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It took N a long time to learn that worship was not the same thing as love. Probably a longer time than most others whose brains were not as scrambled and whose upbringings were not so warped.
For years information was fed through a drip tube, prophecies—diagrams of love and trust that he didn’t understand were intubated through a slit in his throat which left a blackened mark. What rendered him speechless throughout all of it was not that, not the lack of choice but simply that it appeared to not be a choice at all.
All laid out in front of him, a butcher presenting his finest knives, Ghetsis swept across the Place with the Throne time and time over again, steam rolling forward with the determination of the Champion himself, too fast to see, too strong to slow. N had it drilled into his skull and tissue that if he were to live, it would be as king one day. As king and as champion with all the strings he needed attached, to be held upright at the perfect angle. That, to live at all, was to be as close to the divine as he could and nothing short.
Determined to keep a promise. Never broke his promises, that man. There is something about that which is scarier than if he did. N knew what he was from the day he was born which, coincidentally, was not the day he woke up for the first time and took an introductory breath. Ghetsis had told him so, that his whole being had one purpose and that was to liberate Pokémon. To be king, to be revered, to be admired by the blind and hated by the rest. That was a promise.
Although even after the coronation, N did not feel like royalty standing there facing his father, facing the throne with a crown not cast to fit his head. Ghetsis looked at him like a renaissance painting, a piece of art he’d dutifully managed every brushstroke of. N did not feel like royalty, no. Only like some court jester, some false idol, some mirror for his father to look into. A mirror with a crown.
High up on the pedestal he was sewn to, it took a while but soon enough the faces of his sisters, his servants, the shadow triad and the sages. They had all meshed into one colour, one unifying shape of indifference, of unimportance. It was strangely nihilistic, being so distantly there but high above it all, unaware of what people would deem first-world problems.
Ghetsis did not disappear. He rose with him, always watching. Always one step behind with a silent knife at his throat. The very place that the blackened scar had been once before, the place he was fed his information. Always holding the knife. It was a reminder that, whatever N had, his father could always take it away. And Ghetsis would never be a face N forgot.
N had an image of the world unlike any other. Splintered and warped, it was a tattered hand-me-down from his father, only tailored down to mould the innocence N possessed. There was always unanswered questions, always plot holes in the tapestry of fiction Ghetsis weaved. Although he never acknowledged them, only said N was ‘too young to understand.’ Every word he was told about what lay beyond the castle was carefully chosen, every action orchestrated to ensure he stayed within his bounds. To ensure the seeds they had planted in his mind would start to take root.
He should’ve known that the tortured creatures left wilting and battered at his door weren’t a sample size big enough to tell the whole story. Pokémon abused and abandoned by their trainers. It made N’s heart ache for them, empathy sky high. He spent nights lying awake, frantically imagining these Pokémon—every Pokémon—inflicted with this kind of damage. It festered an iron grudge towards people that would not be easily torn down. He had heard hundreds of lies about Pokémon, about trainers but he was too blinded by his fury to see it.
Deep down he wanted to believe people were good. He didn’t want to have to know that in every person there was the innate desire to control and abuse these wonderful creatures. He wanted to imagine peace out there, but the seeds had established their grip. ‘Knowing’ something meant nothing. And N knew that if he let his goal slip out of his hands, he would surely die. He would become king, he would stop this no matter the cost. He would do what he thought was right. And he was convinced, through the thick fog of fungus in his brain, that it was truly his idea.
Although some small part of him still whispered. That before they were harmed and their trust abused, maybe those Pokémon that were placed on his doorstep flourished once with people like he might have. But whispers really meant nothing in the end. And in the end both were chosen because they had potential. And both’s potential was twisted and marred into something it’s not.
Worship. Nobody used that word around him. He had found it in a dictionary, one of the many he’d tossed away, read again and tossed again. One of few stale activities and toys, with recycled thoughts stapled to every page, all things he’d seen before, all retraced steps of boredom and predictability. It almost made him crave the times Ghetsis would tell him of his future only because it was something new, position him on the amber throne like a doll and insist that it was destiny. Only with a glint of envy in his eye. Almost.
Worship wasn’t a word, it was a life he didn’t claim. It was a heavy crown digging into his scalp, was a responsibility—it was destiny. It was force. It was obsession. It made him feel he was a key cog in one ginormous, moving machine of a ritual.
Love was different. It had always been different, just as he had been. It was fleeting and alien. It was something he didn’t feel often, only leaving an aftertaste lingering like needles in his throat. It was supple sweet and bitter and craving and horrifying. Love was something he could not understand no matter how many years of dedicated healing and patience he would pin under his belt. He couldn’t understand it just as he couldn’t understand humans. Human beings and the creatures they called Pokémon. One he could grasp and the other he could chase and never reach. Both which he could not be.
