Marley turns around to the sound of someone else's footsteps advancing behind her in the cave. She isn't startled, not really; they've never spoken, but she recognizes Riley from the few times she's visited the Survival Area with her arcanine, from overhearing the occasional passing trainer talking of a tall man of mystery with a lucario and a preoccupation with spending time in caves. And plus, it's not exactly easy to forget someone dressed as distinctly as he is (not that she can say anything about that).
Still, as she regards his impassive gaze with one of her own, it's not as if she expects to run into him here.
"…I thought you liked Iron Island better," is the first thing she tells him, regretting instantly her lack of a greeting. She hopes he doesn't take offense.
Instead Riley offers her a muted smile and a noncommittal shrug. His lucario stares curiously at her. "I met someone some time ago, and she made me think I could use a change of scenery – that probably sounds strange to you, considering I'm just going from one cave to another, but trust me, there's a difference." He chuckles to himself, and outstretches his hand. "You're… Marley, correct? I didn't think I'd see you here."
"Same here," Marley says. "Not many people know about this part of the cave."
She shakes his hand reticently; his grip is firm and his expression is good-natured, and she doesn't know why, but the tunnel suddenly feels a little less cold, a little less dark than it was before. She stares at the palm of her right hand for a moment, running her left thumb absently across the skin.
"I'm looking for something at the end of this tunnel. Will you let me go with you?" she asks.
"Of course." Riley nods. "That's what I was going ask you anyway."
-x-
She bends and touches the surface of the tablet, feeling the cold smoothness of stone against her fingertips. Above them, the sun is setting, drenching the sky and everything beneath in a warm, melting glow, colors that make something in her heart clench strangely with a feeling she wishes she could put to words. If she could meet that pokémon, she thinks, perhaps she would be able to.
"You wanted to see this?"
Marley straightens, brushing away imaginary dust from her skirt. "I heard there's a pokémon that visits this place… Shaymin, a pokémon that conveys gratitude. I want to see it someday," she tells him. "But maybe it's no use. I'm not very good with emotions… there's no way a pokémon like that could appear before me."
"Don't say that." Riley shakes his head firmly. "Lucario and I – we both can tell you're a trainer who loves your companions very much. I can sense your arcanine's trust in you through its aura. So even if you don't believe yourself, your pokémon think otherwise. And I'm sure Shaymin will think so too."
"…Thank you," she mumbles, after a moment.
Her chest tightens; she clutches at the hem of her skirt, bringing her eyes to the ground. He's a near-stranger, and yet he's able to say those words of reassurance to her with ease, every word sounding earnest and full of care, and it only makes her more conscious than ever of how much about her own emotions and others' she doesn't understand – how much she wants someone to help her understand. Maybe, maybe then… maybe she wouldn't need Shaymin to make her able to express every single thing in her heart, even the small things, the insignificant feelings she always thought were better off kept hidden behind a stoic mouth and a steely pair of eyes.
She returns her gaze to his.
"Thank you," Marley says again, her voice no longer a whisper this time. "That makes me feel a little better." It does. "I'll try to believe you."
To that, he nods, having nothing further to add. Then he glances at the sky, darkening by the moment; when he turns to her again and offers a ride back to the city on his salamence, it surprises herself how easily her mouth curves into a small smile in response as she says yes, even though she's fairly sure it's because he can't see it.
-x-
The next time she meets him in the Survival Area, he's already in the middle of talking to Byron about returning to Iron Island again for training. It takes a few moments and some deep breaths before she's able to walk up to him and ask if it's true that he's leaving, even as the voice in the back of her mind says, why should you ask? You don't even know him that well.
Riley's expression, unbelievably enough, looks almost sheepish. She can't help but find it – incongruous. (She can't help but think that it might not be the best word.) If she were anyone else, Marley thinks she would laugh.
"So you heard that? You probably think I'm strange, don't you? Always going to that island for weeks at a time…" he lets himself trail away, holding himself back from a laugh. "Anyway, it's rather unbelievable, but I find myself already missing that place. I'm catching a boat from Canalave as soon as I can."
"…I-" she starts, "I was thinking – I want to go, too."
"Oh?" He raises an eyebrow, "And what would you want to do in a secluded island full of nothing but dirt and rock?"
"To train," she replies, because, well – it isn't untrue. Or, it shouldn't be. She's a trainer too, after all, so it's a perfectly reasonable excuse. "My pokémon might be fast, but … I've noticed that when dealing with rock and steel-types like the ones Roark and Byron train, they don't always fare well against those defenses. So I thought, if I went to Iron Island to train…" she doesn't realize how much she's said until she catches herself, and goes silent, suddenly struck with self-consciousness. She must've sounded very silly.
