Roaring Snow as Sand
Feb. 28th, 2011 07:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
axolotlTitle: Roaring Snow as Sand
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ainbthech
Rating: PG-13
Verse: Gen IV, both DPP and HG/SS
Characters: Kotone/Silver, implied Silver/Green, Cynthia, Dawn, Volkner
Notes: A remix ofkitsuneasika 's Moments Through An Hourglass
Summary: Kotone travels across the regions and then some, trying to work out her wanderlust, keeping up a long-distance relationship with Silver and accidentally falling into questions of friendship, sexuality, and theology.
I’m at this island, Kotone writes. Well, islands— there’s this kind of big one, where I’m on, and then there’s these two smaller ones near it. The people here are really friendly. They worship this sea-god thing, though, and I think… well, I think it might be Lugia. I didn’t say anything to them, of course— I mean, I don’t want to tell them that I caught their god!
She puts down her pen and laughs, looking out the window at the sun setting on the beach. A few Wingull, distant, move across the cloud cover, and the waves roll in, but otherwise the view is still; there is nothing but ocean to the west, and no one out sailing today. The tourist season is over, and while these islands don’t experience winter per se, the residents and a few budget-minded vacationers are the only people here besides Kotone at this point, and she’s thinking about moving on once her current research project is done.
A little part of me wants to let Lugia play in the water, she writes, nibbling on her bottom lip and still gazing out the window. Just for a few minutes, enough for someone to be certain they saw but not long enough for any good photography. But when I thought about it I heard two voices in my head: Professor Elm saying something about “ethical participant-observer relationships” and you saying “Well, what would you hope to gain by doing that?” I know you think you’re so calculating and cruel, but it’s a really good question— it’s not worth poking fun at the people here for a few moments of laughter if it’s going to set back understanding of Pokemon ecology in the region by tens of years.
She kicks her feet up onto the desk, crossing stockinged legs and reading over her letter again. She tries to send a message to Silver every few weeks, often thinking of him alone in his apartment watching movies. Occasionally when her messenger returns, they are carrying what might as well be a novel from him — but usually she gets a sentence or three written on the back of an envelope, brusque, resentful. When she gets those letters, she wishes that he’d been willing to come along, so that she could read his face and see what he really thought about the people she spoke to. Kotone cannot tell when someone is lying, but she can tell when Silver knows someone is lying, and multiple times in her travels she’s wished for his knowing glances, the way his left eyebrow arches, his bangs in his eyes.
But his feet loved familiar ground as much as hers needed to find new places; he’d even moved back into Viridian City once he’d stopped challenging her for the Championship back and forth and they decided to turn it over to the next generation, Kotone retiring in order to travel. They’d tried traveling together, spending time together in Hoenn trying to fill out their Pokedexes, and they bickered the whole time. As much as Silver had complained about their lives being boring, he’d missed the routine of the Championship challenges, battling and training, making a social group out of the Elite Four and their groupies. Wandering Hoenn not knowing where they’d sleep each night made Kotone feel alive again, remembering sleeping on forest floors and mountaintops as she collected her gym badges. Silver just longed for indoor plumbing. So he hadn’t come with her when she decided to see the world beyond the registered regions, and here she is, writing him letters because there’s no phone service well south of the Orange Islands.
When she calls out Pidgeot, she promises him he won’t have to make the trip again for a while, and he reluctantly takes the letter in his talons. Darkness blankets the ocean as he disappears. Kotone hopes that Silver is in a good mood when he gets her letter, not daring to hope that he’s written a letter already, and goes to sleep.
—
Farfetch’d and Kotone stop in a tree to rest for a few minutes, the bird Pokemon munching on a berry and Kotone eating a sandwich she’d made the previous day. The two are on their way from the islands to Sinnoh, and it is early fall, the leaves just starting to change. Other bird Pokemon fly past them, keeping some distance but looking at the Farfetch’d with curiosity; your average Taillow has never seen a Farfetch’d at all, let alone one sitting in a tree next to a human.
Kotone is lost in thought, watching clouds go by, when Farfetch’d almost knocks her out of the tree, rubbing its beak against her side pocket. “Farfetch’d! Stop that!” She grabs a branch to steady herself, the Pokemon backing off but then rubbing its head more gently against her pocket. She sighs, and pulls out the photograph of Silver, caught in a rare unabashed smile. “It’s not time to meet him yet,” she says, patting the bird on the head. It squawks and flaps its wings. “I know it would only be a day to Kanto, but when I left, he made me promise that I wouldn’t come back until I was back, and we’re not done yet.” She puts the photo back into her pocket, and flips open her Pokegear. “We’ve still got twenty or thirty Pokemon left to meet, and Sinnoh to visit, and who knows what else.”
Something catches her eye. I have reception here? The Johto/Kanto cell phone network hasn’t caught on across the regions yet, but sometimes there’s coverage in the funniest places, especially if you’re in the top of one of the tallest trees for miles. He never said I shouldn’t call... we did talk on the phone a couple of times when I was in the near Orange Islands... “Is this what you wanted, hmm?” She looks over at Farfetch’d, who is gazing intently at its leek and ignoring her. “Oh, fine.” She dials.
Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. “Hello,” says Silver, “you’ve reached my voicemail, most likely in error.” She hangs up, and calls again. The same non-response, and she hangs up again, unwilling to leave a message. She pulls a leaf off of the tree, still green, and lets it float downward, watching it until it is indistinguishable.
“What if I’m losing him?”
—
“You’re not losing him,” says Cynthia, resting a hand on her shoulder. “He wrote you a thirty-page letter not three weeks ago, didn’t he?”
Volkner nods, sipping tea, as the three of them sit in a cafe booth, Kotone twisting her napkin into shreds and leaving her pastry untouched. “It sounded pretty positive, too.”
“Positively exhausting,” says Kotone. “He told me about every Pokemon battle he’d had in the last month, and nothing about himself.” She twists the napkin again, back and forth, worrying the shreds with her fingers. “Do you know how many battles that is? I know Gengar uses Shadow Ball. I don’t need to hear about it fifty-six times. I want to know if he’s happy.”
“Hon.” Cynthia puts her other hand on the napkin, catching Kotone’s fingers, holding them still. “The man is trying to find out what happiness is, and as much as he wants you there to find it for him, he has to find it for himself. If he finds it in training, is he really any different from any of us?”
Volkner looks into his tea and says nothing.
“I know it’s hard, Kotone, but if you want to travel the world and find yourself, you have to let him find himself, too. And when you go home, you’ll be able to share a whole new set of things with him. At this point it’s been how long?”
“More than a year,” she says, taking a deep breath and drawing her hands back, resting them on the edge of the table.
“If you made it that long,” says Volkner, “you’ll make it longer.” He laughs. “I spent five years apart from my last boyfriend, and when we saw each other again, we had a whole new set of stories to tell each other for the first time.”
“And then you broke up.” Kotone covers her mouth when she sees Volkner wince. “Oh no, I—” He takes a sip of tea and makes a dismissive gesture, staring over her shoulder.
“You can owe me one later. Is that your Pidgeot at the window?”
Cynthia and Kotone turn and, sure enough, there is Pidgeot at the window, looking more worn out than he has for a long time, holding an envelope. Kotone bursts out of her seat and runs to the window, frantically turning the crank that opens it, the bird Pokemon pushing his beak through the glass and trying to squeeze through immediately. When he finally gets in, he tosses the envelope at Cynthia, and starts in on Kotone’s pastry.
“Pidgeot! Thank you so much.” Kotone runs her fingers through the bird’s feathers, willing herself to focus on her Pokemon and not on the letter. “Was it a bad flight?” She feels him tense up and bites her lip. “I’m sorry.” She waits for him to finish the pastry, ignoring Cynthia’s amused stare, and then coaxes him back into his ball, slipping it back into her bag.
She sits back down, and grabs the envelope, opening it with a fingernail. “It’s short,” she says, “only two or three pages.”
“No shadow balls this time?” Volkner asks.
Kotone doesn’t respond, her eyes growing wider as she finishes the first page, tosses it aside, and her mouth hangs open as she reads the second. “A boy,” she says quietly, grabbing the first page and scanning it again, “it sounds like he found himself a boy.”
“He swings that way and you didn’t tell me?” Volkner puts down his tea. “Because I would have—”
“Volkner!” Cynthia’s glare leaves Volkner ashen. “Oh, Kotone, I’m so sorry, that must be—”
“Wonderful!” Kotone looks up, eyes meeting Cynthia’s, intense. “It’s wonderful.”
“Huh?” The other trainers look at Kotone, then at each other, and then at Kotone.
