Chapter Text
Ash meets the King when he is only twelve.
And he is still the King.
Even if he has been reduced to little more than some angry, grudge-ridden spirit. Even with his kingdom left in half-buried ruins in the wake of his failure—his people, his family, likely slaughtered to the quick. He is. Still. King. And if he cannot save his people, he can damn well avenge them.
—Faced with that kind of grief, small wonder that Ash—just a boy, only a child— failed so spectacularly at fending him off when he first took over. Made all the easier by the scars that litter the boy’s soul, the ravaged parts of his mind that even he doesn’t notice.
There are blanks in Ash’s memories, he notices after only a few months spent sharing space with the child he’d almost succeeded at killing in the name of revenge. Inexplicable and large, less a barrier or wall and more a black hole starving for more, only gaping wider the longer he watches it. It’s a shit job, a poorly executed memory wipe so rushed they are honestly lucky it hadn’t eaten everything nearly as soon as it was implemented. Even luckier that it’s nearly unnoticeable despite the size of it, if only because it means that Ash doesn’t notice that there’s anything missing.
It reeks of death…
It is not his proudest moment. What he did to Ash, who reminds him more and more of his own younger siblings every day they are forced to spend bound to each other, was… not good. All the grief and well-deserved anger in the world cannot change that. But he cannot say he regrets it either.
For all that their arrangement is still a prison, Ash is a much kinder jailer than Ho-Oh and her priests.
“It’s you…” N says. And he wonders if the boy sees how the edges of his vision blur just enough. If he realizes that this is yet another nightmare for him.
“It’s me.” He says back, grinning with what must be too many teeth if the way the child recoils in fear of him is any indication. He knows he is unsettling, that he has always been that way. Up until he’d met Ash, he could only ever recall two people who had never once looked at him as anything other than human. “To what do I owe the pleasure tonight, child?”
N blinks back at him gormlessly. Probably thinks that this second encounter is part of some grand machination on the part of the dead king.
It isn’t.
Honestly, even that first encounter had been a mistake. Ash had grown protective of the boy practically as soon as they’d met, attached in the he always got when faced with wounded, broken things. Faced with that inevitable disappointment, the king had been content to sit back and observe. But N was born with power in his blood, and that made him sensitive in a way that Ash’s previous companions hadn’t been.
Looks like I need to tweek the barriers a bit more…
“Who are you?” N cuts through his thoughts, and there’s a bite fueled by a surprising amount of spine behind the words. An order that would be followed to the letter, if only the king wasn’t the king.
He laughs, a chilling bark in the air that has only ever gotten him a glare out of Ash but used to make many cower before him. “You’re about 10,000 years too young to be attempting that trick with me, Boy. But it’s a valiant effort none-the-less.”
He has to be gentle here. Gentle and forgiving, or else Ash will show up. And Ash will not be pleased with either of them.
“Y-You don’t scare me…”
N is a strange child. Beaten down in the way things are when someone who thinks they are powerful wants to make a puppet out of someone who is. It reminds him of his father, and of Yun.
“I don’t imagine that I do.”
“I’m going to be king. I-”
“You don’t know what it means to be a king.” And what does it say that he hopes the boy never learns? “Time to wake up, Child.”
“Wait!” the boy orders, a spark in his eyes that gives the king a hint as to why Ash might’ve taken such a liking to him.
“Little would-be king… you may call me…”
Maybe, not that long ago. The king feared Ash and his kindness. The boy’s forgiveness hadn’t been difficult to earn once they’d stopped tearing into each other. And that was foreign. Foreign, and new and strange.
Ash is not soft; he is all blistering sharp edges shredded through and stitched clumsily back together. A burning inferno that refuses to be put out or smothered, no matter how hard the world may try.
“What’s your name? I can’t keep calling you ‘King of Pokélantis.’”
“What do you even care for? I tried to kill you!”
“Yeah, but that was before! This is now…”
“I was right… you are a fool.”
“Don’t tell me you don’t remember your na—oh…”
“I have been asleep for eons, Little One… and with the priests defamation of my character, who was there left to say it?”
“Well… then I’ll give you a name!”
“Why would you…?”
“Everyone deserves a name! So how’s about…”
“Luca.”
Faced with that, he thinks even Ho-Oh in all her ego-fueled glory, would bend, rather than break.