Chapter Three: If, Somehow

It was rare for him to be up so early.

Avis never functioned well in the mornings. That was the reason why he'd always preferred to take the afternoon shifts before; his mind was always groggy and he would be even grumpier when faced with human interaction.

But his head was clear for once—something about Yveltal's visit had led to that—and it was the reason why he was up, taking a quick stroll before Lillian woke and started wondering where he went.

Besides, he was pretty sure that Lillian would figure it out. He didn't need to worry too much about that.

"I would have thought that you would try and sleep in."

Speak of the devil. He tried not to let the self-satisfied smirk show on his face, and tilted his head as he turned to the younger girl. "I just decided to take a walk when you were sleeping. You know, make the most of the fresh air and all?"

"As if." She rolled her eyes at that statement before taking a closer look at him. "Oh. Your hair—"

He blinked, not knowing how to answer her question, but his memory caught up with him and he realised that he'd dyed his hair back to its original colour that morning. "I just felt like it. Besides, we're taking a break, so..."

I'm going to die in three days and I just wanted to be myself for the rest of them.

That line went unsaid, however, and he could only manage a small, awkward smile.

It was as genuine of an expression as he could make, but somewhere deep down, he knew that he was as terrible at smiling as Lillian was.

"What if we go into town, though?" The teenager's tone was neutral, refusing to give away any hint of what she was feeling, and she raised an eyebrow at his explanation. "People think you're dead. You'll be questioned, right?"

"I'll do what you did." He gestured at the white hoodie he was wearing. "It seemed to work well enough, right?"

He didn't say anything else. He wasn't about to ruin the mood by whining—yet again—about how people wouldn't know who he was either way because he'd been keeping a low profile for the longest time.

Avis hadn't said a lot of things, and he knew that it would come back to bite him one day, but all he could do was pray that he'd be dead before the girl blamed him for not having told her anything.

"Well, I like it," Lillian hummed, running an eye over him again and flashing him the same ugly grin. "I mean, you've hardly been wearing casual clothes lately. I'd kind of forgotten how you'd looked like before all this happened."

Her voice grew quiet at the last part. It was obvious that she was still trying to be cautious, and it made his lip curl—he wasn't someone who needed soft, tender words to comfort him. He needed sense to be goddamn slapped into him because according to her, he was an idiot.

"I also didn't know you owned a white hoodie," she continued. "You seemed to be like one of those wannabe emo kids, you know; the ones who wear black all the time and—"

"Arceus, no." He let out a groan. "I'm not one of them."

"Alright, alright. I was just checking." Lillian let out a small laugh as she prodded at his bad shoulder, frowning a little when he winced. "You know, you should probably put that in a sling or something."

He yawned. "My home doesn't have one, and I'm too lazy to visit a doctor."

"Whatever. I'm not helping you if anything screws up," she shot back, crossing her arms and gesturing to turn back down the path. "So what do you want to do today? We're officially on break until I decide to continue."

"But we're made up of two members," he pointed out. "We weren't even an official group or anything."

The girl smirked back at him. "Why is there even a definition for a group? Any few people can be a group as long as they think they're one. It's all in the mindset."

"I give up on you," he muttered. "Anyway, if we're going to go somewhere, how about Terminus Cave?"

Of course, he was being sarcastic—and he knew that Lillian would be able to tell—but the girl still tensed up at the name. He was a little confused at that; she wasn't the type to be traumatised by her injury, so what was up with her?

"I don't want to be frozen again if Kyurem is still there," she retorted. "That wasn't a pleasant experience. We can, however, go to the nearby hill. Have a picnic or something. Go wild."

At the word picnic, her eyes gained the faintest hint of an excited glint, and it made him wonder if she'd never had a picnic before. She probably didn't; after all, she wouldn't have been allowed to have one if she'd been in the military, and that made him feel a bit of pity for her.

"You know what?" he sighed. "Let's have that damn picnic. We can go back and get some food and have the shittiest picnic ever if you want."

Lillian blinked. "Are you making fun of me?"

"No, I'm suggesting that we have a picnic," he retorted. "The most cliché, boring-ass picnic we can get. Let's go at noon."

There was a moment of silence before she laughed—clear and innocent and without any trace of sarcasm for once—and even though her smile hadn't changed much, it was more genuine than before and it made him relax a little.

