A/N: Anyone remember Sedimentation? That was a long time ago but the world's expanded quite a bit since. Now it's just a matter of writing them… And expanding more. :D This one's set well before Sedimentation. It's set before The Final Years as well, though I lost that one before I could post it and need to rewrite it. One of the things I need to do this year. Context-wise, this contains spoilers for the main novel in this series (Cycle of Four) but since it's not written yet, that's somewhat of a non-issue. There's enough context here to understand what's going on since it's a different perspective than most fics in the series. If not, let me know and I'll probably wind up writing something for it at some point.

Written for the Mega Prompts Challenge, quotes prompt 7: "You've gotta dance like there's nobody watching, Love like you'll never be hurt, Sing like there's nobody listening, And live like it's heaven on earth." ― William W. Purkey

riding the currents of the world

Some people say the world only has one desire: to grow. It's why a flower can grow even in a desert, and why microbes spawn even in volcanoes hot enough to turn even the strongest rock and glass into ash. It's why some species rise and fall, and others endure through the changes of the world. And it's why they, as species in this ever-desiring, ever-changing world, cannot simply float with times. They swim, instead. They study the currents and ride them as best they can and they hold on to each other and hope the majority make it through to the next wave.

If it seems backwards to them, it only means they're not swimming very well. That their humans bodies are poorly adjusting to the times. That their minds are caught up in a world from before, a world that was unrecognisable from the one into which they'd been born. It's the consequence of their records: long memories passed along, and all the research that's been done, research that becomes irrelevant or outdated as the times leave them behind and so require new researchers to update it all.

And then there are some like him, who remembered a time before Unova burned, before Johto's landmass split from Kanto and Mount Silver which had united them split from the both of them and became an island of its own. He remembered a time when he'd travelled through the country on foot and could feel anything from dirt and mud and puddles and sand between his toes - and, when they were within sight of more than simply Mount Silver's peak, then the crunch of a thin layer of fresh white snow. But now there was no need to cross the entire landmass of Kanto to find the snow. Pallet Town was perpetually grey after Mt Ember's demise but Cerulean had been painted white. And their pokemon - once water of various secondary types and now at least somewhat ice - had been painted white as well.

Misty had been clever, and lucky. The passing thimblewinter had all but decimated the once stone-grey Petwer City. There'd been no time to do anything but who knew if, even now, they'd have managed it. Stone that had endured the great fires of old couldn't handle the newfound cold at all. They cracked before the world realised it was more than just a passing drift. They were a wasteland before the grasslands of Celadon began to pale and Viridian Forest was no more.

That was the cold as well. From Pewter to Viridian Forest to Viridian City and then Victory Road and no-one really knew why Pewter City was the herald of it all. But it was and they paid too brutally and too quickly for it and now the once-firm city were frozen ruins that are still too dangerous to touch.

Most only went to stare it and very rarely. Travelling to Pewter was arduous now and Cerulean City and Pallet Town are the nearest but there's hardly anybody still in Pallet Town. The air is toxic: not as toxic as the Orange archipelago but still toxic and no-one keeps families there, and no-one who wants to ride the world is there. It's mostly researchers. Those who survived Cinnabar Island or Pewter City had collated around the Oak Lab and they holed themselves up there. Some years after, new people joined them, left them and, eventually, another laboratory centre opened up where Celadon used to be and Pallet Town was left to die with the old world.

That was the difference between the radical and the conservatives, or so Blue Oak decided. And he's decided to be conservative. Decided that when his own radical youth had led him to destroy something he'd never get back, never could get back - and maybe it was cowardly of him, as the people screamed, but that was the fruit of his labours, the wisdom he'd gained.

And it wasn't wrong, when the pokemon were proof of riding the tides. Humans couldn't live between Pewter and Victory Road up to where the land split, and the island of Mount Silver that was created when that land split off. Humans couldn't live in those places and could barely travel them even with the best aid available to them but pokemon could and did. Pokemon once upon a time considered weak. Pokemon like zubat who one would think couldn't survive the cold at all with their small winged bodies. Pokemon like geodude that were made of the same stone that splintered in Pewter and tore it down. And then the migration of other pokemon who were made for the cold. Like the Seel and Dewgong who'd migrated to Cerulean and turned it into the white city. Like the Swinub herds that swam through the icy sea between Johto, Mount Silver and Kanto, and migrated to the Viridian Forest every year, birthed their young, and then went back again, when there hadn't been any Swinub in Kanto at all during his youth.

Or that wasn't really true. No-one knew about the Swinub on the Kantonian slopes of Mount Silver until Red had told them about it. When was that? he wondered. After he became Champion. Maybe a year after? That first year had been pretty busy for him: the new role with his new challenges and he hadn't managed to travel much at all and he'd looked so restless. But then he'd gotten back onto the road and he'd eased: tension had rolled off his shoulders and lines lifted off his face and he'd looked years younger when Blue had seen him again. He was a traveller that couldn't stay in a single place and he'd always been like that.

