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The Dragon's Den smelled the same as it always had: humid stone, incense gone stale in the corners, and the mineral cold that never quite left the lower chambers no matter the season.
Lance had trained here as a boy. This was where he’d first learned that the things worth having, dragons, trust, other people, came to you slowly and only if you held still long enough to let them.
He came more often than League business required. Nobody in the Clan had said anything about that. Nobody except Clair.
"You're here again," she observed, not looking up from the wax marker she was using to scratch tallies onto a slate log against the wall of the upper hall. Two trainees sparred below, their Dratini circling over the water. Silver wasn't one of them. The boy was at the far end of the platform, alone, running the same drills over and over on a Feraligatr that clearly wanted a different exercise altogether.
"I had a council briefing in the city."
"The council session ended hours ago." Clair wiped a streak of dark wax from her thumb. "And you've been drifting through here since Tuesday. That's not League business, cousin. That's a habit."
From where he stood at the stone railing, Lance kept his eyes on the water below. Silver was correcting the Feraligatr's angle with a sharp gesture: no praise for getting it right, no patience for getting it wrong, just the next command, and the next.
"He won't eat with the others," Clair added, following his line of sight. "Won't room with them either, if he can help it. I had to reassign three trainees to the upper levels of the Den just to stop the complaints."
"I'm aware."
"Are you." Her tone stayed skeptical. "Because from where I'm standing, you drop by, you watch him for an hour, and you leave. That's not aware. That's curious."
"It's patience."
"It's you hovering, and he knows it." Clair finally looked at Lance directly, a dry smirk breaking her usual seriousness. She'd never had much use for diplomacy where he was concerned. "You fought the Elders for a month to get him a spot here. I haven't seen you raise your voice like that in years. I don't think you did that just so you could stand up here and look imposing."
Down in the basin, the Feraligatr finally hit the angle Silver wanted. The boy's shoulders relaxed just enough before he squared himself up again.
"He'll bolt if I push," Lance murmured.
"He might bolt anyway." Clair went back to her slate. "Some kids don't wait for a reason."
The first time Lance asked Silver to dinner, he waited until the afternoon session had cleared out, leaving just the sound of the water against the stone piers.
"There's a small place just down the path from the gym." Lance leaned against the wooden frame of the tool shed where the boy was stowing his gear. "Quiet, and the food is considerably better than what they bring down to the Den quarters. You're welcome to join me."
Silver didn't look up from the heavy leather strap he was cleaning. "I'm fine."
"The offer stands if you change your mind."
"I'm not here to socialize." The cleaning brush was set down harder than it needed, the wood cracking against the bench. "I've got training."
Lance just nodded, offering an easy smile, and didn't ask again that week.
The second time, he brought something functional instead of words: a dense river-stone block and a jar of Cianwood-refined mineral oil, the specific grade used to keep a Feraligatr's thick hide from splitting when it spent too many consecutive weeks out of the water. He set it on the bench beside Silver's things and said nothing, as though it were standard supply.
Two days later, the jar was still there. Untouched, still sealed, but shifted four inches to the left, off the bench and onto the floor.
Not thrown away. Just refused a place at his side.
Lance picked it up, checked the seal, and slid it back into his pack. He didn't mention it when he spoke to the boy twenty minutes later about his Feraligatr's stance.
The third time was the first time Silver actually fought back.
"You don't have to do this by yourself," Lance called over the water, watching the boy run a solo circuit with a Feraligatr that had close to a hundred pounds on him. Without a second pair of hands spotting the platform, a misjudged command could put him straight into the deep stone well. "There's a partner system for a reason."
He didn't slow down. "I don't need a partner."
"It's not about need, Silver. It's about safety."
"Everything's about need with you people," Silver spat, the first time he'd given Lance his full, scorching attention in weeks. "You think showing up enough times makes you owed something. It doesn't. I didn't ask you to fight the Elders for me. I didn't ask you to play hero."
"I know."
"Then stop coming here." The teenager's voice cracked on the last word, a juvenile sound that only seemed to make him angrier. "Go be Champion somewhere else. Stop trying to look good by rescuing the charity case."
