Thunk. The dull noise of me hitting my head against the bedpost again.

Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.

The only one who's still paying attention is Rune, who flinches visibly every time I hit the bedpost. I want the pain to stop, to get the images out of my mind.

Everytime I try to empty my mind and sleep I see Juliet's forlorn face, staring at the friend she'll never see again, looking for the childlike joy of a companion she's already lost to death.

I wonder if Bronze cried.

Of course he did.

Did he get over it?

Of course not.

Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.

It wears into my brain, even though time seems to stretch out forever, soon Rune stops flinching and bit by bit the thunks become less constant, until I'm just sobbing into my pillow. Then the tears stop, and I'm just sitting in the dark bed, alone. That's when I hear it. Tapping.

I look up, flustered, and see the clock. Somehow I've managed to whittle away three hours, as it's well past midnight. There's the tapping noise again, louder and much faster.

"Ugh." I croak, my eyes covered in drying tears, my voice hoarse, I'm all too hot and my head hurts.

I get out of bed, look around the room, and then the tapping noise continues, now even faster. I hear choking sobs, similar to my own.

Someone is crying.

I think about turning on the light to see who it is, but then I realize my whole team is asleep and waking them up at midnight is similar to asking someone to run me over with a car. Probably a bad idea.

I ask cautiously, "W-w-who are you? Why are you crying?"

The crying stops. My bleary eyes focus and I see a dull light coming from under the bed.

I pull away the flaps under the bed, to see Juliet, ears back, typing on my Pokedex.

"I stole it." she admits.

"Why?"

"I'm deleting my PikaPad account." she says gloomily.

I look at the screen, the little Pikachus on the sides smiling and doodling in notepads. I've never seen it, but the layout and the text tells me it's a quaint little writing site. Juliet has no less than 300 followers, and an account started almost a year before I met her.

"Why would you delete that? People obviously love your writing."

"I don't need it anymore." she insists, but I pull it away from her before she can click the button.

Going back to her homepage, I see story after story. Most are fanfictions of various shows, and I recognize the little angel with black wings that Dill obsessed over and kept looking up when Khrys wasn't playing Rare Candy Crush.

The story that has the most reads, however, is the one at the top. It reads simply "Journey of Hope". The picture is a well-done image of a trainer with golden hair and bright blue eyes flecked with gold. Her team is eerily familiar- with a jolt of shock, I realize that it's my own team. Rune's caricatured face stares back at me, Pich spread out behind him like an angel in her own right. Geyser stands on the far left with a berry lazily tossed in the air, and Chrona, looking sulky, stands on the far right, her stone necklace gleaming against her chest.

In the middle are Juliet and Shin. He's laughing and she's striking a heroic pose.

It takes only moments to register that she drew it herself. Without thumbs, this must've taken hours, if not more. I only wonder when she had the time. I gingerly look through the story, my eyes welling with new tears as I read the whole journey from her perspective. The last chapter reads 'Loss-draft'. She must not have published this yet.

"Words. I love words more than anything else in the word. They're the basis of everything, so large and so small in essence. You can use them to make people laugh, to make people cry, for just about anything.

There are so many I love. Forlorn. Melancholy. Dazzling. Fantastical. Crestfallen. Serendipity. Beautiful words, large and small. These are the words that are so rarely used, but when you see them instead of 'lol' or 'ok', you want to put them in your pockets and take them with you. Maybe you can use them on your own time, to spread those words back into the world.

The best and the worst words are the kind that make you feel things. They're the words that sting like cold snowflakes and melt into your very being, making you shudder...

The words I found today were the worst kind. So small, but so meaningful. They're the kind you can't take back.

They were spoken by a friend, laying on his deathbed. My best friend.

'Sing to me...'"

Juliet waits for a while, and I put the Pokedex down on the bed, shuddering.

"You... don't like it, do you? I've been keeping a journal. Just in case I don't make it, someone will always know who I was." she says, "But it doesn't matter now. There will be no one to read it when I'm gone. The people... in there. They understand me, but I'll never see them or talk to them."

"Well, I know this is irresponsible, but if we're still here next year and you get enough followers, we can go to KalosCon and-"

"You- you don't get it! They don't know I'm a Pokemon!" She sobs. "M-my whole life... I was really little when I was thrown out of my family. I used to wander cities and look inside and see all the people watching shows and I thought I could be like them... I wandered campsites and stole people's Pokedexes. I've built this whole lie around me and told all these people that I was like them... it's all just a lie. I'm just a Pokemon. All I am is an animal and I'm going to die, feral or not..."

I hold her tight. "Don't worry. It'll be okay. I lived, didn't I?"

I sleep for her, not having the heart to tell her that I didn't.