Riley.
After Mark's talk, I felt a little better...before I'd started crying, there had been a huge, nauseating knot in my stomach. I'd felt ready to vomit.
As we ran into the cave, I caught the glint of Lee's leather jacket in the light of my Town Map. I stopped for two seconds, to grab it.
Why would he leave this...? I thought. Lee seemed like he loved that jacket, more than any other article of clothing.
We kept going, until I heard Mark shout, "Stop, kids! Stop!"
I shined my Town Map forward, and saw why Mark had us stop. There was...
There was a wall of rubble from the ground to the roof of the cave, with no cracks or holes. We couldn't go forward.
Dee shrieked, covered her mouth with her hand. "Oh my God...!"
"A cave-in..." Mark gasped. He tried prying the rocks apart, but they wouldn't budge. Desperately, Mark started pounding his fist against the rubble.
It was almost heartbreaking. Mark let out an angry grunt, hitting harder and harder.
"Leeeee!" He screamed. "Lee, come on, you asshole! Shout if you can hear me!"
In the dim light, I saw his knuckles were already scraped and bleeding. I couldn't let him do it to himself any longer. I grabbed Mark's arm, trying to pull him back.
"Mark-Mark, please!" I pleaded. "Don't! Stop it!"
"Let go!" Mark roared at me, trying to shake me off. "Lee might be hurt! We gotta..." He trailed off, screaming "Lee, you dick!"
I pulled Mark's arm with all my strength, digging my heels into the dirt.
"Mark, stop it!" Amber squealed.
"Please, Mark!" I begged. "Please, nothing can get through! It won't help! Hurting yourself won't help any of us!"
Tears were in my eyes again. This was too much, all at one time. I couldn't...Mark couldn't break down, not now.
Finally, he heard what I was saying. Mark hit the wall one more time then cried out, cradling his right arm in his left. He seethed in pain.
"Le-ee-ee..." His breathing was choppy and rough. Then, I noticed which arm had been the one punching.
It was his hurt arm.
Mark.
Say something, I'm
Giving up on you.
The moment I recognized that the ceiling had caved in, not only did I know that Lee had caused it, but I knew he had to be dead.
I was nineteen years old. I was nineteen years old, surrounded by three teenagers, and came to the conclusion that my best friend, the one I was in love with, was killed in a mountain cave-in.
I'm sorry that I
Couldn't get to you.
Yes, I momentarily lost my damn mind.
My first reaction was to try and dig out the rock and rubble. When that didn't work, I got angry, and tried to break it apart with my fist. I didn't consider which arm I used, I just wanted to destroy the rubble.
Anywhere, I would
Have followed you.
I honestly never even heard Riley speak to me. When the adrenaline wore off, just a little, the pain shot me like a BB bullet from my elbow, all the way through my bicep and to my shoulder. I almost screamed.
Nurse Joy, in Celestic Town, had claimed that my arm would fully recover. But, she never did any tests on the poison needles Toxicroak had shot at me, to see how strong they were...
Say something, I'm
Giving up on you.
"Lee..." I howled, in both anger and despair.
I had finally gotten the nerve to do something, and kiss him. Lee had kissed back. He didn't push me away.
And I will swallow
My pride.
This can't be happening... I thought bitterly.
"Guys, there's no way in hell it's safe to be in here right now," Dee announced. "Let's cut our losses and go back outside!"
You're the one
That I love.
"Not without that bastard, Lee!" I growled.
It took the three of them to drag me back out if Mt. Coronet. My arm was still in splitting pain. I couldn't think, I couldn't run, I coudn't even breathe.
And I'm saying
Goodbye...
I fell into a ball in the snow outside, taking shallow breaths. My arm was in numbing pain, and I felt sick to my stomach.
Daisy and I, we had predicted for years that her dumbass fiancé would eventually frig up hard enough to cause his own death. But I'd thought he wouldn't be able to do something that stupid with me around...
You weren't around. You left him to do what he wanted. Now you don't know if he's even alive!
"Mark..." I heard Amber's voice cut through me berating myself. "Mark, I...Riley, he found...Lee's jacket..."
