Pokémon Azure

Chapter 6: Sometimes They Fall

(Blake Nakawa)

"Why the fuck didn't you tell us?"

Blake didn't waste any time replying. He knew any pause while he tried to think of the best reply would only inflame this situation further. "I'd really hoped it was a one-off. Leftover… um. Impressions, maybe." He sucked in a short, fortifying breath. "From…" But he let the last part of his sentence out on a sigh instead, along with a simple, "yeah."

An unspoken ripple crossed over their group, and Blake knew that they were all on the same page. Zeke.

In the harrowed silence of their emergency late-night meeting, Blake's eyes found Zahlia. She was stricken in that way that wasn't always easy to pinpoint, but was still painfully obvious to those who knew her. A few people down from her, Orion was pale.

Gav rested his forehead in his hands for one, faltering moment, drawing in an uncharacteristically shaky breath that made Blake uncomfortable to hear. But, of course, when he spoke his voice was level again. "One more time. What did you see?"

Blake frowned, unable to help himself. The "Dream Eater link" had been fairly simple, but he didn't question Gav's request to hear it again. "Vaughn was telling some guy I didn't know to 'go to site A.' I don't know what that means, of course, but…"

"'The place my son found,'" Gav repeated, softly, and for a second Blake was irked. If he could remember those words so clearly, why did he need Blake to repeat himself? A second later he realized what was really going on. Gav was struggling hard against the kind of scatter-brained exhaustion that made a fully-formed thought evaporate as easily as a water speck on a stovetop. He needed a memory jog. Blake found the idea of Gav of all people being that out of sorts distinctly disturbing.

"Brainstorming time," Victoria cut in cooly, though her voice was tight with weariness. "Site A. What do we think this means?"

"A comes before B," Beth said dully.

"… Astute," Amaris said, like he was waiting for a punchline.

Beth managed half a smile. "Not like that, sorry. I only meant, it comes first. It's probably the first site of its kind, or at least the most important."

A wave of shallow nods drifted around the room, this theory generally accepted. The light in Katherine Broome's large living room felt too harsh and bright when all they could see out the cracks in the blinds was pitch blackness. The fact that the rest of Pewter was probably sound asleep while they were calculating risk and piecing together dangerous clues made the whole gathering feel absolutely surreal.

"Should we be egotistical, here?" Jason asked, breaking the thoughtful silence. Many heads turned to face him and he tilted his chin up first, but his eyes were a little late to the party, still locked on some point he'd chosen to stare at while lost in thought. When he finally snapped his tired, but strangely bright blue eyes up to look at the rest of them, he was grim. "Assume that Nakawa is tracking us?"

The quality of the silence became prickly and uncomfortable, but Kaylee spoke up to break it quickly. "That's a safe assumption at this point. We can't be his only enemies, but we've caused a—lot of trouble." Blake got the impression she'd censored herself from using a colorful adjective there.

Gina let out a large sigh at the same point Tim started to speak. "I think—" He paused though, looking to Gina to see if the sigh had been a prelude to speech, but she shook her head.

"Go on," she insisted.

"I was just going to say… stands to reason if he's talking about you guys that 'Site A' would be Edith's cottage. It was your home base."

It felt like the room itself let out a defeated, slow breath. In his mind's eye Blake pictured a stereotypical map of Kanto replete with pushpins and red string tying each point of interest together. How many people were currently working on tracking them, either directly or indirectly? Did they keep spreadsheets, accordion files of paper like the ones their own group maintained about the syndicate? Was there an office assistant in the Department of Scheming, Stalking and Attempted Murder?

For a second it almost felt like Backburner Blake was back, but then the feeble, hollow train of thought vanished. He couldn't be sure, but he suspected most of their number were thinking about Edith, maybe lost in a memory of the sunlit days they'd spent in her company and at her "safe" house, the recollections now tainted with dark, uncertain shadows. How long were they tracked for? Which funny or meaningful scenes had played out with Zeke watching from the cover of the tall trees? Where was their erstwhile hostess now?

As one, the group switched gears on the turn of a pin. "Close the link," Amaris directed.

"Uh," Blake said, taken aback. Before he could sass Amaris out of existence, Kaylee interjected.

"But… I mean, okay, don't get me wrong, but… if we keep it open, we can see what Nakawa is doing. That's not nothing—that's useful. That could be life-saving."

"It's not predictable," Amaris pointed out, at the same time Victoria snapped, "It's not safe."

"That's my worry, too," Zahlia finally said, speaking up quietly from Tim's elbow and almost getting drowned out as Kaylee tried to argue her point back to the redheads. "If it is a Dream Eater link, and we have no reason to think it's anything else, that means it's a two-way feed."

Kaylee grimaced, but fell silent, and Tim sighed and nodded. "You're right. We have to close it."

Blake rolled his eyes hard. "Yeah, fine and dandy. Tell that to Gengar."

