category: Pokémon
world: game
disclaimer: I don't own it.
notes: An homage to my first game, and what a landmark in my childhood it was to have reached this ending point in the game. To Battle Frontier I said screw it! I always played as the girl character, yes, but I figured it'd be more interesting to have her instead as the defeated rival.
She leaves Evergrande discreetly, without a glance backwards at the singing birds and swaying tulips. In the building behind her she feels her father scurrying around excitedly and the Elite Four still applauding and Wallace leading the new champion into a claustrophobic hall with beaming screens and a mirrored floor and two doors sliding shut a breadth from her nose.
To think that she had ran up to him and tried to offer him advice before challenging his final foe when he had already claimed the pinnacle of everything that mattered. She feels utterly stupid and suddenly very tired. She releases her freshly-evolved (and for nothing, she can't help but mutter) wailord once she reaches the shore and steps ankle-deep into the warm water lapping at her toes. She should be rejuvenated with the touch of the sweet sea but she is only weary. The one thing to smooth her splitting ends now is the twining embrace of home.
x
Halfway to Pacifidlog, she realizes she doesn't want to meet the darting eyes of a dozen swimmers eager to anger with their useless tentacool, and she turns right back around the way she came. She almost feels her tropius rattling in its pokéball, begging to be let out, but she is not in the mood to have her hair stiffen with frost and the sky's dew and see happy people loitering a hundred feet below her.
When she hits shore at Lilycove, it has been half a day and the sun is hot on the back of her neck. She punches the buttons on the roof of the department store with an anxious vigor in her movement and gulps a lemonade as fast as she ever had. With a soda pop and two waters tucked carefully inside the shaded coolness of her backpack, she unfolds her bicycle onto the stoned streets and begins to pedal.
x
Endless water is always at her right. She is separated from it by a stretching picket fence, but under the blinders of her goggles, she imagines sometimes that it comes closer and closer to her until her wheels lose their grip on slick sand and she collapses.
Once, she sees a flying shape above-head and comes to a delusional conclusion that it must be a familiar swellow.
Her foot comes off a pedal and she leans the bike to a stop. She wipes at her temples with what had once been a handkerchief and tries not to ponder great things.
After that, she does not see the orange-lit sea anymore.
x
In the very early evening, she is on a winding tributary on Route 119. She gets down on her hands and knees at a point and manages to roll under a bush into a wide hole. Her secret base is all damp soil and musty earthen walls, but she feels relieved for a brief moment. After basking in the cool shade for a while and drinking water very slowly, she rummages in a cubby for any food she had left on earlier trips. Her foot catches on a joke spin mat in a corner and she whips around once, twice before coming to a halt on tipsy feet.
All the fresh water and some of early breakfast spills out of her stomach in a fell movement. She sits unmoving for a long time (again) and crawls out of the hole filled with nostalgia and a sharp tang of astringency at the first moment she can stand up. All the berry trees outside the bush are emptied quickly and the contents stuffed into a pocket of her backpack, and she leaves the area in a rush.
x
She doesn't make it very far afterwards as a thick night envelops the route. Halfway between Fortree and tall grass and splashing ponds and Mauville and rocky slopes, she decides to camp out under a tree for a few hours. It goes without thinking that she won't be able to sleep, but she'd like to keep up a vague pretence of her journey days. She thinks for a bit and comes to the realization that she'd give an arm, a leg, and her pokénav to go back to those times. Had it only been a month, she wonders?
Her stomach pawing at her insides, she fishes out a handful of picked berries and gnaws at them emptily. Her favorite is the bitter aguav, she decides.
She hopes the only witnesses of the wetness of failure on her cheeks are the stars.
x
She catches up to him at daybreak the next day, and does not even remember when he could have surpassed her. He is passed out near the water's edge with fluttering eyelids and a gently-rising chest, hand tightly clutched around his belt of redandwhite balls, and she almost wants to kick him in an unexpected bout of frustration.
She settles for placing his hat on her own head (protection from the burning sun, she tells herself) and starting off again.
x
They ride together for the rest of the day. He does not take back his hat, and she lets him do the talking. Just like that, their parts are set in stone.
"Did you end up catching that feebas?" he asks her teasingly soon before they reach Mauville, already knowing the answer.
She shakes her head no, and tries to animate her face through the motions as she relates the sorry day spent fishing up and down 119.
She thinks she did well, until she catches a sideward glimpse of him turning his head in a surreptitious grimace of a frown.
x
They're passing through Oldale, noses twitching with anticipation, when she gathers the fleeting pieces of courage to congratulate him properly.
"I'm proud of you," she manages to choke out, and the I wish you could be as proud of me, goes unsaid.
"I owe you for everything," he chooses to respond. The sounds of their pedals mix into the rising breeze, and they push onward.
He smiles at her, she smiles back – one day, they will be all right.
x
The expanse of sky is pitch when she sees the front lamps of their houses flickering against the wind. They pull up together on the curb, and suddenly she does not know what to say. Standing in the middle of his front walk, she twiddles her thumbs and bites her lip. She feels something seeping out of her in a constant movement. Something is about to sputter to a bittersweet end.
After a few minutes of solitary thinking, she watches him blink out of a faraway reverie. He moves to fold up his bicycle, and runs a hand through his blown hair. She simply stands, and waits. Her foot is just moving backward onto her forgotten bed of begonias when Brendan turns.
He does not say anything, but presses his hand into the crook of her elbow carefully. "Good night, May."
She in turn squeezes his warm fingers and sighs out a world of closure. "Good night, Brendan."
He moves into a house full of light and warmth and does not look back.
When she opens her front door, everything is dark and she breathes dirt and must.
She can hear the excited shuffling of his mother next door; maybe his father is even back.
Her parents are in a gym in a city that is not here. She does not think they know she has returned.
May shrugs off her worn backpack onto her desk upstairs and carefully drapes her belt of pokémon across the back of a hard, wooden chair. She falls onto a bed that she has never really slept in, and aches for a campfire and moving sand and dusty caves and shifting water and hissing magma.
She falls asleep very late, to a lingering taste of vanishing friendship and rising wistfulness.
notes: Meh. I punched this out in two hours, and I don't know it's the best I could have done, but the inspiration was eating away at me. For anyone who cares, I'm planning on doing a whole bunch of random drabbles about Brendan/May in random places in Emerald. It's my favorite game, and I remember it as prominent backdrop for my childhood. Stay tuned for that, if you're interested.