Twenty-Three: The First Person To Think So

"I'm going ahead to investigate the matter first. You have things to take care of, right?"

He almost wished that he had followed Lillian and ditched the mission, because fighting insolent Hoenn soldiers was annoying and he didn't enjoy the small pang of guilt he had when killing others.

Avis winced as his captain told him to stay behind—and he tried to act like Aiden, shouting back that he could handle the enemies on his side—but he then realised that he was being told to take it easy because of the sling on his arm.

It wasn't broken, thank goodness, but it did have a nasty sprain and there wasn't enough time for him to get to a hospital and find one of the local Chansey for help. In all honesty, he was more annoyed than in pain, so he ignored his leader's orders and charged into the spree.

The boy was glad that Aiden's Pokemon were well-trained, with Heliolisk managing to take down most of the trainers standing in his way and Klefki using his tricks to protect them from any miscllaneous attacks.

He was stopped, however, when a hand grabbed him roughly by his bad arm—and he masked a wince, telling himself to bear the pain and whirl around to look at the figure holding on to him.

Avis expected to be killed in an instant. He didn't expect the man to lower his sword in surprise, hand lingering on his arm in doubt as he looked over the boy—and shock was as evident on his face as the fact that it was day out.

"You..." He shook his head as he stared at his form. "You're that childish Kalos soldier, aren't you? But you should be dead. I stabbed you and you couldn't have survived, so—how could you still be—"

He didn't get a chance to reply as Avis yanked his arm out of his grasp, stifling a gasp of pain as he did so, and he took advantage of his opponent's small breakdown to press his blade against the smooth, sweaty skin of his neck.

"Did you kill him?" he breathed out, and something in his eyes must have scared the soldier—he tried to back away before realising that there was no way out. "Go to hell. I'm not like him."

With that, he let the sword cut deeper.

• • •

She found herself almost choking as she saw the figure staring back at her, leaping back several inches and running a coarse hand over her eyes to make sure she hadn't become delusional from the mission she'd been dragged on.

The boy was still there. She wasn't hallucinating in the slightest.

His gaze was still fixed on her, though it wasn't one as shocked as hers, and the both of them exchanged wary looks without letting a word roll out of their mouths. It must have lasted for just a few seconds; still, she found the silence between them unsettling, and that fear turned to relief when the teenager before her was the first one to speak.

"You—you must be Yan." He stared down at his fingers with a perplexed expression on his face. "So I got sent to the herb shop..." Aiden—at least, the boy who looked like him—trailed off as he continued to stare around the place in awe. "Lacia was right after all."

"Wait," she uttered, daring to interrupt him and regretting it when his eyes landed on her. "You're supposed to be dead. So—"

He froze for a moment before replying, as if taking the time to consider her statement. "Yes," he confirmed slowly, like she'd managed to figure out something she wasn't supposed to, and that in itself was strange because she was just a simple herb-shop girl who wasn't all that smart or flashy. "I suppose I am. And I'm still dead."

"That's not the point!" she cried out, frustrated. "The point is that spirits can't come down from Heaven so early, right? If you just died, there's no way you can be here as a ghost—you just can't. From what I've heard, you need a few days at least."

"What?" He looked even more confused than he had earlier, and he stared at her like she was spouting some form of nonsense that he hadn't heard of. "I died a few days ago."

That caused her to halt, an argument dissipating at the tip of her tongue and the initial panic in her stomach starting to ache once again.

"I saw it with my own eyes," she protested, earning yet another strange look from Aiden. "You were there. In Kalos' headquarters. And the whole thing exploded after I left, so how are you here in the first place?"

His eyes widened at that. "I don't understand," he muttered. "I was killed by a Hoenn soldier less than a week ago. I didn't even go near the headquarters in that time, so how is it that I was alive during that—oh. I get it."

As she watched him with an anxious expression, he paced around the perimeter of the small room a few more times before returning to his original position across her. "According to someone from Heaven, the person you saw would have been Avis."

"Avis?" The name was a word that felt far too unfamiliar now—it hadn't been spoken in a long while, and the pang of loneliness started to return as she curled further into a corner. "Didn't he get killed when—when you did?"

"Based on my knowledge, he would have taken on my role for a reason I'm not too sure of..." He blinked once again when he realised that he was able to talk to someone as if it was a regular conversation. "Wait, can you hear or see me?"

Avis— He'd been alive this whole time. The shock took up most of her capacity to think, but some diluted form of ecstasy tingled at the back of her mind as she took in the information.

She hesitated for just a moment before nodding. He was a ghost, after all—but she knew him, and though she didn't know Aiden that well, she felt some sort inexplainable connection between them that she couldn't quite put her finger on. It wasn't love or friendship; not at all, but it was something that made her especially jumpy in his prescence.

Yan wanted to relax—and it was strange, because she felt the conflicting urges of relaxing and being disquiet tug at her, but she pushed away the peculiar feeling and spoke.

"I'm...I'm someone strange," she admitted with a grimace. "I don't know why, but I can see spirits and ghosts. It's been that way for a long time."

She waited for his answer, choosing to stare down at the ground like it was a far more interesting topic of conversation. The best response she'd ever gotten was Avis, and he'd chosen to ignore that she'd said it at all, so she expected—

"That's cool. I don't know why you look so ashamed."

