AN: For Round 12 of the QFLC. I chose to do a crossover using the Games category, using Pokémon - specifically this is set in Soul Silver's version of Johto. The prompts I used for this story are silver, the nursery rhyme Five Little Ducks, and letter. (Prompts 6, 9, and 13 respectively.)
The title for this story comes from the Five Little Ducks. I would honestly have loved to make this a longer story - but again, there is a 3K word limit, and anymore and I feel like I wouldn't have been able to end it, lol.
Total word count: 2,643 (according to FFnet)
Harry squints up at the sky, shielding his eyes from the sun's glare with an upraised hand. He frowns. Tree branches rustle in the wind, apathetic to him. Something yowls behind him, hidden by the bushes.
Harry glares at the sky.
It looks… different, somehow. It's still blue, still vast. Just a lot more vast than Harry remembers. It seems impossibly big, clear of any smog. Just crystal blue and fluffy white clouds and weirdly shaped birds high, high above.
Also, he's completely surrounded by ancient ruins. Behind him is the archway that spat him out - the other side of the Veil, he guesses. It looks sun-bleached, and has weird symbols carved into. Harry can only feel a faint hum from it. It seems unlikely to let him go back to the Ministry.
Harry has no idea where the bloody hell he is.
He frowns. He looks around him again. He closes his eyes and counts to ten.
When he opens them, the ruins are still there. He is still bleeding slightly from the cut on his chin. There is still some creature that he has never heard before yowling behind him in the scraggly looking bushes that have managed to grow through the dilapidated stones.
On the bright side, he still has his wand.
So, here's the thing.
Harry and quite a few of his friends were fighting Death Eaters in the Department of Mysteries after having been lured there by Volde-bloody-mort.
On hindsight, that was a terrible idea. He could have tried to contact Remus to check on Sirius, or even Mrs. Weasley. Fighting in the Department of Ministries was also a terrible idea. Case in point, when Sirius showed up to save Harry, he was almost shoved through a mysterious portal to another dimension, and could have died. Sirius didn't fall through the Veil thankfully, but that was only because Harry pushed him out of the way and fell into the Veil himself.
A firefight in rooms full of strange and potentially dangerous objects was all around one of Harry's worse ideas.
Now, he's staring at the biggest snake that he's ever seen outside of a zoo in the face. It's purple. It has a strange yellow, red, and black pattern on its hood that looks like a leering face.
This is completely bizarre.
"Stupid human, wandering into my territory! So skinny, so small - I'll eat it whole," it hisses, rising up to tower over him. It's hood flutters dramatically.
"I'm a he," Harry tells it, because he can't think of anything else to say that isn't 'why are you purple.'
The purple… snake rears back, hissing in surprise. Harry is a bit at a loss as to why he can differentiate between hisses.
"Small human, you can speak?" It says to him. It slithers closer in interest, its head bobbing up and down as it moved. It circles him twice before Harry realises that it's coiled around him in a big, loose circle. "I thought your kind just made stupid noises."
Harry looks at the snake with trepidation. "We can speak to each other, but not many can speak this language," he says as it leans closer. He leans back, turning his head away from its tongue. He tries not to feel disgusted by the rancid smell coming from it. "Speaking of which, have you seen any other humans? I'm lost, see, and I would really appreciate if you could just - "
The snake leans closer, swaying from side to side.
"You smell different," the snake says.
Harry sighs.
As it turns out, he's in a completely different world. The not-a-snake-but-a-magnificent-Arbok directs him to a place called Violet City, and by the time that Harry reaches the city he has encountered a whole menagerie of creatures that not even the Magical world could boast.
They're kind of dangerous, too. They attack him with these weird attacks that either use their body or the nature around them, and Harry has used Protego more in the last three hours than he has the last month.
And the people he's met!
They all ran up to him and yelled about challenges, and left very quickly when they discovered he had no 'Pokémon' with him, but not before lecturing him about traveling without Pokémon.
Harry is both overwhelmed and underwhelmed when he discovers that the 'city' is little more than a town at best. He'd expected a lot more, but at the same time it is nothing like what he expected.
It's a town with an amazingly large population of fifty-two, for one. It's apparently the second largest city in Johto, which is the other thing that definitely confirms that Harry is definitely not in England.