So they tried to tell that to Gengar. Zahlia let out her Pokémon and, one by one, virtually everyone gathered took their turn to try to impress upon the distracted creature the severity of the situation at hand. For the first time since his evolution, Gengar seemed a little bit like the Haunter he'd left behind. He wasn't performing loop-de-loops or laughing, but he was displaying that admirable ADD just fine. His red eyes would slide away from each face in turn, a frown lingering there as Gengar seemed to decide that something only he could hear was far more important and worthy of attention. Blake had accepted it long before the others gave up: they could talk at Gengar until they were blue in the face, but it wouldn't make any difference.

It was a dejected, fed up bunch that parted ways some hour later. Blake tried his best to earnestly listen to the advice thrust upon him from every side: try not to think about Nakawa, that might aggravate it—borrow Clefable or Poliwrath, have them put you to sleep with their Pokémon moves, maybe you'll dream less—come to us the instant you get any other flashes of insight, even if you're not sure they're real—

Blake was only too happy to get the hell out of the living room after he'd been talked at for upwards of five minutes straight during his attempt to flee. The group had another useless meeting under their belts. They never seemed to get anything done anymore these days.

Blake felt eyes on the back of his head as he mounted the stairs to get to his room on the second floor. His feet were freezing; he hadn't realized it until now. It was barreling toward summer but that didn't mean a thing in the middle of the night walking around barefoot on hardwood floors.

If the world made any sense whatsoever Blake would have crawled into bed, dejected and frustrated, but exhausted, and would have been asleep in minutes. The day was over, the meeting was adjourned—it felt so much like the ending of all the excitement that he never dreamed another vision was coming. It sucked him in like a sinkhole disguised as a shallow puddle of rainwater.

"No," Vaughn says, a period at the end of Azakawa's rambling sentence. The momentum and frantic energy of the other man's words die like his powerlines have been cut. "Replacing Anderton and Mason this late in the game is an inefficiency we cannot afford. I've already considered and dismissed the idea of taking them out of the equation permanently. The solution is to rope them back into the fold—after reconditioning."

Azakawa is dead silent, not daring to speak after being cut off in such a definite way. Vaughn allows himself to drift into his thoughts for a moment, but it does not last long. Overthinking benefits no one.

"Perhaps shaking down Pallet wasn't such a terrible idea. It got results; it stopped their 'work.' If you don't find anything after your next sweep of Site A, stir the pot again."

For just a second, there it is—the weakness, the doubt that graces even his most zealous employees. Azakawa balks, just a touch, at the idea of what Vaughn is asking him to authorize. Vaughn locks eyes with him, holds his gaze for a long, drawn-out beat, and smiles.

"See what happens."

Blake came back to himself with his eyes burning and screaming, having been open the entire time and staring blankly at nothing, but that was the absolute least of his worries.

Son of a bitch. Before the thought even had a chance to fully germinate, Blake had turned and was running back down the stairs. They're going to hit Pallet again.

Not a single person was still in the process of shuffling off to bed when Blake burst back into the living room from the stairwell. Each member of their group was finely-tuned to tension and heightened emotion, able to radio in to the frequency of oncoming bad news like they came with antennae installed. Blake only took a second to suck in a ragged breath before he blurted it out. "'Nother vision. Vaughn talking to Azakawa this time. They want to hit Pallet again. Think it'll get us to act." There was an explosion of sound, but Blake jerked his hand up and, like a conductor, brought the whole room to as sudden a hush as Vaughn had brought to the rambling Azakawa. The parallel made his skin crawl. "The hit'll happen if—if Azakawa's people don't find anything interesting at Site A. When they do their next sweep."

The room seemed to realize as one that he was done, and questions erupted over one another in incomprehensible layers. Blake shook his head, throwing his hands out, palms up, as if to ask them what they really expected him to do with that much babble.

Victoria whistled in a harsh, grating shrill. "Amaris, go," she said, picking the first person to ask a question at seeming random.

"When are they doing the sweep?" Amaris asked at once.

"Didn't say," Blake said, and resisted the urge to shout out, next!

Victoria pointed to Kaylee, who blurted out, "Who's 'they'? "Not Azakawa, it's got to be some people he's in charge of?"

"Didn't say," Blake said again, already feeling the pit growing in his stomach. There was going to be a trend here, he could tell. He'd given them everything in those few rushed sentences and had no other insight.

Tim got the next one. "They want us to act—they're trying to draw us out? That's the impression you got?"

"Definitely," Blake said. "I believe the exact words Nakawa used were—were 'stir the pot. See what happens.'" A cold, crawling hush fell over the room.

Gina had the next query. "They didn't say what they plan to do to Pallet…?" she asked, her voice almost gone.

Blake grimaced. "No," he said, offering it as an apology, like it was somehow his fault he couldn't emerge from these visions with the syndicate's annual report and itemized budget in hand.