“But weren’t you just worried—”
“I’m not going to lose him if he sleeps with someone else,” she says, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “I want him to be happy, not celibate. How cruel do you think I am?” She laughs, and then looks down at the letter again, and sits bolt upright. “Oh no, but he hasn’t realized the boy is flirting with him yet!” She grabs Cynthia by the shoulders, and the former champion looks at her placidly, biting the insides of her lips to hold back a smile. “Please, can I borrow a flying-type, right immediately now?”
—
Two months later, the three of them sit in the same cafe, along with Dawn, Sinnoh’s current champion, younger than any of the rest of them and a bit spacey. Cynthia fawns over her like nothing else, though, and Kotone’s grown fond of her if only because the girl can’t help but smile. (She’s only a few years younger than Kotone — she’s been Champion long enough that her reputation will hit Kanto soon — but that skirt? Really.)
“So now that I’ve hit all the gyms, what’s next?” Kotone asks.
“Well,” says Dawn, “How many badges do you have? There should be eight.”
“I’ve only got seven,” says Kotone, “but I think I’ve hit all the gyms. Maybe I misplaced a badge? It’s been a whirlwind of a trip.”
“Or maybe you misplaced a gym leader,” says Cynthia.
Kotone takes a bite of her pastry and shakes her head. “Nope,” she says as she chews, counting them off on her fingers.
Cynthia laughs, and looks at Dawn, who joins her in laughing. Volkner sips his tea dispassionately.
“What?” She puts down her pastry and takes a sip of water, dabbing a bit of sugar off of her face. “What’s so funny? I mean, I could have miscounted.”
“You’ve talked to all eight gym leaders, you’re right about that,” says Cynthia. “But I don’t think you’ve battled them all. There’s someone you’re missing.” Dawn tittered.
“Wait a minute!” Kotone blushes, slapping her forehead. “You’re a gym leader? But you’ve been traveling with me this whole time!”
Volkner, laughing, nearly spits out his tea, and Dawn blinks.
“Oh, Kotone.” Cynthia shakes her head, hair curling around her chair’s legs. “You’re so close, and yet.” Her laughter rings clear, and when she puts her hand on Kotone’s to remove it from her forehead, she leaves it there longer than she needs to. “Try again.”
This time when Kotone’s eyes light on Volkner, he smiles — which she is seeing for only the third time ever — and she squeezes Cynthia’s hand in recognition, and then realizes she’s squeezed her hand, and lets go, and bites her nails, and then shoves her hand into her pocket, and finds Silver’s picture there, and at this point her face is as red as a pokeball.
“I do more than dispense sex advice for your boyfriend, you know.” Volkner takes another sip of tea, clearly enjoying Kotone’s embarrassment. “Not that I don’t enjoy so doing. I run the gym here, not to mention the whole power grid, and while I don’t battle very often, yes, I’m the gym leader.”
“Not that he hasn’t irritated the league by spending all of his time building things and drinking tea instead of holding gym battles,” Cynthia says. “Which is why you’d never know.”
Kotone lets go of Silver’s picture and grabs a pokeball off of her belt. “What type are you, Volkner?”
“Electric. Shocking, I know.” Cynthia groans, and Dawn laughs.
“Uhh.” Kotone puts her pokeball back. “I, uh, only have flying types right now, because I keep sending letters to Silver. I’m gonna have to hit a PC first...”
“That’s just fine,” says Volkner. “I’m not done with my tea.”
—
Cynthia helped me check off a couple things on my Pokedex I hadn’t had before, Kotone writes from Cynthia’s guest bedroom. She had Palkia and Giratina! When I asked her how she had managed to get two legendary Pokemon, she didn’t seem to want to tell the story, but she did explain all sorts of things about the Dialga and Palkia creation myth. In Sinnoh, people worship Dialga and Palkia like we worship Arceus — Cynthia believes that Arceus may have created Dialga and Palkia, but she isn’t sure. There’s also a third Pokemon, Giratina, that she claims is even stronger than them, and there was something about a Distortion World that I didn’t entirely understand.
She looks at Silver’s most recent letter and shakes her head. I’m sorry that things didn’t work out with Green, but I’m glad that you got to have some fun, and I hope that you two can stay friends. After all, someone needs to drink hot chocolate with you until I come back! I love you and think of you often.
Cynthia knocks at the door, leaning against the door frame. She is wearing a floor-length black bathrobe and her hair is twisted up in a braided bun; Kotone has gotten used to this, how even in preparing for bed she has to look perfect. “Writing to Silver again?”
“Yes,” says Kotone, “I’m just finishing. Do you think I could borrow Togekiss again? Pidgeot doesn’t enjoy the trips, and Farfetch’d doesn’t know the way.” She smiles, and tosses the bird’s pokeball in the air, catching it. “Plus I want to introduce it to Silver for the first time myself.”
“Of course,” says Cynthia, reaching into her bathrobe pocket. “I brought her along in case you asked me that. You haven’t sent a letter all month, and when you were up here for four hours, I figured that’s what you were doing.” She tosses the Friend Ball to Kotone, who catches it, and pushes its button. Togekiss flies out, wings in a glittery flutter, and waits for Kotone to stuff her letter into an envelope.
“I’m surprised that she listens to you so readily.” Cynthia sits down on the bed next to Kotone. “Generally a Pokemon will only accept commands from its trainer, and other trainers have no influence.”
“I guess you’ve just trained her that well!” Kotone hands the envelope off to Togekiss, who smiles widely and then whooshes out the window into the night, envelope stuffed safely within its feathers. “And she doesn’t mind the trip at all, which is such a relief; most of the birds I’ve found have made the trip reluctantly or not at all.”
“Togekiss isn’t quite a bird, and it’s not just my training.” Cynthia places a hand on Kotone’s shoulder, and Kotone leans into the touch, yawning. “You have a way with Pokemon, Kotone, much like you have a way with people. I know you don’t always see it, but Dawn is the same way. You both— we all— have a champion’s manner.”
Kotone kicks her shoes off. “I don’t feel like I have a champion’s manner, or really a champion’s anything. I mean, I love my Pokemon, and I love to work with them, and train together, but I’m glad I’m not trying to hold the role of Champion anymore. It’s nice to just be out here learning and living where everybody doesn’t know who I am.”
Cynthia laughs. “Well, after you waltzed through all of Sinnoh’s gyms without having a single Pokemon faint, people are starting to talk, you know. You should give yourself at least that much credit.”
“I know I shouldn’t have looked so flashy, but I didn’t want any of my Pokemon to get hurt, especially after all the work I’ve made them do carrying letters for me.” Kotone takes off her hat and undoes her pigtails, shaking her hair out behind her. ”Hey, look, it’s almost like I have longer hair than you for once!”
Cynthia runs her fingers through Kotone’s hair, a bit past her shoulders, and lets her hand settle back on Kotone’s far shoulder, pulling her gently in. “Kotone, let’s go to Hoenn.”
“Zuh.”
Cynthia laughs, but doesn’t move her arm. “Zuh? Is that a new type of Pokemon?”
“No, I, I just... that was sort of out of nowhere, and I’d been thinking about going back home soon.” She looks down at her stockinged feet and kicks them up and down, not quite touching the floor. “It’s been something like three years, and while I’m missing a couple of Pokemon, it was never really about catching them all. I’m not sure, for the first time, why I’m not home. Does that mean it’s time?”
Cynthia takes a deep breath, bites off the first thing she wants to say, and then shakes her head. “I don’t think so, but I can’t tell you that. I do think it means you’re ready to leave Sinnoh. Have you ever been to Hoenn?”
Kotone laughs. “It was a disaster.”
“Weather?”
“Oh no, we went in the summer and it was gorgeous. It was all Silver, really. He hates travel. Everything was either too warm or too dark or too uncivilized or — when I begrudgingly took him into town — too urban. We left within two weeks. I’ve not been back.”
“Come with me.”
Kotone closes her eyes for a moment, leaning into Cynthia, and thinking. She wants to run her fingers through Silver’s hair, drink hot chocolate with him, and laugh when Typhlosion steals his socks. She wants to see if his apartment has changed — she bets it hasn’t — and sit down with him and Green and find out who blushes more when she teases them. She misses her mother, too, and Clair and Lance, and Ethan... but not the way she misses Silver. His letters have been terse again, like there’s something else on his mind, and she hasn’t asked him what it is. There’s a part of her still worried, thinking she’s going to lose him, and that if she doesn’t go back, she doesn’t have to find out, so she says, quietly, “OK.”
“Can we bring Dawn?”
Kotone huffs, looking up at Cynthia and mimicking a child. “Do we haaaaave toooooo?”
“Well, no.” Cynthia slides a finger under one of Kotone’s overall straps and pulls up lightly. “But she wants desperately to sleep with you, and she could also use a vacation.”
“Zuh.”
“Again with the Zuh!” Cynthia laughs. “You seriously couldn’t tell?”
