Chapter Text
Shauna’s eyes are a startlingly bright shade of green, Calem notices. Were they always like this? Not that it really matters. Thankfully she’s too busy staring at her phone, replaying old messages, to notice that he’s long finished his coffee and is instead making a series of bland observations about her.
In the last few years she’s grown her hair out – long gone are the days of pigtails. Long gone, he thinks, but not that long. It’s been two years since he became Champion, and he hasn’t seen Shauna since then. She looks as cheerful as ever – two years travelling the world instead of being stuck in a tiny office in the Pokémon League will do that to a person.
“Sorry!” She says suddenly, setting the phone on the table. “It’s so weird to be back. This place hasn’t changed at all!”
The little café she suggested they meet in was one that she and Serena used to hang out a lot in when they were younger, apparently. Calem and Trevor met there a few times recently, but the researcher has been just as busy as Calem himself. Aquacorde Town is out of the way now, with Calem living in Snowbelle City to be closer to the League and Shauna only back from her travels. Trevor and Tierno are far away too, meaning that the café in Aquacorde Town often goes without their presence.
“It’s still nice,” Calem says truthfully. “Coffee is good.”
“I think all coffee tastes the same,” Shauna tells him, wrinkling her nose. Her own drink is blended with milk and ice, and Calem has to wonder how much coffee is actually in it.
“How was your trip then?”
“So much fun! You should take a holiday sometime, Calem, you’d love Alola!”
“Why there specifically? I saw your pictures from Hoenn, they looked nice.”
“Alola is just so calm and relaxing, I think you’d fit right in! You’re so chilled and laid back.”
“So I take it you didn’t fit in?”
“It wasn’t for me,” Shauna confesses. “I had a lot more fun in some of the big cities in Unova. That’s the life for me! But it’s nice to be back.”
“Any plans now?” Calem asks, earning himself a glare from Shauna – one that he had forgotten about but had certainly not missed.
“You sound just like my mom! But both of you are right – I need to find a job or something. I did really enjoy doing all those posts about my trips, so I… well, it sounds silly, but I was thinking about trying to find some sort of journalism job. Lumiose City is hiving with them, apparently – I asked Trevor.”
“Sounds like it’d be a good fit for you.”
“It’s nice that we’ve all found our way eventually, isn’t it?” Shauna says, resting her cheek in her palm. “I mean, when I set out from Aquacorde Town, I had no idea what I was doing. I was just following everyone else!”
“I didn’t think this is what I would end up doing either,” Calem confesses. “Though I do enjoy it, of course.”
“You as Champion, Tierno’s got big in the dancing world, Trevor working for the Professor, Serena doing all that fashion stuff… all that’s left is for me to seize my dreams!”
“You know we all believe in you,” he says, and this time he’s rewarded with one of Shauna’s grins, ear to ear. He hasn’t known her for that long, especially considering that she left the country for two years, but he feels that Shauna’s smile is one of the most comforting sights in his life.
“Have you seen Serena’s most recent shoot?” He asks, and Shauna sits bolt upright, lifting her bag from the ground to pull out the glossy magazine in question.
Their friend is on the cover, long hair braided and tossed over one shoulder, leaning against a motorbike. Everything she wears is light pink – beret, sunglasses, dress, leather jacket, boots. And that’s just the cover – inside she wears four different outfits, all the upcoming styles of the year to come. Serena is just nineteen, like the rest of them, and yet she’s been named as one of Kalos’s biggest fashion icons. Calem is whatever the opposite of that is.
“She looks so pretty!” Shauna gushes, running a manicured fingernail over the fluffy jumper that Serena wears in one photo, as if she’s going to be able to feel it through the satin paper. Then she looks up at Calem, and he wonders what he’s supposed to say in response to that.
“She looks the same as she always does. But the clothes are nice,” he adds when he sees that glare forming on Shauna’s face again.
“Serena is literally the most beautiful person in Kalos. She beat Diantha in a poll, you know.”