"Fuck," said Jason, out of turn, but it didn't matter anymore. The well of questions had run dry.

Not a second later, though, Blake realized with a lurch that he hadn't actually given them everything from the vision. He'd blurted out the most important piece of information, but in the harrowing silence another detail emerged from his short-term memory. "Also. Vaughn was saying something about Anderton and Mason. About how, what did he say. It's 'too late to take them out of the game permanently' even though he'd considered it. He… he wants to return them to the fold. Um, after 'reconditioning.'"

"Reconditioning?" Kaylee and Orion asked together.

"That's all he said," Blake replied hollowly. "It sounds like some kind of brainwashing bootcamp if you ask me, but he… didn't expand."

"We—" Gav said, but cut himself off. The others all turned to look at him while he gathered his thoughts. "We don't… have a choice. We've got to intervene before they decide to call that hit, somehow. We need… to at least prove that we aren't in Pallet anymore."

Beth added, quietly, "And make an appearance before they decide to force our hand."

Blake was sure he wasn't the only member of their group who had been agitated to the point of near-insanity during their exile in the Power Plant, where they'd had nothing to do and no one to fight. Now, with the knowledge they were going to actively seek out their enemies for a face-to-face confrontation, Blake couldn't help but nod, wryly, to the fact that the grass was always greener on the other side.

Blake had no future in the thespian arts. He'd always suspected as much, but that fact was only cemented over the next several excruciating days. Granted, his acting skills didn't exactly have a chance to bloom in full when the stage upon which he performed was the wreckage of Edith's cottage, and the audience wanted to kill him.

The plan of action had taken many hours and considerable disagreement before it finally solidified into something applicable. Their first plan had been for everyone to go to the cottage together, camp near the outskirts, and wait. Almost immediately that idea had been shot full of holes: it was too obvious, suspicious, even, for them to be hanging around Edith's in a big group, doing seemingly nothing. Opponents of abandoning the idea worried that they'd be vulnerable if they weren't all together, but there was no getting around it. In the end they'd decided to split up their shifts in pairs, dive straight into the wreckage of the cottage, and behave like they were trying to, covertly, dig through the rubble to extract something important they'd left behind. The pairs would keep this up for about four hours at a time, then swap themselves out with another pair. If at any point in time trouble arrived, Tim's Jynx and Gengar, both watching and invisible in Gengar's shadow, would teleport back to Pewter to gather up the others as backup. It was not a perfect plan by any stretch, but it was the only one that didn't seem to lead in a beeline to immediate failure.

Blake and Tim had the 6-10pm shift tonight, and in another seventeen minutes they would sigh, look to each other as if disappointed, and place a fake phone call to the others, for the benefit of anyone watching. They'd report they hadn't found "it" and were coming home.

Blake had, at first, thought it a little weird that he was paired with Tim, but he quickly deduced why that was. Blake only had Grumpy, Farfetch'D and his still-erratic Golbat to his name, as Zeke's other Pokémon were still being rehabilitated. It made sense to pair his lackluster roster with Tim's much larger one. The other pairs went like that, too: Zahlia with Jason, Kaylee with Amaris, Victoria with Gina. None of them were defenseless anymore, by any stretch, but it helped to have those with fewer team members grouped with those who at least had a full and active roster of six.

Blake's movements felt clunky and awkward, exactly like he was exaggerating every motion for the benefit of a camera. He tried to act naturally, but caught himself picking up things that were absolutely ordinary and turning them over and over in his hands like this shattered teapot might be the thing they had come back and risked their lives to retrieve. His only consolation was that Tim wasn't doing much better. He was so tense where he crouched near the wrecked fluff of the sofa that Blake could easily picture him leaping to his feet and deploying his team at the snap of a twig. At least they looked nervous; it made sense for them to be. They were insane for having returned here, and were acting the part.

They heard it a mere five minutes before they were supposed to leave. Blake had only just managed to take up a book and flip through it, like he was searching for a note slipped between the pages, when a cracking rustle sounded from the line of trees to his left. He froze, and felt more than saw Tim freeze the same way from the corner of his eye. There were differences between Pokémon sounds and people sounds. Zahlia had taught him a few of the tricks she'd picked up over her years of early-morning training in the thick of whatever forest she could find. Pokémon sounds were usually steady and unbroken, a rustle followed by an accompanying crunch farther down the way, or a longer series of scraping sounds from within a tall tree. When Pokémon made sounds it meant they felt safe to do so, and had no reason to freeze right after they'd stepped across a twig. When a human who did not want to be detected accidentally made a noise, it was abrupt, quick, and followed by calculated, protracted silence. That was the exact quality of the noise they had just heard.

Tim and Blake exchanged a brief, calculating look, before nodding to each other once. Tim said, in a louder, carrying voice, "Sure wish more people were here to help us look," and Blake knew that was the cue for Gengar and Jynx to silently vanish and start bringing the others back.

