Every Pokemon professor has a story. It's almost a job requirement. Hastings is no exception, but he makes it his business to keep as few people in the know as possible.
This becomes rather difficult when he finds his foster-sister scarfing down pancakes in his living room.
He hasn't seen her—or any of his foster-siblings, really—since he left for university all those years ago. She towers over him now; her sheet of blonde hair falls to her waist. Her clothes have seen better days—he'll probably have to mend them now, she's can't sew to save her life—but her cloak looks brand new and all too familiar. It tells him more about her than she ever would.
He wonders why he chose to wear that, of all things. She knows how he feels about the Church—it's one of the reasons he left.
She pushes a stack of pancakes towards him. "Eat," she says with her mouth full. "You've got to be starving."
He grabs a set of clothes from the closet and throws them at her; they barely miss the pancakes. "Change. And shower. You can't go around town looking and smelling like that."
She rolls her eyes, but she picks up the clothes. Some things never change
"And lose the cloak," he says. She splutters.
"Fiore has never been kind to the Church. You'd know that if you bothered to do any research. Why are you here, anyway?"
She glares at him. "You know the answer to that as well as I do."
He does, but he wishes he didn't.
She leaves the table just as he tucks into the pancakes. She made them for scratch—they're light and fluffy and dotted with chocolate chips. He loved these when they were kids.
He's surprised she still remembers.
Lex was raised by the Church and as much as he'd like to forget about it, so was Lee. Getting rid of gangs wherever they may surface is their sacred duty, and for Lee to be so…so blase about it is infuriating. There wasn't even a cathedral for members of the Church in Fiore—what did they know of her beliefs or her customs? Regardless of their opinion now, they'd certainly accept the Church when she saved them from that gang. They had to.
Right?
She swore to devote her life to the Church when she donned the cloak for the first time. It was her foundation and her springboard; her past, present, and future all rolled into one. Being an Adept of the Church was what she was. It defined her, gave her meaning where she had been aimless and hope where she had once despaired. To give that up, to fail her very first mission as an adept, would be to throw away everything she knew and loved.
She'd be damned if she let that happen.
She'd follow Lee for now—he washer elder, after all, and he had lived here for a while. But when push came to shove, she would act no matter what he said.
