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i. fall
Blanche is supposed to get out of the lab at five; she doesn’t until six fifteen, and only because one of the lab eevees chooses today to bite her.
“It’s fine,” she says, rooting through the first-aid kit with her non-bleeding hand, but her PI glares threateningly at her while muttering about protocol and safety record and worst of all, upcoming grant review, which is how she ends up in the emergency room filling out an injury report for the lab and assuring the intake nurse that her vaccinations are up to date.
They finally give her a fresh bandage and a brochure on secondary infections and let her go after an hour. It’s all much more drama than she would’ve liked, and that’s before the rainstorm that blows in as she’s walking home.
She lets Vaporeon out a block from the apartment, because she figures at least one of them should be happy about the way the day is going. Vaporeon chirps delightedly at puddles all the way back, then tries to swarm her with dripping paws as soon as she unlocks the door.
“Down,” she warns, going to dig out some pokepellets. “You know, one of your cousins bit me today.”
Vaporeon cocks its head at her, then nudges at her bandaged hand with a cold, wet nose.
“Yes, you’ve got much better manners,” she admits. “Eat your food, you silly thing.”
Her shoes are wet and her jacket’s soaked through, leaving her shirt damp underneath. She should take a shower and change, probably; she should read that paper she was supposed to finish last week, and answer her emails, and call the people who keep fucking them over on the primer shipments.
She’s got a million things she should be doing and the teeth marks between her thumb and forefinger are throbbing, and it’s very possible she hasn’t actually seen sunlight the entire day — and she’s thinking about all these things, perched on the edge of the futon with her backpack still on her shoulders, when she closes her eyes for just a minute and falls, quite accidentally, asleep.
———
The streetlight outside her window is too bright through the blinds she's only half-drawn, and there’s someone pounding at her door.
“Blanche, are you in there?”
“Go away!” she yells, but drags herself up anyway, still half-asleep. It takes her more tries than she’d like to undo the lock and yank the door open. “Oh, Candela. Hey.”
“Blaze, hold it,” Candela yelps. At her feet, her flareon abruptly sneezes sparks from its nose.
“Um,” Blanche says, flicking on a light and blinking at the result. “Were you trying to burn my door down?”
“No-oooo,” Candela coughs. “That would be ridiculous and dramatic, obviously. But! I texted you like a million times! You could’ve been, I don’t know, mugged, or dead —”
“Right, because arson would’ve been a big help in that case,” she says dryly, and waves Candela inside. “No, I was just asleep —” She stops. “Shit, I was asleep.”
“Yeah, I got that the first time.”
“No, I had stuff to do!” Blanche says, panicked. “The paper, and the — you texted —?” She pats her pockets for her phone, finds it wedged between the wall and the futon frame instead. When she comes back up, Candela’s still standing in front of her, Blaze on the floor licking its haunches with an injured air. “We were supposed to meet,” she remembers in a rush. “Dinner. Oh my god, I’m so sorry.”
“Hey, chill,” Candela says, holding her hands up. “You said lab might run over late, so I figured we wouldn’t be eating til nine or something anyway. Really, you’re not that far behind schedule.”
“It wasn’t all lab,” Blanche says miserably. “I mean, a little, but then one of the eevees got tired of being manhandled and then I had to wait forever in the ER —”
“Hold up,” Candela says. “The ER? What the hell?”
“No, it was stupid, it was this tiny bite,” Blanche protests, waving her hand in evidence. “It was a protocol thing. A waste of time, honestly, I could’ve just washed the hand and it would’ve been the same.”
“Still,” Candela says, and takes the hand for a closer look. “You should’ve called, I would’ve come by. The ER’s boring.”
“Well, I was gonna call after, except there was the rain and the day’s been awful —” Blanche takes her hand back to rub at her face. “God, let me make this up to you.”
“Hey,” Candela says, “seriously, it’s fine, don’t worry about it.”
“Shut up, I’m worrying about it!” Blanche frowns. “Have you eaten? There’s that Indian place that’s open forever. Or — ramen? They just opened, apparently they’ve got like twenty different kinds.”
“Tell you what,” Candela says. “It’s late, you’re exhausted — you are, look, Vaporeon’s about to fall asleep in the water bowl — so what if you get changed, shower, whatever, and we’ll stay in. I’ll dig up some food, you can tell me about your day. We’ll chill.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, absolutely. Go, do your thing. And remember, if you’re not back in fifteen I’m calling the police.”
