NSO Chapter 51
Warning: This story now has an M rating for a reason.
I don't own Pokemon.
A week of Post-Exam Activities was over. The entire school year was over. It was the holidays that filled up the end of the year, when students took time off to relax before the start of the next school semester.
"Come on, Cliff."
"I don't want to go back to school! None of my friends is there anymore!" The Leafeon's tiny paws beat down on Cleo's back as she carried him towards Wailmer Primary. The school acted as a daycare on off-school days, taking care of the younger Pokemon in the neighbourhood while their parents still had to head off for work. Cleo would have loved to have kept Cliff company at home, however…
"I know, I have to go back to my school too. There's no one to take care of you at home. "
"That's not fair! I can take care of myself!"
The Vaporeon stopped walking to give her brother a quick cuff around the ears, but she silently agreed. Why did she have to return to an empty building? Was it for safety reasons? To keep her on a routine? She did not know. She just did as the confidential letter said to do. Go to Kingdra High every weekday. Wait for that bus. Get to the Institution. She knew the rest.
Cleo groaned. There was still half of the week to go. The few days that passed felt like they took months to complete, and the nights in between…
That nightmare with rings and tendrils never went away. They no longer inflicted physical harm. They just got worse and worse as her psyche meshed with the recurring scenario. Bubbles and eels floated past her as she sank into the depths. Jumper cables wrapped around her body as she fell through canyons of trash.
It always ended with the Vaporeon leaping out of bed with a jolt every morning, shocked back into reality.
A reluctant Cliff was dropped off with a lingering hug. On the way to Kingdra High, Cleo slowed her steps upon hearing a familiar buzz from behind. She was in no rush to get to her destination.
"Cleo!" It was Gayle, and only Gayle, Cleo noted.
"How are you doing? I was so worried after… You know, yesterday."
"I'm doing fine."
"Glad to hear. …listen, have you seen my mom recently? She didn't come home yesterday, and Clint's worried. Did you see her last night?"
Ah. That probably explained why she had been getting better rest in the past two days.
That… probably wasn't a good thought to have.
"No, sorry. She only came by for training two days ago. Maybe she's working overtime?"
"I thought so too. Clint really wants to go and search but… he has to go do his job. We really need the cash, so I can…" Gayle stared at the houses they walked past. "So I can continue therapy."
Cleo looked at the same row of nearly identical buildings.
"Why not go look for her yourself? I know where she works. I could give you directions."
"Clint told me not to leave town. Like, he told me really seriously. It could be another Future Sight Mom had."
Why did Gayle always have to steer it back to that day? Cleo grit her teeth.
"Where's Apollo? Don't you two normally hang out together?"
"He has things to do today. How about you? Where are you going?"
"School." Her answer was curt.
"Wow. That… sucks."
Really? How hard is it to say something empathetic?
The pavement was baking underneath the unusually hot morning sun. It was probably why her paws tingled.
"Yeah. It does suck. I have to spend my time there, and then I get brought to some Institution to waste the rest of my day there. For five days straight. Every week."
"Oh. I… I had—"
"You had no idea? Yeah. I guess you didn't. You wouldn't, now when you have your darling Apollo to tide you through those gruelling school counselling sessions. You wouldn't know or care about how I was poked and prodded at some stupid place, having to remember that fucking day over and over again! Having to see his—" Cleo gasped for breath. "his face…"
"Why would you…" Gayle faltered in her pace. "I'm sorry… he was my brother too."
He's not even your real—!"
Cleo stopped dead in her tracks as that whip-crack of a sentence carved an expression of hurt into Gayle's face. Her loud words lingered in the warm air above the two Pokemon, both unable and unwilling to meet the other's eyes.
"I… I'm… just leave me alone."
Cleo turned and ran. She burst through the double doors of Kingdra High, slamming her back against them to force the entrance shut again.
Why did she do that?
Why did she do that?
"WHY?!" The Vaporeon screamed. The empty hallways repeated the question back in her own anguished echoes.
"Aargh!" There was a sound of splintering when she brought her fist down onto the doors. Paint chips and splinters peppered the back of her palm. Blood was starting to ooze its way to the surface of her skin.
Cleo dropped to the floor. Twinges of pain shot through her arm at any attempt to unclench her paw. All she could do was to try and support it with her other hand.
She wanted to cry. In anger. In sadness. In pain. In anything.
Her body gave up no tears.
"Cleo?"
"Principal Suicune! I-I…!" She tried to prop herself back up hastily, to hide the dent in the door she created.