"I'm not trying to rescue you." Lance held his ground, watching the boy closely, giving him nothing to push back against.
"Then what are you doing?"
"I'm standing here," Lance replied softly. "The same as I did yesterday."
No answer came. Silver simply turned back to his circuit, refusing to look at him again for the rest of the hour.
-
Lance's house sat at the far edge of the clan estate, long and low, built in the traditional Johto-style, all sliding doors and paper screens and tatami gone soft with use. A wide engawa ran along the back, looking out over a garden gone slightly wild and a pond he was never home long enough to tend. He preferred the distance most days.
There was a second place, of course. He also had an apartment in the Indigo Plateau tower, twenty minutes from any council chamber he might be needed in. Floor-to-ceiling glass and clean modern lines, the whole city and the stadium laid out far below. It suited the version of him that wore the cape and sat on councils, and had nothing to do with the one that fed his dragons by a pond. Home was cedar beams and quiet, where nobody could easily reach him.
Dragonite was already waiting at that pond that night, settled into his usual spot at the water's edge. Clear nights meant the same thing between them since childhood, back when the constellations still had to be pointed out to him: they sat together, one leaning back against the other, and watched the sky move over the ridge until somebody fell asleep. Which was usually not the dragon.
Tonight was clear enough for exactly that. Across the garden, Dragonite lifted his head at the sight of him and shifted his weight to make space on the stones.
Halfway up the path, Lance stopped. The mountain chill worked its way through his uniform sleeves while he stood there, caught in his own head. The dragon let out a soft breath and settled back down, watching him with the patience of a partner who had seen this mood before.
Leaving the sliding doors open to the night air, Lance retreated into the study.
The rooms were built with the oversized timber framing typical of the old clan houses, wide enough for a full-grown dragon to pass through without touching the jambs. He had barely pulled out his chair before Dragonite followed him inside, crossing the tatami mats with soft, familiar thuds and settling down right beside the wooden desk.
A League infrastructure report sat untouched in his inbox. He reached out to Dragonite instead, sinking his fingers into the thick warmth of his hide, leaning into his partner's side for a moment of quiet.
I didn't ask you to play hero.
Stop trying to look good by rescuing the charity case.
The accusations lingered, but there was no anger in him for the boy. What troubled him was that he had no way to prove his intentions to a kid who had been taught that every act of kindness was just a hidden debt.
Dragonite rumbled softly, a vibration Lance felt deep in his own ribs; the same one the dragon made whenever he came home late from a rough budget hearing at the Plateau and sat in silence for too long.
"I know," he murmured, resting his forehead against the dragon's snout before looking back out at the dark garden paths. "I know. It's going to take time."
Satisfied with the answer, Dragonite draped his heavy head across his trainer's knee, the tip of his tail curling comfortably around the legs of the chair, keeping Lance grounded.
-
A storm rolled in from the coast in the last week of the season, the kind the elders kept track of on the hall beam notches. Two days of warning, and then the lower chambers of the Dragon's Den began taking water. Cursing the ancient plumbing, and whichever ancestor designed it, Clair pulled the youngest trainees out of the flooded quarters, sending them up to the dry halls of the main estate while telling the older ones to head home for the week.
Most of them had families in the city. Silver had a narrow room on the lowest level of the Den that nobody else had claimed, and a Sneasel that hated confined spaces even before the walls started sweating with damp.
Lance heard about the evacuation before Clair could reach him. He was already at the main gatehouse when her name flashed on his pokégear.
"Don't," she cut straight in before he could say a word. "Don't ask him. He'll sit in three inches of rising water just to spite the offer."
"I know."
"Then what are you going to do?"
Outside, the first real rain of the storm had hit, heavy enough to blur the mountains past the Den's gate.
"I'm going to leave the hearth lit," Lance replied, pulling his traveling cloak over his shoulders, "and let the weather do the talking."
Silver showed up a little after nine, soaked through, a duffel bag slung over one shoulder with Sneasel wedged miserably under his jacket. He knocked twice, short and hard, like he wanted it over with before he could change his mind.
