Once she’d bid Gladius goodbye, once she’d promised that she’d see him again soon even though she couldn’t live anywhere like Aether, and once she’d made contact with Gladion and agreed to speak to him, once they’d established a waypoint and made their way back to Frontier Town, Lillian prepared for a meeting she’d been anticipating for four years now. Some of the impact had been taken out of it by meeting Gladius first, and by
speaking to each other mentally. But the fact remained: She was going to see her twin again.
She knocked, waited for an acknowledgment, then pushed open the door to his room. Inside was a Silvally looked exactly like the illusion that Gladius had worn, down to the necklace.
“Hey,” he said in a voice that she could’ve mistaken for indifferent or terse if not for her ability to sense the same kind of nerves radiating off him as she felt in her own gut.
“Hello. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”
Because he ran away. No, not because he ran away. Because he left her behind. Saved the Null, and
left her behind.
“It has. It’s Lillian now?”
“Yes, Gladion. It is.”
She placed a slight emphasis on his own name. Gladion, of all people, did not get to be annoying about her not using the same name he’d called her when they were younger.
“More mature?”
She nodded. At least he remembered that much. On the other hand, it made it sting more that he hadn’t expected her to be using it by now. Emotions radiated off him: Twofold concern and amusement. She couldn’t infer how they fit together.
“You don’t have to take
her word for it, you know. There are plenty of adult women named Lily, and almost certainly some who even spell it the same way you do.
Mother Dearest isn’t even here in this universe. Live a little.”
Lillian grimaced. “What is it with you two and assuming it’s about—
Augh. Maybe I’ve just changed in the last four years, too!”
Gladion took a half-step back and held up a talon in a gesture of appeasement. “Listen, sorry, didn’t mean anything like that. I just…”
(
Let him think. Imagine: Your twin, actually thinking before speaking. That’s new.)
“…I was worried, you know? That she’d do too good a job shaping you to be her successor by the time we met again. If it’s what you want, it’s cool.”
“It’s… what I want.”
(
Great work selling the confidence there, Lillie!)
“Alright, cool.” (
Said as if you can’t sense his apprehension.) “How bad a first impression’d Odette make?” (
Said with no surprise at all. If anything, he was amused again. She wished she could tell why.)
“It was
her gun being waved around.”
The amusement drained from Gladion. That had
not been the answer he was expecting.
“Shit. Figured she’d probably just insulted someone. You know, I used to hate her when we first arrived. Called me some methhead’s gyarados-assed creation. Assumed it was something like that.”
“She didn’t have bullets in it, at least. But she pretended to. Pointed it at us. Or, we’ll, Gladius was her target, but…”
He’d been worried about it hitting her, at least. That had been enough to make her worry. It didn’t seem to sufficiently worry Gladion.
“Pointing a gun at Gladius is an understandable reaction, honestly. This whole time… Or, when
we first arrived—”
Voice even and explanatory, he told her of the old mayor and Esperanza’s sister, of the disappearances and the path to Terminal Two. With rage boiling in his heart and bleeding into his tone, he told her what they’d found there. He told her about woman who couldn’t take anything seriously, what she’d done to the Null and how she’d used them to fuel the horrors she’d subjected her other victims to. How he’d summoned one of those victims from her home for them. He told her about Articuno and Matthias, the hunt for the renegade Coven faction that had cooperated with Cipher and their own deep labs where they’d made their Null.
The feathers on his neck stood up in a reflexive kind of threat display. She’d been braced for what he was going to tell her since long before he’d reached that point.
“It was him. It was.
All. Him. We have to stop him, before he hurts even more people and tears apart the fabric of reality in the process.”
And so, she didn’t flinch away at his reveal, and had decided how to respond in advance.
“Be that as it may, I still care about him. He’s hurting, and he wants to go home. He needs help, not someone to hurt him even more. He’s family—”
“We are
not related to him.”
“—to me in spirit. I want to save him. Even if that’s from himself.”
For reasons she would never be able to understand, that answer frustrated Gladion.
Why? Why did he
want to hurt another version of himself?
“Fine. You’re not unwilling to fight for this world, at least?”
“That’s correct.”
(
Had that ever been in question to him?)
“But also… you did metal work?” She felt sheepish saying this, but she had to ask. “Is it possible for me to… get a
sword?”
Gladion rolled his eyes, and Lillian failed to recognize an avian smile behind it as he started talking to her about various realistically-attainable nonferrous metal options, while failing to sound uninterested. The tension between them ebbed for a time. At least
some things hadn’t changed between them.
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