Every time its internal clock hit midnight, Emmet’s Xtransceiver received a set number of messages. It took a couple of days for him to confirm the exact pattern, but now that he had the data, it was plainly there-- like an automatic mailing system, running on a daily queue. Clearly, whatever was finally sending the messages had set parameters.

It was good information to have, but not very helpful in the larger scheme. After the third night, Emmet had realized that he couldn’t keep staying up to listen as soon as the messages came in; he didn’t know whether it would be weeks or months before they stopped, and coming into work that sleep deprived wasn’t sustainable on a long term basis.

He’d called out after the first night-- too consumed in his research to stop there-- and then passed out that next day, waking long enough to check in with the Pokemon and ensure he heard the next set of messages. He hadn’t let it persist beyond that.

He should tell their family, he knew, but didn’t know how to approach the topic. Everyone else had given up, and after the period of time he’d spent so… angry with his brother, he felt certain they thought the same of him-- that it had been a stage of grief. Would they just see this as the next step? Would they think he was bargaining, trying to find some way to make the gap in his life bearable?

Emmet had proof, though-- on his Xtransceiver and dutifully backed up onto his laptop. He’d peeked at the metadata after all, since he’d been there anyway, and discovered that he had no idea how to interpret it. They weren’t faked, though; he knew that much.

He thought he’d struck a reasonable balance: every night, he would set his device on silent so he could get a proper night’s rest, and then verify that the calls had come in as part of his morning routine. Oftentimes, he would play an older message-- one he didn’t have to scrutinize-- as he saw the Pokemon tended to and got ready for work. Hearing his brother’s voice as he prepared for the day ahead was comforting, even if it wasn’t really what he needed.

The system made another marked improvement in his current schedule: too curious to wait until his shift was over, Emmet began consistently taking his lunch break. Scrolling through the new sets of texts usually gave him a good idea what to expect for later or, failing that, was at least funny. Whether it was his Pokemon, the environment, or daily life in Hisui, there was always something to comment upon, and, in spite of his serious countenance, Ingo had always had the better sense of comedic timing between them.

The voicemails would wait until evening, once Emmet had taken care of the Pokemon for the night and had the time to afford the contents proper attention. He always kept the notebook nearby, in case there was anything that he needed to put to paper, but as they moved away from sharing a startling discovery to explaining any given day’s exploits, he found that he didn’t need to touch it for entire messages at a time.

Emmet thought he’d been doing an admirable job being normal about the situation. Aside from those first two days, he hadn’t let it derail him, and he’d worked out a system where life went on as per usual while he made incremental bits of progress. As much as he wanted to pick up the pace, he had no choice but to comply with what his Xtransceiver provided.

The messages he received didn’t make the wait any easier. Oftentimes, they were innocuous chatter while Ingo was working on something, or some form of commentary on the world around him. Hearing him speak like that, unhurried and in relatively good humor, ached in a way that Emmet struggled to articulate; he was glad for the fact that his twin wasn’t miserable, but it only underscored everything he’d been missing throughout the past two years. After some time to think on it, he tentatively settled on the word ‘bittersweet’. These particular messages existed as a reminder that, even though things weren’t as they should have been, they weren’t as bad as they could have been.

He definitely preferred those messages to the alternative. While Emmet had understood that the bratty Gligar his brother had taken as a Pokemon partner was dangerous-- having attacked him in the past and actively undermined his orders until very recently-- he didn’t realize the full extent of the peril Ingo was living through every day. Ever since his twin had moved from the tundra to literal greener pastures, Emmet had grown complacent, and that changed when a day’s messages took a tonal shift. It hadn’t been a matter of fear or homesickness, but a vocal change: a rasp of pain and a shallowness of breath, both reflected in an abnormal speech pattern.

“I’m sorry it’s taken so long to get back to you. There was an accident in the Fieldlands.” Ingo said, pausing in between the two thoughts to take a breath. It wasn’t the same as his bout with illness-- there was no wheezing, coughing or hoarseness-- but it sounded tight and measured, a far cry from the exuberant cadence he usually kept. Somewhere in the background, glass clinked together.