"Mm," he replied to Tim noncommittally, purely because it might look weird if he didn't respond. He sent a text to Zahlia from waist-height, concealing the phone the best he could with his book. Someone in the woods. 11:00 from the front door.

He glanced into the mostly-intact, but sagging hallway of Edith's cottage and was rewarded with the sight of Gina, Jason, Amaris and Orion teleporting into the dark shadows of two half-collapsed doorways. Blake went back to messing with the book in his hands, not wanting to give away their position if the person in the trees was watching. Out of the corner of his eye he saw four more people arrive. They would be the Harrison and Larson siblings. Zahlia was the only one who would not be teleported into the cottage. Now that he'd given her the information about what they'd heard, she would be delivered into the top of one of the tall trees surrounding the property, and her Gengar would be sent forward as a scout.

Blake roamed out into the grassy area around the cottage as if he needed to stretch his legs. Nature had reclaimed the lawn, once ruined, muddy and burned from the vicious fight they'd had with Zeke there. Tall grass rustled against Blake's dark cargoes as he made his way in a meandering fashion toward the treeline, marking for the others where they'd heard the sound. Every nerve in his body was singing a starsong of utmost tension.

When Gengar appeared smack-dab in front of Blake, he froze. That wasn't part of the plan at all, and against his will Blake opened his mouth to hiss out a reprimand to Zahlia's unpredictable ghost.

Then Gengar's face split into a gigantic, goofy grin, and Blake realized it in a horrific jolt.

"It's not him!" he shouted, and tore for a tree just as the foreign Pokémon filled the field with the distorted, melodic psychic waves of Hypnosis.

Blake hit the tree and vaulted up it effortlessly, hands and feet finding holds as he launched himself skyward, leaving the attack intended for him behind. He heard teams deploying, shouted orders and the crashing sounds of many people trying to jostle to escape the cramped, destroyed hallway down below. Blake tossed a glance over his shoulder at the ground and saw a host of his friends' Pokémon converging on the Ghost, a second before two more Gengars appeared out of mist to flank it. For a second Blake thought he was going insane—and then it hit him. He knew now who they were up against.

The Initiates did, too. "It's Wyland!" Gina and Jason shouted together, just as Blake looked down from his vantage point and spotted a slender, dark-clad figure tearing through the forest to make a getaway.

"Down here!" he shouted to the others, he didn't care who. He was getting away.

Jason, Orion and Tim leapt into action, their team members streaking behind them as they crashed into the woods to follow Wyland. High up though he was, Blake rapidly lost sight of them as they tore into the forest behind him. It only hit Blake with a jolt when it was already too late to shout a warning to them—Orion only had Normal types at his disposal.

No longer feeling useful up in the tree now that they'd found their quarry and he'd avoided the attack, Blake slid his way down as quickly as he could, landing in a crouch at the base of the massive trunk. The fight on the lawn had moved into the line of trees, Wyland's Ghosts luring them in, and Blake understood why immediately. They would be at a crazy disadvantage in this tightly-packed forest. The ghosts were intangible and could move through the obstacles the others would have to negotiate. Blake grit his teeth, sizing up the space he had to work with, and quickly determined Grumpy was out. He jammed his belt and Farfetch'D and Golbat appeared before him, his duck streaking off into battle and his bat flapping haphazardly higher as if to survey the fight first.

The first Gengar that had appeared, the playful one with the big, stupid grin, spread its arms and took a bow for some unknown reason. It was blasted with both fire and water immediately and leapt up to avoid them both in a tight spin. A second Gengar slopped down to take its place, and Blake had to stare at it for a second to determine that it was actually a Gengar at all. It looked more like a Muk, and when Gina and Amaris screamed "Dodge!" in unison Blake understood why. A second later it flung itself forward at a large group of their Pokémon in what Blake realized was Toxic.

Most Pokémon were able to leap out of the way, but Kaylee's youngest Arcanine, Beth's Poliwrath, and Blake's own Farfetch'D were hit. His Golbat danced lazily out of the way in his usual style from where he'd dropped lower to investigate.

Gina's Nidoqueen slammed her fists down into the earth and quickly disappeared into it, sending dirt chunks the size of tires flying in her wake. She was digging, and Blake knew Gina had been practicing this move with her—something about Yuji from Viridian Gym using it to great effect. Blake could only hope a Gym Leader technique would give them an edge against a member of the Elite 4.

The third Gengar moved in to Mega Punch Gav's Marowak, but the limber Ground-type dodged. Gav's Pokémon caught a Mega Kick to the abdomen next, unfortunately, but retaliated with a Bone Club straight to its opponent's face. Blake did some quick move math in his head and realized that, of Marowak's techniques, literally only Bone Club and Bonemerang would work here—absolutely everything else Gav's Pokémon knew was a Normal-type move.

