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it feels like getting hit by a train.
you’re fiddling with your pokedex. he’s paying bills on his rotom phone. eevee’s in his lap while he dictates and taps at rotom’s screen. pikachu’s shaking the berry tree outside, trying to get the greedent up in the branches to come out and play.
it’s just one moment with his tapping feet while he complains about new models and harangues you in the same breath. you curl your toes, bear closer to the room’s fire. rotom’s electric sway and pikachu’s distant squeal of victory. the push and pull of hail outside that you want to let yourself get buried in.
short breaths leaving you without sound. he sits up, looks at you, squints because he can never quite tell when you’re laughing or not. eevee wisely jumps off of him out of the corner of your eye. you place your gloved hands on the carpet and feel its ragged discord slide around your fingers as they inch closer to the fire. you’re tugged off the couch by your own weight, eyes wide then shut. wide. shut. your muffler’s falling off your shoulders and your pokedex beeps from somewhere inside the sofa cushions--
“red,” he sighs.
a hand in yours. it drags you up to your knees. he makes a face that you realise must be at your dirt-ridden fingernails. he pulls you all the way up, drags you outside.
it’s not a warm hug from your mother; it’s not a kind traveller letting you hide beneath his blanket while you coax out gasps into the wool. but he stands outside of your little rented hobble for five minutes, visibly shivering, while the hail kisses and digs ruts into your pale skin.
five minutes are up. pikachu’s done bullying the local pokemon and returned to your shoulder. he wrings his hands and digs them into your jacket when you’re back inside. his pulse races against your waist.
“better?” he bites, offering up an unkind swear to galar and its daunting lack of seasons. you tuck your head beneath his chin and he clicks his tongue, smacking a hand across your head to get your cap out and away from his neck. you hold him and he hates you for it: not for your vulnerability, but for the icy snap of your goosebump skin.
green, you reflect, is not good at comforting people. he’s hauled you over to kneel next to the fire, swatting at his rotom phone when it tries to get in the way. eevee joins the pile and becomes a source of welcome heat, chirping unhappily at the state of melting slush between your laps. green offers you a harsh pat on the back and you reflect that he is not good at comforting.
nor at being comforted.
tension dies down with your hushed breaths, enough that his arms settle around you, his mind wanders without aim. the slide of his bicep against your back when he starts tapping at rotom is soothing in its way. he is holding you. you are held. pikachu is making a ruddy mess eating stolen berries on your shoulder.
“the showing’s tomorrow,” offers green, tilting his head when you pick up yours. rotom floats around to give you a peek at unfamiliar names scrolling by. “for the cup.” you wince and he raises an eyebrow, flicking his fingers so rotom turns back to him. “what?”
fruitlessly, you try to sign out the name with one hand. “wait.” he lets you free. eevee makes a tired sound at being disturbed. “m-- what?”
melony.
green pauses the feed and scrolls back up. he flicks at the screen like he used to flick you when you were kids. rotom, however, doesn’t seem to mind. “her? the gym leader?”
that’s the one. she’s a bold woman in white. you can tell at a glance what she represents. and at a glance, green can read your mind. “i don’t think they’re battling tomorrow. they show up and look good. take pictures.”
he’s gone back to rubbing your back, idly, while you disagree with your fingers.
“i know you read the tour magazine before we got here. you can’t just go up and challenge her. you have to register, go in order,” he muses, all before offering a scoff. “not that you would know. trying to run up to the elite four before you even had your first badge.”
he’s right, but he’s guilty of the same. he’s also guilty of whining after work, pulling his jacket off and throwing down his keys, about the stupid kids who come challenge his trainers years before they’re ready. he always shoves off your hands when you reach for him, initially, but then on the days you don’t he gives you this annoyed look until you do.
“is the hail not enough for you? do you have to go snog a glacier to get it all out?”
you pause. he gestures the word for you and your eyes light up.
he gives a post-mortem explanation anyway because he likes to hear the sound of his own voice. you touch his cheek. “it’s like ‘making out.’ when in galar, you know?”
you don’t know. he knows you don’t know. he gives you an unimpressed look before he picks your hat back up, smooshes it on top of your head. he wipes the bangs out of your face, furrows his brow. he picks up a length of your hair and studies it critically. tomorrow, you’re going to fight about getting your hair cut at a salon, and you’re going to point and he’s going to yell until he throws up his hands and cuts it for you. again. today, however,
you drop the side of your head against his shoulder. pikachu abandons yours, bounding for the television. eevee joins him and gets a little extra fluffed up from the residual static electricity.
you take out your pinky, your index finger, your thumb, the sign your mom would always call the pikachu face. you tap it to his chest.