Lance had given him the directions more times than he could count by now, edge of the estate, past the second gate, you can't miss the pond, folded into invitations that got refused before he could finish the sentence. Silver had barely looked up for any of them, giving the same bored shrug that meant he wasn't even processing the words.
Apparently, the boy had been listening the entire time.
The door opened before the third knock. Silver stood on the threshold, rain dripping off his hair, his posture tense enough to suggest he half-expected to be turned away.
"The Den's flooding," he announced. "Clair kicked everyone out. This was closest."
"Come on in." Lance stepped back to clear the entryway. "Leave your boots on the mat."
Silver hesitated, testing the offer for a catch and finding none, before he finally unlaced his boots and dropped them on the mat.
Lance had just handed over a pair of dry towels when the power flickered once, twice, and died. In the sudden dark, he reached for the beeswax candles kept in the pantry for storm season, the cheap rustic ones that smelled of woodsmoke no matter what the label promised, and set about lighting them. With nothing but candlelight in the room, he switched on the battery-powered radio, filling the awkwardness with human voices.
The dial landed on the only frequency that made it through the mountains in bad weather: a call-in program out of Blackthorn AM, hosted by a man named Toya who received every report of a dragon sighting with the gravity of a coroner's inquest. A caller was describing an enormous shape over the eastern ridge. Toya asked him, very seriously, for the dragon's approximate mood.
Silver stared at the radio like it had insulted him.
Lance left it on. Some things were worth the static.
Dinner was instant ramen, boiled over the old gas range that ran fine without power. Silver looked at the packet like the Champion of Kanto and Johto owning such a thing broke some fundamental law of nature.
The noodles themselves were unremarkable. What went into the broth was not.
From the bottom of his field pack, Lance grabbed a small earthenware jar, one that had traveled with him through many winters. Inside was a dark paste the consistency of tar: sun-dried Tamato berries reduced down by the Cianwood apothecaries and cut with bitter mountain root, crafted specifically for dragon trainers who spent weeks above the snowline. He spooned a generous measure into each bowl.
The moment the paste hit the boiling broth, the liquid turned a rusty crimson, near black under the candlelight. Steam came off it in a thick plume that smelled of scorched vegetation and faint sulfur, a heat designed to burn the cold right out of a person's lungs.
Lance carried the bowls to the table, two candles flickering between them like this was an occasion, and ate his the way he ate everything, slowly and completely at peace.
A crack of thunder went off close enough to rattle the screens. Silver flinched. His host gathered a few noodles onto his chopsticks, rested them in the broth cupped in his spoon, and ate without spilling a drop, unmoved by the localized apocalypse outside.
After taking one mouthful, Silver immediately regretted every choice that had led him to this room. His eyes watered instantly, a strangled cough catching in his throat, but his pride held firm: there was no chance in hell he was setting the bowl down before it was clean. He glared across the table, his expression shifting from physical agony to annoyance directed straight at his host.
"You eat this on purpose," he rasped.
"It's a Blackthorn recipe." Lance blew gently on his own spoon, considering it. "My grandmother's, technically."
"It's assault."
"It's traditional." He took another bite. "The two aren't mutually exclusive."
Near the hearth, Sneasel took a single, inquisitive sniff of the red steam and sneezed hard enough to stagger backward. Utterly betrayed, the small pokémon bolted under the lowest kitchen cabinet, two eyes glinting out of the dark where the candlelight didn't reach.
Lance hid the kick of a smile behind his tea mug before Silver could catch him.
The trouble started twenty minutes later, when Sneasel, driven out from under the cabinet by hunger that eventually beat out his grudge against the soup, decided the pantry itself was fair game and began working one claw methodically into the latch of the door.
Catching the sound immediately, Silver leaned over with a scowl that was far more protective than he'd ever admit. "He'll get through that latch in an hour. Anything you don't want shredded needs to go somewhere he can't breach."
Lance considered the cabinet, then the claw marks already scored into the wood. "Give me a minute."
He went out to the storage room.
What he came back with was a tin lunchbox, faded at the corners, bright blue under the dark: a Dratini rendered in the blocky, oversaturated style of early League merchandise, coiled heroically in front of an oversized pokéball, with a cartoonish sparkle on its eye that was clearly meant to convey determination. Beneath it, in a bubble font that had been enthusiastic twenty years ago, ran the words The Ultimate Dragon Trainer.
