Part 14: Here and Back Again

James kept running through Jessiebelle's manor, not even sure if he remember why he was running except for the fact that his mad fiancee was, of course, mad. Somehow, that thing he generously called his brain was a bit too deep into Panic Mode to process everything clearly.

He skidded to a stop as that thing he called his brain suddenly realized that Jessiebelle would be even madder if she caught him running through HER mansion anyway.

Except that Jessiebelle was, presumably, being detained by Jessie, who... besides looking almost exactly like Jessiebelle herself, had been last seen shoving him out the door after practically dragging him into Jessiebelle's bedroom, completely uninvited and obviously unwanted...

Which hadn't been the plan at all.

The plan had been for Meowth to detain Jessiebelle separately while Jessie and James found the shiny Snorlax and made off with it. Heck, they'd been told in which room the Snorlax was kept; if James had been actually paying attention when Jessie had dragged him all over the manor, he'd have realized that they were going in the wrong direction entirely. Sadly, being in his estranged ex's personal palace alongside her perfect doppelganger hadn't exactly done wonders for his nervous system; at the time, and even now, it was far more nervous than system.

James was not a complete moron; actually, he wasn't "all there" on either side of the intelligence level. In some ways he was even smarter than most people, but in other ways... he wasn't. He'd been the black Furfrou of the family all his life, and he knew it – and the trouble with being a shiny was that everyone was always trying to catch you somewhere.

Jessiebelle had tried to take advantage of his naivety. Jessie has tried to do the same thing, in a totally different sense of the term...

And then it hit James like a Mega Kangaskhan's Sucker Punches.

Jessie and Jessiebelle. In the same room.

ALONE.

He tried desperately to rationalize fleeing like a scared Deerling, or even just going back and trying to steal the Snorlax on his own – even as he promptly did a total 180 degrees and sped back towards Jessiebelle's bedroom, knowing for almost certain that both his and Jessie's lives could well depend on his presence there – or, for all he knew, both end tragically by Jessiebelle's own whip-wielding hands.

He just had to get there before Jessie brought up the Sleeping Bag Incident...

...and much to his surprise, James bumped right into Jessie and Meowth while coming up maybe the fourth flight of stairs.

To say that James was surprised was an understatement: "You survived?"

Jessie, of course, slapped James' face so hard that she left a mark. "No thanks to YOU! Why'd you have to go and get engaged to a brat like THAT when you could have had ME, anyway?"

Meowth muttered something that is better left unsaid, considering that Jessie might someday be reading this. It wasn't a complement.

James stared at Jessie, whose fancy (and entirely unpaid for) Victorian dress was torn up at the bodice where Meowth had reflexively scratched her, revealing razor-thin glimpses of certain parts of her that are better off unspoken of. "Jessiebelle did THAT to you?"

Jessie was about to correct him, but Meowth figured that this was the best chance to save his own fuzzy skin. "Meowth! Dat's roight! But ya'll nevah guess who came blastin' in ta rescue us!"

Jessie glared her patented poisoned daggers at Meowth, who seemed oblivious to them. "Yeah, yeah, let's go get Snorlax before they have to rescue us again!"

James was confused. As usual. "Wait, WHO?"

Jessie grabbed James' arm, not caring if she was triggering pain during James' surgical recovery phase. "Never mind that. Let's rocket like Rocket-Dan!"

"To protect the world from devastation!" James agreed, not quite knowing what else to say.

To be honest, he wondered if it would have been quite less painful to have just died outright in the stinking Moltres costume while trying to bait Articuno.

You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.

Jessiebelle, of course, had had no intention of doing either. Not that she had much of a choice what was going to happen to her; in the midst of what had been shaping up to be the ultimate battle between her and her evil(ler?) twin, not only had Meowth shown up as a wild card, but he had promptly been one-upped by the sudden appearance of Jessie and James' "competition" to kidnap the red Snorlax first.

Said "competition" being, as fate would of course have it, none other than Butch and Cassidy.

To be continued...