A/N: Right. Hi everyone (I'm not expecting too many views for this one given its weird premise). So this story doesn't make a lot of sense, and I feel I should explain it a little before anyone gets too confused. Right, the most screamed about question right now would probably be "Why is the main pairing NatexLucas?" So yes. I get it. They've never met, they aren't in the same game and they don't meet in any other form of media to the point that this is likely the only fic with this pairing in the world. The main reason I wanted to write it is because I read a lot of Greyskyshipping (NatexHugh) and a lot of Clingyshipping (LucasxBarry). So I found that in most of these fics the characterization for both Nate and Lucas stayed pretty much the same across all those different writers, and I thought hey they'd actually be perfect for each other. Also they have the cutest character models. And voila, this fic was born :)
If you enjoy it please review it and if you don't please review it as well I'm trying to get better just like everyone else and it would really help if viewers could give tips on how to improve my writing. Anyways, enjoy!
First times are always the worst. You get wasted after your first drink, beat up after your first fight, and dumped after your first kiss.
First time travelling. Now that's a real recipe for disaster. No one should ever be allowed to fly overseas alone for the first time. At all. For the rest of eternity. So what if no one ever flies again and the air travel industry crashes and burns. Screw them.
The journey from Unova to Sinnoh was a lot tougher than the airline website made it out to be. Their promises of a "journey spent in the lap of luxury" apparently missed out the part about spending 14 hours in a hard and scratchy airplane seat, only to find that your transfer from Kalos International to Goldenrod airport had been cancelled due to "unforeseen circumstances".
Of course, since this was a budget carrier, they couldn't actually afford to give their passengers a complimentary stay at a hotel, so they'd just have to settle for a night in the departure hall with all the other scrubs who were too poor to afford an actual airline.
At least I got a free sleeping bag right?
Swamped in garish orange polyester, sandwiched between some morbidly obese guy who smelled of cheese sticks and a conveniently placed garbage bin, I could only curse myself for naively thinking that heading to Sinnoh for some training would be a great idea! Blasting all the Patrat and Lillipup in Route 1 would have been easier than booking a fucking commercial flight. Why'd the system have to be so complicated anyways? Was it really necessary to have to queue five times in a single airport? If only I hadn't lost to that conceited blond supermodel...
After getting completely thrashed by Elesa at Nimbasa Gym (her Zebstrika just pummeled Dewott, and my little Vullaby couldn't really do much after that), I realised that before I could even hope to challenge the pokemon league and its asshat of a champion, I'd need more than just a little more training. The gyms in Sinnoh had seemed like a reasonable place to start at the time, since I'd heard that they rarely saw any Unova region pokemon there anyway. It took all of 3 minutes standing outside that awful fashion show of a gym for me to make up my mind then. It is rapidly becoming apparent to me impulsive decision making is not ideal when making choices about making a very long trip to a very foreign land with a stark lack of accompaniment.
I sent a text message to mom informing her about my decision to train overseas, and she completely ignored my preferred mode of communication by responding with an awful 15 minute long-credit-draining call. She squealed at the excitement of another one of her children heading on the path towards becoming a great trainer, and expressed how mightily impressed she was by "how much her little baby had grown", "how much she missed both her children and wished they'd come back sooner". I hastily ended the call then, before she came up with some inexcusable reason for me to visit Aspertia City just to get smothered in sloppy kisses and overly sentimental hugs. It was really just a realisation of her dreams for her second son to be more like her hyper-successful first. She never was good at hiding that I was always second favourite.
I mean, for such a clingy lady, she seemed awfully unconcerned that her not-even-legal son would be travelling halfway around the world on his own, or that due to his shitty personality, he probably wouldn't even think to call back on the weekends or something.
Not that it would really hurt if he did run into trouble of course. "It's a great experience for you!" She would say. And one less burden for me.
I then contemplated telling Hil about where I'd be going, hoping that his brotherly instincts might accidentally kick in and he wouldn't be quite as much of a useless shit of a sibling. Even if he was Champion, it wasn't necessary for him to fuck around all the time and leave me alone with mom. But I texted him anyways, because according to the rest of the world, brothers are supposed to care for each other.
He replied with "K".
So I blocked him. Fuck that guy.
The cash that Hil left in my account from his exploits as Champ was used to pay for a first-class ticket on a straight flight from Castelia to Goldenrod. Even though it was technically my money that was being used here, it still gave me a small sense of satisfaction to see several zeros wiped off my phone's screen after the transaction was processed. I mean, Hil had earned that cash after all. I was just putting his wasted efforts to better use.
Castelia City Airport was a large, whitewashed complex of modernism and hi-tech gadgetry, specifically designed, in my opinion, to provide as vague and lousy directions as possible. They really took the minimalism to a whole new level. After encountering only three signs on my half hour search for the departure hall, by some miracle, I ended up in front of the massive board which listed all the flights departing in the next 3 hours.
20 minutes of staring at the flashing numbers trying to catch a glimpse of "PK1629" amongst the hundreds of other flights scrolling across the LED screen yielded little results. In all honesty, though, the list could have a little easier to read. I mean really, a hundred numbers changing every ten seconds? Reading ancient hieroglyphs would have been easier..
What really was sad though, is that only after asking desperately around the airport for any kind of help, did I actually bother to check the website that I had booked my flight on. Alas, my poor young gentleman of a self had missed his flight, because in his astounding brilliance, he astutely forgot that the prefix "am" is in fact indicative of a period of time in the MORNING.
