Original Prompt from tumblr: "Gilbert trying to catch the most AWESOME pokemon in the world fic?"
Gilbert was born in Snowpoint.
People said that he blended in really well there.
People said that, but not for very long. A broken nose tended to help with that maturation process.
So yeah. Gilbert wore hoodies under his snowcoat and got sunglasses instead of socks for his birthdays, becausewho the fuck had the patience for sunburns in winter? He had some variety of dark clothes and usually ended up standing silhouetted against the snow very dramatically, possibly-not-entirely-not-on-purpose. He punched people who made fun of his eyes and skin, and if he went to the hospital twice as often as he made it to a scheduled doctor's appointment, that just meant he was an active kid. All those times his father hinted that he wouldn't be able to go out and get his trainer's license when he was twelve, because of his, you know, eyes, and skin, and—and his lungs, which weren't really anything you wanted to deal with while traveling on foot, far from any sort of hospital or help—
But not getting a license was? Ridiculous?
Who didn'tget their trainer's license at twelve, and immediately run to the outskirts of town with a family member to catch your first pokemon? Or take up a family pokemon with battle experience? Or barring that, roadtrip to the nearest adoption center? Get a poochyna puppy for a birthday present, at the very least?
Who didn't?
(When Gilbert was twelve, all those kids with broken noses went off to challenge the League.
With no gap year for travel, he was sent directly to the seventh grade, with all of the trainers who'd returned the year before for school. That was, three trainers. It was a class of four. Three trainers and Gilbert.
In eighth grade, he was suspended for, firstly, brawling with his fists instead of proper battling and, secondly, for sending himself to the hospital.
In ninth grade, he got Chatot. )
000
'Got' might not have been the right word. He foundChatot, half-frozen in a mound of snow. A small, ruffled thing that had been blown wildly off course from its yearly migration route between Route 222 and the Azure Bay in Kalos.
It was yellow breasted. Gold tipped wings. Not really moving anymore. Not even able to breathe.
Gilbert scooped it up, cradled it for a moment, considering the chances that this wild pokemon in his arms would suddenly startle and attack. No, though—the bird was frozen solid. Holding it in the crook of his elbow, Gilbert unzipped his winter coat and blue hoodie, slipping the pokemon inside and holding it against his chest. His lungs seized and his arms began to ache, but he zipped the hoodie and coat over the pokemon anyway.
"Fuck shit, motherfucker," he hissed, coughing, needing a moment to get used to the block of ice pressing against his chest.
He hiked home, wheezing. It was only a block or two away, but it seemed a lot longer going than it should've been.
Ludwig met him just inside the door—Gilbert's little brother had already been and gone on his pokemon journey, a record-breaking two days in the wilderness before he turned the fuck back around and demanded to be let back in the house. Something about it not making any sense to have to do a life-threatening journey to prove he was able to handle a job. He had a thing about the sanctity of life, apparently, which was unfortunate since the moment Gilbert walked through the door, the sudden temperature change sent him coughing again.
Ludwig banished him to the living room immediately. With accusatory finger pointing. The house was three rooms in each floor, and two stories tall, with one fireplace on each floor. The downstairs one was currently blazing away, and Gilbert was very succinctly instructed to sit down in front of it while Ludwig went to get something warm for him to drink.
Gilbert had half a mind to walk right back out the door at that kind of talk, but not with a living icecube pressed against his chest.
He settled down by the fire and let it huddle against his chest for a little while longer before finally unzipping his coat to make sure the pokemon was, in fact, still alive.
It slumped over with the jacket no longer supporting it. Gilbert slid his hands under its fragile body and held it up carefully, moving closer to the fireplace and wondering if pokemon recovered from hypothermia the same way humans did.
"What's that?" Ludwig said, standing in the entrance to the room with a mug of something hot and dark.
"A pokemon," Gilbert said, shedding his first layer and wrapping it around the bird.
"Where did it come from?"
"Snowdrift on the way back from school."
"And why didn't you take it to the pokemon center like a reasonable person would?"
He'd never seen Nurse Joy give a home visit before, but she stayed all the way through dinner.
000
Three years after setting out, one of the broken-nosed trainers came back.
