Last Song

“Fuck.”

Under normal circumstances, Bill did not swear. And “normal circumstances” had a broad definition for him at one point. This was, after all, the same man who took turning himself into a pokémon with a surprising sense of curse-free tranquility. But now, under the yawning abyss that stretched across the sky, Bill swore once and precisely once. And that was all he had to say. Just that one “fuck,” followed by a long, desperate quiet.

To be fair, what else does one say when they fuck up so badly they end the world?

Snow fell from the abyss. It might have been falling for a week, for a year, for ten minutes. Bill didn’t know. Time was irrelevant under the abyss. It was because of the hole itself: a temporal anomaly, as he put it to the girl, back when he could think straight. The girl, an orange-haired nurse’s assistant from the pokémon center, stood beside him now and watched the snow bury the city at the foot of Tin Tower. Literally bury. The snowdrifts already consumed Ecruteak City and were creeping up the sides of the shrine. Yet very little time had passed at the top of Tin Tower. It was as if they were in a bubble of slow time as eons passed around them—or as if, for the city at their feet, time passed at an obscenely quick rate. Neither of them could tell which.

There was no point now in doing anything to stop the anomaly. No point in much of anything, really. Somewhere under all that snow, the Time Capsule lay twisted and broken in the rubble of the pokémon center, and even if it wasn’t buried, they both knew that Bill would be able to fix it. It wasn’t just because he would have needed to rebuild the Time Capsule from scratch (or, alternatively, hope to some kind of god that he would be able to repeat his mistakes with a Time Capsule in another city). It was because … they were right. The kimono girls, that is. They were right.

That was the funny thing about chosen ones, really. Sometimes, the important people aren’t there to save the world. And Bill, the kimono girls said, was born to change the world.

He changed it, all right. If bringing about its end could be considered a change.

Bill tilted his head back and felt the snowflakes brush his skin. Why was it snowing from the anomaly? Why snow, of all things?

Not that it was important or anything. It was just a thought. It was too late to panic, so why not cling to curiosity?

Besides, he still couldn’t fathom what to say besides that one curse. He had ideas about that. Plenty of ideas. He turned each one over in his mind, but none of them seemed right. But he had to say something. He was running out of time. If there was still time as a concept in this situation.

Closing his eyes, he considered “I’m sorry; I’m so sorry; oh gods, I can’t express how sorry I am,” but somehow, that didn’t seem right. He craned his neck and let the snow melt across his skin in cold, burning trails. The girl from the pokémon center, the mouse of a girl whose name he right now couldn’t remember, had not said anything since he saved her by bringing her up to the top of the tower. Her company didn’t make things better; if anything, it made the guilt run deeper because she was so young. Or at least, he thought she was young. Someone out there was young, anyway, and now, the world was lurching into the temporal rip. He could hear it. He could hear the groan of the twisting metal, the crack of splintering concrete, the scream of winds streaming into the hole.

He thought that maybe “I have a plan; I can fix this” might do, but that would be a blatant lie. Bill liked to think he could worm his way out of any situation at that point (he did, after all, find a way to fix his body when that one incident with the clefairy happened), but by this point, the rip was too far out of control, too far beyond his abilities to tame.

The snow stung now. Each flake felt like it was burrowing into his skin.

Fuck the snow.

Fuck everything.

That was one of the things he could have said too. “Fuck everything.” Or maybe “I’m the worst possible person.” But the problem with Bill was that he wasn’t given to bouts of self-pity. He never felt sorry for himself at any point during his time as a clefairy, and he never felt sorry for himself as a kid when every goddamn child in Goldenrod City treated his identity, his genius, his weirdness as a highly contagious plague. He wasn’t about to feel sorry for himself now.

And that was why he was still on the rooftop of the Tin Tower instead of throwing himself into the mountains of snow to be buried with the rest of Ecruteak.

Besides, the girl didn’t deserve to see a stranger kill himself.

Looking at her again, he noticed that she was his age. Still young but not as young as he initially thought. Her eyes weren’t on him anymore, and they weren’t on the snow. They were upturned, peering through the foggy lenses of a pair of glasses to the expanse of dead sky above them. He might have even thought she was pretty if he was into that kind of thing and if there was a point anymore.

He still didn’t know what her name was. And it was probably because of that that the last conversation on Earth happened.

“Hey.”

She jumped a little in surprise before sweeping her head down to glance at him.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

She stared at him.

“I’m …” Bill set his jaw and looked out onto the snowbanks. “Well, I mean ...”

“It’s okay,” she said.

He turned back to her. “What?”

“It’s okay,” she repeated. “You don’t have to.”

“Have to what?”

“... Nothing. Never mind.”

“No. What?”

She took a deep breath. “I know who you are.”

“Oh.” Bill looked at what was left of the sky. Everything seemed better to look at now than the girl. “Of course you do.”

A long and awkward silence ensued, and for that moment, Bill regretted saving the girl—if only because, had he saved anyone else, he might have had one less problem about throwing himself off Tin Tower by then.

