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It’s quiet.
Well, not really quiet. Just like any other piece of nature, you can always hear the wasteland breathe.
Rather, it’s quiet in the sense that Aya is with another person, no one is talking, and, despite this, she is still somewhat comfortable. Maybe more comfortable than when she is talking.
Which is a new thing, and one that Aya is slowly coming to accept she enjoys.
Hardy is still well within her eyesight, balanced on an outcropping of what was probably once building and dubiously examining the waves of waste that crawl through the barren field in front of them. She’s been watching him experimentally toss tree branches into it for the past few minutes, herself perched on an almost-ground-level roof and lightly swinging her legs over the side. Her Dragalge is swimming through the sludge, occasionally surfacing with something in its jaws and coming to present it to a hesitant Hardy.
He always looks to her before accepting something from Dragalge, as if she has any idea what the seadragon has clutched in its maw, and she always nods encouragingly, bewildered that he trusts that nod enough to open his hand.
She suspects he’s receiving only particularly shiny and ultimately useless rocks, but, without fail, Hardy crouches down and thanks Dragalge like he’s being gifted some fancy evolution stone.
Neither of them should be supporting Dragalge’s behavior, but Aya never tells it to stop. It’ll surface from the muck, and she’ll start to open her mouth, but then Hardy will look at her, and her resolve just… melts.
She is stubbornly choosing not to examine that.
In fact, she is so stubbornly choosing not to that she almost misses when Hardy gives up on throwing things and returns to her. He awkwardly tries to avoid even touching the waste, making large steps from barren patches of ground to exposed scraps of metal, and finally sits beside her heavily.
“It won’t bite, y’know,” she says, dragging one leg up to tuck her face against.
“The living sludge one step below sentience, or Dragalge?” he asks, scrunching his nose up. “I’m more concerned by one of those things than the other.”
She snorts. “Dragalge bites on accident if you have food.”
“So does my Archeops,” he replies. “At least you know it’s coming.”
She bites down a smile. It’s stupid, silly, and yet she can’t help the sunburst feeling in her chest.
“Speaking of, or, well–” Hardy starts, then trails off, picking at a loose thread on his pants leg. It’s the first time Aya’s ever seen him look nervous. “Y’know, I’ve been here a couple weeks. And as much as I like hanging out with, uh, the waste, I’ve gotta get home at some point. Duty calls and all.”
An awkward beat of silence settles between them as Aya fails to immediately produce words, and she finds herself wishing she was Dragalge, able to disappear into the muck.
She’s a fool.
What had she just been thinking about enjoying the quiet? About being comfortable? Wasn’t she terrible to think that about something that was never going to last to begin with? When she had known from the start that this was nothing more than a week or two for Hardy to galavant away from his responsibilities in a way that she would never be able to?
She always did this. She got too attached too quick, just in time for it all to–
“So, that’s coming in a few. Wouldn’t want ya to think I’m just wandering off on you though, so I’ve got a present first.”
“What?” Aya manages, blinking at him from around a curtain of hair.
Hardy’s back to smiling, and Aya almost resents him for it, as bad as that makes her sound. “Well, I’d feel bad leavin’ you all on your lonesome out here,” he says, “so I thought you might enjoying having some company.” And then his hand is open toward her, Poké Ball resting in it.
She reaches out to take it, trying to ignore the way her traitorous heart jumps as their hands brush. It hasn’t realized he’s leaving yet. She looks to him, questioning, the sphere carefully cupped between her hands, and he nods at her to open it.
Is this how he felt when she nodded at him?
It can’t be.
She clicks the button on the Poké Ball, and what lands in her lap with a burst of white light isn’t what she expected. Hardy’s Rockruff sits there, a sudden weight on her thighs, tail already wagging. Once Rockruff registers her presence, she’s quick to put her paws up on Aya’s shoulders, reaching to lick at her chin. It takes a second for Aya to react, but then she’s holding Rockruff close to her body, taking in the warmth from her fur as she tries to talk Rockruff out of headbutting her.
“Wait, wait, wait,” is all she manages at first. Then, “You can’t,” incredulous.
Hardy shrugs, all pleased smiles. “You like her; she likes you. Why not?”
“You–You can’t just give her to me,” she protests again, hugging Rockruff all the same. “You won’t be here.”
“So? I can still show you how to look after her.”
“But–Well, won’t she be sad without you around? You’ve had her since she was an egg, you said that; you told me that y–”
“Well, I’m going to come visit, obviously,” Hardy replies, cutting her off so gently she can’t mind it. “It’s not like I’m leaving forever, y’know.”
Aya has no clever retort to that. She merely tucks her head behind Rockruff instead, so she no longer feels like she has to make eye contact.
“Hey,” Hardy says, quiet, the way he sounds when he’s trying to soothe, whether it’s her or his dogs or her poisons. “Maybe I’m bein’ a little selfish. Maybe I want the excuse to come see you. …Maybe I want you to have an excuse to come see me, too.” He’s fidgeting again, just a bit. “I like spending time with you, and I think it’d be a right shame if we let a couple town’s worth of distance mean we never see each other but for work.”
