Why hello again! I figured it's about time to start up the second arc of my story, now that it's February haha. I just finished a short story for my creative writing class, so I have more time to write what I want... and like... hey... why DON'T I write some more pokemon for a little while?
FYI—Updates will be a little more sporadic this time around. There's a couple other things I'm trying to work on while I write this, and this is of course lower on my priority list as it's literal pokemon fanfiction. This is more my Fun Project that I jump into when my other projects are being dumb and annoying.
Also expect more weird knockoff OC replacements of characters as well as talking pokemon. Lucaro is in Sinnoh but that doesn't mean we won't get some new friends~
***This Arc begins at the same time as when Niri's began!
ARC II: My Ignorance
In which a pokemon who was turned into a human girl grows up and decides that humanity is not where it's at.
Chapter 11: Filloma and Reluctance
Nighttime. I've been staring at the ceiling since I woke, counting the same cracks in the roof's boards, and I am still not yet asleep.
I catch myself drifting when a sound jolts me out of groggy rest—something akin to the crack of rock against glass. Slipping through the covers, I land thump on the ground and drag a blanket to the other side of my room, in front of the one great window facing the moon.
Once I've rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, I give the glass a gentle knock. Soon after, a pink face greets mine and gestures hurriedly at the lock on my window. It's Marlun. When isn't it Marlun.
I let her in. I can't really not let her in. She'll be cross with me if I don't, and I don't have many other prospects in the realm of friendship.
Easing into the armchair by the window, I raise my brows upon her. My mouth parts into a yawn—then I ask, "What now?"
Her pastel pink cheeks soften and appear to smother the rest of her face. Despite the labor it must have taken to attach a ladder to the back of the professor's home and climb up into its attic to find me, her long brown hair lies perfectly still, a beautiful russet sheet past her shoulders, and she's not particularly winded.
She has too much energy is all. Already Marlun's hands overlap with mine, and she's attempting to tug me out of the chair. "C'mon, c'mon!" she squeaks in hardly a whisper, more the cousin of a shriek, "we gotta go now, Fillmy!"
"Go where?"
I know where.
Just... don't know if I still want to.
I tug back at my hands, my unnervingly white hands, but she won't give in. Pinkish red fingers fight for my attention, tugging me into her grasp until she's encircled them around my back. Slashes of moonlight are what I see by until my head's lodged into her shoulder, and then I can't see much at all.
"I told you, Filloma!" Her cheerfully upright tone tumbles over me. "We're bustin' you out of the prof's house! We're goin' on an adventure! We're takin' my skitty and seein' the world!"
I hear it, faintly, from her backpack, the mewl of the pink skitty: D-Do we have to?
In a deadpan, I deliver: "Your skitty doesn't want to see the world, Marlun."
Her pout is louder than it needs to be, loud enough for me to feel her breath shiver over my head, tangling into my curly hair. "That's simply because he hasn't seen it yet! Just wait—it'll be the two of us in the lively world of Unova, showing off our adorable young selves and garnering all attention!"
My laugh sputters into her shirt. "You just want to find yourself a cute date, don't you? The gym leaders are an excuse for your true desires to stay in hiding."
Dead silence. "F-Fillmy! S-S-S-Stop seein' into my heart like that!" She proffers an awkward laugh, but I catch the nervousness belying in her throat and cringe.
She's warm against me, warm and comforting. She's also the only person I have, outside of the professor. "Marlun... I'm not trying to. I can only hear pokemon hearts, you know, not yours too. I just..."
"You're just creepishly talented at guessing my thoughts!" she huffs, and I giggle in the darkness of her embrace.
Patting my head, Marlun releases me and gazes into me for a moment. I glimpse myself reflected in her: the unruly shoulder-length green hair and the pink flowers trapped within the curls, the wide blue eyes, wide and very very tired, the unnatural white skin and pursed, pink lips.
My fingers delve into my hair and catch on one of the flowers. Flushing, I struggle with my hand, unable to free it—then Marlun's glides over mine and gently tugs it out of the ensnaring curls. "Thanks," I mumble, and she giggles back, "You know what happens when you do that!"
Her hand tightens around my own. She's in her saggy old tee shirt—the one with the togepi in the frying pan on it, the most ridiculous of her shirts and therefore her favorite—and it's tucked into her rattiest pair of black sweatpants, attempting to engulf her tennis shoes.
