Mom has what she calls an 'open-window complex', Yuri.
It was hypnotic—gliding in lazy, rhythmic circles far overhead, tawny wings spread triumphantly over the bristled shell of the woods, claiming the sky as its own.
It's really stupid.
If he did this right, his prey would never see him. All it would see was sky, bright azure for thousands of miles save for the orange tinge toward the western horizon, and the dark blur of trees and cliff faces far below it.
No, even after he knocked it out of the sky, it wouldn't see him. The poor bird would wake up in a metal cage with a floor too flat and smooth for its calloused feet to grasp, walls too close for its wings to spread, and it'd be stuck in there for what would feel like half an eternity, not mere days, before it saw the sky again.
She leaves the windows of her car open when she drives along the cliffs. You know, in case she goes over the edge and falls in the ocean.
His job was to get it there.
He slid a careful, gloved hand near the old and rusting trigger of his Ruger, raised the barrel towards the break in the trees far above where stark daylight sieved through.
She's always been so paranoid of death. Kind of ironic.
He watched his target through the scope—something he'd managed to fashion himself, with the ocular of a broken pair of binoculars left behind in the landfill. The quality of the thing wasn't worth the hour it'd took to build it, to get it exactly right, but it helped his aim. Somewhat.
The bird flapped its wings, distorting the silhouette through the scope and morphing into a smeared shadow flickering in and out of vision as it soared. His finger tapped impatiently against the trigger—a nervous habit, just barely in sync with the loud, unsteady thrumming of his heart.
Mom says if she does fall—and she never will, I bet you ten whole bucks—she won't drown, stuck in her car. She'll just unbuckle and swim through a window.
Twigs snapped. His heart froze up painfully in his chest and his head whipped around, quick eyes catching a glimpse of flashing brown slipping through the trees.
Just a stantler.
But it's stupid! And she knows it. That's why she gave it a name. If the windows are open and she falls—and she won't! —then the car'll fill with water faster. She basically has the same chance of drowning either way. Yeah… you agree.
He growled to himself, casting a sweeping glare at the mess of warm colors and brown that was the forest, struck with autumn, alive with the whisperings of hidden pokémon and subtle winds rustling fallen leaves. He knew, despite the stillness, that he was never alone out here; he knew even his hunter's eyes would never fail to make him think he was.
He backed up against the thick trunk of a tall oak, letting out a breath. He raised the barrel again after readjusting his grip, flicked absently at the trigger as he scoured the yellow-tinted sky through his scope, searching for his prey.
If she's going to leave the windows open like that, she might as well not even strap in. Heck, she should leave the doors open, too!
There.
What's really stupid is the fact she can just take a hammer or something in the car with her, just in case, to smash the windows. There! Paranoia curbed, windows closed. Then we don't have bugs getting in all the time.
Flying in circles and circles and circles almost directly above him, perhaps spying prey of its own, perhaps only enjoying the sky while it had it to itself. Not a care in the world.
But she won't. She'll be darned if she doesn't keep those windows open.
Orson suddenly grinned—his crazed, face-splitting grin, the one he hoped to God or whoever that no one but his mother or his prey ever saw. She'd at least understood it enough to give it a name—hunter's joy. There's a reason we love what we do. Perhaps if someone from town watched him hunt, they wouldn't have the guts to hate him for what he did anymore.
The best part is that she knows it's dumb. She just does it anyway.
He took the shot.
If the bullets were solid steel and made to kill, he would've flinched at the sharp crack sound ricocheting from the end of the barrel, knowing whatever was unlucky enough to be in his sights was at its end. He would've listened to the rustle of flapping wings, bolting footsteps, and frightened cries as the forest pokémon fled from him, flew from him, darted out of his way as he took off sprinting almost faster than they could.
But the bullets were only steel-plated, equipped with a needle for piercing flesh, not a rounded face for punching through it. Nothing heard the shot but him—but maybe they listened to his prey's cut-off shriek of surprise as the bullet hit its mark, buried in the muscle of its right wing. It was numb and knocked-out before it could register the pain.
They heard him when he bolted, tossing the old shotgun over his shoulder where it swung against his back, held to his body by a wrinkled leather sash. The pokémon would only run from him if he got too close in his sprint for the falling bird, not that he would notice—his eyes were sifting wildly through the crisscrossing canopy of bare gray branches, through the fragments of blue sky for the tawny shadow as it began to plummet.
