Work Text:
When Silver turned four, Petrel turned up with a heavy brass Dragonair on a lacquered base and a cherry candy to keep him quiet. He hauled him onto the table by his armpits, shoving the statuette into his palm for a photo. Hold still, kid. Look big for your father's file. The boy smiled around the sugar until the shutter clicked. Then Petrel scraped the candy out of his mouth with a handkerchief and packed the dragon back into its crate. Not a toy, little boss. Rocket inventory.
For his seventh birthday, Archer brought a silver pocket compass with a polished latch. He knelt on the cold tile, his thumbs soft where they smoothed hair behind the kid's ears. He liked the boy. That was the part that made the words burn. You've got his eyes, Archer murmured, and pressed the compass into his hand. Keep sharp. Learn your ciphers. Give him a reason to stay when he looks at you.
On his ninth, Ariana showed up with wool-lined gloves that smelled like lavender and a plum tart still warm in its paper. She sat with him in the dark safehouse kitchen while he ate, brushing crumbs off his chin with real, aching tenderness. Then she slid a sealed black-wax envelope across the counter. Run this down to the docks before the rain starts, she whispered, kissing his hairline. He's asking for the Johto logs. We don't keep him waiting.
By then he understood that kindness from any of them was never really a gift. It was a spoonful of honey to help you swallow the bit.
The Viridian Gym fell the year he was ten, and headquarters emptied out.
The radios went dead on a Tuesday. By Thursday, the safehouse behind Tohjo Falls was stripped to bare concrete. The filing cabinets stood open. Scorched paper hung in the damp air. Archer and Ariana were gone, and no one was coming back to see him on his birthday.
Silver sat on the floor in the corner, leaning against a cold water pipe, working a dull pocketknife into a dented tin of beans. His hands shook so hard the metal rattled. When the blade skittered off the rim and opened a line across his palm, he kept hold of it, pulled his knees to his chest, put his face into the damp wool of his sleeve, and cried.
He bit into the fabric to muffle the sound, tears cutting tracks through the dust on his cheeks. He cried because his hand was bleeding, because he was freezing, because the clock on the wall ticked past midnight without a single footstep in the hall.
For ten years that date had meant someone was going to look at him and decide whether he was keeping up. He'd spent weeks getting ready for it. When midnight came and went and nobody arrived, his shoulders dropped for the first time in a month, and for about ten seconds it was the best he had felt all year.
Then he worked out what it meant. Nobody was coming at all. They had looked at what was worth taking, and he wasn't on the list.
By morning the blood had dried, the date was over, and he was alone.
-
Eight months into living in the Champion's house, Silver still hadn't unpacked his bag.
It stayed rolled and tied in the corner of his room, everything in it accounted for. There was a bed against the wall, and a set of shelves that stayed empty. At the front step he set his shoes down facing the door, ready to pull on, in case he ever had to leave in a hurry.
The boy ate what was cooked and carried the dishes back afterward. He swept the engawa when the cedar dropped needles across it, without being asked to, and then stood there holding the broom, waiting to be told he'd done it wrong.
Lance never did. He came home from the Plateau, hung his cape over the same chair, and checked in on how the training at the Den had gone. He listened patiently, with the quiet ease he gave everything that mattered. Then dinner, and the evening, and nothing else.
The waiting was the worst of it. Sooner or later the man would say what he wanted in return. He still hadn't asked for anything, and somehow that made it worse. A price was at least something you could pay.
There were other things Lance never questioned about. Where the boy had learned to cross a room without making a sound. Why he ate facing the doorway, or why a raised voice on the radio straightened his back. He never once brought up Silver's father, in any direction, for any reason.
Silver went looking for it more than a few times. He’d leave a hook out over dinner, dangling a Rocket alias or a piece of bad news, and get the rice passed to him and a question about Feraligatr’s footwork.
None of the doors inside the traditional Johto-style house had locks. They were wooden and they slid open, and anyone could walk into any room at any time. Lance always stopped outside his and said something first, even when he was only leaving a folded shirt inside.
"There's soup on," he offered one evening through the door, not opening it. "It's better hot, but come out whenever you're ready."
Footsteps went back down the hall. The boy stayed where he was for a few extra minutes, out of sheer stubbornness. Sneasel had his nose pressed to the gap under the door, not even trying to act like he wasn't waiting.