“I hope 911 blocks your number,” Blanche says, and goes.
———
When Blanche comes back with dry clothes, only slightly damp hair, and three minutes to spare, Candela’s sitting cross-legged on the kitchen floor. She’s taken her jacket off and her socks are some kind of absurdly striped ones; she looks carelessly comfortable, in a way that always makes Blanche want something.
“You know you have no people food in this place,” Candela says, looking up. “Your pantry is literally a giant thing of pokepellets and a bag of berry treats, which, please tell me you haven’t been eating that.”
“There’s a pack of — noodles,” Blanche says vaguely.
“Yeah, expired —”
“— and actually, pokepellets are basically just protein and wheat, which is perfectly edible —”
“You,” Candela pronounces, “are sad and pathetic, and I ordered Chinese. Now come and look at this, Vaporeon’s got a new trick.”
Blanche lets herself be waved over. “The one where you yell ‘flamethrower’ and Vaporeon flops over and plays dead? I already know about that one.”
“What can I say, I’m just a fire trainer trying to even the playing field.” Candela grins. “No, this one’s new. C’mon, put your hand out.”
Candela’s tugging at her impatiently, grip warm around her wrist. Blanche obediently uncurls her fingers, palm up, and waits.
“Vaporeon,” Candela says solemnly. “High five!”
“Oh my god,” Blanche says, as Vaporeon stretches up to press both its front paws to her palm. “Are you serious?”
“Always,” Candela says, tossing Vaporeon a treat. “Good job, buddy, we gotta remember that one for later.”
“It is so not worth the brain space,” Blanche pleads. Vaporeon, looking very pleased with itself, ignores her completely. “Candela, I swear to god, one of these days I’m gonna teach Blaze a bunch of useless stuff and you will realize —”
“— that I’ve taught Blaze all of them already,” Candela says, smug, and pops a berry treat into her own mouth. “Hey, these aren’t half bad.”
And it’s a moment that Blanche gets to have, sprawled across the tiles she hasn’t cleaned in god knows how long: Candela laughing beside her, Blaze and Vaporeon gulping mouthfuls from the same food bowl with their whiskers mingling. One moment, that Blanche could imagine pausing and framing in all its bright glory, to save for the kind of days like today.
The delivery guy’s coming, and after dinner she’s still got a to-do list the size of a city; but right now, the world’s just them in this cramped little kitchen, and she’s pretty okay with that.
ii. winter
In January, Blanche gets assigned to present at a conference in San Francisco.
“That’ll be fun,” Candela says. “Go to like, a beach, get away from the snow. Send me a picture back so I can look at it while I’m freezing back here.”
“I’m only there two days,” Blanche says, switching to speakerphone so she can fish out a jacket from the bottom of her closet. “Catching up on everyone else’s research, presenting, networking. Besides, it’s California, not Australia, it’s winter there too.”
“Come on, you can take like an hour to go see the ocean.” Candela sounds disapproving; Blanche can almost see the frown on her face. “All work and no chill, it’s not healthy.”
“If I ever make gym leader it’ll be easier,” Blanche says absently. “Anyway, chill when you’re dead, isn’t that what they say?”
“They’re gonna find your body in some lab in fifteen years,” Candela predicts darkly. “Keeled over on top of some very expensive equipment. ‘She led Team Mystic well,’ your obituary will say. ‘She never came out of her lab or had any fun, but her research was top-notch.’”
Blanche shakes out a blazer, wondering if it’s professional enough. “I cannot believe you’re writing my obituary at me, that’s at least a little macabre.”
“‘Some people say she hadn’t seen sunlight in so long she could no longer tolerate the great outdoors —’”
“I am hanging up,” Blanche says loudly. “But feel free to keep talking if that’s gonna get it out of your system.”
“Oh, talking’s definitely not gonna cut it,” Candela tells her, arch. “I’ll send you an email.”
On the bed, the screen of her phone goes dark. Blanche finds herself grinning at it for a minute before she remembers all the packing she has left and starts looking for shoes.
