Work Text:
Satoshi was almost fifteen minutes later to breakfast than he usually was one Friday morning
Today was the exam day for their Alolan history unit so the teen was probably just worried about that, Kukui reasoned offhandedly.
As he put together breakfast, the tv was playing a news channel to provide some background noise. Having it on during breakfast prep was something that Kukui has done for years, almost a decade now. Today’s channel was the international one.
As Satoshi climbed down from the loft, the news anchor announced that today, being August 18th, was the one-year anniversary of the Kalos Crisis.
As the lady spoke, the sixteen-year-old fumbled and missed the last rung, sending him crashing to the wooden floor.
“Satoshi! Are you alright?” Kukui asked. He had abandoned breakfast prep to help him up.
“Y-yeah,” he confirmed.
The pair set about finishing putting together the human-appropriate breakfast (Kukui) and dishing out the pokechow (Satoshi).
Once it was all dished out. Satoshi hunched over his bowl.
Any other day they would chat about that days’ content or similar and Satoshi would inhale his breakfast in two minutes flat. Not today. Today they ate in silence and the teen took as long as a normal person would.
While they ate, a different news anchor resumed the coverage of the anniversary. A few short clips were played. Satoshi was intently focused on his bowl, ignoring the world.
Eventually they finished and headed to school.
Throughout the exam his boarder kept spacing out, Kukui could tell from his desk at the front of the room.
“Satoshi,” the professor called him up to the desk. “Do you want to go for a walk?”
“What about the exam?”
“You can finish it later,” he told him.
With that confirmation, Satoshi returned to his desk to collect Pikachu before he left the classroom.
Kukui wrote down the remaining time on a post-it note for later.
When hours passed and Satoshi still didn’t return from his ‘walk’, even when school let out for the weekend, Kukui collected his pokemon and went to track him down.
Alola’s Pokemon Professor found his boarder sitting on a tree stump in a clearing in the middle of the woods near the school. Pikachu was sparking slightly from where he sat curled up in his trainer’s lap.
“Satoshi,” Kukui intoned as he stepped into the clearing. The boy turned to face him.
“Oh, Alola Kukui,” he greeted as if nothing was wrong. As if he hadn’t been so distracted he had to leave in the middle of an exam.
“Alola,”
“H-has school finished already?”
“It finished over two hours ago, it’s four PM,”
“Oh…”
Kukui walked around to kneel in front of Satoshi. When he looked him in the eyes, Kukui did not see him as his boarder or who was a student of the Alola Pokemon School, instead, he saw a formerly fifteen-year-old boy who was covered in blood and abraded to all Distortion.
It was at that moment Kukui was reminded of why the sixteen-year-old’s face had been so familiar when he had met him months ago.
“You were there, weren’t you?” They both knew what ‘it’ was: the Kalos Crisis.
Satoshi looked away, being careful not to knock Pikachu off of his lap before he nodded.
“I was,” Silence settled over the pair again.
“But I’m fine now, see?” Satoshi said after a moment, throwing his arms out wide.
Kukui met his eyes, even after the teen tried to break eye contact once again. “It’s alright to not be fine, Satoshi,”
The sixteen-year-old looked away as Pikachu readjusted himself on his lap.
“Yeah, I know that but I — do — can’t,“ Satoshi cut himself off, clearly frustrated with his stumble over his words.
“—It’s one thing to know it and another to actually do something about it,” Kukui finished the sentence.
“Yeah,”
Satoshi got up, not before Pikachu had climbed up onto his shoulder, and the pair headed back out of the woods and towards the house.
When they made it back to the house, Kukui put away the countertop calendar and made sure that the tv was off.
Satoshi hesitated just inside the house after he followed the teacher in, his eyes flickered between the loft (and the homework that he and Kukui both knew was waiting for him) and Pikachu who had scurried off towards the other pokemon.
The conflict was obvious: he should go work on his homework that's due tomorrow but it wouldn’t provide the distraction that he so desperately needed, or he could go outside to train with his pokemon. In the end, going outside won out (as Kukui had expected).
As Alola’s Pokemon Professor washed up the dishes that had piled up in the sink since the previous morning, he couldn’t not get the mental picture of Satoshi held up in the air like he had been nailed to a cross out of his mind.
The lack of noise from outside led to the realization that his boarder and associated pokemon were no longer outside. A quick check outside confirmed that Satoshi hadn’t gone far, only further out onto the beach. He was sitting on the sand, apparently rolling a ball along the sand for Rockruff and Pikachu to chase and roll back to him.
Kukui hoped that the second anniversary, next year, went better than this one had. Even if Satoshi was still in Alola or if he had moved on already (a small part of him hoped that it’d be the first one despite the obvious).
It was only when they were walking to school on Monday morning a week later that Kukui realized that Satoshi had never finished his exam.