“Where do they even do these polls?”
“I don’t know! But she is a style icon, and you say she looks the same as she always does?!”
“She looks the same to me.”
Their conversation is interrupted by another patron of the café, who very politely intervenes to ask for Calem’s autograph. He can sign it in his sleep now, and scribbles on the piece of paper she hands him and returns it with a smile.
“Serena really likes you, you know,” Shauna tells him earnestly, and it only takes a moment for Calem to realise to what extent she means.
“She… what? Really?” He asks, and Shauna rolls her eyes. “Why?”
“I don’t know, I didn’t ask her for an itemised list of reasons. But I was talking to her on the phone not long before I came back, and I asked how everyone was, and she just… kept going on about you, and how much you’d been hanging out, and…”
“Did she actually tell you, or are you inferring from what she did say?”
“Might be the second one,” Shauna mumbles, looking away. “But seriously, my judgement is spot on! I always thought she had a bit of a crush on you when we were all travelling around, and she still seems to have it! I say seize the opportunity, Calem, because she is the most beautiful woman in Kalos.”
“Do her battling skills or how smart she is or anything else not matter? Just her looks? And she doesn’t even look the same in the magazines, she looks worse. They always do her makeup weird; she looks nicer when she does it herself.”
Shauna fixes him with a stare, the most serious face she can muster. It doesn’t last long though, as her mouth breaks into a smile, teeth and all. She slams one hand on the table, picking her phone up with the other.
“Listen to you! Ooh, she’s pretty and she’s smart! Face it – you like her just as much as she likes you,” she accuses, and although Calem can feel his face turning pink, he refuses to answer.
“I just don’t know what she sees in me,” he says after a moment. “I was named one of the worst dressed men in Kalos last year.”
“I can help with that, if that’s your main concern,” Shauna offers. “But really, you’ve always been there for her, you’re the Champion, for Arceus’s sake, and I will admit that you are a really genuine guy. I’d say give it a go.”
“I can’t.”
“Boo!” Shauna says. “You’d be so cute together too – a real power couple. Taking over Kalos with good looks and top-tier Pokémon battling skills.”
“Only one of us has good looks, though.”
“We can fix that,” Shauna encourages. “There is absolutely nothing wrong with your face, dearest Calem, but I will admit that your hair is… atrocious.”
“I haven’t had the time to get it cut.”
“Since…”
“Since… I left Vaniville Town.”
“Yeah, this is now an intervention. Tomorrow, we are going to Lumiose City, and I will go with you to the hairdressers and help you buy clothes. You will no longer be Kalos’s most unfashionable man. I will get you into the top ten if it is the last thing I do!”
“Thanks?”
“You will be welcome, Calem, I swear it.”
Somehow, Calem actually believes her. Maybe it’s the fact that he hasn’t seen her in so long and the nostalgia is making him follow blindly in his friend’s footsteps. Or maybe it’s the fact that really he would like to change.
Serena’s career is thriving. Shauna has settled on what she wants to do. Tierno’s troupe of dancing Pokémon is the most popular new form of entertainment in Kalos. Trevor’s research with Professor Sycamore is breaking new ground in his study of Pokémon environments. And while being the Champion is nothing to turn your nose up at, Calem has to wonder if there really is anything else for him out there.
Really, he should be at work, but he phoned ahead to the Elite Four and wondered if anyone was coming today. Calem received a negative response, and breathes a sigh of relief as he instead heads towards Lumiose City. The League is running a lot more smoothly now, Drasna told him. He implemented a booking system that has to give the Elite Four and himself at least twenty-four hours’ notice of a challenge, meaning that all five of them can pursue other interests. For Calem, that’s mostly sleeping.
Being Champion has really taken it out of him in the last two years, and he didn’t really notice how bad it had gotten until Shauna pointed it out. He’s tired all the time, and battling isn’t quite as fun as it used to be. Maybe it’s the distinct lack of a rival – Shauna and Serena pushed him forward back when they were journeying together, as well as Tierno and Trevor, albeit in a different way. Now he is indisputably the best in Kalos – maybe he should look further afield for a rival?
