Pokémon Crimson

Chapter 37: Done

(Gina Ikeda)

It was Lance the Dragonmaster.

He was cloaked completely, everything obscured except for his tall, mud-caked brown boots, the ones with the miniscule gripping hooks that had allowed him to climb high above their heads. He was poised there now, face in shadow, none of his team visible around him—all there was behind him was the stretching darkness of the rafters where none of the wall lights could penetrate.

"You've come a long way," Lance said, still immobile and hanging like a specter over their heads. "Even after many, many attempts to turn you back and dissuade you."

She could never not know that voice. It was as iconic as the man himself—promos, battle footage, PSAs, interviews, slogans, one-liners and catch-phrases—all of these leapt to Gina's mind as she listened to him, struck mute as he presented to them their final League challenge. Though his voice was lower with age, slightly rougher and raspier than it had been on TV or over the radio, he was unmistakable.

"You are… stubborn," Lance said, contemplatively, and somehow Gina tore her eyes away from his obscured figure to look over at Jason's profile. Her best friend was riveted, utterly arrested, and Gina's open-mouthed expression of sheer disbelief turned ever so briefly into a smile. This was his dream.

"Obstinate," Lance continued, and as Gina jerked her gaze back over to him he moved. His cloak whipped as he leapt smoothly from one set of interlocking beams to another, preposterously spry for someone who had to be in his seventies. She could see why he loved to meet challengers in this hallway with those utility boots of his, dropping down on unexpecting trainers like a bat.

He was no more than ten feet above them when he finished his thought. "I don't know whether to be impressed… or very irritated."

Gina's body understood before she did. The punch of ice in her stomach preceded a tremor in her arms, like they wanted to be moving, doing something. Reaching for Charizard, she realized, as the dread spread through to her legs. Reaching for Charizard because this wasn't some standard, pre-challenge smack-talk.

(Amaris Drake)

He knew them.

"You're trying to uncover what we're doing with the technology I've liberated out of that capitalist hell in the heart of Saffron?" Lance inquired, so still that it looked like he didn't even need to breathe to talk. "You want to know our goals, how to stop us and protect your precious way of life? Too bad."

For someone who could stay still for that long, motion must be a clumsy, highlighted thing—every twitch a clue, every blink a shouted heads-up. Amaris did not blink, did not move his hand any closer to Blastoise's Pokéball than it already was. It was like staring down an Arbok, no one daring to make the first move.

"Whittaker-Cheng was kind. The Nakawa boy and your own brother gave you innumerable warnings." Lance explained, twitching back one side of his cloak suddenly to reveal half of his body and his belt—his completely empty belt. Where are his Pokémon? Amaris wondered even as Lance continued to explain just how badly they'd fucked up. "This is a matter dear to my heart. I won't be so kind."

Amaris took a slow, deep breath and, just as slowly, let it out on a single word. "Please. Wait. We just want to know—"

"Sorry," Lance said, in a tone that sounded a lot more like "shut the hell up." "No more questions. No more gathering information. You are children and I won't hurt you. But you are children standing in the way of something I've dreamed of nearly every year of my life. You won't stand in the way anymore."

"What are you—"

"Enough."

Then from up above, where they had been hidden in the dark corners of the rafters, the dragons struck. It was fire and chaos, enormous, swooping dark shapes and Amaris could only catch snips of stimuli—Gina and Jason deploying their strongest to either side of him, Blastoise turning to shield Amaris and himself from a threatening blast of heat. Charizard, the first time Amaris had seen him since his evolution, retaliated with a burst of his own Flamethrower, but at once, not even five seconds in, Amaris knew there was no way. Lance was right—this was a losing battle from the beginning.

