Yeah, uh... don't ask where this fic came from, because I don't even know. Lol. At any rate, I seriously hate how I can't write anything short anymore. ("Short" for me now is around 3500 words, haha.)
I must say, though, this particular ship is growing on me more than I thought it would. If only because Ray is so angry, and Kyurem's just... well, you'll see. ;)
Enjoy!
Disclaimer- I do not own Pokemon.
For Rayquaza's own comfort, he tended to skirt around this particular part of Unova at this time of year. On the extremely scarce days when he left Hoenn behind, crossed the sea, and headed to the more urban region, he veered sharply away from the area Kyurem calls her home, because even without her breath to hang icicles upon the air so much damnable cold coated every surge of the wind.
Yet tonight, something had told him to head to the northeast. To his great annoyance, and shame when he realized despite his better efforts to ignore the urge his body was carrying him here anyway.
Golden eyes turned to slits against the air nipping at them with a bite that never cursed Hoenn, and Rayquaza snarled in irritation. The sound only escaped the tight confines of his self-restraint because he knew the cold wind would pick it up and twist and warp it until the very few citizens in Lacunosa Town below thought it only an echo of the Pokemon they so fear.
Thinking about the people who actually believed all the old legends about Kyurem using smaller Pokemon and humans for her meals proved an immense mistake: it only pissed Rayquaza off more. Any Pokemon or human that had actually been around her for about four seconds would realize the complete opposite was true of the ice dragon. Hell, he thought scornfully, last time there was a meeting she came to the hall late, saying she was trying to learn a new recipe and lost track of time or some crap.
He shook his head, blinking hard against the small flurries now beginning to assail his vision and distort his view of the thinning buildings. This was a mistake, he told himself firmly; almost as if to emphasize his reaffirmation of the obvious, his lithe form convulsed in a shiver whose majority he repressed. Not only did winter throttle Unova and strip every tree beneath him, but he had never been very fond of cold anyway. Maybe due to icy moves being one of his few vices; he didn't know.
And then he pulled up short, his mind finally chasing down his irritable thoughts and plastering confusion over them. Flurries? Here?
Because apparently, no matter how close the residents of this region, Pokemon and human alike, got to freezing over completely, only frost ever encased the grass here, and even then rather sparingly. Kyurem had always held off on exhibiting the true extent of her power, even though Rayquaza, personally, thought she had every right to unleash the strongest blizzard inside her body on every wretched being nearby.
So he found himself blinking like a dumbstruck idiot in midair, because it was snowing.
His gaze scanned the area below almost absently, controlled by his incredulity toward the now-stronger snow beginning to fall in droves. One of them landed on his cheek just beneath his eye, effectively snapping out of his trance; muffling an irritable growl, he wiped it away with one clawed hand and resumed his flight.
Almost against his will, he scanned about for the Great Chasm's main inhabitant. If only because finding her would mean finding shelter from this sudden, accursed blizzard. I could ask her what's going on, too. Why she's making it snow today, of all days.
Too late, though, it hit him that the snow-laden gale impeded his search, rendering him unable to see even the telltale yellow glow that signified her eyes. If the sun had glimmered high overhead, it might have glanced off her translucent body, and while it would have blinded him, this freak blizzard served almost the exact same purpose anyway.
"Dammit, Kyurem, where are you?" he growled out in a last-ditch effort. Which of course proved to be a mistake when he had to spit out some snowflakes that had rushed into his mouth while it was open.
Inwardly, he reflected on the infuriating irony of this whole stupid situation: that he, the self-proclaimed ruler of the skies, could not navigate his way through one storm. It never snows in Hoenn, he snarled at the voice of skepticism, why the hell would I know how to fly through a snowstorm?
He cut his mental voice off abruptly, though, when the snows cleared for a fraction of a second, drawing his eyes to the anomaly. Through the gap, a dark cavern yawned out at him, before the howling wind seemed to realize he was actually diving down toward it and blocked out everything again.
