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The prologue of "Radio Static," describing the strange childhood of Ingo and Emmet.

Warnings for some identity issues and situations in which children are in distress.

DISCLAIMER: Pokemon and all of its characters belong to Nintendo/Game Freak; I'm just borrowing them for fun.

Words: 3,428

Ingo and Emmet had never liked being apart. For as long as they had been alive, even before they could remember, they would almost always have rather been together than apart, no matter what.

If you asked anyone that knew the twins, they’d say they were practically attached at the hip, for better or for worse. If you asked them themselves, they’d likely not deny it.

There was one story that their parents liked to tell, when the topic arose.

When they had been little, too little to remember it themselves, Emmet had gotten very sick. Their parents had kept them separated during this time, so as to make sure that Ingo wouldn’t catch what he had, too.

According to them, it had been a nightmare to get either of them to sleep, or really do much of anything other than cry. Both of them would scream and fuss all day long, when they had both been quiet and calm before. Nothing they could do would console them. It got to a point where all they could do was wait for them to tire themselves out.

Eventually, though, Emmet had recovered, and the twins became noticeably easier to handle, once reunited.

Needless to say, it had always been hard for the twins to be apart, and it only got harder as they grew and depended on each other more and more.

As the twins grew older and started having their first big milestones, their parents noticed something worrying. While Ingo learned to speak, quite loudly and with quite the expansive vocabulary, Emmet would still hardly ever make a sound. More worrying was that, half of the time, he wouldn’t respond at all when they spoke to him, or even react.

Concerned, they brought it up when the twins were brought in for their next check-ups. The doctor referred them to an audiologist, who concluded that he likely had some form of hearing loss.

Their parents quickly learned ways to help their son with his disability, and made sure he had the resources he needed at his disposal, and did their best to teach Ingo how to help his brother when he needed it.

That was the strangest part, though. When it came to the two of them, there wasn’t very much they had to do to learn how to help each other; they didn’t need it, because they had… something else. They weren’t sure.

Somehow, they always seemed to understand each other, instinctively. Now, they were twins, and very close even by those standards. It was rare to find one without the other somewhere nearby. It wasn’t surprising that they would be able to understand each other, and even have something resembling their own language.

The thing that made it strange, though, was that no one could figure out how they did it. Neither would make a sound, and most times they wouldn’t even look at or touch each other at all, and they would instantly seem to know what the other was thinking. Ingo could easily verbalize whatever Emmet was thinking… almost as if they shared a mind. One would instantly know when the other was hurt or upset, despite not even being in the same room.

Once, Emmet had been playing outside, and he had fallen and scraped his knee. At the same time, Ingo, who had been in the kitchen, nowhere near a window, suddenly burst into tears and said that his own knee hurt.

It was strange, to the point of seeming preposterous every time their parents tried to explain it to anyone else.

“What, like twin telepathy? Come on, now,” their aunt had laughed.

It had been meant as a joke, but something had clicked, then. They had been trying to come up with some sort of logical explanation for it all, but no matter what, they just couldn’t figure it out. The twins were no help, either; it came so naturally to them, they didn’t know it was anything out of the ordinary, and thus couldn’t explain it.

At first, they simply did their best to accept it as something odd about their boys. It was shocking, and took a lot of adjusting to get used to as a concept, but they figured they might as well have accepted it as normal. There was no logical explanation to be found, so they stopped searching for one, and decided to instead be grateful that their boys would always have each other to depend on when so many others failed to understand them.

It was fine, for a while. Mostly.

The boys got some odd looks, sometimes, and their peers would sometimes refer to their connection as “creepy.” Teachers and other adults sometimes worried that the two of them depended on each other too heavily. Their parents worried about that, too, sometimes.

Their worries turned out to be founded in ways none of them could have predicted. As the twins got older, their connection only got stronger. It seemed as though that idea of them sharing a mind was all too accurate, and it was taxing on the both of them.

The boys seemed to be constantly on-edge. It was a slow build up, slowly rising over weeks, months, years. Their teachers said that they were experiencing some sort of sharp slump, struggling with schoolwork in a way that they hadn’t before and struggling to communicate with their peers even more than usual.

The DeMasis were afraid for their sons, but they just didn’t know why.

Mrs. DeMasi asked Ingo, one day, “What’s going on? You and your brother have seemed… stressed, lately. Is there something wrong at school? Did something happen?”

He stared at her, and she felt her skin crawl. He looked so afraid, and it seemed as though he was in some sort of physical pain, but she couldn’t see any wounds. He didn’t say anything.

“Ingo? Honey, please, what’s wrong? I want to help you,” she said, starting to get desperate.

In lieu of a response, he started crying. He was silent for just a moment, and then broke into sobs that absolutely broke her heart. She instantly pulled him into her arms, alarmed. She held him tightly, as though afraid that he would slip away from her and she would never see him again.

She walked him over to sit on the couch. She whispered to him, “It’s alright, I’ve got you. It’ll all be okay. I’ve got you.”

