Golden Rivals, Silver Friends

Chapter Seven:

Too Pure to Hurt Anyone

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The sun was already starting to set, and I knew that the next Pokémon Center was a few hours away on foot. Dropping my backpack on the ground and unrolling my sleeping bag, I busied myself with the routine of setting up camp for the night, under the shade of some trees lining the edge of the road. But as soon as I was warm and comfortable, I found myself with idle hands and an equally idle mind. And when your mind is idle, it has a tendency to wander...

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Satoshi. Trusting, innocent, naïve little Satoshi.

Would he have...?

I swallowed. Even though something in my mind told me that this situation wasn't right, I still thought about it.

Somehow, these thoughts seemed familiar... had they occurred to me before?

Could he have been the one who broke off our friendship...? I shook my head. It just didn't seem like him.

But still... maybe he'd gotten tired of hanging around someone like me, no matter how much I treated him like a friend. Maybe he could sense the gap in ability between us... after all, he'd been the one who almost brought it up. Maybe he thought that as long as he was around me, he'd never get his time in the spotlight...

Thinking back to our battle in the tournament, I smiled grimly. Well, if that was the case, it was certainly true.

It wouldn't make sense for me to give up someone who meant so much to me. Why would I have just pushed him out of my life like that? No, it had to have been Satoshi who did it...

I swallowed. Was that the memory that kept eluding me? The one that took place in Grandpa's field, when we were young, maybe just a little older than when we had been during that conversation about "the best"?

It had to have been him...

But how could have done it? Back then, he was just as reckless as he was now, but he wasn't the type to act poorly to other people. In fact, he had never been that sort of person, then and now. How could he have...?

'... this isn't right...

'You can't pretend. You can't hide.

'Satoshi wouldn't hurt you...'

Then I knew. And I realized that I had known it all along.

Satoshi couldn't have done something like that. He was the kind of person who was continuously making friendships, not breaking them off. Even if he did feel stressed or pressured from being around me all the time, he'd have certainly said something to me, something that I'd remember. He wouldn't have stopped being friends just because of that.

No. No way. He was too innocent for that. In fact, "innocent" was hardly the word for him. "Pure," perhaps. The Satoshi I knew wouldn't have turned against anyone.

As these thoughts came into my mind, I somehow felt relieved. In my heart, I knew that Satoshi would never have hurt me like that of his own accord.

That was good. Unfortunately, this left me with the only option left.

The adults in Masara knew how strong the friendship was between Satoshi and me. They wouldn't have done anything to that, especially since they all knew how small and "weak" Satoshi was, compared to most kids his age. The kids older than us, Nanami's friends, thought it was "cute" that we hung around each other so much. The kids our age had never paid particular attention to us, but they regarded Satoshi as someone of importance, since he was the one person I played with and considered my best friend. As for me, well... I was Ookido Hakase's grandson, and that demands some respect in itself.

Even though I had assured myself that I couldn't have... that I would have never...

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I set out that morning with a heavy heart... This was something that I had to do...

Something that couldn't wait.

Summer was still weighing heavily in the air, like it always does in Masara Augusts. Being so far south, Masara's climate is usually warm and sunny... but for me, no amount of warmth could comfort me that day.

I made my way to Grandpa's laboratory, where I knew he'd be waiting. He always was. I used the wooden gate that day, a strange occurrence for someone who normally jumped the fence like it was nothing.

There was a tree in the middle of the field. We'd found it a long time ago and used it as a landmark in the otherwise unending sea of waving stalks. It was also used by some Pokémon as shade.

And there he was...

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'That was a nice tree...'

My eyes opened.

It was that same memory. The same one that I always pushed out of my mind with thoughts of something else. I felt it fade away, then let out a sigh. I realized that I'd been holding my breath.

But there was no doubt left in my mind.

For some reason, for some inexplicable reason that I couldn't remember...

... I had ended our friendship.

But why? I was fully awake by now, even though the millions of twinkling stars in the sky told me to sleep.

My eyes wandered to the moon, which was slowly making her way across the sky. It was a crescent moon that night, although I couldn't tell whether it was waning or waxing. At any rate, I knew it was changing, one way or the other...

Changing...

That had to have been it. There was no other explanation. Something had changed.

I didn't know when, and I didn't know how. I didn't even know what had changed. But whatever it was, it had taken my life down the drain...

Satoshi hadn't changed. When I had seen him back at the tournament, he was still the same old Satoshi that I remembered... that is, until he saw me. Then, his entire demeanor had changed...

... but it didn't seem hateful. As a matter of fact, in the past six or so years that we'd been through-and-through rivals, he'd never seemed to have wanted to hurt me at all. As strange as it sounded, I'd never felt like he was trying to full-out oppose me.

I'd still been in control. I'd still been the superior one.

And it had always been as if he was trying to prove something to me...

Maybe... prove himself my equal? After all, when I'd brought up the issue of that Poké Ball that we'd both caught in the river, he called it "the time we tied"... not "the time I won" or "the time I lost." Just the "tie." And even if he was trying to prove himself better, it never seemed to come across that way. All through our Pokémon journeys, I'd always been one step ahead of him (and maybe even more, at that).

I don't think I'd ever know what he was thinking during those encounters. But to me, even though we were on opposing sides now, it always felt like things hadn't really changed...

I was still the one in charge. He was still trying to keep up with me.

The only difference was that now, there was so much tension between us... Whenever Satoshi looked at me, I could see a certain fire in his eyes, something that had never been there when we were kids...

But whenever I saw him with his friends, when he wasn't aware of my presence, I saw the same old Satoshi I remembered. Full of laughter, easygoing, relaxed. And, as always, he was with people he could fall back on.

Kasumi, Takeshi... people who he trusted, and who trusted him back.

His friends.

When I saw him at the tournament, I was distracted. I had training and Pokémon on my mind, 24/7. I didn't stop to think about him like I was doing now...

But now, as I thought back, I could see that Satoshi was in nearly the same situation as he had been with me, almost seven years ago...

Satoshi had been the only person I knew who ever insisted on going on a Pokémon journey with someone else. I could recall that first day, when he was just a pale, skinny little kid with a big heart and a disobedient Pikachu, setting out on the adventure of his life...

Alone. And when I next contacted Grandpa to see how our bet was going (I won), he reported to me something a bit frightening that Hanako had said: Satoshi had been out in the thunderstorm all night. When he arrived in Tokiwa, his Pikachu was burned out and he himself was soaked, covered with scrapes and bruises.

Of course, by then it had been some time since I had considered Satoshi my "friend," but even so...

I could remember brushing it off without too much thought. The kid was alive, nothing was broken, no worries.

How did I go from wishing I could share the top spot in the elite with someone to not worrying about him, who'd shown up a day late and could've gotten seriously hurt out there?

Even though it was still weighing pretty heavily on my mind, I found myself dozing off...