Amaris fell hard as Blastoise was forced to back up into him. A roar that struck him down into his bones rattled the very walls around them. Venusaur's vines snapped out along the walls, striking something organic. He caught a flash of golden orange, shining, bright and unbelievably quick, the dragon ducking low under another blast of fire and turning to retaliate with the precision of a creature a tenth its size. An awe-like fatalism and terror sank into his stomach as one of the reptilian wings slammed Venusaur into a wall. It was no good, and Amaris was shouting that now, trying to get Jason to stand down. "We can't stay!" he shouted as Blastoise burst forth with Hydro Pump, dirty water from the filthy rafters splashing down on them in huge buckets. "We have to go! Now, now!"

(Gav Harrison)

It had been hours since Gina and Amaris had vanished through the doors to challenge the Four, and hours since the enthusiastic woman had received a call and vanished from sight. Gav didn't know what to make of this, as it seemed out-of-character for her to disappear when hopeful Champs might be emerging shortly. This was, after all, her job—and a job she greatly enjoyed, by all appearances.

Gav tried very, very hard not to think about this too much.

"What's the protocol, even?" Kaylee asked. "I mean, if they get past all Four. Do they come back out here and head to the main stadium? They would, right?"

"Right," Gav said. "We'd know if it got that far. They're still battling."

There was absolutely no warning past the doors, which turned out to be a kind of sound-proofed Gav hadn't thought previously possible. The "left behind club" was sitting in tense, miserable silence one second, and then Gina, Jason, Amaris, Venusaur, Blastoise and Charmeleon—Charizard—were bursting down the doors and spilling out into the lobby in a wild frenzy.

Everyone started talking over everyone else as Gav's world tilted to the side and his heartbeat flooded his ears in a steady rhythm of denial: no no no no not again.

"It's Lance," Amaris blurted out while Jason said, "We have to—"

"What?" Kaylee demanded over Gina's exclamation of, "he's against us, we need to go—"

"He didn't follow," Amaris cut back in, and for the first time Gav saw how battered they were. They were soaking wet, dirty, scraped, sweaty and shaking. He had no idea what was from their fights with the Four and what was from Lance—Lance the Dragonmaster, Lance the greatest of any Four, who, according to his friends, was working with the enemy.

The floor fell out from Gav's tilting world and he was adrift in a floating, tractionless realm where everything was lost.

"He didn't," Jason was confirming, "but we need to go—" and then Gina groaned out, "the rooms were all empty when we ran back through here, they're all gone, all three of the rest of the Four, does that mean—that means they're with him, right? That means—"

"Guys, whoa!" a voice called from the doorway leading out of the lobby, and shouts of surprise and displeasure chorused through the group as they turned to look at the newcomer.

Nick was looking at them with clear worry, his eyes alive with shock at their frantic, disorganized state. "Are you okay? What's going on?"

"Teleport!" Victoria blurted, and then both Alakazams were out. All Gav saw before they left was Nick's baffled, alarmed face, his hand reaching out to halt them. All he heard was shouting and chaos as the three starters were recalled and bunches of their group crashed together to hold tight to each other for the hop.

All he thought was, it's over, it's all really over. Then he was gone.

(Beth Larson)

Beth gasped so loud it hurt her throat, half a scream and half an inhalation. It was dark, suddenly, and grass was beneath her legs where she'd fallen over. The others were groaning and gagging around her, the jerky mass-teleportation of all nine of them with only two Alakazams, even over a short distance, sickening them all at least a little. Reeling, Beth rolled over onto her hands and knees and lifted her spinning head.

At once she spotted the building they had just fled in the distance and, shaking, she got to her feet and ran through timetables in her head. Nick saw us, what would he do? She only barely knew him and it was hard to imagine what his priorities would be. Would he try to follow or would he gather Casey and Broome first?

"What—what happened?" Victoria pleaded with the Initiates from nearby, and Beth honed in on the conversation. "While we have a second, while security might have a small lag. What did you see?"

"Lance," Amaris repeated again, looking marginally less ill from the teleportation jump than most of the rest of them. "He knows who we are. He was talking about Silph. Saying we're standing in the way of his life's work or something."

