Shouts of battle rang through the moisture-laden air of the Dragon's Den. It was years ago that Silver had won the Rising Badge from Clair, but despite that, in this particular battle, he was steadily being pushed back by the dragon user. In a bad turn of luck, he had sent out his magneton just as Clair summoned her charizard, and the fire-lizard had made quick work of the steel type, ripping into it with fire in its breath and a thousand pounds of force in its jaws.
In its last throes before it lost consciousness, his magneton had let out an electric discharge that made the drake regret taking it into its maw, and Clair had recalled the charizard—injured and annoyed, but not yet unconscious—to send out a fresh pokemon.
Which left him with his last pokemon, his sneasel, standing against a dragonite it was no match for.
It looked perfectly at ease anyways, smirking up at the larger pokemon with a grin of vicious intent.
"Sneasel, use Ice Claw!"
"Take it out with a thunderbolt!"
It was then that something happened that Silver would never have expected.
A deafening crash of thunder rang through the cave, not from Clair's dragonite, but from outside. What surprised him, though, was the way Clair visibly startled, her shoulders jerking up as she looked wide-eyed, over her shoulder towards the entrance of the cave.
Her dragonite, too, froze momentarily in confusion, sensing the hesitation of its trainer.
It wasn't Silver's fault that his sneasel took advantage of the moment, darting out to rake into the dragonite's exposed flank with its lethal claws glowing blue with bitter cold. His sneasel was just acting like a well-oiled battle machine, doing exactly what it had been trained to do, what had been drilled into it through countless long hours of grueling training.
Never hesitate. Never pity an opponent's weakness. Always take every opportunity to seize the advantage.
So it was his fault, really.
It wasn't enough.
Clair's lapse was only momentary—though a part of him, despite the raging battle, noticed the way that her shoulders, which had raised during her startle reflex, remained tense, failing to relax back down into their usual position. A thunderbolt—her dragonite's thunderbolt, this time, slammed his sneasel into the cave floor, where it lay still and unmoving until Silver recalled it to its pokeball.
But way more interesting things had transpired than the battle he just lost.
"You train lightning-breathing dragons, and you're afraid of thunderstorms?" he asked with a smirk on his face.
"Shut up!" she snapped. With Clair, flashing eyes were no exaggeration; he could almost see the sparks flying as she tossed her head like a wild rapidash.
"So it's true then," he added, his interest deepening. He hadn't been quite sure at first—was it just a startle reflex, or was it fear fear?—but he was now.
"That's rich coming from the one who had your team just ground to powder by those dragons." There was color rising to her face—but far from girlish embarrassment, this was the heat of anger.
Silver understood exactly what she was feeling. She was mad, but not mad at him—not really. She hated having a weakness exposed, and she was putting on a fire show trying to hide it. Deep down, she felt ashamed.
Ignoring her taunt, "Do you want me to hold you?" he pressed on, half-mocking, half-amused.
"In your dreams, loser," she said, crossing her arms and rolling her eyes in a gesture that was vintage Clair. The stiffness in her shoulders failed to go away, though.
"Careful what you say—my gengar could make that happen."
"By giving you nightmares? Now I'm not sure if you're insulting me or yourself."
That one had really backfired on him. What had he been meaning to suggest? He would use his gengar to give him dreams of holding Clair? Way to make himself really seem like a loser.
"Yeah, holding you would be a nightmare." At least there was something salvageable he could use to make the idea into a retort, but he was embarrassed by the turn of the conversation and turned to leave. "Anyways, guess the loser will get going now," he said sarcastically. He tried to push the thought of Clair's tense shoulders, which kept nagging at him, out of his mind.
"Wait," she said unexpectedly. "You don't have to . . . you could stay, you know?" she said, a hint of a question creeping into her haughty voice.
Right. The thunderstorm. As if to remind him, it gave a soft, receding rumble.
He met Clair's eyes briefly, startled, and then looked away, made somehow painfully self-conscious by the unexpected note of vulnerability. It set him so off-balance, in fact, that the only thing that came to mind the next time he opened his mouth was what he was actually thinking.
"I didn't expect someone like you would be afraid of storms," he said. He glanced at Clair, warily gauging her reaction. She stood with arms rigidly crossed, standing perfectly still, and he hastened to make sure she knew he wasn't pushing her to reveal something about herself she didn't want to. After all, he hated it when other people did that to him. "I mean, you don't have to tell me why if you don't want to," he corrected.
A silence followed that probably would have made most people uncomfortable—but Silver was not a sociable person and did not care much about social niceties like whether a break in the conversation made someone uncomfortable or not. Also, he was too busy musing on the possibilities of what might be inferred from Clair's asking him to stay to be bothered by it himself.