"Alright," she managed to get out. "We'll do it."

The tension was still there, hidden under layers of lighthearted conversation, but at least now, it was covered up well enough and he could forget about it until the time came.

It was fine.

§

"I can't believe we're doing this," Lillian admitted, laying out the picnic mat on the grass and throwing the basket over it with little care. "You're eighteen. I'm seventeen. We—We're having a picnic in the middle of the day."

"Be honest," Avis uttered back, watching as the girl fumbled with a knife. "You like it. Besides, if you had a picnic by yourself, you'd be lost. You're terrible with things like this, aren't you?"

She scowled in response, trying to find a way to spread peanut butter on her slice of bread, but she failed miserably and somehow managed to get it on her fingers instead. "I'm a daughter of a respected military general. I can't believe that preparing food will be the death of me."

"You do suck," he admitted, raising an eyebrow as he took the knife from her. "I don't know how someone can even screw up spreading peanut butter."

"Hey, I've never had to cook a meal for myself," she argued, accepting the bread from Avis and taking a bite of it as she spoke. "It's a given thing. Anyway, you're around to make sure I don't mess up too much, right? It shouldn't be too much of a problem."

He resisted the urge to throw a sandwich at her, but he wasn't about to waste good food—food that he had spent time on because as smart as she was, Lillian had almost burnt her house down trying to cook—and he bit into it instead.

"I'm not at your beck and call," he mumbled. "I only helped because dying in a fire you caused isn't exactly a very good way to die."

"Let's not talk about that," she suggested. "Let's talk about, say, how good these sandwiches are."

Avis forced a laugh. "You have a butler and stuff, you know. You don't have to flatter me into making food for you. I was meaning to talk to you about, well, the things we've been doing. Did you manage to find anything out at the base?"

Lillian frowned at that. "We agreed that we were taking a break."

"You told me that I got to call the shots," he reasoned. "I'm talking about this based on what I'm interested in, alright?"

There was a moment of silence—and he worried that he'd broken the good mood—before the girl laughed again, smaller and quieter this time, and a rather awkward grin split upon her face.

"I can't believe it!" she whispered to herself, and he blinked at her in confusion. Her golden eyes were dizzy with liquid excitement, and they were almost drunken in her moment of ecstasy. "You seemed to never care about the group until now!"

"Yeah, that's great," he deadpanned. "So are you going to tell me?"

She finished up her sandwich and reached for one of the fancy fruits she'd brought from her house. "Zygarde was the one living in Terminus Cave. He's been the one causing the attacks all this time. I still don't know why, though."

He made a noncommittal noise in response. It made him think of the little things he'd noticed; how Aiden had told him once that he'd talked to Zygarde and he'd told him to shut up, and how Yan had explained things as best as she could the previous morning.

So I shouldn't have told him to shut up, Avis sighed, and he regretted asking about it. He wasn't in the mood to eat anything more.

"Hey, are you OK?" Lillian raised an eyebrow, her hand halfway to her mouth. "Shit, are you crying?"

"What?" It wasn't a good comeback, but he hadn't realised that he was crying. His first instinct was to let out a short string of curses in his mind because how was he going to explain it? "Uh—well, shit, just ignore it. I'm fine."

The girl gave him an unreadable glance. She'd have to be confused; hell, so was he, and he wouldn't be able to tell her the reason behind his tears.

Avis wanted to laugh. He'd been so happy all day; at least, he'd been happier than he'd been in his life, so why was he crying?

I'll miss all of this.

Shit.

"We're not done with the food," he muttered, wiping his tears with the fabric of his jacket, and he hoped that his voice was loud enough to drown his thoughts out.

§

In the end, Avis had spoiled the mood.

Neither of them minded. Lillian had been quiet for the rest of their meal, finishing up the last of the sandwiches with a mumbled thank you for the food, and she'd suggested that they head back to her house for the rest of the day.

He'd felt kind of bad—he didn't even know what had happened, after all, and the illusion that he'd be able to live out the rest of his short life with a sense of normalcy had been shattered.

Why does this feel kind of familiar? He questioned himself as he buried his face in a pillow, wondering for a moment if it would be easier to suffocate to death before his time was up.

