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A pocket-sized shadow cuts across glass skylights plastered dizzyingly high above the Aether Foundation's artificial sanctuary.
"Roo-oo-oo!"
The shadow dives out of silhouette, its egg-shaped body basking in the warmth of Alola's afternoon sunshine. A flutter of beige wings slows its descent, and tiny talons extend like wheels to stick a landing that would make any pilot this side of Mistralton green with an envy more verdant than the Rowlet's spiffy bowtie. Rowlet plucks at unblemished down underneath its rightmost wing, all the while its talons sidle along the curving length of a gnarled mangrove root. The brush of this faux swamp biome is thicker than a Tangela tangled up in migrating Brambleghasts; it's a perfect place for standoffish monsters to hide.
Lo and behold, Rowlet finds itself hanging perfectly sideways on rooted weaves that conceal the mangy hide of a curled-up Growlithe. A topographical map of bruised bite marks and blistered flesh and infected scabs are illuminated in fleeting flickers of dappled light, gaping depressions in its fur like the inhospitable sites of eradicated towns that will never recover.
Growlithe opens one weary, bloodshot eye as soon as it becomes apparent this visitor won't just fly away.
Instead, Rowlet takes this visibility as encouragement to pull its goofiest face out from the hidden depths of its down: eyes crossed, face turned parallel with the floor against the grain of its body.
"Rrrrroooooowowoo!"
A silent beat.
Then, tattered Growlithe gnashes fiery fangs at the Grass-type. It barks with the venomous ferocity of a Pokemon more than 10 times its size.
Rowlet falls off its perch with hoots of surprise and hollers of fear, and just manages to get itself airborne before tumbling into the sulfurous muck below. Growlithe tucks its head into the bent joints of its shabby forelimbs, and slowly falls back into a fitful sleep of shallow breathes and whimpering nightmares.
As Rowlet flies the coup, it passes a young man whose ill-fitting, clinical lab coat covers many of the scars strewn about his punkish black-and-red outfit. Jagged claw marks are stitched back together with fine Spinarak silk and the desperation of a child struggling to learn every skill his silver-spooned upbringing denied. His red sneakers squeak as weight shifts from foot to foot behind the oversized hem of the coat.
With one final, emphatic scratch of his pearlescent ballpoint against a clipboard, the implement an elongated balustrade that looks straight out of Page 58, Subsection Q of the Foundation's branding style guide, Gladion peers to an older woman at his side.
"Looks like Growlithe's still feeling antisocial."
The woman finishes keying a few more data points into her PDA, the oblong Rotom device twitching with each clack of her manicured, nude nails on its touchscreen.
"I'd expect her recovery to take some time, young master." Wicke looks to Gladion and bows her marshmallow puffs of purple curls, which cover her lime-green eyes behind those horn-rimmed Pecha pink glasses. "It is mating season on Akala. Salandit can be brutal when guarding their nests — especially if they're being coerced by a powerful Salazzle."
Gladion bends the clipboard to his side, arm like a teapot's handle. His pen teases at the mop of pale blond streamers hanging atop his right eye, getting it all wrapped up and then untangled over and over. The motion of his arm shifts the whole lab coat, causing that blood red gash across his hoodie to come in and out of view.
"I guess it has only been a week since we took her into our protection." The boy closes his eyes and stops messing with stiff hair long enough to press the pen's rear button against his forehead repeatedly. That satisfying click-clack emanates. "Wicke?"
Wicke's posture erects faster than a Sudowoodo in the rain, Rotom PDA nearly chucked to the floor. Her radiant smile beams as she puffs out her chest, the buxom feature wrapped in pink corduroy that strains vehemently against a single gold-buttoned white strap between her collarbones.
"Yes, Master Gladion?"
Her voice is a salve to wretched pains in the dead of night; it twinkles with pride.
"I'd like to know how our new anti-Toxic solution is coming along. The least we can do is help that Growlithe sleep comfortably tonight." Gladion nods, speech tinged with a put-on gravel that tells the world he's in 'serious' mode. "Please go check with Michelle in R&D, branch chief."
"Right away!"
The Alola branch's pride and joy bows so deep it's a wonder her glasses don't slip down Wicke's button nose and escape the gravity of her cotton candy hair. She saunters deeper into the Aether Paradise's conservation complex in search of an elevator. Wicke's stride never misses a beat, even on the awkward bend of her angelic, block-heeled mid-thigh boots.
Gladion finds himself alone. He crosses the bridge overpass and leans both hands (plus his clipboard) against its railing, two untarnished steel beams broken up by gold-trimmed obelisks, all the same white shade as his pen and his lab coat and his dinner plates and his bedroom and his most inescapable dreams, the ones set in the bowels of Aether Paradise, the room with mortuary cabinet walls and nitrogen ice block desks.