"He's using their technology, for… whatever," Jason added, then huffed out a bitter, broken laugh. "The most powerful member of any Elite Four in history hates our guts."

"It just—this doesn't make sense," Kaylee demanded of no one in particular, running her hands through her hair and pulling at it. "Lance? Lance is the one behind making Pokémon freak out and be in pain through the aggro device, pumping trainers full of chemicals that make them lose their goddamn minds so they can get an edge up on trainers who—trainers who do it the right way, the way he did it? What?"

"I don't know," Gina said, doubled up and holding her stomach. "I don't know, he didn't say. We tried—we tried asking him what his work is, what the hell he meant, but he wasn't exactly—"

"Forthcoming," Amaris finished, and Jason added, "while he was chasing us out of the building with his dragons."

Beth felt like her insides were filled with lead and were in the process of solidifying. It didn't make sense—Kaylee was right. But the fact of the matter remained that Lance felt they were endangering his goals with Silph in some fashion—and that meant he was working with Silph, at least to a degree.

"Alright," she said, putting her head in her hands for a moment. "Alright. Alright, so, what—we need to go, then? We need to go home."

The idea of retreating from this place that they had traveled weeks to get to, months to prepare for, and years to hone in on settled in on their group with a graveyard silence. Gav hadn't said anything at all yet, and this suddenly struck Beth as deeply worrisome. She turned to him, opened her mouth to ask him if he was okay, and then Orion and Nathan Fremont teleported into the clearing right in front of her face.

(Zahlia Nakawa)

Chaos exploded around them, shouts and sudden movement and even one or two Pokémon deploying automatically, but it was as if time had slowed to a crawl for Zahlia.

Hello, she thought silently, her eyes fixed, unblinking, on Orion's face. The second he had appeared his own had found hers, and even in the night they were blue. Long time no see.

Everything was slow, surreal, sluggish. Golem, Victreebel, Blastoise and Golbat were poised around the circumference of their group huddle, ready to assault the newcomers at a single word from their trainers, but Orion didn't bat an eye as the Pokémon closed in around him and his father. Beth was scrambling away, the closest to their landing area, and Victoria reached out and caught her as she tripped. Orion was insensate to all of it. He refused to look away from her and she refused to look away from him.

Distantly, she was aware that Nathan Fremont was talking to his youngest son. Jason had tried to cross the distance at once, shoving past Amaris' Blastoise, which had automatically tried to step in to stop him from getting too close to the threat. Now Jason was here, and he grabbed his brother by the shoulders, utterly ignoring his father's words—whatever they were, Zahlia couldn't comprehend them, either.

Orion's eyes snapped away from her face as he looked down at his brother, and she caught it, and she hoped Jason caught it too—there was a flash, a deep, exquisite pain, and though it lasted for only a second, it was more proof that the boy she had fallen in love with still existed beneath the surface of the skin he wore now.

"I warned you," Fremont was saying, and finally Zahlia could hear. She turned to face him, suddenly aware that, while she could not fight Orion, she could very well turn Haunter against this man who had ruined the Fremont brothers' lives. Nathan Fremont's face was its usual cold, unforgiving mask as he stared at his son who refused to look back at him. It struck her, suddenly: is this the first time Jason's seen his father in all these years? she wondered. It very well must be.

"I warned you he'd never stop," Fremont continued, but now his eyes snapped to Orion.

It was Beth who drummed up the courage to ask. "What's—what's happening? How—why are you here?"

Fremont didn't bother to look her way, addressing the back of his youngest son's head instead. "You dug too deep. Pissed off the wrong people." There was a gritting, brief screeching sound, dull and muffled, and Zahlia realized it was Fremont grinding his teeth. "Even Zeke said he warned you, at the end."

And then the trees rustled above them and Zahlia's brother leapt down from above, and the world started moving again, very, very fast. "It's true," he said, a wide grin on his face that did not reach his cold, distant eyes. "I did."

