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When did it start, they always ask.
How do you explain it?
You dodge and ignore and generally act clueless until one sleepless night, when all your thoughts orbit around him (or the idea, or the memory, or the feeling), and all those hours thinking up strategies and trekking up hills have loosened your tongue. When you aren’t really speaking at all but just letting some that pent-up energy go, a small vent for the volcano, and no one is really listening, not really, not to you and definitely not now. Words of nothing, sentences as transient as the fading night sky— it was easy, you would say.
What did you say? Maybe it was when you were in school and he always beat you, or when you were going to save a fallen pidgie and he got there first. Maybe you were running. Maybe he was too. Maybe you and him were just born into it, this insatiable need to defeat the other in a competition, in a calling, in life itself.
He wouldn’t give in that easy in comparison (always comparing). He would say that there is nothing between them, that riling him up was a pity move, that even remembering his name was a courtesy he owed to his grandpa who never liked such disrespect in the first place. He would ignore you, push you away, expunge any connections until you were right in front of him, and you wouldn’t even know it if he kept his mouth shut— and that was his biggest weakness right there. In front of you, the truth has to come out, melted bit by bit, even if it is ephemeral as the glint of the sun right before it went down.
What would he actually say? He remembers this time, where you were running around on the beach and trying to do everything at once. You saw a kid eat ice-cream and you wanted it, you saw a broken sandcastle and you built on it, and right when he was going to go swim in the waters you dove in and wet the sand he was on.
And it was on, wasn’t it? He wanted to put you in your place, he wanted to teach you himself. He wanted you to remember his name when he became the best of the best, and when you both stumbled into the lab after the promise of being a trainer, well, it was over too.
(For you? For me?)
Too many words, too little time. It’s stupid, not worth remembering. So many excuses for the same thing, and the story always was a little different for an opposing pair who used to live so close. A town big enough for two. One dream and only one winner. Isn’t that right?
It’s simple, really, they decide on. It doesn’t matter.
Why do you bother, they needle next.
What can you say?
You bite your bottom inner lip and scrunch up your face and curl your fingers into the roots of your hair, stuttering and generally building up into a bluster until it explodes out. By the time you get there, though, everyone is many many metres from you and already regretting the question, never really sticking around to hear the answer, and maybe that’s for the best. A storm in the making, sparking up and threatening downpour— who likes the sound thunder makes? Not many, you’d think. Not enough to stay outside when the warning becomes reality. Still, all lightning needs an outlet, and you mutter your piece on hands sandwiched between your heavy head and your knobbly knees, surrounded by still/dynamic nature.
What words came out? You could’ve been friends, maybe, and you hated lost opportunities, especially those rubbed in your face all hours of the day. Always forced into tight quarters and measured up against him, the professor’s grandson, against each other it was no wonder why you hate each other. He started it, like always, trying at a game that you would gladly move away from if its pull wasn’t so strong. Maybe it’s just all the pure stubbornness and an unwillingness to give up sucked up between heaven and earth and squandered between the two of you, one of the many things you guys involuntarily shared.
In contrast, he would have given up his answer in a heartbeat, a blink, as readily as fresh soil begets plants. A grudge is a grudge, and a promise is a promise, and an insult has to be taken up in arms in whatever way you can. So when you challenged him he accepted, and when the time came he dished it out, bon appetit, and there’s no use whinging about it when you obviously started it.
What words lingered in his every baited breath, though? You should’ve been on opposite paths, so far apart it was crazy how close you are now. Always feeling your shadow on the back of his neck made him feel antsy and ornery, and hearing your name growing up felt like getting swallowed up by earth, germination in reverse. You were always the spectacle, the wildcard, the one everyone pinned their dreams on in the hope of seeing it come true, a bona fide shooting star arcing across the sky— and who can possibly hope to outshine it?
And compared to you, everyone will always (presumes to) know who he is and what he will become, just another acorn of the great oak tree. Study and reliable and never moving, dang it, never seeing outside of its kingdom, mired in the mud of the past and forced to grow outwards watching the sky but never really surpassing it, and that’s not right. That’s just not who he is. This is a war between earth and heaven and he must use everything in his arsenal to prove to you, their burning sun, what he is. What he’s made of. The answer: so much better, so much more worth it, so much more, more, more.
(It was always you, wasn’t it? Always him.)