“The Professor’s Oshawott attempted to follow us. He caught the alpha Rapidash’s attention in the process. It’s alright. He’s safe.” He stopped there-- had to stop there-- and the omission couldn’t have been made any more obvious. The Oshawott may have gotten away unharmed, but the same couldn’t be said for the human it had been following.

Emmet had heard tell of the alpha Rapidash before; supposedly, it had a reputation in Jubilife Village for being aggressive and territorial, and was the reason people steered clear of the Horseshoe Plains. Ingo had mentioned wanting to get a better look at it one day, and then the next, declared that it had been a terrible idea. He’d had to wade waist-deep into the nearby river to keep it from catching him, and could only escape it by traveling against the current until he’d gotten far enough away. It had been funny in the moment, because he’d never had to seriously entertain what it could have done to his brother, but now…

“I’m going to catch up on filling out the Pokedex. I have the raw information. I just need to put it in order.” Ingo added, glossing right over the important part. His voice was still abnormally rigid as he lowered it to add, “It’s not as though I can do much else.”

A moment passed in relative silence; the background clinking stopped and something trilled nearby, which caused Ingo to shift, if the sound of rustling fabric was anything to judge from. For reasons yet unknown, he hissed as he moved, and while his breathing wasn’t particularly loud, it was audible as he resettled himself-- a deliberate inhalation and short, awkward exhalation.

“I wish it was better news.” He said, and it was only as he was signing off that he acknowledged the equine in the room. “But I haven’t gotten myself killed, yet. Do me a favor? Stay safe for the both of us.”

And, with that, the message ended. Emmet drew his legs up onto the couch and held them tight, resting his chin on his knee as he stared blankly at Ingo’s Klinklang. The position put pressure on his own lungs, causing a self-inflicted shortness of breath, and he actually reveled in it; it created a sensory kinship that he’d been missing, solidarity with and sympathy for what his brother was going through. The lazy spinning of Klinklang’s gears hastened as it looked back at him, confused by the sudden change in demeanor, and it zipped over, grinding at him in protest. Obediently, Emmet let go, and Klinklang pushed itself into his space to keep him from doing that again. As much as Emmet appreciated it, he wished it wasn’t there-- wished it was with its trainer instead, where it could watch out for him. He ran his hands over the smooth steel in apology for the unspoken thought, and Klinklang began to calm.

Against Emmet’s worst judgment, he allowed himself to find comfort in it, too. The pressure had been cathartic while it lasted-- the closest he could come to expressing what the previous two years had felt like-- but he couldn’t knowingly do that to himself, not when the one thing Ingo asked him was to stay safe. A small part of him wondered if that hadn’t been deliberate; Ingo had already predicted Emmet’s exact trajectory through worry and then anger, so why not this, as well?

When he was somewhat more collected, Emmet played through the rest of the evening’s messages, and Klinklang backed off to hover over the opposite side of the couch-- close, but not too close. Little by little, Emmet picked up on hints of what had happened: allusions to a topical rawst treatment, Ingo’s relief at having gotten a tetanus booster in the months prior to his disappearance, and an entire breathy conversation that he held as he clumsily tried to mend a hole in his coat. For some dragons-forsaken reason, they let him out of the infirmary after only a week, and he immediately went back to skulking about in the wilderness, citing a need to make up for lost time.

His dedication was admirable, but Emmet wished he would give any indication that he was practicing what he preached; after what seemed like an absurdly truncated recovery period, the fact that Ingo had asked him to stay safe for the both of them didn’t sit well.

The final message for the evening started slowly, a way to vent frustration over the language barrier that his twin had yet to surmount. Between that and the guest appearances from Oshawott and Gligar, Emmet had assumed it would be a quiet call as his brother gathered his thoughts and prepared for what lay ahead of him.

“I miss you so much that it feels like an open wound.” Ingo said, unknowingly echoing Emmet’s sentiments from earlier, and just like that, he was reminded that it wasn’t only him. The fact that his brother could put it into words so plainly was frustrating and a relief at the same time; it was so simple that it felt like Emmet should have found it on his own, but even though he hadn’t been able, here it was.

Being apart did feel like an open wound, a never-ending loss he couldn’t hope to stem-- like something had been punctured deep within, leaving him unable to breathe.

It felt like a slow, inevitable death.

“And I should know, shouldn’t I?”