Do you remember that warning for violence way back at the top of chapter 1? Well, it now finally applies to the story!

Skies As Grey As Battleships

- Side Story: Footprints in the Snow -

There were many things in life that Cheren disliked.

One of these things was the cold, especially when it was paired with snow.

He and his company of fellow Unova soldiers had reached the Sinnoh region a little more than a week ago. They'd only arrived at Snowpoint City yesterday, and Cheren was already cursing his decision to apply to the ground division of the army and not the air force or navy. The navy would have most likely gotten him sent to Hoenn, and the air force would have probably taken him to Kanto-Johto.

And this time of year, neither of those regions had snow.

Due to Sinnoh's unpredictable and harsh climate, war was generally waged on foot. Where the Unova army had the upper hand in numbers, the Sinnoh army had in their ability to fight in the most horrendous of conditions.

Based on what Cheren could discern from inside his tent - a tent whose material was much too thin to fully prevent the outside chill from worming its way in - it was sometime early in the morning. He hadn't been able to sleep properly due to the cold, and he didn't feel like attempting to fall back asleep. Besides, for all he knew, the wake-up alarm would be sounding at any moment.

The tent's two other inhabitants continued to sleep. There was the man he'd been paired up with - Cheren's commanding officer had said something ridiculous about using the buddy system while fighting so that no one went off and got themselves killed in a snowstorm or something. Cheren thought that it was more that the army needed two people to a tent anyway and figured that they might as well pair the soldiers off in battle.

Then there was Snivy. Cheren had tried to get her into her Pokeball, but she'd refused. He'd been worried that she'd be too cold to sleep, but because she was often more stubborn than he was, he'd eventually given up and let her crawl into his sleeping bag.

He tried to slide out of it without waking her up, but the maneuver was unsuccessful, and she looked up at him, quickly blinking her eyes and growing more alert by the second. He was just about to attempt to coax her back into her Pokeball when the wake-up call went off.

The other soldier jumped, eyes wide and frightened at the sudden noise. He reached for the Pokeball by his head out of reflex, and Cheren rolled his eyes.

"It's the wake-up alarm," Cheren told him. He might not have tacked on an 'idiot' at the end - between his parents and Bianca, he had managed to learn basic manners - but it was heavily implied.

The soldier grinned a little sheepishly, rubbing the back of his neck. Cheren wasn't quite sure how effective the man would be in combat if he was startled by a simple alarm.

Not that Cheren had ever been in an actual battle, but he'd done perfectly in training, and he had no doubt that he was far calmer than most people. He didn't scare easily, and he was more than willing to use this trait to his advantage.

Cheren quickly pulled his arctic fatigues over the clothes he'd been sleeping in. Realizing that now wasn't the time to argue, Snivy went into her Pokeball without a word of protest, and Cheren hooked the ball into his belt. He grabbed the gun he'd been issued, checked to see if it was still in working order, and holstered it at his side.

Ground warfare was usually conducted using Pokemon alone, but there was the occasional situation that required the use of guns. But with his and Snivy's skill, Cheren didn't think that he'd have to resort to it.

He exited the tent alone, buddy system be damned. His 'partner' wasn't far behind, and it wasn't as if this situation was exactly combat related. A small group had already begun to gather, and Cheren joined the growing crowd. The soldiers chatted amongst themselves until the last of the people had trickled out.

His commanding officer, a woman by the name of Valka Kargin, stood in front of the crowd. She stood at the front of the group, and Cheren noticed that the soldiers nearest to Kargin had put a respectful distance between themselves and her.

Cheren had been surprised when he'd met Kargin. He'd heard stories of what she and her partner Lilligant were capable of in battle. Though they were definitely true - he'd seen her do demonstrations when he was still in training - she was actually a rather nice person. Even Snivy had liked her, and making a good first impression on Snivy was insanely difficult.

Kargin cleared her throat, and the crowd's noise level instantly hit zero.

"I'm assuming that all of you are ready for battle." A chorus of affirmatives echoed from the crowd in response.

"Good. I already outlined most of what you need to know last night, so I'll keep this short. This particular branch of the Sinnoh army is small, but they're extremely skilled in the use of Ice-types, and they know their way around snowy terrain. We're going to drive them out of Lake Acuity. Does anyone need a refresher on the battle plans?"

No one spoke, as expected.

"Then it's time to leave. We haven't far to go, so assume marching order. We'll need the element of surprise if we're going to scale the cliff entrance to the lake without being detected."

Kargin grinned at her soldiers. "Move quickly, but most of all, don't do anything stupid. Move out!"

The march to Lake Acuity was one the most strenuous things Cheren had ever done in his entire life. The training he'd gone through for new recruits had whipped him into shape, but nothing could have prepared him for an hour-long trek through snow that was piled up to his knees. Mercifully, it had stopped snowing half an hour ago, but Cheren's legs still burned from the effort it took to walk.

