Work Text:
— Blackthorn Estate · 5:12 AM · [Private] —
Lance was out on the ridge road above Blackthorn before the sky had decided on a color, the one hour of the day that belonged to nobody.
He ran the same loop most mornings he was home. Down through the cedars behind the house, out along the bare flank of the mountain where the trees gave up, and the wind swept off the valley in an unbroken rush, then back up the long rise to the estate wall. Seven or eight miles, depending on how far out he went before he turned for the gate.
For years he ran with a watch, holding a target pace that followed him into the stride like every other duty. At some point, he left it on the shelf and never picked it up again.
Now the only thing keeping time was his own breathing, the dull thud of his shoes against the gravel, and the burn building in his lungs. By the third mile, the desk had finally let go of him. The League requisitions waiting on his seal, the security reports along the Johto border, and the unanswered letters from the Clan Council all fell behind the plain work of the run. There was only the pale road, the ache rising slowly in his legs, and the chill sinking clean into his chest.
Dragonite tagged along the way he always did, which was to say he didn't run so much as loiter through the air overhead: banking out wide over the treetops, doubling back, sweeping close enough once to push a wingtip’s worth of wind across his trainer's head and pretending it was an accident.
For all his size, he was the gentlest soul on the mountain, and he spent his mornings turning lazy loops over a man on a jog. When Lance slowed on the last rise, the dragon dropped down to walk beside him, snorting in a way that had always sounded smug, and pushed his snout against the man's shoulder until a hand came up to rest on the warm hide of his neck.
The light had come up gray by the time the estate showed itself again through the trees. He was soaked through the shirt, his legs had the loose tiredness that meant he'd gone far enough, and nothing at all was waiting on him between now and nightfall.
He stepped inside, sliding the door shut behind him. The place was built the old-Johto way, dark cedar posts, woven tatami mats underfoot, and paper screens that smelled faintly of pine. The doorframes were cut wide enough that a full-grown dragon could pass through without brushing a wing against the jambs.
Showered and changed into a set of training blacks, he went to the dojo at the far end of the house. A high-beamed room, bare but for a single paper lamp in the corner, and a rack with the Clan's old practice gear: a sword and a blunted spear, the tools his combat instructors had put in his hands before he was Silver's age. He never used them now.
The Den had taught him to fight before it showed him almost anything else. The old body-hardening routines had been hammered into him by his masters, who regarded physical discipline the way they did the weather: something you respected early, or got hurt by later. He kept them up nearly every day, forty minutes at a time, wherever he happened to be that week.
He held the horse stance until his thighs burned and his lower back locked under the weight, then transitioned flat to the mat for the neck bridge, hips driven high, bearing everything on his head until the cords in his neck stood out and shook. Finally, he turned into a high plank, holding an unbroken line against gravity until his whole frame began to tremble.
To anyone else, it would have looked like a lean, muscular body doing absolutely nothing at immense effort. But a Dragonite in a hard dive pulled enough force to drag the blood down out of a rider's skull and shear his spine out of true; staying seated through a high bank with no saddle or stirrups required strength in places nobody watching would ever think to look.
The cameras caught the clean arc at the bottom of a descent, never the boring, unlovely stamina it took to stay conscious through the pull-out. A body that took that strain week after week either armored itself from the inside, or failed somewhere that couldn't be mended.
Garchomp lay along the far wall with his snout resting against his fins, eyes shut, tracking every shift through the floorboards. When Lance dropped out of the last hold and sat back on his heels to catch his breath, his left knee complaining audibly on the way, the landshark sent a rumble through the room. It was the same sound he made on frosty mornings when his own joints were stiff, a dry comment about wear.
"I'm aware," Lance muttered.
The dragon declined to soften it.
They walked out to the archery line on the upper terrace of the Dragon's Den, where the open sky met the deep drop of the gorge. The wind came straight off the ravine, sharp and damp, carrying cold spray up from the falls below the cavern's upper mouth. The range was a plain one: four thick straw targets set against the cliff face, their frames blackened by years of weather. Lance had shot on this line since he was ten, back when the bows were cut small from mountain yew, and a Clan instructor would knock a boy's elbow into place with a wooden marker.
His own bow was a traditional recurve, dark horn and bound sinew. No sights, no stabilizer, eighty pounds of draw before the string touched his chest. He worked through the quiver with the steadiness of long habit. Garchomp sprawled across the sun-warmed flagstones a few yards off, thumping his tail against the rock whenever a point struck dead center.