Finn's Ivysaur barreled his way in and cracked out his vines against Gengar's flank. The punching-kicking Gengar's only reaction was to close one blood red eye for a moment and turn its head ever so slightly away. There was no hint at all of the outline of a red mouth on its stern, serious face. By contrast, the goofy Gengar flew straight for Ivysaur and got pelted with chaotic Razor Leaves. It immediately turned it into a game, tossing bits of purple ectoplasm shadow back at the Grass-type like they were having a ninja battle with throwing stars. Kaylee's older Arcanine blasted fire at it and the Gengar screeched in shock and hightailed it away, grabbing its smoking ass with both hands. If a sign could broadcast to the world what Blake was thinking at that moment, it would be a never-ending tickertape of neon "WTF?"

He was pointless in this stupid fight, yet again. For the first time since his bird's evolution, Blake fervently wished he was just a bit smaller. The least he could do was serve as a healer and status effect buster, and Blake dug in his cargo pockets for some mesh bags of Antidote. He whistled, held the bag aloft, and the poisoned Pokémon seemed to realize what he was doing and orbited in closer to him. Blake squeezed the solution liberally across each Pokémon's flank in turn, but never took his eyes off the fight. He nearly dropped his bag of Antidote when Gina's Nidoqueen erupted out of the ground and almost hit one of the Gengars, but at the last second it fazed out. Blake swore as it reappeared—

Only to be slammed into by Gav's little Diglett, of all things. It had been following Gina's Nidoqueen's lead, apparently, and they got the Gengar with a one-two counterstrike.

Gina's Sandslash was sanding the hell out of what Blake had deemed to be the most dangerous Gengar—the one who had so badly poisoned three of their team members in one go. The Gengar slopped forward over and over but kept getting pelted full of sand and dirt, which was gunking its toxins up and seemed to work well to hold it at bay.

"Go help!" Blake said to Farfetch'D, who had just had the last of his bag of Antidote. Farfetch'D flitted his short wings rapidly and took flight, careening past Amaris' head, but the redhead did a sharp double take after Blake's duck and called a warning to him.

"Not your birds!" he shouted. "Call him back, it—" Charizard's roar drowned out the rest of Amaris' explanation, but Blake didn't need one.

He whistled shrilly for Farfetch'D to return in the nick of time. Thunderbolt scored down from absolutely nowhere and Farfetch'D quacked loudly as one tail feather careened off, blackened and singed. Sandslash, grounded, absorbed the lightning blow with nothing more than a brief twitch of surprise.

Charizard had stepped up to the plate to help Kaylee's Arcanines against the no-mouth Gengar. It seemed to detest fire and favored its Fighting-type moves that put it into closer quarters with their group. It seemed like a good plan to keep it as far away as possible. Still, Blake had a twisting, sinking feeling in his gut as he released Beth's Poliwrath from his care and edged back against a tree to watch. Wyland hadn't made it to the E4 by letting fire stop him from using a team member to its fullest ability. The fight was too easy, even as fast-paced and hair-raising as it was.

His team was holding back.

There was a crashing sound from the trees behind Blake, and he spun around in time to see two more Gengars explode into the clearing, flanking Wyland, who ducked between two trees as if to flee. Tim's Kabutops and Jynx drove him back, appearing directly in his path, but the first Gengar rushed them right through its trainer. Wyland was forced to back up against a tree, much the way Blake had done, and not a second too soon. If the forest had been full earlier it was now packed fit to burst.

Orion's Clefable leapt into the path of a Hyper Beam from one of the Gengars and threw up a Light Shield that blocked both itself and Venusaur from harm. Venusaur was hunkered over, and Blake had missed the humming sound in the din of the fight until it reached a volume he could not ignore. The second Hyper Beam ended, Light Shield went down and Venusaur blasted the Gengar with a Solar Beam that lit up the forest with a bleaching, blinding white light. Blake groaned in frustrated agony, blinking myopically as he saw the Gengar evaporate into mist, avoiding most of the damage.

Both Alakazams were out, Blake now realized, which struck him as a terrible idea. With that type disadvantage he couldn't imagine what Jason and Amaris were thinking, but if their Psychic-types were out shit must be dire. Both gold teleporters were hopping constantly throughout the field, firing off attacks whenever they could, but for the most part they were kept busy simply evading. The Gengars seemed to scent them like blood in the water, and two of the five were constantly preoccupied trying to land Night Shades on them. Layer upon layer of concentrated, coursing waves of darkness made patches of the forest warble unsteadily.

A Gengar rushed in from behind Blake and he just about jumped out of his skin, but a second later he recognized it. Zahlia's Gengar was back, and vanished into the grinning Gengar's shadow. The enemy Gengar made an exaggerated look of utmost offense before disappearing as well, and Blake got the distinct impression they were doing battle incorporeally as mere dark patches in the grass.

For the first time, Wyland spoke. "Three, two!" It made no sense, but it couldn't be good.

