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When she lets herself into her apartment, flicking on the light, dropping her keys into the little wooden bowl with Phanpy carved onto the sides on the counter—a housewarming gift from Lyra—and pulling her hair bands out, she isn’t surprised to hear the TV running quietly in the other room. There’s no sound of greeting from the occupant of the room itself, but there never is. The sight of a pan and other utensils on the drying rack next to the sink is greeting enough, telling her that dinner has been made and her portion is probably in the microwave, still hot but ready to be reheated if she wanted it hotter.
Kris sets her bag down on the kitchen table, painted white and big enough for four, and kicks her shoes off because she wasn’t raised in a barn like some people—people who still wore their hat backwards at eighteen and thought that having their Ampharos deliver a Thunderbolt to their bread would make toasting it more efficient (it didn’t). The cozy air inside feels like a blessing after the freezing wind and snow outside and reminds her of journeying, sleeping under the stars with Houndoom curled warm at her back.
After the stress of her last exam, she’s almost tempted to throw all her studying out of the window, march out of her decently-sized Olivine City apartment and become a wandering trainer. It’d probably give her less headaches, for one, and with her fame as a former Champion she’d have no end of people who would want to battle her, so she’d be making more money than she received from merch royalties. Maybe.
She did get a lot from merch royalties.
Speaking of wandering trainers—
“Did you die in there or something?” Silver’s voice rings out, clear against the quiet, and she makes a face in his direction even though he can’t see her.
“Shut up,” she retorts back, but there’s no bite to it. “What’d you make?”
“Lasagna.” Opening up the microwave, she finds her slice, still warm, and decides against reheating it. She’s too hungry for that. Grabbing an already-dry fork off the dish rack, she makes her way to the living room, finally finding Silver spread out over the couch, Weavile napping on his makeshift bed on top of one of her shelves in the corner. He looks her over in greeting, probably noting the ever-growing bags under her eyes, and tucks his feet up closer to his chest to give her room to sit down.
Silver still didn’t really live anywhere, no matter how much she tried to coax him into staying in her guest bedroom now that she had her own place. He still wandered the region battling those who dared make eye contact with him—he’d gone from being a head shorter than her to a head taller and then some, and if you didn’t know him, he still kind of looked like the type to mug you in a back alley—albeit in a much more relaxed manner than he had all those years ago when the four of them were racing to the top. Some part of her wondered if he’d ever find a place to settle down, or if the concept had grown so foreign to him that he’d all but forgotten it no matter how many times he stayed under her roof, or even Ethan’s or Lyra’s. Only time would tell.
It had taken a few years, but he’d finally grown comfortable enough to stay with them without any sort of tension coiled in his body whatsoever—when the weather was bad, when he was feeling sick, or even when he just wanted to, which was becoming more and more often these days now that Kris lived on her own and it didn’t make him feel like he was encroaching on their parents’ houses. She was sure that he still stayed with them whenever he was in the area around New Bark, but Pokémon and trainers alike were both weaker around there and there was no good money in battling novices.
On the bright side, when he’d finally learned to cook (something that had blossomed from the combined efforts of both Kris and Ethan, because while Ethan had stupid ideas sometimes he did know his way around a kitchen. Lyra, on the other hand, was banned from the kitchen), it meant that she wouldn’t have to do it herself because he always did it for some reason, something she was eternally grateful for when she stumbled home, barely awake, after a late-night studying session at the university library.
She hadn’t been in one of those sessions tonight, but she was starting to regret taking night classes so she’d have more time to dedicate to both herself and her Pokémon in the daytime.
When she wasn’t doing homework, that is.
“Are you gonna eat it or are you gonna just stare at it all night?” Silver deadpans, and Kris realizes that she’s just kind of been staring down at the sauce for however long it’s been since she sat down. Scowling at his expression, she begins to shovel it into her mouth; she hadn’t realized how hungry she was until the aroma hit her nostrils.
The TV’s not playing anything novel or new, just some rerun of a cartoon. She nods at it, hands too full to gesture.
“What's this on for?”
Silver sighs, a long-suffering look overtaking his features. “It puts Weavile to sleep.”
Kris swallows and stares. “Are you sure you’re not just giving into your deep, dark desire to watch…” she glances at the title of the show in the bottom right corner, “ The Adventures of Patrat and Pachirisu?”
“No, I’m not—here. Watch.” He digs the remote out and changes the channel, and—yeah, sure enough, Weavile’s eyes fly open and he immediately starts giving his trainer one hell of a stink-eye. Silver rolls his eyes and changes the channel back, and Weavile gives him one last narrow-eyed glare before he settles back down.
She’s trying so, so hard not to laugh.
“I don’t want to hear it,” he grumbles.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were thinking it.”
The silence that follows is comfortable, mellow, not at all like the iciness that used to hang in the air between them when they’d face each other on the battlefield when they were ten.
It’s nice.
“Lance offered me the Mahogany Gym,” Silver says, without warning, and Kris is glad she finished the lasagna already or she might have choked on it.
“Come again?”
“Pryce is going to be retiring soon,” he’s speaking like he’s not quite sure how to get the words out, and it makes her think he might’ve choked on something when he first heard it too. “He hasn’t announced it to the public yet, but I was training with Lance a week ago, and…he asked if I wanted the position when Pryce stepped down.”
She doesn’t bother saying that it’s a fantastic opportunity that so little people were offered in their lives, that he’d be set for life with a gym leader’s paycheck, because they both know that already. Instead, she asks, “Have you thought about it any?”
He shrugs, and it’s a couple seconds before he speaks again. “A bit. Not sure it’s for me, though.”
And that’s kind of the dumbest thing she’s ever heard, because Silver is hardworking and determined and the Mahogany Gym would probably have to be bumped above Clair’s when it came to the difficulty level because he would refuse to settle for anything less than demolishing every challenger that came ill-prepared to any gym of his, but—
This was Silver, who still refused to settle down in any one place, and a gym was something that required a lot of sticking around.
And that wasn’t even getting started on the hot mess that was Giovanni, who’d been a gym leader himself. If there was one thing Silver was terrified of—not that he’d ever admit it, but she’d known him long enough to see it—it was becoming his father.
Even though him becoming a gym leader would have no correlation with Giovanni’s shitty parenting and international crime-lording whatsoever, but he probably hadn’t gotten past the gym leader part yet.
Instead of getting into that, though, Kris nods again and puts her plate down in her lap so she can reach over and squeeze his shoulder.
“Hey,” she says, and Silver looks up at her, face revealing nothing but idle thought and eyes revealing everything else. “You’ll figure it out. It’s your choice.”
He snorts, but doesn’t move to brush her hand off. “Well, obviously. I wouldn’t sit in a gym for hours waiting for challengers if I didn’t want to.”
And with that, she figures he’ll work it out. He’s not so caught up in it that it’s driving him up a wall, he’s just being a little overly cautious. She gives him one last squeeze, shaking him a little for good measure and grinning at the upward quirk of his lips she gets in return, before sitting back to watch two animated Pokémon running from a bigger, angrier, animated Gyarados.
Kris doesn’t register the plate being taken out of her hands as she starts to nod off, nor does she register the fact that her head had tipped over at some point to rest on his shoulder, but she knows that she has homework due tomorrow, and that her mom’s birthday is coming up soon and that she needs to figure out what to get her, and that she has to call Lyra tomorrow and see if that egg she’d found in Dark Cave had hatched yet, and…
Yeah. It’s nice.