The Ruger knocked against his spine as he leapt over fallen logs buried in leaves, charged through bare bushes, scaled rocks—pounding uselessly where it had for years and years, that one spot on his back that was numb to it now. His feet didn't feel where they clipped on hard stones, his skin where tiny branches whipped at his bare face, already rubbed red and raw by the cold. If he tripped, he rolled with the momentum and sprang to his feet before he realized, neck still craned to stare unblinkingly at the fractured pieces of sky above.
He listened to his prey's limp, numb body crash though a canopy of thin twigs and branches, made brittle by the relentless cold of late fall. Sticks and broken-off pieces of bark rained down as it toppled out of the sky, stubborn wings still spread like they'd somehow manage to catch a wind or gale of some sort to save it, to turn its fall from something violent and crushing to something slow and gliding.
Its stiff, lifeless wings tore apart any breeze they might otherwise catch, flipping backwards as its body slammed against a branch that would not be broken. The bird was sent spinning, hurtling at its terminal velocity towards the floor of a clearing where Orson sprinted, breathless and adamant. He bounded over a dubious root, lurching from the earth like it'd grown that way specifically to trip him in that moment if he wasn't paying attention. Narrowly, his foot missed it, and he shot ahead, suddenly so sure that there was nothing in his way anymore, nothing but empty space and air between him and his falling prey.
Its wing unfurled, reaching for the ground, inches away—but he slammed into its still, warm body, barely managing to lock his arms around its torso as he knocked it out of the air,securing the large bird against his body. He twisted as he fell, scraping along the soft leaf-covered ground on his back, hands buried in the wild and matted feathers of the pidgeotto.
Orson stilled and let himself collapse where he lay, sighing as all his muscles relaxed, as his head fell back into the soft carpet of dead leaves below him. He let a hand rest against his chest, felt for his racing pulse, crushed down like he was trying to force it to slow, but it did not relent.
The shotgun dug into his back and ground against his spine where he wasn't numb, and he winced. He got a grip on the unconscious pidgeotto and pushed himself up. He stared down at its disheveled form in his lap, wings crumpled against its body, head lolling over his knee, lank red crest matted with knots—they always looked so much more majestic in the sky, where they belonged. So ugly and out of place on the ground.
Tentatively, he reached for its right wing and began unfurling it, fighting the locked stiffness in its joints and slowly, gently, working it open. He didn't need a wing attack to the face if it happened to wake up—he had enough scars.
Fully extended, he could count the wing's feathers, the different shades of white and brown speckled across its coverts and shoulders. The way it was marred by the silvery bullet buried in the muscle. He grabbed it and pulled the needle out fast, shoving it into a bag in his pocket—it'd be disinfected later and the chemical knockout solution reapplied.
Orson worked its wing back against its body, though it seemed more unwilling to close than it had been to open, and held the pidgeotto in one arm as he stood and started retracing his steps—they were easy to follow. He'd carved out a path of trampled leaves and fallen twigs in his mad sprint for his prey as it fell, eyes trained only on the pidgeotto as he crushed or shoved aside anything in his path.
Cradling it like a small child, Orson started to run again, streaking in flying leaps instead of fast and agile bounds over bare bushes and stones. He ran and the dying woods collapsed into a blur of orange, yellow, and gray, wide streams of mixing color flanking his sprint. He ran and gazed up at the way the trees seemed to bend towards him, the earth with them, stretching and warping in his vision till it seemed like the world itself was propelling him along, back the same way he'd come—there was the undulating oak tree he'd leaned against to take his shot, there was the dried-up riverbed that'd long since filled with dead brown leaves that rippled like pseudo-water as he sprang across, clearing the gap in a single leap. He'd been taught how to do it right—how to throw your weight back and force your whole body to ricochet forwards, how to always make the jump and land with barely any free space behind your heels.
The forest began to whip itself back into its usual theme of sharp lines and angles as he slowed to crouch at the base of a large, half-buried rock where a bicycle leaned. It was an old, rusty thing, its blue paint having long since chipped away to reveal its brittle silver skeleton, but he knew from years of use that it was adamant. If it was going to fall apart, it would've done it years ago.
