Chapter Text
Me and Jay pulled into Pallet Town a few hours past dark, and got off the boat as fast as we could manage. With solid ground under us for the first time in days, Jay took a second to catch his breath, and when his hands curled in the fur of my ruff, I leaned my flank against him, and we stood in silence for a bit, recovering.
The waves out in the bay were dark and choppy, hissing and slapping against the quay as a dull, roaring backdrop to the sounds of the night–the rough seas were a going-away present from the atrocious weather that had chased us all the way from Cinnabar and up along the mainland, before finally blowing itself out in a miserable squall right as we got to Pallet Town. The remaining cloud cover gave everything a grey, dead look, muting the glow of the almost-full moon, and the threat of rain was making good in freezing cold flurries as we walked down the dock towards town.
The boat had been a shitty little fiberglass toy that barely had room for two people to live comfortably, let alone an arcanine as big as me, and it took off again as soon as we were on the quay; the coughing of the outboard motor was jarring against the soft hissing of the rain and the silence of the town. The brass were still fuming about us leaving, and they’d refused to spend more than the absolute minimum on shipping us home from Cinnabar–in the grand tradition of the military, we’d gotten what they’d paid for.
It had been a horrible trip. I’d been too big for the cabin, so I’d had to either hide in my ball, hunch on the rear ‘deck’ near the motor and bear the wind and rain, or wedge myself into the small cargo space in the cabin, with half my body sticking out into the weather. The skipper was a taciturn grey-bearded old bastard who had spent the entire trip grunting whenever Jay tried to ask him a question, and I was glad to see the back of him; if I never had to marinate in the combined reek of human sweat, wet salt, and fish guts ever again, I’d die happy.
Jay nudged me to head inland, and we stepped from the gap-boarded old pier onto concrete and gravel. His footsteps were uneven–a combination of conditioning from three days aboard the shitty little boat, and him still adjusting to his prosthetic–and he leaned on me as we headed for the relative shelter of the storefronts and sheds along the waterline, gripping my neck ruff as I guided him out of the rain. We could have gotten away with putting him on my back, but he always hated that; claimed it made him feel like a little kid, or like he couldn’t stand on his own two feet. I had some concerns about the latter, but kept them private. We’d see how we both went.
“Place hasn’t changed a bit,” he muttered, and I chuffed in agreement, craning my head to peer up and down the town’s main drag. It was after 2200, and in a rural place like Pallet, that meant it was long past bedtime; we were the only living things up and around, other than a couple of sleepy wingull perched along the quay. Only the distant rumble of a car engine, way up in the hills, told us the town hadn’t been completely abandoned since we’d last been here almost five years ago.
We headed up towards the more residential part of town, following the main drag north from the docks. It wasn’t a long trip, but Jay was tired, and as far as I could tell, the only reason he hadn’t asked his pa to give us a lift was that he still hadn’t told his old man about the extent of his injuries. The promise of that incredibly uncomfortable conversation loomed large as we struggled through the rain and the dark, up the hill towards the Nomura family home.
Jay’s pa had left the porch light on for us, but Jay could have walked us there in his sleep. We huddled under the moldering porch canopy for a bit, letting Jay catch his breath, and I shook myself off as best I could; Jay had a coat on, so he could cope with getting a few stray droplets on him. For his part, he leaned up against the brickwork and blew into his cupped hands, then knocked sharply on the door.
We waited. I leaned on Jay, and let him bury his freezing hands in my ruff again. Eventually, soft scraping and thumping filtered through the peeling pine door before the deadbolt slid back, and it creaked open, letting the warm yellow interior light outline Jay’s pa as he looked us over.
He had never been a big man, but in my memory–a growlithe’s memory–he had always been a towering, boisterous, booming figure. He still smelled the same–the same sandalwood aftershave, the same lingering smell of frying oil. Physically, though, the skinny, balding human in front of me, in his ratty plaid dressing gown, with his face hanging from his skull like a poorly fitted rubber mask… I gave Jay a sidelong look, and found him shivering, barely awake. I nudged him forward a step, and he jolted.
“Hey pa,” Jay said, mustering a smile, “we made it.”
He got a critical, squinting stare in return, before his father harrumphed and stepped aside, leaving the doorway clear.
“Took your bloody time, didn’t you?” he barked, “Come on, get inside, out of the weather.”
