girl-like-substance
the seal will bite you if you give him half a chance
Posts: 527
Pronouns: xe/xem
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Post by girl-like-substance on May 19, 2018 9:27:40 GMT
SIX: THE BREAKTuesday, 13th SeptemberThe next morning the tunnel starts sloping upwards again. It's hard to notice at first in the dark, but when she does see it Saadiyyah stops and looks at Gwyneth, a question in her eyes. This time, Gwyneth doesn't hesitate.
“Yeah, okay,” she says, and Saadiyyah comes back to help her climb onto Steggers' back. “Thanks, Saadiyyah.”
He marches on, legs eating up the distance at a steady, mechanical pace. Gwyneth slumps and tries not to scratch her hand, which has started to itch. She hopes it's just hot under the bandages. All the other possible explanations are not very pleasant to think about.
There aren't very many wild pokémon now: the odd boldore or roggenrola, almost all of the sandy brown sedimentary species, with toffee-coloured geodes where their igneous cousins have glittering orange. Steggers stamps and flares his crystals bright red, and most flee before things get any more serious. On the two occasions that they do, he is conscientious of his passenger, holds his head erect so that she can crouch behind it, shielded from stray chips of flying stone. Somewhere underneath all that rock is a living heart after all.
Reluctantly, and much to her surprise, Gwyneth feels herself starting to warm to him.
The passage continues straight up, sloping quite sharply now; even if she'd been healthy – hell, even back when she was on her own trainer journey and so the fittest she's ever been – Gwyneth doesn't think she'd have done half as well here as Steggers and Saadiyyah. Now there's no comparison at all. She takes no exercise, eats badly, often feels like she's rotting from the inside out: poison or not, this is not a slope Gwyneth would be able to climb.
She doesn't mention any of this. Despite the lack of evidence, she likes to imagine she has some dignity left to protect.
“Oh thank god,” says Saadiyyah, after a while. “I think it's flattening out.” She flashes a self-deprecating smile up at Gwyneth. “Kinda rough going.”
Gwyneth hesitates.
“Yeah,” she says, after a moment. “Yeah, it looks it.”
Saadiyyah is right. The slope becomes shallower and shallower, and then nearly flat again. Gwyneth slides off her perch wedged against one of Steggers' crystals and lands awkwardly behind him.
“You know, you don't have to,” begins Saadiyyah, but Gwyneth shakes her head.
“Nah,” she says. “I want to walk.”
Saadiyyah looks like she might want to say but you're not well; if she does, however, she's sensible enough not to follow through. She just shrugs and starts winding up the flashlight again.
“Okay,” she says. “Up to you. Option's there.”
“Thanks.”
Gwyneth glances back at Steggers. He keeps moving, undeterred by her absence. On his back, the venipede glares orangely at her.
“Quit it,” she hisses, too quietly for Saadiyyah to hear, but the venipede is not in an obedient kind of mood. If venipede ever are.
She turns away again and concentrates on following Saadiyyah's flashlight. It's fine. This will be over soon. It has to be, if they've come up again. And then … well, then she isn't sure, then she'll be on her own in Driftveil with three dollars, seventy-five cents and a stale heel of bread. And two apples, she reminds herself. Not that they make much difference, but when you start from almost nothing even a couple of apples count.
So. What happens when she leaves this tunnel? What happens when she's suddenly back in the real world, where there is a place called Humilau she somehow has to get to within the next ten days?
Gwyneth does think about it, and she tries to come up with a solution. She really does. But there's only so long you can think about something like that before you have to stop or start hurting real bad, so five minutes later she puts it out of her mind again and thinks only of the tunnel and the perfect straight-line beauty of its construction.
We did this, she thinks to herself, with a tinge of pride. And then, immediately afterwards: no, they did it. She had nothing to do with it.
As distractions go, this leaves something to be desired. *
Eventually, it ends. Everything always does. A brighter light than the chargestones becomes visible up ahead, and as they draw closer Gwyneth and Saadiyyah see another of those metal emergency phone boxes, glinting dully in the beam of a construction light. There's another of those big, blocky doorways just beyond – and past that, concrete stairs. Daylight is only a few minutes away.
“Yay,” says Saadiyyah, only slightly ironically. “We made it.”
“We sure did,” agrees Gwyneth. She feels slightly sick. She tells herself it's just the poison.
“Better recall Steggers,” says Saadiyyah. “Grab your venipede, would you?”
“Sure, dude.”
Gwyneth picks it up and puts it back on her shoulder, the familiar trash-smell settling back into her nostrils. It rattles loudly in her ear, which she figures she probably deserves, and then marches off to ride on her backpack.
The flash of Steggers' return to his ball is blinding in the dim light; they have to wait a few seconds before either of them can see where they are supposed to be walking. And then – well. Then it's time to go. Through the doorway. Up the stairs. And through a metal door out into another little cabin like the one in Castelia. Sunlight pours in through the window and Gwyneth stares with watering eyes out at the beach beyond. She should have brought her sunglasses, she thinks, before remembering that she lost them.
“Hey,” says Saadiyyah brightly to the woman behind the desk.
“Hi,” she replies. “Come all the way from Castelia?”
“Yep. Looong walk.”
“Definitely. Can I scan your cards? Gotta log you as having left, so we know you didn't die down there.”
“Just mine,” says Saadiyyah, handing it over. “Uh, my friend's not a trainer, I was just escorting her.”
Gwyneth looks away from the window sharply. Friend, huh? Something in her recoils violently from the thought, but a moment passes, she watches Saadiyyah chatting to the clerk, and then the thing inside her calms.
Okay, she thinks, with a certain sadness and a certain satisfaction. Friend.
Saadiyyah finishes at the desk and turns back to her with a smile.
“Okay,” she says. “Let's get some fresh air, huh?”
“I've been counting the seconds,” says Gwyneth, which sounded funnier in her head but what the hell, she's trying, isn't she, and out they go.
Crisp salt air. Brilliant September light. Waves breaking on the stony beach. And to their right, across the water, Driftveil rising up like the Sierra Castaña, a mountain range of factories and dockyards.
Unova, thinks Gwyneth, and feels for a brief moment that old fierce love flare with the taste of brine in her mouth.
“God, that air tastes good,” says Saaddiyah, stretching out her arms. “I spend a lot of time in caves, obviously, but I never get used to coming back out again.”
She feels it too, Gwyneth can hear it in her voice: that love that only trainers and wanderers know. Once you've walked this country, it never leaves you. Unova. Unfeasible, insane, marvellous.
“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah.”
The cabin they have just come out of is set into the western side of Veil Island, a tiny spit of rock south of the city which, the last time Gwyneth was here, was mostly warehouses and docks; now, as they climb the path leading up from the beach to the island proper, she sees that it's been redeveloped. Gardens and plazas, little stalls and gazebos, are all arranged around a single huge building that can only be a tournament stadium.
As she watches, a dragonite descends from the sky and flares its wings, coming to an abrupt halt in the centre of a nearby plaza. A rider drops neatly off its back, pats its flank; the big dragon snorts a plume of smoke, pleased. Lots of trainers here, thinks Gwyneth. At the stalls, walking the gardens, flying in.
“Is this where you're going?” she asks Saadiyyah.
“Yeah.” Saadiyyah's watching the dragonite and its rider with an appraising trainer's eye. “It's called the Pokémon World Tournament. Clay Morton built it – you know, the Gym Leader and mining guy?”
Gwyneth remembers an excadrill ripping apart the ground, shaking Britomartis off her feet. Clay's a strong Leader, one of the ones Nika didn't beat. He also wears a cowboy hat, which both she and Nika agree is suspicious behaviour for anyone who isn't actually a cowboy.
“Yeah,” she says. “Mining guy.”
“There's gonna be this grand opening,” Saadiyyah tells her. “He's been after a bunch of tough trainers for the first tournament. I hear the new Gym Leader – you know, Cheren Boyadzhiev? – he's going to be here.” She sounds excited. “Kinda hoping I get to go up against him. He's meant to be super good at strategy.”
“He is,” says Gwyneth shortly.
The path takes them up to plaza around which various stallholders are hawking vitamins and supplements for various species of pokémon – ZINC GRANULES, getcher ZINC GRANULES for TOUGHER STEEL-TYPES; come on come on we got FEATHERPRO for category B FLYING-TYPES – and here they come to a halt. North is the bridge to the mainland. East is the way over to the World Tournament, the stadium and the hotels.
Gwyneth and Saadiyyah look at each other for a little while.
“Well,” says Gwyneth, after a moment or two of awkward silence. “Thanks for getting me here. No way could I have got here on time without you.”
“Oh, that's okay,” says Saadiyyah, smiling, embarrassed. “I was glad of the company.”
“Yeah?” asks Gwyneth. It's been a long time since anyone said that to her.
“Yeah,” she replies. “Nice meeting you, Gwyneth.”
“Likewise, Saadiyyah.” Gwyneth smiles. It isn't even forced. The kid likes her. How weird is that? “Maybe I'll see you if you ever do come down to Aspertia to take on Cheren.”
“Pokémon Centre, right?”
“Yep. In the store.”
“I'll make sure to grab a few potions, then.”
“You do that.” Gwyneth glances north, at the bulk of Driftveil, at cargo ships moving ponderously across the water. “Well, I better let you go register. See you around, Saadiyyah.”
“Bye!”
And that's it. Gwyneth turns and walks away towards the bridge. She does not look back. She does not want to know if Saadiyyah does.
They won't meet again, she's sure of that. Saadiyyah shouldn't be wasting her time on people like her. She's seen how that road ends.
Besides, she probably doesn't have a job at the Centre any more.
Crossing the bridge – pedestrianised now, she sees; it used to be that the trucks drove over – Gwyneth switches on her phone and brings up a map to find somewhere to refill her water bottle. This is not really a solution to her biggest problem, she is aware, but whatever she does do next, she's going to need water. So she finds a mall within walking distance, turns off her phone again to save the battery, and starts.
Driftveil is brown. There's spots of colour here and there, sure, but nothing like Virbank's neon ghosts or Castelia's glass-and-chrome elegance. This is a city where money comes out of the ground, from clay pits and steel mines, and where those people who aren't digging stuff up or smelting it down are probably shipping it out. Where Gwyneth is by the south seafront is more commercial than industrial, but she can see the smoke rising up over the rooftops from the north; there's nowhere in town where you can't. She wonders if the World Tournament is supposed to make people think of something other than raw industry when they think of Driftveil. It doesn't seem likely to have much of a result.
Still. Don't look up, and this part of town might be any big city in Unova: chain stores and shopping malls, phone lines, pedestrians, heavy traffic. The only distinctive thing is the scars in the road where the streetcar tracks used to be, and even then you wouldn't recognise it if you didn't already know. Gwyneth does already know; Nika has a vaguely embarrassing and very endearing habit of entering enthusiastically into touristhood, of reading every bit of information she can find about a place, and then regurgitating it into her companions' ears as they walk along. She doesn't remember all of it, but there are little bits, here and there. Streetcars in Driftveil, historic Pard Square in Castelia. Little bits of trivia. Little fragments of Nika.
Gwyneth finds the mall, finds the toilets, refills her bottle. She looks at herself in the mirror in the flat yellow light. What she sees is deep, dark circles under her eyes, missed hairs on her chin, the pale face of sickness. What she sees is more or less how she feels.
On her shoulder, the venipede starts rattling, antennae bristling at the sight of its own reflection.
“Chill, dude,” says Gwyneth, too tired to argue. “It's just a mirror.”
It doesn't get it, so she puts it down on the floor where it starts running around frantically, searching for the other venipede. She watches it for a moment, wondering how you explain reflections to a centipede, then shakes her head, defeated, and turns back to the mirror to pull out a few more hairs. The result is not great, but it's better than what she managed in the dim light of the caves.
Gwyneth looks into the mirror again. She cannot read her reflection's expression.
“All right, then,” she says, stooping to pick up the venipede. “Time to go, dude.”
She walks out, of the toilets, of the mall, of the street, and then she takes off her backpack and sits down on a bench. She counts the coins in her pockets again, in case she missed any before. (She didn't.)
Gwyneth closes her eyes, and thinks of home. *
Here is what Gwyneth knows about money: it takes all the running you can do, just to stay where you are.
That's how she explains it to Nika, when it comes to it. She doesn't do such a good job of it, but Nika gets the gist of the thing. It's like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, Gwyneth says. It takes all the running you can do, just to stay where you are. Just to plug the leaks and put out the fires. If you want to get ahead, you have to go much faster still.
What she means is this: when she was little, hers was an ordinary family in an ordinary house. All it took was for one unexpected thing to happen (one dead husband, one smashed car, one funeral, one colossal expense) and then suddenly the ordinary people in the ordinary house were also people who stayed up late at night at the kitchen table, swearing softly at their bills. It was okay, even though it wasn't. There were savings to fall back on, and that covered some of it; her ordinary mother carried on in her ordinary house, thinking that if she got another job, if she saved, she might claw her way back to where they were before, give her children some semblance of normality. So she worked and she saved, except that her kids needed food and clothes, and then her car broke down and that was what she'd saved gone again, and the kids still needed food and clothes, and her shoes were so worn out they had to be replaced because at this point they were letting her down in interviews, and a pipe burst under the sink, and then Gwyneth came out and needed new clothes and couldn't take Hilbert's cast-offs any more, and it kept on going and going, and as hard and fast as she ran she never once got more than a step or two forwards.
Still an ordinary family in an ordinary house. No Dickensian squalor, no ostentatious poverty. Just debt loping after them like a midnight lycanroc, and the race to stay one step ahead of its long white jaws.
And then things changed. They never do, for ordinary families in ordinary houses with ordinary lycanroc on their tail, but sometimes ordinary families spawn extraordinary people, and Hilbert brought home tournament money, the Championship prize, and then, later on, sponsorship deals and advertising revenue. (Gwyneth's mother will never stop being grateful for the League official who approved their request for his training grant, or for Aurea Juniper who gave him his starter free of charge and provided the family with all those copies of the trainer magazines that he and Gwyneth loved so much.)
So Hilbert saved everything. Again. But once the lycanroc has your scent, it's always there inside you, deep down. And Gwyneth, who never remembered a time before it started following them, kept right on running. So she tells Nika about the Red Queen, and Nika, who is wealthy enough for this never to have occurred to her and empathetic enough that she wants to understand, listens, and knows better than to say that the Red Queen is from Through the Looking-Glass and not Alice in Wonderland.
She hugs Gwyneth, though, and won't let her go. And Gwyneth feels the hot breath of the lycanroc on her neck a little less keenly for her grip.
But it's still there, deep inside her; she knows this instinctively, and when she and Nika split she is not surprised to find it there again, lurking in the corners of the shabby apartment she moves into. It's an old foe by this point, she tells herself. She knows how to deal with it. But the truth is that she is not her mother or her brother, and without Nika she is barely even Gwyneth, and her head is a mess and she fails to run fast enough and she has to leave the apartment; and this brings her back to where she is now, sitting out in the cold and waiting on the kindness of strangers.
Back then, it was Shane who stepped in. She hardly knew him before then, but he remembered her and he found her, brought her back to his place. He lent her a couch to sleep on, a computer to search for jobs on, and the difference between what money she had left and what she needed for a new apartment. An awful apartment, one that the previous occupant never cleaned or repaired and which Gwyneth never does either, but an apartment.
And then she left town for Humilau, to go and watch Nika marry Hilbert. Then she got herself poisoned. Then she threw away the last thing she had left in the hope of seeing something terrible.
It's as if she just needed to prove it, one more time. That there really is no good thing so small she will not destroy it.
Gwyneth hunches on the bench, over her bad arm. She can't stop shaking.
Whoever it was that called the ambulance for her back in Virbank, she wishes they were dead. *
Nika would say, you don't mean that. But that's the thing about Gwyneth that Nika never seemed to understand: she really does mean it. She really is that bad. And she refuses to let herself forget it. So: sorry, Nika, no therapy, and no doctors. As if Gwyneth could ever allow anyone to tell her that any of this is not her fault.
Some people get chosen and some do not. Gwyneth is not chosen. Gwyneth is Aksa.
She opens her eyes again and stares at the traffic, unseeing. Cars. Pedestrians. There's a pidove among the regular pigeons on the sidewalk across the street, shoving them out of the way with the bullying confidence of a pokémon amongst animals. It's hard to look at any of it. The air is blurry, or her eyes are unfocused, she isn't sure. She feels her body like a series of heavy pieces of meat, hung loosely together from jointed bone. Her head is full of the emotional equivalent of a modem dialling up, loudly, forever.
It's okay. Gwyneth has been here before and all she has to do is stay alive until it's over. This is easy. The trick to staying alive is not dying, and that happens by itself.
For an indeterminate period of time, she sits there, not dying.
Then she gets up and walks away. *
It's been a while. Gwyneth isn't sure how long, but it's been a while. She tries to remember when she sat down on the bench, but she doesn't really know. The sun has moved. The shadows sit differently on the street. This much she's sure of. She supposes she could check the time, measure it against whatever time her phone said it was when she searched for directions to the mall, but she doesn't really see the point. Some of whatever that was back on the bench is still with her, clouding her head like a charged fog of static electricity, and she cannot quite make herself believe in time right now.
She wanders without thinking of where she's going, taking corners as they come, crossing streets without waiting for red lights. A couple of cars nearly hit her. A lot more honk their horns at her. She is aware of this, conceptually; she knows that what she is doing is a bad idea. But the information is hovering at a level too distant for her to access.
The venipede spits insectoid curses back at the drivers, fearlessly vicious. Its saliva smells sweet, sickly, like old roses or blood or a munna's pain. Gwyneth feels the odour drifting inside her, mixing with the decay inside.
She keeps walking.
Eventually, she stops.
It's over now.
The strangeness falls away and her vision seems to clear, even though it wasn't clouded to begin with. She feels the wind in her hair and the fading sunlight on her face; she sees a police car rocket down the street, siren blaring. She sees shopfronts, shutters coming down, people hurrying home.
Has it been that long? Where even is she? Suddenly alert, Gwyneth checks her phone again, finds her location. Acker Street, wherever that is. Somewhere in southeast Driftveil. There's probably a name for the area but she doesn't know it.
“Any ideas?” she asks the venipede. It doesn't answer. “Yeah, thought so.” She sighs. “C'mon, dude, let's get out of here.”
She doesn't actually have anywhere to get out to, so she just starts walking. It's slightly less random than before, although not by much; the main difference is that she's conscious now, properly conscious: she sees people looking at her, waits for the roads to clear before crossing them, holds her arm close against her chest to stop it hurting as it moves. All the time, with every step, she asks herself what now, and every time she has to admit she doesn't have any answers.
For some reason, she finds herself thinking about what Saadiyyah said, about the ex-Plasma pokémon shelter in the north end of the city. They won't have Blossom or Corbin there, obviously, but still, she thinks of them. It's hard to say why. Does she want to tell them, after all these years? And what good would that do, exactly? Gwyneth can't see the logic in it. Okay, she might make some old Plasma grunts feel guilty. But clearly they feel that way already, or they wouldn't be running the shelter in the first place.
It doesn't matter, anyway. It's after five now; they're probably closed, and if they aren't then they will be by the time Gwyneth makes her way over there. So that answers that question. But the other one still remains, the what now that haunts her every move, and Gwyneth, standing there on the street cradling her aching hand as the air slowly grows colder with the deepening evening, is no closer to answering that than she is to Humilau. *
Gwyneth scouts the area.
This part of town feels a little too nice to her. When people say an area is nice, that's usually code for there being money there, and where there's money there are people around to guard it. Gwyneth sees four cops on patrol around here, and she knows that they see her too. Or no, not quite; they don't see her, they see a suspicious individual, and they watch that individual until it retreats out of their view. Fortunately, none of them decide to follow her any further than that.
Still. This part of town won't suit her purposes. She moves on, the venipede clinging half-asleep to her backpack, and makes her way back to an area she passed through earlier. It's not east Aspertia, not dangerous-looking by any stretch of the imagination, but it does feel emptier than some of the rest of Driftveil. This is not always a good thing; tonight, however, Gwyneth wants isolation. She doesn't remember much of her last time on the streets, spent most of it in the same haze that gripped her earlier today, but she remembers feeling safest when there was no one else around.
At least she has the venipede, she tells herself, and nearly smiles when she catches herself thinking it. Okay, it's annoying and aggressive and it keeps wanting food that she doesn't have, but if it wants to do for her what it did to her in the alley in Virbank, she's willing to concede that maybe it has its uses after all.
After all, she reminds herself, she doesn't really know how to use the knife. And a weapon you don't know how to use …
She finds herself a dark, dry corner, down a sidestreet where the buildings have those old-fashioned indented shopfronts and there are plenty of recesses and blind alleys in between them. Out of the wind. Out of the rain too, should that become an issue. It doesn't look like it will.
Gwyneth looks at the spot for a long moment. She feels the blurriness pressing at the edges of her vision, the modem dialling up somewhere in the back of her head.
She takes a long, unsteady breath.
“Done it before, dude,” she tells herself. “Done it before. And lived, right? And …”
Gwyneth hates herself for this, for what she thinks of as her inability to be practical, to just get the hell on with it. She should be trying to get what sleep she can so she can figure this out in the morning. And yet here she is now, worrying about the mere fact of her being here. Grow up, Gwyneth. Aren't you used to it yet? Were you expecting the goddamn Ritz? Where d'you think you've been all this time?
Gritting her teeth, she clenches her left hand into a fist, slow and unflinching. She feels her arm catch fire in protest, so sharp and bright a pain she can barely even feel her fingers.
“Feeling better yet?” she growls, and takes off her backpack.
Sometime very late, hunched against the wall, she takes the photograph out of her wallet and unfolds it with painful fingers. She looks at the two kids in the picture, laughing against the white background of the photo booth.
She turns it over and reads the words on the back: the sparkling glance of Anaktoria.
It's almost laughable, really. Who else but a child would say something like that? Quote classical literature to lend her love maturity? Yes, it's ridiculous, as kids are, but then Gwyneth was a kid too and she had never had anyone throw poetry at her before. Her heart fluttered every time she looked at it, in that time after their journeys ended and they each went back home, so far away from one another. And even now it has some power to it. Anaktoria. Nobody but Gwyneth knows why Nika calls her Annie. A little bit of their childhood, preserved in a pet name.
Little fragments of Nika.
Little people by the wayside.
Little fires to huddle around in the shadow of the temples.
There's no Shane out there this time, no one to pick her up off the street and lend her a couch. This time she really is alone.
The venipede crawls towards her, a moving darkness in the dying light. Gwyneth stretches out her hand and feels its shell, warm beneath her fingertips.
“Hey,” she whispers. “Hey.”
The venipede clicks curiously. Gwyneth takes her hand away again. It's stupid. She's stupid. She should have listened to Shane. She should have stayed home.
The night passes. It is long and cold and very nearly as unpleasant as those nights in Aspertia, all those months ago.
Gwyneth does not get much sleep. She doesn't get much of anything. *
Wednesday, 14th SeptemberShe gets lucky, and not. Nobody disturbs her, but when she wakes up to the early morning sunlight she finds she's acquired shooting pains up and down her arm. She tries to sit up and feels her arm lock up, breath catch, fingers tingle.
“Oh hell,” she whispers, too breathless with the feeling of it to raise her voice any louder. “Goddamn it.”
With some difficulty, she drags herself to the wall with her right hand and levers herself up into a sitting position. After what seems like an age, she manages to disentangle her other hand from the sleeping bag, and finds the courage to look at it. The bandages are stained yellow, with a few spots of red. Her fingers look much too flushed where they stick out at the end.
Gwyneth swallows. She tries to remember what she did last night, how she managed to mess up her hand like this – hell, even how she got to this alley. None of it comes easily to her, and for several long minutes, none of it comes at all. Yesterday's haze lies around it like a shroud over a corpse.
She lets her head fall back against the wall and her eyes slip closed. She is if anything more tired than she was last night, the kind of tired that you feel almost as a physical ache, deep down in the marrow of your bones. But she made it, she reminds herself. Her head is clear. Her hand is screwed and she's going to have to spend her last three dollars on something to eat if she doesn't want to risk fainting from hunger later on today, but she's here, in the clear light of day, ready to do … whatever it is that she thinks she's doing.
Gwyneth sighs. Even before she ran out of words, she wasn't doing a very good job of convincing herself.
She hears a low rattle and looks up to see the venipede trundling along towards her down the alley, some oddly-shaped lump clutched in its jaws.
“Whatcha got there, asshole?” she asks. The venipede transfers the lump from its jaws to its forelegs, hisses at her, and then reapplies itself to eating. A few seconds later, Gwyneth realises that what it's got is a chicken nugget.
“Hey,” she says, leaning towards it slightly. “Where'd you get that?”
The venipede hunches over its prize and rattles warningly, glaring.
“Look, I'm not gonna take it off you, you've probably dribbled poison all over it. Just where'd you find it?”
It flicks its antennae around, agitated, and Gwyneth sinks back against the wall with a sigh.
“Whatever,” she says. “At least I don't have to feed you for a while.”
She unzips her sleeping bag and kicks her way out, slowly and stiffly. She packs up her stuff again, although it's hard to tightly roll a sleeping bag with one hand and painful to do it with two. It takes her three-quarters of an hour to get everything back the way it was, and when she's done she sits down heavily on her backpack, exhausted by the effort of pushing through the pain in her hand.
For the first time, she seriously considers how long she thinks she can keep doing this. Not that long, she thinks, with surprising honesty. But she doesn't have to do it that long. If she can just make it to Humilau, then … what, exactly? Nika will break off the wedding, welcome her back with open arms and pay a doctor to fix her hand? Sure, Gwyneth, if that's what you want to think.
She sighs. Forget about that. Get to Humilau. Focus on that. If she gets there, it will be okay. It will. It can't be worse, anyway.
And how will she get there? She can't answer this, and she's still worrying the thought like a loose tooth when she hears a scratching by her feet and looks down.
The venipede is back, dragging a torn cardboard carton. There are three and a half chicken nuggets inside it, and also an eye-watering amount of bird crap.
Gwyneth stares.
“Dude,” she says.
The venipede clicks to itself and swivels its big orange eye to face her.
She bends down and picks it up, pats its hump gently. She has to use her injured hand, but she figures it's worth it.
“You tried,” she says. “'S more than I ever managed.”
The venipede hisses. It's probably Gwyneth's imagination, but it sounds marginally less hostile than usual.
Well. She'll take what she can get. *
Gwyneth eats everything she has left on her, does a quick and haphazard job of making her face palatable to the general public and sets off, the venipede perched on her shoulder like a chitinous parrot. She has a plan, kind of, and a direction, kind of. The direction is north, and the plan is to go to the shelter run by the ex-Plasma activists.
She isn't sure what she expects to find there, or indeed what she'll even do when she gets there. But she has to do something, has to convince herself that she's still moving. Once she saw on TV that sharks can't stop swimming because if the water stops running through their gills they'll suffocate. This is something like that, she thinks. Yesterday she stopped, and she suffocated, and now she's up again she has to keep moving or she might not recover the next time around. And going to the Plasma shelter is the only plan she can come up with.
It's in the north of the city, she knows that, and her phone – 68% battery, it tells her, and she fights away the worry about what to do when it runs out – helps her narrow it down: 97 Great Drummond Street, way out in the foothills. A hell of a walk, but then, she made it all the way to Moorview in Virbank, and that couldn't have been much shorter. Even if she was in better condition back then, she thinks she can manage.
Around her, Driftveil starts to come to life, cars nosing their way out onto the streets like rabbits venturing out of their burrows, engines drowning out the distant noise from the docks to the southeast. Metal shutters go up, shop lights turn on; five unfezant fly by overhead in spectacular formation; a burnt-smelling man with hair standing on end leads a nervy zebstrika down the street, making soothing noises and occasionally receiving minor electric shocks. Tiny metropolitan dramas, that's what Nika calls stuff like that. All those baffling little stories happening constantly in every major city. People living and loving and fighting and dying. Pokémon … well, pokémon doing pokémon things. They're weird enough already.
The sun climbs. It's surprisingly warm today, or maybe she's a little feverish. She hopes the former. Either way, she stops to take off her jacket and tie it to her backpack, and walks on with the warm light and cool air mingling deliciously on her bare arms. Gwyneth has always liked this kind of early-morning weather, where the sun is blazing and you know it will be hot later but for now the air hasn't warmed up. She hasn't really ever slept well, or she's been sleeping badly for so long now that she doesn't remember a time when she didn't, and it's not uncommon for her to wake before dawn. Back in Aspertia, when she and Nika had that apartment with the balcony, she would often get up and sit out there, watching the light swell over the city, and this weather reminds her of that. Pre-dawn air. Post-dawn warmth. Hekate on the roof, doing the same thing: watching, waiting for her partner to wake.
Gwyneth moves on.
She slows. It's not that she's tiring, although she is, but that Driftveil's streets seem to get clogged up faster than their counterparts elsewhere. Maybe she's just in a busy part of town, maybe this is just how things are here; either way, by nine Gwyneth finds she's moving at a snail's pace, trying to squeeze through the gaps between other pedestrians and the traffic.
“What the hell?” she snaps, at everybody and nobody. “What gives?”
What indeed. She really doesn't know. She can't think of a way she might find out, either. Gwyneth sets her jaw and keeps on walking.
The shops begin to change, sliding from a mishmash of franchises to independent bookstores and cafés. The pedestrians skew towards the young and eccentric. This all seems familiar to Gwyneth; she recalls vaguely that there's a university here in Driftveil, and guesses she must be close. Kids. Dyed hair and strident opinions. Music, politics, art. She never went to college, but Nika did, and for some of that time they lived together. Not that they meant to, exactly. Gwyneth moved to Nacrene when she left home so that the two of them would at least be in the same city, and then when the other people she was sharing an apartment with left Nika said one of her roommates had left too and she had space for Gwyneth to stay with her for a while. So she moved into what had been Keisha's room, and then after a few weeks Nika moved into that room as well, and in the end 'for a while' turned out to be forever.
Or six years, anyway. But this is old news, even if she does keep endlessly rehashing it, so Gwyneth shakes it off and does her best not to envy the passing students their freedom.
She passes buildings with plaques outside that say things like NATURAL SCIENCES SITE B or LINCOLN HARKNESS MEMORIAL LIBRARY. There are kids lounging on the steps of the library, smoking, laughing. Looking at them, Gwyneth feels very strongly that she wants a cigarette, like an itch that can't be scratched. Wonderful. Something else to keep bothering her as she makes her way through this overpopulated hellscape of a city.
Sometime around mid-morning, three swanna fly by overhead, and half the street stops to watch. Gwyneth isn't sure she's ever seen one in flight before. They look even bigger than they do on the ground like this, their broad white wings stretching out wider than Gwyneth is tall. Pausing, she watches them until they disappear behind the buildings, and then for a little while longer in her mind's eye, tracing their path east. She imagines them settling down into warm Humilau water, massive wings folding back up into their flanks like a magic trick.
“Bastards,” she says, although she is really only angry at her own lack of speed, and keeps heading north.
A few streets later, she's out of the college part of town. Now she could be anywhere, Virbank or Aspertia or Castelia; now Gwyneth's spirits lift a little. Chain stores and coffee shops, apartment blocks and offices: it's all kind of depressing, but it's hers, in the same way that university is Nika's. One thing people don't understand about Aân Hen is that it's not the land part that matters, it's the our. The Henuun are engineers, not mystics; they're talking about culture, not geography. Hell, that's what the word means: hen uûn, Us People. In a way, You People is more accurate than white Unovans know. (So Gwyneth says to herself, painfully aware that she learned this from the internet.) And this place, this middling Unovan blandness, this is part of Gwyneth's culture, her Us-ness, and it's okay. Its inhabitants are wary of her, stare at her injured arms and ambiguous face, but it's okay.
The venipede interrupts her thoughts by crawling off her backpack and onto her shoulder, its claws much more obvious now that she has removed her jacket. The pressure of them on her bare skin makes Gwyneth uneasy.
“Get off there, dude,” she says, pushing it back onto her pack. “I don't like you that much.”
It rattles angrily, tries to return. Gwyneth pushes it back again.
“Not gonna tell you again,” she says, trying not to be cross and not doing very well. “Stay. Okay?”
She can't see it back there, but she can't hear it moving, either. It will do, she thinks. It will have to.
It's getting hot. This isn't a good day to be dragging a bag the size of Gwyneth's around, or to have one hand wrapped up in bandages. She thinks again about not taking Three Nights in Opelucid back to the library when she had the chance. When did she think she was going to read it, exactly? She must have known she didn't have the money to do the whole journey by bus. And she did know really, if she's honest. It's just that she refused to think about it. And now here she is, limping through a city she doesn't know to a place she's never been for reasons she isn't sure of.