The kitchen smelled like ginger and scallion when he finally came in. A pot rested on the low burner, lid tipped open, with a bowl set out beside it and the good chopsticks, the ones with the worn lacquer. Rice in the warmer. A plate of the pickled radish he liked and had never mentioned liking, cut thin, sitting there like it had turned up on its own.
At the table, Lance was working through a stack of League paperwork, his reading glasses on.
The broth was still hot enough to burn the roof of his mouth. Silver ate a whole bowl, glanced sideways across the table, and then quietly served himself a second. The man turned a page, his eyes softening before returning to the text.
-
The sponsorship paperwork came through in autumn, three months late, the way most things did once the Plateau clerks had hold of them.
Lance had filed it back in summer, with his own name in the sponsor's line. On paper, Silver was an unregistered minor under League monitoring, which was a description that suited nobody, and least of all him. Sponsored, he became a licensed Johto trainer with a Champion's signature behind him, free to carry a full team legally, and walk into a gym without anyone at the desk making a phone call first.
The administration office sent it up with a note apologizing for the delay. Cross-referencing had taken time. Birth registries from those years were spotty, and whatever hadn't been buried in Team Rocket's own files had been locked in a police evidence room.
With a pen already uncapped, his eyes ran down the page. Silver's name at the top. His own underneath it, in the sponsor's line. Then a printed entry near the bottom he hadn't thought about until he was looking straight at it, filled in by a clerk who had no idea what she was handing him.
He put the pen down.
The date was eleven days away.
Signing where required, he slipped the form into his desk drawer and sat back in the chair. Sixteen floors below the Plateau apartment, the stadium lights came on one bank at a time, the way they did all evenings at that hour.
-
Silver went up to the Den every day that week and trained until his hands shook.
The lower chambers were cold enough to show his breath. He ran Sneasel through the same footwork drill until the turns were clean, then ran it again. Feraligatr came off the platform sloppy and got sent back to the start, and sent back again after that, long past the point where either of them was getting anything out of it.
It worked while he was doing it. Counting beats and calling commands took up all the room in his head. The second he stopped, there was the date again, waiting.
Clair watched from the upper hall one afternoon. She came halfway down the steps, stood through two full circuits with her arms folded, and turned away to resume her log book.
Nine days. Then seven. Then five.
The trouble was that Silver couldn't guess what was coming. That date had always meant somebody was going to look at him and decide something, and there was no reason to think this year would be different.
At home, he stopped lingering after dinner. He ate fast, took his bowl to the sink, and slipped down the hall while the kettle was still going, answering in single words whenever possible.
Lance always let him go. He said goodnight, leaving the light on over the stove, and put the rest of the fish in a covered dish, because a boy who ate that fast to get away from the table was going to be hungry again by eleven.
That was the part the boy lay awake with. A week of one-word answers and clearing his chair early, and the dish was there every night with a pair of clean chopsticks beside it, the skin picked off the fish the way Lance knew he preferred it, even if neither of them had ever talked about it.
He had no idea how to read that. He'd pushed for distance with each signal he knew how to give, and getting nothing back only felt like stepping onto a floor that wasn't there.
Maybe the man had finally run out of patience. Maybe there was a conversation waiting at the end of the week, the kind that started with we should talk about how long you're staying.
Silver knew he was only making it worse. He could hear himself doing it at dinner and he did it anyway, because if Lance was going to get tired of him, he would rather be the one who started it.
Four days.
He came out of the Den on the Sunday and ran into Ethan at the outpost by the bridge.
"Hey!" The other boy lit up like they'd arranged it. "I thought that was you. Listen, you know how you told me Marill was turning too wide coming out of the water? I shortened her up like you said. She's a full second faster off the bank now. So you were right, and I'm telling you that even though you were incredibly rude about it at the time."
Silver kept walking.
Ethan fell in beside him anyway, talking about the route north and a gym schedule and a bag of something his mother had sent him off with. He always did this. He talked at Silver the way other people talk to friends, and had been doing it for a year now, and had never once required an answer.
Today he caught about a third of it. His hands hurt from the cold. In four days Lance was going to come home and hang his cape on the chair and tell him the arrangement had run its course, and he had been rehearsing his reaction for it all week. When Ethan said his name a second time, all the pressure he'd bottled up came out at once.
