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~ Dragonite: Presence ~
The council video call had been going on for forty minutes, which was forty minutes longer than Lance had budgeted for a conversation about stadium seating capacity.
"The Chronicle wants a statement on the renovation timeline," said the face on the screen, flat and self-important from the laptop Lance had propped on the coffee table in front of the sofa. "Something about transparency. Public trust."
"Tell them the seats will be finished when the seats are finished," Lance responded, in the even register he used for press, councils, or anyone who might quote him later. He was, at this moment, also unable to move his left arm.
Dragonite had come in sometime during the second half of the call. He had been a veteran of the League long enough to recognize the strained edge in his master's voice when a meeting was running too long, and he had developed a deep personal intolerance for it.
The dragon hadn't just sat beside the sofa; he had wedged his massive bulk into the narrow gap between the couch and the coffee table, effectively reclaiming Lance's personal space. With his lower half anchored on the floor, he'd draped his rounded chest directly across Lance's lap and left side, pinning him into the cushions. To finish the job, he lifted his snout, resting his muzzle against Lance's shoulder so that one heavy-lidded eye and a wide expanse of orange scales ended up angled directly at the laptop's built-in webcam.
On screen, the Indigo official was currently staring into a colossal wall of orange scales and one blinking eye. "Uh, Champion? Are you... still there?"
"I am here," Lance's voice was slightly muffled from behind Dragonite's head. "They're going to run the transparency line either way. Let them."
He reached out with his one free hand, leaned forward as far as the dragon's weight allowed, and clicked the button to end the call. The trick with councils, he'd learned years ago, was to sound like a man who had somewhere else to be, and then actually have somewhere else to be, which in this case was directly underneath a dragon who had decided the meeting was adjourned.
Silver found him like that. His silence said plenty.
Crossing the room, the teenager dropped his bag by the edge of the low table, and sat where Dragonite's tail curved out across the tatami mats, leaning back against it like it was an orange beanbag, and opened his book.
"Comfortable?" Lance asked.
"Yeah, actually." Silver didn't look up from the book. "You look stuck."
"I am stuck."
"Mm."
Dragonite rumbled, low and pleased, a vibration that his trainer felt directly through his own ribs, and did not move. His eyes were closed.
Lance had negotiated three-hour council sessions without losing his composure. He had once talked Clair down from filing a formal League grievance after a dramatic Blackthorn gym dispute using nothing but tone of voice. He had no leverage whatsoever against several pounds of dragon who had decided he was comfortable and intended to stay that way, and a fourteen-year-old who had clearly reached the same conclusion and had no plans to help.
"You could," Lance muttered, "move him."
"Could." Silver turned a page. "Don't want to."
There was a version of this house, three years ago, where this scene wouldn't happen: where the boy came home late on purpose, ate standing up at the counter, and disappeared into his room before anyone could ask him anything. Lance thought about it briefly, the way you notice a scar has stopped aching before you remember it used to.
He gave up on the arm. Let it stay pinned. Reached instead with his right hand for the tea that had gone lukewarm an hour ago, and drank it anyway, because getting up was not part of the plan.
"You're going to be late for training," Silver commented, still not looking up.
"I'm aware."
"Thought the whole point of being Champion was that you set the schedule."
"The whole point of being Champion is that everyone else thinks you set the schedule." Lance glanced down at Dragonite, who had relaxed even further. "Turns out the schedule has opinions of its own."
A grin almost crossed the boy's face. He turned another page, staying where he was, and Lance — tea gone cold, forty minutes behind on a training session he had no real intention of hurrying to — found he had no real objection to any of it.
"Easier down here anyway," he muttered, mostly to himself.
Silver secretly smiled behind his book.
~ Gyarados: Temper ~
It wasn't a small pond to begin with: a long, curved basin that ran the width of the garden, deep enough at the center that Gyarados could completely submerge, spanned partway by a low wooden bridge Lance had built himself the second summer after Silver arrived, more out of stubbornness than skill. It had needed rebuilding twice since.
The pond itself had survived four years of mispruned junipers dropping branches along its edge, one badly aimed Ice Beam, and at least two separate incidents involving Silver's Weavile and a garden hose. It did not survive Tuesday.
Lance heard it before he saw it: a sound like a wave, followed by the crack of stone giving way to something considerably larger. By the time he made it out to the engawa, Gyarados was over what used to be the koi pond's eastern edge, a long arc of red scales catching the afternoon light, roaring at a rock that had, apparently, offended him.
