Chương 63: Chapter 51

My partner was splintering. Had already splintered, without me realizing. A gem with a hundred facets shattered into a thousand pieces. Each shard was undoubtedly the gem itself, and were you to put them on a scale, it'd tell you that nothing was really different. But just because the quantity was the same, didn't mean that the quality hadn't changed. Anyone who had ever broken a glass could tell you that. I wasn't getting the impression that Mana was broken, however. Just… separated. Diffuse.

Her odd behavior throughout yesterday and this morning gained new context. Her absentmindedness wasn't just her choosing to ignore me, it was an ongoing struggle for focus that she was battling with even now. One-thousand little pieces each pulled my piscine partner off in different directions, focusing on disparate realities. However, not all of them were so diverse that they required individual attention. And I was pretty sure that this was where the key lay. One-thousand is a huge number.

One that, while comprehensible in an abstract way, is difficult to grasp on a more concrete level. Luckily, Mana didn't need to focus on one-thousand different things. Many of the shards overlapped, similar concerns and adjacent feelings rendering them conceptually close enough that with a bit of work, we could group them together. I could see them all, floating, darting too and fro, arguing and dividing and regrouping and reconciling. Except, 'see' was the wrong word.

There wasn't really anything to see, actually, no space where thousands of Manas and I truly existed. No, there was a connection, a link between us, and there were our two minds, so disparate and yet similar, trying to make sense of this experience we were sharing. Her mind and my mind couldn't comprehend it all in exactly the same way, but that didn't matter. Not really. We were together. That was what was important. I gathered a small cohort of her selves to me, holding them close to my metaphorical chest.

I took a moment to brace them, to fortify them for what was to come, and then together we dove in, to plumb the depths of her feelings. We set about, organizing, categorizing, making coherence of the chaos. First we tackled the largest faction: Concern for my well-being. Whether that meant physical, mental, or emotional, this group numbered in the hundreds, and made up the plurality, as far as I could tell. They were loud, and clamoring, and usefully, they were drawn to me.

They wanted to be near me, to check on me, to fuss and worry. It was relatively quick work to extract them from the whole, pulling the concerned shards free from the scrum and sectioning them off from the others, leaving portions of my focus behind to corral and shepherd them. Guilt formed the next-largest grouping, though it seemed to stem from two disparate sources. There was the recrimination for failing once more to keep me safe, acrid and bitter, and then there was another thing altogether.

An ugly crush of shame for not figuring out these abilities sooner, for pilfering the memories and personalities of her family to create a power that couldn't benefit them. That feeling was heavier. A weighty guilt that wanted to drag us down into the lowest depths. Alone, it would have been overwhelming. It had been overwhelming Mana, and we would have to face it yet. For now though, we could sequester it off, push it aside until we got all of my partner's other feelings under control.

With those three tackled, we had the bulk of Mana's shards compartmentalized, but there were a few other small groupings. One loud minority were the parts of her that were focused on security. These shards wanted to ignore the past and worry only about the present. They put all of their attention on making sure Mana and I and our family were safe and secure. Another was the shards that devoted themselves to getting stronger.

The motivations varied, but there were still nearly a hundred pieces we could pull together into a kind of whole, all intent on increasing Mana's personal strength. There was a small chunk, maybe a couple dozen, that felt stifled, contained. This portion wanted to express their new power, to show the world that they were no longer helpless. Rage without outlet, pain without recourse.

This small minority was also very vocal, and while it didn't worry me overmuch, the other parts of Mana's psyche seemed rather repulsed by this section, pulling further away from where we cordoned them off. And after that were the stragglers, groups of ten or less shards similar enough to cling together. Sometimes, just one single piece of a thousand.

Flights of fancy and smothered impulses and wavering minds formed this group, individual strands of thought so minute we bothered not to gather them, instead letting them flow freely between the cordons, where they drifted aimlessly, sometimes integrating themselves, sometimes fruitlessly trying to plead their aberrant cases, and sometimes pulling one or two shards away from a greater whole. From this whole shifting mass we established a sort of order.