Aya frowns against Rockruff’s fur.
It’s not that she doesn’t like the idea. It’s that it doesn’t feel real, more the kind of promise people make and never follow through on.
The idea that they would follow through is somehow even worse.
“Anyways, I guess you can take all of that two ways,” Hardy continues. “Maybe we can just keep in touch? I can come and visit to check in on him, y’know? …Or maybe you can come back to Agate with me?” He hurries to tack on, “Just for the week. Could let him see his buddies again, before he really settles in here. I could show you around some, too.”
“I don’t know about that,” she says, in a way that feels almost too quick.
“You don’t have to.” Hardy lays back against the roof’s tiles, more relaxed than Aya could ever be. “Offer’s open, but I won’t be upset if you say no. And you don’t even have to give me an answer now, it’s not like I’m leavin’ in an hour.”
Aya just hums, finally having coaxed Rockruff to settle down in her lap.
Saying no is an instinct: Why should she leave, when she has a gym to tend to now? When she’d have to explain this all to her mother, even though it’s a conversation she can’t even begin to imagine having?
She wants to go, though. She really wants to.
And she hates the feeling.
She looks down at Rockruff, and Rockruff gazes back up at her with wide, round eyes.
“I’ll think about it,” she finally says. “Maybe.”
• • •
Aventurine is a difficult beast to enjoy.
Although, Aya hadn’t expected otherwise. She’d never been out of the city before, but she’d known the greenery was as far as you could get from a well-meaning pit of industrialization and poison, and when that’s all you’ve known, that’s all you’re comfortable with.
The difference between the woods and the waste isn’t just surface level, though, which is the part that surprises her. She can’t quite put a name to the something-deeper, but she can feel it in her bones, and knows it’s something to do with how the dirt beneath her sneakers feels dead, even though the whole forest teems with life.
Rockruff doesn’t seem to notice, though, and neither does Hardy. They both treat the forest with the same joviality as they had the wasteland, and she’s starting to think that’s just how they treat everything–like the entire world is, somehow, a world wonder, and like that being true doesn’t take away from the meaning of world wonder.
For the moment, she’s lost Hardy’s attention to the Miltank and Tauros at the edge of the field. Their dogs circle her legs instead of his as she watches him try to coax a Miltank into letting him pet her with a handful of berries.
She can hear the wind in the trees, the call of a stray Swablu in the branches. Feelings on the forest aside, she doesn’t regret coming.
Although, what exactly convinced her to agree, she doesn’t know. She thinks Rockruff is a part of it, though.
Rockruff has enough energy that she has to be let outside to run every few hours, lest she destroy one of Aya’s mother’s pillows, so Aya had spent the days before she and Hardy had left out in the sun, watching the upper boughs of the sparing trees in the wasteland for Venipede as Rockruff had memorized every carved-out path. It’d caught her off-guard, how much she’d enjoyed that.
Yet, clearly, Hardy had known she would.
The thought weighs on her.
Eventually, they bother to stop for lunch. She has to thoroughly examine the trees for Ariados webs before allowing herself to rest under one, but, once she’s sat down, Hardy comes to rest directly beside her, inches between them, instead of settling on the roots of her tree’s neighbor like she’d expected him to.
“Not terrible, is it?” he asks, meeting her eyes, and Aya’s head drops to her pulled-up leg on instinct.
“Not terrible,” she admits, “but I don’t think it wins against home.”
He laughs. “Getting that outta you’s a win to me.”
“I change my mind,” she says immediately. “It’s terrible. It’s hot, and I thought that Tauros was going to gore you earlier, and the flowers smell weird, and the ground is abjectly harder than ground is supposed to be.”
“Uh huh. Sure.” He’s smiling at her. “Ground’s ground, Aya; how’s it too hard?”
“It’s supposed to squish,” she says, wrinkling her nose.
“It is not, your ground is just weird,” he protests, so indignantly that it startles laughter from her.
He’s openly watching her, still beaming, and she’ll never know where she gets the confidence for it from, but she leans to the side and lets her head fall against his shoulder. She feels on fire as she does it.
It’s such a risk. She doesn’t know why she takes it. Maybe just because being here at all is one, too.
“I don’t think it’s my ground that’s weird,” she says.
“Fine, fine. You can win.” As he says it, his arm comes to drape across her shoulders. “The perfectly normal ground that covers ninety-nine percent of the earth can be the weird one.”
“Thank you.”
The moment gets broken by Rockruff, as she comes running out of the woods and into Aya’s lap, forcing her to pull away from Hardy. He only laughs over it, leaning over to hold Rockruff’s face between his hands.
There’s that unabashed joy in his eyes again.
Aya envies it. Begrudgingly, she can admit how much she cares for it too, how it’s that, and the fact that he extends it to her, that makes her stare and run warm and drag herself into the woods for no more reason than his continued presence.
She leans forward to pet Rockruff behind the ears. She catches Hardy turn his smile back toward her.