A/N: And in other news, Sacredshipping stole my brain. No really. I honestly never thought I'd do a fifty-sentences, but these boys just get my writing juices flowing it seems...and before I know it I'm kything all kinds of stuff about past and future and present, and then tigers come for tea, and the stories just start breeding, and I've a feeling this is going to get hell of epic if I let it...
I don't own Pokémon. Dammit, who does? Those little monsters have a life of their own!
#01 - Motion
There's something perpetually restless about Eusine, his flashing eyes and nimble fingers; the only times he is ever completely still are when he's praying, and when he's lying, lazy and sated, in Morty's arms.
#02 - Cool
Neither of them take the heat of summer well, being so pale and inclined to sunburn; but while Eusine just puts on a hat, grits his teeth, and puts up with it, Morty's preferred method of coping involves wandering around in nothing but sunglasses, sandals, a pair of shorts that live up to their name so well they probably violate obscenity laws, and a great deal of sun lotion...
#03 - Young
The first time he came out, he was sixteen and terrified, pretending more pride and self-confidence than he felt; the second time, he was twenty-five, and though he was revealing himself to a much bigger world than just a college in Goldenrod, he wasn't quite so scared, because this time he wasn't alone, and so long as they were together he and Morty could handle anything that was thrown at them.
#04 - Last
The last time Eusine sees Suicune, it doesn't run, and he doesn't try to approach it; both of them know, even before the child from New Bark arrives, that Eusine's days of chasing the north wind are at an end.
#05 - Wrong
"I don't care if someone's wrong on the internet, van Haarte, just get over here and bang me senseless now!"
#06 - Gentle
Whoever started all those stereotypes about Ghost Pokémon and their trainers being eerie and threatening obviously didn't know any, Eusine thinks, watching Morty croon as he pets the Gastly tenderly, which responds to its Trainer's ministrations by giving him a very enthusiastic lick.
#07 - One
Morty had never believed in soulmates, in the idea of one person you wanted to spend your whole life with, thinking it a quaint old-fashioned notion; then he met Eusine, and the world suddenly had more colours.
#08 - Thousand
Eusine's crying in his arms, and it feels to Morty like his friend's a thousand thousand miles away, lost in a universe of pain; gods, gods, no, how can you be so cruel, to hurt him like this, to hurt him...
#09 - King
"I don't know why you keep doing that," Eusine sighs, hiding a smile, "you don't even like that movie-" "No, but it's too good an opportunity to resist," Morty laughs, standing, arms outspread, at the prow of SS Aqua.
#10 - Learn
"I've never done this before," Morty admits, breathless, "not this way-"; Eusine kisses him and assures him "you'll learn," slipping a finger inside him.
#11 - Blur
Riding on Raikou's back, he's moving so fast the world is just a blur, darkness and wind and electricity, and when the Blessed Servant finally slows and allows him to dismount before his proudly grinning boyfriend, the kiss he gives him makes Morty yelp, then laugh, at the jolt of static.
#12 - Wait
His lover's face is ash-grey, and Morty clenches one lifeless hand in his; Eusine's going to wake up any minute now, he won't cry, he will not cry...
#13 - Change
At first he thinks it's just coincidence, or that he's losing his mind, but after the third sighting of the thunder tiger near Ecruteak, the fifth in the vicinity of Eusine, Morty turns to him with a wry smile and suggests, "Perhaps you were petitioning the wrong Legendary Pokémon?"
#14 - Command
Mine, come and fight! says the west wind, and Eusine just shakes and stares at the Lord of Passion in all its glory, unable to process this; Morty's staring too, in naked awe, but he pushes Eusine ever-so-slightly forward and whispers in his ear, "It's waiting for you; go on!"
#15 - Hold
The old man's eyes fix on the pair of them with unconcealed disgust and disapproval, and though Eusine's had to deal with this sort of thing for years, he can't suppress a small flinch; but Morty just holds his hand a little tighter, and gives 'Crasher' Wake a glare that he must have learned from his ghosts.
#16 - Need
He's grumpy and out of sorts and aching inside, he feels like he's missing an arm and a leg; it's entirely unreasonable, but he can't help wanting to just ditch every responsibility keeping him in Ecruteak and follow Eusine to Kanto...
