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Growing up, there was nothing Arven hated more than hearing about how much his mother loved him from other people.
When someone called the house or lab, looking for her and getting him instead. The visitation days and events when parents were allowed to come to the academy, and she never bothered. All the times adults found him alone, where is your mother and I’m sure she’s just busy and I’m sure she loves you very much, the fact she loved her work more always going unsaid as if no one thought Arven had any clue and they weren’t going be the one to break it to him.
Even as he got older, all those adults kept saying the same things. Pitying him, making excuses for it all. The only time Arven ever seemed to stop hearing it was when he stopped going to school.
Arven supposes, only realizing it now in the elevator going down, that maybe he got used to making excuses of his own too.
It’s easy to forget how beautiful it is down here. As a child he always pictured Area Zero as cold and dark, damp and cramped like the tide caves hidden in the bluffs of Cabo Poco, the sort that drowned the things trapped within them come high tide. He’s still astonished beholding that Swanna-dive spiral of earth and rock down into the depths of Paldea, the way the very air of Area Zero shimmered in the light and felt like holding shards of ice in his lungs. The biodiversity too, a strange collection of creatures both of this world and not, drawn here by the light and strange energies. It is a startling place to exist. And markedly easier to appreciate when nothing is actively hunting you down.
However, much to current Arven’s chagrin, those cold, dark places did still exist. They only required a little more effort and a lot more running away from things to get to.
The automatic doors shut quietly behind them as Arven and Mabosstiff cross over into the central room of the research base, followed by a whoosh of air and the soft clunk of the lock being re-engaged, for all the good it would do. The shrieks of the Scream Tails outside still echo in the ruptured steel of the building, sounds of creatures larger, heavier, older a distant thrum from deeper within the cave, so present Arven half expects to see something reflected in the looming crystals as he steps deeper into the room.
He’d been thankful to discover the Pokeball Lock System still up and operational- it would have been painfully (not to mention lame) anticlimactic if he’d made a big deal about coming back only to be kicked out at Zero Gate- but is surprised the system doesn’t seem to have anything to say. The PLS only offers a rapid beep in greeting, and Arven isn’t sure if it's better or worse to know there was no backup now that the Sada AI was gone.
As it is, research station four remains as welcoming as it had the last time Arven saw it. Cluttered and shattered and condemned by the Great Crater of Paldea at large, dim emergency lights reflecting off the rictus prismatic growths spearing the room the last vestige of humanity’s grip on this place.
Mabosstiff sniffs the air, brow furrowed and uneasy. Arven looks around, regretting every decision he's made in his entire life.
"I know you're used to doing everything on your own," Florian had said kindly, patiently, to Arven in his dorm when he’d told him what he planned to do, "But you don't have to do this by yourself. Not if you don't want to."
All things considered, it hadn’t been the outright ‘Do not, under any circumstances, do that please,’ he’d been expecting. Not even Director Clavell had tried to dissuade him from coming, just said he should pack appropriately and perhaps take a buddy. It was honestly kinda scary how all gung-ho they’d all been for Arven’s Bad Idea: the Trip. He wasn’t gonna be talked out of it but he had at least expected some resistance for resistance's sake.
In truth, it sort of pissed him off. All that patience, that support, that kindness, the problem with it all was that Arven already knew he didn’t have to go it alone. He knew two whole champion-ranked trainers and an actual genius for starters, and he felt fairly secure that any of them would have come in a heartbeat if only he asked. And he really, really shouldn’t have felt as irritated as he had when Florian told him all that but Arven has spent the better part of his life being told things people didn’t think he already knew and that anger is easy to roll himself in, to use as a life vest when sadness threatens to sink him.
Because Arven did have to do this alone. He wanted to, he needed to. He needed to put his mother to rest on his own terms, since she never allowed him to do that. Even at the end, the AI with his mother’s face and his mother’s voice and his mother’s brain telling him how much Sada loved him, because she would’ve known better than anyone; and then throwing herself through a hole ripped in space/time before he could respond to stop the Paradise Protection Protocol because his mother truly thought every part of this horrible, horrible operation through.
Arven takes a deep breath, clapping his hands to his cheeks. The sting snaps him back to focus.
He knows he’s stalling. But he can’t do it yet. There’s still so much about his mother he doesn’t understand. This may be the only chance to try to.