Shauna’s face is once again unimpressed when Calem arrives to meet her, mostly because in his daydreaming, he almost walked into her. She sighs, and looks him up and down, evaluating his looks.
“You look worse than yesterday!”
“Well, yesterday I was meeting a friend for coffee. Today I’m getting my hair cut. They’re not really the same thing.”
“I was going to try to take you to that fancy boutique, but they’re hardly going to let us in if you look like that!”
“Let’s just get the haircut over with and we’ll see about the… rest.”
To Shauna’s delight, Calem sits quietly in the chair and allows the stylist to get to work. And to Calem’s delight, the stylist doesn’t mention how bad his hair is, nor does she bring up the fact that he’s the Champion. Perhaps she doesn’t recognise him – maybe he’s not a famous a face as he thought he was. Diantha was huge, and coming after her… well, people just don’t seem to care as much.
When the stylist is done, she takes a step back, and allows Calem to have a good look at himself in the mirror. It doesn’t quite look like him. He looks brighter, somehow, as if losing some hair has taken a weight off his shoulders. Shauna grins in the reflection, and he finds a smile making its way onto his face.
They stop for lunch in Café Soleil, a favourite location of Calem’s. Shauna seems to be practically vibrating in her seat as she sits opposite Calem, and he suspects that she’s up to something once again, despite the current something that she’s up to not being over yet. He ignores her in favour of his soup, knowing that whatever she is bursting at the seams to tell him will spill out eventually.
“Serena’s going on a date!” Is what comes out, and it’s not really the sort of news that Calem wanted to hear.
“Oh.”
“This is the perfect opportunity for you!”
“Explain.”
“So she phoned me last night to tell me this, and I had to pretend to be super excited for her even though I had literally been telling you that I think you’d be the perfect couple like, three hours before. Anyway, it’s with this guy from The Ability Warrior! Like the main guy off the show.”
“So she’s famous enough to be going out with TV stars now? That’s… nice.”
“As if you’re not more famous than him!” Shauna hisses. “Anyway, I have it on good authority that this guy has a track record of not turning up for dates. He went out with Nadia from that… items with Nadia show, and she did a whole interview complaining about how he was always late to things, or never turned up, or…”
“I get it, you’re worried about her getting hurt.”
“Yeah! And I also have a plan.”
“Does it involve me by any chance?” Calem asks, knowing before he even opened his mouth that the answer was definitely yes.
“All you have to do is conveniently go to Restaurant Le Wow on Saturday at say… eight? When she’ll be there, and he won’t have turned up, and you can spend time with her!”
“And I can’t just ask her out normally?”
“Calem, when would you get the courage to do that?” Shauna asks him honestly, and he just looks back at her, knowing that she’s right – he’s never once had the nerve to make a move on Serena, despite his long held festering crush on her. “Exactly.”
“So you just expect me to conveniently be there and just hope that this guy doesn’t turn up?”
“Basically,” she says with a shrug. “Sounds fool proof to me – either you get a date or a dinner.”
“Why are you trying so hard with all of this anyway? Why do you care?”
“Because you two are my friends!” Shauna tells him with a little bit more force than is necessary. “And because… Trevor told me you’re miserable. And you look miserable, and you’re acting miserable, and I think getting to hang out with her will make you happy. And it’ll definitely make Serena happy.”
“We already hang out though. We battle sometimes.”
“That’s not the same. Just… if it doesn’t go well, I’m not going to make you go on another date. Give it a go! I promise you that she likes you – all you have to do is be yourself. That’s what she likes – the you from before… all this. Being the Champion, and her being famous, and…”
“It wasn’t that long ago,” Calem points out, breathing out a laugh. “She told me before though… she said she didn’t need me. She could do things on her own.”
“She didn’t need you to help her on her journey, Calem,” Shauna says, rolling her eyes as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “She didn’t say she didn’t need or want you as a friend. You can be that to her at least, even if nothing else works out.”
