A/N: Here goes nothing. Please be kind, this is the first thing I've posted, but feel free to tell me everything that's wrong about it.

Disclaimer: I do not own Pokémon in any way.

sound asleep

he was always told it was a waste of time to dream.

There's only so much darkness he can take before he craves light; if Cheren has learned anything, and he has, it's that you can't just focus on one side of any situation.

So, he takes a brief respite and wanders out of Victory Road. The same rocks and the same trainers get tiresome after a while, and Cheren doesn't really have anything else to train for. The thought of challenging White for the championship has crossed his mind, but White would have to be in the region for that to work.

Cheren has crossed Unova forwards and back, battled to heights he used to dream of and seen legends come to life. He helped take down an organization, and if that doesn't satisfy him, he doesn't know what will.

Indeed. Cheren's journey is long since over, but no matter what he does, what he tries, he never feels quite finished.

Bianca makes the call and forces Cheren to sit for it. "White," she greets happily, waving into the screen.

White blinks, bright blue flickering behind her eyelids, before grinning widely. "Hey, you guys," she replies. "How's the old fort doing?"

"It's fine," Cheren says. A mess isn't apt enough a term to describe post-Plasma Unova. In shambles, perhaps, or maybe shaken to the core. "They finished repairs on the League last week."

Beside him, Bianca nods. "Burgh and Iris have a bunch of people in Castelia rooting around for old bases. Iris says she's found a bunch, and says that Burgh is useless at it."

"He should stick to art," White laughs.

It's almost, almost, like old times when they talk like this. Bar the screen between them, the region between them, and Cheren could pretend the three of them were back in school and chatting about nothing.

He won't, though, because he's been thinking about what Alder said and thinking about the past brings up all his old dreams, and he prefers not to do deep, painful thinking around the girls.

"What are you doing, anyway?" he asks, breaking into Bianca and White's conversation. "Where are you?"

White whips her head around, utterly nonplussed at his interruption. "Route 18, I think," she says. "I'm looking for the Sages."

Bianca starts. "Wait, White, why are you looking for them? I thought the national police were handling that."

Then White makes the face Cheren knows intimately; it's the well-yes-but-I-can't-leave-certain-things-alone-look. Cheren hates that look, mostly because it usually meant he has to get involved in whatever mess White has gotten herself into.

"White," Bianca groans and he's inclined to join her. "Come on, you don't need –"

"I do," she cuts Bianca off, "because the police don't know what to ask, and I need answers."

Cheren sighs and rubs at the ridge of his nose, where his glasses rest. "You're not going to find him," he grits out. "He's smart enough to go so far that you won't find him."

Somehow the pronoun on its own has become taboo around them, and the briefest flash of betrayal crosses White's face before the more familiar fire replaces it. "You can pick at anything you want, Cheren," she snaps. "But on this, you had better leave me alone."

"It's useless," he insists.

She flushes a deep, angry red. "No, it's not."

He fists his hands in the fabric of his pants and sets his jaw. "Just come home, White. Your mother misses you, we miss you, and frankly, this is a pointless venture."

White watches him for one long moment. Bianca inhales sharply.

"Look, if either of you come across one of the Sages, let the police know." Then White hangs up, and Cheren and Bianca sit there for a while in silence.

She doesn't say anything, but the light creasing on Bianca's forehead are enough to send him home with an uncomfortable tickle in the back of his throat.

He was always told it was a waste of time to dream. Well, White said it once, and Cheren took it a little too deeply to heart.

So he didn't dream, but he held onto empty ideals. Sometimes, when White or Bianca has thoroughly chewed him out, he gets where N was coming from, but most of the time he chooses nursing his deep dislike for the boy instead.

"I know a place you could go," Bianca tells him, knee-deep in the grass of Route 1. "To think, I mean. I like to go there."

Cheren looks up from the clipboard Professor Juniper has given them. "And where is this?"

"The Dreamyard," she replies. "You know, near Striaton City? Did you ever go there?"

"No."

Bianca chuckles and reaches down to pluck a dried berry husk from the ground. She studies it intently. "Well, you should see it. It's…something else. Also, I found another cheri berry."

He marks that down. Careful of patrat hollows, he weaves through the grass towards her. "What do you mean by something else?"

"Something else," she repeats stubbornly. "Really, I think you should go there sometime, Cheren. It might help clear all those silly worries you've got."

"I'm not worried about anything," Cheren says.

Bianca laughs at him. "Oh, yes," she snorts between laughs, "and I'm a lillipup."

He notes a patrat hollows at his feet. She rolls her eyes. "White's a big girl, she'll be fine. Unova's getting better, and we're doing some good work here and there."

Cheren nods along, peering at the teeth marks in the cheri berry.

"I know you think everything you did was for nothing, you know, since you didn't get the championship," she says quietly. "But it wasn't. Cheren, you did a lot of good, you know?"

That might be true, and this is one of those moments that Cheren sympathizes with N, but he didn't do what he set out to do. And that, in his eyes, leaves him with nothing but an empty dream.

His unfezant drops down on the outskirts of Striaton City. Cheren eyes the gray top of the ruined factory, what he can see over the treetops, and is wary of the curlicues of pink smoke rising from it.