Red that had been anywhere and everywhere and through the dead parts of Kanto soon after they died as well. He'd been a big help with sorting things out afterwards, when they'd worked out the cold had stopped spreading so quickly and now it was the slow freezing that pressed against them like a wall on their backs. But then he disappeared and it was a puzzle Blue couldn't solve at all, because Red had long since proved there wasn't a thing in the Kanto-Johto landmass that could kill him. If he'd abandoned the world, then that was another thing and if he did, then Team Rocket would have been the beginning of it all. Them and the legendary pokemon.

His grandfather was dead. Red's mother was dead. But Blue had hoped, still hopes, that Red considers their friendship enough to return to Pallet Town but how many years could it be? They were old and only getting older. Not the young boys who'd traversed across the countryside, catching Pokemon and competing in the Pokemon League as though it was their life's course, as though the real life was a thing that was still beyond them even if they were cast loose in it. And the ideal trainer's journey was like that. The trainers that never pushed themselves that hard, that stayed in the safe areas where the darkness of the world tended not to lurk - but even that wasn't true. Some of it was luck. Or lack of luck. Like the Pokemon Tower. Every trainer worth their poke balls had visited the Pokemon Tower before regardless of their level of skill and regardless of the pokemon they carried with them. And then Team Rocket had trampled on its integrity and it had been beyond horrific and beyond cruel and he hadn't even made it all the way to the top. And he'd never found out exactly why.

Red knew. Red knows but he has a tendency to not tell things like that. Even now, when Blue's the head of the Oak Labs, the one who studies how the pokemon have adjusted to the changing climate and how humans can live in what the world is becoming alongside them instead of how to eradicate the world and revive Kanto into what it had been before. That was foolishness, in his mind. He'd seen the chaos that had arisen with the fossilised pokemon and what had destroyed Mount Ember. He'd seen that and Red had seen that and they both knew, both know. And they live in Pallet Town that's on the edge of liveable and they've survived, breathing in those gases from Mount Ember they'd feared would choke them all. But that wasn't recklessness. It was concentration, and adaptation, and adjustment. Their bodies adjusting to the new composition of the air with the toxic chemicals at a level that wouldn't kill them before they could.

But others wanted more immediate results. The youth who wanted to see fruits in their generation, in their lives, instead of slowly adapt their bodies so their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren can build anew on this new slate the world is giving them. It's the conclusion he's reached, in the end, because humans have brains and capacities for thought far beyond any other living creatures and that includes the pokemon and they're the only ones that can really get it into their heads to destroy the world. They know this, thanks to Red and, though it irks them all, thanks to Team Rocket as well. Of course, not everyone believes in Red and especially not after he vanished but he's Blue: the person who knows him best in this world where their families have died. Even when they'd argued bitterly, there was no-one - no human - who knew them as well aside from their families, and now…

Well, he can guess. They're both tired. And, in a way, though he doesn't know exactly what Red is doing, they're both only half-trying and the other half of them has given up. He, Blue, is working for a future he knows full well he won't ever see, that may be the children in his future won't even see. It's work that might be purely academic. It's not like tailoring their bodies slowly, unlike Viridian and Fuschia that were almost red with constant flame to kill the cold. It's seeing how the pokemon flow in a world that so many humans are trying to swim against the tides to change and its enlightening and only practical if the rest of the world followed suit.

And then there are the people who think that means they should modify their bodies with the genes of pokemon, as though they don't have the potential within them to change. And maybe some of them don't. Blue's sure he doesn't, at this point. He had it in his youth and he used it. He changed. But he's old now, even if old is in his thirties and not even married yet… But maybe, in a few years, when the precarious balancing act they've bet their lives on and survived is at a place where babies will be born with enough resistance (or so they think) and not die choking on smoke they don't even notice anymore but is still there: in the sky, but more importantly soaked into the sea and the earth that binds them. They don't change anyway, nowadays. Not after the incident with the neo-Rockets.

Team Rocket… As though they've made it their life's goal to get in their way as much as possible. Fools who don't realise how they ushered the world towards destruction and maybe the end result isn't entirely their fault but they certainly played a major role in making it happen and Blue has a nice chronology of what he thinks has happened… And, of course, it's Red's tight lips that is holding him up on that front. Though he can respect that, now. The things Red keeps quiet. The things he doesn't want to talk about even if he goes over them again and again in his mind. His failures. His mistakes. The things he isn't proud of and he doesn't want them to see: not his mother, and not Blue either but Blue is a nosy guy by nature and he can't stand not knowing.

The past and the present. And he makes hypotheses for the future but it won't go the way he wants and he can't make them, either. The pokemon will might wind up fossilised with the times and new ones will take their place and the number of species will exponentially increase and, eventually, the humans will come out of the plateau they've sunk into and grow exponentially again and that will be their new world: the world of the future he can't quite see but he can imagine, because by then the past world that still lived on in human memory will be nothing more than a tale of destruction and creation even though it's wrong. The world is still here: every square inch and a little more. It's just changed. It's grown, and it's just not a growth that all of them that lived upon it could tolerate. It's how he chooses to look at it and it's how he thinks they'll live, because try as they might, humans are big enough to herald doom for the world on the scale they see but still too little to objectively destroy the world.