"I . . . when I was very small, I was mad that everyone had pokemon and I didn't. Somehow I found an empty pokeball and went out into the hills, thinking I could catch a pokemon of my own with that. Well, the weather turned, and it started storming, and . . . there are all these trails we have around here, really steep paths up and down hillsides. You can climb those when it's dry, but when it's wet . . ." she shrugged. Silver listened in fascination to the glimpse into the life of Clair as a child. Wild, rebellious, reckless. "I was trying to get home. I slipped down one of those, of course scraping myself up horribly, and then I was down there in the bottom, in the stream valley, and I couldn't get up the other side, because it had turned to a mudslide. And this gully was filling up with flood water, and I couldn't get out . . . it's a stupid story, I don't know why I'm even telling you this."
At this last phrase, color rose to her cheeks again, not in anger this time.
"So what happened? How did you get out?" he asked.
She shrugged indifferently, looked away. "My parents found me, and they didn't let me out of the house again for a week." She paused for a moment. Then, "Lance was there too," she added. "With my parents. He was old enough to have pokemon at that time, he came with them to help look for me."
Mentally, Silver winced in sympathy at hearing that her older cousin had gone with her parents and was there when they found her. The cousin who was already allowed to have pokemon. Who did everything right. Whom all the adults trusted. That, of course, would only have rubbed salt into her wounds. No wonder she had a lifelong rivalry with the dragon master, trying to make herself like him in every way, but stronger.
The sound of boots echoing on stone cut off Silver's opportunity to ask one of the dozens of questions that were buzzing inside him.
"Speak of the devil," Clair said dryly, rolling her eyes again.
As the older man, with his fiery red spikes of hair and iconic cape, came into view and he took in the sight of Clair and Silver together, his expression remained almost impassive—all but for what might have been a tiny upward twitch of one corner of his mouth, or maybe just a trick of the torchlight.
Clair turned to face her cousin. "Lance. How's the weather out there?" she asked, indifferently.
"Pretty nice, actually," he said, just as nonchalant as she was. "Just a few minutes ago it cleared up all of a sudden."
"Here for business?"
"Clan meeting," he said, "to which you are also coming, right?" He raised an eyebrow as he questioned her.
"Right. I'll be right there soon," she said, not moving.
"All right. See you then," Lance said, and continued on his way to the inner depths of the cave.
"So I guess you've gotta get going," Silver said when the sound of Lance's footsteps had faded away.
"Yeah, I've got to get going," she said, and this time, she stirred into motion, walking towards Silver on her way to follow Lance to the inner shrine.
In passing—it might have been her shoes, but Silver noticed she was still taller than he was—she patted his shoulder briefly. Hers, he saw, had finally relaxed again.
"Thanks, Silver," she said. She looked at him sideways as she passed him, just the faintest hint of softness in her eyes, her mouth the slightest sliver of a smile.
It was in that moment, and in the moments following, as he glimpsed the sinuous curves of her form before her cape concealed the contours of her body like clouds scudding over the moon, that the idol of the small-breasted nymph he had secretly worshiped in his younger days shattered into dust, and the image of a woman whose eyes flashed fire, who clung to her pride like a banner no matter how much she was afraid deep down inside, was enthroned forever in Silver's heart.
He knew enough of the world to know that there was nothing that twenty-something women wanted with seventeen-year-old boys. He may as well try to make the moon his as try to make Clair his. It was a stupid, impossible dream, maybe even slightly more impossible than trying to win against Lyra in battle. But he didn't care. He wanted her. He said it out loud, softly, testing out the feel of the words in his mouth.
"Someday I am gonna make you mine."
If Clair, retreating towards the pier that would take her to the heart of the dragon lair, heard the echo of his words, she gave no sign.
Author's notes:
Constructive criticism welcome!
This story is from a prompt on The Artist's Zone, using the following prompts (challenge and prompts provided by AquilaTempestas):
There's a thunderstorm. Character A has a fear of storms but fortunately Character B is there to help them.
AND
Pokemon battle.
1600-2000 words for the two prompts; subtracting the author's notes, this comes in at 1785.
Silver is there to "help" (w). I saw this prompt and wanted to do something turns around the cliché of the female character with a fear of thunderstorms melting into the arms of the male character who is there to comfort and reassure her, so I thought of this idea of Clair being the one with a fear of storms, and not wanting to show it even one bit.
I don't know if anybody has ever paired these two before, but I like the idea of the two of them together once Silver is a little older. Clair is immature for her age. Silver is, well, I wouldn't call him "mature," but he has the street smarts of someone who has had to fend for himself from a young age. Clair is a tsundere. Silver is tsuntsun. It seems like they would enjoy sparring with each other verbally as well as in pokemon battles. And Silver likes to hang out in the dragon's den and train, so they probably see each other a lot.
Also, I combed through both and AO3 to see if there were *any* stories pairing these two characters, and I found none, so I claim the right to give this pairing a silly pairing name. Silver/Clair, I christen thee Silverdragonshipping. I would say I hope lots of people read this and go out and write more Silver/Clair stories, but I don't think many people still write for these games nowadays.
Finally, Ice Claw does not exist in the games, though I did a search, and apparently it does exist in the trading card game! I was looking at the ice moves Sneasel can learn and just was not satisfied with them—it's a physical attacker, but most of the ice moves it learns are special attacks.