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The door to Auntie’s wing creaks.
Iris curses herself for forgetting—she’s lived in or around this building for most of her life, damn it, she should remember what doors and windows and floorboards make noise.
“Who is it?” comes Auntie’s voice from a little further inside, past the shelves of the mini-library and echoing around the circular room. “Caitlin?”
“It’s Iris,” calls Iris from the doorway, but there’s no response, of course. The echoing effect only really works one-way.
She tiptoes inside, the floor turning abruptly from dark tile to limestone blocks that are cold against her bare feet. She skirts the bookshelves and comes to a stop at the rickety wooden staircase up to the loft, the one that everyone complains is going to fall to pieces someday and already gives Iris at least one splinter nearly every time she climbs it.
Auntie’s voice floats from the top. “Caitlin, if you’ve come to return that book, you can just put it back. You don’t have to ask first, you know I trust you not to mess with things on the shelves.”
“I’m not Sissy,” says Iris from the bottom of the staircase, and the little sliver of Auntie’s elbow she can see resting upon the desk in the loft at the top jerks a little in surprise.
“Oh! Iris! What do you need, dear?”
“Can I come up?” Iris calls, a little meekly.
“Yes, yes, of course you can,” comes the answer, so Iris carefully ascends the stairs as gingerly as possible, crossing her fingers for no errant bits of wood to poke the soles of her feet. Her efforts pay off, and she steps up into Auntie’s loft un-splintered.
“Hi,” she says.
Auntie, seated at her desk, looks up from her typewriter and adjusts her glasses. “Hi, sweetheart. What are you doing up so late?”
Iris points to the clock on the edge of the desk, the hands of which indicate that it is, in fact, 3:47. “It’s morning.”
Auntie turns the clock around, peering at the face, before replying, “So it is. This early, then.”
“I couldn’t sleep,” Iris admits, gaze drifting to the side. This is always the worst part.
“Bad dream?”
Iris nods reluctantly. Auntie sees through her immediately.
“Iris, is something else wrong?”
“I just,” starts Iris, before pulling embarrassedly at the hem of her nightgown. “I feel like—like I’m too grown-up. For bad dreams. Or I should be.”
“What?” Auntie blinks, nonplussed. “Who on Earth told you that?”
Iris looks away again, feeling her face heat up.
“Iris, who told you that you were too old to have nightmares? Was it your grandfather?”
“No!” Iris gasps, a bit righteously angry at the thought. Drayden would never say that, and neither would Alder—but maybe it’s still true.
“Marshal wouldn’t—Caitlin, then? Grimsley? Was it Grimsley?”
Iris goes quiet again, fidgeting even more, but even she knows it’s a clear yes. Auntie’s mouth turns down, followed by her eyebrows.
“I’m going to have a talk with that man, specifically concerning what and what not to say to children,” mutters Auntie, before holding up a finger in a wise sort of way. “Nobody’s too grown-up for bad dreams. Everybody gets them, you know, no matter how old you are.”
“Even you?” Iris sniffs.
“Even me,” nods Auntie, a smile pulling at the corner of her mouth. “Marshal and Caitlin, too, and your grandfather. And Grimsley, no matter what he tells you.”
The smile turns softer as Auntie leans in over her desk and says, “Come here, now, and I’ll tell you a secret.”
Iris loves secrets. They were her currency, before Grandpa started to actually allow her to have pocket money—you can get pretty far if you know the right stuff. Auntie takes her glasses off and gently folds the arms as Iris sidesteps the desk, gladly allowing Auntie to scoop her up and pull her close, settling Iris on her lap in the cushy desk chair.
“You know I’ve known Grimsley since we were little kids—littler than you,” Auntie starts. “We met in school, in Castelia, and went on our journeys together when we turned ten. I found work at a publishing company in the city afterward, to keep myself afloat while I trained, and despite my warning he took off for the Black City first chance he got.
“We were still young, then, though—too young, I think, for whatever it was he was doing there. Castelia is hardly best for an errant teenager, but at least I had a job. I was… apprenticing, you know, I had friends, I had connections. I had a good boss who would vouch for me if I got in trouble. My older sister, off in Alola, I had her, and my pen pal in Sinnoh, him too. I had help. I don’t know if he did.
“Black City is a strange, dangerous place, Iris. I hope you never have reason to find yourself there before you turn thirty, and maybe even after that. I’ve only been a handful of times, and every time I leave I hope to never go back.
“It’s a monument to human greed, I think, with the buildings that go on into the sky forever, every wall papered with layers upon layers of advertisements. Every other building is a bar or casino, every street corner is damp and cold. No trees, really, no wild pokémon, just concrete and glass and neon as far as you can see. The city wants you to stay forever—everyone there is just like you in the worst way.