It was warmer in the foyer, and the threadbare carpet was a lot nicer on my feet than the asphalt. As Jay’s pa fought with the deadbolt and Jay struggled out of his raincoat, I looked around, cataloguing the exits and being struck by a strange sense of distance. I’d been here plenty of times, over the course of Jay’s service; Christmas leave every year, at first, and the occasional visit on leave. Now, looking down on the photo frames and furniture that I’d always had to look up at, everything felt slightly skewed and distorted. It left me feeling uneasy, and on edge.
“Your ma’s in bed, and you look half dead yourself,” Jay’s pa was telling him, fussing over his son’s coat as Jay’s numb hands struggled with the fastenings. I felt a stirring of remembered affection for the man as he gently bullied his son towards the stairs. “Have you eaten? Good. Your room’s made up–go up, have a shower and get some shuteye, and we’ll talk in the morning. Get on with you!”
Jay wasn’t in any state to push back, and let himself get guided down the hall, but his pa paused as he glanced at me, a frown drawing his bushy eyebrows together and bristling his moustache–the hair he’d lost from his crown in the years since I’d last seen him seemed to have migrated down onto his upper lip.
“Rum, you go dry out in the kitchen first, you great wet blanket!” He was suddenly in my space, ruffling the sides of my head, under my jaws, exactly like he had when I was a growlithe, and Jay stiffened in alarm behind him–then relaxed a bit when I didn’t respond at all. My stoic, silent stare put the old man off for a moment, but he rallied and demanded, “What in Arceus’ name has he been feeding you? You’re not going to fit on the foot of his bed anymore, I’ll tell you that!”
I let him chivvy me into the kitchen, where the ancient pot-belly stove radiated heat across cracked grey tiles, then watched as he shuffled off after his son. There wasn’t a huge amount of space, even at a regular human scale, so I wedged myself into the space between the kitchen table and the stove, rested my chin on the tabletop, and tried to settle myself down.
This was home ground, I told myself firmly, friendly territory, not a contested area–but I still found myself eyeing the shadows pooling at the back of the entry hall and in the recesses of the pantry, and listening for oddities as the old house settled and the rain drummed down on the shingles. It was like this every time we bivouacked in an unfamiliar spot, but this was Jay’s family home –I had no reason to expect anything more hostile than a thrown slipper if I managed to set fire to Mrs. Nomura’s herb garden again.
Upstairs, through the thin floors, I heard a clunk and a sudden quiet as Jay shut off the shower. A nagging thought chased itself around my head; I should be up there keeping watch for him while he was distracted–keeping watch for what, though? There weren’t any mines under the bath mat, and his pa wasn’t going to pull a knife on him. I was being ridiculous.
It took awhile, but eventually, grudgingly, my body let me wind down from high alert. Nobody came back downstairs for me, but that was alright; Jay was barely awake anyway, and his pa probably just forgot about me. I shifted a bit, arranged my head and paws under the table, and fell asleep to the soft crackling of the stove and the hiss of the rain outside.
***
Morning arrived cold and clear, with lingering grey clouds promising a halfhearted, depressing drizzle sometime during the day. Jay was thumping around upstairs, and either of his parents would be shooing me out of the kitchen before too long. I took a minute to fuel up the stove again from the woodpile by the door, finding a strange kind of familiarity to feeling the splintery redwood in my teeth–then let myself out into the back yard for a stretch and a piss.
Pallet had a kind of open-plan approach to residential housing, probably from when it had been a smaller agricultural hamlet. The Nomura backyard stretched downhill over maybe a quarter of an acre, butting up against privacy hedges and scattering of fruit trees that informally marked out each territory. As I padded away from the house, scouting out a sheltered place to do my business, I tried to remember what it had been like the last time I’d visited. The trees had been bigger, I was fairly certain; the yard had felt bigger, but I was starting to realise a lot of my memories were useless in that area. It was a challenge to find a hedge that I could actually hide behind, even crouching as low as I could.
Eventually, I found a spot behind one of the corner hedges, did what had to be done, and scorched away the evidence with a quick burst of flame. As I was scuffing dirt over the ashes, though, someone must have heard or smelled me, because suddenly one of the neighbors was absolutely losing their fucking mind.
“INTRUDER! INTRUDER! ENEMY! INTRUDER!”