———
Candela never does send her the rest of that obituary; instead, she texts her a steady stream of suggested tourist attractions. “Bike across the Golden Gate Bridge!” says one link, which Candela follows up with “do it b4 ur leg muscles all disappear!!!!!!” Another time, just a picture with the comment “nude beach!!! >:D”
“When are you gonna run out of exclamation points?” Blanche sends back as the first-class passengers start filing through the gate, and then, pointedly, a graph of San Francisco’s monthly temperatures.
Undaunted, Candela responds: are u an ice trainer or aren’t u?!!!!!
“Well, how many volcanoes have you jumped into?” Blanche types one-handed, wrangling her carry-on with the other. “Hey, we’re boarding, see you on the other side!”
It’s a long flight. She ends up rewriting the intro to the presentation about twelve times, trying to decide whether one of the citations is working right, then dozes for a couple of hours before the plane lands at SFO.
Her phone buzzes as soon as she gets back signal. She pauses some steps past the gate to thumb the message open and finds herself laughing, soft but real, while outside the sky goes dark and people hurry by all around her.
It’s a picture: Candela, grinning at the camera, with the mouth of a volcano badly photoshopped beneath her. As a caption, she’d typed, “if i can u can 2!!!!!!!”
Ten o’clock on the west coast means past midnight back home, but it’s something, to think about Candela’s small electronic footprint here to keep her company. Blanche slips the phone back in her pocket, where it sits almost like a warm, living thing, and goes to look for a cab.
———
Blanche’s presentation is scheduled on day two, which gives her a lot of time to fret, and she thinks it’s going to be terrifying until it’s not, until it’s the same data she’s been staring at week in and week out. There’s a lot of things she still doesn’t know, but this — she’s spent long nights in lab, she’s lost sleep and blood over it. All she has to do now is talk.
———
When it’s over — when the audience is gone, and Blanche should probably be vacating the room for whoever’s next — she sinks down into one of the front row seats and looks up at the projector screen. The presentation had gone well but it’s also left her — wrung out, exhausted, like she’s been focused on this for so long she’d nearly forgotten how to do anything else.
The last slide is still up, diagramming polymerase activity in an eevee just before evolution. She thinks about snapping a picture, briefly, and doesn’t know what for.
There’s a message on her phone she’s left unread. It’d come in last night, Candela’s name across the top, and Blanche had saved it for later: something to look forward to, no matter how anything else went.
“GOOD LUCK,” Blanche reads now, smiling a little at Candela’s excited capitals, “& go chill here after!!!!”
Here turns out to be a wharf on the bay. Blanche clicks through the link, curious, and finds a page full of seel pictures. Tumbling in the water, lazily sunning themselves on the pier, sprawled over each other with complete unconcern.
Breeding season is over, she remembers. In January, the seels come home.
“Well,” she says out loud, to the empty room. “Why not?”
———
There’s a cold wind blowing in from the bay; it sets Vaporeon quivering even before they see the water. “Go on,” Blanche says, tucking her hands into her pockets, and watches Vaporeon bound over to trade chirps with the largest seel in sight, its whiskers tipped with white.
They don’t do this often enough, Blanche thinks guiltily. She takes Vaporeon to the pool once a week — or tries to, at least — but even when Vaporeon’s not cooped up in its pokeball it’s mostly curled up by her feet in lab, or pacing the length of the apartment. And Vaporeon never complains, because Vaporeon’s much better than she deserves, and really, that leaves her feeling even worse than if Vaporeon had gotten sulky about it in the first place.
Over on the pier, Vaporeon’s trying to tug some kind of fish out of the water. From the looks of it, there’s a seel vigorously protesting at the other end. Blanche contemplates going over, playing referee, then thinks better of it. The two of them reach some kind of truce eventually; or, at least, when Vaporeon trots back, it’s got half a fish in its mouth and an enormously satisfied expression.
“You’re a terrible show-off,” Blanche says fondly when Vaporeon strikes its most photogenic pose. She obliges anyway, snaps picture after picture until Vaporeon deems one acceptable and only then settles down to swallow its prize.
She sends the photo off to Candela after: Nether half of the spoils inside rogue seel, but hey! A moral #victory. It’s the kind of thing she’d like, and it makes Blanche smile to think about Candela opening it up, maybe smiling back into the folds of her favorite scarf.