“It’s not the ideal environment for a fifteen-year-old boy with nothing but his team and the clothes on his back, I suppose is my point. Easy to enter but terrifyingly hard to leave. Time passed, and eventually I got—well, I got worried, because he’d stopped returning my calls. Stopped answering my letters. Stopped receiving my letters—they’d come back to me unopened, stamped red with failed to send, and I knew he’d never even gotten them. So I took a friend of ours—Morty, from Johto, you met him at the last League conference—he was a year younger than us, so, oh, I don’t know, sixteen or seventeen at the time—and we left for the City to make sure he was alright.
“He was dealing blackjack at the Starlight on the corner of Orion and Gemini when Morty and I found him. Doing alright for himself on the money front, from what we could tell, but Iris—you wouldn’t have even recognized him.
“He used to tell me, earlier, when my calls still rang through and my post still found his address, that day never broke over Black City—that the sun never rose between the skyscrapers, that the streetlights never turned off, that the shadows ate the city up whole until there was nothing left for the light. And I never believed him, really—I figured he was exaggerating, like he was sometimes prone to doing, or maybe that he just kept such a horrible sleeping schedule he somehow managed to never be awake for daytime. But after Morty and I spent what must have been three days there, looking for him, I realized that he was right. The night—it doesn’t end, there. It never did, and I don’t think it ever will.
“He was thinner than he should have been, and pale, even more than usual—enough so that you almost thought you could see through him if you turned your head just right. His hair was blacker, dull and dark, and even his eyes were more grey than blue, like they’d begun to lose their color. I remember how he just seemed so tired—no, it was deeper than that. Bone-deep. Exhausted would be better, maybe. He looked like—like a ghost, like a vampire, a dead man walking, like just being there was sucking the life from him.
“Morty called out to him from the entryway, and he looked up from his cards when he heard his name, and—for a moment, I wasn’t sure he even recognized me.
“But he did, of course he did. He got up from the table and left, just like that, in the middle of the game, like he didn’t even care. He met us at the door and followed us out, and when we told him we wanted to take him home—home home, greater Unova, not wherever he was staying in that horrible place—he just nodded, lit a cigarette and went along. And so we left, and it took us twice as long to find the highway out of the city as it did to enter it.
“He wasn’t really… the same, after that. He wasn’t a different person, of course, and he’s since bounced back in all the ways that truly matter—I would say he’s closer now to how he was at fifteen than he was at eighteen—and I thought, at the time, of course, that perhaps he’d just grown up, and wasn’t taking it as well as I had. It’d been three years, after all. But three years trapped in Black City—and he was trapped, I think, in some way. I like to think he would have left if he could have—it did something to him, something I’ve never been able to put my finger on. Changed him, a little bit.
“I have my suspicions about what, exactly, is wrong with Black City, which isn’t important, really. But I know that on the way back to Castelia—I drove most of the way—at one point over the Skyarrow, he turned to me from the passenger seat and asked me, voice all quiet like it never used to be… he asked me how long he’d been gone.
“So I replied, well, you left when we were fifteen, how old are you now? How old am I? Sort of—poking at him, you know. And he stared out the windshield with those washed-out eyes, watching the lights of Castelia come up closer in the distance, and he told me that he didn’t know.
“That was—well,” says Auntie, a bit distantly, stroking Iris’ hair with an absentminded hand. “I’m sure you can imagine how that scared me to hear. I’m not sure how I kept driving—Morty was asleep in the back, I didn’t want to wake him, but the rest of the trip was a blur.
“We got back to Castelia a few hours later, and Morty left to return to Johto an hour or so after that. By then it was dark, of course, but—a friendly dark, a familiar night that I’d been used to for the years I’d lived there, almost fascinatingly different from the dark of Black City. Time to sleep, at any rate, so I told him that he could take my bed for the night. He agreed, but he was hesitant, and when I asked him what was wrong he told me that he was… worried. Scared. He wouldn’t tell me why, but I think I knew.
“So I followed him to the bedroom, and he sat down on the bed with all his clothes on, and I sat down next to him, and for a split second it was like he’d never left. We were thirteen again, curled up together in a bed on the top floor of the Nacrene Pokémon Center, laughing into Burgh’s ear over the X-Transceiver when all three of us should have been asleep.
“The moment passed, though, when he turned to look at me, and we were hardly adults but it was like he’d been gone for decades. I thought he might cry, but he didn’t. He just—“ The corner of Auntie’s mouth curves up again, the suggestion of a smile at the memory. “He asked me to tell him a story. A bedtime story, so he could sleep.
“So I did. I don’t remember what story I told, but I told him one. And I told him one the next night, and the night after that, and the night after that. He stayed with me for a while—he’d left all he had in Black City—and I think I told him a story every night for two weeks. And then eventually it was every other night, and then once a week, and then once a month, but I still did it. Every once in a while for years and years after, I did it.
“And you want to know when the last time he asked me to do that for him was?”
“When,” asks Iris.