You’re dumb and impulsive, of course. He’s arrogant and rude as always. Biting remarks and grappling hands since birth, twin forces both equal and opposite dictated by science, and no one who has met them can ever say something else. A world too small. Entwining paths and only one winner. Right?
What else were they supposed to do, they answer at the same time. Who else?
What will you do when one of you will (eventually) leave, they will groan.
Who can expect the answer?
You stop, frozen, cradled fist suddenly empty. They keep walking on for a metre or two until they realize they left you and then they turn back, shaking their heads, faces smiling or tired depending on who wore it, sometimes apologetic— and what did you say? What words came out? A disbelieving crinkle of the eyes, a small exhale of bottled-up relief, a three-worded sentence involving the word ‘never’ spat out between sure tongue and lips? A galaxy opens up inside you, the big bang, stardust sparking spoken and you trip over a small rock, trying to regain your balance at the same time your brain reboots trying to process the question: leave?
It’s no question what words came out, a certainy like physics.
He just kept walking, hands shoved in pockets as he tried to ignore the question stirring up dust in his mind, coming back to bite him just like you. What was the question like to him? Every cap in the centre of towns, every flash of blue and red in forests, a small kid holding their hands as far apart as horizonally possible. Grimy soot and cinders, a splinter that digs deeper as the audience increases, ubiquitous as sand, and at some point he stops, trying to get his breath back after trying to outrun the thought.
His words mirror yours, down to the t.
Because you/he won't, right? Neither of you will give in, will give up, will leave the other. You’re not your parents doomed to repeat the same narrative and watch someone leave, and you can’t see the future, but you know this in your bones. He knows this too. One of you will have to prevail, become omnipresent like dust motes enlightened by morning, while the other slinks into obscurity within the confines of the hometown. There are no other options. This is the story everyone has known, as felt vibrating through their very atoms, and while none of you have actually put any of these words out like this, the sentiment is the same.
“That will never happen.”
“Okay, but seriously, what would you do if you won?”
The other half of the ball nestled in his hand, smooth and still warm. He hadn’t won the Silver Conference, but he bet him. He had won in the battle and in the war, because he’s not going to hold his side against him anymore, and this was his last battle and he lost. Two kids who started out their journey watching late at night fated to end up here and so here they are, one announcing to the other that they’re going to travel another path— and not for the first time he's feeling truly powerless.
What could he do? Just like always, he managed to twist this into another loss. And just like always, all he can do is fume in thoughts entirely his own.
He finally won. His childhood rival has lost, and he won , and why can’t he be happy? Why can’t he gloat, or bathe in the glory, or think about his next journey? Why does it feel like the world has ended?
His fist curled up around the second half, never tight enough to break it (he didn’t want it to break, but he wanted to break in his head and tell him to wake up). Second night out and he couldn’t sleep, and instead of excitement it was a deep loss tugging in his gut. He felt he was always tripping over every breath now, trying to explain in his head the sequence of events that led to this.
What he wouldn't do. Once, he would’ve done anything to win. Now…
“Good match.”
He looked up (always following), watching him sit next to him. He hid his hands in his pockets, partly to stop the need to push him over and partly to make sure he never saw what was in his hands. “Yeah.”
He looked at him after a few beats of silence, eyes narrowed before turning away with a sneer (always bitter). “Don’tcha dare think I’m leaving you alone though. We’re still competition, you hear me, Ash Ketchum? Just on different playing fields, that’s all.”
A snort came out of him as his hat shielded his eyes, staring at the ground below him. “Of course.”
(you know, though— you always did)
“Good luck.”
And isn’t that the kicker? That all this hate and spite and spit ended up down the drain, that he changed and he stayed the same, that they came from the same town and went down the same road only to meet at this reverse-impasse, a gambit sacrificing what bond they had in favour of something new, foreign, stuck in his throat.
“You better be the best master out there so this win is actually worth it.”
And he hiccuped a laugh, shoulders shaking with the force of the shock melting away. “And you better be the best researcher out there so I know what I’m actually doing, Gary.”
Gary gave him a conceding nod, a flash of a slight smile as he looked away with a huff. Another victory for him—
Because it never ends, right?
“Goodbye.” A warm piece of a pokeball, passed back to his first rival and possible friend.
“I’ll be seeing you.” Sealed with a handshake, months down the line.
Hey. So maybe they were both winners.