“I, uh, no.” Kotone makes a face. “I can’t read Dawn to save my life. Every time I see her I wish Silver were there.”
“Why Silver?”
“Because he’d be able to read her, and he’d have told me how she felt, and why, and I’d know what to do.”
“Well.” Cynthia lets go of the fabric and brushes through Kotone’s hair, staring out the window. “Maybe it’s best that you have to make the decision by yourself. I probably shouldn’t have said anything, but she was terrified you didn’t even like girls, and I told her that was patently ridiculous, and—”
“Why’d you tell her that?”
Cynthia squeezes Kotone’s shoulder. “Well, dear...”
“I didn’t say I don’t.” She leans in close to Cynthia, breathing deeply. Cynthia smells slightly of roses. “But I don’t know. I’ve never felt about a woman like I’ve felt about Silver, and I’ve only kissed a woman the one time at a party under highly dubious circumstances. Sometimes I worry that I’m straight and it bothers me.”
Cynthia’s brow furrows and Kotone realizes this is the first time she’s ever seen Cynthia look flummoxed. She wonders if Dawn, having taken the championship from her, is the only other person who has seen this face.
“Kotone, we share a bed like three nights a week.”
“That’s different and you know it.” Neither of them speaks for a moment.
“You’re right and I’m sorry.” Cynthia scoots around behind Kotone, pulling her close and brushing through her hair. “How about this. We’ll go to Hoenn, and Dawn can join us once we’ve settled in, and you’ll know what she’s thinking and you can see if you think the same way?”
“And it’s okay if I don’t?”
“Yes,” Cynthia says firmly.
“Then let’s do it,” says Kotone, closing her eyes. “I’ll tell Silver when Togekiss comes back.”
—
When Dawn arrives in Hoenn, she and Kotone finally get the chance to have a battle somewhere that no one except Cynthia will be watching. Kotone understands, finally, how Dawn got to be champion and what Cynthia sees in her and why someone might want to kiss her. When she steps into the ring, even a makeshift one, all of the quaver and faux-ditz falls out of her voice; her Pokemon are responsive, strong, and fierce. The bond she has with Empoleon, in particular, reminds Kotone of her own bond with Typhlosion or the way that Silver and Crobat are, or at least were when she left, essentially inseparable. Dawn wins the battle, although it’s very close and Kotone is hampered by, as usual, carrying Pidgeot and Farfetch’d along.
Unfortunately for Dawn, while Kotone understands intellectually why someone might want to kiss Dawn, the chemistry just isn’t there, so after a friendly week wandering the backwoods of Hoenn, Dawn heads home.
Two weeks later, a Swellow perches on Cynthia’s shoulder, and she tenses up, turning away from Kotone. “I have to go.”
“That’s fine, I’ll be here when you get back.”
“No, like go go.”
“Because a Swellow landed on you? They’re not native, but trainers are trading and releasing birds in non-native regions all the time, and—”
“It’s Dawn’s Swellow. I’m riding it back to Sinnoh right now. I’m so sorry, Kotone.” Cynthia makes a fist with her left hand, digging her nails into her palm. Kotone is afraid she’ll draw blood. “I’m sure I’ll see you again. I look forward to meeting Silver. And I promise I’ll explain this later. But right now, I need to leave.”
There is nothing Kotone can say, so she is silent, and after a tight hug that lasts two minutes and a kiss on the forehead, Cynthia is gone, and Kotone is alone in the woods. She doesn’t know what else to do, so she goes to sleep, her tent colder than it’s been in years. The next morning, she writes.
Cynthia left yesterday. She got a call from Dawn— that’s the girl who’s Champion of Sinnoh now, the girl I told you about. Anyways, I don’t know what she said, but it must have been important, because Cynthia left for Sinnoh only an hour later. It feels kind of weird, her not being here. I’ve gotten pretty used to her being around. But don’t worry! I’m doing just fine. Hoenn is great!! I know you don’t like it very much, but I still hope I can share it with you sometime. I’m in the woods near Fortree City, which I think you’d hate, and I met the gym leader, but decided not to battle anyone in Hoenn this trip. We had dinner together, though, and she’s really nice! If you can believe it, she has more flying Pokemon than I do, even though I’m carting around all of these Pokemon to send letters to you with!!! She doesn’t say anything about it, but she intends to go home within a week and surprise Silver; while she’ll want to come back to Hoenn sometime, she’s become so used to Cynthia’s presence, and in her absence, she realizes just how much she misses Silver. It’s been almost four years. She wants to kiss him again before his hair turns gray.
When she calls out Pidgeot, who hasn’t had to send a letter in months, she misses Togekiss. When she’s sent Pidgeot off, and notices that she still has Togekiss’s pokeball on her belt, she realizes that her journey isn’t over yet.
—
When she gets back to Sunyshore, Volkner tells her that, yes, Cynthia was here; Dawn has fallen horribly sick, but Cynthia believes that she can summon Arceus and convince Arceus to heal Dawn. He tells her that the two of them have gone to the Sinjoh Ruins; he thinks it’s a fool’s errand but hopes against hope that Cynthia is right. He hadn’t known that Dawn was sick; no one had, apparently, except Cynthia. She packs up as much food as she can carry, and then she and Togekiss are off, the Pokemon refusing to go back into her ball and insisting on being the one to search for Cynthia.
This is how Kotone finds them: Cynthia holds Dawn in her arms, the young Champion no longer able to walk. Cynthia’s hair pools on the rocks behind her as she kneels, looking up at Arceus, tears in her eyes. She’s been here for hours, having hiked the last five miles, all of her blankets and jackets wrapped around Dawn to protect her from the cold. The wind whips her hair, tangling it, and she doesn’t notice. She and the god are holding eye contact and Kotone suspects they have been for a long time.
The snowstorm raging isn’t anything Kotone would have made her Pokemon fly through or, in fact, allowed them to fly through; but Togekiss refused to stop, perhaps because she guessed that Cynthia was in there, and somehow the two of them made it there alive. Arceus stands on a giant stone platform with a triangle carved into it, much like the one Kotone and Cynthia visited in Sinnoh.
Kotone doesn’t get a clear view of what happens next, except that Arceus glows and Dawn glows and she looks revitalized and then Cynthia glows black and suddenly she’s calling out all of her Pokemon, and Arceus shoots bursts of black energy at her, and one by one her Pokemon jump in front of her to shield her, and fall down. Togekiss flies over to take her turn, and Kotone is running, calling out Pidgeot and Typhlosion and digging through her bag to see if she has something, anything, and as Togekiss takes a second shot of darkness and shrieks, she pulls out something spherical, and hears Professor Elm, almost fifteen years ago: “It’ll catch any Pokemon without fail... I think you can make better use of it than I can.” She runs as fast as she can up the steps onto the stone platform, standing next to Typhlosion, the last Pokemon standing, in front of Cynthia.
“Arceus!” She shouts, and the god’s eyes turn to her. “Before you strike her down, tell me this: Are you a Pokemon?”
“Kotone, wait—” Cynthia coughs. “You’ll—”
Arceus shifts colors from black to blue and nods in assent.
“Good,” says Kotone. “Then get in the you-damned ball.” The Master Ball flies, and Arceus shimmers and turns red and is sucked into the ball. It rocks back and forth once, and the miasma lifts off of Cynthia, and she falls into the snow; it rocks back and forth a second time, and Dawn runs over to Cynthia, brushing the snow out of her face, looking at Kotone in shock; it rocks back and forth a third time, and Typhlosion growls, getting into a battle stance, ready for the god to pop out of the ball —
And then a soft click, and silence.
The snow starts to stick to the ball as all three women watch it, and then it disappears, the few flakes on it blowing away.
“I guess you can’t catch God after all,” says Dawn, but Cynthia, holding her coat around her tightly, shakes her head.
“Bill’s PC.”
—
In the nearby cottage, a hiker sits drinking coffee, and offers coffee to the three women; Cynthia accepts a mug, and the others decline.
“It’s not often that I see anyone else up here, let alone three people who arrived in a snowstorm. What brings you here?”
Dawn and Kotone look at each other, and then at Cynthia, who takes a sip of coffee, trying to stay cool, only the shaking of her hands giving her away. “Well,” she says, “are you familiar with the story of Arceus and Dialga, Palkia, and Giratina?”
The hiker’s bushy eyebrows perk up, and he strokes his beard, leaning back in his chair. “I came here to research the mysteries of Arceus, though I’ve never before heard Giratina connected. Arceus hasn’t shown up the whole time I’ve been here, no matter who I pulled out of the PC and had search.”
Kotone grabbed the table. “There’s a PC? Up here?”
The hiker smiled oddly. “Someone installed it so that they could do what we’re doing, I guess; hunt for Arceus.”