Orson swept away some leaves at the rock's base after laying the pidgeotto gently on the ground beside him, digging up a leathery backpack. He rummaged inside, sifting through bullet cases and old paper bags he hadn't thrown away, most of them only big enough to hold a canteen and an odd sandwich or two, but a few were so large he'd had to fold them twice and cram them at the bottom. He took one and smoothed it out, turning it on its side to, rather carefully, work the pidgeotto inside.
He could rest just the bird in the bike's wire cage if he wanted to. The bag wasn't really necessary to take it where it needed to go—but something had always felt wrong about biking through town with a knocked-out pokémon out on display for everyone to gawk at like it was dead.
No, they would only see a large brown paper bag, obstructing their view of his face. They'd only see the bag and have to guess what was inside, whether that be a pokémon or not. Living or not. A Schrödinger's meowth, but with a bag instead of a box, he'd often thought to himself when he was younger, struggling to keep his teeth grit and his head high as he biked into town—then, he'd had the support of his mother at his side, warding away the harsh stares and rude comments he endured alone now. Dead or alive, they can think whatever they want about it and you can't change that. If they saw it, if you didn't have the bag, you're basically making the decision for them.
He grabbed the backpack and steadied the bag in the half-cage crudely attached on the front of the bike before mounting it and taking off, pedaling hard against the soft resistance of dead leaves below. He swerved between the trees and scoured the blur of foliage around him for the original path, just a winding trail of uneven concrete that died out barely a mile into the woods and snaked back to town, slowly growing in width and smoothness like it was more confident near Jheriko. It was always a little harder to find in fall when everything in the woods was obfuscated by a storm of leaf corpses—the pokémon used it as camouflage and the road was an inch or two under it all, but he saw where the trees parted unnaturally through the dense haze of orange and brown, like an aisle. He squinted as he rode closer and saw patches of rough concrete showing through the leaves.
He pulled onto the path and sped up, finding it easier and easier to maneuver where the ground was more solid, where nature gave way to something manmade, Jheriko's only extension of civilization in these woods.
The path wound along a steepening cliff face, edged in treacherous crags and juts, some of which housed clusters of twigs and down—pokémon nests. The cliff was a goldmine as a little kid—he'd stand in the middle of the path, poised and ready to run, shotgun leveled at the chest or wing of whatever bird pokémon hadn't been scared away yet and was perched there, glaring dubiously down the barrel of his Ruger. Taking down anything of the pidgey or taillow line had never been a challenge; they could hurt him, sure, but he'd only ever been intimidated if a talonflame happened to be staring him down, daring him to pull the trigger with its wild eyes. Something about the fact it could spit fire in his face if he pissed it off too much had been a bit of a deterrence.
The cliff face smoothed and steepened the closer he got to home; the trees around him fell away as he broke from the woods, as the winding trail joined a paved road that emerged from a tunnel in the rock. If he followed the path, it kept to the cliff side for a number of miles and never touched Jheriko, but farther along, the road forked from it and veered off. Gradually, it sloped downhill toward the glittering cluster of small buildings and streets crammed against the foot of the cliff, barely a few minutes' jog from the beach.
To his left lay the glittering expanse of the sea, just a few shades darker than the sky's blue and twice as cold, eating away at the rocks and sand of the island a little more every year. It tended to blind him if he turned his head to stare at it, far below where he pedaled his bike, gleaming with the light it siphoned from the sun to reflect back skyward. The water fed into a wide, sheer-walled lagoon just beneath where the road dropped off a few feet to his left, churning with violent waves and frothy waters. If he fell, he'd either crack his head on the rocks or choke and drown on seawater, so he kept his eyes trained ahead on the empty road, hands gripping the rubber bars as the bike began to propel itself with gravity and momentum—the road dipped down, and he could trace with his eyes where it wound through a small swath of orange woods and fed into the tangle of streets and sidewalks that was Jheriko. He let the road carry him, tense and ready to grab for the paper bag if it tipped out of the cage.
If they watched for him, someone standing out on the streets could stand and see him blaze down the slope, towards the woods, towards Jheriko—they could nudge anyone nearby and say, "Hey. Look." They'd look, and nothing else really needed to be said.