The papers and journals they found last time are still there, exactly where they left them. He’s almost thankful for it, the idea of someone else taking them and emulating her project, or worse, reading them, terrifying for a multitude of reasons though he supposes after everything came to light it's not like anyone else would be crazy enough to come down here. Crazier than Arven, who's done it three times now, that is.
He rifles through the documents spread across the desk, rereading the note on the open page about the assistant who will become his father and the report on the second Koraidon they managed to pull from the past. Arven’s stomach flips seeing it for what he knows now, the beginning of the end. He sets the journal facedown, and moves on to the bookshelves further back. He’s not sure what exactly he’s looking for, but anything is more than he has currently.
For a while he sifts through the stacks, research logs and documentary notes and history books all crammed together in his mother’s signature organizational ideology of ‘Only I know where it is and that’s all that matters.’ Arven reads what he can from these but finds himself going cross-eyed at most the scientific jargon, relinquishing them and their secrets back to the bookshelves in defeat. He may have grown up in her lab but she rarely paid him much attention, let alone taught him anything about any of it.
Looking around, he spots another pile of folders a short distance away. Opening one reveals more reports and a collection of what seems like to be paperwork, and as Arven flips through the pages a photo slides free, falling on the dusty counter. He picks up the photograph, giving it once over. It depicts a man and a woman standing together in one of the labs, the woman’s wild hair bound back in clay beads and her blue gaze piercing the camera; the man in contrast is sleek, solemn-eyed, his dark beard and graying hair immaculate. She is dressed in her favorite shade of red and he is in deep purple, the colors pristine, well preserved within the safety of the folder.
///// Professors Sada and //ro // is scrawled on the other side, the ink smeared.
At first, he’s surprised by the picture’s existence here. The handwriting on the back isn’t his mother’s- it’s too round, too stylized. Even before she became a living computer she wrote without flourish, clean and straight to the point.
Arven realizes it then. Of course. Of course there were others down here. Four research stations and a central lab couldn’t be run by one person alone, even if that person was as dedicated as his mother. The AI hadn't even been capable of that.
He looks at the picture again, and then at the files in the folder. How many people had been swept up in his mother’s madness? She’d gotten government funding, corporate funding, every available resource with nothing spared. Where had it all gone?
After a moment of deliberation Arven slides the photo into his backpack, tucking it safely between the pages of a heavy cookbook. There’s something about the man in the picture Arven can’t shake, the set of his eyes and jaw, the dark hair that peaks through the gray. He’ll ask Clavell if he knows anything about it when he gets back.
Moving to the other side of the counter, Arven appraises the surfaces and shelves anew. More research surely, perhaps more personal journals. It’s only hitting Arven now that his quest to unravel his mother may leave him with more questions than answers. He’s spent so long simply ignoring it, not thinking about it, his mother and this awful pit she chose over everything else, again and again. Was there really anything here worth knowing when facing that?
Out of the corner of his eye Arven spies a book left spread across one of the consoles. His heart pinches upon realizing what he’s found again; the passages detailing his mother’s desire to duplicate herself, the clinical appraisal of her immense workload. She mentions Arven’s father leaving with such dispassionate afterthought, referring to him only as ‘that man.’ As if he’s nothing in the great scheme of things, so minor a part of her life she doesn’t even deem to refer to him by name. This was the sort of person his mother was. Arven knows this. Objective, ambitious, looking at things for usefulness first and everything else second.
Mobosstiff whines suddenly, drawing Arven’s gaze to him. He’s staring back up, orange eyes regarding him as he pants softly. Arven smiles at him, giving his partner a good scratch behind the ears.
“It’s alright, bud. Sorry for making you worry.”
Mobosstiff shows Arven his teeth like he doesn’t believe him, which is fair. Arven doesn’t believe himself either. The only person Mobosstiff knew better than Arven was Sada after all.
Arven leans against the counter as he leafs through the rest of the journal, skimming passages as he goes. The entries are dated over a decade and a half ago and come in clusters, sometimes several times a day and others months apart. They vary in tone and length and subject, and he’s surprised to find himself mentioned a handful of times throughout. Towards the end of the book, however, one page stops Arven short. Parts of the paper are heavily damaged, not only from age and exposure but from the vicious tearing of a pen, whole sections scratched out in seas of black. According to the date Arven would have been just under a year old.