With a nod to his pokémon, Cheren walks into the Dreamyard with his hands in his pockets. The abandoned factory rises in skeletal angles and arches, clouded in that pink smoke.

It's a little unreal, but then people call it the Dreamyard for a reason. Cheren stifles a yawn, pushing away his light-headedness.

He wanders in, feet tripping over each other aimlessly. The gas irritates his eyes.

"Excuse me." A hand comes to rest on Cheren's shoulder. Cheren jumps about three feet and calls his serperior out with a strangled screech.

His pokémon uncoils itself, hissing angrily at the old man holding Cheren by the shoulder. Cheren wrenches the hand off and adjusts his glasses; the gas makes it even more difficult for him to see, and the prickling in the backs of his eyes isn't all that helpful.

"I apologize," the man says. "I did not mean to startle you. I…I recognized you. I apologize."

Cheren rubs at his burning eyes. "I can't say the same."

The man adjusts his long robes. "Gorm, if you recall," he says, "one of Team Plasma's Seven Sages. Many are looking for me, and you are the one to find me, excellent work."

At the mention of Plasma, Serperior flicks her tongue and slithers around Gorm. "I wasn't looking," Cheren says. "But I will call the police."

Gorm sighs. "Do as you will. The Dreamyard has proved a good hiding place though, I will not deny that." He fixes his faded eyes on Cheren. "Were you surprised at my presence?"

"Yes," he grits out. He didn't think anyone would be here. "No one was outside."

"The smoke indicates a great number of musharna in the area," the Sage explains. "That is enough to repel most. You have not been here before."

Cheren shakes his head.

"I remember you. You were allies with Trainer White, yes?"

"Friends," Cheren replies shortly. "We're friends."

He opens his eyes. Gorm stands at a distance, arms hidden within his robes. "There were three," he muses. "Together you put an end to Lord N's dream. To destroy a dream takes a great deal of power."

"It wasn't a very good dream," Cheren says. "If it were, we wouldn't have been able to stop it. Besides, I don't think N believed in it as much as he thought he did."

Gorm's brow furrows, not affronted but perhaps indignantly. "Cheren. You were the one who sought strength, yes? Perhaps your part in Lord N's demise is an indication of your own power."

It was an indication of White's power, of Reshiram's. Cheren and Bianca called the gym leaders, and he helped Alder. He didn't dismantle any dreams but his own.

Cheren thumbs at his x-transceiver, and is momentarily confounded that is only speed dials are out of the region or all the way in Nuvema Town.

"You're free to call the police," Gorm says. "I have no regrets."

Nodding tightly, Cheren pulls his x-transceiver out of his pocket and as he dials, Gorm stares up at the ruined roof of the factory. "Musharna show the dreams we wish to see, not what we will truly do. That is why the local people avoid the Dreamyard." He sighs. "To seize a dream on your own is a true realization."

"I heard you caught Gorm," White says carefully. Her background shakes as she adjusts her video screen. "Nice job, and all that."

Cheren nods. "Thanks, White."

She smiles at him, the same one he's stared at for years. He leans forward on his knees. "How's your search going?"

"I got Rood, but he practically walked into it. It was kind of boring," she confesses.

"Same," Cheren says.

White laughs. "No one was ever really a match for us, huh?"

He thinks about agreeing, mostly you, White, but he remembers that White didn't know the difference between bug and grass types until he lent her the book, and that she was utterly confounded by TMs until he showed her how they worked.

Bianca figured out the proper way to feed a pidove without hurting it, but she had to explain it to the two of them twice before they understood that yanking on the pokémon's wings was a bad thing.

"Not really, no," Cheren says. "Is there any progress on your…other search?"

White wilts and her eyes darken sadly. "No. I swear Cheren, I've looked everywhere –"

"To destroy a dream takes a great deal of power," he remembers. "And well, you just about decimated N's."

This look is more reminiscent of Bianca, the pinched cheek apology and lowered eyes. "And yours too, huh."

Cheren shrugs. He's been thinking about what Alder said, and he's combined it with what Gorm told him. "I think I was after the wrong thing? I don't know, White. I just – Victory Road isn't exactly where I want to live my life. Does that make sense?"

White nods. He's stupid to think she wouldn't get it; there's nothing that can tie White down, not her mother, not Cheren or Bianca. She understands the stir crazy feeling that Cheren's always had because she had, has, it too.

"I heard the League's looking to expand the west side of the region," she says tentatively. "You know Aspertia Village? Well, the League's thinking of making it a city and instating a Gym."

Cheren raises an eyebrow. "You want me be gym leader there."

White smirks, shaking her head. "It's a suggestion, Cheren," she says with no small amount of affection. "But who knows, you may like it. Better than skulking around Victory Road all day, right?"

"Yes," he says, turning the idea over in his head, "yes, I just might."

White grins at him, blindingly bright and always, always, always, believing in him. She's faltered in some things, but her faith in Bianca and Cheren has never lessened. "It could be, I don't know, a new goal. But hey! Did you hear? Professor Juniper's thinking of asking Bianca to become an assistant!"

Cheren follows White's thread of conversation, noting to ask Bianca about all this next time he sees her, but a small idea reverberates through his head. To seize a dream on your own is a true realization.

So, yes, perhaps he does have a new dream.