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“You won’t be able to guess what I found the other day.”
Augustine looks up from the settee, blinking as he adjusts his vision from the book on his lap to the person in his doorway. One day, that man will finally get himself to an optician, but Lysandre harbours no false hope that such a day will come anytime soon.
“Another Pokémon? Do you want me to study it, or is it for your own team?”
He can’t help but huff through his nose, as close to a laugh that he’ll allow himself sober. “It is not a Pokémon.”
“It was a little hopeful of me, I admit,” Augustine hums. “Should I get my hopes up and ask you if it’s a Mega Stone?”
“Unfortunately not. My apologies.” Behind his back, Lysandre’s clasped hands tighten around it. It’s rather silly of him, to play such a game, but, with Augustine smiling like this, how can he not?
“A normal stone, then?”
“It is not a stone of any kind.” He can feel his lip twitch. “I told you that you wouldn’t be able to guess.”
“Ah, Lysandre! Let me at least try,” he laughs.
Lysandre raises an eyebrow. “What is the saying – three strikes and you’re out?”
“That’s for baseball, not guessing games!” Augustine’s eyes narrow. “So, it’s not a stone. Does it have anything to do with Pokémon battling? History? The history of Pokémon battles?”
“In a tangential sense, I suppose so.”
“Ah,” he smiles. “Did you visit Shalour City? The Tower of Mastery?”
Lysandre shakes his head. “Geosenge Town.”
Augustine’s lips tighten, and Lysandre takes it as his cue to reveal the item with a flourish. They’re not having that conversation. Not tonight. Hopefully, not ever.
“You never told me you had a penpal,” he smiles, “let alone your past self.”
Augustine’s mouth falls open as he looks at the letter, yellowed with age and nibbled away at the edges, but still whole. Still legible. “Xerneas. You must be kidding me.”
“I am neither Xerneas, nor am I kidding you.” Lysandre finds himself smiling. He often finds himself smiling around Augustine.
“I must have written that when I was, what? Six? Seven?”
“I wouldn’t know. I only read the first few lines. If your age is mentioned, or a date from which we can work it out, then I haven’t yet come across it in my reading.”
“Probably not. I never dated my letters.”
Lysandre doesn’t mention that he still doesn’t. He doesn’t date his paperwork or research notes, either. It makes it rather inconvenient to reference them.
Augustine reaches in Lysandre’s direction, flexing his fingers as if to grasp at the air. “Come here, then. Let’s read it together.”
Lysandre approaches, just close enough to hand Augustine the letter before standing behind him, but, as soon as his arm is outstretched, Augustine takes him by the wrist and pulls him down onto the settee.
He doesn’t yelp. He makes a perfectly normal sound of mild surprise that does not, in fact, make his friend snort with ungraceful laughter. Their limbs are tangled together for only a moment until Lysandre sits up, removing his not-insignificant weight from Augustine’s twiggy body. He adjusts his cravat, makes sure the letter has not received any further damage, but he does not stand again.
Augustine, splayed across the sofa, kicks his socked feet into Lysandre’s lap and makes the grabbing gesture again. “Come on, my friend. Let me regale you with the woes and sorrows of Gusti, age five-and-a-half.”
“Woes and sorrows?” Lysandre asks, handing the letter over.
He snorts as he unfolds the papers, squinting at the chicken scratch handwriting that, sadly, has not improved much in the following decades. It isn’t that Augustine is incapable of writing well – early in their relationship, Augustine had written him in the same looping cursive, large enough to be legible, as he did his other acquaintances – but it takes him twice as long, and he never has the patience for it.
“I remember visiting Geosenge Town with my family once. We were supposed to get out in the countryside; appreciate the way history and nature interweave. Naturally, I was far more interested in the local Pokémon.”
Lysandre nods. “You have changed a great deal since then, I see.”
Augustine kicks him a little, but he’s grinning widely, lips stretched thin over crooked incisors and bared canines. Lysandre allows himself a wry smile in return.
“Shush, or don’t you want to hear about my dear penpal’s sadness?” He lets out a little laugh, and says, “It’s a great place, if you enjoy nature walks and tiny museums about ancient history. Little Gusti very much did not.”
“And the Augustine of now?”
He’s always beautiful, but especially so when he smiles. “If you’re inviting me, I wouldn’t say no. Anyway…
“Dear Augustine of the future,
“I bet you’re having more fun than me. It’s been three days and I still haven’t found an Eevee. I forgot about that! I decided that I was going to make friends with a Pokémon so my parents would let me start training it. They wanted me to finish my education, but I wanted to go on a journey as soon as possible.”
“And yet you waited until you were eighteen.”
“Hush, you. I was a mature teenager who knew how to wait until the right moment. It’s pure coincidence that I went to lycée before that moment came. Anyway!” And he continues: “Marin at the hotel said that they live on Menhir Trail but I haven’t seen a single one. Just Flabébé and dog Pokémon and these kind of scary ones. She said those were Sigilyph and Golett but I think they’re stupid because they don’t have mouths so I can’t tell if they’re happy or not. I just run when I see them.”