At Kargin's signal, everyone in the group ground to a halt. The line of frozen trees near the lake's entrance just barely hid the hundred or so soldiers. Kargin made a quick motion with her hand, and several soldiers stepped forward. They had been preselected for the task of sneaking up the cliffside and taking out the Sinnoh sentries.

Cheren was located in what was roughly the front third of the formation. From his spot a couple hundred metres away from the cliffs, he couldn't really see what was going on. When the soldiers returned about fifteen minutes later and they received the orders to move forward, he assumed they were successful.

Though Cheren had enlisted out of a desire to gather information on the various doings of the Unova government, a part of him was excited to experience warfare.

Ropes had already been attached to the top of the cliff, and the soldiers climbed quickly and silently, scaling the cliffside fifteen at a time. The Sinnoh contingent failed to notice their presence until about half of the Unova soldiers had climbed up.

Now that they'd been spotted, the fighting began. Kargin yelled out her orders over the war cries of Sinnoh soldiers. Cheren, along with the others who'd managed to reach the entrance, rushed towards the lake, careful to avoid falling into its frigid water and releasing their Pokemon as they ran.

One thing that Cheren hadn't anticipated was the chaotic nature of warfare. In training, everything had been clear cut - here's the opponent; now, attack! Rinse and repeat.

Real life was far more complicated. Soldiers of both sides swarmed around him, all wearing the same camouflage patchwork of white and grey. It was only by the shoulder patches that Cheren was able to identify his enemies - the Sinnoh symbol, a ring-like shape in green and gold, was supposed to represent a Pokemon native to the region that was said to be omnipotent.

Cheren wondered where their all-powerful god of a Pokemon was now.

In the confusion of storming the enemy lines, Cheren realized that he'd lost track of his assigned partner. Not that it particularly mattered to him, but Kargin would be pretty upset if she found out. She might be kind most of the time, but she could be downright frightening when she wanted to be.

Cheren attempted to weave through the fray and find his partner. Just as he angled his head to get a better look, a razor-sharp icicle shot past where his head had been seconds before.

He and Snivy whirled around to face their attacker. Across from him was a girl not much older than he was, with short, dirty blond hair and bright green eyes. Her Sneasel bounced beside her, looking as if it was preparing another attack. By accident, Cheren did something that he'd been told never to do.

He made eye contact with his opponent.

Though her expression had been cold, her eyes were scared. The second he noticed the opposing soldier's fear, he froze. Snivy looked at him, and he could tell that she was beginning to panic. His opponent's Sneasel shot out a beam of pure ice, and Cheren instantly knew that he wasn't going to be able to dodge in time.

At the last moment, the beam was deflected, shooting straight up towards the white sky. Snivy ended the Protect she'd used, shifting hesitantly from foot to foot. She was waiting for a command from Cheren.

Spurred into action by the attack, Cheren began to gather himself together and decide what to do. Just as he was about to give Snivy a command, he noticed that the soldier he'd been paired with was approaching. The soldier and his Growlithe ran towards the Sinnoh girl, and before Cheren could even blink the Growlithe had let loose a torrent of flames.

The girl screamed as the fire licked her flesh, barreling at top speed towards the nearby lake. She dived in, flailing haphazardly amongst the ripples her entrance had produced. Her skin sizzled in the ice-cold water, sending up furls of steam.

Her chaotic movements soon died down, and she floated calmly on the lake's surface. Her Sneasel looked horrorstruck. Terrified and without direction, it jumped into the water and clung pitifully to its dead trainer.

"You alright?" the soldier asked, looking at Cheren with mild concern. Cheren nodded stiffly as Snivy made tiny distressed noises. He wandered, a little bit aimlessly, towards the edge of the lake clearing.

He breathed deeply, in and out. He didn't understand why he was so affected by what had happened. He'd had training, hadn't he? Training for battle, training for strategy, training for cooperation.

Training for death.

He breathed out again.

"Snai!" Snivy screamed, hastily tugging on Cheren's shirt with her vines. Immediately on alert, he whirled around. A Sinnoh soldier had noticed him loitering near the edge of the woods and was now rapidly approaching. A Glaceon followed the soldier closely, and its eyes were trained on Snivy.

"Vine Whip!" Cheren yelled. This time, there would be no hesitation.

Snivy complied almost instantaneously, snapping her long, green vines against the opposing Glaceon's back. It yelped in pain but refused to stop.

"Shadow Ball!" the soldier commanded, sliding to a halt when he reached the standard five foot distance from Cheren. The Glaceon fired off a pulsating purple ball, which Snivy barely dodged.

"Gastro Acid!" Glaceon jumped to the side, narrowly avoiding a face full of potent acid. A few stray drops spattered onto its ears, visibly corroding the affected fur and flesh. The Glaceon's trainer seemed to consider his next move for a moment. He gave his Pokemon a quick signal that Cheren couldn't catch before he told it to use Ice Beam.

