Chapter Text
He was Ingo.
And that simple statement had begun to sound less like a fact and more like an unclaimed announcement, left echoing through an empty station.
The couch welcomed him the same way a terminal did at night:
passively.
It sagged beneath his weight, indifferent to the burden that settled upon it. His spine locked into the shape of the old seat cushions, one arm perched loosely along the backrest, the other pressed against his knee. He tilted forward, forehead resting in his palm, letting the silence press in like the thick steel walls of a tunnel.
The air here was not stale. It was clean... sterile, even. Ingo liked it that way. He always had.
... Three years gone—Three years in Hisui. Time moved like a glacial freight there, groaning beneath its own age, but here it had been as swift as Magnet Train schedules. Everything continued. Everything adapted. And Emmet—Emmet adapted most of all.
It wasn’t the station he returned to. It was a world that no longer ran on the same line.
His thumb brushed across the fabric seam, counting invisible rivets like they were the bolts of a train car. One, two, three… He stopped at eight. The number lingered in his mind, just as it had earlier—tilted sideways into a soft mockery of forever. The Johtoan festival of August had passed. Now it was November.
Why November? Why the eleventh? Shouldn’t it have been nine?
The thought emerged unbidden, strange and irrelevant—and yet he let it expand, the way steam filled the tunnels:
In Sinnoh, the ninth month was considered sacred for returning spirits, for travelers whose feet were stained with the dust of distant regions. In Johto, nine was tied to endings that looped back on themselves, like a line that never truly closed. But Unova... Unova chose eleven. Eleven, because the double rails met, ran parallel, and never touched again.
...Two lines. Close, but never crossing.
Ingo pressed his palm against his knee a little harder.
Emmet had greeted him at the station on his return day with a grin that was too neat. Polished like a timetable sign. But the warmth that once filled that smile had been stripped down to bare operation. As if he were handling a stranger.
No—worse. Not a stranger. An inconvenience. A delay. An infestation that must be tolerated until the system finds a way to smooth it out.
Ingo exhaled through his nose, slow and uneven.
He hadn’t told Emmet about the nights spent wandering the fog-laden ridges of Mount Coronet, nor about the weight of a name he’d nearly forgotten, nor about the bruises left behind by a world that had no rails. He hadn’t told him anything. He couldn’t.
It wasn’t out of cruelty. It was out of... rust. Bolts too old to turn. Words that no longer fit the grooves they once slid into so easily.
Better not to say anything at all, he thought. He believed. He hymned it.
The clock ticked softly on the wall—a sleek Unovan model that glowed faint blue at the edges. Precise, always on schedule. It ticked in eleven-beat rhythms... odd. Odd it was.
His head tilted toward the empty doorway. No footsteps yet. Emmet would return soon, wearing that bright, brisk smile like a uniform. He would ask how Ingo’s day was without really wanting the answer. He would speak as if everything were the same, just slightly misaligned. A track bent—not enough to derail, just enough to make the train shudder each time it passed.
“Emmet…” he murmured, but the word never quite left his throat. It stalled there, stuck like a broken intercom.
His hands settled on his lap. His gaze fixed on the opposite wall, where an old photo frame hung slightly crooked. A shot of the two of them in their uniforms—his arm slung around his brother’s shoulder, Emmet laughing so hard that his hat nearly fell off. He looked at that photograph the way one stares down an abandoned tunnel.
There was nothing to be found at the end of it. Just echoes.
Just echoes.
...
He shifted on the couch, joints creaking like old brakes. It wasn’t the first time he had sat here waiting for a train that no longer arrived.
And it wouldn’t be the last.