Every story begins with a once upon a time.
Once upon a time, there was a girl - or once upon a time, there lived a boy. The other children tell her it's old fashioned, but she doesn't care - there's a magical quality to that phrase, somehow, the way it just makes everything seem special.
This story begins with a little girl twelve years old, with rather pretty golden hair - 'like a princess', her father always says - and rather pretty blue eyes - 'like the ocean', her mother tells her with a smile.
That little girl's name is Serena, and she grows up with all the stars in the world in her pretty blue eyes.
She dreams of becoming a Gym Leader. The other little girls draw pictures of cottages and castles. She draws a massive ice-palace that glitters like a sculpture carved fro diamond; she draws gardens with roses made from spun-glass, Spheal and Dewgong grazing on frozen lakes.
Her teacher gushes, what a pretty, imaginative child she is; how she'll go far in life, she will.
She is sixteen years old and just about to embark on her Pokémon journey when a new boy moves into the empty house next door.
Vaniville is a small town, and it's only good manners, her mother says, to be neighbourly. And so Serena goes over, the next day, with an assortment of desserts, fresh hot from the oven.
The door opens quickly enough, and a pair of wary grey eyes appear in the doorway. A woman's voice, rather harsh, asks who she is.
She dips her head, graceful, and smiles sweet and pretty - "Serena, I'm from next door," she says, "Welcome to Vani -" An arm reaches through the door, grabs the plate, and a muttered thank you is heard before the door slams shut.
It takes all her sixteen years' worth of graciousness to retreat from the house without saying a word.
She finds the boy in the woods alone.
She'd seen him before, through the windows of that house that she's striven to avoid ever since the first day - a boy around her age, with messy dark hair and rather ill-fitting clothes that she immediately dislikes.
"You should be careful," she says, trying to keep the antagonism out of her tone, "there are wild Pokémon here."
He turns to look at her with wary grey eyes. His gaze is somewhat disconcerting.
"I know," he tells her, and then quite suddenly, grins. It's a nice smile, she notices, with an strange feeling in her chest - it quite changes his entire demeanour.
"Isn't that the fun of it, though?"
Quite against her will, the pair spend the summer becoming the best of friends. She introduces him to Shauna, Tierno and Trevor. They never talk about his family.
They embark on the journey together, sleeping under the styles, eating cups of ramen by the campfire. They train and they battle; Serena painstakingly puts together a beautiful team of Ice Pokémon, Calem makes do with whatever he manages to capture, and somewhere along the line, they become more than just friends.
He tells her about his family - how his parents got divorced when he was three years old. She tells him about the Eevee that belonged to her grandparents, and how much she'd cried when it died. They get stronger and they fall harder, and whenever they walk into cafés people comment on what a beautiful couple they make, and Serena can't help but think about how perfect everything is, and oh, how she wishes this could last forever.
But finally, they both wear eight shining badges on the interior of their jackets.
"I'm going to take on the Pokémon League," Calem tells her. "And then I'm going to go to Hoenn, and then Sinnoh, and Johto, and Kanto. I'm going to travel all over the world."
"Come with me, Rena?"
He turns to her and smiles, but it's slightly sad and very different from the one she remembers. He knows her too well, knows about the ice-palace that still glitters in her dreams, just waiting.
It's her happily ever after, and it's so close.
So she doesn't answer, just presses a light kiss on the corner of his mouth. "You'll come back for me, won't you?" she murmurs.
"'Course I will, Rena," he tells her, looks at her with those familar, beautiful grey eyes.
"Give me a proper smile, then," she says, and he laughs, but his eyes don't sparkle the way they should.
It doesn't work out, her happily ever after.
She goes to Snowbelle to train, and quickly works her way to the top - Wulfric is happy to cede the title of Gym Leader to her - but she's young and the gym is small and the authorities don't take her seriously. They don't give her a lot of funding, and she tries her best, she does - but the Snowbelle Gym remains small, with little traffic, and her beautifully crafted team soon becomes restless and fidgety, and so does she.
They never tell you how lonely it is being stuck in a freezing gym all day.
The Ace Trainers at her Gym are company, but they're all Snowbelle locals and they've known each other since they were children. The Ace Trainers all go home at night, and she's left to curl up at in the backroom of the gym by herself.
She never manages to turn the gym into the sparkling ice palace of her dreams. And four years later, she finally gives up.
( She supposes an ice-palace would've been impractical, anyway. The heating costs would've been astronomical. )
After she leaves Snowbelle, she beelines straight for Lumiose City - after years of freezing cold, the light and warmth of Lumiose are more than welcome.
She spends her days in a blur of CVs and job applications, circling through endless part-time jobs - selling Galettes, grooming Furfrous, waitressing at cafés.
There aren't a lot of job openings for ex-Gym Leaders, no matter how pretty or imaginative you might be, after all, she thinks bitterly to herself.
She still receives letters - from Shauna, who'd long since run off to Johto with a boy called Ethan, and who writes endlessly about some of Johto fashion trend (kimonos, she thinks they're called); Tierno has opened a dance school in Hoenn, and Trevor is a research assistant with Professor Sycamore.
She never receives any letters from him.
She tells herself not to care - that they are finished, ended - but at night she dreams of butterfly kisses and grey eyes, and she wakes up every morning with the bitter taste of hope in her mouth.
He never does come back for her.
She sees him on TV, sometimes - League Champion in five regions. He's always giving interviews to different people, always travelling to different cities and doing charity runs, demonstration battles, leveling workshops.
He hasn't talked to her, not once in six years.
She works as a receptionist in Hotel Richissime, now - walks around in heels and crisp black suits and wears her beautiful golden hair slicked back into a tight bun. She smiles prettily and dips her head gracefully, Welcome to Hotel Richissime, how may I help you? and avoids the gazes of passing young Trainers.
One day she sees an interview on TV, and they ask him if there's anyone waiting back for him at home in Kalos.
He hesitates, and then, with a smile - a smile that never reaches his eyes, that doesn't light up his face like it used to - he shakes his head.
She doesn't let herself cry. She won't, because she is Serena Bellrose, she is twenty-five years old and she is too tired, too numb, too broken.
So she smiles.
"Hello, welcome to Hotel Richissime. How may I help you?"
Every story begins with a once upon a time, but not all of them get a happily ever after.
( You may look like a princess, darling, but that doesn't mean you belong in a fairy-tale. )