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The tire in your legs is an aching pull that grounds you. Gentle, somehow. You stand for a second and fall limp to your fatigue in the next. The soil below you, ancient as it is, is firmer than your spirits.
A pokemon of myth had chosen this cave to serve as its home, or so the folks say. The tales don’t carry much detail; that’s how it usually is with stories told by tongue. Somewhere within the grime, dust, and granite, you’d see hints of a life led before you, the idleness of a creature that has lived longer than the cities have. None of it is what you look for, though.
You are a blink away from going out cold in a cave when the figure of a man you do not recognize, all steel blue and brave red and blurry, kneels before you in concern.
“Are… you alright?”
You’re beginning to wonder if they were lying to you.
Coballion’s presence itself is questionable, but you don’t come in search of the beast itself. You feel for the stains on your shirt with a tremble. If anything, you are unwelcome. Legends are best left alone to their own devices, doing who knows what in places only Arceus is privy to. You understand that. You do. You’ve ventured through the oddities in Sevii, run around blades of Galarian grass, felt the rush of Alolan water riding against your skin; the languages aren’t always the same, but the people’s respect and reverence towards the pokemon that reside is universal. More so to the habitats that house them. You understand that much.
It must not be the luckiest of your days, then, because the world’s not right. A stubborn peek at the all you’d asked for, same as you do with anywhere you’ve yet to explore. The cave meant something to the people. It had a place. It was worth talking about, worth keeping alive. You don’t know what worth looks like, despite the scope of your travels, but you want to see it for yourself, over and over and over. Here you are.
What a sight you must be now, curled up with one scratch extra and a slip too far. Mistralton’s a little mean to you, but Unovan locals barely lie when it comes to loving their own land. Meaning will find you. All you are is unlucky. That ought to be it.
You lean your head towards your own shoulder, hands instinctively coming to cover the unpleasant things you’ve been painted with. You’re sure you look worse for wear. “I’m a bit ashamed,” you reply at last, not exactly a ‘yes’, but it should suffice as a ‘no’ if that’s what he wants to hear, “since it mustn’t be fun consoling a…” you hate to admit it but do so anyway, “...lost explorer.”
“Please. You think too lowly of yourself.” He shakes his head, setting his satchel down. “The fact you’d even made it here is–” There’s an awkward, uncertain break in his words as he darts his attention around in search of something to say. Then, he continues, “–oh. Impressive.” He nods before looking you in the eye. The hint of pride is there. Mostly for himself, though. Probably. “Yes. That’s the word.”
What, is he making fun of you?
“The water one must cross deters many from entering, doesn’t it? Depending on where you start, of course. Clay Tunnel is a long way here as well, if you came from Driftveil.” You didn’t. You’d surfed a good distance with one of your water-type pokemon to get to where you are. The moderate volume he speaks in does nothing for you when you’re another trip away from being lulled to a loss of consciousness. You hear his voice as you blink it off. It is as firm as obsidian and as clear as glass. You could not ignore him even if you wanted to. “The main body of Mistralton Cave is even harder to navigate.”
You ignore most of what leaves him in favor of sneaking a quick glance at the bag. His hands are on his knees. Are they lowered or resigned? You aren’t certain if he’s here to kill you, if there’s a knife or a gun or what. You are in a cave, after all. Nowhere near the broad daylight.
Weak as it is, you try a taunt, still untrusting. “Is it?”
“Indeed, I hear it is,” he outwardly agrees. “I feel that it is, too, now that I’m here myself. The next time I come here, I’ll do so with different shoes.”
It’s not the sarcasm you expect. From someone like him, it couldn’t be. Between you is a line, something there to signify the difference. His back is set straight, body aligned to perfection– a manner hard to keep when you travel and run and tread –and you are here, before him, slouching on top of a somewhat bloody leg.
Ah , you realize, and to you it is unfair. “You’re trying to make me feel better.”
He drops his gaze, a falter in his composure. You witness it, barely, because you’re in the dark. It’s a blur even though he’s right in front of you, but you do not miss the slight flush on his face as he averts his eyes elsewhere and quietly asks, “...is it working?”
Oh. How nice. You’d thought him a fool, worse now that you are aware; he’s completely serious. “I’d figured it isn’t very... pleasant to be in such a predicament. I apologize if I’m being out of line.”
Any shred of dirty hostility, your palms release. Nobody is going to kill you. You’d be surprised if the man has the guts. He doesn’t look like it.
You stop there. Don’t make it personal. It isn’t as though he means you any harm.
“No, it is– the feel better part, I mean. It’s working.” You’re running through your words now. Slow down. “Sorry.” You make sure his eyes are on you, though, just so you could show him what’s wrong with you as your head tilts down and his gaze follows yours. “These guys just put me in a bad mood.”