As far as the public record was concerned, he was one of the rarest pokémon in Johto, a living legend out of Mahogany Town. People still made expeditions to the Lake of Rage hoping to glimpse another one. At home, he was mostly just red, and mostly just a disaster.
He wasn't wearing the cape, nor the tailored coat with the League crest, the one that made him look like something carved rather than dressed. Just an old cedarwood scented jacket he'd had for a decade, sleeves pushed up and arms crossed, looking at his own pokémon with the weary patience of a man who had negotiated peace treaties with less friction than this.
"That rock," Lance stated, "has been there longer than you have."
Gyarados did not appear to find this a compelling argument. He came down hard enough to send a wave of pond water directly onto the stone path, and somewhere in the wreckage a koi made a break for freedom across three feet of wet gravel before flopping to a stop.
The pond's other resident took none of this personally. A small unassuming Magikarp, older than Silver's time in the house, surfaced placidly in the middle of the chaos, flopped once out of habit, unbothered by the fact that its enormous, world-famous relative was in the process of demolishing the neighborhood.
Silver appeared in the doorway with a piece of toast in one hand, took in the scene, and stayed exactly where he was to enjoy it.
"He's really going for it," the boy said, around a bite.
"He's decided the rock started it."
"Did it?"
"No."
Silver leaned against the doorframe, watching the actual Champion of Kanto and Johto attempt to reason with a furious leviathan using the same measured voice he'd once used to talk down a rioting crowd outside Ecruteak's gym. It was not working noticeably better on the Gyarados.
"You could return him to the ball," Silver offered.
"I could." Lance didn't move to do it. "He'll sulk for a week if I return him mid-tantrum. Easier to just let him finish."
"Kind of a mood, honestly." The teenager took another bite of toast, watching Gyarados take a second, unnecessary lap around the ruined pond edge, roaring at nothing in particular. "He's not even mad at the rock anymore. He's just mad."
"I noticed."
The way Lance said it made him glance over. The man wasn't watching Gyarados anymore. He was watching Silver watch Gyarados.
"What," Silver started.
"Nothing." Amusement in his voice. "You used to do that. Finish being angry at whatever started it and then just keep going because the anger hadn't caught up to the reason yet."
The teenager looked back at the pond instead of at Lance. "I don't do that anymore."
"No," Lance smiled. "Not really."
Gyarados chose this moment to slam back into the water with the enthusiasm of something that had never once considered restraint a virtue, and the resulting wave cleared the last standing section of the pond's edge, soaking them both from head to toe.
Silence.
"I'm calling him back," Lance announced.
"Bit late for that."
"I'm aware."
A moment before grabbing the pokéball, Lance watched his red Gyarados finally run out of steam in the wrecked pond, sides heaving, looking faintly embarrassed about the whole thing.
"He does that a lot less than he used to," Silver said.
"He does." Lance stepped carefully around a piece of stone that had, until ten minutes ago, held up the western bank. "Give him time. Even the worst tempers figure out where the edges are, eventually."
Silver looked down at what was left of the toast, now more pond than bread, and ate it anyway. Then he went to get the net for the koi, and if there was anything underneath the sentence that hit slightly closer than the water did, neither of them was going to be the one to say so.
By evening the pond had been more or less reassembled, the koi accounted for, and Gyarados was crowding the shallow end, his length tightly coiled to fit the space with the dignity of someone who knew it had been in the wrong and had no intention of admitting it. In the low evening light his scales had dulled to a tired red, nothing like the myth the public told about the Lake of Rage. Dragonite had come out at some point to observe the proceedings from a dry patch of grass, his antenna twitching with a faint, amused hum.
"Council meeting tomorrow," Silver said, toweling off his sandals. "You gonna wear the cape?"
"I always wear the cape."
"Wonder what the League would say if they could see you right now."
Lance, hair losing every sharp edge it usually had, looked down at himself: soaked jacket and water dripping steadily into his collar and pants. Beside them, the red Gyarados let out a bubbling huff, sending a small ripple across the ruined stone banks.
"They'd probably strip me of the title," Lance noted, his voice even.
"Good," Silver muttered. "Then you'd have time to actually fix the masonry."
A faint, quiet amusement cut through the exhaustion in Lance's face. "Go wash up for dinner, kiddo."
He turned and went inside to change, his sandals padding against the wooden engawa. Silver stayed out by the grass for a moment longer, hands shoved into his pockets, watching the ripples settle on the water. When he finally followed Lance inside, he left the sliding screen door open just a crack — exactly the way the man always did when the weather was mild.
~ Latias: Perception ~
Silver's phone buzzed on the kitchen table for the third time in ten minutes.
