Skyward

Chapter #1 – Falling Meteor

~ Disclaimers: I do NOT own Pokemon or anything associated with it.

Brendan never had a chance to get out of the way in time.

He only had a few seconds notice when a rumbling crash like distant thunder above made him tilt his head skywards to catch sight of what appeared to be a small, azure boulder tumbling down the side of the mountain on a trajectory headed straight towards him.

The boulder dropped over a cliff ledge overlooking the road and rolled down the face, spinning right into the back of Brendan's legs and bowling him over.

Unhampered even in the slightest, the boulder continued on its wild and uncontrollable course until it bounced and flung into the burly trunk of a nearby tree, and was finally brought to a stop.

"Owwwww…" Brendan whined, scowling up into the sky as he lay supine in the middle of the rocky path. "Of course I'd be hit by the single rock that happened to roll down the mountain at the exact moment I was passing by and the exact place where I was standing out of the entire mountainside."

After a minute or two, when he had finished grumbling, Brendan painfully got up again, his legs feeling as good as splintered matchsticks.

He hobbled slowly over to where the boulder had crashed and was shocked to see it wriggling at the foot of the tree. What Brendan had taken to be a blue boulder unwound from the ball it had curled into to exonerate itself as a tiny, round-snouted creature.

Brendan pulled out his Pokédexto scan the new discovery.

"Bagon, the Rock Head Pokémon. To realize its dreams to one day soar in the sky. It will hurl itself off cliffs and as a result, its head has grown tough and as hard as tempered steel."

"Huh…so it's a Bagon," Brendan said, returning the Pokédex to his pocket. "I bet the reason that you rolled down half the mountain and into me was that you jumped off from somewhere pretty high up trying to fly."

The Bagon chittered agitatedly to itself with its eyes closed.

"Hey…are you okay?" Brendan asked, gently. Drawing even nearer to it, his eyes widened as he saw that the Bagon was cradling its left arm at an awkward angle. "Oh no, you're injured…"

Brendan surveyed the Pokémon with attentive concern for a moment while it whimpered quietly. Then he stood up to gauge the circumstances.

It was coming upon dusk and he was several hours away from the nearest town with a Pokémon Centre. Once night truly fell, the duvet of darkness would render him much more vulnerable to wild Pokémon attacks.

"I guess we'll just set up camp for the night and bring you with us for now," Brendan surmised. He leaned down to carefully lift Bagon off the ground and carry it but failed. It may have only looked like a boulder, but it sure weighed like one.

"Halo of Arceus, just how heavy are you?!" Brendan hissed through his teeth as he persisted, succeeding only in budging the creature a few inches.

At his words, Bagon broke out the waterworks and began to bawl its eyes out.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" Brendan hastily excused himself. "I didn't mean it like that!"

In the end, he simply gave up and called out his Grovyle instead, who lifted Bagon up easily without any trouble at all.

They began searching for a shelter for the night and after about half an hour, Brendan found them a modest but cosy cave tucked away into the side of the mountain that was suitable.

Brendan set about collecting usable pieces of firewood littered around the cave mouth. Once he had a good strong fire crackling inside their new home, he released his Kirlia from its Poké Ballas well and fed his Pokémon.

While they ate, he improvised a splint for Bagon, using a straight tree branch he had picked up while hunting for firewood and binding it securely to Bagon's arm with a Silk Scarf from his own backpack that had been gifted to him by a kind lady in Dewford Town.

While he worked, Brendan caught Bagon eyeing his green and white unusual knit cap curiously.

"What, the hat? I never take it off, even when I'm indoors. I've gotten used to wearing it all the time. Bad habit, I guess."

After he was done and the splint had been applied, Bagon ran around in dizzying circles like a windup toy, jubilantly flapping its strapped up arm in tandem with its good one. After several laps, it turned to make a break for the cave entrance and, waddling as fast as its tiny legs could carry it, made a dashing leap right off the edge outside.