"Okay, I understand," Riley says. "To be honest, I'm glad you said that. Ever since that trainer left, I haven't seen many trainers visit that place anymore. Even the miners abandoned the caves years ago. It gets pretty lonely there sometimes, you know?"
Isn't that the point of you going there so often, she can't help but think. To be alone? She opts not to say it, though.
"I'm not familiar with the area, so… tell me when you're leaving, okay? So we can go together."
"Of course." It's only when she lifts her eyes from the floor that she catches the spark of excitement in Riley's gaze that wasn't there before. It's dazzling enough to make her almost look away again. "In the meantime, what do you say to a battle with me right now? I'm curious of what your pokémon are capable of. And, after all, battling is what this place is for, isn't it?"
"I'm aware of that," Marley says, regaining her composure in time, and unclips one pokéball from the belt around her black skirt.
-x-
"Why did you want to become a trainer?"
He asks the question out of the blue, his voice bouncing off the rocky walls of the cave, while they're taking a break from training. Marley drags one heel of her shoe across the ground, stalling as she considers her words. Her arcanine's ears twitch curiously as she absently runs her fingertips across its rough pelt.
Watching her pensive reaction, Riley is quick to lift his hand, smiling in that effortless way of his she thinks she's supposed to be used to by now. How silly of her to think … no, it probably doesn't even register to him when he's smiling how easily it could disarm a less stoic person in a heartbeat. How natural a gesture like that looks on him, she thinks, when it takes so much out of her to allow her expression to be half as candid without her flinching in the process.
"Ah! You don't have to answer if you don't want to. I was a little curious, that's all. I suppose if I wanted a conversation partner, there's always Lucario over here…" He glances fondly at his companion, his shoulders trembling in an almost-laugh.
"No," she says. "It's fine… I started training pokémon because I felt like I could be good at it. Making friends and small talk is hard for me, because I always unintentionally hurt others, and I don't think I'm the easiest person to get along with … but when I started pokémon battling, I felt like it suddenly didn't matter as much if I was quiet, or seemed cold. All that mattered was I was good at it. And what you said a while ago … I've been thinking about that, actually. I've wondered for a while if my pokémon don't know how I feel towards them, because I don't show my feelings very well. So when you told me you could tell that my pokémon trust me, even if I can't … it really helped ease my mind. I'm sure you were telling the truth."
"Why would I lie?" Riley says, his voice gentle, and it's his voice that snaps her out of her thoughts, bringing her back to the dark, still cave they're standing in.
Marley shifts her weight from one foot to the other. She can't look at him in the eye. "Sorry," she says. "I spoke too much. You probably think I'm very silly right now."
"Why should I? That's a perfectly fine reason. Everyone's got their own motivations. That's what makes trainers interesting – including you. It's not silly at all."
"…We've been talking too long," Marley says, her voice clipped, attention fixated on a particular puddle on the ground. "We should go back to our training. I think it'll get dark out soon."
To Riley's credit, he drops the subject immediately. And, if he notices the deliberate way she avoids his gaze for the rest of the day, the way she speaks with even more reticence than usual, then he's too polite to mention anything.
-x-
"You've heard about it, haven't you?" Riley starts, sometime after the aftermath of their second and latest battle. This time, Marley's the one who claims victory; she watches him return his fallen pokémon to their balls, clipping them securely on his belt one by one. Even in defeat, holding onto the brim of his hat, the man can't help but look dignified. His composure – the way he carries himself – is flawlessly glacial, she observes, but unlike hers, it doesn't make him look stiff or unapproachable. "That I turned down the Canalave gym leader position offered by Byron."
"I might have," she replies, because she has. She's heard various speculations on the nature of his refusal, his possible reasons for further embracing the so-called life of a hermit he's rather well-known for by now in trainer circles, but until this moment she's never found a reason to ask questions herself.
"I think I accidentally made you embarrassed back then at Iron Island." He advances towards her, towards the other end of the arena, offering an apologetic smile. She glances away, pretending to be distracted by returning Arcanine into its pokéball. "Even if I didn't mean it, I shouldn't have been nosy, especially knowing how quiet you usually are. So I figured since I lost this time around, I should tell you something of my own. You know, to make up for it."
"You don't need to do that," she says, instead of you remembered that?