"Do you ever shut up?" Loud enough that a trainer by the fence turned around. "I don't care about your Marill. I don't care about your gym schedule. Go find somebody who gets paid to listen to you."
The talking stopped.
Ethan had told him once, laughing about it, that his mother worried he talked too much. Silver had remembered it. He just hadn't known he was holding onto it to use against him.
He had never once heard the other boy go quiet, and it was worse than being shouted at. His chest tightened, the sudden urge to fix it warring with the sickness of what he'd just done.
Eyes down, he kept walking and didn't stop. Nobody said anything behind him. He got most of the way down and only then let himself look back. By then, the bridge was empty.
-
Silver turned twelve on a Thursday, and was up at the Den while it was still dark.
The house was silent, the cape hung over where it always did, and he got his shoes on at the front step and was gone before Lance was up. He had a full day of water drills in him and he intended to use every hour of it.
Two hours in, Ethan's voice came down the passage from the upper chambers, cheerful and much too loud for the hour, thanking somebody for directions.
Every muscle in his back tensed.
"You're a nightmare to find." A coat half open, boots wet to the ankle, rounding the last of the stone arches. "Do you know there's a whole staircase back there with no lamps on it?"
Only a few days after being told to get lost, here he was, up a mountain before dawn, complaining about the stairs.
Feraligatr came back to the platform, and Silver restarted the drill just to keep his hands moving.
"So I know it's today." Straight to it, the way he always was, one hand going into a coat pocket. "You never told me, obviously, because you don't tell anybody anything. I worked it out a while back."
Ethan held out a belt clip. Not the cheap stamped kind that came free with a starter kit, but solid Blackthorn steel, dark metal worked in a plain interlocking pattern, the sort of thing a serious trainer carried and never had to replace.
"Yours is bent," he said. "Has been since Goldenrod. You keep having to jam it shut with your thumb."
The gift stayed out between them. Then, because Silver hadn't moved: "It's not a big thing. I just saw it and thought of you."
He'll want something back. They always do.
Silver snatched it, fingers closing over the cold plate, and before his brain could stop him, shoved it hard into Ethan's chest to make him stagger.
"I didn't ask you for anything." His voice came out thin and much too controlled. "I don't need you buying me things. Go home."
Ethan stood there holding the clip. He looked at Silver the way you look at somebody you've decided not to argue with, then crouched and set it down on the flat stone at the edge of the platform.
"It's yours either way." He didn't even sound angry, just tired. He turned and headed back up the passage toward the entrance.
The chamber returned to the sound of water against rock. Silver ran the exercise twice more and got nothing out of either one. Feraligatr, who had been at this since before dawn, looked at him with the patience of a pokémon waiting for its trainer to admit the session was over.
The belt clip sat where Ethan had left it, on the stone by the cave mouth.
Feraligatr made a low sound behind him and touched his shoulder, and his eyes stung so hard he had to look at the water until it stopped.
He crossed the platform, picked the clip up, and jammed it deep into his coat pocket. The steel felt cold against his fingers, hard and unearned. Ethan had come all the way before dawn just to hand it over, only to get a hand shoved into his chest and the meanest words Silver could find. It was the one thing he was ever good at: taking something offered and tearing it up before it could burn him.
Climbing out of the Den into a bright, biting afternoon with three hours of daylight left to get through, he felt the metal drag against his leg at every step.
Lance was out on the engawa when Silver came through the garden, lacing up a pair of walking boots he had never seen him wear.
Plain dark long coat, gray scarf, no cape anywhere. A year of breakfasts, and of finding him asleep in a chair with his reading glasses on, and the man had always somehow looked like the Champion regardless. Right now he could have been anybody on his way out.
Ethan's gift was still in his pocket. Nothing on the stove, no rice on. Whatever tonight was, it wasn't dinner and an evening, and he had spent the whole walk back building the conversation that came instead. He stopped in the doorway with one hand still on the frame, answers ready for most of it.
"You're back. Good." Lance glanced past the garden at the light, checking it the way he checked everything. "Get your scarf. It's colder up there than it is down here."
That was all. No questions about where he'd been, or why his eyes were red.
Silver went and got his scarf.
