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“I’m coming home later tonight, yeah I know I said I’d be home earlier...no, I got contracted for a job. Yes. A paying job.” The trainer sighed. “You remember that girl I told you about? In the forest with the...uh, fearow? Her parents caught me at the pokecenter the day after, they hired me to be her babysitter. Weekends.”
“Brother! Brother!” The Trainer squeezed his eyes shut for a moment.
“I have to go now. Yes, she calls me her brother, no I don’t know why.” A small hand latched onto a belt loop and tugged insistently. “Yes, I love you too, bye.” He shoved the pokegear back into his pocket, turning his attention on the small girl skidding to a stop in front of him. “Yeah, kiddo?”
“Look! Look!” The girl dragged a small boy around from behind her. “I made a new friend!” She proclaimed, her hand tightly clasped around the boy’s.
The boy was the same height as her, in short, damn tiny. The baseball hat on his head was far too big for him, slipping over his eyes and causing him to push the brim up every couple of minutes. Brown shorts, dark green t-shirt and a pair of dark blue velcro shoes. At least they aren’t light up . The trainer thought, sparing a half frustrated glare at his charge’s slip on light up shoes. The amount of zubat he’d had to battle his way through because of those alone . “He’s from Cinnabar Island and he has a bird pokemon too!” The boy nodded his head slowly, eyes focused on the ground.
“Oh really. I didn’t think Cinnabar had any bird pokemon.” The trainer was only half paying attention to the boy, the other half was on the giant bird looming right behind the smaller children. Zapdos didn’t appear to mind the boy at all, but the trainer kept a close eye on the pokemon regardless.
“It doesn’t.” The boy kept his eyes focused on the grass at their feet. Hm, well, the global trade station existed for a reason. “It’s only a pidgeotto.” The boy mumbled. “Not as cool as a fearow .” The girl giggled with pride. Meanwhile, the trainer scrutinized the boy carefully. No, no sign of recognition. The kid did actually believe the giant yellow and black bird was a fearow.
Zapdos fluffed itself up, turning almost into an eye searing yellow ball, crooning smugly in its throat. The trainer resisted the urge to smack his face into his palm. Of all the stories he’d heard of the legendary pokemon, not a single one had made mention of the fact that Zapdos was incredibly vain.
“Oh, but a pidgeotto will evolve into a pidgeot!” The girl cheered, clapping her hands.
“That’s right!” The boy’s head snapped up with the realization, a smile working its way across his face. “Pidgeot are awesome!”
“See?!” The little girl bounced in place.
“I mean, pidgeotto’s pretty cool too.” The boy said loyally. “I caught her myself! Saved up for a greatball and everything! ” Wait just a minute .
“Where exactly did you catch her?” The Trainer inquired.
“At the seafoam islands. Everything’s real pretty out there! I caught a ride with a swimmer who had a tentacruel.” Oh no . The trainer felt a pit open up in his stomach. There are no pidgeotto out at seafoam islands.
“Can I see her?” The girl asked innocently. The boy nodded his head vigorously.
“Yeah sure!” He thumbed the release on a slightly scratched greatball.
There’s no way it can happen twice! The trainer thought wildly. He was proven wrong when the red light of release vanished, the temperature had dropped a couple degrees, and Zapdos was looking slightly ruffled.
“She’s so pretty!” The little girl exclaimed. “Do all pidgeotto have tails like her’s?” The little boy shrugged.
“I guess so. She’s got the same head feathers. So what else could she be?” The girl rubbed her cheek against long blue tail feathers.
“She’s so soft! Do you think I could catch a pidgeotto?” The boy nodded enthusiastically.
“Yeah! I mean, I caught mine after I gave her half my tuna fish sandwich!”
“A...a tunafish sandwich?” The Trainer fought to keep his voice even, but was sure it squeaked at the end.
“Uh-huh. I fell down when I was in the caves. Right through the roof!” The boy was more then happy to talk about his pidgeotto. “And pidgeotto was there! She looked really lonely. There wasn’t anyone else anywhere , so I sat next to her. And I gave her some of my sandwich, because sharing is caring.” The boy nodded decisively at the end. “Mom says the best way to make friends is to talk and listen. But pidgeotto doesn’t talk, she likes listening though. So I told her all about looking for a pokemon of my own! So the jerks at school stop teasing me. And when it was getting late, she flew me out and let me catch her!”
Zapdos and Articuno had been gently sizing each other up, but at the conclusion of the boy’s explanation Zapdos tilted its head and Articuno shrugged in response and Zapdos settled back down. An exchange of:
Really?
Really.
Me too.
Well okay then.
Said entirely in legendary bird body language.
The Trainer choked on a laugh and buried his face in his hands. This could not be his life. These kids were going to be the death of him.
One caught a Zapdos by being lost and playing tag with it, the other caught the seafoam islands’ articuno by being lost and sharing his sandwich.Trainers ten times their age, ten times the Trainer’s age, had been trying for years, literal, actual years , to catch these pokemon. Trying every method they could, except apparently throwing a lost, naive child at them. What those vastly older and more experienced trainers hadn’t been able to accomplish, two kids had done without even realizing it, or even really trying.