Neither human nor Pokémon, N lay somewhere stagnant in between the two, unable to touch either but cursed to feel them both, to look one way but speak the language of the other. Like a patchwork amalgamation of a person, masquerading as something divine, something that chased light and caught it like fireflies squished between their palms. Disconnected from both corners of the world, he was destined to always rest somewhere like this, somewhere that nobody dared venture, some grey area or untold myth. And much like that, Love was one end of the extreme, Worship the other. Neither he could fathom.
Love and Worship, such simple and strange potions of beauty and danger. And they were decidedly different, although he couldn’t have known that, just like how the lines between human and Pokémon had blurred when he was born. So Love and Worship became a single cause that both bound him forever and left him stranded alone. It was hard to tell the difference when both seemed to overlap so many times, intertwined into a tangled jungle of cables and uncertainty. He’d convinced himself he’d cheated the system and had scored both at once. Although something was always missing.
And he yearned every day for that which he didn’t understand, that which he lacked, sick of the grey area, of the push and pull of destiny and the total black void of the unknown. The impossible, horrifying idea of defiance. The fixed, unbending truth that had infected his heart warring the ideals he knew he could chase if he let go. Wrapped with gold leaf and twine on marble-white podiums or entirely cherished for the very first time deep in the belly of the empty night. And he didn’t know what to do with himself
Every move he made out there felt so wrong, every turn he tried to take with confidence only spitting up loss again and again and again. Accumula Town, Nimbasa City, Chargestone Cave, Dragonspiral Castle. Every path he’d go down only seemed to feel like getting lost in the blank ocean of forest or the inescapable depths of a pool too deep for him. He was chasing something, he was sure of it, something like the status of king or champion. Just, was it because he wanted to? Or because it was all he ever knew how to do.
He could only tread water for so long before the thick slurry of terror consumed him and he could not fight what he feared could be true. Terror that all he believed could come crashing down if the sages and his father were wrong. Wrong about him, who he was. This ‘hero.’ And falling from a place higher than God would surely kill him.
So he denied, rejected and deflected at every turn despite this poison, this festering, ever consuming doubt infesting his heart. The idea that his father’s truth, his ideals, they were wrong. That all of this stock he’d put into these beliefs was just dead air and borrowed time. In the end it took a war, a coronation, many battles and wordless conversations. It took everything for N to finally realise it.
He knew what was right all along, only he just didn’t have the nerve or the will to deny everything he’d ever known. He didn’t know what it was to not be worshipped. Didn’t know what it was to be free or to think for himself. It was scary being thrown out into the world without a destiny to follow, without some hero to try to be. It was terrifying. But it would never be worse than what it was before
He felt just as fragile, impressionable and vulnerable as he did when he was young, when destiny was displayed for him, when Worship became Love. And the separation was just as ugly as Ghetsis had said it would be, only he knew that the end result would not be certain damnation or something far crueler than death. It would be liberation.
He’d been taught so long and hard about liberation; it was the solution, the mission and what would be the saviour. Except he had always been so fixated on Pokémon, he’d never realised they weren’t who needed to be freed or whose captors needed to let go of the leash. Maybe he only felt the bite of the metal collar and pull of the chain so vividly and empathetically because it was always around his own neck and he was too blind to see it. The sentiment of their liberation just as hollow as the devotion that was pinned to him.
N had learned a lot since then, had seen the world in all of its shining glory that was once sealed behind lock and key. And once he had realised that the name Harmonia could not bind him to that place or those people, that he could decide what to do with his life and chase anything he saw fit—it wasn’t terrifying. It wasn’t fear that permeated his mind and bloomed in his chest, it wasn’t like his father had swore—it was soaring joy.
It was a weight lifted from his head, heavy drapes dissolved and expectations he could not live up to abolished. And that was the only promise Ghetsis had broken in his life. Although N had realised years after the fact that what his father called promises were only deceitful, illusory ways to say lies—to entrap him into a web of fraudulent reverence. N had realised a lot, which is to say the absolute least.
It always glazed over him like waves, sometimes harsh and sharply sudden, sometimes brittle and hopeless. Sometimes with a kind of clarity you can only experience after this distinct avalanche of pain. People similar to him knew it just as well and suddenly N was no longer so alone in that middle distance of the pale forest.
He was surrounded by pinpricks of souls just as damaged and twisted as he was and there was something about that, much like looking up into the night sky and seeing the stars twinkling down at you, that helped him not feel so alone. Even if they were a million miles away. Still twinkling all the same.
He came back to that Worship sometimes. Worship. Hardly love, anything but love.
The two will never be synonymous. You can’t hold somebody close on a pedestal.
Love is gentle, Love is hard work, and decidedly—Love could never be Worship.
Since, well, a costume of devotion can only last so long.
When Love is timeless and eternal. One of the only things that might permeate the universe.
N doesn’t know how he lived without it—Perhaps, the closest thing to magic he’s ever known.