It was shaky, and temporary, but separating the different impulses gave us enough of a buffer that we could focus on addressing the larger concerns, one at a time. My natural impulse was to take care of the least of these first, to take quick victories where we could, but I stifled that urge, directing our attention instead to the biggest group of shards.

I wasn't sure how long this uncertain equilibrium would hold, and I wanted to tackle as many of the big issues as possible in case my ability to hold my partners' focus faltered. Thankfully, the largest faction of mind-shards was rather easy to placate. We dove in amongst them, letting the concerned pieces of my partner swarm around me.

They surrounded the primary part of my mind in this liminal space we'd created, and in the real world, a similar swarm huddled around me, individuals darting close to inspect me, before pulling back, swimming away only to be replaced by another eager observer. I was hurt, I was weakened, but I was still standing, and I'd reiterate it as many times as necessary to the concerned bits of Mana's psyche.

Distantly, I heard voices, concerned words and pensive exclamations, coming not from the shared space Mana and I had created, but rather from the impersonal hospital room where we both technically still resided. Some part of me peeled off to deal with that, leaving me spread a bit thin. I tuned out the section of myself addressing whatever concerns were happening in reality to focus on what truly mattered.

Slowly but surely, as more and more elements of Mana's psyche evaluated me, the largest portion of her churning mind settled. Pieces and shards, once assuaged, were content to be pulled into the fold, and the collective accompanying me on this endeavor swelled, growing in numbers and coherence. Mana's focus sharpened, and her intent swelled as she got the largest chunk of her scattered thoughts under control. Which was good, because the next subset we'd have to face would undoubtedly be the most difficult.

Mana's guilt. Some of it was comprehensible to me. Her chagrin for being unable to keep me safe, her shame at how weak she'd been. This, at least, wasn't too hard to answer. Because I was alive. Not unharmed, but certainly better off than if she hadn't been there. Regret and recriminations were misplaced, these parts of my partner should be feeling only pride. And if I'd been trying to express that with words, I would probably have had little success, but Mana and I were connected on a level deeper than that.

The synergy stone, even shattered, even split into so many pieces, called to itself. Much like Mana, the shape of the stone had changed, but the shards remained a part of a much greater whole. And through that connection, my partner and I could speak. Again, not with words, not with intentions, but with our feelings, deep and raw and real.

Idly, one of the parts of me restraining a less volatile part of my partner's psyche wondered if, perhaps, this is how synergy stones had once been used, before the advent of AR devices. Because, if my fourth-grade history lessons were to be believed, people in Ferrum had been using synergy stones to connect with our partners for as long as we'd been recording history.

Relative to that millenium, Battle AR (and other synergy-stone powered devices) were a relatively recent invention, only gaining prominence in the last forty years or so. So how did the people of ancient Ferrum (and of just a half-century ago!) synergize with their partners? It was a question I'd never thought to ask, and one that, while interesting, wasn't something I could focus on now. I reined in that part of my mind from its idle diversion, bidding it to focus on the task at hand.

Usually I had better control of myself, and the distraction was evidence that this exercise was taxing my already strained mind. But we were making progress. Some of the guilty shards snarled away, joining the dark and bitter portion wrestling with Mana's true despair. Some shied away, sliding in amongst the drifters, and others filtered towards the group that wanted to grow in power.

But these were the minority, and the bulk of the shards feeling guilty for my condition eagerly accepted the praise, soaked in it, let it draw them up out of the murk and into the whole floating by my side. Mana's consciousness swelled even more, a school in proper now, almost half of the pieces of her scattered self pulled together into a mostly-coherent whole. But that didn't mean the bulk of our work was over. The hardest part was yet to come.

The remaining guilt-ridden shards, clumped and defensive and snarling, swarming around a hard pit of negativity that would doubtlessly tear my partner's psyche asunder once more should we not address it. We'd been putting it off, marshaling our forces by recruiting the less obstinate shards of little fish. But now our time was running thin.

I could feel strain on the edges of my consciousness, pieces of myself falling back, coming to the whole to fortify me as the mental exertions continued to drain what little energy I had. I couldn't take much more of this, which meant we had to dive into the sump now. And dive we did, the two (hundreds) of us piercing through the hard cluster of calcified guilt. The snarling shards rose up around us, and with naught but a gasp, we were engulfed. - It was here that the voices were the loudest.