Rayquaza squinted hard against the icy droplets' onslaught against his eyes and skin – he would probably be sick for a while after this, he reflected with a grimace – soaking into him and rendering him little more than a shivering wreck and making it a miracle that he even got anywhere at all –
The next thing he knew, the next thing he detected, was a distinctive dripping noise. He dared open his eyes all the way, blinking snow that began to melt down at their loss of sustenance off his lashes, and spotted the sound's source: a single icy stalactite, whose lifeblood oozed onto the frozen lake surrounding the spit of land.
His head bumped against the ceiling as he tried to straighten, and so he forced himself to coil slightly inward, more than a little annoyed at how small Kyurem's cave was. Then again, she barely stood at nine feet, and due to her completely unfounded reputation it wasn't as though she had very many visitors; it only made sense that this cavern would accommodate her height alone.
Outside, the blizzard raged on, beast-like roaring created by its wind minions having died down to a dull shrieking. Rayquaza nodded smugly toward it, then realized he was expressing emotion toward an inanimate object and promptly stopped.
The dim light offered by multiple, flickering torches lining the walls – he had to wonder where she got the flames for those torches, whether she had had to drag Moltres here or not – illuminated a single, distinctively draconic shape at the edge. Something flowed off that shape, something long and… pink.
Blinking, Rayquaza floated closer, wondering what wild Pokemon would have taken refuge in here with Kyurem's reputation hanging over her head wherever she went – and pulled up sharply, an unintentional grunt of surprise escaping him.
Kyurem turned at the sound, claws from both hands worrying at the scarf wrapped around her neck. The golden eyes that he had sought out earlier widened as they took him in. He couldn't blame her; his hatred for freezing weather, combined with his residence in Hoenn, put him rather far down at the already-small list of legendaries that would ever come to visit her.
"Rayquaza," she greeted, mild wariness in her tone. "What are you doing here?" His eyes followed the scarf's tails as they swung in tandem to her facing him fully. He shook off the bemusement at the pink snake wound around her neck and answered her question, however scathingly. "Hello to you too. I was just fighting my way through a blizzard. Any particular reason why it's like that outside?" As he spoke, he inclined his head rather pointedly toward her, shiver-cramped muscles screaming at the movement.
Kyurem's confusion faded into mild annoyance, conveyed in her luminescent golden eyes narrowing and her sharp claws falling from the scarf back down to her side. "Fine. Hi. And if you have to know why I kicked the snow up a little bit –" Rayquaza rolled his eyes; it was more than just a little bit and they both knew it – "it's because a trainer came by earlier."
Now that made Rayquaza blink. Apparently, he wasn't the only willing visitor today. We might need to notify the record books after this. After the blizzard was over. If the blizzard was ever over. "A trainer? Really?"
"Yes, and I was trying to get him to go away. At least it worked." Kyurem's voice trembled ever so slightly as she spoke, reminding Rayquaza that while he had grown used to taking down intruders to the Sky Pillar, both her reputation and the lack of visitors to Lacunosa Town kept her from getting accustomed to it as well. He tensed as the very, very unwelcome thought of how much she must have panicked heralded the deep, shadowy embrace of sympathy.
"So if he's gone, then why is it still going?" he pressed roughly.
Kyurem shrugged, inhaling deeply to stave off the raw fear whose fire, however dulled, still blazed inside her. "Paranoia, I guess. A-anyway, that's not the point," she added hastily. "You never did answer my question."
Rayquaza opened his mouth to dodge her question. However, the way she had one eye narrowed at him reminded him that no matter how pacifistic her nature, one of her types – ice – still gave her the ability to take him down in an instant if she so desired. He ended up sighing irritably in surrender and floating forward to coil up beside her, delicately picking up one end of her scarf and moving it aside as he did so. "I felt like flying over Unova, for some stupid reason," he muttered.
"Oh." The ice dragon's aggressive expression unwound at once, replaced by bemusement. "Okay. And why –?"
"I just told you I don't know," he barked, rounding on her.
She recoiled at once, leaning away and pushing him back by placing one hand on his forehead. "All right, all right, calm down! Sheesh." She surveyed him for a few more moments, as if wondering why he had yet to physically rather than verbally attack, then sighed. Rayquaza shivered before he could stop himself as her freezing breath briefly assaulted his frame, but it only lasted an instant, as she stood and spoke without facing him. "Do you, uh… want some cookies? I just baked them a little while ago."