He was taller and tanner, the lucky son of a bitch, but his nose was still crooked, and his grin still had its sharp edge. His eyebrows had only gotten comically larger.
He had a ponyta and a runt of an eevee, two badges, which at sixteen meant enough experience to land him an apprenticeship.
Which was. Peachy? Just peachy. He could come into Greasy's Diner to a whole birthday party's worth of whooping and cheering, pleased as punch and sit down to a free brunch.
It was eleven in the morning. Too early for so much cheering, but an okay time for brunch. And Arthur sat down at that table, grinning ear to ear like a cat, glanced sideways and saw—"Oh, Gilbert. You got a license?"
Chatot paused for a moment between pecking its merry way through Gilbert's tater tots. Gilbert grimaced tried to pretend he hadn't been staring at Arthur Kirkland, broken nose extraordinaire, and said, "Do you see any pokeballs on me, man? Motherfucker followed me home one day."
"Motherfucker!" Chatot trilled. "Motherfucker!"
It got a trill of laughter from the small group that had formed around Arthur since his entrance, drawn in by the excitement of a returning trainer. Adults Gilbert hadn't talked to in his life, laughing at Chatot's words, even as a nearby waitress scolded him for using foul language in a child-friendly establishment. Arthur's face twisted for a moment in what looked like embarrassment. If it were secondhand embarrassment, Gilbert was going to break his nose again.
Perhaps fortunately, they went back to their own meals after that. Arthur got a full meal on the house. Toast, eggs, sausage, and potatoes. Chatot ate her tater tots and Gilbert finished his soda and soup, and popped a pill in his mouth. They left at the same time—a total coincidence, surely—and alone.
"Your dad's not around?" Arthur said as they crowded around the door, taking one last moment to put on their hats and scarves and make sure their boots were on right. Gilbert opened up his jacket for Chatot to nuzzle up against his chest before opening the door, careful to not catch any feathers in the zipper.
"I'm not eleven anymore, dude. I'm yourage, actually. I don't need a fucking escort to the diner. Or is your Ma still insisting on following you everywhere? Did she cheer you on at your first gym?"
Arthur coughed into his fist and shuffled out the door, into the brittle cold. "Right. Sorry."
Gilbert rolled his eyes and trudged ahead.
"So you're not getting your license? Look, if it's about your health, I met a kid younger than me while I was training, Wally something—"
"—you forgot your brother's name?—"
"Notmy brother, Wally. This one was younger than me. He had green hair and was from Hoenn, all right?" Arthur's red face stood out brilliantly against the snow. Gilbert laughed. "Shut up. Look, I'm tryingto say that he had some sort of breathing problem, but he made it all the way up to the League steps, so—"
"I'm not making it to the League steps, Kirkland."
Arthur sighed. "Not with that attitude you're not."
Gilbert nodded. "The League's for chumps. Everyone knows it's the pokemon you get that're what's impressive. This not-your-brother-Wally have any cool pokemon?"
Arthur stopped in his tracks. Started again. Stuttering this time. "Uh, well, yes. He had a galade. This, uh, this monstrous electric type, magne, mange something. I hadn't seen it before, but apparently it's native to Sinnoh. And he had a foreign pokemon, a flaming bird."
"Not Moltres—"
"No, no, no. Not Moltres. Christ, I would've said that first, if I met someone who'd captured Moltres! No, it was ah, talonflame, I think. Something about talons and fire. These two twins I was traveling with kept singing, 'great balls of fire,' every time it did anything, it was dreadful." Arthur sighed again before leveling a long look in Gilbert's direction as they walked. His massive eyebrows only made it all more pronounced. "I thought it would be the kind of pokemon you'd be interested in."
Gilbert snorted ignored Arthur's look, scanning the path ahead of them for ice instead. "Nah, not my thing. I don't do well with dander."
"You've got a bird literally hiding in your coat right now, and you don't do well with dander?"
"I do worse with spores, and she is a very cleanbird, thank you very much. Besides, you think a giant ashy firebird's gonna do me much better?"
"Well, I was thinking having it's body on fire might burn off any dander."
"Sure—" Gilbert coughed into his first. "—and what's it gonna turn into when it burns?"
Arthur sighed and rolled his eyes. "Ash."