Every dozen shots, he walked up to pull the iron heads free and wipe them on the cloth at his belt. Once, from down in the gorge, the reverberating call of a wild Seadra carried up through the mist, the territory beyond the estate wall reminding him it was there. He checked each cedar shaft for hairline splits, flexed it against his thumb, and slid the bundle back into the quiver.
When the last arrow was stowed, he unstrung the bow, wiped down the grip, and sat on the stone bench at the edge of the terrace. The landshark shifted over, head settling onto his knee with a gravelly rumble. From his backpack, Lance pulled a strip of dried charred meat, a Blackthorn salt-cure, and snapped it in half. He ate his portion while Garchomp chewed his share beside him, the two of them resting in the mountain breeze before the evening set in.
The bath took the ache out of his body, and he came out in a dark cotton yukata, loose-fitting and tied at the waist, with his hair still wet, thinking about nothing more urgent than dinner. And that was where the silence ended.
He had the pot barely on the burner before Latias poured in through the half-open door, warbling, and made one full lap of the ceiling before hovering at his shoulder to trill a bright rising note directly into his ear. It was her unfiltered opinion on how long the day had taken to reach the part with food.
The Clan told visitors she was one of the rarest creatures ever to pass through Blackthorn, a red eon dragon out of a storm, which was all true. At home she was the youngest of them, knew it, traded on it shamelessly, and spent most of her time coaxing him for a share of whatever he was making.
He dropped a piece of dashi kelp into the pot and set it on to heat. The santoku knife cut through the burdock, daikon, and sweet potato in rhythmic thunks, not fast, just the habit of a man who had made this pot of fish-and-root broth a thousand times. He salted the mackerel, laid it skin-side down in a cast-iron skillet, and left it to render until the skin went taut and the oil began to pop.
Behind him, the refrigerator latched open with the distinct sound of being forced by something without hands. Hydreigon had hooked the handle with one of her side heads, and got the other two down into the cold shelves. He reached back without turning and gently nudged her snout aside; she withdrew anyway with a terracotta container of last night's rice clamped in her jaw, and the wounded dignity of a creature who considered this kitchen her personal domain.
"That was for tomorrow," he remarked, not expecting to be obeyed.
She retreated to the corner by the hearth, where her size wouldn't be argued with, and set about opening the tub. Latias, meanwhile, drifted over the stove, turning slow circles in the heat off the pot and singing to herself, the little dance she always did once a meal was on its way, never taking her eyes off his knife.
The broth reached a simmer. He skimmed the surface, dropped the roots in, and let it go while the last of the daylight went off the window. He ate standing at the counter, in no hurry: clean broth, the sweet potato gone soft, and salted mackerel.
It was close to what he ate most days he was home. A man in his position spent his life unable to decide most of what happened to him; what he asked of his own body and what he put into it was one of the few things that stayed in his hands. The bowl was empty before Latias finished angling for her share, and he handed over the piece of fish she'd been patiently waiting on.
Later, when the house had gone dark, he took a leather-bound volume to his desk in the study. It was the same surface where the regional directives and council files lived, sorted into documents that he turned face down and moved to the far corner.
The book was old: an early Blackthorn novel, written in archaic dialect that had fallen out of ordinary use somewhere before his grandmother's time, in a printing so small the clan library held one of the last copies. He'd been translating it into modern script for the better part of a year, a dictionary at his elbow for the phrasings the decades had worn out of common use. He needed it less now than at the start.
He put on the reading glasses that years of League paperwork had earned him, a brush pen held loose in his hand, while a finger traced the unfamiliar characters, following two brothers through a bitter dispute over a dry mountain riverbed, a blood feud fought over water rights that had vanished three centuries ago.
Altaria settled onto the low storage chest beside the desk with a soft push of displaced air, and folded herself into the cloud of her own body, close enough that her down brushed his forearm each time he turned a page. She hummed while he read, the wandering song she made when content and half asleep. It broke off whenever she dozed, then picked up again a few minutes later on the same note.
The forgotten roasted barley tea he’d poured was cold by the time he noticed it. He read to the bottom of the page, and the end of the next, and didn't get up to warm his cup.
— Cobalt Mine, Cianwood · 2:57 AM · [Known] —
The word came down at two in the morning: an illegal breeding operation run out of the old Cobalt Mine above Cianwood, the kind that packed pokémon into the dark, in numbers no one was meant to keep.
The G-Men had been inside it undercover for six weeks, handling the operation until it grew too large for a single unit. Lance ran the raid himself, his own agents and the International Police together.
He took the last briefing crouched behind the ridge with the tactical lead. Fog lay thick in the valley, reducing every officer on the slope to a grey silhouette.