(Blake Nakawa)

Backburner Blake could not fight the extreme exasperation he always felt for Zeke, even in light of these daunting events. Always had a flare for the dramatic entrances.

Zahlia's brother straightened up from his landing just as Orion turned to face him, the warning in his eyes one that Blake would never dream of ignoring or challenging. Zeke, of course, ignored and challenged it, and in a moment the two teens were face to face, neither yielding an inch of ground to the other.

"Stand down," Orion said in a quiet, deadly voice.

"Oh, I'd love to see you try to make me," Zeke responded, his voice punctured with an unsteady laugh. Blake wanted to punch them both straight in the face.

Orion widened his eyes just a touch and Zeke seemed to take it as some gesture of deep offense, because he snarled at Orion and lurched forward, apparently expecting him to back down. When Orion didn't budge an inch it became all too clear that a fight would be breaking out in moments, but Nathan Fremont's voice broke above the din, silencing everyone in the area.

"Not now!" he snapped, mostly to his son, though Zeke jerked at the tone and gave him a sharp, pointed glare as well. To the rest of them, Fremont said, "They'll be coming around any second now to see if you're still here."

There was a tumult of noise, some of them frozen and trying to get questions out of their unresponsive throats, some of them dropping into formation and getting ready to deploy even more Pokémon to fight for their lives against either the three men gathered here or whatever reinforcements were coming.

"I knew it," Zeke spat, his face twisting into a grimace somewhere between fury and deep satisfaction. His dark eyes became distressingly wide. "You're traitors, your whole fucking family, I knew it from the beginning."

"Congratulations," Orion said, voice dripping with sarcasm, but before Zeke could react Fremont stepped in.

"Orion," he barked, and Orion, for his part, did not break eye contact with Zeke for even a second as he nodded briefly to his father to show he was listening. "Take 'em away."

This one—this gave Blake definite, unpleasant pause.

"What?!" Jason demanded, crouching low and grasping a Pokéball tight. "What do you mean?"

I can think of a few options, Blake thought, calculating the likelihood of all of them being able to make an aerial escape. There was Charizard, Fearow, two Pidgeots and Grumpy—even Starmie if they needed it—they could do it, but only if Lance wasn't monitoring the skies. Blake did not want to see if he could outfly his Dragonites.

Yet all of this was forced from his mind as Zeke finally snapped, lunging for Orion and making a wild grab for his throat. Somehow Blake managed to catch the phrase, "... dare take my sister—you touch her you die."

(Kaylee Harrison)

Orion blocked Zeke's strike and dropped back a few feet to right himself. He wove underneath another wild right hook and twisted his body, his elbow expertly finding its mark right at the place where Zeke's ear met his jaw. Zeke spun and went down, but it was like he had built-in springs; he roared and threw himself back at Orion, and even when he got a knee to the gut for his trouble he leapt back for more.

Orion had gotten better at this—way, way better, and Kaylee's mouth hung open as she watched the eldest Nakawa and the eldest Fremont grapple furiously with one another in the dark. Jason was shouting at his father, finally acknowledging him, and Kaylee managed to hear, "What are you doing? You're trying to say—what, you're helping us? We're supposed to believe that?"

Zeke tore at Orion's dark coat and Orion planted a foot on his chest and pushed him back with so much force Zeke went sprawling. Then he dropped back down into a stance and snarled, "That all you got?"

Fremont, meanwhile, was watching the fight with no apparent concern. He was perfectly calm on the outside, though Kaylee could practically feel the growing, bubbling tension in him as time ticked by. Wherever he wanted them to go, there was a deadline. "Jason," he said, his voice struggling for patience and just sounding glaringly judgmental, "If I had the time, believe me, I would explain this all to you over a nice picnic in the park." Zeke was wobbling now, swaying from his injuries, but then he slammed his forehead directly into Orion's face and a blossom of blood splattered across the white of Orion's undershirt. Kaylee almost choked on a gasp of air. "But right now you have to—"

Orion's retaliation, a devastating, cracking uppercut, sent Zeke sprawling onto his back hard, and Fremont took that as his cue. "Go!"

