Chapter Text
Pain. It was everywhere.
My arms, my legs my torso, everything hurt. Both in long jagged cracks across my stony body and in a few scattered punctures that almost reached my core. If I hadn’t been reeling from it all I might’ve panicked. But I didn’t have the energy to make the effort; even moving was too much too soon. Instead, I kept my damaged sights shut off and tried to focus on anything else. The cool night air, the wind through the trees, the torn-up soil-and-splintered wood that surrounded where I crashed. Anything but memories. Anything but the pain.
Time passed. I couldn’t tell how much. Only that my internal heat kept steadily leaking, whistling through the cracks and punctures into the wind and taking my life with it. The more that leaked, the weaker I felt, the colder I became. Soon I was too cold to feel the dirt beneath me, and even focusing was becoming too hard. In the lapse of thought, memories rushed in, and I wondered what He would say about my state. What He would do if he knew how far gone I was. I just managed to push back the wondering with a fact: He was not here, and that alone was a relief. Enough of one that passing away didn’t seem so bleak a prospect. All around me grew quieter and quieter, and I was…not happy, but resigned to letting go.
Then the rustling of plants and a low, electronic whine broke through the din, and I was just a little more awake.
The electronic whine stopped. Something dropped to the ground with a barely audible thump. More rustling. Dragging? Crawling? Couldn’t tell. Could only just hear it. It stopped, and all was silent. A small patch of warmth pressed against my chest, and my sights flickered on in surprise.
Damaged as it was, my vision could pick up no color, and the shadows of night did little to help. But I could just make out two indistinct figures. The closer one filled most of my sights, and best I could tell, it had a head and shoulders. The other was harder to make out, enough for me to question if it was even there. I tried to make out more details when a high-pitched whine dragged my attention back to the closer figure. Its head tilted, it whined again, and I couldn’t make any sense of its intentions. And as the surprise of the visitors wore off, so did my surge of energy. My sights began to flicker, the figures began shifting, and the last little patch of warmth on my chest vanished.
The high-pitched whine and a mechanical click were the last things I heard before a flash of familiar energy obscured my sights as I finally blacked out.
For a long time, I didn’t feel anything. I heard garbled clangs, whines, and a few distant beeps, and at one point my sights flickered on to a swath of pink in a sea of black and white. Still, I felt nothing, not even the cold. I might’ve taken that as a good sign had I been coherent; it at least meant I wasn’t dead.
When I did start coming around, the first thing I registered was a semi-soft surface beneath me. A bed most likely. Following that was a rhythmic beeping sound to my right. A moment of consideration and I forced on my sights; they flickered twice before showing me a plain, white ceiling. So I was inside at least, but inside where?
My vision lying down was limited, as it was with all of my kind. Having no neck and a large, rounded chest did that. Still, just staring at a ceiling was not going to tell me where I was, and I was not any closer to being able to sit up and look around. Slowly turning my head towards the steady beeping was the most I could manage, and it at least gave me a better view to work with.
On my right was a row of beds with metal railings, each with a set of monitoring equipment stacked beside them. The one by my bed filled the silence with steady beeping in time to a blinking jagged line on its screen. That told me two things: I was recovered enough to see color, and I was most likely in a pokemon center. The question was how I got there. Before I could begin to wonder, something clattered to the floor to my right, and turned to look. I didn’t see what dropped, but I did see a human child.
He was sitting in a chair much too big for his scrawny frame, bent over and apparently trying to reach for the floor. Sooner than expected he gave up and straightened back up, not bothering to leave his perch as he breathed out a sigh of frustration. After that, he barely moved, and I half expected him to fall asleep. Even as a door opened somewhere out of my line of sight, the child still didn’t react beyond tightening his grip on what looked to be a bundle of metal and wires. Only when a monferno in a green vest came into view carrying a tray of food did the boy turn his head to look, and even then his response sounded as tired as he looked.
“No thanks Nancy, I’m not very hungry right now. But, could you get my screwdriver please? I dropped it again.”
The monkey pokemon rolled her eyes, placed her tray on the childs lap, and dropped to the floor, coming back up with a bright red screwdriver in one hand. She stepped back when the child reached for it, shaking her head and pointing at the food. The boy opened his mouth to protest, when his eyes flickered my way for all of a second and caught me staring.
All at once he faced me, straightened up, and started chattering through a smile that reached all the way up to a pair of bright grey eyes.
“Hey! You’re awake! You’re ok! I mean, are you ok? You must at least be better than before. Your face-lines are lit up again. And you can move! That’s great! You weren’t moving at all when me and Nancy found you in the Dreamyard. How’d you fall out of the sky anyway?”
