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Bede never sought out being an actor, but that is what he’s become. Some of this can be blamed on Opal - it was her old profession, after all, and though she never pushed for him to learn how to perform he has picked up on some of her tricks. Some, too, can be attributed to his life and how he’s had to adapt over his short time alive. People expect certain things from him…different sorts of things.
He holds many characters in his hand, masks that he’s expected to put on to give others what it is that they want. When he walks out onto the field in Ballonlea’s Gym, he is the boisterous Gym Leader - a boy so boastful and full of himself, triumphant regardless of if he wins or loses. He is aware of the fortune granted to him during his darkest hour, and he plays it up grandly for the stands and the cameras and his opponents. Bede is all Opal wanted and more: he is Ballonlea’s pride and joy, their fairy prince.
When he’s out and about, whether it’s on run-of-the-mill errands or important League business, the face of the pompous Gym Leader retires. Instead, Bede is more polite and reigned in. He signs autographs and poses with fans with a smile. When the little girls rush him, begging for just a moment of his time, he releases his Pokemon and displays patience. The boy avoids crowds that feel too large, only becomes clipped and cold when the questions become too pointed and personal. At these times, Bede is a celebrity with a duty to his adoring public as well as his detractors. Well-mannered, soft-spoken, the pinnacle of all a lad with his sort of fame ought to be.
The revolving door of the people he must be is constantly moving, sometimes slow and sometimes fast. He is Victor’s sneering rival, but he is also Opal’s dutiful successor. One moment he is the hard-working and strict coach for his trainers, and another he is a representative for all children just like him: left alone and forgotten, floundering for a place in a world that refuses to listen to them. The wall of faces grows ever-longer with each passing day, yet Bede feels that he wears each one like a second skin when needed.
It may seem like so very much, especially given how cruel wearing all of those costumes has been in the past. To say that he never has time to simply be himself - not an actor in a one-man-production, but simply Bede - is simply incorrect. Moreover - to suggest that those times are rare, that the people included in them are equally minuscule, is to be intentionally ignorant.
The boy who sits down for tea with old Opal and listens to her as she regales him with tales of the family that he is now a part of…that is Bede. It is Bede who laughs with her, who lets her fuss with his hair and his clothes and who lets the old lady hug him. It’s Bede who Opal says she loves, and it is Bede who loves her back.
When Peonia calls in looking to complain about her dad or her schoolmates, the person who swipes the green button is Bede. They talk for hours, sometimes about nothing and sometimes about everything. Peonia fawns over the attention she gets just being around him when they venture out to the shops; Bede lets it happen. Peonia cries on him when the boy she really likes asks out one of her mates instead; Bede comforts her. Peonia tells him on her birthday that she thinks of him like her cousin and that she doesn’t care that he was never formally adopted by her uncle; Bede hugs her tight enough to hurt.
Victor invites Bede (not his rival, not the snobby Gym Leader, but Bede ) with him and the rest of the lot out to all sorts of places. Before, Bede had never been to an amusement park - Marnie shows him how to cheat the rigged games, Victor gets them all on Bede’s first roller coaster, Gloria buys fried food after fried food for him to try, Hop tries to pretend that he doesn’t scream on their run through the haunted house, and Peonia coaxes them all to get their faces painted. They all sleep over at one another’s homes, where Gloria and Peonia get into fights over watching either romances or terrible comedies and where everyone vetoes Hop’s suggestion of curry for supper. Bede, who never once thought of setting foot in an arcade, finds out thanks to their help that he is stupidly good at crane games and becomes hero-for-the-day by winning each of his friends (friends…he has those now) a prize. They invite him out camping and there, under the stars with all of them murmuring around him, Bede has never felt more himself in all his life.
And the person who meets Hop out in Glimwood Tangle once in a while…that is also Bede, and not the bully who destroyed Hop’s self-confidence during their Gym Challenge. In the cover of darkness, the hand that reaches out and takes the one of Galar’s newest scientific mind is Bede’s. When the clouds of Morelull drift by with crooning cries, they pass Bede (not the Leader, not the Celebrity) as Hop whispers something cheeky and private into his ear. The eerie but magical glow of the giant fungi catches Hop’s eyes as he stares at no one else but Bede.
The closet of persons that are also Bede is never long-forgotten; there is always work to do and people to please, after all. The important thing to remember is that they are all a part of him , and not the other way round. Bede is, under all the gusto and frippery, still Bede. It has taken a little while to find peace with that and to allow all he is to finally get that needed time in the spotlight - far too long, long enough to know that the child he was supposed to be deserved this time too. He is a sum of all of these parts…and until the curtain closes, he vows that he will spend his time on stage mostly as himself.
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Many roles later, and here I am as simply me.