Brendan's jaw dropped in disbelief.

"Oh, you are kidding me."

A few moments later, Bagon was sitting back beside the fire, now with both its arms in splints and looking thoroughly crestfallen and slightly sheepish.

"Un-believable," Brendan huffed, stared down at the thing with his arms folded.

Bagon's lips trembled as if it were about to burst into tears again.

"Well, since it doesn't look like you're going anywhere soon, you might as well stay with us a bit longer," Brendan sighed, reaching for his Grovyle's food dish and jerking it away from the quietly munching Pokémon.

"Here…you're probably hungry," Brendan said, kneeling down to place the dish in front of Bagon whose miserable face transformed at once into one of delight.

Behind Brendan's back, his Grovyle sulked.

Unable to pull the bowl any closer to itself with both its arms immobilized, Bagon simply smashed its head down into the tray sending pellets flying everywhere as it scoffed greedily while Brendan watched in amusement.

When it came for Brendan to put out the fire for the night all of his Pokémon were already fast asleep by then, and Bagon had gone outside.

Brendan went outside to check on it and found the big-headed Pokémon sitting on the edge of the cliff.

"You're not thinking about jumping off again, are you?" Brendan asked incredulously but Bagon shook its head adamantly.

"What are you doing out here all by yourself, then?"

Bagon jabbed a stubby arm upward. Following the movement, Brendan craned his neck to see the stars overbrimming the night sky in a vivid display like grains of sand along some celestial shoreline, glimmering as they tread the endless expanse of deep velvet blue above them.

"The stars?" Brendan then remembered what it had said on Bagon's entry on the Pokedex. "Oh, the sky! That's right, you wanna fly some day, don't you?"

Bagon nodded happily.

"Bit hard to do without wings," Brendan observed dryly. "But I guess that doesn't stop you from trying." Together, the two gazed into the bright night, admiring it in companionable silence.

After a long while, Brendan felt a light weight against his side and glanced down to see that Bagon had drifted off to sleep sitting next to him. Unable to carry it, he cumbersomely dragged the snoring creature along the ground back into the cave and carefully covered it with a spare blanket from his backpack before returning outside to enjoy the view for a little while longer.

He pulled out his Pokedex and flipped it open, navigating to Bagon's file.

"Bagon, the Rock Head Pokémon. To realize its dreams to one day soar in the sky. It will hurl itself off cliffs and as a result, its head has grown tough and as hard as tempered steel. It's final, evolved form is the Dragon Pokémon, Salamence."

Brendan sat there for a long time with an unfathomable expression, gazing at the last line contemplatively.

The next morning, as soon as day broke, Brendan and his Pokémon descended from Meteor Falls to travel to Rustboro City. There, the resident nurse removed Bagon's splints and examined it arms for fractures or breaks.

"Just a few bumps and bruises, nothing major!" the nurse cheerfully assured a vastly relieved Brendan when she eventually returned to the waiting lobby wheeling Bagon out in a steel trolley. "You don't need to worry – Bagons are remarkably tough and cliff-jumping is a pretty common recreational behaviour for their species so they're quite used to it, believe it or not!"

"Thank you! I'm sorry for the trouble," Brendan said gratefully.

"Not at all! He's a cutie, isn't he?" she added dotingly, as Bagon squabbled furiously while helplessly rolling back and forth on his back in the trolley like an upturned beetle, his short tail thumping frantically as it tried to right itself.

"Yeah," Brendan couldn't help but let slip a goofy grin. "He is."

After Bagon was discharged from the Pokémon Centre, Brendan decided that he might as well restock on supplies while he was in the city.

Bagon followed the teen around as he made his rounds, waddling after him wherever he went. Brendan stopped at the Poké Mart to restock on Super Potions, visited the Pokemon Training School where he chatted with a few students and received a Quick Claw from the teacher to whom he thanked profusely while bowing low, ran into Mr. Stone who insisted on dragging him over to the Devon Corporation headquarters for a visit to show him the company's latest experiments on Pokémon fossils, which were deemed to be "promising".

