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randomwriteronline · 1 year

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@ingo-ingoing-ingone these are Words and they are For You

The thing heaved cold, sharp breaths from its jagged teeth, condensing into clouds of minuscule crystals that froze the rocks and ground of the cave it had retreat to.

Ah. No.

It was not a thing.

What a mean thing to say.

Even about the same force that had posed the very real threat of freezing his uncle and half the region.

What a mean, mean thing to say.

The Original Dragon's husk let out of its misshapen maw a raucous growl, what remained of its voice coated in disgusting, sorrowful bile, as it turned its large head slightly towards the one intruding in its squalid corner of its wallowing misery, barely perceiving him through its partial blindness and deafness. The man remained immoble, stuck in place, waiting for the horrid sound to cease before doing anything.

Kyurem quieted down, eventually, slowly; the chasm's echo hushed. Emmet swallowed air and bit the corner of his lower lip.

Should he have talked to it? Risked it?

He looked it over, up and down. It was grey. Grey and ice cold, covered in the element it was meant to master, to control, to wield; the element that most hurt its very kind, as much as Dragons and Fairies of old myths. Its arms were small, frail, held tight against its chest, its wings were torn: only their shape remained in the ice that took their place, a frigid afterimage that did not allow for flight.

He swallowed, bit his lip again, exhaled a bit too harsh and loud.

Kyurem roared, and the rocky walls shook so hard with the wave of icy wind escaping its hollow body that they seemed to be on the verge of shattering not unlike glass.

That was his fault. Should have been more careful.

He clicked his tongue softly; after a short while, he clicked it again. He repeated the sound a few more times, always with the same cadence, the same rhythm. To calm it.

When they were much younger Uncle had said that unsocialized Dragons are very much like scared humans: they are aware, somewhere deep within their subconscious, that they're at the top of the food chain, but it doesn't make them feel any safer - if anything, it scares them more.

Kyurem remained where it was, almost crushing itself against the wall as the human approached with slow steps. The repetitive sound didn't quite put it at ease yet, but it worked in keeping its aggression at bay.

He'd never seen it from so up close. He'd never seen it at all, really. Only its individual components after their mitosis, their ripping away. He wondered if it had hurt, or if it had been just like cells dividing in the placenta until twin embryos are formed - natural, painless, quiet.

He wondered how it must have been, when it was right, when it was whole: what a beautiful beast to behold, all scales and fur and vast wings and deep piercing eyes, crests flowing in the winds, tail sparking and blazing, monochromatic shades bursting with red or blue or purple or a vibrant yellow (like the sharp jewel jutting out from its ice muzzle, like its empty cataract-ridden eyes, like Uncle's eyes), the very definition of the word ignition given form and might and life. He wondered how it must have been, before turning into this freezing soulless husk of a corpse.

What a mean thing to say.

What a horrid thing to say.

It was alive. It was not a thing, an empty body, a cryogenic mummy. It was still alive.

From where he was he could not hear what should have been a massive heart beat from within its hunched skeletal chest; it exhaled low rumbling growls that casted freezing clouds near its maw, but it did not seem to inhale at all.

Emmet stopped.

What was he doing?

Just what was he doing?

What was he hoping to achieve?

What was he hoping to get from this?

Kyurem growled after the clicking did not come to signal the human's position to its weakened senses. Its short, weak arms shifted closer to its body, its mutilated tail hit the rocks it had cornered itself against in an angered sway. Its long neck lowered and a veil of frost left its head as it stared at the white blur in the damp chasm, promising a painful end between its jagged fangs.

Emmet looked at it, at those yellow eyes with no iris nor pupil, and found himself starting to cry.

He couldn't figure out why, but he was sobbing. Sobbing louder than he was used to, louder than he should have in front of a half blinded Dragon very much hostile to guests in its den. He couldn't even stop.

He sat down on the cold ground and kept crying.

What would it have been like, being part of a whole? Being part of a single thing? He'd never thought to realize that he already knew that. With time he'd forgotten he used to be a frowny kid who had to remind people he wasn't someone else. With time he'd just stuck to using the same formula out of habit to the point where it was just part of how he talked. Another quirk in a person already full of them. Another quirk between two people already full of them.

They'd called them together, every single time. To the world they were a two-headed eight-limbed beast, with four eyes and four ears and two noses and two mouths and twenty fingers. Sometimes they had thought, in their childish ignorance - more or less bitterly depending on the occasion - that it was almost no different from if they'd been conjoined, or a single anatomy with a starkly split mind. Their names melted together with the conjugation joining them. The order in which they were pronounced mattered little if nothing at all: they were dolls sewn from a single larger one, statuettes made with wax melted from one big candle.