#17 - Vision
Morty's Sight doesn't always show him everything, and sometimes he makes serious mistakes, like he did about Ho-Oh; recently he's had another vision, though, one of a wedding, and he's absolutely certain this one will come true...
#18 - Attention
"...anyway, in my opinion the thing us Gym Leaders ought to do is...wait, you're not listening to a word I say, are you...hey, stop giggling, all of you, it's not THAT big a love bite!"
#19 - Soul
Sometimes Morty wishes he was an empath, instead of a clairvoyant, though he knows empathy's a tough gift to live with; he'd just like to see Eusine's soul, just once, because he just knows it would be so beautiful...
#20 - Picture
The sketchbook is mostly full of copies of shrine paintings and carvings, pictures of the Towers, of the Wind Chasers; then Morty flips over a page, and finds the drawing of a sleeper, a man so beautiful it hurts to look at him, and he almost doesn't recognise himself.
#21 - Fool
Eusine's family have disowned him, saying he's a perverse, rebellious fool, while Morty's parents have been praying for their son's soul ever since they found out; neither man will admit to the other that they still call them regularly, in the vain hope of reconciliation.
#22 - Mad
Both of them are used to being called insane, but as long as each has the other there to reassure them, nothing anyone else says matters.
#23 - Child
"I am going to marry him and have his babies," Morty announces with great drunken earnestness, which makes Fantina clap her hands in delight and exclaim that she'll start work on his wedding dress right away, while their exchange makes Eusine go very red, choke on his drink and whimper slightly at the mental images it causes.
#24 - Now
This moment: there's a big, warm, rambling old house in Ecruteak City, full of prayer beads and Ghost Pokémon and homemade pizza; there's rain blattering down outside, and thunder growling in a self-satisfied way to itself; there's a tiger purring on the rug by the fire, the restless west wind resting, batting an annoyed but resigned Electrode about like any feline with a ball, while a Hypno observes from a cautious distance; there's a four-poster bed, a real antique, that creaks and groans as two bodies join; there's happiness.
#25 - Shadow
The first time Eusine saw glowing red eyes staring at him from the darkness of a cupboard, he was scared out of a couple years of growth; these days, he just laughs and braces himself as Morty's Gengar glomps him.
#26 - Goodbye
He can't believe Aunt Agatha's gone, she was always so alive, so crotchety and cantankerous and nosy and alive, and he can't even weep at the funeral because he's sure that it's all somehow a mistake, that any minute now she's going to hobble over and start scolding everyone; he squeezes his eyes shut in denial, and Eusine puts an arm around his shoulders.
#27 - Hide
There's something to be said for hiding what you are, especially in an imperfect world like this one, but Eusine can't see it; looking at the jewel Morty placed on his finger, he wants to climb to the top of the Bell Tower with a megaphone and shout out his love to the world.
#28 - Fortune
Just when he'd finally and completely given up on the idea of winning a Blessed Servant's favour, just when he'd convinced himself that it would do more harm than good anyway, Raikou-Guardian of Bright Desire-appeared and chose him; he accepted the honour and the joy with pure amazement, and thought to himself that the ways of the gods were more mysterious than he'd ever guessed.
#29 - Safe
Theoretically Morty knows that openly carrying on a relationship with another man has put him in no small amount of danger, and he's reminded of this every time he finds hate mail on his doormat or obscenities spraypainted on the wall of his Gym; nevertheless, he's never felt safer in his life than he does with Eusine's arms around him.
#30 - Ghost
"If you're going to be travelling in the wild all the time, you should have a Pokémon with you," says Morty, pressing the Gastly's Pokéball into Eusine's hand.
#31 - Book
"What are you doing reading a horror novel?" Eusine asks, disbelievingly; Morty replies that ghost stories are so inaccurate they're just funny, laughing at his friend's surprised expression as well as at the book.
#32 - Eye
Purple eyes are supposed(in bad romantic novels)to remind one of amethysts, or maybe violets; Morty's eyes make Eusine think of thunderclouds or bruises, the shadow-stuff of a Mismagius, or Suicune's shimmering cloak.
#33 - Never
Blue eyes blink up at him, sleepy and confused, then they focus and a small, hoarse voice whispers his name; Morty should say something, but words have abandoned him, and he can only press his face against that pale neck, and eventually mumble, "Never scare me like that again."
