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Ingo was home.
He thought about this day back in Hisui quite often, even if he didn’t want to. He imagined the place he’d come from and the people he left behind, trying to make sense of the broken memories his mind managed to hold onto. Rumbling tunnels, a partner with brilliant flames, and the man in white. That was all he remembered.
The man was Emmet and his partner was Chandelure. He learned that almost immediately. They fussed and fussed, making him see all sorts of other people who’d apparently missed him, before letting him see the subway tunnels. It gave Ingo some kind of relief to finally know what those three things were but he still had plenty to learn about his new home. Or rather, his old home. Emmet didn’t seem all that interested in letting him explore though. Not yet at least.
“You should see a doctor,” Emmet told him and Ingo agreed. After all, he saw Warden Calaba plenty and she always had some advice or new medicines for him. It would be nice to have someone like that in the future again. At the very least, he could start building up his stores again. It was a shame he had to leave everything behind in Hisui, medicine stock included.
Seeing a doctor meant something very different in the future though. Ingo had been ready to go right there and then but it turned out Emmet had to call someone, and then was informed Ingo actually had to be the one to do it and Ingo had no idea what he was doing. And then came the forms. Oh, the forms.
There were so many. Ingo could read them, even if his written Galarian skills were rough and half-forgotten at best, but he also didn’t know a lot of the information he was supposed to know.
“Do we have a last name?”
“Am I married?”
“What’s insurance?”
“Am I allergic to anything?”
“What’s our family medical history?”
“Do I have heart disease, diabetes, or cancer?”
And what he did know, Emmet didn’t.
“Do you smoke now?”
“I can’t remember what surgeries you’ve had.”
“Did you break any bones while you were away?”
“How much exercise do you get per week?”
It turned the whole process into something much longer than either of them wanted it to be. Ingo was patient though and Emmet was worried so neither of them made a problem out of it.
The doctor’s office wasn’t anything like Warden Calaba’s tent. It was a little more like Pesselle’s corner of the Galaxy Building but only in comparison to Warden Calaba’s tent. The place was big and empty and Emmet had to talk to a bunch of people that weren’t the doctor and Ingo didn’t like it.
The doctor seemed nice enough. They talked for awhile, the doctor asking about what brought him in as if he didn’t know that. He wrote a lot of things down and told Ingo he had to see another doctor within the first couple minutes, which Ingo didn’t understand but the doctor seemed to pick up on. Emmet ended up with a list of recommended neurologists and nutritionists. Amnesia was a bigger issue in Unova than it was in Hisui, apparently, and the doctor found Ingo’s weight concerning.
Then the questions got a little more specific.
“You experienced some injuries while you were away?”
Ingo did. The doctor asked to see them and Ingo showed them without any issue.
And then the questions got a lot more specific.
Most of them were from Pokémon but the doctor didn’t seem to understand the difference between a Zoroark’s Crunch, a Kadabra’s Confusion, an Ursaring’s Body Slam, and an accidental nick from a Sneasel kit. All very different problems, some not problems at all. He had a lot of questions about how much Ingo fell off Mount Coronet even though Ingo hadn’t fallen in a long time. He wasn’t fussing like Emmet had but it almost felt like it.
“Are you in any pain?” the doctor asked eventually.
“Just the normal amount,” Ingo answered easily.
“Ingo, the normal amount of pain is none,” Emmet jumped in and Ingo had to turn to look at him. That couldn’t be right.
The doctor asked him to show him where it hurt and Ingo did. Then the doctor asked him to rate his pain on a scale of one to ten and Ingo realized how bad it actually was.
His back hurt, that was the big thing. A couple people had commented on his slouching when Emmet reintroduced him to them and Ingo hadn’t thought anything of it at the time. Now he was noticing how straight Emmet and the doctor stood and how so many different parts of his back protested if he tried to do the same.
His legs hurt, even if he wasn’t doing anything. His feet ached, his calves could never quite relax, and his knees creaked. It hurt to spread his arms or lift them over his head. Bending made pain shoot from his hips and lower back. The Sneasler kit scratches on his arms were irritating at best and he didn’t like when his sleeves rubbed against him. The scars from various claws, teeth, horns, and antlers ached dully if he paid attention to them. His head kind of hurt and it was a different kind of hurt in different parts. His neck too, but it was hard to tell with his shoulders hurting more. His ears felt weird. He couldn’t open his jaw all the way. His bones felt stiff. He suddenly wanted it to go away.