"It's alright, Cleo. I know what you have been through. Come." Suicune's ribbons surrounded her injured hand, where water flowed from their edges onto the injury. It was refreshingly ice-cold, providing numb relief for the Vaporeon. She watched wood and paint shards slowly pop out of her closing wounds and float around in the bubble of water that encased her paw.
"Feeling better?" The Legendary sent the debris-filled bubble away.
"Yes… thank you."
"You are welcome. It is my duty to take care of everyone who goes into this school."
"…"
"My apologies, Cleo. Everything will be alright soon." Suicune dipped her head in respect before turning around and retreating back down the corridors.
"What? How would you know?" Cleo did not think her words would have any effect, but her principal froze mid-paw step.
"I…" Suicune gazed down a corner of the hallway. The Legendary's face was too far away to see an expression. "… when you are a Legendary, I am bound to see the same thing happen more than once to your students. Stay strong, child. I am sorry I cannot aid you any further."
Suicune was gone with a flick of her two tails.
…
The courtyard was no longer packed to the brim with yesterday's students. No more boisterous Pokemon pushing against one another like turbulent currents.
Cleo revelled in that silence on the ropes of a jungle gym.
The Vaporeon had scrambled back out into the courtyard once Principal Suicune left. She'd never wanted to enter that building in the first place, to be trapped within the very walls she first lost him to. But her exchange with Gayle… the Vibrava was gone from the school gates she'd been left at. Probably at home, waiting for Apollo to accompany her.
Cleo bit back an involuntary snarl.
Why did things have to be so unfair?
Her newly healed paw felt the rope bite into her pads with a strong grip. Her life was a mess. She was a mess. A destructive, angry, anguished mess.
A mess that was all by herself. Alone. Aimless. She'd lost him, and then driven away everyone else in her life.
Who else did she have–
"I didn't expect to see you here too."
"Wha-woah!" Cleo twisted her body at the familiar voice, but her balance had shifted too much to one side. The rope was too wobbly from her previous sudden movement that it was impossible to recentre herself. Her paws let go at the searing pain of rope burn. The world took a nosedive as she fell backwards, a messy jumble of spinning colours that she closed her eyes to block out nausea.
"Gumph." There were two grunts of pain when Cleo landed on something soft. The impact snapped her eyelids back open into a view of yellow fur. Her back hadn't met the rough gravel floor, caught instead in the support of two trembling paws. A chest rose and heaved, body hot with exertion and pressing against her own with every deep breath. Those brilliant blue eyes captured her attention again like an Electroweb.
"Gotcha."
…
"I didn't mean to scare you so badly."
"It's okay. After all, I'm not… hurt?" Cleo rubbed at a reddish mark on her paw left from the rope. "Alright, maybe you do owe me a bit of an apology. What are you even doing here?"
"I thought there was school today." Seph shrugged. "Then I saw you up there, lost in the troubles of a cruel reality."
"Ha. Ha." Cleo punched him in the arm. "But yeah, pretty much. Just wallowing in my crappy life till that bus comes to take me away to wallow some more."
"I take it that the sessions aren't really working, huh?"
"I… yes? No? I thought that answering the question and doing the exercises would do something to help in some way. I thought I'd be more at peace with myself. With his death. But nothing's changed so far. I think everything's gotten worse."
Two resounding honks from the school gate. There was the yellow school bus, ready to transport the Vaporeon to the Institution.
"That's my cue." Cleo got up. "I guess I'll see you around?"
"Wait." Seph placed a paw on her shoulder. "What about… you don't go for your session today?"
"What?" Cleo pulled away from his grasp. "I mean, I can't just not show up, right? I don't know… it doesn't feel right."
"No, what's not right is that you're not getting better in there at all. There's not even a single problem you managed to get off your chest."
"I… I…" The bus honked again. Cleo turned to Seph, his paw back on her shoulder. "Are you sure I won't get into trouble?"
"It's just one day. They can't do anything to you, I promise."
"I guess one day couldn't hurt…" Cleo's mumbles were lost in the wind as she was pulled into the thick brush of the woods surrounding Kingdra High. Behind the cover of shrubbery, the two Eeveelutions watched the Bewear alight from his vehicle. Always sitting down in the driver's seat, Cleo never truly realised how big the chauffeur was. She probably only came up to his waist, and that intimidating presence caused Cleo to hold her breath in trepidation as the Normal/Fighting-type stomped around the campus schoolyard searching for his missing passenger.
"Come on!" A tugging on her tail diverted Cleo's attention away from the Bewear back to her Jolteon accomplice, who gestured to venture further into the woods.