"The pokémon underneath come out first," Lance said, not raising his voice. "Before the suspects, the records, before anything. There are cages two hundred feet below us with no light and no ventilation, and these people have rigged the timber framing to collapse on top of them. The moment we breach, they'll try to bury the evidence, and the evidence is alive. So we move faster than they can. Understood?"
It went down the line in a muffled relay, and the officers stepped into position.
He went in through the lower drainage entrance with the second team, and for eleven minutes it went the way a good operation goes: efficient and almost boring. Squads peeled off into the side galleries. A police Growlithe gave a short, sharp bark ahead.
"That's them." Lance had a hand on the humid rock, reading the dark by the sounds coming back to him. "Open every cage you find. Don't wait for a count, don't wait for me. Anything alive, you move it toward the entrance and keep it going." A report came in through his earpiece, and he answered it. "The upper level holds. Nobody goes up there until I say."
Then the ringleaders who'd built the place brought it down themselves.
The blast punched up through the mine before the sound did, a deep structural shudder that ran sixty yards of old stone and shook the soles of his boots. He had one order in him before the ceiling gave way.
"Clear the lower tunnels. All teams, fall back now."
An instant later, the timber crossbeams sheared through and the ceiling collapsed.
When the dust thinned, he was still on his feet, which surprised him. He also could not move.
A length of rusted rebar had fallen with the ceiling, thick as a thumb and torn off jagged at one end, piercing his left flank and coming out the back, pinning him upright against the rock behind.
He looked at it with the detached attention he'd give a bad footing on a mountain path. It missed the iliac artery, or he'd already be gone.
The steel filled the entry hole, that was the only reason he was standing and conscious, instead of bleeding out in the dark, though heavy red drops were already pooling in his boot.
"Champion." An officer, close, torchlight swinging across the dust. "You're—"
"I can see it." His voice came out dry, the register he used during council sessions. "Don't touch the bar. Get your tactical lead and the medics with the hydraulic cutter. Tell them it's reinforced iron, not rock."
The man hesitated, eyes fixed on the metal spiking through his body, paralyzed by the sheer gore. Lance quietly brought him back.
"Officer. Look at my face, not the injury. The lower tunnels?"
"Clear, sir."
"The second-level cages?"
"Open. They're bringing them up now."
"Then that's where your people go." Somebody down the line started to protest that the Champion was losing blood, and that took precedence—but Lance cut him off instantly. "The order stands. There are trapped pokémon down there, and I'm awake and giving you an order. Get them out first."
It stopped being an argument. The medics got a mechanical brace on the rebar above and below the entry point so it couldn't twist, and the tactical lead directed a lantern toward the ground while telling him to keep talking. He complied, giving containment protocols between breaths that were coming noticeably shorter.
Overhead, past the cordon they'd strung to keep the rest of the gallery from coming down further, Dragonite had forced his way in.
The dragon had been holding the perimeter above ground, and the moment the explosives detonated, he had smashed down through the caved-in upper shaft to find him.
His first partner, grown from a hatchling at his side in the Den, had somehow crammed himself into the wreck of the gallery and could do nothing there. Held back by the rockfall and his own size in a fissure too narrow to turn around in, he was physically blocked from reaching his trainer.
He was making a sound Lance had never heard in all their years, a high frantic distress call. It was the helpless panic of a creature built for power, realizing his strength couldn't fix anything at all.
The physical pain he could manage; he knew how to compartmentalize a body in shock. What he couldn't manage was the fear radiating off the dragon, close enough now that he could see white around the edges of both eyes.
"Hey." It came out rough and cracked. "Hey. Look at me. I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere. Look at me."
Dragonite strained against the men and the stone, unable to come any closer, the broken cry rising in pitch.
"I know," Lance soothed, in the tone he'd have used to bring him down through a storm over open water. "Stay there. Let them work. I'm not going anywhere without you." He held the frightened gaze with his own and kept his voice steady for him, right up until the medics said they were ready.
The saw bit into the steel.
The high-frequency vibration traveled down the length of the metal directly into the torn muscle and nerve endings. The shock was white and total, a pain with no edges and no bottom, and the sound he made was nothing he recognized as his own voice. His legs gave out. The last thing he heard was the dragon's cry climbing higher before the dark took him.
The doctors kept him heavily sedated. He surfaced slowly over the following days, drifting up and going under again. The first time he woke and stayed conscious, Silver was huddled in an armchair beside the bed.
The rebar had come out on the operating table, in a controlled way, with enough surgical staff around to catch what it let go of when it moved. He'd lost a great deal of blood, and a length of intestine he would only learn about later and would not miss.
