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Merawn's first memory is not physical, but emotional – a sense of deep, abiding, gentle warmth. It's hazy, now, so many years later, but that first memory is still her most precious, and it continues to be a refuge and source of strength.
The first thing she saw after breaking through the eggshell was her trainer's face, and knew instantly and viscerally that this soul was the source of that warmth. She fancies that an unbreakable bond was forged in that moment, when she was given a face and a name – Shana – and a voice to put to the tender emotions that had nurtured her for months before her arrival into the world. She doesn't remember either of her parents, the beings that created her, but she doesn't need to. The smiling, endlessly kind woman who carried her egg is more than enough of a mother to her.
It takes time for her to learn the dynamics between humans and pokemon, and how widely they can vary from case to case. In time, she learns that most pokemon in the world do not live with humans. The wild-caught pokemon she converses with speak, usually with a degree of longing, of deep waters, wide fields, and vast forests untouched by human hands. But Merawn feels no need for these things, no desire to leave her own familiar places. Here, in this place of steel and concrete and skies bordered by towers, she is at home. She knows that many people and pokemon feel claustrophobic here, but she only feels a sense of belonging; this place, this city, teems with thousands of minds she can reach out and touch, thousands of souls and voices and stories for her to hear and read and know.
She learns that many pokemon who live with humans battle each other. At first she is puzzled, then there is a short while when her own misconceptions anger her. But Shana sees this, and brings her to spectate at a League game, and Merawn begins to understand. She reaches out to the minds of the human and pokemon participants, and understands that they want to fight. To harm each other is not their intent. It is a contest of skill and cleverness and fortitude, a test of bonds and trust. She sees something noble in the hearts of these humans and pokemon, a fierce determination matched only by their love for and trust in one another.
She enjoys the League event. The excitement of the crowds and the burning wills of the battlers sweep her up in a torrent of hot, lusty emotion, and it is not long before she is crying out with the rest. She recognizes another of her species among the participants, a tall and graceful Gardevoir, and she catches a brief glance from him. He sends a pulse of amusement at her, for he sees in her her previous anger, and she would be embarrassed, but she is too busy pestering him with silent questions.
Afterward, youngling, he chuckles resonantly in her mind.
They do not have long to speak after the game. The Gardevoir is injured – his wounds are far from life-threatening, but they require prompt treatment. But in the few moments they do have, the Gardevoir confers a plethora of emotions and memories upon her. She sorts through the mental torrent at a later time and learns that he was not born in a human's care, he was captured. He resented it for a time, as she will learn is common among caught pokemon, but his trainer earned his trust, and between them grew a bond that now easily matches what she shares with Shana.
As a Kirlia, she receives her name and learns that her trainer is unusual. Shana never brings Merawn into battle (aside from that one time after the League game when Merawn's blood had been hot, and she half-dragged her trainer into a battle. They lost, badly, and to a rookie. It still stings the pride she likes to think is beneath her ). Merawn comes to learn that her trainer does battle, in her own way, but her opponents are not other pokemon trainers – her opponents are the shadows that lurk in the minds of other humans.
Psychotherapist is the word Merawn learns, and to this day there is something arcane about it, something that fills her mind like the sky, expansive and intangible, delicate and grand. She asks to accompany her trainer one time, and Shana acquiesces.
Merawn sits silently in the corner while Shana and her patient speak, and learns that the world is not so great as she'd believed.
A Ralts's instincts are to shy away from negative emotion. Hostility, pain, anger – this and more a Ralts knows to avoid without conscious thought. Merawn comes to believe it is so that the young pokemon can protect itself and avoid danger. Regardless of its purpose, she also comes to believe that it blinded her for that early time. Merawn has been a Kirlia for only a short while, so never before did she register that kind of deep-rooted pain in a mind, an emotional plague that washed out the world's colors and left the sufferer in an endless, heavy darkness.
Depression is the word she learns then.
Despite her shock, she asks to accompany Shana again, but, to her surprise, her trainer tries to warn her away. But Merawn refuses to be dissuaded, and cannot explain why. She is called by something, some indescribable need to learn the truth of the world she once thought to be paradise, even though she is equally terrified of that knowledge.
Shana agrees reluctantly, but this time asks that Merawn stay outside the door. She is disappointed, but there is something in her trainer's mind that prevents her from objecting.
Her trainer is wise, she learns.