A plop, and a pile of leather sat in front of me. That brought me back. I sat up in the snow, taking the jacket.
"...God." It still smelled like him; that generic guy smell of deoderant and outdoors/woodsy scents, and the faint smell of cigarettes. I saved that in my mind for later, and went for the pockets.
Four pokeballs, a half-empty pack of cigarettes and a lighter, and his Pokegear. Lee had taken his jacket off, two of his pokemon somewhere else and the other two in his pocket...
Lee had left all of his pokemon behind. His laptop. Pokegear. Backpack...
"Goddammit!" I stood up and threw the jacket to the ground.
Shift, recognizing the jacket, lumbered over and sniffed at it. "Um?" She thought we had seen Lee.
I balled my hands into fists. Riley raised his eyebrows in alarm.
"Mark, what happened?" He asked.
"Mark?!" Amber echoed.
I seethed. "Lee, he..." I took a deep breath. "That rat bastard! He lefteverything behind! He knew the cave was gonna collapse!"
The kids took that in. Dee asked, "He didn't look like a geologist. How could he predict something like that?"
"How the hell do I know? But he did!" It sounded exactly like him. Try to do something "heroic" and get hurt in the process...
My arm twinged in pain again. I winced, although it wasn't as bad as before.
Like me... I thought bitterly. I cursed Lee in my thoughts, with every extent of the English language I could muster, as I clutched his favorite jacket to my chest.
The contents of the pockets fell to the ground. Shift pawed at her own pokeball, whining.
"Ummbreee..." She whined. Shift wanted to know where her trainer was, right then and there.
My heart lurched painfully. I crouched in the snow, picking up the pokeballs and Pokegear.
"...Go on in, Shift. You're not gonna see Daddy for a while..." I returned her first, then Fallon, then my own Blaziken. I looked around.
"What?" Riley asked.
"There's four pokeballs Lee had, and only three have pokemon in them," I stated flatly. "If they took Strawberry just to bite us in the ass..."
"No! No, Strawberry is fine," Dee told me. "He had stayed back, with Aron and Snorunt. They held off any other Golbat."
I nodded. "...Fine." I stood back up, and pocketed the pokeballs. The cigarettes and lighter, I left behind.
The kids had to troop after me, Riley grabbing Lee's other belongings and jogging to catch up.
That was one of the worst afternoons I ever endured.
Dee.
That Night.
Between then and dinner that night, that was when I had that conversation with Tess. I couldn't wait to see her again, even with her two lackeys.
Mark and I prepared dinner that night like we had to feed shitty relatives. He had a cold, dead look in his eyes, as if he were thinking just a little too hard.
He rushed to finish eating, then climbed into his sleeping bag at 7, complaining of a headache.
Riley and Amber, they kept staring into the bowks of soup Mark and I had prepared. Riley was mumbling things under his breath, a habit he'd picked up from Lee; just incoherant little babbles I don't think he understood.
"If you think you can make Riolu come out of your dinner by talking to it, you're a dumbass," I pointed out.
Riley's vacant blue eyes finally focused on something; he glared at me. "You're a bitch."
"And you're likely to suffer clinical depression as an adult, so just trying to get my kicks in now." Wow, that was snide, even for me. I guess if Riley was picking up Lee's bad habits, I was starting to take after Mark.
Riley didn't answer. We all went back to eating in silence, hearing the snuffling of our pokemon eating and Riley's disturbing mumbling.
After a few minutes of silence, Amber softly stated, "It's so quiet without them..."
Just her saying that made it all the more real. Riley's hands tightened, and he quietly sighed.
"Stop talking like we're not gonna find them," I ordered her. "A defeatist attitude isn't going to help anybody!"
"What's the point?" Riley demanded. "You're trying to keep our spirits up, but there's no way we can track down where Team Galactic took them! The only person who'd know how is, and he's-!"
"Dead?" I countered. I was the first one, save Mark, to vocally express what we all assumed. That shut him up. "So Lee is the only trainer in the world who knows how to track big damn groups, is he?!"
Riley gave up. He looked down at his bowl of soup. Amber looked at him for the first time in hours, and frowned. She was visibly still upset with him, but me shootibg down every word he said didn't exactly make her happy.