There is a lesson here about the value of organisation, but Gwyneth isn't in the mood for learning.
She passes the Pokémon Centre and sees fire licking up at the sky from one of the practice courts around the back. Lots of kids around here, and lots of pokémon, too, a riot of colour and noise and unusual smells: the usual suspects, of course, the krokorok and boldore and watchog, but Clay's Gym is popular enough and September close enough to peak trainer journey time that Gwyneth sees a few more uncommon species too: an eelektrik that swims through the air above its partner's head, wreathed in sparks; a heatmor licking its flanks with tongues of flame; even a druddigon, casting evil looks around from the centre of an awed ring of onlookers, a beaming girl bursting with pride on its back. Even Gwyneth stares at that. People don't generally train druddigon; they're dangerous, even by dragon standards. She figures the League probably has an eye on her, as it does with people whose pokémon pose a particular risk to public safety, but even so, she moves on in a hurry. Druddigon were killing dinosaurs a hundred million years ago. They haven't had to change much since: humans aren't much trouble by comparison.
After this, the traffic starts to thin out and the buildings to shrink: she's made it. The suburbs stretch away and up over the foothills of the Sierra Castaña, humps of housing rising palely before the distant backdrop of brown stone and pine trees. If she wasn't at street level, Gwyneth thinks she might be able to see Twist Mountain from here, a faint ghost of a shape behind the other peaks. She can't remember whether she ever did see it before; there was an observation tower somewhere that she and Nika went up on, she recalls, but that might not have been here in Driftveil.
There's not much to see out here, not much to keep her mind off the ache and the tedium. There are a lot of nice-looking houses, among which Gwyneth feels dirty and out of place. (She is dirty and out of place, but she doesn't appreciate the reminder.) The roads start sloping uphill too, and this last leg of the trip is one hard slog right up to the little commercial block where Gwyneth at last finds Great Drummond Street. It's not as great as the name makes out; in fact, it looks like anywhere else to her. But that's not important. What she came here for is the big barn-like building at number 97. The one with the sign that reads TEAM PLASMA POKÉMON SHELTER.
Gwyneth stares for a moment. She knew what the place was called, of course; she saw when she searched for it on her phone. But still, she's not prepared to see the words up there like that. TEAM PLASMA, in big white type, as if the name doesn't mean a thing. How this place hasn't been vandalised by an angry mob she has no idea. Do people really forget that quickly?
She shakes her head. Maybe they didn't make as big an impression as she thought. No, they did, she knows they did; that was the whole reason Plasma worked, the spectacular magnetism of Harmonia and N. One of the few things she and Cheren agree on is that this is what made Plasma so dangerous: give an expert propagandist like Harmonia someone as naturally charismatic as N, and he'll build himself a cult leader. Some people get chosen and some do not, and Harmonia chose N in all the worst ways. If Hilbert hadn't been there to expose the lie, people really would have followed N right into Harmonia's trap.
Her lip curls. If Hilbert hadn't been there. Okay, Gwyneth.
She sighs. She's been standing out here for several minutes now. If she's going to go in, it's probably about time.
Gwyneth wipes the sweat off her forehead and makes a half-hearted attempt at smoothing her hair. She looks in her mirror, winces, and puts it away again.
She pushes open the door and goes inside. *
It's dark in here after the bright sun outside, and Gwyneth stands there blinking for a moment while her eyes adjust. After a little while, she sees a desk along one wall, and a door on the other side of the room from behind which she hears the sound of various animals all attempting to be noisier than the rest.
“Can I help you?” asks the woman behind the desk. She looks twenty-nine, thirty, and she has spectacularly long blonde hair. Something about this seems familiar to Gwyneth, but she can't immediately place her.
“Can I help you?” she asks again. The silence is growing strained. Gwyneth has no idea what to say: can she help her? She isn't sure. She wasn't sure before, but now, standing here with the musky smell of watchog rising from the carpet and an earnest woman asking her questions she is less sure than ever. The lack of certainty is in her bones, in her blood, washing around her body with every beat of her heart. She feels it in her like a paralysing drug.
“Um, hello?” asks the woman, now slightly desperate. “Can I help you?”
Gwyneth stands and stares, mute as a swan. She tries to say something about her pokémon but her throat is raw and dry, her lips two strips of wood.
“Hello, Concordia,” says someone else, coming in through the back door and letting in for an instant before it closes a cacophony of barks and whines. “Could you put in another order for those cattle bones? They're going down rather well with the herdier.”
“Oh. Um, yes, Rood, I can certainly do that. I …”
The someone – Rood, thinks Gwyneth, through the fuzz of indecision: Sage Rood of Team Plasma – stops and looks. He is tall and stooped and grey-moustached, dressed in faded overalls that are worlds away from his cultic Plasma robes. Gwyneth sees his past overlaid on him, the TV reports, Hilbert running him down out on Route 18 with that International Police agent. He hunted them all down, in the end. Mechanically. Silently. Like cleaning house.
“Hello,” says Rood. He has an accent that Gwyneth doesn't recognise. Something European. The Sages came from all over the world. “Can I help you?”
Concordia raises her eyebrows to herself, but says nothing. Neither does Gwyneth.
“Is this about adopting?” persists Rood. “Or are you looking for a specific pokémon that was taken from you in the past?”
So careful, the way he says it. No mention of stealing or even the name, Plasma. It doesn't occur to Gwyneth that perhaps he does this to minimise the pain of visitors and not to soothe his guilt. Slivers of anger creep in, and the lock on her voice breaks.
“It's my pokémon,” she says, croaks really, fidgeting nervously. Rood nods understandingly, gives Concordia an I'll take it from here glance, steps forward. His face arranges itself into an expression of calm, soothing concern. How many times has he done this, Gwyneth wonders. How much human pain has this man seen and tried to redress?
“Of course,” he says, ushering her deeper into the room, round a corner to a door she hadn't seen before. “Please, come into my office, sit down―”
“You don't understand,” she says, pulling away from his arm. “It's not – you don't have them. They're not here.”
Rood pauses, a faint frown of confusion hovering on his brow.
“I'm sorry?”
“They're not here,” Gwyneth repeats. “You – you didn't steal them, exactly, but I mean …” She takes a deep breath. It tastes of dog. “I was just a kid,” she says, hearing the pleading tone in her voice and hating herself for it. “I was just a kid and I – I believed you, and I … liberated them.” *
Gwyneth does not really remember the event itself, although it comes back to her often, as smells and sounds and emotions that well up through the cracks in her head and frighten her with their undirected intensity. Nika says this is a characteristic of trauma. Gwyneth knows that she is wrong, that trauma is something that happens to you when real bad things happen, and that whatever has happened to Gwyneth, it is nowhere near bad enough for that. She looks at the awful broken majesty of her country, at its violence and madness, and she smiles harshly and shakes her head. No, nothing of hers is bad enough. Gwyneth's are ordinary misfortunes in an ordinary life. She and her pain are not chosen.
Sometimes she tries to fit it into a series of life-altering events: one, coming out (the first time, the one that started her transition); two, misguided pokémon liberation; three, Martin getting shot; four, the end of her and Nika. This system never seems convincing, somehow. Gwyneth supposes that history never does.
Here are the facts, as far as she can reconstruct them: after she and Bianca had their chat in the pokémon centre, Gwyneth pleaded fatigue and illness and stayed in the Centre while Nika went exploring. Nika believed her, of course. Gwyneth has always been a good liar, and after her conversation with Bianca she looked ill, too. So Nika said okay and asked if Gwyneth wanted her to stay (she didn't) and then went off to do her thing, and Gwyneth went back up to their room and looked at every single Harmonia interview and statement the internet had to show her.
This is one of the things that haunts her across the years: the glint of his electric eye staring into the camera, visible even now in the flash of light on someone's spectacles or the glitter of a ruby ring.
After she did this, Gwyneth knows she must have gone out to the north edge of town, although she does not remember, and she knows she must have let her pokémon out of their balls, although she does not remember this, either. She does not know what she said to them, how she made them understand that their time with her was over. She remembers hurt and confusion, vaguely, on all sides. She remembers the sickly smell of munna smoke charged with fear and anxiety. Like old roses, or blood.
She knows that when Nika found her again her throat was hoarse and her voice was husky, so she imagines she must have screamed at them. They would not have understood; she is aware of this. All they knew is that they were partnered to a human who loved them and whom they loved. They could not know that Gwyneth only ever needed the slightest bit of encouragement to be convinced of her monstrosity – that she was easy prey for Harmonia and his slick, plausible rhetoric.
She does not blame Harmonia, or she does, but she tries not to. One thing Gwyneth does know now is that it's all on her. She was weak and she paid the price. If she had really believed, the way Hilbert believes or Cheren or Bianca, she would never have been taken in. She has been told that this is not a fault, that she was just kind and trusting and these are strengths as much as weaknesses – even that this is exactly how Harmonia manipulated N – but she remains unconvinced. She was weak. Years of persuasion from Nika brought her round, in the end, to the idea that maybe she wasn't such a bad trainer as she thought she was, but she still fell into the trap, didn't she? And that ruins everything. If she was weak enough to be driven to liberate her pokémon, then she was never worthy of them at all.
Nika says she found Gwyneth back at the Pokémon Centre, wandering and staring. She says she thought for a while that maybe Gwyneth was really ill; she wouldn't or couldn't say what had happened, just stared with eyes whose pupils had grown huge and dark. She thought about taking her to the Centre doctors, but she always did have good instincts and her instincts told her that Gwyneth didn't like doctors, so she decided to try just a little more before she caved and took her there, and then that was that: a few more questions and the spell broke.
This is usually where Nika stops. She does not like to talk about that evening, and Gwyneth does not really want to hear, either. She has never been certain why repression is supposed to be a bad thing. There are plenty of things you're better off not knowing. *
Rood looks shocked. He is the kind of man who keeps control of his face, Gwyneth can tell, but he can't hide this. He reaches for the frame of the door with one hand as if to steady himself.
Neither of them speak. Gwyneth can almost hear Concordia's stare.
“I'm so very sorry,” says Rood eventually. “Forgive my surprise, I … I am not sure I have ever actually met anyone who did that.”
No, most people weren't that stupid. But that's Gwyneth all over, isn't it?
She forces a smile. She can tell it looks wrong the second she starts, but she guesses she's committed now.
“Yeah,” she says. “Neither have I.”
Rood gathers himself visibly. Now he looks at her properly for the first time, and Gwyneth feels the familiar discomfort: the light in here is dim and forgiving, but still, there's no way he doesn't see the bags under her eyes, the punctures, bruises, bandages, the haphazard shave job. No hiding here; she looks exactly like what she is, a beat-up trans girl who spent last night in an alley.
“We should discuss this in private,” he says, reaching for his composure and grasping at least a little of it. “Come in and sit down.”
Gwyneth follows him into a cramped office that might be neat if there was more space to tidy things away. A big pot plant drapes rubbery leaves over an unstable-looking clutch of filing cabinets; an unfezant coos to itself on a perch by the window. The left side of its head is featherless, the skin tight and pink with burn scars.
“You can put your bag down anywhere,” says Rood, installing himself behind his desk, and Gwyneth drops it by the chair, transferring the venipede to her lap. It twitches restlessly at the unfezant's presence, but soon settles down. “Can I offer you a drink or anything?”
Gwyneth shakes her head.
“No,” she says. “Thanks.”
“Okay then.” Rood leans on his desk, papers crinkling under his arms. “I'm going to have to admit that this is unprecedented for me, um, Miss …?”
Gwyneth knows what that um means. It means Rood is very professional but that he is no different to anyone else, underneath it. This doesn't hurt her. She has had twenty-four years to learn that she is an abomination and now it is in her bones and there is nothing left to hurt.
“Gwyneth,” she says, in a level voice. It's the kind of voice that says everything and nothing.
“Gwyneth.” Rood nods, masking his awkwardness with a businesslike demeanour. “I am Rood Smits. I started the shelter here with a number of other members of Team Plasma, with the authorities' permission of course. Technically this is part of our sentence. A dispensation in acknowledgement of good behaviour.” He smiles briefly. Gwyneth has the feeling he tells this story a lot. “There was a schism after the events at the Pokémon League, you understand. Some of us sided with N and some with Ghetsis. Not everyone was in on Ghetsis' scheme, you know. Please understand, I am not excusing our actions,” he adds quickly. “This is after all an attempt to limit the damage we did and bring Plasma back in line with N's own dreams for the organisation. Mostly our work involves reuniting as many of the stolen pokémon as we still possess with their owners, although of course some remain with Ghetsis' Plasma cell, and also the care and rehoming of abandoned or otherwise abused pokémon.”
Gwyneth finds her eye drawn to the burnt unfezant. Someone did that to it, she thinks. She does not notice, but the fingers of her right hand close defensively around the hump of the venipede.
“But I am aware that we did more and worse than just that,” says Rood. “Which brings me to this. We … offer what we can to those we have hurt.” He spreads his hands. “We cannot undo the damage. We can apologise for and control it.”
Gwyneth is tempted to mutter something sarcastic like big of you, but she holds her tongue. Rood is a good man. She can see that, and that, more than anything, is what makes her angry about this. What use are enemies if they're better people than you are?
“I see,” she says.
“So.” Rood folds his hands. “On behalf of Team Plasma, I would like to offer you a formal and sincere apology, Gwyneth. Our actions were inexcusable, and we do not ask you forgive, only that you allow us to continue working as far as we can towards mending the communities and relationships that we damaged.”
There's a long silence. Gwyneth doesn't know what to say.
“Uh, thanks.” She rubs her forehead with the heel of her hand. “Yeah. Thanks, I guess, I … I was a dumb kid, naïve―”
“And we should not have abused that,” says Rood smoothly. “I am truly sorry. I … it's strange, I've thought about this quite a lot. What I would say if someone in your position ever came here, that is. Until today I never really knew.” A small, awkward smile, breaking through the administrative composure. “I suppose I had hoped that our message had gone unheeded.”
Gwyneth nods. She is now entirely out of words. It's all right; Rood still seems to have a few more.
“Now, as to more concrete redress,” he says, “you should of course be compensated, but I am afraid we lack the financial backing we had in our … ten years ago. There was a compensation fund for Plasma victims, but I do not know if it still exists. I can try to get in contact with the relevant authorities, if you wish.”
Compensation fund? Even if it does exist, it wouldn't pay out in time to help get her to Humilau. Still, Gwyneth supposes it's worth a shot. They must have run out of worthier people to reimburse by this point, so she wouldn't feel too bad about taking their money.
“That'd be good of you,” she says. “Thanks.”
Rood inclines his head, all calming solemnity.
“Not at all. Can I take down your contact details? I will get in touch when I know more.”
“Hm? Oh, sure, I guess.” She writes down her phone number and email address on a scrap of paper he offers her and hands it back to him. “Here.”
“Thank you so much.” Rood inspects it for a moment, then puts it in his desk drawer. “If there is anything else we can do, Gwyneth, then do please let us know.”
Gwyneth is about to say no, is about to just get up and leave. And then she remembers who and where she is, and she thinks: sharks have to keep moving or they suffocate.
Hell, she might as well try.
“There is something,” she says, slowly, fighting the urge to swallow her words and run. “Kind of weird, but … I desperately need to get to my brother's wedding and – can any of you give me a lift to Nimbasa?”
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Post by bay on May 24, 2018 6:25:56 GMT
Interesting you have Gwyneth's family debt compare to a midnight lycanroc coming at them. Yeah, as someone with family (and myself) struggling to keep up with saving money and bills because, boom, car engine broken, and then, boom, lights in bathroom not working etc.
I chuckled at the scene where the venipede gives Gwyneth the less than desired chicken nuggets is cute. Well, at least he tried!
Huh, so Gwyneth and Nika lived together for a few years after their journey. While I sorta expected that given the focus on their relationship, still nice to have that mention. Gwyneth walking around campus made me reminisce my college days now heh.
So, the reveal of Gwyneth releasing her Pokemon during the Team Plasma fiasco, oh dear. This makes an interesting conflict during her journey there. Asking Team Plasma to take her to Nimbasa, well that won't be awkward at all. = P
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Post by Firebrand on May 26, 2018 16:34:15 GMT
This is a pretty heavy fic in general, but this chapter especially was heavier than usual. Gwyneth has laid out before that she's not a healthy person, mentally, but it was always in a slightly oblique or ironic way, skirting along the edges of her past to say "Yep, I fucked up, I am fucked up, and I'm living with it every day," but now we're really seeing all the things that have happened to fuck her up and the kind of baggage she's been carrying for decades. On the other hand, we see catch a glimpse of what was probably one of the brighter periods of her life, when she lived with Nika, and to a lesser extent when Shane helps her get back on her feet, and I think those little counterpoints make all the other stuff in this chapter much more poignant.
What I find the most interesting here is the scene towards the end where she releases her pokemon. Obviously it was difficult and they didn't want to leave, but they clearly did, leaving Gwyneth alone. That moment seems to have started the cascade of bad things in Gwyneth's life, and to me it's telling that the pokemon she was abandoning were happy, cute looking ones. And now, when she's been battered down by life, she's got Venipede, a real piece of work, who won't leave her alone no matter how hard she tries. It's not the sort of pokemon you would expect undying loyalty from, but it seems like Venipede is the most constant thing Gwyneth has had in her life for a long time. |
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girl-like-substance
the seal will bite you if you give him half a chance
Posts: 527
Pronouns: xe/xem
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Post by girl-like-substance on Jun 2, 2018 15:46:06 GMT
Interesting you have Gwyneth's family debt compare to a midnight lycanroc coming at them. Yeah, as someone with family (and myself) struggling to keep up with saving money and bills because, boom, car engine broken, and then, boom, lights in bathroom not working etc. I mean, that's sort of the way it feels, I think. It's just constantly there, constantly coming for you, and the minute you stop running it's got you. Anyway, I'm glad it resonated (although of course not so glad that you're in a position in which you find that descriptions of debt resonate); a lot of what I tried to do with Go Home was describe a bunch of experiences, and it's good to know I succeeded, in whatever measure. I chuckled at the scene where the venipede gives Gwyneth the less than desired chicken nuggets is cute. Well, at least he tried! Sure did! Which, well, it means something. From trying to murder her to trying to feed her is quite a step; the venipede clearly has at least some of that weird pokémon instinct going on. And hell, Gwyneth could use a companion. Huh, so Gwyneth and Nika lived together for a few years after their journey. While I sorta expected that given the focus on their relationship, still nice to have that mention. Gwyneth walking around campus made me reminisce my college days now heh. There's plenty more of Gwyneth's life with Nika to come! Like, as her flashbacks move forward through her early life, we will naturally get to that point where she and Nika got together. Also, nice to hear that I evoked college memories for you; that's probably a sign I did a good job writing something that resembles a university campus. So, the reveal of Gwyneth releasing her Pokemon during the Team Plasma fiasco, oh dear. This makes an interesting conflict during her journey there. Asking Team Plasma to take her to Nimbasa, well that won't be awkward at all. = P Yeah, that's … kinda the point where it all went wrong for her, at least in her eyes. Probably you could say that some of her issues go back further than that, but that was the tipping point. But it's also the point at which things start to get better for her, too – as we'll see in the coming chapters. The thing is, of course, that after this point Gwyneth is carrying a lot more than she can handle, and that … doesn't end well, for anyone involved. Anyway, thank you for the review! I hope you continue to enjoy the story – the next chapter will be up later today. This is a pretty heavy fic in general, but this chapter especially was heavier than usual. Gwyneth has laid out before that she's not a healthy person, mentally, but it was always in a slightly oblique or ironic way, skirting along the edges of her past to say "Yep, I fucked up, I am fucked up, and I'm living with it every day," but now we're really seeing all the things that have happened to fuck her up and the kind of baggage she's been carrying for decades. On the other hand, we see catch a glimpse of what was probably one of the brighter periods of her life, when she lived with Nika, and to a lesser extent when Shane helps her get back on her feet, and I think those little counterpoints make all the other stuff in this chapter much more poignant. That was kind of the plan with this chapter, yeah – it's where we start to see where things went wrong, but also where things went right. She liberated her pokémon, sure, but, well, she and Nika were very happy together, for a long time. We're pretty close to the halfway point of the fic here, and I felt that would be a good place at which to put these major turning points, good and bad; the next couple of chapters have some of them, too. What I find the most interesting here is the scene towards the end where she releases her pokemon. Obviously it was difficult and they didn't want to leave, but they clearly did, leaving Gwyneth alone. That moment seems to have started the cascade of bad things in Gwyneth's life, and to me it's telling that the pokemon she was abandoning were happy, cute looking ones. And now, when she's been battered down by life, she's got Venipede, a real piece of work, who won't leave her alone no matter how hard she tries. It's not the sort of pokemon you would expect undying loyalty from, but it seems like Venipede is the most constant thing Gwyneth has had in her life for a long time. I think you might be the first reviewer to mention that! Yeah, that's definitely what's going on here; Gwyneth's old pokémon were really suitable for the kind of kid she used to be, mostly happy even if she had moments of darkness (which, like, munna has moments of darkness too, as when the musharna conjures up those Plasma grunts' worst nightmare in the Dreamyard, which is a hell of a thing to do), but for the person she is now, a venipede is more appropriate. The thing that really swung the choice for me when I was considering what she should catch was the description of the whole scolipede line as being relentless. Yes, you could say that Gwyneth is poisonous, damaged and vicious, just as her venipede is, but those are just flavour details; the salient point is that they're both too stubborn to give up. Gwyneth is going to Humilau, even if it means actually asking Team Plasma of all people for help. And the venipede is going with her, even if she doesn't want it to. Gwyneth might not like it, but, well. She probably needs it. Now I'm waxing pretentious about my own fiction, which is like the most insufferable thing, so I'm going to stop here and just thank you for your review instead. Later today: Gwyneth gets a ride out of town, and remembers when she rode a Ferris wheel. |
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girl-like-substance
the seal will bite you if you give him half a chance
Posts: 527
Pronouns: xe/xem
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Post by girl-like-substance on Jun 3, 2018 8:35:46 GMT
SEVEN: OLD SCARSWednesday, 14th SeptemberAsk, and ye shall receive. That's from the Bible, Gwyneth thinks. She's not sure. Bits of Catholicism rubbed off on her from Nika, but not much. Gwyneth is more interested in this world than the next.
Anyway, Rood agrees. He's surprised, of course, although after a moment it fades; he looks at her again and puts the pieces together. This is someone who has spent all her resources, he thinks. This is Gwyneth's breaking point. If he was standing where she is, he might be desperate enough to ask strangers for rides too.
Gwyneth can see this, or thinks she can. (She cannot see that Rood is recalling his own breaking point, nearly a decade ago, when Plasma came crashing down around his ears and his friend Ghetsis turned out to be a monster, and Rood himself ran blindly until he reached Route 18 and bumped into an enigmatic smile and an International Police badge.) It's pity, she's sure of it, and it makes her stomach turn, but she does not say anything. She can't afford her stupid damn pride now.
“One of our people needs to go into Nimbasa anyway,” Rood tells her. “Returning a liepard to his partner. I can arrange for them to take you along.” He clicks around on his computer. “It's … Jackie, all right. I'll let him know.”
“Thanks,” says Gwyneth, trying to sound heartfelt. “Thanks so much, dude, I really needed this.”
Some of the intensity in her voice must be genuine. Rood looks up and smiles briefly.
“It's all right,” he replies. “As I say, he'll be going there anyway. And we do owe you. Quite considerably, in fact.”
Gwyneth shifts uncomfortably. In her lap, the venipede hisses disconsolately at the disturbance.
“Uh, yeah,” she says. “Guess so.”
“I believe he'll be in at around two,” Rood informs her. “Come back then, would you? Tell Concordia you're here and she'll be able to point you in the right direction.”
“Right. Thanks.” Gwyneth stands up, nearly dropping the venipede. Rood watches with obvious unease as she fumbles to catch it, left hand stiff and awkward. “Uh – yeah, so thanks again,” she repeats, grabbing her bag. She just wants out of here now, as fast as possible. “I'll, uh, I'll come back at two.”
Rood stands to get the door for her and she staggers out, trying to juggle bag, jacket and venipede and almost dropping all three. In the lobby she forces herself to stop and sort everything out, and then, venipede on bag on back, she leaves.
Well. Could have gone a lot worse.
Gwyneth sighs and runs her fingers through her hair. She's found a way forward. Isn't that the main thing? It has to be. Forget closure, forget history: she has a ride out of Driftveil. It's more than she had this morning. More than she had any right to have at all, she knows. And yet she has it anyway.
“We're doing all right,” she tells the venipede, to make it sound more real. She is not convinced. It's okay. She doesn't have to be.
She wanders down the street, unsure of what to do now. There are a couple of hours to go until she needs to be back at the shelter, and she's tired as hell after walking all the way here. What she'd like is somewhere to rest, maybe get a drink and something to eat, but it's fairly clear that this is not on the cards. She could afford a meal, just. Some junk food or something, cheap and filling. But she'd rather wait until this evening. If she's going to burn the last of her money, she has to make it count.
So: aimless wandering again. There's nowhere to sit here, really. In places there isn't even any sidewalk. These suburbs weren't built with pedestrians in mind. Gwyneth walks, takes rationed sips of her water, feels the heat of the sun ratcheting up as morning gives way to afternoon. The venipede clicks on her bag and tries to climb down her arm, but Gwyneth is ready for it this time and catches it before it does any damage, lifting it down to the ground where it can scuttle between patches of shade, avoiding what light it can.
“Sun's not your thing, huh,” says Gwyneth, watching it. “You're gonna have fun in Humilau then, dude.”
This is not very funny, but it makes her smile, at least until she realises that she's just predicted a future in which it is still with her by the time she gets there. Then she stops. Abruptly.
“C'mon,” she says, harshly. “Can't hang around in the shade all day. We're moving.”
So she moves, and the venipede with her. She thinks that maybe she could walk up to the edge of the city – she can't be that far off it now – and do some liberation all over again, but she knows she can't. It isn't a question of whether or not she likes it, or it her; it's a question of what is possible and what isn't. And it's not possible for Gwyneth to do that again. She's amazed that she managed to do it the first time. It messed her up for weeks afterwards.
These are strange weeks in her recollection, with Nika hauling her by inches and raw willpower out of her fugue back into life. She remembers being dragged around Nimbasa, Nika determinedly chattering on and on about the rioting in the 1850s and the historic fashion houses; she remembers the theme park and the Musical Theatre, sitting with Nika in the dark and seeing a different sort of trainer coach their pokémon to a different sort of mastery. It's like that first journey together from Striaton west to Wellspring Cave. Then and now, Nika responds to the pain of others with feverish activity, burning herself up to make their lives just a little better. It's an instinct she will never learn to suppress, and which Gwyneth will come to be both thankful for and afraid of: what will happen to Nika if she pours all her energy into maintaining Gwyneth? Because by then Gwyneth will be a black hole, capable of taking everything you give her and still sucking in more, and she will know with cast-iron certainty that you don't throw people like Nika into black holes like that.
Still. Nika is sixteen and Gwyneth is fifteen, and at that age you are fumbling your way through a whole host of new types of interaction you have not yet learned to deal with. They do okay, for their inexperience. And little by little, Gwyneth comes back to herself. She's not the same. She never will be. But she's back.
She realises that it's happened one afternoon in the Pokémon Centre, in the practice court round the back of the building. Word has got around that Nika's pretty good, and there are three or four hotheaded kids who want to beat her; Gwyneth is sitting on the bench at the back, ostensibly watching Astyanax battle a watchog but really watching Nika, the height and grace of her, the way she puts her weight on one leg and her hand on her hip, a perfect image of casual power – and then she realises all at once that she hasn't thought about Blossom or Corbin even once today. And more than that, she realises that she is okay with this.
That evening Nika says she thinks she's tough enough to take on the Gym now, speaking diffidently in case organised pokémon training is still something that might upset her, and Gwyneth agrees enthusiastically. Let's go tomorrow, she says, and Nika stares, then smiles. Okay, she says. Sure thing.
The next day, they go back to the theme park in the East Bank, where Elesa's Gym is built up around one of the rollercoasters. It's possible to get to her without riding the coaster, of course, but after registering Nika and Gwyneth ride it anyway, for the full experience and for fun, and they get off at the end where the arena is, lit by shafts of coloured light and ringed by trainers and fans here to see the battles – or, although they might not admit it, to see Elesa. She is one of Unova's most famous models, and surfs through life on a wave of her own glamour. Nika and Gwyneth are by no means immune: though they watch the three battles that are due to take place before Nika's, neither of them can actually remember anything about them afterwards.
When Nika's turn comes, it's a close thing. Elesa faces a lot of sandile and krokorok, and she has ways of dealing with their immunity to her electric-types' moves; her emolga only ever land for a split second, keeping themselves well out of range of Astyanax's ground-type moves, and shuffle in and out of combat with U-turn, striking repeatedly at his weaknesses much too fast for him to counter. Nika recalls him before they beat him unconscious and sends out Britomartis, against whom the emolga struggle to make much impression. The pawniard waits, tanks hits, and when the emolga get close smacks them out of the air, one by one.
“Oh hey, now I remember Lenora saying something about you,” says Elesa, smiling so beautifully that Nika very nearly loses her concentration and throws the match then and there. (She doesn't admit to this, but Gwyneth can tell, because it has more or less the same effect on her.) “You're the smart one with the dark-types, aren't you?”
Nika admits, stumblingly, that she is, and Elesa looks pleased.
“Looking forward to how you deal with this, then,” she says, and sends out a zebstrika that snorts sparks and sets itself aflame with static discharge, crashing into Britomartis and sending her flying with one perfectly-executed flame charge. She gets up again, just, but Nika knows when to back down and recalls her, sending out Hekate instead. By this point, Gwyneth's heart is sinking – one pokémon left, and a flying-type? Nika has as good as lost – and at first it does look like everything is over. Hekate isn't even attacking, just tottering around on her little legs, rolling between the zebstrika's hooves as it tries to pin her down with bolts of lightning. It's having a hard time of it, with her being so small and its equine eyes not suited for this, but Elesa's voice keeps it steady and Gwyneth knows it must only be a matter of time before one of its blows finds its mark.
But Nika isn't done yet. She keeps this up for a little while, just long enough for Elesa to raise a quizzical eyebrow and the zebstrika to start whinnying and lashing out wildly in discontent, and then out of nowhere she has Hekate whip up a whirlwind, right between the zebstrika's legs. Its hooves fly out from under it in four different directions and, scrabbling around like a spider on rollerskates, the big horse staggers away, back towards Elesa; snorting furiously, it gathers lightning around itself, and though Elesa shouts for it to stop the command comes too late: the zebstrika launches itself at Hekate in a thunderous wild charge that completely misses, taking it out of the arena and into the back wall with a crash and a strong smell of burning paint. It's not badly hurt – pokémon are tough, and frankly the wall looks like it came off worse – but it's confused, and it takes long enough getting back to the arena that the match is forfeit.
It's an object lesson in the inadvisability of trying to charge something as small and bouncy as a soccer ball. Elesa stares at Hekate, preening calmly like she does this every day, and bursts out laughing. Okay, she says, she'll allow it. Why the hell not. Well done, Nika. She asked how she'd deal with a zebstrika and she got herself an answer.
Outside, after Nika's got her badge and TM, Gwyneth tells her she was amazing, that she didn't think it was possible to win, and Nika smiles, ecstatic. She wasn't really expecting to win herself. The idea of pissing the zebstrika off enough that it ignored its training was not something she actually thought would work. But she doesn't say any of this; she's light-headed with the elation of unexpected victory and the delight of seeing Gwyneth laughing and smiling like nothing is wrong, and in her head wheels are spinning without, for once, any of her fears and anxieties to weigh them down, and she suggests that they should do something to celebrate. And the two of them look around and see, rising above the park like an electric giant, the Ferris wheel.
This is where it happens. Up there, with blue sky on all sides. Summeris coming, they said, and now it's here, now it's all around them, light and heat and joy that blanks out even the pain of what happened three weeks ago, hiding the bleeding stump of Gwyneth's trainer career beneath a cloak of bright summer magic.
So, Gwyn, says Nika nervously. (All this seemed like a much better idea when she was high on victory.) Pretty cool view, huh?
Yeah, agrees Gwyneth, although she isn't looking out, not really. Her whole being is focused in this spot, inside this gondola with this girl.