“Hunt?” Cynthia laughs, bitterly. “As if you could hunt a god.” Kotone looks at her, but Cynthia refuses to look up from her mug.
“A PC in the ruins. Someone must have really cared.” Kotone is knotting napkins again, leaving tiny shreds of paper on the cabin’s table. “I wish Silver were here.” It’s not that he’d know what to do; it’s that she would know what to do if he were there.
The hiker put his mug down on the table, shaking it slightly. “Silver?” Kotone nodded, and he spun the mug around. “You don’t look like the type to be digging for ores.”
Dawn laughs, her face still flushed from the cold. “Silver’s the name of a person — her boyfriend. Mineral names are in these days, if you haven’t heard.”
“I see.” He drains the rest of his coffee in one long sip.
So what would I do if Silver were here? Kotone thinks. Well, I’d make him hot chocolate so he could pretend it were coffee, and then he’d finish it and want to go to bed, but I wouldn’t want to go to bed. I’d want to take him outside, and watch the clouds, and he’d get frustrated because it was cold... She looks up, and Dawn and Cynthia are talking about something while the hiker wanders into another room. So we’d walk, and talk, and I’d hold his hand through his glove and he’d get all blushy and... this isn’t helping.
“Kotone, what are you thinking about?” Dawn stares across the table. “You’re destroying all the napkins.”
“Oh.” She pushes the pile of shredded paper away from her and turns to look out the window. The storm is much worse than it had been. “We should go to sleep.”
“And here I just had coffee.” Cynthia pushes the half-empty mug towards Kotone’s napkin shreddings. “But you’re right, we won’t even make it up to the stone platform in this. I’m sorry you got brought into this, Kotone.”
“I’m not, and you shouldn’t be. I’m just upset that you thought you couldn’t bring me along. I would have come.”
“I didn’t want you to know.” Dawn stands up. “I’m sorry.”
“What—”
“Can we just not talk about it?” Dawn walks over to the sink and pours herself a glass of water, unwilling to look at Kotone.
She takes a deep breath. “I don’t want to pry. I just want to ask one question.”
Dawn doesn’t turn around. “Fine.”
“Was this the only thing you could have done?”
She pours the glass of water into the sink, watching the water swirl and disappear. “Probably.”
—
The storm continues for days, and the four of them stay in the cabin, eating the food that Kotone packed and playing cards. Cynthia and Dawn fight over the chance to play paired with Kotone, and so she takes the hiker just to be contrary. They have absolutely no rapport — he can’t read her to save his life, or at least the game — but he can tell when Cynthia’s bluffing, every time, and so they still manage to win a bit more than half the time. Between this and Kotone’s insistence on sleeping on the couch, as there are only two beds, she knows she’s hurting Cynthia’s feelings. But she’s still upset at being abandoned, and it’s obvious that Dawn will be jealous if Kotone shares the bed with Cynthia, and Cynthia will be jealous if Kotone shares the bed with Dawn, and when everyone’s gone to sleep Kotone can just curl up with Typhlosion, anyway, and be warmer than the rest of them.
One night Dawn suggests that maybe all three of them could pile into the same bed, and Kotone swears that if it hasn’t stopped snowing the next morning she’s going to go out anyway, because she’s tired of cards and she’s tired of lesbians and she wants to fix this whole Arceus mess and go home. Luckily, the next morning it isn’t snowing, at least not much, and so Kotone heads out early, with Cynthia, Dawn and the hiker promising to come along once they’ve fixed breakfast and outfitted themselves. They trudge back up to the top of the ruins, Cynthia somehow having managed to find a walking-stick in the cabin that matches her outfit precisely.
“I thought we’d never get out of that cabin.”
“Oh, it wasn’t so bad, was it?” Cynthia laughs, her voice ringing off of the mountain peaks and echoing muffled in the snow. “I think this time I might finally have learned to play bridge.”
“You’re not anxious?” Kotone pulls her scarf tight, stomping along, the stone slab in sight now. “You could have died, and for all I know putting Arceus into the PC has ruined the whole thing, or when I pull it out he’ll destroy us, or banish us to that place you talked about, or I don’t even know.”
Cynthia laughs again.
“I try to stay positive. I really do. But Cynthia, I put God in a ball. What are we supposed to do if it comes out and isn’t happy?”
“Oh, Kotone.” She reached into her pocket and pulls out a Master Ball, tossing it in the air, and then putting it back into her pocket.
“You don’t think you’re the only one with one of those, do you? We’ll be fine. But,” she starts walking up the stairs to the stone platform, “just in case, I’ll bring out Giratina and Palkia in case we need to stall for time, OK?”
“I guess that will do... I just worry it won’t work twice.” The two of them walk up onto the platform, uncovered with snow despite the elevation, the whorled triangle pattern oddly warm to the touch. Kotone looks around nervously as Cynthia pokes away at the PC, returning with five Ultra Balls. She walks up to the PC, looking over her shoulder as Cynthia arranges her Pokemon, and returns all of her Pokemon except Typhlosion. Who do you bring to a battle with God? Eventually, carefully avoiding looking at her inbox, she selects Lugia, Ho-Oh, Lucario, and Gyarados, and then opens her inbox.
One Pokemon: Arceus.
“Cynthia, it’s there.”
“Well call it out already!” Cynthia shouts, a formidable array of legendaries aligned behind her.
The Master Ball pops out of the machine, and Kotone takes it into her hand. For a moment, she considers just throwing it as far as she can down the mountain, but then she shakes her head, and walks to the center of the platform. “I suppose I’ve always wanted to say this,” she says, and then lifts the ball, pushing the button. “Arceus, I choose you!”
Arceus is there, looking at her quizzically, and Cynthia has her hand in her pocket, just in case. Most of her Pokemon stand beside her, but Giratina and Palkia approach Arceus, and stand in two of the three points of the triangle.
“Oh,” says Cynthia, her hand in her pocket relaxing. “Kotone, do you see?”
“No,” says Kotone, turning halfway to look at Cynthia but keeping an eye on Arceus. “What should I be looking for?”
“Just watch.”
Arceus kicks up its front legs, and then it is hovering, the colors of its ring shifting and gradually settling on a bluish-gray. Kotone turns and looks at Arceus, who dips its head, and Kotone dips her head in return, and then Arceus lets out a cry that seems to go on forever — Kotone swears she can see the sun rise and set, the clouds move overhead, and snow fall and settle and blow away and melt all in the span of seconds. There is an egg on the third point of the triangle, and Kotone tries to walk toward it, but finds that she cannot move; she watches the egg and it seems like the evolution of the planet from ball of rock to water and land to continents to regions is played out across its shell.
When Arceus stops roaring, the roar continues, muffled, from inside the egg. Its shell cracks, and a quadrupedal form unfolds from it to stand ten feet tall, much larger than could have been contained in the egg. It ceases its roar, and suddenly Kotone can move again, almost falling down from the shock, lurching awkwardly toward Arceus, who keeps her upright and then steps back. It gestures to the Master Ball with its head, and then to the newly hatched Pokemon, a line of red energy between Arceus and the Master Ball fading before the god Pokemon flies up into the sky and vanishes.
“Dialga,” says Cynthia, “but...”
Dawn, frantic, has raced up the mountain on the back of Dialga, and when they get to the stone platform, both of them stop short. Dialga makes eye contact with Dialga, and the rest of the Pokemon are so flummoxed they hide behind Cynthia, who shakes her head slowly.
“You seriously fooled Arceus with a Ditto?” Dawn hops off of Dialga, looking skeptically at Kotone’s new Pokemon. “How did your
Ditto even know how to do Dialga to begin with? That’s quite an accurate representation. ... What? Why are you staring at me like that?”
—
(The hiker waits for them to leave, and then unscrews the back of the PC, revealing a small black box between the antenna on the outside and the network connection inside the PC. He pulls out the black box, reconnects the antenna, and then closes the PC. The black box slides into a case in his bag, and he calls out a Honchcrow, laughing as they take off.)
—
“Farfetch’d, that’s enough, come back,” says Kotone, laughing. She and the bird had waited outside of Professor Oak’s lab for hours waiting for Silver to finally show up, and the bird was even more excited to see his hair in person than it had been in the photograph years ago. It lets go and walks back over to Kotone, hopping up into her arms.
“What are you doing here?” Silver is angry, but not as angry as she’d thought he would be.
“I missed you,” she says, tilting her head to one side as she makes up something about weather. Silver crosses his arms, the look saying Fine, but you’re explaining this later.
He insists on making sure she is back for good before he will kiss her; by the time the sun sets, she’s wondered why she was ever afraid she’d lose him, and she’s realized just how hard it must have been for him, and as she walks him home, holding his hand, she realizes that she might never have to write him a letter again.