“Ah.” His eyes widen slightly, and when you look back up at him, you find a flash of recollection. He turns to the fallen satchel by the edge of his shoes in an instant, hands gathering the clasps and carefully pulling it open, and you wonder again if he’ll bring out a knife. A second later, and there are a variety of materials in his hands. Gauze pads and the like, and you swear the scent of isopropyl alcohol arises as soon as it leaves the bag to waft in the air. It’s a little late to do so, though, polite as he has been since your first words, he asks you for your permission, “May I?”
Save it for another day, maybe on one where you aren’t at risk of dying. You ditch every grain of reluctance in you and nod.
He seems relieved, if anything. “It may sting. Hold still.”
A minute or two of deft fixing and you’re patched up to the best of his ability, maybe not yet ready to run but remedied enough to keep talking. “There. Is it loose?”
You shake your head, moving a leg around abruptly to prove a lying point. “Not at all,” and you wince. In the midst of his handiwork, you take your care away from the pads, the scent of antiseptic, the pain and the like. Because you can’t help but notice: he looks too proper for this place.
He lets a well-mannered chuckle free, and for once, it sounds as if he’s taking in the kindness of fresh air. Allows himself to, despite the tense drop of his shoulders. “Do I, now?” Oh. You’d blurted it out loud. “I suppose you aren’t the first I’ve heard it from.”
Black suit and red tie, leather boots and all. He looks like someone too prim, too private, like a diamond meant to be paraded in public. Someone who belongs elsewhere, sitting on velvet sofas in marble homes. Perhaps beside a plaque displayed at a museum, or within the comfort brought by a stable office nine to five. Although you see it, faintly, how the slight glisten of sweat beneath his collar and the stray, unkempt strands refusing to stick to his steel-tinted hair say otherwise.
“You don’t have to answer,” he starts, “but I’d like to know what brought you here. I recall being told how Chargestone Cave was better for explorers? Although I’m not entirely sure…”
You’d call it being considerate– whatever he’s trying to pull by being keen on you and your business. For now.
“Heard about something interesting,” you answer. “Sorry you had to meet me like this.” Like this, cut up and bruised by nature, mud stuck to the hairs on your skin, and the dust off the chunky gravel seeping into the larger of your open wounds a good reason for your lack of silence. “I’m too nosy for my own good.”
“What a coincidence.” He smiles, all in good nature. Nothing like the condescending sort you’d always face back at home. “So am I.”
How intriguing. You could ask him the same thing, question his purpose a little. What else is there for your curiosity to do? Gnaw at the rocks? It would if it had the life to, but your teeth are weak and your throat’s had enough of the dirt all around you. A talk is enough. Keep it simple.
You gather the courage and return the gesture back to him with an inquisitive raise of your brow. “And what brings you here?”
“If I put it in your words,” he begins to think, but you believe the better instinct in you that he’s only pretending to. He says, “I’m also quite the nosy trainer myself, you see.”
“Oh,” you realize it then. “You aren’t from here.” The thought lifts the corner of your lips into something you’d call a smile. Small, though it exists– to you, whose body does it of its own volition, and perhaps to him, whose eyes may catch the flicker of solace you briefly show. Maybe. “Neither am I.”
For a moment, he eyes your clothing, curious about something you do not yet know if you’d like to share. “Where do you hail from?” is his question. He is gentle in his delivery. It’s a manner that matches his appearance well. It doesn’t distract you from it, however: how he is touched yet unscathed by the edge of his journeys. Elegant, to your mild surprise. Polished.
Still. A good conversation like this– at the very least, one where rude assumptions aren’t spat at you outright –it isn’t something you come across everyday, so you debate it truthfully. He lets the time pass in silence. For the most short-lived of moments, just a fraction of one, you try to decide. Where must you say you hail from when the whole world opens itself to you with its arms wide and free? Do you tell him, if ever, if it was the place you were born in, or if it was the place you were born to leave?
Maybe it was too trivial to share, yet you were here, sitting face to face with a stranger in a foreign land, inside an echoing cavern in which neither of you belong. It is only your voice, paired with his, that rings against the jagged stone walls and dies along the rocks older than everything. This is home; so is everywhere else. So is where you hail from.
You hold in a deep breath, and in the peace, you trust it.
“...Hoenn,” you say with hesitance, and it almost feels like a confession with how tight your throat constricts. It sounds to you like something you aren’t allowed to say. “But I haven’t been there in a long, long while.”
“Hoenn,” he repeats, calmer than yours, then pauses, and you can tell the surprise he displays is pleasant. There’s a kind of wonder in his gaze, when your own meets his– a kind of familiarity you cannot explain. And all at once, he looks both like a stranger and a friend. He says, softly, “What a small world.”