There is the longest pause, as they reach the top of the wheel and then start to come down again, and then Nika realises that they'll soon be back down on the ground and starts gabbling uh, so Gwyn listen I wanted to say but Gwyneth already knows, is starting to think that maybe she's known since Wellspring Cave, even, and she turns to Nika and smiles and smiles and when they walk out of the gondola back into the crowds thronging the park, the two of them are holding hands. It's tentative. It's awkward. It's perfect.
We should go take your pokémon to the Centre, says Gwyneth.
Yeah, agrees Nika.
And they go, together.
In a way, nothing has changed. Gwyneth will still have guilty nightmares. She still can't see Harmonia on TV without shaking and coming close to tears. She is still punching herself over and over, on the inside where nobody can see. But now she has Nika, even more than she had her before.
Summer is coming, they said. And now summer is here. *
And after summer comes autumn. Nika's favourite day: the autumn solstice. Enough sun left for the old magic to linger; enough cool coming for the new to edge in. The day she chose for her wedding.
It's a fact, and Nika doesn't know that Gwyneth knows this, but it's a fact that Nika would have asked Gwyneth to marry her. She'd been planning it for weeks, and the only reason she didn't follow through is because she was waiting for the unpleasantness to blow over. This was not an unreasonable assumption to make; it always blew over before. But though it didn't that time, if it had and she had got her chance, she would have set the same date.
The impending offer was another reason why they split up. This is another thing that Nika doesn't know about.
If she does make it to Humilau, thinks Gwyneth, she has a lot of explaining to do.
First, though, she actually has to get there. Right now, she's sitting on a low wall bounding the parking lot of a grocery store, taking measured sips of water and wallowing in the past. It's not attractive, she knows that, but what the hell, it stops her going crazy. Assuming she hasn't already. She has always remained wilfully ignorant of anything to do with mental illness, but she doesn't need to know much to know that whatever state of mind she was in yesterday is not something typically associated with good health.
It's okay. She's not dead. She sees this as enough for now.
“Think it's time we headed out, dude,” she says to the venipede, in the vague hope that talking might snap her out of this. “C'mon. We got twenty minutes.”
She gets up and it follows, clicking irritably at the hot tarmac beneath its feet. This side of midday, the heat that was building earlier has soaked into Driftveil like red wine into a white shirt, indelible and impossible to ignore. Heat haze shimmers above the roads to the west. The sky is so violently blue it's almost painful to look at.
Well. There are still six days of summer to go, after all. Maybe Unova's just trying to fit a little more sun in before autumn officially begins.
Inside the Team Plasma shelter, an electric fan is whirring back and forth, making Concordia's hair and the pages of her book shift and rustle. A purrloin has appeared from somewhere and is lying splayed out across the floor directly in front of the fan's breeze. It looks up, heat-sluggish, as Gwyneth enters.
“Hey,” she says, as Concordia transfers her attention from the book to her. (Seeing – what, exactly? Her gaze is as opaque as lead.) “I'm here to see Jackie? Rood said you'd be expecting me.”
“Gwyneth, right?” Concordia's voice is soft and careful, from a lifetime of Harmonia. That's where Gwyneth recognises her from, she remembers: she was one of the two girls he adopted alongside N. Was she arrested with the rest of the team? It seems harsh. Gwyneth doesn't think being roped into something by your abusive asshole of a father ought to be a crime. “Yes, he mentioned. Follow me.”
She gets up, notices the purrloin and sighs.
“You got out again? Oh, never mind. I'll deal with you later, Sam.” She smiles shyly at Gwyneth, who is unprepared to be smiled at by someone as pretty as Concordia and so is momentarily stunned. “Sorry. This way, please.”
“Uh. Okay, sure.”
Concordia leads her through the door at the back and down a noisy corridor that smells strongly of animals, to an exit into the parking lot behind the building. Someone that Gwyneth assumes is Jackie is leaning against a red car that looks like it's in slightly better shape than Shane's.
“I'm sorry, by the way,” says Concordia, as they cross the lot.
“Huh?”
“For what we did to you.” She looks genuinely apologetic. Even Gwyneth can't find it in herself to take that as condescension.
“Oh,” she says, unsure of what to feel if not anger. “Um. Thanks, I guess. It's … it's been a while. Water under the bridge.”
She isn't sure if Concordia believes her, but if she doesn't, she doesn't say so. Instead, she calls out to the man by the car.
“Hey, Jackie! This is Gwyneth.”
He raises a hand in an elliptical kind of greeting. Gwyneth nods. She can deal with laconic. She's no good at talking to people anyway.
“Hey,” she says, and Jackie nods back.
“Hey,” he replies.
“Rood tell you what you need to know?” asks Concordia, and Jackie nods. He's tall and young and dark, in jeans and a short-sleeved shirt that shows the little burn scars on his arms. When he looks at Gwyneth, she knows, he sees the matching scars on her arms, sees a person who knows more than one use for a cigarette. It's okay. She's over it now. It's just that even if you are, you have to carry the marks around for the rest of your life.
She supposes that this applies to everything else in her life, too.
“So, I'm taking you to Nimbasa,” says Jackie. He's careful. He keeps his eyes on her face, same as Gwyneth keeps hers on his. Neither of them knows whether the other is sensitive about these things, or how much. Gwyneth doesn't like people looking at her face, either, but she's long since accepted that she doesn't get a choice about that.
“Yep,” says Gwyneth. “And, uh, my venipede, I guess. I hope that's okay.”
Jackie grins. One of his teeth is quite obviously fake.
“We're Team Plasma,” he says. “We love all pokémon. Although if you've got a druddigon, I'd appreciate it if it stays in its ball.”
It's not the best attempt at breaking the ice Gwyneth has ever come across, but it gets the job done. She smiles and so does Concordia, relieved.
“Okay, well, I'd better get back to the desk,” she says. “Do you have the address, Jackie?”
“Yeah.”
“Good.” She smiles at Gwyneth again. “Goodbye, Gwyneth. Good luck!”
“Thanks,” says Gwyneth, and really means it. (She was ready for the smile this time, but it still packed a hell of a punch.) She and Jackie watch Concordia go for a moment, and then look back at each other, faintly awkward.
“So,” says Jackie, after a second. “You ready?”
“Sure, dude,” says Gwyneth.
“You can put your bag in the trunk,” he says. “Stevie's on the back seat.”
Gwyneth looks in through the open window and sees an elderly liepard yawning in the sun. She always forgets how big those things look when you get this close to them.
“Okay,” she says, and goes to dump her bag.
A few minutes later, Gwyneth is installed on the passenger seat with the venipede and Jackie is pulling the car out onto the road, the wind starting to pick up as they get moving. Gwyneth had almost forgotten what this was like, driving along with the windows open on a hot day. The memory of summers past comes back to her with a sudden surprising force.
“I figure you've probably had apologies already,” says Jackie, “but I can't not, so. I am sorry, for what we did.”
“Thanks,” says Gwyneth. The venipede shuffles on her lap. It's listening to Stevie, she thinks, with the wariness of a small predator sharing space with a big one. “It was a while ago.”
“Stays with you, though.” Jackie takes them round the corner and down another line of interchangeable houses. “Stayed with me.” He shakes his head. “Hell of a shock to find out that more than half the team were there for Ghetsis and not for the pokémon.”
Another long pause. In this bright light, and with time to reflect, Gwyneth is becoming aware of how dusty her clothes are after coming through the tunnels. She probably should have changed before coming back to the shelter.
“Still,” says Jackie. “It was a while ago, like you said. Hope Rood and Concordia showed you Plasma's different now.”
Gwyneth thinks of the unfezant with the burns. She thinks very strongly that she would like a blunt object and the name of the person responsible – but that doesn't help the bird, does it? And that's the difference between her and people like Rood and Concordia. Her instinct is always to fight or to run. Theirs is to help the wounded.
There are various conclusions you could draw from this. Gwyneth's, as usual, is vehement and not very flattering.
“Yeah,” she says. “They did.” She hesitates. “Gotta say, I'm surprised you kept the name. Don't people mind?”
“At first. Not so much these days.” Jackie shrugs. “We figure it's up to us to make Plasma mean what it was supposed to. Though I guess we got competition now.”
Gwyneth freezes. Her heart starts to pound like it wants out of her chest.
“Competition? Plasma's still going?”
“Huh? Yeah. You didn't see the news? Roxie and some kid trainers ran into a cell near Virbank. Harmonia's people. Bad stuff.” He sighs. “Former friends of mine, some of 'em. They called me up and asked me to sign back on. Don't know what they're planning, but none of us at the shelter want anything to do with it.”
Again. It could happen again. Oh, it won't be the same plan, Gwyneth knows that; not even Harmonia could make it work twice. You only get one shot at something like that. After the first time, everyone knows you're not just a pokémon rights activist. But that's not enough to stop someone like him, is it? Harmonia is only human, and Gwyneth knows better than most what that really means.
“Goddamn.” She doesn't know what else to say, so she says it again. “Goddamn.”
“Yeah.” Jackie laughs humourlessly. “Some people just won't quit.”
“Guess they don't know when they're beaten,” says Gwyneth, feeling hypocritical but not quite good enough at irony to know why.
“Guess not,” agrees Jackie. And they drive on.
The suburbs of Driftveil go on for a long time, longer than seems reasonable or sane. Gwyneth wonders how anyone who lives here gets to wherever it is they work on time. She hasn't seen so much as a convenience store for at least half an hour; it's all just houses, row after row after goddamn row.
“Dull part of town, huh,” she says.
“Yup,” Jackie says. “Rent's low at least.”
“That why you're based out here?”
“Yup.”
After a while, Jackie clicks the radio on, tunes around. News, soft rock, pop, period drama with exaggeratedly English accents. He tunes back to the rock and leaves it there, which suits Gwyneth just fine. If you're riding in a car with the windows down on a sunny day, you should probably be listening to rock music, she thinks.
In the back, Stevie yawns and rolls over to curl up the other way. The venipede, which had just started to relax, tenses again at the sudden movement.
“Chill, dude,” Gwyneth tells it, not caring if Jackie hears. “He's not gonna eat you.”
“He doesn't have the jaws for it any more,” says Jackie. “Or the energy. He's sixteen and doesn't hunt anything more lively than cat food.”
“Pretty old for a liepard.”
“Yeah. Took us a while to track down his previous partner, unfortunately. Normally people come to us, but in this case she's bedbound. Hence the house delivery.”
“Right.” Gwyneth looks down at the venipede. “You hear that? He's harmless.”
It rattles at her and she sighs.
“Fine, then, be that way.”
Jackie takes them east, back towards the real Driftveil. It's a city of two coasts, really; the square of land in between is just a wilderness of housing estates, places where the factories and commercial hubs store their workers at night. From the drawbridge down to the docks, the metalworks and foundries stand shoulder to shoulder, belching out smoke that stands out blackly against the electric sky. In amongst them Gwyneth sees huge, dark buildings like enormous barns, giant yellow hazard signs plastered on every wall. They have industrial garbodor in there, massive things with bodies of slag and radioactive waste, capable of eating anything from charcoal to depleted uranium. On their second visit to Driftveil, when they were eighteen, Nika insisted they take the tour, and Gwyneth stared from behind a protective psychic barrier as a garbodor the size of a bull elephant shovelled cinders from the factories into its mouth with fingers like railway sleepers. She remembers imagining dozens of them eating the building, eating Driftveil, eating the world down to a nub of molten metal like a time-lapse of worms collapsing an apple to the core.
“Been to Driftveil before?” asks Jackie, almost as if he's read her mind, and Gwyneth nods.
“On my trainer journey,” she says. “And then again as a normal tourist.”
“Not a lot of those around here.”
Gwyneth shrugs.
“We went everywhere.”
Jackie doesn't ask who 'we' means. Gwyneth appreciates that. She appreciates everything that makes these things go even a little bit smoother.
“What's in Nimbasa for you?” he asks. “Rood said you had to get there urgently.”
“Nothing, really. I just have to get to my brother's wedding in Humilau, and Nimbasa's the next town.”
Jackie gives her a long sideways look, appraising and calculating. It's subtle, but you don't look at Gwyneth without her noticing. He sees more now, sees someone desperate enough that she has to resort to this to get where she needs to go. Sees Gwyneth for what she is.
“That's a helluva trip,” he says. “You two must be close.”
Gwyneth almost laughs.
“Hell, no,” she replies. “I can't stand him. But I like his … I like his fiancée.” She smiles, and possibly the pain shows and possibly it does not. “We got history.”
“Right,” says Jackie. If he sees anything he doesn't show it. He has a face as motionless as a piece of lead. “The good kind, I hope?”
“The best.” Gwyneth pauses, aware she's said more than she meant to. The pause lengthens into a silence, and Jackie drives on through it, bringing the car to rest at the back of a queue at some traffic lights. It's getting busier now that they're out of the suburbs. They got here from the shelter in maybe half an hour, but it'll take twice that just to get from here to the bridge, Gwyneth can tell.
Without the wind of movement to cool it, the car gets hot fast. Stevie lolls and makes grumbling feline noises. The venipede crawls down into the shadows in the footwell. Gwyneth rests her arm in the open window and feels the sun turn her bandages into an oven.
“Here we go,” says Jackie, with a sigh. “They keep saying they're working on fixing the traffic round here but they never manage it. Open a dozen new roads and they fill up just as fast.”
“Driftveil seems like that all over,” ventures Gwyneth, thinking of the congested streets she fought down earlier, and Jackie nods.
“Yeah, it's a mess. Streets ain't big enough for all the crap that's in them.”
They move forward, foot by foot. Car horns blare. Someone walks by with a seismitoad and a plant mister, occasionally spraying the one with the other to stop its sensitive skin cracking in the heat. Every time, the seismitoad croaks a heartfelt thanks and rubs its oversized hands all over its warty body.
“That should be in its ball,” says Jackie, scowling. “Cruel to make it walk around town on a day like this.”
Gwyneth doesn't say anything. She thinks of suggesting that maybe the seismitoad likes to walk, or has a problem with poké balls, but she believes she has no right to talk about what's good for pokémon or not. Leave that to the real activists. Leave it to Jackie.
Her guess about how long it would take to get to the bridge is more or less perfect: an hour or so after hitting the traffic, they drive up onto an overpass and come around a corner to see the orange bulk of the Driftveil Drawbridge shining like a dawn stone in the afternoon sun. Gwyneth can see all the way across the bay to the other side and the forests either side of the highway leading east towards Nimbasa. She sees the cargo ships and ferries, the gulls wheeling high above, the city sprawling along the coast like a concrete lion lounging in the sun. She sees the water and realises with a wonder that just about touches her even through her cynicism and dissociation that she was walking underneath that only yesterday.
“I came to Driftveil through the … well, they call it the Relic Passage,” she tells Jackie, and the name only slightly spoils the magic of it. “The tunnel that goes under the bay to Castelia?”
“What? You're kidding me. How's that even possible?”
“Nah, dude, it's real. Old Henuun thing. There's all these caves down there and they just cut corridors in between them.”
Jackie whistles. It's a good whistle, sharp and clear. The kind you could cut paper with.
“Incredible,” he says. “Right under the bay?”
“Yeah. An escape tunnel from Hil'Zorah. One end at―”
“Hilzawhat now?”
Gwyneth refuses to take the bait. She doesn't know if Jackie's fishing, but she refuses anyway, on principle.
“Hil'Zorah,” she repeats. “Big fortress in the middle of Hilaan.”
“Oh. The Relic Castle.” He says it like someone satisfied to have got to the answer, like someone who doesn't know what he's saying. Okay.
“Yeah,” says Gwyneth. “That.” She takes a breath. They're coming up on the bridge now, the highway full of massive trucks standing shoulder to shoulder and grumbling like bouffalant protecting their calves. It's still hot even in their shadow. “The tunnel's an escape route. One end comes out in Castelia, one in Driftveil.”
“I had no idea.” Jackie drums his fingers absently on the steering wheel. Stevie looks up sharply in the back, hissing, and he stops. “Those Relics sure were good at building stuff,” he says blithely. “Makes you wonder why they didn't put it all back up again after the dragons blew it up.”
Not even indigenes. Gwyneth briefly imagines herself having that conversation, possibly that argument, if it came to it, and then because she knows that even if she wins she will lose in all the ways that matter she decides to let it go.
“Mm,” she says. “Maybe they figured there wasn't any point after all the farmland got turned into a desert.”
Jackie nods, eyebrows raised, a perfect portrait of oh, I never thought of that before.
“Yeah,” he agrees. “That tracks.”
Gwyneth asks herself what Jackie sees when he looks at her. She's forced to admit she can't tell. His is not the kind of face that gives much away, or possibly it's just that there is nothing behind it to be given away. It might be that he never even looked past the burn scars to see the colour of her skin or the nauseating geometry of her face.
She supposes that's okay. She probably gets more of his sympathy this way.
The pace picks up once they're actually on the approach to the bridge; this part was built with the demands of heavy industry in mind, and the highway is so broad in either direction that Gwyneth gets only glimpses of the sides in between the passing trucks. She wonders how many lanes. Then she decides she doesn't care.
She leans back in her seat, completely out of conversation ideas, and they drive wordlessly out over the gleaming waves to an all-Unovan fanfare of radio music and snarling motors. *
Jackie is good at silences, clearly, but every so often he'll ask a question. What's with the venipede? (She bumped into it last week and now they're stuck with each other.) Where's home for you? (Hesitation – Nuvema? Nacrene? – then: Aspertia.) Sometimes Gwyneth asks him something in return. He lives and works in Driftveil, obviously, but he's from Opelucid originally. He hasn't been home in a long time. His parents, sister, old friends, all prefer to keep him at arm's length, after what he's done. He understands, but Gwyneth sees that it cuts him up inside. Maybe it even burns his arms. It's not her place to guess.
Traffic thins out after the big junction after the drawbridge: most of these trucks aren't going dead east to Nimbasa, along the Route 5 highway; it's narrow and densely intermeshed with the trainers' trail, and there are strict limits on what's allowed to go up and down it. Some arcane agreement brokered between the League and the Unova Transportation Authority. Gwyneth watches the trees lining up on either side of the road, catches glimpses of kids walking the paths beyond, and aches for the past.
She digs her fingernails into the palm of her hand. Don't be stupid, Gwyneth. You got things to do.
Ahead, the outskirts of Nimbasa come into view: satellite towns and commuter villages, tennis courts and squares of parkland. This area is nicer than its equivalent across the bay in Driftveil. Nika's Aunt Natalya lives here. It's why she avoided coming here on the first leg of her trainer journey – she wanted to get away from her family, not walk into another branch of it. It was an unnecessary precaution. She turned out to be far more open to the idea of Nika having a girlfriend (and Gwyneth in particular) than Nika's parents were.
Gwyneth wonders if Aunt Natalya (it is impossible to separate her from her auntness; she bears it like a title) would be willing to put her up for a night. Probably not, she decides. That's okay. Gwyneth will survive. All you have to do is not die, right?
Jackie asks where he should drop her off. Gwyneth takes a very, very long time to answer. *
They stop at the west side bus depot. Jackie probably doesn't believe that Gwyneth has the money for a ticket, but she's got her pride, useless though it might be, and she won't admit to being stuck. Besides, she's halfway there now, isn't she? She's been lucky, she's nearly died and has no more money, but she's halfway there. She's going to make it the rest of the way too.
“Well, this is my stop,” she says, as Jackie pulls over. “Thanks, dude. It's real good of you to do this.”
“Ah, no problem,” he replies. “Gotta make up for that misspent youth somehow, huh?”
She smiles politely and gets out, the venipede surging up over the lip of the doorway and down onto the sidewalk.
“Thanks anyway,” she says, and goes to retrieve her bag. She hoists it and the venipede back onto her shoulders, then raises a hand in response to Jackie's wave as he pulls out and away down the street.
Gwyneth takes a big breath of car exhaust fumes and lets it out again. She looks at the depot across the road, the buses coming in and out between the concrete pillars.
The heat is starting to fade. She should put her jacket back on but it's too much effort to take her backpack off. She feels like a lot of things are too much effort right now. She feels like static.
“Sharks gotta keep moving,” she says, and starts walking.
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Post by bay on Jun 7, 2018 6:39:47 GMT
I like that during Jackie and Gwyneth's interaction we have a Plasma grunt in the aftermath after its first incarnation and his feelings towards the new Team Plasma there. One thing I was slightly disappointed with B2/W2 was the games didn't take full advantage of the conflict between old Plasma and new Plasma, instead focusing on the main protagonist dealing with new Plasma.
Also neat we get a glimpse into how Nika deals with one of her gym battles. Well, purposely enraging Elsa's ace is one way to deal with her Pokemon heh. Nika and Gwyneth at the Ferris wheel is cute too.
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girl-like-substance
the seal will bite you if you give him half a chance
Posts: 527
Pronouns: xe/xem
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Post by girl-like-substance on Jun 9, 2018 12:32:58 GMT
I like that during Jackie and Gwyneth's interaction we have a Plasma grunt in the aftermath after its first incarnation and his feelings towards the new Team Plasma there. One thing I was slightly disappointed with B2/W2 was the games didn't take full advantage of the conflict between old Plasma and new Plasma, instead focusing on the main protagonist dealing with new Plasma. Yeah! There's like … two confrontations between an old and new Plasma grunt in the whole game, I think? First, there's the part where a new Plasma grunt is trying to convince an old one to sign back up with Ghetsis; second, there's that bit right at the end where Rood and company show up to distract them while you sneak on to the ship. I would've liked a bit more than that, honestly, so I wanted to dramatise the conflict – and that first encounter is the only one I could work into the story. Jackie is obviously the old Plasma grunt from the first confrontation, as he relates to Gwyneth. Also neat we get a glimpse into how Nika deals with one of her gym battles. Well, purposely enraging Elsa's ace is one way to deal with her Pokemon heh. Nika and Gwyneth at the Ferris wheel is cute too. Yep! Nika isn't quite a Cheren or a Hilbert, but she's full of unorthodox ideas, and she has a kind of dramatic flair that makes really fun trainer battles. I didn't get to write many battles in this fic, but I had a lot of fun with those I did. There are a few more of Nika's Gym challenges to come, if you liked this one! And yeah, the two of them are cute. From this point on, they're going to get cuter yet … until everything goes wrong, of course. :P As ever, thank you for the review! Up later today, in lieu of a Ghost Town chapter: Gwyneth has made it pretty much halfway across Unova, but tonight is when her luck runs out. |
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girl-like-substance
the seal will bite you if you give him half a chance
Posts: 527
Pronouns: xe/xem
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Post by girl-like-substance on Jun 9, 2018 21:22:07 GMT
EIGHT: NOCTURNEWednesday, 14th SeptemberIt's starting to get dark. Sooner than Gwyneth was expecting, too. Summer's nearly over. Eight days and it's official.
Eight days. And she's still the wrong side of White Forest. That's at least a two-day hike, if you're going through it, and Gwyneth doesn't see that she has any other options. Although if she's honest, she's not sure that the hike's an option, either. Not without supplies she doesn't have. And some way to get over the river.
She sighs and kicks a pebble down the street. What are you gonna do, right? She just has to keep going, somehow. One foot in front of the other, and don't die. It sounds so easy when you put it like that, she thinks, and sighs again.
To give herself something to do, she stops and takes off her backpack so she can put her jacket back on. Then she puts it back on her shoulders again, and lifts the venipede back into place, and finally gives in to the cold emptiness in her belly and goes off in search of something to eat.
A couple of streets away she finds a fast food restaurant – this is one of the benefits of Gwyneth's particular Aân Hen, her middling Unovan blandness: there's always junk food somewhere nearby – and she throws the last of her money at something that will, if not exactly nourish her, at least keep her going through the night. She eats too fast, sitting at a chipped Formica table under a glaring light, and then when her stomach starts to cramp she eats slower again.
The venipede scratches around the tabletop, running its antennae over the plastic to soak up whatever oily smells linger in a place like this. Sometimes Gwyneth offers it a fry and it takes it from her fingers with surprising delicacy, holding it between its forelegs and pushing it slowly into its mouth. Something about it reminds Gwyneth of a watch she once had where the back was transparent and you could see the clockwork moving. Bugs are like that, she thinks. Like intricate little machines.
She lingers over the last of her food until it's cold and unappetising, trying to put off having to go back outside. Beyond the glass, the sky is the deep blue of twilight, punctuated by a half-moon and the bright dot of Venus. The other stars are all invisible because of the light pollution. It's okay. Think what Nika's Romans would say: an omen, right? Diana for not marrying. Venus for love.
Gwyneth laughs at herself for thinking it, but it's an honest laugh; the hot food has put her in a good mood for once. Romans, huh? Okay, Gwyneth. Romans it is.
“You know about Romans, asshole?” she asks the venipede, giving it the last cold fry. “Basically they were these dudes who liked civic engineering and masculinity.” She wrinkles her nose. “Not sure why Nika was so into them.”
The venipede's jaws make a little scrunching noise like paper crinkling. Gwyneth thinks it might be looking at her, but it might just be staring into space while it eats.
“I guess she liked the stories,” she says absently. “I guess I did too.”
She sits there for a little while, in her uncomfortable fast-food-restaurant chair, and then she runs her greasy fingers through her greasy hair and sighs.
“Okay, dude,” she says. “Hope you enjoyed that, 'cause that's the last food either of us are seeing for a while.” She picks the venipede up and then has to put it down again, the fingers of her left hand going weak with pain. She counts to three, slowly, ignoring the interesting colours staining the bandages, and then awkwardly scoops the venipede up into her right hand. “Help me out here, dude,” she says, trying to put it on her shoulder. “Just get on there, all right?” It gets the message and hops up onto her backpack. “There you go.”
It clicks at her, and Gwyneth nods.
“Okay, then,” she says. “Let's go.”
She goes out into the deepening night, leaving the noise and the smell of hot fat behind, and looks up and down the street. It's virtually empty. Everyone has gone home.
Her good mood does not seem to be lasting. *
Gwyneth goes for a walk. She's doing the thing again, with the modem and the blurred vision and the sense of being meat, but not so much. It's okay. She only has opinions about this state of mind after it's over. Right now, in the thick of it, she doesn't care about anything at all.
Nimbasa is sort of pretty at night. Not so much this part of town, but she can see the lights of the fairground over the rooftops to the southeast. She registers this as she registers the sidewalk beneath her feet, as a mere fact of physical geography. If she sees the Ferris wheel, shining like a frozen firework in the night, it is only as an object and not as the place where she and her girlfriend of nearly nine years first became an item. The world is empty of meaning: everything is itself and nothing more, coming to her free of all history and intent. On other nights these streets might move past her like black ribbons, the lights of houses like fireflies, but tonight the road travels beneath her like a length of asphalt and the houses on either side like rectangles of brick. And Gwyneth walks through it all like a thing with legs, irresistibly singular.
She doesn't have a destination, but she doesn't need one. This isn't that kind of walk. Gwyneth crosses empty streets and strides down deserted boulevards, takes corners as decisively as if she knows where she's going, and somehow she feels she knows this place, these offices and parks. She's in the city's northern quarter now. The place where she made her catastrophic decision can't be far away.
She remembers, distantly, her idea earlier that day that she might liberate the venipede. Her decision that it was impossible. She grins, sharklike, mirthless.
Gwyneth heads north.
The streets grow twisted and narrow. The city shows its age here, in houses that sag like old meat. Litter. Graffiti. A hump, half-glimpsed down an alley, that Gwyneth knows is someone sleeping. She notes without rancour that this is what she can expect from this night for herself.
The sky thickens into the washed-out dark of a city night: black, but not so black the stars show. Gwyneth sees other people. They keep their heads down and move quickly, although in secret they are watching her as they watch everyone else they pass. Just to be safe.
It's getting late, after all, and this isn't Coldside. There are no sports stadiums or theatres here. This is the Old Town. Gwyneth doesn't know this, but she has an inkling. A year and a bit in Aspertia's east side has taught her to recognise these things.
She is aware, on some level, that she shouldn't be wandering around here after dark; that she is small and people feel able to harm her in a way they don't with other (white, cis) people; that she doesn't know how to use her switchblade properly. It isn't that she is ignorant of this. It's that it doesn't matter.
Gwyneth keeps walking, keeps heading north, and somewhere in the tangled maze of narrow streets she stops.
“Hey, dude,” she says, as the man approaches her. She does not quite recognise the situation as one which warrants fear. Not yet. “What's …”
She trails off. He is taller than her, and broader, and almost certainly stronger. A big, simian thing whose flanks steam gently in the cool air walks on its knuckles alongside him. It has no neck and barely any head, face stretched grotesquely across its chest.
There is a conversation. It is brief and unsatisfying. The man swears at her and calls her a word that Gwyneth in her present state of mind has some difficulty registering: six letters, begins with T. She blinks and tells him she has no money. He swears at her again and his darmanitan bares its teeth. It has a lot of them, and the biggest are longer than Gwyneth's hands.
She tells him again that she has no money and the man asks for her wallet and phone, although ask is perhaps too polite a word. He calls her another six-letter word, this time ending in T rather than beginning with it. He grabs Gwyneth by the front of her top and says it all over again, slurs and all. He seems afraid, young, desperate. Gwyneth has been mugged before, does not think he really knows what he is doing, although she thinks he is probably fool enough to really hurt her in an attempt to convince her that he does.
The static fuzz in Gwyneth's head stands between her and fear, but she is aware it is the right reaction now. She takes her switchblade from her pocket and flicks it open, and the man, the boy really, smashes his arm into hers with a blunt panicky force that sends jolts all the way up to her shoulder and knocks the knife into the gutter.
The boy swears at her again. His vocabulary is limited. Gwyneth does not judge: so is hers. She tells him she doesn't have anything and his darmanitan whoops and he says he will not ask again and he leans in close as he says it and the venipede, silent until now and unnoticed, leaps out from behind her head, screaming that awful scream it screamed before in the tunnel, and he swears and lets her go as he recoils and the poison sting flies overhead and the darmanitan tears fire from its eyebrow with one hand and lobs it with perfect accuracy over Gwyneth's shoulder to cover their retreat as it follows the running boy still swearing and spitting out slurs and the venipede falls from her with flames licking at its shell and hits the sidewalk without a sound.
Gwyneth stares, but only for a second. Quickly, without thinking, she throws off her backpack, ignoring the wrenching pain in her wrist; she takes off her jacket and throws it over the venipede. She picks it up still swaddled, still hot, and as she learns what burning chitin smells like she runs. *
No one stops her. They stare and swear as she shoves them out of the way, but they do not stop her, not here in the Old Town and not south in Coldside, where she barges through the queues outside the theatres. Not in the town centre, where she trips going over the bridge and twists as she falls so she lands on her shoulder and not the bug cradled in her arms. Not in the South Bank where she nearly knocks some kid and her watchog into the river.
No one stops her, and Gwyneth crashes through the sliding glass doors into the bright lights of the Pokémon Centre unchallenged. *
She sits waiting in the hallway and drinks black coffee that someone gave her. She doesn't remember who or when. It's very sweet but almost completely cold.
For the first time in years, Gwyneth cries. *
Thursday, 15th SeptemberThe prognosis is not good. A little after midnight, a nurse takes her aside and asks her how long ago she caught the venipede, and Gwyneth says just a few days. The nurse nods understandingly, and tells her as gently as he can that the venipede is not healthy.
“We think she's maybe two years old,” he says. “But it's not been a good two years, I'm afraid. Whatever she's been eating, she hasn't got the minerals she needs to maintain her shell properly. Her lung is inflamed – we think bronchitis, probably from air pollution – and the shell that's grown over her missing eye has gone too deep and is putting pressure on her brain.”
Gwyneth listens without answering, almost without comprehending. She wills herself to remain present, to not let this information flow past her ears without entering. She needs to know.
“All this means she's not like a trained pokémon,” the nurse says. He has a name badge. Gwyneth cannot at this moment in time make out what it says. “She can't just rest and be fine a day later, especially not after a fire attack – that's not just physical damage, it hurts her essence too.” He hesitates. Gwyneth can see he's thrown by her lack of response, but she cannot speak. “Dr. Marsden is a bug-type specialist, and he's doing all he can, but I'm afraid we can't be sure she'll make it.”
Gwyneth stands and watches him. He watches her back, and she sees doubled in his eyes something tear-stained and grey. Something broken.
A long moment passes, and the little line of worry between the nurse's brows grows more pronounced.
“What's her name?” he asks, trying to make a connection, any connection, and Gwyneth drops her eyes to the floor.