Author:
ainbthech Rating: PG-13
Verse: Gen IV, both DPP and HG/SS
Characters: Kotone/Silver, implied Silver/Green, Cynthia, Dawn, Volkner
Notes: A remix of
kitsuneasika 's Moments Through An HourglassSummary: Kotone travels across the regions and then some, trying to work out her wanderlust, keeping up a long-distance relationship with Silver and accidentally falling into questions of friendship, sexuality, and theology.
I’m at this island, Kotone writes. Well, islands— there’s this kind of big one, where I’m on, and then there’s these two smaller ones near it. The people here are really friendly. They worship this sea-god thing, though, and I think… well, I think it might be Lugia. I didn’t say anything to them, of course— I mean, I don’t want to tell them that I caught their god!
She puts down her pen and laughs, looking out the window at the sun setting on the beach. A few Wingull, distant, move across the cloud cover, and the waves roll in, but otherwise the view is still; there is nothing but ocean to the west, and no one out sailing today. The tourist season is over, and while these islands don’t experience winter per se, the residents and a few budget-minded vacationers are the only people here besides Kotone at this point, and she’s thinking about moving on once her current research project is done.
A little part of me wants to let Lugia play in the water, she writes, nibbling on her bottom lip and still gazing out the window. Just for a few minutes, enough for someone to be certain they saw but not long enough for any good photography. But when I thought about it I heard two voices in my head: Professor Elm saying something about “ethical participant-observer relationships” and you saying “Well, what would you hope to gain by doing that?” I know you think you’re so calculating and cruel, but it’s a really good question— it’s not worth poking fun at the people here for a few moments of laughter if it’s going to set back understanding of Pokemon ecology in the region by tens of years.
She kicks her feet up onto the desk, crossing stockinged legs and reading over her letter again. She tries to send a message to Silver every few weeks, often thinking of him alone in his apartment watching movies. Occasionally when her messenger returns, they are carrying what might as well be a novel from him — but usually she gets a sentence or three written on the back of an envelope, brusque, resentful. When she gets those letters, she wishes that he’d been willing to come along, so that she could read his face and see what he really thought about the people she spoke to. Kotone cannot tell when someone is lying, but she can tell when Silver knows someone is lying, and multiple times in her travels she’s wished for his knowing glances, the way his left eyebrow arches, his bangs in his eyes.
But his feet loved familiar ground as much as hers needed to find new places; he’d even moved back into Viridian City once he’d stopped challenging her for the Championship back and forth and they decided to turn it over to the next generation, Kotone retiring in order to travel. They’d tried traveling together, spending time together in Hoenn trying to fill out their Pokedexes, and they bickered the whole time. As much as Silver had complained about their lives being boring, he’d missed the routine of the Championship challenges, battling and training, making a social group out of the Elite Four and their groupies. Wandering Hoenn not knowing where they’d sleep each night made Kotone feel alive again, remembering sleeping on forest floors and mountaintops as she collected her gym badges. Silver just longed for indoor plumbing. So he hadn’t come with her when she decided to see the world beyond the registered regions, and here she is, writing him letters because there’s no phone service well south of the Orange Islands.
When she calls out Pidgeot, she promises him he won’t have to make the trip again for a while, and he reluctantly takes the letter in his talons. Darkness blankets the ocean as he disappears. Kotone hopes that Silver is in a good mood when he gets her letter, not daring to hope that he’s written a letter already, and goes to sleep.
—
Farfetch’d and Kotone stop in a tree to rest for a few minutes, the bird Pokemon munching on a berry and Kotone eating a sandwich she’d made the previous day. The two are on their way from the islands to Sinnoh, and it is early fall, the leaves just starting to change. Other bird Pokemon fly past them, keeping some distance but looking at the Farfetch’d with curiosity; your average Taillow has never seen a Farfetch’d at all, let alone one sitting in a tree next to a human.
Kotone is lost in thought, watching clouds go by, when Farfetch’d almost knocks her out of the tree, rubbing its beak against her side pocket. “Farfetch’d! Stop that!” She grabs a branch to steady herself, the Pokemon backing off but then rubbing its head more gently against her pocket. She sighs, and pulls out the photograph of Silver, caught in a rare unabashed smile. “It’s not time to meet him yet,” she says, patting the bird on the head. It squawks and flaps its wings. “I know it would only be a day to Kanto, but when I left, he made me promise that I wouldn’t come back until I was back, and we’re not done yet.” She puts the photo back into her pocket, and flips open her Pokegear. “We’ve still got twenty or thirty Pokemon left to meet, and Sinnoh to visit, and who knows what else.”
Something catches her eye. I have reception here? The Johto/Kanto cell phone network hasn’t caught on across the regions yet, but sometimes there’s coverage in the funniest places, especially if you’re in the top of one of the tallest trees for miles. He never said I shouldn’t call... we did talk on the phone a couple of times when I was in the near Orange Islands... “Is this what you wanted, hmm?” She looks over at Farfetch’d, who is gazing intently at its leek and ignoring her. “Oh, fine.” She dials.
Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. “Hello,” says Silver, “you’ve reached my voicemail, most likely in error.” She hangs up, and calls again. The same non-response, and she hangs up again, unwilling to leave a message. She pulls a leaf off of the tree, still green, and lets it float downward, watching it until it is indistinguishable.
“What if I’m losing him?”
—
“You’re not losing him,” says Cynthia, resting a hand on her shoulder. “He wrote you a thirty-page letter not three weeks ago, didn’t he?”
Volkner nods, sipping tea, as the three of them sit in a cafe booth, Kotone twisting her napkin into shreds and leaving her pastry untouched. “It sounded pretty positive, too.”
“Positively exhausting,” says Kotone. “He told me about every Pokemon battle he’d had in the last month, and nothing about himself.” She twists the napkin again, back and forth, worrying the shreds with her fingers. “Do you know how many battles that is? I know Gengar uses Shadow Ball. I don’t need to hear about it fifty-six times. I want to know if he’s happy.”
“Hon.” Cynthia puts her other hand on the napkin, catching Kotone’s fingers, holding them still. “The man is trying to find out what happiness is, and as much as he wants you there to find it for him, he has to find it for himself. If he finds it in training, is he really any different from any of us?”
Volkner looks into his tea and says nothing.
“I know it’s hard, Kotone, but if you want to travel the world and find yourself, you have to let him find himself, too. And when you go home, you’ll be able to share a whole new set of things with him. At this point it’s been how long?”
“More than a year,” she says, taking a deep breath and drawing her hands back, resting them on the edge of the table.
“If you made it that long,” says Volkner, “you’ll make it longer.” He laughs. “I spent five years apart from my last boyfriend, and when we saw each other again, we had a whole new set of stories to tell each other for the first time.”
“And then you broke up.” Kotone covers her mouth when she sees Volkner wince. “Oh no, I—” He takes a sip of tea and makes a dismissive gesture, staring over her shoulder.
“You can owe me one later. Is that your Pidgeot at the window?”
Cynthia and Kotone turn and, sure enough, there is Pidgeot at the window, looking more worn out than he has for a long time, holding an envelope. Kotone bursts out of her seat and runs to the window, frantically turning the crank that opens it, the bird Pokemon pushing his beak through the glass and trying to squeeze through immediately. When he finally gets in, he tosses the envelope at Cynthia, and starts in on Kotone’s pastry.
“Pidgeot! Thank you so much.” Kotone runs her fingers through the bird’s feathers, willing herself to focus on her Pokemon and not on the letter. “Was it a bad flight?” She feels him tense up and bites her lip. “I’m sorry.” She waits for him to finish the pastry, ignoring Cynthia’s amused stare, and then coaxes him back into his ball, slipping it back into her bag.
She sits back down, and grabs the envelope, opening it with a fingernail. “It’s short,” she says, “only two or three pages.”
“No shadow balls this time?” Volkner asks.
Kotone doesn’t respond, her eyes growing wider as she finishes the first page, tosses it aside, and her mouth hangs open as she reads the second. “A boy,” she says quietly, grabbing the first page and scanning it again, “it sounds like he found himself a boy.”
“He swings that way and you didn’t tell me?” Volkner puts down his tea. “Because I would have—”
“Volkner!” Cynthia’s glare leaves Volkner ashen. “Oh, Kotone, I’m so sorry, that must be—”
“Wonderful!” Kotone looks up, eyes meeting Cynthia’s, intense. “It’s wonderful.”
“Huh?” The other trainers look at Kotone, then at each other, and then at Kotone.