"Get yourself dressed, missy! We've got a prison break on our hands~"
I roll my eyes and instruct her to face the other way as I tear out of my pajamas, leaving my sweet dreams of sleep balled up on the floorboards. "Give me more than the time to get dressed, would you? Unlike you, I have plans of packing more than a singular outfit, as well as other necessities." While she's turned away, I pull my backpack out of hiding. Laden with supplies, it requires some cramming before I manage to fight the blanket wrapped around my hips into the bag, but it just about works once I take out the topmost pair of clothes.
Quickly I slip into my white dress, the one with the pretty little fringe on the bottom, then the fuzzy pink cardigan and the white ankle boots. I've a few more outfits in the bag, as well as some extra rations, the blanket, soap, and a miniature first-aid kid.
No poke balls.
No poke balls.
The thought jabs into my gut as I sidle the backpack's straps over my shoulders.
Standing on wobbly feet, I turn Marlun by her shoulder. Her strength isn't visible until I touch her and feel her musculature, alive beneath the skin, waiting to be noticed. Offering a cheeky grin, she tugs me back towards the wall and slides out the window, gesturing for me to follow.
Immediately the ladder is trembling, as soon as my feet reach the highest rung.
I let out a cry. "W-We're gonna die—"
Three floors of falling, Marlun. I stare down at her as she skitters to the ground, then steadies her hands around the ladder's steel sides. "Fillmyyyyyyy! Get down heeeereeeee! Hurry before you fall and break every bone in your body and then Juniper will definitely know that you tried to sneak ouuuuttt!"
She's a terrible friend. Scowling, I shuffle through the narrow cusp between life and a painful death while my hands shudder around the metal. If she wasn't so hotheaded, I wouldn't have to deal with any of this... we could just live peacefully in Nuvema Town. I'd become the next professor one day, putting the things my adoptive mother taught me to good use, and Marlun would perhaps give me a freaking break.
She's just horny... so horny.
My boot lands on one of her hands. She squeals. "FILLMY!" Swallowing my laugh, I slip to the ground in front of her. She glares down at me, lips smeared together. "That was not a very nice thing to do, that there." I catch her skitty's squeal from her bag.
"I'm sorry, but who's the one who made me climb down a ridiculous ladder?" I huff out a sigh. "Honestly, Juniper probably wouldn't even notice if I left using a more... traditional route, such as the front door. It's—How late is it?" Marlun stares up at the sky like she'll somehow surmise it from the stars. "No it—it doesn't matter how late it is. The point is that it's late and she sleeps like a regular human being, unlike you."
"Hmmmmmnnn... I just, I just..." Marlun trades my sigh for her own. "I'm just so excited, Fillmy... I wanna kiss all the people—especially girls. I wanna kiss so many girls." She eyes me, but that memory of that time we tried to date must have surfaced between us, because a cringe wrecks across her complexion like a hurricane. "Not you, but like, literally any other girl." I don't even remember what she found so repulsive about the encounter. Maybe it was the fact alone that I didn't care enough.
I don't know...
Shaking my head, I gesture ahead of us. "Let's go put the ladder in your father's shed, before anything else."
"Oh, yes!" She's on it, sidling in front of me, unlocking and shortening the ladder, going off into the weary darkness to probably put the ladder not where it belongs.
To her return, we take hands and leave the quiet majesty of our home behind us.
My heart seizes.
"M-Marlun... I'm afraid."
She pauses. Her hand ducks behind my ear and tilts my head into her direction. "Of what? Of what we might find?"
I open my mouth, shut it, then meekly nod, staring at the ground.
"Oh, sweetie..." She tugs me into another embrace. I let her, and my arms lock around her back. "Think of it like this, okay? You won't find any of the scary people who hurt you because I will literally punch them into last year. Then they'll never hurt you, ever."
Into her wet shoulder I mumble, "I don't remember what they look like, Marlun." I just see flashes of it when I stare into the darkness. Between pinpricks of moonlight the path is littered with the shadows of humans, arms stretched wide before me, reaching out to me, fighting to clutch me with their gnarled hands. I feel it and I shudder, and I plunge my head deep into her chest.