Silver didn't tell him he'd been scared. That wasn't a thing they usually said to each other.
What came out instead was, "Clair said Dragonite wouldn't let anyone near you after they pulled you out. They had to tranquilize him to fly him back; he woke up in the Plateau tower and took out half the west wing looking for you. She's furious."
It was as close as the boy could get to saying he'd been terrified, and Lance heard everything he was hiding.
His kid had grown up learning that relying on someone was dangerous, that wanting people around only gave them a way to hurt you. Now the one constant in his life had been carried into a hospital with a hole through his torso, leaving him to face the cold reality that everyone eventually leaves.
Lance couldn't undo years of hard lessons from a hospital bed. So he rasped, "How's Dragonite now?"
"Finally asleep. Clair brought up some calming herbs from the Den and sat with him until he stopped fighting," the boy muttered, looking away toward the window. "You look terrible."
"Thanks."
Later, once Silver had eaten something from the cafeteria because Lance made him, he asked the real question, his eyes glued to the floor. "What actually happened? Nobody will tell me anything except there was 'an incident.'"
The man thought about how to answer that. He wasn't going to lie, because a lie would only prove that Giovanni had been right about how the world worked.
But what was true and what was the whole story were two different things. What he left out was what the pokémon in those cages looked like when the light finally hit them, the screech of the saw cutting through steel, and how long he'd stood there wondering whether he was going to bleed to death. None of that needed to live in the head of a thirteen-year-old who'd clearly been awake since three in the morning.
"A G-Men operation went wrong," Lance said quietly. "A structure crashed down while we were inside. I was closest when it happened, the team got me out, and the suspects are in custody.” He shifted on the mattress to meet the boy's eye. “It was a bad hit, kiddo, but I'm going to be fine."
Silver studied his face for a long moment, searching for any sign of a lie. Finding none, he finally leaned back in his seat and let it go.
"Okay," the boy breathed softly.
They sent him home eleven days later, moving like a much older man, and the place had to be relearned around the injury.
He couldn't have managed a fast walk if the kitchen were on fire. The ridge road was still out there, completely beyond him. Lance minded that more than the wound.
Silver, without discussion, moved a great many things. The Blackthorn novel had migrated from the study to the low table by the futon, the dictionary and the loose translation pages still tucked inside it, at the passage he'd left off.
The kid also tried to make the broth. The kelp had gone stringy from being in the pot too long; the sweet potato was either raw-hard or falling apart, depending on which piece he found. Going by the state of the kitchen, he'd made more than one attempt, and he served it anyway with the sharp insistence of a teenager who had decided this was his job now.
Dragonite hadn't gone more than a few feet from him since he left the hospital. He had returned from the Plateau subdued and watchful, keeping a steady eye on his trainer.
When the man eased down on the engawa, one careful step at a time, to sit in the afternoon sun, the dragon thumped his head onto the floorboards right beside him, his slow exhales puffing hot against Lance's knee.
"He hasn't left you alone since they brought you back." Silver stood in the doorway with a bowl he hadn't asked for. "Clair tried to lure him out with berries yesterday, and he just ignored her."
"He'll manage."
The boy set the bowl down within reach, lingering a moment longer than he needed to. Then he sat on the step a careful arm's length away, close enough to the dragon's flank to feel the warmth. "Eat that. Clair's coming Thursday, and if you lose any more weight she'll blame me."
Lance ate it. It was slightly scorched at the bottom and the best thing anybody had put in front of him in eleven days.
— Mesagoza, Paldea · 10:38 PM · [Anonymous] —
Mesagoza after dark was terracotta roofs going gray against the sky, streetlight caught in old pale plaster, café chairs out and half full in the plaza below his window, and nobody knew who he was.
He was there for work. A cross-region summit had dragged through three days of legal jurisdiction, agency overlap, and extradition rights. It was the kind of bureaucratic slog that brought a Champion halfway around the world to sit at a long table, and say very little to a great deal of purpose.
Paldea ran on its own League authority, with its own Elite Four and distinct protocols. The whole point of the week was aligning paperwork between regions that rarely needed to coordinate. They had promised a single day off in the middle, tomorrow, and he had already decided to spend it doing absolutely nothing.
The hotel bar was all dark wood, low lighting, and potted orange trees along the far wall. At this hour, a few scattered guests kept it quiet enough to hear ice clink against glass. He sat at the mahogany counter with a drink he was taking his time over. In Goldenrod, he couldn't have crossed a train platform without drawing a crowd. Here he was just another face in the corner, and it was the closest thing to a vacation he had enjoyed in years.