His wizened emerald eyes never leave Growlithe down below.
If they can find a way to soothe the pain of Salandit's poison… Maybe then—
"Hoooo-wah!"
The outcry breaks Gladion's concentration. Limbs stiff, Gladion slowly rises. His sneakers creak against polished tile as he twirls, view shifting from caustic swampland to the chill waters of Brooklet Hill in an instant. Crossing to the opposite railing puts him directly over that other enclosure.
He scowls at the figure floating steadily down a rivered crevasse.
"Oh. You're still here?"
Hau's gaze never breaks from the sanctuary's skylights. His bare extremities soak in the river around his standard-issue Foundation innertube [Page 17, Subsection D], wearing nothing but his sunny floral trunks. It's impressive how a body so relaxed, stretched limp like a basking Staryu, can have such a troubled face.
"Gladion?" Hau projects without any direction. "Do you miss Lillie?"
The boy spins unendingly round and round, like a record player without its stylus. It's up to Gladion to provide that input.
He takes his sweet time getting there.
"… What kind of a dumb question is that?" The older boy spits venom. His eyes roll, landing on a posse of Pikipek splashing their talons in a marbled column of a birdbath [Page 18, subsection C]. "She's my sister, Hau. I miss her more than you could begin to imagine."
This bare hint of kinship finally draws Hau's anguished, blank stare.
The native Alolan moves for the first time in who knows how long, struggling against the sterile white floatie's impressive buoyancy to sit up, legs still dangling in the water. If those Aether scientists have perfected anything, it's how to make things float. By the end of this excursion Hau is soaked through, from his matted head of mossy hair to his potbelly, packed with malasada, railing against his metabolism's drive toward a svelte, youthful figure.
"It just doesn't feel right."
Gladion's jet-black nails drum against the railing, in sharp contrast to his white knuckles. "What doesn't?"
"Lillie not… Being here."
"She left of her own volition."
"Shoots, I kno-o-ow that! That's not what I mean."
"… Then what do you mean."
"It just doesn't feel right!"
Gladion grinds his teeth. This start-and-stop conversation would be annoying enough without each statement having to be announced over a cliffside.
"Hau."
"Why's she gotta be gone for someone who wound up as rotten as Miss Lusamine?"
Gladion freezes. Images of that office seep back into the conservation area. His vocal cords pull so taut they struggle to hold words, stretching down deep to tie a knot in his stomach.
Hau continues filling the silence: "Wouldn't she rather be here with us? With Elio and Professor Kukui. Instead, she's with the person who made her so miserable. I just can't stand to think of it, eh?"
Aether's interim president closes his eyes, but that cold, clean chamber is seared into the back of his lids, brighter than the mid-day sun. He leans over the railing until steel catches the crook of his armpits, clipboard dangling on numb fingertips.
His one eye not hiding behind that emo 'do watches Hau spin round and round, constantly having to turn his head to keep the conversation going. But also, it watches a hundred overlapping nightmares, like scar tissue healing so wrong it's impossible not to notice.
"Lusamine is… Was a monster. But she wasn't always."
"Huh?"
Gladion's lips pull tight. His 'serious' gravelly voice returns, but it fails to mask the way each sentence croaks out harder than the last.
"Growing up? I can't think of any bad memories — before or after Lillie was born. Our meals weren't always prepared by maids and Aether employees back home in Unova, sometimes my mother would descale and fillet a Basculin herself. An old family recipe, she'd say, promising to teach us how it was made once we were old enough to safely hold a knife." He has no idea why he's sharing this with Hau of all people, but now that the words have started it's impossible to stem the tide. "Lillie liked the cuts she made best of anyone's. Always red-stripe, with a Sitrus vinaigrette.
"Even when we moved to Alola, took shelter in this brand spanking-new hunk of floating junk"—Gladion pounds his clipboard against the lower stretch of railing, its din breaking up his words like an air bubble embolism more dangerous than the syringe's poison—"everything was wonderful. Like a permanent vacation, y'know? If our parents were working, that just meant Lillie and I could run wild with the Pokemon. Mother wanted us to dress well in-keeping with our duties to care for the injured creatures here, but she never demanded it like Lusamine. Then our father disappeared.
"It was like a switch turned off in that woman's brain, some central repository of sense or empathy — or both. She became neglectful, always absorbed in researching Ultra Space. When she wasn't neglecting us, she was running crueler experiments in our bedrooms than those in the secret basement labs. The ends always justified the means, so long as those ends were perfection, an impossible degree of control over a life gone too haywire."
