"Boys! Are you up there? It's snack time!"

Daisy placed her foot tentatively on the lowest rung of the rope ladder. Immediately, the head of her younger brother, with his hair a mess, emerged from behind a large tree branch, glaring down at her.

"You can't come here! No girls allowed!"

Daisy removed her foot from the ladder and put her hands on her hips. "Haven't I taught you to be nice to girls?"

Blue pushed himself further onto branch, close enough the grasp the leaves nearest to the trunk. The branch wobbled ominously underneath him, but he paid it no mind. Instead, he focused on his older sister, standing firmly on ground.

"This has nothing to do with that," he protested, and turned his head around, hugging the branch. Red had managed to pull the boards, mismatched and with plenty of holes, but theirs and theirs alone, up to the big fork in the tree, and placed the bundle next to bunch of ropes and piece of tarpaulin they had hauled up earlier. "This club is for boys only. You're too old too!"

"That is no way to speak to your sister, Blue Oak."

Red cast an amused glance at Blue as he pulled a face, then focused on undoing the rope around the boards. Blue groaned and decided to placate her sister. From the thin smile on her lips, he was relatively sure she wasn't that angry, but there was also a dangerous glint in her eye that made Blue think his words twice. This wasn't the time to annoy Daisy. Even if summer felt endless on sunny July afternoons like the one at the moment, it would fly past faster than a legendary pok mon if Daisy grounded him for a month.

"You know I don't mean it like that," he muttered. "But we want it to be a club just for us."

Daisy's expression softened so quickly Blue began to suspect she hadn't been cross in the first place. "What if you make me an auxiliary member?"

Blue frowned. "What does that mean?"

"It means I can bring your snacks here, but the tree house is for you alone."

Blue glanced at Red, who nodded, then turned back. "Deal."

Daisy smiled like she had gotten exactly what she had wanted. Blue didn't get it. By his account, Daisy had gotten the short side of the deal. "How about I bring you sandwiches and juice here after you're done?"

Blue smiled back. "Thanks, sis."

Daisy retreated inside.

Red grinned. "Good deal."

"Yeah." Blue gave their supplies a once-over. "This shouldn't take too long. Once we have our headquarters, we need a name and symbol for the club."

Red looked up from his toil. "What kind of a symbol?

"Something that's quick to draw, but that also makes sense. Something only we will understand. We can use it to sign our secret messages." Blue began to grin. "We should come up with a code language too. And identification papers written in code, and with the symbol." He placed his hand on his chin. "I've gotta think about it."

Red tightened the knot around the two boards. "Once we get the floor done, we should bring some paper and pencils here and plan one."

"Yeah." Blue joined Red in his toil, trying to puzzle out a good symbol all the while. Soon, they'd have a brilliant headquarter for their organization, and a fancy logo, too.

"I didn't ask you to come here."

They had left Blue's gym and began walking towards Pallet almost unconsciously and in complete silence, but just before reaching the town, Blue turned around and cast an irate glance at his companion. "Right? I said nothing about it. I didn't even hint at it. So you can stop giving me that look."

The look Red now gave Blue was the same he would have if his childhood friend and rival had suddenly sprouted wings and joined a flock of pidgeys. He stopped dead in his tracks and stared down at his dusty trainers. One shoe unlaced as always, Blue noticed to his annoyance. All these years, and still Red hadn't learned to tie a proper knot.

"Like I can't tell what you're thinking. You're looking down on me, like at some poor charity case with no opportunities you're deigning to entertain for a brief moment before continuing on your path to success." Blue snorted and raised his chin. "You come back after two years wandering who knows where, pretending to be some kind of a mysterious hermit trainer, without as much as a word to anyone back home. And now you pretend Kanto is so far beneath you you can look down your nose at me. Which one of us is a gym leader, again? I was a champion, too, and if you think that because you beat me for the title then means you're better than me, I'll challenge you to rematch right here and now." He gave Red the evil eye. "What, am I not even worth words! Say something!"

Red cleared his throat. "I sent a postcard."