Orson let out a ragged sigh at the thought, flinching when the bright sunlight flickered out as his bike swooped into the sliver of thick forest, momentarily cutting off his sight of town. He knew exactly how many seconds it took to cycle through the woods and he counted each one, breathing in deeply and tensing before he emerged. His face was stoic as his eyes glanced over the nearby street sign, as he passed the first buildings, a smattering of brick houses on the outskirts of town. He swerved to the sidewalk as a car turned the corner ahead, ignoring the skittish man that shuffled away from him as he came near.
He turned a few corners himself, passing through uniform grids of warehouses and low-roofed stores that broke up clusters of houses, all of it roped together by the thick and tangled power lines strung up between poles of rotting wood, some of them loose and sagging too low with the weight of traffic lights or someone's old shoes.
Orson pulled to a stop at the last intersection—just one more turn and he was home.
A chorus of mutterings stirred him from his thoughts and he turned his head to the left, heart already sinking, eyes already narrowing at a duo of teenagers he recognized from school, leaning against the wall of the commissary. Their gazes were trained on him, or rather, the bag, their eyebrows pulled together in mild horror.
"God, what do you think it was?" the girl murmured to the boy beside her, swallowing hard as she stared. Her eyes found Orson's and suddenly she was glaring, but it was a weak glare. Nervous.
He turned away; focused his gaze on the flickering traffic light. Come on, green…
"Poor thing."
Green. Hurry up.
"There's something wrong with him."
Green. Green. Green. The few passing cars moved so damn slowly—and they stared at him too, those hidden faces behind the wheels, gazing with shaded eye sockets at the wild boy with a shotgun slung across his back. He listened to the grind of tires over tar, he listened to the girl as she whispered, he listened to their thoughts… he swore he could hear them thinking. Thinking loud, angry, ignorant things.
"It's so… cruel."
Green.
He let out a breath, closing his eyes for half a second before pushing off, swerving right. By some stroke of luck, his house was too far down the road for them to see him pull up to it and cast a wild glance around before stepping off the bike. He leaned it against the front porch's whitewashed fencing, taking the bag carefully in his arms.
The house was small and very nearly identical to the others—a red brick box with a few small windows, a narrow front porch, a flat shingled roof. Two stories, with a sliver of backyard and a garage barely large enough to cram the family car. Jheriko's houses were all identical at one point, but each were very lived-in now—most of the citizens had spent their entire lives in town. Each house had its own sort of air, whether that be the particular smell, the dents and bruises on the walls, the style of the furniture or lack thereof—reflective of the people that had lived inside them for decades. Orson's house looked beat-up—shingles missing from the roof, a shattered and duct-taped window there, cracked supports on the porch's fence, a crooked, half-open garage door, but as far as he knew, it had always been that way. He used to think it was the fault of all those people who didn't like his family and took it out on the house, but he knew now that it was just because of the people who lived there. Himself included.
Orson quickly scaled the porch steps and wrenched the front door open, stepping over the threshold and into a haze of dim brown lighting. "Noah?" he called hopefully, kicking the door shut with his heel and listening to the house shudder with the force.
"Calm the hell down!" a voice echoed deeper inside over the buzz of a radio. "And don't slam the door!"
Orson cast a nervous look inside his bag, at the limp body of the pidgeotto—still out. He trekked forward, over the piles of miscellaneous junk collecting against the walls; things like old jackets, shoes, maybe a torn-up book or two, not like anyone living in Orson's house did much reading. The walls were no better—some of it was decorated with childish crayon scribbles, much more was hidden behind endless myriads of framed photographs, some bright with fuzzy colors, most dull shades of black and white.
He maneuvered through it all, rounding the base of the stairs to emerge into the brightly-lit kitchen. He shuffled across the white tile pattern and rested the bag on one of the counter's few cleared-off spaces, staring into the darkness beyond the bar area, past the scratched-up dining table, where he made out a lopsided silhouette of someone's shoulders and head. Someone leaning towards an ancient radio system that stood taller than he was, listening intently as it spat fuzzy streams of dialogue at max volume.
"You're home early," Orson said, leaning on his elbows against the counter.
The boy listening to the radio tilted his head like he was about to look back, but then decided against it. "So are you," he scoffed.