Arriving 12 hours late for a midnight flight really left little room for hoping that the gates would still be open. In my defense, no other mode of transport that I'd ever taken ran at midnight, so it seemed perfectly reasonable at the time to assume that 12.10 was just a little past noon.
I got pretty flustered then, not in the least because I had just spent a five digit sum on a seat that I wasn't even sitting in, and desperately tried to get a refund for my ticket. After queuing again at the airline's counter, I was politely informed by the attendant that there existed a policy where first-class tickets could not be refunded in the case of a missed flight. I told her that there was nothing telling me during my purchase that the ticket was nonrefundable, but she deftly brought out a thick stack densely worded documents and laid it on the countertop for me to read. "These are a copy of the terms and conditions which were shown to you before your purchase was made sir. It states right here that first and business class tickets are non-refundable," she indicated, pointing at a single line trapped between the ocean of words covering the page. I pointed out that no one actually reads terms and conditions, to which she replied, "then maybe you should."
Bitch.
Frantically searching for a way to get back what was over half the cash available to me, I took turns alternating between begging and crying in the hopes that she would take pity on the sad little 17 year old who had just fucked up big time. Yet her steely expression never wavered, staunchly refusing to allow any sort of deviation from her Holy Commandments, the sacred Terms and Conditions.
Understandably, I was fairly pissed at her then, and told her where she could put her fucking terms, which was probably when she began threatening to call security. The queue behind me had been growing increasingly impatient and more than a little annoyed at the asshole who was holding up the line while abusing staff, and I could hear a few pissed of mutters from a short distance behind. One of them probably notified airport security, because as my rant against the unfairness of legal clauses died down, a rather large and imposing guard appeared to be making his way through the crowd of annoyed travelers that had accumulated at queue number 17.
That was my cue to accept fate and leave before I got arrested for verbal abuse in public.
I spent a good 15 minutes making sure that no burly giant of a man was tailing me, and, once I was sure of my safety, took a seat at the airport lounge while contemplating my absolute failure of an existence.
I couldn't go back to Aspertia or ask Hil for help. If he found out that I couldn't even book my own flight, I would never hear the end of it. It was enough that he already one-upped me in becoming champion first, I didn't need him to be better at fucking travelling too.
The only logical solution was to quietly wait in line for a small budget carrier, and hopefully continue my journey to Sinnoh without further delay. So I headed over to the budget terminal (yes, they had a whole other terminal just for them), and quietly skulked around for a new carrier to bring me on my way.
I spotted a single flight to Kalos International scrolling lazily across the screen above the desk for Swanna Airways, figuring that if I could reach the transport hub of the world, then getting to Sinnoh after would be much easier. The clerk (wo)manning the counter below gazed disinterestedly at the monitor in front of her, scrolling through something that likely had nothing at all to do with her job. She resembled a Slakoth that had been forced to watch reruns of 'Girls over Sunflora' for her whole life, chewing a piece of gum as if it wasn't obvious enough that she hated her job.
"Excuse me, I'm trying to get to the Sinnoh region."
Bubblegum stared at me expectantly. A light pink sheet was stretched across her lips.
"Um, can you, uh, help me get there?"
She sucked the gum back in, and restarted the chewing process. "We don't have flights to Sinnoh." *pop*
Well she's nice.
"Oh. Then, uh, can you tell me how to get there?"
She sighed, shrugged her shoulders and rolled her eyes before typing a couple of words into her computer. What fantastic service!
"You can take this flight to KIA and then transfer to Goldenrod after. There's some ferries there, I'm sure. Y'can probably get on one there or something. Anything else?" The last two words came out rather strained, more a signal for me to shut up than an offer of help. I shook my head and muttered a vaguely polite "thanks" while waiting for the transaction to process.
"Hold your phone over the scanner there," she indicated at the light blue plate mounted on a desk stand. As the transaction processed, this time it hurt when a noticeable bite out of the remaining cash I had slipped away. So much for trainers being rich.
My flight to Kalos International would be 14 hours, and from there I could take a transfer all the way to Goldenrod, where hopefully, booking the ferry for my journey to Canalave City would be significantly less dramatic. Glancing at my watch, I was relieved to find that 2 hours of free time waited between me and departure, thinking it high time to grab a snack to calm down after the stress of my plane-booking adventures.
Yet halfway through enjoying an ice-cool casteliacone, the P.A. system sounded throughout the departure hall with, "LAST CALL FOR NATE BLACK!"
The announcement repeated itself again, this time with the added info that the boarding gates would be closed in 15 minutes. 15 minutes sounded reasonable enough for me to get to the boarding gates, but considering my luck with air travel so far, I wasn't about to take any risks. Flinging the rest of my frosted dessert into the trash, I tore down the ridiculously long corridor towards my flight hall, unwilling to deal with horror of trying to book another fucking flight to the same place on the same day.
And hence my stay in the lap of luxury that is KIA begins. Stuck uncomfortably in a stuffy airport hall, with a worryingly dismal amount of cash and a mood that could blacken a Sunflora's smile. The lard ass laying beside me finally fell asleep as well, and started snoring these awful wet nasal sounds, like all the snot had built up inside his meaty nostrils so that it could deliberately annoy me on one of my top five shittiest days. I seriously considered asking Dewott to freeze his face off, but going to jail would sort of ruin my chances of putting Hil's smart ass in its rightful place, so I resorted to pressing my face against the cool plastic of the trash bin, and stuffing the sleeping bag case into a pair of makeshift earmuffs.
It's going to be a long night.
Also its in first person POV so this might be a little weird... Lucas is coming up next 0.0