He waits until the silence is uncomfortable for both of them, and offers her another cup of coffee. She nods her acceptance, because if she does he will go away, and then as he leaves to get it she sinks back into her seat and wishes fervently that she had something sharp. *
After a while, a severe-looking Henuun woman comes out of one of the doors. Gwyneth recognises her as one of the doctors she saw earlier, on her journey through the inner corridors of the Centre to this place in the infirmary.
“Ms. ze'Haraan?” she asks. The word is flawless in her mouth, the pit-of-the-throat aa and soft z pronounced perfectly. Here is a woman who knows her history.
Gwyneth nods. The doctor continues, introducing herself.
“Dr. ze'Naarat. I'd like to take a look at your hand.”
Gwyneth blinks slowly. From somewhere beneath her feet, words move sluggishly towards her mouth.
“I … I can't pay,” she says, and ze'Naarat shakes her head irritably.
“I don't care about that. Your hand looks infected.”
“It's fine,” insists Gwyneth, and ze'Naarat glares. She has no patience for this kind of patient, the kind who brush off their illness in the hope that it will get better, only to come back when it's harder to treat and a real risk to their health.
“Really,” she says. “When was it last looked at?”
“Uh … Saturday, I―”
“And what have you been doing to it since?”
“Nothing, I – look, I've been travelling―”
“Do you want sepsis?” asks ze'Naarat bluntly. “Come with me, Ms. ze'Haraan.”
And Gwyneth can feel herself slipping, collapsing into that state of mind where she can't really think and can only do as she is told; but not yet, not while the venipede is still hurt, so she shakes her head and stands her ground.
“I'm waiting for my venipede,” she begins, and ze'Naarat sighs irritably.
“Your venipede is being taken care of,” she says shortly. “It won't benefit from you losing a hand to infection here in the hallway. Now. Come with me.”
Gwyneth just doesn't have the energy to resist any more. She gets up and follows the doctor back into her office.
“Finally,” mutters ze'Naarat, not quite quietly enough for Gwyneth to not hear. “Now, sit down here, please, and let me take a look.”
She unwraps Gwyneth's hand with quick, professional movements, uncovering something swollen purple and yellow with bruising and fluids that Gwyneth cannot name but which she knows are never meant to see the outside of her body. There's blood too, and a faint smell. Gwyneth looks at it for a moment, unable to comprehend that this bloated broken thing is her hand, is part of her body, and then looks away again as ze'Naarat clicks her tongue in dissatisfaction and reaches for a bottle of something.
“All right,” she says. “This needs cleaning. And I want to run some blood tests, too.” She shoots Gwyneth a dark look. She does not have what Gwyneth's mother would call a good bedside manner. “You haven't taken good care of this.”
“Haven't been able to,” mumbles Gwyneth, too tired to be ashamed. “Slept in an alley.”
And ze'Naarat pauses for a second, looks at Gwyneth again; she sees now not just an irresponsible patient but all the other things too, the scarred arms and bad skin and unwashed hair and everything else as well, and she sighs. She sounds irritated, but perhaps at herself as well as Gwyneth.
“Right,” she says, with the curtness of someone too belligerent to admit to embarrassment. “Hold on. This is probably going to hurt.”
She's right, it does. When she touches Gwyneth's hand, her whole arm goes weak with the pain of it. But she sits and bears it, partly because there is no choice and partly because she needs pain now, to remind her that yet again she has failed as a person, and she does not so much as flinch.
Ze'Naarat cleans the wound, thoroughly and without emotion, then dresses it and binds a splint to her wrist with bandages, so that she does not accidentally flex it and stretch the wounded skin on her hand.
“It hurts when you move your arm, yes?” she asks, and when Gwyneth nods she ties a sling around her neck so that she can avoid that too. “There,” she says, viewing her work with an acid sort of satisfaction. “I'm going to put you on some antibiotics, too, and then once the bloods are done I'll review.”
Gwyneth says nothing. She thinks about how much that might cost, and then her thoughts go right back to the venipede. It's actually quite small, when it's lying still like that. It only seemed bigger because of all that movement, all that anger.
A few moments later she becomes aware that the doctor is talking to her.
“… tonight?”
“Huh?”
Ze'Naarat sighs again. It's a sharp sigh, the kind that someone makes at half past midnight if they have been working since eight in the morning with minimal breaks.
“Do you have a place to stay tonight?” she asks. “I'll need to see you again tomorrow when the results of the blood test come back. And your venipede isn't going anywhere for a while, either.”
“Oh.” Gwyneth shakes her head slowly. “No. I thought … I thought I'd just wait.”
Ze'Naarat visibly bites back her irritation.
“You need rest, Ms. ze'Haraan,” she says. “Real rest, just as your venipede does.” She starts typing rapidly on her computer, index fingers stabbing like the beaks of hunting herons. “I'll sign you in as a trainer. There should be a room available somewhere, and that will cover your venipede's treatment as well.”
Gwyneth stares. She isn't sure she heard what she just heard. It doesn't seem possible.
“Here?” she asks, stupid with shock and fatigue, and ze'Naarat raises one eyebrow without looking away from her screen.
“Yes, here. Another night out there isn't going to do your arm any favours. Neither of us wants to―”
“Thank you,” says Gwyneth fervently, suddenly waking up, lurching forward with earnest gratitude. “Oh my god, thank you―”
“Yes, yes,” says ze'Naarat. She has darker skin than Gwyneth, but Gwyneth can see the blood rising in her cheeks all the same. She makes eye contact briefly and then breaks it again, embarrassed. “It's – I'm a doctor. I have a duty of care.”
“And you mean it,” says Gwyneth, which is as close as she can come to saying I've met a lot of doctors, and I know that they're people as well as professionals, and they are capable of all the same malice and hatred as any other person, and you are not like them.
And ze'Naarat hesitates, for once, and her mouth twitches at the corner in an awkward almost-smile.
“It's nothing,” she says. “Really.”
But it's not, it never is, and Gwyneth will carry this not-nothing with her forever. *
Gwyneth does not sleep so much as she passes out, on the narrow Pokémon Centre bed between deliciously fresh sheets, and as consciousness flees her she feels as if her body is melting into the dark. *
Gwyneth wakes very late, especially late for her, to a riot of the sort of aches and pains you feel after a return to comfort from a hard few days. She lies there for a few minutes, trying to work out where she is and why, and then she remembers and makes a brief attempt at getting up before she realises she isn't quite up to that yet.
“Ugh,” she says, slumping back down again. “Fine.”
It's just noise. She isn't angry really. She's worried, and in a little pain, but she's comfortable, which she hasn't been since she left – and perhaps not then, either; her own bed isn't as nice as this one.
Gwyneth rests her eyes and allows her muscles to untense. She feels weak, which she supposes she probably is, after everything, but there's a kind of pleasure in it. There's the sort of helplessness that someone forces on you and the kind that you relax into, and this is the second kind. Right now, Gwyneth isn't sure she can actually sit up, and she's also not sure that this isn't okay.
She thinks about the venipede – her venipede, somewhere three floors below in the infirmary, connected to tubes and wires and the detritus of modern medicine. She remembers telling herself it's just a bug back on the ferry, and almost laughs at the idea of all that time and effort being put into saving the life of just a bug.
Almost, but not quite. It isn't really very funny, under the circumstances.
She makes a silent promise to stop calling the venipede 'it'.
After some time, she edges her way out of bed and over to the window. It's raining outside, hard. From her vantage point on the third floor, she can see the water splashing in the gutters of the roof across the street.
Gwyneth imagines sleeping out there and shivers.
Turning her attention back to the room, she fumbles open her bag, one-handed. She inspects the clothes she has been wearing for the past few days and decides that that particular tank top is not so much white any more as it is grey. She dresses in fresh clothes, inelegantly, then grabs her key card and shuffles down the hall to the bathroom.
Pokémon Centre showers are not particularly good, but this one, after the last few days, feels like heaven. Even having to constantly manoeuvre to keep her hand dry doesn't spoil it, and Gwyneth comes out feeling vaguely human, which for her is no small achievement. She shaves, plucks, conceals, and takes the elevator down to the lobby.
There are kids in there with her, who stare and try without success to hide it, but Gwyneth closes her eyes and leans against the wall and feels them melt away into nothingness all around her. It's okay. More or less, anyway.
“Hey,” she says to the receptionist on duty. “I brought my venipede in last night and i― she was hurt real bad, and I was wondering if she's okay?”
“Right,” says the receptionist. “What's your name, please?”
“Gwyneth ze'Haraan.”
She tries to say it the way Dr. ze'Naarat did, the way a Henuun woman would, but the botched sounds ring loud in her ears. She sounds like a white girl reaching for someone else's ancestors. Like what she is.
“Okay,” says the receptionist, not noticing anything wrong. “Venipede, venipede … it seems she's stable.”
Gwyneth lets out a breath she didn't know she was holding.
“Can I see her?”
“Sorry, I don't think so, yet,” says the receptionist, and then adds, at the look on Gwyneth's face: “I can call the doctor and ask―”
“Nah, it's okay,” says Gwyneth, shaking her head. “I'll wait.”
She's about to turn and go when the receptionist calls her back.
“Oh – one other thing, Dr. ze'Naarat left a message for you. Apparently you have an appointment with her at four o'clock.”
“Four o'clock,” repeats Gwyneth.
“Yeah. That okay?”
“That's fine,” says Gwyneth, as if she had any other plans for today. “That's just fine.”
She goes to the canteen and pauses in the doorway, struck for a moment by the tables full of kids, eating and laughing and slipping their pokémon morsels of food. Nobody here is over eighteen. Gwyneth stares and feels – not old, because she knows she is not old, that she in fact has a depressingly large number of years left to get through, but sad, and tired. She remembers all of this so vividly, and what comes after. Summer is ending. Most of these kids will be home again before October's over. And that will be it: no one will ever be as kind to them again as they are now, and no one will give them presents and advice. In some ways, Gwyneth decides, the trainer journey is a cruel idea. What's the point of showing kids the woman with the ultra ball, if you're only going to take her away again afterwards?
She joins the queue for breakfast, her slight build and height helping to disguise her age, and shows her key card in exchange for food. It works, thankfully – Gwyneth was half-expecting them to demand she show a trainer card she doesn't have – and she takes her breakfast to a quiet corner where she can eat and watch the kids enjoying the morning. Oh, they won't all be happy, she's aware of that: trainer journeys don't solve everything, and they have all the usual teenage nonsense to deal with, on top of whatever's going on at home. But they're travelling Unova, with the League providing food, board and medical care, and they've all got pokémon. Some of those pokémon will stick with them for life, and so will some of the people they meet.
Gwyneth remembers what Jackie said about Team Plasma coming back, and a coldness settles around her heart. It will happen again. This thing, this impractical, colossal, fantastic thing, that costs the country millions of dollars to run and pays out in nothing but the happiness of children – this thing that redeems Unova will be poisoned again. There will be thefts and abuses. There will be thugs with uniforms and slogans. She looks at these kids, these trainers, and she is furious that even just a few of them may have it taken from them.
She still hates that they have this and she does not, of course. But she hates anyone who would spoil it for them even more.
On her way out, she steals a couple of bread rolls and some fruit. She's got to move on from here at some point, after all, and she needs to start stocking up.
There's no word on her venipede at the desk, and even if it wasn't raining Gwyneth wouldn't be able to face going outside today when the alternative is a warm lounge and complimentary coffee; she gets the wifi password from the receptionist, finds herself an armchair out of the way of the kids watching TV on the other side of the room and starts going through news websites on her phone. Hilbert ze'Haraan: Is he Getting Married? asks one headline, and Gwyneth rolls her eyes. She should call up the tabloids and offer them the story, she thinks sarcastically. Might be a couple dollars in it for her. Unusual Weather Phenomenon Spreading Across Hoenn, announces another article. Gwyneth watches four seconds of heavy rain falling on white stone buildings before scrolling away, unable to see any difference between that rain and the stuff falling outside.
There's the usual political horror stories, although they all seem to be referring to something that happened while Gwyneth was underground and so not paying attention; there's a report saying that some third-party researcher has cleared up the crustle swarm on Route 4, opening up the highway and trainers' trail again; and then at last she finds it: Reports of Plasma Activity in Virbank. She reads the article and is irritated by the constant use of the word 'allegedly'; apparently not even the word of a Gym Leader is enough for this to be taken as fact. Gwyneth guesses no one wants to believe that Plasma could be back.
There aren't many details given. Gwyneth gives up and goes back to the front desk to ask about her venipede again. The receptionist tells her that there's still no word, and offers hesitantly to send her a message as soon as there is any. Gwyneth is touched, although also annoyed that she comes across as that desperate, and accepts.
Gwyneth goes back to her corner in the lounge and sits, listening to the rain hammering at the window and watching whatever the kids have set the TV to over the back of the sofa. It's noisy in here, with four or five different conversations going on at any one time – no one wants to go out and train on a day like this, except perhaps for a few water-type trainers who can't pass up this opportunity to keep their pokémon in shape – but that's all right; it's a good kind of noisy, even a peaceful kind, if that makes sense. She feels out of place and yet at home. She feels clean and tired and calm.
She worries about the venipede, but she's used to worrying and this specific fear joins the other nebulous ones at the back of her head, half drowned out by the white noise she carries with her wherever she goes.
Gwyneth remembers sitting in this chair before, a little over nine years ago. Sharing it with Nika, the two of them perching on it at angles that her older self can no longer see any comfort in. Sitting and waiting for Nika's pokémon to be healed, Gwyneth's right arm twined loosely around Nika's left, fingers just about touching in a way that might plausibly be claimed to be an accident.
They're both very nervous. This is new territory for both of them, and despite the fact that this is, in part, why Nika went on her trainer journey (much later she will admit, laughing a little at her past self but also nostalgic, that she did have a romantic notion that she might travel Unova and fall in love with a cute girl), even she isn't sure what to do now that it's actually happened.
They talk around the subject. They talk about the Gym battle and what they might do next. They even talk about pokémon liberation, a subject that Gwyneth brings up and which Nika, surprised, carries on with. Both of them agree that Gwyneth is doing better now.
Neither say that Gwyneth's journey is over. The thought that she might go home is unbearable, and they both know without having to discuss it that they have to hide what she did, because if anyone finds out then her card will be revoked, making her a child again instead of a trainer, and she will cease to be able to wander the country as she pleases and have to return to Nuvema and explain herself to her mother.
(It's not quite as bad as this: they make it scarier by worrying about it, and forget that the League would be sympathetic, would want to use Gwyneth's story as ammunition against Team Plasma. It's understandable. They're only kids, after all.)
So they don't talk about that, and they don't talk about the Us they have become, either. Nika suggests they go to Lostlorn Forest tomorrow – there are buses that take trainers out in groups a couple of days a week – and Gwyneth says okay. It can be like, Nika begins, and then breaks off, embarrassed. It's all right. Gwyneth knows what she means.
Lostlorn Forest is a good day out. On the bus they meet Delarivier, whom Gwyneth will forever remember for the withering sarcasm she picked up as a result of being stuck with the name Delarivier, and they make friends. They will never see each other again after today, but when the sourness that has been growing in Gwyneth over the past few weeks starts to become visible, Delarivier's acid disposition will provide it with a template for its development.
In the forest itself, Nika and Gwyneth go off alone, and Delarivier leaves them to it; she's no fool and she has seen the brief contact between their hands for what it is. They go deep into the woods, Nika's pokémon fluttering stomping crawling all around them, and they find what seems to be a lost child and which, when Nika calls out, flickers out of existence and is revealed to be an illusion cloaking a zorua that dives into the undergrowth and escapes beyond their ability to track.
It's magical. There's a lot of did you see? and oh my god and their shock is a convenient excuse to cling to one another. Nothing happens, of course – they are still too shy even to think of going any further than hand-holding – but it cements what was built yesterday, wears away some of the newness of it, and when they come back late that afternoon, out from the dark eaves of the forest into the rosy evening light, this thing called Us is starting to seem believable to them.
By now they have been in Nimbasa for nearly a month. Gwyneth seems to be doing okay, all things considered. (She keeps her shame locked away deep inside, using her growing infatuation with Nika as a jailer.) It is time, they both agree, to leave.
Route 5 is beautiful at this time of year. The later flowers are in full bloom and the trees are so brightly green as to make your eyes ache when the sun shines through them. Each of them feels giddy to be here with the other; they stay up long into the warm nights, lying on their backs and learning constellations from a booklet Nika bought in Nimbasa. Even the pokémon feel the change in the air. Astyanax gets more and more energetic as the days get hotter, and starts under Nika's direction to rear on his hind legs every now and then as his bones begin to change shape beneath his skin. Hekate's wings start lengthening and she learns to flap-jump her way up onto Nika's shoulder, crowing triumphantly. Only Britomartis does not seem to take to either the change in Nika or the deepening summer; she boils inside her heavy steel armour, hisses when touched, refuses to leave the cool interior of her poké ball except if there is a pond or stream she can lie down in. Nika lets her have her way. She is too happy to fight.
And if Gwyneth envies her this (which she does), she says nothing. When Astyanax sheds his skin and comes out with longer legs and clever grasping foreclaws, she congratulates Nika and shares in her delight; when Hekate manages to stay airborne for a full thirty seconds before crashing back down onto her armoured rump, she applauds along with her. And when they see wild minccino, scurrying through the long grass with their tails held out like pennants, she says nothing at all.
Nika tries to offer her a poké ball, once. She could try to catch something, she says.
Gwyneth does not answer, and Nika understands that she should not offer again. She puts her arms around her instead and rests her head on Gwyneth's shoulder. The gesture surprises both of them, but neither move to end it. They sit there for a long time, taking stock of this new pleasure, until at last Gwyneth has to move to put more wood on the fire.
Later that night, Nika looks from her booklet to the sky and points. That's Cassiopeia, she says, her classicist's brain clicking into gear. She was beautiful and she knew it, which pissed off Poseidon enough that he tried to feed her daughter Andromeda to the sea monster Cetus (which is actually a constellation itself, over there she thinks). But Perseus, you know, the gorgon guy, he rescued her on his way home from killing Medusa, so Poseidon went for Cassiopeia instead and chained her to the sky. The constellation's right next to the North Star, so Cassiopeia gets hoisted up and suspended upside-down half the year.
Gwyneth stares, tracing lines with her eyes.
“Poseidon's a dick,” she says.
“Yeah,” agrees Nika. “They all are, actually. Everyone was very unhappy about it.”
They are one day's walk from the bus stop at the end of Route 5 that ferries trainers across the Driftveil Drawbridge. They are at a campsite where nobody else has stopped. The world is huge and dark and incredibly quiet, a place made just for the two of them.
They kiss, once, hesitantly, and in the morning they move on to Driftveil. *
Yes: Nimbasa is a town full of memories. This Pokémon Centre especially. Gwyneth thinks that the time she spent here was the weirdest of her life. She still isn't sure how she managed to negotiate both her first relationship and the aftermath of the liberation at the same time. Probably she shouldn't have done it. It's got to be more healthy to take these things one by one, right? But then, that isn't how life works. Everything happens, all the time, so unreasonably.
She thinks about going to ask the receptionist for news of her venipede again, but holds herself back. She'll wait for the call. The receptionist has definitely got better things to do than answer the same questions over and over. And besides, getting up from this chair seems like far more work than Gwyneth is ready for right now. She took the tablets Dr. ze'Naarat gave her, but obviously they're not really doing anything yet; her arm still hurts like hell, a brittle pain that fractures when you feel it so that splinters cascade throughout your body. The doctor was right. There is something bad going on there.
She's lucky. Just the bill from the hospital in Virbank alone is probably going to be crippling. What the cost of dealing with these complications would be Gwyneth doesn't want to think about. It's a good thing ze'Naarat has ethics. Or no, really it's a bad thing that Unova itself as a country doesn't, but this is a pointless way to think about it. Unova is Unova, huge and careless, and Gwyneth could waste her whole life screaming at it without it so much as blinking.
At about midday, the receptionist's voice chimes over the PA system asking for Gwyneth ze'Haraan to come to the front desk, and she levers herself up out of her chair with as much speed as she can muster, heedless of the kids that stare. When she gets to the desk, she gets directions to the infirmary that she barely acknowledges before she's off again, frantic.
Dr. Marsden is tall and black and younger than Gwyneth expected. He looks at her and Gwyneth detects none of the usual recognition in his eyes, no minute shock of revulsion. She is surprised, and a little flattered, and a lot irritated that she is flattered by what should be common courtesy.
“She's stable now, and improving,” he explains, walking down the ward with her. Gwyneth tries to keep her eyes ahead, to not see the pokémon and their pain on either side of her. She isn't completely successful. “It wasn't just that it was a fire attack, it's that it hit her with a lot of force – like being punched, if you like. Some surgery was required to address the internal trauma. But she pulled through, and I have hopes that we might be able to wake her in a day or so.”
The venipede is lying on a padded table, a tiny dark hummock in an ocean of white and mint-green. Her shell is black and flaky all down the left-hand side, and under the antiseptic smell Gwyneth can still make out that awful burning-chitin stink from last night. One part has been cut cleanly away and replaced with a pale fibreglass panel.
She was wrong about the wires. There are only four: two cables attached somewhere on her underbelly that lead to a machine whose screen is thick with unintelligible meaning, and two tubes that terminate in what look something like oxygen masks, strapped to the venipede on either side.
“What are those?” asks Gwyneth, because she feels she has to say something and she doesn't dare ask the more important questions.
“Venipede breathe through holes in their carapaces,” says Marsden. “Spiracles. Here and here. These machines are helping her to breathe.”
“Oh.” Gwyneth stares. “Is that like … fake shell?”
“We had to remove some to do the surgery. It will grow back, eventually.” Marsden pauses, watching her. His is the careful face of someone used to having difficult conversations. “I know it looks bad,” he says, “but she's doing well, believe me. It was a darmanitan that hit her, right?”
“Yeah. Flame burst, I think.” In the bathroom mirror, Gwyneth saw the singed ends of hairs, and light burns on her cheek and neck: the evidence of a tiny explosion. It hurts, a little, but the louder pain in her arm drowns it out.
Marsden nods.
“That's what I mean. Urban venipede, isn't she? And fresh caught? Most of them wouldn't have survived that, but she's as tough as they come.”
Gwyneth feels the ghost of a smile touch her face, even here, even looking at her venipede half carbonised like a cookie left too long in the oven.
“She's a vicious little,” she begins, and then decides not to swear. “She's a vicious little monster,” she says. “Put me in the hospital when I caught her.” She indicates her arm, without looking away from the venipede. “She's tough enough to … I mean I hope …”
She can't go on. She looks at her boots, all worn and scuffed with flavours of dirt from Aspertian to Nimbasan. She senses rather than sees Marsden rearrange his face into something soothing.
“It's looking good,” he says gently. “She's got a long way to go, but it's looking good.”
Gwyneth doesn't say anything. She is astonished at how upset she is. She wants to be angry about it, too, but she finds she cannot.
She supposes she should have expected this. What has she learned from her history with pokémon, if not that she is not chosen? No, she thinks, she should never have let herself forget. Some people get chosen and some do not.
Gwyneth drags her eyes up to meet those of Marsden. She opens her mouth and absolutely no words come out. *
After lunch, which she goes to only in order to steal more food – she has no appetite after her visit to the ward – Gwyneth's phone goes off and she stares at it for a moment, confused. A call. Really? Apparently so.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Gwyn, it's Shane.” (It's … Shane?) “How's things?”
“Oh. Uh, hey dude.” Gwyneth gets up from her armchair and goes over to the window, where the noise from the kids is less overpowering. The rain is still coming down hard, splashing on the asphalt of the practice court where a bedraggled kid is chasing an incredibly excited oshawott around in circles. “Things are … things are weird.”
“Yeah? Maxine called, said her niece Sadie―”
“Saadiyyah.”
“Huh? Okay, Saadiyyah, she called to let her know she got to Driftveil safe, so I figured you probably had signal again for me to check in. So how you doin', Gwyn?”
Gwyneth is silent for a moment, considering her response. The kid still hasn't caught the oshawott. Both of them are getting wetter by the second.
“I'm okay, Shane,” she says in the end. “I'm in Nimbasa.”
“Nimbasa? Hey, that's not bad, Gwyn, not bad at all. Halfway there, huh?”
“Sure,” she says. “Halfway there.”
(In the alley behind the video game store, standing on a carpet of ageing cigarette butts, Shane frowns slightly, blows out smoke like a breaching wailord.)
“What am I not gettin' here, Gwyn?” he asks. “Somethin' up?”
It's hard to speak. Gwyneth holds her breath for a long time before she lets the words out.
“I caught a venipede,” she says. “Accident. In Virbank. Stupid thing attacked me and I threw the ball at i― at her without thinking. Now she's hurt real bad and I'm in the Pokémon Centre, waiting.”
Pause. Breathless anticipation.
A sigh down the line, crackly with proximity to the mouthpiece.
“Oh man,” says Shane. “Sounds rough, Gwyn. Sorry.”
She can hear how adrift he is. It's barely been a week, if that, and there's already so much in the way between them. A journey will do that, Gwyneth thinks. Especially on foot, through Unova, with pokémon.
“Thanks, dude,” she says, trying to feel her way back towards the place she was in when the two of them last spoke. Before the venipede, before her injury, before Saadiyyah. It seems much longer ago than it was. “I'm okay though.”
“Yeah?” He sounds unconvinced. Gwyneth can't blame him. She doesn't believe it either. “You, uh, you sound kinda―”
“I'm just worried about the venipede,” she interrupts, before he can get all kind and awkward at her. “Like, I … she's awful, she scratches and spits and she tried to kill me, but I like her. I think. I'm just worried, Shane.”
Silence. (Shane shifts uncomfortably. This does not sound like Gwyneth: something is wrong here beyond his capacity to diagnose, let alone address.)
“Yeah, I can hear it,” he says in the end. “You … doing okay? Like in terms of gettin' where you need to be?”
(No.)
“I'll get there, dude,” she says, pushing hard at her anger, knowing it is inappropriate. “I got this far. I'll get there.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
The rain comes down like white noise on a TV screen. The kid outside makes a grab for the oshawott, and it slithers through his hands and between his legs. Gwyneth hears him curse, the sound muffled by weather and glass. She reads his lips: c'mon, buddy, please.
“Hang in there,” says Shane, in a tone of voice Gwyneth has never heard him use before. If asked, she could not say what it means, but it makes her skin crawl. “'S a crazy damn plan, Gwyn, you know as well as me, and yeah, man, hang in there.”
A soft thud: Gwyneth's forehead against the glass. The noise comes at her before she realises she has moved and surprises her.
“Okay,” she says, exhausted. “Thanks, Shane. I will.”
He lets her go. Gwyneth stands there and watches the kid until he catches his oshawott and trudges off in the direction of the door.
“If you die I'm gonna kill you, asshole,” she mutters, aware of how stupid she sounds, and goes back to her armchair, to sit and wait and hang, as Shane suggests, in there.
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Post by bay on Jun 22, 2018 6:18:48 GMT
Oh ouch to that confrontation the two had there. Sounds like the venipede will make it in the end, though very sad over her not having good health overall. Gwyneth also should take better care of herself, fortunate the doctor advise her to not stay outside (for the best or that incident would’ve happen again).
Like the little references to Nika’s interests in mythology there, shows more depth to her. Yeah many mythological tales are like that heh.
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girl-like-substance
the seal will bite you if you give him half a chance
Posts: 527
Pronouns: xe/xem
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Post by girl-like-substance on Jun 23, 2018 17:47:53 GMT
Oh ouch to that confrontation the two had there. Sounds like the venipede will make it in the end, though very sad over her not having good health overall. Gwyneth also should take better care of herself, fortunate the doctor advise her to not stay outside (for the best or that incident would’ve happen again). Like the little references to Nika’s interests in mythology there, shows more depth to her. Yeah many mythological tales are like that heh. Yeah, Gwyneth ... has been pretty lucky so far, I have to say. But we're halfway through the story now, and that means things have to get more difficult. For now, though, she's got a Pokémon Centre to sit around in, so I guess that's all right. I mean, she kinda needed the break or she'd probably have got herself killed, honestly. Gwyneth has heard of self-care, but I suppose she thinks of it as something that happens to other people.
And yes! Nika is a massive classics nerd, as previously established by her being able to retell the entire Iliad from memory and quoting ancient Greek lyric poetry at Gwyneth at the tender age of fifteen. Three guesses what she ended up studying at university.
Anyway -- thank you for the review! Coming up later today: Gwyneth has a chance to catch her breath, but every hour she spends here is an hour she's not moving east to Humilau -- if ze'Naarat doesn't stop her first.
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girl-like-substance
the seal will bite you if you give him half a chance
Posts: 527
Pronouns: xe/xem
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Post by girl-like-substance on Jun 23, 2018 21:25:46 GMT
NINE: WOUNDSThursday, 15th SeptemberGwyneth falls asleep for a little while. She wakes up embarrassed and self-critical, feeling herself an ageing intruder in this place, and is glad to find it's nearly four o'clock. Hoping no one watches, and knowing that they do, she levers herself out of her chair and goes off in search of Dr. ze'Naarat's office.
“Good,” says the doctor, when she arrives. “You're here.”
“Yep,” agrees Gwyneth. “I am.”
Ze'Naarat tells her that the blood tests have been run, and she was right, Gwyneth's hand is infected. Not badly (although she implies with her tone and her viciously mobile eyebrows that this is nothing short of a miracle) but still, infected. She needs to rest, and to keep taking those antibiotics for a while.
Gwyneth listens calmly. None of this is really news to her; she's known for a long time now that her hand was much worse than she pretended.
“Okay,” she says. “I have to be in Humilau by the twenty-second.”
Ze'Naarat looks at her with an expression that says she was waiting for Gwyneth to say something this ridiculous. For once, Gwyneth can't find it in her to be angry. She's right. It's exactly as stupid as it sounds.
“And I guess you're walking there, aren't you,” she says. It is not a question.
“Yeah,” replies Gwyneth anyway. “I am.”
Ze'Naarat takes off her glasses and polishes them with a small cloth and quick, deliberate motions. They soften her face; she looks meaner without them. Gwyneth finds this obscurely comforting. She knows all about unfortunate appearances.
“Not that it's any of my business,” she says, “but what is there in Humilau that's so staggeringly important?”
“I have a wedding to go to.”
Ze'Naarat blinks in surprise. It's hard to imagine Gwyneth having friends, family, the kind of people who drag you to weddings. Gwyneth has seen this reaction before. She understands. Sometimes, she's surprised herself.
“I see,” says the doctor, slowly. “Yours, or …?”
“No. My brother's. And my … a close friend.” Gwyneth could kick herself for the hesitation. When is she going to learn to figure out what to say before she starts speaking? “I can't miss it,” she says, to cover her awkwardness. “That's not an option.”
“I have to advise against it anyway,” says ze'Naarat, returning her glasses to her nose. “Even if you do go, your venipede is in no condition to travel, as I understand it.”
“I'll go when she is.”
“That might not be any time soon.”
“You can't change my mind,” says Gwyneth simply, tired of this game. “I'm going to Humilau.”
Ze'Naarat gives her a long, searching look. She looks like she is starting to have misgivings, or like she had some already and is now allowing them to come to light.
“It's a long way,” she says. “You aren't well.”
“I'll make it.” Gwyneth hears how hollow it sounds even as she says it. She'll make it, will she? What possible evidence does she have to support that claim?
“Will you now.”
It is not a question. Gwyneth doesn't answer.
“All right,” says ze'Naarat. The words seem off to Gwyneth. Something about the way she says them. Maybe the tone isn't right. “I'll mark you down as taking that under advisement.”
“No,” insists Gwyneth, and she knows she's being childish but she comes out with it anyway. “Don't.”
Ze'Naarat raises her eyebrows.
“I see,” she says again, although neither she nor Gwyneth is entirely convinced that she does. “Well then, Ms. ze'Haraan. I think that covers everything.”
“Okay. Thanks, then.”
Gwyneth is about to get up and go when the doctor speaks again.
“You can stay here until you leave, of course,” she says, without looking up from her computer. “Try to act young. And when Heaney's on duty at the desk, stay out of his way. He doesn't like us and I don't think he'll take kindly to you being here fraudulently.”
There it is again: that grudging, graceless kindness, spat out almost as an afterthought. Gwyneth thinks that this is how she herself would offer help if their positions were reversed. She thinks she gets it. She is wrong, but still, the thought is calming.
“Thanks,” she says.
Ze'Naarat waves her words aside with professional coldness.
“Someone has to think about your health,” she says acidly. “It's just my job, Ms. ze'Haraan.”