Orion turned, blood streaming down his face, and pulled a device out of his pocket. Zeke tried to reach him but Orion stepped easily away from his grasping, weakened flail. Kaylee felt the hum in her gut before she knew what it was—then she looked down and saw the teleportation diamonds, bright blue, that had appeared below each of their number of nine and Orion.

Zeke let out a howl that was part Zahlia's name and part anguished, nonsensical sound, and it twisted and shattered into a feral, incomprehensible roar as he leapt, his arms going right through Orion as he vanished.

The last thing Kaylee saw was so out of place she thought she was making it up—for just the briefest of moments, Tim Broome's pale, grave face emerged from a patch of shadow, the outline of Gengar's jagged body twisting him back into its cover right before Kaylee, too, disappeared.

(Jason Fremont)

Jason was at Edith's—he could tell from the smell of the earthy grounds, the change in temperature, the line of trees so familiar he could walk them in his sleep. None of this mattered—all that mattered was that he was solid again, and now that he was he could dive at his brother. Orion turned to him just in time to brace as Jason tackled him. Even with the second of warning they both tumbled hard to the ground.

"Don't even think about it!" Jason shouted, wrestling with Orion as his brother struggled to get out from under him. "Don't even think it!"

Orion had just beaten the ever-loving hell out of Zeke, and Jason knew his brother could very well deck him right now and probably knock him out cold. Orion wasn't getting away from him successfully and Jason knew, on some level, that was only because he didn't want to hurt him. This realization, the raw, recent memory of his father's face, the familiar grass beneath his body and the crushing knowledge that they were back at square one built upon itself, frothed and bubbled up wildly, and it burst out of Jason in a sudden surge of sheer, blinding rage.

"You are not fucking leaving like this again!" he shouted at Orion, and Orion got an arm free and grabbed Jason's shirt, half hugging him close and half pushing him away.

"I have to," Orion said, and as Jason finally was yanked far enough away from him to see his face, he saw that his brother's eyes were alive with unshed tears. "I have to, Jason, I need to go back. This is the only one we have, and dad—"

"Fuck dad," Jason growled. "Don't—don't fucking go, you don't have to do anything!"

"You don't get it," Orion snarled, his sorrow curdling as he gave Jason a harsher, stronger shove. For a heart-stopping second Jason lost his grip but then he found it again, clinging tight. Teleportation works this way, right? he thought desperately. If I don't ever let go you have to at least take me with you.

"You don't get it, and I don't have time. We screwed it all up, all of us, and we can never go back."

Jason had no idea what he was saying, but then Orion began to glow, underlit by blue. Jason grasped him hard, refusing to give even an inch, but Orion was no longer fighting. He'd gone limp, just waiting, and Jason realized it when his brother started to go immaterial right in his grasp.

"Don't!" he begged as Orion gave him one last, brief squeeze. Then Jason's arms clasped together across his chest, closing on empty air, and he felt something deep in his throat tear with his primal, furious shout.

(Victoria Larson)

Needless to say, they had attracted the attention of Edith. Their tenth member burst out of the house just in time to see Orion vanish, just in time to hear Jason scream like a wounded animal and begin beating the earth with his fists, chunks of grass and dirt flying. Edith rushed to pass by them and get to Jason, but Gav got to her first, moving so quick it was like his leg wasn't in need of healing at all.

"I'm so sorry," he managed to get out, hand grasping around her upper arm. Her wide, dark eyes were still fixed on her fiance, who was having a stronger and stronger melt down while Gina tried to talk him down. "We fucked up so bad," Gav said, and Edith tore her eyes to his face, clearly trying so very hard to comprehend what he was saying to her. "Orion dropped us here—yes, you saw, it was really him, really, actually Orion. We aren't safe."

