A/N: This was originally written for my own entertainment a few years ago, but I've decided to turn it into a fanfic. I may or may not be updating this, depending on how it is received.
The cargo van's motor stirred, murmuring dreamily beneath Wrene's knees like she was hitching a ride on the back of a slumbering beast. She dunked her box cutter into a jar of expired honey, angling the lacquered blade toward the sun and letting its warmth melt the grains in the syrup. Lavishing honey on a piece of toast, she nodded disdainfully at the apple core clutched in Melanie's hand. "Are you ever going to throw out that apple?" she asked, slurping sticky crumbs out of the spaces between her fingers.
Melanie pinched the apple stem's short wick and twirled the core through the air, flinging brown flecks onto Wrene's honeyed toast. "No," she said sweetly, "I intend to carry it for the rest of my days."
Wrene took a hefty bite of toast to muffle her laughter, adjusting the corner of their gingham picnic blanket as a cab honked violently behind them.
Melanie swung around wrathfully, her wayward knees knocking a melon platter off the roof of their van and into the street. "Go around, jackass!" she screamed, pitching the apple core at the cab's tinted windshield. Wrene glanced awkwardly about the gridlocked freeway. Cars packed bumper to bumper extended to the farthest margins of her sight; How does she expect him to go around all this mess? A whirlwind of vulgar hand gestures and soundless threats raged inside the cab. Melanie squared her shoulders and snorted. "Oh, thank you! You sir are a gentleman and a scholar; and also, fuck you!"
Straightaway, Wrene climbed down the van's sun-bleached flank, her toes curling around the metal running board and stepping onto the street below. She edged through the slender corridors between cars and waved amicably at the cab driver. He rolled down the driver's side window to scream at her and she shoved a mason jar in front of his truculent face. As she shook it a pitch-black substance roiled behind the glass, like she had bottled up the darkness from an eclipse. "Would you like some traffic jam?" Wrene offered smilingly. The scar on her cheek ruffled up like an inchworm. "Blueberry, I think.. might be blackberry." She scrutinized the unmarked jar, shrugged, and left it balanced in the flat of his hand as the cargo van's horn bellowed at her.
"Come on Wrene, the traffic's letting up!" Melanie called out the open window. "The early spearow gets the worm!"
Wrene spilled into the passenger seat and wrestled on her safety belt, muttering, "And the early worm gets eaten by the spearow."
The van lurched forward and picked up speed, the forgotten remains of their picnic flying off the roof and garnishing the cab behind them.
"No, I've got this Wrene, don't worry!" Melanie reassured, her sharp-featured profile gazing intently out the van's front window.
Wrene began her chiding lilt, a rather familiar sounding tune between them, "I really don't think you should-"
"FORD THE RIVER!"
Knuckles white, Wrene dug her nails into the dashboard, her foot stomping frantically on an imaginary break. "STOP!"
A quicksilver spray swelled over the van. Clear river water spouted through the holes in the floorboard like miniature artesian wells and Wrene's feeble stomping subsided. The current tugged the van in a sideways list. Cold rage kindled in her eyes. "I told you.."
"Don't try to tame me, Wrene!" Melanie shouted while the engine bubbled and fumed blue smoke. She set the parking brake and killed the ignition. The van tread water, silently fuming. "I am a fierce bitch! Do not ever try to tame me!"
Sullenly, Wrene watched water continue to jet out of the floor. She flipped up the hood on her jacket as Melanie scavenged through the backseat debris. "Shit! Where is the damned motor oil?"
"Here." She retrieved a black jar from the glove compartment and proffered it.
"Wrene, this is blackberry jam."
"Blueberry," she corrected, pointing at the label. Realization gradually dawned. "Oh no.. nonono.. That guy! I gave it to that cab guy!" She watched ire slowly hatch on Melanie's face and changed tack, "Well, it's not like you can change the oil underwater anyway!" She unbuckled her seat belt and swung the door open, water swelling about her ankles. "Look, I'll just trot off to the closest town and find help, simple as that. You stay here.. the captain always goes down with the ship, right?"
She left Melanie grousing furiously in the front seat and waded to shore, her jeans soaked through and clinging to her legs, stiffening her gait as she surmounted an embankment and shuffled along the road to Maelstrom Falls.