Right. He'd done the exact same thing before—he'd done it over and over again, whenever he was sick of someone's bullshit or when Aiden was trying to talk to him. It had gotten him out of conversation's well enough, but now, it seemed that—

—he was just trying to run away from his problems again.

"Why did I have to cry, goddamit?" he murmured, and he would have cried a second time if he didn't have enough self-restraint. "If I hadn't, everything would have been alright."

It was already night. After he'd slept, there would be two more days before everything was over.

"I came to check on you for a bit. You don't look that great."

Lillian stood at the entrance of the guest room as he rolled into a sitting position, watching as she observed him with narrowed eyes before walking over.

"It's nothing," he defended, shifting a little and letting her sit next to him. "I was just thinking of things and I got upset for a while. I'm sorry it happened."

"I was thinking that you weren't that much of an idiot," the black-haired girl replied dryly, glaring at him with a tired face, "but normally, people don't apologise for crying. I may have overestimated you just a little bit."

He let out a sigh, turning his head so that his eyes could catch the starless night behind him. "It's late, isn't it?"

"You're not tired," Lillian observed. "Neither am I."

The two of them remained in thoughtful silence for the next minute or so; he continued to bask in the pitch darkness that lingered outside the room, and Lillian stared ahead as if she found the eggshell-white layer of paint on the wall interesting.

She was the first one to break the quiet between them.

"Hey." Her voice was barely above a whisper, but it was still firm, and it made him snap to attention. The oil lamp he'd set up wasn't enough to keep her golden eyes from glinting in the dimness. "Is it alright if I try something?"

Lillian never waited for a response—and just as he asked, she moved an inch closer and pressed her lips to his.

The action only lasted for a second. She seemed to notice how he tensed up against her, full of bewilderment and shock and utter questioning, and she pulled away before anything else could even happen.

She looked down in slight embarrassment, as if her actions had just dawned on her, and he could do nothing but stare at her in the moments that passed.

"What was that?" he blurted out, the darkness doing nothing to hide the growing blush on his cheeks.

Lillian fixed her gaze on the floor. "How do I phrase this? I've always kept an eye on you—even before everything happened with Hoenn and everything—and my father asked me when we met if I liked you romantically. I wasn't sure, so..."

To her credit, she sounded a little guilty, and when she didn't respond, he decided to pause the growing awkwardness before it spiralled out of control.

"So?" he asked, not knowing what to say. The girl offered him a sheepish glance. "Did you figure anything out?"

"I don't know," she confessed. "In the end, I think labelling something romantic or platonic is a waste of time. Why does everything have to have a name and a meaning to it? Can't a relationship just be a relationship?"

Avis would speak, but she'd already drawn her next breath, and he decided to hold his words for a little longer.

"I used to admire you for having such an ordinary life," she muttered. "I've always done everything in a different way, and you just...existed. After everything that happened, I don't think I'll admire you anymore, but I do care for you. I'd like us to remain like this even when everything's over."

A bitter retort jumped to his lips—when everything's over? Are you trying to make a joke?—but he could only remain silent as she waited for him to answer.

"Avis?" she prodded, and goddamn Arceus, she sounded worried and the way she'd put her point across had been so calm—

"I care about you too. In the same way, I think." At least, the first part was the truth. "It's late, Lillian. I think we should go to sleep."

§

is it canon? is it not canon?? even the author doesn't know lmao there's a reason why i'm not entering this in romance

everyone should be as chill as lillian tbh

to be honest i'm like the least qualified person ever on romance??? sure i ship lots of stuff but irl i think i'm probably aroace or demisexual so :///

ANYWAY yes we're nearing the end which means that 1) it's a month until the last chapter is published and 2) I can edit soon!! bless lmao maybe I can get to all the parts people hated and 3) I can get around to continuing GLIDE because I actually like the plot of that book more~

//irrelevant but at least this story isn't going to have any more let's go homes because I used up my quota of them in WIND lmfao

Thank you guys so much for 6.7K reads and 1K votes!! :0 You have no idea how much this means to me <3 (THANK YOU GUYS SO MUCH FOR 1K I LOVE YOU ALL OKAY BLESS YALL HAVE A WONDERFUL LIFE)

As always, votes, comments and critiques are very appreciated °˖✧◝(⁰▿⁰)◜✧˖°