A year ago, it would have stayed in his pocket, or somewhere Lance couldn't have read the notifications. Lately, it just sat there, face-up, a detail that didn't pass unnoticed by Lance.
Latias noticed it too.
She'd been the newest addition to the house, Lance having found her half-grown and caught in a storm she hadn't yet learned to fly through, a couple years after Silver had already claimed the second bedroom.
There was never any caution between her and the boy who was already there. Silver was simply part of the world she had woken up into, like the garden or the old cedar-scented jacket she'd first been wrapped in. Latias adored the teenager with the same uncomplicated ease she adored everything Lance loved.
This morning she floated in sometime after breakfast, humming to herself, a little melody she kept up most days, drifting in a looping circle around the kitchen island like she was dancing to something only she could hear.
Settling near Silver's elbow at the table, Latias made a soft, curious sound at the phone when it lit up again.
"It's nothing," the teenager said to the room, since nobody had asked.
Latias tilted her head. She made the sound again, higher this time, distinctly unconvinced.
"It's Ethan. It's not a big deal."
She made a third sound. Lance, pouring tea at the counter with his back turned, was doing an unconvincing impression of a man who wasn't listening to every single word of this.
The phone buzzed again. Silver ignored it, doing the deliberate not-checking of someone who very much wanted to. Latias drifted an inch closer, gently nudged at his sleeve, an expression crossing her face that was, unmistakably, smug.
"She's doing the thing," he sounded annoyed.
"What thing?" Lance asked, setting a cup down in front of him.
"The thing where she acts like she knows something."
"Does she?"
Silver's ears went faintly red at the tips.
"She's a psychic type," he grumbled. "She doesn't know things. She just picks stuff up. Impressions. It's not the same as knowing."
Latias let out a pleased trill that suggested she strongly disagreed.
The phone buzzed a fifth time. He picked it up, thumb moving fast, the corner of his mouth giving him away before he could stop it.
Delighted, Latias drifted directly over his shoulder, peering down at the screen with the shameless curiosity of a creature who understood the concept of privacy perfectly well and intended to ignore it anyway.
"Hey—" Silver angled the screen away, too late.
Making a warbling sound, the tone rising at the end, Latias was questioning the sudden color of his face.
"It's not— that's not what that is."
The same sound came again, slower, like she was savoring it.
"Lance." Silver refused to look across the kitchen. "Tell your pokémon to stop."
"She's not doing anything," Lance replied from the counter. He didn't turn around, but his shoulders told a different story. It was as close as he ever got to visibly enjoying himself. "I can't control what she picks up on."
"You could tell her to knock it off."
"I could." He didn't. "But she's not wrong, is she?"
The teenager set the phone face-down on the table with more force than the action required.
It did absolutely nothing to stop Latias. She hovered directly beside it, eyes closed now, humming something low and pleased with herself, the picture of innocence.
"I hate when she does that."
"You could stop leaving it face-up."
"I forget."
"You didn't use to forget things like that."
Silver drank his tea, ears still faintly pink.
Apparently satisfied with the havoc she'd created, Latias drifted out of the kitchen and curled onto the wide cushions of the living room sofa. She tucked her head under one small wing with the deep contentment of someone who had gotten exactly what they wanted out of the morning.
The phone buzzed once more. Silver didn't move to check it in front of anyone this time. He picked it up on his way out of the kitchen instead, already reading before he'd cleared the doorway.
The smile that followed him out into the hall was wider than the one he usually let people see. But nobody was watching except a pokémon who already knew, and a man who had learned a long time ago not to need everything explained.
On the sofa, Latias cracked one eye open, gave her trainer a knowing look, and let out a soft, amused warble.
"Don't look at me," Lance murmured, though his voice was unmistakably fond. "You're the one who started it."
Pleased with the accusation, Latias drifted back into the kitchen and lowered her head to his, nudging her snout against the man's cheek with the same stubborn insistence she used every morning to beg the last of the cream from his teacup.
Letting out a huff of laughter, Lance obligingly tipped the ceramic pitcher her way, his hand coming up to stroke the soft feathers right behind her ears. She leaned into the touch, her small arms reaching around his shoulders, pulling him into a floating hug. Then, drifting back toward the sunlit living room, Latias picked her tuneless little hum back up right where she'd left it.
~ Hydreigon: Wariness ~
Six weeks in, and Silver still couldn't tell the house's ordinary noises from anything worth worrying about. Old wood settling. Wind finding the gap under the sliding doors. He woke at every one of them, taking each sound apart the way you did in a place that hadn't proven yet it wouldn't hurt you.