“But weren’t you just worried—”
“I’m not going to lose him if he sleeps with someone else,” she says, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “I want him to be happy, not celibate. How cruel do you think I am?” She laughs, and then looks down at the letter again, and sits bolt upright. “Oh no, but he hasn’t realized the boy is flirting with him yet!” She grabs Cynthia by the shoulders, and the former champion looks at her placidly, biting the insides of her lips to hold back a smile. “Please, can I borrow a flying-type, right immediately now?”
—
Two months later, the three of them sit in the same cafe, along with Dawn, Sinnoh’s current champion, younger than any of the rest of them and a bit spacey. Cynthia fawns over her like nothing else, though, and Kotone’s grown fond of her if only because the girl can’t help but smile. (She’s only a few years younger than Kotone — she’s been Champion long enough that her reputation will hit Kanto soon — but that skirt? Really.)
“So now that I’ve hit all the gyms, what’s next?” Kotone asks.
“Well,” says Dawn, “How many badges do you have? There should be eight.”
“I’ve only got seven,” says Kotone, “but I think I’ve hit all the gyms. Maybe I misplaced a badge? It’s been a whirlwind of a trip.”
“Or maybe you misplaced a gym leader,” says Cynthia.
Kotone takes a bite of her pastry and shakes her head. “Nope,” she says as she chews, counting them off on her fingers.
Cynthia laughs, and looks at Dawn, who joins her in laughing. Volkner sips his tea dispassionately.
“What?” She puts down her pastry and takes a sip of water, dabbing a bit of sugar off of her face. “What’s so funny? I mean, I could have miscounted.”
“You’ve talked to all eight gym leaders, you’re right about that,” says Cynthia. “But I don’t think you’ve battled them all. There’s someone you’re missing.” Dawn tittered.
“Wait a minute!” Kotone blushes, slapping her forehead. “You’re a gym leader? But you’ve been traveling with me this whole time!”
Volkner, laughing, nearly spits out his tea, and Dawn blinks.
“Oh, Kotone.” Cynthia shakes her head, hair curling around her chair’s legs. “You’re so close, and yet.” Her laughter rings clear, and when she puts her hand on Kotone’s to remove it from her forehead, she leaves it there longer than she needs to. “Try again.”
This time when Kotone’s eyes light on Volkner, he smiles — which she is seeing for only the third time ever — and she squeezes Cynthia’s hand in recognition, and then realizes she’s squeezed her hand, and lets go, and bites her nails, and then shoves her hand into her pocket, and finds Silver’s picture there, and at this point her face is as red as a pokeball.
“I do more than dispense sex advice for your boyfriend, you know.” Volkner takes another sip of tea, clearly enjoying Kotone’s embarrassment. “Not that I don’t enjoy so doing. I run the gym here, not to mention the whole power grid, and while I don’t battle very often, yes, I’m the gym leader.”
“Not that he hasn’t irritated the league by spending all of his time building things and drinking tea instead of holding gym battles,” Cynthia says. “Which is why you’d never know.”
Kotone lets go of Silver’s picture and grabs a pokeball off of her belt. “What type are you, Volkner?”
“Electric. Shocking, I know.” Cynthia groans, and Dawn laughs.
“Uhh.” Kotone puts her pokeball back. “I, uh, only have flying types right now, because I keep sending letters to Silver. I’m gonna have to hit a PC first...”
“That’s just fine,” says Volkner. “I’m not done with my tea.”
—
Cynthia helped me check off a couple things on my Pokedex I hadn’t had before, Kotone writes from Cynthia’s guest bedroom. She had Palkia and Giratina! When I asked her how she had managed to get two legendary Pokemon, she didn’t seem to want to tell the story, but she did explain all sorts of things about the Dialga and Palkia creation myth. In Sinnoh, people worship Dialga and Palkia like we worship Arceus — Cynthia believes that Arceus may have created Dialga and Palkia, but she isn’t sure. There’s also a third Pokemon, Giratina, that she claims is even stronger than them, and there was something about a Distortion World that I didn’t entirely understand.
She looks at Silver’s most recent letter and shakes her head. I’m sorry that things didn’t work out with Green, but I’m glad that you got to have some fun, and I hope that you two can stay friends. After all, someone needs to drink hot chocolate with you until I come back! I love you and think of you often.
Cynthia knocks at the door, leaning against the door frame. She is wearing a floor-length black bathrobe and her hair is twisted up in a braided bun; Kotone has gotten used to this, how even in preparing for bed she has to look perfect. “Writing to Silver again?”
“Yes,” says Kotone, “I’m just finishing. Do you think I could borrow Togekiss again? Pidgeot doesn’t enjoy the trips, and Farfetch’d doesn’t know the way.” She smiles, and tosses the bird’s pokeball in the air, catching it. “Plus I want to introduce it to Silver for the first time myself.”
“Of course,” says Cynthia, reaching into her bathrobe pocket. “I brought her along in case you asked me that. You haven’t sent a letter all month, and when you were up here for four hours, I figured that’s what you were doing.” She tosses the Friend Ball to Kotone, who catches it, and pushes its button. Togekiss flies out, wings in a glittery flutter, and waits for Kotone to stuff her letter into an envelope.
“I’m surprised that she listens to you so readily.” Cynthia sits down on the bed next to Kotone. “Generally a Pokemon will only accept commands from its trainer, and other trainers have no influence.”
“I guess you’ve just trained her that well!” Kotone hands the envelope off to Togekiss, who smiles widely and then whooshes out the window into the night, envelope stuffed safely within its feathers. “And she doesn’t mind the trip at all, which is such a relief; most of the birds I’ve found have made the trip reluctantly or not at all.”
“Togekiss isn’t quite a bird, and it’s not just my training.” Cynthia places a hand on Kotone’s shoulder, and Kotone leans into the touch, yawning. “You have a way with Pokemon, Kotone, much like you have a way with people. I know you don’t always see it, but Dawn is the same way. You both— we all— have a champion’s manner.”
Kotone kicks her shoes off. “I don’t feel like I have a champion’s manner, or really a champion’s anything. I mean, I love my Pokemon, and I love to work with them, and train together, but I’m glad I’m not trying to hold the role of Champion anymore. It’s nice to just be out here learning and living where everybody doesn’t know who I am.”
Cynthia laughs. “Well, after you waltzed through all of Sinnoh’s gyms without having a single Pokemon faint, people are starting to talk, you know. You should give yourself at least that much credit.”
“I know I shouldn’t have looked so flashy, but I didn’t want any of my Pokemon to get hurt, especially after all the work I’ve made them do carrying letters for me.” Kotone takes off her hat and undoes her pigtails, shaking her hair out behind her. ”Hey, look, it’s almost like I have longer hair than you for once!”
Cynthia runs her fingers through Kotone’s hair, a bit past her shoulders, and lets her hand settle back on Kotone’s far shoulder, pulling her gently in. “Kotone, let’s go to Hoenn.”
“Zuh.”
Cynthia laughs, but doesn’t move her arm. “Zuh? Is that a new type of Pokemon?”
“No, I, I just... that was sort of out of nowhere, and I’d been thinking about going back home soon.” She looks down at her stockinged feet and kicks them up and down, not quite touching the floor. “It’s been something like three years, and while I’m missing a couple of Pokemon, it was never really about catching them all. I’m not sure, for the first time, why I’m not home. Does that mean it’s time?”
Cynthia takes a deep breath, bites off the first thing she wants to say, and then shakes her head. “I don’t think so, but I can’t tell you that. I do think it means you’re ready to leave Sinnoh. Have you ever been to Hoenn?”
Kotone laughs. “It was a disaster.”
“Weather?”
“Oh no, we went in the summer and it was gorgeous. It was all Silver, really. He hates travel. Everything was either too warm or too dark or too uncivilized or — when I begrudgingly took him into town — too urban. We left within two weeks. I’ve not been back.”
“Come with me.”
Kotone closes her eyes for a moment, leaning into Cynthia, and thinking. She wants to run her fingers through Silver’s hair, drink hot chocolate with him, and laugh when Typhlosion steals his socks. She wants to see if his apartment has changed — she bets it hasn’t — and sit down with him and Green and find out who blushes more when she teases them. She misses her mother, too, and Clair and Lance, and Ethan... but not the way she misses Silver. His letters have been terse again, like there’s something else on his mind, and she hasn’t asked him what it is. There’s a part of her still worried, thinking she’s going to lose him, and that if she doesn’t go back, she doesn’t have to find out, so she says, quietly, “OK.”
“Can we bring Dawn?”
Kotone huffs, looking up at Cynthia and mimicking a child. “Do we haaaaave toooooo?”
“Well, no.” Cynthia slides a finger under one of Kotone’s overall straps and pulls up lightly. “But she wants desperately to sleep with you, and she could also use a vacation.”
“Zuh.”
“Again with the Zuh!” Cynthia laughs. “You seriously couldn’t tell?”