She was saying it to herself as much as she was saying it to him. She was so, so scared for her boys. It was very rare to see Ingo in such a state, but being his mother, she’d seen both of the twins on their worst days, and had done her best to help them through it.

But none of what she’d seen before even held a candle to the awful state he was in right then. Nothing could have ever prepared her to see her son in such a way. All she wanted was for this nightmare to end, to have her sweet, happy boys back - to be able to do something, anything to help them, like a mother should be able to.

She started crying, too, but kept quiet. She didn’t want to upset Ingo any further.

Eventually, still crying and hiccuping, he calmed down enough to say to her, “I can’t tell who I am.”

At the same time, Emmet was being comforted by their father, after having started sobbing out of nowhere while they were out at the park together. There was no trigger, nothing he had noticed that could have set him off. They had actually been having a really good time together, and then he had just broken down crying for seemingly no reason.

It must be Ingo, he thought.

He had known his wife had planned on asking him about the twins’ recent behavior, and had actually taken Emmet out to have his own talk with him. But now, it seemed that things weren’t going very well on her end. Just what in the world was going on…?

Despite not really understanding, though, he did his best to comfort his son, although that wasn’t saying much. Nothing he did or said seemed to make it any better, so eventually he just stopped trying, holding him close until he came out of it on his own.

He felt awful. It always hurt to see his boys in pain, but especially now, when it seemed like he couldn’t do anything. All of it was just so beyond him, and he hadn’t the slightest clue how to help. It seemed that the boys didn’t know what they could do, either, as they were usually pretty forthcoming with it when they were struggling.

Emmet pulled away, then, and he gave him his full attention. Usually, he would sign, or, more recently, only say a sentence or two. Instead, he said, “Ingo is hurting Emmet. Emmet is hurting Ingo. We do not mean to. But we can’t stop.”

He took a deep breath. His father looked at him in shock, which only grew with each word he said. He had never heard his son speak this much at once, and he could barely process what he was saying to him.

“In my head, there are two sets of thoughts. I can’t tell which are mine. I am scared. He is scared. I feel both, and I... Just can’t tell…”

They had gone home directly after that. He needed to talk to his wife, that instant. The drive had been quiet; the both of them were spent, but they also knew that their day was far from over.

When they had gotten back, Mrs. DeMasi had been waiting at the door for them, her face grim. There was fear there, but also firmness, in something they both knew; they had to do something - they had had to do something years ago, but the second best time was right then.

They had to come up with a solution, and fast, before their boys accidentally destroyed each other. There was no one they could go to, no specialist that would take them seriously, no one they could trust to take care of their boys.

No, this was something they had to do themselves. No one else would be able to understand, or would know what to do. But with such a limited understanding of how their boys’ connection worked themselves, they didn’t know what to do.

To buy some time, they would have to do something they had never wanted to. It felt cruel, and they hoped that their sons would be able to forgive them for it, would understand someday.

Their connection had always seemed to be weaker the farther apart they were; they had never directly tested it, but they figured that if they kept them far enough apart, they could keep them safe while they tried to come up with a solution. Sever the connection temporarily, so it couldn’t continue to hurt them while they tried to figure out a more permanent solution.

It broke their hearts, and the boys seemed terrified at the idea; they had never even slept in separate rooms, or been apart for an entire day before. Now they were going to be kept miles apart for an indefinite amount of time. It was a reality that had never crossed their minds before.

Ultimately, though, they had accepted it surprisingly easily. Whether they had each decided it independently, they had made the decision together, or they had simply concluded that the fastest way out was through, they didn’t know, but they were grateful either way.

While Ingo and their mother had stayed at home, Emmet and their father went to stay in Opelucid City. The twins’ uncle lived there, and, once he had the situation explained to him (they had had to tweak it somewhat so that he would take them seriously, but he had the general gist of it), he had been all too willing to allow them to room with him for a while.

The boys had known they’d had an uncle, but had had yet to meet him. They had previously been excited at the prospect, but Emmet couldn’t bring himself to be excited about it. Not without Ingo.

He knew that it was for the best that they were separated, he knew that it was temporary (because it had to be, because he wouldn’t know what to do without Ingo in his life), but it still hurt. He knew they had to be apart. He didn’t want to hurt Ingo anymore. But he couldn’t help but daydream about running back home to Ingo and never leaving again.

He wanted to be near his brother again so badly, to not have his world filled with a terrible, awful silence that Ingo had always ensured he had never had to live with. But that was exactly the problem.

Not for the first time, he thought, I wish we had just been born normal. Ingo heard it, and found himself agreeing.

It had only lasted a little over a month, but by the end, all four of them were thoroughly exhausted. The boys had both bounced between lethargic and erratic the entire time.

Ingo, usually such a chatterbox, barely spoke a word most days. Sometimes he’d look around, confused, or pause to listen to complete silence, as if expecting something to be there.

The worst part of it, though, were the dreams.

From what Ingo described, they weren’t nightmares, and he never labeled them as such. But they were very strange, to say the least.