The doctor just nodded away and Emmet’s perpetual smile became more and more unsmile-like. It was a lot, Ingo realized. Other people didn’t feel like he did, he knew, but that was because he was a different person than them. Warden Calaba always had some kind of ache bothering her and her joints were so worn that Ingo or another clan member sometimes had to carry her if it rained. Zisu usually favored one side of her body in a practice spar and she was no stranger to Pesselle’s corner of the Galaxy Building. Melli’s hands often shook too much to cut an Oran Berry and climbing a tree instead of a cliff face sometimes sent his hip into spasms that left him limping for weeks. And that was just what Ingo could see.
Everyone knew Ingo had a problem with his back. They could see it just by looking at him, just like he knew they had injuries and pains of their own. But he had plenty of injuries and pains they couldn’t see and that meant they must’ve had invisible ones as well. Everyone here just seemed fine though. They stood up straight in a way that Ingo couldn’t. They seemed rested and energized in a way Ingo had never seen before. Sure, he’d seen some people with canes and he knew there were plenty of pains that he just wouldn’t be able to see but the majority of people just seemed fine. That wasn’t at all the case in Hisui.
Normal meant something very different here.
That made Emmet fuss a whole lot more on the way home, starting his research for specialists the moment they walked through the door and making Ingo do all the little things the doctor recommended to make himself feel better.
It made Ingo feel like he was going to lose his mind.
The ice, and the heat, and the stretches made him feel better but he was aware of the pain in a way he’d never been before and the relief only cemented it. It almost made him feel worse. Before, he could ignore it but now he couldn’t and it was unbearable. He thought he had pretty good tolerance but to live like this forever? Every moment of every day? He could hardly fathom it.
There were moments like this before. Moments when an injury was fresh, of course, but also flare-ups where he laid on the floor of his tent or Lady Sneasler’s den unable to do much. Those were ones caused by something physical. There were plenty of times when Ingo was just consumed by sheer feeling. There was a physical component to those too, of course, but it wasn’t the defining part anymore. Sometimes it just felt like he couldn’t take it anymore. And he hadn’t recognized it for what it was.
Emmet made him lie on a damp, heated towel and Chandelure sat on his chest and Ingo tried to pull himself together.
He didn’t protest when Emmet sent him to all sorts of doctors, often more than one in a day.
He didn’t like the ones for his mind, both amnesia and mental health. His lack of memory wasn’t that distressing these days, even if he was in the place he couldn’t remember. And his therapist was making a bigger deal out of his time in Hisui than he thought they should’ve. There was that lesson about normalcy again. It was what Ingo knew and he’d been happy there. It didn’t feel like there was anything to unpack.
There was a lot he didn’t understand about a lot of the doctors he saw. A couple took his blood and didn’t even tell him why. They used words he didn’t understand and told him to take medicines that were totally different from the ones he knew. They didn’t taste as bad, at least, but he couldn’t really feel a difference. He knew medicine didn’t work that fast though.
And then came the doctors that actually did something.
All of them asked a lot of questions but this one did more than that. Something physical, like Ingo knew some of the medics in Hisui did, though he’d never experienced it himself. They watched him move and asked if it was okay to touch him. He laid down on a table and they pushed on his feet and asked him to move his arms around. He wanted to ask what they were doing but then they started pushing on his back. It hurt like hell but Ingo didn’t stop them, too surprised to speak up. They jerked him around, making his back crack, and kept digging their fingers or tools into different spots and the pain was gone.
Ingo didn’t cry, he wasn’t the type to do that, but he wanted to holler in joy. He didn’t because they were still working and the pain just kept melting away. It wasn’t totally gone, far from it, but he could feel a lot of it going away as the minutes ticked by.
When he stood up and faced Emmet, his brother beamed. “I am Emmet. You are standing up straight!”
Not totally, Ingo could tell it wasn’t quite the same as the way Emmet stood, but he felt more relaxed and his body hurt less. The medic explained what changed but Ingo wasn’t really listening. He just knew it worked.
There were more that worked, more that actually did something instead of just talking. More people who touched his body, manipulated his limbs, and pressed heat and cold into his muscles. More people who made the pain fade.
It didn’t go away completely. Plenty of people told Ingo it probably never would. It got better though and sometimes it got worse but then it’d get better again.
His memory never really did come back but Emmet retaught him all sorts of things. He ate what the doctors told him until instructions shifted into recommendations. He kept seeing different doctors and doing what they told him to do at home. And Ingo found a new normal. A normal where pain was a part of it but it was a hell of a lot better than it was before.