Tonight it wasn't the house. It was the refrigerator.
He came down for water and found the kitchen already occupied: the refrigerator door hanging open, throwing a cold light across the wooden floorboards, and something enormous crouched in front of the vegetable drawer.
Silver went very still.
He'd seen it exactly twice, both times from a careful distance, with his whole body braced like it might decide, this time, to be what everyone said it was. Lance's Hydreigon didn't come out for guests. Didn't come out for much of anything. Three sets of teeth, a reputation that preceded her into every room she'd ever entered.
She turned all three heads at once. The main head froze mid-chew, while one of her side heads, still clamped firmly around half a tomato, looked at him with the guilt of being caught red-handed and totally unrepentant about it.
Silver didn't run. Maybe because running felt like admitting something. Maybe because Hydreigon looked, in the dark, considerably less like a legend and considerably more like what she actually was: a very large creature standing in a kitchen at two in the morning, holding a tomato, extremely busted.
"You're gonna wake him up," he said. His voice came out smaller than he meant it to.
All three heads froze.
"He finds out you raided the fridge, he's gonna—" the boy didn't actually know what Lance would do. He'd been here for only six weeks. He didn't know what Lance did about anything yet, only that so far it hadn't been what he expected, which was kind of unsettling. "I don't know. Something."
The middle head lowered, slow, testing. The tomato-holding head didn't move at all, still frozen mid-crime. The third watched Silver with wary suspicion, the same look he was pretty sure he wore most of the time himself.
Silver crossed the kitchen, barefoot on the cold floor, and eased the refrigerator door shut before the light could wake the whole house. Hydreigon watched him do it with all three heads at once, uncertain what to make of an eleven-year-old closing her out of contraband rather than reporting her for it.
"Sit," the boy said, and immediately felt stupid for saying it, since she wasn't a Growlithe and he had no actual authority in this house.
Hydreigon sat anyway. Lacking any functional legs, she just dropped her three-hundred-pound bulk straight down onto the floorboards with a heavy thud that shook the nearby dish rack. All three heads settled at slightly different heights, watching him carefully. She'd learned, the hard way, that a room could look safe and still not be.
Silver found the fruit bowl on the counter, took a handful of berries, and sat down on the floor across from her, back against the cabinet, knees pulled up.
He tossed one of the berries toward the nearest head. It caught it out of the air without moving anything except its jaw.
"Don't tell him I fed you." He tossed another. "He'll say I'm encouraging it."
The middle head made a low sound, almost a question.
"I'm not doing you a favor." The boy pulled his knees in tighter. "I just don't want the noise. If he wakes up he's gonna come out here and ask me things."
That wasn't entirely true, and a small part of him knew it wasn't, sitting on a cold floor at two in the morning across from a dragon that the rest of the world was usually terrified of. It occurred to him, distantly, that he wasn't.
He tossed the last of the berries. All three heads caught their share without a single wasted motion, a movement that struck him, for one strange second, as more dignified than anything he'd expected from a creature people described the way they described her.
"You're not what they said."
Hydreigon unblinkingly watched Silver with all three heads, and said nothing back because she couldn't, but something in both of them eased, the same careful distance the kid had been giving this house since he arrived.
They stayed like that a while, long enough that his legs went stiff on the cold floor. Eventually Silver got up, put the empty fruit bowl back where he'd found it, and went back to bed.
In the morning, Lance found the kitchen as he always did: silent, ordinary, the sun coming in low through the open sliding doors. He also found the vegetable drawer half-empty, five tomatoes reduced to their stems, and a suspiciously empty fruit bowl.
He decided that this mystery was best left uninvestigated before he'd had any tea.
Silver came down for breakfast braced for a conversation that didn't happen. Lance set a plate down in front of him, poured his tea, and said nothing about the missing tomatoes, about the fridge, nothing at all. Except, once, glancing toward the door where Hydreigon's ball sat on its usual shelf, the smallest private smile crossing his face before he turned back to the stove.
~ Altaria: Tenderness ~
Originally, she had arrived as a joke.
Steven Stone had sent her up from Hoenn years ago, a small pokéball tied with a light blue ribbon, cloud-like Swablu inside it. The attached note was written in handwriting too neat to belong to anyone who took himself too seriously: Every Dragon Master needs something cute to balance out the terrifying ones. Try not to let the cape scare it. — Steven.
