"Why am I still alive?"

Two days. It's been two days.

So I am nearing the beginning of it all, with such thoughts and such words on waking up. Afternoon naps are hardly my thing, but it seems I've gone ahead with the unnatural patterns.

I rub my eyes. After a groan brimming with a sickness of life, I let the encroaching darkness claim me whole. It clears my head and encircles my temples, leaving me its dusty cloak and the six strikes of a bell.

A familiar figure unveils himself as the scenery spreads its thighs, unravelling a picturesque garden where the meadows reach my knees and a variety of flowers and berries mingle. The Hypno stands between two plots, his left leg sinking into a bunch of acanthus plants, the glossy, jagged, large-leaved foliage growing in all directions, red stalks nearly covered by white leaves. The rose-purple oregano flowers cower by his other foot, their minute green leaves swaying about as if to evade capture. In place of his usual ring is a white lotus pendant which he removes from his neck and places into my palm.

He meets my curious gaze with an unquenchable fire I have never known could exist in him. "You have been progressing well."

"I haven't found a way to escape." I clench my fists and blink. "You initiated this?"

"You called for me," Hypno says and rubs his hands in glee. "You have some questions for me."

"Will you answer them?"

We stroll through the freshness, bypassing spearmint and tansies, overlooking purple Kasib Berries and golden Ginema Berries on either sides, before he swivels his head with a wrinkled nose. Our feet pause in the middle of two lanes of Persim Berries just ripe for picking.

Hypno nods. I take it as a challenge. If anything goes, then I ought to ask the question I've been meaning to all along: "Why are you stalking me?"

"So I can root for you." He glances downward and I trail his shaking vision, keen on holding him tight. "I was told to."

"Adolf instructed you," I shoot.

He attempts to block my attack, but he flinches.

I repeat myself with more gusto than before, and still he refuses to answer me, like it is a taboo subject for him. He grunts and looks the other way with a frown.

"Something else."

"Why did you put me through all this... pain?"

He squats and picks a fallen Chesto Berry. He looks at me and we move on. He's distracting me with our surroundings, deflecting the essential questions, going against our deal in a manner that seems not at all subtle.

"It's partly my fault." He swallows, and his voice roughens up a little. "I was only trying to help you."

His lack of elaboration and tendency for short answers are far more irksome than his actions.

"Did you cause those deaths too?"

He squeezes the Berry and the green juice bursts out. "No."

"How did so many of them die?"

"Suicide."

After my raised voice and his muted whisper, we return to the vein of silence we grow comfortable to. Blood flows to our ears, the heat threatening to kill me, and I glance at him from time to time. The lone rowan tree in the distance produces a melancholy stare, unafraid to yield to the changing atmosphere. It merely dances to the cold, slow gale.

Two figures in a garden, previously face to face, now back to back, standing at the edge of reason, walking the line, teetering as they try to throw off the weight on their shoulders. Two mortal creatures soak in the view, taking in the ripples on a pond by a bed of snapdragons and the fall of leaves. I don't know if he sees them too, but he has to. In this moment, this is the only thing we can share.

This goes on for a while before I turn. This stasis doesn't belong to my past so it's only rational I want to leave, especially when he has nothing more to say. One foot after the other, one ragged breath after the other, I walk toward the rowan, steeling myself for the shade I will soon be in. Whirling around on reaching my desired spot, I sigh at the Hypno who remains a statue. Behind him lies the meadows, and behind them lies levelled beds, white curtains rustling as the covers grow rustled, as if their occupants awake from troubled dreams all at once, clutching forget-me-nots that waver in their withdrawn hands. If only it were true, because the beds are empty, and there is no one else but us two.

Though, why do we meet in a garden at an asylum equally forsaken? He must have his reasons. He glances at me, a cold sweep, and saunters toward the hollowed bark of the rowan tree.

"It wasn't a mass suicide. Their deaths were eerily similar to each other, how they prepped guns and ammunition, ropes and alcohol, pills and..." Hypno punches the bark, causing a sharp vibration. "They could have lived. They never wanted to die."

"What did they want to escape from?" I ask on the other side of the tree.

"Their woes. Anything that hurts them. An obstacle, a situation, a person, a Pokémon... Most of them yielded to fear and doubt. They were equally—or not so—attached and detached from the world, from their self-image, from the images of others."

With how he hides his face, I can only imagine his pain.

"Do you think they regretted it?"

"Irreparably." Hypno coughs. "Maybe some of them didn't regret it, or chose not to. But I know those who did. I saw it in their eyes, the extinguished flame burning again when it was too late. They could have accomplished more, could have been braver, could have fought."

I close my eyes and suck a breath. "I'm sure they are already to some extent the things you think they could've been."

Attachment—the root of suffering. Perhaps it is why I feel more at ease with all my dissociation. Even then, ill detachment could be just as fatal.

"You don't understand." His shadow flips itself.

"Do you?"

Again, we are set for a collision course into disquieting quietude. Or at least, we both give off that sensation, for the time being.

The rowan may separate us, but our gazes seem to penetrate it. I could see him drowning in his vulnerabilities, and feel his eyes settle on me. We are both figuring each other out, as much as we try to comprehend ourselves.

An agonised whisper smacks the tree. Somewhere, a twig must have snapped.

"I don't know."

The picture of patients holding forget-me-nots as they loiter about an asylum etches itself in my mind. They fear oblivion, and the only one left to string them to the current reality is none other than the Hypno who now looks inward, a slumped shadow on the grass, curled into a ball.

I walk over and place a hand on his shoulder. It's always the little things: tiny gestures, minute moments.

"You aren't responsible for their deaths, you know."

Our eyes meet. He tears them away.

"But you are."

I swallow my words and raise a fist to my heart. My blurring vision cuts to the asylum, to the drooping patients with their forget-me-nots, each an image of simple, visceral beauty. Every one of them carries a differing shade of blue in their features. They have always been there, not as characters I make up in my head, but as proper human beings who chose to leave self-esteem and self-care out in the open, feuding lands. Their heavy eye bags, lifeless stares, bony frames, decidedly stoic miens...

They are all me.

To live and die over and over in their pasts—in my past—because I feared reconciliation, to go back and forth, to rewind and fast-forward and replay the moments of an act of my life... They are the reasons I am still alive. They who let everyone else trample on them by making welcome mats out of themselves, who reduce themselves into someone lesser, who refuse to face themselves, are the ones who pass the baton to me.

Because they told themselves they are unimportant in comparison to everyone else. Because they let themselves withdraw again and again after they were deposited into the world, that cauldron of suffering. Because they held back their regrets.

If I had died, who knows what will become of them? What will become of me? Will the next Yan forge forward against the necessary ghosts?

But there shouldn't be an 'if'.

I am them, and they are me. We will all awake from our troubled dreams and return to reality.

This is my promise, and I will see it fulfilled.