Candela’s reply comes when Blanche is halfway to the airport, about to catch a red eye back to New York. It’s just a picture of the sidewalk outside Candela’s gym, her flareon glaring balefully at a snowdrift — but Blanche looks at the the gray view and Blaze, fluffed up to nearly twice its size, even Candela’s shoes halfway out of frame, and feels something like a warm fist around her heart.
A long, long time ago, Blanche had chosen research because she thought it would give her clear hard answers. It hasn’t really turned out that way. But this, right here, is as simple as it gets.
She’s going home.
iii. spring
Theoretically, Blanche has the week off.
“Theoretically,” Candela says, coming out of the ring for a hasty gulp of water, “doesn’t that mean you’re supposed to be, I dunno, not working?”
“I’m not — working,” Blanche says. “Not exactly? Not in the precise — definition of the word. Related, maybe. Anyway, look, you’re still working.”
“Valor has a tournament sequence that ramps up in March and basically explodes in June,” Candela says, pointed. “You have a break where you should be in like, Florida, but instead you’re hanging around my gym reading ten thousand papers.”
“Okay, but I was supposed to have a proposal written up weeks ago,” Blanche protests. “A project that’d be more self-directed, you know? Something that’s about what I want to look at. And my PI’s been super nice about it but I’ve been putting it off and the deadline’s this weekend and I’m just — stuck. I don’t know what I want to do.”
At the end of it she’s got her head on the table she’s commandeered, staring miserably at the paper on top of the stack; from the half of the title she can make out, it’s something about pre-evolutionary hormone cascade pathways in the domestic eevee.
Candela comes over to pat her on the head. “Maybe you should branch out a bit more,” she says. “I mean, you’ve been looking at eevees for months, right?”
“Well, they’re good organisms to look at for evolution,” Blanche says, blinking up at her. “Easy to work with, breed uniformly, and they evolve consistently given specific stimuli. It’s pretty much what you’d design if you wanted a perfect example to study.”
“I mean, look,” Candela says, and drops into the seat next to Blanche. “When I first had to pick what type specialty I wanted, I went with fire because it’s got a lot of offensive power, right?”
“Sure,” Blanche says dubiously.
“Right, so it was great, I loved it. But then I got, I dunno, stuck. I didn’t wanna think about battling, or move combinations, or anything. Everything was predictable, and I just got so fed up with staring at the same lineup all the time.”
“I didn’t know that.” Blanche sits up, to look at Candela properly. “You never said.”
“Well.” Candela shrugs. “I didn’t wanna talk about it.”
Blanche had never thought much about battling; it wasn’t an aspect of training that ever interested her. But Candela had loved it as long as Blanche had known her. Maybe it shouldn’t be so surprising that Candela had had doubts, once, but —
Blanche had always thought Candela was the surest person she knew.
“Anyway,” Candela says, “my mentor asked if I’d ever thought about working with some of the other types. And, you know, I’d obviously done training against them. But it’s — different, I guess, having to look at type from a whole other angle. It puts what you know into context.”
“Hang on,” Blanche says. “Is this the time you borrowed Vaporeon for like a whole week? I thought you just wanted to train for water weaknesses.”
“Well, I did some of that too.” Candela grins. “But it was fun, we did a lot of battling together. You know, Vaporeon’s pretty good. Look.”
Candela had left Blaze working on target practice when she came over to talk, and at some point, Vaporeon’s joined in. Blanche watches now, bemused, as Vaporeon leaps up in a perfect arc and launches a water gun at the last target. The attack hits it dead center — the target goes down with a loud bang.
“Yeah, buddy!” Candela says, delighted. “You still got it.”
“Hey, c’mere,” Blanche says, reaching out, and Vaporeon flits over at once to butt its head against her knees, purring all the while she’s scratching behind its ears. “You’ve been hiding your talents, huh? When’d you get so sneaky?”
“So yeah, that’s what I did.” Candela suddenly looks sheepish. “Probably you can figure out your problems without a whole bunch of pokenapping.”
“Well,” Blanche says, thinking. “When I went to that conference, there was this — Professor Willow, he’s done a lot of interesting work with pidgeys — and we actually had a pretty good conversation about what he called ‘evolutionary inertia.’ I mean, he pointed out we were both looking at species that are kind of volatile, evolutionarily speaking? And we were talking about how it might be nice to have data on a species that’s more inert. I mean the problem is that most pokemon like that are too big or hard to take care of or don’t breed easily — just, not great if you want to do a larger kind of study.”