It was his last words that struck a chord and brought back memories of my crash. Of the small shadowed figure that, on closer inspection, matched right up with the little human sitting across from me. A little human who was much too small to be capable of carrying me to safety, with or without his monferno to help.
Then I remembered the mechanical click, and the flash of energy. And spotted a bandolier crossing the humans chest lined with pokeballs.
I was caught. Caught by a child who hadn’t even fought me for the right. My curiosity died to the fresh spark of anger in my chest, and I promptly turned away from the little creature in favor of staring at the machine with its blinking lines.
“Oh. I, uh, guess you're still tired huh? Sorry If I woke you up.” I showed no sign that I heard, hoping he would take a hint and leave. Instead, he stayed put and stayed still. Didn’t squirm in his seat like most children would, didn’t even swing his feet from what I heard. All I could hear apart from the beeping machines was the burning flame from the monferno’s tail. “So, um, what kind of Pokémon are you anyway?”
“He’s a golurk,” Came an older, female voice through the opening of a door. It belonged to the nurse who came to stand by the machines, eyeing the beeping and jumping lines before scribbling something down on the clipboard in her arms. Thankfully it was enough to drag the boys attention away from me, “Golurk? I’ve never heard of them before.”
“I’d be surprised if you did. Their kind aren’t native to this part of the region. Even in the right area you are more likely to run into their first evolution stage, golett. You said you found him in the Dreamyard?”
“Yeah. He fell right out of the sky and crashed in the trees right near where I was training.” He paused, then continued with that same gloomy tone I first heard him use, “He looked like a broken pile of rocks when I found him. I was really scared he was gonna die.”
“Well, he was definitely lucky you were there. Any longer out there alone and we would’ve lost him. Just one more day of rest and recovery and he’ll be good as new and ready to fly.”
“He can fly?”
I silently scoffed at that; how did he think I got in the sky in the first place?
The nurse answered with more patience, “He sure can. Golurks are one of the few ground types capable of flight. And I bet this one is just itching to be on his way.”
That caught my attention and gave it relief. Of course this was temporary. Surly the child was just doing the Right Thing in helping the poor hurt pokemon and would soon let me go.
“On his way where?”
And those four words promptly nipped my relief in the bud. The nurse, meanwhile, looked surprised and sounded worried, “Well, you’re not considering keeping him are you?”
“I am keeping him. I can’t just abandon him. He’s my responsibility now.”
I tuned to look at him and did my best to glare. The child looked determined, the monferno unsurprised, and the nurses voice took on a tone reserved for talking someone out of a mistake, “Listen, Mica is it? You only just got your first badge. A fully evolved Pokémon like this one will be too much for you to handle. The best thing for both of you would be to release him once he’s completely healed.”
I was inclined to agree. If the little creature thought he was getting a loyal, overpowered lackey out of this he was straight out of luck. Sadly, I couldn’t voice my thoughts as he shook his head at the nurse’s advice “I can’t just give up because it’s gonna be hard.”
“It’s not just a question of difficulty Mica. Even if he did decide to listen to you, his power would be too much for you to properly control. You could very well end up getting hurt.”
“I’m on a Pokémon journey. If I was too afraid of getting hurt I would’ve stayed home. And…” He turned his gaze downward, hands resting on his tray of untouched food and curling even tighter around his wire bundle, “I promised he wouldn’t be alone. You can’t break promises like that, ‘specially when it’s about other people.”
He caught me watching him then, and gave me a small smile that only soured my mood even more. Behind me, the nurse gave a defeated sigh, “ If you are this dead set on keeping him, then I better not send you off completely blind. Wait here a moment, and I’ll get all the information we have on golurks for you. What they eat, what moves they can learn, that sort of thing.”
The boy looked up long enough to give a cheery “thank you” and watch her leave. When it was just him, the monferno and myself, he looked back to my sights and began reaching towards me. I ground my internals in a sharp, deep growl and he snatched his hand back with wide eyes. Jumping between us, the monferno growled in return, eyes full of fury and swinging tail burning bright in warning.
“Easy Nancy, it’s ok. It's my fault.” Gently petting down the fire monkey’s bristling shoulder, the boy leaned around her and gave me a soft apologetic look, “Sorry for trying to touch you. Don’t think I would like someone I don’t know doing that either. How about we start over?” Here his eyes lit up once more, “My name is Mica Eriss. I hope we can become friends.”
Starting over or not, my unspoken response was the same.
Not on your life, little creature.