Chapter Text
Rose!
Without seeing him, Rose Reeves knew that the voice he heard from below belonged to a beautiful man.
Beautiful men existed. Rose had yet to meet one in real life. All of the men who worked with him in the mines and all of the men he shared the necessary criminal enterprise of sexual encounters with were calcified by the lives they lived. But Rose saw a world full of different men on the telly. They had enchanting, kind eyes, or dazzling smiles, or hair that looked quite satisfying to muss, or, like the one calling him deeper into the mine, lovely baritone voices that were not so posh as to make him feel inferior but soft enough at the edges to make him feel disarmed.
Rose, there's something down here! Follow my voice!
Rose did not need to be commanded. He had by now convinced himself that the most beautiful human being in the history of the world was in the mine that killed his father and would one day likely kill him. Perhaps this was that day. It did occur to Rose that he might have breathed in something and hallucinated a voice in the throes of dying. In such a case, he could simply hallucinate his torch having enough battery to get him to the end.
Dig! the voice said. Dig there!
Rose sort of liked how desperate the voice sounded.
But he had a job to do. Which Pokémon could he have dig? Was it dangerous to bring out Copperajah here? He was far away from the work site and uncertain of the way back. Well, if he was going to die today, he would die trying.
Eager for something to do, Copperajah rent earth and stone with her trunk. Rose did see a faint glow when a crack appeared. He told her to focus there. She saw it too, so perhaps he wasn't imagining this.
Part of the wall caved. Rose gasped - terrible idea in a coal mine - recalled his first Pokémon and scrabbled in the dark until he smacked into another hard surface. He had dropped his torch. When the falling rocks ceased he crawled cautiously to retrieve it.
He had uncovered a great dark egg.
Oh, Rose! said the voice, but then it changed. He heard his name that one final, tremulous time, and then the voice of the ethereal hero was gone, replaced by this was how Rose could build the future. By listening to the creature within this egg, he could escape this mine, he could liberate Galar from the necessity of this mine, he could build the future.
Rose was the future. He knew it just as he had known the voice of the only man he would ever love.