Thunderlight

(Cont.) A Celebration of Love

"Montgomery?" Florian starts, eyes wide. He narrows them. "What are you doing in my room?"

"I was just looking for you," he says, his mouth heavy and dry. His heart is pounding. "I wanted to talk to you."

"So you had to break in?" Florian sniffs, slithering past him and rolling his eyes. "Don't tell me you've lost all your manners out on the road."

Mott watches him. Florian doesn't seem to notice, too preoccupied rummaging through his bag. Swallowing the lump in his throat. His eyes dart down to the family pendant on his neck. He focuses on the black, glittering jewel inside.

"Well? I don't have all night," Florian snips, closing his back and placing it back on the hook. Raising a characteristically haughty brow at him, he demands, "What did you need?"

The black jewel looks familiar. Sickeningly familiar. It's the inscriptions, Mott realizes, with a sense of panicked detachment.

Thunderstorms.

"Montgomery."

His eyes shoot up to Florian's. Florian watches him, a taut hesitance beginning to creep into his features. Florian's gaze becomes needle-sharp, defensive yet probing. Mott can hardly breathe.

"It's you," Mott says, trembling from head to toe. "It's you."

Florian stiffens.

For a long, drawn out moment, neither of them speak. All they do is stare at each other, tense and unblinking. Mott's not sure that either of them even breathe.

Then, with a sharp turn of his head, Florian speaks.

"What are you talking about? Of course I'm me; what did you expect when you came into my room, to find someone else? You've clearly had too much to drink tonight," he states, his tone cold and callous. He sounds nothing like himself. Mott wonders if he even knows Florian's true self to make that judgement. "Why don't you go home and rest. We'll talk in the morning."

Mott nods, numb. He takes a step back, toward the door. Florian watches him, unmoving, unblinking, coiled up tight and ready to pounce.

His heart pounds.

They watch each other.

In a flash, Mott lunches forward with his scalchop, slashing at the pendant.

Florian whips aside, narrowly dodging, but not fast enough to keep the pendant from being sliced from his neck. Mott snatches the pendant from the air, reaching out to rip the jewel from it, but he barely brushes a finger against it before Florian retaliates with a blindingly rapid strike.

Staggering back and crashing into the desk, Mott shakes his head to reorient himself. Florian is gone.

His breath halts in his throat, aching and frantic. He whips his head back and forth in a desperate search, catching a glimpse of green entirely by chance—from the ceiling. Up in the rafters, Florian looms like a gargoyle statue, glowering down at him. It reminds him of the Roselake Museum, of the killer in the rafters—the killer that struck with blindingly rapid speed.

The shadows cast up onto Florian's face in an eerie caricature of the devil.

Mott's never seen this face on his childhood friend.

"It's you," he rasps, somewhere between rage and fear and disbelief. He wants to believe it's not real. He wants to wake up and laugh at himself for having such a silly nightmare. But Florian's tail curls possessively around the pendant, the pendant holding Zekrom's stone. "It was you this whole time?"