Please Stand Clear of the Yellow Line

Some Pokémon fanfic because why not. I wondered, “So what if Emmet went kind of crazy as a result of losing Ingo?” and then this happened.

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Chapter: 2,648 words | Story: 5,339 words

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Please Stand Clear of the Yellow Line
Written by Sudo (Pseudinymous)

~ 2 ~
Early Departure

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“I am Emmet! Get off me!”

The Servine holding him down to the stretcher did not, in fact, get off him, nor did the paramedic who owned it order any such thing. The more Emmet struggled against the Pokémon’s vines the more tangled up his limbs seemed to get, trapping him down and casting a smug assurance that as an unruly patient he wasn’t about to be going anywhere.

Emmet thrashed against the Servine anyway. Ingo was alive. It set his mind alight in an unstoppable blaze, and from the moment he woke up he found himself without breaks.

“Emmet, wait!” Elesa begged, cutting through the noise.

He suddenly realised she was even there, and stared at her with wild eyes.

“Stop it, you hit your head, you’re in an ambulance! These guys are just trying to—”

Stop you from finding your brother.

Emmet wrenched his body in a hopeless attempt to reach for any one of the Poké Balls clasped around his belt. His fingers weren’t quite long enough to make the gap as the vines fought against the strength in his arm, and even as he stretched as hard as he could, it was only enough for a nail to barely grace the ball’s shiny metal cusp.

That was until the ambulance hit a pothole. Everyone jumped. Everyone except Emmet, who thanks to the Servine was effectively wearing enough seatbelts to restrain an N700 series Shinkansen.

But it worked in his favour. Verrry well in his favour. The Servine adjusted its grip.

And Emmet’s fingers finally reached his partner.

“Galvantula, Electroweb!”

Pandemonium.

Galvantula, a Pokemon absolutely not designed to fit properly on the floor of a standard ambulance, was released from its ball with its six hairy legs spread over six different pieces of expensive medical equipment. Elesa huddled backwards into her seat the moment she realised what was going on, an effort that afforded her approximately zero protection from the attack that followed.

Galvantula raised its forelegs. The Servine stared at it in frozen religious horror.

And then a sticky electrified net shot messily from the Pokémon’s maw and ruined just about every piece of equipment in the ambulance, electrocuting all of its occupants and dousing the Servine from head to foot.

The level difference was interminable. It didn’t matter that the attack wasn’t very effective, the Servine didn’t even get the chance to take a hit to its speed. It simply fainted.

The three singed occupants of the back of the ambulance gradually regained their bearings. Galvantula started to chitter, as if it wasn’t sure it had actually done the right thing.

No stranger to an electric shock, Elesa dragged her conscious awareness out of the swamp first, just enough to be beside herself. “Emmet!” the gym leader half-slurred. “What the fuck happened to safety first?!”

Emmet blinked. He was also not a stranger to the occasional zap, not that he would ever admit it. “Safety first?” he asked, dazedly, and looked around.

Leftover sticky web was slathered over everything. The machine monitoring his blood pressure had simply given up and died. The paramedic in the back with them looked as if she’d just come back from pulmonary arrest.

“Oh no,” said Emmet.

The ambulance rolled to a stop.

Elesa’s face was in her hands. “Oh my god,” she breathed. “I know it’s because you saw Ingo but what were you even thinking?”

That was rather a good question. What was he thinking? What was he even thinking now, while half-grinning out of horror at the disaster he’d just caused? He pushed lightly against the fainted Servine’s now slackened vines, at least until he could do something that vaguely resembled sitting up. What was this? Blood all over his coat?

Emmet did not have time to consider anything further before the back door of the ambulance was wrenched open by the paramedic driver. “Don’t you even move!” he shouted, pointing a chubby little finger directly at Emmet. Emmet wasn’t the best tell of other people’s emotions but a six foot tall wooden bookshelf could have seen that this man was verrry angry. “That Galvantula goes back in its ball right now! What on Arceus’s good earth is even wrong with you?!”

Emmet was about to numbly grab its Poké Ball, but Galvantula returned itself out of shame before he could even get there.

“All you had to do was say you didn’t want to go to hospital when you woke up,” said the paramedic, teeth ground together. He boarded furiously and started checking over his coworker, whose head was lolling from side to side. “We wouldn’t have had to restrain you if you didn’t try to attack us to get off! I don’t care how much blood you’ve got running down your face, if you want off, get off! I’ll be happy not to take you anywhere after this!”

… Blood? Running down his face? Him?