Well, that was random. Rayquaza supposed she was trying to plaster a hospitable front over her obvious exasperation toward him, and opened her mouth to both refuse and tell her just as much. But then his stomach chose that moment to intervene and tell him fighting his way through the blizzard had rendered it empty and in need of sustenance.
He huffed and folded his arms. "Why the hell not," he grumbled flatly.
She brightened visibly – hell, her happiness at his acceptance lit the room more than the torches on the wall did – and lumbered off to a hidden corner of the cave. As her bulky tail vanished, he sat back on his haunches with a mildly disturbed frown, wondering why he had felt the need to oblige her. Somehow, he knew he couldn't just chalk it up to his empty stomach and leave it at that.
She rounded the corner again, presence announced by a series of clomping footsteps, and set an almost comically small plate down in front of him. He stared at the pile of frosting-covered cookies, even as Kyurem sat next to him with her own plate and babbled on about something or other. Something about how she had made these just before the human appeared in the Great Chasm, and how they were a little cold but a relief from the blizzard outside.
After a moment of eyeing the confections, he decided to take a risk and took a bite out of the topmost one. It crumbled all too easily in his mouth, and he chewed a couple of times, suddenly wanting to savor its taste.
Some amount of enjoyment must have wormed its way past its constraints and appeared on his face, for Kyurem tilted her head into his periphery and inquired, "Good?"
Glancing at her, he found anxiety contorting her face and making even her sharp, angular countenance look just a bit softer. As if she actually gave a damn about his opinion, which he couldn't fathom, considering they barely knew each other.
Then again, he reflected, perfunctorily nodding in her direction and taking in with mild scorn how she deflated with a sigh of relief, it wasn't as though he could point this out to her without his mind wheeling him nose to nose with his own lack of concern for others' thoughts of him.
Kyurem's brand of solitude was a different one entirely from his. He had forced his own introversion upon himself, had chosen this path to follow, but she had never wanted to share that feeling. Had never wanted humans and Pokemon alike to regard her with fear and horror and flee from her very name. Hell, Rayquaza would give anything sometimes for others to just leave him alone.
Yet she had never wanted that.
The notion made him stop chewing for half a second – just half a second – before he swallowed and stared out at the frozen lake. More water was dripping onto the icy surface, and he spent a few moments tracing their path from the cavern's teeth down to where they hit the ground with his eyes. Just watching water hit the lake's surface and eating cookies with a very nervous ice dragon at his side.
Wasn't the way I wanted to spend the evening, but she's not the worst company, I suppose.
Even as the admittedly-small stack of cookies on his plates dwindled, though, another emotion besides grudging acceptance nudged into his chest, one he couldn't identify. He frowned to himself, as much out of the desire to ask her for more cookies as concentrating to find the name of that emotion.
Once he did, though, it was all he could do to restrain his visceral response of reeling back. Because that emotion's name was contentment, something that very rarely, if ever, caressed his heart.
Yet it was now. With Kyurem, of all Pokemon.
Trying to give himself something else to think about besides his shame at his emotions, he stared down at the ground. The glimpse of a much brighter color, one that swept a pink streak across the frosty floor and made Rayquaza all but have to squint against how the torchlight lit its translucent surface, deepened his frown at first, until he remembered exactly what that pink object was.
Almost without realizing it, he traced the path of the scarf's tail with his eyes, up Kyurem's body and eventually past it, to her face. Which was currently turned to him and had no small amount of confusion covering it. However, to her credit, she didn't openly point out his blatant staring, much to his relief.
Instead, she tried to smile, and he fought the suddenly-mighty urge to turn his head away and hide the way blood was beating into his cheeks. You're a legendary, not a damn schoolgirl.
Of course, thinking that was the same as acknowledging his blushing – ugh, that was such a horrible word – in the first place, so he tamped it down and spoke the question on his mind. "What's with the scarf?" he asked, gesturing to the brightly colored item wrapped around her neck.