He was one of a pair, one of a whole. His existence demanded a second body with a second label, for to be himself alone seemed almost nonsensical. There is always two heroes and one kingdom; there is always one dragon and two parts. The twin princes of Unova. Eldest and youngest. Youngest and eldest. The Original Dragon. Zekrom and Reshiram. Reshiram and Zekrom.

The Multi Line. The Double Line. The Single Line.

It's always two, one, one. One, one, two.

What was zero, then?

There was the vacancy of the throne and there was the husk of the Dragon. What was zero, then, for something as stupid as a subway?

He kept sobbing and couldn't stop.

The Pokémon was quiet before him. It merely stared thoughtlessly at the miserable lump of a man sniffling mere meters away from its body, curled upon himself, hiding in his own shoulders. What could a cadaver even think, after all?

What a mean thing to say.

It was alive still.

Stupidly, not thinking, maybe guided by something he did not want to acknowledge, Emmet scooted closer, closer, closer, until his head laid slightly against the skeletal arm. He noticed only somewhere far in the back of his mind that the Dragon had allowed him to do such an incomprehensibly foolish thing.

It was cold, of course. Cold, rough, scraping his skin. Harsh to lean on. It was terribly uncomfortable, and he could feel his forehead freezing into a horrid migraine from the chill, but he did not move. He was crying still, louder than he should have. He raised his head a little and bumped it somewhere a little less bony. He thought his tears would freeze against the icy carapace and lock him to it, like a dumb kid licking a lamppost in winter; instead, they seemed to warm it ever so slightly.

He did not realize Kyurem had sat down.

It looked away, into the nothingness, the grey walls of rock of its hiding spot away from the entire world. Emmet listened to the silence around them.

Oh.

He could hear it now.

Weak and slow, although his ear was right on the side of the vast frigid chest, but he could hear it now.

A heartbeat.

He timed it mentally.

It pulsed inside the hollowed body slowly.

So, so slowly.

"Maybe," he whispered, softly, so softly, "We should get out of here."

Kyurem rumbled, but did not growl.

They did not move; they wallowed in their shared infernal loneliness of incompletion for a little longer, sitting on the cold ground.

He wondered, when he finally stood and carefully laid his hands under its jaw as Uncle had taught them to do, to lead it slowly outside of that cave in which it desired to be left to rot, if it was allowing him to do so and following him because of some phantom of a memory. He wondered if the heroes of old had ever held in their hands its massive head back when the beast was whole and healthy, with vibrant eyes and polished scales and voluminous fur. Legends talked about how beloved by them it used to be and vice versa, to the point where it could not choose to favor one over the other; it wasn't silly to presume it must have gotten to enjoy, even briefly, the affordable luxury of affection.

He had no clue what to do once it would have been outside, honestly. He could not just catch it. He could not just let it follow him to the nearest town or city. He could not just release it in the wildnerness - not after seeing what damage it could be capable of.

Its head was heavy in his palms. It was cold, and trembled with every step. It inhaled in spurts, short quick breaths. It walked slowly, heavily, higher and higher; it walked out of the chasm.

A cloud of frost left its maw with a low growl, hitting him square in the chest and making him shiver violently.

Kyurem yanked its muzzled head away from him, stumbling back, away from the human. Its hollowed yellow eyes swayed to attempt focusing on something and seemed to fail; it gave another growl, its tone a confused mess of indiscernible emotions, and climbed back down, trudging along as it struggled to carry its own forcibly deformed shell of a body down, down, down, back into the depths of the earth, to disappear forever from the rest of the world out of spite, out of anger, out of a mourning melancholy that would have eaten it from the inside if it had still had anything left withing itself to give.

Emmet watched it without following. The stomping of its clawed feet grew weaker, weaker, weaker, like a slow waning heartbeat, until he could not hear it anymore.

It was warm outside. Just a little bit. He could feel the sun warming him on his back.

The light caught the corner of his eye and burned.

He needed to get back to the station.

It would have been a little cooler.

It would have been a little darker.

He never liked summer anyways.

He left.

#pokémon #submas emmet #kyurem #random writing #?? (gestures to this) ????? (nods) (shakes head) ?.#no idea what the hell this is or how to describe this at all #mr ingoing-ingone very kindly provided me with the prompt #which is 'emmet meets kyurem while searching and realizes how similar they are. ingo is gone any% no death'#and i got Really Into It #the words look very nice! not sure where theyre going tho #OH WAIT I SHOULD POINT OUT.#EMMET AND INGO ARE *NOT* REINCARNATIONS OF THE HEROES/PRINCES #HES JUST DRAWING PARALLELS

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