Dragonite came down into the garden and folded himself low so they could climb up, and riding him turned out to be nothing like flying on anything else. There had been a Pidgeot once, all speed and panic, the ground snatching past underneath. This was smooth. The wingbeats came in long, unhurried pulls, the whole enormous body rising and settling on each one, and the warmth coming off his back went straight through.
"Hands here." Lance moved them onto the harness strap. "He'll bank in a moment. Lean with him, not against him."
Dragonite banked left. The boy leaned with him.
Below them Johto went dark and blue, ridge after ridge, and the wind was loud enough that nobody was going to be having a conversation. For the first time in eleven days his head was completely empty.
They came down on a hillside above Violet City, where a shrine sat back in the cedars with a wooden gate at the bottom of the steps, and the whole rise was lit.
"Autumn Matsuri," Lance said, sliding down off Dragonite's shoulder. "The shrine holds it every year to mark the end of the harvest. It's an old tradition. Food stalls, local vendors, and a quiet night out."
Paper lanterns ran up both sides of the stone stairway on lines strung between the cedars. Along the path stood yatai, wooden stalls with their fronts open and their cooks working under rows of bulbs, families going up and down between them, kids in yukata with the sleeves too long, old men standing around a brazier with their hands out over the coals. The air smelled like woodsmoke and hot sugar and something frying.
At the bottom of the steps Silver scanned it, because that was what he did in a crowd. Nobody was posted anywhere, nobody had eyes on the gate. Just families drifting between the awnings, cooks yelling over grease, and a queue of teenagers arguing over a goldfish net.
Lance started walking up at an easy pace, leaving the choice open behind him.
The boy followed. The stalls came at them one after another as they climbed, a woman selling roasted chestnuts in paper cones, a man with a tank of goldfish and the paper scoops you were meant to catch them with before they tore, a grandmother running a table of handmade wooden toys. Nobody looked twice at either of them.
Then the smell hit him, and Silver slowed without meaning to. Soy caramelizing, sweet and scorched at once, the kind of smell that gets into your mouth before the food does. One old man was working the griddle, turning skewers of rice dumplings with his bare fingers, three white balls to a stick, brushing them with a dark glaze that hissed and went sticky where it hit the heat.
He watched the man work through two full batches, memorizing the turn and dip of the skewers. Each time the line shuffled forward, he closed the gap on instinct, his eyes locked on the sauce pot until the heat of the iron came up against his face.
"Mitarashi dango. Charred rice cakes with sweet soy glaze. Best in Johto, no matter what the people in Ecruteak tell you." Lance bought two, handed one over without a word, and kept walking, giving the boy room to eat unobserved.
Hot enough to slightly burn his tongue, the rice was soft enough to pull straight off the stick, and it was, without any real competition, the best thing he had eaten in a year.
Further up there was tai-yaki, batter cakes pressed in a hot iron mold, and the ones at this stall came out shaped like Magikarp with the scales printed into the sides, filled with sweet red bean paste. Lance bought one of those too and broke it in half along the seam, and they ate it on a stone bench at the edge of the grounds, looking down at the valley where the lanterns had already started going out one by one as families carried them off.
The boy licked his thumb clean and leaned back against the bench, relaxed for the first time in weeks.
Coming back up, they passed a booth hung with a hundred strings dropping down from behind a curtain, every one of them tied at the top to a prize nobody could see.
"Senbonbiki. Pull a string, take whatever's on the end of it." Lance smiled at the boy pretending very hard not to be curious.
Silver looked at the strings, then at the curtain. "It's rigged. The ones on the left are hanging heavier. That's where the good prizes are, tied off behind the crossbar so you can't reach them."
The vendor was about sixty, had run this booth longer than the boy had been alive, and had never once been called on it. He gave him a long-suffering look.
Two coins went down on the counter. Silver went along the left side with two fingers, testing the strings for weight, and took a good fifteen seconds about it before he committed.
He pulled. The string came up slowly, taking its time about it, weighted enough that something real was coming.
A plastic pokéflute landed on the counter. The toy kind, three inches long.
The vendor found something on the far end of his rack that needed his full attention.
Lance reached up and pulled one without any ceremony. His string came up with a small bag of plum candy on the end of it. He unwrapped one, put it in his mouth, and looked at Silver.