“yeah.”
you jab him a little more forcefully. he stares at you and then smirks.
“yeah?”
you duke him in the chest with your fist. he coughs and falls back onto the carpet. you follow him, digging an elbow into his stomach.
“me too, dumbass,” he chokes, and only then do you let him breathe.
of course he does. once upon a time when you were ten and kanto was a maze, he left you to panic alone in a cave. three years after and he would never leave you be, hauling up a mountain with a shitty lunch that you ate anyway. on the days you wouldn’t look at him he’d lay on your sleeping bag and read his book of kanto sign language. he’d make particularly offensive gestures at you until your expression changed and then he’d laugh, smooshing his knuckles into your cheek.
you kissed him when you were fourteen and his lips tasted like the gas lantern he kept bringing up with him. he held you in the thin mountain air where breaths were even harder to come by. he dragged you back down and the first thing he did was throw your old hat away in the garbage, and after that you beat him senseless.
you lay your cap on his chest now like a white flag waving in the wind. you’re a guy. he’s a guy. he merely grunts when you rotate sideways and drop your head on his stomach, watching the excited challengers bounce and bumble in interviews for the first time.
“i’d kick his ass,” he mutters when the champion comes on screen, pointing at how the man fiddles with his hat. “he’s just like you. he’s just begging to be taken down a notch.”
he mumbles more things, about the excitement of stadium lights and feeling like a rock star. you hum with your ghost of a voice. out here, you’re both in your twenties, just arrived from a train station to study galar’s wild area. in your head, you’re two years younger and he’s locking the door to his gym, turning to you with hiked-up shoulders, crying himself raw in a had-to-be-coming breakdown.
in your head, you’re cradling him awkwardly and staring up at the ceiling wishing for once, a voice would come out of you.
out here, he bumps you, to bring you back to the present.
“your girlfriend’s on,” your husband tells you, without a hint of irony, when melony presents herself for interview next.
she’s got a soft voice like honey. she holds a hand up to her mouth when she laughs like erika did, that one and only time. she looks a little like sabrina because she’s elegant, see, but there’s a bouncy energy to her that’s a child in an adult’s body and honestly. honestly, you feel that.
it goes to commercial and he abandons you to the carpet, hopping to his feet. “you want some tea?”
you nod and he throws a blanket over you. you drag it around yourself -- holding it open for eevee and pikachu to dive in -- feeling kind of like that new pokemon you saw in the snow. rotom can’t understand your signs so you crawl over like a caterpie to the couch, rolling all the way back when you’ve got your hands on your pokedex. you’re tangled up in wooloo thread and two pokemon when green returns. he nudges you with his foot to get you to make space.
“snom,” he reads off your pokedex. the rotom phone zzrts excitedly at the sound of his voice, showing the pokemon in all its wiggly glory, its known habitats, what weather it likes. your old model can’t do anything like that, but you have a monochrome picture, and that’s well enough.
“i don’t know why they keep supporting that thing.” green transferred his data long, long ago, and it’s been carried with him ever since. now it follows him around on a phone. mutedly, he stirs his tea. “doesn’t that take batteries? don’t you get where we are? it’s the region of eco-friendly electricity.” you close the shell of your pokedex and it powers off. “and free wi-fi.”
you roll around with a decided lack of concern for his statement. he puts your cup of tea next to your ear, so you finally pull yourself up to it, take a sip when he turns on the tv.
pikachu pops out of the blanket with his ears fluttering.
“can you project to the telly, rotom?” green asks.
“sure thing!” it answers back. he gives you the remote while rotom pulls up green’s video history. you scroll down over to the let’s play you were watching, because both of you are adults, with no time for gaming. (well. one of you is an adult with a gym leader job, and you just left your gameboy at home.) even still, green’s all about the new, and he’s been trying to get you into this switch thing for a while.
he’s chattering straight through the dialogue. you don’t really care. pikachu and eevee end up with a command of the blanket while the two of you migrate back to the couch.
he’s kissing at the side of your mouth while you press a hand to your heart. he folds his fingers over yours, pausing to feel its beat.
“you’re good,” he promises, so you nudge him back to kiss him properly.
green gets all excited when you jerk your hand back and forth. his face falls when you ghost-laugh.
“what?”
you spell it out for him, the new sign you’ve learned. for a moment, he’s agape.
“did you just call me a wanker?”
yeah.
you tumble back against the couch when he wrestles for your collar. you kiss his fingers. he bites your neck.
“thought you were all old hat,” he says with a challenging grin.
sometimes, you can learn new things too.