Disclaimer: Pokémon is copyrighted by Nintendo, Game Freak, Warner Bros, and Wizards of the Coast. I in no way claim rights to Pokémon; this fic is a non-money-making venture for free distribution on the Web.
Dedication: This fic is for Lightning-Strike. Lightning-Strike is a talented, cool author here, whose user id is 141533. This is her Christmas fic, especially for her! ^!^ Merry Christmas, L-S!
Light of a Dark Black Night
Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life,
You were only waiting for this moment to arise.
Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these sunken eyes and learn to see
All your life,
You were only waiting for this moment to be free.
Blackbird, fly
Blackbird, fly
Into the light of a dark black night!
-'Blackbird', The Beatles
1: Exile
Shadowgleam released herself from her Pokéball to find herself alone, on a grassy, shaded slope, below a road, as if the Ball had been flung there.
She had been asleep. It felt like it had been for a long time. The last thing she remembered was the healing matrix of Mahogany's Pokémon Centre's rejuvenator, restoring her through the patterns of her Pokéball.
Carefully, the Raichu sniffed the air.
What puzzled her was that she didn't scent her trainer.
She smelled nothing, actually. Nothing but these woods. And the Pokéball, of course, which faintly held Gavin's smell. His had been the last hand on her Pokéball. That made sense.
She listened. After a while, a car went past on the road. It went off into the distance without seeming to change direction much, or slow down, or stop.
Nothing. No human landmarks. Leaving her ball where it was, she climbed up the slope to the road and checked; she could still see nothing. Now that the car had gone, everything was quiet. She heard Spearow, and a breeze in the trees. She heard her own breathing, steady and deep as it should be.
She went back down to her Pokéball, trying to figure out how it had got there. The grass wasn't the kind to leave indents - it was thick and very springy. So the absence of footprints didn't tell her anything. There were no scents, and that did.
Flung? That was the first thing she'd thought of. Surely she'd have woken up if her Ball was violently tossed around? Or would she have? She was a light sleeper - when she was out of the Ball.
My ball could have come here by accident, she reasoned. Out of the back of a bus - or a van - maybe something had happened to Gavin, her trainer...
If he's okay, he'll be looking for me! Of course.
Gavin, she thought 'loudly'.
Gavin!
Her trainer was psychic. Only slightly - in a way that had made him the kind of person who fades into the background whenever he can. He could 'hear' when people were thinking about him - if not their actual thoughts. Through his whole life, it had been like an itch in his brain - impossible to understand, control, or even, sometimes, to endure.
But this 'ability' had sometimes been useful in training. Gavin could locate Shadowgleam and her team members at all times.
Here I am, Gavin!
He might be in danger, however. Shadowgleam didn't want to distract him. Perhaps she wasn't the only team member who had inexplicably found him or herself in the middle of nowhere. So she would keep up a steady stream of Gavin-related thoughts. Nice ones. Apparently he found those ones easier to deal with.
At one point, Gavin had taken lessons which had increased his ability to identify who was thinking of him, and what their mood was. But he'd stopped the lessons, because, despite the instructor's best efforts, the strength of Gavin's awareness had grown faster than his control.
Gavin's Raichu tried to picture him now, in a family-photo type of scene. First there would be Gavin. He hardly needed glasses, but wore them because they hid his eyes, which were icy blue. Most of Gavin's appearance was calibrated this way, and almost everything you saw about him was done in an attempt to make him less eye-catching, more forgettable.
The glasses had dark, thin frames. They fit snugly on his nose and didn't slip down it. His hair was a kind of generic browny-blond, a colour that had a human name, which Shadowgleam couldn't remember. The look on his face that Shadowgleam could picture best was a wary, unfocussed, listening look, when he had his eyes narrowed and his shoulders hunched, but he practised a calm, casual expression.
His height had always seemed normal to Shadowgleam, who, out of curiousity for his quest to be nondescript, often compared him to other humans. He wore clothes of brown, dark green, black - nothing with a specific label or specific type. The more labels people can put on you, he'd explained, the more they can identify you, and the longer they will remember you. His backpack was black, his tent was olive green, his Pokéballs were red and white, and if he got a Great or Ultra ball, he painted it.