Calem nods mutely – Shauna does have a point. If he had known sooner than yesterday that Serena liked him, he might have made a move. But she had never displayed any signs of liking him, not ones that were obvious to him at least. And Shauna is usually right about these things, even if she gets a little overexcited in the process.
“Will you please let me take you to the boutique then?” Shauna asks, and Calem sighs, and Calem relents.
Getting into the boutique is an adventure in and of itself. The woman at the door lets Shauna in without a second glance, but stops Calem in his tracks, scrunching her nose up at his messy clothes. Her attitude quickly changes when one of the other assistants points out who he is – that’s the Champion! – and he’s allowed in. He can see the flashing of cameras out of the corner of his eye as he follows Shauna up to the men’s floor, trying his best to resist rolling his eyes.
Truthfully, Calem can’t recall if he’s ever worn a suit before. But at Shauna’s insistence, he tries one on. The assistant on the men’s floor is a lot calmer than the women downstairs – an older man who greets him by name as if he was an old friend before pointing out some of the clothes to Calem. Shauna, the traitor, takes a seat on the other side of the floor and just watches.
The first suit is blue, and as soon as Calem comes out of the fitting room to show Shauna, she snorts with laughter and he turns around, ignoring her protests to come back. The second suit, black with a white shirt, is more of a success – she nods in approval, and the man from the shop agrees that it fits well. There’s something missing though, he muses, and shoos Calem back into the room.
Shauna practically applauds when she sees the last suit – grey jacket and trousers, and a black silk shirt underneath. Against his pale skin and dark hair, this look works better for Calem. Reluctantly, he agrees to buy it, as long as the man in the shop doesn’t tell him how much it costs.
“Wait, before you get changed again, let me take a picture!” Shauna says, earning an eye roll from her friend. “Come on! Give me your phone!”
He can’t bring himself to smile, but he poses for her before marching back inside the changing room, hoping that this nightmare will be over soon. It’s bad enough that Shauna is making him go on this stupid excursion to the restaurant on Saturday, but having to wear a stupid outfit makes him feel even worse about the whole thing. At least he’ll have this suit if the League puts on any events – one bright side to this whole debacle.
Shauna hands his phone back to him at the counter, having picked him out some more clothes. At least these ones look more like things he’d actually wear – jeans and t-shirts and a zip up jacket that Calem must admit that he had admired on the way into the shop. He pays, reluctantly, well aware that this boutique is known for its ridiculous prices.
Once they leave, Calem can breathe a sigh of relief. His bags are heavy, his brain is mush, and he can’t wait to get home and not have to think about shopping or haircuts or lunches. Shauna doesn’t seem too keen to let him leave just yet though, and while he wants to be home more than anything right now, he also can’t bear to be rude to her.
“I think before I leave I’m going to drop by the Lumiose Press office, just to see if there’s any sort of… opportunities.”
“Sounds like a good idea.”
“Oh, look! There’s a whole gang of tourists over there. If I were you I’d be making my escape right about now. They’re bound to know who you are – you are like the celebrity.”
“I know you keep saying I’m that famous, but barely anyone recognises me.”
“That’s because you don’t really work on your image. Which is what we’re doing now! Diantha was so well liked as well as being well-known. If you’re not well-known, you’re not going to be liked. Unfortunately, that’s just how these things go. Look at some of the Champions in the other regions too – remember Steven Stone? I used to love him when I was younger. Oh, and Leon! You know, from Galar. He’s like, the number one! That’s the sort of person that the people want you to be.”
“I can’t be like them,” Calem tells her honestly. “I can pose for photos and buy suits but it won’t work in the long run. I’m not… likeable.”
“I like you perfectly well, Calem,” she says, the pep gone from her voice a little. This is the honest Shauna that he much prefers. “I just think that you need to care for yourself a little better so that everyone can see you for who you really are. I read some of the things they say about you online while I was away, and it wasn’t all… pleasant.”