The late afternoon sun streamed through the forest canopy in beams, giving the whole landscape a beautiful mottled pattern over everything. The air was alive with the sounds of nature. The warblings of songbirds and chirping of all sorts of insect Pokemon alike was the perfect accompaniment to their traipse through the undergrowth.
"Come on, you can move faster than that!"
"You're leading the way! Where are we going, anyway?"
"You'll have to catch me to find out!" Seph raced off into the thickets of the woods, leaving behind sparking paw prints.
Cleo had never felt this exhilarated before. The rush of her blood from her wildly pumping heart, the speeding sights and sounds… There was nothing else to focus on but the pounding of her paws against the leafy ground, and for the first time in a long while, her head was clear. The constant thoughts shouting in her head were gone.
She was… happy.
Cleo kept running, leaping over thick three roots and springing from stone to stone. There was even a small creek that ran through the forest, and she was tempted to splash around in it before Seph called for her to keep going again.
The Jolteon was right. This was so much better than being cooped up in a room constantly for hours a day. Dare she say it, but it reminded her so much of when she was…
She slowed to a stop in front of a skiff. It stretched high into the sky, the stone face eroded into sizeable ledges through millennia of rainfall.
"The place we're going to is just on the other side."
"Are we going to climb it?"
"Why go around something…" Seph was particularly in a clump of low-handing vines that hung from the cliff. They grew in bunches, and one bunch dangled from their high perch on the cliff and their vines draping onto the forest floor. Seph lifted a few of the vines out of the way to reveal a hole. "...when you can go through it? Come on!" The Jolteon squeezed himself through the moderately large opening. Cleo followed in after him, her smaller body letting her fit into the tunnel without a hitch.
"They say that an Onix dug this tunnel."
"It must be a small one then." The Eeveelutions continued to crawl through the tunnel.
"Well, I'd say the smaller ones get it done more efficiently then." That remark earned a snort from the Vaporeon. "I think I can do something about the darkness." Small arcs of electricity spread from his body and travelled up the spiky fur ends on his tail, providing a small light source for her to see...
"You have a sparkly butt!"
"It's a sparkly tail, not a butt!"
"What tail? You mean the slightly longer fur on your butt?"
"Hey, do you want the light or not?"
"...sparkly butt."
The tunnel wasn't as long as Cleo expected. It opened up into a circular clearing, enclosed within the same stone walls as the cliff. Lush greenery was still aplenty, blooming and thriving in the firm soil. The most captivating thing about this little hidey-hole was a large pool of water that occupied half of the area. The stone walls curved upwards in a cylindrical dome, but there was a hole in the ceiling that allowed light from outside to hit the pool's surface just right for an inviting shimmering surface.
"Wow… just… wow."
"I know, right? It really takes your breath away. Right? …Cleo?"
The Vaporeon could not look away from it. A small 'Z' the size of her paw was scribbled onto the cave walls in blue chalk.
"Why?" Her voice was hoarse. "Why do I keep seeing him everywhere?"
"Hey, hey." Seph steered her away from the wall. "Let's sit down first, alright?"
She let herself be guided over to an empty spot near the pool, where the waves lapped at their paws as they sat. Seph picked up a small flat rock and tossed it. They watched the stone skim across the pond surface until it struck the opposite cave wall with a resounding clang.
"Pebble for your thoughts?" A stone was pressed into the palm of her paw. "Could make things feel better."
"Really? We skipped therapy to have therapy?"
"Hey, better me than Haworth."
"I don't know," Cleo hurled the pebble as hard as she could. It arced through the air and landed in the pool with a huge splash. "I feel like my life's just been crap lately. That I'm a crappy Pokemon."
"You can't mean that."
"I shouted at Gayle today. I called her… a horrible thing. I chased my sister and her boyfriend away. My mom… my mom hasn't replied since we last spoke." Cleo felt around the pond bank for another pebble. "I've been a huge jerk, and I thought the sessions would do something. Anything. Nothing."
"And you're saying that the doubt, despair and destruction… all of this stems from Zenith? That seems unlikely, but now that you mention it…"
"Ha. I know how you feel about him, Seph." Cleo wrapped her pain around a rock. "But since he was taken away… since he died…" She let the stone slip through the cracks of her fingers, sighing. "I suppose you're right."
"...sometimes, I wish that all this never happened, you know?"
"I do. It was a shame that you took to someone who never truly loved you back. He, who prioritised fulfilling his own whims and put himself first before you."
