Chapter Text
Under the parching sunrays of the summer solstice, a billed Pokémon refuged himself under the lazy currents of the Loaf Stream. Only his lily pad-topped head could be seen overhead, concealing his cyan arms and green legs, as he drifted relaxedly with the course of the river.
With eyes closed and nostrils plugged, only the drowned music of the currents kissed his senses. In this rapt state, he could let himself be transported to lands or seas unknown, surfacing only when his powerful lungs or huge stomach gave in, whichever came first. But in the world of the surface, he had responsibilities to tend to and yokefellows to support, break bread with, and share laughs with, so he opened his eyes and broached.
The merciless sunlight dazzled him before he could even orient himself. Wincing, he squinted and raised a hand to shade his eyes—for it was midafternoon and his lily pad no longer shadowed him directly—blinking a few times before whirling in place once.
In the distance he spotted his friends Skiploom and Bunnelby—the latter clad in a loose, fallow tunic and rutting the soil with their strong ears, while the former munching on fruits, vegetables, and berries then spraying their seeds from their mouth. It was difficult to gauge their countenances from such a distance, but their postures clearly indicated weariness.
The billed Pokémon hollered at them as he swam upstream where he had been originally.
“All the way over there?” exclaimed Bunnelby as Lombre rested his arms on the stream bank a couple of paces away from the normal- and flying-types, his right ear motioning to the bend where Lombre had appeared to be a mere speck a few minutes ago. He tapped his left leg impatiently. “Some more minutes daydreaming, and you would’ve found yourself in Labyrinth River. Then how would you have been able to tell Loaf Stream apart from other tributaries?”
“Roberto…” said Skiploom diffidently, fidgeting with her knobby arms while angling towards him.
“Do you seriously think so lowly of me?” Lombre feigned offense while waving an arm dismissively. “I was raised in these waters, molded by them. You don’t know the secluded creeks and brooks I venture.”
“That’s not the point!” squeaked Roberto, stomping the ground one last time before stalking downward to the bank with Skiploom at his tail. “Why do you get to dillydally in the stream while we’re furrowing and sowing the fields under this scorching heat?”
“Because, dear compadre, you’re the digger,” Lombre said assuredly while pointing, “and Margarita here is the sower—and me?” He propelled himself against the bank with his feet, floating away with his claws behind his nape. “I’m the waterer.” He flashed a smug smile, tilting his lily pad to better screen his face against the sunlight.
“And who in blazes decided these roles?” groused Roberto, stamping the ground again.
“Us, silly,” replied Margarita pointedly. “When we formed this team to farm this parcel.”
“Would you rather I plant each seed piecemeal, Margarita dig the furrows with her nubs, and you hoist bucketfuls of water from the stream to the fields?” retorted Lombre, then he shrugged. “It would get the job done either way, though I don’t recommend it.”
Roberto wrinkled his brow annoyedly. “No, Gonzalez, I would not like that,” he said in a monotone, then he resumed his expressiveness. “It’s just…not fair that you be spared from this heat while we support the brunt of it.”
“I actually quite enjoy this weather,” Skiploom commented contently, her bloom twirling.
“Well, then it’s not fair that only I support the brunt of it,” Bunnelby grouched, directing his leer to the airborne Pokémon instead. His eyes widened then. “Just look at Margarita’s flower for crying out loud! It’s fully flared!”
Gonzalez’s eyes rose. What Bunnelby was claiming was true, which meant it was as hot as it could get outside the crispness of the stream. His gaze met Roberto’s again, and he shifted upright. “If summer heat was the issue, you should’ve said so earlier! I gotcha.”
“Wait, wait, wait, wai—” A gentle Water Gun splashed against Roberto’s face. He flinched at first and promptly screened himself with his sizable ears. “You jerk!”
Margarita giggled next to him, and Gonzalez soon followed with hearty guffaws after dropping his move, whipping his right arm against the water about him in his mirth. Roberto unshielded himself then, revealing a long, drenched face. “Not funny,” he grumbled through gritted teeth.
Roberto’s temper mellowed with time, however. He closed his eyes as a zephyr swirled around his soggy fur, sighing contently. “Actually, I very much needed that…”
“See?” Lombre said as he readied to float on his back again, but Margarita’s voice stopped him.
“Don’t forget about me, Gonzalez! But be gentler, teehee~”
“Right!” He aimed skywards this time, adjusting the pressure of his Water Gun such that the gush scattered above the normal- and flying-types and showered them agreeably.
Both Pokémon sighed with eyes closed, and once they were thoroughly soaked and Lombre ceased his move, Skiploom’s bloom twirled as a favonian Gust blew in their direction.