"Fillm—Oh my goodness. Fillmy." Her fingers lock around and shake me, but I do not get leave my hiding place. "Fillmy this is getting a little embarrassing. Come on. Filloma. Okay. I get you're upset. They aren't here. Please get out of my chest. Pretty please. If someone sees us they will definitely think I am taken, which is definitely not the vibe I'm trying to give out.
"Filloma please."
Wincing, I push back from her, my cheeks hot and red. "Sorry..." But I still see them, lurking in the periphery of my living nightmare.
"C-Can I hold your hand at least?"
Marlun releases a slow sigh. "Okay, but only because it's three in the morning and nobody should see us. Just so you know, I am dropping the hand if so much as a sound creeps out from the forest. I'm not squandering any of my chances here." Her eyes glint in the fertile moonlight as she proclaims this, her hands cupped outwards and overflowed with her fantasies.
I almost feel guilty. Almost, that is.
After all, I am still her best friend.
Taking her strong, warm palm into my dainty fingers, I hold tightly and let her lead me through the umber fronds of grass. Our feet crunch around sleeping little pokemon, and if I concentrate, I can hear them whispering their dreams. I tug Marlun away from any unsuspecting pups she nearly crushes with a wayward sneaker.
"Maaaaan, if we had poke balls, we'd be able to catch so many pokemon right now." Marlun pouts. "I mean, not that I need much more than my sweet Scamp, but like, it'd sure be nice." She does adore her "special Hoenn-imported" skitty.
I shake my head. "If you release a poke ball, I will destroy it."
"Geez. Does anyone think like you?"
"I don't know. There must be someone out there who agrees." The pokemon surely do. The fear they feel when one such prison enters their periphery fights to stop my very heart.
Someone must agree... someone out there must think like me.
I'm thinking about it, my heart hard and heavy and difficult to carry—a burden alongside my backpack—when I catch the sound of a melodious voice. It floats through the night and wraps itself around me, and I... I recognize the melody.
It steals my breath and weaves through the shadows, and suddenly I've thrown away the safety of Marlun's hand, tossing myself into the depths of the sound, moving closer, heart beating, heart screaming.
There—Behind the route's sandy man-made pathway lies a foreboding forest where even the stars cannot find home. Just beyond the bleak surround, I hear the budding of the sound. I dive through and enter the shadowy void, and I know even as my breaths give me away that I could very well be placing myself into the very danger I had structured my life in the hopes of avoiding it for the past ten years.
I could be destroying everything by doing this—but the sound... it's so sweet, so soft, nothing like the jagged aches of memories I can make out whenever I dare a glimpse into my past.
The song abruptly ends. "Who's there?" A voice, low-pitched and... lonely.
Straightening—though he cannot see me—I answer. "I am."
"And who are you?" he asks.
But I cannot answer, because I am struck by the whisper of another. I'll protect you.
His voice returns, reaching out to me. "Hello? Are... you still there?"
"Yes, I'm..." I don't know what brings me to say it. A risk. "I just... I was... shocked by your pokemon's kindness. I've never met a pokemon who loved a human as much as yours does you."
"I... I think I know you," he replies, and my heart freezes in my chest.
Then a brightness tears through the forest; a glowing blue bracelet around the boy's arm illuminates the entirety of the small diameter surrounding him, and he catches the white flash of my frightened face.
And I stare into his.
His hair is long and green—a shade of green quite similar to my own—and it falls to his waist in an enchanting flourish. His face has been tanned by the days he has spent outside, but it still somehow retains a pale, foreign quality. Like he doesn't belong here... isn't natural.
His eyes seek into me, a mesmerizing blue, dark until I sink into its bright centers.
I know him. My heart... it speaks to him, and I sense his speaking back.
Somehow... I know this man.
His gaze lands to my hair, my tangled curly hair that almost but does not quite hide the flowers within. Anyone would assume they are well-placed barrettes.
"Shay..?"
To my flinch and leap backwards, his voice grows desperate—"Please don't go. Please... Please stay. I've been searching for so long I thought you had disappeared. Or that something... had made you disappear."
I hesitate for far too long. His long fingers shackle about my wrists. He's gentle, but he's so tall, his shadow practically swallowing me whole. "It's me," he whispers, "it's me, Shay... Do you remember me? You couldn't pronounce my full name, so you called me N. We lived in my castle together. My father found you—
He pauses as the fear overwhelms my face. "What's wrong?"