And neither one knew what pokemon they actually had.
A small hand yanked at the hem of his shirt, when he looked down, the little girl smiled up at him.
“Hey mister.” The boy having got over his shyness now that he could hold onto the vastly bigger Articuno’s wing, called out to him. “Are you okay?”
“He always does stuff like this.” The girl assured him, patting the Trainer’s hip, the highest point she could reach, in what she probably thought was a reassuring way, but was actually just her slapping him as hard as she could on the hip bone.
Zapdos hopped itself across the ground to lean heavily against the Trainer, fitting its large head over the Trainer’s own. A sound like a generator humming coming from the bird’s throat. Zapdos, the Trainer had learned, was an asshole. A fact backed up by the small twinges of static charge Zapdos was shocking him with in intervals of ten seconds. Nothing terribly painful, but certainly annoying.
“Get off me!” The trainer growled, shoving ineffectively at Zapdos. The bird, instead of doing the correct thing and leaving, merely stretched its wings out to drape over the trainer. “Oh my god, no.”
“Yeah!” The little girl immediately went from smacking his hip to body hugging his knees. “Hugs make everything better!” There really wasn’t anything you could say to that, except to reach down and awkwardly pat the small girl on the back. With any luck this would be over soon, twenty incredibly embarrassing seconds at the most.
Then two blue wings enfolded him from the other side, and two other small arms grabbed his legs as well.
Damnit.
“Really?” He said down at the oversized ballcap, all he could see of the boy.
“Didn’t wanna be left out.” Came the slightly muffled response.
“Right.” The trainer sighed, at least zapdos couldn’t shock him now, because then it’d be shocking the kids too. He didn’t think zapdos cared all that much about zapping articuno, but the kids were off limits. “Okay, off. Off now .” The boy and articuno back off first. After some coaxing, the little girl was persuaded to let go as well. And zapdos followed the girl. It always does.
Why is something he’s never quite understood.
But maybe he’d been thinking about it all wrong.
The trainer supposed that if you looked at it from a certain angle, you might possibly see why a legendary bird would consent to being caught by a child.
You just had to picture it.
Being a legendary pokemon, you’d have trainers after you night and day. Always hunting you, challenging you for the prestige or the honor or the power of controlling you. No one would want you for just being you.
You’d learn to live with it. Not to like it, but adjust to it.
Accept that it was your lot in life.
But then, one day, a tiny little child invades your space, your nest.They're not a trainer, far too young and far too lost. Far too scared.
When you loom out of the darkness over them, their eyes go wide, their mouths drop open. Their face holds all of the wonder and awe of the full grown trainers who failed to catch you before them. (but none of the fear.)
Except when their mouth starts working again, and they whispercallsay your name, it’s the wrong name .
They think you are the most beautiful, amazing, wonderful pokemon they've ever seen. But not because you’re rare or one of a kind. But because you are a pokemon. And they want you. Not because you’re powerful, or a pokemon of legends. But because they want to be your very best friend, they want to travel with you, they want, in short, to play. They don’t know you’re a legendary. They don’t care about prestige or honor or power or bragging rights. They don’t care about that. They want someone to play with.
(It’s been such a long time since anyone has wanted to play with you.)
They don’t want to catch you right away either. They spend time with you first. They share what they have with you. You! A pokemon of awesome strength and power. But to them it is second nature to offer half a sandwich and not expect anything back.
They want to play tag.
They want someone to talk to.
They want a friend .
You can be that friend. You want to be that friend. So when they ask, when they toss that ball at you, you let it catch you. You don’t struggle, you go willingly.
Maybe it’s time to see what all this training nonsense is all about.
Yeah, the trainer thought. If you looked at it like that, he could see why a legendary pokemon might decide to hang out with a kid. Or two.
Even if it did make his life just that much more complicated.
“Is that Articuno?!” The Trainer’s lips twisted in an annoyed snarl, he half turned to see a younger, brasher trainer behind them. Pointing vigorously at Articuno, a spoiled looking meowth curled around her leg. “Hey kid!” The other trainer yelled at the boy. “I ch-”
“Nope, no, no way, not happening.” The Trainer cut in, shoving the boy behind him. It had been an exciting, stressful, annoying couple of days, tramping through the damn cave system. But here was someone he could take his anger out on. He grinned ferally at the other trainer, pulling out his own pokeball. “You want to challenge them, you have to go through me first .”
That night, after dropping the little girl back off at her place and going home himself, his pokegear started ringing. Definitely not a number he recognized. He answered it anyway. What's the worst that could happen?
“Yeah?”
“ I hope I’m not interrupting you. I got this number from the nurse at the pokecenter." It was a woman's voice. Middle aged. Tinged with good humor. He had a sudden bad feeling about this. "My son can’t stop talking about you. Since you’re helping that little girl with the zapdos, we were hoping you’d be open to taking his articuno and him on. ”
He sighed, pinched the bridge of his nose, thought it over for less then twenty seconds and agreed. His weekends and holidays until the kids grew up and realized what they had were gone.
But, if nothing else, a little extra cash flow wasn’t anything to sneeze at.