I've gotten good at multi-tasking recently. Very good. I'd never really thought too hard about my limits, but for a short period, I could doubtlessly concentrate on half-a-dozen tasks at once. It came in handy when cooking food to suit eleven different palates. This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings. But all of that? No matter how thin I spread myself, it was all me. Just myself focusing on different things at the same time. And I was pretty sure the same was true for Mana.

Maybe I was just projecting my experiences, but I didn't really think that was the case. We were so connected, so interwoven, it felt impossible that I'd miss the presence of an interloper. And yet, I could tell that Mana herself didn't agree with me. She perceived these shards, these offshoots, as individuals in their own right. That was what was giving her so much trouble. She felt like each one of them deserved her attention, her focus, herself. Not realizing that they were herself.

And it'd been pulling her apart. We'd improved the situation, pulled together what coalition we could, but now we faced the worst of it. The worst of my partner. In a way, it made a lot of sense that Mana would rather consider these pieces of her psyche as something separate. Something different. It made processing the awful, cloying despair of her other selves much easier. And it was awful. A wretched, writhing sump that wanted nothing more than to color the world in its own misery. The associations were clear.

These were ghosts. Accusing phantoms born of memory, flickering skeletal shapes and silvery apparitions. And they were loud about their accusations. The chirruping cries were in no language I could understand, but the feeling they conveyed was more than clear. Why didn't you save us? You should have done more! Why were you the one who lived? It's not fair! Hundreds of clamoring calls, all with something vile to spill. Mana, the pieces of her I'd brought down here with me, recoiled from the assertions as if scalded.

She didn't want to face this, I could tell, and I could hardly blame her. The malice was palpable, even though it wasn't mainly directed at me. It came off the shards surrounding us in pulsating waves of malignant force. It was crushing, grinding, wrenching pressure, the sort you'd find deep in the earth, or at the bottom of the ocean. And into it I poured out what Mana had once offered me. Love, affirming and unrestrained and unconditional.

The bond we shared, the undeniable proof that she was my family, and I was hers. It was like a light, pointed directly at shadows. The recriminations and the guilt had no home under my gaze, saw no quarter from me. They could flee or they could accede and there would be no other choices. To my side, I could feel Mana gaping at me, but I couldn't for the life of me understand why. All I was doing was returning the favor she'd offered when I was at my lowest.

Twice she'd saved my life, given everything she had for the chance to keep me safe, how dare she be surprised when I reciprocated. Distantly, I felt small, warm droplets run down my nose towards my mouth. Tiny azure forms darted to catch the blood, swimming away with their pilfered prize, but neither the bleeding nor its consequences were of concern. All that mattered was proving to Mana, to every part and piece of her, that she mattered.

That no matter what she felt about herself, whatever lies the ghosts of her memories whispered in her ears, I loved her, and I always would. Under my searing attention, the hardened pit of malice weakened. I dug deep, and offered a deluge of gratitude, of heartfelt joy, of anything I could muster to assuage just a little bit of that guilt. The past was worth acknowledging. Family was worth remembering. But the here and now mattered too. We couldn't let what has come before weigh us down and drag us to the depths.

And Mana knew that I meant it. Meant everything. There could be no duplicity between us, not here, not now. Not connected as we were. Something had to give, and maybe some parts of me feared that it'd be me, but that tiny concern didn't come anywhere close to stopping me. And with a naught but a sigh, my optimism was vindicated. The crystallized guilt shrunk, worn down by my ministrations. Not gone, not totally, but reduced, scabbed over, like a pearl in a Cloyster.

The school surrounding us scattered, suddenly without anchor. Droves of them joined the throng already accompanying me, while others fled for the far corners of our attention, filtering in with the drifters or ingratiating themselves amongst other factions. There wasn't really anywhere to go, though. Because we'd collected enough. Enough piece of my piscine partner that she could reclaim herself. I could see it happening, before my very eyes. Literally. In the real world.

