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Barry’s mother had always talked about his father as if he were a sailboat. Bright, beautiful, boisterous, she’d say, eyes distant as she stared out at where the river met the sea. Full of energy, just like you are. Always going places, like you will. No-one could ever hope to moor him in one place for long, it was in his nature to come and go. When he came, he brought back laughter and presents; when he left, he took his smile with him.
Point is, she’d tell him, tucking her hair behind her ear as she smiled the smile of an old woman, your father was like a sailboat, and I knew he’d never stay. Some people just aren’t meant to stay places. But maybe if we’re patient, then one day, he’ll dock at our shore again.
If anything, Barry knew that his mother loved his father, and it was that love that filled their home and made it sometimes seem like he was still there. As a child, Barry would draw crayon-line doodles of his father on a grand pirate ship, sailing the ocean blue, and his mother would pin them to the fridge. Years later, after getting caught skipping school to explore Lake Verity, she’d scolded him saying that “his father would be disappointed”, and Barry cried in his room for hours, aching with the loss of approval he’d never known. When starting his journey, knowing that his father had favored the water-type Milotic, Barry had chosen a Piplup as his lifelong companion.
It isn’t until one day, many years later, when Barry’s come back to Twinleaf to visit and is helping his mother wash dishes after dinner, that he hears the sound of shattering glass from the living room. He dashes out immediately, hand on Pokeball, but before he can inspect the smashed cup, his mother points and redirects his attention to the television screen.
The Sinnoh Battle Frontier is having its grand opening gala, and shaking Champion Cynthia’s hand with a broad smile on his face, is the newly announced Tycoon of the Battle Tower.
The Frontier doesn’t open up to the general public for a few months, but Barry has had enough of waiting. It takes a bit of convincing and pulling of strings, but Dawn and Lucas are good friends who understand the gravity of the matter, and they manage to persuade Cynthia to choose Barry as one of the Tower’s first beta testers. While on the ferry from Snowpoint, Barry hands grip the rail so tightly that he melts the ice beneath his gloves, and his stomach churns the entire ride, although he’s never been seasick in his life. He can feel the burn of acid deep in his throat, and his resentment hurts like a poison. He has a million questions, and none at all. Really, he just wants to punch the man in the face, but at the same time, there’s no way he can do that to his father. But the one image in his mind that won’t go away is the tear-stained expression on his mother’s face after she’d seen the television broadcast.
“He’s finally back.”
Barry doesn’t have patience for many things, much less for men who make his mother cry.
The inside of the Battle Tower lift is cold and bare. Barry’s sweaty hands curl into fists at his side as he stares the numbers lighting up on the lift interface. Floor 21, where the 21st battle will take place. Once these doors open, Palmer will be on the other side of the battleground. The thought is a daunting one.
Barry steels himself, and it’s a fight to keep his legs from shaking, because this isn’t the kind of first impression he wants to make on the man who abandoned him and his mother over a decade ago. Naturally, his Pokemon can sense how tense he is. Staraptor croons comfortingly from behind him, brushing him with downy feathers, and Empoleon looks down towards him with the eyes of a warrior.
Barry nods affirmatively and swallows, pretending that he can’t taste the bile in his throat. This is the first time he’s ever been so angry, so disappointed, so hurt all in the same time. Compared to this, losing to Dawn at Victory Road is nothing. It physically pains him to contain so much fury, and Barry knows that even if Palmer doesn’t remember, even if Palmer doesn’t care, he needs this closure. He wants this toxin of hate gone. He doesn’t want to hate his own father. The ticka-ticka sounds of the lift rising come to an abrupt stop, and Barry braces himself for the light as metal doors slide open.
Standing across the room with a Cresselia floating by his side is a man with messy blonde hair, bright amber eyes, and a boisterous smirk. For a moment Barry can barely breathe, but at the same time, he feels like he might explode.
Barry steps forward into the room, and is bathed in light.
“Long time no see.”