"What, is your screening done? Hey—speaking of which, I finally thought of a question."
Noah sighed, leaning back on the couch after tweaking the volume knob. The sudden decrescendo was disconcerting; Orson found himself aware of the spinning whirr of the living room fan, the creak of pipes in the walls, his own stubborn pulse that hadn't yet slowed from the encounter at the traffic light.
"Took you a week. Hope it's not as dumb as the answer you gave my question."
He was avoiding the first thing Orson asked and he was doing it on purpose. Orson glared at the back of his head.
"No, no—I think you'll get a kick out of this one. So, Noah, where would you most want to be exiled to?"
Noah gave a harsh laugh, finally twisting where he sat to hang an arm over the couch and lock eyes with his younger brother. Theirs were the same, pits of dark brown that missed nothing. "I think these questions are getting a bit too open-ended. It's supposed to be would you rather stuff. Why change it after ten years?"
Orson rolled his eyes. "Just answer it."
"I'm not being screened at the JDR so they can exile me, Orson—"
"Just answer it."
Exaggerated sigh. "Well, I hear Hoenn's nice this time of year."
"Hoenn's nice every time of year."
Noah shrugged, smirking. He turned back around, crossing his arms as he shifted his focus back to the radio program—an energetic play-by-play on some League battle—but Orson knew he was still waiting for his brother to say something else.
"So… Hoenn, then?"
He took a moment before responding, trying to form the right words. "It's… definitely up there on the list. I've always liked the thought of living somewhere like Fallarbor—"
"Cool. You have a question for me yet?"
Noah bowed his head like he was rubbing his eyes, or maybe he was pinching the bridge of his nose—Orson couldn't tell. "I'll think about it. Hey, you did catch something on the hunt, right?"
Orson feigned offense, glaring at the back of his brother's head. "What do you think?"
"What are you stopping here for? Get it to the JDR before it wakes up and beats the shit out of you!"
He stared dubiously at the bag, suddenly tense, every twitch of the paper suddenly a harbinger of the pidgeotto's awakening.
"I'll have a question when you get home. Go!"
"I—I wanted to see if Dad called—"
"He didn't. You know he didn't. Orson, just talk to him when you get there." Noah sighed. "You shouldn't have come home. You could've biked straight there and no one would've seen you—God, it's like you're asking for it now."
Orson narrowed his eyes at nothing, hauling himself into motion to fish the bullet bag out of his pocket and toss it by the sink. "Yeah? Fine, I'll get going. You clean the bullet."
"Take Chronister Street, it cuts around—"
"Albany's faster."
He took the bag into his arms again, leaving his backpack and shotgun on the counter in its place as he made for the front door again, passing into the dark hall between it and the kitchen. The multitude of framed photos hanging on the walls were just black-and-white blurs in his peripheral vision, but he knew what each of them held. He knew when he passed one of the oldest, one of the biggest, the one he always ignored—a grainy image of a potbellied man holding Orson's Ruger in one hand, his other arm wrapped around the snow-white neck of the prey he'd shot dead.
But his prey wasn't a pidgeotto or anything like it. No—he'd shot down something a little bigger; something that would shake the very foundations of Jheriko and its people.
He spared a glance at the caption, something his mom had scribbled in blue pen at the bottom of the photo, her handwriting messy but perfectly formed at the same time—Grandpa Drew + Valhalla the latias.
Right. That was when the hunters in his family used bullets to kill. That was the last time they used bullets to kill—but it didn't matter, because in the eyes of Jheriko's citizens, to everyone but his own family, Orson was a killer like his long-dead great grandfather. It was their eyes Noah wanted to shield him from when he told his brother to take Chronister, to skip home; he understood that.
But he wasn't his great grandfather. He didn't have to feel ashamed for what he did.
He would never be his great grandfather.
"You are stubborn as Mom was, Orson," Noah called over the static-infused blare of the radio, his voice so clear and defined in contrast it was almost jarring. Orson stood over the threshold between his home and the rather harsh outside, bag cradled in one arm while his hand gripped the doorknob. He paused for barely a second before slamming the door shut again, cutting it all off.
He had a thought as he pedaled away, nothing he'd ever tell his brother, nothing he'd admit to anyone but himself—Maybe.