Silver stared at it the way most people stared at accidents.
"That's..."
"Reinforced tin," Lance said calmly, setting it on the table. He popped the metal clasp open and transferred the dried meat and vulnerable rations inside. "Nothing gets through it. I tested that fairly thoroughly at the time."
Picking it up by the handle, Silver held it at arm's length as if it might detonate. "Did you own that?"
"I was seven."
"You were never seven." The box turned over in his hands, his mouth twisting in utter disbelief. "This is horrific."
"It kept my sandwiches dry," Lance noted, taking the lunchbox back, snapping the heavy latch shut and returning it to the shelf that the small pokémon had been targeting. Then he set a portion of dried meat strips meant for ice types into a ceramic dish on the floor.
Sneasel lost all interest in cabinet doors, tin latches, and general spite the second the food hit the bowl.
Eyeing the cartoon dragon, Silver curled his lip. "If I tell Clair you still have this, does she double my training hours or yours?"
"Yours," Lance replied, smiling faintly into a quiet sip of tea. "For making her look at it again."
It was the first time all week the boy had said more than four words to him without a weapon in the sentence.
By midnight the storm had eased into something less violent, the kind of steady downpour that meant to settle in for the night rather than pass through. Silver had gone quiet on the floor cushion nearest the radio, Sneasel curled against his side, the candles throwing a steady warmth across the cedar walls that the dark hadn't managed to swallow.
"You should get some sleep," Lance murmured, pinching out one of the wicks. "There's a room down the hall. Second door."
Silver's eyes were already half shut, but something in him still resisted on principle. "Not staying. Once the Den's fixed—"
"You'll go back when it's fixed." Lance's tone was calm and open, leaving no room for a fight. "Until then, that room is yours. Not a guest room. Yours."
Within minutes, the boy's head dropped right back against the cushion, completely overtaken by sleep before he could even attempt the walk down the corridor.
Moving quietly, Lance stepped across the tatami mats, and gathered him up into his arms. Silver was lighter than he should have been, all lean frame and sharp edges, but barely stirred on the way to the couch, settling into the cushions as a thick wool blanket was pulled over him.
Sneasel hopped up and reclaimed the space against the boy's chest. That last part seemed to relax him more than the blanket did.
Leaving the radio low, Lance let Toya's voice keep debating, with total gravity, whether a local farmer's sighted 'dragon' had actually just been a particularly large Pidgeot. Outside, the storm kept on without any sign of slowing.
The room down the hall stayed empty for three more nights. Silver slept on the couch instead, as though a bed with his name was something that had to be earned before it could be used.
He went back to the Den once the water receded. But he returned to the house after that, more than once, testing without a word whether the room would still be waiting for him.
It always was. It took him the better part of a year to stop packing the duffel bag every time he walked out the door.
That was the night it became possible. Lance stayed where he was a while longer, watching an eleven-year-old sleep in the faint, smoky scent of beeswax candles, the storm going on beyond the windows. He'd spent his whole life reading weather before it broke and dragons before they trusted him; this was the same skill, only aimed at a boy instead.
~~~ * ~~~
A year in, the house had reshaped itself around two lives. There was a place by the door for Silver's boots now. Sneasel had his own cushion by the living room window. The boy still didn't say much over breakfast, but he sat down at the table to eat, no longer hovering by the door as if ready to bolt.
The letter came on a Tuesday. League seal, gray envelope, the kind reserved for active Team Rocket casework. Goldenrod had forwarded it: a request for a statement from anyone with firsthand knowledge of the organization's remaining cells. Specifically, it named a twelve-year-old whose records Lance had been quietly fighting to seal.
After reading it twice, he answered back that same afternoon. Not available for comment. Handled directly through the Champion's office. He affixed his personal seal, signed it himself, filed his copy, and never brought it up to Silver.
In his mind, the matter was resolved.
He forgot that Silver no longer lived like a guest walking on glass. The boy had started opening drawers and checking the mail, the unthinking habits of someone who had finally begun to feel at home.