The shock flees in haste and you do not know why you believe him. You do not tell him ‘I want to know where you come from’ in turn. Even as he sits himself next to you, dirtying his black suit, staining himself in the same grime as you are, you do not ask him for more than what he is willing to give you. The gauze pads and bandages are his gift; you have told a truth you hesitate with as thanks.
But, only for the stranger who treats you like a friend though you sit together in foreign soil, you’d like to, for once. Another scratch can’t hurt you. Just this once.
You have treaded the body of nature, always wandering about with nowhere to truly stay. It is easy. It always responds differently: in the pokemon you come across, the terrain you dare to travel, the people you meet. You have called it home more than you have set your foot in Hoenn, despite nature being nowhere and everywhere, absent and present, today and tomorrow. Unova is nothing short of wondrous, exactly like Johto or Paldea when it bruises your knees and scratches you with stalagmite fingers. It is so different, and yet it is inexplicably– no, utterly, beautifully the same.
You have many a great desire, you realize then. Naive, yet you do not have the luxury to regret this, not in the way the man beside you likely does.
Ask away.
“Let me guess.” So, you start in the only way you know how to: with home. “Rustboro?”
“Far,” he replies, “though I will say I’ve been there.” The tone of his voice takes a melancholic stance. “Perhaps too often when I was younger. I owe my avoidance of it to that.”
“Smoke of the city got to you, didn’t it? The stuff never clears, anyway.” You didn’t have to, but you add it nonetheless, “That’s what happened to me.”
Rustboro, as you remember, was a city well-maintained and loved enough by its people. The flair was in the stringency, the city’s submission to the corporal life considered something worth dreaming of. And although the establishments, factories, and people held countless ideals, Rustboro, at its core, reveled in realism. It was grounded since it was someplace safe. Safety, as you’d accepted long ago, is not for you.
He aims his attention to the ceiling of the cave. Not much to look at, save for the few pokemon that sleep. “Well, I’ll be sure to tell the folks at Devon.”
“What, you work there or something?”
He almost sounds amused. “Not at all.” Or repulsed, in a milder way, as if the notion meant a tad more than the nothing he makes it seem as. You don’t know, either. The stranger’s quite hard to read.
You hum, skeptical. “Seriously? Is the suit and tie a statement, then?”
“If style is a statement,” he remarks, his fingers carding through the folds across his own clothes. Proud of his own choices, at least. You can see why.
“Sure is.” It clicks for you there, easy and instantaneous. You snap your fingers. “On second thought.”
He turns his head your way, not so startled by the echo of the sound. “Hm?”
“Fortree,” you guess again, but he chuckles, much to your dismay. Still far, it seems. Let’s see. There are over ten more towns and cities to cross off. You wonder where a man like him would be. Somewhere urban, where the streets are riddled to death with the rising factory smoke? Someplace living in modesty with its surroundings, like Fallarbor and Lavaridge, or somewhere in between?
“Are you fond of wailmer?” he hints. Anyone from Hoenn would understand immediately. You have not been there in years yourself, but having grown up there for a considerable portion of your life, you’d know it, too. You recall news reports and sections in papers dedicated to facts and intricacies about the region. There had been trivia meant for metropolis children who yearned for more than what the bustling roads took them to. Water and its ways. And if your memory serves you well…
“Mossdeep,” you whisper low. You sound more excited, for some reason, a detail surprising yourself. You don’t give it much thought. “You’re from Mossdeep!”
The relief that swells in your chest is less for him and more for yourself. So you’ve yet to lose heart yet. You still remember.
He brightens up. The joy, albeit minimal, etches itself onto his form evidently. He explains, “There’s a cave north of the city. Shoal– have you heard of it? It floods, almost completely, whenever the tide is high.”
Shoal. You have seen worse. So has he, you presume, if it is this much he knows of. When a rough landscape materializes in your mind, you can’t prevent the shiver that races down your spine. You hope your voice doesn’t show it, too. “Scary.”
“Isn’t it?” he says, agreeing with a newfound enthusiasm. “And if you have the courage to enter it, there exists a cavern of ice in the aphotic zone.”
“Purely ice and nothing else?”
“Not entirely ice. Most of it is, though,” he clarifies. “The geodes present are interesting as well. Some, I’ve only found to exist in Shoal Cave’s peculiar conditions. For instance, the–“ he stops himself, and for a moment you find yourself reluctant to ask him to continue.
“The…?”
“Ah. Excuse me. I didn’t mean to ramble.”
“No. Please go on.” Clumsily, your hands gesture for him to continue. You’ve come so far in the face of your unwanted stay. Because Coballion, or whichever fabled pokemon of lore in Mistralton Cave had sentenced you to misfortune in its territory, by now the fear must do nothing to graze you, or so you believe. And absent-mindedly, your mouth runs itself without regard, “You have a nice voice.”
You think nothing of it, maybe the man does. If so, he doesn’t show it. That, or you don’t hear it, really. There isn’t much to see with how dim the environment is.