The pink-haired girl raised her head to give him a surprised glance, and Aiden shrugged in response, an apologetic smile tugging the corners of his mouth upwards.

"It makes me sort of relieved too," he exhaled. "I never knew that I would have been able to have someone to talk to. I was worried that I was going to be alone when I came here."

The relief in his voice was for a reason entirely different to hers, but she managed to understand the emotion somewhat—relief, after all, didn't have many different variations, and she was just as glad as him to find someone who wasn't going to judge her for it.

"You're the first person, you know," she commented, looking up at him with a curious glance. "Everyone else either doesn't believe me or tells me that I'm abnormal because it isn't a very human thing to be able to ."

"I have to believe you," Aiden muttered, gesturing to the way his cloak fluttered and sliced straight through the walls at points. "If people think you're a freak, then I'm not exactly normal either. To spirits, you'd be known as someone amazing."

Yan lifted her head, mouth frozen in an expression that lingered between a smile and a bland line. On one hand, she was grateful—more than she could ever express in words—that someone accepted the ugliest part of her—but just seeing Aiden's face reminded her of the misfortune she'd caused and the sole reason why she had managed to evade her fate.

"Thank you, but I'm really quite selfish," she breathed, feeling her hand knocking against the wooden surface of the counter and gripping onto it like it was a lifeline.

The boy shot her a curious glance. It wasn't sympathetic, but it was a kind of sad curiosity that she appreciated. "What happened? I'm sorry if you—"

"I caused them to die," she bit back, and a voice at the back of her head whispered that he didn't have any idea of what was going on. "Lillian, Fau—Fabio and your brother. Some spirits sensed something bad and I tried to warn them, but they didn't listen, so I ran and left them behind."

It wasn't as much selfish as it was cowardly, but either of those things were just as bad as the other and there was no way to choose the lesser of two evils.

Aiden took a few moments to prepare a response. She expected to hear something harsh; she knew from countless conversations with Avis that the two of them were close, that Lillian was his girlfriend, but instead—

"Are you OK?"

His gentle voice interrupted the storm whirling through her head, and she snapped back to attention and tried to focus on the spirit again.

The former knight stared at her with a worried expression, and having his blue eyes study her face so intently was so alike Avis' own gaze that she had no choice but to back up a few more steps. "You're crying."

It was then that she realised that her cheeks were wet, stained from not just rivulets of liquid but anguish and guilt. "I'm sorry," she apologised, "but why aren't you angry? I would have thought that you cared about your friends and brother."

"I'm a ghost," he interrupted. "And I wouldn't have come here if they were dead, so I think they're still alive. Besides, I'm dead. They'll move on from my death."

She wanted to respond with something else—like bullshit, because that was easy to say and it was true; how could Avis move on from that in the first place?—but she decided that it was unwise and tried to dodge the topic instead.

"Why are you here?" Yan clung to a snippet of their conversation, hoping that it would be enough to keep it going, and Aiden seemed to start at that. "I mean, spirits stay in Heaven or Hell unless they're defined as placeless. If you're from Heaven, why did you come back?"

"It's hard to explain," the boy answered. "I have some sort of mission to carry out. For now, though, since I found you—could you do a favour for me? You don't have to accept if you want to."

The girl glared at the ground with a sullen expression, remembering how Fabio had asked her the same question and left it such that she'd had no room to consider anything, but she reminded herself that Aiden was different.

"I guess," she started, keeping her voice wary. "It depends on what you want me to do."

"If Lillian and Avis are alive, I'd like you to pass on a message for me." He took a deep breath at that. "Tell them not to go near the Terminus Cave no matter what. That's it—the only hard part would be to find them."

Yan bit her lip at that. It wasn't anything unreasonable; she appreciated that, and she would just back out if anything got nasty. It was as simple as that.

"I guess I could try," she replied. "I'll ask my father for a few days' leave and go find them. If I can't, then I'll just decline your offer. Does that sound OK to you?"

"Of course," the knight hurried out, and it was clear that he was relieved by her answer. "Thank you so much—you can leave whenever you want, and I won't mind. As payment...as a ghost, I can't offer you anything, but I do know that there's a shrine in a nearby village that's rumoured to be able to summon Dialga. If you want to know more about your abilities, you could try that."

She just gaped at him, crossing her arms and staring at him with a blank expression. "How do you even know that?" she asked, but he just laughed and shot her another of those smiles that caused her to flinch—she hated how it felt like she should be closer to the man, because she wasn't and the feeling was awkward and got in the way.

"I was a knight, remember?" He attempted something that looked like a wink. "I'm familiar with the villages in Kalos. By the way, is it alright if I stay in your shop at night?"

Yan murmured out a response, something about how it was fine and that spirits always slept in her shop anyways, and he made himself scarce after that, retreating to a corner and laying down to sleep.

She headed to bed just a few minutes later.

• • •

;w; yey I finally updated

I also finally finished planning this book I can die happy now :"))

just curious but who's your favourite character so far?? huehuehue (don't worry about bias they all get around equal amounts of fluff and shizz because stuff ^^)

(my personal favourite so far is aiden, but it may change over the course of writing this :"D)

Thank you guys so much for 1.4k reads and 209 votes!! :0 You have no idea how much this means to me <3

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