Silver found the copy three days later, while hunting for a spare charger in the hall cabinet.
The boy crashed into the study, where Lance was still at his desk.
"You answered this for me." Silver's voice was dangerously quiet. The paper shook slightly at the edges where he gripped it.
Lance looked up from his papers, instantly recognizing the letter in his hands. "It was an administrative inquiry," his tone was measured. "I handled it so you wouldn't have to."
"You didn't ask me. You didn't even tell me it existed!" The words tore out of his throat as the boy slammed the paper down on the desk. "You just decided for me. Like I don't get a say in whether I talk about my own—" He cut himself off, choking on the word he refused to say, chest heaving as he pivoted to a safer rage.
"WHY?" Silver shoved himself back from the desk, loud enough that Sneasel bolted from the window cushion. "You don't get to just—you don't get to decide what I'm allowed to talk about!"
"Silver—"
"NO!" He was fully shouting now, the words coming too fast for his chest to keep up. "You decide what's good for me and you don't ask! You don't care about what I actually want—you just want it handled. You want everyone to see how well-behaved your little project is!"
Rising slowly from his chair, Lance raised a hand in a calm gesture. "Silver, stop. That's not what this is."
"ISN'T IT?" The teenager kicked the desk chair aside to close the distance between them. "You think you're any different from him?"
The question rang against the quiet room, loud and sharp as a blade.
Stepping directly into Lance's space, he looked him right in the eye with sheer defiance. "You think because you speak softly and leave the fire on, it's not the exact same thing? You just want a trophy. Something you can point at and say, look what I saved. You're not my dad. You're just a dictator with better PR."
Silver stood there breathing hard, waiting. Braced for shouting. He wanted it.
Something in Lance went cold instead, the iron resolve that took over him when a situation went out of control. Except there was no wild dragon here—only a boy he loved daring him to prove he didn't.
"You think this is about control." His voice came out unnaturally quiet, stripped of the anger the boy was trying so desperately to provoke. "Assuming the worst of anyone who shows you warmth is the only way you know to protect yourself. It's exactly how you were trained to think, and you're still letting it run your life."
Never in his life had Lance needed to raise his voice to end a conversation, and he didn't now. "You'd rather believe I want a trophy than believe I actually just want you here."
"You think you're fighting his legacy, Silver? You're carrying it out perfectly. Pushing people away. Treating kindness like a trap. Look at yourself." The exhaustion of a long year finally broke through, and the words slipped out before his intellect could stop them. "You're just like him."
Silver froze. Every bit of the fight drained out of his face at once, and what replaced it was worse.
Before Lance could reach for him, the boy grabbed his jacket by the door, the same hook that had held his boots for a year, and threw the sliding door open, vanishing into the cold mountain rain.
Lance didn't sleep a single minute that night. He tried to convince himself that his search was purely rational, a twelve-year-old was out in the rain with a Sneasel and no destination, but the cold knot in his stomach said otherwise. The fear wasn't just about the storm; it was the sickening realization that he was the one who had driven the boy out into it.
The mountain paths above the estate dropped forty feet in places, and the rain had been coming down for hours. That was the thought that kept hammering in his mind. He called Clair at eleven and again at one, and she checked the Den both times and told him, patiently, that the boy hadn't come through the gate.
Twice he took Dragonite up into the gale, flying low over the winding paths. They found nothing. It provided no relief, only escalating dread, because Silver had spent his entire childhood learning how to vanish from people actively searching for him.
Each return to the house brought Lance back into the study where it had happened. Every time he closed his eyes, the sentence echoed in his mind, relentless and damning, refusing to give him peace.
Three times he sat at his desk to write something down, the beginning of an apology, a plea, anything, only to tear the paper across and crumble it in his fist. Words had never once failed him; as Champion, he mediated crises, calmed panicked crowds and commanded authority. Yet a single, bitter sentence spoken in his own home had undone every ounce of fragile trust built, and he couldn't find the words to stitch it back together.
Dragonite refused to leave his side, nudging his shoulder with an anxious hum, blocking the hallway to force his trainer to rest, or resting his chin over Lance's knees when the Champion finally sank into his chair, helpless.