“You were scared of them?” Lysandre huffs out a few arrhythmic breaths, biting his lip. “Really?”
“Please stop mocking my dear penpal. He wasn’t great at Pokémon body language at that point in his life.”
“I really want to find an Eevee because they’re really cool. Are you on your journey yet? Have you found an Eevee? Has it evolved? I think that Espeon is the best one they evolve into because it happens due to friendship, and being so close that you evolve into something completely different would be so amazing, but I think it would be even better if they evolved into different Pokémon that haven’t been discovered yet, either. What would a Flying-type evolution look like, or a Dragon-type? Future Gusti, will you find out for me?
From Gusti of the past.”
“And then someone’s Eevee evolved into Sylveon,” Lysandre muses, “and you were in a prime position to study it.”
Augustine hums. “Gaby. Wonder what they’re up to these days.”
“You’re no longer in contact?”
“I suppose so. Unless they’ve changed address or phone number, I could reach them easily, but, ah, what is there to say?” He sighs, leaning a bony shoulder into Lysandre’s chest. “This is simply the way things are. We haven’t spoken in years, and to pick up again now seems… I suppose it feels too troublesome to try.”
Of course. Such is the nature of things, to grow apart and never reunite. The ocean wears away at cliffs, and islands between the coasts of Kalos and Galar are slowly eroded into naught but sand. As lives dwindle and fade, so do relationships, with all the pomp and circumstance of an hourglass’s near-silent susurrations. If one were to look away, they wouldn’t even notice its ending.
“What about Marin?” he asks.
After a moment of bemused silence, Augustine breaks into laughter. “If I’ve seen her since that holiday, I haven’t recognised her!”
“You held her in high esteem.”
“Apparently so! From what I can tell, she was a kind young woman who knew about Pokémon and talked to me like an actual person. I can recall someone twice my height, fetching books from the higher shelves for me, and I know I was excited to go back to the hotel after a long day out, but that’s all I remember.”
Lysandre doesn’t shift an inch. He stays perfectly still. Perfectly normal. He does not flinch. He has not flinched once during this entire conversation.
“Lysandre?”
Augustine looks up from him, half-lying in his lap, with an expression of concern.
“You think that I’m going to forget you, one day, don’t you?”
There have been occasions – rare, but not non-existent – where Lysandre has been hit. He’s been punched in the face once, for reasons he still can’t quite understand, and the amount of accidental blows he’s taken to his stomach, while not unreasonable, still needs both hands to count out fully. That is to say: Lysandre is familiar with how it feels to have the wind knocked out of him. This experience is not dissimilar.
“You think I’ll forget you, or that we’ll lose contact in some way or another.” It’s not a question, and could never be mistaken for one. It’s Augustine, his Augustine, dropping the ‘what-do-you-think’s and ‘it’s-only-my-opinion’s that bubble out of him in almost every conversation he has with other people. People who aren’t Lysandre; people who don’t know him so thoroughly.
He nods.
A slim hand rises up; settles against his beard; strokes gently at his cheek. “That would never happen. I couldn’t ever leave you, my friend.”
“You left behind Gaby, and Marin.”
It’s a weak retort, even to his own ears, so he’s not surprised that Augustine laughs right in his face. “I knew Gaby for, what, five years? And Marin for two weeks, at most. How long have we been friends?”
“A decade, come March.” He tries to avert his eyes, but, when Augustine smiles, his gaze can’t help but be drawn back to him.
“And I want to spend the rest of them by your side, too,” says Augustine, “all the way up until we’re old, old men, hobbling around whatever fancy nursing home you get us into, and our minds are so gone that we don’t remember each other. Even then, I’ll always insist on sitting next to you, and sharing our meals, and talking with you until we both fall asleep. That’s worth so much more to me than grad school roommates and passing acquaintanceships. Don’t you agree?”
And Lysandre does, at least verbally. He hopes that Augustine takes him at his word; that he doesn’t see the truth – that for Lysandre to see Augustine feeble and elderly would be a betrayal of all his convictions. He fears he may lose his friend to the passing of time, yes, but it is a childish fear that may be put aside and buried like the secrets of Geosenge Town.
The wheels have been set in motion, now, leading to a final truth: Lysandre will never see Augustine grow old. If all goes well, they shall live forever in an endless garden of beauty, always staying by each other’s sides, and, if it does not-
“I think I got cornered by a horde of Nosepass at one point,” Augustine muses. “Honestly, I don’t know why my parents let me run around like that.”
Lysandre finds himself smiling, even as Augustine frowns, and asks, “Could they have stopped you?”
He’s rewarded with a beautiful laugh, both snorting and musical and, altogether, perfect. “Perhaps you’re right! I could be a very unruly child, under the right circumstances.”
Lysandre laughs too, Augustine warm and smiling against his chest. There is no need to think of the future right now: he is here, with the one he loves, and the evening has just truly begun.