“You said most,” Candela says.
Blanche throws her hands up. “I mean, yeah, there’s magikarp. Definitely high-effort to tip those things over. And like, it’s all good and fine to have a hundred of them in the lab, but at some point you’re gonna want them to evolve, you know? I could probably scrounge up the facilities for a couple, maybe, and then what are you gonna do?”
“Trading Network,” Candela says, as if it’s obvious.
“Er,” Blanche says.
“Well, if it’s gyrados,” Candela says, “there are probably a hundred trainers in Arizona alone looking to complete their teams with one. We’ve also got an international channel but it’s probably too much of a pain to go through, there are some some crazy regulations out there. I don’t think it’s a Valor-only thing, want me to set you up?”
“Ye-es,” Blanche says slowly, thinking. Something’s coming together; she can feel it, a spark of an idea crystallizing, all at once.
“Hey,” she says. “You wanna go pokehunting?”
———
“So when you said ‘hunting,’” Candela says, “I thought there would be more — hunting.”
“But you kept thinking that after you heard ‘magikarp’?” Blanche says. “Maybe you should get your ears checked.”
“I mean, there are those deep sea fishing shows where they sometimes land like, thousand-year-old magikarp and the fishermen cry about it,” Candela points out. “I’m just saying.”
Blanche chooses not to dignify that with an answer. There’s the sound of running water nearby, so she’s pretty sure they’re nearly there; then the trail curves, abruptly, and the stream unfolds into view.
The timing’s right. It’s the season for magikarp to head downstream, and there are quick flickers of movement in the water everywhere she looks. “Aha,” she says with satisfaction. “We can probably make quota by lunch.”
“It’s just so — unsporting,” Candela says, though she takes a handful of the lab-issue pokeballs anyway. “They flop there. You catch them. There’s no art in it.”
“I hate to break this to you,” Blanche says dryly, “but if you wanted art, you came to the wrong neighborhood.”
“You think so?” Candela says, with a raised eyebrow, before she turns and splashes into the stream. Blanche stares at her far too long, puzzled, until Vaporeon starts nosing impatiently at her boots.
———
They all catch their share of magikarp, even Blaze, who spends the whole time barking madly on the banks until one quite accidentally leaps into its jaws. And somewhere between the 77th and 78th, Candela falls in and comes up sputtering with a blinking dratini draped over her head. The sun’s up high and Candela’s beginning to laugh, and Blanche takes the picture before she can think about it: the bright gleam off the dratini’s fins and Candela’s grin, all at once.
“Stop taking pictures and help me up,” Candela demands, holding out a hand. So Blanche tucks her phone carefully away, swallowing the laughter bubbling up in her chest, and reaches for her.
iv. summer
The year’s wrapping up, so naturally, Blanche still has a million things left she needs to do. The eevee project is at a pretty delicate stage at this point, and there’s a lot of background she wants to cover on the magikarp before she has to actually start dealing with them. She ends up splitting all her time between lab and the library. She’s staked out a carrel. She’s fallen asleep on more books in the last two weeks than she has the entire rest of the year.
It’s a bad habit, throwing herself so deep into work. She keeps meaning to break it, but it’s only for a while, until everything settles down.
(It’s always just for a while; but guilt’s not something she has time for, either.)
Candela’s gone on the New England tournament circuit, which is — well, it’s good. It sounds like she’s having a lot of fun, even if it’s also exhausting. So it’s ridiculous, really, to feel like the city’s somehow different when she’s not around, like the heart of it’s missing.
Blanche tries not to think about it, mostly. She keeps her mind on work and ignores all the ways she’s beginning to feel stretched all too thin.
———
Something like a lifetime later, Candela texts: MADE NATIONALS!!!!!!!!!
Blanche is in the stacks with godawful signal; it’s a miracle the message made it through at all. She decides on a five minute break to resurface and calls just outside the building, squinting against the bright sunlight.
“Congrats!” she says as soon as Candela picks up. “You did it!”
“Hey, you, it’s been great,” Candela says, breathless. “It took so long to find out because there was some PNW fuckery, but the one who finally made it through’s a grass trainer, I’m gonna crush her.”
