A/N: A day or two after Pokemon GO came out, I wrote this fic and posted it to tumblr. Now I'm posting it here.
I look both ways before creeping down the path. You'd expect that the alleys back here would be dark, would be dingy, would be full of the kinds of smells you don't ask questions about. But those pokemon professors, they like that thin veneer of respectability. From the outside, Willow's lab looks like any other pokemon research facility. It's nice and neat, in tip-top shape, and passerby could see mounds of books and cutting edge equipment stacked up against the walls. Or they could if there were any passerby.
No one just passed by old Professor Willow's place.
I ignore the whispers that trail me as I walk inside. They know me here just as well as they know any of Willow's suppliers. I think that's why Nurse Joy won't meet my eyes in the local Pokemon Center. Why she smiles tightly, but doesn't tack on that usual saccharine "I hope we see you again!" No one ever wants to see me again. No one but Professor Willow.
He looks up as I enter, fingers still dancing across the screen of some electronic ledger. I don't ask what findings he's writing down. That's why he likes me.
"Hey, professor," I say, pulling the bags from my back. "Did you miss me?"
His eyes crinkle at the edges, but the smile doesn't reach his eyes. "Every time. What've you got for me?"
I busy myself with the ties that bind the waterproof sacks. I may not busy myself with much else, but a girl knows to take care of her equipment. The world of tall grass will swallow you whole if you're not prepared. Eventually, the bags come open beneath my hand and I dump the contents of them out on his desk. Balls. Dozens of them. "Twenty-five rattatas, maybe a dozen pidgeys. There was a swarm of doduos out on Route 115, so there's a shitton of those."
He tsks at the way the balls scatter across his desk, mussing his papers and coming perilously close to dropping to the floor. I know where my bread's buttered, but I can't help but mess with the guy sometimes. It's the least he deserves, and we both know it.
But he just pushes his ledger to the side and gives me a level look. "And you really want to transfer them? You know you can't take them back after they've been transferred," he says, rote, and his lips press together in a sardonic smile. We both know what my answer will be.
"Yeah," I said. I remember when I'd just started, when I was fresh out of some podunk little town and that word still tasted like ash in my mouth. Now it didn't taste like much of anything. Now it was a living.
He reaches for the nearest pokeball, but I reach out and stay his hand. "And your side of the deal? You're good for it, right?"
His lips twist, contemptuous, and he nods to the bins on the far side of the room. "You know where the candy is," he said. And if we both knew what Willow was about, we both knew what I'd done to learn that location. None of us had clean hands, not in this part of town.
"You know," I say conversationally as I count out my earnings, "It'd be a hell of a lot more useful if you'd start paying in stardust or something."
He hmms out some kind of noncommittal answer as he looks over his new charges. We've had this discussion before, and we'd have it again. He was never gonna change his pay, and I was the fool who'd always take it.
Bags emptied, pockets filled, I turn to go. But something's different today. Something stops me. Maybe it was the trusting look that last rattata had given me as I'd coaxed it into its ball. Maybe it was the weight of pokeballs in my pack, heavier every day. But the question that had been hovering on the tip of my tongue and hidden in the back of my mind since day one finally spilled from my my mouth. "Hey, professor? What do you do with them?"
He freezes for a second, and his hands still where they lay on the smooth surface of a pokeball. He doesn't answer me.
I should let it go. I should stay stupid and quiet like I have for years. But the words are out now, and I can't just let them hang there. "What do you do with all those pokemon?"
"I don't pay you to ask questions," he tells me, voice gone dark and low. Then he looks at me, and I don't like the gleam in his eyes. "Everyone likes poke puffs, but no one wants to know how they're made."
It's a clear dismissal, but I stand there as if my legs have gone to lead.
He clears his throat, goes back to his work. "Not getting a conscience on me, are you? You're my best supplier." He pauses, doesn't look at me even as his lips split in an unkind grin. "I never would have been able to do this without you."
I nod, and when I speak, my voice hardly sounds like my own. "I know."
He looks up at me then, and he smiles. It's the smile he'd used on me way back when, when he introduced himself as a curious Pokemon researcher who only wanted to make the world a better place. It's the smile he'd worn the first time he'd eased the scratched, well-loved pokeball from my hands and replaced it with a striped candy. He doesn't often bother to smile like that anymore. He already has me.
"Take a few Razz Berries on the way out," he says to me, still with that casual, friendly smile. "Recent research shows that they keep pokemon docile and friendly. They'll go along with anything if you feed them."
I pack them into my bag with shaking hands, and a particularly ripe one bursts and leaks through the fabric as I walk out. I feel it run red and sweet like blood down my fingers.