The second night was worse than the first.
You're not my dad.
The accusation haunted him far more than his own anger. It hit the one nerve Lance had tried to ignore for a year. They had never signed papers. They had never formalized a thing. Neither of them had ever dared to speak the word out loud. He had always reassured himself that labels didn't matter as long as the care was real.
But sitting in the empty house, surrounded by Silver's things, he wondered if he had avoided the word out of respect for Silver, or out of his own fear of failing him.
Silver returned on the third morning, cold to the bone, with a soaked Sneasel cradled against his chest. He offered no apology, no excuse, and no record of where he'd spent the last two days.
Walking straight past Lance, he headed into the kitchen, opened the cupboard, and began making tea for them both, badly, the way he did most things he'd had to teach himself, using far too many leaves and pouring the water while it was still violently boiling.
He set a heavy ceramic mug in front of Lance, the dark liquid bitter and steaming, before pulling out the opposite chair and sitting down with a cup of his own.
Lance didn't demand an accounting of where he'd been. Silver didn't ask for a clean slate. They sat together in the dim morning light, drinking the ruinously strong tea while Sneasel shook the damp out of his fur and padded over to his cushion by the window.
-
Months later, Lance was at the desk in his study, flipping backward through the wall calendar to verify a League scheduling date, when his eye caught a small mark in his own handwriting.
Every year, he quietly logged the date of the storm—the night Silver had first knocked on the door with a miserable Sneasel tucked inside his jacket.
Directly beneath it, scrawled from a night he remembered far too well, was a second note he barely recalled making: Bad night with S.
Lance stared at the page, checking it twice, certain he'd misread his own writing. He hadn't. Both entries fell on the exact same date. He never brought it up to Silver. It felt like the kind of truth better kept to himself, folded away between the pages of an old calendar.
~~~ * ~~~
Two winters went by.
Lance did not get sick. It wasn't pride; it was just scheduling. There wasn't room in a Champion's calendar for illness, and his body had taken the hint years ago. So when a violent cold finally caught up with him the week after back-to-back League summits, it arrived with the force of a long-delayed debt coming due.
He made it as far as the living room sofa. That was the extent of the plan.
Silver came through the room, backpack slung over one shoulder, clearly on his way out the door. He stopped the moment he saw Lance's state: pale, wrapped in the thick wool throw from the hall closet, breathing heavily through his mouth. His eyes narrowed in a mixture of annoyance and sudden concern, and then the boy was gone without a word.
Sleep took him somewhere in the middle of the afternoon, until a heavy thud on the coffee table jolted him awake. A box of cold medicine sat beside his mug: the cheap, over-the-counter kind, ripped open along the wrong edge. Next to it lay a thick slice of coarse bread, pulled apart by hand rather than cut.
Silver stood over him with his arms crossed, unwilling to sit, unwilling to leave either.
"Ethan got sick last month," he announced, looking at the wall. "Tried to cure it by eating raw Chesto berries because he read somewhere it kicks the immune system into gear." The disdain in his voice for this idea was total. "Don't be an idiot like him. Take the pills."
He was gone again before Lance could answer, footsteps already receding down the hall.
Lance ate the bread and took the pills.
A few minutes later, a door closed down the corridor. Silver's room. Lance stayed where he was, working it out through the slow haze of his fever: Silver had been wearing his pack, headed out for the day, and he had changed his mind.
When Lance woke again, the house was dark.
On the table, beside the medicine box sat a mug filled with tea gone lukewarm, a spoon resting inside it next to a jar of honey. On the other end of the sofa, tucked as far into the opposite corner as the cushions allowed, Silver was fast asleep, his knees pulled toward his chest and his jacket draped loosely over his legs.
It occurred to Lance, fever-warm and half-asleep in the dim room, that this was the first time in two years the boy had taken care of him instead of the other way around. He reached down, shifted the heavy wool throw over the gap between them to cover Silver's shoulders, and let himself drift back to sleep.
~~~ * ~~~
Silver was fifteen the day it happened.