By the time that he was finally done, the sun was waning amidst a fiery orange sky that was streaked with comets of pink clouds as bright and fleecy as cotton candy. Ornate iron-wrought street lamps began flickering awake to embrace the early evening.

He glanced down at his new companion.

"What say we go for some ice cream?"

Brendan purchased two of what the vendor had named Vanillish Cones – vanilla soft serves decorated with a goofy smiley face sketched out of blue icing and edible blue sugar crystals all set in a waffle cone dyed with blue food colouring. Brendan stared at his cone, trying to process how ludicrous of an idea an ice cream Pokémon was.

Afterwards, they wandered down to the large pond in Route 104 and found an old and shoddy wooden bench fronting the water to settle down onto.

As Bagon plopped himself down, the entire bench splintered into two with a loud crack. The small Rock Head Pokémon was dumped onto the ground and promptly burst into a storm of noisy tears.

"Sheesh, I didn't know you were that sensitive about your weight," Brendan said.

They moved to the next bench over which thankfully retained its integrity, albeit with a ponderous groan of wood.

Brendan handed Bagon his unfinished cone as the Pokémon had upset its own after it had toppled over.

As Brendan watched Bagon eat, he recalled what he had read on the Pokédexthe night before.

"Bagon, listen," Brendan said, quietly. His eyes were downcast and he was absently fidgeting with his hands.

"Look…I – I can't keep you any longer."

Bagon gazed up at him uncomprehendingly with its head cocked.

"I…I just can't." Brendan's voice cracked, as his coherence collapsing into a rambling heap. "It's…when I was a kid…you don't get it…don't understand why…"

"Why I wear this stupid hat!" he burst out, and without warning, he tore off the offending headpiece in anger to reveal three parallel scars, stark white and unsightly, inflicted on the right side of his skull, viciously tearing through a scalp of otherwise kempt dark flat hair.

"When I went cave exploring with my dad when I was eight, I got separated from him and got so scared. And then…and then I ran into a Salamence – and it did this to me, and ever since then…"

He trailed off, unable to bring himself to articulate the trauma that had followed – the frequent nightmares that had extinguished any hope for peaceful sleep or the fact that he couldn't so much as look at a photo of Salamence in an encyclopedia without being seized by an all–consuming terror that left him unbalanced and short for breath.

"Every time I see these scars in the mirror or in my reflection I get reminded of how ugly and repulsive they make me look," Brendan said in self despisal. He replaced the hat on his head, carefully adjusting so that it was sure to cover up the ghost of his childhood wound. "That's why I wear this all the time now. I got sick of people staring and pointing at me."

His eyelashes bristling with hot tears, Brendan wiped them away with his forearm and gazed down at Bagon, who was bouncing up and down, completely oblivious to the trainer's anecdote.

"I – I don't even know if you can understand what I'm saying," Brendan gave a shaky laugh that was half a sob of amused hopelessness. "I mean, I know that you Bagons are pretty thick-headed and because of that, you're not as good as other Pokémon with picking up on complex human language…"

Bagon continued to bounce, chattering joyfully as it enjoyed its ice cream.

"If I keep you, I know that you'll become strong. So strong. And that one day, you'll become a Salamence. And when that happens, I just…I just can't. I won't be strong enough to be the trainer you need, anymore. I'm just too scared and too weak to do it – I'm sorry. You deserve someone stronger and braver than me. You deserve a normal, fully functioning trainer who can form a healthy relationship with you. I can't give you that. I'm sorry."

Bagon had probably not understood a word of everything he had just said.

"Bye, Bagon."

After a few moments, Bagon glanced around to see that Brendan was no longer sitting with him anymore and was gone. Believing that the trainer had simply gone to get more ice cream for them, he wiggled to settle himself comfortably into the bench with his stumpy legs outstretched over the edge, ecstatic at the idea of more Vanillish Cones to come.