Gwyneth isn't sure she believes that, but it doesn't matter. If she thinks about it too much she'll only feel guilty that it was her who ended up in the Pokémon Centre and not whoever it was that she saw sleeping in the alley last night. *
She spends some time up in her room, feeling drained. No reason, particularly; she hasn't done anything more strenuous than sit and watch the rain. Ordinarily she would be irritated at what she sees as this weakness, but today she can't be bothered. She is, she knows, a very angry person, but only sometimes. Other times, she's barely even a person. Today is one of the other times.
There's a clock on the wall whose hands go round and round. Gwyneth watches it from underneath heavy eyelids, and falls asleep again around half five. She wakes crumpled on her bed, starts to drag herself upright and then decides it isn't worth the effort. Her eyes close again, and the next time they open the room is dark and cold.
She shuts them again, but she can tell right away that sleep has fallen away from her entirely. It's okay. This is nothing new. She's amazed she's slept as much as she has done. Normally she's up half the night, staring at her window and wishing she had curtains. It isn't that she's not tired, it's just that she is awake anyway. She's been like this for years, although it like everything else has got worse since the break-up.
Gwyneth sighs and gets up. She closes the curtains, like she always wants to back in her apartment, then draws them again when the hanging folds of fabric start to unnerve her. There's her face in the lamplit glass, hovering in front of the rain. Hello, Gwyneth, she says silently, and watches Gwyneth say it back.
She doesn't want to be here right now. She gets her key card and goes downstairs, prowling around aimlessly like a street cat. Someone that Gwyneth suspects is Heaney is at the desk, so she avoids the lobby, creeps into the lounge like the world's crappiest ghost. Some kids are still up, although she was expecting that, really; she stayed up too late herself as a trainer, like everyone else, just because her mom wasn't there to make her go to bed.
Gwyneth stands there for a few minutes, watching them talking and playing with sleepy pokémon. A watchog tugging at the sleeve of a girl who's fallen asleep. Two boys playing rummy, a krokorok trying to imitate them by holding a fan of cards in its claws. A couple hidden away in a corner, whispering with the quiet intensity of teen lovers.
Aân Hen. Except it's not any more, is it? That's over. And none of this is hers any more, and it never will be again, because she proved that she can't be trusted with it. She's still proving it now. Still getting innocent creatures hurt.
She cannot stay here. She tries to turn and go back to her room but she finds she cannot go there, either.
She hangs there in the doorway for a long time, and then, defeated, goes back upstairs to her reflection and a fruitless attempt at sleep. *
Friday, 16th SeptemberIn the early morning, when the dawn light is just beginning to show over the rooftops of the East Bank and the rain has slowed to a vague drizzle, the lounge is emptier. Gwyneth has slept a little and stared at her window a lot, the way she does when she can't sleep back in Aspertia, and she is more than ready to change her surroundings for something else. And now she can: most teenagers don't get up all that early, and Gwyneth has the lounge all to herself.
She makes her way over to her armchair and sits down, opens Three Nights in Opelucid. It looks like she's going to get a chance to read it after all. She isn't enjoying it as much as she was before: she liked the mystery and the magic, but now a vacuously heterosexual romantic subplot is rearing its ugly head and taking up more space on the page than Gwyneth believes is necessary. It was already a very cis novel. It didn't have to be so damn straight as well.
She supposes Shauntal Grimes is only writing what she and her readers want of their fiction. There must be someone out there writing something that allows, even if only fleetingly, for Gwyneth to exist. But who?
Gwyneth continues reading anyway, page after slow page, to see if the protagonist will put her damn man aside for a second and get on with finding the killer. After a while, she becomes aware that she is not alone. She looks up, and sees a face watching her over the back of the sofa.
There are options here. Gwyneth's initial impulse is to ignore the kid, as she does with most of the many people who watch her, but something makes her hesitate. An angle. An expression. A sudden understanding.
She puts the bit of paper she's using as a bookmark in between its pages and rests Three Nights in Opelucid on her knees.
“Hi,” she says.
“Hi,” says the kid.
Neither of them move.
“I'm Gwyneth.”
“Tor.”
“Cool name,” she ventures, offering Tor an opening for that one joke, and to her relief Tor takes it.
“Thanks, I chose it myself.”
“Same.” It's a little early in the morning for it, but Gwyneth tries to smile. Tor smiles back, showing shyness and much better teeth than hers.
“What are your pronouns?” asks Tor, which is a question nobody has asked Gwyneth since she hung out with some of Nika's university friends and which she hopes Tor knows better than to ask of most people, for both Tor's sake and that of the other person. She could take it badly, and she nearly does, but Tor is young and so she does not. Besides, it is not the question it sounds like. It is a request that Gwyneth ask the question back.
“She,” answers Gwyneth. “You?”
“They.” Tor unfolds. They are taller than Gwyneth, which she feels is frankly embarrassing, and just as bonily shapeless. There are coral colours in their hair, big glasses on their nose and an expression of vague disbelief on their face. Gwyneth doesn't even need to think about what Tor sees when they look at her. They see an adult trans woman in a Pokémon Centre; they see a trainer. They see a future that they did not know was open to them.
Gwyneth thinks back to the kid at the bus stop in Floccesy. She can do this, right? She can be the woman with the ultra ball. She has to be, this time. There's no margin for error here. She thinks briefly about just getting up and leaving, to escape the pressure, and immediately knows she cannot. Tor's here, and whatever the hate says to her, whatever the envy, Gwyneth can't walk away from that fact. It's the duty of the adult to the kid on a trainer journey, and it's another, deeper and more compelling even than that.
“You a trainer?” she asks, as Tor perches on the edge of the sofa. They feel awkward, Gwyneth can see it in them, but they aren't. They are so much better at this than she was. She loves them for it, and resents them. “Stupid question, I guess,” she adds, and Tor smiles again.
“Yeah,” they say. “I am. Are you?”
“Kinda,” says Gwyneth, carefully careless. “I'm travelling across Unova with a pokémon. Going to a wedding and I figured I'd walk.” Smile, goddamn it, Gwyneth, smile. “I'm kinda rusty but I'm getting there.”
“That's so cool,” says Tor, eyes wide. “Are you like doing Gyms on the way, or …?”
She shakes her head. Keep smiling.
“Nah, I got a deadline. Got to be there by the twenty-second, so not a lot of time for sightseeing. Besides, I wasn't very good at that stuff. My” (and she hesitates, because she never describes her this way to strangers, but with Tor she thinks she wants to) “girlfriend was better. She got four badges, I got none.”
“Yeah?” Tor looks amazed. Gwyneth is moved, partly to sadness and partly to affection. “I'm not so good either …”
Gwyneth makes a dismissive gesture with her good hand.
“Ah, I wouldn't worry about it,” she says. “'S not about winning. Or okay, it kinda is, but the journey's the really important thing.” She knows that will sound convincing: it has the force of all her faith in trainer journeys in it. “That's why I'm doing this again,” she says. “It was the journeying bit I missed.”
“Yeah! I mean, I started in Striaton and it's been so cool just getting here. Even if I haven't managed to beat Elesa yet.” Tor looks sheepish. “I thought my sandile would be enough, but, uh, I guess you don't get to be a Gym Leader without figuring out how to cover your weaknesses.”
“Yeah,” agrees Gwyneth. “My girlfriend, Nika, she led with her sandile in that fight and he lost right away. In the end she had to try to take down a zebstrika with a vullaby.” Inspiring. Encouraging. Make them believe.
“And did she?”
“Huh?”
“Take down a zebstrika with a vullaby.”
“Oh, hell no, she's good but she's not that good. She won on a technicality. Got it so annoyed it ignored Elesa's commands and charged out the arena.”
“Wow. It's like … thirty seconds out of the arena, right?”
“Ten. They changed it in the fifties, after Liat Morgenstern and that weavile.”
Gwyneth is not sure if that's right, but she wants to seem like she knows. Not for her own sake, though. For Tor's.
“What pokémon do you have?” she asks, and Tor's eyes light up like Saadiyyah's when she asked her the same question.
“Well my sandile Belle, like I said,” they reply. “And a sigilyph from the – the desert.”
They look suddenly nervous, and Gwyneth does her best to reassure them.
“Neat,” she says. “Takes a lot to distract them from their patrols.”
No one is sure if the Henuun made the sigilyph or not, the way they made the golett and golurk; too many records were destroyed when the library at Hilaan burned. What's clear is that there is nowhere else in the world where you find them, and they patrol the streets of the dead city without apparently realising that it has fallen. Sometimes if they see a trainer, usually a Henuun one but not always, they try to report to them; sometimes they even agree to work with them like any other pokémon. One reason Gwyneth never went to Hilaan is that she was afraid that the sigilyph would not recognise her, and also afraid that they would.
But one recognised Tor, clearly. She makes a conscious effort not to be bitter about it, about this white kid who is chosen, and she almost succeeds.
“Yeah, I heard that,” they say, clearly brimming with pride. “I'm trying to see if I can use her barriers like directionally, to deflect attacks? 'Cause you know, if you just put up the barrier someone can break it, but if you try to like bounce them off it, that's – well, you know.”
“That's cool,” replies Gwyneth encouragingly. “Sounds like you got a way to beat Elesa then, if you can make it work.”
“Yeah.”
A pause. Enough? Enough: she doesn't want to make things weird. Gwyneth gets up.
“I'm gonna be here a couple more days while my pokémon gets healed,” she says. “Say hi sometime.”
“Yeah, I will!” says Tor eagerly. “See ya, Gwyneth.”
“See you, Tor.”
Gwyneth leaves. She has not asked why Tor is lurking around in the lounge before dawn. Probably the same reason she is.
She smiles to herself, bittersweet. This is what it's all about. Tor must know by their age what things are like. What Gwyneth can offer them, all she can offer them, is the hope that they might survive anyway. *
Thursday, 8th SeptemberGwyneth does not sleep well, the night before she gets the news about the wedding. This is not unusual for her. Very often, she will wake in the small hours, for no reason she can name. For a while she will lie there, trying to get back to sleep, and sometimes it works. Mostly it doesn't. Mostly she gets up, in the end, and walks across the room to get a glass of water and stand by the window, looking out. In the electric light, she sees almost nothing except her reflection, and the impression of darkness all around it, and she cannot help but realise how perfectly she is framed there in the square of light, for her shadow-self out there in the mirrored room.
It watches her as others do. It makes her. It teaches her the same old lesson, the one carved into her bones from twenty-four years of being shown her place.
Other children did not like Gwyneth. They didn't know what was wrong with her, but they knew that something was. (It is best, in matters of education, to get to kids young.) They avoided, mocked, bullied. Ordinary hardships in an ordinary life; nothing for which Gwyneth lets herself feel pity. Later on it got worse. When she was twelve she got beaten up by some boys a year or two older. They were not clear about their reasons. Some slurs were thrown around, some homophobic nonsense, but then, that kind of thing always is. Probably they didn't know why they did it themselves, but Gwyneth could now, twelve years on, go back and tell them: she's Henuun (even if she isn't), and she's a trans girl. Never one or the other, but always and damningly both.
It's like a chemical reaction. These things come together and make something new, something singular. Its name is Gwyneth and it is poison.
Gwyneth tried to be a person, she really did, but even back then nobody believed her.
The light isn't good enough for her to see the eyes of her reflection, for which she is always grateful. In the clear light of day, when their gaze is unavoidable, she sees how nauseous she makes herself, just as she does everyone else. She's lost jobs over this. (She's too aggressive, they say, uncomfortably, although she is careful to be as polite and deferential as she can force herself to be.) She was nearly expelled after being beaten up that time, and she wasn't even out then. When people hurt her, it's her fault. Just by existing she is provocative, unnerving; how could you blame someone for reacting? Just look at her. Just look.
Gwyneth looks. From outside, in the ghost-room beyond the glass, Gwyneth looks back.
Her mother wasn't okay with it. She pretended to be but Gwyneth overheard her crying. She doesn't know if she ever came to terms with it; she never asked.
Hilbert never said a goddamn thing.
Tonight, as so many other nights, Gwyneth looks from the window to the glass of water in her hand and imagines hurling it to the floor, imagines the broken shards scattering across her bare feet. She imagines bloodstains on the carpet.
She drinks her water and puts the glass in the sink and goes to watch TV until she falls asleep. *
Friday, 16th SeptemberAfter breakfast (where from her corner she sees Tor, eating on the periphery of someone else's group of friends), Gwyneth returns to her venipede. She looks much the same, although the nurse tells her she is doing well. Gwyneth nods and stares. She thinks she sees the venipede wave one of her antennae, but she might be imagining it.
The machines beep; the ventilator hisses. Gwyneth stands there until she feels like her head might burst with guilt and the thousand tiny noises of the ward, and then she leaves again. For a while she reads some more of Three Nights in Opelucid, but it's starting to depress her, so she leaves it alone after twenty minutes or so and goes outside instead for some air.
The drizzle is the very fine kind that makes the air clammy and seems to get under your skin. It's colder here in Nimbasa than it was in Driftveil or Castelia; not as bad as Aspertia, but still, Gwyneth shivers a little in her thin jacket and clumsily zips it up one-handed. It wasn't a particularly warm jacket to begin with. Now, after losing a substantial amount of its lining to the fire, it's even worse.
She walks down the street, concentrating hard on the sensation of her feet on the ground. It might stop her drifting and it might not. Given how unreal this all feels still – the bed, the medical care, the cripplingly injured venipede – she has her doubts. But she tries anyway.
Huddled under a dripping rooftop, pigeons and unfezant alike fluff out their feathers and stare sullenly into the grey air. Two seagulls tear at trash and take off suddenly, mad-eyed and shrieking: the trash bag has stirred, opened anaemic eyes and rustled softly away down an alley.
Trash bunny, thinks Gwyneth, with a sentimentality that surprises her. She was going to catch a trubbish, back when … well. Back when. Something about their cutesy ugliness appealed to her, although she doesn't know what she would have made of the smell. Maybe it wouldn't have mattered. She's fine with the venipede, after all.
There aren't a lot of people out, although the streets aren't deserted, either; what pedestrians there are walk with purpose, shoulders hunched and heads down: people who have somewhere to go and are braving the rain to get there. Gwyneth is the only one idling. It's kind of nice, actually. In weather like this, everyone withdraws into their own little world, and no one has even a glance to spare for her.
She walks the block or so north to the river, then makes her way east along the South Bank, watching the water. Today it looks black and writhing, surface stirred up by the impact of a million tiny raindrops. At her approach, a group of ducks drift towards her, hopeful, and then when it becomes clear she has no interest in feeding them they disperse across the river.
It's pretty wide, really, reflects Gwyneth. If you'd asked her a week ago how big the Calnorna was, she would have underestimated its size by a long way. It cuts a swathe through Nimbasa, creates a corridor of clear space down which she can look and see the theme park, dull and dark behind a mist of raindrops, and on the northern bank a couple of the Coldside theatres. She thinks that if she went out onto the bridge and looked east, she might even be able to see the forest.
Not today, though. Visibility is awful.
She stands there for a while, feeling the weight of the rain in her hair and her jeans, and then decides she's had enough. Fresh air is overrated anyway. All the good things in life are indoors. *
In the Pokémon Centre lounge, Gwyneth makes some tea to warm herself up and feels stupid for going out at all. You're not well, Gwyneth. You get lucky and someone lets you in here and then you go right back outside again? Yeah, okay. Sit down, stay warm, rest. Idiot.
Her armchair is occupied by a kid and the fluffiest growlithe Gwyneth has ever seen, and there are no other free seats except for a few on the sofas; since going there would involve actually sitting next to some kids, Gwyneth avoids them all and takes her tea up to her room instead, where she lies on her bed and tries to read her book. When this effort fails, she plays a game on her phone where there's a coral reef and you slowly populate it with fish and water-types. There isn't actually any gameplay as such, it's just soothing. The slow movement of vibrant tropical wooper back and forth across the screen is almost hypnotic.
Gwyneth used to be a video games kind of person, but not for a long time now; she doesn't know where her computer is any more. She thinks she probably sold it, or maybe it broke, or maybe it just got left behind with the stuff that never made it out of the apartment when she got evicted. It's difficult to say: she wasn't really in the right frame of mind to keep records. Much of that time she barely remembers. Besides, that was always Nika's job. She organised things, and Gwyneth muddled along in her wake, feeling guilty about not being able to corral her life the way Nika did hers.
In retrospect, Nika was unusually good at that kind of thing, Gwyneth thinks. She kept a diary – actually wrote in it almost every day, week after week, for as long as they knew each other. Who does that? Gwyneth likes sometimes to think she could keep a diary, but she knows she can't, really. What would she say? Dear diary, today I went to work and was more of an asshole to people than I should have been. No, she has nothing to say. But Nika always does.
She remembers her filling the pages in her round, looping writing in Pokémon Centres and on buses, moments when there was time to sit and reflect. That is in fact her memory of the bus ride to Driftveil: Gwyneth sitting by the window, watching the bay go pass with wide eyes, and Nika scribbling all her teenage secrets next to her. She'll cringe, rereading it a few years later – dear diary, let me tell you about the coolest girl in the world, Gwyneth ze'Haraan – but she'll reread it all the same. And Gwyneth will reread it with her and laugh and call her a dork, which Nika will agree is, based on all the available evidence, very true.
But on that bus ride Nika writes all her clichés down with the fervour of real belief, only looking up when Gwyneth points out particular points of interest: a pelipper tipping its head back, a fish flashing silver as it struggles in its beak; a dark shadow high up in the sky that might be a hydreigon (and wouldn't it be cool if it was?); the view of the Sierra Castaña to the northwest. Only some time after the bus has crossed the bridge and the views have faded to the asphalt wasteland of the multi-lane highway does she click her pen closed and put her diary away in her bag, and Gwyneth is silently impressed by how much writing she has managed to squeeze out of the last couple of days. She isn't sure she could make a whole page out of it, not even in her big, scratchy handwriting.
It's okay. Gwyneth is starting to see a pattern in all this, in her persistent failure and Nika's effortless success. She is starting to think that maybe it's okay if she gets it all wrong, because she could help Nika get things right, instead. Some people are chosen and some are not, but there's nothing to stop those not chosen from being sidekicks, even if they can't be heroes.
She says nothing about this. She is afraid that people will think it's sad, and she doesn't think she could bear to be so misunderstood: this isn't a tragedy, it's a relief. Rather than chosen, she can be free. And while later she will come to the conclusion that freedom is not uncomplicatedly positive, that if anything is possible then awful things can happen just the same as good ones – while all of that looms in her future, here and now, on this bus moving slowly through the suburbs of Driftveil, she is conscious only of a weight lifting from her shoulders.
It doesn't last. Some shadows are too long to escape from so easily, and Hilbert's is longer than most. At the Pokémon Centre, while Nika is busy fussing over Britomartis whose irritation, it turns out, is partly down to having picked up a kind of parasitic rust that infests steel-types, Gwyneth overhears someone talking about something happening at the Pokémon League. For a moment, she stands there, unsure she wants to know, and then, because even if she doesn't want to she has no choice, she has to know, she goes to the computer room and brings up the Pan-Unova News website.
And there it is. Live updates: Unova League Under Siege. The Gym Leaders are being called in right now; some kind of structure has been photographed rising out of the ground around the League building; N has been seen, along with a huge black pokémon not known in Unova for three thousand years. There's a photo right there of him landing at the League entrance, dismounting, looking back towards the person taking his picture, guilelessly photogenic. He looks grave; he looks like a king. And that there, hunched so that he can slip from its massive shoulders to the ground, its swollen tail crackling with arcs of blue lightning, is a thing out of legend.
He has been chosen. The country is gripped by indecision: Gwyneth sees it playing out in the comments. What do we do? This is Unova, right there. The legendary dragon that stands, in an iconography inherited (or stolen) from the Henuun of three millennia past, for all the ideals of Unova itself. It has selected a champion. What do we do? What can we even do?
The military is mobilising, along with the Gym Leaders, but there is opposition, hesitation. This is only one dragon, but it is still half of the pair that created Aksa. It is not something to be engaged lightly. And more than that, how can we be sure whose side is right?
It could go one way or the other. Gwyneth abandons the computer and sprints to the lounge, where what feels like half the trainers in Driftveil are clustered around the TV. There's helicopter footage of the League, and the strange building clamped like a parasite onto its flank. Nobody can see N; the commentators are repeating the same meaningless facts over and over, trying to understand what it is they're looking at. Everyone knows that what they're really waiting for is for someone to win. Alder or N? Hardly anyone has even seen Alder for the past few years. Didn't his main partner die? What kind of a trainer is he, compared to N, to someone chosen?
There are muttered arguments and no conclusions. Everyone is waiting, in the Centre, in Driftveil, all across Unova, and in this tense, strange in-between time, the nation does not know any more what is right or wrong. All it would take is a victory, one way or the other, and the world might turn upside-down. If Zekrom chooses Plasma, how can anyone deny their right?
Gwyneth feels sick and exhilarated and shivery, all at once. The thought comes to her, watching the news, that she might have been right – and at the same time, she feels equally strongly that nothing as horrible as what she did in Nimbasa could ever be right. She looks at her hands and sees them trembling violently, chipped orange nails jumping like crickets across her field of view, and she wishes Nika was here to hold them.
When the Gym Leaders arrive, the cameras go inside. All the famous pokémon are there: Clay's excadrill, Stanton; Brycen's beartic, Saskia; even Lenora's ancient stoutland Rex, mostly retired from battling now but evidently the only one she trusts for a mission this important. And there too (Gwyneth realises with a shock of what feels like terror) are Hilbert and Cheren, their serperior and emboar waiting by their sides with the wary patience of old soldiers. Drayden of Opelucid speaks to them – something Gwyneth cannot hear – and signals for the news crew to back off. Before they stop filming, Gwyneth sees Hilbert taking something from his bag that gleams white as hot metal in his hands.
She does not yet know about the light and dark stones. Nobody does; the information won't be released for some time to come. But she doesn't need to know that to get the significance of it. N and Hilbert; black and white; Zekrom – and Reshiram.
In the interim, while everyone is watching and waiting and listening to the people who are on computers shouting out the live updates as they come, Nika arrives, reading the instructions on a bottle of unguent for Britomartis, and Gwyneth latches onto her immediately.
“Oh, okay,” she says, sensing her desperation and hugging back. “What's going on?”
“It's my brother,” says Gwyneth, shaking in her grip. “And Team Plasma. They're at the League.”
The wait is awful, but it's easier now. Nika does not – perhaps cannot – know exactly what is going on in Gwyneth's head, but she can tell that this is even bigger for her than it is for everyone else. She stays close and holds her hand without caring what people will think. As it happens, nobody even notices: everyone's attention is on the news, and what will come next.
It takes an hour and a half, and then the presenter visibly starts, pressing his finger to his earpiece. There are reports coming in. They are going live to the inside of the Plasma building.
And then there they are and there he is, Hilbert, his serperior slumped with awful stillness on the tiles of some great hall but his hand on Reshiram's side, Zekrom sprawled before them with its eyes closed. N is clinging to it, eyes low and wounded, and Ghetsis Harmonia, earnest, avuncular Ghetsis Harmonia, rages and screams beside him like a captive demon. He shoves N out of the way and the boy falls without a word; he throws a poké ball and releases a hydreigon, an actual goddamn hydreigon, and the camera jumps as the news crew tries to back out. But Hilbert smiles and points and Reshiram flicks its head forward like a snake, unsettlingly fast, and the next thing anyone knows the hydreigon is on the floor, raising a cloud of soot laid down by the battle between the dragons. It whines piteously, heads flailing. It does not look or sound like Unova's apex predator.
Harmonia does not give in. He never gives in. He rants and rails and glares in different directions with his mismatched eyes, and he releases more pokémon, bouffalant and bisharp and more, and perhaps they are more afraid of him than they are of Reshiram because they obey his command to swarm it; and though the great dragon dispatches them all in seconds the distraction works. When the smoke clears, he is gone.
There is a long, terrible moment where nothing happens and nobody knows what to do. And then Hilbert steps forward and offers N his hand.
The camera does not show his face but Gwyneth knows he is smiling his fucking enigmatic smile.
Someone says something and the video feed cuts back to the presenter outside. He looks as stupefied as everyone watching at home.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he says, in a slow, wondering voice, “it would appear that we have a new Champion.”
It's over. Plasma is shattered. Nika touches Gwyneth's face and Gwyneth realises for the first time that she has been crying.
“It's okay,” she promises her, holding her hands tightly so they cannot shake. “Hey, Gwyn, it's okay. I'm here, okay? I'm here.”
Gwyneth lets herself fall into her arms, and together they leave the room and this strange, awful day for somewhere and somewhen else. *
Well.
Gwyneth sits up and sighs. She rubs her forehead. (Feeling: a spot, a scar, the ring in her eyebrow.) She glares out of the window at the rain as if it is responsible for everything that she just thought of.
“It's lunchtime,” she tells herself, to break the silence, and goes back downstairs.
She eats a little and steals a little more, then goes back to check on her venipede. There isn't much change, but Gwyneth thinks her shell looks maybe the slightest bit more solid, although she has to admit that it might just be that all the flakes have come away now. The nurse – the same one from the first night she arrived – tells her that she's the toughest venipede he's ever seen, and they're planning to try to wake her soon.
“When?” asks Gwyneth.
“We'll let you know,” he replies.
“She's going to be okay, right?”
He hesitates. The answer, when it comes, is honest.
“If we can wake her up, she'll make it,” he says. “If not … I don't know. I'm sorry.”
Gwyneth thinks of saying something like I can't lose her, except that's a cliché and anyway she doesn't know if it is true. She hopes it is, but despite what Shane thinks of her she has always been sceptical of her own capacity for loyalty.
She thinks, this is my fault, and feels the hard knot coil a little tighter inside her.
“Okay,” she says instead, a reply as monstrously inadequate as she is, and she leaves.
Back in the lounge, Gwyneth evicts a trio of cottonee from her favoured armchair and applies herself to Three Nights in Opelucid again. She likes stories, but this has never seemed to her to be the best way to tell them. She didn't know what that way might be, until Nika told her about Troy. And then she knew: she wanted to hear them told. Not just read out; Gwyneth finds it as hard to concentrate on audiobooks as she does on their paper counterparts. Told, half remembered and half improvised. Told, like Nika tells her myths.
Gwyneth knows that these are unrealistic expectations. It's okay. Most of the time, she makes do with memories: late nights, flashlight, the shadow on the wall of Nika's big, expansive storytelling gestures. Romans and Greeks. The light of passion in her eye.
The rest of the time, she reads books and feels bad for being dissatisfied with them. She's twenty-four, after all. She should have figured out how to enjoy reading by now.
She pushes through Three Nights in Opelucid, sentence by sentence, and does not think of Nika or Team Plasma or the venipede, and with a vast effort of will she forces time to pass. *
That evening, she eats with Tor. She doesn't mean to, but she sees them sitting alone at a table in the otherwise bustling canteen, and though she tells herself that this is none of her business something in her refuses to let it go. So she sits opposite them, hi kid what's up, and they smile in such obvious relief that Gwyneth feels terrible for even considering sitting anywhere else.
“I'm okay,” says Tor, and probably they think she is fooled, so she decides not to disillusion them. “I was working on that barrier thing with Vega, and I think she figured out what I wanted. She popped a reflect open in between Belle's teeth right as she was biting and bounced her across the room.”
“That sounds neat,” replies Gwyneth. “Belle okay?”
“Yeah, she was just startled.” Tor looks excited. “I think maybe I'm gonna go challenge Elesa tomorrow. We can do the same thing with light screen, so I oughta be able to flick off the lightning.”
Gwyneth considers. It could work. She's never seen anyone do this before, and she has watched a lot of IBN over the years, seen hundreds of trainers with hundreds of pokémon, but she doesn't see why it wouldn't work. She tries to force her brain back into old habits: think, Gwyneth, what are the weak spots? Why might this fail?
“I think that might work,” she says slowly, the trainer's part of her mind creaking from long disuse. “But you got to think about two things. One, can Vega react fast enough to raise the barrier against an electric-type? And also I guess does she have the stamina to keep putting them up and taking them down again. And two, that might let her shrug off the electric attacks but how's she actually gonna take the other pokémon down?”
Tor chews thoughtfully for a little while, then swallows.
“Uh,” they say. “I guess I wasn't as prepared as I thought … um, hang on, lemme think …”
“'S okay,” says Gwyneth, clumsily chopping a sausage in half one-handed. “No rush.”
“I mean her psychic powers are pretty strong,” says Tor. “She put barriers up and took them down again all day today while we were practising.”
“Yeah?” Gwyneth wonders, privately, how powerful Vega is. How long do sigilyph live? How long has she been out there in the desert, protecting the city? Sigilyph are known for their iron discipline and dedication, but it's still always a risk when a rookie trainer ends up with something too strong for them. People tend to get hurt that way.
“Yeah.” Tor ponders the matter a little while longer. People pass behind them, taking trays to and from tables, and Gwyneth senses eyes on the two of them. It bothers her, much more than if they were only staring at her. “There is this one thing,” they say eventually. “Do you know a move called stored power?”
“That's … the one that gets stronger the more your pokémon's powered up?”
“Yeah. It like detonates the energy you've built up. So you think I could have her use it on the barriers?”
Gwyneth blinks. She feels hopelessly un-trainer-like. What was she thinking, trying to coach Tor? They must know so much more than her, just through doing the damn thing.
“I don't follow,” she says. “Sorry.”
“Blow the barriers up,” clarifies Tor. “Like parrying with a stick of dynamite.”
“Oh. Uh … well, I dunno. Never used that move myself. Guess it's worth a shot.”
“Great!” Tor beams. “I'll give that a go after this, I guess. If it doesn't work I still got her regular psychic attacks. Those are pretty strong too.”
Gwyneth takes a sip of her water and smiles.
“Sounds like a plan,” she says. “Good luck, kid.”
A short silence, made up of the clatter of cutlery and the babble of teenage voices. Gwyneth eats, as slowly as she can. She has a bad habit of bolting food that she's been trying to kick for years.
“What pokémon do you have?” asks Tor, after a while.
“Venipede,” she says, swallowing. “Haven't had her very long. I … let my old partners go at the end of my journey. Had to. They were too used to battles to want to hang around while I went to school and work.”
It's uncomfortable, for all sorts of reasons: the improvised lie, the reminder that the trainer journey doesn't last forever. Again, that sense of shame returns, again like a millstone grinding at her gut. Couldn't she think of anything better to say?
“She took a bad hit from a darmanitan the other night, though,” she says, trying to cover her awkwardness with more words. “'S why I'm hanging around here. She'll be okay, she just can't travel yet.”
The confidence in her voice surprises even her with its plausibility. She sounds like she has it all together. She kind of wants to laugh, but not in a good way, and she has to hold it back to avoid startling Tor.
“Right,” they say, a little nervously. (Thinking, perhaps, that maybe this will have to end after all, someday.) “What did you have when you went on your first journey?”
Gwyneth does laugh then, but only a little, and as lightly as she can.
“A minccino and a munna,” she says. “Blossom and Corbin. Never evolved. Like I told you, I wasn't all that good at training. I didn't get any badges.”
“This will be my first,” admits Tor. “If I can get it.”
“Did you try in Striaton or Castelia?”
“No way. You know like eighty per cent of trainers fail their first challenge? I mean, so did I, but like I wasn't gonna go for the first Gym I got to.”
“Yeah, they said that back when I was your age too.” Gwyneth scratches her head. “I think you'll be okay. They're not too hard on you if it's your first Gym. And you've done your homework. You'll do fine.”
“Yeah?” Tor looks hopeful, excited. Gwyneth has the impression of someone who is not used to receiving encouragement. She wonders, briefly, about their parents, and grits her teeth. There are ways in which even a supportive family can choke you.
“Yeah,” she says. “Elesa's probably only ever faced a couple of sigilyph before. She won't know what hit her.”
“You really think so?”
Gwyneth smiles. She feels faintly sick with the knowledge that Tor really believes in everything she tells them. But how can she take it away?
“Yeah,” she says. “I really think so.”
Tor smiles back, and then above their heads the PA system chimes.
“Gwyneth ze'Haraan to ward 2,” it says. “That's ward 2 calling Gwyneth ze'Haraan.”
She's dead, thinks Gwyneth for one heart-stopping moment; and then she curses herself for being so jumpy. The venipede's not dead. Didn't they say she was doing well? She's fine. She's the toughest venipede they've ever seen.
Gwyneth takes a deep, slow breath. Okay.
“I better get over there,” she says, getting up. “See you around, Tor.”