The serious fighter Gengar, the Muk-like one and a third, very blank-faced Gengar all fell into one another seamlessly. Blake didn't understand for a second—were they combining their powers to form one super Gengar? Then they released a Psybeam—the most intense, blinding, overwhelming of its kind he had ever seen. No one had time to do anything as it struck Jason's Fearow and Tim's Jolteon—and took both powerful Pokémon straight out of the battle in a one-hit K.O.

"Jesus!" someone shouted. It might have even been Blake. They could never let that happen again, and what was worse, not everyone in their group had seen it. "Orion!" Blake shouted, cupping his hands around his mouth and bellowing as loud as he could in the elder Fremont's direction. "Orion! Clefable!" Orion finally turned to face him, his eyes a ravaging, wildman intense, and Blake prayed he could comprehend him through the haze. "Sing!" Blake roared, feeling his throat tear on the shout, jabbing his finger at the Gengar group. If Sing failed they'd need Stun Spore at the very least—it was their next best bet.

Jason was on it, and Venusaur sent a huff of buzzing, agitated gold powder at the Gengars even as Clefable began to croon an eerie, haunting tune.

The three Gengars leapt back in a smooth, seamless motion as if they really were of one mind. The Pokémon in the area they were facing scattered as quickly as they could, but when the Ghost types spat out an enormous, transparent eruption of Confuse Ray, Blake could only watch in dismayed horror. Almost half the Pokémon in the field were suddenly rendered unpredictably useless. Blake gritted his teeth and scowled at the ugly battle that was quickly tipping the scales decidedly not in their favor, and realized something he should have gathered long ago.

Meek and understated or no, Wyland was a phenomenal trainer. He'd clearly been holding back almost a laughable amount during the League challenges if Jason, Gina and Amaris had managed to defeat him all in one-on-one combat.

Violet burst into Blake's line of sight as Zahlia's Gengar got forcibly kicked out of the shadows on the grass. He flew straight through Blake, who was in the middle of snagging at Farfetch'D's new copper Pokéball at his belt. His bird was clearly too confused to continue fighting—his friggin' bat had dodged yet again, though. Blake fought off the ghost-induced full-body shiver and caught sight of the happy Gengar—or, the formerly happy Gengar. It looked decidedly less so now, and Blake and many of the others shouted, "No!" as it leapt into the Gengar group. No sooner had it joined its team members than all four had to mist away to avoid three streams of fire.

They were four strong when they blasted Night Shade at Poliwrath, Sandslash and Amaris' Alakazam, so Blake figured that was why it felt like he'd just died. The black and silence was so thick and absolute Blake had a hard time convincing himself light and sound had ever existed at all. When he staggered around blind, tripped over a root and went down hard, the pain that shot up his wrists was almost a relief. At least it meant he could still get data from one of his senses.

When the darkness abated the first thing Blake saw was that all three Pokémon were down. Absolute horror rose in his throat and the forest devolved into utter chaos.

Everything was so loud, bright and immediate after that choking darkness, and they needed a strategy badly—but Blake couldn't think. His head was buzzing, he couldn't form a single thought in the back of his mind. How could he have ever achieved distance and logic with his backburner brain before?

All four Gengars pivoted to attack again, and the fifth leftover one blasted at a Pokémon behind Blake with something that rolled over him like an unstoppable sea. Hypnosis, Blake realized dimly, barely aware of how different this move felt from anything he'd experienced before. Blake moved to dive aside but it was almost comical—he was so sluggish, so clumsy and slow, and he felt his legs give up on him and buckle halfway.

The bastard child's getting taller.

Zeke feels lucky for one of the first times in his life. He knew it would be a grab bag to see who he got, which one of this ragtag team would be teleported into his particular room of the Saffron City Gym. He'd been hoping for Zahlia, he'd been willing to settle for punching Orion Fremont in the face… but he didn't even realize how fun Blake would be until the little whelp appeared before him.

He's such a good liar, and he never looks afraid. Even now he's calculating, weighing his words carefully, trying to play Zeke. What a joke. Zeke grew up with Vaughn Nakawa as a father—no one plays him.

When Zeke name-drops the League, Blake gets it. His face is blank, just the way Zahlia's always is—what a fucking pair they make—but Zeke can see the look of oh shit on the runt's face. A surge of sadistic satisfaction fills him. The kid's not carved from stone, after all.

And, what do you know—Nancy Nakawa's mistake has tricks up his sleeve, because a second later Zeke's face is full of a Pidgeotto and he's tackled around the middle by a battering ram of gangly limbs. Zeke finds it in himself to be distantly impressed as they vanish almost before his back even hits the telewarp tile.