//////////////////////////////////////////////
///// Most of them are gone now. They followed him when he left. //////
Sometimes I wonder if in a different world, our roles might have been reversed. Him with the drive, and I the one with the sense to tell him how dangerous this was. For everyone. For every living thing.
It’s not impossible. Far from it. If this machine will open doorways to the past, what is to say it will always be the same ‘past’? How many probable pasts have we destroyed here, simply by existing and reaching for it?
/////////
I cannot stop now. It cannot all be in vain. I will not allow it.
Though most of the entry was indecipherable, those final three lines at the bottom were crystal clear. Arven puts the journal down and closes his eyes.
She could have stopped. She could have stopped at any time. If her AI, her perfect replica in every possible way, had the reasoning to stop this, then his mother had too.
And she knew it.
Arven reaches for his anger and finds it easily. What he doesn’t expect is for his nose to also run. He sniffles, rubbing at it with the fist still clutching his mother’s journal. Out of the corner of his eye he catches a small flash of color, and glances to see a yellow scrap of paper flutter free from the pages.
Setting down the book, he squats to the floor to grab it. The words are shaky, spotted in parts by an unsteady hand.
You will never know him, my little one. And for that, I am sorry. I doubt he will ever forgive me, even if he knew about you.
You will only have me and I am terrified of what that will mean for you.
For several long moments, all Arven can do is stare down at his hands. So many questions he’s been holding onto all his life, answered so quickly and so quietly. The sound of their epiphany taken from them, so very like these research bases, silent without Sada’s voice. And yet Sada manages to get the last word anyway.
Once when Arven was young, he’d gotten so frustrated at being ignored by Sada and he had gone into his mother's laboratory and shoved a whole table of equipment on the floor right in front of her. The resulting mess had been catastrophic; everything had broken, pieces going every which way in a spray of glass and metal and when his mother swooped in on him, he’d expected the dressing down of a lifetime. But what she had done was ignore the mess entirely and check his hands first. He can still remember the look on her face as she turned his palms over, front to back and wrists to arms and all over again, expression tight, the barest hint of panic. When she'd found him uninjured, she'd scooped up all the pieces of the broken things and put them in a drawer of her desk, and went back to what she was doing. They never spoke of it again.
There are other memories Arven holds of his mother, jumbled up inside him like those broken pieces in that drawer. Memories he can't place when they happened, what led up to them, only that they existed and had mattered once.
Being very small walking on a beach in Cabo Poco, his mother leading him by the chubby hand. Giving Mobosstiff a bath together, back when he was just a messy little Maschief. The shelf she gave him to keep some of his own books and things on in her lab. Offering up stones and Tera shards and sea glass to her with dirty fingers, dug up by hand with the hope of contributing to her research. Coming home to Koraidon and Sada curled together on the sunroom couch, napping away in the golden afternoon light. One morning when she stayed home and he made her breakfast, bringing it to her bedroom so she could have it in bed, so she could see how good he’d gotten at cooking, so maybe she’d stay just a little bit longer.
She never went back and fixed those things. Arven had opened that drawer a few years ago looking for something else and found the pieces still there.
When Arven made the choice to come here, he knew that with all the time that’s passed, there wasn’t going to be much of his mother left, and he was thankful for that. His whole body had been shaking the entire climb down, and even now his hands clench and unclench, palms sweaty, knees about one more revelation away from giving out entirely. And the only thing that made him put one foot in front of the other, the only thing other than Mabosstiff at his side, was the knowledge she wouldn’t be whole when he got there.
Whole. Not her body, not her mind. But just enough. Just enough of her left to make it worth it. For Arven to understand.
Arven doesn’t understand. He thought he was long past being angry at himself, blaming himself for his mother’s negligence, thinking he wasn’t interesting enough to be worthy of her attention, too young and too new for a woman who only concerned herself with the distant past. He isn’t though, not as he sinks to the floor, head between his knees, clutching her tear-stained note in his fist.
He thinks maybe he should have tried harder, reached out more. Hadn’t given into his anger. Just as quickly as these thoughts come to him they ricochet, turning sharp. If his mother had such sentiments she could have said something. She could have said sorry. She could have come home. But she hadn’t. She chose not to. She chose instead to write these feelings on slips of paper she shoved in books miles below the surface of the world no one but her knew existed and she chose to never say a word of it to Arven. She put herself over him every single time.