They wish her luck. She thinks about that as she walks away, pockets full of bread rolls, and repeats the words to herself. “Good luck, Gwyneth.” It doesn't sound as good when she says it.
In the ward, Dr. Marsden is waiting. He greets her by name and tells her he'll get right to the point: he wants her permission to try to wake the venipede up.
“Done,” says Gwyneth, before he's even finished speaking. “Do it.”
“Just a minute, Ms. ze'Haraan, I need to make sure you're making an informed decision here―”
“The nurse said if you could wake her she'd be okay,” she says stubbornly. And, silently: if you can wake her I haven't killed her.
“Yes, it's very likely she will, but it's a risk, and as her partner we need your permission before we can attempt it. Which I can't ask for until you know enough to make the decision.”
“Okay,” says Gwyneth, resisting the urge to snap at him. “So tell me what you need to tell me.”
He speaks, and she waits, and she does listen, even though it doesn't really matter to her what he says, and when he's done Gwyneth speaks again.
“Okay,” she says. “Wake her up.”
Marsden hesitates for a moment, and nods briskly in response.
“All right,” he says. “We'll begin preparations. I can have someone let you know when we're done, or―”
“I'll wait,” says Gwyneth. “I'll just go outside.”
He does not argue with her. Probably he has worked out by now that Gwyneth is an irritating person with whom to argue. He nods, and says okay, and Gwyneth goes. She sits on the chair out in the corridor that she sat on the night before last when she drank cold coffee and cried, and she chews her thumbnail with short, savage movements of her jaw.
“C'mon,” she mutters. “We got a wedding to go to, asshole.”
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Post by Manchee on Jul 1, 2018 20:15:26 GMT
Hello! I just got through chapter three. Not sure if I've reviewed this anywhere else before, but I wanted to stop by and say that I'm loving this. I read the first chapter a good bit ago, and really enjoyed how it played out. You set it up nicely to characterize Gwyneth as "the other person" when compared to Hilbert, which is a fun read. Unova is the perfect region to have this set up in, too, because it feels so different from the other regions and you can make her lower-middle class lifestyle have more of an impact on her struggle to travel so far for her brother's wedding (speaking of which, I find it fascinating that despite their relation, Hilbert seems to have overlooked his sister as much as the rest of the world- I mean, he's so extremely famous and has to know his sister is not as successful as himself, yet he doesn't try to assist her in any way to travel to his wedding, or so it seems).
I'm guessing that Gwyneth fell into Plasma's ideology and released ("liberated") her Pokémon? That's the vibe that I'm getting and I can't remember at the moment if that has been explicitly stated. But that's my guess either way! It adds to her character a lot because she doesn't seem to regret not having her Pokémon anymore. Still carrying the ultra ball added to the depth of that, though, because it didn't make her appear to want to own another Pokémon, but made her appear to miss the travels and friends that she used to have. Which, whether that was actually the intention, is relatable to a reader like me who is less than a year away from being halfway through their twenties and misses a lot of their childhood, even if I don't necessarily want to be a teenager again.
Speaking of the ultra ball, though, because this is one of my favorite things to happen so far since it caught me by surprise, it was a fun twist to see Gwyneth try to go convince the ship captain to return, only to be attacked by a venipede instead. I wasn't expecting to see Hugh and (insert male protagonist here), but it was a moment where I said, "Duh! Of course they're going to appear!" and appreciated not seeing it sooner. But then! Gwyneth captures the venipede that attacks her, which is super ironic, and THEN! She releases it. I like that it felt very in-character for her to do that, even if it meant she loses the ultra ball she's been carrying around. When she first released it, I was thinking, "Aw! But venipede would be the perfect, cynical traveling partner for Gwyneth!" until I saw the symbolism of her finally getting rid of the ultra ball. And it felt right and complicates her journey over to Humilau less, BUT THEN! The little bug comes back to her! During that scene I was wondering if it was Plasma back to freeze everything, but my memory of BW2 isn't the best since I hardly played those games, and I was pleased at how it all unfolded. Having venipede tag along without a poké ball is symbolistic and kind of perfect in its own, twisted way, and I'm very excited to see how it adds to her travels.
Castelia is one of my favorite Pokémon locations ever, so I'm thrilled to see where this goes now that she has conquered a large chunk of the path to Humilau. Great stuff so far!
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girl-like-substance
the seal will bite you if you give him half a chance
Posts: 527
Pronouns: xe/xem
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Post by girl-like-substance on Jul 7, 2018 11:21:27 GMT
Hello! I just got through chapter three. Not sure if I've reviewed this anywhere else before, but I wanted to stop by and say that I'm loving this. I read the first chapter a good bit ago, and really enjoyed how it played out. You set it up nicely to characterize Gwyneth as "the other person" when compared to Hilbert, which is a fun read. Thank you! One of the original ideas for Go Home was to write about the difference between player characters and NPCs, and while the concept evolved a bunch from there I still wrote from the starting point of asking what happens to the person you don't choose at the start of the game? I couldn't actually call her Hilda – there was no way that would be realistic – but that's basically where Gwyneth comes from, conceptually. She is, as she says, the one not chosen. Unova is the perfect region to have this set up in, too, because it feels so different from the other regions and you can make her lower-middle class lifestyle have more of an impact on her struggle to travel so far for her brother's wedding Obviously in this telling Unova is just fake America; that was one of the other things I wanted to do, to write about America. (As, uh, a British citizen who went to America exactly once well over ten years ago, but you know, nobody's said how dare you do this yet.) It's interesting that to you Unova feels like a place where this kind of story could happen, as opposed to the other regions; I wonder if that's because its immediate inspirations are more familiar? Certainly I know more about America than I do about Japan, so perhaps that's a factor. (speaking of which, I find it fascinating that despite their relation, Hilbert seems to have overlooked his sister as much as the rest of the world- I mean, he's so extremely famous and has to know his sister is not as successful as himself, yet he doesn't try to assist her in any way to travel to his wedding, or so it seems). To be fair, he doesn't know where she is; Gwyneth hasn't had any contact with her family for about two years at the time that Go Home begins. But no, Hilbert is not a great brother. Gwyneth is a much worse sister than he is a brother, but still. It would be messed-up to have a player character as a close relation, you know? Someone so hideously perfect and impossibly powerful. Gwyneth's spite isn't entirely unjustified. I'm guessing that Gwyneth fell into Plasma's ideology and released ("liberated") her Pokémon? That's the vibe that I'm getting and I can't remember at the moment if that has been explicitly stated. But that's my guess either way! It adds to her character a lot because she doesn't seem to regret not having her Pokémon anymore. It hasn't been stated explicitly yet, no. But she does regret what she did, I think; it's just that this fic inhabits Gwyneth's head, and Gwyneth tells herself very insistently that she regrets nothing and her pokémon are better off without her anyway. So like, maybe don't always believe everything the narration says; the fact that it's full of things that sound like stuff Gwyneth might say is not coincidental. Still carrying the ultra ball added to the depth of that, though, because it didn't make her appear to want to own another Pokémon, but made her appear to miss the travels and friends that she used to have. Which, whether that was actually the intention, is relatable to a reader like me who is less than a year away from being halfway through their twenties and misses a lot of their childhood, even if I don't necessarily want to be a teenager again. I don't think Gwyneth ever had very many friends, but she does miss her journey. It's definitely part of what I intended, anyway; I wasn't much older than Gwyneth when I first wrote this, and while my own life wasn't quite as much of a garbage fire as Gwyneth's at the time, I was still quite bitter about not having the childhood I would have wanted. I didn't give that childhood to Gwyneth – like, this is about trauma and abjection, so it would've been weird – but I did give her a taste of something good to have regrets about. Speaking of the ultra ball, though, because this is one of my favorite things to happen so far since it caught me by surprise, it was a fun twist to see Gwyneth try to go convince the ship captain to return, only to be attacked by a venipede instead. I wasn't expecting to see Hugh and (insert male protagonist here), but it was a moment where I said, "Duh! Of course they're going to appear!" and appreciated not seeing it sooner. Yeah, I've sorta fudged the timeline a bit – BW2 is two years after BW, not ten, but I wanted to have the main plot happening in the background to other people, while Gwyneth just struggles on with her own small NPC problems, so I decided to make a bit of a change. You'll have already noticed that RBY is happening as the story begins; the stories of the Hoenn and Sinnoh games are also happening at the same time. It's just that things like that don't happen to people like Gwyneth. (Or so she thinks.) But then! Gwyneth captures the venipede that attacks her, which is super ironic, and THEN! She releases it. I like that it felt very in-character for her to do that, even if it meant she loses the ultra ball she's been carrying around. When she first released it, I was thinking, "Aw! But venipede would be the perfect, cynical traveling partner for Gwyneth!" until I saw the symbolism of her finally getting rid of the ultra ball. Yeah, I mean she hates that ultra ball – like, she sees it as weakness to have it at all, especially since she's deliberately lost so many other things that tie her back to that time. And of course, Gwyneth does not want a pokémon, not after everything else. Having one would probably be good for her, and she might even be able to recognise that, but of course she doesn't want anything good for herself ever. And it felt right and complicates her journey over to Humilau less, BUT THEN! The little bug comes back to her! During that scene I was wondering if it was Plasma back to freeze everything, but my memory of BW2 isn't the best since I hardly played those games, and I was pleased at how it all unfolded. Having venipede tag along without a poké ball is symbolistic and kind of perfect in its own, twisted way, and I'm very excited to see how it adds to her travels. I guess I have kind of a habit of dispensing with poké balls for the most part, since they're not a particularly pleasant concept; in later stories, I came up with some ways to make them less uncomfortable, but I hadn't figured it out at the time of writing this story. Doesn't really matter; the venipede wouldn't have a poké ball anyway. As you say, it makes the story better to have it that way. Castelia is one of my favorite Pokémon locations ever, so I'm thrilled to see where this goes now that she has conquered a large chunk of the path to Humilau. Great stuff so far! Yeah, this is the easy part – like, up till now, Gwyneth has actually had some money to her name. From here on out, she's going to have to travel without funds, and that's where things get really difficult. Thank you for reviewing, and I hope you continue to enjoy the story – there'll be a new chapter up later today, although of course if you're not quite caught up yet, I guess that doesn't matter too much. But it will be there waiting for you to reach it! |
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girl-like-substance
the seal will bite you if you give him half a chance
Posts: 527
Pronouns: xe/xem
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Post by girl-like-substance on Jul 7, 2018 23:08:23 GMT
TEN: VULTUREFriday, 16th SeptemberLate that night Gwyneth is called back to the ward by an exhausted-looking Dr. Marsden. He is smiling, though, and even before she gets there Gwyneth feels her face start to crack into a grin as well.
On its table, the venipede stirs and glares and is most definitely awake.
“Hey, asshole,” says Gwyneth, sitting down next to her. “Shoulda known you were too stubborn to die that easy.”
Her warning rattle is weak, and she does not seem to have the energy to move, but she fixes her single eye on Gwyneth with all the usual malice.
“Feeling's mutual, believe me.” Gwyneth reaches out and the venipede throws her remaining stamina into weakly headbutting her knuckle. She can't tell whether this is hatred or affection. She's okay with that. She has the same difficulty herself, sometimes. “I got something for you, but the doctor says no food yet. Speaking of which, you've been scamming me, haven't you, dude? He says you can go weeks between meals, and you've had me feeding you every day.” She shakes her head. “Asshole.”
The venipede clicks in what is possibly insectoid self-satisfaction. Gwyneth tries her best, but she can't stop herself from smiling. She's happy to see her up again. So dumb, isn't it? This is a bug, a literal pest, a venomous little monster that eats trash and tries to kill people in back alleys. And she is the misguided pokémon liberator, someone who promised herself she'd never inflict her dubious partnership on another pokémon ever again, never expose anything to that kind of harm. But she can't deny it. She's angry about it, sure, but still, she's happier than she has been since the break-up. And it's only partly because it turns out that she hasn't gotten the venipede killed after all.
Gwyneth knows this isn't saying much, but it's an improvement, and she's in no position to turn that down.
“Thanks,” she says, turning to Marsden, who is hovering in the background with that expression on his face that people make when they see unforced affection. “I … yeah. Seriously. Thanks.”
“It's my job,” he says. “Don't mention it.”
“Will she be able to travel any time soon?” Gwyneth asks. “I dunno if you heard, I'm kind of on a deadline …”
“Yeah, Lee – uh, Dr. ze'Naarat – she mentioned.” Marsden pauses for a second, and Gwyneth wonders if he's in on the fraud. He definitely suspects, even if he isn't. She hopes he isn't planning to do anything with this information. “I think,” he says carefully, “that we can expect her to start recovering much faster from here on out. Venipede metabolise fast, and her shell is already starting to harden from the supplements we've been giving her. She won't be battling for weeks, but it's not impossible that she might be able to leave in a day or two, as long as she's well looked after.”
“She will be,” promises Gwyneth, with mixed shame and pride at the fact that she seems to really mean it.
“There is the matter of her eye surgery,” Marsden goes on. “I don't know if anyone's told you, but the shell that's grown over her lost eye is malformed. There's a lobe of chitin pressing on her brain. She's definitely not strong enough for surgery now, but I recommend you get that seen to within a few weeks. There's not enough research been done into the function of venipede brains for me to say exactly how that's been affecting her, but I know enough to tell you that it needs sorting out sooner rather than later.”
“Okay,” says Gwyneth, nodding. “Okay, I will.”
The venipede hisses to herself, and Gwyneth finds her eye drawn back to her. She seems bigger now that she's awake.
“I'll leave you to it,” says Marsden understandingly, and then it's just the two of them again. Just like Gwyneth was starting to get used to.
She sighs, and reaches out to run her finger along the contours of the venipede's forehead. She feels antennae run delicately over her skin, tasting its oils.
“Dude,” she says. She doesn't have anything else left to say. *
Gwyneth sleeps pretty well, for once, and sure, she dreams that one dream again, but it's okay. Her venipede's back, and she's okay. *
Saturday, 17th SeptemberIn the morning, Gwyneth counts up her bread rolls, apples and bananas, and figures she's on track to make it through White Forest. She's only got the one water bottle, but the rivers and streams there are supposed to be very pure. She could refill it from them when she needs to. There's probably a risk of some awful disease, cholera or whatever it is you get from bad water, but whatever, she'll run it. Can't be much worse for her than the crap she usually eats.
She spends the morning with her venipede, not really doing anything in particular, just sitting there, sometimes talking and sometimes not. She watches the venipede slowly grow more and more lively, and is reminded of watching Nika's pokémon recover after a battle, the way you could almost see them healing, their energy coming back with supernatural speed. Gwyneth has heard the urban legends like everyone else – the blissey that got eaten down to a skeleton and regenerated its entire body, the quagsire that grew not just a new limb but a new head – but there's a little bit of truth to them. Look after them, make sure they get the right food and care, and most pokémon will shrug off wounds that would cripple or kill anything else. Fighters, every one.
Gwyneth looks into the venipede's eye, at the flat, brute cunning gleaming at the back of it, and wonders. She struggles to imagine what it must be like to cling onto life with that kind of ferocity. The venipede probably only survived because she was too stubborn to die. If their positions were reversed, Gwyneth doesn't know if she would have made it.
By lunchtime, the venipede has started chewing the padding on her table, adamant that if she isn't getting any food she can at least destroy something, and Gwyneth feels okay with leaving her to get herself some lunch. She looks around the canteen, but doesn't see Tor, and wonders if they're at the Gym right now. She hopes, with a sudden fierce emotion she didn't know she had, that Elesa is good to them. Gwyneth doesn't know the positions of the Gym Leaders on people like her and Tor. She never had to face them and find out.
After she's done eating and putting stolen food away in her backpack, she checks on her venipede, which is still trying and failing to destroy the padding specifically designed to be proof against that kind of thing, and heads out for some air. She doesn't like hospitals, or doctors, or anything medical whatsoever, and recently she's spent more time around all of these things than she is comfortable with.
Nimbasa today is grey and damp, a diffuse cold spreading out through the city like a fog, but it isn't raining. Wet leaves carpet the sidewalks underneath the trees, torn loose by wind and rain and the approaching autumn, and Gwyneth goes slow, aware that she has only one arm with which to adjust her balance.
She moves through the rhythm of the city's weekend, observes the South Bank crawling all around her with wholesome, middle-class life. She sees dogs and herdier being walked, kid trainers scuttling around like insects, children in brightly-coloured coats being taken to the playground. (Their mother shepherds them away from Gwyneth, as if her wrongness is catching. She closes her eyes momentarily and does not respond.) Dozens of ordinary lives being led. Gwyneth misses that. Adventure is painful and expensive and exhausting. Her old job in Nacrene was tedious, but at least it wasn't difficult. And she had a proper home to come back to in the evenings.
Stopping on the riverbank to lean on the railing and watch the water moving, Gwyneth glimpses a shape moving across the sky out of the corner of her eye, and looks up to see broad wings and a lozenge-shaped tail: the distinctive silhouette of a mandibuzz. She's never really been into birds, but everyone in Unova can recognise a mandibuzz or a braviary. And Hekate gave her plenty of practice.
Gwyneth remembers when Hekate came back. Nika released her in the end, as she did all of her partners, but Hekate turned up again after a couple of months with another mandibuzz, sitting on the roof of her parents' house. Some days they were gone and some days they were there, but they followed Nika through every change of address she ever made. Nika said, this is an omen, Annie.
Gwyneth said, why?
Nika said, you know mandibuzz are all female, right?
They stood there for a moment in the warm Humilau sun and watched the two birds thrusting nesting material into the lee of the chimney.
Gwyneth said, giant lesbian vultures?
And Nika laughed and said, yes, Annie. Giant lesbian vultures.
Hekate's probably back in Humilau now, Gwyneth thinks; Nika's almost certainly gone home by this point, and she and her nameless mate will have followed, to perch on the roof of her parents' house and live off fish for a little while. Then when she leaves for her honeymoon they'll disappear into the wilderness again, like they always do when Nika goes abroad, and, tracking her by some sixth sense known only to pokémon, return a few days after she comes back.
She sinks a little further onto the railing and closes her eyes. Nika on her honeymoon with Hilbert. Why would you even think about that, Gwyneth. Why the hell.
With an effort, she pushes herself upright and trudges on. It's best not to think about why she's doing what she's doing, or what she'll find when she gets there. Better just to do it, and consider the consequences later.
She's no fool. She knows this is bad advice. But she also knows she'll never get to Humilau if she doesn't think this way, so. Delusive hope it is.
The last time Nika went abroad, at least as far as Gwyneth knows, was with her. They went to Kanto, on the savings they'd built up over the first two years of Nika's job. Nika had been abroad before, of course, to visit family in Mexico and Russia – she is a woman who knows her history, who is (if stumblingly) trilingual – but it was Gwyneth's first time on a plane, let alone out of the country. She felt so stupid and naïve, fumbling her way through the intricate ceremonies of the airport, staring out of the window at the clouds.
She sighs. She has to stop doing this. She knows perfectly well that this is no way to live her life. It's just that she doesn't know how to change it.
Suddenly Nimbasa seems oppressive, the grey bulk of it, the gleam of lights from the distant theme park. She can't wait to get out of here, to some place that has no history for her. White Forest will be a relief: she's never been there before. No old ghosts lying in wait among the trees.
She turns and starts heading back towards the Centre. Over the river, the mandibuzz calls out, long and mournful, and begins to fly west towards the sun. *
Dr. Marsden has good news for her.
“I'm really happy with how she's improving,” he says later that afternoon, as the two of them stand and watch the venipede crawl slowly around her table. “You have good instincts, Ms. ze'Haraan. You must've caught the toughest venipede in Virbank.”
Gwyneth smiles briefly.
“So when can she leave?” she asks.
“I'm not in on Sunday mornings, but I'll have someone check on her early tomorrow,” he says. “And if she's good then, well. As long as you keep her on the supplements and meds like we discussed, I see no reason why she shouldn't travel.”
The venipede hisses. She's been allowed food now, on the grounds that withholding it was making her unduly destructive. Gwyneth thinks the joke is on the Centre staff: they fed her, and she's still trying her best to shred the table cover. The thought gives her a small, vicious satisfaction, which is probably not a good thing but whatever, it's fine.
“Thanks,” she says. “I appreciate that.”
“Not at all,” replies Marsden. “Good luck to the both of you.” He leaves – there are probably other more pleasant pokémon that require his attention – and Gwyneth sits back down in the chair by the venipede's side.
“You hear that, dude?” she asks, as she trundles past, displaying her panel of plastic shell like a flag. “We're getting out of here.”
Does she understand? Gwyneth isn't sure. It doesn't really matter. What does is that this reprieve is almost over. She's been lucky so far, with Shane and Saadiyyah and Rood and Dr. ze'Naarat; she's bought and begged and guilt-tripped her way halfway across the country. But this is where it gets harder. White Forest – okay, she'll hike that, but she has to get there first, down Routes 15 and 16 and across the Marvellous Bridge. Then there's White Forest to Undella, miles and miles of tangled rivers that make the ground soft and marshy. She might be able to hike that, too, but she's not sure she can make it through fast enough. And then, of course, there's Humilau itself, and god only knows how she's going to manage that leg of the journey.
Gwyneth says to herself that she needs a plan. This is not a substitute for coming with one, but it's all she's got right now. *
As she leaves the ward, Gwyneth is accosted by ze'Naarat. She is dressed casually, although still somewhat austerely. Gwyneth guesses that maybe she has Saturdays off. In which case, why is she here at all?
“Dr. Marsden tells me you plan on leaving tomorrow,” she says, and Gwyneth knows then that she was right: Marsden is in on this. It's a relief, in a way. It means she doesn't have to worry about it. “I'd like to advise against it.”
“Didn't we have this conversation already?” asks Gwyneth, a little more acidly than she intended. “Thanks for everything, seriously. But I'm going.”
She starts walking, and ze'Naarat moves too, keeping pace with her.
“Is there no other way for you to get there?” she asks. “Your body is under a lot of stress and a long hike is more or less exactly what it doesn't need―”
“No. No other way.”
“No family or―?”
“Haven't spoken to them in nearly two years.”
“Then why are you going to your brother's wedding?”
“Why do you care?” snaps Gwyneth, stopping in the middle of the corridor. “I got my reasons. What's it to you?”
“I'm a doctor,” retorts ze'Naarat, finally snapping herself. “It's my job. Or do you really think you can make it all the way across Unova on foot and come out in one piece at the other end?”
Gwyneth curses silently. She should have known there was something behind her interest in her. Nobody gives you anything for nothing.
“Yes,” she says stubbornly, although she knows her hesitation has given her away. Ze'Naarat must notice, but she displays none of the triumph Gwyneth was expecting. She does not react at all, in fact.
“You came in because someone attacked you,” she says, without any trace of emotion in her voice. “Would you have come if they had hurt you, not your venipede?”
(No.)
“What, to a Pokémon Centre? Obviously not.”
Ze'Naarat looks away. Gwyneth realises suddenly that she is not as old as she thought she was. Late twenties. Thirty at most.
“Gwyneth,” she says, and there is a note of kindness in her voice now, so warm and natural that it seems almost strange to think she was snapping at her earlier. “What are you really trying to do here?”
There is a long, long pause. Someone edges awkwardly past them, trying hard to pretend that they haven't seen any of this.
Gwyneth shuts her eyes.
“Hell if I know,” she says, with a sour bravado that even she cannot definitely identify as real or fake. “I'm just going to Humilau.”
Ze'Naarat's expression does not waver.
“Why?” she asks.
“Fuck you,” says Gwyneth quietly, and leaves. *
Later, while she is eating slowly in the canteen and thinking about ways to get out of town before Dr. ze'Naarat tries to speak to her again, Tor comes up to her, looking excited. Over their head is something that looks like a geometric suggestion of a bird, beating spindly wing-analogues too slowly to sustain the illusion that they are what keep it in the air and staring with an eye that looks like it's been painted on.
“Hey!” they say, sitting opposite her. (They have brought no friends but their sigilyph, Gwyneth notes. She is unsurprised, and depressed.) “I did it!”
She forces her thoughts of travel and ze'Naarat away and summons a smile from somewhere.
“Yeah? That's great, kid. Your deflection thing work out?”
“Yeah, it did!” They look delighted that she asked. “All the lightning attacks kinda dissipated when they got bounced off, so Elesa tried to get her emolga in close with U-turns but like it was going really fast. So when Vega pushed it out of the way it kept bouncing right out the arena.”
“Neat.” Gwyneth considers what to say next. Above Tor's head, Vega holds position, motionless but for the beating of her fake wings. Gwyneth does not think she has ever seen anything so emphatically not a bird. “Elesa would've brought two pokémon for you, right? Emolga, and …?”
“Eelektrik. But like there was nothing it could do. Vega deflected its lightning and then it tried to wrap round her but she wouldn't let it get close enough. It went on so long Elesa had to concede. Said she hadn't brought the right pokémon for the job and didn't even know what they would be, anyway.”
What a battle it must have been. Gwyneth is half sorry she didn't see it, although she guesses it might end up on IBN: if trainers are okay with it, their challenges get filmed for training purposes, and sometimes really spectacular ones get televised. By the sound of it, Tor's battle meets the criteria. It's not every day a Gym Leader has to admit that they simply don't know how to win.
She's jealous, she realises, but not the way she expects. She wishes she was Tor, sure, but more than that, she wishes she was their age and travelling with them. They're going to do well, just like Nika did, and Gwyneth loved watching her win more than she ever did winning herself.
“That's pretty incredible,” she says in the end. “You don't see that every day.”
Tor grins shyly.
“Oh, it was okay,” they begin to say, and Gwyneth, determined to make them feel their victory for what it is, interrupts:
“Nah, kid, I mean it, it's incredible.” Big smile. Come on, Gwyneth. You can manage that. “You know how often a Gym Leader says they're so outclassed they don't even know what to do? Like never. And she's been doing this, what, fourteen years? Since she was fifteen. It's not like you beat that new guy, Cheren.” (She allows herself a small, vicious satisfaction in casting him as the hapless rookie.) “You did real good. You should be proud of that.”
Tor is looking at her in a way that makes her deeply unhappy. No one has said anything like this to them, ever. She can see their hesitance, their unwillingness to believe that anyone might actually want to praise them like this, balancing against their desperate desire to take her words at face value.
She tells herself that this is okay. This is what trainer journeys are for, right? This is why they matter. This is her job, as the one not chosen.
“I don't know what to say,” says Tor, after a while. “I mean … thanks, I guess. Yeah. Thanks.”
Gwyneth smiles. Tor is too young to see how brittle it is.
“No problem,” she says. “You earned it.”
Here's to you, kid. Here's to the fifteen-year-old who hangs out with Gwyneth because she of all people is the friendliest face in town.
Sometimes Gwyneth is surprised that nobody else seems to realise why she is as full of hate as she is. *
That night she is less okay than the last; that night, she dreams the dream again, only this time Tor has sharpened that other part of it, the one that dwells on her own failure. Because isn't that the way with dreams? So much meaning, so much pointless, mundane, personal-to-the-point-of-boredom significance, that you can dream them over and over and keep finding new angles in them from which to attack yourself. Tonight, Gwyneth struggles to answer Juniper for a different reason altogether: she knows what will happen. This question is the prelude to her being given a partner and sent off to become a trainer. But this has all already happened, and Gwyneth already knows that she will hurt her partner, cast her out and destroy her ball. She knows that she will betray the trust that Juniper is placing in her, and overturn every expectation that she will share in even the smallest way in her brother's success.
So when Juniper starts talking, asks her name, if she's a boy or a girl, Gwyneth hangs her head in shame and cannot speak. How can she? She is the most gullible person in Unova, the one who fell for Team Plasma's spiel, the one who liberated her pokémon from the one human they really loved. She isn't worthy of this, not like other kids, the Tors and Cherens and Biancas and Saadiyyahs and yes, the Nikas, all those who believe. She is not them. She is not chosen.
Yes, it's the girl thing, and yes, it's the Hilbert thing. But it's this as well, and so when Hilbert steps out of the shadows to take her place, when he arrives to be chosen, Gwyneth is so relieved that she could cry. Until she remembers that she hasn't avoided anything. Until she remembers that it has all already taken place, and it can never be undone. *
Sunday, 18th SeptemberIn the morning she gets ready to go. She's been here long enough; she's still got half the country ahead of her, and only four days to cross it in. It's been nice to have a bed, and food and hot showers, but it can't last. This isn't her place any more. She's no trainer, and it's time to move on.
She takes everything out of her bag, tips out crumbs and lint, then refolds clothes, wraps food and puts everything back. It takes a while, with her hand, but she manages. As she sees it, she doesn't have a choice.
After breakfast, which she eats quickly to avoid bumping into Tor again, she heads down to the ward, where she sits down by the venipede and waits for the nurse to come.
“Hey, dude,” she says. “I forgot yesterday – you can have food now, right? Here you go. Courtesy of the Pokémon Centre canteen.”
She holds out her hand and opens her fingers to reveal a chicken nugget she saved earlier. The venipede looks at it, then at her, then takes it delicately between her forelegs and begins to nibble.
“Yeah, you're welcome,” says Gwyneth, with a vague aggression that might be real or might be fake. “Just hurry it up. I could do without the doctors chewing me out for feeding you junk food.”
Her worries are unfounded. The venipede demolishes the nugget long before the nurse arrives to examine her. When he does, he pronounces the venipede fit to travel, as long as Gwyneth takes good care of her, and Gwyneth nods seriously.
“Yeah,” she says. “Don't worry, I will.” She owes her that, if nothing else.
And that's it: time to check out. Gwyneth hoists the venipede gently up onto her shoulder, trying not to touch the burnt part of her shell, and hands her key card in at the front desk. It's a wrench to see it go, and to know that with it goes access to all the creature comforts she'd just started to get used to, but it's okay. She has Humilau in her future. That's got to be worth giving this up.
It's getting harder to believe that, after her last conversation with ze'Naarat. But Gwyneth might as well be the patron saint of lost causes, and she knows she won't stop. No matter what anyone says, it's all just a matter of putting one foot in front of the other, right? Just like living is a matter of not dying.
Gwyneth puts one foot in front of the other, and she does not die, and she walks out of the Pokémon Centre into the grey light of day. *
She is not entirely without resources. She has a plan, and although it isn't a very good one it does at least exist.
Here is the thing about this stretch of the journey: you can't walk it. Route 16 has no trainers' trail, just a stretch of highway linking Nimbasa to the Marvellous Bridge. Why would it? There's nothing there. Well, there's Lostlorn Forest, but that's in the middle of nowhere, and if you want to get there you drive or take one of two buses, the regular one for the Unovan public or the League-subsidised one that takes trainers free of charge.
This is the bus that Gwyneth rode on nine years ago with Nika and Delarivier. It has four stops: Nimbasa Pokémon Centre, Lostlorn Forest, the start of the Route 15 trainers' trail, and White Forest.
This is the bus she is planning on catching.
There are a couple of problems with this idea, but if Gwyneth gets it right, she thinks, none of them should be insurmountable. One: she isn't a trainer. Okay, but she kind of looks like one, right? With the backpack and all. And anyway, doesn't everyone keep saying that only a trainer would have a venipede? But then there's two: she doesn't have a trainer card. She doesn't even have her old one any more; she lost it years ago. Lost, as in deliberately forgot where it was, so that she could be rid of it without having to go through the act of throwing it away.
This is a more difficult one, and she's going to to have to rely on luck to get around it more than anything else. There are a lot of trainers taking the subsidised buses in the summer, and from what Gwyneth remembers the drivers often get lax about checking cards. Oh sure, they're meant to check them all individually, but when there's three dozen squawking kids and half a zoo of pokémon clamouring to get on, you find your patience gets thin fast. There were plenty of times when the driver just waved them through, eager to get going and keep the bus as close to on time as was possible. It's not like there was any oversight, really. Nobody intending trouble gets on a bus with a bunch of kids and pokémon who've spent the last few months learning how to fight, not if they want to get off again with all their limbs still attached. (Some people might get on that bus and ride it out somewhere remote, follow a child till they were alone, but then, Gwyneth guesses they could just as easily do that by taking the regular bus.)
But some people probably got free rides that way. People who were short, and had a pokémon, and looked like they'd been walking around in the wilderness. Well, Gwyneth checks all the boxes.
It will work, or it won't. She'll have to pick her time carefully, find a crowd to lose herself in. It's fine. She'll save enough time travelling by bus that she can afford to spend a few hours staking out the bus stop, picking her moment. If she manages to get on. If the driver doesn't look at her too closely. There are trainers Gwyneth's age, and they are entitled to ride the buses, but they're not common, and if a bus driver sees one they'll always check their card, just in case.