What's wrong is that his father did not find me. I remember it, I remember it with blinding alacrity, the feeling of his rough hands on my skin, being dragged so far away from my home that I completely forgot what it looked like, the guttural tones of the old man's voice, the way I forgot myself when he hit me, and the feel of cold metal underfoot.
He did not find me.
I glare up at this man and I spit, "Your father stole me from my rightful place." In his shock, his grip slackens, and I break free of his stifling memories. Landing at the edge of the black trees, the moonlight leads me away from N and away from the firm grip of his father. I slip through shadows and throw myself at the girl who has stood in the same place since I left her, hiding my head into her chest, not caring whatsoever when she asks me the many questions she deserves answers to.
His footsteps follow, and he emerges at the edge of the forest.
Marlun's head jumps from where it was against my ear to stare at the tall man who evidently was after me. "Uhhhmm, who are you?" Her arms lock around me.
"Please..." I make out N's plea through the fabric of Marlun's togepi shirt, but I don't bother to look. "She's the only person who understands me."
Marlun looks up at N, back at me, up at N, then settles at me. She furiously whispers into my ear, "How in the hell did you already meet a weird guy probably linked to your freaking past? That's just—Honey, that's just uncanny." I shrug into her. She scowls. "Well do you want me to tell him to get lost?" To my frantic nod, she looks up just in time for the man to ask her to please let him come with us.
"Yeah well... uh..." Marlun swallows. I feel her form shudder. "Filloma doesn't seem to trust you, so I don't know if I should either."
He implores us, "Why... wouldn't you?" I whine into her chest. Marlun gently slaps me. "I knew... Filloma... when we were children. I've been searching for her ever since we lost her. I thought... I really thought we would never find her again. We looked everywhere, I thought, but... not many of the small villages ringing the outskirts of the cities. I guess we... we didn't consider that she had somehow snuck into one of them. You, ah, you see her. She is quite striking in appearance.
"I just had hope... so much hope that we would find each other again. And I have. So I ask you, please... it has been far too long, and I need to speak with her."
Marlun's mouth brushes against my ear again, but I step back, folding my hands into fists. I stare up at N, and his eyes refuse to release me. "You're... You'll just follow us if we say no, w-won't you?"
"I..." He looks away, his face a sudden, bashful pink. "I wouldn't... I wouldn't want to intrude on your lives, but I have been looking for so long... and I... I'm sorry, but I need to see you..."
Oh, dear. My heart—it's thudding deep inside of me, begging to get closer to him.
After he mentioned his father, I didn't even consider what I thought of him.
He's... cute. And he clearly has been seeking after me. And I...
I might come to terms with my own tangled existence if I can learn to understand his own.
Swallowing, I let out a breath. "Fine. F-Fine, you can come with us. But you're not using my blanket if you don't have one of your own."
Marlun coughs away her laughter. I glare up at her; she shrugs, hiding her grin behind a hand.
I turn back to N.
His face glistens with a warmth. "Thank you... Thank you, Filloma." He's already picked it up, my new name, my chosen name, the name that lets me pretend there is nothing I am hiding behind it. He steps closer, and when I don't back away, he lets himself move in front of me. His hand... reaches out, but he stops and lets it fall.
There are so many words in his mouth, but he speaks none of them, just gazes into me for as long as Marlun can stand it. Then her hand flits around my shoulder and tugs me ahead.
"Okay, let's go, Fillmy. And uh, you too, Tall Man. I'm tired and the Pokemon Center's still a ways ahead."
He cannot hide his smile. "My name is N."
"En..?" Marlun shrugs. "Sure, okay, En."
"Like the letter," he adds, and her face flushes.
I let him walk beside me, but I keep a small distance between us, a distance small enough to let him know that even if he is traveling with us, I still am not ready to talk about the mysteries separating me from him, nor the ones that have tangled us together.
I couldn't stop myself from throwing in a couple references to Lucaro (who I mean, also hates poke balls and would relate to our new friend Fillmy on that)
Also... I mean... glowing blue bracelet? Why? does N have that? what?
anyways I miss Lucaro so much but sometimes you just can't write about your favorite lucario since he's literally in the Sinnoh region at this point about to meet Layke and Niri for the first time