Lance had laughed out loud reading it alone in his living room. Steven knew exactly what he was doing. Back then, his officially registered League roster, the pokémon photographed at every title defense, was mostly Flying-types with a lethal reputation. Dropping a literal cotton ball into the middle of all those teeth and scales was an incredibly elegant way to call him a try-hard.
What Steven's prank never accounted for, was how quickly she redefined the team dynamics.
Little Swablu held her ground in a fight the same as any of them, but the strange part was what she did the second the battle ended: she never carried a win like a prize, and a loss was never a wound; the moment a battle passed, she simply went back to being gentle.
Eventually, she'd even evolved into an actual Dragon-type. Lance had sent Steven a message the day it happened: The flying cloud just developed a dragon typing. Your argument is invalid.
Steven wrote back within the hour: Devastating. I send you something soft and you go and make it formidable. Typical.
But if Steven expected that evolution to finally force her to harden, he was wrong. She stubbornly refused to pick up the edge that usually came with it.
It was an impossible trait for the rest of the team to understand, and they had stopped trying to. Altaria became a strange sort of neutral ground. She was the only creature in the household allowed to completely smother the residents; draping her pillowy wing over Garchomp's sharp snout until he stopped growling, or resting her chin on Gyarados' head until his posture eased.
The fluffy dragon was the only thing in the entire squad completely detached from the hierarchy of pride and power, the one carefree, untouchable safe haven they all shared. Nobody ever had to perform being fine around her, because she never asked them to be anything other than what they were.
Tonight, it was Lance who needed the landing.
He had retreated to the back of the estate, where the house gave way to the garden. Silver found him half-slumped on the edge of the engawa a little after eleven, buried up to his ribs in dense, jasmine-scented feathers while Altaria dozed across his lap.
The man was still wearing the stiff, dark suit the League council mandated for budgetary summits, the jacket pooled carelessly on the floorboards and his tie loosened until the top button gave way. He looked out of his zone, diminished by hours of sitting under fluorescent lights while civil servants turned the words "public trust" into a weapon to stall facility funding.
"Long one?" Silver asked, sitting down beside them. He leaned close enough that her outer feathers brushed his arm.
"Long one," Lance sighed. He didn't elaborate. He never did on these nights.
The garden did the peaceful things gardens did in the evening: the rhythm of crickets, the occasional stir of water in the koi pond. Gyarados was asleep in the shallows, and Dragonite was comfortably resting on the grass a few feet away.
Altaria hummed, half a sound, half a sigh, and pressed a fraction closer into her trainer.
Silver watched her practically try to absorb the stress right out of Lance's shoulders. "Steven still sends you a card every year?" he asked, nodding toward her.
"Every year." A tired but fond smile crossed the man's face. "Every year he asks if the Dragon Master learned to relax on his own yet. And every year I have to admit that letting her into my life was probably the smartest call I ever made."
"Bet he'd say the plan worked exactly as intended."
"Steven would say a lot of things," Lance noted, clearly amused. "Most of them insufferable."
Altaria made a pleased trill at being discussed. She shifted, resting her elegant head directly across the man's knee, her eyes closing all the way.
"She's good at this," Silver's eyes softened, his voice dropping.
"Good at what?"
"Making it smaller." The teenager looked out at the dark garden. "Whatever it is. She doesn't fix it. Just makes it smaller for a while."
Lance didn't answer right away. When he did, his voice had the tone reserved for things that mattered. "She's been doing it since the beginning. I used to think it was just a fluke of her nature. Now I think it might be the whole reason Steven sent her."
"Guy's way smarter than he lets on," Silver noted.
"Don't tell him I admitted it," Lance murmured. "He'd never let me hear the end of it."
They sat a while longer. The night went on being ordinary around them, and Silver had come to find real comfort in that.
"You said something to me once," Silver whispered, his eyes fixed on a distant stone lantern. "About the peak. About it being easier with someone else at the same altitude."
"I remember."
"Guess I finally get what you meant." The teenager picked at a loose thread on his sleeve, an old defensive habit resurfacing without him realizing it. "Easier down here too. With you—" a small unguarded pause, "Thanks, dad."
On Altaria's head, Lance's hand stopped moving.
Silver's words went by the way water goes by, impossible to grasp once it had already passed. Lance didn't look over, and he didn't let his expression change; because some doors were best left to swing open on their own. He let his hand resume its slow motion through the white feathers.
The rest of the team was slumbering somewhere in the house and garden, not far from the crooked juniper they'd been mispruning together for almost six years now. Surrounded by them, the two sat in the night, slowly becoming the family they had always been building toward.
Altaria, half-asleep, made a small contented sound, and the rest of the evening wore on.