Harry is so in over his head that he is spinning, absolutely delirious with hysterics.
He's hyperventilating at the edge of town - he refused to call it a city, for Merlin's sake, Little Whinging had more people than this place, and less of a giant rodent problem. Curled into himself, hiding behind the massive trees that surrounded basically everywhere, Harry takes the time to actually consider what happened to him. What could happen to him.
Harry has no idea how he's even going to get home. He doesn't have any of the currency they have here. He doesn't even have identification or anything, Merlin, what is he going to do, he doesn't even know what's dangerous here or if there's anyone else with magic -
"Um, excuse me, are you alright?" says someone from behind him. Harry stands, quickly twisting around to face the stranger and shuffle backwards at the same time. He almost trips on a tree root. That move was a lot easier to do in a castle with stone floors, Harry notes with a grimace.
The woman in front of him is dressed in a light pink cotton dress, her hair and eyes are a pleasant, common brown, and the laugh lines around her eyes make her look very friendly. On the other hand she also has one of those creatures on her shoulder; a massive bird with a wicked looking beak and narrowed eyes trained on him.
"Uh, hi," Harry says. "Um."
She looks at him shrewdly, head tilted slightly to the side. The bird imitates her perfectly. "You don't look alright," she says. "Your forehead's bleeding." She frowns.
"Oh, no," Harry says, still dazed by the giant bird on her shoulder. It's not attacking either of them. He thought these creatures were all rabid, but he's clearly wrong. "That's dried blood. It stopped a while ago."
She frowns even more. She somehow manages to look as unimpressed as Professor McGonnagall manages on occasions reserved for pure stupidity.
"Right. Ah, thanks for your concern - ?"
"Let's get you to the Poké Center, young man. It looks like you need medical attention."
The bird squawks out something that sounds like 'pidgeot.'
Mariam, the nice lady who's kind of pushy, brings him to a sleek looking building with an orange roof.
Then the nurse there starts fussing - his cuts are bandaged, his bruises iced, and his scratches cleaned up in record time. The only bump in the road is when she begins asking him questions.
"It doesn't seem like you have a concussion," Nurse Joy says, scribbling something down on the clipboard she held. "But we'll go over the standard questions just in case."
"Sure," Harry says. With the adrenaline gone his whole body aches. He's tempted to ask for painkillers, but he doesn't really need them, and he really would rather have a clear mind until further notice.
Nurse Joy smiles. "Do you know your name?"
"Harry Potter," Harry says.
"What's today's date?"
"Uh, eighteenth of June?"
"Two days off," she says with a frown. "Do you remember what happened? How you got hit on your head, that is."
"Um," Harry says. He does remember, quite vividly actually. It was from the shards of Prophecy Records that had shattered overhead during the fight, but it wasn't like he could tell her that. "Uh," he says, unable to come up with a good excuse.
Nurse Joy frowns more, clucking at him in concern. "You don't remember? Oh dear. That might be a sign of amnesia."
Harry latches on to the idea. "Really? That might explain why I don't remember anything important. Where am I? What country is this? What're those creatures that keep attacking people?"
The frown on Nurse Joy becomes so deep that her smile lines are no longer smile lines. Harry is giving her so much frown lines. He fidgets, ducking his head sheepishly.
"I think I need to speak with the lady that brought you here," she says.
Mariam is a very nice lady. Very kind and generous. After speaking with Nurse Joy, she offers to take Harry in and help him until he recovers his memories. Either that, or until he's able to fend for himself.
"I don't mind," Mariam tells him as they clean out her daughter's room. "Ever since Helene went out on her Pokémon adventure the house has been too quiet." She hands him some bed linings.
Harry takes the pillow case and jams the pillow into it. "How old is she again?" he asks, taking a glance outside. He briefly considers the ani - Pokémon that he's seen so far. He has seen snakes as big as he is. He has seen giant bee-wasp-things with more than one stinger. He has never hated nature more.
"Oh, fourteen." Mariam says breezily. "A bit older than when kids usually start out, these days, but I wouldn't let her go." Harry's eyebrows raise. The kids here had more guts than half of the fifteen year olds in his year.
She looks down at the bed sheets she's adjusting. "I miss her terribly," she adds quietly.