“Oh, Margarita, you’re a sweetheart,” Roberto moaned blissfully, his tunic flaring and flapping with the wind.
“Heh… Alright, you two feel free to cool and rest in the stream,” Gonzalez said as he swam to and climbed atop the bank, “I’ll water what you’ve sown.”
After shaking his body and letting the excess water evaporate in the sunlight, he walked to their pack where he had stored his light-orange poncho. He pulled it on, made sure the guild badge fixed onto it was straight, then he ascended the slope leading to the furrows; but once he reached level ground, he saw on the dirt path bordering their parcel two figures heading his way. They were huge even in the distance, and behind one of them moved a cart.
“Uh… Margarita, Roberto?” he called out, tilting his head back only slightly to keep an eye on the mysterious figures still. “Did any of you receive word of a mulch or amendment delivery? …Or even nightsoil?”
“No?” Margarita replied distantly.
“Please come.”
Once his friends were with him, they stood in the middle of the path to meet the strangers, but as the features of the pair became clearer, a chill ran down Lombre’s spine.
Stamping towards them were an Ursaluna and an Ursaring—the former donning a taupe neckerchief and a harness with which they were towing the cart, and the latter a bloodred cloak laced with void-black and ending in tapering flaps at the bottom, and a cap plumed with a red-tipped feather from the crest of a Staraptor. They bore mean countenances that, Lombre felt, penetrated right through their skulls.
“What business could they have here?” Roberto shout-whispered, looking to both his partners for answers.
Margarita whimpered uneasily, and she rode an updraft that lifted her several feet in the air, drawing a disbelieving, wide-eyed stare from Bunnelby.
“Seriously? You’re leaving us at their mercy?” he exclaimed.
“I’m not! I’m just…keeping my distance in case things go awry…”
“And why should you get to enjoy such luxury? I can’t even dig an escape tunnel with an Ursaluna at my tail! A-And what of Gonzalez?” His voice cracked, and he gestured to Lombre with both arms.
Margarita hovered guiltily but ultimately did not budge. Lombre drew their attention then. “They’re from the Hunters Guild,” he said plainly.
“H-How do you know that?” Roberto snapped his attention to Gonzalez.
“On Ursaring’s cloak. Their insignia is clasped there.” The ursids had come close enough for him to distinguish that.
The Hunters Guild ensign was a terrible craftwork. Patterned after the Pokémon of Death and Destruction, Yveltal, it bore two red-and-black wings that extended oppositely from a taupe core, and a third one that stretched from the bottom but curved upwards to grasp a lustrous, sky-blue orb incrusted in the center. Gonzalez could not, to save his life, imagine a single reason why they would pick such a ghastly Pokémon to represent them, if not to say the quiet, sanguinary part aloud.
“Gonzalez, pardon my pessimism, but that doesn’t soothe me in the slightest!” squeaked Roberto, his face affrighted and alarmed.
Lombre gulped, sweat beading on his forehead and hands. “Me neither…”
The stout cart creaked to a halt a few paces away from the farmers, bearing inside it a mantled lump. Ursaluna angled her head towards the airy Skiploom, observing her with an indecipherable look, then she angled it down to meet the earthbound Pokémon. Only Lombre was at eye level to her; Bunnelby, however, if the ears that constituted half his height were not counted, was like the size of one of her fearsome, powerful paws. She glanced at the other ursid and rumbled.
Ursaring cleared his throat, his head angled downwards even more than his partner due to his bipedal nature. “Is…Mr. Lombre of the Cultivators Guild in your midst?” he asked.
Everyone’s eyes bulged, and Skiploom and Bunnelby snapped their attention to the water-type. Goosebumps prickled across Gonzalez’s entire body, and for a moment he had the urge to explode on his fellows for indirectly yet unsubtly outing his identity to these fearsome strangers. But that would have been unfair to them, for he bore on his heart the ensign of their guild, patterned after the likeness of Landorus, the Guardian of the Fields and the Lord of Harvests; and the likelihood that the ursids did not know what a Lombre looked like was low.
He gulped and, with a quivering bill, answered, “Th-That would be me.”
The ursids expressions softened mysteriously, and Gonzalez swore he could detect a tinge of hesitation and even sadness in them. He did not know what to make of this. “May we…have some privacy, please?” Ursaring requested Bunnelby and Skiploom.
Fear gripped Gonzalez—a fear that his yokefellows would abandon him to the carnivores to save their own hides—but after an unbearable eternity of quiet and stillness, Roberto allayed his trepidation. “We’d rather stick together,” he said, sidling closer to Lombre.