The pause he permits is short. Either he has heard these very words a million times or he hasn’t. You do not care for the thought because either way, he tells you, so sincerely it could melt the gravel and granite and all things sharp and rough in this wicked cave, “Thank you.”
“And what was that about the geodes in Shoal Cave?” you continue. “Your knowledge goes pretty far. It’s cool.”
His closed-eye smile is an apologetic one. “I’m afraid I love what I do a little too much.”
Though a bit rude, you tell him, uncaring now, “Obsessions are good for you.”
“I prefer to call it a passion,” he counters. “Obsession, however? Haha. Many insist that it is. They aren’t wrong. I’d dwell upon it for the rest of my life if I could.”
“What
do
you do, anyway?”
“See this,” he says as he brings his closed satchel to his lap and opens it again. In slow movements, he digs through it under the lack of light, the memory of what lies inside alone guiding the hand that dives in when it feels for whatever it is he looks for. As soon as the thought of guessing what it could be strikes, you’re too slow. He pulls his hand out, now clenched into a gentle grip, and opens his palm to you.
Small gemstones present themselves almost shyly, not quite like sacrifices, but like two little lives, one a blue you do not often see outside of the shallow ocean and the other greener than Viridian blades. The glimmer shines through your lack of recognition. He fixes that for you. “This is peridot; the other, larimar. These were excavated two regions miles apart, nothing like each other, and yet the world will let me have it like this.”
“Rocks,” you begin, not in dismissal but in awe, “You’re obsessed with rocks.”
“Passionate,” he reminds you with a grin, but he does not retreat the gems from your view yet. He’s allowing your eyes to linger. This is a form of trust you’ll need to reciprocate. “What about you?”
You feel compelled to confess a habit of your own, just to make it fair. You want to say more, let him know he’s not alone. “I’m a corporate escapee turned professional drifter, or something like that,” you half-joke. You figure it’s the last you’ll give him for the rest of the day, so you turn the tip of your finger back to the tiny stories in his hand. You want more of what he has to say. “Back to your rocks, stranger. I wanna know why you love them.”
“Because rocks are born from resilience,” he states, asking for your palm to open. When you reluctantly allow it to, a gem– the blue one, larimar , you think –is there atop your skin, smooth and ancient and precious. “Time and time again, the world destroys, shields, and reinvents itself. Reemergence comes in all shapes and sizes.” He speaks in strong syllables and navigates them with loving ease. Geology, to him, must be something deserving of his fervor. “Watch as the tides take the shores whole, only to return again in gentle laps. See how the skies grace us with color mere minutes after it is devoured by storms. Stones and rocks, similarly, are products of reemergence.”
The peridot, he brings closer to his face, as though he could examine it, study it, admire it in all its glory forever. “It is a matter of a million years or longer,” and by now you’ve come to understand. You listen. “The world can periodically destroy the various aspects of its body, friend, and yet here they are,” he stops if only to regard the gem with the tenderness of a lover, “back to linger around as these little pieces.”
It makes you think of yourself, as everything always does: throughout the regions, from Hoenn to Kalos to wherever your feet have taken you in Unova, the one constance you will always have is yourself. You hurl yourself towards danger in search of reasons and meaning. You grasp at anything new, be it beauty, anger, or a brand new belief, and return to yourself in the end– even as you grow further into who Hoenn could not let you be, even as you are in pieces, you could always take a breath. Find your voice again. Reinvent yourself. Every step of the way, the world is with you.
“They fascinate me for a thousand reasons, though that, I believe, is the strongest one.”
Geology, to him, must be worth the dedication of his own life.
For the second time, you feel how familiar it truly is. Everything, you mean, the touch, the scent, the scenery. At first glance perhaps too rough or too polished, often overpowering yet overly calm. You have been everywhere. In it, there is the kind. You lie here, and simmer in the gentle reminder of it now that you have forgotten how friendly it can be. A man you do not know has the back of his suit touching the wall with unbelievably perfect posture, having tended to your wounds not too long ago. He keeps you company; you keep his. As often as it has you second-guessing your own survival, the world, foreign and familiar and everything in between, offers up these moments of… No, they’re more than mere convenience, so you do not call it that. How about consideration? Comfort, even?
“An outlook like that’s too enviable,” you say at last, full of relief, “Do you know what that means?”
Yes. You think you like how the sound falls on your ears.
“Oh,” he says, partly in realization, and you are aware of what it is and who he will be from now on. “How rude of me that I’ve yet to ask.”
It cares. You forget sometimes– how, in spite of the feet that trample on it, it gives back things that you are left to wonder if you deserve at all. And, in the end, all of its folks are ultimately forgiving.
“What is your name?”
You wonder if it is proof of your pardon, somehow, that you meet Steven Stone this way.