The stadium had a particular sound on League session days, hundreds of small conversations layered over each other, camera shutters going off in clusters whenever someone recognizable passed through. Lance had long since stopped hearing it as noise.
He was between meetings, Karen and Will a few steps behind him arguing amiably about a ranking dispute, Bruno at his shoulder the way he always was in these halls, saying nothing. Silver had come to meet him for lunch and was waiting near the press barrier with the scowl he reserved for crowds, when a reporter from the Hoenn Chronicle peeled off from the pack and cut across Lance's path faster than protocol allowed.
"Champion Lance. A quick question." The woman had her recorder raised, the red light glowing. "There are renewed concerns about the wisdom of your custody arrangement, given recent Team Rocket remnant activity in Johto. Critics are asking if raising Giovanni's own son under the League's banner sends a troubling message about accountability. Any comment on whether that judgment call has compromised your—"
"That's not a question anyone gets to ask him."
The words cut in from behind her, sharp and cold enough that for a second no one recognized the voice. Silver had closed the gap instantly, stepping right into the reporter's space. He wasn't yelling, which made the coiled tension in his shoulders infinitely worse.
Karen went quiet mid-sentence. Even Will, who rarely stopped talking, stopped talking.
"You want to use his name to dig for a story?" Silver stepped closer, the reporter having to tip her head back to hold his stare. "Go on. You want to talk about judgment? Lance is the only person in this whole building who's ever made a decision that wasn't about how pretty it would look in paper."
"I—"
"You came here to ask whether taking me in was a mistake." His voice didn't rise. It went lower, and considerably more frightening. "Ask me. I'm the one who knows what the alternative was."
To her credit, the reporter didn't step back. She flicked her eyes toward Lance, clearly expecting the Champion to intervene, to smooth this over the way he smoothed everything.
Lance didn't move. He needed the half-second more than he'd ever admit to anyone. A boy who had spent years testing whether affection came with conditions was now standing between him and a hostile question, shielding him with pure instinct and no self-preservation left in it.
He calmly stepped forward and set a protective hand on Silver's shoulder. He didn't pull him back; he just stood beside him, turning his presence onto the press.
"I'm sorry, I didn't catch your name." Lance's tone was perfectly pleasant.
"Marisol Vane. Hoenn Chronicle."
"Miss Vane. Your question contains more assumptions than facts, and I'd be doing you a disservice if I let you print any of them on my authority." He smiled at her, and the warmth of it was genuine, which gave her nothing to push against. "My office handles all custody inquiries. They'll be glad to hear from you. Though I'd think carefully about a story that turns on a child's parentage. Readers have a habit of noticing when a paper punches downward."
She hesitated, recorder still running, plainly aware she'd gotten something much more interesting than the quote she'd come for, and far less printable.
Behind them, Karen let out an appreciative whistle. "I want that in writing."
"Wow. Silver's what, fifteen?" Will was delighted. "I've had media training and never once shut someone down that cleanly."
Bruno said nothing. He clapped Silver once on the back as he passed, hard enough to move him a full step forward, which from Bruno amounted to a standing ovation.
Silver was still breathing hard, fists loose at his sides, eyes fixed somewhere in the middle distance.
"You didn't have to do that," Lance whispered softly, keeping his voice just between the two of them.
"I know." The teenager kept his eyes locked straight ahead, his chin tilted up. "I wanted to."
There wasn't a version of thank you that wouldn't have made Silver retreat from it, and he'd learned by now exactly how the boy accepted warmth: in small, unnamed doses.
He kept his hand where it was on the boy's shoulder, firm and protective, guiding him past the press line toward the exit doors. Silver didn't pull away. He kept his head held high and walked right beside him, leaving the noise of the stadium behind for somewhere they could eat in peace.
~~~ * ~~~
The next year, the date came around again.
Lance had never told anyone it mattered. It was just the anniversary of a storm that loomed differently than the rest, standing out against the calendar like a high ridge on a clear morning.
He left for a council session that morning, and it was sunny the entire flight back, clear enough that Blackthorn's peak rose sharp against the sky for the first time in weeks.
The blinds were closed when he got home.