“I, uh, no.” Kotone makes a face. “I can’t read Dawn to save my life. Every time I see her I wish Silver were there.”
“Why Silver?”
“Because he’d be able to read her, and he’d have told me how she felt, and why, and I’d know what to do.”
“Well.” Cynthia lets go of the fabric and brushes through Kotone’s hair, staring out the window. “Maybe it’s best that you have to make the decision by yourself. I probably shouldn’t have said anything, but she was terrified you didn’t even like girls, and I told her that was patently ridiculous, and—”
“Why’d you tell her that?”
Cynthia squeezes Kotone’s shoulder. “Well, dear...”
“I didn’t say I don’t.” She leans in close to Cynthia, breathing deeply. Cynthia smells slightly of roses. “But I don’t know. I’ve never felt about a woman like I’ve felt about Silver, and I’ve only kissed a woman the one time at a party under highly dubious circumstances. Sometimes I worry that I’m straight and it bothers me.”
Cynthia’s brow furrows and Kotone realizes this is the first time she’s ever seen Cynthia look flummoxed. She wonders if Dawn, having taken the championship from her, is the only other person who has seen this face.
“Kotone, we share a bed like three nights a week.”
“That’s different and you know it.” Neither of them speaks for a moment.
“You’re right and I’m sorry.” Cynthia scoots around behind Kotone, pulling her close and brushing through her hair. “How about this. We’ll go to Hoenn, and Dawn can join us once we’ve settled in, and you’ll know what she’s thinking and you can see if you think the same way?”
“And it’s okay if I don’t?”
“Yes,” Cynthia says firmly.
“Then let’s do it,” says Kotone, closing her eyes. “I’ll tell Silver when Togekiss comes back.”
—
When Dawn arrives in Hoenn, she and Kotone finally get the chance to have a battle somewhere that no one except Cynthia will be watching. Kotone understands, finally, how Dawn got to be champion and what Cynthia sees in her and why someone might want to kiss her. When she steps into the ring, even a makeshift one, all of the quaver and faux-ditz falls out of her voice; her Pokemon are responsive, strong, and fierce. The bond she has with Empoleon, in particular, reminds Kotone of her own bond with Typhlosion or the way that Silver and Crobat are, or at least were when she left, essentially inseparable. Dawn wins the battle, although it’s very close and Kotone is hampered by, as usual, carrying Pidgeot and Farfetch’d along.
Unfortunately for Dawn, while Kotone understands intellectually why someone might want to kiss Dawn, the chemistry just isn’t there, so after a friendly week wandering the backwoods of Hoenn, Dawn heads home.
Two weeks later, a Swellow perches on Cynthia’s shoulder, and she tenses up, turning away from Kotone. “I have to go.”
“That’s fine, I’ll be here when you get back.”
“No, like go go.”
“Because a Swellow landed on you? They’re not native, but trainers are trading and releasing birds in non-native regions all the time, and—”
“It’s Dawn’s Swellow. I’m riding it back to Sinnoh right now. I’m so sorry, Kotone.” Cynthia makes a fist with her left hand, digging her nails into her palm. Kotone is afraid she’ll draw blood. “I’m sure I’ll see you again. I look forward to meeting Silver. And I promise I’ll explain this later. But right now, I need to leave.”
There is nothing Kotone can say, so she is silent, and after a tight hug that lasts two minutes and a kiss on the forehead, Cynthia is gone, and Kotone is alone in the woods. She doesn’t know what else to do, so she goes to sleep, her tent colder than it’s been in years. The next morning, she writes.
Cynthia left yesterday. She got a call from Dawn— that’s the girl who’s Champion of Sinnoh now, the girl I told you about. Anyways, I don’t know what she said, but it must have been important, because Cynthia left for Sinnoh only an hour later. It feels kind of weird, her not being here. I’ve gotten pretty used to her being around. But don’t worry! I’m doing just fine. Hoenn is great!! I know you don’t like it very much, but I still hope I can share it with you sometime. I’m in the woods near Fortree City, which I think you’d hate, and I met the gym leader, but decided not to battle anyone in Hoenn this trip. We had dinner together, though, and she’s really nice! If you can believe it, she has more flying Pokemon than I do, even though I’m carting around all of these Pokemon to send letters to you with!!! She doesn’t say anything about it, but she intends to go home within a week and surprise Silver; while she’ll want to come back to Hoenn sometime, she’s become so used to Cynthia’s presence, and in her absence, she realizes just how much she misses Silver. It’s been almost four years. She wants to kiss him again before his hair turns gray.
When she calls out Pidgeot, who hasn’t had to send a letter in months, she misses Togekiss. When she’s sent Pidgeot off, and notices that she still has Togekiss’s pokeball on her belt, she realizes that her journey isn’t over yet.
—
When she gets back to Sunyshore, Volkner tells her that, yes, Cynthia was here; Dawn has fallen horribly sick, but Cynthia believes that she can summon Arceus and convince Arceus to heal Dawn. He tells her that the two of them have gone to the Sinjoh Ruins; he thinks it’s a fool’s errand but hopes against hope that Cynthia is right. He hadn’t known that Dawn was sick; no one had, apparently, except Cynthia. She packs up as much food as she can carry, and then she and Togekiss are off, the Pokemon refusing to go back into her ball and insisting on being the one to search for Cynthia.
This is how Kotone finds them: Cynthia holds Dawn in her arms, the young Champion no longer able to walk. Cynthia’s hair pools on the rocks behind her as she kneels, looking up at Arceus, tears in her eyes. She’s been here for hours, having hiked the last five miles, all of her blankets and jackets wrapped around Dawn to protect her from the cold. The wind whips her hair, tangling it, and she doesn’t notice. She and the god are holding eye contact and Kotone suspects they have been for a long time.
The snowstorm raging isn’t anything Kotone would have made her Pokemon fly through or, in fact, allowed them to fly through; but Togekiss refused to stop, perhaps because she guessed that Cynthia was in there, and somehow the two of them made it there alive. Arceus stands on a giant stone platform with a triangle carved into it, much like the one Kotone and Cynthia visited in Sinnoh.
Kotone doesn’t get a clear view of what happens next, except that Arceus glows and Dawn glows and she looks revitalized and then Cynthia glows black and suddenly she’s calling out all of her Pokemon, and Arceus shoots bursts of black energy at her, and one by one her Pokemon jump in front of her to shield her, and fall down. Togekiss flies over to take her turn, and Kotone is running, calling out Pidgeot and Typhlosion and digging through her bag to see if she has something, anything, and as Togekiss takes a second shot of darkness and shrieks, she pulls out something spherical, and hears Professor Elm, almost fifteen years ago: “It’ll catch any Pokemon without fail... I think you can make better use of it than I can.” She runs as fast as she can up the steps onto the stone platform, standing next to Typhlosion, the last Pokemon standing, in front of Cynthia.
“Arceus!” She shouts, and the god’s eyes turn to her. “Before you strike her down, tell me this: Are you a Pokemon?”
“Kotone, wait—” Cynthia coughs. “You’ll—”
Arceus shifts colors from black to blue and nods in assent.
“Good,” says Kotone. “Then get in the you-damned ball.” The Master Ball flies, and Arceus shimmers and turns red and is sucked into the ball. It rocks back and forth once, and the miasma lifts off of Cynthia, and she falls into the snow; it rocks back and forth a second time, and Dawn runs over to Cynthia, brushing the snow out of her face, looking at Kotone in shock; it rocks back and forth a third time, and Typhlosion growls, getting into a battle stance, ready for the god to pop out of the ball —
And then a soft click, and silence.
The snow starts to stick to the ball as all three women watch it, and then it disappears, the few flakes on it blowing away.
“I guess you can’t catch God after all,” says Dawn, but Cynthia, holding her coat around her tightly, shakes her head.
“Bill’s PC.”
—
In the nearby cottage, a hiker sits drinking coffee, and offers coffee to the three women; Cynthia accepts a mug, and the others decline.
“It’s not often that I see anyone else up here, let alone three people who arrived in a snowstorm. What brings you here?”
Dawn and Kotone look at each other, and then at Cynthia, who takes a sip of coffee, trying to stay cool, only the shaking of her hands giving her away. “Well,” she says, “are you familiar with the story of Arceus and Dialga, Palkia, and Giratina?”
The hiker’s bushy eyebrows perk up, and he strokes his beard, leaning back in his chair. “I came here to research the mysteries of Arceus, though I’ve never before heard Giratina connected. Arceus hasn’t shown up the whole time I’ve been here, no matter who I pulled out of the PC and had search.”
Kotone grabbed the table. “There’s a PC? Up here?”
The hiker smiled oddly. “Someone installed it so that they could do what we’re doing, I guess; hunt for Arceus.”
