note: this didn't turn out to be quite as epic as I would have liked it to be.
let's dance this out
01. When Lyra is eight, she has this habit of sitting on the veranda in mild summer nights, dressed in sweaters that are at least five sizes too big, and staring at the sky. During these nights, she never goes to bed and her mother has stopped bothering to make her long ago. Besides, it's not like she can't keep an eye on her daughter or Lyra is completely alone—Ethan, the neighbour's son, accompanies her every time, pulling a blanket over and a pillow under her as soon as she's fallen asleep.
Until one night in mid-July.
The crickets are playing one symphony after the other and the stars wink at Lyra like clever, devious conspirators. A church's clock tower announces that it's eleven now; Ethan usually arrives around eight. She considers throwing rocks at his window or maybe even ringing the doorbell, but (her) dreams about friendly men in familiar sweatshirts are bribing her out of her consciousness before she can. She'll wake up, only a couple of hours later, freezing, go back inside the house to lock herself up in the bathroom and pull the hood over her face.
She won't leave until Ethan will come over in the late morning of the next day, after having been forced to by his mother. ("Be a man, boy," she'll instruct dictatorially.)
"Hey," he'll greet Lyra creatively, not really knowing what he's doing at all. "Don't you wanna head out to the beach and look for some seashells?"
There'll be silence, much heavier than any blanket he has ever laid or could lay upon her.
Then she'll say: "You didn't come."
Ethan will reply nothing to this; won't be a strong shoulder for her to lean on; won't distract her into anything. She's always behaved weird, still, this goes beyond the scope, and he won't stay the only boy to be of this opinion.
She should just abandon those sweaters and the man who they once belonged to, he'll just think, instinctively predicting he will not even be her second choice.
02. When Lyra is ten, she has this dream of great championships and fame and other deceiving things like that, and fathers eventually coming back to their forgotten homes.
On a sunny April afternoon, her first pokémon only one stone's cast away (she can practically smell The Day approaching), she perceives an angry-looking redhead lurking around Professor Elm's laboratory she has never seen before here in Newbark Town. The stare and generally large amount of attention he donates the building's windows send an unusual feeling down her spinal cord, causing her to step forward and out of the role of this timid, little girl next door she always used to fill out so nicely.
"What are you doing there?" she asks, loud enough for him to hear but by no means accusing or insulting.
"Nothing," the redhead barks, his voice reminding her of the growl of a houndoom, albeit it is not nearly as blood-lusting. "Leave me alone!" Jerkily, he pushes her away from him so that she falls on the ground, hard.
Lyra feels both indignant and intrigued by the sensation of underlying significance this (chance?) meeting seems to inhere.
And this sensation does not betray her, as she indeed meets the redhead again and again and again. Although, mostly, they solely battle against each other on these occasions, she does find out one thing or two about him: He calls himself simply 'Silver' and her a pathetic loser, but he never wins a single fight. (She concludes he must have severe issues with losing—maybe even an inferiority complex.) He behaves anti-social and unfriendly to other people, especially her.
And even so, Lyra finds herself looking forward to her encounters with Silver during her journey through Johto. In an indescribably strange way, he makes her feel alive. Much more alive than the flickering rips of memories and old sweaters used to.
03. When Lyra is ten and a half, she is being introduced to Ethan's grandparents. They are a sweet, elderly couple, living and running the Day Care at the edge of Goldenrod City, where the majority of the houses is as white as the vests of their owners.
She isn't sure for whom it is more awkward—Ethan or her.
(He, as the honest and honourable young boy he is, still bears the guilt of the one night in July he has not kept her company. She would like to do something, to tell him that she's fine now for example, that she has other things (people) of interest now, yet the words won't leave her mouth, for some reason.)
"Are you Ethan's girlfriend?" his grandmother asks, smiling warmly at her, and the wrinkles around her eyes deepen. She glows with youth; Lyra suddenly feels weak and confused and unbelievably old.
"No," she says and pretends she doesn't see Ethan cringe.
04. When Lyra is eleven, she knows Silver is Giovanni's son. All the hints and the alikeness of their eyes and—she just does. She also knows she shouldn't but can't help wondering if it's better to have that kind of father or to have none at all.