His pokégear lit up.
A photo, no message at first. A baking tray over the kitchen counter, a dozen malasadas burnt nearly black on top and crooked at odd angles, one collapsed outright. Then the text arrived below it:
Don't judge, they taste fine. Ethan helped. Call me tomorrow?
Lance looked at the picture, a subtle smile breaking across his face. He traced the edge of the screen with his thumb before typing back:
They look like they put up a fight. Save me one. And yes, I'll call.
The woman five stools down was perhaps thirty. She had been observing him long enough to realize he wasn't waiting on anyone. When she moved over to the empty seat beside him, it was easy, unhurried, and without much agenda beyond the obvious one.
"Let me guess," she offered, gesturing with her wine glass. "The League summit."
"Is it that obvious?" he asked, with a faint, self-deprecating grin.
"Half this hotel's here for it, and the other half's trying to drink through it." She had a dry way about her, a folded lanyard visible in her coat pocket, and the restless energy of someone stuck far from home for the night. "You have the posture of a man trapped in a boardroom since Wednesday."
"Tuesday, actually," he corrected gently. She laughed, the sound warm, and neither of them had exchanged names.
He liked her, and he recognized the appeal. He had accepted similar offers on past trips in distant cities, gone up to a private room, and appreciated the simple release and the uncomplicated presence of someone who expected nothing from him the next morning.
He weighed it honestly, because she deserved that much. Then he thought about the tray of burnt dough, charred at the edges and dusted unevenly with sugar.
It wasn't physical company he needed tonight. He wanted home, and a brief encounter with a stranger would only make the distance feel wider by morning.
"You're waiting on somebody after all." She read it off his face without any offense.
"Something like that." He gestured to the bartender for his tab. "Have a good night. Stay safe out there."
She took the refusal with a light shrug and a genuine smile, and went back to her friends. Lance paid his bill, went up to his room alone, and felt no worse for it.
The next morning he spent on foot, with no plan he'd have cared to explain. He went out in an unbuttoned linen overshirt over a dark tee and trousers, dressed like any other traveler exploring the city.
Mesagoza was old under the modern noise. Two streets back from the wide central plaza, the town folded into itself, descending into narrow cobbled lanes barely wide enough for a handcart. Centuries of foot traffic had polished the paving smooth and pale, the alleys twisting past whitewashed walls and wrought-iron balconies heavy with climbing bright blossoms. He let the incline carry him wherever it went.
Halfway up one of the hillside turns, he found a bookshop, a small place with books stacked to the ceiling and worn sofa cushions in the reading nook by the window. A plump Pawmi slept curled on a velvet pillow on the wooden counter, not even twitching as he entered. The owner, an old man with spectacles resting high in his white hair, gave a single nod and went back to his crosswords, leaving his guest to browse in silence, which was the finest hospitality Lance could think of.
Hours passed while he pulled volumes from the shelves. Though he could barely translate the Paldean script, he liked flipping through the pages, taking in the scent of aged paper and the weight of the binding, while the sun came warm through the glass. He eventually picked out a slim collection of local folk legends, along with a leather-bound dictionary. The shopkeeper wrapped them in brown paper without a word.
Food happened when he felt like it, guided by appetite rather than a schedule. A bocadillo at an open-air counter, crusty bread, cured mountain ham, and a drizzle of olive oil, eaten standing up among locals doing the same thing.
Later, off a wooden cart near the plaza steps, a paper cone of churros still spitting from the oil, dough with cinnamon, dusted with enough sugar to appall the version of himself that strictly measured these things at home.
The man who usually lived on clean broth and rigid routines, running at least seven miles before breakfast, was in an unfamiliar courtyard eating fried food, simply because it tasted good and he could. It was a tiny luxury, and it felt like one.
As the afternoon wore on, the sunlight turned the basin the color of a polished seashell, the pale stone gone gold. Wanting privacy as evening approached, he climbed the long steps up to the ancient outer ramparts and found a deserted alcove along the high city wall.
Once he was certain the walkway was empty, he let his whole team out. Altaria preened in the breeze, Latias darted playfully around the watchtowers, and Garchomp settled beside him onto the flagstones. Dragonite leaned in close, resting his broad snout against Lance's shoulder, while his trainer put his back to the warm battlements and watched the day go down over the hills with all of them around him.
When the last of the red light slipped beneath the skyline, he recalled his partners to their capsules and made for the hotel. Along the way, he pulled out his pokégear, found Silver’s contact, and hit call.