Seph took her hand and brought her closer to the pond, which now shined in the light of a fully risen full moon. She could see stars on its gleaming surface, twinking prettily above their heads as the two of them gazed at their own reflections.
"He didn't appreciate you at all. Your hobbies. Your quirks. Your beauty." She leaned into the paw placed on her cheek, feeling the tingles sent down her spine as he trailed along the curves of her fave, tracing down her jawline to cup the cusp of her chin. Her gaze was jerked away from the pool to meet those eyes, shining the brightest blue she had ever seen.
"You pined for someone who simply did not care." His eyes were closer now, close enough for Cleo to sink herself into, soaking in every beautiful, brilliant detail. His lips were on hers, his tongue prying open her pursed lips and finding its way past her teeth. Her own tongue relented, and the two of them shared a dance in the ballroom of their mouths. She was light-headed when he finally pulled away, a line of saliva connecting the two panting Eeveelutions.
"You can change that." His paws wrapped around her wrists, bringing her arms above her head. A few jolts of electricity sped from the palms of their intertwined paws, contracting the muscles from her paws to her shoulders. A chill started from her tail, running up her back as Cleo was slowly lowered onto the cavern floor, her paws spread out to her sides, paralysed and pinned fast.
"You can let me love you…" He nuzzled her snout in her neck, eliciting a tense moan from the Vaporeon. She was hot all over. "...let your worries melt away. This is what you want, right?"
"I don't…" Cleo squirmed beneath him as a stronger, throbbing heat started to probe the entrance of her privates. "I don't want to remember him anymore."
"Don't worry, my love." Her frills stood on end at his sultry whisper. "I'll make sure you won't."
"Then…" Her tail twined around his hips, tugging the Jolteon gently forward. A whine escaped her lips, needy and lustful. "Then make me forget. please."
"As you wish, raindrop."
…
Seph pushed a passed-out Cleo off his body, whistling. The cave floor, walls and their bodies were slick with fluid, but there was one more thing he had to do first.
The Jolteon traced a paw across Cleo's soaked hindquarters, rubbing his fingers together with the sticky liquids he had gathered.
"Well, Zenith," A single paw swipe erased the chalk logo. "She wanted this."
…
Cliff's door was shut and locked when Cleo returned home. Cleo skipped right past it to her own room, throwing herself onto the bed with a satisfying flomp. She was giddy from, well, everything that had just happened. There was still a dazed smile on her face that she could not rid herself of.
She couldn't sleep. Not when she knew what she had to do.
CADMO?
Yes, Cleo?
I want to use Memory Storage and Removal.
You have selected: Memory Storage and Removal. Are you sure–
Yes. Do it.
Initialising. Please picture the subject you want to forget as clearly as possible.
Right. Zenith. What would have triggered other horrible memories and recalled nightmares before, Cleo could now just barely form an image of this Umbreon in her mind, shrouded amongst the mist of recollecting what wonderful, wonderful things her body had experienced.
Keep focusing on the subject… subject registered. The rest of the storage process will proceed autonomously. Would you like to proceed?
Yes. It was always that easy? If only she… she… just took a quick nap…
Initialising… please be sure to destro… C.A.D.M.O's words no longer registered in an unconscious, slumbering mind.
…
Process complete.
"Huh? What?!" Cleo woke with a start at the loud sounds in her head. "What…who are you?"
Greetings, Cleo. I am the Camouflage And Defense Mind Operated System, or C. Dot. A. Dot. D. Dot. M. Dot. O. Dot. For short. I am designed to enhance your mimicry and self-defence capabilities, all controlled in conjunction with your mind.
You purchased me from a yard sale a week ago.
"I guess that sounds cool. But how did you get on my… on my neck?"
You put me there. Mind Synchronisation mode requires close proximity to your mind.
"I guess I remember doing that at some point… You sound useful, so I guess I'll keep you around. Would be a shame to destroy something I bought, anywayOW. Ow. ow."
Cleo winced as she gingerly got out of bed, with every tense muscle screaming at her to stop moving. Especially everything from below her waist. Arceus, she was sore.
"So last night really did happen, huh?" She whispered to herself. "I thought it was a dream… I wish it… It happened. It really did."
"No, it was…" Cleo gripped the edge of her sink. She shook her head violently, reaffirming herself with a chipper tone. "I'm sure it's what I wanted."
"Right?"
Her reflection had no response. It just wore a face she could not read.
"Right."
She'd better whip up breakfast for Cliff to make up for yesterday's tardiness. Today felt like a better, brighter day.