Gladion stops, bowing to his need for a raw, shuttering breath, the wheeze of a body wracked by infection. Then, he concludes:
"But I still think about that fish. Trite as it sounds, you could taste the love. The same as when she tucked us in and read us stories about cotton-tailed Buneary or Feebas with prism scales, waiting to evolve. Mother… She can't have been wholly consumed by Lusamine. I know Lillie feels the same. I hope to Arceus she's able to pull someone we recognize out of that fetid swamp."
The final syllable pops off Gladion's lips and stumbles down the chasm, hitting each wall back and forth for its entire descent. It slams the transfixed Hau like a truck, hard enough for him to break free of that corporate floatie once and for all.
He stumbles around in the knee-high water to find his footing, and then sloshes across the riverbank before embarking upon an arduous trek up the side of a steep, muddy hill. The islander slips more than a few times, coating himself in a protective armor of muck imported directly from Akala Island's Water-type bastion.
Gladion can't help but smile at the ridiculous sight, the emotion cracking through an otherwise annoyance at how cavalier Hau seems to be amid this vulnerable moment.
Once Hau reaches the apex of the plateau, he collapses beside a faux boulder with definitely-not-obvious Aether surveillance equipment sticking out of the side [Page 106, Subsection I (see prototype images in the addendum)]. A Wimpod crests from the mud nearby, wriggles its carapace free, and — true to its nature — races off to sights unseen.
This undoubtedly disappoints anyone watching the wildlife stream online.
"Hooo-wee." Hau throws his head back with a few sibilant pants. His chest steadily rises and falls as he catches his breath. It smells of almond up top. "Why don'tcha have more stairs built 'round this place?"
"We do have stairs. In the designated observation wings." Gladion drums the railing. "Most people don't get lost in the habitats and have to crawl their way out."
"Hey! I didn't get lost. Was having a float down from the lagoona."
"Right."
"And I just wanted to get up here to ya."
The blond boy watches as Hau does a sort of half-hearted breakdancing spin in an agonizing effort to sit up straight again. Hau crosses his legs so he can lean into his knees, letting them sink into the plateau's soft dirt.
"Um… Than—"
Hau seems to second-guess the statement, and immediately pivots: "You didn't have t'tell me all that, Gladion."
Gladion's expression darkens, like death pumps through his veins.
"I told you to make a point," he says, glancing off toward a group of scientists in reflective mirror masks as they rise from the nearest elevator. "Wouldn't you do anything for your family? Regardless of any spats you might've gotten into." With a pause, he reflects, "At least if you knew there was still something good there."
Hau's eyes droop to his muddy core.
"Course I would. But… Don't think I'd have to." His sheepish chuckle clearly tears open some old scars given the toxic anguish that overwhelms his happy-go-lucky expression. "Tutu's always been there. He'd take care of everything before I have a single breath on the matter!"
Gladion lifts himself off the steel rail, grinds his left molar in the same motion as he feels the silky felt of his borrowed coat.
"Big shoes to fill, huh?" He huffs a sort of laugh. "Guess it's good, though. Having someone in your life you can trust with anything."
"Sure. I guess."
Hau unconsciously frees the tie holding his hair back in a bun, letting course, wet strands fall all around his shoulders.
"You guess?"
"It's all great until, y'know… Nobody turns to you for help." The island boy meets Gladion with a grinning mask, a goofy expression that barely conceals the acid burning any features behind it. "Your cousins ask the Kahuna to move boxes. Your folks call away for a Yungoos in the brush, no matter how strong you get. Your best friend skips town without a word. Like you're not strong enough to handle the good-bye."
Their eyes meet across the chasm.
Gladion recognizes what he sees. It's the same look he found in that broken motel mirror each night, that first year away from home; an expression like that only breaks through at the point of exhaustion, after a long night training an unkempt, chimeric beast. The burden of a huge, rusted mask weighs heavy on the wearer.
Gladion recognizes the eyes of an injured animal, hiding away in the roots of a tree where you think nobody can find you.
Until they do.
And you think anything you do is poison. It will chase them away.
He takes a deep breath, imbibing the sweet smell of a babbling current.
"Hau?"
"Mm?"
"What say we go write Lillie a letter." Gladion's smile is warm, both eyes exposed as he tilts until that tuft of hair falls away. He offers a hand over the railing. "Wicke keeps a supply of malasadas in the first-floor break room, just in case you visit."
That mention of food is all it takes to snap Hau back into eager, panting attention.
"Ooo, the good stuff from Malie City?!"
"Of course."
"Yes!" Hau shoots to his feet, triumphantly raising his arms to fling specks of dirt in all directions. He rears back, getting ready to vault across and take Gladion's arm. "How can ya be in a bad mood with a tummy full'a the best stuff on Earth!"
The corner of Gladion's mouth ticks, fire seeping into his eyes. "How indeed."