— Blackthorn Ridge · 4:23 PM · [Unseen] —
There was a wide ledge of rock high above the Dragon's Den, a two-hour hike past the last of the training paths, that Lance had been coming to since he was a boy.
He went up alone and on foot, no cape, no crest, in an old coat that had never been near a camera. His team stayed down in the valley, Dragonite included. This was the one place he came with nobody at all to look after, and it had taken him years to stop feeling strange about that.
The trail rose through pines and finished on bare granite. His old injury pulled at every long step, a year fully healed and still complaining in cold weather, so he took the last stretch slower than he once would have. He reached the top anyway and sat down on the flat stone with his back to the wind.
From that height the whole range showed itself, dark rock giving way to slate and snow at the far peaks. Below him, a river of fog worked through the gap, spilled over, and pooled among the pines.
At the League, every moving thing was a variable. Wind shear was a number he adjusted for. Cloud was cover or hazard. Water was a surface to read for what moved under it. He'd spent so long turning weather into information that he'd half forgotten it could just be looked at.
Here, he was allowed to not know things.
That, more than the view, was what he came up for. Uncertainty was a luxury he couldn't usually afford. A Champion who hesitated in front of a council lost the room. A commander who said I don't know in an emergency got people killed. Years of serving as the fixed point for everyone else had left him little space to be unsure.
So he sat with his doubts, letting them drift without needing a resolution.
He thought about Red, because on a high cold ridge, it was hard not to. Someplace off to the north, a boy who had beaten everything worth beating had climbed to the top of Mt. Silver, and let the rest of the world carry on without him. He stayed up there in weather that had no business keeping anything alive, waiting for a challenge.
Lance had stood at the foot of that mountain, looked up the white throat, and felt the terrifying pull. The urge to go past everything he was answerable to, bury it under the snow, and never turn around. He was never going to do it. He'd made his choice a long time ago. But sitting here alone, he could admit he understood exactly why a kid barely older than his own had gone all the way up there, and that knowledge still frightened him.
His mind wandered off, and landed on a night years back.
Silver in the bedroom doorway at two in the morning, all sharp edges and held breath, riding out a nightmare he'd have died before confessing to. He'd been living in the house only a few months then, all slammed doors and prickly silence. Lance had spent that whole time with no way of knowing whether his patience was reaching the boy, or if he was merely a warden being endured.
The light stayed off. That much he had already learned: a lamp, a question, anything made too large would send him straight out the door. So he only shifted over on the futon, opening a space between him and the wall without a word.
For a moment nothing happened. Then the boy crossed the floor, stiff with embarrassed frustration, and dropped into that gap with his back turned, his body rigid against the fact of being there. An hour passed before the tension finally bled out; his breathing slowed, and he rolled over in his sleep, curling in against Lance's side for warmth.
He turned that memory over now, where it couldn't undo him in front of anyone. Everywhere else, people needed him as a function, a title to lean on, a force to fix things, a guarantee that the regions would hold. That night, a frightened boy wanted nothing from the Champion. Silver had just wanted Lance.
He'd lain awake for hours afterward, not daring to move and wake him, slowly realizing he'd been starving for that his entire life without ever knowing it.
Whether he was getting any of it right remained an open question. Here, he could let it rest.
Daylight failed early at this elevation, slipping behind the western peaks. The orange along the skyline deepened into dark violet, and the first faint stars broke through.
In every other corner of his life, he was the largest presence in the room, the one everything else arranged itself around. Up here he was a man on a bare ridge—nothing much at all, and that brought more relief than anything his life had ever given him.
In a world where everyone fought to be seen, Lance was the one who stood out by staying silent.
— Indigo Plateau · 4:46 PM · [Public] —
The council chamber beneath Indigo Stadium was designed to be watched from every seat, which was the first thing Lance had disliked about the place.
Tiered benches ran up on three sides, filled largely by the Johto gym leaders and regional department heads. The fourth side held the observation gallery: League staff, aides, and Kanto trustees packed in behind a brass rail. Nothing spoken on the floor stayed in the room; every word entered the official record, and some version would reach the press by morning.
Everyone at the long central table had learned to speak for the transcript. A requisition for a new set of gym facilities got argued like a border treaty. Councilman Bexley, who sat for one of the regional committees, had a habit of pausing before his key points, chin lifting slightly so the stenographer could catch every syllable clean.
The Johto League council met four times a year to settle logistics, budgets, and jurisdictional lines. Lance chaired the sessions, letting representatives argue until they ran out of points, then offering a single, decisive outcome.