"What?" Only now did Blue remember the strange postcard depicting a licktitung on the beach and with a Kalos region stamp that had come with the mail the prior fall. It had been addressed to the entire Oak household, and what little Red had written on it, with his terse, angular letters, had been entirely standard, except for the small symbol next to the stamp Gramps and Dais hadn't been able to make heads or tails of.

Blue caught himself nearly grinning, and pulled himself back to reality. "That barely counts. It wasn't my real point, anyway. Think I'm so dumb I'd forget what I just asked?"

Red fell silent for a moment, as if he needed to think about the reply. Blue allowed himself to grow more irritated.

"You're the one who abandoned Kanto. You're the one who left. Why don't you just go back to wherever you came from and forget about us again?"

Then, he became genuinely annoyed as instead of replying, Red turned aside and stepped into the tall grass by the roadside, face impassive.

"Running away?" Blue sneered. Of course he was. Not physically, but from the question, definitely. Not that Blue expected Red to answer truthfully either way. No doubt he would say he had never forgotten, that Kanto had always been on his mind.

Maybe he wouldn't say that. Maybe he would tell the truth, admit that the outside world had swept him off his feet and wiped his past promises from his head. The thought didn't make Blue any more pleased.

Red straightened up in the grass, and quickly stepped back onto the path before any wild pokémon got on his case, a long twig in his hand. As Blue looked on, he stepped in front of him and began drawing onto the dirt path. Only a moment, and he straightened out again, brow furrowed. "I can't do the colors with this."

Blue looked at the symbol. It was a symbol of a pokeball, slightly wobbly but easily recognizible.

He extended his foot, and wiped it over the upper half of the pokeball, revealing darker dirt underneath.

"There," he said, standing on both feet again. He met Red's eyes. Of course, on the ground they were merely two different shades of brown, but in both their minds one half was red and the other blue.

"I didn't forget," Red said quietly.

"Easy to say now." Blue's throat was dry. Red had a hard look in his eyes, but it wasn't the look of a liar. "That's not something that's easy to forget."

Red shrugged. Then, with a decisive step, he grabbed Blue's shoulders and plunged upwards for a kiss.

The kiss was short and relatively chaste, but as he pulled away, Blue was out of breath. A heady rush of happiness not felt in over two years, both nostalgic and bittersweet, filled his sense.

"I didn't forget that either," Red said with a hint of a smile.

Blue willed himself not to flush. "You call that a kiss? Let me show how it's done."

He took a determined step forward, took Red by the chin, and pulled him into another, deeper kiss.

When he finally pulled away, he had no idea how long had passed. The route was the same as ever, but at the moment Blue thought it looked more beautiful than on even the brightest day before.

Red slowly opened his eyes, looking slightly dazed. Then, he gave Blue a crooked smile. "You always have to go for the one-up, huh?"

Blue snorted. "You're one to talk." He turned on his heels and began walking towards Kanto. Red followed.

"Anything different in Pallet?"

"You'll see for yourself. How long are you staying?"

"I don't know yet. I have no pressing reasons to leave."

"I bet you'll forget you ever said that in a day or two."

"I don't have to go alone. If I can find someone to go with me."

"Some of us have responsibilities to keep in mind. I can't just wander into other regions like some kid on their trainer journey."

"Can't you find someone to take your place for a while?"

"What, just for your sake? I think not." Despite his words, Blue was already going through potential gym leader substitutes in his mind. Not because of Red, of course. It was a simple fact that he had been doing nothing but working for a long time now. A bit of new environments would do good for both him and his team.

"Been to Sinnoh yet?" he asked in his most casual voice. "Is there really as much snow there as on TV?"

"In some places. Near the mountains, definitely." Red looked into the distance. "I like fall in Sinnoh the best, though. The trees look like they're on fire."

"Hmm." Blue looked at the cloudless sky. "Gonna be a while until then. It's still May, after all."

"Yeah." Red began walking towards Pallet. "I'm thinking about spending the summer here." His gaze hit a copse of trees near the town. "Is our old tree house still up?"

"Was when I last checked it. Wanna see if it can hold our weight still?"

Red's usually passive eyes lit up with a strange glow, and his smile made the corners of Blue's lips nudge up, too. "Why not? We've got the time."