"Huh? Oh!" Rayquaza rolled his eyes at Kyurem's initial puzzlement, which quickly remedied itself in the time it took her to express that puzzlement. She lifted one hand and stroked it over the pink streak wrapped against her neck. "Some human dropped it a while back. Running away, I guess." A self-deprecating chuckle rent the air, which for some reason struck a chord of irrational annoyance.
Before Rayquaza could try and find its source, though, the ice dragon went on, "It obviously wasn't this long at first. I just found a ton of the same colored material and knitted it all together. And now here it is." She waved the piece of scarf in her hand to accentuate her finishing the explanation.
Rayquaza snorted. "Found. Yeah, sure. More like you got some other legendary to pick it up for you."
That proved the exact wrong thing to say: Kyurem bristled, actually flared up both her normal and crippled wing without wincing at the strain offered by lifting the latter, and cocked her head almost defiantly at him. "So what if I did? I wanted something to keep me a little warm out here." When he eyed her dubiously, she rolled her own eyes back at him, the movement somehow conveyed despite her lack of pupils. "Just because I'm an ice-type doesn't mean I hate being warm. I… I want it, sometimes."
The sky dragon braced his claws against the ground next to him and angled his head to stare right at her, hoping some measure of disbelief could channel itself through his amber irises into hers. Because rather than sympathy, something else, something far more familiar to him, was rising up. Slowly, surely, began to replace that contentment from earlier with all the deceptive calmness of storm clouds sweeping over the sun.
Really, therein lay the reason behind the very powerful anger growing within him and ballooning up into his throat to become words: He didn't understand her at all. Didn't understand why she would covet and hold close and try to make better something from the beings who feared her so much.
And before his self-control could take over, the ire poured forth.
"Why would you keep the stupid thing in the first place?" he demanded, fury taking over his voice and rendering it ragged. She narrowed her eyes, clenched the claws on the hand that didn't still grip the damned thing; somehow, the fact that she wanted to avoid tearing her precious heat preserver apart only served to enrage him more. "After the way those humans treat you, you don't need to be keeping the random crap they drop on the ground. If anything, you should have let a bunch of wild Pokemon eat it. And hey, if they get sick from eating wool? Not your problem! They hate you, too, remember?"
"As if I need reminding!" Kyurem spat, hand trembling as she rested it, rather ironically, on the ground inches from his. The confirmation of her aversion toward verbal conflict did not deter him in the slightest. She hesitated, still glowering at him, her talons working over the ground as though her mentally grasping for the right words to say carried over to reality. Then she spoke, so quietly he could barely hear her and hated that he instinctively strained to do so. "I kept it because –"
"Because what?" he snapped. His body arched up threateningly, stretching so his long body could tower over her and he was effectively glaring down his nose at her. Any hope of grazing her hand with his – not that said hope had even existed in the first place – vanished with his lifting his arm off the ground. "Why don't you hate them, after everything they've done to you?"
And there it was, tossed out in the open: the question that had plagued him since he had first flown over the Great Chasm and seethed over her unjust reputation. The thought that drove into the crux of the matter and promised so many answers that he suddenly didn't know what he would do if he obtained them all.
What was even more surprising was Kyurem stiffening briefly, amber eyes appraising him with shock, before she calmed. His own, volatile temper had taken a couple of baby steps closer to joining that relaxation, but flared up again when she answered him with another question. Just like he had to her, earlier. The role reversal made him want to scream.
But then words tumbled out of her with all the gracefulness of a small waterfall, so starkly quiet in comparison to his acidic query it was almost painful.
"Why would anybody hate something they're fascinated with?"
A beat. One blink, two blinks, three. And then he lowered himself so he could properly meet her gaze, whose furious blazing had died down – the stupid irony of an ice legendary, particularly this ice legendary, nursing a fire inside was not lost on him – into much gentler golden embers. He searched her face for any sort of lingering anger, but weirdly, any vestige of their almost-maybe-argument had vanished, swallowed up by a willingness to make him understand as powerful as the blizzard still raging outside.