They’d seem normal, at first, not much different from his regular dreams, if at all. At some point, though, they’d shift. They would get hazier, blurry, as if being broadcast from somewhere too far away to have a good signal.

And maybe, in a way, that was the truth. The dreams themselves were fairly innocuous, but they didn’t feel like anything that Ingo himself would have dreamt. He saw things in them he’d never seen before, a tall man who looked like their father, but wasn’t. A house he’d never been in, a church he’d never attended, a city he’d never been to.

It felt like someone was reaching out and telling him something, but not on purpose. It felt so close to familiar, that he would wake up crying, regardless of how pleasant they were.

His mother tried her best to comfort him, but as always, she felt so out of her depth. She had called her husband, once, hoping that he might have had some idea of what to do. It seemed, though, that he was as stuck as she was, for the same reason. Although Emmet wouldn’t tell him what his dreams were about, he could tell he had been having some that bothered him, and they affected him much the same way they did Ingo.

They knew that their arrangement wasn’t sustainable. The boys weren’t much better off than they had been before, and they still hadn’t the slightest idea how to help them.

They were stuck. They wanted so badly to be able to tell their boys what was going on, they wanted them to at least not have to wait in uncertainty anymore. But they also didn’t want to give up, not so soon, not with so much at stake.

But they just didn’t know what else they could possibly do. Every time they thought they figured out where to start, nothing came of it. Every path lead to a dead end. They feared that by the time they figured out what to do, it would be far too late, and the boys would already be grown up, or worse -

They didn’t want to think about it.

In the end, it was Ingo who brought the hardest time in all of their lives to an end, on complete accident.

He and Mrs. DeMasi had been sitting on the couch. The TV had just been turned off, and they were about to go to bed, when he asked her something that broke her heart.

“Mom?”

“Yes, honey?” she replied.

“...Are Emmet and I going to be apart forever?” he asked.

She paused, unsure of what to say. There was no way to guarantee it one way or another, and she was starting to worry about that same thing.

“I really don’t know, sweetie. But I don’t think so,” she said.

He nodded, looking sad, but not surprised. She hated being unable to properly comfort him without lying to him. She couldn’t do that, not with this. He would hate her if she said they’d meet again and they never did; more importantly, the betrayal and hurt would crush him. It would be irresponsible to set him up for that. But Dragons, would it be easier.

“Emmet and I have always looked out for each other. I’m worried about him, because I can’t do that right now,” he said, after a moment.

“I’m sure he’s alright; he’s got your dad, and your Uncle Drayden to help him out if he needs it,” she tried to reassure him, but she knew it was just… different, in the same way she knew she could never truly understand it.

He shook his head, sadly. “I know, but it’s not the same,” he said, and paused. “Did you know that when we were younger, I used to sometimes let Emmet use my ears, so he could hear better?”

She looked at him sadly. What could she say to that?

…Wait. “Let” him?

“What do you mean by that?” she asked, turning it over in her head, trying to reign in her emotions.

He seemed confused. “I would share my hearing with Emmet. You know we can do that. What’s wrong?”

She remembered herself. “No, no, nothing’s wrong. But, Ingo, are you saying you could choose what you shared with him?”

He nodded. “Sometimes, when we were younger.”

She had an idea, but she didn’t want to share it with her son yet. She couldn’t risk disappointing him if it turned out to be another dead end.

Soon after, she sent him off to bed, and called up her husband. It was a longshot. Maybe they had lost that ability once they had gotten old enough. Maybe it wouldn’t work, or it wouldn’t be enough. But they had to try. They didn’t really have any other options, unless you counted waiting for something else to come their way.

But they would need to bring the twins back together in order to see if it would work. That could have disastrous consequences. They each asked the twins what they thought, and they agreed that it was worth the risk.

Maybe it was irresponsible. The twins would have been desperate to see each other, consequences be damned. But they were desperate, too, and they just wanted it all to be over already.

Within the week, Mr. DeMasi and Emmet had packed their bags and bid Drayden goodbye, Emmet’s first words spoken aloud to him.

Along the drive there, the twins had felt it as they regained their connection, felt as it got more and more stable. It was simultaneously relieving and terrifying.

It didn’t instantly solve the problem. But they quickly realized that it was, indeed, possible. It took a while to properly develop, but eventually, blocking the connection between themselves came about as naturally as using it.

There were some things that they couldn’t completely stop. It was easy for them to lose their grip and let their feelings spill over to the other if they got too upset, and sometimes certain thoughts were shared that were meant to stay private.

But generally, the two had a good grasp on it by the time they set out on their journeys together.

That didn’t mean it was completely quiet between them, though. They still had conversations no one else could hear or see. They still shared their emotions, too, though not in full; instead of feeling them as one, it was more of a quiet hum in the background all the time, so that each would always know how the other was doing. Another constant was the way they could both feel two heartbeats in their chests at all times, comforting, assuring them that they weren’t alone.

They were always aware of each other, even when they were apart.

That’s why when Ingo disappeared, Emmet was the first to know.