Drawing a good mental picture of Gavin was the best way to gently let him know he was on her mind. Shadowgleam added herself to the picture.
Mentally and physically, she placed herself in battle stance. Her tail curved down, lightly touching the ground, and turned up again so that its sharp-edged axe-like tip pointed over her right shoulder.
Absentmindedly, she allowed a few sparks to play over her cheeks, and then, in annoyance, flipped her tail-tip down to the ground to get rid of them. Perhaps battle stance wasn't the best idea.
Gavin made himself look as 'normal' as possible. It would have taken impossible effort to make Shadowgleam blend in. She was six inches taller than the average Raichu. Her proportions were right, but her colour was wrong, dusky all over - her stomach fur pale grey-brown, her stripes nearly black, her body darkly tinted. Perhaps her colour helped explain why she knew two Dark-type attacks - and perhaps her colour made it less unusual that she had been able to use an Ice TM. (Icy Wind).
The sparks had died. Uneasily, she stood there, staring at her Pokéball. Her home for two years.
She didn't want to stand there and stare at it. She moved away restlessly, heading down the slope as the first move to scope out the area. The Pokéball remained; it was a landmark. Having a place to come back to would help to keep her from getting lost. Besides, Gavin might return.
Where was he? Where was she? She walked downwards, moving in as straight a line as she could.
She heard a stream just before she smelt something familiar - Pokéchow.
You're here! she thought, the excited thought escaping from her mind.
She bounded around a tree and found a small package on the waterside. It held Gavin's scent and the scent of her normal food. A lot of that kind of food.
That wasn't normal at all.
Suddenly, her mind leapt. Shadowgleam ran to the crude picture diagrams scibbled by his hand, and tore them up in outrage as she confirmed what she had thought. She almost blasted the food into the water, but turned back and headed for a better target.
No clues. He'd obviously worked hard to give her none. There'd be no use following a trail. And she didn't care if there was a trail - she'd never be one of those dependents who followed their trainers after…
after they'd been abandoned.
Gavin!! She mentally screamed. Gavin! Gavin! Gavin! Wherever you are, you're going to hear me! I'll make sure of that! She doubled the intensity of her mental pictures. Here was an envisioned snapshot of the first time she'd shocked him. Here was a video clip of their meeting, altered so that instead of tilting her head to her side and chirping at him in her favourite way, she whipped her Pikachu tail forward to leave a blood-dripping cut on his hand.
She reached her target - the Pokéball - and charged up to blitz it. Thundershock after Thundershock she released, not bothering to charge up for a more powerful attack, just weakening herself with shock after shock, as its paint melted, as its internal components were ruined, until finally it exploded. Shadowgleam fought her instincts and refused to duck the flying pieces. By pure foolish luck they missed her.
You can't touch me, Gavin. Never, never any more.
She came back to herself slowly.
The ghost of an afternoon moon, barely gibbous, was setting, and evening was coming. Her cheek sacs felt drained - they felt as if they were channels through which her energy was rushing out of her…
Shadowgleam snapped out of it.
Then she began her walk.
It was like a march, or a pilgrimage. She went by the stream, tail held high and still, gathered up the supplies that Gavin had left for for her, and marched away.
As night fell, her marching turned to wandering. She left the stream and found it again - or perhaps it was a different one, but she couldn't tell. She swept her tail in front of her, and that helped a little to keep her from tripping in the dark. When she did trip, she got up immediately after.
She tried using sparks for light, but they etched their movements into her eyes, their negatives dancing across her vision until she could hardly tell if she was emitting electricity or not. Tiredness was exhaustion, except that the right word didn't matter. Once, the awesomeness of the stars almost woke her from her daze, but this numbness was too strong to allow her to react to their clarity and beauty.
False dawn came and she pushed herself on like a runner on the last lap of a race. True dawn came, and with it, Shadowgleam slept.
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