Emmet dabbed at his cheekbones with a gloved hand, succeeding only in smearing the thick red fluid over the pristine white fabric. It… couldn’t be that bad. Surely it wasn’t.

“You hit the corner of that metal table when you passed out,” Elesa rattled out. “We didn’t know what to do, there was blood everywhere and you wouldn’t wake up, that’s why we called emergency for help, we thought…” She shook her head. “We just didn’t know, Emmet!”

Cold, icy shame cut into his chest, like a burning stalactite. When he’d woken up he’d only been thinking about Ingo, about how to get off this thing. He’d shovelled that female paramedic away in his efforts to get out and quickly gotten himself restrained in the process. And then this. This.

All these safety violations. Elesa was almost crying. All over… seeing Ingo. Seeing raw proof that Ingo was alive. Needing to get to Ingo, one-tracked, to hell with all the consequences…

He still needed to get to Ingo. But that video was five years old, and he was… in a right state. Five years had passed, surely the solution to this could wait half an hour. At least it could wait until he wasn’t bleeding anymore, not that he even knew where to start searching.

“I… I’m sorry,” he stammered out.

“Then what the hell you grinning for?” the male paramedic shot back.

Elesa reached out as much as her seatbelt would allow as Emmet recoiled, trying to put her hand as a physical barrier in between them. “He’s just… he’s like that, he’s…” she trailed. “He doesn’t mean it like that,” she finished.

Was this… what was this feeling, that warmed his heart so well? Even after causing all of this, she was still defending him. Even if it wasn’t something he could ever deserve.

“Well, we’re going to see who’s grinning after you get the bill,” the paramedic ground out, cutting through the touching moment.

Ah yes.

The bill.

Emmet took in a fraction of the damage and cringed. This was going to get expensive, yep. He could barely even look the paramedics who were supposed to be there helping him directly in the eye as it was, but placing his attention on the damage made him realise that it was probably about time he got off this thing in shame.

“… I’ll go,” he said, voice quiet.

Emmet started to get up. He did not get far. Elesa tore off her seatbelt and grabbed his shoulders and pushed him straight back into the stretcher. “No, you are not just leaving! You need to go to the hospital!”

“It’s fine, I’ve caused a lot of—”

“Emmet, for God’s sake!” Elesa half-shouted. She snatched up a little portable make-up mirror from her pocket and shoved it in his face. “Look at yourself!”

Emmet stopped.

Emmet’s eyes went wide.

Okay. Well. Yes. Maybe that was not completely ideal. Perhaps that was definitely rather a lot of blood. Was that really him? He must have cut his head open twice, once when he hit the corner of the table and a second time when he crashed to the floor, because there was at least two wounds that he could count, and he was a mess. If he walked out onto the street like this with his usual smile, he wouldn’t be surprised if people ran in the other direction.

Elesa snapped her folding mirror back together and put it away. “So you’ll let them take you? Please?”

“… Yes,” said Emmet, quietly.

Elesa finally relaxed. “Thank you.”

It took a bit of time before the female paramedic could get back to doing her job properly. The driver didn’t leave until then, and certainly not without a heavy grimace in Emmet’s direction as he hopped back in the driver’s seat, clearly unhappy with the idea of having to transport the man who had just destroyed half an ambulance and nearly killed his coworker. The female paramedic wiped her face and blinked her bloodshot eyes and returned her worse-for-wear Servine, then got back to work manually checking Emmet’s vitals in silence as the engine started up.

“I am Emmet. I am sorry,” he said, after a few awkward minutes.

“Mm.”

She didn’t even look up. Emmet’s lip curled under.

“Are you alright?”

He wished he didn’t ask. Her icy blue eyes flicked to his and pierced them like a knife. “I will live, no thanks to you.” And then she looked back down.

This was horrible.

“Hey Jack, all the obs I can still get are normal,” she called, eventually.

“What are you missing?” the driver called back.

“Blood pressure.”

He glanced over his shoulder. “Top drawer on your left.”

“Right.”

This time Emmet didn’t fight it. A manual blood pressure pump was strapped around his arm, at least after he dragged it out of his thick subway coat. Those numbers came back normal too. For all intents and purposes, despite the blunt force trauma and the quickly swelling headache, he was actually alright. The rest of the ride took place in a gradually thickening silence that hurt far more, leaving Emmet with a dour sort of guilt that soon coalesced into an obsessive mental pacing. Ingo was never far from his mind on a good day, but on a day like this…

He couldn’t help it.

He couldn’t not think about him. About how he was alive but only the heavens knew where on earth he had gone.