"What should I say to sweeten the deal, then? I'm in the mood for talking right now." He laughs good-naturedly. "Are you hungry? It's almost noon. What do you say we take a break from training and have some lunch?"
Beneath her assuredly calm exterior, she feels the start of something stirring. What it is, she doesn't know; she's never been good with emotions. She's not sure whether she likes it or not.
"It's only a date if you think of it as one," Riley says, sounding amused as though reading her thoughts (a mortifying possibility).
"The – " Marley says, surprising herself at how spontaneously the rest of the words leave her mouth. What's even more surprising is that she doesn't mind it. "If so, then it's a date."
Now it's his turn to be taken aback. His composure doesn't recover quickly enough for her to not commit his surprised face to memory.
"I refused," he tells her later, over sandwiches and iced tea, "because I didn't think I could trust myself to hold such a title. Byron, despite my suggestion, never considered ceding the position to his own son. He kept telling me I was the right guy for the job. I like him well enough, but me, really? Someone who disappears into radio silence and holes himself up in caves for weeks at a time and who's practically a hermit first and a pokémon trainer second at this point? I'm sorry, but I enjoy my own selfish whims too much to give all of that up."
He chuckles to himself, and she pretends she didn't hear the way his tone had turned a tad rueful towards the end. She stays quiet throughout their lunch, intermittently dropping responses here and there, all the while distantly wondering how many people – how many girls – wouldn't dare dream of being her place right now. It's not an unpleasant feeling.
"You should tell me a bit about yourself sometime," Riley says, after they've split the bill. He's quick to add: "If you want, of course. I won't force you."
"We should do this again," is all Marley has to say in return. "If you want," she echoes.
"You needn't ask," he says, sounding pleased.
-x-
He takes her out for lunch and dinner, regaling her with tales big and small about the places he's been and the pokémon he's met, the particular variety of ore you could dig up in mines, his memorable experience teaming up against Team Galactic with the kid who saved the region from apocalyptic doom, how even after the years of seeing the things he's seen and the people he's come across, he still never feels quite comfortable unless he's either in a heated pokémon battle or exploring his way through a dark unknown cave – that's the way he is, he tells her.
He listens to her stilted, awkward attempt at telling him about the childhood she barely remembers in Kanto, her brief foray into painting to express herself before she started training pokémon instead, how and when she met the pokémon who accompany her, how she's heard of this faraway region housing a psychic pokémon who can divine the future through patterns in the stars. He's patient with her, even as she stumbles over her words or refuses to continue talking altogether.
Gradually, talking becomes an easier thing to do; expressions take less effort, and now she spends less time carefully considering every syllable of every word before they leave her mouth. The first time Riley reaches out to shrink the gap between them and tells her that her smile is lovely, she doesn't stop herself when she feels the flustered heat spread all the way to the tips of her ears. Riley presses his thumb softly against her cheek, looking into her dark eyes, and kisses her again for good measure.
"How long… have you known?" she asks him, afterwards, lying on his sofa as he sets down two cups of tea on the table across the television set. "How long have you known that I liked you?"
He bends over the sofa to brush her hair out of her eyes. "I liked you first, you know."
Her eyes widen. "Since when…?"
"Since I felt your aura, all the way back, the first time we met. Even if you don't always show it on your face, you're a very earnest and considerate person. You work hard for your pokémon and care deeply for them. It sounds cheesy, doesn't it? But it's the first time since meeting that trainer that I sensed such a strong – feeling from someone. And I've had my eye on you ever since then."
Marley's eyelashes flutter beneath Riley's calm, deep gaze. His face softens.
"And what feeling is that?"
He pulls something out of his suit pocket, tucking it delicately behind her ear. She recognizes the colors of the petals and the lulling sweet scent in an instant – a gracidea flower.
Gratitude.
Before she can say anything to that, he leans in once more, but not without whispering, "I'm glad I met you, Marley."
"So am I," Marley says in turn. "Maybe it was the gratitude pokémon who brought me to you," she adds, her voice trailing away, and she can't bring herself to care about her wildly beating heart and bright crimson face when she turns her arms around his back to tug him down, pulling him closer to her, the TV and cups of tea on the table long forgotten.
-x-
a/n: the sinnoh hype died years ago but one day i randomly thought of this ship and decided... hmm, i must write it. so this happened. honestly 90% of my motivation for writing this was that their fashion choices look so jarring next to each other, and i sure do love ships with incongruous mismatched aesthetics.
please let me know what you think if you liked!