Edith tried to care. Victoria could see the split-second process she went through, trying to find it in herself to prioritize Gav's earth-shattering news over Jason, and in the end she could not. "I can't," she explained, then shoved past Gav to get to him.

Gav let her go, watching as Jason buried his face in his balled hands, his body tense as iron. Edith tried to go to him but was forced to wait until she could get close, orbiting him as he alternately sobbed and raged.

Gav was still talking, Victoria realized, muttering to himself, nonstop under his breath, his brown eyes staring straight ahead but seeing nothing. A jolt of terror shot through her as she realized he was likely having a breakdown of his own, just nothing quite as dramatic as Jason's. She got close enough to hear what he was saying.

"This whole place could be compromised. How do we just—how do we just live with that, ignore it? That device… what if they can track it, even if he doesn't want to hurt us—"

Zahlia was close enough to hear as well, something Victoria hadn't realized until she spoke up. "He doesn't."

Gav turned his face to her like he wanted to make eye contact, but he was still locked in a staring contest with nothing. "I would love to believe that. I really would. But I can't. We can't. And there's no—" he stopped, trailing off, and Victoria reached out to his jaw, her hand trembling, to try to make him look at her. He turned his face to her as she prompted him to, obedient and unresisting, but he was still staring, looking right through her. Victoria steeled herself before she spoke, unable to believe that this was the moment that had terrified her more than anything else that day.

"Gav—" she started, then had to take another breath to steady herself. "Gav. Come on, look at me. What are you saying?"

Gav finally flickered back, his eyes meeting hers, but what she saw was almost worse than the blank, thousand-yard gaze he'd had earlier. It was absolute, utter despair.

"Sorry," he said, very quietly. His voice was just barely a rasp, and yet the others were coming in closer, those who weren't preoccupied with Jason. They seemed to know, to sense somehow, what was coming. "Just… it's over. I'm saying this whole thing, all of it—it's over."

"Gav?" Kaylee demanded in tandem with Amaris, Blake and Beth all exclaiming various things at him too. Victoria's hand dropped from his face and she opened her mouth to try to reason with him, but he just shook his head.

"No. We're done."

(Orion Fremont)

Vaughn Nakawa was never in this much of a hurry unless it was a big deal, and as Orion and his father remained poised on the knife's-edge, ready to fight or flee, he felt an undeniable little bubble of ironic flattery at the concept. We're a big deal, now.

Sometime while Orion had been dropping off the others at Edith's, Zeke had been sent home, probably by the same two syndicate lackeys that normally tailed him everywhere. Now it was just Vaughn, two more of his backup bodyguards, Orion and his father in the clearing.

Well, and a Gengar, most likely concealing its trainer. Orion could sense the Ghost-type and its Night Shade, but he wasn't about to clue Vaughn in on that little piece of information.

"Your friends have really done it now," Vaughn said, measuring each word carefully. He never, ever wasted language. Orion held the device behind his back, the coordinates keyed in, his and his father's signature locked for immediate deployment. It was hopeless to think they could salvage this trainwreck, but they had to try. "You need to give that to me."

"No thanks," Orion said, keeping it short and simple. Nakawa would "appreciate" that. "You already know how we feel about this topic and I'm not giving them up."

Vaughn scowled, his strangely generic, calm face even nondescript in his anger. "You have no one to blame but yourselves. Give it to me."

"I said no," Orion repeated, noting that his father was silent. Still cowed by Nakawa after all these years, Orion thought, a complicated mix of disgust and pity for his father warring inside him.

"You can't think this ends well for you," Nakawa said, and Orion could hear that same blend of disgust and pity in Zahlia's father's voice.

Instead of answering, Orion punched the button. The field dissolved and he closed his eyes and let it go.

Author's Note: Guys... that's it. That's the end of Crimson. Thank you so much for making it halfway through this series with me! Lapis chapter 1 is already written and will be going up shortly. I'll try to alert those of you I know review often when it goes live so you can find it easier.