SHATTERED
He didn't understand.
"I said I hated you. No… I despise you."
But- no. That couldn't be possible. They were friends, best friends, from the very beginning. When they were kids, they played together every day. He'd thought-
-what? It was like trying to hold onto water, or dry sand- his thoughts just keep trickling from his grasp, faster and faster until he was holding onto nothing.
So he took the time to study his pokemon- the one that hates him. Familiar, so familiar, all of it. The glossy black fur on top, the gray fur on the stomach and neck and it's wrong, so wrong, to see that look- to know what it means- in its eyes and feel his stomach clench because that's hate, hate meant for him and not- not…
"Why?" he asked, feeling like it was hard to breathe.
That look in his pokemon's eyes changed. Pity and despair and disgust and through it all that hate. Weary hate.
"You can't even hazard a guess?"
Dumbly, he shook his head. No, he can't- or maybe he can, because little things are starting to come together, like puzzle pieces only he doesn't have the picture just yet, and the edges are somewhere in a jumble of pieces.
How they'd started, just the two of them, taking time to do more then just battle and walk and battle some more.
The first time his pokemon had gotten hurt, really hurt, and he'd passed it off with a laugh- because he was so nervous, and it couldn't have been that bad, could it?- and used a potion and thought that was that. It hadn't been, because there had been something in his pokemon's eyes for days after.
Battles, so many of them, all blurring into one big mess behind his eyes as he remembered: cuts and broken bones, poisonings and paralysis, sleeping and being crushed, being blinded and being burnt, frozen, so many things that had gone wrong and been ignored or passed off.
But going to a pokemon center took so long! When there were potions and antidotes and what all to be carried about in a backpack-
-when a pokemon center would have healed everything, showed he'd cared-
-but he did care, damn it! He did!
And a little voice in the back of his mind whispered, 'do you? Do you really? What do you say during battles, after battles? What do you think'
And a thousand little complaints, a thousand insults, all rushed into the forefront of his mind.
So he sat, and looked at his pokemon, and then at the bond they'd once shared.
It was shattered, and the pieces were sharp and painful and would draw blood at a touch.
Almost absently, he remembered what a few other trainers had said. They'd known, they'd seen, that there was hate in the bond. But what they didn't know, what they hadn't seen, was under the hate.
"If I can make it better," he said, stuttering only a little, "if I can try, will you give me a second chance?"
His pokemon looked away, and he watched the bond shatter just that little bit more.