It was a growlithe; quite a young one, judging by the shrill, yappy barking. I stuck my head up over the hedge, scanning the treeline until I spotted him standing on the edge of the property, bristling like a quilava and yelling madly at the top of his lungs. If I ignored him, he’d wake up the entire neighborhood, and I could expect a repeat performance every time I showed myself outside. With an internal sigh, I vaulted over the hedge, shook myself, and stalked over towards the little idiot, making hard, fixed eye contact the whole way.
At first, he redoubled his effort; he was almost vibrating with outrage as he hurled epithets at me. As I got closer, though, and he got a better idea of my size, I could see him start to wilt; by the time I reached the property line, and he had to tilt his head back to stare up at me, his barks had turned into whines.
“Intruder?” he quavered as I loomed over him, his tail firmly tucked between his legs. He was visibly shaking, but he didn’t roll over and show me his belly–brave kid, he earned points for an almost suicidal level of loyalty to his family there.
“Shut up,” I growled.
He shut up.
“Better. I’m not an intruder. I’m part of the Nomura family.” I let him process that for a second before I leaned in close, exhaling a mouthful of smoke between my bared teeth–it had always put the fear of Arceus into the new recruits, and it did the trick here too. “Pick a fight with me again and I’ll bite you in half, got it?”
“Got it!” he yelped, doing absolutely everything in his power to lean away from me without breaking eye contact.
“Good. Now piss off.”
He bolted for the house the moment I let him, almost bowling over a little girl who had emerged from the back door to sleepily peer into the yard. I watched for a moment as she fussed over the whining, cringing idiot, then made myself scarce before I could get told off by a braindead civvy who thought I’d been bullying their pet. When I got back, I found Jay up, dressed in clean slacks and a button-up shirt, and leaning against the side of the house while he smoked a surreptitious cigarette. He looked like he was ready for an interview; I supposed he was, in a way, whenever his mother woke up and came downstairs.
“Making friends, Rum?” he asked me sardonically, and I huffed in reply, blowing his cigarette smoke right back into his face. “Oh, you actual bastard –see if you get any of my breakfast this morning, then.”
Not long after that, Jay’s pa had emerged, muttered something about his potatoes, and shuffled out into the yard to poke around in what I now realized were badly overgrown garden patches. We followed him back inside when he returned–or rather, Jay did, and I parked myself in the doorway to avoid completely blocking half the kitchen. My partner took one of the rickety old chairs at the table, and watched as his pa fished out a cast iron pan, a half-empty packet of bacon, and a carton of eggs, and started frying the lot over the elderly stove. My feelings towards the old man warmed a bit when he glanced over, gauged the distance, and tossed me the empty eggshells, one after the other, his moustache bristling in a grin as I snapped them out of the air.
“Your ma will be down soon,” he told Jay, “put the kettle on, would you?”
Jay dutifully followed orders–for whatever reason, the kettle was electric, even though the oven was wood-fired–and fished out three mismatched mugs from the cabinet over the kitchen bench. When his ma stepped out of the stairwell–wrapped in the same purple dressing gown and smelling of the same lavender soap I remembered–everything went on hold while she gave him a bone-breaking hug, swaying him from side to side, then holding him at arm’s length to give him an appraising once-over.
“They haven’t been feeding you properly,” she accused, “you’re skin and bones, Jay!”
“I was in hospital, ma.” Jay pointed out gently as she herded him back to his seat, then took over making the coffee. “Give me a few of pa’s breakfasts and I’ll be as big as Rum in no time.”
“You’d better hope so. How was the trip? Did they fly you in?”
I tuned out the small talk as Jay’s parents grilled him for details of the boat ride, and then the discharge. The eggshells had whetted my appetite, and I wondered if any of the frying eggs were for me. If not, I could depend on Jay to sneak me some. When I tuned back in, it was just in time for the shoe I’d been expecting to drop since we’d knocked on the door last night to hit the ground.
“I maybe left some stuff out of the letters home,” Jay admitted, shooting for a light tone, but just managing to sound nervous. “My leg injury wasn’t… I didn’t want you both to fret.”
He leaned down, rolled the hem of his pants up. The bacon and eggs hissed and spat in the pan as the Nomuras took in their son’s stump leg, the beige prosthetic, the surgical scars. He rolled his pants back down after only a few seconds, quickly, as though getting it out of view could clear the tension now choking the room.
“Oh, my boy,” his ma sighed, stepping around the table to wrap him in her arms again, “my Jay. You should have said.”
“Would have taken the truck over to the dock,” his pa muttered, moustache working uneasily, “you didn’t have to walk all that way!”