The swirling orb of azure constructs surrounding me stretched and warped, control reasserting itself over the school. The formless horde elongated, orienting their bodies all one way, following some instinctual blueprint to create a whole beyond the sum of its parts. I could feel myself rising, my body pushed up and out of the swarm, until I lay prone atop a bed of rippling bodies. The roof of the hospital room lay just above my head, and Mana's constructs had swollen to fill half the room.

A few doctors, nurses, and Pokémon, who I'd been trying vainly to placate moments ago, pushed themselves against the walls as the leviathan in their midst shook itself, azure form rippling with barely constrained power. I couldn't see the entirety of Mana's new form, but it must have been at least six meters long, and I could feel the bodies straining beneath me, packed in tight to avoid pushing against the walls.

The azure body, formed from an amalgamation of hundreds of rippling constructs, had a dark blue coloration, almost black. It looked like water dredged up from some lost oceanic abyss, and glowing red and yellow eyes flashed out of the murk in incomprehensible patterns. A dorsal fin lay along its back, and a long, lashing tail extended out to the rear, thick and powerful.

Two pectoral fins drooped beneath the body, almost touching the ground below, and though I couldn't see it from my angle, I knew the maw at the front of the leviathan must have been large enough to swallow a person whole.

"Ms. Alvida, please, get your Pokémon under control!" That was one of the doctors, frantically pushing against Mana's tail as it drew lazy circles in the air, inadvertently pinning him against the hospital bed. I didn't want to listen to that instruction, had been belaying it as much as I could, but I could feel more warm fluid running out of my nose, and I could hear security pounding down the hallway. I reached a gentle hand down, running it over Mana's head, feeling the cool, watery bodies ripple beneath me.

"You did it Mana. I never doubted you could. Not even for a second." A low groan of contentment came from my partner's enormous maw, and the resonant sound stilled everyone else in the room. All movement stopped, even outside in the hallway, from what I could hear, people and Pokémon alike stunned by the unearthly cry. I only smiled, and continued to rub her head.

"Remember this feeling, keep this locked in your head. This is what you're capable of, and don't let anyone, not even yourself, tell you otherwise. The school of constructs rippled, a wiggle of joy that sent the whole body undulating like a wave. Slowly, without even needing to be asked, Mana pulled me into her body, piscine constructs shifting aside to allow me passage, moving me through the abyssal press with only the lightest of touch.

She dropped me on my hospital bed, gentler than if I'd laid down on my own, and then she began to glow. Constructs faded away with naught but a whisper, the huge leviathan that once filled the room shrinking at a rapid pace as pieces of it flaked away, some vanishing, others collapsing to a size that was barely visible, and some of them floating into inconspicuous corners. I even caught one of them wriggling down the drain of the sink by the hospital room's entrance.

After a few seconds, nothing remained of the school but a single visible fish with a few tiny blue forms orbiting her. I'd expected Mana to look tired, exerted in some way, but if anything, she seemed energized. Her scales were practically glowing, and her eyes were bright and clear. She descended down, nestling in my lap where I could run my hand down her side, careful to avoid irritating the scaleless flesh that she was now comfortable enough to show me.

As my hand brushed across her skin, I could feel something hard and sharp, tucked into one corner of her body, halfway swallowed and resting comfortably just below her jaws. I stopped for only a moment, before continuing to run my hand down her side, while surreptitiously stowing another sharp shard of stone beneath the sheets on my bed. After a few moments, the doctors and nurses began moving again, as if they'd broken free from a trance.

A pink-haired nurse approached me, the classic Joy smile fixed on her face, and knelt next to my bed.

"That's quite the powerful partner you have there, Fe," the nurse told me, her expression locked.

"She's the best," I confirmed, not bothering to look up.

"Sorry for the trouble. We were just working through some stuff."

"Mhm," the woman acknowledged, obviously doing her best to keep her tone level.

"Would you mind recalling her for us Fe, just for a little bit, while we check you over." I'm not proud to say that I almost snapped at the woman. In my head, I knew that she was just worried about me, and about my very powerful, potentially volatile partner. But that didn't change the way being talked down to like that made me feel, and that wasn't to mention the underlying insinuation in her statement, that my partner was dangerous and uncontrolled.