Blake never holds back, and Zeke can't understand why it took him this long to appreciate that. The wayward Nakawa child wipes the floor with Zeke in Pokémon Monopoly without a shred of mercy and Zeke loves it. He groans and laughs as he shells out colorful, fake marks to the boy with their mother's dark eyes and revels in the fact that he's not afraid of him—not at all, but then again, he never really was. The scrawny twig of a preteen has grown into a man somewhere far away in a place Zeke has never had access to.

Zahlia's the one who's making it difficult, in the end. He can feel her tension and distrust, and even though he knows Blake hates him, at least with his little brother it's simple.

Little brother.

It gives Zeke pause. He's never really tried out the sound of that before, and he finds with some interest that he likes it.

He really doesn't want Orion Fremont's face to be the last thing he ever sees—but Zeke doesn't have a great track record of getting what he wants. The ground leaves his feet and it's sheer, dumb luck that his back strikes a jagged set of broken planks of wood instead of empty, open air. Zeke clings desperately to the blasted-open hole in the Pokémon Tower and understands with sudden, brilliant clarity that these are his final moments. The world is so bright and so loud, and Zeke struggles as hard as he can to take it all in.

And then Blake is there, diving into the murderous path of the Fremont boy's Metronome, reaching for him and finding his arm with a grip that bruises. Zeke just stares at him, a million and one thoughts surging wildly through a head that hasn't been this clear in years.

No—get back! We don't have to both die here today—

What are you doing, Zahlia and mother can't lose you—

You're the good son, you idiot bastard—

This is the last human contact I'll ever experience.

I want mom. I want to see her one more time.

I'll never get to say I'm sorry.

Zeke had begun to doubt that Blake could even experience fear at all, but there it is now, etched in every line of his face. He tries to pull them back inside, but he's just a boy, not even sixteen quite yet, and the wall is giving way and they aren't going to make it.

His mother's eyes stare back at him, blazing, fierce and stubborn even in the face of fear and pain and death, and all Zeke wants to do now as they tear out into the open air is thank his little brother.

He got to see his mother one last time after all.

Zeke can feel him trying, but Blake's fingers leave his arm.

Blake opened his eyes and saw nothing but gray.

I'm fucking dead, was his first disbelieving thought. His second was, no, I'm just finally goddamn insane. Way to go me, I held out for a long time there.

He tried to turn around to see something else—anything else—and a distant figure caught his eye. They were the only splash of color in this monochrome landscape, but Blake couldn't even really call it "color"—the person approaching him was a study in black and white. Blake squinted, heart hammering in his ears, picking out dark hair, pale skin, black clothing—and then he understood.

He was dead, because this had to be hell.

He blinked hard, hoping the image would vanish, and when he opened his eyes Zeke was standing right in front of him. Blake jumped a mile.

His brother had no dark circles under his eyes, no sallowness to his skin, and his dark hair didn't sport the sheen of unkempt grease Blake had last seen. Zeke's face even looked different, an almost unrecognizable expression of honest shock and some kind of vulnerable, stripped-bare emotion making him look so much younger than the 22 he'd reached before he died.

Blake felt like he should say something, but his brain stalled out. And, unbidden, from a slumbering place deep inside, a stray thought emerged.

Okay. If heaven is supposed to be bright and hell is supposed to be dark, does gray mean purgatory? Does it work that way?

Of all the times for Backburner Blake to kick back on. Blake blinked hard at Zeke, still mute, and for some insane reason he didn't pull away when Zeke reached out for his shoulder. His brother mouthed his name in the perfect silence, his face transported with sane, clear-eyed wonder—

"Get up!"

Blake's eyes snapped open for real. For a flat, suspended second he was sure the face above his would be his dead brother's, but the eyes were too bright, the hair all wrong. Zeke didn't have freckles, did he?

Amaris hauled him to his feet, his face sooty and his hands shaking but insistent. Backburner Blake figured it was PTSD—it looked like Amaris had just been close to fire. "I know. He did it to me once, it sucks. Keep moving."

He should have been a half-destroyed wreck, a hole blown straight through him by the awful, emotional gravity of what he'd just seen, but something was clearing in Blake's head even as his core ached terribly and what he realized were tears dried on his cheeks.

"All one target," he said, numbly, as Amaris tried to shove him behind a tree.

"What?" the Initiate asked, only half-listening to Blake's misplaced babble.

"They're all one target like that," Blake reiterated, hoping that if he doubled the number of words he spoke it would make more sense.

Amaris blinked at him hard a few times. "Yes," he conceded, "but anything that aims an attack their way gets demolished."

"So we do it anyway. Only other option is to keep running and getting picked off one by one."

Amaris paused, but Blake could see the gears turning now. "They'll—they'll get hit for sure, some of them. Almost all of our team will get taken out in the process."

"'Never let your partners fall,'" Blake said flatly, quoting one of the Champions who had scratched that advice onto the VR wall so long ago. "But sometimes they fall and there's nothing you can do."

Zeke was silhouetted in Blake's mind, growing smaller and smaller as the earth rushed up to take him home. He could tell when he looked at Amaris' face that the other boy understood at least some of the aftershock he was experiencing.