“Three weeks ago,” whispers Auntie conspiratorially. “Three weeks. At the ripe old age of twenty-nine he asked me to tell him a bedtime story. And you know what?”
“What?”
“I did it,” says Auntie, poking Iris in the stomach to make her giggle, breaking some of the tension from Auntie’s story. “I did it, and I didn’t even make fun of him for it. I never will, because he’s my best friend. I don’t know what happened to him in Black City, but—Iris, I want you to remember this whenever he or anyone else tells you you’re too old for nightmares. Anyone who tells you that is being a hypocrite.”
“Okay,” says Iris dutifully, and then yawns so wide her jaw cracks a little bit. The just-left-of-scary story, as usual for Auntie’s yarns, was on the edge of knocking her right out—she wonders, vaguely, how much of what she’d just heard had been a fabrication, meant to put a kid to sleep and nothing more.
Auntie doesn’t lie, though, so maybe it was true. She tells a lot of stories, but she doesn’t lie.
“Getting tired?” Auntie asks, amused, and Iris’ head is so heavy against her shoulder she can barely lift it enough to nod. She feels more than hears Auntie’s quiet laugh, just before she shifts a bit to tuck an arm beneath Iris’ legs and another against her back to lift her from the desk chair.
“You are getting a bit too big for me to pick you up like this, though, you know,” she says as she crosses the room, laying Iris down carefully onto her sheets and sliding into the bed beside her, pulling the comforter up around Iris’ shoulders. “Caitlin already can’t do it without telekinesis. Marshal will probably be able to lift you forever, but Grimsley and I? Oh, our time is definitely fleeting.”
“Told you I was too big for bad dreams,” Iris mumbles into the pillow. It smells like lavender, sort of, and like Auntie’s clothes soap, which itself smells like fake-pomeg-berry.
“Oh, sweetheart, I didn’t mean it like that,” says Auntie, and Iris feels one of her hands come to comb itself through her bunched-up cloud of hair. “I’m just not very strong, that’s all. Like I said, you can still have bad dreams, even when you’re bigger than me.”
“But I’m the Champion,” says Iris plaintively, and maybe it sounds a little like a childish whine but Iris doesn’t even care, really. Not right now, at least. The question is more important than how she asks it, especially in front of Auntie, who she isn't really worried about patronizing her. She's always been good at avoiding that.
“Iris,” says Auntie, before pausing as though she’s choosing her words very carefully.
“I meant it, when I said that nobody is too old for nightmares,” she continues after a moment, absently stroking through Iris’ hair. “But being the Champion—it doesn’t make you a superhero. Sure, other Champions have done incredible, impossible things, but you shouldn’t have to chart the Distortion World, or dismantle Team Rocket, or stop a meteor from hitting the Earth. Nobody should.
“Being good at battling doesn’t make you any older, or—or give you life experience. You’re so grown-up in so many ways, but Iris, you’re only eleven,” Auntie finishes, voice wavering just a little. “Cynthia, Steven, Lance—they’re grown-ups. You’re still a little girl.”
“Does growing up mean I have to do scary things?” Iris asks, so quiet, almost nervous to say it. “Like Cynthia? And Steven, and Lance?”
“Maybe,” replies Auntie, just as quiet. “Maybe. If we’re lucky, nothing like that will happen again for a long, long time. But sometimes scary things—not world-ending scary, mind you, but just normal scary—will happen, and when you grow up you have to live with them.”
“I don’t wanna grow up if it means I’m gonna be scared,” Iris protests.
“Oh, baby, it happens to everyone,” Auntie says, smiling sadly in the dark. “This is what I mean—adults can still have nightmares, because growing up doesn’t mean that things stop being scary, even though what scares you might be different from what scared you when you were eleven.
“You probably won’t get dragged off by a Drifloon, or kidnapped by Elgyem, or eaten by a Wailord,” she continues. “But maybe one of us will leave, and we won’t come back. Maybe one of your friends or your team members will get hurt, and you’ll have to trust someone else to take care of them. Maybe you’ll get stuck in a bad place that you need a friend to get you out of. Maybe, one day, you won’t be the Champion anymore.
“All of that is scary, so scary. But part of growing up is learning to rise above your fear, and when you can’t do that, learning to adapt, to make it manageable. You can’t just turn fear off like a faucet. You need ways to deal with it.
“That’s why I tell your uncle bedtime stories, when he asks,” Auntie finishes. “Because Arceus knows that he’s a scared, scared man. And sometimes all I can do is sit with him and give him something else to think about for a while.”
Iris blinks slowly, assessing—eventually she decides that Auntie must be right, or if she isn’t, Iris is too tired to protest.
“You’ll tell me bedtime stories too, right?” she asks against Auntie’s shoulder, rubbing her left eye with a curled fist. Spots dance in her vision when she removes it and blinks again. “When I get scared?”
“Of course I will,” says Auntie, her voice seeming to stretch away as Iris finally falls asleep. “Anytime you need.”