"Yep." Gilbert reached over and ruffled Arthur's hair. His hand was slapped away and was rewarded again with Arthur's beet red face. "Besides, I don't want some fucking baby firebird as my pokemon."
"Oh?" Arthur said, scowling, the red still in his cheeks and the tips of his ears and nose. For the first time, Gilbert wondered if it were something other than embarrassment. Perhaps it was from the nipping wind, which was only whipping stronger, down off the Acuity Plateau. But Gilbert's neighborhood was in sight, he didn't want to walk onto his front step contemplating the reason for Arthur Kirkland's red face. "And what kind of pokemon do you want? Just some stray chatot? How did you even get that thing?"
"A gold wingedchatot," Gilbert said, sticking his nose in the air and huffing a bit. Maybe huffing too much. The cold and wind and moving weren't helping his breathing much at the moment, but he kept talking. "My first pokemon is a shiny. It's only up from here."
Arthur's sigh came out in a whirl of fog. "And what quantify's 'up' from a chatot that you can't even officially register without your license?"
Gilbert hummed. "Well, I dunno. Maybe I'll go out and illegally catch legendaries."
Arthur tripped over a snowbluff and fell face first into a heap.
Gilbert stepped over him, laughing a little and waiting for Kirkland to get back on his feet before realizing he wasn't the only one laughing. In the snowdrift, Kirkland's shoulders were shaking. When he rolled over to face the sky and gasp in air, his hand covered his mouth and he was blinking back tears.
"Gilbert—h-hey shit, I'm not laughing at you, okay? I just—fuck—you haven't seenthose sorts of monsters, you'd have to be as good as Red to—Gilbert? Hey! I said I wasn't laughing at you! Get back here!"
000
He kind of thought he could sleep it off.
He'd slept off a lot of things, before. He'd slept through the aftermath of his mother's departure. He'd slept the night of his twelfth birthday. He'd slept through a bunch of nights in the hospital.
Not that night, though.
Chatot wasn't having it much better. She had her own perch at the foot of his bed. She'd claimed it after the first time Gilbert woke up with a face full of feathers and accidentally chucked her across the room while hacking up a lung. She seemed to have forgiven him, but kept to her perch, where tonight she was shifting from foot to foot and cooing unhappily while he rolled from side to side and coughed into the crook of his arm.
In the morning, he stole his father's hiking bag, and packed.
Who had long to live, anyway?
He wasn't some snotty twelve year old who didn't know the first thing about planning.
000
Thermal heating pads, emergency radio, heavily padded grippy-gloves, thermos of hot soup; in Snowpoint City, they were household items. Gilbert took as much as he could sustainably carry and set off for the foot of the Acuity Plateau.
Gilbert was born in Snowpoint. He'd always been in the shadow of a legend.
As the highest place on their part of the mountain range, the plateau controlled the winds in the area. In Snowpoint City itself, the winds blowing were constant, but would be considered mild if not for the sub zero temperatures. Further south, on the routes between the city and Mt. Coronet, the winds fell right off the plateau with blizzard force. Conditions were hazardous at the best of times, deadly at the worst.
The place directly at the foot of the plateau was dead silent. Hardly a whisper of wind to be heard.
No one built houses here. No one set up shop. The forest was as old as the rocks that made up the cliff itself, untouched by man or beast. It was eerie. Gilbert couldn't even see the lights of Snowpoint City from where he stood, though he knew it was less than an hour's hike away. With a slow breath he turned his attention back to the cliff face.
The rocks were rugged, despite hundreds or thousands of years being exposed to the elements. He looked down at his feet and then up again to the place where the edge of the Plateau met the sky. It wasn't—it wasn't but sofar. And he was sixteen. Pretty tall with some muscle, despite everything. The plateau was only a couple times his height. His breathing was shallow, but that didn't mean much. The jutting rocks off the cliff face would've given any pokemon trouble.
He unzipped his jacket to free Chatot, just in case. Then, he climbed.
His lungs began to give out halfway up. Chatot trilled at him. She swooped and dove behind his back before digging her talons into his shoulders.
"Fuck!" His right hand slipped as he twisted, trying to shake her off or shout her away. One wild swing too far lost him his other handhold. Gravity took him suddenly, he felt himself start to tilt backwards, and started to shout, reaching out to try and grab the cliff face again—
He didn't fall.