"Mine works fine."
"It's a bag of candy. That's the consolation prize."
"And you have a whistle." The candy clicked against his teeth. "Grab another string. We'll go together."
"That's not going to change the tension."
"It changes the odds." The man was already reaching for a string on the left, and he waited there until Silver took hold of the one beside it, both cords held and neither of them pulling. "On three."
They pulled together. The curtain rustled, and two small cedar charms slid down onto the counter on red silk cords, omamori, the good kind, the blessed ones they sold at the shrine office for four times the price.
The charm in the boy's hand had a dragon on it, carved around a line of cloud, a character stamped in black ink at the base. Safe passage.
The other one had a claw mark cut into it, sharp and curved, with a different character burned into the grain. Strength. Lance looped that one onto his belt.
"Yours is better," Silver grumbled, although making no move to hand his over.
"Mine's a claw. Yours is a dragon, and it's meant to keep you safe. I know which one I'd rather see you carrying."
The path down to the shrine pond went away from the stalls, between bamboo, and the noise dropped off behind them until it was just flutes and drums a long way back through the trees.
Halfway along, Lance stopped, reached over, and tugged the boy's sleeve back over the wrist where the bare skin showed.
"You've grown two inches since you came to me," he observed, letting go of the fabric. "We're getting you a proper winter coat before the snow."
Then he kept walking, pushing ahead down the slope and holding a low bamboo stalk aside until Silver was past it.
The pond opened out at the bottom, with a wooden landing running a little way over the water. People had been floating lanterns on it. Small square ones, wood and paper, each with a candle burning inside, dozens of them out on the surface already, drifting nowhere in particular, throwing shaky orange light across the lily pads.
Down here the shrine felt tucked away from the rest of the world, lit only by warm, swaying circles under the eaves, the air off the pond cool against their faces. Lance brought a flat-pack float lantern onto the low table: thin bamboo struts, oiled parchment, a candle, and an ink brush set beside the paper base.
"Give me a hand with this?" Lance asked softly, meeting his eyes with a patient smile. "It's a two-person build, whatever the box says."
His thumbs were too broad for the work. Every time he tried to guide a notched corner into its slot the tab slipped sideways, and the second attempt bent it far enough that it was going to snap on the third.
Silver watched him struggle with it for five seconds, let out an exasperated breath, and reached in.
"Let me," he muttered.
Two fingers came down on the base block to hold it steady. The boy's hands were fast and light on the joints, quick from years of picking locks and untangling line and fixing gear on the trail in the cold. He lined up the pre-cut notches, clicked the four corner struts into place, and pulled the frame square.
The candle went in the middle. Trimming the frayed wick with his pocketknife, Silver struck a match with a hand cupped around it against the wind, and touched the flame to the cord.
Lance dipped the calligraphy brush and painted a four-character prayer for safety and happiness across the top of the panel, then signed the bottom corner, turned it around, and put it in his hand.
Ink gathered on the tip and dripped onto the table.
"What are you supposed to put?" The boy held the brush over the panel without letting it down, afraid of writing the wrong thing.
"Whatever you want." Fingers stayed steady on the struts. "A prayer for protection. Safe travel. Whatever you need to lay down."
Silver looked at the empty half of the panel. He didn't believe in prayers, and he didn't trust wishes. But he looked down at the bottom corner, at the sharp familiar signature already inked there.
He dipped the brush and painted his own name beside it. Just his name, sitting next to the other one, on the same paper hull that had to stay dry to keep the flame alive.
"That works too." Lance's smile was barely there, aimed at the two names in the bottom corner of the panel.
They carried it down the stone steps together, one hand each under the lantern, and the boy lowered the base onto the water keeping the paper off the candle, and they let go at the same time.
A ripple took it out from the bank to join the rest.
On the bottom step, hands shoved back into his pockets, Silver watched the little boat they had built together go further and further out, lit up and drifting and nowhere near anything that could touch it.
They went out along the wooden landing and sat down at the end of it, legs hanging over the water. In the boy’s pocket, the belt clip Ethan had carried up a mountain rested against the dragon's charm.
Then the fireworks started over Violet City. They were far enough off that the light came first and the sound arrived a second behind it, a low thump rolling up the valley, and the whole pond lit gold underneath the burst, then crimson, then gold once more.