“Lanette,” she said.

He raised his eyebrows at her. “Sorry. What?”

“My name is Lanette,” she told him. Her face reddened, she bowed her head, and her voice lowered in volume—actually lowered, much to Bill’s embarrassment. “Nice to meet you.”

“Oh. Yeah. Nice … nice to meet you too, Lanette.”

He had thousands of questions then, and the majority of them focused on that girl. Suddenly, she was the most interesting person in the world, although as much as Bill hated to admit it, it was because the other thing he could have thought about right then was the last thing he wanted to dwell on.

But he didn’t ask any of the questions that came to mind. It was because Lanette had one of her own.

“So what now?”

And what a question it was. Under other circumstances, Bill might have outlined an entire plan in response. He might have taken pride in coming up with all the nuances of what that plan would have entailed or in the complexity it boasted. Or if he was anyone else in that very situation, he might have replied with scathing sarcasm.

But he wasn’t in any other situation, and he was no one else but Bill. Bill, whose absolute utter brilliance—that level of genius people somehow came to admire only after he built things they thought were useful—ended the fucking world.

He wanted to curse again, but he didn’t.

Instead, he froze when he felt something warm touch his hand. Looking down, he found Lanette’s hand grasping his. Not in the way couples would hold hands but instead in the way someone would grab a hammer.

“You don’t want to do that,” he told her.

“Why not?”

“I’m bad luck.”

“I don’t believe in luck.”

He sighed and tried to pull his hand free. But it was a half-hearted effort, really. He didn’t really feel anything for the girl, but her touch … it was nice to be touched by a human being right then.

“I believe in reincarnation, though,” she said.

Bill chuckled. He couldn’t help it. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe in the possibility of an afterlife (as a scientist, he was open to the possibility of everything). It was just that, all things considered, where would one be reincarnated to at that point?

He asked her. She shrugged.

And he thought that was the end of it, but after a few minutes, Lanette said something else.

“This isn’t the end.”

“Lanette, there’s a temporal rip right above us that’s already consuming large chunks of the world.” He thought, anyway. In truth, he hadn’t seen anything go into the hole. The hole was more encompassing the world in its entirety. Like an ekans devouring a rattata. It wasn’t biting off parts of the universe so much as slowly pushing its body around it, enveloping it in a muscular sleeve of darkness and digestive fluids.

Bill shuddered. He really hoped that wasn’t why it was snowing.

“No,” Lanette continued, as if she didn’t notice her companion tremble. “It’s a hole. That’s all. And holes have other sides. Entrances and exits.”

That was a possibility Bill had considered. It didn’t seem likely, though, what with the fact that Bill could see nothing but an inky void whenever he peered into the hole in the sky. But it was a comforting thought.

Still, something bothered him about it. Something obvious.

“How do you know it’s a hole?” he asked.

She shrugged again. Then she explained it to him. She explained all the quantum theories, all the quarks, all the ripples of time, all the event horizons, all the little details he had only read about. And as she did so, she stared out almost wistfully into the whiteness before her, and Bill stared at her blankly.

This girl was more brilliant than he was.

Was that why she was at the pokémon center?

He asked her something along those lines, although it was phrased more like a non sequitur, a question of what she did for a living (even though he knew thanks to Nurse Joy).

“I’m a medical student,” she said. “I’m doing an internship at the pokémon center.”

Present tense, not past.

“You’re very optimistic,” Bill observed.

She shrugged for a third time. The shrugging was starting to get annoying.

“Have you ever thought about getting into physics?” he asked her. “Or maybe engineering? I could always use a hand.”

She smiled wryly. Bill could almost hear her say “clearly,” but she didn’t. He only figured that was what she would have said because it was what he would have said if she was the one to create a time machine that ripped apart time itself.

Well. So much for not feeling sorry for oneself.

“Don’t worry,” she told him.

“What?”

“You look troubled. Don’t worry.”

“We’re about to die.”

“Possibly. But there’s always another time.”

“I don’t think there will be, Lanette.”

Her hand shifted. Her fingers laced between his, and although this alarmed him, he didn’t pull away.

“Well,” she said. “If you really think so.”

He sighed.

“It was nice knowing you, Bill,” she told him softly.

“Yeah. You too.”

Bill bowed his head and swallowed hard, but that didn’t stop the tears from coming.

He couldn’t remember the last time he had cried, but he did then and couldn’t entirely understand why. The world was dying. There was nothing to cry for.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

Lanette stood there for a long time, her hand holding his and her body making no further effort to comfort him. They were strangers, after all. In this timeline, they were lives that happened to cross by serendipity once and only once.

But maybe … in another timeline, in another universe, just as another Bill had explained to another Lanette, there would be a next time.

So that was why Lanette sagged her shoulders and softly responded, “It’s okay.”

And that was why, in the whiteness of Ecruteak City, Bill uttered the last words of that little world.

“Thanks. Just … thanks.”