“I… I do appreciate that you’re just trying to help. And I am thankful, I promise. It’s just… a little much all in one go.”
“Okay,” Shauna says, managing a smile. “Next time, we’ll just do tea at my house.”
“Sounds good. I’ll see you then.”
Shauna was right – the group of tourists notice him, but not before he has the chance to call his Talonflame from its ball and make a speedy exit.
Calem’s little cabin in Snowbelle City is the perfect house for him – just big enough for him and his Pokémon and a guest should he decide to have anyone over, tucked in the corner of the town. All the residents of the city know not to disturb him – Calem is a quiet man, and appreciates his privacy.
Curiosity takes the better of him after hearing Shauna’s comments. He’s never felt the need to look himself up online, and generally avoids the celebrity columns of the newspapers anyway – they don’t usually interest him. He types his name into the search bar, and holds his breath.
The first few aren’t too bad – older articles from when he was on his journey. There’s one about when he took down Team Flare, his name cropping up as well as Serena and Shauna’s. Another follows when he became Champion, both from the day Diantha lost and from his inauguration. Both of them describe him as quiet and reserved, but some of the following articles aren’t so kind.
The quietness becomes a problem after a while for the press, his refusal to speak to them seen as standoffish instead of due to the fear that settles in his stomach when he spots reporters. They comment on his appearance, slate what he wears. They compare him to Diantha, both in how they present themselves and in battling style. Worse still, they compare him to Serena, and wonder why on earth he managed to become Champion over her.
That makes him feel worse than anything else. When they were travelling, Serena was always so keen to beat him, sending challenges via the Holo Caster before the Rotom Phones were popular. And she was a great trainer too – a well balanced team, oozing with personality to match her own. She would make a great Champion, Calem thinks. Hindsight is wonderful – if he had known that there would be so many people against him, perhaps he would’ve stepped aside and let her take the throne.
He lifts his phone from the arm of the sofa to see if there’s any actual news from today. There’s nothing that he can see, though Shauna has texted him to say that she’s sorry once again. He replies quickly to reassure her that it’s okay – in a way, he needed this. Knowing that people are almost universally wary of him because he’s not like his predecessor has turned a switch on in Calem’s brain – he has to do something to be at least perceived as a normal person to the general public, as stupid as he might feel doing it.
What really interests him on his phone screen is the ‘999+’ icon sitting over the PokéGram app. He doesn’t use it all that often, and only has it on Siebold’s advice. All he’s ever posted is a picture of Greninja and one of a particularly nice lunch he had in Café Soleil a year and a half ago. It’s gone entirely unused since then, though he sometimes logs on to look at what his friends are posting.
His face greets him when he opens the app – the photo that Shauna took earlier on. He certainly didn’t post it, and he sighs aloud when he realises that she must have posted it when he was changing out of the stupid suit. It’s not the worst picture he’s ever seen himself – that honour goes to some of the photos in those articles. Still, it’s not one he would’ve posted himself.
She’s captioned it “shopping.”, and he has to give her some credit for how accurate that sounds as something he would write. The photo has gotten over five hundred thousand likes, a number that Calem can’t really wrap his head around. He has a blue tick next to his name, he notices for the first time – maybe that’s why.
But looking through the comments does wonders for his self-esteem, particularly after reading those articles. There’s a jokey one from Shauna- wow who took this?!?! – presumably commented minutes after she posted it herself. Some of the gym leaders have weighed in, and Siebold has posted a thumbs up emoji. Most of the comments are from strangers – looking good! one reads, followed by damn is this the same guy that’s the kalos champion?.
It feels a little strange to have his appearance now complimented by people he doesn’t know, but he can’t deny that it brings a smile to his face. As he continues to scroll, another blue tick catches his eye, with the username beside it simply reading @Serena. Calem’s heart almost stops in his chest when he spots her name, and her comment only makes things worse – Tres Bien!, followed by emojis with hearts for eyes.