She takes a breath. She slouches down the road and takes a seat in the bus shelter.
The venipede rattles uneasily in her ear, and she lifts her carefully down onto her lap. She seems okay: a little slow, a little unsteady, but okay.
“Here we go, dude,” says Gwyneth, stroking her shell and wondering if she can even feel it through the layers of chitinous armour. “White Forest or bust, I guess.” *
The morning passes. Ordinarily Gwyneth would listen to some music, but she doesn't want to waste the phone battery. So she sits in silence and watches as the buses and their passengers come and go.
They leave at ten after the hour, every hour. The first two have a handful of passengers, but after that, as the clouds begin to clear a little and the teenagers in the Centre start to wake up properly, the line at the bus stop thickens and swells into a crowd. Gwyneth keeps her head down in the corner, letting her hair mask her face, and listens to the chatter: so like I tried out that rapid spin thing against Courtney the other day―and he said it should be okay if she rests it―did you see that guy's sigilyph? Yeah, I know, how the hell did he get one of those anyway―so what's the deal with this Lostlorn Forest place? Like is there anything there or is it just woods?
When she hears the reference to Tor, she feels her muscles tense. It's not right. When you do that to her, that's just life, but when you do it to someone else it's wrong. Maybe they never spoke to Tor, maybe they just assumed, but that's what it always is, isn't it? Just an assumption. A perfectly reasonable assumption, and never mind that someone ended up hurt.
Gwyneth scratches moodily at her bandaged arm. Let it go, she tells herself. She does not, and it goes off to join the pile of other things that fester deep inside her.
The next bus has just come round the corner. She stands up and gets her backpack ready.
“This is it,” she mutters to the venipede. “Try to look trainery, okay dude?”
The bus pulls up to the stop, and Gwyneth inserts herself carefully into the crowd, halfway along its length. It's not so hard. She's spent enough of her life in cities to know how to queue aggressively, and she's able to get to where she wants to be without too much effort. Now she just moves forwards with the rest of them towards the open doors, trying to look young.
Nearly there. She doesn't hear the driver asking for cards. She risks a quick glance up from the sidewalk, and sees kids pouring on steadily, without stopping. Okay, she thinks. Okay, this might just work. She's third in line now. Second. And then …
And then she's stepping up through the doors, face turned away, walking as fast as the crowd will let her―
“Hey,” the driver says. “You.”
The world seems to stop for a moment, the whole earth dying on its axis; the kids' chatter fades and the sun disappears, and Gwyneth, heart in her mouth, turns through air that seems to drag at her like molasses towards the driver.
“Yeah,” he says, looking straight past her at someone about to get in. “Put that in its ball, would ya? We ain't got room for anything that big.”
“Oh, sure,” says the girl. “Sorry. Ryszard? Back to your ball.”
And the sawk disappears and Gwyneth lets out a long, shaky breath. Goddamn it. She was this close to a heart attack.
She hurries away down the bus before anyone notices her lingering. *
Gwyneth sits somewhere in the middle, by the window. A forgettable kind of place, she hopes. She's not the only person over the age of eighteen on this bus – there's a guy with a wingull over there who must be around her own age – but she still stands out, and she'd prefer not to. She thrusts her bag down by her feet, settles the venipede on her lap, and waits for the footsteps to stop and the bus to get moving.
The girl with the sawk sits next to her. This is a good thing, because a few seconds later Gwyneth sees Tor get on board the bus, and the girl provides some measure of cover. Gwyneth shifts the venipede out of the way and bends down as if to get something from her bag, watching the aisle out of the corner of her eye, and only when Tor is past does she straighten up again. They're heading for the back. Good. They won't see her there.
Gwyneth wonders briefly why she bothered. Tor isn't going to rat her out, after all. And they would have liked to sit with her, she thinks, as unlikely as it seems. Maybe she would have liked to sit with them as well. It's not like they're bad company. Although Gwyneth usually is, if she isn't putting in the effort to be nice, and this is a long bus ride: she's not going to be putting in the effort.
It was probably for the best, she decides, and tries to relax into her seat.
Nimbasa is grey today, with occasional spots of brightness where shafts of sun break through the clouds. There is definitely an autumnal feel to the air now. Camping in White Forest is going to be cold, and possibly wet. And Gwyneth doesn't even have a tent. It's okay, she tells herself. There are lodges, aren't there? Like the one she and Nika stayed in just off Route 6. If she moves fast, and gets the route right, she won't have to sleep outdoors.
If. Gwyneth half-smiles. If.
The bus chugs along slowly, unremarkable houses giving way to unremarkable offices that in their turn fade into suburbia. The kids chatter, inexhaustibly energetic. Next to Gwyneth, the girl has turned around and is talking to her friend over the back of her seat. Gwyneth listens for a moment, learns that she is called Daisy and her friend is Louisa, that they're super excited, that they heard there are zorua in Lostlorn Forest and how cool is that, and then tunes them out again, tired just from listening to them. How do they have this much energy? Something about it almost seems obscene.
Gwyneth turns her attention to the window instead, but the view is uninspiring. This is an empty land, a nowhere country that offers nothing to the spectator. Down here in the basin of the river valley, there is no prospect of seeing beyond the buildings, and in the suburbs the buildings are not worth seeing. Gwyneth thinks that even the first time she looked at a scene like this, she must have felt she'd seen it all before. Housing on an industrial scale. Lawn flamingos and cars. Middle Unova, ad infinitum. The extent of it all is exhausting. Gwyneth closes her eyes on it, and returns as always to the past.
Driftveil she remembers as being a good time, at least after the weirdness of Hilbert's great victory. It takes her a little while to get over it all; there are calls from her mother, excited-slash-terrified outpourings of emotion (because Hilbert never tells them anything, because the first her mother learns of all this is from the news and since she cannot get through to his phone she calls Gwyneth instead), and there is the electric excitement that pervades the country in general and the training industry in particular. It's tiring. Gwyneth spends a lot of time just sitting around, trying to figure out what the hell is even happening to the world. It's all right, she doesn't miss out: the whole of Unova is doing the same.
But it passes. The updates from the League stop being extraordinary soon enough, and people rediscover other topics of conversation. Nika ceases to have to block conniving journalists who have figured out who Gwyneth is and want to speak to her. (This kindness will go unrevealed until much later, when Gwyneth is in a position to be pathetically, furiously grateful, and when it will find a place among the dark thoughts that tell her Nika is more than she deserves.) And Gwyneth thinks to herself, okay it's over now, it's time to forget it and move on, and she is able to get back to something much more important: being young and infatuated, with absolutely no adult oversight.
This is much more fun than being Hilbert ze'Haraan's sister. She and Nika are over their initial awkwardness now and sliding back into their previous familiarity, except that this time it is a familiarity that comes with hands and eyes and lips and absurdly melodramatic teenage seriousness. One afternoon, while eating victory ice cream after Nika has thrashed several trainers who thought they could take the dorky fat kid with the braces, the poetry comes out for the first time: with a solemnity that only a child could manage, Nika quotes Sappho's Fragment 16 at Gwyneth and reduces her to a squirming, delighted-embarrassed bundle of nerves.
It will be agreed, later, that Nika is such a nerd. But that summer in Driftveil, it seems not nerdy but profound, as if the two of them were the first people ever in all the thousands of years since Sappho died to really understand what she was talking about. Because what do classicists know, or poets, or literary critics? What do boring old people really know about the important things? About Love, and Joy, and other capital-letter emotions? They promise each other that they will be different, that they will stay this way forever. They will never be old. They'll just burn out spectacularly in their twenties. It'll be great, you'll see.
In between their obsession (because it is one, because they are children and are still learning how to love), there is of course Nika's trainer career to get on with. Driftveil has a Gym, and it is known as a tough one. Gwyneth knows all the statistics by heart, and she could tell you that the Quake Badge is one of the least-frequently-attained badges in the Unova League. She says as much to Nika, and Nika shrugs.
“I'm here,” she says. “And Clay's back from the whole thing at the League now. Might as well try.”
So they go to the Gym, and Nika tries, and Nika fails. She gives it her all, and her pokémon, unused to losing, cling on so desperately to the fight that she has to recall them before they battle themselves to the point of collapse, but really Clay has the upper hand from the start. Down in the dim light of his subterranean chamber, he sends out an excadrill whose speed her team struggles to match. Her lead, Astyanax, does outpace it, just; when the excadrill launches its first attack, tearing across the arena in a whirl of edged steel, he gets out of the way and rips the ground apart beneath it with a bulldoze, knocking it out of its drill formation and forcing it to engage him on foot. But it's a close thing, and he doesn't have the staying power to make his initial victory stick. The excadrill knocks him down, again and again, and once he's out the match is as good as over. Britomartis is too slow, and Hekate cannot stand up to a single rock slide. Nika refuses even to send her out: there is no point getting her hurt over nothing.
Clay assures Nika she did well. Gwyneth, watching from the sidelines, decides she doesn't like him. What kind of a fight was that, anyway? The excadrill was clearly way too tough for Nika's team! (It wasn't, but Gwyneth is more loyal than she is sensible.) Clay practically cheated, using something like that. And the way he keeps calling Nika 'squirt' is so irritating. Doesn't he hear how condescending he sounds? (He doesn't, although Gwyneth is not the first person to have pointed this out.) And who even wears a cowboy hat? Does he know what century he's in? (He does, although his hat is the subject of several long-standing jokes among members of the Unova League.)
Nika herself is not fazed. She knows she isn't unstoppable, even if Gwyneth doesn't. But she lets Gwyneth fuss over her indignantly anyway. She thinks, and she is aware that she probably shouldn't say this to her face, that it's kind of cute.
Besides, the winning isn't the point, is it? Her pokémon are with her because they want to grow, and they are growing, Quake Badge or not. Astyanax is by now a full-fledged krokorok, and Hekate's wings are coming in fast; she is clearly not far off adulthood. Even Britomartis, her rust dealt with, is starting to grow heavy and slow, and Nika suspects the day is coming when she will shed her baby armour and emerge an adult bisharp.
Gwyneth sees all this and knows that Nika is a good trainer, and a good person. She's looked after her team, given them the care and training they wanted. Even Ajax the lillipup: she knew he didn't want to fight, and so she sent him home again, over the box network, to become the pet he is more comfortable being. Gwyneth knows that when she looks at Nika she looks at someone who could never have liberated her pokémon, and though in some obscure sense she hates and fears this she also loves her for it, for being what she cannot.
It's not perfect. It's okay. Nothing ever is.
They hang around Driftveil for a while longer, Nika and her team winning more matches than they lose and getting better with every one. They visit parks and museums, although there are relatively few of either in this city, where culture sometimes seems to be an afterthought. They go to the historic marketplace, and Nika buys souvenirs while Gwyneth watches, aware of the finite amount of money her League grant gets her. (Nika offers to buy her a ring she keeps coming back to, and it isn't even that expensive really but Gwyneth is too embarrassed, shakes her head no.)
Summer waxes. Nika's skin darkens, and Gwyneth's hovers indecisively between tanning and burning. Driftveil gets hot and sticky. It's time to move on.
Route 6 is special: the wilderness trail here snakes north through the woods, crossing and recrossing the river as it winds down through the foothills of the Sierra Castaña, and the summer heat is muted in the dappled shade of the trees. They bump into a couple of other trainers, Kit and Nova, and they travel together for a time in the cool shadow cast by Nova's massive, lumbering beartic. Kit is uninteresting, and Nova is both several intimidating years older than them and unwilling to speak, but the weather remains beautiful and somehow, between the trees and flowers and occasional startled deerling running across the track in full summer regalia, everyone gets along.
Except that they don't, not for long. Gwyneth is very young still, and she passes as cis more of the time than she thinks, more certainly than she will when she is older, but after a few hours of walking and talking Kit works out what she is. He takes it as a personal insult, the way that people do; she sees it in his eyes and in an instant she goes cold and dead inside, the memory of a fist driving into her ribs hanging crystalline before her mind's eye. He does not say anything, not yet, because Nika is so obviously both her ally and partnered with stronger pokémon than he is, but Gwyneth stops talking anyway and walks on in silence, waiting to be hurt.
When they stop that night, Nika goes off to exercise Britomartis, who is growing heavier as her evolution draws nearer and so has been too slow to walk with them, and Nova retreats into her tent in silence. Kit looks at Gwyneth across the fire and she looks back. He speaks to her and uses a word that has six letters. She does not reply. She feels her misshapenness like a knife wound.
It could go further. It would not be the first time, and it would not be the last. (Hands. Eyes. A man in a police uniform and the memory of Martin.) It does not.
Kit does not need to make it go further. He doesn't even need to say anything else; that would only risk a confrontation with Nika, and anyway he knows with the brutal adult cunning that they are all beginning to grow into that Gwyneth will say nothing to her about this.
She comes back, and laughs and jokes with Kit, and Gwyneth sits there and tries to smile with them and wishes she could take hold of Nika's hand. But she knows the score. Kit has just reminded her, after all. She is the kind of thing that nobody touches, and if Nika's hand ever makes contact with hers it has to be choreographed, has to be plausibly deniable. You only touch her by accident, or to harm her.
Summer is here, she thinks desperately. Summer is here and everything is fine. But when she looks at Kit, devil-red in the firelight, she knows with an awful certainty that one day, autumn will come. *
Nothing changes. It's okay. It hasn't killed her yet.
Gwyneth sighs and opens her eyes to trees, moving past on either side of the highway. Nimbasa's gone, then. Good. Too many ghosts in that town.
“Time for your medicine, dude,” she tells the venipede, and reaches into her bag for the bottles. There are two: one of vitamin and mineral supplements that she's supposed to give the venipede twice weekly, when she feeds her (more often if she's battling); another of something to promote healing and shell regrowth, to be taken twice daily for the next three weeks. Venipede are incapable of taking tablets, or perhaps it's just so hard to get them to do it that nobody bothers, so the bottles contain not pills but what look unsettlingly like insect larvae. Gwyneth takes one out and the venipede twitches in her lap, instantly alert. She doesn't see the appeal herself – it's a big, soft chewy thing made of some kind of foam or gum that feels gross to the touch – but she supposes this is the kind of thing venipede are meant to eat, rather than chicken nuggets and overripe fruit.
“Here,” she says, holding it out. The venipede is about to pounce, but she doesn't have the strength; she wiggles a little and then settles for seizing the fake larva in her jaws, first decapitating it in case it thinks of escaping and then chewing her way slowly down its length. “Don't get too used to it,” Gwyneth warns her. “You don't get them forever.”
The venipede keeps chewing, occasionally taking a short break to chitter quietly to herself. Gwyneth watches the intricate movement of her jaws and forelegs. It's strange how delicate she is. So vicious when she's hunting, and so precise and fastidious after the kill.
“Glad you like it,” she says, and turns her attention back to the window.
Route 16 stretches out, long and dismal. The sun still hasn't managed to break through the clouds properly, and the forest either side of the highway looks dark and brooding in the subdued light. Occasionally, a raindrop bursts against the window. Gwyneth really doesn't envy the kids who are planning on going zorua-hunting. She very deliberately does not remind herself that she is also planning a walk in the woods.
After what feels like forever, the bus turns left off the highway and briefly climbs a hill before stopping at a wooden sign advertising Lostlorn Forest. Most of the kids get off here, including the girl sitting next to Gwyneth; in the crush of bodies pushing down the aisle, she doesn't see if Tor is among them. Without the chatter, the bus seems twice the size all of a sudden, and the few trainers who get on to replace them don't make much impression in the new emptiness. As the bus begins to move, Gwyneth sighs and untenses her shoulders. She didn't know how much she wanted the quiet till it came.
“Here, dude,” she says, helping the venipede down onto the seat next to her. “Carried you long enough. Let me read my book now.”
With her out of the way, Gwyneth can spread Three Nights in Opelucid across her knees and hold it in place with her good hand while she reads. Her other hand stays in the sling, itching and aching. The pain has got better – whatever Dr. ze'Naarat gave her is working – and it's mostly confined to her arm now, but it's still not something you can ignore. Gwyneth remembers breaking a tooth (she has never been good about dental hygiene) and going around with the pain for a day and a half, suppressing a wince with every breath and lying awake at night in agony, until finally Nika saw through her pretence and told her to go to the damn dentist, Gwyneth, what were you even thinking. This is not so sharply focused, but it's the same kind of persistent. Every time you think you might be about to forget about it, it comes right back with a cheery wave and a malicious smile.
The book helps distract her a little. The plot has picked up again, kind of, although it's still only halfway through the second of the three nights. Gwyneth wonders if anyone can really get this much done in a single night. She supposes it's possible, if you're organised. Pencil it into your diary: 8.18 pm, revisit crime scene, 9.07 pm, chase suspect, 9.44 pm, receive anonymous tip-off, 10.13 pm, send your natu off on a spying mission, 11.30 pm, decipher cryptic clue left by killer. Detective work by numbers. Kind of silly, really.
She keeps reading anyway. She figures she could use a little silly. That's why she picked the book up in the first place.
The forest glides by, impassive in the weak sunlight. Drizzle begins to spot the windows; stops; starts again. Some trainers talk quietly a few rows behind her. Gwyneth hears an I love you too, raises her eyebrows and concentrates on not listening any more.
She evaluates her progress. It's the eighteenth, and she should reach White Forest by the early afternoon. Two days, if she's fast, to get to the other side. She'll need to get a lift to Undella somehow; maybe she'll meet some friendly hikers. And then a boat, or a bus, or another kindly stranger with a car, to get her up to Humilau.
It's a long way, she knows. And it's country she's never travelled before, either on her journey or later, with Nika. She can say Aân Hen all she likes; she's not part of that Us People, not really. She has no culture and no tie to this land. She doesn't have the first idea about how to find her way through it fast enough.
It's okay, she decides. She'll just have to do it anyway.
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Post by bay on Jul 12, 2018 5:42:15 GMT
Oops got a bit behind here, but some quick thoughts on Nine and Ten!
Well as the saying goes, create what you want. But yeah, in all seriousness though I do love you have a wide range of diverse characters like Saadiyyah, Maxine, and Tor.
Speaking of Tor, Gwyneth's intearction with them was cute. Can tell Gwyneth tries hard to be optmistic but still feels a little awkward, which is understandable.
The flashback to what happened during the Pokemon League I like the extra details of a news crew and some military back up there. I mean, two legendary Pokemon having a showdown in the Pokemon League is considered newsworthy am I right? = P
Haha, this is a cute exchange.
Glad that the venipede managed to make it in the end! Venipede's medicine sounds like something I would be kinda hesistant to touch lol. Here's to hoping no more mischief will fall upon her.
The scene with Gwyneth and the doctor, oh dear that didn't end on a good note. The doctor is understandably worried Gwyneth wouldn't be able to handle the long trip in her condition and I would feel the same way.
Can't help but compare how Gwyneth reacted to when Tor won and when Nika lost to Clay. When Tor won she was very encouraging to them and telling that they deserved that win and praise. When Nika lost it upsets Gwyneth more than Nika herself. Both scenarios though show that Gwyneth is much more interested as a cheerleader/spectator than a trainer.
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Post by Manchee on Jul 12, 2018 20:54:33 GMT
Thank you! One of the original ideas for Go Home was to write about the difference between player characters and NPCs, and while the concept evolved a bunch from there I still wrote from the starting point of asking what happens to the person you don't choose at the start of the game? I couldn't actually call her Hilda – there was no way that would be realistic – but that's basically where Gwyneth comes from, conceptually. She is, as she says, the one not chosen. Did you pick the name Gwyneth out yourself or is it one of the premade female name options for someone to pick aside from Hilda? I can't remember, but I've wondered multiple times throughout reading this and haven't thought to ask until now. It's interesting that to you Unova feels like a place where this kind of story could happen, as opposed to the other regions; I wonder if that's because its immediate inspirations are more familiar? Certainly I know more about America than I do about Japan, so perhaps that's a factor. Maybe it's because of the immediate inspirations, but it's also trying to make it across a region that isn't very forgiving. I remember reading something you wrote somewhere about Unova being so different from the other regions because of Team Plasma, and their effect on the region allows for stories like this where someone could have fallen trap to what the organization was preaching and have that affect them for (potentially) the rest of their life. It could happen in other regions, yeah, but it works really nicely here, especially for the type of character that Gwyneth is. (also, you write a pretty spot-on fake America) It hasn't been stated explicitly yet, no. But she does regret what she did, I think; it's just that this fic inhabits Gwyneth's head, and Gwyneth tells herself very insistently that she regrets nothing and her pokémon are better off without her anyway. So like, maybe don't always believe everything the narration says; the fact that it's full of things that sound like stuff Gwyneth might say is not coincidental. Makes sense, and reading further that POV is much clearer. I like it a lot! There's a lot of push and pull on her view of trainers and their Pokémon- not like she's indecisive, but very much someone who doesn't know exactly what they want, and life hasn't been great to them to help them along the way in figuring out what they are trying to accomplish in life. Yeah, I've sorta fudged the timeline a bit – BW2 is two years after BW, not ten, but I wanted to have the main plot happening in the background to other people, while Gwyneth just struggles on with her own small NPC problems, so I decided to make a bit of a change. You'll have already noticed that RBY is happening as the story begins; the stories of the Hoenn and Sinnoh games are also happening at the same time. It's just that things like that don't happen to people like Gwyneth. (Or so she thinks.) It's good to have it that way! See how different writers interpret the timelines is really cool, especially if they write multiple fics that exist within the same self-contained canon. Like, for example, if this is happening within the same canon as Arbitrary Execution, even if neither fic makes reference to the other - it's neat to see if writer's do that or keep all of their stories separate from one another. But anyway, I'm all caught up (on Canalave, anyway)! I read a lot since the last time posting and I'm bad at picking out specific things when I read that quickly, but I'll say these things- I really enjoyed the time that Gwyenth spent with Saadiyyah. The setting for their travels together felt well-paced. The feelings of losing track of time and walking all day long came through the writing in a good way, and made for those scenes to be a fun time. It was a relief to see someone help out Gwyneth with her medical needs, along with the Venipede's. She went for so long with that pain that I could feel it getting worse and more uncomfortable each chapter, and to see it get treated was like a sigh of relief. I'm glad that through her time in Nimbasa she was able to reflect as well as start caring more obviously for the Venipede. Looking forward to where the next leg of the trip takes them! |
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girl-like-substance
the seal will bite you if you give him half a chance
Posts: 527
Pronouns: xe/xem
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Post by girl-like-substance on Jul 22, 2018 17:42:25 GMT
Well as the saying goes, create what you want. But yeah, in all seriousness though I do love you have a wide range of diverse characters like Saadiyyah, Maxine, and Tor. It's a bit of a meta joke, I have to say. :P I wrote this part because I like Gwyneth am looking for these stories and don't seem to be able to find them. But I think there is a real difference between creating these stories and reading them as written by others – I can reread Go Home if I want, and sometimes I do, but it's never going to be the same as if I were reading something by someone else. Even if Gwyneth was a writer, which she isn't, she'd still be justified in wanting stories by someone else. Also, thank you! I felt like Unova was a lot less diverse in-game than it probably ought to have been, for you know, fake New York, so I did my best to broaden out the spectrum of humanity on display. Speaking of Tor, Gwyneth's intearction with them was cute. Can tell Gwyneth tries hard to be optmistic but still feels a little awkward, which is understandable. It is cute, yeah. I love how hard Gwyneth tries for Tor; they really bring out the best in her. The flashback to what happened during the Pokemon League I like the extra details of a news crew and some military back up there. I mean, two legendary Pokemon having a showdown in the Pokemon League is considered newsworthy am I right? = P Absolutely! In-game, nobody seemed to care, which is … weird, honestly. It's almost as if everyone knows how useless the League are (that bit where the Gym Leaders show up at the end is … man, every time I play that I'm like, too little too late, guys. You distracted like seven dudes, all of whom I could've beaten single-handedly). Haha, this is a cute exchange. I'm glad you think so! It's one of mine, too, which means I'm always delighted when people tell me they liked it. Glad that the venipede managed to make it in the end! Venipede's medicine sounds like something I would be kinda hesistant to touch lol. Here's to hoping no more mischief will fall upon her. Well, her medicine has to be as gross as she is! :P I wanted everything about her to be kind of awful, really, so if you feel like you wouldn't like to touch it, I think I've done my job. The scene with Gwyneth and the doctor, oh dear that didn't end on a good note. The doctor is understandably worried Gwyneth wouldn't be able to handle the long trip in her condition and I would feel the same way. Nope. Gwyneth is … not doing great. She wasn't in very good health when she started and she's really not in good health now. Especially given the fact that she's decided to go on a long hike through White Forest, which is probably up there with microwaving a fork on the list of Really Bad Ideas. Can't help but compare how Gwyneth reacted to when Tor won and when Nika lost to Clay. When Tor won she was very encouraging to them and telling that they deserved that win and praise. When Nika lost it upsets Gwyneth more than Nika herself. Both scenarios though show that Gwyneth is much more interested as a cheerleader/spectator than a trainer. Yeah, Gwyneth was never much of a trainer – and I think after she liberated her pokémon, she became very afraid of ever being a trainer again, honestly. Watching other people is much more her speed, especially since she can see how well they do and then tell herself they're better than she is. Anyway! Thank you, as ever for the review, and I hope you continue to enjoy the story – there's a new chapter coming out tonight. Did you pick the name Gwyneth out yourself or is it one of the premade female name options for someone to pick aside from Hilda? I can't remember, but I've wondered multiple times throughout reading this and haven't thought to ask until now. It isn't one of them, nope. But it means 'white', and her deadname, Blake, means 'black'. There's a fun little Easter egg for you. Maybe it's because of the immediate inspirations, but it's also trying to make it across a region that isn't very forgiving. I remember reading something you wrote somewhere about Unova being so different from the other regions because of Team Plasma, and their effect on the region allows for stories like this where someone could have fallen trap to what the organization was preaching and have that affect them for (potentially) the rest of their life. It could happen in other regions, yeah, but it works really nicely here, especially for the type of character that Gwyneth is. (also, you write a pretty spot-on fake America) Aw, thank you. The last time I went to America, I was like … ten? And I've never been anywhere near New York, either. But I find America fascinating, even if my knowledge is only secondhand, and I've been mining its media for years to try and figure out some kind of way of writing about it. When I started writing Go Home, I figured that some Americans were probably going to tell me about all the things I got wrong – and sure, people pointed out all the times I'd forgotten to change 'torch' for 'flashlight' or 'lorry' for 'truck', or that double-decker buses aren't so much of a thing in America, but nobody's said what are you doing, person who lives and works in Britain, you can't possibly write about America, look at all the things you're doing wrong yet. So I figured I must be writing an okay fake America, and it's good to hear that I actually am. Makes sense, and reading further that POV is much clearer. I like it a lot! There's a lot of push and pull on her view of trainers and their Pokémon- not like she's indecisive, but very much someone who doesn't know exactly what they want, and life hasn't been great to them to help them along the way in figuring out what they are trying to accomplish in life. Exactly! That's not all, either; she can't be trusted in her opinions about what Nika or most of the places that she visits, and probably quite a lot else besides. I'm glad that comes across! It's good to have it that way! See how different writers interpret the timelines is really cool, especially if they write multiple fics that exist within the same self-contained canon. Like, for example, if this is happening within the same canon as Arbitrary Execution, even if neither fic makes reference to the other - it's neat to see if writer's do that or keep all of their stories separate from one another. Technically they do exist in the same world, yes! In Arbitrary Execution, the current Indigo League Champion is Casey Rigadeau, and in the very first chapter of Go Home, Gwyneth is watching Casey get unseated by Blue, who is in turn challenged by Red. Since you can figure out what year Arbitrary Execution is set in from the birth date on Artemis' trainer card, you can then work out that Go Home must be set sometime in our future, although only by a year or two. I can't remember if there's any other crossfeed between the two stories – I don't think so – but I wrote them at the same time, so there might be something that I'm not remembering. ( Ghost Town, while we're on the subject, also happens in the same world; you can see the beginning of my idea about the divide between Kantan prosperity and Johtonian recession, itself inspired by the fact that Johto feels much less modern than Kanto, in some of the things Emilia says about her childhood in Arbitrary Execution.) But anyway, I'm all caught up (on Canalave, anyway)! I read a lot since the last time posting and I'm bad at picking out specific things when I read that quickly, but I'll say these things- I really enjoyed the time that Gwyenth spent with Saadiyyah. The setting for their travels together felt well-paced. The feelings of losing track of time and walking all day long came through the writing in a good way, and made for those scenes to be a fun time. It was a relief to see someone help out Gwyneth with her medical needs, along with the Venipede's. She went for so long with that pain that I could feel it getting worse and more uncomfortable each chapter, and to see it get treated was like a sigh of relief. I'm glad that through her time in Nimbasa she was able to reflect as well as start caring more obviously for the Venipede. Looking forward to where the next leg of the trip takes them! Thank you! Rereading this as I post it, I love that part with Saadiyyah too; being with trainers forces Gwyneth to make an effort, and that's something that she really could stand to do a little more often if she ever wants to get out of her rut. I'm also with you on it being a relief that Gwyneth finally got some medical attention, but of course, that's … not going to stand. We're into the last third of the story now, and that's where things start to get really rough. Honestly, even if things did go perfectly, the kind of strain Gwyneth's putting her body under would probably wreck her hand anyway. But to say more would be spoilers! Thank you for your review, as always – and I look forward to sharing the next chapter with you and everyone else later on today. This time, Gwyneth gets going again in earnest, and as you might expect, things pretty much immediately start to go wrong. |
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girl-like-substance
the seal will bite you if you give him half a chance
Posts: 527
Pronouns: xe/xem
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Post by girl-like-substance on Jul 22, 2018 21:10:56 GMT
ELEVEN: DOGGEDSunday, 18th SeptemberA little before noon, the forest falls away on either side and the bus pulls out into the sudden emptiness of the Marvellous Bridge. Below, the Arat empties out into the bay, millions of gallons of water rippling greyly in the dull light; above, the footbridge is deserted, dripping at its edges. On the right, just visible through the opposite windows, is the flat ocean horizon, further away than even seems possible. On the left, right outside Gwyneth's window, the Arat slowly carves out its canyon, a huge gleaming slash dividing the forest on the west shore from the hills on the east. Far off, some pale dots that might be swanna bob up and down on the water. Just as far beyond them, something big is moving across the sky, a light plane or braviary or visiting dragonite.
Gwyneth feels something lift inside her. She glances at the venipede, but she has fallen asleep on the seat, so she says nothing.
Okay. It's not all Aân Hen. But it's Unova, and it's beautiful, and from up here you can't even see all the people who make it into something worse.
It's a good thought, and she needs it right now. She holds onto it for the full ten minutes it takes to cross the bridge, and then, as the bus descends onto the plain and the view slips away behind her, she surprises herself by letting go with only the slightest touch of regret.
The land is different here. This side of the river, the soil is poor: no trees here, or almost none, just clumps of pampas and other grasses. Shrubs. Mostly just space, and the huge pale bluffs that rise out of it like ruined temples. Gwyneth has seen pictures before, has in fact been shown pictures by Nika, who has always meant to visit this place but never done it; still, it's something else to see it in person. The highway bends south, to go around the national park, and that puts the plain on her left, right outside her window. There's a thin mist here today, and the bluffs are monumental shadows in its depths. Gwyneth stares, and tries to remember what she knows about this place. Fossil-bearing clay. She has the phrase 'fossil-bearing clay' in her head. She doesn't know if that's what she's looking at here or if she's thinking of something else.
What she does know is the route taken by the trainers' trail. It hugs the north end of the plain, even winds up and down some of the bluffs. Gwyneth has seen the pictures online and in the magazines. She imagines walking it in the mist, a huge wall of something that might be fossil-bearing clay at her side, cold and grainy to the touch. And on the other side – what? Empty space. The plain, the shrubs. Spikes of pampas piercing the mist.
This is Unova too. There are the cities, the sprawl and the high-rise, and there is the space. A country wider than it is old. Millions of square miles and only a couple centuries of history.
There were people here before then, of course. But it wasn't Unova for them. That was someone else's history.
Gwyneth feels this is significant somehow, the relative size and youth of her country, but she has never been able to explain why. She always has had trouble putting big thoughts into words.