05. When Lyra is twelve, she becomes the Champion of Johto and (shortly after) Kanto. She is famous now, just like she wanted, 'for the many achievements she has at this young age already', according to one of the various articles that have been published about her recently. Camera teams and journalists of renowned TV shows and magazines interview her on a regular basis, the most frequent enquiry always being: "Do you get many challengers?"
It's stupid to ask about something like that, she thinks at the end of yet another question session with some people whose names or origin she has forgotten right after hearing them, because that's what matters the least.
(No, she doesn't get any. Every time it's her who does the challenging, on Mondays and Wednesdays.)
On bad days (meaning the weekends) she calls her mother and talks to her about the weather. She can't quite summon the strength or bravery for anything more.
As soon as Monday finally kicks in, she instantaneously rushes back to Dragon's Den, where Silver resides nowadays. The battles are intensive and short and raw, and they have never been the reason for coming here, not even for one minute. (They do, however, act as magnificent distractions.)
06. When Lyra is thirteen, this routine of pretence crumbles and so does she.
It's three o'clock in the morning and she sits in front of Dragon's Den, silently waiting for dawn to arrive. The utter loneliness of her empty daily life has caught up with her; trapped her and rammed its canines deep into her heart (soul). Battling with Silver is the only thing she has left that distinguishes her from a ghost anymore, which itself is worth being depressed for.
"What on Earth are you doing here, brat?" Silver demands, his face split in two halves: a dark and a light one. The tone of his voice is a soft shade of grey and nothing like it sounded just last week. Lyra wonders if that is what darkness does to people like him.
"Is your father dead?" she asks back.
He shifts slightly (taking a few steps back into the shadows) and shoots her something in between a glare and a flicker of dusty curiosity.
"Do you wish he was?" she continues and, as an afterthought, adds, "I've never had one. A father, I mean."
Silver snorts and she almost expects him to shake his head in a disapproving manner. "You're crying over someone you don't even know."
Lyra's eyes narrow, cueing a few tears to spill out, naturally. And she says, "So what."
And he says, "So don't."
She feels like this should mean something; like she should do something—anything—just to be conclusive, but as fast as the moment has come it's gone, so she plainly lifts herself up, dries her eyes and leaves. It's the first Monday she spends at Blackthorn in her apartment in a long (so very long) time.
07. Ethan visits her on Wednesday and, for a millisecond, Lyra ponders whether he knows she's stopped going to Dragon's Den or whether this is just another way of The Inevitable screwing with her.
"Why are you here?" she enquires, sounding less casual and a lot more agitated than she would have liked.
"I've seen Silver," he answers and purposefully avoids looking at her, because. That's just who he is. "Coming out of Professor Elm's lab. I—I thought you ought to know."
Lyra toys with the idea of being defensive and snapping something like: "What makes you think so?" Then she reminds herself that she has given up on trying to keep stupid, pointless remarks like this one in conversations with him already half her life ago.
Wordlessly, she opens the door and motions him outside.
For the first time during the years we've known each other, she finally lets me be correct, Ethan thinks bitterly, grinning like the hero('s sidekick) he is, as he steps outside into the sun. (He's never truly had a chance.)
08. It takes Lyra a week to sum up enough courage to return to Dragon's Den once again. She's drugged herself confident with sentences such as, "I am the Champion so I should be able to do this, at least," or, "This will NOT be the most degrading thing I've ever done." (But, actually, those are nothing more than meaningless set-phrases—her mind is filled with crowds of questions wanting to be answered; with hopefully delusional 'we's and 'together's.)
Angrily she starts shouting Silver's name in front of the Den's entrance until, finally, he comes out, disgruntled, as though she has woken him up. (She probably has.) He doesn't say anything but just stands there, looking grotesquely distant. It makes her hesitate for a moment. Then she shakes the image off and averts her gaze to the ground, hissing, "What were you doing in Newbark?"
Silver's face brakes into an ugly grimace, which is most likely supposed to be a leer, yet he appears more pained than anything else. "What, did your little love slave tell you?"
"Ethan isn't—"
"Who said I was talking about him?" He crosses his arms in front of his chest, smirking haughtily at her, although the pained expression from before is never, not once, leaving his features. For a moment, Lyra considers the option of just going back to her apartment and to get some silence. This thought, however, is easily dismissed again, as she has already fallen too deep(ly over him) to simply leave now.