"You're right," Amaris said, curt and short. He wasted no time shouting to one side of the field, and somehow Blake found it in himself to call to the other half.

"No choice! Stand your ground, face center—they're all in one spot!"

Blake's team of maniacs drove him crazy sometimes, but they never shone brighter than when it was all on the line. They heard him—they understood. With only the slightest staggering of moves, all evasions ceased. Their teams turned in as a unit, each member facing the group of Gengars as one. Blake counted Clefable, two Arcanines, Golduck, Jolteon and more, but before he had a full idea of who was attacking they struck. Fire, water, electricity and intangible bursts of energy erupted from the lopsided circle and Blake flung his arms up over his face from the steam alone. A sound like a train wreck rattled through his bones and Blake could only guess what the Gengars were retaliating with. He peeled his arms away from his face earlier than was wise and squinted through the haze, his heart in his throat. If his plan hadn't worked…

Golduck and one Arcanine were barely clinging to their last scraps of health. Clefable, Arcanine, Jolteon and two other Pokémon he couldn't see were down.

But so was the Gengar group. Wyland had gone from a full roster to one fifth of his team. The last remaining ghost was forced to shadow to its trainer's side to protect him.

"Don't you even think about it!" Victoria snarled. Victreebel whipped a teleporter device Blake hadn't seen out of Wyland's hand and smashed it into pieces against a tree.

Blake and the others had five entire seconds of blistering, jelly-legged relief. Then the world exploded.

There was so little time to react it was like they'd actually lost seconds from the day. Blake barely had time to feel his face morph into an expression of stupid shock when twelve attacks erupted from six new Pokémon—

From six dragons.

Blake fell directly onto his ass as the earth rumbled wildly under his feet. Hyper Beam—and the flames of Dragon Rage, he knew that blue fire. A tree crashed to the ground between two wildly confused Pokémon, then another, and then a third. Hurricane-force wind whipped across the forest, a scream echoed through his ears—fire, then more fire, flashes of gold mass, a Gyarados' roar.

The forest had been so tightly packed before, but somehow the Dragonmaster had levelled out a respectable space between their group and Wyland. The unmoving forms of fainted Pokémon on the torn-up grass had easily doubled in only a few chaotic, mind-rupturing seconds, and every single remaining creature had fallen back to protect their humans.

Not a single person or Pokémon moved a muscle for several frozen seconds. Blake thought he could feel it—there was an unspoken, creeping knowledge that, if they let out all of the rest of their team members in this new makeshift clearing, they could overpower Lance together. Yet something about his electrifying, arresting presence stopped them. Blake knew it was only partly the sudden realness of Kanto's most famous face. The more logical reason was, in spite of everything, they still desperately wanted him on their side.

It was a relief when Lance finally broke the silence. Blake was sure none of the rest of them could have managed it then.

"Why in the world would you come back to this place?" Lance asked, his face still a veiled threat but his gravelly voice more confused than anything.

Tim spoke up first, the only one of them who'd ever had a positive interaction with the leader of the Elite Four. "Lance," he said, sounding just a little daunted. The sheer volume of information they had to impart was staggering. "You've got to give us a chance to talk. You might think you know what's going on here, but it isn't the whole story."

"Remember what happened at Saffron, Lance?" Wyland spoke up for the first time.

"I did not ask for your input," Lance interrupted, not even giving Wyland a backward glance. "I'll deal with you later. The fact that you were skulking around here at all incriminates you, believe me."

Blake wasn't into the whole "jump on the hope bandwagon" thing. That was more Beth's territory, which was why they balanced each other out so well. Yet even he couldn't deny that Lance's words here were encouraging.

Gav stepped forward next. "Sir. My name is Gav Harrison. I'm—"

"I know who you are," Lance cut in, but said no more.

Gav only took a faltering second to regroup. "Will… you please tell us what you think is going on here?"

It was an interesting tactic, very diplomatic and very Gav. While Lance's eyes did narrow in suspicion, he didn't refuse or react rashly, and Blake finally climbed aboard the "holy shit, maybe we can do this" train.

Three flashes of sudden red light might as well have been canon fire. Their highstrung group leapt, and Lance's face broke into an expression of furious, disbelieving rage. Blake didn't understand—why did he look so unhappy if he'd just recalled three of his dragons?

When the other three disappeared not half a second later—all with Lance never once reaching for a ball or a belt—Blake understood.

"Fall back!" he screamed just as someone else cried, "Get down!" not a second too soon. The quiet underbrush exploded and a flood of unfamiliar Pokémon charged.

Blake's train careened off its tracks and crashed in a fiery wreck below. God damn it—he should have known.

Author's note: Short update in the profile as well as review replies. A little buried right now but I do have a tiny chapter buffer. I'll be a little slow at posting until it's healthier, though.