She closes her eyes, shutting out the vastness, and leans back in her seat. She's got a lot of walking to do. Probably rest will be more useful to her than philosophy. *
The bluffs don't go on forever. On the other side, a few more hours away, is the slope down into White Forest, where the scale of the country is hidden behind an endless sea of gorgeously autumnal trees. Gwyneth actually starts when the bus gets close enough for her to see. Even on a grey day like this, the light picks out a million and one colours among the leaves, shifting and changing with every gust of wind. She hears a few gasps and some breathless muttering from the kids. It is beautiful, she concedes, and then, irritated at catching herself thinking it, she tells herself to see how beautiful it looks when it's midnight and she's shivering under a dripping tree.
“See that, dude?” she asks. The venipede is awake again now, sitting in her lap for the warmth. She might be looking out of the window, or she might not. Gwyneth isn't really sure how good insect eyes are. “'S our stop.”
The venipede rattles quietly. She decides to take it as a response. *
Eventually, they arrive. It's later than Gwyneth was expecting; four o'clock has come and gone by the time the bus finally turns off the highway and comes slowly to a halt in a grove of ash trees. She feels she ought to be ready to go by now, but even with her legs numb from sitting all day she can barely find it in her to get up. Apparently it takes more than a couple of square meals and some sleep to fix everything that's wrong with her.
Still, there's no choice, so she gathers her stuff and disembarks, keeping her face turned away from the driver. The air is cool, but not unpleasantly so, and it feels damp on her skin. She stands there and breathes it in, slowly, and then when she hears the trainers from the back coming up behind her she walks away behind a stand of trees. It's a good decision: from her hiding place she sees Tor among the kids getting off, silent and withdrawn. She watches until they and the others have disappeared down the trail, flashes of blue light popping in their wake as they release their partners, and then counts to thirty, just to be safe.
When she's certain she'll be travelling alone, she emerges and stands there for a moment in the empty road. It's so quiet: there's no wind, and almost no birdsong. The rumble of the bus has long since faded away.
Gwyneth exhales into the silence, and feels it settle on her like snow across the shoulders of a statue.
“Neat,” she says, or breathes really, not wanting to spoil the calm, and starts walking.
At first it's good going. This was always her favourite part of the trainer journey: the woods, in the autumn when everyone else had gone home and nature was winding down towards winter. Silence like you don't get in cities. Sometimes Gwyneth thought she could hear Nika's heartbeat, but she's sure she was just imagining things.
And it's good, even now, to be here, moving forward beneath a canopy of fire-coloured leaves in the stillness of a dying season. For a few minutes, Gwyneth almost forgets why she's here, even where she's going. She walks, and listens to her footsteps and the tiny hiss of the venipede's breath, and the knot inside her, for a little while, unclenches.
But she can't walk away from the pain. It nags at her, gnawing on her hand and spreading with each repeated movement, grating in all her joints, and soon the spell breaks. She's tired, she realises. All she did was sit on a bus but it's true all the same. She's tired, and she still has so far to go.
She thinks about singing, but she can't remember the words to anything. Not even that Mountain Goats song that Nika played on repeat for three goddamn months that one time, until Gwyneth finally snapped and threatened to throw her speakers out of the window. Probably it's for the best. She doesn't like her singing voice anyway. Too many cigarettes and not enough practice.
Gwyneth keeps on walking. The light fades faster than she thought it would; when she looks up between the branches overhead, she sees the clouds are thickening and growing dark. Rain, she predicts, and tries to hurry up for a while before her aches grow unbearable and she has to slow down again.
She supposes it doesn't matter. She's going to get wet either way.
Half an hour later, she reaches a fork in the path, and a big, cast-bronze map on a wooden stand that holds it up at an angle. It's pretty cool, really. More like a model than any kind of map Gwyneth's seen before. She can reach out and run her fingers over bronze treetops, imagining that the shadow overhead is being cast by her hand doubled into the sky by cartographic sorcery. She does not do this, but she does think it, which is close enough for her.
The map shows several ways she could go from here. Trails snake north and east, travelling in a broad loop through the middle of the forest. If she takes a left here, there's another trail a little further on that winds away at a weird angle and continues off the edge of the map; she guesses that's how you get here if you're a trainer walking all the way across the Route 15 plains, or a really dedicated hiker. There are a few others, but the one she's interested in is on the other side of the loop: the path going northeast towards Route 14.
Gwyneth looks at the scale at the bottom of the map. She measures it with her fingers, then moves them to the path, gauging the distances involved. She does some math, and winces.
The one saving grace is that there are designated places to stop. White Forest is a nature reserve, and you can't just go where you like, not least because a huge number of wild animals rear their young here, including grizzly bears and staraptor, and that means that there are also fiercely protective mothers. So there are rangers and lookout towers, and more importantly, campsites and lodges placed so as to limit people's wandering. Gwyneth can see several of them marked on the map around the edges of the loop, and a couple on the other trails, too.
“'S where we need to get to,” she says over her shoulder, at the venipede. “Unless you feel like sleeping in the rain tonight.”
The venipede doesn't respond. Gwyneth can't see her, but she thinks she might be asleep again. The thought makes her vaguely envious.
“All right,” she says, shifting the weight of the pack on her shoulders. “Let's go, dude.”
She takes the east path. It looks slightly shorter, although there probably isn't much in it. Less than twenty minutes after she starts down it, the wind starts gusting, tearing leaves from the branches by the handful, and then the rain begins. Not heavy, but persistent: the kind you almost don't feel landing on you, but which after a few minutes leaves you soaked right through.
Gwyneth swears, and then again, with feeling. She stops, disentangles her arm from her sling and takes the venipede off her pack, ignoring the blunt teeth of the pain in her hand.
“You probably shouldn't be getting all wet, in your condition,” she says, tucking her inside her jacket. “Try not to stab me in the lung with your stupid pointy feet, okay?”
Click, replies the venipede. Gwyneth grunts and zips up her jacket as best she can. It's not really very waterproof, but it's the best she's got.
She keeps going. The birds have shut up and gone home now; there's no sound but the wind in the branches and the relentless patter of raindrops. When she breathes she inhales the rich, earthy smell of moist soil. It's a good smell, but you really need to have some shelter to appreciate it. Gwyneth remembers a rainstorm in Kanto that caught her and Nika by surprise; they stood beneath the canopy outside the restaurant, holding hands and cocktails, and watched Viridian Forest melting into sheets of water. In that twenty minutes, the smell was perfect. Today, in the fading light of an evening shower, it's just irritating.
Gwyneth remembers there was a bird that landed on the table, sheltering from the rain. Nika said look! and she looked, and it just pecked at someone's crumbs without even caring they were there.
Her hair starts hanging into her eyes, limp and rain-heavy. She tries to flick it away, but it just falls back again. Her good arm is busy holding the venipede; she thinks for a minute about taking her arm out of the sling to push it back, but somehow she can't face making the movement, so in the end she just leaves it.
She keeps going. It's cold in her wet clothes, especially now the sun is setting. Cold and soon to be dark, too. Why didn't she pack a flashlight? Because she didn't have one, she reminds herself. She didn't have one and she didn't think to buy one, either. Great planning, Gwyneth. You're doing a real good job.
The shadows lengthen. She's very wet now, jeans heavy and jacket ruined, and the venipede is starting to shuffle uncomfortably under her arm, her legs jabbing Gwyneth's ribs. Her bandages are soaked and her fingers feel like icicles jammed point-first into her knuckles. None of this is helping the pain at all.
But she knew this was going to happen, and she still came here, and whatever she does from here she's not getting any drier by stopping, so she carries on, even when she starts to limp. Between the mist of rain and the dying light she can barely see a yard ahead of her, and slowly the world shrinks, grows small and cold and dead. There's nothing out there, no forest, no campsite. There's a tiny bubble of cool air and water and she is stuck at its centre, limping and swearing and apparently unaware that the land beneath her is simply rolling like a treadmill, trapping her in place.
Gwyneth thinks of Humilau, of hot sand and a sky as blue as an untuned TV screen, and briefly finds herself laughing. It isn't the kind of laugh you enjoy.
In the dark she misses the turning. God knows what instinct makes her stop and turn back, questioning, but it does, and Gwyneth thanks it vehemently as she drags herself into a clear area of flat ground where you could, in better weather, pitch tents. At the back are two tin trailers with low, broad steps and ramps, intended for the physically impaired but tonight dark and abandoned, and Gwyneth almost falls into the unlit fire pit in her haste to reach them.
She half-falls against the door and finally, finally she is inside. It's still dark, still cold, but the rain is out there now, and she shuts the door on it with gratitude.
“Okay,” she mutters, through stiff lips. “Okay, dude, we made it.”
She fumbles across the wall, finds a light switch and flips it, to no effect. Right. There'll be a chargestone generator or something, somewhere outside. She swears again, loudly and passionately, and then sighs and starts the process of getting the venipede out of her jacket.
“Stay here,” she tells her, trying to hold her by the undamaged parts of her shell. “I gotta go back out there, because apparently I have a goddamn death wish.”
Leaving the venipede on the floor – she can't find a table in the dark – Gwyneth turns and limps back outside. After what feels like forever, she manages to trace the trailer's cables back to a metal box around the back; somehow, she prises open the cover and turns the switch, and suddenly light shines out over her head from the trailer windows. She doesn't know if she's ever seen anything more inviting.
Back inside, she drops her pack, leans against the door and breathes out.
“Goddamn it all to hell,” she says, conversationally, and starts trying to get out of her wet clothes.
The trailer contains one electric heater, one chair, two beds, and a counter along one wall. Gwyneth turns the first item on, hangs her clothes across the second and fourth, and collapses onto the third, breathing hard. Everything is numb, and at the same time everything hurts, and she is so tired that neither thing seems to matter. But she can't sleep yet, so she forces herself back up onto her feet and begins to sort out her pack. The blanket and sleeping bag, strapped to the top, are soaked through; she drapes them over whatever she can find, and hopes they'll be dry by morning. The rest of her stuff is okay. It's a good backpack, tough and waterproof: she's had it since her trainer journey and it's still in decent shape.
She didn't bring a towel, so she sits there and waits for the slowly increasing heat to dry her off. While she waits, she picks at the sodden bandages on her left hand and sighs. Probably this is terrible for her injury. But there doesn't seem to be anything she can do about it.
That reminds her to take the tablets Dr. ze'Naarat gave her. She does this, eats some stale bread, and sits back, leaning against the cold wall and listening to the whisper of the rain. What irritates her most is that it's not even coming down hard. It didn't put in the effort and come down heavy, it just got through her clothes anyway, by persistence. This strikes her as somehow unfair.
The venipede shuffles around, sniffing the room with sweeps of her antennae. Gwyneth watches her, wondering what she thinks of all this. She's a city creature, like Gwyneth herself. Is the forest a paradise she never dreamed of, or some alien hell?
Gwyneth makes a face. The question annoys her, although she can't quite say why.
She feels her hair. Still wet. She could fall asleep right now, easily, but she refuses to until her hair is dry: this isn't her pillow to ruin. So she sits there, watching the venipede and listening to the weather, and thinks about another cabin, many years ago. She thinks about a forest at the other end of the country, about getting up the morning after Kit drew a diagram of her life with a six-letter word, about packing up the tents and washing the pans at the pump, and walking through the Route 6 woods in the direction of Chargestone Cave.
It is a beautiful morning. Nika in particular is feeling good; in a quiet moment when Nova is off somewhere and Kit has not yet emerged from his tent, she spontaneously kisses Gwyneth and smiles at her embarrassment, delighted to be alive and have lips on a day as wonderful as today. Her enthusiasm is catching, and right until Kit gets up Gwyneth feels fluttery and devoted. Years later, she will wonder if Nika knew what she was doing, and judge her innocent. Nika will not come to realise for many years how little Gwyneth thinks of herself, how easy she is in her self-loathing naïveté to buy with any casual sign of affection. By then it will be too late. She will have already made Gwyneth love her more than anything else in the world.
It's okay. It isn't entirely ethical, but neither of them know yet how vulnerable Gwyneth really is, and neither know what's going on. And while Gwyneth will, when she is eighteen, work it all out, Nika will not until the very end; and so she, not knowing how much power she has over her, never abuses it.
It's a dangerous balance. They are both very lucky that nobody gets hurt.
When everyone is ready, they get going. Even this early in the morning, it's hot; Nova's beartic pauses what feels like every couple of minutes to puff out more ice and refresh its beard. Nova stops with it, silent and unapologetic. Kit asks if it really needs to keep doing that.
“Yes,” says Nova curtly, and even he has nothing to say in response to that. Later Gwyneth will look beartic up online and learn that their beards are important to them, that the size and shape of the masses of ice crystals identifies each beartic to others in complex ways that nobody yet understands and that without them they get nervous and irritable; right now, she is simply cowed into silence by the force of Nova's statement.
But it's okay. She doesn't mind stopping; every stop makes the journey a little longer, and she never wants this to end, especially after last night's realisation. Okay, it would be a better journey if Kit wasn't here, and if maybe Nova would say something without intending every utterance to be the end of the conversation, but still, she's got Nika, and anyway she's lucky to be here at all, after what she did in Nimbasa. She should be grateful.
So Gwyneth keeps going, looking at flowers made strange by the greenish lenses of her plastic sunglasses, and concentrates on being grateful. Most of the time, she even manages it.
In a couple of days' time, the group splits up. Kit, eager and restless, wants to press on to Chargestone Cave; Nova wants to wander. Gwyneth suggests to Nika that wandering might be nice, because the woods are so pretty, and (she does not say) because she cannot wait to be free of Kit. Nika, who has herself come to sense that Kit is maybe not such a nice person, agrees, and that's that: Kit goes one way, west past the research lab, and the girls go another, meandering vaguely eastwards into the forest.
Ten minutes after the split, Nova smiles for the first time since she joined up with them.
“Been waiting for that for a long time now,” she remarks, in her accented Unovan. “God save us all from teenage boys.”
Gwyneth agrees, rather quickly, and Nova raises her eyebrows in a way that means she suspects but will say nothing. Nika just looks awkward. She feels like she has missed something, and she is right.
It transpires that Kit has been following Nova around for a while, and grating harder on her nerves every day. This is one reason why she has been so guarded. The other, as they find out later in the hikers' lodge that they come to in the evening of the third day, is that she is ex-Team Rocket.
She tells them this after discovering a bottle of bourbon someone left behind in one of the cupboards and drinking slightly more of it than she intended. (She offers them some, forgetting their age or not caring, but they are too nervous and anyway it smells terrible.) Her life story is less a narrative than a series of bad decisions: dropping out of high school, a stint dealing drugs in south Goldenrod, getting in with the Rockets and thinking the money and organisational rigour was a way of sorting her life out, realising she was wrong after a botched robbery saw her skull fractured by an angry pupitar, discovering too late that Rockets don't accept letters of resignation. Fleeing Johto. New name, dyed hair, an application to become a trainer. And here she is. Wandering around on a League grant with a cubchoo she stole too young for it to remember she isn't its original partner.
Nika and Gwyneth sit and listen in silence, a little afraid and a lot ignorant of what to say in response, and Nova pours herself more bourbon.
She gets these headaches, she says, although she peppers her speech with a few more expletives. Like someone's squeezing her head in a nutcracker. She's going to have them forever. Forfuckingever.
Nika mumbles some kind of a response that Nova doesn't acknowledge, and Gwyneth shrinks in her chair, unable to speak. She feels like she might explode.
Fortunately, someone else arrives to take the pressure off: a clown, apparently, although he just looks like an ordinary guy. He is as jolly as Nova is morose; at first Gwyneth thinks he doesn't see her despondence, and then she thinks that maybe he does and simply knows, through the years he has had to practice his art, how to keep on laughing in the darkness. When Nika asks if he's really a clown he does a routine with a couple of bottles and Gwyneth as an assistant that has even Nova laughing. Modern clowning has apparently come a long way since the pratfalls and custard pies that the kids know from old movies.
He smiles, as casually as anything taking Nova's bottle away from her, here give me that would you I need another one, and he juggles so very badly with it and a few others that Gwyneth can tell he must actually be very good. He is somehow forever on the verge of dropping everything and never actually doing it, and then he starts losing the bottles in midair, looking increasingly distressed as they cease to fall back into his hands but soldiering on with four three two and finally one, tossing it disconsolately from hand to hand before slowly and sadly putting it down on the table. It is very, very funny, and nobody even notices that the bourbon bottle is among the ones that have got lost.
In the middle of the night, Gwyneth wakes to strange noises, and in the morning Nova is gone. On the table are five glass bottles, one half empty, and a baltoy spinning on its axis like a top. Sometimes it spins a little faster and one of the bottle blurs out of existence for a moment.
The clown, whose name is Pat, comes in just then and smiles to see her up.
“She said she was in a hurry,” he says, in response to the question visible in her face. “Also to say thank you for the company.”
Something about the way he says it makes Gwyneth aware that what Nova was trying to do was apologise. She nods, and decides to accept it.
Pat can't stay. He and his baltoy have to be in Driftveil by the end of the week for a clowning convention. Gwyneth imagines a whole conference centre full of people like him, people for whom ordinary objects cease to function as they do for everyone else and instead maliciously fall over or trip them up or disappear only to reappear behind their backs, and shivers. It's part excitement, part fear. All those clowns in one place seems like a recipe for slapstick disaster.
Only a while after he has gone does Nika sit up sleepily in her bed, yawning and stretching like a cartoon of someone waking up. Hey, she says, blinking. Where is everyone?
Gwyneth thinks about how to answer this for a while. In the end, she just tells her the truth.
They're gone, she says. It's just us.
Oh.
They are silent for a moment, the quiet and loneliness of the empty space around them settling on their skin, and then Nika smiles shyly.
Just us is okay, she says.
Gwyneth smiles back, and offers to make her coffee. And she stays smiling while she goes and makes it, but underneath it she is still thinking about Nova. *
Monday, 19th SeptemberGwyneth wakes slowly and stares at the ceiling above her. The light's still on. She fell asleep sitting against the wall, and now she is twisted uncomfortably across the bed. This is a bad position; her back and neck hurt like hell.
She doesn't move. She keeps staring at the ceiling, at the burning white lightbulb that stings her eyes, and doesn't blink.
This goes on for some time.
In the end, it isn't the pain that forces her to move: that is too distant, and it cannot really reach her where she is right now. Nor is it the venipede, which has sensed her wakefulness and started rattling loudly from the floor, demanding to be moved. She is only even dimly aware of the noise. Instead, what makes her move is Nova, getting up and leaving before dawn with a hangover pounding her temples and inelegant sutures in her skull.
Gwyneth blinks at last, eyes watering, and eases herself stiffly back into a sitting position. She looks blearily out of the window whose curtains she never bothered to draw, sees no light out there. The thought occurs to her that she could check what time it is, but somehow she can't make herself care enough to do it. It's not morning. That's all she needs to know.
She bends down, her body protesting like that of a much older woman, and picks up the venipede, which seems annoyed.
“What is it?” she croaks. She is reminded of talking to Shane a week ago in Aspertia, how she was so many miles away from her voice. It's the same here. She's on the verge of going somewhere bad, she can feel it, but it's okay. She's not okay, but it's okay. “What do you want?”
The venipede clicks and rattles at her, legs wriggling in midair. Gwyneth stares at her and sees a bug, a little machine, something alien and inscrutable. She sees the shapes that make her up, the interlocking segments of her shell and legs. Planes, angles. Geometry, not life.
“What do you,” Gwyneth begins, but this time she can't finish. The venipede hisses; she puts her on the other bed, drops her face into her open hand and rubs furiously at her forehead. “Stop it,” she whispers, but the venipede keeps hissing and rattling. “Stop it. Stop it. Stop it.”
She wants to shout. It doesn't take. In the end she reaches for the light switch, trembling now for some reason she cannot quite identify, and climbs back into bed in the dark, where she closes her eyes and tries not to hear the venipede's insistent anger until, hours later, she falls back to sleep. *
In the morning she is a little more level. Not much, but Gwyneth takes what she can get, and right now what she can get is a vague grasp of reality. It will have to do.
The venipede is asleep, antennae twitching restlessly as she dreams of prey or violence or whatever it is that venipede dream of, and Gwyneth leaves her that way while she drains her water bottle and forces down a banana. She is still a little afraid of her, or more accurately how Gwyneth saw her last night. It has happened before, this dissolution of living things into meaningless shapes, and the results were not good. She doesn't want it to ever happen again.
She sighs and climbs back into mostly-dry clothes, keeping her eyes off the venipede. There will be time to think about this later. Right now, she needs to fix her face and get more water.
Outside, the rain has stopped and the sky is mostly clear. Gwyneth breathes in the air, cold and incredibly fresh, and tries to summon up that fierce love that sometimes buoys her up, but it's not the kind of feeling you can force. She shakes her head and goes instead to look for a stream or something.
Fortunately, she doesn't have to go far. There's a sign by the campsite entrance that she missed in the dark that tells her the water in the stream slightly to the north of here is of excellent quality and safe to drink, but advises boiling it first to be safe. Gwyneth looks from the sign to the wet, dripping fire pit, and wonders if there was a hot plate in the trailer that she missed.
There is, and a battered saucepan in a cupboard under the counter, too, although the chargestone in the generator is depleted from having the lights on half the night, and Gwyneth has to switch it off and wait nearly an hour before she can get the hot plate to work. She's losing time here, she knows, but what the hell. She's already going way too slowly. An extra hour isn't going to make much difference now.
But she gets it done in the end, and eventually she's ready to pack her bottle of fresh and unpleasantly warm water in her bag and get going. Her sleeping bag and most of her clothes are dry; her blanket and jeans aren't, quite. It's going to have to do. Gwyneth puts everything away, gently tucks the sleeping venipede into the crook of her arm, and leaves.
It's a long walk, and it feels that way before even the first twenty minutes are past. Gwyneth might have started feeling better at the Pokémon Centre, but Dr. ze'Naarat was right; she really wasn't ready for this. The pack is so damn heavy, and her arm hurts so damn much, and she is so damn tired she could fall over right now and not find it in her to get up again.
She doesn't fall over. She doesn't stop. She may not have strength or health but she has raw, stubborn-as-hell willpower, the kind that gets you to twenty-four without dying, the kind that makes and then also breaks relationships, and it has got her more than halfway across Unova on the stupidest road trip anyone has ever made. It's going to get her through this, too.
When she hears herself think this, Gwyneth almost smiles. Really now, Gwyneth? You must be getting desperate.
Around her, White Forest drips and squelches and emits staccato bird calls from far away among the branches. Once, she hears something that might be a wolf, or it might just be her imagination. Another time, she hears what is definitely a magmar: low, mournful honking, too big and too deep to be a goose.
Gwyneth thinks briefly about being incinerated. It's probably kind of unpleasant, she decides, but it would dry her clothes out at least.
After a while, the venipede wakes up, and looks at her with a sleepy kind of malice. Whatever was wrong with her last night, she doesn't seem to have forgiven Gwyneth; she wriggles and pokes with her legs, and Gwyneth, biting back irritation, stops and gets out her gross medicinal gummy worms. It's about time anyway, and she could use some peace about now.
“Here,” she says, tossing one into the leaf litter and watching the venipede attempt a limping kind of lunge at it. “Dunno what your problem is, dude, but get off my back, okay? I don't have to carry you, you know.”
Whether it's the treat or the attitude, the venipede seems to quieten down. She lets Gwyneth pick her up and put her in her usual spot on the backpack without anything more than token hissing, and the two of them continue in a silence that is, if not exactly companionable, at least free of active hostility.
Her feet ache. She has crappy boots, she knows, worn down at the heel and shedding flakes of lining inside, but it's not like she can do anything about it. Right now she has literally no money at all. She did get three cents' change from her meal in Nimbasa but she lost it. Probably it fell out of her pocket when she tossed her jacket around trying to extinguish the venipede.
Gwyneth sets her jaw and keeps moving. One foot in front of the other. Simple, right? Right. Except that it's not, except that she can almost hear her sinews creaking, every little movement an agony of exertion, but still. Simple. Right.
She doesn't know when she stops. Her phone has been off since she left Nimbasa, to save the battery; the campsites might have power, but the tiny chargestone generators have limits, and there's nowhere to plug anything in. So when Gwyneth finally gives in to the pain and fatigue and stops, all she can say is that the sun is high and it feels like it's been forever since she left the campsite. She sits on a nine-tenths dry log, drinks some water and eats ageing food, and tries not to think about how much more of this there is to go.
It used to be fun. It really did. But that was when there were no stakes: back then, a walk in the woods was just that, a walk in the woods, and if she went slow it didn't matter because it was fun and she had all the time in the world. Now she's sitting on the other side of the table with the bottle of bourbon; now, she's Nova, travelling not for pleasure but because she has no other options except running. Now everything is riding on this. Everything, meaning – what, exactly? Gwyneth doesn't know, but she knows that it is riding on this, even if she isn't sure what it might be. There had to be some reason she gave up everything she had to get here.
She tosses the core of her apple away into the bushes for the ants to pick over and stands up.
“Less thinking, more walking,” she tells herself, and gets on with it. *
Sometime in the afternoon she sees a deer. Four of them, even, or three and a sawsbuck. They're standing there on the trail ahead of her, cropping the leaves from everything they can reach. Two white-tailed does, a big sawsbuck stag whose antler-leaves are browning with approaching autumn, and a hybrid fawn, dun coat flecked with green leafy hairs like a deerling.
Gwyneth stares. She remembers reading in her magazine, years ago, that pokémon are weirdly good at making hybrids, at interbreeding especially with each other but also with regular animals. Something something labile DNA or whatever. She is conceptually aware that this is something that happens, but she's never seen it before in real life.
The deer stare back at her for a while. The does tense as if to run, but they know the sawsbuck is a pokémon and won't flee if it stands to defend them. It sniffs and eyes Gwyneth warily, and then turns and walks away, dull fur and leafy antlers merging into the surrounding forest. Its companions follow, with substantially less composure.
Looking at the empty path, Gwyneth feels the spell break. She blinks, and finds she's holding her switched-off phone in her hand, as if she was going to take a photo.
“Huh,” she says, because she feels she should say something and yet also has nothing to say, and shoves it back into her pocket.
Behind her head, the venipede clicks quietly to herself.
“Yeah, okay,” says Gwyneth, and moves on. *
She sees some more animals. A couple of birds she can't name, and one she can: northern cardinal, a cheerful splash of red against the browns and fading greens. It flies off when she gets close, which seems reasonable enough to her.
There are a few other clues that animal life is around. As the day wears on, the clouds break up and the wind dies down, and when the bushes rustle now Gwyneth can tell there must be something moving around in there; she never sees what it is, though. Patrat. Voles, maybe. What is a vole, anyway? She thinks it's like a rat, but she isn't sure what she's basing that on.
“You probably eat voles, huh,” she says to the venipede, although she doesn't get any answer.
The trail goes on and on and on. She becomes half convinced that it's somehow connected up to itself in a loop, that she's going past the same twenty trees over and over, and then suddenly she sees a sign saying CAMPSITE 10 MILES and feels relieved to know that the laws of physics still apply.
It gets easier after seeing the sign. Not for very long, fifteen minutes maybe or however long it takes for the pain to eat through her optimism, but for a little while at least. Gwyneth feels grateful to whoever put the sign up, and then obscurely resentful.
“Nearly there, dude,” she tells the venipede. Still no answer. She may have fallen asleep, or maybe Gwyneth is just imagining the sound of her own voice and she didn't actually say anything. Either option seems equally plausible at this point.
Somewhere between the sign and the campsite, she starts to drift again, the pain and the fatigue floating off to some strange place where they can tangle her limbs and make her stumble but not quite reach her mind, because she no longer has one. She has instead – is, instead – a series of tubes and cuts of meat that operate in uncertain unison to propel themselves forward. Gwyneth holds up her hand in front of her and wonders without any sense of wonder at the strangeness of it, at its baffling shape and inexplicable motion.
If she feels anything at all, it's that she's okay with this. The alternative is pain, and she is sick to death of that.
The forest grows dark around her. The birdsong changes, then goes silent. Once or twice something does call, but Gwyneth does not think it is a bird.
She keeps walking, and keeps walking, and somehow keeps walking, and then she sees a light through the trees that seeps through her dissociative haze and tells her that civilisation in some form or another is ahead. She keeps walking, past bushes that seem intent on reaching out to poke her, past the pools of moonlight and spreading patches of darkness, past puddles and rocks and at last around a corner and into the warm light of a cheerful campfire.
“Hey, someone's here,” she hears, and blinks until the kids around the fire come into focus. Three or four. Between sixteen and eighteen. Experienced ones, then. “Hey, man, how's it going?”
Gwyneth sways a little and counts again. One two three four. A watchog on the periphery, standing guard over a cooler; a honchkrow doing what honchkrow do best: skulking in the shadows, but somehow stylishly.
“I'm okay, dude,” she says, voice cracking slightly with fatigue. “Had a long walk.”
“Well, time to sit down then,” says the guy who greeted her. “C'mon. Fire's great and we got beer.”
They are obviously, even spectacularly, underage, but okay. Gwyneth doesn't really care. She stands there, looking, and the kids start to get restless and uneasy.
“Are you sure you're okay?” asks a different one, a girl whose arms are thick with woven bracelets. “You seem, um … kinda out of it.”
“Rough day,” croaks Gwyneth. “Week. Whatever.” She manages to unstick her feet from the ground and take a step forward. “Uh, I might join you in a minute. I think I need to lie down a while first.”
“Oh sure.” The girl nods at the trailers behind her. “They're both empty.”
“Cool. Thanks.”
Gwyneth gives herself an internal shove and staggers forward, past the staring eyes that are beginning to parse her, to read the marks of injury and gender on her body and come to certain conclusions. She does not let herself look back at them. It's just as well; even watching where she's going, she nearly trips over the guy ropes of the kids' tents, and makes the honchkrow hop away with an air of disdainful majesty, making a noise that sounds uncannily like disapproving tutting.
On the low step up to the trailer she stumbles and catches herself noisily against the thin metal wall. The kids, who have just started talking amongst themselves again, stop, and Gwyneth feels their eyes boring into the back of her head; she grits her teeth and forces herself upright, draws back the door with a vicious jerk of her hand and stumbles in.
The lights won't come on, but she's damned if she's going back out there to flip the switch on the generator. She suppresses her anger long enough to get the venipede off her shoulder without hurting her, then lets her pack fall to the floor with a savage thud and climbs onto the bed.
“Ugh,” she grunts, dragging off her boots. “Damn kids.”
She lies down, or maybe she just stops holding herself upright and lets gravity do the work. She doesn't know if she's ever been this tired before in her life. It's worse than last night by a long way. And it's only going to keep getting worse.
She should eat something. She even says it aloud, to try and get it into her head: “I should eat something.” But the words seem to get jumbled in her throat, coming out of her mouth all soft and barely audible, and almost before she's finished speaking them she can feel herself drifting off to sleep.
It's probably okay. Nothing much right now seems worth staying awake for.
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Post by bay on Jul 27, 2018 6:03:36 GMT
Interesting flashback with Nika and Gwyneth finding out more about Nova's past. I think the Gen 7 games are the only ones that outright stated the grunts in a secret organization due to feeling like failures and no where else to go. While there are characters like that in many fics, when playing the games you kinda forget about that.
I also like the little detail with Pokemon and real life animals breeding. Also I find it very amusing underaged kids offering an adult a beer, though luckily Gwyneth doesn't care to rattle them heh.
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Post by Manchee on Jul 27, 2018 21:43:19 GMT
To comment quick on your replies to my last review: I really like those little Easter eggs and the clarification of how your stories exist within the same world. Fun tidbits to know about this story and AE, and I look forward to keeping the Johto-Kanto relations in mind when I finally go and get through Ghost Town.
For this chapter, we see things start to get rough again for Gwyneth, which is unfortunate but not totally a surprise with her character. It's nice to see a present-day Gwyneth matching her perception of herself that can never be good enough at staying healthy and being a "normal" person- she feels more real that way. A lot of people are not great at taking are off themselves.
Two of my favorite scenes in this chapter are when Nova disappears in the middle of the night and when venipede is hissing at Gwyneth when she starts to have a little freak out. They both felt... disconcerting, I think is the word I want. I initially didn't totally believe Pat about her leaving in the middle of the night, mostly because Gwyneth heard some odd noises during the night and then she was gone. But since there's no one's word besides Pat's to go off of, I guess we just have to believe him. I also wasn't totally understanding of what was going on with Gwyneth when she starts to see shapes and things, so venipede's behavior confused me in the mix of all of that. That incident felt like there was more I should be picking up on, but as I kept reading it didn't seem like it was necessary to make sense of the rest of the chapter, so I kind of pushed it to the side. Looking forward to seeing where these events take Gwyneth in the next chapter considering how the situation looks like it is getting worse.
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