“Hunt?” Cynthia laughs, bitterly. “As if you could hunt a god.” Kotone looks at her, but Cynthia refuses to look up from her mug.
“A PC in the ruins. Someone must have really cared.” Kotone is knotting napkins again, leaving tiny shreds of paper on the cabin’s table. “I wish Silver were here.” It’s not that he’d know what to do; it’s that she would know what to do if he were there.
The hiker put his mug down on the table, shaking it slightly. “Silver?” Kotone nodded, and he spun the mug around. “You don’t look like the type to be digging for ores.”
Dawn laughs, her face still flushed from the cold. “Silver’s the name of a person — her boyfriend. Mineral names are in these days, if you haven’t heard.”
“I see.” He drains the rest of his coffee in one long sip.
So what would I do if Silver were here? Kotone thinks. Well, I’d make him hot chocolate so he could pretend it were coffee, and then he’d finish it and want to go to bed, but I wouldn’t want to go to bed. I’d want to take him outside, and watch the clouds, and he’d get frustrated because it was cold... She looks up, and Dawn and Cynthia are talking about something while the hiker wanders into another room. So we’d walk, and talk, and I’d hold his hand through his glove and he’d get all blushy and... this isn’t helping.
“Kotone, what are you thinking about?” Dawn stares across the table. “You’re destroying all the napkins.”
“Oh.” She pushes the pile of shredded paper away from her and turns to look out the window. The storm is much worse than it had been. “We should go to sleep.”
“And here I just had coffee.” Cynthia pushes the half-empty mug towards Kotone’s napkin shreddings. “But you’re right, we won’t even make it up to the stone platform in this. I’m sorry you got brought into this, Kotone.”
“I’m not, and you shouldn’t be. I’m just upset that you thought you couldn’t bring me along. I would have come.”
“I didn’t want you to know.” Dawn stands up. “I’m sorry.”
“What—”
“Can we just not talk about it?” Dawn walks over to the sink and pours herself a glass of water, unwilling to look at Kotone.
She takes a deep breath. “I don’t want to pry. I just want to ask one question.”
Dawn doesn’t turn around. “Fine.”
“Was this the only thing you could have done?”
She pours the glass of water into the sink, watching the water swirl and disappear. “Probably.”
—
The storm continues for days, and the four of them stay in the cabin, eating the food that Kotone packed and playing cards. Cynthia and Dawn fight over the chance to play paired with Kotone, and so she takes the hiker just to be contrary. They have absolutely no rapport — he can’t read her to save his life, or at least the game — but he can tell when Cynthia’s bluffing, every time, and so they still manage to win a bit more than half the time. Between this and Kotone’s insistence on sleeping on the couch, as there are only two beds, she knows she’s hurting Cynthia’s feelings. But she’s still upset at being abandoned, and it’s obvious that Dawn will be jealous if Kotone shares the bed with Cynthia, and Cynthia will be jealous if Kotone shares the bed with Dawn, and when everyone’s gone to sleep Kotone can just curl up with Typhlosion, anyway, and be warmer than the rest of them.
One night Dawn suggests that maybe all three of them could pile into the same bed, and Kotone swears that if it hasn’t stopped snowing the next morning she’s going to go out anyway, because she’s tired of cards and she’s tired of lesbians and she wants to fix this whole Arceus mess and go home. Luckily, the next morning it isn’t snowing, at least not much, and so Kotone heads out early, with Cynthia, Dawn and the hiker promising to come along once they’ve fixed breakfast and outfitted themselves. They trudge back up to the top of the ruins, Cynthia somehow having managed to find a walking-stick in the cabin that matches her outfit precisely.
“I thought we’d never get out of that cabin.”
“Oh, it wasn’t so bad, was it?” Cynthia laughs, her voice ringing off of the mountain peaks and echoing muffled in the snow. “I think this time I might finally have learned to play bridge.”
“You’re not anxious?” Kotone pulls her scarf tight, stomping along, the stone slab in sight now. “You could have died, and for all I know putting Arceus into the PC has ruined the whole thing, or when I pull it out he’ll destroy us, or banish us to that place you talked about, or I don’t even know.”
Cynthia laughs again.
“I try to stay positive. I really do. But Cynthia, I put God in a ball. What are we supposed to do if it comes out and isn’t happy?”
“Oh, Kotone.” She reached into her pocket and pulls out a Master Ball, tossing it in the air, and then putting it back into her pocket.
“You don’t think you’re the only one with one of those, do you? We’ll be fine. But,” she starts walking up the stairs to the stone platform, “just in case, I’ll bring out Giratina and Palkia in case we need to stall for time, OK?”
“I guess that will do... I just worry it won’t work twice.” The two of them walk up onto the platform, uncovered with snow despite the elevation, the whorled triangle pattern oddly warm to the touch. Kotone looks around nervously as Cynthia pokes away at the PC, returning with five Ultra Balls. She walks up to the PC, looking over her shoulder as Cynthia arranges her Pokemon, and returns all of her Pokemon except Typhlosion. Who do you bring to a battle with God? Eventually, carefully avoiding looking at her inbox, she selects Lugia, Ho-Oh, Lucario, and Gyarados, and then opens her inbox.
One Pokemon: Arceus.
“Cynthia, it’s there.”
“Well call it out already!” Cynthia shouts, a formidable array of legendaries aligned behind her.
The Master Ball pops out of the machine, and Kotone takes it into her hand. For a moment, she considers just throwing it as far as she can down the mountain, but then she shakes her head, and walks to the center of the platform. “I suppose I’ve always wanted to say this,” she says, and then lifts the ball, pushing the button. “Arceus, I choose you!”
Arceus is there, looking at her quizzically, and Cynthia has her hand in her pocket, just in case. Most of her Pokemon stand beside her, but Giratina and Palkia approach Arceus, and stand in two of the three points of the triangle.
“Oh,” says Cynthia, her hand in her pocket relaxing. “Kotone, do you see?”
“No,” says Kotone, turning halfway to look at Cynthia but keeping an eye on Arceus. “What should I be looking for?”
“Just watch.”
Arceus kicks up its front legs, and then it is hovering, the colors of its ring shifting and gradually settling on a bluish-gray. Kotone turns and looks at Arceus, who dips its head, and Kotone dips her head in return, and then Arceus lets out a cry that seems to go on forever — Kotone swears she can see the sun rise and set, the clouds move overhead, and snow fall and settle and blow away and melt all in the span of seconds. There is an egg on the third point of the triangle, and Kotone tries to walk toward it, but finds that she cannot move; she watches the egg and it seems like the evolution of the planet from ball of rock to water and land to continents to regions is played out across its shell.
When Arceus stops roaring, the roar continues, muffled, from inside the egg. Its shell cracks, and a quadrupedal form unfolds from it to stand ten feet tall, much larger than could have been contained in the egg. It ceases its roar, and suddenly Kotone can move again, almost falling down from the shock, lurching awkwardly toward Arceus, who keeps her upright and then steps back. It gestures to the Master Ball with its head, and then to the newly hatched Pokemon, a line of red energy between Arceus and the Master Ball fading before the god Pokemon flies up into the sky and vanishes.
“Dialga,” says Cynthia, “but...”
Dawn, frantic, has raced up the mountain on the back of Dialga, and when they get to the stone platform, both of them stop short. Dialga makes eye contact with Dialga, and the rest of the Pokemon are so flummoxed they hide behind Cynthia, who shakes her head slowly.
“You seriously fooled Arceus with a Ditto?” Dawn hops off of Dialga, looking skeptically at Kotone’s new Pokemon. “How did your
Ditto even know how to do Dialga to begin with? That’s quite an accurate representation. ... What? Why are you staring at me like that?”
—
(The hiker waits for them to leave, and then unscrews the back of the PC, revealing a small black box between the antenna on the outside and the network connection inside the PC. He pulls out the black box, reconnects the antenna, and then closes the PC. The black box slides into a case in his bag, and he calls out a Honchcrow, laughing as they take off.)
—
“Farfetch’d, that’s enough, come back,” says Kotone, laughing. She and the bird had waited outside of Professor Oak’s lab for hours waiting for Silver to finally show up, and the bird was even more excited to see his hair in person than it had been in the photograph years ago. It lets go and walks back over to Kotone, hopping up into her arms.
“What are you doing here?” Silver is angry, but not as angry as she’d thought he would be.
“I missed you,” she says, tilting her head to one side as she makes up something about weather. Silver crosses his arms, the look saying Fine, but you’re explaining this later.
He insists on making sure she is back for good before he will kiss her; by the time the sun sets, she’s wondered why she was ever afraid she’d lose him, and she’s realized just how hard it must have been for him, and as she walks him home, holding his hand, she realizes that she might never have to write him a letter again.
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Date: 2011-03-06 02:04 pm (UTC)