"JUST ANSWER ME!" she bellows from the top of her lungs; afterwards they hurt in a very agonising, alive sort of way and she can hardly breathe anymore, but she also feels lighter, somehow. Slowly, she slumps down into a huddle and begins to cry. (Absentmindedly, she wonders why she always ends up humiliating herself in front of Silver of all people.)
09. He lets her stay and neither of them ever utter one single word about it. That's just one of these things that go unspoken, she guesses. Why he allows her this privilege—out of compassion, understanding or a whim—he probably isn't even sure of himself. (Although, as they both know, he isn't fond of hypocritical emotions like the first two.)
Living with Silver is incredibly odd and new to her. It's pretty nice here, especially compared to her old, dead apartment crammed with too many self-destructive 'what if's, and 'could have been's, and imaginary family pictures she's lost count of.
10. When Lyra is fourteen, she still lives together with Silver, and gradually, they're beginning to really get to know each other(—it's kind of unavoidable when you share pretty much every day of your life with each other.)
She learns that he is the literal opposite of a morning person and needs fifteen minutes at the minimum to be able to wake and stand up properly. She learns that he is a sweet tooth, although he's trying to hide it from the world ('the world' first and foremost meaning her), but never cooks or bakes something sweet whenever it's his week of kitchen duty.
She learns that he only trains his pokémon during the hours before dawn and after dusk, because he is constantly afraid someone might see him and attempt to spy on his tactics, and always brings back some kind of souvenir (yesterday it was a pretty white quartz stone, today it's a maple leaf, and tomorrow it'll be a shard of emerald glass). She learns that he keeps those in old bottles which are definitely souvenirs from somewhere, as well.
She learns that he has a restless sleep and keeps tossing and turning and that the only thing capable of stopping it is stroking his hair softly and assuring him that everything is going to be all right.
11. When Lyra wakes up one day, Silver isn't there and doesn't return until the sun is only barely capable of keeping itself above the horizon anymore and the first stars begin to pierce the sky. He brings some giant, (disturbingly) muscled men with him who are carrying a huge wooden bed into the Den.
"I want the money back," he informs her subtly, as they watch the the men place the bed beside his own disproportionately small one. (And it's funny because, while he's been out, she's cancelled the contract for her apartment.)
The next day they head out to Blackthorn to officially start her move. Except there isn't really much to move (as almost everything she owns she usually keeps in her bag) but a lot to throw away.
Around noon on the third day of their moving project she locks herself into her old bedroom, in order to store away the old sweaters into one single nondescript-looking cardboard box without Silver noticing anything. It figures that he figures this out right away.
"You don't even know him," he mumbles through the door, sounding muffled and sullen.
"And exactly that's why!" Lyra snarls, and it hurts. Much more than it did before, when she was still little and innocent and heartless. Now that she is who she is—an admired celebrity (adult) in a teenage body—she doesn't know what to do, because she's used to saving herself, but it's stopped working.
"SHUT UP. HE'S NOT WORTH IT!"
That's probably the most heroic thing Silver has ever said, she thinks, almost amusedly, and wonders if this is just some cruel, messed up plan to make her lose to him.
"Don't you dare cry over a guy like him who won't even show himself to his daughter when she's become Champion! That kind of disgusting person doesn't deserve being called fath—"
Lyra slams the door open into his face and buries hers in the nape of his neck, inhaling and exhaling so sharply to a point where it doesn't even sting anymore.
12. When Lyra is fifteen, she takes Silver to Newbark Town to formally introduce him to her mother. Inwardly, she's been dreading this day, fearing he might disappoint her mother's expectations, but, stunningly, the whole evening goes down rather smoothly. It's weird, normally everyone tells them how different they are and how they will never work out, there's just no frigging way they will, yet they aren't so very different at all. In fact, they are pretty much alike. Or so her mother says, at least, as she stands in the doorframe to send them off. She seems exhausted in a way, and a lot older than Lyra remembers.
Before they leave, she hands her mother the box with the sweatshirts in it, those she's stolen once, as a small eight-year-old, and says, "I'm sorry."
She is. But not for herself.
FIN.