Dragonite noticed it before he did, banking early to set down in the garden rather than at the front path, head already turning toward the shuttered windows. Nothing about him suggested alarm. He simply took it in the way he'd watch weather rolling in off the coast, and then wandered off to the pond to wait.
Inside the house, the air smelled faintly of woodsmoke. Not the hearth, which was cold. The cheap beeswax candles he still kept in the pantry, all these years on, for storms that hadn't come tonight.
A radio was playing in the kitchen, low. Toya was still on the air, older and no less serious, receiving a fresh report of something enormous over the eastern ridge with the gravity he had always brought to the subject. Lance hadn't known that station was still broadcasting.
"The blinds," Lance observed from the kitchen doorway, taking in the shadowed room and the soft, golden candlelight flickering on the counter.
Silver didn't look up from the stove. "Sun was too bright."
"It's the clearest day we've had all month."
"Exactly." Silver adjusted the burner, offering nothing else.
Then the smell hit him, faintly scorched, and unmistakably the dark paste from his old field rations. The exact one Lance had pulled out during a storm five years ago. Silver set two bowls down on the table and dropped into the chair across from Lance, who picked up his chopsticks. The broth in both was the color of rust.
It was, remarkably, the same dreadful instant noodles. The same fierce, aggressive heat, the faint scorched note, and a level of chaotic over-seasoning. Silver was sixteen now; he had been cooking competent, respectable meals for two years without supervision. This was a deliberate mistake, with real skill spent getting it precisely wrong.
Weavile, snoozing near the window, caught one whiff of the steam, let out a single betrayed sneeze, and ducked under the low cabinets without looking back.
Lance ate every bite. If his eyes watered slightly more than the chili paste warranted, he offered no explanation.
When both bowls were empty, Silver reached under his chair, dragged out a small metal box, and slid it across the table.
The lunchbox was faded at the corners, the bright blue dulled after years of keeping. On the cover, a blocky, oversaturated Dratini coiled heroically in front of an oversized pokéball, a hopeful sparkle drawn onto its eye. Beneath it, printed in an energetic bubble font: The Ultimate Dragon Trainer.
Reaching for it, Lance found his hands lingering over the latch longer than required. Inside lay rows of homemade treats. Dozens of small, dragon-shaped biscuits, so uniform in size they could only have come from hours of meticulous work.
"For the chaos out there," Silver nodded vaguely toward the garden, past Dragonite, out to all the dragons who had ever pushed their heads through the kitchen door at dinnertime. "Figured they wouldn't bother us if they had their own thing."
A quiet ache opened in Lance's chest before he could stop it. "You made these yourself."
"Obviously."
"How long did this take you?"
"Does it matter?"
It did, and they both knew it. The words slipped out before Lance could stop them, his tone a little too warm and open. "It matters that you—" he caught himself just in time, "—apparently think I can't be trusted to season my own food, considering what you just served me."
The teenager almost smiled. "You looked like you needed the practice."
Through the narrow gap in the blinds, the last of the sunlight was turning gold across the water. Outside, the treats had successfully bought their peace, leaving half a dozen dragons sprawled out in a satisfied, sugar-dazed stupor.
The lunchbox closed gently under Lance's hands, the latch clicking into place with care. He carried it to the shelf above the kitchen counter, setting it in plain view beside the tea leaves.
Silver looked at it for a moment, got up, and turned the tin a few degrees so the Dratini faced the room properly. Then he sat back down, scowling, as if the effort had embarrassed him.
"I'm telling Clair you still have this."
"She helped me pick it out," Lance observed, turning on the tap at the sink.
"You have the worst taste of anyone I've ever met." Silver looked up from the table, straight at him, his shoulders dropping as he gave up on the glare.
"I took you in." Lance met his eye, the initial tease giving way to an easy warmth. "Best decision I ever made."
Silver didn't look away. He just smiled, slow and reluctant, and didn't hide it this time.
"That's exactly what I'm saying," the teenager grumbled, fighting the grin the whole way down.
Lance let out a soft laugh and crossed to the window, drawing the blinds open. Golden late afternoon light spilled back across the kitchen.
"Come on, kiddo. We can put the candles away. It's the clearest day we've had all month."