Wrene stood on a vacant hill where trees would one day rise. She could feel the anticipation of an unborn forest stirring under her feet, the light-ward yearnings of leaf and limb thrusting up against her heels, lifting her like a staircase on which each step existed only until she abandoned it for the next stair. A gentle avalanche cascaded down the slope, another tread crumbling to dust. They're so far under, they'll die before they get out, she thought. I should save them. She envisioned herself prying up clods of dirt and rocks, rooting out the grass in fistfuls, and exposing fetal trees to the world, the sun glowing ghost-like through their transparent roots.
As she walked ever upward, the dead weight of her pant cuffs slithered after her, sweeping moisture over the dry earth. Wrene laughed, softly. I am helping them; I'm watering them. The hill leveled off and Wrene looked out over a land of clouds, fear and guilt building in her eyes. Then her gaze fell and she saw herself on the ground, cut off at the ankles, a reflection glassed in dove-gray water.
She couldn't see Lake Temperance for the fog, but she could feel its weight sinking into the earth, dragging the trees, wind, houses, everything into its mist. She reassured herself that she was firmly planted on the ground, not flying in the sky like a caged bird, I'm still free.
Knowing full well she had left her map in the van, Wrene fished through her side pockets and scared up a knot of paper money, counted it, sighed, then replaced the bills in her pocket. Even if she was free, the world remained expensive.
She wandered lost and intimidated by the blunt wooden buildings huddled around the wharf. After some time she worked up the pluck to enter a bait and tackle shop.
She was a long time finding a map in the shop's ordered chaos and even longer pondering whether she could afford to be lost; the price wasn't labeled and she dreaded the humiliation that awaited her at the counter. Fingers worrying the wrinkled bills in her pocket, she swung around to leave without purchase and a miracle caught her eye. A posted sign: fishing contest, free to enter, special prize.
Lawlessly optimistic, she greeted the pert woman behind the counter, "Morning."
"Why, yes, it is morning, you're quite observant," the cashier replied dryly. She stared wonderstruck at Wrene's face like she was trying to imagine what it was like and how she would fare if their roles had been reversed. She would probably kill herself, Wrene thought with more than a little satisfaction.
The woman's dimpled chin lifted and lowered as Wrene rose to her full height, took stock of the back-counter's exiled merchandise, then hunched over self-consciously. "Right.. Uhm, can I sign up here? For the contest?"
"Yeah," the cashier replied, steering a clipboard across the counter.
As Wrene fumbled to combine pen and paper into some legible symbol of her existence, she casually remarked, "It's a nice morning isn't it?"
"Yeah."
Wrene's brow furled, her smile tightening. "A bit nippy though."
"Yeah."
"Alright.. Have a nice day!"
"Mhm."
She whisked out of the shop in a fiery haze of embarrassment, privately reproaching herself all the way out the door and down the pier for having turned into one of those dastardly cheerful women. A fishing rod thumped against her shoulder and she hefted it reverently in both hands. Experimenting with its willowy swish and twang, she swayed to its fickle movements, looking ridiculously like a newborn deerling learning to stand upright for the first time.
After what felt like an eternity, she heard the telltale plunk of the bobber and felt the line tug taut. Ecstatic, Wrene rose to her feet and churned the reel, shimmying about as a flat, round shadow surfaced.
"Era," she called forth a glassy-winged dragonfly. "Kill it!" The yanma winged a spry circle around the pier, skimming low over the water.
An exotic fish breached the surface with graceful fury, hurtling its bulk into her yanma's thorax. Era's wings faltered and she sunk below the lake, her feet snared in the fishing line. The rod was loosed from Wrene's grip as the fish dove underwater, dragging her yanma down into the depths after it. The liquid pooling to the surface was hardly two shades darker than the silvery water, but the sight of her yanma's blood raked jagged shock across Wrene's heart. Moments later Era sputtered to the surface and Wrene collected the yanma in her arms. She removed her jacket and ran it over the bug's body, rubbing warmth and life back into the wounded creature. It's not from here.. its body, there was something about its skin.. it has no scales. A mucous membrane sheathed its innards; but what was the consequence of this fact? Touching its skin has a healing effect. It tends to wounded pokémon at sea. Era shed the jacket quickly and rose hovering in the air, multifaceted eyes flickering with the energy to fight.
"No," Wrene breathed, "have patience."
Arms trembling, she sifted through her jacket and extracted a box cutter and lure ball. Aiming the rectangular blade over the water, she drove it into the flesh of her palm and plunged her hand into the lake's numbing chill.
The water stirred and a pink dorsal fin emerged from below the pier. Its flank grazed over the gash in her hand, soft as breath against her skin, and she felt the wound close. She shied the lure ball at the alomomola's exposed tail-fin and it vanished in a wink of watery light.