“Y-Yeah,” Margarita added, descending to be at ear level to Bunnelby.
Ursaring shifted his attention to Lombre. “Would that be all right? Our business here is of a sensitive—”
“Y-Yes,” Gonzalez found himself consenting immediately, sighing inwardly. I ought to treat Roberto and Margarita for this…
Ursaring nodded soberly. “Mr. Lombre, we have…lamentable news about your wife, Politoed of the Safety Guild.”
That sentence was so close to perfection, to incurring in him exultation bordering on the beatific. Gonzalez wanted to beam, to rejoice with his fellows in light of the tidings that these unexpected visitors bore, and, above all, to behold and fondle and kiss again the wife that had vanished three months and twelve days ago during a rescue mission inside a Mystery Dungeon. But that abominable word, lamentable, marred it all and set it topsy-turvy, from the loftiest zenith to the most hadal nadir.
In his maelstrom of emotions, Gonzales was unaware of his trembling limbs, and with a face that registered the initial joy twisting into bleak disbelief and misery, he uttered a meek “huh…?”
“It was as the Rescuers had feared: she had feralized,” said Ursaring as he lowered his cap and pressed it against his chest.
A weight plummeted to his stomach. In truth, Gonzalez always understood that this was a possibility, and with the panging trudge of time, after even rescue teams had given up on her search, he had come to accept it as reality and reattained a semblance of normalcy thanks to his friends. But clearly he had not truly moved on, and the cankering fang to his heart that the Ursaring delivered was proof of that. Tears began dewing his eyes.
A realization suddenly struck him, however. “W-Wait, how do you know? Was she found?” he asked desperately, stepping forward once, clinging to the hope of seeing her again, even if she had forever lost her mind.
Ursaring gulped diffidently. “Y-Yes,”—Lombre’s spirits lifted—“one of our teams did, but—”
Gonzalez did not need to listen any further, as he was finally able to answer his own question of ‘Why them? Why Hunters?’ All hope that had budded in his visage was wrenched out from the roots, and only ghastliness and pallor remained in the despoiled soil.
He retracted his step and even began backpedaling while shaking his head and muttering, “No, no, no…” His partners considered and retreated alongside him anxiously.
“Mr. Lombre, please,” Ursaring pleaded, extending a paw yet remaining in place. When Lombre showed no signs of stopping, he added, “We…have her…”
Gonzalez halted, eyes bulging.
Ursaring sighed tensely. “One of our teams found her,” he said as he started for the back of the cart, placing his cap on its edge, “but, as I said, she had already feralized. They didn’t notice her tattoo until after…the deed.” He hefted the shrouded lump with both arms and bore it to where he had been standing. “As proper, we mended what we could, and now we’re returning her to you, her beloved, that you may mourn and grant her the dignity of a proper burial.” He gingerly set it before himself, then he turned to nod at the Ursaluna, and they both backed up a few paces. “On behalf of the entire Hunters Guild, we’re deeply sorry for your loss.”
Gonzalez watched this unfold with blear eyes fixed on the shrouded lump. With the weight of the dread on his legs for what he would see, he plodded towards it at a painfully laggard pace, droplets sparsely wetting the parched ground beneath him. And once he was before it—before her—he dropped to his knees and tremblingly unswathed her.
Each unfoldment was like tearing the rind from a tree with his bloodied claws, causing him to wince as if from the agony; but he did so out of fear of what he would see—a fear that soon became reality as he undid the last fold.
He did not recoil when his eyes finally met his lover’s peaceful-seeming face. He beheld it in a state of suspended emotion, almost of suspended time, as if his brain had not even processed the crucial fact that Politoed was here only in body. But when he reached to caress her cheek, the frigid touch of death exploded from his claws to the rest of his body.
“Rocío…” he whispered her name as he jerked his hand away, and as his eyes finally noticed the limpness of her body and the stitches marring her beauty, the numbing lull that had settled over him was sluiced away by the sudden cataracts that burst forth from his eyes. He keened forlornly, then embraced her body with his face buried in her chest.
Bunnelby and Skiploom presently joined him by his side. Margarita even alighted as the two Pokémon flanked their mourning partner, rubbing his back in a soothing motion as they waited for Lombre to recover.
Gonzalez had not kept track of time in his grieving. He only craned his bleary eyes up once they had flowed dry, and with his mind depressingly numb now, he examined Politoed’s body more closely and somberly.