Merawn is ravaged by the terrible force of the patient's emotions. An outpouring of anguish that brings her to tears and to her knees, she is swallowed by a thick, heavy poison that oozes from the broken fragments of his mind, a wretched self-disgust that makes her want to crawl out of her own skin, a grief that makes her cry for something irrecoverably lost, a horror that leaves her breathless and frozen.
She knows, then, why Shana told her to remain outside of the room. It's so she can flee.
And she does flee. She teleports away, found by Shana an hour later on the roof.
Something crystallizes in Merawn's mind that night. She thinks of the bond between the Gardevoir and his trainer at the League match. She thinks of the memories he'd shared with her, memories of battle alongside his trainer, and knows suddenly that she wants to do the same.
She wants to battle alongside Shana. She wants to stand at her side against the demons she faces. She wants to bear light into the darkness in others' minds, wants to clear away the crawling things that bite and tear and sting inside of their hearts.
She tells this to Shana , and so begins to learn the ways of mending minds, and learns how to best assist Shana in doing so.
She comes to think of this space as the Quiet Room. The walls are thick here, and the words spoken here to not escape to the spaces beyond. Merawn is a Gardevoir now, and though she is short and slender, she is the first thing noticed by the wounded who come here.
Some of them don't want her present. Their reasons are varied – some of them don't like pokemon, some of them don't want their thoughts heard so directly (even though she can't really read thoughts, only feelings), some of them simply want their words heard by as few as possible. She is disappointed, but she understands, and never fails to respect their wishes. When this happens, she leaves the room quietly and finds some way to busy herself for an hour.
But when they agree to her presence, she stands silently in the corner, eyes closes, and lets their hearts bleed over her own.
Shana has trouble sometimes, she has learned. Shana is clever and wise and skilled, but she cannot see into the minds of those she speaks to. She is fallible, and the information she misses may prevent her from helping her patients as she otherwise might.
Their patients, now. She begins with letting Shana better understand what dwells within their hearts – their sorrows and their angers and their fears. Over time, Merawn helps Shana better understand their inner machinations, helps her find the wounds and understand how best to close them.
It's always a slow thing. But Merawn is no longer possessed of the impatience of her youth; she has learned that no injury of the mind heals quickly or neatly. They may see a breakthrough if they are lucky, but most of these hours are filled with the most gradual progress, and sometimes no progress is made at all. The souls before her are fragile, she knows, and they must tread carefully.
It is always slow, but it is not always quiet. Sometimes the physical voice matches the storm within, and there is shouting, screaming, crying. Merawn's first instinct is to shield Shana when this happens; she knows that her trainer is not disquieted by words, however sharp, but when there is great rage in them, Merawn fears that it will be more than words that they lash out with. But when she knows that there is no danger, she tries to help. It's taken her a while to master the trick, but now she reaches out to their minds and does her best to bring them calm and comfort. She touches their broken hearts with her own, ventures into their darkness and brings them back to the light.
Merawn and Shana are warriors, she believes. They battle dark, awful things that laugh and sneer and howl, that rip and tear and bite. But no warrior goes undefeated; they do not win all of their battles. Usually it is that their patients have simply stopped coming, and Merawn is left to wonder what becomes of them. She hopes that they try again, and that the next warriors who fight their demons are successful.
But sometimes…
Sometimes the wounds are too great to be mended. It is rare, but sometimes they learn that their patient has died, has surrendered to their demons when they lost the strength to go on fighting.
Shana never receives this well. These memories blaze in Merawn's mind, etched in by the thick grief that rolls off of her trainer in waves, laced through with a bitter sense of failure. Merawn cannot speak human words (though of late, she has been trying), and so has no words of comfort to offer.
Truly, though, what could she say? In these times, Merawn is riddled by her own sorrow and self-recrimination. She would have no words to offer even if she could speak them, and any emotions she might try to impart to her trainer are uselessly hollow.
But a warrior must go on. Merawn and her trainer have learned to cast off their grief shortly after it comes to them; they simply don't have time for it. Whoever they may have lost, there are many others who need them.
Merawn is grateful for her life. For the opportunity to dance to Shana's songs, to assist her in healing the wounded, to be wreathed in the vibrant emotions of the city's ten thousand souls. She knows not what any tomorrow will bring, but she does know that she will be at Shana's side, and she will welcome the day's events with an open heart.