DISCLAIMER: I don't own Pokémon.


This short piece was based on shouji_ni_nanshi's drawing of Hayato (Falkner):

Enjoy.


His father always said that the sky was where a man's heart was destined.

"We were born angels without wings," he'd say, and Falkner believed him.

Falkner's first flight, on his father's Skarmory, was a memory he would cherish forever. The rush of air and adrenalin, the rush of a soul freed from the confines of the earth, the sheer power of the bird beneath him, cutting through the atmosphere like a knife through butter.

Falkner loved his father. It was partially due to the absence of a mother figure, partially due to his father's innate passion which he applied to everything in his life.

"Bird masters used to wear ceremonial tunics representing the blue of the sky," his father told him, "Not those silly outfits bird-catchers wear now."

"Birds aren't meant for cages, they're meant to be free," his father told him.

"They're meant to fly."

So many hints, all of them on a clock, ticking downward, and yet Falkner never realized that his fathers lessons were all apologies, a downward spiral to an inevitable goodbye.

And so when his father disappeared one morning without even a note, Falkner was left in shock. He notified no one; the nurses found him in his sky-blue tunic, curled up in a corner, whispering to himself over and over, "Dad, was I your cage?"

He hadn't slept or eaten for three days.


For the longest time, Falkner was the quietest kid in the orphanage. The other kids were put off by his high-quality clothing, his crisp etiquette, and his constant relapses into depression. The adults didn't know what to make of his eyes, which never seemed to look at anyone, but through them, and up, up, up, into the sky.

Eventually he stopped communicating altogether.

He was eleven when he escaped from the orphanage, and it caused the whole of Violet City to fly into a panic. No matter how strange he was, no matter how rash his father had been, to leave the Gym abandoned and the town without protection, Falkner was still the son of the city's greatest trainer and hero! They had to find him…and find him they did.

He stood in the fields, surrounded by crooning Pidgey and their more mature evolutions. The Jenny who found him said that she couldn't approach the boy, there were so many birds. She'd never seen anything like it.

"A circular field of down and feathers, and him in the center, basking in the moonlight."

He returned from that escape full of conviction.

Falkner joined the police force and in short order turned Violet City into the city with the lowest crime rate in the entire region of Johto. He led them from the sky, first carried by a flock of Pidgey, then by a Pidgeotto, then finally by his Pidgeot, by then as in tune with him as a Psychic.

His Pidgeot was full grown when he re-opened the Gym.

He wasn't a good leader, even if his training skills were superb. His tactics were the chiseled instincts of a fighter used to the brutality of the police force and the downright lack of fair play from Team Rocket. He tried to change, but his heart was never into it. His eyes stayed viciously sharp and every 'development' in his fighting style either made it more awkward or more vicious. Then one day he saw a child, driven to tears after a battle with him, whose father rushed into the gym to comfort him.


The Gym was closed for a month.


When the Violet City Gym opened yet again, Falkner seemed like a different person. He held back. He used growing birds with carefully non-offensive tactics. His birds became known for kicking up mud instead of blowing up terrifying winds. "Mud-Slap Falkner", they called him in jest.

He responded by developing a TM for that very move.

Eventually, the word on the street became that Falkner was a pushover. That he and Bugsy were where to start on the Gym circuit, because they were the rookies, the inexperienced ones. "Easy". Of course, there were also the people of Violet, who remembered the boy that led their police force. So whispers also existed that he had dark secrets, that he was unbalanced, that he'd never gotten over his abandonment. One day a young woman who'd known Falkner back in his orphanage days came across him and accused him of "Roosting in his den like a right old owl, watching us all under those bangs of yours!" She said other things to, but Falkner tended not to care about his repute on the grapevine.

The bird analogy, though, he was interested in, and soon his Gym had a new TM to its name.

People started to even call him some sort of mad scientist, though of course TM-development was hardly difficult with the resources of a Gym. And Falkner wasn't interested in dispersing the rumors that he wasn't fine. People would believe what they would believe.


The Jennys know that Falkner is fine. The entire police force does. He healed, that night, in the meadow.

"You haven't seen the talks he gives the criminals after he puts them in prison. You haven't seen him nursing his birds' wings after every battle. You didn't see him, on that field, that night, with a little Pidgey on his fingertips, smiling like Christmas had come early."

Falkner isn't a pushover, or filled with some unresolved past. He's found his calling in his birds.

"Falkner is the gentlest of the Gym Leaders. He was an angel without wings, and now he's found them."