Silver sat where the observers were placed, at the far end of a side bench. Five years into learning how to read the man he lived with, he watched Lance manage a room full of people who each held a high opinion of themselves.
"...which leaves the projected shortfall at eleven percent across the biennium." Bexley paused on cue. "Eleven percent. I am not convinced the council fully grasps what that does to the young trainer subsidies."
Lance turned a page in his folder, his voice firm and unhurried. "That figure relies on last year's intake numbers. Update the ledger before you build a budget around it."
"The projection remains sound," Bexley countered smoothly. "If you examine the second column—"
"It relies on old data," Lance noted, without a drop of heat. "Bring the current tally to the next session. Moving on." He turned his attention toward the far end of the table, where a Goldenrod transit official and an Olivine port liaison had been dancing around the same jurisdiction line for nearly half an hour.
"Harbor inspection permits fall under port oversight," the liaison insisted. "That was established under the marine accord."
"The amendment covers transport, not regional enforcement," the transit officer shot back. "You cannot expand your own mandate."
Lance let the back-and-forth run just long enough to draw out the core issue. "You both are claiming overlapping authority. One of you is mistaken. Discuss it outside this chamber, resolve the overlap, and present a single agreement next month."
Silver had witnessed this routine before, and still marveled at its efficiency. At home, the same man argued with a Hydreigon about the contents of the refrigerator and lost. Here he dismantled an extended dispute in two sentences, cutting through fluff with clarity, and closing doors so smoothly that no one thought to push them open again. He never raised his voice, and he never played to the gallery.
Forty minutes in, the side door opened, and Clair walked in, indifferent to her late arrival. She slid into the high-backed chair beside Lance, a seat everyone else on the council knew better than to claim, and pulled a copy of the agenda as if catching up on light reading.
She held the Blackthorn seat on the council, she was his cousin, and the deference the rest of the table offered the Champion had never once impressed her. She had grown up beating him to the top of mountain trails.
The next topic was Den access, Clair's own initiative, and the two of them had been on opposite sides of it for months, which surprised nobody who knew them. The two cousins had argued about everything since before either could reach a doorknob.
She wanted the Dragon's Den opened wider, and quickly. For centuries, it had trained Blackthorn clan offspring and a tiny handful of rigorously vetted candidates. Clair was pushing to bring the region's most promising young talent through its gates, arguing that Johto needed stronger dragon tamers and there was no better proving ground to forge them.
Lance agreed with her intent. But he refused to sign off on her timeline.
He had fought the elders just to enroll Silver, an outsider without a dragon lineage to his name, and the kid had earned his place through the slow regimen the Clan demanded: months of supervised care, safety protocols, and endless hours logged before being allowed near a full-grown dragon. The preparation came first; the access followed. The boy, sitting quietly on the bench, understood the wisdom of that path better than anyone. He was the living proof that the method worked.
"The elders signed off on the revised draft," Clair said, leaning back in her chair with cool assurance. "You'd know that if you answered your mail."
"I responded to them yesterday." Lance kept his eyes on the document before him. "I told them the structure remains inadequate. Not at this pace."
"You told grandfather no," she corrected smoothly. "Everyone else is waiting on you to stop treating the Den like a museum."
Down the table, Falkner sat up a little straighter, looking as though he wished for a rulebook to hide behind.
"A dragon is not a starter pokémon," Lance said, looking straight at her. "You put an eager sixteen-year-old on a Salamence just because he won a few badges, then the first hard bank will pull the blood out of his head, and he will come off the saddle at three hundred feet. I've buried trainers who made smaller mistakes than that, Clair. I will not repeat the experience to satisfy an intake quota."
"Then teach them what you know." She countered, opening her palms. "That is the whole purpose of expanding the program."
"It cannot be taught in a single season. It requires years of the foundational work you consider an unnecessary delay."
Whitney, halfway down the row, abandoned all pretense of reading her notes and covered her mouth with a hand. Morty didn't laugh, though his eyes crinkled with amusement.
"So it comes down to discipline," Clair murmured, turning a page of her own file. "Not tradition, not bloodlines. You will open the Den the day you find someone willing to work as hard as you do, which means never, because no one measures up to your standard."
Near the end of the bench, Chuck let out a rumble in his chest that he hastily disguised as a cough, a beat too late.
To Silver, who lived with one of them and had been drawn into the orbit of the other, it was the least frightening thing in the world and also the funniest—the Champion of two regions and the Gym Leader of Blackthorn, who between them could have levelled the building, bickering like children over a mountain home they'd both grown up on.
Across the table, Jasmine rested her chin in her hand, watching the cousins slip through their lofty titles with a soft, knowing smile.