Remembering the very thing that had driven him here in the first place, Rayquaza risked a glance over his shoulder at the cavern entrance. Somewhere between Kyurem's appearance and now, the howling of the wind had died down; a sliver of pale starlight lancing across the floor greeted his eyes.
Staring at the cave entrance, marveling at how easily the blizzard had vanished and left no evidence in its wake, Rayquaza realized Kyurem's explanation rang true without even having to see the truth on her face.
At the very least, he reflected with half-hearted annoyance, it explained why he felt he could never hate her. Her, and her refusal to return the way humans and Pokemon alike shunned her. Her, and her reluctant acceptance of the loneliness he so embraced. Her, and the stupid scarf that had somehow trapped itself between his claws.
Kyurem's eyes darted down to how he carefully ran his claw over the material, which was deceptively soft in his grip, being careful not to snag the tip on wool. If she had had to knit all this together, she had done an exceptional job.
He didn't even realize he had voiced this compliment aloud until she turned her head away with a mumbled thanks. Somehow, that crimson in his cheeks had found a way to cross the space between them, scant though it was, and leak into her own, though due to her paler form it was much more visible.
Rayquaza didn't know whether to smirk or balk at the fact that he had caused it.
"Kyurem," he said, and she glanced back, impressive fangs worrying over her bottom lip. He could almost see her mentally preparing herself to elaborate on her explanation, however indirectly she had given it, but just as she was opening her mouth to speak it hit him that it did not matter much to him why.
"Do you have more cookies?" he chose to say instead.
Her relief was contagious, and he watched her nod with just the tiniest quiver wracking his claws as he dropped them back to his side. She gathered up his plate, leaving him to stare at her suspiciously-untouched plate of baked goods until she returned with said plate's mirror image.
They ate together in silence for a moment, Kyurem apparently having overcome her anxiety enough to mimic his movements. For what felt like the umpteenth time that night, an unfamiliar feeling seeped into Rayquaza's veins, though not near as warm as his contentment from before. This was more aching and miserable, and if he didn't know any better he would almost call it guilt.
Nebulous identity of the feeling aside, it only took an instant for it to prove too much for him, and he uttered one word he had spoken maybe once or twice in his millennia of life. Kyurem almost choked on her cookie upon hearing it and tucked her head down so her scarf covered her nose to muffle her cough. "I, uh… Didn't catch that?"
"I said, I'm sorry," Rayquaza repeated, mildly irritated at her overreaction. Now he could double the amount of times he had ever apologized. "I shouldn't have yelled at you. I…" He paused, uncertain, then figured this final confession wouldn't compromise his own reputation – the one he sought to maintain; yet another juxtaposition between the two of them – any more than actually talking to her and sitting down to eat cookies already had.
"Your explanation makes sense," he admitted, rubbing his arm with the opposite one. Kyurem drew herself up, swallowing visibly, but he cut her off before she could interject, knowing this next part would coil up inside him painfully unless he got it out now. "It… it's the reason why I could never hate you."
That earned him a shocked grunt from her, and he glared down at the ground, finding purchase in her scarf brushing against the ground – the very thing that, really, had started this whole stupid discussion in the first place. Why did I even say anything? Stupid thing. Stupid heart.
And then something was curling its digits into the space between one of his armor plates and the soft skin beneath and tugging him toward it. Rayquaza instinctively whirled, ready to snarl at his assailant, only to find his snout pushed into where Kyurem's non-crippled wing met her body.
Craning his neck, he stared up at her to see her regarding him with a new tenderness on her face. Fleetingly, he thought, if any of those Pokemon and people who hate her so much could see this they wouldn't think she would eat any of them, but then he had to shake off that thought because this wasn't about those damned beings who shunned someone they barely knew.
Perhaps as a result of that thought – and the sight of the tips of her fangs poking out to drag her bottom lip nervously into their grip – he relented on his instinctive reaction of tearing himself away and let himself relax into the embrace. Somehow, he didn't even mind the freezing air that radiated from her body in unpleasant waves and made him shiver.
After that blizzard, this cold was nothing.
Kyurem is such an old granny legendary. I didn't even realize she seemed so much like that until I got halfway through XD;
Review, please?