It took less than half a second for Cheren to realize that Snivy wasn't the target - he was. He dropped to the snowy ground on reflex, and the attack soared harmlessly over his head.

But by hitting the ground so violently, he had dislodged a sheet of ice that had attached itself to the cliffside. He and the newly freed piece of ice plummeted downwards to the floor of the surrounding forest, and Cheren was deposited onto the ground in a flurry of snow and pine needles.

Snivy quickly swung down and landed beside him, crooning in concern.

"I'm alright," he assured her, though he wasn't sure he believed it. He brushed the snow off of himself and got to his feet. He craned his head to look straight above him. The soldier he'd been fighting against was staring down at him, conflict evident on his face.

In the end, duty to his region won out, and the soldier began making his way down, moving carefully but quickly.

Cheren weighed his options - fight or flight.

He'd been shown all of the maps that Unova had managed to obtain that related to the woods near Lake Acuity. He mentally flipped through the images, trying to match any one them to his current location. Since he was so near the lake, it wasn't incredibly difficult, and he soon had a rough idea of where he was.

He wasn't really near anything useful, but fighting was looking less and less of a viable option. Cheren knew that something was wrong - tiny specks of colour danced across the edges of his vision, and he felt dizzy and off-balance.

An odd sensation on the left side of his head stole his attention. He tentatively reached a hand up to his temple and brought it away.

His fingers were slick with warm blood. Though he knew that head wounds often looked worse than they actually were, dizziness and a head wound combined with temperatures below freezing was one of the less promising combinations for success in battle.

If another attack were aimed his way, he didn't think that he'd be able to dodge it - and Snivy could only use Protect so many times before it failed. Making his decision, Cheren scooped Snivy up in his arms and took off running into the forest.

Assuming the maps that Unova had made were accurate, then there should be a large pond roughly a mile or so in the direction Cheren was currently heading. If he could make it, then he wouldn't need to resort to battle to defeat his opponent.

"Hey!" the opposing soldier yelled, noticing Cheren's speedy departure and quickening his own descent to the forest floor. It was almost as if he thought that he could stop Cheren with words alone.

Cheren had more than a twenty metre head start, though he had the feeling that he'd have to put every bit of it to use. Even as he ran further into the woods, he was always within his pursuer's field of vision. And with a pace slowed by injury, he had to reach his goal soon.

After what seemed like hours, Cheren spotted what he was looking for. Partially covered by snow, the pond's frozen surface gleamed under the faint light of the cloud-covered sun. Cheren ran as gingerly as he could while maintaining his speed over the ice until he reached the edge of the pond.

He fought the urge to collapse in an exhausted heap. Setting Snivy on the pond's surface, he panted heavily, sucking in gulps of frigid air.

It didn't take long for the Sinnoh soldier to come to the pond's clearing. He stepped onto the ice, approaching Cheren slowly, with the air of predator who had cornered his prey.

"We take prisoners of war, you know," he said. Cheren didn't have enough energy for a reply. Annoyed by Cheren's silence, the soldier added, "Unlike you Unova soldiers."

"No choice," Cheren rasped, waiting for the right moment to enact his plan.

"I find that hard to believe. But if you won't surrender, then I have to kill you."

Slowly, Cheren nodded. It was time.

"Now," he whispered to Snivy. The other soldier immediately ordered his Glaceon to fire off an Ice Beam, but it was a split second too late. Acting on a plan that Cheren had explained while running, Snivy let loose a torrent of acidic purple liquid aimed at the soldier's feet.

Or, more precisely, the ice under the soldier's feet. Cheren's opponent and his Pokemon crashed through the corroded ice and into the dangerously cold water. Thrown off balance by its fall, the Glaceon's Ice Beam missed Cheren by a significant margin.

The Glaceon seemed to come to its senses before its trainer. Knowing that it wasn't strong enough to pull its partner out of the water, it instead tried to climb out. Its dark blue paws scrabbled uselessly against the pond's slick, icy surface, and it floundered about in the water.

The soldier thrashed about before calming down just enough to try and hoist himself out of his predicament. But with fingers and joints numbed and made clumsy by cold, his attempts met with as much as success as his Pokemon's.

"Help me," he begged, staring at Cheren with frightened eyes. For some reason, Cheren noted that his eyes were a vivid blue. Almost as blue as the water that would be his grave.

Cheren sunk slowly to the ground. "Unova doesn't take prisoners."

"Please -"

"Snivy, use Wrap." Snivy unfurled her long vines and closed them around the opposing soldier's neck, and he choked and clawed at the clinging vines. His neck was broken with a deliberate flick, and Snivy loosened her vines and allowed him to bob in the water.