“Huh. And here you always said type wasn’t everything.”
“Don’t use me against me,” Candela says, mock-outraged. “Listen, though. I gotta be in Philly by next week, we’re doing placement matches, but I’m gonna drop home for the weekend. Um, do you wanna — maybe go out for drinks. Dinner. Something?”
“What, you’re asking?” Blanche says, laughing a little. “Usually you don’t even bother. You have somewhere in mind, or—?”
“I’ll text you!” Candela says. “Okay. Good! It’s — it’s a date.”
“Sure,” Blanche says. “I’ll see you, okay?”
It turns out the inside of the library feels a lot colder this time around; but Blanche has gotten much better at not thinking about it.
———
At some point in time, the story goes, some grad student’s electrode got loose in the research library, happily set up camp next to the computer labs, and nearly blew up itself and half the building after six hours of stray electric discharge. They had to call the bomb squad to evacuate. And this is why, legend says, there is now a strict pokemon check-in policy at the front desk.
Blanche would say of course that’s not true, except she’s pretty sure she knows someone who’d fit the story to a T. So maybe it’s not so impossible for someone like Spark to have existed back then, too.
The fact remains: whether it’s true or not, there’s the policy. She’s never liked it much — it’s not like she’s one of those people itching for a battle at the drop of a hat, but there’s still something about stripping off her pokebelt to hand off to someone else that leaves an uncomfortable feeling between her shoulderblades.
So she’s been putting off coming here until she absolutely can’t, and then she sighs and grits her teeth and slides her pokemon over the counter. She knows mostly what she needs. If she can get everything done today, she won’t have to come back.
She’s so close. She’s going to finish this, and the year’s going to wrap, and she’ll finally have room to — breathe, to not feel like her life’s barreling onward without any way to stop. She can do this one thing, and then things will be — better.
The next time she looks up, Candela’s there, looking windswept and —
“I’ve been calling,” she says.
“You’re — dressed up,” Blanche says, blank. Her phone’s in her pocket somewhere — it takes a moment to fish it out and find it completely dead.
“Oh my god,” Candela says tiredly. “You — you know what? Yeah. It’s fine.”
She turns, is halfway down the hall before Blanche can scramble up. Blanche looks down at the table, swears, and dumps everything onto the nearest return shelf before sprinting after her.
Candela’s already passing across her ID across the checkout counter when Blanche catches up. “Candela,” she says, fumbling for her wallet so she can do the same, “hey, listen, I’m sorry, can you please —”
“You don’t — have to apologize,” Candela says, colorless. “Just forget about it.”
“I didn’t think — come on, if you could just —”
“I said —” Candela turns with a flash of heat — “Dammit!” The return tray’s come back, and her elbow crashes into it, sends both their pokeballs flying to the floor. “Sorry,” she mutters to the guard, crouching down to pick hers back up while Blanche does the same, and when she straightens back up Candela’s gone back to subdued. “Look, I’m gonna go.”
It’s dark outside the library. “Candela,” Blanche says, helpless.
Candela stops, then. “Look, it’s — it’s my fault,” she says, and keeps going before Blanche can protest. “You have this — thing, okay. You find something and then you get so deep into it there’s no room for anything else. And I like that about you, I don’t wanna — force you to change. But if you want this, if you want me around, then you gotta let me in. Because I can’t do this anymore, okay? I can’t keep being this — afterthought to whatever else you have going on in your life. I thought I could, but it’s. It’s too hard.”
Blanche should say something, anything, but she can’t think what.
“I’m gonna catch the train,” Candela says. “Go home. Get some sleep, you look like you could use it.”
———
Blanche had always thought there’d be time later, to figure everything else out. Internships and lab and fighting for publication, that was now. But she’d get through it and it would end and then she could finally have a chance to —
To live, maybe.
It’s a long time, though, not to have anything else.
Blanche goes home, and thinks about all the work she has to do, and finds, almost mechanically, a clean bowl to feed Vaporeon with. “You eat, I’ll talk,” she tells the pokeball. “You can help me think.”
But flareon is the one who steps delicately out of the light, then sneezes.