Why had a crack in space-time (was it really a crack in space-time?) opened up directly beneath Ingo’s feet, and then swallowed him whole like it was the yawning cataclysm of a Hippowdon’s jaw? Was it a completely random event, or was it attached to Ingo himself? Had Ingo done something to make this happen? Or had he attracted the attention of an entity so far beyond Emmet’s own ability to comprehend, that the nature of this could only be… unknowable…

It didn’t matter.

It didn’t matter because Ingo was alive. Emmet knew it. He didn’t care that five years had passed, wherever he’d gone, wherever he’d ended up, Ingo was alive because Ingo was always alive. It didn’t make any sense for him to be dead. It didn’t make any sense for Ingo to have died and for Emmet to be left behind. It was… it was too…

… Cruel.

He tried to close his eyes, even as the thoughts shot around his head like ping pong balls. It seemed like forever had passed, and then suddenly they were getting unceremoniously paraded out of the ambulance, herded into the hospital’s sterile white walls. Emmet pulled his bloodstained coat closer.

And then they waited.

A doctor came.

They talked.

The wounds were cleaned.

There was a brief argument with one of the nurses, after Elesa gave Emmet back his hat.

And then they waited again.

And waited some more, under observation.

“I get it.”

The voice seemed to come from nowhere, cutting through the noisy silence. Emmet looked up, stared at Elesa through his headache. She’d barely spoken a word in private since they’d gotten into the emergency wards. Neither of them had.

“Really, I mean it,” she said.

“Get it… about Ingo?” he asked, eventually.

“About what happened in the ambulance.” Elesa uncrossed her legs in her awkward plastic chair and recrossed them in the other directly, keeping her arms close as she tried to stay warm. “You just want Ingo back, don’t you? And that video… maybe you just, I mean it was the last thing you saw before you blacked out, and I know you weren’t thinking straight.”

Elesa gave a steady stare towards the ground, her eyes tracking along the sterilised linoleum floor until they hit the white subway coat draped over the end of his bed.

“I don’t… have a twin, but I know how much it hurt you. I saw it. Maybe I wouldn’t have done the same thing, but I don’t… I don’t think I’d really have been in my right mind, either.”

There was a steady silence as he tried to digest what she was saying.

Was it… forgiveness? No, he was leaping ahead there, hoping meaning out of her words. It was more like understanding, but then hadn’t she just admitted that she couldn’t understand, not really, because she didn’t have a twin herself?

But… she had known Ingo. She was a sister to them – at least adoptive, anyway. She…

Emmet rubbed his recently cleaned face with his recently cleaned hands, shaking his head side-to-side half-heartedly. “Thank you,” he tried, because in the quagmire of responses he could give that was one that usually worked.

She nodded. Good enough.

Another silence, though slightly warmer, passed between them, filled only by the ever-present static of a poorly tuned TV station.

“I want to see Ingo again too.”

Emmet looked up. “We will see him,”

Pity. Was that pity? “But Emmet, how? You saw the video, he just… vanished. Into whatever the heck that portal thing was.”

“No, we will see him,” Emmet repeated, with conviction. It made his headache throb, but he didn’t care. “We will find him and we will bring him back. Definitely.”

Elesa clearly didn’t believe that, but didn’t know how to say it. Emmet wasn’t having a bar of it though, and he kept going, incensed with the need for her to understand.

“You’ve seen all of those myths and legends, about all of those crazy strong Pokémon we barely know anything about. Like the deities. We can find one and ask it for help!”

Even he knew it sounded nuts. What kind of person would think of that as a viable solution? But Emmet wasn’t like other people. He knew that verrrry well, it was something that had been impressed upon him since childhood, even more than it had been impressed upon Ingo. Other people just weren’t bold enough. They weren’t willing to entertain even the idea of such a possibility, because—

“Emmet, you’re going to drive yourself crazy,” said Elesa, sadly.

He stopped in his tracks.

Elesa got up, gently rested a hand on his shoulder. “We can look, I… god knows I want to look everywhere with you, I just want to find him! But… come on, we both know how this is really going to turn out.” Pity. Too much pity. He didn’t like pity. “What happens when we can’t find anything?”

There was the longest silence.

But there were tears forming in the corners of Elesa’s eyes. Tears that she was desperately holding back, tears that she didn’t want him to see, so that she could be the one in between the two of them to keep it together, and look after them both.

She sniffed, breaking face for just a moment, and swiped at an already mascara-smeared eye.

“The same thing that happens if we don’t look,” said Emmet.

The plan was decided.

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