as well as him?"

He remembered that she'd asked something similar once. She'd questioned him when they were in front of Terminus Cave, but the events that had transpired after that had made him forget about most of it. He could, however, remember how angry she'd acted at that time.

For a few moments, he wanted to lie and spout some nonsense about how she was wrong, how he'd given up on that train of thought long ago—all to shut her up so that he wouldn't have to deal with anything more. But he was sick of lying; he didn't have the strength of doing so any more, and the girl was too sharp to fall for it in the first place.

When he responded with a slight nod, there was a momentary pause and a sharp intake of breath before she stepped forward.

Avis hadn't been expecting her to slap him across the face.

"Idiot." Her face held a puzzling expression—and he wondered if it was a talent of hers to sound so calm even when she was upset. "And I thought you were the smarter of the two. Are you only intelligent when your thoughts don't twist your views?"

He held his smarting cheek, unable to reply to her cross statement, and she turned away with him with an oddly childish huff.

As he tried to open his parched lips and rush out a half-hearted apology, however, the sound of hurried footsteps on the packed earth interrupted him.

"What are you doing here, Yan?" he asked in surprise, watching as the girl grabbed on to his shoulder and continued to pant for the next few seconds. The bandage over her right eye surprised him enough to mask the pain shooting from his collarbone. "Never mind that; what happened to you?"

It was when she let out a garbled sob that he stiffened.

"I—" She took a while to continue her sentence. "I don't care about that now," she muttered, but her flat tone said otherwise. "Fabio did it to me, but that doesn't matter. I need your help with Aiden, OK? He's been acting strange."

At the mention of his friend, he glanced at Lillian, but the girl just drew her lips into a tight line and shook her head, as if she knew something he didn't.

His first instinct was to blink and shoot back a confused response. "Yan, what are you talking about? I'm Aiden. It's fine."

"Shut up!" she bit back, her voice just as cutting as the sword that hung by his side. "Stop pretending you're Aiden when I already know you're not! You only keep denying it because you never trusted me enough to believe that I could see ghosts—so I could never explain anything to you!"

The both of them reeled back as if they had been hit, with Yan scowling at him in momentary anger while he blinked back at her in shock.

"Truthfully, your facade was so damn good that you tricked me for a while," she whispered. "But after the incident in the Kalos' headquarters, I saw Aiden's ghost." Her voice was as bitter as it was soft. "I don't care if you don't believe me, but he explained some things to me."

He didn't know what to say to that. Yan was unstable, he knew that, and she had changed from the meek girl he'd once known, but he couldn't find it in himself to say it. It would be like calling himself a hypocrite; after all, it would be a lie if he said that he hadn't changed in the slightest.

"I'm not asking that you believe it now," she breathed out. "You never did in the first place. I'm asking you to help because Aiden's your brother, and like it or not, I'm not joking."

She never turned back as she continued running.

§

The only thing running through her mind was the fact that she was being stupid.

When she burst through the doors of her shop, she registered that Aiden's conditioned hadn't improved one bit since she'd left—he was still half-awake, curled up in a corner of the room and focusing glassy eyes on the ground as if it was the only thing grounding him.

For all she knew, that last thought might have been the truth.

"Are you better?" The rhetorical question felt like acid as it spilt from her lips. "Are you going to talk about what happened? Please."

Aiden glanced up for a second, dull eyes trying to focus on her, but it felt more as if he was staring at the wall behind her head instead. Whatever regality that he'd possessed in their first meeting was dissipating into an invisible puddle at his feet.

His head dipped back to its original position after a few seconds. It wasn't that he was trying to be rude; he didn't have the energy left to hold his head up for much longer, and he resumed staring at the floor as if it was the most interesting piece of art on the planet.

"Look, Aiden," she sighed, "I may be the only one to be able to see you here, but I can't read your mind. You have to tell me what's going on."

She vaguely registered the sound of Avis and Lillian entering behind her. Avis took an awkward step forward, and she observed his brother, watching as a sudden burst of energy spurred him into lifting his head in surprise.

"It looks stupid, but he's there," she whispered. "Just try to get him to talk. Think whatever you want of me, but just do it."

There was a lapse where everything was quiet for a few seconds, and she thought for a moment that her best friend—the teenager who was a brother of sorts to her—would refuse to talk and go right back out of the shop.

"This is awkward." Avis' voice was low and harsh as she'd remembered it to be, but she didn't have the strength to feel happy at hearing his old voice. "I'm not sure what to say to you."

Aiden's watery gaze darted to her for a split-second, and the most she could do was return the look with a pleading gaze of her own. It wouldn't be convincing—the expression in her right eye had hardened a lot from the weight of the world—but she was trying.

"Just, well..." He trailed off for a moment, and she noticed the downcast look in his eyes. "I never hated you, alright? And you're making Yan worry, so just speak up or something."

The silence between them was stifling. Lillian hovered just behind the two of them, unsure what to make of the situation, but the reassuring glance that she shot her quelled the panic in her mind somewhat.

It was the only time she would admit to being grateful for the older girl's confidence.

"I lied." Aiden's words were almost too soft to be heard, but the soft edge in his tone was enough to make her tense up. "I'm sorry. I have to leave you."

His quiet, miserable tone hit her almost as much as his words did.

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sorry for the crusty pov switch in the middle lol

yes yan is back woo ++ I've started editing the first few chapters but there aren't noticeable changes sighs

how do i make it more oomphy like glide sighs

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