I might have lashed out, had Mana not been looking up at me at the time, nodding her head in acceptance.

"Are you sure?" I asked her, looking down at my little fish.

"You should stay out if you want to."

"Washi, wash wash."

"Don't worry about them, worry about yourself. You're too selfless Mana."

"Washi. Wawawa." I sighed, but nodded in acceptance, taking the Poké Ball the nurse had offered to me and recalling my partner.

"There, everyone happy? Comfortable?" I asked the room. The nurse had the decency to look chagrined, though I saw some of the doctors' faces twist up. To their credit though, none of them said anything rude or condescending, which made me feel like a bit of a heel.

"Sorry," I mumbled to the room at large, pulling my knees up to my chest.

"That was uncalled for."

"Don't worry about it Fe," the nurse told me gently.

"Being hospitalized is a stressful time for anyone. We just want to make sure you're safe and healthy," she leaned in, dabbing at my nose with a tissue she'd procured from somewhere.

"You're bleeding." I could hear the frown in her voice, even though her face still had the same textbook smile.

"I might have exerted myself a little bit," I admitted in a quiet voice, pulling my knees in tighter.

"You're still recovering Fe. You're not doing you or your partners any favors by endangering that process."

"I know that," I acknowledged.

"This was important, I swear." The nurse held my gaze for a few moments, before levering a sigh.

"Well it was certainly dramatic. Now put your knees down dear. The doctors here are going to need to run a few tests now and they'll be easier on everyone if you're nice and tucked in." - The tests were mercifully short, just a few minutes hooked up to some machines. Apparently I'd drained my syn again, hence the nosebleed, and maybe set my recovery back a few days. I maintained that it was worth it, even and especially to my parents, once they returned. No matter how much mom guilted me about it.

They returned from their short trip with a whole assortment of things to brighten up my hospital room.

A couple of books (among them my ranger handbooks and the journals from Drake's associates), a pair of jackets in case I got cold, Mana's travel bowl, several bags of kelp (one of which got emptied into said bowl and the rest of which ended up in the nurse' office refrigerator), a charging cable for my Pokégear (along with the device itself, which had somehow survived the battle with only minor scuffs), some very lovely flowers, and a backpack bulging with something indeterminate.

That last mystery was solved when Maushold hauled the bag up onto the table set below the room's window, and pulled out a bevy of sewing supplies and nondescript fabric. A memory stirred in me, instructions to dispose of an outfit. Based on the indeterminate nature of what my newest partners were working on, they were well on their way towards fulfilling that request.

My knights started to get a little bit antsy, refilled on energy after eating lunch, so dad offered to take them down to the courtyard to work out the excess. Mom insisted on sitting by my bed, her pink hair oddly congruent with the white walls of the hospital room. Something about the combination felt natural, and I could almost see the nurse Joy who'd been treating me overlapping with mom's silhouette as she leaned forward on the stool, resting her elbows on my bed.

She still looked tired, and the little stabs of guilt that'd been welling up in me redoubled in strength.

"I'm sorry for setting my recovery back. I promise, I'll be more careful after this."

"It's not that I don't believe you mean that sweetie. You can just be so– you're so much like your father. You both get so focused on something, so intent, and everything else just falls by the wayside," she complained, her face twisted in a rictus of concern.

"Well now I can focus on recovering. Promise." I made the genies' sign, crossing my arms as I made my vow to prove that I meant it. Mom sighed, but she reciprocated, planting her hands on her hips in the acknowledging gesture.

"Just what was so important that you'd risk hurting yourself when you're already hospitalized?"

"Family, of course," I responded without a second of hesitation.

"How could I fail to do everything in my power to help when they'd do the same for me?" Some part of me noted that the sounds of gliding thread and piercing needles had stopped at my declaration, and felt three pairs of eyes bore into me. Mom opened her mouth to reply, stopped, thought for a few moments, and then sighed.

"Just– Please remember Fe, your family, all of us want, more than anything else, for you to be safe. Me, your father, your partners, your grandparents. As long as you're healthy Fe, what more could we possibly ask for?" I couldn't come up with a response that felt satisfactory before my knights trooped back into the room, accompanied by my somehow-exhausted father.