Harry looks away, back to the pillow he's abusing. He jams it more firmly into the pillow case.
At one point, Mariam wheedles Harry enough that he tells her that his first memory in Johto was waking up in the Ruins of Alph. He didn't know the names of them, but when he described them, Mariam recognised the ruins that were very close to Violet City.
She sends a letter to her daughter to see if she knows any more about the Ruins.
In the letter back Mariam receives via an actual metal bird - a Skymory or Skarmory or whatever, it doesn't matter because what does matter is that it's a giant metal bird with actual metal wings that can slice Harry quite easily in half, and it answers to Gemma - Harry learns about what kind of people inhabit Johto.
Helene is a very put-together girl. Very level headed. The letter that she sends she tells them about the Unown, the puzzle pieces, and how this one girl Lyra figured out most of the puzzles and how the scientists are all abuzz.
They were all very excited a couple of weeks ago. Apparently there was some increase in activity in the Unown, but they still haven't figured out the reason why, he reads when Mariam hands the letter over.
A few weeks ago is the approximate time that Harry came to Johto. His fault, he's willing to bet.
But more importantly! Lyra, the girl I told you about before, got a Silver Wing! She got it from the Kimono Girls after battling them. She told me she doesn't know what it's for, but I bet it's something really cool! She sent me a picture of it, it looks like a legendary Pokémon's feather. Or maybe it's just a shiny Pokémon's feather. I should have asked Lyra if I could travel with her, she's so nice and always in the middle of the biggest events. Mom, I'm telling you, she's going to be the next Champion -
Harry stops reading after that. His head is spinning from all the lingo, and his earlier decision to read up on this place's basic history and stuff seems like a better idea the more he thinks about it.
Mariam takes the letter back from him and smooths it gently. "She's started talking about Lyra again, didn't she?" Mariam asks. She laughs when Harry shrugs. "Lyra's her hero, you know? She wants to be like her, even though Lyra's younger." She sighs, sitting back on her chair, and sets both hands down on the top of the dining table, letter placed underneath her fingers. "She hopes to become a Pokémon breeder - she didn't want to, before, but she said that since Lyra's going to be champion, she'll have to do something else." Mariam taps on the letter, tracing the loop of the y with a fingernail.
"She's growing up so fast." Mariam mutters.
"I think all kids do," Harry says. "I certainly did." I was going to fight in a war, he doesn't say. It's nice here, he doesn't say. There's no war here. It's so bright here, and open and trusting. Here, I feel like I could stay a kid forever.
She stares at the letter for a long time, misty-eyed.
Harry gets up and goes into the kitchen to start preparing dinner. He pats her awkwardly on the shoulder as he passes, and doesn't even squawk in surprise when her Pidgeot, Peta, swoops past him to perch on the back of Mariam's chair to groom her hair comfortingly.
"You are very strange," the Arbok he's talking to says. She's the same one that directed him to Violet City. Apparently she took a liking to him, decided that he's going to be her trainer, and thus followed after him. Harry doesn't even have any Poké Balls or one of those Trainer cards.
"I am not, Selene," Harry defends himself. "I just worry a lot."
In the back garden of Mariam's house, surrounded by giant trees and patches of tall grass that reaches Harry's knees, he's comfortably speaking Parseltongue. Selene is comfortable in the warm sun and eating the pieces of Pokémon treats that Harry took from the kitchen.
"Mariam will be fine. All little ducks come back eventually." Selene hisses. She twists and wriggles, lashing all eleven feet of her around and flattening the grass until she manages to curl her head in Harry's lap. He scratches her where her hood meets her body. She makes a strangely serpentine sigh of happiness.
"I shouldn't have taught that song to you," Harry mutters. He presses his forehead against her cool skin and smiles.
"Sing it again," Selene demands, nudging him in the side with her tail.
Harry laughs, but complies. "Five little ducks went out one day," he sings. It's in English, which Harry learned that Selene understands after a rather disastrous attempt to hiss-sing the song.
"Over the hill and far away…"
Here's the thing:
Harry has no idea how he's going to get home. How he's going to go back to a war and people who don't trust each other and to a house where no one will smile at him and ask what he wants for dinner.
Harry has no idea how he'd be able to leave Mariam or Selene or this new, incredible, strange world behind.