The old man turned back to tend the eggs, and I suspected to hide his face. The clink of plates and cutlery being arranged took over for a few minutes as the food was dished up. Happily, I did end up getting one, even if it vanished in a fraction of a second and didn’t hit the sides on the way down. I’d have to scout myself out a proper breakfast later.
“I can get around alright,” Jay defended himself, “and Rum’s a pretty decent crutch if I need one. The medics said it should heal fine, and once I get used to the prosthetic I’ll be more or less as good as ever.”
That hadn’t been the conversation with the doctors that I remembered, but I understood his reasons for prevaricating and didn’t particularly care. His false positivity really didn’t cut it with his parents, but neither of them pushed him on it. I suspected they were still processing the unpleasant news they’d been given.
“Surprised they let Rum leave with you,” his pa harrumphed, offering me the rind off his bacon, which I politely accepted. “Wouldn’t think they’d be tripping over fire stones and arcanines these days.”
“He got injured protecting me,” Jay said, then paused, thinking about his next words. Slowly, he explained, “He looks fine, and he can mostly get around fine, but he’s got a bunch of shrapnel still in his hindleg and flank. Hopefully won’t cause him more issues before we can get him in for the specialist surgery, but his hip is pretty wrecked, and with the organ damage–” He cut himself, rubbing his face, and drummed his palm against my side in the way I liked. I leaned into him. “Neither of us meet military standards anymore, is what I’m trying to say.”
“You’ll stay with us till you’re back on your feet,” his ma said in a firm tone, “there’s work going at the sawmill, or at the new laboratory they’re building in town. You’ve got that degree, that will get you a spot.”
“I was actually thinking of taking the gym circuit.” Jay interjected, bringing her up short. “I never did get the chance as a kid. Always too busy with Cadets.”
I blinked at him. He’d never mentioned that, not to me–had he only come up with it overnight?
“But–how will… travelling all up and down Kanto, really?” His ma seemed flustered, off-balance. “Jay, really, this seems sudden. Are you sure? Wouldn’t it be better to find a job, something to get you back into the swing of things?
Jay wasn’t happy with her angle, but he’d always been a polite and respectful son, and I wondered if the tension in his shoulders and jaw was only visible to me.
“I’ve got savings–never really spent anything–and there’s the pension, too. It’s not a lot of poke, but enough for us to travel on. A gym circuit would let me get formal accreditation to officially keep Rumbler, too–he’s still a military asset, and they won’t fully release him to me unless I’ve got the badges.” He turned to me, found me staring, and flashed me a grin. “You’re technically light artillery, you know that? We can’t leave Kanto without violating an arms export treaty.”
He did seem to have thought it through; maybe he’d just thought I’d object, and hadn’t mentioned it yet.
“You’ll want to talk to Samuel over at the Viridian gym, then,” Jay’s ma said eventually. “He’s the local League representative. Honestly, will he even be able to sign you up, at your age, Jay? The gym circuit’s for children, I thought.”
“Their website says it’s open to all first-time entrants,” my partner pointed out, his fingers digging into the thick fur at the base of my ears and making my eyes half-close involuntarily. “Nothing about an age requirement. Dunno if they’ll let me enroll Rum, though–we might need to start a team.”
That made me stiffen, and shake his hand off to eye him warily, and he laughed in my face.
“Oh, come on,” he grinned, “you’d love looking after some fresh-caught little pidgey or rattata, I bet.”
“I will genuinely, actually eat them,” I told him, but it just made him laugh harder at my tone.
***
The morning was bright, clear and cold, on the day we left.
Jay got us up early, barely after dawn; he’d said his goodbyes after dinner, and we both knew his parents would find reasons to keep him from escaping into the wilderness. There’d be friends of the family to meet, odd jobs to do… no, it was better to get out in the early hours, and it meant we’d get further before the hottest part of the afternoon. It was a good plan, and I approved.
We took the main drag as far north as it would go, right to the edge of Pallet Town. Gravel and asphalt became packed earth and long grass, and tall stands of wild beech and plantation pine bracketed Route 1 as it wound its way deeper into the heartland of Kanto. I could smell greenery, and dew, and wild pokemon on the breeze, and despite myself, I felt a bit of a stirring of the old excitement.
“Off we go,” Jay hummed, scratching my ears absently, “on the road to Viridian City. You still know the way, buddy?”
As it turned out, I did.