"You do this with everything," Clair added softly. "You get a thing running well, and then you'd rather keep it safe than let it evolve. The Den. The League rotations. Yourself, for that matter, for the better part of a decade."
Lance's hand paused above the paper.
Bugsy froze mid-note, his pen hovering an inch above his pad before he carefully lowered his gaze.
The silence held for a moment. Lance let the sentence hang in the air, then calmly closed the folder before him.
"Submit the full proposal at the next session," he said, without a trace of emotion. "Include the safety protocols and instructor ratios. We will review it then."
"You offered the same response last time," Clair noted, making no move to gather her documents.
"And I will say it again next time, if the safeguards remain incomplete." He stood up, adjusting his cape. "That concludes today's business."
At the far end, Pryce made a single note in his ledger without lifting his head, having watched this exact spectacle for almost a decade.
The apartment was twenty minutes away, and a world apart from the council chamber.
Located near the top of one of the towers that ringed the plateau, its floor-to-ceiling windows offered a clear view of the arena below, the sprawling facility rendered into a grid of white and gold lights against the dark. A sleek space, modern and understated—the standard home base for the version of Lance that wore the cape. What made it real, on the nights it was one, had just come through the door with two bags of takeout, complaining that the counter guy had lost their ticket twice.
They ate around the coffee table, sitting on the rug, straight out of the boxes.
No one had bothered to fetch plates. Silver took his bowl of tonkotsu ramen the moment the bags were unpacked, pulling it into his lap with the territorial focus of someone who had gone without enough food early on to take none for granted. The rest of the spread sat in the center: gyoza, pan-fried noodles, and a paper tray of karaage gone translucent at the edges, the total antithesis of everything Lance put in his own body when left to his own devices.
He studied the parade of deep-fried food with the quiet gravity of a man evaluating a questionable tactical maneuver.
"You wanted the grilled place." Clair didn't glance up, working a gyoza out of the container with a set of disposable chopsticks. "The one across the plaza that serves steamed fish and seasonal greens and closes early."
"There is little in that tray beyond salt and fat," Lance observed mildly.
"Nobody requested a nutritional breakdown. You've been outvoted, cousin. Surrender to the sodium and eat your food."
He had indeed lost the dinner vote with a finality that would have stunned the League funding board.
Silver delivered his assessment around a mouthful of noodles. “He does this every single time. Looks at a table full of deep-fried carbs the same way he checks his five in the morning run log.”
"He was far worse in training." Clair aimed a chopstick at the man without mercy. "He used to weigh his rice portions on a small scale so the portions were consistent."
"That was one summer."
"That was four full years, cousin, and you know it."
Lance didn't bother defending fourteen-year-old versions of himself, because it was true, and reached for the crispy bites instead.
Clair was casually resting an elbow on his knee to reach the soy sauce, and Silver had wedged himself into the small gap between Lance's shoulder and the side of the sofa. He moved his arm to give the kid more room and went on eating.
Eventually, a single piece of karaage remained in a corner of the tray. Three pairs of chopsticks arrived at the same instant, locking together in a motionless standstill over the last piece of food.
Silver claimed it, unburdened by polite hesitation, while meeting Lance's gaze directly.
"You could have left me that one," he noted dryly.
"You have reservations about fried food anyway," the boy replied, a knowing smile breaking through his usual straight face as he popped it into his mouth.
Clair slumped back against the sofa with her eyes half shut, and Silver had long given up pretending he wasn't leaning on him.
Lance stirred, some old instinct already reaching for the nearest empty box.
"Don't." Silver didn't lift his head from the man's shoulder. "Whatever you're about to start tidying, it can wait until morning."
"I wasn't going to clean anything."
"You were totally going to." The boy's voice was thick with exhaustion, but dead sure of itself. Clair made a tired noise of agreement and leaned a little heavier into his arm.
"If we miss the seven o'clock briefing tomorrow," she muttered, flicking her ponytail back over the top of the cushion, "I'm telling the board you lost the agenda notes."
"It's still his fault," Silver added, tracking a stray grain of rice across the table with the tip of his chopstick. "He shouldn't have let us pick the restaurant."
"I was outvoted," Lance pointed out, looking out over the grid of arena lights. "Two to one."
"You're Champion," Clair noted with lazy authority, "you're supposed to overrule us." Silver let out a short, dry huff of laughter, shifting his weight just enough to get comfortable.
"Not tonight." Lance let his head tip back against the sofa. "Tell the committee whatever you like."
"Oh, I always do." She burrowed in warmer against him. "It's half of what those meetings are for."