She bore what appeared to be a bite mark on her right thigh, several lacerations on her abdomen, and even purpling from blunt damage, he presumed—all mended to the best of the Hunters’ ability. He narrowed his eyes, embittered by the abuse that his beloved Rocío had suffered before her passing. The sober part of him that rationalized that her tattoo was too small for the Hunters to have seen in the heat of battle was no match to his judgmental side. After all, her tattoo was on her left—
His bloodshot eyes bulged. Rocío’s tattoo—an amphibian settled on a blooming lily pad—bore a sewn gash that ran across it, ruining it.
Gonzalez angled his eyes furiously, and if he were not currently holding his beloved, he would be clenching his claws in righteous ire. There is no way those monsters did not see it! his mind rushed, his breathing quickening. Why would they blemish it if not to try to get away with murder?
“Gonzalez…?” Margarita spoke up in a concerned tone with a nub to her chin. “Are you okay? You suddenly…tensed up.”
Skiploom’s words, however, could not clear his animosity-raised barrier. His gaze flicked to the ursids, startling them. They aren’t the murderers, are they? He recalled their mentioning of ‘one of their teams.’ “Wh-Who…” he started with a quivering, coarse voice, then gulped, “is to blame for this…?”
The ursids exchanged worried stares. Ursaring then replied, “I’m…afraid we cannot disclose that information, Mr. Lombre.”
“Wh-Why…?” he asked tensely.
“Hey, Gonzalez,” Roberto spoke up nervously this time as he massaged Lombre’s left arm, drawing the ursids attention. “M-Maybe we should drop that…”
Ursaring resumed his wary stare with the water-type. “It’s…confidential—kept so for the safety of our guild members.”
Lombre’s eyes burned with wrath upon hearing that word: safety. “You would protect murderers?” he straightened and exclaimed suddenly, prompting both his partners to tumble backwards with a start.
“Murderers?” Ursaluna spat back indignantly. “We are a legitimate guild just like yours!”
“Astella!” Ursaring reprimanded, snapping his attention to her.
That comparison was the straw that broke the Numel’s back. “We’re nothing like you!” Gonzalez shrieked, leaping over Politoed’s cadaver and barreling towards Ursaluna, his claws extending to five times their size and emitting a white glow.
He brought them down on her face upon reaching her, but his Fury Swipes was suddenly intercepted by Ursaring’s back. He roared in pain as Lombre’s claws sent shreds of cloth and tufts of fur and spatters of blood flying. And although this was not the water-type’s initial target, he believed both ursids were equally culpable and continued his assault anyway.
“Brother!” Ursaluna cried, glaring at Lombre behind Ursaring vengefully. She raised a paw to ready a Slash.
“Astella, no, stop!” Ursaring barked while enduring the onslaught in place. “To the guild, now!”
Ursaluna vacillated momentarily, but she hastily lowered her paw and galumphed back the way they came at full tilt, the cart behind her rocking violently over the uneven country ground, the cap that Ursaring had set atop it falling to the wayside. The bloodied Pokémon sprinted next, but Lombre pursued him.
“Gonzalez!” both Skiploom and Bunnelby shouted upon recovering from the initial shock, chasing after their frenzied partner.
Margarita was the first to act. She spat a barrage of Leech Seeds around Lombre’s feet, which rooted themselves fast to the ground and coiled around his legs at supernatural speeds. He tripped, and as he struggled to snap free from the sprouts with his claws, Bunnelby overtook and pinned him with his ears.
“Gonzalez, stop!” Roberto besought. “You’re going to get us all killed!” But as he held Lombre down, his eyes drifted to the fleeing Pokémon, and puzzlement battled with trepidation to register on his face.
“Margarita, Roberto, let go!” Gonzalez growled as he struggled against Bunnelby’s grip, but his exertion did not match his anger. It was not directed at his friends, after all, and now that Rocío was confirmed to be gone, they were all he had left.
He yielded eventually with a frustrated sigh, and his eyes snapped to the two ursine silhouettes in the distance. “Don’t you ever show your faces around these parts again!” he howled, a vein throbbing on his right temple. “If I see you again, I’ll kill you! Ya hear me? I’ll kill you!” His voice broke at the end.
With the subjects of his wrath receding in and blending with the background, Lombre was once again at the mercy of reality. Rocío flashed before his eyes, and he clenched them to shut his view of her, but her deathly sallow likeness had already burned itself into his retinas. His head dropped to the hard ground, and a smart pain exploded from his bill to the rest of his face, but that paled in comparison to the emotional pang smarting his very heart and soul. A shrill wail burst from his parting bill, but no tears wet the parched soil, for they, alongside Gonzalez’s spirit, had run dry.