#34 - Sing
Eusine's done listening desperately for the singing of the wind, the belling voices of the Lords Upon The Land, so he just stands there gobsmacked when out of nowhere there's suddenly a pair of wild red eyes gazing into his, and the music of the storm becomes a word; Mine!
#35 - Sudden
It wasn't so very sudden, really, it had been happening for as long as they'd known each other, he'd just never noticed, but nevertheless, when Morty kissed him for the first time, it felt cataclysmic, the sharply-delineated end of all his life so far and the beginning of something gloriously new.
#36 - Stop
"I love him," Morty's eyes are dangerous, "and I will not stop loving him to please you, whatever you think the gods want; if you ask me, you're the depraved ones, you're the ones who drove the sun and moon away with your cruelty, you're the ones the gods pity!"
#37 - Time
It's that moment of intense, charged stillness, the moment before the dawn, the shiver of an egg about to hatch, the curtain just about to rise, the band about to play; that moment when everything's electric, when Morty tenses and moans his name, any second, any second now...
#38 - Wash
"Well what did you think would happen if you put red things in with whites?" demands Eusine, retrieving his damp and faded bowtie as Morty stares in horror at a washing machine full of pale pink cargo pants.
#39 - Torn
Being sincerely religious and just as sincerely gay is no picnic; people who accept the one ofttimes can't accept the other, so that either way, Eusine had to deny part of himself, and he'd given up on ever finding anyone who would understand...until, completely out of the blue, he met someone who did.
#40 - History
It was what had brought them together, way back in the very beginning; Eusine had been newly arrived in Ecruteak, and a girl in the library told him "the Gym Leader knows lots about the legends-why don't you try talking to him?"
#41 - Power
They're both strong personalities, and sometimes they feel the need to assert that, to struggle for dominance as it were, and, well, there's a lot you can do with a scarf like that...
#42 - Bother
Morty grumbles to himself as he gets up and drags on clothes; dammit, Eusine's right there, in his bed, he has better things to do than Gym work!
#43 - God
They murmur the sacraments together, kneeling before the altar, feeling the presence of a greatness beyond mortal ken, submitting in willing devotion to the will of the gods, attaining Balance.
#44 - Wall
If the back wall of Ecruteak Gym could talk, what stories it could tell...
#45 - Naked
The first time, he stood hesitant and shaking, unsure of himself-had Morty ever seen another man like this, had he wanted to, did it disgust him, was this all a mistake-and he might have said something, but Morty just stared at him and said in a murmur that was almost a growl, "Gods, gods, you're so beautiful," and Eusine just had time to notice that those staring eyes were full of awe and desire, before Morty slipped his face between his legs, and he forgot how to think.
#46 - Drive
Raikou likes to stick its head out of the car window, just like the Growlithe Eusine's family owned when he was small did; he can't help but choke back an irreverent laugh at that, apologising immediately for the blasphemy, but the legendary beast just gives him a very humorous look.
#47 - Harm
Sometimes the Sight shows Morty not what will be but what might have been, if only; he shudders at the vision, of another version of himself, with another Eusine, a Eusine so eaten up inside with obsession that he can't see out of it anymore, angry, needy and abusive; when his Eusine sees the shaken look on his face and asks what's wrong, he tries to evade the question, but eventually he cracks and tells him about that other world-the one where Morty hides bruises and flinches when he's screamed at and waits hopelessly for the person he loves to stop doing this to him and come home-and receives a tight hug, a kiss on the forehead and a fervently whispered, "This other me is an idiot; I would never do that to you."
#48 - Precious
The Ecruteak girls are cute, and very eager to pounce their handsome young Gym Leader, and Morty likes spending time with them, likes going out with them, but lately he can't go on a date with a girl without thinking that something's missing; some spark that he's never known, so why can he see it so clearly, the look in eyes that gaze at him as if he's made of gold...
#49 - Hunger
Morty licks grease from his fingers absently, and Eusine reflects that his boyfriend may be the only person in the world who can look sexy eating pizza.
#50 - Believe
He lost faith, once, faith in the gods and faith in himself; but Morty was there for him, and now faith flows through him like a river, because when Morty smiles at him, he has absolute proof beyond all doubting of the love and glory of the gods.