His eyes were still wide open. They'd never shut. The sky was very much where it had been a moment ago, and not falling away from him. There was still no wind. Chatot screeched, her talons digging in hard to Gilbert's shoulders and almost entirely supporting his weight, keeping his feet braced in their spots on the cliff.
He found his handhold again, his breathing thin and heart pounding in his chest. His head swam so hard it was difficult to focus on anything in front of him, though the stabbing pain in his shoulders kept him somewhat in the moment.
He considered trying to go down, but his stomach flipped at the thought of trying to look down to see how far he was from the ground. He was not about to vomit halfway up the Acuity Plateau.
Fingers clammy in their gloves and sweating hard, he climbed.
Chatot was too small to carry him like another flying pokemon might've been able to, but she was strong enough to help take some of the weight off his climb; it was worth the pain in his shoulders.
Finally, his first hand gripped the top of the Plateau. While he braced himself for the last few feet, Chatot apparently got fed up of waiting. She dug her talons hard into the back of his coat and started flapping hard enough that Gilbert's feet left their footholds. She dragged him the last few feet onto the edge of the plateau and collapsed.
Gilbert got a faceful of snow for his part.
The snow was hard. Really hard. He made a dent where he lay, sure, but it made a dent in him, too.
Chatot hadn't fared much better. The fucking yellow ragmuffin shivered so badly, all Gilbert could do was unzip his coat and make sure the thermal hand warmer he'd shoved into an inside breast pocket was still working. Chatot spotted the motion with her keen eyes and hobbles towards him. He zipped her in.
They lay like that for a while, breathing hard and warming up. Getting over the ache in their shoulders—he was pretty sure Chatot's wings were going to ache after trying to fly with a human in her clutches.
Gilbert wasn't sure how long they were there. He didn't have a watch and hadn't checked the time before they left. It was a Saturday, no school the next day, so he had time. Not that he was planning on going again, though home was much closer than the end of a quest, and—should he be thinking about school and going home when he just got to the top of the Acuity Plateau?
He sat up. Chatot squawked against his chest. "Motherfucker!"
Shouldn't there be more wind?
He got up slowly, not just for Chatot's benefit, and looked around.
There was no wind. Not even when he knew all the winds of the Snowpoint mountain range were supposed to go right overtop it. He couldn't even hear the winds he'd hiked through howling.
There was no wind. Just a vast, still lake with a grassland on the far shore. Large pine trees stood guard, trees taller than any building ever made. He hadn't, hadn't he—he hadn't seen them from the ground. It was a wonder if they couldn't been seen from the ground, with how—how tall?—how was the sunlight so bright with so many monstrous trees?
There was no legend in the lake, only an island. When Gilbert moved closer to investigate, the water was dark and murky, and utterly still. He was tempted to stick something in to see how deep it was, though he got the idea the lake was far, far deeper than he'd ever be able to wade. Far colder than any human should try to swim.
There was no legend and no wind. Only a lake, and a distant grassland, and an island.
A single ripple rolled over the surface of the water, and then was still again.
000
A/N
Though not exclusive to albinos, parents with albino children displaying lack of pigmentation in the hair and eyes are advised to keep on the lookout for frequent coughing or difficulty breathing, as it may be a symptom of a serious and eventually fatal disease, pulmonary fibrosis, which is characterized by the growth permanent growth of scar tissue in the lungs. Pulmonary fibrosis is common, but each specific type is rare. It becomes more common as a population grows older. It may be a secondary effect of other diseases or, more uncommonly, simply appear without any known cause, known as idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF).
40,000 people in the US die annually to IPF, the same number as die to breast cancer. IPF is one of the few diseases remaining to which the FDA has no approved treatments, no known cure, no definitive cause.
Symptoms include coughing, dry hacking, fatigue and weakness, chest discomfort and pain, chronic shortness of breath (particularly with exertion) , rapid weight loss, and lack of appetite.
Lung transplants are regarded as a last resort option.
Gilbert's case of IPF is advanced, especially for his age.
Medical information was gathered by googling on the internet and may therefore be inaccurate. Apologies in advance for any exaggeration or underexaggeration of the symptoms displayed in this fanfiction.