“What are you doing here?” Blanche says, startled, and checks over the rest of her team. They’re all fine, though; only Vaporeon’s missing, while Blaze is here, starting to tear into the bowl Blanche had set out. They must’ve gotten mixed up, back at the library. And she hadn’t noticed because —
Blaze’s pokeball is still sitting in the palm of her hand, and all the small nicks and scratches, the wear and tear that marks the course of a partnership: she knows them. She and Candela had gone through all these things together, and she’d handled Blaze often enough for it to become familiar — for Blaze, and Candela too, to fit somewhere in her life, so comfortably that she hadn’t even noticed.
“Blaze,” she says. “I don’t want her to leave.”
Blaze tilts its head at her, then comes over to lick her hand.
“She’s gonna need you, though,” she says. “You think she’s already left for Philly?”
———
Candela’s not answering her phone. Blanche leaves her a message, then a text, standing in the middle of Penn Station, and then, before she can start thinking about it, buys a ticket for the next train.
“She might not be so happy to see me,” she tells Blaze, huddled on top of her shoes.
Blaze throws its head up and bursts into a round of barking. It sounds almost like laughter.
———
She gets into Philadelphia at six in the morning. The city’s plastered with posters; it’s easy to find the way to the tournament, but a lot harder to find Candela. “I could try to get a message through,” one of the volunteers says doubtfully. “But the trainers have a photo session after the breakfast, and then they’re going straight to the matches.”
“Thanks,” she says, and tries to figure out what to do next. Candela’s still not answering her phone. “She’s gotta know by now,” she says. “They have team check-ins, she’ll know you’re not there.”
Blaze looks at her with its large, bright eyes, then reaches up to nip gently at her fingers.
“Well,” she says. “You’ve never seen a match from the stands, have you?”
———
The placement matches are 3-on-3. Blanche knows Candela likes fighting with Blaze best, but it doesn’t mean she’s not proficient with the rest of her team. The opponent’s down two, sending out an enormous venusaur as the last, and Blanche is wondering if she was right to come after all when Candela recalls her arcanine and tosses her last pokeball into the ring.
Blanche is pretty sure she can hear Vaporeon’s thrilled chirping all the way from here.
It should be an easy match; the venusaur’s got an advantage in both type and sheer mass. Obviously its trainer has the same idea, because the venusaur sends out a swift blizzard of petals, then starts a lumbering charge while Vaporeon’s distracted.
“Vaporeon,” Candela shouts clearly. “Flamethrower!”
And while everyone stares, baffled, Blanche remembers the hours Candela spent tossing treats to Vaporeon on the floor of her apartment, while Blaze sat curled against her legs. And here it is again, just playing out on a bigger stage. Blaze here, purring contentedly in her lap, while Vaporeon does what it likes best: play tricks.
Vaporeon plays dead, and the venusaur soars right over it.
“And now,” Candela says, while Vaporeon’s lying still under the venusaur’s unprotected belly, “aurora beam.”
Blanche had seen that move too often to count, but this is the most beautiful it’s ever been.
———
She finds Candela outside the winner’s circle, carefully setting her crown of flowers on top of Vaporeon’s head.
“You’re here,” Candela says, surprised, and still flushed from the excitement of the match. “I was — look, Vaporeon was just —”
“You were great,” Blanche says. “And you were right.”
Candela stands very still, looking at her.
Blanche is not good at this, figuring out the right thing to say, but she’s trying, now. “I like you,” she says. “I like it when you’re with me. When we talk. When you send me texts. I miss you when you’re gone. You said you didn’t know if I wanted you around but I do. I always do.”
“Blanche —”
“I know I don’t always — I lose track of important things. But I want to be better, okay? I want to fix this, and I want to make it work, and I want —”
“Okay,” Candela says.
Blanche blinks. “I had more things.”
“Yeah, probably.”
“It was a long train ride,” Blanche says. “You sure you don’t wanna hear it?”
Blaze barks. Candela comes around to give it a thorough scratch behind the ears, and when she stands up she’s smiling a little. “Maybe later,” she says. “But we could — go get lunch?”
Blanche kisses her.
Blanche kisses her, and Candela makes a surprised sound before she pulls her close and kisses back. And when they pull back Candela’s got a delighted look on her face, and Blanche thinks, I want to deserve that. You.
Blaze and Vaporeon are watching them, looking suspiciously smug about the whole thing. “We are going to have a talk,” she tells Vaporeon sternly, and kisses Candela again.