Lance set his own charm down between them, looking out across the pond.
"Happy birthday, kiddo."
Silver kept his eyes on the water.
The fireworks went on over the city. The boat lanterns went on drifting. Beside him, Lance sat with his hands resting on his knees, waiting for nothing at all.
The boy got half a breath in, and it came apart on him. "Don't."
Lance stayed where he was, offering a shoulder close enough to lean on if Silver needed it.
"No, you don't get to." It came out wet and cracked, around a sob he had no hope of stopping.
A sharp, furious sound came out of the boy's throat, and he dragged his sleeve across his face. Too late. The tears came up hot and fast, and there was nothing he could do to stop them.
"You don't get to just do that. You brought me up here and you bought me food and you didn't ask me anything all day. And you knew." He was shaking now.
Glaring at the water, his breath hitched hard. "You've known this whole time—and you let me stand in that house for a week thinking you were going to throw me out."
"Wait." Lance looked at him with stunned disbelief. "Is that what you thought?"
"That's what happens!" Silver was crying openly now, the ugly, jagged kind that comes out from the bottom of the chest. "That's what the day is," he spat, scrubbing at his eyes with the back of his wrist. "Somebody looks at you and works out what you're worth. Every year. Every single year, and then he—"
His breath caught.
"He didn't even come back—he didn't come back to tell me I wasn't worth taking, he just..."
The rest of it broke apart on him. Tears got caught on the back of a hand, and the next breath came up short.
"He left me." It took a moment to get the next words up. "...in a room—"
Silver bit down on his lip, but a harsh sob tore past it anyway.
"...with a can of beans."
The last word went to pieces. He folded forward over his knees, both arms crossed over his head as he cried. It came out in long, ragged pulls that shook his whole frame, the sound high and wrecked, every breath fighting against the next sob.
Anger went through Lance sharp enough to numb his hands. He didn't let a trace of it show. The boy didn't need to see it, and it belonged to a man who wasn't here to take it anyway.
He leaned over instead, put a warm hand on the boy's back, and held it there.
"And you're just sitting there," Silver choked into his sleeve. "Like it doesn't mean anything."
"It means you're here," Lance said softly. "You don't owe me for today, and you never will. Not for any of it."
"I don't know how to do this." The boy's shoulders came down, the fight going out of him all at once.
"You don't have to do anything." Wrapping both arms around him, Lance pulled him in, one hand across his shoulders and the other cupping the back of his head, holding him tight out of the wind. "It's just the day you were born. That's all it ever has to be."
Silver stayed buried in the front of his coat, breathing in and out against a chest that went on rising and falling underneath him, slow and solid.
When his hand finally came out of his pocket, it had the dragon wood omamori in it. He turned it over once in his fingers and set it on the timber between them, right next to Lance's charm.
Out on the pond, the lights went on drifting, and the arm around him was warm.
"Thanks," the boy whispered, barely louder than the water against the posts.
The hand on his shoulder squeezed once, firm and quiet, and held on.
"Any time, kiddo."
They stayed there until the last of the lanterns had drifted out past the reeds and the drums up at the shrine had stopped.
The Matsuri was winding down by the time they got back up to the main path, most of the food stalls pulling down their awnings below.
Beside him, Lance slowed, eyes sweeping the vendors still open. "We should grab something else before we leave."
"We ate two sweet potatoes, three sticks of dango each, a bag of plum candy, and a waffle shaped like a fish that was ninety percent red bean paste," Silver rattled off, incredulous.
"It was shaped like a Magikarp. They're supposed to be mostly filler," the man said reasonably. "Besides, you'll be hungry on the fly back."
"No more sugar," he muttered, offering zero resistance to the hand that landed on his shoulder and steered him toward the last stall at the end of the row.
"Fine. Savory." A scan of the wooden sign above the counter. "Nikuman or fried noodles?"
"Noodles are too messy." The boy pulled a face.
"Steamed meat buns it is." Lance said it like the matter had been settled some time ago. "Two each, then."
A smile got most of the way onto Silver's face before he caught it and turned it into a scowl.
He kept his hand in his pocket the whole way home, holding the small pokéflute whistle, the dragon charm and the belt clip all together, working out what time was too early in the morning to go find Ethan.