The Glaceon was in hysterics. Having abandoned reason in favour of fear-induced instinct, it swam under the ice and hid where Snivy couldn't get to it.

Cheren closed his eyes and finally let himself rest. Sleeping in the cold while injured was an incredibly dumb idea, but he just couldn't bring himself to care.

When he awoke, Snivy was curled up at his side. Covered with a thick layer of snow and feeling like he was at risk of collapsing at any moment, he very cautiously stood up. His head was a painful mess of snowflakes and crusted blood.

Though he'd slept through to the next morning, he hadn't slept well. Nightmares had plagued him constantly, a mishmash of the horrors of yesterday.

He glanced over at the frozen pond. The Glaceon's corpse had floated to the surface sometime during the night, and the man's body still lingered at the top.

Feeling sick from the sight, he stumbled away from Snivy, who was in the process of waking up. Pointedly looking away from the bodies, an image arose in his mind, unbidden and unwanted - that of the girl his age, blond hair and pale skin aflame, pinwheeling into Lake Acuity.

This time, he was physically ill, emptying the meagre contents of his stomach onto the snow. Shaking from the cold and from something else he couldn't identify, he forced himself to move. Snivy followed him to the edge of the pond's clearing.

Cheren started laughing, though he was pretty sure that crying would have been a more appropriate response. The blizzard that had passed through while he was sleeping had not only erased his footprints, but had also reshaped the forest's landscape. Paths that had looked familiar before were now foreign.

Cheren estimated the direction he'd come in, using guesswork as a substitute for facts - something he wouldn't have even considered under normal conditions. He hobbled through the snow at a far slower pace than he would have liked.

After hours of wandering through the homogenous terrain of snow and trees, he collapsed onto the ground, sinking into the powdery white floor.

"Vi, vi!" Snivy yelled, nudging Cheren with her nose. Cheren tried to stand up, but his head was spinning too much for him to keep his balance, and he fell back towards the ground.

"You need to go," he urged her. Snivy shook her head and attempted to use her vines to tug him through the snow. Between the unforgiving friction of the snow and the natural weight of a human body, her efforts barely caused him to budge.

"I'm sorry." He had the feeling that he might not have been apologizing just for leaving her.

The dots in the corners of his eyes suddenly multiplied rapidly, converging into a mass of roiling colours that blanketed his vision. As his eyes slid shut, the last thing he saw was a bright burst of light.

He awoke in the medic's tent back at camp. He still felt horrendous, but the sense that he could quite possibly die was gone. He maneuvered himself into a sitting position with some discomfort - his muscles were sore, and the sudden movement jarred his head unpleasantly.

Spotting his glasses on a nearby box that was acting as a makeshift bedside table, he leaned over, careful not to tumble out of the hospital cot. He slid the glasses into place, and his surroundings sharpened into view.

Noticing that Cheren was moving around, one of the doctors walked over.

"How are you feeling?" he asked.

"... Alright. Though my head's pounding."

"You sustained a minor concussion. It's going to hurt for a little while, but you'll be fine. By your bruises, you've clearly gone through some sort of impact, but there aren't any broken bones. What happened?"

Cheren shrugged, immediately regretting the action as his shoulder muscles protested the movement. "I fell off of a cliff."

"That would do it," the doctor laughed. "You know, you're lucky you made it back."

"I was wondering about that. Why am I here?"

"Your Pokemon pulled you back, all by herself."

Cheren was confused. Though he'd been partially out of it at the time, he clearly remembered Snivy trying to tug him through the snow and failing - she hadn't been strong enough.

"She's resting in the adjoining tent. You shouldn't be walking right now, but I can bring her here if you'd like."

"Yes," Cheren nodded. "I'd like to see her."

The doctor disappeared into the side tent, reemerging a minute later holding Cheren's partner in his arms. He set her down on Cheren's lap and left.

Cheren blinked. Instead of a Snivy, a Servine was looking back at him. But though the form was different, Cheren somehow knew that this was his same Pokemon.

"You evolved," he stated, unable to prevent a bit of awe from creeping into his voice. Servine nodded her head before tackling him in a hug.

Cheren suddenly remembered the bright flash of light he'd seen before passing out.

"You evolved to save me."

"Ser!" Servine chirped happily, snuggling closer to Cheren.

"Thank you," he said, a little bit of disbelief still evident in his voice.

For once, he let himself smile.

A/N: When I first started writing Skies, I was seriously debating whether or not I should write side stories for some of the other characters. In the end, I decided that they were pretty crucial to character development and that any cons were outweighed by the pros. Bianca's is probably next, but there'll be at least three or four chapters before it appears.

I ended up giving Cheren's commanding officer a name because it quickly became a huge pain to refer to her as 'Cheren's commanding officer'. I followed the Czech theme of Bianca's Japanese name and Cheren's name - valka is Czech for "war".