If he wasn’t half convinced something would break down the wall and eat him, Arven would have screamed.
In time, he calms down. Mobosstiff presses his cold wet nose to Arven’s cheek, and Arven is suddenly struck with the magnitude of it; the heat of his breath and the weight of his body against Arven's, how thankful he is that he’s able to feel that again, when for so long he’d been terrified of losing him forever. Mobosstiff had only gotten hurt as badly as he had because they tried to go down and find her after months of no contact. He blamed his mom for that for a while too. If it wasn’t for her, Mobosstiff wouldn’t have nearly died.
But now he can’t help thinking that Sada was already dead by then. He feels it, with a terrifying bone-deep certainty. She really had been gone all this time. He'd spent so long afraid for Mobosstiff, he’d never for a moment spared a thought about a similar fate befalling his mother. Growing up he'd never known when he’d be able to see Sada, had eventually gotten to the point where he never wanted to see her anyways, and now. Now he’s here. Wanting to see her. Too little, too late. Like mother, like son, huh?
Arven sniffs again. Something steadies within him and he rises to his feet.
She’s long gone but… he still wants to bring her home. She hasn't been home in so long.
The AI had said she’d died protecting the first Koraidon from the second. That second Koraidon had been held here when it was under observation. And Arven knows when he sees it. The collapsed wall, the rubble, the pipe split open and all the crystal spilled into the room. He won’t have to dig much.
He doesn’t.
He sees the beads first. The clay beads she always wore in her hair, orange and red, their lacquer shining even from beneath the rubble. Some are still intact but most are shattered under the weight of the collapsed tube.
Arven picks one up, letting it roll in his hand. His eyes follow the trail of shattered clay to a grayed curl of cloth he knows to be a lab coat. It bulges in odd places. Those are her bones, he thinks. This is her , his mother, the famed Professor Sada, curled on her side as she had died, crushed and in pain and completely and utterly alone.
Arven is already crying before he realizes it.
Mabosstiff pushes his nose on his shoulder, making high noises of panic. Arven swipes an arm over his eyes. He knew he was going to cry. He’s been crying since they discovered the truth down here, on and off and when no one but Mabosstiff could see him. He’s been crying since he was a kid, left alone to figure everything out for himself and then growing up to become the same sort of person she was, unwilling to let anyone help when he was fine, just fine, doing it all himself, being alone, never telling anyone how he truly felt. He was so sure with time and distance and growth his mother was done casting her shadow over his life and now it seems impossible it will ever stop.
Arven’s not even sure if this, this whole crazy, stupid mission to bring his mother home will make him stop. If these feelings will ever stop. He has every right to be angry, to hate her guts, to never want anything to do with her again, but he just can't. He came here because he couldn’t do that, couldn’t leave her to rot in this place any longer, the wrongness of it picking at the stitches sewn in his heart over the space Sada’s absence hollows in him, worse now than ever before knowing there will never be a chance to fill it, not really. This hole she leaves, as big and deep and strange as the Great Crater itself.
He puts the bead in his pocket and finally reaches for her. The cloth of the lab coat feels so fragile, so frayed he’s afraid it will disintegrate under his fingers. But it doesn’t. He holds it in his hands and finds her bones beneath it and collects his mother’s body, wrapping it within the coat.
Her skull falls in with the rest of her with a muffled thump. The empty eye sockets stare out, once-blue eyes that Arven had inherited from her. She was only human in the end. Human down to her bones.
Mobosstiff whines again. Arven bundles his mother up to his chest, and looks down at his partner.
“It’ll be alright.” He says, voice cracking from all the crying. He clears his throat, tries again, because he has to try to believe it, if nothing else. “It’ll be okay. I promise.”
Mobosstiff barks, and the loudness of it echoes throughout the building, resonating within Arven as well.
He knows he’ll get more chances to be better. More chances to show the people he cares about how much they mean to him, to grow beyond his anger, and with luck, more chances to understand his mother too. There's still so much to learn and do, so much that the Arven of before wasn't capable of. He’s not the same person he was when he left for the Academy- he’s not even the same person he was hours ago, before he came here, before he found what little he could. Arven is not his mother, even if he's made some of her same mistakes in the past. Arven is still alive, and still capable of change.
And so Arven nods to his partner, and together they head for the door. “C'mon. Let’s get out of here.”